Jim’s Brain Online

Posted by Jim at April 29th, 2006

I went to Ukraine just three years after Chernobyl. It was May of 1989. Hope College’s Chapel Choir’s tour of the Soviet Union.

Tinanmen Square protests were on the television, but, the tanks wouldn’t roll in until after we got back to Holland, Michigan. It felt optimistic instead of doomed at the time. In November, the Berlin Wall would fall. An amazing year, all things considered.

While there, we went to Moscow (Red Square and the Kremlin), to Petersburg (then Leningrad), Estonia, and Ukraine. As absurd as it seems to bring a choir to that part of the world (they’ve got a massive choral tradition of their own), the tour was mostly an excuse to go to the Soviet Union now that restrictions were loosening up.

Details blend together. I’m no longer completely sure what exactly we did in which place, but, I know we went to Kiev. We saw the Golden Gate (of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition). We heard rumors about Chernobyl.

Even three years later, people still told stories about it. Almost 20 years later, I don’t remember them, but I remember hearing about them. Kiev was the place where I had the most direct connection to blackmarketeers of the entire trip.

In order to understand why I would have any connection to the Ukrainian black market, you have to understand the economic situation in the Soviet Union at the time. It was a state controlled economy. When you came into the country, you would change money, getting a ruble for every 62 cents (I think). You were told that they would keep track of the money that you spent and you would get in trouble if money was not accounted for.

You could, however, spend money at the special stores for tourists (and officially this was the only place that you could spend foreign money…). These stores sold a variety of things that you simply could not buy unless you had foreign currency. Between the stores and the possibility of buying other things from foreigners (like blue jeans), the Soviet Union’s citizens were very interested in foreign currency. While the official exchange rate was ridiculous, the unofficial exchange rate was closer to 10 rubles for one dollar. I remember hearing that one person had actually been offered 17 rubles per dollar.

In any case, a group of us went exploring in Kiev with no particular plan in mind. This was good because none of us spoke either Russian or Ukrainian. We ran into a couple black marketeers at a subway station as we tried to work out where we were going next.

Meeting them made that leg of the trip. They showed us the city (they knew english). We dropped by one of their apartments and drank one evening (we saw Tinanmen Square on tv). We went to an opera (I’ve no idea which one). We also rowed out to a small island in the Dnieper river and inspected merchandise.

They offered us the usual assortment of touristy pins and buttons (picturing local spots). They also sold fur hats and a few other things–like gas masks. That was a legacy of Chernobyl. Apparently a lot of people bought gas masks after the accident.

I traded a pack of lifesavers for a pin and was amused to find the individual lifesavers used to sweeten coffee when we visited their apartment the next day.

After meeting them on the island, I think I may have gone swimming in the river, wondering all the while what pollutants were in it.

The black marketeers seemed like interesting guys. One had served in the army and had been sent to Poland during his service (probably during the crackdown after the rise of Solidarity). The other had pretended to be insane and thus obtained a deferment. They worked together, doing their best to avoid the attention of both the authorities and the Russian mafia–which was growing stronger now that the Soviet Union was getting less authoritarian.

I sometimes wonder what they’re doing now. I don’t even remember their names–assuming that I ever knew their true names.

Well anyway, that’s what I remember about my own experience of Ukraine. One of these days I ought to write up an account of the whole trip (and find the pictures). There were some more exciting parts than I’ve mentioned here. For example, I ended up sheltering some high school students in my hotel room one night in Leningrad when the police took away a friend of theirs. It is too long a story to write now.

Still, it was cool to go when we did and fun to remember it–even if the memory was prompted by Chernobyl’s twentieth anniversary.

Posted by Jim at April 28th, 2006

It turns out that April 28 is National Hairball Awareness Day.

I don’t have any kind of special observance planned. We’ll find out what my cats have in mind. To be honest though, I think that they celebrate this one all year round.

Posted by Jim at April 25th, 2006

Here’s something I’ve been thinking about lately:

Computers are much more about people than seems obvious.

Programs come out of people’s needs. People need to solve a problem. They contact a programmer or sysadmin or whatever to either write or configure a program so that it does what they need. The computer specialist gathers specifications to make it fit the general needs of the people who are going to use it and they regularly bring it over to be inspected.

Similarly, when writing programs one of the big things that people emphasize is that:
1. You should document what you’ve done so that others can change it later.
2. You be organized about the way you write your code so that it’s easy to figure out what parts connect to each other. Thus major advances in programming are more often than not about ways of making programs easier for people to understand. The horrible spaghetti programming that it’s so easy to do with assembly is replaced by functional programming which is replaced by object oriented programming.

The funny thing about this is that while normal people care about computers because they solve problems (in theory), computer specialists (programmers, sysadmins, etc…) care about them because of the activities they they are allowed to engage in while using them (troubleshooting, abstract logical problems, and so on). Thus, those of us working in the field tend to be excited about the small stuff that allows us to do our jobs and aren’t as bothered by things that are a little hard to operate.

It’s not too surprising then that programs tend to be a little harder to use than one might hope. Honestly, I can’t help but wonder if they will ever get better whle they are designed by people who like using computers.

So anyway, that’s what I was thinking about. It’s a little obvious but hey, it’s the first post in almost a week. I’ll try come up with an original thought tomorrow.

Posted by Jim at April 20th, 2006

An interesting article called The Rise of the Creative Class. It basically argues that certain lifestyle issues more than anything else determine a city’s affluence and potential.

Grand Rapids, as it turns out, is specifically mentioned in the article.

