State Park mountain cabin decor (at Smith Mountain Lake State Park)
November 27, 2014
Drove to Smith Mountain Lake for family Thanksgiving, delayed for a day by the snow further north.
Listened to the first couple of episodes of Serial in the car. OK, yeah, it’s pretty compelling radio. I have seen (but not read) some bloggers talking about their discomfort with Koenig’s whiteness vs her subjects’ non-whiteness. Perhaps I will seek some of those critiques out & read them.
I’m less concerned about racism or cultural tourism than I am about her frequent foregrounding of her lack of distance, though. But at least she gives her subjects the opportunity to call her on that.
We are in cabins in the state park, so we’re blissfully free of TV (and Wi-Fi), and plenty far removed from the world of commerce. Best of luck to everyone out in Ferguson and elsewhere who are actively protesting at stores, and to everyone else who is boycotting.
Our family is small, and all of my grandparents are dead. Even when they were alive there wouldn’t have been much in the way of heated political arguments around the dinner table. I was picked on plenty at school growing up, for being a smartass and then a nerd and then kind of a freak, but I never had to argue with my own family about politics or society or anything else, and for that I’m eternally thankful.
November 26, 2014
The snow in Virginia postponed a planned trip to the Roanoke area by a day, leaving me at loose ends. Should have been a study day, but honestly I temporarily forgot that every day this week is supposed to be a study day. Was so annoyed at everything in the world that I just surfed the web and read comic books.
Comic book, that is, Strong Female Protagonist, which is loose and jokey and kind of web-comicy, which I guess makes sense, because it is: http://strongfemaleprotagonist.com/issue-1/page-1/
Braved the wet and the mysterious crowds at Morgan Imports to have a BLT at Parker and Otis. It’s a damn fine BLT.
Dinner at Gocciolina, because I was about to leave town, and M wasn’t. It’s always just so good.
Saw Birdman, which is quite the tour de force. But I’m in the mountains of Virginia, writing this on my phone, so my thoughts on that will be written on my laptop tonight & uploaded whenever I get a chance.
November 25, 2014
Spent most of what was ostensibly a vacation day on the phone or IM with support, trying to get someone to fix my work website, since I only have indirect access to the filesystem, and no shell access at all. Why did it break? Someone had to reboot the VMs over the weekend, and despite the fact that they had ‘http’ IN THEIR HOSTNAMES, nobody bothered to check whether httpd had successfully restarted.
And nobody even managed to figure out that I had an application running on those boxes, so they didn’t even tell me they were performing a change that might affect me. I had to figure it all out by asking everyone on the support calls if they knew anything.
Didn’t go to any protests or marches. I’ve never been much of a joiner, and that spills over to anything that involves a lot of people standing or moving together in a group. I know I should probably try harder to get outside of that comfort zone, but to be honest, I was pretty sure there would be a CrimethInc contingent there, and I just don’t want to be anywhere near those assholes.
So instead we sat at home & listened to the helicopters circling overhead.
Watched A Most Wanted Man, which was very very LeCarre. I enjoyed it, even though I have a hard time getting even slightly worked up about the threat of international terrorism, given how many people are killed in the US every day for such an extraordinarily wide variety of terrible and stupid reasons.
November 24, 2014
It’s not as though the lack of an indictment was any kind of surprise. It’s sad that Bob McCullough couldn’t reconcile his conflicting allegiances, but hardly surprising. Prosecutors & cops are two sides of the same coin.
I look forward to reading the book[s] that will emerge from the 4700 pages of grand jury testimony released tonight, though.
I have successfully insulated myself, social-media-wise, such that I don’t have any friends in any of my various timelines making racist remarks – instead I follow folks like @YesYoureRacist on Twitter, who takes care of injecting that stuff from any of an infinite number of highly racist strangers.
It’s sad to see Barack Obama’s limits exposed – the limits of his ability to speak out as president, even one in his second term. Or the limits of any black American who is part of the power structure to speak out. Or the limits of his own empathy, as someone who is no longer young, no longer poor, no longer close to the streets.
People (mostly people in power) want to call for calm, for peaceful non-violent protest. They choose to ignore the fact that it has consistently been the police bringing the violence to the people.
As tragic and uncontrolled and, yes, short-sighted as they are, though, rioting, burning & looting have their place. They send the message to property owners that the mere fact of their property ownership aligns them with the police & the capitalist power structure, against the workers, against the people, particularly the people who have nothing.
