Scratchpad

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 Googling indicates the following as possible sources, but I fear the list is outdated: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.

Confession of a Filthy Dilettante

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I find myself finally having to admit that I'm not a Democrat any more. I've been drifting away from the party for several years now, and a number of events that have taken place in the last few months have finally come to a head. I've broken with the party. It's over. Fuck you. I wish I could say it was good while it lasted, but I can't even do that. I'm still liberal. I still have tendencies. But I can't date you any more.

Will I still have friends after this admission? I'm still the same person you've always known and I'm sorry if I haven't treated you right during this whole thing. I'm sorry if I lashed out at you because of my own identity crisis. I mean it. It wasn't your fault. It was me. I hope you can understand.

I suddenly think I must know what it feels like to be a pedophile - I crave something impossible, and I wish I didn't. I wish I could just be happy with having what everyone else has, and with being content with comfortable, safe conversations, able to connect with ordinary people and have the same discussion again and again, stroking my ego with its familiarity, with its mirror reflection of myself, telling me, "Yes, you're right, you're brilliant, you're so smart, everyone agrees with you." But that conversation disgusts me. I want to have it, but when I do I find myself furious at its impotence, its uselessness, its inability to spark even the slightest arousal in me. It's boring. It's cold. It's like having sex the exact same way over and over and no matter what I do I can't force myself to enjoy it. I sneak out at night and I go to listen to conversations I've never had before with strangers I will never meet again, and it excites me. The not knowing excites me. The thrill of the chase excites me.

There. I admitted it. You've become boring. Tired. Slow and sloppy in your cyclical, smug self-satisfaction and I am nothing but a filthy dilettante. You will never satisfy me. You little insular communities are all the same. You blow your wad after five seconds. There's no finesse, no tease, no build up, no excitement. I'm not leaving you for another party. I'm leaving you for another game altogether.

All I want is to discuss possibilities. Ideas. I crave to hear new ways to do things. Is the system broken? Let's fix it. Let's come up with alternatives, options. Let's experiment and tweak and alter and play. Test, feint, parry, recoup, flex, adjust. Tinker. Tease. Explore. Let us explore. Please. I want to explore. I cannot be the only person who wants to explore. I want to taste new foods and see new places and meet new people and for the love of all that is holy in this world I want to hear a new idea that I have never heard and I want to hear the journey you took to get there, and then I want to take it all apart and put it back together again. I want you to ask me hard questions and let me ask them of you in return. And sometimes, I want you to leave me alone so I can ask them of myself. I want you to be unafraid of making mistakes, and in so doing stumble upon something phenomenal. I would like you to seduce me slowly with your thoughts, not fuck me in the ear with your tired quickie sound bytes.

I'm tired of you telling me what to think, what to wear, how to live or eat. I am not a baby bird. I do not want to eat my food prechewed. I do not need you to do it for me; I can and want to catch it myself. Because, quite frankly, prechewed food is vomit. You are throwing up on me and you think that I should be titillated or at the very least grateful that you've saved me all that hard work. "Hey, man, everyone else does this. Why can't you be normal? This way is easier. It's normal to want to do it the easy way." Well, guess what? I am not fucking normal - I actually like to work for what is mine. I like my knowledge hard-earned, thanks, and I'm tired of your regurgitations.

I'm tired.

I'm fucking tired. I have a headache. I'm on the rag. I'm not in the mood. I am not hungry for your leftovers. I can't be a Democrat any more. I can't call myself a feminist. I'm damn sure not going to call myself a Republican or a Libertarian or anything else you have a label for, because the instant I put any group's labels on myself, all their buddies come out of the woodwork and start gang banging me with their assumptions, nodding their heads and staring at me with glassy eyes and refusing to actually chew the meaty heart of a matter, while they assume I am doing the same. I feel dirty when I lie and pretend that I am one of you. I am tired of that feeling. I would like to feel alive and true again. I would like to live well on ideas, not eke out a meager existence on your safe platitudes.

Silos

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23 Jan. 2008

I finally decided that after being in NY for four months it was time to check out at least one local lesbian hangout, albeit with trepidation. (Honestly, could there possibly be a less interesting scene in the entire world than a lesbian bar? If so, morbid curiosity impels me to keep looking for it.) So I popped on down to a little joint in the West Village, sidled up to the bar, turned to my left, and to my complete non-surprise saw another Sarah Lawrence grad from my class on the stool next to me. We'll call her H.

