The Hard Opening Made Easy

This work project for TriMet's new fare card web site always has me on my toes. Like I said, being so far down the chain of contractors, and being a thousand miles away from Portland, often crucial pieces of information don't make it to until the last minute.

For example, as of last week I thought I would all this week to clean up some of the remaining bug-fix tickets in the app before the live roll out to the public. On Monday I set out tackle some of the most intractable ones, thinking I could take the whole day to cover them.

Then at 5:30 PM, I got an email saying that the next day (that, today, Tuesday) would be the deadline for the release of the version that would go to the public. Moreover, I got a list of a high priority items. Could I possibly have them all done by the end of the next business day?

Of course I said yes. I get paid for that. Also I enjoy it. I love coming through for people. I am very good at making people look good at their own jobs. Even though pretty much the entire project came down to yours truly hacking at the keyboard to wrap up the bug fixes---something no one else could possibly do at this stage of the project---I know I will not get any formal public credit for any of this. I don't mind that, so long as the check clears. Money is not everything, but it's a good measure of the value one contributes at time. Moreover, I get the pride of completion of a job well down.

My key to success so far: I give a d@mn.

That being said, I'm still crossing my fingers nothing goes horribly wrong. Some things are beyond one's control. I can only do my job.

Fortunately all the last minute things they wanted me to do were very easy, so I got them done. They were things like changing the link of the instructional youtube videos to updated ones (like the one below). Sometimes people want the impossible and think it will be easy for you. Other times they want something easy and think it will be impossible. It seems to even out.

All of this recent hoopla and build-up had me deciding that I just had to join the party next Monday in Portland. So I'm flying up to Oregon this weekend, visiting for the first time since we left there eleven months ago.  I'll get to drop by and see my mates at the Brigade in Albina, and also join them at the kickoff party in downtown Portland on Monday morning.

You're invited too. See you there!

Hop launch media event

When	Mon Jul 17, 2017 10am – 11am
Where	SW 11th and Morrison, Portland - TriMet's 11th Ave rail turnaround

So that was the Soft Opening

As a contractor of a contractor of a contractor of a contractor (I discovered there was an additonal layer in the last few days), much of the work I do on this TriMet fare card project has been on a need-to-know basis. Many important pieces of information about the project never make it to me. I'm perfectly happy with things being that way, by the way. Most of that stuff, I don't want to know about, but in some cases it does help me with job.

For example, I learned on Thursday that the Wednesday launch of the Hop card system was in fact the official launch, but it was a "soft launch," meaning that it is indeed up and running for the public, but the launch was without any publicity by TriMet. This is actually a very smart thing to do, in case something goes horribly wrong, or the deployment has to be rolled back. It hasn't needed that kind of thing so far. Let's keep our fingers crossed.

I learned moreover that the public launch of Hop card, with all the hoopla that TriMet can muster, will be on the 17th of July, a week from Monday.

I just got an email invite to the official launch party at the TriMet headquarters, and I am thinking strongly of going. My collaborators at the design firm, who originally hired me, are also having their own party with other folks involved. I haven't seen them in almost a year, so it will fun to drop by the offices in Albina while I am in town.

Think of Me When You Ride TriMet

Today was a nice day for me professionally, one I'll remember for a long time.

This is because today TriMet, the transit agency of Portland, officially launched Hop card, its new tap-and-ride fare card system. The Hop card a "smart" system. One basically buys a card from a local retailer, loads it with money using a credit or debit card, and then taps it each time one gets on or off one of the three transit systems of the greater Portland area (TriMet itself, the Portland Streetcar system, and the bus system of Vancouver, Washington).

The name "Hop card" is meant to refer both to the idea of "hopping on the bus" but also obliquely to the hops used in the brewing of beer, because of the local microbrewery industry.

The "smart" part about the Hop card system is that it has fare caps. If you use your card once to buy a fare, then you effectively have a pass for the rest of the day, and no more money will be deducted if you use the card again. It also works that way for capping on a week and month basis too.

The whole system has a web interface, for managing cards, both on an individual level, and also on the corporate level for passes given out to employees.

Originally, when this project started a couple years ago, TriMet wanted a system like the one they have in London (the Oyster Card). They hired a German database company that specializes in transit systems to create the tap-and-go card system, and install the tap readers in the train stations and buses.

But Portland being Portland, TriMet told the German database company that as part of deal, they would need to subcontract the design the card management website to a local Portland company, which could build one that had the right "Portland look-and-feel" and the expected Portland-level digital user experience (what we in the trade call UI/UX). Anyone familiar with the design industry in Portland would understand what they mean.

