After a little more reflection, and particularly after reading Ken’s comments, I’m still feeling a little distanced from what happened, but I can certainly see that this is more than just the death of some people I didn’t know.

Indeed, every man’s death diminishes me. Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee. And in that sense, I tend to feel much more affected by the horrible disasters that happen in Africa every day and are a bullet point, or not even mentioned at all, in the western press. On the day that the WTC fell, killing more than 3000 people in the worst disaster on US soil, more than 5000 people died in gas line explosions, and subsequent fires, in Nigeria. One was not worse than the other at the time, but one has clearly had wider repurcussions in the lives of every living human being.

So when a space vehicle crashes, what are those wider repurcussions? Last week, I was doing Apache training, and one of my students was connected with NASA via her work, and she remained confident that the space program will not lose funding, and will not lose steam. Accidents happen, and this is not the end of the line. Finding out why it happened, and not letting it get in the way of future discovery, is the goal of the moment, as evidenced by the detail being given to going through the evidence even at this very moment.

The death of one individual is not more tragic, or less tragic, than the death of another. Every time an individual dies, be it spectuacularly, or quietly at home, we are all affected in some way, and those close to the person will grieve whether the person was a prince or a pauper. But some events, like this one, are genuinely tragedies of national, and perhaps international scale, because of the lasting effects that they will have on policy, discovery, and our future.

Ken, thanks for your comments, and for putting things into a sensible perspective.

We went to Gatti Town last night, to celebrate Sarah’s 5th birthday. What an awesome place! I had never been there before, and it was a blast, as long as I could suppress thoughts about how darned expensive it was. Sarah, having misheard me the first time I mentioned the place, then insisted on calling it “Daddy Town” the rest of the evening, much to my delight. They had a truck simulator, and let me tell you, there’s nothing quite like driving a 18-wheeler with a 5-year-old! Also, she never quite got the notion that, in the taxi game, we were supposed to stop and pick up the passengers, not run them over.

Two thumbs up to Gatti Town!

Just a few quick comments before I fall into bed.

I just got back from the Pikeville Professional Linux Group, where I gave an “Intro to Apache” talk for their Sunday afternoon meeting. Of course, to get there, I had to drive about 3.5 hours each way. And by some strange trick of geography, it was all uphill, both directions.

Most of the trip was on the Mountain Parkway, which was beautiful on the way there, and terrifying on the way back, by which time it was pitch dark and snowing.

To add to the fun, I ran out of gas on the way back. At least, my gas gauge fell as far below E as I have ever seen it, and seemed to be trying to go through the pin at the bottom end of the scale. But, since this was way up in the hills of Eastern Kentucky, there was not a gas station, or a town, to be had for many miles. Somehow, I managed to go more than 20 miles after I was sure I would run dry, and found an exit for Campton. I still had to go about 6 miles from the exit to find a gas store that was open. I was absolutely convinced that I would be stuck in the middle of nowhere, with no idea where I was. But I made it. I always thought that my gas tank was 15 gallons, but I put 17 gallons of gas in it. Very unnerving.

Pikeville, which is roughly 100 miles east of Lexington, has a really impressive technology center, where I gave the presentation. The room that I was in had a 6×8 screen at the front of the room. That is, a 6 foot by 8 foot monitor, into which I plugged my laptop. It was very impressive. The turnout was a little disappointing, but several of the folks that were to come were sick with the flu.

I’m glad I agreed to go do this, but now I am utterly exhausted.

Yesterday, the space shuttle Columbia broke into pieces as it approached for landing, at a height of about 200,000 yards above Texas, raining debris over a huge area of land. I mention this purely so that there is a historical reference to it in my journal. However, at the risk of seeming unfeeling, as the newspapers trumpet the idea that the whole world is in mourning, I find myself earnestly wishing for a life so simple and idyllic that I could find it in me to mourn a vehicle crash killing 7 people I don’t know. Yes, obviously the implications are wider than that. Their families. The space program. The people in the path of the debris. But, the same day, there was an explosion in Lagos that killed between 25 and 50 people, and this seems no more remote to me than the shuttle accident.

As often happens when I am upset about something, I did not actually eat anything yesterday. And, about the time when I was going to do so, the gentlemen from the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints showed up, and stayed for a little more than an hour. I should probably write something about that visit, but I need to get to work. Perhaps later.

