But: At last, I have found my scarf. :)

I've written before about Pine, the e-mail client I've been using for more than a decade. My love for Pine is hard to describe. I cannot think of another software application (of any type) that so perfectly lets me do exactly what I want to do, quickly and efficiently, no more, no less, never crashing, never surprising me in any way even as it has slowly evolved and sprouted new features. Pine is very easy to learn and use for geeks and non-geeks alike. No, it does not look modern. It does not need to. E-mail is a text medium.* A text-based app can handle things just fine. Pine does better than that. Pine kicks ass.

And now even moreso. Earlier tonight, the Free Software ecosystem grew a bit richer with the first public release of Alpine, the successor to Pine. Alpine looks and works just like Pine always has, and runs on Windows, Linux, and the Mac OS just like Pine did, but they've cleaned things up under the hood and rebirthed the whole thing under the Apache license, which is good news for everyone. Pine's source has long been available, but Pine was never Open Source (or Free Software) because though you were allowed to meddle with Pine's source code on your own, you were not allowed to share any modified or improved form of Pine. That restriction is gone with Alpine, so if the University of Washington chooses not to accept code contributions from the hacking public, legitimate, supercharged versions of Alpine could still emerge.

It will be interesting to see what happens with Alpine. All I know is, I like the idea that if I just learn enough C, I can make the slight changes I've been itching to make all these years and bequeath Mahna Mahpine to the world. I like that this part of my essential software stack is Free at last.

Here I present what may be the Web's first screenshot of Alpine.

* Or is it a textual medium? Is there a copyeditor out there to make the call?

. . . but I have somehow hidden my scarf from myself during the warm months. I cannot find it anywhere. :(

It feels good to give.

(It feels good because it does your soul/spirit/whatever good.)

(When was the last time you surprised someone with a simple gift? Do you remember how you felt when their face lit up?)

This is the time of year for rainy Sunday afternoons at matinees, so today I took in The Fountain. I have been waiting for this film for quite some time. The writer-director is Darren Aronofsky, who previously brought us Pi and Requiem For a Dream. The former is completely bizarre and unsettling, the latter about as harsh and brutal and nightmarish a time as I've ever had at the movies. But both proved that Aronofsky is the real deal. He can write, and he can shoot. The Fountain proves that like any artist, Aronofsky can also aim very high, and misfire.

The story we're told spans a thousand years. Five hundred years ago, Hugh Jackman is Spanish conquistador Tomas, and Rachel Weisz his Queen Isabella. She sends him off to New Spain in search of the Fountain of Youth. After much toil and bloodletting, atop a Mayan pyramid he instead finds . . . a tree. And dies. more...

Over in the City, at the Buena Vista — the tavern that introduced Irish coffee to these shores — they've changed the whiskey they pour, actually moving away from their own private blend. The owner sez money has nothing to do with it. He just likes Tullamore Dew better, and claims that was the stuff they used when Irish coffee arrived here in 1952. Hmm.

I will not judge the actions of the Buddhist monk in this news story, but I am very, very glad that I do not experience similar impulses.

On a day like Thanksgiving, if you can't be with family, you make family. Did you have a happy Thanksgiving? I did.

Here we have American troops teasing Iraqi children who are apparently desperate for a drink of fresh water. Just listen to these asshats laughing it up. A nice reminder that there are plenty of ways to treat people cruelly without resorting to torture. Our forces seem to be exploring all options.

[spotted at Fark]

The California Golden Bears blew their chance to go to the Rose Bowl for the first time since 1959, losing 23-9 to USC.

[image taken by yours truly at the San Diego Zoo last December]

The problem with NaBloPoMo is, there are some days when I am simply not inspired at all, and posting something lame feels worse than posting nothing at all. Posting becomes a chore. And I don't like chores.

Two things are clear. First, tasers are not nonlethal weapons. They kill people. Further, they bring out the worst in a particular type of bad cop: the sort that is rather too quick to inflict debilitating, nightmarish pain on anyone who doesn't immediately fall into line.

Last night, some cops repeatedly tasered a student at UCLA's Powell Library. His crime? Refusing to show ID. Does this sound right to you? It sounds scary as hell to me. It's the sort of story that makes me want to stop using the word "cops" and start using the word "pigs." I try to reject that urge, because I don't want to fall into the mindset of thinking all police officers as enemies. But these officers at UCLA? Pigs.

