The following flyer, laid at the front door of my and every other apartment in the building, is the latest and most extreme in a series:

Attention Residents!

Shopping Carts

The Imperial Tower Apartments owns a total of 14 shopping carts for all residents to share and use. NO one should be storing these carts in their units for their own personal use.

If we do not see a chance in our current situation, we will be giving notice to ALL residents for an inspection of units for shopping carts.

We will be giving a 3 Day Notice of Conevant or Breech to those that are found with a shopping cart in their unit. This may result in your lease being terminated.

Please return the shopping carts immediately!

Thank you! Imperial Towers Management

In the four months I've lived here, I've never seen more than 5 shopping carts at once at their garage-level corral by the back elevator. The most intriguing question, to me, is whether we have many different cart hoarders, or a single fiend.

Reading the newspaper, it's hard not to get the impression that the main change civilization brings over barbarism is that , while people still act solely out of greedy self-interest, the object of that self-interest is more abstract. When Eric Rabe, the vice president of public relations for Verizon criticizes Philadelphia's plan to set up wireless broadband, "Government doesn't do service well," (NY Times) of course his statement is ridiculous on the face of it. Call Verizon and try to get good service. Verizon, Cox, the phone companies who have changed their names because so many people hated them that they had negative brand value, they all provide terrible service, constrained only by the law (somewhat) and the free market (not really - they just tacitly collude to all uniformly bad service); in contrast my encounters with government services are varied but frequently quite satisfactory. Rabe makes this obviously questionable assertion because he has a job with a company that has a greater profit opportunity if Philadelphia does not provide a particular service. So many quotes in stories are completely predictable in tone simply by knowing the financial interests of the speaker. This may not be an especially brilliant or original observation, but I just had to vent. On the bright side, at least he's just lying to reporter James Dao instead of bashing him over the head and taking his woman and land. Civilization is only a bust compared to our ideals. On a related note, as I'm sure I've written before, the European Union must be considered one of the greatest successes in the history of civilization if only for getting people to argue about regulations in conference rooms Brussels instead of shooting each other in trenches in northern France.

On an even brighter side, An Indiana state bill that would have made it hard for cities to build their own broadband networks was killed on Wednesday. Municipalities are perfectly suited to provide city-wide natural monopolies such as broadband, and they are accountable to their citizens, whereas corporations are accountable to managers and other corporations who stand to make more money by devising convoluted voice mail systems to make you hang up in despair before ever getting your problem fixed.

This article contains SPOILERS for the movie In Good Company.

I got a free online subscription to The New Republic when I renewed my Salon subscription. The New Republic annoys me. One reason is the gratuitously contrarian article summaries. These examples are all from the last week:

• Hosni Mubarak is a nasty dictator who has stymied liberalism in Egypt. But it's precisely for the sake of liberalism in Egypt that he should be allowed to reelect himself one more time.
• The U.N. Oil-for-Food scandal is not really a scandal. It worked exactly as expected. And that's the problem.
• Bush's record on global warming is better than you think.
• Why North Korea's announcement that it has nuclear weapons could prove to be a good thing.
• Holland thought it was a model for Muslim integration into Europe. Unfortunately, it might be.

Yeeahhhhh. Anyway, what I really want to complain about is Stanley Kauffmann. He reviews movies for TNR, and he regularly provides evidence that big chunks of plot and meaning fly right over his head. And I don't mean deep Kurosawa or Renoir subtext. I mean basic plot elements. A recent review provides an example. He writes of In Good Company:

Dan Foreman is an advertising salesman of fifty-one, working for a company that is part of a global conglomerate. A high-level merger shakes the organization of his office, and Carter Duryea, who is twenty-six, becomes his boss. Quite separately (the twist!), with no connection to the office situation, Carter and Alex, Dan's eighteen-year-old daughter, become acquainted and are soon pleasantly involved. The affair blossoms until Dan accidentally discovers it--and Carter discovers that Alex's father is Dan while Alex discovers that Carter is her father's boss. Dan is outraged, fallaciously believing that Carter is exploiting his power over him to make out with his daughter and that Alex is obliging in order to protect her father.

