I haven’t talked. I haven’t written. I haven’t called. Whatever the case, you haven’t heard from me.

It never fails. I can come back here after a month, read what I’ve written already, and be shamed into silence. I’m just often in a different place when I come back here. And this isn’t to say that I have nothing to say. I just haven’t bothered.

I’m going to publish this just to break the silence, and then I will come back and rethink what I want out of this site.

I’m resolving to go vegetarian for 2012 and beyond, for both personal health reasons and for environmental reasons. I’m particularly challenged knowing that I have very strange preferences in foods, but I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and it seems like the right thing for me.

The preferences issue is going to work partly in my favor, anyway. I’m not a big fan of the meats that most people seem to really like: bacon, steaks, roasts, stews, pork chops, and so on.

A few friends have mentioned a concern over whether I’d get enough protein, and considering how much I like having pasta with a bit of sauce as a meal, it’s a valid concern, so I’m being sent recipes en masse and told about meat substitutes. My fridge now has Quorn and textured vegetable protein.

I’m also trying to control dairy intake a bit, but I’m not overly concerned about it at the moment.

It’s kind of odd to get used to having this thing around. It’s quite different from reading a book. It’s more linear. It seems less holy, somehow, than turning the pages. You get this stream of words, instead, and you can still see the seams of the technology.

Maybe I should talk about this Nook thing in specifics. Let’s get tech review here–this thing is slick. Probably the most important question you’re asking right now is why I chose this over the Kindle, which is basically the iPod of the e-reader world. Good question!

The truth is, I was in the store looking at all the options, and this includes the Kindle, iRiver offering (whose name was forgettable), and cast of others, and I chose the Nook for its openness, which is second only to the iRiver (which I rejected for design reasons). If I want, I can throw some stuff on here and go. And I have. I’m so looking forward to reading things like Le petit prince and My Antonía again.

So, you can put in a microSD card to expand its storage, which is nice. It’s got nifty cover options and is a pretty small form factor (towards the smaller end of the group). It feels rugged, with a somewhat soft, matte shell all over that withstood pizza grease passably well.

DRM gave me trouble at first. Doesn’t it always? I bought some books from the Barnes & Noble store (a relatively painless experience in itself) which were synced to my library, but upon opening them, it asked for my name and credit card number. And then it asked again. And again. And wouldn’t stop. Turns out it asks this to decrypt the DRM that comes along with the books you buy from their store, and it took a while of messing around to get it to accept my credentials and let me read the books I bought.

Of course, it’s quite easy to add books from other sources if you have an ePub formatted file.

I walked into a Target to make another purchase and got this thing on a whim. I had all the devices in demo-mode in front of me, and though I was slightly biased against the Kindle going into this, I ended up with the Nook because I felt the design slightly edged out the others, and it felt more sturdy to the touch.

Wow, I didn’t mean for this to turn into a tech review. I really meant more to celebrate my return to reading. Having a library at hand of all the books I really loved reading growing up tends to do that to you.

I’ve also been incredibly busy with my new full-time job as a Perl programmer in Portland. I’ll pause for applause. Okay, well, this means I’ve been busy and getting progressively nerdier with each passing week. You guys will have to put up with it.

Well, the subject of this post is really about where I’m at right now with trying to get back into writing. I figure I can take my nerdy learnings and apply them to writing so I get what I want out of the process. That is to say, if I want to write, I want to sit down to something elegant, minimal, immersive, functional, and capable. Microsoft Word is great if I want to worry about content and presentation at the same time. But writing is about the content, and maybe I want to punch out some words first.

Notepad with plain text is a little too simple. Nowadays, I’m running vim to edit Markdown-formatted files stored in a git repository, and when I want to focus on the job at hand, I just full-screen my terminal and crank up the font size a bit.

Vim lets me edit text in in a purely textual interface. Markdown lets me write and use plain text with a minimal set for formatting so I can get just the bare minimum of structure and format and focus on what I’m writing. Git lets me save a perpetual running history of my projects that can be rewound, branched, backed up, shuttled around, and shared easily.

