Author: Michael Alan Dorman

Yogi, brigand, programmer, thief, musician, Republican, cook. I leave it to you figure out which ones are accurate.

“Did I get it confused?”

Apparently some people didn’t like, or at least did not look upon Quantum of Solace with anticipation.

I think they express their issues concisely and amusingly in this proposed theme song.

Personally, I thought many things about it were very beautifully presented—the chase that opens the movie may be the finest one ever done in a Bond film; it certainly takes my breath away—though the overall plot is…weird. Not the “water is the next great resource to control” part, which actually makes sense to me, but the “there is a great big pervasive conspiracy” bit that is supposed to drive the whole film, but doesn’t quite cohere enough to work as its engine.

I should also point out that I think the point of the title is quite obvious in light of the last scene of the movie. Am I the only one?

Tying a bow around the Ringworld…

In the last three months or so, I’ve read every book of Larry Niven’s (some in collaboration with Edward M. Lerner) that deals directly with the part of his “Known Space” universe that concerns itself with the Ringworld. So, in order, Fleet of Worlds, Juggler of Worlds, Destroyer of Worlds, Betrayer of Worlds, Protector, Ringworld, The Ringworld Engineers, The Ringworld Throne, Ringworld’s Children and finally, the newly released Fate of Worlds.

I remember discussing the original Ringworld with Chet a couple of years ago, as he picked it up for the first time. Parts of it have those antiquated gender role assumptions that so often succeed in annoying me, though not quite as ferociously patronizing as, say, Heinlein regularly evinced. But mostly, boy it goes by fast. It (along with Rendezvous with Rama) is among the first Big Dumb Object stories, and there is a blessed lack of a sense of need to attribute meaning to it—it just is.

Protector turns out to be the background for all that follows, and perhaps my favorite of all the books—it’s more like two novelettes packaged together, and they’re both interesting and fast-paced. A reminder, really, of what the new generation of SF writers meant in the 60’s and 70’s.

And it promptly becomes the basis of a multitude of enormous retcons to the Ringworld.

That’s not to say that I didn’t like the books—there are many worse ways to spend your time—but from The Ringworld Engineers the action becomes increasingly baroque, and at a certain point, I just didn’t care to work hard enough to follow it. By the last half of The Ringworld Throne, I don’t have the patience to try and fight my way through all the thrusts and counter-thrusts. It doesn’t feel worth my time to try and figure out which protector is allied with whom, etc. I’ve read that book at least four times, and I still feel in the dark. Ringworld’s Children just magnifies the problem in all directions.

The new “* of Worlds” books are at least clearer, but again, I just don’t have any real investment in the characters, even the ones that have shown up in earlier books that I actually liked. And when they start trying to reconcile the already-complicated timelines of the two series’ so that they can sync up for the last book…well, obviously, they got my money. But my heart just wasn’t in it. I felt like I could skim without missing anything of real importance. It all felt kind of empty.

It doesn’t have to be that way. At all. But I think these big end-of-life tie-it-all-together books that some SF writers seem to move toward are always going to feel somewhat hollow. They are, necessarily, more about tying things off than starting things anew. In fact, I think most sequels are like that, except perhaps where the author is willing to leave no bridge un-burned in the service of a new story that needs to be told.

“If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!”

Or: I think I have finally figured out why Robert Heinlein makes me so nuts

At the age of 17—the year he died—my most favorite author in the whole world was probably Robert Heinlein. I don’t think anyone else came anywhere close. I had read just about everything he had ever published, and (with the exception of Farnham’s Freehold), I loved it all.

Some of these books had enormous implications for my attitude toward the world—Stranger in a Strange Land, Time Enough for Love, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Starship Troopers being the most obvious. They marked me indelibly. They helped make me who I am today.

Which is why, for about the last fifteen years or so, I’ve not understood why I couldn’t pick up one of his novels and read it without getting…annoyed, often downright pissed-off, even as I could recognize how this or that passage or scene had had some specific impact on me.

It’s not that I was disappointed to find that they were badly written—to this day, I rarely have problems with Heinlein’s prose, or even his plots; he was good at the craft of writing. Hell, I recently re-read The Sword of Shanarra, a book I had a great deal of affection for at 14, and found that, yeah, it was actually worse than I had expected (not just wan pastiche of Tolkien, but, truly, badly written to boot), and that didn’t piss me off. So it wasn’t that.

