So we are pulling up stakes from here, at least for the time being, and going to try weblogifying over on "wordpress dot com", where the Secret Second Life Weblog (and a few others written by other people) already are.
Maybe I will start posting regularly again!
Or maybe I will miss hand-coded HTML so much that I will come back and start posting over here!
It is an adventure!
*8)
]]>
I thought I would post today, though, in order to get in before Saturday, just in case ol' Harold Camping is right.
Of course come to think of it the Rapture would probably provide some really excellent weblogging material.
I was listening to Family Radio in the car today, just to see, and they were surprisingly calm. They had their regular Bible reading, and some music, and like Chapter Five of some inspirational book. They even had an ad for their pamphlet explaining how the world is going to end (well, to start ending) on Saturday; you can get it on the web, but you can also call this number and they will send you as many copies as you can use.
In the mail.
And I thought, well, shouldn't they really have said "express mail orders only"?
'cause if it takes longer than a couple of days to arrive...
... there's really no point.
As fun as it can be to make fun of (pardon any video ad that you're required to watch to see that page; mine appeared to be for an upscale prostitute), it does make me wonder deeply about human nature.
I mean, these people supposedly do believe that Saturday is The Rapture, so why are they going ahead with business as usual? Do they actually not believe? What does it mean to believe something, but then act as though it were not true?
One possibility, of course, is that those Family Radio employees who really believe it have gone on leave in order to Get Ready, so it's the ones who Aren't So Sure that are left running the station, and they are going ahead with Business As Usual in order to hedge their bets.
On Sunday I expect the station will continue to go on with Business As Usual, perhaps without the ads for the pamphlets with the dates in them, at least until Harold has time to figure out what went wrong this time, and update them.
Speaking of the End Times, a Very Large Tree (belonging to a next-door neighbor) fell over in a windstorm the other week, and entirely crushed the ol' Big Tub of Water.
(Flickr pictures to prove it.)
Which was not really all that devastating, despite the fond memories. We haven't opened it for a year or four, the kids having in some sense outgrown it and we adults being far too sedentary and/or doing other things. So it was probably more the Big Tub of Fecund Slime when the Enormous Tree hit it.
The tree has been removed since the pictures, but the crushed fence and tub, and the scratches and dents to the side of the house, are all still there, waiting for various estimates and contractors and possible insurance checks, and for us to basically take enough interest in the whole thing to hurry it along.
It is rather amazing that I am sitting here writing this (as you probably know all too well), rather than being in Second Life (where things continue as ever) or World of Warcraft (where I now have a second character over level 80, and headed for 85 with Spennix at some rate), or busy into the evening with work things (work has been one big perpetual deadline for months, due I think largely to the theory that it's possible to schedule ground-breaking research and first-of-a-kind development far in advance).
I have discovered, or concluded, or something, that I am a very reactive person.
I don't plan things out particularly, or rehearse them to myself in advance, or have a theory of how they are going to go.
Things happen, and when I notice them, I do stuff.
I get to work, for instance, by going out and getting in the car, and then successively doing whatever seems to be called for in the immediate situation.
I can give you instructions on how to get to work, if I have to, but I have to derive them, by imagining myself more or less vividly getting into the car, backing down the driveway, and then calling to mind what I would see next, and what I would do.
I have the feeling that for many other people, it's not like that at all, and that the plans and directions and stuff are primary, and the reactions sort of secondary. One has an idea in advance what's going to happen and what you're going to do, and so what you do is whatever the plan calls for doing next.
At least in theory.
So I've always liked the Greeting Card saying "Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans" (possibly John Lennon); it validates the idea that those plans are sort of fictional, and really what happens is whatever happens, so what you do is react. Or act, in context.
Certainly in software development, even relatively routine software development, and probably product development in general, it's always seemed an enormous waste of time to me to plan six or twelve months in advance. The plan is going to be wrong, and there doesn't seem to be any good reason to think that what you're going to do in pretending it's right will be any more accurate or successful than what you would have done day-to-day without it.
So when there are planning and scheduling sessions and things at work, my mind sort of glazes over, or fails to make contact with the subject, or something, and I just want to get back to taking the next step in getting the thing working, without first having had to weigh in with a prognostication on how many steps there are left.
This does not always make me popular in planning meetings. *8)
On other subjects, there is an adorably cute little cat sleeping with her eyes all closed and her little paws tucked endearingly, on M's legs just across the room there. Tiny Mia is no longer a tiny kitten, but rather a still-petite cat, being about what twelve or something months old, and ten or something pounds heavy (she does not really greatly enjoy being picked up for weighing, or any other, purposes, but she is nonetheless picked up and carried around regularly, especially by the little boy).
And I'm just starting to think of us as having a cat, really.
(I still don't really think of myself as having a beard, and it's been like thirty-odd years now; of course the cat is more visible from here than the beard is.)
I've been vaguely thinking of NaNoWriMo this year (work will surely have calmed down by then, eh?), but I'm not sure what I'd do.
Blank verse is tempting, but fifty-thousand words of it?
We came into the town of Esk at night,
Yolanda, Ben, old Fred, Patrice, and me.
The windows were all shut against the chill
that rolled off of the giant cakes of ice.
"to SLEEP perCHANCE to DREAM aye THERE's the RUB."
I think I might go crazy from the rhythm pretty quickly, though.
This is really nice. *8)
I do like talking to y'all, and of course hearing my own voice (for textual values of "voice"). I speculate once again that it might be a good thing to switch over to wordpress or some other nice easy Content Management System, like what the secret Second Life weblog is on. I would probably post more often if I didn't have to hand-edit HTML and post files via scp. Or maybe I wouldn't! I dunno.
And it would lose some of the distinctive flavor of what it is like to post here.
Not that everything doesn't always change anyway... *8)
Maybe I will do this again soon!
Rapture permitting... ]]>
These things happen!
Speaking of obsolete 800MHz iBook G4s, one thing that Apple (normally so hot on the whole User Experience thing) somehow completely doesn't get is that it ought to be possible to figure out which product you actually have.
