Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2011/01/28/atherton-fear-the-shadow/
Beware the Shadow
Admittedly, not much of a photo. But here’s a shot from this morning’s local free paper. I always like to see what sort of petty crimes have made the Atherton Police Blotter. (Atherton is where we keep our rich people, sealed off in walled compounds.)
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2010/09/30/september-2010/
Wednesday, September 1
This morning I skipped the bicycle ride to work, figuring that inhaling auto exhaust is less advisable on a “Spare the Air” day. Then I got double-whammied by the VTA at Evelyn station, where I arrived just-in-time to have caught a train on the platform, except I had to buy a ticket first. And of course, once the train was gone my $5 bill slid right in and required none of the usual massaging and unfolding-of-the-corners.
So, I caught another train one stop out to Mountain View: the end of the line. Since it is one track at Evelyn, any train waiting to start its run from Mountain View has to wait. And wait it did, until we pulled up to the platform. The train I wanted to be on slid back toward Evelyn before my train could even open its doors. So, I waited another several minutes to leave Mountain View, but I got to pass the time reading, which I can’t do on the bicycle, so I’m not going to complain much.
When I got back from lunch I learned that the market had rallied, and my limit order to sell TSLA at $20.45 had finally executed. It actually peaked ten cents higher and then closed at $20.45. This is the second time I had rode Tesla’s fluctuations successfully and now that I’m no longer on the East Coast and the market starts its day before I wake up, I figured I’d cash out of this fancy-pants chicanery and buy DIA. But I placed a limit buy at $100, which is where it has been lately. “Name your price!”
Thursday, September 2
“The simple view is that medicine exists to fight death and disease, and that is, of course, its most basic task. Death is the enemy. But the enemy has superior forces. Eventually, it wins. And, in a war that you cannot win, you don’t want a general who fights to the point of total annihilation. You don’t want Custer. You want Robert E. Lee, someone who knew how to fight for territory when he could and how to surrender when he couldn’t, someone who understood that the damage is greatest if all you do is fight to the bitter end.”
–Atul Gawande
“Letting Go”
The New Yorker
August 2, 2010
Friday, September 3
Biked to work today. Ordered a tape recorder for the99ers.net and pulled an old picture from the Tellme days for the theme’s header image. Dinner tomorrow with a friend who is moving back to Chicago. Sunday I’ll drop Mei off at the airport so she can fly to LA for the week for her boards review course.
Monday, September 6
Not much to say.
From the Catacombs, beneath Paris.
I don’t like Flickr’s new interface. It used to be that if you viewed “all sizes” you could get the HTML to link to a photo. Now you have to click on a FAQ, then navigate back to the photo, and go down a different route to grab the HTML. Would it be so wrong to support the navigation habits of users who have been using the site for over half a decade? All the buttons that used to be just a click away are buried under a menu, and I sometimes have to scroll down to beneath the photo to change the title. I also miss that tags used to each be on their own line. The new interface seems like its been labotomized so that we can be filled in with a bigger photo, and more white space.
*sigh*
Okay, just wanted to let that out.
The sweetheart is away. I am copying some episodes of The IT Crowd over to play.
Tuesday, September 7
I took a different route to work today, up Stevens Creek, over to Ellis and then tracing along 237 and 101, first on quiet frontage roads and ultimately on dedicated bike trail. It was nice and had very little traffic stress compared to my Evelyn-Wolfe-Arquez-San Thomas-Tasman route. On the other hand, I end up breathing in 8 lanes of highway exhaust much of the way. Do I prefer the quick death of a vehicle collision or the slow death of lung disease? Hopefully we can repair that stuff in a few decades.
It is not that children are just smaller adults, it is that adults are larger children.
Thursday, September 9
I have an orthodontic consult this afternoon. Consequently, I am working from home today. I took my hardware VPN back in since I don’t need it any more, and can free up some desk space and power drain. Alas, I had to jump through a few little hoops to get software VPN working this morning. I have been back at the office for just over a month now and my commutes to San Jose and San Bruno have all been via public transit or bicycle, with the occasional ride home from a co-worker. This little bit pleases me.
Sunday, September 12
“It occurred to him that life, which he’d treated as a pastime, and which he’d thought he could yet outdistance, had finally caught up with him. And he’d discovered, much as he’d suspected, that once life caught up with you, you could never quite shake it again. It endeavored to hobble you with greater and greater frequency. How you managed to remain upright became your style, who you were.”
–David Bezmozgis
“The Train of Their Departure”
The New Yorker
August 9, 2010
Mei comes back tonight. I pick her up at the airport around midnight. After too long, I have gotten my hair cut, at a Chinese place where speaking English is sufficiently awkward that the lady skipped the usual foreplay of asking what I wanted and just got down to the business of cutting my hair. Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am!
Compared to Brooklyn, Mountain View is a sleepy, slow town, where people spend their time waiting for turn-arrows and a trip to the convenience store invariably requires one to stand patiently in line, as the lady carefully counts out exact change and labors over the implications of whether it is worthwhile to sign customers up for the club card, while I quietly wait in line, nostalgic over all the times in the past year when I had ducked in to a store, exchanged quick cash with the proprietor, and was back on my way. Club cards be damned. They have no place at a convenience store.
