“Bobby and the A-Bomb Factory” is my childhood memoir. It’s now available from Amazon.

According to the jacket blurb:

This deeply personal memoir of the 1950s weaves a connection between the the men who built the A-bomb, their wives and children and ancestors, and the Native Americans on whose lands they lived.

This book defines a new genre, one that I will call historical autobiography. The emphasis is less on the nominal subject of the autobiography himself, and more on that subject as an accidental axis around which swirl historical and culture currents—in my case, America’s atomic program, as the title indicates, but also 1950s politics, Indian culture, and American religions.

Here’s one early reader review:

…fascinating…very well-written and flows and fits together and is funny and reflects you. Just great!

The subtitle of the book is “Growing up on the Banks of the Columbia.” Future volumes will involve the other rivers in my life: the Hudson, the Limmat, the Charles, the Sumida.

A disorder of memory in which dreams or fantasies are confused with reality.

I made the mistake of downloading a couple of albums from MusicMatch, which of course come in WMA format. Then I bought my fabulous new Squeezebox home media integration server, which only knows how to play MP3s (actually, it can handle AAC and some other formats as well). So I needed to convert the files—but how? I discovered the hard way what a lot of computer music aficionados certainly already knew.

I had to burn audio CDs of the WMAs I had downloaded. Then I had to re-rip those into MP3. That worked. But what’s the point of making users jump through these hoops? And who knows what happened to the quality of the CDs during the burning and re-ripping process?

Bush is really on a policy roll. He’s announced two big initiatives in the last week: first, he wants to legalize the status of illegal immigrants; second, he wants a base on the moon and eventually to go to Mars.

But none of our intrepid pundits have unearthed the obvious connection between these two proposals. Bush clearly wants to attract and keep immigrants so he can then shoot them up to the moon and eventually hopefully Mars.

At the Democratic presidential candidates’ radio debate on January 5, the candidates were asked to cite a mistake they made that they regretted; in response, Joe Lieberman brought up the fact that as Connecticut’s attorney general he had focused more on the rights of criminals than crime victims.

Just a couple of minor things Joe. First of all, why couldn’t you just have focused on all the rights that everyone is supposed to have instad of picking and choosing your favorite people to have rights? Second, as a lawyer I hope you know that the criminal process involves exactly two parties, the state and the charged. Although some people might like the victim to have rights, such as to see the bad guy shot by a firing squad, for instance, in our legal system, thankfully, they don’t, other than to make a sentencing statement or in some cases get restitution. So Joe, precisely which victims’ rights are you were sorry you didn’t focus on more?

Unfortunately, it looks like the current Japanese food boom has not completely extinguished that sorry remnant of the past, 60’s-style Japanese restaurants of which Benihana is the prime examplar. I recently had the most unfortunate experience of eating at Hamada in Las Vegas—I simply assumed that a prominent Japanese restaurant in the City of Sin would be on the cutting edge. How wrong I was.

This unfortunate blast from the past has one branch in the Luxor, another on Flamingo. The menu is your old teriyaki and tempura style. Nothing introduced into Japanese cuisine in the last two decades is anywhere to be found. The sushi we ordered came looking limp and forlorn, crammed on an undersized plate with no garnish. The sake menu was weak and the waitress, an oldish Japanese woman who had probably spent less time in the last 25 years in Japan than I have, could not answer basic questions about it and seemed insulted that I would dare to ask them in the first place.

A place like this, sadly, will probably take another decade or two to completely die off, since the Las Vegas clientele is by definition dominated by the family from St. Louis that goes there every five years and thinks chicken teriyaki is the pinnacle of Japanese cuisine.

Threatening; menacing.

We just noticed a new “Japanese” restaurant a ten-minute walk from our house, at Robertson and Melrose: Fat Fish. We checked it out on the web and it sounded great: an upscale-istic fusion-ocious Asian French sushi bar with exotic green-tea margaritas, or something like that.

It could have been a bad sign that the place was completely empty at 6pm but then again that’s early for West Hollywood. No-one was at the entrance or noticed us so we walked in. We started off with some sweet and sour shrimp which any Chinese-American restaurant in the 1950s would have done a better job of. Service was perfunctory. The asparagus tempura was a soggy mess; perhaps they thought the elegant “presentation” (stacking them up like Lincoln logs) would make up for that. The “Tuna Trio”, a combination of tuna tartare, tuna sashimi, and seared albacore, looked and tasted like it had been put together by a guest worker hired the day before, which it probably had been. The “Ichi Roll” was some dry salmon meat and yellowtail wrapped up in some kind of unidentified covering and perhaps deep-fried? It seems unlikely it had been made that same day. We passed on the proffered dessert of tempura ice cream. After we gave them our credit card they took ten minutes to bring back the receipt to sign, then acted put out when we asked why it was taking so long.

