A few weeks ago I decided to buy some new music. More specifically, I needed a more difficult collection of relatively short pieces to use for practice sight reading during my occasional bouts of piano playing. After consulting a variety of online piano forums and blogs, I settled on purchasing a copy of the Henle Album from the fine folks at G Henle Verlag. It's a steal at about $10, it's beautifully engraved, and it's meticulously edited.

Prior to this purchase, I had never so much as heard of Henle. (Relatively speaking, I'm not an especially talented pianist, and so I don't have a whole lot of exposure to the world of music publishers.) So I spent a few minutes poking around their website to learn, for one, what it meant that everything they sold was labeled as "urtext."

I also learned that as recently as 2000, Henle hand engraved all of their sheet music. That is, as recently as ten years ago — at about the same time I purchased my first digital camera — Henle still employed people who cut lines, staffs, sharps and other musical notation into sheets of lead with delicate metal instruments to produce printed sheet music. In fact, they still have a short film on their website documenting the process. It's almost unbelievable.

On the one hand, the fact that the company stuck to their now-antiquated methods of production for so long makes me wonder about the company's management. But on the other, there is something remarkable about a company so committed to producing the most elegant, most functional printed music that they would keep employing people to engrave music by hand, in spite of the emergence of digital publishing tools.

Of all the inconveniences I face living in a college dormitory, none rivals the absence of a well-equipped kitchen. I feel uncomfortably confined knowing that I cannot make a lasagna bolognese from scratch given a quick trip to the grocery store and ten or eleven hours of uninterrupted time with various kitchen gadgets. Not that I regularly make lasagna from scratch, even when I'm at home. (After going through the whole process last December, including the manufacture of the noodles, I've concluded it's something one ought to do about once a year, at the very most.) There's just something immensely comforting in knowing I could make profiteroles on a whim.

More pressingly, I find not having a kitchen at my disposal prevents me from following my desired food consumption path. Namely, I can't have a nice, relaxing mug of well-made hot chocolate on a whim. (Anyone who claims I can walk to the dining commons and have a mug of hot chocolate there must have desensitized taste buds. Their hot chocolate is better described as a hot chocolate-like beverage.) Principally, this inconvenience stems from my distaste for small refrigerators, which makes it difficult to keep the requisite milk on hand. But I have my reasons. First, storing something as large and bulky as a small refrigerator over the summer would be an inconvenience. Second, it seems really unnecessary for me to buy an appliance to chill milk, bottled water and the occasional bar of exotic chocolate. Third, for less than $2000, it's impossible to find an undercounter-style refrigerator with any kind of soundproofing. I would not welcome the drone of a dorm refrigerator's compressor humming all night.

A few minutes ago, however, it occurred to me that some companies sell aseptic single-serving containers of milk that don't require refrigeration. (Why it took two-and-a-half years for me to make this link, I don't know.) Though convenience does come at a steep price. From everything I've been able to glean online, this super-convenient milk runs about $30 a gallon, or at least ten times the price of a conventionally packaged gallon of milk. I would probably come out ahead in the long run if I bought a small, inexpensive refrigerator.

Yet another bizarre tradeoff only I will ever face.

While I'm not ready to put any code online, I thought I would make a brief note about the latest phase in the development of my online note taking application.

At some point in the last week, I decided it would be useful to give my software the ability to algorithmically generate short summaries of long notes. From the point of view of the user interface, it's quite a bit easier to browse notes and find something when the software doesn't display too little information — just a title or some statistics — or too much information, such as the whole ten paragraph note. (Think how much scrolling users would have to do!)

I've spent the last two days working on the algorithm, and I'm really quite pleased with how well it works, especially since it's a relatively simple algorithm, of less than 300 lines of code.

For instance, I just ran an article from CNN about Sarah Palin's recent decision to step down as Governor of Alaska through the algorithm. The original article is a little more than 5800 characters. My algorithm produced this 54 character summary:

It has a number of flaws, like the stray quote marks, incorrect punctuation of questions and a pronoun as the first word, but it's not half bad either.

In the course of some research on the Internet, I came across a San Francisco-based firm called Loomia, which provides companies with software to do those "If you liked this, then you'll also like..." blurbs on their websites. Curious about the company, I poked around their website to learn more, which led me to their "Tech Challenge Questions" for prospective employees.

Some of the questions were quite clever, though I really liked one in particular, which I will post here, with some modifications in the phrasing.

Challenge: Given the set { a, b, c, ... , z }, the set of lowercase letters of the standard English alphabet, we then define the operation $. Suppose we only know that

a $ b = ab = a
bc = c
cd = g
ef = u
ee = q
wy = i
wn = a
pq = g
rm = w
zc = y

and that the operation $ is associative with the identity element b. What, then, are the values of faulkner, oconnor and welty ?

It's not a particularly difficult to reverse engineer the operator, but I thought it was amusing enough to merit my repeating it.

While I have no data to back myself up on this, I at least feel like what I write on this blog is more often negative than positive. Without a doubt, I can be a very critical person, but it's not as if I have a reason to dislike everything around me!

So here are some additional endorsements.

I joined Twitter back in October, and I've been a fan ever since. It's simple, elegant and just generally wonderful. What makes Twitter even better, of course, is the universe of available applications that leverage Twitter's openness. On the desktop, I tried TweetDeck, but found its footprint on my computer bothersome. I prefer a piece of software called Tweetie from the fine folks at atebits. (A very clever name for a software company.) On the iPhone, I like Twitterrific.

Also, I recently had a chance to try out the Rosetta Stone language learning product. After playing with the French package, I'm convinced it's the best way to at least begin learning a second language, short of total immersion in another country or specialized classroom setting. In particular, I was quite impressed by the software's voice recognition capabilities, which did an excellent job of rejecting my input when I gave my French a strong American accent.

As part of my effort to post to this blog more frequently, I figured it might be a good idea to post some shorter pieces too, as most normal bloggers seem to.

So I have two recommendations for online reading and one book to plug.

