bear

Acqs & acks & ads, oh Flickr.

Tue, 21 May 2013 19:02:24 GMT

Rumors were swirling over the weekend about Yahoo acquiring Tumblr. Or, possibly, Facebook acquiring Tumblr to prevent anyone else from doing so.

Yahoo did buy Tumblr, and of course lots of people were talking about it this morning. I think in the long run, Tumblr was kind of doomed anyway without a buyout deal, because they still haven't figured out a good business model. And with the spectre of a Facebook buyout raised, I'd take my chances with a Yahoo-owned Tumblr over a Facebook-owned Tumblr.

That being said, I think Yahoo's model has been pretty detrimental to the properties they've bought overall. Their pattern has been to integrate Yahoo-specific hooks into their new acquisitions, then benignly neglect them, then reap the results of that neglect by shrinking the staff (whether by pulling them to work on other projects or just letting them go), and then close or "sunset" them, in a way that would make it difficult for those properties to pull out the Yahoo-restricted code and go on as an independent from there. Then again, I might still be traumatized on multiple vectors from how they handled the Delicious "sunset," both personal and professional. (And that's far from the first acquisition Yahoo has screwed up.)

I *want* Mayer to be the second coming, to have a coherent vision, for her actions to all be driving towards her vision. I want to regain my confidence in Flickr's future. The new mobile app has helped a little; it's still playing catch-up, but it seems to indicate that they're not fully asleep at the wheel anymore. But I'm still wary. And realistically, the only thing that's going to give me confidence isn't going to be a lightning bolt one-time action, it's going to be seeing Mayer's actions to turn Yahoo around *work* over a long period of time, while minimizing the destruction of things I love in Yahoo's custody.

But Tumblr, for me, is a take-it-or-leave-it proposition. I'm not nearly as engaged over there as I am elsewhere. What drew me into the Tumblr stories: the footnote that Yahoo was expected to announce updates to Flickr Monday afternoon.

( Flickr account type comparison table: the updates )

1. Eligible Pro members have the option to switch to a Free account until 8/20/2013. What happens after that, I don't know. Automatic downgrade to Free? Automatic switch to Ad-Free?
2. Check your account history to see if you're currently on a renewing subscription or a one-time purchase.
3. It is possible to upgrade to the "Doublr" account, with all the privileges of the Free account type, and an additional terabyte of storage for a total of 2TB. Doublr is priced at $500/year. Because of this, I didn't bother giving it its own column in the table. Honestly, Doublr and Ad-Free seem more like a la carte add-ons than fully differentiated account types.
4. It is unclear to me what quality of HD video this limits Pro accounts to. Somebody with more familiarity with typical video file sizes will know better than I will. It's also unclear that the previous restriction of only Pro users being able to view HD video will remain; more likely that the FAQ just hasn't been updated yet.
5. And here's where we come to the big problem for me.

So it's unclear how much longer Pro users will get to keep their Pro accounts. And when Pro users switch to Ad-Free, they'll be paying twice as much per year to not see ads. And Flickr's wording here is pretty canny:

Pro accounts have "ad-free browsing and sharing;" Ad-Free accounts only promise "no ads in your browsing experience."

In other words? Free users are going to see ads on your Flickr photo pages, at the very least. What happens when you embed your Flickr-hosted photos somewhere else? And a free user, or somebody without a Flickr or Yahoo account, views your photos?

And yet, where else can we go? Where else can I see my friends' photos in a convenient community feed, and vice versa? We already know the answer to that, the ones we didn't want to hear: Facebook or Google.

I've been a Flickr Pro user for a number of years; even after I expressed my doubts about Flickr's long-term viability last year, I've kept my Pro account. As much as SmugMug is a better fit for my desire to be prioritized over advertisers as a customer, it's not community-oriented in its vision. There is no friends feed, like there is on Flickr and Facebook, and even if there was, I know exactly one other person using SmugMug right now anyway. And the costs aren't trivial ($40/year for the lowest level account). But they do seem to be rooted in the reality of running a successful independent web service. It's not perfect. 500px may be another option, but I don't see a friends' photos feed there, either. Both seem to be more oriented towards helping you sell your photos, though.

I'd hoped Yahoo investment in Flickr would help turn it into a solid Facebook competitor. Not this round. Nobody trusts Google/Picasa, either, and they're barreling straight down the realname path Facebook forged. So. How do we solve this? Go back to personal hosting? Wait, isn't RSS dying, too? :P Plus, the problems of the network effect are well-known, and difficult to overcome. We have this conundrum in modern Western society - we've come to trust and support larger global companies and forgive them their follies more than our smaller independent companies at the same time that we've also ceded our financial stakes in them to global advertisers.

But of course, all the smaller services I've been supporting haven't integrated modern things I consider core to my internet experience, like friends feeds or social collaboration. (Pinboard, I'm grateful for you; you saw a gigantic horde of us coming over from your social ex-competitor and you listened to us and made room for us, but you have a massive metadata problem in your "antisocial" culture, and that is probably eventually going to cause me to leave, because that's a cultural lack-of-fit I desperately want to fix. SmugMug, you're fancy and powerful, but I can't even share my photos with my friends without having to send them back out elsewhere like Facebook?) Which, you know, one-person products. Or at least small-team products. And I'm not saying these are simple things to implement, at all. They require dev time that's at a premium in smaller companies, and they also require that the visionary for the given software thinks that social stuff like that is a priority or a benefit for the culture they've been developing. But dammit, I still want more.

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the violence that doesn't get headlines in boston

Tue, 07 May 2013 17:06:28 GMT

It's been three weeks since the Marathon bombings. Just under three weeks since the creation of The One Fund Boston, meant to funnel funds towards victims of the bombings. Two and a half weeks since the lockdown, during which time we wished for bacon, not guns.

I knew many people who'd gone to watch at least some of the Marathon; it wouldn't have surprised me if my husband, an avid runner, had decided to take a long lunch that day and wander down to the finish line to see some of the action. I might have even been there myself if I'd felt like dealing with the crowds, because it's an important event in my personal conception of Boston. Thankfully, neither of us were. But that was just one day, one shocking event that might have affected us. In truth, we both worry about each other *every* day, about the epidemic of violence in the neighborhood we live in and commute through, about surviving to come home to each other. Because we live in Roxbury.