Needless to say we got to talking (if nothing else, it's hard to shut a Sarah Lawrence student up) on a whole host of topics, including words, neighborhoods, experiments in group ethics, pulling people off of subway tracks, girlfriends, the Internet, waiting tables, tiny apartments. You know, the usual topics for liberal arts geeks who get together. All in all, quite an enjoyable evening, and I had to scold myself for expecting it to turn out badly.

Even so, I was - and have remained - particularly discouraged by one aspect of the conversation. We were talking about words. I believe her friend asked whether a particular word was a real word or if she was making it up, and the bartender, who was a weird, veritable font of random trivia and aspires one day to be on Jeopardy, indicated that it was. Then the OED came up and we started talking dictionaries and made up words. I suggested that if H. was really as intrigued and simultaneously disgusted by made-up words as she indicated, she should check out the Urban Dictionary.

Now, as an aside, I find Urban Dictionary wonderful and fascinating and hilarious, and although I used to be rather uptight about "proper English," I've since come to embrace how wonderful and rich language can be through the process of evolution. Sure, there are certain words that I abhor and refuse to use (I'm thinking mostly of business-ese here...the utilizes and synergies and concretizing), but, on the whole, I think that playfulness and ingenuity are admirable traits in all other areas of life, so why not with language?

So, having divulged that about myself, I shouldn't have to tell you that I was pretty crestfallen when the bartender piped in with, "Urban Dictionary? Oh my God, that is the worst fucking site ever. I fucking hate that site. It's an affront to the English language. It's illiterate, ghetto central," or something pretty similar.

I felt like I had to come to the site's rescue. "Well that's the point, isn't it? That's what makes it so fascinating. I mean, it's precisely because these aren't the types of words you would use that it's so wonderful. This isn't stuff you're going to hear from most of your friends or the circles you normally run in, it gives you a little window into a whole different culture." Which is true, but I know that my defense came across as pretty lame.

And then, what the fuck out of the blue, H. comes at me with something about how everyone thinks the Internet is so wonderful but it's not, because it leaves out whole swaths of the population. Essentially, she came at me with the access argument, but couched in slightly different terms. Her implication to me was how could I be defending the Internet as being great when there are so many minorities who aren't represented on it? (As if that's the Internet's fault and not society's fault, but I haven't quite got to that part of the story yet).

Now, that's fine, that's all well and good, I've heard that argument a million times before, but the part that really slapped me at the time and which has only more persistently been seeping into every pore and just nagging the hell out of me ever since is that we were just discussing a website frequented by and essentially made by these very same "underrepresented minorities" she was purporting to defend, and she and everyone else in the conversation was trashing the site as being an illiterate piece of shit. But more to the point, they were making it very, very clear that they absolutely, positively do not go to those sorts of websites.

So the bit that's really started to nag at me is just how accurate is the party line on underrepresented groups on the Internet? And I do mean party line - I hear this argument stated as fact all the time on any number of the mailing lists I'm on, in articles in the Times, on Slate, Personal Telco...everywhere. (And by everywhere, I mean everywhere there are liberal, white, educated folk who have the white man's burden to make sure everyone gets access, or at least talk about it whether or not they are actually trying to do anything about it.) After watching the conversations in such places carefully over the last several years, after studying topics like viral marketing, after listening to endless political rhetoric, I've become keenly aware of how truths wax and wane and become more true within closed communities and it's become very, very hard for me to accept anything as fact just because I hear it a lot. If anything, the more I hear something the more suspect it becomes in my mind. I've come to hate taking anything for granted, least of all my own beliefs.

So that's it. It's been bothering me like mad ever since I had this conversation. I've been on some crazy sites during my love affair with the Internet. Forums haunted by professional mercenaries. Social networks comprised of miners and welfare moms. Porn sites. I came across a blog the other day by and for perfume industry professionals that practically bordered on scent fetishism. Black power sites. Sites from school kids in rural Appalachia. Sites from African-American expats living in Africa. Latino dating sites. I even looked at a couple of neo-Nazi sites once...for a few minutes, anyway. Even I have my limits. But mostly I just stick to my little corner of things and chat with the folks I know and who have similar interests to my own. And that's the part that bothers me. Here we are talking about underrepresented this and unfair that and no access and human rights, and from what I've seen (and this extends beyond H., to be fair to her) most of the people doing the talking aren't willing to explore the very corners of the Internet they claim don't exist.

So is it that they don't exist? Or are they there and are we just too damn ignorant and self-important to know they do exist? Do we actually want to know they exist? Or maybe we want them to have access, but only if the pages they make look and sound white?

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