Saturday, September 30, 2006

Four impressions after babysitting

I was called upon today to baby-sit my mentor's children. Here are some impressions from that adventure.
  1. A five-year-old child can be excused for once, or even several times, addressing one of his father's boring friends by the name of another, rather than by his own name. However, when I am so addressed on every occasion -- indeed, several times (despite my gentle reminders to the contrary) in succession -- it is unavoidable to conclude, much to my regret, that I simply have the kind of personality, or at least name, which does not make much impact on a kindergartener. When the same five-year-old, happening upon me using the phone, asks "Are you leaving a message" and, upon being assured that I am, asks "How do you know about messages?", I am forced to the conclusion that it is not only my personality which does not impress.
  2. Had I not seen Robots myself, I would never have believed that a children's movie could include Tom Waits music. (Although, to be fair, I also would never have expected David Lynch to make a sweet movie centred around the reunion of two brothers.) The fact that the song in question (Underground) is from the CD Swordfishtrombones only adds to my bemusement, for it means that, in the course of searching for music for the soundtrack, Blue Sky Studios must have considered, if only briefly, the song Frank's Wild Years, in which the protagonist is said to have "hung his wild years on a nail he drove through his wife's forehead", among other such delightful antics. (Also, watching such a movie as this makes one savour the realisation that Robin Williams must one day die, and imagine the punishments in store for him. My contribution to the genre, conceived with great delight, was his reincarnation as a mute paralytic.)
  3. It seems strange that one can no longer, or at least no longer easily, buy a plain old Monopoly board. The closest I ever encountered was a $60 "commemorative edition", which I need about as urgently as I need George Lucas's fresh vision of the original Star Wars trilogy.
  4. The Departed looks like it could be really, really good. Of course Jack Nicholson is always a plus in a movie, and Matt Damon is fast becoming one of my favourite actors (I found The Bourne Identity absolutely incredible 1). Although I shudder at the thought of Leonardo diCaprio, I rather liked Catch Me If You Can, so I feel it's only fair to give him a chance.

1 I first watched this movie in the theatre at 700 S Wabash Ave in Chicago, which, though I have fond memories of it, is pretty terrible. (A showing of Spiderman which I attended there was interrupted when the projector caught fire, because the air conditioning in the projector room wasn't functioning.) There is a moment in the movie in which Matt Damon, while still suffering from amnesia, is wandering about his character's old Paris apartment, searching for clues to his identity. We, the viewer, know, both from the musical cues (or absence -- I don't quite remember) and from the exigencies of the plot, that something nasty is about to happen, but Doug Liman does not want to reveal it immediately, so we are left to wait breathlessly for the unveiling. What happened eventually was that the ceiling fell in. This seemed to me to be a reasonably satisfying resolution to the moment of suspense, and also an exceptionally marvellous piece of special effects, until I realised that the real ceiling was actually falling. It was just some panels, actually, not the whole ceiling, and (fortunately!) no one was sitting in the affected area; but it certainly got my adrenaline pumping. What I found amazing was the casualness with which everyone, both managerial staff and attendees, seemed to take this occurrence. (One or two people left the theatre, and the janitors came in eventually and cleaned up the biggest chunks -- but that was it.)

Creative use of frequent flyer miles

I created a post with lots of (boring) content yesterday, right? So no one can blame me if I put up a post today with just a link to a news story, sans even any analysis, right? Certainly they can't! Since no one reads this, no one will ever know to do so! Anyway, herewith the single link which is, shamefully, the content of this post.

P.S. On further thought, I've got some analysis after all, and here it is: Cool!

Friday, September 29, 2006

Utilities for the Mac

The first Macintosh computer I used was an Apple IIe, in elementary school; though I barely remember it, my impressions of it are reasonably positive (probably because it was on the Apple IIe's that we played Oregon Trail, at which I used to be pretty good). The next time I used a Macintosh, I think it must have been running one of the very early versions of Mac OS -- System 7, or whatever was out around the midlife of Windows 3.1 -- and I really, really hated the interface. I can't remember what it was that bugged me so much -- it may just have been something as simple as the inability to, or my inability to figure out how to, minimise a window (I mean, really minimise, so it's out of sight, rather than collapsing it to that little 'curtain rod' menu bar) -- but this short interaction was enough to convince me that I didn't want to use a Macintosh ever again. Thus it was that the first three computers I bought for myself (in 1998, 2003, and -- when I realised that buying a cheap used computer, even one much faster than my 1998 system, hadn't been that bright an idea -- 2003 again) were all PCs (all Dells, in fact) 1.

