Vita Contemplativa

So It Goes... R.I.P. Bungee

2009-05-04T14:12:00.000-07:00

It is not my intention for a blog entitled the "Contemplative Life" to devolve into a sad series of death notices, but it seems like experiencing the loss of someone I care about or respect is about what it takes to force my hand. It is a psychic kick to the head that I cannot let pass without acknowledging.

We just had to put our cat Bungee down and it was pretty horrible. It had been our intention to bring her with to California but it had become obvious in recent weeks that her body had begun shutting down. She had arthritis but the pain medication made her throw up. She had a thyroid problem but the medication there caused allergic reactions. She had become incontinent and had lost control of her digestive processes.

We adopted her from the Harbins ten years ago when Beau had had enough of self-medicating to deal with his cat allergies. Kristin had just moved out to Virginia from California and her parents' cat had to be put down after a long, painful series of health issues and she was devastated. The timing was right and she took to us right away.

Anyone who knows us knows that she's been a pain in the ass almost the entire time. She developed a problem peeing inappropriately and caused all manner of damage and high vet bills. Against my better judgement, we even hired a pet counselor to see if she could help diagnose the issue that triggered the behavior. As I anticipated, she brought nothing but common sense and a bill; no results.

We tried to bring another cat into the mix, a sweet young male cat who'd had a hard life. We got him from the Piedmont Feline Rescue League after seeing him at a bookstore in Arlington, VA. His name was Sylvester and Bungee was not happy about the addition. She ended up tolerating him, but never quite grew attached. He had been very sick as a kitten and had been nursed back to life by a woman in Middleburg. After about a year, he also developed serious elimination issues. We tried to deal with his health problems but in the end (and a lot of money later), we decided he needed to be an outdoor cat back on the farm where he came from. It broke our heart to get rid of him but we just couldn't handle two cats with bathroom problems.

The reason we put up with it was that Bungee was about the sweetest, most loving cat you could ever have met. Anyone who came over was met with curiosity, love and affection. To a person, they were astounded at how friendly and affectionate she was. We used to joke that she'd be a fine guard cat because she'd charm any intruder with her personality. We're not sure if it was her life experiences or genetics (we believe she was a Norwegian forest cat), but she was a unique cat in this regard.

In the last year, she started losing weight and was clearly suffering from some joint issues. We tried a variety of medications but with the reactions I mentioned above, it seemed like a losing battle. The vet had suggested that a series of glucosamine injections (that we would give weekly) might help the arthritis and radiation therapy might help the thyroid issue, but we weren't convinced. She was in her 18th year and this all seemed like it was going to be rough on her.

In the past few weeks we noticed several changes. She would spend an increasing amount of time away from us, sleeping under chairs, in her carrier, etc. It was unlike her and a sign of a cat being unwell. Her limp became more pronounced and we even saw her struggling to lie down from time to time. She stopped joining us upstairs at night, although she did come up a few nights ago after I got back from L.A. It became increasingly obvious to us that the move would be too much for her. We struggled with the idea of putting her down while she still seemed like herself a good portion of the time, but we decided that that was the right thing to do.

We didn't want it to get to the point that she was in so much constant pain that there was none of her left. There is extreme guilt in making this kind of a decision but at some point it becomes more about quality of life than how much you will miss someone. This is true for pets as well as people.

Bungee spent a good portion of today in her carrier. I don't read too much in to that, but it sure seemed like she was telling us she was ready to go. It is easy to make up senseless explanations like that because it makes you feel better. We were there the whole time during the process. First, she got a heavy sedative. The vet was surprised at how quickly it took. When she was knocked out, she received a second injection and passed almost immediately.

I am convinced we did the right thing; our vet agreed. I still feel horrible, but that will pass. It was difficult to come back home to an empty house with her basket and food bowls and toys as clear reminders of her absence.

This post is less expiation of guilt and more acknowledging her passing and the place she had in our lives.

R.I.P. Bungee

So It Goes... R.I.P. DFW

2008-09-14T10:45:00.001-07:00

"My vocabulary fails me, it's a sesquipedalian thing..." -- Jim's Big Ego

As I mentioned in my post about his death, I anticipated Vonnegut's end for quite some time. David Foster Wallace's suicide, not so much. I am not sure how to respond. He always presented slightly Not Right[1], but given his capacity for self-articulation and the borderline narcissism[2], his fully examined life (with apologies) seemed Worth Living.

Marisa introduced me to his fiction (for which I am thankful) but it was always his non-fiction that energized me the most. I remember with amusement and humility how appalled I was reading "Supposedly" on my way up to NYC for NYE to see Phish at MSG back in 1997. As someone who has the occasional propensity to succumb to sesquipedalian onanism[3], I found his profligate use of uncommon words clear evidence of Communicative Insouciance. I circle words I do not know when I read something and look them up when I have the opportunity. By the time I arrived at Penn Station, I had 30 or so words to investigate. As word after word revealed itself to be not le mot opaque but le mot juste, I began to realize that the fault was mine. Yes, proponents of effective communication would be appalled, but that does not mean he was wrong to marshall the full capacity of human expression; there was nuance to his writing.

