Grace Notes

I have no reason for that title; I just like it.

The CD player's putting out 'Love for Sale', and has just segued into another soft jazz tune which I don't recognize -- wait, it's Sweet Georgia Brown -- but I like. It's Sunday morning, and the living is good. Breakfast came off pretty well -- we learned that cooking bacon in the oven does work, but trying to cook both the bacon and crescent rolls at the same time does not -- the bacon cooks in 25 minutes at 400, but dropping it down to 350 for the rolls extends the baking time more than we allowed. But microwaving fixed it. The Belgian waffles, drenched in syrup, were good. The strawberries were -- well, pretty good. And the coffee was excellent. So things are going well.

We don't have too much planned for today. I want to redo that wall switch that I put in upside down -- its funny; we have the same switch in six other places; in four of them, they're dual-throw switches, meaning that up or down can mean 'off', while on the other two, they're single-throw -- down is off, up is on -- so it really shouldn't matter which way the switch is in there. But we've lived here for twenty four years, and, by god, our core brains know that if that switch is up, then the lights should be on -- whether they are or not. It'll be a pain to flip the switch, but it'll be a one-time pain. Retraining our brains could take considerably longer. And we're going to go to a local park for a walk -- its a pretty barren spot, actually, but we like it. When my wife lived in Delaware, she used to drive to a state park with a huge -- must have been three miles, easily -- oval that was used by joggers and whatnot. She'd just walk it, passing under the trees, listening to the birds. We don't quite have that delight here, but we do what we can.

The New York Times Magazine does a one page interview every week. It's usually pretty light reading, and I do so about half the time. This week it was Charlie Crist, the governor of Florida. Oh, god, I thought, not only Florida, scene of vote fraud, but I know this guy is a Republican, so the odds of liking what he thought were pretty low. I was quite surprised to read his observations about various things. He sounds intelligent, bright, and insightful. Granted, much of what he said was phrased in careful politician phrases, but I found myself thinking I could vote for this guy. And too bad he can't run with Obama. Amazing.

I learned a new phrase this morning - 'reality mining'. Basically, its a method of tracking activity through records of the movement of location-aware devices - ie, GPS-enabled, or cellphone signal generating (the cellphone signal inherently allows location determination) - and, by mapping it, fitting activities into clusters -- here's a general 'flow' of how the day usually goes for a given group of people who have similar flows. This is yeah, so? information, but then they say 'so if you'd like to know where people who are otherwise much like you in their flow go on their weekends, or at nights for entertainment , here's a list; perhaps it'll contain things that you might find of interest'. This is magical information for people who'd like to know where the flows go, overall, so that they can position the next Starbucks or the next bus route or more cops there, too. Very interesting.

I picked up the local paper today; part of the program to save money on the Sunday papers. I noticed something interesting. There was an article about how people in rural areas are hit harder by gas prices than ones in semi-rural or urban ones. They don't have alternatives; they can trim usage somewhat, but not a lot. What surprised me was that if I had seen that comment in a major paper, I'd have thought 'well, duh!', but because it was written by local people, I judged them a bit more kindly. I didn't expect as much from them.