Category Archives: Uncategorized

TV B Gone

We got a TV B Gone. We went down to Walmart, stood in the electronics section, and pressed the button. TVs started winking off on the enormous wall-o-TVs, randomly, one by one. It was wonderful.

Can’t wait to try it out at the next restaurant we go to for a quiet evening.

The Song

The Song
10-Aug-2008
Via Three Word Wednesday

The rumble of the generator,
unnoticed for its ubiquity,
suddenly ceased, leaving a palpable
silence, my ears full of cattails and kapok,
the pitch well of the night suddenly
towering above me, my hands invisible
before my face.

And as my stunned eyes, long dazzled
by the shriek of the city,
recovered, a miracle
burst forth overhead.
A million, trillion stars,
unnoticed in the fluorescent cacophony,
turned the sky into a spilled puddle of milk,
understanding for the first time
the Via Lactea – the Milky Way –
unseen by most of us in this over-enlightened age.

Down by the river
the bullfrog adjusts his harmony
to compensate for the missing generator,
and the song goes on.

Croissants

From the Weekend Wordsmith


Croissants
August 9, 2008

Flour, some water,
butter – mustn’t forget butter,
real butter, not oil or margarine,
but butter –
these are the ingredients
for a memory.
A little Nutella for sweetness,
a café au lait to wash it down,
and the Paris sky
warming our faces and our hearts.

A trip to the mountains

I wrote the following blog post in 1999, and never published it, because I never got around to finishing writing it. So most of this post is 9 years old, and the last 3 paragraphs were written this afternoon. It’s kind of disconnected ramblings, because I figure if I wait until I make it into a coherent narrative, it’ll probably be another 10 years before I publish it.

—-

The summer before coming to college, I had an adventure.

We flew from Nairobi to Kigali, landing in one of the smallest international airports I’ve ever been in. Mom and Dad were going to some conference or other, and Andy and I went on from there to further adventures.

Rwanda is probably the most beautiful country I’ve ever been in. We drove for hours through virgin jungle. Folks make remarks about how I should be used to jungle, having grown up in Africa. In reality, this was probably the first actual jungle I had ever encountered. It was amazingly green – eye-jarringly green, and *so* beautiful.

When we crossed into Zaire, a sign on the wall in the customs office declared “Do Not Insult The Crocodile Before Crossing The Nile.” Sage advice, there.

We drove to the hospital where Andy’s highschool roommate’s family worked, way out in the middle of nowhere. Several incidents have imprinted themselves on my memory.

As we were driving the 50-some miles into Zaire, which took us 3 hours or so, we encountered a landrover plastered with various advertiser stickers. Since we hadn’t see any other cars for quite some time, we stopped to chat. This character was driving from Cape to Cairo. He had previously driven from North Pole to Tierra Del Fuego, and this was the second leg of his journey. He was doing a story of some kind for National Geographic.

A little later, we came to a bridge. Actually, it would be more accurate to call it a former bridge. A large steel skeleton spanned the river, but there was no road. The boards that made the road had all been borrowed. Fortunately, we arrived there right behind a bus. Upon arriving at the bridge, everyone got out fo the bus, unloaded boards from the roof of the bus, and built a road across the bridge, and drove across. They let us drive across, for a fee. They then collected the boards, reloaded the bus, and drove on.

At one point, we came to a little town with the road passing through the middle of town. The town itself was about 10 feet lower than the road surface. The road had been resurfaced sufficiently many times that it had grown to this height above the rest of the town. I remember that we stopped here to buy a 5-kilo bag of sugar, which cost 10,000 z (the local currency at that time, the zaire).

While we were at the hospital, a long-awaited shipment arrived. It was a railroad container on the back of a flat-bed truck. The guys driving the truck wanted to leave immediately, and had no way to unload the container from the back of the truck. The solution to this was to lash one end of the container to the side of a building, drive the truck out from under it, and then put truck jacks under the other end, so that the truck could drive away.

This left the container suspended in the air, with truck jacks on one end, and roped to a building on the other end. And, due to the way that it had been loaded onto the truck, the doors were flat against the side of the building. I don’t remember if we ever heard how they solved this particular dilemma. It was still hanging in the air when we left.

We (Andy and I) spent 2 weeks out there at this bush hospital in the middle of nowhere. One of the days, we built a dam in the little stream nearby. That was fun. And I remember that when the generator went out in the evening, it was dark as soot.

