Zathras' Great Machine

A magical night

Last night was truly wonderful. We left the house at about 3:30 and got to Tara Thai at about 5. I decided to order the Larb Gai and the duck, which is what I usually have at my favorite Thai restaurant, Duangrat's, which is not just the best Thai I've ever had, but just about the best food ever. Tara Thai, naturally, doesn't hold up against Duangrat's, but it's still quite good, and it's also rather less expensive. Denise also had the duck, but chose the spring rolls for an appetizer. (Oddly, her duck was quite a bit better than mine; juicier and more tender).

We dawdled over our meals for an hour and a half or so, her finishing with mango sorbet ice cream, me opting for a cup of coffee with a shot of Bailey's. I persuaded Denise to try a sip of the Bailey's before I put it in my coffee... I've always thought Bailey's was a rather smooth and mild beverage, but Denise didn't care for it, finding it rather too "lively". Ah, well. There's no accounting for tastes. :^)

We then headed back to the Metro to head out to Wolf Trap. There was a bit of confusion at the West Falls Church Metro station, since they're renovating the bus terminal area, but we got it straightened out in fairly short order and located the Wolf Trap shuttle bus. The ride to Wolf Trap was about ten minutes, made rather enjoyable and amusing by our exceptionally silly driver. He started the trip by asking all the passengers whether there were any history teachers on the bus -- there weren't (too bad K couldn't have been there!) The driver then proceeded to fill the ten-minute trip with various gags and trivia questions, mostly about U.S. history, especially presidents. Example: Which U.S. President's real name was Leslie King? (No, I'm not going to tell you the answer... if you're that curious, Google it!)

We got to Wolf Trap about half an hour before the show started, just enough time to make a "pit stop" and to spend a few minutes looking at the souvenirs. No, we didn't buy any; even if we were both filthy rich, which we're not, everything there was horribly overpriced (typical for that kind of venue, of course). Finally, we settled into our seats shortly before the show started.

There's really no way to describe what it's like to attend a show at Wolf Trap -- you have to experience it. How to convey, for example, the feeling you get when you're listening to an uillean pipist performing and being able to look out at the forest in the dusk? Or the magic of seeing dancers performing steps that don't even seem humanly possible in their speed and agility? "Irish Thunder and Lightning!" exclaims The Washington Post, and it really is.

My favorite dance in the show is "Thunderstorm". The theme of the dance is overcoming infinite adversity with nothing more than the sheer strength of one's own willpower. The dancers are all clad in black, and the dance is completely a cappella, which fits in with the theme (that is, "We are so powerful that we will overcome any adversity with no outside help at all, not even from music.") It's almost Kafka-esque, in an unusual sort of way, except that in this dance, the "nameless/faceless torturer" isn't a nameless/faceless human or humans, it's the nameless/faceless elements.

"Thunder and lightning batter the rocks. The winds howl and great storms break on the forest, scatter the herds like grain. Fire leaps from dark to dark; fear and anger leap to meet it... We will not go down. We will not be beaten down like grain."

The show ended at about 10:30 and was followed by another amusing trip with the bus driver. "Look at all these crowds! They'd better get out of the way, I'm losing patience and I might just run someone over. [passengers laugh] Oh, you don't believe me? OK, here then. --Hey, you! Get out of the way! Get out of the way now! [Bus runs over speed bump] I told you I'd run him over!"

We got back to the house at about midnight and went thru our mail together. Denise conked out before me, astonishingly enough... while she hit the hay, I did some more work on migrating from the evil OS X Mail client back to the far-superior Eudora, finally turning in myself at about 2 AM.

All in all, it was a wonderful way to spend an evening. Even if I did have to point out to Denise, as we were on the shuttle out to Wolf Trap... "Hey. We're on a date, you know." No, she didn't know, but seemed to appreciate the reminder. :^)

A wonderful Saturday night is in the works

Denise is getting ready for our evening out... we've been planning this for a couple of months or so now, and I'm pretty excited. We're having dinner at a a Thai restaurant in Arlington, then heading over to Wolf Trap ("the only national park dedicated to the performing arts") to see Riverdance. This is going to be my second time seeing Riverdance, and I'm looking forward to it, especially since I'm going to have someone special to share it with this time. :-)

Wolf Trap is an open air venue, and going to shows there has always been a really neat experience for me. This is going to be my third show there; the first time was Riverdance in Summer 2001, and the second one was Mannheim Steamroller last year. It rained during Mannheim Steamroller, but that was OK, and actually even kind of nice to have a bit of "cool mist" drifting in from the side of the theater (sitting on the lawn, though, must have been rather unpleasant). The really neat part, though, is that the show starts at 8 PM, which is fairly close to sunset, and the stage faces West. So the show starts with natural sunlight basking the stage, then ends three hours later in the dark. I wish we had a full moon tonight to complete the effect, but you can't have everything.