Another student caught the incident on video using a cell phone. Hmm. Perhaps the increasing ubiquity of video cameras in people's pockets will ultimately help curb police brutality?

(One more thought: When I was at Cal, most students I knew made a distinction between the Berkeley city police and the UC police. Berkeley cops were all right. The UC police were pigs, every last one of 'em. I had a roommate who was beaten by UC cops one night, for trespassing in a construction area on campus after dark. It was his contention that the UC police force was comprised of power-trippy assholes who couldn't pass the psych exam for a true cop job. I wonder.)

[UPDATE: discussion and interesting additional linkage at MeFi]

Pictures of dog noses just make me feel better about things.

The Star of India is one of the jewels of my hometown of San Diego. This stately and beautiful ship has been sailing the seas since 1863. It is the oldest active sailing vessel in the world. For most of the year, the Star is docked in San Diego and serves as a fascinating walk-on-board maritime museum. But for one weekend each year, she goes sailing.

Would someone please get me this lovely Buddha that is offered for sale at Costco.com (of all places)? the_lucky_duck (who sent me the link) notes that shipping and handling is included. [link fixed 11/15 22:27]

On day one of NaBloPoMo, the_lucky_duck got a free bike. I thought that was pretty amazing. But I had no idea I would be the next winner! Leaving the office on Friday, I espied a laser printer sitting atop a trash can at the northwest corner of 2nd and Bryant. A sheet of paper in the output tray conveyed the handwritten message "Free (works fine)." (Lesson: Blog daily, get free stuff! Who's next?)

I have wanted a laser printer for some time. Inkjet printers — well, modern inkjet printers* — suck all kinds of ass, unless you print regularly. If you don't, the ink doesn't flow right when you fire it up after three months, and you print eighteen hideous pages before you get a clean one. I have had this problem with Epsons and Canons, and I've been told that Lexmarks and HPs are no better. You either print a minimum of a couple times each week, keeping that expensive ink a-flowin', or you curse whenever you use your printer. I've been struggling with an Epson Stylus Color 860 for several years now. I've wanted to heave it out the window with nearly every use.

Well, eff all that. I have a laser printer now. more...

Longtime readers of this blog know that I think the Chron's Jon Carroll is the finest newspaper columnist in the land. So I was bummed this morning to read Carroll's latest, in which he returns from vacation only to pour cold water all over those of us who feel uplifted by the results of this week's election. "Nothing has changed," he writes: "Same president, same policies, same corruption, same continuing embarrassments."

Well, no. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Sorry. "First, a lot of those losing Republican incumbents will immediately move down K Street and become lobbyists," Carroll says. "They will make substantially more money, and they will get to do essentially the same job: they will write the laws that govern our nation." I tell you, they may try, but they're going to be fighting a hard uphill battle. Nancy Pelosi has the destruction of the Republicans' K Street Machine very much in mind. Carroll also suggests global warming will still be treated as "alarmist nonsense." I don't think so, not since Barbara Boxer now gets to define Congress's agenda in this matter. more...

After — only after — you see Borat: Cultural Learnings of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, go read Salon's fantastic account of what's real and what's staged in the film.

It's Election Day, and here in Alameda County, the Sequoia e-voting machines are actually not the touch-screen models I'd feared. No, we're filling out huge-ass paper ballots with ink, and then feeding them directly into chirping electronic readers ourselves. So, we've got nice paper trails should we need them, no one is cursing at misaligned screens, and the biggest problem at my polling place was that one of the election workers had misplaced some of the "I Voted!" stickers.

I haven't been this hopeful on Election Day in a long time. Let's hope this day is the turning point we've been waiting for. Power to the people!

One of the main reasons I am not an iPod owner: I can't stand the way iPods store their files with scrambled filenames, in a pathetic and half-hearted attempt to curb music piracy. I simply don't want to deal with the inconvenience of a device that can't speak to a computer unless that computer is running iTunes (or some Linux-based program that speak iPodese, like Rhythmbox, Amarok, Banshee, or Exaile). A hard-drive based MP3 player should just behave like a damned hard drive.

