Travel Fun and Games

August 15, 2008 at 1:10 pm · Filed under Day to Day Blather

So, I am in New York for the Advanced Placement Development Committee meeting. I suppose I should just shut up and be happy to be here after the travel day I had yesterday getting here, but why would I have a blog if I shut up when I was supposed to?

So, New York is a great place that I really haven’t had time to enjoy during the meetings because they’re packed. So I decided to come early Saturday (fly out at 10 AM) so I could get to the fashion district and Mood Fabrics from Project Runway.

Looking back, this was a good idea, or I’d still be traveling. I got to the airport, went to my gate, at the end of the B terminal and was informed my flight was moved to the middle of the B terminal. Yeah, I’d passed the gate and then gone much further.

No problem, exercise is good. So I go to the new gate, but the plane there is going to Philly, not Newark. But the gate agent announces the Newark plane will be there (numerous times…lots of people are surprised like I am), so I sit and knit.

And, let me just say, I could have been real bitchy yesterday if I hadn’t had my knitting in my purse. But I decided to make each delay an opportunity to knit another row. Yeah, I went Pollyana on the problem. Not at all like me.

So, sooner or later the Philly plane leaves and ours comes and unloads and we get back on in pretty good time and of course the plane is full, but that’s okay, the flight is under an hour and a half.

And then the pilot makes an announcement. Over the next 5 hours I’m gonna learn to hate the pilot making an announcement, but for now, it’s interesting. Seem’s there’s a stop at Newark, so we can’t take off. And that’s all he knows.

Hey, I had meant to finish reviewing the multiple choice questions during the flight, so I take them out (and oooooh, out my tray table down!) and get to work. To Delta’s credit, the crew does their damndest to make the wait tolerable. The pilot invites families to come to the cockpit and take pictures of their kids in the pilot’s seat (something I’d never seen before in a post-9/11 world). The flight attendants bring out trays of water. And the passengers don’t riot or demand to be let out (although there is some grumbling by the skinny girls around me that they’re hungry). And we wait.

And I finish all the multiple choice.

And for some reason (the pilot explains all the intricacies of the flight controller in DC and his handler in Atlanta, but really, I don’t care why–I just want to know when) we taxi out to the end of a runway. (Okay, the stop was lifted, but we still don’t have a landing slot in Newark.) And we wait some more. A lot more.

And I finish writing up all the free response solutions and call my father and talk to Charlie and Fran (who has already arrived in New York and who I was supposed to be shopping with). So I start knitting again, which is good because I can knit standing up and the guy in the seat next to my aisle seat keeps getting up to go pace.

And, we finally take off at about 1 PM (just 3 hours late) and fly via the Indianapolis flight controller instead of the DC one so the flight is a bit longer but who cares because we’re flying! Since the flight was due in around noon, we’re not eating anything more than peanuts, but hey, it’s better than sitting on the tarmac.

And we land and luggage takes forever as usual, but there’s a train and it’s good and fast so we’ll get to Manhattan soon, except…

To get to Amtrak, you have to take the airport train. Fine. So we go until we can see the Amtrak station and come to a stop. And sit there. And wait, and wait, and watch the Amtrak pull in, and watch it pull out, and then we move.

So, normally there’s no problem, but since it’s a Saturday, it’s 50 minutes until the next flight. So I get some of the free response solutions entered and running.

And the train finally shows up and it’s packed–mostly very skinny kids who seat 2 to a seat made for big adults so they can play cards. Fortunately, they get off in a few stops and 3 very tired adults get their places and the trip continues without incident until I get to the hotel and there are a million or so people in the lobby. But after another wait (and I am getting good at knitting while waiting), I get a room and it’s okay if you ignore the toilet that doesn’t stop and the fact the bed looks like it was made by my cat and dog and one of the is still under the bedspread.

But I’m here and I finally eat and we see a play (Altar Boyz–great fun and not more concentration than I can deal with) and I get some sleep and a good strong shower this morning and then the straw breaks the camel’s back.

