Road Trip
So Christmas was wonderful. I got so many great presents from my friends and family. I was not able to give all I would have liked, but I’m looking forward to a prosperous 2003.
Christmas with the Crawford family was wonderful. My Uncle and his son played the guitar on Christmas day, and we all feasted on turkey with all the trimmings. Christmas Eve I made quite a haul. We had our traditional potato soup, and opened all the “Non-Santa” gifts. It was wonderful to be in the presence (and presents! forgive the pun) of family. I got a shaver from my parents with a digital readout. It gives a close shave so far. Right now it’s charging. Before we began opening presents we started with a reading by my Uncle of the story of the birth of the Christ from the New Testament. I think Mark? (not sure at all on that, I know one one of the books does not even mention it if I remember right).
This weekend Leah and I will drive to Utah. Yes, you read that right, Utah. She will see her brothers and sisters, who are all far afield and are converging on Utah. It will be a long drive, but maybe not too long. I will keep her company and read and we’ll listen to music. We will return late Sunday so I can get my nose back to the grindstone. I’m hoping to take at least a few photos. The weather outlook is favorable, so we shall see.
You are currently browsing the monthly archive for December 2002.
Christmas Plans & Thoughts
I have a lot of thoughts this Christmas. It’s been a heckuva year, that’s for sure. From separation to divorce. Job changes. Some freelance. Some botched opportunities on my part. Marital counseling. Counseling. New relationships. It’s all been a bit much. Sometimes I think I should just go lie down for a month or three. But I will survive it all.
Christmas is here. And here are the plans: We’ll do the traditional Christmas Eve at the Crawford Grandparents, then I’ll be staying at Leah’s place with her, her four kids, her roommate Craig – we’ll do a semi-traditional Christmas morning there. Then I’ll be off to my Aunt’s for Christmas afternoon.
I’ve been around Leah with her kids twice now, and it goes pretty well. It’s a different kind of experience, and I certainly want to be smart about it. But there’s no perfection and no simplicity in this type of situation. I’m dating her, not her kids. This is the fact. But these people, well, young people, are a big part of her life, and I have to figure out how to fit in to the picture as a boyfriend. She’s far from any family, so it’s her, and her kids for Christmas.
Christmas brings feelings – old feelings – of religiousness, of the story of Christmas, of this person called Jesus. To me, stories. Stories of incredible power. Stories containing great bits of natural philosophy, but in the end most of them are myths. Ideally, myths which encourage people to be the best they can be to one another. Myths which encourage and sustain lives. Myths which remind us of the amazing power we all have inside us.
It’s at Christmastime that I find myself wishing I was religious. I wish that I could simply accept Christianity or even Religion without analysis. The reality is that my experiences of the miraculous ended when I came to understand death and suffering as banal events. We simply die. It is terrible. To hope that there is a life after is probably wishful thinking. To attempt to believe in a useful supreme being or an afterlife knots my stomach with illogic. I remain agnostic. I will not judge the power that religion has in another person’s life. For my grandmother, my mother, for several aunts, for friends, colleagues—religion is a powerful, comforting force. For me, I find comfort in my fellow human beings. I find comfort in the amazing capacity humans have to love and do good. I have experienced so much pain this year, but for every pain and hardship, I have experienced love and hope too from my friends and family and even strangers.
It is with these thoughts that I wish you all a wonderful holiday season, whatever your creed, whatever your race, whatever your beliefs or nonbeliefs.
Much love.
Don’t drink too much egg nog, don’t be rude at the mall.
Onward.
Outrage in Support of “National Security”
Coffee, Tea, or Should We Feel Your Pregnant Wifes Breasts Before Throwing You in a Cell at the Airport and Then Lying About Why We Put You There? is outrageous. If it’s even half true, be scared for your nation.
This is not America to me.
NPACI Rocks Toolkit, or, Build Your own Cluster Supercomputer
On Thursday I went to the ACM San Diego meeting. I even got a tour of San Diego Supercomputer Center. They have lots of computers and computing power. I got to see the gigantic (1.7 teraflops (a teraflop is a trillion floating-point operations per second) Blue Horizon machine. When I think about Moore’s law, and think that the machine is getting obsolete like with every minute—words fail me.
The talk/demo on the NPACI Rocks toolkit for building supercomputer clusters was great. I didn’t grok it all, but I like the use of XML to config redhat installs, and the autodetection of new machines on the cluster was quite clever. As a web developer, I appreciated the use of Apache and MySQL to keep track of the cluster, and to have the machines report their status and structures. The variability of commodity hardware makes simple hard disk mirroring – which I believe is the way things like Beowulf work – chancy. The differences between hardware can make installations unstable or break. Their philosophy is to let Red Hat be Red Hat and install itself on variable hardware with proper drivers. They use the de-facto standard of RPM files to do updates to all the nodes on the cluster. The problem Rocks solves is the problem of administering lots of linux boxes. By using smart administration the whole system, and all the nodes, can be updated intelligently.
Read the NPACI Rocks Cluster Distribution: Users Guide Introduction for more information.
From My Medicine Days
See one, do one, teach one.
DMCA versus Librarians
DMCA exemption sought to allow saving of PC software from decay
Early PC software is about to decay and it is not clear we are allowed to save it. The anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA may prevent libraries from saving some of the most creative works of the 20th century from being lost.via nettime
Some Fascinating Good Words
1997 Rise of the Stupid Network
1998 The Dawn of the Stupid Network
2000 Worse Is Better
2002 The Paradox of the Best Network:
The best network is the hardest one to make money running.
TIA is a Bummer
“Total Information Awareness” as a diagnosis problem
JavaScript: Don’t hate the playah, hate the game
The Problem with JavaScript is a rather lukewarm article that talks about the fact that JavaScript itself is not evil, but the things people do with it are. It blames (rightly) browser and email client creators for enabling it to do malicious stuff. For an excellent history of JavaScript read Steve Champeon’s history of the language.
Me, I like JavaScript. ( See: ArtLung Lab: Scripting )
Recent Comments