vlion - a pursuit of the ineffable

The Big Goal this year is to substantially increase physical fitness of my family. We're overweight, and not terribly fit. We know that's going to have medical issues coming down the tubes for us if we keep that up. I've already had some very unpleasant episodes related to straight out physical weakness. So... we're sweating it out at the gym this year.

Um.

What else. Got a used cheap single speed bike to bang around downtown, cafes, etc. The cheap helps for when it gets stolen. Nice bike though. Hoping I keep it a while.

life in seattle goes well.

the job is fun, mostly. and well paid. whee.

at home hacking hsa slowed, as it often does towards summer.

the wife likes going out with me after work.

I'm not on irc much right now because of #3 and #4.

skin games by jim butcher is pretty decent. the usual dresden files plot though, wtb another plot plox? the overplot is doing well, but the episodes are getting repetitive

sporadically doing implementation research on my old MS topic. should desporadify it

debating writing a book on practical sw engineering


odd article came out: http://damemagazine.com/2014/05/23/amazon-killing-my-sex-life - not entirely without flaws or truth. a good and true quote:

"""
The new tech bros have one thing on their brains—making money. They are different than the programmers I knew from ’90s, many of whom were also artists—musicians, photographers, DJs, involved in underground and alternative subcultures. They were freaks. Coding was as much a creative activity as a means to making money. If you got into computers in the ’90s, you were already a little weirder than the rest of the world, you already thought differently. Now that computing is trendy—and economically fruitful—it’s attracting a different kind of person altogether.
"""

so true. you can see it in cs classes and in the workplace.

Moving to Seattle in a few weeks for a new job. I'm excited, mostly.

I guess it's time to figure out how we're going to socialize in the area.

Board game groups can be nice, but the yelling geeks can get tiring.

Biking is very athletic there (hills, hills, hills), though we love it.

Churches will be interesting to find. I get the idea that Seattle doesn't have much middle ground theologically , which is where we both tend to fall on non-ecclesiology matters. It's been a real struggle locally to find people who practiced what they preached and remembered love as the primary gift.

I will be able to plug into hacker groups, for sure. Maybe an OpenHack group or other similar group. I also want to learn sailing. So I can figure out something to get involved in.

M'lady favors the Fiber Arts and has had a thing for spinning for the last few months.

life in bellingham (north of Seattle) is nice. its raining tremendous amounts here now. fall and so forth. we're still unpacking books. we have lots of books.

I wish I had more interesting things to say that didn't come in "super long form". I think more and more, if its worth saying much about, it's worth saying in depth, with detail, and with citations and bibliography. I've become quite convinced that long form writing and long form thought are really and truely the best way to work out thoughts. This may correlate with book ownership, but - also I think it comes of reading many tweets and many forum posts over the years that are short and ill-thought out.


I'm debating working up a homeschool computer science curriculum.

I'm debating working up an (un)systematic theology of my beliefs and understanding of Christianity - loosely, they ought to be considered antinomian/antihierarchical and mystical. these are not popular trends and have never been.

I've started to learn Hebrew a bit. Slow going.

I've been involved in some of the PNW tech activism relating to the NSA. I don't believe it's going to be fruitful except as a stop-gap - the internet of things is coming and a body of law, culture, and thought need to come into existence about it before nasty little nazi-minded tyrants take advantage of the opening. This is a good example of a start: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/29/magazine/dave-eggers-fiction.html?_r=0 this needs to be a conversation in the US and an understanding of what is acceptable. The NYT in the conversation really helps the conversation exist outside of my FSF/functional programming world.

I want to drop out of the activism. I think my life has too much in it and activism is best left to those who have a heart for it. I am in it because I think it genuinely has a potential to threaten the ability of a church to freely speak - chilling of discourse sort of thing.

Visiting with some of the DW people in the area has been nice. if you ever have the yen to go out for coffee with a vlion, let me know. if you come in from far away I might be able to drift down Seattle way.

One thing I like to do is keep an eye on the politicians that my district sends to Washington DC. So I followed them on Twitter tonight. Should be interesting watching what they have to say.

Also need to figure out the B'ham city council/mayor newsfeeds. I really having been realizing the importance of *local* government lately.

I am at a coffeeshop under my workplace, mooching wifi.

My wife and I biked here from our new apartment; it's abuot 5-15 minutes bike, I think. Probably 5ish.

Internet at home will be hooked up late this week (boo).

Work is OK so far. Lots of C#/Windows. Pro tip, everyone: Linux stack >> Windows stack. -.-

The car is getting worked over at the shop. It was smoking and needs a 'valve job' (sounds dirty, neh?).


I hope to be on #dreamwidth regularly in the coming weeks.

If anyone lives in the region (Bellingham, WA), I'd love to visit!

