afongen

Faithful readers of The Norm will have noticed that it disappeared from newspapers a few months back. Michael Jantze, the strip’s creator, decided to call it quits. It was a sad day.

But he’s back! Jantze is making The Norm available on his web site to subscribers. Beyond my excitement about being able to read new strips, I’ll be interested to see how this business model works out.

Rather than do gift lists for Christmas this year, my mom had us all do questionnaires. Here is mine.

Three words you would like Christmas to be :

Quiet wintry night

Favorite comfort foods :

Good cheese (say, English cheddars), espresso, Indian food, pizza.

Favorite beverages :

Coffee (Guatemalans. Mmmm…), tea, beer (Summit Winter Ale. Mmmm…), water, tawny port.

If I won the lottery today the first three things I would do :

Pay off mortgage. Go to Quebec. Sleep.

My favorite activity on a rainy day:

Reading, watching the rain.

My hobbies, interests, collections etc.

Reading, watching the rain. Seriously, hobbies? Am I supposed to have hobbies? Other than what I get paid to do? Uh, reclaiming Christianity from the far right, which is damn funny for someone who isn’t Christian. Long walks by the river. Hangin’ with Owen and Kiara. Compulsively reading everything in sight.

Favorite colors :

Most of them.

Favorite reading material

Most anything in sight. Weblogs. Programming magazines. Comics & graphic novels. And strangely, teen fiction (e.g. by Garth Nix).

Favorite simple pleasures:

Owen’s laugh. The hush of falling snow.

I’ve always wanted to learn how to:

Complete questionnaires like these. Read Hebrew.

Clothing sizes:

shirts: XLT, 17 x 34 or thereabouts
pants: 36W x 34L
shoes: 13½ medium, except that no one makes 13½ anymore, so 13 it is.

In the coming year I am facing the following challenges

Sleeping enough.
Grokking Java instead of just knowing it well enough to get by.
Getting more fun time with Kiara and Owen.

If I had it to do over again I would be

Done with the degree.

My dream vacation would be

Doing basically what I do at home, but in Quebec.

Favorite movies :

Hero, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Gattaca, Tai Chi Master.

The 3 gifts I would like to receive this Christmas :

Karen Armstrong’s memoirs. Warm socks. Other books.

If I were to join a CD club I would order the following artists/titles :

I have absolutely no idea.

Things I like but seldom buy for myself :

Wine.

The Christmas rituals I enjoy the most.

Rice pudding. (My mom traditionally makes rice pudding on Christmas morning, topped with heavy cream.)
Sitting up late at night with all the lights off except for the Christmas tree.

I liked doing this. I think we all did. Reading out responses, we all learned something about each other. My mom has us do this in an effort to simplify Christmas, and although I don’t know whether it had that effect this year, it sparked a discussion that means it might just do so in years to come. Kiara’s already starting work on a questionnaire for next year.

Campus Crusade for Christ paid a visit the other day. I’m still trying to calm down. That they told Owen that he’s a sinner is enough to make me scream and punch something. Hard.

Kiara skipped a couple details. The Crusaders gave Owen a bracelet with colored beads: this bead is for God’s love, they said. That’s when is when they said that God loves him more than his mommy and daddy do. This bead stands for sin. That’s when they told him he was a sinner. This bead is for the blood of Christ: “Christ died for us, he died for our sins, isn’t that wonderful?”

You are a sinner. Your mommy and daddy don’t love you as much as you think. Christ died for you. These are not things you say to a two-year-old. It is absolutely not something you say to a stranger’s child when you’re “spreading God’s word.”

Stay the hell away from my son.

I’m working on my iBook with headphones on, and just dragged something to the trash. The little clicking sound it makes is in stereo! There’s a subtle echo. How very cool.

A favorite recent addition to my blogroll is Garrick Van Buren’s First Crack, a podcast about coffee, technology, music, and whatever else strikes his fancy. He first caught my attention with a — what do I call it? show? episode? podcast? — about copyright issues and the Intellectual Property Protection Act, near and dear to my heart. His interview with The Winter Blanket introduced me to some great local music. Good stuff.

Garrick recently interviewed Greg Beale, a coffee roaster at Dunn Bros.. I brewed myself a pot of freshly roasted Guatemalan coffee, kicked back, and thoroughly enjoyed myself. It was just so damn cool to hear. I worked as a coffee roaster for a few years and am still in love with the process. So much of how I roasted was a sensory experience: I relied on sight, sound, smell to know how the beans were developing and how to nudge them along. Listening to the interview brought it all back: the green beans as they drop into the roaster and rhythmically churn around, the subtle shifts in the sound as the beans warm, the satisfying crackle and smoke of the second crack when the beans are released into the cooling tray.

I’ve got to start roasting at home again soon.

Rafe Colburn writes about how every one-off becomes an application. I have a related problem: I believe myself when I say that the quick one-offs that I write will be replaced by a full-blown application in a matter of days or weeks. I should have learned by now that it never happens. Years later, there they are, still plugging away, taunting me. I have to run my small projects past a coworker on a regular basis so she can stop me from saying, “this will work for now and the real app should be along shortly.” Because no, it won’t.

A couple weeks ago I mentioned the Committee to Save Merry Christmas. I did not have kind words but didn’t write much because I thought that if we ignored them they might go away. I mean seriously, people, get over yourselves. But no: conservative Christians have picked up the meme with a vengeance. In response, Saint Paul Pioneer Press columnist Laura Billings has been going to town. Her last two columns, “Partisan shoppers dreaming of a Red and Blue Christmas” and “‘Merry Christmas’ needs no help” are spot on. I am tempted to pull out quotations to entice you, but they’re worth reading in full. (They’ll probably end up behind a ridiculous subscription requirement, so keep BugMeNot close by.)

Steve Ross wrote something on The Gutless Pacifist, one of those thoughts that makes me get up and dance around because it speaks so clearly to what I’m thinking:

I have a few points of reference for these folks:

• When store clerks say “happy holidays” rather than “Merry Christmas,” you are not being persecuted. When you are tossed into prison for saying “Merry Christmas,” you are.
• When the government is barred from putting nativity scenes on government property, you are not being persecuted. When you are sentenced to hard labor for belonging to a house church not sanctioned by the government, you are.
• When you are not allowed to say a Christian prayer over the loudspeaker at a public high school graduation, you are not being persecuted. When you are killed by an angry mob for leading someone in prayer to Jesus, you are.

I’ve got a few more Gmail invitations if anyone’s interested. Drop me a line at gmail-invite@afongen.com

Update: the invitations are gone.

Crazy. On the way into work today, I dropped two DVDs in the mail to Netflix. The mailbox said that mail is picked up at 2:00. I just checked my Netflix RSS feed and see that they received the DVDs at 7:00.

It’s nice to have a local warehouse. It’s also nice that the post office isn’t too busy this time of year.

I don’t always remember to check the Perl Advent Calendar on a daily basis. That shouldn’t be a problem anymore, as I finally noticed the RSS feeds.