2013-01-27 South Lake Tahoe

Warrior [Ke$ha] (CD)

Like any self-respecting intellectualoid, I had only haughty disdain for Ke$ha and her antics. After all, she sang a childish bubble-gum rocky electropop that glorified getting drunk, getting high, and calling people either douchebags or losers. On top of that, she couldn’t even sing!

Then I spent two weeks in Hawaii, working on the house. My handyman, in his early twenties, forced me to listen to Ke$ha’s first album, Animal + Cannibal on the half hour drive from and to the site. At first, I was horrified. After a couple of days, I was intrigued at how easily some of her songs just catch your mind. I never got into the lyrics as much as he did, but I started really appreciating the music.

L'America: The World of Movies

It is incredibly hard to gain an idea of what a country feels like without actual experience there. To make up for it, I guess, we tend to use sources of information that are very, very indirect.

So it happened that Albanians started crossing the strait into Italy, fooled by Italian soap operas into thinking that every Italian lives in a marble palace, and that even the poor can afford a bedroom for each child. Imagine the shock when they landed into one or the poorer parts of the country and found laundry hanging from the balconies, and the cars tiny and old.

L'America: Where Do I Get a Visa

As most people around the world know, America is split when it comes to immigration. One part of the country remembers that America is a country of immigrants. Even the oldest inhabitants came here from Asia, tens of thousands of years ago. To prevent people from entering the country, these people say, is unfair to them and to America, which has always benefited from successive waves of immigration.

On the other hand, many people feel threatened in their livelihood and in the vision of a unified America by waves of immigration. That was true at the end of the 19th Century, when many though Chinese immigration had swamped the country in the West. Now it is mostly Latino immigration that is of concern to some.

L'America: Introducing L'America

When I moved to America (from Europe), I was surprised at how different things were. I had to get used to a new life in every detail – from the banal and bureaucratic (“Where do I get a Social Security Number?”) to the social (“Why is dating so different?”).

No sooner had I gotten used to everything being different that my friends and family in Europe started using me as a resource to explain to them why America did this, that, or the other thing. This all started with the election of George W. Bush, and initially the questions focused on details of the process.

The Law of Wishing Well

Once upon a time, there were wells. Those were long, straight holes dug into the ground, usually with a retaining wall and a pulley. You dug until you hit fresh water and used that for drinking, bathing, watering the plants, etc. Some people thought that wells could be magic (they certainly could be tragic, e.g. if you fell into one and drowned). So they’d throw something (usually a coin) and make a wish.

HOWTO: Map Truecrypt USB Drives on Linux

One of the little annoyances with USB drives on Linux is that they are placed on a different device node each time, depending on the sequence with which they were mounted. The problem with that is that if you tell Truecrypt to mount, say, /dev/sde1, it might be a different drive next time you mount.

My setup here is such that I have truecrypt mounting drives automagically using autofs. I have a smart script that knows how to mount all sorts of things, and truecrypt files are just one of those things. (It also knows how to automatically mount source code repositories, ssh/ftp/http file systems, ISO files, and a bunch of other things.

Habla Espanol? Chat Translation in Pidgin

I have a new surfing buddy in Mexico. He doesn’t speak much English, I am struggling with Spanish. It works fine in the water, because we just nod and congratulate when we hit a good wave – the expression of joy doesn’t need translation. Organizing a trip, though, was a nightmare until recently.

I figured out that instant messaging was a good solution. I could type something in English into Google Translate, which is good enough for communication (although at times hilarious). I would then copy and paste the translation into the client. He would read and reply, usually doing as I did.

Why Android Must Die - and Why Nokia Did It Right

Have you ever held an Android (or newer BlackBerry) phone in your hands and played with it? Have you ever experienced that sometimes, randomly, when you didn’t do anything out of the ordinary, the phone freezes for a variable amount of time? Nothing seems to be helping, you can punch keys and screen as much as you want, but the phone is dead. Then, miraculously, the phone springs back to life.

The Ten Worst Habits of Advanced Surfers

YouTube has some funny videos – even about surfing! The one every novice should watch, though, is titled, How Not To Be a Kook.

It’s a short compendium of the things you need to watch out for when you start out. The rules of the trade, the etiquette in the water, the all-important right-of-way. The things listed in the video are very typical of novices and any surfer worth their salty hair will know better.