Looking for something else entirely this afternoon, I stumbled across Edna St. Vincent Millay's poem First Fig, which I hadn't seen in years. Disturbingly appropriate.

My candle burns at both ends;
it will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends —
it gives a lovely light!

I've no doubt my day of accounting for taking on too many and varied things lately is fast approaching and I'm not particularly looking forward to it. Still, the ride is fun for the moment. If only I could get things under control a bit more.

Topics: life

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Mixed emotions when I read this morning that the latest Space Shuttle mission had launched succesfully and reached orbit.

January 29, 1986, when the Challenger shuttle exploded was one of those moments when I'll always remember exactly what I was doing.

For people of my parents' generation, it was things like where they were when John F Kennedy was shot, or Harold Holt disappeared (not quite as distinct, even for Australians, since it wasn't a single moment in time in the end), or Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. For me, the first space shuttle disaster is a very powerful memory.

I was 15 at the time, living in semi-rural Victoria, and had been up during the night with a stomach ache, passing time in the lounge room watching television. Very quietly, since we had a fairly open house and it was 3:00 a.m. Fortuitously, one of the five television stations was showing the launch live, since it was such a big event, even in Australia (the first couple of shuttle launches and landings had been broadcast, but then it became "routine" and non-newsworthy). After the launch — the whole rocket blasting off thing still impresses me — and the explosion, I remember clearly thinking "did that just happen, or did I dream it?" Continued viewing convinced me it really had exploded and I was in a slight daze until the rest of the family woke up.

What I hadn't known, until a bit earlier this year, was that the designated backup for Christa McAuliffe — a teacher by the name of Barbara Morgan — remained in her role as designated "teacher in space" (Education Mission Specialist) and finally now has her chance to complete the job. 21 years later! Imagine the thoughts going through her head in her quieter moments.

So, here's hoping all goes smoothly. Accidents happen and in a risky business like space flight (attach humans to top of big explosive, stand well back, ignite) accidents and oversights are catastrophic. The post-mortem findings of Challenger are still useful as a number of lessons in engineering, management, presentation and PR techniques and, particularly, failings. Hopefully there are less distressing ways to learn those in the future.

Topics: life, science

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My head feels like it is going to explode, although it's better than it was yesterday. I've caught something, most likely just a cold but it's making me feel like crap.

Started today reading through some things to follow up from yesterday and realised I had behaved like a complete moron on at least one mailing list. I might stay off the Internet today.

Topics: life

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Went to the local post office this morning to collect some packages that had arrived whilst I was travelling. It was like Christmas in July, except that it's August... three Amazon packages!

Turns out they were all from people sending me books as gifts for work done in Django. One I knew about, two were surprises. It is difficult to describe the feeling of happiness from receiving things like this. They are entirely unexpected, in the sense that it's not my motivation for contributing; a pure bonus. I am slightly of two minds about even posting this, because I don't want anybody else to feel obligated at all. Still, three boxes in one day brought home how much I appreciate the effort.

So, to four people in the the USA, Belgium and France, my humble thanks. You have made my day (well, the US source made my day a couple of weeks ago, since it arrived the day before I left for the US, but I'll include it in the group here).

In passing, the Allan Steele cover is probably my favourite book cover at the moment — a rocket hung between six huge pillars. Up close, the cover isn't quite as spectactular, since it's a watercolour, so the details are a bit blocky. Not too bad, though. John Scalzi pointed out (3rd comment down) that it's the same cover artist who did his Old Man's War US covers, which also look pretty nice.

I want to write more about book covers I like in the near future. I've been noticing them a lot more lately.

Topics: books, life

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Arrived home again mid-morning yesterday. As a result of not sleeping very well at all on the flight, I crashed yesterday afternoon, so my sleep cycle's a bit screwed up at the moment. Unfortunate, but unavoidable.