So for the website the German database company hired a local Portland firm, and they began building this "front-end" website so people and companies could manage their cards online.

This local Portland design firm is one that, like most design firms, specializes in graphics. They know how to "brand" web sites, and make them look cool. For example, they recently made a site for Spotify, and they go to SXSW each year to soak up the hottest digital trends.

But they didn't have expertise in building web applications---doing the code work that makes complex sites actually do their thing,  They had one developer, but they needed a second one to keep up with the work. So they hired me, in the Spring of 2016, back when I lived on East Burnside. I've been working on this over a year now.

It's been very rewarding, and I've gotten to meet and work with a lot of great people, at TriMet, at the German database company, and at the Portland design firm. All of this while on many days I don't even leave the grounds of our house up here above Scottsdale.

In the last few months, the beta testing of the consumer site went very well. I perused the reactions on the Portland Reddit, and most reactions were very positive. Throughout last week I was in last minute bug fix mode, doing little changes all over the app, and committing them to the code repository on GitHub.

One of the last changes I had to make was to tweak the Google maps that lets you find a retailer for the Hop card. I had to change autocomplete of the address you enter so when you started typing "Vancouver" it would return results for Vancouver, Washington (just across the river) instead of being swamped with results from the city in British Columbia.

I hadn't ever used this part of Google Maps API before (that part of the app had been built by someone else, but he was gone). It was fun looking up how to make that change and tweak a parameter so the search worked the way they wanted.

On Friday we wrapped up the last "sprint" (a term for a short development cycle comprising specific goals). All through the morning, I kept giving them new releases of the software, even hourly, as we found the last few bugs of the day.

The last couple hours on Friday were calm, and then the messages from them stopped entirely. I took that as a good sign. They were satisfied. Moreover, we actually met the project deadline in a very graceful way, without any last minute crises.

Today my colleague at the design firm in Portland informed me (via our Slack channel) hat Hop Card has been launched.

So far no frantic emails from TriMet. Things seem to humming alone.

You want to try it out. Here it is.  I've been staring at that interface for a long time. I didn't do any of the stuff that looks pretty. All of my stuff is in the way the application works, handing the data and doing it's application tasks. Like I said, a very rewarding experience.

And wow, there's already a Wikipedia article about Hop card.

Reading French Novels With Maman

I just wrote my friend in Marseille an email. He could be elsewhere by now, but he always gets his email at the same address, and replies in due course.

I told him how I had been reading some French novels later, in translation and the original, and wanted to share my thoughts with him.

I told him I'd gotten ahold of a copy of The Camp of the Saints (translation from the French), by Jean Raspail, written in 1973. It was forbidden novel during last winter, that everyone was talking about it. But it was out of print, and used copies on Amazon going for several hundred bucks. Then someone put out a new cheap trade paperback edition for fifteen bucks and I scooped it up. I gave it a try. Très lourd, I told my friend in my email. Very heavy.

I decided I needed some lighter fare, something to pick my spirits up, but also something in the same line of artistic inquiry, namely science fiction, so I ordered a copy of Les Planètes des singes by Pierre Boulle, written ten years earlier in 1963. Amazing that within five years this earlier book had already become a famous Hollywood sci-fi movie with one of the most iconic scenes of all time.

My late father probably didn't even hear of Raspail, but no doubt he read Boulle's novel in translation. Certainly he scooped up all the classic science fiction back then. He was a voracious reader to the end of his life, and he was one of those men of that generation who could provide a deep background to science fiction literature as it evolved over that time period.

Boulle turned out to be a much easier read. It's short, and the French is easy for me to read, with use of a dictionary maybe once a paragraph so far. It differs substantially from the movie adaptation in the early chapters, which are in the form of a framing story that doesn't exist in the movie, that of two oisifs (loafers), Jinn and Phyllis who are travelers in a bubble-like spaceship and who push their journeys to the ends of the traveled realms of space, hoisted on the solar winds. In other words they are the far distant versions of the trendy travelers of today who seek out the most obscure experiences, always outrunning the ennui, with a sense of joy in the momentum of pushing the envelope of travel.

Then they find something floating in space...

Like I said, a fun read so far. I got the chance to read parts of it with mom when I was back in Colorado a couple weeks back. I just started reading from the beginning outloud in her living room. She was able to understand most of it, with the help of my interruptions of my own narration to explain certain words, many of which were the ones I had had to look up myself.

We got all the way up to Chapter 2, which begins the inner story, of Ulysse Mérou...

