* ??Alissa Clark??: “New York Blessings”:http://www.relevantmagazine.com/life_article.php?id=7212. On love letters for cities.
* “WeatherIcon”:http://www.viper007bond.com/wordpress-plugins/weathericon/. I wanted to use a widget for weather on “Everything Newark”:http://blog.newarker.info, but I realized that my theme, “K2″:http://getk2.com, disappointingly, still doesn’t support plugins.
* ??John Gruber??: “Macworld Expo 2006 in Review”:http://daringfireball.net/2006/01/mwsf_2006. John mentions in passing that you can mount a WebDAV drive in Mac OS X. Seeing that I have 26 GB (!) available on my web-hosting account (“Dreamhost rocks, people”), I thought I might try to investigate that as a backup strategy.
* Play anything on any operating system with “VLC Player”:http://www.videolan.org/vlc/. This thing is awesome. Schmoo and I were set to watch a movie on the Thinkpad-from-work (the lappy is in the shop right now), and I realized that my computer didn’t have software to play it. A quick Google search for “open source watch DVD” led me to this player, which I have also installed on the Mac. A quick download, slapped the DVD back in the drive, and it just worked. Brilliant.
* ??Hugh MacLeod??: “A man’s heart”:http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/002913.html. So true.
* ??Jeffrey Zeldman??: “Silent phone, secret phone”:http://www.zeldman.com/2006/06/12/silent-phone-secret-phone/. Best snarky Verizon complaint, ever. As far as I can tell, the problem involves phone lines, so you can see why it would take one of America’s largest phone companies five days to tackle a brain teaser like that.
* ??Matt Mullenweg??: “Beeping”:http://photomatt.net/2006/06/13/beeping/ Your assignment today is to take a walk around your blog, application, website, whatever you work with on a daily basis, and allow yourself to be supremely annoyed with the beeping smoke detector in the corner.
* ??Wired Magazine??: “Judging Apple Sweatshop Charge”:http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,71138-0.html?tw=wn_index_3. Steve Jobs’ Think Different campaign celebrated labor leaders like Gandhi, who used strikes as a form of civil protest, and Ceasar Chavez, who organized poor, migrant farm workers. But a British newspaper at the weekend published a rather shocking report about the factories in China that make his company’s iPods.
* “Quinn Tetris for the Mac”:http://www.simonhaertel.de/quinn/home (“via John”:http://daringfireball.net/linked/2006/june#mon-12-quinn). Free, open source, and oh-so-pretty version of Tetris for the Mac.
* ??Angela Wu??: “How I got here: blogger break-up”:http://hereisangela.com/2006/06/15/how-i-got-here/ All those times you had “outages,” you never explained yourself, and I started to feel insecure. I know you didn’t mean it to be like that, and I still think you’re a good bloghost. You’ll be great for someone after me, I just know it. Maybe I’ve just outgrown you. Maybe it’s me, not you…
Reset your bookmarks to hereisangela.com.
* Breitbart: “Microsoft’s Gates to Leave Daily Role”:http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/06/15/D8I8SD100.html (“via Jason”:http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/gates_plans_his_exit_from_microsoft_whats_next.php) Bill Gates is stepping down from Microsoft. WOW.
* ??John Gruber??: counterpoint, “And Oranges”:http://daringfireball.net/2006/06/and_oranges. ??Mark Pilgrim??: counter-counterpoint, “Juggling oranges”:http://diveintomark.org/archives/2006/06/16/juggling-oranges. The tennis ball has been bouncing between two of my favorite bloggers over this matter of open formats. Pilgrim’s argument — proprietary and DRM formats will, one day, trap _everything you’ve ever enjoyed about your computer_ (music, video, photos, email, documents, etc.) if you let them — has been compelling and got me playing with Linux again. Gruber’s responses to this have been frustrating — he still won’t address the point of lock-in head-on. I wonder if Mark’s ultimate statement about DRM hasn’t already been best stated in his 2001 blog entry, “My crush on Spyro, what Flash animations remind me of, and what the past will look like someday”:http://diveintomark.org/archives/2001/07/29/my_crush_on_spyro_what_flash_animations_remind_me_of_and_what_the_past_will_look_like_someday.
Category: Friends
My first car was a 1982 “Buick Skyhawk”:http://www.carsearch.com/772491.htm. I bought it in the summer of 1996. Compared to what I had been previously been driving — a car that my family affectionately referred to as “the Pink Lung” — it was beautiful. Two-door, bench seat, automatic 4-on-the-floor trans, in dark blue. It was independence, it was reputation, it was driving myself to school through my senior year.
