The Mandelbear's Musings

A very mixed day / Uncle Jack

Tue, 13 May 2008 06:42:12 GMT

It's been a very mixed day. On the the one hand, I scored one of the last three Linux EeePC 900's at Central Computing, to give to Colleen as a slightly belated Mother's Day present. The stream player is buggy, which caused me quite a bit of frustration setting the thing up, but presumably that will get fixed soon.

On the other hand, just as Kat and I were leaving for Joyce's house my Mom called with the news that my uncle Jack, the older of her two brothers, died suddenly of a heart attack.

On the gripping hand, we had a good rehearsal for our concert slot at Baycon.

Colleen and I are sharing a drink in Jack's memory right now.

I never had a favorite among my three uncles: I always liked them about equally. Jack worked his entire career at NIH, doing research on fallout-induced thyroid cancer. He died at work. He'd been feeling ill for a while, and had a cardiology appointment scheduled for tomorrow.

Sorry, folks; I'm at something of a loss for words right now.

In a bar he rarely visits, an aging hacker sips the last of a glass of Glenlivet, raises it, and toasts "To Uncle Jack!" before flinging the glass into the fireplace.

Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

Mon, 12 May 2008 12:57:30 GMT

... to the multi-talented hrj!!! Have a good one!!

Happy hacking

Mon, 12 May 2008 00:29:58 GMT

The main bit of hackery for the day was diagnosing Tatooine, an aging Fry's windows box (long since dual booted with Debian) that started out in the office, and most recently was used in the bedroom as Colleen's machine. Replacing Seymore, a slightly older Fry's box.

Tatooine had developed the bad habit of rebooting in the middle of the Windows boot sequence. We retired it when it developed the even worse habit of shutting off in the middle of the Linux boot sequence.

This morning I took advantage of a moderately new Vantec power supply I had sitting around, and gave it a try. Linux worked, of course. Windows still reboots -- something must have become corrupt. (OK, Microsoft has been corrupt for years. But I digress.) I'll have to see if the Windows partition is readable at all; I may be able to run the Windows games via Wine.

I also have to see whether I can make Seymore run now. If I remember correctly, a new power supply didn't help it, but it's worth a try. If not, I can always cannibalize it.

Afternoon out

Mon, 12 May 2008 00:00:26 GMT

After a somewhat belated lunch I went out to see whether I could find some of the scarce items that had eluded us this morning. Mostly successful. The first stop was Mel Cotton's, the local camping- and sporting-goods store that's been a fixture on W. San Carlos since before we moved in. They didn't have my Keen boots, but they had a catalog. They'll place the order Monday. They also had purple bandanas -- I got one for the Cat.

Next to OSH -- Orchard Supply Hardware. That's another one that's been in the area since it really was mostly orchards; they had the light switch I needed for the sewing room (replacing a dimmer that completely loses when used on compact fluorescent bulbs, even if they say they're OK to use on a dimmer -- if you want mood lighting, maybe, but this is a sewing room: it needs light). They also had black, grey, and purple duct tape. Yay! (The black is for the Younger Daughter's friend; she wants to make a prom dress out of it.)

A quick run past Santana Row, where I might have found a bud vase, turned up a total absence of parking spaces. I came home, made a Mother's Day card, and did the dishes.

An outing with the (rolly)Cat

Sun, 11 May 2008 21:34:19 GMT

After yummy pancakes for breakfast, the flower_cat went out for a Mother's Day shopping expedition. Unfortunately we didn't find most of the things we were looking for, but we had fun anyway.

A little surprisingly, the wheelchair does not fit in the back seat of my car; it probably would if the passenger-side front seat were pulled up all the way, but that's unlikely to happen. The best way to get it into the trunk is to reach over the chair, grab the folded crossbars between the spokes of the far wheel, and put it into the trunk diagonally, wheels first. Comparatively painless.

We went to Valley Fair, the local mall, mainly in search of three things: a pewter bud vase and a purple laptop bag for the Cat, a new bathroom scale, and a pair of Keen hiking boots for me. We found the scale. You'd think that a mall full of shoe stores would have at least one selling Keens, but you'd be wrong. Macy's had an astounding variety of men's shoes, none of which I'd be caught dead in (but which would kill my feet in short order if I tried). Many stores had an astounding variety of handbags, very few of which were purple and none of which the Cat would be caught dead carrying. Most were so bad that I wouldn't have wanted to be associated with anyone who wanted to carry one.

