I’ve often made fun of the complete despair the infomercial actors find themselves mired in while trying to do utterly basic tasks. While I just chuckled and moved my attention elsewhere, others found inspiration:

Discovered via Jason Kottke.

This site that Matt Mullenweg linked yesterday was notable for him because it used WordPress in a unique and novel way but the actual content of Typography for Lawyers is insanely well done in terms of writing and applicable use. I wish that this site had existed when I spent far too much time on a weekly basis translating Colorado Supreme Court and Court of Appeals opinions into something web-worthy from the source PDFs.

The interview linked in the ‘About’ section of Typography for Lawyers is also an entertaining read. I didn’t catch it on the first read through (hey, it’s Monday morning and things are broken, man) but, according to the interview,:

Heller: On your website you list a number of books about law writing. Do any of these address typography?

Butterick: Bryan Garner’s books about legal writing touch briefly on typography. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit has a great little guide to legal typography on the front page of their website. But I’ve recently signed a contract to turn Typography for Lawyers into a book, so the void will soon be filled.

it looks like Butterick is working on a print version of Typography for Lawyers which is good news since a dead tree version of anything loans credibility to the, um, man and might create some traction to get a text on typography added to law school curriculum.

My personal interest is long finished as I’m already five months away from my last job but, in the interest of making things more readable and less terrible, I’m excited for the potential of making specifically formatted printed matter less onerous to read.

I was inspecting the pile of links over yonder on the right looking for mildly entertaining content to read while trying to eat lunch. Seeing my old pal Planet Sun there made me think I might find some drama/insight into what those who were consumed by Oracle are up to these days. I’ve never been a huge fan of anything Sun in general but most of the planet postings were longer and more in depth that what you’d expect to be aggregated into a planet. Instead, we get a notice of closure and a redirect. How unfortunate.

I’ve been informed that I do not post nearly enough which is completely true. The not entirely obvious part of this absence is that I’ve been experiencing what I can only call writer’s block. Whether or not you actually believe in this phenomenon is completely subjective and I’ve long been a critic (imagine that) of its overuse as a excuse maker’s panacea for all sorts of laziness and ineptitude. My particular version of this has more to do with feeling like I can’t write what I am thinking and becoming quickly frustrated with everything I pound out and then, because this isn’t essential to anyone, just abandoning the effort with something akin to relief. I’m pretty quick to blame this on being away from school for so long and realizing that outside academia that anyone who can assemble a complete sentence is praised as a genius. That is just a little sad.

Since I last posted I’ve also started a new job. When I say ‘new’ I mean that in location and pay grade only as what I do now is a slight variation of what I’ve been doing for the past eight years or so. Once again, I’m a system administrator of a largely Windows infrastructure that serves a ‘mixed’ environment. That means there are a bunch of Apple machines that graphic designers use. In short, other than being poorly maintained in the past, it is plain old boring. There is seldom any quiet time but it’s generally because the last person here was sleeping while driving for a long time. Long enough for major revisions of interconnected software to fall softly and silently out of date with one another. Again, I am King Turd of Shit Mountain with a slightly larger paycheck. It’s distressingly similar to how things were arranged at my last place of employment minus the blame I could lay on outside consultants who were responsible for most of the network and server work. Here, it was just a bunch of lazy fuckers. It’s powerful motivation to keep up the status quo of suckiness and just do oil changes instead of building new and more solid infrastructure. I just can’t care a whole lot.

Another thing that is new and unappealing about the new work situation is the amount of stress that it generates. In terms of structure, I basically manage an entire department that consumes a huge percentage of capital expenditures but I don’t technically have a management title (which I’m totally fine with) and I don’t have any employees other than a contract worker who may get shoved out the door by budget constraints at any given moment. Being responsible for a whole lot of money and remote offices, phone contracts, and other crap that I didn’t setup and need to administer on demand kind of freaks me out. I’ve also needed to remotely close an office in Chicago with less than a single weeks notice which was, um, less than optimal. I’m slightly in the market for better things but not enough to say update my resume or bother sending any out. It takes longer than four months for that degree of burn to really set in. It always does though, eventually. It’s a part of the process, I guess.

