- I like nuns (most nuns, if perhaps not all nuns) and I’ve said good things about the few that helped me get started on the road toward personal discipline and basic thinking skills. Over at the Make blog, they’ve got a few photos of an offering left at a monument dedicated to one Sister Nicodema: An elaborately painted wooden lightning bolt carefully delivered in an elaborately crafted custom case. No idea who she was or even where this is in the world, but somebody gets points for originality in implementing the tribute. She must have been one helluva teacher. (The great German term “geistesblitz” comes to mind.)
- I thought of another couple of Irishisms associated with my grandmother Sade Prendergast Duntemann: Kafoothering (furiously fussing with, or frantic activity generally) and curniklee, which defies easy definition but might be described as gross dirt. Both spellings are phonetic, and I’m guessing the originals are from the Irish language. I haven’t myself used “curniklee” in decades, but “kafoothering” is a wonderful word that bears remembering.
- Those who don’t read Contra comments on my WordPress main site may have missed Jim O’Brien’s insights on “oonchick,” which in Irish is spelled “oinseach,” and denotes a person of pathetic foolishness or stupidity. He also suggests that since in Irish the suffix “og” means “young,” a “gomog” may be a young gom, which in Irish is an idiot (or an “eejit” as Sade herself might have said.)
- The “Axis of Evil” patterns that people see in maps of the cosmic background radiation may be caused by lensing at the boundary between the solar solar wind and the slower interstellar wind. Or you can have my completely speculative opinion (not peer reviewed) that the pattern is due to the cumulative effect on the cosmic background caused by everything massive in the universe acting as a very lumpy and unevenly distributed gravitational lens. The universe is not perfectly smooth and featureless. If the cosmic background is indeed leftovers from the Big Bang, it is the farthest source of radiation possible. We’re seeing it, in a sense, through slightly wrinkly glass. How could it be otherwise?
- At least we’re not seeing the Blessed Mother in the cosmic background hiss… (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- I’ve known about the Baby Name Voyager for some time, but I don’t think I’ve cited it here before. It’s a Java app charting the popularity of names given to infants since the 1880s. The name “Jeffrey” barely existed until the 1930s, peaked about when I showed up, and then was mostly gone again by 2000. I always thought it was a bad idea. I wanted to be James, and was almost Eric. For a truly fascinating graph, though, enter a single letter, to see the relative popularity of all the names beginning with that letter. Like Q.
- I’m not a beer drinker, but down at Shop and Save, they have Russian beer in 2-liter plastic bottles. I’ve never before seen beer (nor anything else alcoholic) in what most people think of as soda bottles, and I always figured it was either illegal or simply a bad idea chemically. I guess not.
Odd Lots
For Small Values of “Thumb”
The last time we had the nerd gang over, Eric Bowersox gave me a couple of the smallest USB thumb drives I have ever seen. The unit shown above right is 1 3/8″ long X 1/2″ wide and holds 512MB. It was a promo giveaway branded with AMD’s logo, containing tech spec PDFs for AMD’s CPUs and motherboards. I included a 4 GB Cruzer Micro Skin in the photo for comparison, but what doesn’t show well is the little gadget’s thickness, which is just about 1/16″, or a hair over 2 mm.
The unit Eric gave me is a Kingmax Super Stick, and in case that’s too big for ya, there is also a Kingmax Super Stick Mini that is another 4 mm shorter. I was not surprised to see that they have higher-capacity units, from 2GB up to 16GB. The 4GB unit sells on Amazon for $6.95, and the 16 GB for only $35.75. Kingmax knows its market, or at least understands careless geek laundry habits, since the product is advertised as “…washer and dryer SAFE!”
A drive that small is basically the size of the glass-epoxy connection tang inside a conventional USB flash drive, minus the metal guide that ordinarily surrounds it. The downside to a thumb drive without the metal guide is that it can plug into a USB port two ways, only one of which is useful. I made that mistake the first time I tried it, but I recognize that there’s no harm done plugging it in the wrong way, because in that event there’s no electrical connection between drive and port.
