Since I moved, every time I have the urge to buy a book (physical or Kindle) that I think I will read only once, I instead go to sfpl.org and see if the book can be rented. It’s a great way to be slightly more careful with your money and conserve living space.

Granted, there are times you want to have an artifact. For this I’m trying to use the Kindle, because I don’t want to move boxes of books again if I can help it.

The only down side with the sfpl.org site was that it didn’t preserve my login data. Regrettably, the site login ID is an un-memorable string of digits and my strong password is equally impossible to remember. You can access your account directly by making a bookmark with the following format.

https://sflib1.sfpl.org:443/patroninfo?code=patronID&pin=loginPassword

Obviously, storing your login ID and password in a bookmark presents some security issues, so caveat lector.

Add this file: /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.postgres.launchd.plist

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN"
        "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd";>
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    
    <key>Label</key>
      <string>org.postgres.launchd</string>
    <key>Disabled</key>
      <false/>
    <key>UserName</key>
      <string>_pgsql</string>
    <key>GroupName</key>
      <string>_pgsql</string>
    <key>Program</key>
      <string>/usr/local/pgsql/bin/postmaster</string>
      <key>EnvironmentVariables</key>
      <dict>
              <key>PGDATA</key>
              <string>/usr/local/pgsql/data/</string>
      </dict>
    <key>RunAtLoad</key>
      <true/>
</dict>
</plist>

You can then load it and unload it by issuing:

$ sudo launchctl load /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.postgres.launchd.plist
$ sudo launchctl unload /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.postgres.launchd.plist

Now get to making some great Rails stuff!

Barton will set up an aspect of performing Shakespeare and call forth the performers to illustrate the concept under discussion. Occasionally other actors of the company toss in observations and methodological notes. In that capacity the actor Alan Howard had come to notice as a particularly reserved if not nebbishly. In his collar and sweater and large brown plastic frames he was almost reminiscent of a mid-career Jarvis Cocker.

But then Mr. Howard was called forth to demonstrate his solicitation to the widow of his slain enemy, Queen Anne, in the guise of Richard III. Free of smoldering cigarette and spectacles the camera comes in on a tight close-up of another man: his body was crouched, his eyes glinted with malice, and his tonguue turned into a triangle, like an arrow’s point. He hobbled, crab like to his quarry and professed his love.

While this was noticable, the moment of truth is that the lady Anne spits on Richard, square in the face and Howard betrayed no wince, no flinch as her saliva sat fat on his face. Oddly, his eyes seemed to burn slightly brighter, this facial defilement being nothing but a mere annoyance on the hatiching of his plan.

He was stunning to watch.

In any case, the show, thus far, has been a joy to watch and I recommend it.

Let me leave with a review of Howard’s performance in this role:

Alan Howard’s Richard must surely rank among the few truly outstanding interpretations of this fascinating and exacting role seen during the last decade or so.

This Richard, the very epitome of bitter malevolence, heaves and wrestles his twisted body about a dark cavern of a stage, his vicious tongue as sharp and menacing as the dagger that is rarely far from his hand, and with which he points his vicious verbal barbs.

His mind as twisted as the body he so loathes and resents, he weaves his verbal spells around his victims with the cunning of a snake and the devilish impishness of a medieval Quilp.

From: http://www.alanhoward.org.uk/richard3.htm

It has been a long established problem with the communications plans of the Democrats that, unlike the Republicans, their nuanced messages simply do not distill succinctly to a bumper-sticker platform. Want to know what Republicans (pace amici, I differentiate between Republicans and Conservatives) stand for? Try this out:

Traditional Values. Low Taxes. Small Government. Strong military.

Guiding, succinct, and can fit easily with room to spare on the back of your Tahoe. Try that with a Democratic stance. Take, say, the particularly thorny issue of gay marriage. The Republican formulation is “TRADITIONAL VALUES,” leaving it pretty clear that their platform is a “No” on that one. But what’s the Democratic stance? “Well, we note that the objective fact is that marriage is a ceremony performed on top of a civil recognition of the granting of a marriage license, so in fact no one really has a marriage. You technically have a civil union whose paperwork is signed by an officiant with a state-recognized right so to do, but who also, in many cases, is a representative of a religious order…”. Undoubtedly someone who considers the matter could be led to the same point of view, but who’s, honestly, going to stay awake that long or fight their gut response long enough to allow their mind to be changed? If the R’s can put their platform on a bumper sticker, the D’s would have to print it on police tape and wrap it around their Prius nine times.