Perhaps the greatest example of his ability to render interesting what he found interesting was the fascinating 100 page review of a dictionary found in "Lobster". If you think I am kidding, I am not. That was one of the most enjoyable essays I have read in years. Also of note in this volume is his detailed experiences following McCain's 2000 campaign as a passenger on the Straight Talk express.

I found it fascinating (not morbid or shameful) that one of my first reactions to the news today was to wonder about what a DFW suicide note would look like. I don't know if he left one, but I would sure like to read it. I imagine perhaps a highly-footnoted and impassive dissection of how he had come to his conclusion.

I will miss your work, DFW.

Kind thoughts to your friends and family.

1. Equal parts agoraphobia, an obsessive propensity for deliberate and detailed footnotial annotations and a hint of sadness at the loosening grip Man had on the full articulative [sic] nature of his language.

2. I do not mean to suggest for a moment that DFW was an actual narcissist, but it would be understandable for an outside observer to come to that conclusion given the attention he paid to his own life and experiences [cf. A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, Consider the Lobster, etc. ]. The Myth of Νάρκισσος has many variants through the ages including Ovid, Pausanias, Oscar Wilde, Bob Dylan and Genesis (the band, not the first chapter of the Pentateuch). The common interpretation is a morality tale against self love, but several versions reject this notion as an implausible and unspectacular literary device. Instead, authors such as Pausanias prefer the idea that he had a twin sister whom he loved. When she died, he pretended that the reflection in that water was her given the similitude of their appearance. Still, DFW qua Narcissus was apparently indifferent to the affections and affectations of Contemporary Echoes. I believe he saw in his own (self) reflection an opportunity to focus his profound attention productively, nothing more. Proximate narcissism, perhaps, but not the Real Deal. [a]

3. It was recently advised that I excoriate the phrase "interstitial flux" from a report about the applicability of semantic technologies to a customer in the scientific publishing industry.

a. DFW the Professor would be disappointed if I didn't cite my source even if he might disapprove of its authoritative credentials.

A Moment for Moderation

2008-09-09T13:22:00.000-07:00

As I have mentioned many times, I grew up overseas; a child of the World with my own nationality never far from my sense of self. In the Philippines, Germany and Japan, I made friends with people of all races, religions and nationalities. Even in my youth it seemed fairly clear that a single perspective did not Universalize easily. I saw poverty and wealth in the extreme. I learned to make friends quickly and take people for what they were. I witnessed the failures of unfettered self-interest and indulgence of the 60's, 70's and 80's varieties. I faced bomb threats and anger at an early age simply because of where I was born. I also saw unfettered appreciation for Post War magnanimity and a respect for the Narrative of Liberty and Freedom we wore on our sleeves.

I discovered evidence of chronosynclastic infundibula here on Earth. In "Sirens of Titan", Kurt Vonnegut defines these as "those places ... where all the different kinds of truths fit together". Spending as much time as I did overseas, this was the story that was sold about the United States. It is what I believed to be true.

This message of tolerance is not a recipe for complete lack of judgement or critical thinking. Rather, it is an acknowledgement that no matter how fervently one believes in one's own perspective, if you are honest, you cannot deny that there are other perspectives on the table. Nietzsche quips, "A casual stroll through a lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything." Does this devalue faith? Arguably, it does not. What it does is remove it from any kind of comparative analysis. You cannot use acceptance of Truth without Evidence as any kind of club. It remains a personal and shared expression of a world view. If we do not share that perspective, no matter how hard you try, you will not convince me and vice versa.

This collective dialogue of respect for competing views and lines drawn in the sand is what I always imagined the political process to be... until I looked on. Instead, we have a cacophony of Pro-Us chants emanating from the edges. Perhaps the adolescent name-calling and destructive venom have always been part of the process, but it's nice to imagine a dialogue of Ideas. The U.S. Constitution is a pretty high concept way of self-organizing. It is difficult to imagine it emerging from a culture distracted by the Colonial equivalents of Brangelina, Britney, Spitzer, the Hills, the OC, the View, etc. And yet people are people so it wouldn't surprise me that there was more of that going on than we care to imagine.

So, I am encouraged that it might still be possible to rise above the muck and have real conversations with real debate. We seek a balancing act between the roles of the Individual and the Group. We seek the shared efficiencies of many hands pulling in the same direction. How strongly you embrace the Way of Things is clearly directly proportional to how well you think S. Quo has worked for you. There is plenty of room for discussion with no need for the raw, polarizing anger of contemporary political discourse.

The World is a crazy, frightening, unstable place requiring more discipline, consideration and maturity than we have demonstrated in quite some time. It is easy to fall back on the faults of the last Eight Years, but it goes back further than that. We have not been led by Wisdom, Vision, Leadership or healthy perspectives for quite some time. Retreating into jingoistic chants won't cut it. Denying realities that the rest of the world sees clearly makes us look foolish. Taking control of our legislative bodies and accomplishing nothing is a waste of time, money and self-assigned High Ground. Embracing indefensible, equivocated positions of our own past make us look infantile. Ignoring the fact that we have ceded our moral, social, scientific, military and cultural leadership positions doesn't mean we haven't.

