Signal to Noise

When I was growing up I was under the impression that “burning the candle at both ends” was a bad thing. It usually meant that somebody was working too hard and was in danger of “burning out.” Of course, as with many sayings of yore that were meant to act as warnings, there were occasions where one might be accused of burning a little too much candle with an overtone of admiration; look at you doing so much and being so successful and suffering no ill effects from your superhuman efforts–obviously you must be one of the rare few that has unlimited candles and can burn them willy-nilly (any post that uses the word “yore” must be balanced by the use of “willy-nilly” or risk falling into the pit of arrogance and self-reflective cleverness).

I continually (against my best efforts) fall into the trap of assuming that I have an unlimited store of candles that can be burned with the aforementioned willy and nilly abandon. History has shown that I am an idiot in this regard and somehow manage to be (honestly) surprised each time I run into a wall of exhaustion. I was not planning on getting sick as a (very sick) dog after doing more than is my ability–EVEN AFTER RECOGNIZING THAT I WAS DOING MORE THAN I SHOULD. How can a person be so oblivious to such a precedent? I have a rare gift for selective ignorance. If I could bottle it I would be a rich man during election campaigns … wait … that is another rant.

It was somewhat by accident that I started reading the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay and found that she appreciated the value of a well-burned candle. If you were to believe WikiAnswers then her poem was the origin of the candle burning phrase. I would suggest you do not believe this. It is more likely to have existed for quite a while and examples of the phrase being used to describe living at a hectic pace and in relation to extravagance and thriftiness have been around for hundreds of years.

I have had a copy of Edna St. Vincent Millay: Collected Lyrics for a few years without ever venturing into its covers. I heard her work mentioned when I was taking one English course or another and found the book shortly after. It then promptly fell victim to limited time and changing interests. C’est la vie. Having time thrust upon me by virtue of being ill I dug out the book and read bits of it between other books and movies and waiting to get better.

I like it a lot–and not just the bit about burning the candle at both ends. That poem is called “First Fig” and is the first in A Few Figs from Thistles by Millay (1922).

MY CANDLE burns at both ends;
    It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends--
    It gives a lovely light!

I will resist my temptation to give my version of literary criticism on this poem and those that follow in A Few Figs from Thistles. Read them yourself. Millay wrote in the post-World War I era (and before that as well but I enjoy a lot of Modernist literature so I am lumping her in with that lot). Millay is a writer that has fallen into relative obscurity (in comparison to the high-profile lifestyle of most poets) but earned high praise from her contemporaries and produced work worthy of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. It was a bit of good fortune that I stumbled onto her work while I was suffering from post-double-candle-end-burning malaise. I am still reading bits of her work when time permits but I am now well and truly hooked.

I have been doing quite a bit of development for hand-held devices lately, mostly the iPhone and Windows Mobile. I took a brief foray into Blackberry and realized that I did not have enough high-quality booze to get over the learning curve (as close as you can come to a step function and still have rounded corners) and Byzantine documentation and API choices. I felt rather guilty at not being able to master the Blackberry and will probably give it another try when I have more time and fewer deadlines.

I came across a story about a developer who decided to write an application for the Blackberry and documented some of the ups and downs of his work. The article concentrates a lot on the aspects of writing an application that come after the development is “finished” (at least released) and the difficulty in converting the application into customer dollars. That part is interesting but the part that caught my interest was the first third of the article that deals with the development process and some of the difficulties he experienced. The part where he describes choosing the development environment hit very close to home as this was early in the process for me (and him) and it left me rather disheartened early in the process.

All BlackBerry phones are java based, and there are two SDK options for developing software on them: MIDP/CLDC and BlackBerry specific APIs. … Initially I leaned towards CLDC to maintain portability, but I eventually decided I’d rather take full advantage of the platform. I could always port it later if it came to that (if there is a later).

Great, now I just needed the RIM SDK. Turns out there are about 5 different versions, and the more features you get the fewer devices you can support. RIM has been around for a long time, and unfortunately (and unlike the iPhone) not all operating system revisions are available for all devices. The basic choices when I started PodTrapper were 4.2, 4.2.1, 4.3, 4.5, and the newly released 4.7.

He also hit a snag that I experienced (and the one that eventually broke my will), connecting to the network:

There are 10 different network transports available on BlackBerry: WiFi, Direct TCP, WAP, WAP2, BES/MDS, BIS, Unite, BES Serial Bypass, USB and Bluetooth. A lot of options for getting data in and out. What would be nice is to say:

Me: Give me an HTTP connection using least-cost routing.
BB: Here you go

What you get is:

Me: I need an HTTP connection, is Wifi available?
BB: No.
Me: Is BES available?
BB: No.
Me: Is BIS available?
BB: Yes.
BB: Ooops, that file is over the size limit for BIS.
Me: Is TCP available?
BB: Yes.
BB: Ooops, TCP looks available but it was blocked by the carrier’s firewall…..

Regdarless, he persevered and ended up with a decent application. I envy his dedication and results. Mine will have to wait until next time. I know it can be done now.

I had planned to do a lot of biking this year but I have found that I have very little reason to get on my bike for travel. I used to bike to work (which was a decent 20+ km each way) last year but I am working from home this year and do not really have the need to wander too far from my coding dungeon to ply my trade. The end result is that my bike has not been out of the barn yet this year.