Monday, September 13
From the upcoming “Social Network” movie, via The New Yorker:
“Listen. You’re going to be successful and rich. But you’re going to go through life thinking that girls don’t like you because you’re a tech geek. And I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that that won’t be true. It’ll be because you’re an asshole.”
As someone surrounded by geeks, I’ve always known that if someone thinks I’m an asshole, it is because either I am an asshole, they are an asshole, or between us we’re just confused as to who the asshole is.
Tuesday, September 14
Advice sent to a loved one:
Aaaaanyway what I’d do, if anything, is thank the lady for her good intentions, and apologize that sorry, I can’t send her any money because of my discomfort over the quality of decision making made in the name of religion. It sounds like her mission is to overtly spread the idea that personal morality can not be guided by the innate human capacity to discern right from wrong, but by a confusing and contradictory corpus of Iron Age mythology mediated by a competing group of organizations which are at best patriarchal in nature and at worst openly practice terrorism and sexual violence. This approach to enriching humanity is a cause I could never support. I would explain that I would be strongly inclined to make contributions on the behalf of secular charities with morally clear missions like Habitat or MSF.
Its like, you can gently suggest that someone’s belief system is foolish and deadly without having to bring up the inquisition, the IRA, or 9/11. After all, she thinks you’re going to hell, so, whatever. If someone ever wants to throw down I’m sure you can get all Richard Dawkins on their ass.
Wednesday, September 15
San Bruno fire Captain Bill Forester’s Engine 51 was one of the first two teams on the scene; the other big truck got hot so quickly its windshield exploded. “This looks like Armageddon,” Forester recalled thinking Tuesday. “It was like they took a Saturn V rocket and tipped it upside down during blastoff.”
Terrified residents were fleeing down the hill with the fireball chasing them, firefighters recalled, many already badly burned and screaming for help. There were so few ambulance trying to keep up that paramedics began asking unhurt residents to drive people with smoldering burns to nearby hospitals. Police officers and firefighters kicked down doors to rescue anyone stranded in homes.
Even with the wail of sirens filling the background of one radio call asking dispatchers to issue a third alarm, it is the rising alarm in a firefighter’s voice that tells the truest story. “We’ve got multiple houses” on fire, he reports to the command center. “We’re trying to get close. We have extreme heat. We have possibly several blocks on fire at this time.”
There is silence on the radio for a moment. Grasping fully the nightmare that she can hear unfolding in an invisible chorus of voices, the dispatcher slowly replies, “Copy that.”
More than 15 minutes into the disaster, a dispatcher issues a fourth alarm, summoning fire companies from all across the Bay Area to respond to “a plane crash.” A firefighter asks whether it’s a “large aircraft or small aircraft,” but no one knows. This would affect the firefighters’ initial response to the blaze because the accepted method of dealing with a plane crash is to put it out at the source in order to save passengers’ lives.
Gas main fires are extinguished by shutting off a valve, and there have been reports that it took PG&E well over and hour to close this one.
“With a pipeline that big, even if you shut it off a mile away it could burn for another hour,” said Kevin Conant, a battalion chief with the San Jose Fire Department who was not involved in fighting the San Bruno blaze. “I think it was completely legitimate for them to consider that there was an airplane involved because of the amount of fire they had.”
First responders say the most frightening moment occurred when they tried to tap into the neighborhood fire hydrants and heard only a sucking sound . . .
Mike Rosenberg and Bruce Newman
“Tapes Reveal Frantic Scene”
San Jose Mercury News
September 15, 2010
Later, Bike Snob NYC made me laugh:
“Like coffee, religion props people up and gets them through their day, and in this sense I believe that religious institutions are like Starbucks in that there are way too many of them and they sell a lot of crap–the only difference is that at least Starbucks pays taxes and offers WiFi.”
Friday, September 17
I was a little surprised to see sfcitizen whining about the physical impossibility for driving 25 MPH, so I chimed in:
Once the speed limit hits 20MPH, then your chances of a fatal pedestrian accident become extremely unlikely. There is advocacy in Britain to expand 20 MPH zones:
http://www.20splentyforus.org.uk/
If you keep light on the gas, it is entirely easy to drive slowly, and a pleasure to boot, because down in this speed range your mind can almost catch up with all that is going on around you: less stress! You just have to let go of the selfish idea that you have some God-given right to drive fast.
I just returned to the South bay from Brooklyn. I have to say, driving in Brooklyn at a constant 20-25 MPH, slaloming around double-parked cars, bicycles, and the rest, is a lot more relaxing than waiting two minutes at a left-turn light so you can tear down El Camino at 40 MPH.
Open your mind instead of the throttle. you might find you enjoy driving slow. Good luck!
-danny
Yeah, I know I’m a crackpot. And when I was younger I had a more leaden foot, but over the past decade or so my driving has mellowed a great deal, possibly because of the station wagon. When you’re driving a boat it is easy enough to relax and take it easy, and I maintain that style in smaller, more nimble cars.
Thursday, September 23
So, we decided to spend Thanksgiving with Mei’s folks in Hawaii and Christmas with my folks in Chicago, so I set up our Hawaii vacation for November. I have never been there myself but it should be easy to enjoy.
