Wedding Announcement

Here's the wedding announcement from the Muncie paper.

CIA Leak

I think the best place to get good information about the CIA leak is the conservatives themselves. They know that they are fucked so they are actually talking about it truthfully, at least some of them are. This sounds a lot like the Watergate case. Unpopular war. Republicans doing illegal things to Democrats. Perjury. "Who knew what, and when". Yikes. The Republicans are falling apart right now.

Getting Digital Photos Home Safely

Wow, this guy is almost as anal as me when it comes to safeguarding digital photos. He didn't mention one more step which I like to do: scp the files over to my server back home.

Eugene Hütz

It turns out that Eugene Hütz, the dude from Gogol Bordello, plays Alex in Everything in Illuminated. Cool. No wonder I liked the character so much.

If you don't know, Gogol Bordello is a really cool band from New York that can be best described as Ukranian Gypsy Punk. It's really awesome music and their shows are really amazing. When you see them live you want to get up and jump around. Laurel and I saw them at Bumbershoot a few years ago.

Endangered Species act for Ways of Life

I've been reading Blog From Bolivia because it provides a pretty good analysis of politics in Bolivia, although obviously skewed towards the politics of Evo. Sometimes I agree with the writer but I just finished reading an essay that pissed me off:

Families leave the countryside for the city, for lack of schools and work. Bolivians leave the cities to seek their fortunes abroad. Families get left in the dust. Economics at work. If Bolivia loses its rural life, as it may well in the next generation if nothing is done, it won’t just be Bolivia that will be the loser, it will be all of us. Maybe we need an Endangered Species act for Ways of Life.

I admit that I used to think like this. I used to get pissed off that we screwing with people's way of life. But I know now that I was wrong. I realize that people who live in the country live a quaint life but they should be able to do what they want. Country life is hard work. Yes, working in the city is hard too, but we shouldn't delude ourselves into thinking that peasant life is a paradise. If people are moving to the city then they are doing it for a reason. Obviously they think that their lives will be better in the city.

I know that it would suck to travel to Bolivia and not see peasants in a rural village, but the world wasn't built for American tourists.

Decent Sized Pictures

What I've never understood about the print media (or CNN or BBC) on the internet is why they have such tiny ass photos of stuff. Goto CNN, there photos are usually 220x168. The BBC's are even worse at 203x152. The NY Times is sometimes a little better. The Seattle PI's website very rarely has photos.

But then you goto a blogger who talks about Seattle related news and you get 512x384 on the article with links to 2048x1536.

Why doesn't the real news post photos that have detail? What do they lose by keeping the good photos from us?

Timeless Way of Building

I just finished reading The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander and it was a really good book. Jacob G. first told me about this author when I joined his team. He suggested that I read Notes on the Synthesis of Form which he said was applicable to Computer Science. Even though we talk about Software "Architecture" I was amazing that an architect would write a book that a manager of Software Engineers would suggest as good reading. It was definitely worth reading.

The book that Christopher Alexander is most famous for is A Pattern Language where he first describes the idea of using patterns of techniques that are known to be good, but that are malleable to the situation. Anyone who has built software in the last 10 years has heard of the Gang of Four's Design Patterns but what you might not know is that this famous book came directly out of the work of Christopher Alexander.

The Timeless Way of Building describes a way of coming up with a design that has been used for millenia to build amazing building but that we have since mostly forgotten in favor of prefabricated designs that come more out of trying to build with standard parts instead of trying to build the best building. His arguments are that most older buildings "work", they do the job they were intended for, but most modern buildings are built for cheapness or looks, not for actual use.

The book is written in a very poetic way and it was sometimes hard to get through the first 2/3's so that I could read the specifics of the process, but I think that first 2/3's really made the specifics more meaningful and easier to fully understand. If you start reading this book you shouldn't be put off by the start of it, I promise that you'll get something profound out of it.

What I got out of it was that I shouldn't try to draw the changes to my house first, I should instead write down everything that I do in the house on a regular basis and spend time imagining doing those things in a perfect house. How would the flow between the couch in the living room and the kitchen be? I need to first think about what I'd be doing in the house, and later draw what I mean.

The part of his argument that I'm not completely convinced of is that you shouldn't put specifics down on paper. He believes that the only good way to build a building is to go to the site and start building and make changes and you do along. Hmmmm, doesn't that sound familiar?