A carnival of technology

Slate published a column Tuesday about Thanksgiving from the point of a view of a food writer. The gist is that food writers hate Thanksgiving, because Thanksgiving means a time to find in the day–this secular holiday with no patriots to honor or message beyond that of the moment, a call to give thanks for our fortunes, whatever they may be–something new and exciting, and that isn’t what Thanksgiving is about. It’s about tradition, and while the season can’t be ignored in the Dining & Wine sections across the country, no one’s really interested in finding new ideas for the meal they’ve made the same way every year. The template itself is fairly limited, a celebration of late-harvest New World delights–turkey, cranberries, pumpkins and squash, pecans, sweet potatoes–that nearly always manifests itself as a roasted bird stuffed with bread, some pies, some sauce and an assortment of sides. The Thanksgiving feast comes with expectations, individual or shared, and experimentation takes away some of the comfort we find in it.

I hosted Thanksgiving last year: my parents and sister found space to sleep in my one-bedroom apartment, and I spent most of the long weekend completely stressing myself out for no good reason. For the meal, one change I introduced was that very little of the meal was store-bought. I was buying food from a farm co-op at the time, and, when Thanksgiving rolled around, I jumped at the opportunity to get a pastured turkey and all the trimmings. I don’t think the source of the food caused any problems, but what I did with it might have. On the advice of the farmers, I decided to brine the turkey before roasting it, while the family tradition has been to simply roast an unadulterated bird using one of those oven bags to keep it from drying out without basting. I liked the brined bird; there are some things I would change with the brine itself, but overall the turkey was more moist and had some different flavors to it that I thought were interesting. The joints were a bit tougher, which made carving more of a challenge, and the skin didn’t brown and crisp like a dry turkey would have. It probably would have worked a better on a different day.

The parents are staying at Kat’s place this year, a sensible choice since she has the bigger apartment for now, but I’m still responsible for procuring the food, in part because I’m the one who eats meat. I haven’t paid much attention to the farmers’ newsletter since my job change and their closing of a north-metro dropoff point made getting the food inconvenient, so I missed the chance to get a turkey from them this year. But still, my opinion of animals is essentially: a) they’re delicious, and; b) maybe we ought to treat them kind of ok before slaughtering them and feasting upon their flesh, so in the interest of avoiding Farmer Bastard’s corn-fed curiosities, and out of my laziness with regard to driving to more than one grocery store for one list of stuff, this Thanksgiving is brought to us by Whole Foods. The turkey actually came out a couple bucks cheaper, but ay Dios they charge a lot for vegetables there. My family’s Thanksgiving meal consists of a stuffed turkey, some sweet potatoes, “green fluff” which is basically (deliciously) flavored cool whip, pumpkin and pecan pies, canned cranberry sauce and an assortment of raw vegetables like celery and carrots and such. This year I plan to make the experiments that worked last year: a pecan pie (only experimental because I was the one making it), a sweet potato casserole topped with pecans and some other stuff (veganized for Kat this time by using margarine instead of butter), and this year I’m going to add some acorn squash baked and stuffed with rice and pecans and cranberries and whatever else seems like a good idea come tomorrow morning.

I like pecans. They’re tasty and it’s about the only nut native to North America, one of the fruits of the Columbian explosion. I wish I were able to say the word without thinking about how to pronounce it every single time. My geography and ever-growing drawl suggests [?pikæn], but my family and really not-at-all Southern heritage uses [pI?k?n], PEE-can vs. pi-KAHN to put it another way. Usually I end up using the awkward compromise offered in the middle of Meriam Webster’s choices, the vowels of the first with the stresses of the second. What a weird word. Anyhow, I use lot of pecans for Thanksgiving, and last year buying a big bunch of unshelled nuts meant a lot of nut-cracking, most of which was handled by my dad, who had more of the patience and dexterity needed to extract the intact halves needed for the aesthetics of the pie. I bought unshelled pecans again this time around, mostly because those bags were from fancifully-named south Georgia farms and the shelled ones and the shelled ones from California looked like they’d been sitting on the store shelf for a good while, but I also stumbled across some fresh, shelled Georgia pecans at the last minute, so maybe that’ll make the pie a little easier.

My parents are asleep at Kat’s, and tomorrow I’m going to try to make a few dishes that combine tradition with new ideas for taste, some dishes without animal products to accompany the centerpiece of meat. Shelling pecans sure is a whole lot easier using channel lock pliers instead of a nutcraker.