For instance, this thing here is an Alienware M15X, which is a relatively well-defined class of things; one imagines that when they bring out a different computer, it will be called the M15Y or N17Q or Snuzzy or something. And the respectable work computer is a Thinkpad W500; different Thinkpads are called T60p or T410 or whatever. But the macbooks whose LCD displays I wanted to swap, and look up what kind of memory they take? Not so clear!
They are 13-inch macbooks, but that doesn't entirely narrow it down. For instance on the "macbook: how to remove or install memory" page, there are eleven different macbooks listed, all 13-inch, with extremely helpful names like "MacBook (13-inch, Mid 2007)". I don't know about you, but my having any idea when a particular computer in my house was acquired (let alone manufactured, which is what they probably mean) is as unlikely as a significantly unlikely thing! (And just when did "Mid 2007" start and end, anyway?)
But note! That page points to a "How to identify MacBook models" page, which will no doubt clear this all up. That page has not just one, but two, methods of accomplishing our goal.
First, you can enter the serial number, and it will tell you what you have. Terrific!
Sadly, when I enter the serial number of one of these, it tells me that it's a 13-inch Macbook. Woo woo! I knew that; I need to know if it is the Mid 2007 one, or say the Late 2006 one, or perhaps the Mid 2009 one, or for all I know the "Macbook (13-inch, made that day when Lenny came in smashed)" model.
The other method on the page instantly disqualifies itself from usefulness by starting with "If you still have the box or receipt from your MacBook...".
Ha!
Ha ha!
Ha ha ha!
That is very funny, Apple.
You are such a card.
So anyway we just went with the information for some random submodel of 13-inch Macbook, and everything seems to have worked (so far touch wood).
And it is very nice having non-broken computers! And having a working computer with iTunes on it (although the latest iTunes' pathological obsession with "Ping" really needs a nice big "omg go away with the Ping stuff" button to push).
Just tonight for instance I have added to my library nine separate covers of "Hit the Road Jack", including Ray Charles (of course), two different reggae versions, and one from Thai Beat a Go-Go (Vol. 1), which should be interesting... ]]>
One ancient 800MHz iBook G4, which I used to use a long time ago, and the little boy had inherited and suffered with stoically all this time, until recently he wanted to use something that really wants OS X 10.5 or better, which really doesn't want to install on such a slow machine (and although there are ways to trick it, he's suffered long enough),
One early Intel macbook, used intensely at college by the little daughter until it broke in various ways (significantly not including the LCD screen or memory) and she moved on to a macbook pro,
One similar early Intel macbook, used by me pretty much just for my music library, and in fact used so seldom that I eventually I left it in a corner somewhere where it got a heavy object dropped on it corner-first, resulting in the spiderweb pattern of cracks in the LCD that mean "this has had a heavy object dropped on it corner-first",
One PowerPro P 15:2 or something, which turned out to be a complete lemon (one suspects that somewhere in the supply chain, someone did some dumpster-diving to cut costs), and although the folks at PowerNotebooks are very nice, they apparently consider a machine falling all to flinders after a year to be normal wear-and-tear, and therefore out of warranty.
Add:
One cool purple-glowing Alienware M15x or something, where one has one's fingers crossed that large companies are less likely to ship lemons and claim that it's a normal thing, running Windows 7.
One perfectly respectable covered-by-corporate-maintenance-contract Lenovo™ Thinkpad™, supplied by the Employer, running Windows XP because businesses are conservative.
Mix:
Swap the good LCD from the little daughter's former macbook with the cracked LCD in my macbook, using clever instructions from the Web.
Swap the 2GB of memory in the little daughter's former machine with the mere 512MB in mine while we're there,
Copy the 50G or so of stuff from my macbook (which now has a working LCD and 2GB of memory)
onto the Alienware machine; this turns out to be Really Annoying because first they won't
see each other on the network, and the macbook won't write to the NTFS-formatted USB drive
that we have until I install a third-party NTFS driver, and even then it won't write from a
command shell, and the Finder gives up 20 minutes into a four hour copy when some niggling
thing goes wrong, but then finally they do see each other on the network for no
apparent reason, and cp -nRvX moves the files in a mere six or eight hours. (Always amused
that if you want something that works on both Windows and OS X, the answer is generally
something with a Unix heritage.)
Use find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 cksum to make sure that all those files came across okay
(similarly).
Re-copy across the three that didn't (Green Day's "Holiday", Santana "El Farol", and U2 "Discotheque" (the Hexidecimal Mix)).
Install the Windows version of iTunes, swap in the copied-over library, let it update itself, let it "restore" my iPod Classic in "Windows format" (eww eww eww), and reload everything onto it. Re-import and re-sync the two tracks that didn't sync right because their names had somehow mutated ("The Men of the West" and "Whack fol the Diddle" from the Clancy Brothers' classic "The Rising of the Moon"). Make sure music actually plays.
rm -rf (gulp) the iTunes music library from the macbook, freeing up a few dozen GB; upgrade it to OS X 10.6 from whatever
old thing it was running, and turn it over to the little boy.
Copy all the personal stuff (WoW, Second Life, collection of handcrafted Carol Cleveland desktop backgrounds, etc) from the old broken PowerPro machine, onto the Alienware machine.
Struggle mightily to get Lotus Notes and Rational Team Concert and OpenVPN and stuff like that working on the perfectly respectable Lenovo™ Thinkpad™, and all the relevant data copied over from the broken PowerPro machine and everything probably mostly apparently working (although I'm still afraid I may be about to accidentally regress some files in the source tree next time I check stuff in, and parts of Notes seem to think they are version 6 or even 4, when the rest is version 8).
Result:
One decently working macbook running OS X 10.5, with 2GB of memory, for the little boy to run stuff on.
One perfectly respectable Lenovo™ Thinkpad™ with work stuff on it.
One fancy glowing purple Alienware machine with personal stuff on it.
A pile of broken and/or obsolete laptop computers and pieces thereof to be filed away for later spare-parts scavenging and (in the case of the hard drives) "oh, I bet that's still on the old hard disk that's in..." moments.
Whew!
I am proud that that eventually all worked, and disturbed that after all these years it's still so hard to do.
One thing that makes me sad is that I'm now Macless for the first time in years; I like Macs. But one makes sacrifices for one's children. *8) ]]>
So is "gringo" offensive?