I think I finally found the answer the other day.

I was thinking about something—I don’t even remember what about, probably something political—when I said to myself, “Well, of course, that’s just a social construct.” And I started considering where I had been taught to look at things that way, to try and see the way so many things we are told are “the way things are” are really just things that we as a society have chosen to privilege, and should be open to being questioned and, ultimately, changed.

And as I thought about it, I realized that that was something that I almost certainly got from Robert Heinlein. It is, in fact, a huge theme throughout his work—almost all of his characters question social conventions, defy them, reshape them, mock them and generally point out how instrumental they are in keeping people down, and often unhappy.

What I realized annoys me is that, having established that social conventions and mores are things to be regarded with suspicion and contempt, Heinlein then proceeds to tell you how if you did it his way, everyone would be better off.

That’s chutzpah.

I think the problem was that as I became an adult, as I started to move into the real world, I ran up against the realization that his vision of what would make everyone better off comes off as somewhere between quaintly backward—right up until his last novel, he has a sort of Madonna/whore complex that comes off as alternately protective and patronizing toward women—and Ayn Rand levels of ignorant of actual humanity. Even when I agree with him, the way he presents these notions makes me cringe, because they’re presented in such a paternalistic way, in circumstances that are so absent from real life.

In effect, as I internalized what I think was his greatest lesson—and don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful for that lesson, it has stood me in good stead all my life—I was being set up to not actually be able to enjoy his writing.

I can’t decide if it’s a shame, or it’s a natural progression, the realization that eventually people do run out of things to teach you, or that you have to sort through the lessons yourself to understand what really matters.

This is why the Hulk rocked in the Avengers, and has sucked in every other movie

Between Ang Lee directing one, and Edward Norton starring in the other, you’d have thought one of the Hulk movies would have been great. Or at least really good. But they both fell somewhere between boring and tedious—even while being well acted and well directed.

Because, I would suggest, they didn’t understand the character’s value. I have a vague memory of a review—I thought it was Roger Ebert, but a quick check suggests not—that suggested that watching a guy who feels like he can’t get mad get chased around was going to be fundamentally boring.

In fact, I think this deleted scene from the Avengers may do a better to explain why the Hulk as a character has the potential to matter.

The initial “Sage or Butterfly” exchange is funny, but the substance is at the very end:

“I know where I can do the most good, but it’s where I can do the most harm.”

“Well, that’s no different than anybody else.”

To do good requires changing things as they are—but anytime we are a force for change, there is the possibility that we won’t be successful, that the changes won’t take the form we wanted, or have the outcome we desired. That, in the end, we will end up being a destructive force. The Hulk is merely this truth writ large—which is why I think the other movies failed: the alternatives Banner was always being presented with were to do nothing, or be destructive, never to effect change for good. They were only ever showing half the coin.

Happy Birthday, Debian!

Debian GNU/Linux turns 19 today.

I estimate that I did my first install some time in late 1995, perhaps early 1996. I haven’t really used anything else as my day-in-day-out OS since. I’ve never had a Mac of any stripe, and haven’t used Windows with any frequency other than for World of Warcraft since ’99.

I can pin my first contribution to Debian with far more accuracy: September 3, 1996. That’s the date on the first Debian changelog entry in the libwww-perl package, which was, I believe, the first package I ever made. It still exists in Debian and Ubuntu (and other derivatives) and if you have it installed, you can look at /usr/share/doc/libwww-perl/changelog.Debian.gz, and right down there at the very end, you’ll find my grubby little fingerprints.

Sadly, things quickly went downhill—I am, to some extent, to blame for the fucked-up naming convention (with its poorly-sorting use of a -perl suffix) of every Perl library package in Debian, and probably by extension, the similar poor choices in the -java and -cil groups. Even the PHP guys were smarter.

As I remember it, having packaged libwww-perl (which is the actual name of the package as it exists on CPAN, so I just used that as the package name), I discovered that for some things—FTP support, I believe—it required the libnet package, which provides a lot of Net::* modules. But when I announced that I was going to package it someone (I want to finger Rob Browning, but cannot in be certain, and I don’t know if the Debian archives go back that far, and can’t be bothered to check, really) said they were about to package the libnet C library, which would conflict, so maybe I could call it libnet-perl, like libwww-perl, which I did. And then the next thing I packaged I ended up calling lib<whatever>-perl for no good reason, and it all went to hell.

