Radios Appear

I mean, seriously, how could there not be?

You've probably seen this video already, but if not, check it out. The speed with which the beach goes from "nice day" to "black as night" is pretty intimidating.

Incidentally, I already had a category for "weather". WTF?

I went to re-read Dune, and ended up re-reading Dune: Messiah as well, and picked up a couple of quotes I wanted to hold onto:

It was mostly sweet, and you were the sweetest of all.

We're all in this beauty together!

If so, I give you, Rock-Paper-Scissors-Lizard-Spock-Friends-Pie

I've spent about the last three weeks converting much of the infrastructure code for AnteSpam to use AnyEvent.

One of the small bits of fallout from using AnyEvent is that we now have a large number of anonymous code references as callbacks, and in our logging code, these all have the same name: __ANON__.

This makes debugging output a little less useful.

In browsing some code in AnyEvent::SMTP, I happened across the trick of locally setting the __ANON__ typeglob to the name you want to use used in stacktraces and the like:

my $var = sub { local *__ANON__ = 'What::ever::you::want'; ... };

So, this is kinda ugly, and I couldn't find any official documentation of it, so I went looking around, and found Sub::Name, which is a module to make this a little more palatable. Now we can do:

my $var = subname 'What::ever::you::want' => sub { ... };

Still perhaps not beautiful, but not totally covered in warts, either.

Now to go retrofit this onto all of our code...

I vaguely remember being entranced with the show when I was very young. At some point, I guess I started to feel that it was stuff for "little kids", and came to view it with something a little like contempt.

I kind of wonder what I'd make of it now, because the person behind the show is someone I might have liked to meet.

I don't think I've watched any significant portion of Animal House in two decades or more. But I happened across a note in Wikipedia's page on Robert Cray that notes that he was the bass player in the band performing "Shout" at the party.

That, plus the always amusing scene of Donald Sutherland dissing John Milton seems worth a re-watch.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Pretty darn cool.

Yeah, so I missed a day, but that's because by the time I got home last night, after a day pretty full of AcroYoga, it was late and I was exhausted.

But I also got to fly, for real, yesterday and today. Video is forthcoming.

Mind you, I am now contractually unable to make fun of any of my flyers if, say, they can't tell their right from their left when we're working together—when you do some of this stuff, it is impossible to tell which way is up, down, sideways, whatever.

It was amazing.

The New York Times Magazine has a profile of John Friend up on the web (and presumably soon in print). As an Anusara-Inspired yoga teacher, who has met and studied with John many times, I was interested to read it.

Overall, I thought the piece was pretty good.

Most of the things that Ms. Swartz writes about John—and yes, everyone in the Anusara community calls him John; it seems like name-dropping until you meet him, and then it seems pretty natural—ring true to me. But not all.

I've attended 8 events with John, and while I certainly agree that he has his groupies, I've never seen anyone attempt to give him their hotel room key, which the article succeeds in making sound like a commonplace occurance.

I also diagree with the characterization of John as "an easygoing guy with an easygoing yoga — except when it comes to business."

If you go to an Anusara Teacher Training with John, you will understand that he's not really all that easygoing. His expectations of his teachers—especially of the Certified Teachers, but of anyone who is attending one of his teacher trainings—are very high. He wants the people he trains to be teachers to be the best of the best.

I would be interested to have gotten more of the context surrounding Judith Lassater's comments; they seem very negative, but I wonder if there was more to them that made a different point. I also wonder if they were specifically directed at John or were just about the commercialization of yoga in general.

Incidentally, that John draws a salary of $100K a year doesn't bother me one bit. John's been teaching professionally for a quarter of a century, and is internationally prominent. Prominent enough, in fact, to get profiled in the New York Times Magazine. I put to you the question: in what other profession in this culture would that salary be considered excessive for someone in his position?