Clueless

I read Den Beste, although it's probably more accurate to say I skim him. He seems to have the kind of time on his hands that allows him to pour thousands of words into his analyses. Succinct, he ain't.

War in Iraq, a topic I'm tired of since it is patently obvious we're going to have one, so why not move on to other topics?

But I'll kick this dead horse one more time. As I said, I'm a sucker for lost causes.

Stipulated, simply to save time: Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq poses a potential threat to his neighbors, and the United States.

What is the best way to deal with the problem?

It seems to me that the best solution would be the one that achieves the objective of removing Saddam Hussein, at the least risk, for the least cost.

Is war the best solution?

I don't think so. It would appear that, having rejected containment as exemplified by the last decade of UN sanctions, no-fly zones and maritime interception operations, the administration defaulted to forcible entry without considering any other options. I don't know why. The administration has thus far declined to share with us what other options it considered and why they were rejected. I would hazard a guess that no other options were seriously considered, this thing seems to have been almost spring-loaded from the start.

Prior to 9/11, Iraq had been something of an issue. It certainly didn't command the kind of attention it has garnered post-9/11, but it was clear that something had to be done. Colin Powell was advocating something called smart sanctions, about which we have heard very little, at least lately. Let's assume for the moment that they would have been ineffective, or otherwise inappropriate to address the problem, what other options were there?

It is clear that even before Bush's administration was installed, the CIA was receiving renewed support and attention for dealing with terrorism the old fashioned way, up close and personal - well, I'll include Predator drones and Hellfires in that category as well. Iraq has two indigenous populations that are hostile to Saddam's regime. The Kurds in the north, and the Shiites in the south. Additionally, there are literally millions of Iraqi ex-patriots around the world who have no love for Saddam Hussein. It seems reasonable that these groups represent a significant resource that could have been employed to destabilize Saddam's regime over time, ultimately going so far as to mount a successful effort to overthrow the regime, aided by U.S. covert operations and limited direct military support. Everyone say "Bay of Pigs!" I knew you could. I expect we've learned a few things since then.

I'm quite certain that with the necessary resources and commitment by the United States, we could have made this nearly an all-Iraqi affair. It would also have had the virtue of the Iraqis believing they had earned their liberty through their own sacrifice.

What's the downside to a program of covert operations designed to lead to an internal revolt? Well, there are several.

It wouldn't be quick. Probably something on the order of two to five years. Puts it outside the window of Bush's administration, and if he were to have only one term, the program could get derailed in a subsequent administration. Additionally, Saddam might have been able to exploit the additional time to acquire additional weapons of mass destruction, which would increase the threat if we had to go to war as a "last resort." Of those two, I suspect the political timeline would be the biggest hurdle.

Second, we would have much less say in what a post-Saddam Iraq would look like. While we would undoubtedly support someone we thought could work with us, these things don't always go the way we'd like and we might end up with Saddam II. It's a risk.

Third, a destabilized Iraq for a protracted period of time might negatively affect the price of oil for that period of time. I really have no idea how likely that would be, or how those effects could be measured against what we're experiencing now and will experience following cessation of hostilities in Iraq. But, it could have been a factor.

Finally, there's the matter of something on this scale hardly being "covert." I'm not sure how much of a downside this is. In terms of being able to sell it to the American people and the world at large, I think it'd be a hell of a lot easier than the invasion we're undertaking now, especially since it would be largely an Iraqi affair. But I could be wrong.

Okay, so why isn't war the best solution? In a word, chaos. War is a chaotic process, in the scientific sense of that term. Things happen in war that are unpredictable. Some of them are good, some of them are bad. Chaotic processes aren't utterly unpredictable, they tend to be bound by something called phase-space. While the movement of a pendulum can be said to be chaotic, we can be pretty certain where that pendulum isn't going to be. It's probably not entirely appropriate to apply this term to a phenomenon like war, but there is some value here. The more we know about our adversary, the more we can kind of outline what the phase-space is going to be, what the boundaries of possible outcomes are: best case and worst case sorts of analyses. The problem with Iraq is that there are likely to be several unknowns that are very important. A worst case scenario may include smallpox infected refugees streaming out of Iraq. There may be others.

War is hugely symbolic. While Saddam might have had few illusions regarding who would have been orchestrating and supporting an internal insurrection, it would have lacked the theater that war offers. Saddam is the star of the show right now, and we have to wonder how he will choose to make his grand exit. I think he's likely to want to do something that will cause history to remember him, whether for good or for evil. Evil is usually better remembered. By choosing to go to war against Iraq, we make Saddam even more dangerous and give him the motivation and the attention to do something horrific if he has the means to do so.

The fact that the U.S. will initiate a conflict with another country, especially without the unambiguous support of the United Nations, makes the world a much more dangerous place for countries who view the United States as an adversary. North Korea is making this point plain today. Tomorrow it might be Iran, or Pakistan. The point is, while it might be nice to think that upsetting the status quo is a good thing, we simply can't predict what is likely to happen. The world will, in the near term at least, be a more dangerous place, not a less dangerous one.

Cost - this is going to cost a hell of a lot more than supporting an Iraqi rebellion. How much will it cost? Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said today that there is really little way of knowing until it's over. But we can be sure it's going to be expensive.

Dead Iraqis. It's hard to argue this issue because the tragic truth is there are going to be dead Iraqis no matter what is done to remove Saddam Hussein. How many will die in this war is like knowing how much it will cost, we won't know until it's over. If Saddam tries to use his own people as a biological weapon, the cost could be beyond counting, and the whole world may pay. Even if he doesn't do so, it's hard to rationalize the death and dismemberment of Iraqi men, women and children as the price of their liberation. I'm quite confident that our armed forces will do everything within their capability to limit the numbers of civilian casualties to the maximum extent possible, but war is a blunt instrument. There will be casualties. It's hard to say whether more would die in this war or in a rebellion, but in a rebellion most of the deaths would at least be at the hands of fellow Iraqis.

Well, that's part of my thinking about why war isn't the best option. The thing is, I'm not terribly smart, as I'm sure those who disagree with me will only be too eager to point out. But there are folks who are much smarter than me who could probably come up with better ways of getting rid of Saddam Hussein than the one I outlined, and this war.

Doesn't matter though. War it will be. We'll just have to pray that it goes as well as it possibly can. If it goes badly, we'll have a test of our national character like none other in our history I suspect. I hope we're up for it.

Smallpox

To my mind, the single greatest risk and unknown in a conflict with Iraq is whether or not Hussein has smallpox. I'm guessing the assessment is that he either does not, or does not have it in sufficient quantities to pose a serious risk.

If he's got it in any kind of significant quantity, it wouldn't have to be weaponized to be used. He could just use a ruse to inject it into his own people as part of a "vaccination." He could rely on refugee movement to carry it to nearby nations, and perhaps around the world.

I don't know how many people would have to be infected to start an epidemic. I don't know how prepared we are to address a number of outbreaks occurring simultaneously in Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait - or if any of those who may have been infected could fly out of those adjacent countries to places like Bangladesh or the Philippines, or Europe or North America.

The idea, of course, would not be to preserve Saddam's regime. It would be to avenge it.

I'll be kind of holding my breath for the first few weeks, even if things look like they're going exceedingly well. Here's hoping I'll have been worried about nothing.

Friday

Now this really is the dark ages...there's not another three-day weekend until May!

I'm going to look at my pay statement and see how much vacation I have. I took a few days around Christmas, so I expect it's not much, if anything. I can work four ten-hour days and have a day off, but that's kind of hard because I don't like leaving the kids alone any longer than I have to. We'll see what the pay statement says. I don't have my current one, I have to stop by an office and pick it up. If I can get two days off with no kids at home I can probably catch up on some personal stuff and a lot of housework.

It's snowing in D.C. and it's raining down here. I guess I'm still running on the charge I got from Monday's walk on the beach, because it doesn't really bother me too much, apart from the mud the dog tracks in.

I made it out to the magnet school last night. It wasn't as crowded as I'd feared. They have an impressive program, I'm just not sure Caitie is ready for middle school, something Maria and I have to figure out very soon.

No promises, but since today is the last day of February and I have to create a new Tinderbox file for March, I may actually finish the tutorial. Just in time for Eastgate to release their weblogging "wizard" which will hopefully make a lot of the set-up and internal plumbing easier. We shall see.

Never Discuss Women, Religion or Politics in the Wardroom

Fortunately, Sainteros' place isn't the wardroom.

NPR

I'm an NPR supporter, although I'm a little cheesed at my local NPR affiliate. They put up a new antenna starting sometime last year, and I think the Empire State Building was built in less time. They reduced power every day to the point where they might as well have been off the air. They're back on the air full time now, but I don't think I got anywhere near a full year of NPR for my donation. But that's just an aside.

One of my favorite shows is the Diane Rhem Show. The last couple of days I've caught snippets of interviews with authors I want to make sure I read. One is Nuala O'Faolain, whose book Are You Somebody? The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman, is the one I want to read first, though not the one she was interviewed for. She sounded fascinating on the radio.

The next day was another author, Frank Schaeffer, and his book, Keeping Faith, also sounded fascinating.

So many books, so little time...

Argh!

I hate it when Monday falls on a Thursday. Obviously, it doesn't happen the same the same day every week.

It's amazing to me how much difference one hour can make. If I go to bed at 10:00 PM, which is ridiculously early by my lifetime average, I can pop out of bed at 5:00 AM with little difficulty. If I stay up until 11:00 PM, I'm likely to sleep until 7:00 AM and then life gets interesting.

Plus, it's raining hard enough that I am going to give Chris a ride to school, which kind of precludes another task I wanted to accomplish this morning. Caitie still has a shot to attend the performing arts magnet school through the lottery system. Supposedly, your chances are improved if you visit the school and take the tour and have your application signed by a school official. For a variety of reasons, I didn't attend the previously scheduled tours, and today is the last day, naturally. There are two sessions, one in the morning and the other in the evening. I expect the evening one is going to be packed with parents like me who waited until the last minute, and it's first-come, first-served. So I was going to go this morning, thinking I had a better shot of getting in with the least amount of stress. Well, it's raining and I overslept and Chris needs a ride and the only reason I'm typing this is because I'm waiting for the dryer to yield a dry shirt.

I watched The West Wing last night, and I enjoyed it more than some of the other recent episodes. I've missed a few between January and the end of this month. What I liked about last night's episode was the humor, more so than the plot-line having to do with genocide in Africa. Somehow, it's difficult to get over the cognitive dissonance of Martin Sheen appearing on television opposing the war in Iraq and appearing on television as President Bartlett ordering a military intervention in Africa. Whatever. Will and the intern speech-writers was kind of funny, but Mrs. Bartlett and Amy was very funny, as were Josh and Donna. But the best bits were with Sam, Toby, Charlie and C.J., and Toby telling Sam that they're going to be throwing rocks at him next week and he wanted to be standing beside him when they did.

What can I say? I'm a sucker for a lost cause.

I have accomplished very little in the housekeeping department this week. Mostly due to an utter lack of discipline on my part. I did write quite a bit, although little of it is likely ever to appear here, and a good deal of it was in other folks' comments. I should probably leave the computer off until I have all my domestic chores finished, and not look at weblogs at work. If I look at them at work, the first thing I want to do when I get home is see who's commented on what in the ones I thought were interesting, or to comment on something myself here. Major time sump. I haven't started to neglect personal hygiene yet.

