Interesting thought

Heard during sets on a streaming Internet station last night: “If Jesus had a tape recorder, how different would things be today?”

Google Print and stupid lawsuits

From a student paper, dated October 21, 2782. Don’t ask me how I got this.

The following is one of the recovered fragments of The Book of Internet. There are gaps in the translation, due to disk errors on the ancient and rusted hard drive, recovered from the archeological digs in Silicon Valley.

... then Google was born, and indexed the Internet. And it was good.

... Google looked at the world, and asked itself, “what else can I index and make available to my mighty Search Engine?” And it came to pass that Google passed a bookstore. “Eureka!” cried Google. “I shall scan all these books, cause them to be searchable, and display small snips, that users of my mighty Search Engine may locate books and perhaps buy those that please them.” And Google obtained The Mother Of All Scanners, returned from the Public Library with an armload of books, and got to work. ...

But the Publishers were wroth, and gnashed their teeth and waved their lawyers at Google, crying “Cease and desist! For your scheme will surely allow your users to read our books online, without paying us for the privilege!” ...

Then was the wrath of the Authors stirred up against the Publishers; and they spake unto the Publishers, saying, “your lawsuit is not helping me or my book.” ....

It is plain from this and other surviving records that purveyors of “analog” technologies (printed books as well as recorded music and video) were having trouble adapting to the digital realities of the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries.

Unfortunately, the knee-jerk refusal to embrace digital technology only hastened the demise of the old gatekeepers. Not only was digital media easy to transfer, it was easy to create. It seems odd that there was ever a time that people were passive consumers rather than consumer-creators, but such was the reality as humanity entered the Third Millenium. The pace of change at the time seems almost mythical, and may explain the toxic political and pseudo-religious movements that dominated the first few years (as a coping mechanism by those unable to understand or participate in the rapidly changing world of the time). Many people of today consider the people of the early 21^st century (if we think of them at all) as ignorant, benighted savages. However, it is important to remember that they are not only our direct ancestors, they gave birth to the society we enjoy today.

Herding cats

Nearly home from dropping off Daughter Dearest, I saw several pairs of eyes reflecting my headlights on both sides on the road, and got on the brakes. A few seconds later, I saw a ran-over kitten in the road, and several survivors off to the side. Dangit, I thought, some ’hole dropped ’em off. I pulled off to the side, thinking maybe I could catch all or most of them (I think there were five, some black, some tan/white), take them home, and let them live in the outbuilding until I could find homes for them. From experience, I’ve found the best way to give away kittens or puppies is to take them to a Wal-Mart. Their unwritten policy seems to be “people taking the critters will buy pet food and accessories.”

Little wild teases: they would stand their ground, let me walk right up to them, then run away as I bent over to grab them. Then I saw a bigger cat and realized it wasn’t a dump-off. The mama was a bit friendlier; she let me touch her (and was she skinny!). She was on the side of the road I’d been driving on, calling to the babies who were on the other side. So I chivvied the little buggers across the road (by pretending I was trying to catch them) and away from the pavement, then went on home. If they’re still hanging around tomorrow, I’ll take some catfood to them. That mama looked like she could use a couple of turns at the Fire Mountain buffet line.

Uh-oh

I drove Daughter Dearest to her first homecoming dance this evening. Oh wow. I knew this day was coming, but knowing & being ready are often two different things....

The Boy and M.A.E. were going to a movie with a friend, so I dropped them off at the friend’s place since it was on the way. And I have no idea where Lobster is tonight.

Just me & the wife here. We cracked a bottle of peach wine, and she (as usual) is zonked after one glass... too quickly for me to take advantage, as it were. :-P

The General Stickiness of Stuff

Mountain Cerridwen (aka SallyCat) wrote a fine Crass Commericalism Rant today. That, and the post immediately below it on Sally’s blog, called to mind a conversation (i.e. yakking on AIM) about materialism (I’m in red here; he’s in blue)...

True. I don't know why I keep a bunch of CDs with outdated software on them, even with a dialup, but there you are....

