So it turns out that my computer speakers, which uses a number of analog jumper cables from the output to the amp built into the subwoofer, gracefully handles receiving a mono signal by playing it on both speakers. Handy trick if you listen to a lot of mono material. But for I don’t know how long I didn’t realize my stereo jumper wasn’t fully seated so that only the left channel was getting through.

And I spent a long time a few nights ago trying to figure out why I couldn’t hear the guitar solo during The Pixies’ “Hey”. I’m just that stupid. Today I was trying some pan effects that weren’t working, which led me under the desk to discover the problem.

Now I’m back from the purgatory of false mono and firmly back on terra stereo. That’s a really good guitar solo, Joey Santiago. Glad I can hear it now.

In Mr. Holcomb’s AP English class, the capstone event of the year was the Literary Scavenger Hunt, an extra-credit tool that had the potential to bump the winner’s grade by a full letter. Only the best performing team could claim the top grade bump. In previous years a Senior was paired with a Freshman from the lower-level AP class, but in my last year of high school the teams were pairs from the same class.

The scavenger hunt was a thick sheaf of stapled pages, each full of obscure trivia to uncover. These were not straightforward questions. Often the question itself would be hidden behind some puzzle, a pictogram or a cryptogram. Holcomb liked the telephone cipher, and I remember several of the scavenger hunt hints obfuscated that way. The telephone cipher is the replacement of letters by the telephone keypad number on which that letter appears, e.g., “the” becomes “783″ and “book” becomes “2665″. Finding the question was sometimes harder than finding the answer.

The trivia ranged from finding the name of a biker gang in an obscure old movie to deciphering the latin phrase that appears in the MGM logo. In 1993, the days before Yahoo or Google, we didn’t have the Internet to turn to. Today Holcomb’s Scavenger Hunt would be no better than a short course in search engines.

Had to drive an hour away to find a video store that rented the 1954 film “The Wild One” but today it takes only seconds on IMDB to find that the name of the rival gang in that picture was “The Beetles”.

Since only one pair — one team — could win the Hunt, collusion was nearly nonexistent. I engaged in some disinformation when other teams would ask for an answer they knew I had. The winning team would be decided by a raw tally of correct answers, found clues, solved puzzles. Some were so easy everyone got them, others fiendishly difficult. It was these tough ones you’d hold onto. I fed lies to rivals; incorrect answers. There was a lot at stake: for some students a full letter grade bump in English could mean the difference between graduation and summer school. Not me, but my partner was in that boat. I couldn’t let her down. Even so, Binoy Patel managed to steal my notes at least once, probably scored himself a few good answers, but in the end it didn’t help him win. (Binoy was a smart guy; I have no doubt that he’s excelled regardless of the outcome of Holcomb’s exercise.)

As much as I love the ready information the net provides — Google and Askville and Mahalo and Yahoo — I’m glad I was able to enjoy an analog offline information search like Holcomb’s scavenger hunt.

Holcomb was a hard teacher. Not in the sense that he challenged his students, but in the sense that he actively put up roadblocks to stop them from excelling. He was the guy who’d draw a line in ink down the left margin of your term paper and subtract points if any line of type didn’t adhere to his one-inch-margin style guide. I don’t think anyone was lining up margins by hand with a typewriter; even as early as 1993 we had an inkjet printer on the 386 and I think all the kids in AP English had access to similar stuff. Holcomb’s pedantic alignment test was just a holdover from tougher times.

The nearby Salinas River flooded Holcomb’s house that year and our term papers were destroyed. The yearbook features pictures of students who hated the man hauling mud out of his family room. My yearbook also features half-angry notes from students I’d screwed over in order to secure the winning position in the scavenger hunt. We either won or tied for first place, but whatever the case we got the grade bump.

In retrospect, it was probably poor judgement to allow a classful of high school sophomores unchaperoned access to the streets of San Francisco. We bussed up to see Les Miserables performed at the Curran Theatre. 1990 or 1991. Got there early, an hour or so to kill before the doors opened, so we were set loose to do as we pleased with our time. My AP English class.

