cos

#1. Last week, chibitatsuluna was flying Boston and I was going to meet her at Logan. When I asked for her flight info the day before she texted me her arrival time but said she didn't remember which flight it was. I tried Logan's web site, but it doesn't let you look up tomorrow's flights, only today's (and since the current time was later than its arrival time, that same flight on that day had already landed, so it wasn't listed for "today" either). Then I got an idea...

Recently at work, I've had to debug some problems involving software that reads flight schedules. In the airline industry they have this really old-skool file format called SSIM for flight schedules - fixed format all-caps ASCII with two-digit years, the sort of format that pre-dates the invention of more modern formats such as, say, CSV :)

I've had to learn a little bit about reading SSIMs, so I decided to put that to the test. One of the servers I take care of has a SSIM file, updated regularly, of pretty much all the airlines' schedules. Knowing only what time she was scheduled to arrive in Boston, and which city she was flying from, I grep'ed appropriately through that SSIM ... and easily found the flight!

I know enough to be able to read the airline, flight number, departure and arrival times and airports, which days of the week, and what dates that schedule entry is for. It has other info, like type of aircraft, that I don't know how to read, but that was pretty cool; it made the data I've been working with feel a lot more real to me.

#2. We have movies at work on Wednesday and Thursday evenings, along with free food. I usually don't watch the movies in the actual movie room, but they usually also show them on some screens we have in the cafeteria next to it, so those of us who are just eating sorta see them in the background. One day, the movie was Kill Bill.

Although I wasn't expecting as much of a reaction as I got, I randomly put this comment into a gap in the conversation around our table: [gesturing up at the screen] "Little known fact: This is actually the ninth movie in a series called Signal Bill."

I managed to silence the entire table as one by one people got it. Some took over a minute. It was beautiful!

Note: I expect only some of my readers to get that; it's very unixgeeky. For a particular subset of those of you who did get it (especially catness): The first in the series was not actually a movie, it was track 3 on an album by Head and Leg.

mini-review:

You know how sometimes in a movie there's a perfect line of dialogue followed by another followed by another, and the scene is almost unbearably fun to watch, and you remember and quote it later? I can't easily remember those moments from Up in the Air because there were too many of them. I think more than of total screen time was that sort of dialogue. I haven't had this much fun watching people talk in a movie that wasn't of the witty/silly comedy genre often, or maybe ever.

I'm not yet sure how good a movie I think it was, because it usually takes me a while for a movie to sink in and my opinion to settle, but I can say that they did not take the easy way(s) out in resolving the plot, and that even though this was essentially a movie about relationships, it still passed the Bechdel Test.

I got a letter, from the Netherlands.

It is addressed to "POLYMORY c/o Sir Ofen Inber" and then my street address.

A handwritten letter from a guy who says he lives in the Netherlands, heard something about polymory (it's consistently spelled that way), wants to know more, will I please tell him about it? And do I know of any poly groups ("like-minded organisation of polymory") in the Netherlands, and what their postal address is.

I'm almost sure he got my name and address from the domain registration of polyamory.org (although I did spell my name correctly in the domain registration), but he sent a postal letter and says he doesn't have email, and the only contact information is his postal address. Knowing myself and my weird mental block about sending postal letters, I wouldn't be surprised if I never reply, or take a year or more to do so, but ... it's strange and out of the blue enough that I might get through that and send something soonish. If I knew what to say.

Ummm, what do you think I should reply with?

After the State of the Union, Obama accepted an invitation to go to the House Republicans' retreat in Baltimore, where he gave a short speech and then answered questions for more than an hour (transcript). Watch it, it's very good.

Audio on the Q&A is not good for the first ~2minutes, then they fix it.

[ Recap for people not in Massachusetts: Today is the general election to fill the US Senate seat vacated by Ted Kennedy last year. ]

Since I made it clear how much I don't like Martha Coakley, the Democratic nominee, I feel I need to say this: Please vote for her today.

Most of those things I don't like about her? Scott Brown's positions are as bad or worse. Whatever her tolerance for shoddy prosecutions and low regard for civil liberties protections... Brown thinks the president should just be able to declare someone guilty and avoid the whole "fair trial" process altogether, and as far as I can tell, torture is just fine with him.

