North

I recently visited a page on Snopes about Lt. Col. Oliver North and Osama bin Laden to correct a friend who had forwarded the bogus story to a local mailing list.

What I didn't notice the last time I visited the page was an attached and very real letter from the desk of North himself, penned only a few months ago as a response and rebuttal to the rumor.

Wow. Always strange when a voice from another era bubbles up unexpectedly, and talks about now-things.

Reminds me of something I heard on NPR last October... an address President Clinton had made about 9-11, and how it reflected on this country's foreign policy. To enhance the creepy feeling that the listener had briefly slipped into an alternate universe, they played surreal music by Tortoise behind his voice for the ten minutes or so that they aired of it. I found it fascinating.

Duck

I continue to work my way through Hillegass's book. I don't think I've had this much fun with a computer book since working through Learning Perl in 1998.

I'm really looking forward to finishing it and subsequently starting work on my big program idea: a DocBook-aware word processor. Mac OS X development tools already let you build a basic wp in about fifteen seconds (the standard TextEdit application, for all that it can do, is just the AppKit's standard text editing widget dropped into a simple window wrapper and given save/load functionality). I want to take that and extend it so it knows all about DocBook XML, giving the user navigation tools and other assistance to write DocBook really quickly.

The trick is that it won't be a generic XML editor, of which there are plenty (and none of which I use, since emacs with psgml-mode is fine for generic XML hacking). Since DocBook is a popular and successful application of XML, I don't understand why there are few-to-no DocBook-specific editors for any operating system. Very strange.

So, my overt motivation involves a desire to have a nice word processor for producing the Nutshell book in. (All O'Reilly books use DocBook as their in-house canonical format. Most authors write in Word, which the ORA tools group (where I used to work) converts into DocBook.) I will, of course, continue to hack away at the book in emacs, while developing the application on the side. The challenge will be to see if I can have the app in a useable state before the book is done!

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I haven't been too impressed with AT&T Broadband's service over the last few weeks. The Shrine's hardwood floor is lately carpeted in a cushy layer of dropped packets that bounce in an irregular stream out of the cable modem. Bleah.

I don't compain too loudly because I'm moving again in one bloody month. I did mention that this hasn't sunk in yet, right? Or maybe it has and I've gotten so blasé about moving that it seems almost as regular a chore as taking out the garbage.

Whatever. I think I'll like it a lot, actually.

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Carla printed out tax forms because I took out the garbage, tonight. I should at least work my way through the state forms tonight, just in case I need to collect more information tomorrow. I have learned through my friends that Mass lets you compute a deduction based on rent, which is pretty spiffy, and probably means that I'll owe less than I thought (though I'll still owe).

Does anyone actually use the IRS's e-file thingy? They put a lot of energy into pushing it, but once you actually visit irs.gov, you get something like the following (paraphrased):

Welcome to E-File!

Yay! Yippee! E-file! Rah rah!

To start using E-file, find some software somewhere that lets you use E-file. We can't provide any, not even a stinking web application, because we're not allowed to compete with the private sector. Also, we don't even suggest any, apparently for the same reason. We will cryptically say "You don't need to purchase any software," though, and leave it at that.

Then, use the software you found to do whatever it does to do stuff, also thingy, moo, fet blah. At this point jmac has abandoned all interest in the page so we'll talk about the weather. Sure is blustery today, hehn?

And so on.

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I haven't made decision about the wedding stuff yet, sigh. The general feeling among those with whom I've so far discussed my plight seems to be that there'd be less net karmic damage from attending Peter's wedding, but I still can't talk about it without getting all bent out of shape, falling into totally out-of-character levels of cynicism.

Leah and Shawn have weighed in with their opinion, reminding me of the importance of family obligation and saying I can always visit them later. Yeah but, yeah but. I suppose the next logical step would involve getting Peter's take on it.