Caroline, or Change

Jeanhee and I went to see "Caroline, or Change" tonight. The Tony Kushner musical is in it's second day of previews in it's new Broadway digs. Great book, fantastic cast. Highly recommended!

On a side note, we saw Sarah Jessica Parker at the performance. Must be something about the block. We saw Sex and the City's "Big" (Chris Noth) last month, at Da Marino's, the Italian restaurant next door.

Iraq

My cousin Tim is in Iraq.

I've spent considerable energy demonstrating my opposition to this war. Starting from before the beginning ("The World Says No to War") and most recently marching here in New York City a few weeks ago. ("The World Still Says No To War").

Tim joined the Marines out of high school. He arrived in Iraq a few weeks ago, just before my most recent march.

It's given the war a more personal edge for me. I hate it more and I want it to go well more and I want everyone to come home healthy, especially Tim.

On the news tonight, they had a National Guard unit from Brooklyn preparing to ship out. One guy was a plumber. Another a carpenter. A woman worked as a waitress as Applebee's. All somebody's cousin, too.

What are all of our cousins fighting for again? WMD? Against terrorism? To create a model of a peaceful democracy in the heart of the middle east?

I just don't buy it. There are precious few necessary wars, and this ain't one of them. I won't mention my feelings to Tim, of course. It's probably tough enough as it is keeping your morale up. Maybe after he's back, we can have a good chat about it.

Tim reports that the conditions for the solidiers are pretty good, all things considered. He's comfortable and is really, really busy.

I take some solace in the fact that a good number of Americans and Iraqis will have the unmistakably positive experience of meeting a Melia.

Bloglines

In another blogosphere-inspired change, I've tucked NetNewsWire away and am now using Bloglines, a web-based centralized aggregator.

It's major benefit is solving my main problem with NNW, which was that I couldn't easily access my subscriptions and read/unread status from work. I had gerry-rigged solution involving a perl script to scp some files back and forth, but all-in-all it was rather inconvenient.

It's also got interesting future possibilities as an aggregator of many people's subscription lists. It's already beginning to exploit some of them, like a recommendation engine to suggest blogs that people like you may like. I'd be into a solution ties a social-networking framework into your friend's subscriptions and a search engine, so I can limit search results to the sites that my circle subscribes to.

Anyhow, it's not perfect, but overall I like it. The stateless nature of HTTP makes a news aggregator an imperfect match for a web app, IMHO. It would be cool if they exposed the data as a web service, so that others could write desktop clients for it.

Feel free to check out my subscriptions. Am I missing your favorite feed? Let me know.

Outsourcing

The outsourcing trend and debate hits pretty close to home. As a software developer, my job is of the variety that are going overseas. The destination for a big chunk of these outsourced "knowledge worker" jobs is India, where I lived and traveled for six months in 1999.

I have a relatively zen (or maybe it's lazy or resigned...) attitude about it all. We live in a time of free-and-getting-freer markets and in a small-and-getting-smaller world. If someone can deliver as much satisfaction as me to a client for less money, it will happen eventually, whether I like it or not. I don't have the monopolistic weight to change these things.

Salon reports on Rachna Asirvatham in Bangalore, who "has a 56K modem, a bookcase full of software manuals... and a bunch of American clients." Who am I to begrudge Rachna her opportunity?

My job already demands that I learn daily. It's one of the things I love about the work. Most of what I am asked to do, I don't know how to do.

I guess that's why I'm laissez-faire about outsourcing. If I need to reinvent myself, I can do that. It's what I do everyday anyway.

George W Zork

Your Office

There's a big desk here. Real big. And a big chair. Sitting in the big chair
means work. You don't want to sit in the big chair. There's also a door
to the west. If you could only go through the door. If only you could go
west. If only you could exit, then... then you could take your vacation.

Condoleeza Rice walks intot he room, just as you start to gather your
things. "Mr. President?"

You can see Condi here.

Condi patiently waits for you to talk to her.

>

Brilliant! (You'll need Java...)

Quicksilver

I'm a confirmed Quicksilver enthusiast. Quicksilver is beta software for OS X that gives you quick keyboard access to your stuff. I think Snappy the Clam originally turned me on to it, but it's been all over the blogosphere.

One of my favorite features of the app is how it can recognize search bookmarks. I've been using it to lookup PHP functions lately as I've been working on JDM's site.

I wish I had Quicksilver it on my new laptop a work (a Dell Latitude 600). I installed AppRocket, but it's just not the same. Then again, I feel the same way about Windows and OS X, so I'm par for the course.

On a tear

If you haven't checked in on Anthony lately, head on over to Slapnose. He's on a real roll lately, with some great political punditry.