The saving grace of ‘running my department’ is that I can administer my MSFT network using a real operating system and no one can question me. Granted, I’m still using Virtualbox to take care of some Windows only applications but largely just doing a high percentage of what I need to do with RDC clients and guesswork. I’d nearly forgotten how instructive it is to torch a Windows install and start new in a predominately Windows network. P.S. Fuck you Cisco.

I also bought a new car in January. This would not be at all remarkable other than the fact that I’ve really owned a car much less a new one. I drove a totalled 1995 Civic around for a year or so but, excepting that, I’ve never had a completely unused car. It’s strange. On the upside of this aren’t you like 37 years old or something story is that I bought a hybrid that’s actually fun to drive and doesn’t randomly accelerate into fiery death. I got a 2010 Honda Insight EX with Navigation. I didn’t really want the navigation but I’ve learned to love it dearly when I’m trying to get to some fucked up place I’ve never been to before. I had to make a trip out into the here be dragons areas outside Denver today to drop my amp off for repair and would probably still be somewhere in Littleton, CO if not for the nice lady who tells me where to drive. Since I’m primarily a city driver, like on city streets and typically during the very worst part of rush hour, I don’t get stellar gas mileage but I’ll settle for the 38 I’m getting and try not to remind myself that I drive like a complete jackass who drives only in the city proper and has terrible and incurable habits that come from getting a driver’s license in high school, letting it expire for something like ten years, almost never driving again, and then going through the entire process again. All of that aside, I really like the little fucker because it doesn’t randomly dump me into battery operation, has stability control which has already saved me from any number of fiery/snowy deaths, and has a stupid amount of space for things that aren’t even people or trash which I’d previously been ill equipped to accomodate. I also enjoy the voice activation feature which allows me to do many things with my car without ever knowing how to do them manually and making me feel like Batman. When stamping on the gas becomes necessary the car will chirp its tires and take the fuck off. Plus mine hasn’t been recalled. Woooo.

Oscar will be two in July. That is pretty nuts. He becomes more fun all the time. He keeps surprising us by spitting out new words on a nearly daily basis and is apparently very keen on waking up before 6am every morning. Keeping with my policy not to discuss Oscar here, that will be all.

More to come when I’ve got time and inclination. Both are scarce commodities lately.

It’s that magical, magical time again when I’ve grown completely frustrated with my feed reader and am looking for recommendations for a Linux feed reader that isn’t a machine killing hog.

Liferea (1.6.1-1) used to be my default choice but its performance over the past couple of months has caused me a ton of frustrating downtime where my desktop is completely unusable while Liferea updates 130 feeds or so. It might be Arch‘s package or not but it isn’t really an option. I thought about building it from and then decided against it.

I also tried Akregator for a while and it was a lot less antagonistic towards my CPU(s). It also has some pretty buggy behavior, though, and instances like the below finally convinced me that it was a stopgap rather than a good replacement for Liferea. It’s also a KDE which makes it look pretty strange in Gtk-land.

I even fired up Flock with the intent of using is just for feed reading. It doesn’t work so swell these days — a bit too monolithic and tuned for its own purposes rather than mine. I toyed with it for awhile and then shuffled it off to /dev/null.

So, anyone have any good suggestions for me? I like lightweight, GUI (preferably Gtk+ but I can deal with whatever for the sake of working), and capable of importing OPML. Thanks

There is a fan-fucking-tastic article on The Globe and Mail about the future of the book in the face of the rising popularity of ebook readers. The general gist of the article is that ebooks work phenomenally for everyone but publishers. I feel the same way about this as I do record companies, especially now that the more industrial means of production (note: there really needs to be a ‘commie’ HTML tag so I could nest it in sarcasm tags) for printed material have largely been rendered optional. You don’t need an expensive to produce trade paperback to have a fair number of folks able to read your work.

I hope that over the course of time this evolves to make self publication easier for writers who aren’t political wingnuts with an agenda to push and works to erode the control publishers currently have over what is available to the masses. This doesn’t necessarily mean that spare bedroom fiction writers are going to storm the marketplace (and they probably shouldn’t) but that you could feasibly have a book out there with a large means of distribution without the overhead of having a publishing company and all of the baggage that typically comes with influencing that availability. The downside to this is that, as is typically the case when something gets easier and becomes more visible, the marketplace will likely be flooded with (e)reams of unreadable genre fiction that will make discerning between half-assed experiments and totally assed experiments in publishing difficult if not impossible. This flood might be the savior of traditional publishers, enabling them to gain additional cachet as a litmus for quality or at least works that have been checked for spelling and grammar. This might even convince publishing houses that they might need to do a bit of marketing that matters to promote books instead of limiting it to the typical book signing events and review copies.

