Zero Vents Plasma

I started working for PRWeb in December of 2005.  Now, approximately 1,200 work days later, I am preparing to lock my workstation and walk out of this building for the last time.

Don

Is 1,200 days a long time, or a short one?  I don’t even feel like the same person I was when I started, in large part because I have been changed by everything I’ve experienced here, and enriched by the people I’ve been so fortunate to work with.  The people of this company have been like a surrogate family through all the commotion of an acquisition, the catastrophic upheaval of hardware migrations, and the departure of many friends.  We’ve bickered and laughed, broken bread together, partied into the wee hours, and spent summer afternoons kicking a hacky sack.  These have been fantastic years.  My dear friends: I will remember my time here fondly; it’s been a great ride.

Now it’s time to ride off into the sunset — for a week.  And then onwards, and upwards!

I prefer to imagine that a huge audience of Kevin devotees check this blog for new content daily — I refuse to check my logs just to avoid disturbing this cozy little illusion.  I have no evidence that anyone other than Poem Pitzer has actually read anything I’ve written here for the last year or so, and she usually just points out my typos.

Random news items follow!

I am down to one month remaining at my current job, and boy howdy, that last month is bound to be interesting.  In a way, I feel bad — I agreed to stay on for an additional three months in the hopes of transitioning our product out of the hippie quarter of cyberspace (the usual insult that LAMP has to bear) and into DotNet/Sql Server.  I’ve learned a lot, I’ve gone through a lot of ibu profen, and it’s become quite clear that I am not going to be able to see anything through to completion.  I’m starting to refactor my definition of success.  If I can impart a graceful and extensible structure to these works in project, I may still be able to influence battles that will be played out after I am elsewhere.

I have learned to love PHP over the last several years, but I can see pretty clearly how possible it is to fall in love with C# and Visual Studio — when they work as designed, they are things of beauty.  They inflict a lot of the structure and discipline that PHP (being a big, dirty hippie of programming language) allows you to neglect if you wish.  Really, the differences between these languages are hilarious.

In other news — Holly’s husband, DJ, is in the midst of recovering from a partial colonectomy and is scheduled to begin chemotherapy in 2 weeks.  His docs are reasonably optimistic but, even given the best possible outcomes, there is nothing fun or nice about what he’s going through.  DJ has almost always been a cold, remote personality — but he’s a great dad and a good community man, and it is hard to see this happening to him, especially after Bjorn’s passing.  I don’t suppose he’d appreciate one of these:

Fuck Cancer

In other news:

• My neighbors got a cat.  They have had her for three days now and they can’t decide what to name her.  She is *adorable* and will make a great neighbor for my kitties!
• We bought a Nikon D3000 camera recently as an upgrade for the point-and-shoot piece of crap we’ve been using for the last several years.  It’s fantastic!  Anyone who can guess the number of times we’ve sung Simon and Garfunkle’s “Kodachrome” since we got the camera on Friday can have the old point-and-shoot.
• I have developed an unexpected taste for italian opera.  Cathy has threatened to take my speakers away.

Kitty just emailed me this:

Good news: Moppet’s butt isn’t at bad now as it was earlier this AM. Bad news: she must have wiped it off on something she sat on.

Good news: I discovered the source of the bad smell in the kitchen and took out the garbage, toter for compost, and your ceramic jar for compost, which eliminated the smell. Bad news: while I was at the CST, some raccoons got into your jar and spread food all over the deck.

Not sure if that makes me want to laugh or weep, or both.  Probably both.

Speaking of wild animals — we’re about two weeks into converting our code from PHP to C# in a very well developed framework.  When I say “well developed,” I don’t necessarily mean well-coded (I am reserving judgement until I understand what I am looking at thoroughly) — rather, I mean that the platform is bulging with implicit functionality and assumptions about methodology that are nowhere spelled out.  It’s funny seeing all our safe, familiar structure broken apart into little pieces and reassembled in this new territory, built of unfamiliar material.  Probably like seeing the book of <a href=”http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113842476″>Genesis reinvented as a “comic” book</a> or seeing the comic book Spawn reinvented as a german opera (so far as I know, that latter item has never been done — but I think it has great commercial potential).

I think Haiti caught me a little by surprise.  I mean, it’s a small country in the Caribbean, which is known primarily for sunshine and sandy beaches.  And really, a 7.0 isn’t *that* big…  at least not for a country flush with industrialization, cash, and seismic engineering know-how.

The death toll is looking as though it will level out somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000, a number which only takes on its full meaning when considering that Haiti’s population is only about 10,000,000 and that most of that population is concentrated in urban areas, where my instincts tell me that a substantial percentage of the casualties have occurred.  Simply horrible.  By comparison, 9/11 killed about 0.01% of the population of the United States — let us hope that the vitriolic rhetoric of madmen like Pat Robertson does not make the Haitians think God has declared war on them, or they may simply never recover.