The “Theatre District” in San Francisco isn’t really called that except with irony. The truth is that it’s nestled uncomfortably between the posh Union Square and the seedy Tenderloin. Outside the theater, tickets in hand, you could walk down Geary street in either direction: one leads to galleries and light and retail, the other to what most guidebooks call the worst neighborhood in San Francisco.

Guess which direction I went?

It was me and Robert Krufal. We found a record store and I bought a copy of Faith No More’s The Real Thing on cassette tape. Dressed in theater finery, at least what passed for theater finery. Black slacks, Docker-type. Button-up shirt. Not t-shirt, not jeans. Must have taken a wrong turn on the way out, because it was quickly clear that we weren’t going where everyone else was heading.

It wasn’t dark yet, but getting there. Got hassled walking past a local kid, asked us for change or money. Ignored him, kept going, but decided we’d be better off going in the other direction. Had to walk by again, and again he asked, commented on our clothes. Ignored him again, walked by. Kid started following us, a friend of his, maybe an older brother, comes out of nowhere to join him. Taunts. “Why can’t you give me no money? Dressed like that, got no money? Bullshit.”

The Tenderloin is where noir goes when it wants to get good and scared after dark. Nah, that’s probably overstating it a little bit. But it is a working-class neighborhood dropped in the middle of San Francisco, between the stately civic center and the inspiring financial district, between the bustling Market street and the eccentric Chinatown. It’s just there, and people get mugged there and shot there and people buy sex and drugs there, and nobody wants to be there. Lower Nob Hill is a euphemism for the Tenderloin because otherwise it doesn’t look good in real estate ads. No-one wants to be there, but some people have to.

Robert and I don’t, and we’re doing our best to fix the problem. The kids don’t follow far. But for two kids from shitsplat farming towns in the Salinas Valley, big-city hoodlums are a different beast. Union Square is a bright shining comfortable place, and we laugh it off as though we’ve had an adventure.

That kid, though. He had to go home at some point. And it wasn’t an adventure. I bet it wasn’t at all.

Played with PhotoBooth’s animated background replacements. They’re based on a difference key: you move out of the range of your iSight camera and it takes a snapshot of what it sees, then when you move back in frame it recognizes you as the difference, so it can composite you into a new background. It only really works with good lighting and not very busy backgrounds.

I played with it in low light, and most of me must look a lot like the couch and the wall. Even the pupils of my eyes were knocked out, and through them you could see beyond to the roller coaster track. Most of my face was a Paris mask; a Phantom with an Eiffel Tower on his cheek.

3dmark 2001 se 10946

memory bandwidth 2094/2093

dvd-rom index 2578

cpu arithmetic dry 4288 wet 1153/2696

cpu multimedia int 8782 fp 10686

61 db

Everything old is new again. But just because we have 1970s gas prices shouldn’t mean we have to embrace 1970s climate science.

Global warming contrarians, goaded by the puckish jockeys of the media slapping the sweaty flanks of Rush Limbaugh, are on cloud nine reading the recent study in Nature that suggests that global warming is going to “take a break” for a couple of decades. But these people also think global warming stopped in 1998 and that an insignificant adjustment of US temperature data means 1934 is the warmest year on record and that, thus, global warming is hooey. Which is to say contrarians are not very good at reading past their own biases.

But a study in Nature could be the real deal. The guys at RealClimate (nor William Connolley at Stoat) don’t think the forecast holds water and are actually putting money on it — thousands of pounds sterling. That’s a lot of money in 1970s dollars — and today’s.

Regardless, nothing here suggests that long-term anthropogenic global warming is not occurring or will not occur. A brief respite might be statistically expected, but as with brief amplifications like 1998’s ENSO, it will come, if it comes, and go, leaving us with a slow ramp up to the top, and from what I can tell, the view’s not going to be something to write home about.

To commemorate, I’ve posted an article I wrote last year and never published. You can find it over on the left under “Articles.”

Took the Pentax outside this afternoon while Amber took a nap. Put on the cheap-ass 80-200 mm consumer lens because (a) I am a consumer and (b) I’ve heard it said that 99% of lenses are better than 100% of photographers, so I really doubt it’s going to hamstring my photography. I don’t make very good photographs anyway, but I’ve really only recently begun thinking about photography in more than point-and-shoot terms.

