The following are short essays, some personal, on whatever comes to
mind. Basically, I'm mimicking Montaigne's Essays here, but with
much less intriguing content and style and far shorter entries.
Longer, more academic focused essays may be found on my wiki.
If you use a RSS reader and would like to keep updated, please use my
feed.
An Open Science Example
I recently had a paper published that was a few years in the making, and at this point, I think this paper is the best I've done at applying an open science process. I think to do better, I'd register the research at OSF or elsewhere when designing the study.
The open science goal here is not only to make the various research products accessible (i.e., open), but also to document the process from as near to the beginning of the project to the end. Documenting the process fosters reproducibility but also creates a kind of chain of custody (not in the legal sense of the term, though).
The code and the data are stored on GitHub. The repository for the project is titled medline-longitudinal. I used Zenodo to create DOIs for the GitHub repository. There are two DOIs for the project. The first one is the DOI for the project at the time I submitted the manuscript. The second DOI was created based on changes I made to the code based on peer review feedback. New DOIs for the Git repository are automatically created by Zenodo when I create a new release of the repository on GiHub. The current, final DOI is 10.5281/zenodo.4757516, and the prior DOI and repo version can be found on that Zenodo page.
Outside of publishing the paper, other communicative products exist. This includes a short paper that I gave at a conference near the start of this project when it was still a work in progress. The short paper is available at http://hdl.handle.net/2142/105316. I also gave a talk in the Fall 2020 semester at my College about this project, and I deposited the slides to my institutional repository. The talk is titled Functional Search Problems among MEDLINE Databases.
Finally, PLOS offered the ability to make my peer review history open for the paper. So all the peer review feedback and my responses are available on the PLOS ONE article page, and that article page also captures post-publication commentary, including any comments on social media and elsewhere. The bioRxiv preprint also displays any social media activity about the preprint.
I'm following the same process with another project that I'm working on right now. I think it's worked well.
My only wish is that I could submit non-Word submissions. I think journals should be able to take Markdown files, ODT (LibreOffice) files, or files created by research notebooks. This dominance of Word is annoying. Journals in my field often do accept LaTeX files, but it's been a while since I used LaTeX and I don't have much interest in taking it back up again.
Phoning It In
In a first for me, I phoned into a webinar today to give a talk. We did a test run a couple of days ago, and when I tried to connect to the video conferencing system, I was taken to a web page that said that I needed to use a supported system, which listed Linux as supported, but that does not in fact support Linux, which was confirmed to me when I called their technical support. What nonsense. Thus, to solve the issue, I phoned in the talk. Google Voice didn't work. I had to use my actual phone.
Anyway, it worked well. I put in some ear buds, called the webinar number, and gave the talk with some slides. The moderator had to change the slides for me, but I numbered them to make it easier. I think I forgot to say next slide a couple of times, but the moderator didn't say anything about that. I am grateful for their patience. Also, since I couldn't access the video conference, another moderator had to email me the questions that I received after the presentation. The whole thing was kind of hilarious. I never would have predicted that I would literally phone in a talk.
It was fun, too. I enjoyed talking about a project that I've been immersed in for a while and to receive great questions from attendees. However, it was weird because other than the people who asked questions, which were emailed to me after the talk was over but while the webinar was ongoing, I have no idea who attended. That added some extra oddity to the experience. And the whole thing felt like I was talking to the slides on my screen instead of to a room full of people, or to a room not full of many people. I think that last factor made it a bit easier on my nerves, though.
No Sudo For You
Learning moment: don't do sys admin work when you're distracted and
interrupted. I edited my sudoers file with sudo visudo,
but I messed up the syntax. Of course, visudo warned me of the
syntax error, but because of the distractions and interruptions, I saved the
file anyway. Running sudo afterward resulted in a segmentation
fault. And since this is Ubuntu, I didn't set up a root password. Oi! Things
would go downhill quickly if I couldn't manage the system.
In the olden days, I'd just reboot with a Live CD, mount the drive, and edit
the file. It would have been a simple fix because I only needed to delete two
lines. But the drive is encrypted via LUKS and also uses logical volumes. So
the challenge here was to boot with a Live CD, decrypt the drive, then mount
the correct volume and partition, and edit the sudoers file.
To solve this, I rebooted with the Live CD and once running, I opened
a terminal and did the following:
# locate partitions
sudo fdisk -l
# mount volume to /dev/mapper/myvolume
sudo cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sdb3 myvolume
# scan LVM volumes and choose the correct one
sudo vgscan
# activate the correct volume
sudo vgchange -ay vgubuntu
# locate root volume
sudo lvs
# mount partition (I think correct location; from memory)
sudo mount /dev/vgubuntu/root /mnt/
Once the partition was mounted, I could then fix the file:
sudo visudo -f /mnt/etc/sudoers
As usual, other people had similar problems and these were addressed on
Stack Overflow. The answers helped me solve this issue:
I'm super thankful this was my home computer and not some box that I connect to remotely.
The Liminal Space That Was
I don't think I'd ever come across the concept of liminal space until I read a recent article in The New Yorker on The Pleasant Head Trip of Liminal Spaces (and another article at Musée), even though, for as long as I can remember, I've been drawn to these kinds of spaces. As a young kid, I would wander around my grandfather's office building in search of these empty spaces. One summer when I was in college, I worked mornings as a janitor at a country club (and afternoons and evenings as a lifeguard there), and in my break during the day, when the main building was empty, I'd relax in these empty spaces that were abundant. Also during college, I worked at the creepiest of all liminal spaces. Every Friday night, from 11pm to 7am, I'd sit in the boiler room of the science building. My job was to monitor the boiler pressure gauges. I had a little black and white TV that received one and one-half channels. The boiler room, situated in the basement, was the size of a football field, and only my little corner was lit. Here in Lexington, there are a set of walking, covered bridges that connect several of the downtown buildings. The bridges and the parts of the building they are attached to are all liminal. These places can be eerie, and that's part of their attraction, but they also feel safe in their loneliness.
When I read those two articles linked to above, it dawned on me that this experience of a liminal space was what I experienced last spring when the pandemic shut most everything down and the once busy streets and parks emptied of much human presence. I'm not going to miss the pandemic and will be thankful when it's over, but that was the first time that an outside area in the middle of an urban area that was once quite busy felt like a liminal space, and it was sweet.
The Aha Moment
For several years I have been teaching a class on knowledge management, and I've based the course on a reading of Michael Polanyi's short book, The Tacit Dimension. In the process of teaching this course and reading other not so related literature, I developed a nascent thesis on a topic pertaining to open science and tacit knowing.
I wanted to explore this thesis this semester on my sabbatical. To do that, for the last few months I've been reading tons of literature. I've read much more Polanyi but also a good deal in the philosophy of science, on open science, information science, gestalt psychology, learning theory, educational technology, and more.
This has been great and helpful, but if someone had asked me for a detailed outline of my thesis, I would only have been able to give a halfway account. I simply wasn't fully there.
Then, in a perfect example of serendipity (an information encountering concept), I read an email that was mistakenly sent in response to an announcement on a small listserv that I follow. That email included a reference to a paper, which looked like it fit within the scope of my thesis. As I read the paper, my entire thesis opened up to me.
I opened up my text editor (Vim!), and in about twenty minutes, I wrote nearly a 1000 word series of 15 statements that work like a chained modus ponens. Each of these statements is supported by the research I read in the areas I listed above (philosophy of science, open science, etc.). Together, they support my overall thesis and serve as an outline for my book. Each statement will become a fully developed chapter.
I think (hope) this will be a good book, but regardless, I doubt I would have gotten here if not for the sabbatical. I've had the nascent idea of my thesis for years, but there was no way I could have developed it without the time to immerse myself in the literature that I needed to read for it. The day-to-day work of academia just does not support deep immersion into a topic. That's a whole other discussion.
But also, I'm just really happy that it all finally came together in a very cohesive and coherent way. I also wanted to take a moment to document the main process of it all. It feels great to get to this moment.
Now comes the hard part.
Mix It Up
Sometimes it seems Jacques Pépin makes dishes on his show, Cooking At
Home, with whatever ingredients he has on hand. It's as if he's making
a show about what he's cooking for dinner that evening. I love it.
Case in point, in one episode, as he demonstrated how to make hummus, he
noted that he was out of tahini, and so he substituted peanut butter instead.
And I thought to myself, "oh of course that
would work. That's brilliant."
Lesson learned, Chef! We ran out of peanut butter, but we had tahini. So
I made a tahini and jelly sandwich, and that works really well also.
Wrong Hard Drive
A couple of months ago I wrote about problems I was having with lag on my
desktop computer. It seems that some (not entirely all) of the keyboard lag
issues were fixed when I worked on it, but still, sometimes I'll hold down
a key, like the letter s, and nothing happens on the screen, and then
20 s characters will appear. It's annoying. Furthermore, the computer
is still quite slow at a lot of tasks. Anything R related, for example, takes years to
run, and my data is not all that big.
I dove into the comments section for the hard drive that I got, and there
were some
comments about the hard drive using SMR
technology. I had not heard about SMR before, and this info was not listed
anywhere on the specs. But I searched the model number ST2000DM005
and found that it was true that I'm using an SMR drive.
Based on the comments that I've read, SMR can cause lots of slowness. I'm
not hardware smart, but folks
seem to think that because of that and because of the way that SMR writes
data, it's better used for archival and storage purposes, when writing to disk
is minimized, and not for main operating system use.
Also, since I'm using Fedora 33,
I accepted the default Btrfs
file system. I can't get a straightforward answer about how well Btrfs works
with SMR, but some people seem to think they
get along well, if used for read and not write intensive purposes.
I asked for a replacement drive and am happy that I will get to replace the
drive with an SSD drive. The other problem with the SMR drive is that it's
super loud, distractingly so. The SSD will take away the noise and should speed
up the computer quite a bit. I'm looking forward to it. I'll pass the SMR drive
to the person who provides technical help in our office, and so at least it'll
get used.
Lessons learned, especially about hardware, which I don't pay much attention
to nowadays. This desktop is eight years old, but it's still beefy enough, and
I'm happy that with minimal investment, it should last quite a while
longer.
Larry McMurtry
I saw today that Larry McMurtry passed. I am sad about this. My high school
English teacher, Billie Bailey, introduced me to his books. I remember the
classroom that we were in when this happened. I remember Ms. Bailey's smile
because she knew she was offering me something special with this introduction.
Ms. Bailey was also a major influence in my life. I shall write about her
someday.
I can't be sure but I believe the first McMurtry book I read was All My
Friends Are Going to Strangers. Or it might have been Texasville,
but I don't think so. Whichever one, I was immediately hooked. McMurtry's
melancholy connected to mine. Straight to my soul. And his humor was outsized,
like the Texas I knew then. No author has made me laugh or cry as much as he
has. Moving On and Terms of Endearment would yank those
emotional chains.
I read most of his books in Texas, but I have a nice memory reading The
Desert Rose at my grandparents' house in Missouri. I miss my
grandparents.
I regret not ever making it to his bookstore in Archer City, but I don't
think it was in Texas yet by the time I left the first time in 1991.
Thank you to all the authors who make worlds and who capture their truth,
which if done well, is all our truth, too. Thank you to the teachers and
librarians who connect us to these worlds and truths. Thank you, Larry
McMurtry, for helping to shape who I am.
Professor Suda
A couple days ago I learned that one of my favorite undergraduate professors
passed away.
I was really fortunate to have David Suda as a professor and mentor when
I was at Monmouth College. It's been 25 years since I graduated, but I can
easily recall approaching his office in the basement floor of Wallace Hall,
peeking through the open door, and asking if he could talk with me about
whatever, my thesis or what to do after graduation. He was generous with his
time and patient with me, and I remain grateful for that.
