New Vaccuum

When we first moved into this place (or maybe it was before that), my parents bought us a vacuum cleaner. It was, we thought, a serviceable thing. It cleaned our carpets for several years until the hose wore out, and then we duct-taped it up again and we used it for another couple of years. But finally, it was time to replace it, so last week we went out and bought a new one. I was dreading it because vacuum cleaners have always seemed tremendously expensive to me. We went to Sears and bought a Eureka "ez kleen" in a metallic red finish. I mention that because that's about how much I know about vacuum cleaners. Like that old joke about asking someone what kind of car they have and the answer is "red".

Anyhow, the primary features of this new equipment are (a) it's red, (b) it's very small, (c) it was super cheap ($91, and apparently it's on sale for even less this week), and (d) it's bagless, with a transparent dirt-cup in the front where you can see the dust and dirt and gunk that you vacuum up whirling around like crazy.

That last feature totally rocks. It makes vacuuming feel like you've achieved something. More like mowing the lawn. Face it, unless you've spilled a bag of cheezies on the floor, vacuuming isn't particularly satisfying, because at the end of the day you don't really have much to show for it. But no longer. With this new vacuum, you can see exactly how much crap has been pulled off your floor and, let me tell you, that can be an absolutely amazing amount. Both Stella and I were stunned at how much dust this thing can pull out of our two little patches of carpeting in a single session. We've only had the thing for a week and I've already emptied and cleaned it out twice, with a significant amount of dirt both times.

I never thought I'd be impressed with a vacuum cleaner, especially a $100 one, but life is full of surprises.

Navel Gazing

Seriously, are we so short of worthwhile things to write about that this sort of nitpicking is interesting to some people? Maybe it's just me, but whether or not the space next to my selection gets included in the copy/paste output does not rise to the level of a 1500 word essay, unless you've just quit your day job and have nothing better to whine about today.

My view: the behavior that Gruber (whom I respect enormously, and who is a much, much better writer than I) is bleating about is completely consistent with text editing of Roman languages in general. He's apparently annoyed that NSTextView doesn't understand that he was pasting into an HTML context. Well, he was using MarsEdit, so I suppose that's a reasonable complaint, but he should direct his complaint at that application, and not at Apple's framework engineers. Apple's frameworks do a lot of things tailored for the general case. If you're writing an app that edits source code, you might want to override particular behaviors. I'll bet that MarsEdit engineers never gave any thought to smart "C/C/P" behavior and just used what they got for free (free!) from Apple. Their mistake, but TextEdit and other human-language editing apps benefit from this sort of behavior, and it's just dumb to suggest that the needs of a special-purpose app like MarsEdit trumps the more common case.

Another Year, Another Sun Run

It was probably 1997 when I did my first Sun Run -- taking part in the race as part of a company team. I remember starting the race with one of my friends from work, and losing him somewhere around the halfway point. I remember feeling quite a bit of pain (no training). I remember stopping to walk and then starting to run again when I realized that the pain didn't get any better and it was going to take me longer to finish if I walked. I remember waiting for the crowd to thin out, and it never happening. I remember very sore knees afterwards. But the thing I remember most is crossing the finish line. Exhilarating! Even in a fairly manageable race like a 10K, you just can't beat the feeling of having accomplished something tangible.

I'm running my 9th Sun Run tomorrow. Over the years it's become more of a solitary thing. I don't think there was any sort of organized group at work -- nobody was talking about it, and the friends that I used to run with aren't participating any more for various reasons. I still get jazzed by the crowd energy so I like to get up and run around downtown once a year, but I do miss the social aspect of the race that made it more of an event than simply a way to get 10K under my belt and listen to my iPod for an hour.

Scourge of the Internet

My wife got a phone call from her aunt saying that our website was down. "Odd," I thought, but when I checked it I too saw the "Bandwidth exceeded" message meaning that something bad had happened. A little nosing around revealed the answer: Trackback pings! Lots of them. maybe 8000 or so, and for some reason they caused 4GB of traffic over the past couple of days, which is double my previous maximum.

Turns out that I had inadvertently left Moveable Type configured to allow Trackback pings on some of my blog entries, and some spammer bombarded me. Loser. I was faced with the task of navigating the Movable Type interface to try and find and delete 8000 spam links. This is not a pleasant thought, and after manually deleting about 400 of them I gave up and went and manually deleted the database file (10M or so). That's probably the beginning of the end for Movable Type and me. I doubt that torching a database file is a very good idea. Unfortunately I've got a lot of 'content' on MT that I'd like to archive somehow before I remove it from the server completely. Of course, I guess that's a problem with Blogger too -- the content is easily accessible from the web, but as far as I can tell, not too easy to move around. I faced a similar problem when I wanted to move from MT to Blogger. The obvious "export from MT/import to Blogger" functionality was just missing.

