From the Annals of the Department of Redundancy Department

wood s lot points us to this review of The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, by Andrew Solomon.

Unfortunately, the passage quoted contains the following phrase which caught my eye:

"...Solomon manages to give the reader a sense of depression's shape-shifting, protean character."

Reviewer Judith Lewis is probably a fine writer. She's probably a better writer than I. But I can't help pointing out that protean means "readily assuming different shapes and forms." So we can rewrite the passage above as:

"...Solomon manages to give the reader a sense of depression's shape-shifting, many-shaped character."

Oops.

Busy Week, Busy Weekend

This was the first week of development of the next release cycle at work, and as such I've had my head down and shoulder to the wheel, as it were. Come Friday night, I had to clear my queue of optional home tasks, so I got to bed at around 11:45, after:

• burning some CD-Rs for my friend Tom



• Installing XFree86 on my iBook's OS X partition



• Doing strength training for my back



• Balancing the checkbook for weekend shopping

The installation of X Windows (XFree86) on my iBook was interesting, to me anyway. After all the install work, I successfully started the X server, only to see that the window manager was TWM (Tom's Window Manager)! This is literally the first window manager I ever used, when I started programming on Unix. That was something like 1985. Talk about blasts from the past. And the irony of course, of running the ancient window manager on my modern laptop computer.

Next task, then, is to hunt up a more modern window manager. I think I recall reading that the Mac port of XFree86 doesn't support virtual screens yet, so no multiple-desktop managers just yet. Still, by the time I'm ready to buy another computer, maybe a year from now, I'll have all the kinks worked out, and will be able to use my laptop as a productive Mac, and as a X11 workstation when I want to.

As for the weekend, we've got the usual chores, and, on Saturday, a birthday party for some of Kelly's friends (don't know where it is yet), and NOVA in the evening. On Sunday it's Mentor's annual company picnic, with the theme "Under the Big Top". There simply is no excuse, gotta take Kelly to that. So the weekend is more crowded than usual.

Corrupting the Young

Today's field trip: Kinokuniya bookstore, located within spacious Uwajimaya Asian grocery, in Beaverton. Kelly was ready to buy all the translated Card Captor Sakura manga they had on hand, which given that they had volumes 2-5, and $12.95 per volume, would have cleaned me out for a couple of weeks. I finally got her to settle on Volume 2, and a pack of CCS trading cards.

Geek Sports

While I have no team to root for, I've been watching the International Conference on Functional Programming's 2001 contest. The contest is over, but the results won't be announced until early September, shortly after the conference. Bah.

There is progress, however, as they've announced all the contestants knocked out in the first round. Using that data, Bruce Hoult built a formula incorporating the various criteria stated by the judges to analyze the remaining competitors' results, and choose the winners.

It'll be interesting to see how close he comes, especially since his number one pick was programmed in C++, the language I use at work.

Mini Trips

Our trip to Las Vegas was mostly painless, so I've resolved to try to take a two or three-day vacation every quarter. In the Fall, we're tentatively going to do a long weekend at the Oregon coast (about a ninety minute drive, so we've always got the option of bagging it). In the Winter, we already promised Kelly we'd do our best to take her to Disneyland. She's never been there, hadn't even been born when Mentor sent Jean and I to Disney World.

So this morning Jean and I are chatting, and the topic comes up. She says she'll call AAA of Oregon to get information about Disneyland packages, including flights and hotels. I suggest that while she's at it, she might look into the coast trip as well.

"Oh, I don't think they'll have anything about that..." she says.

I reply, "AAA of Oregon? Thanks for the information about flights to California. We also want to take an auto trip to the coast of Oregon, but I know you don't know anything about auto trips..."

Jean had to admit it was probably worth asking...

More Book Chatter

I just returned a library book, after reading about half of it. The book was Nickel and Dimed, On (Not) Getting By In America, by Barbara Ehrenreich. Why did I return it half read? Was it a bad book?

Not at all. To my socially liberal sensibilities, it was a fine book, journalism in it's best light. Ehrenreich joins the ranks of the working poor for several months. She sets the goal of being able to pay for food and housing using only the money she can earn working unskilled jobs, posing as a recently divorced woman forced to re-enter the work force with no professional skills. She seeks to see what secrets the poor have for getting by on low wages, and discovers that there are no secrets, life is damn hard. Duh, huh?

It's in how she tells her tale, from direct experience living this life, that gives the book it's value. I eventually stopped reading it for the simple reason that the story was plain well before the end of the book. It echoed my own experience as an unskilled teenager and, early on, college student. I think any young person who isn't solely supported by their parents until they graduate from college and land that first job, knows what the life of the poor is like, at least a little. But being young, we don't really care, since we think we are invulnerable and immortal anyway. Most of us are lucky enough to transcend that initial poverty, though. And some of us, I'd guess, forget all about it.

Jean and I often reminisce about those days of eating beans and rice, living in shabby apartments, working and taking classes at the same time. Just a few different choices, a few bad breaks, and we'd be in this book. I've always said every kid should work food service or some other menial service job, so they get a taste of what they'll be doing their whole life if they don't find a skill and nourish it. Maybe I'll buy this book and store it away for when Kelly gets older...

Bibliophile

"Yes, I normally read four or five books at a time." - Cameron Barrett

Yeah, I used to do that too, before Kelly, before work reached E-05 levels, before, before, before. For a period of several years I used to keep a log of all the books I read, and the topics were varied, all over the map, and some years peaked at 250 books. I'm not so diligent about recording books as I finish them anymore, and I'm also more willing to put a book down before finishing it than I used to be.

I still read four or five books at a time, but it's more like "have a book in the dining room, a book in the bathroom, a book in the den, and book lying on that table over there, and the book in my hand this week." I still haven't finished The Arrogance of Power, for instance. So sometimes I don't so much give up on a book as forget I was reading it...