Bleargh.

Almost 16 years later, we have ~ 3000 Perl packages in the repository, all with that damned -perl suffix. So, um, sorry.

My other big accomplishment of any note, I think, was to finally get the 64-bit Alpha port to a self-sustaining state. This started with a bootstrap that someone had done from a set of RedHat binaries before, and gradually pulling along various bits of the system until we had a self-hosting system.

Along the way, I was responsible for another unfortunate bit of “engineering”—@libc6.1@. Again, I don’t think I was totally alone in putting this forth (David, David…um, I forget his last name, and the libc6 changelog.Debian doesn’t go back that far), but it probably would have been better to bite the bullet and avoid all the gymnastics it required.

As I remember it (this was, err, ’97? So I may have some details wrong), RedHat had pushed their first Alpha release using a libc with a SONAME of 6, based on a pre-release glibc-2…and then the 64-bit ABI was changed when glibc-2 was released. Our versioning tools for shared libraries were much more primitive at the time, and we wanted to keep compatibility with RedHat, since that’s where a lot of the heavy duty engineering was going, so we had to follow them in changing the library SONAME to 6.1. This entailed a lot of churn at the time, most of which I’ve blocked out. I did a lot of mechanical patches on a lot of packages.

I did spent a lot of time doing fixes for 64-bit-isms in various packages, and I can remember the flush of pride I had when Alan Cox mentioned that he’d gotten a bunch of 64-bit fixes as well as the conversion of the @mh@ mail client to use an ELF shared library from the Debian package, because that was my work.

My time as an active Debian contributor was not always a smooth one—I wasn’t always as attentive about keeping things up to date or doing triage on bugs as I could have been. I think I finally formally recognized that I wasn’t able to keep up around 2002, which was probably a couple of years later than everyone else had realized it.

Ironically, I probably maintain more packages now, for our internal company purposes at Ironic Design, than I ever did as a developer; the tools have made the maintenance at least of the sorts of packages I do (libraries and simple applications) incredibly easy.

I maintain ~ 20 production Debian servers, with a handful of dev servers and a couple of home systems, including the laptop I’m writing this on, with basically no problems on a day to day basis. It has its warts, but I have boxes that have been continuously upgraded over a span of half a dozen years with no appreciable problems. I am able to be productive and use the environment happily. I remember the rough spots at the beginning (the move from a.out to ELF, for instance), but what Debian provides now always surprises and delights me.

So kudos to those Debian maintainers, former and current, who have contributed to such a great software system.

Buffalo Stance

So twice in as many days I’ve found myself channel surfing to the video for Neneh Cherry’s “Buffalo Stance”—a song I hadn’t heard in at least a decade:

Incidentally, did you know she underwrote Massive Attack‘s first album? I didn’t.

Anyway, that reminds me of one of my few regrets from college—the time I didn’t go see Michael Hedges. This would have been in 1990, right after the release of Taproot—my favorite of all his albums.

There were plenty of good reasons not to see the show, like 1) I didn’t really have the money for it, 2) I didn’t hear about it until the day of the show, and couldn’t get tickets 3) it was more than an hour away in Birmingham.

The stupid reason that I actually ended up not going was because I was too cheap to pay for parking so I could go see if there were any tickets or scalpers. Yes, I drove all the way to Birmingham, circled around within a few blocks from the arena, couldn’t find a space free space, gave up and drove back to Tuscaloosa.

When Mike Nix got back the evening, he told me that, in addition to a number of other covers he was well known for doing, Michael had performed “Buffalo Stance”.

Well, 20+ years later, I’ve heard his rendition:

It’s a little heavy on the piezo quack, but otherwise pretty wonderful. For good measure, I leave you with him doing The Who’s “Eminence Front”:

It’s good, though I don’t think it’s quite as good as the real thing:

This guy makes beautiful guitars

I have to say, I also agree with his tagline redefining custom—some of his guitars are pretty damned strange, though still beautiful.

But what I really like is that he’s done a series of videos on youtube taking an absolutely beautiful guitar from start to finish. It is fascinating.

Tosin Abasi

Mostly, I’m having one of those, “How have I not heard of this guy?” moments.

Anyway, I was, no kidding, looking through some Guitar Center catalog I got in the mail, and saw an Ibanez 8-string guitar being endorsed by this guy whose name rang absolutely no bells at all. And I kind of wrote him off, because it seemed like senseless “more is better”-ness.