The Moments When You Really Feel the Heat

Bakery Open Today The forecast was for a couple degrees cooler, only to reach 114 locally. I took home a croissant and a sticky bun. An occasional indulgence there, instead of the coffee house chain, and its wonderful sandwiches.

The few degrees does make a difference. I was just out walking on the patio in the noon sun, with my wide brimmed hat. Thermometer says 110 even. Barely felt the heat.

Even yesterday when it was pushing 118, sitting in the shade, one felt the dryness more than the raw heat. Except when the wind blew, even just a gentle breeze. Then one feels the heat like a blast from a nearby fire.  Stillness is better.

Extreme Heat

It's supposed to be almost 120 degrees here. This morning before seven I drove down into the main part of town (Fountain Hills, that is) to get a cup of coffee, and afterwards I went to the bakery, but it was closed, with a sign saying it was because of the heat warning today.

Personally I love this kind of extreme. I'm looking forward to sitting outside a bit today during my breaks from work. I love feeling the air that temperature, at least for a little bit. The pool really helps on these kinds of days.

The Difference Between 2012 and 2017

2012: Bilderberg Group holds their annual meeting, having chosen a site this year in Chantilly, Virginia. Meeting is protested by several hundred activists, including Matthew Trump, a digital nomad software programmer of little account and consequence.

The group does not return to North America in their scheduled rotating in the coming years, but instead holds all their meetings at various secluded places in Europe.

2017: Bilderberg Groups returns to Chantilly, Virginia, their first meeting in North America in five  years. The meeting attended by a delegation from Donald Trump, President of the United States.

The Bilderberg Group was (and still is) a semi-formal annual gathering of (mostly European) elite, designed to share ideas among each other to seek possible common ground in moving forward the history of Europe and the world. In some ways, it can be seen as an attempt by the old European aristocracy, so devastated by the wars, to form a bloc that could rival American influence in the west. In many ways it has been extremely successful, as it has brought the old European elite back into parity with the Americans within the spheres of global influence again, at least according to their own view.

On a related note, I am of the opinion that the Chatham House Rule (which the Bilderberg Group follows in their annual meetings) is one of the key technologies invented in the early Twentieth Century crucial in forming the entire history of the century. Without an understanding of it, it would not be possible to understand the method by which ideologies became established and propagate among the global elite. By this, one can achieve a clear agenda ascribable to no one in particular, at least in public.

The Difference Between the TPP and the Paris Accord

TPP: For America to remain a nation, the United States must reject the TPP. (Status: rejected)

Paris Accord: For the Establishment globalists to retain any shred of being coherent cadre of world leadership through the existing structures and relationships, the United States must accept the Paris Accord (Status: rejected).

That's how far we've come in so short a time.

Solving the Health Care Crisis Requires No Change of Law

Another pundit I love reading is Karl Denninger. I've mentioned him before I think. He's a little bit older than me, and is a long time expert in the business of network computing. 

But the subject I read him for his amazing clarity on the subject of the health care crisis in America. He long harped on the idea that most people completely misunderstand what is going on, and are offering horrible solutions. Above all, he's a numbers guy, i.e., mathematics doesn't lie. He's convinced that the health care industry, in particular the health insurance industry, is deeply corrupt, and, with the cooperation of both parties in the federal government, is royally "screwing" the rest of everyone else in violation of the law, and should be treated as criminals.

Here's a great recent starter regarding his opinions, which have coalesced over time to the idea that unless Donald Trump takes the steps he suggests, the health care crisis will overwhelm his presidency (as it would anyone who was president right now).

President Trump, you simply have to come to grips with where the problem lies in health care. It's not access to insurance...
Health insurance accessibility is, at its core, all about the price of the underlying service.  And let's cut the crap, eh -- that price has no market force or discovery mechanism available to the common man today, and hasn't for 30+ years.  That is why -- and is in fact the only reason why -- health care is so damned expensive and health "insurance" is what people are "falling back on."

In his latest series of articles, he explains why the current health are insurance law is disastrous for businesses and is a great incentive to hiring anyone

..."mandatory" health insurance imposed a large contingent cost on employers that didn't appear to be there right up until someone who has a pre-existing condition shows up and wants to be hired.  Remember that as soon as that happens it screws everyone who already works there and what's worse the employer is forced to conspire with the applicant since (1) he can't ask about said condition and (2) if he figures it out he can't discriminate either or he will get sued and lose. 