Pretty simple, right? But it’s infinitely configurable. When it comes to a process like writing, you can spend time honing the tool bit by bit over the weeks, months, or years, and slowly but surely it remembers every change and shapes itself to you like a well used tool over time. That’s part of the attraction of (almost) plain text and vim–it’s always going to work the same and won’t really change over time (except for what I do to change it). They’re decades-old, simple technologies.

I got a treat this afternoon—a blog post about unconscious motives by my friend, along with some off-the-cuff discussion as it relates to queerness. This is already interesting, and near and dear to my mind, but as I began to read, it mixed in together with something I heard on the radio the other day.

Apparently a doctor is presenting locally on a medical theory that’s gaining steam, called developmental pathology. Simply put, when you control for other factors, low birth weight seems to be correlated with higher incidence of heart disease in middle age. This idea is that, in utero and neonatal development are crucially important to how we fare against disease later in life, and to an extent, it’s set in stone. It turns out one of the greatest factors influencing heart health later in life is how the heart is built, and it’s built in the womb.

Another expert on the radio who deals with kidney disease corroborated how sound this theory is with an example: The number of nephrons (the basic filtering unit in the kidneys) is set before birth. You’re born with your permanent allocation of them. If you’re malnourished in the womb, and your kidneys’ development suffers, then no matter how healthy you grow up to be, no matter how much exercise, good diet, and water you obtain, you’re congenitally predisposed to poorer kidney health later in life simply because your nephrons will encounter a greater work load throughout your life.

Maxporter does a great job of discussing a concept well known to developmental psychologists and therapists and perhaps less well known to the population at large. In our infancy our minds are still in utero, so to speak, and the same idea applies. For example, some of us are predisposed to be more trusting than others. We quickly gain an idea of whether the world is safe or not through the circumstances we encounter in our pre-lingual period, and it forever shapes our approach to the world and the situations we find ourselves in.

We internalize a great number of things in that period, and I’ve begun to think of the result as a kind of developmental pathology of the mind. Very early childhood events and development appear to have lasting, permanent effects on our psychology later on. I’m certain, for queer people and non-queer people alike, we internalize very powerful ideas about sexuality and gender that persist and cause discord and suffering throughout our lives.

Bullying seems to be a symptom of the conflict inherent in the disparity between the bully’s internalized sense of gender/sexuality and the conflicting evidence before him or her in a person he or she perceives to be outside the norm. In other words, it just is another way some of us end up a victim of the same bullshit we’re taught as a kid, both from without and within.

We’re not just taught these things. Our entire mind is built around the ideas we internalize as a baby. Maybe “unconscious motives” is a misnomer. Maybe we should be talking about a structural framework that shapes our entire worldview so entirely that it’s impossible for us to perceive it.

Maybe I should be discussing this with my therapist.

Maybe I’m only one of five readers there, as he alleges (which I can easily disprove; Google Reader alone shows twelve people follow his blog), but I do cop quite a bit of value from his posts just because it’s so different than most of the things I read. Maybe it just has to do with the fact I think he’s a cool guy.

But I see his point. I deal with the same thing. On my own blog, I feel like I’m putting messages into bottles and setting them out in the ocean. I’ve struggled with maintaining a writing routine lately, though I’m getting better about it.

Personally, I feel like I’ll have a better time weathering my own blog’s existential tempest. Part of why it has not-so-many readers is simply that my friends aren’t really blog-reading types. That might change in the future. Another part is that there’s no fixed schedule, theme of posts, and so on. To take an interest in this blog is really to take an interest in me because I’m just dumping bits of myself here.

Actually, I’ve regurgitated before my motives for doing what seems to be a silly, self-masturbatory act of writing a blog that (seemingly) no one reads in an earlier post that addresses specifically this. That entry goes a long way towards explaining why I would bother. I should add to that, though, and say that this blog (and my other, more personal stuff elsewhere) is part of my own feedback loop. In large part, I write this because I myself value from this discussion. I might contend that the completion of the thought process isn’t communication or discussion, as maxporter contends, but articulation.