First, I've long been a fan of Piled High and Deeper (or PHD) comics, the grad student comic strip. While I'm not a grad student (yet), I really empathize with the fictional students in the strip. It's also funny, if you're an academic geek like me.

Next, I would like to recommend The Art of the Title Sequence blog. It's a blog about movie title sequences, shockingly enough. While some title sequences — and movies for that matter — are banal and uninteresting, there are some movies with title sequences that merit extra attention.

Finally, I just finished reading P.D. James's latest novel The Private Patient. Literary merit aside, I enjoy reading mystery novels. P.D. James weaves the police procedural novel together with a more cerebral, psychoanalytical point of view that adds a great deal of depth. I also enjoy her subtle sense of humor.

A few weeks ago, with Winter Semester fast approaching, I realized I needed to buy more notebooks. For the last four years, I have exclusively used Moleskine's Extra Large Cahiers to keep all my notes. They're relatively inexpensive, so I could easily have one notebook for each course, and they're durable, with acid-free paper, stitch binding and a durable cardboard cover.

But, to my horror, when I popped online to place an order for more notebooks, my supplier didn't have them in stock.

Some sleuthing revealed the ugly truth. From what I learned, a giant paper products conglomerate had acquired the Moleskine company. In a bid to streamline the company — something I wholeheartedly support in most cases — the new corporate overlords had discontinued the less popular products, including my beloved Extra Large Cahier.

Initially, I thought it might be possible to find some dealer with lots of overstock product, swoop in and buy up all of the remaining Extra Large Cahiers. As it turned out, however, most dealers with leftover inventory were praying on desperate devotees, such as myself, by selling them with insane markup. (Even I'm not crazy enough to pay $70 for 3 composition books!)

Thus, I set about finding a replacement. My first thought was the French paper products company, Clairefontaine, more or less the official provider of paper products to French students. I like their products quite a bit — I've recently switched to their top-bound notepads from the comparable Moleskine products — but they only offer notebooks with spiral binding, which I find cumbersome compared to the Moleskine-style stitch binding.

Then I stumbled upon Minneapolis-based russel+hazel. They offer a wide assortment of paper products that appear to have been designed with neurotic people like me in mind. The pages of their signature SmartRule paper have line numbers, just like Xcode. The notebooks also come in a variety of colors, unlike the all black, all the time Moleskines, which would make finding the right notebook that much easier, especially when it's one of 50.

Unfortunately, ecru, a fantastic Portland-area stationary store, only had one russel+hazel composition book in stock. I bought it, though, and I'm impressed with the product. I suspect they will become my new note taking medium of choice. Not to mention, I will probably spend a small fortune on their line of binders, notepads and filler paper designed for type-A personalities like me.

This is a fantastic video. Watch it.

In May 2007, Apple CEO Steven P. Jobs, in a open letter promised consumers and environmental watchdog groups alike that Apple would, when economically prudent and technically feasible, eliminate the CCFL (cold cathode fluorescent lamp) backlights from all of its LCD computer displays. CCFLs contain mercury and other toxic heavy metals, which, of course, harm the environment.

Naturally, environmental groups cheered. The CCFL's successor, the LED (light emitting diode) backlight contains fewer toxic chemicals and requires less energy to operate. Creative professionals also welcomed the transition: LED backlights, unlike their predecessors, reach their full brightness the minute they turn on. Anyone working in an environment where accurate color matters can appreciate the improvement.

Since May 2007, other manufacturers have also taken steps to transition their products' backlights to LEDs from CCFLs. The LED backlit display has become, for the digerati, the "it" item of the moment, to draw a somewhat unseemly comparison.

At the same time, however, many of the same environmental groups who chastised the consumer electronics industry for using CCFL backlights launched programs to help consumers reduce their environmental impact by switching to funny-looking CFLs (compact fluorescent lamps) from their old incandescent lamps.

This makes absolutely no sense.

That the consumer electronics industry has decided to abandon CCFL backlights indicates the LED represents — for its superior efficiency, less severe environmental impact and technical improvements — a superior technology. Also, given that consumer electronics manufacturers, as for-profit entities, would want to minimize costs, their switch to LED backlights signals the LED has some economic advantage over the CCFL as well.

Why, then, do environmental groups continue to push compact fluorescent bulbs rather than the arguably superior LED sort?

Some would argue — and argue correctly — that the price of one LED light bulb far exceeds that of one compact fluorescent. But, just as the compact fluorescent lamp lasts longer than an incandescent lamp, an LED lamp lasts far, far longer a compact fluorescent.

Environmental groups should stop extolling the compact fluorescent now. I can just imagine the headlines in five years: "Compact Fluorescents: Dangerous and Deadly." Or the latest initiative from Greenpeace: "Ditch Your Compact Fluorescents: Go LED!"

Microsoft of late has received quite a beating, at least in the public perception and advertising department, from its rival-in-chief, Apple, Inc. of Cupertino. Those "Get a Mac" advertisements — featuring "Too Cool Mac " Justin Long and "Lovable Workaholic PC" John Hodgman — have wreaked havoc on Windows Vista's reputation, portraying it as more of a downgrade than an upgrade.

Today, two years after Apple launched its "Get a Mac" advertisements, Microsoft took the wraps off its own marketing push back. As of this writing, visitors to Microsoft's homepage see this teaser graphic:

On the one hand, I like the concept and the advertisement. I have never understood what people hated so much about Windows Vista. Sure, it has some problems. Sure, I would rather use my Mac. But Windows Vista really does not deserve its reputation as something to be avoided like the Bubonic Plague.

Part of me, though, objects to the ad, not because I don't think Windows Vista deserves a chance to dig itself out of the gutter, but rather because the advertisement reinforces the incorrect belief that not a soul in 15th century Europe thought the Earth was round. As a matter of fact, many, many people, prior to Dear Christopher believed the Earth was round. Those big thinkers in Ancient Greece, for one, developed reasonably accurate methods of estimating the size of this misshapen sphere we humans call home.

In my mind, the belief that everyone thought the world was flat represents just an egregious factual error as people believing the world was flat in the first place. Scholars have known the ancients knew of our planet's shape for many, many years. Yet, in our popular culture, we continue to reinforce this loony misconception that everyone thought the world was flat. And, those of us brave enough to point out the problem with that thinking usually face accusations of over thinking or being some kind of academic show-off.

