Category: a learning experience

One of the many things parenthood doesn’t prepare you for is the notion of encumbered time. The word “encumber” is usually associated with a burden but that’s not the sense in which I am using it.

The concept of an encumbrance I have in mind is how it’s used in government financials, where an amount of money is said to be “encumbered” or assigned and allocated to a defined purpose. It’s not spent – in fact it may never be spent – but it exists on paper for a specific purpose. It can’t be reallocated or reassigned to some other purpose without being unencumbered, usually a hassle and considered a sign of poor planning.

So encumbered time is time that is allocated to a purpose that can’t be used in any other way. For example, time spent taking someone to an appointment is time in which you are not engaged but that you can’t put to it’s best use. Sure, you could knit or read a book or harass politicians on Twitter. But you can’t paint that room or weed that garden bed because you’re not there. A job is not encumbered time, nor is any household task in which you are actively engaged: my definition means time when you are not part of what’s going on. It’s not for you.

There is a lot of that when you have kids or a family of any size. And it’s not new. Generations before us have experienced it. The concept of a name for it just came to me recently. And it’s not a case of resenting it or regretting the choices that brought you here so much as knowing what it is, of understanding it through naming it.

There have some homebrew ways of doing this, but their reliability suffered: if the library made a change to how they presented or managed their data, it could break any user-generated hacks.

The Seattle Public Library: Library News Release Detail:

With the new Horizon system, patrons will notice a number of improvements, including

• Improved search and page loading times, especially for people with slow Internet connections.
• A better interface for Library users with visual disabilities.
• RSS (Really Simple Syndication). Just as Web sites now offer RSS as a means to provide updated information without having to “visit” the site, the Horizon RSS feature allows search feeds (new titles from your favorite author) or a listing of “items out” to be incorporated into new readers (My Yahoo! Or Bloglines).
• Icons that clearly display the type of material (book, DVD, book on CD, etc.) so you can quickly locate what you want.

Patrons should be aware that due to privacy concerns and the USA PATRIOT Act, the new system will no longer keep track of yearly holds placed by patrons.

The bit about library systems not tracking holds was something you had to opt out of: now they’re just not tracking anyone. What kind of books do you have to have checked out for the terrorists to have won?

Now playing: Out of Control by U2 from the album “Boy” | Get it

Main Page – Wikipedia:

Today’s featured article
The Holy Prepuce (or Holy Foreskin) is one of the various relics purported to be associated with Jesus Christ.

This was never mentioned in any discussion I can recall about Holy Relics. The odd bone, perhaps a fragment of the True Cross[1], that was about it.

fn1. Definition of Relic – wordIQ Dictionary & Encyclopedia: Erasmus famously remarked that there were enough pieces of the True Cross to build a ship from.

Now playing: Magazine: Shot by Both Sides from the album “Real Life” | Buy it

I managed to whittle my 80+ validation errors down to 20 on the main page of this weblog.

The fixes so far were easy. The easiest fix was to make sure all hrefs that used an image as their target were all on one line: hang readability <sigh> . . . I was accustomed to opening the href on one line, indenting the img src on the next line, and then closing the href. bad, bad, bad . . .

Now to work out the remaining score of gotchas . . . for what it’s worth, tidy passes the page with flying colors.

now playing: Guiding Light from the album Marquee Moon by Television


[/sw]:: which tclsh
/sw/bin/tclsh
(paul@purple)-(05:08 PM / Tue Dec 2)
[/sw]:: tclsh %


Finally.

Now to fetch DarwinPorts and see how that goes.
Continue reading “Darwin progress report”

GROKLAW

As someone wrote me the other day, Windows comes from a box. Linux comes from a community.

Interesting article: it demonstrates that for arbitrarily chosen time periods, one can claim that one OS is more secure than another. But in all the IT jobs I’ve held, the only time period you get to work in is the present. If things are broken now, reflecting on some random quarter from 1999 where things were fine doesn’t fix the problem.

If the brain trust in Redmond could buckle down and make the the hard decision to fix things instead of making these foolish comparisons, they would be better off.

My farewell address to my workplace was very well received by faculty and staff. I expected the staff to be in agreement with some of my sentiments, but I got some kind words from faculty members I wasn’t aware even knew who I was.

And I have had a couple of folks hoping that the circumstances around my departure, indeed my leaving at all in less than a year, will serve as some kind of catalyst for change. I’m not going to indulge in anything quite that messianic, since I was hardly in a core department nor was this all that big a deal, in the grand scheme of things. I think the fact I was located at the periphery had a lot to do with the lack of structure and process in my situation.

It’s not like there’s a peasant’s revolt looming, but I wonder if this should pass unremarked? Is there something an administration committed to change could point to as the kind of behavior or institutional practice that can’t go on?

Wired News: Xbox to Switch to PowerPC

[But] Richard Doherty, research director of Envisioneering Group of Seaford, New York, said the announcement could be the first in a more general shift by Microsoft away from Intel.

“It’s a very big win for IBM. It’s a clear change of direction for Microsoft, and it’s a very unfortunate surprise for Intel,” he said.

“There’s quite a bit of irony here,” he added, referring to the fact that it has always been assumed that Apple would move to Intel, rather than Microsoft moving to the PowerPC, a chip technology co-developed by Apple, IBM and Motorola.

It’s been said many times that gaming is driving the technology in the PC industry, from clock speeds to graphics capabilities. The clear message here is that when performance matters, the PowerPC is the right choice.

[IP] Bill Joy’s interview to “Fortune”

I couldn’t pick just a couple of pull quotes: I recommend reading the whole thing.