A touching moment between father and son.

Hat tip to http://www.kottke.org

K

From dilicous :
Below is a list of the top 106 books tagged “unread” on LibraryThing. The rules:
bold = what you’ve read,
italics = books you started but couldn’t finish
crossed out = books you hated
* = you’ve read more than once
underline = books you own but haven’t read yourself

1. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
2. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
3. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
4. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
5. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
6. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
7. The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien
8. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
9. The Odyssey by Homer*
10. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
11. Ulysses by James Joyce
12. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
13. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
14. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte*
15. Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
16. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
17. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
18. The Iliad by Homer
19. Emma by Jane Austen
20. Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
21. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
22. The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
23. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer*
24. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
25. The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
26. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
27. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
28. The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
29. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
30. Guns Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond
31. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
32. Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco
33. Dracula by Bram Stoker*
34. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
35. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
36. Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley*
37. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf*
38. Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
39. Middlemarch by George Eliot
40. Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
41. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
42. Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
43. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
44. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley*
45. Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson
46. American Gods by Neil Gaiman*
47. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
48. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
49. Wicked by Gregory Maguire
50. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
51. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
52. Dune by Frank Herbert
53. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
54. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
55. Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
56. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
57. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
58. The Inferno by Dante Alighieri
59. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
60. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
61. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf*
62. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
63. Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
64. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
65. Persuasion by Jane Austen*
66. One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
67. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
68. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
69. Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman
70. The Once and Future King by T.H. White
71. Atonement by Ian McEwan
72. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
73. A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
74. Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
75. Dubliners by James Joyce
76. Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
77. Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt
78. Beloved by Toni Morrison
79. Collapse by Jared Diamond
80. The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
81. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
82. Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence
83. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
84. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
85. Watership Down by Richard Adams
86. The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
87. The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman*
88. Beowulf by Anonymous*
89. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
90. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig
91. The Aeneid by Virgil
92. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
93. Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence
94. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
95. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
96. Possession by A.S. Byatt
97. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
98. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
99. Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
100. War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells*
101. Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
102. Candide by Voltaire
103. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
104. The Plague by Albert Camus
105. Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
106. Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier

You may have noticed that number 29, Life of Pi, is crossed out (I hated it), but neither italicized nor bolded (I haven't read it).  The fact is, I could only make it through the author's introduction before throwing it down in hatred.  The overblown, apparently unironic pretentiousness of it all made me want to stab myself in the eye.  Jill finished it and told me about it, and I feel that my hatred was justified.

So, how about you?

K

I've been trying to wrap my brain around that horror in Austria. You just ask yourself, what kind of a person is that? How does that happen?

And it all meant this: that there are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal, kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do.

Terry Pratchett. Small Gods

Austria. Abu Ghraib. The Nazis. It kind of explains them all.

K

K

Last night, I took a photo out of my window of 7 American Airlines MD-80s, sitting like ducks on the runway:


This photo is now being used for an article on The Consumerist:

http://consumerist.com/378762/these-headlines-are-getting-repetitive-aa-cancels-570-more-flights

Go me.

K

Cross-processing is the practice of developing film of one type in chemicals designed for another type of film. For example, developing slide (positive) film in C-41 (negative) solution, or the other way around. This gives photographs a funky look, often shifting colors and blowing out highlights.

While digital photography has no film processing, you can still apply different techniques and filters to digital images to match the look of cross-processed film. Since I've had some spare time on my hands, I went through a few of my photos, and applied cross-processing filters to them.


