Download Chrome

If you're on a Windows machine, skip Internet Explorer in favor of Google's new browser Chrome.  It's positively boring, it works so well.  And if you download research papers, you can pull a multi-hundred page PDF in a new tab without seeing any affect at all on the rest of what you're doing(!).

Of course, there's no FoxMarks for it yet, which is my "killer app", so my usage will necessarily be limited, but I highly recommend it.

Nuff Said on One-Upping Sarkozy

My gun's spoken for, but, on the larger issue, does this seem to anyone else just like Harriet Miers/Geraldine Ferraro all over again, aka, let's get an inoffensive no-one with all the right moral criteria for the constituency to bring in leverage from the 'if it's a woman it must be the right thing' baby boomers? Or maybe she's just PUMA-bait?

The Frog

Once upon a time there was a frog who thought he should not have to swim. "Swimming's hard, we don't need it" thought the frog, "and anyway, just because everyone else likes to breathe all the time, why does that mean I should?"

And so the frog stopped swimming. The frog's friends didn't understand why he would not swim, and came nearby to stop him from sinking. But no frog can support another who will not swim, and so the frog slipped to where his friends could barely even touch him with a flipper.

The other frogs asked themselves, "What can we do, when he will not swim?" But none of the other frogs had any answers, so they decided that they would hang out nearby in case an opportunity to help came by.

And the frog sank a little more, and was lonely. But swim it would not. "You shouldn't have to swim! Enough of this 'you must swim' regime! Not everything is right for everyone after all!" And the frog floated around, just a little deeper than before.

Just about the time the frog was going nuts wondering why his froggy friends wouldn't join him, he met two new friends, Fish and Eel. The frog really liked Fish and Eel, who both maintained that though they were under the water, that they swam just fine. "Breathing?" said Eel, "You mean ingest air on purpose! Why should anyone want to do that?" Fish agreed, shuddering her fins at the thought.

The frog became fast friends with Fish and Eel, and, though he wouldn't follow them through all their caves, had long debates over the nature of Pond. But all the while, the frog was slowly sinking deeper.

Eventually, the frog hit bottom, and rested there after all the turmoil. "Come, let's play in caves", invited Fish, but the frog knew that playing was really just another form of swimming and breathing, only for the below-air folk, and wasn't interested.

Eventually, the frog started running out of oxygen; his vision swam for him, and everything started getting darker. Looking up at the frog-shaped silhouettes, he thought his final thought:

"I wonder how they climb so very high?"

[Nuff Said] It's just unprecedented

Dvořák and Beethoven

I'm over at my mother-in-laws running numbers right now trying to figure out why we're still hemorrhaging our savings, and just realized that when you're hopped up on narcotics for your bad back, even if you're largely immune to opiates (Russ and I seem to shrug off opiates like it's science-fiction), that's not a good time to drink a beer. Tipsy squared!

But since I'm feeling a sudden need to worship at the alter of Procrastinus, I thought I'd mention that Maddie and I were comped some tickets to the San Francisco symphony, to which we got gussied up and went last night. It was the 8th of the Dvořák's famous dances, followed by the Emperor Concerto and, after intermission, From the New World (one of my very favorites).

The woman who played piano for the Beethoven was wonderful -- she came out in a totally black gothalicious gown and candy-red 4" FMPs, and gave what I must declare to be the geekiest performance I've ever seen from a pianist in my life. It was magnificent. She was totally into it in a nonchalant, "this is such cool stuff, and, oh hey, there's an audience there!" kind of way. Really sweet. And her pianissimo attacks were sublime -- it was like hearing a butterfly stomping its feet. Just maginicent.

The 9th was more of a mixed bag. The conductor, who's apparently the heir-apparentto Michael Tilson Thomas (or, to his coterie of would-be boyfriends, "MTT"), the guy came to the podium with the score, which I didn't take to be a good sign. He started the piece in exactly the kind of gentle, sweeping way that Toscanini didn't do it, and I was inclined to be disappointed, but as time went on, things got better. You could really tell the portions of the music that he was concerned about, because they tighted up and you could really get knocked over by the subtle conversations going on, but then it would be back to grand-sweeping mediocrity. The beginning and ending of the piece were so-so (granted, so-so for this piece still makes me happy), but in exactly the middle portion where folks tend to gloss through things he really did a bang-up job. Overall it was a very nice experience, even where he let things go on autopilot -- I'll never be able to afford the kind of sound system at home that can rival tenth-row orchestra seating, so all I've gotta say is if the lady who comped them to my mother-in-law has more of them, I'll be giving a hearty "yes please".