[Via Gruber]

Allowing anyone to read and write your file format is a bold move because it says in essence, “We don’t need a locked down file format to compete. The format can be available for everyone, and we’ll compete on the ease of use and efficiency of our applications. We have what we think is the best interface for reading, creating and managing Office documents, but if someone has what they think is a better way to build Office documents, wonderful, we welcome it!”

What Apple has done with Keynote, Pages and Numbers is exactly this.

The idea that, in 2007, opening up your file format is “bold,” and that you are “allowing” other programs to read and write your format, is frankly offensive. It implies that your default position is that my data belongs to you to exploit as a competitive advantage.

Aslan is what Jesus would have been if the Bible had been written by an American. After his “sacrifice”, he comes back with a huge army and bites his enemy’s fucking head off. Much cooler.

I was reading a bit from the Wikibook about Lucid Dreaming, and came across this passage in the section on Wake Initiation of Lucid Dreams:

If you pay attention to your physical body while using these techniques, then you will likely enter sleep paralysis without losing conscious awareness of your body. You will get a tingling and buzzing sensation (this might be unpleasant). These sensations might be so strong that you feel that you will die (e.g., you might feel a choking sensation), but don’t worry, this is perfectly safe! Sometimes you can simply wait until you fall asleep straight into a lucid dream. However, if you don’t fall asleep, and you become completely paralysed (with the exception of your eyes), don’t try to move.

Reading this explanation of what it feels like to fall asleep, wondering why they were treating it so gingerly, it hit me: this is not normal. Most people have already lost consciousness when this happens. When people talk about drifting peacefully off to sleep, they’re not just talking about mental peace, they’re actually mentally asleep before the physical discomfort of the sleeping state sets in.

I never really realized that.

It makes sense, and now that I think about it, sometimes I go to sleep that way too; just not often enough for it to really define the experience for me. Most nights, I feel that loss of control, and frankly it’s not fun.

This gives me a completely different outlook on people who like sleep, a claim I’ve always been just a bit dubious of. Even though it has useful effects, I’ve never really quite believed, deep down, anyone who said they liked the process of sleep. But if they’re not really experiencing that loss of control; if the process of becoming unconscious happens in more subtle ways most or all of the time, it begins to make sense.

The door is locked.

Slightly belatedly, I read the sign on the door; the one that’s been there for at least a week, cheerfully telling me that they’re closed for Martin Luther King’s Birthday (Observed).

It’s not the first time I’d read that sign, I just hadn’t put it together this morning. Maybe I should have had that hollow, soulless coffee this morning after all.

I went with my friend Lea; one of her friends was in the play, and said friend apparently wanted to meet me; so I joined a few of the players and Lea for the post-reading hang-out at Denny’s. Good times were had by all.

Unrelated: I tried to make cookies tonight. Failed totally at cookies; they poofed up like pancakes. Yummy, though: butterscotch, white chocolate, dark chocolate and marshmallows. I’ll try again later in the week and see if I can keep them to cookie-like consistency. If I get the recipe figured out, I owe a plate of cookies to a friend…

How’s it going?

Oh. Sorry to hear that. The thing is, we need to talk. Yeah, like that.

I just don’t know what our relationship is anymore, Coffee. I’ve gotten lost somewhere in that triangle between pleasure, tool and addiction.

I used to enjoy you. I mean really enjoy you; savor, even. You were a delightful sensation. You were complex, you had a distinct and unmistakable aroma, you were warm and comforting.

Then, as sleep deprivation became more normal (parenthood’ll do that to you every time), you were such a useful tool. You’re good for the brain sometimes, Coffee, I’ll vouch for that and so will science. You can banish the mental fog of nighttime; you can bring clarity to the most distant of thoughts. Coffee, you ushered in the Age of Reason, and I thank you for it.

But this morning as I boil the water, as I dutifully scoop you into the press, something is missing. It’s not a ritual, it’s an empty gesture. I am numb this morning, and I am dull, and I am starting to climb out of numbness and dullness enough to realize it.

I respect you, Coffee, that’s the thing. I love you, and I always will. I haven’t been treating you as something worthy of respect recently, and that’s sad.

That’s why I think we should become just friends. I don’t want to give you up, but I don’t think you’ll be such a constant companion any more. Not for a while, at least.

This morning, I’m making coffee on a Saturday morning. I have some time, and I’m going to damn well make it a ritual. I’m going to inhale deeply before I drink. I’m going to steep the grounds for just the right amount of time. I’m going to do right by you, Coffee. You deserve that.

Monday morning, I might just leave you on the counter. But wouldn’t you prefer it that way, rather than just going through the motions?

I remember being rather horrified one summer morning long ago when a burly, cheerful labouring man, carrying a hoe and a watering pot came into our churchyard and, as he pulled the gate behind him, shouted over his shoulder to two friends, ‘See you later, I’m just going to visit Mum.’ He meant he was going to weed and water and generally tidy up her grave. It horrified me because this mode of sentiment, all this churchyard stuff, was and is simply hateful, even inconceivable, to me. [But] I am beginning to wonder whether, if one could take that man’s line (I can’t), there isn’t a good deal to be said for it. That was his symbol for her, his link with her. Caring for it was visiting her. May this not be in one way better than preserving an image in one’s own memory? The grave and the image are equally links with the irrecoverable and symbols for the unimaginable. But the image has the added disadvantage that it will do whatever you want. It will smile or frown, be tender, gay, ribald, or argumentative just as your mood demands. It is a puppet of which you hold the strings… The flower-bed on the other hand is an obstinant, resistant, often intractable bit of reality. —C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

Tomorrow’s Thanksgiving Day, which I’ve always found interesting. It’s a useful reminder, isn’t it, this idea of taking time aside to be grateful?