Ergo, match made in heaven. Tom could give the D’s the succinctness to, as the rhetorical scholar Foghorn J. Leghorn once said, “Spit it out, Son!”

Case in point, in the article dated 23 January 2010, Friedman gives these one-liners:

” What the country needs most now is not more government stimulus, but more stimulation. We need to get millions of American kids, not just the geniuses, excited about innovation and entrepreneurship again.

• Obama should have made 2009: the year of innovation, the year of making our pie bigger, the year of “Start-Up America.”

• The best way to counter the Tea Party movement, which is all about stopping things, is with an Innovation Movement, which is all about starting things. (bene scriptu!)

• Without inventing more new products and services that make people more productive, healthier or entertained — that we can sell around the world — we’ll never be able to afford the health care our people need, let alone pay off our debts.

• You want more good jobs, spawn more Steve Jobs.

It helps that I agree with Friendman’s conclusion: Grow America by business and communities organizing together to create commercial successes. It’s pretty much the pat Silicon Valley liberal / independent software hacker mantra.

1. The greatest “Tonight Show” presenter ever was Johnny Carson
2. Conan gets the axe because NBC sucks and he will go somewhere else
3. Jay has ruined audience goodwill and “The Tonight Show” will fail spectacularly
4. Jimmy Fallon will have a “tragic accident”
5. Carson Daly will be left the lone man standing

Check and Mate, sir

Proof

They’re both named “Carson” for a reason.

Marla… the little scratch on the roof of your mouth that would heal if only you could stop tonguing it, but you can’t.

From “Fight Club”

There are those people, those special, special people who as much as you find reason(s) to be repelled by them — their boorish talk, their penchant for racist assumptions, the way they treat special moments of your life as a roadbump on the way to saying what they wanted to say, the way they indiscreetly ogle women as you talk to them — somehow you just can’t excise their cancerous character from your life.

You damn them when you go home: “I can’t believe she said that, that snarky bitch” or “Did you see him talk the entire time to her D-cups?” and yet somehow, someway they fascinate us with their disregard for the rules. I’m pretty sure this has something to do with the power psyochpaths have among the general population, as an aside.

Making the curiosity cocktail all the more potent, occasionally, amidst all that slovenliness or booziness or smacking of gum or incessant smoking, is a silver beam of heroism, brilliance, style, or sex appeal that casts a glamour on you. “She donated how much to the children?” or “He saved the old lady by rushing her in his arms to the ER?”

You question your assumptions and hold on to a crumb of hope that they were really more like this good person and less like that hideous being you dislike. If only you could get more of that good quality and less of the other. Perhaps the only solution is to hang around them more so that you can see these great qualities. Yes, that’s right.

…And then that Jeckyll side comes back out and they infuriate and disappoint you anew.

I don’t know what the DSM-IV specification for this type of personality is, or what the specification is for the sucker who is mesmerized thereby, but it describes my relationship with the œuvre of Ayn Rand. She beguiles and then revolts me with a one-two rhythm befitting unto windshield wipers.

She has a seductive way of writing about the poetry of the industrial age. She describes coke being blasted in industrial funaces, burning crucibles of steel pouring golden, flaming liquified power as (handsome!) men in hard hats look on — square-jawed and draped in the sartorial perfection of the “Mad Men” era. And these titans, these thinkers, these doers, these über-beings bearing strong names like Howard, Dominique, and Dagny, they do great things and bend before nothing. They pay no mind to sycophants or reputation, they do what’s right by their own measure for their own benefit and don’t let any morality of bad faith “Bad faith (existentialism) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia”) slow the locomotive of their own genius. Reading of their lives and their passionate existences can run a reader to the top of a lofty peak where s/he inhales pure air and see the sunrise of a better tomorrow.

