Step Right Up

I heard a Tom Waits song on the radio the other day. It is called Step Right Up. In the song, Waits strings together every carnival pitch line, every tv pitch line, every used car salesman line that you’ve ever heard over a pulsating bass line accented with sax riffs. It is great.

I like Tom Waits. He plays characters when he sings a song. His singing voice is very intentionally gravelly. He sings in tune but his tone has lots of texture. It is so rough that it inspires concern that he will hurt himself singing that way.

He has had a second career as an actor. He typically plays the same kind of gritty character that he sings about in his songs. I listened to an interview with him at SIU in Carbondale, Illinois. He talks about the character that he attempts to portray and how he has become the character to some degree.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

Technical Debt

The clock on the mantle is ticking. I have a little bit less than an hour to meet the challenge of writing a blog post for today. I have sat and thought. I have watched TV, an interesting documentary with Josh Gates joining searchers for living specimens of the Tasmanian tiger. I’ve read Dave Winer’s blog posts for the last couple of days. I’ve read Alec Nevala-Lee’s blog. None of them have inspired a topic.

I am no longer daunted by the blank page. I am confident of my ability to fill it with words organized into coherent sentences and paragraphs. But until I can sit down and write something more or less on demand, I won’t have gotten my mind around the process of blogging.

When inspiration comes, or rather when I track down it’s sorry ass and shoot it in it’s tracks, I do a fair job of transforming it into good, coherent narrative creative-fact or fiction. I even write an occasional piece reminiscing about my childhood.

But nights like tonight, I struggle to say anything of interest. It is Friday night and I have had a rough week. I am learning a new phase of the testing life cycle at work. I am also learning how technical debt can spiral out of control as quickly as financial debt can.

Technical debt is a concept that has entered the lexicon of software development in the last ten years or so. The concept is, you find yourself at a point in a project where you are behind schedule and you have cobbled together some horrific piece of code that somehow works if only just barely. Now that you’ve gotten it working, you know how to go back and clean it up so that it works well but you don’t have time to clean up the implementation and meet your deadline.

So, you ship the code as it is with a promise to yourself to rewrite the ugly code later when you have time. This is fine when you pay your technical debt down regularly and go back and refactor the code that you shipped earlier. But all too often other schedule pressures arise and you never get around to paying down the technical debt.

It’s at this point when another programmer comes from outside the project and in the process of finding their way around the code base they discover all the dirty little secrets hidden within it. The problem is, by now the team in general and management in particular, have learned to live with the ugly code. At this point is extremely difficult to convince them that the code desperately needs the major refactoring that the current level of technical debt calls for.

So the project continues to spiral downward into the mess of unmaintainable spaghetti code that it is becoming until eventually someone decides that it would be more cost effective to rewrite the whole project from scratch than to try to refactor the existing code. And they’re right.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

You Eat Peanuts, Butch. That’s What You Do Best.

I’m sitting here in my living room eating peanuts with an elephant. He sits across the room from me and pops peanuts in his mouth with his trunk. He stares at me with beady little eyes. I find myself matching him, peanut for peanut. I stare back at him and feel the gravitas of his physical presence.

I wonder how he got in here. He is much too big to have come in through the door or the window. He must have been much smaller when he entered. How could he have been here that long without anyone noticing him? I can only conclude that no one wanted to see him. We only see what we want to see. Or rather we only acknowledge that which we pay attention to.

There have been clues. The pungent smell of elephant dung, the peanut shells littering the floor, and the bags of peanuts stacked by the door, all lent credence to the idea that maybe there was an actual elephant in the room. I even admit to seeing an occasional glimpse of grey in the room from time to time. I just have never followed up on the glimpses.

But now there is no more denying it. He is there. Nothing I can say or do on my own can change  the fact that he is here. But it is good to have finally seen him. I am glad that I can talk about him and talk with him. It was becoming harder to ignore him as he got larger and larger. The truth is, you can’t unsee him once you have seen him. That single fact changes the nature of your thoughts on the matter.