In 1996, I knew nothing about owning or buying a car. I have no idea how many miles were on it. It was previously owned by a friend of my Mom’s, and I just sort of looked at it and agreed to buy it for $300. In retrospect, it was a pretty low-risk deal: with my job stocking shelves at the local A&P, the car would have cost me about two week’s worth of work after taxes.
That week, I drove everywhere. To my friend Jon’s house. To my friend Lindsay’s house. And, not least of all, to work to pay the thing off. It was August, and school was due to start up again soon. It was also the week my friend “Ryan”:http://flipsidejones.net/ was visiting the States from his home in London. I told him about the car and we hatched a plan to celebrate the end of the summer and my new ride. We would “drive down”:http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&hl=en&saddr=Long+Valley,+NJ&daddr=537+Monmouth+Rd,+Jackson,+NJ&ll=40.472024,-74.597168&spn=1.055121,1.873169&om=1 to “Great Adventure”:http://www.sixflags.com/parks/greatadventure/ all by ourselves, blow a lot of money, hang out all night, and get back late. He was due to catch a flight early the next morning, but he would just catch up on his sleep on the flight. No big deal.
And somehow, at some point — and I’m not really sure how — we got the idea to invite someone else, too. Her name was Erin. She was quiet, a member of the 4H club, and she liked horses. She was also the first girl I ever dated. I don’t think I was carrying a torch, but I wasn’t unhappy when she said yes.
So we went. We climbed into the Skyhawk and meandered down the New Jersey Turnpike. I had never done so much highway driving. We got to the park, we had a great time. The best time, really — Ryan and I were euphoric with the autonomy of a new car, and Erin played deadpan to our giddiness. We stayed at the park until it closed.
Back in the parking lot, we climbed into the Skyhawk and started it up. We drove a few hundred feet. I noticed the pickup wasn’t as good as it had been. Then it stalled.
We drove around some more until I found a security guard and asked for help. He sent over the park mechanic who, after listening to the engine for 10 seconds, delivered the bad news: I’d “thrown a rod”:http://www.epinions.com/auto-review-3388-1887077-3895269F-prod4. Here we were, three seventeen-year-olds, 70 miles from home, at midnight, and our only means of transportation was completely shot. The mechanic gave us two options. We could leave the car and find another way home. Or, we could hope for the best, take the car, and destroy the engine in the process of driving back. We started driving.
That night, the car burned through two tanks of gas — most of it escaping as white vapor through the exhaust pipe — as we drove a top speed of 40 MPH on the Turnpike, hazards flashing. When I’d run out of money at the second rest stop and had to borrow $10 from Erin to cover the second tank, I knew that any chance of rekindling interest was just gone. I called my 20-something friend Jay for help and car advice with what little change I had left, and he suggested that car would never make it up the hills on the Turnpike. Take Route 1 instead, he said, so we did.
Route 1 is all poorly-timed stoplights through sketchy urban neighborhoods (terrifying for teenage suburbanites). Each time we came to a stop, the car would die. The only way to get it moving again was to restart the car with my foot on the gas, rev the engine in park, and slam the gearshift into drive, chirping the tires and progressively destroying the transmission. I flinched every time. After a few miles, and I started slowly coasting through red lights to avoid having to stop. A sign for a familiar local road loomed into view, and I took it: we drove the remainder of the trip up the winding, farm-lined Route 206.
That was 2 AM. Ryan and Erin were asleep as I coaxed the Skyhawk up and down the hills of the country road, alternately praying and cheering it on under my breath. By 3:30 AM, we’d reached the foot of “Schooley’s Mountain”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schooley’s_Mountain, a couple of miles from home. I parked the car in the lot of a local pub and called my mom, who, bless her heart, came to pick us up and drop off my friends.
The next day, a mechanic met us at the pub. The car sat like a hollowed-out shell: the engine and transmission were both completely destroyed, and it wouldn’t even start. He offered to take it off our hands for free.
That senior year, I took the bus to school. I never went out with Erin. And for my senior formal dance, I picked up my date in the Pink Lung.
“But, she didn’t seem to mind”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/kennsarah/160499005/.
* ??Overheard in New York??: “That Really Gets My Goat”:http://www.overheardinnewyork.com/archives/005665.html (“via Angela”:http://hereisangela.blogspot.com/2006/06/common-knowledge.html). That has got to be one of the funniest Overheard moments I’ve ever read.
* Google Maps “Send to Phone”:http://local.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=32461 and the “Firefox Extension”:http://www.google.com/tools/firefox/sendtophone/index.html. Send information (“even from maps”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/acmelab/120622272) to your phone directly from Google. This is freaking awesome.