I’ve articulated, for example, the joy I find in making dough, and like I said, I later derive value from that kind of thing myself. I go back and re-explore and re-experience those thoughts and am able to find new perspectives on them, often enough.

This is all beside the point, though. Fostering discussion is a tricky thing, I think. I’ve given more than a few minutes’ thought to the same thing because, even if I do find value in masturbating in a digital echo chamber, I find more value in thoughtful discussion with others and sharing ideas.

I think the key, though, is fostering community. Discussion is a side-effect. There is a whole blogging world, some of whose inhabitants sit in dark corners writing for their own purposes, and some of whom interact with one another. So the key is reading as well as writing, following discussion inside the community with whom I wish to be connected.

I don’t really know what this concept of community will mean to you, but there’s a reason the respected bloggers in, say, the design community or the DIY community or so on have big conferences and small get-togethers, follow one another’s blogs, and generally have relationships with one another. It’s the same reason why most blog software treats linkbacks (such as trackbacks) as on par with comments. It’s the same reason why social media actually took off like it did—status updates don’t make much sense if you’re the only one who ever sees them.

They’re all discussion. Discussion happens all among ourselves. The trick is finding the rest of your blog community.

I’m going to leave this post here and return to this subject at another time because these are raw, nascent thoughts that could use some polishing and further development. Maybe even some discussion.

Screenshot of Tweetdeck on Linux

Now, the only people left reading are our Ubuntu-using crowd. If you’re into social media especially, this one’s for you! I figure a lot of you guys are probably using Gwibber, going to the Twitter website, or just don’t care, but in case this does interest you, I figure I’d put some instructions here. This will help you out with any Adobe AIR application, but I especially had a particular interest in making sure TweetDeck worked.

There is no 64-bit version of Adobe AIR, but it’s possible to run 32-bit versions of applications if all their dependencies are in place.  Turns out that, by default, all the libraries and so on needed to run a 32-bit version of Adobe AIR are already in place in Ubuntu 11.04, and it was simply a matter of creating a package that I could install without complaints, after which point I can use AIR apps without a problem.

These instructions can be found elsewhere on the Internet, but I wanted to put it up somewhere explicitly saying these instructions pertain to version 11.04 and confirm that they work there. I also added a step of my own that’s TweetDeck-specific. Simply issue these commands:

wget http://airdownload.adobe.com/air/lin/download/2.6/adobeair.deb
mkdir tmp # make a working directory
dpkg-deb -x adobeair.deb tmp # extract the package
dpkg-deb --control adobeair.deb tmp/DEBIAN # extract the control files
sed -i "s/i386/all/" tmp/DEBIAN/control # remove the 32-bit requirement
dpkg -b tmp adobeair_64.deb # rebuild the package
rm -rf tmp # get rid of that temporary directory
sudo dpkg -i adobeair_64.deb # install the package

If you want to run TweetDeck (the reason I grabbed AIR to begin with), you can just go to its website and install it like normal. I highly recommend letting it make a “desktop shortcut” (a launcher) and then using that to launch the program so that the Unity Launcher shows its icon correctly. In my case, I put the launcher in a safe place and then dragged it into the Unity Launcher as a permanent home.

One last thing. Notice TweetDeck doesn’t show up in the notification area (up there next to the application menu) at the top with a nice icon. Depending on your settings, this could cause you to lose the program, necessitating that you kill it. By default, 11.04 hides most new notification area icons except for a few exceptions. We can just easily add TweetDeck as an exception.