On NPR yesterday or sometime, they were doing their usual "listener comments" bit, and apparently they got quite a few outraged letters from listeners about a piece where a Hispanic woman expressed how she'd felt relief on finding out that the shooter in Arizona wasn't Hispanic, and used the word "gringo" more than once to say what it turned out he actually was.
I don't feel particularly offended by "gringo", or "honkey" or "haole". I especially don't feel offended when they're used apparently without malice, but really I'm not all that offended even if there's some possible malice in the use. I mean, the malice may be offputting, but the choice of word doesn't bother me personally.
On the other hand, I am bothered when people use malicious words for members of various other groups. I don't know if this is just because it bothers me more when someone is mean to someone else and perhaps causes injury, than when someone tries and fails to be mean to me, or if there'something subtler behind it.
One possible narrative that might lie behind not being offended by "gringo" is a narrative that I don't think I want to participate in. This narrative says that "gringo" isn't offensive because it's used by comparatively powerless groups against comparatively powerful ones, and when comparatively powerless groups try to do things like that, it's not important. Because those groups, being powerless, can say whatever they want and who really cares after all.
That's not a nice narrative. People in general matter, and what people in one group do shouldn't matter, just because of what group it is, more or less than what people in some other group do.
Which means that, if this narrative is salient here, I ought to mind that the Hispanic woman used the word "gringo", to the extent that some people found it offensive, or had their feelings hurt, or felt disrespected. Because, if I don't mind, I may be saying that what the Hispanic woman does isn't important, in the way that a white person using an ethnic slur in casual conversation would be.
Whether or not that narrative is in fact salient here I haven't decided. But I thought I'd write it down...
I am sitting and typing this in the music school waiting room while the little boy is in there having a make-up lesson because of snow or something. I am typing on the fancy new laptop (alluded to previously), and various children have admired the alien heads and glowing purple keyboard. Also I am on the Interwebs via an unsecured router called "netgear", which one hopes belongs to the music school for the use of its patrons; or perhaps I am just hijacking bandwidth from some careless neighbor. Or alternately I am communicating through some subtle and clever malicious proxy-network, which is watching me use the 'net and hoping to catch some credit card numbers or something going by. In which case it is out of luck.
My usual Jehovah's Witness friend came by this morning, as usual. We are still working our way through their little "What does the Bible really teach?" book (although my friend knows that I am not actually at the stage of caring greatly what the Bible really teaches, 'cause I think it is just some words written by people, like all th' other books).
Today we finished up the How to Make Your Family Life Happy chapter, which is full of fine advice about love and respect and all, and also significant amounts of pernicious stuff about how the husband is the head of the wife, which I gave him a certain amount of trouble about. His attitude is that well yeah but this is what God wants; from my point of view on the other hand this is just more evidence that the book was written by some dudes a long time ago, writing down what they thought at the time. But we are both nice people, so as usual we parted amicably.
I wonder what happens after we finish the book?
Speaking of books, I've done some more browsing around the web, and as I somewhat suspected last time pretty much everyone but Idries Shah describes the Sufi as a relatively straightforward mystical (i.e. stressing direct experience of the Godhead rather than books and institutions) branch of Islam, rather than an eternal secret society of adepts who will say whatever is necessary at any given time or place to further some mysterious ultimate goal.
Of course maybe that's just What They Want Us To Think!
*8) ]]>
Reading anything and everything in Sufism is like reading all kinds of books on different subjects without the necessary basis. It is a calamity, and, like indiscriminate medication, may make a man worse than before he started.
Hadrat Bahaudin Naqshband, from Idries Shah, "The Way of the Sufi"
So now I've finished "The Way of the Sufi", mentioned th' other day in our last entry.
The rest of it was less annoying, being small (mostly very very small) stories and paragraphs and aphorisms attributed to various persons. I do wonder how accurately the selections represent the larger body of writings that make up Sufi literature under various definitions, and how much is the stuff that best reinforces the collector's particular outlook; but that's inevitable (if, as it turns out, extremely germane).
The basic premise seems to be that, in all times and cultures, there have been people in possession of a higher sort of knowledge, and these people have worked, largely behind the scenes, to generally raise the level of human beings toward this higher sort of knowledge, because this is the "next step" in the purpose of humanity. Because people and cultures and places differ, these people have done different things, and taught different things, in different times and places, as appropriate. But most people are still far, far (far) from the higher sort of knowledge.
Two major themes in all this are worth special blathering about, I think:
Both of these positions are self-disrecommending in interesting ways.
The first seems clearly to imply that we can't ever know if we've actually found the higher knowledge. Someone who hasn't attained the higher knowledge can fool himself into thinking that he has, of course, but more remarkably it would seem that even someone who does have the higher Sufi knowledge can never actually know that he has it.
Why not? Well, since people are so good at fooling themselves, both the deluded ordinary person and the true Sufi think "ah, I have had these experiences, and I have this knowledge, and I have had these teachers, and I am a member of these associations of the wise, and from this I conclude that in fact I am a true Sufi, and have the higher knowledge."
The deluded ordinary person believes this falsely. The true Sufi believes it and is correct, but his evidence is exactly the same as the evidence that the delude ordinary person has.
Since the true Sufi believes the same thing, on the same evidence, as the deluded ordinary person, and the deluded ordinary person is mistaken, the evidence must not be sufficient to justify the belief, and therefore the true Sufi cannot be said to know (since his evidence is insufficient).
(This analysis is based on a simple notion of knowledge as justified true belief, which is of course known to be insufficient; but the same argument could be made, albeit with even more words, with for instance Nozick's Tracking Theory of knowledge, which is pretty good.)
Which is to say, the true Sufi, being honest with himself, would say "I believe that I am a true Sufi because I have this-and-such knowledge and belong to this-and-such Circle of the Wise, and have experiences this-and-such states; but that is exactly what the deluded ordinary person thinks; yow!".
And that's kind of fun. *8)
To get out of this quandry, we would have to have some agreed-upon criterion for some thing that the true Sufi can actually do with this higher knowledge that he has (attain inner peace, show great compassion, project laser-beams from his eyes, levitate goats, or whatnot); but at least the bits of Sufism that we get from Shah here don't tell us anything like that. So it's a problem.