* ??Mark Pilgrim??’s “recent declaration”:http://diveintomark.org/archives/2006/06/02/when-the-bough-breaks to switch to Linux has got me looking at playing with Linux again. I decided to skip the “Powerbook installation from hell”:http://joh.deworks.net/powerbook/ and just create a partition on my Thinkpad from work. Impressions coming soon, but, overall, “linux gives us the power we need to crush those who oppose us”:http://ubergeek.tv/article.php?pid=54.
* ??Dean Allen??: “Things That Happened”:http://www.cardigan.com/2001/03-18/. Dean Allen’s old Cardigan Industries blog, dead since 2001, still has a lot great entries, many of which are too dirty to highlight here. 
* ??Killing the Buddha??: “Jesus and I Broke Up”:http://www.killingthebuddha.com/confession/jesusandi.htm. I’m frighteningly single. At least once a week I hit the religion section of the local bookstore, pick up the first title that catches my eye and take it home. Rumi one night. Buddha the next. I know it sounds cheap, but each time I hope it’s love. It never is.
* Wikipedia: “Space Quest”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Quest. My favorite video game growing up! Rumors are circulating that Sierra will be releasing a new compliation of these games come December, which is good because their 15^th^ anniversary game is now going for over $100 on eBay (it retailed at $40 a few years ago).
* ??Corissa Poley??: “Identity issues…continued”:http://cori.sojourn-of-grace.net/?p=90. Cori doesn’t exist — coulda fooled me.
* ??NPR??: “Life After Foster Care: A Tale of Two Boys”:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5443614http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5443614. These two kids — both 13 years old in 1994, both separated from their families, troubled and already acting up — told me with astonishing innocence and optimism about their lives in the group home and what their lives were like before they got there. I wondered what happened to them after that and what they made of their years in foster care.
* ??Eric Blair??: “Google Calendar and PHPiCalendar”:http://www.raoli.com/archives/2006/04/000561.php. The Village Church “calendar”:http://villagechurchnyc.com drama continues. My “brilliant idea”:http://kennsarah.net/2006/05/22/rethinking-the-tvc-calendar/ to use Google calendar has been working. I set up a cron job to pull in a file from Gcal, got the template to look right, uploaded the files, created a Gmail account, and created the events. All that, only to find that Gcal exports all events as “Private” even though they’re tagged as public. Here’s the part where I create a wonky “regular expression”:http://www.regular-expressions.info/ solution!
* ??Luckymonk??: “About the Luckymonk”:http://luckymonk.com/pages/contact. Best description of Chicago, ever. The second best was when I asked “Graeme”:http://www.myspace.com/graemehinde why he left Chicago to move to New York. He said, “You know, after three years of dating a girl, that you’ve either got to marry her or break up? Well, I wasn’t ready to marry Chicago.”
* ??Angela Wu??: ” A religious exemption for same sex marriage”:http://hereisangela.blogspot.com/2006/06/religious-exemption-for-same-sex.html. Sarah and I have wondered at the whole “legislating morality” issue before, and there seem to be two prevailing conservative schools of thought. Sam recently “touched on”:http://www.villagechurchnyc.com/worship/sermons/series/mark/2006/06/the-end-of-the-world-is-near/ this in passing: let the civic leaders stave off the inevitable decline of society. Angela’s approach — let the country do what it wants but let the church preserve its identity (and, perhaps, clean up the mess) — is much more laissez faire. Which creates a more just society, and is that the point?
Spent Saturday doing mostly-web-stuff, which was mostly-fun, before going to Tom’s Birthday party in the city. It was a blast, but, when the party moved from laid-back, Zen-vibe Park to quasi-hipster Brass Monkey, Schmoo and I had a hard time keeping up. Maybe because we’re getting old, but probably because the music was so loud we had to yell at each other at the top of our lungs (at times in Scottish brogue).
Sunday at the Village Church where Sam gave a 60-minute presentation on the capital-e End times and I gave a 4-minute presentation about our “web presence”:http://villagechurchnyc.com/. Got some feedback and an offer of some help from “Josh Clayton”:http://typefield.com/ to post some photography on the site. I can’t wait to kick around some ideas with him.
Napped for a few hours, which subsequently means I haven’t been able to sleep yet, so, of course, it’s time for a site redesign. “Fickle”:http://kennsarah.net/2005/12/22/facelift/, I know, but while discussing our site design with Tom on Saturday — okay, after wildly gesturing and lip-reading over the booming techno — he reminded me of our initial design before the conversion to WordPress. It looked “something like this”:http://kennsarah.net/archives1/2005/01/09/would_you_buy_a_500_mac/index.php but featured a big, fun photo at the top of the page that I periodically updated. Tom and I agreed that the idea was still good, so the gears began to turn.
