Where’s the peanut butter?!

some ideas for holiday giving:

• give donations - heifer international let you “buy” animals for people who need and can use them. does your kid need an ipod more than a sense of connectedness with the external world? forget what he tells you…
• give experiences - subscriptions, lessons, concert tickets, or parties extend the giftgiving cycle beyond one day. do not confuse this with a gift card, though. give money before you give gift cards.
• thanks, for inspiration
• something you made - it’s like junior high shop for adults and whoever you give it to is almost sure to at least get a laugh out of it.
• things with reusable wrapping - wrapping paper is a huge waste. try paper that might be reused or a nice bag.
• other things not easily classifiable as “more stuff”

Why didn’t I install cygwin ages ago? For some stupid reason I
struggled to set up my own sshd outside of what cygwin would give me
and used the native xemacs rather than cygwin’s (here because I really
couldn’t use cygwin very easily at work) and for over a year have
suffered with not being able to start xemacs in a shell since -nw
support from the native install to putty doesn’t work very
well, though the cygwin binaries work just fine. And it GIVES me
xemacs, ssh, aspell, and all this other cool stuff. And now I’m
typing in xemacs two ssh sessions away - something I doubt I could
have done before. It’s awesome.

once in a while an album comes out with opening chords or a general structure that immediately evoke a feeling of despondence in me in the best possible way. “continuous hit music” which kicks off American Analog Set’s Promise of Love is such a song. its beauty in simplicity is totally disarming. was i in the middle of a difficult game of sudoku? some interesting work? out at a bar with friends? (or, this track would never come on in a bar) the context is irrelevant and immediately washed away. there are other songs like Wilco’s Via Chicago which also impart despondence, but subtly more direct and deeper yet less personal due to the narrative. “i dreamed about killing you again last night and it felt alright to me” is replaced with anything and nothing when listening to American Analog Set’s despondence. growing up i surrounded myself with music and friends who shared my passion for music and i’m not moderately saddened that these days it plays such an auxiliary role in my personal and public lives.