David Suda had a powerful intellect and a range of talents, and he was kind,
laid back, funny, approachable, and humble. He delivered consistently engaging
lectures on aesthetics, the self, Russian literature, ancient Greek thinking,
Jewish philosophy, and more. I have a copy of the book he published, The Moving Image: Immutability,
Metaphors, and the Time Clocks Tell, and cited it in an article that was
published this month. The book possesses all the earmarks of books that I love
most. It draws from a swath of literature, literary and philosophical. It
connects ideas from the sciences and humanities. It is reflective and
beautifully written. I learn from it each time I read from it, and I am glad to
be able to revisit his thoughts through it.
Professor Suda, I hope you had a good life. Thank you for your time.
Another Anniversary
I can only imagine that it is maybe, just maybe, appropriate to storm
someone's home if (A) it is a war zone, and/or (B) someone's life is in
immediate danger and the success of a rescue is very likely; and that in either
of those cases, the decision to storm a home would come only after absolutely
all peaceful options have been thoroughly, thoroughly exhausted.
Given that (B) was not the case last year, then I believe that it must be
that (A) is true. That's the injustice.
Peace to you, Breonna Taylor.
One Year
Tomorrow marks one year since quarantine started for us. We had our last
in-person faculty meetings on March, Friday the 13, 2020 and found out that
we'd be working remotely henceforth. As I packed up stuff in the office
afterwards, a colleague stopped by to say goodbye and to chat for a second on
their way out, and I remember saying, "see you in the fall." I meant fall
2020.
The university plans to return to normal operations next year. I am
surprised to find that I am torn about returning to campus. I look forward
working in a quiet atmosphere again, even though the office can have its own
set of interruptions, and to see my colleagues, but I love being around my
family.
It's not that I don't need breaks every so often and that they've rarely
come this last year. It's difficult to be cooped up in a small home with
several young persons. But I love these people and will miss having them around
during the day. Even when it's super crazy and clamorous in this house, like it
is in this instant, and when it feels like their turbulence matches that of
a hurricane, like it feels right now, I'm still kind of smiling (even if it's
only on the inside!). But the little persons need a brighter and more social
future, all my family does, and I hope that begins sooner than later for
them.
I miss the family I grew up with, too. I'm impatient to see them, and I hope
to this summer. It's not all good news on that front, but it still might be.
A few years ago I recorded oral histories with some older people in my wife's
extended family, as a kind of future gift to their children. I hope to do that
with my own extended family soon. It needs to be done, in fact. Time should not
be taken for granted anymore.
Peace and long life.
On Cooking Shows
I started to work in restaurants back in the late 1980s. My first job was in
fast food, and after I was fired from that job (funny story) I continued to
work as a cook off and on until I graduated from college.
When I was hired to manage a kitchen in the late 1990s, I started to devote
myself to becoming a good cook, and not just a good line cook. I was not ready
for that management job, but I embraced it. My general way of learning
something is to ignore everything else in the world and become consumed by the
topic. So that's what I did. I worked 16+ hour days and in my off-time,
I bought and read scores of used cookbooks and watched one of the relatively
few cooking shows that seemed to exist at the time, Great Chefs of the
World on PBS.
I still love Great Chefs of the World. That show taught me so much.
Each episode began with one chef who prepared an appetizer, a second chef
cooked a main dish, and a third chef presented a dessert. There was hardly any
talking. At times a chef would say something, quietly, but mostly it was the
presenter, Mary Lou Conroy, who spoke.
Conroy's voice and narration were even-keeled. It was a calm and quiet show
because the focus was exclusively on the cooking and the techniques involved.
It felt like watching golf but without any drama. There was this one time,
though, that I remember sitting on the edge of my seat during an episode, and
this was because I had detected some muted excitement in Conroy's voice. It was
unexpected and thrilling and entirely out of character.
What happened was that Conroy had introduced an Austrian (I think)
patisserie who was about to make a tart. Conroy's voice so slightly rose when
the patisserie free-handedly cut a circle out of some dough that fit perfectly
in a 15 or so inch tart pan. It was amazing to see, and I felt like I shared
Conroy's unexpected excitement just because it was so out of nowhere. I loved
her awe at watching someone at the top of their game.
Besides that show, I could watch Jacques Pépin all day. He is one of the few
people who cook on television who is able to show how it's done in a home
kitchen. "This mushroom doesn't usually go in this dish, but I had a mushroom
in my refrigerator and I needed to use it." That's the kind of thing he says.
He is beautiful to watch.
I could live without most other cooking shows. They feel overproduced and
loud.
Cook's Log, Fermentation Date 28
And on the twenty-eighth day, we opened the third jar of fermented cabbage,
and it was good.
It was very good. The first two batches, on days 9 and 11, were quite tasty,
but this batch was perfectly sour and the cabbage was still crunchy. I had
guessed otherwise because the cabbage had sunk quite low in the jar. Final
verdict: it is worth a longer fermentation.
This is the batch that contained some Serrano peppers, and boy were those
really tasty, too. The spiciness didn't impact the cabbage. I had expected
differently with this, too, and will definitely have to make a jar of those in
the future.
I'm curious how much more quickly they'll ferment in the spring and summer
when it'll be warmer in the house. Right now we keep the thermostat at 62 to
65, but in the spring and summer, it'll be in the seventies. That should hasten
the fermentation process a bit, I think.
Interesting twist: the youngest child didn't like the first batch, but they
ate a bunch from this batch. I was so happy with that!
On Alphabetizing
The other day I gave my oldest a pocket dictionary that I've had for years,
and then they asked me how to use it. I had fun talking about alphabetizing letter
by letter with them, and we worked through a few examples on paper. They've
literally kept the pocket dictionary in their pocket for the last several days,
and have only selected pants to wear that have pockets large enough to hold the
dictionary. The day after we talked about looking up words in the dictionary,
they came up to me to proudly let me know that they successfully looked up
their first word. It was wonderful.
I briefly wrote here a while ago that I
really love reference works and that I'd rather be researching them. As
a long-enough time generalist, topically and methodologically, I get tickled by
new ideas and questions to ask, but I think it's time that I focus on something
I really, really enjoy. Showing my oldest how to use a dictionary just simply
sparked that joy and reminded me of what I ought to be doing to make me a bit
happier.
I think I can make this new focus work and that it would contribute to the
literature. There's a lot to say and understand about our world that a deep
study of reference works would reveal. I'll prove it.
I only have one project left to complete before I get started full force.
It's time to wrap that up.
The Restorative Work of Reading Just Books
Yesterday was a bit of a free day for me, and it was lovely. I was able to
spend hours finishing Hope Jahren's book, Lab Girl. I loved this book
and the blend of memoir and science writing and saw that she had a second book
published last year (The Story of More), which has been added to my
reading list.
I've knocked out six books since I purchased my e-reader last fall and five
of them since the beginning of the year. This pace makes me happy. I've always
read a lot, but haven't read in this way in a while. When I was growing up, you
wouldn't catch me without a book in hand. Nowadays, though, mostly what I read
are articles (and some books) for research or articles on the web.
I largely stopped reading just books about eleven year ago. Two
things happened then: I started my PhD program and I read Cormac McCarthy's
The Road. It's obvious why seeking a PhD might disrupt non-work
related reading. The Road, though, that messed me up. It was such
a dark book, full of despair, that it left me incredibly sad for a long time
and it took a long time to recover and to want to read just books
again. I love McCarthy's works, but dang, The Road was an emotional
and spiritual doozy.
Reading just books has been the most restorative part of my
sabbatical so far and although I haven't selected these books I'm reading
lately because I thought they were or weren't related to my research, I am
finding that they are informing and inspiring it. In fact, Jahren's book has
given me a great idea about how to proceed on a topic that I'm studying and
also on how to proceed as a researcher and academic more broadly. So, thank
you, Professor Jahren for your story, your science, and for the
inspiration.
Cook's Log, Fermentation Date 11
This is posted four days late, but by popular demand, I opened the second
jar of fermented cabbage two days after I opened the first jar, which was
gobbled up in less than 12 hours.
The second jar contained cabbage, minced garlic, and sliced ginger. The
cabbage has a very lovely ginger flavor and aroma. I've eaten some ginger. It's
much milder than raw ginger, but it still has a bit of spiciness and crunch.
I also sliced it too thickly. Next time I should use the mandolin to slice it
as thin as paper.
The next jar has cabbage, garlic, ginger, and Serrano peppers. If I can keep
the kids at bay (well, the middle one is the ferment addict), then I'll try to
wait a couple more weeks until I open it. I don't think the batch will be spicy
because of the peppers. I had some raw and sliced up before I added some to
ferment, and they were a pretty mild bunch.
Font Lode
Update 3/11/2021: I had to make some changes. The code below is now correct.
Original 2/28/2021: I added some new fonts to this site from Font Squirrel last night and so
crossed off another item on my tinker list. For the navigation items and the
h2 and h3 heading HTML elements, I chose Open Sans. For the
h1 heading element, I selected Afta Serif, and for
the p paragraph element, I picked Liberation
Serif, which is the default font in LibreOffice. I tested a few serif fonts
for the p tag but thought Liberation Serif was the most
readable.
Update 3/11/2021: Instead of using the TTF and OTF fonts, as described
below, I used the Font Squirrel
Webfont Generator to generate WOFF files,
and then used those instead, along with the code that the generator
produces.
I downloaded the TTF and OTF font files from Font Squirrel
and uploaded them to my web space and placed them in a fonts
directory. In my CSS, I specified
the fonts with the following code:
Code generated by the Font Squirrel Webfont Generator:
The function creates an HTML copy of the markdown file, and in the process,
it strips the .md extension and replaces it with the
.html extension when creating the copy (hat
tip). If the markdown file were named post.md, then to get
the HTML version, I only have to type:
makepost post.md
Bash functions (and aliases) are so useful. For aliases, I'd rather not ever
type clear in the shell to clear the screen, which I do often
because I like the cursor up high. Instead I just type the letter
c, which is set by this alias:
alias c='clear'
Cook's Log, Fermentation Date 9
I opened one of the three jars of cabbage that I began fermenting on
February 5. It tastes great! The cabbage has a firm bite and a nice tart taste.
I think I'll let one of the other jars ferment for a couple more weeks and
then, depending on how that goes, the third jar for a couple of weeks beyond
that.
We're having a fairly chilly winter, and we keep the thermostat in the low
sixties. I'm keeping that in mind because I'll likely want to see how this goes
in the summer, when it's much warmer in the house.
I'm excited to see what becomes of the cabbage, ginger, and peppers in the
other two jars.
Bonus: the two older kids love the sauerkraut (but not the little one).
Puzzled
Kind of like in the recent George Clooney movie, The Midnight Sky,
when he uses some instrument to detect how near in the atmosphere whatever it
is that's killing all life on the planet, I've played a lot of puzzles in
recent months as a way to test if I have brain fog from long Covid-19. I don't
think I've had Covid-19. We've been pretty isolated, and I've never tested
positive. But I as long as I still have the ability to focus for some
substantial amount of time on a puzzle, then I guess I'm happy.
I'm writing about puzzles pretty broadly. I play about three Sudoku games
every day, but the coding counts, for my sysadmin work but also for research,
which involves a lot of R lately. We also are working on a 1000-piece actual
puzzle. It's nice to get lost in that. So, generally speaking, puzzles are my
instrument.
Salt the Hash
There was one last item on my to-do list for (near) total sysadmin automation. One
of the classes in our program uses an open source content management system
(CMS) with MySQL as its database. Normally, for a new user to set up an account
on the CMS, the CMS would need to have at least an SMTP server configured to
complete the user setup. I'm not allowed to use a full-blown email server on
this computer, and I didn't want to set up an email account and use something
like msmtp to have emails sent to new
users to complete account setups. What I wanted to do was merely batch create
the student accounts.
Batch creating the student accounts is easy with MySQL. To do this,
I download the roster for the course as a CSV file, quickly remove the unneeded
columns in LibreOffice Calc, and save this as a CSV file. Then I create
a sql source file from that CSV data using, primarily, some
sed one-liners, and the result would look something like this:
insert into table_name(id,username,name,email,active,role) values
(id_value,username_value,email_value,active_value,role_value),
(id_value,username_value,email_value,active_value,role_value),
...
