Category: Deep Thoughts

The wrong lesson

As a kid I read the entire Chronicles of Narnia [1] several times. Probably at least once a summer vacation from the time I received them as a gift until the time I started working at a real (not paper route) jobby-job. So, conservatively, I’d put it at a dozen total readings. Even during the first few readings I made the off-putting connections Lewis was telegraphing vis a vis Christian morality [2]. Without a larger collection or consistent access to a library my summer reading choices were necessarily limited, so I read them just to read something.

At any rate, most of the books are a certain kind of treacly bullshit that passes for a lot of Christian children’s writing. Don’t get me wrong, there is a time and place and audience for that. Also, Lewis is a masterful writer and a thoughtful theologian; c.f. The Screwtape Letters. But when you crave fantasy adventure as any Dungeons and Dragons obsessed youngster does, The Chronicles are pretty meager fare. All of this to say, there are obvious lessons that are being demonstrated and there are obvious takeaways to be had—and I had ample opportunity to experience this.

The thing that most tickled me about The Chronicles however was the reaction of the dwarfs in The Last Battle. Tired of being jerked around by both sides intent on maintaining orthodoxy and the framing that entails, they say “Fuck it, we’re done. Enough of your crap.” Well, they don’t say it quite like that but they did say, “The dwarfs are for the dwarfs!” They checked out of the whole stupid True vs. Fake/Narnian vs. Calormen/Good vs. Evil battle. Instead they became a force for neutrality; or at least a force for themselves.

Instead of fighting for either side, they fought both sides. “The dwarfs are for the dwarfs!” When one side was gaining an advantage they would loose a volley of arrows, bringing the sides back to even strength. “The dwarfs are for the dwarfs!” over and over again as the forces for competing orthodoxies battled it out. I absolutely loved that climactic moment. It made the slog that was reading the previous nine books in the series worth it. The payoff was, as William S. Burroughs once said, tasty. It was the one moment where it seemed a bit of pragmatism peeked through the fog of masturbatory goodness. And I cherished that.

But of course the story doesn’t end there. Lewis gets the dwarfs into the shack [corporeal death] and shows how their disbelief in the One, True Aslan [the Trinity] keeps them from enjoying the oddly corporeal delights of Aslan Land [heaven]. He leaves them in the dark shack to sort it out for themselves—leaving the door to Aslan Land open for when they knuckle under…errr…accept the One True Faith [purgatory]. The dwarfs, however, are bereft of fucks to give. It may not be the storybook outcome but it was an outcome of their own making and of their own choosing.

I loved those dwarfs. Pretty sure that wasn’t the lesson I was supposed to take from The Chronicles however.

[1] https://www.narnia.com/us
[2] http://atheism.about.com/od/cslewisnarnia/a/chroniclenarnia.htm

bash on Windows

My rose for the day [so far].

On Windows you can use the command explorer SomeDirectory and Windows Explorer will open with the view set to SomeDirectory, assuming one exists as a child of the current working directory. The same holds if you want to jump around the tree a bit. explorer \foo opens foo in the root of the current volume and explorer D:\foo would open D:\foo even if you were currently in the C:\ volume.

Which, once I learned about the awesomeness of Console2 [1], I’ve always created an alias mapping ‘exp’ to ‘explorer’. Because, you know, saving five whole keystrokes seems like a major win. Yes, I’m lazy.

I’ve since switched from the default cmd.exe as my Windows CLI to the bash shell that comes for free from Git [2]. All kinds of awesomeness ensue. On shortcoming however is that *nix paths are separated by ‘/’ while DOS paths are separated by ‘\’. Also, the Git bash refers to volumes using the ‘/c/’ notation while DOS uses ‘C:\’ notation. All of which means I still have to remember which frickin’ shell I’m using when on a Windows box. At least if I want to use the CLI to open Windows Explorer to a specific location, which I often do.

I finally sat down and spent a few minutes fixing my bash ‘exp’ alias a bit.

exp() {
# Grab the dir argument and put it in a friendly container
theDir=$1
# Only drop the volume if it exists otherwise /c* is ambiguous
if [[ "$theDir" == /c/* ]]; then
theDir=${theDir#/c}
fi
# Normalize '/' to '\' for Windows
theDir=${theDir//\//\\}
# Call explorer.exe with the swotted argument
/c/Windows/system32/explorer $theDir
}

Now I can use bash to launch Windows Explorer with an arbitrary directory without having to remember to swap out my path separators. It also means I can use tab-complete instead of having to type the entire path when jumping around the filesystem tree.

Yay!

[1] http://www.hanselman.com/blog/Console2ABetterWindowsCommandPrompt.aspx
[2] http://git-scm.com/downloads

Pet peeve

Folks who refer to tasks/items that fall outside the general case as “onesies and twosies”, especially in a business setting, drive me frickin’ bats. It is, as one might just as inappropriately say in this setting, “cutsie wootsie”.

That is all.

Quandry

I really want to brew a kölsch but I already have a cream ale that is ready to keg, carbonate, and drink. I also have on hand the ingredients to brew another dubbel and I should get around to using those ingredients soon.

But I have my brain set on drinking a kölsch right now.