Plutor

It’s one my few yearly traditions to check the list of movies nominated for Oscars and see how many of them I’ve seen through the year. I never do very well, not because I usually see crappy movies, but more because I usually don’t see very many movies. The 80th Annual Academy Awards nominees were announced today, and here’s how I did.

If these had been announced 2 weeks ago (before I saw Juno), the only point I’d have got would have been the Best Screenplay nomination for Ratatouille. There are at least 9 more points listed on my Netflix queue (No Country For Old Men, There Will Be Blood, and The Butterfly And The Diving Bell), but I doubt any of those DVDs will come out before the awards ceremony press release.

For the past two years, I’ve posted my reading list for the year as well as ratings and brief reviews for each book. This year, I’m going to do it a little different. If you review my old lists (2005, 2006 part 1 part 2), you’ll notice that it gets hard to describe unremarkable books from eleven months prior. So instead I will share with you my thoughts about my three favorite books from 2007.

Book of the Year - World War Z by Max Brooks I won’t be surprised if you’ve already been bored to tears with praise for this book. Neither would I be shocked if you thought that a book about a fictional war with zombies wasn’t going to be any more than a re-tread of decades-old plot elements. But this book is something different than that. Starting with the cover itself, Brooks creates a universe where the war actually happened. The review quotes on the back and the biography on the flaps treat it as a documentary with historical implications. It’s written as a series of interviews with survivors: The doctor who met Patient Zero, soldiers who fought phalanxes of rampaging mobs in Yonkers, an isolate teenagers who had to escape from an apartment building in Japan by climbing down the outside of the building. Each story is just a handful of pages long, but the interweaving storylines and Brooks' ability to give every character a unique personality make the book feel as true as he had intended.

Surprise of the Year - The Blind Side by Michael Lewis The Blind Side is a true story about a poor black boy from Memphis thrust into a wealthy white religious High School. He’s built like a linebacker, but he moves like a basketball player (and, in fact, plays for the basketball team for a while). But when shifting football tactics make people built like him a precious commodity, his adopted family convinces him to play. It’s a great story, full of inspiration, and it showed me a glimpse into the world of football strategy other than “get the ball down the field”. (Incidentally, I wish I remembered where I heard about this book. It was on my list for more than a year before I stumbled on it in Logan Airport.)

Classic of the Year - I Am Legend by Richard Matheson Inspired by the look and feel of the Will Smith movie, I decided to pick this up and read it. It blew me away. Matheson spends a long time showing you what years of loneliness and constant invasion can do to a person. The setting and direction of the novel, as well as its moral, are very different from the movie, but the same intense feeling of a hero fighting an impossible struggle is obvious. (Note that it’s not a long story, maybe 150 pages, and the book I got had a number of Matheson’s short stories along with it. They were good, also, but none of them stuck out in my mind so much as the title story.)

Full list of books I read in 2007:

• Space Race by Deborah Cadbury
• Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
• Zodiac by Neal Stephenson
• The Old New Thing by Raymond Chen
• Beyond Fear by Bruce Schneier
• Manhunt by James L. Swanson
• Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
• World War Z by Max Brooks
• The Poincare Conjecture by Donal O'Shea
• The World Without Us by Alan Weisman
• The Blind Side by Michael Lewis
• The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
• Bringing Down the House by Ben Mezrich
• I Am Legend by Richard Matheson

At work, each new user is assigned a totally random alphanumeric 12-character ID. They’re random instead of sequential because this is what goes into the user’s cookie (and in some cases into URLs) and we didn’t want the IDs to be discoverable. Sometimes we need to do what we call a subscriber load and generate thousands (or sometimes many thousands) of IDs at once. The subload process tends to be very slow, and one of my co-workers was tasked with making it faster. While profiling the code, he discovered that a big time sink was the ID generation procedure. After more research, we discovered that it was written in 2004 and had never been modified after the original checkin. It was hundreds of lines long, used all kinds of global variables (Perl hasn’t had static variables until 5.10), and involved big math with a magic prime number close to 70¹². Worse, it was implemented as a hash function. And it was always passed a salt. And that salt was always random.

We replaced it with this code:

my @chars = ('A' .. 'Z', 'a' .. 'z', '0' .. '9');
sub randid {
    $rv = '';
    for my $i (1 .. 12) {
        $rv .= $chars[rand(@chars)];
    }
    return $rv;
}

It used to generate about 100 IDs per second. Now it can do 175,000 per second.

A web user is looking at page A. He clicks on a link for page B. That page has a META Refresh to page C. What is the value of HTTP_REFERER for that last request? What if the redirect was a Status 307? Or a location.replace() JavaScript call? What if he’s using Opera? I’ve been doing some redirect referer tests this week and I have results for some the most common browser/OS combinations. I hope to expand them further.