Yeah, totally. I probably have discs that have the cutting-edge IE and Netscape 3's. Why keep them? I don't know but I do. Nostalgia for the good old days when it was exciting to rip open the magazine plastic and see what's on the CD, read the Mac Addict letters to the edit, etc.

I don't really care anymore but can't let go of it.

Seriously, I think sometimes it's easier to just leave stuff behind than take it with you.

If I had a mind to, I could clear out of my house with all the possessions I *really* wanted to have in about an hour.

Well, you know what would be easy is to pick out the things you want, like that. It'd be easier than making a conscious decision to throw something else out. Grab your computer, some clothes, some things from a file cabinet, maybe a photo album or two, and burn the house down.

Over the top, sure, but it’s too true. It’s easy enough to identify the possessions that are really important (beyond family, of course) — but having identified those things that are important, why is it so hard to let go of the other stuff?

I suppose part of it involves ego — the “he who dies with the most toys wins” mentality, or maybe it’s “I paid good money for that crap, I need to get something back out of it.” The latter, at least, could be dealt with by throwing a yard sale. The problem with yard sales, though, is you have to drag all that stuff out there and then drag all the unsold stuff back in at the end of the day.

A friend of mine told me about how she cruised yard sales, bought designer clothes, then sold them on eBay for a tidy profit. eBay would work for what would be high-end stuff in a yard sale, but the cheapo paperbacks & workaday clothes would wind up with shipping charges 2x-4x more than the price of the stuff.

One thing I’ve managed to do on occasion is to bundle up a big ol’ pile of stuff and take it to the local thrift store. I get a receipt I can use at tax time, and some extra space; they get more stuff to sell cheap to people who can’t afford to shop anywhere else, and those people get more choices. Everybody wins.

I have an alarming number of PowerMacs in the outbuilding. Fortunately, I have a home for one; a friend of The Boy needs a computer and knows his way around MacOS. That leaves several other Macs to give away or sell. Plus a bunch of other crap.

The Eyes (Don’t) Have It

Wife is slowly getting over herself, although it’s taking a little longer than usual. I picked up The Boy from his job (very late) last night; he asked me “What was she mad about today?” Nothing really, just the hangover from the night before. M.A.E. grabbed an order of jalapeño bites for him on her way out of Arby’s (I ate one of them though!) so he had a little snacky before bed.

So this morning, the wife was looking at M.A.E’s schedule. They make a printout of her hours for the week & we stuck it to one of the refrigerators in the kitchen (yes, we have two fridges, and we use ’em both). The printout is pretty small — like 4-point type — and the wife couldn’t read it. She had to ask me to look at it.

So far, the most sucky part of hitting the mid-40s is the vision change (only because menopause hasn’t started, I’m sure). Over the last year or so, I’ve had to peer over my glasses to read, or just take them off. In the morning, it takes a while for my eyes to want to do their job, so I try not using the computer for the first hour of the day. A minor inconvenience. But in the last couple of months, I’ve noticed that she’s had a seriously hard time reading small print of any kind. This morning, she finally admitted what I’ve known for a while. I hope she doesn’t have to get bifocals; from everything I’ve heard, they sound like more trouble than just having two pairs of glasses.

I wonder if the R-K surgery she had done back when is a factor. I’ve always been leery of elective eye surgery myself.

Autumn nights

...mean bonfires!


I’m slightly proud of this one: I got it going with one match. Having lots of dry pine straw in the pile helps a lot.

I spent an hour or so tending it until it died down enough to feel comfortable leaving it alone. Then I had to go back out and find the camera cable. Sheesh.

Ah, nuts...

Coming back from lunch, I suddenly realized that I wasn’t getting any sound from the left side of my headphones. So after wiggling wires and looking close, this is what I found (look where the wire almost goes into the earpiece, click to get a bigger image)...


Dangit. Those were my favorite headphones, too. I switched to the old reliable set of Koss earbuds (bright yellow wires!) and I’m now getting music out of iTunes the way Steve Jobs intended.