Enter YamiPod, which seems cool enough to perhaps make me an iPod owner someday. This app lives on your iPod, and runs under OS X, Windows, and Linux. It seems to let you freely copy music to and from your iPod to any computer. Can one of my iPod-using homies give this a look-see and tell me if it's as cool as I think it is?

(Double-post today to make up for a busy, postless Saturday. Have I destroyed my NaBloPoMo mojo?)

If you haven't yet been exposed to Sacha Baron Cohen, the comedic dynamo behind Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, it's either because you don't have HBO (where his material airs here in the States), or you don't know anyone British who foisted upon you years ago (before Cohen was known in the States at all) a third-generation VHS copy of several BBC productions by one Ali G, one of Cohen's characters. (I'm in that latter category, myself.) Ali G is a wannabe-gangsta who somehow cons "important people" into interviews; he positions himself as a means for Power to speak to Youth, but instead repeatedly serves as a means for Power to display its own ludicrous shortcomings. (I love the clip of Ali G "interviewing" professional curmudgeon Andy Rooney. In three minutes, Cohen proves Rooney isn't just a curmudgeon, but a genuine asshole.) "Da Ali G Show" has done quite well on HBO, and has been Cohen's entry vehicle in this hemisphere, his previous film (Ali G Indahouse) having been mostly ignored here. more...

My alma mater's longheld desire to renovate its football stadium has hit yet another unexpected snag: It appears that the current plans would effectively destroy the longstanding Golden Bears institution known as Tightwad Hill. I've never watched a game from up there, but I've always liked the idea that it was a possibility. My hunch is that the university will destroy the Tightwad tradition, just as surely as it has quashed decades of tradition at nearby Bowles Hall.

1. The new Sequoia e-voting machines set to debut in my home county of Alameda next week apparently have a rather awful flaw: "Just push the yellow button and you can vote as many times as you want." No kidding. And of course, the brain-dead (or are they willfully devious?) public officials who have adopted this horrid technology are still missing the point. They say they're going to ensure that poll workers watch the machines all day — to make sure there's no funny business from the voters. Apparently nobody remembers Florida in 2000, which taught us that it's not the voters you have to worry about, but the election officials themselves, who now have another tool in their arsenal should they decide to rig an election and leave no evidence behind. This is frightening as all hell. The Help America Vote Act of 2002 has proven to be exactly what you would expect from the current Republican regime — a boondoggle for greedy/evil corporations that want government money (heaps of it) for producing shitty products or providing shitty services. We're seeing it all over the map. Halliburton in Iraq. Various companies providing expensive, ineffective machines for the "security theater" ridiculousness at our airports. And then companies like Diebold and Sequoia, who really take the cake because they're not just providing shitty solutions — they're undermining our very democracy. Three cheers for the American Way.

2. Heard this joke last night, am loving it. How many Bush administration officials does it take to screw in a lightbulb? None, as there is nothing wrong with the lightbulb — as a matter of fact, the situation with the lightbulb is improving every day. And it's hard work. But any talk of a lack of illumination is liberal, Democrat spin. Besides, you think the Democrats have a plan to replace the lightbulb? They want us to just live in the dark! That's what you're voting for if you vote for a Democrat — you're voting for darkness. Why do you hate our freedom?

PROBLEM: You want to play the music on your iPod (or other digital jukebox) in the car, where you have a factory head unit with an AUX that only talks to CD changers — and you live in an urban area where all FM frequencies are taken, so those stupid FM transmitter solutions simply don't work at all.

SOLUTION: The Aux2Car from Peripheral Electronics. You purchase this sucker, plus a customized harness that connects it to the head unit in your particular vehicle. As far as your car stereo is concerned, this sucker is a CD changer, but of course, it's not. It just talks to whatever device you plug into it.

The whole shebang cost me about a hundred bucks (great prices on eBay...), and it took about an hour to install. The installation procedure includes the setting of DIP switches, which I hadn't encountered for years; I felt taken back in time in a very happy way. And now, there's a plug in my car that fits right into the line out of my MP3 player (a 20GB Rockbox-ed iRiver IHP-120 — soon to be replaced by an 80GB iPod, as soon as Rockbox runs on those), or the headphone jack of my Treo 700P cell phone, which is sporting a 4GB card full of tunes these days. Digital music in the car, at long last! HUZZAH!