Posted by Jim at August 30th, 2006
Just for what it’s worth, a European lunar orbiter will crash into the moon on Satarday night at 10:41 pm PDT (Sunday, 1:41 am Eastern?). The area it crashes into will be darkness at impact. If we’re lucky, backyard telescopes might be able to view it.
Cool, eh?
Posted by Jim at August 28th, 2006
Two thoughts on writing my novel:
Singapore
A chunk of my novel uses Singapore, Michigan as a setting. Singapore used to be a lumber town. It was located at the last bend before the Kalamazoo river meets Lake Michigan.
I’ve almost been to Singapore in that I’ve been on the beach next to the mouth of the Kalamazoo, but I need to go a bit further inland to get to the site. Currently I’m thinking about doing so some weekend in September. Thanks to low water levels in Lake Michigan, this might be a good year to go.
It is not, unfortunately, a kid-friendly adventure. As I see it, my choices go as follows:
Boating sounds like the best combination of level of hassle vs. remaining legal. Trouble is, I don’t have a boat.
On Writing What You’ve Forgotten
Since the novel includes a rock band, there’s always the temptation to use band practice as a way of exploring tensions between the characters. There are, after all, quite a few ways for muscians to drive each other completely nuts. These range from being late for practice to consistently screwing up on a particular part of a song to making questionable musical choices.
The trouble with illustrating character differences via musical differences is that you have to explain why one character would find what the other is doing annoying.
When I started writing this novel, I was playing my bass semi-regularly, was trying to learn more about jazz improvisation, and could come up with musically based conflict situations more easily than than I can now. Sadly, I don’t really have time to play bass or trumpet anymore.
My novel’s theoretical future readers have thereby escaped from digressions about why you might use dissonance in jazz and why some rock musicians might get cranky if you sneak it into their stuff.
Posted by Jim at August 25th, 2006
I’m eating supper with my family. Specifically, I’m eating Ethiopian food which was surprisingly edible despite the fact that this food had never been touched by actual Ethiopians. I had made it myself.
One of my kids ate the Ethiopian food. She was doing it more or less correctly too. Correctly in this case means that she was ripping off pieces of the injera (a sourdough flatbread) and wrapping it around the chicken or using it to scoop up/absorb the sauce.
My other daughter was eating Campbell’s Double Noodle Chicken soup since she had let it be known that there was no way that she was going to touch anything we were eating.
Midway through the meal I noticed that she was doing something she wasn’t supposed to.
“Becca,” I said (holding a piece of injera dripping with sauce and chicken), “Don’t eat with your fingers.”
Strangely, it didn’t work.
Posted by Jim at August 23rd, 2006
In an effort to be clear about this, I should note that this is not a post about having wine with kofta. It’s actually two different things.
First off, I’d like to draw attention to the fact that I got a comment on my earliest post about Kristen’s winemaking. Apparently it is possible to make drinkable beet wine.
Who knew?
Curried Kofta
Tonight I made an interesting meal. I got it out of a cookbook on Middle-Eastern and African cooking. Essentially it was meatballs (kofta) in sauce with rice. In detail, however, it was a little odder.
Among professional cooks, I’m told, fusion cooking (mixing the techniques and flavors of two or more cuisines) is controversial. There’s some degree of division between those who want to make meals in the style of the culture that created them verses those who want to combine to make entirely new things.
Though not a professional cook, I’m inclined on a theoretical level to favor the experimenters, but I’m more interested in eating what the traditionalists make.
That being said, I think that all cuisines could be considered fusion. Certainly, the dish I made tonight was.
Despite being Middle-Eastern, Arabic cooking, it used spices that I associate more with India. I’m thinking specifically of turmeric, cardamom, garam masala (a spice mix from northern India), and another sort of curry powder.
The sauce of the dish was composed of a combination of beef broth, tomato, and yogurt. Once the curry powder was added in and the whole mess simmered for a while, it was much more like something from India than the Middle East.
It would be interesting to know the history of the dish, but the cookbook didn’t go into it.
Some of you might be wondering how my kids reacted to it. I can’t say for sure since I was called away to do technical support, but my wife tells me that one daughter ate only the rice (not a surprise). The other daughter, however, gobbled down seven meatballs and stopped eating only because a friend came over to play.
P.S. It just occurred to me that I’ve now written a post on what I had for supper tonight. Does that mean that I’m officially out of ideas?
Posted by Jim at August 21st, 2006
Here’s another post that will bore my wife to tears. Actually, bearing in mind that I now know that both her sisters have seen my blog, I have the potential of boring her entire family–and probably most of mine too.
So anyway…
I’m using my FreeBSD box a lot these days. That, of course, means that I have a lot of time to meditate upon what like and dislike about the FreeBSD ports system.