(id_value,username_value,email_value,active_value,role_value);
But that sql source file was missing two columns: a hashed, salted password
column and a salt column. I've worked with databases enough to know more than
the basics of working with data for analysis or retrieval, but I've never
really worked with databases, other than doing the kind of thing as above,
where I have to modify user accounts for a CMS, and so I didn't know how to
create a sql source file that included the hashed password and the
salt. This meant that I could create the accounts for my colleagues, but then
they'd have to log in to the CMS and manually add passwords for the students.
At least I could generate passwords for them using pwgen or
diceware.
It took some reading to figure out how to accomplish automating the salt and
hash password process, but I worked it out and learned some things, which is
cool.
First, the CMS uses a 16 byte salt. To generate the salt in Bash, I learned
that I could use the tr command and random data from
/dev/urandom to generate it. So clever.
With that salt, I create a new sql file with the relevant MySQL
commands. Let's say the password for the new user is grapes and the
new user's account that I want to update has a table ID of 100, then to salt
and then hash the password and store it in the appropriate table cell for that
user:
update table_name
set password=sha1(concat('FCTSAB10-YKYGAC-','grapes'))
where id = 100;
And then I update the table to add the salt to the salt column. This is
needed for the CMS to parse the password and let users login.
update table_name
set salt='FCTSAB10-YKYGAC-'
where id = 100;
Sometime later I'll write a proper Bash script to automate this process for
the 50 or more students who use this CMS each semester.
Not Really a Kobayashi Maru
The NY Times site/app has a spelling bee game. The goal is to form as many
words as possible with the seven letters the game provides. Six letters
surround a center letter that is required in all word formations. Words must be
at least four letters long, and the player gets bonus points for forming
pangrams, words with all the letters used. Rankings start with Beginner level
and then end with Genius level.
I'm usually not very good with word games because my vocabulary is not the
greatest (I'm bad at crosswords, e.g.), but it's an enjoyable game and I got
reasonably good at it after playing it for a few weeks. Then one day I realized
this is the kind of game where it would be fun to write a script that would
help me solve the game every single time. So I wrote a Python script at the end
of last semester to do this.
The Python script receives input from the player and then asks the player to
specify which letter is required (the center letter in the game). Then it asks
for the length of words to form, like 4, and then generates words
based on that length. To generate the words, it creates all possible letter
combinations and compares those combinations with a word list, and selects
those, and then again selects those that have the required letter.
It doesn't work well with words that contain more than 9 letters just
because it's too computationally intensive for my desktop computer. I know that
there is a much better, easier, and less computationally intensive way to
solve this problem. For example, I could select all four-letter words from the
word list and then select those words from that subset that contain the
required letter, and so on. However, when I was writing it, I specifically
wanted to work with the Python itertools library
because I can imagine needing to use that library in some future research
projects. It's like when a former high school friend and I did stuff when we
were teenagers, we would always and intentionally choose the hard way to
accomplish our goal (e.g., we'd take the longest and most difficult path to get
to a location), but we always learned a lot, and had fun. Anyway, something to
play with next time I have the itch to do so.
Today I used the Python script to reach a score of 300. It seems like somebody scored 392. I think I need a better
word list to compete with those smart cookies who are probably not cheating
like I did!
Our neighbor died sometime around the new year 2017-2018. We were out of
town and came back to hear the news. His name was John, and he was a really
nice neighbor to have. We don't have a driveway at our house, and John invited
us to use his if we ever needed it after he saw my wife return home one day and
walk down the block in the rain with an infant and a little kid. When we
replied that we'd be concerned that we might block him from getting out of or
into the driveway, he replied, grinning, "I know where you live!"
We returned home from our new year's trip and met his sister, who gave us
the news that John died at home with his dog, Morgan, out back. His dog
survived, which is fortunate, because I guess she was outside for a couple of
days in the freezing weather. I used to help John catch Morgan, who would
sometime escape the yard and run off. Morgan liked our kids, and I hope she
found a good home.
A few people came and looked at the house after John died. We met one family
who stopped to take a look, and we were excited about the potential of that,
but eventually it was bought by an LLC and it's used for a rental now. The new
owner is nice, too, but it's not the same as having a neighbor. We often find
trash all over our yard (lots of beer cans) and listen to intoxicated, loud
renters on occasion. I'll say something when that happens but it's no fun
asking people to quiet down. One time I did that with the other next door, now
previous, neighbor, who was having a party, and then ten very intoxicated guys
marched over and proceeeded to pound on my door and threatened to beat me up at
like one in the morning. My children were sleeping, and I was quite annoyed. So
there's always the threat of a violent reaction when you ask people to stop
being annoying.
The current owners of the place took the fence separating our backyards down
last summer because it was falling apart, which is good, but it hasn't been
replaced because I guess the pandemic has caused the price of wood to
skyrocket. One day a couple of months ago or so, while having dinner, we
watched a guy through our window stumble out the house, not ten feet away, and
then pee on the driveway in broad daylight while we were eating. He then
staggered back inside that house.
This morning I woke up to find that the people renting the house right now
drove in our backyard and crushed our garden sometime late last night. I guess
if a fence was there, maybe they wouldn't have driven into that, or maybe they
would have knocked the fence down. The garden doesn't matter so much. I can
rebuild that. It was a cheap hack that I put together anyway, but I'm glad this
didn't happen during the day because the kids play out there.
I hope we get a neighbor someday, even if that means we have to move for it
to happen. It's nice to have neighbors. I didn't have the most stable of
childhoods, but there was a stretch of years when I lived in one place and had
great neighbors. My brother is still friends with a couple of them, thirty
years after we've all moved away. That's cool.
On Top
After all these years of using Linux, I've never taken advantage of the
top command and have instead favored htop, largely
because of the latter's nicer UI. Then, not too long ago I read a short article
on configuring top, and now
I use it more often than htop. It barely took some tinkering to
get a much nicer UI and to remove the large amount of noise that displays by
default with top.
Fermented Cabbage
I started three jars of sauerkraut today. One jar contains cabbage and
garlic. The second jar contains garlic, fresh ginger, and cabbage. The third
jar contains garlic, fresh ginger, one Serrano pepper, and cabbage. I have no
idea how the latter two will turn out, but I thought I'd experiment with some
things I had on hand. I'm especially curious how the one with the pepper will
taste. I hope it's spicy and tangy.
I can't wait to do cucumbers. I love fermented style pickles.
My Sysadmin Work
A few years ago, a number of faculty in my unit were using some ad hoc
services to teach a few technology courses. I suppose for some things, this
would be fine, but in several hallway chats, I kept hearing stories about the
instability of these services. For example, professor A would use X free
hosting service for some content management system, and then halfway through
the semester, the service would do something disruptive, which would then
disrupt the course.
Perhaps if this kind of thing only happened to one professor and
infrequently, then some other solution could have been applied, but it was
a problem several professors were experiencing often. So I proposed that we buy
and manage our own server. Or, rather, I proposed that they (the unit) buy
a server and that I manage it for the faculty and install whatever was needed,
as long as it was some open source solution since this would be a Linux based
server. I also wanted to use the server to teach a couple of courses: one on
systems administration and the other on semantic web development. And I knew
that one other faculty would want to use it for a similar purpose. They
accepted the proposal. A server was ordered. I set it up, got a domain name for
it from the university, set up SSL certs, and installed and configured what we
wanted.
It started off well and it was eventually used in six or seven courses and
more sections of some of those courses. A few of those courses used it to
access a couple of different content management systems, and a few others used
it for shell access to work on things like MySQL, PHP, and like. But then the
university made big cybersecurity changes about a year and a half ago, and it's
much more difficult for students to use SSH to get shell access from off-campus
now.
My solution to this was for the unit to pay for and use a virtual machine
provided by a hosting company for those courses that needed shell access and
keep using the unit's server for those courses that use content management
systems. The virtual machine is super cheap and even though it's minimal, it's
fine for our needs. They accepted the proposal and this is now the current
setup, which means that I'm managing two servers. In a way, this is more work,
but in another way, it's better to partition out the separate use cases because
it's easier, from a security standpoint, to keep the shell users away from the
content management systems. I like to give my students who have shell access
a lot of room to roam around the directories, and I couldn't do this when they
were all on one machine because I had to lock down a lot of directories. Since
the shell users are now using a virtual machine at a hosting company and not on
the university's network, and since the machine itself is managed well by the
company, it's not so much of a problem if the system is compromised,
intentionally or not.
Even though it's a bit more work, most of that work is simply keeping an eye
on things. That's not nothing, but I've largely automated the other tasks. For
example, for one course, every semester I need to create shell and MySQL
accounts for a list of students and create databases and set up privileges for
those databases. I had written a couple of Bash scripts to take care of this
and recently merged them into a single script that does all this work. I still
want to generalize the script a bit more but it's only used for one course, and
so there's no hurry. Here's the script:
For the original server, the faculty who teach one of the courses that uses
a content management system (CMS) need new students added to the CMS every
semester and in particular roles in the CMS, and students removed and content
purged from the CMS from the prior semester. Since this is an open source CMS,
I studied the MySQL databases and figured out how to automate this so that
I could add and remove students and delete old content in batch. Otherwise, the
faculty would have had to delete everything manually in the CMS. The faculty
still have to send the students their passwords for the CMS. I had installed
and configured an email server for this machine to automate the crendential
process, but the university's cybersecurity folks detected the email server and
asked that I turn it off. Oh, well.
I'm a tiny bit burnt out doing this stuff. I still have to teach, research,
etc., but mostly, it's good that I'm doing it. Since I teach a system
administration course, the work keeps me current, and it's important to me that
I stay current with these technologies so that I can teach better.
Back To i3
For some reason that I can't recall, last spring I switched back to Gnome after using i3 as my window manager for quite a long while.
Maybe I just wanted a fresh experience of something---a change of "scenery"
given that we were recently homebound.
I like Gnome and will keep using it off and on, especially when I need to
record video. It's less of a hassle to manage audio and video in Gnome than it
is in i3, and for a desktop environment, it is a minimal and out of the way
one, especially compared to others. For most of my workflow, though, there's
something quite satisfying about the minimalism of a tiling window manager,
which I first started using well over a decade ago when ratpoison was my primary window
manager.
I like minimalism so much, earlier today I switched to a virtual terminal to
work on a manuscript. It's a great environment for writing. Whether it's
a tiling window manager or a virtual terminal, nothing beats dedicating one
whole screen to one application, especially for writing. I'm looking forward to
using Fedora's spin on i3 when Fedora 34 is release in April.
Regarding the lag that I reported in my previous entry, when I was searching
the error message that I was seeing in journalctl output, I saw
someone post a fix by switching their USB keyboard cable to a USB 2.0 port from
a USB 3.0 port. In an act of desperation, I did that, and it seems to have done
the trick. Who the heck knows. I'll check the journalctl logs
tomorrow to see if the lag is still showing up there.
On File Systems
File systems are a weak point with me and operating systems. This is
because I've never really had to deal with lots of disks, with
complicated storage needs, humongous amounts of data, etc., and
therefore never really had to learn a lot of the intricacies. I
remember, for example, in my early days of using Linux, having to edit
/etc/fstab and feeling bewildered by the process and trying
to figure out how to understand the relevant man pages.
However, since I started to teach system administration with Linux, I've
had to learn a lot more than I did, and now feel good working with
partitions, volume management, and related tools.
Now that Fedora has switched to the Btrfs file
system, I'm starting from scratch again since I'll need to teach Btrfs
the next time I teach my sysadmin course. This file system is a bit
confusing, and to make matters worse, I've been having issues with my
hard drive (I think) since I installed Fedora the other day. Since I
installed Fedora right after installing the new drive, however, I can't
be sure where the problem is without a lot more investigating. Are the
problems I'm having due to the physical hard drive? Or the file system?
Or something else, like Wayland? I'm completely not sure. Too many
variables.
This morning I used the Btrfs scrub utility, and it
felt like the thrashing went away as a result and that the OS
was running more smoothly. However, as I type this in vim,
there's sometimes a decent amount of lag after pressing keys. It's
pretty frustrating, and since I have a lot of non-Linux work to do this
sabbatical, if I don't get it resolved soon, I might switch back to
Ubuntu. Perhaps Fedora is too cutting edge for my daily work needs.