But for these visions and vistas, for imagining Angelina Jolie as Dagny in “Mad Men” garb in the mini-series version, you may almost miss the philosophical system underneath that has some uncomfortable ends. State-run hospitals for, as Rand called them, “sub-normals” should be shut down. In her portrayals, female sexual fulfillment necessarily borders on hero-worship and effectively calls for her to seek to be overpowered. And those living through these contracting economic times certainly have reason to pause at Rand’s philosophy’s suggestion that a more deregulated economy is needed.

Like Marla from “Fight Club” cited above, in my teens I couldn’t shake this (sick?) fascination with Rand’s world. This lead to reading Rand’s non-fiction work and reading Barbara Branden’s memoir “The Passion of Ayn Rand.” Like an overoptimistic girlfriend, I thought that perhaps by understanding Rand’s history better I could find a way to get rid of those nasty bits and have her poetry without the nausea.

If anything, the biography made it harder to tolerate Rand’s reasoning lived as her own life. She would not give up smoking until she had lung cancer owing to “lack of sufficient evidence.” She forced her husband and her protégé’s wife to accept a open affair (I believe that’s called “open marriage” these-a-days) between her and the protégé, Nathaniel Branden. In later years, Her YouTube videos show a harsh, severe person who’s tolerance for dissent is non-existent and whose favorite tools for debate were refusal to engage, weeding out dissenting parties, and Soviet-style “disownments.” Amidst these character assassinations and purges she radiates a Nixonian aura of paranoia.

When I heard that a new Rand biography was in release I again felt that urge to visit Rand-land and see if an intrepid researcher had somehow found something that could make it all hang together for me. Heller’s biography is well-researched, revealing, and entirely compelling. Heller starts with Rand’s youth in Russia, where she sees the collapse of the Tsar, the rise of Kerensky, and the Bolshevik authoritarian crackdown and takeover. Heller also gives full consideration to Rand, née Rosenbaum’s Jewish identity. Her father’s business was seized by the Bolsheviks and she had to endure the debilitating “tolerance” edicts that ghettoized and marginalized Jews and generally used them as a source of money when the Tsar’s coffers ran light. Heller’s research into Rand’s mother (“a little bit pink”), a social climber and Communist collaborator explains the callow, infantilizing mother character so often present in Rand’s work. Rand’s female role model exploration is paired with an examination of the roots of her masculine paragon. Rand’s sexual / heroic / intellectual male protagonists (in Rand’s thought the intellectual man is the sexual ideal and is never separate from his own sense of heroism) derive from her favorite teenage books: French picaresques where dashing Western Europeans subjugate voodoo powers in darkest Africa, darkest India, or in the wastes of the lands of The Great Game. These facets of a tumultuous childhood full of idealistic reasoning and hero-identification help explain some of the wooden, absolutist characterization seen in her novels.

Heller’s research also presents how Rand was the benificiary of altruistic kindness of others. This is decidedly against the Rand ur-myth. Rand’s relatives in America shelter her, help her out, and provide her some of the opportunities that give her the chance encounters that net her a career in screenwriting. While it’s important to note that Rand never had anything handed to her and her own spark and initiative certainly were the core personality traits that allowed her to advance, she did not do it in a vacuum, an orphan struggling entirely unaided.

Heller’s presentation of the intellectual content of We the Living, The Fountainhead, and Atlas Shrugged all provide a fair synopsis of the philosophical underpinnings of the books and Heller deftly identifies and traces the thread of “a Romantic ‘sense of life’” that Rand considered the basis for living well and thinking clearly. Heller cogently presents this system and manages to do so without sounding awed or pronouncedly skeptical. She describes these ethical systems with the neutrality of someone explaining a catalytic converter and her restraint and balance is to be lauded.

After the zenith of Atlas Shrugged’s publication, the rest of the tale is anticlimax. The superstar, the public intellectual begins to be surrounded by sycophants and intellectual hollow men. Before long they make a world around her where everyone walks on eggshells, everyone agrees with She Who Must be Obeyed, and dissenters are cut loose of their social support system as a punishment for invoking her ire. While I’ll stop short of calling it a “cult,” the occasional insistence of breaking family ties, leaving spouses, or being forced to tolerate the sexual infidelities (“Hey there, Bob, Larry there is Suzy’s romantic ideal, so, uh, can you arrange to be home late on Thursday night? Don’t worry, it’s not infidelity, it’s her being true to her Romantic sense of life. Mm’kay?”) definitely shows a dangerous insularity.