On Monday they opened up a long-closed bike trail up North of Moffett Field. This has been a long-awaited link in the Bay Trail project, and I am pleased because now instead of riding on streets and on a 237 frontage road I can ride up the Steven’s Creek trail, then around the North side of Moffett Field, then East along the Bay Trail and then along a canal to the office. That’s a bicycle commute that is over 90% off the street.
But . . . a lot of this new route is gravel. It takes more concentration to ride safely, and getting a flat on my road tires is more likely. The salt flats smell of salt, seaweed, and decay. But I’ll take the occasional flat tire and maybe a gravelly wipe-out or two over being killed by a distracted SUV driver, and the wetlands scenery is a greater pleasure for the eyes and the nose than riding through high-speed suburban street traffic and waiting for red turn signals. I feel lucky.
When I rode the trail home on Monday people would smile and greet each other as they passed, because hey, we had a new toy.
The other new toy I have this week is Civilization 5. I was able to play the first half of a game last night, and so far I really enjoy it. It is a pretty huge change in a lot of ways from Civ 4. Civ 4 is more of a simulation game with lots and lots of variables thrown in to keep a player challenged. I think the developers leaned back and said “Civ 4 is great, but it is pretty dang complicated. Let’s make it easier for new players.” So, Civ 5 has streamlined a lot of things. The graphics are really beautiful, and the tech trees and units are pared down. Diplomacy is re-worked and the whole religion-civics thing has been consolidated into a new set of “Social Policies” which you can enact as you amass more culture.
The interface has moved from the traditional sim-manager style to more of a “builder” paradigm. For example, happiness is now an aggregate for your entire Civ instead of something managed in each city.
Aaaaaaanyway . . . . . I want to understand the military and diplomatic interfaces better, and just get a few games done and out of my system.
Friday, September 24
“I think we are making a transition, the most important in the history of Homo sapiens — more important than our long walk out of Africa and across Europe and Asia. This is our moment. Anyone who died before 1930 never lived through a doubling of the human population. Anyone born after 2050 likely won’t either. We are in a 120-year transition that will require an emerging consciousness if we’re going to make it through.”
Wes Jackson
“Farmed Out”
The Sun, October, 2010
Monday, September 27
We purchased a humming bird feeder this weekend. Within about ten minutes of installation, the first little bird flitted over. They catch on quicker than the larger birds, who we can occasionally hear at the other feeder, spilling a steady trickle of seed on to the balcony.
Thursday, September 30
It is nearly noon and I am relaxing with the ever-studying Mei at my favorite coffee shop. My work hours today are going to be around 1pm-9pm, due to afternoon and evening deployment windows for software on our production networks. That’s my day job. Well, today my day job is slacker, and my evening job is deployment engineer.
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2010/08/19/sister-helen-prejean-describes-an-execution/
From the August, 2010 issue of The Sun Magazine:
Cook: You’ve said that if executions were made public, people would realize the brutality of this system and work to end it. Yet, in our past, crowds would show up for public executions, some with picnic lunches. In our age of violent media, what makes you so sure average citizens wouldn’t applaud the execution of a killer they were certain was guilty?
Prejean: There would be some, no doubt, who would pull out a beer and cheer that this terrible murderer had been killed. But for most people who see it up close, capital punishment is very unsettling. The head of the Department of Corrections in Louisiana has to arrange the protocol for executions, and part of that is gathering witnesses. At first he thought he’d have a line of people stretching across the Mississippi River waiting to get in, but soon he realized that no one who witnessed an execution asked to come back. When you’re in the death chamber, you see when they have to jab the needle eighteen times into the arm of the condemned. You hear the stumbling last words of those who are killed: “Mama, I love you,” or “I’m so sorry.” Imagine an ordinary American family having their evening meal, and the news comes on, and the kids ask their parents, “Isn’t that murder too?” and, “Why are they putting antiseptic on his arm if they’re going to kill him?” It would not take long for people to cry out against this, and that’s why it will never be public. You have to keep it from the eyes of the people.
Cook: You have served as spiritual advisor to six men who were executed. What were their last days, their last hours, like — for them and for you?
Prejean: Being with someone who is about to die is surreal. When you’re with someone in the hospital who is dying, it’s at least a natural process; you can see them leaving you. When someone is fully alive, and you’re talking to him in the way you and I are talking, you can not get your mind around the fact that in two hours, now one hour, now forty-five minutes, he’s going to be killed.
The death itself is almost scripted: Now they’re walking in. Now I’m telling him goodbye and kissing him on the back. I’m praying for him and asking him to remember me to God. Now the guards have me by my arms. They are sitting me down in a witness chair. There’s the big clock on the wall. There’s the exhaust fan, already turned on, that will suck from the room the stench of the human body burning. There’s the blank glass with the executioner on the other side. They’ve already tested the chair. It’s run on a seperate generator, so nobody can prevent the execution by throwing the main switch. The lights are bright floursecents. There are two red telephones on the wall: If one rings, it is the court issuing a stay of execution. If the other rings, it’s a pardon from the governor. Neither phone rings. The victim’s family is sitting in the front row to watch. The other witnesses and I are sitting behind them. There are two newspaper reporters writing vigorously on narrow spiral pads. And the condemned man is looking at me. And I put my hand out. And he can see my face. And they put the leather mask over his face, so tight I worry he can’t breathe. How quickly they strap him in the chair and step away. It’s an oak chair. They put a cloth soaked with saline solution on his shaved head and then the metal cap. A thick, curled wire runs from the cap to the generator. And then the strap goes across his chest.
