Last night I finished rewatching season 1 of Alias — my second rewatching of the season. Last winter while in Berlin I rewatched seasons 1-4 as well; it was the middle of season 5 at that point.
See, all the seasons are very good TV, better than most things you’ll find on network or cable, but only after watching all of them and going back to 1 and 2 do you realize how good those first two seasons really are/were.
The laundromat raised prices 25 cents on their front-load washers. So now the rates are:
* top load: $1.25
* double-load front load: $2.25
* triple-load front load: $3.00
* quad-load front load: $4.00
* $0.25/10-minutes for the dryers
I found 3 quarters in my apartment and I had two dollars in my wallet; I didn’t know about the price increase.
Sundays I “get together” with friends — since I am in Madison and most of them are in Boston, they get together, I tele-commute so to speak — and we spend about an hour doing “prompts.” There are three prompts (provided by two of the members), with ten minutes devoted to each prompt, and after thirty minutes of writing (with coffee breaks) we post our texts (stories, excerpts, whatever) for others to read/critique. This reminds me a bit of high school English; in Mrs. Kruger’s class we had 5-minute free-writing segments on a regular basis, and these then served as a foundation for the chapbooks we put together at the end of the year.
Day long snowing in my neck of the woods. Gentle, though.
After an hour of fiction writing around noon with friends I turned later in the afternoon to some baking.
Last week it was white bread, today wheat, but after kneading the dough my left palm, near the thumb and up the thumb, actually, became a bit numb. A bit tingly like a pinched nerve, and I don’t know why. My right hand is fine.
I also prepared a loaf of Honey-Mustard Oatmeal Bread, which is currently rising as the wheat bread finishes baking. The white bread only bakes for 25-30 minutes, but at 425. The wheat recipe, which is identical in almost every regard, goes for 40-45 minutes at 375. I’m not aware of the reason for the change. Like the white bread recipe it makes two loaves.
The honey-oatmeal bread recipe makes one loaf, baked in a pie tin.
I made it to “C.”
I was supposed to get together with J&C and Matt on Sunday to watch “Das Leben der Anderen” — one of the best recent German films, and one which has won a lot of awards. I saw it in Berlin last summer. Matt got the German DVD as a gift in November.
1. Today is first about people …
… getting off the 3 I ran into Regina, whom I hadn’t seen since the end of last semester (she and her husband managed to make it to Spain for their delayed honeymoon), and I recommended House of Leaves to her — she recommended an author to me, but I don’t recall the name (or the name of the books … only that they’re a type of alternate-history fantasy, in which, for example, WWII didn’t occur, but the Crimean War went on and on …)
… Angela came into the department today; I also saw Mike and Ben (I had already seen Adam), and a number of folks were hard at work, so to speak, in 850.
… upon picking up my coffee at Fair Trade I semi-encountered Kjerstin, deep in conversation with Milda. More later.
… while on a retreat in Yosemite Andrew chatted extensively about game design with Robin, the girlfriend of one of his friends. He was of the opinion that I would have enjoyed the conversation — I haven’t played a good game in ages. That’s a shame.
… I got caught up on a few emails. When I get behind on emails, when I owe someone an email, out of guilt I avoid the obligation, making my completion of the task at hand even later and later. Emails should be replied to immediately. I owed a response to Tiffany and to some Betsy in the Twin Cities who thought she recognized me from WisCon, which I’ve never attended, despite my enjoyment of Sci-Fi.
2. Aside #1
Last night I finished eight hours of Bruce Springsteen. I didn’t listen to Springsteen as a kid — in elementary school I heard of “Born in the USA” and had heard it once or twice. It was this thing on the periphery of my experience. I knew he took part in the “USA for Africa” (“We are the World …”) project; I didn’t know of his music from before that iconic song.
Eight hours of Springsteen — a lot of good stuff. Something about “The River” captivates me. I am almost out of the Bs in my quest to listen to all my mp3 and ogg files in alphabetical order by artist. Tonight: BT (I have the 2-CD “Rare and Remixed” collection) — techno/dance/eurotrash stuff? Then one CD of Bush, and then I’m on to Cake …
3. Tech
In the realm of tech, this .NET-specific article on CMS design is applicable to non-.NET projects as well. One annoying thing, though, when searching for CMS (Content Management System) and DMS (Document Management System) projects is the dilution of the term — everybody calls their pet blog project/code a CMS (or even DMS) these days, when in fact it’s not just that blog software tends to possess a subset of CMS functionality, it’s also that a blog typically includes functionality that is not necessarily part of most CMSes — the tagging and RSS and trackback and other such features. Hardly a “blog” engine out there would qualify as a true CMS.
No, I’m interested in content, not diary, management systems, and even more so, document management systems, systems for managing forms, poems, articles, essays, diaries, recipes, letters, emails, short stories, novels, genealogical records, address books and so on.
Such an application can be built using a framework, such as Ruby on Rails (Ruby) or TurboGears (Python). I’ve mentioned these before. Yesterday I saw Streamlined, another sort of framework. See, most of the framework software is for mapping your software classes to your data model (your SQL tables and relations), which, while not very low level, is nevertheless relatively low level (think of the web interface, pointing and clicking, filling in content forms, as high level, and the business logic that runs this as middle level, then yes, the backend database is relatively low level and far from the experience of the user, and, to an extent, from that of the website developer). Then the developer/programmer, has to create the business logic and interface (how one interacts with the website) by hand; what Streamlined tries to do is provide an easy-to-use abstraction layer for that task (since otherwise you have to reinvent the wheel every time you add a new “type” of information), and the video they have on their site to demonstrate it is convincing and tempting.
