July 2008 Archives
Tonight I'm headed over to my Grandad's place to feed him dinner. He's gotten too sick to feed himself, and for the past couple of years my parents have taken turns feeding him. When they are out of town, either me, Evan, or Jesse goes over to make sure he gets something down. The nurses where he lives could feed him, but he is mean and confused and usually will not let them. He can't really have a conversation with me any more because the pathways between his brain and his mouth just don't work like they should. Most of the time, though, when he's at least able to pay attention, I get the feeling that he listens to me when I talk. It's hard to tell if he understands what I'm saying, but I think he likes the sound of a vaguely familiar voice somehow. So, most of the time I carry on a conversation with him, even if he's not able to reply. I used to hate going, because it was hard. But strangely, I have kind of grown to enjoy the small feeling of brightening his day in some distant part of his mind that may be ever-so-slightly aware that I'm there. I wish Halleigh wasn't scared of him. maybe he'll live long enough for her to grow to the point of understanding, but I'm not even sure if that would be a good thing. God knows what's best.
I've been meaning to blog this for a while. It feels good to get some "real" stuff down on the blog from time to time.
Today, I had a visitor to my blog from the Philippines. That makes visitors from at least 51 countries since I started keeping track for the fun of it in February. I'm always amazed by the random flow of strangers that filter through the site. Earlier in the week I had a visitor from Tehran. I guess that's the nature of the new global world we live in.
The funny thing is that I visit very few foreign sites--in fact, I often avoid them. The traffic seems to be one way. I wonder if that is because of my lack of language skills, or another sign of how disconnected Americans are from the rest of the world.
I took the 2008 List Apart survey and so should you. I think it is terribly interesting, and the larger the sample, the better the results.
Recently I've been intrigued by a series of articles (1, 2, 3) about a blogger's tiff with a Cook's Illustrated partner about posting recipes on the web (via The Wooden Spoon, via Eat at Joe's). I have mixed feelings about this, because I think the company has a right to protect their product, but I also feel totally turned off by the way corporations often bully and intimidate individuals and often claim more rights than they actually have (as in this case). As bloggers, we have just as much at stake in our rights to fair use.
So, I think I will probably cancel my Cook's Illustrated subscription. I can make my own potato salad, and I don't need a magazine to tell me how to do it.
I read an article this morning about speculation that Tim Kaine is at the top of Obama's VP list. I'll go on the record right now that I like Kaine. I voted to put him in the VA governor's office and I think he fits well with the kind of campaign Obama is running.
Interestingly enough, in the weeks leading up to Kaine's election as governor 4 years ago, Brooklynne and I received an automated call on our answering machine from Barack Obama encouraging us to vote for Kaine. I kept the message for a long time, joking that I got a call from my old friend Barack, but I didn't realize how fun it would be to still have that message if the two were elected together on a historic presidential ticket.
Anyway, as I've said before, no matter how much Obama works to make the changes he's promised, one man can't do it himself, and in order to be successful, Obama will need 1) a dedicated and motivated body of supporting local community leaders and 2) a young and effective VP who can carry on the vision in a future administration. I think Kaine could do that.
As soon as the real VP selections are confirmed, I'll put together a set or VP report cards, like the ones I did for the presidential candidates. Stay tuned....
Sometimes I fight a battle over my desire to rebel against Google's steady march toward being rulers of the universe (and their questionable respect for privacy), and my desire to rebel against the people who think it is cool to use the new, fad search engines that pop up on a regular basis. So, usually I try out new search engines hoping that they will give me some kind of substantive reason for breaking up with Google.
This morning I read about a new engine designed by former Google engineers, which promises to be more aware of people's privacy concerns. The site also claims to have a more comprehensive search algorithm, and thus, better results. It is called Cuil and you can try it out here.
I did try it out with disapointing results.
As many of you know, for many years, I had an ungooglable name. If you searched for Miles Travis, you would alway get results for distances, directions, and race results because no matter how much my name appeared on the web, it was dwarfed by the amount of information related to miles as a measure of distance.
That all changed last fall, when Google introduced a new technology that was better at indexing blogs, and also seemed to do a better job of ranking instances of "Miles" and "Travis" used together in proper context. Now you can type in Miles Travis, and the top 4 results are me, even if they are mostly oldish pages that I should update. Google also does well for Brooklynne (6 of the top 10 results), Halleigh (10 of 10), and even Kona Bean (6 of 10)!
