adamrice – Page 39

Pros and Converse

17 Dec 2008 / personal

Growing older has its pros and cons. Most of the pros are mental, most of the cons are physical.

When I was a little kid, I desperately wanted a pair of “high-tops” (I didn’t know what else to call them). When I was in second grade, my parents indulged me, but only once. I wore those out quickly enough, and didn’t get another pair.

Until I went to college and was living on my own (and, for better or worse, buying my own clothes). Chuck Taylors were the only shoes I wore throughout my college career, and for a long time after.

As I got older, I found that my feet had less and less tolerance for the complete lack of cushioning and support in Chuck Taylors. It wasn’t that the shoes had changed (although aficionados will always say “they don’t make ’em like they used to”), it was just one of the cons of getting older. I visited New York City in 2001 and did a prodigious amount of walking in Chucks. After a couple of days, I damn near felt crippled. When I got back to Austin, I broke down and bought a pair of “cross-trainers,” and have worn some variety or another ever since.

But I miss wearing Chuck Taylors. I still have a few pair, and trot them out for parties when I know I won’t be doing a lot of walking. I miss the simplicity and utilitarianism, the personality and playfulness. If they came out with a line of Chucks with modern soles, I would be all over them.

True fans would complain they weren’t real Chucks. Whatever. It’s a compromise my feet would gladly make. Converse no longer exists as an independent entity anyhow. It’s owned by Nike, which treats Chuck Taylors as a fashion brand and sells them for a premium.

Blago

14 Dec 2008 / current events

Imagine you are the governor of a fairly large state. After a historic election, a Senator from your state and member of your party has just been elected President. The incoming Senate will be close toâ€”but not quite atâ€”a cloture-proof majority. The incoming President will be facing a historic crisis, is enjoying unprecedented levels of goodwill, and ran as a transparent, clean-government candidate. It is your job to appoint his successor. Do you:

Appoint a caretaker who will step down in two years when the term ends, to avoid giving an appointee the advantages of incumbency (which, as it turns out, may not be such a big deal)?
Appoint someone who will be a strong candidate able to keep the seat for your party?
Attempt to shake down the President-elect, creating an aura of guilt-by-association for him, threatening the ability of the incoming administration to get work done, and weakening your party in your state?

If you picked #3, congratulations, you’re Rod Blagojevich. You’re also a fucking moron.

The fact that Blago did this over a phone that he knew was being bugged speaks not only to his obvious corruption, it is a sign of his deep, deep stupidity. The idea that he’d try to wring some mean little personal advantage out of the situation is obviously corrupt, but also shows his inability to see beyond his own nose: wouldn’t it be better all around to be in the good graces of the President? My former classmate (and let me tell you, it is very weird seeing her on TV) Lisa ~~Murray~~ Madigan is seeking to have him removed from office on the grounds that he can’t serve.

Forget about corruption. This guy is too dumb to breathe without assistance, much less serve the people of Illinois.

Custom key commands for Gmail

11 Dec 2008 / net stuff

If you use Gmail and have a keyboard with a numeric keypad, try turning on the Labs feature, and then turn on the “Custom keyboard shortcuts” gadget.

This will create a new tab under settings for your keyboard shortcuts. Following is a proposed set of shortcuts allowing for faster browsing and sorting, with what I consider a logical organization. Note that I’m not showing shortcuts for every command, only the ones I propose changing.

Action	Key(s)
Back to threadlist	4
Newer conversation	8
Older conversation	2
Select conversation	5
Star conversation	+
Report as spam	*
Move to trash	–
Open conversation	6
Previous message	9
Next message	3

Characters per word

09 Dec 2008 / translation

In Japanese-English translation, it’s useful to be able to estimate how long the English translation will be based on the number of Japanese characters in the source document. If you bill by the output word, you want to be able to give the client a cost estimate upfront, and if you estimate your productivity by the output word, you want some idea of how long a job is going to take.

Early in my career, I arrived at 2.2 Japanese characters per English word as a rule of thumb; I get the impression that a lot of JA-EN translators use a number around this. If a client asks me for an estimate, I’ve used 2 characters per word just to cover my ass.

Back when I started out, most jobs arrived by fax, so it was a lot of work to get an accurate character count on the source text. These days, most of my work arrives in some sort of live text, so it’s a lot easier. For the past year, I’ve been tracking the length of both the source and target documents when possible (my desire to track data like this is part of the reason I’m dissatisfied with every job-tracking app out there), and have come up with some average values for characters per word that surprise me.