It’s a little small for my own personal thumbs, but may be a reasonable form factor for plugging into netbooks or smuggling across borders stuffed up one nostril. What I find more notable is the fact that 512MB flash drives are now so cheap that they can be produced as trade-show freebies. The size of our data isn’t increasing, and the capacity of cheap storage is expanding astonishingly fast. What’s the bandwidth of a $5, 64 GB nostril drive crammed full of 25,000 MP3s and passed from one hand to another? Media creators are wondering in their nightmares, and if they aren’t, they should be, because we’ll be there before you know it.
Cranky Insight
I haven’t posted for eight days, and people are starting to send me notes asking if I’m all right. I am, though I’m not sleeping well and don’t have my usual energy. Whatever time and oomph I haven’t had to devote to family issues here I’ve been pouring into the book. I’m now 161,000 words in, of about 180,000 total, so the end really is in sight–but seeing the end isn’t enough. I still have to grind through the material.
I will take an opportunity to gripe a little, this time about the Insight GUI shipped for and with the gdb debugger. Insight isn’t perfect, and parts of it are excellent–especially compared to the molasses marathon of using naked gdb in a console, God help us–but a good deal of it is simply awful. I chose Insight as the example debugging tool for my third edition, in part because it’s technically a component of gdb and not an add-on. However, it comes closer to the truth to say that after I interviewed Linux debuggers for use with C-free assembly code, Insight was the last man standing. Most debuggers assume that they’ll be dealing with clib and C source code, and don’t know how to load a C-free executable, even if contains valid STABS or DWARF debug info. At least Insight allows assembly language source debugging in a window.
As grateful as I am for it, certain things about Insight make me nuts. Good example: The Memory view. This is an ordinary hexdump-style memory display, with only two means of navigation. You can scroll the dump up or down for 16 bytes by clicking the arrows, or you can type in a new address in an entry field. And I mean type–the GUI does not recognize paste from the clipboard. If you want to fill the field with a new address, the keyboard is all you get. Worse, moving up- or down-memory by clicking the arrow buttons takes one to three seconds to refresh the window. (This is not an exaggeration. I timed it.) An operation like that, on a 2.8 GHz machine, should be instantaneous. How about buttons to take us to the address currently in ESP or EIP? Or sheesh, maybe implement paste from the clipboard to the address entry field!
I’m tempted to blame it on the fact that Insight is written in Tcl/Tk, but I’ve actually used Tcl/Tk and I don’t think it’s inherently that slow. The only guess I would hazard is that because working in naked gdb is horrendously ponderous but still nearly universal in the Linux world, the guys who wrote Insight didn’t know any better, and thought that their results were transcendently wonderful. Not true. One click is often (if not always) worth twenty or more frantic keystrokes. To me, that’s a win. You command-line people should get out more.
Odd Lots
- The rest of Bichonicon was uneventful enough (and I was tired enough) that I decided it wasn’t worth a whole ‘nother entry. Aero won a ribbon on Saturday, but did not win points. Carol and I ate too much fast food. We came home. End of story.
- I did briefly run into St. Louis native Nancy Frier, granddaughter of the man who founded Alox Manufacturing Company, maker of shoelances, kites, marbles, military radar corner reflectors, and lots of other odd bits. She had visited a marble factory in West Virginia and showed me a video of glass marbles being made on a machine very similar to the one Alox had used. It’s a great video, and when she uploads it to YouTube I’ll post a link here.
- And I found two bottles of Diet Green River. The trick is to look in small local grocery stores or local chains, like Garden Fresh Markets or Shop and Save. Have not yet checked the local Butera, but it’s on my list.
- A reader chided me that “All your damn dogs look alike. Post more pictures of Carol.” He’s right about the dogs, I guess, but I have posted quite a few pictures of Carol in my photo gallery. In fact, here’s an almost 40-year run of the two of us together.
