Mambo Taxi

I went to the optometrist for the first regular checkup in many years. They did the pupil dilation thing, which was sort of annoying and now I remember how much I didn't like it the last time. I probably should have used the cheap sunglasses they gave me, but I didn't. On an overcast day, on the walk back to the office, the white lines on the road were blinding me. Yeesh. My pupils looked, and still look, like an animé character's.

Night fell shortly after I got back to the office, which was convenient. And from then until now, everything is brighter than I expect, and point-source lights have pretty auras around them.

I walked roverthedog through the big park, which has been decked out in Christmas lights.

Wow. Pretty. Very pretty.

The strings of lights in the trees each looked like thick cables, bright but not quite painfully bright. Again with the pretty auras. If I could have turned off the streetlights, it would have been perfect.

I'm not sure I would recommend this as a way to get into the Christmas spirit, but hey, as long as I've got weird vision, might as well take advantage of the few unexpected benefits.

I have been in a writing lull over the last month. I've spent a bunch of free time immersed in that game; I've been thinking about work at other free times, solving problems in my head; I've been thinking about Quaker Meeting and making plans for Quaker-related travel; and while dan was away, I had a cold for a week that made me fairly low-brain.

Then, the cold got better two Sundays ago, and I went to Quaker Meeting and felt absolutely wonderful, and spent the afternoon bouncing around, writing journal posts in my head, only to see them disappear when I sat down at the end of the evening, just as the cold symptoms came back again for the night. So, oh well.

But the last two weeks have been pretty good. I went to a Vote Mob [1], voted early in the national election, went to a birthday party, a pub dinner with programmer friends, and we had friends over for tea and cookies. I think I finally kicked the cold, despite some very rainy and windy weather. And I finished what I needed to do at work, for the start of the new term on Monday, despite a fairly impressive set of potential problems with infrastructure upgrades which have largely been ameliorated. And that is all I will say about work.

Last Wednesday was the start of Open Ears music festival, which is more low-oomph than prior years. It's held every other year, and it's how dan and I have seen Pamela Z, Negativland and Patricia O'Callighan, and DJ Spooky, among other highlights. I hope they can get their act together for 2013; Open Ears has been one of the great things about living around here.

This time the only out-of-town performers I was really excited about was the Princeton Laptop Orchestra; and their concert didn't really do it for me.

So far, the best pieces were by Penderecki String Quartet (with DJ P Love). The Quartet are always excellent, even if I don't like what they play. This time they played Different Trains by Steve Reich, and it totally blew the recording away. The mix was different; you heard less of the recorded voices, and a much more lively violin-against-steam-whistle that just sounded awesome. They also played a piece composed during the CBC Strike (of 2005?) by Nicole Lizee, called "this will not be televised", which at one point, sampled the most famous riff from the middle of Duran Duran/"Rio", and cracked dan and me up.

Last night I saw Tanya Tagaq Trio, who are made up of a percussionist, a violinist, and Tanya Taqaq, an Inuit throat singer. This is not easily described. I'm glad I went. She has toured with Bjork, and I can see the mutual attractions. Many of the sounds she made were ones I didn't know the human body could safely produce. They closed with a set of traditional Inuit throat-singing, between Tanya and a female cousin, which was amazingly intimate and sort of kind of like this, though dialed up in intensity quite a bit.

There are two remaining concerts I'm interested in: Blue Dot tonight, and Da Capo tomorrow afternoon. However, we have our friend Lee-Ellen visiting from Ithaca, and I'd rather see her than the concerts!

[1] Vote mob: if you're outside Canuckistan you've probably not heard the term. And fellow Canadians are probably sick and tired of hearing it. In short: a month ago and at a school not very far from here, students decided to Stick it to The Man via YouTube, to counter the claim that "young people don't vote," and there have now been a few dozen youtube-video-driven events along the lines of Flash Mobs, though none I've seen have had amazing music or amazing dancing or amazing anything. Just lots of energy. Being part of the local campus one was... um, sort of silly. But I got to run through mud puddles, which turned out to be fun.

The week so far has been fairly full.

Today I went for an all-day Emergency First Aid training. I'm curious how many of my friends are CPR trained? Either current, or lapsed? (I'd also be curious how many of you have ever used it? I know at least two of my friends have. What's that like for you?)

My training was led by an ex-US Marine, ex-firefighter, with just about as much authority on the subject as I might hope for. It was a really intense day. Hopefully I'll sleep OK tonight; I've been to the gym and had a strong drink, which I think has helped calm my mind down. :)

I wonder how the day's tone would be different with, dunno, a more "boring" instructor. He shared a lot of his macabre sense of humor. One story; he was working as an EMT in Atlanta at the Braves stadium for a big home game. They got the call about a man who collapsed; they got within a few hundred yards and started humping their equipment through the press of crowds, many clustered around the guy who was down. As they got there, they discovered two "good ol' boys" (as he called them) running a jumper-cable from their big truck, engine racing, just about to make contact with the old guy on the ground. Fortunately, they got there just in time; turns out he fainted from the heat, his heart was beating fine, though it wouldn't have if the two dudes had worked faster!

A few things I learned:

1) if someone feels faint, *don't* tell them to put their head between their knees, unless you're holding on to the back of their shirt. If they go unconscious, their head will hit the ground and then they might have spine/head trauma to deal with as well. According to Ian, slouching with head back is perfectly fine.

2) AED's, Automated External Defibrillators, are some really cool technology. The modern ones are designed so anybody can use them (though you can get going a bit faster if you're trained). They will talk to the user, flashing lights to tell them what to connect to the patient and where. They will detect a weak heartbeat and if necessary, send the shock to try and restart their pulse; but if they don't detect any pulse, they will guide the user through CPR steps, including sounding out the beat for chest-compressions.