Shortly after buying the last of those computers, I began noticing, straining my keen powers of observation to their fullest, that lots of people were carrying around small computers, computer much smaller than mine, computers that could fit on their laps -- 'top-o-the-lappers', I think the kids call them; or just 'neuterers' for short -- and realised that I wanted one of them. (It was not just that I coveted Sexy Small Technology; the main motivating factor -- really! -- was that the people with laptops could access the wireless networks that were frequently present at homeworks in order easily to check their mail, whereas I had to join the feral masses squabbling for use of the one slow terminal allocated for guests' e-mail checking.) Proactive go-getter that I am, I did nothing about this until the fall of 2004, at which point, swinging promptly into action, I whinged to all and sundry that I wanted a laptop (because, you know, maybe the Laptop Fairy was listening). "Yes, yes, so get one and shut up about it, OK?" was all that most people said; but my mentor, S, had some more definite advice: "Yes, yes," said he, "so get one and shut up about it, OK? -- but make sure you get a Mac." I made the gagging and choking noises I thought were appropriate, but he was effusive in his endorsement, and I began seriously to consider it. Once again a bold decisiveness carried me through, and it only took me until the summer of 2005 actually to get around to buying the computer, which is (as I hinted above) a Powerbook. (In case, dear reader, you find in reading this précis that it is unacceptably brief and curt, and cry out, exasperated, "Where, Loren, are the details, the real meat of this fascinating story?", I encourage you to visit my post The amazing dexterity of Loren from several months ago and scroll down several paragraphs; having done which, you will find all -- well, some -- of your desires satiated.)

Dear reader, you, faithful as you are, remember the title of this post, which is "Utilities for the Mac". I pondered expressing my admiration for these objects by calling them "useful utilities for the Mac", but fortunately realised that this was redundant and backed away from the precipice. (I do wonder what to call a small program which does not serve any desired purpose -- an 'inutility'?). While, I can tell even as I write this, you are reeling in admiration of my dramatic storytelling ability, not to mention of the profusion of footnotes unaccountably linking amongst themselves, I know that you must be wondering (but guiltily) "Is this really the topic of this post? Do these sentences, gorgeously well-crafted as they are, describe utilities for the Mac?" Your instincts do not lead you astray. I have not, so far, addressed the title of this post. The reasons for this are two.

  1. My previous post was only two sentences long, and at that consisted only of a link to external content. Were I to make another post with little content, you might think that this blog was turning into a link farm, or that the aliens had come and replaced me with someone who could craft readable sentences.
  2. We cannot just hand out potent utilities willy-nilly. We must first weed out the weak, and there is no surer way to do this than to subject them to mind-numbing paragraphs of text. You, the strong, have come this far (unless you scrolled down, cheating natural selection); it is for you that I record these links.

Now on to the utilities themselves. When I got the Mac, I struggled to learn in one swoop the analogues of the many keyboard shortcuts the knowledge of which I had gradually accumulated on the PC, and without which I felt I could not go on. By dint of such strategies as posting comments on Slashdot saying that one couldn't do certain things on the Mac using a keyboard, I was able quickly to find out how to do the most important things, but one task (whether executed by keyboard or by mouse) eluded me -- how to 'cut' (rather than 'copy') a file in Finder? I noticed the item was greyed out in the menu bar, but assumed that a little cleverness would lead me to a solution. It did not, and, since one of the items I saw mentioned (before the WWDC) in a guess-list for Leopard features was "cut capability in Finder", I think it is not just that my ignorance has blinded me to a well-known solution. There's always the old "drag it to the desktop, then drag it to the target folder" strategy, and similar kludges, but these don't work well if, for example, one wishes to cut a large file on a remote volume. Thankfully, khsu (to whom I must say: "Bless you") is more dedicated to finding a solution than I, and he (or she, or it) provides the heaven-sent utility XShelf to simulate the desired functionality. Setting aside the slight problem of trying to write into a write-protected folder (XShelf doesn't wait for one to authenticate properly -- as soon as it sees that there's any problem with writing, it dumps the desired file off the shelf and back into its original location), this is just what I have long desired.