Here’s a trivia question (to which I currently do not know the answer) inspired by the Red Sox’s recent World Series win and what I can only hope is soon to be the unbeaten 9-0 Patriots. If you take the 4 major American team professional sports championships (Stanley Cup, World Series, Superbowl, NBA Finals^[1]), what’s the longest streak of consecutive championships in one metropolitan area?^[2]

^[1] - Is it just me, or does basketball not have a very recognizable term for its championship? ^[2] - I’m willing to be relatively flexible with the definition of “metropolitan area”.

Update: Answers below the fold!

There are a number of issues that make this question less than straightforward to answer. Firstly, before 1915, the Stanley cup was only contested on a challenge basis (similar to the way that chess and boxing are done today). Since the challenges weren’t annual, and there were a lot of times that the challenger was crushed outright, I’m going to ignore those years. Second, the question of how far back to look comes up. There’s never been a streak of more than two consecutive championships in the same area as long as all four contests have existed in their current form (the Superbowl, started in 1968, is the youngest).

Not counting pre-1915 hockey, there have been three times that there have been streaks of three. In 1906-1908, the Chicago White Sox won the World Series once and the Cubs won twice, and none of the others existed. In 1927, the New York Yankees won the World Series, and then in 1928 the Rangers won the Stanley Cup and the Yankees won again. In 1932-33, New York repeated the feat with the Yankees, Rangers, and the (baseball) Giants.

There has almost been one streak of three since 1968, but it requires that we make the cognitive leap to assuming that San Francisco and Los Angeles are a single metropolitan area. And I think that in terms of sports affinity, it’s a hard case to make. But in 1988, the Lakers won the NBA Finals, the Dodgers won the World Series, and then in early 1989 the 49ers took home the Lombardi Trophy.

Sometime during the planning of our two parallel Halloween parties, Chris and I realized we needed some way to allow the two groups to communicate. Videocasting was our first thought, but we didn’t have the equipment or the knowledge. But when it came to taking photos and putting them on websites, we had all kinds of both. Using something Chris had written a while ago as a guide, I wrote a quick script to pull the photos off the camera, resize them to a reasonable resolution, and upload them to our web server. I then wrote a CGI that would pick a random photo from each location and place them side-by-side. Chris asked me to make the algorithm weight towards newer photos, which was far easier than it would have been if we had been uploading to a service like Flickr or something.

After a rough (and late) start in Boston, things went well. Philly took some naughty shots early, which got people riled up here and for a period of time, things were pretty lewd. Eventually it became family-safe fun time party photos and some gentle photo-jabs were traded between the sister parties. Sometime around midnight, Chris texted me “this is the best thing we’ve ever done.” I agree. That said, we learned things. The script had all kinds of bugs (mostly because I wrote it without having the camera we were going to use or the software). The CGI was too weighted towards new photos. And whereas Chris had done this before and had a neat photobooth setup (a side room, tripod, IR trigger), Boston had a camera that had to be hand-shot and plugged back into the laptop every few minutes.

Will we ever be able to learn from the mistakes we made, and try out a new iteration of the script? I certainly hope so. Maybe we can hook in a third city. California friends, I’m gesturing in your direction.

For some reason, I’ve been thinking about Klondike solitaire probabilities a lot lately. Primarily, I’m wondering what the likelihood is that a game will have zero legal plays. I’m certain it happens, but it’s got to be pretty rare. It’s a complex game, though, so here’s my plan towards solving it:

1. Given two non-ace cards, what is the chance that one cannot be placed on the other, using standard Klondike rules?
2. Given three non-ace cards, what is the chance that none can be played on any other?
3. Given seven...?
4. Given two (three, seven) cards, what is the chance that there is no legal play (placing one on another or moving an ace to the foundation)?

There are more steps after that involving the eight deck cards, but it gets pretty complicated pretty quickly. I’ll be happy just getting this far.

As of midnight last night, the New York Times has made anything in their archives newer than 1987 available for free. Even more interestingly, everything in the public domain (1851-1922) is also available for free, although it looks like they’re mostly just in PDF format. How can they do this? They expect to make more in increased advertising revenue than they did with the paid subscriptions.

You can find the NYTimes coverage of the most important events of the 19th century pretty easily:

• President Lincoln Shot by an Assassin, April 15, 1865
• The oldest mention of baseball I can find, September 15, 1866 (the score was 39-15!)
• The completion of the transcontinental railroad, May 10, 1869
• The opening of the Suez Canal, November 17, 1869
• The first modern Olympic Games, April 26, 1896

Go, search!

Update, 20 Sep: Jason Kottke has posted some more of his own finds.

