Finished taxes: six grand winging its out of my bank account today to pay Uncle Sam plus the Governator. That’s only how much I underpaid my taxes, nowhere close to what I paid for 2007 overall. It’s book review time. I’m most of the way through a book entitled Where Does the Money Go?: Your Guided [...] » Read more

Something I heard about on NPR this morning: from the recently declassified files of the CIA – the so-called “Family Jewels” – comes an internal memo describing “oddball letters and phone calls” sent in to the CIA in the early 1960s. There’s the usual Cold War paranoia, including the guy who tried to alert the [...] » Read more

It didn’t really hit home how bad it was until I watched television (CNN) last night for the first time in a week. I’ve been hitting CNN’s web site at work but watching moving pictures, hearing unscripted reactions of victims and reporters was something else. I was in New Orleans for SIGGRAPH [...] » Read more

I took the bus to the Cinerama yesterday. A clean cut guy, in his fifties or sixties, who was on his way to Westlake Mall to take part in a protest was earnestly discussing his experience in the Vietnam war, why he had to speak out against the situation in Iraq, and his plans [...] » Read more

I’ve been in California since Saturday and will be here for the rest of the week. Susan had a break-in last week, so I’ve been here providing moral support and working from the mother ship in Emeryville. Turns out after yesterday I might be the one needing moral support. I gave up hope [...] » Read more

Random musings. Ariadne Auf Naxos was on Wednesday, and I’ve decided post modern librettos in opera just really aren’t my thing. Give me a good burning, suicide by jumping, or end of the world any day instead. Leon has apparently given up on the New York Rangers for good. I can’t blame [...] » Read more

Looks like Arnie will be the next governor of California. I’ve been kind of mildly amused by the entire recall thing. I think this is due to growing up with British Columbian politics, which has a brand of silliness unlike any other place I’ve been to; so electing movie actors as governor just [...] » Read more

The BBC reports: “Appeal for dwarf-tossing thrown out” – and then, for those unaware of the finer aspects of the sport, helpfully explains that “the person who throws the dwarf furthest wins”. Which brings back a debate I had years ago with Manh in the UBC cafeteria: dwarf, or midget? The argument spilled over [...] » Read more

With digital rights management (DRM) so much in the media lately, tonight’s little rant will hopefully illustrate what can easily go wrong with the entire idea. I own a recording of Yo-Yo Ma entitled “Solo”. The first track on it is Mark O’Connor’s Appalachia Waltz, arranged appropriately enough for solo cello. I was [...] » Read more

Woke up, turned on my computer, looked at the slashdot headline, froze my neurons, turned on the TV in time to see the awful image of the second plane smashing into the towers – some unbelieving part of my brain said “this has to be CG footage” before footage of the towers collapsing and [...] » Read more