Wednesday, 24th o March 2004
"Listen, are you waiting for a flood? Man, look at those pants."
"Hey, I like them like that. I'm prepared at all times!"
"And you, look at that old guayabera, VERY stylish."
"This shirt is quality. Q-u-a-l-i-t-y. I've had this shirt for over 15 years. You can't get that kind of quality today."
"Oh, sure," he laughed poking the man's shirt.
"Man, check that out?" pointing to a sexy bombshell on the morning TV show.
"Ay Dios Mío mami."
"I'd like a slice of that!"
"What are you gonna get?" Another asked.
"Coffee and some oatmeal."
"To go?"
"Hey, let a man finish his coffee and toast. You have some hurry?"
"Well some people have things to do. We can't sit around on our asses and pretend to be useful."
Chuckles all around.
(Overheard conversation of a group of three 60 year old+ in a local bakery in Puerto Rico).
Monday, 22nd o March 2004
There isn't any symbolism. The apple is just an apple. The seeds are seeds. The sidewalk is a sidewalk. The ants are all ants no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know.
I just happened to be caught briefly channeling Hemingway on the way home. So sue me.
Saturday, 13th o March 2004
Just got in from a wonderful party, so I'm a little buzzed. Well, actually, I can't feel my fingers as I type this. Chuckle. My sister-in-law, who is Lebanese, had an Arab-Lebanese party. Wow, what a nice time. We drank, smoked the water pipe, laughed, told stories, ate tabbouleh, babacanush, humus, kabobs of chicken, and a bunch of things that I will never ever be able to spell.
Juan Carlos brought some fabulous Rioja red wine. That got the thing rolling as we took liberally of these fermented red grapes. Todd, an ethnic American, who became friends with Miray's brother, Lebanon and his party crew, was an old hat with the whole thing. He knew most of the basic Arabic terms and greetings, and seemed comfortable with his assimilation into his adopted context outside of his own. He reminded me a little bit of myself with the Puerto Rican crowd. Something about them demanded my attention. They accepted me and I fell in, eventually marrying into the culture. Todd, Mikey, Lebanon and Rami were a party group extraordinaire.
Then somebody brought a couple of water pipes, one of which was new, being used in a group setting for the first time. They fiddled with it, complaining about the tightness, the newness of the fitting, poking holes in the aluminum foil to aerate the tobacco. No good, and away and away we puffed pulling the heat into the tobacco through the water and into our mouths trying to get a good draw. The cherry infused smoke was aromatic and we were even able to convince most of the women to give it a go.
A dance began with a particularly rhythmic song, as the hostess and her brother, Lebanon began to circle in a traditional form. Arm in arm they circled, laughing and dancing, winding their way through the house.
Most of the evening was spend chuckling, drinking, sharing stories and trying to get a good draw on the water pipes. I spend my fair share drawing deeply. It was truly wonderful, and eventually we began to get a good smoke. "This pipe is smoking good now," they would say, as they fiddled with the other. I came and I went, as I chased down Jaimito, checked on Olaia and Laura to see how they were and what they were up to, but I kept making my way back to that pipe. There was just something about it.
I was an extremely nice time because of how differently the experiences played out from what I'm used to. It was interesting and wonderful to enjoy good times, but in a slightly different context. The brotherhood of man, shared over tobacco, something as old as human-kind itself, takes on a perspective of closeness, seen from an angle that makes me take notice. Sharing the water pipe, puffing, and laughing and passing, gives a visceral and immediate context to our lives. Sometimes we forget about the commonality we all share, and it is a dead dried plant and some spittle that brings it back into focus. What am I talking about? What else could that be? We all come into this life the same way and we all leave it eventually. What we miss is all those wonderful details in the middle, those simple banal things upon which we rarely focus, quickly and recklessly moving onto the next thing, the next destination. The same feeling, I believe, can be found in other rituals around the world, a Japanese tea ceremony, a Basque cider house, Catholic mass, tribal or native dance, or a simple sharing of the hunt, alcohol, or smoke. Taken in moderation and shared amongst people in a certain context they can be powerful rituals of remembrance.
Bah, but I write such drivel. Perhaps tomorrow I will be able to communicate this in a better fashion. I feel like I do it such little justice with these numb fingers and this swirling "mente" of mine.
Thursday, 11th o March 2004
I have this distinct impression that I am beginning to write for an audience (as I see my unsolicited visitors increase). It's starting to bother me, so let me return to some weird moments of reflection that possibly only I could enjoy.
This is for you, little apple. I write these words of remembrance.
I was eating an apple while driving home from the Puerto Rico Products Association today. I was travelling through the urban setting, a decidedly un-vegetation friendly environment. I reflected that if I had been in the country, I would have tossed my apple core from the car into the tropical foliage. Drat, I am here in the city. The apple core is an eye sore. How would I like apple cores on my side walk, sitting there, collecting ants and turning brown in the hot sun? The apple that falls on the concrete of the city has no chance for life, and in the best of cases is an ugly mess.
