The Thinkulum

I’m about to go to bed, but I’ve been meaning to blog, and I have something short to write about.

I stayed at work late tonight, and when I left it was sleeting. It’s still going now. I can hear the grains of ice in irregular fits spattering against the window. I like it. I didn’t like walking out into it, but I like listening to it. It’s slightly cold in my apartment. I could turn the heat up, but I like that too. It reminds me of the time I took a walk in the rain and actually enjoyed it. I hate cold and I hate getting rained on, but somehow, even with the wind, that storm was just warm enough that the rain was only comfortably cool rather than cold. It was like a kaleidescope of sensation, and really I didn’t just enjoy it; I was ecstatic. From where I am inside, this weather is like that in my mind but milder. It makes me feel cool but in a cozy sort of way. It will be good to go to sleep to.

So there’s an obscure passing thought for you. I have tons else to blog about, so hopefully that will happen in the near future.

It is very interesting to do your laundry at night when the machines are in another building and there’s a torrential downpour outside. It lends drama to an otherwise mundane activity. Fortunately my building is only a few feet away from the laundry hut, but still I had to wade through a river to get to it, and the river was pouring in under the door and down the drain. I also wasn’t carrying my clothes because I was only moving them from the washers to the dryers. It wasn’t raining when I first took them over.

The front door was shut, but the sliding door was wide open, so I closed it. I think this disappointed the shirtless guy who half collided with it later and ran off again, probably looking for a dry shortcut to wherever he was going.

Someone had turned the lights off, but I didn’t bother turning them on. Lightning is a much more exciting light source. So I shuffled my clothes from one machine to another in the dark, imagining various stormy scenarios. What if there were a prowler stalking about in the rain and he somehow chose this building as the scene of his next crime and me as his next victim? Or what if I were with a group of people, stuck in a small, isolated laundry building together, forced to wait out the storm or to send a single person out for help, and what if I was that person? See? Fun.

I hope it’s not raining again in 20 minutes when my clothes are finished drying.

It’s way past time for another blog. This time I’ll continue with my general life update as I said I would.

My personal life right now consists of my projects, church, and some occasional social interaction. I’ll organize this entry around those. Since my mind is always kind of a blur, I need outlines like that so I can think of what to say.

I have too many projects going on right now. It’s kind of overwhelming to think about. There are two major ones, the first of which is that I’m reading ANTEHRJ (well, it’s on hold right now), which I will use to start developing an at least semi-formal language for describing philosophical arguments. There are already formal ways of stating certain kinds of arguments, but this one will fill in the gaps. It’ll be a glue language, like Perl was. That will take forever. But I’ll do it iteratively.

Project number two is a rule-based algorithmic music composition program. I got to work on that some this weekend when I was in Colorado. That will also take forever, and I will also do it iteratively. I’ve been wanting to write something like this for ages. It will write tonal music, as opposed to the fractal music generators that pop up around the net. Once I have that, I’ll be able to be lazy and still write nice music.

These two projects are probably too ambitious, but oh well. I want to try them anyway. I think I’m just obsessed enough that they might happen.

Then I have other minor projects that involve programming, such as an RSS feed creator and a programming code indexer. I work on those here and there when I feel like it.

I’m also editing Brandon‘s Lord of the Rings parody. It’s really a parody of TheologyWeb using LotR as a backdrop. My other major projects are on hold until I get that done, which will hopefully motivate me to finish it sooner.

Church is just kinda there. I manage to make it every week, except occasionally when I oversleep. The main thing I’m doing there is a small group. I have had an “interesting” relationship with this group. I like the people well enough, but for a while I was considering dropping out. With all my issues, I’m just on a very different page spiritually from most other people in the group, and I didn’t think we could be of much help to each other. But I have pinpointed the exact reason I first became uncomfortable there, which I’ll blog about later, and I think I can deal with things better now. We have also started a new series of lessons that I am helping to teach. These are much more in my field because they’re about Bible study, so I will definitely be able to make a contribution.

