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A colleague forwarded this link to How to calculate the day of the week for any date. Neat. The author calls it a party trick but I don’t get invited to that kind of party. Probably just the crowd I run with.

Received a number of books over the holidays (great gift, hint, hint…) so I’ll mention them:

• The Hipster Handbook by Bechtel, Lanham and Nicely. Funny as hell field guide to an urban subculture. You probably know (or are) these people and even if you don’t you probably have their record collection and read their canon of books.
• Reefer Madness by Eric Schlosser. Juicy muckraking on the confluence of government and the businesses of drugs, pornography and illegal migrant labor. I’ve been reading it over Maria’s shoulder and it’s great. I can’t wait to read it through.
• Flim Flam by James (Amazing) Randi. Meandering, often conversational, debunking of the well-known claims of the paranormal. Interesting but in desperate need of a good editor. I’m halfway through and I don’t know that I’ll ever finish reading this one.
• Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn of the Century New York by Kathy Peiss. This has been on my reading list for years. A well-researched examination of the development of working class female culture, autonomy, mores, sexuality and (to a small degree) identity. A good, but not great, read that’s at its best when discussing the interactions of male-female socialization and economics, middle-class values and the commercialization of entertainment. I’m going to have to track down more recent books (Peiss published this in 1986) that go deeper into the topics and explore those in the bibliography.
• Monsters: Human Freaks in America’s Gilded Age by Eisenmann and Mitchell. Reprint of a 1970’s edition with new material. Looks interesting but a little light. I haven’t started it yet but it shouldn’t take more than an hour… the ratio of text to pictures is low.

C|Net News.com has an article about Intel and Microsoft working with Phoenix and Gateway to replace the aging PC BIOS with a new firmware. Great idea, except instead of going with the existing standard IEEE 1275-1994, known as OpenFirmware, like Apple, IBM and Sun, or sponsoring or contributing to the OpenBIOS, they’ve chosen to create a new "standard". Sure, I’m cynical but isn’t going off and reinventing the proverbial wheel a little suggestive of ulterior motives? It will be a few years before it gets to the market but I expect it is another way to bolster their so-called "trusted computing" scheme and doing away with the hangover from the original IBM PC is little more than a happy side effect.

Back from Florida…

Karen and Russ got engaged! I have pictures. I put them on snapfish and I’ll eventually get them on here.

On the way out we rode the new AirTrain at JFK. Conveniently linking mass-transit, parking and all the terminals together almost brings JFK up to the standards set by nearly every other international airport in a major U.S. city… except the NY/NJ Port Authority reams you for $5 per person each way for the ride. In case you had any ideas, they stopped running buses, making the tram the only way to get from the subway to the airport. Nice. You can go the nearly thirty miles from the top of the Bronx to outer edge of Brooklyn for $2 with MTA but it’s $5 to go less than two miles with PANYNJ. If you recall, the statements about the AirTrain were full of how the $3 per passenger FAA-approved airport surcharge would allow it to be built and operated with no State or Federal taxes. They left out how they would hose the riders if the funding didn’t come through.

In any event, on the heels of this trip I have some phrases you only hear in the South: * (Overheard in front of a Publix market) Well, I’ll have to defer to Moses’s law on that one… * (Everywhere, to us) Where’s all y’all from? * (Everywhere, from us) What’s taking so long?

Happy Holidays


To the 7345 unique addresses that have requested pages in my weblog since October.


(who would think this drivel could be popular with anything other than robot webcrawlers?)