I didn’t look the first time, because with the mask I knew he couldn’t see me anymore. With lethal injection he can see me, but not with the electric chair. I closed my eyes and heard the sound of it. The huge, rushing, powerful sound of the fire being shot through his body. Three times. They run 1,900 volts, then let the body cool, and then 500 volts, and then 1,900 volts again. What’s terrifying is that they’ve done autopsies of people who have been electrocuted, and the brain is mainly intact. We don’t know what they feel. We really don’t know, when we kill a human being, what’s going on inside, the pain of it.
Cook: You believe that the days leading up to an execution amount to torture.
Prejean: I don’t say this lightly. According to Amnesty International, torture is “an extreme mental or physical assault on someone who’s been rendered defenseless.” Just imagine if somebody took you hostage in a room and said that in twenty-four hours they were coming to kill you. And, when the time comes, they put the gun to your head and pull the trigger. It clicks. It is an empty chamber. They laugh and walk out and say, Not today. Maybe tomorrow. That’s torture.
Everybody I’ve known on death row has had the same nightmare: they dream it is their time, and the guards come and drag them out, and they are screaming and sweating, and then they wake up and realize they are still in their cell. Just think about when you have to go to the dentist for a root canal. If the appointment is for Friday, all week you are living in dread. That’s just for a root canal.
You can read a longer excerpt at the Sun’s web site.
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2010/07/13/i-like-to-type-on-my-smartphone/
I still fondly recall the nice rubber keyboard of my Sidekick 2. So nice, I was reluctant to “upgrade” to a G1, which has a nice enough keyboard. A few months back I got to spend some time with a Nexus One, which was really nice . . . but I just could not adjust to the on-screen keyboard. The on-screen keyboard has gotten very good for inputting addresses and short messages, but if you’re a compulsive typer like me you need an excellent physical keyboard.
So, I keep my eye out for an Android device with an excellent physical keyboard, and naturally I do a little research on this HTC “T-Mobile myTouch 3G Slide” . . . the name is truly awful, but it sounds like the keyboard shows promise. (It sounds like the physically-similar HTC “Touch Pro2” has an excellent keyboard, but I don’t want to run Windows on a mobile phone.)
So, in case, like me, you have wondered if the keyboard is any good, here is what various online reviews have had to say:
Of course, the main reason to get the myTouch Slide is for the full QWERTY keyboard. There are a few negatives but, overall, it’s an excellent way to bang out messages on the go. The shape of the keys are just right and the feedback and “clickability” make it easy to write long e-mails wherever you are. Hitting the secondary function or Caps lock key will bring up a handy light above the keyboard and I always appreciate dedicated comma and period buttons. There’s also pretty good auto-correction software with the keyboard so you don’t have to worry about throwing in apostrophes. The sliding mechanism produces a satisfying sound and it feels like it will hold up over time.
On the downside, I found the Tab button and A a little too close together and this led to multiple frustrating typos. What’s even worse is that the top row doubles as the number keys. This happens on many keyboards but usually you’ll have the letters and numbers a different color or font size to help you quickly find what you’re looking for. The myTouch Slide has “T5” “Y6” “I8” and others the exact same color and size, which can take some time to get used to. None of these quibbles are deal breakers though, as I was quickly able to get up to speed with my typing.
(The keyboard has four rows instead of five, and the top row reads “Q1 W2 E3 R4 T5 Y6 U7 I8 O9 P0” which looks dumb and would take some getting used to. Alas, the Touch Pro2 has five rows, like all the keyboards I am used to.)
From http://mobile.engadget.com/2010/06/01/t-mobile-mytouch-3g-slide-review/:
The keyboard is one of the best four-row designs we’ve used in recent memory (LG, seriously, take some pointers from this before you go releasing an Ally 2) with great feel, spacing, and clickiness — it’s readily apparent that HTC’s deep experience in making these kinds of keyboards is paying dividends. They’ve made room for all of the most important keys that you should be able to access without pressing Shift or Alt, notably the comma, period, and “@” symbol, plus you’ve got Home and Search keys and duplicated modifiers on the left and right sides. HTC aficionados will also be pleased to see that they’ve carried over the lit Shift and Alt symbols above the numeric row, which makes it super easy to see what character you’re about to press. It’s a nice touch.
From http://www.phonedog.com/2010/06/03/noah-s-mytouch-3g-slide-review/:
Keyboards are a very personal thing, and personally I love Slide’s QWERTY. While not quite as luscious as the Touch Pro2 on which it’s based, mT3G Slide’s thumbboard has been a joy to use save for some minor issues I have with the labels on the keys. Buttons on the keyboard are offset and isolated and have decent travel and solid tactile feel – in other words, its the exact opposite of the Moto Droid‘s flat grid of near motionless buttons, which I can’t stand. If you just read that sentence and wrote off the rest of my review because you love, love, love Droid’s QWERTY, then you may well hate Slide’s keyboard. Like I said, QWERTYs are a highly personal matter.