After they left, I wrote one recipe for the Apache Cookbook. One. That’s the sum of my accomplishments for this week. And so, somehow, in the next 48 hours, I need to accomplish something useful, and hopefully meet a few of the deadlines that I’m supposed to be working towards.

Meanwhile, I am very hungry, and don’t feel particularly great. I might end up having to skip this evening’s festivities, just so that I can get done a few of the things that have been left undone in the hell of this week.

At the SuperBowl-watching-event, I took my LCD projector, which we looked up to provide a big-screen version of the action. We also got the wireless network going, and hooked up my laptop to the projector, so that we could switch back and forth between the action and the stats on the web site, or various other web sites.

I’d like to mention, for posterity, that Dexter Jackson was the first Safety to win SuperBowl MVP, and that he was chosen based in part on the overwhelming number of votes he received via the web.

On a somewhat unrelated note, I’d also like to mention that SuperBowl.com is running Apache 1.3.22 and mod_perl 1.26 on some Unix variant – possibly Linux.

And, finally (of course completely unrelated) I’d like to note that their web site was very happily able to handle 30 or 40 requests per second without any noticeable slowdown.

There’s a new wine store in Nicholasville. Frankly, it seems entirely too nice and upclass to be downtown Nicholasville. I wish them much success. I went in there yesterday, and was very very impressed, both with the store itself, as well as the staff, who are very knowledgeable. They were doing a Yalumba wine taststing (Oxford Landing, I believe it was) in honor of Australia’s Founders Day. The chard was great – fruity, bright, and easy on the oak. The Shiraz was even better, although it could stand to stay in the cellar for another year or two. Huge nose. Berries and plums and leather. Lots of tannins and earthy flavors. Yummy.

The flight out of Lexington was delayed, and my time in Cincinatti, already painfully tight, was reduced to about 3 minutes. I arrived at the gate after they had already closed the door, but as the plane door was still open, they let me on.

And so I’m on my way to JFK, using my wonderful new ElectroVaya 16-hour laptop battery. I’m really happy with it. Although it was very expensive, it’s cheaper than 3 laptop batteries, which is about how long it lasts. Except for my laptop batteries, which seem to last about 10 minutes on a good day. When I’m using 802.11, it seems to last about 6 hours. When I’m not, I seem to be getting about 10 hours out of it. So it’s not *really* 16, although I suppose if I did console only, no sound, no network, I could probably get that much out of it.

In other news, the Magical Vhosts thingy that I posted a few weeks ago only works for one vhost. So it’s not much good. The fix is pretty simple. Instead of:

$VirtualHost{‘*’} = { … etc

I have

push @{$VirtualHost{‘*’}}, { … etc

This should have been obvious to start with, but, alas, I did not actually test it. Well, I tested it with one vhost, but not with more than one. And having it work for one vhost is not terribly useful.

Hopefully, the guy on IRC who was frantically trying to get this working will still be online this evening, or tomorrow morning, or some time, so that he does not get fired for not getting this working. I had to get on the plane, and so did not have a chance to tell him my solution, which I really just arrived at just now, at 5000 feet or so.

Heading out to Linux World Expo this afternoon. In New York City. In the dead of winter. Ick. Anyways, hopefully it won’t be too terrible, and there will be a few training leads that come out of it. (Shameless self-promotion!)

My goal for this trip is to get my GPG key signed by John “Mad dog” Hall.

Oh, yeah, and to get my presentation written before it is time to give it. 😉

I went to Joseph Beth this evening, knowing that if I stayed home, I would be distracted by IRC and get nothing written. As it turned out, Robert Jordan was there, signing his new book. And so were all the Robert Jordan fans in the state of Kentucky. Every one of them. And they were all waiting for him to sign their copy. Every 10 minutes or so, the Uber-Loud announcer would announce the next letter in the alphabet, and there would be a mad rush of frenzied fans around the store trying to get in line. Meanwhile, the rest of the fans, realizing that they would be waiting until sunrise to get their book signed, moped dejectedly around, pretending to be interested in the latest edition of Car and Driver, or The Complete Morons Guide to Navel-Lint Farming. It was almost as distracting as IRC. But not quite. So I stayed until I had written at least one chapter, and then came home. At least, I think I finished a chapter. I’m not actually sure, since the chapter was not outlined, and I was sort of winging it.