The interesting part about this is the role that Amazon is beginning to take in shaping the pricing structure of ebooks. Rather than directly fighting publishers prices, Amazon just started selling them for less and sometimes at a loss. Media types have done no small amount of speculation on how free Kindle offerings are going to skew the popularity of ebooks on the whole and this plays out when you look at the digital bestsellers list. The hole in this particular theory about free ruining the market is that most of what is listed and is zero cost is genre fiction that wouldn’t ordinarily be at the top of any list much less a bestseller list. The authors (or, maybe, publishers) have made a conscious choice to make their books available at no cost in exchange for the increased visibility. Amazon then takes care of the distribution end of the deal and gives people a little more impetus for buying a Kindle. Seems like a pretty good deal for everyone at the party other than publishers. They would largely love to pretend that ebooks never happened or that things remained the way they were when readers were still expensive or next to useless in terms of functionality and that paper books were still the absolute nadir of written word consumption where they had more control even when dealing with the world of one stop distributors (which are famously vicious about their terms for selling a product that is not a bestseller). I have precious little sympathy for this weird protectionist stuff and almost no patience for folks moaning about their deflating bottom line while others are actually doing pretty well by, you know, adapting to the circumstances.

I’m no marketing dude and despite the fact that I work for a publishing company of sorts, I’m the IT guy so I have no idea how all of this will play out. Maybe it will mean the end of the written word as we know it (insert ominous music here) but, as someone who reads a lot and dislikes most of the physical aspects of the book format (especially the dreaded hardcover edition that always precedes the mass market edition), I hope that the growing multitude of forces that have a stake in the future of both ebooks and publishing manage to shake things up in a productive way that might provide the appropriate shaking out of stupor and slap of reality. People who write, keep on writing. Thanks.

I have a bunch of Google Wave invites which is good since, so far, Wave is a bit like an MMORPG with few players. You log in, look at the same handful of objects you had last time that may look slightly different, and then you log out again. That said, you want one?

I haven’t posted much here over the past few months and I can’t say that I feel much of anything about that. I can’t really feel any sort of guilt or sense of laziness about that because, in truth, I’ve been incredibly busy and none of it has been anything to proverbially write home about. I have an increasing number of balls that I’m obligated to keep continually aloft and precious little energy for tech fetishist pseudo-intrigue. Excuses begone:

1. I’ll own a Kindle in a few days which I’m pretty excited about. I can’t really comment a whole lot on the controversial DRM because I buy books pretty consistently and hate the fact that I’m left with an all but useless husk when I’ve finished the book. I also dislike the fact that the cheap trade paperbacks that I favor when thinking about the comparatively small amount of disposable income that I have to blow on fiction are not durable at all. I’m much happier with access to sanely formatted text than I am with twenty more pounds of paperback to cart around until I eventually spill coffee on them and they are destroyed.

A former co-worker was kind enough to let me mess around with hers a bit and I’m pretty happy with the e ink display. I’m pretty sensitive to glare after too many years of squinting at bad monitors attached to server room KVMs and making the mistake of buying more porous contact lenses and the Kindle display is ridiculously glare resistant.

The only real downside that I can see is the issue of expense — no more super cheap used books but I think there is some exchange in value there simply because I can’t lose or physically destroy the book. I’ll write some more on this when I’ve actually had some time to beat on it and figure out if the interface is as good as it seemed after using it for a few minutes.

2. New job. I finally found a new job which is apparently something akin to a miracle while the economy is being nudged down the shitslide into eternal torment and damnation or something like that. It’s the same basic deal as always but pays a lot more and will (hopefully) give me more time to do system administration and less call to delete normal.dot and play seek and destroy in the Windows registry. This is wishful thinking because, although I sincerely feel as though I’ve paid my desktop support dues, I will be the entire IT department for a 60-85 user environment. This is pretty similar to the situation I just left but the money certainly helps. I start tomorrow and feel better already.