From http://www.mobileburn.com/review.jsp?Id=9572: “the keyboard has great feel, but is visually flawed.”
From http://www.mobilecrunch.com/2010/06/10/review-t-mobile-mytouch-3g-slide/: “who is this for? It’s for folks who miss their Sidekick and want a keyboard for messaging. The MyTouch 3G Slide’s processor won’t win the blue ribbon at the County Fair, but it is an impressive bit of cellphone.”
My verdict? I would want to try it out in the store, but it sounds like the keyboard would probably be “good enough” for me. That said, I think I will continue to hold out on upgrading for the following reasons:
Given that it may be either a hassle or an impossibility to upgrade my phone without paying more money each month, an expensive “upgrade” had better be worth it. The Slide sounds like it would be good enough as a new phone–a better alternative to the G1–but it has a few too many compromises to justify the cost of upgrade.
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2010/01/26/when-will-google-voice-support-apps-users/
Background: Google Apps is a service where Google will host the e-mail and calendar for your domain. So, instead of going to gmail.com I go to mail.toldme.com and log in as dannyman for dannyman@toldme.com. The annoying thing that has been going on for several years now is that only a minority of the growing array of Google software that features personalized content will support my Apps login, so I have two completely separate Google accounts:
Apps Account: dannyman@toldme.com
Gmail Account: picasasucks69@gmail.com
The first contains an archive of e-mail going back 15 years, my combined e-mail, telephone, and address book of all my friends, and Calendar appointments for the past five years. It integrates seamlessly with my Android Phone.
The second is for all the stupid Google applications that do not work with my Google account and require me to have a Gmail account that I never use otherwise: Picasa, Blogger, Google Maps, Google Voice . . . that last one is especially annoying, because now the brokenness leaks onto my Android phone!
The following is adapted from http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Apps/thread?fid=475790531056779f00047e151dc314f4:
As a big Google fan, I have an Android phone and a Google Apps account, and a Google Voice account. Google Voice is really neat, but since it only supports Gmail logins it is really poor that my Gmail / Android contacts aren’t available in Google Voice. That’s right: since I’m a really big Google fan, the Google Voice application will NOT sync with my Google Phone.
I understand that it is possible to install software that pulls the data out of your Apps Gmail account or Android phone, and then re-copies that back in to the Google Voice non-Apps account. But this requires extra effort on my part to maintain a kludge to have duplicate copies of data stored in two different places.
What I want instead is the obvious and sane solution, where I log in to Google Voice the same way I log in to everything else: with my Google Apps account. My Android phone logs in to my Google Apps account and has instant access to my contacts list, and my hosted Gmail logs in to my hosted Apps account, and has instant access to the very same contacts list shared seamlessly with my Android phone. So, when I log in to Google Voice, I want to log in with my Apps account, and then Google Voice has instant access to all of my phone numbers and e-mail addresses associated with my Google Apps login.
Basically, I am asking for sanity, and short of sanity, at least an acknowledgement that sanity is a desired outcome.
This “second class citizen” treatment is really frustrating at times: the biggest fans get the worst support. Any idea when Google Voice is going to stop locking us out? And when that time comes will I be able to keep my phone number, or will it be like when I was forcibly migrated from Google Calendar over to a blank Google Apps Calendar, losing all my appointments and shared calendars, with no option to migrate my data?
I have tried to get an answer from Google Voice to no avail. I would like to think the Google employees behind Apps are working behind the scenes to make Google Voice available seamlessly to paying and loyal customers. Or maybe this simply is not a priority and us common folk Google Evangelists just shouldn’t get too worked up about Google products, and consider switching to competing technologies. Thanks!
These days my Android phone is in a weird way, because I’m starting to use Google Voice for SMS, except Google Voice has no access to my address book, so everywhere I am accustomed to seeing names and pictures for my contacts I see a ten-digit number, because Google Voice has no access to the contacts in my Google account.
Ugh!
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2010/01/17/week-of-10-january-2010/
2010-01-10 . . . it is too bad they didn’t have binary numbers one thousand years ago.
Last night I began reading Studs Terkel’s “Division Street America” . . . it is starting to remind me of Richard Linklater’s “Waking Life” where you drift from person to person, hearing a monologue . . . things shift around as in a dream. Some are more engaging than others.
I like that by page 27, I find a kindred soul in Elizabeth Chapin, who was 75 years old in 1967:
“The automobile, what could you do without it? In another few generations, people will have no legs, we won’t need them. I take the dog for a walk every day. Walk a few blocks to the bakery shop. I have known people who live around the corner from the bakery, who take their car to get there. People are amazed when I tell them I don’t pass a day that I don’t walk three, four miles. It just wouldn’t occur to me. There’s so much to see, to observe, while you’re walking. What happens to us when we don’t see these things? When I take the dog for a walk, I see things. People’s eyes are closed, with a thin film over them, or what is it?”
I should be walking more, myself.