After the mall we headed for home; I set a course past the Rose Garden, so we stopped there. The wheelchair worked well on the paved paths, but bogged down in the grass. At that point we changed modes and the Cat used it as a walker. It was delightful; it must have been several years since the Cat walked in the Rose Garden. I hadn't realized that she didn't know where the Royal Amethyst was located.

At that point we were both a little too hungry, so we came home and had lunch: yogurt, granola, and strawberries. A little bread and cheese for me, as well. Yum.

Happy Mother's Day!

Sun, 11 May 2008 16:23:08 GMT

A very happy Mother's Day to all the moms reading this, and most especially to my very own flower_cat. (I'll add my Mom here as well, though I'm pretty sure she's not reading my LJ. I'll call her in about half an hour.)

Meanwhile, I'm about to go wake the Cat and fix her some apple/buttermilk/buckwheat pancakes for breakfast.

10:08 Yummy. Hodgson Mill buckwheat pancake mix; substitute buttermilk for milk (it's what we had in the house...) and fold in half an apple, diced. (I ate the other half with blue cheese about an hour ago.) Served with maple butter we bought in the Toronto airport. As I said, yum.

10:18 The Younger Daughter brought down a lovely hand-made card, signed by both kids. She tried to apologize for not presenting a store-bought one, but we stopped her. Hand-made with love is always better.

(re)Defining my terms: open, transparent, receptive

Sun, 11 May 2008 15:00:56 GMT

My recent post defining "openness" pulled in a surprising number of comments -- thank you. Thanks in particular to filkferengi's suggestion of "transparency" for the sending side of openness. I realized a few days later that "receptiveness" is a better word than "open-mindedness" for the receiving side.

So, just to get down to the roots and make the definitions explicit...

One is transparent when one is sharing information about oneself.

One is receptive when one is taking in and taking into account information about somebody else.

So where does this leave "openness"? Is it merely transparecy plus receptiveness? I think not -- I think there's a whole other aspect of it that I hadn't considered last time. (See how language affects thought? Now that I have good words for the two concepts I was trying to get at downwhen, I can pull them out and consider the remainder.) I think it's captured best in phrases of the form "open to new {ideas, possibilities, relationships}". It's less about the information than about one's relationship to that information. As we will see, this will allow us to capture the meaning of such things as an "open relationship".

So...

One is open to new information, relationships, possibilities, etc. when one is not merely receptive in those areas but ready to be receptive in them. Not necessarily actively seeking out opportunities to be receptive, but willing to persue them if they should come along.

Similarly, one is open about an area when one is ready to be transparent about that area when the occasion calls for it. (Note that I originally had "willing" instead of "ready" in these two definitions, but I think that "ready" better expresses the idea of active preparedness that I'm looking for.

It's worth noting that any kind of relationship requires a significant amount of both receptivity and transparency -- one has to be ready for both in order to be "open" in the more general sense.

A relationship is open when both parties in that relationship -- by extension all parties where applicable -- are open to new relationships. Similarly, a group is open when it is open to new members. Note that there may be -- and usually are -- quite restrictive conditions on this kind of openness.

As usual, comments are welcome. What are your definitions? Do mine seem to work, or am I still missing something or getting something wrong? Inquiring minds...

Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

Sun, 11 May 2008 12:54:24 GMT

... to min0taur!!! Have a great one!!

OK, well, that took longer than I'd planned...

Sun, 11 May 2008 03:27:57 GMT

Upgraded my ancient (IBM i series) laptop from DeMuDi (Debian Sarge-based) to Etch. Involved an hour or two resolving dependencies, and then another couple of hours re-hacking my config files to make them tiny-screen-friendly. I've been using wide screens both at home and at work for a while; it takes a bit of squeezing to fit things back onto 800x600. But I remembered how I'd done it, back when that was a big screen...

There are still a couple of bugs, but they're manageable.

My Baycon Schedule

Sat, 10 May 2008 05:13:56 GMT

Friday     	5/23/2008 	22:00  	Concert: Tres Gique 
Saturday 	5/24/2008 	13:00 	Every OS @%*^& 	
Saturday 	5/24/2008 	16:00 	Filk for Kids 	
Sunday  	5/25/2008 	14:30 	Recording Music

Notes from $work

Sat, 10 May 2008 02:43:55 GMT

My performance review yesterday seemed to go pretty well. No numbers until $boss goes to $grandboss and things grind through the mill, but... On average, my income has not kept up with inflation; I don't expect that to change. $boss had some good suggestions about my next project; it's starting to come together into something coherent. And useful, which is always good.

