Well, all blogs are now safely upgraded, but I have to say this has not been an enjoyable experience. Also the Wordpress team has made some pretty dubious decisions with the 2.5 admin menus, and neither M. nor I are impressed. Perhaps it will grow on us.

This was way too much effort to go through for what should have been a fairly straightforward upgrade...and I'm only managing four sites. As I expect to add three more to this number within the next few months, it's probably time to start looking for a multi-blogging solution that can cleanly handle multiple domain names. Still, Wordpress is quite good at what it does, and I'll need a pretty compelling case to switch to something else. Comment spam protection as-good-or-better-than Akismet is a sine qua non.

Well, that's enough time spent on personal system administration for the next few weeks. Time to get back to machine learning.

I've spent the evening bashing my head against the Wordpress 2.5 upgrade, which has broken many things on the four blogs that I'm currently hosting. I've upgraded k2 to the latest nightly, I've upgraded or disabled all plugins, and still one of the blogs blandly reports, "Your attempt to edit your settings has failed." How bleeding unhelpful is that? Even after I get this all sorted out I'm going to have to spend far too much time cleaning up all the bits and pieces that have fallen out of place.

I rushed this upgrade because of some rather ugly security holes...M. briefly thought that one of her sites had been hacked. I'm mostly quite happy with Wordpress, but upgrades have been a bear.

Time for a second Golden Monkey.

Current Mood: aggravated

I don't think I used my grill once last year, but 2007 was, in retrospect, pretty damned pathetic. Already, 2008 shows much more promise.

The weather was clement on Saturday and F--- was visiting, so I decided to smoke some salmon: rub it with salt, pepper, and brown sugar, let it sit for a half hour, pop some wood chips (or a broken Ancho chile or two!) in the bottom of the smoker, and put it on the flame for fifteen minutes or so.

Actually, you don't even need a smoker or a grill. Just get a heavy-bottomed pan with a tight-fitting lid, toss your smoking medium in the bottom, tear a piece of foil to fit the bottom of the pan (with a hole in the middle to let the smoke through) and put the salmon on a footed rack in the pan. (If your rack doesn't have feet, just ball up some more foil.) Put it on the burner and once it starts smoking a bit cover it up and leave it alone for fifteen minutes or so...it should flake nicely with a fork when its finished.

I used apple-wood chips, this time, serving it up with rice and salted edamame in the pod. Delicious! For dessert, a six-minute chocolate cake (that's how long it takes to mix the ingredients) with a chocolate-coffee frosting, and fresh strawberries dipped in the extra. And what's more, there are leftovers...how long until lunch, again?

Sunday was Eggs Benedict. My, but it's been too long since I've spent time cooking.

Current Mood: hungry

I took the day off from work to give the new kayaks a test paddle. M. and I went up to Lock 60 of the Schuykill Canal, a placid and scenic waterway just under two-and-a-half miles long. I was quite confident that my kayak (a Wilderness Systems Tsunami 125) would be exactly what I wanted, but we ended up special-ordering a Tsunami SP for M, even though it might have been too small. It's definitely snug and a fraction less stable than the Tsunami 120, but so far it's proven to be a good choice.

The weather was stupendous, cool and fair, a perfect spring day. The banks were awash with the fresh green of buds settling in for the serious business of erupting into shoots. We saw at least a dozen turtles sunning themselves on rocks, one of which was the largest I've seen in years...a foot long, at least.

Since we were in the area, we also took the opportunity to have lunch at the Sly Fox, as I've been wanting to drop in to try their beer for some time. I opted for a sampler, my usual routine at a new microbrewery. They had a dozen beers on tap, so with only five to the sampler I had to make some hard choices.

To my dismay, their only IPA was unavailable, but the Phoenix Pale Ale proved to be a worthy substitute, strongly hopped and quite reminiscent of greenish bite of Victory's Hop Wallop.

The Royal Weisse was a nice surprise, with more character than your average wheat beer...though its delicacy was a bit overwhelmed by the ham-and-mustard flavor of my sandwich.

