Cruftbox: My Box of Cruft

I finally took the plunge and chose a syndication aggregator. My blogrolling list was getting out of hand and there are lots of sites that don’t ping places so I know when they’ve updated.
Here are a couple things I wanted in an aggregator for my home use.
1) Handled RSS & Atom feeds
2) Separate app from email and browser
3) Displayed CSS & images of feeds
4) Auto-discovery of feeds
5) Auto-search for terms
6) Runs on my platform – Windows XP
I looked at several good apps, but in the end, I chose FeedDemon. I found it had pretty much everything I wanted.
I like the interface.

Over the weekend, I finished another book.
The King’s Coat – Dewey Lambdin
I am a huge fan of the C. S. Forrester series on Horatio Hornblower. I tried reading Patrick O’Brien’s books on the Age of Sail, but I don’t like his style.
Last holiday season, I was wandering in the book store looking for gifts when I spied a book with an obvious nautical theme. I looked it over and saw that it was the latest novel by Lambdin in his Alan Lewrie series.
At home I googled up the info and found the first book in the series was The King’s Coat. I added it to my wishlist. After several months I got the chance to order and read it.
Lambdin’s style is good. Much more like Forrester than the wordy O’Brien style. The story begins with our hero, Alan Lewie, being booted out of his aristocratic luxury and into the navy as a midshipman. Not knwing one whit about seamanship, Lewrie finds himself in a world of hurt. To the reader’s amazement, we find that Lewrie takes to the sea and life in the Navy like a duck to water.
The main differences in the style of the book to that of Forrester and O’Brien are clear. Lewrie is a randy chap. He enjoys the company of women and the author points this out at every occasion, pairing our hero with lonely wives in secret rendezvous. Also, the author believes in cursing, as do I. In this book, the characters are sailors and they swear like them. Often.
Plot and action are good, in accordance with typical Age of Sail norms with duels, gun battles, boardings, and mass destruction. The only thing I can fault the author with is an obsession with correct and detailed sailing info on the exact configuration of the sails. Mr. Lambdin is obviously a sailor himself and wants us to know that he knows what he is talking about. Passage after passage about the current set of canvas fill the novel. Here’s an actual quote from the book:

To ease the wind aloft, Ariadne came more southerly to take the wind abeam. Waisters hauled in braces to larboard. With the third reef came the need for preventer braces and backstays, parrels aloft to keep the yards from swinging and flogging sails, not so much with an eye to sail or yard damage, but to keep the topmen from being flung out and down by a heavy smack by the flying canvas.

See what I mean. I’ve read dozen’s of books like this and passages like this still make me scratch my head at passages like this.
But this point is minor. If you like the Jack Aubrey and Horatio Hornblower books, then you will enjoy the Alan Lewrie series.

Yesterday was a day of rest after the crawfish party.
Late in the afternoon, the girls and I took the train downtown to a meetup for people from #joiito IRC channel. The meetup was at Phillipe’s: Home of the French Dip, one of my favorite places in LA.

Mira, Zoe, Jill, and Grant

Yesterday was the Annual Crawfish Party at Len & Monique’s house. In addition to cooking and eating somewhere around 200 pounds of crawfish, it was Kate Perruzi’s 4th birthday too.

I switched Michele over to using TypePad instead of MovableType for her blog and finally I got the DNS issues resolved.
She’s been blogging on the road. Check out -> Scarymommy

I’ve been playing Battlefield Vietnam, the successor to Battlefield: 1942 for a little over a week now. I really enjoyed BF:1942, and have been looking forward to this game for quite a while.
A few screen shots:

SA-7 about to take out a helicopter.

The troops are choppered into a combat location.

Some people have difficulty mastering helicopter piloting.

Michele is out of town this week, so when I get home, I listen to the various phone messages people have left during the day.
When I get a message from one of my friends (read: another man), it usually is something like, “Dude, call me.”
Hearing the messages that are meant for Michele is an eye-opening experience. The messages are usually one to two minutes long and involved detailed explanations of some sort, that will inevitably be said again when Michele calls back.
I simply am amazed at the length and detailed nature of these messages that explain not only what they are calling about, but their motivation for calling and usually some extraneous topic tossed in for good measure.
Today I listened to call asking if Zoe wanted a playdate that went on a 90 second detour on why an extra helmet was needed during the overall 3 mintue call.
With women’s gift for verbosity, I’m surprised that all of our politicians aren’t women.