Social occasions are few and far between for me, but I have had a couple. When Superman Returns came out, my friend Joel from work invited me to go see it with his friends, and then he invited me to his 4th of July party. I really appreciated those gestures because I basically have no friends in the area that are around my age. Well, okay, I’m exaggerating slightly, but I do need to get my social life together.

The biggest social thing recently was my friend’s wedding two weeks ago in Colorado. I was a groomsman. I believe this was the best wedding I’ve ever been to. It may even have surpassed John’s last year, which was also in Colorado and I was also a groomsman in. What I loved about John’s was that it wasn’t just a ceremony. It was a gathering, with a picnic the day of the rehearsal and a lot of sharing at the rehearsal dinner. And that’s what I loved about Cam’s this year too.

My impression of most weddings is that they are largely a collection of strangers who happen to know the same two people, and they celebrate the marriage but still maintain a polite distance from each other and mostly keep to themselves. In this wedding there was some of that (regrettably I was in turtle mode the whole time), but what struck me was that the families of the bride and groom weren’t strangers, or even acquaintances. They were friends. They obviously liked each other and had fun together.

An explanation came during the wedding ceremony, which Nicolette’s father conducted. He said that instead of dating, Cam and Nicolette courted, because Nicolette’s family felt that was the biblical way to do things. Courtship, as I think of it, is where the guy basically dates the girl’s whole family. In Cam and Nicolette’s case, both of their whole families seem to have dated each other. They all got to know each other, and it clearly showed that weekend. I always thought of courtship as an odd, fringe activity, but I now have a positive opinion of it.

I also loved getting to know Cam’s family, his old roommate John, and Nicolette a little better. They are great. And I got to meet some Australian girls who were there visiting Cam’s brother. Yay.

Oh yeah, and the wedding had a Scottish theme, because that’s Cam’s ancestry. He and his brother and John wore kilts. The rest of us were cheap and wore suits. I thought it was kind of a random and strange set-up, until the wedding party processional when I watched Cam walk down the aisle in his kilt with uilleann pipes playing in the background (“The Woman’s Mountain” from Piper’s Call by Liam O’Flynn—yes, I know it’s Irish. It still worked. :P). It was an evocative image and brought out the significance of this moment in my friend’s life.

When I got back home, I found out that our apartments had been bought again, and this time they’re being converted to condominiums. I can’t afford to buy anything right now, and I didn’t want to settle here anyway, so it looks like I’ll be moving! Fortunately I’ll be able to stay for the rest of my lease, which ends next July. Over the next nine months I’m going to try to get rid of a lot of my junk and a lot of my books too so I’ll have less to move. I’ve been meaning to do this anyway, and now I have more of a reason.

Did you know that the software that runs Wikipedia is open source and that you can download and install it on your computer?? Yes, and I have done just that to create my own personal wiki. It seems like a better way of organizing my random thoughts than the separate journals I keep for different subjects. Maybe it will even help me get my thoughts into writing more quickly. I used to be so much better about that. We shall see!

So, what’s been going on in my life lately? It never feels like much is happening, but somehow I still have a lot to say, so this will be a two- or three-part entry.

Work got exciting a few weeks ago when I had three major programming developments:

First, I had a breakthrough in my understanding of Yapp and Lex (Perl’s yacc and lex clones), and I began using them to create an XPress tags parser. QuarkXPress is one of the two major typesetting programs (the other is Adobe InDesign), and they have their own markup language that’s a real pain to work with. So for a long time I’ve wanted to create a more abstract way of dealing with them.

Basically, for my non-techie readership, parsing means teaching the computer how to understand each part of the text, rather than seeing the file as a meaningless mass of characters, so that I can tell it, “Take this paragraph and move it one paragraph down,” rather than saying, “Take everything between this ‘@Body Text:’ string (which starts a paragraph) and the next newline (which ends a paragraph), and everything between the next ‘@Body Text:’ and newline, and switch them.” Now which of those instructions would you rather have to think about? I thought so. My first two attempts at a parser were pretty messy and I gave up on them, but Yapp and Lex will make things much more orderly.