- From the Words I Didn’t Know (or at least understand) Until Yesterday Department: “Kukla” is Russian for “doll.” The eponymous little guy on the seminal Kukla, Fran, and Ollie kids’ show had been built as a doll for a friend by puppeteer Burr Tillstrom, who liked the doll so much that Tillstrom kept him, and made him the star of the show.
- From the Words I Didn’t Know Until Yesterday (And Didn’t Think Were Necessary) Department: A merkin is a wig for women’s genitalia; basically, a pubic toupee. Sheesh. English has a word for everything.
- Here is A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages. I think it’s truer than people will admit, especially the Pascal entry. Thanks to Bruce Baker for the link.
- Blandishments: Salt-free mustard and ketchup.
- A guy scraped Twitter data for the phrase “just landed in” and mapped the air travel data, hoping to create a new tool for epidemiology. Germs like jet aircraft for various reasons, and this is the first genuine use for the Twitter system that I’ve ever heard of.
- I follow Icecap as part of my ongoing climate research, and it’s interesting for another reason: It consists of a navigation column and three narrow content columns. I’ve never seen another blog with a layout quite like this, and I like it. Narrow is better than wide, especially for small print. Scanability (given that I don’t read every entry) is high.
- Finally, some images speak for themselves. This is one of them. (Thanks to Baron Waste for the link.)
Bichonicon, Day 3
Things kicked into high gear today at the Bichon Frise National Specialty here in St. Louis. The seminars are over and the judging began bright and early at 8:30 AM. There are quite a few different classes: Puppy dog (and here, “dog” means “male dog”) puppy bitch, junior handler, open dog, and open bitch, among others. Carol showed Aero in the Amateur Owner/Handler class, where he took first place. The class is for people like us, who buy a show-quality puppy and do the show circuit but do not breed dogs. We own Aero and Carol handles him (meaning that she takes him physically to shows and runs him around the ring) but we aren’t doing it for money, hence “amateur.” There are professional breeders and professional handlers, though how much money can be made there is a seriously open question. Just about all of us do it for love, and a few of us (very few) make a buck or two here and there. (Just like fiction writing, no?)
Carol almost got second place in the Winners Dog class; the judge had Carol take Aero around the ring a second time and was clearly considering him, but then someone else got the red ribbon.
Our friends have done well too: Mary Provost (who draws the show logo cartoons) took Reserve Winners Bitch with her new puppy Mona Lisa, and Laura Pfab’s daughter Kirsten won Junior Handlers with their new adult dog Ron Stoppable.
I’d say more, but it’s late and I’m getting cross-eyed here. Everybody had a good time, and although Aero’s blue ribbon did not come with any points, we’ve learned a lot about grooming and showing from the old pros here. Everybody says that Aero almost can’t avoid becoming a champion–he just needs to hit a few more shows and keep his tail up. I think we can do that. We will certainly try.
Tomorrow is our second shot in the ring, and then it’s back home to Chicago up I-55.
Bichonicon, Day 2
Last night was the awards banquet and rescue auction for the Bichon Frise National Specialty show here in St. Louis. All the bichon powers from the Denver/Springs axis were gathered at one table, plus a couple of old friends from as far away as Pittsburgh. As that sort of dinner goes, it was exceptional: We had roast tenderloin of beef, with new potatoes, carrots, and string beans. (I gave my string beans to Carol, but the rest of it was spectacular–even the carrots.) The weakest part of the meal was the cheesecake dessert, but that was certainly workmanlike, and we all enjoyed the meal immensely, at least on the merits of the food.