Cuil is not so good. Miles Travis yields no relevant results. In fact, Cuil seems to live up to it promise of being more comprehensive because it includes alot of spam results--sites that aggregate keywords and phrases that don't necessarily match up well with their content. Search for Halleigh Travis and you will see a lot of results for key phrases I have used to describe Halleigh Show videos on youtube, but when you click on these, the pages have nothing to do with Halleigh or her videos. Weird.
I think I'll stick with Google for now. What are your favorite search engines? Any new trendy ones that I should try out?
In other movie news....
Don't forget about the Last Mondays Film Festival, which resumes tonight. The movie starts at 8:30pm. Just show up, or call me for details if you want to come. I think we've got drinks and some popcorn, but if you want more than that you'll have to bring it.
Also, perhaps even better than seeing The Dark Kinght last night, I loved seeing the trailer for the new Terminator movie due out next summer. I had heard the franchise had been sold to a company that planned to reinvent the series, but I didn't realize it would happen so fast. They have planned a trilogy, the first of which takes place in 2018 (between the end of T3, late 1990s, and the earliest views of the future included in T1, 2029). Oddly enough, it stars Christian Bale (Batman) as John Connor and is written by the same guy who wrote the screenplay for The Dark Knight, which may be fitting given the Batman film's reputation for darkness, and the probable mood of a movie detailing how machines drive humans to the brink of extinction. Other notable characters will be Kyle Reese, played by Anton Yelchin, and Kate Connor, played by Bryce Dallas Howard, who is better known as Ivy Walker of The Village. Word is that the governor of CA may make a cameo. You can see the trailer here.
I went to see The Dark Knight last night, and I would be failing in my duties as prima blogger if I did not give some thoughts, so here they are in a nutshell.
The Dark Knight
PG-13
Critics: A-
Miles: B
First off, let me say that this is a good, solidly entertaining movie that is probably worth $9 at the theater. Still, I'm not planning to watch it again or go out and buy it for my collection. Here are the 3 things that everyone is saying about the movie and my responses: 1) the movie has a very dark tone or mood. I agree that this is more dark than previous Batman films, but it is not overly dark. To give you an idea I would mark this as lighter than 12 Monkey's (one of my personal favorites), but darker than Empire Strikes Back. 2) the movie is long. It is quite long, and there is a point with about an hour left, when I thought it was winding down, but then it picked up again. But really, the movie was entertaining enough to keep me interested, and so I didn't notice it being longer than the typical flick. 3) Heath Ledger's performance was great. Yes, the mood of the movie is carried by Ledger's Joker, and Heath broken new ground by making the Joker more of a true psychopath and less of a cartoonish boogie man. But still, I think I would rank Ledger's Joker well behind several of the other great movie villains of our generation, including Darth Vader, the T-1000, Hannibal Lechter, and even Agent Smith. Where would you guys rank the Joker? I guess I would summarize this review by saying that this was a good summer movie but it misses where all summer action flicks miss--by not developing the deeper human dimensions. They could have done so much more with Harvey Dent. The film glossed over the choices people made regarding doing the right thing in desperate times. And the provocative allusions to privacy vs. power in the face of terrorism are just swept under the rug. Perhaps The Dark Knight wasn't trying to do those things, which is fine, but that places a self-imposed ceiling on its greatness.
Check out this video where Anna is working on her sports vocabulary.
We've been meaning to get a new Halleigh Show up, so look for that this weekend.
Alot of people are offering really good ideas about energy solutions these days. Andy Grove argues that energy resiliance should take priority over energy independence. Very interesting. He says that transferring our energy usage to be more electicity-oriented would insulate us against the volitility of the energy market. One of the problems he cites is the technology gap between traditoinal gasoline vehicles and electric vehicles that have to be charged every 100 miles. How can our expectations of transportation work if you can only go 100 miles? You could go further, but charging time and infrastructure would be prohibitive.
Here's my idea: why don't we sell electricity for cars like we sell gas for grills? You buy an electric car and a battery separately. You drive 100 miles. Then you pull into a station, deposit the spent battery, swipe your card, and plug in another, pre-charged battery, and then drive another 100 miles. The station then recharges the battery and swaps it with another customer the next day. Zero end-user recharge time. My gas car only goes 300 miles between fill-ups. I wouldn't mind "filling up" a little more often.