Those of you born after the baby boom probably don’t remember when “Made in Japan” pretty much meant the same thing as “Made in China exclusively for Wal-Mart” means now — in a word, junk. But Japan put its sense of national pride on the job, and it started to show in the early 1970s. Nowadays, “Made in Japan” usually means solid stuff. But not even the Japanese have figured out how to make wires small, flexible, and kink-proof, apparently. :-P

Wife-BOOM-ba

“It’s quiet... too quiet.”

Or it was.

The Boy has lately been reneging on his agreement to be in bed by 11 on weeknights. Naturally, this makes him harder to get out of bed in the mornings, but that’s not the issue at hand.

Last night, he was told several times to get upstairs and get to bed. Around 11:30, SWMBO ordered me to go upstairs and “find out what all that banging is about.” (His bedroom is directly above the living room, and anything that interferes with her TV watching is Not Allowed.) So I went upstairs, to find Lobster in bed and The Boy sitting on the floor next to his bed. Given the general order of the room, it looked like he’d been cleaning.

“What was that thud noise your mom heard?”

"What noise? I dropped the Xbox, is all.”

“Fine,” I told him, ”get to bed, it’s 11:30.” He got up and got in bed, I went downstairs.

“He dropped his Xbox,” I told SWMBO. “It looked like he was cleaning up his room a bit.”

“He’s supposed to be in bed now!” she barked, with a tone that implied that I was to blame for this whole thing. Like I said, next to idiots in Accounts Receivable, nothing puts her back up faster than interrupting her TV.

“I told him that,” I replied, using a similar tone. A while back, SWMBO told me I needed to stand up for myself more often. She was right. Change begins at home.

It didn’t help matters that music started coming down the stairs at that moment. Of course, she told me to go up and tell them to shut it off, then stopped me. “Just stand where you can hear,” she said. “I’m going to find the breaker and turn it off.”

So I stood at the bottom of the stairs, and she started flipping breakers. “Did that do it? Did that do it?” even after I told her that I would let her know as soon as the music stopped. I saw the bathroom lights go off and on, then Daughter Dearest came out of her room.

“What happened to the lights?” she said. I explained, while SWMBO went through the entire breaker box unsuccessfully.

“There’s got to be more breakers,” she said.

“There’s that box in the garage,” I reminded her. “Do you want to go out there, or do you want me to go?”

At this point, she got even more irrational, and repeated her assertion that there had to be more breakers. I simply repeated what I said, not that it did any good. Finally, she threw up her hands and told me to go tell them to turn off the music. (I have absolutely no clue what the problem was with going to the garage.)

So I went upstairs, and turned off the stereo since it’s right inside his door. The Boy, who was laying in bed by this point, got huffy. “I was just playing that one song for Lobster!”

“Doesn’t matter, you should have been in bed for a while now. You agreed to 11 o’clock, lights out, stereo off.”

He just shook his head. “Why is it such a big deal?”

“Because it’s bothering your mom!” I said.

She was 1) listening at the bottom of the stairs, and 2) took offense. “He can just listen to his %&#@!! music all he wants to, for all I care!!!” SLAM went the doors. I gave The Boy a dirty look.

“Why did she go off like that?” he asked.

“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “If you had done what you agreed to do, none of this would have happened, and you would be easier to get up in the morning.” I left and went back downstairs to put up the laptop.

SWMBO was in the bedroom as I came in; I just started putting things away and she huffed out. Next thing I know, I heard The Barge going out. She probably went down to her mom’s; all I know for sure is she didn’t come back. I went to bed. When caught by forces of nature, it’s best to just ride it out and move on.

After about 20 minutes, The Boy came downstairs and we talked for a while. We talked about things; he said he was going to save his money and move out by January.

“Just hang in there for a while and it’ll blow over,” I said. He claimed to take offense to SWMBO’s use of “%&#@!!” and so forth. I wanted to tell him that lying about not smoking was just as bad as foul language — SWMBO found a pack of cigs in his room last week — but it wasn’t the time. So we talked about things for another 20 minutes; after we finished I told him we needed to talk more often, but not at 1 a.m.

