27 May '09-19:42
The evening adventures of Grandma Dowdel
It is a shame that many of the books for young adults are missed by the not-so-young adults. I do not know how many books we have read aloud but the bookcase in the children's room would suggest that the number is in the hundreds. We have read some of the "classics" from Roald Dahl and Judy Blume (Fudge and his brother are great). There have been some newer books by Andrew Clements, notably Frindle. And there are a host of others I have not mentioned.
I want to point out, again, that these books are enjoyable to read. I will allow that part of my joy in reading them is seeing the pleasure in the audience. Hearing the laughs and making the funny voices is always going to improve the experience. But I also found that if I missed an evening and was behind a chapter or two I would need to read the missing pages before I would allow more to be read (okay, that last bit may be an indication of my compulsive nature ... but I was not going to miss out on the story). And there is nothing like having a children's author describe and explain some of the most complex and emotional issues facing children (and everybody) to make it tough to choke out heart-wrenching dialogue out loud.
The last books we read were A Long Way from Chicago and A Year Down Yonder by Richard Peck. These books are two of the most enjoyable books I have read. Each book is a series of short stories (a chapter per story) and are told from the point of view of Joey Dowdel (A Long Way from Chicago) and Mary Alice Dowdel (A Year Down Yonder) and describe visits to Grandma Dowdel in a small town in Illinois. The stories are set in the late 1920s up to the late 1930s and are told in retrospect by Joey and Mary Alice when they are in their old age. The language and attitude of Grandma Dowdel had me laughing to tears. Peck also manages to wrap the character of Grandma Dowdel in a nostalgia that is not overly sentimental (in the sense that she shot the lid of dead man's coffin when a reporter was in the room) and still showed a deep caring for people who were having a hard time. This was the depression era--most people were not doing that well.
I cannot remember ever having such good chats with the girls as the chats we had after reading chapters from these books. It is surprisingly hard to explain why some of the things that Grandma Dowdel does (which are, let's face it, illegal) are morally correct; certainly there was no moral confusion in Grandma Dowdel's mind.
We just finished reading A Long Way from Chicago for the second time and it still evoked the same laughter (and occasional tear) as it did the first time we read it. I suspect the biggest reason was my greatly improved voices, but I will allow for a bit of ability on behalf of the author.
07 May '09-11:28
Biking up that hill ... with no problem
Today's reoccurrence came through my recent Music-Coffee-and-Code-in-a-basement life. As I am beginning a new project using Windows Mobile I chose the New Project menu item and followed the appropriate step to create a new mobile project (yeah, I know, this kind of riveting storytelling keeps me alive ... I will be unboxing Happy Meals soon ...). The result of these straightforward and previously effective acts was a little tiny failure message and a very disconcerting beep (not your standard disconcerting beep either; this was a new and ugly beep).
The reason for said disconcerting beep and lack of new project was a problem that occurred as a result of the security in Internet Exporer 8. I found this while drinking my iced addiction and listening to the CBC Radio 3 track of the day: "The Prisoner" by D.O.A.
There is no way that I can listen to D.O.A. without a flood of memories that bring me back to struggling up some gruesome hill (I always tried to stop and look at the lake for its beauty and not because I could scarcely draw an unlaboured breath). My suffering and panting (I am gravity enhanced and prefer the ride down to the ride up any hill) would always camouflage the stealthy cranking of those riding behind until the gutteral refrain of "my old man's a bum ... uurgh" would appear in my left ear as I would be left trying in vain to dig down to find enough energy to grab the aerodynamic advantage of the rear wheel quickly spinning ever further ahead.
I never caught the wheel and I always knew I would hear the lyric. The very occasional time I managed to summit anything greater than an on-ramp without hearing the whizzing of passing tires and D.O.A. lyrics (it was sometimes worse ... Tom Jones's "it's not unusual to be loved by anyone" can stay in a person's head for hours) was a victory savoured at least until the next hill. Of course, the downhills were their own reward.
In celebration of finding a way around a tedious problem I am pouring myself a little more coffee (be careful filtering that stuff ... it is very easy to drop the strainer into the coffee bowl and have to do it all over again and be forced to wait for a second straining) and putting D.O.A.'s Just Play It Over and Over five songs (one with Bif Naked doing some singing as well) on high rotation. The code mines were never better.
28 Apr '09-10:37
Jello Mercer
I am happy to report that I still like the Dead Kennedys. I do not like them in the wow-these-guys-are-really-politically-cool-and-they-don't-care-what-people-think-blah-blah-blah sense. I used to. I like them now more because I enjoy looking back on them and remembering that the late 1970s and early 1980s were a lot more than Air Supply and soft rock. It was difficult to imagine that a band who had an anti-racism song called "Nazi Punks Fuck Off" might be capable of some subtlety in scathing commentary but after watching "California Uber Alles" (that is a link to the YouTube version of the video I was watching--my DVD even had the sing-a-long version with the lyrics underneath it) for the third time (I started through the DVD a third time) I enjoyed having Jello point out what should have been obvious. I could also see why people were offended--metaphors to totalitarian regimes and using organic poison gas (it is California after all) might be a tad off putting.
I also realized that Jello Biafra is Rick Mercer. I know this is going to be difficult to accept because both are currently alive and each have their own Wikipedia page and differ in age by more than 10 years, but it is true. I saw the truth just as I was fading from consciousness having just flipped between the Dead Kennedys and a CBC commercial for the Mercer Report. It was as plain as day (night). Of course I can never watch the Dead Kennedys and not see the Mercer Report.
