The site was down for several days until this afternoon, as you may have noticed. As near as I can figure this was triggered by an overdue bill, which I paid on the 15th of the last month. I had gotten a warning email that day before I paid it that my account could be shut down in 48 hours if I didn't pay, but I never got another one that my web sites had actually been shut down. I didn't discover the shutdown until Monday, and the sites were brought back up after three emails to my hosting company, the first two of which went unanswered.

While the hosting company certainly should have been more communicative and responsive (and this may be the excuse I need to move over to Dreamhost soon), it also would not have lasted nearly as long without my own many-faceted neglect of the site. And even though there's no commerce going on here, and no one was complaining that it was down, I have somehow come to believe that it is important to maintain my online presence. So I apologize, and will make sure nothing this severe happens again.

There's an odd design quirk on the New York Times web site that's been bugging me for a while now. When you open a slide show on the site (this gift guide, for example) you immediately see a count of images in the slideshow: 1 of 9. When you get to slide 8 of 9, you can reasonably expect to see 1 more slide. But you don't. When you advance, all you get is a semitransparent panel that pops up with a link back to the beginning, and links to email, save and share. I find this very disappointing when I'm enjoying the slideshow and expecting more content.

I can sort of see the motivation for this. The slideshow does not advance automatically, but they want you to click forward after the last slide so they can show you the information mentioned above. If you knew you were on the last slide, you'd have no reason to click again. But this is pretty clearly a solution that creates a much worse problem for the user experience. Why does the link back to the beginning have to go on top of the slide? Why can't it be off to the right with the "More Slide Shows" gallery, and show up when you get to the last slide?

To make matters worse, there is no link back to the article (at least in this case--I feel like maybe sometimes there is one). I almost always want to go back to the article, and almost never back to the beginning of the slide show. This forces me to use the 'deep' back button on my browser to go back 9 pages to the article.

* * *

Bonus rant: Flickr slideshows embedded in web pages. They advance automatically, and every time they do so, it's considered a new page load by the browser. So I'm reading Gothamist or whatever, and after 5 minutes I get to the part of the page with a slideshow on it. Then I finish reading, and click Back to go back to my home page. Nothing happens. I click on the deep Back button and OH DEAR GOD NO. Apparently I've loaded the page 100 times without realizing it. Maybe this is some kind of scam to get advertising dollars, maybe I'm more paranoid about my browser's movements than most, but in my opinion it's got to stop.

1. a shock of hair.
2. close cropped or short cropped.

Can I please read a few New Yorker or New York Times Magazine profiles that do not use either of these phrases?

Today I'm going to write about my favorite supermarket in New York. The story begins in early 2005, when RST moved to 233rd Street and Broadway, in Kingsbridge. Across Broadway was a supermarket where we sometimes got sandwiches, and I also went there to stock up on provisions to keep at work. The place seemed to be having an identity crisis; judging by its verbose awning, it was called something like 'Eastside Fruit Plaza,' but the receipts said "Villa's Market." The name that became most widely understood around the office was "across the street."

Over several trips, I gradually realized that Villa's Market, as I preferred to call it, had a lot of products that you didn't see much in these parts, and yet it rose above the level of a specialty market, because of its supermarket size and because these products did not seem to be tied to a particular country, though there was perhaps a region of emphasis. They had lots of Greek, Spanish and Dutch cheeses; Russian soda; crackers and cookies and chocolate from all over Eastern Europe; and dozens of types of salami. The cheeses and salamis were often available for sampling, which was always fun. They also had amazingly low prices on many of the products that I was used to only finding at Zabar's and Fairway, such as Fage Greek yogurt and Rao's pasta sauce. For a long time they had a rotisserie and sold whole roasted chickens for $3.99. I started shopping there for home groceries whenever I could.

The other magical thing about Villa's was that almost every time I went there, they had either added a new section, installed a brand new shelf of coolers, replaced the checkout equipment, or made some other huge change. It was in constant flux, though I hardly ever saw the work in progress. They have at this point expanded into two or three former neighboring businesses, including one Italian salumeria the loss of which we mourned at work, but I don't think their closing was Villa's doing.

My all-time favorite product sold at Villa's has to be these gigantic pails of Bulgarian sheep's milk cheese. Each one weighs nearly nine pounds and sells for thirty-eight dollars. It looks like something intended to feed an army, and yet I have actually seen people buy them. Closeup here.

