Month: May 2008

Some Words

In the last few days I’ve encountered a number of words that, while previously unknown to me, have come to define this week. Words like hemoptysis, friable, pulmonary lavage, and bronchoscopy.

While I’m glad the latter two exist, the whole ordeal from Elz suddenly coughing blood on the way to do some mundane provisioning to the four total hours of sleep I’ve had the past two nights to spending lunch and evenings in ICU with my poor lady who is just physically beat down, I could really do without encountering any of these words again. She’s slowly on the mend and might even make it home some time this weekend. As a favor to me, please hug and/or kiss [as appropriate] those around you who matter most.

As for me, well, the dogs need to go outside, some semblance of laundry needs to be done, and there’s a special lady who requires adult supervision.

Jon Bruning is a twit

Bruning Takes Housing Discrimination Fight To CNN – Omaha News Story – KETV Omaha

The guy was a poo-flinging, party boi back when I went to high school with him. He was a grandstanding party boi when I went to college with him. Now he is a grandstanding, poo-flinging twit who just happens to be the attorney general of this state. The utter transparency of his shallow efforts at being the most righteous of the right wing in an attempt to pander for higher office is completely ridiculous.

Dynamic Languages Strike Back

Steveys Blog Rants: Dynamic Languages Strike Back is a great article. Or at least it reads like a great article. To be honest, I don’t have the chops to voice a truly knowledgeable opinion but I figure if I keep reading this stuff it will come to me eventually.

It all relates to a paradigm I and my first mentor skirmished over a bit. He was old school and in to sucking every bit of processing out of a single command as possible. I, being much less experienced, would write code that was a bit more human readable but also less direct, less elegant. To be sure, I greatly admire elegant code and strive for it myself but I also recognize that processors have a little overhead when it comes to dealing with most tasks so why not use it?

Bringing it all around then, the essay deals with how dynamic languages are becoming competitive with static typed languages when considering the application as a whole. Improvements in hardware, compilers, and runtime engines plus smaller code bases and quicker prototyping make dynamic languages attractive.

Of course, he’s pushing for Lisp while I’m pretty happy with Python.

Celebrating Entropy

Listening to M83’s Before the Dawn Heals Us and I am struck by the overpowering evocation of longing and despair the album has. Seriously. I’m sitting here at work and all I want to do is sigh and maybe let loose with inexplicable sobbing. Haven’t felt like this since my at-the-time spouse seemed to be purposefully incinerating our marriage and all I could do was watch. I want to say the music personifies reckless waste for the sake of dystopia. Not so much reckless I guess, because it’s as if there’s a compelling need to bring about destruction just for the sake of destroying something.

Celebrating entropy maybe…

I think this mood has been prevalent lately because the slow-mo incinerating marriage is also finally approaching its terminus. That, and the fan blades gained their fecal coating about this time of year two years ago. The judgment is final on the 9th and this completes the cycle that began June 18th, 1993. From then on, she becomes no more than any other person I might run across on the street and I am protected from having to clean up anymore of the messes that have been spawned in the past two years. The dissolution has been exceptionally drawn out for reasons beyond my control and for the past two years it has been to my emotional well being what smog is to Los Angeles.

Oddly, we’ve been forced to correspond a bit over the past month and change because she insists on soaking up every last bit of support she technically has coming to her. I’ve changed jobs and this means a change in insurance and the like. So, anyway, a rash of email back and forth. I was somewhat struck by the apology she issued in her last communique but, ultimately, I’ve just got to file it away with everything else. Sometimes a wholesale paper shredding policy is best. At any rate, I have a great thing going with Elz and I’d have to say that I’m better off now than I have been in the past 20 some odd years.

Anyway, M83 reminds me a lot of Sigur Rós which, oddly enough, I listened the heck out of almost two years ago. Time to find me some juju right quick so I can reverse this emotional trainwreck. King Sunny Ade is completely antithetical to depression which is what is called for at the moment.