Anyway, just wanted to share my work. I've got a group of more photos in this style on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kevinq2000/sets/72157604470632085/

K

This made me laugh so hard I almost started crying in class:

io9.com has an article on "worst sci-fi con artists." It's standard gawker fare (i.e. almost, but not quite, worth reading), but it does have this gem, talking about Captain Jack Harkness' first appearance in Dr. Who, which involves time travel, aliens, WWII, and a space ambulance:

He has some way-too-complicated plan to send a space ambulance back in time to World War II, and pretend it's a war ship. And then sell it to the Doctor, but explode it before he realizes it's actually just an ambulance. Between the incredibly overcomplicated plan and getting side-tracked by trying to seduce his marks, Jack dances himself all the way out of his hustle. He should probably just stay out of sales altogether: I can picture him trying to sell you a time share, but sending it back in time to the middle ages and pretending it's actually a hot-air balloon. And then staring at your pants for an hour.

I smile every time I read those last two sentences.

K

In this picture, Jill is visiting a castle in Europe. I don't imagine that she's doing this now, but I know she has, and she would like to again in the future.

I like to picture Jill happy.

K

So, I'm down here in Texas for training. It is, in a word, boring. When the boredom gets so great that my heart runs the risk of just giving up, I re-energize myself by picturing what my beautiful wife's day must be like. And then I illustrate it in Microsoft Word, the only tool available on the provided laptops.

For example, here is my wife on her way to work in the morning:



She likes to feel the wind through her hair.

On her lunch break, she takes some time to stop and smell the flowers:



When she gets home from work, she takes some time to relax and read:



And then before she goes to bed, she waters her little citrus trees:



And when I think about her day, my heart is happy again.

K

Jim DeRogatis at the Sun Times sums up some of my mixed feelings about Juno. I didn't hate, hate, hate the movie like this guy did, but I did feel like some things were a little off. This is a good analysis:

Here is a 29-year-old screenwriter (Cody) and a 30-year-old director (Reitman) brainstorming with a nearly 21-year-old actress (Page) and deciding that the intentionally primitive and infantile sounds recorded by a 35-year-old musician (Dawson) epitomize “the music that the kids today really listen to.” This sort of contrivance hardly smacks of the honesty and humor the filmmakers brag about, and which many critics have hailed.

Check out the rest of the post.

K

So, I got a new camera lens for Christmas. It has a super-wide aperture, which does two things. It lets a lot of light in, and it makes the depth of field really shallow. "Depth of field" is a measurement of how much of your photograph is in focus. Most photos are shot with a very large depth of focus, so that as much as possible is in focus. A narrow depth of field, however, limits the image focus to the subject of the photo - anything in front of or behind the subject look fuzzy.

This is the kind of lens that they use for food photography in fancy magazines. And now I've taken some of my own.

To start with, the turkey I roasted for Christmas:



Jill and I got sushi today:



A closeup:



And then we finished it off with some ice cream:



Man, that's making me hungry again.

K

So. Best Buy lies*. This is generally know. See this story, for an example

Basically what happens is this: You see that a product is on sale at BestBuy.com, and is available for instore pickup. You head on over to your local store, grab the item, and it rings up at a higher (or non-sale) price. You say to the cashier, "Hey, it was cheaper on your website. Don't you guys price-match?" He says, "Sure, let me see the website." He brings up the website on their in-store kiosk, checks out the item, and says, "It says here on our website that it's actually the higher price. Maybe you were looking at a different product." You don't feel like fighting, so you just say, "Whatever," and pay, and leave. You get home, look up your product again, and sure enough, it's on sale at a cheaper price. What just happened?

Best Buy uses a fake in-store website on their kiosks which lists a higher price, so they don't have to price-match like they promise. Best Buy lies to you.

Now, I had read that this happens (Consumerist.com has been following this for a while) but I had never had it happen to me. I had gift certificates, and my eye had recently been drawn to a certain single-serve coffee maker, so I decided to buy one.

I looked up the price online, and sure enough, it was on sale. (About $7.50 cheaper. Not a fortune, but about the cost of extra coffee, so why not.) Knowing that Best Buy pulls these shenanigans, I printed off the page from their website showing the price:



See: $142.49.

I went to Best Buy, looked around for the coffee maker, and couldn't find it. So, I looked it up in their kiosk. Lo and behold:



Back up to the $149.99.