Update: The keyboard lag is a libinput issue, it
seems, based off of journalctl. But then I ran sudo
libinput debug-events, and everything seems dandy, i.e., no lag.
Since I was having the problem in vim, I decided to try
nano, and I'm not getting any lag in nano (I'm using
nano now). Now I have to figure out what's going on with
vim.
Loud, Clamorous, Blaring
The theme of the day is NOISE. The children bounced (still are) off the
walls while I worked. Way more than usual. Their loud pitched screams
accompanied their frenzied physicality. Fortunately, I was able to work in
a separate room. Unfortunately, this offered zero sound and vibration proofing.
The wee one wouldn't nap and is hyper because of it.
The new hard drive I installed is loud, too. So LOUD. I regret not getting
a SSD. I mistakenly put the desktop on top of the desk, adjacent to my
ear. Wrong move there, Burns. I finally unhooked the cables from the computer,
re-seated the new hard drive to be sure it was snug, and converted the desktop
into a deskunder. I think one of these things helped with the noise
a bit.
I guess I was surprised by how much I've adjusted to this atmosphere over
the course of this past year. "Adapt or perish," I suppose. Of all things, it
was the hard drive sound that was driving me up the wall. But fixed that.
In My Next Life
My hope is that if there is a next life in this world, that I am
a singer-songwriter in that life, and that I feel all that I feel now, and that
I am able to capture it in song and sing it out.
You Have Mail, too
My very simple email script that I wrote yesterday did not
perform as expected this morning when I ran it. I should have realized this.
The basic if/elif statements meant that the script would report on one
mailbox at a time and that I would have to open mutt for each
mailbox in order for the script to move on to the next mailbox. Subpar
work, Burns!
So I modified it this morning. I assigned the mailboxes to a Bash array and
then surrounded a simpler if statement with a for loop that
cycled through the array. I defined a function for this and then called the
function at the end. This works as desired and the code is nicer to look
at:
#!/bin/bash
checkmail() {
base_dir="$HOME/Mail"
mailboxes=("$base_dir/INBOX/" "$base_dir/association_lists/"
"$base_dir/university_lists/" "$base_dir/library_lists/"
"$base_dir/courses/")
for mail in "${mailboxes[@]}"; do
if [ -s "$mail"new/ ] ; then
echo "You have mail in $mail."
else
echo "No new mail in $mail."
fi
done
}
main() {
checkmail
}
main
Maybe later on I'll have it report email metadata. I took at look at the
email headers last night, and it wouldn't be a hassle to do, but as I was
looking through the headers, I was thinking that I might not care that much.
We'll see. Perhaps I'll just return a count of new emails.
A small command-line program called email that I used on Ubuntu
does not seem to be available in the Fedora repositories. All the program did
was tell me if I had new or unopened email in various Maildir directories
(mailboxes), which contain subdirectories new/, cur/, and
tmp/. I liked it because I could just type out the command to see if
I had new email without having to open mutt, the email client that
I use on the command line (I know, this is super lazy of me).
I also used email in my .bash_functions file. Although
I have a systemd timer setup to sync email every five minutes using
mbsync, I have a function in .bash_functions to sync and
list new emails on command:
I wanted to keep using that function, and so I hacked together a very simple
little script to replace what I lost by switching to Fedora. It uses the Bash
[ (test) builtin with the -s option to check if the
new/ directory is greater than zero. If it is greater than zero, then
that simply means there's a file in that directory, and if there's a file in
new/, then it means there's a new email, or more specifically, a file
that hasn't been seen by mutt. When mutt does see
that file, it gets moved to cur/, even if I don't open the email. If
I don't open the email but mutt sees it, then mutt
labels it as unopened and not just new.
Eventually I'd like to update the script to print out the
From and Subject lines. That way I can decide
if I want to open mutt at all and read my email or just ignore for
a while. In the meantime, I can use mutt -Z to open a mailbox that
has new email, if email says I have some.
Here's a smaller version of the script. The full
one checks several Maildir directories that new mail goes to based on some
filters I use.
#!/bin/bash
# Date: 1/24/2021
# A way to check if I have new email
# Specifically, check to see if the Maildir new/ is greater than 0
base_dir="$HOME/Mail"
inbox_dir="$base_dir/INBOX/"
if [ -s "$inbox_dir"new/ ] ; then
echo "You have mail."
else
echo "No new mail."
fi
A Good Long Walk
I took a good five-mile walk today with the wee one, who was strapped in
their stroller, layered up and blanketed. They napped the whole way.
I crossed paths with a colleague, a delightful one. We chatted for a bit,
and that was very nice.
When I walked to work every day, I got into the habit of listening to
podcasts. I've gotten out of that habit, and it makes me glad to have let it go
and to walk in silence.
I usually nod my head at or wave to people when we pass each other, if we
happen to catch each other's eyes, but it's not often that anyone responds. The
only stranger to wave hello to me was another parent with her child in
a stroller. I guess it was something about the shared situation that warranted
acknowledgment and a connection.
Always the Tinkerer
I've been playing around with this site's design recently. I wanted to add
more pages and I didn't think the last layout, with the horizontal nav bar,
worked well for that. But it's also that I like to fiddle around and keep up to
date with basic web design ideas. If I don't, then I quickly start to forget
those things.
I'll probably redesign it again in a few months, in fact. I predict that
I'll start tinkering again when I'm knee-deep in my sabbatical research only
because I'll want a mental break, and doing little techie things like this can
be a nice reprieve.
Fedora Switch Complete
The new hard drive is now installed. It took 2 minutes and also hours. Here's the process:
Back up home directory to external drive (short process since I backup often)
Download Fedora ISO
Create Fedora bootable USB stick
Boot into a live Fedora session
Overwrite old disk with random data. This takes hours. So:
Help make dinner
Clean up
Play Scrabble with family
Turn off computer
Disconnect hard drive and pull out of mount
Remove hard drive cage. I kept looking for how to unscrew the cage and my
9 year old child, who is with me because they want to learn how to change
a hard drive, notices that the cage is flexible and all I have to do is pull
the cage off. I have very literally changed hundreds of hard drives. LOL!
Place new hard drive in cage and remount
Now, because my desktop is not near my router, I have to use a USB wireless
dongle. Because this is a work computer, my work bought one for me. Because my
work can only buy from select vendors, I only had two choices. Because neither
choice supported Linux by default, I had to find a driver for it. Because the
base install of Fedora doesn't come with the necessary development software to
install a new driver, I had to connect the computer to the router, which again,
was in another room, to have internet access to download the required software.
So:
Relocate computer, monitor, etc to the room with the router
Connect computer to the router with an ethernet cable
Install Fedora on the new hard drive with the bootable USB stick
Download and install necessary software to add the new driver
Download driver
Install driver (it worked)
Relocate computer, monitor, etc back to my desk
And finally, restore my backup and install additional applications that are
not installed by default (mutt, etc).
Usually when I install a new Linux distro, it takes an hour to install and
set things back up to how I like it. But because I wanted to secure wipe the
old drive and because I had to relocate the computer to another room, this
process took a lot longer. But all is well now, and Fedora is nice.
My Desktop after Eight Years
Even though it's been nearly 8 years, my desktop computer for work is still
humming along nicely. When I selected this computer, I intentionally picked out
a computer that was fairly beefy at the time because I wanted it to last a long
while. The computer has 4 cores (i7-3770 @ 3.40GHz), 32 GB DDR3 RAM, an NVIDIA
Quadro K2000 GPU, and a 1 TB hard drive at 5400 RPM.
I can't remember if I added RAM or replaced a bad RAM stick soon after I got
this machine back in 2013, but other than that, I haven't changed any of its
hardware. I do run statistical computations on this machine for research but
not real big data computations, and the machine handles it all fine.
The machine also runs Linux. I've been a long time Ubuntu user but will
switch to Fedora soon. I teach Fedora in my Linux systems administration course
and have grown to like it a lot. I'll install Fedora this week when I replace
the hard drive. The current drive has been spinning for over 6 years and
4 months, and although a SMART test shows that it's mostly okay (there are some
pre-fail values), it is past its lifetime. The new drive is twice as big as the
current one, and I doubt I'll need the extra space for years, but it also runs
at 7200 RPMs, and the faster speed might be nice.
I hope this machine lasts at least another 8 years (or even longer). If it
does, I like that I'm saving my employer a lot of money and that I'm lessening
my environmental impact, albeit a very small one, by saving this machine from
the recycle bin and replacing it over and over.
I Will Pass on Time Travel
I have this recurring night or daymare where I travel back in time to my
younger self. However, instead of there being two of me at this previous point
in time—i.e., an older me that goes back to a time when the younger me also
exists—in this dream it is only my conscious mind that is sent back and that
occupies my younger self. In this scenario, I do not relive my life as a third
person viewer, but I re-possess my old self, so to speak, and this gives me the
ability to redo my future.
While at first blush it seems neat that I could relive my life, when I find
myself back in time in this dream, I realize that the future that I remember is
forever lost—that there is no way to recreate the steps that led me to my old
future or to prevent what I know about my old future from influencing what I do
in the new present. I am forced into a new future.
And I panic because of the implications of this. A new future means that
since my three children are partly a function of the exact time they were
conceived, that is, if they were conceived a day later, then different
biological interactions, inevitable if occurring at different times, would
result in different children—just as children that are conceived between the
same two people at some other time in their relationship are siblings and not
identical or clones of the prior ones. In essence, while I think I could manage
to find my wife again in this alternate universe, I think it would be
impossible for us to have the same children again even if I do find her. Going
back in time in the way I dream it would thus be disastrous.
This is a bizarre dream to have, but I think it's simply an active
imagination that's considering getting older and taking measure of the life
I've lived. Overall then, it's a good dream, even if it has this nightmarish
setting, because it's about how I don't care to relive my life simply for the
fact that the sacrifices involved are too costly. It's about how my life is not
just about me but also about these three little darlings that are a part of my
existence. Even if my life hasn't been anywhere near perfect and there are
struggles that I have now that I could have prevented if I had known better,
I have taken measure of it and have found nothing wanting and everything to
lose.
Update 1/16/2021: Ha! My wife tells me this is like the plot to the movie About Time. I haven't seen it, but I guess I will now.
Citizen Science
I've lived in the same house going on eight years now. What's nice about
that is that I've been able to notice how the neighborhood changes around here.
It changes pretty dramatically each year since a lot of students live on the
block, and they usually only rent for a year or two.
It's also been nice to watch how other things change. There's a groundhog
that lives out back, and we've noticed it come out and eat the grasses
throughout the years. My next door neighbor has a holly tree in their front
yard, and every winter the robins strip the berries off that tree. It takes
them about a half hour or so to complete their work, and because there are so
many robins and because it happens so quickly, it's fun to watch the
frenzy.
This year the robins went after the tree a couple of days ago. I had the
sense that it happened at a much different date then in previous years.
Fortunately, I had taken photos and video of the event in some past years.
I went through my photos and found that the robins had stripped the tree on the
following dates:
January 26, 2014
January 20, 2016
January 12, 2021
Given that this appears to be occurring at earlier dates, I was
curious if that was correct and if so, if there was a cause. My initial, vague
hypotheses were that 1) the tree was fruiting earlier, or 2) the birds had
changed their behaviors, and that either of these were due to a warming
winter.
I thought I'd reach out and share this information with someone who does
work on climate change and ecology at my university. I searched for a name and
then emailed the professor. She responded back and added that it might also
have something to do with the sweetness of the tree, given the sweetness of
other trees in the area. And she let me know about some citizen science
activities that I might find worthwhile! It was pretty cool, and I'm thankful
that she responded. I look forward to collecting some data with the
children!