It was only when I considered this third act that I understood Heller meant “the world [Rand] made” not as the world of the aspiring, selfish individualist portrayed in her writing, but the world of hollow toadies and purges. The world she made, indeed.

But where did this leave me in my quest to attempt to sort out this maddening woman’s writing? Heller helped me find roots in her thinking, continuity in her actions, and helped me see the person more as the person in herself minus the reverential apologia of the remnants of her circle. Rand was brave and right in many ways. She correctly limned Communism’s philosophical implications, she decried racism (as uncaptalistic!), she dared be an open atheist, she portrayed strong female protagonists more interested in careers than suburbs with children and iceboxes in the 40’s, she was pro-choice, and she dared bring discussions of “rougher” sexual desire to the popular mind in some ways heralding the identity politics coming in the 70’s and 80’s. But she was also a real, vital, person. A person who cherished rationality so dearly that the hint that she was irrational was a slap to the face. She was a person who clung so tightly to the syllogism that she couldn’t see her blind spots. She overused amphetamines. In short, she was a person of her times, a times a contradictory mess.

Accordingly her works reflect this person. The works are both sublime and horrific, hopeful and cynical, egalitarian and oligarchaïc. I think perhaps time and Heller have made it more easy for me to accept that beautiful work can have ugly side-effects and brilliant people can have tragic flaws. If anything, Heller presents us Rand in full human-scale relief, and I think the young Rand would have very much appreciated that.

I look back at that and think “Gosh, 2006.” The world was so different then. Lauren and I were in the earliest, most tentative parts of our relationship. We were going to test the strength of our relationship in the crucible of relocation, confusion, and new things.

And I was weary of the Bay Area. I was so tired of the traffic, of the dumpy airport, of vast fields of nothing to do. I was tired of the weight I was gaining, I was tired of the rain, tired of the struggle to make ends meet, just plain old tired. I needed to get away a while.

And I did. I ran back to the place that’s my healing place: Austin. Austin worked its magic, its lazy river heart washed out the toxic bits of mean and hard that had become embedded in me. Yoga, distance, Ruby, quiet, and the steady growing bond between Lauren and I changed me.

And then came schooling again, I reconnected with the learning, growing heart of me. I know this is not a part that I can ever leave to languish ever again. I re-learned mathematics and computer science. I learned new programming lanugages and then came Latin.

And I met wonderful people, from Ryan and Jamie, Matt and Nicole, Alfredo and Nicole, Marcus, Juan and Letty, my sister and brother-in-law and their sweet dog, the programmers of Sodade coffee house, my office mates…all of you animate the days of events and in giving yourself to my life gave my life color and flourish. I saw my sister wed, the gentlest-minded man I knew as a student wed and bring forth a sweet little girl, my best friend married and now has a young son. The sister of a friend I lost and I found each other again, and her life seems to be blossoming beautifully, a marriage looming next year. It’s been wonderful to be close to you all to see these events and positive unfoldings.

And I finished years-long work at my job. Things that were impossible, and unthinkable, slowly stones were broken by the slow dropping of water.

And adversities came: lung infections and appendicitis, but Lauren and I nursed each other, and those great friends mentioned above were there too.

Ultimately my animus returned back to the way it was in 2000 when I left Austin.

And in my world came new friends. We danced the nights away to the pulse of swing, we even dared Karaoke, I ran a 5K. I grew back into the healthy person I had let myself slip from. OK, well, I admit I still love the Chik-Fil-A too much and the Tex-Mex as well.

But this healing place, as big as it is, as tender and loving as it is — it and I need to separate for a while. I need to leave the summer heat and I want to go back to the bigness of a city, the biggest city I’ve ever loved: San Francisco.

When I was in 6th grade my Dad took my family there. The diners, the air, the bay, the tall buildings. I’ve loved the city on the Golden Gate since I before I was a teenager. It feels like going back is just giving into a fate that I’ve been fighting for a decade or two.

As I look back and consider going back to the place I’d lived before, I have to ask “Who was I then when I lived there?” My old romomate is now a father with a beautiful family. My haunts are not for he nocturnal eyeing and trading of phone numbers any more. I feel a break from my amor fati, my sickness unto death, my existentialist metaphor. So many of the things I sought there once I seek no more.