Those sons-of-bitches. So, prepared for battle, I eventually found the one I wanted, stacked near a wall, grabbed one, grabbed the accessories I wanted, and headed to the register.

Sure enough, guy rings me up, the coffee maker comes up at the higher price. I say, "That's on your website at a lower price," he says, "Do you have the website?" I pulled out the printout I had made at home showing the lower price. After scanning the printout and the item's box (trying to find a loophole?), he knocks $7.50 off the price, I pay and go home, happy to have my coffee maker, but slightly upset that they tried to rip me off.

So, lesson for the day: If you are going to buy something from Best Buy, check their website for prices, and print out the item you are looking for, showing the price. Keep that with you, and when they ring out out, watch their scanning, and show them the printout if they try to rip you off, too.

It's a deceptive practice, and they said they were going to stop it, but they haven't. Protect yourself - be an informed consumer.

K

(* Could this be a little strong? I mean, "BEST BUY LIES!!!!11!!" could be overdoing it a bit. Couldn't there be an innocent explanation, such as, "This is just showing their in-store prices." I'll admit, stores are not required to sell things at the same price online as in their stores. However! Their in-store kiosk display is specifically designed to look like bestbuy.com. This is a conscious choice, with no indication to the consumer that the web pages are different. There is no legitimate reason why their in-store kiosk has to look like a page for ordering products online. See, for example, the difference between the kiosk display and website for Border's Books and Music. The only explanation is that they are trying to avoid matching their prices online, despite their promise to do so. That makes them liars in my book.)

Watch it. It's funny.

Watch it again.

K

He was in the tile bag.

K

That's it. We boxed up all of our stuff, got a few sturdy friends and a truck, and moved it all down to Montgomery County, Maryland. We're in our apartment!

It's still a bit of a mess right now, but it's starting to take shape. Our office is pretty much set up, as is our bedroom, and the kitchen, but the living room is a mess of boxes and furniture. We'll get that sorted out in the next few days, hopefully.

My job doesn't start until Monday, the 29th, so we've got some time for cleaning, as well as heading back up to Akron for a friend's wedding and assorted good times.

Also, I find out if I passed the bar exam on Friday.

Our apartment is nice, it's got the features we want, and it's right by the Metro. We like it. Ya'll'll have to come down and see it.

K

Woohoo! I just received notice that I have clearance to begin my job in DC. I start in about 6 weeks. More to follow.

K

The guys who made Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz started with this show, Spaced.

In it, Tim, who's just been kicked out by his girlfriend, meets Daisy, who's also looking for an apartment. The only flat they can find requires a "professional couple," so these two new friends decide to pretend to be a long term couple to get the flat. Hijinks, as they say, ensue.

It's a great show that's unavailable on DVD in the U.S. This is the pilot episode.

If you read this journal, then at some point in the past I've told you you need to watch this show. Here's your chance.

K

Charming little animated short with a surprising middle, and an unexpected (or perhaps not) ending.




Enjoy.

K

via the boing

Now, when I read news articles, I think about them in terms of bar exam questions. 

For example, if a defendant commits a felony and is fleeing from the police, and two news helicopters collide in midair, killing all aboard, is the defendant guilty of murder for their deaths?

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/0727crashmain0727.html

If a cop dies in an unrelated car wreck on his way to arrest you, can you be convicted of felony murder?

http://www.ksdk.com/news/news_article.aspx?storyid=124701

Always good to know.

K

There are no spoilers here.

I have finished reading the last Harry Potter book.  I lacked the will to stay up until past midnight last night, so Jill and I picked up the book this morning.  I started reading it around 10:30am, and finished it almost exactly 8 hours later.

I enjoyed it.  I don't feel that it was the strongest of the series, but I don't think it was the weakest, either.  It will be interesting to see how they film it.

But now it's over, and I can resume studying for the bar exam.

K