Little Snitch

I'm playing with this gadget from Objective Development, the people who brought us LaunchBar. It monitors your outgoing network connections and lets you know what programs are trying to make connections. The user interface is a preference pane in the System Prefs. I'm giving it a go to see if it'll be worth $25.00 to buy it. So far it seems to work as advertised. It alerted me when I tried to save my Tinderbox file to my iDisk, and when NetNewsWire Lite tried to do its thing. You can then set up a rule so that it always allows those connections without alerting you.

Stoicism and Emotion

I almost never visit meta-filter, but on a random whim I went to the main page and browsed down the list of topics people were pointing to and found this one. Wow! A lot of great stuff all linked in one post. Connects a bit with the repression thing from Sunday. More to follow on Stoicism. I think if I had to claim an "-ism" as my own, this one would be it. Zen not being an "-ism," in my book.

I've been carrying Meditations with me every day for the last several weeks, and Seneca is by my bed.

No News Is Good News

There are days when you wish you simply hadn't looked at the news. Well, like today for instance.

Increasingly, there are also days when you wish you simply hadn't looked at some folks' weblogs.

That's one of the interesting features of this new sort of medium. While it is just another form of expression, it can be kind of misleading, if not deceptive. In one set of circumstances, you make a number of acquaintances with whom you feel you share some similar views, compatible dispositions. Sure, you won't agree on everything, but for the most part those things are like water under the bridge.

Then along comes something like 9/11 and now, inexplicably, Iraq; and you find there are very real differences. Even those could probably be overlooked, as we used to say, "Never discuss women, religion or politics in the wardroom." But the web isn't the wardroom, and so nothing is really out of bounds and you're forced to consider just what you really have in common with people who you simply cannot understand. Well, in fact, you can understand, but that doesn't help. I know why people want to go make war on Iraq, and I know why they feel right doing so. But it's a view I can't reconcile myself with.

Even that would be okay, except often it's day after day of the relentless, smarmy commentary. The false drama of victims of Saddam's tyranny, as if there aren't victims of tyranny and worse throughout the world. The posturing and posing about how we're going to "liberate" Iraq. The ceaseless effort to justify something unprecedented in our history. The mocking of people who disagree. The lack of imagination to even consider there might be other alternatives. Now, I'm guilty of some of the same offenses, though I've tried to back off. It doesn't help, and I don't feel particularly better for very long afterward anyway.

The thing is, you don't know you're going to encounter it until you go look. Once in a while, okay. But when you get hit in the face with this crap three days in a row, you begin to wonder why you bother? Some folks, not in that list over there to the right, are absolutely predictable in what they'll write. I could wake up to NPR and if there was a particular event in a particular part in the world against one particular group of people, I could guarantee that I'd see some hand-wringing commentary on it from one particular individual. Where's the fun in that?

Well, it's my problem to solve, not theirs. I haven't really figured out what this means to me. But there are some days when I wish I hadn't clicked on the link.

Where Do We Go From Here?

This was going to be a piece about religion and faith and other things of some importance, but I find I can't put together a coherent piece in one night. There are too many things spinning around in my head right now. I could talk about them, but I can't write about them. I talk much faster than I can write and when I write I feel like I'm walking through mud. Maybe later after things have settled down a bit.

In the mean time, let me point you to this little piece at Escapable Logic.

If there is a more frightening vision of the future, I can't think of what it is.

Britt seems to believe human beings will use all of this particular technology in good ways. I'm not sure he's ever lived in a small town. What he describes would enable the very worst of human nature to oppress and enforce conformity within the community. Suicide rates would sky-rocket. Hopefully, it will never happen; though I'm sure some fraction of it will to the extent that it will convey an advantage to one group. I can think of a half-dozen Twilight Zone episodes set in Britt's vision of the future. I sure would hope I was Rod Serling.

Something tells me I'd like Richard Bennett. He seemed to have hit the same nerve I did over at Shelley's place with Tom Matrullo.

Maybe Britt should meet Richard.

Well, to kind of return to the religious theme: I suspect that technology is going to compel us to confront our spiritual problems in a way that nothing else could.

Irony is the fifth fundamental force of the universe.

Human Nature

It seems I've been issuing more than the usual output of hugs lately. Weekend before last it was because of Jaguar. Today Caitie found out she wasn't admitted to the local arts magnet school on the basis of her audition.

Another area where technology doesn't really change everything.

Thankfully.

A Day at the Beach

It was an absolutely gorgeous day today. At lunch time, I had a clear-blue sky, an ocean, and an hour to call my own. I walked from one end of the base to the other and back. At the end, there were a bunch of people with the same idea, but for almost half an hour, I could pretend I was pretty much all by myself on that strip of sand where the land meets the ocean and the sky.

La Plus ca Change, La Plus c'est la Meme Chose

"This changes everything," redux.

Shelley Powers, with whom I have not always found myself in complete agreement, wrote something the other day that I very much agree with, and that is that weblogging isn't going to change the world; disputing the seemingly popular sentiment that "this changes everything." It's a topic I've mentioned before, most recently in Time's Shadow: here, in a brief mini-rant I wrote when I was in one of my less-happy moods.

Some of the comments were in disagreement with her, and I wanted to add my two cents to the discussion because I happen to think she's closer to the mark than those who disagree with her. You'll find my somewhat in-artful post here. It subsequently engendered the rather interesting, if vehement, response from Tom Matrullo immediately following.

I seldom get that kind of reaction from anyone. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not. But it wasn't clear if Tom was objecting to what I said, or just how I said it. Hopefully, he'll clarify at some point.

I'm a technophile. Always have been, probably always will be. But I'm a different sort of technophile today than I was even a few years ago. I bought my first computer, an Apple ][+, in 1981 just because I thought it was so cool to have a computer that belonged to me, that I could play with whenever I wanted. It was going to balance my checkbook, keep track of addresses for me, and help me be a better citizen by allowing me to word-process letters to my elected representatives. I remember quite distinctly one afternoon when I was feeling what I now know to be the emotion of powerlessness, as I waited in vain for the cable guy to show up to hook up our house. It was the second or third appointment, and I always had to ask for half a day off because they could never tell me when they were going to show up. Getting half a day off while you were a division officer, on sea duty, from at least my department head, was like going through hell. Doing it twice, and faced with having to do it again, just so I could watch The Playboy Channel, was beginning to become extremely painful. I fought my way up through customer service to a "supervisor," and I informed him that I had a personal computer, a word processor, and a dot matrix printer; and I was going to go to the public library and discover every municipality in which they were competing for the cable franchise, and I was going to send them all letters documenting how poor their service was!

I'm sure I must have intimidated them, because I recall we did get cable - eventually.

But I never did write those letters. And I never balanced my checkbook. And I never kept my addresses on the computer. What I should have learned then, that I only learned much later, is that if you're not the kind of person who did those sorts of things with a pencil and paper, you're not likely to do them with a computer either. Technology doesn't change human nature. But I didn't know that then.

A few years later, a guy named Tom Weishaar published a newsletter for Apple II users called Open-Apple, I think Apple made them change their name to A2 Central some time later. In any event, I wrote a letter that actually got published. (Parenthetically, I've only written three letters to editors that I can recall, and two got printed. One was the one to A2-Central, the other was a letter against the flag-burning amendment printed in the Jacksonville Times-Union. That one garnered a similar reaction to the one Tom Matrullo offered today.) Anyway, in the letter to Tom I wrote about how I saw the Apple II as an example of how technology could serve as an empowering tool for for ordinary human beings, and saw that very much as a positive thing. Still do, mostly.

Well, here we are two decades later, and what's different? Superficially, lots of things are different. Scratch beneath the surface though, and everything is pretty much still the same.

Consider this: Here we are in the most technologically advanced country in the world. We created the internet. We have C-SPAN, we have public television, we have e-mail and telephones and faxes. How many people vote? How many people participate in their government in any kind of meaningful way? How has technology changed that? For the better? Consider the 2000 presidential election. Leave aside for the moment that all of our technology could not clearly resolve who won the election, it was, in effect, a tie - the difference was smaller than the margin of error. The lesson is that politicians and political parties have learned how to use technology to exploit human nature to such an extent that the two major parties were able to basically divide the electorate in half. The part of the electorate that actually got up and voted anyway. All those ads, all that polling, all those sound bites, were all created by, or facilitated by technology. Did it make voters better voters? Or did it manipulate them better? Your call, but you can probably guess what I think.

Consider this: Again, we're the most technologically advanced nation in the world. The only remaining super-power. No other nation or group of nations rivals us economically or militarily at this particular moment in history. After half a century of living in a bi-polar world, basically at peace with a nation armed to the teeth and able to destroy us many times over, we are going to make war on a country the size of, what?, Pennsylvania? The majority of whose population is supposedly below the age of 15? (I'm putting question marks here, because I'm not sure these are facts. I'm cooking dinner, and I'm lazy - technology doesn't change that either - but I think I'm close on these.) Why is that? We used to be the good guys! We didn't throw the first punch! Well, apparently we do now.

The answer, sadly, is technology. Both on their side, and ours. On their side, the technology of weapons of mass destruction makes them a threat we supposedly can't tolerate. On our side, our technology of precision-guided munitions, network-centric, non-linear "hyper-war," makes us believe that the risks are acceptable. Technology doesn't change human nature, but sometimes it can amplify the worst of it in ways we may come to regret.

I wonder what people thought about the automobile? I'm sure some folks said "this changes everything" about that too. It "empowered" people. Well, it didn't change "everything." People still do all the things they used to do, only now they have to do it at a scale that accommodates the automobile. That's not changing "everything" - and I'm not sure it's really a change we'd like if we had it to do over either. Smog, global warming, middle east oil, urban sprawl, traffic jams - we did learn a great deal about the Law of Unintended Consequences.

Now, I'm not saying technology is inherently bad. On the contrary, I'd say, net, it's great! It's the only thing that's keeping more than six billion of us alive on this planet, although how well it's doing that may be a matter of some debate.

But it simply doesn't change human nature, and unless you're just talking about re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, it's human behavior that is "everything."

In my comment at Shelley's place, I wrote:

"People lift themselves out of ignorance when they feel the need or the desire to do so; most of the time they're content to let themselves be entertained. Technology doesn't change that bit of human nature either."

Perhaps that's glib, but it's also true. We're all ignorant. The nature of ignorance is such that often we simply don't know what we don't know - so we don't really worry about it. In the mean time, we're content to be entertained. Look at television. I'm old enough to recall when people still believed in the potential of television to educate and illuminate. It does do that, but it doesn't bring in the kind of ratings people are looking for in their "target demographics." So mostly we get Jerry Springer, or "reality" TV - fake millionaires dating impossibly beautiful women. That's pretty edifying.

People will educate themselves when they are suitably motivated. As a parent of a 10 year old and a teenager, I'm often the source of the motivation, sometimes through the imposition of consequences. I've always had a desire to learn, but it was usually narrowly focused in particular areas of science and technology. Then my life went somewhat awry, and I didn't understand why. I became motivated to discover what that was about, if for no other reason than to alleviate my own suffering. I discovered a great deal of ignorance I was woefully, if previously somewhat blissfully, unaware of. (Grammar is another thing I'm kind of ignorant of.) In any case, I've learned a great deal in the past three or four years, probably the most valuable education in my whole life, but it wasn't inspired by or even especially facilitated by technology (Though tech has helped a little.). It was inspired by events in my life that weren't what I was expecting, disappointments, setbacks and lingering unhappiness. I don't think I'm exceptional in that regard.