And then he, and his band, Animals as Leaders started showing up in my YouTube feed.

So, what the Hell, I watched one. And then another, and then a third. And for the last week I’ve been doing occasional bits of spelunking around.

I’m not going to pretend that everything he does interest me—a lot of it would have appealed to me more 20 years ago, when I was more interested in stuff that carries a lot of aggression. But he’s wickedly articulate:

And some of the things he does solo I do find sometimes startling and beautiful (the first bit he runs through in this clinic is wonderful, the rest of it interesting but not entirely compelling to me):

And finally, he can also operate well out of his usual milieu very comfortably:

He has an album that he describes as more jazz-oriented that I’m thinking of—in the hopes that it will have more of what appeals to me and less of the noisy-double-bass-at-180bpm of Animals as Leaders that leaves me cold.

New X-Men

I sold off my copies of Grant Morrison’s run of New X-Men from 2001-2004 in a big purge a couple of years ago, thinking to get the Omnibus to replace them…only to find out that it was out of print. I dragged my feet on picking up new copies in trade in the intervening time, until I found out several months ago that they were going to re-print the Omnibus—which I had understood never to happen, so yay procrastination.

So I picked it up last Tuesday and spent a week getting through it. Re-reading it was interesting.

I was impressed with Morrison’s ability to set himself up at the very beginning with things that weren’t going to reach fruition for a while. For instance, there’s a moment in the second issue where Cassandra Nova injects herself with nano-Sentinels that I had never before noticed as the moment setting up the nano-Sentinel sickness that becomes of importance…well, all through the series. From the early sickness that afflicts all the X-Men that ultimately leads to Beast’s downfall at the end of the series.

In fact, it is this very deftness that leads to the one great disappointment, which is, of course, the big reveal of Xorn as Magneto. A lot of people say they see evidence from the moment that the character is introduced that Morrison planned it that way, but if that’s the case, it’s too subtle for me, because I find it all but impossible to make it fit as seamlessly and clearly (in retrospect) as so many other thing in the series.

Besides that, I find it most interesting to view this through the lens of Morrison & Quitely’s Absolute Superman.

New X-Men reads like a dry run, in some ways, for that book—the sense that the value of the events is to shine a light on the characters, to let their most vital essence show through, the willingness to acknowledge what has come before without being bound by it.

The moments at the end for Jean Grey—when Logan kills her in an effort to try and spare her a painful death, and the surrender in her final statement to Scott Summers, “I’m always dying on you.”—carry a lot of emotional weight while still acknowledging the fundamental unseriousness of death in comic-books, and set the scene for an emotional component that Morrison succeeds in sustaining throughout Absolute Superman.

I’m not going to suggest everyone go out and spend the $71 that Amazon charges (in contrast to Absolute Superman, which I would suggest everyone read), especially since this ends up being a true doorstop of a book—it’s a little unwieldy. But if you have any affection for these characters—if you grew up with them in their heyday of the late 70’s and early 80’s, you should really consider reading this, even if you just borrow it.

The Disappearing Spoon

There are, broadly, two categories of science books; those that focus on one thing, with only enough digression to perhaps explain background or competing theories (I’m thinking of The Elegant Universe, for instance), and those that have a theme that try to tie together many disparate bits of scientific knowledge or history.

Sam Kean’s The Disappearing Spoon is definitely in the latter camp. Though it certainly takes the periodic table as its jumping-off point, it’s really a broad overview of the formalization of chemistry and physics as their own, separate disciplines in the 19th and 20th centuries, seen through the lens of our relationship to the not-as-fundamental-as-we-think (or, for that matter, most of the scientists being discussed thought) components of our universe.

Some of the endnotes are pretty interesting—the scientist who nearly didn’t get his Nobel Prize because he nearly died from a Staph. Aurea infection that degraded into necrotizing fascitis, for instance. And, truthfully, it’s easily read in small bites, which fits with the time I have available to devote to reading right now.

If you’re into this sort of collection-of-anecdotes sort of book, go for it; it’s an excellent example of that sort of book.

These are the most ridiculous and disturbing commercials I’ve ever seen…

In fact, I assumed that they were a joke, they were so weird and creepy. I assumed that the web site would be a big put-on.

But as far as I can tell, it’s not. It’s a real ice cream place.

