A few days ago I stumbled across a motivational page for marketers which contained an aphorism.  Since reading it, I have discovered that this aphorism has become lodged in my subconscious. And not lodged in my subconscious like a an acorn taking root in loamy, fertile soil, either. It’s more like having a chunk of stinky french cheese wedged into your sinus cavity just out of reach of your fingers.  Here is the phrase:

Enough molehills is all you need to have a mountain.

Because I am feeling both curmudgeonly AND pedantic, let us review this simple premise on both its literal and figurative levels, in that order.

Molehill Mountain

To begin with, the idea of actually making a mountain out of molehills isn’t really a new one; the ancient Britons did it 4,500 years ago. Silbury Hill covers about 5 acres, contains a quarter million cubic meters of chalk, soil, and gravel, and is estimated to have required more than 15 million person-hours of labor to complete (roughly equivalent to the entire population of Bellingham, WA working together for one year, with weekends off but without any holidays).  And yet the finished result looks a great deal like a glacier may have developed intestinal cramps and stopped at the side of the road to empty its bowels.

Part of the problem is that molehills are made of dirt. And dirt, unlike concrete blocks, bricks, or even loose rocks, does not lend itself to stacking. It simply doesn’t stay where you put it. There’s a reason why sandcastles are so popular but mudcastles are so very not.  There is also a reason why the pyramids are revered as icons of human accomplishment and Silbury Hill is in danger of being compared to glacier poo.

The author is not, of course, encouraging people to trundle a quarter million cubic yards of molehills into a central area over the course of many decades.  His point is simple, gratifying in its apparent practicality, and rational in its optimism — at least, it is at first glance. The premise is that a great many small things, carried out diligently over a sufficiently long period of time, must inevitably produce something great.  You don’t need a grand plan and you don’t need luck; you just need the determination to do many, many small things with faith that they will eventually congeal into a large one.  Unfortunately, this metaphor doesn’t hold up figuratively either.  The power of positive thinking may add a few months or years to your life, but it won’t raise your IQ or make your investments flourish.  All the little things must gel together; they must cohere long enough for the structure to rise.

I acknowledge Mr. Godin’s wise adherence to a policy of consistent execution, a necessity for anything — careers, relationships, homes, pyramids — to be built.  But please use bricks, not dirt.  Trust me, it’ll work out better and your aphorism will be in less danger of shredding by a curmudgeonly fellow like myself.

That’s right.  I’m running a wordpress install that gets a handful of visitors per day (seldom more than 20), a photo gallery that no one but le Goog ever visits, and a home grown front-end that receives perhaps a hundred hits per day and *barely* uses a MySQL database.  And this activity is so “intense” that HostMonster has “throttled” my account for more than 12 minutes in a single 24 hour period…  for activity that even moderately inadequate and overburdened hardware should be able to deliver in less than 40 seconds.

No wonder I can no longer get a page to load in under 12 seconds.  Thanks a lot, HostMonster.

I know I’m not the only person to experience similar problems.  I’m surprised to see so much obvious propaganda extolling their virtues — like this review, which is a whitewash if ever I saw one.  I suspect such material must be written either by folks who are being paid to publish a positive opinion OR who are pathological liars OR both.

Dear anyone who is listening to me whining and whinging: if you are looking for inexpensive, functional web hosting: cross HostMonster off your list.

Alessandra has a bad hair day

There is one scene in particular that comes to mind in this respect.  In this scene, the lovely Alessandra Mastronardi, playing a countrified woman searching for a sophisticated coif for her travel-blasted locks, becomes lost in a labyrinth of plazas and basalt structures lit up gold in the sunlight.  She looks around as though noticing her surroundings for the first time and, for a long moment, the camera turns away from her and does a 360 degree circular pan, as though amazed to find itself in such august surroundings.  It’s a strangely formal gesture in the middle of such an absurdist comedy, but effective — acknowledging the city as a character in its own right.

A character I would certainly like to visit before I die =)

I can only say, I hope you like this song:

Like Allen’s persona, this song haunts the movie with great perseverance: you’ll hear it almost a dozen times over the 110 minutes of screen time.  It is slightly less successful than Allen in avoiding wearing out its welcome.

This film boasts one of the most impressive ensemble casts I’ve seen in some time, and I’d like to mention a few highlights:

• Alec Baldwin has beautiful blue eyes.
• Jesse Eisenstein is truly talented at playing an unlikeable, manipulative 20-something.  He may actually be a savant, of sorts.
• Ellen Paige is also capable of playing an unlikeable 20-something.  I thought her (presumably) natural pluck made her immune to this, but it does not.  Perhaps Eisenstein’s aura rubs off on her.
• Opera is much funnier when it is being performed inside of a shower.
• American audiences are expected not to notice Penelope Cruz’s accent.  She’s learned Italian for previous roles, and I was curious how good or bad her accent actually was.