The trick would be to establish a safe, standardized, cross-model battery that could be easily swapped out. Stations might have to hire changing attendants who could perform the swaps for safety and weight reasons. Still, Oregon and New Jersey already require attendants, right?
As I have said before, our garden is looking good, and let me tell you, it is a cucumber factory! We didn't even mean to plant cucumbers (way too many last year), but after a mix up of sprouts, we ended up with 6 or so vines. Yesterday, we had planned to pickle some cucmbers we got out of the garden earlier, but they had been in the fridge too long and they were ruined. So I told brooklynne I would head out to the garden and see if there were any that were ready to be harvested. Well, I picked so many cucumbers that we canned 6 large jars of pickles and made a quart of Tzatziki, and we still had 14 or 15 left over!!! Anyone want any cucumbers?!!
Ok, so maybe that is a little over-simplified, but I thought the jarring strangeness of the quote at the end of this article speaks volumes about why the US consumes 25% of the world's oil despite only having 4% of the world's population.
I got those stats by watching this video that I found via the Jersey Snore. I'm not sure this will ever come to be, but we can hope for some changes in this direction (if we don't give in to the false hope of off-shore drilling).
I would love to know what Hilde thinks. Are gas prices too high in Norway?
As a former cartoonist for the Pirate's Hook, the Daily Tar Heel, and the Exponent, I LOVED the New Yorker's Obama cover (although, as a supporter, I got the shivers thinking about all the backwoods arch-conservatives that have been trained from an early age to read everything 150% literally). Now, I can say that I'm a fan of Vanity Fair as well. Is this one of the greatest campaign seasons ever? Or am I too young to have been aware of the great moments of other epic battles? Will Obama-McCain shape up to be remembered like Jefferson-Adams? I hope so.
Via 2SB.
Here's another thought-provoking article. Apparently, the commentatory thinks competition is what public education really needs. Brooklynne and I have had some really tough conversations with friends and each other lately about school choices. Several of our friends have kids just a little older than Halleigh who will soon be entering school. So here come the value decisions--public v. private, home school or outsource, liberal, classical, traditional, religious, secular, do you use the word "no," do you make a kid say "I'm sorry," the role of sports, extra cirriculars, class size, personalized learning plans, local, cross-town, etc., etc., etc.
I don't mean to be overly cynical, but when it comes down to it, does all this really matter in a way we can predict? What I mean is that Halleigh already has all the tools I believe it will take for her to get a good education and be prepared and successful in college and beyond: parents and family that are educated and deeply invested in her, the socio-economic advantages that give her a vast head start, presumably a good moral, ethical, and behavioral grounding, and--I'll be the one to say it--promising signs of a fortunate set of genes. Everything beyond that is icing on the cake. So with all these things in her favor, do we have the freedom to be less demanding of her schooling, or do we have more of a responsibility to squeeze every bit of training out of what we can get in 20 or so years?
Are there any other parents with opinions reading this?
This is just a friendly reminder that the Last Mondays Film Festival will continue next Monday at 8:30pm. The movie is 72 minutes, so if we start promptly, any sleepy-heads among us can be in bed by 10. Kids are welcome to join us, but if you would rather have a night off and need a sitter, start lining one up now.
Also, the first Errol Morris film got such poor reviews, we've decided to branch out. This month's showing will be Project Grizzly. See you there!
Check out this article from last week. I just finished some training on different types of security you can impose on a computer system, and it is a little scary that there are few good safeguards against really messed up individuals within the system. This could have been much worse. I haven't heard how this has played out since last week. Anyone know?
** balanced follow-up: Terry Childs: San Francisco's Imprisoned FiberWAN Administrator **
Yesterday, I finished working on the historic landmark application for 413 E. Chapel Hill Street. Now all that is left is to go before the HIstoric Preservation Committee and see what kind of recommendation we'll get. This is the first real piece of historic consulting I've done and I really enjoyed it. It actually made me think about doing this for a career instead of continuing to chase the professor life.
I think we have a good case. The building was constructed between 1924 and 1950 (see the 1950 Sanborn map paste-up below), but I think I can point to 1939 as almost certainly the year it was completed. That was the year The Seeman's Printery moved in, which was one of several well-known tenants. Seeman's was a large operation, and the presence of oil and ink from the machines explains the black stains that Evan found all over the wood floors.
