The Mandelbear's Musings

05:36 am - Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

... to robinpage!!! Have a great one!!

11:00 pm - Columbae House reunion

The high point of the weekend was Saturday evening when Colleen and I went to the 35-year reunion of Columbae House, the co-op house where I lived for a couple of years when I was a grad student at Stanford. As it says in the history

Columbae is a student-run, Consensus-governed, Vegetarian cooperative house located in the heart of the Stanford University campus and dedicated to Social Change through Nonviolent Action.

It was an extraordinary group of people, at an extraordinary time. Lots of the people I knew were there last night; many meetings and much fantastic catch-up conversation. I was shy and geekish back then, even more so than I am now; I think I had more good person-to-person conversation in a couple of hours last night than in most months when I was living there. I could have stayed and talked another week.

On the whole I think we look a lot like we did then, modulo grey hair and wrinkles. We still think a lot like we did then, for the most part. After dinner we sat together in a circle and shared our stories. Fascinating. I found out later that I wasn't the only one who forgot to mention their kids, but Colleen got a prominent mention along with the fact that it was our 33rd engagement anniversary. A few people remembered her from Alan Strain's Quaker meetings; she never came by the house because we hadn't started hanging out together at that point.

After dessert we got back together to stand in a circle and sing along with the Joan Baez recording of We Shall Overcome, and share brief visions of the world as it ought to be.

Sang a short version of QV during dessert, though I don't think more than a handful heard it. It just faded into the background, which is probably as it should be. Handed out a few cards. Some people live surprisingly close to us; San Francisco, Palo Alto, even San Jose. All these years...

We need to get connected again, and stay connected. Three and a half decades later we're still standing, a circle of friends all singing the same song.

07:07 pm - Weekend walking

Walked the five-mile loop up Los Gatos Creek yesterday and today. Running shoes and ankle braces. My feet ache a little, but no blisters and my ankles don't hurt. Feels very good to be back getting a reasonable amount of exercise, and as much as I like the Rose Garden it's nice to get some variety and a couple of gentle hills. I like the Creek a lot. Won't be able to do it the next couple of weeks, unfortunately; my schedule is starting to look busy.

02:04 pm - River: Friendship and love

The River winds back and forth across the wide, unmarked valley between Love and Friendship. Which side you're closest to at any given moment is less important than who's beside you on the journey. When you get down to it the River posts, like the song that inspired their name, are mostly about love and friendship.

Some people can draw a bright line between their emotions, and know with absolute certainty "I love X, but Y is just a close friend." They may even be able to say "I love Z, but Z is not my friend." I've never been able to do that. Even now, after 32+ years of marriage and my new-found insight into my feelings, I still can't do that. Sometimes it's very hard for me to tell whether somebody is an acquaintance or a friend; a close friend or someone I love. I'm not sure it matters that much to me. It matters, but I'll get back to that.

What I call "love" has always grown out of deep, close friendship.

Take another look at the second verse of The River:

When you're cold and alone in high hills of spent passion
Or lost in dark valleys of grief and despair
Remember clear water runs down to the river
And follow your friendship to lead you back there.

It's a river so deep that we can't see the bottom,
A river so long we can't walk to the end;
We'll journey together beside the clear water;
As deep and as long as the love of a friend.

Unlike the people who, apparently, associate "love" primarily with the intense but comparatively transient experience of falling in love, I've never been tempted to confuse the two -- I had what I call love first.

I've never fallen in love with a stranger, or with someone I hardly knew. I've never had the feeling that I'd found My One True Love, and would be happy forever if only she loved me back. I've never had the feeling that this one person was essential to my happiness, or that I could never be happy with anyone else. I've been desperately lonely, to be sure, but never desperately in love.

Because love, for me, is based on friendship, I've never had to worry about losing it. We may get closer or farther apart, but the friendship remains. I've never had to worry about rejection: I may be disappointed if a relationship doesn't go as far as I'd like it to go, but the friendship remains.

This is probably going to get long, but it's too important to cut. Deal with it.

I'll tell you a story:

Colleen and I were friends for a long time. She first spotted me the year I started grad school, as she was sitting with friends in the Stanford coffeehouse. We met now and then; went for walks together, met at events of various sorts, had long talks. At some point we started sleeping together. It was some time after that, that I felt comfortable saying "I love you." I'd never been in love before, you see. It really didn't feel that much different from being best friends. I'm not sure it does even now, after our love and friendship have deepened. There is a difference, but it's hard for me to say exactly what it is.

In effect, Colleen and I started our marriage, after a year of living together and four years of friendship, with the kind of love usually associated with "old married" couples: with friendship, trust, and a confident delight in one another's company. Yes, we've had disagreements, sometimes loudly enough to alarm the kids. But our friendship is solid enough to survive the occasional disagreement.

