I put up with the ads they started playing in between songs.

But today…

I’m done putting up, ‘cause they’re done putting out.

Back to KPLU, KKJZ or CDs for me.

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  He who smelt it dealt it.
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  One more small step in my quest for SynerLisp
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  AOL is missing a few letters: S, S, H, and a final E.
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• Scott Bellware: The Problem with Big Design Up Front is the "Big" not the "Up Front"
  Precisely.
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As a foundation for “the causes which impel them to the separation”, the authors state:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Personally, I find none of these to be self-evident.

To me, it is supremely evident that all men (and women) are not created equal – that in fact no two people are equal in any respect.  We are all very different, possessing different strengths and weaknesses.  Some of us are better suited than others for various activities.

It’s also evident to me from observing nature and history that neither life, liberty, nor the pursuit of happiness are automatically granted by creation, evolution, or whatever you want to call How Things Got The Way They Are.  These three “rights” have only ever been secured by a lengthy struggle against their corresponding “wrongs” (to play along with the value judgment inherent in the term).

Nevertheless, I do agree with the Lockean notions of self-determination expressed in the rest of this document that led to representative democracy and the eventual enfranchisement of slaves and even women.  Why?  Because experience has taught us that although liberty and equality are not givens in life, institutions that impose artificial limitations on liberty and equality diminish our potential — individually and collectively.

It is not possible to institutionalize an effective recognition of individual differences.  Therefore, government must act as if we were all equal, and let our differences work their way towards their own best purposes.  Government must not circumscribe our liberties, even when we’re unfit to decide for ourselves – because the government is even less fit to decide for us.  Liberty means freedom to decide for ourselves, not freedom from the responsibility for those decisions — or their consequences.

On this Independence Day, I can be thankful that I live in a country that still lets me make most of my own decisions and reap most of my own rewards and failures.  But I worry that increasingly our government wants to make certain decisions for us, and protect us from the consequences of those decisions that still remain in our control.  Government, through a natural attraction towards self-preservation, wants to make itself indispensable.  Governmental involvement leads to a greater dependence on government, and that’s a trend to which I will never add my John Hancock.

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  Swapping should be easy (at least, some people think so).
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  Thanks, Arjan.
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The exact middle doesn’t come at noon, however.  Because the year begins and ends in Standard Time, the midpoint will be at 1PM Daylight Saving Time (for those who observe it) – and on leap years it would come at 1AM, July 2 DST.

It’s hard to believe that the year is already half gone.  Perhaps an optimist would say that it’s half unexperienced.  Each year seems to go by faster than the last one.  I’m not alone in that perception – that observation has become so common that it often serves as conversation filler.

My own theory for why time seems to pass more quickly the older you grow is that each segment of time (day, week, month, year) is a smaller percentage of your life so far.  When you were ten a year was 10% of your life, and it seemed to take forever to get through a grade at school.  Now that I’m approaching fifty (much like a cat approaching a bath), it takes the passage of five years to seem that long.

That also explains why older people often get confused over what decade they’re talking about.  “Back in ‘64 – no wait, it was ‘74”  heck, it all flies by so quickly you can’t keep it straight.  It doesn’t bode well for my experience of the rest of my life.  Will I just increasingly fast-forward this movie until it ends with a click?  It’s an old lesson, but one I need to learn again and again:  take time to experience Today.

Come, fill the Cup, and in the Fire of Spring
The Winter Garment of Repentance fling:
The Bird of Time has but a little way
To fly–and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing.

– The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Fitzgerald translation

• Eunoia : Stu Savory’s Blog – July 2009
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  The only damage it did here was start the dogs barking before 6AM.
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  Now we know why nobody wants to be a beta tester
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  Randy lays the BRA on IVB.
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  The most depressing way to watch the clock.
  Thanks, head lemur.
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  Simon says, set my property.
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  Just what every Synergy/DE programmer didn't know that they wanted.
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  Can I get an "Amen"? Oh wait, somebody already said that before…
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That melody continues to grip my emotions every time I’ve heard it since the very first time when I was five years old and my mother bought us an LP of The Great Composers – which included excerpts from works by Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Brahms, and Tchaikovsky combined with the stories of their lives (Disneyfied, naturally).  My sister and I wore the grooves out of that LP from playing it over and over again on an old Magnavox turntable, so every passage sparks an immediate recognition whenever I hear it again – but none of them affect me quite the same way as this little etude by Chopin.

