Mick West

Going to Mammoth tomorrow. You may have seen our Christmas card from last year.

Well, here’s what it looks like in the summer (not us):

So, we’d be about on 12 feet of snow there:

I ordered a Nintendo Wii a few weeks ago, and it finally shipped. Thanks to the miracle of the internet, I can tell that it left Dallas at 8:34PM yesterday, and arrived in LA at 7:00 this morning. Currently it’s “Out for delivery”, meaning it’s on the brown truck, somewhere in Santa Monica.

My UPS guy got tired of waiting for us to come to the door, so he’d just knock and run, leaving his deliveries on the doormat. Recently he does not even bother to knock, just leaving the packages, so we often only discover there has been a delivery when we walk the dogs at night.

But if there’s something I’m looking forward to, I could go and look outside the door, but instead, I just refresh the UPS query. Yup, instead of walking twenty feet to see if something is there, I get my computer to ask a computer in Mawah, NJ, to tell it all it has been told by the computers in Dallas, Ontario, Los Angeles, and a computer in a truck somewhere in LA.

And it’s actually easier. Here, one click, in five seconds I know exactly where my Wii has been, and that it’s not on my doormat. I marvel now at this new technology, but soon it will be as accepted as cellphones were - or a better example: trains.

[later] …. And eventually, I checked the page, it told me the package had arrived, I open the door, and there it is! Wiiii!

Bliss. I just moved over from shared hosting to a virtual dedicated server on GoDaddy. It’s just incredibly faster, and a lot more configurable. Moving this blog over seems fairly problem free. Although I seem to have a problem uploading images for some reason.

Oh, just needed to chmod a bit, seems like it’s a common problem. Look, an upload:

I also needed to chmod my perl scripts, and cpan install Geo::METAR and Gedcom, and now my scripts work again!!! Woot!!!

And I can have spaces in filenames, so my old genealogy document gallery is back up and running (when the FTP finishes):
http://mickwest.com/family/wdocs/index.htm

Oh, and “Pretty permalinks” work, meaning this post has the much nicer like of:
http://mickwest.com/2007/01/15/sweet-server/
rather than some random number.

What this means is: I no longer have any use for Yahoo, the final straw was when i emailed them asking if there was a way of changing the height of the email box, they email back a stock answer discussing the width. Yahoo needs to invest in some development.

IT2010 was a competition I entered and won in early 1988. At that time I was 20 years old and a student at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (more commonly known as UMIST). The competition was a join promotion on the part of EDS (a large IT company, previously part of GM), and the Sunday Times (a venerable British Newspaper).

The competition was only open to students currently in higher education, and basically involved predicting what “Information
Technology” would look like in the year 2010, which would be 22 years in the future back then. The prize was £2010, which would be the equivalent of around $8000 in today’s money, a staggeringly large amount of money for a poor student back then, greater than all the money I had spent in my entire life up to that point. So I resolved to enter.
Read the rest of this entry »

A month and a bit away, and we are finally back home in Santa Monica. I like it here.

Marcus Aurelius supplies this quote

Love the little trade which thou hast learned, and be content therewith

Which I like for various reasons, so I just copied it from some page of Aurelius quotes, which listed the source as Meditations IV. 31..

Now I always like to see quotes in context if possible, so I tried to find it in the gutenberg text.

But then, Gutenberg says it’s actually 4:26, translated differently:
(by Florence Etienne Meric Casaubon, 1907)
http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext01/medma10.txt

What art and profession soever thou hast learned,
endeavour to affect it, and comfort thyself in it;
and pass the remainder of thy life as one who from his whole heart
commits himself and whatsoever belongs unto him, unto the gods:
and as for men, carry not thyself either tyrannically or servilely
towards any.

Hey, that sounds different in meaning! “comfort thyself in it” is not the same as “be content with it”. What the?

Bartleby, where I found the original quote, has the full text, but here the 4.31 becomes:
(Translated by George Long, who died in 1879)
http://www.bartleby.com/2/3/4.html

Love the art, poor as it may be, which thou hast learned, and be content with it; and pass through the rest of life like one who has intrusted to the gods with his whole soul all that he has, making thyself neither the tyrant nor the slave of any man.

That certainly seems the closest, and may well be the actual origin of the popular saying, just simplified a bit for the books of quotes where is it found.

It seems to me the original greek is actually 4:30

http://zipper.paco.net/~yury/LL/aurel.html.utf8

Τὸ τεχνίον ὃ ἔμαθες φίλει, τούτῳ προσαναπαύου· τὸ δὲ ὑπόλοιπον τοῦ βίου διέξελθε ὡς θεοῖς μὲν ἐπιτετροφὼς τὰ σεαυτοῦ πάντα ἐξ ὅλης τῆς ψυχῆς, ἀνθρώπων δὲ μηδενὸς μήτε τύραννον μήτε δοῦλον σεαυτὸν καθιστάς.

Which is all Greek to me.

