Older blog entries for jfleck (starting at number 71)

bones
I have the coolest job.

Yesterday I got to hold, in my own modest little hands, fossils dug from the Earth more than a century ago by the great fossil-hunter Edward Drinker Cope. Much of his fossil-hunting was really done by others he paid to work on his behalf, but in 1874, he came to New Mexico with the Wheeler Survey and collected himself in the San Juan Basin. There, he found the first bones ever discovered of a giant flightless bird called Diatryma.

The fossils are in the collection of the American Museum of Natural History, and are on loan to a researcher here. Along with them came a little box of cataloguing papers, including a tiny slip written in Cope's own hand identifying the bones. I was afraid to touch that, but the bones I held.
computers
Racing against a vacation deadline, I've been getting a tremendous amount done. I've found fixes to three of the four customization requests Eugene has filed for gnome-db2html3, in the process learning some more cool things about how to solve problems using libxslt. I was getting frustrated with it, and found it amazing how much help the simple addition of an emacs major mode - xslide - can be. Color coding of text is such a conceptual help for me.
vacation
Which brings me to vacation.

Off on Saturday to Mesa Verde to camp for a few days. It's a favorite spot of ours - nice camping in a small high valley, the most amazing Anasazi ruins. And this year, big fire damage from a wildfire last year! That might sound bad to some, but it's actually fascinating. We've been going there for years, and you can see the changes wrought upon the landscape by fire, which is a natural part of the western landscape.

Then we're going on to Ouray, in the high mountains of Colorado, to hike and lounge by a pool and bask in hot springs. If only I could figure a way to take my bike. But alas, it won't fit in the little Subaru wagon. Maybe there will be a rental shop.
marriage
I haven't decided if this is about my marriage or about Route 66. Perhaps it's about both. You decide.

We are in the throes of a celebration here in The States of the 75th anniversary of Route 66. For those of you in older lands, this must seem odd, but we are a young nation, and have to reach hard to make a history for ourselves. So 75 years of a road is a worthy historical passing to mark.

Stretching from Chicago to the beach in Santa Monica, it was the first road to span much of our continent, and we use it to symbolize the 20th-century freedoms brought on by the automobile.

My affair with Route 66 is more personal, though. The freeways were already beginning to replace it by the time I came to be, but for all but a handful of my 42 years I have lived within a mile or two of the Mother Road.

I went to High School on it.

My parents were both teachers, which meant summers off, which meant these epic car trips across the southwest, through Barstow and Kingman and Winslow and Holbrook and Gallup and Albuquerque. It is the sort of car-bound freedom that Route 66 symbolizes - a big family station wagon and a canvas tent and Indians selling jewelry by the side of the road.

My first newspaper job was in a little community spanning it.

My marriage (I was headed here, trust me) has seen its major milestones, with no intention, happen there.

Our first date, a Friday night after work at Griswolds Patio Pub Night in Claremont, happened on Route 66. It was a huge weekly affair, one of those things with free salty snackish foods to get you to buy beer. All the artists and other riffraff hung out there, nursing beers and eating free. I hate beer, but it was a cheap dinner.

I proposed to Lissa at the Wigwam Motel in San Bernardino.

On our honeymoon, I rode the bumper cars on the Santa Monica Pier, where Route 66 ends it run, dumping cars out onto the Pacific Coast Highway beneath glistening palm trees.

Today, we live a mile from the Mother Road. Thinking about this today, I made a wandering detour on my Independence Day bike ride, back up through Albuquerque's old neighborhoods to Central Avenue, festooned with "historic Route 66" signs, past the Indian jewelry pawn shops and the university, up the hill home.

It's just dumb luck, I guess. There's no real point to my life with Route 66, except it's been there all along without my really noticing it.

But I am certain that the secret to the success of my marriage - which gets better by the year - has something to do with the fact that we were goofy enough to become betrothed in a cheesy motel shaped like a teepee on Route 66, in what must be the heart of our way of life.
3 Jul 2001 (updated 4 Jul 2001 at 02:10 UTC) »
food
If there is any finer food than the avocado, I have not tasted it. And yet it is such a tricky, fickle temptress. Eaten a bit to soon, it is tough and rubbery. Too late, and it gets that smokey, aged flavor that disappoints. This morning, it is perfect.
computers
Got some good stuff done last night:
  • Sent off a gnome-db2html3 patch for review, a simple code cleanup I've had sitting around for a while and my upgrade to the DocBook 1.40 xsl stylesheet
  • Got a workable draft of the GNOME Documentation Style Guide posted so the #docs crowd can start providing their feedback. I'm pretty proud of it. I've learned a lot in the process of working with Pat Costello on it. He made some fabulous contributions. Now I know that I regularly write sentences that are way too long.

hawk

Yesterday morning I saw Henrietta, our neighborhood hawk, catch a sparrow. Lissa and I were riding our bikes a couple of blocks from our house when Henrietta (could it have been Henry?) swooped low across the front lawn in front of me, after a clump of sparrows. She caught the slowest one - evolution in action - then zoomed back up to the trees in the park where her little ones were waiting for breakfast.
shame
I'm so easily tricked.

