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Friday, March 19th, 2004
Tomorrow we will go to the Museum of Natural History for Sylvia's dinosaur fix. Aunt Miriam is coming along! Before the museum we will eat lunch at Barney Greengrass, the sturgeon king.
posted afternoon of March 19th, 2004: Respond
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Wednesday, March 17th, 2004
Last night (in the context of a longer dream which I cannot remember), I went to visit Robert Volokh, a former co-conspirator who had stopped blogging after fighting with Juan ("and other non-Volokhs", was the text of the dream, but I am not sure quite what this meant) over the excessively moderate nature of his posts... Robert had summoned to his abode a cabal of widely-read liberal bloggers -- I'm not sure quite why I was there, maybe in my role as taker of minutes or maybe I was tagging along with somebody else. I can't really remember who all was there but at least one Timberite, and probably Atrios. The gist of the matter was that Robert had written an Important Post on his rarely-updated personal blog and was requesting that people link to it. He was quite a mystical figure and seemed to be held in deep reverence by the assembled party. There was no actual ring-kissing but people did seem quite honored to be granted this audience.
posted morning of March 17th, 2004: Respond
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Tuesday, March 16th, 2004
I started reading Tender is the Night, by Scott Fitzgerald, yesterday. (Picked it up from a street vendor a couple of weeks ago but have been spending my commuting hours on crossword puzzles in the mean time.) It's fun. All the characters are ciphers to me (thus far) except for Rosemary. A nice mix of mannered comedy with something else -- there is an element of mystery or suspense present. A very gentle tension that really points up the jokes. I am about to go look at IMDB to check if there was a movie made of it but am going to say beforehand that I think Gary Cooper should have been in it... And here it is! Nope, no Gary. Jason Robards is the lead. Jill St. John plays Rosemary.
posted morning of March 16th, 2004: Respond
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Friday, March 12th, 2004
Yesterday one of my batch processes stopped working. I was a little baffled. The batch downloads some files from an ftp site, then expands them using pkunzip, then sends them to a program for processing. Pkunzip was telling me that I needed version 4.5 or later to expand the files -- never a problem in the past. I thought maybe the vendor had changed zip formats, which struck me as pretty bizarre. Everywhere on the web that I could find pkunzip, it was the same version as the one I was using (2.03g). And then I thought to try opening the files in WinZip. That worked of course; and I was very happy to discover that a command-line add-in is now available, along with a new version of WinZip. So... problem solved! (And into the bargain, wzunzip is way faster than the pkunzip I was using.) But what was the problem? It hit me when I was reading the "What's New" page in the WinZip 9.0 help file: In addition to supporting the original Zip file format, WinZip 9.0 also supports the 64-bit extensions to the Zip file format. The extended format lets you store all the data you need in Zip files of virtually unlimited size. The original Zip file format limited the number of member files in a Zip file to 65,535, and the maximum size of both the Zip file itself and any member file to 4 gigabytes. For all practical purposes, the 64-bit extended format eliminates all these restrictions. Using the extended format, the member file size, Zip file size, and number of member files you can add to a Zip file are limited only by your system's resources. So I checked and yep, the file size of the download is now a hair over 4G!
posted afternoon of March 12th, 2004: Respond
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Thursday, March 11th, 2004
From whence does this organ music come? Deedle-ee, doodle-oodle-oo, doo, dah
Deedle-ee, doo, doo, doo, dah... It's been running through my head for days and I can't identify it -- some old horror movie? The Hunchback of Notre Dame? Help... The "beep" which the elevators in my building utter when you get on or off of them, is the first note in this fragment and it has become my habit to whistle the fragment whilst riding down the elevator (if I am alone). Update: Jim to the rescue! It is the opening of Toccata and Fugue in D Minor by J. S. Bach, and it is commonly used in the soundracks of scary movies.
posted afternoon of March 11th, 2004: Respond
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Tuesday, March 9th, 2004
Ellen finished House of Sand and Fog today. She liked it a lot, for similar reasons to my own -- the clarity of the characters' portraits will take your breath away. One note she found a little jarring was the level of detail in the narration -- it does not seem plausible that the characters would notice everything around them so accurately, when they are portrayed as being disconnected from the world. I can see the validity of this criticism but did not react that way myself. Ellen told me what the title meant, which I had been wondering about -- "Sand" is Moussad, "Fog" is Kathy -- I thought it was just a reference to the house being near the San Francisco Bay.
posted evening of March 9th, 2004: Respond
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I found an interesting book on my way to work this morning. While looking at a used-book vendor's table on 40th Street between Madison and Park, I noticed an old hardbound book called Mother Goose in Prose. Hmm, an interesting idea -- then I noticed the author's name, L. Frank Baum! Update: I asked about this book on the open thread at Making Light; Seth Ellis says it is Baum's first children's book.
posted morning of March 9th, 2004: Respond
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Saturday, March 6th, 2004
So it turns out to be easier for me to play The Ballad of Hollis Brown in straight Drop-D tuning than in double Drop-D. It's sounding really nice although I have not quite got down how to sing it without whining. Or how to remember all the lyrics.
posted evening of March 6th, 2004: Respond
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Friday, March 5th, 2004
Pursuant to some thinking I've been doing about Dylan lately (inspired in large part by this Crooked Timber thread) I have tracked down a couple of good Dylan links. - Bob Dylan Musical Roots: These pages have a lot of interesting stuff about Odetta and other blues and folk singers that Dylan listened to.
- Bob Dylan Chords: Pretty comprehensive, with information about alternate tunings and picking patterns. This site was originally called "My Back Pages".
- BobDylan.com: Discography, etc. And lotsa links.
posted afternoon of March 5th, 2004: Respond
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Ellen and I are starting to get serious with Sylvia about her sleeping through the night in her bedroom -- the pattern over the past few months has been, she goes to sleep in there and around 2 either comes into our room and gets in bed without waking us (in which case we wake up an hour or so later when she starts thrashing around) or wakes up screaming and won't stop until she is allowed to come in. We are all three running short on sleep and it seems like time to do something. Since Tuesday we have been borrowing an idea from my brother, the "grab bag" -- Ellen has assembled a bag of toys and games, and whenever Sylvia sleeps through the night, she will be allowed to take one of them out of the bag. She is way into this idea during her waking hours, but when she wakes up at night it doesn't really wash. Last night however she did sleep through the night (thanks in part to some decongestant we gave her for an incipient cold) and was quite pleased to be able to select a toy -- she said "I'll do it every night!" but we shall see... I have been trying to convince her for a while now that her stuffed dog (a gift from, IIRC, Dave Feldman, one of the first and perhaps only readers of this journal; thanks Dave!) will protect her from anything scary in her room at night -- again, she is totally into it during the day time and at bedtime, but loses her conviction when she wakes up at night.
posted morning of March 5th, 2004: Respond
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