Even up to a couple of years after our marriage, I don't think I had any real certainty that what I was feeling could properly be called "love". There was never a moment of epiphany, no bells or choirs of angels, no desperate longing. But we'd been living together, sharing our lives, our fortunes, our kitchen, our roof and our bed, for most of a year, and I knew with absolute certainty that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with my best and dearest friend, and that was enough no matter what you call it.

I told her so, and we became formally engaged, exactly 33 years ago today: October 11th, 1975. I'd do it again in a heartbeat.

So, does it matter what you call it?

Oddly enough, it does matter. It matters very much. I'm not sure exactly why, but I'll give you what I have at the moment.

Certainly, it matters to other people. Across the huge semantic gulf that separates me from most other people, even with the necessary disclaimers and qualifiers required to bridge that gulf, saying "I love you" sends a strong, if uncomfortably ambiguous, signal.

And it matters to me, even if I'm not certain what it means. Mostly, I think, using the word "love" says that the emotional component of the relationship is serious enough to be taken seriously.

That's it, really. When love comes into a relationship, on your end of the conversation or on mine, it means that the emotional component of that relationship is strong enough to matter. Something that's worth talking about. Working on. Caring about. Nurturing. Fighting for, maybe. Enjoying and celebrating, certainly. Committing to, perhaps.

That's it?

Almost certainly not, but it's what I can think of at the moment. Oh, sure, there's a lot more. But it all seem to come out of taking the emotional relationship seriously enough to want it to continue, and deepen. (Disclaimer: I'm new to this game. I could be totally wrong about all this.)

Let's take sex, for example. It's not called "making love" for nothing. But what's the difference between casual, recreational sex and sex with someone you love, if not that you're taking it, and its place in your relationship, seriously? You care about one another. It makes you feel closer, more connected, more joyful. If you're just starting out, taking it seriously means that you've taken the time and the care to talk about it and what it will do to your relationship.

Or look at the potentially difficult topics of platonic love and romantic friendship. See how simple they become when you realize that love is "just" a deeper and more emotionally-connected form of friendship?

I'm not sure I believe this analysis myself. Next week I'll probably think of some fatal flaw; I'm sure this won't be my last post exploring this topic. And certainly what I mean by "love" seems to be a lot different from what other people mean by it. Can we still communicate? I hope so. I'll get back to that.

But what about falling in love?

Yes, there's limerence, that "falling-in-love feeling" -- I'm getting a little better at recognizing it now. I don't think I felt it when Colleen and I were courting; but I've felt it several times since. Falling in love, repeatedly, with the person you're already married to is simply delightful, and saves a great deal of emotional wear-and-tear -- and tears, for that matter. I've fallen in love a couple of times with other women, fairly recently; that's a subject for another post, perhaps.

It's entirely possible that I wasn't really capable of falling in love thirty years ago: I've gone through some huge emotional changes since then. Or perhaps I was simply a lot less in touch with my emotions.

But I hadn't felt it before I fell in with Colleen. I've never fallen in "love at first sight", or fallen in love with anyone but a friend. Maybe that disqualifies me from having an opinion worth listening to on the subject. Or maybe it qualifies me by making me more objective. Here it is, anyway, for what it's worth:

At best, limerence is an indication that the potential for love is there. New Relationship Energy (NRE), the delightful feeling of starting a new relationship, is also a hint at best. At worst they're powerful drugs that you can easily get addicted to. When the effect wears off you might find yourself in the arms of your best friend and lover, amazed that you never understood what love really is. That's if you're lucky. Or you may find yourself in the bed of a stranger, wondering what in blazes possessed you. You may find yourself unable to pull yourself out of a horrible, abusive relationship because, every once in a while, you get another fix.

(Colleen's comment is that, of course, she fell in love with me at first sight. She had the good sense, rather than tell me immediately and risk almost certain rejection, to patiently cultivate my friendship until it was safe to tell me. That works.)

It's best to be friends first.

So here we are, back again, with friendship. I recommend it.

To be honest, I have no way of knowing whether a long-term relationship would work without at least one partner falling in love with the other. I think it would, but it would probably take a long time to even be recognized as something beyond "mere" friendship.

I'm pretty sure a long-term relationship won't last without friendship. And I think it needs a strong enough emotional bond that both parties are comfortable calling it "love" and committing to working with their friend to keep it going.

07:14 am - River: Verts[2] Energy balance and feedback

Things are actually a little more complicated than I thought when I wrote Verts a couple of days ago. Or maybe simpler, but in any case different from what I thought at the time.

It seems that I almost always gain energy when I'm giving it, and getting a positive response. It's an obvious feedback loop. In technical and geekish conversations I'm usually dispensing advice, or at least information. Similarly, casual social contact, saying "hello" to a stranger, usually results in a little positive feedback. This explains why...