Here is to personal responsibility of both the individual and group kind. Here is to an administration that believes in the U.S. Constitution and doesn't mock it. Here is to an appreciation of the subtlety that defending ourselves does not mean reducing ourselves. Here is to hard work and strong reward and compassion and generosity. Here is to tolerance with a backbone both in terms of what we should reasonably accept and what we can defensibly reject. Here is to an educated populace capable of competing on a World Stage that is going to look very little like what we expect when we look backwards. Here is to a citizenry who understands their actual place in the world, not the one they imagine. Here is to having Big Visions for Hard Problems and the courage to do what it takes for success.

You may say I am a dreamer, but I am not the only one. -- J. Lennon

A Good Funeral for a Great Guy

2008-02-10T18:48:00.000-08:00

We attended Steve Metsker's funeral today. It was literally standing room only.

Two thoughts:

1) It was amazing to hear everyone reiterate exactly the same things. Steve was consistently wise, clever, accepting, inspirational, encouraging and a stand up role model to everyone he touched. He was a team player, eschewed the spotlight, accepted people as they are and pushed them to be what they might be. I have never been to a funeral where it was so clear what the direct impact of a single life had been on so many people.

2) The power of a liturgical structure in a ceremony is that it provides a narrative at key life moments (birth, death, wedding, etc.) because we often lack them on our own. Granted, the Unitarian Universalist tradition doesn't offer much in the way of concrete narrative, but this funeral today was entirely made by the personal anecdotes from a variety of friends and family. Steve's life, words, actions and influence were clearly narrative enough. Everything else (sparse as it was) simply got in the way.

Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry. -- Mark Twain

Hey, man. You win.

So it goes... R.I.P. Steven J. Metsker

2008-02-08T13:21:00.000-08:00

I was just devastated to find out that my friend and former customer, Steve Metsker, passed away yesterday. I had not the slightest idea he was ill. They discovered some form of cancer on January 11 and less than a month later he succumbed. Apparently he was in a lot of pain toward the end so the swiftness was in his best interest, but it is so hard to make the mental shift and realize that the world is one Good Guy shorter today.

I met Steve when I was hired as a consultant at Capital One as a contractor. They had a project that had taken a group of PowerBuilder developers, given them some modest Java training and told them to go forth and build Enterprise Java applications. Hilarity ensued.

After many false starts, missteps, etc., Steve was added to the team to help. Within a year (my recollection on the timeframe may be wrong, but the results are not), he had helped turn them into a functioning, consistently productive team.

As I worked with him, he and I developed a friendship and mutual respect. We had similar senses of humor and enjoyed talking about software, life and everything. I showed up at Capital One very excited about the ideas of Aspect-Oriented Programming. Steve shared my interest, but cast a cautious eye toward silver bullets. Still, I credit him with encouraging me to send myself to the first Aspect Oriented Software Development conference in Enschede in April of 2002. That was a pivotal point for me as it was there I met Gregor who introduced me to Ron who introduced me to Jay.

Steve was an accomplished author, mentor, speaker, trainer and all around sharp guy. I remember one time when his parser book had been translated into Japanese, he was curious what the Japanese reviewers said:

わかりやすく簡潔で超おすすめ

My Japanese is pretty good, but had gotten rusty, so I ran that through BabelFish and came up with:

"To be easy to know being brief, the super male be completed"

The gist of the review was that it took a pretty special person to make a book about writing custom parsers in Java so simple, accessible and brief. He also wrote about Design Patterns, UML, Software processes and pedagogy.

That was Steve's gift. He was a talented communicator; a distiller of ideas. He was very much in favor of hands-on instruction and used the approach at various OOPSLA and other conferences to teach people about Design Patterns.

Recently, Steve had attended several of my NFJS talks on REST, the Semantic Web and NetKernel and was again cautiously optimistic about building scalable, maintainable systems with these ideas. I don't think he had quite wrapped his head around the full picture, but we were working on that.

A little over a year ago, Steve asked me to be part of OOPSLA as the Demonstration Track Chair. I was flattered and happy to do it, especially since I would get to work with people like Dick Gabriel, Joe Bergin, Guy Steele, etc. The last time I'd seen Steve was in Montreal last October. We had a lot of fun and spent a good amount of time together, eating, drinking and just gabbing about software. It was at this OOPSLA that I got to hear Fred Brooks, John McCarthy and David Parnas in one day! That evening, through a weird series of coincidences typical of my life, I ended up joining John McCarthy for dinner and got to explain some of the ideas about the Semantic Web to him. Talk about the highlight of my career!

I owe a lot to Steve and his influence, guidance and encouragement. But as enthusiastic as he was about his career, books, etc., nothing was more important to him than his family. I heard so many stories about the various activities with his wife and daughters. They were all precious to him and it showed. I don't think I could end this any better than to quote him from a variety of emails. They do a good job of showing his enthusiasm, supportive spirit and wide interests:

About his willingness to pitch in and be involved in his daughters' activities:

In other news: Today’s Pinewood Derby day, where 50 or so boys race little tiny cars they’ve built (in the morning), and then about 50 girls race in the afternoon. I was the least averse to volunteering to help, and am now pretty well running the whole thing. There’s a ton of logistics and operational stuff, with an aluminum track to set up, an electrical timer (with a laser switch!), and race management software. Man! Anyway, I think I’m prepared. If I pull this off, though, I’ll send along a revised resume!

