Just a quick post to thank everyone who chipped in to my "Memory of Scrub" fund. I decided to close the fund today, because (thanks to both your generous gifts and a final bill that was significantly lower than I expected), I have reclaimed roughly 70% of the total bill. This was substantially more than I had expected to receive and has reduced my losses to a manageable level. I have no interest in trying to get every nickel-and-dime out of this process and would rather cut the effort off now and declare it a wild success.

Update, 29 March 2010: I've removed the chipin widget and closed this fundraiser. If you are still moved to make a donation, please direct it to your local animal shelter.

My wonderful dog, Scrub, passed away unexpectedly on February 23rd, 2010, at the tender young age of 4 1/2 years. At the time of his death, and still now as I write this post, I was traveling in Southeast Asia and had not seen him in nearly 6 weeks. I wish, so dearly, that I could have been home to comfort him during his brief illness, and to properly say goodbye.

Every year since 2006, the market share held by Internet Explorer 6 has been plummeting, dropping about 10% per year. This is a good thing, as IE6 creates huge headaches for developers and security risks for end users; for instance, IE6 security exploits were at the heart of the recent security breach with Google in China, which is what got me thinking about this post.

My life was pretty hectic in the first month of the year, but when Jed posted 10 reflections for 2009 on the last day of January, he convinced me that it's not too late for me to do the same, particularly since it was a pretty big year for me.

A few months ago I bought a new Canon Rebel XS, the first time I've owned a digital SLR since I had $2k of gear stolen back in 2005. I've been surprised how much I've had to relearn about photography, after several years away - in particular, my eye for both lighting and framing is just not quite what it used to be. With all the travel I have coming up, I'm really excited to have good gear again, though, and to be getting back in the photography groove.

I assembled the following photos for a book that I gave Emily as a going away present in July 2009. The book was 40 pages, and included about a dozen full page pieces like these, blank pages for writing on, and a bunch of snapshots from our years together. Sorry, folks-in-the-know, but the soft-core shot isn't going online.

Marx Cafe is where Emily and I went on our first date. Whether she was wearing cowboy boots or just slutty non-cowboy boots is a subject of much debate, but I commemorated it nonetheless with these hippie-cowgirl shots of Sonia. She's drinking Makers Mark, Emily's preferred bourbon, and chewing on some grass that I found outside while I waited for her to arrive.

Now that my graduate days are behind me, and I've found a job that I plan to stay at for quite awhile, and my academic & political blogging is housed elsewhere, I've begun rethinking (again) what to do with this space, and plan to shift it towards crafts, gardening, photos, and the other things I love about my life in DC.

My house has a radio in the shower, permanently tuned to National Public Radio, so most days begin with a splash of news. Saturdays, however, start with Car Talk, and today's episode began with the bold and not-car-related proclamation that Americans lifespans are shortened by the fact that we don't linger in coffee shops. By this crude and uninformed measure, I am likely destined for immortality; for the past six months, I have drifted in and out of neighborhood coffee houses with absurd regularity, often occupying a table for an entire day.

By now everyone has seen this brilliant comic from xkcd putting the AIG bonuses in perspective:

I felt like I a little color would help just a little more. So in the version below, the entire comic represents the bailout, and the red punctuation represents the bonuses, rounded to the nearest pixel:

That's it!

Excerpt from the Origin of Species

(Full Text)

Authors of the highest eminence seem to be fully satisfied with the view that each species has been independently created. To my mind it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator, that the production and extinction of the past and present inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes, like those determining the birth and death of the individual. When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled. Judging from the past, we may safely infer that not one living species will transmit its unaltered likeness to a distant futurity. And of the species now living very few will transmit progeny of any kind to a far distant futurity; for the manner in which all organic beings are grouped, shows that the greater number of species of each genus, and all the species of many genera, have left no descendants, but have become utterly extinct. We can so far take a prophetic glance into futurity as to foretel that it will be the common and widely-spread species, belonging to the larger and dominant groups, which will ultimately prevail and procreate new and dominant species. As all the living forms of life are the lineal descendants of those which lived long before the Silurian epoch, we may feel certain that the ordinary succession by generation has never once been broken, and that no cataclysm has desolated the whole world. Hence we may look with some confidence to a secure future of equally inappreciable length. And as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection.

It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.