Still got your terminal open? Issue this command first:

gsettings get com.canonical.Unity.Panel systray-whitelist

You should be looking at a list of items that it prints out. Mine looks like this (yours is probably different):

['JavaEmbeddedFrame', 'Mumble', 'Wine', 'Skype', 'hp-systray', \
'qq', 'Pidgin', 'Shutter', 'vlc', 'handbrake-gtk', 'Revelation']

We just want to add TweetDeck to this list. (Bear in mind, you can also add things like Pidgin, Revelation, Shutter, or a raft of other programs there.) Issue a command like this (assuming you’re just adding Tweetdeck to the default list; if you run my command per se, it’ll add more exceptions, which is fine if that’s what you want):

gsettings set com.canonical.Unity.Panel systray-whitelist \
"['JavaEmbeddedFrame', 'Mumble', 'Wine', 'Skype', 'hp-systray', 'qq', \
'Pidgin', 'Shutter', 'vlc', 'handbrake-gtk', 'Revelation', 'TweetDeck']"

Done! Next time you log in, it’ll take effect. Don’t want to log out and back in? Then let’s replace Unity real quick! (Warning: This might jostle your windows a bit, as this recreates Compiz as well.) Press Alt-F2 so that the Unity Dash lets you issue a command (we don’t want to run it from the Terminal; otherwise, Unity would become its child process), and type this in and press Enter:

unity --replace

Ta-da! You should be all done now! Enjoy Adobe AIR! Comment below if you have questions, want to correct me (I’ve been using Ubuntu only for a week), or have a comment. Thanks.

For a while now I’ve been on a quest for the best pizza I can possibly make at home. This has led me through dozens of pizzas, maybe hundreds, over the last several months. I know this seems ridiculous, but when I want to perfect something, I’m driven—and when I do perfect it, well, why not have perfect pizza all the time? It’s one of the cheapest things I’ve ever learned to make, to be honest, and one of the most versatile and impressive.

Fresh batch of dough rising: most satisfying thing in the world

All of my effort has revolved around the dough-making process. I thought I’d share some of my methods here and some things I’ve learned along the way. So I’d like to walk through my dough-making process for you guys. Needless to say, this entry has been months in the making. (Pardon my meager food photography, by the way—it’s a work in progress, I suppose.)

The first thing I do is grab a jar I’ve marked off at the three-fourths of a cup mark and run some hot water up to that level. I aim for a temperature that would be the most comfortable for showering for me, pretty hot but not scalding. It’s funny how my yeast likes the same temperature I do. I no longer bother measuring the temperature of the water in any way; my sense of touch is quite reliable now.

Speaking of yeast, I’ve bought a big sack of instant yeast from WinCo’s bulk foods department and have been using it for months. It’s proven to be an amazing investment. I first grab something a little short of a tablespoon (perhaps two and a half teaspoons) and throw it into my water jar, and then I grab two tablespoons of sugar and do the same. Lately I’ve tried out brown sugar as well with great results. The resulting combination I mix (often gently shaking) until it is an evenly dissolved, brown fungal muck. So I set this aside to percolate while I get the rest of the ingredients ready. If after ten or so minutes there’s a nice bubbly foam on top, I know it’s working. I wish I had a picture of this, but I don’t. Just imagine a nice head on a glass of beer.

Personally, I find this process almost impossible without a good dough mixer, preferably a stand mixer. I take out the big mixing bowl and dump in the other ingredients. The flour here seems to be key. I use bread flour into which I mix some gluten flour to raise the gluten content even more. Lately I’ve been throwing in whole wheat flour as well, and the result has been pretty good, especially along with brown sugar. So, I throw in two cups of that flour mixture (maybe a very small bit more if I want to adjust the moisture content of the dough later), a tablespoon of oil, and a teaspoon or two of salt. I don’t personally bother with sifting anything.

I usually tend towards less salt rather than more for a couple of reasons. First of all, I prefer sweet and yeasty to come through in the flavor of the dough stronger than salty. Second, though, and more importantly, the salt proportion has an inhibitory effect on the yeast metabolism later during the rising process. Adding a tablespoon of salt works, but it makes for very salty dough that doesn’t rise quite as vigorously, I’ve found.