So I’m working at home today. SWMBO came in long enough to get a change of clothes, then off to the chicken houses. Neither of us said anything. What... ever. Like the computer said in War Games, “the only way to win is not to play.” If she doesn’t come back, I’ll put FAR Manor on the market and move closer to work. She knows that, so I expect she’ll be in by lunch and pretend nothing ever happened.

RTF: the “other” interchange format

Category: technology
MacDevCenter’s Giles Turnbull has an article up on using RTF (Rich Text Format) as an interchange format. For non-technical users, this is probably the best way to move documents around without having to worry about whether someone can read them. Nearly all word processors that aspire to be “full-featured” provide some support for RTF these days, so it’s a good starting place.

This morning at work, I was asked to provide some information from a quick-start guide for a hand-off to a customer (who wants to write some custom stuff). We’re using FrameMaker for documentation, not Word, and Word users just seem to assume everyone else uses Word. Imagine that. (For those who wonder why I don’t use Word, this profanity-laden rant pretty well sums it up.) FrameMaker’s RTF exporter is less than wonderful, producing sloppy text formatting and losing the graphics, but the customer just wanted the tables so it’s all good.

Way back when, I brought RTF home once and used a text editor on an Amiga to make updates to a manual. We had a deadline and a snowstorm, so I wanted to make sure I could hold up my end of things even if I couldn’t get to the office. It worked, except for one minor detail: those spaces at the end of lines of RTF are significant, and my text editor insisted on removing them... so when I got back to work & opened it in the word processor, there were spacesmissing here and there. Running the spell checker fixed all but one or two of them.

So with all these wonderful real-world examples, what’s lacking in RTF compared to ODF, the virtues of which I’ve been extolling lately?

First, RTF has been one of those formats that is supposed to be well-known, but Microsoft has always had a penchant for omitting things. The newer specifications are better.

Second, there are RTF parsers and conversion tools out there, but they are far less well-known than equivalent XML tools.

Third, even Microsoft is moving to XML for document interchange.

RTF, given its Word-driven ubiquity, will be around for a long time to come and will continue to be a useful interchange format for people interested primarily in exchanging and using documents. Many people will continue to use older versions of Word and Office for a long time to come, and XML interchange won’t be feasible for them. But for those of us who want our computers to extract (and perhaps transform) the important pieces of the documents we get, XML is really the way forward.

Stinkular and their smell-phone “service”

Wife got the Stinkular bill today, and almost ended up like that guy on the T-Mobile commercial. $380.

M.A.E. didn’t realize that just downloading ringtones runs up charges... she thought you only had to pay for the ones you keep. OOOOOPS

Daughter Dearest called... Turkey?!!??? three times because a number from there showed up on the phone. Fortunately, it was “only” $2+change for each call. She also downloaded a ringtone, but only one.

The Boy’s phone showed like 4000 minutes of usage, thanks to M.A.E. being on it almost constantly, talking to family in Florida. He tends to be the heaviest user in the family without her help.... That’s going to change, she has her own pre-paid phone now. I wonder how long it will be until she talks it to death.

OK, none of that is Stinkular’s fault. Their problem (besides the signal dropping out in inopportune places, like my office... “raising the bar,” my fartpipe) is that they have a bad habit of trying to double-bill add-ons like MediaNet service. I have it on my phone, primarily so I can email pictures off the camera and do occasional forays online. But they try to bill my phone and The Boy’s.

It’s not like it’s the first time they’ve tried to pull this crap. We wind up going into the st00p1d store each time we get the bill because they’ve messed something up. They take it off, but it comes back just about every time. Seems like they fix one thing, they screw up another. I guess the retarded howler monkeys from the hospital’s billing department moonlight at Stinkular. Or the other way around.

If it’s Cingular to you, what’s your secret? One phone, barebones service?

Short-item roundup

I didn’t feel like doing separate posts for these little things...

Daughter Dearest scored a 17 on her all-state chorus audition. It’s a decent score; whether it will make the cut remains to be seen. I’ll follow up when she finds out (and tells me)....

