entirely safe and fun

Law school was out of ctrl, but I just spaced out and found myself board shiftless.

Via the vital blog Anonymous Lawyer comes this gem of a story. Adrian Zachariasewycz, a law student at the University of Michigan Law School has brought suit against the school (among other things), alleging in his complaint that:

18. Upon information and belief, the system of course examination and grading at the Law School in certain exams disadvantaged students that could not type at a sufficient speed to produce the volume of text required to produce competitive examination responses.

In other words, he’s suing the law school for discriminating against him as a slow typist. I’ve got no sympathy for any party to the case; law schools’ feathers fletch the arrows that are shot at them. Train enough litigators and you’re bound to get sued. But the law school is the least unsympathetic party, like Mel Gibson’s character Potter in Payback.

I’ve prepared a little rubric about what’s wrong with this picture…

1. Law school grades are proportional to the amount of text produced. This certainly explains the cost of litigation — we’re apparently paying by the word!
2. Somehow, this guy, who is supposed to be training as a lawyer, missed the fact that “slow typists” are not a protected class. Volunteer for the Army, or convert to Mithraism, and try again, buddy.
3. He is also proceeding pro se, meaning, as the old saw has it, that he has a fool for a client. Also, it means that he couldn’t convince a lawyer not related to him that his case has a lick of merit (assuming that Maria Zachariasewycz, co-complainant, is a lawyer).
4. If this guy wins his lawsuit, the precedent will be set such that every Computer Science graduate with a GPA less than 4.0 is in for a payday. No lie, I wore an inch off each finger in college.

Anonymous Lawyer has this to say: “I don’t think this kid who’s suing his law school is going to have much luck finding a job. Not even so much because of the lawsuit, but because he’s admitting he’s a lousy typist. What else is a first year associate good for anyway?”

Did you know that recent versions of Firefox block attempts to connect to http servers on non-standard ports? That there is no dialog box to make Firefox connect to those ports? Did you know that Internet Freaking Explorer respects its users enough to connect to whatever port they specify, while Firefox obstructs and then obfuscates? I am the user, a human being with executive decision-making capacity. The browser is a tool and I will be thrice-damned if it will dictate to me how I am to use it.

agittins wrote up this workaround:

Go to about:config in your Firefox browser.

Right click somewhere, and choose “New => String”

In the setting Name box type “network.security.ports.banned.override”

In the Setting Value box, type “1-65535″. Yep, that’s all of ‘em

Click OK

As I said, that’s a workaround. The solution is this: I probably ought to just finish making my switch to Opera — don’t know why I’ve been putting it off. Maybe I was thinking I’d miss access to the source code, but my lack of time and interest keeps me from contributing to Mozilla (or even reading their code) anyway.

Every February at the Toronado, San Francisco’s finest beer bar, the excellent folks who run the place take fifty-odd beers off tap and replace them with kegs of barleywine. I recommend strongly that if you find yourself in the vicinity of Haight between Filllmore and Steiner between 17 and 24 February 2007, that you proceed immediately to the Toronado and get your drink the heck on.

For the uninitiated: Barleywine is the strongest traditional style of English ale, typically around 9-12% alcohol by volume, and it poses some serious challenges to its brewers. The long fermentation time invites contamination, and the high final alcohol content brings with it the possiblity of a “stuck” fermentation. The yeast must be kept at a temperature that allows it to keep going, but if it gets too warm it will flood the beer with unpalatable higher organics, and they’ll stay in solution, and the result will be highly suboptimal. The huge amount of sweet malt used to fuel that fermentation tends to leave a syrupy mess of a beer, unless carefully balanced out by a proportionate dose of bitter hops; even competently brewed barleywines can end up treacly or bitteres Biergesicht-inducing. Brewers that successfully navigate these straits wind up with a product so intense in flavor that most American beer-drinkers are not prepared to enjoy it. Since malt and hops are expensive ingredients, and barleywine calls for large amounts of each, barleywine is expensive to brew, and given the possibility of failure and the limited market, only serious artisans generally bother.