About his interest in fostering clear communication to people submitting tutorials to OOPSLA and encouraging them to be involved again and again:

I notice as I fill in my tutorial reviews that some of y’all are not filling in the section on “Evaluation, including points in favor and against, and comments for improvement.”

It’s important to fill this in.

Filling in this section is a courtesy to the submitters – they need to see what we’re thinking, especially when we reject. It helps them grow and submit better tutorials next year. It can incent rejected submitters to try again. (It might, I suppose, have the opposite effect, depending on our wording. But I can’t imagine that pure silence is better than trying to give them ideas on how to improve.)

On his encouragement of me and my career:

Ya know, I gotta say, you're one of those people who seems faintly
bemused that others see a lot of potential in ya. Self effacement's Ok, but it's Ok to believe in yerself too.

On his reminder to me to not let work overtake more important relationships:

Glad to hear it, given that I assume with not one moment of doubt that you do not allow your busy schedule to any way impinge on your relationship and partnership with your beautiful wife. :)

And finally, the last e-mail I got from him was an idea he had submitted to Threadless based on a conversation we'd had:

As I said, the world is down one Good Guy today.

Goodbye, my friend.

The Grieving Process

2007-12-05T07:03:00.000-08:00

I've had my share of grieving. Losing my mother so early in life was a blow, but I felt like it couldn't get much worse than that. Ultimately, I still believe that, but it doesn't make it easier to countenance a new loss, even if it is only indirectly.

Right now, my heart has been rent by the struggle of a fourteen month old girl who I have never met, but I have just found out she no longer struggles.

We hear about tragedies on the news all the time, but we simply cannot bear the weight of the world on a day to day basis so we don't process the full implications.

I'm trying to keep functioning. I have a lot to do and I find the work to be a good distraction, but every once in a while a I'll find myself surprised that I'd put it out of my thoughts, at least for a short while.

The shock one enters into is such an important aid; it would be impossible to function without it. It is a thankful psychological band-aid that masks the struggle that will come next. I've found that the hard part isn't the losing, it is the learning to live without.

It is an intentional process of self-preservation that wracks you with guilt the entire way.

I remember the first time I caught myself enjoying hearing a song on the radio after my mom passed away. I was horrified that I could have slipped into a sense of normalcy. That I could have "forgotten" for a moment about my loss. It seemed like an affront to her and how crucial she'd been to me.

Eventually, it starts to happen more frequently and the guilt and the shock attenuate with time. They have to.

Living without is not forgetting.
Living without is not ignoring.
Living without is... living.

Heartbreaking Tragedy

2007-12-04T19:31:00.000-08:00

We at Zepheira were devastated over the weekend to hear about Chime's tragedy.

Our broken hearts go out to them.

If you'd like to contribute to the family, a fund has been established:

Ogbuji Family Fund
c/o Dr Linus Ogbuji
2737 Green Road
Shaker Heights 44122

You, Sir, Endure!

2007-11-19T20:02:00.001-08:00

Of course, I am punning on his name, but, man, Yossou N'Dour can bring it! He played tonight at the Kennedy Center and went on for longer than I expected and had people dancing in the aisles. I'd wager the normal K-Center crowd rarely gets that animated.

It was a real D.C. moment. The crowd was ethnically, culturally, nationally, socially and generationally diverse, but were all there to celebrate one of Senegal's favorite sons and Le Super Etoile de Dakar, a group of such talent, to refer to them as a "back up band" is an insult.

I have heard quite a bit of his work although "Joko" is the only album I have. Believe it or not, "Birima" was not among my top three favorites from the evening which should give you a hint of how good it was.

While he has moved away from his earlier work in mbalax, that remains one of the most amazing parts of his show. I'm going to have to go back and revisit some of his earlier work. While the insane, layered Afro-Cuban jam sessions were my favorite, "New Africa" was particularly moving.

We started the evening in the K-Center's Roof Terrace Restaurant which was surprisingly good. We'd wanted to grab some food somewhere before the show, but ended up not having a whole lot of time. At the last minute, we made an Open Table reservation and left Fairfax with 30 minutes to make it through rush hour traffic. The Gods of Spontaneity must have smiled on us as we actually made it. The evening wasn't even ruined by the two naive cows who rejected their food because it arrived too quickly. They were convinced that they'd been given someone else's "reheated" food. My wife and I had to bite our tongues but decided, in the end, engaging that kind of stupidity simply wasn't worth it.

In any case, the evening was filled with fun, singing, clapping and forgetting about the outside world for a while. It's hard to ask more of an evening on the town.

A special note to vm: this is by no means further encouraging em to buy more music, although he would certainly enjoy it were he to chose to do so on his own accord. :)

So It goes... R.I.P. Alfred H. Peet

2007-09-05T09:31:00.000-07:00

Sigh...