Chopin himself said of this etude, "In all my life I have never again been able to find such a beautiful melody."

The melody appears deceptively simple – like much of Chopin’s work.  It starts out climbing the E scale a measure at a time, repeating the same basic pattern in each measure.  But it suddenly skips over the dominant to seize the sixth – and then drops back down to the tonic.  Next comes a little section that toys around with B minor, to dutifully end the second phrase in the dominant.  The first phrase is repeated, but then detours with growing intensity and angst through dissonance and accidentals that touch on at least four different keys, seeming to urgently ask some great question, before resolving into a glorious E major chord that suspends the melody high on the major third – either affirming or perhaps only wishing earnestly for some eternal answer, before taking its lyrical journey back down the E major mountain until it quietly reaches its tonic home.

When I hear this melody, I wonder if I’m really a Romantic at heart after all, despite my love of Nietzsche and my yawns at Brahms.  Chopin’s intense yearning, expressed with such unaffected genius, almost makes me want to believe in the eternity of love and the soul.  Almost.

Mr. Doss was my sixth grade homeroom teacher, but he also taught PE for the boys in our three-classroom rotation – enough boys for four teams of nine or ten boys each.

“We’ll keep track of team records, and declare a champion team at the end of the year.”

“It sure won’t be mine,” I thought.  I wasn’t very good at softball.  My eye condition made both hitting and catching difficult, and years of hearing the laughter at my comical performances had convinced me that’d I’d never be any good.  I knew I’d be picked near the end of a roster — but no matter where I came up in the batting order, it would be the wrong time to send old Chip to the plate.   PE was destined to be a torment for me for the rest of the year.

Sandy Witcher chose me seventh on a team of nine.  Not bad, I thought.  In fact, I felt downright complimented.  Even though the guys after me were pretty pathetic, the one just ahead of me was a decent hitter.  Sandy, the captain and lead-off hitter, was quite an athlete – and he was also a really nice guy.  He never made fun of anyone, and never felt like he had to show off his own talents.

The first game we played, Sandy stepped up to the plate and hit a home run on the first pitch.  Next came Glenn Dalton, who got on base with a single.  Tim Doss also got a hit and put Glenn on third.  Then Barry Dalton hit a home run.  Philip Keesee and Victor Franklin followed with a hit each.

Then I came to the plate.  Somehow I managed to hit the ball, but it dribbled on the ground out to the pitcher and I was thrown out at first.  I was dejected as I walked back to the bench, but Sandy said, “Great sacrifice, Chip!”  Not knowing much about the game, I thought at first he was being sarcastic, but he corrected my attitude.  “You drove in a run – that’s how we win the game!”  Philip came over and slapped me on the back, “Thanks for getting me home!”  All of a sudden, I felt a lot better.

The next two guys struck out to end the first half of the inning, but we were ahead 5-0.

I played in left field, but I never even had a chance to screw up – Sandy struck out the side.  After five innings we were ahead 24-0, and Mr. Doss (who was the umpire) called the game on the mercy rule.  I didn’t get a hit the whole game, but it hardly mattered.  My outs were almost a relief to my team, for otherwise the innings might never have ended.

Before the next game, Sandy told us not to get cocky.  The team we were to face looked strong — they had soundly beaten their previous opponent.  But we slaughtered them.  And I actually managed to get on base, with a fielder’s choice.  Not ideal, but it was only the first out and I was able to survive the next two batters.  Top of the order with two outs, Sandy took the bat and drove me home.  It was the first time I had ever crossed home plate in any game in my softball career.

The winning grew infectious.  Everyone on the team became better players, even we three at the end of the order.  Our opponents, on the other hand, were often defeated before the first pitch was thrown.  We won every game that season, and never by less than five runs.  I even started to get a hit every other game or so, as did the guys who came after me.  Once when our ninth batter Oscar (who had started out the year with a vertical axe-chopping downswing) hit the ball solidly, I thought “Wow! He’s really learned how to hit.  Hey, so have I!”