Since April 15, the day of the bombings, Boston has had 28 shootings. Roxbury *alone* has had 14 people shot, five of them murdered.

- May 3, 1:30 pm: two shot at 416 Warren St. Both died.
- May 3, 12:45 am: two shot at 41 Prentiss St. One died.
- April 29, 9:00 pm: two shot at 65 Beech Glen St.
- April 26, 10:30 pm: one shot at 90 Regent St.
- April 20, 1:35 am: one shot at 52 Copeland St. Died. Hours after the manhunt for the Tsarnaevs came to a close.
- April 17, 10:00 pm: two shot at 609 Shawmut Ave. These would be out of a total of ~~six~~ seven shootings overnight 4/17-4/18 in the entire city of Boston, five of those in majority-black service-class neighborhoods in Boston.
- April 17, 8:30 pm: one shot at 237 Dudley St. Died.
- April 16, 2:30 pm: three shot at Martin Luther King Blvd at Mayfair St.

This list does not include shootings where nobody was reported injured, nor self-inflicted shootings like the one on April 15 near Dudley, nor stabbings, nor other acts of violence, because isn't this depressing enough?

Edit: have a map of the Roxbury shootings, for context.

I linked to the Universal Hub articles rather than the Boston.com ones, because, well. The morning of April 18, where there were seven shootings in Boston the night before? I wish I'd thought to grab a screenshot of Boston.com. Above the fold: seven stories, a slideshow, a liveblog, all about the Marathon bombings. Screen two: 30 more stories related to the incidents at the Marathon, with another link to "Complete Coverage of Marathon Bombings." Screen three finally gets to other news, and it wasn't even until screen four that *one* of the shooting incidents got a link. (The two shot in Dorchester.)

Eileen McNamara, a journalism professor at Brandeis, notes:

We are very particular in this country about the kind of violence that mobilizes us to talk — if not act — about public safety and gun control. The slaughter of little children in a Connecticut elementary school. The carnage in a Colorado movie theater. An assassination attempt at a Tuscon shopping mall. An act of terror at the Boston Marathon.

The more insidious and persistent violence, that spawned by gangs and drugs and poverty and despair, barely registers on the consciousness of those with the good fortune to live outside the battle zone.

(One might also note that the Sikh temple shootings weren't mentioned in that first paragraph, and for good reason - America didn't want to talk about that, either.)

Jamahrl Crawford (blackstonian) points out:

When the tragedy at the Boston Marathon occurred there was a noticeable difference in the handling by law enforcement and the media and elected officials and the private sector which all echoed the fact that THIS IS important. Conversely, the lack of response to primarily Black and Brown pain and trauma indicates that THIS ISN’T important.

At the prompting of Gov. Patrick and Mayor Menino, local corporations and every day citizens alike began contributing to the “One Fund” and within one week had generated over $20 million dollars (now at $26.7 mil) which to many communities of color struggling with violence, school closings, community center closings, etc. seemed like a huge slap in the face. Its as if there is a magic money bag that appears when something “important” happens or when there is a “tragedy” or a loss of people of “value” to instantly address the situation and care for “victims” who have been traumatized. Unfortunately for Black and Brown people from Boston to New York to Detroit to Chicago to Atlanta to Compton we are left to fend for ourselves and bury our own dead.

So I went and looked at the 2010 Census data, and plotted out the demographics for the census tracts where the Marathon bombings took place, and the census tracts where the Roxbury shootings since then have taken place. (I've also got the data for the non-Roxbury shootings in notes, but I haven't had a chance to enter it into the spreadsheet yet, nor research those incidents' media coverage, and I want to get this posted.) The breakdown:

- Three shootings were in majority-white tracts (in Brighton, the South End, and Roslindale).
- Seven shootings were in multiracial tracts, where no one race dominates. This includes the two Prentiss Street shootings, which is technically considered Roxbury, but Prentiss Street is in an area where Northeastern University students dominate the population (over 50% of the 18-and-over population in that tract is under 25).
- Six shootings were in majority-black tracts in Dorchester.
- The remaining 12 shootings were in majority-black tracts in Roxbury.

I was at a group dinner Thursday night, with mostly white professional-class people (if minorities along other vectors). When I mentioned that we were apartment hunting because we were tired of the violence in our neighborhood, people in my vicinity mostly nodded sympathetically, continuing other talk as is typical for a long-table dinner gathering. When I cited the numbers in passing, it brought dinner conversation to a dead halt. Nobody knew how to respond.

Then again, it's not like I have any answers, either. Because three weeks ago, I was cursing the 45 senators that voted against the Manchin-Toomey amendment (which was primarily to close a loophole on the lack of mandatory background checks at gun shows, an act supported by 90% of Americans) and the gun lobbyists who donated money to 42 of them. But Manchin-Toomey doesn't matter in a world where you can now print yourself a plastic gun ~~and ammo~~ that shoots standard ammunition, with absolutely no background check whatsoever. And even if you don't personally have access to a 3D printer (spoiler: you can buy them at Staples; that price will only continue to drop), there are still people like Kyle Coplen and his Armed Citizens Project, giving away guns.

And blackstonian continues to update the count as it grows.

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quickly

Wed, 01 May 2013 04:19:52 GMT

Happy birthday, Internet. Happy birthday, Dreamwidth.

In the meantime, I am recovering from eating ALL THE CHOCOLATE with bostonkas. Pictures soon.

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we survived the lockdown of 2013 and all we got were these lousy teeshirts

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 02:28:31 GMT

This has been the strangest week ever.

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$17 worth of Scotchmallow bars plus actual Google Reader alternatives

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 19:01:37 GMT

You guys, kids are these amazing creatures. On one trip home, they are mostly giggling and emoting at you with the occasional close-to-a-word morpheme ("Hup. Hup. HUUUUUUUP!"); six months later, they're stringing together complex thoughts, squeezing tubes of lotion *just* enough to see what's inside (then letting it slurp back in), climbing ALL THE THINGS, and working on every manipulation in the book that will let them touch the magical mystical tablet that controls "myu-sick! 'nother myusick! 'gain! 'gain! 'gain! up? up? hug! up! MYUSICK STYWE!"

