A Wonderful Day
  Today, T and I went up to Scotsdale Farm to hike on the Bruce Trail. The segment we traversed offered a rich variety of terrain. We began in a luminous young forest sparsely populated by thin trees with few branches. Parts were cool, denser forests with thicker, bushier trees, some with thick barrel trunks—one particularly memorable trunk was a massive column rising straight up, tapering only near its apex. We emerged from the forest, climbing up and down a wooden ladder graciously placed over a wire fence, to behold a wide expanse of undulating hills covered with dry shin-high grass that shone lusciously under the late afternoon sun. T later recalled the gentle brushing sound of those hills swaying in the breeze. There were streams several feet wide coursing at a moderate pace, tiny streams barely a foot across moving at a trickle, and seemingly still patches of water crawling to lower ground. In the middle of one forest, we stopped on a footbridge and feasted our eyes on the shimmering glow of a waterfall.

Even though you could occasionally hear in the distance the familiar sound of a car rushing past, I couldn't help but notice, on several occasions, how secluded we were. While we did pass a few couples walking on the trail near the farm, they were the last people we saw anywhere, even in the far-off distance, until we returned to the farm several hours later. The isolation was, on the one hand, serene, and, on the other, unfamiliar, somewhat strange. The only indication we found of larger animals in the area were some bean-shaped droppings I found on the ground. I also noticed there were very few insects, only a few large flies in some spots and two nests of caterpillars which T delighted in probing with a thin stick. The experience was markedly different in this respect than walks I've had on other parts of the Bruce Trail which are kept more like parks, with picnic areas, washrooms, and ice cream shops nearby. This part of the trail felt more like Nature proper, with only a few auspiciously placed bridges, ladders, and painted markers to guide the hiker through a particular interpretation of this work of God's art.

I've found a new grind, a new set of quests to complete: to walk each of the Bruce Trail segments which together span Ontario from Niagara to Georgian Bay. Thank you T for giving me, for my birthday, the gift of wonder and discovery.

Labels: birthday, bruce, trail

* 2:40 AM [permlink] [2 comments]

Unix Blues
  Let's make a tarball of my home directory so I can finally back it up. Should be simple:

tar cjvf home-backup.tar.bz2 .

Ack, I don't want to back up all these .files, .dirs, spam, and mailing list mailboxes. Ok, --exclude=.*. Dammit, tar doesn't do glob-expansion (the shell usually does, but that wouldn't work here anyway as we'll soon see). Ok, let's use find to get all the files to exclude, even the easy ones:

find . -name 'mail/SPAM'

Hrm, no matches and I'm sure mail/SPAM exists. Doh, -name only matches basenames; you have to use -path to match subtrees:

find . -path 'mail/SPAM' -o -path 'mail/debian*' -o etc.

Ok, we've got the pathnames! Now we can pipe or xargs them to tar. Dammit! Neither --exclude nor --exclude-from take their args from stdin or the command line. I could have stopped here by redirecting find to a file and then passing that to --exclude-from, but come on—communicating over files? Ok, let's try a bash script; I can just iterate over each pathname returned from find and grow a string of "--exclude="s. Dammit, bash interpolates too much:

f=".*"
echo $f

yields all the .files in the cwd. Hrm, ok, what's the string concatenation operator in bash?

man bash

Gaaaaah! Who the hell was this written for?

I resort to perl once again and it works. I now have a greater appreciation for users who choose a full-featured app first and only then resort to the standard Unix toolbox. * 1:43 AM [permlink] [2 comments]

Kid Logic
  A transcript I made of a segment from This American Life. Enjoy.

It all began at Christmas, two years ago, when my daughter was four years old. It was the first time that she had ever asked, "what did this holiday mean?" I explained to her that this was celebrating the birth of Jesus. She wanted to know more about that. We went out and bought a kid's Bible and had these readings at night--she loved them. Wanted to know everything about Jesus. So we read a lot about his birth and about his teaching and she would ask constantly what that phrase was. I would explain to her that it was, "do unto others as you would have them do unto you." We would talk about those old words and what that all meant.

One day we were driving past a big church and out front was an enormous crucifix. She said, "who is that?" And I guess I never really told that part of the story. [Laughs.] Oh ... that's Jesus and I forgot to tell you the ending. He ran afoul of the Roman government. This message that he had was so radical and unnerving to the prevailing authorities of the time that they had to kill him. They came to the conclusion that he would have to die. That message was too troublesome.