In the version I saw, the first extended conversation between Carter and Alex occurs over foosball in Dan's garage, after Carter has invited himself over for dinner, and many scenes before the affair starts. I could understand forgetting a small detail, just as I'm not 100% sure if Carter already knew Alex was Dan's daughter and Alex knew Carter was Dan's boss before the dinner (they had already met in an elevator), or if they only realized who each other was at the dinner. (I think the latter is true.) But in order to botch things as badly as Kaufmann did in that paragraph, you would have to have forgotten the lengthy dinner scene, and then missed all of the moments when Carter and Alex are afraid of discovery. You would probably have been a bit bewildered by the scene in the office the morning after Carter and Alex first sleep together, and Carter is freakishly nervous around Dan. This isn't deep textual analysis, it's an obvious and overt plot point. After Dan discovers them (he sees them holding hands in the driveway at his birthday party, and later follows her to a restaurant date, where he confronts both of them), there's nothing to suggest that he thinks Alex is "obliging in order to protect her father". The film has made it quite clear that that's not the case, and while it passed through my head that it probably passed through Dan's head, he is furious with both of them, very disturbed simply from the shock and dismay, and never does or says anything to suggest that he invests any credence in that theory, which is never mentioned outright.

Kauffmann misses the point so regularly that, basically, you shouldn't trust him to get even facts right, much less meaning.

I just had to get that off my chest. I'll keep an eye out for his reviews and share with you other gems I see. On a more positive note, his co-reviewer Christopher Orr's review, The director's cut of Donnie Darko explains too much, is well-argued, meshes with other things I've read, and is enough to convince me to avoid the director's cut of this fine movie, which I saw on a bootleg vcd of a bootleg screener tape with iffy tracking on a crummy little PC with tinny speakers, and which deeply entranced and moved me.

... The Social Security Administration doesn't release its official figures until Spring '05. So what are hundreds of media outlets reporting on?

A Babycenter.com press release.

Give credit to the clever folks at Babycenter.com, a parenting web site owned by Johnson & Johnson. They looked at their many users, ready to answer polls and post birth announcements, and created an annual "BabyCenter Baby Names List." Then they sent out a press release announcing their top names.

... The problem is the press, large and small, happily reported these lists as "the most popular baby names in America in 2004." Despite the clear-cut, in-your-face evidence that Babycenter's lists are not a snapshot of America's babies. Listen up, reporters:

There are no Spanish names on the list.

In 2003, America's real top 100 boys' names included:
Alejandro, Antonio, Carlos, Diego, Jesus, José, Juan, Luis, and Miguel.
Not a one made Babycenter's list, in 2003 or 2004.

Whatever Babycenter is reporting on, it isn't America's babies.

—Laura, Baby Name Wizard

I run pretty much pure debian linux—on my desktop, on my home server, on my laptop, and since last week on my internet server. Every linux distribution must address the issue of how to package and distribute programs, and there seem to be basically three solutions: debian packages, Red Hat packages, and Other. So every linux distribution can be put into one of these categories. It's probably not the overall best way to sort out distributions, but on the other hand maybe it is, and here's why:

"Amateurs talk about tactics, but professionals study logistics." (The quickest citation is Gen. Robert H. Barrow, USMC (Commandant of the Marine Corps) noted in 1980, but the axiom is probably much older.) Similarly, users think about features, but professionals study upgrades. Many program and most operating system upgrades suck, but those on debian usually suck less. Distributions may add polish, testing, configuration, and so forth over and above the basics, but upgrades are constrained by the architecture. Any upgrade system includes both the technology itself, and the quality of the process and people maintaining the repository of programs. Debian's repository and team are both huge and both very well polished. (To digress, Debian-based distributions you may have heard of include Linspire, Knoppix, Ubuntu, and Xandros. Red Hat, of course, uses Red Hat rpms, and SuSE also uses rpms, I believe. The Other category includes those built from source, with gentoo being the one I've heard most of, and stuff like Slackware which I know has a cadre of adherents but I've never encountered it.) (To further digress, some other famous repositories that I've heard of include CPAN, for perl, with which I've had mostly bad experiences; Windows Update; and bsd ports, which is superb.)

One limitation of Debian's repository, or strength if you drink the koolaid, is that it has very strict licensing requirements, and only limited means to work around them. I'm currently deviating from the pure path on my desktop machine in three ways: I run a proprietary binary kernel module from NVidia to get proper performance from my video card (not for games, but to run my wide screen and let me switch workspaces quickly; I use qmail for email, more because of my invested time in understanding its quirks then because it is still the best, and djb's restrictive source license means that installing qmail requires jumping a few extra hoops for no discernable valid reason (the key trick, sadly, I have forgotten to document three times in a row now, but it involves extra flags forcing the qmail.deb installation without de-installing exim and its dependents); and java, for which these instructions are as a rosetta stone. My point, though, is the site which the title of this posting links to is such a sublime way to present large quantities of data that it's worth installing java to see and feel it.