I admit, I was something of an outsider. All but one of our tablemates were women, and most of them had attended a seminar on dog reproductive health and whelping earlier that day. I like puppies a great deal, but I’m not passionately interested in seeing them happen in Technicolor and real time. And of course, the old pros at the table all had their own whelping hax, honed over many years of ushering new puppy life into the world. Much was said about the “stuck puppy” problem, which is about what you think and can be fatal. I was hoisting a nice, medium-rare chunk of tenderloin on my fork when one of the venerable whelpers at the table offered the wisdom that “you can insert your index finger into the bitch’s rectum and re-orient a stuck puppy…”
Some mental images take a minute or two to remove from one’s head. I seized that opportunity to set my fork down and head for the men’s room, hoping that we’d be on to something better by the time I got back.
And we were. The rest of the meal was uneventful, and we nibbled our cheesecake while the raffle prizes were awarded (generally hand-made bichon crafts) and the auction conducted, for the benefit of the national Bichon Frise Rescue group.
This morning was a quiet one for me; Carol wanted to watch the Obedience and Rally events, and I mostly kicked back and read a book, unless one of our friends was in the ring. Obedience is just that: tests to see how well a dog listens and obeys relatively complex commands. Rally is peculiar; it’s basically close-order drill for dogs, with dog and handler working through a course of various commands like 270-degree and 360-degree turns.
I fetched back lunch and snacks as needed, and held QBit down while Carol practiced shaping the hair over his rump. (QBit does not like having his butt fussed with. Maybe he’s heard too much about those whelping seminars.) By midlate afternoon all of our friends had had their turns in the ring, and we went back to our room and napped for an hour. We caught a quick supper outside at Panera (or St. Louis Bread Company, as they call it here) in gorgeous if slightly humid weather. Carol is now bathing Aero, and after she dries him, our more experienced friends will be over to the room here to offer advice on getting him brushed and scissored into championship form.
Aero hits the ring tomorrow eleven-ish, and whereas he’s in pretty good shape overall, he is competing not against two or three other bichons (as he often does at smaller dog shows) but well over a hundred. Carol’s putting her back into it and we’re hoping for the best, but much depends on how well Aero “baits”; that is, how focused he is on Carol with a piece of bacon between her lips. Aero doesn’t bait easily, and he tends toward rowdiness. The dog show thing for him is a glorious opportunity to wrestle with his own kind, even (or especially) when he should be daintily prancing around the ring. He’ll get his chance, and I’ll be on the sidelines, taking movies and praying that nobody nearby is in heat. Sex trumps even bacon–but you knew that.
I’ll let you know how it all goes.
Bichonicon, Day 1
We got here last night seven-ish, and had time to lay on our backs on the bed and just decompress after the 330-mile blast down I-55. Carol washed QBit earlier this morning, and is now “tipping” him (snipping off the small “tips” of his hair that stick out beyond the general contours of his coat) just for practice. Aero’s up next, as he will be in the ring both Friday and Saturday and needs to be at his absolute best.
The hotel is about what we expected. Hotels willing to host dog breed specialties have certain common characteristics: They’re older, somewhat careworn, and ripe for large-scale rehab. The occasional piddle spot is acceptable, given a four-day full house at what I consider premium rates for an ever-so-slightly crufty property like this.
The faux-Swiss Sheraton Westport Chalet actually isn’t bad. We love the standard Sherton beds, and our room-service breakfast was nicely done, arriving hot and right on time. The Wi-Fi, though; aggghh! It’s $10/day, four days for $30…and it drops the connection every five or ten minutes. I have 48%-60% signal strength, which should be more than enough to maintain a connection. I can generally restore the connection by breaking and remaking association with the access point, which is a nuisance, but it’s better than nothing. It’s notable that I’ve had Wi-Fi problems at other Sheratons, especially in Des Moines, where I could never get the damned thing to work at all. (I got my money back.)
While we were walking QBit and Aero around the hotel earlier today, we passed a restaurant that ferdam looked like a Panera–except that it was called the St. Louis Bread Company. Once I had a connection again, I discovered that that was what Panera was called when it was created here in St. Louis in 1993. Restaurants in the St. Louis area still bear that name.
