Cue the Barry Manilow soundtrack...

Last week, as Omaha and I fought through our summer headcolds, dealt with Kouryou-chan's flu, and made the transition from school to summer, I saw once again the tough, beautiful woman I married hold it all together.

Today is our 17th anniversary. 17 years of holding it all together, and I still can't help but be in awe of how she does it. Without Omaha, my life would be a meaningless shambles, and I know it.

Birthday announcements are one thing, but anniversary announcements always feel a bit cheesy. I think-- I hope-- everyone knows just how much I love and adore Omaha. But at least once a year it's worth repeating.

What is this, the NSA?

So, this weekend I got NX working on my desktop at work and my laptop at home. For those of you from the Unix world who've ever used VNC (Virtual Networked Computer), NX is the next generation in this technology. Both VNC and NX run a remote screen server (the "screen" exists on one computer, but is being displayed on another), but NX promised to be "the next generation" of virtual displays. I struggled with NX for weeks, but I finally got it running.

Despite being over my relatively slow (~640-800Kb/s) link at home, and the wireless, it was impressively faster than VNC. What was even more impressive was that it was faster despite all of the hoops through which it was passing.

Y'see, in order to make it work, I had to SSH into the firewall box at work, and have the server do port forwarding for me from the firewall box to my workstation. That's one layer of encryption. Then, the nxclient runs a local version of SSH which allows it to contact the SSH server on my desktop and remotely run the nxproxy and nxserver programs, beginning the transaction. That's a second layer of encryption. Then, because both the office and my house are NAT'd^[?], the client complained that the connection looked compromised and that both it and the server were switching to SSL-- adding a third layer of encryption!

So my mundane email reading this weekend was protected by triple-AES^[?]. What a waste of cycles. And it was still faster than VNC.

What Design Communicates

For the past month, I have been haunted by ads for Las Vegas. They're billboards scattered throughout Seattle, and they say things like "I had to unbutton my pants," "We did it until we dropped," and "I joined a threesome."

It's obvious, in retrospect, that the quotes are meant to imply sex. And yet, my first thoughts, upon seeing them was, in order, "... because I ate too much," "Shopping," and "Bridge? No, that takes four. Ah, golf. Ha ha. Not funny." And indeed, in small print at the bottom, there's a line that reads "Visit Las Vegas. Let dining be your excuse." (Or shopping, or golf. I got all three right.) The campaign is known in the business as the Alibi campaign.

If salaciousness was their intent, they failed miserably, and it is the fault of the graphic designer. First, the text has no caps. Second, it's done in a very 70s-ish blocky but not gothic sans-serif typeface. And third, the background is nothing but a black wallpaper with big, dully multicolored dots on it meant to imply poker chips. My first impression upon seeing the billboards was they were a desperate attempt to update something out of the 1970's. It still looks 70's-ish, but it fails to look updated.

You know what all this communicates to me? Just as America is discovering that kidulthood may be a necessary survival component of our modern and increasingly changeable world, Las Vegas wants to remind everyone: Las Vegas is for OLD PEOPLE. People who remember the 1970's. People in their sixties and seventies. People who aren't embarassed to admire John Travolta's first movie career. People who identified with Maude.

It may be just because the very first one I saw was the one on the freeway ramp as I head out of my neighborhood, which has the "I had to unbutton my pants" line on it. I saw that, in its typeface and with its background, and my extended reaction was, "... because I am a fat, bloated middle-aged American who can't control himself."

The previous campaign, "What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas," was successful because it did have that powerful wink and nod to sex. This campaign does not, and it is the graphic designer's fault that it does not.