The point is, technology alone is seldom sufficient motivation for people to overcome their own ignorance about matters that can "change everything;" and technology alone cannot overcome ignorance at all. I submit that "changing everything" will chiefly require overcoming ignorance, and you can't do that for anyone but yourself.

Further, I submit that if you truly, genuinely do wish to "change everything," you have to begin where you are, and that is within your own skin. It's not the kind of thing one thinks of when one thinks of "changing everything."

As an aside, there are potentially two technologies that can "change everything." They are nanotechnology, and genetic engineering. Nanotech, if we can survive a transition to a global nanotech economy, and I don't think that's by any means a sure thing, will make all of man's problems spiritual ones. (In my opinion, they already are, but this would make it clear.) If our lifetimes could be extended indefinitely, and if our every material desire could be satisfied, then we would all be, in effect, living our own version of Groundhog Day, and we'd learn something about how to become who we really have the potential to be.

Alternatively, genetic engineering may alter us in ways that modify our fundamental behaviors. I'm much less optimistic about pulling that off than I am about surviving the transition to a global nanotech economy.

Short of those two eventualities, the only way to "change everything," is for every human being to focus a good deal of their effort and attention on becoming a better person by overcoming their own ignorance. I don't think that's ever going to happen, but that's okay. I just have to work on my own. You don't have to believe me, and that's just fine. I wouldn't have it any other way. Standard disclaimer applies: I'm an authority on nothing. I make all this stuff up.

Doesn't mean I'm wrong though.

Monday Morning - Happens the Same Day, Every Week

And so, it begins.

What? You thought it was going to be something profound? Afraid not. Did all that in the morning pages thing, which is turning out to be a good idea. Lots of stuff I never write about here appears in there!

Anyway, I've got a couple of minutes before I have to hold reveille on the offspring. It's going to be a challenging day for me, if for no other reason than I drank way too much Diet Pepsi playing Starcraft yesterday. Hardly slept at all last night. I never got very far in StarCraft when I first bought it, and I pretty much stopped playing most of my games after I moved over to OS X, but I tried 1.09 on 10.2.4 and it works like a champ. It hadn't always done so on previous versions of OS X. So yesterday I decided to try to complete a level that had been stumping me, and that led to the inevitable, "just one more level..."

What a time sump. It was fun though.

Obviously, that kind of precluded me from making any further effort at documenting one way to weblog with Tinderbox, but I'll make an effort to get to it this week. I owe it to myself, too. I hate re-learning this stuff all the time, and we're just days away from starting a new month. And RSS is still broken too.

I did manage to make significant progress in the garage. Tuesday, Vietnam Veterans of America will come by and collect a large mound of stuff. I dragged a bunch of stuff down by the curb for the trash, but apparently some folks thought it was too nice to send to the trash, because a lot of it was gone the next day. Of course, I found some of it back by the curb in front of some other folks' houses, so I'm not sure if it was kids or second thoughts.

Next weekend I should be able to make enough of a hole to actually get the Montero into the garage. It's just something I want to do at least once in my life, actually park my car inside a garage. Of course, that just means Caitie will tip her bike over into it and put another dent or scratch, or both, in it.

"I figure you for a glass half-empty guy."

The weather was much nicer than my recollection of what the weather-guessers were calling for. I went for a run after I brought home the groceries, and, while it was a little cool running into a fairly stiff breeze, the sun was shining and I had worked up a good sweat by the time I made it home. My time wasn't bad either.

Lot's of domestic duties to attend to this week. As usual, I guess. I'm looking forward to hearing how other folks like Apple's power supply replacement. My DP 867 isn't "blow-dryer" loud, but it is louder than the G4/400 that Maria uses. It can intrude into your thoughts sometimes, and I can see where it might annoy some people.

Well, best go holler at the kids.

Hope you all have a great Monday.

Sunday Night Thoughts

A couple of comments on the repression thing: First, the unexamined life isn't worth living. Repression is not only a loaded term, it's not a particularly helpful one either. The idea isn't that one should live one's life in denial. Rather, that we should embrace the whole process, and get through to acceptance - howsoever one has to do that. Along the way, we may often acquire a modicum of knowledge, or perhaps even wisdom. Something that will serve us well in the years to come, as life's inevitable setbacks and tragedies return. So the point is not that we never look back on what has happened to us, but that we do so to see what it can tell us about ourselves, about others, and the world we share. Yet we must try to keep in mind that we haven't heard all of the story yet, there is always more to learn.

Second, some people won't be able to do that. Some will get stuck and stay stuck, in denial, in bargaining, in anger, or in depression, and it's not for us to blame them or shame them, but to love them and accept them as best we can. Sometimes "as best we can" may mean, "at a distance." And that's okay too.

Repression: It's Good for the Soul

Repression is a loaded term in psychology. But this article in the New York Times suggests that new research shows it might be time to unburden it.

"Still other researchers suggest that repressors are good at repressing because they can manipulate their attention, swiveling it away from the burned body or the hurting heart, and if that fails, they believe that they can cope with what befalls them. They think they're competent, those with the buttoned-up backs. Whether they really are or are not competent is not the issue; repressors, Ginzburg suggests, think they are, and anyone who has ever read ''The Little Engine That Could'' knows the power of thinking positively when it comes to making it over the mountain."

Apart from the flippant style, the quotation resonates with stoicism, and, perhaps to a similar extent, Zen Buddhism. Stoicism suggests that "shit happens," and it will always be that way. If it didn't kill you, don't worry about it. If it's so bad it will kill you, you have nothing to worry about either, for you'll soon be gone. That sounds kind of flippant, but it's pretty damn close to a summary of one of the core beliefs of stoicism. The other message is that "you are adequate to all you will confront." Some folks have a little trouble with that, because some people are confronted with seemingly insurmountable difficulties, and truly they are. But what choice do they have? Either they find a way to be adequate, or they are undone. If they are undone, then they must rely on the compassion, pity or charity of others, and that's okay too.

You will also note the phrase, "manipulate their attention," which is, I believe, a component of Zen Buddhism. It's more highly developed there than in stoicism, which shares a lot with Zen. We're terrible masters of our attention. Usually our attention is mastered by others, as part of our evolutionary past. We're wired to be members of groups, of social organisms which exist by marshaling the attention of constituent members to attend to the priorities of the group, often to at least the neglect, and sometimes the harm, of the individual.

The past is gone, and has no power to harm anyone. The only power to harm exists in the mind that insists on reliving the past.

Garage Excavation

The weather appears to be cooperating for the moment, so I think I'm going to take the opportunity to clean up the garage a bit. If it starts to rain later, I'll work on Maria's G4 and the Tinderbox tutorial.

I tested for blue belt last night and passed. The school must be doing well, the place was packed last night. Had to break a board with a jump round-kick. Our boards are actually plastic training devices that are supposedly equivalent to varying amounts of one-inch pine. Later next month, we're supposed to do a board break-a-thon as a fund raiser for an instructor at another school who was severely injured in an automobile accident. We'll be using real boards at that. I'm wondering what the difference will be.

Anyway, I'm going to don my spelunking gear and try to reduce the entropy of the garage for a little while.

NoteTaker 2003 Observation

One of the hazards of creating a metaphor in computing that is very faithful to the original is that it can confuse simpletons like me.

NoteTaker presents itself to the user as a (surprise!) notebook.

You can hide that tool bar.

Okay, so you're typing along and you get to the bottom of the page, and your first thought is to turn the page. So, what do you click on to get a new page? The answer is nothing that you see in that window! Though there are a few things that seem to suggest they will get you a new page. The "New Page" text in the heading, is really the title of the page; clicking on that allows you to edit it. Clicking on the left side of the dog-ear near the page number takes you back a page. Clicking on the right side takes you to the table of contents, because there are no more pages in that notebook. If there were, it would take you to the next page - though it won't create one for you.

Frustrating, that.

The way to get a new page is to go to the Table of Contents page (How many of your notebooks have a table of contents? Mine never did.), and then clicking in the title of an existing page and pressing Return.

In this view, I turned on Show Page Tabs - I'm not sure why "New Page" doesn't have a tab, but Test does. It's also not clear how to get rid of a page. If you click on the little diamond widget, it takes you to that page, which is okay I guess. If you click on the text of the title of the page, you can hit delete and it deletes the text in the title. There's no way immediately obvious to select the page itself, and hit delete.

If you click and hold the diamond widget, you can slide the page up and down, to reorder items in the table of contents. If you let go of the mouse button after moving the entry up or down, you'll see a solid rectangle around the whole entry. If you hit Delete, and you'll get a dialog box confirming you want to delete the entry (the page). Further experimentation reveals that if you click to the left of the diamond widget, making sure the cursor is an arrow and not the pointing finger that seems to stand for hyperlink, you'll select the entire entity. Once you have one page selected, you can use the arrow keys to select a different page. A glitch there seems to be, if you hold down the Shift key while using the arrow keys, you won't select multiple pages. But if you hold down the Shift key and use the mouse to click to the left of the diamond widgets, you can select multiple pages. They should probably fix that.

Frankly, I don't think they intended for you to treat a notebook exactly like a physical notebook. If you keep typing on a page, you eventually cause the text to scroll upward, and you'll get the usual thumb on the right side to scroll up and down. I think I'd like to flip pages, but then it kind of complicates the outline features of the application, as each page is a new entity in an outline.

Of course, I never read the manual until I absolutely have to. So far I haven't had to, but it has been a little bit challenging.

My Fans

Apple's offering a power supply swap to the folks who bought mirrored drive doors (MDD) PowerMac G4s. It includes a new cpu fan as well, from what I can see. They want $20.00 for shipping and handling, and it includes a pre-paid shipping container to return the old power supply (and fan?) to Apple. The replacement power supply is rated at 360 watts, while the original is rated at 400 watts. I don't think that would ever be an issue for me, and Apple seems to agree, but I think I'll watch as the discussions unfold on the various Mac sites before I order one.

The installation instructions are rather involved, but nothing harder than I've done already with the 6500. I think there's only a couple of places where you might cut your hands on sheet metal. The 6500 is a veritable death-by-a-thousand-cuts torture chamber by comparison.

I'm not hysterical about the noise emitted by the computer, but it is loud. Maria brought the G4/400 (Gigabit Ethernet) up to have me do some maintenance on it, and I'll compare the two. You get spoiled by working on an iMac that is nearly silent. Sometimes, while working in a single application (and foolishly not saving my work every few minutes - what can I say?) the hard drive would spin down, and it would be silent. There's a lot to be said for silence.

There's a pun there, in case you weren't paying attention.

Okay, go back to whatever it was you were doing.

Differences

I seldom find myself in strong disagreement with anything fellow Floridian Rogers Cadenhead writes, but I do disagree with him on this issue. Maybe it's a sign of an ossifying intellect, the product of advanced years, but I do believe the woman in question is exactly right. I think most of the digerati or technorati or whatever you want to call them are overly infatuated with their perceptions of their own self-importance and the utility of their new toys.

Things are far less different than these people would have you believe. The proof is before our eyes every day. Nothing that matters has changed.

Because technology does not change human nature. Often, it merely amplifies the worst of it.

