iTunes... when it's free.

I'm a computer geek. One may infer two important things from this admission. First, that I like gadgets (and for the most part this is true). Secondly, that I like caffeine. This is also true.

I'm also cheap, as many can attest to.

These two are related, at least for purposes of this missive.

For the past few months, Pepsi has had this promotional campaign whereby 1 out of every 3 (in theory) bottlecaps of select Pepsi products (see also "overly-sugared chemical glop") has a code on it, redeemable at the iTunes site for a free song (retail value 99 cents).

I have managed to bat at least .500 in the redemption department as far as this scam goes. I even have my wife and some of my co-workers giving me their "winning" caps. I've downloaded a bunch of songs at this point, from all sorts of genres. It's whatever strikes my fancy at that given moment. Just this week, I snagged various songs by Public Enemy, Queen, Green Day, Vengelis, Gordon Lightfoot, Cake, Yes, and The Magnetic Fields. Wheeeee! All this and a Mountain Dew buzz too.

Steve Jobs... John Sculley... Apple... Pepsi... it's a conspiracy come full-circle. In this case, everyone's selling sugared water and changing the world.

sleep. at long last, sleep.

Terri Schiavo has died.

Sleep well, Terri.

Be gone, self-important politicians and crazed religious zealots. Everyone's gone through enough already.

the words are a beautiful music.

Robert Creeley has died. He was a former professor of mine (OK, full disclosure: he guest-taught a few poetry classes of mine; since he'd long since achieved emeritus status, he wasn't actually teaching as much then) in the English department at SUNY-Buffalo. He was one of the big heavyweights they'd had there as long ago as the early '60s: he was colleagues with lit-crit god Leslie Fiedler (also deceased) , po-mo historical novelist par excellence John Barth (now at Johns Hopkins), and break-all-the-rules-with-clam-dip Charles Bernstein (now at Penn). He was at Buffalo for nearly 40 years, having only recently accepted a position at Brown. When he died, he was in mid-stint as a visiting scholar at the Lannan Foundation in Marfa, TX. A native of these parts (Arlington, MA, which I never knew until I read his obit), he's to be buried in Cambridge Cemetery, where other greats are also forever interred (Henrys James and Longfellow, O.W. Holmes, J.R. Lowell, Bernard Malamud).

This makes me want to go home and read Howl with a glass of single-malt.

I'd call Creeley the thinking man's Bukowski (for language, not behavior), or maybe the Beats' Shelley. Yes, he was that big.

You can read some of his work here.

"freedom is a dangerous thing."

More wingnut action in Florida.

The crux: students who disagree with their professors' teachings will have the right to sue them if this law passes. This goes for Holocaust revisionists, Creationists, and other intellectual giants of our age.

My favorite inevitable soundbite: "Freedom is a dangerous thing[...]" - Rep. Dennis Baxley, R-Ocala

well put.

This columnist says it better than I could ever hope to.

From Bloomberg.com, 3/24/2005:

"A Letter to My Family in Light of Terri's Law" -- by Ann Woolner

Dear Loved Ones (and your lawyers):

If I should wind up in a persistent vegetative state with no reasonable chance of recovery, please let me die in peace.
Specifically:
1. Do not involve Congress in my condition. To resolve any disagreement among you, litigate if you must, but keep Congress out of it. Congress's job is to enact laws of general interest, not to settle family disputes or to give the losing side in a lawsuit more chances than anyone else gets.
2. Tell the president and the governor to stay out of it, too. Like members of Congress, they are more focused on their own interests than mine. My condition and my wishes are best determined at trial, where evidence is weighed, not by politicians giving vent to public emotion.
3. Do not involve the state legislature in my condition, either.
See Numbers 1 and 2.
4. If so-called pro-life or other advocacy groups claim to speak for me, please make it clear that they do not. I abhor the idea that people might use my diminished state as fodder for their cause.
5. Do not allow cameras to capture my likeness after my brain has essentially stopped working, not even for litigation purposes.
Compared to brain scans, video of what's left of me is all but useless in deciding what my brain is doing, and selective airing of excerpts would distort the truth. Besides, I don't want millions of strangers watching me in such a condition.

