(If you have a LiveJournal and you befriended my lahosken.myopenid.com account, I encourage you to stay awake through this post. The rest of you folks can fall asleep. Oh, but if you have your own domain, you might want to stay awake a little bit anyhow so that you can read about the mistake I made with OpenID. Then you can avoid making that same mistake yourself if you decide to use OpenID in the future.)

The short story: I dare you to befriend lahosken.san-francisco.ca.us.

The long story: myopenid.com is an OpenID provider. I am an OpenID ignoramus, but I'm getting better--I even went to a lecture! Thus I learned how I can use my own URL as my OpenID instead of, say, the maybe-it's-legit-but-who-can-tell lahosken.myopenid.com, while still letting the folks at myopenid.com do all of the hard programming shme.

So I'm going to stop using the lahosken.myopenid.com LJ account. I'm going to use lahosken.san-francisco.ca.us instead. Sorry for the extra work. Sorry for the confusion.

See, some folks are early adopters: they start using technology before other people have figured it out. I am such an early adopter that I started using OpenID before I'd figured it out myself. I am so elite.

Apparently Bernd Becher, industrial site photographer, died last week. Dammit. I would prefer that tragedies be restricted to fiction, please.

Poor George is bleak. Nobody knows why they do the things they do. Everybody suffers. All effort is futile. Everyone is doomed and unhappy. I love books like this. If you do, too, then you'll probably like this book.

I just woke up. I thought I was running late for work--it was 9! But it turns out it was 9pm, not 9am. I was most of the way through my morning routine before I noticed it was dark outside. Why is my sleep schedule off? Why am I so clueless? Because I pulled an all-nighter volunteering at the Googol game.

I took some incoherent notes about it.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going back to bed.

I finally figured out how to make some progress on the No More Secrets write-up--I'm sitting at an undisclosed location in the Googleplex, volunteering for the Gooooogol Game. Nothing to do but sit and write... Oh except that there's a great internet connection here. And so I find myself reading instead of writing.

Earlier this year, Volvo selected Odyssey to sink a treasure chest in the Western Mediterranean. They had planned to take the winner of the [puzzle] hunt, 23-year-old Alena Zvereva from Ekaterinburg, Russia, out to retrieve the treasure from its secret location. What they found was the discovery of an estimated $500 million in coins from a deep ocean site that the company has now code-named the ‘Black Swan.’

As soon as the discovery was made public, Odyssey found itself in the eye of a media storm. Reports have circulated that a court in the Spanish coastal town of La Linea has issued an order for the Spanish Guardia Civil to hold any Odyssey vessel if it leaves the port of Gibraltar, putting Volvo’s retrieval plans on hold. --egmcartech

Compromised clue sites are always a drag. Stupid gold, always getting in the way.

Dear Lazyweb--

I'm volunteering at the Googol Conglomerate tomorrow, i.e., Saturday. I could spend three hours getting there from San Francisco on CalTrain. But I'd much rather mooch a ride with you, chatting about Game stuff. I can share exciting true stories behind PiratesBATH mini-puzzles. It will be a blast. web+comment@lahosken.san-francisco.ca.us

This comic book tells Ganesh's origin story. Apparently India Authentic is going to be a series of comic books full of Indian myths. I don't know much about Ganesh, and I was sorry that the comic book authors picked one of the few stories that I already knew. I didn't get much out of this comic book.

I don't read Eric Harshbarger's LOGOLOG blog very often. Hey, give me a break--it doesn't have a feed. Thus, I have to remember to check it. I checked it today, thus finding some week-old news. He's talking about putting together some big puzzly thing happening in a few months. I thought I'd point that out just in case you, like me, don't tend to hear about things that aren't mentioned in feeds.

The Debian upgrade is not going well. OK, I kinda lost X Windows.

"Where was it when you saw it last?"

"On my monitor."

"Well, did you look for it there?"

"Yeah, it's not there now."

Fortunately, at work there are tons of computers, so I finally got around to rescuing my photos of recent Games and uploading them to teh internets. No, I haven't made much progress on the No More Secrets write-up. Can I blame that on the botched upgrade, too? I guess not, that machine still has Emacs and a keyboard and stuff. So I guess the other problem is that I'm slow.

Anyhow: photos.

