Inspector Henri Castang of the Police Judiciare in­ves­ti­gates the apparent kidnapping of a politician’s mistress and discovers a far-right conspiracy.

Written in Freeling’s char­ac­ter­is­tic idio­syn­crat­ic style, this is as much a meditation on corruption and compromise as it is a police procedural.

This year is the 23rd an­niver­sary of the Seattle AIDS Walk. A whole generation has passed since the Northwest AIDS Walk began. AIDS used to be the un­stop­pable disease that killed much of a generation of gay men.

AIDS is still a serious problem, but the de­vel­op­ment of an­ti­retro­vi­ral drugs in the Nineties means that people with HIV are living longer, healthier lives than before. More than 1.5 million Americans are now living with HIV/AIDS: 9,000 of them in King County. 40,000 people are infected every year, and most new infections are among African-Americans. The U.S. is getting off relatively lightly: about one-quarter of the adults in southern Africa have HIV!

The Lifelong AIDS Alliance …continue.

Approve Referendum 71. If you’re eligible to vote in Washington state in November, remember this: Approve Referendum 71.

On May 18, 2009, Governor Gregoire signed Senate Bill 5688, aka the “ev­ery­thing but marriage bill” or the Domestic Part­ner­ship Law, a law ensuring that all Washington families are treated the same, with the same pro­tec­tions, the same rights, and the same oblig­a­tions as their neighbors. Under this law, registered domestic partners (same-sex couples and opposite-sex couples with at least one partner over age 62), and married couples, are treated equally under the law in all parts of the state.

Key rights and oblig­a­tions in the law include:

• Death benefits for the partners of police and fire­fight­ers killed …continue.

I had about 60 apparently corrupted photos on a Com­pact­Flash card this evening. It might have been due to Lightroom going berserk, but it was more likely from my pulling the card reader out of the computer without ejecting it first.

The photos wouldn’t show up under Mac, Linux, or Windows. I tried to chkdsk the card under Windows, which complained about a “raw” disk. That led me to ZAR, the Zero Assumption Recovery toolkit. The evaluation copy retrieved the photos very nicely. Whew!

Das Barbecü is Wagner’s Ring Cycle trans­plant­ed to Texas for comic effect. We saw it at Seattle’s ACT Theatre tonight. The Ring Cycle is currently playing at the Seattle Opera, who com­mis­sioned Das Barbecü in 1991.

I’m no opera buff and certainly no Wagnerian. After sitting through four hours of Tristan und Isolde years ago—Ach du lieber Gott! Mein Arsch! Meinen Ohren!—I told Emma that my limit for opera was two-and-a-half hours. I have never seen any part of the Ring Cycle and had only cursory knowledge of the story, and it detracted not one whit from my enjoyment of Das Barbecü.

Wagner might have …continue.

Ted Kennedy died tonight, at the age of 77, after a year-long battle with brain cancer. He was, according to Wikipedia, the third-longest-serving senator of all time, elected in 1962, as soon as he became eligible at 30.

He was a great liberal and he ac­com­plished much. He will be remembered for much more than being the youngest brother of Jack and Bobby Kennedy.

To my tech supportees:

XKCD’s Tech Support Cheat Sheet nails it! This is es­sen­tial­ly what I’m doing when I sit down at your computer and dig you out of your latest hole.

If only you’d make some more in­tel­li­gent guesses for yourself, you might be able to solve more of your problems.

But it’s not quite that simple.

You probably don’t understand very much about what you’re doing. I have enormous depth and breadth of experience which informs my in­ves­ti­ga­tion. I am—no false modesty here—a master of debugging. The extra context helps me hone in on a solution more often than not.

Still, do give the flowchart a shot. Being able to solve your own problems is …continue.

Jack Aubrey was disgraced in The Reverse of the Medal. He is now a civilian privateer, bitter at having been framed. Two ex­tra­or­di­nary actions do much to recommend him to the general public and make him wealthy, and by the end of this book, it seems certain that he will soon be restored to the Navy List. Stephen Maturin’s own fortunes improve as he effects a rec­on­cil­i­a­tion with his wife.

The Letter of Marque is the twelfth novel in the Aubrey-Maturin series. O’Brian once again writes …continue.

Patricia Teeling wants to experience more of life than farming and university, and moves to Dublin to be a science teacher. She quickly finds herself adrift, belonging no more in her country home yet not of the city. She is soon drawn to the married Englishman who lives downstairs. His wife is murdered after she receives obscene telephone calls. Then an attractive man with a limp—­dubbed the Goose­foot—ap­pears.

While the author has an enviable command of English, I found his characters to be tiresome and in­scrutable yet un­ac­count­ably eloquent. Patricia is improbably untouched by the …continue.

Before we left on our trip, I picked up a pair of 4GB SD cards for my point-and-shoot Canon Elph. I brought my Linux netbook along, which has a built-in SD card reader, and the cards worked fine with that.

But they didn’t work at all in any of the external card readers that I have, and I had to resort to a USB cable to transfer photos from the camera to my other computers.

Wikipedia discusses com­pat­i­bil­i­ty issues with 2GB and larger SD cards, which is initially what I thought the problem was. On looking more closely at the cards, I see that they’re the newer SDHC cards. The card readers were …continue.