Since Governor Romney ended the "blue laws" banning of liquor sales on Sundays, and is interested in a real, consumer-oriented repeal of out-of-state wine shipment laws, is it too much to hope that the silly 20-year-old "Happy Hour" laws could be repealed?
These regulations hurt responsible consumers by restricting price competition in the marketplace, keeping beverage prices artificially high. They hurt small business owners, who can't fill their restaurants or bars during off-peak hours.
They hurt our sense of community by encouraging us to head home after work rather than enjoying a drink with friends or coworkers in a public space.
I'm sure no one is lobbying for this, but it's one of those little ways the state house could get off our backs and make life more enjoyable.
1.26.2006
Rendezvous Redux
Indeed the bourbon cocktail at Rendezvous is terrific, as is the hot toddy.
I didn't sample the menu, but the Boston Globe liked it quite a bit.
I didn't sample the menu, but the Boston Globe liked it quite a bit.
1.19.2006
Rendezvous
Central Square is a lot of fun, and I don't get there nearly as often as I should. This drink at Rendezvous ought to motivate me...
mmm..caramelized orange oils...
(Thanks Hallsey!! Get a blog so I can link to you!)
mmm..caramelized orange oils...
(Thanks Hallsey!! Get a blog so I can link to you!)
1.12.2006
¡Pensamientos al Azar del Tequila!
- Cabo Wabo - Tastes great going down, but what ever Sammy Hagar puts in it messes with your head!
- If you're looking to sample a lot of great tequilas cheap, Fajitas & 'Ritas in downtown Boston is a great place to be. Ask for the tequila list and go to town. Just be prepared to smell like nacho chips for the next three days.
- If you actually want to eat something, the current champion Mexican place in the Cambridge area has to be José's, tucked away on Sherman St. near Mayor Danehy Park. Incredibly hospitable staff, even when the place gets busy. Margaritas are pricey but perfect, and the food is authentically delicious. Try the Burrito en Adobo, or the black bean soup.
- Is it wrong that I want to go to San Diego just to sneak across the border to the Cabo Wabo Cantina? See... they must put something in the stuff...
1.09.2006
Worse than Stale Bread
Is it my imagination, or do the 21 finalists in the Service Employees International Union's SinceSlicedBread.com "new ideas" competition sound quite a bit like the policy wish-list you'd expect from these guys? I mean, did SEIU really need to survey the countryside to discover, "Wow, we think single payer health care, a constantly rising minimum wage and huge government jobs programs are terrific ideas!"
Not to mention that even this layman sees serious economic problems with most of the finalist proposals:
The ultimate organized labor candidate, Dick Gephardt, was flogging many of these ideas in his ill-fated presidential campaign (so ill-fated, the SEIU endorsed Howard Dean!), e.g. he described SSB's "Ownership of Retirement Assets" as "Portable Pensions". It's hard to believe a clever website is enough to turn stale bread big government into gourmet public policy.
The "ordinary people" who devoted far more time than I to this foregone conclusion of a PR stunt seem to agree.
Not to mention that even this layman sees serious economic problems with most of the finalist proposals:
- Making college tuition tax deductible doesn't make college more affordable for the poor. If you hand everyone who wants to send their kids to college $10,000, colleges will just raise tuition by $10,000, and the same people who could afford it before can still afford it, thanks to the tax deduction, and colleges are $10,000 richer per student. Not to mention that the deduction saves more money for the middle-class and rich, who are in higher brackets! Many of the poor pay no income tax at all, so the deduction for them would have no value.
- Pulling the youngest (and on average healthiest) people out of the private health care pool would result in truly skyrocketing costs for everyone else.
- I don't even want to think about what would happen when a government-chartered corporation is in the business of allocating capital, deciding which small businesses should and shouldn't exist.
The ultimate organized labor candidate, Dick Gephardt, was flogging many of these ideas in his ill-fated presidential campaign (so ill-fated, the SEIU endorsed Howard Dean!), e.g. he described SSB's "Ownership of Retirement Assets" as "Portable Pensions". It's hard to believe a clever website is enough to turn stale bread big government into gourmet public policy.