A Sad Case

That such instructions might be necessary is a sad commentary on the very sad case of Terri Schiavo.
The truth of her case has been lost while interest groups and politicians have been using her poor body to push their own agendas.
More frightening is the loss of any sense of the constitutional roles of the three branches of government, or the constitutional differentiation between state and federal roles.
"This Congress is on the verge of telling states, courts, judges and juries that their decisions do not matter," U.S. Representative Jim Davis, a Florida Democrat, said as he urged his colleagues not to grant Schiavo's parents an extraordinary round in federal court because they couldn't get what they wanted out of state courts.
The House passed it anyway, by a stunning vote of 203 to 58.

Constitutional Responsibility

"I believe it unwise for the Congress to take from the state of Florida its constitutional responsibility to resolve the issues in this case," said Senator John Warner, a Virginia Republican. The Senate approved the measure on voice vote.
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, a Republican from Texas, would have us believe that Congress was acting to protect Schiavo's constitutional right to life.
Wrong.
The 14th Amendment prohibits the government from taking life without due process of law. No one can say with a straight face and uncrossed fingers that Schiavo's parents have not had due process as they have tried to prolong her life.
"Ten courts and 19 judges all have reached the same conclusion,"
Representative James P. Moran Jr., a Virginia Democrat, said on the floor of the House in the late Sunday night and early Monday morning session.

Seven Years of Litigation

Add to Moran's count one U.S. District Court judge and 10 federal appeals court judges who this week said the chance of the Schindlers's prevailing is so slim that feeding and hydration tubes should not be re-inserted, not even temporarily to provide time to hear the full merits of the case.
The very fact that after seven years of litigation, Robert and Mary Schindler called on state and federal lawmakers, a governor and a president to intervene shows how little evidence they have on their side.
Their desperate actions are understandable, given that Terri is, after all, their daughter. What's unforgivable is that elected officials have been going along with them instead of insisting that the law rules.
Every court that has looked at the merits has said that Terri Schiavo's husband is rightly her legal guardian, that the evidence is clear and convincing that she would not want to live in her condition, and that she has no chance at recovery.
"The evidence is overwhelming that Theresa is in a permanent or persistent vegetative state," the Florida Second District Court of Appeal said in 2001. Her state is not "simply a coma," from which some people emerge.

Err on the Side of the Law

Her cerebral cortex has liquefied, the judges have found, based on brain scans and other medical evaluations. For her to regain functions, someone would have to invent a way to recreate this essential part of the brain.
Allegations of abuse, claims of new treatments, and accusations that Michael Schiavo denied his wife therapy have all been tested in court and found not true. Courts have given the Schindlers far more leeway in pressing their claims than the rules required.
None of that seems to matter to Congress, the Florida legislature, to President George W. Bush or his brother, Florida Governor Jeb Bush, all of whom have intervened in the Schiavo case. At least the Florida legislature, which gave in to the Schindlers before, has rebuffed another attempt. The U.S. Supreme Court also refused to order reinsertion of the feeding tube.
When President Bush signed the law Congress passed in the middle of the night, he said, "In extraordinary circumstances like this, it is wisest to always err on the side of life."
What Terri Schiavo has is not life in any way that she would want to experience it, the courts have repeatedly ruled.
And here's point 6:
Even if I were in Terri Schiavo's place, I would want what I want now, a president who errs on the side of the law."

---

Surprisingly, even today's New York Post, ordinarily an almost-reactionary tabloid, asks to let Terri go in peace.

this pretty much sums it up.

David Rees hits the nail right on the proverbial head:

What I fail to comprehend is that the conservative Pinellas County judge who ruled against reinserting Schiavo's tube in the past few days has received numerous death threats for his actions. Funny (that's tragic, ironic funny, not ha-ha funny) how the death threat often seems to be the favored form of debate for the conservative bonkjob.

Q: Tell me, Mr. Conservative Bonkjob... do you disagree with me regarding my stance on [insert essentially any pertinent topic here]?
A: Why yes, I most certainly do.
Q: OK, then, let's discuss it.
A: No thanks, I'd rather just scorn you and your kind and threaten you with death.

I also find it interesting that the collapse that led to Terri Schiavo's present state was probably prompted by an electrolyte imbalance brought about by bulemia. So perhaps this whole thing could have been prevented from the get-go by someone noticing Terri's psychological condition and getting her some help. But that's a whole other Pandora's Box.

he be illin'.