On Aging
I've gained a few pounds since the start of the pandemic. I used to walk
a few miles every day by going to work and back home, but since I've been
working from home, I walk much less. So, I started running a few days ago, and
it's made me realize the difference between my twenty-something year old body
and my post-mid-middle-aged year old body. The difference is this: in my
twenties, when I'd start a new exercise, I'd only feel sore. In my
post-mid-middle-ages, I not only feel sore, but I also feel like my body is
going to break apart. This cracks me up. But the running has made me feel
better overall even if there is a lot of creaking going on in this shell of
mine.
The Trick to Social Media
We have lived with social media for fifteen or so years, but I have only now
realized the trick with it. Here it is as a general, universal rule that
I recommend all people of the world follow:
Feel free to post to social media, but never ever read, watch, or listen to
anything posted.
Or,
Produce it. Never consume it.
On Conservatives
I think of myself as politically liberal but not uncritically so. And it
seems to be important, at least in how we tend to form societies, that there
exists a healthy conservative party. Because if the current conservative party
cannot heal itself and eventually splinters, then what we saw yesterday might
get worse
for democracy in the US.
Republicans, heal thyselves. Pronto.
Lullabies and Mixtapes
My wife has been responsible for putting the children to bed when they were
infants. She'd normally hold and nurse them until they fell asleep. As soon as
they become babies/toddlers, I would take over.
During my tenure, I have usually put the children to sleep with music, but
I've had separate playlists (mixtapes) for them. The first child's playlist
followed a specific musical pattern. The songs would start off upbeat. The
third song would reach a crescendo, and then the fourth and remaining songs
would wind down and therefore wind them down'for example: 4) He War
/ Cat Power, 5) Drive / The Cars, and 6) Gypsy / Fleetwood
Mac. If the child wasn't asleep by the time Drive completed,
Gypsy would definitely do the trick. Simply because I found it a bit
funny, the last song in this playlist was Nonstop Disco Powerpack
/ Beastie Boys. I played this to test if they were asleep. If they started to
dance, then I'd need to start over. This was rare, though.
The second child's playlist mostly followed the same, general pattern but
was shorter because they usually fell asleep faster, and still do. Their
playlist (mixtape) ended with St. Judy's Comet / Paul Simon. I liked
ending it with a bona fide, modern lullaby. It's a sweet, loving song. This
child also adored the Moana soundtrack, and for a while I think I knew
the words to most of the first seven or so songs of that soundtrack.
The third child technically has only one song in their playlist—Always
On My Mind (Live) / Willie Nelson. After that song plays, because I use
a streaming service, the rest that play are determined by whatever algorithm
the service uses. But as soon as Nelson starts to sing, even if that child
might be sitting up, standing up, or crying and resisting, they'll drop their
head down onto my shoulders and start to sing along. They're still not quite
talking yet, but this child usually bellows out wordish sounds that resemble
the last word of each line in the lyrics. It's not uncommon for them to fall
asleep by the second song that plays, which might be another Nelson song or
a Kris Kristofferson song, but it could take nine or ten songs to do the trick.
This is a tricky child.
More Hard
Today has been another hard day with the kids. Meltdowns galore. I am sad
for these children of mine.
I have been trying to teach them how to meditate—or just breathe—when they
get upset, and to take them on walks or to the park. Getting out of the house
can help a lot, but it can be hard to gather and shuffle three little things
out the door when it's cold outside. Layering up takes time and is difficult
when they're already hyped up.
They miss their friends. In the absence of their friends, they often look to
me to be their friend and to play with them all day, but I can't always be
available to them in that way. I try at points throughout the day, but not the
whole day, which is what they increasingly want.
My research sabbatical is this spring. I've wavered about postponing it
because I doubt I'll be as productive as I would like to be. When they have
meltdowns like what happened today, it is difficult to get back to work.
Recovery takes a while. I'll need to think of new ways to be more preemptive
with this. Past ideas don't work anymore.
Somewhat Automated
I have this blog somewhat automated with two Bash scripts. The first one ./WWW-toc-generator
generates a new table of contents entry for the home page and inserts the entry
on that page in the right place. The second script ./make-rss
generates the XML for the RSS feed. Both scripts are pretty ugly, but I'll
address that later.
Once I've written a post, the other steps only take a minute to complete,
but I'd like to automate it all. Thus, the next step is to automate inserting
new blog posts into this page and automate inserting the new XML item block
into the index.xml RSS page. Then clean up the scripts. I'll rewrite them and
try to make them a bit portable. Right now they are far from that.
I've never been completely happy with other flat-file based web projects
even though there are some nice ones out there. I'm happy that this project, as
slow as it goes, is scratching an itch I had about that.
The Dark, Hard Days
I was a line cook for about 18 years, and I loved it and loved being really
good at it. I loved those days when the restaurant was busy and cooking and
service went smoothly. The world disappeared and a singular focus on cooking
replaced it. The physical and the mental would meld, it felt like.
There were times when line cooking didn't go well. A thing would go wrong in
the front or the back of the house, and the effect cascaded and would break the
day. It felt herculean to regain order. There was some joy in that kind of
recovery, if we were able to recover, even if most of such days lacked joy.
There were times when line cooking that the day felt like a sustained,
rhythmic assault, but the rhythm was odd and out of sync with our work. The
tickets would print quickly and incessantly. It felt hard to breath and to get
through it required an intense, determined will to focus. I remember working
one shift like this the day after a Thanksgiving. The assault lasted hours and
to calm myself and push through it, I found myself imagining curling up in
a fetal position with my arms lifted up over my face to block the blows to my
head. This was a most awful day.
These past nine months have felt like the second scenario above but
sometimes the third. It felt like something went wrong last March and then
a cascading effect broke the rest of the year. My children suffered, my wife
suffered, my family suffered, my friends suffered, the world suffered.
Our own little household, 900 or so livable square feet of it, mirrors
a cramped restaurant kitchen. We stepped over each other, tripped over each
other, blasted each other sometimes, even if only under our breath, but
sometimes to each other. We cried out for help. We tried to give each other
help. We sought some help from outside. We regressed and then got better. Over
and over.
We are recovering, I think, which is why the last two posts have felt good
to write. I've felt good, better. To push through this year, instead of curling
up and weeping, which I've often wanted to do, I tried to hold my children as
much as possible and to talk with my wife more. This has helped. I wept, just
two weeks ago, when I found out my Mom had covid. I didn't think she'd make it,
but she did. It's not stellar yet, but the days feel like they have less weight
to them than they did even until recently, and I have high hopes that we'll get
through this stronger than we were when it started.
On Buddies
I am in a group chat with some college friends. It's been on and off since
the start of the pandemic, but it's begun to flourish recently. It's nice
because even though it has been nearly 26 years since I've seen some of these
people, we talk and joke and razz each other as if no time has passed—as if we
haven't become middle aged, as if we haven't married (or not), raised children,
become grandparents, had failures, gone to funerals, gotten divorced, and so
much more. Or, despite all that, or because of it all, because we do comment on
the intervening years and how much has happened and how it has all affected
us.
When I was growing up (nine different public schools, etc), and when
I worked as a line cook (21 restaurants and many different states), I lived
a fairly nomadic life, as much as that may look like in modern America. It's
meant that most of the people I've shared my life with, or have shared their
lives with me, are not in my life anymore and never will be again, nor
I theirs. There's a kind of gravitas attached to that, and I didn't realize how
much, like the father in James Baldwin's Tell Me How Long the Train's Been
Gone, that I was ...
lonely for those faces which had borne witness to that past
It's been nice then not just to have this automatic reconnect with these
friends, but to have it with these specific friends who once bore witness to
some significant years of my past and whose past, significant for them also and
for their own reasons, I bore witness to. It's nice that there's still some
part of us that is who we were then—that there is some continuity, despite the
nomadic life, despite the intervening decades, but that there's still something
to learn about each other that's different and that this promises growth in
these friendships.
This loneliness that I had felt was not sourced in nostalgia. I do not wish
to relive those days nor recreate them. I am happy with who I am. I'm happy
that I have a family and a nice job. I want to keep going and keep growing as
a person and with my partner, and to help my little ones become the persons
they will be. But still, it's nice to reconnect and share again. It feels
really good.
Three Quarters of a Year
Three quarters of a year, and almost three seasons, have passed since the
start of this quarantine. My Mom came down with covid recently, and she somehow
defied the odds, which were not remotely in her favor—she's the definition of
underlying conditions. I dreaded this happening to her. She works in a big box
store in a geographic area where it's common for people to refuse to wear masks
and get aggressive if requested to do so. If the former wasn't enough for her
to more likely contract covid, the latter made it more so. Well, it happened,
and I'm so happy that she's still here with us and that she's out of danger for
now.
In our house, we call this time the Time of the Sickness. Despite all the
difficulties (I've been trying to learn how to cry again, which helps with
mental health), some great good has come out of it for us as a family, and I'm
very thankful for that'a very silver lining around a very dark cloud. As if
before my very eyes, I've watched my youngest transform into a toddler from
a baby in a way that I don't remember noticing with the others, and it's been
fun to watch how this child has latched onto their two older siblings, often
mimicking the second oldest and demanding to play with them every chance they
get. And I've watched my older two become big kids and best friends. I can't
steal the last cookie in the sight of my middle child without that child
declaring that I must save it for their older sibling, and the oldest one often
gathers the younger two to read to them as they sit on each side. So although
it's been the Time of Sickness and Great Sorrow (too), at least it's also been
the Time of Togetherness.
Like everyone else I hope, I look forward to the end of this Sickness, but
I'm not sure how much I want things to change for the family. I'll still have
the option to work remotely, at least for part of the week, and I will probably
take that option as much as possible. I've grown kinda comfortable working amid
the blaring of children.
Update (12/20): Ha, ha! Of course, an hour after I posted this, one kid had
a meltdown and the other two started fighting. Such is this roller coaster.
On Fezzik
Who knew The Princess Bride was so prophetic about mask wearing?
Fezzik: Why do you wear a mask? Were you burned by acid, or something like
that?
Man in Black: Oh no. It's just that they're terribly comfortable. I think
everyone will be wearing them in the future.
On Ebooks
I purchased an ebook reader recently, and I'm enjoying it. So far I like not
adding more print books to my collection. The weight of the ones I have now is
too much, although I still value having them.
I like that if I do not become involved with a book that I'm reading on the
device, I can simply remove it from the ereader and forget about it. Unread
print books haunt me when I see them on my shelves. They remind me that I have
somehow committed the sin of uncommitment. I appreciate freeing myself of that
type of guilt.
I wonder, though, if my migration to ebooks will have at least one negative
consequence. My print books act as indices to parts of my life. I can look at
any of the books on my shelves and remember when I got them and where and what
I was doing during those times in my life. I know that I will lose that with
ebooks. I might have other ways to index my life, though, and I guess that
means time will tell, or it won't.
A Good Read
Tonight I finished reading Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan. I don't
remember why I picked this book, but I think I saw it on a list somewhere.
However I chose it, I'm glad I did. It was quite a pleasure.
I am not quite pleased with a couple of reviews of the book that I read.
I wanted to see how others thought about the ending, which is why I read the
reviews after I read the book. The reviews were positive but also critical in
a way that I thought were unwarranted.
So, remind me not to read reviews again. It kind of spoiled the nice feeling
I had and tend to get when I've just taken in a good story.
Let's Dance
I like that toddlers automatically dance to music. Let's dance, kiddo.
On Sudoku
I've been playing a lot of Sudoku in recent months and I think I've gotten
fairly adept at completing very difficult puzzles. Sometimes when I'm stuck,
I'll work through all the empty cells and add notes for all the possible
candidates in each cell. Sometimes that doesn't help at all and the puzzle
looks like a mickle of numbers. However, if I go through and delete all of the
candidates and start over, more often than not I'll see what I missed and
complete the puzzle.
On Carrots
I was lucky to once work for one of the greatest chefs in the country, and
she didn't like carrots, and we never had them in the restaurant. I thought
that was funny because, you know, mirepoix.
But it was fine. Everything tasted wonderful. Her broth, her sauces, her
soups, everything was out of this world.
Primate Lessons
There are a lot of PBS documentaries on primates, and I've been watching
a bunch of them and realizing how little I know about our fairly close
biological relatives.