From the previous post's linked book (paraphrased): in the 1800s, most babies were dressed in white smocks/dresses. Only the most minor decoration on them. Babies were not 'feminine' or 'masculine' per se, as those words would connote an erotic sexuality, much like our word 'hottie' does not get applied to girls under a certain age by people with, well, taste. Babies were essentially neuter socially.

As the modern economy emerged, women began buying their clothing instead of making them, and it turned out (handwave) that people both liked to buy and companies liked to sell relatively gendered baby clothes. This trend continued until the mid-60s, at which point this dramatically reversed (c.f. Free To Be You And Me) until '86, at which point, BANG!, gendered clothes were in. The author notes that pink as a color sold something like 2x better to girls than other colors (to girls) as of 2010 or so. The author notes that pink as a color became the *common* (but not defining) color of femininity in the 50s, vehemently rejected by the second wave feminists in the 70s (defining pink as the female color), and then suggests that in the reclaiming of femininity in 'third wave' feminism, pink also became reclaimed.

The author brings up a regular aspect since the Little Lord Faunteleroy era of people being concerned about effimancy of men and *therefore* a social desire to keep their men Manly.

(disclaimer: I don't claim to condone nor condemn nor espouse these views. I'm just paraphrasing for my own recollection and the interest of DW)

And now for a more personal rumination.

K (The Lady aka The Wife) and I have a relative who is being brought up in an *extremely* gendered environment. Many things are Just Not OK for him to do. "Boys being boys" is a common refrain in that situation. Peculiarly, I note that I don't feel comfortable with boys doing certain traditionally girl things, although I feel that it's OK for girls to cross over. My internal introspection indicates to me that I feel that certain actions are symbolic of weakness and not-success, and these actions are girly. So I don't think I'm without blame here.

Example. A girl playing a doll. OK. A boy? Not OK. A boy playing with a stuffed animal? OK. A girl? OK. (this feels very cognitively dissonant). But note, "playing with dolls" is kind of insult. Hmmm.

A girl wearing a dress? OK, I guess. A boy? Naw. Kilts are cool though. A girl wearing pants? OK! A boy? OK.
To me, most dresses indicate impracticality and foolishness: running not easy, can't bike, can't really do sports, etc. It usually connotes housewife, etc. The only woman I know who regularly wears dresses is a very sad woman who firmly believes that men > women. Oddly, I don't link "showy" dresses with that thought process: Perhaps that's because I place things into two mental boxes: Costume vs. Getting Real Stuff Done. Costumes are free to be silly and impractical. I got married to a woman who was pants, as it so happens. No dresses for her! (she hates them)

High heels are verboten in all forms and genders IMO. Blamey things are bad on the feet.

Football? I'm not really OK with football, period. But I'd feel a lot more comfortable with a boy who went footballing than a girl. Dissonance.

Seeing women fight in a movie makes me excruciatingly uncomfortable. Even more so when a man and a woman fight. Totally, horrifically, horridly uncomfortable. Man vs. Man? Yeah, that's OK. I don't know. I don't really think fighting is really a great thing. But I get a much more viscerally negative reaction when a woman is involved. Hmm.

Okay, relax time is over. Time to get back to moving.

I graduated, M.S.C.S.

I am beyond thrilled and excited. K and I went and got a very nice meal tonight.

I am now laying plans for writing papers on my Master's work, along with future research plans.

Work is, for lack of a better word, easy. So I have a set of minor programming projects going on at home - stocks analysis, ai, a game, a recipe-finder, etc. I have an idea for a graphical web browser, where you can see the links pointing off to different sites in 3 dimensions and you can swoop and zoom around on the Web without *having* to load up a given HTML page. I will probably do some of that after I roll up the AI and recipe finding software.

I've really become disenchanted with the reinvention of software & windowing systems. In the last 20 years (since '92), we've had Windows & OSX for desktop windowing (Ok, and Solaris, CDT, and Genera if you want to get picky), then we went to the web. Notice that the Web lacked the appropriate elements for actual windowing use, so someone got the bright idea to invent Flash. It had various idiosyncratic & badly done windowing systems. Well, we all know what happened to Flash. Now we have HTML5. Oh, and now Mobile. Once again we rewrite our software for the new Windowing modality.

@$%@#$^ this @#$@$#% with a #@$@$% in the CONNECTION INTERRUPTED...

....RESUMING.

Yeah. I lean more to the CLI for my information management every *day*. Easier to program, easier to compute with, and often easier to manage my information retrieval. And in the long run, isn't it better to make it easy to use at a powerful level than cool and new? I think so...

Hey, if anyone wants to hack on a Common Lisp project, let me know. I have a few of my own, and would be OK with working on someone else's.

Got a 'new' car. Old car dying. Ugh, that's 12K I won't see again.

Wish I could walk to work every day.

That'd be *great*. Biking would be spiffy too.

Work going okay. Helping hire. Man, so many bad resumes... so many weak candidates.xs

I'm offering help to anyone in DW, especially in the software development field if they want their resume critiqued. I'd really love to help.