On a completely related note, I have now memorized Fun.'s Some Nights and the chorus for Gangnam Style. Though I should probably warn said kid's parents that the video for the former is surprisingly gory and cliched, so in case she gets the bright idea that Fun might also be available on the iPad. (Right now, Fun is "car-only" music, and Style is "iPad-only." There's only so many more years that separation will work, though.)

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The Wes Welker trade, the new Pope, the Veronica Mars movie Kickstarter, the Google Reader shutdown. Which of these four has managed to cause the biggest stir in my circles yesterday? The big G. (Which surprises me; I'd honestly thought the election of the Pope would be, and the GReader thing was just me being an infonerd.)

Unfortunately, the majority of the currently-suggested alternatives are of the "popularity" algorithm-driven, ooh-shiny picture magazine style, rather than being true Google Reader replacements, which to me consist of reverse-chronological text-focused options. ~~Feedly? The former, even with "send to Instapaper" (I don't want to have to send anything anywhere just to read it, though I would like the option to if it's a long read).~~ Okay, I've taken a closer look at Feedly, and it is possible to tweak it to behave a bit more like Google Reader. I think there are better, less slow options out there, but it's no longer "not an option" for me. Pulse? The former. Taptu, Flipboard, Zite, Prismatic, even Bloglovin. And half of those exist as a niche within "mobile-only;" they *require* you to have an iPhone or an iPad or an Android phone or tablet. (Why I will not link to that CNET article that's been banging around since yesterday. Ragecoma-inducing. The Lifehacker coverage is better (at least it breaks it down into "Cloud solutions" vs. "Desktop solutions" and avoids the newsmagazine UX trap), but honestly.)

Things I want in a replacement RSS reader:
- I'm a power user, so I expect to add hundreds of feeds and skim; I do not read the majority of my feeds to the equivalent of "inbox zero," but scan for things that look interesting or relevant. Given this, the ability to import an OPML file with my feeds is pretty necessary (and is why Google Currents is NOT an option; I am not manually importing my feeds ONE BY ONE ON A TOUCHSCREEN, what a hellacious thought.)
- I want it to be web/cloud-based, so that at the very least, I can access it from multiple desktops and have what I've read be marked as read (though still accessible).
- Reading by category is also a priority, especially by categories/folders/labels that I create.
- I'm from the old school of del.icio.us, so I would *like* the ability to follow friends' shares and have commentversations about their shared links, but it is not as important as, um, having a place where I can READ MY GODDAMN RSS FEEDS.

Things I emphatically do not want: any more of those stupid "LOOK I'M A ZAGAMINE I SHOW YOU PICTURES" things. I have Pinterest and Tumblr for that.

So, *actual* alternatives I'm considering at the moment:

- Newsblur
- The Old Reader, which seems to be the closest to Google Reader in terms of its interface
- Netvibes. Bloglines runs/ran on Netvibes? But I thought they were on the verge of shutting down a few years back, so no idea how stable they are now.
- Reader 2000 has been mentioned, but I can't figure out if it supports OPML imports yet (the popular format which Google will export your feed list into).
- it's a pity HiveMined seems to be vaporware; from what people were saying around the time Google got rid of Reader Share and the sharebros fled, it was supposed to be the most promising (social) alternative RSS reader. I have other outlets for social so it's not the most pressing requirement for me in any alternative, but it would be a nice feature.

And unfortunately, of course, given the GReader exodus, all of them are running incredibly slowly. Understandable, but it makes it a bit difficult to evaluate them to my level of acceptability. Oh well, at least we have until July 1.

*

In between seeing all the babies and kiddos, I did manage a little barefoot downtime in the sun:

And then came back to rainy and 40s in Boston. Sigh.

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El Jay Pee Ess Ay

Thu, 25 Oct 2012 06:05:11 GMT

Friends who still use LiveJournal may be interested in the latest Russian beta news post (English translation).

Quick summary of what stood out to me:
- Advertising has been removed.
- Friendspages will soon be in sitescheme, not your personal journal style.
- If, while reading your friendspage, somebody posts a new entry to it, a notification will pop up.
- Infinite scroll on your friendspage will soon be the default, a la Tumblr, instead of having "previous/next" links.

So, in my opinion, one good, three "Okay, you're differentiating your service how?"s, and one "OMGWTFBBQ accessibility problem?!"

(If you want to leave a comment for staff, do it on the Russian post; the English translation was provided by a volunteer.)

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This block of cheese weighed 22 pounds, not two tons, but, well, we're also not invited to White House parties, so the budget's a little more lowbrow. Happy belated ~~Total Crackpot Day~~ Big Block of Cheese Day!

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Mac people!

Thu, 11 Oct 2012 22:57:19 GMT

After an epic journey through multiple shipping systems, an accidental return-to-factory, and a holiday weekend of it going nowhere, I am finally in possession of my new computer. And I'm making the big switch from Windows XP to Mountain Lion!

IT IS PRETTY. AND FAST. AND WEIRD. (Yeah, moving from 768 megs of RAM to 8 gigs will do that.)

So, um, as a brand new Mountain Lion user coming over from WinXP, what do I need? What do I not know that I need? Things I've figured out over the past 24 hours:

- The default Notes is annoying the crap out of me. Recs for plain text editors? Perhaps something along the lines of Notepad++? (Maybe Notational Velocity? NVAlt? Delving into Dropbox if I really need cross-machina syncing to my iPhone? Giving Scrivener its 30-day free trial for longer projects?) iAWriter?

- PuTTy doesn't exist for Mac (yeah, I know, it's called Terminal and it comes with the Mac), and it's time I upgrade to a better dev environment anyway (things like autoindents and color-coded text won't go amiss, for starters). Web scripty/codey people, what do you recommend for SSHing into a server and hand coding (mostly tweaking HTML/CSS/JavaScript, but I've been wanting to learn Ruby for awhile now)? Would something like Coda do what I want? Am I looking at something more like BBEdit?

- I've tried both Adium and Colloquy for IRC/IM, and I'm liking the latter significantly more. I'd be an even bigger fan if I could customize the interface a bit more - things like shrinking the size of notifs, making them appear bottom right instead of top right, adjusting timestamps to include the seconds. I've found AdiumXtras, but I'd really prefer to DIY rather than sort through dozens to hundreds of styles that might not do what I want. Anyone know the right direction to point me in?

