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Misty Petersburg

Natasha in Saint Petersburg has been exploring her passion for photography lately. Here are a couple of water-themed shots from last week (click to expand), the city wrapped in mist like a dream.

The Campfire Headphase

Sweet! Boards of Canada is coming out with a new album in a few weeks.

I'm really happy to see a new album, but it's a pity they don't let you get further into the site. They used to have this interactive flash animation where you could fly over island landscapes surrounded by a wide glassy sea, backlit by a twilight sky in alien colors. It's quite like the images I get from the music.

I always listen to Boards of Canada when I'm flying transatlantic. It feels especially "appropriate," if you want to call it that, on the leg out westward, when you're chasing the sun for eight or ten hours at a stretch, the sky outside a perfectly clear lightening dusk of deep turquoise, stretched over indistinct grey-white flatlands of cloud or ice. Time stands still, then.

Witness protection

Just finished an exhausting week in this exhausting month, and now get to go off for a week on vacation. I could barely focus today as I was trying to tie off all the loose ends so I could finally leave the office. Came home and tried watching "Commanding Heights," a PBS documentary on macroeconomics. Okay, that didn't work... I ended up watching Clueless instead, over a bottle of Scotch.

I feel much better now.

Heh, I'm catching up on personal email, and saw one of Warren Ellis's old Bad Signals where he says he heard that Kate Bush is going to make a comeback, meaning that Tori Amos will probably have to go into some kind of witness protection scheme.

Nano Lust Shocker

Oh man, the new little iPod Nano is killing me. Cec and I both have standard iPods and our music libraries are too big to make the Nano useful, but that little thing is just so cute!

One huge advantage the Nano has over regular iPods is that they're flash memory-based rather than hard drive-based. I've almost dropped my new iPod a few times since I got it, and it's just scary to think what a drop from walking height would do to the 19th century Victorian mechanism of a hard drive-based device.

There's an article on Ars Technica about the incredible amount of abuse they put the Nano through as part of a stress test, before the thing finally broke down. They even ran it over with their car and the music still worked fine! (The display got a little weird, understandably).

I'm guessing when the price of flash RAM comes down they'll move all iPods into flash RAM and finally get rid of hard drives altogether.

Here's Steve Jobs introducing the iPod Nano at the Apple conference in San Francisco.

I'm working for the wrong company.

Back in Denmark

Made it back to Denmark yesterday, am shaking off the jetlag and trying to finish a big project that's due Tuesday (no rest for the wicked).

It was a good trip to Seattle. Productive but exhausting. I'm starting to come face to face more often with the idea that I may have to move back to the States at some point. The job looks like it might head that way in a year or two.

I'm so torn about it. The US has a lot to offer, as far as diversity, friends, economic opportunity, music, sushi... there are a lot of things I miss. But every time I've been there lately there will be at least two or three things that hit me and really creep me out.

This time, the thing that hit me most was a commercial for the National Guard that came while I was watching CNN one night. The commercial showed all the usual messages, guys jumping out of helicopters, a woman in a Navy nurses' uniform caring for a sick or wounded person in a stretcher, etc. But when they ran the bullet list of reasons why you should join (what my company would call a 'value proposition'), among the bullets was listed health care and education benefits.

And two things hit me: first, that it was obvious that whoever called that number was going to end up in Iraq, no question about it. And second, that the advertisement obviously targeted lower-income people who wouldn't be able to afford health care and education on their own.

So what does that say about the country? That the social contract implies that lower income people need to fight in a war (a war started for reasons, whatever they may have been, that were decided by the ultra-rich), in order to secure the most basic human rights like health and education.

It struck me as horribly sad, and it's moments like that when I'm really not sure I can handle living in the States again. Even worse than the advertisement, maybe, was the idea that I might have been the only one around that recognized the val prop being offered, and found it ugly.

Just remembered today was September 11. Can it really have been four years?

Falling apart

Fucking nightmare, it feels like things are really starting to come apart at the seams. New Orleans is under water, and there have been running gun battles between gangs of looters and rescue teams. The Army says it doesn't have enough airlift to get the survivors out and supplies in.

Not enough airlift? The whole American military is built around a posture of rapid deployment. There are huge pre-positioned sealift ships constantly on alert on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, ready to bring thousands of troops with their vehicles and equipment to any place on Earth within a few days. The Air Force has the largest, most effective fleet of long range transports in the world, and the Army has thousands of transport helicopters that could have snatched people off roofs while dropping tons of supplies. We've done this before... in 2001, we used military transports to blanket Afghanistan with food packets dropped by parachute. Where was the military this time when our own people needed it? Fighting for their lives in Iraq, of course, where they're likely to be for a long time coming.

Meanwhile, with the Gulf Coast oil infrastructure a shambles and a third of American oil refining capacity offline, the oil crisis (I think it's fair to start calling it a crisis) doesn't appear to have any resolution in sight. Even if the federal government releases the strategic oil reserve, the refining capacity to turn that oil into gasoline just isn't available right now, and I've heard there are some airports in the US that are running dangerously low on jet fuel. I talked to a friend in Florida earlier today, who told me about fuel rationing at some stations there. So we're back to 1973 again.

And then for another swift kick in the stones, I read this morning that Cheif Justice Rehnquist just died, giving this despicable president the chance to appoint *two* Supreme Court justices and *really* fuck us all for life.

Somebody please tell me it's not as bad as it seems. I just found out I have to fly to Seattle tomorrow, and I'm just not in the mood.