Posted on by mwhybark

Edging

Lately I have been working my way around the sprawled furl of moss and crabgrass that is our lawn, where it intersects with and overlaps the mysteriously vast expanses of slurred and broken concrete aprons and purposeless cement curbs that measure our property’s internal geometry. The tools I use as I ruthlessly demarcate, again, the boundary between the organic and the architectural are a square-end spade and a half-moon edger, the geometer’s straight edge and half circle, Apollo’s rule and Diana’s curve.

Reclaiming the formerly fringed and fronded concrete is hard work, and leaves me sore and winded each evening before I clamber up the steps to the kitchen to cook dinner. It’s the only exercise I have been getting since moving out past the end of the sidewalk.

The mats of mossy grass and grassy moss I dismember are generous in scope, in some cases nearly a foot wide and a couple of yards long. Some of the trimmed flash is nearly pure moss, and has the soft, light texture of human hair. Loth to simply chuck the trimmed turf, I have been laying it atop areas of the lawn previously denuded due to shade and root competition, expecting to prune the overhangs shortly.

As I step, hard, onto the lip of the edger, feeling the satisfying ‘chunk’ of the blade as it scrapes along the edges of this concrete coffer or that cracked pavement, I muse and curse. I don’t believe the work I’m performing is moral. I believe it’s an expression of the spirit of evil in the world, of territoriality and division and inorganic order over biological diversity and lushness. I’m the executioner. I’m the enforcer. I’m wasting my time and at the same time committing sins against my nature and that of the world.

I’m probably going to need some pretty decent pruning shears when I get to the bushes and the trees.

Posted on by mwhybark

Discrete Data and Discretion

Attention, geeks:

I have an interesting database problem that I must grok to determine a course of action.

I have set N, a set of n datasets. The datasets are consistently formed flat-file tables. For each of the sources of members of N, there is a distinct schema.

For reasons of data purity and to minimize the differentation between the source set and the working set, I have chosen not to normalize the tables when I bring them into a workspace and add a presentation layer. Currently, the presentation layer is recoded for each dataset’s schema.

The flat-file tables are saved as text files and imported into Access to an Access table which has at least the same structure as the flat-file, but which also includes additional columns. For purposes of this musing, consider this a generic SQL question.

The presentation layer – the UI – incorporates some minor aggregation and analysis which is enacted when the record is displayed, but not stored.

What I’d like to understand is if it’s possible or advisable to add a layer of abstraction under the UI which would permit me to display records from each or all of the members of the datasets without having to either work out the full normalization for all the tables or having to unify the tables’ schemas to accomplish a simple normalization. The reason I;d prefer to avoid doing this is to simplify errorchecking in the case of observed discrepancies between the working data and the source data.

For example

table MYPETS and table YOURPETS contain similar data in differing schema.

MYPETS:

Name Nickname Size Weight Breed Species

Chloe Chloe-bo Small 6 lb Mixed Housecat

Simon Sweetypie Medium 8lb Mixed Housecat

YOURPETS

Nickname FirstName LastName Kilos Diet PeltColor Size

Poo-poo Sherlock Smith 6 Vegetarian “White with Spots” Medium

Linus Linus Smith .2 Birdseed “Green feathers” Small

I can discard the unique-to table data in the UI, so what I’d keep is (Name, Firstname, Lastname, Size) for display.

What to do?

Posted on by mwhybark

Freddy

AZ posts an unresolved reflection on an acquaintance’s puffery, prompting a recollection of my own on the theme.

During the tail end of high school and early college, I was friends with a street drunk named Freddy, “Freddy the Biker,” to give his full moniker.

“I’se just a broke-down ol’ scooter tramp without a scooter,” he’d say, by way of intro or explanation. Fred was originally from “the Region,” the megaplex around Gary, Indiana, and had run with a few MCs, according to him, over the late sixties to late seventies. When I knew him, he was a profound alcoholic prone to passing out and wetting himself. Despite this, his weatherbeaten face and inexhaustible repertoire of entertaining stories of rock and roll shenanigans – and his happy willingness to buy booze for underage drinkers – endeared him to my social circle.

One of the many things Fred claimed to have done in his life was to have worked as a roadie for innumerable rock bands. Among others, he claimed Metallica, Iron Maiden, and the Sex Pistols, on their sole American tour until reforming in the 1990s. The Pistols claim, for sheer improbability, was subject to the greatest interrogation and elaboration.

Before I met Fred, I had a photo poster of the Pistols taken during a concert presented in Austin Texas during the 1979 1978 tour. In the shot, Sid Vicious, the band’s second bassist, is caught mid-pogo, and his feet are clearly visible. He was wearing full-height engineer boots, the motorcycle boot that has a single buckle and a clearly defined block heel. Full-height boots reach to protect the entire calf and shin.

This image formed my idea of desirable footwear and for twenty years thereafter engineer boots were my preferred footgarb.

The day I first set steel taps to resist the rapid heel wear on the heels of my first low-rise engineer boots, I slipped and stumbled at a party in front of Freddy. He remarked, laughing, “You need to learn to walk on steel, boy!”

That night, I pressed him, disbelieving, about roadie-ing for the Pistols. He told me that it was a fun gig and that “the boys” were just folks. Except, he said, for Sid.

Fred claimed that Sid was the nicest kid most of the time, but that sometimes he would “get an idea” and that you couldn’t talk him out of it. The particular example he gave was that in Austin Texas (a city place I knew the band had played but which I did not mention to Fred), Sid had admired his motorcycle boots. They were, it seems, high boots that Fred had just bought, happy to have the money for some durable footwear. Vicious, it seems, would not be put off, and he badgered Fred into giving him the boots.

When I heard this story, I was utterly skeptical, but suspended critique in respect of Fred’s entertainment value. A few years later, I heard that Fred had died of complications from an infection brought about by an untreated cut on his foot – he’d contracted gangrene and the amputation came too late to save him. He died, and I understand was buried, in New Orleans, a perfectly appropriate place.

Years later, I read Jon Savage’s detailed account of punk rock, circa 1974-1980, England’s Dreaming. In the book, Savage incorporates an anecdote about Vicious on the US tour, in which the Pistol badgers an unnamed roadie into giving up his brand new pair of calf-high motorcycle boots just before the band’s Austin Texas show.

Freddy, here’s to ya.

Posted on by mwhybark

Vidpod

I have spent a portion of my weekend messing with RSS and The Democracy Player, per the instructions linked, and so far, so good, although my DSL speed is slow enough to consign this to permanent experiment until I finalize the LAN setup and shanghai one of the G4s as a dedicated media server.

The Times has a look at the burgeoning world of IPTV content production: As Internet TV Aims at Niche Audiences, the Slivercast Is Born.

One of my longtime colleagues has been oriented to providing IPTV instructional programming for over a decade now – it really seems like this should be his moment. I wonder if he has rights to all the content he’s produced over the past ten years? On a related note, I wonder what would happen if I started considering my weekly pitchlist as the basis for video content as well? In particular, a subset of my story ideas are always how-tos, reviews, and explanatory material. A typical magazine story yields 500 to 700 words and takes less than a minute to read, in my experience. If that 700 words could be recast as a three-minute-script and shot at the time the article is prepared, I think there might be a decent microcontent media property, as long as the subject matter is sufficiently consistent.

Some of these ideas could also very productively apply to SIFFblog, I think. Hmmm.