zen.org Communal Weblog

John W. Dean has put together a great article with the blunt subtitle, “Had he been a Democrat, he’d probably be hiring a criminal attorney.” You’ll really enjoy the rest of it; he starts with:

On Monday, August 22, the Chairman of the Christian Broadcast Network, Marion “Pat” Robertson, proclaimed, on his 700 Club television show, that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez should be murdered.

“We have the ability to take him out,” Robertson continued, “and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability. We don’t need another $200 billion war to get rid of one, you know, strong-arm dictator. It’s a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with.”

What, Mr Robertson can say this and there’s no outcry, no political storm? Think the reaction would be the same—i.e., none at all—if “Pat Robertson” changed to any name from the Middle East, and “Chavez” was “Blair” ?

For the nth time, I’ve brought down my browser’s Bookmarks tab, and closed it a moment later. The array of items stacked up there is stunning. At some particular moment in time I figured I’d go back and finish reading that page soon, or refer to it later. But have I? Nope, don’t think so.

Anything important usually ends up in one of the four small folders in my Personal Toolbar Folder. But as I look over them now, I see how few I’ve actually touched in even a year. Or two. Or more.

Time to blow away the bookmarks, and just accept I’ve weaned myself off them completely. Any random piece of information I need, google seems to provide. Amazing control position they have, huh?

Early last year, we spend a significant amount of time trying to figure out why the wireless connection between our house and some neighbors up the road just refused to work reliably. Sometimes it’d be going along just fine, then suddenly it would stop working. We were away, and it would work then not. Nothing seemed to be a clear cause. (By the way, we were having the exterior our house painted at the time.)

Fast-forward about a year. I’m upstairs, and have my laptop plugged into the wireless stuff trying to make something else work. On a whim, I try to ping the wireless access point that’s up the road. It works! Later that afternoot, we’re there and I sit down at their laptop. I bring up a browser, and then a terminal window. I make it use the ethernet device, then back to the browser: random site, please.

Voila, it works. An idea comes, as I continue to visit random sites successfully.

When I’m home later that night, Elana’s up in the office. I’m upstairs in the house, and give her a call on the house phone. After asking her to start pinging the access point I used earlier, I closed the window sitting in front of the Cantenna that’s doing the wireless connection. Elana quickly reports the pings have stopped.

I pulled down the window. “They’re back,” she announced. Each time the window went up, she said they weren’t responding anymore. When I put it down, they were going again.

Last year, the painters periodically used our upstairs windows to take care of some parts of the house instead of coming up on ladders. Didn’t really pay attention to it at the time.

So now the window’s stayed down for a couple of weeks, and connectivity up the road has been fairly consistent. The windows are double-glazed, but I’ve still got to look into the actual chemical structure of them. What could be 100% messing up the 802.11g wireless connection between our houses?

We’re relieved to know the basic premise of what I dreamed up last year is actually working. The pain: we have to come up with a placement of our Cantenna to be pointed at their house, but withstand things like rain, snow, sleet, and the rest of Mother Nature’s best attempts.

I’m dying to know what makes the windows wreck our connection.

I went running up the stairs with some laundry, trying to do some tidying up on an overcast Saturday morning. As I passed Patrick’s bedroom in the upstairs hallway, I heard Patrick’s friend Dario whisper not very quietly, “Your dad scared me!”

“Why’d he scare you, Dario?” Patrick asked.

“He came up so fast! He surprised me.”

“That’s okay, Dario,” Patrick reassured him matter-of-factly. “You don’t have to be scared, my Dad is a really nice man.”

(Melt.)

I recently discovered a really cool hack by Toni Rönkkö: he’s created a fully-workable implementation of dirent, the set of POSIX-compliant functions to let you cycle through the entries of a directory on a disk. It means you can now write code that calls opendir(), readdir(), and closedir(), among others, and all of it will just work on both Unix and Windows when you include his uce-dirent.h header. You no longer need to manually write separate code to call the Windows FindFirstFile and FindNextFile functions, or the MS-DOS equivalent _dos_findfirst and _dos_findnext.