I don’t even know what I want out of a computer anymore.

Outside of my job, the things I want a computer to do are about the same things anyone wants a computer to do:

• Surf the information superhighway
• Read and write email
• Store recipes
• Play some wicked tunes

Since about 1998 or so I’ve used Linux at home, the reason then and still being that I like to tinker. Windows is pretty alright for the things I want to do but often confining, and I’ve never quite been able to wrap my head around Mac OS. My attempts at using Mac OS, even without the xtreme popup rad-mode dock, have usually ended in confusion over some detail or another, and I still haven’t forgiven Apple for Quicktime.

As far as my computer habits today, the difference I’m finding is that while I still like to tinker, I’d rather not have to. I’d like for everything to work right out of the box, but I know that this will never fit my skewed view of the world, so I’d instead like everything to work after the box, some brief configuration and a handful of extra programs. My choice of web browser dates back to the Netscape wars with reasons long since irrelevant, but I now find the Web unusable without Adblock and a browser that makes such extensibility possible. I use Thunderbird mostly because it’s slightly less awful than the alternatives and less likely to do something unexpected. My music player, Amarok, is really the only choice that binds me to Linux. Could I find something in Windows to fill the gap? Probably, but it was painful enough finding a good player in Linux that doesn’t choke on a collection of my size and understands that some albums have more than one artist. I stick with Linux partly because of its philosophy of customizability–easy access to keyboard shortcuts, “sloppy” focus, finely tunable keymap options that present the full range of human expression, or in my case at least the full range of New Yorker English and the occasional dash or two–but mostly because of the environment it provides for when I program as a hobby instead of as an occupation. Windows provides some very nice tools, some them now even free, for building a Windows application, but it doesn’t make it easy to tinker.

What I don’t like about Linux is that it’s always a step or few behind environments that don’t require tinkering. The particulars of hardware support is always the worst. For example, I have a USB hard drive, and in order to save power and wear it will spin down after ten minutes or so of inactivity. It takes about five seconds or so to spin back up, and it used to be that Linux would wait about two of those seconds and then decide something must be wrong: even if you do end up reading from the device at some point, it’s probably a bad idea to write to it so let’s just turn the whole thing off before you do something dangerous. There was a way around this. I added a file to /etc/udev/rules.d that, when it saw the plugin event from this drive’s particular set of identifiers, would write some text to a file somewhere in /sys that would instruct Linux to chill out and maintain if it can’t read the device right away. This extra step became unnecessary a few upgrades ago, but still: this was a release version of a popular Linux distribution, and it failed in an annoying way that would never be seen in Windows or Mac OS. My annoyances today seem mostly to stem from the differences in GNOME and KDE, an ancient and boring fight between graphical toolkits that I only care about now because I use one for my music player and the other for everything else. Amarok wants to be able to watch for discs in the CD-ROM drive and iPod plugins, and if it happens to catch on to those things before GNOME, which is fortunately rare, it usually makes a mess. Linux has gotten a lot better over the years, but what’s most frustrating is that while it’s grown into something that feels much more like a real desktop operating system than it did back in the 90’s, it’s always fallen a little short of the mark.

The first Linux distribution I used was Redhat 5. I briefly used Slackware before switching to Debian by the time I went off to college, I experimented with Gentoo for a while after that, and I eventually became fed up with distributions in general and joined two other Tech students in creating Peachtree Linux (not affiliated with Sage Software or the Peachtree Accounting suite). After Peachtree’s demise I switched to Fedora because everyone else was using it. Fedora, by way of Redhat, has been a long constant in the Linux world, and I no longer cared enough about whatever objections I’d had to it before. Recently I realized that maybe there are other choices out there, and maybe I ought to take a look around and forge my own path. I ended up finding a lot more maybes.

What I want is a Linux distribution that provides a desktop environment where manual configuration of just about anything–network, display, sound cards, USB devices–is considered an exceptional event, preferably a distribution where these exceptions can be handled by simple graphical tools instead of a need to poke through a hundred text files in a hundred different formats. I’d like a distribution that can adequately walk that thin line between cool new features and stability. Additionally, I need to consider whether a distribution can handle the fourth task in that list above. Due to a mess of patent licensing and other legal concerns, distributions that are out to make a buck tend not to provide support for mp3s or several video codecs. So I need a distribution that can either turn a blind eye to this point of law or has a community that does, something like Livna, in order to easily play mp3s.