The second theme above is one that also shows up in the Buddhist notion of Skillful Means, at least as it figures in say the Lotus Sutra. In both of these cases, what seem to be contradictions in doctrine, or critical differences between teachings that a sect says are both authoritative, are explained by saying "oh yeah, the Wise always say whatever it's best to say at the time, and that can be different, and even apparently contradictory, on different occasions".
The problem here is that once you've said this, you might as well give up, really. Anything else someone says after saying this might as well be random character-strings.
Language works, really, only because we can assume that in general people try to say what is true (modulo mutually-understood exceptions like fiction and metaphor), with only the occasional rare exception, in the form of lies that we have social measures to detect and deter.
But as soon as you say "I say whatever I think will have the best effect on the hearer at the time", or as soon as you praise someone else who says that, you're out of the language club.
So when in the Lotus Sutra the Buddha says "oh yeah, I talked about escaping suffering back then, because that's all that you were ready for, but the real truth is that you can become immortal Buddhas!", the natural response is "uh-huh, and why should I believe you this time?".
And when the Sufi teacher sends a questioner away with some simplistic answer, and when questioned by a disciple says "oh yeah, it wasn't exactly true, but that's all that he was ready for", the disciple will of course think "wow, I guess I can't believe anything the teacher says to me, either; I sure hope he knows what he's doing."
So just what is the greater knowledge, and just what is the aim toward which the Sufi have been secretly working all these millenia? Well, we don't know. And anything they say about it can't be trusted (or at least can't be trusted to be true), because by their own admission they say whatever will best futher the aim at the time.
For instance, if the ultimate aim of Sufism were (just as an example) for all of humanity to worship the rat-god Floon by getting themselves into certain esoteric mental states and then squeaking loudly, they presumably wouldn't tell us this, but might speak about (for instance) higher and purer forms of knowledge instead; and they wouldn't feel any guilt about this, because they aren't players of the language-game, but instead do whatever will most hasten the Great Day of Floon.
Less comically, whatever a Sufi writer writes about the ultimate aims of Sufism, and just what is "higher" about the higher knowledge, can't be taken at face value since, again, they are committed to saying whatever will most "help" the hearer, rather than whatever is true.
Which makes it tough, as a hearer, to decide in the first place whether or not one actually wants the help, or whether the Sufis and their higher knowledge are not something one is especially interested in after all. Can't tell, because by their own description the speech of the Sufi teachers is basically marketing, not truth-telling.
Which sounds a bit harsh put that way *8), but that's where I ended up after reading this.
It's easy to make a simple "Sufi is to Islam as Zen is to Buddhism" sort of analogy, but I don't think it quite flies. Zen does make some statements (obscure and somewhat paradoxical as they admittedly are) about what the end-goal is, and this attitude that the teachers work in secret to push the world in a certain unspecified direction, by saying whatever seems likely to work at the time, is pretty much absent.
So that's me blathering about "The Way of the Sufi" tonight. *8) If anyone has any other sources to recommend that might not have this air of self-disrecommendation, and any explicators who might not annoy me like Shah, I would as always be appreciative.
And Happy Boxing Day!
Good boxes to all. ]]>
Part One, at least: "The Study of Sufism in the West". It's all about how everyone (else) in the West who's studied the subject has gotten it all wrong, and that Sufi ideas are really behind everything that's ever happened, but people writing books often overlook this fact. The subtext (which, for a subtext, really bashes the reader over the head) is that finally Idries Shah, who is much smarter and more learned than anyone else, is coming along to give us the real story.
And that kind of thing always annoys me. *8)
But anyway, Hi! I do still exist! And here is a kitten-picture:
Mia is attempting to lick the bottom of my empty coffeecup. Is that not adorable? I have suggested to M that we should take "videos" of the kitten and put them onto the "you tube", where they would be sure to "go viral" (which, as I understand it, leads inevitably to wealth).
Many things have been happening, as usual. The secret Second Life weblog records some of the virtual ones. In World of Warcraft, Spennix is now level 82, and can fly at the maximum possible speed everywhere in the world (good that I never splurged on that Kirin Tor ring, and therefore had enough to buy all the newly-available flying training!). Which is to say, we got ourselves the Cataclysm expansion for Solstice. *8)
Much (much) less taking time off to lie about doing nothing than at most Solsticetimes; more on that when it is all behind me and I can look at it from a distance and get a better view of it. M and family are all fine, the little girl is home from school for the holidays, the little boy is in the prestigious Jazz Ensemble at school, and all is wonderful on that front. And modern psychopharmacology continues to keep me well-supplied with neurotransmitters in the right places, and therefore a functioning member of society, which is also good.
I can't decide whether my tendency to fall asleep in the afternoon unless I drink a certain amount of coffee is a caffeine-addiction thing or a growing-up thing; possibly it's a distinction without a difference (as they say).
I've just read, and highly recommend, the EPR paper, in which Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen first pointed out how weird quantum entanglement would be as a theoretical thing; not clear to me whether they thought it was possible in actual practice.
(Note that no I don't follow all the math, but one doesn't really have to. Understanding all of the non-math bits is good brain-exercise. The use of external sources is permitted. Please use blue or black ink.)
Read a piece about recent developments in quantum entanglement in Science News, and am now more of a fan of decoherence theories, as they are apparently more "putting some math behind the Many Worlds Interpretation" (which seems right) than they are "making the weirdness go away by magic" (which seems wrong, and was my first impression of how decoherence ideas were being used).
I have a free 14-day membership in EVE online, which has lovely graphics, but as far as I can tell incredibly complex and tedious gameplay, which is I'm sure great fun if you're willing to like devote your entire life to it.
Oh! And the reason I have a free 14-day membership in EVE online is that I checked the box to have it preloaded at no charge onto my new fancy laptop.
"Now wait," my long-time readers are remarking to themselves, "he just got a fancy new laptop a bit over a year ago! Is this not profligacy?"
Well, it may in fact be profligacy, but here we are. Last year's fancy new laptop has, sadly, proven to be something of a lemon; the CPU and GPU and other techy parts were as promised, but the rest of it turns out to be make of clarinet reeds and Scotch tape (as we say in these parts). Both of the hinges holding on the display have cracked right through, the keyboard has a mind of its own (which mind enjoys making up random keystrokes, usually involving disastrous control and function keys, and is generally reluctant to notice the "d" key), and the place where my left wrist rests is basically wearing away.