Toni has collected into a single header all the extra effort you almost had to do yourself, Mr Portable Hacker Dude. 🙂

Tonight Patrick fell asleep to me reading him part of Star of the Sea, an amazing book by Joseph O’Connor. The writing is really incredible. It’s not like Stephen King, an author I’ve read over and over again without hesitation for more than 20 years. When I recently read Black House (2001), the sequel to The Talisman (1984) co-written with Peter Straub, I again enjoyed the incredibly easy flow of character and plot. With Stephen King you just go on this amazing ride, losing yourself in the words— and worlds — of his novels.

With Star of the Sea, I found myself remembering reading things like Bleak House, Wuthering Heights, and Middlemarch. Books I know I enjoyed, but I was forced to read them at a slow pace. Slow. Each and every word was carefully chosen, making each sentence burst with descriptions stronger and deeper than anything cranked out by the current day’s most popular authors. (My hero Mr King has found a wonderful middleground to make his stories rich with content but still easy to digest.)

Joseph O’Connor has been able to type up a story that would be great to read by a warm fire on a cold evening. This kind of recreation is similar to enjoying a 12-ounce rib-eye steak with a specially-selected red Pomerol wine. Even if it seems to take an awfully long time, you love absolutely every minute of it.

There have recently been articles in the June 26th issue of the Sunday Tribune and also in yesterday’s Features section of the Irish Independent. Of course, as already mentioned on the blogs of other folks, lots of newspapers still don’t put much online.

As if that weren’t enough, she was also on a radio show this morning! She was interviewed over at the Ballyogan Recycling Park and Landfill, and told everyone listening all about it.

(The link to the show will only work for the next week, but we’re going to find out how we can get our own copy. I use RealPlayer as the default app for firefox to play the SMIL audio file given from the radio show link.)

Sometimes a little honesty makes people blush.

It struck me after reading their long, detailed information about the dash character just how amazing Wikipedia really is. It’s this generation’s version of the encyclopedia, only it’s absolutely free and doesn’t involve a traveling salesman.

I went looking for a small bit of information — the Unicode sequence for the em-dash — and I found a wonderfully complete description of all of the em-dash’s cousins, including symbols from other alphabets and how you make the character show up in a wide variety of applications. The site has content in more than 60 languages, and for a real kick (click?), you can let it make a totally random selection of what to read (in your own native language of course).

Right now our son Patrick’s in the back yard with his friends jumping on the trampoline, so while Elana’s out with them I key in the word trampoline. There it is: the history, construction, and safe use of a trampoline. It’s so much fun when you get a new toy…

After some effort figuring out zen’s new home, I think I’ve managed to reconstruct our weblog. There are still a few tweaks I need to put in from the old weblog tree (like all the work to block spam), but this is 90% of it back and functioning.

We owe heart-felt thanks to Brian Fant and box2 technologies. Our dear friend Pati told him about our troubles, and he jumped to the task. Less than 48 hours after zen.org’s previous home had been savagely attacked by a massive tree (I’ll let Sven make that post), I received email from Brian offering their help and facilities to get zen.org back on its feet. (To make it even more exciting, we were on the other side of Ireland visiting friends at the time, racking up their phone bill while I stayed dialed up talking to Sven in IM and working out the logistics of relocating our domain.)

Brian’s company has been responsive and willing to do a wide variety of tweaks and fixes to help us get everything going. Email accounts and aliases, DNS, mysql, SSL where we wanted it, imap & pop3 & webmail, spamassassin, mailing lists, restoring mail folders, the works. While their company does a wide variety of things other than Web hosting, I’m happy to endorse box2.com to anyone looking for a good hosting service, wherever you may be around the world. Speedy, reliable, and helpful.

The next time we’re in California, dinner’s going to be on us. 🙂