The "ordinary people" who devoted far more time than I to this foregone conclusion of a PR stunt seem to agree.
12.01.2005
Lost and the Cartesian Demon
At last, my promised theory on how to explain much of the strange goings on of Lost without resorting to (too much) mysticism.
The problem: there are too many random coincidences in the memories of the survivors to be explained consistently. How is it that the "numbers" and variations thereof turn up repeatedly in what would otherwise be meaningless minutiae? How is it that horse that Kate saw in a field in the middle of nowhere years ago is now on the island? How to explain the seemingly random encounters and relationships between the survivors months or years before they arrived?
We could assume that these are all coincidences, but that's dramatically unsatisfying and unrealistic. The same is true of assuming that some all-powerful force has manipulated the destinies of the survivors for years: Either it's a mystical or religious force (fate, God) that can never be explained, or we have to assume that the agency behind the island is nearly omniscient and omnipotent (and concerned with what looks like trivia for fans).
Instead, it's far more promising to assume that the "flashbacks" we witness are memories that are not entirely reliable, at least as reflections of what actually happened in the real world outside the island. Suppose the agency behind the island is playing with their recollections in subtle ways (either constantly or between when the crash happened and when they woke up on the beach). This isn't hard to imagine, given what the filmstrip discusses about the connections between the island and experimental psychology. With this manipulation in play, many "coincidences" become much easier to explain. I theorize that there was no horse in the field where Kate crashed, the memory was invented, so producing the same horse (by whom and for whatever purpose) was easy rather than magical. The same is true with all the trivial appearances of the numbers: injecting those false memories makes perfect sense if the goal is to ensure the residents of the island remember them and keep keying them into the computer. One could suppose that Hurley actually won the lottery with a totally different set of numbers, and had a string of bad luck, but now falsely remembers the numbers he used as "the numbers".
I suspect that none of this kind of memory manipulation is unheard of in today's psychology.
I don't know if this theory has been proposed before, since I don't read a lot of the speculation forums, but I think it makes a lot of sense. It's a subtle form of the "Cartesian Demon": the idea that you can't trust your perceptions because you have no way to distinguish between a genuine sensory experience and one created for you by a demon (or a holodeck, or the Matrix ... this idea has gotten a lot of pop culture play in the last decade).
Of course, what the ultimate purpose of all this manipulation is (assuming it's more than getting a bunch of total strangers to sit around typing numbers into a computer every two hours) I can't say, but at least it doesn't require suspending too much disbelief to suppose what's happening on the island could "really" happen.
The problem: there are too many random coincidences in the memories of the survivors to be explained consistently. How is it that the "numbers" and variations thereof turn up repeatedly in what would otherwise be meaningless minutiae? How is it that horse that Kate saw in a field in the middle of nowhere years ago is now on the island? How to explain the seemingly random encounters and relationships between the survivors months or years before they arrived?
We could assume that these are all coincidences, but that's dramatically unsatisfying and unrealistic. The same is true of assuming that some all-powerful force has manipulated the destinies of the survivors for years: Either it's a mystical or religious force (fate, God) that can never be explained, or we have to assume that the agency behind the island is nearly omniscient and omnipotent (and concerned with what looks like trivia for fans).
Instead, it's far more promising to assume that the "flashbacks" we witness are memories that are not entirely reliable, at least as reflections of what actually happened in the real world outside the island. Suppose the agency behind the island is playing with their recollections in subtle ways (either constantly or between when the crash happened and when they woke up on the beach). This isn't hard to imagine, given what the filmstrip discusses about the connections between the island and experimental psychology. With this manipulation in play, many "coincidences" become much easier to explain. I theorize that there was no horse in the field where Kate crashed, the memory was invented, so producing the same horse (by whom and for whatever purpose) was easy rather than magical. The same is true with all the trivial appearances of the numbers: injecting those false memories makes perfect sense if the goal is to ensure the residents of the island remember them and keep keying them into the computer. One could suppose that Hurley actually won the lottery with a totally different set of numbers, and had a string of bad luck, but now falsely remembers the numbers he used as "the numbers".