Though of course I'm waffling now, because I want IMs to pop up in separate windows and IRC to stay in the default window. But I can add Google Talk to Messages, but not Facebook Chat.

- What should I do to maximize battery life? Are there guides out there that explain when I should charge, should I let the battery run all the way down, etc?

- Audacity for audio editing? Gimp for picture editing? ??? for video editing?

I will probably add more questions as I think of them, so thank you in advance!

Update: ALSO I JUST WATCHED AN ENTIRE MOVIE ON NETFLIX ON MY COMPUTER, FULL-SCREEN, NO STUTTERING. THE FUTURE IS AMAZING.

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my years by cities

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 04:03:25 GMT

These days, I read Not Martha for the old-school entries filled with a list of interesting links. In today's edition, she links to writer Anh-Minh Le, who maintains a lovely tradition at year's end of listing all of the cities she's spent time in that year (minimum of an overnight; cities in your home county/"metro area" don't count). I'd like to make this a tradition for me - certainly, I love travel and the memories associated with it. How am I doing so far this year?

San Francisco, CA (technically El Cerrito and Santa Clara)
Amsterdam, Nederland
New York, NY

I know between now and December, I'll be back in the Bay Area, and we're probably going to Knoxville for Thanksgiving, and hyounpark still needs a real vacation at some point this year that doesn't involve family or graduation or weddings. ;) But it's been pretty calm relative to 2011, though granted, the Bluepass really helped with that:

San Juan, PR
Phoenix, AZ
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Anaheim, CA (Disneyland!)
Los Angeles, CA
Washington, DC (technically Arlington, VA)
Durham, NC
Chicago, IL
San Francisco, CA (Pacifica and the city proper)
Edison, NJ (motel in New Jersey for the Chocolate Party)
Orlando, FL (and Disney World! In the same year!)
Knoxville, TN

At some point, I really do want to write up these trips and link back, so, uh, call that ongoing project #65536? Thanks to the power of Flickr Maps and Foursquare, I've been able to quickly reconstruct most of the last decade, so documenting that here as well:

( 2010 )
( 2009 )
( 2008 )
( 2007 )
( 2006 )
( 2005 )
( 2004 )
( 2003 )
( 2002 )
( 2001 )
( 2000 )
( 1999 )
( 1998 )
( 1997 )

Admittedly, if I'd been better about tagging my LJ/DW entries, I probably could've used that information too :) I suspect my old LJ entries will be useful for filling in the gaps, but that's, again, a longer-term project.

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Vienna Teng at the Rockwood, Sunday night

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 01:16:25 GMT

( oops this pic is really large if you don't have img {max-width: 100%;} in your journal style )

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Dit is Amsterdam, en dit is mijn fiets.

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 03:24:43 GMT

I know, I know, it's the trendiest thing, "Hi, peeps, I haven't updated over here in three months, how are you, have some pictures until I get a chance to actually WRITE MOAR, love, ursamajor." Lather, rinse, repeat three months later. And yet I'm all over Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Pinboard. Shock, I've fallen into the trap of living in my smartphone's apps >_>

But I went to Amsterdam last week! So I come bearing photos, and for once, more photos of bikes than food. ;)

(In case the slideshow doesn't show up: Amsterdam 2012.)

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( onto the technobabble )

Teal deer: chaaange, you guys.

*

On the other hand, I went to Amsterdam and the first thing I did was go buy my OV-chipkaart so that I could get the tram into town so that I could do the second thing, which was to go ( rent a bike for the duration of my visit. )

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no power in the 'verse can stop me

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 21:18:36 GMT

In the beginning, you could bookmark things to your web browser, and lo, it was okay. Because even in the early, heady days of the World Wide Web, there were enough websites out there that you couldn't be expected to remember them all.

And then there were search engines, so when your hierarchical bookmark folder system exploded out of sheer unwieldiness, you could just depend on a search engine to find what you were looking for, most of the time.

And then there was the vastly underappreciated Delicious, which let you bookmark things to the cloud, tagged for easy reference and rediscovery, and mostly shared in an awesome and unobtrusive way that meant you could often crowdsource information on a given subject in a way that you can't do with search engines, thanks to all of the metadata appended to Delicious bookmarks.

(And then Yahoo listed Delicious for sunset, ~~AVOX~~ AVOS bought it and eviscerated it, and everyone in my network fled to Pinboard or gave up on social bookmarking. It's still criminal what Yahoo had, and then trashed, in early December 2010. The Library of Congress archives tweets; this crowdsourced database directory of metadata-tagged encyclopedic knowledge deserved the same preservation. Yes, I am still saddened and furious, a year and a half on.)

And all the while, the popularity of various social media streams like Twitter and Facebook kept growing - more places to discover all sorts of useful information. But more often than not, these useful nuggets of information were buried in private or semi-private notes that were difficult if not impossible to bookmark (particularly with Facebook), let alone be able to search for after-the-fact. Neither of these tools come with particularly incisive or inclusive search functions.

Enter Greplin. (Referral link: right now, I have the free account, which lets you unlock a limited number of sources; if you join through me, I get to unlock more sources for free. :) )

Awhile back, in mid-February or so, I had the ambient awareness that we were in the heart of Maine shrimp season up here in New England; given that I follow a couple of hundred local restaurants on Twitter and Facebook, I would have been hard-pressed not to note that every Cambervillain chef and then some were dishing up wild Maine shrimp specials. So when I was at the grocery store and saw that they had wild Maine shrimp on special, you bet I picked up a pound of 'em and headed home to do my research.

Which meant that I typed "Maine shrimp" into Greplin and received the following results, personalized to my various reading lists:

Most notably:
- East by Northeast had a Maine shrimp congee.
- The Blue Room fried up their Maine shrimp with jalapeno butter.

All this was crossing my mind at the same time I'd opened Google Reader (looks like the promise of HiveMined is dead, so GReader is the best alternative for now, even with no sharing) and spotted Jaden Hair's recipe for skirt steak with kimchi butter. Which inspired me to make wild Maine shrimp juk with kimchi butter:

And it was damned good, even though the kimchi butter scared hyounpark at first. (He does not tend to trust me with kimchi anything ever since I brought him home a Lil' Kimchi, aka a grilled cheese, kimchi, and sweet sesame black bean sandwich.)

