I decided this year that I wanted more Christmas music in my life. I’ve been asking some friends what their favorite music of the season is and Daniel had a good roundup, so I decided that I should list some of my favorites too.

Sufjan Stevens

Songs for Christmas

Songs for Christmas

Probably my favorite this year, this is actually a 5-disc compendium from Sufjan’s past musical Christmas gifts to friends and family. As such, it’s a mish-mash of originals and standards in varying stages of production and arrangement. What I love about it is how Sufjan manages to capture the feelings of Christmas—softness, wonder, wistful sadness, intimacy, reverence.

Favorite tracks: “Once in Royal David’s City” (from “Hark!”), “That Was the Worst Christmas Ever!”, “Joy to the World”, and “Holy, Holy, Holy”.

Over the Rhine

Snow Angels

Snow Angels

Over the Rhine has been one of my favorite bands since I first heard them in 2006 (thanks, Ken) but I just discovered last year’s Snow Angels last month. Like Sufjan, Karin and Linford capture the experiences of Christmas with Americana originals, no standards.¹

Favorite tracks: “Darlin’ (Christmas Is Coming)”, “White Horse”, “Here It Is”, and “Snow Angel”.

Bing Crosby

Bing Crosby's Christmas Classics

Bing Crosby’s Christmas Classics

White Christmas is probably my favorite Christmas movie (yes, probably even over A Christmas Story) and that’s almost entirely because of Bing. This album showcases some classic Christmas songs with his classic voice.

Favorite tracks: “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”, “What Child is This? / The Holly and the Ivy”, “O Holy Night”, “The Littlest Angel”

Your Turn

What are your favorite Christmas albums/songs? I’d love to know! I’d like to be prepared for next Christmas, to have a reasonably good collection of music all ready to go.

1. This one just feels like winter. ((Incidentally, their earlier Christmas album, The Darkest Night of the Year, is mostly standards and, though effective, sounds more dated. ↩

So I’m a big fan of Ubiquity. Easily one of my favorite Firefox extensions. If you’ve not heard of it, it’s basically a set of commands exposed in Firefox, akin to Quicksilver/GNOME Do/Launchy but, you know, for web stuff.

My list of search engines

One of my favorite commands that I’ve found is simply called Search, courtesy of Blair McBride. It enables any existing search engines (OpenSearch) to be used within Ubiquity, so rather than issuing “amazon really neat stuff” or “google that thing I wanted to look up” I can simply issue “search politics with Google News”. The sky’s the limit.

Couple that with Add to Search Bar extension and you have some real power. Add to Search Bar allows you to right-click on a search field (on any website) and add it as a search engine in Firefox. Certainly the heavy hitters will be auto-detected as search engines, but this allows you to search what you want (e.g. Google Images, Boxoh universal package tracking, Snopes). Because a) I’ve collapsed my Search Engines bar and b) don’t use it directly anymore, I’ve added a lot more search engines:

I’ve suggested to the Ubiquity team that OpenSearch engines be automatically added (and the command syntax a bit less awkward), but the Search command is certainly a step in the right direction.

Which of This Fall’s Oscar-Baiting Holocaust Movies Is Right for You?:

This fall presents a veritable smorgasbord of awards-baiting Nazi-related cinematic entertainment choices — no less than six in all. Yesterday saw the release of The Reader, which joins The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, already in theaters — and coming soon, just in time for Oscar consideration, are Adam Resurrected, Defiance, Good, and the hotly anticipated Valkyrie (starring Golden Globe nominee Tom Cruise!). But which to see? Since, in this economy, nobody wants to spend what little money he has on an unenjoyable Holocaust movie, Vulture has devised a fail-safe, flowchart-based guide to help determine which is right for you.

OK, so I ended up being conflicted with “How do you like your Nazis?”, but ended up at The Reader either way. I leave it as an exercise to my readers how I got there. (I already had it in my Netflix queue; compelling storyline and cast… and come on, it’s Kate Winslet!)

(Via Zach)

America’s Best Places For Alternative Energy - Forbes.com

The “cubic mile of oil”–a metric roughly equivalent to the amount of oil consumed worldwide each year–is frequently used to explain the challenge facing solar, wind, geothermal and biomass power.

So what would it take to replace the amount of energy in a cubic mile of oil? Roughly 4.2 billion solar rooftops, 300 million wind turbines, 2,500 nuclear power plants or 200 Three Gorges Dams, according to Menlo Park, Calif., nonprofit research institute SRI International.

In other words, no single category of renewable energy is growing anywhere near the speed it needs to bear the full brunt of displacing carbon-emitting fossil fuels anytime soon.

[...]

While there is no doubt that wind, solar and geothermal [power] have ample energy to power the planet–the sunlight that hits Earth in a single hour contains enough energy to fuel the human population for a year–they will need years to mature before they reach anything approaching their potential. Oil has had more than a century to mature, and its shortcomings remain painfully obvious even now.

Hopefully this isn’t a surprise to most, but it looks like we’ll need a lot of hard work—certainly not just a bunch of people and companies “going green” in name—to really effect environmental change. That’s a glass of cold water.