"The sun is our lord and father,
Bright face at the break of day,
Comfort of hope, cattle and crop,
Lord of the morning, lord of the day.

Lifting our hearts to sing his praise,
Dance in his healing rays..."

Friday morning

And a good day to everyone this morning, on the morning where we can celebrate the fact that the Supreme Court yesterday decided that sexual behavior between consenting adults in private could not be outlawed simply because some people might find it offensive. The vote was 6-3 on the Texas sodomy law... the three dissenters, predictably, were Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas.

Also predictably, the Washington Post lauded the ruling this morning, while the Washington Times condemned it; the Times' main argument was that the Supreme Court did not have the authority to invalidate the Texas law because of the Tenth Amendment. Sounds reasonable at first glance, except that the Tenth Amendment says that all non-federal powers are reserved to either the states or the people -- conservatives tend to focus on the "states" part (which is perfectly valid) and ignore the "people" part (which is a mistake). The Times doesn't understand that certain rights and powers rest only with the people... and if adult consensual sexual behavior in private isn't one of those rights, I don't know what is.

In a related area... Scalia fretted that this ruling would open the doorway to gay marriage rights. Not sure about that, but even if it does, so what? It's hard to take conservatives seriously when they say that gay marriage rights "threaten the rest of us". If two gays want to get married, it's certainly no skin off my nose. Besides which, legally recognized marriage confers certain rights and privileges that you just don't get otherwise, such as (for example) the right to refuse to testify against your spouse in a court of law, or the right to decide on medical treatment under certain circumstances (such as when the spouse is unable to give consent for him/herself), and inheritance rights.

Thomas said that he was opposed to the law, but could not vote to strike it down because he couldn't find a "right to privacy" anywhere in the Constitution (and he's right; it's a concept that isn't defined or protected anywhere in that document). I can have a certain amount of respect for this viewpoint, although I can't agree with it. The problem Thomas is overlooking is that the government has only those powers that are specifically granted to it in the Constitution, and whichever powers it isn't explicitly granted are powers it doesn't have (that's the Tenth Amendment again). Also, to take it a step further back: although the Declaration of Independence carries no force of law int his country, it is in many ways the foundation for the Constitution that followed some fifteen years later. In that document, the Founding Fathers held it as a "self-evident truth" that all human beings have certain inalienable rights, including liberty. Thomas doesn't understand that "freedom" and "privacy" are concepts that are inextricably intertwined. If you have no privacy, you have no freedom. (The reverse is also true, of course.)

OK, just had to get all that off my chest. Certain people have been puzzled as to my occasional claims to being essentially a liberal with certain conservative viewpoints, since many of my conservative opinions (e.g., gun control) are among the more visible. Perhaps this little meandering opinion will serve to inform that I really do adhere to a lot of leftist viewpoints. BTW, I also oppose the flag amendment, I opposed the war in Iraq (although only after Denise gave me a lot of information about it that I hadn't had before), and I think that our foreign policy in general just plain sucks, inasmuch as it's far too interventionist.

Chai is good...

Hmm. Chai is really, really good stuff. I need to watch out, though... I had only two cups of it this morning, and now I've got caffeine jitters. I'll have to limit myself to one cup per day, or at least one cup every few hours. This is a rather potent little brew.

Oversights

Whoops! What with all the excitement this week, I completely overlooked it. It's now Thursday morning already, Denise and I have tickets to see Riverdance on Saturday night, and we haven't picked out a restaurant yet! We'll have to talk about that when I get back to the apartment this afternoon.

