TXdot: The Texas leg of the journey will involve Houston and New Braunfels, and places in-between (though the places in-between will be very, very brief visits indeed, like, just long enough to drive by). You going to be in either of those places?

Also: Here at this party, I was tasked with the duty of putting more beer in the ice in the cooler. Apparently, while doing this, my hand got cold and numb enough than I didn’t feel the injury I did to my thumb. So now it’s swollen up like a balloon. It doesn’t hurt, beyond just the pressure feeling and the painful ache when I forget and try to use it as if it weren’t swollen. It doesn’t look bruised, and isn’t painful enough to be broken; it’s just enlarged.

So it’s a mystery why my thumb has an erection.

Travel update, for those who worry:

I made it to the wonderful world of Colorado. The train ride was, ahem, uneventful. It was made all the more uneventful by the detour through southern Wyoming, rather than going through the central Colorado rockies. If you ever have need to ride Amtrak’s California Zephyr line, make sure it’s not during the week that they’re fixing the tunnels in the rockies, or suffer the consequences of riding through the badlands and natural gas refineries of southern Wyoming. (They do a week-on, week-off work schedule on the tunnels.)

The ride through the Sierra Nevadas was nice. They have a deal with a local historical society where an interpretive guide volunteer was making announcements about the places we were travelling through, which gave some good historical perspective.

Next up: a weekend of hanging out with people in Colorado, and then off to Texas.

Small ironies on Apple’s GUI Scripting web site…

By default, the accessibility frameworks are disabled.

I’m about to embark on a long trip.

I do this every year, and every year it’s still hard to get everything in order before leaving. Especially when my life is as slo-mo chaotic as it is. If it were just chaotic, then I could deal, but the slo-mo part gets me every time.

How much does iPhoto suck? Glad you asked.

This is a shrunken screen capture of the same picture from two different places iPhoto put it:

The one on the right is an archive I burned to CD through iPhoto. The color is correct.

The one on the left is what happens to the picture when I drag it from the CD archive back into the ‘Photo Library.’ Simply unarchiving the picture changes its color balance.

I’m using the last version of iPhoto before the paid upgrade, but geez… Why should I feel good about spending $49.95 for a piece of software that might still do this?

UPDATE: Ok, forget that. Quitting iPhoto and then restarting it fixes the problem. Yeah. ‘Fixes.’ Sheesh!

I’m looking at a picture of my dad. It’s one I took last year, around the beginning of July, when we all went to Nashville to celebrate his mom’s 100th birthday.

The picture is on the porch at Echo Lodge, which is an old log cabin in the central Tennessee countryside jointly-owned by his generation of the family. The surrounding is the intense, almost psychedelic green of dense foliage, seen from the wide, L-shaped porch which surrounds the cabin. He’s sitting on a bench on that porch, though the picture doesn’t reveal the bench.

We had just walked down the hill to the river, and then back up in the July heat. Dad’s a little fatigued, a bit of sweat on his brow. He’s in his 70s and he’s walking through the woods in July. Then he sits down and his son takes a picture of him.

He’s looking straight at the camera. He’s looking at me. And it’s hard to read him; he’s tired enough to maybe be annoyed, but he’s not annoyed. He’s looking to see what I’m up to, so it’s kind of an intelligence-gathering look. But it’s also more than that. It’s ambiguous without more context.

I’m thinking about his life, and how it seems so ordinary to me. It’s just how dads are, according to my little story of How Life Works. He’s a decent guy, a scientist, a naturalist, a world-traveler. Canoeist. Birder. He’s had numerous recognitions from big-time scientific organizations. He’s not Mister, he’s Doctor. Just like all the dads out there, right?

A few years ago, we took a road trip together. We went to Yellowstone, among other places, and he showed me Beartooth Pass, on the northeast boundary of the park. He pointed out places where he’d done his field studies, in the Absaroka range. Sea fossils on the tops of mountains. He mapped them and wrote a paper. He hiked over some of the most spectacular landscapes on the planet and got college credit for it.

And he took a hike at Echo Lodge and got his picture taken.

Interesting idea: iTunes Registry, a web site where users voluntarily upload their iTunes playlist database for subsequent data-mining. Definitely a solution in search of a problem, but they’re opening up their database to whoever wants to code apps for it.

Thanks once again to Omni Disk Sweeper, my computer hard drive is free of over 200 megabytes of cruft.

Most of the cruft came about as a result of using fink to install stuff like Cinepaint and Sodipodi, which leave lots of files in their wake. And here’s a clue: If you want to install GIMP under Apple’s X11, you don’t need GNOME.

Reagan’s legacy: Ketchup is a vegetable.

Bush’s legacy: Frozen French fries are fresh vegetables.

Maybe Kerry’s legacy will be: Soybeans are meat.

Bush’s plan to dose Americans with expensive antipsychotics

According to this British Medical Journal article, “Lilly made $1.6m in political contributions in 2000—82% of which went to Bush and the Republican Party.”

So it’s not surprising that the President announced a plan to screen the entire US population for mental illness and pump lots and lots of people full of expensive Eli Lilly drugs.

There’s a theme in the Bush administration: When you’re fucking up badly (Enron tapes, Ashcroft telling Congress to screw, 9/11 commission telling the world that you invaded Iraq for essentially no reason at all), fuck up in a smaller way for the current news cycle.

But it’s nice to perhaps have a POLICY discussion rather than one about whether or not America’s turning into a theocratic facist imperial power.