Second, we had a meeting that Tuesday to talk about putting together an archive of our past material that we can use in future products. They’ve been tossing this idea around for a while now, but I’ve been thinking about it longer, and my boss recommended that they include me in their discussions. The content catalog, as we will call it, will (hopefully) be part of a larger project I’ve been planning practically since I started working there—a hybrid content and project management system. So this meeting delighted me because everything they said played right into my hands! >-) I shall subvert their inefficient and problematic procedures and shove the company to the cutting edge of publishing! AAAAhahahahaaaaa!

*ahem* Anyway, since I already knew how I wanted to do things, when they finished laying out the problem and asked me what form the archive should take, instead of being open minded and suggesting several options like I would normally would, I just told them the content would be put in a database with a web interface. And they basically said, “Okay, sounds good.” I love it when people just agree with what I tell them. 😉

So I now have official approval to start on the content catalog, and I have to give one more presentation to the bosses to get approval for the rest of the system. The catalog isn’t where I expected to start (seems kinda backwards to have all this stuff in a nice system but then have to pull it out of the system and plunk it into Word because the word processing functions aren’t there yet), but I’ll scratch them where they itch. Now I have to learn all about automating databases and writing web applications, and I’m throwing more and more work at the content gatherers to keep them busy while I figure out what I’m doing, hehe. I’m going to have them gather all the content, get it all into a uniform file format, proofread all of it, and then worry about entering it into the system. It will take months. I should have something put together by then. Even sooner, with Ruby on Rails, I bet. 🙂

Third, on Friday we had a meeting to talk about our website. It has problems, mainly the fact that it’s all in Flash and the only person in-house who knows enough to fix it doesn’t have the time. So since I’ll be doing all this web programming anyway, I volunteered to redo the site. We’ll start with regular ol’ text and fancify it later. We have a nice little division of labor too. I’m the site “engineer,” and we’ll have two other people to manage the content and create the graphics. For the text-only version, I had our typesetter create a layout in InDesign, which I turned into HTML. It looks really nice.

By contrast, this week has been a very boring one of copyediting some Bible study guides.

Next up, what’s been happening in the rest of my life!

I am feeling really scattered right now. I was hoping to get something productive done tonight, probably some editing, but I keep finding interesting websites to read. Major links from tonight’s chain: from my friend Rob’s blog, Kyle Potter (which I’ve visited before); Addison Road (not the band); The CCM Patrol; a thread on a site called Yay Hooray that finally drove me to find out what in the world “Web 2.0” is; a funny jab at Web 2.0 visual design features; a site that promotes such design; Twinspark, which coined the term “wet floor effect” (part of Web 2.0 design); Say-So, a service by the Twinspark people that’s an atypically-formatted forum for discussing anything and everything; and, via a link from digg (a Web 2.0 site), Programming is Hard, which is the kind of resource I’ve been thinking about lately—a place people can post code snippets to help other people out. I’m tempted to sign up immediately and find out more about it after. … Okay, done, heh. Once I post some code, I’ll link to it from my programming page. Yay, another way to decentralize my web presence. 😉 I love conserving bandwidth (which, um, would only matter if I had a lot of visitors and a lot of things for them to access).

I’m pondering my relationship to Web 2.0. The system I’m going to create for my employer will definitely have some of its AJAX-y aspects. I blog. I just joined del.icio.us. I like Web 2.0’s ideas as they’re presented on Wikipedia. And I like the design well enough. But I’m resistant to trendiness. So although I’m participating, I’m sort of holding it at arm’s length. I feel the same way about Ruby on Rails. I’m going to use it because it seems like a very good thing, but their trendy writing style kind of turns me off. Postmodern design does too, such as using capitalization and punctuation in bizarre and pointless ways.

Okay, that’s not what I was planning to write about earlier today, but I wanted to get something up, and I couldn’t think of anything else very interesting to say.

Edit: I found out that Programming is Hard is based on an older site called Code Snippets, which has a lot more users. So I signed up there too. 😀 I might just use that one, unless Programming is Hard still seems worthwhile.