There was a group in the lunchroom this afternoon (or maybe it was yesterday; everything runs together these days) discussing code readability. Somebody remarked that my Perl code always looks like I expected it to be read by somebody else. I responded that I know damned well that when it comes back to me in a year or so, I'll be somebody else.

... but that doesn't always help. Our form-handling system was written nearly a decade ago, by $boss.previous, on top of an old version of the world's third-ugliest programming language. Which, to my lasting embarassment, I designed. (Aside: PIA is basically a stripped-down Lisp with XML syntax. HTML, in the beta version. Just for comparison, the fourth ugliest language is INTERCAL. Trust me, you don't want to meet ATLAS or the Advantest IC tester language (the name of which I have mercifully forgotten) which are in second and first place respectively. Syntax by H.P.Lovecraft; architecture by Sarah Winchester. There are things you're better off not knowing.)

Anyway, our intrepid system administrator was trying to get it running on a modern Linux box so he could pull out the historical records. M. is fscking brilliant (fluent in five or six languages, degree in CS, ...) but let's face it: mouldering code, dead language, written by people who should have known better... Took us about an hour to find both places where an absolute pathname was hard-coded in. Just because it was my own stupid design didn't mean I remembered it: thank goodness for find, grep, and man.

Could probably have done it in half the time if it'd been me at the keyboard. Nice to know that, even with my brain mostly turned to mush from old age and chronic caffeine addiction, I can still out-debug a bright young whippersnapper half my age.

Experience

Fri, 09 May 2008 15:44:47 GMT

A recent conversation made me wonder just how many "relationships" (by some definition) I've had over the course of my life, and how many ended in "breakups" as opposed to just quietly drifting apart (or, in one case, staying together for over three decades).

So let's define a "relationship" as something lasting more than a month, with some non-trivial level of romantic involvement ("love" by some definition), mutual physical attraction and physical contact. Define "breakup" as an abrupt, major decrease in the closeness of the relationship.

The answers turn out to be seven and one.

The corresponding numbers for Colleen, who is 5 years younger than me, are four and zero.

Grump

Fri, 09 May 2008 12:55:15 GMT

For a while there it looked as though my weight had dropped to solidly below 180. Maybe, but it turns out the bathroom scale is broken. So I won't know for sure until we get a new one. It's an old Healthometer balance scale; we've gotten more than 20 years' use out of it, so I'm not complaining.

Steampunk in the NY Times

Thu, 08 May 2008 21:16:09 GMT

Steampunk Moves Between Two Worlds - New York Times

It is also the vision of steampunk, a subculture that is the aesthetic expression of a time-traveling fantasy world, one that embraces music, film, design and now fashion, all inspired by the extravagantly inventive age of dirigibles and steam locomotives, brass diving bells and jar-shaped protosubmarines. First appearing in the late 1980s and early ’90s, steampunk has picked up momentum in recent months, making a transition from what used to be mainly a literary taste to a Web-propagated way of life.

What is friendship?

Thu, 08 May 2008 19:29:40 GMT

One of these days there's going to be a Defining My Terms post on friendship. This isn't it -- right now I'm still in the early phases of gathering data.

But here is A Thought On The Nature Of Friendship by theferret just to get that data-gathering process out in the open. Note that I don't really agree with it. He says, "I think that, by and large, there are two types of close friends: Those who are committed to being a net bonus in your life, and those who want you to be where they're comfortable."

That's his definition of "close friendship". Or two. I've seen others recently, even more widely separated, ranging between "someone I can tell anything to" to "someone who calls me up every day to see if they can help". In my mind, the term covers such a broad range that it seems to be as much a barrier as a bridge to understanding. Like limits, it's probably something you have to negotiate up front once a relationship gets to a certain point. I've seen all sorts of havoc caused by people working from different definitions of "friendship" and "closeness". Caused some of it, too.

Something I haven't seen in anyone else's definition so far, but that's definitely part of mine and Colleen's, is the sense that the friendship itself is important to both parties. That it's something worth almost any amount of struggle, and compromise if necessary, to preserve. Worth fighting for. We work out our problems and our differences, sometimes too loudly and sometimes too long, because we're friends -- perhaps by totally different definitions -- and intend to stay that way.

I'm wondering...