It’s a new day, a new time in this unknown but familiar city. I see something new this time, I see a place of boundless opportunity. It’s to that San Francisco I go. It’s there I go with the most loving girl I’ve ever known, it’s there I go to make, what I hope will be, our home.

And it’s scary there, the stakes high, the competition fierce. But I know that I can’t stay in my beloved Austin forever, I need the bigger confluence of this far-away place.

To the city I must say farewell, to the friends we have here, you are the best part of the friendly heart of my native state. You come with us in photos and memories and cards. I suspect my next post will be written with the Pacific to my left. Merry Christmas to all and Happy New Year as well.

Let me close with the opening of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a work I studied this year whose beauty and wisdom is only matched by its silliness and brutality.

My mind moves me to speak of changed forms in new bodies

Ego ipse quoque mutabo

Ah, Verbot, you cute little guy, with your hard plastic shell head, your friendly pseudo-Japanese visage, and your weird white microphone with a dangling black cable antenna… Thanks to incessant advertising during Transformers, everyone knew the sacred name of this proto-Cylon. Verbot was undoubtedly the toy of aspiration in my 4th grade Christmas year. I even recall in art class that the Y bechromosomèd were DRAWING verbot on those vast expanses of manilla paper. I think it would be fair to say that we had Verbot on the brain.

Having incredibly generous parents, come the dawn of the 25th of December, I had a Verbot.

Here’s how it would work.

1. Turn on Verbot
2. Hold in a chest button that corresponded to an action
3. Repeat the command you wanted to associate to the action
4. Hope that the solid red LED would light, indicating successful recording
5. More often than not it would take 3-4 repetitions to take
6. Now, attempt to repeat in proper voice, tone, and timbre the sounds that you associated to each command. A typical session would be:
7. Forward. Forward. No !@%!@!@$!@% I !@$!@%!@ said !@%$!@% you stupid !@%$!@%. Right. Forward. Forward. Pick Up. Pick-úp. Píck-up. Lift. Forward. Forward. NOTE: Cursing is optional, usually on the part of the parent wondering why the heck Santa brought this stupid !@$!@%!@% that doesn’t work.
8. Realize that 6 commands is not greatly entertaining after about 30 minutes.
9. Power Verbot down
10. Think of something cool you meant to do with Verbot, usually about 40 seconds after you slid his switch to OFF.
11. Loop.

I recall on Christmas Day eve, my father and I used Verbot to pick up a mini Pepperidge farm canister of parmesean cheese and move it across the dining table. That’s right, Verbot, petit garçon.

These were the good times.

My father seemed to have better luck with the Verbot because he understood what it was like to have an object of limited understanding, few interesting activities, and limitless capacity to ignore basic instructions: he had 2 kids already.

Speaking in level tones he seemed to be able to get Verbot to stack blocks, something like brain surgery with a cauliflower stalk. What can I say, anyone who grew up coaxing extra horses out of a GTO (think Luke Skywalker) in the canyons of Amarillo must have had a John Connor like grasp of machines.

But as all toys invariably go, at one point Verbot ended his playble life and was superseded by the next wave of kiddie conditioning.

I suspect that Verbot may have been the tipping point for many of us. Combining Verbot (effectively a Turtle) with an introduction to LOGO gave, I think, a generation its first taste of practical robotics. Just last month at Rubyconf there was a session on programming mini-controllers with Arduino.

I wonder how many of us first had our imagination kindled by these ‘bots.

Viva Verbot!

I’ve heard a great number of bands, but the truth is, I haven’t really listened to music in years.

It’s one of those questions you’re not supposed to say “No” to. It’s up there with, “Isn’t that queso good,” or “Isn’t $STARLET_NAME hot?” Once I used to put music on and do nothing but listen.

Later I would work, code, or work and code with it on. Now, I simply can’t bear anything with words or narrative anywhere near me when I work - unless I didn’t choose it (i.e. at a coffee shop) .

No, I’ve not listened to music in years.

Next week I’m attending RubyConf where I will run in the Rubyconf 5K &emdash; my first! I’m a bit anxious about being last, but on the other hand, I’m not going to be sleeping in late and bopping down to the raft o’ donuts unlike most, so I can feel good about whatever my time is.