Apparently, we suck.

Posted by Jim at April 18th, 2006

We hear a lot about how politics is unnecessarily harsh these days. I was reminded of it recently via both Reddit and Digg. Both linked to reports of what happened during a debate between Al Franken and Ann Coulter. Here’s the opening of the speech plus discussion on Al Franken’s web site. You can read another account with discussion on Free Republic.

If you read the comments on each site, particularly focusing on the comments about Al Franken by Republicans or about Ann Coulter by Democrats, you’ll probably note that they can be intensely personal and rather nasty. I’ve seen (in other places) people of both sides note how the other side constantly uses personal attacks. Reading these discussions makes it pretty obvious that no side has a monopoly on that sort of thing.

I can come up with possible reasons pretty quickly. They might include:
1. The blending of the public and the personal that Joshua Myerowitz suggests that technological communication promotes in his book No Sense of Place. Personal attacks on politicians are a logical result.
2. It could simply be that online communication makes it easier to be rude.
3. it could be that political parties and activist groups demonize the other side too successfully, making rational communication hard.
4. It might be that harshness of political rhetoric goes in cycles and soon this too shall pass.

That being said, it may be that imagining our time is somehow abnormal in the harshness of the rhetoric that’s inaccurate. I always heard that a person should avoid discussing religion and politics if you want to have a pleasant conversation.

Anyway, here’s a list of what I like in a conversation about politics:
1. Discussing the pros and cons of an issue, but, allowing for the possibility that you might be wrong or haven’t considered certain aspects of a problem.
2. Avoiding excessive language. By this I’m not meaning swearing. I mean overly broad statements about the worth of an idea or the worthlessness of a particular perspective (”Well of course you think that, you’re a Republican/Democrat/Scientologist…” or “Bush/Clinton is evil/has no morals/has bodies buried under the East Lawn”).
3. Allowing people to save face. Saying “I told you so” or making it clear that someone with a particular perspective is an idiot means it will take that much longer (if ever) for them to tell you that they’ve changed their mind. Who wants to admit to being a fool?
4. Giving someone the benefit of the doubt. Politics is something people feel passionate about. Sometimes they say something stupid while promoting their beliefs. So does everyone.

I don’t write this under the illusion that it will change anything, but would very much like to talk about politics without having other people go into massive rants in front of me.

Posted by Jim at April 14th, 2006

I don’t know if anybody else has this, but when I’m using Firefox 1.5 on my iBook, I’ve got an annoying problem.

Firefox has an auto-complete feature. That is to say that when I’m typing something into a form, a list of stuff that I’ve typed in appears under the form box. I can then move down the list and choose the one I need and save myself the bother of typing all of it.

At least that’s how its supposed to work.

Here’s what actually happens:
1. I begin typing.
2. It creates a list of words with the same letters.
3. I move the mouse pointer over it.
4. The little multi-colored circle appears that indicates that the program is doing something.
5. It stays there.
6. Forever.
7. And doesn’t do anything else.
8. At that point I get annoyed and kill the application.

Interestingly, Firefox does not have this problem either on Windows or FreeBSD. Maybe I should update the version I’m using on the Mac.

Posted by Jim at April 10th, 2006

Wondering what the opening theme to Chips sounded like? Only vaguely remember the other characters that appeared in McDonald’s commercials?

Check out Retrojunk.

Also, The Muppet Show.

Also, Pinky and the Brain.

Last, but not least, Knight Rider.

Posted by Jim at April 8th, 2006

A couple weeks ago, I found that had no internet access. As someone who does computer programming and network/server administration from home, this is disastrous. Fortunately for me, this happened after 5 p.m., meaning that it didn’t interfere with me working at all.

I wasn’t initially bothered because one thing you do learn when working at home is that “always on” DSL does occasionally have its moments of being off. My general experience is that they are few and far between, but they do happen.

After the second hour, however, I called tech support to see if DSL was out in my area for some reason. It wasn’t. After a bit of fooling around, it turned out that DSL worked just fine if my computer connected directly to the modem without including the router.

Upon rebooting the router and looking through it’s configuration, however, I found that somehow all the DSL information had disappeared. I re-entered it and found that things worked. Sort of.

It wasn’t initially obvious, but I found that large files downloaded more slowly than usual. Worse, wireless internet connections seemed to result in time-out errors about half the time.

Finding this unbearable, I bought a new router from Amazon, recieved it Wednesday and finally installed it today. I’m not sure what was wrong with the old router, but things seem very much back to normal with the new one.

Speed is good.

Posted by Jim at April 5th, 2006

Kristen screamed when she walked into the laundry room on Monday night. I learned why immediately. Hot water was spraying straight into the air from behind the washing machine. Within a few moments, I’d turned off the water and we discovered that the hot water hose had a hole.

Then we tried to figure out how that might happen.

Our basement floor slopes toward the drain. Thus, when our washer has something heavy in it, it shakes and moves steadily downhill toward the drain, rubbing the rubber hose against the wall. After nearly 9 years of this, it finally wore a hole through the hose.

Somehow Kristen decided that I was the person who should go get a new hose. I got around to it tonight (two days later). It turns out that Meijers sells hoses. I managed to get the new hose in without much hassle if by “without much hassle” you mean that I:

–discovered that the 6 foot hose I bought was short and ended up joining the new hose to another hose in order to reach the back of the washer.
–wore the same (nice) clothes while working on connecting the hose to a water pipe that I wore to a meeting earlier in the day. This was stupid.
–only dropped the plumber’s wrench on my foot once.