Hanging Fire

I haven't forgotten about the Tinderbox tutorial. My RSS feed is broken again, and when I sit down to try to understand why it's broken, I'll document the RSS process. I've also noticed that the agents that collect the main page and the "recent" page stop automatically updating after a brief while. Selecting Update Now from the File menu doesn't solve the problem. What seems to work, though I don't know why, is to choose Rename from the Note menu (or the contextual menu), and then just "touch" the Query, you don't have to change anything, click "Okay," and it'll update.

I hope to get some quiet time to work on it this weekend, but one can never be sure around here. If I don't get it done this weekend, I'll try to make myself do it one evening early in the week. I usually get home from work and do whatever domestic and familial duties I'm required to do, and then I just want to veg a bit. But that's probably just a lazy habit.

Less Than 2 Weeks Till Springsteen

Meant to mention this on Tuesday, but it's less than 2 weeks away now. Hopefully, the world will still be in one piece.

Project Moonbase

The DVD of the 1953 movie Project Moonbase arrived the other day. It's only 63 minutes long, so I watched it on the G4. It had some glitches, but I'm not sure if they were due to the DVD Player application, or if the transfer to DVD format could have gone better.

It hardly matters, it's not a great film. It's entertaining in a campy sort of way, but it's not a classic like Destination Moon. It's more in the vein of the Saturday matinée serials, and indeed I think it ultimately morphed into Space Patrol on television or something.

I'm really looking forward to the release of The Day the Earth Stood Still on DVD. I'll probably make some popcorn, turn out all the lights on a Saturday night and give that one a "formal" viewing.

Note Taker 2003

A few weeks ago, I had been waiting to get the oil changed in my car. When I returned to the shop after the 60 minutes they told me would take to complete the job, I found out it wasn't finished yet. The Montero has a skid plate underneath the engine that has to be removed to change the oil filter. So it looked as though I had another 30 minutes to kill.

I wandered over to the base library and started browsing the stacks. I happened to notice The Artist's Way, which I had seen at Books-a-Million quite often, but never really looked at it. I started flipping through the pages, and I was kind of intrigued by what it had to offer. So I checked it out and went back to see if the car was ready.

One of the main exercises in the book is something the author calls "morning pages." It's kind of a meditation, though perhaps not exactly what one thinks of when thinking of meditation. The idea is to write down all the crap in your head first thing in the morning, and just see where it leads you. I have some experience with this here at this site.

To a certain extent, that's what I've been doing here; but perhaps not as well as I might. I impose a great deal of self-censorship, and even fret a bit over some of the things I do choose to disclose. So whatever value there may be in getting it out in text is mitigated somewhat by squelching some things.

I considered creating another Tinderbox file to use for morning pages, but I've been reading about NoteTaker 2003 lately, and I'd played with a demo briefly before the DP867 arrived. I liked what I saw, but I wasn't sure I needed yet another outlining, information management tool. But I'm a sucker for these things, and NoteTaker 2003 sure is pretty. Tinderbox is pretty utilitarian in appearance by comparison. I liked the notebook appearance and metaphor, I think it's kind of sympathetic with the concept of writing these morning pages.

So, rationalizing spending yet another $69.00, I went ahead a paid for it. I haven't played around too much with it yet, but so far it looks like a good choice. I've made some changes to the desktop environment as well. I've put a medium gray solid color on the desktop, and got rid of most of the icon clutter. I'll do a "Hide Others" when I move to NoteTaker for morning pages, and hopefully minimize some of the distractions. I'll probably have to turn e-mail reception off for a while, but I get so little e-mail I doubt it will be a problem. Most of my e-mail is spam and the spam filter does a pretty good job of keeping it out of my inbox. I picked the graph paper background for the notebook I'll use for morning pages, because I always enjoyed working on 5x graph paper in my engineering courses. Each notebook has a cover, and you can put a graphic of your choice on it. I used one of my beach sunrise photos.

We'll see how this goes. There have been a lot of mornings, and some late nights, when I've written a lot of stuff and then decided not to post it. I usually wind up deleting it. Maybe by putting it in another vehicle, expressly for the purpose of keeping it and not publishing it, I'll do it more often and perhaps derive some greater benefit from it.

By the way, The Artist's Way is ostensibly about helping creative people recover their creativity, but it's about a lot more than that.

You Too

You can hear a song a million times, and then one day it taps you on the shoulder:

In summer I can taste the salt in the sea

Kite, U2

Martian Water

Is there liquid water, or not? Let's go and find out.

More Dimensions of Space

A piece at Edge on the issue of 'branes in quantum physics and cosmology. Again, I'm feeling rather inadequate because I must have a fundamental misunderstanding. The subject (author? - I assume I'm linking to a text transcript of an interview. One can't really tell from the way Edge presents it.) of the piece, Lisa Randall, also discusses extra dimensions in terms of their sizes.

One of these days, I'll meet a physicist who understands this stuff, and I'll ask her how a dimension can have a size. Size is the measure of an object in a particular dimension. Dimensions are sizeless, they are simply a place for something to be. All this talk about very tiny dimensions is nonsense to me. I can accept that objects, which can have "sizes," may be very tiny in a particular dimension, and perhaps all the features of our universe in any but the three spatial dimensions we are familiar with are either so very small, or so incredibly large, that we cannot perceive them, but that says nothing about the dimension being "small" or "large." I think this is just a bit of sloppy writing or thinking in what is normally a very precise science, that has been accepted as kind of a convention. But it annoys me.

As you can tell.

A Matter of Time

I like that phrase.

NPR's Morning Edition is doing a series on time, although the only part I've heard thus far was this morning's. It was an interview with author Kathleen Norris, who wrote about her experience in a Benedictine monastery. I liked what she had to say about starting and ending her days in silence, something I seem to be having difficulty bringing to my life at the moment.

That's not a lament, just an acknowledgment of the work I still have to do.

I did take a walk on the beach yesterday, which is an hour of mostly silence. This time of year, the number of people you encounter on the beach can be counted on the fingers of one hand, and I kind of like that.

Connections

This is pretty cool.

The other day, Sainteros linked to an article ostensibly about Buddhism. I didn't care for the article very much, and told him so in his comments. In his reply, Sainteros wrote, "Religion is inevitably bound up with culture, and should therefore be appropriated only with the greatest of care."

Today, AKMA is writing about religion and culture, offering: "Conversations about faith suffer from the turbulence induced by cultural knowledge , the kind of thing everyone knows about religionÑpremises that may not actually be true or applicable or well-constructed when brought to bear on particular (alleged) instances of the category."

Weird how that happens.

Chinese Farmer

In a piece called Consequences, Jonathan Delacour offers a lengthy quotation at the end that resonates strongly with the Taoist tale of the old Chinese farmer. Worth reading.

Better Today

It's much more like Florida today, although it's still pretty cloudy and wet. I think it's nearly 70 degrees out there though, and that's great. I went for a run this morning and felt pretty good. My time wasn't one of my best, but it wasn't bad and my knees felt great. Well, better than usual anyway. Took Mandy for a walk around the neighborhood after the run and admired the impressive mounds of dead and rotting ornamental vegetation that folks had assembled by the curb for the city to collect. I'll have to make my own soon.

I notice the spacebar on this keyboard has a tendency to double-up on me a great deal. Maybe I'll have to lighten my touch, or perhaps there's some modification I can make with an o-ring or something to mitigate the bounce.

I stayed up last night and mopped the kitchen floor. That probably doesn't sound like a big job, but the floor I'm mopping really covers three rooms. A large kitchen and entryway off the garage (I usually hit part of the laundry room and half-bath as well), the dining area, and the TV room, which are all contiguous to one another and covered by the same vinyl flooring. So there's a lot of prep work and furniture moving before one can actually begin swabbing. It usually takes me an hour from start to finish; but when it's bad, it'll take me an hour and a half - like last night. I'll have to hit the spots Mandy trashes when she comes in, but it's vastly better than it was. I must be scarred for life or something, because clean floors are kind of a big deal for me. That's not to say you'll always find clean floors at my house, because I can't keep up with entropy around here. But I try.

It's wet enough to preclude doing much in the way of yardwork, (that's rationalization for you) so I'm doing laundry and trying to just relax a bit.

I wonder what goes on in Karma's mind. She never got along with Jaguar, but I think she knows something is different in a way that must upset her. She's much more in my face than usual. Maybe it's just because I was gone for four days, but I think it's something else. Another orange tabby that had been fighting with Jaguar has been hanging around the house the last couple of days as well. Caitie still comes over for hugs every few hours, saying she misses Jaguar. Chris seems to be fine now, though I'm sure he misses him as well. You could say it was only a cat, but you'd be wrong. I miss that hungry orange ball of fur too.

What Would You Do?

Another thing you read a lot in weblogs that rah-rah going to war against Iraq, is this seemingly rhetorical question regarding what those who oppose going to war suggest doing about Saddam Hussein.

The point of anti-war demonstrations is to register objections to a given course of action, not lay out an alternative plan. Nevertheless, a number of alternatives have been put forward in other, more appropriate venues; yet somehow these don't seem to be acknowledged by the war-heads. They are just dismissed out of hand, "Won't work! We tried that!"

Okay, so don't ask any more stupid questions.

Supposedly there are four million Iraqis who have left Iraq because life is so bad under Saddam Hussein. Why don't they form a terrorism movement and go blow him up? Better yet, why don't they become "a pack, not a herd" and go take care of their own problem? I guess they're much too comfortable in exile, basking in all the favorable attention from the war-heads. "Give me liberty or give me death?" I guess they've answered that question. Those are the folks I want to go kill and die for.

A Pack, Not a Herd

You read that comment a lot in certain weblogs. It usually refers to people doing something seemingly smart and brave in a group.

I guess it's supposed to make us feel better about ourselves, and intimidate our supposed adversaries.

The reality is much more like this.

A mob, not a civilization.

Scared Stupid

Had a perfect example of this last week in D.C.

As we stood in the freezing wind to have our bags inspected before entering the gate to the facility we were visiting, people in cars were being waved through after a brief glance at an ID card.

Go figure.

Security Through Obscurity

It seems we're going to try to make ourselves safer by restricting the free exchange of information. I think this is an error. The opponents quoted in the article make most of the points I would make.

The Cold Equations

The investigation into what happened to COLUMBIA continues to move forward, if slowly.

I don't think there will be a great deal of useful information gleaned from the wreckage that is being collected and sent to Kennedy Space Center. I can't see how one could differentiate between damage that may have occurred prior to the destruction of the orbiter, and that which occurred during the breakup, descent and impact. But you never know, so the collection effort goes on.

What will be useful is the data from COLUMBIA itself, and we've got a few more bits of that. Using data from the flight control system, we should be able to model different damage scenarios which would lead to the types of command inputs COLUMBIA's flight control system was using to maintain the correct vehicle attitude.

The fact that the data shows COLUMBIA was relying on its attitude control thrusters will help in modeling the extent of the damage. Unfortunately, it was a desperate effort, ultimately in vain. Those thrusters are intended only for use in space, where the shuttle's aerodynamic control surfaces are ineffective because of the near-vacuum of space. The fact that they were being fired near the end shows that the drag forces on the left side of the orbiter exceeded the amount of controlling forces that could be generated by the shuttle's control surfaces. Those thrusters contain only a limited, relatively small, amount of fuel. Even if they could provide sufficient thrust to maintain the vehicle's attitude, eventually they would run out of fuel. I'm not sure if the investigation will show that the drag forces on the damaged portion of the shuttle exceeded the total amount of force the flight control system could generate to maintain vehicle attitude, and that's what caused the shuttle to break up; or if it simply ran out of fuel for the attitude thrusters, and then the shuttle did what pilots and crash investigators call, "departed from controlled flight."