I suspect that none of this kind of memory manipulation is unheard of in today's psychology.
I don't know if this theory has been proposed before, since I don't read a lot of the speculation forums, but I think it makes a lot of sense. It's a subtle form of the "Cartesian Demon": the idea that you can't trust your perceptions because you have no way to distinguish between a genuine sensory experience and one created for you by a demon (or a holodeck, or the Matrix ... this idea has gotten a lot of pop culture play in the last decade).
Of course, what the ultimate purpose of all this manipulation is (assuming it's more than getting a bunch of total strangers to sit around typing numbers into a computer every two hours) I can't say, but at least it doesn't require suspending too much disbelief to suppose what's happening on the island could "really" happen.
10.27.2005
Speed up OpenOffice startup
Reading Slashdot is not always a waste of time:
I use OpenOffice at work, mostly as a viewer for documents others send around in Microsoft Office formats. As such, I doubt I'm going to run into the limitations of OpenOffice when Java is disabled. The speedup is amazing: from 5-6 seconds on my 1GB, 3.4 GHz notebook to almost instantaneous. I like Java as a programming environment, but Sun absolutely has to figure out how to cut down the JRE startup time, at least for embedded applications.
I made the mistake of opting for x86-64 Gentoo for one of my desktop boxes ("upgrading" it to 32bit this weekend), meaning I have to use the 32bit precompiled OpenOffice binaries. But these need hooking into a 32bit JRE which x86-64 Gentoo doesn't have, since making 32bit apps available through Portage is seemingly something that Gentoo Won't Do Because You Should Be Happy With 64bit. So whenever you start OOo it spends about a minute looking for a JVM (and failing) before you can do anything. I could have manually installed Sun's 32bit JRE, but I can't be bothered.
Disable Java in the options and it starts in 1-2 seconds on the same machine.
By way of comparison, I tried the same trick on my 32bit box (similar spec but with slower HDD's) and OOo was as snappy as hell and opened like the proverbial soil off a shovel.
If there's any functionality I miss through disabling Java, I haven't encountered any yet. And please note I'm not saying that Java is slow to execute (it isn't), it's just appallingly slow to load.
I use OpenOffice at work, mostly as a viewer for documents others send around in Microsoft Office formats. As such, I doubt I'm going to run into the limitations of OpenOffice when Java is disabled. The speedup is amazing: from 5-6 seconds on my 1GB, 3.4 GHz notebook to almost instantaneous. I like Java as a programming environment, but Sun absolutely has to figure out how to cut down the JRE startup time, at least for embedded applications.
9.22.2005
Lost
I'm trying to decide if the persistent telegraphing of the "twist endings" on Lost is intentional. I think it has to be. I don't read spoilers and don't obsessively rewind and freeze frame with the TiVo, but I still rarely find myself surprised by the revelations. Wasn't it evident about a minute into "Walkabout"'s first flashback that Locke was handicapped? Every shot was framed to accentuate Locke's powerlessness, not to mention that he was never standing up. Was there any doubt that Sawyer was going to kill the wrong man in "Outlaws"? If he kills the right man, there's no emotional turmoil, and no surprise, and Lost is never without both.
Kate's doomed childhood friend... Locke's kidney stealing father... Desmond in the hatch... all obvious well before the "payoff".
Part of it must be Hitchcock's "Bomb Theory": if the audience knows what to expect, and the characters don't, the result is suspense. But that doesn't really explain spending so much time building up to the reveal of Locke's handicap. Maybe it was more subtle than I give it credit for, but it appears that Lost could be accidentally underestimating its audience's intelligence, or deliberately taking advantage of the typical viewer's desire to feel clever.