(Even as I've been typing this log entry, the keyboard has twice suddenly exited from the editor, through what series of keystrokes I can't offhand imagine; fortunately they result in save-and-exit, rather than abandon-and-exit.)
The folks at Power Notebooks continue to be nice and personable, but also hold fast to the opinion that both hinges cracking right through after a year is "wear and tear" and therefore "out of warrantee"; the fancy extra three-year warrantee that I bought from them apparently only applies if you don't ever open the computer.
Would have been nice if they'd mentioned that in advance.
But so anyway! In a moment of weakness, after the laptop had for the N-dozenth time decided to type Escape and then Enter while I was in the middle of composing some work email, which key combination causes the mail to be sent even though I am in the middle of typing a sentence, I thought "to heck with it" and went to the Alienware site, and now have a computer with roughly the same performance characteristics as the maddening laptop, and also alien heads and a purple glowing keyboard and stuff. And a large and mostly-reputable company behind it, which I hope reduces the probability of having a lemon without recourse.
("A Lemon Without Recourse" woul be a good name for a novel or something, wouldn't it? Feel free.)
Which reminds me I also didn't do a NaNoWriMo novel this year; just too much going on. I did reread Strangers (aka "Shore Leave"), the 2008 one; it's actually not bad. *8)
Considering.
So there I am (here I am) writing in my weblog! That is unusual! I may or may not do it again sometime soon; One Can Never Tell. It feels good to be doing it again; on the other hand it is always Hard To Find The Time.
And belated Happy Solstice!
Did ya see the eclipse? I saw the Web version. ]]>
Our Thursday entry got mentioned on popular geek site Reddit (thanks, Sean!), resulting in a massvie traffic spike (I expect; I haven't been saving and analyzing traffic logs for a few years now), and comparatively lots of reader comments.
A few selected ones, from the comment box and the Reddit thread:
I wish you all could have been at the code review meeting I was at today. My god. It's almost like it came straight from the meeting...
I carried on scrolling, got to "as nifty as virgins", realised my life is essentially meaningless and closed the tab.
This should be required reading for all programmers.
Story of our lives.
poopoo
Hey I'm not sure your colors are as user friendly as they could be
I just wanted to express my appreciation for your September 2 post - even though it hurt a bit to hear my coworker ask "what's so bad about it?"
omg++
slots = SEVEN made me literally lol
2010-09-02 kicks ass
well hello! Nice blog you've got here
(Other popular responses included several "Hi!" or "Hello" or "Howdy" or "Hey, there!", one "dog", one "daugther" and one "sims" (probably related to sims), and one perhaps rather overly familiar "hi fatso!".)
Condolences and congratulations to the reader who acheived enlightenment on reading "as nifty as virgins"; glad to have been of service.
The user commenting on the imperfect user-friendliness of the color scheme is invited to try out the alternate stylesheets available from the tiny selection box at the bottom of the page, or alternately to harden up.
The Reddit comment thread is pretty interesting reading, as things about software development go. A couple of people there articulated an important principle that I think we forget alot (and that I've been encountering a bit at work, and that partly led to my posting in the first place although not at a consciously spelled out level): it turns out that in many cases it's not actually efficient to design software in such a way that it can easily be made to do lots of things that you don't need it to yet, because most likely you will never need it to do those things. Either you will never need it to do anymore than you do today (if it turns out not to have a future), or you will need it to do some different set of things that you didn't anticipate when you were first writing it.
So you will have either wasted effort writing general code that will never need to generalize, or you will have wasted effort writing general code that is general in the wrong way, and that is probably harder to generalize in the way that you actually turn out to need than it would have been if you hadn't done the original generalization at all.
(The XP meme for this is YAGNI, or You ain't gonna need it.)
Which isn't to say that you should never generalize anything; just that it's far too easy to overestimate the future benefits of generalization when weighing them against the present cost in code complexity and development time.
In email, a reader who I suspect got there from Reddit and then scrolled downward, writes:
i read your post about jehovah's witnesses and virgins.
here's the clearest explanation i've found of what "virgin" actually means
http://mordochai.tripod.com/virgin.html#top
although some claim that virgin means "young girl", they don't understand Hebrew law from 2000 years ago.
I replied that that's fine for talking about the words used to describe Mary, but since Revelation was (probably) written in Greek rather than Hebrew, and it uses the relatively unambiguous "parthenos" for "virgin" (whence the English "parthenogenesis"), and includes also the helpful "not defiled by women" bit, there's not much doubt about the intent.
Unless of course you think it's a metaphor. *8)
And finally, a picture of a kitten!
]]>
s = 7
"We're allowed to have multi-character variable names now, you know."
slots = 7
"Okayyy... Isn't that 7 sort of hard-coded?"
SEVEN = 7 ... slots = SEVEN
"Very funny."
SLOTS_PER_WIDGET = 7 ... slots = SLOTS_PER_WIDGET
"Getting there."
import widgetConstants ... slots = widgetConstants.SLOTS_PER_WIDGET
"Okay, that's..."
widgetModelFactory = WidgetModelFactory.getInstance() widgetModel = widgetModelFactory.getWidgetModel() slots = widgetModel.getSlotsPerWidget()
"Sure, okay, that's..."
context = Context.getCurrentContext() serviceDirectoryFactory = ServiceDirectoryFactory.getServiceDirectory(context) serviceDirectory = serviceDirectoryFactory.getServiceDirectory(context) serviceDescriptor = ServiceDescriptorFactory.getDescriptor("widgetModelFactory") widgetModelFactoryServiceLocator = serviceDirectory.getServiceLocator(serviceDescriptor,context) widgetModelFactory = (WidgetModelFactory)widgetModelFactoryServiceLocator.findService(context) widgetModel = widgetModelFactory.getWidgetModel(context) slots = widgetModel.getSlotsPerWidget()
"I'm not sure you've really got this whole Object-Oriented thing down quite right..."
slots = thisWidget.getSlotCount()
"Thank you." ]]>
"Is that a little sensitive?"
"Yeah, if you STICK A SHARP METAL THING INTO IT, it is."