There’s a serious dearth of FeedWordPress filter plugins out there. I aim to rectify the situation. FeedWordPress Collapse Filter will collapse multiple posts being imported from a single feed into a single post. I use it here on Plutor.org to keep Flickr photos (which I frequently upload by the handfuls) from overwhelming everything else. Each syndicated feed can be separately configured to collapse (or not) with a different time threshold.

Download FeedWordPress Collapse Filter 1.0

In celebration of what was apparently Plutor.org’s sixth birthday a couple weeks ago, I hereby unveil version 2.0 7, let’s say it’s version 10 of my blog. Simpler, cleaner, no more silly orange stripes or fixed menus. I hope the individual pages put more emphasis on discussion, and I hope that in the future, I spend more time writing than linking.

Thanks to Brian and Chris for being the actual impetus behind this change. They staged a webdesign intervention, and to them I am grateful.

Boston has been considering linking the two halves of its weird bus/subway hybrid Silver Line for a while now. The so-called Phase III project has gone through several designs and redesigns, one of which called for a 0.6-mile long tunnel for a cost of $780 million ($1.3B per mile). More recent proposals were saner and cheaper, but people who live downtown complain about the added traffic and noise of articulated buses that hardly anyone uses anyway.

But that got me thinking: That’s just a bus tunnel. How does that cost (nearly a quarter-million dollars per foot!) compare to historical Boston subway projects? The red line was extended in the early 80’s from Harvard Square to Alewife. That 3.2 mile extension cost $579 million, including three new stations. In today’s dollars, that’d be about $459 million per mile, or about one third the price of that Silver Line plan. Sure, a tunnel through downtown would be a more complex project, but that seems extreme.

And for the anti-drivers in the audience, for the cost of the Big Dig ($14.6 billion, and it’s not yet done), Boston could have built 31.8 miles of subway including 30 new stations. That’d reach to Nashua.

Western Massachusetts has several notable mountains. The highest mountain in the state (Mt. Greylock) is there. More interestingly, Mt. Frissell, whose southern slope contains the highest point in Connecticut (Bear Mountain, the highest peak in CT, is about 50 feet lower) is in the Southwestern corner. There is another summit nearby that induces the exact same reaction from every single person. That mountain is Mt. Everett. [pause for audience pun] No, Mt. Everett.

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The hike from Jug End Rd in Great Barrington to the peak of Mt. Everett is a moderate 9.2-mile round trip (it took us just under 6 hours). The beginning of the hike features some rock scrambling and some confusing switchbacks. Enough people have missed the switchbacks that the ground is worn in a trail-like manner going in the wrong direction. For the first mile or so, make sure to pay careful attention to the white blazes. You’ll get to the top of a ridge that would have had some great views if it wasn’t the hottest, humidest, haziest day of the year. At about the 4-mile mark, you arrive at Guilder Pond, a really fantastic swimming hole. If it’s a hot day, bring a pair of trunks and a towel and a water filter. You’ll be glad you did. (We didn’t.)

The top of Mt. Everett is actually pretty dull. The fire tower was torn down in 2003, and all that’s left is the foundation. By the time you get to the pond, you’ve already climbed most of the way up. The 360-degree view looks like it’s probably pretty great on clear days.

Note: I realized the other day that M and I do a whole lot of hiking. I want to start writing up some of them here 1) for posterity, 2) for future reference, and 3) so you and random Googlers can use our experience to plan hikes.

Dear Plutor of the future: I know that the crumbling economy, skyrocketing gas prices, and warming climate trend has likely made the world of 2008 a bleak Mad Maxian landscape. If the grocery stores are even open anymore, the selection is likely poor – jicama and tomatillos being among the very few surviving produce. But I have good news for you. I know of a place where, ideally in August, you can pick and eat delicious ripe blackberries until you explode. I will leave the task of fashioning a boat out of household materials to you^[1] – I’m certain that as the world spun towards chaos, the last issue of Make Magazine was particularly helpful. You’ll need to boat straight out from the end of South Boston to Spectacle Island. Once there, hope that the trails have not yet been completely overgrown, and follow them to the north drumlin. Along the path, you’ll see the plants, but the mother lode is just before you get to the hilltop, on the left.

Bring a few containers. And good luck.

[1] - I don’t envy you this task. In 2007, there was a Ferry that you could pay $12 to bring you to Spectacle Island and the many other harbor islands. It was fun for a number of reasons other than the fruitful bounty.

Last week, New York Times published a list of 101 summer meals.^[1] Some are lame (#1, for instance) and some use meat (#3, 9, 10, et al). But there are a lot of simple and fast meal ideas there. Urban Vegan took the list, removed all the meat and dairy recipes, added her own, and presented a list of 101 vegan summer meals^[2]. Even for us omnivores, there are a load of good ideas in that list, too. I’ve already got gazpacho and salad niçoise on the menu for this week.

