November 22, 2006

Politics, sausages, and writing

November is Seattle’s worst month, but even at that there’s a comforting quality to the gray blanket of low clouds, the cool rain dripping daily from evergreen needles and thatched roofs, the lazy sunrise and reassuring peek of setting sun well before dinnertime. I remember driving around in the dark, wipers on high but still insufficient to keep the windshield dry, peering out into the night, headlamps making crystal beads out of the fat droplets. This is the time of year to light the fireplace, snuggle on the sofa with tea and blankets, wear sweaters and slippers and dig out the Netflix.

I reluctantly started the much-hated non-Sorkin season seven of West Wing and was surprised at how much I liked it. Clever writing had given way to clever plot lines and it felt more like 24 than West Wing but I immediately ordered the rest of the disks. I also watched The Lady Eve, one of Paul Phillips’s recommendations. An old Preston Sturges con-artist romantic comedy with Henry Fonda, I’m surprised I never saw it before. I should order all the rest of Sturges’s films – talk about clever writing!

With nothing on the rotisserie until Thanksgiving Day I called Mike Craig and asked if this would be a good time to fly down to Phoenix and work on our poker book (second poker book, actually – I wrote one of the chapters in the upcoming Full Tilt Strategy Guide – Tournament Edition) and fix me up with the four hot chicks he keeps threatening on me. It was, so I booked a flight and got a suite at the Westin Kierland. Mike offered me a vacant condo but I wanted a place with a gym so I could continue my workout regimen uninterrupted. Mike is one of those rare writers who actually gets work done, which is why I twisted his arm to collaborate on this book with me. Originally I was just going to publish a collection of my blog entries but as we strategize and synergize it looks like there will be a ton of new material. I’m excited.

I won’t go too much into the inner workings of politics, sausage-making, or writing a book, but suffice it to say that we’re making progress despite taking plenty of time to hang out with Mike’s family, smoke cigars out by the fire, and eat at each of the new Mastro’s restaurants with a different one of his yenta selections for me each night. We also got to see Arnie the Compmeister, whose wife and daughter it turned out the Craigs actually knew already. I’ve been drinking the 2004 Twenty Bench Cabernet by the glass – 2004 continues to be a very promising year for Napa, perhaps as good as 2002. I plan to fly back to Seattle on Thursday, in time for turkey at the Saltas, with a stack of Myspace addresses burning a hole in my pocket.

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November 6, 2006

Twenty-Four Seven

I finished watching season two of 24 on DVD, and despite some outrageous plot devices and a few technical slip-ups (“that uses Huffman encoding so you should be able to use it anywhere”) I liked it a lot. At the end of every episode I laugh out loud at how they manage to create a cliffhanger every hour, on the hour.

It may just be that Jack Bauer, played by Kiefer Sutherland, is the perfect embodiment of some of my most important values: freedom, loyalty, and progress. Elisha Cuthbert, who plays a blonde version of my first wife, doesn’t hurt either, and the constant Kafkaesque shifts in the characters’ realities make for gripping, if somewhat far-fetched, spy drama. The final season of West Wing just came out on DVD, so I’ll watch that, intermixed with Paul Phillips’s movie recommendations, before getting season three of 24.

Being a guy who bleeds Microsoft blue, I faithfully downloaded Internet Explorer 7 when notified it was available by Windows Update. I was excited to try out the tabbed browsing that users of alternative browsers are always crowing about. I still can’t see much advantage to it other than speed, and the implementation by Microsoft has a couple very poor design decisions. Now I need to train myself to close tabs in two different ways: the X on the tab for all but the last one, and the X on the window to close the browser itself if I am done with the last tab. It’s just silly for there to be no X on the last tab; it should bring you back to a blank page or the home page as you opt.

The second problem is there doesn’t seem to be any way to get all new pages to display in a tab by default. Why on earth would you want it do default to a whole new browser window once you have these tabs? And if you use the nifty little arrow on the Favorites menu to open a new tab, it takes three clicks (plus the click to drop down the favorites menu) to actually see the new page! As Bill used to whine in design-review meetings, “Doesn’t anybody actually try to use this thing?” I guess it’s unreasonable to expect such a megacorporation to maintain what Charles Simonyi used to call “the craftsman’s fine hand” but come on! This is the flagship product! Guys, just call me any time and I’ll make your design decisions for you at only double my usual rate.

I found and plugged a leak in my Chuzzle game and I am now very close to even on the non-illegal Skilljam non-gambling site, non-illegal because you gamble with Chuzzles rather than cards I guess. Look for me at the final table of the World Series of Chuzzle. Oh yeah. I guarantee a win.

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