The vulgarization of complicated ideas has a place. Not everyone needs to know how a submarine works down to the tinniest button or switch. In other matters, though, we owe it to ourselves to be faithful to the truth.

Image courtesty Jurvetson

Just about every phone sold in the last two years has a Bluetooth radio. This Bluetooth technology enables devices — such as a computer and a cell phone — within 30 feet of one another to talk, wirelessly. Thus, just about everyone who has purchased a cell phone in the last two years could backup their phone — names, addresses and phone numbers included — to ensure they needn't reenter their hundred zillion contacts using one of those painfully cramped numeric keypads.

But almost no one does. And, for the longest time, I could not figure out why. In the last five years I have gone through five cell phones. (Four of which have been iPhones. Apple keeps giving me duds, though they have replaced them all free of charge.) With each of those five phones I have never spent more than five minutes loading all my contact data onto the device, thanks to Bluetooth.

It occurred to me, however, as I restored my latest replacement iPhone yesterday afternoon, how much easier it is to load contact information onto the iPhone, and how much more difficult it was for me to coerce my old Nokia to do the same.

At that point I realized it all comes down to human interface design. First and foremost, most PC manufacturers do not include a Bluetooth radio in the computer by default. Thus, for the vast majority of the Windows-using world, it's technically impossible to backup its phones via Bluetooth!

This is a tremendous oversight. Many, many people want to backup their cell phone. Many, many people also own cell phones with a Bluetooth radio. Finally, a Bluetooth radio costs a computer manufacturer a whopping two dollars. That two dollar addition can make a person's computer a whole lot more useful.

Of course, the problems don't end there. On the Windows side, most cell phone manufacturers use proprietary software to sync their phones with users' computers. This proprietary software may, or may not, be included in the box with the cell phone. Either way, the user has to actively install the software from a mysterious CD in the box with his or her cell phone, or go online, hunt down and install a software package.

And, inevitably, those software packages do not make it easy for the phone and the computer to speak with one another.

On the Mac, it's a little easier. First and foremost, just about every Mac sold in the last four years comes with Bluetooth. Most cell phones also communicate with Apple's iSync software out of the box, without any additional drivers or downloads. But even on the Mac, for the mythical "average" computer user, setting up the sync is complicated. One has to first pair the phone, which, depending on the cell phone can be tricky, and then setup iSync, a program Apple says little about, thus reducing the chances the "average" user knows about it.

The only phone I know of that makes backup truly painless is, of course, the iPhone. I plug it in, iTunes opens and, voilà, synchronization.

But that begs the question, why doesn't everyone make syncing so simple?

If the technology companies decided to worked together, they could easily come up with some standard protocol for making cell phone sync painless.

Computer manufacturers could include a Bluetooth radio with every computer sold, and Microsoft and Apple could develop some kind of system, integrated with the operating system, that "listens" for nearby cell phones with Bluetooth. Then, when a user powers on their cell phone in proximity to their computer, it could prompt the user to setup sync.

There are some rather obvious problems with such a simple solution — I can easily see myself sitting in an airport terminal and going insane as hundreds of prompts to "Sync with Bob Smith's Cell Phone?" crowd my screen. Perhaps cell phone manufacturers could include a prominent "Sync" button either in the phone's interface, or on the phone itself to put the phone in its discoverable mode.

Collectively, people waste thousands of hours reentering millions of phone numbers, simply because technology companies cannot make phone sync simple. At this point, I say everyone should just buy an iPhone. Which is a great reason for everyone else to think about making the synchronization system simpler. As for the toilets, waterproof phones would just be too bulky and clumsy.

When my upgrade to Movable Type 4.1 broke every piece of my custom tempting scheme, I figured it would be more exciting to just start over and come up with a new, if similar, design.

The process is coming along well, especially now I ostensibly have nothing to do (it's not as fun as most people imagine), though, as is apparent, the look is still rough around the edges. Still, this, unlike the mangled mess Movable Type generated after the upgrade, can at least be read without too much eyestrain.

For most of my life, I have either used a plain vanilla text editor or Macromedia's Dreamweaver to cook up my HTML. But, as much as I have come to know and love those two tools, they have their shortcomings.

Creating markup with a text editor can be unbearably tedious. It's nice to have software that does syntax highlighting, magically indents in the right places and completes certain strings. Without a doubt, Dreamweaver's WYSIWYG editing environment is easy and quick. The markup it spews out, however, often fails to pass muster in multiple browsers, and the software limps slowly along like an overweight tortoise.

Then I discovered Coda. While I will admit the folks at Panic have a few wrinkles to iron out, the software still manages to best every other piece of web development software I have used.

The text editing component has everything I want and then some. Syntax highlighting makes deciphering gigantic amorphous blobs of HTML a snap and the built-in syntax-aware autocompletion feature saves my poor fingers from typing more than they must. It also saves me from those pesky problems that result from missing a letter or forgetting the closing tag, since Coda just drops the text in place.

Coda replaces Dreamweaver's cumbersome preview system, which involves switching to an entirely different application, with instant, beautifully rendered WebKit previews, thanks to Apple's WebKit framework. It just works. And it works well.

The clips heads-up-display (or "HUD"), while not a headline-grabbing, awe-inspiring feature, has also proved surprisingly useful. On the surface, it's really nothing more than a glorified copy and paste system, but it still manages to save me a great deal of time. I just drop a blob of code into the HUD, name it and I can quickly add it to any other page.

Even the FTP system has blown me away. I have never used Panic's acclaimed Transmit, but, if it uses the same underlying technology and has the same beautiful interface, its fans have good reason to love it. Unlike, say, the FTP component haphazardly attached to Dreamweaver, Coda's remote site access is fast, effortless and unobtrusive. I can continue to code away while I wait for an image to upload without the constant annoyance of Dreamweaver's petulant FTP status window.