It is liberating to be able to talk about these things rather than continuing to sweep them under the rug. I know I can’t be the only one that feels this way. It is frustrating to hear people talking as if he isn’t there. It’s nothing that I wasn’t already cultivating within myself.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

All You Need is Love?

We can learn a lot about how people think by studying the words that exist in some languages and not others. For example, Greek has six words for love. It is difficult for those of us who come to these concepts later in life to fully appreciate these different meanings.

The Greek words for love are Eros, Philia, Ludus, Agape, Pragma, and Philautia. Eros refers to sexual passion. Philia is deep friendship. Ludus is playful love or as we sometimes call it, puppy love. Agape is selfless love or love for everyone. Pragma is mature love or longstanding love. Philautia is love of self. With so many different words for love it is clear that the Greeks have thought long and hard about their interpersonal relationships.

How many times has the lack of adequately discriminating words for love caused miscommunication in English. The lack of a concept of different kinds of love leads many people to misconstrue feelings of affection. How many times has one person said I love you meaning Philia or Ludus to another person who says I love you, too meaning Eros. That is a recipe for hurt feelings.

Just knowing that there are these different dimensions to affection can lead someone to think more deeply about how they actually feel. And then of course there is the fact that sometimes one feeling grows into another. Having the vocabulary to discuss such emotions is useful. It’s too bad that more people don’t have or take the opportunity to study other languages. It can expand your view of the world greatly as this one example has shown.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

Over Reaction To Weather Forecasts Considered Harmful

In recent years we have seen a number of changes in the way our institutions, especially schools, react to forecasts of severe weather. This is partially because we have gotten better at forecasting weather and partially because the schools systems are afraid of being sued if there were injuries or deaths due to severe weather. I honestly don’t think students are any safer at home. The fact of the matter is that they are just more distributed. Consequently, while the chances of lots of students getting hurt are less, the chances of some students getting hurt is probably greater.

But there is a greater risk of preemptively cancelling schools every time there is a possibility of rough weather. That is that every time we over react to the forecast and nothing actually happens we erode the credibility of our weather forecasters. As a result we encourage people to disregard predictions of rough weather. This is dangerous. Our weather forecasting capabilities are getting incrementally better. We are constantly getting better computer models that can more accurately predict what is going to happen and computers are getting more capable every year. And yet these models are only good if we heed their warning.

We should be making better emergency plans and tailoring our reactions to what is actually predicted. Instead, we have school systems which would rather make it somebody else’s responsibility to keep their students safe. It is all an issue of avoiding liability. We are teaching our children to overreact to threats of all kinds instead of rationally evaluating risk and making solid contingency plans. I think we will regret this in the long run.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

Far Out, Man

I first listened to many of the classic rock albums of the late sixties in my cousins room. He was a life guard at the country club. I spent the summer with my cousins while my dad finished writing his dissertation for his Ph.D. We would come home from the pool and do whatever chores there were to be done around the house and then listen to records and hang out in his room.

He had joined the Columbia record club with its introductory offer of around a dozen or so albums for two cents. The catch was that you had to buy a minimum number of albums during the next year. I suppose it wasn’t that bad a deal if you were going to buy records regularly anyway.

He had The Rolling Stones His Satanic Majesty’s Request, Santana Abraxas, Woodstock, Crosby, Stills, & Nash first album and Deja Vu,  and a bunch more that don’t come to mind right now. He had one of those record players that would automatically change records so we put on a stack when we went to bed and they played long after we went to sleep.

It was the summer between my sophomore and junior year. I had long hair and played electric guitar. I considered myself a hippie. I was really just a naive kid. I wanted to rush head long out into the big wide world. Of course there were nasty things out there. We were fighting a war in Vietnam and boys and girls only a couple of years older than me were going off to fight and die, or worse, come home missing parts of their bodies and souls.

I lived a charmed existence. I still do. I’ve learned that we make our own luck. But I still have to admit that I dodged some extremely scary bullets in my life. It was an exciting ride.