On the other hand, the Black Raspberry Reserve was quite a disappointment. Raspberry beers are hard to do well, and this one fell into the usual trap of being too sweet and too raspberry. My gold standard in this area was a raspberry weisse that I had at the Brandywine Brewing Company quite a few years back that was not sweet in the slightest, and had a flavor that was the delicate and bitter echo of a raspberry leaf...Sly Fox's Black Raspberry Reserve just didn't measure up.

The Seamus Irish Red Ale was the worst of the lot, and tasted like nothing so much as weak iced tea. It was drinkable with a strongly flavored sandwich, but only just.

Perhaps my favorite was the Belgian-style Renard d'Or (though the Phoenix makes a close second). It was nicely complex, full-flavored and well-balanced, at once a touch sweeter and bitterer than Victory's Golden Monkey.

M. and I plan to make another visit back when the have the IPA on tap...if you're in the area and like beer, Sly Fox is definitely worth a trip. This was much better than my trip to McKenzie's in Malvern a couple weeks back, where out of seven or eight beers sampled there wasn't a one I'd cross the street to drink again.

All in all, this has been my first day off in quite a while that actually felt relaxing. More like this, please.

Tags: beer., kayaking

The turn-out yesterday for S.O.S.'s Japanese Game Night was surprisingly light, but it ended up working out quite well. There were five of us (plus dji, who kindly hosted, as ever), and the focus for the evening was mahjong.

hairness, complexated and I had spent an evening with mikekn earlier this month, trying to figure out the rules for playing the Japanese Riichi variant. It took us the entire evening to play two hands (figuring out the scoring was particularly painful), but the effort paid off. Mahjong is a bit of an imposing game if you've never played it before. Even though the basic concept is simple enough, it's loaded with special cases and calculating the final score is torturous the first few times.

Based on last night's experience, it looks like the best way to teach it is to describe the basic goal (it's a lot like rummy), and then dive right into playing a practice game with all hands exposed. Even though the two folks who'd never played it before were a bit dubious at first about all the rules they didn't know, it was straightforward enough to explain as different situations come up.

We played for around three-and-a-half hours...I played the first hand (getting a haneman, to hairness's dismay), but sat out thereafter and provided rules clarifications as needed. The last hand of the evening turned out to be fairly exciting, as hairness (with only 4,400 points left of his original 27,000) narrowly beat complexated to mahjong, evading her deadly open pung of dora. It would have been nice to have time for one more hand, as we probably could have finished the complete East Wind round.

Mahjong will definitely be an option at future game nights, and we now have five people who are familiar with the rules. I might make up a one-page scoring flowchart to make things easier for the next game, as it's easy to overlook things.

Next game night will be on May 31, featuring hanafuda: Japanese flower cards.

Oh, and by the way, complexated: the rule I was trying to find last night is nagashi mangan. If all the tiles in the wall are exhausted and you have discarded only terminals and honors (none of which have been claimed by anyone else), then you get to claim a five-yaku (mangan) win, along with any riichi bets and counters.

Tags: games, mahjong, sos

On the way home today, I noticed that the scrub alongside the highway is brushed with yellow: the forsythia is beginning to bloom.

Spring also brings dangers: my office has declared an anserine danger zone: a pair of extremely agressive Canada Geese have taken up residence in the shrubbery.  They are quite willing to attack...even though I'd tried to given them a wide berth by walking on the lawn, one flew at my head, flapping and squawking.

I'm surprised and pleased, though, that the facilities folks haven't tried to drive them off or poison them...instead, they've roped off a portion of the parking lot, sacrificing valuable parking spaces for the benefit of goosely procreation.

I have actually managed to find someone interested in playing chess variants with me (at work, no less!), so we sat down at lunch today for a quick challenge. I like raw, F.I.D.E. chess well enough (even if I'm a bit of a slouch), but there's something about playing a new variant that really activates the hunting part of my brain.

He'd never played any chess variants, so we decided on Alice Chess as something mostly familiar...and yet strangely different. I'd never played Alice before, either, so that put us on equal footing.

Alice Chess is that best sort of chess variant: one that makes a simple, well-defined change to the game while leaving the rest of the rules nearly intact; yet the change should alter the flow of the game into something alien. In this, good chess variants are much like good SF: the laws of reality are tweaked a bit, and those tweaks are essential to the development of the story.