My little boy is ill. We all returned home from a long (for many reasons) Easter weekend in Buffalo (yes, we did those long overnight drives -- there and back -- and he slept most of the time, thanks to a brilliant suggestion from my better half), only to discover early this morning that the little boy has some sort of stomach bug, or is suffering some sort of food poisoning, or something. I know that the usual seasonal flu-type of thing is going around, but I'd think that his chances of contracting something like this would be lessened somewhat by the very fact that he has essentially no interaction with any other little kids, since he doesn't go to daycare. We did see his little cousin this weekend (my brother's 19-month-old daughter), who's supposedly well into an antibiotic regimen for some sort of malady (the details of which are presently sketchy), so there's one potential vector. Another theory is that he could've eaten baby food from a "bad batch," which is not unheard of. At any rate, he's sick, and none of us are happy about it. I'm sure it's something benign, but I still have those new-parent nerves.

I hope he gets better soon.

shuffle off to Buffalo

In about 3 hours, my wife, my son, my sister and I will pile into our 1998 Ford Explorer and drive through the night to Buffalo for the Easter weekend. There are several reasons why this is completely and unabashedly insane.

First, the family (namely, mine, since I'm from there; the wife hails from suburban Boston). 'Nuff said. The ties that bind and gag and all that. :-)

Secondly, the drive. Originally, the plan called for my wife and I to wake up at the normal time (that is, whevener the kid woke us up), load up the car, get gas, swing by Harvard Square to get my sis, then hit the road, Jack. However, this morning, the wife was struck with this little spacenugget of brilliance: why not drive there at night? I have to admit, my initial reaction was something along the lines of what the fuck for?! Then it dawned at me: when does the kid sleep? Right! When all other sane, normal people do -- at night. If we drive at night, that may increase the likelihood of the boy actually sleeping en route. Had we driven during the day, we'd have screwed up his napping/feeding/playing/babbling schedule. This way, he'll (hopefully) sleep throughout much of the journey, and only his mother, father and aunt will have their schedules screwed up. :-)

Aah, nothing a couple hours' nap can't fix, right? Breakfast in Buffalo... JJ's or Amy's Place, anyone?

That's one thing I love about going back to the old sod: the food. Ask any ex-pat from Buffalo what they miss most, and chances are they'll say something pertaining to food. You can't really go wrong with a town that has Wegmans, the original Chicken Wings, Bocce's Pizza, Anderson's Custard and Beef-on-Weck? I'm drooling already (and my cholesterol is skyrocketing)... :-)

If I can just swing visits with my two buddies still living there, all will be grand. Provided familial bliss reigns o'er all the land, too -- that would help.

letting go

Fer Pete's sake, people, let poor Terri Schiavo go, with what's left of her dignity. Sometimes it's all just about quality of life, and where's the quality in having a machine breathe for you?

Let Terri go. She deserves to sleep after going through all this nonsense.

a chip off the old mitochondrion

My wife took our son to the pediatrician this afternoon. She called me to report that he's just under 30 inches in length (90th percentile), and 21 pounds 14 ounces in weight (75th-90th percentile). And he just turned 9 months last week.

Big sucker, ain't he? :-)

mortality and mercy in Mendocino

One of the things I've been peeking at lately is a small newspaper's "investigation" (I use the term loosely) of what could arguable be called an attempted murder. In 1990, radical environmentalist Judi Bari and a companion were in her car in Oakland, CA when a pipe bomb detonated inside the car under her seat. This event, and the lives of the people involved in it, have spawned a host of investigations, documentaries, books, vitriolic press conferences, radio shows, op-eds, you name it.

Check out the archive. You may even be compelled to rethink your own sense of where you stand on the environmental movement (or movements -- there are many different stripes and temperaments) and the law as it pertains to violent behavior. This stuff is about as close to libelous as I'd think it would get.