He thinks that the POTUS has the power, through the Attorney General, to simply force existing anti-trust law to applied in the health care industry (instead of blatantly disregarded), then health care costs would drop like a stone across the board, so that health insurance would hardly be necessary for most medical expenses (the way it used to be), and would be much cheaper for the categories of expenses (catastrophic, etc.) for which it would remain necessary.

Of course Denninger realizes this would trash an entire sector of the economy.

I get it that if you take this on using existing law, which certainly appears fully adequate to put a stop to all of this, and demand (1) price lists be posted publicly for everything, (2) everyone pays the same price for the same good or service no matter whether they have insurance or not, who it's through or how they're paying, (3) that consent on an individual and priced basis is required for anyone able to give it; if you're unable due to unconsciousness or similar "drive by" and similar types of charges are deemed felonious and (4) the United States demands and enforces "most favored nation" for pricing of drugs and devices with any firm that refuses loses all its US patent protections and US licensing that we'd have a deep and immediate recession since roughly 15% of GDP would disappear in a puff of smoke in an afternoon. All those facilities built with debt -- which is most of them, as I'm sure you know -- would be bankrupted immediately.

But that would mean health care would be much cheaper for everyone across the board.

But that's good, not bad.  Someone would buy that bankrupt hospital the next day for 5% or 10% of what it cost to build, and the lights would remain on.  Costs would plunge like a stone thrown off one of your high-rise buildings; in fact, they'd fall by up to 90%.  Telling "practitioners" that Jeff Sessions will be as rough on them as you want him to be with dope dealers with maximum charges for peddling known lies when it comes to disorders such as Type II diabetes -- that one should "chase" their fast carbs with drugs instead of not eating the damn things in the first place would go a long way toward resolving not only the cost issues in health care but the underlying diseases themselves.

The Reasons the Israeli-Saudi Alliance Has Worked

As Thomas Wichtor sees it, one of the key factors behind the success of the quiet Saudi-Israeli alliance has been the development of a new generation of tactical weapons and munitions, developed by the Israelis and financed by Arab money.

These weapons specifically are drone-related reconnaissance and munitions-carrying drone weapons capable of isolating, observing and attacking targets within the close urban environments of Middle Eastern warfare against insurgents.

The Americans didn't develop these weapons because they didn't need them, and they have concentrated more on longer-range drone warfare on a strategic level.

By contrast the Israelis (and increasingly the Gulf Arabs) realize that in the Youtube age especially, they must play by a different set of rules in urban warfare, where there cannot be flagrant civilian causalities as a side-effect of an operation, one that can be spread virally across the Internet within hours.

If they want to eliminate the Iranian backed subversives, they will need to do it a smart way, they realized.

Also there is a recognition that all the uniformed forces must be seeming to be Arab. This is to create a proud, honor-bound command of Arab special forces with the higher ethic of the great (benevolent_ warrior model of the American, British, and other western special forces.  The idea---an old one---is a powerful warrior tends to be a humane warrior.

How Peace is Coming to the Middle East

The Saudi-Israeli alliance in its current form dates from 2006 (the two nations had been cooperating via their intelligence services for many years before that).

In 2006, however, the Saudis and Israelis created a new military alliance that was meant to fulfill longterm stability needs in the Middle East, in an era going forward in which Americans would eventually withdraw a large number of their forces.

The alliance was not well-publicized in the West, but neither was it hidden. But it was ignored in the American press and media. This is because it was taken as a direct threat to the power base of certain segments of the U.S. government, for whom the status quo of the Middle East---low grade warfare involving both regular armies and guerrilla factions, was in fact necessary for the continuation these segments of the government in holding power. This most directly involved the U.S. State Department.

The effort of the U.S. State Department to keep itself as the center of the Middle East balance of power is paramount to the State Department.

In the meantime the Saudi-Israeli backbone of the new security alliance evolved in what became called the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). The GCC as an alliance involves other Arab states, including in particular Iraq, where the GCC has been instrumental in creating an effective new Iraqi Army that---with American special forces training and Israeli-designed new generation aerial weapons, has virtually annihilated ISIS and other guerrilla forces in Iraq.

This has happened rather quietly, and (once again) ignored by the U.S. media.  All of these efforts by the Saudis and Israelis to create a stable, peaceful Middle East have been bitterly opposed by the U.S. State Department, which sided with Iran, the archenemy of both Israel and Saudi Arabia.

All Trump has done is get out of the way, and let this happen. That's why they treated him like a conqueror.

Going forward the U.S. help in the Middle East will be quiet, and largely in support of the GCC through training, weapons, and intelligence.