In dealing with the leaky toilet, I completely miss the fact there are no bath towels in the room. In fact, I miss that little fact until I get out of the shower. Fortunately, I have two hand towels (and yeah, I’ll admit it, sheets) so I’m up and washed and dried and ready to face the day.

Let’s hope it’s better than yesterday. But if it’s not, I still have my knitting.

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My favorite OSCON quote (so far)

July 24, 2008 at 5:46 pm · Filed under Computer stuff ·Tagged

Question: “What version of the code are you using?”

Answer: “Monday.”

Yeah, that about sums up how things are working in the Open Source world.

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I know C. Dang.

July 24, 2008 at 3:09 pm · Filed under Computer stuff ·Tagged

Crap.  It looks like I know C.  Or at least a little of it.  Enough of it to contribute to Open Source.

I’m in the Just Enough C for Open Source session.  It is well presented and interesting to see how the old ideas are being presented to the new age of programmers (”Oh no, variables aren’t automatically initialized!”), but I’m not getting much new out of it.

Which is disappointing for me.  I decided a long damn time ago not to learn C.  I knew Basic and Fortran and Cobol and Lisp and Pascal and Modula-2 and Ada and at the time, that seemed like enough.  And I wasn’t using C for anything, so it seemed like too much to add another language to the mix.

And the C/Unix guys were just annoying.  I’d ask them how to do something simple and be told to do something difficult instead.  Why bother?

Of course, in the intervening years, I’ve learned another language or two (or 20, but I don’t feel like worrying about that now), but still avoided C.  I still had no reason to learn it.  I did learn C++ and Java, which are sorta close!

But, osmosis happens.  Sitting through this session, it appears I’ve learned C.

I had a friend in college studying comparative languages who decided never to read Hamlet.  I got where he was coming from.  I wonder if he was as disappointed when he realized he knew who Yorick was as I am now.

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Watch out compilers class!

July 23, 2008 at 2:28 pm · Filed under Computer stuff ·Tagged ,

Oh my.

I’m in an OSCON talk about the Parrot Compiler Toolkit.  It is just way too cool and way too right for a compiler class.  There’s support so that all you really have to write is the parser and code to tag action methods.  Those are the big things I want my students to do.  So I really have to figure out the PCT.

Now, someone might say instead I need to figure out yacc, since that’s been around for forever and does the same thing, but I just won’t listen to those people.  In fact, since you can get to all the parts of the compiler (like the OPcode tree, or POST), I think I could justify PCT being better.

And anyway, yacc’s been around for forever.  Isn’t that sufficient reason to try something new?

Tres cool sidebar…I entered all my sessions in Google calendar (very easy, since Google imported the calendar file created by O’Reilly) and I just got warned of my next session.  So gotta go.

But I’ve saved the link for my poor compiler kids!  (Really, pity them not…this has got to be easier than compiling to .NET!)

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OSCON Day 2

July 22, 2008 at 6:01 pm · Filed under Computer stuff ·Tagged

So,

I’m sitting in a session that makes no sense to me, but mostly because I think it makes no sense to anyone.  Well, that’s not quite right.  It just seems to be presented by someone who has no idea what a good OSCON tutorial is. 

The slides are done in a simple white font on a black background that is so much duller than anything I can describe. 

The speaker is talking in a monotone.

He doesn’t have his examples ready…to show something new, he goes to Google to look it up.

Not that the examples are that good…we’re seeing YouTube videos, ads for 3D mice, etc. etc.

I think for a very small audience, this is a good presentation.  I’m not in that audience.  Neither are most of the people here.

I needed more of an overview of the tools available.  I mean, sheesh, this is the Open Source Conference.  You don’t need a lot of time on licenses.  I expected you to start with Blender or Inkscape or the Gimp or something and do things.  Surveying just doesn’t cut it.  Hey, I did a survey of someone else’s tools last Friday, but I showed examples and explained what they were good for. 

And I didn’t keep talking about tools that weren’t open source and not for the web during a talk titled “Real Time 3D on the Web for the Web.” 