Thu, 08 May 2008 17:49:52 GMT

...what effect andropause might have on Asperger syndrome. I couldn't find any obvious references on Google; anybody know of one? It seems relevant to me these days.

My son-in-law is job hunting

Thu, 08 May 2008 17:47:08 GMT

Resume: Sean Stirling. I'm guessing that something in Western Canada or the US Pacific Northwest would be preferable.

From this post by chaoswolf.

I'm just visiting this planet

Thu, 08 May 2008 14:55:46 GMT

The cover article in April 2nd's Computerworld was titled Asperger's and IT: Dark secret or open secret? OK, if you have to ask you haven't been paying attention. It does raise the very legitimate question of "If Aspies are everywhere among us, why isn't the IT industry doing more to support them or even to simply acknowledge their existence?"

High-tech companies, after all, have been at the forefront of supporting workers with nearly every type of social, ethnic, physical or developmental identification. Microsoft, to take just one example, sponsors at least 20 affinity groups -- for African Americans, dads, deaf and hard of hearing, visually impaired, Singaporeans, single parents, and gay/lesbian/bisexual and transgendered employees, to name a few. Just nothing for autistics.

But this isn't a song about ~~Alice~~ Microsoft, or even about IT.

I've noticed that I tend to approach people and relationships almost exactly the same way I approach any other technical problem, for example an unfamiliar piece of software. I don't have the automatic understanding of other people that ordinary humans seem to have: I have to treat each problem analytically.

And, of course, since another symptom of Asperger's is an ability to concentrate on one problem, and a corresponding inability to multitask, this can come across either as a possibly-disturbing intensity of focus, or an annoying inability to drop a subject. Sorry about that; I'm working on it. As a technical problem, of course.

Hmm...

Thu, 08 May 2008 13:52:36 GMT

I wonder whether this explains a few things...

TANSTAAFL

Wed, 07 May 2008 20:56:28 GMT

Went out for a business lunch at the Bombay Oven -- tasty, inexpensive Indian buffet. Unfortunately the company isn't paying for the parking ticket...

The really stupid part is that I saw the sign, it just didn't register that today was the first Wednesday of the month, and therefore one of the two days when I couldn't park on that side of the street.

That's better

Wed, 07 May 2008 15:43:18 GMT

Finally found the time this morning to reboot Nova, the main household fileserver -- it needed doing now because I'd just upgraded the kernel yesterday. While it was down, I moved it onto the APC SmartUPS 420 that had been sitting around since I bought the 1300 for the bedroom, and swapped cables accordingly. This gets me from an uptime of 30 minutes for the rack, to 53 minutes for Nova and 70 minutes for everything else, including the routers and switches. This makes me a happy geek.

Note to self

Wed, 07 May 2008 13:12:21 GMT

Hey, Self!

Waking up at 4am for snuggles and sex certainly helps her get back to sleep... Maybe plan on a nap after lunch?

...but not very productive

Tue, 06 May 2008 03:17:35 GMT

This past weekend was a heck of a lot of fun, but not much actual work got done around the house. Worth it.

I did, however, get to a minor bit of system administration that's been in my queue for a while: I took down my office workstation (Harmony), put it on the newer of the two BackUPS Pro 600's (the old one, which I rescued from work, doesn't provide as much information over the serial line), and moved the mirror drive from an external case to an internal tray.

There are still some oddities on that machine -- it really needs a new motherboard and CPU. It's pretty far down on the queue, though.

I also uploaded artbeco's wedding pictures; it's up to the Wolfling to wrap something useful around those. Took several hours; our upload speed sucks. Fortunately there were plenty of other things to do.

A pleasant weekend

Mon, 05 May 2008 15:46:50 GMT

We spent a delightful, relaxing weekend with the jenkitty. She got up at some ridiculous hour to fly down from Seattle Saturday morning, and left Sunday evening. We (me, the flower_cat, and the chaoswolf -- the Y.D. wasn't interested in the kinds of things we had partially planned) piled into the van with Colleen's wheelchair and spent all day Saturday driving back from the Oakland airport (which has been extensively renovated since I was last there, and had surprisingly little traffic) by way of San Francisco.

The entire weekend was an exercise in real-time scheduling. We drove along the waterfront, passing up the food paradise of the Ferry Building because of large crowds and a lack of parking, past the tourist traps of Fisherman's Wharf, South on Van Ness, West on Geary past Japantown, and had a late breakfast at the Cliff House. Crab is a house specialty. Yum.