After I brought my new bicycle home, nothing really happened for a week. It was rainy or cloudy all week ("If we continued at that rate for the rest of the season, we'd get 26.17 inches, which would be the most ever in San Diego. The record is 25.97, set in 1883-84." - Rob Krier), so I didn't want to go for a ride. After a week of staring at the thing, and using my old bike for grocery runs in the rain, I finally took it across the street to the park on Sunday. I felt like everybody was staring at me as I went through the crowds, but that could be because I was wearing shorts but no spandex underneath, an ill-considered combination for the necessary riding posture. Cruising through less crowded park streets, I stumbled upon the Administration building's very nicely landscaped courtyards, with several fountains, and spent half an hour practicing starting, stopping, starting into a left turn, starting into a right turn, tight circles, and so forth, with lots of looking over my shoulder and signalling. I learned that, in tight turns, I really do need to pedal with only the outside foot, holding the inside foot away from the front wheel overlap. In panic stops, if I obey my instinct to sit forward, the rear wheel comes up and then everything pivots around the steering column and stopped front wheel and I am forced standing and almost over. If I instead sit back in the chair while panic-stopping, I swerve but both wheels stay grounded. At least, it seemed like that would happen but I didn't test very hard after realizing that I might be screwing up my tires. Good lessons to learn at low speed.

I also picked up a new set of tire levers, a 650c-sized tube, a cheap pump on sale, a patch kit, and more water bottles. Given my history of losing water bottles, I hesitate to call them purchases; leases, perhaps. And, happily, I have already received a new Bike Planet Protege 8 computer, with a stiffer mount so that hopefully it won't fall into the elevator shaft.

Last weekend I went up to Los Angeles to pick up my new bicycle. I'm very excited about it, but getting it home was a bit frustrating.

The bicycle I settled on is a red RANS Force 5 LE. I like it because it has large wheels (more efficient, cooler) and a very supine riding position, with the feet almost at eye level. I added clipless pedals, a pannier rack, a rear light, a mirror, a computer, and a water bottle cage. The total weight is now 30.2 pounds, or just about the same as my old bike, which has the same stuff. I rode it about 10 miles through the Valley, and it was mildly scary. I could turn my head fine, but if I lifted a hand from the handlebar, or pushed too hard to get my shoe into the pedal, or otherwise didn't just sit still, I wobbled severly.

Bringing it home to San Diego was also uncomfortable. The panniers sit over and almost behind the rear wheel, and this moves the balance point to an area of the frame where there's no good way to grip it. In contrast to my old bike, which I can hoist up on a shoulder fairly well-balanced, even when it totals 50 pounds with my stuff, the F5 is almost unmanageable with a load. I got it down the subway stairs by reaching through the seat to grab a bit of frame, but soon resorted to using elevators (which, being terribly macho, I never do with my old bike). I also felt very weird and obvious, like everybody was looking at me. And when you take public transportation in Los Angeles outside of rush hour, and you are an Anglo, you are usually the only Anglo.

The myth that recumbants are harder to take up hills seemed true enough to me going up Banker's Hill in San Diego. I can climb almost anything on my old bike, or could until the spokes and chain wore down too much to take the load of steep hills, but I couldn't imagine going up some hills on this thing.

It all came together after I turned up Fifth avenue to go home. In the far left lane of a three-lane, one-way, high-speed street, I decided to take advantage of a lull in traffic to merge to the right side. I couldn't use the left-mounted mirror to check the street, so I was craning my neck but trying to keep my body perfectly still, except for pedalling up the hill. Just as I had decided to change direction, a bum shouted, "Hey!" I looked. "Don't fall asleep on that." I was so stressed from a fear of either falling down or being hit by a car I couldn't see that this distraction right as I was changing lanes made me furious, and if I had been able to control my direction I might have committed an act of violence. In retrospect, it shows pretty clearly how uncomfortable I am on the thing that one person shouting something inane could destabilize me so badly.

When I did manage to get home, huffing and puffing, one elevator was not working. The other one took forever, and even came to my floor and left without opening the door. With more button-pushing (and in the garage, you have to turn a key just to push the button), it came back. I waited for somebody to get off, but before I could wrestle the bike around to enter the elevator, the doors closed. When I punched them in frustration, I had my keys in my hand so now I have a some sort of bloody gouge under the skin of my palm. When I dragged the bicycle onto the elevator, there was a bump and something plastic skittered through the gap and down the shaft. Eventually I figured out that this was the bicycle computer. This tendency of the Protege 8 to fall off into elevator shafts compensates for the fact that, in every other way, it is far more usable than my current, much-hated bicycle computer.

Monday, of course, it rained.

So, I'm going to keep riding my old bicycle in town. I'm completely comfortable in traffic on it, and it still works, albeit with assorted weird noises. Some time this week when the weather improves, I'll take the new bicycle on a longer ride, out to the beach. Hopefully its advantages, the better streamlining and the more comfortable seat, will kick in.