Now normally, this would not be enough for me to blog this. But I know people in Philadelphia. I am more or less demanding that you go check this place out and let me know if it’s as much of a nuthouse as the commercials suggest. Please. I have to know.

Via

Erik the Viking (and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen)

I’m not sure Erik the Viking necessarily counts as a great movie by any metric, but when I noticed it had appeared on Netflix, I immediately dropped it in my queue.

I remember having a great deal of affection for it a couple of decades ago, when it first came out—though I probably haven’t even thought of it since college—so it seemed worth watching.

It’s certainly not without some virtues; the story isn’t as quite as fluffy as you might expect (however you might regard the Pythons, they’re not intellectual lightweights, just silly), and the actors do what they can with a script that is certainly geared for laughs—the moment when Erik and company are trying to take in the differing notion of life on Hy-Brasil is played a little broadly, even though the point it’s making about cultural assumptions is pretty funny.

“What, all the time?”

I do remember thinking at the time that no one as attractive as Imogen Stubbs should have as old and frumpy a name as that. I still believe this to be true.

It actually reminded me, in production quality, of another film, from another Python, from the same year, that I had recently watched again. The Adventures of Baron Munchausen showed up on Amazon Prime not long ago, and one Sunday afternoon a few weeks ago I watched it.

The commonality is reasonably strong. I think it’s fair to say that both embraced their limitations, and decided that if absolute realism was not possible, they would dispense with it entirely.

In fact, the Dragon of the North Sea reminds me of nothing so much as the leviathan from Baron Munchausen.

I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that, upon reviewing it, Baron Munchausen no longer seemed as amazing and riveting as it did 20 years ago. Seeing Uma Thurman 19-year-old tits was as delightful as might be expected (however briefly), but otherwise, the scatter-shot quality of the storytelling seemed much more apparent to me than it did in 1989.

Still, it’s amusing to see some of the people no one knew then who were in the films. Of course, Sarah Polley was the little girl in Munchausen, and she’s gone on to do a thing or two. And I actually remember Joie Brun pointing out Sting’s cameo.

More surprising to me was recognize Ray Cooper, whom Chet and I were to see playing on tour with Eric Clapton the next year. And finally, Erik includes a young Samantha Bond in what appears to have been one of her first movie roles.

I’m not saying that either one is a bad way to spend a couple of hours, but as with so many things, the intervening time hasn’t been entirely complimentary—whether because my tastes have changed or become more sophisticated, it’s hard for me to say.

Given sufficient time…

I’m sure I could come up with a jazz cover of a rock song that seems more unlikely than this cover of Queens of the Stone Age‘s “Hanging Tree”. But it might take a while. Of course I’d be lying if I said I didn’t like it, especially as the saxophone is stating the vocal line in the first verse.

Update. OK, maybe this cover of Soundgarden‘s “Black Hole Sun”. But I think “Hanging Tree” still wins, just because is a more obscure song.

Apparently Brad Mehldau is making something of a career of this sort of thing. Here’s him covering Radiohead‘s “Everything in its right place”. There’s a beautiful moment in it right at 2:18:

Needless to say, youtube has links to many others.

TV on the Radio

I am, at this moment, kicking myself for not having made the time to go to Moogfest so I could see them live.

When I have five minutes, I sit at my drumkit and play *Golden Age*, because it is currently my favorite song in the whole universe:

And yes, that is the weirdest, most fucked-up video I think I have ever seen. Isn’t it glorious?

But what I love is that this is not a band that is static, that is just reproducing a record. Consider, for instance, these three performances of “Will Do” (which I find a lovely song by any standard):

First, the album version:

Then a performance from Letterman, (just a few days after their album was released and just six days before their long-time bassist died of cancer) which is obviously the same song, but not a reproduction of the album by any means:

Then, this version from SXSW, a few months later:

Even this song off their just-released album, is still evolving. They’re in no rush.

Or, even better, a song off an older album, “Dirtywhirl” (which gets points in my book for being about Durga), which in this 2006 performance starts with them looping Tunde Adebimpe beatboxing:

Versus the original album version:

I am in awe of their brilliance.

Being Elmo

Definitely a movie worth your time. Kevin Clash’s story is wonderful to witness, the way his obvious passion took him to exactly where he wanted to be. If you’re like me, the insight into the backstage part of how Muppet productions work is intensely interesting.

But none of that is really what stuck with me.