Another theme so far is the people are bothered by the increasing isolation . . . 40 years ago. In the old days it was playing cards and long conversations. I’ve been thinking the world might be a better place if television was a metered service: you pay $1 for each hour you watch, with a fair portion of that going to whomever created the programming. People would watch less TV and the quality would go up if people were more selective about it. Anyway, maybe I’ll actually set up a jar in my own living room. Since I pay the cable/Internet bill I can reimburse myself. Or give it to charity or something.
0.5h Saturday Night Live
1.0h Nova: What Darwin Didn’t Know
In the afternoon I snuck off to the Tea Lounge before returning home for the Pager Review Meeting which is at 3pm in California. I go on-call Tuesday morning at 11am . . . well, 2pm local time. Right before the pager review meeting my workstation crashed and required a fsck . . .
1.0h Nova: What Darwin Didn’t Know
I started feeling seriously blue on Monday, and this morning was no better. The contributing factors are known and temporary, so no reason to freak out, but damn. This morning I treated myself to brunch . . . and spent some time just standing in the frigid sunlight, synthesizing vitamin D and hopefully ameliorating seasonal blues, thinking that office workers should work while the sun is down.
At brunch it was more the people watching than the delicious chorizo frittata that did me good. At first I kinda sympathized with the girl who kept sighing at her computer, which she had to hard-reset . . . Windows Vista or 7 running on a ThinkPad T61 . . . but she kept sighing and I was thinking “attitude problem” . . . the guys next to me sounded like the older guy providing some career mentoring advice for the younger guy. All while I was reading about the Whole Foods CEO in The New Yorker.
“. . . a tendency, common among smart people, to presume that everyone in the world either does or should think as he does–to take for granted that people can (or want to) strike his patented balance of enlightenment and self-interest. It sometimes sounds as if he believed that, if every company had him at the helm, there would be no need for unions or health-care reform, and therefor every company should have someone like him, and that therefor there should be no unions or health-care reform. In other words, because he runs a business a certain way, others will, can, and should, and so safeguards that have evolved over generations to protect against human venality–against, say, greedy, bullying bosses–are no longer necessary. The logic is as sound as the presumption is preposterous.”
On my way out I saw the girl on my left was editing an article in a WordPress blog, and I felt better about her. People who have found the joy of good software have a preposterous notion that software doesn’t have to suck, and so they are logically entitled to sigh when their computer’s operating system starts acting dumb.
Rough day on-call. I never even left the house.
1.0h Daily Show
Another rough day on-call, but I went out for groceries. I walked to the store farther away, since it was a beautiful day: sunny with a high of 38F. On the shopping list was an onion, which allowed Mei to make beef stew. Yum!
0.5h Community
1.0h Project Runway
I was paged throughout the night as a consequence of maintenance activity that ran long. I sent an e-mail to management sharing my reservations about how the project in question was being handled. During the day I took it easy, and we managed to roll out an emergency measure to keep this other thing that had been paging a lot quiet.
Usually, on-call isn’t so bad. My last few times on-call had plenty nights of uninterrupted sleep. Luck of the draw.
1.0h Daily Show
1.0h Dollhouse
The weather was nice so I sat on the park bench in front of the house and read. Of course, the wind kept blowing so I made a few trips inside for more clothing.
I have been bothered by my level of credit card debt and have hatched a scheme whereby I’m thinking to pay it all off out of savings and lay the cards aside. I’ll reduce my monthly “allowance” that I draw from savings for the year in order to re-pay the money borrowed, and basically live within my means on a tighter budget, whipping out the debit card when I need to pay with plastic, and then only if I can afford it. Hooray for austerity! (I haven’t put this idea into motion yet.)
And no, its not that I am anywhere near broke, but I have had my share of hard times, and I am pretty excited that in July I may have a 20% down payment on real estate I can afford, right around the bottom of the real estate market, which has been brought to us by reckless overspending. When I was a kid, my mother yearned for years to own our own home, and it was always just out of reach. As a kid, I seldom had much money I could spend, and had to learn to say “no” to nice things. Well, finally being able to afford a place will feel good. And there is also a value in being able to say “no” to nice things you don’t really need.
0.5h Colbert Report
0.5h King of the Hill
1.0h Aqua Teen Hunger Force
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2010/01/10/rita-buscari-25/
Excerpt from Studs Terkel’s “Division Street America” (1967)
There were about forty of us went down there to protest James Dukes’ execution. We had a very orderly, and I think, dignified picket line. We marched in two’s up and down, very quiet. We rarely spoke to each other. But across the street there were about two hundred people in their cars with the doors open, the radios blarin’ out rock’n’roll music, with beer cans and with sandwiches. They were there all evening, and very often there would be jeers at us from across the street.
I was marching with a Northwestern student, who goes down to protest every time there’s an execution. He said these people are there at every execution. Every single one. He said no matter how cold it is–this was a warm night, this was August–no matter how cold it is, there are approximately the same number of people. He believes they’re there because the lights dim in the building, which isn’t true, because the chair is rigged up to a different electrical system.
They stay there until the body is brought out in an ambulance. You got the feeling, you know, that this was the instinct that sent people to the Colosseum in Rome. And it’s here, right here and now, present in our society. Warden Johnson said people call up and ask for tickets. Well, if tickets were sold, I’m sure it would be a sellout house every single time.
