Older blog entries for jfleck (starting at number 110)

I learned this evening that three of my IRC GNOME buddies were Boy Scouts when they were younger, as was I. Go figure. It was a great experience for me. It was where I learned to rebel against authority, grow my hair long and purposefully leave out the "under God" when we said the Pledge of Allegiance.

Plus, we went backpacking once a month, and took two week-long summer trips every year. My favorite was a leisurely canoe float down the Colorado River from Blythe to Imperial Dam. I don't know what we were thinking. Blythe is desert writ large, and we went in dead hot summer not fit for humanity, but we swam and dawdled on what was more slow-moving lake than river and had the time of our lives. I've never been so tanned.

Somewhere I still have that canoe paddle. It was a "Navajo brand", and I painted out the picture of the Indian in a teenage gesture of solidarity. The Navajo's didn't have canoes, for chrissakes!

It seems so small stacked up against the large.

Sitting in the airport snack bar talking with a man from Philadelphia. He has been bouncing from ticket counter to ticket counter, trying to arrange a flight home, stuck here, missing his wife and young child.

He is eating spinach quiche.

How does that compare to the enormity of the large thing? He is safe and alive. His story would be a large thing on another day, but he is patient, and understands that his story is a small thing on this particular day.

I do my job poorly. I don't ask him how old his child is? Boy or girl? I am very tired, but know I have no right to be on this particular day.

Over and over again Tuesday, we collectively did the same thing.

We tried to find some personal connection to The Thing, some relevance, something to do, to help get our arms around it.

At work, we put out an afternoon Extra. Never mind that every possible reader had been glued to a television all day, and that anything we could tell them at 5 p.m. they already knew. It is what we do. So for our connection, we made a newspaper.

At the airport (that was my assignment, my connection-finding mission, to go to the airport and interview stranded travellers) there was a guy from Chicago hovering around a pay phone, stuck in Albuquerque with no way home, who almost seemed to be relishing his predicament.

Being stuck in Albuquerque gave The Thing meaning for him, gave him something to think about and do, provided a way to relate to it on a personal level.

There was the mayor of Albuquerque, presiding over the city's Emergency Operations Center, hovering around a room full of cops and fire chiefs and Red Cross people with really nothing to do, but all wanting to do something. To give The Thing their own personal meaning

Up on the giant video screen at the front of the big computer-laden Emergency Center room was a log of the days events - all things happening in New York, attributed to CNN. "3:22 p.m. - another building collapses at World Trade Center - CNN". Something to do.

Last night, my daughter was hanging out on line with her buddies, playing roll-playing games, and the main theme seemed to be "stomping terrorist ass". Good girls. They found some meaning in The Thing, made it their own.

The thing is, there is no way to get your arms around this. But today I will try again, back to the airport to watch the first planes take off, to see what we do next.

An entertaining thread on the New Mexico Linux Users Group list.

One of the local McDonalds franchisees has put Net terminals in the fast food stores, running Debian. They're proxied to block porn, but the kids quickly came up with the solution - the proxy checks domains, so they just do it by IP address.

Ah, the cleverness of youth.

dmerrill has started putting together something that sounds as though it will be very useful - scrollserver - a help documentation server. I was skeptical when he was pushing the idea on the GNOME docs list in part because we are up to our collective asses in alligators and he was adding one more to the swamp. But now that he's started wrestling this particular alligator, my perspective on the idea has changed completely.

I finally upgraded my box to Red Hat 7.1 this weekend. It was a home grown hybrid of various previous Red Hat versions, and I kept getting trapped in more and more dependency chains whenever I wanted to add something new. Increasingly, my tactic had been to go to the Red Hat ftp site to try to get versions of stuff that had been tested to make sure it played nicely together. So I finally figured the right thing to do was to pay the nice boys and girls at Red Hat for their efforts. First shrink-wrapped software I've bought for my computer in years.

It is a joy watching someone work who is really good at what they do.

My touchstone for the feeling dates back 20 years, when I was living in Walla Walla. I was hanging out in the boiler room at my apartment building talking with the super while he worked. He was an old guy, had worked as a mechanic in various fashions most of his life. I watched him look at a bolt on the boiler, then reach over without even thinking about it to grab the right wrench.

Today I spent the day in a middle school classroom (13-year-olds) watching a good science teacher. It was a simple lesson - speed, distance and time. He had them measuring a stretch of school hallway, calculating their average speed, then figuring out how far they could really go during the school's four minute passing period between classes.

