Category Archives: Uncategorized

Newspapers

For reasons I haven’t yet determined, I started getting the newspaper 2 weeks ago, and it has been arriving every morning on my front door step. From there, it has been moved to the woodpile. So far, I haven’t even taken any of them out of the plastic wrappers.

The Herald (mis-)Leader is not exactly the pinnacle of journalism, but I suppose it’s not any worse than most small city newspapers. They don’t make any pretence of being politically balanced, so at least their leanings aren’t decieving. Their coverage of world events tends to fall in the “What?! There are other countries?!” arena, and their coverage of local events seems often to be from a perspective of power and privilege. Which, I suppose, it probably is.

I suppose I should read a few of the newspapers they have sent me. Perhaps my opinion of them is from another time, before the purchase, before the new editorial staff, before the dawn of clue. I don’t know. I do know that Joel Pett still does editorial cartoons for them, and manages to offend nearly everyone as often as possible, without being at all enlightening in the process.

So, for now, the newspapers go from doorstep to woodpile, and, perhaps when I have time I’ll look at one a little more carefully.

Meanwhile, I really hope that I’m not costing any delivery guy his job because I’m getting someone else’s paper. That would be tragic.

Reading to third graders

Yesterday I got to go to Sarah’s class and tell them about Kenya. I took various artifacts, including my rungu and spear, and talked a little about growing up in Kenya, and in what ways things are different there from here.

I read them When Africa Was Home, which is a wonderful book about what it’s like for a kid who has to move from one culture to another – in this case, from Malawi to America – and back again. I love this book because in a small way it’s about me.

Kids ask the funniest questions. One kid asked how people cut their fingernails in Africa. I’m not sure what thought process went into that question, but I talked about how most of the time one can get the same stuff in Africa, although it might be a different brand, or work differently.

In all the years that I’ve done these “what is Africa like” talk, there’s one consistent question that I always get. “Did you get to ride an elephant?” So now, the first time when I can actually say “Yes, but not in Africa”, nobody asked it. It was very disappointing. 😉

Rails and mysql timeouts

Dear LazyWeb, I could use some help. I feel like I’m asking the wrong questions, and need some nudges in the right direction.

noodl has been very helpful, I think, but his suggestions appear to be answering the question I’m asking, rather than the one I mean. I think.

We have Mongrel + Rails + Apache + proxy_balancer on Server Q out in the DMZ. Mysql is running on Server Z, inside. There’s a firewall rule to allow Q to talk to Z on the mysql port. So far so good.

After N minutes, the firewall times out idle connections between Q and Z. N is configurable, of course, but that doesn’t fix anything, because people go home over the weekend, and N will eventually be reached. So increasing N postpones the problem, but doesn’t fix it.

The problem is thus. After the N minute timeout is reached, the connections to mysql drop. Subsequent requests to the Rails application do not result in the database connection being reestablished, as expected. (At least, it’s what I expected, but perhaps I need to adjust my expectations.) Requests to Rails after this point result in an extended wait period, followed eventually by a proxy timeout. The only way to reestablish the mysql connections (that we’ve found) is to restart the mongrel cluster.

Functions put in a before_filter to reconnect do not seem to be getting called. Indeed, the before_filter doesn’t even seem to be reached. It’s as though the hangup is happening in some stage before the before_filter – Rails is trying to contact the database, and is waiting indefinitely for a response.

Placing a reconnect in the before_filter works, and reconnects, as long as the mysql connection is up. (Not useful, but interesting.) However, after N minutes are allowed to expire, and the connections drop, that code does not appear to be getting invoked at all.

So it’s entirely possible that I’m asking the wrong questions, but my hope is that one of my knowledgeable readers will see this post and immediately say, Oh, sure, that’s the well-known problem that is solved like *this*, and *here* is the question you really should have been asking.

Please? 🙂

GeoCrashing

Jenn has discovered a new form of extreme geocaching, GeoCrashing!.

I haven’t been caching in a long time, and now my GPS is not cooperating. Perhaps I can find a way to get a new one some time soon. The trouble is that I have acquired rather expensive tastes in GPSes, and probably wouldn’t be satisfied with one that I could afford right now. So I’ll wait a little longer.

