Winner of the March 2006 Inefficient Tourist Award 2006

Dinah Sanders! For spending 7 hours at one museum on her one free day in Washington, D.C.

My excuse: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is excellent.
(And I did spend an hour of that time hanging out with a really cool librarian there - hi Vincent! - who makes me want to help them out with getting more of their collection known to the online world).

I want to write a longer piece about the museum and my experience there, but for the moment, just go check out their website, particularly the part about the genocide in Darfur and how you can help prevent further loss of life.

Bringing more games a little closer to my beautiful computer hardware... 2006

My friend Joel drew my attention to exciting news this morning: Windows XP on Mac solution posted. Unfortunately, still issues with video drivers, so Spore on Mac is not an immediate certainty, but it's a matter of time...

The comment thread, I warn you now, is just maddening and summed up by this addition:

Everyone knows the internet is fueled by rage, and my rage is fueled by those who don't bother to read. The internet is a selfsustaining power source now.
-- Adam

Generally Good 2006

Hello, yes, I'm around, just not very posty.

Everything is pretty much fine. Weather variable. Health took a hit through the whole middle of the week with a beastly cold, but I'm on the mend now thanks to the care of The Lovely Man Who Feeds Me Soup And Reads To Me.

Work as usual has the potential to be highly stressful, but I'm managing pretty well under the load. (Thank you David Allen and Merlin Mann for the boost to my productivity and time management skills over the last year).

Didn't get to go to SXSW this year  :(  but that's because I spent all my money on my fabulous trip last year and this tasty maxed-out Powerbook :) so it all balances out.

Yes, yes, I will start getting some of the Tanzania pictures up soon - Kenya's all there at least - and I'll add in the travelogue in the blog one of these days. (I do wish the TypePad gang would get around to improving that post date selection tool so it was easier to select a day months or even years in the past. It really is the fly in my blogging ointment. *sigh* I've tried suggestions, whining, reminders, cupcakes, pointing to the good way to do it (thank you, Flickr!) and am beginning to wonder what it will take to get that feature. I wonder if they'll do contractual development? Only problem is they make more money than I do, I suspect. Poop. I hate waiting.)

You begin to see why I haven't been posting lately. So boring! Good lord. Go watch The IT Crowd or something. At least things catch on fire in that.

"The sunlights differ, but there is only one darkness" 2006

This morning I finished reading The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin. It is another brilliant work, providing a perspective on political organization of societies much as The Left Hand of Darkness did for gender organization.

LeGuin writes about decisions, about habits, compromises, and choice. She is probably one of the best writers on the concept of freedom you could read.

Highly recommended. Here's a taste:

Fulfillment, Shevak thought, is a function of time. The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal. The variety seeking of the spectator, the thrill hunter, the sexually promiscuous always ends in the same place. It has an end. It comes to the end and has to start over. It is not a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a locked room, a cell.

Outside the locked room is the landscape of time, in which the spirit may, with luck and courage, construct the fragile, makeshift, improbable roads and cities of fidelity: a landscape inhabitable by human beings.

It is not until an act occurs within the landscape of the past and future that it is a human act. Loyalty, which asserts the continuity of past and future, binding time into a whole, is the root of human strength; there is no good to be done without it.

Candy Land memories 2006

In December 2000, my pal Heather hosted a fun game of Candy Land in which I played against, among others, Daniel of Waferbaby (who just posted this faaabulous photo today which got me thinking "How did I get acquainted with waferbaby?" The answer is, I think, through mutual weblog reading, particularly his fine interviews).

My player description for the game was:

Riding the extreme fringes of sweetness, I like blackstrap molasses, Altoids curiously strong peppermints, bittersweet cooking chocolate, and actual slices of licorice root. As a warning to everyone of my dangerous proclivities, I am playing the red piece.

(Only a shadow of the game can still be seen here in the lovely Internet Archive).