Dear serious artisan brewers: Thank you. You rock unreasonably hard.

The Toronado opens at 9AM on the weekend of the Barleywine Festival, and before noon the crowd at the bar is four deep. Attendees make pilgrimmages from all over the West to sample rare barleywines and meet with their fellow beer connoiseurs, marking down notes on the handy spreadsheets provided, deploying six glasses at a time onto heavily marked-up placemats. A productive tasting day might stretch over twelve hours, including a trip or two to the Rosamunde Sausage Grill next door for a sandwich, and include forty tasters spread out among four or six people plus a few retastes - in case you forget, you know.

San Francisco is a great food-and-drink city. Sometimes, it forgets the food part, and that’s OK too.

I just suggested a feature for WordPress… Trust.

• If I put a div into my content, it’s because I wanted a div, not a p. It is none of WP’s business why.
• If I nest elements like divs, it’s because I wanted them nested.
• If I put an <a name=”…” / > into my content, it’s because I want an anchor. It’s not a malformed link.
• If I am smart enough to edit in HTML mode, I would like to be treated as smart enough to solve my own HTML problems.
• In short, I never want to “UPDATE posts” again; it obviates the entire purpose of having a CMS. I want a mode in the editor where it just smilingly takes the HTML I feed it, pushes it into the DB, and lets me shoot myself in the foot if what I need is a hole in my shoe.

The Disable wpautop plugin is kind of a start, and I will probably implement a counterfeature in my own installation to undo WP’s alleged HTML correction feature (both “correction” and “feature” are being modified by “alleged” there), but I sense that I’m not the only one who wants WordPress to just trust me. I sense this because no one who has anything to say about wpautop, the function in wp that “corrects” your HTML, has anything nice to say about it.

Also, the 2.1 post editor is a huge step backwards. I am seriously considering downgrading. I miss 2.0.x’s html editing mode; 2.1’s Code editing mode is nearly useless. It is really hard to make 2.1’s editor as nice as 2.0.x’s.

Update: The plugin mentioned above wasn’t working for some reason, probably because it was written for 2.0.x. I’ve gotten the 2.1 editor doing almost exactly the right thing by lobotomizing the functions wpautop() and cleanpre() in wp-include/formatting.php — that is, reducing the function bodies to return $pee; and return $text; respectively— and then turning off the per-user “Use the visual editor when writing” setting on my user profile. balanceTags() seems like it might be genuinely useful, and could benefit from a more selective brain surgery down the road. I will probably try to come up with something better than complete decerebration later, but for now frustration > will to code.

Anyone who wants a copy of the “fixed” (in the same sense that a dog is “fixed” I guess) formatting.php can get it here. I’m offering it as is, with no support and no warranty of fitness for any particular purpose, etc etc. Sorry if it makes your web site a-splode. Remember to back up your current copy of formatting.php before putting my dumber version in its place.

In the Internet’s fastest-working meme labs — places like 4chan, fark, Something Awful, YTMND, etc — a phenomenon has grown up of adding captions to (typically) animal pictures, often featuring Vazquez-esque tortured syntax and spelling for added humor value (”for the lolz,” one might say). The archetypal image of this type is certainly the O RLY? owl.

But the greatest consumer of captioned animal images appears to be Caturday — at least, this is what they tell me, as I have no plan of going anywhere near the place — which calls for captioned cat images, and so I believe it is fair to adopt the world “lolcat” to describe the class. It is the tag that the new-as-of-this-year blog I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER? has come to apply, I think most fittingly. What a great word! It is officially my Favorite New Word of 2007 So Far.

Also, kitten.

Click for a larger version

Due to a pressing need (chiefly on my part) not to be in Silicon Valley for a couple of days, Punam and I took an overnight trip starting Saturday morning down to the Monterey area, with the idea that we’d see some new sights and in particular that we’d finally get to see the Mission San Carlos Borroméo de Carmelo.