The most pressing task is the winding down of the ultra-corrupt Assad regime in Syria.  Assad has mostly been a pawn of Iran for years, and in control of nothing inside in his country except the capital. Everything else has been the Iranians propping him up.

The night after Trump slammed the airway with the Tomahawks, the flights from Damascus to Teheran were packed with Iranians leaving the country.

The missile strike essentially destroyed the airplanes while letting the GCC use the airfield as it quietly invades Syria, takes it over, and transitions the kingdom to a constitutional restoration.

Many people have learned many lessons from many mistakes. What we are seeing play out right now is the fruit of those bitter mistakes.

The final act of the drama will be the downfall of Iran. This will not happen by military invasion but by the overthrow of the mullahs by their own people. The Islamic Republic will be overthrown. Women in Teheran will throw off their hijabs in joy. This is going to confuse lots of people in Europe and North America.

It's OK to be confused now. It will make sense as time goes by.

Trump Astride History

Today was an amazing today, with Trump's arrival in reception in Saudi Arabia. It is probably the biggest paradigm-shattering moment in world history since Reagan.

You probably don't realize that, I suppose, if you have been following the mainstream media, or even most bloggers. Thankfully I've been following one of the few clear voices with a rational understanding of recent events, a fellow named Thomas Wictor on Twitter (@ThomasWictor). Without his insights, I'd probably be flailing in my understanding as well, but I was lucky to stumble across his account at just the right time, a couple months ago.

I could write a lot about this, suffice it to say that Wictor is of the opinion that Trump is one of the most transitional figures in American history, and that most of his supporters "don't deserve him" because they are too fearful, and take too many things at face value (e.g. all the BS about leaks and "Trump being in trouble," etc.). Trump is firm control of things. He is playing the media for chumps and nearly all the leaks are coming from him, ultimately to destroy the media by showing them for fools.

But all this pales in comparison to the end of the Middle East wars, which are we are now approaching. Among Wictor's specific talents is an ability to dig deep into the study of Middle Eastern munitions and the order of battle of the wars raging there. He has convinced me and others through persistence that we are the threshold of amazing change there, of an era of peace that few could have foreseen even a year ago. If you want to know more, check out his Twitter.

I find myself in a curious position, as someone who long ago came to the conclusion that the leadership of the Saudi kingdom was in cahoots with the attack on 9/11. But there is new leadership there. Among other things, the kingdom was reeling. We beat them in the oil war through fracking. This is Glasnost all over again. This is victory.

Travel Clarifies Memory: A Shandyist Lesson of Life

A final note about my recent reading of Tristram Shandy before I move on to other works I've read.

If you read the Wikipedia article on the novel, or any description of it for that matter, you'll learn that although it purports to be a story of the narrator's life, the narrator spends very little of the hundreds of pages in discussing his own trajectory through time and space. Mostly he talks about other people's experiences in a very nonlinear, almost chaotic, fashion.

The exception, as these articles points on, comes near the end of the book when the narrator spends a series of about a dozen chapters discussing his travels in France. Here the book takes on an almost conventional form, as we follow him across the English Channel, through Picardy to Paris, down to Lyon and then cutting across Gascony.

We are treated in scrumptious linear detail to the narrator's difficulties in trying to arrange transportation down the Rhone from Lyon, and later to his joy in fantasizing about living among the peasants and taking a local wife in a small rural town.  Then, in the midst of this immersion, his narrative eventually drops off in southern France and at some point later he is back in England without any mention of how he got back.

Besides the fact that his aforementioned travel difficulties seemed so very familiar to me from my own experiences vagabonding around Europe and Asia with a backpack, even two centuries, later, there arose a deeper familiarity with these chapters that comes from the fact that their linearity and clarity of narrative stands so much in stark opposition to the rest of the book.

It struck me that it is an example of how travel experiences clarify memory. There are times of my life when I was living in one place, doing nearly the same thing for months and even years on end. My memory of those times is indeed very nonlinear. I can't tell you what I did at any given time during that stretch. I have a jumbled bag of memories in no particular order, attached to people and places.

But during my travels, ah that is very different. Even three decades later, I can tell you what I did almost every day during the three months I spend in Europe in the summer of 1985, from the Isle of Skye to Izmir. I can tell you where I stayed, and the people I met. It's all burned into my brain still, and in sequential order. Give me a date during the summer of 1985, or 1990, or 1992*, and I can tell you exactly where I was, and what I was doing. For certain other years I might not being to do the same even to save my life.

Even the fact that Shandy's narrative of his travels in France seems to end right in the midst of the most intense part of his voyage, dancing with the young woman in the village, felt very familiar.

