All Eleven Doctors!

BBC won't confirm, but the Telegraph is reporting that as part of the Children in Need charity appeal, in November there will be a Doctor Who special with all 11 Doctors.

saints of the Church

So at church last Sunday, Fr. Paul's sermon was about a Russian-born emigré in Paris, Fr. Dmitri, who has been canonized for—among other things—issuing false baptismal certificates for Jews during the Nazi occupation (he eventually suffered martyrdom in a concentration camp). "It's really amazing," Fr. Paul said with a grin, "how many saints have been canonized for being liars."

And then today, in my "Daily Readings" email (courtesy of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese), I find this:

Reading from the Synaxarion:

The holy Martyrs Manuel, Sabel, and Ishmael, Persians by race and brethren according to the flesh, were sent by the Persian King as ambassadors to Julian the Apostate to negotiate a peace treaty. While with him at a place near Chalcedon, they refused to join him in offering sacrifice to his idols. Scorning the immunity universally accorded ambassadors, he had them slain in the year 362. This was a cause of the war with Persia in which Julian perished miserably the following year.

Notice that there is no mention of Ss. Manuel, Sabel, and Ishmael actually having accepted Christianity.

Linux RSS aggregators

Dear Liferea Developers:

I like Liferea's interface (although I do wish for some more keyboard shortcuts), and I appreciate your efforts in writing it. However, when another aggregator which is beta-quality and runs on Java starts in the same amount of time as Liferea and then is more responsive while it's running—well, you have a problem, is all.

Best regards,
Carson

engines on standby, keptin

Very little has been going on to pique my interest—hence the lack of posting. I'm on Twitter now. Yeah, I caved.

We're scheduled to close on the house June 24, God willin' an' the crick' don't rise.

Getting the Right Melon

In the past few weeks and months, I've been trying hard to get my life a little more organized: have a plan for meals and groceries, note down on the calendar when the car needs an oil change, sort my email into folders—that sort of thing. As much as I hate to admit it, this kick I've been on has been inspired by the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People class I was forced to go to. I normally put about as much trust in business gurus/self-help/whatever as I do in astrology (I'm looking at you, Myers-Briggs)—er, that's none at all, by the way. But since I had to go to the class, I figured I should listen while I was there, if only so I could make fun of it later. Sadly there wasn't any material for mockery because really, Stephen Covey's just enunciated clearly what people should be doing anyway: (1) focusing on the important stuff, and (2) not being a jackass while accomplishing whatever it is. This strikes most people, I think, as common sense—although obviously it isn't, since if it were, Dr. Covey wouldn't be rich as Croesus.

So since my memory about some things is appallingly bad—and it's hard to prioritize if you can't remember what things you need to do—I've been making To Do lists. And being a savvy guy of the 21st century, I've been making them on the computer. This turns out to be problematic.

Basic tasklist functionality seems to be easy. All you need is

1. Short statement of the task
2. Date—if any—the task is due
3. Ability to sort tasks by date
4. Visually marking overdue tasks

and pretty much every task application gets these right. Actually, you could really do these in your favorite spreadsheet fairly easily. Overkill, but you've probably got a spreadsheet installed already.

It's probably also good for a task application to have

5. Multiple tasklists (work, personal, etc)
6. A big free-form text box for each task in case you need more info

which seem to be harder (why a big, non-parsed, text box would be hard, I don't know).

Now the biggies. Some people don't need 'em, but enough people do that if you're writing a to do list app to end all to do list apps, you should include them.

7. Recurring tasks—this is my number one need after the basics
8. Sending tasks to other people
9. Sending a report on a task to someone
10. Making the task lists accessible and editable from any location
11. Integrates with a calendar

Outlook, which is what I use currently for to do lists, gets all of these right except for 10. Evolution doesn't do 10 or 7 (and don't hold your breath on the latter: Bug 200907's been open for eight and a half years). Remember the Milk doesn't do 6, 9, or 11 but is otherwise perfect for pure task list management. Tasks, which Moblin ships with, doesn't even do 2 and 3, although it does do 5.

I've come to the conclusion that I'm either going to have to settle for less than I really want or else write my own app. Anybody wanna work on a task list program with me?

first thoughts on Moblin

So I did install Moblin beta 2. I've had a few problems, but nothing major.

1. I really like the user interface of the web browser (moblin-browser), but the program is fairly crashy. Like, almost every time I tried to use SSL crashy. Plus lots of other times. Fortunately, Firefox (with a new theme and rebranded as "Minefield"—I assume because of the Mozilla Foundation's licensing restrictions) is installed as well. Given the sheer amount of crashiness, I'm pretty sure this is being worked on.
2. I couldn't get the "Manage Applications" app to install Flash; it kept complaining that the package was unsigned, and when I clicked to "Force Install" nothing happened, as far as I can tell. Opening a terminal and doing yum install flash-plugin verified I wanted to add the Adobe signing key and then installed the package. All of which is fine for me, but probably not the sort of thing I should have to be doing on a netbook.
3. Sound is very very soft. If I turn it up all the way, I can barely hear it, even using earphones. Sound was quirky under Ubuntu as well, so I suspect it's just a Linux issue with the EeePC 1000's soundcard. Not sure what's going on, but since at the moment I don't really listen to music on my computer, not a huge deal.