Trip home was reasonably uneventful, although we were just over three hours late leaving New York, which had all sorts of impacts for people making connections to other flights to Australia in LA (they didn't make them and stayed on our flight instead). Sat next to an IBM project manager from NY to LA and a Microsoft employee from LA to Sydney. Intelligent conversation with both. Didn't get a chance to check the latter's iPod for any James Brown tracks, so don't know if he had any soul left.

Matt Damon is smaller in real life than I expected (he was on our flight and I saw him in the lounge before we left, too).

I am a long way behind on email, once I combine the weekend influx with various threads I was intentionally not responding to last week (to avoid saying things I might regret later). So if you're expecting anything from me, please wait a day or two and ping again on, say, Wednesday if you've heard nothing.

Topics: life

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A few weeks ago, after a bit of pestering from a couple of friends, I succumbed to peer pressure and signed up for Facebook. I keep hearing about how great these new social sites are meant to be, but nothing has hit me over the head with their Wow! factor yet.

So, a few thoughts after trying it out for a while. It's not too bad and I'll stay signed up and current, I suspect. For me, it's an interesting intersection of two, previously fairly disjoint, parts of life: the IT portion and the "everything else" bit. Most of my online presence is fairly invisible to the latter group, since I hang out in reasonably technical circles. Turns out a lot of non-IT friends are already on facebook, particularly the younger ones who are right into the school/university social stuff. That should make it easier for me to keep up to date with what they're doing (and vice-versa).

Being able to pull information in from other sources (a.k.a. Facebook applications) seems like a mixed bag. Setting aside the various toys that look like they'll have fad life-cycles, it's handy that I can display my Flickr photos without a lot of effort (although it did take a while to find an app that had a nice combination of display and ease-of-use). Somehow — and this is a slightly tricky problem — it would be nice if photos pulled from elsewhere could be labelled just as directly imported photos are. The tagging of people in photos and inter-connectedness feature seems nice. It could be done as an overlay that checks the existing image against a hash so that they don't overlay the details onto a changed image.

The whole relatively carefree way in which people label themselves and others in photos leads to another point, though: the whole place really is a stalker's paradise. Most profile information seems reasonably well protected by default — you can't view it without having been befriended. However, photos provide a leaky source of names and images. Maybe I'm overreacting (having been a casual teacher in a couple of all-girls schools in the past, this stuff was well highlighted by school regulations and local laws), but is there a whole generation or half-generation growing up without sufficient "stranger danger" sanity checks in their head?

It looks like the intention (of the Facebook owners) is that Facebook somehow becomes the centre of the social sphere for somebody and everybody views information through the Facebook lens. I can't see that working for me, at least. Trying to pack that much information into a single browser screen and a paned layout leads to a mess. Still, I will be making bits of information available through my Facebook page for others' benefit, since some people do seem to live there, from the frequency of updates. Can't throw stones too much, though, I live in my feed reader sometimes and on mailing lists at other times.

Syndication feeds are only used sporadically throughout the site. They appear in a lot of places, but are conspicuously absent in others. Might be work in progress, might be oversight, might be shallow, woolly thinking. Hard to say.

Trying to determine the current status of various things is a varying experience, too. I requested an addition of my high school a couple of days ago. There's no tracking ticket number supplied, no feedback; the request has just gone into the ether and either it's taking longer than they predicted, or it's been declined. Similarly, sometimes Facebook tells me I have a friend-request pending with somebody and sometimes it seems to forget (or I do). I thought maybe it dropped back to "add as friend" if the person rejected you the first time around, but that doesn't seem to be the case — one person I could add as a new friend accepted a weeks old invite. I have a bad memory for relatively unimportant things and I could have expected some kind of "you have requests pending to these people" list to be available somewhere. Not sure how ignores/rejections should be handled, though. Do they also have a "you have been found to be unworthy" list? Or just drop back to where you can try again (which is the current behaviour)? Social interactions, particularly disagreements about status, are tricky, so I suspect this is actually a hard question.

Conclusion: I can see why it's a hit with many people, particularly school- and company-based social circles. The cross-pollination between my tech and non-tech (but not Internet-ignorant) social circles is an unexpected surprise and makes it worth it for me (useful, in other words). Seems more useful than other social networks I've dabbled in (e.g. LinkedIn).

