Our adventures started the night before, with United changing our seat assignments without notification, then disabling Amy’s online check-in. Then, some excitement on departure: a transformer blew up at the corner as we left in our taxi.
Notes on Elderly Cat Care
Pandora the Cat is now 20 years old, and still enjoying a reasonably good quality of life, but her advanced years have seen many feline health difficulties common to cats her age.
New Twitter, First Tweet
I’m not a big fan of #newtwitter, partly because I don’t like client-side-scripting-heavy content delivery interfaces with hashbang URLs, and partly because the redesign still fails to address a long-standing problem with archiving.
Old tweets are still not organized in any kind of list or dated format; there aren’t even next/previous buttons on individual tweets. As a result, Twitter entries tend to fade into forgotten unsearchability after a few days, weeks, or months — depending on the user’s post frequency. Previous promises to offer native archiving have fallen by the wayside, and the Google Realtime deal expired in July 2011, transforming into open hostility between Twitter and Google. Nor have we heard much about the Library of Congress Twitter archive project since it was announced.
Had I known my tweets would continue to be so ephemeral years later, I would have implemented a third-party backup solution much earlier. As it is, years of my Twitter use are in limbo and for now effectively wasted. That said, I’m thankful for an XML file provided to me by Russell from an archiving script, containing my tweets up till 14 Feb 2009 — back when it was easier to crawl Twitter for full posting histories. From that I can glean my first tweet in 2006, and use one of the features I do like about #newtwitter, easy tweet embedding:
Im in ur twitter txtng ur fons.
— brownpau (@brownpau) October 8, 2006
Despite my protestations regarding archival impernanence, I know there are people who’ve switched to Twitter as a feed reader replacement, so in the fashion of @kottke and @gawker I shall indulge these “tweedreader” types by auto-feeding RSS from How Now Brownpau through Twitterfeed to @hnbp. (I’ll also be using @hnbp to follow preferred RSS-auto-fed Twitter streams to test viability as a feed reader versus my current RSS-reading web app, Google Reader.)
Through all this, I’ll be tweeting as usual at @brownpau but always with the full knowledge that all things there are tenuous at best, and what I wish to preserve should go to my site rather than be lost to an eternal scrollback mist.
Update: I canceled the @hnbp account because it was additional maintenance that seemed at best vestigial.
Overheard at HKG
Filipino family at Hong Kong Airport airline transfer desk, answering some questions due to some missing paperwork.
Gate agent: “Country of origin for this trip, ma’am?”
Saucy Pinay lady: “United States of America, which is our home.”
“And what city?”
“Texas.”
Sick Days
Been a trying time health-wise; a sore throat from last week blossomed into a full-blown bronchial infection with fever, sinus congestion, and painful coughing. I took sick days off from work to recover but my condition worsened, and with an unavoidable travel deadline looming a trip to the doctor was needed.
Two days of clogged eustachian tubes and sinus congestion got me interested in this chart.
I was prescribed azithromycin, an antibiotic, on the chance that the infection was bacterial, and a bottle of antitussive syrup to soothe coughing through the course of the trip. By lunchtime I was feeling well enough just from general placebo effect to have lunch at Maneki Neko, a Japanese eatery in Falls Church. I sampled a couple of Kumamoto oysters and finished a bowl of Okinawa Soba noodle soup with roast pork, quite therapeutic for my tortured throat.
I write this the next day aboard a trans-Pacific flight to Manila, still a bit sniffly and phlegmy, but feeling otherwise comforted by a mild codeine-and-analgesic haze. The symptoms are subsiding more quickly with the antibiotics, which might mean that the bronchial infection was indeed bacterial — or if it was viral, has simply run its course. It’s the sickest I’ve been since my shingles experience: another illness that hit me on a trip to the Philippines, interestingly enough. Pre-travel stress does that, I guess.
Costco Safari
I suppose membership with Costco is an inevitable step in my ongoing Transition to Suburbia, and despite having lived in the USA for almost a decade now, trips to big box warehouse-type stores still hold an almost anthropological fascination for me, a cultural exploration of the types of consumables — and crafts-turned-consumables — that retailers sell in bulk.
Brownpau Show #1
I was in an IRC channel talking about 5by5.tv and the nature of internet fame, and nostrich said something along the lines of “WELL DO YOUR OWN SHOW” — so I did, with The Brownpau Show #1:
Mostly I was just testing out the iPad 2 camera, and how well iMovie did on-the-fly video capture, editing, and upload. I’ve done boring personal vlogs like this before — badly, on a mobile phone — but even a collection of the most ordinary observational talking heads from an iPad camera can be improved with a few snappy cut-to-cut edits. Expect more of this homemade excitement!
Thanksgiving Weekend 2011
We went to New Jersey last weekend to spend Thanksgiving with Amy’s family, and to witness the baptism of her brother Bob. Continue reading Thanksgiving Weekend 2011
Last of the Litter
Sad news: Jasper the Cat has died, at the venerable old age of 20. You may remember Jasper from my time living in Baltimore — he was my old housemate’s cat, and Pandora’s brother. An active and affectionate gray tabby with a roguish penchant for the outdoors, Jasper was excitable opposite to his quieter, more reserved indoor sister. With both cats born from a litter of four, of whom the other two had died previously, Jasper’s passing leaves Pandora as last survivor of the litter.
As for Pandora, 20 years old is impressive for a cat, but the age is not without attendant health and behavior issues, among them feline hyperthyroidism, renal dysfunction, litterbox aversion, and frequent regurgitation. Regular vet checkups are a must, and with regular medication she’s doing fairly well for such an advanced age. It’s not cheap, but it’s worth it; hopefully she lives for years longer still.
On the Passing of Computer Luminaries
Steve Jobs died on October 5th, shortly after the iPhone 4S was announced. Jobs’ reserved seat sat empty at the event, and as new Apple CEO Tim Cook delivered the keynote he almost certainly knew the time was near. I half-expected that he would demo the new iPhone’s FaceTime app with a call to to Jobs in his sickbed, but that would probably have been a bit crass, with Jobs in no condition to deal with a video call.
Jobs didn’t invent the personal computer, laptop, graphical user interface, portable music player, smartphone, or DVR; but he did bring to all these a distinct mix of discovered design talent and business/operations acumen that transformed average consumer electronics into accessible life-changing devices, defying expectations and thinking so future-forward that sometimes it seemed crazy. From a $666.66 DIY motherboard kit, to touchscreen communications devices made from tiny logic boards strapped to giant batteries, Apple under Jobs managed to take existing ideas, introduce to them a magical sense of aesthetically rewarding utility, and sell them on a Reality Distortion Field-powered cloud of overwhelming cultural desirability. I was not immune.
Some final notes: His sister’s eulogy, the Apple memorial page, and the naturopathic folly Jobs held to that allowed his cancer to progress past the threshold of survivability.
Steve Jobs’ death was shortly followed by the deaths of Dennis Ritchie and John McCarthy, arguably even greater computer giants for their own seminal contributions. Ritchie created C and helped create UNIX, while McCarthy created Lisp and influenced the development of artificial intelligence. Their deaths made less of a public splash than Steve Jobs’, but their technological legacies deserve as much memorialization and reflection.
There have been analogies to Edison, but I like to rank Jobs and Ritchie and McCarthy more along the lines of Babbage, Lovelace, Morse, Turing, and other past luminaries upon whose shoulders the current computer age stands.