Relnotes madness.Last minute FC6 Release Notes changes are rolling in over the last few days, which is great since we’re snapshotting this evening. You have just a few hours left! Once again, we will have, as Karsten put it, the best release notes in all Linux. |
Why yes, we are surprised!Tonight Eleya pointed out the cover of this month’s Parenting magazine, which featured the blurb, “6 Surprising Things Your Baby Really Needs.” Of course, before reading the article, we had to come up with our own list:
Needless to say, the list in the magazine wasn’t nearly as surprising. |
First against the wall when it came.Mark Danielewski’s first novel House of Leaves is largely an empty shell — albeit cleverly ornamented with many onion-layers of allegory, wordplay, text ciphers, typographic ingenuity, Wallace-esque footnotes, postmodernist fourth-wall conceits, and a suffocating sense of dread — which asks reader to imprint their own paranoid musings and fantasies to power the somewhat threadbare plot. And as such it’s a rousing success, so much so that I was thrilled to hear on Friday that SuperWife ordered us Danielewski’s new book Only Revolutions, which arrived today. I’m looking forward to reading it after FC6 gets released, although I’m not sure “reading” is the right term for a densely crypto-typo-graphic love story cum road novel told in free verse. “Experiencing” sounds better. |
Drink up!
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The gravedigger’s dream.Wait Tom, I’d like to make a list including a few more of the more heinous crimes against humanity perpetrated in the name of strengthening a dead writer’s estate:
(See also here for a few ideas that, thankfully, never made it past the twisted brains at McSweeney’s.) |
Cougar Pride!Today was Evie’s first day of school. She was so excited when I put her to bed last night I was sure she’d wake us up before dawn with her backpack on, ready to hit the road. Fortunately she slept well — better than either of her parents to be sure. To somewhat keep Eleya’s mind off missing Evie, we ran a couple errands, including a library run and a weird crosstown zigzag as we tried to find decent Chinese cabbage for me to make some homemade kimchi. Mmm, kimchi. After I got the cabbage cut and soaking in the brine, I took her and Ethan, who was probably rejoicing that he was now inexplicably and miraculously an only child, to lunch in town. After nap-time we picked Evie up from school, and she obviously had a great time there. She already made a friend or two, and got to know her classroom, school, and teacher. I have to say I’m pretty impressed with the idea of a “journal” that the teacher sends home daily. If there’s anything we need to know, she puts it in the book, and vice versa for that matter. It’s easy for us to correspond without demanding too much of the teacher’s hectic schedule. It’s also good for the kids since it helps set up a routine and gives them a sense of responsibility without overloading them too much. Evie got home and immediately sat down at the table to write a note. I asked her what she was writing, and she explained to me that one of the children in her class had been very upset and crying because she missed her mother. She was writing a note to console the little girl! I guess that means we’re not raising a sociopath, so we’ve got that going for us. |
School’s out for weather.The ugly weather from Tropical Storm Ernesto is keeping everyone in the house today, and the outlook for the weekend is pretty poor by all accounts. Those of you with small children know that when combined with a long weekend off work, this spells looming insanity. For some reason the word “Valium” keeps flashing in my head in big neon letters. My personal road to the screaming heebie-jeebies got started when I showed up at work and the water mains serving our building were out. Not a working faucet or bathroom in sight. At lunch time, with no relief in sight, and probably feeling the strain as their bladders expanded like water balloons, the executives sent everyone home for the day. It seemed a little ironic, since the all the water currently falling from the sky will be relieving a long drought, and probably causing some flash floods to boot. Perhaps I can use some of today to work on our packaging stuff in Docs. I got some pretty sweet OMF generation working a few days ago and haven’t had time to return to it for a while. |