^[1] Yes, this is a working link. Thanks to Mari for the tip.
^[2] Thanks to Shaun for the tip.

Mount Katahdin has rightfully earned its reputation as one of the hardest mountains in the Northeast. M and I hiked it last week, planning about a 7-mile day. We got up at 7 to read the weather forecast on the Ranger’s cabin, and hiked the 3.3 miles to the Chimney Pond campsite in the south basin. We dropped off our tent, sleeping stuff, clothes, and one of our packs. Around 10am, we started up Pamola trail. It was 1.3 miles and 2000 vertical feet up that trail to our first peak.

What we learned is that the trail up Pamola is perilous, windy, totally exposed, ridiculously steep, and covered with pointy and scratchy boulders. We rock scrambled at a 45 degree angle hundreds and thousands of feet above the foothills for nearly three hours. Yes, that’s right, it took us three hours to climb a mile and a third.

At the peak, we reconsidered our options. We were tired. No, wait, we were exhausted. We agreed that it very likely had been the hardest hike of our lives, and it was shorter than the distance from our house to Boston Common. Coming up was the most notorious stretch of trail on Katahdin: the Knife Edge. It’s a rocky trail about three feet wide at parts the follows a sharp ridge between Pamola, Chimney Peak, South Peak, and the top of the mountain: Baxter Peak. After some math, we took the optimistic route: continue the plan.

We started heading to the opposite side of the peak, and then we saw it. Not just the Knife Edge, but the first hurdle on it: the Chimney. A 200 foot precipitious drop that we needed to rockclimb down and then the same on the other side to get back up. But we weren’t ready for it. We tried a couple different ways down, struggling against tired muscles. We sat staring at it, weighing our other options. It cut a deep groove directly between Pamola and the rest of the peaks, so we couldn’t go around.

We were beaten by Katahdin. We turned around, heading back down Pamola trail, and the whole way down we had to hope we wouldn’t fall off the pointy and scratchy boulders.

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Quick hypothetical: You’re at the library, and you pull a copy of The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell from the shelf. Before bringing it to the front desk to check out, you flip through the pages, and an envelope falls out. You pick it up, and it’s stamped and sealed and addressed to a P.O. Box one town over. What would you do with it?

Followup: Would your answer change if it came out of:

• ... a volume of Encyclopedia Britannica?
• ... Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkhaban by J. K. Rowling?
• ... The Infernal Machine: A History of Terrorism by Matthew Carr?
• ... a book on the new releases shelf?
• ... a magazine?

If no to all of the above, is there any case where your answer would be different?

The release of a beta of Apple’s Safari for Windows earlier this week has resulted in an interesting flurry of activity in web designer circles. Nevermind the instant security bugs and the quick release of fixes from Apple. I’m talking about typography.

The day that the beta came out, Jeff Atwood asked “What’s wrong with Apple’s font rendering?" He pointed out that others had discussed this before, but it wasn’t until the difference was visible side-by-side on the exact same machine with the exact same fonts (and with presumably the exact same font libraries) that it became truly surprising. Joel Spolsky responded with the answer: Apple and Microsoft have very different priorities when it comes to font rendering, and at current screen sizes and resolutions, Apple’s total respect for the letter shapes can mean blurriness. Their diligence becomes especially impressive when you consider the work that Apple must have had to go through to get Safari to run on Microsoft’s home turf but render fonts the way it would on Mac OS X.

Dave Shea piped in with his own opinion and a caveat: I like Mac’s look better, but I think Microsoft’s is a better choice for the medium. But more importantly, he points out that as soon as higher-DPI screens are available, the whole question will be moot. Microsoft’s deference to the pixel grid will be essentially meaningless. Which brings us back to what Jeff Atwood does best: a big post with research and quotes and numbers showing how far screens have come since the release of the PC AT and Macintosh. Not far. The sad realization:

Short of some kind of miraculous technological breakthrough, I can't see computer displays reaching 200 DPI in "a few years". It's unlikely we'll even get there in ten years. I'd love to be proven wrong, but all the evidence of history-- not to mention typical consumer "bigger is better" behavior-- is overwhelming.

Can e-ink or OLED be the miraculous technological breakthrough we need? Possibly, but neither of them are yet ready to replace CRTs or LCDs.

^[1] The always brilliant Joel ends with a great metaphor about how people usually prefer what’s familiar. He doesn’t say it, but I think he was implying that this is a big contributor to entrenchment in computing holywars: Mac vs. PC, vi vs. emacs, KNF vs. OTBS.

