majority holding premised on infallible dogs

7:09am: I a place I cannot comment, someone wrote "the last three mania books were written by women... and in two of them, the hero was a heroine." So I'm assuming the "mania books" are Harry Potter, Twilight, and Hunger Games, and that the "heros" in question are Harry Potter, Bella, and Katniss.

Here's Wikipedia's plot summary for the Twilight saga, edited to just show the places where Bella is doing something:
Bella Swan moves from Phoenix, Arizona
[Bella] live[s] with her father
[Bella] allow[s] her mother
Bella finds herself involuntarily drawn
[Bella] learns that he is a member of a vampire family
Edward and Bella fall in love
[Bella] escapes
[Bella] is tricked
[Bella] is seriously wounded
[Bella and Edward] return to Forks, having killed James.

Bella goes into a depression
[Bella] develops a strong friendship with Jacob Black
[Bella] discovers James can shape-shift into a wolf
Edward is stopped [from committing suicide] by Bella

Bella is compelled to choose
Bella chooses Edward's love over Jacob's friendship
[Bella] agrees to marry him.

Bella and Edward are married
Bella discovers that she is pregnant
She nearly dies giving birth
the Cullens ... convince the Volturi that the child poses no danger

Basically, I think there's a difference between "hero"/"heroine" and "viewpoint character." I do wonder, though, if Bella reads more like a hero when you read the books, rather than just the plot summary. I know she comes off pretty badly in the first five pages, but who doesn't?

9:44am: MD: OK, you're riding in the desert on a horse. You've been running from the law for three days.
AR: "I shot the Sheriff..."
MD: No, actually, the Sheriff is who you're running from. And all you have is a horse.
AR: And some beer, right?
MD: OK, sure, you have a waterskin full of beer.
AR: Rock on! Are there any girls there?
MA: Where am I?
MD: You're standing in the middle of the desert when you see a guy on a horse ride up to you.
MA: Howdy!
AR: Hi!
MA: Boy, I sure am thirsty. I've been running from the law for four days, and I have nothing to drink! I notice you have some beer there - can I get some?
AR: You can't get none! I totally try to run away on my horse.
MA: I pull out my shotgun and put it to his head!
MD: Uh...

But really, the best part is when they get to the inn, and the DM is playing a Strider-analogue NPC who helps them start a bar fight and rob the place.

12:51pm:

When he was 16, [redacted] approached a middle-aged Vietnamese man on the street and, using a large wooden stick, knocked him unconscious (while calling him "Vietnam fucking shit"). He also attacked another Vietnamese man, leaving him permanently blind in one eye, and attacked a security guard (again using racist language).

For these crimes, [redacted] was charged with attempted murder, pleaded guilty to assault, and was sentenced to two years in jail at Boston's Deer Island House of Correction, of which he served 45 days. In another incident, the 21-year-old [redacted] fractured the jaw of a neighbor in an unprovoked attack. Commenting on his past crimes, [redacted] has stated: "I did a lot of things that I regretted and I have certainly paid for my mistakes." He said the right thing to do would be to try to find the blinded man and make amends, and admitted he has not done so, but added that he was no longer burdened by guilt: "You have to go and ask for forgiveness and it wasn't until I really started doing good and doing right, by other people as well as myself, that I really started to feel that guilt go away. So I don't have a problem going to sleep at night. I feel good when I wake up in the morning."

So that's what I think of whenever someone talks about how they don't think Michael Vick should have been allowed to play in the NFL ever again. I don't think there exists a meaningful "scale of horrifyingness" that would allow us to compare an unprovoked racist attack that disfigured its target to running a criminal dogfighting enterprise; but I hope we can agree that both are horrifying.

But for some reason, reporting on the former is, as far as I've seen, always presented as a tale of redemption, of someone who deserved and got a second chance, of someone who has fully paid their debt to society and deserves all the success they've since received. I mention all this because I just saw a friend gush about what a wonderful person Mark Wahlberg is, and I know that she believes Michael Vick should still be in jail to this day.

9:49am: One of my livejournalfriends has a Magical Trevor icon. She used it in a post today, and I thought, "Man, I should go watch that again." And I did. And it was still awesome. And in the process of finding it I discovered that Oh Wow there are FOUR Magical Trevor things.

But none of the others are as good as the first.

Actually, I think my time might have been better used just letting the first loop four times.

Look at 'im now, disappearing a cow!

3:10pm: Android people! Your dreams are now fulfilled! For only a dollar, you can have a cat head on your desktop that shoots lasers at your finger. And all the profits (that is, apart from Google's chunk) go to a local no-kill shelter.