Just in case someone from Panic actually reads this, I will air a few grievances. With large files, the syntax highlighting tends to slow down, to the point I crashed Coda opening an enormous JavaScript file. On a similar note, the ability to collapse code would be wonderful when working on long CSS or JavaScript files. It might also be nice if I could have some way to make Coda automatically complete Movable Type template tags.

Still, Coda is, far and away, the best web development tool on the market. It offers just the right combination of tools in a beautiful, simple package. And, at $80 — less than a quarter of Dreamweaver's astronomical price tag — it's a bargain too.

I will take a moment to break from my frenetic studying to write a word or two about the Cantor Diagonal Method, which one might use to prove there cannot be a bijection between the reals and the naturals.

To this point everything in my five-day-a-week, 5-hour-a-day mathematics course, while not always intuitive, has at least been proven or presented with elegant mathematics. The Cantor Method, though, lacks that elegance. I cannot deny its usefulness, or even indispensableness, however, a proof written with his method, rather than flowing elegantly from one statement to another, relies upon a hideous morass of numbers in an equally hideous table.

I can only hope some other mathematician comes up with a more deft way to do what George managed.

One need not look further than France to realize that language is fluid and malleable. While a lexicographer might scoff at a word like "obeausity" or "splendiferous," people will, if the word sticks, call someone obeause or something splendiferous. The Académie française can insist French speakers use the "correct" term for email, "courriel," but, as the French have shown, such mandates can be blissfully ignored.

There is, however, one word whose usage has spiraled out of control recently and that has absolutely no function whatsoever in improving the English language. That malicious word is none other than "oftentimes."

Frankly, I find it astounding just how much the use of oftentimes has exploded. As an extremely corse and mostly unscientific measurement of oftentimes' use, I observed that a Google search for the string, "oftentimes 2008" garnered just over 2 million hits, whereas "oftentimes 2002" produced just over 1 million. Even taking into consideration the fact that, in all likelihood, more writing was published online in 2008 than 2002, the statistic astounds. The year 2008 has not even hit the halfway point in its march to December 31.

Of course, just because more people use a word does not necessarily mean it has no linguistic value. In most cases, a words' increased usage would tend to indicate it had more, not less value, as I implied. But, from my perspective, the word "oftentimes" has, in and of itself, no linguistic merit.

Oftentimes and its linguistic parent, often, have the exact same meaning: frequently. In fact, my dictionary defines oftentimes as often. As far as I am concerned, there is no reason to introduce an extra syllable if it adds no extra depth or meaning. It serves only to add extra and entirely superfluous weight to a sentence.

I suspect people use oftentimes for the same reason they employ utilize, rather than use: to sound academic, pretentious and authoritative. It is somewhat ironic, then, to learn that utilize and oftentimes actually have newer etymologies than their more "formal" counterparts. Use comes from the Old French verb user, whereas utilize comes from the much younger French verb, utiliser, which, as it happens is still used today. Often has its roots in Middle English, a derivative of oft, while the painfully long oftentimes comes from what my dictionary calls, "late Middle English," making it at least a few years younger its parent. So much for deriving authority from the ancients.

Even Thomas Jefferson, not someone with a reputation for penning concise or straightforward prose, kept his writing free of oftentimes' infectious presence. A search of the University of Virginia's Thomas Jefferson Digital Archive turned up exactly zero documents with the string "oftentimes." (Often, by contrast produced 21.) If Jefferson managed to live without that extra pretentious syllable, the rest of us can too.

While I have something of an affinity for the English language, I do not have an affinity for the "art" that is literary criticism. Nothing, save perhaps the handful of utterly idiotic errors I made on my second mathematics exam, in my one semester of tertiary education has caused me more grief than my French literature class. To be sure, I feel much more intelligent having read such big names as Baudelaire and Appolinaire in their original unfiltered French. Analyzing their poetry, however, has caused me a great deal of mental pain, albeit mental pain for the better.

Mathematics, on the other hand, is perhaps the most pragmatic subject around. It is, for the most part, utterly useless by itself, but, when coupled with a real world problem — particle physics or microeconomics — mathematics manages to solve big problems without messy ambiguity.

As such, when my French literature course turned its attention to Oulipo, I was intrigued. For Oulipo — whose name constitutes a shortened form of "ouvroir de littérature potentielle" or "the workshop of literary potential" — strives to bridge the divide between literature and mathematics.

Of all the avant-garde literary movements producing bizarre, conceptual writing, Oulipo is, without question, the least insane. The writing created using the various Oulipo constraints, while often entirely nonsensical, is at least founded in good mathematics. Moreover, much of the more nonsensical pieces are hilarious, and the more serious pieces are technically breathtaking.

Georges Perec — one of the more well-known "Oulipiens" — penned La Disparition without using a single "e." But, while one might imagine, out of sheer necessity, a 300 page novel without a single "e" would be a meaningless blob of jibber-jabber, French book critics failed to notice the lack of "e" on first glance. Frankly, I found skimming La Disparition a tad frightening. Had I not known Perec omitted the letter "e," I would never have noticed its absence.

One of the more amusing Oulipo works for the mathematically inclined is Cent mille milliards de poèmes or One hundred thousand billion poems. The printed book itself is no larger than a standard hardcover, which, when first I saw it, made me cast doubt on the whole Oulipo movement. I figured the title was nothing more than superfluous literary hyperbole.

Inside, however, the book contains a series of manipulable strips, each printed with a line of poetic verse. I liken it to magnetic poetry. Granted, unlike those absurd magnetic poetry kits, which manage to combine my hatred of refrigerator magnets and completely ambiguous poetry, any permutation of the lines in Cent mille milliards de poèmes actually makes sense. More importantly, it is actually possible to produce about one hundred thousand billion poems, given the number of interchangeable lines in the book.

Whether Oulipo manages to truly bridge the realms of literature and mathematics, I cannot be sure. Nevertheless, Oulipo is easily my favorite way to play with words in a way founded entirely in mathematics.

(For the French-speakers out there, a visit to the Oulipo website at oulipo.net cannot go amiss.)

This will be a brief entry. I should have more time to write and, more importantly, focus next week as I return to the West coast for Bates' somewhat haphazard February break.