Quelle mess on the Metro on the way home yesterday afternoon... I left the office at about 2:30 PM and got all the way to the Takoma station, just one stop short of my own, when they had to shut the Red Line down because someone crashed a car on the subway tracks. It's a good thing I missed rush hour for that one. I had to take a bus from Takoma all over the place before I finally got to Silver Spring to take my usual Ride On #2.

I Stopped at Starbucks for a Venti Chai Frappuccino before I caught my bus. Damn, that's good stuff. I continue to marvel at the things Denise is teaching me about life, even about such seemingly minor matters as frozen tea beverages, which I would never have ever tried if she hadn't given me a sip of hers the other day. :-)

Phone company phun

So the phone went out of service last week (probably during an electrical storm we had) and I had to have Verizon come out to repair it. I set up the appointment thru their web site, and they told me the tech would be at my apartment sometime between 8 AM and 4 PM on Tuesday (yesterday), and that I'd have to stay home to receive the tech. I was kind of glad to have the excuse not to go to work, since Denise got in late Monday night and we could both use the rest.

Anyway, Tuesday morning rolls around, I get up early enough to be sure to be ready when the tech gets here, and begin dozing off in my recliner... then at about 9:45 AM, the phone rings, and the tech from Verizon tells me that everything is set. (So why did you tell me I had to be at home...?) But wait, it gets better.

Later the same evening, the phone rings again, and again, it's Verizon. This time, they're calling me to ask me whether the repair service went OK and whether the phone is working again. In the immortal words of Dave Barry, "I am not making this up."

I bit my tongue and replied politely that yes, the phone was working fine, thank you for checking. Afterward, I told Denise about it and said that most likely the guy was just following orders... likely as not, he himself wasn't an idiot but was merely following instructions given to him by an idiot. Denise agreed and pointed out also that their service in that regard is significantly better than that I've received from my cable company when my cable connection goes out... a point that I certainly can't disagree with.

We now return to our regularly scheduled blogging

Fine, lay into me for not blogging again. I suppose I do deserve it. :^)

Denise and I have had several days of frenetic discussion and planning, after which she finally got into BWI late last night. Special thanks go to K.L. for selling us one his his frequent-flier tickets at a very attractive price. We owe you one. :-)

Other than that, not a great deal has been going on around here. We had a nice electrical storm late last week which fried my phone line -- Verizon told me I had to stay home today so they could repair it, and then repaired it from outside the building without even telling me they had come (natch).

So now Denise and I are sitting in my low-lit and (for the moment) quiet apartment. She brought her wireless router with her, so we can now both actually use the Internet at the same time. I've really got to get one of those for myself.

Which Fantasy/SF character are you?

I have to admit, I'm pleased and flattered by this one, even though these quizzes are obviously not meant to be taken seriously. According to the quiz, I am Captain John Sheridan, even though I personally have always identified more with (of course) Zathras.

In the last few years, we've stumbled. We stumbled at the death of the president, the war, and on and on. When you stumble a lot you tend to look at your feet. Now we have to make people lift their eyes back to the horizon and see the line of ancestors behind us saying, "Make my life have meaning," and to our inheritors before us saying, "create the world we will live in."

Lunchtime

We're having a conference today, and I'm currently on my lunch break, but had to share this little gem from this morning. I'm the A/V guy for all our conferences, which means I typically spend a fair amount of time talking to the event speakers, making arrangements for their PowerPoint presentations to go smoothly. I had a chat this morning, early, with one of our speakers as we were getting his presentation ready.

Me: Oh, you're with AHRQ?
Speaker: Yes.
Me: Do you by any chance know Rob Borotkanics? He's also with AHRQ.
Speaker: Yes, I do, I work with him from time to time.
Me: Oh, neat! He's a good friend of mine.
Speaker: I'm sorry.
Me [laughing]: Oh, come on! He's not that bad. Besides, you should see him when he's not in the office.
Speaker: Oh, yes, I know. I enjoy working with Rob. He's very direct.
Me: Yes, that's for sure... [thinking of the time in college during one class when Rob loudly proclaimed that the Bible was a piece of shit].

Had to share that with everybody. *grin*

Never thought I'd see the day...

According to the NRA-ILA daily update that I received last night, on June 11th, the governor of Alaska signed into law a Vermont-style right-to-carry bill. I couldn't believe my eyes, frankly -- I never thought I'd see the day when another state would go "Vermont carry", even though Oklahoma has come close on one or two occasions.

