Older blog entries for jfleck (starting at number 213)

I am Weed Man, new Superhero for the Modern Age. I am a sensitive superhero, respecting my adversary even as I root it from the garden. I respect the old lawn as it tenaciously tries to poke its little grassy fronds into our garden 8 years after we ripped it out. I respect the little dandelions, and the sedums that took off from three little plants on the north side of the cactus garden and seeded themselves everywhere.

I respect all, but for one - the spawn of Satan, a plant I call Evil Weed. It is sharp and spiky and ugly, a member of the nightshade family with its pathetic little purple flower. I am not fooled by its evil ways. I rip it from the ground at every sight.

It is spring, and I have emerged from my winter transformed into Weed Man.

Key to understanding Weed Man is understanding the touch, sometimes light and sometimes heavy, he places upon his garden ecosystem. A weed in the right place is transformed into a plant, and is gently spared and watered. A weed in the wrong place must go. But there is always the fascination - why this spot? Why this weed?

The best is the pond, an old stock tank in the backyard Lissa bought me for my 40th birthday. We planted water lilies in it, but they fared poorly. In their place emerged cattails, volunteers, "weeds". The cattails are making their spring appearance. I will let them stay. They have graduated from "weed" to "plant".

I've been playing some more with XML and DV's libxml. I've set up a dtd for my freelance stories and written some little command line programs that sort through them doing chores I had been doing manually. There's nothing really here yet that couldn't be done easily with tools that are already available - it's just a fun toy project. It's also very specific to my own needs, and not something particularly worth sharing. But working with it and using it is helping me think through the problems of making it more general. And DV did mention recently a desire for better libxml documentation. I can't document it if I don't use it.

April 1 - time for Wanda's water to be changed.

Riding past Mary Celeste Elementary School* this morning, it is spring break, no kids around, and yet (cue spooky music) at 8:55 a.m. the morning bell rings to summon the children to class.

* OK, really Montezuma Elementary, but it still was spooky.

I have problems with authority. I was always the kid sure to turn my homework in on time, and it was years after I got out of school before I stopped having those dreams where I hadn't been to class all semester and then there was a big test. Panic.

Yesterday I went out riding and decided to tour the big interstate construction project in the heart of town. It's about two miles from my house, and they're building a new set of frontage roads that snake through the heart of the interchange - perfect bike riding roads with no cars on them. So I rode around the "road closed" signs and started cruising the construction site, big smooth pavement all to myself except for a handful of workers doing Sunday duty.

But here's the thing. I didn't enjoy it. I spent the whole time worrying about getting in trouble, thinking a security guy in a pickup truck would pop out from behind a bridge abutment and nab me. Like they would care about some doofus on a 10-speed (OK, "16-speed", but it doesn't have the same ring) tooling around their empty streets, right? But it was no fun.

I'm pathetic.

I raise my right hand and repeat this solemn oath: "I am not a hacker." But just a little bit won't hurt, right? So this weekend I did a couple of GNOME2 patches, little UI changes that I could do so I did. But I am not a hacker, OK? Just a dilettante.

I also got Daniel Carrera's gnome-dictionary docs in and made new screenshots, since the UI has changed a bit. And this morning a rebuilt GNOME2.

Ah, the promise of spring.

So we finally got a scanner, and I've been putting it to use converting old snaps to bits. The primary reason for doing this is an album of my Dad's old photos from World War II. He wants to contribute them to an archive, but I told him I want to make digital copies first so we can keep them forever. He was an officer in an Army Air Corps photography unit, and his record of his life and experiences during the war years is dramatic. It's both personally and aesthetically important to me, because my father is an artist, and I can see his aesthetic in the pictures he took as a young man. It's also of some historical interest, I think, documentation of the ordinary lives of GI's in Europe and on the home front during the way. I've put up a few things, but there is much, much more.

I also put up some family snaps, which every good self-indulgent personal web site ought to have.

I've long been fascinated by Kevin Bacon, Paul Erdos and the small-world phenomenon. I like things that are counterintuitive, and the notion that we can easily be linked through a short number of connections to anyone on the planet is especially attractive in socio-political as well as mathematical terms.

So it was with great excitement today that I learned of a particularly short path between me and Mr. Bacon. He is a regular visitor at an inn in New York, north of the city, run by Alice and Tommy (1). My sister, Lisa, and her husband, Tom, work as innkeepers at a second inn owned by Alice and Tommy, this one on Cape Cod(2). That puts me three degrees from Mr. Bacon.

I also will note, that we might complete this circle, that Paul Erdos has a Bacon number of four.

It's finally warm enough to ride in the mornings before work with a few layers of jacket and a couple pair of socks. I rode Thursday with my buddy Jaime for the first time in a while, and as usual he left me gasping for breath with quivering legs - but that's the point, eh? We've both got what I'd call "spring legs", the product of winter idling, but his spring legs are a fair bit stronger than mine.

Lissa and I have been able to get out a fair bit, too, including a ride down by the river this morning complete with hawk siting and a bit of greening along the water.

Any comic strip that can get "semiotics" into a daily newspaper is worth the price of admission. Note: The link to Zippy above goes to today's comic, whatever day that might be, so if you follow it after March 21 you won't find a direct reference to semiotics. But the theme will certainly remain, and Zippy will almost surely force you to grapple with the concept whether you like it or not.

I hate to be one of those bragging parents, but we can talk, can't we, 'cause it's just you and me? Nora's Arvin dog-hair-collecting robot won two prizes at the Northwestern New Mexico Regional Science and Engineering Fair - the $100 Cecil Land Memorial Award (he was an electrical engineer and inventor) and selection as an alternate to compete in next month's state science fair (which means if one of the primary winners doesn't go, she will be able to compete there). I'm so excited and proud. But I'll shut up now.

Saturday night, in addition to celebrating Nora's science fair success, we celebrated Mom's 82nd birthday. How incredibly lucky we are that she is so healthy and happy and still on top of her game at 82.

We had cheesecake.

Nora asked Lissa to make her a cape. It is long and elegant, black velvet with a shimmery blue lining, and a hood. The first time Nora wore it to school, some of the other kids made fun of her, calling her "Harry Potter" and "Darth Vader" and "cape girl" and making witchy jokes. But some of the kids liked it, and told her so, and she kept on wearing it. It makes me very proud of her, that she is self-posessed enough, at this critical age where sticking out is a hard thing to do, to wear a long flowing black cape to school.

jody has been trying to convince me that our standard docs make file, cut and pasted merrily throughout GNOME cvs, is a bad idea, that as soon as we find something wrong with it, we'll have to fix it in 14 different places rather than one. I didn't really get it until today, when James Henstridge found a problem that I'll need to fix in 14 different places.

This is Jody's cue to say "I told you so."

Having a lazy vacation around the house - gardening and the like. This morning Lissa and I packed the bikes in the car and drive down to Bosque del Apache, a bird refuge an hour south of here along the Rio Grande. Most of the wintering birds are gone back north, but we saw eagles (golden and bald), hawks, and a lovely large flock of snow geese. Mostly, it was just peaceful to ride the refuge's dirt roads for a couple of hours. Then lunch at the Owl Cafe, a legendary dive in San Antonio that sports an eclectic mix of farmers, birders and bikers (the Harley sort).