But my morning talk was great.  It was devoted to the fun and convolution that is Perl programming.  How bad is the code you can write?  Damian Conway can write worse code and he walked us through it.  And I understood it most without my head exploding.

And while I avoided Damian like the plague for a while, he really has mellowed and started being more interested in his audience than in his own strutting and posing.  By far it was the best of the tutorials I signed up for. 

It’s break time.  And while I’ll try to be polite, it’s a bit hard with a talk like this…

I wonder how many people will be back here after break.  I guess I’ll never know.

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Belated Pictures

July 21, 2008 at 6:20 pm · Filed under Cats and Dogs, Uncategorized

Ike on Alert
Mom and Kittens
Lunchtime for the kittens


So, we had kittens and they spent just a day with us (I still have no idea where they came from or where they went to).  But I did get pictures and now that I’ve figured out how to log into this blog again, I’ll try in vain to catch up.

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OSCON, 2008

July 21, 2008 at 3:03 pm · Filed under Computer stuff ·Tagged , ,

Well, this is an obvious thing to blog about…I’m at OSCON, taking workshops for the first two days.

I started in an introduction to Rails plugins.  I didn’t belong in an introduction to Rails plugins.  I haven’t really thought much about Rails since the first Rails conference, over a year ago.  And I hadn’t updated Rails since then.  So I tried to get Rails 2.0 running this morning and run through a tutorial to refresh myself.

And lemme say, I think it’s really sucky of Rails to “automatically” use SQLite, but then not make it clear that Ruby doesn’t by default include SQLite, so I have to install it.  And if I had more time, it probably would have been clear, but dammit, I wanted to go through the tutorial in 10 minutes and that’s just not enough time to RTFM.

But I did get a lot out of the course.  I remembered how it feels to think the instructor is speaking a foreign language using English words.  I have some students who are definitely in that boat.  Of course, I know that it’s possible to figure out what’s going on.  I honestly believe that some of my students don’t know just how lost they are.

And I got Rails to run.

And I felt very female.  After 45 minutes or so, I looked around and noticed very few other women in the session.  Ah, but there was one a few rows back!  Alas, she was the other woman in my group.  She also ditched the second half of the talk.

So, I decided to go from the sublime to the ridiculous, or some such thing, and spend the last hour and a half of the morning in an Introduction to Python session.  It’s been 8 months or so since I’ve thought about Python, but it’s come back a whole bunch faster.

Nice workshop though.  I can pay attention and do other things, like blog and get the PyDev add in working in Eclipse.  Good slides for the next time I need to learn Python.

And some cool phrasology…”Python is a language for consenting adults” for anytime something slightly dangerous is done (like dispensing with getters and setters).  Of course, this is not something someone interested in Python in the high school is wanting to hear.  But then, it’s been my reason for not wanting to use Python in the high school

And the Double UNDERscore is called the “dunder.”  Of course.  How cool.  What a dork I’ll look like in class this fall!

For purely cool programming, there’s Python function building…

def adderNew(n):
   def add(m):
      return m+n
   return add

add20 = adderNew (20)
add42 = adderNew (42)

x = 2
y = add20 (x)
z = add42(x)
print x, y, z

which gives 2, 22, 44!

We’re getting ready to leave…even though I don’t have to fight lines in the ladies room, I should finish up for now.

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A bit of magic in the morning

May 27, 2008 at 8:44 am · Filed under Cats and Dogs ·Tagged

So, I woke up, early (still getting over the effects of travel to Europe and realizing I’ll be getting up early for the next 2 weeks, so why bother sleeping late) and wandered to the living room, passing the glass doors to the back porch.

And the porch was full of kittens.

Well, not actually full. There was still a grill and lawn chairs and such, but there were actually 4 kittens playing on the porch. And since they were healthy kittens, they filled the porch, bouncing and climbing and killing acorns and such.

But I was awake enough to realize that, as adorable as they may be, kittens don’t really belong on the back porch.