"I see. Well, you'll need two onlays, which will cost eight hundred dollars more than whatever your insurance is willing to pay, and you'll have to come back four more times."
"..."
"Teach you to get fresh with me, boy."
That's not exactly how it went, but that's always how I come away feeling...
So these friendly Jehovah's Witnesses were talking to me about Bible stuff the other week, and for some reason that I forget at the moment we read Revelation chapter 14, where it talks about the hundred forty and four thousand, and how "These are they which were not defiled with women; for they are virgins".
And rather casually they said "of course, that's a metaphor" (because in their story various married persons and all are member of that set).
Now, come on.
That's really specific and explicit.
It doesn't say "as pure as virgins" or "like virgins" or "as nifty as virgins", it says "they are virgins" and in particular that they "were not defiled with women."
If we can say that that's a metaphor, we can say that anything's a metaphor.
I mean, I can say that my theory that the Universe was created, and is ruled, by a committee of eighty-seven radishes named Fred, is perfectly Biblical, and where it talks about there being One God, that's just a metaphor for the wonderful consensus that exists among the Committee of Freds. And where it talks about Jesus being made in God's image, that doesn't mean that Jesus was actually a committee of radishes, it just means that he was as awesome as a committee of radishes.
It's a metaphor.
What else?
The little daughter (who I think I mentioned is apparently twenty years old) now has a driver's license! This is utterly terrifying, and also extremely convenient. She drove us all to a fancy restaurant last night or sometime to celebrate.
The kitten is still alternating between sleeping and pouncing anything that moves. M says she is much bigger than when we first got her, and M is always right about stuff like that (and, objectively, the kitten can no longer fit entirely into my sandal). On the other hand she (the kitten) still seems very smallish and kittenish to me, and I can still easily hold her in the air above my head in one hand for extended periods of time.
She makes the cutest baffled little faces when I do that, too.
(We have a million kitten pictures in the camera, but who can be bothered to extract them, y'know?)
I have a new little art gallery in SL, and I'm playing with ideas for a build for Burn2, wherein I have reserved a plot to build stuff on, which should be fun.
I want to write about partial-reserve banking sometime, because a couple of times now I've heard people decrying it as The Source Of All Evil, and this seems weird to me, or at least worth writing about in my weblog.
But I don't think I'll write that tonight.
Here is Full Metal Disney, which is pretty funny.
Oh, and speaking of YouTube, my Second Life self has his or her very own YouTube channel ("channel"), where I have thrown a couple of trippy Thingmaker videos. So now I am a certified XXIst Century Person, 'cause I have a youtube channel!
Also, the dentist has just sent me a Facebook Friend Request.
Shudder. ]]>
It's Just Like The Old Days, in that there are eight of us in the house, and we're on the eastern shore of Linekin Bay. We're just a tad closer to the head of the Bay than the house that we started doing this in, all those years ago. It's a very nice house, with huge open windows, lots of light, and a good wireless internet connection projected from the studio up the hill a bit where the owners live.
The main difference from the Old Days is probably how enormous the children are. The little daughter is twenty now, which is just absurd, and the other children are older roughly in proportion.
We've been doing a whole lot of nothing this year; I think everyone is tired. I've been calling into daily phonecalls at work to help The Project with my sage advice, and doing the very occasional checkin. While that sounds like it might be annoying and stressful, I actually finds it helps with the relaxing, because I don't have to worry that I am out of touch and not keeping up with things and all. This way I know that I am, and I can nap and play WoW and log into Second Life and read cheap paperback and eat lobster with a clear mind.
(Although the Buddhas of all the millenia still don't really approve of the lobsters, I don't think, given the method of preparation. The flesh is weak!)
It rained significantly yesterday (so I got a bit wet on my phonecall, because the place where I can most reliably get an intelligible cellphone signal is out on the little lawn, between the side door to the house and the steps down to the dock; and we got quite wet dashing into and out of the restaurant for lunch). Today it is sunnier and gorgeouser. (I am writing this on let's see Thursday; I vaguely think it's been clear a bit, cloudy a bit, and raining for one day, but durn if I can recall the details.)
Haven't gone to Wiscasset (except to pass through it on the way in), or the sand beach, or any lighthouses, or out on any boats. I have, though, taken a (very brisk and bracing, one might even say incredibly farking cold) dip in the Bay, and the kids even did the same (well, three of them) later the same day. This house has a wonderful advantage in that area, because it has a "hot tub" of all things, and one can get into that when one emerges, chilly-fleshed, from the sea.
Napping down on the floating dock is great, too.
Also unlike in the Old Days, M has an "iPad" device with her which can pinpoint our location within like ten feet, and show a startlingly clear image of the roof of the house on the screen. Which is a bit frightening. And everyone has their "cellular phones", and I have this computer of course, with which I can even get to the Rational Team Concert repository at work and do checkins.
We have gone into Boothbay a time or two for the shops and icecream, and into the tiny East Boothbay a couple of times (once for lunch and once for dinner; eating and mailing letters being pretty much the only activities supported by the town). In Boothbay proper I did my usual sweep through the Used Book Sale at the Library (twenty-five cents per book for the books on the porch; I got eight!).
In roughly descending order of size: "Exons, Introns, and Talking Genes: the Science Behind the Human Genome Project", which I might actually read at some point; "The Select" by F. Paul Wilson, a "medical cliffhanger" of the kind that one is vaguely surprised ever came out in hardcover; the February 15, 1982 issue of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, for obvious reasons; "Blue Champagne", a collection of short stories by John Varley that I might possible not have already read; "Where the Dark Streets Go" by Dorothy Salisbury Davis, a paperback murder mystery; "Give the Boys a Great Big Hand", by Ed McBain, a (wait for it) paperback murder mystery; "clarion II", edited by Robin Scott Wilson, "An Anthology of Speculative Fiction and Criticism", which I've finished, and really wasn't all that impressed by; and finally John Creasey's "The Toff and the Great Illusion", a paperback murder mmystery, which I've also finished and was fun and just what one would expect.
What else what else? Another largish difference from the Old Days is that I have well-controlled clinical despression, whatever the heck that is. I don't know how much of an effect that has on the experience of being up here, of listening to the seagulls and waves, of resting and thinking. Quite likely some, quite likely not very much.
