When The Matrix Reloaded was released early this summer, one of the more bizarre criticisms of the film was that it lacked vampires and werewolves. Even more astonishing was that one of my oldest and bestest friends agreed.

I thought the issue was dead and buried (hee!)… but, err, no. Behold Underworld: a rather hastily-thrown-together port of the Matrix look-and-feel, complete with hordes of monstrous werewolves and vampires lurking in the shadows.¹ Oh, there are some cosmetic differences. The grim faced warrior-babe in black pleather is played by Kate Beckinsale; the confused surfer dude who might have mysterious, untapped superpowers is played by… some guy from Felicity. But there you go — the Matrix with lots of guns and swords and vampires and werewolves. With a Romeo-and-Juliet spin. Sam and I saw it last night, and all I have to say is, happy now, Sammy? Actually, I already know the answer to that question.²

In Other News: Idiotic Newspaper Columnist Excoriates Idiotic Sun Trademark Policy. Now I hate picking on the Mercury News — it’s basically my hometown paper, and M’ris lobs enough stinkbombs their way as it is. I’m also trying to avoid using the word “idiotic”, because it’s really just a forceful reminder of how easily web writing can degenerate into childish namecalling. I’m approaching 30 now, and such behavior is unbecoming.³ That said, Dan Gillmor just gets under my skin. Maybe it’s his unrelenting histrionic tone. Or maybe a very good friend of mine happened to have the misfortune to have worked with him, and I now have plenty of (secondhand) Dan Stories. Whatever, the guy bugs me.

Now, as an ex-Sun employee, I have to say that while there are plenty of complaints one could make against Sun, being upset that they have a 3rd-party trademark policy is just obtuse. All 3rd-party trademark policies consist of silly, pedantic guidelines on how to properly string together product names. That’s essentially what trademark policies are. As one of Dan’s astute readers pointed out, Apple’s trademark policy for 3rd parties is quite similar to Sun’s. Meanwhile, Knight Ridder (Dan’s employer) neatly avoids this problem by simply forbidding all unauthorized usage of their trademarks whatsoever. Well, that’s much less idiotic.

What about other major computer companies? Perhaps they don’t have such “ridiculous rules.” Let’s see, here’s some ridiculous rules from IBM. Or what about Microsoft? Eeek, not only do they have a trademark policy, but they have specific guidelines just for the media. Outrageous! What about the First Amendment!? Freedom of the Press! I can just see Dan’s hysterical column/rant on that one. It practically writes itself.

But of course those are all giant world-dominating computer corporations. Wicked, bad, naughty, evil corporations. So what about warm, fuzzy open-source Red Hat? Nope, they’ve got a substantial trademarks section, complete with — wait for it! — examples for 3rd-party usage. Okay, but how ’bout OSDN, home of Slashdot and SourceForge and all that is Good and Right and True in the computer industry today? Turns out their statement on 3rd-party usage is buried in the OSDN Terms of Service: “Users may display or use the OSDN Marks and VA Marks only in accordance with OSDN’s and VA’s Trademark Use Guidelines.” Unfortunately, said “Use Guidelines” are helpfully not linked, and after struggling with OSDN’s site navigation and search engine, I soon gave up trying to find them. Perhaps OSDN has the smartest 3rd-party trademark guideline of all: the phantom guideline. At least that provides protection from what every company fears most: the mocking of journalists who, despite having over two decades of experience in the industry, don’t have the first clue about how trademarks work in the real world.

1. Not unlike Windows XP.

2. “No.”

3. Then again, Dan is much older than me and he uses “idiotic” freely. So what the heck.

Jacques has a nifty new feature on his sidebar that serves up a random “Bushism” every hour (taken from the master list at Slate.com). Whoa, I thought. Is Slate serving up an RSS feed of Bushisms? Did Jacques build some sort of custom HTML scraper tool in his copious free time? The truth was a bit more mundane — Jacques simply pasted all the quotes in a local flat file. Heck, even I coulda written a script to handle that. Says Jacques: “My motto is, ‘Low-tech solutions for a low-tech presidency.'” Heh.

In Other News: my blogmother M’ris has done got herself her first house!

That’s good!