Ike was with me and shared my kitten consternation. He just crouched and stared at them. And, since neither of us knew what to make of a porch full of kittens, we decided to bring Charlie into the mix. He’s been able to sleep later and is heading for the west coast today, where he’ll sleep later still. But he made the mistake of muttering something as I was leaving bed, so I figured he was awake.

And there were kittens on the back porch.

Sure enough, this wasn’t some sort of strange hallucination. Charlie agreed, once he woke up enough, that there were in fact kittens on the back porch.

So, the three of us watched the kittens and mama cat (who had had enough of the kittens to spend the time on the porch railing, above the fray). Three of the kittens were colored like their mother,
mostly white with a few large black or gray patches. But one was the spitting image of Ike. I really had to wonder if he had figured out a way to get out of the house to go catting around. (But our vet is too good; I’m sure it wasn’t Ike’s progeny.)

Random kittens on the back porch are a magical way to start the day. In fact, This American Life reported on the attempts to create a tv channel of puppies, because watching puppies is so good for the soul.

But, after a while, you start to wonder how the kittens got there and are they abandoned and what do we do with them and were they born in the yard and what are kittens doing on the back porch?  The mother didn’t look familiar so we thought maybe the family had gotten dumped, but they seemed exceptionally healthy and happy.  After a while, they proved to us they could slip through the barricade that we put in to keep Linus on the porch and disappeared.

And that’s how the day started out.  With a bit of magic in the morning.

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Surprising Productivitiy

January 10, 2008 at 7:00 am · Filed under Day to Day Blather

So, maybe I am really getting over having cancer. I got my stitches out Monday and have been surprisingly productive over the last week or so. I’ve made lots of progress on some crocheting and knitting (pictures when I’m done!) and got syllabi and calendars ready for classes yesterday. In one of the classes, I even came up with page numbers from the text for almost every day. (And it’s a book I haven’t used before!)

I was at school over an hour before my first class and almost felt like I knew what was happening. Surprising!

Let’s see how long this happens.

Now, for the disgusting/dismaying/discouraging/just plain weird e-mail of the day…Ike (the cat) got email from Purina today. (Of course my cat has email.) And they were touting high-tech devices for your cat. Well, sure, a cat with email would be the prime target for this sort of advertising. Fortunately, I got to it before he went to this web page to start ordering…and you just know he would if he could. (But he’s more of a low tech cat and would have ordered yarn instead.)

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The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World

January 4, 2008 at 5:18 pm · Filed under Books

You know, I really should have thought ahead. Yeah, cool, decide to blog more often right before becoming a vegetable. I mean, the excitement in my life this last week has been going a day without narcotics and wearing a skirt. (Hey, you try something with a waist band after getting laparoscopic surgery. It’s far more exciting than it sounds.)

But I did finish my first book of the new year: The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World by Michael Pollan. As a teacher of Scientific Inquiry, Pollan’s books are almost a guilty pleasure for me, but they are a pleasure. It’s not really science, more a combination of memoir, natural history, and strange thinking. And a little science. I really like the strange thinking.

But ya know, I never really thought about why people can get high until I read this book. Really, what’s the biological benefit of intoxication? But Pollan makes some guesses.

And I always saw Johnny Appleseed as that simple elementary school hero, bringing an apple a day to the frontier for its health. Ain’t necessarily so. Seems that until Prohibition, the reason people grew apples was to make hard cider. The whole apple a day/eat apples for health was developed during prohibition to have something else to do with apples.

And I had no idea apples didn’t grow true…if you plant an apple seed, you’ll get a tree and it’ll have fruit, but they probably will be nothing like the apple you got the seed from. (Apparently citrus is even more strange…an orange seed may result in any sort of citrus fruit tree.)

So, that’s been the highlight of the last few days. I also was finally able to count to 8…when I came out of surgery a week ago, the nurse counted and told me there were 8 incisions. For the life of me, I’ve only seen 7 of them for the last week. This morning I noticed that what I had thought was one bandage was actually two, so I made it to 8. Just in time to have all the bandages removed Monday.

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