Expostulation and Reply

Expostulation and Reply, by William Wordsworth.

I was reminded of this while watching something about Benedict this morning, and about his urging that we observe what is around us, and learn from it, as much as from the things that we read and study. One of the Benedictine monks in the video made the simple, but profound observation, “If you miss this moment, you miss your life.”

At the same time, I’m fascinated by the notion that books are “the spirit breathed from dead men to their kind.”

“WHY, William, on that old grey stone,
Thus for the length of half a day,
Why, William, sit you thus alone,
And dream your time away?

“Where are your books?–that light bequeathed
To Beings else forlorn and blind!
Up! up! and drink the spirit breathed
From dead men to their kind.

“You look round on your Mother Earth,
As if she for no purpose bore you;
As if you were her first-born birth,
And none had lived before you!”

One morning thus, by Esthwaite lake,
When life was sweet, I knew not why,
To me my good friend Matthew spake,
And thus I made reply:

“The eye–it cannot choose but see;
We cannot bid the ear be still;
Our bodies feel, where’er they be,
Against or with our will.

“Nor less I deem that there are Powers
Which of themselves our minds impress;
That we can feed this mind of ours
In a wise passiveness.

“Think you, ‘mid all this mighty sum
Of things for ever speaking,
That nothing of itself will come,
But we must still be seeking?

“–Then ask not wherefore, here, alone,
Conversing as I may,
I sit upon this old grey stone,
And dream my time away,”

Books on tape and reading aloud

In the high and far off times, oh my best beloved, various persons read books to me.

My parents read the Narnia books to us kids at home, and Mr. Bruce read The Hobbit to us in class. I think that these two, more than any others, ignited my love of books, and in particular of that genre of fantasy that Mr. Lewis and Mr. Tolkien were particularly good at.

There were many, many other books that were read to me, but those are the ones that I most remember.

I read to my daughter, every night. We’ve gone through The Little Princess, The Secret Garden, and are almost done with the last of the Narnia books. And of course there have been many other books – the Junie B Jones books, the Boxcar Children, and the Magic Treehouse feature many times.

And I listen to audio books every day on the way to work. I have a membership at Audible.com, and get a book from them every month. When that runs out, there are numerous free podcasts of stories that I listen to. Some of these are from the Old Time Radio Podcast Network, which is one of the websites that restores my faith in the original goals of the Internet, or at least my interpretation of them.

I was discussing all of this with a coworker, who said that he doesn’t feel that he’s actually read a book if he’s listened to it. I can agree with that at some level, with some books, depending on who did the recording/reading.

There are some books that I simply wouldn’t ever get through if I couldn’t listen to them. Some of this is due to time, and some of it is due to the difficulty of certain books. Anna Karenina just about killed me, but I got through the entire thing, reading it the old fashioned way on paper. But that was an act of sheer willpower. There are some books, however, that when read in a different voice, can hold my attention a little better, and I can get through them. I made it through a number of Anne Rice books this way, which I really don’t think I could have done otherwise.

I still do read a lot on paper, too. At the moment, I’m reading Eldaterra, The Abolition of Man, and Montessori, a modern approach, among a few other things. I’m reading the Just So Stories for the umpty billionth time, and recording it for your listening pleasure. 🙂

I love reading aloud. I love reading to kids (if they actually listen) and, for some reason, I love reading and recording, with the notion that other folks are listening and enjoying, particularly when it is stories that I love so much, like the Just So Stories, or A Christmas Carol. I’d like to also do some readings from Dandelion Wine, but there’s the trouble of copyright there.

Anyways, nothing much profound to say about this. Curious what folks feel about the validity of claiming to have “read” a book, when one has only listened. I guess that once a year or so has passed, I no longer remember whether I read or listened, unless the reader was spectacularly bad, or spectacularly good. For example, I listened to “The Man Who Was Thursday”, which was just awful, because the guy reading it either didn’t get the story, or had a head cold, or … I don’t know. Anyways, when I read it (on paper) it was brilliant, and a lot of fun.