Ubuntucat » Blog Archive » Please stop pretending Windows “just works”

As a matter of fact, computer problems existing has little to do with what OS you use. I’ve seen Mac owners complain about various Mac problems and Linux users complain about various Linux problems. There is no such thing as “just works.” Windows does not just work. Mac OS X does not just work. Linux does not just work.

The only way around this I can see is a redefinition of the phrase just works. Here’s my new working definition:

Fill-in-the-blank operating system has caused me personally (and no one else necessarily) fewer problems than other operating systems I have used, and when I do encounter problems, they are ones I can tolerate and not big enough for me to abandon this platform for another one.

As someone who works in tech support, I can say that this is definitely true. It’s pretty much a level playing field with regards to the problems you will encounter.

For me, GNU/Linux is free, has a more consistent user experience, and has a great community in which to play a part (e.g. seeking the inevitable support, learning more, contributing yourself). That’s what gives it the advantage over Windows/OS X in my book.

I’m certainly no Sprint fan, but this is really neat. (Be sure to check out the full version for an infogasm.)

I actually know the feeling here!

I’m a Christian and I’m voting for Barack Obama on Tuesday (in large part) because of his stance on life issues.

I had intended to write a longer post about how I think a pro-life stance must be holistic, incorporating not only the issue of abortion, but I have not. So I will be borrowing words.

Tim pointed me to an article by Jim Wallis from Sojourners Magazine talking to James Dobson. Dobson takes a very conservative (and narrow, in my opinion) Christian viewpoint on the election. Wallis responds on the issue of abortion and what it means to be “pro-life”:

You [Dobson] make a mistake when you assume that younger Christians don’t care as much as you about the sanctity of life. They do care—very much—but they have a more consistent ethic of life. Both broader and deeper, it is inclusive of abortion, but also of the many other assaults on human life and dignity. For the new generation, poverty, hunger, and disease are also life issues; creation care is a life issue; genocide, torture, the death penalty, and human rights are life issues; war is a life issue. What happens to poor children after they are born is also a life issue.

And there was an interesting point from the article to which Wallis links:

While many Christians disagree on the legal questions surrounding abortion, together we can and must pursue practical steps that actually reduce abortion rates. Three-fourths of women who have an abortion say a primary reason is that they cannot afford to raise a child, so reducing poverty and supporting low-income women is a good place for our candidates to start.

I became Catholic this year and while we discussed pro-life issues in RCIA, I was never told (nor in Mass today) which way to vote in this election.

I advise everyone, of any moral background, to vote with your conscience on Tuesday. Each of us must make an estimation of which candidate will do the best for our country and everyone therein—and such decisions are difficult and are hardly cut and dry. In my opinion, on every matter other than abortion, it is clear that Obama has (and I would argue Democrats in general have) more respect for life, and that plays a very big part in my upcoming vote on Tuesday.

I started looking up high-fructose corn syrup after those dubious propogandacommercials about how “everything’s OK guys.” (I agree with the poster of the video that it does seem akin to a tobacco commercial.) Turns out it’s worse than I thought.

I knew that import tariffs made sugar expensive and have driven producers to use corn (cheap and abundant here in the US) for sugar. I recently learned that fructose (and thus high-fructose corn syrup) more or less suppress the body’s hormonal signals to stop one’s appetite. (And, for my own part, I knew that it caused problems with my own energy and headaches.)

What I didn’t know was the sugar industry’s and our government’s effect on ethanol and alternative fuels:

Deal Sweeteners: The New Yorker

Our current policy is absurd even by Washington standards: Congress is paying billions in subsidies to get us to use more ethanol, while keeping in place tariffs and quotas that guarantee that we’ll use less. And while most of the time tariffs just mean higher prices and reduced competition, in the case of ethanol the negative effects are considerably greater, leaving us saddled with an inferior and less energy-efficient technology and as dependent as ever on oil-producing countries.

(I understand that ethanol may not be the proverbial basket in which we put all of our proverbial eggs; apparently too much reliance on corn could drive up food prices.)

And regardless of the timing though, this is no partisan affair:

A recent study by Amani Elobeid and Simla Tokgoz, scientists at Iowa State University, projected that if the tariffs were removed prices would fall by fourteen per cent and Americans would use almost three hundred million gallons more of ethanol.

But that isn’t likely to happen anytime soon: the Bush Administration proposed eliminating the ethanol tariff this past spring, but Congress quickly quashed the idea—Barack Obama was among several Midwestern senators who campaigned in support of the tariff—and the sugar quotas appear to be as sacrosanct as ever. Tariffs and quotas are extremely hard to get rid of, once established, because they create a vicious circle of back-scratching—government largesse means that sugar producers get wealthy, giving them lots of cash to toss at members of Congress, who then have an incentive to insure that the largesse continues to flow.

We’re protecting domestic corn farmers, but in a very odd way and with odd consequences.

In general, I throw out all circulars and any mail addressed to “Resident”. By far the largest circular I get in the mail is RedPlum, something like 40 pages. I dug around and figured out how to remove myself from their mailing list. Yay.