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Hot, frothy, cocoa and crusty birote (which is a Mexican bread that, in Guadalajara and in my lonely opinion, tastes a lot like a Manhattan plain bagel). Nothing is meant with the title, it’s but a wonderful saying.
I’ve been pretty uncomfortable these days with this blog.
“I remember James Agee who worked in the obituaries at Time magazine for many years said that for a young writer it was always useful to work within the limitation of a form to feel the cage. To feel the burden of that; that I have to be a writer within this formality. “
I understand that and yet I want a change of cage. It may be foolish, but so what? It may not. I want something more à la Gelernter’s information beams. I want my blog to be a stream-of-consciousness. The textstream to the right of this blog has been one of my favorite and most active sections lately but I’m sure most simply miss it. It feels odd there, buried at the side, violating some deep semantic principle, overcrowding the already overcrowded sidebar. I much prefer Kottke’s elegant solution to it: remaindered links. I envision a page with only two vertical sections: the right a weird, tagged aggregator of posts, text scraps, links, and photos, the left the commentstream.These days, even pigeons have blogs. They provide them with electronic recording equipment and their output is automatically fed into a blog. —Wait! Pause for a minute to wonder how profoundly weird that is. Done? Go!— In a way I’m like that, sometimes I’m but a text pigeon, reporting what I find amid the words. And I’m proud of that. Y es que quiero que mi pensamiento deje estelas. Poe’s Murder in the Rue Morgue comes to mind: |
| Because we can | 2 0 0 6 |
Apr 17 |
Or I could tell you about the time Apple released an unbelievably cool, unbelievably wasteful, 3d-rotating user-switching. The best description I read, and it still reads on the feature page: “Because we can.”
| Are we suddenly christians? | 2 0 0 6 |
Apr 17 |
“Once long ago, when Japan was still struggling to enter the modern age, we let ourselves be ruled by our military. Soldiers were our masters, and they led us into an evil war, to conquer nations that had done us no wrong.”
“We paid for our crimes when atomic bombs fell on our islands.”
“Paid?” cried Aimaina. “What is to pay or not to pay? Are we suddenly Christians, who pay for sins? No. The Yamato way is not to pay for error, but to learn from it.”
I’m hungry for Japan.
Btw, Children of the Mind is the 4th book in Orson Scott Card’s Ender Saga. Card noticeably risks a whole lot more than in previous books, too much at times and he often fails, but at others, he really shines.
| Todo pasa, hasta la ciruela pasa | 2 0 0 6 |
Apr 17 |
I really don’t know what led me to spin this whole tale from the vaguest of memories when I read this post but it did. (The teacher, btw, is almost surely Dorothy, my Mexican History teacher… or perhaps that cool Spanish teacher whose name I’m forgetting now.) Parece que tengo futuro como redactor de comerciales de Aplijsa.
“But,” and the monarch looked at his son in the eye as he put the ring on his finger, ”’they will pass’, and that wisdom is my gift to you.” The prince nodded gravely and yet distant, blithely enveloped in the abstractness of youth.
“Wait,” said the king, as his son was leaving his royal chamber, “there’s one more thing. Perhaps the day will come to you, as it came to me, when not even these words will be enough. There’s a hidden message on the back of this ring, therein lies the rest of my wisdom. It shall give you hope, as it gave it to me. You must not read it until then.” And with that, he sent his son away to enjoy his day.
Time passed. The king died a few years later and our prince succeeded him, proving himself a king as noble and wise as his father. He was very successful but he was not without his share of tragedy; the ring was his companion at those times, and indeed it gave him hope when there was none.
But soon after his 40th birthday, terror stroke his kingdom, a plague with no parallel even in legends devoured his entire country. It took her wife and his two children away, and so it did to almost half of his subjects. His kingdom was crumbling, reverting to a state of chaos, and there was generalized despair. His people turned to him for guidance but he found none within himself. But just when he entertained thoughts on his own death he remembered his father’s ring. He took it away slowly and, after some hesitation, read the hidden message. He cried happy tears at the sight of those four letters; he had found his hope.