For example, I did not know that there is often a rigid social hierarchy in
many primate groups, as there have been in most human societies throughout
history. I wonder, as primates, if we have a kind of default disposition toward
that kind of societal structure, too, and if it makes democracy and equality
a hard sell for us. If so, then it is fascinating that attempts at democracy
and equality have been as successful as they have been for so long here in the
US, even if that success has been marginal for many and has fallen short,
tragically, in so many ways, but then not surprising that it is so fragile and
threatened, as we are discovering these days. I wonder if this default
inclination, if it exists, is the reason for the appeal of the strongman among
half the population.
These thoughts give me new meaning to King's quote, that the arc of the
moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. My take on this now is
that, it's a moral universe because we are not simply primates, but the arc is
long because we are.
On Solace
I've moved away from listening to podcasts and instead have been listening
more to music in recent months. It's been a great source of comfort. Lately
I've been revisiting Kris Kristofferson and Willie Nelson's catalogs. They
remind me a bit of home, but
not in a nostalgic way, and that's not why I've been listening to them anyway.
I think I just forgot how poetic they were, or I never appreciated it until
now. I need sung poems.
Surreality Polarity Reversal
When the pandemic hit, it felt surreal to go outside because the world was
so quiet.
I took a walk the other day. There was so much activity that I forgot for
two seconds that there was a pandemic. Surreal also.
Dear Mom
You're still here, but it's been a long time since we've had a visit with
you and the rest of the family. I find, as this long year stumbles on into its
darkest season, that I am missing you all very much. Give the rest of the
family a big hug for me.
Love,
Sean
Not That 1984
What was it about the movies that were released in
1984? It's as if all at once a bunch of different movie makers found the
key to unlock pop culture. I remember going to the movies when I was a kid, but
there is no year where I remember going to the movies to see all of these, and
there's no year that occupies such an outsized space in my head as that year.
It could have been my age, but that can't be all of the reason.
On the Historical Person
What if someone of historical note traveled through time to today, then
heard someone quote them, and responded, "I said that?"
The time travel part would be remarkable, too.
A Pictorial List
My middle child, who is not yet writing, thought I asked them to list some
ideas they might have for a project. To create their list, they drew eight
equal sized rectangles on a sheet of paper, and in five of the rectangles, they
drew a picture that captured a specific idea. The remaining three rectangles
were left empty.
I simply think the preliterate mind is fascinating, but it also made me
think about lists differently.
Aside: This has been a very hard seven months, but there have also been
these very gratifying and loving moments, too. I'm grateful for that.
On Covid19 and Keystone Species
I was watching The Serengeti Rules episode on PBS about
keystone species, and the part where Robert Paine discovers the abundance of
mussels after removing the starfish from the tide pool made me think that we
are the mussels and covid19 is the reintroduction of a keystone predator.
The crazy thoughts we (or is it just me?) have after seven months of
this.
I am not a biologist.
s/awk/R/
One of the difficult parts of R is simply cleaning and prepping the data.
I'm curious if that part of a research project would be better served using
Awk, since Awk is a data-driven programming language, and then let R (or
Python) take over for the analysis. I think I might give it a go with this next
research project I'm working on with some colleagues. It will be a challenge,
but I bet it might pay off nicely down the road.
Update: I suppose I should have titled this post with the Awk equivalent for
find and replace, instead of the sed version. Oi!
s/sed/awk/
How did I not know that sed could work on a specific field or
occurrence in a line? Instead of:
cat test.csv
apple apple apple apple
awk 'gsub("apple", "orange", $2)' test.csv
apple orange apple apple
We can do:
sed 's/apple/orange/2' test.csv
apple orange apple apple
Or specify a line:
sed '1 s/apple/orange/2' test.csv
apple orange apple apple
How nice.
On Marriage
My wife said I'm a Dwight.
On Teaching Linux
I have been using Linux for a long time now. In the early years it felt kind
of magical and new and mysterious, and what I really mean is that using the
command line felt that way, and would have felt that way if I was using the CLI
on any *nix-based operating system. It is a really comforting place for me to
be, and sometimes I wish it was the only computing interface needed.
The magic and mystery faded a few years ago. I suppose that's likely to
happen with lots of things. Getting stuff done became more important. Then
I proposed an undergraduate course on Linux systems administration, and in
teaching that course, I have discovered new things about the OS and
rediscovered experiences I had long ago.
That's all. I simply wanted to reflect on this for a moment, and be grateful
that though I have people in my life that are infinitely more meaningful than
a computer, I have this small thing that brings me calm.
Dark Nights
I have this routine where I wander the house before bedtime each night,
picking toys, clothes, and litter off the floor. I like to pause at the
backdoor and peer through the window. I like to admire the night and see the
shadows cast by the moon and the occasional night creature—the possum, the
raccoon, the mouse. Last night I couldn't see a single shape. The clouds kept
the moon hidden and the street and surrounding house lights were off or too far
away to have an effect. The darkness was beautiful and eerie and almost
total.
On Revising
I couldn't let go the last Bash script On Distractions. As I read more about
awk, I learned that it was possible to write multiple
condition-block statements. It then occurred to me I could write a (long)
one-liner using this technique and that the Bash function and the
awkif-else statement were unnecessary:
#!/bin/bash
systemctl status --user mbsync.timer |\
awk -F";"\
'/Trigger:/ && $2 == "" { print "Syncing..."}
/Trigger:/ && $2 != "" { print "Time left to sync: " $2}'
The code instructions:
Run the systemctl command
Pipe output to awk
Do a regex search for Trigger:
If the output is NULL, then the systemd timer is syncing
and print that.
Do a regex search for Trigger:
If the output is not NULL, then the systemd timer is
counting and print the count
On Distractions
It was a fairly productive day, but I'm not sure how I got anything done.
Lots of distractions.
My first distraction of the day was all my fault. I use mbsync
to retrieve email and I have a systemd timer (instead of
a cron job) set to retrieve email every five minutes. This is the
first time I've used systemd instead of cron. It's
fine, but even though I have no skin in the systemd controversy,
I'm often annoyed by the length of some of the commands. For instance, to see
when mbsync would next sync my email to my desktop, I'd type this
out:
systemctl status --user mbsync.timer
I wanted to fix that. I could have taken better advantage of Bash history,
but I thought I could make it a bit more entertaining, and this morning
I decided to write a small function to replace that whole line, and I also
thought that I'd write it so it would simply return the time left until the
next sync. So I wrote this:
systemctl status --user mbsync.timer |\
grep -F "Trigger:" |\
awk -F";" '{ print "Time left to sync: " $2 }'
And that worked fine. It would output something like:
Time left to sync: 4min 17s left
That's pretty much what I wanted, and all was rosy until I ran the function
and got something meaningless in return. Then I realized that
mbsync was syncing at the moment that I ran the function and so
there was no time info to return. Enter distraction, and I said to myself,
“what was the syntax for an awkif-else
statement.” I'm only beginner level awk writer, and it had been
a long time since I played around with awk conditionals.
But I worked at it and kept boinking the if statement up,
and there were many other distractions that had nothing to do with any of this,
but eventually, I got rid of the bugs, and now when mbsync is
syncing, my little script checks if field two is null, then returns "Syncing
...", else it prints the time left to sync, per the systemd status
message:
#!/bin/bash
# Check how much time left to sync email
# Aug 26, 2020
# Sean Burns
gettime () {
awk -F";" '{
if($2=="")
print "Syncing ...";
else
print "Time left to sync: " $2
}'
}
# Replaced grep with awk (8/29/2020):
#systemctl status --user mbsync.timer | grep -F "Trigger:" | gettime
systemctl status --user mbsync.timer | awk '/Trigger:/' | gettime
Specifically, when mbsync is syncing, it tells me:
Syncing ...
It's things like this that make primarily working at the command line fun in
the same way that playing and solving a hard Sudoku puzzle is fun. And
I learned something, too, which I'm happy about because I think
awk is a neat programming language.
A Distro Hop
I've begun the migration to Fedora Linux. I installed it on my laptop,
replacing an Ubuntu installation, and have really liked it. If I complete the
migration, this will be the first non-Debian based distribution that I've used
as my main OS since the early 2000s, when I used to run Red Hat Linux and
Mandrake Linux, my first two GNU/Linux OSs.
I've been using Fedora for a few years now on a server and have also used it
as the demo server in my Linux SysAdmin course, so it's not entirely new to me.
What's new to me is the desktop version. I like the take on Gnome (although
I prefer i3), which seems to work much better than it does on Ubuntu.
I may switch back to Ubuntu someday. Who knows? But in the meantime, it
feels kinda good to distro hop—feels like my first days with Linux.
On Conspiracy Theories
I think if I were to believe in a conspiracy theory about Covid-19, I think
I'd believe that this is a plot by NASA in order to test how well humans are
able to self-isolate for long periods of time. You know, because space
travel.
Seriously though, I know some people who tend to believe in a few kinds of
theories, some related to Covid-19 but also a few others, and it's starting to
really annoy me.
I read Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story, Earth's
Holocaust, about 25+ years ago, and re-read it recently because I kept
thinking about it these last few years. When I first read it, I was studying
religion, philosophy, and literature, and that had an impact on how
I interpreted the story. Now that I am in the social sciences, I can tell
I read it much differently. But since that old me is still there inside, it
felt like two different, almost conflicting, identities were reading it at the
same time. Regardless, though, it's still a depressing tale, and the question
stands from my two readings: is the human heart forever condemned, or can
institutions solve our base tendencies?
Peace and justice.
Come Sail Away
I like that turn of phrase, "I've found myself doing something."
When a person says or thinks that, it's not that they just discovered what they
were doing but that perhaps they realized there was a mystery about the thing
they already knew they were doing, which of course, suggests that there were
doing something they didn't know they were doing.
I've found myself recently watching lots of online videos of people sailing
around the world. I think I must be watching these videos for two, perhaps
seemingly conflicting reasons.
The obvious reason is that these videos are a way to escape. Times are rough
right now. Who wouldn't want to get away from the Threat and see beautiful
parts of the world and all the great oceans and seas.
But most of the videos I've been watching are of people sailing around the
world either on their own or with a partner or a small family. They go long
stretches of time without seeing others. It's not just escaping then. It's
social distancing. It's how it feels right now.
Apropos.
On the Bookshelf
I've kept a book on the bookshelf now for over thirty years. It's not a long
book, and I don't know who gave it to me, but someone did, and I have never
read it, nor its companion book (it's a series, I guess) that I also have.
I might read it, but the book has always weirded me out. The book has almost
no information about the author or translators or the series, and there's no
copyright date and the copyright page is non-standard. There are blurbs in the
front matter, but they seem made up---part of the book's fiction. It was
printed on good paper and was well made. It looks as new as it ever did, even
the jacket, which it still has.
Over the years, as the web grew, I thought I could find more information
about it. I've never thoroughly tried to research the work---only cursory
searches. It shows up on Amazon and various book sites and apparently is held
by very few libraries, but these listings do not provide background
information. Author or publisher information is absent on the web. There are
some short reviews on a few sites, and they say brief, delightful things, but
they are not informative otherwise.
It's the oddest little thing. Kind of a mystery, and I kind of like that,
even though it really does weird me out.
The Chronicles
This is something like the 44th day of our Quarantine. I am fortunate that
this whole thing mostly feels surreal, but sometimes I see it playing out like
it's a movie.
Movie opens with a family preparing breakfast before school and work, and
chatting about their day or arguing about some random thing. TV plays in the
background and news reporter is covering a virus outbreak in Wuhan, China.
A couple of weeks later, and the scene is on a different person or a group
of people. Perhaps a couple in their bedroom at night who are watching TV
before going to sleep. News about the virus becomes more frequent and urgent.
Couple briefly talk about it and wonder if it'll impact them somehow.
Again, another week or so later, and another person, like a teacher in
a break room or something. Reports are coming in faster about the virus, and
it's spreading. Teacher is eating lunch while watching the reports.
Meanwhile, hospitals, particularly in the US northeast and US northwest,
start to see increased visits from people with flu like symptoms.
