A Good Imagination and a Pile of Junk

or NOT actually.

Just found out I won’t have a car ’til Sunday.

Oh I’m getting a little punchy here.

I seem to have a fairly persistent problem with complex
projects.   I get in my own way and tend to abandon them as I
get close to fruition or major milestones.  Of course this doesn’t
happen when I’m on someone else’s deadline, on someone else’s
project.  There’s just too much at stake.

But on my own projects I will almost always find something else to do
that seems more interesting.  Then, lingering in the back of my
head someplace will be this accretion to my own self-doubt as I go on
to something new and shiny.  It almost happened again as I went
diving for Cocoa programming.  Not that the diversion is frivolous
really.  I need some kind of native GUI system for my “Huge Honkin
Console” app.  

But it’s useless if there’s no app.  

Tonight I spent a good hour in the garage dragging boxes marked “Top
Shelf Geek” (guess what THEY are full of) back to the basement
proto-command-center, and taking the… oh… 75 or so favorite of my
geek books and setting them up in a makeshift shelf (I can’t seem to
find the hardware to build my bookcases.  Whups.)

As I was setting them up:  A dozen books on patterns, another
dozen on C++, a fair amount of Com Sci stuff (compiler theory, lex
& yacc, Knuth, etc…) and lots of Stevens, Lakos, & O’Reilly
of various & sundry sorts, I got really enthusiastic.  I ended
up spending another hour flipping through “Patterns of Enterprise
Application Architecture” (nice new one from Fowler), Austern’s
“Generic Programming & the STL” (another fave), Alexandrescu’s book
and a couple others.

I realized how much I miss pure C++ programming.  And for no
reason at all.  So I cranked up XEmacs & Cygwin (my Redhat 9
box is still in a box someplace) and bopped into bash with a “cd ~;
make clean; make all” and watched 129 project directories rip. 
Then I turned back to the mac and started my Buddha Bar I-IV playlist
(which, let’s face it, is what the mac is REALLY for) and started
coding.

I’d forgotten how far I was along on my http server.  It’s already
working with my xmlrpc code.  All I have to do is plug in some
functionality.  I had stopped because I was starting to work on a
framework for hot-loading DLLs (well… “.so”s really) so I could run
dynamically configured xml-rpc functions and it was getting
tough.  I’m just not gonna worry about it for a while.  It
will likely be a very long time before HHC outgrows static linking.

I hate it when I lose sight.

But now I have that wonderfully overblown enthusiasm that’s most
typical in action movies (or actually Anime) after the good guy is
brought to within an inch of his life, goes away to train and is about
to come back and kick some righteous ass.  Usually with a dark
smile and softly spoken: “I’m back.”

Mostly.

I’ve been here a week and a day.  My hosts departed on their US
tour on Thursday morning before I crept from my coffin.  I won’t
have a car at my disposal for a few days (perhaps upwards of a
week.)  In some regards I’m definitely beginning to fly off the
deep end.

The difference between living in a 6-floor walk-up in Brooklyn Heights
overlooking the BQE with a Skyline view and living in the middle of
Weston Ct where I can only see neighboring houses now that some of the
leaves are starting to come down is quite startling.

It’s a big house with lots of glass.  Glass sliding doors in the
basement and out to the deck.  A full front porch.  There’s a
fireplace, picture windows in the dining room.  And the front door
is glass.  My sense is that the locks are all very weak and little
and that any old damn fool could execute a near perfect smash and grab
without anybody knowing, as long as I was on a different floor. 
It’s very exposed.

I have to walk upstairs to get to the shower, downstairs to get to the
washer/dryer. (there IS a washer & dryer.) and it’s a reasonable
amount of exercise to go get the mail.  I’ve set up my computers
(well, 2 of them. I haven’t set up the whole lan yet) in the basement,
figuring that’d be as unobtrusive as it could get and still be
functional.

I grew up in suburbia, so none of this is completely alien to me. 
But after living home for 4 years, it’s all quite a shock.

So in the morning I walk out behind the shed to the rapidly dwindling
woodpile and grab a few more logs than I intend to use to just stack
next to the house.  I figure by the time it starts snowing (which
at this rate should be Tuesday or so) I’ll have a healthy woodpile that
I don’t have to dry off.

At 10 in the morning and 2 in the afternoon the deer come to the house
looking for munchies.  So I toss out some stale bread (from
Tuesday’s effort) and apple slices from a bag labeled “deer food”, and
they chew happily.  I’m beginning to think I should eat the deer
food and give THEM the nachos and hot pockets.