Seriously, it's awesome. You just can't even imagine.

11:04pm: Two years ago, I picked up a Motorola Droid. It's been nice, but the problem with Android is that you can install crap on it. And every bit of crap you install makes it a tiny bit slower, it seems. After two years, it's started to get really annoying. Every time I press the home button, my desktop crashes and it has to enumerate all the installed apps again. It's just frustrating.

So I bought a Droid Bionic on release day, and returned it today. Here's what I learned:

The Pentile display really is that irritating, and for buying a future device, it's a veto. I think it would actually be less annoying if you could always see the weird effect, but sometimes it blends in just fine, and sometimes it grabs you by the eyes and will not let go. On its own, it wouldn't have been enough for me to take this device back now that I'd bought it, but it was definitely a factor.

Android runs really well on a dual core 1GHz processor. I'm really looking forward to having a phone with a better processor.

4G is great when it's working. According to the guy who was making an excuse not to waive the restocking fee (and I caved fast and hard, so this experiment cost me $45), it was probably "just the SIM card" that was causing the phone to get sub-3G downloads, and sub-33.6 modem uploads. Apparently I should have reseated the SIM card, and the connection would have been just fine. But considering that the SIM card was seated for the first time (by a VZW employee, no less) on the first day of crap 4G, it just wasn't worth it to fuss with.*

The device actually felt a good bit lighter than the Droid. The difference is only 11g, but perhaps because the Bionic is larger, the reduced density just makes it all seem lighter. Of course, one thing I really liked about the Droid was its heft, so for me this isn't a huge plus.

All told, I'm really looking forward to getting a fast 4G Android phone, but the Bionic isn't going to be it. I thought that I could live with the Pentile display in order to replace the decrepit Droid this month rather than next, but between that and the radio problems, I'm happy to wait.

* - So what exactly was wrong with the 4G? I don't know what the cause was, but the symptoms: with a relatively good signal, I would end up with a connection that was obviously very high latency, just from my experience trying to browse with it, and which the speedtest.net app occasionally reported as having a ping over 2000ms, a download speed under 400kbps, and an upload speed of 20kbps. That last was central to the problem, I think - the way the app would display it, it started off with a speed of "62500" - I think that's in kbps. But then it would instantly drop off to nothing, and perhaps not recover at all. That sort of matched what I was seeing in practical applications - it would start to do something, and then hang for several seconds before starting up again.

8:38am: Of course, this is not legal advice.

So occasionally, I will help friends draft contracts. Normally, those contracts are "friendly" contracts, between two parties who have an ongoing relationship that is greater than that contemplated by the contract. And one thing that I always try to communicate is that it's important to draft a contract to protect you not just against the party you're contracting with, but also against that party's successors in interest. (And similarly, to offer the other party protection against your own successors in interest.)

I'd just like to take this opportunity to publicly thank Google, Sun, and Oracle for giving me such an excellent example to use to show that this kind of situation does actually happen, rather than just talking in the abstract about "well, what if the tiny little company you're dealing with now gets bought out in three years?"

1:11am: So I'm thinking about children's literature. There are five books I absolutely must have for my son - Fox in Socks, Winnie the Pooh / The House at Pooh Corner, Little Fox Goes to the End of the World*, Never Tease a Weasel, and Dominic. I own four of the five, and need to order a used copy of Never Tease a Weasel soon, because I don't know what happened to my copy from when I was young, and I hate the illustrations in the new one.

But what I really hate about the new one is that now the boy is on the front cover, not the girl. When I pick up the old one, that will bring the total number of girls on the cover of books to 2, and the total number of girls who are active characters to... 2, if I recall correctly. I don't think Kanga really rises to that level, and if I recall correctly the only two females in Dominic are relatively passive. And I don't expect books other people buy for my son are going to move those needles much.

So I'm thinking that any book I buy for him sua sponte** will (1) have at least 1/3 of the obviously gendered characters on the cover be female and (2) have at least 1/3 of the active characters in the book be female. So that means no Very Hungry Caterpillar and no Poky Little Puppy and no McElligot's Pool and no Where the Wild Things Are and the more I think about how many books there are that don't fit this rule for no good reason, the more it makes me want to follow this rule. Why is the caterpillar male? Why is Roo male? I find it very frustrating. But as I think back on all the books I read as a kid myself, it's hard to find any that meet my rule.

So - any suggestions? Obviously, I have plenty of time to shop and look around myself, but I just want to know if anyone has any books about girls who do stuff that I should look into.

* - entertainingly mislisted in one entry on Amazon as "LITTLE FOX GOES TO END WORLD"
** - obviously, once he starts to ask for books himself, I'll buy him things he wants in addition to all the books about girls I keep shoving at him.

