Scratchpad

Yes, I am still alive. And, yes, I feel weirdly guilty about it.

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1 May. 2008

I write the occasional entry about amusing, annoying, or just plain strange tidbits I find in my server logs, but the last couple of days I noticed something unusual that quickly turned downright depressing. I've received a number of hits from multiple users from the ISP Bresnan, a little operation out of Purchase, NY. I was a bit baffled at first as to why all of these people from Purchase were finding me by searching for my name (they mostly arrived via Google by searching for "Alexis Turner"), until I noticed that a couple of the searches included the terms "suicide" and "passed away."

I don't know who this anonymous Alexis was, although I did manage to find an obit finally. But I feel sad for her in a way I wouldn't if we didn't share a purely arbitrary connection on our names. Part of me feels awfully guilty that I am still alive with nothing better to do than poke about my server logs. I feel like I ought to at least be making something or living or reading...or...well...anything besides sitting here on this damn computer.

Syncretism

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20 Apr. 2008

I had a conversation with Tim yesterday in which I managed to repel him by admitting that I'm currently trying to wean myself off caffeine. Things quickly degenerated, ending with him grunting about the end of civilization and something about prying coffee from his cold, dead hands.

I was thinking about this conversation a few moments ago as I was walking home from the nearby bagel shop, clutching a nice, warm cup of coffee in my hands. The crux of Tim's argument was that the act of drinking coffee is so intensely pleasurable, that he feels so magnificent after having just had a cup, that he can never bring himself to give it up. I didn't actually disagree with his assessment of the sybaritic pleasure of a cup of joe (hence why I was in the middle of imbibing even as I am trying to stop), but I realized as I was walking that my disagreement with him is over which aspect is so pleasurable. It's not the caffeine. It's not even the coffee itself. It's the ritual of having a favorite drink, at a certain time of day, and allowing yourself to momentarily do nothing but wallow in the ritual. When I drank Dr. Pepper, nothing could be as heavenly as the peppery, sweet bite in the back of my throat and the mild irritant of the fizzy water. When I switched to Italian soda, the sharp bite of the bubbles continued to please. And, now that I drink coffee, I delight in its warmth when I have it hot, and its creaminess when I have it cold. And always, always through the three I have engaged in my sinful little delight at the same times of day.

As I admired this intriguing little realization, it struck me that it's not at all unrelated to the whole host of other disagreements I am currently having with a whole host of other people and ideological positions. I've struggled recently - painfully unsuccessfully, I might add - to articulate to myself and others exactly why I'm having such a nasty break with so many positions I thought I held or that others expect me to hold. Why can't I bring myself to be a feminist if I'm both a lesbian and a liberal? (This particular failing has been especially infuriating to many people I come across, as I am apparently "supposed" to be a feminist.) Why have I suddenly decided I am against the death penalty when I had no problems with it before? Why do I suddenly think Democrats are absolutely 100% full of shit even as I continue to identify as liberal?

Let me back up just a bit before going on. Although the discussion Tim and I had is finally allowing me to answer all of these questions, it was preceded several nights ago by a different conversation that laid the foundation for my coffee-inspired realization. The conversation was over whether the death penalty is acceptable or not. I was surprised that, save one, all of my friends said it was. My argument against it was twofold.

The first part was that, although at any given time we must out of practical necessity put our faith into the fact that we are right, history consistently proves us wrong. We now know that the earth is not flat. There is no such thing as the ether or the vapors. Freud was mostly wrong. Newton's been proven inadequate and Einstein's starting to look a little shaky himself. Personally, I'd go so far as to say there may not be such a thing as truth, but that's beside the point - all of those theories and beliefs have proven immensely useful while they were in vogue. They worked. They allowed us to make decisions, create worldviews, get things done. They gave us a direction and let us put our shoes on in the morning. So I'm not saying that we should discard any effort to believe things or choose a position. But I am saying that you'd have to be just plain stupid not to exercise a level of humility when it comes to your beliefs. Greater men than you or I have been proven wrong by the cruelties of time and popular opinion, and I, for one, simply cannot bring myself to believe that I will escape that fate where they did not.