The B’klyn Heights apartment was a 125 year old brick and concrete mass
that prevented you from hearing anything that happened in any adjoining
apartment.  It was very nice for 3-5 am White Zombie coding fests.

But here, when the heat is on for example, the floorboard radiators
sound like they’re full of rats as they come up to temperature. 
The foam insulation on the pipes in the basement ceiling crack and
twist with the change in temperature, sounding remarkably like the
creaking of someone walking around in the kitchen above, trying
hopelessly to be quiet.  Every peep somewhere in the house seems
to be broadcast over an invisible speaker system to everywhere
else.  Every noise is right behind me.

Most of the time though, it’s quiet.  Deathly quiet.  I can
walk outside at 3 am and there is just nothing.  No traffic, no
late-night tourist party people lost looking for the Promenade. 
No horn of the Staten Island Ferry as it departs Manhattan.

So every day I bundle up, put on a hoodie and denim jacket and go sit
on the deck to breathe in the crisp clean cool air laced with the smell
of the ever-burning wood fire.  And it’s good.

I haven’t seen a single human being in almost 5 days. 

I can’t for the life of me figure out where that valign=”middle” tag is
coming from.  SOMEtimes it’s there.  SOMEtimes it’s
not.  It’s in a shadowy level of granularity that isn’t in the
easily accessable templates in Radio.

Back to digging.

The answer to my quandry is Objective-C++.  From that info page:

w00t!

August Mueller (of VoodooPad fame) is my new personal hero for pointing it out.

BWAHAHAHA!  Now I’ll show them ALL!  They’ll pay for what they’ve done!  Then it’ll be MINE ALL MINE!!!

*runs off cackling maniacally, muttering about world domination and revenge on grammar school bullies.*

Harrumph. I was just starting up Project Builder to whack out a
couple HelloWorld++ apps that involved xml interoperability and I can’t
seem to find any reasonable xml toys for Objective-C. Can that be
right? (Well, no. It’s wrong regardless of whether or not
it’s correct.)

I’m pulling down libxml2 and someoneorother’s OS-X binary port of it, and I hope that installs as a nice pretty framework.

Once more, from the top:

When I develop my own software I’m an architect/developer of that software.

When I use someone else’s toolkits and 3rd party development toys I am
a plain old user/consumer. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to
expect user-level support.

The fact that I’m interested in slinging some code does NOT mean it’s
ok for me to be expected to “Twiddle some source files and mash around
the make file to get it to go.” NO.

If I’m involved in a porting effort, well duh. Of course.

But if I want baseline xml SAX support for OS-X’s programming language of choice? No No NO. Bad monkey. No banana.

(This was actually Tuesday)

Ugh. Today I baked a couple loaves of bread.

Unfortunately most of my equipment (bowls, bench knife, measuring cups
& spoons, and most important: the scale) is still packed away,
buried in a forest of boxes in the garage in “The New Digs”. So I
kinda had to wing it a bit.

This meant 4 cups of flour, 3 of water, a bunch of yeast and a bunch of salt.

The results were ok, in that the two loaves were marginally
edible. My hosts raved over them (they won’t be gone until
Thursday morning) but I knew better. It’s been an inexcusably
long time since I’ve done any baking and it shows. Normally I
would be able to wing it and do a really good job.

I really have to get back in the baking gym.

Rabbit Rabbit

(burp post deleted)  

Well, you were there when True Porn Clerk Stories came around.

Hell, you might even know about The Salon Piece.

But how many of you know about the darker escapades of Ali Davis?

Move over Indiana Jones.  Move over Scarface.

Read The Coffee Chronicles

…since we returned from Iceland. (Ok, it’ll be more than that by the
time you read this, since I like to muck around with text before I
send/post it.)

Already it’s seeming dreamlike and abstract. I wonder if it
happened. Checking my woefully insufficient pictures I recognize
people and places. I can add emotions, sounds, colors, weather,
smells and all kinds of other associations to the pictures and the
places depicted therein, so I must’ve been there, right?

Taking for granted that it did, I seem to have learned some of the same lessons I thought I’d learned after previous trips.

It might sound horrible, but I spent too much time with too few
people. The last couple nights in Iceland I had the great
pleasure of hanging out with people I hadn’t spent any time with before
and ended up having some of the better conversations of the trip.
By the end of the trip, as we made our way through airports, through
customs, I glanced over everybody more than once and wondered who some
of those other people were, really. I want to continue those
conversations, have more. Hell, out of the 24 or so people there
were on the trip, I’ll bet there were a half a dozen names I couldn’t
come up with. Pretty much makes me feel like a heel.