6:55pm: Things I really wish existed, now that I have a child:

A video game console with a one-handed controller.*
An air-conditioned Baby Bjorn.
A device that tells me everything is going to be OK.
A nice, sit-down restaurant where we can sit by ourselves in a cozy soundproof chamber.

* - Yeah, bonding, and I love talking to him and singing to him and reading to him, but... yeah. Some days are very, very long.

9:21pm:

11:50am: I went shopping at Target yesterday morning. The gentleman who checked me out made my morning; he was friendly and talkative, and when he bagged my bananas, cherries, and bread, he handed each bag to me and told me what was in it so that I could put them somewhere safe from crushing. So I went over to guest services, but there was just one person working there, so I grabbed a comment card, and it directed me to target.com/comments - which was a bad link. But I found my way to the "submit a comment" section, and wrote up my experience, specifically asking them to tell me if my comments would be passed on to the employee's manager. I just got this email back:

Dear cdk,

Compliments like yours are fun! It's great to hear when our team members provide you with an enjoyable shopping experience.

We count on friendly, energetic team members to make Target such a fun place to shop. I'm excited to share your experience with the Dallas NE Target Store Team Leader. That way, [employee name redacted by cdk] at the checkout will be recognized for providing outstanding service.

We're always glad to hear from you. So feel free to give us a call, visit us online or speak with a Guest Service Team Leader during your next visit. Whichever way, we're here to help!

Thanks for taking the time to share your shopping experience with us.

It's possible that the whole thing is a form letter, but it still made me feel great about having put forth the effort. I'll have to remember to do that more often in the future.

8:12am: Having a child means sitting on a couch, and sitting on a couch means watching movies! I'm totally hooked on Redbox, at this point - sure, the selection is nothing compared to Netflix by mail, but the relatively spare selection avoids some "how can I possibly decide?" paralysis. And we caught a few movies in theatres, and my new job took me to see Captain America. So! A few brief reviews, and a spoiler for THE ADJUSTMENT BUREAU ( under the cut )

12:04pm: Oh, and I was thinking of a lawful seizure of a weapon within the arrestee's wingspan.

9:54am: OK, so yeah, I'm still alive. I do occasionally post over on facebook.* I'm not actually "taking a break from livejournal" in any conscious way, I just haven't had anything to say that achieved escape velocity. I'm still reading my friends list daily, tho'.

That having been dispensed with, here's what I actually wanted to say:

I appear to, at least for the moment, have failed at the "being a paid lawyer" trick. Everyone I've talked to pretty much confirms that the job market sucks, and it's not a huge surprise that I've not found anything. But anyway, I've been getting paying gigs developing apps for Android phones. (For a while, I was referring to myself as an "android developer" but I decided that sounded way cooler than what I actually do.) As a result of this, I've needed to buy a Xoom - the emulator slows to such a crawl that the period between idiopathic crashes is shorter than the time it takes to launch an app, and things that look right on every other device will suddenly look 100% wrong on the Xoom.

And with all that prologue out of the way:

The speakers on the Xoom are awesome. Not terribly loud; you couldn't use it to listen to music in a noisy environment. But for sitting in a quiet room and typing a livejournal post, it's entirely adequate. There are much cheaper ways to listen to music, obviously, but at the same time, it sounds much better than my $2000 laptop. (Also necessary for work purposes. I do kind of love having jobs that are impossible to do without buying fancy toys.)

* - There's a string of characters on my livejournal userinfo that, if you search on the string in quotes with Google, gives only one result. That result tells you my real name. Sadly, there's now another person with exactly the same name on Facebook, but I'm the bald, greyscale one. But honestly, you're not missing much.

9:07am: We've learned a great deal about Robocop, but it remains unclear what not-very-similar-to-French-toast-after-all thing I am thinking about. Please, feel free to join in!

5:43pm: I used to think I was kind of smart, but Manufactoria is doing an excellent job convincing me otherwise.

3:55pm: It's important that I sit in this chair and maintain consciousness, but not all that important that I accomplish anything. As such, I am thinking of Something which is not altogether unlike french toast.

7:32pm: Alright, so kids who were born, say, five years ago - are they going to grow up thinking that an un-autotuned voice sounds weird? Or is autotune going to progress like 3D graphics, to the point that in 10 years it will sound 100% lifelike, and today's music will sound as quaint as 78rpm records do now?

1:57pm: Pure, unsweetened cranberry juice might just be the best thing.

Spoiler: a splash of unsweetened cranberry juice in scrambled eggs is actually quite nice.