The crux of the second was the same - that you'd have to be just plain stupid not to exercise a level of humility when it comes to your beliefs - although in this case substituting the words "misguided and dangerous" for "stupid." I was struck fully by the repercussions of this when watching, of all things, the movie Jesus Camp. There's a scene in which the leader of the camp is discussing how her goal is to create "God's Army." When noting how that differs from, say, Muslims teaching their kids to lay down their lives for Islam, she laughs a slight, dismissive laugh, as though she can't believe the obviousness of the answer and says incredulously, "because...excuse me...because we have the truth!"

And, in essence, this understanding of the possibility of error is what I see the entire American democratic system being based on. The system is built to mitigate error through the use of checks and balances and through heterogeneity. The idea is that an unchallenged belief system becomes extreme because there is no way to identify errors. And, god forbid that belief system happens to be wrong, the possibility for disaster is increased exponentially. In essence, America is founded on the idealism that through reason and Enlightenment we can become greater than we are, even as it also relies heavily on the practical realization that people are fallible. The system relies on the use of heterogeneity to mitigate error, given that homogeneity magnifies them.

Given that, it seems to me that the death sentence is inherently un-American. It removes the ability to come back later and say, "Oops. Heh heh. Sorry we locked you in jail for 30 years. We fucked up." The person is dead - there is no rectifying that error. The death sentence wraps the judicial system in the mantle of infallibility and removes the ability to check or balance its decisions in retrospect. Likewise (to finally, finally bring this back around to what I was talking about initially), I find that many ideological positions wrap themselves in that same cloak. It's wrong, they say, for our opposition to engage in (fill in the blank - building armies, refusing to listen to outsider voices, discriminating, refusing to pay taxes for our cause - the list is endless), but because we're right, it's okay for us to do that.

So that's the ultimate realization I've had with regards to my inability to reconcile myself with any number of positions I feel like I ought to be taking but just can't. It's not that I necessarily have any problem with the theoretical position. It's that I have a problem with the practice of carrying the ideas to fruition. The air of infallibility taken on by practitioners, the willingness to engage in inherently dangerous and fascist behavior because we're Just. So. Sure. that we're right. Our society laughs behind its hands at Machiavelli, calls him wicked and wrong and says we'd never do that, yet to our peril we live his philosophy every day.

Given this, the only position I do find myself being able to take is the one that embraces - actually, truly embraces - the fact that opinions diverging from one's own are necessary and absolutely vital to a healthy society. To that end, I do buy into a lot of the Democratic party's platform. Diversity is vital to a vibrant, progressive, secure, and robust society, one that can withstand the most pressures from the most directions at any given time. And also to that end, I can't sit in a room with a bunch of Democrats vilifying "the enemy" or belittling divergent opinions as stupid or wrong. It's hypocritical and dangerous. Democrats wonder how they manage to blow it at the 11th hour every election cycle? It's because they don't practice what they preach and everyone realizes deep down that they're full of shit, their promises mere empty rhetoric. They say all the right things, they have all the right aims, but they don't look to the heart of why they are striving to achieve those goals.

In other words, they haven't analyzed their own positions. They think they want diversity, but they fail to appreciate why, and so they fail to realize when their own actions inhibit their ability to reach that goal. And when the chance for ritual presents itself, they pass it up, holding out, wrongly, for its pale shadow - a mere cup of coffee.

Beauty in code

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3 Apr. 2008

Apparently, CSS can actually make me weep with joy.

I'm working from home today and waiting for an eternal virus scan to end before logging into the company VPN (yes, I'm a nerd and actually do this step....deal with it), so I decided to kill 0.5 seconds by looking at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden's Cherry Blossom map. The map isn't perfect - namely, I hate that the little info bubbles stay in place even when you move away from a particular tree, preventing you from activating other trees that are underneath the bubble. Even so, I really like it and am impressed by it every time I obsessively reload the page to see whether it's been updated yet or not. It's simple, beautiful, easy to use. So, suddenly overwhelmed with curiosity about how they get the map like that, I looked at their source code and realized they do the entire layout with nothing but CSS. There's a little javascript for the popup tool-tip, but the actual map itself is entirely CSS. Holy crap. That is some loving, painstaking work, and proof that you don't need the latest code fad to accomplish a beautiful interface!