Moral of the story: GREPLIN IS MY NEW BACKUP BRAIN AND IT CAN BE YOURS, TOO.

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( Tangent. )

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sweet, sweet, sweet, sour

Sat, 14 Apr 2012 03:34:18 GMT

You know what, let's just start with the food.

1. Question for Camberville/Boston people with experience with restaurants and celiac and/or needing to eat GF: have a friend with celiac coming to town in a couple of weeks. We're looking for a Sunday brunch (cuisine is flexible within the bounds of being celiac-friendly, she was quite adventurous foodwise pre-diagnosis) that is T-accessible, can handle a group of ~6-8 people, and takes reservations - does this exist or am I questing after a unicorn? Our current plan is the Friendly Toast, but apparently they don't take reservations, and even though we're planning to get there around 10, sounds like typical wait for our size party around that time would be ~45 minutes, and I'm like, "there's got to be a better way" ;)

2. This week has been Passover; per usual, the boy has been consuming far more matzah than me. I just make cookies, including coconut chocolate chip meringues and these cashew-cinnamon crisps:

( Recipe for flourless cashew cinnamon cookies )

3. KORRA, I AM IN LOVE. I believe the season premiere is free to download on iTunes for now; if not, it debuts tomorrow morning on NICK. Giving Apple and Nickelodeon my $30 for season 1 posthaste, given we ditched most cable awhile back.

But that doesn't even get into the awesomeness of a female Avatar, confident and adventurous, and a more modern world. I do hope we get more good female characters in the mix soon

Sidebar: anybody else getting slight Zanarkand vibes? Okay, maybe it's just me wanting Korra and Mako and Bolin and Tidus and Wakka to all go out drinking together, get up to shenanigans, and then Lin Bei Fong comes along and shakes them all down. Mannnnnnn.

4. I also made chocolate olive oil mousse so that hyounpark and I would have a yummy dessert to eat while we were watching The Amazing Race succumb to trainwreckiness.

Ugh, TAR, I watch you because most of the time you *don't* pull this bullshit. For a show that's supposed to be 40-45 minutes in viewing length, I should not be able to watch an episode in under 20 minutes because I keep having to fastforward past all the dramallama. With six teams left, I should not actively dislike four of them.

5. Is it time for more Korra yet? Is it?

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five things ursamajor is thinking about this morning

Sat, 24 Mar 2012 17:36:11 GMT

1. My internet acquaintance Skiecrow and her friend Silvae have created a webcomic, Greyscale: Rise of the Four Fears, that, in their words, is:

a dystopian semi-post-apocalyptic fantasy of gay shapeshifters in a research laboratory in a city run by highly organized crime syndicates. There is murder, mayhem, dragons, drugs, romance, and un-mad science. ... As a bonus, it has shirtless guys.

I suspect a number of you will be interested in checking this out, though most especially ladysisyphus. ;) Start from the beginning.

I know, I know, everybody who's consuming dystopic media this weekend has gone to see the Hunger Games. I'm waiting out the opening weekend crowds and will probably go Monday or Tuesday night. In the meantime, I'm re-reading Divergent and waiting impatiently for its sequel Insurgent, and also the less-dystopic but much longer-awaited (2.5 whole years! You can see why I never got into the Robert Jordan stories) Bitterblue.

1a. Speaking of works in progress, synecdochic steered me towards Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, so now this means I'm utterly hooked on THREE epic-length WIPs. (The other two: Embers and damkianna's Imagine the Ocean.) For somebody who swore she would never start reading WIPs again, well.

2. Somerville embodies precisely zero degrees of separation. I went to go see bryghtrose perform at the MassMouth Story Slam semifinals last week; I didn't think I recognized anybody else there, but then one of the performers turned out to be an acquaintance's ex-husband, and another I think I had dinner with at some point last year thanks to running into elements having dinner with her at Mr. Crepe, based on her story ringing a very vague bell and then making the mental connection with her name this morning.

3. WHY ARE KING'S HAWAIIAN ROLLS SO ADDICTIVE. (Okay, I know why; they remind me at heart of Goldilocks' ensaymada, sans cheese. Given that I cannot seem to get ensaymada from scratch right (or really, almost all yeast breads period), maybe I should just grate cheese and sugar over King's, melt in the microwave, and be done.)

4. Speaking of addictive things, DRAWSOMETHING. I am horrible at it but it's so much fun. Anybody else out there playing? :)

5. THE FIRST TWO EPISODES OF KORRA ARE OUT AND STREAMING ( small spoilers for ep 2 )

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love love love all through our minds

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 14:42:50 GMT

I celebrated ~~St. Patrick's Day~~ Evacuation Day in Boston by evacuating to the island of relative peace, sanity, and non-soused-by-green-beerness known as the Brookline Booksmith, in order to find a 1st birthday present. I emerged with two board books (one an old classic from my childhood; one a modern classic that will probably have her parents suspect me of trying to induct her into the labor movement at an early age), the latest edition of Lucky Peach, and from the sale table, Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese and Marilyn Burns' Math for Smarty Pants.

So after last night's four hours of the worst sleep ever (multiple accidental-death nightmares, I am BURNING MY PILLOW because it's haunted or some crap), I got up and distracted myself with paging through Math for Smarty Pants. It was one of my favorite books as a kid, and as a whole it's stood the test of time. But on page 29, there was a section labeled "On Which Day of the Week Were You Born?" with the note:

This method works for any date, as long as it's used in the 20th century. You can't use it to find out days before 1900.

And it turns out the method as provided doesn't work for the 21st century, either. This is not going to be terribly relevant to any child of mine, who will be born in the 2010s. ;) I think the fix will be relatively easy - the basic formula is:

1. Write the last two digits of the year you were born. This is A.
2. Divide A by 4 and drop the remainder. This is B.
3. Look at the provided Table of Months to get C.
4. The number of the date you were born is D.
5. Add them together, then mod 7. Look up said remainder in the provided Table of Days.

When I tried to put Saturday, March 17, 2012 through the formula, it tried to tell me that date fell on a Sunday, so I think the Table of Days just needs to be shifted 1 and then it'll work again. But then the book went on to say:

In the back of some telephone books there is a perpetual calendar.

