Painted the master bedroom

Last week Karin's school was closed for Spring Break, so we took the opportunity to repaint the master bedroom. Karin bought new curtains and a new comforter/sham set for the bed. We also took the opportunity to give away the never-used old TV set, and then rearranged the furniture a bit. Taking pictures of the house is really stressing how much the 50mm fixed lens is not the right lens for the job. It's tricky to get a shot of much of the room, but I did take some before and after shots. The after shots are also HDR shots. I took three exposures at -2/0/+2 stops for each shot and then combined them in Photomatix Pro. These came through Aperture but I didn't do anything there but vignette them.

Before:

(note the dingy ceiling, which we also repainted) Here's where they dropped the window a foot. They did a nice job of texturing the wall, but it needed painting.

Assistant:

We had just taken the dresser drawers out in order to move it when Heisenberg decided to help.

After:

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Email encryption in OS X and GMail

People who receive email from me are used to seeing an attachment which is a digital signature that basically A ) advertises that I have an encryption key that you can use to send me secure email and that B ) cryptographically proves that the email hasn't been altered since I composed it. B is obviously the domain of the tin-foil-hat crowd, I don't know that I've ever sent an email that I worried would be altered en route, and if I did the overwhelming odds is that my recipient would not know what to do with the signature. But encrypting emails is really a good idea. If you're somebody who is upset with the whole "hey let's have the NSA illegally wiretap the entire internet", then you ought to be using email encryption when you can. (and if you're not upset with the whole NSA wiretap mess then I'd guess you're not paying attention. Ask me about it sometime. :-) ) I started using email encryption many years ago back when it first came to light that some companies scan employees email (here's a 2006 Wired article that claims "about a third of big companies" do this) and there was some debate about whether the companies were legally responsible for the content of the emails in question. At the time I worked for a company owned by News Corporation and it was very plausible to me and several friends that NewsCorp was going to complain about the contents of some of not-really-work-related emails. So we started using encryption and I've just sort of kept it going. For more than 10 years I've used some variant of PGP encryption, but when I upgraded to Leopard I had to shut off the signature/encryption stuff. When I did it I assumed that GPGMail would be upgraded within a few weeks, but something is taking way too long for the Leopard release. (Sidebar: Yes, the OS X PGP software is called GPG (sigh). I don't know all the details, there was something where PGP (which stands for Pretty Good Privacy) went commercial so the open source folks created a compatible open source implementation which they call Gnu Privacy Guard. Why? Because open source folks value verbal cleverness over being clear and unconfusing. So anyway, I was running GPG software using my old PGP key. Clear as mud, right?) I finally got fed up and did some research and ended up discovering that OS X's mail.app supports S/MIME, which is apparently more of a "standard" these days than PGP managed to be. A big, big win here is that OS X already has a certificate management system and all of the "web of trust" stuff can be safely ignored by an end-user, which was never really true of PGP. One side effect is that almost all modern mail clients will read the signature and display something useful instead of just a file attachment. In particular Mail.app Just Works(tm) once you create a certificate for your email. If you receive an email from somebody that is signed then you're automatically set up to encrypt mail to that person in the future. It's pretty slick. I wrote up some instructions for my fellow encryption user and thought it would be a good idea to share them here. To get email encryption working on OS X and Mail.app the main thing you need is a certificate. While you can create one yourself using Keychain Access, it's a lot better to get one from an accepted Certificate Authority, because Mail.app will accept those without complaining. Here's an article that explains a little more about this. I used Comodo and it seemed very straight-forward. (I also tried Thawte and immediately had problems with their account sign-up process.) 1) Go to Comodo using some reasonable browser (don't know if Safari will work, I used Firefox) 2) Click the "Get it free now!" button. Fill out the form, ultimately they will generate an email to send you. In the email will be a link that installs the certificate inside your browser. 3) In Firefox, open Preferences, click the "Advanced" tab, and click "View Certificates". A new Certificate Manager window will pop up. In the "Your Certificates" tab you'll have a certificate from "The USERTRUST Network". Click "Backup", fill in a password and save out the .p12 file. 4) Drag and drop the .p12 file onto Keychain Access and enter the password. When this is all said and done you should have a certificate in your Login keychain with your name. 5) Open Mail. When you compose a new message you should see icons in the upper right - a lock (for encrypted) and a little starburst with a checkbox (for signed). 6) Send me an email and make sure it is signed (Mail will default to signing your emails now, you can turn that off with the little starburst button.) 7) Once I get the signed email I should be able to encrypt emails to you in the future. Huzzah. Although I don't usually use GMail for much I also found a Firefox plugin that lets you use S/MIME encryption inside Gmail. Basically follow steps 1 and 2 above, and once you have the certificate inside Firefox you can install the plug-in. It was pretty straightforward, but if you're interested in using this and have troubles let me know. There is one fly in the ointment at the moment which I should disclose. The person who I emailed these instructions to can use encryption just fine. I can use it fine as well, but I can't later decrypt anything I sent out, unless I specifically include my separate gmail key in the recipients. I'm still trying to figure that one out, it doesn't seem like it's supposed to work this way.
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Catch-22

