Out of Cheese

Through Brian Jepson to Jason Whittington, I came across a C# plugin for Eclipse.

Of course, Eclipse runs on Mac OS X, and that leads us to the obvious question: Can we use Eclipse as a C# IDE on top of Rotor? I’m not sure yet, but I certainly intend to find out.

Today’s Mac OS X Hints mentions that keyboard navigation works in file dialogs in Mac OS X 10.2.3. That’s a feature that worked wonderfully in Mac OS 9 and earlier, but hadn’t been enabled in Mac OS X. I’d given up all hope of seeing it until 10.3, but it turns out that it works as of the latest update.

My only complaint with the new feature is that it’s not as easy to dive into a folder as it was on Mac OS 9. In Navigation Services dialogs, you could could press Return to enter a folder. On Mac OS X, Return seems to do nothing in the same circumstances. Instead, you have to press the right arrow key. I can’t reach the right arrow without moving my hand away from its standard typing position, which makes diving through folder hierarchies a lot slower than it was on 9.

I spent most of the day today reading Sandy Koufax by Jane Leavy, which my parents gave me for Hanukah. It’s the first baseball book I’ve read in a number of years, and it’s probably one of the best I’ve ever read.

The book isn’t really a biography of Koufax — he clearly treasures the distinction between his private life and his life between the lines, and Leavy respects that decision well enough to barely touch on details like his early childhood or his family. What it is, though, is two intertwined stories: One covering Koufax’s life with a heavy focus on the six years when he may have been the best pitcher the world will ever see, and a second about the night of September 9, 1965, when Koufax pitched a perfect game in what may have been the best exhibition of pitching on both sides that baseball has ever seen.

Leavy alternates chapters, one about Koufax’s life and another about an inning from the perfect game, one by one, with exquisite timing. I’ve never read such a terrific description of a single game — the feel of the crowd and the emotions of the players, the umpires, the broadcasters, and the fans as they realized they were seeing history being made. The transposition of that story with a beautiful description of Koufax as viewed by other players, his friends, and the rest of the world produces a book that’s far more enjoyable than a typical biography.

Through Chuq Von Rospach (”The Halflings, cap’n, they will na take the strain…“), I just ended up at an astonishing collection of alternative versions of The Lord of the Rings. Wow. I have to stop reading because it’s just too much at once — too many good ones, and not enough time to read them in.

The page that Chuq pointed to directed me to a page where many of them got started. That one includes pretty good versions by Hemingway, Twain, Milton, Dr. Seuss (”Gandalf, Gandalf! Take the ring!/I am to small to carry this thing!”), Freddie Mercury (”I see a little silhouetto of a man/Saruman! Saruman! What will you do with Frodo?”), Hans Christian Andersen (”Once there was a beautiful golden ring that had been made by a terrible lord….”), and others.

Some of the ones there are taken from older pages, though…apparently this art isn’t all that new. There’s the Alternative Lord of the Rings page, for example, with P.G. Wodehouse (”Sam, I’ve decided to go and overthrow the Dark Lord by tossing his jewellery into a volcano.” “Very good, sir. Should I lay out your crazy adventure garb?”), A.A. Milne (”We’re not going to *discover* anything, Pippin, we’re going to *undiscover* uncle Bilbo’s old ring.” “CAN you undiscover things?” asked Sam. “Discovering doesn’t seem to be a thing you can UN-, if you know what I mean.”), etc.

And then there’s the commentary on the page that Chuq points to, which stands on its own.

Like Chuq, I’m practically speechless. Wow. And I just topped it off by watching a new Lord of the Rings movie starring Humphrey Bogart. I’m stunned. OK, so it gets one plot point rather wrong, but hey, who’s counting? It’s still really impressive.

