Concern

The Futurama episode “Jurassic Bark” always makes me cry.

Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man really does manage to suck, in spite of itself. The butchered editing manages to utterly fail to bring together interesting interviews, and interesting performances of interesting songs, a feat that’s probably hard to do deliberately. Ignoring that, the film is pretty good, but just a tape of the performances, and then a separate tape of the interviews with Cohen and other musicians would have been just as good. The final U2+Cohen performance, while a good rendition of Tower of Song, fails to bring any climax to the feature, probably because it really looks lip-synced, and not a live performance.

Also, the sound in the theater kept cutting out, which is, you know, bad for a concert film.

Tor is surprisingly easy to use on OS X. It could hardly get any simpler: download it, run it, point your browser at it. The only thing that could make it any easier is if it configured your browser for you, with all you having to do is flip an on/off switch. But there’s that impenetrable wall of XUL.

The site is blocked by the great Seawall, so it’s automatically one of the better things on the Internet. I’ll need to see how usable it is behind that wall next week.

I drove my new car to work today, for the first time. This is a 37-mile haul from Santa Cruz, over the notorious highway 17, then up state route 85 into Sunnyvale. My first impressions follow.

• The clutch is nice; it doesn’t feel too hard, and it’s not squishy. It’s really comfortable to use in traffic.
• The car feels more comfortable at a higher RPM than my old car; most gears felt right between 2000-2500 RPM, on this it’s more like 2500-3000. I was trying to keep my same shifting pattern per RPM, but in most gears that feels too low. I found myself getting up to fifth at only about 60 mph.
• Gas mileage. The display can be configured to display the mileage you’re getting on the current trip, and going to work (very light traffic) I got 31 mpg. Coming home (stop-and-go on 85; pretty clear on 17) I got 27. I think I’ll hit my goal of not needing to fill up twice a week
• It’s a really quiet engine.
• The interior is roomy, and the leather seats are great.
• The suspension feels a bit stiffer. Our crappy California highways had me bouncing a little.
• The brakes are a little sticky, but it is brand new.
• I can’t seem to get the Sirius radio to activate.
• I drove lightly today, because I need to break the car in, but I did push it a little to see how the turbo does. That’s awesome; accelerating is pretty great.

Geat piece about how we’ve, uh, basically lost the “war on terror” by Bruce Schneier.

Edit: oh, and I also realized: since “teh War on Terror” is eternal and unwinnable, it means we haven’t lost it, it means we keep on losing. Forever.