Older blog entries for jfleck (starting at number 311)

Visitors from Switzerland over the weekend gave us the always fun experience of seeing our home through a lens. They are thirty-something daughter of a friend, and her boyfriend, and we'd never met them before they came through Albuquerque on a round-the-world tour, and they were delightful.

The highlight was the Mine Shaft Tavern, or maybe the Georgia O'Keefe museum in Santa Fe.

Saw my first sandhill cranes of the season Friday morning, picking through the debris of a plowed chile field down in the Valley. They're magnificent birds, tall with a gawky grace, and when I clump of birds flew into the field with that wonderful squawking racket I was as happy as I am every fall when I hear them for the first time.

raph: I very much like the idea of topics. As I mentioned recently, I've been a bit disjointed lately, with two blogs, one for work and one here, and my blog here disjointed between free software life and life life.

A young hipster standing at the traffic light at Central and Louisiana, too cool to push the pedestrian crossing button, too cool to hurry across when the light turns green.

New guy, been here less than a week, quit this morning, announcing:

"I'd rather have rectal cancer than stay here five more minutes."

random bits of business

paper

I was reading an article in the New York Times this morning (we get it on paper in the office) that I thought Nora would like. I went through a couple of moments of confusion, then turned to the computer, found the story, and emailed it to her.

From Slashdot, a link to interesting thing about government policy toward licensing of code developed under government contract. I blogged it here, and it's a great example of this blogging angst and confusion I feel. What do I put in my Advogato diary, and what in my Journal blog? Audience has a significant effect on what and how I write - both choice of subject and tone, and I figure the audience here is very different than the mysterious swarm reading abqjournal.com. Dunno.

Diner, diner, burning bright
In th' forest of th' night
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful rhubarb pie?

I got sidetracked on the road to Lampadas over the weekend by Postgresql, which I'd never used before. Fun little goober, that. In order to get Lampadas working, I need to have Postgresql set up right to handle the back end, but rather than just set it up and get on with things I've been plowing through the Postgresql tutorial learning how it works and imagining how I might put it to work on some of my many half-completed projects. I'm incorrigibly easily distracted by shiny new technology and half-baked schemes.

Several hours invested last night in catching up with the math in Lissa's statics book. She's learning how to calculate the bending force on a beam under various complex loading scenarios, and poked me to read over the chapters so I could help her make sure she's getting it. I've been cocky about this stuff thus far, but these chapters were hard. Take-out Tex-Mex was procured, the baseball game bypassed (save for an inning here and there), and I think we've got it. She's off to class this morning with questions for the instructor.

Join me, as we watch a species go extinct! (I imagine beer and hot dog sales out by the river.)

Lissa and I rode up to the north end of town, where the old Alameda bridge was left for walkers and bikers and horse people after they built a new one 50 yards to the south. It lets you get out over the river and look, and it didn't look good. Looked like you could easily wade across without getting your shorts wet. Most places the water wouldn't have been above your ankles. Mostly sand.

U.S. Supreme Court Ruling Leaves Minnow in Mud

By Dan McKay
Journal Staff Writer
A U.S. Supreme Court justice refused Friday to force federal managers to release water from Heron Reservoir for the endangered Rio Grande silvery minnow.
Environmentalists had appealed to Justice Stephen Breyer this week, asking him to reverse an earlier decision by the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
John Horning of Forest Guardians, one of the groups that sued to help protect the minnow, said the tiny fish's prospects for survival are bleak.
"I think extinction in the wild is highly probable, but we could get lucky with some rain," Horning said in an interview Friday.

It sure as shit doesn't look like rain.

I'd just finished up a great bike ride this morning - cool fall day, but not too cold, fog along the river when Jaime and I started riding at dawn, cottonwoods turning along with touches of yellow in great morning light as the sun finally topped the mountains. I haven't been riding as much as I had been over the summer, and I'm already slipping a bit out of shape, and it took about an hour before my legs and my heart settled into a rhythm, and then I felt completely alive. There's nothin' like a great bike ride.

When I loaded up the bike and headed for home, my drive took me on the Central bridge across the Rio Grande, where old Route 66 crosses into town. I looked out across the river, and felt stunned. It was so low, lower than I've ever seen it, lower than it's ever been in the 12 years I've lived here, not a river at all, really, but some brown muck meandering between the sand bars.

We're in a drought. In that river is the last surviving population in the wild of the Rio Grande Silvery Minnow, a teeny little fish teetering on the brink of extirpation from the wild. There is a complex court fight now going on about whether to release water from behind a dam upstream to save the fish. Water is precious here in the desert, and there are competing interests - humans with reasonable claims on that water who argue it should be left there. It is a tough battle, one in which I am careful not to take sides because of my professional responsibilities.

Maybe it was just the endorphins, or the funereal string piece they were playing on public radio as I drove across the bridge. But I was deeply moved, deeply saddened.

I'm going back this weekend to look at the river. There's something incredibly important about what's going on here that I need to better understand.

I spent time last night and this morning reading my .emacs file. This might seem an odd exercise, but I use emacs for all my writing, but aside from stealing a bunch of code from other people years ago I've never really spent any time customizing it, which is silly, given that customization is the whole point of emacs. So after poking around in an old emacs book, I customized (fill-individual-paragraphs! cool!)

I've been a bit of a slacker in dealing with the gnome docs organization problem, which over-arches a number of our other issues, so I started installing Lampadas last night (which is to say I started installing the depencies). Some good overview docs from dmerrill and David and Alexander Bartolich have written a useful guide to the dragons lurking in the installation process. I quote:

Installation of lampadas is a bloody mess.

Part of my curiosity stems from my need to manage all the docs I write on my own computer, and I figure learning how Lampadas addresses those issues will give me a good foothold in understanding how it will work with our gnome docs.