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Last winter I noted that HBO had optioned the rights to George RR Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series of novels. I incorrectly assumed this meant they were going into production but it turns out that at the time they simply optioned the rights, and they’ve recently announced that they’re funding the production of a pilot episode. Pretty great news really - it still doesn’t guarantee we’ll be seeing the series on HBO, but it’s a significant step forward and increases the chances. Here’s hoping it’s good - as the article I link to notes, if anyone can pull this off it’s HBO.

If you’re unfamiliar with it, The Song of Fire and Ice is an as yet incomplete series of gritty high fantasy novels set in a sort of alternate medieval Great Britain. It covers some generally familiar ground, but it’s really well written, has some fantastic plot twists, and plays quite a bit with conventions in the genre. They’re definitely worth checking out if fantasy is your cup of tea.

This is a slow moving drama, so it’s not for everyone, especially not for a lot of my regular readers, but if you’re in the mood for a well crafted, thought provoking, reasonably well acted crime drama, it’s definitely worth checking out.

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I mentioned a week or two ago how I had finally gotten the last and hardest badge for Desktop Tower Defense over on Kongregate.com and how I needed to find a new pastime for my lunch hour. I’ve found it. It’s called Warzone, and it’s cast from the same mold that DTD is. You purchase various kinds of towers and place them on the board, building a maze to channel the enemy forces through, slowing their march towards your home and exposing them as effectively as you can to the firepower of your towers. Warzone doesn’t add much in the way of innovation to this formula, but it’s well executed, comes with a number of maps and game modes, and so far, 5-10 games under my belt, it seems pretty well balanced. I wish it had some kind of slowing/freezing tower, and I wish it was over on Kongregate with badges etc would be the only things I would say in terms of enhancements. This is flash based so it should play on any machine. Check it out for a little friday fun, and good luck trying to beat my current high score, ~85k on the original map using cash mode.

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We use Drupal at work and are pretty happy with it. I’m happy for the folks behind it because for the second year in a row they’ve won open source CMS product of the year from the folks over at Packt publishing. It’s also pretty cool that Earl Miles, who contributes extensively to the Drupal project and who is the principle author of Views/Views2, a central component of most Drupal sites, was recognized as an MVP this year. Kudos all around, both the award and the recognition are well deserved.

As you can see, the staircase has some almost paper thin joints on it, and before I shored it up it was very wobbly as you walked down it.

Next, what I did about it:

Not much to look at, but effective. The staircase is definitely much sturdier than it had been.

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If you have a PC and you don’t buy this game, you don’t love fun. Audiosurf is this fantastic little music game that uses your own music collection to build levels you fly through, collecting tokens for points as you go. At $2.50 over on steampowered.com this week, you have nothing to lose by trying it - your morning coffee probably costs more than Audiosurf does and it won’t last nearly as long. Get thee over and buy it, then friend me on Steam so we can compare scores!

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Susan and I ordered a pellet stove in July, figuring on the most expensive heating oil ever this winter. While that’s looking less likely to be true, we still have a pellet stove coming this month, and part of the installation involved the removal of a cast iron steam radiator that sat where the pellet stove ultimately will. We had a plumber disconnect it a couple of months ago, but we’ve been waffling about what to do with it until recently. We decided to save it for the day when the house is sold in case the new owners want to install it in one of the rooms rather than selling it off to a scrap dealer. The only problems were it was too heavy for Susan and I to move, and the basement stairs were rickety to the point where we were afraid anyone trying to cart it into the basement would end up going through the stairs with it.

The first problem was easy enough to solve: we hired a moving company. The second problem we put me on, though I’m no carpenter. We picked up about 40′ of 2×4 on Saturday, and I spent the afternoon bracing the staircase. The end result looks a bit ramshackle, but the stairs are definitely sturdier than they were.

Our plan when the movers arrived was to have them slide the radiator into the basement on a skid plate, using a rope to control the descent, because while the stairs were much stronger structurally after my bracing them, some of the individual steps are still pretty rickety. The movers came, took a look at our plan, seemed to agree with us, then appeared around the corner with the radiator in hand and lumbered down the stairs before Susan and I could say boo about it. I sort of quietly freaked. I was sure they were going to plunge through, but all went well in the end, me at the top of the stairs like a nervous nellie encouraging them not to step in the center of the stairs. Now I think we could have gotten away with me doing absolutely nothing, but oh well. At least the stairs will be stronger when someone is looking to cart that radiator back up out of the basement.

[edit] As Kevin points out in the comments, it’s Bruce Banner, not David Banner. No idea what I was thinking there - now I can’t remember why I loved the Hulk so much as a kid.

[update] Turns out this story has been widely misreported - note this piece over on daringfireball.net revealing that Apple has not in fact denied Opera. I believe the gist of my post above remains true though - Apple is denying software access to their platform and doing so is not in their interests.