M.A.E. started her new job at Arby’s today (yup, it came through). With colder weather coming, I’ll be eating at Arby’s more often. The reason: the ones in this area have an atrium-like area with a live tree under the skylights. I can eat lunch there on sunny days and pretend it’s not January or whatever....

Lobster was thinking about moving home, but didn’t follow through on it. I think he was just miffed because we made him get out of bed Sunday for church, after being up later than he should have been. He (and The Boy) need to get a little more responsible about getting up in the mornings; they have both gotten several tardy notices and will probably end up with detention or something....

DD also announced today at dinner that she set up a Myspace... page? site? I said, “I have a blog.” She grunted, wife looked at me like she wanted to say, “what’s a blog?” but didn’t want to {pick one: look uninformed || hear a lengthy technical explanation, which I do have a history of doing}. Further exchange between DD & I made it clear, saving us the trouble. I have no idea whether she cares or not; she has a poker face that would be right at home on ESPN’s games....

Our minivan’s transmission continues to deteriorate. Wife keeps talking new car; I keep bringing up minor details like no spare change for payments. The mechanic says he’s afraid pulling the motor will kill it. huh??? We keep pouring transmission fluid through it for now, about a bottle a week. Cashing in stock won’t help much; the price cratered here in the last week (on good news, no less)....

Hurricane Wilma (I keep thinking of the Flintstones every time I hear that name) looks to miss us completely now. My mom, on the other hand, has something to worry about (besides her broken wrist, healing slowly). So does Cuba — but Castro will, once again, school Bush-league and his crony (formerly) at FEMA on how to evacuate a major city....

Be sure to read the next entry down. Possibly wonderful news.

Fingers crossed tightly!

The Boy had a trip to the endocrinologist yesterday. Being diabetic, he gets stuck for blood every few months to see how well he’s controlling his glucose levels¹. His A1C is a little higher this time, not horribly so given what he did between tests. The nurse-practitioner² was going through his records, and said he was Type II diabetic. We said no, he’s Type I.

This prompted the NP to look a little more closely. “Oh,” she said finally. “The doctor did decide he’s Type I. But some of these tests say one thing, and the others say something else.” So we got to talking about his Summer of Discontent, during which he admitted he took very little insulin (but said he didn’t eat much either). “In that case,” she said, “you could be Type II. The C-Peptide [I think that’s what she called it —FF] test went that way, and you’re still taking a relatively low amount of insulin. You could still be in the honeymoon period, but we can run the test again and maybe you could replace the Novolog with pills.”

Needless to say, we’re overjoyed. I’m really trying not to get my hopes up, but this would definitely be a plus for The Boy — instead of four needles a day, he would only have to use one (for his Lantus overnight) unless his glucose started getting high. He didn’t show much emotion, but maybe he’s trying to manage his expectations as well. He did agree to use his meter more often (that’s one of the things we’ve been nagging him about) so he & the medics can get a better picture of what’s going on.

If you’re the praying type, please pray for him. This could be a huge boost.

---

¹Be careful what you ask for... if you want more control over your life, you could end up doing what your pancreas does for you. :-P

²NPs, it seems, get all the responsibility of a doctor in general, just without the recognition or prestige.

Happy #21, M.A.E.!!!

Yup, The Boy’s lady fair is 21 today. They celebrated at a steak&sushi place.

Happy Birthday! Happy Birthday!
People dying everywhere,
Misery is in the air,
Happy Birthday! Happy Birthday!

That’s the last birthday this month at FAR Manor.

To any Virginia readers...

You might want to know a bit more about Jerry Kilgore as he tries to slime his way into the governor’s mansion.

UPDATE: Austin Post has some more thoughtful commentary on the race.

Happy Birthday, Daughter Dearest!

OMG, number 16. She’ll be taking her driver’s test pretty soon, although she’s in no hurry (either to take the test, or behind the wheel in general).

So on this wonderful Saturday morning, she had auditions for all-state chorus. Long drive, she snoozed a little but that’s fine since I was driving (she needs more practice with a manual transmission too). I plotzed around with the iBook in the cafeteria, putting some edits on a short story I may post here later, and banged around Yahoo on my cellphone when I get done with that.