(Also I still can't smell, which is downright annoying, because I'd like to be able to smell the sea and the wind and the coffee; I really ought to try to get that fixed...)
All sorts of things have of course been happening unreported, because I have not been writing here in the log much (as usual, it feels very good to be doing so again). I actually got the energy and organization up to go to the Second Life Community Convention and interact in person with actual other people in large bunches, which was quite a trip. It is, of course, written up more or less in detail or not in the secret Second Life weblog.
And I did mention the kitten. *8) She is at home, being cared for by the very kind and cat-experienced next-door neighbors.
It is lovely sitting and looking out over the Bay, admiring the various anchored boats, the occasional prosperous-looking people motoring out from the town dock to fiddle with their boats, arrange things, sometimes even raise a sail and sail off somewhere. Everything seems so well-groomed, neatly-arranged well attended-to. I have little daydreaming fantasies that I am the Lord of the Manor for the entire Bay, overseeing the boats and docks and shops and restaurants and houses, with the inhabitants coming to me now and then to help resolve their little disputes, their endearing uncertainties.
This is a very dangerous sort of place, it occurs to me, for people in actual power to spend significant time. But I'm afraid that they do, many of them. Hanging out on docks and at golf course restaurants and urban hotels where everything is neat and well-ordered and seen to, and everyone seems prosperous and content.
It's all too easy, spending time in that sort of place, to come to feel that what life is about is maintaining that sort of place, improving it, caring about it. And that other kinds of places, and the people in them, are just sort of unfortunate side-shows, things that one might make gestures toward, even work toward aiding, but not really in the center of one's concern, not something one thinks about very often. Because, well, that is there and this is here.
I also brought a number of books, and the latest New York Times Book Review, and some random magazines, from home. But I won't list those. M, on the other hand, has probably several dozen or several hundred books in her iPad, and thousands more available upon whim.
Which is pretty weird.
There is vague discussion of going out and doing things, if only we can get a few more of the kids to get out of bed. I will stop writing for now, probably write more later, and then eventually post this so that you can read it. Won't that be nostalgic?
So we went into town (into Boothbay) again, for reasons that slip my mind, and had seafood for lunch, and then went walking about, off to the antique (antiques?) store to find a thankyou present for one of the kitten-sitters, and the icecream store for icecream (I had an extra-thick chocolate and banana "frappe" (which is New Englandish for "shake") mmmmmm), and then we went to Enchantments.
Enchantments is this big crowded New Age and Water Pipes ("For Use With Tobacco Only") store that's been sitting there in Boothbay forever, where I've bought all sorts of inneresting books and things in past years (various of them mentioned here in the annual editions of the weblog). It is great fun.
This year I bought two books ("Sitting", by Diana St. Ruth; and "Blame it on the Buddhists", by Martin E. Segal) and one CD ("Bamboo", by Kazu Matsui, featuring Keiko Matsui on piano), bought because it sounded nice and cost less than twenty dollars and "Keiko Matsui" reminded me vaguely of someone in Second Life.
And now the little daughter and I have sat on the dock for awhile, putting our feet into the water and me reading my various books, and us both taking pictures of things and of each other; and that was nice.
Now there is discussion of dinner, and apple pies, and maybe going for swim in the Bay again.
The swim in the Bay was utterly delicious, the tide far ebbed, the water shallow enough, just barely, to stand, close to the dock, on one's tiptoes, and bring up interesting stones and shells from the bottom. It was cold, but not too cold, and I paddled around for some time (M's sister's husband for a bit less time, the little boy for not much time at all, having a higher surface-to-volume ratio or for other reasons).
Then the little boy and I soaked in the hot tub for awhile and that was omg idyllic also, lolling in hundred-degree (F) water, looking lazily out at the lengthening shadows of the deck chairs on the grass of the little yard, listening to the voices of people talking inside, watching the clouds moving, boats moving on the water here and there.
And now I am sitting with a glass of dark red wine, showered, in my nightshirt, writing this and watching people bustling around in the kitchen with ideas about apple pie.
And that is also very nice.
I wanna hold 'em like they do in Texas, please!
Now we have been sitting around while the apple pies bake (apparently there are two of them), being extremely gender-normative: the females have been doing crafts and reading and discussing things, and the men have been playing poker.
Poker is kind of fun! I was winning most of the time (due to having good "hands"), until the nephew (who seems suspiciously familiar with the game) went "all in" on the final "hand", and surged into the lead.
The last hand was interesting and random, being five-card draw with two draw rounds, deuces and one-eyed jacks wild, no round-the-corner straights, as chosen by the nephew, who was dealing, as a fittingly weird final hand. (Myself, I am very fond of round-the-corner straights.) He won the hand with five queens; our second five-queen hand of the night (the previous one being mine, on I think it was a hand of seven-card "play what you're dealt", deuces and likely some other stuff wild).
There was some discussion as to whether a wild card can legally be used as another card that is already in one's hand, as is required to get five-of-a-kind; we decided that house rules would allow it tonight, whatever the Global Consensus on the subject is.
The fun thing about poker (at least the poker we were playing) is that each hand is different, because the dealer gets to mix and match any of the relatively large stock of available rules each time. We didn't actually play any loball, or hi-lo, or anaconda, but it's nice knowing that the dealer could have chosen them on a whim.
(I haven't been able to find on the Web a standard term for my favorite quick hand: everyone gets seven cards, face down, and makes the best possible hand from them, using whatever wild cards the dealer has seen fit to declare, with a single round of betting and no fancy-pants "draws" or "flops" or "rivers". A game for men with mustaches! If any readers know its name, send the information along; assuming and of the sending-along mechanisms still function.)
And now I might go into Second Life and work on ideas for my Burn2 build, having splurged on a site reservation with some money what I made scripting and stuff. I might write more tomorrow, even though it will technically be Friday, and I will probably date this entry Thursday for narrative and bookkeeping purposes. I know you won't mind. *8)
Friday was again lovely, in weather and also in relaxing sorts of things. We had pancakes for breakfast, and I did my morning work call (things seem to be coming along pretty well without me, somehow), and then drove my kids and the little nephew out to Popham Beach, where there is actual sand and surf and beach-like stuff like that.