The other utility is less commonly useful; but, when I need it, I am very glad to have it. This is timdoug's unpkg. The purpose of this utility is very simple -- as the name suggests, it unpackages a .pkg file, leaving one to handle for oneself the important task of, say, copying an application into the /Applications folder, or a library to the /Library folder. (If you want to unpackage a .mpkg file, you still need the non-free Pacifist.) Since I like to have control over what's happening on my computer (not least so that I can know what changes need to be backed up), and also since I like to keep my applications organised in subdirectories rather than in a single flat applications directory, this has been extremely helpful to me.

1 I've finally figured out how to cause the underlining for the footnote links to appear immediately underneath the footnote number, not at the baseline of the surrounding text! (For those of you as stupid as I was, it's <sup><a href="#blah">1</a></sup> instead of <a href="#blah"><sup>1</sup></a> 3.) Now to retcon all previous footnotes into conformance (or, perhaps, conformity)! That happy ejaculation, though, was not the point of the original footnote which you, dear reader, followed to get here; rather than cramming two distinct points into a single footnote, I will instead direct you to the next footnote (which is so debased that it doesn't even get a usual footnote-style link, only that inline link).
2 Although this morsel of embarrassment doesn't really fit into the body of the post above, I cannot leave it out. My wife, who is knowledgeable about computers but, unaccountably, doesn't have the feeling that her penis shrivels whenever she admits there's something she doesn't know, occasionally humours me when I behave as if I have great technological knowledge to impart to her. When my newest PC was shipped, I opened the box and, as I removed its contents, explained to her, in what must have been insulting detail, how miniaturisation allowed one to make minitowers, such as (and here I pointed) this one we have just been shipped, instead of full-size towers such as was my 1998 computer. (Let us set aside the fact that, probably, minitowers have been around for a long time -- I looked just now, but couldn't find any references -- and simply take the statement on its own merits.) I was embarrassingly far into my disquisition before I realised that what I was holding was the subwoofer, not the computer 4 (which, when it was finally shipped, turned out to be a full-sized tower).
3 There must be a better way to insert literal HTML source code into one's document than escaping every < and > as &lt; and &gt;, but a search for 'literal + HTML' and 'verbatim + HTML' did not reveal it.
4 I was very pleased when, in a recent episode of Alias -- I mean, an episode I saw recently, not one that was released recently (in fact it was from the first season) -- Jennifer Garner, armed with a device which "sucks all the data out of a hard drive" from a distance of a few inches, broke into her adversary's office and placed the device on the computer, not on the monitor. (To be fair, since this is a post extolling Macs, I should acknowledge that the distinction between computer and monitor on an iMac is blurred; but this machine was visibly a PC.) My admiration was only slightly dulled by a later episode in which a visiting dignitary was described on a computer display as a 'parlimentary delegate'.

Thursday, September 28, 2006

Geography

I was always a little weak on geography in school, but I think I would have remembered this. (Thanks, Slashdot!)

Wednesday, September 20, 2006

A programmer's definition

... and now for something completely different (courtesy of www.vim.org):

UPDATE 3 October 2006. In reply to those who asked, I should mention that, although at least the second image above is probably illegible -- or whatever is the analogue of illegibility for pictures -- at the displayed size, following the link underlying either one (or indeed any picture on this blog) will take one to the full-sized version.

Linguistic embarrassments

I have always thought that 'concision' was much more elegant than the clumsy formation 'conciseness'. Today, I started reading some articles on Perl, where, I suppose predictably, I found the concept of concise-itude referenced repeatedly -- and always it was the latter word that was used. Well, I gritted my teeth, much as I do when I find yet another example that people just haven't learned that not all thei'r possessives need to have apostrophes 1, and moved on; but then I came to Larry Wall's Apocalypse 5, on regular expressions (because I had heard that Perl 6 was completely reimplenting regular expressions, and, together with, I must imagine, every civilised programmer, had salivated at the thought that to all Perl's other power would now be added the Holy Grail of named capturing parentheses), where he, too, uses 'conciseness'! "Oho", thought I, "now to catch the linguist at his own game, for he, at least, should be careful of language!" I zipped triumphantly to the OED, only to discover that the synonymy of 'concision' with 'conciseness' is only the third definition, the first referring instead to cutting to pieces. This failure comes so close on the heels of the recent demonstration of my inability correctly to conjugate 'to lay' (I bridled, incorrectly, at the grammar -- never mind the content -- of NPR's report that President Bush Junior "laid a wreath" at the reflecting pools at Ground Zero) that I begin to wonder whether I can trust my own pedantry.