There are several points that may justify a historic designation, but to me, the most compelling find was that Seeman's had been the printer of choice for African American factory workers who wrote ballads to sell on the streets for a penny apiece. I think I found some of the originals in the Broadside Verse Collection of Duke University's Rare Book, Manuscripts, and Archives Library. They had been stored at the printery for years, but at some point Dr. William Boyd (history prof. and director of Duke's libraries) convinced Seeman's to give him the last originals because he found them worthy of preservation.
They disappeared and were forgotten until I stumbled on a mention of them in an oral history recording and got some help from the very friendly library staff at Duke. That's the kind of find that you dream about when you are a budding historian.
Montana has been on my mind for the past couple of days.
Yahoo Travel declared the Madison Valley southwest of Bozeman as one of the 10 places in America that you should see before you die. The Madison Valley is pretty wonderful, but there are alot of places in Montana that could have competed for that recognition.
I was also looking up some of my old professors lately (Dr. Rydell and Smith), and I stumbled across some commericals for MSU (Montana State). You can check out the first one here, and the others are linked at the bottom of that page. I recommend that UNC hire those guys to redo our jacked up half-time ads.
As much as I complained about living in Montana at the time, it sure was great.
The 1920 Durham Elephant Parade. Via the Durham Historic Photographic Achives.
I grabbed some more pictures from the weekend. We had more than 200 on the cmera when we got home (3 gigs!), and we erased a bunch of bad ones when we ran out of room on our SD card. I won't bore you with all 200, but here are some of my favorites.
Unlike last year when we only got about 3 tomatoes, a few zuccinis, and nothing else but cucumbers, this year's crop is looking very promising. We have about 20 medium-sized tomatoes on the vine, which should be ready in the next week or so. Brooklynne harvested about 10 large cucumbers yesterday (that had grown from too small to pickle to too large, while we were gone). She also picked one bell pepper and we have 4 more that will be ready soon. Our carrots look good, although they are still far from eating size. The basil and cilantro are still growing like weeds and we have harvested lettuce from our two plants twice already each, and they seem to be going strong. But the most surprising and exciting discovery in the garden on our return was 7 or 8 cantaloupes and 4 watermelons that have appeared out of the blue.
We did not plant broccoli, squash, or peas this year. Maybe we should have tried broccoli and peas again, but they were such a dud that we didn't feel very motivated. Our zuccini attracted grubs, which I have heard are impossible to get rid of, so we tried the watermelon instead, hoping that the grubs would not be interested. So far, so good. We also planted corn last year, but we couldn't keep kona from eating it, so that went by the wayside too.
I think the main difference in the garden, though, has been the level of rain we have gotten this year. Last year, we watered ALOT--I mean we watered until I was sure we were the cause of the extreme water shortage. We also used the miracle grow spray-on fertilizer. This year, I've only used fertilizer once because there haven't been days when it was dry enough that I felt I really needed to water much. I think we are still under water restrictions, but I would guess that we have to be close to normal capacity in our reserves, right?
I just can't wait until one saturday morning I can wake up early and walk out in the garden, pluck a cantaloupe right from the vine and sit on the porch and eat it on the spot. How nice will that be?
Brooklynne, Halleigh, and I returned from the beach last night. The 5th was our 5th anniversary, so we planned a special vacation. Saturday, we spent the first part of the day at the NC aquarium at Pine Knoll Shores and then took in historic Beaufort (BOW-fort) and had a good meal of grouper and shrimp before relaxing for the night at the Beaufort Inn. Our room overlooked the waterway, so we were able to watch the fishing boats go in and out under the drawbridge.
Sunday, we caught the 12:00 ferry to Ocracoke, where we rented bikes, visited the British Cemetery, got ice cream, and went swimming.
Monday, we biked to the the beach and spent the entire day there, outlasting the people who came after us, and the people who came after they left. Then we hit a geocache, grabbed crabcake and tuna steak sandwiches, and rode over to the park to watch the sunset.
Yesterday, we hit two more caches and killed time biking around the village before we started the long ride back. The last hurrah was a quick meal at the famed Sanitary Fish Market in Morehead City, where Halleigh ate her own weight in hush puppies.
I've posted a few pictures beyond the "continue reading jump. Hopefully Brooklynne will have time to post some others. Enjoy!