South on the Great Highway to Golden Gate Park, and parked under the de Young Museum. We need more museum time. The textile gallery was showing Turkmen weaving -- wow! The pace and interaction are vastly different when I'm wheeling Colleen around, but it wasn't unpleasant by any means.

After the museum we went next door to the Japanese Tea Garden. This was mostly a matter of Jen and Kat exploring widely while I tried to figure out how to get around with Colleen and the chair. On occasion I failed miserably; fortunately the Cat is still fairly mobile under her own power. No disasters.

Finally, we drove down to San Jose via Skyline Boulevard (as far as Woodside), took a turn past $WORK on Sand Hill Road, and tried to figure out where to have dinner. We'd originally identified a couple of places in Menlo Park and Palo Alto, but it was still too early and the Wolfling really didn't want her sister to be entirely left out, so we went home, let the Kitty take a nap, and headed out to Kobe, our favorite sushi boat place.

The evening was a combination of filking, conversation, and looking at the proofs of the wedding pictures, which artbeco brought over for us to sort through.

Sunday the Kitty slept in while I went out for bagels and Scottish lox, then a walk to the Rose Garden. There was time for Jen to have a bagel before going out "silly food shopping" to Cosentino's with Colleen. Colleen's been shopping there for nearly three decades; most of the staff are old friends. Dinner was huge pieces of lamb (which Colleen pan-broiled with Greek seasoning) with saffron rice and caprese (which I made). Quick, simple, and delicious.

All too soon it was time for Jen to leave. I combined the trip to the airport with dropping the kids off at their gaming session a couple of blocks down Coleman Avenue. All-in-all a delightful weekend; I just wish there was some way to do it more often.

Capped the weekend with a pleasant drive with the Cat.

Defining my terms: Openness

Sun, 04 May 2008 06:05:00 GMT

It occurs to me that, in a series of posts about mental states and relationships, I probably ought to define my terms. It's only fair, especially in an area where peoples' personal definitions are both vitally important to them and in some cases appear to have very little overlap.

Since this is an exercise in information sharing, it seems only right to start off with my definition for openness.

Openness:

Openness is, fundamentally, willingness to share information. In both directions. One might call the receiving direction "open-mindedness", though that's probably only part of it; I can't think of a good word for the sending direction. Anyone?

So let's take the sending direction first. Openness, in that direction, is a willingness to share information about yourself with others. There are degrees, of course, both in who one shares with and how -- and exactly what -- much one is willing to share. Some people share their most intimate feelings only with their closes friends; others (like me) "publish and be damned" almost everything on the open web.

In the other direction, openness is most of all a willingness to listen. It implies both interest in what the other person is saying, and (where applicable) a willingness to consider new information and possibly change one's own mind.

There's a lot of similarity between openness in relationships and in software; a good open-source software project not only shares its code freely, but accepts bug reports and patches for that code. It's not exact; there is, unfortunately, no revision-control system for relationships.

Most of the time I'm pretty far out on the openness side of the scale, by my own measure. There's very little about my own emotional life that I wouldn't publish here in my LJ, or put into a song. There have been a couple of times when I've suddenly thought "did I just say that to the entire damned Internet?" and friends-locked a post, but it feels wrong when I do it. As if there was something I needed to hide.

Sometimes I do need to hide things, though. I won't share anything I understand to have been told to me in confidence, and I won't share anything I understand will hurt someone else or reveal information they don't regard as private. The key word here is understand -- I'm all too likely to default to my own standards of openness; feel free to whap me with a cluestick if I blunder and cross one of your boundaries.

I've run across other peoples' boundaries enough lately that I'm setting up a private journal that's just for myself, finally. I haven't had a private journal in nearly four decades, but I have to write about things if I expect to understand them, and I need to be open with myself even if I can't necessarily share those particular thoughts with anyone else. It still feels wrong.

So, just as a reminder: this is my definition. You can tell me how it differs from your definition -- I really hope you do, in fact, since one of the motivations for this is to find out how my use of language differs from everyone else's -- and I'll be glad if you point out obvious inconsistencies or mistakes, or places where I could be more precise. ~~You don't get to tell me that my definition is wrong.~~ (edit 5/4) You can tell me why it doesn't really appear to be the definition I'm actually using. And you can tell me why you think I should be using a different one.

Similarly, you can tell me where you are on the scale, but you don't get to tell me I'm in the wrong place.