One day, Phil took us out to see the airstrip. After hunting around for a bit, he found the place where the airstrip had been a few weeks before. It was overgrown with full-sized trees. Apparently it’s so fertile there that this was enough time to make the airstrip unusable.

Towards the end of our visit, we took a hike up into the mountains. We drove as far as we could go, then got out and hiked for a while. I remember Phil’s brother saying “We’re almost there. I remember that herd of cows.”

Eventually, we got to a teensy cabin, which was our destination. Although there was no running water or electricity, it was still quite comfortable, with cots, and a loft with more sleeping space.

In the morning, being Sunday, we had a makeshift church service using the one book in the cabin, which was an ancient methodist hymnal. There were four of us, and we taught ourselves “Come Thou Almighty King” in four parts. Every time I hear that song, I remember that morning, singing to the cows (and to God) on the top of a hill with the thick forest all around us.

The four of us have moved on to other things, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen Phil or his brother since that summer, although I expect my brother has. This was twenty years ago now, and it’s still so clear and recent in my mind, when so many other memories have faded.

Dion

I found out today that Dion Gillard is having some rather serious medical problems. I’ve thought quite often lately about the aging of the population of the Apache Software Foundation. We’re not 21 any more, although there’s a steady supply of new participants that arrive for the party every day.

Dion has been around since almost the beginning, having been part of the Jakarta project since it started. I’ve only met him a few times, although I’m sure we’ve attended the same conferences for years.

Dion, our prayers are with you as you struggle against this. As you said, positive attitude is everything, and, hey, you helped make Jakarta happen, so you’re practically guaranteed to succeed! 🙂

Mark Read

Bloglines has updated their UI again, on the beta site. One of the changes is that each posting now has this new “Mark Read” control on it:

When you click it, it turns from that grey color to a very pale blue color, indicating that it’s marked read.

In other words, if you have any color blindness, or if you are just not looking very closely, it looks like every article is already marked read on initial page load, and that when you click it to mark it unread, it doesn’t change at all.

Who thought that this was a good idea?

Waiting

For the Weekend Wordsmith.
Yes, I’m several months behind.

Waiting
August 8, 2008

We watch them waiting
for so many things that will come
too soon.
Waiting for school, for summer, for school again.
Waiting for the weekend, the trip to the zoo,
that package to arrive.

While we wait for things that may not
come at all.

All those years that I waited,
now irretrievable,
opportunities frittered away
while sitting at the red light
without the foresight
to take another road.

Cake

After many years of saying “I really should take a look at CakePHP”, I’m finally doing something useful in it. And it’s marvelous.

What’s fascinating to me about shiny new technology like this (new to me, that is) is that I’m almost always reluctant to get started, and I’m almost always thrust into it by a co-worker who says that it’s the way to go, and starts doing stuff in it. This was the case with Apache, Perl, mod_perl, POE, PHP, AJAX, and now Cake.

Also, as usual, I am incapable of learning anything in it until I’m doing an actual useful project in it. I can’t just work through the tutorial, or make up a project. It has to be something that’s important to me, and is at least a little interesting.

And, as usual, my reaction here is, why the heck didn’t I jump into this years ago. Can you imagine the time and pain it would have saved me?

For those of you who don’t know, CakePHP is an MVC framework. Which is to say, it’s just like Ruby on Rails, or Catalyst, or any of a dozen other frameworks out there.

And for those of you who aren’t geeks, when we say “framework” it means “someone else did the boring work for me so that I can focus on the interesting part of the project.”

As it turns out, with most web applications, 90% of the work is doing the stuff that you’ve already done before on every other web application that you’ve ever written. Database connections, getting data, creating data, updating data, deleting data, asking the user if they’re sure they want to delete the data, etc, etc, etc. Very boring. Cake (and other frameworks) do that stuff for you, so that you can focus on the actual business logic of the application – that is, the things that make this web app different from the last 28 that you’ve already written.

iPod Touch 2.0

Despite my misgivings, I upgraded my ipod touch to the 2.0 firmware, and have been nothing but impressed. They’ve addressed almost everything that made me regret having switched from Palm.

It even, finally, actually syncs the calendar categories from iCal, and keeps the colors assigned to each category – something that always seemed pretty obvious to me, but which it has never done before, and Palm never even attempted to do.

So, to the iPod/iPhone firmware team, a hearty thank you.

Now, the only thing that seems to be lacking is desktop-side conduits to sync stuff from the iPod onto the desktop, like, say, note entries.

I remember some Linux Palm sync thingy that let you write sync conduits in Perl, but I can’t remember what it was called. That was a while ago.