Despite all my criticisms, and the fact the plot charted a course directly through the center of Italian Romantic-Comedy cliche, I still enjoyed this movie thoroughly.  I’d give it a solid B.

(Just kidding about Minecraft! I’ve logged 25 minutes in the last 8 months. Once I’ve uninstalled Minecraft again and get Visual Studio and Eclipse installed, I will feel ready for anything.)

I also started shifting my web host from HostMonster to an entry-level ServerGrove VPS offering because, let’s be fair, 5 second load times for a small wordpress site are bad PR. My hair does enough bad PR for me already — I really don’t need any more.

While I was poking around on my VPS, I found that I had PHP 5.4 installed. I finally got around to checking out the new features for 5.4 and was delighted at the prospect of exploring them!  Here’s a sampler of what’s on tap:

• Anonymous functions and closures. I’m chagrined to admit that both of these mechanisms struck me, at first glance six years ago, as messy techniques that would promote confusion and unnecessary complexity — not unlike C/C++ macros taken to their (il)logical extreme. Working with animations in javascript, where graceful leveraging of closures is essential to building anything more than rudimentary widgetry, I finally saw the light. Now I can imagine all sorts of uses for them in PHP.
• Short array syntax. PHP’s hashed arrays, a built-in type that radically predates their standard object implementation, are enormously useful but have, until now, been burdened by an inexplicably verbose and obscure notation.

      $data = array
      (
          'key1' => 'This is a text string',
          'key2' => 6,
          'key3' => new ThingyMcThing(),  // delicious trailing comma to ease future additions to the array
      );

  And that’s fine — it’s functional — but it’s awkward to type (left pinky used four times for the as and the parentheses) and looks less like a data declaration than a function call. But now, we can declare arrays just like in javascript:

      $data = 
      [ 
          'key1' => 'This is a text string again', 
          'key2' => 7,
          'key3' => mcThing.factory.getMcNugget(),  // nom
      ];

  And it feels better — it feels right.

• And here’s the best saved for last: effective in this version of php, <?= will (wait for it) always work regardless of whether short_open_tags is enabled or not. Short open tags have never provoked the same sort of heated dialogue as code indenting idioms or editor choice, but they have been debated deeply and at length. And while the arguments against short open tags are compelling, the utility value of inline substitution (specifically, the <?=$variable;?> form) is simply enormous. Given the amazing quantity of open source libraries, frameworks, and templating engines, it’s easy to forget that PHP is *itself* a templating engine. Indeed, disabling short_open_tag functionality makes using raw PHP template expressions cumbersome to produce and grueling to decipher (particularly with !@#$ing alternative control syntax).  This particular choice in 5.4 is ingenious. XML can keep its <?, but <?= belongs to PHP. It’s the perfect middle ground.Glyph by glyph, I’ve always thought of the abbreviated open tag assignment like this:
  

  < // open a channel
  ? – pass through the barrier from HTML space into PHP space
  = – assign. Helpful that the equals sign, when compressed between ? and $, looks like a pipe or a connector.
  $variable – push the content of $variable outside of PHP space, through the assignment pipe, into HTML space.
  ; – end of PHP expression
  ? – pass through the barrier from PHP space to HTML space
  > – close channel

  Of course, the symbols are entirely arbitrary and have no such intrinsic meaning — I don’t mean to say that they do. But we humans naturally excel at populating the unspecified with our own imaginations, and furnishing arbitrary symbols with meaning. We do it so well that we spend most of our lives suspended in a web of meanings that we have created ourselves and transmitted culturally. It’s great!

I am looking forward to a new mode of existence in the not too distant future. As a result, I’m excited about new things! PHP is a messy, pragmatic language, but I’ve always found it to have a sort of neanderthal vitality to it. It’s a good place to start =)

Addendum & Important Caveat

“Technologyland” should not be confused with “Tomorrowland.”  Technologyland is cool, it really is.  But it isn’t particularly colorful, has very few mushrooms in it, and generally does not smell of body odor.

Tomorrowland: colorful as hell, but bring your own sunglasses and computing devices

This is a narcissistic age, and I’m not immune to thinking of my wrinkles as though they were a a contagion — not unlike the spread of an invasive bacteria through the alleys and warrens of a body’s circulatory system. There is a fatalistic inevitability to the way they spread and deepen like cracks in a windshield, or an ice-shelf peeling away from solid rock and sagging towards the ocean.

But I really prefer to think of my face like a hand-illustrated manuscript of the medieval period. The smooth vellum is just the raw material for the finished product: lettering done in the 13th century, the illustrations completed in the 14th, the color applied (sloppily, in places) in the 15th. Fine preparation for being stuffed in a closet for a few centuries and then sold on the black market for a ridiculous price It would be gratifying to view my wrinkles as a sign of wisdom, but I have only inconclusive empirical evidence of such a thing.