It only took four months, but Apple finally addressed my sole remaining Leopard-related complaint. The Mac OS X 10.5.2 update, released yesterday, adds the "Transparent Menu Bar" checkbox to the Desktop and Screensaver preference pane. At long last, the menu bar need not be a hard-to-read, mildly unsightly blemish atop my screen.

In other news, Quidditch teams have begun sprouting up at colleges in the Northeast. Given that Vassar and Middlebury have formed teams, I cannot help but think Bates will soon follow. The lack of flying broomsticks, enchanted bludgers and winged snitches makes the phenomenon somewhat nonsensical. But whatever technical or logical problems are easily trumped by the college Quidditch scene's wonderful whimsy. The YouTube video of the Vassar team practicing is particularly charming.

Pure Genius
It's no iPhone, but it is quite clever.

While my effort a year ago — to save trees by posting this list online — failed, in the sense that it did not do what I hoped it would. That said, apparently people like knowing what I want.

So, here it is, for 2007.

$25 & Under

Books, books and more books. Perhaps ironically, I have a particularly strong desire to read How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read.

• How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read (Pierre Bayard)
• Beethoven's Anvil (William Benzon)
• Made to Stick (Chip and Dan Heath)
• Powers of Ten (Charles and Ray Eames)

$50 & Under

• Kitchen Chemistry (Ted Lister with Heston Blumenthal)

$75 & Under

• The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes (2-Volume Set; W. W. Norton and Company)

$100 & Under

No, that's not a typo. I still want (and still do not own) an infrared thermometer.

• Reveal Watch (Daniel Will-Harris)
• Aromatic Milk Frother (Nespresso)
• Tall Electric Tea Kettle (Breville)
• IR Gun Industrial Infrared Thermometer (Thermoworks)

$200 & Under

Spending more than $70 for a tie would, under normal circumstances, constitute an act of insane, irrational behavior. Hermès, though, has produced a tie so incredibly clever, it more or less embodies the word. From afar, one sees a dotted purple tie. But, on closer inspection, it is revealed that the small dots are really cartoon octopuses. Pure genius.

• Cashmere Scarves (Paul Smith)
• AF-S DX Zoom-NIKKOR 55-200mm f/4-5.6G ED (Nikon)
• Clever Octopus Tie (Hermès)

$200 & Up

• Agatha Christie 24-Volume Hardcover Set (Agatha Christie)

For the developing world, aid and debt forgiveness are good. But empowerment and education are great. Nicolas Negroponte's one laptop per child, or "OLPC," initiative has the potential to change the world, despite the various setbacks and budget overruns, by empowering children in the developing world through technology and the power of the Internet.

It has been possible to donate an XO laptop computer, for $200, or help fund the project's development and deployment through one-off donations for quite a while. Now, however, people can participate in the OLPC project's new "give 1 get 1" program. For $400, purchasers receive an XO laptop of their own and provide the funds to give a child one of the XO laptops too. While the XO has less processing power than my iPhone, it is still a pretty neat computer. It uses so little power that the battery can be charged by hand-crank: something very important for those people without access to electricity and rather novel for those of us who do.

Check out the OLPC project at laptop.org.

My advertising campaign on Facebook has produced some very interesting results. I say interesting because neither my Facebook nor my Google AdWords campaigns have, in their short lifetimes, failed to bring me any additional business. The Facebook advertising, though, has given me an interesting look into the way the human mind functions, or rather does not function.

As I mentioned on Friday, Facebook does not allow advertisers to locally target their "flyers" to specific geographic locations when paid for on a per-click basis, rather than on a per-impression basis. So, my advertisements have been displayed to Facebook users across the United States, despite the fact that my business operates locally in the Portland area. To compensate for this unfortunate fact, I made sure to specify where my business operated in the advertisement by noting that I offer, "…computer consulting services in the Portland, OR area…" (emphasis added).

One would think, especially given the number of college graduates and students using Facebook, that this would deter someone in Iowa from clicking on the ad. Logic and intelligent thought, however, collapse when confronted with a dose of unfiltered human behavior. According to my fancy Google Analytics — which provides me with an almost Orwellian amount of detail about every one of my visitors — my business' website received several referrals from Facebook users in the states of California, Iowa and Kentucky

It appears that people either blindly click on my advertisements out of sheer boredom, or they read its title, "Computer Support" and click through without a full perusal. Otherwise, I fail to see how anyone could possibly mistake Portland, Oregon with Fort Dodge, Iowa.

While I generally try to think positively and adopt a sanguine outlook, this information depresses me. Either the average Facebook user has absolutely no intelligence and cannot distinguish one discrete name from another, or the average Facebook user displays absolutely no prudence whatsoever in reading advertisements and further compounds consumer ignorance.

But this is only day four of the campaign. Knowing as little as I do about online advertising, it may well take a full week to really start delivering on its promise of fantastic ROI.

Like the poor Floridian who had the misfortune of being struck twice by lightning, I have terrible luck. When I bought a Staedtler Lumocolor permanent marker, I had planned to refill it upon its death. But Staedtler failed to mention that, while they do sell the Lumocolor markers in the United States, they do not sell the refill kit. Such was the collapse of my well-conceived plan to protect the environment by purchasing a slightly overpriced German marker.

I find it incredibly ironic that my effort to protect the environment may actually harm the it. Apparently, I have to order the refill kit directly from Germany, which means that, in addition to the the insane sum in Euros and the currency conversion fee I will have to pay, I must also have the inkwell shipped in some airplane across two continents. That is, to say the least, awful for the environment.

And, without doubt, Staedtler does not sell the refill kit in the United States because Americans are so incredibly lazy. Just today I discovered that Costco sells instant cosmopolitan mix. If a nation cannot throw a dash of lemon vodka, a touch of Cointreau, a splash of cranberry juice and a squeeze of lime into a shaker, then there is no way it would purchase refills for markers. The effort of dipping a pen into a well of ink would probably kill the millions of people whose hearts are failing due to lack of exercise.

Yes, I love this country.