The different scenarios accounting for the drag forces being generated by the damage to the orbiter can be compared with scenarios that account for the heating being registered by the shuttle's sensors, as well as the loss of certain sensors. And those will be married up with the photographic record being assembled by the investigators, as well as the types of debris being found west of Texas.

I think we'll have a pretty good idea of what happened to COLUMBIA on reentry, but I don't know that we'll ever be certain what happened to cause the damage in the first place. We'll get a list of likely causes, but I don't know how we could ever be certain.

Weather is Here, Wish You Were Beautiful

Well, it could be snow. I guess I shouldn't complain.

I stayed indoors today, apart from buying this week's supply of canned goods, duct tape and plastic sheeting. I'm beginning to wonder about the combination of duct tape, plastic sheeting and canned beans though. Which would be the more hazardous atmosphere, the one out there or the one in here? One of the perils of life in these modern times, I guess.

Rain keeping me indoors, I did some virtual housekeeping on the DP867. (If I mopped the kitchen floor, the dog would merely track mud all over a clean floor. Somehow, it's easier to accept that on an already-dirty one.) Anyway, I cleaned up my desktop and disposed of a lot of the detritus that accumulates when one is bringing a new computer online. I imported my mailboxes from the iMac and reorganized the mailbox structure in Mail.app. In the process, I got a good look at the Rules feature of Mail.app, which I hadn't paid much attention to since Jaguar was released. It's a lot better, if you haven't looked at it yet.

I installed StarCraft on this box, and played it for a bit. It seems much better behaved on 10.2.4 than it did on 10.2.3 on the iMac. It didn't crash on me at all.

Keynote seems to have some difficulty opening and presenting PowerPoint presentations. I only tried one of the many I brought back from DC, but it reversed one of the graphics and it had some difficulty with the text. PowerPoint X seemed to have no problems with any of the ones I checked. As much as I despise Microsoft, having Office certainly gives me some additional flexibility in doing my job.

I looked in on my bank account and was somewhat disappointed to note that the balance I was keeping in my head was pretty damn close to the actual balance. Things should improve in March, but I expect in April I'll be writing a check to Uncle Sam. As long as I can pay off the new Mac in July, I'll be happy.

I'm Tired

I'm beginning to think I need a vacation, or something. Putting Jaguar down this morning was hard. I took the kids in to say goodbye, and I think that was a good thing. He wasn't well, and it showed. If they hadn't seen him, true, their most recent memories of him might have been as he was, though even then he wasn't well. But at least they understood something of the necessity for what was to come.

Chris wanted to stay, I sent Caitie to the waiting room and called the vet. I was proud of Chris. You don't send your animals out of this world in the presence of only strangers. It was tough for him, but I was very proud of him.

Anyway, that's done. I took Caitie to Books-a-Million and gave her her allowance to spend. I picked up another copy of the pocket edition of the Tao, and the Office X Missing Manual. I looked at Mac OS X in a Nutshell, but I've got the new edition of Mac OS X Unleashed inbound, and I think that covers most of the same material.

I stopped in at Ace Hardware, right next to BAM, to pick up a hole saw to mount a 120mm fan in Chris's computer case. That was a rather depressing $30.00 for the saw and the pilot bit. I'm guessing I might have saved about $10.00 at Home Depot, but I didn't feel like crossing the ditch today. When I got home, I cut the hole for Chris and everything seems to have gone well. I was worried about getting aluminum shavings in the electronics. We covered everything as best we could with a piece of cardboard and some plastic wrap, but there were still shavings everywhere. I think I vacuumed most of them up. (knock on wood)

I received Keynote on Monday before I left. I haven't had much time to play with it, other than to note it sure is pretty. I came home with a CD-ROM full of PowerPoint briefs that I must review, and I was pleased to discover they all opened just fine in PowerPoint for OS X. Just out of curiosity, I'll try opening a few of them in Keynote a little later on.

I just installed the newest update to Tinderbox 1.2.3, and I welcome the scroll wheel support. I need to get back to my tutorial this week.

The weather today was beautiful, which was a welcome relief. Another gray day would have made this morning's efforts that much more difficult. I hope to spend some time outdoors tomorrow. I need to wash the car, but there are a lot of other things I need to do as well. We shall see.

One thing I definitely need to do is either run or ride the bike. I was happy to note that I hadn't gained any weight on the trip, but I did indulge in some "comfort food" today (a white chocolate chip cookie at BAM). I need to get my real bike fixed so I can start riding on the beach again.

Well, that's enough for today.

Jaguar ? - February 15, 2003

Back in Town

I guess it goes without saying, I'm back.

Had my lower limit reset on my internal thermometer. I won't be complaining about 42 degrees again anytime soon. It was friggin' frigid in D.C. I've been to D.C. in February four out of the last five years, and this was by far the coldest.

I rode the Metro nearly every day and I couldn't detect any increased level of anxiety as a result of the increased terrorist alert and the admonition to buy duct tape and polyethylene. The news sure made it sound as though everyone was on edge, but you couldn't tell in the offices where I was working.

I'm happy to be home, although I wish there were better news regarding Jaguar. We'll have to deal with all that grief again tomorrow. The kids seem to have turned their attention to other matters for now.

Senator Bill Nelson was on my flight back, along with an old shipmate of mine who's working at the Pentagon. Me, I'm just another working stiff.

I had dinner with Pascale Soleil at a bookstore in Dupont Circle. It was great meeting a fellow blogger. I mentioned to her that she's much more animated than I expected from her writing. (There's that expectations thing again.) She's smart and funny and I had a great time.

The motel I stayed in sucked. I won't mention any names, except to say it was the Courtyard Marriott at Crystal City. Conveniently located near almost nothing, it had no high-speed internet access, no complimentary continental breakfast, a mattress that was so old it sagged, and otherwise was just not a very nice place for $140.00 a night.

Professionally, it was an interesting visit. I learned a great deal that will be of value to me in the work I do. I can't say I enjoyed wearing a coat and tie every day, but I survived.

I missed all the excitement with the CINC visiting Mayport. That's a good thing, I think. I'm willing to wager that when I hear about it on Tuesday the inconvenience of the security arrangements will be a hot topic.

I've downloaded and installed 10.2.4 and the new version of Safari with no ill effects thus far. I've tried to catch up on what most of you all have been doing, but it'll probably be a few days before I'm back up to speed.

It's good to be home again. I've got the long weekend off. We'll attend to our pet tomorrow, and do some housekeeping. Then I've got to hold training on energy conservation. I got the electric bill today and it's $375.00, which is about 50% higher than it has ever been. I suspect it was because during the cold snap, Chris had his windows open because his room got too "hot." I don't know how long he had been doing it before I noticed it and made him close them. Nor do I know if he kept them closed. I just have to shake my head sometimes.

Well, that's about all I'm good for tonight. Which isn't much.

Bad News

Well, Jaguar doesn't have fatty liver syndrome. He has liver cancer and there's nothing they can do. Chris and Caitie are taking it pretty hard, as one would expect.

I'm going to call the vet tomorrow and see if we can come in and see him, and then decide what the most appropriate thing to do is. I'm afraid I already know that answer.

Pre-Underway Checks

Another busy day today. I've got to call the vet to see if I can get the cat in this week. I need to check with the dental insurance people to see if it's too late to file for some dental work on the kids from last year. The rebate for the Viewsonic needs to get in the mail today, if it isn't already too late. Clothes have to go to a one-day dry cleaner, hopefully the one on the way to Chris's school will be able to give me one-day turnaround. I need to go to the bank to pay a few more bills before I leave. I have to let the schools know that Melissa will be looking after Chris and Caitie while I'm gone. Caitie has an audition at a magnet school tonight, I've printed out the directions. I still need to pack. I've left the mailbox key on the desk. I'm sure there's something I'm forgetting.

One of these days I have to get a will. I'm pretty sure I have one, it's one of those things you do in the Navy, but I have no idea where it is. I scurry about to get all these bills paid because I figure if I croak while I'm away, at least the lights will stay on and the water will run while they sort out the financial issues. But I probably need to put together a package with all the paperwork to the various policies, passwords for the computers, account numbers, outstanding loans, where the spare key is to the Montero, and that sort of thing. I'm insured to the gills, so that's not a problem; sorting out the paperwork could be confusing though. It's all in a big file box I keep, but it could be better organized.

Jag's just laying in the corner of the laundry room. I gave him some food and he just sniffed at it. He drank a lot of water though. He seems very weak. Poor guy. We'll try to get him fixed up.

Okay, that's all the cheese sandwich you're going to get from me today. I gots places to go and peoples to see...

Save the Tiger

Well, Jaguar anyway. After sleeping on it, and trying in vain to coax this guy to eat something, I've decided to spend whatever it'll take to get this guy back on his paws. It's not like I have bushels of money either. I'll probably regret buying this computer.

Don't ask me why. The bastard pissed right next to my head in my bed after I was petting him one morning. It's not like I'm terribly fond of cleaning up all his little calling cards around the house. Or pulling him out of trees, for which he's never thanked me, I hasten to add.

The good news is, if he pulls through, we can put him on Prozac, and that's supposed to be very effective at eliminating the spraying in the house. Prozac for pets. What will PETA think? On second thought, who gives a rat's ass?

I've never had to buy a cat, look for one, ask for one, or otherwise exert any effort to acquire one. They have all just appeared in my life. There's probably some cosmic connection there. I just wouldn't feel right not trying to save this one.

Damn cats. Can't live with 'em, can't just let 'em die.

One Sick Kitty

Jaguar, formerly the sole domestic feline in residence at Shangri La, who has recently been expressing his displeasure at having to share his domicile with two other cats by spraying every vertical surface in the house, wasn't looking well this morning. He was lethargic, drinking copious amounts of water, and neglecting his food.

I debated waiting to see if he'd get better by himself, but something told me I needed to get him in to see the vet. So I called the civilian vet I use for surgeries, and they said they'd see him without an appointment. $230.00 later, we learned that he has fatty liver syndrome. It's not a confirmed diagnosis because we didn't do a biopsy or an ultrasound, (more $$$) but liver enzymes were elevated, and an x-ray showed some enlargement of his liver.

It's a pretty serious illness for cats. The fix is to have a tube surgically inserted in his stomach, through which we can force feed him. It's expensive, and not a lot of fun for either the cat or the owner. So now we're doing that soul-searching thing every pet owner has to do from time to time. In the mean time, we're trying to encourage him to eat.

I'm beginning to hate friggin' February.

A Dangerous Thing

I was browsing around Amazon and noted that Bill Murray's The Razor's Edge is available on DVD. For a long time, I couldn't find this movie in any format. I'm glad to see it's available now. It's in the shopping cart. Too bad Quick Change isn't available yet.

Anterior Cingulate

This is an interesting little piece in Science Daily on using functional magnetic resonance imaging to to study the effects of anti-depressants on the brain.

Extended Low

These are the "Dark Ages," the time between the Christmas holidays and spring. They're usually not too bad in Florida, but they can be pretty cold and miserable even here.