Life has slowed down a little. I go to bed early and get up early. Only  because my job requires it. That’s what I tell myself anyway. I still enjoy sleeping in and staying up late. I can’t pull all nighters any more though.

I miss playing rock music with people. I know people that like to play folk and Americana music. I have fun playing that genre but I wish I could find a band that liked to play classic rock. I keep looking but I haven’t found a group yet.

I don’t have enough hours in the day to play in a band on top of work and my writing commitments that I’ve made to myself. Maybe someday when I’ve cut back on the hours of my day job I’ll actively seek out a rock band to play with.

Time passes. The older you get, the quicker it flows. You’ve got to enjoy life while you’re living. Keep your priorities straight and your powder dry.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

Happy Birthday Dear

My wife had a birthday party today. She said it was the best birthday party she’s had since she was five years old. When I asked her why she thought that was, she said “Because it was on my own terms.” I’m glad to have done my part to help her pull it off. I have to admit it was a pretty impressive party.

The meal was salad with homemade dressing, spinach lasagna, garlic bread and cupcakes with an icing rose on each one. In attendance were her mama, daddy, brother, sister, brother-in-law, nephew, our daughter, and a couple of close friends. It was pretty amazing that we got eleven adults into our small living room.

Everyone enjoyed the food and company. The house was beautifully decorated and all cleaned up. This was no easy feat considering we have two dogs that like to strew their toys throughout the apartment.

Afterwards, we both nodded off for a short nap on the couch. Then we had a quiet Sunday afternoon watching documentaries on BBC Four. The evening is being topped off by a tour of the top nominees for the British Restoration of the Year award. They have been busy restoring landmark architectural specimens that had fallen into egregious disrepair.

Another weekend has come and gone. They pass by quicker all the time. I’m going to have to get serious about making my bucket list. Else there won’t be time to get it all done. My birthday is the end of June. I hope it is as well planned and executed as my wife’s was.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

Highfalootin Musing on Art

All artists are saying look at me. Look at what I’ve done. And beyond that, in the best of cases, they are telling a story that illuminates a particular aspect of human experience. Sometimes it is superficial and at others profound. Every artist that is honest with themselves wants to be relevant. It takes work to craft something that is both aesthetically appealing and at the same time meaningful.

Those that attempt to deconstruct art and tease deep philosophical meaning from it are on a fools errand. It is not wrong per se but it is like dissecting an animal to try to discover how it works. Art stands or falls on the basis of how well it hangs together as a whole. You can discuss how it affected you and theorize about how the artist achieved their effect but I seriously doubt that you can ever truly understand a piece completely by intellectual analysis.

Good art works on different levels. It is like a many faceted gem. You can hold it in your hand and examine it. You can see it from one perspective. You can turn it around and see it from another but there is always the other side that you can’t see preventing you from grasping it in its entirety all at once. Art has an intellectual dimension, an emotional dimension, and a philosophical dimension.

I’m not even sure you should try to analyze it. Perhaps from the perspective of an artist wanting to riff of of it but not as a critic wanting to explain it. Art is ultimately inexplicable.

On many occasions I have reexamined art after years and I usually find that it has new meaning that comes from the experiences that I have had in the intervening time. This suggests to me that the art is dependent on that which it stirs up in the observer. This is part of the intangible aspect of art that makes it defy analysis.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

Top of the Pops

We have an app that lets us stream BBC television live as it is being broadcast in the UK. This makes it offset from our local time by six hours. That means that, for instance, when we watch at 9:00PM here, it is3:00AM in Great Britain. It is surprising that we can almost always find things that we want to watch quicker there than we can in all the channels on the local cable pretty much any time, day or night.

I may have also mentioned that early on Saturday morning, BBC Four plays old Top of the Pops episodes from a long time ago. Tonight they were playing an episode from 1977. I was living in Germany at the time but I was totally unaware of Top of the Pops at that time. I was, however, aware of many of the artists that they featured.