UPDATE 3 October 2006. In my post Utilities for the Mac, I used the word 'conformance', and wondered whether I might actually mean 'conformity'. A visit to the OED didn't help much, since the first definitions for the words in question are, respectively:

Conformance. The action of conforming; the shaping of action in conformity to or with.
Conformity. Correspondence in form or manner; agreement in character; likeness, resemblance; congruity, harmony, accordance; exact correspondence to or with a pattern in some respect or matter.
Well, I'll be damned if I know which one I meant.

1 I mean, seriously. No one ever writes 'hi's', 'her's', or 'their's'. Why do they write 'it's' 2?
2 I know, I know. Because 'it's' is a word, whereas 'hi's' &c. are not. My blog, my illogical rants.

Saturday, September 16, 2006

Witty introduction

I've been trying for a long time to think of some way to add my own stamp to the laugh (and shock of recognition) this remark gave me, but, since I can't, I think I'll just pass it on without any further comment. The context (for those who don't like to scroll up) is a Metafilter thread on the thoughtcrime registry recently established in Ohio for people who may, or may not, be child molesters, based on solid incontrovertible hearsay.

http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/54442#1421666

Attempting the impossible

As a previous entry on art may have made clear (if in a slightly back-handed way), I am a tremendous fan of Magritte's. Knowing this, my wife bought for me last Christmas a Magritte monthly calendar, which I decided to take in to my office. (After all, there is probably no better person than a researcher stuck on a problem to understand the true meaning of la durée poignardée.) This venture has gone swimmingly -- up until this month; for, as it happens, the picture for September is Attempting the impossible: Now, although this picture does not move me as does the aforementioned La durée poignardée -- which is August's picture -- or L'homme au journal, another favourite, it happens that I do like it very much. However, it seems that the delicate cautionary measures in which I, and all other teachers, habitually engage -- such as, say, always leaving the door at least slightly open when one meets with a student -- would be rendered a bit irrelevant if they were supplemented by my tacking up at my wall something which, to a casual viewer's quick glance, probably looks first and foremost like a bit of pin-up. Well, as I've mentioned, I like August's picture, so I don't mind waiting until October to switch the page.

Won't somebody think of the ...?

From an article on PDF vulnerabilities (which, not unlike the recent article on Macintosh wireless vulnerabilities, charmingly reassures us that we should be very, very, very afraid, without being entirely clear about, say, how we can resolve the security problem, whether other configurations than the one discussed (Windows with Adobe Reader and Internet Explorer, as near as I can tell) are vulnerable, &c.), we have the following quote:
Active exploitation techniques such as buffer overflows are becoming more and more difficult to find and exploit .... The future of exploitation lies in Web technologies.
Forget about the future of our country, and our children's futures. These are old hobbyhorses. The new worry is: Whither exploitation?

Monday, September 11, 2006

I'm Your Man

I'm just back from seeing the Leonard Cohen documentary I'm Your Man at the Michigan Theater. This title, taken together with one of that of one of the movies playing at State Theater (which is about half a block away), makes for an interesting combination. (I would have preferred getting pictures of the marquees, rather than just listings from Moviefone, but, unfortunately, I'm Your Man appears on the Michigan Theatre marquee as "Leonard Cohen".) Since I just finished watching Season 1 of Alias (on which more later) -- which culminates, as those of you who don't wait until five years after their release to see TV shows know, in a search for the identity of The Man -- I am left wondering if there is some important message here which I am missing.

OK, so, what about the documentary? It focusses on the Came So far for Beauty concert (somewhat eccentrically capitalised as Came So far For Beauty, then later as Came So Far For Beauty, in the end credits), in which many other performers came together to honour and celebrate Leonard Cohen. One of these performers was Nick Cave, who, now that I have sampled the entire Cohen discography and the entire post-Swordfishtrombones (inclusive) Tom Waits discography, is my new source of gravelly-throated inspiration. I felt that, with Cohen at the fore and Nick Cave present, it should be hard to go wrong (even with the promised appearance by Bono), so I went to see it with some eagerness.