As for the show itself, things are still being set up. The opening banquet is tonight (dogs do not attend, which in one sense is a shame) and for the rest of the afternoon everybody’s likely to be in their rooms or out on the lawn grooming the contestants. We’ve already run into most of the people we know in the bichon metaverse, though alas, neither QBit’s nor Aero’s breeders will be attending.
One final unrelated item: Several people have sent me notes about the announced sale of Borland to Micro Focus. What this means for Delphi is absolutely nothing, since Borland sold off all of its programming language products to Embarcadero Systems in 2008. Most of what Borland still sells is StarTeam, a revision control system, which is evidently what Micro Focus wants.
It’s a quiet day. I’m helping Carol as needed, and when not needed, I’m quietly thinking about how I think about the things that I think about when I’m thinking. Being free means knowing your own mind, and making sure that no one and nothing receives your unquestioning obedience. If you can’t do that, you are not free.
Off to Bichonicon!
Carol and I are packing up for the dash down I-55 to St. Louis, where we will be for a few days, attending the Bichon Frise Nationals at the Sheraton Westport Chalet. Hundreds and hundreds of bichons in one hotel! Furballdemonium! As always, it’s hard to tell how often I’ll be able to post while there–hotel broadband is a very uneven phenomenon. I’ll try and get some pictures for those who can’t imagine it. (On the other hand, I know that most of you can imagine a lot.)
But in the meantime, I want to post more broadly what Jim O’Brien pointed out in a comment to yesterday’s entry. Spelled correctly in Irish, “oonchick” would be “oinseach”–not that I would have had a chance in hell of guessing!–and means what I think Sade meant: a person of pathetic and foolish stupidity. And although Jim had not heard the term “gomog,” a “gom” is Irish slang for idiot. I greatly appreciate Jim’s tips, and again, spelling is key: If you can’t spell it, you can’t find it.
And for quick grins, Domino is now pushing certified CarbonFree sugar! (Yes, yes, yes, I know what they mean. But multibilliondollar corporations should maybe filter their merchandising efforts for that species of completely avoidable howler.)
Redshanks and Omathauns and Gomogs, Oh My!
I had an Irish grandmother. Her Irishness was off the scale, pinning the needle and wrapping it around the (green) post three times, one for each Person of the Trinity. She was wry and cranky and as a younger woman had an operatic voice, which she used mostly to ridicule the whole idea of opera. (If I had inherited her voice, by God, I’d use it for the same thing.) Sade Genevieve Prendergast Duntemann (1892-1965) was quite the character. Back in 2005, I published the marvelous letter she was writing to my father when WWII ended. She gave me her Underwood typewriter–the same one from which that letter emerged–when I was only ten years old, and in doing so changed me forever. Words, both spoken and hammered in uneven type on a smeary two-color cloth ribbon, were the bond we had together.
And some of those words were…odd. Four in particular come to mind, though she died 44 years ago and I may have forgotten a few. I always assumed she had made them all up, as making things up was one of her gifts. (I believe that my knack for storytelling came down from her through my father.) Then, as the years rolled on, I started encountering them in real life:
- Redshanks, in her parlance, were small imaginary animals that burrowed in her garden, making a mess. As a preschooler I imagined them as bright red mice with little horns. I would build redshank castles with my blocks, and my father and I once made redshank houses with strips of papier mache laid over half-flattened beer cans. I later found out that redshanks were also Scottish mercenaries serving in the Irish army circa 1600. There may have been an ancient family tradition coming to the surface here; had the Irish Army ever marched through County Mayo and trampled the Prendergast tomato patch?
- An omathaun was a silly, clumsy goof–a word she applied to me often, and my father perhaps more than that. Again, I thought it was a pure Sade invention, until we saw the scraggly Irish cartoon fox in Mary Poppins yell “You heathen omathauns!” at the pursuing fox hounds. As with a lot of things, it was hard to research because I didn’t know how it was spelled. I suspect that in the original Gaelic the “th” was the single letter thorn (which looks like a crooked “d”) and today it’s generally spelled omadhaun. Sade had this one precisely right.
