the golden mean

8:18pm: a marriage wrinkle
In 30 days, it will become legal for same-sex couples to marry in California. In November, there is some chance it will become illegal again, and even a chance that same-sex marriages conducted in the meantime will be invalidated.

If California leaves marriage intact in November we have the potential for a full-faith-and-credit test case as there is no residency restriction there as there is in Massachusetts.

But even if they do pass an amendment, we still have a test case. While California can invalidate marriages performed there, it can't invalidate marriages performed in Massachusetts; it can only refuse to recognize them. California residents are now (or will soon be) allowed to marry here. And the 1913 law is concerned only with legality at the time of the marriage -- once they're married, they'll stay married.

12:54am: house numbers
I've just been proofreading the SOS map, and I've discovered something bizarre about house numbering in Somerville.

I had thought that the rule was that odd houses are on the north or east sides of the street. Sometimes "north" is not where you think it is in Somerville, and some streets are just exceptions.

Turns out the rule is actually, odd numbers are on the right hand side of the street as you walk in the direction of increasing numbers. Most streets in Somerville are numbered with the low end at the south or east end of the street. But some streets are numbered the other way. Some of these are one way streets, but not all (Kidder St, for instance, is two way). Mostly when they're one way, the one way runs in the direction of increasing numbers, but not always. Some neighborhoods seem to have more of this kind of thing than others (south of Union Square and between Willow and College Ave in particular).

Who knew? At least now I can tell which house I'm looking at in Google Maps.

12:33pm: a political post for a change
Here's a gamble I'd take if I were Barack Obama.

I'd agree to seat Florida and Michigan according to the rules the Republicans are applying to those states, which is that the number of delegates is reduced by 50%. This is totally in line with the rest of the Democratic party's rules: the later your primary is, the more delegates you get.

The reason to take this gamble is what happens if Michigan gets their do-over. Sure, it's fair. But Hillary probably wins it and because it's in June it gets a disproportionately high number of delegates.

Better to give her back 20 delegates or so than to risk giving her 50. And the PR points might make those numbers back in Pennsylvania.

11:15pm: a tougher puzzle
What's this?

Comments screened, at least at first.

4:29pm: back to the usual game
What's this? (difficulty level: low)

Extra credit: Which one is it? (difficulty level: medium)

11:16am: Happy birthday, Grace.

12:36am: not quite the usual game
What's this?

Comments screened, at least at first.

12:00am: 30 minutes, door to door
miss_chance just ran an errand that had potential to take a long time and got back gloating (justifiably) about how it had taken her "30 minutes, door to door".

While she was gone I installed a Drupal instance in a subdirectory of one of the sites I maintain. Without using shell access to do it.

Very nice.

8:55pm: quote of the night
"I thought he was saying yesterday no whining. So is it no whining or whining? He can't even keep a straight answer on the whining or no whining question. So here's a guy that's taken the no whining position now the whining position."

-- Mike Huckabee, responding to Mitt Romney's, well, whining about the behavior of McCain supporters in West Virginia

9:46pm: half a million
500,000 is a very big number. Especially when it's the number of people stranded at a single train station, in Guangzhou. I say "at" and not "in" because, of course, they don't fit inside.

2:26pm: happy birthday, mr. dodgson
Not bothering with the Arisia debrief that's going on right now. Who wants to go out on a bike in the snow anyway. It's not like I'll be a div head next year or anything.

Meanwhile, I've got half a pound of Dunkin Donuts coffee all ready to take to work with me tomorrow. Mm, mm.

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All true, after a fashion. I'm home sick and would just as soon not infect all the Arisia staffers, nor make the crud worse by biking in the cold and wet. I'll still be reading conchair@arisia.org, I suspect, but my actual position will most likely report to Ben and not to Jill. And someone's got to drink the commercial stuff Rosa brought in to the house while we were waiting for the 18-pound Sweet Maria's order to show up. It's not going to be any of us, so it might as well be my unsuspecting coworkers.

11:12pm: well, that went well
A while ago I posted speculating that as conventions get larger it becomes harder to run them as three-day events and easier to run them as four-day events. But I was talking about conventions twice the size of Arisia, and so it took my by surprise how much easier this Arisia was to run than last year's three-day event.

We had 200 more badges picked up than last year, and yet traffic was easier and everyone was noticeably calmer. Everyone seemed to be having a genuinely good time. Some of it was having a chance to work out how to use the hotel well, and some of it was not getting as far behind on the schedule during the leadup. But I was expecting logistics to fall down hard because of the extra day and instead it worked *better*. Maybe people were getting some actual sleep instead of pushing themselves during the con trying to squeeze everything in.

11:02am: coffeemakers?
Sunday afternoon at Arisia I'm hosting a Coffee Tasting.

I've roasted up fifteen batches of coffee. I'm going to do drip as I don't think even my prosumer espresso maker has the bandwidth to brew it all in only four hors. Can I borrow your drip coffee pot, or even just the carafe? I won't be able to brew a lot of machines at once but having them on hand will mean I can be setting one up and serving from another while a third one brews.

