Music of the Day: I finished with the Beastie Boys the other day, so had Ben Folds last night, which I finished this afternoon. I just loaded Besh o droM, which I’ll recommend to anyone who will listen …
Today’s Artist: Alex Maleev — he does comics, among other things. His run with Bendis on “Daredevil” (vol. 2) is highly regarded.
Another Artist: James R. Bingahm — as covered in a blog post elsewhere.
Daniel Handler (of Lemony Snicket fame) has an interesting review of “Etiquette books” for children over at the NY Times. The last two paragraphs are what I like:
The bad-manners books are more fun than the finger-wagging set, but it’s pointless fun, and if you’re looking for pointless fun, there are countless picture books of glorious nonsense that don’t even pretend to be good for you. There are books with characters who don’t behave or misbehave, but merely act like themselves, illustrated by artists who dream up improbable worlds rather than reminding us of the restrictions in our own bossy homes.
In these books, the heroes often behave selfishly and then, stung by regret, learn to compromise their unfettered ways in order to make friends, and help others — others who might be misbehaving themselves. Out of this incoherent jumble of a world — the backstabbing badgers in Russell Hoban’s Frances books, the transgenerational miscommunications in Mo Willems’s “Knuffle Bunny” — comes something more presentable. In other words, such stories are etiquette lessons. Why would we look for them in books that don’t have the good manners to give us something good?
Last night I went to Memorial Union, had my Fish Fry (Friday), downloaded a few things, and waited for LUG members to arrive.
I hadn’t been to a LUG (Linux Users Group) meeting since September or so, so it was nice to see people again. One of the co-presidents (Steve) showed up, along with a few other regulars, including one (Lee) I hadn’t seen since before I left Madison. Another guy, whom I had seen before but not for a couple years, was there, and he suffered, alas, from really crappy (emphasis on the crappy) hygiene.
I wonder sometimes how people do not notice this … perhaps they just can’t smell how bad they smell. But body odor aside, freshly washed clothes, a daily shower, likely deodorant/anti-perspirant, and brushed teeth should be a must for everyone … a no-brainer. I can understand lapses by homeless folks on the street and some of the crazies on the bus who have a hard time taking care of themselves, but we’re dealing with a relatively bright, adult (50s?), likely married man … who smelled like shit.
I demonstrated some scoop features to Steve, who, along with Thomas, is responsible for the MadLUG site, which hasn’t had any updates in months.
In some ways something scoop-like is what I want, since it is not only a database-backed/driven-application (webserver, scripting language, database –> Apache, Perl, MySQL in this case), most of the application code itself is kept in the database, which means that it, like the content of the site, can but updated on-the-fly from a web-browser by those with the proper authorization. Scoop is a “full application” … in other regards what I’m looking for for my database projects is more of a “framework” … something like TurboGears, Django (both for Python), or Ruby on Rails. The only thing that really stops me is that I’m not too happy with the object-relational mappers of these things. It seems to me that they are more interested in mapping their objects to SQL relationships, whereas I have my SQL relationships all figured out in my head and want to map them to objects, and some things seem to get lost in translation.