The idea that a large percentage of make-a-wish children want to meet Elmo makes perfect sense to me–if he’s so firmly associated as a source of gentle, physical, unconditional love, and you’re sick and in pain and everyone around you seems unhappy, *of course* that’s what you would wish for. And yet the idea of doing that even once would terrify me for reasons that I suspect many could understand: what if I couldn’t provide what a child needed? How could I stand knowing that this child will be gone before his or her time, and soon at that?

You know. Cowardice.

It reminds me of a piece Peter Sagal wrote a few months ago about visiting “Walter Reed”:http://petersagal.com/2012/04/walter-reed/, and how, visiting the first soldier he was scheduled to see:

bq. As I listened, I tried to focus, and control my own feelings of horror and dismay, and my growing urge to walk out of the room and tell the Sergeant, patiently waiting outside, that I could take no more and needed to leave now. (The sergeant told me later that this does happen.)

His story is a bit of a tough read, but it’s well worth it, too.

Redshirts by John Scalzi

If the title carries meaning for you, you are, arguably, the intended audience.

I found the main story to be a fun little meta-fictive romp, and not a lot else. In tone it very much reminded me of his earlier novel, _Agent to the Stars_–deeply aware of, if only to have fun with, genre conventions. As utterly unconcerned with the “science” part of “science fiction” as its purported source material.

There are certainly far worse ways to spend a few hours, though there are many better ones as well.

I was intrigued, though, by the three “codas”. Obviously, John felt it necessary to write “a little apologia”:http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/31/a-note-about-the-format-of-redshirts/ for it. And I was doubly intrigued when a review I read of the book a couple of days before I got to it myself suggested that the codas were a waste of time.

In fact, I think the codas–specifically, the second coda–are the best part.

Now my gut reaction to writing in the second person is something in the general neighborhood of derision. Tell me you’re doing it, and I will suggest you are making a mistake. Tell me you’ve already done it, and I will make a note to avoid your book. Admittedly, if you get me to read your book anyway, and I might actually like it (thank you, Mr. Palahniuk), but my default assumption is that it is going to be annoying and precious.

But I can’t imagine the second coda to _Redshirts_ working as well from any other point of view. To ask the reader–especially one who has some idea what might be coming–to empathise with the weirdness of the situation the character finds himself in pretty much demands something as jarring and weird and annoying as second person narration. So I think it not only worked, but was the only way it *could* work. So I actually found myself more satisfied after the codas than before.

I’ll note, just because I’ve started paying a little more attention to this in my fictional choices, that I believe the book fails the _Bechdel Test_. I think there are only two female characters in the whole thing, and they never talk that I remember. Just so you know.

On the impermanence, and importance, of things

This is one of those infinitely digressive posts.

I refrained from using a metaphor about the induction of _Guns ‘n’ Roses_ into the _Rock and Roll Hall of Fame_ as an avenue for exploring Patanjali’s Sutra 1.9 in class this morning.

But, of course, I mentioned that I had thought about it–because I think people should laugh in yoga class, and think in yoga class and connect with one another in yoga class, because hell, you’re going to have to try and do all of those things at the same time under even more stressful conditions outside of yoga class–which led someone to ask, as we were heading into the home stretch of the practice, how, exactly I had intended to do that?

(The answer is: they created two albums titled _Use Your Illusion_ and then spent more than 15 years working on an album that was perpetually on the cusp of coming out. If I thought Axl Rose was more clever, I would assume that, in fact, this was all an elaborate joke/commentary. As it is, it is a perfect example of how we can convince ourselves of the truth of things that are manifestly unreal.)

(Incidentally, given the rumors of favoritism-verging-on-corruption that always surround the choice of artists to induct, why on earth did they choose G’N’R? They produced maybe one and a half albums of good material 20-odd years ago, were a profound influence on no one of any consequence that I’m aware of, and they were *guaranteed* to have a contentious appearance if indeed they all showed. Or perhaps I just answered my own question with that last bit. Nothing to drum up interest like controversy.)

Anyway, as I was answering, I flashed on the very first time I saw the video for _Welcome to the Jungle_. Strangely enough, I can give you an exact date: November 14th, 1987. I can do this because, well, the Internet knows everything, including the date and even the set list of “the show KISS played in Pensacola”:http://www.setlist.fm/setlist/kiss/1987/pensacola-civic-center-pensacola-fl-1bd36584.html that night.

I was at that show. I’m not proud of it, but there it is.

