March 23: I feel like a Mom

I drove 35 minutes (on the Turnpike) to get Sarah after her game. Freezing, and most of the girls in shorts. I'm making her buy leggings. Drove home two of her teammates. It was such a mom thing to do. Nice girls; they like Sarah.

James Beard nominations

Anne and Maricel nominated (reference book and mid-Atlantic chef, respectively). We'll be very disappointed if they don't win.

March 17: On the SciFi Channel rebranding

Apparently, the SciFi Channel has re-branded itself as "SyFy" (which I will pronounce "siffey", as if it were short for syphillis). Geek reaction has been universally bad. I mean, when Wil Wheaton tells you to go "fyck" yourself ... Wil has such a reputation for being a nice guy, that it's a bit like Mother Theresa telling you where to get off. On the other hand, it's like Mother Theresa just told you where to get off!

My favorite justification:

"The name Sci Fi has been associated with geeks and dysfunctional, antisocial boys in their basements with video games and stuff like that, as opposed to the general public and the female audience in particular," said TV historian Tim Brooks, who helped launch Sci Fi Channel when he worked at USA Network. ("Sci Fi Channel Aims to Shed Geeky Image With New Name", TVWeek)

Haven't we moved beyond the "boys in the basement" geek image? Larry and Sergery were almost certainly not working in a Stanford basement when they started the work that would lead to Google. Steve Jobs does not work in a basement. My office is on the fourth floor, with a lovely view of Penn's biopond (or in my backyard in the gasp! sun and fresh air). Let's get over the anti-social, junk-food eating, lazy geek stereotype. I work with a bunch of geeks, and they run marathons (me, I just bike every day in any weather). Geeks marry. Some of us even have uteruses — that would be your "female audience" above. I was geek long before it was cool and I'm tired of of marketeers telling me what geek is. I know geek. I live, eat, breathe and bleed geek, and you'll pry my speculative fiction from my cold, dead hands.

And if you want programming that will attract women, it's very, very simple and straightforward (like writing good code):

1. Pass the Bechdel test, which means screen time for multiple women, with intelligent dialog. Amazingly, women talk about things other than men, especially in a professional setting! Even as friends, we talk about: the overheated housing market in Seattle, the difference between American and British English, the difference between socializing in America and Germany, how beuracracies suck, which character an a local author's book is which of our friends, all sorts of things.
2. Brains not boobs. There will never be a show without pretty people, but it would be nice if the characters were not there just to keep heterosexual male attention on the screen.
3. Competence. I hated the Lucy and Ethel characters on I Love Lucy. Incompetence is just not funny. To run a production company, Lucille Ball had to be intelligent, talented and competent, which makes her character's inadequacy all the more galling. The character that is always incompetent, can't help but screw up and needs constant rescuing gets old very fast. It's especially noticeable when the only women on the show are incompetent. I didn't like Seinfeld, either.
4. Similarly, not overburdened with trauma or neuroses, angst or ennui. I like The Closer for a lead character who is female and in charge, not because her personal life is a mess. On the same line: no tears.
5. No Heinlein-esque macho posturing.

You'll notice this list says nothing about vampyres, psychics, princesses in need of rescue, romance, cute animals or children. Good plots, scripts, actors, directing and effects would by nice, but that would appea to male and female audiences.

I've only watched SciFi for Doctor Who and its spinoffs recently. As far as I'm concerned, John Edwards (the charlatan "psychic," not the adulterous presidentail candidate) was the shark, and that was years and years ago. Battlestar interests me, but Jorj loved the original series and shunned the new. We just don't watch any TV, unless we record it and make time to watch it (Who, Closer, Leverage, Burn Notice for Bruce Campbell — "Bruce Campbell" should be on the list up there).

March 16: Of interest to grandparents and godparents

Video of Jake (and a bit of Sarah)

March 6: Kind and unkind words on the Kindle

At New Year's, I met Trudy Rubin, a Philadelphia journalist I've long admired. We spent the afternoon in our friends' rowhouse kitchen, talking with Rubin, her husband and another handful of liberals. Rubin's column is one thing I miss about not getting the Inquirer.

But, as Jorj pointed out, we are very bad at recycling newspapers. It's all we can do to keep up with two weekly news magazine subscriptions.

Jorj's solution? A Kindle and Inquirer subscription for my birthday. This was one give I would NEVER have guessed.

It's come a long way ...

There really is a difference between the Kindle and software e-book readers. Amazon got the black and white screen exactly right. The letters aren't made by light (or the absence of light), but by small particles that move up and down (in and out of visibility). Reading on the Kindle is much, much easier than reading on a monitor, especially for my aging eyes.

In addition to my newspaper subscription, I bought a collection of Dashiell Hammet short stories I didn't think I had (I was wrong), and have been reading them on the train. Although the viewing area is much smaller with fewer words per page than any book except Jake's picture books, it's very readable, and I can maintain my usual reading speed.

