Month: December 2003

Naming Objects

In the US, a the bucket where you throw refuse is called a trash can. In Britain, it’s typically called a dustbin or a bin. The US versions of Mac OS have a “Trash” folder where you put files you want to delete, and US versions of Windows use a “Recycle Bin.” However, British versions use “Wastebasket.” Nautilus follows that lead: “Trash” in the US English version, and “Wastebasket” in the British English version. Of course, this leads to anger on the part of those who feel that “Dustbin” or “Rubbish Bin” or “Bin.”

Within five minutes of this discussion beginning, it invariably goes beyond insulting Americans (everyone in the discussion agrees they can’t speak properly) to the various portions of the Commonwealth arguing over their respective dialects. I love watching people hash out colonial disputes that have been settled for generations.

Curiously, it’s mostly Australians and English people who do this– the Indian developers rarely get involved. For the most part, I think, Indian programmers are satisfied with the quality of the British translation and want to improve the quality of display for Hindi, Devangari, and so forth.

Sleep

I was up til 3 last night working. I’m still in my pajamas, and haven’t showered or brushed my teeth. It feels like 2001 or something.

I miss those days sometimes, the all-night excitement, the do-or-die “we need this file now, can you do this?” adventures. And it’s nice, from time to time, to have a night like that. But only occasionally. I can’t imagine how Nat feels, running at full speed all the time for the past… three, six, ten years?

I know he gets tired, but he seems to be invulnerable. Part of the aura of inevitability that creates success, I suppose. He’s an amazing person and I do not envy him his position: he works much, much harder than anyone else I know.

Prophylactic Values

“‘What we heard today‘” about over-the-counter emergency contraception “‘was frequently about individuals who did not want to take responsibility for their actions and wanted a medication to relieve those consequences,’ Dr. Hager said. He said he was worried in particular that it would encourage sexual activity among adolescents, who could just buy the drug on their own.”

So, in other words, Doctor Hager, you’re worried your daughter is a slut, and that eventually she’ll end up being arrested for encouraging masturbation.

Clever Spam

They’re getting clever, those spammers. After the five or six word pitch were the following words:, designed to fool my filters into thinking I’d been sent real text:

elegiac disneyland lucre fuchs committee ahead annulling hairpin obsess brain carrageen invincible allotropic barbell sieglinda brazen inconsiderate brinkmanship consonantal azure aluminate nee certain dedicate treat beehive clockwise striptease thule basophilic sycophant depict beat supine sculptural hour hydrochloric eel bloodstone execrate idiotic cleave tango correct elinor muslim mice

And so forth.

Paste Paste Paste

I’ve fallen behind. Here are links:
SF Arts and a NYT article on cheap SF weekends.

Criticism of Left Behind, the evangelical sci-fi fantasy novel series. The novels are terrible, of course, and the characters are poorly drawn, and the moral universe is distinctly un-Christian… in short, it’s like a lot of other crappy sci-fi/fantasy, except it pretends to be, well, Saved.

Snark, snark, snark.

Queer Eye criticism. I’m surprised this didn’t crop up much, much sooner, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the Fab Five are just sarcastic and frivolous enough to deflect any sincere criticism. That’s an important coping skill for many people growing up gay, or otherwise different from the other ducklings, I might add.

Zoning

Federico sent me an old article about sprawl, from the Atlantic. I’m not entirely sure how to respond to it. The article is a few years out of date, and the beginning of it has some major logical flaws (ignore the parts about how the old building methods were best– they often sucked, and there’s a good reason that many old buildings have not survived).

On the other hand, I basically agree with a lot of what the author has to say: a community is more than a group of houses, it needs human scale and mixed use and so forth. And I agree with his overriding, mostly taste-based assertion, “Sprawl bad,” despite the fact that it totally fails to take into account the fact that lots of people like having big houses on big lawns, like the separation and privacy that subdivisions create, and dammit they like their cars.

Anyway, it all comes back to me with the family farm. All that new-urbanism kind of development takes more than just a developer. It takes a broad-based commitment on the part of public leaders, and a willingness on the part of individuals to take risks that are not entirely known or predictable.

