Entries in Life

Alexis and I have finally settled on names for our fourth. Neither name appears in this list or this one — lists I would call “Completely conventional names.” See, when you give your children theme names (“Ginger”, “Basil”, “Violet”) you have to develop a defensive attitude towards those who react, err, strangely. Because, when you mention your child’s name, sometimes you’ll get a stare. Others, a giggle. And, if the listener has no “home training” at all, they’ll begin suggesting names like “Ragweed” and “Turnip”.

I’ve been reading this past month about Google digitizing libraries for universities, but I didn’t think they had anything live yet. So, while looking for some links to add to a post, I was surprised by this: Google has the whole text of Little House on The Prarie online! They’ve OCRed it and are highlighting search terms on the page. (This is similar to what Google catalogues is doing.) Fun! What other books do they currently have online?

I blame my wife. is a morbid woman. She loves books like The Grapes of Wrath and The Jungle as well as the more mild Laura Ingals Wilder series because they show the “gritty reality” of life. No easy breaks here. Only starvation, hard work, child labor, and nine months of winter. So, it is no surprise that our four-year-old is obsessed with death. My mother-in-law died shortly before she was born and, to honor her, we gave Violet her grandmother’s name: Duyen (vietnamese for “grace”). Maybe my inlaws were right. Maybe it was a bad omen. Besides singing hobo songs that she picked up from O brother Where Art Thou, she is prone to ask us hard-to-answer questions like this gem we got the other day: How many ways can you die? What do you tell a four year old when they ask you that? “Uh… There are lots of ways.” Of course, that is never gonna be good enough. “Like what?” All this to say that when Julie Leung thinks her children have lost their innocence because they learned that people kill each other?!? Just wait! Maybe they’ll be little mini-goths like our daughter.

I’m pretty stubborn about some pretty silly things (e.g. operating systems) and, if I’m not really careful, that can lead to problems. For example, I wanted to keep track of some websites and that means using some sort of syndication reader for RSS or Atom feeds. Since I was living in an Emacs world, I looked at what was available within Emacs. Even when that turned out to be less than sastisfactory, I kept at it because of my inertia and stubborn silliness. “I don’t wanna use an RSS reader that other people have heard of!” But then, Emacs slowly started receding from front-and-center in my life — something that I should’ve allowed long ago. It’s an awesome tool for editting text and source code and weblog entries, but just because you can use it for reading weblogs and email, it doesn’t mean you should. ‘Cause I’ll let you in on a little secret here: Emacs doesn’t have multi-threading support. That means that if you want to perform some long-running task (like checking your email or updating the weblog list), you can’t use it to edit a file. What this means is that if you’re using Emacs for everything, then when you check your email, work stops. Yes, you can set up some kludges, but they’re cumbersome. So, I’ve decided to apply my philosophy about religion to my use of Emacs. I’m an Orthodox because it has been around for a couple of thousand years, it’s the second-largest Christian sect, and, I figure, it has a lot of the kinks worked out as a result. So, if not very many people are using Emacs’ nnrss to read RSS feeds, maybe that’s an indication that I should use something else. If nothing else, then the other readers are more featureful and — this is big — I won’t have to write the code to support new features. So, today I started using bloglines.com. Sure enough, it works a lot smoother than Emacs as a reader and I’ve already subscribed to more feeds than I had in nnrss. First, I quite using Gnus to read my email, then I quit using my own weblogging software, now I’m using a “mainstream” RSS reader… Do you think I start using notepad soon?

evidently thinks that our kids should get non-gender-specific toys. Too late! They’ve already been inculcated with the gender-specific myth. Must be in the genes… As an example, when we were wrapping up two dolls, one for each of our daughters, Alexis asked if I thought we should give a doll to Basil — as if he would be jelous of his sister’s gifts! “I don’t think so. I mean, he’s gonna play with their Barbie sleepover inflatable matresses and the canopy — they’re gonna pretend its a castle or they’re in a jungle or something — but I haven’t seen that he has any great desire to play with their dolls. And they don’t seem to want to play with his shooting toys.” Of course, I was right. You would think she would realize this. She spends all day with them, after all.