Among my stored possessions are several travel journals I recorded during my first set of travels to Europe in the Eighties and early Nineties. In looking through them (something I have not done since I wrote them) one would find that they are kept rather meticulously for the first phases of the trip, but that at some point, typically after a couple months, the writing drops off to become less frequent, and with shorter entries written in hasty hand, until at last the narrative ends altogether before the end of the voyage is recorded, as if leaving me in some faraway place from which I never returned.

This used to bother me, the fact that I did not complete these journals in the way I started them, but at some point I came to peace with it and realized it was the way things had to be. If your travels are truly vibrant, then at some point, when you are long past that initial chaotic phase of amusing adversity in arranging tickets and finding lodging, one finds oneself so deeply embedded in the moment, so far outside one's realm of ordinary experience, that putting it all down in words, at least in that moment, becomes nearly impossible. All the time one would spend writing that down at the end of the day feels like cheating oneself out of precious moments that could be used to absorb one's surrounding, and the fellowship of one's companions at that instant. The discipline to do so becomes impossible because it feels counterproductive.

In other words, the drop off is a sign of success.

*These are by no means the only times of intense travel memory, but they are the times I kept the kind of travel journal I mentioned. This blog is an example of doing the same thing in online form. I have often neglected it during the times it might be most useful to follow, for example during the fall of 2014 during our trip through Europe that started in Iceland. In the end, online composition cannot be compared to the paper-and-ink version in any case.

The Day of the Spunky Detective

These are the kinds of days that I got TCM for. A whole slate of Torchy Blane mystery comedies to play on the iPad while I work from my home office. Fortunately I can pick up the West Coast TCM feed that lets me view three hours behind the broadcast times in schedule, so I don't even have to miss the early morning ones before I get up. As I write this, this one is playing:

Newspaper reporter Torchy Blane is handed a telegram, which she reads before realizing it actually was sent to Theresa Gray, the woman sitting next to her on the train. Torchy's telegram, when she gets it, is from policeman Steve McBride, announcing that he will have a minister waiting to marry them when her train arrives. Worried that her marriage to Steve will put Torchy ahead in covering the police beat, several reporters decide to play a practical joke on her and postpone her wedding at the same time. The reporters hire an actor to play dead and phone Steve with the news. They hope that Torchy will report the death and that a second paper owned by publisher Mortimer Gray will embarrass her by printing the truth. Then, Harvey Hammond, the actor, is actually murdered, and Torchy beats the other reporters to the story as usual.

Note the dates of the movies in the schedule. All of the above features were made over a three year span, with all but one featuring the Glenda Farrell in the Torchy role. That seems amazing, but not really, when you think that the running time was typically 70-75 minutes, a series like this was the equivalent of a television show of later era.

Meditations in Mid-Air Over Cold Water

That was the temperature of the backyard pool today. It's almost in the range for typical leisure swimming.

That doesn't mean I haven't been using the pool, however. As it happens I've been taking dips throughout most of the winter. This is because last fall Red wanted to watch the Tony Robbins documentary on Netflix, I Am Not Your Guru.

Red really liked the documentary. I found it less engaging than her (even I'm a big Tony fan from way back in his early informercial days in 1991). One of my favorite parts of the documentary was learning that at his new Florida home, he has a cold-water plunge pool, kept at exactly 57 degrees, in which he submerges himself every morning.

I used this as inspiration to declare that I was going to take cold water plunges in the backyard pool, no matter what the temperature.

As October rolled into November, I quickly learned than anything below 70 feels mighty cold. As the temperature gets colder than that, it really doesn't change much, except that it makes you want to stay in the water less.

Soon the only way I could keep this habit up was by resolving to do so at a given moment, then marching immediately out to the pool as quickly as possible and jumping into the deep end. There is a moment when you are suspended in the air, when you know you can't go back, when you anticipate the coldness to the highest degree. The actual cold water is actually less of a shock.

I very much looked forward to getting down to the Tony's temperature of 57 degrees. It turns out we had a cold rainy winter, and even though I was out of town over the holidays, I still got to experience temperatures down to 52 degrees. In that range, it becomes hard to breathe evenly when submerged, even during the short period of wading to the stairs. I head learned to keep the thick terry cloth robe handy, that Red got me as a Christmas gift.

As the warm weather has approached, the temperature of the water has increased. I've noticed how nonlinear this is. The temperature seems to jump by five degrees and then stay there for a week on end.