Then, week before quarantine. The virus has spread to multiple countries,
but the threat is still abstract for most people in the film. But people are
increasingly becoming infected, according to the reports. Lots of uncertainty.
Decision making, personal, commercial, governmental, is on hold until
uncertainties are addressed. Information goes out about washing hands, not
touching faces, and then a bit later, social distancing.
Then the Quarantine. Some experience just horror---especially those on the
front lines, while others experience economic hardship, or other types of
losses. Others are simply experiencing a wait, and the whole thing feels like
a slog to them. Some become impatient or perhaps are suffering under hardships,
and begin to vent through protest.
Past Colleagues
A long time ago, I worked as a cook at a restaurant alongside an old chef
who taught me a lot about cooking. I was thinking about him recently because he
once told me that in order to make good chicken stock, I had to use vegetables
that I would be willing to serve to guests. That meant no onion skins or carrot
shavings, or like, but peeled onions, shaved carrots, and like.
Dave, I'm here to tell you that you were wrong. I've been making vegetable
broth with saved vegetable trimmings only. So, only onion peels, carrot
shavings, and like. And the broth I've been making has an incredible aroma and
taste.
As I started to write this, I texted a friend of mine that stayed in that
area, and asked about that old chef. He texted back that he had heard that the
old chef had passed away about 15 or so years ago, possibly from an AIDS
related illness.
Rest in peace, Dave. I'm glad I still have cooking conversations with you in
my head.
On Consistency
I am often surprised by people behaving inconsistently with their strongly,
espoused beliefs, and I can only think of three explanations for why it
happens.
They do not behave consistently because they haven't thought through their
beliefs.
They do not believe what they espouse but espouse in order to signal.
Their beliefs are not as strong as they espouse.
I kind of tested this a bit recently on a person who acknowledged that they
were behaving inconsistently with their previously and strongly espoused
beliefs. They responded by with a shrug. I suppose, if they were responding
truthfully, that that indicates (3).
So, I don't know. People are interesting, as another friend said to me
recently about a different matter.
Restaurant Dreams
I worked in many restaurants and did so for many years, but it has been 13
years since my last job in one. I used to have the standard, common, nightmare
restaurant dreams when I worked in them, but it's been a long time since I had
one of those. This week, I've had two of them.
Last night I dreamt I was visiting a restaurant (in today's time) that
I worked at 20 years ago. There was some desparation in the air, and I was
asked to take over the grill station at the last minute just as the restaurant
was opening. But I no longer knew the menu, and all the prep was wrong. Steaks
were cut in grossly uneven portions and in different shapes, as were various
vegetables, and so everything was cooking wrong. The oversized things were
burning on the outside but were raw on the inside, and the undersized things
were burning throughout. The tickets were coming in faster.
Go away restaurant dreams.
I hope you're all okay, my old restaurant friends.
35 Days
It's been 35 days since our Quarantine. Fortunately, everyone I know is well, but I feel great sadness for all those that have suffered and especially for those that have died alone. Too many.
Be kind, as the Doctor would say.
An Action Under Which Description
I can imagine a conversation where one person asks an other person what they are doing.
Case 1:
The person walks into a room. The other person is on the computer writing an
email. The first person asks, "what are you doing?" The other person
replies, "I'm on the computer."
Case 2:
Here is another scenario where the action is fairly similar but the tool
different, and therefore I imagine, the response is different, and more
specific.
The person walks into a room. The other person is hand writing a letter on
a legal pad. The first person asks, "what are you doing?" The other
person replies, "I'm writing a letter."
Case 3:
In the last scenario, the tool is the same as in Case 1, but the action is
obvious, and therefore the response is specific as in Case 2.
The person walks into a room. The other person is on the computer playing
a video game. The first person asks, "what you you doing?" The other
person replies, "I'm playing a video game."
Thoughts:
Case 1:
I'm wondering if we default to the less descriptive action when the tool
that we are using affords a broad range of functions. Thus:
"I'm on the computer" versus "I'm writing an email."
Case 2:
I'm also wondering if we default to a more descriptive action when the tool
that we are using affords a narrow range of functions. For example:
"I'm writing a letter" on a legal pad versus "I'm on a legal
pad."
Case 3:
In the last case, I'm wondering if we default to a more descriptive action
regardless of the affordances offered by the tool if the action is obvious in
some way.
"I'm playing a game" on the computer versus "I'm on the
computer."
Under what other actions on a computer might the specificity of our
descriptions vary, I also wonder.
Why do our descriptions vary?
These are some initial thoughts on action and
affordances.
The Slow Down
I imagine many people in higher education are wondering how the pandemic
will change our work. I haven't measured it, but I have noticed that the volume
of email I receive (and send) has dropped substantially.
I can think of a lot of reasons for why that might be, and I'm sure there
are a lot of reasons. The major idea I have is that people have less time to
work because they might be at home and having to mind children, but also worry
about relatives, and like, and when they can get work in, they're doing the
really essential stuff, like teaching and research. In a way, it could be
leading to more efficiency, but that's just a hypothesis, and perhaps something
to test down the line.
I mean, perhaps it's just me who is getting less email, but I've heard from
one colleague in a different college that this experience was true for them,
too. However, I would wager that what we're experiencing right now will be
woven into the fabric of what we're calling the new normal. That is, these
behaviors will persist. We'll see, I suppose.
I'd Rather
... research old reference works. They have a lot to say about us and about
technology.
Soon perhaps.
It's the Little Things
Like many people who are fortunate to have a job during this pandemic, I am
working from home. I have a desktop machine at the office at work, but I didn't
bring it home, and instead am using a laptop with a small ~13-inch screen.
When I tried to use this laptop more intensively in the past, I found it
frustrating to do any kind of substantial work. My desktop machine has a nice
sized monitor, and sometimes two of them, and I had gotten very used to them.
So I am surprised that I have become quite adjusted to working completely off
a small screen, and have even enjoyed using it as a primary device to do all
the same work that I was doing on my desktop. I have even found that it's
helped with focus.
On Research Speed
For the longest time, I felt insanely guilty for not writing research
manuscripts fast enough. Sometimes, I was even guilted by collaborators.
I don't blame them, though, because as I've aged into this research, I've come
to better understand how I work and think through problems, and I didn't
necessarily have these insights before now. Nowadays, I'm perfectly fine being
a bit slow, and I'm better at communicating that with collaborators. That, my
friends, feels good.
On Stress Relief
I find that when I'm a bit stressed out, I code. For example, tonight
I updated this website. Next I'll work on some R code. If I don't code, I play
Sudoku. Not sure if this means anything, but I'm fortunate and grateful that
I have a healthy mechanism for winding down.
On Sheltering
The whole point of the social sciences is to acquire the knowledge needed to
improve society, and then apply that knowledge. But the coronavirus epidemic is
highlighting all the points of failure across our various systems: healthcare,
politics, economics, education, etc.
I hope we get through this with minimal harm, but I also hope that we learn
how to build a society that is more just and caring to all, and that is based
on all the things we know work towards that kind of system.
On Social Distancing
We went for a walk yesterday on a short trail in the city, just to get
everyone out of the house and to be in a place where few people might be
congregating. There were a few others on the trail, and what was interesting
was that whenever we would pass these people on the trail, no one would look at
us, or smile, or say hi. All heads were kept down.
That kind of distancing isn't common, in my experience. People are generally
friendly on the trails, and so although I'm guessing, I think it's because this
is how people interpret social distancing --- we don't just physically
distance ourselves from each other --- we also distance ourselves from
strangers in deeper ways. I noticed this kind of thing at the grocery store the
other day. There I thought it was simply because people were becoming
competitive for goods, but I'm guessing it goes beyond that. If this is a good
interpretation, it worries me.
This pandemic is going to have long lasting consequences across a broad range of our societies.
Losing a Walker Friend
I had mentioned before that over the years I had made some acquaintances as
a neighborhood walker. These were fellow walkers, too. I found out this morning
that one of them, B, who I had mentioned in a previous post, passed away a couple
of months ago. Of course that explained why I hadn't seen him since then, and
I was worried the last time I saw him. He had been in a wheelchair for a while,
but still roamed the streets, and the last time I saw him, he had his pant legs
drawn up to his knees so that his heavily bruised, swollen skin was exposed to
the subfreezing temperature. I told him to pull his pant legs down, and he
responded as if he wasn't even aware that they had been pulled up.
He was an alcoholic, probably a diabetic, and he certainly had other health
issues. I met his partner once. She was nice, and he described me to her as if
I were an old friend.
It was nice talking with him over the years.
Rest in peace, B.
...
August 2020: It seems B has been spotted and may not in fact have
passed. I stil am not sure, though.
When a Baby Cries as a Toddler
There are usually just a few number of reasons why an infant cries. They
need to burp, they need a diaper change, they need to eat, they need to sleep,
or they are not feeling well.
So it's kind of neat to see them cry for a new reason. Like when they are
annoyed by something. Even though it's sad or hard in some way to see them cry,
when they cry for a reason that's not directly related to a physical need, it's
kind of a marker that they are becoming a toddler, and thus, that they are
developing a sense of self. It's kind of a beautiful thing to witness, as
a parent, I think.
Post Two
Converting Markdown to HTML with Table of Contents Using Pandoc
So I remember: to convert Markdown to HTML with a table of contents using Pandoc:
pandoc -s -t html5 --toc file.md -o file.html
That is all.
Post One
Switching Window Managers
I'm testing out the Regolith
version of the i3 window manager. I really
like it but I don't know if I'll make the switch permanent. Regolith makes i3
very nice looking and I really like the Gnome integration, but Regolith has
different keybindings, and the keybindings are different enough to make it
annoying and, in some cases, feel more cumbersome to use.
The keybindings are configurable, but because of the Gnome integration,
there are a lot more than there are in standard i3, and it's annoying to go
through the configuration file and make the changes.
I bet someone has created a more aligned i3 configuration file for Regolith.
I might look for that.
Perhaps this is a switch that I could work on over the summer.
Remembering Some Text
Every once in a while I'll confuse something in my memory. The other day
I was thinking of the TREC experiments but had confused the TREC experiments
with the Cranfield experiments from the 1960s. In particular, I was thinking of
something that had happened at the Cranfield experiments but had it in my mind
that the event had happened at some TREC track.
However, I knew I was missing a piece of information, and I also needed the
reference. I remembered that I read about the event in a specific book, which
I had read in 2009. I pulled my copy of the book from my bookshelf and scanned
the index for TREC, but the term wasn't there. Then I looked for the keyword
relevance and found the section that I remembered reading over ten
years ago. That led me to a journal article that I had also read ten years ago
and that covered the event in more detail.
It was all kind of a meta information retrieval moment about an information
retrieval topic, which I thought was kind of funny.
And that is all I have to say on that.
Some Observations on Usability Pertaining to a Child
I was watching a young child (8 years old) use a word processor application
for the first time. The child knows how to write, relative to their age, but
had practiced writing mostly on paper. I learned a lot by watching them:
We started by launching a word processor application and a new, blank page.
Even though an entire blank page appears, since the default position of the
cursor is at the beginning, no part of the page was accessible. The child
didn't understand why the entire page was not accessible but that what was only
accessible was the point up to the cursor. The child was initially confused by
being presented a page or a sheet of paper and not having the
ability to use it like they would use a physical sheet of paper.
The child therefore had to learn how to create space, even though the page
looks like a piece of paper, all that space doesn't yet exist. The child had to
learn how to create empty space by using the space bar and the enter key. This
page or sheet of paper metaphor that a word processor
presents is really powerful but obviously not coherent with physical sheets of
paper. The strength of this incomplete metaphor had never really occurred to me
before.
Eventually the child created a few pages of content by writing a story for
their book that they're writing. The red squiggly lines that appeared
underneath misspelled words were a source of distraction for the child, who
once they understood what they signified, wanted to stop and edit before
completing their writing. To me, this violates the write first, edit
later principle. I turned that function off to help the child focus on one
thing at a time.