(I have also seen Ratt, Poison and probably something else embarrassing that I’m forgetting. Oh, well)

And then I remembered that I went to the concert with a guy named Sam. I remember crashing at his house that night after the concert, and seeing _Welcome to the Jungle_ and thinking that just perhaps this band was actually evil. How terribly young and naive I was–I didn’t realize that the only person in hard rock who might have been as evil as he sounded was Bon Scott.

I have no way to find out his last name, at least not easily. I didn’t get a yearbook, as I was only in the school for one year, and never expected to see any of these people again, really. In fact, I didn’t get a yearbook for any year I was in High School. I wanted nothing more than to get that period of my life behind me.

But I did buy a mug. It had the names, admittedly in fairly small print, of the 80-ish people I graduated with. So I might have looked through the list (assuming Sam graduated–I’m not 100% certain that he did) and found a name and looked him up on Facebook, so on and so forth. Stranger things have happened.

But alas, that was not to be. That mug took a dive in…hmmm, I’m gonna have to guess here and say ’91. I do know that it got taken out by [“Chet”:http://mischeathen.com/]’s girlfriend at the time, Cassie. I remember this because Cassie–who was a very nice person–was very contrite and got me another mug to replace it, a handmade one from somewhere near where her parents lived, though I don’t actually remember where that was.

And that was the mug I drank out of for a number of years.

Until it, too, bit the dust. Probably in Miami, maybe some time around ’98, though it is possible it made it with us to North Carolina before meeting an untimely end. I’m fairly certain that it didn’t see this millennium, though I don’t remember for sure.

This time it was Anne who done the deed. But she, too, was quite contrite, and got me a mug that I still have today. Dark, dark blue, heavy and big—the defining quality of all three mugs being that they were quite large.

I’m a big believer in not getting attached to things–they get broken, they get lost, you give them away to the people who can use them better, you dispose of them to make more room, whatever; usually feel better after the occasional purge. It’s always just stuff–I don’t want to be the narrator in _Fight Club_, thinking I’ve got it solved because I’ve finally got that coffee table and couch issue squared away.

At the same time, though, I believe fiercely in working to remember where they came from, and how they’re bind you not by their thing-ness, but by the story of how they came to you, and the people who gave them to you, and everything else they might have given you. I hadn’t thought about Cassie in probably a decade, since Chet told me of running into her once by accident. I hadn’t thought about Sam in probably 20 years. I hadn’t thought about the mugs, and how they came into my life.

On the one hand, my experience of this is fairly profound. But from the outside, and even to an extent from the inside, this is terribly, spectacularly mundane stuff.

Thank God they at least got rid of the commas

Someone created a bestiary of “List Code Typography”:http://kazimirmajorinc.blogspot.com/2012/03/few-examples-of-lisp-code-typography.html and my immediate gut reaction upon seeing the earliest possible examples was that the only thing that could ever have been more confusing than all the parenthesis in the world was if you had to put commas in-between every goddamned thing.

The language I’m currently learning, Haskell, has its roots in the Lambda Calculus as well, but goes entirely in the other direction–no punctuation at all.

On becoming more mainstream…

I’m realizing that 17 years ago turns out to be a pretty pivotal time for me professionally. In addition to being the time period when I found what has been my primary programming language ever since, it is the time when I threw caution to the wind and embraced Linux as my primary desktop OS.

As out-of-the-mainstream as that decision has been–and it was far more radical back in the ’90s before KDE, Gnome, Ubuntu and what-have-you–I have often constructed my desktop out of components that were considered outre even by Linux standards. I ran FVWM 2.X when people were still thinking that 1.x was the way to go. I ran IceWM when a lot of people were embracing Enlightenment or one of the NeXT-step based WMs. Even when I was using components of Gnome on a daily basis, and even trying it out from time to time, I never committed to it, figuring out how to use those components from within whatever unusual setup I was using.

For the last three years or so, I’ve been using the “Awesome”:http://awesome.naquadah.org/ WM to construct my thoroughly idiosyncratic but highly-efficient desktop environment.

No more.

I’ve always run something more mainstream on my desktop machine, because Anne uses it occasionally to work with GnuCash. Which meant that I was also using it fairly regularly, since I try to keep up with our finances on a daily basis. And six weeks or so ago, I decided to “upgrade” it to Gnome 3. I knew that if it didn’t work out–and I didn’t really expect it to, Gnome 3 having been pretty thoroughly reviled when released–I could always fall back to Xfce, which is what it had been running.

