F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1920, read as an e-Book from BlackMask.com

This collection of short stories deals with the bored daughters of the super-wealthy, jaded society girls, lucky ne’erdowells, fallen philosophers, and other (perhaps less expected) characters. The stories vary in tone, in how convincing they are, and general depth:

• “The Offshore Pirate” was somewhat weak and predictable; the best part of this story was its early descriptions of the spoiled, bratty Ardita, the Paris Hilton of her set.
• “The Ice Palace” is one of the best of the collection, which deals with regionalism, relationships, and the lies we tell ourselves when we think we’re following a dream.
• “Head and Shoulders,” while contrived, told a good story of the twists of fate and changes to plans that love can bring.
• “The Cut Glass Bowl” was a second rate story, but did get in some digs at society mores.
• “Bernice Bobs her Hair” is an interesting exploration of the battle for status in the leisure class. Direct and brutal, it’s one of those stories I’d had to read in high school, and therefore didn’t properly appreciate. It really highlights Fitzgerald’s understanding of human interaction, and the ways people establish social hierarchies.
• “Benediction” is the most subtle of set, and has more complicated characters than the others.
• “Dalyrimple Goes Wrong” is a simple tale of the downtrodden worker being turned to crime, and thus to politics. Amusing, but forgettable.
• “The Four Fists” is a fun conceit about an ordinary fellow who gets punched into moral behavior, and thus great success.

Fitzgerald’s greatest strength seems to be exploring the inner dialogues of the desperate and disaffected, although he also excels at a sort of insider critique of upper class American culture and the mythology it creates for itself.

OK, this is an esoteric one, but I’m happy to report there is a simple solution.

We migrated Stacy over to using Thunderbird (from Outlook Express) on her Mac to cut down on the spam. In the process, we upgraded her to OS X.
Strangely, while POP connections to our local QMail server are nearly instantaneous on the Windows machines, there would be a 30-40 second delay for her. It wasn’t a Thunderbird problem — we could replicate the problem by telnetting to port 110 — and only from the Mac OS X machines.

Karl finally succeeded in diagnosing the problem. QMail uses tcpserver to wrap connections. tcpserver, in turn, checks back via ident. The Mac OS machines don’t have identd running by default. By running tcpserver with the “-R” option (disabling the ident lookup), everything works brilliantly as it should.

So I was playing with the cool wp-mail mod by John Blade, and trying to moblog from my Treo 650 and Versamail. It works impressively.

But I’m never quite satisfied with any software — I wanted a few new features, and I wanted a fix for a weird VersaMail bug. So I added some features, and tweaked some code.

This version adds the following:

• Allow uploaded articles to specify status (e.g., draft, publish, static, private).
• Fixes a weird encoding issue introduced by VersaMail, which sends encoded images with a MIME type of “application/octet-stream”. Huh?
• Creates thumbnails of the uploaded images, and includes them as links to the actual images

Status Code
To specify status for an article, you use John’s subject syntax to specify a category, then follow it up with the code for the status:

• d – draft
• p – publish
• s – static
• P – private

So, for example, to upload an article as a draft into category 6 with a title “My Article”, you would use the subject:

[6d]My Article

If you’d wanted that to be immediately published instead of posted as a draft, you could just omit the “d” in the category specifier, or explicitly add a “p”.

If you don’t know which category you want, you can still use this status hack; assign the posting to category 1, and change it later from your admin console.

Thumbnails
This functionality depends on Thomas Boetell’s popular GD lib being installed. Many PHP installations come with it prebuilt; otherwise you’ll need to bug your ISP to add it (or rebuild your PHP if you run your own server).

By default, thumbnails are created with the maximum dimension of 100 pixels; that means the longest side of the thumbnail will be 100 pixels, regardless of the aspect ratio (if your original image is 640 x 480, the thumbnail will be 100 x 75, but if your original image was 480 x 640, your thumbnail will be 75 x 100). You can change this maximum dimension; simply edit line 49, and change
$thumb_max = 100;
to the value you prefer.

Download
I’m sending my changes to John, so he can incorporate them into whatever he’s doing with wp-mail. In the meantime, you can download ’em here. Simply expand the archive, and replace your wp-mail.php with the file from the archive.

wp-mail.tgz Oooooh! A single file in a tar archive!
wp-mail.zip For those of you who prefer zip format.

I went to an art opening of work by David Trulli tonight at the Earl McGrath Gallery in West Hollywood. It’s a great show.
There has been a lot written about David lately, and it’s not hard to figure out why. His work is compelling and a little disturbing. They are rich in film-noir narrative, a very strong sense of place, and often come from an unexpected viewpoint. There is a fascination with the infrastructure of alienation (or is that the alienation of infrastructure?) Most, if not all, of the works feature people surrounded by the city; people caught in the middle of their own stories, yet pulled from the leading roles and made into extras by the buildings, overpasses, streetlights, microwave antennas, radar dishes, automobiles, and chain link fences.
The show is on through the end of February. Definitely stop by if you’re in the area!

Oliver Sacks, Vintage, 2004.

These are less a memoir than the story of a boy’s recapitulation of the discoveries of pre-Quantum chemistry. Sacks tells the story of his love affair with chemistry, as fostered by his Uncles (including the eponymously apellated Uncle Tungsten). His enthusiasm is contagious, and his highs of discovery made me want to rush out and buy a chemistry kit … although, as he points out, today’s chemistry sets are sadly hamstrung by the removal of anything that could be dangerous — which is to say, anything interesting. His interweaving of stories of stinkbombs and metallic sodium explosions with the history of how these same chemical processes became understood makes the history accessible — not to mention more impressive.
It made me think about the knowledge that is today taken for granted (e.g., the air we breathe is a mixture of gases, and different kinds of “air” can be emitted from various chemical reactions), and the profundity of these discoveries.
Perhaps I learned less about the chemical properties of various elements than I could have from this book, but I certainly did take away a sense of the history of chemistry, a sense of the magic, and a sense of the enormously exciting environment of discovery that took place through the nineteenth and early twentieth century.