This year, I am thankful for remembering. I am thankful for that peculiar and very human quality of life — that our experience changes us; for the fact that none of us will be the same people on this day next year.

Until next Thanksgiving, here’s to another year of obstinant, resistant, often intractable reality. Here’s hoping it brings us all more life than death, more to remember than to forget. Wassails!

I do think that women could make politics irrelevant; by a kind of spontaneous cooperative action the like of which we have never seen; which is so far from people’s ideas of state structure or viable social structure that it seems to them like total anarchy — when what it really is, is very subtle forms of interrelation that do not follow some heirarchal pattern which is fundamentally patriarchal. The opposite to patriarchy is not matriarchy but fraternity, yet I think it’s women who are going to have to break this spiral of power and find the trick of cooperation.
  — Germaine Greer

I actually frequently quote a part of this out of context, and I feel it’s “only slightly” misrepresentational. It can be hard to explain being a feminist white male, and when I need to reduce it to a sound bite, I cull this sentence:

The opposite to patriarchy is not matriarchy but fraternity.
  — Germaine Greer

For my birthday celebration, I attended the first “serious cultural event” that I’ve been to in years; going to Seattle to see the wondrous Kate Mulgrew play Katherine Hepburn in the one-woman show “Tea at Five.” And my word, was it a good show.

I traveled with my friend Syd; it was fortunately quite easy to sucker her into doing the driving, which was my primary ulterior motive for getting someone to go with me. She didn’t even mind going on a Thursday night, either (it was the day before my birthday, but I got a $40 discount for being under 25 years old).

The Seattle Repertory Theatre is smack in downtown Seattle, within blocks of the Space Needle. Our seats were fantastic, much better than I thought they were going to be based on the Web site’s seat map — six rows back and off to the side, but “off to the side” just didn’t matter as much as I expected.

Now, I will happily admit that my initial reason for being interested in “Tea at Five” is because I’m a hopeless Star Trek fanboy, and Voyager is, by far, my favorite Trek series. Janeway rocks, and Mulgrew’s performance was always both precise and in-character. She utterly inhabited Janeway and that impressed me. Furthermore, I’d seen a few (relatively minor) non-Trek roles for Mulgrew, and it’s notable how non-Janeway they are — i.e., her stellar execution of the Janeway character is due to her acting chops, and not merely happy coincidence.

Plus, she does have a physical resemblance to Hepburn.

The interview with her in the Voyager DVD special features, however, moved me from mildly interested to feeling like my life would be poorer if I never had a chance to see the play. Two things are particularly interesting: one, the play was specifically written for her. (The playwright was watching Voyager with Mulgrew’s best friend, and said something along the lines of “she should play Katherine Hepburn some time.” Said best friend apparently replied with something like, “If you write it, I’ll make sure she sees it.” (In fact, the playwright, Matthew Lombardo, was apparently in bed with said best friend at the time, but it’s “not nearly as naughty as it sounds,” says Mulgrew.))

Second, at one point during the interview, she says something like: “‘Fun’ is a word I would hesitate to apply to this project. It’s been total, which is better than fun.”

So, this was a play I determined I needed to see, and she brought it to Seattle for my birthday. Very kind.

Now, I don’t actually know very much about Kate Hepburn either. I’ve seen (and loved) The Lion in Winter, and her performance is certainly impressive. That might in fact be the only role in which I’ve seen her (at least when I was old enough to remember; I think I probably saw “On Golden Pond” as a kid).

I wasn’t sure what to expect from a one-woman show; what the style would be like. The format worked spectacularly well. In the first act, I think it could best be described as the audience being treated a bit like a very good friend, who’s perhaps a bit uninformed, but gets a casual ongoing commentary on the goings-on of Hepburn’s life. At various points the phone will ring, you’ll hear one side of a conversation, and after she hangs up, she’ll talk about the person on the other end of the line. A package is delivered; she reads the note aloud. The wind blows, she goes to the window, peers out and muses.

Mulgrew owns the stage; she struts, she lounges, she lays on the floor and talks up at the ceiling.

The second act takes place later in Hepburn’s life, and it feels more like catching up with an old friend. A little more retrospective, a bit less interruption, and one hell of a perfect ending.

The play is funny, too. Beautiful humor; the kind that relies on just the right delivery, and she nails it.

All in all, it’s an utterly flawless delivery of a fantastic script. If you’re reading this and you can make it to Seattle in the next week, to San Francisco in June, or to Pasadena in August; you owe it to yourself to go. Tickets start around $30, and I guarantee you’ll have a good enough time to justify it.

A few times I’ve asked mailing lists, and nobody’s ever known who he was. A couple times a year I run into the quote in some context or another and search Google, and all I’ve ever gotten are page after page after page from quote collections, containing only the single line. It’s been one of my life’s minor but longstanding mysteries.

Anyway, today I Googled it again, because I wanted to relate part of the story to the author of this post, and: lo and behold, they went and upgraded the Internet! It really does answer everything now!

Apparently, ORC is OSC’s grandfather, after whom he was named. (And Brigham Young is ORC’s grandfather, interestingly. I’d known OSC was devout and all, but didn’t realize he had such direct family ties to Mormon history.)

So that’s one minor mystery down for the count. Next, I just need to find out if the story of the physicist and the 5-gallon jug of distilled water is apocryphal or not…

Some of my favorites:

• When your only tool is a shovel, every problem looks like the back of some guy’s head.
• When your only tool is a strategic bomber, every problem looks like a city
• When your only tool is getting hammered, everyone looks like you should nail them
• When your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When that hammer is C++, everything looks like a thumb.

• “you can’t tell me that’s not”…
• “didn’t your mother ever tell you not to”…