prog | Entries tagged with my parents

The fruit-picking mission got an extra kick by the fact that my iPhone's GPS + Google-mappiness proved quite useful in getting us there. At one point Nate-the-driver wasn't sure where we were, so I launched the phone's Maps and asked it to draw a line between our destination and wherever the heck we were. (I was able to specify our destination by launching Safari, googling the name of the orchard, then returning to Maps and hand-poking in the revealed street address.) We followed that line, and a little blue blip representing our current position obligingly poked down its length. It was accurate enough that I'd say "OK, we'll cross 495 in a second", a second before the foliage parted to reveal the overpass.

This shit still kind of astounds me. I'd say it was ST:TNG-type technology that's found its way into the real world, except that tricorders actually seem less flexible than modern smartphones do.

During their visit, my parents were very good about not mentioning politics of any sort. At one point I accidentally gave my dad a really juicy opening to pounce on, and I cringed, but he gingerly stepped around it instead. I was impressed. (Not that I said so.)

I can't tell if my mom is getting wackier or if I just notice it more for not seeing her very often. Retrospective analysis suggests that she's been a total fruitcake, god love her, for my whole life, but I'd be willing to believe that old age is simply giving her natural battiness a richer flavor. Anyway, in the few hours she visited, she confirmed that her fashion sense drifts ever further into Bozo-the-clown territory, revealed that she keeps a naked steak knife in her purse now (it's useful for going out to eat, see), and showed my girlfriend baby pictures, making sure to identify the ones where I had a load in my pants. OK, I had to laugh a little at that last one, but still.

As I write this I'm on the train on my way to visit

doctor_atomic amid her studies at Rutgers, where her job seems to mostly involve exposing babies to visual stimuli, and then writing grant applications about it. This is just a lil vacation; I haven't traveled for pleasure in a very long time. (I can't count last year's Origins.)

My mother does not understand this trip and is sure that something sinister is afoot. She asked if

classicaljunkie is "allowing" this, and insinuated that perhaps the doctor hasn't told her bf. (In fact, he is catsitting for me.) I reminded mom that she's been a very close friend of mine for more than five years. I think this just made her more uncertain. "Maybe you should bring Amy with you."

My dad is not batty as my mom but nonetheless wanted to warn me that Rutgers has a reputation as a wild party school and I shouldn't drink too much. I told him OK.

This visit comes only a few days after the thon, which she came up for. (She comes up a lot anyway, since the bf is here.) Let us speak of the thon. I shall direct you to a post from Spatch for a nice description of the event as a whole and another from the doctor that summarizes all the things we saw in this particular festival. As she notes, the films both short and feature-length were deliciously varied this year. I hope that the tradition of mixing shorts into the annual program continues!

This leaves me to mention random things. It was a mixed start for our little group. OK, our big group; there were seven of us at once point, which is the largest thonning party I've had the pleasure of; I'm used to a rotating crew of two or three. When we arrived our chosen section was already checkerboarded with people, but some oldsters who overheard our predicament gladly rearranged themselves to clear out some contiguous seats for us. "Hooray for fandom!" said I. (Though to be quite honest I am not sure of the thon's place within SF Fandom proper. It seems to exist largely independent of the convention circuit.)

Once we settled in and Forbidden Planet started up it became clear that we had another problem: a chatty cathy sitting directly in front of us. As Spatch notes in his post, some audience participation is OK, but running commentaries not so much. This fellow, a middle-aged gent sitting by himself, felt the need to crack wise after I-kid-you-not just about every third line of dialogue, and he was extraordinarily unfunny. Also a little creepy, since he was addressing all his remarks to a couple sitting two seats to his right (who laughed politely each time) and finished each bon mot with a self-satisfied little "Hm hm hm hm!" Here's a little sampler of what I can remember:

On-screen activity	Dude's chatter
A line about boarding a tram to be taken to "the residence".	The residence? The Residence Inn? I'd stay there! I've stayed there before! Hm hm hm hm!
Someone asks Robby the Robot if he is a robot.	No! I'm Marilyn Monroe! Reincarnated! Hm hm hm hm!
Referring to a chained prisoner, one character instructs another to "remove his bonds".	Did he say "remove his bottom"? Hm hm hm hm!
A woman hands her shoes to a man for safekeeping.	Sniff 'em! Hm hm hm hm!

I shushed this guy about three times over the course of the thon, and to his credit he stayed shushed until another film he found chatterworthy started up. I don't like shushin people at this event coz I'm not the quietest person in the theater myself, but this was just beyond the pale. But once we discovered the Power of Sssssh we were able to stop worrying about him and enjoy the movies so that was OK.

Back to family: my niece Colleen is in a kind of trouble. It is the kind of trouble you're in when you're, what, 22? 24? and completely clueless. She'd be a slacker if she had a family able to support that lifestyle, but instead she's just sort of a vagrant, bumming around her mom or grandma's house or sleeping in her car in between, broke and directionless. (Her family is also broke but at least they're anchored.) Who knows what to do about that?

On the train I listened to my backlog of voice mails of Ricky talking about his daughter's most recent misadventures. He suggested I email her or something just to send her some cheer, so I sent her a text message right there from the train, telling her about my trip and the rain outside and how I hoped all was well. She pinged me back a moment later to assure me that it was so. So that much is nice, at least.

At the doctor's apt now and it's almost dinner time. Cheers!