Books, books, books. Gotta get the "to review" pile whittled down. Today's book is Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. I read this back in November, due to a strange confluence of events. What I meant to read was Slaughterhouse-Five and I had an odd conversation with Karin where she was talking about Catch-22 and I was talking about the Vonnegut book. Then when I went to buy Slaughterhouse-Five from Amazon did the "Buy it with" trick for Catch-22 and I said what the heck. For whatever reason I encountered neither book in high school or college so they were both new to me, although I understand they are pretty common assigned reading. Unfortunately, I'm not going to be keeping Catch-22. I wanted to like it, I really did. There were large parts I did like but ultimately the pacing and general downer nature of the anti-war message did me in. The pacing is the first issue and it takes a long time to get the rhythm of the book flowing. Everything in the book is circular and Heller takes a long time just starting up all the circles and spinning them. You're introduced to tons of characters and also some rather maddening things that aren't explained very quickly. There's a character that is always referred to as Major -- de Coverley, and this is eventually explained as a joke that nobody knows his first name. But when I say "eventually" I mean over halfway through the novel. The first time I encountered the character I kept leafing back trying to see if I missed something. It was rather maddening to have no real choice but to keep reading and hope that it made more sense before I got hopelessly lost. There are things in this novel that make no sense because they just don't make sense, and there are things that make no sense because this is the first go-round of a particular circle and it won't be explained until the third or fourth revolution. This leads to a lot of tension - there are many open questions on first reading and it's never clear which are ones for concern and which are just examples of military foolishness and can be safely ignored. After a while things start to hang together and you can dig into the meat of the piece: the absurdities of war and particularly of the modern military organizations. This middle section I liked the best and had a couple of moments of clear humor, as opposed the bleak sarcasm of the main story. There was a section of the book where I really thought I was going to end up liking it. The last section suddenly takes this hard left turn into extreme darkness. Yes, it's been a war all along and there's been some deaths, but for the most part it was played for laughs. Then suddenly there's several chapters of just relentless slaughter and rape. I realize it's an anti-war book and so at some point it has to address the horrors of the situation but I really felt the end section is a far different and unpleasant tone from the bulk of the book. This is what really tore it for me. I really didn't like being drug through the violence that climaxes the story. If you ask me it weakens the book, because the mordant humor had been very effective at highlighting the dire straits the main character found himself in. Suddenly changing tacks and drenching him in gore had an odd effect of making me sympathize less with him than I had before. There are several neat little bits of story embedded throughout. Overall I'm glad I read it, but I don't think I'd ever read it again and I'd be reluctant to recommend it to most people. While there are sections I'd like to read again I know that I'd be dreading the dark part near the end, enough so that I think it would color the whole experience. Of course, now that I've told you this you'll have the same experience-coloring without even having read through the book the first time.
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Look, there's random and then there's *too random*

So my iPhone has a fair chunk of my music, but it can't hold anywhere near all of it. I've been preparing for a "small" iPod for a while, rating songs and getting comfortable with Smart Playlists so I had an easy way to tag "here is the best stuff". My iPhone has a few key artists - everything I have by the Beatles or Jonathan Coulton, plus a few "by hand" playlists that incorporate most of my Norah Jones, Sarah McLachlan and a few others. It also has everything in the "My Top Rated" smart list which is anything with 4 or 5 stars in iTunes. As of right now I have 6913 tracks in iTunes, 5088 of which are unrated. Of the 1825 rated tracks 226 are in "My Top Rated". I let the phone take "My Top Rated" out for a shuffle spin today. It led off with Bugs Bunny from the Bugs Bunny on Broadway CD - What's Opera, Doc? OK, that's a bit eclectic but I'll defend the four star rating there, this is a classic piece of culture. Even as the final Looney Tunes sting fades away it launches into … Roger Waters playing Another Brick in the Wall Part Two live from the In the Flesh set. This is not a segue you can take smoothly. Fine though, I can roll with the Pink Floyd or it wouldn't be on there. After that it switched to Aqua's Barbie Girl. Now this is really stretching the definition of coherent playlist well past breaking. I mean Bugs Bunny to Pink Floyd to Aqua in three songs? That's not eclectic, that's psychotic. After that it settled down and played Depeche Mode with Black Celebration, which it followed up with MC Frontalot's It is Pitch Dark. OK, that's spanning like 20 years of my life, but I can see that I likely played Infocom games while listening to DM. The last track on this little odyssey was Oingo Boingo's Gray Matter, which again, I can go from a song about Zork to a song about brains with a minimum of twitching. Shuffle mode, you have redeemed yourself. FOR NOW! But the double secret probation mode will remain in effect until further improvement is observed.
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