This last week has been tantalizingly close to normal swimming. In the meantime I've fallen out of the habit of the plunges. Fifty-two degrees was a nice experiment, but I'm ready for summer.

Moving to Scottsdale?

Red is convinced that she is going to win the contest for the HGTV Smart Home 2017, which is currently being constructed down in Scottsdale. We're watching the promo on the building of it right now. Among other things it answered my questions on how they move around saguaros here when doing construction. Also our future house is going to have lots of robots.

Tristram Shandy is a Work of Genius

I finally finished reading Tristram Shandy a couple weeks back. When I was done, I still was haunted by the question what the heck did I just read? 

Moreover, was it any good? Throughout most of the novel, I kept the consistent opinion that most people I know would hate it, and perhaps among everyone I know, that I alone, with my proclivity for insisting to myself that classics are classics for a reason, and that I should suspend judgment and make it my mission to understand why a particular lauded work is a product of genius, could have read the novel and come away glad that I had done so.

I was sure that most people I know would hate it, and would pooh-pooh it away. Yet in the last few pages, I found myself wishing the story would go on. I was disappointed that it stopped. I wanted more.

The story is chaotic, almost unfollowable at times. Yet the characters seem come alive as they had in few novels I had read. I felt I knew everyone in the story, including the narrator of the title, who purports to tell his life story yet tells almost nothing of it.

I wonder how many people walking the earth right now have actually read Tristram Shandy and agree with me (and Schopenhauer) that it is indeed one of the great products of literary genius of the English language? The number must be very small, yet I feel that if were ever to run across anyone who has read it and loved the experience, that we could talk about it for hours and perhaps days, that we would belong to some secret fraternity of Shandy lovers.

How many books can one say that about?

Science in the Age of Feels

There are days when nothing satisfies me like watching a good Thunderf00t video on Youtube. He's definitely my favorite spoilsport. Although he and I don't see eye-to-eye on everything about the world, I respect him greatly as a scientific thinker who can use simple "back of the envelope" calculations to destroy unsound ideas.

What's amazing is that almost none of the calculations Thuderf00t does in any of his videos involves anything more than first-year physics. Most of them could be back-of-the-chapter exercises.

Yet these simple calculations can be used to destroy many phony ideas going around about new and exciting technologies, including ones being funded by government research grants and underwritten by renowned universities.

In physics, there is no penalty for using simple calculations to make big statements. In fact, if you can pull that off, so much the better.

All of this is quite disturbing to me, however. It tells me that we are truly living in Age of Bullshit, when the most "exciting" ideas in popular discourse cannot stand up to simple physics. Instead we are living in an age when science and technology seems to be based on how it all makes you feel.

If an idea makes you feel good and cozy about the future (the environment, social justice, climate, renewable energy, etc), then who cares if it doesn't stand up to basic physics? There has to be a way to make it a happen.

But no, sorry, we aren't going to have solar powered roads. Yes, I know you saw it on Facebook and shared it and liked it. So cool, right?. It's a great feeling idea.

No, sorry, we aren't going to have plastic roads, either.

No, sorry, we aren't going to have Thorium-powered cars.

No, sorry, we aren't going to have simple devices to allow poor mothers and kids in the Third World get drinking water for free from the atmosphere.

And, no, sorry, we aren't going to have the freaking Hyperloop. Elon Musk may or may not be a conman. Hard to tell, but the fact that the so-called Edison of our Era has yet to produce a single darn thing worth while for the masses should tell you everything you need to know about our current era.

All of this is probably heart-breaking for a lot of people. But that's the wonderful thing about physics is that it breaks your heart like that, and in that realization is freedom.

A Tourist in Twitterland

My short career on Twitter so far has convinced me of one thing, namely that I have no desire to be a "Twitter celebrity," one of the the folks with many thousands of followers who Tweet on a regular basis, and whose Tweets are retweeted by many other people.

I'm talking here about people who are not "media celebrities" in the traditional sense (most of those folks are worthless), but people who are only "Twitter famous." Some don't even use real names, but only personas. They are usual the best folks to follow, to get the real gist of what Twitter is about. But I don't want to be one.

Don't get me wrong. I'm glad such people exist. I'm glad they have taken upon themselves the burden of this kind of task. But a task it certainly is. It reminds of what it must be like being a television pundit, or a columnist. Not only must one opine, but one but do so on a regular schedule. Moreover in this day and age, there is duty to be interactive with people. On Twitter this means having conversations with people in your feed.

I'm much too reclusive for that. Moreover I don't have the chutzpah to put forth my opinions and observations as so authoritative on daily basis, about any subject under the sun. I'm not that clever, who is not that clever, all in all. I admire the people who can do that.