Debian might fit most of the bill, but I doubt it. Their “stable” release is famous for being hilariously out-of-date, and “testing,” a compromise created about eight years ago between the slow-moving stable and the unfiltered, buggy battle of the unstable distribution, is still a briar patch of surprises and daily changes. Also, while Debian is famous for creating their community-oriented model, opening to their users an unfathomable expanse of software choices, they lack the centralization or drive necessary to make the coherent environment I’m looking for. Gentoo is just a Debian that’s made some bad decisions and where an update means spending a week rebuilding the system from scratch. Ubuntu is a derivative of Debian, but built in such a way as to take advantage of the huge pool of community contributions but offer a friendlier environment on top of it. I don’t trust Suse or Mandriva (didn’t one of them go bankrupt?) to have grown past the mistakes I remember struggling with at Emperor, and I don’t think either is in a position to offer anything interesting. And then there’s Fedora. I’d like to like Fedora. Fedora’s problem is that every release contains some new thing that’s kind of cool and some new thing that’s horribly broken.

Fedora 9 switched from Redhat’s system-config-network, a tool that’s brought me joy and pain through the years on its own, to GNOME’s network configuration tool, NetworkManager. That all seems well and good, switch from the Redhat-specific things to the the new, generic things, but they left system-config-network running. I don’t know why and don’t really care–my guess is that NetworkManager doesn’t work in all situations and they left the old tool around to pick up the slack,–but the result is that, after whatever exciting races the two tools run at boot time, I get a DHCP lease about 95% of the time; the hostname isn’t set at all, even though I set it during the install, unless I add it to some text file somewhere, and I have about a 5% chance of being able to lookup names local to the LAN (like the name of the NAS box I need in order to get to the mp3s I can’t play). Fedora 8 brought pulseaudio, which appears to be an attempt to reinvent esound in a way that crashes even more frequently. As a bonus, after installing the compatibility layer that makes sound work on Youtube again, Flash becomes extra unstable and will bring the browser itself more often than not. Perhaps pulseaudio is meant as a madeleine to bring back memories of those halcyon days of Netscape 4. Sound in Linux is complicated. A lot of people made some bad decisions; I think the Fedora maintainers are among them. Fedora 7…I don’t know, I’m sure it had something wrong with it. Fedora 6 seemed ok.

But Fedora, or rather Redhat, has done a lot of things that I think are really kind of cool. Rpm, despite its flaws and godawful spec file format, is really the best package manager I’ve seen. It has an automatic dependency creation and resolution system that puts the hand-crafted three-level ridiculousness of Debian and its ilk to shame, and it was the first to figure out that it isn’t feasible to use a flat text file to store the kind of package data needed in any general purpose distribution. One Redhat-specific addition that I find pretty neat is the way it handles debugging symbols. While Redhat/Fedora packages are shipped without debugging symbols, as is the way of such things, it also has the option of installing unstripped programs and libraries in /usr/lib/debug. The Redhat-packaged gdb knows to read these files and can even tell you which debug library packages you’re missing for a particular program. It makes tinkering available and easy. I wish the rest of the distribution had that kind of thought put into it.

I’ve viewed Ubuntu as some kind of a hipster joke for most of its existence. When it came out I didn’t want an extra user-friendly desktop, I didn’t want something based on Debian, and I certainly didn’t want something with ads that looked like American Apparel joins the Peace Corps. With this distro-existential crisis I’ve been having I decided to cast off my prejudices and install Horny Hedgehog, or whatever the H release is called. There were a few minor things that annoyed me right off the bat, mainly the choice to make the trash can a tiny icon in the taskbar instead of a big one on the desktop, and the hoops I had to go through to prevent anything from happening when I plugged in my mp3 player when all I want in to get to it in Amarok, but overall the Desktop is pretty nice. Missing packages are available at the click of a button in situations where things go wrong (mp3 codecs, flash plugin), and I actually found myself getting annoyed when I had to change things outside of the available tools (like the music player plugin thing), getting annoyed at times where before I wouldn’t have thought it unusual to open a text file in one window and a dense manual in another and fix it by hand. It has a kind of cool feature where if you type an unavailable command in a terminal, it’ll tell you what package to install and what command you need to run to install it. And it’s removed the idea of a root user, instead making administrator functions available by prompting for the user password anytime an escalation in privilege is needed (or just silently doing it for people who know what to add to which file), something I think desktop-oriented systems should have done long ago.