Oh, Rotel

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25 Mar. 2008

Much as poutine to Quebec, marmite to Queensland, or egg cream to the Bronx, such is Rotel to Texas. Which means it has thus far eluded me in NY, and now I find I need it desperately. Shit, shit, shit. Time for another weekend mission, I guess. Googling indicates the following as possible sources, but I fear the list is outdated:

  • Walmart
  • Stop & Shop (I do recall as a student in Yonkers that this was accurate...but today?)
  • Food Emporium
  • Target
  • Dean & Deluca
  • Random bodegas

If any of you five trusty readers has had a recent Rotel sighting, now is the time to come forward! Do you remember that crap queso I served you recently? Do you?! Do not make me feed that to you again.

Update: Although the bodegas and larger groceries of Astoria and Greenpoint were sadly lacking in the Rotel department (as was Kmart), Food Emporium of Union Square came through.

2: Key Foods @ Ditmars has Rotel. Instead of being shelved with the other canned tomatoes, however, it is tucked away next to the beans and Mexican foods.

I ♥ NY

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27 Feb. 2008

I've been trying to pinpoint what it is that makes me so excited to be back in New York again, especially since, when I lived here years ago, I absolutely hated it. Too busy, too dirty, too active, too exhausting. Now, though, I've hit my stride and can't imagine living anywhere else. So what changed?

It could be a variety of factors. I no longer feel the need to do and see everything the way I did when I was 20, for instance, so the exhaustion element doesn't really exist any more. I got spoiled by walking when I lived in DC and crave a city that lets me continue to do that, mitigating my irritation with other, less desirable, elements. But, mostly, I think it's because as I've refined my understanding of democracy and human interaction I've come to appreciate NY as one of the few examples of the American city the way it is supposed to work. I love New York for its pure embodiment of that tenuous American dream.

I miss the South sometimes. I miss the oak trees. I miss the expansive skies and furious thunderstorms and I miss mockingbirds and mourning doves and whipporwhills. I miss the food (good Lord, do I miss the food). Ocassionally, I even miss my crazy ass family. But I don't miss the people in Texas. I don't miss getting unabashedly hateful stares because I'm not dressed right or because I don't have makeup on, or when people realize I haven't been to church on Sunday. I don't miss hearing the word nigger all day long, and I don't miss the fact that the only permitted topic of conversation is who saw the appalling hairdo Nellie Jean got and how could that man marry her anyway, seeing as how she ain't nothing but trash anyhow, but at least she'll get found out when the kids turn out to be rotten, 'cause, you know, that bad blood's got to turn up sometimes, just you wait and see. I don't miss hearing that I'll turn straight once I find the right man. I don't miss seeing a person who needs help denied it because they aren't the right sort of person. I don't miss the oppressive heat and I don't miss the oppressive rules by which a proper person lives their life, and by which other proper people make sure it happens.

New York, though. New York. Nobody gives a shit if you walk down the street wearing a pink tutu and wings. Nobody cares if you speak Tamil, or Greek, or English. You can get together with your buddies on the weekend to play poker, and nobody's gonna sit around and tell their Aunt Myrtle about it. You can be a Democrat, you can be Republican, you can be a complete bastard or a saint. It doesn't matter. Because, more than anything, New Yorkers cherish their freedom. They are free to dress, talk, think, and act as they damn well please, as long as those actions don't negatively affect someone else's ability to be equally free. New York embodies the American ideal the way no other place I've lived has. A person is free to strive towards the life they want to live, on their terms, and no one else's. You are free to fail spectacularly or suceed gracefully in New York, based on nothing but your own choices. This does not stop people from, perhaps, secretly thinking you are a complete fuckup. But they keep that information to themselves, thank you very much, and in so doing leave you open to continue living your life. Freely.

Would that the rest of the country followed New Yorkers' example. We might live forever.

Oops, I Found My Limit

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19 Feb. 2008

Although my feelings on social networking sites are decidedly ambiguous (love del.icio.us, indifferent towards Friendster, ambivalent/distrusting/but still a user of Facebook), I have until now not found a social networking site that I really, really do not want to use. The payoff from most of them has been enough for me to go ahead and suck up any slight misgivings I have and use them anyway.

But yesterday I got an invite to use Goodreads, where, basically, you share what you're reading and can make and take book recommendations from friends. You can also view other users' bookshelves. Honestly, given how many of my friends run in publishing circles and read as voraciously as I do, I'm surprised it took so long for me to get an invite to one of these (but, then again, many of my friends aren't as plugged in as I am so I guess it's not that much of a shock). At any rate, I created an account, logged in, and added maybe 5 books to my shelf before I stopped dead in my tracks.