The house is in faraway Minnesota.

That’s bad.

The house is really nice, though, and they’re very happy with it.

That’s good!

But the house was almost taken away at the last minute by Steve the Accursed Mortgage Being.

That’s bad.

They replaced Steve with Pam the New Mortgage Being.

…

That’s good.

Can I go now?

First Jason Kottke. Then Dave Shea. Then fwammo! — a whole ‘mess of articles on XHTML, semantics, and standards. Note to self: if one had anything to say on this general subject — say, for example, something on the absolute necessity of “bulletproofing” one’s XHTML — now would be an excellent time to write it up and get it posted in a prominent place. Hmmm.

In other news, my baby sister has tripped off to college. I think I’m feeling a small taste of what my parents must be feeling. We’re supposed to be excited for her and all, this is a wonderful opportunity for her, but…

The good news is that baby sis and I finally got to see Ferris Bueller’s Day Off together. When I learned she hadn’t seen it yet, I was horrified — this would have to be rectified immediately. I was a bit worried that the movie wouldn’t translate very well across half a generation, but thank goodness, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off stood the test of time.¹ We were both crying with laughter at the “Star Wars” flying-car scene — she seeing it for the first time, me for the sixth or seventh at least. Fabulous stuff. Somehow Ferris manages to be a great teen movie without resorting to endless bodily fluid jokes. (I suppose there was a vomit joke or two in there, but it was electronically-faked vomit, which is forgivable.)

Anyway, because I’m feeling bummed, I thought I’d post something I read a few days ago that cheered me up immensely. The following is from the transcript of last week’s live chat with Carolyn Hax, the Washington Post’s advice columnist. Hax rocks, but her regular readers (the “peanuts”) sometimes rock harder.

The Twilight Zone: My father has cancer and I need to go home to help my mother take care of him. Since my parents are being bankrupted by medical bills, and I’m a non-profit grunt, my father’s (wealthy) mother offered to pay for my plane fare. She sent the check last week and then calls me up last night (she has never called me before in my life) to accuse me of inflating the cost of the tickets to get more money out of her. I’m mortified that she would even ask. So my questions are: I know that your job entails a lot of head-banging and I was wondering what materials you would recommend: walls, wooden posts or metal poles? And when she dies and I get my inheritence, should I blow it all on something frivolous, or donate it all to a Jewish charity (she hates the fact that my father married a Jew and my brother and I are Jewish)?

Carolyn Hax: Answer: Yes, people really are that awful. I’m sorry. Any chance you can afford to send her check back, or pay her back for the ticket? Even if it takes you years of monthly installments, the satisfaction might be worth it.

Hax handles several more questions in the chat, and then…

Re: Twilight Zone: I’m the CFO of a small Jewish charity in Rockville. How soon is Grandma expected to be of blessed memory?

Carolyn Hax: I love my job.

1. With a few exceptions — for example, Sloane’s fringed leather jacket did not stand the test of time.

Via Jacques Distler, I ran across this lovely article about gem-quality artificial diamonds. According to the article, the DeBeers cartel is pretty freaked out.

In Antwerp, Van Royen tells me of another threat. There’s a rumor of a new, experimental method for growing gem-quality diamonds. The process – chemical vapor deposition – has been used for more than a decade to cover relatively large surfaces with microscopic diamond crystals. The technique transforms carbon into a plasma, which then precipitates onto a substrate as diamond. The problem with the technology has always been that no one could figure out how to grow a single crystal using the method. At least until now, Van Royen says. Apollo Diamond, a shadowy company in Boston, is rumored to be sitting on a single-crystal breakthrough. If true, it represents a new challenge to the industry, since CVD diamonds could conceivably be grown in large bricks that, when cut and polished, would be indistinguishable from natural diamonds. “But nobody has seen them in Antwerp,” Van Royen says. “So we don’t even know if they are for real.”

I take a transparent 35-millimeter film canister from my pocket and put it on the table. Two small diamonds are cushioned on cotton balls inside. “Believe me,” I say, “they’re for real.”

