Coordinating meeting availability is hard. The concept of an emailable text-based meeting scheduler makes it easier, but I’m thinking this would suck in an environment where most everyone is using proportional-width fonts and/or HTML in email.

As for me and my house, you’ll pry the fixed-width fonts from my cold, dead fingers.

I wrote yesterday about the resignation of Duke Cunningham, and an article in today’s Washington Post is making me revisit my remarks so that my position will be clear. In discussing the growing wariness about the commingling of money and politics, those quoted in the article seem to indicate that they think money and politics is a problem. I disagree, and I long have—I hated on McCain-Feingold in the day.

The problem is not money changing hands—it’s that it changes hands under the table. There’s so much suspicion of money influencing political decisions—whether it’s concerns about whether Big Oil owns the Bush Administration, or whether Big Trial Lawyers and Labor own the Democratic Party—that what we need aren’t controls and limits but openness.

If everyone had known that Duke Cunningham was in the back pocket of a defense contractor, no one would trust him to be objective in that regard.

Openness is the first and most important step towards good governance … and we really don’t have it right now.

I’m writing a series of posts over on Imperfect Mirror about the 2005 Advent season. 40+ days of daily posting … I promise you, that’s harder for me than any ol’ Blogathon, but at least here I can store up posts and set them free in the future without complaint.

Maybe you want to read that … and maybe you don’t. I’m just letting you know it’s there.

I think the hardest part for me, as a Mac newbie, has been adjusting back and forth between the keyboard shortcuts I use in Windows and what I use in OS X. I’m very much one for using the keyboard as the primary input device—I like keeping my hands on the keyboard and using the mouse as little as necessary—and swapping between the two is a bit of a sticking point with me.

Consider today: I’d been using a Mac exclusively since lunchtime on Wednesday, and that was enough time for me to become wholly ingrained with all the Mac shortcuts. It took me almost an hour to remember that I was in PC world. Similarly, when I got home tonight, I found that it took me a half-hour to remember that I was indeed home and using my Mac.

I’m hoping that swapping back and forth between the two gets easier for me, especially when I fire up my home PC again later this week. [It's been off over a week ... the last time it went that long, I'd just moved into this house.]

Does anyone else find switching platforms difficult? I’m hoping that my purchase of a dedicated keyboard and mouse for the mini will help.

If we think Duke Cunningham is the only crooked Congresscritter, we’re fooling ourselves. Cunningham resigned his position today after entering guilty pleas to taking bribes in return for official favors. It’s probably worse than even I imagine, but … I applaud this if it’s the first salvo in a consistent barrage of such investigations.

Marc Hedlund is upset with Amazon’s Wishlist, and I share many of his frustrations.

Dear Reader: I can’t decide which book I should attempt to tackle next. After polishing off the wonderfulness that was Shteyngart’s The Russian Debutante’s Handbook on Saturday—it was so good, I might even attempt to review it—I’ve got three daunting non-fiction works that have been sitting in my to-do pile for some time. If you have a choice amongst the three, leave a comment telling me the book that you believe I should tackle first.

[I mock these types of entreaties when they're made on message boards ... and yet, I've become what I hate. Typical!]

Jeff Jarvis is angsty, and he wants to know how many people subscribe to his feeds via some of the hosted aggregation services [FeedLounge, Bloglines, Google Reader, etc.]. In his rant, he points to an entry about sending forward the number of subscribers as metadata in the HTTP user agent. Seems like a good idea to me … what about it, Alex and Scott?

It’s like Joe Friday used to say: “Just the facts, ma’am.” If you’re writing or reading about families, you might wish to take a peek at Po Bronson’s family factbook, which he put online in support of his new book, Why Do I Love These People? : Honest and Amazing Stories of Real Families.

[HT to Freakonomics Blog.]

I don’t get mad … I get even. I found my wire cutters in the truck while I was out just now, and I terminated the life of the burglar alarm. Step 1 was to quickly disconnect the speaker wire. This wouldn’t have been my original thought, but Dad suggested it. I held my breath, but nothing happened. [Cutting live circuits is never a good idea, but since this was signal wire to which no signal was passing, I was okay. Yes, I moved quite quickly to cut that line.]

After fouling the loud speaker, I then moved into the guest bedroom, exposed the breaker panel, and guessed at a breaker. I heard the alarm panel stop chirping, congratulated myself on an excellent guess [because the breaker has never been labeled; future project is now in place to label it], and then proceeded to sever the power line. I haven’t restored power to that circuit because I haven’t followed Jeff’s advice to remove the transformer—I’ve not seen a way for me to access the screw, but I also haven’t looked at it for more than 10-15 seconds.

Once I can remove the power transformer, I’ll pull the wire through the staples where the installer made the run to the main box, and then I’ll restore power to that circuit. [This will happen soon, as I do need to do laundry, and my washer is also on that circuit.]

Suck it, Monitronics!

Like most any user of WordPressDash, I have to tell you that this is the first post made with it. It’s pure goofiness to do so, but … oh, what the hell … it’s the Internet.

I will now leave the house, set off the alarm, and forage for food. When I come back, the alarm will be my bitch…

Before I left town on Wednesday, I started having issues with my alarm system. Wait … it’s not my alarm system … it’s P.J.’s alarm system. Therein lies the issue. I have never had the passcode for it, and I still don’t. It was beeping incessantly on Wednesday, and then … I screwed it up and armed it. [I'm still not real sure how I did that.] This isn’t a big issue, as I don’t even have a home phone line for it to call out and get me in deep with the Madison PD.

I, of course, had it go off as I left out on Wednesday. As I waited to see if it would shut off—if it hadn’t, I’m sure I would have broken out the wire cutters or something—I called P.J.’s cell and his house, hoping he’d answer. He didn’t. I called the alarm company, who said … they couldn’t do anything for me. I threw up my hands, hopped in my truck, and drove off.