3:24pm: Something you don't see often in Dallas: "Wind chill readings as low as 6 below to 11 below zero." Still better here than pretty much anywhere north of here, and we only ended up with a thin layer of ice on the roads, but wow.

1:05pm: Because apparently such things are necessary:
1) I consider myself "on the left."
2) My first reaction to the shooting was "good lord, that's awful."
3) My second reaction to the shooting was "I hope this is an isolated incident."
4) My third reaction to the shooting was "there's no way we know why this happened yet; I wish everyone would stop jumping to conclusions about the root causes."
5) I do not think violent rhetoric, especially calls to violent action (veiled or not), is appropriate in American politics, regardless of the political identity of the speaker.

8:02pm: Context irrelevant, but available here:

The criminal complaint accused Cruz of trying to hire David Carrington and David Walters -- homeless men who go by the street names Little Dave and Big Dave -- to murder Campbell. It was not immediately clear who was Little Dave and who was Big Dave.

8:06am: In other news, my laptop became infected with a trojan on Sunday. To its credit, Microsoft Security Essentials notified me when it happened, and told me it needed... something... to be able to properly clean it. But then it told me it had cleaned it. And it hadn't. I noticed that my Google search results were taking me to the wrong places, and ran Malwarebytes, which helpfully deleted the REAL crss.exe.

So on Monday, I re-installed Windows on my laptop. This is kind of a touchy process, because I bought my laptop before Windows 7 came out, so the only installation I have with all the right drivers is Vista. Therefore, I have to install Windows 7, then figure out what drivers I need to install from the Lenovo support website to get the hardware I want (and only the hardware I want) working.

The really touchy one is the trackpad/trackpoint driver. I'm not sure I'm actually using any features that I wouldn't get if I didn't install it, but I thought I was, so I grabbed it. Then I had to hunt around to try to figure out what it was doing that was screwing me up. When the middle mouse button stopped working (and the fact that it has a middle mouse button is one of the reasons I went with this laptop in the first place) that one was easy enough to track down. But then I noticed that sometimes the trackpad would stop responding to the first movement event.

Here's the description of the feature I disabled to fix this problem:
"The PalmCheck™ feature guards against operating the TouchPad with accidental contact. PalmCheck allows the TouchPad to recognize when your palm is resting on it or brushing its surface while you are typing. This will help to prevent unwanted pointer movement or clicks."

It sounds really smart, doesn't it? But really what it does is, whenever you type, it turns off the trackpad for a second. So if you press a key, then try to use the trackpad, the cursor will hesitate for a second. It sucks. It's disabled. But it took me 20 minutes to figure out what was going on.

Yes, I know I'd be happier on a Mac. But I really, really like having a physical middle mouse button that I can feel.

7:25pm: I'll summarize the past month here in a bit. Short version: in Texas, unemployed.

But right now, a lazyweb request:
I want a device that meets the following requirements:

• Costs less than $100
• Has no dimension greater than 12"
• Has no fan
• Stores at least 100GB of MP3s, and lets you select and play songs or playlists without a lot of fiddling or an external monitor

Ideally, it would have SPDIF output, WiFi, and a remote, but I'll settle for all of the above. An old-school hard-drive based iPod takes care of everything except it's very, very fiddly. The PS3 requires fiddling and an external monitor. I want to be able to play So it would be really nice to have something that, you know, just works. Any suggestions?

9:21pm: Sure, 15 games.
1. D&D - I think I played it all of once before moving on to AD&D, but I spent a lot of time with module B2
2. AD&D - I've spent more time playing this one than any other system
3. AD&D 3.5 - And this would be second most
4. Star Wars - I played in one campaign that never really went anywhere, but I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how it was supposed to be fun
5. Toon - I'm not sure we ever honestly got past character creation on this one
6. GURPS - Every time I've made grand plans to run a campaign which ultimately fell through, the system was GURPS
7. Marvel Super Heroes - Unstoppable Cat Basket!
8. Risk - This game is so boring when not facilitated by a computer
9. Gammarauders - I wish this game were as fun as the art
10. Kettlers of Satan - This has become less and less exciting as I've stopped finding "I've got wood for a sheep" giggleworthy
11. Chess - I was in the semi-official school chess club in 7th grade; I'm sure that counts for something
12. Robotech - In contrast to Star Wars, this universe seems wide open to me, even though it's just as tied to an Epic Saga or three
13. TMNT - Quite possibly the most fun character generation I've ever experienced
14. Shadowlord - See #9
15. Werewolf - Of all the campaigns I've started but not finished, this is the one I regret allowing to die most
I'll update with annotations when I'm done with laundry.