In the back of a what? Oh, the things I support an opt-in program on so that I never have to receive another unsolicited phone book ever again. And then I go to find a helpful link for a perpetual calendar, and lo and behold, they discuss the mathematical formula behind all those "calculate the day of the week" functions. :)

Of course, even the "modern classic" book that I bought for Little Miss T shows its age a bit because, well, the typing cows use a typewriter, and those are hard to find for sale even in antiques stores these days. You're more likely to see them used as musical instruments, a la Marian Call or the Boston Typewriter Orchestra:

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Gender'd, still.

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 21:24:04 GMT

Paper'd, a new iPhone wallpaper app, was featured on Mashable yesterday. I like wallpapers as much as anybody, at least insofar as it lets me make my various machina a little more personalized, but I've had the same muted cherry blossom wallpaper for a couple of months now, so I'm thinking, maybe it's time for a change?

Flipping through the collections, they seem to be of the shiny I'd expect to see on Pinterest - appealing design, picturesque photos of faraway places, inspirational motivational quotes. And then I stumble across separate collections of "Ego Boosts for the Guys" and "Ego Boosts for the Ladies," and I'm like, yay, maybe we *can* reclaim "Ladies" as an acceptable non-sterile casual word to refer to adult women!

And then I look at the two collections.

Spoiler alert: this one's for the guys.

Guys	Ladies
You're such a rockstar.	Well, aren't you gorgeous today.
Look at those giant muscles.	Hello, lovely.
You're so hot it isn't even fair.	High five, beautiful.*
You win at life.	Nice work on being amazing.
You're my hero.	You're having a great hair day.
Man, you're sexy.	What a flattering outfit!
Strong and smart? Wow.	You're my favorite.
Well, aren't you powerful today?	You've got it, so flaunt it!

Bolded words are the ones that stand out on the wallpapers by design.

Gender	Actions	Looks	Ambiguous
Guys	rockstar, "win at life," hero, powerful, "smart and strong" [5]	"giant muscles," hot, sexy [3]	[0]
Ladies	"being amazing" [1]	gorgeous, lovely, beautiful, "great hair day," flattering [5]	favorite, "you've got it so flaunt it" [2]

Really? Five or six of the ego boosts designated for my gender center around my appearance, still? I go to the gym 3-4x/week and love biking and there's no strength wallpaper for me in this collection? I analyze things to death and am applying to grad school and I can't get some accolades for saying something smart? Come on, 21st century women, especially 21st-century women who own their own business. I know sexism is insidious and everywhere and a societal ill; let's continue to fight against it rather than inflicting it on ourselves.

I'm particularly disappointed by this given the infographic about Jamie Varon and Nicole Antoinette, the two women who started this company refers to them as "two gutsy ladies," talks about their actions, labels them entrepreneurs, treats them as inherently powerful. [Mashable's article doesn't make it clear if Varon designed this infographic or Mashable did, though I suspect the former because of the style.] It would be nice if they would keep that same kind of action-based empowerment in mind for future collections designated for the "ladies."

A finaly irony: one of Paper'd's non-gender-labeled collections is called Quotegasms, with an associated Tumblr. I can only assume that this image is available as an iPhone wallpaper as well, since it's a paid collection:

*

Also in my recently-read articles at the same time I was pondering Paper'd's gender issues was Deanna Fei's "The Real Lesson of Linsanity." In it, she talks about what Jeremy Lin means for potentially taking the teeth out of the American stereotype of Asian and Asian-American males as emasculated:

what's most undeniable about Lin -- what screamed to anyone who saw his game-winning, buzzer-beating three-pointer Tuesday night -- is that the guy has balls.

Which obviously has always been true of other Asian males. But now Lin is demonstrating it in a way that even the most racist douchebag would be hard-pressed to refute.

And the effect is only magnified by his relatively low-key yet evident swagger, his self-aware nerdy cool, his substantial yet unfreakish build, the fact that on TV he pretty much looks and sounds like your brother or your cousin or a kid who rode the same bus in high school. Amid all the hoopla, he's utterly unafraid to be himself -- which, in the end, is the only form of masculinity a mother truly wants for her son.

Emphasis mine, but. Seriously, women. Can we get this world for us too, already? This should not be a form of masculinity, but humanity. There are still daily life situations in which I am afraid to "be myself," in which it's better to walk away quietly, not draw attention to myself. I am terrible at self-promotion, at speaking up for myself; I've been socialized this way as a "proper lady," to the extent that I can't actually always tell when I'm trying to be a peacemaker because a working consensus is the best, vs. trying to be a peacemaker because I'm tired of arguing and I'm not supposed to be obnoxious anyway and I'm just feeding all the stereotypes of women being unable to make "rational, unemotional" arguments and decisions.

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mellon collar and the infinite shame

Sat, 03 Mar 2012 19:39:19 GMT

We had a rather eventful Kalends of March, to put it mildly.

hyounpark passed out at an industry dinner Thursday evening, and conked his head on the way down. He's doing okay now, but has a mild concussion and has to wear the self-dubbed "cone of shame" for a week:

hyounpark: "How did people ever deal with ER visits before mobile Facebook?"

Because of the concussion and attendant mild nausea, I fed him fairly cautiously Friday morning - water and applesauce, BRAT-diet style. But at lunch, I decided it might be time for some variety, so I went to look through the cupboards to see what I could find, and spotted the KFP matzo I'd picked up on Wednesday. Hey, it's bland and cracker-like, so probably okay for a tender tummy, I figure!

So I bring the box of matzo into the office where Hyoun is tapping away on his laptop:

ursamajor: "You ready for some more food, sweetie? How about some crackers? I picked up some matzo yesterday at Whole Foods and -"
hyounpark: "We have matzo?! Why did I not know about this?! I LOVE MATZO! YOU ARE THE BEST WIFE EVER!"

I'd say his eyes lit up somewhere along the lines of this:

Then he proceeded to stuff three matzo crackers down his gullet. (For those who don't know, these are ~8"x8" squares.)

ursamajor: "If you get to matzo number five, I'm going to have to filk this."
hyounpark: "MATZO MATZO MAN. I WANT TO BE THE MATZO MAN."
ursamajor: "I ... take it your appetite is okay. Did you need anything to go along with your matzo? More water? Maybe some chicken broth?"
hyounpark: "We still have pulled pork in the fridge, right?"