... but it's not there yet

However, the Kindle is not designed for reading newspapers, with their sections, articles and photographs.

Reading a novel (or event a collection of short stories) is not like reading a newspaper. Newspapers have only a vague concept of start and end. Newspapers are designed to be jumped into, at any point. That's why the sections are physically separate, no matter how few pages — you can jump right to sports or regional or weekend if you want. Long articles have sub-heads, so that you can jump in into the middle. Photos and charts are visually enticing, and (at best) informative, supporting the articles and making clear what wordy descriptions can't.

After opening the Inquirer, the Kindle shows a table of contents for each section, with an article count. Using the Kindle's square mouse, you can move down and across the double (quadruple) column list of sections and article counts. Pushing the mouse (it's like the eraser mouse in the middle of old Windows laptops, but easier to control) selects the item. Selecting a section leads to the "first" article in the section; selecting the count shows headlines and the first two lines of the first five articles.

First problem: reading the front page of a newspaper section, the reader scans the headlines and photos for anything enticing. A good headline leads to reading the first graph or two, which should suck you in to the rest of the article. With the kindle, one can't scan the headlines and the first few paragraphs, looking for something interesting to read. The view is either the headline and beginning of one article, or headlines and first twelve words of five articles. Neither lends itself to traditional scanning. Additionally, the Inquirer can't (or hasn't included) any illustrations. The Kindle 2 allows greyscale, and other e-books include graphs (e.g. Shirley Corriher's Bakewise). Of course, how to place any photographs becomes a problem on the small screen.

In an article, one can jump to the next and previous articles using the square eraser mouse. However, there is no way to return to the list of articles in a section, only to the list of sections. Again, this makes scanning a section nearly impossible. This might be how the Inquirer has programmed their newspaper, or it might be a limitation of the kindle.

There is a Back button on the Kindle, but it does not return the reader to the previous section. This is not to be confused with the previous page button, which behaves as expected, as do the two large next page buttons (one on each side), or the Home button, which goes to the list of downloaded periodicals and books, or the Menu button, which brings up a context-sensitive drop-down menu (yeah, calling it Menu is confusing as all get out for anyone who's used a DVD player in the last month), and then the square eraser mouse to select on-screen options... Newspapers do make it easy to find the news you want quickly, and to get a (filtered) overview of the world quickly. Some of the big usability issues are right — Next page is big, and on both sides, for any readers of Hebrew or Japanese — but the trickier questions seem to have been fobbed off on "we'll put it in a menu" or "just add a button." Yes, UI is hard, I do it for a living, but this is Amazon, the 600-pound gorrilla of on-line merchants.

And it's not going away

I can see why there is a market for the Kindle even though every hand-held computer has at least one e-book software package. It is much easier to just read than any LCD or CRT screen. However, the small screen makes reading anything that is non-linear, like newspapers or technical books, more difficult.

January 24: I'm sure I've been doing something

People ask, how are things going? what's new? And all I can say is, we've been frantically busy, I'm sure we've been doing something, but I'll be danged if I can remember what it is.

January 13: Unamerican

Sarah came back from a "pasta party" the night before a swim meet and asked, "Where's our forty-two-inch TV and game room and three-car garage?" Tobi had the same reaction when we picked him up at the airport in a Saturn. Where was the SUV? he wondered.

In some ways, we break a lot of stereotypes of Americans (big cars, big TVs, big ... everything). On the other hand: house, car, kid, working mom. Pretty all-American. We eat a lot of German food, but that's just my immigrant German heritage; you know any Italian-Americans who don't cook with olive oil? Like most Americans we eat a lot of "ethnic" food in general.

September & October 2008 July through October, 2009

One-liners about bad UI, Doctor Who, and the rest of my life.

What I'm reading

• Dashiell Hammett short stories, published as Nightmare Town by Vintage, and under a generic title on my Kindle.
• BakeWise, Shirley Corriher's long-awaited sequel to CookWise is as good as the first volume. If you are interested in developing your own recipes, if you want to know why your recipes succeed or fail, if you want to become a baking expert, this is the book. It's as tasty to read as the recipes purport to be.
• Culinaria Germany an American translation of an originally German work. It covers Germany state-by-state with lots of glorious photos. It often pays special attention to foods I consider quintessentially German (like asparagus and pretzels) and has two pages for Stollen and five for Christmas in general. Mmmm.
• Siddartha, Hesse, original German, only a chapter a night. Hesse is the easiest of the German literary writers.
• Anne Mendelson's Milk. Fantastic. Buy it now.

What I'm listening to

• Der kleine Hobbit, an audiobook of the German translation of the Hobbit. My German is really bad.

Guilty pleasures

• The Closer, Burn Notice, Leverage
• Sleeping in while Jorj takes care of Jake
• Having my hair washed before a hair cut
• LOLCats
• Cake Wrecks

I bake too

And sometimes I write about it.