Listen to the rhetoric in the mainstream news, or on White Twitter. The consistent underlying theme is that property trumps human life, and specifically that any threat to property is de facto justification for taking human life.
This is how it has always been, ever since private property was invented. It’s certainly the story of America from the very first moment any European set foot here.
So horribly apt, then, to be writing this a couple of days before Thanksgiving, that most American of holidays, when we ostensibly commemorate the native peoples’ willingness to share what they had with the Pilgrims. A favor that wasn’t exactly reciprocated.
November 23, 2014
I’ve had a trainee during my shift at the radio station off on & for the past couple of months, and today was his last training. I feel like I’m probably a terrible trainer, because I’ve been doing it so long that it’s all kind of second nature for me. But it’s good to be forced to bring it back to the foreground and think it through now & then.
In any case, as I told him near the end of the afternoon, it’s not really about doing everything perfectly, but rather about staying calm when you inevitably screw something up, and being able to recover comparatively gracefully. There you go: a life lesson that’s worth at least a semester’s worth of Duke tuition.
After dinner we watched Adaptation, which I had never seen. It was about like I figured it would be, I guess, only somehow I had forgotten that (a) it starred Nic Cage and (b) he played twins. The makeup was truly appalling – I hope someone was nominated for an Oscar for Nic’s hairpieces, and whatever kind of crazy dental appliance Chris Cooper had going on.
M has all kind of family things happening right now, which are awful & a drag. As is the news, daily. I hope someone makes a top-20 list of good things that happened in 2014, because I could use some perspective.
November 22, 2014
I think the current series of CS lectures I’ve been watching has outrun its usefulness, which is actually too bad, because I have come to believe that for at least some topics, I really do learn better via the combination of listening, note-taking and watching slides.
I’ve also noticed recently that having a solid grounding in some fairly basic core concepts and vocabulary has made it easier to understand all the books that I’m going to have to rely on for the other stuff I’m trying to learn. Yay education!
After lunch there was a brief errand run, partially accompanied by the Sound Opinions dudes fawning over Robert Plant. To his credit, he sounded pretty self-deprecatory and grounded. There was one moment where Greg Kot floated some theory that he was clearly very proud of having conceived, and Plant was like “no, I disagree."
Critics: Keep inventing those convoluted nutjob theories about other people’s art; it’s a fun game. But in an interview context, maybe just ask open-ended questions?
Got to Gocciolina at 5:35 and snagged the last 2 seats at the bar. I was really happy to see photos on Facebook from the friends-and-family soft opening of The Boot, since it will hopefully ease the pressure on Gocciolina somewhat. I love that they’re super-successful, but having to go full-bore packed house with your dinner service from the opening bell has got to be stressful.
I remember looking at the kitchen crew, thinking about how tired they must be, and then looking at the clock and realizing it was only 6:45.
Food was awesome, of course.
(I’m also looking forward to trying out The Boot when it opens for real, because I’m a longtime fan of Andy’s cooking. The menu looks more American-Italian, though, and I have a pretty limited ability to handle cheese.)
M stayed home and watched Nights of Cabiria, and I went to Carrboro to see Gross Ghost & desark & The Tender Fruit. Good times, always:
Not pictured: the ~13-year-old girl who stood right down front next to the speaker cabinet throughout the des ark and Tender Fruit sets. Her mom bought a des ark CD. I hope it straight legit changes her life.
At no point did I see the Carrboro city bus with Aimée’s photo on the side of it. Drat.
November 21, 2014
Came home from work, read the movie section of the Friday Times, ate dinner at Toast. Walked by Letters Bookshop on the way home & M wanted to go in, which is how I wound up buying The Things They Carried and a late-90s collection of Christgau essays, Grown Up All Wrong.
I’ve never read any Tim O’Brien and now seems like a good time to change that. The Christgau will go on the shelf next to all of the Consumer Guide books & will eventually get read.
M didn’t buy anything.
Did some debating about whether to fly to NYC in February to see John Cameron Mitchell in his 8-week run as Hedwig. Current thinking is that it’s not quite worth it. Had we heard about it the instant tickets had gone on sale, and been able to get aisle seats in the first 6 rows, it’d probably be a different story.