Ladies and gentlemen, my husband, the culinary Jew. ;)

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Sexism, as if that's a surprise, and an attempt to mitigate with cookies.

Sun, 19 Feb 2012 17:51:46 GMT

Random sexism of the day: paging through the Pinboard popular links as I am wont to do. Click on Why We Created Julia because, hey, they created a whole new computer language? Sounds nifty, wonder what for, worth the 30 seconds to skim a summary.

Couldn't even make it to 50 words into a 500+ word document before the following sentiment was expressed:

There are those of us who used Mathematica before we could grow facial hair. There are those who still can’t grow facial hair.

Before and still, with the implication that the only reason "those of us" who can't grow facial hair is due to youth, rather than gender or genetics.

Dear Viral, Jeff, Stefan, and Alan: you publish these words; you tell us your target audience is "power Matlab users" and "male," and then you give your language a female name. Please tell me you're not surprised I find this sexist. (No, I am not a Matlab user myself, but this certainly would turn me off from using your language if I were. And yes, I do know female Matlab users, thank you.)

Then again, we live in a society where this week, a Congressional hearing on a women's health matter was held and the only two female witnesses allowed to speak came from conservative religious colleges:

From a smart but depressing article on the culture war over birth control:

If we’re wise, we’ll keep our eyes on the long game, because you can bet that those angry men are, too. The hard fact is this: We’re only 50 years into a revolution that may ultimately take two or three centuries to completely work its way through the world’s many cultures and religions. (To put this in perspective: it was 300 years from Gutenberg’s printing press to the scientific and intellectual re-alignments of the Enlightenment, and to the French and American revolutions that that liberating technology ultimately made possible. These things can take a loooong time to work all the way out.)

*

So if you like your chocolate chip cookies chocolatey, I recommend Guittard's "super cookie chips." Holy cow. (Cambervillains and Bostonians, they are available at Whole Foods; I suspect some place like Pemberton's or Formaggio Kitchen is likely to carry them as well.)

At least part of this is due to the recipe on the back, which cuts the proportions of the non-chocolate ingredients in half relative to the chocolate chips, but the size of the chocolate chips in question - larger than thumbnail, when most standard chocolate chips are pinky-nail size - plays a significant role as well. And they are yummmmmmy.

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onto the supremes!

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 18:32:17 GMT

Prop 8 ruled unconstitutional.

More from NPR.

Text of the decision. (Update: direct PDF links on the 9th Circuit website, since Scribd is behaving weirdly for some.)

NO STOPPING INDEED.

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doing the digital shuffle

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 03:22:30 GMT

Given that:

- Yahoo has proven itself incredibly unreliable for long-term data archiving;
- Yahoo just laid off the majority of Flickr's customer service team, including the ones savvy and high-level and Flickr-versed enough to translate customer issues into bug reports;
- I have 4000+ photos over on Flickr, and my Flickr Pro account expires at the end of this month;
- The cost of archiving these photos at Picasa would run me somewhere between $50-$100/year by my best guestimate (this is not a dealbreaker in and of itself);
- I prefer to not have all of my data under one large corporation's control;

I think I'm moving my photohosting to SmugMug, assuming that either Smugglr or Migratr works out for moving all my photos with metadata intact. I know the community feel isn't as great over there, but I'm not sure anywhere else is, even on Picasa. Has anybody else made the Flickr-SmugMug migration?

I'm not totally leaving Flickr; a good number of friends still post their pictures there. I know I can go month-to-month on Flickr, and I may overlap that with SmugMug membership for a little while. Even if I ditch Pro, I think old photo links will remain intact, so overlap may not be totally necessary. We'll see.

As for other web services, I have found Google gradually taking over all aspects of my weblife to an uncomfortable degree, so:

- I've made DuckDuckGo my default search engine in lieu of Google Search. I find DDG's results to be at least as good as Google's, and sometimes even a little superior; they offer the ability to "repeat this search on Bing or Google;" their privacy policy and lack of tracking is a much-needed breath of fresh air (and readable in plain English!); you can install secure https:// search in Firefox; and it just plain uses less memory on my poor old netbook. From a UX perspective, it's clean and pretty intuitive.

- I've gone back to Firefox from Chrome; I don't know exactly what information-gathering advantages Google has when I read GMail or GReader or use GChat in Chrome, but I suspect if they exist, they're quite integrated.

- I'm still vaguely looking for a replacement RSS reader; HiveMined hasn't panned out (read: they've been stuck at 81% complete for over two months now), but I haven't liked the overly cluttered UI of the existing options. In this case, sticking with GReader is not a dealbreaker.

- I still think GMail is the best email product out there, though I don't like the recent UI changes because they EAT RAM LIKE NOBODY'S BUSINESS AUGH. But I'll stick with GMail and GTalk.

- As for G+, I guess I should check in on that, but I get the feeling most of what's in my circles there is crossposts from other social media sources like Facebook and Twitter.

*

Anybody else giving similar consideration to their digital workflow?

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In case anybody wanted to know what reading my flists Friday looked like

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 22:47:46 GMT

stuff

stuff

R:

stuff

stuff

B: "L and I are excited to announce that this summer, we're expecting our first-ever baby boy! If you would, please pray that everything with our little fellow would be totally healthy. Thanks!"

stuff

stuff

D: "10 fingers, 10 toes. Strong heart, and definitely a girl!"

stuff

A: "so exhausted. 16 more weeks? really? thank goodness for M being the most patient and thoughtful man ever."

stuff

J: "D & I are terrified and overjoyed all at the same time to let you know that we are expecting the K household to grow by one.
A little JD is expected to make an appearance around August to raise all kinds of havoc."

... Now keep in mind that I sang with the first four people in college. R and A specifically, I sang with in both college choir and the a cappella madrigals group, and I sang with J in two groups in high school. As I said elsewhere, "OKAY WHO ELSE IS PREGNANT. SERIOUSLY, IF WE EVER SANG TOGETHER, YOU SHOULD PROBABLY GO PEE ON A STICK."