So it goes... R.I.P. Brian Lyons

2007-09-05T07:24:00.001-07:00

One of the downsides of traveling so much is that Life (and Death) doesn't follow a convenient schedule. I missed a friend's brother's funeral the other week because I was out of town. And now, I am likely to miss the funeral for a former boss this weekend.

Brian Lyons, CEO, CTO and Co-Founder of Number Six Software was killed in a motorcycle accident on Monday. He was a great guy, terribly talented and prolific and had a family.

I worked at Number Six for about a year. While I had my ups and downs during my tenure there, I am still wholly positive about going there when I did. When I had the opportunity to do some consulting with them a few years later, I jumped at the opportunity.

Brian and Rob had come from Rational and were interested in building better software. Because of their heritage, they were big proponents of RUP. While we didn't always see eye-to-eye on topics like process, I respected their experience and expertise as did their large customer base. I also appreciated (and was probably influenced by more directly than I realize -- cf. Bosatsu Consulting, Inc. and Zepheira, LLC) their entrepreneurial spirit.

One of my favorite memories of Brian (besides lots of laughs over food and beer) was a demo he did that tied together the various Rational tools and used a Rose model as a hub for tracking things like code coverage, defect rates, tying failure back to requirements specification, etc. It was one of my early glimpses into the relationship between requirements, design, testing and development. It made me realize that software failure was an organizational failure. It was one of the experiences that led me to believe better process and design tools like AOP might help more closely track a design concept, its implementation and the requirements whence it came.

In addition to his being willing to try to contribute to improving our failed and broken industry, Brian had a joie de vivre that I think I resonated with. He was a CEO biker, but more biker than CEO. Ultimately, this love seems to have been his undoing. Please don't point fingers and lay blame. Risk management is a complicated subject that involves every decision you make; even then you can't control everything.

So, the lesson I learned from Brian was that life is worth living and that an individual can make a difference to this industry. Thanks for the lesson, Chief.

Six Degrees of Brian Sletten

2007-08-16T19:04:00.000-07:00

Anyone who has ever sent me a LinkedIn invitation knows that I turn my nose up at centralized social-networking blivets (military usage) like that. The Internet is bigger than any single site and there are very few endgames for these companies that doesn't involve them selling this information. While I don't imagine it is yet a viable replacement, I prefer something like FOAFas it is decentralized, based on open standards and makes the networks available to you (something LinkedIn is only now considering).

I do believe that within the next few years there will be real pressure to assert yourself into a social network in order to get a job, get hired as a babysitter off of Craig's List or go out on a date. It is simply too easy to start to spider and find connections.... we know the same people, we went to the same school, we are interested in the same topics, etc.

While Dave and I have worked on some cool tools to passively harvest RDF while browsing (using NetKernel as a proxy and, after grabbing pages, asynchronously running them through a GRDDL filter), I still considered FOAF a niche technology.

I needed an application for my next DevX article which is going to be on Mulgara. While I was originally going to demonstrate using ZeroConf to advertise RESTful services and store RDF metadata about said services (an immensely better approach than lame technologies like U Don't Dare Invest (UDDI)), I decided that might be a little too adventurous for a 2,000 word article.

So, I decided to write a FOAF explorer. I start with my FOAF file and then do a query for everyone I know:

alias <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/> as foaf;
select $foafurl from <rmi://localhost/server1#foaf> where $someone <foaf:knows> $someoneelse and $someoneelse <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#seeAlso> $foafurl;

For every person that comes back, I load their FOAF file into my Mulgara instance:

load <http://zepheira.com/team/eric/contact.rdf> into <rmi://localhost/server1#foaf>;

I keep track of everyone I've processed and repeatedly query Mulgara until I run out of data.

Now, admittedly, I don't have very many people in my FOAF file at the moment: the management team at Zepheira (and señor Uche, who knows everyone, hasn't even updated his file yet!), some mavens/connectors like Danny, some folks I've worked with in the past, a few NFJS speakers and some Mulgara collaborators. Also, my approach didn't use threads and was pretty simple but stupid, so there is plenty of room for performance improvements.

Despite these caveats, I am astonished how many results I got back. The same spidering session is still going. What's interesting is that I've presently hit a LiveJournal trough that I don't expect to break out of to non-LiveJournal sites. As soon as I get the transitive friendship closure of the LiveJournal folks that got me in there, I expect it to stop.

It's pretty cool that there is that much FOAF out there though and that sites like LiveJournal have committed to folding it into their system so that every user. As it prints out the FOAF files it is spidering, I've enjoyed copying the links and seeing the random people I am connected to.

I was going to wait until it finished to report how many people I was ultimately connected to, but I'm not sure where this is going to finish. (Update: Oooh! Just got some non-LiveJournal files!)

This exercise has also inspired me to make some progress on my goal to create some good tools to lower the bar to FOAF usage. I am going to leverage the PURLS work that we are doing for the OCLC. This will allow us to create permanent, resolvable names for ourselves that transcend where we currently hang our hats*. This will allow the networks to be more resilient. As many links as I am finding, there have been a ton of broken links (presumably people who have moved on) that would have enriched the result set even further!