Client A (newspaper articles, corporate communications): 2.66 characters per word
Client B (press releases): 2.92 characters per word.
Client C (discursive programming documentation): 3.10 characters per word
Client D (verbose corporate procedures): 3.16 characters per word
Client E (variety): 2.28 characters per word

There are a few jobs in my archive with more than 4 characters per word. I’m not sure if I’ve become a more economical translator with ageâ€”I’d like to think soâ€”but perhaps I need to rethink my rule of thumb. I’d like to know what numbers other translators come up with.

East Austin Studio Tour: an incomplete preview

21 Nov 2008 / Austin

This year’s edition of the East Austin Studio Tour is daunting, with some 200 artists taking part. I plan to see as many as possible, and encourage everyone else to, too. But if that’s just not in the cards, here are some tips for places to see that should give a good sampling on a limited time budget.

First off, ride your bike. Places are so close together you’ll likely spend at least as much time driving, parking, walking from car to each venue, and so on as you would if you rodeâ€”plus, bikes are more fun.

Second, there are a lot of different locations, but there are a few locations that have a lot of artists.

Here are some highlights. I am unapologetically playing favorites and calling out my friends here. The numbers below are the numbers given on the map.

9. Big Red Sun. Landscape architects. Always beautiful stuff here.

12. Okay Mountain. They always have interesting stuff.

14. Ethan Azarian. Whimsical paintings.

15. Barry George. Sculptures made out of scrapmetal. Do not miss.

30. Doghouse Studios. My friend Jen Balkan, who just got a nice writeup in the Chronicle, is based here.

151. Obsolete Industries. Poster printers. Yes, this is numbered out of sequence

45. Lisa Crowder. Jewelry with really nice silversmithing that combines fine work with a slightly industrial aesthetic. One of her studio-mates is a ceramicist who I don’t know but does nice work. And the Seussian building facade by Lance is a work of art in its own right.

49. Veronica Ceci Blasphemous robot art. Need I say more? There’s other good stuff at her location.

59. Splinter Group. Several furniture makers are based here, and they do stunning work.

60. Pump Project. This location probably has the most art, and the most artists, per square foot, of any place on the tour.

68. Big Medium. These are the guys who started E.A.S.T. Another high-density art complex.

70. Craig Newswanger is the mad scientist responsible for the singing Tesla coils. ‘Nuff said. He’s in a complex with a lot of other worthy artists, making this another high-value target.

78/79. Gingko Studios/Philippe Kleinfelter. Ceramics and monuments. It’s fun just to walk around this place. Sort of out of the way, but worth it.

84. Austin Artistic Reconstruction. These are my people. They are creative and weird.

91-99. Tillery Studios. This is where my good friend and neighbor Mychal has her studio, which is where Gwen will be the guest artist. This is a very big complex with a lot of very good stuff. Another high-value target.

127. Flatbed Press.

I know there’s a lot of other great stuff on the tour, and I don’t mean to give short shrift to anyone, but I feel confident recommending all these locations.

Do not patronize World Secure Channel

21 Nov 2008 / tidbit

Today, this site (and some others that I manage on the same server) was hacked by world-secure-channel.com, or more likely a piece-of-shit script-kiddie they contracted with, making me an unwilling part of a link-farm. World Secure Channel supposedly offers VPN services for anonymous browsing, but considering the respect they show for the integrity of my website, I can only wonder what they do with the data you would route through their servers.

Mutts like me

09 Nov 2008 / current events

In an his first press briefing as president-elect, Barack Obama referred to shelter dogs as “mutts like me.” Apart from the bracing self-deprecation, that offhand remark resonates for many Americans, who consider themselves mutts and are proud of it. Indeed, in a melting-pot society, what could be more American than being a mutt?

There’s some sublime conceptual jiu-jiutsu in this phrase. The enlightened position is that race is a cultural construction. We know that there is more genetic diversity among the members of one race than between races, and the lines separating one race from another are arbitrary. For America’s first black president and first biracial presidentâ€”the fact that both of these are valid statements reinforces the arbitrariness of raceâ€”to identify himself in this way turns his race, which could be a point of division, into a point of commonality.

I like that. I decided it should be on T-shirts. And now it is. Go get yourself one.

The text is set in Gotham, the typeface used in Obama’s campaign materials. The dog is Suki, and I worked up the image from a photo taken by my friend and his person, Casey.

We wonâ€”now what?

06 Nov 2008 / current events

It’s been hard for me to organize my thoughts about this election, and I won’t even try to cram them all into one blog post. Suffice to say I am very pleased with the outcome.

