I filled six densely packed barrels with yard waste today, before and after the victory barbecue for the Wild Geese Players. No wonder I’m tired.

Three barrels from the pile of clippings left over from cir­cum­cis­ing the camelia tree on Memorial Day weekend, and another three from the big bush that Emma hates in the front rock garden. The latter barely looks pruned at all.

Our 2009 Bloomsday reading is over! I thought it went very well. We had quite a large audience by our stan­dard­s—about 30 people, we got a lot of laughs, and most of them stayed until the end.

Of all the spaces that we’ve performed in, I like the University Bookstore the best. The events area is sunny, airy, and spacious, and easily discovered by customers in the store. The staff were very helpful and easy to work with. I’d prefer not to do another event on the same day as the University of Washington’s Com­menc­ment, however.

Eric came along with a big lens and took hundreds of photos. Emma took a few as …continue.

Sequel to Shad­ow­march. Southmarch is under siege by the fairy army and the teenaged regent, Briony, has been deposed by an ambitious noble. Briony is on the run, fleeing for her life. Her twin, Barrick, is lost, mentally and physically, behind the fairy lines. Far to the south, Qinnitan has suc­cess­ful­ly fled from the autarch, but now the autarch is besieging the city of Hierosol where she is hiding.

The second book in a trilogy often suffers from Middle Book Syndrome: the first book es­tab­lish­es the characters and the plot, the final book resolves …continue.

This morning, the video adapters on my Vista dev box were resetting 2–3 times per minute.

After a pile of Windows Updates landed on my machine at 3am yesterday, it would oc­ca­sion­al­ly freeze solid for a few seconds. Once in a while, all the monitors would go black briefly, then restore. Each time, I would see a status update pop up from the system tray, "Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding and has suc­cess­ful­ly recovered."

This was irritating enough that I downloaded the latest NVidia drivers this morning, 185.85_desk­top_win­vis­ta_32bit_eng­lish_whql.exe. That really screwed me. The video adapters started resetting 2–3 times per minute, rendering the machine almost unusable. I have two video adapters, NVidia GeForce 8600 …continue.

Ob­jec­ti­fied is a doc­u­men­tary about industrial design and the man­u­fac­tured objects that litter our lives. In interviews with some leading designers, Hustwit brings forth such topics as our emotional attachment to those objects; the ephemer­al­i­ty and planned ob­soles­ence of most of this “stuff”; the approaches of different designers; designing the man­u­fac­tur­ing process as well as the object; how good design often almost dis­ap­pears; sus­tain­abil­i­ty, when most objects end up in landfill; in­ter­ac­tion and interface design; etc.

The danger with such a broad survey is that you can’t do justice to anything. I was left wanting to know more about many of the topics. In the Q&A afterwards, …continue.

I just sent out the Evite for Frank’s memorial on July 5th. If you didn’t receive a copy and you’d like to go, let me know.

Next up, choose the poems and music. We may reprise some of those that I read at Toast­mas­ters. Certainly, we should read “How to Eat a Slug”.

Perhaps the most ir­refutable sign of middle age for me was getting pro­gres­sive lenses six months ago.

I had noticed for several months that I was having a little difficulty with smaller print, and a visit to the op­tometrist confirmed that I needed reading glasses. Now I’m near-sighted and far-sighted, all at the same time.

The new glasses took some getting used to. I had been accustomed to looking through any part of the lens. Now I had to tilt my head downwards rather than simply turn my eyes down, if I wanted to look at the floor, or I’d be looking through the short-distance reading portion.

These lenses are also noticeably heavier …continue.

Kubota Garden is a little-known gem in the Rainier Beach area of south Seattle. Twenty acres of hills and valleys in a Japanese style.

Emma and I met Lyndol down there this morning and rambled through the garden for two hours. It was a fine, overcast day, with tem­per­a­tures in the low 60s and occasional driz­zle—and a pleasant relief from the record heat of earlier this week. I had visited there before: it’s at the far end of the Chief Sealth bicycle trail. Lyn had too, but it was Emma’s first visit.

The gate was locked when we arrived at 10:30, though the sign proclaimed that it was open from 6am …continue.

ESR writes about Elo­cu­tion­ary Punc­tu­a­tion, dis­tin­guish­ing it from syntactic punc­tu­a­tion. The latter, says he, is the style taught in schools, where the punc­tu­a­tion cor­re­sponds to gram­mat­i­cal phrase structure. Elo­cu­tion­ary punc­tu­a­tion treats punc­tu­a­tion as markers of speech cadence and intonation.

I think I fall in this camp. I’m careful about my punc­tu­a­tion, though I can’t nec­es­sar­i­ly articulate why I choose one way over another. If it sounds right in my head, that’s the way I go. Even before I started doing staged readings, I paid attention to how my writing would sound, were it read aloud.

While I’m pon­tif­i­cat­ing on punc­tu­a­tion, let me say that I’m a firm proponent of the serial comma—the comma just before the final …continue.

Google finally released the much-an­tic­i­pat­ed Chrome preview for Mac and Linux yesterday. I’ve tried it on my OS 10.5 MacBook and my Ubuntu Jaunty Netbook Remix netbook.

Chrome works fairly well, so far. It seems slow at resolving hostnames, but otherwise downloads pages quickly. Rendering speed is good. Gmail comes up in an amazingly short time, as in Windows Chrome. It uses less CPU than Safari or Camino.

Favicons are not showing up in tabs on Mac. Fonts are not an­tialiased on Linux.

As a user, I’m happy to see that there is real com­pe­ti­tion between the browsers after the stagnation in the first half of this decade, when IE6 ruled. As a web developer, it’s a …continue.