And that seems to be the case more so than not recently. Cold and rainy today. Gray yesterday. Blech. Of course it rained after I mopped the kitchen floor so the dog could go outside and come back in and leave paw prints all over the floor.

Entropy always wins.

I've got to clean up all the dead vegetation killed off by our recent freezes. The sight of all those dead plants isn't very cheery either.

There's a trip north next week, that I hadn't planned on. It's going to take about four days. On another occasion, I might welcome a chance to go on a little trip, but right now it's just an inconvenience.

And I suppose I'm going to have to figure out how my health care coverage works. My left arm doesn't seem to be getting a lot better by itself and does give some indication that it may be getting worse. Entropy always wins.

That's one thing I miss about the Navy. Don't feel well? Go to sick call. I think you can count on your fingers the number of times I went to sick call in 26 years (including the four at USNA). But I never had to worry about filing a claim, making a co-pay, who accepted my insurance and all that crap. Of course, some people claimed Navy health care was worth about what you paid for it, but I had no complaints.

Then there's all the cheery news about Iraq and COLUMBIA and the U.S. economy. Yeah, Dark Ages is about right.

I did take a walk on the beach at lunch time on Wednesday. It was a sunny day, and relatively warm. I was fortunate, because I hadn't bothered to check to see when low tide was, but it appeared to be right around noon because I had a lot of good beach to walk on. I even found an intact Sand Dollar, which seems to be a fairly rare occurrence on these beaches. Normally I just find broken ones. This one was only recently washed ashore, so it was covered with whatever passes for Sand Dollar tissue, all kind of green and fuzzy. I soaked it in bleach for a couple of hours, which left the white skeletal structure.

Keynote hasn't arrived yet. I called Apple because it hadn't arrived and I hadn't received the usual notices from Apple about an order shipping. The hold time was much shorter this time, and I got helpful, knowledgeable person right off the bat. It turns out it has shipped, but by FedEx ground shipping, and the person who placed the order didn't enter my e-mail address, so I couldn't be notified. I've got a tracking number, but I left it at the office. It'll probably get here while I'm up north.

I played around a bit with Video Lan Client on the DP867. I can pause a frame and then use Apple's built-in screen grabbing function and grab frames of movies with it. I was watching this one the other night:

It was the subject of a pretty good MST3K once.

I ordered Project Moon Base on DVD from Amazon, which is another 50s sf film based on work by Robert Heinlein. I've never seen it before, but it looks interesting. I also ordered the Jaguar edition of Mac OS X Unleashed. I'm looking forward to next month when The Day the Earth Stood Still is released on DVD. Then the only movie I'll really miss on DVD will be the original The Thing From Another World, Howard Hawks' film of a John W. Campbell short story, Who Goes There?.

I hate to wish the time away, but February can't be over too quickly for me. I'm a little concerned that March might not be much better, but the weather should be a little nicer, the days a little longer, Springsteen is coming to town and that can't be bad. Hopefully, the war will be brief and not too many people will suffer. Then maybe we'll have a nice spring. That is, if the tornadoes don't kill too many people.

Yep, I'm in a great mood.

This Changes Everything

You read that statement a lot. Chrysler used to use it in a commercial.

Chrysler.

Nowadays, you read it in connection with the internet.

Maybe it's just hyperbole. That's probably it. Because, from where I sit, the internet has changed nothing.

Well, let me be more specific, it changes the "how" of a lot of things. It hasn't changed a single "what," and the "whats" are "everything." The "how" of the internet is the same "how" of every other technological advance. It expands the "whats" in space, and contracts them in time.

What do people do? What activity exists now that is wholly new and never existed before the internet? Don't tell me weblogging. Weblogging is just a form of communication. People have been publishing pamphlets, writing letters to the editor and ranting on street corners forever. The internet just expands the potential audience.

You want to change "everything?" Try changing a "what." What do people do? They hurt each other. Try changing that.

They fear. Try changing that.

They hate. Try changing that.

They suffer. Try changing that.

They hurt. Try changing that.

When people don't fear, don't hate, don't suffer and don't hurt, then you can tell me everything is changed. Otherwise you're just blowing warm smoke up each others' ass.

And you can start by trying to change that.

Pay No Mind

If it's not obvious, I'm rather easily distracted.

Which is why I was happy to read this article in the NY Times, once again affirming the value of meditation in managing stress.

More Flying Pundits

Gregg Easterbrook is one of the flying pundits who condemns the space shuttle and NASA. That doesn't particularly trouble me. I don't happen to agree with him, but then I'm probably not as smart as he is so that's to be expected.

It does irritate me though, when some smart guy gets a couple of pages in a national news magazine to vent his spleen, presumably for a paycheck, and he gets a couple of trivial facts wrong.

Toward the end of the screed he writes, "no safety systems were added to the solid rocket boosters whose explosion destroyed Challenger." Well, call me a nit-picker, but the SRBs didn't explode. The propellant burned through a seam between two sections of the one of the rockets, which are built like a layer-cake. The plume of flame and hot exhaust gasses burned through the support struts holding the SRB to the ET, and the booster became unlimbered from the rest of the vehicle, striking the ET and rupturing it. It was the liquid hydrogen fuel that caused the great explosion.

Plus, the SRB mating rings were redesigned following Challenger. I'm not sure what kind of system one could put into what is just a dumb rocket to make it safer, but it was made safer in its inherent design.

Then in his grand finale he writes, "In 1986 the last words transmitted from Challenger were in the valiant vow: 'We are go at throttle up!' This meant the crew was about to apply maximum thrust, which turned out to be a fatal act."

Maybe he's just taking dramatic license, but Challenger was doomed before the throttle up event in the ascent phase. It had nothing to do with what was about to occur. It wasn't so much a "fatal" act as it was a final one.

But, he's a smart guy I guess. That's probably why he gets ink in Time magazine, and I just scribble my meaningless ravings here in Time's Shadow.

Flying Pundits

I wonder what the specific impulse is of all the hot air issuing from the mouths of all the self-appointed space pundits. Probably not enough to achieve escape velocity.

Too bad.

Along the lines of the good thing/bad thing duality illusion I mentioned the other day, let me add to the torrent of virtual hot air with some thoughts of my own.

If, following the investigation, an assessment is made that the existing orbiter fleet is unsafe, what do we do then? The International Space Station depends on it, do we decommission the space station as well?

I say no. I say we fly minimally-crewed shuttle missions (which may in fact be the full complement, I don't know) to complete assembly of the ISS. At the same time, we embark on an accelerated program to develop a reusable crew-transfer vehicle (a la, the spaceplane). It won't have the payload capacity to move components, but it can ferry crews and supplies.

Once the ISS is built-out, we retain two shuttles for service missions as necessary and decommission one.

Underscoring all this, we have to figure out just what the hell we plan on doing up there. Either let's go back to the moon, or let's go to Mars. The mission of the ISS should be re-oriented toward supporting R&D for long-duration, manned interplanetary space exploration. Let's at least have a goal.

If we're going to go to Mars, then let's build a nuclear rocket engine. That ought to scare the pants off of all the environmentalists. Hell, we can launch it out of Iraq if we have to. They've got plenty of desert. We can put the bloody thing on a big dumb booster that's over-engineered to a fair-thee-well, and get the thing safely to a parking orbit where we can mate it to the ship it's going to propel to Mars. Or two ships. Or three.

The engine is never going to return to Earth's surface, we'll re-use the damn thing making trips back and forth, and we'll include some special safety features just to make the nervous ninnies happy should it happen to miss hitting its parking orbit on a return flight and auger its way to the surface.

What are we going to do on Mars? We're going to start a colony. And I'm going to open the first bar. I want to call it Rhysling's, those of you familiar with your Heinlein should recall the Blind Singer of the Spaceways. I sure as hell wouldn't call it Callahan's, I'm a little cheesed at Spider these days.

We're going to go to Mars and we're going figure out how to survive on an inhospitable planet. We're going to find out if we can terra-form it. Maybe we'll slam a few comets into it or something. Once we get something started there, maybe we'll drop by some asteroids and see if there's anything there that's interesting. And Venus! Maybe we'll get some nanobots to create an enormous sunscreen and let that sucker cool off a bit while we figure out how to get some of that atmosphere out of there. Or maybe we'll heat it up with mirrors and see if we can't boil some of that excess gas off if it. What do I know?

Meanwhile, back at home, we can deploy some solar power satellites and maybe reduce our CO2 emissions and our reliance on oil and fossil fuels.

But let's think big, and let's do something more exciting than re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic at the UN.

In the immortal words of Bluto Blutarsky, "Whadaya say? Who's with me?!"

Yeah, that's what I was afraid of.

Speed Traps

Looks like the little 12" Powerbook is no slouch when it comes to speed, lack of an L3 cache notwithstanding. You'll find a nice report here (via Accelerate Your Mac). The author seems to believe XBench yields benchmarks that accurately reflect real-world performance.

What will be somewhat more interesting will be the speed comparisons between the new 1GHz DDR RAM and 133MHz bus iMacs with the original G4 iMac. I'd also like to see how it compares with the low-end G4 tower. I'm still happy I got the DP 867, though I would have sprung for the DP 1GHz if I'd waited!

Should be getting my complimentary copy of Keynote tomorrow. Um, I hope. I haven't received the usual e-mails from Apple that it's been shipped and what have you. We'll see.

I haven't had time yet to really see what I can do with the new machine. I've been busy with domestic chores, getting the Tinderbox file up and running on a new machine for a new month, and trouble-shooting (easter-egging) Chris's box. I want to see if I can frame-grab DVDs using VLC or DVD Player. I want to try out the copy of Snapz Pro that shipped with the G4, maybe make a movie or two. I want to burn a CD of pictures of the beach from iPhoto. I haven't played around much with MS Office yet either. I want to open some files from work and see how productive I might be working from home.

Too many toys, too little time.

Blow Me Away

I mentioned that Chris's computer was down hard the other day. It had been acting up for a couple of weeks, and so he bought new RAM to put into it, but that didn't fix it. Then we noticed a tiny fan on the motherboard wasn't spinning and so we bought a $10.00 fan and that seemed to fix the problem, at least up until the LAN party.

They took a power hit at the party, and after that the computer would boot, but it would keep rebooting after a few minutes. Chris persuaded me it was the power supply, so we bought one of those. While we were waiting for that to arrive, I did some research on computers rebooting all the time and there were some indications that it may have been a driver issue. Chris immediately seized on that idea, because he had just installed updated drivers from the web for his sound card. Unrelated to that, while Maria was here, Chris persuaded her to buy him some fancy fans for inside his case. They have colored lights in them and would look pretty cool through the plexiglass window in the side of his case.

Complicating things somewhat was the copy of Windows XP Chris was using. Let's just say it was of uncertain pedigree. I went out and bought a retail copy of XP Home Edition at Office Depot, $200.00 more to the MS collective.

Jaguar only costs $129.00 at full retail. Sheesh.

Well, the new power supply comes in, and the computer keeps rebooting. It won't stay up long enough to install XP. Chris wants to buy a new motherboard. I'm like, out of money, dude.

One nice thing about his motherboard is that it has an onboard diagnostic routine that includes the cpu temp and the fan rotation speed of the cpu fan. So I start up the computer and drop into the motherboard diagnostic which runs out of ROM, and try to see what might be going on. If it'll stay up just running the ROM routines, chances are it's fine.