(This also means my babywatch calendar for 2012 exploded yesterday - new-to-me kids in bold.)

Any second now (due tomorrow): LJ #2
March: KG #1
April: NT's twins, but she's already on bedrest for pre-term labor, so I wouldn't be surprised to greet them in February TBH
May: AM #1
June: MK #2, KS #2, RR #1, DJ #3, LB #4
August: JD #1

*

Also, I went to New York Tuesday to look at grad school, and we won't discuss how behind in my own life I feel looking at grad schools while everyone else in my age and peer group is churning out kids (unless they've declared themselves firmly in the child-free court), most of them on at least their second, and finally met up with intrepia after years of our paths crossing and just barely missing each other, and we ate burgers and played Pandemic and watched the SOTU and played exercise games instead of drinking games for it (next year, seriously, we have to develop a routine).

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hey, this whole lack of a 140-character limit thing. it's gonna catch on. it's the new hotness.

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 22:02:14 GMT

Me: If you're done with the rice bag, I'm gonna go warm it up again for bed.
hyounpark: Warm it up, Lynne!
Me: ... I'm about to!
hyounpark: Warm it up, Lynne!
Me: 'Cuz that's what I'm supposed to do?

*

So the first thing I did this year was clean out the fridge. Then we filled it up with ALL THE FOOD (kind of) and made it actually somewhat organized!

And then I stuck pictures on Flickr and added all sorts of notes because I am a food nerrrrrrrrrrrrrd. (I meant to do this ages ago when it looked like I had a jungle growing out of the fridge, but really it was just the entire middle shelf full of kale and spinach and fennel.)

( In my fridge )

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all these places feel like home

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 06:44:04 GMT

Earlier this week, hyounpark and I had to make an emergency 3 am cough medicine run. (10 years ago, we would've been making emergency 3 am late-night munchie runs to Chinatown. As sheeri points out, "And in a couple of years, you guys will be making emergency 3 am diaper runs!" Oy.) So we drive over to the Stop and Shop, only to learn that just because a supermarket that has a pharmacy is open 24 hours does not mean that the pharmacy is open 24 hours.

Two tops later, we find a CVS that's open in the Back Bay, grab the godforsaken dextromethorphan + guaifenisin combo, head to the self-checkout, do the "You are buying an age-controlled substance" ID spiel with an actual human being, and are about to head out when I spot CADBURY CREME EGGS next to the register.

It is January 3.

As I discovered last year, Cadbury apparently ships a very limited number of creme eggs per Easter season, so once a given store runs through their stock, That's It. I went looking for them at the Davis and Porter CVSes last year in early March, right around Ash Wednesday. The response: "Oh, we ran out already. Not getting any more in."

Look, Cadbury, you could probably make serious bank if you created Cadbury Creme Hearts and had stores put *those* out in January before Valentine's, then release your Creme Eggs for the actual Easter season. I'm just saying.

(Yes, I know, I can make my own creme eggs at home. Or even my own creme hearts, assuming I can find an appropriate mold. Still.)

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I am having a case of the homesick.

Sat, 07 Jan 2012 02:53:17 GMT

Brought on by:

1. These pictures of Yosemite and the Golden Gate by Angela B. Pan, whose pic of the sunrise at the Vietnam Memorial you may have seen floating around recently.

(I am also apparently having a case of the forgetting to close div tags properly, mahbad.)

2. Links coming across my path today to open-space preserves and organized runs that hyounpark would love to go running in on a regular basis. Runs that he could do year-round, because his minimum running temperature is 40F and he doesn't seem to have much of an upper limit.

3. Berkeley Enough, the B-side to "Whole Foods Parking Lot":

4. A linked me to a pretty, pretty TIC duplex less than two blocks from the N-Judah and suddenly I'm having wild fantasies about H and I buying one half and H's brother and sister-in-law buying the other half because the housing prices aren't *that* much more than Boston for more actual *space*. (I know there are ever so many more factors to weigh than just this one-off happenstance set of links that crossed my path, and I love and adore Camberville and we have friends and family here. But we have friends and family in the Bay Area, too.)

5. I got to go home twice this year, and I'm pretty sure we'll be in the Bay Area next fall as well. Still:

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Friday afternoon food pr0n, or how I learned to love sea urchin.

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 22:28:12 GMT

I completed another trip around the sun last Thursday, so hyounpark and I went out to celebrate at Menton. I embedded the slideshow below, but if it doesn't end up showing up, here's the set.

( My taste buds have undergone yet another subtle shift. )

A lovely way to finish the old year and begin again, with new discoveries.

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yeah, i haven't watched this show in awhile, but spoilerland told me i had to

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 02:00:07 GMT

( spoilers for HIMYM: Disaster Averted and Tick Tick Tick )

But it does make me want gen fic about Nora and Kevin. (Separately. They had lives before they got caught up with Barney and Robin, respectively. They have friends outside the MacLaren's booth. I know very little about Kevin besides him having been Robin's therapist at one point, but I feel like I know even less about Nora, despite her storyline having gone on for somewhat longer and her actually working with Robin. Tell me more, people.)

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bear

Acqs & acks & ads, oh Flickr.

the violence that doesn't get headlines in boston

quickly

we survived the lockdown of 2013 and all we got were these lousy teeshirts

$17 worth of Scotchmallow bars plus *actual* Google Reader alternatives

El Jay Pee Ess Ay

Mac people!

my years by cities

Vienna Teng at the Rockwood, Sunday night

Dit is Amsterdam, en dit is mijn fiets.

no power in the 'verse can stop me

sweet, sweet, sweet, sour

five things ursamajor is thinking about this morning

love love love all through our minds

Gender'd, still.

mellon collar and the infinite shame

Sexism, as if that's a surprise, and an attempt to mitigate with cookies.

onto the supremes!

doing the digital shuffle

In case anybody wanted to know what reading my flists Friday looked like

hey, this whole lack of a 140-character limit thing. it's gonna catch on. it's the new hotness.

all these places feel like home

I am having a case of the homesick.

Friday afternoon food pr0n, or how I learned to love sea urchin.

yeah, i haven't watched this show in awhile, but spoilerland told me i had to

$17 worth of Scotchmallow bars plus actual Google Reader alternatives