Today, Villa's appears to be nearing the completion of its massive renovation, and has resolved its identity crisis by replacing the facade seen above with a new one that reads "Garden Gourmet Market" in large red letters. The name is used consistently on the receipts, the bags and the uniforms of the staff. Apart from the great product selection and prices, Villa's (it will always be Villa's to me) has a personal touch that I find lacking at Zabar's and Fairway, where my queries about unusual products are usually met with blank stares or even sneers. And that's why this is my favorite supermarket.

Harry Partch's "Delusion of the Fury" was performed last week for the first time since its premiere in 1969.

Why was I not told of this?!

Partch was a one-time hobo who invented his own orchestra of instruments, using his own 43-tone scale among others.

In last week's Talk of the Town, Lauren Collins used the word belletristic:

...the book ["Amo, Amas, Amat...and All That", a primer in Latin] turned out to be the Tickle Me Elmo of the belletristic-stocking-stuffer trade, selling more than ninety thousand copies.

As I kept forgetting to look this up and wondering about its meaning, the only idea I had was something about belle and triste, beautiful and sad, a nice combination. It turns out to mean of or pertaining to belles-lettres, or: "Literary works valued more for their aesthetic qualities rather than for any informative or educational content, " according to Wikipedia.

The week before, Nancy Franklin used the word ginormous in her review of Gossip Girl:

It comes from the kind of stock that makes it a perfect fit for a network geared toward young viewers: it’s based on a best-selling series of novels for teen-age girls which are centered on the juicy extracurricular doings and desires and the brand-name possessions of the most privileged kids in the most privileged part of Manhattan—private-school students on the Upper East Side. Because this is a world open only to the few, it’s of great interest to the many. (And, it goes without saying, of ginormous interest to the few.)

I used to scoff at my roommate Al's indiscriminate use of this word in college. It just made it into the dictionary this year, and I've become more a descriptivist. Still, it's surprising to see it in the New Yorker, especially used to describe something like interest.

Evan Williams' post is the second defense of the Kindle that I've read recently. The first was at 37 Signals' blog Signal vs. Noise, and it did them no favors in my mind given that Jeff Bezos is an investor in the company and that it is one of the most ill considered posts I've ever seen on the blog.

Their main point is that too many people had knee-jerk reactions to the device without ever having used it. They praise its good points, such as not being tethered to a computer and saving trees. They conspicuously ignore the fact that you don't have to use the device to comment on features that are known quantities, such as the very ones they discuss, as well as the pricing model, the DRM, and the way it looks (assuming the photographs are not completely deceptive).

Evan Williams focuses on the much-maligned feature of paying for subscriptions to blogs on the Kindle. He claims to rebut an argument that it is immoral to price them this way:

"Look, blogs aren't free anyway. You paid for your computer, and you're paying for your Internet access (or someone is)....You get blogs with the package."

But there is a clear difference between paying for a computer and internet access, with the money going to hardware makers and sellers and the ISP, and this pricing model, in which after paying for your Kindle (but not for its internet access), you then pay Amazon and the producers of the blogs for each one that you want to read. It's a confusing situation with many possible analogies, but I think you could argue that blogs are normally free because you don't have to pay the author for the specific act of reading them. If anyone is interested in it I would be glad to take up this debate in its own entry.

In any case, I think the 'immorality' of the pricing model is something of a straw man. Of course blog authors and Amazon are free to offer any service they want. Some blogs are definitively not free; until recently no less a blog than Daring Fireball had a system rather analogous to this one, in which you could pay for a certain convenient delivery format, in this case an RSS feed rather than a portable device. This was canceled primarily for technical reasons.

I think what Williams is really getting at is why people are reacting more strongly to this than they would to any old product that they don't find compelling. The reason for this is that Amazon presented it as a revolutionary product, and it seems like it could have been one, and yet as this column so eloquently stated, they seem to have chosen to cripple it for no good reason. "The Kindle is almost certainly the first bona-fide Internet appliance." Blogs and the entire web could have come "with the package", even if it meant paying a monthly connection fee instead. That is clearly the preferred model, as Williams acknowledges. If anything is immoral here, it's pointlessly bad product design, where that term includes aspects such as the pricing model.

"Frankly, this applies to them charging money for your personal documents (I think its $0.99), as well. Do you not pay for paper and ink if you print them?"