I noticed the temperature on the cpu keeps going up and the fans speed keeps going down, and eventually even the motherboard diagnostic quits. Watching the fan inside the case, sure enough, it starts to slow down shortly after the computer starts up.

It's the fan. I hope.

Chris's new fans arrived, and he installed two of them. A case fan and the cpu fan. Now it works fine. He's got one more fan he can install, but he needs to cut a hole in the case. I guess I'll be looking for a hole saw next weekend.

All in all, it was an expensive exercise in why I don't use Windows.

Although I am thinking about replacing the power supply fans in my DP867.

Heh.

Well, Because. Just Because.

As I was mopping the kitchen floor last night, I listened to a couple of stories about the loss of COLUMBIA on CNBC. As usual, they revisited the endless debate on the wisdom and utility of sending humans into space. As usual, there is the case to be made that machines can do everything we need to do in space, more cheaply and at less risk. Also playing to type, the astronaut presenting the other side of the debate mentioned the flexibility and utility of two hands and a brain to guide them.

It's easy for me to dislike the people who argue that putting people into space actually impedes our exploration of it. My immediate reaction was that the gentleman was a shallow, bloodless, fainting, cold, unimaginative, "why-did-you-bother-to-get-out-of-bed-this-morning?" imitation of a man. But I think that may have been a little unfair.

There is simply no case to be made, using any tangible measure of costs versus benefits, for the United States, or indeed any country, to put human beings in space. But that's not to say we shouldn't do it. Irony is the fifth fundamental force of the universe.

We should do it because, "Man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?" We should do it because it does challenge us, and inspire us, to bring out the best in each other, rather than the worst. We should do it because we do value things that can't be measured, or counted, or weighed. Of course, people of a different vision will point to the measureless suffering of humanity and say that that is where our real frontier ought to be. But I say that's just an illusion.

There will always be suffering. Yes, we can alleviate some of it; but we will never be rid of it. There will always be a difference between the way things are and they way we'd like them to be. There will never be an end to the people who will say that things can be "better," and that we should focus our efforts on making them so. And some will claim that this argument in favor of our going into space is merely the same thing, though for less immediately valuable purposes. I disagree with that as well. I don't claim that humanity suffers for lack of going into space. I'd just claim we weren't being human.

There will be people who will try to answer the critics by saying that earth is too fragile a basket for humanity to keep all of its eggs in, and they'd be right. But that's just more bean counting. It's good that we count beans. It allows us to make predictions about how many beans we'll have next year, and how many we'll need, and how to share the beans we have when we don't have enough. Bean counting is a valuable exercise. But, in the final analysis, it's just counting beans.

There will be people who will say that humanity going into space will just spread human injustice and intolerance and ignorance into space. That space will be exploited by bean counters, and whatever spiritual value our presence there may have, it will be negated by our all-too-human weaknesses of greed and avarice, which will assert themselves even in space, eventually. And, I suppose, they're right. But I don't think that's any reason not to go. Because getting there will require those good qualities we admire, and it will be quite a while before those good qualities will have won us the kind of access to space that the bean counters can exploit. And when they do, we can set our sights on the next horizon, and continue to demand the best from ourselves to reach it.

Making that demand, and showing that it can be achieved, is money in the bank, if you ask me. It says there is more to life than just counting beans, and that great wonders and achievements can be ours if we allow ourself the chance to pursue our dreams. And maybe we'll have fewer bean counters, and less greed and less avarice if we permit ourselves to pursue our dreams.

Individually, we all have to do this work on ourselves, never leaving our own skins. As a species, we need some place focus our attention so that the bean counters don't end up counting our souls as yet another asset or liability in the balance sheet of existence; and nothing is ever undertaken unless it satisfies some dry cost-benefit analysis.

I'm not sure that's ever going to persuade anyone. The bean counters and their lawyers have got their hooks into our souls pretty deeply already. But I don't think they can hold us back forever. We'll go one day, because...

Well, just because.

Semi-productive

I ran into a problem with Tinderbox, so I had to fix that before I could do anything here. It's fixed, and once again I've relearned something.

This will go into the How To piece, but just so I don't forget...

Setting attributes is often easier by using an Action in a note than by using the Attributes window, or by typing the value into the note itself. Here's how I spent over an hour tonight sort of beating my head into my desk:

Each weblog entry is a note, and one of its attributes is called PublicationDate. What it's supposed to be is the date and time you created the note. This is an attribute that will change with every note, and it's something the computer ought to be smart enough to do itself so you don't have to.

There is an attribute value called Today that will reflect the current date and time wherever it appears. For some reason, I kept believing that if I typed "Today" into the "Default value" field for Publication Date in the Attributes window, then each new note would have the current date and time entered as its publication date. I made it work before, what I had forgotten was that was not how I had made it work.

Using "Today" as the default value in the Attributes window for PublicationDate gets you the date and time you clicked the change button. Nothing more, nothing less. This, to me, seems contrary to the purpose of having a token called "Today" for a default, but maybe I'm just dense.

No, the thing you want to do, to set attributes for similar notes (like your weblog entries) is to use an Action in a parent note to set the attributes for all its children, like so:

The rest of the text you can't see in the Action Field is "PermaFile=feb03" (without the quotation marks). You could arrow over the text in the live field and see it all.

That's the way you do it. Your money for nothin' and your chicks for free.

But I'll document all this a little more thoroughly later this week.

Fun, fun, fun!

Groundhog Day

Happy Groundhog Day!

I was going to do it today, but I was kind of depressed last night, so I watched the movie a day early. I'm glad I did, I loved it. It's such a great movie. If you just want a laugh, it's got enough to give you a stomach cramp. If you want spiritual insight, it's got that too.

I've written about Groundhog Day and the hero's journey before, but I still pick up new things even now.

If you've never seen the movie, you certainly owe yourself the experience.

The hero's journey parallels the five stages of grief because it is a personal transformation and the loss of a former self, and grief is the process by which we integrate loss into our lives. I don't think the stages are marked by rigid demarcations and I think one can drift back and forth between bargaining and anger quite a bit. And, of course, one can get stuck in one of the stages, something I seem to be very familiar with. But that's another movie.

Watching Phil Connors last night was refreshing as well as it was amusing. "I'm not going to play by their rules anymore!" Stuck forever in Punxsutawney, Pa, Phil decides to make the best of it and use the advantage he has over others to satisfy all of his ego desires. He works his way up from his base desires, to the one object of his desire that is unobtainable, his producer, Rita.

In pursuing Rita, he tries to make himself into Rita's ideal man, but he doesn't realize that Rita can spot an inauthentic human being. Phil ultimately despairs of gaining her affection and his period of bargaining and anger ends, and his depression begins. The numerous attempts at suicide are not only a reflection of Phil's depression, but of his renunciation of his inauthentic life.

When he realizes he can't achieve extinction, he awakens to his spiritual nature as we see when he tells Rita in the diner that he is a god. Then we get to see Phil begin to work outside himself, he has exhausted and extinguished his ego and he begins to serve others. But there are lessons he has to learn here too.

Although death has no personal meaning for him, he has still not accepted death as a process of life. We watch Phil go through this process in his repeated efforts to save the old homeless man.

"It was just his time."

"Not today, it's not."

Phil learns that it isn't up to him.

We see Phil growing to help others. As he discovers those things that are within him, which are an expression of his soul as an artist in his piano playing and his sculpture. We witness him embrace his true self, as he reclaims his authority over his soul.

And then he gets the girl, and today is tomorrow.

It's a great movie. I laugh and cry through the whole thing.

Of course, I still struggle with what it's saying to me. You will too.

Uncertain Times

I remain unpersuaded that whatever advances in technical means for communication the internet offers, it will yield a "better" world. It seems we have little to say to one another, other than the things we've already said by other means.

Something like yesterday's event happens, and it's just an opportunity to grind an axe. Because that's all we have to say.

I don't take a lot of it very seriously, though it does get discouraging. I don't know how a country like the United States could ever be universally admired. There is simply too much wealth here, and I'm not saying that's a "bad" thing. What I am saying is that there is simply no course of action the U.S. could take with respect to any issue that would engender universal approval, or even respect.

I just looked for it, and I seem to have lost my little pocket copy of the Tao. I'll have to buy another one. In the back, there's a story about a Chinese farmer. I suppose it's a Taoist kind of story or it wouldn't be in there. I'll try to recall how it goes, I think I've forgotten how it begins exactly, so if you know how it goes and I get it wrong, let me know. I do know the point of the story though.

One day, a farmer's horse ran away. His neighbors all said this was bad fortune. His father said, "How do you know? Perhaps it is good fortune."

Later, the horse returned accompanied by another horse of barbarian stock, a particularly hardy breed of horse. His neighbors all said this was good fortune. His father said, "How do you know? Perhaps it is bad fortune."

The horses bred a line of excellent horses and the farmer grew prosperous. One day, the farmer's son was out riding one of the horses when he was thrown and became crippled. His neighbors all said this was bad fortune. The farmer's father said, "How do you know? Perhaps it is good fortune."

Later that year, the army came through the region and conscripted all the young men into the army to go and fight the barbarian hordes. Most of the young men did not return.

The point of the story is that no event exists in isolation, they are all connected. We can't see the future at all, and we only imperfectly recall the past. With such poor vision, it is not always a terribly useful thing to say this is good and that is bad. There is always more to the story.

I don't know what's going to happen in the weeks and months ahead. Much of what I read around the web from those on both sides of the various issues in contention is little more than powerless complaining, even if some of it is poetically written. I'm certainly guilty of it too, although I'm pretty sure I could never be accused of being poetic.

We should live in the moment. Right this very moment, my life is okay. I have this moment, and what I can do in this skin, and that's all; and that's enough.

Heroes' Journey

One of the aspects of the mythic hero's journey, as described by Joseph Campbell, is the return of the hero with a boon. Campbell notes that sometimes, the boon is rejected.

It's not a criticism of the hero, or a comment on the boon, it's just that sometimes the rest of society or the world isn't ready for what the hero has to offer.

Seven people died this morning. For the families of those astronauts, there is no quantifying the amount of loss they've suffered. But many other accidents claim more lives all the time. An enormously expensive, marvelously complex and wonderful vehicle was lost, but that's just hardware. We can build another shuttle.

What makes this accident something more than just another airplane disaster is the mythic element: the hero's journey. To me, the greater tragedy in this episode is our rejection of the boon. Our failure to embrace the wider view, the greater perspective our presence in space affords us. Every year it seems we try to do less and less in space; half-heartedly trying to live up to the vision created by others almost half a century ago. We reject the boon, because we are not up to our destiny yet. Or at least, that's what we seem to believe about ourselves.

Of course we can't speak with the dead, but I do think we can imagine with some fidelity how they would view their own deaths. Becoming an astronaut and entering space is the hero's journey in spades. One has to have a call, and there are tremendous obstacles to overcome, and by all the accounts I'm familiar with, it does change them. One of the aspects of the hero's journey is often also the death of the hero. If we could talk to them, I think of course they would regret the suffering their deaths brings to those who loved them, but I think they would tell us that it was worth it, the adventure, the hero's journey, was worth it.

We shouldn't look for meaning in their deaths. We should look for meaning in their lives. And what that says to me, what they've told us by their lives, is that we are up to our destiny. We have but to hear their message.

One day, perhaps we will.