I took too few pictures. I always take too few pictures.
When I’m in a place it seems like such a bother, and I feel that I’d
rather BE there than take pictures, confident that I’ll remember
whatever it was. In Galapagos I took about 450 shots. That
was a little less than a year ago and now I don’t remember much that I
didn’t take pictures of. I fear what I’ll forget from
Reykjavik. Jury’s still out on that though. I see people
lugging bags of camera gear and spending their time looking for perfect
shots and it just seems a bit detached. I could be wrong.
I’m not sure I’ll ever take more pictures. Perhaps best to just
take better ones.

No postcards. Just like the picture problem but different. Only not so different.

The place was amazing. The landscape, the people, weather,
everything. The drinks were weak and expensive, but that’s a
minor adjustment coming from NYC, where they’re strong and expensive.

Problem is that I have a nagging sensation that, as wonderful a time as I had, a significant part of my time there was misspent.

I want to go back, alone.

When you drive 80-90 miles an hour in the morning commute in step with
the rest of the commuting monkeys you start to increase your stress
level over time. “Going Fast” becomes far more important than
where you’re going. You start looking for ways to dodge traffic,
slipping into thinner spaces when changing lanes, punching it as soon
as you get to an open stretch. You become increasingly conscious
of obstacles to your speed.

After a while, back when I was driving to work, I started becoming
aware of the increase in heart rate I’d experience every time I got on
the highway. So I decided to see what would happen if I were to
take it easy, back off, and drive between 55 & 60 (on 55 mph
roads.) It was really tough to get used to at first, people
honking and blowing past me “at the speed god intended”. But
after a while I realized my neck was a bit more relaxed. My
shoulders weren’t up around my ears. I didn’t need driving
gloves, and it was much easier to focus on what I was doing.

When I would get to work my mindset changed completely. I wasn’t sitting down ready for combat. And it was good.

It’s been a day and a half since I’ve strung three lengths of phone
cord, held end-to-end with beige female/female couplers across
the basement ceiling, twisted around the veins and arteries of my new
digs.

As I unpack boxes (on an as needed basis; having been very cavalier
about not labeling them I find myself in a bit of an awkward position,
so the going is slow) I come back over to the machines to check email,
newsgroups, feeds and chat systems.

The first few hours was no big deal: I connected, started the
aggregators (yes, more than one) the email client, iChat,
everything. I thought “wow, this isn’t too bad. A little
slow, but aside from pulling down Strong Bad and downloading Audio
books, it’s quite functional”.

Part of my todo list today was to get some kind of broadband underway.

But I thought about it as I responded to emails, waiting to send them
out in my 3-hour batch and I thought perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad to
scale down to dial-up. Unplug a bit. Besides, did I really
USE that bandwidth for anything interesting? Or did I just seek
to fill it?

What a great experiment it would be to just divorce myself a bit from
the race to plug the internet into the back of my skull and sit out on
the front porch and write with a notebook for a few months, instead of
being so irrepressibly networked. I’d have time to do a great
deal more baking, writing, photographing, etc. All those hands-on
things that don’t involve CRTs, LCDs, keyboards, mice and cat-5e.

I looked outside a half hour ago and saw 3 deer looking back through
the window at me. It was ok to go a bit slower, to do things a
bit more deliberately. I could really stand to relax a bit, to
change my metabolism to match where I am. It would probably add a
dozen years to my life.

I thought about when I scaled back my driving, and how much happier it
made me when I ceased being so damn obsessed with how fast I was
travelling through the arteries of Westchester County.

Then I remembered something: That lasted about 2 weeks. I was bored to tears driving at that speed.

The “self-install” optimum online cable modem kit is on the way.

Jack me in baby.

Jack me in.

It’s only dial-up.  But it’s here.

There are trees outside my window, not the BQE.

There is native american flute music on the stereo upstairs

I’m sitting ina warm basement, the proto command-center, having just gotten my mac, “BitchAss” up and connected to a phone line.

The token emails have been sent.

Blogging shall commence.

I’m still carless.

18 1/2 hours.

My clear thinking sisters have just instructed me to shut down and pack
the computers so I pack instead of fucking around on them.

Blogging will be lite ;-)

Have:

1. an apartment full of unpacked crap
2. the “7-8 room house” box assortment.
3. 3 bottles of diet mountain dew
4. 1 case of diet-coke w/lemon
5. bottle of Stacker III insane heart exploding pills
6. asymptotic “Stress”
7. 23 hours and 17 minutes do it
8. the will to get it done.

God how I miss deadlines.