It’s late November, so there are actually around a half-dozen movies playing in Durham (or at the Raleigh Grande) that we’d like to see. Half of them will be gone by the end of this coming week. I’m well aware of the market forces that dictate studio release schedules (it’s just as bad in the music world), but it does suck to be a moviegoer in a tertiary market.
So of course we didn’t go see anything after dinner. Had a discussion with friends at Toast about the fact that the Carolina now seems to have some kind of repertory double feature in their various “Retro” series literally Every Single Friday. I wonder how many people they got out to see The Odd Couple last night.
Today [Saturday], just before sitting down to write this, I walked to Geer St. for lunch. On my way out of our building, I ran into a couple of guys who first spare-changed me, and then asked for directions to some sort of apocryphal market on Queen Street, or a parking lot, or something. And then went walking off up the street, checking car door handles (including mine).
I didn’t call the cops. The folks on the neighborhood listserv would be really disappointed in me. Instead I spent my entire walk over to Geer St. mulling over white supremacy & global capitalism.
I didn’t come to any useful conclusions.
November 19-20, 2014
I have three vastly different books going at once:
- The Principles of Object-Oriented Javascript, by Nicholas Zakas
- The Peripheral, by William Gibson
- Liquid Intelligence: the Art and Science of the Perfect Cocktail, by Dave Arnold
And if that was all you knew about me, I’d be an egregious White Male Tech Nerd. Ouch.
Still, they’re all pretty solid. The Javascript book is actually outstanding – if you’re a software developer with an object-oriented background, this book is only 95 pages & it does a better job at telling you what you need to know than anything else I have read. Really well-written.
I’m liking the Gibson so far. Better than the most recent trilogy.
The cocktail book is ludicrous, which is why I bought it.
Ate dinner Wednesday at Piedmont, for the first time in a couple of months. Marked improvement in the entree – it was probably the best thing I’ve had there since the turnover. It was flounder with some fingerling potatoes, some fennel, and some kind of foam. In the old days it would’ve been aggressively salty or sweet or something, but this time it was subtle and delicious. No wonder they’ve been a lot busier lately.
Late Tuesday night, Hiss Golden Messenger were on Letterman. I haven’t watched late-night TV in ages & ages, and even my next-day internet watching has waned. I got kind of teary when I saw Dave Letterman, because I watched him [a little too] religiously in high school, and high school was a long time ago.
Hiss Golden Messenger were great, as good as I have ever seen them. Glad they busted out the big guns for their national TV debut (whatever that means nowadays), and glad to see folks like Amelia Meath up there singing backup, taking a break from being Way More Famous than Mike is.
I have opinions about current events on various fronts, but they’re fairly predictable and I’m pretty sure I have covered them adequately, here and elsewhere.
November 17-18, 2014
I’m not sure anything of import happened on Monday. I mean, OK, work was good. I like my job.
I have been on this program of studying core Computer Science concepts via online courses from [coincidentally] Ivy League schools, specifically the lecture videos, and I’m discovering a few things, rather belatedly.
For example, there’s definitely something to the notion that learning [for me] is accentuated by hearing something explained, seeing it (on a lecture slide) and writing it (in my notes), all at more or less the same time.
This is all in service of my taking over a lot of the technical interviewing duties at my job. I have the knowledge, but being self-taught, I have always lacked some of the vocabulary, so I’m filling that in now.
As a self-taught programmer, I generally learned new concepts by first bumbling into a project that I wanted to do & for which I lacked the skills, and then picking up the skills along the way. What that has meant, I’m finding out, is that I learned a lot about system architectures comparatively early in my “career” as a programmer, since I started in on real-world projects more or less from the very beginning.
So, for anyone reading this who is a CS student or professor: Tackle real-world projects sooner! Don’t wait until upper-level classes.
Tonight, Tuesday, we watched this show on PBS wherein Henry Louis Gates Jr. researched and explained the genealogies of Tina Fey, David Sedaris and George Stephanopoulos. You’d think that would be kind of rad, right? Well, no. Although it featured many kind of awkward moments in which HLG revealed some mildly interesting genealogical fact to one of the three & they had to figure out how to react to it, on camera.
But mostly it was a reminder that PBS exists solely to entertain shut-ins and other people with weak constitutions, and with the exception of independently-made documentaries that it picks up for distribution, it should probably just be left to die.