How To

Weblogging with Tinderbox. This is a long post, and it's just the beginning. There's more to come. Eventually, I'll edit out all my superfluous chattiness, but for now bear with me. Update: This is an early revision based on some very constructive feedback I've received from Mark Bernstein, and some new insights I've developed just in the process of writing this guide. Learning never stops!

You can create a weblog with Tinderbox. It's not an ideal tool; but then, I haven't seen the ideal tool for weblogging yet. It has a lot of power, at the cost of some complexity. The good news is the complexity is at least exposed to the user in a way that makes it somewhat easier to master than an application like Radio, where the complexity is hidden and is even more complex.

When my Radio weblog broke, I didn't know why and no one at Userland could help me fix it. I was basically looking at throwing it away and starting over. Well, if I was going to do that, I didn't want to use a tool that I couldn't make work the way it was intended to, and that might force me to throw it all away and start over yet again. I had already purchased Tinderbox for reasons having little to do with weblogging, but it seemed like it could do the job and it didn't look as arcane as Radio. It looked accessible. Well, it seemed that way, anyway!

So starting last September, I re-launched Time's Shadow at .Mac using Tinderbox. If you're considering using Tinderbox for a weblogging tool, I'll share with you some of the things I've learned over the last few months, and perhaps save you a bit of time and some frustration.

You don't have to start from scratch, although you certainly could if you know something about HTML. Eastgate, the developer of Tinderbox, offers a few templates to get you started. You'll find them here. If you want to modify some of them, it helps to have some references available to help you with cascading style sheets, which are used in at least some of the templates. You will recognize Gray Flannel as the template I chose for Time's Shadow.

A weblog in Tinderbox uses a number of files. There's the basic Tinderbox file that you write you weblog entries and maintain your blogroll and things like that in, and there are various templates, which are text documents containing the markup text and special codes Tinderbox uses to determine what goes where in your template. More on that later.

Once you've chosen your template, you could pretty much get a weblog up on the web in about 15 minutes (assuming you have a host like .Mac or some web space offered by your ISP), but don't do that yet. You want to think about this for a minute or two so that you aren't reinventing the wheel three months later, like I did.

The native document format Tinderbox uses is XML. That is, whenever you save your Tinderbox file, a text file is written that contains your writing in a surrounding markup text called XML, which you've probably heard of already. You don't need to know anything about XML; and if you don't know what it is, just think of it as HTML on steroids.

The point is, when you save a document in Tinderbox, a fair amount of processing goes on before the document is written to the disk. More importantly, the same is true when you open your Tinderbox document. A text file containing XML is read from the disk, and then Tinderbox turns it into your document. The point of all this is, as your document grows, so does the time it takes for Tinderbox to open, save and export your document. Exporting is how you create the web pages that are your weblog. I was writing Time's Shadow on a 400MHz G3 under OS X (you could use Mac OS 9, but I'm not sure it would be much faster), and by about the beginning of the third month, it was taking a long time to open, save and export my weblog. Using the Clock application in OS X with the second hand showing, I timed opening my original Time's Shadow Tinderbox file on both the 400MHz iMac and the 867MHz Dual Processor G4. The file is 7.3 MB in size, and consists of about 434 notes. On the G3, the time from when you click "Open" in the Open File dialog box, to when the document is displayed on the screen ready to edit was 55 seconds. On the G4, it took 23 seconds. It pretty much scales linearly with the processor speed, with a couple of seconds shaved off for having a faster bus and hard drive on the G4, probably.

55 seconds is nearly a minute, and waiting a minute for a computer these days is aggravating. By contrast, my January Tinderbox file opened in 14 seconds on the G3 and about eight seconds on the G4. The difference isn't as great as it should be because the file on the G3 doesn't have this note and all these graphic images, otherwise the times would be in the same ratio as the large file. Saving files doesn't take as long as loading them, and that never particularly bothered me. It was when I wanted to post something quickly that I grew to be very dissatisfied with the speed of opening a document.

If you are the sole user of your Mac, you might be inclined to leave your Tinderbox file open all the time, and just put the Mac to sleep. But I shared my iMac with a few other people who all had their own accounts under OS X, so I was forever opening my Tinderbox file. If you just want to post a quick note, it can get a little frustrating waiting for all the gears to turn to get your deathless prose to the un-printed page. So you might want to think about how you want to structure your weblog to keep the size of the file from becoming a source of aggravation.

The solution I came up with may not be the best one, because it compromises one of Tinderbox's very powerful features. On a good day, I can be a prolific blogger. Nothing like garret vreeland, but six to ten posts wouldn't be out of the question. I've decided that every month I will start a new Tinderbox file so that the size of the file won't become burdensome in opening, saving and exporting. What solution you choose will be a function of how much you think you'll write, how fast your Mac is, and whether you can live with the compromises or not.

One compromise affects an important feature of Tinderbox, which can be used to create a feature of many weblogs. In addition to maintaining a chronological archive, some weblogs offer archives based on categories. Everything you've written about movies might appear in a Movie category, or, say politics, though hardly anyone seems to write about that, right? If your weblog was one long Tinderbox document, it would be trivially easy to to have Tinderbox auto-magically collect any note you created that related to that topic, and post it in the appropriate category archive. It's not quite as simple as that, nothing ever is, but it's pretty close.

But if you decide to use more than one Tinderbox document to manage your weblog, you'll lose the ability to have Tinderbox collect everything you've written in a given category, because the mechanism Tinderbox uses only works within a single document. It seems to me, if you want categories, you have to live with large document sizes and their rather lengthy processing times. Perhaps a faster Mac would be the order of the day. It's also possible that there is another solution that I haven't thought of, I had to do this in something of a hurry and once I made my choice I didn't give it a great deal more thought.

If this is beginning to sound like it's too hard, don't get discouraged. It's not that hard, and the point is you'll understand much of how this thing is supposed to work. Then, when it breaks, you'll be able to fix it. Radio makes things a lot easier, but when it breaks, you have a limited number of things you can do to try to fix it and then you're stuck with trying to get Userland to help you, which may or may not be effective. They weren't able to help me.

Okay, so you've downloaded your template of choice. I'll use Gray Flannel because it's what I'm familiar with. If you open the Gray Flannel Templates folder, you'll find these three files: Gray Flannel Weblog, the Tinderbox document you'll use to create your own weblog template. The folder containing the HTML templates (text files) that instruct Tinderbox how to create your web pages with that Gray Flannel look, and an "exported files" folder that will hold your web pages for uploading, unless you're using .Mac or some other WebDAV service. Here's a snapshot:

Double click the Gray Flannel Weblog document and we'll get started.

The first thing I noticed is that this is Release 2 of the template, which suggests they may have fixed all the things that were wrong with it when I started with it. That's good news. Less work for me. The first thing you might want to do is to select all the text in each of the notes and use the Style menu to increase the pt size to, say, 12. Perhaps an easier solution might be to go into the Document Preferences in the Edit menu and use Magnify Fonts. I'm 45 and I run my monitor at 1280x1024, so 10pt text gets pretty hard to read. Your mileage may vary.

If you follow along in the basic steps listed in the READ ME FIRST topic, you'll have your weblog up and running in fifteen minutes. But it won't reflect your decisions regarding how large you want your Tinderbox file to be and how you want your archives structured. As the template is configured right out of the box, your archives would become one enormous text file that would take longer and longer to upload as time went on, as well as taking a long time to open and save as a Tinderbox document. Let's fix that.

Stay with me here, because this could get a little confusing. If you have a fast Mac, you're the sole user, you don't write a great deal and you have a broadband connection, you may have decided that you'll keep your entire weblog, archives and all, in one Tinderbox document. That's great, but you can still organize your archives by some chronological period if you'd like to minimize your upload times. Tinderbox doesn't seem to export new pages for things that haven't changed. This is a good thing, and you'll save time if you take advantage of it.

Welcome to Tinderbox's world of lots of moving parts. Watch closely, my hands will never leave my sleeves...

If you followed along with the steps in the template, you will recall the Attributes window where you created your weblog title and tag line. Well on my machine, I had to drag that little dog-ear down in the lower right-hand corner a bit to make that window a little bigger. When you do that, you'll see two more buttons, Delete and Create, like so:

We're going to Create a new attribute, so click that sucker.

In the name field, type PermaFile, and then click OK.

An attribute is a piece of information that goes in every note. Tinderbox looks at attributes when it does things like gathering notes or when exporting them to a template. The PermaFile attribute is going to be used to create a page of weblog archives based on the periodicity you choose, and it's a part of the permalink URL.

A quick digression on permalinks may be in order, in case that's a new term. If you wrote something very funny and somebody read it and wanted other people to read it, they'd link to your anecdote. Without a permalink, the most they could do would be to link to your home page or a page in your archives, and then the poor reader would have to do a "find" or scroll around to locate the amusing anecdote. In today's world of instant gratification, that's not going to happen. A permalink gets your eager reader right to the source of the pithy prose so they can be amused or get edified, and be on their merry way in no time. It's a good thing.

If you want a sane archive in your weblog, if you want permalinks, then you need a PermaFile. It's a good thing too.

Okay, the shin bone is connected to the knee bone, once you start changing things, you just never know where it's going to end. Fire up your favorite text editor, and let's make some changes to the templates to reflect the addition of the PermaFile attribute.

I use Text Edit in OS X. It's free, and it was handy. It also drives me nuts.

This is the Open dialog box from Text Edit. See that blue check-box with the check in it? Yeah, that one. You want to check that box. There's a preference in the Text Edit prefs page that allows you to make that the default behavior. Unless you like checking boxes, I'd say do that now.

Okay, open the item.html file in the "html templates" folder. An item is a weblog entry. This is what you see:

This is a little unnerving for me, because mine looks different; but it's close enough, I think, to tell you what you need to do.

Okay, on the sixth line down, the one that begins with the left angle bracket (this thing: <), and ends with title="permalink">, we want to change that line to read:

..

Th at text is a picture because Tinderbox choked on it as text because it's HTML. There's a way to "escape" the HTML so it'll appear in the weblog, I just don't know what it is right now, and I'm lazy so I took a picture instead. You can see I have check spelling as you go turned on, that's why there are all the red underlines.

This will create the correct permalink to your archived entry when you export your Tinderbox document. Here's what's happening, as best I understand it. The text between the carets ()(...) are directives or instructions to Tinderbox. As Tinderbox exports your document, it reads through the template and when it hits one of those caret directives, it grabs the value of the attribute identified in the parentheses and inserts it into the text it is exporting. Think of it as mail-merge on steroids. Pretty cool.

Let's go back to the Tinderbox document now.

Okay, that's enough for now. I've got some other things to do, but I'll get back to this soon and we'll go through and point out all the other changes you have to make to actually create a reasonably structured weblog using Tinderbox. We're not done with PermaFile yet by any means. Using Tinderbox to create a weblog means there is seldom the chance to change "just one thing." Changes have to be propagated across lots of different pieces and some of the methods of that propagation are counter-intuitive or unfamiliar to Mac users.

Mark Bernstein read about my intention to write this little guide and sent me a note that indicated they are planning to have a wizard-type helper application kind of step you through this process, so these instructions may not be exactly relevant at some time in the relatively near future. That's fine. This is mostly for my use, since I doubt a wizard is going to be able to help you make specific changes to your weblog, you still have to know how the wiring and plumbing works to really maintain the thing.

Well, I've really got to go now. My son just told me we've lost COLUMBIA.