It’s finally happened: I switched weblogging systems. Earlier this year, between jobs, I spent quite a bit of time working on some upgrades to OpenWeblog. These upgrades allowed me to do all sorts of nice things (like work better with existing weblogging tools) that I couldn’t do with the older version of the software. I had even implemented a really nice FTP backend to the weblog entry repository, so that you could post to the weblog using FTP tools. I was growing a full-blown CMS. But I chickened out on actually putting it into production. I lied to myself — told myself that my words were too valuble, too precious to be off the Internet when any breakage happened (as if I had kept my site up 24/7/365). I’m beginning to think that I my subconcious was shouting what I would conciously say to other people about their pet projects: “Hasn’t this already been done?” So, when my boss asked me what we could offer our clients in the way of weblogs, I began looking around at the available tools. I considered indulging my hubris and using the OpenWeblog codebase to build up something. But, I knew that there would be plenty of bugs to shake out and I had other more “mission-critical” tasks at work (read that as: Using my largly un-tested code would mean lots of wasted time and blogs aren’t gonna make us any money. Not directly, at least.) And I wanted to let people comment on stuff I write here. Sure, you could email me, but somehow people are more likely to write an comment on a weblog than to write an email. In the back of my mind, I had been thinking about using the LiveJournal code base: it is written for mod_perl, hosts multiple weblogs, allows comments, encourages community journals, and supports Atom as well as its own fairly mature protocol. LJ gets a lot of flack because it is associated with whining teenagers, but several of my friends and people I know have used it (uber-hacker jwz and an Orthodox bishop, to name but two). The request from my boss just pushed me to finally make a decision. So, I’ve changed the server at http://www.openweblog.com/. It is now a LiveJournal Server. Accounts are free (for now). If you set up a domain and point it at openweblog.com’s IP, you can even have your journal/blog show up there. That’s what we’ve done with Alexis’ weblog. Her id is dvfmama and we’ve registered dvfmama.com to point there. I’ll let her explain what “DVFMama” means.

On my mail server, I recently started using SpamAssassin’s baysean learning capabilities. To help SpamAssassin learn, I’ve been going through all the email classified as spam and verifying that it is spam. In the process, I’ve managed to unsubscribe from a few spammer’s lists that I “signed up for” in the past. Those emails that have unsubscribe links are pretty good about unsubscribing me — I don’t get their spam any more.

But, I’ve still been going through the spam box every day. Occassionally, SpamAssassin catches Powell’s Review-A-Day or some spammy looking email, and (more rare) a spam will occassionally slip through SA’s filters to my inbox, but, for the most part, the spam I get now falls into one of a few categories: Nigerian scams, Lottery scams, Mortgage scams, Rolex spams (genuine and fake), spam I can’t read (usually in what looks like Russian, Chinese, or Japanese), and sales of pharmaceuticals (I can’t tell if these are a scam or not). I would set up a weblog to record the interesting stuff, but Leonard beat me to it In any case, today’s fun spam subject line is “V”iagra is out of fashion, find out why.” Yes, I take pills because it’s fashionable.

Last night, we were eating dinner and I asked my kids how their day was. Violet used to opportunity to tell us a long rambling story about a good queen, a bad queen, some dogs and cats. After Ginger, her sister, complained that her story had too many “and then”s in it, I saw a “teaching moment” and asked Violet to tell us what the queen was doing with the dog. She made up something and, seeing my opening, I drove home the lesson. “You should try to include the other people in the story. They should do things together.”

She gave me a blank look. “No they shouldn’t. It’s a big world!”

This past weekend was a little odd. For one thing, I traveled all the way to Little Rock (via American Airlines) and then to New Orleans (via my parent’s Honda with do-it-yourself back-window tinting (it was that way when they bought it)).

In New Orleans, I was able to touch base with a few business and Church friends and enjoy the 80° weather. Oh, and the food. The grand finale (food-wise) was Brigtsen’s. Rich and tasty food, but three of us ate for less than $100 (of course, we didn’t order wine).

