Zero Vents Plasma

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.

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.

I don’t have anything nice to say about my own life at the moment, so I’m going to post the lyrics to a song I love (unaccountably, since it is a strangely raucous country western-styled song by a Canadian hip hop artist, and I generally enjoy neither country nor hip hop).  If this is insufficiently personable for you, then go get stuffed.

Rough House Blues

I’m Going Down The Road Feeling Bad, Bye And Bye
Deep Fried Blues But I’d Rather Die Than Cry
Gas Station Food Bound To Go Stale Soon
There’s A Curse In The Air And A Toe-Nail Moon
Yeah, Some Of These Towns Are Still Non-Friendly
And This Is The Hammer That Killed John Henry
I’m Sick Of Being Tired, Sick Of The Circus Life
Here Day-Dreaming Of A Waitress As The Perfect Wife
Utterly Inappropriate, Taken Out Of Context
Degenerate Nervousness, Developing A Complex
No Good With Money, Left-Overs In A Bitch Bag
Fryin’ Pan Soul And A Face Like A Dishrag
A Million Old Movies, I Figured I’d Tell
Childhood Memories Triggered By Smell

So Now What, You May Ask, Well That’s Hard To Say
Because That Old Jack Of Diamons Is A Tough Card To Play

All The Wrong Reasons, Just Another Skull To Crack
Askin’ The Dust, I’m Stuck In A Cul-De-Sac
And It May Sound Silly But To Me The Threat Is Very Real
So That’s Why I Sing Love Songs And Carry Steel
Women And Warfare, Roaches And Roadkills
No Easy Answers, No Deadlines And No Frills
Catchin’ Your Drift, Receivin’ The Warning
Packin’ My Things, I Live In The Morning
I Drive All Night, Gone To See My Friend
One Day This Highway Will Be My End
Now The Hills Are Alive And The Motor Is Dead
That Man Has A Zero Floating Over His Head
I Follow My Instincts, Sometimes Follow Dogs
Drink Muddy Water,Sleep Inside Hollow Logs

So Now What, You May Ask, Well That’s Hard To Say
Because That Old Jack Of Diamonds Is A Tough Card To Play

Today is a day for anyone even remotely connected with web development to throws their hands in the air and celebrate.  According to StatCounter Global Statistics, Firefox 3.5 has become the most popular browser in the world.

Graph of Browser Shares

That is pretty darn tootin’ amazing!

Hopefully, our next day of celebration will be the day when IE6’s market share drops below 1% — on that day, there will be toasting and dancing and, if I have anything to do with it, widespread public drunkenness.  To the future!  *clink*