Chuggnutt!

Month: January 2004

  • New Gutenberg Look

    I don’t know why I didn’t point this out back when I noticed it, but Project Gutenberg has a new site and design—much cleaner, simpler and faster than the old site they had before. It’s a thousand times easier to find an ebook (no more multiple windows!). And did I mention it was fast?

  • The Donner Party

    The January issue of Discover Magazine lists the top 100 science stories of 2003 (according to them, of course), and coming in at number 96 is the story of the Donner Party cannibalism site unearthed (scroll down the page for their summary).

    In case you haven’t heard of the Donner Party, here’s a capsule review: in 1846 a group of pioneers on their way to California were trapped in the Sierra Nevada mountains by a blizzard. They had a limited food supply that ran out quickly, and survivors were forced to eat the bodies of the dead to survive. Gruesome stuff.

    Anyway, Discover’s recap of the story—that archaeologists unearthed what they believe to be the Donner Party camp—spins it so that the Donner Party tragedy was a “legend has it” type of event—i.e., doubtful that it occurred. Say what?

    This bothered me, so I went to the source: The book Weird History 101 (great book, I highly recommend it) contains several contemporary accounts of the Donner Party from the people who survived: Virginia Reed, daughter of one of the Party leaders; Lewis Keseberg, one of those forced to eat the dead to survive; and Edwin Bryant, not a member of the Party (I don’t think) but who visited the camp in the spring.

    “Legend has it,” indeed. I can understand the importance of scientific investigations of an historic event, but playing off a well-documented incident as questionable as to whether it even occurred just seems awfully sloppy, and a bit irresponsible.

  • Plumbing

    So on the upstairs bathroom faucet today the cold water suddenly won’t shut completely off; I have no real idea why, other than the faucet valve isn’t closing all the way, or perhaps something’s jammed in there? At any rate, I turned off the cold water under the sink and have been pondering taking the faucet apart or if we should instead just call a plumber.

  • Elderberry Wine

    Glass of homemade elderberry wineFollowing up yesterday’s Wine Stories post, today I opened up a bottle of the elderberry wine and tried it.

    It’s not bad!

    It’s much more like a sherry than anything else. The aroma is quite good, almost exactly like what I’d expect a good dessert sherry to smell like, with a strong hint of brandy. The flavor doesn’t live up to this, though; there are a bunch of different profiles going on in there: a sweet-ish sherry, some fusel alcohols, mild-but-tart fruit, a mead-like dry character (my wife suggested it reminded her of mead). They clash a bit, but all in all it turned out much better than I could have hoped.

  • Wine Stories

    I occasionally dabble in making wine and thought it would be amusing to write down some notes about my homemade efforts. I’ll start with a disclaimer, though: I am not a wine connoisseur by any means. I have enough knowledge, as they say, to be dangerous. I do enjoy making it, however, even though it takes quite a bit longer than beer.

    I have five bottles left of a batch of rhubarb wine that I made about five years ago and I’ve taken it upon myself to work on drinking those bottles up over the next few months as a sort of sideline contribution effort to the moving process. For a homemade fruit wine (an unconventional fruit at that) it’s not at all bad, and in fact won a second place ribbon at the Deschutes County Fair a few years back.

    It’s best served very cold, and has a very dry and very neutral profile, surprisingly pleasant. Not astringent, not sour (as one might expect from a rhubarb wine). I have no illusions about its quality, however: it is very much a table wine and I wouldn’t open a bottle as a main attraction for guests, but would keep it on-hand for anyone interested in tasting it.

    The very best wine I have ever made was my last batch, a Cabernet Sauvignon that I made for my wife from a kit. It turned out to be surprisingly high quality, despite my reservations about “kit wine.” This is a wine that I would serve to guests as the main wine, and have. The only complaint I can make against it is that it seems to turn astringent after being opened for a couple of days more quickly than a wine from a professional winery; I surmise that wineries must add more preservatives to their finished products.

    I also have five bottles of an elderberry wine I made about a year before I made the rhubarb wine, but to tell the truth I have no idea what it’s like because I’m a bit afraid of it. What happened was I acquired about four, four-and-a-half pounds of fresh elderberries from my aunt and, following a general recipe in my winemaking book, decided that I would use all of those elderberries in a one gallon batch of wine. Four pounds of elderberries is a lot to put into a single gallon, but my reasoning was that I would be making an elderberry port wine, a dessert wine with higher alcohol content.

    I let this wine ferment and age in glass for about a year before I got around to bottling it. When I finally bottled it (probably about the same time I bottled the rhubarb), I poured myself a small taster to see what had been happening to it over the course of the year. To my great surprise, it turned out to be the most astringent, puckering, strongly un-sweet example of a wine I had ever tasted. I nearly poured it out entirely; the only thing the kept me from doing it was the amount of effort and time I had put into it up to that point, and besides, what’s the harm in bottling up five extra measly bottles?

    A little subsequent research into the use of elderberries uncovered the fact that elderberries, in normal proportions (no more than two pounds per gallon), make quite a harsh wine that takes quite a bit longer than a normal wine to age and mellow to a drinkable quality. D’oh! So I haven’t opened a single one of those five bottles in five years, largely because I don’t know how long I should wait to let this wine mellow, and if—if—it is going to mellow and turn into a decent wine, I’d hate to open one now as a crapshoot on the off chance it might be ready.

    But you know what? I think I’ll open up a bottle tomorrow to see what it’s like. Crapshoot be damned. :-) I’ll blog the results, too.