In clear-cut white letters, the back of the ring read only: “This, too, shall pass.”
| If you should bow, bow deeply | 2 0 0 6 |
Apr 17 |
Today I acquired a newfound respect for journalists and a new reminder of just how easy it is to fool oneself. More details will follow but this note tonight is for me, I don’t want to forget this moment.
| Ven devórame otra vez | 2 0 0 6 |
Apr 14 |
“Y mi mente ha parido nostalgia por no verte ya… Hasta en sueños he creÃdo tenerte devorándome, y he mojado mis sábanas blancas recordándote”. Extraña esta cancion de Lalo Rodriguez, Ven devórame otra vez. Es tan burda que es chida in a campy sort of way. De cualquier forma, es destacable por el solo hecho de ser una canción inmensamente popular (hasta yo la conozco) que menciona (aunque algo eufemÃsticamente) la masturbación y los “sueños húmedos”.
| RAE y sus acentos | 2 0 0 6 |
Apr 13 |
A pesar de sus terriblemente anacronistas definiciones y su interfaz decimononica, el diccionario de la Real Academia de la Lengua Española es utilisimo y le agradezco sinceramente a la Real Academia que lo tenga en linea gratuitamente. Aclarado eso, el pet peeve que me mueve hoy a escribir sobre ella es su extraña fijacion con los acentos. A pesar de que dispone, sensatamente, de una busqueda por aproximacion que me permite buscar palabras sin tener que escribir acentos, me restrega siempre en la cara el no haberlos escritos. Por ejemplo, si yo busco “redaccion”, me manda a una pagina de redireccionamiento en la que me dice que “La palabra redaccion no está registrada en el Diccionario.” y procede a darme una larga lista de un link, obviamente, “redacción”. Es decir, me fuerza a aceptar conscientemente una opcion que se da, de sobra, por entendido. Parecera poco y hasta me rei la primera que lo vi pero ya por la sexagesima vez que ocurre empieza a perder lo gracioso.
Claro que quizas todo sea solo pesimo usability design de su parte, pero conociendo a la Academia lo dudo, a mi me huele a pura mala leche linguistica, a esa sabida preferencia real-academica de la prescripcion sobre la descripcion.
| Caja Negra... VIVE! | 2 0 0 6 |
Apr 12 |
Today I had decided I was finally taking Caja Negra—a political web app of mine—online after so many failed attempts (I’m so sleep deprived now that I get dizzy, really dizzy, just looking at the screen). At first I thought it was a problem with Rake and so I started by reading it’s online documentation. It proved a dead end but it turns out Rake is a pretty interesting thing (and so are Rails migrations).
I decided to read some more on the Login Engine itself, and I read, much belatedly, that it is bloated and hard to modify. That has been precisely my experience—and yet, it was very useful to me and after some friendly fisticuffs we learned to get along. Many thanks to James Adam for it.
I finally decided to start the deployment all over again, from scratch, carefully checking the tiniest step. It all narrowed down to a simple command, “rake engine_migrate ENGINE=login”, that just wouldn’t run. I found some people with the same problem but no working solution.
So I kept reading and trying all sorts of different versions of the command once in a while, like a kid magician who just can’t pronounce the incantation correctly.
Along the way, I finally found out why my blog was dead a couple of days ago. It turns out TextDrive rolled out the new version of Rails (1.1) but it was incompatible with Typo and so they rolled it back. They now advise people to freeze (new word for me) your Typo to Rails 1.0 or update to the new, compatible version of the blogging engine. Even DHH apologized in the name of the core team for all the trouble the upgrade caused. TextDrive’s Justin French, on the other hand, was as diplomatic as usual when someone expressed the caring hope that people get notified about what they should do:
That crankiness is actually one of the reasons I enjoy TextDrive. Masochism, they call it.
Anyway, I was definitely getting nearer. I was now sure that what I needed was to freeze my web-app to Rails 1.1. Blessed yerejm gave some instructions for how to do just that here. But the simple conjuration, “rake rails:freeze:edge REVISION=4091”, wasn’t working. I stared hopelessly at the screen for some 20 minutes, thinking about what could be the problem. Then it hit me, probably out of some small passage that I must have read in the realms of documentation I skimmed today, that last colon should probably be an underscore for me. And it all worked.
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