We had a weird sense as we made our painful way through this meal that this was not a real Japanese restaurant. By Japanese, I mean menus designed and dishes cooked by people that trained in Japan and with Japanese chefs. Frankly, a Japanese restaurant would not dare to serve the crap that Fat Fish does. Later we found out—Fat Fish is run by some non-Japanese restaurateurs who are moving upscale from the low-ball sushi takeout business. Suddenly it all makes sense. Samurai on La Cienega is another sorry example of a non-Japanese Japanese restaurant. The kim-chi on the menu is a dead giveaway.

Next Fat Fish says they are opening another location in Westwood. It’s really too bad that there are so few enough people who actually know what Japanese food is supposed to taste like that establishments like this manage to stay open.

My translation of Dogen’s “Bendowa” uses lots of footnotes, so I put it up in MS Word .doc format, but that’s not very friendly. So I thought I’d put it up in PDF. Adobe has a 30-day free trial for Acrobat Professional so I wouldn’t have to fork out the $300 price of the product just for my little experiment.

But the download is 200MB! That might be the largest thing I’ve ever downloaded in my life. Took at least 20 minutes.

Acrobat did a good job of PDF’ing my document. But it took a good 10 minutes to do a little 40-page document. This seems way too slow if Adobe hopes for PDF to become a widely-used distribution format. And although Adobe made my footnote numbers “hot” so they jumped to the footnote text, why can’t do they do the same for index entries? And the Japanese text, although it came through OK, is all sort of grayed-out looking; why is that? (The PDF is here.)

I’ve heard that Adobe wants to push PDF as a means for archiving entire web sites, and in fact the verison I downloaded apparently can do this, although I didn’t give it a try. But that seems like a weird attempt at positioning the product. In terms of people today trying to display a web site, any computer that can run Acrobat can run a competent web browser, so there’s no reason to Acrobatize web sites for people today; the idea must be to do it for people in the future. Aside from the fact that that seems like a very narrow niche to be aiming at (“Preserve your web pages for the ages with Acrobat!”), my guess is that fifty years from now someone will have at least as good a chance of viewing a website saved as its original HTML/CSS/JS files as they would trying to view a version frozen five decades ago in time by Adobe Acrobat 2004 version.

I think Adobe is in complete, if understandable, denial about the fact that the weird FORTH-like language called Postscript invented 30 years ago by John Warnock that ran on a 10cps teletype, which was not a very good language to start with, even for laser printing applications, is not and cannot and will not ever be, no matter how gussied up or repositioned into a workflow tool or secure document environment or collaboration system or forms product or whatever else, the lingua franca of computer-readable information in the 21st Century. We already have one, and it’s called HTML and related W3C standards.

Come to think of it, it also seems weird that a company whose mission in life is bridging the worlds of printed documents and computing would not have figured out that we need better ways for computers to help us read on-screen documents. Here’s a quote from a 1994 Warnock interview:

Q. Will people in fact learn to read onscreen the way that they read books today? A. I think that the more personal computer displays become like lightweight books, the more people are going to feel comfortable reading from them. A PC that you can open up and physically handle easily, that has the right kind of battery and display, will give the same visual impression as a page.

The only thing he can think of to make the on-line reading experience more rewarding is the form factor. That’s pretty limited.

We just bought the most useful piece of home electronics gear ever—Slim Devices Squeezebox, which lets you play all your ripped MP3s on your home stereo system.

I guarantee this box will change your music life. You’ll listen to lots more music because it’s so painless. You’ll listen to more different kinds of music. You’ll have more fun listening to music.

I love this product. It works perfectly. It keeps surprising me with cool things it does. Like yesterday I found out it can stream Internet radio stations to the stereo.

Here’s the basic way it works. There’s a small box which you attach to your stereo. It talks via WiFi to a piece of software called SlimServer, which runs on any computer you’d like. Which it can do more easily since its interface is through a web browser—a brilliant, if obvous design approach which means you can control the player from any device that has a browser, including your Palm. The server scans your music collection and provides a competent juke-box like interface.

I especially like the feature that multiple people can access the server and all add their own favorites to the current playlist!

This ultra-clean architecture also allows the server to communicate with multiple Squeezeboxes. So you can play one song in the bedroom and another in the living room off the same MP3 collection. And since you can hook a Squeezebox up to powered speakers directly, you can put a full-fledged jukebox stereo system in your bedroom for the price of the speakers and the Squeezebox.

Some vendors say they try to make their devices look like the other black boxes in your stack of stereo equipment; not SlimDevices, whose product is a little rounded unit with a nice display showing the current tune. You can also control it with a handy remote control device, which provides surprisingly rich functionality including the ability to search your entire music library.

The installation took about three minutes; the only minor glitch was figuring out that the wireless network name was case-sensitive. Beware—WMA is not supported, no great loss there. Don’t worry Scott, it does support AAC, through server-side transcoding.

I’d love to see what other products this company is going to come out with to really make home convergence happen. Picture albums on the TV is an obvious one that they could do easily.