When I went off to SXSW I finished three books I had been reading.
For Us, The Living by Robert A. Heinlein
I saw this book and was startled. I have read every Heinlein book written and this was not one of them, until now… Evidently, Heinlein wrote this book in 1939, before he really began his successful writing career. The book has been missing and rarely talked about for years. Robert James, a Heinlein scholar, tracked down the book and got permission to get it published. Amazing story. Literally, there was one last manuscript in the world, unnoticed for almost 50 years, and he found it.
The book is not for general science fiction fans. The story is rather weak and has a few major holes. Heinlein fans on the other hand, will find it fascinating. This book, from 1939, basically lays out the world view that Heinlein expounds upon in his novels for the rest of his career. The novel is the genesis for most of his themes on personal liberty, sexual freedom, libertarianism, military service, and even information technology. His vision in this book carried his stories well into the 60s where he found widespead fame.
If you’ve never read Heinlein, this book is not for you. If you appreciate Heinlein, this book is worth the read.
Eastern Standard Tribe by Cory Doctorow
This is Cory’s second book and I devoured it in a couple of days. I really enjoyed his first book and was looking forward to this one. He doesn’t disappoint. Set a little over 15 years into the future, the novel touches on many interesting ideas like the world spanning tribes, communication technology, electronic currency, industrial sabotage, and even police methods.
But the book seems rushed. Not that I can point out a hole in the storyline, but everytime I wanted to know a little more about something, we were off to the rest of the story. The book zips through the story in record speed getting to the end and leaving the reader wanting to know more. I don’t know if was an editing decision or Cory’s own fast paced nature, but I was left wondering where they put all the extra stuff. Are the deeper explanations of tribes and their history stored in a folder on Cory’s laptop? If so, I want a copy…
I’m not asking for Cory to go Neal Stephenson style, but he should feel freer to expound upon his ideas and characters in the book. Perhaps his experience in writing short fiction is where this comes from, where you write to size and brevity matters.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great book and you should go pick up a copy immediately. You’ll enjoy the book immensely. I just wanted a longer novel.
The Knight by Gene Wolfe
This is the first book in a new series by Gene Wolfe. I assume that since the subtitle is The Wizard Knight, Book 1 and it appears Book 2 is to follow.
This is a fantasy book that combine some elements from the traditional elf/giants/magic realm and mixes in a little ‘fish out of water’ story with (of course) the courageous hero.
Our hero appears in a new world by magic and doesn’t seem too concerned that he has left the modern world and been thrown into a magical land of monsters and adventure. He quickly becomes a player on the stage of this world and gets himself into all kinds of trouble.
Wolfe doesn’t bother with much of the Tolkeinesque order and cohesiveness. Sir Able simply falls in and out of Aelfworld and the reader is given little explanation as to what is really going on. Kinda like watching a movie and every 10 minutes you fast forward though 5 minutes, getting a flash of images, but not really understanding how we got to where we are.
The overall prose is great with the detailed scenes conjuring wonderful images and characters. The various characters encountered are great and look to be fun, ongoing presences in the ongoing storyline. Wolfe’s vision of how a Knight acts and behaves is an interesting take on the concept of the Hero Knight that has been written about for centuries.
I look forward to the next book in the series and will try not to let my desire for details and logic to derail my enjoyment of the book.

The LA Times website sucks.
I subscribe to the physical newspaper and read it daily. Today I read an article in the paper and wanted to send a link to it my brother.
Going the latimes.com site required me to login, as do many newspaper sites. I resent this, but logged in anyways. I was surprised to find that the article was hidden behind the pay only portion of the site. They wanted me to pay them money to get to a news article on the internet.
You know, fuck that.
It’s enough that I pay money for the physical paper. It’s enough that I log in to the site. It’s enough to endure the relentless ads on the site.
But it’s too much to pay for news on the web.
The LA Times people but have their heads buried way up their rear ends. Go check out Yahoo News or Google News. There’s no barrier to entry to get the news there.
I eagerly await the day when Yahoo or Google print me a customized newspaper nightly and drop it off at my house, replacing the old school and destined to fail LA Times. If I can get the NY Times at my house every morning before the LA Times arrives, I’m sure there’s a place for custom printed newspapers in the near future.
LA Times, wake up or you will find yourself going the way of the typewriter.

There are a number of anti-war protests going on today. I read this in a Yahoo News story:

In Cincinnati, several hundred people gathered in a downtown park to call for a U.S. troop withdrawal. Claire Mugavin, clad in a biohazard suit, pretended to look for weapons of mass destruction beneath benches and garbage cans.
“We figure they’re not in Iraq,” said the 24-year-old Cincinnati resident. “So we figured we’d come look for them in Fountain Square.”

Hilarious.