Much to my surprise, I found I kinda liked Gnome 3. It got rid of a lot of the clutter that had annoyed me about most Gnome 2 setups. In fact, except for the fact that individual windows had titlebars, the default presentation was almost as minimalist as my Awesome setup. And I found having the ability to hit the Mod4 (AKA Windows) key and then just start typing to start an application, well, that was actually more convenient than the Mod4+F1 that I was doing with Awesome. And so forth. Basically, it seemed like with a little tweaking, I might be able to be happy and productive.

So late last week, I installed all the Gnome 3 stuff on my laptop, and started tweaking. And yesterday, I uninstalled Awesome and the things I had been using with it.

Now I’m not embracing every aspect of Gnome life. There’s no way I’m going to try and manage my email in Evolution, whose interface I find awkward and slow. And I’m not likely to trade Chromium for Epiphany just yet–not until it’s got equivalent JS speed, at least. And I installed a few gnome-shell extensions, and intend to install a few more. And I totally remapped the window manager keys.

But right now, I am working more within the Linux mainstream than I have, well, perhaps ever.

Choosing a new language

I have been programming primarily–for long stretches, almost exclusively–in Perl for the last 17 years or so. I seem to remember starting to use it around mid-1995, with 5.001–during that long, awkward time between when Perl 5 came out and when the 2nd edition of Programming Perl finally arrived in late 1996.

I’ve kept with it because I’m fluent in it, I am productive in it, and at this point, I can make it do some fairly absurd things (ask me about writing event-driven servers in Perl, I dare you). In fact, I like the language. I understand the complaints people have about it, but the subset in which I write these days is pretty clear while remaining concise and expressive, and the ecosystem that exists around it is simply unparalleled.

Nonetheless, I think the time has come to move on. The downsides of the language–speed, largely, and lack of good language support for expressing things like parallelism–have started to wear at me. I’m tired of the hoops I have to jump through to do the things I want to do.

So for the last 18 months or so, I’ve been reading a lot about a number of languages. I don’t think I’ve rejected any out of hand except PHP, though I certainly have some biases. For instance, I am looking for a mainstream language–something like “IO”:http://iolanguage.com/, though interesting, does not qualify.

But mainstream isn’t everything–I want something that is going to open up new options, that’s going to be fun to get immersed in; so I’m not considering things like Ruby or Python because for the most part I think they recapitulate most of the problems I have with Perl (speed, concurrency support) just with different syntax.

In the end, I came down to three options. Node.js, Scala and Haskell. I find that as I’ve been sitting with the question for the last couple of weeks, though, I’ve stopped thinking about Node.js as a real option. Though it’s fast, and it’s got a great ecosystem of software surrounding it, raw event-driven programming doesn’t really engage me any more. It was fun for the first year or two I did it, but the idea of moving to an environment where Everything Is A Callback leaves me cold.

So it’s down to Scala and Haskell, I think.

As a consequence, I’ve spent the last week reading _Programming in Scala: A Comprehensive Step-by-Step Guide, 2nd Edition_ by Odersky, Spoon and Venners, and before that I got most of the way through _Learn You a Haskell for Great Good_ by Miran Lipovaca (though I’m going to go back through it now and finish it).

I intend, over the next couple of weeks, to post about my experiences working on using each to write a couple of short (but non-trivial) programs with both of them–ones that, incidentally, I have implemented in Perl already, so I can do a real comparison of code.

Jeff Beck, Live at Ronnie Scott’s

I’ve just TiVO’d and watched this for a second time in about nine months.

I have to admit to knowing a fair bit _about_ Jeff Beck, while knowing almost none of his music.

The performance here convinced me to pick up some of his best-known albums…which mostly disappointed. I guess part of my mistake was getting some of the “Jeff Beck Group” albums, because while those are certainly well known, I wasn’t particularly interested in his work with Rod Stewart. But even with the solo instrumental work, it seemed sometimes a little sterile.

But in the live context, I was blown away by his tastefulness, his craft, his absurd command of dynamics. For instance, not only is his solo on this track admirably restrained, but his backing during the the verse is amazingly rich.

And he had “Vinnie Colaiuta”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinnie_Colaiuta of “Catholic Girls” fame playing drums for him. And “Tal Wilkenfeld”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tal_Wilkenfeld is both adorable, and able to keep right up with him.