I took passable photos of a bird or two, which is really only possible with a long lens and with 200mm at the far end of this zoom, that’s the best I can do. Still had to crop way down so the little guy didn’t get lost in a sea of green or stone or whatever.

A couple of photos of vertical objects around the outside of the house — an oil torch; a lamp; the electrical hookup on the roof — ended up as unremarkable object studies but compositionally instructive.

A few photos turned out considerably worse than I’d have liked, but I can go back out and try them again, because I think the subjects are interesting and if I can get composition and focus correct I can make some good photographs out of them.

Also, Adobe Lightroom is awesome. See the pics I’m talking about on my gallery.

I’ve got to hand it to Jon Favreau. Not only did his comic-book movie Iron Man set the box office on fire ($100 million+ opening weekend counting Thursday preview sales) but it’s got great reviews, too (78/100 on Metacritic; 92% on Rotten Tomatoes).

I was surprised at first, thinking “Where did Jon Favreau learn to make an effects-heavy action flick?” because, you know, this is the dude what wrote Swingers and directed Will Ferrel in Elf. I did not realize prior to looking him up on IMDB that he also directed the Jumanji sequel Zathura and was not in fact a stranger to effects films.

I think Mike Seymour and David Stripinis have it right, when on the VFX Show they mention that anymore, when you see the expected director attached to the expected film you’re looking for trouble. The dude that directed Swingers (Liman) went on to give us the Bourne trilogy and Jumper. That Memento guy (Nolan) went on to reboot the Batman franchise with great success in Batman Begins and, soon, The Dark Knight. But put an action movie in the hands of Michael Bay or a video game movie in the hands of Uwe Boll and what you get sits lifeless on the screen. Even the Wachowskis started with an intense character piece, Bound, before entering the Matrix.

For my part, I thought Iron Man was a great movie. I liked all the actors in it, and I liked the performances they gave. I liked the effects and thought they were spot-on (the VFX show guys, mentioned already, also thought the effects were top-notch, and they should know). I liked the score, especially how it featured prominent heavy guitar riffs that fit the picture perfectly. I liked the characters, I believed their motivations, and when the veil of comic-book-world descended upon the film, it wasn’t done in a hyper-reality mode where verisimilitude takes a hike. Favreau got me to buy into the comic book world and kept me there, and that’s a rare treat in this kind of movie, where too often the give-and-take between reality and comic reality is a zero-sum game.

I can’t think of anything negative to say about this film. As the first installment of a franchise (Iron Man 2 already has a release date in April 2010), it strikes a perfect balance between character introduction and development and action and adventure. I send an enthusiastic high-five out to Favreau, Downey, Jr., and everyone else who made this show. Great work.

I used to blog pretty heavily back in 2004 and 2005. It just dried up, not sure why. But I usually blogged book reviews of the things I’d read, and since I’m on a goodreads kick right now, I thought I’d trawl through the old blog and see if I wanted to lift any of those old reviews to paste into goodreads. Some of them, yeah, but in general that old blog was profane, strident, and usually each post was hacked out in a matter of minutes with no proofreading. Like this one.

Still, some of those entries are worthwhile, and it’s certainly been valuable to remember what I thought about particular books immediately after I’d read them. I think everyone who reads should at least keep a journal so they can someday look back and remember.

Like, I go through most of my days in 2008 thinking that there wasn’t any big deal about Lolita but now I realize that when I read it in 2004 I was moderately disturbed by what Humbert Humbert did to that poor nymphette.

A cat on a leash ought to be an abomination. You don’t put a collar ’round their neck like a dog; there’s a two-restraint system that loops not only around their neck but also around their chest just behind their front legs. They might hate it if they feel bound up. Max takes to it right away, but Sossity flops onto her side and looks pitiful. Out in the grass she forgets all about it, and I follow her through brush and under the scratchy tree with yellow flowers. She investigates a bunny house built under a haphazard pile of shed tree limbs and sticks, but don’t let her get too close.

A cigar on the deck, a bottle of Chardonnay. Fonseca and Mumm Napa, respectively. A Sunday evening.