Have you been frustrated at the way every decent piece of legislation Obama has asked for, has been hacked into bits in the Senate in strained efforts to get the support of Olympia Snowe or Joe Lieberman to get through the Republicans 39-member "filibuster every damn bill no matter what" block? If Brown gets elected, that block will grow to 40, and nothing will get past the Senate unless it can get both Snowe and Lieberman's support. Lieberman will become an even more unavoidable roadblock.

Health care: Here's what will happen if Scott Brown wins today's election: the US House will vote on the Senate's crappy bill as is, because it's better than passing nothing, and since the Senate has already passed it, that will be the only way to get health care reform through without going back to the Senate. The House's ability to demand improvements would likely collapse instantly as soon as a Brown election victory is announced.

Yeah, I still don't like Coakley, but all the good candidates in this election already lost last month. Sometimes you lose elections, it happens. Now, though, we determine just how much of a loss it will be.

Martha Coakley will champion equal rights for women and LGBT people, work for more health care improvements, support infrastructure investments for economic recovery, fight financial fraud and predatory banking practices, support Obama's policy of diplomacy and engagement while also supporting efforts to remove American troops from Afghanistan, and support clean energy legislation. Brown would be her opposite on all of those things.

Polls are open 7am - 8pm. Find your polling place at WhereDoIVoteMA.com.

My department at ITA Software is looking to hire several people. I've been here since May and find it a fun place to work, and the boss & grandboss heading our groups are both great. The guy running this department is one of the few people I've worked for who would make me want to take a job somewhere just based on knowing I'd be reporting to him.

We've got openings for:

• Some database people. Mostly Oracle and Postgres.


• A couple of ops tools/build/release engineers who would do things like write and maintain tools we use packaging, testing, deploying, and monitoring software. Heavy Python use on that side of things.


• What I do, which is not exactly "unix sysadmin" but close enough that it calls for the same sorts of people who'd do a sysadmin job. Operations/Applications administration, managing installations of software that was written at ITA. You don't handle the hardware at all, you don't configure the OS. Think of it like what a DBA does for databases, except that instead of databases you'd be dealing with very different (though just as complex) applications. We do things like monitoring, testing support, configuration management, upgrades, high availability, and so on.

ITA is near One Kendall Square, about 8 blocks from the Central Sq T stop and 6 blocks from Kendall.

Fun action mystery with a lot of good lines and satisfying scenes. Fits in pretty well with the canon Sherlock Holmes (a lot better than the Star Wars prequels fit in with the original trilogy, for example). Clever. Not amazing, but a good time.

Previews made it seem very violent. While it did have about as much fighting as the previews had led me to expect, the movie as a whole was a lot less focused on the fighting than I had expected.

When I made fun of Atlanta earlier this year, I hadn't yet heard of this crazy place. I suspect it of secretly being a corn maze concept taken too far, or something from a puzzle book.

[ Post title is a reference to some between-songs banter about West Virginia (mp3) by the Dry Branch Fire Squad ]

Several years ago, when the country was plagued with touchscreen voting machines that made re-counts impossible and gave no way to verify that their counts weren't buggy, Representative Rush Holt (one of the few scientists in Congress) was pushing a bill that would've required these machines to at least produce a paper printout at the time votes were cast, that voters could look at. While he - and I - much preferred paper ballots instead of voting by touchscreen, he didn't think he could get that passed, while this seemed to have a chance, and was better than nothing. Holt's bill had about 150 cosponsors, including multiple Republicans (Holt is a Democrat), but my Representative, Mike Capuano (Boston/Cambridge/Somerville/Chelsea) was not on the list.

I called Capuano's office to ask, and they told me he opposed it. Why? They weren't sure, so they said they'd find out and call me back, and not long after, they did call me back to explain.
( What Capuano's objection was, and what I did with that information... )

Capuano's office thanked me for the call, and said they'd pass along everything I'd said to the Congressman.

Shortly after, Capuano co-sponsored Holt's bill.

I've had this story in the back of my mind for years, and am finally getting around to posting it now because Massachusetts is holding a special election tomorrow to elect a replacement for Ted Kennedy in the US Senate. Mike Capuano is running in tomorrow's Democratic primary, and I hope you'll vote for him. I've had several other interactions with him since this one, and he's changed my mind on a few things. I've found him to be effective, smart, progressive, great at constituent service, and great at his job in Congress, and I think he'd be a good replacement for Senator Kennedy. I hope that if you live in Massachusetts, you'll vote for him, and whether you do or not, you'll pass this on to people you know in Massachusetts.

