In 1946, George Orwell wrote an essay on the pitfalls of English prose, describing what he considered to be the common mistakes made in modern writing. Politics and the English Language identified dead metaphors, over-used phrases, and vague diction as habits to be eliminated from writing, for they tire the reader, confuse the meaning, and destroy the specifics of one's intended message. Whether purposeful or accidental, such errors have not yet been eliminated from the English language: 60 years later we still make the same mistakes, albeit in slightly different forms. While most writers keep their prose admirably clear of such obstructions, passive, vacuous, and needlessly complex sentences cloak the modern world of bureaucracy and politics in a haze of pretentiously irrelevant verbosity.
Take the first of Orwell's charges: the dying metaphor. Some of his examples of have now faded from use, like "ring the charges on" or "take up the cudgels for." After all, few people fight with cudgels nowadays. However, some of these phrases remain in circulation. "Toe the line" has become embedded in our vocabulary to the extent that it fails to arouse any trace of visual imagery. One has only to examine any political statement to encounter these tired phrases being trotted out once again for display. We speak of "cutting off ties" with other nations, or refer to America as "a shining beacon" of democracy, and no one thinks anew. The problem of dying metaphors hasn't gone away, but merely shifted to a new collection of unimaginative analogies.
Why the Lucky Stiff (author of Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby) has written a slick web frontend to the IRB Ruby shell, allowing anyone to try out the Ruby language from their browser. There's also a handy tutorial available.
Okay, this is officially the coolest peripheral ever.
So I'm back at work again, but my job has changed. No longer am I the stealthy IT ninja, whose responsibility it is to replace components the day before they they break, anticipate obscure printer errors that could bring ruin to the marketing department, repair desktops while their users are out for a cup of coffee, and arrive silently in an employee's cube before they hang up the phone. I'm still messing about with the network monitoring system (especially the TAP gateway, which fails silently half the time), but my official job is now within the realm of support. Working against time on a laptop with a failing hard drive, I'm writing a support web site with the Ruby on Rails framework which will interface with our customer relations management service.
Let me tell you this: Ruby. Is. Amazing.
I am thankful for good friends, fun, educational, confusing, and generally unforgettable college experiences, a warm (comparatively speaking) house, cats, music, large quantities of delicious food, a job doing what I love, bicycles with functional pedals and brakes (The Brick, I'm referring to you here), photography, and hugs.
I guess I'm back. Woke up Tuesday at 7:30. 11 hours of cars, airports, airplanes, half-hearted goodbyes, J.D. Salinger, The Samples, Neil Gaiman, and Something Corporate later, I arrived (somewhat displaced) at the doorstep of my old house. A lot's changed since I left. The walls, once a gallery of landscape and family photographs, are home to spare collections of hooks where frames once hung. The plan is to re-paint most of the interior walls, hence the spare decoration. The back door, the one that never closed properly, is replaced as well. All the doorknobs feel small here.
Writing the title of this post makes me wonder really where home is. I don't have a permanent address, really, just a probabilistic chance of successfully being reached. I live a quantum life, shifted by finite yet predictable uncertainties.
It's 11 PM, and once again I'm stargazing on the hill of three oaks. There is no trace of human activity here--only the full moon for light, the soft sound of snow crunching beneath my boots, and winds slipping fiercely past my coat. An hour at these temperatures concentrates the mind; one's world contracts to the blazing, tingling flame igniting in one's fingers and toes from the cold, the taste of blood flowing from frozen, cracked lips, and the howling of the wind against one's face, slowly numbing into a frostbitten simacrulum of one's former physiognomy. At the same time, there's nothing else like looking into this white expanse, tinged blue by the cold light of the moon and stars; to wonder at the majesty of the trees which stand here year after year, etched in black against the sky; to look up, and fall softly to the ground at the sight of ten million brilliant and specific stars.
I lay here, and wait to become a part of the landscape.
It's snowing today: dry flakes swirling down through the cones of light from the street lamps. -17 degrees celsius wind chill, says the observatory's weather station. Walking to work at this hour of the night is an exercise in self-control, moving from step to step with care to avoid slipping on the icy walks, squinting to keep the flurries of snow from smacking into the eyes, and keeping hands tightly within pockets to keep the frigid air at bay.
Really, though, the snow and the cold make me happy. The vortices of air swirling around buildings whips the flakes into an intricately fractal frenzy, and the biting cold is a reminder of how crisp the world can be, absent of warmth. Tomorrow morning, I look forward to opening the door onto a landscape transformed into smooth forms of black asphalt, white snow, and grey stone and sky. Black and white has a certain, quiet, eloquence.
W00t w00t! Looks like it was just the bios that got screwed up. A quick reflash did the trick. There were a few loose inodes on fsck ("/ has not been checked in 46091 days, check forced"), but I can attribute those to the power failure.
Now, on to the paper of doooom!
This week hasn't been especially good for me, but I'm somewhat amused at the fortuitous timing of last night's storm. The power got knocked out briefly last night, and when I came home I found my computer shut down with a note from my roommate:
"Your computer was making beeping noises so I turned it off."
I'd always suspected that those books everyone keeps raving about, The DaVinci Code, and its sequel Angels and Demons were, shall we say, perhaps less than factual, but this really cinches it for me.
Q: Does CERN own an X-33 spaceplane?
Someone caused an interesting bug this morning: the input validation function doesn't check for weird character encodings (Hello, Korea...), which can be parsed and stored correctly but gunk up the XSLT processor. I've modified the node addition system to perform rigorous sanity checks on all incoming data. This has the added benefit of ensuring that your content is valid XML, so mistakes like tags which are closed out of order will be detected.