The big question in my mind is “now what?” When Bush was re-elected in 2004 with a razor-slim margin in both the popular and electoral vote, he claimed a mandate; he and his party were remarkably corrupt and high-handed in government. Obama has been elected with a healthy margin in the popular vote and a near-landslide in the electoral vote, despite which he is taking a conciliatory, cautious tone. But he was elected on a message of change, and right now, with national and world events such as they are, change is going to happenâ€”the question is whether he’ll be engineering the changes or be tossed around by them. Hope has gotten him this far. Now is the time for audacity.

When one party has had the run of Congress and the White House, they’ve tended to overreach and then get beat down in short order. One time when this conspicuously was not the case was during the Great Depression, when one party in the legislative and executive took bold action that was met with public approval. Everyone in the news telling us that our current economic peril is like nothing since that time.

And then there’s the Republicans. Shortly before the election, I wrote a comment on Metafilter that when the GOP is reduced to a bunch of anti-gay, anti-science, anti-abortion, anti-rest-of-the-world populists, it becomes self-limiting and easy to dismiss. If the USA had a GOP that stood mainly for things like limited government and fiscal responsibilityâ€”Eisenhower Republicans, you could sayâ€”it might bring something useful to the table.

Having lost the presidency and seen their contingents in the House and Senate reduced, the GOP is now in the introspection and wound-licking mode. One might hope that those Eisenhower Republicans would stand up and guide their party back to sanity. As Paul Krugman predicted, one would be disappointed. I had previously thought of RedState as one of the saner right-wing community sites. And they’re not as frothingly mad as, say, Free Republic (where some members were suggesting that Obama killed his own grandmother), but it is clear they have allied themselves with what we might call the Palin wing of the GOP: anti-gay, anti-science, anti-abortion, anti-rest-of-the-world, and from what I’ve read, party leaders are headed in that direction as well. If this really happens, it guarantees that the party will marginalize itself not only in terms of its representation in Washington, but in terms of its relevance to the country at large and questions of policy. Politics benefits from multiple viewpoints, but only when all of those viewpoints are founded on informed, open-minded, and reality-based positions.

The Democrats are not going to have a supermajority in the Senate, so the Republicans there may choose to gum up the works with filibusters. They may choose to sit back and watch while the Democrats screw things up (or so they will hope). They may not be able to filibuster at all if a few of their more moderate members decide to play along with the Democrats and the Democrats manage to maintain party unity. There may even be a few party-switchers coming over the to Democrats, as there were going the other way following the Republican revolution in 1994. If the GOP takes a more dogmatic tilt, this seems likely.

There’s a lot of work for Obama to do. There’s a lot that his supporters are expecting from him. And there may be little standing in the way of his taking bold action. He’s already made history and moved the country forward simply by being elected. I hope he keeps the momentum up.

Ride more bikes

13 Oct 2008 / cycling, personal

In the severe hailstorm that hit Austin back in May, our car took a beatingâ€”some of the dings were so sharp that the paint cracked at the point of impact. When I took it in to get a repair estimate, they told me they were going to have to replace the hood and roof. In short, major repairs.

We finally got around to taking the car in to get the repairs done, and as of today, have been without a car for three weeks. The experience has been instructive.

I’ve lived in Austin without a car before. That was as a renter, and it definitely involved compromises. It would be much more difficult to live here as a homeowner without a car.

I’ve only had to bum a ride once during these three weeks. And there are certainly a few car-based errands that we’ve deferred. But for the most part, we’ve managed pretty handily, and more importantly, it’s been a reminder that most of the short 1/2/3 mile errands we run can be accomplished just as well by bike.

It’s a little embarrassing that we got out of the habit of using our bikes for errands in the first place. We didn’t quit riding them entirely, but we didn’t ride them nearly as much as we might have. It’s hard to put a finger on why this is. Too lazy to ride? Perhaps in part. Another dumb reason might be our garage door. When we moved into this house, the garage (where we store the bikes) could only be locked or unlocked from inside. So to get the bike out I’d go into the garage, open the door, pull the bike off the wall, put it outside, come back in, lock the garage, go through the house, go out the front door, and lock that. This is not a huge inconvenience in the grand scheme of things, but it adds just enough friction to the process that we’re more often inclined to say “fuck it” and take the car. We had the garage door fixed a few months back, so we don’t have that trivial hurdle to overcome. And now we’ve been booted out of our bad habits by circumstances. I’m optimistic we won’t fall back into them.