Susan’s a member of a local CSA farm, and she often picks up celeriac, which I’d never had until a month or so ago. Celeriac is the root of a particular kind of celery plant. It looks like a very large gnurled potato, but it has almost no starch content so it’s perfect for diabetics. You can prepare it much like you would prepare mashed potatoes, or you can dice it and steam, boil. or stirfry it and serve it as a side vegetable with your dinner. It’s great! It has a very mild celery taste, it’s versatile, and when you can find it it’s dirt cheap. Definitely worth trying if you’re looking to add some healthy variety to your diet.

A picture is worth a thousand words:

Here’s a ~5 minute youtube video showing off what the gameplay looks like:

As of this month, Netflix is charging the fee, and they made a great compromise move. It’s only $1 more a month, easily palatable and an acceptable balance between cost and access. I was pleasantly surprised, figuring they would raise it by at least several dollars, or start charging a per Blu-Ray disc rental addon fee. Kudos to the folks at Netflix for how they handled this.

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Below is my winning maze, for those that are interested. Note that the big central area was filled with anti-air towers for most of the game - I sold them off right near the end and bought several additional bash towers, also spending a good deal on upgrading a number of pellet towers. For most of the game, the only non-anti-air towers I had were 1 bash tower and two ink guns.

Now that I have a winning formula I suspect I could bump up my score a bit, but… I’m done. I’ve been obsessing on this for months, now that I’ve beat it, I’m moving on.

(I’ll just go off to find another tower defense game to obsess over

20Rafaelloello, yes, that is true, but as I understand it, most holders of CDS have them hedged off to someone else. …”

In (most?) lines of insurance you cannot take out a policy unless you have an insurable interest in the asset or life. In CDS’s there was no requirement of this.

Somebody buys Rafaelloello’s mortgage, they want to hedge that risk with a CDS, fine.

5,000 other investors say, “Hey Rafaelloello hasn’t missed a mortgage payment, I want to “insure” that he continues to pay.”

Then 5,000 more say, “I’ll take that bet, because even though it looks like he’s going to continue to pay, I can hedge my bet that he wont…” Enter the next 5,000 “investors”.

Before you know it, Rafaelloello is the equivalent of a top-ranked college athlete. Tens of millions of dollars are being bet on my ability to perform, with no direct ties to the underlying assets (My home and my ability to pay).

You’re only hedged as well the ability of all parties to pay their bets/bookies/vigs obligations. In this ring of hedges it only takes a player or two to skip town and the whole game implodes.

The rest of the thread is over here, and it’s well worth a look if you’re trying to grok what’s going on with the financial system. I’ll repeat my oft repeated assesment though - in layman’s terms, it was a giant fucking ponzi scheme.

The rest of the cool stuff - editable playlists, skins, games, utilities, a true browsable file system - they’re all just gravy. Rockbox is free, has a great little installer, a huge support community, and tons of mods. If you have a player which Rockbox supports, it’s definitely worth considering. One downside to be clear on - if you install this on an Ipod, you can’t use Itunes to manage the device anymore, it becomes a mountable volume on your computer and you copy files over. There are other media library software that will do this for you (things like Mediamonkey for example) but it also means losing access to the music store integration and so on. Not that you should have been buying music with DRM baked into it to begin with… but that’s a post for another day.

Ifil: Next question. Governer Palin, you first. Can you explain to us how you would bake a chocolate cake?’

Palin: Sure, I’d be happy to. Let me tell you about the time I was at the game with the hockey moms, and I sucessfully negotiated for cheaper hot dog prices for all the kids from the vendor at that stadium. It just goes to show how my experience as an executive demonstrates my experience! And did those kids enjoy those hot dogs? You betcha!

Ifil:… Senator Biden? Would you like to respond?

Biden: …err… [big fake smile, demonstrating he thinks Palin's charming] well, back in PA, my mom made the best chocolate cake, and let me tell you how, but before I do, let me just mention that John McCain voted against chocolate cake 37 times since he’s been in the senate….

God help us if the Republicans take the White House again. Everyone’s giving Palin credit today for not blowing it, but I’m completely appalled that anyone could watch last nights exhange and continue to count Palin as a credible candidate. I got up this morning and did the same thing I did after watching the last debate: went over to the Obama campaign’s website and donated $100 to their campaign. Here’s hoping they win, we’re all in deep shit if they don’t.

I should note I’m not really sure what to make of all of this. I read an analysis in the last couple of months that suggested the food supply has actually never been safer, it’s just that regional threats like ecoli outbreaks get more widely reported than in the past. At the same time though there’s overwhelming evidence that the Bush administration systematically went after regulatory systems, and it’s not clear to me what impact that had at the FDA and other government inspection and regulatory bodies that oversee the food supply. It seems better to be prudent than sick is what I guess it boils down to.

Fortunately Susan and I eat pretty danged healthy and we don’t eat all that much processed food, so here’s hoping our exposure to risk is as minimal as it seems.