I found an old cardboard box of CDs that I hadn't gone through since several moves ago, that contained mostly CD-R's, demos, show recordings, pre-release albums from friends' bands, and the like, from the mid/late 90s. Unfortunately some of them were damaged - I think this box was in my trunk on a road trip a long time ago and soaked up some automotive liquid (antifreeze? wiper fluid?) from a leaky container. I've been able to restore some of them by washing them, though even most of those have some damaged tracks.

One that seems to have survived completely* (after washing) is "Bad Release: The Dead Opossum Sessions" by Oxytocin High. Which was their performance at WBRS that I recorded, and they possibly re-mixed then burned onto CD with track names and titles, and a nice printed label. Someone even entered all the track info into CDDB.

So I'm sitting here listening to lyonesse and ceelove singing songs they wrote, with instrumental accompaniment by coraline, nacht_musik, and a few of their friends. I can hear chaiya in the audience, and I know iabervon and veek are there.

I haven't listened to this in probably nearly a decade. But I used to sit in on some of their living room practices, and it's surprising how completely familiar every single song is. I didn't think I remembered their songs, and if you'd asked me yesterday I probably wouldn't have been able to recall any of them except maybe a title or two.



[ Some of the other finds in this box: An early 4-track demo from January, and an early 4-track demo from Fluttr (before they became Fluttr Effect) which has some damage causing pops and hiss in the first ~10 seconds of each track ]

... Five women dressed in many colors are singing a rhythmic soundscape on the state. They bring it to a quiet, and silently place their wireless mics, in unison, on the wooden floor at their feet (clack-clack-clack-clack-clack). Slowly, one, then the others, tap their feet lightly, recreating the rhythm. They swoosh their thin, colorful scarves in the air in front of them, lightly almost-touching the mics in time with the music, adding a flowing windy sound as they begin to sing again...

I've seen several thousand live music performances, and the three times I saw Zap Mama stand out in my memory. They might possibly be the best band ever. Wikipedia has this:

... musical group founded and led by Marie Daulne. Daulne says her mission is to be a bridge between the European and the African and bring the two cultures together with her music. "What I would like to do is bring sounds from Africa and bring it to the Western world, because I know that through sound and through beats, that people discover a new culture, a new people, a new world." Zap Mama specializes in polyphonic, harmonic music with a mixture of heavily infused African instruments, R&B, and Hip-hop and emphasizes voice in all their music. "The voice is an instrument itself," says Daulne. "It's the original instrument. The primary instrument. The most soulful instrument, the human voice." They sing in French and English with deep African roots.

Actually they also sing in some African languages and in made-up sounds and nonsense syllables. Their use of vocal music pretty spoiled me for a capella. One song on their first album is a story about a drive: the rattling of the keys, the start of the ignition, the quiet roads, the sounds of passing on the highway, the crash, the ambulance... all without words in any language. On stage, I saw them act it out, be the car as they sang it.

Marie Dualne was born in the Congo to Belgian & Bantu parents, and grew up in Belgium with her Bantu mother after her father was killed; her music is very very much "world music", and deliberately so.

So, Zap Mama has a show at The Paradise in Allston tonight. Doors at 7pm, I guess the show is around 8:30.

Coming?

Several people asked me for an update to my earlier post about what you can do if you want a public health insurance option passed. Sorry I've been slow. Now's the time to call, so read this today if you want to help.

Where We Are Now

Everything I wrote then remains true. Here's what has changed:

1. I said the Senate Finance Committee would come up with a terrible proposal. Indeed, the Baucus-Grassley proposal was completed, and it is irredeemably awful.


2. I said that the public option probably had the support of a majority of the House and Senate. Now we know that to be true; it has been independently verified by Democracy for America.


3. I said that the media was misleading you by focusing on the Senate Finance Committee, since other committees were done and Finance was the only one where there was still some action. That's even more true in the past few weeks, and the press has made it seem as if the fate of reform lies in what amendments pass or fail in the Finance Committee. That's still false; the fate of reform lies in whether or not we prevent the Finance Committee's idiocy from becoming law.
   
4. I said that our best strategy for good health reform legislation with a strong public option is to defeat the Baucus-Grassley proposal in committee, so that Finance passes no bill at all. That vote may happen this week.

