Word of the Day: "Huckenfreude"

Defined by Ross Douthat as:

Huckenfreude (n): Pleasure derived from the outrage of prominent conservative pundits over the rising poll numbers of Mike Huckabee. Particularly sharp when the pundits in question are partisans of Rudy Giuliani, but extends to supporters of Mitt Romney as well. Usually experienced by evangelicals, crunchy cons, populists, and other un-airbrushed elements of the conservative coalition.

Then there's Rich Lowry of the National Review with Huckacide (via Ariana Huffington):

This is when a national party commits suicide by nominating an "under-vetted former governor who is manifestly unprepared to be president of the United States."

Truly Amazing Photos of Coast Guard Boat in Heavy Surf

And when I say "heavy", I mean "higher-than-the-masthead-roll-the-boat-over" heavy. YIKES! This image gives you an inkling about what these guys and gals are about to experience. One of the commenters on the blog opined, "Seriously, you want to talk professionalism, talk Coast Guard."

Thanks for sending the link Warren!

Full sequence of pictures

After Coulton, I Feel Fantastic

Saw Jonathan Coulton at the Majestic Theater last night, with Paul & Storm. Summary: Run, do not walk, to buy tickets for the next show you can get to. We laughed to the verge of incontinence all through Paul & Storm's set. I was actually worried that Coulton would be somewhat of a letdown after that, since I've listened to so much of his stuff that the humor wouldn't have the shock of novelty helping it along. I needn't have, it was a completely terrific set with a nice mix of stuff we'd heard and love (SkullCrusher Mountain, Future Soon, Re: Your Brains) with songs that were new to me.

I continue to be impressed with how these guys combine a knack for cutting, intelligent lyrics -- whether funny or straight -- with standout musical chops. Coulton's melodies in particular bring a lot of emotional depth to the subject at hand, which is important. Even his funny songs always bear a freight of sadness and alienation, and the music really helps you both feel and transcend the pain. Doesn't hurt if you're spilling your drink laughing, either.

That's Janet's head on my shoulder in the top sitting row right of center (thanks, Jon, for Flickring this shot from the stage).

Julian Beever is Still At It: More Amazing 3D Chalk Drawings

Feast your eyes and your sense of wonder. This blogger collected a bunch of newer pix; if these whet your appetite, truck on over to Mr. Beever's site and see the whole collection.

Mmmm, Subversive Goodness on OS X!

I use Subversion for revision control on my Mac (as well as the Windows and Linux boxen of my collaborators). When I run an update, I used to get Subversion's default behavior in the event of a conflict (i.e., a change to lines in my local copy which are also changed in the new revision from the repository). This consists of a "C" indication on the status output, hoses the original file with conflict indicators, and as a special bonus generates three new files for my viewing pleasure (.mine, .r333, and .r340, if my local copy started at rev 333 the repository is now up to rev 340).

Apple's XCode comes with a slick little visual-diff utility called FileMerge (aka "opendiff"); a nice fellow named Bruno de Fraine at Vrije Universiteit Brussel wrote some wrapper scripts for Subversion that call FileMerge when differences arise. The scripts work both for the normal time-to-update use case as well as the conflicted one; time will tell if I really like the former, but I am in LOVE with the latter. When a conflict arises, you see a GUI and merely pick the set of changes you want from either side, then save the result. Ahhh!

I did have to change one thing in one of the scripts to get it working on my Mac: There is no "tempfile" utility, so I replaced that invocation with "mktemp /tmp/madeup_root.XXXX".

Bliss!

Lauren Does It Again

A thoughtful, compassionate essay on Google, privacy, and the tension between profitability and not doing evil.

I've been reading PRIVACY forum digests for basically ever; geez, I might have started back before "inter-net" lost its hyphen and gained capitalization. Recommended, unless you don't give a damn about who knows every detail of your life.