talbotlucas.org: a word to the wise is sufficient

fsb.com

Last week I basically answered some viewer mail for fsb.com: The Right Database for Your Business. As slow as I am, I'm determined to prove the Tech Skeptic wrong.

fashionable (or not) names

Today in Property, my professor recalled the names of four siblings involved in a claim of title by adverse possession against co-tenants in common: Daisy, Myrtle, Violet, and Dorcas. And he volunteered some of the names of his family members that were common in their day and now are rare or seem strange to our ears.

This came to his mind because we were reading a case that has taken the place in our case book of the one he mentioned (Shives v. Niewoehner, 191 N.W.2d 633), and because Eugene Volokh, a UCLA law professor and one of the forces behind The Volokh Conspiracy, had only yesterday posted an interesting tidbit about names. It reads:

FORGOTTEN NAMES: I knew I had read an excellent book about trends in baby names, but I couldn't remember the name of the book or the author until Ted Arrowsmith reminded me. It's Stanley Lieberson, A Matter of Taste: How Names, Fashions, and Culture Change (Yale University Press, 2000). Lieberson is a sociologist at Harvard. If you're about to have a son, "Stanley" would be a great name if you want a retro sound but don't want to use one of the same retro names everyone else is using. Stanley has been in decline for nearly a century. It was the 36th most common boy's name in the 1910s, but by 2001 it had dropped to number 513.

Those familiar with the talbotlucas.org family will probably smile at Professor Volokh's choice of "Stanley" as a good retro hip name...

arts & letters

I've been informed that a few of our blog categories haven't been populated and generate an awful "404/file not found" message when selected. To put that to an end, I thought I'd point out one of our featured links, to the Arts & Letters Daily site. We at talbotlucas.org mourned its demise when Lingua Franca was not able to keep it going, but it's been revived with assistance from the Chronicle of Higher Education. The site is updated daily, and its own list of links is a nice shortcut to a variety of international news sources. Enjoy.

an odd sort of justice

Yesterday I was unhappy about the murdered pelicans. Today, some indirect relief (for me, not the pelicans, alas) via the Associated Press, who report on a man who fatally shot himself while beating his dog with a gun.

locksmithing lesson

Being able to pick a lock has always seemed like an attractive talent to me. Not one that you'd advertise or put to use very often, but a nice arrow in the talent quiver. Makes me think of the Sherlock Holmes story in which we learn that if Holmes hadn't turned to detective work he would've made the best cat burglar in London.

In the same vein, I've sometimes wondered how master keys work. Why is it that my key only opens certain doors, but the maintenance guy has a master key that opens every door. How does that work?

Puzzle no longer: a recently published article not only explains this, but explains how to make a master key from a non-master key. Is this useful information, or what?

Many thanks to LawMeme for bringing this to my attention. The topic, posted today, is entitled "Computer researcher finds vulnerability in real-world locks."

(Makes me think we should have an "information you might use" category on this site...)

pelican outrage

Since my first visit to California I've had a soft spot in my heart for pelicans. They're large and oddly shaped, but watching a group of them glide along the shoreline of the La Jolla Cove gave me the feeling that, somehow, all was right in the world. They'd find their favorite spots on the rocks, flip their bills onto their backs, and take a nap. Not a bad life. They don't really bother other birds, or people, and they seem fairly social. They were a frequent sight in San Francisco, too, and Wallace and I would watch them glide over the water as we walked along the Embarcadero.

Intruding on my pelican reverie, however, is the real world. Today's issue of The New York Times includes a story about pelican killing along the California coast. My small hope is that whoever is responsible for this meets their fate in a similarly horrible way. (I'll push past the urge to make specific suggestions here and now.)

Back to the books...

one hell of a mother!

Having decided that Martin Luther King, Jr. Day was as good as any to liberate our homemade vinegar from its barrel, we removed the vinegar and an ENORMOUS mother from our one-gallon wooden barrel, strained a pint or so of lip-puckering red wine vinegar for our everyday use, and gave the barrel a thorough rinsing. The unstrained vinegar with its bits of mother has been returned to the barrel, and we'll add a bit of wine and water tonight to keep the process going.

One of the things missing from our kitchen is a pH testing kit so we're not sure where our vinegar falls on the pH spectrum. Inhaling naturally over a bowl of it gives one the same kind of jolt as a blast of good wasabi or horseradish. The stinging tingles start at the nostrils and zoom past the tonsils--wheeeee! Our target pH is 6.5 and I'm sure we're below that. With a little practice and attention I think we'll be able to gauge better how long it should sit.

Our vinegar experiment was spurred by a visit to Oak Barrel Wine Craft in Berkeley and Paul Bertolli's praises of homemade vinegar in Chez Panisse Cooking. We found that it's a great way to make something of the wine that hasn't found its way into our glasses.

TiVo: God's Machine?

This one's for David: FCC's Powell Calls TiVo 'God's Machine'

What else can I say? With TiVo's recent Rendezvous annoucements, there may yet be enough life to keep things going until the rest of the world wakes up and get's with it.

"TiVo's upcoming premium service package will use Rendezvous technology to automatically discover Macs within the home network and determine which services they provide, allowing customers to listen to their shared music or view their shared photos on their TV," said Jim Barton, co-founder and CTO for TiVo. "We are excited about working with Apple on other ways Rendezvous can help TiVo Series2 DVRs connect to a Mac to deliver future services."

Need I say more?

wallace's annual checkup

Our boy's a bruiser! Wallace weighed in at 35 lbs today, so we'll probably be lightening his meals a little in the coming weeks to help him take off a few pounds. (30-32lbs is our target range.) In addition to getting a few shots and a thorough checkup, he also had a portion of his upper left carnassial tooth removed. Some time around Christmas, he broke the tooth, and we discovered the damage on the 27th. Mind you, it hadn't slowed his eating or other activities! Had you or I experienced similar damage we'd be writhing in pain (scenes from Marathon Man come to mind...) but Wallace showed no signs of discomfort, and we only discovered the problem during his weekly tooth inspection.

Wallace is a little groggy tonight because he was sedated during the dental work, but we expect he'll be back to running the house in a day or two.

back at the keyboard

Some of you may have wondered what happened after the site launch in April. Little things kept getting in the way of adding material to the site...little things like finding a place to live from 500+ miles away, helping Wallace recover from surgery, packing up our lives, getting settled in our new home, starting law school...I trust you get the picture.

As one friend put it in his 8 August email, "Even at the rate of one keystroke a day since April 16, (not including 'enter', 'spacebar', or punctuation), you'd have a sentence of about 115 characters, which, with rigorous editing, could speak volumes about your current status."

Well, Stephen, here goes...

Happy New Year

What do we have for 2003? Why, it's a new, bouncing baby blog!

Seriously, why? Well, a lot of you have asked for updates, running commentary, random bits of info. The fastest way to get the information out is to use weblog software and transform the site into a journal-based format.

The look-and-feel are a subject of some debate here in BH, so you can expect it to go through a few revisions in the next few months. As always, if you have comments or questions, post them here (by clicking on the comments link), or send 'em to one of us via e-mail (by clicking the author link).

Welcome, finally, to interpersonal computing. We hope to hear from you soon...