I grew up loving airports, and loving flying. Airports used to be a place of wonder, with the stores, the planes, the exotic people. My brother and I used to copy down the various airline logos, and I used to have quite a collection of stickers from the various countries I’d visited.

In early September, 2001 – must have been either the 1st or the 8th, since it was a Saturday, I took S up to the observation deck at the Lexington airport and we watched the planes come in and go out. We didn’t have a ticket to go anywhere, but she loved watching the planes, and in those days you didn’t need a ticket to go through security up to the gates.

I remember going to the gate to welcome folks getting off the plane. I even remember going out to the plane to greet people getting off. That wasn’t so very long ago.

And I felt so much safer those days.

But I also remember that, at the same time, there were highly publicized hijackings and plane bombings, so it’s not as though terrorism didn’t exist then, or even that I was unaware of it. Airline terrorism has been something I’ve been aware of for as long as I can remember.

You just understood that it was statistically improbable that it was going to happen to you, or anyone you knew.

Now, I dread flying, and I feel very unsafe. I don’t feel that there is a higher chance that I’ll be affected by any terrorist incident – it’s not that at all. It’s that I have to be subjected to the indignity of the “security” process. I know that my laptop and recording gear is going to be scrutinized and roughly handled by people who assume that it’s a weapon. I know that if I packed too much shampoo, it’s going to be taken from me. I know that my wife will be ogled, and that my kids may be touched in ways that I’ve specifically taught them to resist loudly and violently.

Air travel used to be about adventure. My father always dressed in his best to travel, because it was something of an event. Also, he taught me, if you dress respectably when you travel, you’ll be treated with extra dignity. This is no longer the case.

You can read rants against the new TSA regulations elsewhere. I don’t have anything to add. But it makes me sad to have lost something that was such an integral part of my childhood – the love of flying and of travel in general. This isn’t something new that suddenly happened this month. This has been happening gradually and inexorably since the first post-9-11 flight I took in October of 2001.

Mr. Bush famously made a lot of silly remarks shortly after the 9-11 event about if we gave up our freedoms then the terrorists would have won. We then embarked on the last 9 years of jettisoning our freedoms as fast as we’re able. I’ve seen the Franklin quote (you know the one about liberty and safety, you’ve heard it too) thousands of times in the last 9 years, yet we continue to lose more and more liberties in exchange for less and less safety, and we, as a nation, become more and more accepting of what we’ve already lost in the face of each new insult. The freedom to travel unhindered was one of the core principles that irritated that John Adams guy sufficiently to get behind the revolution.

Quite clearly, by Mr. Bush’s logic, the terrorists have won, and by Mr. Franklin’s, we don’t deserve liberty or safety.

Oh, and I’ll be driving the next time I have to go anywhere where it’s at all feasible. I hope that doesn’t require pat-downs any time soon.

I am appalled that this would happen at what I have for years thought of as MY conference.

I’m appalled that this would happen within the Apache Software Foundation, which, I realize, has a long way to go towards equality, but which seems largely composed of pretty good people.

I’m appalled at the huge number of people making statements that sound like it was somehow Noirin’s fault, as though being young, attractive, outgoing and vibrant are sufficient reasons to attempt to rape someone. I thought that the “she asked for it” mindset belonged to ignorant, uneducated, old-world minds, but apparently it’s still a fairly common sentiment even in the supposedly enlightened world of software engineers.

I’m appalled at the folks stepping up to defend the creep who was unable to act like a gentleman, unable to keep his libido in check even when told very firmly that she wasn’t interested. I am confident that there was no room for confusion. Noirin isn’t known for being half-hearted in expressing her opinion.

I’m deeply saddened that not only is this not the first time that this has happened to her, but that it has happened in this same kind of setting – technology conferences, where the attendees are presumably educated, intelligent people.

Noirin is a board member of the Apache Software Foundation. She is a colleague on the httpd documentation project. She is the chair of the conference committee. She is every bit as important a member of the Apache community as anyone else – more than many. And yet, somehow, certain people look at her as nothing more than a skirt.

This is completely unacceptable. And yet, I find that I don’t really know what to do to prevent it. Sure, I speak out when men (or, rather, juvenile boys) speak this way about her, or other women. But beyond that, I’m at a loss to know how to combat this kind of ignorance and self-centered piggishness.