If you want it, more detail about points #1 and #2 ( here behind the cut... )

What You Can Do

Briefly: Call Democrats on the Finance Committee and ask them to vote NO in committee on the Baucus-Grassley proposal (officially "America's Healthy Future Act").

Last time, I asked you to call and thank those Representatives who had signed a letter saying they would vote against final legislation without a public option. They stiffened the House's backbone, vs. the Senate, on this.

Now, the Senate is where we can make a difference: If we can prevent Finance from passing its awful bill, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will run out of time to wait for them, and will bring the much much better HELP Committee bill (with a public option) to the Senate Floor as the base legislation. If we can manage that, we head off that fight between the House and Senate, and nearly ensure a better bill becomes law. If we can't manage it, then things get harder; our odds for getting a public option would still be better than 50%, but they'd be lower, and all sorts of other bad stuff from the Finance Committee might make it into law too.

Finance has 13 Democrats and 10 Republicans. We can expect Republicans to vote no, but there's a risk that Olympia Snowe will vote yes. So, to be relatively safe, I think we need 4 Democrats to vote no. If Grassley and Enzi vote yes, we'll need 6 Democratic no votes, but if the proposal turns out to be so horrible that even Grassley and Enzi would vote for it, we shouldn't have much trouble getting some extra Democrats to oppose it.

Chuck Schumer (D-NY) submitted an amendment in committee to add a public option to the Baucus-Grassley bill. It failed, but 10 of the committee's 13 Democrats voted for it. Can we find 4 from among those 10, who will vote no on the whole bill?

Here's a list of Finance Committee members. Do you live in one of their states? Call! Tell your Senator's office that you think the Baucus-Grassley proposal is terrible and cannot be salvaged, and ask them if they'll commit to voting "no" on it in committee, so that the much better HELP bill can become the Senate's base bill.

Here are the ten who voted for Schumer's public option amendment:

• Massachusetts: John Kerry - 202-224-2742


• New York: Chuck Schumer - 202-224-6542


• New Jersey: Robert Menendez - 202-224-4744


• Delaware: Tom Carper - 202-224-2441


• Michigan: Debbie Stabenow - 202-224-4822


• West Virginia: John D Rockefeller - 202-224-6472


• New Mexico: Jeff Bingaman - 202-224-5521


• Florida: Bill Nelson - 202-224-5274


• Washington: Maria Cantwell - 202-224-3441


• Oregon: Ron Wyden - 202-224-5244

Is the Internet melting our brains? - Salon book review / interview:

By now the arguments are familiar: Facebook is ruining our social relationships; Google is making us dumber; texting is destroying the English language as we know it. We're facing a crisis, one that could very well corrode the way humans have communicated since we first evolved from apes. What we need, so say these proud Luddites, is to turn our backs on technology and embrace not the keyboard, but the pencil.

Such sentiments, in the opinion of Dennis Baron, are nostalgic, uninformed hogwash. A professor of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Baron seeks to provide the historical context that is often missing from debates about the way technology is transforming our lives in his new book, "A Better Pencil."

[...]

I start with Plato's critique of writing where he says that if we depend on writing, we will lose the ability to remember things. Our memory will become weak. And he also criticizes writing because the written text is not interactive in the way spoken communication is. He also says that written words are essentially shadows of the things they represent. They're not the thing itself. Of course we remember all this because Plato wrote it down -- the ultimate irony.

Normally I'd post something like this on coslinks but I wanted to quote all of that, and I don't write more than a couple of lines beyond the link on coslinks. So I'll add this: A lot of the criticims I've heard over the years of things like LiveJournal or text messaging, have often made me think, "I bet this is the sort of stuff people said about telephones or postal mail when those were new."

I could just imagine people recoiling at the thought of having phones in every house because calling someone on the phone is such alower-quality act than dropping by their house for a chat. Which may be true, but misses the point: it looks at a new communication technology as if it were a mere replacement for something older, and is supposed to do the very same things. Compounded by the fact, of course, that when a form of communication is really new, people don't know how it's going to be used, they're still trying it out and figuring out the possibilities. And those who have partly figured it out can't easily convey what they've found to those who haven't used it that way yet, because it's an experiential sort of figuring out.

[ Though it does puzzle me when people who don't text, compare texting disfavorably to voice-calling. Yes, those are things typically done using the same device, but I should think the difference between them would be obvious. I'd expect people who don't text to compare it disfavorably with email, or instant messaging, or something like that. ]