CurtBlog

Good Rolling Stone article about the very real possibilities of life in the US when we start facing fossil fuel shortages.  Could happen in most of our lifetimes, in fact it's highly likely.  A rather sobering thought.  One of the most interesting thoughts that comes out of the article is that food production is suddenly going to become much more important (both land and the skill of farming).  And it will need to be much more localized since it could get prohibitively expensive to ship food all over the country.  We are used to cheap produce from Latin America, cheap manufactured goods from all over the world via companies like Walmart, easy access to all kinds of specialty foods and other items from other cultures.  The good news is that we are going to be forced to work as communities again, to help each other, to barter for goods potentially, etc.  I'm not sure if I'm hoping that we solve this with new technology or if I'm hoping it completely disrupts our way of life.  It might be just what America needs.  Here's the article online:

The Long Emergency

On Friday night Kristin and I went out to Vivo, one of the many fine restaurants on Chicago's burgeoning West Loop.  The place has a very cool vibe, although quite cozy, with empty wine bottles lining the walls and black & white movies projected on a set of translucent screens hanging from the ceiling.  We started off with cocktails and salad: I had some roasted asparagus that paired quite well with my Manhatten, amazingly enough and K had the salad special with goat cheese, beets and other assorted goodness.  Both very good.  The asparagus was fairly large stalks, which can sometimes be tough and harsh, but the roasting was the right choice and made them quite tasty.  For the entrees, I had a very tender veal tenderloin with wild mushrooms in a brown reduction sauce.  K had the rigatoni with sausage, goat cheese, a nice rustic Italian dish with a bit of spice.  Our waitress was very helpful in picking out a bottle of wine and I ended up getting a ROSSO DI MONTALCINO (sangiovese) that started off very tight and tannic before the food arrived, but paired with the food it was a like a different bottle.  Italian wines are definitely meant to be served with food, they just don't taste that great alone.  But paired with the spice and smokiness of our food and it was delicious.

At Vivo, entrees run in the $20 range, although some pastas are cheaper.  Wine is generally $30-60 a bottle, although there are better selections that go up from there.  Still, if you just go in for entrees and don't get wine, it would be a very reasonable night out for some very good good.

If the advance screening previews are to be believed, this movie could be similar to the experience I felt after walking in to see The Matrix for the first time and getting my head blown off.  This looks really interesting and the cast is quite impressive.  I just keep seeing rave after rave online from people who have seen it, so I'm definitely looking forward to seeing if it lives up to the hype.  It doesn't hurt that it is basically a comic book version of a film noir, except without shirking from the violence and grittiness those '40s and '50s directors weren't allowed to show.

I'm on a short project and having a chance to work a bit with a couple of open source products I've heard a lot about: NDoc, NAnt and log4net.  It's pretty cool because I've been curious about all of these, but really didn't have a big reason to try them out for any personal site stuff or anything like that.  NDoc is pretty great, if you write good C# comments, you can spit out some really nice looking documentation in no time.  On the project here they are starting to run builds through NAnt and CruiseControl and that seems to be very flexible.  You can do a ton of automated stuff and the syntax for the scripts seems pretty reasonable.  All xml stuff of course.

I've worked the most over the last couple days with log4net and I have very mixed feelings about it, mostly positive.  It's really a flexible way to log and once you get the concepts down, it's fairly trivial to use.  One nice thing that is built-in is being able to change configuration on the fly, so once you have logging set up you can add additional loggers (log4net calls them appenders), change your logging level based on event types, etc.  There are a lot of built-in appenders, including the basic Windows event log, text files and even things like udp that you can hook listeners up to.  My biggest gripe is that once you get beyond the basics, the docs pretty much suck.  For instance, I have a scenerio where it sounds like using a Respository is the right way to go, judging by their description of it.  The only problem is, there is no sample or example showing me anything about how to use one, set one up, etc.  Looked through Google, looked through their newslist archives, looked through blogs, can't find a single thing.  This to me is still the biggest shortcoming you run into with open source.  I could potentially post a question and maybe get an answer from one of the contributors, so that's pretty cool in some ways.  But it would be nice to have some concrete examples for each thing they mention in the API.

Bruce Willis was on the Daily Show the other night and was talking about how much he liked his Tivo.  Nice pitch, Tivo needs all the support it can get right now.  Jon asked him if he programmed it himself and he said something like "No, I have people to do that for me.  I have a Tivo Wrangler."  Can I have that job?  Sounds fun.  That would be a conversation starter at a party - so what do you do?  Oh , I'm Bruce Willis's Tivo Wrangler.  Funny stuff.