This is going to be fun!

*This work is being built on NetKernel too!

Hanalei Wrapup

2007-07-21T17:29:00.000-07:00

Our final day in Hanalei isn't until tomorrow (Monday doesn't count, we're leaving early), but I'll probably be packing and enjoying the day. It's amazing how quickly two weeks can pass.

We have a Tropical Depression in our neighborhood, but it is still sunny in long spurts. We'll go swimming in a bit, but as a soccer fan, I have to watch Beckham's American debut so I figured I'd knock out a blog entry.

It's been a great few days. It was my niece's birthday on Monday, so we got to celebrate again when they came to visit us on Tuesday. They live over on Oahu, so it was a short flight. (Apparently, they missed Nick Nolte by a day!) We are looking forward to spending the next week or so with them. As great as it is to have a place to stay in Hawaii, we don't get to see them enough. Unfortunately, we found out yesterday that there was a shark attack just off one of our favorite beaches. Apparently the victim was an attorney which puts an end to that joke about professional courtesy!

While my brother, niece and I were swimming in Hanalei, a guy walked by who looked like David Crosby. As Graham Nash owns (used to own?) the house a few doors down and Martin Sheen was here a few summers ago, it wasn't out of the question, but I didn't really think it was him. However, two days ago, on the way back from the store, we drove by him again and my wife was convinced it was him. When we got home, we mentioned this to my in-laws. My mother-in-law said, "Oh, yes, we saw him on the porch at the Nash house the other day when we went for a walk on the beach." So, there you have it. Apparently he is now on his upper porch watching the GICRA Championship in Hanalei Bay.

We've been eating a lot of leftovers recently, but one meal bears mentioning. We picked up some monchong and made this tomato and mango vinaigrette. Mmmm....

Yesterday, we had a phenomenal trip to Waimea Canyon, famously called "the Grand Canyon of the Pacific" by Mark Twain. (While I am thinking about it, I read Letters From Hawaii recently after my brother gave it to me. I quite enjoyed it and thought it would make a great movie). The sights were astonishing, but so was the presence of roosters at 4,000ft!

The air was immaculate and wonderfully cool. I wouldn't have minded just sitting up there and reading for a while, but we had a nice picnic before heading home.

On a side note, my first article for DevX recently went live. I am excited about the new association and opportunity to talk about SemWeb-related things and occasionally some of the work we are doing at Zepheira.

Ok, as expected, Beckham's first game was all hype, but it is exciting the amount of attention it is bringing to soccer. Now, if only my team can get a freaking stadium deal done, I'll be happy.

Sun's out, time to swim.

Dinner update: We decided not to create new leftovers, so we got takeout from Pizza Hanalei. *WOW*! It was excellent. Expensive, but excellent. Give 'em a try if you come back. Jason (and David Crosby) also recommends Bubba's Burgers, but we haven't had the pleasure yet.

Getting a Better Idea of What I Am Seeing

2007-07-14T19:54:00.000-07:00

"I think a future flight should include a poet, a priest and a philosopher . . . we might get a much better idea of what we saw."
-- Michael Collins, NASA Astronaut

The title of this entry is directed at me, not you. I am trying to find words to explain the peace and beauty found on the north shore of Kaua'i. I have been here once before, but perhaps I needed this vacation more this time. I'm not going to tell you exactly where; my in-laws would kill me for revealing this little gem to the world!

I feel the shortcomings of not being a real poet. Words so rarely convey the full bandwidth of human experience. Our brains compress things because they simply can't store everything. Our poets compress things into tropes like metaphors and similes as a shorthand for the vibrancy of life. We relate by relating, not by imagining from Dickensian detail (he simply got paid by the word, duh!).

As many of you who are hassling me about being on the computer know, this is a working vacation for me... the joys of self-employment, but I don't mind. It's a good life. I wake up early to interact with folks on the East Coast, have some breakfast (usually fruit, artisanal bread, Peet's coffee(we brought, but you can buy here!), pineapple, papaya; today included oatmeal and some local goat cheese infused with herbs picked up at the farmer's market first thing) and then either go for a swim, run some errands or get about my business. Today I worked on a press release, but other days I've done things for clients or some writing.

In the afternoon, I'll swim again or take a nap. Before dinner we'll have drinks and some spicy ahi or tako poke. For dinner we've had scallops provençal, some rockin' burgers, fish kebabs and grilled chicken.

At night, the mosquitos come out, but honestly, to complain about that would paint me as an ingrate. Better to keep my mouth shut and whip out the Muhi or Mopiko.

It rains a bit and then it shines. The colors are really almost caricatures of themselves; life is not this vibrant. Waterfalls in the nearby mountains seem to come and go. We've had several rainbows in just the past few days. The house we are staying in has a huge, immaculately kempt lawn, freshly green from all of the recent rain.

This is an exceptionally remote part of the world, but here I am, posting a blog entry over a WiFi connection. In between breakfast and swimming we got to watch the Giants lose to the Dodgers (Boo!). It is amazing how normal life can be in this abnormally beautiful and unique location.