Memorial Day weekend is a somewhat-traditional planting weekend in the Northeast. This spring, even USDA hardiness zone 6a^[1] has been experiencing some quite balmy temperature, so we’ve actually had our sprouts outside for almost all of May. But this weekend, we couldn’t buck tradition, and we went ahead and planted the majority of them, and took a trip out to Milton (a.k.a. the city that got beat up in middle school) to visit some nurseries. We came home with a butterfly bush to help screen our yard from the neighbor’s. The directions on the bush said to dig a hole twice as deep and thrice as wide as the root ball.

Eight inches down, I hit a layer of something weird. It was hard, and kind of looked like paint chips. And there were a bunch of them. Under the paint chips, there were plastic bags. (Wonder Bread! Doritos!) Under the bags were cans of Schlitz (!) and empty bottles of Nair (!!). Eventually, we passed through the garbage and emerged into some nice-looking dark organic soil. Shove the bush in the hole and run. But wait.. paint chips? The Schlitz can was clearly an old-style removable pull tab. According to the Wikipedia article, the new style was invented in 1975, and was almost universally adopted by the early 1980’s. And lead paint wasn’t banned for sale in the US until 1978.

Although plants don’t take up much lead, we should definitely clean all of our vegetables thoroughly, and probably get a testing kit.

^[1] Boston is in zone 6a under the official (but relatively old) 1990 hardiness zone map. But it’s been placed in zone 7 under the 2003 draft of updated hardiness zones and other more recent drafts based on new climate data.

The following is a classic science post I wrote for the coolass metablog in May 2004.

Sometime last week, Penta Water was introduced to our group. Not having any on hand, and only having vague second-hand assertions of “five-molecule water”, the usual response was “What, it’s just a very small quantity of water?” Based on the assumption that it was probably five-atom water (since that made slightly more sense to us), theories ranged from “Maybe it’s a liquid with a different molecular makeup but similar characteristics to H₂O,” to “Maybe they count disassociated Na⁺ and Cl^- ions from a tiny amount of salt in the water as two additional atoms,” to “Maybe it’s total bullshit.”

The key to unlocking this marketing mumbo jumbo is understanding water.

The past decade or so has seen a small group of physicists and chemists trying to answer some of the most fundamental, yet troubling, questions about what liquid water is. For example, no calculation or model has ever been able to explain exactly why water has such high surface tension. Similarly, no one knows why water can hold so much energy (i.e., why it’s specific heat is so large). These and more esoteric questions about water have led these scientists to try to model how water molecules interact.

Because of their strongly polar nature, water molecules seem to spontaneously form structures, and although usually these structures are random and tree-shaped, sometimes they are ringed. These rings are called isotopomers, and can take the form of tetramers (4), pentamers (5), hexamers (6), and even larger. It’s important to understand that all water forms these structures spontaneously and transiently (generally on the order of picoseconds).

From here, we go from hard science into marketron land. Penta claims that their water is so pure, so free of impurities, so well filtered, that the molecules in their water forms smaller water clusters. They then go on to say that smaller water clusters are more easily absorbed by the cells in your body, and thus that drinking their water is somehow more “efficient”.

I will allow the reader to draw their own conclusion as to the validity of these statements. Penta has links to research “supporting” their claims, but I am neither a physicist or a chemist. I would be unlikely to go any further than suggesting that Penta is probably no worse than any other filtered bottled water.

More medical jargon you didn’t realize you needed to know:

• emesis - vomiting
• pandiculation - yawning and stretching
• singultus - hiccups
• rhinorrhea - runny nose
• borborygmus - stomach growling
• eructation - burping
• sternutation - sneezing
• epistaxis - nosebleed
• horripilation - goosebumps

(Previously)

For the last year or so, I’ve been using Planet to aggregate my del.icio.us links (white background), Flickr photos (blue), blog posts (yellow), and recently Last.fm music history (tiny text with eighth notes). I knew from day one that there were a few shortcomings, but I was able to code around most of them, like collapsing multiple consecutive items from the same source into one (like how photos show up with “and 3 more”). And I needed to write plutor.org twice, in two totally different templating languages. But in the last few weeks, several minor annoyances have become bigger. I never liked having my archives across several different sites. And some feeds are too short (Flickr, occasionally, but definitely Last.fm). Since planet was totally stateless, and just grabbed the RSS on every execution, once something fell off the source feed, it’d be gone. Even if it didn’t yet need to fall off plutor.org.

Starting today, I’m using FeedWordPress to import these external feeds directly into Wordpress. No more Planet necessary. There’s a totally separate list of things I need to code around, and some of them are less trivial than they used to be. But I’m hoping that getting that data pulled into Wordpress will allow me to make plutor.org even more complete than it already is. Twitter? Netflix? What else can I integrate?