Here's the conceit: Alice Chess is played on two boards. When you move a piece, it transfers to the equivalent square on the other board (which must be empty). Moves must be legal on the board on which they are played. A few minor clarifications need to be made for castling and en passant, but that's really the game in a nutshell.

The game developed slowly (except for a queen exchange on move 4!), as we both felt out the ramifications of each move. Pawn structures, for example, work quite differently when your advance pawn can be captured and the attacker immediately blips to the other board, evading the defenders. I blundered early, losing a rook, but it didn't have much effect on the flow of the game...my bishops ended up doing most of the dirty work, finally pinning down the black king with the help of a knight. It was a bit close until I managed to dissipate black's two-rook threat on my king side.

I can thoroughly recommend Alice Chess as a fun, well-balanced variant. The game plays more "openly" than chess, as a constricted piece can often increase its mobility by making a quiet move...after which it will transfer to the other board with completely different lines of attack.

Tags: chessvariants, games

An enjoyable S.O.S. meeting last night, not least because Blue Seed 9 finally came to an end.  What a thoroughly mediocre series!

I've seen worse anime, which is about all the praise I can give it.  The characters are wooden, unpleasant, and impossible to care about.  Like too many series it contents itself with looting a few names or events from myth and history, then layering on an execrable excuse for a story.  In these episodes we discover that (and I will cold-bloodedly reveal this "spoiler", as it is depressingly irrelevant) one of the principal antagonists is actually Yamata-no-Orochi, the eight-headed dragon slain by Susano-O-no-Mikoto in legend.  Maybe we knew this already; if so, I missed it. This revelation makes absolutely no difference to the plot, it's simply an excuse for yet another tensionless fight scene with Kusanagi bouncing around ineffectually..  hairness suggested that the series might have been better if they'd cut it down by about half, which certainly couldn't hurt anything.

Kiddy Grade is very nicely animated, but the profuse loli fanservice doesn't do a lot for me.  Episodes 11 and 12 reveal what are, I gather, supposed to be shattering revelations (along with lots of full-frontal nudity in 12).  The series appears to be trying to move beyond the episodic, mission-based format of the earlier episodes; perhaps an infusion of plot will kindle my interest in the series, but I'm not holding my breath.

Full Metal Alchemist is not without its flaws, but it's quite worthwhile for all that.  The world design is consistent, and the characters are at least a bit more than cardboard cutouts.  One the whole, the creators do good job of injecting moments of genuine tension into the story.  This show has kept me engaged nearly all the way along, though I get a bit impatient with some of the choices, at times.

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya makes up for all, though; it's one of my favorites.  It's experimental without abandoning entertainment, and is certainly varied.  The voice of the protagonist/narrator Kyon lends a nicely sardonic tone.. The producers must have blown two episodes worth of animation budget on the concert scenes in episode 12.  That reminds me: there's a fan translation project for the novels that I'd like to get around to reading one of these days.

Tags: anime

Went to a Mark-Jason Dominus talk on functional programming techniques for parser construction this past week.  As always, MJD was an engaging speaker.  The talk began a bit slowly, but was quite good overall..  It was a a nice example of the benefits of thinking functionally.

Best line of the evening: "You can also stick a tree branch up your butt--that doesn't mean it's a good idea.  I'll tell you what, please don't mention anything about C++ again."

I just gave up on The Mark of Ran (Book 1 of "The Sea Beggars) by Paul Kearney.  I'd picked it up from the library hoping for a good adventure tale, but it's a very frustrating book.  Kearney seems to share Zelazny's taste for superhuman, amoral protagonists.  Unfortunately, Rol (the protagonist of Ran) doesn't have the iconic power of a Corwin.

Worse, Kearney's language is opaque and unnecessarily stilted.  Opening the book at random: "The evening light off the Wrywind Sea set his red-gold hair alight in a momentary kinship of color."  "It was a case of visualizing that veil of shadow , and then seeing men's regard turn toward it like bright spears of interest."  In general, he seems to be aiming for a sort of high-fantasy effect, but my reaction is primarily impatience and irritation.

It was the inconsistency of the characters that pushed me over the edge, in the end.  I won't be finishing this one.

Tags: books, fantasy