23 Apr '09-11:18
Cold coffee thunder
You can experience this joy for yourself by making iced rocket fuel using the method above and listening to Thunderheist (CBC Radio 3 Sessions podcast). You are on your own to find C++ bugs.
14 Apr '09-10:43
Disparate or disparu
Later, because I did not have enough media pounding its way into my head, I watched the Trailer Park Boys (I believe) last special entitled "Say Goodnight to the Bad Guys" and may I never again have to see even a fleeting vision of Mr. Lahey's penis.
There ... that should take the tone of this post down sufficiently. It makes listening to Eddie Izzard discussing his visit to France to do comedy (well, it is hard to tell where the discussion of the visit ends and the comedy begins as he mentions needing to bring a cat, a mouse, and a (naughty) monkey with him in order to be able to use the French he learned in grade school in the course of conversation--the monkey later goes on to reenact the movie Speed so I am thinking there is some creative license being taken). Here is a transcript to the lead up to the aforementioned bit about reenacting Speed.
“Bonjour, je suis Anglais, je suis ici en vacances. C’est très belle ici, les couleurs, les bois, très belle.”This is better when viewing the performance. His rather large and dress-wearing person does make the executive transvestite / action transvestite bit rather funny.
( inhaling ) “Tu est un travesti?”
“Oui, je suis un travesti, mais pas un travesti typical. Je suis un travesti executive… Un travesti d’action!”
“Très bien…”
Okay, enough floating through the day.
13 Apr '09-12:41
Pure joy
I do not remember how I ended up at the site that had the following quote from The Mythical Man Month but when I read the quote it made me smile. I can remember feeling a true sense of fellowship with the author when he wrote that "[a programmer] builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination." I still have moments when I feel that I have built something that simply did not exist before I dreamed it into being--something beautiful and poetical. There is much more in my life now than programming and I am not nearly as good as I once was but on the few times that I can look back at what I have built and I think that it is beautiful I am, just for a second, a poet.
Taken from here quoting The Mythical Man Month.
Why is programming fun? What delights may its practioner expect as his reward?
First is the sheer joy of making things. As the child delights in his mud pie, so the adult enjoys building things, especially things of his own design. I think this delight must be an image of God's delight in making things, a delight shown in the distinctness and newness of each leaf and each snowflake.
Second is the pleasure of making things that are useful to other people. Deep within, we want others to use our work and to find it helpful. In this respect the programming system is not essentially different from the child's first clay pencil holder "for Daddy's office."
Third is the fascination of fashioning complex puzzle-like objects of interlocking moving parts and watching them work in subtle cycles, playing out the consequences of principles built in from the beginning. The programmed computer has all the fascination of the pinball machine or the jukebox mechanism, carried to the ultimate.
Fourth is the joy of always learning, which springs from the nonrepeating nature of the task. In one way or another the problem is ever new, and its solver learns something: sometimes practical, sometimes theoretical, and sometimes both.
Finally, there is the delight of working in such a tractable medium. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. (...)
Yet the program construct, unlike the poet's words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separately from the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be.
Programming then is fun because it gratifies creative longings built deep within us and delights sensibilities we have in common with all men.
03 Apr '09-11:37
I might as well be tweeting this stuff
"When you realize that life is a joke the only sensible thing to do is become a comedian."
Funny world.
31 Mar '09-13:18
Opposing and complementry
"I never met anyone who didn't speak M-16"
"I no longer worry about life passing too quickly"
10 Mar '09-15:12
Don't wear black socks
there is a study that has shown that men who wear black socks are more likely to have heart diseaseThis would be a good time to point out that I do not know if this study exists and if it does I do not have a reference to it. The point the professor was making is that some types of studies are "epidemiological studies" that attempt to correlate various factors of human populations in order to discover causal relationships between these factors. In other words, get a bunch of people and look at what is the same (or different for that matter) for that bunch of people and see if there is a reason for for the sameness (or difference).
If it turns out that men with black socks are more likely to have heart disease (which might be true) it does not mean that black socks cause a higher incidence of heart disease. There is a correlation but not a causal relationship. Another favourite of mine is the assumption that the crowing of a rooster causes the morning to arrive. The rooster always crows before daybreak and the day always comes. That is a slightly different argument that suggests timing implies a causal relationship (post hoc ergo prompter hoc) but I like it as an example, even if it does not prove anything about heart disease or epidemiological studies.
All of this would mean very little if it were not for the fact that I was catching up on XKCD and came across the above comic a couple of hours after I had a relatively long discussion with my aforementioned wife about High-Fructose Corn Syrup and the correlation (though potentially not causal relationship) with North American obesity. You may be jealous or relieved you do not have such conversations with your partner--I think you should be jealous, but that is just me.
Anyhow, I am still no fan of HFCS and I am not going to wear black socks. You have been warned.
10 Mar '09-14:44
The hardest 40
On a related note and at the risk of making it more crowded at the pool, it is great going swimming in the mornings at the CARI. There are very few people there and those that are there do not mind slow, plodding swimmers.
Now, time to get the muscle relaxants.
This a testament to the arrogance of believing that a mid-life crisis is interesting and should be laid out before strangers.