When M and I were recently visiting Denver, we ended up walking into Savory Spice Shop in downtown Littleton. Walking in the door, I was thinking it would be dull and quick. But they pounced on us.

"Feel free to open any jar and smell it. Next to the jars are tasteable sample bottles. Put whatever you want in your hands and taste it. If you think it's gross, just throw it on the floor."

And then we started smelling and sampling, and we were almost instantly won over. They had like ten types of cinnamon (and the cassia was labeled accurately!), six or seven different whole chilies, all kinds of rubs and pickling seasonings and mustards and whole dried herbs and extracts and some special salt-free blends. And several different sizes of garlic powder, including High Bulk Index, which is more densely flavorful and integrates in much faster. We ended up buying unbelievable Saigon cinnamon, smoked hot paprika (man, hot paprika is hard to find), and peppercorns. And thank god they sell everything online, because I can guarantee we’ll be buying more.

I can also guarantee we would have been in and out in like 20 seconds if it wasn’t for their brilliant tasting policy.

Famed Physicist Richard Feynman once joked that he wanted to memorize π up to the 762nd digit. Why? Because that’s where pareidolia kicks in, and the digits appear to briefly coalesce into rationality:

3.1415926535 8979323846 … [727 digits] … 9605187072 1134999999 …

He would end a hypothetical recitation at that point, the implication being that from there on the decimal repeats. Virtually everyone, obviously including Feynman, knows π is both irrational and transcendental, and thus such a fact is impossible. The so-called “Feynman Point” is the first incidence of six consecutive identical digits in π and it also happens to be the first incidence of four and five consecutive digits.

Happy Pi Day.

In November, I participated in National Novel Writing Month. Sadly, I only made it about 2500 words in before getting wrapped up in, whaddyacallit, you know, life. I’m glad I gave it a brief whirl, but I hope to give it a better thrashing in 2007. Here’s the dull introduction to my half-plotted story, Assuming Perfection:

The best way to know Roland was to see his lawn edger: it shined like the day it was made. It sat in his garage, next to the labeled green plastic bins of lime and fetilizer, and just under the three snow shovels. Standing in his garage, in fact, gave the impression that you weren’t in a place that was used so much as stocked. Looking closely, the pattern of slight wear on the handles if the edger was fairly visible. But had the blade ever really touched soil? It’d be impossible to be sure.

Unless you were there on a Saturday morning. It wasn’t so much ritual as it was habit. The lawn mower was dusted—yes, dusted—and brought to the driveway. The hinges and screws and belts were checked. The gas tank was topped off, and the oil was as well. And only then, the lawn was mowed; not immaculately, but diligently.

Afterwards, the edger came out. The steps were the same. And the blade touched the grass and did what edgers do. And before the edger or the lawn mower went away, they were wiped, occasionally scrubbed, and always oiled (to prevent rusting).

Saturdays were spent cleaning, and Sundays were for shopping. A man’s home is never finished, Roland would say. Nothing was ever quite right: the front door was the wrong shade of blue one week, and the knocker clashed. The sprinkler did the ksh-ksh-ksh a little too fast, and watered in a thoroughly disorganized manner. Shoes got scuffed, socks got worn through. And even the most stylish of men tired of the same style clothes.

This particular Sunday, Roland had come back home with deceptively full bags. They contained a number of pillows of differing thicknesses and materials. He had stood at the store, trying to imagine sleeping. The mattresses and the pillows were, perplexingly, halfway across the store from each other, which had made the task a greater challenge.

“How am I to know whether I’m a side sleeper or a back sleeper?” he had thought. “I know how I wake up. And I know how I am most comfortable when I am trying to fall asleep. But they are not the same. How can I be sure which—if either—is the way I spend most of the night?”

He considered returning home to set up a video camera to watch himself sleep that night. “But,” he reasoned quietly, “would being conscious of the video taping make me self-conscious of the way I’m laying? Will I sleep the way I’m most comfortable sleeping? Or will I sleep the way I’m most comfortable being watched? Once the camera is off and the pillow is decided on, I may regret it.” And he didn’t like the idea of keeping the camera in his room for the rest of his life, just to be sure of getting a satisfactory night’s sleep.

Roland had tried to try each pillow in the store, pressing it against his head in a manner which roughly approximated sleeping at home. It wasn’t long before he realized that the uncontrolled factors—the plastic wrapper around the pillow, the inability to actually lay down, the way he could only support a portion of the bottom of the pillow with his arms—meant that this method of gaining information was a futile effort at best.

In the end, he had decided on a rare course of action: he purchased four entirely different pillows. He felt he had had little choice in the matter. The store’s poor layout made it impossible to make a firm decision. And even then, he couldn’t unwrap the pillows. He would just have to return next week with the pillows he disliked.