Or perhaps it is better compared to a block of stone being incremental chiseled into the increasing likeness of a human:

The blow of the hammer stings, but look how finely etched is the detail of my face!

The deep strike of the chisel aches, but look how deep you can see into the heart of this stone!

Shadow of a crow
upon the snow is as black
as the bird above

Lovely, isn’t it? I used to think I could actually write poetry, but I have long since shed that pretension like a frayed skin two sizes too small. Nevertheless, I decided to try writing a few of my own because, well, why not? Fortunately, haiku isn’t really poetry at all — it’s more like breath control in yoga, or applying a particularly satisfying texture to the cream cheese on your lunchtime bagel before you tuck in, or effortlessly rescuing an apple in mid-fall from a produce stand. They’re like graceful little gestures lost in a crowd — the fact they’re so small as to be almost unnoticed, and soon forgotten, is one of their virtues. Anyway, I wrote one and the other three percolated up from my subconscious.

* * * * *

shivering maples
stand naked, yearning for rain –
winter’s tender kiss

* * * * *

daylight forgotten,
sleep through another sunrise
taken on good faith

* * * * *

ice blue, ember red:
we hunt in vain for winter’s
imagined accents.

* * * * * *

crow, summer’s stranger,
dances through the naked branches –
he’s come home at last.

When I am done buzz-cutting it tomorrow night, it will look like this:

My thoughts require ventilation and fresh air.

Because right now, I’m thinking that if a work week exceeds the seven days of the Roman week, there should be a name for every additional day:

Day 8: Glumesday.  This day is named in honor of Eeyore, the Patron Saint of Whiners everywhere.

Day 9: Yaunsday.  Becauzzzzzzzzsnort it seems appropriate after a workday that runs til 3AM.

Day 10: Shavasday.  This day is named after the “corpse pose” common to every Yoga discipline.

In addition to Hurricane Sandy’s brutality to the east coast (very prosaic by Day after Tomorrow standards, and yes, I did watch the movie to put things into perspective), the last week’s headlines have included two shark attacks, a three year old boy killed by a pack of painted dogs in a Pittsburgh zoo, and THIS: the harrowing account of a single Nepalese leopard who is believed to have killed and eaten 15 people in the last year and a half. Buried in the text, I found this gem of information:

Stare into my eyes… your eyelids feel heavy…

Maheshwor Dhakal, an ecologist at the Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation in Kathmandu, agreed that it is unusual to find more than one or two man-eating animals in one area. Most leopards live on wild prey. “Since human blood has more salt than animal blood, once wild animals get the taste of salty blood they do not like other animals like deer,” Dhakal said.

When I saw this, a little blinker went off in my mind. It all suddenly made sense… humans are obviously tasty animals, but why? Of course! IT’S THE SALT.

In this leopard’s defense, if I were given the choice between an unlimited “acceptable” diet of bland, stringy deer, or a strictly forbidden diet of delicious human flesh rich in salt (preferably with garlic butter, but wild animals can’t be choosy), I would almost certainly be a man-eater. And in this leopard’s further defense, there *are* an awful lot of humans these days. In fact, though exact numbers are difficult to come by, it looks like there are approximately 250,000 leopards worldwide — just about one for every 30,000 humans on the planet. And in this leopard’s even further defense, it probably has really pretty eyes.

If I were to offer the Leopard one word of caution (other than to watch out for people with guns), it would be: watch your sodium intake. That shit’s not good for your heart. Excess salt intake may end up being just as deadly as revenge-motivated humans with modern firearms =/

And, in case that should be destroyed, here is a permalink.

Stay cool… and party on.

I’ve never understood why a sane, intelligent human being would want to squander so much of their life energy in a job where so many constraints are imposed, so little concrete success is possible, and such an unthinkable burden of responsibility is levied against you by the entire world.

It’s a dirty job, but some people are willing to do it anyway.

On occasion, I can’t help but suspect that they are all SOCIOPATHS. Or, in some cases, imbeciles.

“Um, herp derp. Umda la la!”

– President Andrew Johnson, Imbecile.

Most of the time, though, I imagine that their stoic countenances are just barely rigid enough to survive each camera shot, and that when they turn away, there are tears of frustration and hope glistening at the corner of their eyes. I suspect that when the microphone is pulled away, their next sentence is uttered in a quavering voice. And I want to believe that, after a debate where two individuals are pitted against each other like two gladiators in a coliseum, after blood is drawn, characters assassinated, and honor sacrificed cheaply for political gain, that everything changes when the curtains draw closed. That the two candidates can step up to each other, clap the dust and the detrimental insults from each others shoulders, smile ruefully, and say: “We are fighting for the same thing. We are a dual sacrifice on the altar of American democracy, that the people may have CHOICE.” And I want to believe that they recognize themselves in their opponent’s weary expression.

I would really like to believe that.