When it comes to one family, and one farm, being developed, it’s not going to be a “real community,” whatever that means. It’s going to be a twisty-roaded subdivision. We’re not going to come close to any of the ideals of new urbanism or intentional communities, we’re talking what does grandma do with 200 acres and a zoning law that insists on a minimum lot size of 20 acres. In that case you get 10 lots, 20 acres each, which is too small to farm and too big for a neighborhood. You get big houses on the big lots and it’s a bedroom community.

So, given that you can’t farm 200 acres, what can you do with it? I’m not trying to change the world here, I’m trying to figure out what combination of individual action and community policy could create something other than sprawl. It’s easy enough to say “I want new urbanism” but how do you get there in the medium-sized chunks of most peri-urban development these days?

To whoever posted that comment

Thank you for posting a comment. Most of the comments I get are spam, which is why I’m turning comments off for all new posts.

In response, note that Saddam did not attack us. Note that he gave tax refunds to those who needed them least. Note that he failed to aggressively pursue Osama, and allowed Saudi royalty, allied with his family oil interests, out of the country on 9/11 and 9/12 2001. The medicare reform is a joke– it makes medicare even less supportable. His economic policy is a disaster, even if it is giving us a ‘sugar high’ of a boost right now. And the AIDS program is actually OK — provided that he actually funds it, and except that it fails to teach the #1 prevention method (condoms), because his religion has become our foreign policy. The Kyoto treaty might or might not have been any good, but he’s gutted enough other environmental protections that I know he’s basically in favor of putting mercury into my dinner.

He didn’t win last time, I don’t think he’ll win this time either.

Family, Prayer, Snow

I woke up late and hungover today, and Nat called me and asked if I could come to the funeral home to meet Ettore’s family. So, I went. He was there at the door and said the family was inside, and so was Ettore. I was glad he warned me, because I’d never been to a funeral home or seen a body laid out before. I was sure there was some sort of set of rules or a protocol but I didn’t know it, so I just walked in and looked over at him and at the people sitting around the room staring blankly at their hands or the floor or the ceiling. He was there at the front. That is, his body was there; he wasn’t exactly there. They’d shaved his face, and he looked gaunt and incredibly sad. His family was sitting opposite the body, and then his friends were seated along the wall.

I wasn’t sure what to say to the family, but I guess they wouldn’t have understood it anyway, since they don’t speak much English, so I just shook their hands and mumbled. Later, Tim Ney showed up he went up to the body first and kneeled before it and crossed himself and then went to the family and said he was very sad for their loss, and so I guess I was pretty close to the expected action.

People kept getting up and going outside to smoke, and the room got cold, waht with the door being open and shut so much. Some people looked blank, or nervous, or awkward, but mostly people looked defeated. Larry looked absolutely shattered. I can’t imagine I looked great either, sniffling and wiping my nose on my scarf. I would have expected a funeral home to have more tissues around, but there was just one box, and it was in the far corner, and it was empty. In the parlor there was a picture of a young man who I guessed was the funeral home owner’s son, labeled with his name and the years 1960-1980. The picture looked like a high-school portrait. I wondered if his death had been a factor in their starting the business, or if they’d already been in the funeral business beforehand. There was a dish of individually wrapped mints with the name of the funeral home printed on them, and I thought about the HBO show “Six Feet Under” and about how mints were probably pretty useful to have around, because there would be a lot of hugging, and people would want to make sure their breath would smell OK.

The funeral director spoke with Nat and David Patrick and Ettore’s family about arranging to send the body back to Italy, and getting in touch with the consulate, and what would have to be done for that. They arranged to meet up tomorrow, with a translator, to go over the paperwork. At about that point I figured it was almost time to head out.

The sky got greyer and greyer and then it started snowing. I got up and went up to the body and said goodbye to Ettore and nearly started crying again. I felt that if I stayed I’d get more upset so I said goodbye to everyone and went down the street to the Town Diner and had jonny cakes and coffee. It was warm in the diner and despite the sign saying “Best Coffee In Town” the coffee was bitter. I went outside to take the 71 bus back to Harvard. It was cold and so I started walking to keep warm, and I figured I’d walk along Mt. Auburn St. until the bus caught up with me, but I ended up walking all the way back to Harvard Square, where I bought some yellow lillies.

I’m going to miss him, but I don’t feel angry at him any more, and I am beginning to understand that he’s gone– for the most part I’ve stopped wanting to warn him, or ask him the odd software or Italian cooking question, and I’ve stopped expecting to see him at work Monday.

I still think Faggas Funeral Home is an awful name.