So much is my aversion to this kind of role that even my brief episode of having a mini-viral Tweet was exhausting. For a couple days running, people have been liking it. Finally the notifications have dropped off, and I'm glad for it. Yesterday, while perusing my feed, I found myself thinking of something slightly witty and interesting to say, that might have made a good re-Tweet. I hit the button to start typing a new post.

I felt an ego battle going on inside me. I imagined that my new post might become another mini-viral Tweet.  But what I had to say wasn't that important. I was posting it for gratification, as if my part of the conversation was someone important.

I had other things to do that day, than get distracted by the ding ding of the online social media casino machine. I hit the cancel button.

The same principle I described here applies to this blog, by the way. Somewhere along the line I realized that not only did I have no desire to be a popular well-read blog, but that I was actually averse to it. I don't make an effort to hide this blog, but to me this is an open invitation-only salon, where I can communicate to the small number of folks out there who actually know me (and to people in the distant future perhaps).

It almost feels like the lost art of letter-writing, one of those quaint 20th century things that no longer exists, but which I used to enjoy so much. It is something the kids of today will probably never know.

Twitter Delivers Me Cherries, Thanks to G.K. Chesterton

Today found me making another Tweet that went mini-viral, gaining over a dozen likes within an hour. It caught me somewhat off guard, as it was a spur of the moment issuance during a break from work in the mid-afternoon while I checked my Twitter feed.

Like my previous success, this was a Retweet of a popular account's Tweet. I added my own commentary, and originator like my Tweet enough to Retweet it back onto his feed, where it was seen my many folks.

Suddenly my notifications from these likes rolling in were blowing up on my iPad. Ding. Ding. Ding. It was the sound of the virtual currency of Twitter cred in the imaginary casino of online social media. It was no a mega jackpot, to be sure, but a mild flow of tokens that makes one want to play longer.

I must finding my voice on Twitter, which is as as traditionalist. In fact the account I had retweeted in this case described himself in his sidebar simply as that in one word---"traditionalist." His original Tweet was quoting a passage from G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936), whom I have seen described as "a contender for the most-quoted man on the Right."

Chesterton is certainly popular among the literary-minded figures in the Rightist Twitterati.
Before I joined Twitter, the most I'd ever read of Chesterton was a single quotation, which I had practically memorized in a paraphrase. The original is:

“Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.”

Gilbert Keith Chesterton. Wikipedia: Chesterton is often referred to as the "prince of paradox".Time magazine has observed of his writing style: "Whenever possible Chesterton made his points with popular sayings, proverbs, allegories—first carefully turning them inside out.

The original Tweeter, upon whose Tweet I commented, had posted one of Chesterton's quotes in regard to modern fear of one's neighbors, and by extension how travel is a form of escapism. I replied off-hand about how one of the most rewarding experiences of my life was the 2003 blackout in New York City. I didn't think anyone would even see my Tweet, but somehow people just got it.

An Icelandic woman in my feed posted this.

The Elusive Punchline

In reading Tristram Shandy, one is constantly looking for that self-referential punchline, in the way one would if one were reading a modern 20th Century author such as Nabokov or Borges. But this was written in the 18th century. The punchlines are much more inscrutable.

The book starts out with the narrator's attempt to document his life in extreme detail. He starts with his conception and gets to his birth at nearly the halfway mark, lamenting that day of his life is taking an entire year to document, and realizing that an infinity of time to catch up to the present.

Later, his father undertakes a project to provide an education of all necessary things to him, by writing a "Tristra-paedia" for his son. At this point, my 20th century-trained senses are looking for that punchline. In this passage, his father reads a section of the Tristra-paedia to the village parson, Yorick.

The Intricate Harmony of Overlapping Memories

What was I saying, about the effects of technology on small-town life?

So tonight I'm sitting in my living room in Fountain Hills with the iPad open next to me while I watch a Youtube livestream from my hometown in Colorado. The livestream is of the the district-wide Elementary School honor choir. My 10-year-old niece is singing in the ensemble, representing her school. They're performing in the same auditorium in downtown Fort Collins where my own high school choir once sang, along time ago.

The first piece they sing, "Possum Gonna Play", turns out to be have been arranged by this guy, who used to sing next to me in the bass section of the Willamette University Choir in 1985.*

Out of continuity, I hope my niece has similar pleasant experiences of intruded past experiences, many years from now.

*and who composed our class Glee song in the Great Fiasco of '88. Those who were there know what I mean.