Please, men in the Open Source world (and elsewhere, of course), I beg you to speak out, call out men who are being pigs, tell them it’s not ok to treat women like nothing more than a pin-up. This kind of thing can’t continue. Every time this happens, it demonstrates that we are, as Ray Bradbury observed, too soon from the cave, too far from the stars.

I can’t think about anything else today, and I’m sad, outraged, angry, and embarrassed.

Dear Jacob,

Thanks for your performance at the concert this evening.

This evening, my son, who, just last night, stomped upstairs, wailing at the injustice of having to practice the stupid, stupid cello, sat next to you and watched you play. I watched him intently following your every bow stroke, as though you were a rock star. Which, of course, you are. I watched you gently and patiently show him how to play the few notes he needed, how to sit, how to hold his bow.

As we walked back to the car, he told us how much fun he had, and how he had sat next to the most amazing cello player in the whole world. He said that you had been playing cello since fourth grade, just like him, and so you’d been playing for eight whole years! He said that he can’t wait until next year, when he gets to play the harder parts, and that he wants to keep playing the cello, although a few days ago he wanted to switch to some other instrument as soon as possible.

Now, I have no doubt that next week, he’ll once again wail about how unfair it is that he has to practice, but tonight he got a glimpse of where he can be in a few years with patience and perseverance.

I’ve watched you at other concerts give the same kind of patient attention to other kids, and I can’t help but imagine that you’ll be a great teacher and leader in the coming years, whether or not you choose that as your profession.

So, thank you, and the best of luck as you graduate and move on to bigger things. I appreciate your attention to the ones that come after you, and hope that my son will follow in your footsteps.

My daughter and wife went together to get me a Kindle for my birthday.

I love it.

I’ve been reading e-books for many years, but it’s always been a frustrating experience. I used some reader on my Visor, and then on my Palm, and contributed quite a lot of content to MemoWare in those years. But reading for any length of time on the Palm was very taxing to the eyes, and after about an hour I couldn’t focus very well on what I was reading. The resolution wasn’t good enough, and the light was hard on the eyes. And the power didn’t last very long anyways.

Things are better on the iPod Touch, but there, too, the light is not conducive to extended reading. The eyes get very tired. And the screen size is another problem – each “page” is only one or two paragraphs, and this is very disruptive to the flow. I’ve been using the Kindle iPhone app for the last month or so, and have read quite a bit on it, but never very long at a stretch.

When the Kindle first came out, I was reluctant to go that route because of the book purchase model. It’s still annoying to me that I can buy a book, and then not be able to share that book with a friend, loan it or sell it, or even give it to my wife. But we are very quickly running out of places to put new book shelving, and I’ve got to get my book problem under control.

The Kindle is practically a magical device, because it’s so obvious – there’s really no question about how to use it – and because it’s just one thing. It’s a reader. It doesn’t (yet) attempt to be a browser/cell phone/game device/music player/tv. Although I do notice that it is trying to become almost all of those things, so hopefully they don’t mess up a good thing.

The other great draw of the Kindle is that I have access to all 33,000 books on Gutenberg, and any other non-copyright-encumbered content that I can find or create.

And the display is wonderful. Almost no glare. Works well in high and low light conditions. The letters look like printed letters. I can read for hours without any eye strain. It weighs almost nothing.

And right now, in something the size of a very thin paperback book, I have The Count of Monte Cristo, Treasure Island, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Lovecraft’s complete works, Poe’s complete works, A Christmas Carol, The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Princess and the Goblin, Macbeth, At the Back of the North Wind, The Man Who Was Thursday, Orthodoxy, Our Mutual Friend, Barnaby Rudge, the Bible, and the New Oxford American Dictionary.

That’s at least five shelf-feet of books right there, and should keep me busy for the rest of the year.

I’m a little miffed at how expensive the (non-free) e-books tend to be. I rather expected that they would be a small percentage of the cost of the paper book, rather than almost the same price, or, in some cases, more. And it seems that an awful lot of books just aren’t available at all. I expect this will change, but I expected it to change faster than it has done.