She thinks she messed up on sight-reading, and she was supposed to bring a blank cassette tape (or be auto-DQ'ed) but her instructor saved the day with a couple extra tapes. So now we get to settle in & wait to hear if she made the cut.

From experience (she was in all-state three years ago, last time she was in public school), there’s a second audition... primarily to make sure the kids have practiced the music. So here’s hoping.

We finished out the day by getting her some Magic:the Gathering cards (three decks!) and eating (very late) lunch at one of her favorite restaurants.

Laziness and Open Document Format

Categories: technology, work
Current music: Groove Salad
Just before I took off for lunch today, the contractor who picked up the projects I was working on before the reorg motioned me over and asked me, “how did you do it? You put together the whole shell of this project, and I’m just hanging stuff on it. Especially the command-line stuff... how did you get so much of it done with nothing to work with?” Pulling miracles out of my, er, back pocket has been a lot of what I’ve done at the office for the last few years. I got deadlines, limited access (at best) to equipment, a little help from my boss when he’s not swamped with other stuff, very little in the way of specifications, and somehow I managed to maintain documentation for three entire product lines.

My secret is: I’m lazy.

Look, I sit in front of a computer all day. If I can get the computer to do something for me, especially if it’s something that needs to be done more than once, I’ll do it. For example, our original (now “legacy”) product line came with about 4000 pages of documentation scattered over about 20 different manuals. We provided a master index, a 110-page book of its own, as a way to let customers zero in on which manual(s) covered a particular topic. The first time I did the master index, it took two solid weeks of nothing else. This is one of those prime examples for automation: I had to build a book in FrameMaker of all the other books, tag each chapter in each manual, run the index, convert the tags to document references (for example, change “EG” to Engineering Guidelines), remove all but the first reference to any chapter, blah blah blah. To make a long story shorter, I wrote a handful of AppleScripts that eliminated literally 80% of the grunt work: instead of two weeks, I could build the master index in two days. Yesterday, I wrote a script that created index entries from headings (which is OK for a first pass at indexing commands) that saved me a day’s worth of work.

I told you all that to tell you this.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about Massachusetts adopting Open Document Format (ODF) for state government documents. Between than and now, OpenOffice 2.0 went into beta test; yesterday, OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) submitted ODF to the International Standards Organization (ISO) for consideration as an international standard for office document interchange.

The neat thing about all this is that the ODF format is easy to pick apart and fiddle with. Internally, content, graphics, and style information are separated and the whole thing is rolled up in a ZIP file. Content and style files use an XML format, which is important for two reasons: XML is plain text, and there are lots of utilities to work with it. So what does that mean? There are several Free programs that support ODF already (OpenOffice and AbiWord run on most computers, while Koffice also runs on Linux systems). But the really fun part is, given a document format both open and relatively easy to parse, you don’t need an office application to do things with ODF files.

In the computing world, when a group like OASIS sets out to nail down a standard, they form a Technical Committee (TC) of interested parties. In the case of the ODF TC, some of the interested parties include companies that make content management systems (or CMS... the alphabet soup is sloshing around quite a bit tonight!) — suffice it to say that a CMS allows you to store, retrieve, and process documents to make something new (kind of like putting basil leaves in a food processor and making pesto). Given the job of a CMS, it usually doesn’t just store a document as-is. In the case of an ODF file, the CMS would probably unzip it and extract just the content and metadata (data about the data) components. The graphics are already stored in the CMS. Let’s say I send a document to the CMS and come back for it a couple of months later. During that time, some of the artwork has been changed. The CMS grabs the original content and metadata, rolls in the updated graphics, and hands me an ODF file. Oh cool, I didn’t have to update the graphics myself!

Another handy utility might be nightly publishing runs. Sometimes, I’m working on a manual that’s getting change requests and bug reports coming in fast & furious. Some of the manuals I deal with have a lot of bitmap graphics, and can take nearly an hour to generate a PDF. Remember, I’m lazy... I don’t want to sit at work an hour overtime just to watch the computer make a PDF. In my theoretical ODF-based system, I simply send in the stuff I worked on during the day, and the CMS builds a new document and emails it (with a summary of what changed) to all the reviewers. The reviewers get fresh hot documentation every morning; I get to go home, sit on the porch, and write haiku before it gets dark.