It has been restored to a strikingly nice condition — enough so that Rome named it a Minor Basilica, and that it received a pastoral visit from the last Pope. Above, I composited a panorama of the courtyard. To the right, the chapel, with its catenary arches, as opposed to the old semicircular arches. Catenary arches are most closely associated with the twentieth-century architect Gaudí, and their use here would have been pretty advanced when the chapel was constructed in its present form in 1793. The calculus required to calculate their correct shapes was less than just about a century old at that point, depending on how you interpret the Calculus Priority Dispute, and far from widely taught. There are some exhibition areas within the Mission’s outer wall, and Punam and I spent a pleasant hour at the exhibition of the art of Jo Mora, the Californian artist-of-many-trades.

Click for a larger version

We then proceeded to Asilomar State Beach, which it pains me a little to say is yet another dramatic Central Coast beach. Which is not a complaint or anything! We hiked through the dunes, and played around near the tidal pools. I took a few photos in a stab at a “micro-panorama,” stitching together some high-zoom, short-range images, but the errors that the focus mechanism made in reporting its focal length in the EXIF metadata, irrelevant in most applications, created some severe aberrations in the final product. Still, it was cool to get so many pixels to work with! This pool, full of bright green sea anemones and deep red seaweed, was isolated a good three or four feet above the then-current tideline, meaning it had been cut off from the ocean for around four hours by the time we got to it, and the uppermost of its denizens were just beginning to dry. Sea anemones can curl themselves up into little donut-shaped masses, which keeps their most delicate tissues (such as their tentacles) from dessication. Some of the little monsters, such as the one in the upper-left corner, are partially dry, and have tucked in the tentacles above the water line while leaving their underwater tentacles out to catch food. Also, some of them are curled up defensively, probably in reaction to my moving shadow.

Your narrator’s beard, unruly though it was, had not a stripe on the tree-beards.

On Sunday, we went to Washington Park in Pacific Grove to see the overwintering butterflies. We walked through the wet forest, every branch heavily-laden with a variety of epiphytes. Initially, we weren’t sure what we were looking for. There were a lot of butterflies in the air, but no more than you might see by chance in a still forest. But then, we saw a small crowd assembling around a taped-off area, and we looked up. There were many thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of monarch butterflies, tightly clustered on high branches. In the picture below, note carefully that there are no dead leaves, just poorly-resolved orange wings.

The butterflies were busily mating, which involves a male grappling with a female, the pair tumbling to the forest floor, and then (after a little while) the male flying away, carrying the female aloft by their attached, load-bearing genitalia. It is most remarkable. My camera, with its once-massive two-megapixel resolution and its sometimes unpredictable shutter delay, simply couldn’t capture it adequately.

And finally, on our way back up to Oakland for a Superbowl party hosted by one of Punam’s high school friends, we stopped in the city of Monterey for a little while, where we walked out to the beach to watch sea otters and listen to the surf. The otters escaped photography, but Punam and I didn’t, so: one final trick-photo panorama.

For now, he rests — but soon the stars will again be right, and the groundhog will arise from his long slumber!

Groundhog Day! That quaintest of traditions! Thousands gathered in the tiny town of Punxsutawney, PA (site may be slashdotted), for dawn rodent-watching and early-morning Straub-drinking, pounding longnecks as they greet their own long shadows in the chill pink light! No holiday is more Homeric than this, when the elements themselves gather in sympathy for a great groundhog and order themselves at his disposal.

That such a holiday is most famously observed in Pennsyltuckey — that frequently lovely but perpetually benighted region east of Pittsburgh and west of Philadephia — has long confused me, since no one there actually likes groundhogs; locals’ animus against burrowing rodents increases in proportion to their economic dependence on hooved livestock. A neighbor of mine in Lancaster once offered the pithy observation that “A spade is a tool for digging holes. A small-bore rifle is a tool for removing groundhogs.”