…but who’s surprised?

Bus stop for the 31 at Howard St. and Lombard St.  The 31 schedule was changed on February 1st, sixteen days ago.  Announcements were made, new schedules drawn up, and so on.  The scheduls at the stop is still the one from September of last year.

Convention Center Light Rail stop.  The double tracking message board has two items.  The lefthand one describes the change back to two light rail lines, effective as of February 1st, 2004.  The righthand one has a diagram of the three lines.  On the opposite side of the board is a schedule from 2002 that predates any of the double track changes and is, of course, wildly incorrect.  Not sure whether the presence of dates on the three documents offset the fact that they all convey conflicting information, especially to readers that don’t look closely enough to compare the dates.

I’ve finally gotten emacs working just the way I want with respect to UTF-8.

For entry of non-ascii characters, I most like RFC 1345.  Emacs doesn’t have such an input system, and I don’t feel like writing one.  screen, on the other hand, has support for digraph input, which will do the digraphs from RFC 1345 with the help of a little patch.  (The same digraph input will also do any Unicode character if you know the hex for it, via the “U+xxxx” syntax.)  Using screen instantly gives UTF-8 input support for pretty much every program I use.

The problem with this and Emacs is that if Emacs gets characters with the high bit set, it treats that high bit as a meta key.  This, of course, breaks any method of inputting UTF-8 into emacs from an external source, including cut-and-paste.  I had to M-x customize-variable keyboard-coding-system and set the coding system to utf-8.  That made UTF-8 work, but broke the meta key, since that was indeed how xterm was sending it.

To fix xterm, I set this in my .Xresources:

XTerm*metaSendsEscape: true

to change the way Meta keys were sent (this also made meta work with a couple more programs, notably irssi).  I also added this to my .xsession:

xmodmap -e "keysym Alt_L = Meta_L Alt_L"
xmodmap -e "keysym Alt_R = Meta_R Alt_R"

so that Meta would be bound to my Alt key.  (It’s an IBM Model M keyboard—Alt is all I have.  When I had a Windows key, it was bound as Meta.)

I liked The Name of the Rose, so when I saw Foucault's Pendulum at the bookstore, I decided to grab it.  Unfortunately for me, it’s a rather different sort of book than The Name of the Rose.

The Name of the Rose is essentially a detective story.  It’s set in medieval times and is told in a wonderfully baroque manner, but with all the descriptive flourishes pared away its story is relatively straightforward.  Foucault's Pendulum is more of a surrealist book—the journey matters more than the destination, and the book’s climax is just a single element in the tapestry of the narrative, a fact for which I was not completely prepared.

The pacing of the book is also rather slow, and not always in a good way.  In, say, A Fire Upon the Deep, the pace is slow, but there’s a feeling of grandness, of something gradually but inexorably building as the story progresses.  I often felt that Foucault's Pendulum was dragging along without necessarily going anywhere, especially during the elaboration of the Plan, where the characters just keep piling details on details seemingly without end.

I should not that the edition I read had an annoying synopsis on the back cover.  It claimed that the main characters put facts into a computer that drew connections between apparently disparate facts.  In the book, those events don’t take place until about two-thirds of the way in, and the actual details are somewhat different than those which the synopsis implies.  At least it didn’t completely give away things, like the summary text at the beginning of my copy of Archangel.

I’ll discuss the ending below the spoiler barrier.

Spoilers

Again, Foucault's Pendulum is not a straightforward tale.  Since I was expecting one, the ending came as something of a disappointment to me.  Throughout the entire book, the narrator referenced the events of that night in terms that were filled with portent.  When the book actually got around to describing it, I thought it very anticlimactic.  There’s the implication that the main characters have somehow divined something true, but the climax arrives and the reader is told, “No, sorry.  It’s all fake.”

I suppose I should read it again in the right frame of mind, but it’s really dense and I’m not sure the effort would be worth it.  Goes on the “someday, if I get around to it” list.

For about the last week, Simplex has been plagued by electricity problems.  Which is why I’d been off the ‘Net for a while and why aperiodic.net was unreachable for that period of time.  In the interests of archival, here’s the timeline:

§ Wednesday, Jan 28th, night

I’m playing Simpsons Hit and Run with Leah when the power flickers.  The UPS with a bad battery just barely manages to keep the computer and PlayStation 2 alive.  I learn the hard way that you can’t save in the middle of a mission, right before the power cuts out entirely and the game goes bye-bye.  We figure it’s an area problem and that BGE will fix it.  The power continues to flicker on and off throughout the night, so we just shut off all of the computers.

§ Thursday night

The problems persist.  We realize that everyone else seem to be doing okay, so I resolve to call the leasing office in the morning.

§ Friday morning

The power is mostly on, but keeps flickering off and back on.  I call the leasing office after I get to work.  They haven’t heard from anyone else, so it’s probably just us.  They promise to send out someone to look at it.

§ Friday late afternoon

A maintenance person goes to the townhouse.  Ray is home at the time.  Naturally, the power works while the maintenance person is there.  He’s got other calls, so promises to return on Saturday and look more closely.

§ Friday evening

I get home and note that the electricity is still having problems.  Ray’s already left, so I don’t know about the visit from the maintenance person.  I call the emergency service number and leave a message.  When I don’t get a response, I call BGE.  They have an automated menu system that works me though the symptoms that I’m seeing.  It ultimately tells me that this sort of thing is usually internal to the house and not something they can fix.  It offers to set up a service call, but warns that if the technician determines that the problem is not something BGE can fix they will charge me $80.  I call the leasing office again.

§ Friday, about 11:00pm

The power flickers off and back on again for what will be the last time that night.

§ Friday night

The maintenance person calls back.  I talk with him for a while, giving him some more background on what sorts of things are happening.  He says he has a pretty good idea of what’s going wrong and will be in first thing on Saturday morning.

§ Saturday late morning

The maintenance person arrives, looks at the circuit breaker panel, and says he has to leave again.  I’m left with the impression that he’ll return; Ray is left with the impression that he won’t.  Regardless, he doesn’t.  Power works all day.

§ Sunday night

Power problems manifest again.

§ Monday morning

I call the leasing office to report the continuance of the problems.  They say someone will be out to look at it.

§ Monday evening

I return home to find that someone came, more or less just looked at things, and left.  Ray was home at the time and was told that they’d get someone more knowledgeable out there.

§ Tuesday, 3:30pm

I call the leasing office to see how things are going.  I’m told that an electrician has been called, but has not yet responded.

§ Tuesday evening

I get home to find that no one has yet been in.

§ Wednesday, early afternoon

I call the leasing office again to see if they’ve actually done anything.  I’m told that the electrician is currently in the townhouse.

§ Wednesday, late afternoon

The leasing agent calls back to say that the electrician had been in.  Naturally, the electricity did not misbehave while he was there.  Going on what he’d been told about the problem, he rewired several of the circuit breakers.

§ Wednesday evening

I get home, verify that the power seems to have been working continuously, and power up all of my computers.  It has now been a week since we first started having problems.

Had dinner at Phở Ðật Thành last night.  Very good Vietnamese food.  (Well, the food was very good, and it’s a Vietnamese restauraunt.  I would have to leave it to someone more familiar with that cooking style to judge its authenticity.)  It’s good food, and it’s Columbia.  Go there.  They have a huge menu.  Go there a lot.

(Really, I just made this entry because I could put the full name of the place in Unicode.  I’m a dork.  But the food’s really good.)