Tent Living Update

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I started 2012 with the goal of "camping out" every night for the entire year.

I've already had to modify that goal: Last weekend's trip entailed a family hotel stay, and I doubted the innkeepers would tolerate a tent in their backyard (Tamara rejected the idea of everyone staying at a rental tent camp site; can't say I blame her).

So in January, I went 30 for 31 days.

I'm thinking that I should probably allow myself one day a month for such things, sort of in the spirit of people trying to set world records for pole-sitting or roller-coaster-riding or whatever getting five minutes off per day or hour to use the bathroom and whatnot.

Other than that, nothing of note to report, really; just asides:

• I've definitely become acclimated to lower temperatures -- these days, I don't bother zipping up the sleeping bag unless it's below freezing.
• The cheap Ozark Trail tent has been a real champ in terms of weather resistance, especially since I sheltered its north face with a tarp lean-to. Any tent will admit a little moisture if there's stuff pressing against its inside walls, and there's some condensation on cold days, but apart from that the thing has been nicely dry, and surprisingly un-drafty.
• Consequently, I'm kind of planning to just stick with this tent all year (or until disaster of some kind falls upon it) rather than buy or build something else come spring. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. I must admit that the FieldCandy outfits look pretty cool, but they also appear to start at something like 25 times the cost of what I'm using now.
• Based on past summer sleepouts, though, I think I'll try to figure out a reasonable way to mount a fan in front of one of the mesh windows once the temperature creeps up above 80 or so.

Adventures in Browser Organization: Symbaloo

Since my forcible repatriation from Chrome to Firefox (I've tried everything, including multiple nukings/reinstallations, and Chrome just won't run correctly any more), I've been looking for a replacement for NewsSquares, the one Chrome extension which had most revolutionized my daily browsing routine.

I haven't found anything quite as useful yet, but this LifeHacker article on useful start pages by Whitson Gordon turned me on to Symbaloo.

No, Symbaloo doesn't do everything that NewsSquares does (integrate with Google Reader, let me preview articles and keep track of read/unread stuff, etc.). Not even close. But it does at least let me organize my "daily routine" URLs into pretty clickable squares that open in new tabs. It also has some nice built-in news tracking features. Both of those things are big time-savers in my 100+ site daily grind.

Symbaloo is also web-based and browser-independent, so I don't lose it if I switch to Safari, Camino, Opera, or even eventually back to Chrome. That's obviously a major plus.

Here's hoping that Symbaloo steps up its game and adds NewsSquares-like features, or that Rocket-in-Bottle or some eager beaver clones NewsSquares as a Firefox add-on, or better yet a web-based, browser-independent hangamajigger.

Well

That's a deep subject, isn't it?

Yes, I blew the Florida primary prediction, big-time -- looks like by about 23 points or so. Hey, it happens.

Mitt Romney needed to win by 10 points or more to really get back in this race. It looks like he won by 14.

BUT! Lookit:

 

I grabbed that graphic from Fox News, on the supposition that a generic state map with colored counties reflecting public information probably is probably fair game for fair use. Red is for Romney, green is for Newt Gingrich.

Yes, Romney won the state fair and square. But if you take a gander at the geography there, it doesn't look very good for Romney in future GOP primaries or for the GOP itself in the general election.

In the panhandle, where the GOP primary electorate looks a lot more like most of Republican America and especially southern Republican America, Gingrich whipped Romney's ass. If he has the money/backing to stick with this, Gingrich probably has North Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Lousiana, Kentucky, Tennessee and Arkansas in pocket. And, of course, his home state of Georgia.

In southern Florida, where the GOP primary electorate is more moderate, Romney proved that he can beat candidates perceived as more conservative. But in November even Romney, if he's the nominee, will be the putative conservative. And the GOP is unlikely to win the White House if it can't win Florida.

This is Romney's fourth time out in this cycle. He's 2 for 4, and has yet to break 50% anywhere. The majority of Republican primary voters keep saying "not Mitt." By Super Tuesday, I predict that that "not Mitt" vote will have largely coalesced to "yes Newt."

Contra Epstein

Reid J. Epstein @Politico:

Gingrich needs a close race more than Romney needs a blowout victory.

I disagree. Anything but a blowout for Romney today is effectively the end of his campaign.

If Gingrich wins Florida, "prohibitive frontrunner" and biggest spender Mitt Romney will be 1 for 4, and that one an underwhelming win in the smallest contest thus far.

If Romney wins but it's close, he continues to be what he's been since Iowa -- "the walking dead." He may hold on until Super Tuesday before going down, but down he shall go.

He needs to win by at least 10 points to really get back in the race.

With the polls now open, I'm still calling Florida for Gingrich.

I Feel Jonathan Franzen's Pain ...

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... but only a little. One of America's most highly-regarded novelists (by the kind of people who fancy themselves qualified to highly, or not highly, regard novelists), author of The Twenty-Seventh City, thinks e-books rob literature of a needed sense of permanence.

Like most of those critiquing Franzen's viewpoint (Lance Ulanoff at Mashable, for example), I'll open with the disclaimer that I am a (dead tree type) book lover. I've been a dedicated reader for 40 of my 45 years, and have sometimes found myself in competition with my library for living space. Some volumes bring back associated memories every time I pick them up: "I accidentally left my last copy of this (The Guns of August, by Barbara Tuchman) on the airplane when I flew back from my speech to the New York Junto against the Iraq war in 2003;" "I was reading this one (Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand) the day my daughter was born in 1990;" etc. There's just something about a physical book.

But look at what e-readers are doing! Like other technological advancements (Brad has them pretty well-covered here), they're making a lot of people's lives a lot richer.

For the cost of 10-15 paperbacks (and the cost is falling), you can get a device that instantly puts thousands of classics in front of you "free" (courtesy of The Gutenberg Project, et. al) and lets you get the newer stuff with a click. The instant I bought my e-reader, my library got about 10,000 times larger, maybe more, without taking up any more space.

Ten years from now, I expect that every school kid will have an e-reader device of some sort, connected to a library much, much, much larger than any room in the government schools I went to as a child (no, I'm not putting those libraries down -- they, and their keepers, influenced me a lot; but still ...).

On this last weekend's trip, I took about 70 books with me (I actually read from four or five of them), and they didn't fill up the back seat of the mini-van. They all fit in the glove compartment, on my Cruz Reader.

I hope that dead-tree and electronic formats achieve some kind of coexistence ... but if we can only have one of the two, the latter just makes more sense. It makes more art and more knowledge available to more people, less expensively.

• More at memeorandum