Although Roland normally would have felt defeated by having to resort to a purchase that he was sure he would not keep, in this case he returned home in high spirits.

Roland’s house sat at a dead end at the very top of a small, bare hill, not far from the center of town. It wasn’t very large, but his continuous upkeep and desire for improvement gave it the appearance of an illustration, not of reality. Like the yard, the trees and gardens were well-maintained. The tall brown fence kept the neighborhood dogs’ trouble out. Roland himself had always feared being a poor pet-owner, and had never got up the courage to even seriously consider the idea.

Roland returned home to a dark home at the tail end of dusk. He closed the garage doors, noting again that the loud motor needed to be re-oiled before too long. From the driveway, he walked the brick walkway to his front door, unlocked, and entered.

When he turned the light on, he saw exactly what he always expected to see: the main stairway leading directly from the front door, straight up to the second floor. To his left was his living room, where he occasionally would spend an evening reading and where he planned to disassemble and rebuild the garage door opener. To the right of the stairs was a door to a coat closet hardly large enough to hold his three coats.

He walked past the living room to the kitchen. He felt a pang of guilt over having spent a small fortune on the dark granite countertop, and he tried to think consciously about how much it increased the resale value of the house. That, the stainless steel fridge and the island with the six-burner stove made this a kitchen he was quite proud of.

Upstairs, in the only bedroom, he placed the two bags of pillows on the floor. He had been thinking since he left the store how he was going to schedule the pillow testing. Seven clearly does not divide easily into four. How sure could he be after a single night’s sleep that any one pillow was or was not satisfactory enough? Should he set an alarm for halfway through the night so he could switch pillows?

He discarded that last thought with a quiet chuckle.

The plan Roland had settled on was this: he would give each pillow a single night’s sleep as a preliminary test. He felt there was a good chance that he’d be able to discard at least one of pillows as completely unacceptable after that short period of time, and would give each of the remaining pillows at least one additional night. He wasn’t sure what he would do at the end of the seven nights if he was unable to make a final choice, but Roland was confident he could determine a plan of action at that point if it became necessary.

While preparing for bed, Roland made a mental inventory of the things he had done during the weekend. His father had drilled this into him as a child: “Floss your teeth, Roland, what did you have for breakfast yesterday?” Eggs, sunny side up; toast with raspberry jam; cottage cheese, small curd. “Now brush, where did you go this afternoon?” To the barber, then to the laundromat to do a load of whites with bleach, then home to put a second coat of varnish on the front stairway’s left railing. “Use the toilet, how many tomato seedlings did you plant in the front garden?” Seven. And four basil seedlings, and a full package of trellis cucumbers in the rear. “Wash your hands and face, which pillow are you going to sleep on tonight?”

Roland stood in the bathroom doorway, hands and face unwashed, staring at the four pillows lined up on his blue duvet. As far as he was concerned, they were all the same. He was equally torn between all of them. And now that they were disassociated from the signs at the store, he couldn’t even decide based on their ascribed qualities.

“I’ll flip two coins of differing denominations. One will be head-head. One head-tail. One tail-head. And the last tail-tail. I’ll do this each night, reflipping until I get a pillow I haven’t slept on yet.”

Having decided, he washed his face and hands, dug a quarter and a nickel out of his coin sorter, and flipped them. Both heads. Lucky.

He got into bed, not with the pillow he wanted, but with the pillow he had. And he turned off the lights and slept terribly.

---

The highway was packed, as always. The grit and the smoke and the smog and the general filth and stagnant air of the city forced Roland to keep the windows closed today. It was the first beautiful spring day of the year, as far as he could remember, but even if he could bring himself to crack open the windows on his red Honda, he’d regret it. The air was unpleasantly warmed by burning hydrocarbons and the sound was filled with the ruckus of the city. He knew this. It wasn’t new, but today made it sadder than usual.

He only had to drive twenty miles to work, but it usually took him two hours in the morning, and two more in the evening. There were other commuting options, of course. There always are. He could have taken the bus. Forget it, on the bus he couldn’t block out the city, it would be pressing against him and sitting next to him. Or worse yet it would be standing in front of his seat, and his eyes would be staring at its butt for an hour. He tried the bus once. Only once.

He had carpooled for a while with an Accountant who worked just a mile away from his own job. They shared driving responsibilities, but with that came a compromise that Roland found difficult to accept. It felt the same and looked the same, but his environment was not his own. He shared it with Bill. There was no huge serious gaping problem, but there were little things. He never felt entirely comfortable, and for four hours of every day, he was on edge.