Back in El Dorado, I celebrated Thanksgiving with my brothers and sister while my wife (7 months pregnant now) and kids celebrated on their own. Like I said, a little weird. Weird, but good. Alexis and kids enjoyed the ride to Philly enough, though. They found Philly’s chinatown and ate good food.

Being in New Orleans by myself, I had plenty of time to think. And I had time to think about what made New Orleans a great place.

Here it is: the city celebrates humanity. Everywhere else, we’re always striving for perfection, but New Orleans celebrates the decay and, yes, decadance of everyday life. We’re human. We fuck up. Our houses rot, our streets sink, the roads flood, mesquitos bite us, palmetto bugs walk brazenly down the sidewalk, liquid trash stinks up the streets in the morning before it is swept away.

And life goes on.

We keep celebrating, we keep living, we keep loving. Ignore the decay — live with it. That cup of coffee with the friend is more important than the fixing a house that is already livable. The house has been there for 100 years. It’ll do for another year or two. It isn’t quite necessary to fix it right this minute.

And it is the drudgery, the everyday-ness of life. We celebrate that to. Maybe not with a party like Mardi Gras — who can sustain that level of activity year round? — but with a beer at the end of the day. Yeah, your day sucked. Have a beer. Watch the grass grow and don’t worry about cutting it for now.

And so what if there are potholes everywhere? That’s just what happens. Things fall apart. Let’s go suck the heads off of some crawfish and drive a little more carefully.

And those bugs. We’ll put up some mesquito netting and maybe stomp a couple of those palmetto bugs. But not all of them. You’ve got to clean up too many bug guts if you smash a lot. A beer is better than smashing bugs.

See, everyone looks at Mardi Gras as the epitome of the New Orleans experience, but it ain’t. That’s like saying the epitome of the Christian Life is Easter. Parties aren’t what everyday life is about. Life is about enjoying what is around you. If that’s decay and peeling paint, well, so be it. We’ll enjoy that.

We’re all about accepting our imperfections instead of reforming everything right now. This drives some people batty. They want a Disney World experience, not a New Orleans Experience. Clean streets (made so by industrious workers!) are more appealing to them than the streets that stink from tourist’s vomit.

But the shopkeeper’s do come out (even if it isn’t early enough for some people) and they do hose down the stench. They battle back the vomit for yet another day. And, even if some people are appalled that they’ve had to witness such an event, the shopkeepers get back to the business of selling t-shirts and Tylonal to the vomiting tourists.

That’s the New Orleans Experience, my friend. Instead of hiding out from the our fallenness, we embrace it. We acknowlege it. We accept it. We don’t hide our cleaning crews. And, yes, you can vomit in the streets. Try that in Disney World!

’Cause refusing to hide from your fallenness is the first step to overcoming it.

All those Bible-Belt Baptist Believers? They ain’t gonna get very far because they are, as a friend so eloquently put it, “back porch sinners”. Only when I have the freedom to sin on my front porch — only then can I really change.

And, ooh boy, can you ever sin on the front porch here. You can practically fuck in broad daylight (some days of the year). So, if I can do that — and I’m not — then I must really have been reformed.

And I’m not talking Las “What happens here, stays here” Vegas, either. I said front porch sinning, and I mean it. You live here — you’re not sneaking off to some other town carry out the dark deeds of your heart. You’re not ashamed of who you are: you’ve accepted it.

Sure, as a Christian, I hope you want to be more Christ-like. But, I also want you to be true to yourself. I want the real you, not some made up goodie-two-shoes who secretly spends all night surfing porn on the Internet.

Let it all hang out. Be real. And learn to accept other people — to love them in all their humanity. They’re all made in God’s image, after all. Accept that they all exercise that likeness through the choices they make. And some chose differently than you or God wanted them to.

God still loves them. And so can we.

Colocation of my server isn’t cheap, so I try to offer hosting to some people to defray the cost. A year and a half ago, I was trying to persuade someone to use my services and, in the process, they mentioned that they used FeaturePrice.com.

Click on that link. It goes to a litany of complaints about the site. Evidently they went out of business and were investigated by the FCC and shunned by the BBB. At least I’m still in “business”!