When I'm hurting, I don't mind being around people I don't know very well: they make me feel a little less alone, and I don't really have to interact with them. I might even get little positive strokes if I make the comparatively minor effort of saying hello.

But, paradoxically, if someone is trying to give me energy -- to take care of me or comfort me -- the feedback goes the other way, and I end up worse off than before. And the worse off I am, the more the interaction tends to drain me. It makes a weird kind of sense; being reminded that I'm feeling miserable generally makes me more miserable. Asking for help, asking for anything, drains me as well.

I'm getting better. Hugs can be comforting now instead of painful, possibly because they're mutual. In effect, I'm helping someone who's distressed to see me distressed. An odd kind of mental aikido, but it seems to help. Similarly I'm getting better at turning an argument (negative feedback) into a discussion (positive feedback) aimed at understanding.

Experience, I guess. As Ben said, "... a dear school, but fools will learn in no other, and scarce in that."

06:24 am - Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

... to my esteemed colleague finagler!!! Have a good one!!

11:06 pm - River: Loving a loner 2: Hobbies

Everybody needs a hobby, but it's especially important when you're living with a loner. Let's face it: your loner's going to want to be alone a lot of the time. You need something to fill in the time and, above all, keep your mind occupied with something other than how much you want to be with somebody who's off in a private world of their own right now. (Don't worry: your loner almost certainly has one. That's the problem, isn't it?)

You need something so engrossing, so engaging, so enjoyable, so addictive, that when your loner calls for you to come to bed you have to think a moment and then say "wait til I finish this last little bit".

Ideally you should have two, maybe three. You should have one hobby that you can persue quietly, by yourself, but in the same room as your loner, and that lets you pay a little bit of attention just in case they feel like starting one of their rare conversations. If your loner is a performer, something you can take to a concert. Knitting, crocheting, beading, and needlework are popular choices. And of course there's always reading and writing, if you can multitask or at least fake multitasking and don't mind missing a few things.

The other thing you need, for your own sanity as well as your partner's, is something that you cannot do in the same space. Woodworking, sewing, ceramics, maybe music (bagpipes, for example). I'm pretty sure this is why Mom took up ceramics and gardening. Ceramics is a great choice: clay is sensual, easy on the hands, and it affords a good mix of complexity and the mindless but highly satisfying activity of "wedging" -- flinging a lump of clay repeatedly against a flat surface to work out the potentially-explosive air bubbles and your equally explosive latent frustration at the same time. Breadmaking is almost as good. Woodworking lets you play with sharp blades and noisy, potentially deadly power tools.

Colleen's choice for this one is watching old movies -- whenever she thinks I ought to be spending some time by myself practicing or writing, or when my grumbling or moodiness get on her nerves, she has only to put on one of her favorite movies that I've seen a dozen times already, and I'm gone. And they comfort her -- that's important, too.

The third possibility for a hobby is something you can do either apart or together. Music, for example. This gets a little tricky -- one of you will generally be better than the other. And there are going to be times when you'll want to be making music together, while your loner would rather be playing a solo. Music by all means -- I expect that a majority of my readers are filkers, after all -- but it shouldn't be your only spare-time occupation.

Good luck!

10:33 am - Whew!

In the end, the demo had a large number of loose ends to tie together -- finagler and I finally got it working "reliably" last night at 6pm. This morning it worked without a hitch, with our lab director giving the demo to the head of the parent corporation.

It'll take a month or two to turn it from a barely-functional, works-if-you-have-two-hackers-holding-its-hand demo into a reasonably robust, flip-the-switch-and-it-usually-works demo, but we're happy.

07:59 pm - River: Verts

(/me waves at pocketnaomi and cflute -- hope this explains a few things.)

I was talking with my coworker rowanf this morning; she said that the difference between an extrovert and an introvert was whether other people feed you or drain you. I had to disagree.

I know at least one person who is fed by her close friends, and drained by everyone else. I added that, in my case, I tend to be fed by people when I'm feeling good, and drained when I'm hurting. But I realized later that I was wrong.

When I'm hurting, I don't mind being around people I don't know very well: they make me feel a little less alone, and I don't really have to interact with them. I might even get little positive strokes if I make the comparatively minor effort of saying hello.

But people I know require energy that I don't have. Interaction takes energy. The better I know them, the tighter the interaction, the more energy it takes. Being around someone who loves me and wants to pay attention to me can be actively painful. I don't know why that makes things worse, but it does. That's why I can sometimes do OK all day at work, being friendly and interactive, but have to crawl into my cave and hide at home.

Even when I'm doing well, I suppose, people drain me; I just have a more favorable energy balance on the whole, and interacting with people I know is easier. Who knows, these days I might even be a little bit of an extrovert, able to gain energy at the same time as I'm giving it. Not when I'm sick, or hurting, or depressed, though. Then, I'll be in my cave, or all alone in the midst of a crowd of strangers. It's about the same.

