entirely safe and fun

One down, 434 to go!

Primary season has been a real downer here in California’s 14^th. Not only did our serial incumbent Representative Anna Eshoo not draw a competitor within her own party, she doesn’t appear to have even drawn a Republican challenger! We don’t have a shot at either of our Senators, and all of the Presidential candidates are basically identical. Surely there must be some good news, right?

There is! Arizona Republican Representative Rick Renzi had already announced that he wouldn’t be running for re-election this year, and now we know why… and can be sure that he’ll actually keep his promise, a rare and beautiful treasure among Congressthings. He’s been indicted on charges of abusing his power as a member of the House Natural Resources Committee to secure sweetheart federal land deals for his co-conspirators, showing again how any power a government has, even something as simple as owning land, is bound to lead to corruption sooner or later.

The disgraced Congressman has appeared on the radar of many corruption NGOs over the past few years, and the group CREW has apparently featured him on their “Most Corrupt Members of Congress” list (fascinating read) for the last three years. Congressman Renzi, great job, and thank you for supporting term limits and the “Vote Freshman” campaign!

Adapted from this, and likewise made available under the GFDL

Toshiba, key player behind the HD-DVD format, announced this week that they’ve called in the priest for last rites. The conventional wisdom holds, then, that the competing Blu-Ray format “wins” the high-def format war. Honestly, I don’t buy it. It’s not clear to me that there’s anything to win. Downloaded or on-demand content is the next, and in some senses final, medium of choice for movie distribution; Blu-Ray gets to be King of Nothing for a day at best.

Consider: High-end computer monitors already offer resolutions of 1600 lines (2560×1600 glories in the entirely parody-proof name “WQXGA”) or more, compared to the 1080 lines addressed by today’s “high-def” content. Next year, there will be even more monitors with more than 1080 lines than there are this year, as an inevitable consequence of computer desktop creep. The year after that, there will be still more. At some point, it will become a selling point for high-end TVs that they are, as electronics salesthings are wont to say, “future-proof” in the same way as those computer monitors. Right around that time, some enterprising person, probably in the adult entertainment industry, will decide to sell content with 1600 or more lines of resolution, targeting the profligate. As a hard-coded standard, Blu-Ray is completely incapable of filling that many lines; it was written with VC-1 as its (arguably) highest-efficiency codec in terms of pixels/Mbit, and with Blu-Ray’s hard limit of 40Mbit/s video throughput, VC-1 can paint at most 1920×1080 at 24fps. On the other hand, a general-purpose computer, driving that same monitor, can add a new codec at any time. There is no pre-set limit on the throughput of its storage or network devices, and in fact we can expect that to remain a fast-moving target; thus, there is nearly no limit on the number of pixels per frame, or frames per second.

You will have your five-megapixel QSXGA smut, sure enough, but it is going to have to be delivered as “just data” rather than on a disc of the older, player-based kind. It may come on a BD-ROM, at least for a little while, but eventually will ship over the ever-accelerating Internet. Blu-Ray simply isn’t enough format, a problem compounded by the popularity and youth of the DVD format, and it seems likely that it’s destined for a northern winter’s day in the sun.

Documented here, the continuing saga of my attempt to master microfoam. Also, the awesomeness of ImageMagick. I was able to make that little montage with just a few keystrokes, by putting just the sixteen pictures I wanted in a directory by themselves, changing to that directory, and saying…
md small
for %i in (*.jpg) do convert %i -resize 100 -filter Lanczos small\%i
cd small
montage *.jpg -geometry +1+1 ..\montage.jpg
Note that “convert” and “montage” are two of the programs in the IM suite. I do have one small complaint about IM — why is it that I can’t take all the results of a batch transformation and “pipe” them into a multi-image operation like montage? The support for piping single images is incredibly handy, and it would be awesome if it could be generalized.

Embarrassingly, I didn’t notice that the previous/next links at the bottom of each page weren’t working, as a consequence of my changes to support the moblog. What I needed to do was query_posts($query_string . "&cat=-16");, rather than just query_posts("cat-16");. What a silly thing to miss…

fig. 1: The baby perceives the object of his desire, but discovers that it is out of reach.

fig 2: He raises his rear end as high as possible…

fig 3: …and rolls onto his back, critically, straightening his torso. Here, he is momentarily distracted by his socks.

fig 4: Dante rolls onto his tummy, having moved forward about four inches. He wins the prize.

More pix on Flickr, tagged “protocrawling”.

As you can plainly see, Dante is still very cute. His cute overflowed, in fact, requiring a cute trim! He’s been trying really hard to sit up — he can do it with a little help, in fact — and he rolls and wiggles about, an obvious precursor to crawling. However, he has an idiosyncratic method of rolling. Consider how you, an adult, might go about rolling from your stomach to your back: probably, you’d do it by pushing up a bit with your upper body, then reaching across your torso with one arm and pushing with that arm (you might instead do the same thing with your hips and legs). Dante prefers to pull his legs under himself, stick his butt in the air, and then lean, giving a more catastrophic character to his movement than would be expected from something as gently named as “rolling”.

Lots of new pictures are up on my Flickr page, tagged “20080129″, and there are more in the “yearzero” tag.