I'd be much appreciative, and there's be good coffee in it for you.

1:24pm: so much for the long view
Usually I use "next 3 weeks" for my Google Calendar view. That gets about the right number of slots for the eighteen calendars I either maintain or monitor. But in the next few days there are too many places where I have five things going on at once . And I don't just mean 5 all-day entries on the same day. I mean 5 timed entries all running at 2:00 on Saturday.

So far, "next 5 days" is holding up OK. We'll see if I have to make the window even shorter.

2:14pm: thinnest, my ass
Well, that was disappointing. Macbook Air specs basically the same as the 19mm-thick machine I paid $800 for over six months ago. Well, updated a little: 1.6GHz instead of 1.2, 2G memory instead of 1.25, 802.11n instead of g, 80G disk instead of 60, LED backlight instead of flourescent. But it's been six months and Toshiba has all those specs now *plus an integrated DVD burner*. Oh, and their machine is over a pound lighter than the Mac. Though since they added the optical spindle they're now a little thicker than the thinner-than-thinnest machine I'm carrying.

Geez.

8:35pm: email tennis
Note to self:

In tennis it is not necessary to return every lob. The ones that are out will get you points for not swinging at them. Email is the same way. The more email is coming in, the more important it is to remember this.

12:20pm: mail
I've been using the timestamp of the 50th thread in my inbox as a figure of merit for how much is on my plate: the more recent it is, the more is going on. The first 50 threads tend to be things I haven't looked at; the second 50 threads in the box are generally dealt with or at least transcribed to the to-do list; and the 50 after that are really only of historical interest.

For most of the last week, the top 50 threads have been spanning a time of about 24 hours.

Right now thread number 50 has a timestamp of 7:00 this morning.

I guess I have some cleanup to do.

10:09pm: new products
On the way to miss_chance's studio the other day I saw this:

in the window of this:

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MacWorld is coming up. Folks are predicting a thin laptop. I'm predicting that it's a tablet with a capacitive multi-touch screen. Whether it has a keyboard at all, and whether there's an option to put a traditional HD in it instead of flash, still remain to be seen.

1:34pm: arisia never sleeps
At Arisia we have 24-hour events, and there is a chair on duty at all times and someone in the ops room overnight. Gaming and anime and the Con Suite run around the clock. But it's not just at-con that we're a 24-hour operation. Often the last-minute rush to prepare programming and publications involves burning a lot of midnight oil. In the last week I've pulled two near-all-nighters preparing documents for the hotel, once staying up until 7:45am and the second time until 6:15 (happily, in neither case did I have to go to work the next day). Even on "normal" nights deguspice and I are often up until 3, which is when cintyber wakes up from what I would call a nap and gets online. Email to Arisia public-facing addresses is likely to be answered at any time of day or night. So far I'm managing not to violate Passovoy's rule. But last year after a week in which no hour of the day failed to contain email from me at least sometimes, our then hotel rep asked me whether I ever slept, and I'm expecting a similar question from her replacement.

2:06pm: last night's vote
After a conversation about election dynamics with Pat Jehlen (who was conveniently holding a Berman sign outside my polling place), I decided to vote for LaFuente as well as White and Berman, but not to vote for Sullivan. Sullivan was reelected, as was Desmond... by 38 votes over LaFuente. So I feel like I did the right thing there. And it's nice that of the returning aldermen Desmond is the vulnerable one.

3:53pm: still undecided with only a few hours before polls close
The Progressive Democrats of Somerville have endorsed only two candidates for Alderman at large: Bill White and Fred Berman. I agree with them, and generally think it'd be nice if Bruce Desmond were not reelected. But I'm not at all convinced that voting for, say, Dennis Sullivan and Tony LaFuente is the right move, for all that Dennis appears to be a reasonable enough guy and Tony seems to have gotten with the progressive program since his last run for office four years ago. Bruce is likely to win election anyway and this year I'm more concerned about electing Fred than I am about defeating Bruce.

2:19pm: aux provinces
For all that I complain about how provincial Boston is when it's 11:00 at night and I'm looking for dinner, I love how compact it is. Case in point: I just drove to the airport from my office to pick miss_chance up at the airport. Including parking the car, meeting her at security in Terminal C, waiting for her bags, and navigating some minor traffic in the Sumner Tunnel, I was away from my desk for 56 minutes.

8:25pm: another round
what's this?

Comments screened, at least at first. I like ceo's idea of just unscreening them all after 24 hours or so; I may adopt that.

9:00pm: number 264 came through at 8:45 -- it looks like the whole schedule is delayed about half an hour from last year, for Daylight Savings. I've seen some of last year's after-dinner kids already; I wonder if we'll get a group through or not. At 9:00, that house has a crew of 7 taking the decorations down so no one makes off with them.

8:00pm: 8:00: Number 225 could not have been four years old yet. All in all much more of a mix of ages through the night rather than a progression from younger to older.