Fear not! The second installment of Woe, Waiters and Water, which will contain my account of horror and woe aboard America's worst airline, will arrive in due course. In the meantime, I have this quick trio of tidbits.

I recently discovered a wonderful blog called the Language Log, compiled by a number of esteemed linguists from around the world. The writing is very dense and the authors generally explore extremely esoteric aspects of semantics and other linguistic principles, but it is enjoyable all the same. I especially liked their recent post on the president's use of "like totally" in recent speeches.

Switching gears, my best photos from the recent Paris escapade are now organized and neatly arranged in a flickr Set for all to enjoy. My percentage of selects as they relate to total photos was exceptionally low, at just 5.07%, or about half my average. But some of the blame must be attributed to the rather capricious Parisian weather. Nearly all of my Louvre photos have a very sombre gray look that does not appeal to my artistic eye thanks to the dark August cumulonimbi that so frequently hovered over my lens.

Also of note on the photography front, my trusty Nikon D50 has now taken over 14,000 photos. To me that seems a staggering number, however, it may well be typical. Nikon has given its newest camera, the D300, a projected life span of 300,000 shots, which makes my number look rather sad.

Sickness, pain, genocide, bad food — all things I truly despise. But, more recently, I have come to really, truly detest these bizarre pieces of footwear called Crocs that people from all walks of life have adopted. Words alone cannot fully express just how deplorable I find those hideous bright-colored sandal-esque pieces of footwear.

For goodness sake! Buy a pair of tennis shoes, flip flops, sandals — anything — but those horrid pieces of closed cell resin. As I always say, comfort is absolutely, positively, never an excuse for choosing something incredibly hideous and tacky.

But the real reason that I have endeavored to write this little snippet is my recent discovery of a truly fantastic website: ihatecrocs.com. This website, like its second-cousin, Ban Comic Sans, has a multitude of information for the enterprising portion of our population looking for even more confirmation that their deep seeded hatred is justified.

When I read, yesterday, that Six Apart would release an update to the Movable Type 4 beta today, I figured that they would. But with only an hour and a half left until tomorrow in the Pacific time zone, I have begun to develop doubts that such a wonderful event will not come to pass.

While I spent half an hour sitting at my computer waiting for the beta to go online this evening, I paid a visit to my friends at flickr. Unlike the somewhat feature-happy people at Six Apart, the developers at flickr have added some new features since last I visited. Among them is support for six new languages, French among them. So, patiently waiting to fix my website, I switched the language just to see how it would feel to browse all those pretty pictures en français.

As anyone who uses flickr knows, the homepage greets users with a greeting in an attempt to impart the ability to greet in another language. Obviously someone browsing the flickr files in English would learn nothing by learning how to say hello in English. But for the francophones, such a greeting might prove (mildly) educational. Unsurprisingly, then, I was greeting with an English-language salutation that looked like this:

There is something mildly humorous about that little blob of text. The caption below the image reads, "Now you know how to say good day in English!" If I had a nickel for every time I heard those two greetings mixed up I would have a very empty piggy bank. Ah, the joys of translation.

I have no qualms about free verse poetry. Without question, many remarkable poets have composed their works without a rhyme scheme or meter to speak of. Students, however, seem to possess a certain propensity for dislike when it comes to the composition of poems with a rhyme or meter. On Monday, a few brave souls in my English class shared the poems they had composed for our "I'm Tired" poetry assignment, inspired by the somewhat macabre history of Pete in Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

But much to my dismay, not one of the shared poems had any semblance of a rhyme scheme or meter. I would not have minded if only half or even three-quarters of the poems lacked structure, but it disappointed me to see that so few people had chosen to give themselves some sort of boundaries when composing their poems. I have no idea whether my confrères at school simply prefer unstructured poetry or if they dislike the extra effort often associated with structured poetry. Frankly, though, I suspect the latter.

I end with my poem, yet another tirade against the lamentable online social-networking portal, MySpace.

O Rupert, Why?

There is a place, right on the net,
Where children post 'til dawn,
It's ugly and obtrusive, yet,
They fawn and fawn and fawn,

"How can this be?" I say and say,
Along with every click,
Cannot it all just fade away?
It looks and reads like sick,

The letter "I" ought be in caps,
Bemused does not mean glad,
Who are all of these writing quacks?
They make me very sad,

A photo of a green baboon,
With fuchsia does not go,
Nor does that sad new emo tune,
Make for a nice hello,

I tire of these spaces, my,
So ghastly and so vile,
One day I hope to say goodbye,
And strand them on an isle.

Once again, I have found something blogworthy in my website statistics. My assumptions could be wildly wrong, but, as with everything, I like to think I'm correct. At any rate, when I checked my website statics today, I noticed that someone had come across my website by typing the following search string into Google:

"the important thing is not to stop questioning. curiosity has its own reason for existing. one cannot help but be in awe when one contemplates the mysteries of eternity of life of the marvelous structure of reality. it is enough if one tries to comprehend only a little of this mystery every day."

This quote, which I mentioned in Shakespeare, Einstein, and Princeton, comes directly from both the mind of Albert Einstein and the essay portion of the Princeton University Undergraduate Application. This lazy or conniving student made such a blatant attempt to steal the contents of someone's essay that I hope he or she does not gain admission to Princeton in the spring. In fact, I would go so far as to predict that Lazy Larry or Conniving Chloe will relieve at least one piece of very unwelcome mail in the spring, if he or she has such a deficit of integrity or creativity.

An Enigma

After an exceedingly difficult or dull day at school, I make sure to visit a number of websites, so as to keep myself abreast of the latest news and happenings around the world. I generally start with engadget, BBC News and LCI, followed by a quick check of my website statistics. There, I can view all sorts of information about the lovely people who visit my website each and every day. Amongst the browser statistics and top search strings is an area which permits me to see which web pages link to mine and how many people have followed the links on those websites. In general, the referrals come from places I might expect - say a friend's blog or technorati.com. Today, however, I noticed a litany of links from a certain person's LiveJournal. Curious, I clicked on the link and happened upon a page explaining that only the user's friends could read the entry. So, I removed part of the URL and looked at the user's public LiveJournal.