Once these dry ingredients are in the bowl, I’ll glance over at the water mixture to see if it’s developed a nice head of foam yet. If not, I’ll wait a few. If so, though, I’ll go ahead and dump it into the bowl with the rest of the ingredients. Now everything is together in a loose slurry, and I mix it with a spoon by hand slowly until the flour seizes the water and holds all the ingredients together. Now what’s in the bowl is a proper dough!

At this point, it needs to be kneaded, a lot. Kneading makes sure everything is mixed, but it also develops the gluten. That is to say, it binds and aligns the gluten protein into strands together that hold the structure well and give the dough strength. It also aerates the dough, mixing in thousands of tiny pockets of air that the yeast can respire carbon dioxide into as it rises and leading to the bubbling, porous texture of the resulting baked bread crust.

So I stick bread hooks onto the stand mixer, smear oil with my fingertips down their length, and then set it to kneading on a slow setting for fifteen minutes. I vary the speed a bit usually, but fifteen minutes is the minimum to get a good development of the ingredients. The finished product ought to be strong, smooth, and easy to shape, like an elastic silly putty.

After it’s done, I can pull it out of the mixer and press it and roll it into a ball. I usually just hold it in my hands and fold the dough up underneath into itself like a kind of jellyfish. The top will be a smooth, round sphere. Then I just toss this into a plastic bag, shrink wrap, or container of some kind or another that gives it room to expand at least twice its original size without drying out. If I want the dough as soon as possible, I let it rise on the table or counter for thirty minutes to an hour. Otherwise I toss it in the fridge and just try to come back to it within the week. It rises perfectly fine in the fridge but does so over a much longer time. The dough also absorbs gases from the yeast during this time, giving a slightly different flavor.

Uncooked bread sticks rolled out onto a cutting board

I’ve discovered having a ball of yeast in the fridge is one of the cheapest, tastiest, and most versatile things I can make. What all can you do with it? Lately I’ve been on a kick where I’ve been making bread sticks, just plain bread sticks to dip in sauce. It’s so easy and quick. It definitely helps to go the extra mile and get a pizza stone (or an unglazed quarry tile) and season it and douse it with oil. You get a crisp, fried surface on the bottom if you’re lucky. And nothing is better than fried dough. Once they’re baked, I’ll spread some garlic butter over top and eat them.

Toaster oven pizza, prepared and served

The batch of dough described above makes at least two big pizzas, but I’ve discovered that it’s far easier and more fun to make perhaps five or six little pizzas out of the same recipe. I’ll have the dough sitting in the fridge, and for lunch, I’ll just pinch off a bit and flatten it into a disk, put some sauce, cheese, and toppings on top, and slide it on a baking sheet into the toaster oven for ten minutes. The result is invariably amazing.

Then there’s everything else—quick garlic knots, pizza rolls, calzones, pepperoni sticks, you name it. If there’s cheese, butter, or any meat in your kitchen, you can improvise an amazing, fresh-baked meal. And if there isn’t, then you have gourmet bread sticks ready to make! I’ve found the above dough recipe costs me perhaps twenty-five cents or so a batch and perhaps fifteen to thirty minutes of effort (most of which is spent watching a mixer).

If you’ve got any questions about these techniques, feel free to ask below!

Pizza Dough Recipe

Ingredients

• 3/4 c hot water
• 2 tbsp sugar
• 2 1/2 tsp yeast
• 2 c bread flour
• 2 tsp salt
• 1 tbsp olive oil

Directions

1. Mix water, yeast, and sugar and set aside for 10 minutes to bloom.
2. Measure remaining dry ingredients in mixing bowl.
3. Add water and other ingredients to the mixing bowl after 10 minutes.
4. Mix into dough by hand.
5. Knead dough for 15 to 20 minutes either with a mixer with dough hooks or by hand.
6. Rise dough at room temperature for at least 30 minutes to 1 hour, covering it to protect it from drying out; or alternately, set in fridge after covering to let it slowly rise for 18 to 24 hours.