Back to CMS stuff and blog software — out there the idea of content is basically limited to a simple document that has a title, an introduction, a body, and an author. Looking through the documentation and links for Drupal I noticed an interest in what they called taxonomy, which at first seemed like different types (classifications / categories) of content, but they mean it at a meta-level. Is this an article about food or cooking? Or about skiing, or computers, or comics, or racing, or film … is it about a set of flat categories (color pictures, black and white pictures) or about a tree hierarchy (US -> Washington -> Spokane, US – Washington -> Seattle, US -> California -> Los Angeles, UK -> England -> London, UK -> England -> London -> Parliament …), and so on. But the document model (title, intro, body, author) stays the same.
4. Aside #2
The link is to “The Best of XRT,” where a friend of mine in Boston works. “Pretty Space Pictures” is the brief description.
5. A return to people …
I ended up with a table near Milda and Kjertsin, and when the two were done talking, Kjerstin joined me and we talked for a while, first about Berlin (“Altes Europa” was mentioned recently in the NY Times … my neighborhood cafe-restaurant-bar in Mitte, you see, named ‘Old Europe’ in the wake of Rumsfeld’s comments a few years back), and then about the new Hitler movie (“Mein Führer”), in which I am an extra, so people refer to it as “my movie” from time to time. The question, the one raised by the critics, is that of the appropriateness of portraying Hitler as anything but a monster on film. The same debate raged about “Downfall” (“Der Untergang”) a few years back. A related (but seeingly [and only seemingly] reversed) debate goes on now about the portrayal of Muslims as terrorists in the TV series “24.” We shifted to a discussion (related, you see) of sympathy and empathy … curious terms, you see, because in English we have both, and the sym + pathos, the “feeling with,” of the term has been taken over, to a great extent, by empathy, and sympathy has come to mean “I feel for you,” or even structurally more interestingly “I sympathize with you” (“I ‘feel with’ with you”) — basically a matter of identification, a connotation that is not always there in the Greek. Someone who sympathizes is on your side (thus we refer to “sympathizers” in politics and war), but someone who empathizes understands because he/she can feel, but that doesn’t mean they are necessarily on your side. This led me to a brief — well, brief for me — discussion of Stephen Donaldson’s “Thomas Covenant” books … which leads me back here, to a recent diary, or, as I like to call them, MySpaciary.
Kjerstin called William, who joined us. I showed him some Berlin pictures from Kjerstin’s visit, and then these cool garlic still-lifes from July. Then we packed things up and headed down State Street for dinneer.
Hüsnüs it was. I just like using umlauts there. I mentioned to them that I probably hadn’t been there since a meal with Regina, Marcel, and Ivana nearly three years ago — it used to be such a department staple, really. I had had my Fish Fry for lunch at the Union, but enough time had gone by that I was ready for dinner, and the börek was tasty. And the Turkish pilsner? (was it Efe?) Good stuff. I had the dark, William the light. Kjerstin the pinot grigio, and we chatted and talked and remembered and exchanged, on film and cities, on people and childhoods, and traditions and follies, on Heidegger and the 68ers in Paris.
And when finally it was time we paid our tab and walked into the wind.
When I arrived at Fair Trade this afternoon shortly before 5p.m. and took a seat along the front window I found a hardcover copy of Stephen Donaldson’s Runes of the Earth (the most recently — I believe — Thomas Covenant book) on the floor. Perhaps, I thought, I was taking over an already taken seat, one occupied by a person currently in the bathroom (or occupied by an invisible person), but I quickly concluded that instead that the person who had brought the book had left without it, so I notified the barista who poured my cup of dark-roast, who was at that moment clearing out the tub of used cups, plates, and utinsils, and he took it with him somewhere behind the counter.
I like new clothes, I like clean clothes, I like comfortable, non-torn clothes. And shoes, too.
But shopping for them is not something I do on a regular basis. I do not hate shopping; in fact, I rather like a good deal of it, and not just purposeful, “I am going to buy A, B, and C and head straight home” shopping … but shopping for clothes and shoes is not something I do regularly.
My office has not been touched since December; the week before xmas I came in twice to hold “office hours” of sorts, allowing my students to come by and pick up old homework, quizzes, exams, and papers.I always want my work space(s) to be clean and organized. A shared office, however, is never these things, and my own desire for a minimalist aesthetic conflicts with my pack-rat-ishness. Today I’m getting rid of old newspapers.
I need to head to the University Bookstore later for “Der treffende Ausdruck” — there is no desk copy in the office so I’ll have to pick one up using the department’s account #. Thereafter …? Coffee, I suppose. No fritter today for me, though … the pants are getting a bit snug in the waist. It’s the gut, really.
If you want to learn Ruby, a good place to start is the Ruby in Twenty Minutes quick tutorial. It’s easy to follow for users of Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.
Today is Björk-Day in my apartment, and I’m currently approaching Joga after finishing Homogenic.
Roofjumping not Downhill but also crazy — painful stupidity. This is America.
Report: Miss New Jersey USA resigns over pregnancy: “Harder, 20, told the newspaper she voluntarily stepped down because it’s against pageant rules to compete while pregnant.” First we have a stupid rule: the ideal of a beauty pageant is reenforced here — thin and virginal. But I have little sympathy for Ashley Harder, the now-pregant and now-ex-Miss-New-Jersey: “Harder, who was crowned in October, told the newspaper she’s expecting her child in ‘late summer’ and plans to marry her live-in boyfriend.” Late summer means likely August, perhaps July or September, but let’s just say she got pregnant not too far back, meaning she was already Miss New Jersey. She would have known the rules about not being pregnant and competing, so either somebody who has, probably, spent years in the socially-retarded pageant culture working towards these competitions suddenly decided “I don’t want to do this anymore, I’d rather be pregnant at age 20,” or the pregnancy was unplanned, meaning that both she and her live-in boyfriend are idiots.
I suspect the latter.