This mysterious LiveJournal impressed me in one way, disappointed me in another, and left me quite perplexed in yet another. To begin, this mysterious LiveJournal looked good. Really good. In fact, it looked better than any other LiveJournal I have happened upon in the past. Unfortunately, though, the praise must end there. For I cannot judge the LiveJournal in any other way, since the author has only granted permission to his or her LiveJournal friends to view his or her entries.

But that aside, the question remains: who is this mysterious referrer?

A Mystery

I often find myself in the midst of a conversation whose subject would not necessarily cross my mind. Today, for instance, I spent several minutes discussing the merits and demerits of certain types of Christmas trees. The notion had never crossed my mind. Though, when I did consider it, I realized that I had no real preference as to which particular type of Christmas tree I prefer. Certainly, I would much prefer a strong healthy tree to one who looked on the brink of disintegrating into a pile of dust. But I cannot say that I prefer a Douglas Fir to a Noble Fir. I call them both "Christmas Trees."

I have long known that Parade - a supplemental pseudo-magazine that graces in the insides of many Sunday papers in the United States - does not distinguish itself with the kind of writing contained in the pages of its competitors, such as the New York Times Magazine. However, I did not realize how strange it was until earlier this evening.

I picked up the 19 November issue of Parade as I was munching on a cinnamon roll. After the celeb-gossip section and an article chronicling the technological phobias of some famous faces, I stumbled upon an article about high-tech cooking tools with a sentence that made me scratch my head. The sentence reads, "Everything from ovens to refrigerators is getting smarter." At first, I thought that the author of the article incorrectly chose to use "is," rather than "are," in the sentence. But upon further examination I realized that the author had mutated "to be" correctly. Still, it would have made the sentence clearer if the author had inserted some hyphens so that the sentence read like this: "Everything - from ovens to refrigerators - is getting smarter." Otherwise, it seems like the sentence should use "are," as in: "Ovens and refrigerators are getting smarter."

Most of the other writing, while clearly not written for the most astute audience, did not baffle me like that article on page 8. However, when I finished rifling through Parade and flipped it over, revealing the cover, I saw something else that struck me as strange. The cover has a blurb reading, "An easy guide to keeping it simple." I don't see why the author choose not to write, "A guide to keeping it simple" instead. The word "simple" implies that the activity is not terribly complicated, so, assuming that simple activities require simple instructions, the guide must be easy to understand.

I stopped looking for writing anomalies after finding the one on the cover, though I am inclined to think that if I had continued looking, I would have found more. I cannot believe that a nationally syndicated magazine has such strange sentences contained within its pages, especially in giant, 48 point type.

Rarely do I write two blog entries in a single day. But tonight I seem to have the writing bug, so here goes.

MySpace, the wildly successful social-networking website, has one problem that irks me beyond all others. Without considerable skill, time, and dedication, one cannot possibly create a MySpace that looks anything less than decidedly hideous. "Your Fav. Blonde," whose MySpace I selected at random, has a MySpace that looks like this:

(Lime green and hot pink do not go well together.)

Fortunately, however, Six Apart - the same wonderful company who writes the MovableType blogging software I use - recently launched a new service called Vox. Vox provides many of the same features of a MySpace, but without the undesirable hideousness. Users can still befriend one another, contribute to their online journals, swap messages with one another, and extol the virtues of a particular book or band.

But unlike News Corp's MySpace service, Vox provides users with thousands of gorgeous templates that can be applied on a whim as they see fit. As a result, Vox users have some of the best-looking websites on the Internet. Aldrin, a Vox user selected at random, has a Vox that looks like this:

Clearly, Vox users have an advantage in the looks department. Templates come from a variety of sources on Vox - from professional graphic designers to closet creatives - and, for the most part, they all look incredible. Vox also makes choosing and applying templates exceedingly simple. One simply clicks on the design button, finds a design, and clicks apply.

Vox's more polished look also seems to promote better writing. In my limited experience with MySpace, I have never noticed any writing that seemed particularly stellar, or, for that matter, even passable. On Vox, however, all of the writers manage to compose complete sentences and many Vox users write with a fair amount of skill.

Vox users John and Sylvie wrote recently:

MySpace user Girien, on the other hand, recently posted:

That is not to say that nobody on MySpace writes well, but rather to illustrate the generally higher quality of writing on Vox.

Hopefully, Vox will supplant MySpace as the preferred method of online social-networking. It provides many of the same features minus the ugliness. Pay them a visit at Vox.com, especially if you use MySpace.

Whoever uploaded this video probably broke some French law, but I find that fact quite immaterial. C'est pas Sorcier is some seriously great television. This episode's subject is the universe and whether or not UFO's (OVNI's as they say in the land of cheese) exist.

Amusez-vous bien.

Few beverages can calm me more than a piping hot mug of cocoa. But in many cases, I feel either too lethargic or simply too tired hunch over the stove and concoct hot chocolate from scratch. So, desiring a high-quality quick-fix hot chocolate, I began an investigation into hot chocolate mixes.

Having consumed many abysmal mugs of instant hot chocolate, I figured that the best course of action would involve creating a mix from scratch. Unlike the food scientists who develop Swiss Miss and other popular (though insipid) hot chocolate mixes, I did not have access to the commercial food-altering chemicals used to enhance mouth feel and flavor. Still, I reasoned, if the mixes with unusual chemicals hark of diluted sugar water, as opposed to cocoa, my lack of flavor-enhancing chemicals could not possibly be detrimental.

After much unsuccessful trial and error, I turned to the Internet for guidance. Eventually, I stumbled upon a recipe for hot chocolate mix created by one of my culinary heroes, Alton Brown. Admittedly, I found some of his choices a little bizarre, such as his decision to add cayenne pepper to the melange. Though, given my lack of success up to that point, I figured I ought to at least try it.

The "Good Eats" Cocoa Mix, as Mr Brown would refer to it, certainly mimicked a real mug of hot chocolate far more convincingly than any other amalgamation I had tasted prior to that point. But at the same time, a water-based hot chocolate - even one using a seemingly excessive quantity of powdered milk - cannot begin to mimic an actual mug of hot chocolate.