With the manual finished, I have to send it to the translators. Currently, this involves gathering all the various files together and archiving them (and sending missing pieces or assuring them that the extraneous files aren’t important). In my dream system, I tell the CMS to give me an ODF document of the book. Boom, all the pieces get wrapped together, nothing gets dropped, nothing extra gets added, and I send one file to the translators.

I’m willing to put some effort into making this a reality. After all, I want the computer to do the work for me.

Death by Number 33

We went to one of the local Mexican restaurants last night (there are two in town, and two more in the retail district — people here like their tacos, I guess). Since I was on the way, they ordered #33 (chili relleno, tostada, quesadilla) for me. The barking started soon after leaving the restaurant; Daughter Dearest made the mistake of riding with me and I got to “share.”

It gets worse: the wife tells me the snoring (from both ends) went on most of the night and she ended up sleeping in the living room. I was even more oblivious than usual.

It continues to get worse: they haven’t completely gone away yet, over 24 hours later.

Not so fuelish

I find myself returning to this topic a lot, perhaps because it’s something that affects both the cast of characters (and I do mean characters) at FAR Manor and everyone else around us. I don’t intend for it to become an energy blog though.

Fuel supplies on Planet Georgia are still hovering close to barely adequate or maybe slightly less. Gas stations still run out on occasion (especially a certain BP station close to my office), and it’s not uncommon to see other stations having only one grade of gas available. Prices are a tick below $3/gallon, which is eating Lobster alive. [I told him to look for something smaller than the truck, but he wasn’t listening. He was in love with that Ranger.] Rumors of a climb to $4/gallon this month haven’t materialized... yet. Thank God.

On the other hand, I’m seeing some hopeful signs that people are getting fed up and actually doing something about it. My in-laws started driving less after prices got above $2/gallon. The president of Shell Oil thinks demand will decline (which is why they don’t plan to build more refineries) — current vehicle sales trends seem to confirm that. Demand for big new SUVs has dropped to the point where Ford stopped making Excursions at the end of September. SUV owners are trading in their gas guzzlers in droves, getting smaller cars.

No less than four motorcycle dealers have set up shop between FAR Manor and the office — certainly, some of them are “power-sport” or “lifestyle” oriented, but one Suzuki and United Motors (a Chinese make) dealer had a sign out front recently: “We get 70MPG. Do you?” With fall settling in and winter on the way, some of those new bikes will end up in the garage for a few months; but when it starts warming up again, I’m looking forward to not being the only rider on the road in the morning. (That’s not totally true even now; I’m seeing more bikes on the road but I’m not sure if it’s gas prices or fall weather bringing them out... probably both.) Come spring, there could be a lot of bikes on the road, especially if predictions of honest-to-God shortages over the winter come true.

In the long run, or even the medium run, moving to more fuel-efficient vehicles won’t be enough. If we’d continued to bite the bullet we bit back in the 70s, it might have — but Reagan pretty much p!$$3d away that opportunity, and his successors made (at best) token efforts. Some of the changes coming will be positive — manufacturing and markets will become local again, at the expense of national or international chains — but we will end up being a much less mobile society, and that will be a wrenching change for many people.

Forewarned is... half an octopus.

Voices from the Borg

As much as I dislike Microsoft — mostly their business practices, although I’ve lost too much work to Word over the years to trust it — I have to admit it’s pretty cool that they let employees blog about what they're doing at work. For example, Brian Jones discusses the development of the XML-based file formats in Office 12; Cyndy Wessling covers the PDF output capabilities of upcoming versions. (If Visio ends up creating decent PDF, there will be a lot of happy FrameMaker users out there.)

For a view of the corporate culture, Mini-Microsoft recently hit the “blogs of note” list and provides an unvarnished look at the ossification of a large corporation as it happens. I’m sure there are other blogs about Microsoft by Microsofties... if you run across any, leave a link in the comments.