Longtime readers of this journal¹ might recall that I’ve been concerned about diamonds for a while now. I’ve wanted nothing to do with the unscrupulous DeBeers cartel and their nasty “conflict diamonds”. In fact, I had pretty much given up on the idea of engagement rings altogether until M’ris pointed out that you need something to brand your spouse as property. But what, then? M’ris suggested tattoos. I thought that a tattoo might be too subtle, but M’ris replied that the tattoo would simply need to be across the forehead and read, “TAKEN”. Problem solved!

Speaking of M’ris, I now have proof that the officially silly California recall is entirely her fault. When she was in Minnesota, Jesse Ventura was elected governor. Now that she’s in California, we get this recall circus. Coincidence??? I think not, and neither does her old friend Scott. Now, sure — you nitpickers are saying, “Evan, aren’t you coming a little unhinged? That doesn’t exactly constitute proof, old boy.” Well, then, consider this: I’ve done a little² linguistic research and just as I suspected, in her native Norsk tongue “Marissa Kristine Gritter” translates as “The all-powerful warrior woman who, because of her endurance and inflexible will to win, will go from gubernatorial debacle to gubernatorial debacle leaving fire in her wake.” I dunno, seems awfully suspicious to me.

1. I.e. Marissa, my sister, my brother-in-law, and Mom.

2. Obviously very little.

• Fortune Magazine: Is a Futures Market on Terror Outlandish?

  Yet another mainstream publication stumbles upon Salon.com’s patented technique of writing contrarian articles that trample both logic and good taste in order to draw a few extra readers. On message boards this is called “trolling“; on Madison Avenue, this is called “guerilla marketing”. Dude, Fortune — when the Cato Institute is crapping all over your market-based solution, it’s time to pick up your marbles and go home.

• Speaking of good ol’ contrarian Salon.com, it turns out they’re (surprise!) rather enamored of the movie Gigli. Although reviewer Charles Taylor deems it a “minor failure”, the film still “deserves credit for its refreshingly frank sexuality.” Heh. If “It’s turkey time! Gobble, gobble!” constitutes “refreshingly frank sexuality”, you Earthlings are straaange cats indeed.

• John Gruber solves his labor shortage problem in Code Monkey:

  See, back in 1998 I became the owner of a South American woolly monkey, whom I named Paco, with the intention of training him to assist in my freelance graphic design work. Everyone told me this was a terrible idea, that it would not work, that at the very least I would need a chimpanzee or orangutan, that a mere monkey would never be able to do graphic design.

  Everyone in the Bay Area is worried about losing their programming jobs to cheaper labor from overseas. Meanwhile the real danger is lurking right around the corner, brandishing a banana.

• Darren Barefoot and his Hall of Technical Documentation Weirdness: “Note that I’m not looking for just bad technical writing–there are plenty of examples of that. I’m looking for the inexplicable, the surreal and the strange.” By the way, if you’ve somehow gotten it into your head that all young male technical writers are as suave and handsome as this Darren character… well, you’d be dead right.

• Speaking of suave and handsome, take a gander at ESPN’s Eric Karabell and DiveIntoMark’s Mark Pilgrim. Separated at birth?? We report, you decide.

• The Onion, NPR Listener Acquires Kick-Ass Tote Bag
  (scroll to bottom):

  “If I knew listening to Morning Edition every day before breakfast was gonna get me this cool bag, shit, I woulda sent them money a long time ago.” Hasaji added that Renee Montagne’s insightful interview with author Diana Abu-Jaber was “totally off the hook.”

  I think we would all have to agree that Renee Montagne is indeed “totally off the hook.” Still, she ain’t got nothin’ on my Nina.

• Finally… in case you were wondering, it turns out that Xena Is the Very Model of a Heroine Barbarian:

  Xena:
  
  I am the very model of a heroine barbarian;
  Through Herculean efforts, I’ve become humanitarian.
  I ride throughout the hinterland — at least that’s what they call it in
  Those sissy towns like Athens (I, myself, am Amphipolitan).
  I travel with a poet who is perky and parthenian
  And scribbles her hexameters in Linear Mycenian
  (And many have attempted, by a host of methods mystical,
  To tell if our relationship’s sororal or sapphistical).
  