I’m very tempted to sign up as a judge for the Synopsys Silicon Valley Science and Technology Championship. That mouthful of a name is San Jose’s regional science fair for the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. I was fortunate enough to attend the ISEF twice while I was in high school, and I’d love to get involved in science fairs again. While I might mentor someone eventually, the easiest way to get involved right now is as a judge.

Of course, in San Jose I’m sure they have their fill of computer science judges already. We’ll see if I can convince them to fit another one in. I’ll have to wait until I have a phone number, though — they understandably require one of those on the form, and I don’t know what mine is yet.

I’ve finally figured out how to get NetNewsWire Pro pointed to my weblog — it was guessing the wrong URL for Movable Type’s XML-RPC script — so I’m now trying to use it to post things.

Even if this works, I’m not sure I’ll stick with it. To me, reading RSS feeds and posting to my weblog are two separate things, and I’m not sure I see the benefit of trying to shoehorn both of them into a single application. I can see how it’d work well for someone like Dave Winer, who posts very little that isn’t a reference to someone else’s weblog, but I’m far more likely to link to newspaper stories or random web pages than something I saw in an RSS feed.

In any case, it’s software from Brent Simmons, so I’m sure it’ll be good when it’s done. It’s clearly an early beta now, though, and that shows. But I’m happy to play with it and do my small part to help him make it better.

I think I’ve decided to get a Roomba after I move. I keep reading good reviews for it, and anything that can actually get me to vacuum more than I currently do has to be a good thing. The idea of turning on the vacuum before leaving for work in the morning and coming home to clean carpets is just too cool to pass up.

How Appealing points to a fascinating story in the Weekly Standard about Dr. Samuel Mudd, who was convicted of aiding and abetting John Wilkes Booth in the hours after Booth’s assassination of President Lincoln. For years, all I’ve heard of the tale has been about the Mudd family’s attempts to clear the doctor’s name. This story is about the Mudd family and their efforts, but it ends with a detailed explanation of the facts, which apparently have largely been ignored over the years. If you’ve ever read an article about the Mudd family’s work to clear Dr. Mudd’s name, this story is well worth a read.

It was supposed to rain all weekend in California, but it was absolutely beautiful instead. That was a very pleasant surprise.

Less pleasant was the surprise I had when I picked up my car at the airport and saw that it was covered in frost. I think I’ve been spoiled by our garage at home, but I don’t own an ice scraper. Fortunately the folks at the parking lot where I left my car were nice enough to clear off my windshield, and a combination of the defroster, air conditioning, and a fan turned all the way up allowed me to see well enough to drive. Until I hit the fog, that is.

Just to make things more interesting, I turned on the radio and landed in the middle of a series of reggae Christmas songs, including such pieces as Eek-A-Mouse’s The Night Before Christmas and something the DJ called “a Rasta Jingle Bells”. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything quite like that before.

One of the more interesting bits of apartment-hunting was watching how the person showing us around at each place treated my roommate and me. I’ll be rooming with Ruby, a good friend of mine from Stanford. Yes, that’s “Ruby”, which is a female name, and yes, that’s “good friend”, not “girlfriend”.

Of course, you don’t introduce yourself to someone who’s trying to sell you an apartment by saying, “Hi, I’m Eric, this is Ruby, and we’re Just Friends.” But you’d think that when you mention that you’re looking for a two-bedroom, two-bathroom place that perhaps they’d realize that they might not want to assume that you’re sleeping together.

Invariably, though, whoever was giving us a tour would say, “Here’s the master bedroom, and here’s the guest bedroom.” Even for apartments in which the two bedrooms were the same size. Grr.

Of course, none of that was as bad as the one apartment salesman (what do you call those people?) who didn’t even look at Ruby the entire time. He never even introduced himself to her. When two people are looking for a place to live, you’d hope that both of them have some influence on the decision. Ignoring one of them really doesn’t go over very well. That certainly dropped his apartment complex a few notches in our rankings. Of course, the fact that the place’s floor plan didn’t provide any place for a TV in the living room didn’t help, either.