Now, I’d looked at the new (2002) translation by Hicks, and I found the language dull and uninspired. Looking up this phrase we have:

Cherish your gifts, however humble, and take pleasure in them. Spend the rest of your days looking only to the gods from whome come every good gift and seeing no man as either master or slave

“Cherish your gifts”? Pap! “your gifts” is not the same as “the art, poor as it may be, which thou has learned”. Danggit, now I’ve got to translate the original Greek to see what he really said. Are the Hicks dumbing it down, or did the older translators spice it up?

Another modern translation, Gregory Hays, 2002:

Love the discipline you know and let it support you. Entrust everything willingly to the gods, and then make your way through life - no one’s master and no one’s slave

Better. “Discipline” is better, but still so distinct in meaning from the old timers.

Back to the “original”

Love the little trade which thou hast learned, and be content therewith

This is listed as the quote in lists of quotes and aphorisms. Indeed the first use I find is in 1906, in a book “Familiar Quotations” by John Bartlett.

Rather oddly it is also attributed to “Mabel Ashburton” in the 2005 book of quotes, “The White Wallet”. “Mabel Ashburton” does not appear on the internet, but is probably “Mabel Edith Baring” (nee Hood), Lady Ashburton, which is confusing until we find The White Wallet was actually written by Viscountess Pamela Grey of Fallodon, in 1912, collecting and publishing quotes being an acceptable occupation for a gentlewoman. Probably Mabel stole it from Bartlett, and offered it to Pamela as her own.
http://www.thepeerage.com/p8064.htm#i80632

We also have a latin version, by J. M. Schulz, 1802
http://www.slu.edu/colleges/AS/languages/classical/latin/tchmat/pedagogy/latinitas/ma/ma4.htm

Artem, quam didicisti, diligito et in ea acquiesceto: quod autem vitae super est, id ita exigito, ut qui Deo omnia ex toto animo commiseris, neque ullius hominis aut dominum aut servum te praebeto.

Transliterated very badly:

Art, how learnt, esteem and in also (?accquire?), that also life/career beyond is
http://www.archives.nd.edu/cgi-bin/words.exe?Artem%2C+quam+didicisti%2C+diligito+et+in+ea+acquiesceto%3A+quod+autem+vitae+super+est%2C

Dammit, this transfer is taking too long. The no-spaces rule for filenames really messed up my genealogy page, the Perl scripts seem not to be working - include path and SSI not quite right, and then the pages were loading slow because of some stats gathering that Yahoo appended on the pages. Luckily that could be switched off, which made things load a LOT faster.

I also rather foolishly attempted to upgrade Wordpress from 2.0.2 to 2.0.6, and had some problem with caching that made me have to comment out some lines from wp-config.php. There was also some error when converting the database (post-status, or something), but it all seems to work.

Fun stuff. I’m slightly regretting the move to Yahoo because of the above problems, but it’s nice to be integrated with email - and the new email is nice, with multiple aliases meaning I can switch off my catch-all, which was generating spam up the proverbial wazoo.

Now what’s the big problem? Really just two outstanding issues. Firstly my weather page does not work since SSI of perl scripts (or anything other than a html file) simply does nothing.

Secondly, my genealogy gedcom browser does not work, since it can’t find the gedcom module. Either I need to move the module around, or I need to figure out include paths?

(a few minutes later) - hey, the “move the module around” worked fine, I just moved it up into the same directory as the script that was calling it, and it worked fine. I think it worked before because it was in the cgi-local folder, which on my old server was hard wired into the perl include path.

Now, the SSI problem I feel to be more intractable. I doubt I can make it work, but then the ONLY think I’m using it for is the weather page. So I could just hack it somehow, or just forget about it. It’s all just grepping, so should be a useful learning exercise to convert it to PHP - I want to learn PHP webbery so I can hack Wordpress more effectivly.

Bah - it’s old technology, and I don’t even fly!, I’m just going to forget about the weather page for now.

2006 Oregon Christmas

That’s a link to a picasa album, they let you cut and paste some code to get it looking all purdy like that, but unfortunately the generated code is missing a final </div> tag, which I had to add manually to keep it from messing up following posts. What’s up with that Google?

Then you can also embed individual photos:

From 2006 Oregon C…

Yahoo web hosting does appear to have excellent backup software, with version control on idividual files. I think that every editable file in the world should have automatic version control all the time. I just hate the idea of making a change to a file and being unable to undo that change.

Manual version control with Perforce, et al, is great, since it lets you pin a file at a specific point in its history, but between “submits”, I want version control on for every key I press.

This kind of ties in with something I like about the “One Laptop Per Child” computer - their OS arranges things as a “journal”, basically listing in order everything that was done on that computer, as opposed to keeping things in files. THis means you don’t have to remember the location of files, you just have to know when you edited them, which is usually recently for the files that matter. For everyhting else you can search. It’s the future.

Why! Why does Yahoo web hosting not allow spaces in file names? Grrr! Now I’ve got to spend an hour fixing all my file names and the associated links. There’s no reason for it!

Other issues:

Yahoo’s wordpress installation comes with a cache module. Nice for them, but I’m paying for the bandwidth, so (since nobody is actually reading this) I want to use it and not have to wait five minutes for changes to links to show up. Disabled it for now.