Just because the screen technology is called e-ink doesn't mean it's ink and not simply a better screen. The only resource being used up with each document is electricity, and the user pays for that. A better analogy is paying for each document you open in Word. No, it's not immoral, it's just ridiculous.

Gothamist used one of my photos in their story about the 'penny harvest field' at Rockefeller Center. It's more a matter of having been in the right place at the right time than anything else, but it's satisfying nonetheless.

I was very happy to receive the Complete New Yorker as a gift when it came out. But now I'm miffed. The complete DVD set is going for an absolute steal of forty dollars, while the replacement first DVD, updating for the last year or two depending on when you bought the set, is twenty. Half as much for one DVD, and I guess the software, as for eight DVDs and the package and printed book. It seems natural that many users will want access to recent articles if they remember one they read but can't find, or threw out, the physical copy they had. This is like the razors and razor blades business model, and it's got me feeling like a sucker. Heck, I'd be better off buying the whole set again and giving the outdated version to someone I don't like very much.

The MTA is giving free rides on the 'Nostalgia Train' every Sunday in December. It's running on the V line between 2nd Ave and Queens Plaza from 10am-5pm. I saw the train in 2004 on an elevated track on the 1 line and was totally bewildered by it. You can see some photos of it here.

On her way to work today, Maya saw someone catching pigeons. This reminded us of this New York Times story about pigeon kidnapping that has apparently been going on for many years. The catcher she witnessed, though, didn't seem to have the same M.O. as those described in the article. It was one man, on foot, who caught two individual pigeons in a net, rather than men with a van catching many at once by luring them with seeds. She said after scooping them up he used some device in the net to cinch them at the bottom, very tightly. She described it as a very disturbing sight. This was on 207th Street and Sherman or so.

Today I stumbled on the blog of the software engineer who makes the Audio Damage plugins, and he posted about an origami polyhedron that he made out of 60 identical units. I was immediately fascinated by this. I've heard of mathematically based origami before, but this variety, apparently known as modular or unit origami, seems especially elegant. The individual units don't look like they'd be hard to make at all, though assembling them into the whole might be another matter.

The authority on this type of origami is Tomoko Fuse; she has many books of patterns. I wanted so badly to try this out that I thought about where I could get one of the books today. The best shot seemed to be Kinokuniya, the Japanese bookstore in Rockefeller Center. I went over there after work and they were having a closeout sale, with all books 50% off, in preparation for a move to a new space across from Bryant Park. Sadly, it was pretty much the dregs remaining. There were a couple of books in Japanese that looked like Fuse's, but I have enough trouble following origami instructions in English. It will have to be Amazon. I look forward to seeing the new Kinokuniya.

I've come to a rather indecisive decision on the problem of sharing a photo library between two computers, as discussed at the bottom of this entry. Some googling brought me to this discussion on the Adobe Forums of sharing a Lightroom library between multiple users and/or computers. What I got from it is that the software's support for this is currently limited at best, but that there is a decent chance it will improve in the future.

I also learned about NAS, or network attached storage devices. Essentially they are arrays of hard drives in a box, like a home server or 'media center' but with minimal software and hardware apart from the drives themselves. I wasn't very aware of their existence, but this is pretty much exactly what I'd been wanting for a general home backup solution that's in some ways more convenient than a Firewire or USB 2.0 external drive. It's a nice example of computing technology filtering down from industrial, scientific and business applications to home users. Pretty soon we'll probably all have servers in our closets, storing the ever-more thorough documentation of our lives and sharing it among the ever-growing number of computers in our homes. I'm not much of an early adopter however, and the current selection of NASs still looks a bit rough around the edges. So for now my canonical library will live on my PC, with its large screen and ample (and expandable) storage, and when the time is right I'll move it over to an NAS.

Flickr's new 3.0 version of Uploadr is very timely. I was just about to tear my hair out and/or write an entry complaining about the previous versions. First, the Windows and Mac versions were as different as I've ever seen. Second, on the Mac version you could drag a photo into a certain spot in the sequence being uploaded, but once it was there it could not be moved. You'd have to remove all the photos from that one on and start over. If you were uploading a large number of photos and cared about the ordering, this was a nightmare. Third, yesterday I uploaded about 80MB worth of photos. Afterward, Uploadr was using 535MB of memory. When did it become acceptable for applications to use as much as memory as they can get their grubby paws on?