Although a rather informative biographical conversation with Cohen weaves its way through the movie (revealing, for example, the identity of the Suzanne of, well, Suzanne -- a question I had never particularly sought to answer, and one whose answer meant little to me; but maybe there are those out there who need to know), and we are treated to liberal (and delightful) samples of his artwork and poetry, there is actually very little of Cohen singing; rather, we spend most of our time watching others cover his songs at the aforementioned CSffB concert. After having heard Cave's loony but delightful cover of Tower of Song on his album B-Sides and Rarities, I had high hopes for him as a cover artist, but his performance of I'm Your Man was disappointing, and I didn't feel he shed particular light on Suzanne. According to this review of the concert, he also sang Diamonds in the Mine at the concert, which I would have loved to have seen and heard -- it seems to fit perfectly with his wilder side.

Three other songs which particularly stand out in my memory are whichever one Antony sang -- I can't remember its name (The Guests, maybe?), but, whatever it was, to those concerned, please, please don't let him sing in public again, or at least tie his arms to his sides if he does; I Can't Forget, covered by Jarvis Cocker, whose facial expression made him look as if he were either in mortal pain or badly constipated, and who actually indulged in the ridiculous device of slapping the side of his head as he sang "I can't forget/But I can't remember what" (but who sounded all right if one closed one's eyes); and The Anthem, sung (quite well) by Perla Batalla and Julie Christensen, in which the lines "I can't run no more/With that lawless crowd/While the killers in high places/Say their prayers out loud" -- which I have long felt is a beautiful summary of much of our current political situation -- elicited a huge cheer.

I was surprised to find that Rufus Wainwright (whose rather reedy voice I thought left him unfit to sing Leonard Cohen songs) was by far the best of the cover artists I heard. Although his version of Everybody Knows was a disappointment -- at the end, as the song should have been building to apocalypse, he sounded like he was thinking of a really good party -- he (with backup singers Joan Wasser and Martha Wainwright) delivered a lovely rendition of Hallelujah. His performance of Chelsea Hotel #2 (of which Cohen says that he, Cohen, regrets having ever been so ungallant as to reveal who was its subject) was not revolutionary, but did offer an interesting perspective on it.

Very near the end is the moment for which, of course, one waits the whole film, namely the time when Cohen himself steps out (although I understand from the reviewes on IMDB that this was footage added for the movie, not part of the concert) to perform just one song for us -- in this case, I think perfectly appropriately, Tower of Song. (What a beautiful song of tribute.) Though one can't help noticing that the years sit heavy on his face, it was beautiful to see him step up to the microphone, and lovely to anticipate hearing the golden voice which had been serenading us with words throughout the movie finally break into song -- but he seemed to be lip-syncing! I hope, I desperately hope, I am mistaken, but the evidence seemed quite strong to me, and it really spoiled my enjoyment of this coda.

All in all, though I think the director, Lunson, shed no particular light on his subject -- in fact Cohen has an interesting look on his face throughout, as if he is contemplating the jokes he could (and maybe did!) weave into his sometimes discursive answers to the interviewer's questions -- it was pleasant simply to spend, even vicariously, an hour and a half with Cohen, and with so many wonderful singers who share one's adulation of him. I wish I could have been at the concert.

Milestone

Woo-hoo! In just under four months, I have achieved the remarkable statistic of 100 visitors. (While it may not sound much to you, just think -- that's more than 0.8 visitors a day!) Thanks, everybody! Thanks, A. C. and J. P., you loveable scallywags! Thanks, me, for occasionally reloading the page eight times in a row to check small edits, while forgetting that I hadn't blocked my IP address from showing up in the logs!

Saturday, September 09, 2006

Ann Arbor buses

Given that the lion's share of my (staggeringly massive) traffic seems to come from Europe -- of which again by far the majority is people from England looking for information on Those Two -- I suspect whingeing about buses in Ann Arbor will not find its perfect audience here; but nonetheless the spirit moves me to comment. Why, why, has the perfectly functional and unobtrusive ding (followed, on some buses, by a pleasant announcement "stop requested") been replaced by the God-awful CLANG CLANG which now follows every single stop request? It sounds as if it was designed by someone who used to live near a trainyard and felt nostalgic for the sound. It bugs me -- it's loud enough that it's distinctly audible over my iPod (a birthday gift, by the way, from my wonderful wife) -- even during a fifteen-minute bus ride; I can't imagine what it must be like to be a bus driver and have to listen to the sound over and over and over and over, all through one's shift. Can anyone have been clamouring for this? Who could have thought it was a good idea?