Meanwhile, however, I’m greatly enjoying reading The Count of Monte Cristo on it – a book that I’ve wanted to read for a long time, but which, due to its size, discouraged me from taking it on a plane with me, where I do a large percentage of my reading.

I used the term “tribal knowledge” at work earlier this week, and folks didn’t know what I meant. It’s a term that we used to use around the office all the time at several of my past jobs, and I thought it was common jargon, but apparently not.

Tribal knowledge is when everyone knows stuff, so you don’t need to write it down. Everyone just knows. And when you don’t know, you know who to ask, right?

So, if you want to know where the good fishing holes are, you ask Uncle Joe, and he’ll show you where they are. You could ask Ron, but he hasn’t been fishing in a while, and there was that storm last month, and it knocked some trees down, so you can’t be sure.

If you want to know about fixing your car, you ask Frieda, because she’s always tinkering with cars, and she knows all about them. But she’s a bit secretive, and she’ll probably prefer to just fix it for you than to tell you how to fix it.

If you need a new watch, Vinnie can get you one – he knows this guy – but you can’t get them yourself, because that might tip off The Man, and then the supply would dry up.

Thus, over time, it turns out that nobody knows anything, and in order to get anything done, you have to know who to ask to find out who to ask, and all the wisdom of the tribe is squirreled away in these secret repositories of hidden knowledge. Of course, when Frieda moved to Chicago, nobody could fix their car any more, and when Uncle Joe got eaten by that alligator nobody knew where the fish were biting.

And it’s the same way when little bits of knowledge aren’t captured in any kind of documentation at work. Some people do this because they enjoy the power of being The One Who Knows, and others do it because they think it’s job security, but most people do it because … well, they just don’t think of it. There’s so many things to do, and writing down that the creamer is kept in the cabinet on the far left just isn’t important. After all, everyone knows, right? And if you don’t, you can ask Bertha where it is.

Documentation is not wasted time. Documenting processes is an investment in future productivity – possibly even your own, because you’ll forget. Code comments today save hours of work next week. Documenting the arguments that are passed to a function will save me having to search through dozens of source files to find examples of how it is called.

Tribal Knowledge is a very damaging thing to your project and your company, because people leave. They move on to other jobs. They get assigned to other projects. And, even more often, they just forget. The half-life of unused knowledge is awfully short. And then someone else has to become The Expert, and pretty soon they find that they’re the one that gets the annoying phone calls at 5:16pm, on their way to their daughter’s orchestra concert, to explain how to insert the flywheel onto the grommet. So write it down. Put it in the wiki. Tell everyone where the information is, and encourage them to put their information there too.

This evening I attended a scout pack meeting where they retired the colors. This is a ceremony where a flag that has come to the end of its life is disposed of with honor. The process is to cut it into strips and then put the strips on a blazing fire. I learned a few things about the flag code in the process.

One is that a flag ceases to be a flag as soon as it is cut, and so what is placed on the fire isn’t a flag any more.

Also, the blue part of the flag is never cut, because it represents the unity of the fifty states, and so should never be cut apart.

I spent almost all day yesterday and today working on painting my son’s room. You can see the fruits of my labor here.

I’m a little disappointed with the Apache. I think by that time I was just so tired that I didn’t have the same attention to detail. I’m very pleased with the mustang and the piper, and the airliner is pretty awesome, too.

My Beloved has painted several murals around the house, and this has somewhat raised the bar when it comes to painting the kids’ rooms.

A while back I sketched up a few ideas for Z’s room, and I finally got started on it. It’s going to be blue on top, and green on the bottom, with various things on the various walls. The wall I’ve started on is airplanes, and if you squint just right, you can see two of my initial sketches here.

So far I’ve drawn a P52 Mustang, a A64 Apache, a Piper Cub, a Sopwith Camel, a Cessna 172 that I drew from memory and so isn’t particularly accurate, and a view from the front of some kind of commercial jet coming off of the runway.

Later today, I plan to start painting them. I’d like to get the Mustang and the Cessna done, so that we can put up a shelf across the top of the wall.

More pictures as it becomes more recognizable.

Meanwhile, we also repainted S’s room, to match her new quilt that my Beloved made for her. It looks awesome.