The child's interpretation of the page indicator at the bottom of the
screen was interesting. After the child created a few pages of content, they
moved the cursor to the third of the fourth page. The child then noticed the
page indicator for the first time, which stated "Page 3 of 4", and
asked why their book (which is what they were writing) could be no more than
four pages. That is, to the child, that "of 4" suggested all the
pages that could exist for their book.
This is not the first time the child had written on a computer, but it was
the first time I had let them use a word processor application. A couple of
times before, I let the child write in the Nano text editor. None of the above
issues came up because Nano does not use the page metaphor or most other
indicators besides a cursor. The cursor on Nano is more obviously on a screen,
and not a page or sheet of paper.
Bad Superblock
It's painful and a bit nerve wracking, especially if your most recent backup
is not recent enough. Also, bad superblock sounds like a name
for a terrible hard rock band.
A Quick Bash One-Liner and Children
I wrote a little Bash one-liner script today that was fun to write. I have
a CSV file that looks something like this:
"last name, first name","username","email address"
My goal was to grep and yank a username out of the file and then insert that
into a s-nail command in order to send local email. Took less than
a minute to write, which is probably why it was fun:
In other news, came home today. Landslide was playing. The children ran and jumped in my arms. It made me happy cry.
Tidyverse Skeptic Too
Upon reflection, I am skeptical with Matloff,
too. When I was writing R code for my last project and using the Tidyverse
dialect, I found myself having to refer continually to the
documentation to see how to express each function. Even after repeated use,
they just wouldn't stick in my memory. In base-R, and CRAN packages that follow
that original dialect, I only have to think about the data and how it's
structured in order to slice, filter, etc the data. It felt good reading that
piece because now I know it's okay to let it go.
mutt -s "Subject Line" person@example.org <<EOF
> message line
> message line (cont)
> message line (cont)
> EOF
Wrap an at command around this to schedule the email to be sent later:
at 15:00 today
at> mutt -s "Subject Line" person@example.org <<EOF
at> message line
at> message line (cont)
at> message line (cont)
at> EOF
at> ^d
Some Routines I Find Calming
Although I may fiddle
with Vim, terminal, or some other command line settings when I'm
procrastinating, it's also true that playing around with these settings or
exploring some other part of my work flow can help me find my calm. For
example, a few nights ago I felt a bit anxious about life things, and instead
of watching some show or reading some book, I went to my laptop and read
documentation on the Mutt email client, and
I was able to configure Mutt in a way that I had not thought was previously
possible, even after using Mutt for something like 15 or so years. The end
result was just calming. To get lost in the documentation, to read it closely,
to apply it to my application---it was just nice.
Walking is also a calming routine
for me, and of course it has health benefits. Exploring technology has some
nice practical side effects, too. That is, because I find, generally, the
command line to be a much less disruptive, more pleasing computing environment,
because of the CLI framework, using it requires me to learn more about
computing itself.
Understanding why I like to play with technology helps me be a better
teacher. It allows me to empathize, or try to, with my students, and try to
understand what they find interesting about exploring or not exploring
technical topics. If I can empathize with them about it, then I can help them
find their own path and their own joy in understanding the world around them,
even if their path or joy is different from mine.
The Product
Academics are the product. Look at our web sites, and it becomes apparent.
The Walkers
I walk a lot. I walk to work, to the grocery store, around the neighborhood,
to friends' houses, on lunch breaks. I like to walk because it feels good. My
legs are often restless and need to move, but I also like to walk because it's
a quieting experience.
I've long been a walker. When I lived in the Seattle area, I walked to and
from work. It was seven miles each way and took about an hour and 45 minutes.
I started drinking coffee because of this walk. I don't remember the weather
there being incredibly cold, but it was cold and wet enough to seep through to
the bones, and for the first time in my life, black coffee started to taste
good and feel restorative. It was then that Seattle made some sense to me.
One of the interesting things about walking is that you are more likely,
I think, to notice the other walkers. When I lived in Missouri, there was
a woman who was a walker, and I would see her all over town, pretty decent
miles apart, just walking, hands in her pocket. Here in Lexington, I know of
a number of walkers. There's one man who shares an appearance with Shaggy, but
he's much taller, bulked up, and a bit intimidating. He always, always carries
papers with him. For years, they were stuffed in a manila envelope. I would see
him on the other side of town, and still he had those papers under his left
arm, crammed in that manila envelope. Sometime recently he acquired a shoulder
bag, which now bursts with those same papers, I assume. It's very mysterious
and intriguing. There's another person, I'll call him B, who used to
walk all around my neighborhood, but then due to some illness, transferred to
a walker, and now he's in a wheelchair. Still, he gets around.
Another interesting thing about being a walker is that I sometimes develop
some kind of relationship with other walkers. B and I talk a bit. He
knows what I do for a living and just about every time we speak, he tells me he
would like to have become a librarian if he could start all over again. It
comes across as a life gone wrong kind of regret. Even if we walkers don't
speak to each other, there's the nod, although it often has to be earned. When
the man with the manila envelope and I first passed each other on the sidewalk
five or so years ago, he wouldn't acknowledge me. After a couple of years of
this, he began to return my nod, but his nods were always subtle---just
a slight downward motion. Nowadays, the nods are deeper and stretched out, but
I don't see him very often anymore. More mystery.
There are other walkers, too. There's the guy who works at a local store. We
often pass each other on the way to our jobs, located in opposite directions,
and may share a couple of words in that passing. Sometimes it feels like it's
a disruption to his own quieting, as if acknowledging me is a burden, and
I feel bad about that because I respect the quieting. There's the guy who
dances as he walks. There are others.
I like the walkers. I don't know if they're good or bad people. I know
a little of B's story, but I don't know anything about the others.
Maybe I should dare to ask, but I also like the mysteriousness of it all, and
I like that they seem to be private people. And I like that they've always been
there, no matter where I've lived.
Written and edited in ed, and touched up in Vim.
On Solitude
The right writing tools help, but there are two other problems that deter
good work. First, good work requires solitude and long bouts of it. Second, the
web has destroyed space. Solitude requires space. Therefore, by entailment, the
web has destroyed solitude. My premises overreach and simplify but not by far,
I think.
Even as I write this, there's a part of me that wants to go look up
something on the web. Even though I haven't had social media in a long time,
I still have the desire sometimes to share a tweet or a post. Even if I'm
physically alone, the web feels inside me and invasive, and it is noisy.
I need to retrain myself to be disconnected. Back in 1993, when I was
a junior in college, I spent a semester at a major research library. There was
the occasional letter or phone call, and periodical social gatherings during
lunch or in the evening, but for the most part, for nine weeks of that
semester, all I did was research. I read, took notes, and wrote, and after
a while of this, I put together a long paper. I did that, just as my classmates
did, without the web or the internet, and the focus came easy.
It's true that I have many more responsibilities today, but there must be
a way to re-train my mind to feel that solitude and find that kind of focus
again. I touched it recently. Last summer we went camping for a week. I was
alone on the first night and it was great. Even when we were all together, our
phones didn't have a connection, and by the end of that week, the focus had
begun to return as the world had begun to recede.
I think this summer
I'll re-read Erazim Kohák's wonderful book The embers and the stars:
A philosophical inquiry into the moral sense of nature. The book was gifted
to me by one of my professors when I graduated college and became one of my
favorite books, and I think it'll help equip me with the mental tools needed to
get that focus back.
Written and edited in ed.
On Writing and its Tools
It feels like I used to have an academic writing voice and because I had
that voice, writing came easily.
I remember when I lost that voice and writing suddenly felt sluggish. I was
taking a philosophy course in graduate school and was trying to write a paper
on a difficult topic that was also quite new to me, and during the struggle of
thinking through the problem, it felt like something cracked in my mind.
I could almost hear a once coherent thing in my head fracture like a loud clap
on a thunderous night.
My quest to find the perfect writing tools began well before this event. The
initial motivation I had for learning Linux was because I found it offered
tools, like Vim and Emacs and the terminal itself, that afforded a much nicer,
liberating, and less distracting writing experience than the options that were
available at the time on other operating systems, but something about that
event made that quest hyperactive.
Losing that coherent voice had some odd side effects. I think I can sit down
and write despite whatever mood I am in, but the mood will dictate the tool
I use. Sometimes sitting at a computer feels stifling and writing just seems
impossible. To attempt to write this way feels like I must first break through
some great barrier. Then, writing by hand can feel less resistant.
If I continue to use the computer, though, I have to be careful because
I can easily get distracted by the tools themselves. I might begin to fiddle
too much with my Vim configuration or my terminal settings---altering the
terminal color scheme, font type, or font size repeatedly---and end up not
writing at all. If I can recognize this frenetic mood quickly enough, but can't
write by hand because I need the tools on my computer for some reason, I might
switch to a different writing program, like a regular word processor, and find
that just by doing so the writing comes more freely.
And then sometimes writing weirdly comes easiest when I am composing an
email. I think I may have written half the first draft of my dissertation as
Gmail messages to no one. But writing this way, as if I was writing to someone,
as if I had an idea of an audience, felt good and was productive. I haven't
been able to replicate that experience with the current version of Gmail. The
interface has changed too much and writing in Gmail now feels
uncomfortable.
While my academic writing voice feels fractured, my creative writing voice
does not, but the right tool helps here, too. I have an old 1950s era
Smith-Corona typewriter. I use this machine to write for fun---mostly letters
to family and friends. Writing this kind of material on this machine has been
a relaxing pastime.
I started typing this in the ed text editor. My go-to
editor is Vim, but ed can be a respite for even that minimal interface. The
problem is that even with editors like Vim, there is still a temptation to mix
modes -- to edit as I write. Since I find it much more cumbersome to edit with
ed as I write, using ed places more focus on the writing process.
I particularly enjoy writing in ed with the terminal in full screen mode. It
is probably overkill because I already use the minimalist i3 (tiled) window
manager, but even with i3 and Vim I get distracted by mixing up my modes -- by
writing and editing concurrently. Ed forces me to write because switching and
working in different modes in ed (input mode to edit mode) is unlike switching
and working in different modes in Vim, and the latter is easier. To edit in
Vim: press the escape key, move around the screen, make the desired edits,
repeat, done. In ed, start a new line, press period (.) to enter command mode,
print to screen the range of text to edit, make edits using regular
expressions, repeat, done. This is all a bit cumbersome, and the process
encourages me to avoid using it.
I do not altogether avoid editing in ed, and a side benefit of editing with
ed is that it has made me a more advanced Vim user. Even though I have been
using Vim for 15 plus years, I am still learning.
Keeping it Minimal
My 30 plus year history with computing has been a history of keeping things
minimal.
In the 80s, I had a Tandy 1000 SL with, I think, MS-DOS 3.x. That computer
lasted for about six or seven years, and I enjoyed it and learned a lot about
computers by primarily using the DOS command line.
I brought my computer with me when I went to college in 1991, but I also
used the computers in the college's library. I don't know what kind of
computers these were, but what I really liked about them was that they had
WordPerfect 5.1. Like the word processors we have today, I didn't use the vast
majority of the functions WP 5.1 offered, but what I liked about it was that,
like all DOS-based applications at the time, its interface was minimal.
I felt comfortable and at home in that DOS minimalism, and have never stopped
seeking or recreating it since.
My Tandy stopped booting sometime around 1994 or so, and I graduated at the
end of 1995. I went several years without my own computer, but in 1998
I started working for a company and had to use a computer with Windows 95, and
then later I bought my next computer, which had Windows 98.
The graphical user interface was entirely new to me, and I hated how busy it
was. In the early 2000s, it occurred to me that it would be nice to install WP
5.1 on my computer so that I could have that full screen, single application
interface that I found so appealing. By this time, it was already too late. WP
5.1 was gone, but in my search, I found other ways to recreate a minimal
writing experience when I found Emacs, and then Vi/Vim, and of
course, Linux. It's now been about 16 years since I first installed Linux.
The computing world had only grown more complicated and busy, but I still
like to keep it as simple as I can. I use the i3 window manager, after having used ratpoison for years. I practically
live in the terminal, and Bash, Vim, and Mutt are my primary applications. If I could
only use w3m all of the time, I'd be
even happier.