Friday, September 08, 2006

Amazon Unboxed

I know I'm a bit late on the scene with this comment, but there was a sentence in an article about online movie rentals which appeared shortly before Amazon Unbox débuted which I found a little strange:
The reason Amazon will have content from most major studios, while Apple may have only one, comes down to price, insiders said. Because it also sells DVDs, Amazon has agreed to studio demands that digital wholesale prices not undercut those of DVDs. As a result, Amazon.com's digital download prices are expected to range from $9.99 to $19.99 -- about the same as those for other online retailers such as CinemaNow, Movielink and AOL.
I know I'm a simple-minded no-business-knowledge twerp, but: Why should digital wholesale prices not undercut those of DVDs? I don't mean here that, as a consumer, I deserve lower prices for my digital downloads (although it's easy to think I do); but rather, why would a studio even be concerned with this? I heard lots of arguments over on Slashdot that the apparent savings in price for digital sales isn't really as considerable as it seems -- that is, that the packaging and pressing involved in providing a physical disc aren't really all that expensive -- and I can believe that, although I think it neglects the considerable financial advantage (reaping which is, as I understand it, a large part of Amazon's business model) to a retailer of not having to maintain a physical brick-and-mortar presence -- but surely it can't be more expensive to sell a digital product than a physical one? (I set aside the initial cost of developing the (snort snicker) uncrackable DRM with which the downloads are certainly laden.) My wife came up with two suggestions, in both of which I find merit:
  • The bandwidth costs associated with providing tremendous files for download (especially since, to have your download on the two computers allowed, Amazon actually requires you to download it twice) might offset the other savings mentioned above.
  • The studio executives are so scared of the adjective 'digital' that they shrink in their seats like vampires before garlic and cry "No, it burns, it burns!"
The first suggestion I find a sober and considered one, except that, it seems to me, the bandwidth costs would be borne by Amazon (which is actually providing the downloads), not the movie studios (which are simply presenting Amazon with their finished products). The second solution I find eminently believable, and suspect is the actual reason, except that I wonder: If they're so paralysed by their fear of piracy, even when soothed by the calming ministrations of DRM vendors, that they will do everything they can to discourage people from actually buying these downloads -- I'm even granting them here their ridiculous obsession with crippling DRM, and just talking now about the price -- then why make the downloads available at all?

Envy

Perhaps it is just that I have had my expectations lowered by the clever headlines with which such newspapers as Chicago Tribune spin-off Red Eye decorate their front pages ('Super Manny!' cried a recent headline on the apparently front-page worthy trend of men who work as nannies -- heroes all of them, naturally, unlike, one presumes, the women who do the same job, because, come on, 'Womanny' isn't even funny), but I think I could die a happy man if I had come up with a title as sublimely wonderful as Horsemen of the Œsophagus, a recent book on competitive eating.

Wednesday, September 06, 2006

Unusual search terms

One of my favourite running jokes in Christopher Livingston's old site Not My Desk was when he would detail the bizarre search terms that had brought people to his site. When I started this blog, it was easy to believe that my purpose in doing so to communicate my deepest, innermost feelings, on, for example, missing 'n's, but really, if I am honest with myself, what I wanted to see was what strange search terms would lead people here. (I understand it's dangerous to mention this explicitly as a goal, since nowadays people rise to the challenge and it becomes difficult to sort out genuine search results from artificially but cleverly crafted ones; but I think this danger is somewhat mitigated if, as in the present case, the mention appears on a blog which no one reads.)

So -- aside from the brief flurry of Technorati users finding (and rapidly leaving) this blog while searching for A. C. and J. P. 1, what is the one search term which, according to Statcounter, has ever led someone to this site? 'Semisimplification'. If the visitor who was searching for that term ever returns, well, welcome back, and I'm sorry that (as I can only assume is the case) you didn't find the information for which you were looking. As compensation, I can point you to a great site for information on painful hiccupping.

While I'm greeting people personally (or as personally as a greeting gets based on IP addresses), hi to the visitor from the University of Michigan, although I'm slightly unnerved that you got here by searching specifically for my blog's name.

1 Because, if I spell out their names, then the Technorati users start coming back, that's why.