The last game of the year was more of a team celebration than a contest.  As each of our batters came up, we cheered him with memories of his past accomplishments and encouraged him to hit one more for old times’ sake.  When I stepped into the box in the top of the last inning, I heard the other guys all cheering me on, and thought about what a magical year it had been.  I had gained so much confidence in just a few months.  It struck me suddenly that that was the only difference between the loser I had been and the player I had become:  confidence.  We expected to win, and we did.  Unlike in the past, my teammates didn’t expect for me to lose the game for them – they expected me to do well, and I could!

The next pitch came before I could think about it, and I instinctively swung.  “Ping” went the aluminum bat, as I felt the full force of Newton’s Third Law in my wrists and arms.  The softball shrank away into the sky.  I watched in disbelief and heard my teammates’ voices rise in exhortations to “Run, Chip! Run!”

But there was no need to run.  The ball cleared the fence by no more than a whisper – a whispered “please” from deep within a boy who had never before hit a home run in his life.

The other team couldn’t understand the celebration – after all, we were already ahead by 12.  They didn’t know why the whole team ran out to tackle me at home plate as if I’d just hit a walk-off to win the game.

But we knew – we knew all about that we.  And we all knew that a far more important contest had just been won.

• Better JavaScript class generation
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• Andrew Kennedy’s Blog : Units of Measure in F#: Part One, Introducing Units
  Magic! No, just good math. Years from now, we'll wonder how programming languages ever got along without features like these.
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On our way back, I spotted the neighborhood’s Pileated Woodpecker.  We often hear his rapid drumming on the many dead trees in the surrounding forest, but we rarely get a good look at him. This time he drifted across the road about two feet over the pavement and landed on a cedar in the lowlands on the north side.  When I heard the familiar drumming coming from the south, I turned and saw his double!  It’s the first time I’ve ever seen two woodpeckers together.  I didn’t know then how to determine their sex, so I don’t know if they were mates or competitors.  But thinking about woodpecker sex reminded me of one of my great-grandfather’s favorite rhymes:

Woodpecker pecked on the woodhouse door
He pecked and he pecked ‘til his pecker got sore

My great-grandfather was not known for coarse humor – or any humor, really.  But my Dad said he would always laugh heartily after reciting that one.

Speaking of avian identification – now that the robins are out in full force, we’ve noticed a few smaller birds among them that look like mini-robins, except that the head and back are black rather than gray, and they have little white spots on their shoulders and a large white spot on the breast.  After searching whatbird.com, I believe these to be Spotted Towhees.

Both of our dogs are now on medication.  Halley takes Benadryl for her allergies, and Harry is on Melatonin to treat Alopecia.  He has two strangely identical regions of hair loss on either side, between his ribs and his hips.  The vet conducted a blood panel to rule out various diseases, and suggested we give Melatonin therapy a try.  Fortunately, Melatonin is relatively inexpensive, and it’s a simple matter to get a Labrador to swallow anything smaller than a softball.  Labradors put the “omni” in “omnivore”.

Food is a long-standing common bond between humans and their canine companions, and dogs never feel more useful than when they can help us to acquire a meal.  Once when I was a wee lad, my grandparents’ hound dog (whom we called Laddie, but my aunt called Hamlet) brought a freshly killed rabbit up to the house.  My sister and I cried over the poor thing, but my grandparents skinned him and cooked him for dinner.  I had to admit that he was pretty tasty, whatever his relationship to Peter Cottontail or the Easter Bunny.

Not that we were unused to our place in the food chain.  My sister and I often named and loved the calves that we eventually saw loaded into the pickup truck to be taken to the slaughterhouse, and we were well aware that the beef we later consumed came from their flesh.  I’m reminded of the bear rituals of the indigenous Northern cultures, in which a bear that has been raised as a member of the family is finally slaughtered for its meat, often with apologies to the bear.

Once when I was about five years old, I ran into my grandparents’ house after being chased by a large Leghorn rooster.  Those things can get pretty mean – they’ve been known to peck the eyes out of small dogs.  When I told my grandfather about my encounter, he said not a word (he hardly ever did).  But we had chicken for dinner that night, and I’ve never enjoyed more my status as a carnivore.

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“Now!”

In response to our shocked expressions, he added, “and ‘please’.”