I scribbled this entry into a pocket-sized notebook during a period when I was living in a partially-converted barn. The closest indoor plumbing was 40 yards away, across a gravel parking lot, but I had a space heater and a fast DSL connection. I liked that room.

I have ants in my bedroom.

My sister and I had a good laugh over the phone when I noticed a troupe of ants attempting to take over my desk. I worried that I might accidentally crush them. She mused that most people would just smoosh them and have it over with.

Now it’s been two weeks since the troupe arrived. Their numbers have neither increased nor decreased. There are about 12 of them. Somehow, they continue to discover trace amounts of sugar in unexpected places. Earlier this week I started hearing a periodic popping noise off in the corner of my desk. I assumed that the ants were just walking noisily. Yesterday I discovered the source of the noise. My new tenants had found an abandoned package of Pop Rocks beneath a pile of papers.

When I take away their treats, all but one of the ants scatter. The biggest ant remains and gnashes its pincers at me. When I blow in its face, it gets pissed off and runs at me as if to attack.

Today they took over my teacup. They were sucking sweet milky drops from the spent teabag. I picked up the cup and dumped it outside. The big one bit me.

The ants are all afraid of the screen on my laptop. I can actually chase them with it, when nothing else seems to phase them. I wonder if I should be frightened too.

tags: ants living pincers poprocks

>The other day, I was thinking about the idea of a “videophone” and I had to laugh. Back in the day, we would watch movies like BladeRunner and think “Yeah. Won’t that be cool when we have video phones.” It never occurred to us that a video “call” would be made through any sort of device other than a special phone.

Twice a week, I log into a conference call with participants in Seattle, Minneapolis, New York, Boston, and London. We regularly talk for over an hour while also exhanging text messages and files over an encrypted connection. The brilliant bit is that these sessions don’t cost us anything. That’s right. It’s completely free because we all log in through Skype. In addition to being free, it’s also completely portable as long as we can get to a laptop with a broadband internet connection. Once, I dialed in from a coffee shop. Rather than disturbing my fellow coffee drinkers, I wrote my comments into an IM session while listening to everyone else via headphones.

We don’t even have to worry about OS interoperability. Half of us use Macs, half are running Windows XP. It’s never caused a problem, even when we pass files back and forth through the Skype session.

Even when I need to get ahold of someone who’s offline, I get to do it for cheap using SkypeOut. I just spent 31 minutes on a call to a land line in London. It cost me €0.544. That’s €0.017 per minute. In January, it cost me less than €3.00 to talk for an hour with my friend Raj in his hotel room in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Our team of collaborators started using Skype to communicate across the Atlantic about a year ago. At that point, it was terribly unstable. SkypeOut was useless because it introduced a painful lag. It made me feel like the person on the other end was mad at me (because there were lots of awkward pauses after I said anything). At the time, Skype also didn’t support conference calling on Macs. I was cautiously skeptical of the tool, waiting for it to be proven before singing any praises. Since then, they have really gotten their stuff together. The fact that now you can call any US phone for free makes it indispensable.

That’s all well and nice, but I want (group) video chat. Now.
In true American form, I can’t be satisfied with a wonderful thing. Instead, I turn my head and look for more. I don’t want to just have a file-sharing audio conference every Wednesday. I want to see the people I’m talking to, and I want to do it for free. This is where the technology just hasn’t caught up with us, but it’s close. If we were all on Macs running OS X, we could use iChat AV to have videoconferences with up to 10 people, passing the info over the Jabber Protocol. Sadly, to date nobody has released a Jabber client on Windows that can handle group video chat sessions. The solution is a-brewing though.

My only question is who will get it done first.

tags: skype jabber ichat videoconference

>http://www.sahana.lk/

“Sahana is a Free and Open Source Disaster Management system. It is a web based collaboration tool that addresses the common coordination problems during a disaster from finding missing people, managing aid, managing volunteers, tracking camps effectively between Government groups, the civil society (NGOs) and the victims themselves.”

SourceForge Project of the Month for June 2006: http://sourceforge.net/potm/potm-2006-06.php

>The existence of external phenomena and the existence of a creator God are equally impossible to prove or disprove. The only difference is that the difficulty of establishing the latter is more noticeable.

External Phenomena: (1) Phenomena which are perceived to be external to the mind. (2) Events and objects that are ultimately material in nature and thus inherently existent beyond the realm of the mind, mental activity, and mental experience.

tags: buddhist philosophy mind mindandlife theology deism religion

> I wanted to put a photo of myself in my profile (seemed prudent), but in order to do that I had to post it in a blog entry first. There you have it.

>Get a load of this epic saga of Medical Ethics brewing in Seattle.

Basically, doctors tried to force Tina Marie Carlsen to allow them to put implants into her baby, Riley, so that he could undergo dialysis. Carlsen refused, insisting that she wanted to seek non-surgical alternatives or alternatives that don’t involve dialysis (the details are unclear in the current news articles). The state responded by taking custody of Riley and moving to perform the surgery without Carlsen’s consent. To prevent the surgery, Carlsen abducted Riley from the hospital. This resulted in her being declared a Kidnapper, hunted down by the State, and thrown in jail for five days without being allowed access to her baby. Meanwhile, the doctors are again planning to do the surgery without Carlsen’s consent.

Carlsen was hunted down by the State because they believed that the baby was in imminent danger if he didn’t receive immediate treatment. Now, after the fact, the Hospital is admitting that Riley was not actually in imminent danger at all. Now the State is trying to wash their hands of the situation, implying that they were misled. More imporantly, possibly Carlsen has/had time to seek out alternative treatment for her baby?