Before I did so, I called my parents to get their neutral-party take on Question 1 - they split on it. I actually ended up voting differently than I thought I would when I woke up this morning. I think I'd be satisfied with either outcome, for different reasons. (Q1 is basically: should supermarket chains be able to easily sell ~~booze~~ wine in MA? You can generally find liquor only in state-licensed, independent "package stores" now, but it's not like these aren't all over the place.)

We spoke of other politics too. My dad acknowledges that Deval "sounds like an OK cat". They know and like Mitt, but I don't think they'd even heard of Healey. (Deval Patrick is poised to become the first Democratic governor of Massachusetts in 15 years. He's running against Lt. Gov. Kerry Healey.)

Regarding 2008, my mom, who has in her elder years become more progressive in women's politics, surprised me by explicitly stating that she feels the presidency is a man's job, so Clinton is dismissable outright. What an interesting indicator of a national thought-hurdle that is. However, she said she's prepared to like Obama if something happens there. I dunno if they feel about McCain; they'd probably like him too.

My Fox-fan parents think that, fraud concerns aside, the Dems will take the House but not the Senate. This has been my thinking as well, though I'm hoping for an all-out party flip.

My parents finally picked up a Globe to check real estate prices 'round here. They didn't believe the numbers I have recited to them, until now. But then this led into another long lecture (in the academic sense) about home-buying strategies, so I know it didn't really discourage them from their dream of seeing their youngest become a homeowner; owning property is the one true form of financial security, to them.

I'm still not convinced of why I'd want to own a home versus renting one. However, I suspect that I just haven't collected enough reasons yet. I still feel that it's pretty likely that Linden's the last apartment I'm going to rent, before entering the real estate market on my own. I feel that it's equally likely I'll live here for more than a year. Perhaps I'll break the two-year record I set with my W-ville place! But, yes... we'll see.

Volity news:

Volity isn't behind schedule, but I feel like it should be. I guess I'm just impatient. Some of this also comes from the fact I'm repeating myself in mail to people, including curious strangers who've been joining the mailing list. I've had to write two separate emails about how the graphics're going to work, to two people who independently asked the same question. The question was perfectly reasonable, emerging from the currently published doucmentation describing the graphics system in general but not in detail. This makes it clear to me which book chapter I ought to write next, which is great, but on the other hand I'm hesitant to write anything definitively until we actually have a client, and can prove (to ourselves as much as anyone else) that these ideas will actually work.

That's actually what I'm impatient about. Clients we have so far include a very basic command-line thing that

daerr wrote, and the Java client that K has recently started building. The latter is going to be the big deal, but it's a month or three away from usability. What to do in the meantime? I predict that I'll spontaneously sink some hours into mutating d's client to use the Jabber libraries I wrote, and then extending it from there to handle all the functionality I'm adding into the server code. Either that or talk d into doing it. We'll talk.

Random thought (spurred by the music the diesel is playing right now, dunno why): One of the Karate Kid movies (II? III?) had the title character visiting Japan, and the TV trailer depicted him awkwardly asking a local girl "Are you... arranged, like?" (Referring to arranged marriage.) My dad, when we watched this ad (long, long ago, mind you) thought he said "Are you arranged right?" and exclaimed about what a crude movie this no doubt was.

I'm pretty sure I saw Karate Kid II, but I don't remember anything about it other than the Bad Karate Man (he wore a black gi, boo hiss) and a scene of KK and his coach on the long flight to Okinawa (IIRC). The fact that they were flying wasn't as important as the fact that they were traveling, and the focus of their scene was conversation about their destination. I think I remembered that scene because it seemed inspiring to me, who was (and remains) jittery on cross-country airplane flights, and here were these guys not even thinking about an intercontinental flight.

That Christmas I got an action figure of the BKM, who didn't have kung-fu grip per se, but did have a button on his back or hip or somewhere that made him kick, and came with little plastic oil barrels or something for him to kick over. The other figures based on the movie all did different things, chop and punch and so on, but I didn't have any of those. However, the BKM was like twice the height of my Star Wars guys, and so made for an effective exotic villain in young jmac's chop-socky playhouse of the mind.

Has anyone ever created a piece of media titled The Kung-Fu Grippe? I'd check now but I'm not online. It could be about any number of things, anyway.

Crap. I just asked the girl "C'n I have half a refill of the dark?", but it came out as "have have a refill"... I'm speaking in thinkos... and now I have a second large coffee here, which is too much. If I drink it all I can't let myself have any coffee until I finish peeing all this out, which won't be until 6 p.m. or so, or I will turn into Mr. Coffee Nerves and ineffectively fly around the office with my little jet pack and ruin marriages until it's time to go home.

True fact: I'm less shy about the word "girl" than I have been, perhaps as recently as a year ago. UMaine isn't the most oppressively P.C. place on earth but it does encourage what I imagine is the standard battery of Right Thinking through Word Elimination that one sees in American universities. There, "girl" is never ever the right word, unless one is talking about an actual young child. It took years of soaking in the Real World to get a feeling for the contexts when the word is just fine -- even stylistically appropriate -- to apply to an adult female-type person, and the contexts when it is legitimately too squirmy for the 21st century. (Which are many, granted.)

I'm probably like this with a bunch of words, actually.

Of course, this assumes a rational audience. A friend once told the story that someone crossed out the phrase "The home of Boston's chic shops" from an ad poster in the T, and wrote "WE'RE CALLED WOMEN" over it.

Also, it's old news, but still: did I call it, or what? I was guessing that his downfall would have been a misstatement, not a sound effect. But, whatever. Doom doom doom. I will do what I can.

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A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

That's awful high, Jason. That's awful high.

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