Update: not looking great for the new version so far. On the upside, it looks consistent between Mac and Windows. On the downside, I just tried to drag in 86 photos at once, and I've had nothing but 86 pairs of red and blue dots orbiting each other for the past 20 minutes. Restarting the software has no effect; the photos, in blank dot form, remain.

Update: still no luck with the Mac. I uploaded my photos from my PC, but with a bit more perspective, this new version leaves much to be desired. Namely: you have two choices for sorting the photos, by the date the picture was taken, or your own custom order. But the former can only be done with the newest photos first. You can't reverse the sort! This is such a basic feature that it boggles the mind that they didn't include it. Reversing a list is a task that was made for an algorithm. If you want the photos in forward chronological order, you have to first put in two of them, then change the order so it goes into custom sort mode and won't automatically sort them the wrong way, then drag in the rest one by one. I'm sure this has already been discussed thoroughly on the Flickr's own forums, I just needed to vent. Also: once you've added tags to a batch of photos, you can't delete them by batch. If you made a typo, you have to fix them one by one. Or you could simply remove them all and then add them again--one by one. I guess the Flickr guys just don't specialize in installable software. Do they really not have the resources to make this a decent program?

It's well past time to write about our trip to Spain in August.

We flew to Barcelona and stayed there for six days, then took the train to Valencia for five days, then took the train back to Barcelona for a final day before flying home.

If I learned anything from the trip, it's that Maya and I have rather different styles of travel. When I'm traveling somewhere for the first time, with no specific purpose other than to absorb the place, a typical day for me goes like this:

• Wake up, stuff some gummi bears in my mouth, drink something, and head outdoors.
• Walk, observe, take photographs, walk some more. Walk until I can walk no more and my stomach has begun to eat itself.
• Decide that it's time to eat something. Obsess over finding an eatery that is authentic yet accessible to a non-native, quality yet inexpensive. Ending up eating fast food or something from a convenience store. Tell myself this is authentic for people with poor diets.
• Walk more, until my feet ache unbearably and I crash for the night, in some cases on the street.

Maya, on the other hand, subscribes more to the idea that a trip should be relaxing. She insisted on activities like sitting down in cafes, and on eating something substantial before starting out for a day of walking. In Spain the two went hand in hand, as there wasn't really any food available from street vendors or 'to go.' I tended to strain at the proverbial leash on these occasions.

I prepared for this trip more intensely than ever before. This involved studying two languages as well as researching restaurants, hotels, and sights, all of which I will talk about more in the entries to follow.

I didn't always prepare like this, except for the language part. I can scarcely believe now how spontaneous, and sometimes foolish, I was on previous travels--arriving at one end of a country and improvising my way to the other, or arriving in a city with no place to sleep. At some point I got wrapped up in the idea of transcending tourism by knowing as much as possible about the place ahead of time. I half-joked before this trip that I wanted to be able to give street directions by the time we got there. I am still a tourist, of course; I can't deny that. I am there to see the sights and get to know the place. I have no official business there. But I do like the idea of being able to go beyond the version of the place that has been readymade for tourists; the sights that inspire awe and appreciation without requiring any knowledge of their context, and the buses that will take you between them without requiring you to explore any alleyways or side streets, or deal with any uncertainty other than where the next bathroom will be.

This is the travel philosophy espoused on Anthony Bourdain's show No Reservations, and I embrace it. But Bourdain has 'fixers,' local guides that show him what's good and translate. The rest of us don't have this advantage, especially if we don't know anyone who lives there. It can be very intimidating, even when the people are friendly, to walk into a restaurant that clearly doesn't cater to tourists, that has no English menu. Community travel sites help us break down the barriers, but sometimes I worry that all the user reviews and study are taking away the mystery and the spontaneity of the experiences. In this case though, I felt the preparation paid off and gave us some experiences that we never could have had just by wandering.

Today I went to Qdoba, the mexican fast food place that just opened a location on 53rd and 3rd. It's remarkable how many details there are the same as at Chipotle, which has a location one and a half blocks away. From the shredded pork available in the burritos, to the salsa options, the self-service fountain drinks and the selection thereof, the bottles of hot sauce and lime wedges, to the slogans about emphasizing fresh ingredients, it's a bit spooky. I won't pass judgment on who copied whom, because the real story is often more complicated than it seems, but it's certainly a direct challenge.