It was about a month later after that Christmas; we had gone through the whole story of what Christmas meant. It was mid-January. Her pre-school celebrates the same holidays as the local schools, so Martin Luther King Day was off. I knocked off work that day and I decided we'd play and I'd take her out to lunch. We were sitting in there and right on the table where we happened to plop down was the Arts section of the local newspaper. There, big as life, was a huge drawing by a ten year old kid in the local schools of Martin Luther King.

She said, "who's that?"

I said, "well, as it happens, that's Martin Luther King. He's why you're not in school today. We're celebrating his birthday. This is the day we celebrate his life."

She said, "so who was he?"

I said, "he was a preacher."

And she looks up at me and goes, "for Jesus?"

I said, "yeah, actually he was, but there was another thing that he was really famous for, which is that he had a message ...." You're trying say this to a four year old, this is the first time they ever hear anything, so you're very careful about how you phrase everything. So I said, "yeah, he was a preacher and he had a message."

She said, "what was his message?"

I said, "he said that you should treat everybody the same no matter what they look like."

She thought about that for a minute and she said, "that's what Jesus said."

I said, "yeah, I guess it is. I never thought of it that way, but yeah. That is sort of is like 'do unto others as you'd have them do unto you.'"

She thought for a minute, looked up at me, and said, "did they kill him too?" * 9:33 PM [permlink] [0 comments]

What
  After a bad day, my usual pastimes--drugs, video games, movies ... porn--aren't enough. When the deadlines seem far off in the horizon, I indulge in these pastimes with abandon; foresight and prudence are cast aside for a few precious twilight hours every night until a deadline becomes imminent.

I had two consecutive presentations today. The first was immediately interrupted by the prof as it was too "low level" for the audience, thereby obviating the rest of the slides I had so optimistically prepared. The second began somewhat OK, but in the latter half of the presentation I faltered when trying to explain an example which I didn't completely understand (I was presenting a conference paper using the author's PhD defense slides). The rest quickly degraded into a series of pauses, stammers, and unfinished sentences. I trudged through the last few slides and awkwardly declared, "that's it!" Relieved and disappointed, my supervisor, who is also the instructor for the course, let us take a break before the next presentation.

Stayed up till 4 last night, still drinking at 3. Got up at 9:20 thinking I could pull off some last-minute preparation, but ended up languishing around the apartment until 12:30. Naively thought I could still prepare for the second presentation during the first class, but ended up paying attention to the other students' presentations. When 3 o'clock came around, the beginning of the second class, I only had an apple and a big cup of coffee in my stomach. By the time my second presentation reached maximum lameness, I thought I was either going to have a breakdown--tears, yelping, gagging--or faint. (Un)fortunately, my body didn't give out. If only I had collapsed; that would have convinced everyone that I'm not simply a slacker, but that I have health or mental problems which prevent me from being an effective grad student. Really, I'm just a healthy, lazy motherfucker. * 1:07 AM [permlink] [2 comments]

disorder
  Can't sleep. Our sleep cycles have gone out of phase again. T fell asleep four or five hours ago; she'll probably be up soon. I deliberately avoided sleep two nights ago in an attempt to re-align myself. Last night, I fell asleep around 1:30 in the morning, which is relatively early for me, but when I woke around 8:45 today, I was so tired that I fell asleep for about an hour immediately after Kriya. Afterwards, I dozed for hours at a time, throughout the day. I finally awoke for good around 6 in the evening, at which time I worked until 11 or so.

Stretches, dinner, and two drinks later, it seemed like I'd only need an hour or two of relaxation before I'd quickly settle into a natural slumber. However, as I lay in the dark, I gazed at the menacing, throbbing glow of the clock radio's LED digits, peering at me from the warm, black depths of the room. Overcome by dread and malaise, I first sat at the edge of the mattress, then stood up, and went to the kitchen to make some Tension Tamer tea. With mug in hand, I droned back to my desk and turned the computer back on.

I sent a tiny pic of me and T to a random person from #toronto who claimed to be 19f from Jakarta, Indonesia. We exchanged MSN addresses; I created a new one for the occassion. 19f signed off soon after I sent the pic. I didn't get one in return. "Is this your gf?", "yes", "19f has signed off." * 3:42 AM [permlink] [2 comments]