As time wore on, it became increasingly obvious that Ubuntu’s main contribution is to offer a theme that turns everything brown. I guess that theme was really the first thing that irked me. I get it, founder dude’s from Africa, some of Africa is the color of dirt; please make everything not ugly again. H is a “long-term support” release, which apparently means that it’s still full of buggy software, but those bugs will be updated over the course of thirty-six instead of eighteen months. The bug that pissed me off the most was one involving the keyboard. I like to remap Caps Lock to act as an extra Ctrl key, because I hit Ctrl a lot, I don’t want carpal tunnel and I think Caps Lock is useless. This Ctrl key position is seen a lot on old Unix workstations, and it’s easy to set this layout in the GNOME keyboard preferences. The problem in Ubuntu is that once I did this, while the Caps Lock was Ctrling like it should, it was also toggling the Caps Lock LED. The bug was fixed in the new short-term support release, but I don’t know if the change ever made it back to H; I just figured out what to put in which text file and moved on. One problem I haven’t yet figured out is the little gray rectangle the sometimes appears in the top left corner of the screen. It looks like the corner of a window that’s been accidentally moved off-screen, and it’s becomes most visbile and distracting when I try to watch a video full-screen and the little rectangle stays in the foreground. It goes away when I close Firefox, and it’s something I never saw in Fedora. On the plus side for Firefox, flash isn’t so crashy anymore despite it still running through pulseaudio, but it looks like that’s because Adobe released Flash 10 while I was making this switch, so it’s probably fixed in Fedora by now, too.

So in all Ubuntu works mostly like I’d expect it to, but it’s especially noticeable when it doesn’t, and from browsing the forums and bug reports it looks like users and developers alike lack either the knowledge or motivation to do anything beyond making every program match their shit-ugly brown coffee stain theme. Sigh. At least some of the folks at FedoraHat know what they’re doing and maybe even get paid for it. I just don’t know. Fedora 10 is coming out in a couple of weeks. Maybe that one will be ok.

I don’t want to get too opiniony here today, because everyone’s had about enough of that. Barack Obama announced his candidacy on February 10th, 2007, John McCain on the 25th of the following April. Nearly two years. Two years this election has been in headlines, filled the airwaves, been a backdrop during financial collapse, ongoing wars in the Middle East and new unrest in Central Asia, earthquakes and floods and hurricanes. Two years. This is it. And whatever happens tonight, we’re watching history.

Georgia has been early-voting since late September, but that whole idea never appealed to me. It feels like cheating. The law is clear: after the Sabbath following the bringing in of the harvest, it’s time to hitch up the wagon and make a trip into a town to cast your vote on the first Tuesday following the first Monday of November; thus it is our solemn duty as citizens of this great country to suffer through all of the campaigns’ final surprises, thrusts and dying gasps until it comes time to appoint our Electors on Election Day. Plus there were like two million people trying to early vote. It was nuts; wait times averaged about three hours. If I’m going to have to wait three hours I’m doing it the patriotic way.

Today began as most days do on mornings after I’ve set my alarm for an earlier time: I woke up around 8 with the realization that I didn’t actually turn the alarms on and rushed through a panicked blur of clothes and toothpaste and hot water and orange juice. The annoyingly re-dated Daylight Saving Time switch helped out today, though, since 7 still feels like 8, and, while I couldn’t get in line before the polls opened, I at least wasn’t starting terribly behind. Grab a book, get a coffee from the Citgo and off I go to exercise my rights as an American citizen.

There have been a handful of elections since I moved to Sandy Springs–the 2006 midterm elections, the presidential primaries this year, the statewide primaries and a handful of local things–and it seems like my polling location changes every single time, swapping between the High Point Elementary and Ridgeview Middle schools. I really don’t know why, maybe something to do with expected turnout and how fine-grained a particular precinct needs to be for a particular set of ballot questions. It’s confusing. Poll workers periodically walked up and down the lines today reminding us that the state of Georgia really can require photo ID to vote this time around–the law got a shout-out in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board and everything–and trying to explain who should be in this line and who should be a in a different line at the middle school down the road. Your voter information card is a lie, the web site might not be accurate; through all the last-minute registrations and address changes and other complications, it all came down to which side of a two-lane residential road you live on, and just pray that the computer at the front of the line agrees. I only saw one person cut to the front of the line having earned his credit waiting for a couple of hours in the other one, so I guess you could say it went smoothly for the time I was there.