07:48 am - Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

... to crystalfall!!! Hope you're having a great one!!

08:26 pm - I can haz demo!

I've been pretty productive this week -- I think my strategy of staying the heck off IM may have something to do with it. My coworker finagler and I managed to slam together a demo -- for possible use on Friday -- in two days. Perl on my end, Python on his, plus a lot of stuff that we were already working on or thinking about. Fun!

No, you don't get to find out what it is. Not yet, anyway. And it's still very flaky; lashed together with metaphorical baling wire and duct tape. But still... feels good.

I'm beginning to wonder whether my recent emotional changes have come about as a result of the CPAP. The timing is about right -- I got it last November 8th.

We need to do some serious house-cleaning over the next couple of months. Our experience with the last couple of houseguests has made it clear that the sewing room really needs work if it's going to double as a guest room. Especially the closet, which is currently unusable. More upwhen, perhaps.

08:31 am - Productive again??

It was still dark when I got up at about a quarter to six this morning; the house was full of little lights. It's amazing how many electronic gadgets we have these days.

I spent the entire day yesterday with IM turned off, and managed to get a solid start on the server-side code we need for a possible demo on Friday. Hacked it together as a Perl CGI, of course. Today I'll be doing the image-processing parts with PerlMagick.

I was originally planning to do it as a stand-alone server based on CherryPy, but decided after looking into somebody else's similar app that I didn't have the time to learn both a new language and a new framework.

Snuggle and conversation ate up most of the evening; I'm not complaining, but I'll have an awful lot of catching up to do. The office and sewing room both need serious organizing and re-packing, and that in turn will get into the garage and attic. Towers of Hanoi, indeed.

06:13 am - Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

... to elimloth!!! Have a great one!!

07:47 am - Tres Gique 2.0

(Takes deep breath. Jumps off cliff.)

"My" Toastmaster concert at ConChord this year was actually a Tres Gique concert, and it went off remarkably well considering that we really only had two rehearsals together as a group since last May, and that the set included three songs we'd never done as a group before.

It wasn't awesome. Parts of it came close, though. Quiet Victories, even with a couple of flubs and my flagging voice, was very close to awesome. I don't usually tear up listening to recordings.

Callie's partner, Naomi, pointed out that we could be awesome, consistently, if we got together every 4-6 weeks for a weekend of intensive practice. So that's what we're going to do. Or at least try to do -- we'll get together sometime in mid-November and see how it goes.

This is going to mean some big changes.

The biggest change for me is that we're not going to be "Steve Savitzky and his occasional backup group" anymore. We'll be doing a mix of my songs and other people's songs -- we won't even stick to filk; Joyce has been singing folk since forever. We'll try writing stuff jointly -- I have some ideas about that. I won't always be lead singer (I can hear the cheers from the audience already). I won't get nearly as many concerts as just me -- that's part of the price. But I'll learn to be a better performer, and my concerts, with or without TG, will sound a lot better -- that's the payoff.

For Callie and Joyce, the big change will be that they'll have equal billing as performers in the group, not just as part of some singer-songwriter's backup group. That's what happened to Callie with Echo's Children: she was just Cat's backup and never became known as the fantastic performer she is.

Jordan, our drummer, will stay in that role at least for a couple of years; eventually he may move out, go into impoverished college student mode, and we'll have to worry about what to do next. Kat, who's performed with us a couple of times, won't be able to make it down from Canada for rehearsals; she can sit in via streaming audio if she wants, but mostly will become our Webmistress. Things will sort themselves out.

Joyce's husband Dave, who has been doing live sound for her and others for years at folk dance camps, will be the official Sound Guy. Colleen is, of course, Catering and Hospitality, and possibly logistics.

Now, about that version number. Back around the end of last year Kat and I came up with a version-numbering scheme: I was 1.0, Callie and Joyce were 0.1 and 0.2 respectively; Jordan and Kat were 0.0.1 and 0.0.2 respectively. Add 'em up. Wwll, we're not playing mix-and-match anymore, and I'm not the main performer anymore. So, Tres Gique 2.0.

If this comes off, we'll have our first concert at Consonance or Baycon.

06:04 am - Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

...to dr_nebula and jeffreycornish!!! Have a great one!!

11:21 pm - Weekend wrap-up

Didn't spend much time at all at the drama llama petting zoo Silicon this year. A panel on Saturday, dinner with the Cat, and Peter Beagle's concert in the evening. A quick turn around the dealer's room, which didn't take long. The kids gofered, and Colleen spent a couple of hours there today.

Very small con, and the hotel, once the local SF con hotel, sucks. We won't bother going next year, I don't think.