⁂

Basically a layout engine (as I’ll refer to it from here on out) the hard part of writing a web browser. It’s the part that accepts the text from the web server and turns it into a page to show to you. As you’re reading this blog entry, the layout engine is responsible for everything you see starting from just under the toolbars at the top of this window all the way down to the bottom (where you may or may not now see a status bar).

In today’s world, there are only a few of these engines kicking around, all so similar as to be indistinguishable to 99% of the population, and they are among the most complex undertakings in software, tantamount to the complexity and scale of writing an operating system¹. Few people know what a layout engine is, that they exist, or what they’re made of, and almost nobody would consider writing a new one from scratch.

In fact, that’s always been the story. When Microsoft needed one in the 90s, they snatched Mosaic’s²; when Netscape needed one, they also snatched Mosaic’s; when Mozilla needed one, they snatched Netscape’s; when Firefox needed one, they snatched Mozilla’s; when Konqueror needed one, they snatched Mozilla’s; when Apple needed one, they snatched Konqueror’s; when Google needed one, they snatched Apple’s. With few exceptions, software powers have been marshaling the giants’ shoulders already near at reach when they need to turn HTML into a point-and-click interface as long as there have been webpages.

These projects are no mean undertakings. Our web browsers’ layout engines, as we know them today, are intermarried software dynasties, whose age and scale are roughly on par with those of our operating systems today. Go ahead and check this out for yourself.  In Google Chrome, for example, just input “about:credits” into the address bar and check out the various licenses and all the projects mentioned, with copyrights and licenses for various components going back even to 1991.

⁂

I say all this to say that layout engines are large, complicated, and mysterious.

How do you begin to conceptualize the processes at work in turning all the HTML, CSS, and Javascript³ into a graphical layout that interacts with you in real time?

Reading, for example, IE9′s development blog has been a real education, complete with diagrams and explanations⁴. They’ve been diligent in giving a behind-the-scenes look at the tech involved, even if it is with all the jargon and dryness of an automotive hobbyist’s magazine.

As with any other very complex process being tasked on a Turing-complete machine, we break the problem into steps.

1. First and foremost, we (the browser) grab all the relevant pieces from the server. This is by sheer dint of networking using code venerable and old as the Internet itself. Nothing special here.
2. We analyze all the pieces for what they are, determining what’s what and how they work. This varies a lot between browsers and gets rather complicated.
3. This naturally leads us to constructing a Document Object Model, a standard way for structuring a complete webpage with all its inbuilt content, structure, behavior, and so on. Imagine an outline of a webpage, whose every node contains tons of information and code, and you’re on the right track.
4. By this point, we, the browser, have a complete understanding—a gnosis—of the webpage. Now we must show our work. Each node of the DOM must be formatted and set into separate blocks according to its requisite rules, styles, and behaviors. Essentially, we’re making letter-pressed index cards for each node in the outline, getting organized, giving things a tangible form.
5. That outline of blocks must be put together, sequenced and nested graphically the way an outline is nested structurally. Each block must be trimmed and shaped⁵, and then each is positioned sequentially in relationship to one another. This is called layout and happens on a chunk of memory one may think of as a scratch surface.
6. This layout is shown on the screen. Modern browsers are currently in an arms race to do this fastest and lightest way possible.
7. Finally, the browser runs in a circle, waiting for events to happen and updating the page when they do. This allows the page to come to life and do things rather than be a static image on the screen.

Hopefully you’ve just come out of this outline with some idea of the processes behind what the browser shows you in a non-technical way. The point is that something relatively obscure should hopefully be a little less so.

⁂

Exploring the way an interface comes together has always been sort of a black magic to me that’s endlessly fascinated me to learn about.

When I first used a computer, and this hasn’t been so long ago, I didn’t have any concept of what was going on inside. Somehow, I imagined that what I was seeing on the screen actually existed in some way fundamentally. Somewhere inside the circuits of the computer, a window was an actual box with physical properties, that I was moving around a mouse cursor inside that display, and touching parts of that box. The display, as it were, was simply showed what was inside to me.