Mentioning my gnome-db2html3 procrastination in my diary worked, and I spent much of the day today working on the stylesheets. Shame is a powerful motivator, even when (especially when?) self-imposed.

It looks like we will benefit greatly by upgrading to Norman Walsh's 1.40 stylesheets. They fix some of the issues Eugene O'Connor had been worried about in a more elegant way than the customization I was thinking of.

You know, I've really been procrastinating on this world peace thing....
real world
My employer today began its grand experiment - charging for its web site.

I believe this will not work. But giving it away for free clearly did not work in a business sense, so I suppose there's no harm in trying.

The advertising model for the web does not work. No one, with the possible exception of a few major brands, is making money this way. So if people want quality information, the kind gathered and written by professionals, sooner or later they will have to pay in one way or another.

I have to eat, and in five short years I'll be paying to send my daughter to college. So as a "professional" (as in "gets paid for it") I grit my teeth and accept it.

But this is a sad day indeed, because all I really want is to write stories and have lots of people read them. The web was great for that - a substantially larger audience of potential readers. But I must admit it is a bit self-indulgent of me to expect my employer to subsidize that vanity.

If I still want that audience, I of course have Advogato or Inkstain. I have the freedom to write what I want, when I want, for whom I want. Alas, I can't have my cake and eat it too. I can't have the comfort of a salary for my work and free distribution of it as well.
hawk
The hawk comes first

Lissa and I went out two evenings ago (was it Thursday?) to see the hawk in the evening. She was standing on the edge of her nest, sticking her butt out at us, feeding the babies. We never saw the babies, and now I'm not sure I saw them earlier, maybe just imagined it.

It has become a community affair. Lynn and Martin were out watching with binoculars and their telephoto lens, and Martin toting his ever-present oxygen tank (the man is a joy and an inspiration - I wanna be that cheerful and energetic if I ever get that sick).

Lissa and I did careful bird book analysis, and based on the good long look we got at her butt, we're pretty sure she's a Cooper's hawk.
cycling
My bike rides have been productive the last couple of days, but I think I'll have to start billing the newspaper for my time in the saddle. Both yesterday and today I ran into sources, and got stories I'll need to follow up on. Slowed me down, both times, too. I guess one can never leave one's job.

Today, too bad. I was getting a great time on a long timed loop up along the river and back through the northeast heights, keeping the average elapsed time speed over 17 mph, which means mostly 19+ before you subtract out the intersections and other imposed slowdowns. My legs are strong now. It's time to tackle whatever challenges I can before I start wimping out and backing off this training regimen. The mountain beckons....
confessional
I've been procrastinating on the much-needing GNOME Documentation Project xsl stylesheet and related coding for the help system. It's hard, that's why. Some days it's just easier to veg out and cruise bugzilla sorting bugs, and still feel like I'm being GNOME productive (hey, it's better than Tetris!). By writing this public admission in my diary, I force myself to start thinking about it again. I'm so dumb and easily tricked....
confessional redux
yakk made a fascinating observation about these diaries the other day which applies to all of us. We're better at writing what we do than how we feel. Guilty.
hawks
I finally saw our neighborhood's new baby hawks this morning.

I heard about them over the weekend, and Lissa and I went looking for them Sunday evening but couldn't find them. We knew they were in one of the big elm trees at the park, and were pretty sure which one, but couldn't find the nest. We've seen the mama in a nearby pine tree keeping watch, but no luck with the babies.

So on my morning bike rides this week I've added an extra loop around the park every day, looking for our neighbor Lynn, who has been watching them. This morning I caught up with her on her morning walk, and she showed me the nest.

It's way up in the tree, so I need to come back with binoculars. But I could see little moving baby hawk heads poking up over the top of it, and mama, ever vigilant, standing watch. Lynn calls her Henrietta.
cycling
A week ago, I mentioned bumping into my friend Nancy on a ride. She's training for one of those big, long, fund-raising treks. She's also a writer - here's an account of her experiences so far.
addendum
gleblanc - Sorry. I was way too obscure there. "Emergent properties" is the idea of collective behaviors that arise out of the actions of a host of independent agents, each acting on their own. Ants are a great example. There's no "ant boss", no one in charge. Each ant has a bunch of simple behaviors, yet a rich and complex behavior arises out of their collective effort. If one ant finds food, it grabs some and walks home, leaving a trail of a particular pheromone. When other ants smell that pheromone, they follow it in the opposite direction, toward the food, grab some, and head home, leaving more pheromones. The result is a trail of ants between nest and food. No boss told any of the ants where to go, they just smelled the pheromones and their tiny little hard-wired brains triggered into "get the food" mode.

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