Whoah. Whoah. Whoah. What the fuck am I doing?! I am putting every thing I read, everything that influences my thought, everything, in other words, that I hold most dear and private and central to what makes me tick, online for the entire fucking world to look at?! Librarians and people in both democratic and tyrannical countries have fought tooth and nail, in some cases to the death, to keep reading material private, and I am just blithely putting it up for anyone to take a look at? And not just putting it up there, but storing it so any one could retrieve it and parse it any time? Compare my reading habits to similar and not so similar people?

This may sound crazy, but I literally felt sick when I realized what I was doing. I feel kind of sick describing it now. I really felt like I was just running my ass down the street with no clothes on. I thought of the multiple strongarm attempts the FBI has made with libraries through history to "Red flag" reading material so they can, you know, keep a good, friendly eye on any suspicious people, and I thought I must be absolutely fucking crazy to be putting my shit in this system.

I like the idea of sharing reading suggestions with close friends and confidants, or the occasional recommendation I get from shoulder surfing an interesting book on the subway from a stranger, or overhearing some folks talking about some fascinating tome they've been digging into while standing in line for my morning donut. I like the idea of a personal system shared and run just between friends, with no third party intermediary. But I don't think I can ever bring myself to log back in to Goodreads or other similar systems.

I'm curious to hear if any of my readers feel the same way. Any social networking sites you refuse to use? What do you consider private and what do you consider fair game for the public domain? Am I nuts for thinking that what I read is more sensitive than the movies I like or who I hang out with or even personal intellectual struggles I have (many of which probably make me look like a complete dumbass, but which I have no compunction posting on this public scratchpad)?

He Said, She Said

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18 Feb. 2008

I've been doing a little research project recently on the origin of a particular quotation, and I've found that most sources out there are maddeningly terrible for this particular effort. I mean, truly, truly maddening. In my crankier moments, I ask myself how we as humans can expect to solve any of our problems if we can't even remember our own history. Theoretically easy history. Like who said what when. In my more charitable moments I remind myself that identifying the reality of a situation is actually damn hard, even if it doesn't make it any less frustrating. Sigh.

To take an example, I came across an unrelated quote today and Googled it out of curiosity. I ended up with the following ridiculous hodgepodge of crap attributions:

Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.
- Doris Lessing
- Just Lessing , not Doris (and another, from 1886)
- Louisa May Alcott
- La Bruyère
- Charles Seymour
- Dorris Tessing (yes, I'm serious)
- Jean Toomer

Doris Lessing is the most popular choice, but the quote was attributed to la Bruyère in a publication printed before Doris Lessing was even born. That, of course, doesn't say anything about the accuracy of the la Bruyère attribution - around the same time period, the quote was attributed to a Lessing, just not the Lessing. Basically, in this entire list, the only three possibilities that fit the time frame of the earliest quote I found are "Lessing," Alcott, and la Bruyère. "Lessing" could apply to Gotthold Lessing, Karl Lessing, or Otto Lessing, but I'm putting my money on Gotthold, based on the subject of most of his work. In an irony of ironies, the quote is attributed to Doris in a book right next to other quotes attributed to Gotthold.

And people ask why I question everything. An apt quote, indeed.

It's all the Same, but Different

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I was startled when I logged in to my news reader this morning and saw something like 8 of the same headline staring at me from multiple sources. In spite of news companies' tendency to copy each others' stories, that's actually something of a rarity. So this was obviously "Big News."

At any rate, I'm intrigued by how different each of these articles is. Not surprised, just intrigued. On a lark, I also went to the Houston Chronicle site, just for the sake of comparison. Oh, Houston Chronicle, you never disappoint.

I'm still processing all of the different articles. I suspect there will be a slew more as the day progresses. It does come at any interesting time for me - just a couple of days after I noticed what might turn out to be an impostor meme in its nascent stages.

The more you look, right?

Comments, at last

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17 Feb. 2008

Okay, I finally bit the bullet and added comments to this thing. I noticed that my blog entry screen wasn't working any more. Did my host update PHP? I have no idea, but I decided the homebrew blog had served its purpose (making me practice my programming) and it was time to move to a "real" system. So, it might look the same, but you're actually staring at a shiny Wordpress blog right now.