It was a thoroughly convincing illusion to me. But I later came to find out that’s what it was—an illusion. A trick happening so fast, in fact, that it seemed fluid and real (save for the occasional glitch).

The real process is similar for every OS⁶ and not so different than the browser process above. Given a well known state for a system already in progress (a collection of words and numbers that describe it, basically), the computer goes line by line, dot by dot, and paints a picture of what it imagines this system looks like. It does this at least sixty times a second to make the illusion look real.

The process of accumulating and updating this state is a little different. Essentially, the OS has to ask each program what it wants to look like before apprising the user. Then the OS has to inform each program of what’s going on so it can understand what it should look like now as opposed to a few milliseconds ago.

These are events⁷, and the OS inside your computer accepts and spews events by the thousands at all times, every second, turning in circles fast enough to make sure it doesn’t miss a single one⁸. So too each process in turn can and does send events itself, to each other and to the OS, using its own spinning loop to keep up.

So when I’m looking at my screen, even as still and placid as it may appear at any moment, even if I’m not doing anything, I eventually came to realize that behind the scenes is a kind of hot, swirling darkness of activity at all times. Every action I take scatters perhaps hundreds of events to every program in your computer, each of which waits with bated breath to know if a mouse cursor has happened its way or if I’ve typed something (or different kinds of events you probably have never thought about, including each and every millisecond tick of the clock).

⁂

I guess I wrote this (and this has been sitting in my drafts pile for a while) because I wanted to demystify one of the strangest parts of a computer: namely, how a machine that supposedly executes things in order can apparently paint a picture of many things happening at once. The answer is that it’s hard work going on under the hood. Hope it makes a little more sense now, though.

1. For example, “Windows” or “OS X”.
2. Mosaic introduced graphical web browsing as we know it.
3. Tech note: These are languages whose domains respectively pertain to the structure, appearance, and behavior of a webpage.
4. Further reading: See in particular http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2010/09/14/performance-what-common-benchmarks-measure.aspx
5. Further reading: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/box.html
6. Tech note: “operating system.”
7. Tech note: These are called Windows messages, essential bits of numerical information.
8. Tech note: This is known as an event loop, and every graphical program does it in some form. Further reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_loop

First, though, I just want to assure you I’m in good health these days. After a bit of emergency surgery and some healing time, I’m feeling tons better. Over the last month or two, I’ve seen no less than four doctors or so, and have multiple appointments next week for health stuff to follow up. Sorry if I’m being vague about what’s going on, but I guess I’m being protective of my privacy, given that this is my public blog. Those who know me will be already well apprised of the particulars.

That said, here are the things I’ve been thinking about and will write about in the near future.

• Can I first just pass on a link to an interesting new Tumblr-based blog I found last night called Microaggressions? Oppression too often is torture by a thousand tiny cuts, and this blog underlines all the reasons social justice matters to me. I haven’t written enough about this, and I intend to.
• I’ve lately been living inside the oven, baking everything in sight, even with the toaster oven. Turns out you can do a lot with one, and I have pictures to prove it! I’ll have some techniques to share on making dough at home.
• Movie reviews! Lately, I’ve watched (with a blushing face) Airborne, Captain Ron, and Cabin Boy, and on my list to watch next is the “Ulysses Cut” of Waterworld. I’m not sure if I can even bring myself to write about Airborne. There is truly a movie that, if someone walked in during it, I would surreptitiously change the channel before anyone could suspect what’s up.
• My recuperation has involved inordinate amounts of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.
• Nerd stuff—why GitHub has won me over, and why git just makes sense to me now.
• Speaking of nerd stuff, might also clear out a nerdy draft or two about graphic design and/or computer interfaces.
• Maybe even I have something to say about the circumstances of having your luck in life and love change unexpectedly. We’ll see what percolates.

Hope you’ll be reading something here soon!