  Chorus:
  
  To tell if their relationship’s sororal or sapphistical!
  To tell if their relationship’s sororal or sapphistical!
  To tell if their relationship’s sororal or sapphisti-phistical!
  

Yup, I’m out.

I’ve been trying to get M’ris to add an RSS feed to her journal. Considering that M’ris hand-codes every one of her entries, this is a dubious proposition at best. Nevertheless, I soldiered on with what I thought was an extraordinarily persuasive argument:

This would make MY life much easier. Oh, I’m sure you’re thinking that this would involve some work for you. But why are you always thinking about yourself? It should be about me, me, meee!

She replied that:

You should never believe that other people aren’t thinking about you, you, yoooooou. If it appears that we aren’t, you should convince yourself that we are preparing an elaborate surprise for you. The longer you have to wait for it, the more elaborate it’s likely to be. Aren’t we nice?

So while I wait for what is bound to be an extraordinary surprise from M’ris & co., here are some items in brief:

• Poker night tonight. I hope to continue my massive winning streak from last time, where I took ’em for twelve dollars. Just eight or nine more nights like that, and I’ll be back in the black.

• Or about thirty-five more nights like that, and I’ll have paid for my recent brake job. When one’s brakes go from making a squeaking noise to making a rattling, grinding noise, it’s behooves one to take care of the problem, damn the cost.

  Not that I’m unhappy about this. On the contrary! It’s like my old Rastafarian roommate Miles used to say, usually while grinning from ear-to-ear, “I love paying bills.” Why do you love paying bills, Miles? “Because I hate having my power and phone shut off.” Truer words were never spoken. I love paying for brake repair. I hate involuntarily sailing through busy intersections.

• With the aid of my newly repaired brakes, I popped down to LA for the weekend. I saw Eric and Susan, Jason and Megan, and Elana and Adiv. Now that was all nice, but the real triumph of the weekend (not to give short shrift to my oldest friends and my sister and brother-in-law) was the successful Quest for Donutman Strawberry Doughnuts.

• For years, I thought I had lost Donutman forever. I couldn’t quite remember how to get there, and to make matters worse I couldn’t quite remember the name of the place: I thought it might be “Donutman”, but I also remember that back in my college days, many of us called it “Foster’s” (which may I say is quite wrong: it’s “Donutman”). My searches on the web pulled up nothing — I found a couple of personal websites raving about the donuts, but none of them provided an address or directions or anything useful. Heartbreaking but true.

  So on Sunday morning Eric, Susan, and I struck out for the Claremont area. Our original plan was to find some poor student playing frisbee, kidnap him or her, and extract the information by all means necessary. Desperate times call for desperate measures. Fortunately it didn’t come to that — the street names started to look familiar to me again, and soon enough we found Donutman. And I had me a strawberry doughnut. Huzzah!

  For future reference, Donutman is located on 915 E. Alosta in Glendora, CA. The nearest major cross street is Elwood. If this information helps just one poor, befuddled alumnus of the Claremont Colleges find their strawberry doughnut, this journal entry — nay, this entire website — will have been worth it.

I’ve decided that Cory Doctorow is a brilliant man. Sure, I got a kick out of his opus, Complete Idiot’s Guide to Publishing Science Fiction. I mean, who didn’t? But if you really want to move to the next level, I think you need to write a useful article on meta-information. It’s hard enough to write a comprehensible article on meta-information, let alone a funny one.¹ I wait only for the day when I can cry, “Unleash the vengeful info-ninjas!” and really, like, mean it. I suppose this would require the purchase of A) a cat and B) a subterranean volcanic lair… but a man can dream, can’t he?

In Other News: Mom informs me that you can in fact sew a seam invisibly. Who knew that sewing technology had reached such an advanced state! Well, I’ll believe it when I see it. Also, I attended Jay’s New Years party (Festivus ’02.) Jay and Shelley were recovering from a nasty case of the flu, so a couple of the other guests and I worked in the kitchen early in order to get all the food ready. I made a double batch of mojitos, which were quite a hit, if I do say so myself. Now according to Hank Steuver of the Washington Post, mojitos are “out” this year. Then again, this is the same Hank Steuver who wrote that horrific article last year entitled ‘Harry’ and the Nation of Dweebs, in which he laments the rise of geek culture and fantasizes about beating up those who are weaker than he is. So really, I interpret his deprecation of my favorite drink² as a badge of honor.