It was so brutish. I was marching with pacifists and ministers, and the quiet of these people compared to the crowd across the street gave it a nightmarish quality. At the time of the execution we all turned toward the jail and ceased conversation. And this was when the rhythm of the noise on the other side gained momentum. They had all the radios on, first of all because they wanted to hear the announcement. The sounds on the other side increased as our silence increased.
When the announcement came through on the radio, there was a big reaction across the street: Oh, that’s over with. Oh, that’s great. Especially toward us. It was a victory for them, you see? A great victory against the crackpots who were demonstrating across the street. You know: This is how much your demonstration has achieved, you’re no place at all.
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2009/05/27/transit-etiquette/
I will never forget a day in high school when I was sitting on a crowded bus, headed home, and the lady in front of me, who was not old or pregnant, had what looked to me to be a pained expression on her face. I wondered if maybe her legs hurt as the vehicle lurched around, but I was a shy kid scared to offer her my seat in case really I had just totally misread the situation. After a while the crowd eased and the woman took a seat near me with obvious relief. I had failed on that day to give my seat to someone in need, and ever since I have made an effort not to repeat that mistake by paying greater attention to my fellow passengers.
I still ride transit most weekdays, and I have noticed especially that younger people tend to fail at the whole courtesy thing. Part of it may be self-involved rudeness, but part of it I think is a combination of shyness, and a fear of making contact with strangers in a public place. My generation was raised on the lessons that the world outside our homes is extremely violent and treacherous and that the most dangerous thing a child could ever ever do is to talk to a stranger. I like to think that with time most people grow out of their shells and feel more comfortable taking the initiative for social responsibility.
My own strategy is that if I see a person who might better deserve my seat, I try to make eye contact, at which point I start to get out of my chair. Then they either move forward or gesture for me to sit down. (It is better to err on the side of getting someone a seat. Also, I think people looking for a seat know to look others in the eye.) In other cases if the vehicle is crowded and eye contact can not be achieved, I’ll often just stand the heck up anyway, positioning myself in such a way that the person who could best use my seat finds it most accessible. (I would hate for a young punk to ignorantly snipe my seat.) (more…)
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2009/04/14/systematic-developmental-retardation/
I am presently enjoying an old thick history book. A footnote in the first chapter says:
“Biologically considered, the distinguishing mark of humanity was systematic developmental retardation, making the human child infantile in comparison to the normal protohuman. Some adult human traits are also infantile when compared to those of an ape: e.g., the overdevelopment of brain size in relation to the rest of the body, underdevelopment of teeth and brow-ridges. But developmental retardation of course meant prolonged plasticity, so that learning could be lengthened. Thereby the range of cultural as against mere biological evolution widened enormously; and humanity launched itself upon a biologically as well as historically extraordinary career.”
W H McNeill
“The Rise of the West”
I was thinking that domesticated animals are similarly developmentally retarded relations of their wild kin. Dogs mature to a wolfishly adolescent level. By remaining in a younger, more affably co-dependent state, they more easily get along with humans. From what I have seen, a lot of adult humans could be described as childish, and while the usual concern is that they are less effective for their childishness, they also subordinate themselves more readily to more ambitious leaders, and this facilitates collaboration.
Or, I guess, domesticated humans and animals fall more naturally into packs, for better and for worse.
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2009/04/03/iowa-gay-marriage/
We used to visit Newton, IA every year or two for McConeghey family reunions. Iowa’s a nice place, though admittedly somewhat dull. But today, America has a big patch of purple right at its heart because the Iowa Supreme Court has declared the state’s ban on same-sex marriage unconstitutional. Joe Eskenazi explains beautifully in “Will Gay Mecca Relocate From San Francisco To Des Moines?”
Disdain of San Franciscans’ disdain of all things Midwestern has become nearly as clichéd as the original sin. And, yet, there’s always a touch of schadenfreude anticipating city residents’ chagrin whenever legitimately good news emanates from the Midwest indicating its denizens have out-progressived our self-anointed capital of progressivism.
The Iowa Supreme Court this morning did what many observers feel its San Francisco-based California colleagues will not — rule that a ban on same-sex marriage violates the constitutional rights of gay and lesbian couples. This morning’s decision adds Iowa to the very short list of states in which same-sex marriage is legal — Connecticut, Massachusetts, and, now, The Tall Corn State. Perhaps it’s only fitting for a state with the motto “Our liberties we prize and our rights we will maintain.”
From what I have read, if conservatives want to defeat this, it will require the legislature to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot. This could be done by 2011, and even then Iowa residents may not support it. Personally, I’m just really proud to see progress being made on this issue, from of all places, the “fly over country” where I grew up. (Well, I’m from Illinois, but I can still root for the hawkeyes on this one.)