Lest you think I wimped out by giving up the roll-yer-own blog system, I would like to say that I had a ton of fun playing with MySQL to transfer the old blog entries into the new database schema. Here's the outline, for anyone else finding the need to do this (I was annoyed to discover there is no info on doing this on the Wordpress site, so I'll stick it here for some desperate soul to stumble across):

  1. I used mysqldump to dump the old blog posts and the wp_0d5m70_posts table from the new.
    Deciding to do this was a real stroke of inspiration, because I had no idea how I was going to keep the post IDs the same from the old to the new - which would have broken any outside links to specific entries (and, yes, there are at least a couple out there). But performing the mysqldump showed me a couple of cool little tricks I didn't know, including "ALTER TABLE `table-name` DISABLE KEYS." This command turns off auto incrementing while you add your old post IDs to the new table. At the end of the process, mysqldump enables the keys again, and voila! All new posts will increment correctly.
  2. I cut the INSERT statement from the homebrew dump file into the wordpress dump file
    This was a huge line, so I used a little Linux trick that kept me from having to cut and paste. Basically, I found the line number of the statement in the homebrew file and ran the shell command 'head -line# homedump.txt | tail -1 >> wp-dump.txt'. This took out the single line I wanted and appended it to the end of the wp-dump file. Then I could just go in to the wp file and move it to the right place.
  3. I edited the INSERT statement to only insert the columns that my table shared
    This was a simple matter of defining the column names being inserted. 'INSERT INTO `wp_0d5m70_posts` (ID, post_title, post_date, post_content) VALUES (blahblahblah). I didn't touch the values section of this statement any more than necessary because it was shit crazy long. Instead, I just told the insert statement what it was looking at that corresponded to the wordpress column names. Now, there was a single column I had that did not translate to the wordpress table. That could have been really ugly, but I got lucky because it happened to be formatted pretty uniquely. So I exited the text editor and used the command 'perl -p -i -e "s/find-this//g' to delete all occurrences of that field. If you have never used Perl pie before, you should seriously learn how, because it saves my ass all the time, and I barely even know how to use it. I can only imagine how rad it would be if I got good at it.
  4. I added in a couple of new UPDATE statements to fill in the fields that my table never had.
    Listing every one is a pain in the ass, but basically I looked at the wp-dump file to identify all the columns being used and used the generic values like so "UPDATE `wp_0d5m70_posts` SET post_author=1, post_category=0, post_excerpt='', post_status='publish'....etc". The second update statement I used was pretty cool and I had never done this one before, but I used it for the guid column, which is the one that defines the permalink to the post. Since my permalinks involve the post ID, I used the CONCAT function like this: "UPDATE `wp_0d5m70_posts` SET guid=CONCAT('http://redheadedstepchild.org/lists/scratchpad/entry', ID);" That tacks the ID onto the end of the URL in the guid column. Pretty sweet.
  5. Ran the commands in the edited dump file to change the table with my updates.
    This can be done by running mysql from the command line and redirecting the output of the file into it as commands. 'mysql tablename < wp-dumpfile.txt' If there are any errors, mysql tells you right away where the error existed and you can edit your dumpfile to fix it and try again.

This is definitely involved and roundabout, and it wasn't perfect (I have yet to figure out how to nicely transfer my post tags more quickly than it would take me to enter them by hand), but it was 8 trillion times faster than manually entering the posts via the Wordpress interface. I basically did it in something like an hour after I finished breakfast. All in all, I'm pretty pleased with how painless it was, but if you notice anything buggy about the transfer, let me know. In my new comments section.

Edge Cases

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13 Feb. 2008

Great post over at Blue Flavor about the evil of edge cases. It speaks to me on the obvious level of web work and my current job, but it also really jumped out at me as being applicable to a lot of other areas, especially academia. In particular, it beautifully explains the tendency of graduate students (and, by extension, the later faculty members they become) to focus solely on the problems in an argument and thus miss the big picture. They seem to gain an impeccable ability to deconstruct, but no real impressive ability to construct.

At the end of the day, I think it comes down to the Behar quote included at the end: "If you stick your head out, you can't be afraid to have it cut off." We need less fear in academia. It holds us back. We need to be willing to make mistakes and look like idiots every now and then for the ultimately larger payoff of solving an intractable problem or discovering something new.

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