We’re off to Spain and Ireland tomorrow evening, so lots of last-minute prepa­ra­tions tonight. I laid out my clothes on the spare bed on Sunday; Emma picked out hers this evening. I’ve just paid some bills and I’m trans­fer­ring files onto the netbook that I’m bringing.

I still have to whittle down the large pile of books that are under con­sid­er­a­tion. I don’t want to run out before we get to Ireland, but I don’t want to take too many. Depending on what else is going on, I’ll get through a book in a day or two when I’m on vacation. Maybe two books on those long plane flights.

I mentioned three weeks ago that I was putting together a group of people to see Greenstage‘s production of Shake­speare’s Comedy of Errors at the Seward Park Am­phithe­ater. Six of us braved the rain last night, ate our picnic, and enjoyed an hour and a half of ribald slapstick.

Almost all of the cast cross-dressed. The main male parts, the two sets of identical twin brothers, were played by women, The wife, her sister, and the courtesan were played by ugly men in the best panto dame tradition.

The play, like so many of Shake­speare’s comedies, requires an endless series of confused identities, which could be cleared up in moments if only someone paused …continue.

Two picnics this weekend.

Today we held the tenth annual BiNet Seattle picnic for the bisexual community, which I once again organized, with some help from Emma. Almost all of the preceding ones were held at Ravenna Park. Even though I booked the picnic back in March, Ravenna Park was un­avail­able this weekend, which was the only weekend that really suited me. We went to Golden Gardens Beach instead. It’s a nice park, but parking is atrocious on a busy weekend, which may explain the poor turnout. There were only 10 people, down from 20–30 for the last few years. Three new faces; the rest were regulars. As usual, Emma and I brought …continue.

For weeks, Lyn has been telling us about the musical talk that he was going to give today at his UU con­gre­ga­tion about Billy Strayhorn, a little-known but talented composer, who col­lab­o­rat­ed for decades with Duke Ellington. Strayhorn was openly gay in the homophobic decades before Stonewall. That, coupled with his apparent liking for remaining in Ellington’s shadow, probably con­tributed to his obscurity.

Lyn talked about Billy Strayhorn and his life and music for half an hour. He also ac­com­pa­nied Shirley singing some Strayhorn songs on piano, as Linda and Marion played the clarinet and cello. He said that Strayhorn’s life gives rise to two questions, Do you know who you really …continue.

I mentioned three weeks ago that I had just repaved my work dev box and installed the 64-bit version of the Windows 7 RC. Nine or ten years after I first ported parts of IIS to Win64, I am finally running my main desktop on 64-bit Windows. With one exception, it’s been painless. Programs have just worked, devices have just worked. There are relatively few native x64 ap­pli­ca­tions, but for the most part it doesn’t matter. The cases where it does matter—e.g., shell extensions such as Tor­tois­eSVN—are available as 64-bit binaries.

I briefly flirted with using the 64-bit build of Python, but realized that I would have to recompile several eggs as 64-bit …continue.

We held our rally for healthcare and the public option at lunchtime, outside the Jackson Federal Building where both Senators Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray have their Seattle offices.

Turnout was good: about 100 people, I’d say. We had about half-a-dozen speakers over 45 minutes. A cameraman from King–5 covered it, but I can’t find anything on their website. A handful of people went upstairs to the senators’ offices and delivered 291 pages of petitions.

One concrete suggestion that I came away with is to write a hand­writ­ten letter to the senators advocating for healthcare reform. Hand­writ­ten letters carry more weight than printed letters or calls and much more weight than emails.

Do it soon. If July slips away …continue.

We’re traveling to Spain and Ireland for three weeks. I’m bringing the netbook, not the 17" MacBook Pro, because it’s small and light. It doesn’t have a DVD player and I’d like to bring some DVDs to watch. I could either spend about $80 on an external DVD player, or I could rip the DVDs beforehand.

I’ve ripped a few DVDs with Handbrake, an open source, cross-platform video transcoder, which seems to do a good job. I’m playing them in the cross-platform VLC player, which released version 1.0.0 yesterday, after almost 8 years of de­vel­op­ment.

A couple of weeks ago, a group of us visited our senators’ offices to talk to their staffers about the Public Option in health care. We’re organizing a downtown Seattle rally at the Federal Building on Thursday at 12:15pm, where both Senators Cantwell and Murray have their offices. It’s one of the large number of rallies that MoveOn.org is organizing at senators’ offices all around the country on Thursday.

Will sent out this email to a number of people earlier this evening and I’m going to reprint it here.

"I think it’s fair to say that July is going to be the most historic and con­se­quen­tial period for health care re­for­m—per­haps …continue.

Lyn, Raven, and Iain came over on Friday night for dinner. We did a little planning for Frank’s memorial today and selected some poems.

Emma and I packed up the car and got to Lyn’s by noon, which gave us plenty of time to set up. I wore my com­mem­o­ra­tive Portland motsscon t-shirt, which I know Frank would have gotten a kick out of.

A dozen or so of Frank’s friends arrived around 2 o’clock. We chatted for a while waiting for Holly and Kim to arrive after fighting through the crowded ferry system from Vashon Island. Shirley sang You’re Not So Easy to Forget, while Lyn ac­com­pa­nied her on the keyboard. We moved outside …continue.

George Smiley has retired after the events of Call for the Dead. He is asked to look into the murder of the wife of a teacher at the exclusive Carne public school, as he can mix socially with the staff while the police cannot. She had sent a letter predicting that her husband would murder her. The couple were from a lower-class, Non­con­formist background. He had tried to assimilate, she had not, and it had rankled the snobs.

Smiley finds class prejudice and moral ambiguity as he observes …continue.