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2009/01/15/spirituality-sexuality/
As someone who has wondered at the issues involving monastic vows of sexual abstinence, I found myself dog-earing the following passage from an interview with a Buddhist couple who gave up the monastic life for marriage, as interviewed by Leslee Goodman in the January, 2009 issue of The Sun. (more…)
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2009/01/12/scandalously-erotic/
A bit that got me laughing out loud, from a New Yorker article on breast milk:
In 1735, when the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus first sorted out the animal kingdom, he classed humans in a category called Quadrupedia: four-footed beasts. Even those of Linnaeus’s contemporaries who conceded the animality of man averred that people have two feet, not four. Ah, but hands are just feet that can grip, Linnaeus countered. This proved unpersuasive. By 1758, in a process that the Stanford historian of science Londa Schiebinger has reconstructed, Linnaeus had abandoned Quadrupedia in favor of a word that he made up, Mammalia: animals with milk-producing nipples. (The Latin root, mamma, meaning breast, teat, or udder, is closely related to the onomatopoeic mama—“motherâ€â€”thought to derive from the sound that a baby makes while suckling.) As categories go, “mammal†is an improvement over “quadruped,†especially if you’re thinking about what we have in common with whales. But, for a while, at least, it was deemed scandalously erotic. (Linnaeus’s classification of plants based on their reproductive organs, stamens and pistils, fell prey to a similar attack. “Loathsome harlotry,†one botanist called it.) More important, the name falls something short of capacious: only female mammals lactate; males, strictly speaking, are not mammals.
Personally, I think I would approve of anything that was scandalously erotic. Oh my! Also, my high school biology teacher said that I, a male mammal, could indeed lactate, if given the right hormones. I was glad to hear that I had the capability, just in case . . .
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2008/12/19/hi-tammie/
I was asked to “critique” a friend’s new blog. Because I’ve been writing like this since before anyone called this format a “blog” . . . here’s two paragraphs from my response:
I’m really excited about Prop 8 as well, and it is funny that you borrow that story from Gandhi that I enjoy as well. Tonight I just watched “Cry, the Beloved Country” and was moved all over again by great words in a book I have read twice, about . . . compassion and forgiveness. I did not expect to be left feeling so emotionally.
[ . . . ]
And I hope you enjoy the blogging thing. Write for yourself but remember you are being read. I still get emails from old posts I wrote, especially about the divorce stuff. Occasionally someone comes to me expressing a pain that is familiar, and I have the chance to return in a small way some of the kindnesses that have been bestowed upon me over the years. Your children, your grandchildren may some day read through or skim what you had to say. In that way you may be able to help them in their growth, years from now. And remind yourself of things forgotten.
To be sure, “the divorce stuff” is really just a bunch of excerpts from a book someone else wrote. Lately though I have had very little to say about my personal life or things that have stirred my passion. There is less creative self-expression or revealing of myself these days. I am not sure if that is as it should be, or if that needs to change. I figure that my relationship with my web site changes over time based on my needs and how I take responsibility for fulfilling those needs.
Oh yeah, and I love reading what Dennis has to write as well. Happy holidays, folks!
Update: Tammie was laid off a few weeks ago. If you know anyone looking for a smart, talented and diligent Microsoft .net and C# hacker, please check out her LinkedIn profile. (Welcome to the economic down cycle. Yahh!!)
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2008/12/19/seriously-who-throws-a-shoe/
Surely you have by now heard about the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at President Bush. Whatever your own position on Iraq War II I think we can all agree that this seems like the perfect expression at Iraqi anger and frustration at how terribly the postwar occupation has been managed. I also enjoy hearing how Chinese Internet folk look at the issue. Here’s some of the quotes I most enjoy, as translated by ChinaSMACK:
qwerty_a:
This (news) shows that the democracy of Iraq has been greatly improved.
If any one dared to throw shoes at Saddam, he might have already been fed to the lions.
The United Sates had spent billions of dollars and thousands of human lives to gain the right for Iraqi people to throw shoes. Chinese people’s right for throwing shoes needs to be gained by the Chinese themselves.å…¬å为:
What was the brand of the shoe he threw at bush? If it was made in China, the U.S. would again say China provided terrorists with weapons.还有多久天亮:
I saw it too,
Little Bush was nimble;
The journalist’s courage was laudable;
Good job, both!Note from Fauna: Although not many people like Bush, I think many Chinese netizens will still miss him because he was such a funny man and not many people could be very serious about him.
I myself have always thought Bush was kind of funny. I have made a conscious decision not to get too worked up over the many awful things he has done as President, if only for my own health. Obama has been elected and Bush was bidding adieu to his greatest legacy; I hope the people of Iraq find the shoe-throwing somewhat cathartic.
If Iraq’s democracy survives, I hope that one day they erect a status of this guy in a square somewhere, leaning back to hurl his shoe, a testament to the mixed blessing of American occupation and the (often terrible and bloody) freedoms it has brought. More power to them!
Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2008/11/23/racism-isnt-racis/
I enjoy the New York Times “Freakonomics” Blog but recently I was reminded of one of the shortcomings of modern academics: they can deny common sense by talking too much. Take the following sentence recently published by Eric Oliver:
“Racially isolated whites in Arkansas or Alabama may have been more afraid of voting for Obama not because they are more racist than white voters in Minnesota or Montana, but because they perceive greater racial competition with nearby black populations.”
Seriously: WTF? This is like saying: “It is not that they are racist, it is just that they have a reason to be racist.”
“When Frank got into a car accident while under the influence of alcohol, it isn’t because he was a drunk driver, it is just that he has been going through a lot lately, and he enjoys drinking a lot of cheap beer.”
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