Didn't get much else done, though, beyond running errands, taking care of Colleen, and some writing, mostly working on a big river post on love and friendship. Music? Not nearly as much work as I intended.

12:23 pm - Unique lemming

HowManyOfMe.com

There are 1 or fewer people with my name in the U.S.A. How many have your name?

Not really very surprising, although the "fewer" part would be very surprising if true. There appear to be only 336 Savitzkys. 375,546 Steves, Stephen is equally unique.

08:40 am - The Commandments of Coyote

From the archives of the awesome and amazing cadhla, we have The Commandments of Coyote.

I. Thou Shalt Have As Many Gods and Spirits and Personal Trainers and Gurus As You Like Before Me, But You Shalt Not Let Them Block the Exits, and More, You Shall Not Permit Them To Take the Last Beer, For That Beer Is Mine. Seriously. Don't.

II. Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor's Wife, But Thou Art Totally Welcome To Admire Her Ass When She Walks By, and If It Happens To Come Out That They Are In An Open Relationship, Dude, Tap That Ass As Much As They Are Willing To Allow. Same Goes For the Ladies. Coveting Is Sort Of Stupid, But Sex Is Just Plain Fun, Unless Thou Art Doing It Entirely Wrong.

07:57 am - There's a reason why I don't use databases

Several reasons, actually, but this post, I, Cringely . The Pulpit . Data Debasement | PBS, gets to one of them.

Thanks in part to Larry Ellison's hard work and rapacious libido, databases are to be found everywhere. They lie at the bottom of most web applications and in nearly every bit of business software. If your web site uses dynamic content, you need a database. If you run SAP or any ERP or CRM application, you need a database. We're all using databases all the time, whether we actually have one installed on our personal computers or not.

But that's about to change.

We're entering the age of cloud computing, remember? And clouds, it turns out, don't like databases, at least not as they have traditionally been used.

This fact came out in my EmTech panel and all the experts onstage with me nodded sagely as my mind reeled. No database?

No database.

07:16 am - Colleen's back at home

Was roused out of a sound sleep at 5:30 or so by the sound of my pants ringing. Fortunately I'd given Kaiser the landline number as well; I was fumbling with the cell when they called it.

Colleen's home now; back in her own bed. Much happier, and sufficiently re-hydrated that they're not worried about her anymore. So I'm guessing that they didn't find anything in the blood cultures, or anything else that needed immediate treatment. The anti-nausea stuff(ondansetron) they gave her a prescription for will let her keep her potassium tablets down, and the Cash&Carry across the street sells genuine Mexican Coke.

So I get the full convention experience after all, without the fun of filking til 4am. *sigh* At least I have my flower_cat back.

12:48 am - Colleen: update

Colleen's still in ER getting IV fluids to rehydrate her after four days of not being able to keep anything down. She sent me away at midnight as she was being wheeled away to X-ray; the blood cultures won't come back for several hours yet. She thinks it's another bacterial infection; she's usually right about what's going on in her body.

She's as comfortable as can be expected under the circumstances, with blankets, pillows, and her head up to ease the post-nasal drip. She'll probably sleep better than she has in days. The nurses are sweet and caring. She'll be fine.

I passed the time reading Ray Bradbury's The End of Summer. Didn't like it. It describes a boyhood as remote from mine as the mountains of the moon.

I need more aspirin, and sleep. G'night.

(5:50am She's ready to come home, apparently. As soon as I have some coffee.)

Current Mood: tired

08:44 pm - Gaak!

Colleen is feeling no better, and is apparently dehydrated at this point after four days of it. ER time. Grump. Back tomorrow.

07:25 pm - Who is Joe Six-Pack, really?

How do you document real life? - Hey there, Joe Six-Pack

Sarah Palin et al like to call us "Joe Six-Pack," and they think we like it too. They think it sounds folksy and homey and cute.

Sure. It's a folksy, homey, cute way to euphemistically call us something very close to trashy, ignorant hillbillies. We're just not supposed to be smart enough to realize it.

copperwise

07:01 pm - ??

I didn't think I could get this drunk on one goddamned glass of gin.

The Cat is still seriously under the weather. I'm glad I went to work today (after an impromptu meeting I have considerably less to do for an impending demo). But she's doing a lot worse than she was this morning, and I don't like the look of it.

Meanwhile, the kids are off at Silicon. It seems I have one panel to give tomorrow afternoon, but apart from that I'm off the hook.

Mostly I'll be spending the weekend at home, taking care of my Cat and working on music and the Tres Gique website, which needs it. More precisely, I'll be working on our collaboration environment. More on that soon, I hope.

05:52 am - Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

... to the lovely and talented allisona!!! Have a great one!!

07:52 pm - A longish day working from home

I've been working from home all day, taking care of a very sick Colleen and ripping stacks of CDs. (The latter, especially, give me a convenient way of timing my breaks and an excuse to come out and interact if anyone's in the living room.)

