I've been hanging around with this bunch of people I met at the airport in Denver. A pretty good crowd, it was strange in a way, to just come across a bunch of people who cared about things, and even a couple of people who live right near me. Maybe, I guess, most people do care, but we (at least me) are so caught up in our lives (or what we like to call our lives) that we (at least me) sometimes don't notice that we're surrounded by other real, thinking people.
While we were sitting around, thinking they would get us out of there (we were snowed in) any minute, we started talking about how sudden unpredictable changes can really turn your life upside-down. Mostly we talked about Katrina, how even though we knew it was coming, we all sort of pretended it wouldn't, or pretended we could handle it (or just ignored it, a heck of a job). Somebody started talking about peak oil. I always thought that was another version of 'look at me, give me attention because I have something scary to say!' In fact, I might still feel that way, but anyhow we got into a sort of doom and gloom fest about what if gas cost $5 a gallon and the whole world fell apart. We were making up these crazy joke scenarios (everybody will have to walk to work with a wheelbarrow full of starbucks) when this kind of twitchy guy, I couldn't tell where he was from, anyhow he was listening to us and he sort of blurted out 'you may get what you wish for, on the last day of april, it will not be the same again.' Of course we all went 'why? how come, what do you mean?' and pretty much all he would say is 'you will see.'
But you know he couldn't get away, because none of us could in that smelly terminal. After a while someone went and pestered him about it again. He came and stood by us, and talked about how the price of oil was decided by all sorts of crazy political things and what the stocks were doing, I couldn't follow it, but he never did cough up why he thought something bad was coming up. Then some airport security guy cam and talked to him and he just left. I think he got some chartered snowplow or something, but I didn't see him again.
We all started saying if something is going to happen, we should prepare. So, we are. What a bizzarre trip.
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I've been meaning to write up some notes on 10 years of telecommuting. Now I guess I really ought to.
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I've been studying Ruby on Rails, a fascinating and fun (!) web app framework. ASP.Net developers take note: fear this, or embrace
(tm) it.
It's funny, the RoR book I am reading avoids acknowledging that MS or ASP exists at all, even to the point of saying that the <%= ... %> syntax
'should be familiar to PHP or JSP developers' (never mind the fact that this syntax
is ASP). This is not surprising to me, I'm the ever-critical cynic, and the RoR folks are quite mac-friendly, and Apple has made a marketing campaign out of dissing MS (which sucks - negative campaigns, especially when they are a lie, is not 'do no evil'). I can play that game too by the way (that guy in the TV ads, the cool young Mac guy who can do anything, and who makes the dorky, suited MS guy look stupid, well, he still lives with his parents).
But more to the point, the major themes, the recurring issues that developers face in writing web apps, they converge when you start to look at RoR from an asp.net developer's view. Object re-use, XSS defense, really using CSS for layout, separation of business and UI layers. It's interesting that somewhere in the MS universe* there are program managers or maybe just grunt coders who see the future, maybe it's just that the old guys (like me) are moving on. Well anyhow, I expect it will converge, and the winners will be the future coders who are now still focused on... whatever 2nd graders are focused on these days.
*The MS universe came home to me one time when I spoke to a guy on the IE 5 dev. team. I asked him about standards and he said "MS is so big, inside, that we sometimes forget about the world out there, we think what we are doing *is* the standard, because what we are doing engulfs us. It's hard to remember that there is another world out there that might not be the same as the world we live in".
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So, the cup isn't over yet, still to come, Fr. v. It. for the cup, and Portugal v. Germany for third. But boy do I have an opinion about who are the real winners....
Ghana, played so well, so much better than anyone expected, and guess what? Their best player was out with an injury. Look to the cup in South Africa, 2010 for an upset by a team on home turf.
The finalists, Italy vs. France. France did very well, with Zidane on his retirement binge. Very nice, very good, I hope they win. But they're not the winners...
Itlay... could not score against Australia, except for a bad call by the ref.
France... could not score against Portugal, except for a bad call by the ref.
My card:
Potugal - C. Ronaldo - exciting, honest, the best team
Australia - determined, earnest, the tenacious team
Ghana - intense, the magnificent team
4th - Germany - what a great host
5th place - Univision - they rock - how about an english simulcast next time????
Last place, racists and referees - get a clue.
No mention - ESPN - uhh.
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Remind me to ruthlessly, relentlessly copyright my forthcoming monograph on sandboxes...
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I've been working on an interactive map website lately, so of course I have to have the CSC images for each site on the map, and yesterday morning seeing several dozen of these at once, all of them uniformly dark blue, was kinda like a slap upside the head. I must go observe, it's been too long. So I put down my hanky and quit crying about missing SSP and...
Last night was one of those perfect nights at Montebello. It stayed warm until the wee hours, 2:30 when I finally left. The seeing was excellent, at times perfect, my scope was performing very well after a long rest, I haven't been out since CalStar last October, and there was a plethora of treats to observe.
My main intent was to get some good views of Jupiter, and I was very happy to catch a shadow transit just as it began. Extremely crisp and inky black shadow, elongated a bit on the eastern limb at the beginning. Seeing oscillating from perfect to OK about once per second, it could have been a little tube current as well, as there was a breeze blowing right in the bottom of the scope and the seeing seemed synchronized with the gusts a little bit. As good a view of Jupiter as I have ever seen though any scope.
Marek and a couple of other folks were up there providing good company, and a woman named Nora who had come up for the sunset (and missed it) stumbled upon us and was treated to a bunch of great views, so we got all the stimulating 'wow!'s and intelligent questions one gets from a good public night, without any of the hassle. That was good.
Marek suggested we have a go at splitting Antares and we both did with ease, he with a mask on the M scope (who needs a 7" apo when you can have a 100 pound obsession?) and me with the little dipper 10" cranked to 600x for grins (at this mag also saw proper airy disks for the first time through the 10 near zenith, so used to seeing them in little refractors, that was a treat the seeing made possible). Jupiter through the M scope with the mask was also a great view, no spikes and a hair more contrast than I was able to get.
The usual summer eye candy was on display, the southern Milky Way was almost 'dark sky site' quality, just a little granular. Even the north wasn't too bad with all the little dipper stars clear. Mercury, Saturn, Mars and Jupiter all at the same time naked eye, Saturn through the scope a little bit at twilight, good view but too low for comfort..
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Tom has written a very clean Polling control for the CSK, really quality work.
I'll be putting on Penql soon. Read all about it at
Tom's Blog
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The
Oxometrical Society of course, but how I wish there were;
- Cranky People United Against Advertising During Soccer Matches on TV
- The Art Crayon Association
- Brotherhood for the Resurrection of the 5 Cent Havana Cigar
I can only hope, or maybe I will forget (probable). After all, thinking outside the box is partly a by-product of being unaware one is in a box (or disagreeing that a box exists in the first place).
Walls do not a prison make and all that.
Now, where did I put that oxoplasmometer?
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Whilst pondering the classic
Web 2.0 mind map and similar visually weighted conglomerations of words such as
tag clouds, it struck me that the web, along with nature and 19th century natural philosophy, provides us with another
almost analogy to music. With themes (web 2.0, species) and motifs (ajax, propagation) and even movements (blogospherically speaking) one even approaches by accident (but not Aristotelian) a symphony. No wonder the wonder of the iPod.
What would Mozart be coding today?
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