Can You Day Trip from San Diego to Mammoth?

So, maybe 2015 was not your year. Maybe everything went wrong in your personal and professional life. Maybe there have been long lasting relationships falling apart, or greedy and incompetent advisers. Maybe you have been in a funk for months, thinking dangerously frequently about that suicide scene in your upcoming novel with no suicide scene anywhere in it.

Fret not, a new year is here, a new leaf is turned, and a new adventure awaits. This time, to find the answer to the age old questions: Is a day trip from San Diego to Mammoth possible, advisable, worth it?

L'America: What Really Happened to Theresa Halbach?

Netflix is trying something new. This time, a documentary spanning ten hour-long episodes about a murder case. Seems like an incredibly long time for a single case, considering that other shows present the “same” content in a few minutes and then move on to the next. I thought for sure it would end up being boring. Instead, I found it gripping, a true blueprint for a new brand of show, not unlike when Truman Capote jump-started the true crime fiction genre with his In Cold Blood.

Creating Pebble Apps: A Guide for the Novice (Like Me)

Great News! The intro I had written about smartwatches in general and why the Pebble is better than others is gone! Now more Pebble App Development tips!

Developing for Pebble is fun! No, really! It’s complicated, but it’s fun. It has lots of moving parts, but it’s fun!

I am going to skip the part where I tell you why you should develop for Pebble. Because it’s fun! And that’s all anyone needs to know, really.

Should You Watch “The Man in the High Castle?”

Yes!

Philip K. Dick has long been one of my favorite science fiction authors, excelling in inventiveness and concision. His stories are plot-driven and to the point, which makes them almost perfect for movie adaptations. Some of those (think The Blade Runner) came out splendid, while others (think A Scanner Darkly) were more mixed blessings.

Of course, this being science fiction, making movies out of novels was always hampered by cost. Science fiction is not cheap to special effect on any day, and plot-driven (as opposed to action-driven or character-driven) movies are a particularly expensive type. They have none of the bombastic effects of, say, a planetary explosion while not much of the cheap timeouts of a romantic subplot.

L'America: What Do I Do When My Green Card Expires

I mentioned how (slightly) disappointed I was when my green card finally arrived. It simply came in the mail in an unmarked envelope. I wasn’t expecting a ticker tape parade, and it was certainly convenient. After so many years of tribulation, though, it seemed a little unspectacular.

Wait ten years, and the thing expired. I had set a reminder in Google Calendar, but somehow it disappeared. Then, one horrifying morning, I woke up and checked. I was expecting another year of validity, but it wasn’t so. The card was about to expire.

L'America: The Republican Primary

Stop hounding me, already! Yes, I will explain the Republican primary to you. And get that smirk off your face: after all, for every Trump there has been a Berlusconi, and for every Huckabee you had a Harper or an Abbott.

Primaries. When voters elect a person, instead of a party, it makes no sense to have a random set of characters show up. It’s smarter to pick a single candidate and pool all the votes of a group together. Otherwise you need runoff elections and the like. You could argue that a runoff election is no worse than a primary vote, and you would be right. But that’s just not the way things work here, in America.

L'America: Obergefell v. Hodges

Just in time for Gay Pride parades in much of the world, the Supreme Court of the United States announced that marriage was a universal right that couldn’t be withheld from same-sex couples. The world turned rainbow for a day, much happiness and sadness ensued, and a few readers asked me to explain what happened. Here is my account for the America-challenged.

First, the ruling was not unexpected. In fact, the big suspense in June was whether it was going to be big majority or small majority ruling. It had been long clear that there was a small majority (5 of 9) that was going to rule in favor of gay marriage. It had also long been clear that three judges (Scalia, Alito, and Thomas) would vote against gay marriage no matter what. The big question was whether the youngish Chief Justice, Roberts, would vote with the majority or the minority.

Ellen Pao or the End of Internet Capitalism

Have you been following the Internet, lately? Its self-declared home page, reddit.com, has been splattered all over the news after the interim CEO, Ellen Pao, caused a major uproar and finally had to resign.

If you’ve never been there, the idea of reddit is neither new nor innovative. Its users are grouped into named categories, called subreddits. They can post entries to the subreddits, and other users can vote them up or down. When you then go to the subreddit, the entries that have been viewed most favorably are on top.

Automate Instant Messages with Pidgin and DBus

Despite being an overall fan of KDE, I always preferred the Gnome version of the Instant Messenger, Pidgin. It is really designed for ease of use, it is extensible with incredibly useful plugins, and is available on a ton of platforms. Also, it can be easily configured and you can synchronize the configuration files with no issues, even using OwnCloud or Dropbox.

No surprise then that I would use Pidgin to automate all sorts of tasks. I will send myself a message so I get notified on all my phones, using whatever mechanism I want to use. Pidgin comes with a plethora of protocol plugins. If you need something that isn’t on the list, you can also look for third-party plugins. And you can, of course, write your own. I am doing that as a side project to include small social networking sites that only use a web interface.

Last Snow in Mammoth

It was so tempting: on the heels of the mega-epic trip around the Rockies, I wanted one last chance to ride before the season’s officially over. Also, I had bought this cheap Arbor board and these cheap Gnu bindings and I wanted to give both a go.

I packed the car and my friend Torrey and we dashed up the highway on a fateful Monday afternoon. The snow divinities liked us, as we sailed up the 15, then 215, then 15, then finally 395 without a hitch. I’ve had the worst experience driving through San Bernardino before: none of that this time.