3. Ubuntu. I’ve finally settled on using Ubuntu on my desktop machines instead of the other distributions that I’ve known and sorta loved. I really tried to keep a couple of installs of Debian unstable sane but they eventually broke or conflicted in a way that made them useless. I’ve always held Ubuntu in mild to moderate disdain as a luser-oriented distribution in contrast to Debian’s QA-centric take on building the stable branch of the distribution. Unfortunately, I’m mainly using Linux on the desktop these days so I typically need newer/sexier versions of applications and libraries and can’t deal with unfucking dpkg/apt after every update. Ubuntu is a fairly good compromise between the tendency towards bleeding edge and having your shit actually work. Feel free to heckle me so I can give you the interWeb equivalent to a blank stare. That is oddly fulfilling.

I’m trying out Chrome as my primary browser on this machine for a couple of days. I’ve converted all of my *nix boxes back to Debian because, whether I’m comfortable admitting or not, I like the way that things work in Deb land and most other distributions are frustrating. I’m even running the stock kernel (2.6.30-2-686) which doesn’t happen very often.

Anyway, back to Chrome because that was my intent when I opened emacs to write this. I installed the developer release straight from the mouth of the beast which seems wiser than the community built Chromium releases that I’ve found pretty crashy and not very much fun. Most of those early builds were missing any of preferences which are scant but at least accessible on this version. I’m hoping that one day I’ll be able to run Chrome and control which fonts it uses. Right now, that isn’t a presented option which was disappointing because I do a fair amount of reading from web sites and being unable to bypass the demonic urges that cause some folks to force us to read in small, serif fonts is making me kinda headachey.

Other than that rather small glitch (which is perfectly acceptable for somethng that is released for developers), my Chrome use has been really stable and easy on resources. It’s a much lighter browser than Firefox by miles and with the inclusion of Flashblock basically disappears from the process landscape when I’m not actively using it. This works out great for me since I typically have somewhere between 15 and 30 tabs open in a browser. I tend to open links people have mailed me or from things I want to read from an RSS reader and Chrome has yet to freak out and freeze or crash. That is exactly what I needed and here’s hoping that the eventual move from beta to something closer to a final release doesn’t change that sentiment drastically. Remember when Phoenix was jaw droppingly awesome? Sigh.

I’d nearly forgotten that MariaDB existed or that it was nearing the point of being a viable replacement for MySQL but Jeremy Zawodny mentioned the project and its progress today on his linkblog. It’s pretty surprising how well things are coming along and the features it offers in comparison to MySQL. Given the questions surrounding the future of MySQL now is an ideal time to start looking into alternatives in case Oracle decides that they can suddenly reap huge profits by making that software less accessible or something equally inane.

The really super duper good news is that the devs have organized a Debian and Ubuntu repository for packaged versions so taking MariaDB for a spin is a much simpler process than I first imagined. I’m hoping to set aside a little time to install and configure it on a test machine tomorrow. If that actually happens I’ll try to write something about the observable differences or at least how well a clean install or conversion went.

Question posed to no one in particular:

Has anyone ever seen an actual implementation of the Coda file system. I started reading the CM site sometime in the past couple of weeks and noticed that it was updated within the past year. You couldn’t tell that from the available documentation though since most of it is nearly ten years old and does its comparisons with Linux based on ext2 and seems pretty ambiguously hostile towards file systems that are actually used. Just curious if anyone knows about any actual uses of it and how it fared under real world stress and being accessed by the usual gamut of applications.

I’ve been looking for a new job for the past couple of months and I’ve reached an epiphany of sorts about it. I’m starting not to care at all about potential environments and thinking more about the potential money. This is probably a pretty solid indicator that I need to move on to something else. I’ve grown pretty weary of the dichotomy between HR-heavy interviews where I’m asked too many questions about teamwork and the developer-esque interviews where people try to stump me according to their favorite hangups and and amounts to a dick measuring contest. Although I really do want another job that doesn’t require me to jump through so many ridiculous hoops crafted from years of laziness and incompetence, I’m also less willing than I’ve ever been to keep cranking on the dimmer switch for my actual personality predictively for each and every loathesome interview. Perhaps the more correct methodology would be to wear a tiara and just answer: a best effort to fix all of your broken shit because I hate things that don’t work the way they’re supposed to. Also, I’m tired of simultaneously nodding and rolling my eyes when asked about Vista experience without screaming “You deployed that bullshit!?!?” at people interviewing me.

School? Shit, maybe.