*cracks knuckles menacingly*

ETA for movers?  30 hours.

% of apartment packed?  About 45.

Projected time to finish?  a good 3 days.

I’m so screwed.

My sister came over this afternoon to help pack my apartment, and we
took a significant bite out of the work;  emptying shelves, taping
up boxes and stacking them in the newly-empty front room.

Last night I disassembled my kitchen table, took the shelves out of the
kitchen bookcase, and stacked them with the bones of the other
collapsable fauxniture that seems to permeate my apartment. 
Well… seemed anyway.

I stopped to take a break, sit down and relax a minute.  But I
realized there really wasn’t any nice comforting place to sit any
more.  It was very unsettling.

It’s a strange experience, packing.  You’re forced to do some
nontrivial recapitulation as you dismantle your home and convert it
back into merely a place.

You (well, I) don’t realize how much the features of your home play
into your memories of time spent there.  Ok, sounds like a world
class “duh” but all the interactions I’ve had with people here (that’s
about as explicit as I’m gonna be, you fill in the blanks Sherlock) all
the phone conversations, chatting sessions, little party-lets, baking
memories, and on and on all have my apartment as the setting.

Taking that apart and stuffing it in boxes and down the garbage chute
has been tweaking my head something fierce.  I feel like I’m
dismantling my life.  I’ve talked about that before in general,
but it just feels so absolute, so concrete.  All the things that I
remember from this local incarnation are dissolving into piles of
fauxniture hardware and boxes labeled “MORE CRAP”.

The place I’m moving to for the next six months isn’t mine in any way
and not a place I can really consider home enough to sleep well.

I’m finding it all very unexpectedly saddening.  Part of me is
“sure” that once I settle in at the beginning of next week, that I’ll
feel much better.  Most of me suspects I won’t.

Part of me fights at every piece of paper, every movie ticket stub,
every fortune cookie fortune, business card, book of matches. 
“Damnit!  Don’t you remember that date?  If you throw that
away you’ll forget, and diminish.”  Nope.  Garbage. 
It’s all garbage.

Well… It’s ALMOST all garbage.  

This afternoon as I was fiddling through piles of stuff, I was picking
up coins and tossing them into one of my several jars for such things
(I have GALLONS of change around.  I just don’t put it in my
pocket.) and I broke into laughter as I remembered a similar scene from
about 10 years earlier:

Back when I was a puppy in the early 90s I, along with 3 other guys,
rented a house in Montgomery, NY.  It’s a godforsaken little
crap-ass town, but we had a 3 bedroom house for $750 a month on 4 acres
of land, split between 4 of us.  Cheap livin.  

None of us were particularly tidy which led to an interesting
evolutionary phenomenon “Cleaning Day”.  It was a cooperative
motivational thing:  Blast the stereos and clean up.  It
worked pretty well.

Ok.  I’m lying.  It only happened once.

After I’d moved all the furniture I had to move.  I was down to
picking up the little piles and sorting out the garbage, etc.  I’d
been at it with a trusty 5-gallon jar for coins (this is an old habit)
and a big trash can.

In my meditative little state picking through these little piles I
stopped and burst out into teary laughter. Like I was losing the most
high-spirited of ticklefests.  Finally Fletch came in to see me on
the floor amidst the morass of miscellaney, entirely unable to sit up
straight, howling with laughter.  He looked at me with puzzled
amusement.

I realized I only had two piles.

“Garbage and change, man.  It’s all just garbage and change.”  We laughed for hours.

7.8ish quake hits Japanese island of Hokkaido.

cnn
fox
cbs

Tsunami warning information

Yahoo… (A.P. news) lots of links here

Drudge has some stuff as well.

It’s easy to understand why the author of gangstories
has found dredging up his past to be too painful to continue, but it’s
sort of a shame. You don’t often get this kind of clear-eyed gripping
depiction of life in poor neighborhoods, let alone honest portrayal of
gangbanging without all the “gangsta” glamour shoveled on top by many
popular movies, videos, and music.

Here’s an excerpt:

Dealers are respected for two
basic reasons: dealing in cash makes them appear richer than they
really are, and always packing heat makes them physically untouchable.
The threat of robbery makes it hard for dealers to store much wealth.
So they wear it, drive it, and stuff rolls of it in their pocket, and
that makes them look like “ballers”. And always packing heat for
protection means dealers never get their asses kicked, at least in
public. That combination of apparent wealth and toughness was the holy
grail of social status, and was something we all looked up to.

I didn’t think too much of this until I realized I’d read the whole blog, front to back. Another excerpt:

Go read all of it.