What were Carlsen’s medical alternatives? Why doesn’t she want her baby on dialysis? Nobody seems to be giving a clear answer to these questions.

I can’t wait for Anderson Cooper or Nightline to sniff this one. I want info.

It’s been hard to find an article that gives a good breakdown of the situation, but here are two pretty good ones:

Mother, doctors fight over care: Kansas City Star, MO, June 29, 2006
Off track over baby’s welfare: Seattle Times, June 29, 2006

People have set up a website in support of Carlsen and her baby: http://www.helpbabyriley.com/

Wild stuff man.

tags: medicine dialysis baby riley seattle surgery ethics kidnapping

>I’ve recently embarked on a web services adventure. Some work that I have been doing for a Buddhist Monastery gave me ideas for a great company. I dialed up a couple talented friends and after a prolonged transcontinental huddle (alla Skype and British Airways) we’re rolling along. The first stumbling block was deciding whether to implement the service in PHP or to do it in Java. I did a bunch of reading and picked some brains. I considered Python, and even admired RubyOnRails for a few days. After digging up some compelling arguments in favor of using PHP and being directed to read an interesting case study by Sun, I concluded that Java was the way to go. In many ways, this meant that I had to start off at square one, due to the fact that the vast majority of my programming experience is with PHP. While I have long been familiar with the theory of Java, JSP and Patterns-driven Object Oriented Programming, I never came around to actually getting my hands dirty.

Thus it began. I fired up a trial version of myEclipse IDE and started beefing up on the latest trends of Java Dev. It quickly became clear that I needed a wholistic context to use as a reference point while trying to grok the relationships between all the myriad frameworks floating around in Java land. I poked around a bit and settled on Spring Framework due to the fact that it forces you to use relatively sophisticated design patterns while ensuring that your code remains easy to test. A late night trip to Borders left me $44 poorer with a copy of Spring in Action in hand.

Thence followed four days of exasperation. It only took me about a day to absorb the necessary concepts, but actually implementing them was another issue altogether. I took a serious butt kicking trying to deploy and run even a simple web app. Every time I thought I was making a bit of headway, I would meet a new wall of error messages. Even the examples from the book wouldn’t run.

Refusing to be deterred, I kept at it. In areas where the book glossed over a topic, I supplemented by reading through more detailed tutorials I found online. When I couldn’t figure out an error message, I turned to Google or just took a break and read a few chapters of Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon. This evening, my efforts were rewarded. A bunch of interlocking confusions all cleared up at once and after a bit of tweaking, I had gotten a relatively elaborate web app to deploy and run on JBoss without any errors. Huzzah.

In my experience, whenever I try to learn a new programming language, or start using a complicated technology, there’s always an introductory period where nothing makes sense and nothing works right. After a bit of tinkering, the haze clears a bit and then it starts to click; my head adjusts to the paradigm and then everything flows along much more smoothly. While I didn’t expect it to take quite this much effort to click into the Java paradigm, I think I’ve broken through now. It feels good.

Keep an eye out for the first deployments of my new project.

tags: java, spring, eclipse, php, huzzah

>This is a dish I might not have ever dreamed up on my own, but the ingredients were in the larder and nobody was going to use them, so a new recipe was born.

Potatos – thin discs
Onions – julienne
Fresh Fennel Leaves – minced
Dill (dry or fresh) – minced
Olive Oil
Pepper
Sea Salt or Kosher Salt

Preheat oven: 350 degrees Farenheit

Peel and cut the potatos. Put them into a big bowl and set aside.

Sautee Onions in enough oil to coat the potatos. Add fennel after a few moments. Add salt, pepper, and dill. Simmer over medium heat until the onions soften. Pour all of this over the potatos and toss so that the potatos are evenly coated.

Spread the oiled potatos one disc deep in an oven-proof dish. Bake for about 45 minutes.

Paprika is a good garnish on this.

>

Externally, this age of conflict’s chaos erupts;
Internally, exhaustion engulfs body and mind;
Secretly, vivid thoughts flood the conscious mind.
The practitioner who transcends these three
Keeps a happy mind and is oh, so joyful.

– H.H. Dudjom Rinpoche (1904-1987)

>Serves 4

I came up with this on an evening when I was pressed for time and decided to make the most of it. The recipe definitely needs work. If anybody has ideas for how to improve it, please post a comment.

Main Ingredients
1 med Onion – Julienned
1/2 lb. Lamb or GimmeLean – Cut into 1″ chunks
1 med Eggplant – Sliced into Strips 1/2″ by 3″
2 Tbsp Olive Oil
1 1/2 Tbsp Thyme
3 Tbsp Paprika
1 or 2 Bay Leaves

Sauce
5 Tbsp Mustard (from a jar)
1 1/2 Tbsp Oil
2 Tbsp Corn Starch
… Mix well and then add…
1 1/2 c. Water, Broth or Wine

Warm olive oil in a heavy pan and Brown the Lamb or GimmeLean. Set aside the meat. Then, in the same pan, saute the onions for a few moments and add the Thyme, Paprika, and Bay Leaves. Add eggplant strips, cook until eggplant softens (stir constantly).

When the eggplant has softened, add the cooked meat to the onions and eggplant. Sautee for a few minutes and then add sauce and toss or fold together. Simmer. If you are using GimmeLean, simmer for only 5 to 10 minutes and then serve. If you are using Lamb, simmer for 20 minutes, or put the pan in the oven for 30 to 40 minutes. Make sure there is enough liquid to have some sauce remaining after cooking.

Tags lamb recipe mustard experiment gimme lean vegetarian