David Gessel
Winter in Canada
My job takes me to Canada every week lately. It’s always an adventure in the winter, but I haven’t been here absent a snow storm in weeks. Apparently this is the snowiest February in 117 years. Yay.
Snowstorm
Back at yyz and yet another snowstorm.
Calendar Syncing
Like many people, I have to use Outlook. It is by far not my favorite email or calendar system; I use Mulberry personally because it does not suck at all and it has a cool calendar I can use offline. I haven’t quite figured out my own webdav server, so I use Google Calendar to keep track of shared events with my girlfriends and others in my life. And everyone can use Google calendar and it does not suck either, so there’s no reason not to.
But it does create a sync issue. One which can be solved with free software and services by the following fine providers:
I end up using Google as my shared hub, sort of. Technically scheduleworld.com is the hub, but it’s invisible to everyone but me. To get there I use the Funambol outlook plug-in to sync my outlook calendar with scheduleworld.com (following these directions). It is not able to sync directly to Google yet because Google has to do it their way. Fortunately the clever man behind scheduleworld has that figured out. I also sync contacts using funambol to scheduleworld, but Google borked the contact API and so they don’t make it to Google Contacts from scheduleworld any more: scheduleworld does have an LDAP server though.
On the well-designed side, I use gcal daemon to sync my Mulberry calendars with Google (my directions here). I also subscribe to the scheduleworld LDAP server from Mulberry so I can access my outlook contacts from mulberry.
Now, oddly, Outlook’s contact databases are painfully borked and the local address book and global address books do not collaborate at all. Stupid. Unfortunately neither does Mulberry offer an option to sync the local address book to one or more remote LDAP directories, which would be very useful. I think there is still an odd disconnect on the part of developers who tend to work stationary and assume everyone has an always-on connection with very rare moments of disconnect, but as someone who gets on at least 4 planes a week can attest: this is not always the case. Even Mulberry, which is the only IMAP client I’ve found that supports a workable disconnected mode, does not make frequently disconnected mode trivial to use – neither to keep IMAP mailboxes in sync nor to provide off-line lookup of LDAP databases.
But Cyrus is responsive and I am optimistic we might, someday, have a good solution. If not, Adobe Air is pointing the way toward a viable seamless connected/disconnected (or periodically disconnected) world. I think this will become increasingly essential as the world goes to frequently interrupted wireless connectivity. Currently we tolerate wireless (WAN) interruptions because we have to, but that rules out far too much of what we’d like to be able to do and solutions thus far are generaly ad-hoc. We need an imperfect WAN connected world that is perceptively as relaible as a wired one.
The romance of travel
Who wouldn’t want to be here? Guelph in winter…
Plus every flight was screwed up. Amusingly I got out of YYZ easily on the one flight that left even upgraded to first. But at IAD where there were no weather problems it was a cluster… so it goes…
Ovulatory cycle effects on tip earnings by lap dancers
In an article titled “Ovulatory cycle effects on tip earnings by lap dancers: economic evidence for human estrus?” in the Journal of Evolution and Human Behavior 28 (2007) 375-381, Geoffrey Miller, Joshua M. Tybur, & Brent D. Jordan presented the results of an experiment designed to test the correlation of tips earned by lap dancers as a function of fertility as a proxy for sexual desirability.
The study was soundly constructed and enrolled 18 dancers who supplied data on 296 work shifts and approximately 5300 lap dance performed during that period. A lap dance was described as “entail[ing] intense rhythmic contact between the female pelvis and the clothed male penis.” (Barton, 2006; Beasley, 2003).
The results showed that exotic dancers in heat earned approximately $70 per hour, dancers in luteal phase earned about $50 per hour, while dancers “on the rag” earned about $35 per hour. Taking the pill, which induces a state of pseudo-pregnancy, results in an income loss of about 30%, which suggests substantially diminished sexual desirability; a good reason to consider an IUD.
The author’s conclude that:
"In serially monogamous species such as ours, women's estrous signals may have evolved an extra degree of plausible deniability and tactical flexibility to maximize women's ability to attract high-quality extra-pair partners just before ovulation, while minimizing the primary partner's mate guarding and sexual jealousy. For these reasons, we suspect that human estrous cues are likely to be very flexible and stealthy—subtle behavioral signals that fly below the radar of conscious intention or perception, adaptively hugging the cost–benefit contour of opportunistic infidelity."
Perhaps the most interesting revelation of the paper is the number of academic research papers that have been published on exotic dancers including, in addition to this one:
Borgo Cafe
Our favorite cafe in Borgo recently changed ownership. Nikola has taken a new job and now it is the Gecko Cafe. 0.80 Euro for an espresso – the best coffee I’ve had. It’s a really cute coffee shop and the new owners are very friendly.
Winter in Borgo a Mazzano
Winter is beautiful in Tuscany. The light is more gentle all day than in the summer and the warmth seems closer when the distant mountains are covered in snow and the nights are cold. We had a lovely time there, if only for two nights, warming the house with the wood furnace and taking long walks down to town and up to Rocca.
We ate at I Macelli in Borgo a Mazzano the first night – I had the Minestra Di Cereali, then the Ravioli di Castagne and finally the Filetto Di Manzo, all excellent as always. The food at I Macelli is excellent, always. The second night we had dinner at The Butterfly, just outside of Lucca. Butterfly is a Michelin rated restaurant and perhaps the best restaurant I’ve ever been to. Everything there is amazing.
Carolyn and I both had the “of the land” tasting menu. Of I think about 8 courses, only the pasta with sardines was not to my taste, but I don’t normally like them anyway and even so it was good.
It is a source of constant amazement how affordable first rate restaurants are in Italy. The food there is much better than anything one can get in the US, probably because the supply tend to be local and everything is made fresh and from local ingredients, and possibly for the same reason the prices are surprisingly low, even with the painful exchange rate one eats better in Italy than one could in the US at 4-5 times the price.
And then there’s the bulk wine dispensed into your own bottle at less than 2 euro a liter…
Venice
We only spent about 5 hours in Venice, between the arrival at dawn of the train from Zagreb until our departure by train to Firenza, but it was a perfect day. It was my first time there and it is by far the most photogenic city I’ve ever seen. It takes all the challenge out of photography that no matter where you look, no matter what time of day, there is some gorgeous and ancient structure or vista in front of you.
Sunrise