For those of you who don’t know:
One of the more annoying things about unix is that sometimes when you install a program, you find that it won’t work without another (or possibly many more) program(s). There are various systems of getting around this. One of them is the FreeBSD ports/packaging system which actively downloads all the programs that your program depends on so that you don’t have to track them all down individually.
This is great when it works.
What’s not great is when you install a program that depends on many different things, none of which you’re running (such as, for example, the entire GNOME desktop environment). Worse, while it can find packages for some of the programs, it can’t find them for all. Thus, it actually compiles the program in question.
The end result is that sometimes your computer will end up compiling late into the night. Sometimes, it will not only compile late into the night, but when you come back the next day, you will find that some selection of programs no longer works.
For example, even as I write this, I am theoretically installing eclipse. The last time I installed eclipse, it forced most but not all of my GNOME desktop installation to upgrade and I was forced to repair it.
This sucked beyond words.
Not coincidentally, I’m not using GNOME anymore. Thus, it can’t mess up my desktop. Nonetheless, it’s irritating that in order to run a program that’s written in java, a language that’s not dependent upon the local computer, it is somehow necessary to install the entire GNOME desktop and not just a few libraries.
FreeBSD’s ports system is usually great, but this is one of those things that irritates me. I’m sure that someone will figure out a solution to it someday, but until then, I’m stuck watching piles of largely superfluous packages install on my machine.
Posted by Jim at August 17th, 2006
I wrote about L. Frank Baum yesterday and thought I’d be able to toss off a blog post.
However…
This morning on NPR, I heard a story about one of Baum’s descendants apologizing for Baum’s editorials recommending genocide for native Americans. I’d been aware of his views on this, but hadn’t known that anyone in his family wanted to apologize.
I just thought I’d bring it to people’s attention.
Posted by Jim at August 16th, 2006
The novel that I occasionally manage to work on includes a number of references to Oz. This shouldn’t surprise those of you who know certain things. First, that I grew up in Holland, Michigan. Second, that L. Frank Baum, the writer of the “Wizard of Oz” and a number of other books lived near Holland for a while. Third, that my novel is set in Holland.
Recently a radio show did an episode devoted to Baum and Oz. It’s worth a listen.
Posted by Jim at August 13th, 2006
I installed PC-BSD today. It took about 30 minutes.
It blows my mind.
It probably won’t blow your mind if you’re used to Windows XP and Apple’s OS X. Those are operating systems where things tend to work immediately. They’re also operating systems where you can reasonably expect that when you’re done installing your OS, you’ll actually be able to do something with it.
With Linux and FreeBSD, that’s not always true.
Even with some of the better distributions of Linux, I’ve often found myself configuring X-windows late into the night. FreeBSD has at times not even had X-windows included in the initial distribution. Thus I’d end up:
1. Installing FreeBSD
2. Installing X
3. Installing a Desktop Environment (GNOME or KDE)
4. Modifying things
5. Flailing hopelessly as I tried to make standard amenities like Flash, Java, and sound work.
With PC-BSD, it went like this:
1. Install PC-BSD
2. Download and install the Nvidia display drivers, sound driver, Java, and Flash.
And they all just work.
I’m currently listening to music via Mplayer, something that I’d gotten to work previously, but I’d had massive problems getting the sound to work and no motivation to spend the time (since it working easily on my mac and on XP).
Particularly amusing for me is that I’m actually using Flash 8. I don’t think that I’ve ever before used a current version of Flash on FreeBSD. It’s almost always been Flash from the previous version (at best).
Of course, not everything is perfect. For example, I found that some video and sound get messed up, but still, it’s far better than before.
Posted by Jim at August 12th, 2006
Last year, my wife and I got more money than we expected as gifts for our anniversary. In the wake of this, we decided that we ought to do something with the money that was worthwhile. Thus, we bought what my wife informs me is the least romantic anniversary gift ever–a chest freezer.
The fact that we are now capable of freezing fresh fruit, buying vast quantities of meat (legs of lamb, sizeable chunks of deer, etc…) and storing leftovers like never before does not console her.
I admit that she has a point, but I still like the freezer.
That being said, I’m informed that any money we get this year will go toward buying season tickets to the Grand Rapids Symphony.
Posted by Jim at August 11th, 2006
Sometime this weekend I intend to install PC-BSD. PC-BSD is essentially FreeBSD with a focus on making things easier for the new user.
From what I’ve read, the installation is remarkably easy. Similarly, it’s also easy to install software thanks to the distribution’s method of packaging them. I don’t really fall into the new user category, but I am married to someone who wants to have sound and video on the Freebsd/Linux box that we happen to have as our second computer.
I’m sure it would be possible to make things work without installing a different version of FreeBSD, but honestly, I don’t feel like figuring out how and I’m hoping that things like that will be easier than usual.
We’ll see.
Anyway, watch this space and you’ll hopefully get to read about how wonderful installing it was. If not, you may get to read about me installing something else to see if I can make that work instead.