Topics: life, thinking, technology/web

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If you were checking the news and saw headlines that read

Police question rampaging tank driver

and

Temporary phone towers may be needed after tank rampage

where would you place the stories? Iraq? Jerusalem? Sydney!?

Maximum points for the last answer. Maximum surprise value, too. A later story even has a photo of the conclusion of the chase. There is so much that is odd about this story,

Topics: life

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Carpet Stretcher.

This is one facet of carpet laying that happens after the fact (six years after, in this case). Essentially, chiropractics for carpet.

The agency I rent my apartment from did one of their periodic inspections on Tuesday, something that typically happens about twice a year when renting in Australia. It's primarily to check I haven't wrecked the joint (for overseas readers: typical rental agreements here don't let you repaint or redecorate. One even has to get permission to put in picture hooks). He noticed that part of the living room's wall to wall carpet was bunching up in the middle and realised it would only get worse and become unsafe over time. I'd just assumed there was nothing that could be done about that.

A man with tools came along this afternoon, pulled up a few of the edges, stretched the carpet a bit and literally ironed out the bump with a big steam iron.

Surpisingly, I only needed to move three of the ten bookcases in my living room.

Topics: life

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One small household domestic task I tend to avoid is pairing up socks after doing the washing. They'll sit in a drawer in all their singleton fineness and I'll match on demand. This approach tends to work reasonably well, on average, although it sometimes takes longer than it should to find a matching pair of black socks on days when I'm feeling unadventurous.

In a spate of cleaning up random crap on Monday, I went through the sock drawer and made little pairs out of them. Each sock now has a designated sock buddy that matches in colour, size and shape. Almost. Seven of them do not have buddies. Seven! How did I lose seven socks in, let's say, the last six months? It's a short trip between the laundry, which is inside my apartment, and the bedroom. Total distance, maybe 20 meters. It's not as if birds are stealing them from the dryer (something which used to happen, from the clothesline, when I was a wee lad growing up in the Victorian countryside).

The conclusion is clear: there's a pan-dimensional sock monster with a doorway to my laundry and he gets hungry sometimes. I'm not claiming the conclusion is very comforting, but it's the only one supported by the facts.

Topics: life

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Yesterday's New York Times has an article describing the fairly woeful ability of US airlines to schedule a barn dance, let alone a plane flight to a pre-determined location.

What struck me about the article, though, was the fairly restrained tone taken by the reporter, in stark contrast to the ludicrous situation they were laying out. If a plane is diverted to another airport, it does not count against an airline's delay statistics. Ditto if the plane taxis out to the runway and then is called back and canceled. What the..??! The article informs us, in polite, restrained NYT style, that the US Department of Transportation is taking comments "on whether it should tighten airline reporting criteria." How about we call a spade a bloody shovel here. Ask the airlines to stop telling lies! If I am on a plane and it does not arrive at the airport marked on my ticket at the time indicated, it is late. This isn't something that's open for debate. Depositing the passengers at another airport (right time, wrong location .. sorry about that) shouldn't even be an option for counting towards on-time. Not even leaving the original destination is certainly a mark against you.

This is how the whole situations arises in the first place: airlines are permitted to — and let's call it what it is— lie about their reliability.

The article does do nice job of briefly covering the consequent extra loss of time to passengers when a flight is delayed. It's not just the two hour delay getting in; that is just the start of the domino effect that can cost a day or two (when international travel is involved).

I really shouldn't have read that article today as I was finalising some travel bookings for a trip to the US at the end of this month. I have two internal flights and a relatively short transfer time in Chicago. It's the same airline and they say it's a connecting flight, but it's only going to take a 30 minute delay in Portland taking off and I'm completely screwed. Might not get into New York until hours after my expected time.

(via Justine Larbalestier, who, it should be mentioned, may actually be more cursed than normal when it comes to flying.)

Topics: life, travel

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