Dyshidro­sis (/dɪs.haɪˈdroʊ.sɨs/, also known as "acute vesicu­lob­ul­lous hand eczema," "cheiropom­pholyx," "dyshidrot­ic eczema," "pompholyx," and "podopom­pholyx") is a skin condition that is char­ac­ter­ized by small blisters on the hands or feet.

    — Wikipedia

I’ve oc­ca­sion­al­ly had little blisters appear on my fingers and palms in hot weather in the past. These vesicles are filled with clear liquid, annoying and a little bit sore, and they sting when my hands are soaked in water.

In August, they came back and they were larger and more swollen than ever before. My doctor diagnosed a case of dyshidrot­ic eczema and prescribed clobetasol propionate ointment. The eczema promptly cleared up, but I had …continue.

We went to hear Matt Taibbi speak at Town Hall Seattle tonight. He spoke about the topic of his new book, The Divide, which covers inequality in the United States. After several years of covering white-collar crime in Wall Street after the financial collapse of 2008, and not seeing any pros­e­cu­tions, he got curious about what the criminal justice system is like for the poor. Community policing is harsh in many poor com­mu­ni­ties, like Ferguson and Staten Island, where the police regularly issue tickets for minor in­frac­tions. Those being summonsed can ill-afford the fines, often leading to worse con­se­quences. The U.S. prison population is now twice as high as it was in 1991 and four times …continue.

Marsh Tanner is a San Francisco private in­ves­ti­ga­tor. His secretary Peggy is starting to unravel, as she’s been getting sexually harassing phone calls for months, which she’s hidden from Marsh. Thing is, she’s also started to develop a case of Stockholm syndrome with her stalker. Marsh discovers more about Peggy—and him­self—than he really wants to.

Moderately enjoyable. I found the plot and the characters plausible, unlike so many modern stories.

The first volume of John Cleese‘s au­to­bi­og­ra­phy takes us through the first 30 years of his life, from his birth in Weston-super-Mare in 1939 to the creation of Monty Python’s Flying Circus in 1969. I learned along the way that his mother was im­pos­si­ble; that the Pythons consider themselves writers first, performers second; that he greatly enjoyed his school years; quite a lot about the various TV and radio shows he worked on before Python; not much about his first marriage to Connie Booth; and that his speech in A …continue.

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.

For want of a shoe the horse was lost.

For want of a horse the rider was lost.

For want of a rider the message was lost.

For want of a message the battle was lost.

For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.

And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

— proverb

I want to step down as the webmaster of the Northwest C++ Users’ Group after serving for four years. The NWCPP website is built with the Pelican static site generator. I don’t know who will succeed me as webmaster, but it’s likely that they’ll be a Windows user. Pelican …continue.

My mother’s mother’s sister, known to all of us as Auntie Pat, was born on January 2nd, 1915, in London. My mother and a few other family members will join her today for her 100th birthday party. I understand that the Queen has been notified and will be sending a telegram of con­grat­u­la­tions, but can’t attend in person.

Pat is frail but her mind is still good, and she continues to live by herself in her own home in Bournemouth, England. In the last decade, Pat has twice emigrated to New Zealand, but it didn’t work out either time.

Pat married only once, in her sixties, to a Polish émigré who had served …continue.

John Buchan’s classic novel, The Thirty-Nine Steps, takes place in the summer of 1914, weeks before the Great War breaks out. Richard Hannay, who made his fortune in South Africa, is bored of London. When his neighbor is murdered after disclosing a spy plot to him, Hannay is forced to go on the run to avoid being arrested by the police or killed by the spies. He spends much of the book hiding out in rural Scotland, before returning to London.

This proto-thriller—or “shocker” as Buchan called it—is still an en­ter­tain­ing story.

In most of the world, as I write this, it’s already 2015. We in Seattle will enter the New Year in 4½ hours.

For me personally, it was a reasonably good year. My health remained good, I had a new job, we had a good summer vacation, and generally enjoyed ourselves. Emma’s health was not so great, but she’s set up an Etsy shop for her knitting and started modeling for artists.

I look forward to 2015.

My DasBlog-based blog at http://www.georgevreil­ly.com/blog/ has been out of commission for months. I’ve been meaning to replace it for a long time, but I only just got around to making a serious effort, as I realized that otherwise I would have no posts at all for 2014. I received only a handful of complaints about its absence; if there had been more, I would have fixed it sooner.

DasBlog is a fairly light­weight blogging engine that runs on ASP.NET. It doesn’t require a database, but it does require the ability to write XML blogpost entries to the local filesystem. That’s a non-standard con­fig­u­ra­tion for ASP.NET and IIS websites, which inevitably causes problems. Whenever …continue.

Tuesday December 10th was my last day at Cozi. I had recently rolled off a major project that lasted for most of a year, and the timing was good to go do something else. In my six years there, I made lasting friend­ships and I built a lot of software that makes me proud. Cozi has about 15 engineers, small enough that I worked on most of the software, notably on the web services that power everything else and on the web client ap­pli­ca­tion, though not, alas, on the iOS or Android ap­pli­ca­tions. Cozi was a great place to work and I knew I wanted to replicate what I valued …continue.