Some things are done differently. The Chipotle location nearby is a dank, industrial box. Frigid air gusts in every time the door is opened. The line snakes around the entire place at peak times, so that everyone eating there has hungry people standing over them. The very high ceilings somehow make it all the more forbidding. It's about the worst place imaginable to eat the food you buy there.

Qdoba is a big improvement in both atmosphere and crowd control. They have two separate burrito assembly lines, and the queues are kept folded up and away from the plentiful seating. A vestibule keeps the cold air out. When I walked in an employee said "welcome to Qdoba," both greeting me and informing me of the correct pronunciation--cue doh ba.

As for the food, some have said it's not as good as Chipotle. Personally I guess I'm something of a burrito utilitarian; I couldn't detect any big difference.

I'm not sure how all this looks for the Burritoville that is almost directly across 52nd Street from Chipotle, completing the trifecta. Its food is somewhat inferior, but it still draws a lunchtime crowd, and I've had a soft spot for the chain ever since high school, when the student special (two dollars for a small burrito and a drink) and free tortilla chips nourished us.

As for me, I'm happy with this turn of events. Clearly the neighborhood's burrito demand was not being met by two merchants. Perhaps the new competition will force Chipotle to become a bit more civilized.

I like to use trips as a reason to learn a new language. I studied Japanese in preparation for my trip in 2004, and tried to study Spanish before going to Puerto Rico in 2006. The second effort didn't go as far, because the trip was only planned a few months ahead of time, and most everyone there preferred to speak English to me anyway.

It's a bit of a scandal that I can't speak Spanish already, considering that the neighborhood I live in, Inwood, is about as Spanish-speaking as Puerto Rico. But for some reason being surrounded by a language every day mutes my interest in studying it, while the idea of a trip to an exotic place motivates me powerfully. I picked up my effort again when we started planning to go to Spain. I tried out many different study materials and techniques during this span, and I've had a blog entry in my head for quite a while in which I go through the strengths and weaknesses of each, but that will have to wait for another day.

Some time in the winter of 2006/2007, I told a friend about our plans and my studies. She had been to Spain and speaks the language quite well. She told me that if I really want to make the locals happy I should learn a bit of Catalan. I did want to make the locals happy, to convince them I was better than the average tourist. I got a used copy of the 1975 edition of Teach Yourself Catalan (reprinted in 1993), after reading that the newer version had been dumbed down in many ways. It appears to be the only readily available book on the subject. I figured I would just get as far as I could.

Catalan is spoken by 9 million people in Catalonia (the autonomous community of Spain that includes Barcelona), Valencia, the Balearic Islands (which include Ibiza), the small country of Andorra, and part of the Italian island of Sardinia. Its use in Spain was largely proscribed under Franco, until 1975. This means it was still forbidden when my textbook was written, but there is no commentary on it. I guess the book itself is commentary enough.

I was a pleasantly surprised at how my Catalan studies went. The vocabulary, pronunciation and grammar seemed in many ways to be a mix of Spanish and French, fitting to its classification as a 'Gallo-Iberian' language. Compare the phrase for 'Please' in Catalan: si us plau to French si vous plait. Also the silent 't' at the end of words like quant 'how much.' Ironically, one of the features I found most challenging was also a way in which Catalan is closer to English than to other Romance languages. In short, unstressed 'a' and 'e' are pronounced like 'uh', or the schwa. I found this extremely difficult to get used to. In every foreign language I've studied, 'a' is pronounced 'ah'. That had become a characteristic of all foreign languages in my mind.

I also used several web sites for this effort; again I will probably have to save full descriptions for their own entry, but for now you can see a list here.

I ended up speaking a fair amount of Catalan in Spain, but the results were not exactly as I expected. Very few people spoke it back to me; they usually just spoke Spanish. And no one looked surprised or delighted to hear me speak Catalan. They reacted as though it were completely normal. By the time we got to Valencia, I mostly stopped speaking Catalan, as it simply didn't seem necessary and my vocabulary and grasp of grammar was still greater in Spanish.

I am glad I studied it though. For one thing, as a practical matter, it enabled me to pronounce all the Catalan names of places and food items correctly. If I didn't at least know the pronunciation well I probably would have been much more afraid to have the conversations that tourists typically have--talking about where we are going, ordering dinner, and so on. Words are often easier to pronounce than they look. For example, passeig, meaning avenue or boulevard, is pronounced almost exactly like the English passage. It's really a nice language and I'm glad it doesn't seem to be falling prey to endangerment any time soon.