On the other hand I have been riding tandems far more than I ever have. I am not counting kilometres too closely but the number is likely closing in on 400km already. Part of that is the training I was doing with a friend (he recently completed a two-day 200km tour in Toronto) and the rest is on a recumbent tandem that we bought this year.

Because I promised my youngest daughter that we would bike into school together this year, and as today is the second last (the penultimate for all you word geeks) day of the school year for my daughter, we saddled up bright and early for our ride into school. I brushed the spiders off of the recumbent tandem, adjusted the seat positions, and stuck a bottle in one of the cages (nothing like having a new batch of baby spiders on your bike to make an early-morning ride ever so less enticing–I did this before my daughter saw anything; that might have scuttled the plan before we got started). Then, a little before 8:00am we began our ride to school.

It is at this point where I should mention that we live at the bottom of a rather steep hill. If you think PEI is flat then you are right from the point of view that there are not a lot of mountains (“The highest elevation is 466 feet (142 metres) above sea level in Queens county.” from Prince Edward Island (province, Canada) — Britannica Online Encyclopedia). On the other hand, I live in Queens county and our house is approximately 3 metres above river level; I call that close enough to sea level. Also, Prince Edward Island may have more roads per square kilometre than any other province but they saved a fortune by not changing the grade of secondary roads from the natural rolling and winding paths that were their ancestors. So, this is my way of saying that the ride to school this morning was anything but flat.

I had anticipated the 14km ride to take a little under an hour. I was wrong. I had forgotten to factor in the recumbents-are-more-comfortable-but-make-hills-excruciatingly-painful-to-climb coefficient. For our ride that coefficient was approximately 1.3. My daughter rolled into school at 9:14am. I will try to have her at school on time tomorrow. It is best to end on a good note.

The next ride will be on a nice flat stretch where the recumbent tandem really does shine.

So, my legs are sore. She did her best but her nine-year-old legs were no match for my older and much greater mass. Some of the sweetest words I have ever heard were “Do you need a little burst of power now daddy?” and I heard them often enough to find them funnier each time. She would blast out twenty or thirty hard pedal strokes that would rock the bike side to side and then let out an exhausted sigh. The bike would slow a bit and then (inevitably) I would hear “I can recover quick if you need me to do it again.” It was a great ride.

I am smiling. She was smiling when she walked into school. One nice family moment and one more reminder that even a bad day on a bike is better than a good day in the office.

One of the great things about working hard is the feeling of accomplishment. Another is finishing and looking back at a job well done. I have been working rather diligently lately doing some coding for mobile devices (Windows Mobile of all things … how I ended up at that is a long and winding tale beyond what I feel you, the casual reader, can endure at this moment). I was also teaching a programming course for high-school students on Saturday mornings. On top of this I was enjoying helping a vision-impaired cyclist train for a 200km tour ride by being a sighted rider on a tandem with him. Actually, “rider” is not entirely accurate because there was no notion of “being along for the ride” while we were training (yes, damnit, it was training and my legs are still sore).

About ten days ago I finished the programming course. It was quite good but I am sure I could do better if there is a next time. That day (Saturday) I went out biking for the long ride that was to be the big ride before some easier rides that would lead to the tour the following Saturday. Man, what a ride. It was long and hot and … as we were going down a large hill very quickly … terrifying. The second most horrible sound a person wants to hear (and possibly the last sound one might hear) when speeding down a hill on the front of a tandem bicycle (one that tilts the scales at nearly 600lbs with both riders and gear) is the taaannng of a spoke breaking on the front wheel. The most horrifying sound is a second taaannng that follows the first before one has had a chance to decelerate any significant amount while still going down the hill at great speed and squeezing the brakes with increasing force and urgency.

It was a very long, careful, and slow ride back to town.

I also want to plug MacQueen’s bike shop in Charlottetown (particularly Danny) who shook his head and pulled a wheel off of one of his tandems and told us not to worry about it until later so we could finish our ride. I appreciate his desire and ability to keep us riding.

The upshot of all this is what my body did to me on Sunday. The biking, teaching, and working left me tired and (apparently) susceptible to the Martian Death Flu (MDF). Not to be confused with Swine Flu or West Nile Virus, or any of the horrors that will terrify us throughout the summer, the MDF knocked me out of normal life for a week. Of that week I spent 4 days in bed (it might have been 5 but it is hard to judge that last one where I was out of bed for part of it). Did I mention that I was IN BED during this time–and not just moping around the house.

The good news is that I was able to watch movies and (eventually, when my brain would allow it) read some books. I read all five of Dashiel Hammet’s novels and would seriously recommend The Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key, and The Thin Man. The first two, Red Harvest and The Dain Curse are quite intense–think Kill Bill as a novel. I have watched The Maltese Falcon a few times and it is very close to the novel. The Thin Man movie was a much looser interpretation of Dashiel’s book but attention to the characters in the movie brings out much of the charm (yikes, lots of pretence to use the word “charm” when writing about books and movies) of the novel. The characters spawned a total of six Thin Man movies. I like them all (with the last two being my least favourite but still worth watching).

So I read (I also finished my next book in the Cadfael series, Saint Peter’s Fair) and watched (all three of the original Star Wars movies with director’s commentary on–you know you are sick when you can lie through that dribble and be too apathetic to change the audio track). And I am very glad to be back on the mend. Oh, and the BBC adaptations of the Cadfael novels is quite good as well.

Life lesson: do not work so much that you get sick. Burning the candle at both ends leads to a short and soggy candle, even if it were extra bright while it burned. Let’s see if I can remember that for the next time.