It also highlights the fact that I probably don't really need to live in Northern Virginia. I need to be able to travel easily (which is not possible from Hawai'i), but I can probably be more proactive about where we choose to live.

Not Just a Clever Name

2007-05-15T16:35:00.000-07:00

I try to be a reasonable person, citizen, customer, etc. When I am wronged, inconvenienced, etc., I try not to be excitable or take it out on the customer service person. I don't usually demand anything for my inconvenience, I simply want it made right by someone who takes ownership of the problem (remind me to tell you the story of how amazing Peet's was when I tried unsuccessfully to send some coffee to em in Columbus... short version: they were unbelievably amazing and it wasn't even their problem), but tonight I got a little irritated with Cox (the not simply cleverly-named company).

My wife noticed that our cable had gone out. This has happened a handful of times but it hadn't happened for a while. When we moved two years ago, we were told to simply bring our settop box with us. Six months or so after that, our cable went out: a random sweep of customers didn't have this box registered to the account at this address. Sigh...

So, when no amount of cable tightening, box power cycling, cat cursing (under the theory that she had dislodged something crawling around behind the television; she knows better, we've discussed this, but I saw her there today) fixed the problem, I called Cox expecting something similar. It was different this time. It didn't recognize me based on our phone number. I got someone on the phone ("agent!"... "agent!") and she couldn't find the account either.

Eventually, going through the address (I had started to have my pique raised at this point, I've been a customer for four years), she found my info. It said I had ceased to be, I was no more, I was an ex-customer.

You see, apparently I had issued a disconnect order because I was moving. Except I didn't and I wasn't. The helpless technical service person struggled to explain it and couldn't. She punted and sent me to sales thinking I was perhaps an evil menace who ordered disconnects and reconnects for fun (and the technical folks like sending the crazies to sales).

I explained who I was and what my problem was yet again to someone who asked me if I'd moved and then put me on hold ("We've got another crazy, Marge!"). Eventually, someone else (Jessica), answered the phone and inquired if she could help me (I was transferred with no context). At this point, pique passes into pissed-offedness. I am having to spend way too much time reiterating my problem. To her credit, Jessica discovers the problem quickly, realizes it was their mistake, takes my number and promises to call me back with a window for them to have a tech come back and reinstate the service ("I'm not dead yet!").

As promised, she called back and informed me I was out of luck until tomorrow. As I had been looking forward to watching the Giants play the Astros tonight, I was now feeling particularly inconvenienced.

"I'm sorry, we can't get anyone out there until tomorrow, but is there anything else I can help you with?"

"Yes, do you have the number for DirectTV?"

"No, sir, I do not have that number."

Now I am irritated that she missed the dark humor of my question. At a minimum, I wanted a credit for the day; I don't want to pay for service I am not getting. When I mention this, Jessica adopts a new tone (roughly, "Duh!"): "Sir, you are not being charged for service you aren't receiving." This tone doesn't sit well with me. I mumble something about that being a charitable way of compensating me for their mistake (and having wasted 40 minutes now resolving it). So, she decides she has to offer me something else.

"Well, sir, I can offer you the Internet for $19 a month for three months."

And that is what set me off.

#1) I already have Cox Business Cable Services for which I pay them over $100 a month
#2) They took the opportunity to compensate me for their mistake with an *UPSELL*!

I point out the fact that I am already a customer (clearly their CRM systems are not linked), so this is not something I am interested in and she apparently has nothing to offer me.

"Sir, I am offering you the Internet for three months for $19 a month".

Well, with apologies to Mr. Morrissey, that joke wasn't funny anymore and I lost my cool. I wasn't rude. I told her I understood it wasn't her fault, but that I was just fed up with companies wasting my time for their mistake. How difficult would it be for a corporation to empower their people to make things right when it was *CLEARLY* their fault? Answer: It is apparently not difficult because Peet's employs a helpful woman named Susan who was empowered to fix something that wasn't their problem.

Six months later, I am still in awe and can't recommend Peet's enough. Their coffee is absolutely fantastic and worth every penny (I kid you not, if you think that chain is "good coffee", you owe it to yourself to order some Peet's. It will be roasted on the day you order it and you will thank me for a lifetime), but their customer service is worth even more.

This is why I can recommend Peet's to you and not a bunch of Cox.

Complexity, Flowers and Stooges

2007-04-12T20:54:00.000-07:00

A large portion of my past is inaccessible to me. Growing up in the Philippines, Germany and Japan, I have memories of places that I cannot easily return to. I think one of the reasons music is so important to me is because I am able to make the journey back any time I hear something that I associate with an earlier time in my life. Now that I am in my mid-30's and perhaps more nostalgic, being able to carry my entire musical life with me wherever I go is understandably quite comforting.

