Posts

I’m packing for a trip to Memphis, for what will probably be the last time in the foreseeable future. I can’t really say that I’ll miss it. It’s a great place to be from, I guess, and the instant Elvis-and-Jack-Daniels association it has in the eyes of Europeans has started many an interesting train conversation. But most everyone I know, save a couple of friends and a pile of Facebook acquaintances, has moved on. My mother was a compelling reason to book a flight, but she’s gone now, too, and my stepfather moved shortly thereafter to San Diego. Even the Last Cat Standing in the ten year battle over the house has found a new home. All that’s left is the house itself, full of stuff. Most of this stuff is future garbage, if it isn’t already present garbage, which I’m off to dig through in order to find the small bits that aren’t. This is doubly weird, as Memphis is basically the capital of my past, and it’s pretty much impossible to travel there without also traveling in time. ...

Got yet another SVP (Swiss People’s Party) flyer stuffed in the mailbox yesterday, outlining what passes for their platform for the April cantonal elections, which is a straight cognitively-dissonant mix between xenophobic nationalism and classical liberalism. Schweizer wählen SVP, it says: Swiss people vote SVP, the implication being that all the other parties are for people who are somehow less than Swiss. The party somewhat disappointingly leaves the question of the impact of the rather stark protectionism implied by disengagement from Europe on the freedom of markets and Switzerland’s competitiveness unanswered. I get the impression this is because actually attempting to answer such a question would require nuance, which doesn’t fit onto a triple-folded A4 flyer in 36-point type underneath the picture of the scary foreigner. (You’d hope they’d be smart enough to realize, at least from the mailboxes, that they were advertising to a building full of binational couples. But alas.) ...

It is not yet completely clear the extent to which the Revolutions of 2011 were run on Facebook and Twitter, but to say they have not been instrumental would, I think, be disingenuous. Like Matthew Brady’s Civil War photographs, the body counts in Vietnam, or CNN in Kuwait, from the American standpoint the social networking protocols have removed one more layer of separation between the reality of these revolutions, and those watching them. The key here is that they are also used as a primary communications medium for those taking part. Now is perhaps not the time to point out that they’re doing it wrong. ...

Stuck at home this weekend: doctor said stay off a rather badly twisted ankle, not from snowboarding in Arosa, but from falling down the damn stairs in Bahnhof Chur after snowboarding. The upside is I’ve got a nice new lens to play with, so I’ve been shuffling and lurching around the flat taking photos of anything that doesn’t move. ...

This is Ivan S. (name der Redaktion bekannt). Ivan lives with his wife and young son in a dingy little apartment in an old building in a small town outside a small city in Switzerland, an Ausländerghetto filled with asylum-seekers and semi-skilled foreign workers. Ivan has held the occasional odd job, but most of his time these days is spent on low level criminal activity for the Swiss arm of one or another criminal organization with ties to the Balkan peninsula: petty thievery, drug dealing, armed lookout and intimidation, transport. If it involves breaking the law with only marginal autonomy, Ivan’s probably got his fingers in it. ...

When the Glattalbahn Line 12 opened in December, it turned the VBZ/VBG tram network into a big circle with a few branches, which made this (admittedly somewhat abstract) representation possible. See if you can figure out where you live.

I started this blog, ostensibly, to write more, especially fiction. I’ve written quite a bit over the past five years, but most of it just falls apart on the page before I can finish editing it together, so very few people have seen any of it. There’s a story about a train, a story about a house, a story about a sniper and a waitress in a coffee shop in the north end of Chicago. Maybe, one of these days, I’ll finish one of these. But in the meantime, there’s this. ...

ICANN will hold a press conference in Miami on Thursday, presumably announcing the exhaustion of the IANA IPv4 address pool. This is when 102/8, 103/8, 104/8, 179/8, and 185/8 — each a block of 16 million addresses — will be handed out to the regional registries (RIRs), thereby ending the allocation of IPv4 address space at the first level of delegation. I’m going to go ahead and predict right now that almost every journalist covering this event will get something subtle but essential wrong, and that the result will be fifteen minutes of panic followed by business as usual for everyone except those who understand the minutia of IP address allocation policy until we start seeing pressure at the lower levels of delegation. As a disclaimer, I’m not actually one of those people who understands the minutia of IP address allocation policy, but you’re reading this on the Internet, so you’ve already proven yourself willing to believe things you read from random people who have no credibility whatsoever, and you certainly can’t do any worse with me than with the thirty-second blurb you might hear about this on your favorite cable news noisebox. So with that in mind, here’s what this actually means: ...

Nope, this isn’t about web privacy. My old blog had a tag called “Royale mit Käse”, on the little differences between Switzerland and America. One of the bigger little differences is the sweetness of dessert. My mom once sent me a care package full of Mrs. Fields cookies (“trans-fats are proof that there is a God, he loves us, and he wants us to be insanely fat”) with the approximate energy density of a neutron star; these would induce a temporary diabetic coma in the average Swiss person. On the other hand, for dessert one night this weekend, we had something more traditional, which as near as I can tell was basically grits with extra gluten and a pinch of sugar. Two scoops of ice cream on top of that and I could barely taste it, which made it just about tolerable. After a couple of years here, my palate’s definitely leaning somewhere in the middle of these two extremes. Start-with-a-quarter-pound-of-butter recipes just don’t work any more. So without further ado I present my adjusted-for-Switzerland portable cookie recipe. This basically started as the average of a few American sugar-cookies-from-scratch recipes I found on the web, with the sugar and butter scaled way back. ...

Welcome to trammell.ch, yet another in a long line of periodically updated versions of my web presence. This is all somewhat under construction, as is everything, always. The old weblog, My Ridiculously Circuitious Plan, has been incorporated into the archives here (as of December 2013).