This was not capital S Science, just science, taught lovingly by a guy who wanted these kids to grasp that science is not a body of knowledge, but a way of intelligently interacting with the world. They seemed to be getting it.

I never had the privilege of watching John Coltrane play the tenor saxophone. I imagine it was similar.

Nora and I built a robot last night that bumps into a wall, backs up, turns, and goes forward again until it bumps into another wall. It beeps a bunch, too. The sensor system needs work. It doesn't do at all well when it hits the wall obliquely rather than head-on. But that's an engineering problem, which is the whole point, eh?

Got a manual page done this morning for xmlcatalog.

Oiled up the old chainsaw yesterday and took it to one of the two Redbud trees in our front yard. It's the state tree of Oklahoma, but this is New Mexico, and a desert tree it is not. We're going to replace them with a pair of desert willows, something a bit more fitting.

Bud, my 80-year-old neighbor, "helped" me. Any time we get involved in something in the front yard, Bud likes to lean over the wall and give us a commentary, but he was actually a help yesterday, rocking back and forth on the trunk as I whacked away with our dull and underpowered chainsaw.

Bud did have some particular ideas about what we should do with the stump, something about mounting a planter on top. I'm sure Lissa will have to hear Bud's pitch several more times over the next week.

Still, it was a good neighborly sort of thing. I appreciated it.

I built a new Nautilus from cvs this evening for the first time in ages. Maybe it's just 'cause I've been following the discussion, but it sure seems to fire up faster.

I also started looking closely at DV's xmlcatalog, that I might write some documentation for its users. What a cool tool! I think it cries out for something more than a simple man page, though - documentation that serves as a more thorough treatment of XML and SGML catalogs and how they work and what they do. Which means I will have to learn about XML and SGML catalogs and how they work and what they do. I think I'll just start with a man page, though, so's there's something for users, before I launch anything more ambitious.

I figured it was now or never, so I set out this morning to wind my way from my house (elevation 5,200 feet) to Sandia Crest. I've wanted to do the ride for years but never had either the fitness or the nerve. I still wasn't sure about the nerve this morning - I was real nervous, it's a very hard ride - but at least I'm pretty fit.

Lissa teamed up to help me, with a planned meeting spot 3/4 of the way up to bring me food and water and give me a chance to bail out if I was blowing up.

It's 35 miles from my house to the crest, a gentle climb for the first 15 miles, then increasingly steep, with the last 13 miles unremitting.

I've ridden as far as the base of the mountain ski area a couple of times, and that was hard both times. But today it was straightforward - keep the heart rate down and conserve energy for the final climbs.

The last section, steep switchbacks, was brutal, but I did it. I bonked about four miles from the top, ran out of fuel, but Lissa was there with a fruit drink and I was able to churn the rest of the way. I really wanted to quit, but kept saying to myself, "If you quit now, you'll have to do the whole thing over again." Not that there's any reason I would have to do it again, but I'm easily fooled.

We ate sandwiches at the top, then put the bike in the car and drove back down where the air wasn't so damn thin.

As you can imagine, I am now hobbling and eating a lot.

Lissa and I spent yesterday evening at Jefferson Middle School's semi-annual open house, meeting all Nora's teachers.

It's funny to be the interloper on what is so clearly Nora's turf - bustling in confusion from one class to the next on routes she must walk easily and knowingly each day.

This is her third year, and there's enough consistency in her schedule that we already knew the teachers in four of her seven classes. All four are terrific, and at least one more of the remaining three looks good, so we're ahead of the game again this year. Public school (meaning "government-run school" for you Brits) is a bit of a crap shoot, but almost every teacher Nora has had in her eight-plus years of schooling have been exciting and talented and committed.

We're especially excited that the math teacher she had in sixth grade is back after a year at another school, and it was funny to hear all the other parents say the same thing. "We're so glad you're back," they said, one after another.

Nora has been tracked into special classes for smart kids, which means she's privileged to spend much of her day in a world where extra funding means smaller classes and teachers have the extra eagerness borne of the belief that they're working with special kids. There was a big clue last night to what underlies this: Even though the class sizes in the gifted classes are smaller, the number of parents who showed up for those classes at open house was larger. There's a demonstrable relationship between parent involvement and student achievement, and you could tell the teachers were excited just to have a bunch of us show up.