Without the usual workplace distractions and most of an hour's worth of commute, I've actually been pretty productive. Even without working hardware, there's a lot of planning and documentation I can -- and did -- do just as well running Emacs at the other end of a net connection.

08:07 am - Morning

Colleen's fever broke briefly before bedtime last night, but appears to be back now. I'll see whether she needs me to work at home today. (9:45 -- she does, and I am. It's nice to have wireless phones with an intercom feature.)

The Y.D. has taken to pouring herself a big commuter cup of coffee to take to school in the morning. This leaves me with maybe a cup and a half.

The sky was beautiful this morning, with thousands of little scraps and ragged bands of cloud, backlit in the East by the rising sun. The forecast says that it's likely to rain later in the week.

There's something scheduled every weekend from now to the middle of December; the rest of the year will fill up quickly. Time? It's an herb.

Current Mood: calm

04:01 pm - Mostly home today

Colleen's been down with the flu all day; decided to stay home most of the morning, run her errands, and see whether it was worthwhile going in to work in the afternoon. I think this is the same mild flu and severe post-nasal drip and congestion that I had earlier in the week; it seems to have hit her a lot harder.

Went to a talk this morning at 11:00 at our Cupertino office; that's halfway to picking up A, who's the Cat's usual shopping companion on Wednesdays. So we went to Cosentino's -- everybody who works there knows Colleen, and most of them know A. About half remembered me as Colleen's other half, but only because A's presence reminded them.

By the time we got home it was nearly 2:00, so I had lunch and went out for a belated walk. So much for working in the afternoon.

06:36 am - Morning

It helps to actually put the freshly-ground coffee into the coffeemaker before you run it. It says something about my current mood shift that the first thing I did on discovering this was to start mentally composing this post rather than cursing at my stupidity.

05:50 am - Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

... each to the lovely and talented jodimuse and linda_muireall!!!! Have a great one!!!

07:31 pm - State of the Bear, continued

The koi have spawned; the little ones school near the edge of the pond like tiny jewels: grey, gold, bronze, black, white. Beautiful. Their parents are huge, and even more beautiful.

Sitting and watching them it was easy to ignore the fact that the computer I'm using for my new project at work had frozen again, and again refused to boot (it booted fine when I got back after sitting unplugged for a couple of hours; presumably a thermal problem). Easy, too, to ignore the fact that I had been staring at my cell phone for five minutes debating whether to make a call (I never did).

I suppose that what I'd been feeling up until recently has been best described as blunted affect rather than actual depression most of the time; Colleen says it's been a dozen years. I wouldn't know; I can't remember the last time I was consistently happy for more than a day or two without some specific cause. It may be just a shift in brain chemistry, and it's probably temporary, but I'll take it.

04:17 pm - Clearing my tabs: Choosing secure passwords

Schneier on Security: Choosing Secure Passwords

Ever since I wrote about the 34,000 MySpace passwords I analyzed, people have been asking how to choose secure passwords.

My piece aside, there's been a lot written on this topic over the years -- both serious and humorous -- but most of it seems to be based on anecdotal suggestions rather than actual analytic evidence. What follows is some serious advice.

The attack I'm evaluating against is an offline password-guessing attack. This attack assumes that the attacker either has a copy of your encrypted document, or a server's encrypted password file, and can try passwords as fast as he can. There are instances where this attack doesn't make sense. ATM cards, for example, are secure even though they only have a four-digit PIN, because you can't do offline password guessing. And the police are more likely to get a warrant for your Hotmail account than to bother trying to crack your e-mail password. Your encryption program's key-escrow system is almost certainly more vulnerable than your password, as is any "secret question" you've set up in case you forget your password.

Offline password guessers have gotten both fast and smart. AccessData sells Password Recovery Toolkit, or PRTK. Depending on the software it's attacking, PRTK can test up to hundreds of thousands of passwords per second, and it tests more common passwords sooner than obscure ones.

So the security of your password depends on two things: any details of the software that slow down password guessing, and in what order programs like PRTK guess different passwords.

10:18 am - Lessig on Creative Commons and DRM'ed media

Free Culture and DRM (Lessig Blog)

Ben Jones has a piece about my book, Free Culture, being made available on Kindle, a platform that uses DRM.

In my view, the "free culture" test for a work is whether it is available freely -- not whether it is also available not freely. "Free Culture" is available freely -- meaning, it is licensed freely here. One can put that freely licensed version on a Kindle, freely. I hadn't known my publisher was going to make Free Culture available on the Kindle, but now that they have, I'd be very keen to have a version I can make freely available on the "Free Culture" remix page.