Of course, Lost could be brilliantly getting the best of both worlds: casual viewers are surprised, and regular viewers feel self-satisfyingly clever. The omnipresent "Easter eggs" of pre-island character connections (Hurley on Jin's TV, Locke's box company), and the inclusion of some "surprises", like Jack's future wife's miraculous recovery, that aren't surprises if you've been watching regularly, support this interpretation.
It's a tough balancing act: keep the twists from seeming like they come out of nowhere, but don't make them so obvious that the audience spends the whole episode anticipating the ending, ruining the suspense. Frequently (particularly in the case of the flashbacks), I think they err too far towards the latter.
This is all by way of praising with faint damnation. Lost is terrifically entertaining. The premiere was surprisingly satisfying, especially given the tendency of many shows to "wimp out" after building up to a suspenseful finale, premiering with:
Lost opened the hatch in the finale, and showed us what was in it in the premiere - and better still it wasn't another hatch, an empty room, or some other clichéd metaphor. Even though all of television history suggests the writers/producers don't have any idea where they're going (paging Chris Carter), so far everything has fit together so well that I have some faith there's a story being told here. Maybe I'll theorize in a later post.
Kate's doomed childhood friend... Locke's kidney stealing father... Desmond in the hatch... all obvious well before the "payoff".
Part of it must be Hitchcock's "Bomb Theory": if the audience knows what to expect, and the characters don't, the result is suspense. But that doesn't really explain spending so much time building up to the reveal of Locke's handicap. Maybe it was more subtle than I give it credit for, but it appears that Lost could be accidentally underestimating its audience's intelligence, or deliberately taking advantage of the typical viewer's desire to feel clever.
Of course, Lost could be brilliantly getting the best of both worlds: casual viewers are surprised, and regular viewers feel self-satisfyingly clever. The omnipresent "Easter eggs" of pre-island character connections (Hurley on Jin's TV, Locke's box company), and the inclusion of some "surprises", like Jack's future wife's miraculous recovery, that aren't surprises if you've been watching regularly, support this interpretation.
It's a tough balancing act: keep the twists from seeming like they come out of nowhere, but don't make them so obvious that the audience spends the whole episode anticipating the ending, ruining the suspense. Frequently (particularly in the case of the flashbacks), I think they err too far towards the latter.
This is all by way of praising with faint damnation. Lost is terrifically entertaining. The premiere was surprisingly satisfying, especially given the tendency of many shows to "wimp out" after building up to a suspenseful finale, premiering with:
- a flashback episode - Battlestar Galactica almost went this route for season 2, and much to showrunner Ron Moore's credit, they recognized it was a terrible idea.
- a flashforward episode - The West Wing began heading toward the shark jump in season 3, when the premiere skipped ahead to months after the MS revelation, which something like the last 12 episodes of season 2 had intimated would be a huge ordeal. I think ultimately the payoff was one congressional hearing that focused on Leo.
- a left-field episode - South Park becomes Terrance and Phillip...
Lost opened the hatch in the finale, and showed us what was in it in the premiere - and better still it wasn't another hatch, an empty room, or some other clichéd metaphor. Even though all of television history suggests the writers/producers don't have any idea where they're going (paging Chris Carter), so far everything has fit together so well that I have some faith there's a story being told here. Maybe I'll theorize in a later post.
9.21.2005
Good advice for Microsoft
As it struggles to compete for mindshare and marketshare with Google and Linux, Microsoft would do well to take this anonymous minimsft poster's advice:
Read the whole thing.
There's actually a plethora of insightful comments (and the expected sour grapes) on the anonymous-MS-employee minimsft blog.
I actually interned for Microsoft in the Windows product group in Summer 2001 (working up to the XP release). The top-down direction criticized by the poster was very much in evidence. It baffles me why an organization which prides itself on hiring amazingly smart people would put a management structure into place that actively discourages small, exciting projects. Instead, the review-goals-uber-alles mindset means that if you're not polishing a spec for a dialog box or oiling a cog in a compatibility database, you're hurting yourself professionally.