During my geek-out session on Saturday, I discovered the “plaintxtBlog”:http://www.plaintxt.org/themes/plaintxtblog/, a clever minimalist theme with a penchant for typography. After installing and playing with it, I was sold: I took the new theme and did some hacking to pull in the latest photo from Flickr from our account tagged with the word “featured”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/kennsarah/tags/featured/. All I have to do to update the photo is upload it to Flickr and tag it and it’s automatically resized and shows up on the site — which feels really maintainable.
There are some things I miss about the other design, and I’m not totally happy with everything with the new design, but I think this design has got some potential. What do you think?
Jai & Becky had their beautiful baby girl, Brianna Marie Brinkofski, yesterday, May 28^th^, at 4:00 PM. She weighed in at 7lbs, 4 oz and was 19 inches long. As any good web geek, Jai already has photos and video online. Congratulations Jai & Beck!
(Love the “punk rock”:http://brinkofski.com/annie/big.php?photo=pics/annie-060.jpg photo, by the way.)
Congratulations, “Tom”:http://canaanbound.blogspot.com/2006/05/eeeeeeeeeeeeeee.html and “Alissa”:http://www.alissaclark.com/?p=322! And, impressive cross-blog photo posting, as well. I can’t wait to hear the story.
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Drove 1 hour and 20 minutes to the Mazda dealer to pick up a sideview mirror, which was broken and later glued back on to the car. Vehicle abuse is one of the charms of our town. I need to find a new parts dealer.
Went to an excellent Master’s Degree recital by “Jenny Jobb”:http://www.myspace.com/jennyjobb at Juliard. It rocked–and I was even more impressed because flute is not my favorite instrument. Jen’s music was ecclectic and fascinating. Thanks for the invite. 
Church on Sunday began with Darin & Sam’s Marriage and Dating class. Sam taught on the “asymmetry” of roles in marriage relationships. Judy Fujimura helpfully pointed out that both men and women both have to make the decision to lay their lives down for each other, even if the actual implementation looks different.
Speaking of the d-word, we were highly honored to spend lunch with the most “übercüte couple”:http://www.alissaclark.com/?p=287 at the Village Church. We talked shop about Newark (which is _so_ “up-and-coming”:http://kennsarah.net/2005/10/15/newark-unveiled-as-a-force-in-the-art-world/), the m-word, visiting Europe, “new apartments”:http://www.alissaclark.com/?p=300, and “widgets”:http://kennsarah.net/2006/04/28/on-the-radar/. Then we consumed the best “cream puffs we’ve ever had”:http://www.google.com/url?sa=U&start=2&q=http://www.muginohousa.com/creampuffs.html&e=9797.
Finished the weekend watching “Sullivan’s Travels”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?tag=ourstory-20%26link_code=xm2%26camp=2025%26creative=165953%26path=http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html%253fASIN=B00005JH9C%2526tag=ourstory-20%2526lcode=xm2%2526cID=2025%2526ccmID=165953%2526location=/o/ASIN/B00005JH9C%25253FSubscriptionId=0EMV44A9A5YT1RVDGZ82. Very good, though we’re not sure why we put it on the Netflix queue in the first place.
I’m not sure why, but it seems like the majority of blogs written about Christian issues (as opposed to blogs simply written _by_ Christians, like this one) are really, really lame. If they’re not whining about other theological camps — such as how calvinists, fundamentalists, Catholics, premillennialists, or emergents are stupid — then they’re filled with uninteresting self-loathing and lukewarm spiritual insights.
I initially subscribed to “Angela’s blog”:http://hereisangela.blogspot.com/ because I know her, but I’ve stuck around because of her truly interesting work in international law and religious freedom. Really, really interesting. I’m not sure if it’s because she’s a compelling writer, or because her work is a direct application of her faith (and therefore easier to grasp), but the intertwining of the issues at hand and how those directly make a difference in her life has put her blog high on my list of Daily Reads. Well done.
Anyone have other recommendations? Esoteric topics in Xianity (the role of Mary in Eastern Orthodox liturgical practices over the last 200 years, for example) are okay, but the more context I have for living in the present, the more likely I’ll subscribe. Blogs that speak to one point of view in the faith are okay, too, but if I detect a rabid foaming at the mouth I’ll not likely stick around for that, either. Thanks.
“Jai”:http://kuriosband.com/gallery/photo.php?id=86&id=86 and “friends”:http://www.kuriosband.com are playing “Autumn Blaze”:http://www.autumnblaze.org this year with headlining bands Jars of Clay and, um, some other guys on October 1st. Anyone want to do an Ironworks reunion?
But if I must go
Things I trust will be better off without me
But I don’t want to know
Life is better off a mystery
So keep ‘em coming these lines on the road
And keep me responsible be it a light or heavy load
And keep me guessing with these blessings in disguise
And I’ll walk with grace my feet and faith my eyes
—Caedmon’s Call, Faith My Eyes