Category Archives: Uncategorized

Shirt Tails

In response to Weekend Wordsmith:

Shirt tails
23 November, 2007

A butterfly,
far up in the ice blue sky,
swooping and jigging
with the unreliable winds.

Diving headlong to self destruction,
lacking a tail to steer it
through the hostile currents.

Daddy, understanding that, to us,
the needs of the kite
outweighed his sense of fashion,
hauled in the disobedient mariposa,
and, surveying the situation,
took decisive action.

Shredding his shirt
and forging an indelible memory,
he tied a tail
and relaunched the now-rock-steady kite
back into the wind
where it danced elegantly,
master of the wind, and
not mastered by it.

So always did he give of himself
for my stability,
and thus, ballasted by a
tail of my father’s shirts,
have I held my keel
through the storms of my days.

Fortune

In response to Weekend Wordsmith:

Fortune
November 24, 2007

You can wait your whole life
for your fortune.
Most people do, or so it seems,
waiting and working and wishing,
while the days and weeks
turn into your whole life,
slipping over the spillway
and into the sea of regret.

Fortune lies, I think, in seeing
what is here, now.
And although I could be wrong,
I think I’d rather
fool myself now
than reach the end
and realize the joys I missed
because I was focused on
a different goal.

Deleted Wikipedia articles

At least 5 times in the last week, I have found a Wikipedia article via Google, but then when I’ve gone there, the article has been deleted by some officious do-gooder who thought that the article wasn’t important enough to consume that valuable 2k of disk space.

I’m getting profoundly irritated with the self-important snobs who go through Wikipedia removing useful information in the name of … what? I don’t really understand their rationale. But whatever their rationale, they have succeeded in making this resource far less useful than it otherwise would be. It’s high time that either they are thrown out of their position of power, or an alternate site be created for those “less important” articles which, it seems, are what I find myself looking for practically every time I use Wikipedia.

Can someone please reign them in?

Vegas

In light of the two poems Ruth linked to (One, Two (scroll down to “To An Old Black Woman”) I got thinking about the old Hispanic woman I saw handing out stripper cards on the street in Las Vegas, when I was there for ApacheCon several years ago.

I think about her quite frequently. What she must have thought when she moved to the USA in search of a better life. How disappointed she must be with the life she has found. The profound shame of having to hand out advertisements for whores in order to feed herself and her family for one more day.

Perhaps her story isn’t that bleak. But there are millions of people, all over the world, who gave up their simple existence to go to the promise of something better, and just haven’t found it.

She is the one I think of every time I think of Las Vegas. It’s an interesting place to visit, once, but one has to wonder how much suffering all that glitz is built on top of. I have no desire to go there again.

Vegas
Nov 20, 2007

Someone’s mother,
possibly someone’s grandmother,
come across the border
for the promise of a new life,
better schools for the kids,
a safe place to grow old.

She remembers the farm,
the warm kitchen,
the shouts of the children
and the sounds of the
men returning from the fields.

She remembers leaving that
for something so much better.

If only she could have it back.
If only.

She stands beneath the garish lights,
hears the incessant bells from the casino,
holds out the hated cards
to one more young white man.
$69 for a private show.

Her eyes downcast,
she remembers how proud her family was of her.

Sync with rsync

I’ve been looking for a simple (and free) utility to sync a directory on OS X (say, /home/rbowen for example) with an external drive (say, my iPod, for example) for the purpose of backup. I found a variety of things on the Intarweb, but they all had one (or perhaps both) of two shortcomings. Either they were non-free, or they weren’t able to exclude directories from the backup.

Suddenly I discovered that I was, as usual, making a simple problem much more difficult than it needs to be. We have rsync. Why make it harder?

#!/bin/sh
rsync -av –delete –exclude-from=/etc/exclude /home/rbowen/Documents /Volumes/iPod/Data
rsync -av –delete –exclude-from=/etc/exclude /home/rbowen/devel/docs /Volumes/iPod/Data

Simple, no?

So, I plug in the ipod, run this shell script, and I have an up-to-date backup of these two important directories. And since rsync only copies files that are different, it’s amazingly fast, after the first time.

Twitter, take two

While I’m still not sure that I’ll ever use Twitter on a regular basis, it seems that it’s amazingly useful for a conference, or other event where a bunch of people are in close proximity to one another, and it’s useful to know where each one of them are – say, what talk they are attending, where they’re going for dinner, what they think of the keynote. Of course, even then, it’s only useful if everyone updates it regularly.

It turned out to be quite handy during ApacheCon, but I expect that I’ll stop using it pretty quickly now that I’m back in the real world. You know, unless everyone at work suddenly started using it, in which case it might actually become a useful work tool, and replace the department-wide “I’m going over to a meeting” kinds of messages.

ApacheCon Lightning Talks

Last night at ApacheCon, Fitz and Ted hosted the Lightning Talks, which are always a lot of fun.

I did the “Rewrite your configuration file” talk that I did in Amsterdam. Quite a few people had already seen it there, but it was still well received. And I had fun, which is what really matters. 😉

However, as usual, it really doesn’t work without the visuals, so I’m going to post up the slides somewhere soon, so that you can follow along. Warning to my non-geek readers, this has a geek rating of 9.

If you did a lightning talk last night and want an MP3 of your talk, come see me. I’m editing them right now, and should have them all done in the next hour.