So. That’s as far as I’ve gotten. The two other words I will give you phonetically. My favorite is gomog, which in use was a somewhat stronger version of omathaun, particularly when there was a lot of frantic motion involved. “Running around like gomogs” is an expression Carol and I still use to describe QBit and Aero tearing through the house at flank speed, yapping like hyenas. I’ve already used the term “gomog” as a sort of immaterial AI PDA in my magic-as-software fantasy novel, Ten Gentle Opportunities, which I may finish someday with some borrowed Irish luck. (Quick, where’s my shamrock?)
And finally, oonchick. (Again, the spelling is phonetic.) An oonchick, if I recall the nuance correctly, was a dullard, albeit one deserving of some respect. I suspect it was Sade’s opinion of President Eisenhower, though we never talked politics. Mostly it was spoken in conversation I overheard, about adults I did not know. Sade was never short of opinions, just as she was never short of words.
I miss her, as I miss all those who were ever kind to me; and I miss her more than many, because of the peculiar power that her kindness imparted. I’m sure, as my mother lugged the heavy cast-iron contraption with “Underwood” painted on the front out of the car and up to my room, she was wondering, “Now what in heaven’s name is he going to do with that?” Sade had a hunch, and she was right. Wherever she is, I hope she got the word.
Odd Lots
- Still sniffling, still congested, still coughing, and still mostly lying on my back, taking a Zicam every three hours like clockwork. I feel better generally, but the growing pile of Kleenex on the floor next to the bed provides time-trend rather than anecdotal data. This has been worse and tougher to shake than I had hoped.
- The Cassini Saturn probe can actually watch ring disturbances occur, especially those caused by the way-far-in moon Prometheus. Here’s the culprit making tracks in the ring system, courtesy Astronomy Picture of the Day.
- There is a portable version of Scribus, the only open-source desktop publishing system that I respect. One key principle of degunking Windows PCs is to staythehell away from the Windows Registry, and portable apps, almost by definition, leave no fingerprints there. There’s more here than most people understand, and Wikipedia’s list of portable apps is a very good place to start. (I advise reading the entry talk page.) Here’s another big list.
- Another key principle is to avoid software that insists on launching services all the time, having tray icons, etc. Most of these are commercial packages that are desperately trying to upsell you. Best path here is to avoid commercial software as much as possible, especially trialware and “basic” versions that are invitations to install nagware and are often very hard to get rid of.
- (Next morning.) The nose is drying out (finally) but the cough is still with me. About to head out for some yummy McDonald’s iced coffee, with sugar-free vanilla flavoring, to chase a delectable Sausage McMuffin with Egg. I’m stuffing my pocketses with Kleenex, but after two days of self-enforced isolation, it’s almost within my grasp: The Contrarian Breakfast of Champions!
- (Later.) It’s been a bad season for the Global Warming crowd. Freeman Dyson jumped the Tiber, and now says that the whole thing is a religion. The Australian Bureau of Meteorology has admitted under duress that its Antarctic bases have shown a cooling trend since 1980. Another Australian, albeit a hated Tory, penned a pretty good summary of the problems to be found when you study the data and not the dogma. Word seems to be getting out: Only 30% of Americans support cap-and-trade, which has become corrupt even before becoming law. And here’s what one of the sponsors of the Waxman-Markey bill has to say about the dangers of global warming. OMG, if that tundra at the North Pole ever emerges from under the ice, we’re all gonna die!
- Remember Global Cooling? I lived through it. It was scary. The lesson? We knew shit about how climate worked in 1975. And today? We know shit plus 15%. Some humility (and caution) are called for.
- (Still later.) Gosh. I really must be feeling better. The needle has climbed out of “groggy” and is rising rapidly through “puckish” on its way back to “jovial and unprovocative.” Dare I hope to get all the way to “serene”? Not likely; the viruses are surrendering, but I still have 35,000 words to go on the book–and I can’t find any Diet Green River!
