Ted, Ted, Ted

before getting too excited. I don’t think they really have these cool floating cities yet.

I try not to be surprised when an amateur comes up with a better how-to guide than I’ve done in a while.

Drew is a very nice guy who makes a mean espresso. He works at Ritual Coffee Roasters, about 10 blocks from our house. I spend way too much time there. Here is Drew at the national barista championship in Minneapolis a few minutes ago. Chris Baca, another Ritual great, was on earlier in the day.

Lilly is a pretty good shot. Every picture in this set was done by her, except the first one.

It’s cool to be reminded of what a place looks like from a view four feet off the ground.

I usually don’t go in for April Fool’s kind of stuff, but this is moderately funny, in a mildly geeky way.

The difference between Matt Gonzalez and me is that Matt isn’t too lazy to document exactly why the Obama thing is such a scam. I just take it for granted, but Matt magnanimously takes on the burden of proof.

This is currently the best site on the web. (It acceded to the position after this one abdicated recently.)

My cousin Ian, on his way from Austin to Osaka for some super-brainiac post-doctoral type thing, was stuck on a plane for six hours at San Francisco last Friday night, courtesy of a storm we were having. We brought him home and made him eat some of Mary’s chicken pot pie. The weather cleared the next morning and he was gone before we woke up.

…was a blast as expected. Laura was annoyed at the liberties taken with the plot, but I was too busy soaking up the Terry Gilliam silliness to notice. Evil minions in funny hats, fisheye lenses, the whole thing — it reminded my suddenly how long it’s been since Brazil, and what an impact that movie had on the way I watch movies. The bears, which loom large in the physical world of the book, are even more impressive on screen. They are an animation slam-dunk. The animators let a little fuzzy-and-cute slip into the bear characters and if anything it adds to the overall towering monsters effect. The screenwriters mostly dropped the author’s anti-church broadsides, but the usual suspects are getting upset about it, which is all to the good.

My dad’s dad passed away in November at 95. He became a Lutheran minister in 1935 and served in about 10 churches, ending up in Madison, Wisconsin. Laura and I joined the family for the funeral in Minneapolis, where Opa had lived in retirement. Then we all drove to Madison and had another service at the church where Opa had served his longest tenure. It was good to see everybody, and it was good to know Opa went out a pretty satisfied guy. He was a connoisseur of church music — he booked the organist for his funeral himself, a couple of years ago, and the man was indeed the best organist I’ve ever heard live. I was picturing Opa lying there listening with that sly little smile he used to get when he heard something he really liked.

Look for us in that long, roped-off line for the opening night of Philip Pullman’s Golden Compass movie. We never do that, but I have a good feeling about this one.

Lilly was a dog for Halloween this year. Her school has the nice tradition of a Halloween parade around the playground.

Later that evening we walked at least four miles, starting at Kristin and Mark’s place near Guerrero, wending our way up into Bernal Heights and then back over to Glen Park. Our kids are in that Halloween sweet spot, age-wise: old enough to walk more than a few blocks, young enough to want to. We live in a pretty hilly part of town now, so it was a workout.

Hear hear.

Here’s a sane and fair-minded account of why the people who write our entertainment (without whom, of course, there would be no entertainment) started withholding their labor power this week. (Note for comics fans, such as Laura: the speaker, Brian Vaughan, did some of the writing on Runaways, our current favorite Marvel series.)

This fight has nothing to do with software writers like me, as far as I can tell, but if I see a picket line around here I’ll enthusiastically not cross it.

Now that we’ve moved closer to my work, I don’t get much time to listen to audio in the car. But I still like to strap on the pod whenever I have a long wait in a line or something. I’m bookmarking this site here for the next time I need something to listen to.

The Boston Globe today:

Researchers with access to closely guarded college admissions data have found that, on the whole, about 15 percent of freshmen enrolled at Americas highly selective colleges are white teens who failed to meet their institutions’ minimum admissions standards.

When I was a white teen, by golly, you had to get into your not-so-selective institution by your own bootstraps.

We’d been thinking about moving across town to the Mission for a long time. Closer to both our jobs, Lilly’s school (and Laura’s too, as of this year), better weather, more diversity, decent coffee. This summer we finally went ahead and got an agent (Steve Davis, who is married to Cassandra Mettling-Davis, the architect who helped wiht our remodel a few years ago) and from there things went very fast. It was of course a big project, and it inevitably oozed on into the school semester, which increased the stress level, but finally we were out of there.

Next chapter: A short-term lease in Bernal Heights while we shop for our new place.

Laura’s report on her new middle school.  Bottom line: doesn’t seem to mind it too much. She is playing the saxophone in the band and practicing to try out for the basketball team. Her “elective” class is a peer-support program where she helps other kids with homework and school issues. I’m still not a fan of uniforms on kids, but if that’s my worst complaint, I think we’re doing pretty good.

Luther dons the killer shades for an article about his mad solar cooking skillz. We expect to be doing a lot more solar cooking now that we’ve escaped the fog zone and moved to the sunny Mission district.

My friend Jeff, a CollabNet engineer and an astronomer, got up damn early the other morning and made these spectacular shots of the lunar eclipse.