Current Mood: cheerful

07:48 am - River: Stage Three Trust

If you're in a long-term relationship, or you're thinking about whether you want to be in one, Go read this article titled "Stage Three Trust" by theferret. I'll wait. Here's the intro:

What I am about to discuss is Stage Three advice -- the nitroglycerin of relationship counseling. Used properly in the right place, the "How Could This Happen?" technique will help you to maintain a loving, stable relationship... But use it at the wrong time, and it'll explode into a fountain of heartache and betrayal.

See, most relationship advice breaks down into three rough categories, each sequential:

1. How to determine whether someone you like is worth staying with, and what to do when they aren't;
2. How to build trust with each other;
3. How to act once that absolute trust is in place.

Hardly anyone talks about Stage Three, absolute trust, because the things you do to build a happy relationship with someone you trust are absolutely suicidal when used with someone who's not trustworthy. This advice, when used on the wrong people, will allow terrorists of love to fly Boeing 767 airplanes into the twin towers of your heart.

Heck, there are a lot of stable relationships that never reach Stage Three, and they're doing okay. They don't have absolute trust and never will, but a lot of people don't want to risk letting folks inside that close.

Furthermore, Stage Three takes a long time to get to for some people. Gini and I were married for four years before we even brushed up against it. That's right: we were willing to marry for life almost half a decade before we decided to trust each other implicitly.

It's suddenly very clear that Colleen and I have reached Stage Three -- we've probably been there for a long time, but I don't think we really knew that until earlier this year, when that trust was tested close to the point where anything less would have broken. Many, probably most, of the people reading this have not.

I'll also add that, clearly, absolute trust is neither necessary nor sufficient for a stable long-term partnership. You may be happy together but unable to open up completely to one another, or you may have perfect trust and transparency and love but be unable to share living quarters without driving one another mad. (The latter is stable; it leads to the kind of loving long-distance friendship that can last for a lifetime, the kind Gwen Knighton writes about in "Love Song for a Friend".)

Talk to one another. Figure out where you are in that journey, and where you want to get to.

06:06 am - Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

... to the lovely and talented trystel!!! Have a great one!!

07:03 pm - State of the Bear

I've been very congested lately; have gone back to a daily Claritin. OTOH the cutting back the Flonase by 50% seems to have helped with phlegm in the throat, so that's good.

My mysterious hardware failure at work turns out to have been due to a loose (or possibly even mis-installed) RAM stick. Grump. It's also been plagued by a loose PCI card, but that's unlikely to manifest again until I drag it into the conference room and give a demo. Spent the afternoon on window manager configuration. So I am now back to approximately where I expected to be this time Friday.

I have not been getting nearly as much writing done as I would like. I have been getting more sleep than I would like, but less than I apparently need.

A shorter-than-usual walk, squeezed out between a longer-than-usual (but good) morning meeting, online bill-paying that should have been done last week, and an earlier-than-usual afternoon talk.

04:42 pm - The perils of DRM, part N

Wal*Mart shutting down DRM server, nuking your music collection -- only people who pay for music risk losing it to DRM shenanigans - Boing Boing

Hey suckers! Did you buy DRM music from Wal*Mart instead of downloading MP3s for free from the P2P networks? Well, they're repaying your honesty by taking away your music. Unless you go through a bunch of hoops (that you may never find out about, if you've changed email addresses or if you're not a very technical person), your music will no longer be playable after October 9th.

07:46 am - Warm fuzzies

Last week Colleen gave me a cotton flannel shirt, which I wore for the first time this morning taking the Y.D. to school. It's light, soft, warm, fuzzy, and petable; the collar caressed my cheek the entire time.

Thank you, Love.

06:41 am - Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

... to johno!!! Have a great one!!

07:28 pm - A weekend of conversation

It's been a weekend of conversation, puntuated occasionally by snuggle, sleep, food, and a little music. Many things left undone, though the few important items, plane tickets to OVFF and a second room for Loscon, finally got taken care of. On the whole, I'd rather spend time talking with friends than almost anything else.

Mostly talk with M.S., up from Southern Cal for a funeral and staying with us for friendship and lack of drama. A good little walk in the Rose Garden yesterday, and two lovely mornings of bacon, eggs, coffee, and conversation. Mostly about relationships, hers and mine. I showed her the Royal Amethyst rose and explained that, yes, it's OK to talk about Amy. Grieving isn't about forgetting the past but about coming to terms with it, and remembering is my way of doing that.

A brief interlude yesterday to take the Y.D. to an interview for possible travel next summer, and rowanf's 25th anniversary party in the afternoon. They'd requested music and poetry on the theme of love in lieu of gifts; I sang The River, of course, and got some good reactions. Longish talk with spikeiowa afterward.

This morning, M gave me a voice lesson -- extremely useful. More on that later, perhaps. A drive with the Cat in the afternoon -- the conversation continues. I love my friends, and I love talking with them. I love my Cat the best of all, and even when we have little to say, the silence between us is alive with conversation.