Now that we have cool weather again, I have resumed brewing. Punam got me a thoughtful Christmas gift, an immense, 8-gallon clad-bottom brewpot with two threaded ports, which we’ll also use for canning. It went to work a day early, when, on Christmas Eve day, and with the help of my friends Chris and Carolyn, I made another batch of my German-Belgian hybrid wheat beer. I decided to change up a few elements of the process this time. Most importantly, since it was the beginning of tangerine season and our tree is bent under the weight of its fruit, I substituted three full ounces of fresh tangerine peel for the usual half-ounce of dried orange peel. To accentuate the citrus flavor, I bumped the reinforcing coriander by 50%, changed the hops to the unassertive, floral/pine-woodsy variety Challenger, and lowered the amount to keep alpha acids approximately constant. I then took the fermenter outside, brewing at ambient temperatures, which stretched fermentation time to just over two weeks. I brought the fermenter inside once bubbling had come to a virtual halt, to make sure fermentation went all the way to dry… and did it ever! The final gravity was noticeably lower than usual, at about 1.010, pushing the upper limit of attenuation for the yeast strain. Final product is precisely what I anticipated, the citrusiest (is too a word!) beer I’ve ever had, delicious and nutritious. Some extremes are easy, I guess.

New photos are up on Flickr, tagged “month four”. My favorite is this one, which is festive and seasonal and smiley, but there are others… with some of Dante’s baby friends… Rule of Cuteness #12. More babies = more cute. The relationship is not linear, either, but rather exponential, until you can’t resolve the individual babies anymore.

The boy acts so much more like a tiny person now than he did before. He takes conversational turns with his noises, occasionally decides to mimic facial expressions, smiles and giggles, and has taken to making a pretty wide range of sounds, with four or five different vowels now. It gets harder each week not to try and interpret what he’s saying as underformed English, no matter how many times I reassure myself that it’s impossible that he would be producing meaningful signals of any sophistication. He’s also become more demanding of attention, as he rolls around now and has become a potential danger to himself and others. The scariest moment so far was the first time we found him sleeping face-down, nighmare-provoking after all the back-to-sleep coaching we got over the course of Punam’s pregnancy and during Dante’s perinatal care. Of course, babies sleep just fine on their stomachs, have been doing it since the dawn of time, etc, but the power of the modern culture of scaring new parents to death cannot be denied.

A couple of weeks back, Punam, her mother, Dante and I went to the wedding of our friends Anne and Steve in Santa Fe, NM. The pictures are up on Flickr, tagged “santafe”.

It was Dante’s first plane trip, and his first encounter with the TSA! He had his own boarding verification document that they checked at security.

The happy couple, at the rehearsal lunch. Interestingly, no party in the wedding actually came from Santa Fe — Anne and Steve had met there, but in the intervening time have moved to Phoenix, AZ. But there’s a lot to like about Santa Fe; it’s a beautiful, historic city with really great weather. How important a consideration this is became clear to me during my own wedding in rainy, dark Pittsburgh, when it was pointed out to me repeatedly by the photographers how lucky we were to get a few hours of sun.

We were happy to meet up with Debra and her husband Dave, and spend the night before the wedding hanging around in town. Even if Santa Fe had nothing else going for it, it has a really excellent food scene, as long as you like the meats.

Martha and Chris got to meet the boy for the first time. The suit is so cute! No one could believe that we had found a tie in Dante’s diminutive size.

Punam, Anne, and Debra at the reception. We had a really excellent time!

Dante only looks partied out here… he got his second wind eventually. It was in his diaper.

The DJ played some Guns ‘n Roses. Debra made like Slash for the win.

And somehow, we managed to fit in visits to the Bradbury Museum in Los Alamos (with lots of bizarre nuclear-arsenal propaganda) and Petroglyph National Monument in Albuquerque!

At Petroglyph with Punam’s mom.

After it was all over, we hosed down the boy and put him in his helpfully labelled “BABY” bathrobe, which (as previously mentioned) is sometimes helpful in differentiating baby from bathwater.

And then we all slept like babies, especially the baby.

Some of you may have heard that we had a moderately strong magnitude 5.6 quake centered right under San Jose on 30 Oct. Like (happily) everyone else, we’re all fine, none the worse for the experience. In fact, it was kind of a fun ride! But the long-distance capacity of the phone network was strained, so we couldn’t make calls to let everyone know what had happened. So I have turned to the Internet to let everyone know that Dante rode the whole thing out in style, camped out with me and his mom under a doorway.

You got your Yoda in my Cthulhu!

A new batch of pictures is up, covering the last month or so. This is my favorite, as it shows off Dante’s recently acquired “smiling” skill, and also the awesome calamara-cephalic hat that our crafty friend Jenn was kind enough to knit for him… and, as if that weren’t enough, there’s also his Yoda robe. So cute.

For friends and family looking for baby pix, Dante features in a few moblog entries, like this one, featuring Dante wearing an outfit that says “Baby” on it. This is so users know that he is a baby. My dad pointed out an interface problem, though: when you bathe a baby, you almost always remove its clothing. How, then, does such a label enable you to distinguish baby from bathwater?

A week later, we received a bathrobe, also featuring the legend “Baby” on it, which goes about halfway to a solution.