When I got back, I, of course, had the same issue. I tried a new attempt at a passcode, based on what I know of PJ’s family, and … no dice. I tried him again, to no avail. I waited until the alarm shut off, then called the alarm company … figuring I’d find out who the local rep is, and have a service call done. [I mean, I want them to cut this stuff off completely or come in and reset it and make me a customer. If I'm going to set this thing off, I want it to be on my own nickel, y'know?] But … the business office is closed for the holidays.

Maybe I’ll be jackass enough to actually go through the emergency responders’ switchboard to find out who my local service representative is, but for now, I’m just happy to be home, and I’m glad I brought my bag in when I did, because I really don’t want to leave the house and set this thing off again two more times [once as I leave, once as I return].

Hmmm … maybe I have wire cutters in the house…

In a development that I already know is cheering my friend Scott, I am loving Ryan Adams’s Demolition this morning. Between this and Sufjan Stevens’s Seven Swans, I’ve got some really great stuff to listen to as I wing my way to my grandmother’s.

As for that, I don’t know when I’m coming back from Guin … maybe Friday, maybe Saturday. I do have a stop to make on my way back, though.

NASA/MSFC issues sole-source justification to use ATK Thiokol to peform the DDT&E task on the first stage of the CLV. And so it begins.

More links when appropriate.

Todd reminded me that it’s that time of year again … An Equation of Motivation.

Right now, my c is pretty low—I really do enjoy what I’m doing—but the f is pretty high.

[If you're asking, "Is Geof going to bump this up every November?" the answer is, of course, "YES!"]

Lamood Big Hats. Somewhere, Lillian Anderson is smiling. “Finally, a place where I can buy hats for Mike!”

The FeedLounge guys have moved over to PostgreSQL, and from talking to them while they were contemplating everything, this is a great move. Folks have probably been wondering what the bottlenecks in FeedLounge development have been, and I’m here to tell you that this has been one of them.

I bet Alex is happy that he’d gotten all that PostgreSQL experience in porting Tasks and TasksProâ„¢ over to it …

Crap … I just lost a filling on a molar. Well, not lost … part of the filling covers the outside of the molar, and I just felt it come loose. I put it back in its place, but I will be calling the dentist come 0830 and seeing if they can fit me in today. :sigh:

Clearly I have achieved something in chilling out the last week, because I was awake and alert and ready to go this morning at 0530 on a rainy Monday morning.

Something is clearly quite wrong with me.

Ariel Sharon to leave Likud Party, start own party for new elections.

On Sunday, Sharon told Shimon Peres, 82, who lost the recent Labor leadership vote, that he would soon need his services. Political analysts have suggested that the two men, who have been active in Israeli public life for six decades, could win over many moderate voters if they formed a party focused on ending the conflict with the Palestinians.

I would welcome that. Long-lasting conflicts end when both sides agree to live together in peace. That’s what I want for Israel and Palestine.

Behold … the first post written on this Weblog from my new Mac mini. I rather suspect that it won’t be the last.

It’s really, really disconcerting to me how quiet this thing is; I’m quite used to how loud my old desktop was. I’m now thinking about how I can stick it in a closet somewhere to muffle the noise. Crazy, I know, but … there you go.

Anyhow, back to Software Update…

OI! Now I know how bad IJSM.org looks in Safari. :wince:

Stephen called me earlier today, having forgotten to set TiVo to record the Duke game. “If you can get the game, I’ll just come over and we can watch it together.” Worked for me. He came over around eight tonight, and we watched the game. Afterwards, I was curious to see what TiVo was recording, and I saw it … Extreme Dodgeball.

“I have to see how bad this is.”

“Sure, why not?”

We proceeded to watch it, and it was so bad, it was good, in that train wreck kind of way that has me watching really awful shows like The Real World and Elimidate. [Ain't gon' lie.] It got to the point that we were actually semi-interested. The only problem was the fact that the announcers didn’t take it seriously enough for the mockery quotient to be really high. [Think of the seriousness of the Celebrity Death Match announcers, and you've got it---mock seriousness is what this needs.]

We definitely have some viewing material for the next guys’ gathering—come on, this is so bad that it’s good—and we’re now wondering if Phoenix has a team that Sean could attempt to join.

Viva la Breadtruck!

On the advice of Maciej Ceglowski, who recommended a variety of Eastern European novels to his readers, I’m reading Gary Shteyngart’s The Russian Debutante’s Handbook.

Reading fiction like this is totally outside of my standard fare, but I found it rather hard to put down last night. [I only succumbed because it was late, I was tired, and it was delightfully cold in my house, the kind of cold that begs one to throw the covers overhead and coccoon oneself into the night.

The only weird thing for me is that I keep imagining Shteyngart’s Vladimir to be like my friend Daniel Khaykis … which just isn’t fair. It is, however, amusing…

Dan Cederholm points to WebPatterns and WebSemantics, a way to use the same principles of patterns that underlie object-oriented programming into the emerging discipline of Web design. Hmmmmmmmmmm.

Oh, sleeping in is such a guilty pleasure, isn’t it? I took today off of work—more appropriately, I recognized that my 80 hours for the pay period were up and chose not to work for free today—and while there was this notion yesterday that I might get up and be productive this morning, that notion died at 0610 when I got out of bed, turned off the alarm clock before it could sound its song, and crawled back into my nice, warm bed. For me, someone who’s very warm-natured, nothing beats these crisp nights in late fall and winter, when the house settles below 60F and the bed is cold except where I am.

I best not talk about that much more, lest I go back and sleep until noon. I do have things to do today …