In the country, though, it would have a chance to grow into an apple tree. Ah, but I have eaten the flesh of the apple, the flesh that would give its small seeds the nourishment for new life. I have done such violence to these poor little things. They would stand no chance to achieve life if left to their own devices. They are done whether on the side walk or the forest. They were done in by me, by my hungry apple flesh eating mouth.
The poor devils.
Thursday, 26th o February 2004
Jesus' saved bash session
How Linux will Save the World, part II
to be read while listening to Queen's "I'm Going Slightly Mad"
Everything and everyone is a file, no more than a file, no less.
We all strive to be big monolithic programs, with fancy buttons, big memory footprints, environments where people, if they want to do anything, must go through us. We strive to be pre-eminent on the desktop, world stage. We crave fame. Look at me we say. Look how important I have become. I am an Office Suite, hear me roar. Look how much I can do. If you want to do any work, you must come through me.
Yet, quietly, the hand of the messiah shushes us and compassionately tells us we don't want that burden. You do so for your own glory and not the glory of the community, the glory of your siblings. You channel them through yourself because you deem yourself important and indispensable. You are indeed talented, he gently says laying his hand on your shoulder, but where do you wish to go with this? To what end do you hope to arrive? Sooner or later the load on your shoulders will be too great, the bloat uncontrollable, unwieldy. You will not be extensible. You may be the greatest that has ever been born, but the strain is not something I should visit upon you. Why do you think I gave you brothers and sisters - GNU? Bash? These are your salvation. These are your tools to interconnectedness, these are the gifts that will lead you to the sublime.
Be at ease, big program, you are but a file, but you are not JUST a file. You are a node that links together this network, wherein shall you fish. They made you fishers of data, I shall make you fishers of knowledge.
I still haven't been able to shake this mania that I've been under... it's like a Linux spell. I have been hacking on Altamente's server products for like two months straight, going to bed around 2 am every night. If I didn't know better, I would have thought I'd wound up on the night shift. In my delirium, today, I had a vision, a waking dream, a incandescent glow-induced hallucination about the universe and my place in it.
In the paradigm of Linux, everything is a file. I see files everywhere, I interact with them, their inodes, links to them both symbolic and hard. They are physical tangible objects to me. I know this interaction like an old shoe. I've been using it off and on since 1989, and it fits, or perhaps like that old shoe, I've broken it in, and I fit it as much as it fits me.
Take MDA's for example (Mail Delivery Agents), where mail goes before it winds up in your Outlook folders *rolls eyes*. Some use a format called mbox, which was one big glommed together gigantic pile of bits, a big sloppy ball of wax, just waiting to explode in your face every time a new mail arrived. You had to have all kinds of special tools to extract, prune, or otherwise manipulate this file. Everything had to be custom written especially for that stinking format. Delete a mail? Well, first, lock your mbox, then back it up, then rm. No? Oh, you need a special delete program specifically designed to work with that file. Wah, I want to use rm.
When the choice of Maildir delivery arrived with qmail, it was like that old familiar world of Unix. It made sense again. I could use regular filesystem tools to deal with these mailboxes. If wanted to clean out old mails, cron, grep, find, rm, and bash were all I needed. Fantastic!
#!/bin/bash
find /var/spool/qmailscan/quarantine/ -name "*mango*" \
-a -type f -a -mtime +2 | while read file
do
rm "$file"
done
This is a bash program I use on mango to wipe out any quarantined virus email after 2 days. We get a ton of them, and without this tiny little program, the server would fill up. However, we'd still like to have a disposition of a couple of days in case we need to check it out before deleting it. See how simple this is? We use cron to run this little script every day at a set hour. The above is a program. The above is just as sophisticated as anything with buttons, checkboxes, and a gui - but it's better. This little jewel is an autonomous agent capable of performing the same task every day without failure for as long as it has electricity. In short, after I write this little thing, I never have to look at it again. It does what I need it to do, reliably and without intervention.
I've written tons of little one or two line programs to do everything from take poorly formatted word documents of data and massage them into suitable formats for publication in HTML or injection into a database or mailing list. I get these things sometimes in such poor shape. I run a few tiny teenie little bitty itsy one function programs like grep, cat, tr, and awk and I've got a nicely formatted list, table, or structured document.
My point is this: I wonder if there is a place for people like me in the future of IT. I don't even fancy myself a programmer. I do okay, but I've never written a program over a 1,000 lines in my life, and 99% of the them are less than a 100. See what I mean? I almost always can string together pre-built GNU utilities, rm, find, grep, cat, sort, gawk, bash, cp, touch, tr, bc, diff, mv, sed, tar, and many others.
I feel like this monk of the arcane, cloistered away from the buzzing of corporate dollars, fancy slogans, glossy programs, big deals. I am but a little worm hidden away from all of this, competently hacking out one useful task after another with no more needs than a square meal, a comfortable bed, an old PII, and a decent net connection.
We must teach our brethren the ways of the Unix shell, for if we don't we will forever be trapped handcuffed in that big shiny plastic bubble of modern life, where we see but we can't interact. We must go back, back to the beginning and learn the first lessons. We must relearn that it is only through connection, collaboration shall we achieve, shall we be saved.