Damage is funny…  it’s never localized.  I see in local news that a native of Port Orchard, where my father works, was killed in a collapsed orphanage.  Molly Hightower’s parents hoped she might be recovered even though a survivor from the 7th floor had located her on the 5th — but alas, it was not too be.  They have updated Molly’s blog with a final post.  I struck me that she had titled the blog “525,600 minutes - how do you measure a year?”  Which for some reason makes me start to tear up.  Weird.  Then again, it’s been a rather emotional week.

What to do?  Mostly nothing.  As my old friend Jon Grout noted via Facebook just a few moments ago,

There is enough misery in the world that you can be unhappy all day every day if you choose. For me, I feel like I need to expose myself to enough media to be informed, and then go on living my life, being happy, supporting my loved ones, doing my job, and being prepared to donate when bad things happen. You don’t have to feel guilty for living a happy life, and sometimes that means limiting exposure to unconstructive vicarious trauma.

Which is true.  I have poisoned myself by taping my eyelids up and forcing myself to watch shit before, out of some conviction that if the world was suffering, I should suffer (at least a little bit, passively) along with it.  Not very useful, really.

Of course, if you’re an adventurous individual of independent means, and you happen to have a plane handy (for instance, a Pilatus), and you care deeply about your fellow humans, you could always get behind the wheel and ferry equipment and supplies into Haiti directly.

(10:42:12 PM) Emma Bush: i decided NO to the surgery because the double vision thing is just a nusiance.

Further documentation that my sister is a certifiable, unrestrainable, grade-A, punch-first-and-ask-questions-later ass-kicker.  Yes, people — that’s MY sister.  So you better treat me right, or I will point her in your direction and tell her you kicked my cat or insulted one of my paintings, and she will do her thing.

Of course, she is totally crazy:

(10:48:35 PM) Emma Bush: so thankful.  that same punch split me open, can you imagine if she got to keep pounding me in that eye? what damage COULD have been done?
(10:48:37 PM) Emma Bush: lol
(10:48:46 PM) Emma Bush: that, is the definition of blessing in disguise
(10:48:49 PM) Kevin: shit
(10:49:03 PM) Kevin: there were two dozen people shouting for the ref to let the fight keep going
(10:49:10 PM) Emma Bush: ha!
(10:49:13 PM) Kevin: stupid blood sports
(10:49:23 PM) Emma Bush: i know, if they wouldn’t have stopped it, I would have kept going
(10:49:36 PM) Emma Bush: but honestly i was so relieved when they did because i couldn’t see a damn thing
(10:49:38 PM) Emma Bush: lol

So consider yourself warned.  My sister does NOT need her sense of vision to keep on kickin’ your butt.  And she’s still on my side for now

Martha Lyon just posted this as her facebook status, and it struck me quite favorably:

Contemplation often makes life miserable.  We should act more, think less, and stop watching ourselves live.

Upon cross examination, she revealed that this quote’s author is Nicolas Chamfort — a French playwright, and a contemporary (and fickle courtier) of Louis XIV. The sentiment is lovely — that the best life is one lived close to the heart, relatively uncontaminated by the cold and exacting influence of logical deliberation, or the alienating effect of metacognition.  I find that part of my mind buys into this.

Unfortunately, after his days as a courtier he fell in with the revolutionaries — he was amongst the first to storm into the Bastille in the first, heady days of the Revolution.  Unfortunately, his loyalty to revolutionary causes was too sane to follow the fanaticism of the Terror, and his satirical tongue, unrestrainable, got him in trouble.  He was imprisoned; then after release, the authorities issued another warrant for his arrest (fie, seditious tongue!).  Poor Chamfort decided to take his own life.

Sadly, he was a lousy suicide:

Chamfort is the very exemplar of the botched suicide. Unable to tolerate the prospect of being imprisoned once more, in September 1793 he locked himself into his office and shot himself in the face. The pistol malfunctioned and he did not die even though he shot off his nose and part of his jaw. He then repeatedly stabbed his neck with a paper cutter, but failed to cut an artery. He finally used the paper cutter to stab himself in the chest. He dictated to those who came to arrest him the well-known declaration — “Moi, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas de Chamfort, declare avoir voulu mourir en homme libre plutot que d’etre reconduit en esclave dans une maison d’arret” — which he signed in a firm hand and in his own blood. His butler found him unconscious in a pool of blood.

I had to google to find the translation, which is:

“I, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas Chamfort, declare that I wished to die a free man rather than be enslaved in a house of detention.”

Which, when you get down to it, is extremely banal for a so-called “famous” quotation.

Well, so much for lovely thoughts.  The contemplation of this one has made me rather pessimistic.  In retrospect, I wish that I had spent more time working, and thought less about this quote, and not learned anything at all about how poor Nicolas Chamfort had lived.