For myself, voting didn’t take too terribly long. I found an illegal parking spot a couple of blocks from school at about 7:30, and I was out of there by 9. Everyone was prepared for a long wait–I had my book and tiny radio tuned to NPR, some people had chairs, a lady in front of me was reading Twilight, but we didn’t need our little comforts for long.

One thing I noticed while waiting was that the poll workers seemed younger than usual. There were the usual octogenarians tapping away at the awkward registration roll computers, but there were also a bunch of people there in their twenties or younger. Georgia’s current system in this world of tomorrow is to have voters fill out a card with name and address by hand, take that to someone checking IDs, take the freshly initialed card through another series of lines to someone who looks up the registration and formats a smart card, and then take the card to a touch-screen Premier Election Solutions (né Diebold) voting machine. The ballot was eleven screens long–president, senator, John Lewis running unopposed again, county surveyor (“As there are very few duties for the county surveyor, i will serve to best of my abilities when required to perform my duties.”), a whole mess of mostly unopposed, incumbent judges, a handful of state amendments and some homestead exemption referendums. I tapped away for a bit, hit the “Cast Vote” button and traded the ejected card for a peach sticker. And that was it. I voted.

And now, in the immortal words of the fourteenth president of this great nation, “There’s nothing left but to get drunk.” Barring some kind of 2000-style fiasco, by tomorrow, or maybe even a little later tonight, we’ll have elected the forty-fourth leader of this diverse and fertile land so blessed by Providence. Let’s hope he’s a good one.

On December 31, 2006 February 17th, 2009, all full power analog television broadcast licenses in the United States will expire per Title III of the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 (47 USC 309), ending analog television broadcast and completing the transition to digital TV. The goal of this change is to reclaim the VHF TV spectrum, and because digital TV is way more rad than that analog NTSC junk. Cable and satellite TV subscribers are unaffected by this change and are most likely already receiving digital signals anyhow.

I don’t have cable or satellite. Apart from the presidential debates I’ve been masochistally consuming this year, about the only TV I watch is that show with the angry jerk doctor, so I haven’t felt any need to pay for it. And since the median year of the movies I have on DVD is around 1980 or so, I haven’t found any pressing need to buy a new television set. I am one of the dwindling group of people affected by the switch, one of the people using rabbit ears and an analog television, so I need to buy a converter box if I want to watch TV after February. And that’s what I did.

Part of that most recent act to mandate the digital switch was a program to provide $40 coupons, up to two per household, toward the purchase of a digital converter box (www.dtv2009.gov). Mine came in the mail on Friday, so I walked over to that new Target sitting atop the apartment complex down the street that was demolished in an effort to rejuvinate The Prado, and I purchased a converter. Target had three brands ranging in price from $50 to $60, and I couldn’t see any difference among them other than that one of the $60 models had a plug for a smart antenna, which I don’t have. Cheapest one available, then.

The coupon I had was issued by the United States Department of Commerce, and it came as a red magstripe card, looking much like the logo for the dtv2009 site. Of course, no one at Target knew what to do with it. This card didn’t go through the Visa or Diner’s Club or whatever network like other discount cards might, and it didn’t have a barcode to scan like a manufacturer’s coupon. It took three people poking buttons and scanning things to figure it out, but I was able to buy a converter box for $10 + tax so that I can join the future and contribute my fair share to the deficit.

So now I just have to figure out how to use the thing. I have trouble picking up analog channels. With the exception of some religious stations and Telemundo, most transmitters in the area are south of me, and my apartment faces north. I can pick up Fox for some reason, but that’s about it, and even that one station is a struggle. I have fiddle with the dipoles and get out some Reynolds Wrap and try to find that one tiny spot on the gain knob like I’m adjusting the hot water in the shower. But through all of this I have instant feedback: if I did something right, the picture gets better, and if not the picture gets worse. Things are a bit different with the digital converter box. Since the picture now depends on the digital tuner synchronizing to a digital stream and not losing too many packets, there isn’t much space between a perfect picture and a blank screen. I can hit a button on the converter remote to get a signal strength bar, and I can sort of use that to adjust the antenna position and gain. It’s a lot more difficult to tell when I have it right.

So now instead of fiddling with the antenna position and maybe living with a some multipath ghosts, I have to fiddle with the antenna position even more and maybe live with some ugly-looking packet loss. Hooray, the future.