We spent a few hours there; the tide was high so we just hung around on the narrowish strip of sand and went in the water now and then. When the tide's low, as it's been other years when we visited, you can walk across the sandbars and play in the tidepools and wade out to a rocky island and things. But it was fun just getting chilly in the surf also.
And now we've more or less packed and I'm staying up too late writing this, and tomorrow we will drive home and I will probably post it then.
It will be good to be home.
P.S. Home safe! *8) ]]>
Can I hear an "awwwwwwwwwwwww"? *8)
In much more minor news, our narrator in Le diable au corps has, at the age of twelve, sent a love-letter to a classmate, and then there is some rather obscure stuff, in French, that I have not yet figured out.
And this spam made me smile for some reason, so I am sharing it. The original was like triple-spaced (and I have slightly obfuscated contact details, names, etc).
Acme Trading Services
4th Floor, Atlantic House 4-8 Circular Road ,
Douglas, IM99 2BB Isle of Man, UK .
Tel: +44-[redacted]
Fax: +44-[redacted]
We wish to confirm you with full cooperate responsibility that we are end seller ready, willing and able to transact and sell the commodities, with the following specifications, terms and condition.
Sales and purchases will be based on the following procedures: The product is used Train Rail Scrap with the specification of R50 & R65 as confirmed to the ISRI codes.
Manufactured in Russia & Ukraine . The origin is South Africa & Nigeria.
Quantity: 360,000 MT (Three Hundred and Sixty Thousand Metric Tons) Contract period: Twelve Months. Price: USD $ 130 per Metric Ton FOB.
Payment Terms: should be Standard Bank Letter of Credit (SBLC) or Bank Guarantee (BG)
Chemical Composition: International Standard as follows:
R50.67kg/m COST 7173-75
C:0. 67-0.8%
Mn:0. 75-1.05%
Si:0. 13-0.28%
P: max. 0.035%
S: max. 0.045%
Ar: max. 0.15%R65-64.72kg/m COST 8165-75
C: 0.6-0.082%
N: 0.75-1.05%
Si: 0.13-0.28%
P: max. 0.035%
S: max. 0.045%
Ar: max. 0.15
Please confirm if you are willing to close down the contract as to enable us schedule and arrange for your urgent trip to Africa for inspections of the material and signing of the contract.
Finally, be informed that upon your acceptance to this offer, you will be provided with all the related documents for your perusals before coming down to Africa for the signing of the contract.
For more detail and proceeds Contact person:
Engr. Nzuma Edwin
Email: engredwin@atlas.cz
engrnzuma7@live.comYours Faithfully
Asher Serah
Acme Trading ServicesDisclaimer and confidentiality note: everything in this e-mail and any attachments relating to the official business of Amce Trading Services to the customer is confidential, legally provided and protected by law. Atlas Trading Services does not own and endorse any other content other than the information enclosed on this email. Views and opinions are those of the sender. The person addressed in the e-mail is the sole authorized recipient. Please notify the sender immediately if it has mistakenly sent to you. Do not disclose or use the content in any way. Atlas Trading Services cannot guarantee that the confidentiality of this communication has been maintained or that it is free of errors, virus, interception or interference.
If anyone needs a few thousand metric tons of used Train Rail Scrap, drop me a line and I'll forward the actual details... ]]>
This must be, I reflected to myself on getting out of the car yesterday at the Bagel Store to buy bagels and feeling the heat beating down, what is it like much of the time in places where much of the time it is like this.
Whew!
Anyway, I have this book. I took it, on impulse, from the Book Exchange rack down in the lobby at The Lab, because it was thin, and had an attractive cover. I did realize also that it was in French, and that nearly stopped me from taking it, but at the last moment something whispered "be brave!" into my ear.
I sort of vaguely but not really speak French. Where by "speak" I mean "can read", and by "sort of vaguely but not really" I mean that I took it for a number of years in High School, and then took the placement test my freshman year of college and got placed into French 1, and then took it enough in college to satisfy the language requirement, and then stopped.
French has many many words!
This book, which is in French, is called "Le diable au corps", which I take to mean "The devil in the body" or perhaps "The devil in the corps" (Marine Corps, that sort of thing). It is by Raymond Radiguet, and it is a roman, which I remember is French for "novel". The back of the book says that Raymond Radiguet est l'auteur de deux romans (two novels): this one here (qui connut un succèss considérable), and also Le bal du comte d'Orgel (which perhaps didn't connut so much succèss, since the book doesn't say).
I liked the first sentence of the blurb about the book itself on the back, because I could mostly make sense of it, and it sounded plausible.
Ah! que la guerre est jolie quand on a 15 ans et que l'on aime !
which I take to mean more or less
Ah, how pretty war is when you're fifteen years old, and in love!
or perhaps
Ah, how pretty war is when you're fifteen years old, and someone loves you!
or possibly even
Ah, how pretty war is when you're fifteen years old, and how you love it!
hm or come to think of it...
Ah, how pretty war is when you're fifteen years old, and how it loves you!
which choice of translations gives you a reasonable idea of my abilities in French.
I've read about half a page of the book so far, and I am enjoying it very much. Here is my current couple of paragraphs; they are lovely!
Je n'ai jamais été un rêveur. Ce qui semble rêve au autres, plus crédule, me paraissait à moi aussi réel que le fromage au chat, malgré la cloche de verre. Pourtant la cloche existe.
La cloche se cassant, le chat en profite, même si ce sont ses maîtres qui la cassent et s'y coupent les mains.
Isn't that great? Currently I'm reading it as something like:
I have never been a dreamer. What seems dreamlike to others, more credulous, seems to me as real as cat-cheese, or a bag of water. Because the bag exists.
The bag closes, the cat profits, whether or not their masters close them, or clap their hands.
Cat-cheese or a bag of water!
Of course I somewhat doubt that that's what it actually says; but the experience of reading it that way is very enjoyable. It's like being in an odd half-understood waking dream, where the cat profits and its master claps his hands (or perhaps strikes him, or something).
The next paragraph seems to be about how the narrator had a girlfriend called Carmen when he was twelve, which is also promising. No sign of the cat yet... ]]>