Tonight I was able to catch Hothouse Flowers, an Irish rock band made famous when Bono signed them after catching them on a late night Dublin television gig. I was introduced to them by my Scottish buddy Steven Watson almost 20 years ago. The first album, "People", was a bluesy rock album with uplifting lyrics like:


There's a smell of fresh cut grass
And it's filling up my senses
And the sun is shinin' down
On the blossoms in the avenue
There's a buzzin fly
Hangin' round the bluebells and the daisies
There's a lot more lovin' left in this world

In college, "Home" came out. It was more soulful, less soul. One of the breakout songs was a remake of Roberta Flack's "I Can See Clearly Now". As evidenced by the likes of Van Morrison, Rory Gallagher and The Commitments, these Irish boys like their R&B. Later, "Songs From the Rain" emerged more World and worldly. I enjoyed it, but it was quite a departure from what had come before. I lost track of the boys after that which isn't surprising given that they didn't put out another record until 2000.

Now, tonight, I was able to catch the Flowers 15 minutes from my home at the Barns of Wolf Trap; side stage to a National Park for Performing Arts. It is a small venue so I was anticipating an intimate setting. I couldn't get any takers so I went by myself. I received a copy of Exploring Complexity from Amazon today so I took it with to peruse before the show started. (Yes, I know what that sounds like, and yes, I was stared at. Move along.) I had hoped to drag Brent and his wife up from Richmond because it was his birthday (Happy Birthday, Brent!) and I introduced him to them in college, but that would have been difficult.

The current incarnation is Liam, Fiachna and Dave. Kieran Kennedy, of the Black Velvet Band fame (another great Irish band), is filling in for Peter on bass for some reason. (Trivia note: Kieran is married to fellow bandmate Maria Doyle Kennedy who is presently playing Katherine in Showtime's The Tudors. She was also in "The Commitments".)

The first thing that struck me was how old the audience was. I didn't expect the Flowers to be popular with, say, 20 Somethings normally enamored by the artistic stylings of AFI, but I didn't expect to be one of the younger people at the show. I'd say the average age was somewhere in the 40's. There was a gray hair in a Hawaiian shirt a few rows up. The gentlemen in front of me had a hearing aid!

The Barns is definitely a more staid venue, so I expected a good representation from privileged white corporate Northern Virginians, I just didn't expect that to be basically... it.

This realization was made acute because a week ago Doug and I went to catch Iggy and the Stooges at the 9:30 Club. Ok, different band, different genre, different venue, but Iggy is about to turn 60! The Godfather of Punk definitely still speaks to a younger audience though; I felt quite squarely in statistical Meanland at that show. It was a varied and interesting crowd. On the one hand, we had what looked like a trucker grandfather in a plaid button down (over a Devo T-shirt) and a Circle Jerks hat. On the other hand, I had two little emo pixies with glitter and a confused sense of fashion (think 80's punk fashion reinterpreted through Steven Cojocaru, furnished by HotTopic). (Trivia note: I had two extra tickets to get rid of for this show. I almost sold them to (what I could tell) was an Italian Mormon who worked for Al Jazeera. Truth! He was unable to go, however, and I ended up gifting them to a Chilean economist and his female friend who was visiting and didn't speak English.)

The Flowers are in their 40's and so are their fans, apparently. I got the feeling some of those fans brought their parents too.

In any case, the show was solid but awkward. The venue and the audience (especially the jackass sitting next to me who didn't want to be there but was only because his girlfriend was a fan) kind of sucked the enthusiasm from me for the first part of the show. There were highlights and a handful of people dancing.

Most of the classics ("It'll Be Easier in the Morning", "Don't Go") have been reinterpreted in interesting ways, but that ended up sapping the emotional weight of the experience for me. Having never seen them live the songs ended up feeling like cabaret versions of themselves and I found that unfulfilling.

When the show ended is when it really began. The last few songs broke through the Old White Person barrier and we saw emergent behavior arise dynamically (see, I was reading complexity books before the show!) People were on their feet, dancing in the aisles, etc. The encore was "Isn't It Amazing" and then a Gaelic dance song that went into what almost sounded like a Native American jam and then wrapped up with an interpretation of Nina Simone's "See Line Woman".

The evening ended well and I was glad to have gone. It wasn't the emotionally charged experience it could have been, but it was better than a sharp stick in the eye. I would have preferred to have gone to a nightclub to see them with a more diverse audience and perhaps my wife, Brent and Steven as well.

God Bless You, Mr. Vonnegut

2007-04-12T07:27:00.000-07:00

It has been a while since I have blogged. It hasn't been for wont of material, but from a somewhat broken publishing infrastructure. I had been using a rich client app that maintained a lot of state and when I switched from my old, old Powerbook to my old Powerbook, I lost that state somehow. Now that I am on to my MacBookPro, I'm not sure I have a hope of recovering that state so I am starting fresh.

The catalyst was, of course, the passing of Mr. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

I knew it was coming. I've known for the past ten years that it was coming. His death was an impending reality since before he attempted suicide in 1984. This reality is true for all of us, but it always seemed especially true for him. His passion for smoking was one long, slow attempt at suicide that ultimately failed (he died from brain injuries after a fall). The weight of the world was heavy on him, it is almost delicious irony that it was ultimately gravity that did him in.

I don't want to wax nauseatic about his importance to me. He'd hate that from what I know of him. Instead, I'll put a link
to one of my favorite stories from my life and one to the most beautiful commentary on his passing I could imagine.

"A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved."
-- Kurt Vonnegut