Alton Brown's cocoa creation certainly improved over most instant hot chocolate mixes, however, I have concluded that one simply cannot mimic the marvelous mouth-feel and fine flavor of real hot chocolate, made with real milk.

(For the curious, my recipe for real hot chocolate follows the discontinuation)

I found this assignment mildly amusing, so I figured I would put it online.

Oh, and, incidentally, this boast won the award for "Most Authentic" in my English class, if that has any pertinence to anything whatsoever.

My Poor Pen
© 2006 Joseph Kibe. All rights reserved.

In general, sneezing does not constitute a particularly remarkable or noteworthy event. But on Friday I sneezed with my Waterman Carène fountain pen clutched in my right hand. Post-sneeze, the pen proceeded to fall three inches, eventually striking my desk. As it turns out, I managed to bend the nib of my (very expensive) Waterman fountain pen back so much so that the pen stopped functioning.

Of course, my next realization did absolutely nothing to ease the pain of having irreparably damaged a very expensive writing instrument. Just after dropping the pen, it struck me that, if I were to have the nib replaced, it would undoubtedly cost a fortune. First and foremost, the nib of the Carène is solid 18k gold - currently trading on the New York Mercantile exchange for around $550 an ounce (or around $8800 a pound, for the math impaired). Secondly, the channel on the nib of the pen, which facilitates the flow of ink, must be hand ground by some highly-paid craftsman in France to achieve its slight taper.

Despite my fear that the estimate would be sky high, I sent an email to the Waterman repairs office to obtain an estimate. Just minutes ago, I received their reply, and it was not terribly pleasant reading.

According to Nancy, my specially appointed Waterman repair representative, the Waterman company has a $75 flat-fee to replace the nib of a Carène pen. Madness, to say the least. But, as if that were not enough, Waterman charges another $10 for processing!

While $85 does not put me even halfway to replacing the pen, it does seem like an awfully high price to pay for a fairly simple repair. I will probably wind up spending $85 to repair the pen, though one would think that a company charging as much for a pen as Waterman would try to be more accommodating.

Generally, I try to avoid references to movies in my blog; perhaps because my familiarity with movies hovers between "nonexistent" and "virtually nonexistent," or merely because movie references seems so platitudinous. However, in this case I feel almost obliged to make use of a cinematic allusion, as it fits so well.

Today, I spent the bulk of the afternoon in my new capacity as a copy editor for my school's newspaper, editing the various stories that students had turned in for publication on Friday. What I saw appalled me - haphazardly capitalized words, fragments, punctuation after quotation marks - however, when it came time to write a blog entry about the gruesome nature of the writing produced by my confreres at the newspaper, I drew a blank.

Ten discarded drafts later it stuck me that I had developed a case of blogger's block, or, at least, that is what I intend to call it. Though, somewhat more gallingly, after polishing the writing of a dozen others to flawlessness, I could not come up with so much as a phrase myself. My situation reminds me (albeit in a very limited manner) of the situation Alicia Silverstone's character in "Clueless" finds herself. Like Cher Horowitz, I too seem incapable of success in my own right, while effortlessly shepherding others onto the path of perfection.

Of course, to add to the irony, someone will undoubtedly discover a rather obvious error in my writing.

In a very general sense, I do not watch sport. Just a few weeks ago, for instance, I played the piano for three hours in lieu of watching Super Bowl Extra Lackluster. However, the exception to this general rule are the Olympic games; for one reason or another I find them quite interesting. But, once again, large media conglomerates have prevented me from enjoying something. Unlike television networks in Europe, which now broadcast the Olympics non-stop, commercial-free over multi-channel interactive TV and the internet, US media conglomerates, namely NBC Universal, restrict the way I watch the Olympics.

Perhaps the most maddening aspect of NBC's coverage are the tape delays. The opening ceremonies took place nearly twelve hours before NBC broadcasted them on the west coast of the United States. NBC would likely argue that the schedules of most people necessitate the tape delay, otherwise people could not watch the opening ceremonies. However, NBC has not one, not two, but four cable television networks (five, counting Universal HD). Why could NBC not broadcast the ceremonies live on USA ? Were they afraid of interrupting a Law and Order re-run ?

Another point of contention is the lack of online video. NBC has only posted low-quality highlight reels, and old footage on their goofy nbcolympics.com website. Worse still, NBC expects you to sit through commercials. France2 (that's "France Deux," not "France Two") has multiple live streams of Olympic action in DVD-quality streaming broadband video - without commercials. Undoubtedly, NBC wants people to "tune-in" and watch the games, commercials and all. But I have TiVo. I do not watch commercials.

Hate to break it to you Jeff*, but NBC has some pretty abysmal Olympics coverage. Yet another point in my life where I wish I could receive the BBC.

In my research for a book project I came across an absolutely wonderful website called Urban Dictionary. As the name somewhat implies, it is a dictionary of "urban" terms. It has loads of them too, it's great. I've found such gems as "Abercrombified," which refers to, "A person who is obsessed with Aberombie & Fitch, wearing only that article of clothing," and "L'Oreal," which contrary to normal logic means, "The most evil cosmetics company in the world. As a company they are backstabbing scum who treat their suppliers like dirt promising big orders but rarely delivering. And when you get an order their quality people reject everything based on archaic byzantine specifications thet they provide little training on. The supplier is expected to essentially become a branch of L'Oreal."

Some of the words make absolutely no sense, as they are new, very strange, definitions of existing, commonplace words. One such definition was Urban Dictionary's version of the word scene. According to them scene is defined as (I'm paraphrasing this) someone who is self-obsessed and tweaks their MySpace account endlessly. If you feel so inclined I've put the entire definition in my extended entry.

As might be expected a vast majority of the words have very explicit, lewd, or vulgar definitions. However, it is nonetheless a useful resource if it ever becomes necessary to find out what tegrabra means.

(Tegrabra apparently is a slang manipulation of "integra bra (brother)," meant to be uttered when an Acura Integra is seen)