At Google, it appears, a great idea can go from a glimmer in an employee's eye to a beta system used by millions in a matter of weeks. There's no reason Microsoft couldn't have the equivalent of Google Labs. If they don't start encouraging individual innovation, they're going to see those most interested in innovation go elsewhere.
Microsoft is way too focused on building the next billion-dollar business; there is no way for a team to start something that will be a great 50 million dollar business even with great profit margins. Why not create 100 teams like that? Some of them (with no way to predict which) WILL turn into billion dollar businesses. But if you don't let them start they never will.
Read the whole thing.
There's actually a plethora of insightful comments (and the expected sour grapes) on the anonymous-MS-employee minimsft blog.
I actually interned for Microsoft in the Windows product group in Summer 2001 (working up to the XP release). The top-down direction criticized by the poster was very much in evidence. It baffles me why an organization which prides itself on hiring amazingly smart people would put a management structure into place that actively discourages small, exciting projects. Instead, the review-goals-uber-alles mindset means that if you're not polishing a spec for a dialog box or oiling a cog in a compatibility database, you're hurting yourself professionally.
At Google, it appears, a great idea can go from a glimmer in an employee's eye to a beta system used by millions in a matter of weeks. There's no reason Microsoft couldn't have the equivalent of Google Labs. If they don't start encouraging individual innovation, they're going to see those most interested in innovation go elsewhere.
9.09.2005
Python
I'm finally starting to do some real work in Python. There are some small annoyances, like the weird nodelimiterlowercase built-in names, but generators are (a carryover from Icon, I believe) are terrifically useful. I'm surprised something like them didn't show up in other scripting languages earlier, since they're naturally suited to the sort of source/filter/sink piping you see often in scripts.
In this particular case, I'm using a generator to produce specification objects one at a time from Perforce, which conveniently gives you an option to get your command results in the form of marshalled Python objects. Generators let me open up one connection to Perforce for a whole set of these, and return them one at a time as requested. The generator "owns" the network connection, and keeps it up while waiting for future requests. Poor man's lazy evaluation!
In this particular case, I'm using a generator to produce specification objects one at a time from Perforce, which conveniently gives you an option to get your command results in the form of marshalled Python objects. Generators let me open up one connection to Perforce for a whole set of these, and return them one at a time as requested. The generator "owns" the network connection, and keeps it up while waiting for future requests. Poor man's lazy evaluation!
9.01.2005
I can't believe...
... that I missed Grilled Cheese Monday on Slashfood!
At least now I know what I want for Christmas. Ought to be perfect for making the delectable mozzerella, fig jam and prosciutto sandwich.
At least now I know what I want for Christmas. Ought to be perfect for making the delectable mozzerella, fig jam and prosciutto sandwich.
8.29.2005
Mmm... ham, cream cheese, and strawberry jam...
Stayed at the recently renovated Hilton Hartford this weekend with the girlfriend. Overall we were very pleased; the renovations are stylish and the room was comfortable. Our only real complaint was the (audible from the 12th floor) jackhammering in the parking garage at 8am Sunday morning, but the hotel was nice enough to refund us $20 for the annoyance.
The highlight was breakfast at Morty and Ming's. I had a grilled sandwich of straberry jam, grilled ham, and about a half-inch thick spread of cream cheese. Sinfully good, though it probably doesn't sound that way! She had blueberry pancakes with vanilla butter, also delightful. The hashbrowns on the side—shredded potato, the only way to do it right, crisped to golden perfection with onions and scalions—were the best I can recall.
Just enough energy to survive a trip through the New Haven Ikea...
The highlight was breakfast at Morty and Ming's. I had a grilled sandwich of straberry jam, grilled ham, and about a half-inch thick spread of cream cheese. Sinfully good, though it probably doesn't sound that way! She had blueberry pancakes with vanilla butter, also delightful. The hashbrowns on the side—shredded potato, the only way to do it right, crisped to golden perfection with onions and scalions—were the best I can recall.
Just enough energy to survive a trip through the New Haven Ikea...
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