• No More Secrets including an ice cream truck
• BATH3 including two Mystery Machine vans

Those Debian install CDs showed up. Fortunately, I have two computers. So here I sit, typing on the laptop-- uhm, excuse me. OK, I'm back. Here I sit on the laptop, occasionally pausing to swap CDs, hunching over the drive and-- uhm, excuse me. Hmm, errors processing libc6. That sounds bad. It didn't like the libc6 that I downloaded, didn't like the one from the CD-ROM. Hmm, that seems bad. Man, I hate computers. Let's talk about a book instead. Let's talk about Lunch Lessons.

This book was good. But it was not aimed at me. I was reading the wrong book.

This book, by Ann Cooper and Lisa Holmes, is about nutrition and sustainable food, applying good food techniques to school lunches. I wasn't the person who should be reading it--it's preaching to the converted.

I was hoping the book would have anecdotes about introducing healthy food to kids raised on junk food, how they were brought around. I thought I saw some magazine article about that... I forget who wrote it. I guess when I heard about this book Lunch Lessons, I assumed that magazine article was promoting this book. How many people could be out there, writing about school lunches, right?

This book didn't have much in the way of anecdotes. It had sound advice. I read it through. But if I'd had another book in my backpack, I don't know that I would have finished it. Oh, I didn't finish it, not really. A lot of it was kid-friendly nutritious recipes. I don't have kids and I don't cook, so I skipped that part. And then I was done with that book, and I was still on the bus and the bus was still in South San Francisco and I had nothing to read. Watch out for those recipes--they'll make you think that it will take a while to read this book, that you won't need another book for your commute. But you'll be wrong and bored in South San Francisco.

Pre-book-report non sequiturs can be fun: Darcy Krasne. We now return you to today's Book Report, already in progress.

...ever get published? Though this book is by Sarah Vowell, I blame its widespread existence on David Foster Wallace. Wallace has written some good essays and many bad ones. He pokes fun at himself for being such a geek. He does it a lot. He does it until it stops being funny and then keeps going. In this book Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell, she pokes fun at herself for obsessing over presidential assassination trivia. She travels to different places and thinks about things that happened there.

I didn't finish the book. Is it funny that she studied a lot about something? Not that funny, it's not. I just wanted to say, "Get over yourself. Get over David Foster Wallace's book sales, too. Just calm down and report. He'll be first against the wall when the revolution comes; you don't need to follow him." But there's no point in saying that to a book, so I didn't.

Dave Hill wrote in to say that he'd been reading some of my old web pages. (He didn't say so, but he probably started browsing because he was hoping to see some kind of writeup about the the No More Secrets Game. I finally got a chance to play in a Game with Dave Hill! In the No More Secrets Game! So there should be a writeup! Which I'm working on. Slowly. Well, which I'm slowly procrastinating on.) Specifically, he wrote to say that he'd met Dishwasher Pete. This just goes to show that while I have some book learning, Dave Hill has genuine punk cred.

Yesterday, as part of my strict procrastination regimen, I went to the comic store. There on the shelf was Dishwasher, the new book by Dishwasher Pete. I read it this morning, couldn't put it down. I was staying by the phone, wondering if the BATH3 organizers were going to tell me what I'm doing next weekend, if I should buy a sleeping bag or what... Anyhow, I sat and read. This is the guy with the quest to wash dishes in all 50 states. He wrote a zine about dishwashing with neat asides about labor history. Then the zine stopped. So you might be wondering what happened with the quest? Well, he met this nice girl, and wanted to settle down, so the quest turned into kind of a sprint and...

But that is not the point. The point is that I got into reading the 'zine late in its run, and I didn't know about the early years. This book filled me in on that time. There are other dishwashers who taught Pete secrets of the trade. There are good things in Portland, OR. There are... Look, just go read the darned thing.

I liked the part in Dale's post-Game GC writeup where he talks about programming the phone system. I especially like the part where he mentions that it was cheap to set up for inital development/testing. Talking with Snout about voice systems wasn't so reassuring. "Well, one of us worked at Hearme, so we got this free testing account...". But $11 a month for a few months sounds workable. And it's good to learn new things.

Like last weekend, I found out that the jelly from jelly rolls is not the same as hair gel. It's not so difficult to notice the difference; bees can distinguish between them quite easily.

Unlike books juxtaposed = laughs. Sorted Books Project. Also: Sorted Books Project