  • Ebook lag

    So yes, I know I’ve been way behind on the Palm ebooks lately. I’ve got a bunch queued up to convert but just haven’t had the time or energy lately to do so. But here’s a taste of what I have in the hopper:

    • De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America
    • Sherlock Holmes
    • The Canterbury Tales
    • James Fenimore Cooper’s The Deerslayer and The Last of the Mohicans
    • Grimm’s Fairy Tales
    • Moby Dick
    • The Story of Mankind from Hendrik van Loon

    So, I’m getting there. I figure by posting this and including this gratuitous plug for free Palm Reader ebooks I’ll get more motivated to do them.

  • RSS as Poor Man’s Copyright

    These ideas have been rolling around my brain for a while, fermenting, percolating, but bear with me if they might still be a little incoherent. It’s really the first time I’ve put words to them.

    Perhaps you’ve heard of the “poor man’s copyright.” The idea behind it is to provide yourself copyright protection without actually registering your work, typically by mailing yourself a copy of your work with the idea that the postmark on the envelope will be enough to prove the copyright. I rather like the idea behind this concept, although in reality there is no legal provision for the poor man’s copyright and holds no legal weight whatsoever. In practice it would be easy to fake a copyright in this way.

    But this idea of being able to prove and protect the copyright on your creative work (short of registering it) is a powerful one, so it’s natural to transfer the poor man’s copyright concept to the computer. The problem is, it’s even easier to fake a datestamp on an electronic file than on an envelope full of materials, so just relying on Word files on your computer is out.

    You could borrow the idea of the PMC more literally and email your work to yourself—or better yet, to someone else. That would provide a better claim to credibility than files on a disk, but it’s far from foolproof—dates can be altered and forged on emails too. But now we’re moving in the right direction. And that’s where RSS comes in.

    Post your work into an RSS feed that has a decent number of subscribers, the more the better. Their aggregators regularly ping and download your RSS feed, and your work is suddenly distributed among dozens—hundreds—thousands of computers and users, each instance of your work (ideally) stamped with the date and time it was downloaded (important note here: an item in an RSS feed can claim any arbitrary creation date, so that’s why it’s important to disinguish the download date at the aggregator level). There would be a standard deviation of several hours to several days, perhaps, of these datestamps. But what would you have? A distributed, decentralized, and dated web of your copyrighted work, collectively becoming a digital postmark on the proverbial envelope.

    Fakeable? Sure, if you had access to a small number of controlled computers. But the larger the audience, especially a well-distributed one, the less able you would be to pull this off. That’s the beauty of this system: for a large enough set, the likelihood of faking or gaming the system approaches zero. There’s no single point of failure or vulnerability.

    Other drawbacks? Well, you’d have to have a fairly large audience downloading your RSS feed regularly. That’s a bit of a trick. RSS aggregators would have to be sure to accurately record the download date of the feed. Also, anytime you wanted to back up a claim, you’d somehow have to mobilize enough of this audience to check their aggregator archives and confirm your claim in a timely manner and communicate this assertion to the other party securely and independently. Details, details. :-)

    Would RSS PMC be any more legal and provide real protection over regular old PMC? In practice, I doubt it. Again, it’s the idea that’s powerful here and takes us to the next step. You’d have a peer-reviewed network where the group could at anytime confirm or deny the validity of what you claim. An online archived record distributed among thousands of computers of everything you created and loaded into your RSS feed.

    It’s a double-edged sword, too. If you tried to plagiarize someone else’s work and claim it as your own, you’d have the community calling foul and moving against you. And the community has a long memory.

    Suddenly, this sounds a lot like an online reputation system, doesn’t it? Once you get started thinking about this stuff, the ideas just start rolling out. That’s the beauty of this RSS thing—the possibilities and potential it creates.

  • Mazda Autobot

    Something cool this morning: a Flash animation from Mazda showing one of their cars transorming into an Autobot. The only thing missing, though, is the Transformer sound effects.

    Found via Boing Boing.

  • Transitions

    Unusual day at work today. It was one person’s last day, and two others are revealed to be leaving by the end of the month.

    It’s weird to see people leave who have been with the company longer than I have. It’ll change the work dynamic, definitely, but the upside is, I get a bigger office space.

  • Home Selling Tips: Preparation

    Here are some tips and things to consider when you’re getting ready to sell your home.

    Pack up and/or throw out half of everything in the house.
    This does several things. First, you’ve made your house more presentable to a buyer; the less you have in the house, the more the buyer can picture his or her own things there. Second, it forces you to evaluate your possessions and help you prioritize what’s important. Finally, you’ll be half packed!
    Clean everything. Twice.
    Even though you think you’ve cleaned everything, chances are, you haven’t. Clean again. Buyers are like my wife: they’ll look everywhere.
    Put away all pictures and personal items.
    Buyers want to try to picture themselves in the home, and personal items detract from that. Try to make the home as neutral as possible. This includes clearing everything off of the refrigerator door, even if you think the magnets on there are neutral.
    Put away small valuables.
    Well, you just never know when someone might have sticky fingers.
    Get an inspection.
    This is a preventative measure which uncovers any nasty surprises that the buyer’s inspector (make no mistake, the buyer will have an inspector go over your house) might find and allows you to address them first. It also shows the buyer that you have taken the initiative and are serious about selling.
    Fix any problems you can from the inspection, and see if you can get another inspection report issued.
    We did this, and the inspector was nice enough to come back and is re-issuing the inspection report at no charge. The fewer the issues that a buyer can try to use as leverage in negotiating the sale, the better.