Go, Alaska! *grin*

I'm always eager to help!

I was thinking things over today, and I realized that some of my friends and family may be staying up nights worrying about finding new ways to be nice to me. In that regard, I'm setting up my wish list on Amazon. No, no need to thank me.

Hmm. Waxing nostalgic about the pseudo-educational Schoolhouse Rock and other Saturday morning joys from our youth. :-) In fact, I do remember Big Blue Marble and most of the others... if you broaden the scope a bit, there was, of course, "Zoom", with the secret Ubbi-Dubbi language and all the rest of it. Except the "Guest" section, which was always too long and too boring.

I've watched only one or two eps of the new "Zoom". It just doesn't have the same mystique.

For those who haven't already heard, the boss called me in for a meeting on Monday morning and told me that I'm likely to get laid off next month. I'm still trying to figure out how they'd ever get along without me... I've pulled that company's fat from the fire more than once, and I also recall more than one occasion where I recommended a course of action (e.g., to stop spamming) that, when they didn't follow it, nearly sank the place.

Hell, just on Monday morning (right before that meeting, ironically enough), the entire network went down, and I was the only one there who even had the skills to identify the problem, let alone solve it. Basically, we had two hubs in the server room, and one of them died, so I had to remove it and recable the patch panel to the remaining hub. Nobody else in that company even knows what a hub is, let alone what one does or how to determine whether it's working properly.

Five'll get you ten that, if they do lay me off, they'll start calling me and asking me to help them. Which is fine. I'm already working on a proposal for my freelance consulting rate.

Breaking the weeklong silence...

Been a while since I made an "official" entry, obviously, but I just want to give a hearty "congratulations" to Denise, who finally worked thru the nightmare tangle with the idiotic Berkeley bureaucracy and got credit for a course where her outcome should never have been in doubt in the first place. The spectre of Summer school is exorcised, Denise is done, a Berkeley alumna, and the Summer belongs to her!

Congratulations!

Getting myself into more trouble...

Hmm, it seems we've got an old IBM Thinkpad laying around that's not doing anything. *grin* No one's used it or even asked about it in months, and knowing the way my company is run, it's likely that everyone's forgotten that it's even here. Well, I think I'm going to try installing SuSE Linux 8.2 on it... does anyone by any chance know of any reason why this might not be a good idea, assuming the notebook meets all the hardware requirements? I'll wait a little while before I try it to see what the Peanut Gallery has to say.

OK, we're trying Mozilla

I've downloaded and installed Mozilla 1.3.1 and have it set as the default browser. We'll see how things go over the next couple of weeks or so.

Ditching the OS X "Mail" client for Eudora

As I've mentioned before, there are various client applications bundled with OS X, and to one degree or another, they all stink. My main complaint right now is with the "Mail" application, which has a lot of weaknesses compared to my preferred mail client, Eudora. (I've just written a piece on the subject for Shaggy's Mag, in fact, which should be appearing on his web site with the next update).

After some searching, I found an AppleScript that will convert Mail format to Eudora; the only snag is, it dumps all my e-mail into Eudora's inbox rather than creating new mailboxes in Eudora and filing all the mail appropriately. I'm not the e-mail junkie that Denise is, but my archives are still pretty considerable: around 13,000 e-mails from the past five or six years. Needless to say, sorting thru all that junk by hand and moving it back into new mailboxes in Eudora would be a major headache. After a bit more investigation, though, I think I've found a solution to the problem.

The OS X Mail client, mercifully, creates a separate file for each mailbox and puts them all in the same folder, which is where this AppleScript looks for data to import. Now, if I take all the mailboxes out of that folder, then put them back in one at a time and run the script each time, it should import only the contents of that one particular mailbox. Then I can just do a "Select All" from Eudora and move them all into the appropriate newly-created mailbox in Eudora. Theoretically.

It's going to have to wait, though. I'm not up to dealing with something like that today because even if it works flawlessly, it's still going to be an all-day project.

I'm also working on moving away from Safari, the OS X web browser, which is rather buggy. For the time being, I'm just using Explorer, since that's included with OS X as well, but I know Denise won't leave me in peace until I've downloaded and tried Mozilla *grin* so I'll probably have a look at that, too. In fact, I might as well download it now.