Most days Wine development is painfully slow, with each step forward followed by several steps back.
Today was not one of those days.
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One of our free-software-advocating board members has been paying to have Vincent adapt Wine to work with the XO laptop‘s user interface. Thanks to John’s funding and Vincent’s hard work, soon children all over the developing world will have free access to faux-8-bit flash games. Maybe.
This morning there were fewer buses than usual. Fewer buses means a longer commute time as well as being packed cheek-to-jowl during the ride — usually I don’t mind this, but in the winter the additional bulk of winter coats and sniffly noses makes things a bit awkward. At one point a little subscription card fluttered out of my New Yorker and landed on the muddy floor of the bus, and I was caught in a brief but heart-pounding ethical dilemma about the evils of littering vs. the evils of squeezing between my fellow passengers to pick up a muddy piece of trash which I would then have to clasp like a treasure for the remainder of the ride.
Which, I did. And then upon exiting the bus discovered that the municipal trash cans haven’t been emptied for quite a while so I had to balance my muddy piece of trash on top of an already overflowing pile. These small but consistent breakdowns in civil society meshed well with the fact that the New Yorker I was reading consisted almost exlusively of articles about financial collapse — the phrase that sticks with me is “The clothes in our closets today will be the ones we’re wearing when we’re old.”
Arriving at work, I’ve logged into ‘Mint.com’ in order to be reassured by the fact that I am not yet entirely broke. The top line in my financial report is one that I mentally classify as “Cash to buy food after I lose my job.” Today some sort of software error has resulted in that number appearing as a nice, round zero. (I’m hoping that it’s a software error and not a bank failure because later on in the report it describes my cash-flow situation as being positive which could not otherwise possibly be true.)
All this makes me question the wisdom of renting a $1000 room in Honolulu next month. Perhaps I will try just a little bit harder to find a subletter for my place here in Minneapolis.
I’m bringing brussels sprouts to thanksgiving. For some reason I know as a rule of thumb that “chestnuts pair with brussels sprouts” so I decided to peel a few handfuls to add to the vegetables.
Cookbooks and online guides say to pierce, slash, or score the nuts before roasting. I never do this because I like listening to them explode in the oven. But today I’m hoping to keep the meats intact, so I’m going to do this the right way.
After a few of those, it was clearly only a matter of time until I wound up slicing open my hand, so I switched to a sawing approach.
Tedious! But, 10 or so minutes of this, and the pan was ready for roasting.
15 minutes of baking, followed by a good 90 minutes of peeling produced this, about a pint of finished product:
Whenever I eat (or try to eat) chestnuts I think about the dark-age southern Europeans who ate nothing else. I can’t decide if this is an idyllic image or a horrifying one. On the one hand, you have people living off the land, eating the fruit of trees planted by the Romans 1000 years earlier — no tilling, no weeding, just chasing the occasional pig out of the grove. It’s a pretty beautiful image. But their thumbnails must have been so sore!
I’m asking various Carbon Emission calculators how much of a mess it will make for me to fly one-way from Los Angeles to Honolulu.
TerraPass.org says: 702 pounds
NativeEnergy.com says: 2050 pounds
TravelMatters.org says: 1633 pounds
So, that’s confusing. I was hoping to compare different travel options (taking a train for part of the distance, flying nonstop vs. nonnonstop, etc.) but if the original numbers are made up in the first place, then comparison seems pretty useless.
Every year or so I get a great idea: Wouldn’t it be nice if my tenants could pay rent electronically? Then I wouldn’t have to go to the bank, tenants wouldn’t have to remember to write a check, I’d lose fewer days to the float, the laborers at the clearinghouse would get fewer papercuts, and everyone would win.
Every time I research this, the problem seems further from being solved. PayPal looked promising in their early days, but their fees keep rising. Even if a tenant pays me via a direct bank transfer, PayPal wants 3% plus a couple bucks (that means I’d be paying them about $75/month.)
Today I’ve discovered that there are quite a few electronic rent-paying services seeking to solve my problem. There are a couple of wrinkles, though. The transaction fees are outrageous (dollars per transaction rather than pennies or fractions of pennies), and they want several hundred dollars in ‘set-up fees.’
Really, I do not have a Rent problem, I have a Money problem. As does every single other American who wants to give money to someone else without counting pennies. I guarantee that every day of the year some bank CEO looks at a balance sheet that includes a six-figure expense for clearing checks, counting coins, and straightening bills. And yet, they expect me to pay a few grand a year to lighten their burden. What gives?
In a movie review in the avclub, I came across this clip from the movie ‘Match Factory Girl.’ I’m not especially interested in the film, but the opening footage of the match machines is fascinating. I would watch films like that all day long if I knew where to look.
Right now I’m sitting on my couch listening to voice mails. My new phone service was assigned a number that previously belonged to someone with many outstanding bills, so there are now 120 impatient voice mails from bill collectors in my box. I have to listen to each one and mash 7 in order to clear out the box. A picture forms: unpaid bills, a car with failing brakes, pseudonyms (including one obvious stripper name, ‘Angelica Champaign’ and a Vietnamese name which the robots don’t even try to pronounce and just spell out instead). Late in the game there are calls about filled prescriptions.
The only reason I’m out of bed at all is because I’m waiting for Animal Control to show up and remove a rabid bat from my bathtub. In a couple of hours I hope to have an empty tub and an empty phone, at which point I will bathe and make another attempt at starting my day.
Right now a couple of my coworkers are playing Double Dragon with the volume turned up, and through the music I can hear my COO (excited by the new toy) explaining his 5-year plan to one of our neighbors: “We’re having a good year! The plan is for me to acquire a meth habit, a porsche, and have an affair with a codependant stripper. By age 45 I expect to be divorced and have my kids totally hate me.” The neighbor responds: “I think I know a guy who can set you up.”
Some time ago, my boss made an empty promise to another employee — something along the lines of “If we experience even marginal profitability by the end of the year, then we will…” There was no danger of this being fulfilled, since we have never, ever turned a profit.
Well, bafflingly, sometime around the beginning of this year, business began to boom. And so… the promise was kept.
Note the custom paint job and illuminated trackball:
Productivity is going to skyrocket!