He could switch jobs, and find something closer to his house. “Yes, that is an option, Roland,” he’d tell himself. “If it ever gets really bad, you can quit.” Four hours was bad, but it wasn’t really bad.

Roland got off at his exit, and slowly made his way down the surface streets to the misshapen brick building where Slingston’s offices were located. There was a yellow car in the spot where he always parked. A dented yellow sedan. He couldn’t determine the make; the emblems were gone, and there were rust spots where the bolts previously keeping them attached had punctured the body. The yellow was not even a uniform yellow: it was stained as if with cigarette smoke. No, he corrected himself, exhaust. As far as he could tell, it had parked on the side of the highway, bathed in exhaust for the entire fifteen years since it was constructed. Then, someone found it, was unable to get it started, so kicked it all the way here. And left it in Roland’s spot.

It was only 8:30, so there were still plenty of extra spots in the parking lot. Roland wasn’t sure which were taken, and he briefly debated taking the one just to the left of his. But will that person understand? Will she end up parking next to her? Will it domino and spiral out of control and lead to parking lot chaos?

Tired and reluctantly, Roland parked at the end of the parking lot. It wasn’t the farthest spot from the door, but it was far enough that he felt confident that no one would be disturbed by the change. Or, at least, no one else.

Coffee and briefcase in hand, he paused at the top of the fireproof stairwell. The door that led to Slingston was just feet away from the door in front of him. He listened, surprised. He could hear laughter. Raucous. Roaring. A caliber of laughter that was entirely inappropriate for a Monday morning. It was surprising: the other clients on the fourth floor were fairly button-down. There was a small but influential venture capital firm, a paper-products reseller, and a customer service call-center for Hewlett-Packard. One of the last in the western hemisphere, he was told in the strictest of confidence.

He couldn’t come up with a likely reason for any of them to be laughing so loud so early. It died down before he could identify the direction. Sticking his head out of the stairwell into the hallway didn’t help. It was gone.

Roland turned to his left, and opened the door to suite 403.

“Roland!” hollered a voice, behind which was a face of a stranger.

“Oh.. um.. er,” Roland looked again at the door to verify that he had opened the right one. He didn’t recognize the face, but he did recognize the voice. It was owned by the same person who had been laughing.

“Oh, Roland, you’re in the right place.” Standing up from where he had been seated behind the strange man was Abraham Slingston, the large, fifty-something scruffy namesake, owner, and operating manager of Slingston. “This is just Drew. Drew, I’d like you to meet Roland, the finest architect this side of the mighty Pacific.”

“Er..” Roland was equally thrown off balance by the unexpected stranger, the unbidden complement, and the gigantic smile strewn across Abe’s face. Somehow, it turned him from a stern old man into a jolly grandfatherly figure. “Uh..” Roland just stared at the hand Drew was offering him.

“It’s a great pleasure to finally meet you, Roland. You’re taller than I was expecting. Abe, why didn’t you tell me how huge this man was? What are you, six-six?”

As soon as Drew seemed to get used to the idea that he was far too surprised to shake his hand, something got unstuck in Roland’s mind. He reached forward and took it. His mouth wasn’t yet ready to listen to his brain, but at the very least he could handle being cordial.

“I met Drew this weekend in the mountains. I was skiing, he was snowboarding, and, well, pow!” Abe punched his two fists together to demonstrate. “Neither of us were really hurt, but the ski patrol saw it and they made big deal about bringing us to the lodge and checking us over. We just started chatting, and by the time they were satisfied we were okay, we realized how much we really had in common!”

“Oh.. er, hi.” Roland took a step forward and let the door swing closed. He realized he was still holding it open, and there was no reason to bother the rest of the floor with this racket. It was, Roland reminded himself, still before nine on a Monday morning.

“Hey, there, stranger, sorry for scaring you like that the moment you came in the door!” Drew patted him on the shoulder and moved towards the door. But instead of leaving, he bent down to pick something up.

“Here you go.” Roland’s travel mug was in his hand. The handle was broken.

(I should have posted this much earlier, but I was having some problems with my blogging software. After today’s update, the problem I was having has been fixed.)

Ever since we took a trip to see OK Go in Providence earlier this month, I’ve realized how much I miss going to shows. They really put on a great concert. They did an acoustic couple of songs in the center of the crowd, and a couple of excellent covers, too. (And Providence is really surprisingly convenient for an evening show.) So I’ve started looking at who’s coming to the area, and there’s a lot of good stuff showing up in the next month or so. The problem is going to be what to go to; I can’t see everything!

• The Thermals, March 3
• Badly Drawn Boy, March 5
• The Roots, March 13
• The Shins, March 15
• The Decemberists, March 23-24
• Plain White T's, April 18

How do I decide? I’m almost definitely going to see The Decemberists, but besides that..