As I watched such bands as Bob Marley and the Wailers, Thin Lizzy, and Queen to name just a few, perform their current hit songs I was impressed by how rigidly produced many of the acts were. Their dancing was choreographed. Rod Stewart was even using an acoustic guitar as a prop, he obviously wasn’t playing it.

In this post Milli Vanilli age modern audiences take a dim view of lip syncing but in 1977 it was required by most television producers. One can understand their nervousness about things going wrong on a nationwide feed but after all, that is what these artists do, night after night on tour. It is going to take more than the novelty of a television studio to throw them.

I had my run as a professional musician. It was exhilarating. By the end of the three year run I was as good a rhythm guitar player as most of the ones that I saw on tv tonight. And the more you play, the better you get.

But I was saved from that probable catastrophe by circumstances. The nail in the coffin of my musical career was when my wife got pregnant with our first daughter. We had to change the plan then. We couldn’t live on a shoe string and hand outs from our parents any more. I had to get a real job.

And as fate would have it, that job was as a missile computer repairman for the Army. It brought me to Huntsville and taught me the trade that would end up carrying me through a successful career as a programmer.

Being a professional musician takes a lot out of you. If you are successful you are never at home. You have to learn to make home where ever you are. And you have to resist the temptation of drugs and alcohol and promiscuous sex. In spite of the early termination of my musical career I struggled with those issues in my twenties. I can only imagine how difficult it would have been if I had had the kind of access to those vices that a musical career at that time would have given me.

On the other hand, if you are a less successful musician, you are never home. You couldn’t afford a home anyway. You are constantly looking for a gig to put food on the table and get you to the next gig. I won’t say things have been easy for me but they’ve been a lot easier than they would have been as a professional musician.

I miss the audiences though. It’s not a matter of ego though. There is a magical exchange of energy between musicians and an audience that digs the music they are playing. Both the crowd and the performers feed off of that energy and, paradoxically, the more they do, the more the energy is amplified.

I still play music. Not as much as I’d like. But I keep in practice. I keep my eyes open for a small group of musicians with similar musical tastes and abilities. The nonverbal communications between musicians is another thrill that I miss. If you play music and want to get together sometime, let me know.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

Butt in Chair Time

Years ago I attended a Science Fiction convention in Huntsville Alabama. It  was called ConStellation and it had only been around for a couple of years. One of the speakers was the editor of one of the monthly science fiction magazines, I forget which one. I forget his name. I forget a lot lately but that’s a topic for a different blog.

This editor’s talk was about what it was like to be an editor and what it took to be a writer. He used a particular phrase so often it almost became a mantra. He said to be a writer you’ve got to spend time with your butt in the chair writing. Not thinking about writing. Not reading something. Writing. Doing other things is perhaps necessary to inspire what you write but in order to be a writer you have to write and that takes “butt in chair” time.

I have taken that advise to heart. I have scheduled my butt in chair time and I defend it vigorously. My wife sometimes resents the fact that I have time to write but I don’t have time for some of the items on the honey-do list. To be fair, that is a fault not of my writing time but of my neglectful attitude toward the honey-do list. But that too is a topic for a different blog.

I have discovered the importance of having a distraction free place to write. I can’t write with the television on. I’m liable to watch whatever drivel is on instead of writing. I often put headphones on and listen to music to drown out the TV. That is only marginally better. I find I write best when I’m sitting in near silence.

Some times I sit in the silence, waiting for the idea that is going to come forth. I am close to despair. I have got to write my blog so that I can go to bed. And then it happens. The ideas flow out of my head and onto the page. Are they any good? I guess that’s for you to decide. All I can say is that they are coherent. They start at the beginning and proceed to tell a story. That’s really all I ask for.

So, if you want to master something, whether it is writing, or playing a musical instrument, or painting a picture, you’ve got to spend the time doing it. Do it until that spark of creativity flows out of you and becomes the art that you are driven to produce. It will happen when you least expect it. It is liable to startle you when it happens. That is the miracle of creativity. If you court it long enough, it will come.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.