The Wicker Man arrived from Netflix on Thursday, and we watched it last night (I'd seen it before, but Karen never had). The original, of course, not the comedy with Nicolas Cage (YouTube).

I didn't realize until this morning how seasonal-appropriate it was.

A retired Marine colonel and legal scholar discovers that marching in a peace rally, or (in his case) publicly lecturing on the Bush Administration's violations of the Constitution, will get you on the No-Fly List.

But, hey, it's not like the concept of "freedom of speech" means you can criticize the government without fear of reprisal, right?

FORM IT-40PNR

1. What was your total income in 2006? ___________

2. How much do you have left? ___________

The value on line 2 is the AMOUNT YOU OWE.

At work, I spend a lot of time automating the mindless and repetitive tasks that I spend large parts of my day performing. I'd been a bit worried that I'd eventually write my way out of the job, but it looks like my schedule abhors a vacuum.

I'll now be working on two different states' programs (and possibly a third soon), as well as going up to Canada soon to train customers on our system. I was telling myself I'd like to get out of the house more, but that's not quite what I had in mind...not that I'm complaining about traveling on someone else's dime, of course!

There seems to be renewed interest in my fonts recently, I'm not sure why. But it's spurred me to go back to updating them for the modern world. Now that I'm not restricted to 224 usable character slots, I've been expanding them a bit, adding new ligatures and features. But now comes the tedious part: kerning all the new glyphs.

For each new letter or ligature, I have to put it next to every other letter which might reasonably be expected to appear next to it (on either side) and make sure it looks good — and tweak the kerning if they don't. This is especially important if there's an overhang or underhang ("To" will require a tighter kerning than "Th", for example). For period-style typefaces, reproducing the look of lead type, one would expect that there wouldn't be much need for kerning — with solid type, you can't shove the 'o' under the overhang of the 'T', after all — but since the better foundries would often cast special type for such cases, you should kern for the best-looking result anyway.

That's just the tedious part, though. The tough part is getting the OpenType features in there and making sure they work right. While there are a couple of applications which support OpenType ligatures — InDesign, for example, or the Linux version of Firefox — I haven't found anything yet that supports all the OpenType features (like initial/medial/terminal forms of the same letter). It's hard to be sure everything's set up right when there's nothing that actually displays them yet.

Somebody on Fark linked to these pictures of 10th- and 11th-century Hindu temple carvings. How odd it seems, as a Westerner, to see evidence of a religion where human sexuality was celebrated, rather than repressed and made shameful.

My replacement credit card was delivered on the 18th, according to FedEx's UPS's tracking site, and was left at the front office.

Which is interesting, because my house doesn't have a front office.

I am watching a spelling bee on TV. That's how bored I am. Apparently the way to win is to be fluent in Latin, German, Hebrew, Yiddish, French and Greek, because since I've been watching, they haven't asked for the spelling of an English word yet.