Somebody should write that program.

Update: It turns out that (almost) half the problem is already solved. Moveable Type does indeed have a very convenient export function that has allowed me to preserve my old content for posterity on my own media. Now I just have to figure out what to do with it.

Thoughts: Shake Hands With The Devil

Last year, during my year dedicated to getting stuff done, I made a conscious decision to not plan to do a lot of reading. I've gone most of my life with a massive "to-read" list -- I think most of us do. Every time we hear of an entertaining or worthwhile book, we sort of mentally put it on our list (which is easy) until we have this massive, unachievable mental list that we couldn't ever possibly read our way through. A few years ago, I found something called the "Lifetime Reading List" which is a list of 100+ "must read" books, which forced me to add a whole bunch of books to my reading list that I had never even heard of, simply because they were on someone else's list.

Insanity. I'm a busy guy and I don't have time to do a lot of recreational reading. I tossed out my list and set myself a reasonable goal: one book a month. I don't get a ton of time to read, but I figured I could handle that, so last January, I made myself a list consisting of some of the stuff from previous reading lists, some popular/well-publicized stuff, and -- because I've always wanted to read more Canadian literature -- I picked three winners of the previous year's Governor-General's awards as likely worthwhile Canadian literature. I actually ended up with a list of 13 books, but I figured I might be able to sneak the extra book in, since some of them were pretty short.

No such luck, of course. Things come up -- for example an ex-colleague of mine wrote and published a fantasy novel, and I simply had to read that (one line review: I looked forward to reading it every night in bed), and other things came up besides. Plus, I spent months working on some particularly good/thick/tedious stuff (Neil Stephenson) and well, by the end of the year I had only cleared about half my list.

This year, I updated my strategy -- stuck with the dozen book goal, but left some empty slots for incidental titles that would force themselves into the list, plus I determined to finish last year's list. Which brings us to Shake Hands With The Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda by L. Gen Romeo Dallaire.

I think that everyone needs to read a book like this every now and then, just to come face to face with the reality of life in some parts of the world. Gen. Dallaire was the Canadian Force Commander of the United Nations' UNAMIR mission to Rwanda, during the genocide of 1994, where 800,000 people were murdered -- most of them absolutely horribly -- in the space of about 100 days as a rebel force of exiled Rwandans fought government forces for control of the small central African nation.

Dallaire is not a great writer. He dwells on seemingly insignificant details, takes far too much care to give credit and kudos to everyone who could possibly deserve any and lays out the day-to-day of his mission in a manner I generally found quite dull. But the story he tells is compelling nonetheless: a tale of viciousness, inhumanity, bloodthirsty tyrants, courageous soldiers, military genius, bureaucratic incompetence, Western indifference and malice.

The book leaves me with a few matchbook-cover thoughts: (a) The high-level structures that run our planet -- the UN, national governments and the like -- are almost entirely ineffectual, corrupt and largely incapable of dealing with an atrocity like this, (b) I have a more respect now for those who devote themselves to military service than I did before. Gen. Dallaire has my respect and admiration -- there's no way that I could have put up with the conditions he and his staff worked in. About twenty times during the narrative I muttered under my breath "Why don't you just leave? Quit! Go home". But he didn't. He stuck it out until he was literally mentally ill from the stress and horror of dealing with that situation with next-to-no support from his organization (c) the book's subtitle "The failure of humanity in Rwanda" is a misnomer. I don't think the events in Rwanda represent a failure of humanity, but simply an example of what humanity is all about. We flatter ourselves impossibly when we use the word 'humanity' as a synonym for 'kindness' or 'benevolence'. Humanity is a vicious and unforgiving lot. In terms of sheer numbers, the Rwandan genocide is tied for only 21st place in the top 30 atrocities of the last century.

Anyway. Heady stuff. Worth reading.

A Christian and an Atheist

I have to write some more about this podcast, which is somehow one that I listen to occasionally and find both maddening and worth listening to. Perhaps it's because I dislike it so much that I listen to it. The two hosts of the show seem like reasonable, intelligent people, but in practice they each do such a poor job of representing their sides of whatever they're talking about that when I'm listening I often feel like screaming.

Of the two, the atheist seems to be making a better presentation than the christian, who is virtually incoherent when he really gets going. To his credit is quick to say so when he knows he doesn't know what he's talking about, but by the amount of completely garbled thought he emits, he hasn't figured out how recognize when his brain lapses into neutral.

But still, I applaud these two guys because they're talking about philosophy, and not enough people take this stuff seriously these days. Ultimately, thinking is good.

Interestingly, while looking up the URL above, I found another podcast called the Christian and the Atheist (why do the Christians always come first :-) ?). I may have to give those guys a listen and see how they do on this topic.