06:50 am - Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

... to nolly!!! Have a great one!!

10:31 pm - Oddly cheerful update

This afternoon I found myself sitting in the little park near work where I take my walks, looking at the beautiful, huge koi, and realizing that I was still happy. I'd just been on the phone to some of my dearest friends (one of whom I'm married to), but that only reinforced my mood, it wasn't the cause of it.

Even the fact that, later in the afternoon, I managed to clobber my desktop session (note to self: even when using x2x to talk to another computer, keystrokes like control-alt-backspace and control-alt-delete go to the computer the keyboard is connected to) didn't earn so much as a casual curse. Nor did the fact that the hardware I'm using for my current project, on a tight deadline, mysteriously stopped working when I moved it into another room for a test. (And the sysadmin who bought it for me is out of town all next week -- I'll have to drag in something from home as a stopgap.)

For all I know, it could have been a TIA. I've had them, mostly causing a little numbness around the left side of my mouth. Had one yesterday, in fact: a tiny area on my lower lip went numb for a couple of hours. Yes, I took aspirin, and have increased my daily dose. That's a slightly disturbing thought; the next one could do real damage instead of just improving my mood.

My finances are a slow-motion trainwreck, and many of my friends are going through hell in various ways.

But the air was warm, the water was clear as glass, and the koi were majestic and beautiful.

08:01 pm - State of the Bear

The shoulder and back problems that were plaguing me earlier this week seem to have vanished; I wonder whether that has anything to do with the mood shift. Don't think it's the light; I was feeling pretty good when I got up before sunrise. (I'm sleepy right now; better go to bed early.) Being a little more productive at work due to my recent schedule change? Something settling out in my mind? Who knows?

The Ace adjustable ankle braces and the running shoes seem to be the best combination for long walks these days, as long as I don't make the braces too tight.

The mood shift still bothers me, but I guess I'm not likely to know for certain.

08:03 am - Word of the day: Mudita

From the answer to a query by meglimir, mudita is "a Buddhist (Pali and Sanskrit) word meaning rejoicing in others' good fortune. Mudita is sometimes considered to be the opposite of schadenfreude."

It would be the Buddhists who coined it, but I think it's something that any parent would feel for their children. Most people feel it for their friends, as well. You want your friends to be happy.

With someone you love, there may be a mixture of jealousy, especially if that happiness comes at the expense of their time and attention for you. I'm a loner, though. It's natural for me to feel happy when my lover is off somewhere having fun, by herself or with somebody else.

01:46 pm - Weird

Set out on my walk this morning, got to the top of the hill, and realized with total shock that I felt happy. It was the weirdest damned feeling.

Last night I was feeling vaguely ill, achy and tired; this morning I wasn't, but that doesn't really account for the change. Got some good news from a friend, but there was bad news from other friends to balance it. Got a few things accomplished, but I'm still up to my eyebrows in unfinished "to.do" items. It was bright and sunny and warm -- do I suffer from SAD? Probably.

Damned if I understand it, and that bothers me. How can I make it happen again if I don't know what I did? How long can I expect it to last?

Something is probably about to go terribly wrong.

08:13 am - The morning routine

Now that Kat's back at home for a while, and needs to get to school for a 9:30 class, I've changed my morning routine a little (and all for the better). I leave the house with Kat at 8:30; this gets me to work around 9am. It does mean less time at home, which is regrettable but can't be helped, and much less writing time at home. On the other hand, I can now get to work in time to get quite a bit more done between email time and lunchtime. Big win there.

06:43 am - Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

... to keththeamac!!! Have a great one!!

07:43 pm - The concert at ConChord

My toastmaster's concert at ConChord, which happened a week ago last Saturday, is finally split up, properly indexed, and uploaded. You can find it here. For field recordings, the sound quality is remarkably good; they were captured on my H2, just in front of the audience. The performances a little less so, but parts of it are, if not awesome, at least served up with win and a modest amount of awesome sauce. I did tear up at the ending of QV, so that says something.

06:56 am - Wanted: open-source, cross-platform music notation

What I'm looking for is an open-source, cross-platform (Linux, Windows, and preferably also MacOS) program for music notation. Preferably with the ability to export to Lilypond (for typesetting), ABC, and MusicXML. Must import and export MIDI files and play via MIDI. Rosegarden would be absolutely ideal, except that it only runs on Linux (for a change).

Canorus looks plausible, but appears to be immature at this point. Definitely worth a try, though, since there are Windows binaries on the download page. It's based on the earlier Noteedit, which is Linux-only again.

Of course, we could always use VMWare and either run Lilypond on Windows, or a pirated version of Concertware on Linux. The latter is ancient, though, and stuck with proprietary formats.

06:15 am - Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

... to tollers!!! Have a great one!