3) The "First Aid Recovery Position" is the same as it was when I learned it at Cornell when I volunteered at Slope Day, a booze-fest on the last day of classes. Preventing someone from choking on their own vomit is timeless.

On that classy note, what about yesterday?...

Yesterday was the annual campus conference. I gave a talk, on one cross-campus collaboration project I'm involved with. It went ok; the best part was finishing and having lots of leftover time for conversations with people. I saw good talks and so-so talks, and ended on a great note with some students very energetically talking through some mobile dev projects they are working on in spare time. They made me, personally, feel completely not-cutting-edge, but that's fine. Sometimes other people get to be the sharpest knives in the drawer.

After work, I had a fairly difficult phone-call to make relating to some stuff that happened after Quaker Meeting on Sunday, but you know what? It was fine; and it was entirely the right thing to do, and I felt supported by a bunch of people in the Meeting in the process.

Just beforehand, I shoveled snow for the first time this year, and a bunny came over from a few lawns over and sat just across the street, sort of under a bush, watching me the entire time. It was still keeping watch when I went inside. And it helped me stay grounded as I went inside to make that phone-call.

And in the evening, dan took me out for all-you-can-eat tapas, using the thank-you gift-certificate from the talk that he gave yesterday, to a bunch of high-schoolers. (Next year? I think the school will try and avoid having a CS conference for some hundred students on the very same day that most of the technical staff are at their own conference. The combination went OK, but that took a lot of work from lots of dedicated people!)

I went to a potluck on Sunday that was hosted by a variety of grassroots organizations: a Local Foods vendor, barter group, and the local car-share. I happen to be members of none of these, but nobodyhere was.

I had more fun than I expected to. I ran into friends I don't see much (pnijjar ) as well as a coworker and his spouse, who I enjoyed talking with; and also someone who used to come to Quaker Meeting and was wondering about whether she should come with her 2.5-year-old (yes!)

Also, nobodyhere and I brought our dogs; and many outdoor events are better with dogs.

The potluck pot was surprisingly lucky. Among 50 or so participants, I brought the only fruit salad; there were lots singleton main courses, finger foods, and deserts, and all but one dish I tasted was yummy (the non-tasty one was some sort of cheese pie that tasted old). Someone made skor bars. I should try that some time.

Later on Sunday, I finished my Canadian passport application, which included figuring out when I had met my two references. The last five years have been good for me socially.

Tonight, I watched melted_snowball give a 30-minute talk to high-school students; he did an excellent job connecting with them and giving them a positive model for an academic path.

My bike odometer rolled over another 1,000km on my commute home from work. Just before some sort of stinging insect made impact with my nose. Which is still swollen, but by now it doesn't hurt as long as I don't poke at it.

Bless me LJ, for I have been quiet. It has been two weeks since my last post.

Hey, I'm 36! My birthday was low-key; bookended by food: takeout BBQ one night and yummy home-cooked shrimp scampi. And ice-cream on my birthday. 36 so far feels like 35 with more things falling apart.

I've lost track of how many times I've had bike flats in the last month. It's at least five.
Tomorrow morning might be exciting; I'm biking to work by way of the bike shop, to replace the rear tube (again) and tire (overdue). The tube/tire on the bike might hold long enough for me to get there.

On Saturday morning, I went to reinflate my bike tire to the recommended pressure... and didn't notice a hole worn in the tire sidewall. "Hey, that side's bulging. Hey, maybe I should let the air out before it - " BAM! My ears were ringing for a while. I had to laugh out loud at the absurdity. I immediately pictured birds flying in circles around my head.

In the last week, I've had high hopes for a long bike-ride after work, or on the weekend, but with the different flats, it just didn't seem like a good idea. Hindsight, at least two of the flats were caused by wearing through the tire sidewalls. One was glass, one was a bad patch (over a seam) and I don't remember what the rest were. At least I can still say Rapid Flat-Fixes Я Us.

The odometer did roll over another 200 km, Friday evening just after I replaced the n-1th flat on my way home from work; exactly 30 days after the last 200km.

Other stuff falling apart? Goodness. My laptop has been crashing (though I now have Time Machine running backups, so at least that's automated), my phone/camera has been acting finicky, my iPod has been refusing to update again, our front stoop has lost a chunk of stone and now looks a bit gap-toothed, and I think the front doorknob is possibly loose. Whee! Oh, and we're probably going to replace the car reasonably soon, as upkeep costs begin to approach trade-in value. I feel super-lucky, though, that none of these are dire situations, as long as everything doesn't fail simultaneously. (*glares menacingly at laptop, phone, iPod*)

Anyhow, this weekend included a batch of errands, a wonderful walk with roverthedog and melted_snowball in a leash-free dog-park along a river, and a fairly recuperative Pilates session that made me feel all stretchy.

Work recently has included a foray into writing some C code, which is quite challenging for me. So many ways to screw up! But I've hopes that I (and colleagues I can rope into helping) will end up with a minor contribution to OpenSSH. Srs!

Since I last posted, I also went to Philadelphia for a Quaker thang, which was useful at unsticking some "how should I do this" sort of questions I'd been stuck on (and perhaps will post on eventually) and also for some good news about the Quaker Quest program- there will soon be funding to hire some number of additional staff. And then I spent a wonderful afternoon with friends in the Philly area, and we romped in the park with their dog and their 5-year-old, AND had a visit from NJ friends who came into town for the afternoon; and then they fed me soup and brownies and sent me on my flight back home with a big smile on my face.