Reading this demented yet entertaining stuff reminds me of Thomas Pynchon's novel Vineland, which, like the events of the Bari bombing, take place in rural northern California. I'd always thought I'd want to live in this area (I lived in San Francisco for two years, which, though only a couple of hours south, is in many ways worlds away), but the more I read about it, the more I want to stick with my own brand of hep urbanism. ;-)

The newspaper itself makes for an interesting read. Fill out their simple form online and you can get a free honest-to-goodness real paper trial issue. It's sort of like Dr. Dobb's Journal meets the Socialist Worker, with a smattering of Emma Goldman thrown in to make things somewhat indendiary.

literary diversions

Life grew exponentiallly more complicated when our son was born. Much of that has to do, for me, with not being on top of my game. I have poor time-management skills, and I procrastinate a lot. If I were to fall off the roof of the Sears Tower, I doubt I'd plummet to my death in seconds -- I'd probably get around to it eventually, stopping by on the way down for coffee or to pick up The Atlantic or something.

When I'm not sometimes overwhelmed by life, I try to get some reading done. Some of it is for fun: I enjoy lengthy tomes (Infinite Jest, V., Cryptonomicon, etc.) -- something my wife calls torturous. The latest is Gravity's Rainbow, which has incredible language and imagery, though it's not as rollicking and cerebrum-squeezing as, say, this, or maybe this, which I'm also chewing my way through.

I also enjoy the New York Times Magazine, and The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, and Harper's, and the Utne Reader, and Scientific American... so many distractions, so many responsibilities to shirk...

what's doin' @ work

I'm a network engineer for a financial company in Boston. I help design the corporate data and voice networks and maintain the overall physical and logical (sometimes illogical) infrastructure for the company. I've been working in IT (i.e. getting paid), in various capacities, since about 1994 or so, and have been doing network engineering full-time since 1998, when I lived and worked in Chicago.

In the past few months, my company has spent millions of dollars upgrading our network from one vendor's equipment and topology to those of another. For many reasons, this has widely been regarded as a good move. Downtime has decreased by a couple of orders of magnitude, and we're already realizing a (theoretical) return on investment -- fewer helpdesk calls and complaints about the network "being down." Granted, this doesn't mean people don't call at all, but at least we can definitively say it's not our problem. This time. :-)

I've been doing a lot of SNMP hacking lately -- tweaking our new network management (manglement!) system. It's pretty cool when I can get one of its zillions of components or features to work, but by and large, it's rather clunky and unwieldy. And it cost sixty grand. (It runs on Windows... need I say more?) But I must admit I'm learning quite a bit about SNMP and other network management technologies and concepts, and it keeps my brain sweating (more or less), which is always good.

I'm also studying (or at least trying not to get distracted too much from studying) for another professional certification. We'll see if it pans out. I have pretty poor study habits (you should see my college transcript), as I'm very easily distr--... ooooh, look! Donuts!

Why the switch?

So for well over a year, I'd been editing my "blog" (essentially a flat HTML file) with emacs and just secure-copying over to either of 2 servers it'd been hosted on. This was happening with glacial frequency. And it looked... well, rather archaic. And emacs can be kind of difficult to play with, especially if you're like me and haven't taken the time to learn all the appropriate keyboard shortcuts. (I know, I know... UNIX purists would scoff at my not using vi.)

Now that I'm enabling myself to edit my blog from machines anywhere, particularly those that don't have local ssh clients, I can pretty much post from anywhere they allow port 80. Which would be pretty much everywhere. :-)

For the most part, I'll be droning on and on about a bevy of things: current events, politics, technology, the mundanity of my middle-class white-collar cubicized existence, etc.

A little bit about me:

I'm a married, 33-year-old computer geek living in Somerville, Massachusetts -- a rapidly-gentrifying city adjacent to Cambridge and a stone's throw (literally) across the Charles River from Boston. I've lived in all three places over the last ten years, with intervening layovers in Chicago and San Francisco. My wife and I are the proud parents of a (presently) 9-month old boy and a (presently) 4-year-old dog. We enjoy reading, watching movies, playing with the kid, harrassing the dog, spending time with our respective families, running, hiking, and chilling out at my in-laws' place in rural Maine.

Last year, we bought a slightly dilapidated 127-year-old house, which needs a little work, which we're doing piecemeal.

We're both computer geeks. My wife is a Mac expert, while I'm a network hack. As I'm wont to say, At the end of the day, it's all just 1s and 0s.

Anyway, at the risk of sounding more trite than I've already become, I'll dispense with the formalities and go on to more banalities. Yeah, that rhymes.