If anything really starts bothering me, I'll file a bug report.

Moblin

I'm trying out the Moblin beta from a live USB-drive image. My first impression is that this is what the Ubuntu Netbook Remix wants to be...and fails. Barring any major issues, I'm switching. Sorry, Mark Shuttleworth, et al.

waterboarding

This whole business with whether Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi knew waterboarding was done or was just an option is stupid, irrelevant, and misses the point. Waterboarding is torture, and I cannot believe that anyone who knew what it is would think otherwise. (I understand that there are some people who acknowledge that it's torture and believe it should be an option anyway in some interrogations, but I vehemently disagree.) In my mind, if she knew it was an option, then that knowledge and her subsequent lack of vociferous and public protest are morally equivalent to acquiescing to its use. And I do not believe that anyone who acquiesces to torture, even by omission, should have a place in our government; they should at the very least resign or be impeached. Anyone who ordered the use of torture, or who committed torture, should be prosecuted.

Politicians vs. Academics

Anybody who's ever interacted with me textually knows that I love footnotes. (I save my particular love for digressive footnotes, but I must allow that citations have their place as well.) So what I'm wondering is: why doesn't legislation have footnotes? Take, for example, from the HR 2195 §1(a)(1) (as introduced April 30, 2009):

(1) The critical electric infrastructure of the United States and Canada has more than $1 trillion in asset value, more than 200,000 miles of transmission lines, and more than 800,000 megawatts of generating capability, serving over 300 million people.

I have no idea if that's accurate, though it may well be—it sounds right, but I have no real way of judging. And that's the point: neither do the members of Congress, to my knowledge. I'd at least like to know where Rep. Thompson—who happens to be my representative. Hi, Bennie!—got his figures, even if it's not an academic-style citation. And I seriously don't think that's too much to ask from the government we're entrusting the running of the country to.

Internal Parasites FTW!

I just scarfed down two slices of cold pizza and a sandwich-on-a-bagel that I brought for lunch. Apparently I have a tapeworm or something.

Dear Blogger,

Apparently, you didn't realize that when I changed some things in my template I wanted them to remain changed and for you to not revert back to the default template FOR NO REASON. Stop it, or I will smack you. Hard.

Sincerely,
Carson

sharps!

So Joey took advantage of Linens and Things' going-out-of-business sale last year to buy me a knife, one I'd been wanting for a while. It's the 8" chef's knife from Calphalon's Katana Collection. Today I got to use it for the first time, and it's awesome. I mean, the Damascus-steel look is cool, but the best thing about it is the sheer heft of it. It's a little heavier than, say, the Wüsthofs I've used before. And that is exactly why I wanted this one. I already said thanks once, but one more time: Thank you, Joey!

National Day of Prayer

Yesterday was the National Day of Prayer, and a lot was made out of President Obama's decision to make it more low-key at the White House than his predecessors. But this really misses the point, I think. If we do believe that the country and its leaders need to be prayed for, wouldn't a much better solution be to pray for them—as every liturgical church does, so far as I'm aware—every time we gather together? Every Orthodox Divine Liturgy contains in the litany a prayer "For this God-protected land, for its President, for all civil authority, and for the armed forces, may the Lord God remember in His kingdom." Our country—any country—needs not just a day of prayer, but continuing prayer; and for that matter, so do all of us.

I was wrong. Writing Lojban with Tolkien's alphabet is not the nerdiest thing ever. It is, in fact, a Star Trek/X-Men crossover novel that holds that title.

I haven't read the novel, but I'm just amazed that anyone thought this was a good idea—and did so thrice, apparently, as there were (according to Wikipedia) two previous crossover comic books. I'm not against X-Men or Star Trek, but...seriously, why would Marvel and Paramount do this? The market for "People who read (or used to read) comic books and like Star Trek: The Next Generation and who think a crossover between them sounds like something they'd like to read" must be vanishingly small. Am I just wrong?

Stanley Fish's review of Reason, Faith and Revolution makes me want to read the book with verbiage like this:

The fact that science, liberal rationalism and economic calculation can not ask—never mind answer—such questions should not be held against them, for that is not what they do.

And, conversely, the fact that religion and theology cannot provide a technology for explaining how the material world works should not be held against them, either, for that is not what they do. When Christopher Hitchens declares that given the emergence of "the telescope and the microscope" religion "no longer offers an explanation of anything important," Eagleton replies, "But Christianity was never meant to be an explanation of anything in the first place. It's rather like saying that thanks to the electric toaster we can forget about Chekhov."

Netflix is strange

Netflix suggests a DVD of The Cure's greatest hits "Because you enjoyed Doctor Who: Earthshock." Is it just that they're both British? I find it difficult to imagine Peter Davison (Fifth Doctor) listening to The Cure—Chris Eccleston (Ninth), yes. Colin Baker (Sixth), maybe. But Davison?

MINE

Want. Thank you, Ashley, for finding them for me.