I also learned how to make salmon paté with no food processor. Just lots of chopping. “Peasant-style,” said one of the other cooks. (Just like great-grandmother in the shtetl used to make.) The pate was pretty good, but we made over two pounds of the stuff. We basically ran out of bread to put the pate on (although one guest was happily dipping tortilla chips into it), leaving us with about a pound of diced fish at the end of the evening. Shelley forced me to take it all home. That’s a lot of fish. I suppose that on the bright side, I hear that fish is pretty good for you. As my old professor Peter Saeta likes to say, “Every floating mass of buoyant hydrogenous precipitates possesses argentine surface properties.”

1. Contrary to Doctorow’s article, there are in fact no “Plam Pilots” currently on eBay… although they do have what looks like a good deal on a “JVC PLAM SIZED CAMCORDER!!!!!!!!!“.

2. Just for the record, I’ve been drinking mojitos for years — before they started appearing in GQ and the like, and way before James Bond saw fit to order one. Thank you.

Yet another schmuck is suing Google for something. It must be Monday.

So last weekend was pretty good. Saturday was Jan and Nef’s wedding, a very classy affair. For the ceremony, they chose a gorgeous little spot in Fort Mason with a view of the bridge. Of course, when you hold an outdoor wedding in a San Francisco park, you always run the risk of finding an obscenity-spewing “Vietnam veteran” stumbling through your reserved location… and this particular occasion was no exception. Fortunately, said veteran was convinced to take his leave, and the ceremony was able to begin without interruption.

After the ceremony, we all took a ride on a pseudo-cable car through the Presidio, and then sat down for a nice dinner. Good wine, and lots of it, was served. There were lots of Mudders in attendance who I hadn’t seen in years, although honestly I spent much of the time playing with Katie (Page’s two-year-old daughter) and Karen (Wendy and Phil’s two-month-old daughter). Little Karen was polite enough not to spit up on my only suit — I can already tell that Wendy and Phil are going to be excellent parents.

Now Katie, unlike Karen, happens to know all the Poker Buddies^TM. In fact, when she comes home from daycare on our poker nights, she always blows us kisses and says “Night-night!” to all of us before going to bed. It’s kind of difficult to maintain your tough-guy poker facade when all the other tough poker guys are grinning like idiots and saying, “Night-night, Katie! Night-night!” in high-pitched voices. Sheesh, we’re pathetic. Now in the old days Katie treated us all equally. However, a couple of weeks ago I attended the San Carlos Art Festival with Page, his wife Jan¹, and a bunch of friends of theirs. Basically, Page and I walked Katie around, I carried Katie on my shoulders, we swung her as we walked… you know, typical father/daughter/random-poker-buddy-of-father stuff. Well, ever since then, Katie has been calling me by name and running up to hug me. I guess all I have to say to the other Poker Buddies is Ha ha ha, Katie loves me best.

But I digress.

Sunday was also a good day. I have lots of spare PC parts lying around the house, and I came up with a grandiose plan to use them up: build a system for my little sister. She could use one for college next year, after all. I figured that all I really needed was a new CPU and motherboard, and we were golden.

Ah… how naive I was. At first, I could only get the CPU fan to run. No hard drive spinning, no LEDs, no nothing. After much frustration and fiddling with a voltmeter, I discovered that Pentium IV motherboards require an entirely new kind of power supply. (When all else fails, read the directions.) Then I learned that Intel’s new 845/850 chipsets have implemented a remarkable new feature called, “If you plug in an AGP 2X video card, you will damage your motherboard“. That would be, as they say, double-plus ungood. In other words, the old ATI video card I wanted to use is right out. At least on Sunday I got the new power supply. Now the hard drive spins up, the LEDs light, and the system makes a lot of loud angry beeps. But they’re the right kind of angry beeps², so it’s a victory. Of sorts.

1. Not the same Jan that was getting married Saturday. Page’s wife Jan is already married… to Page. Pay attention, people.

2. The beeps are saying, “You idiot! Where’s my video card?”