Category: Daily updates

Generally musings of the day, usually accompanied by a photograph

Heading home

Tonight, I saw the Coen brothers film True Grit and found it quite interesting and enjoyable. Hailee Steinfeld is very entertaining to listen to, and her character reminds me of Lyra from Philip Pullman’s ‘His Dark Materials’ trilogy. That said, the film did leave me wondering why a young woman of such premature sophistication would maintain such a simplistic attitude about the desirability of revenge. Seeing Jeff Bridges play a hardened ranger was amusing, though also a bit hard to swallow after having been frequently exposed to him as a pot smoking bowler / detective.

Tomorrow, I will be taking a Greyhound up to the border, across to Montreal, and home to Ottawa.

[Update: 29 December 2010] I was amused by this text message, which I received from Fido upon crossing the border into the United States:

Fido welcomes you abroad! Our Travel Packs help you save http://fido.ca/m/usa (data fees apply) Regular roaming rates: $1.45/min, $0.75/txt, data up to $0.03/kB

First, I found it funny that they use the term ‘abroad’ to refer the the almost trivially routine transit across the 49th parallel. Second, I found it curious that their chosen form of ‘welcome’ to a new place is exorbitant roaming rates.

Hamilton to Albany

The voyage from Hamilton, Ontario to Albany, New York is about 550km. At 3:30am, I caught a cab to the Hamilton GO train, in order to begin the journey.

Normally, the border is the most challenging part, crossing in a Greyhound bus. Either you get stuck in a substantial queue of other buses and need to wait hours to even get to the checkpoint or someone on your bus strikes a border agent as suspicious and they hold up the entire vehicle for hours. This time, however, the border went smoothly.

The trouble began in Buffalo. There, the bus driver decided to wait for the next Greyhound from Toronto to arrive, so that they could consolidate passengers and save some money. This meant sitting motionless in Buffalo for an hour beyond our scheduled departure time. As a result, I got to Syracuse 15 minutes too late to catch my connecting bus. The next bus, they told me, was at 5:00pm, arriving around 8:00pm.

In what I thought was an act of cleverness, I checked with the attached Amtrak station and found they they had a train leaving around 3:15pm. It was originally scheduled to be an 11:00am train, but they were confident it would actually arrive around three and arrive in Albany about two hours later. The train did arrive at about 3:40pm, and only sat around about twenty minutes before starting. Somehow, however, it managed to take about five hours to traverse the 250km to Albany. Part of the delay arose because the train had no heat and everybody was shivering in their outerwear. To correct that, they spent half an hour replacing one of the power cars. Nonetheless, the journey took about twice as long as advertised, even ignoring that delay.

As a consequence of all this, my uncle and cousin ended up waiting for me for hours in Albany, in order to drive me to Bennington. At the end of eighteen hours of continuous travel, I was particularly glad to see them and to have their help and company for the last stage of the voyage.

In the future, I will try to stick with the more straightforward Ottawa-Montreal-Albany route, rather than the seemingly more problematic Ottawa-Toronto-Albany route, with Hamilton thrown in as an enjoyable side-journey.

I have to be somewhere

I don’t think there has been any point in my life when I had open-ended time to myself. That is to say, a period where I could have gone and done anything without eventually violating somebody’s expectation that I would be in a particular place at a particular time.

As a child, nobody is in a position to determine the shape of their life (those who are forced to do so early are forced early into adulthood). In high school and university, there are breaks with defined endings. While working, I have applied for and received defined periods of vacation. I accepted a university position before finishing high school, accepted a grad school position before finishing my undergraduate degree, and accepted a job before finishing grad school. Now, I expect to accept a new job before reaching the defined endpoint of my current one. My calendars – literal or figurative – have always included a “first day at X” entry, somewhere out in the future.

I suppose the logical opposite of all that structure is the life of the aimless wanderer: the protagonist from On The Road or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In addition to lacking obligations to appear at such-a-place and such-a-time, such characters tend to be unencumbered by burdensome possessions. Making the transition from one of those states to the other – in either direction – seems daunting. Both transitions highlight the limits of human freedom. Going from an unscheduled life to one filled with obligations involves accepting the restrictions that the expectations and actions of other place upon each of us, as individuals. The universe simply will not provide for us to do whatever we wish indefinitely. More grimly, the transition from structure to an open-ended existence seems inevitably bound to the idea of mortality, and the certainty that there will be a definite end to freedom as some unknown time in the future. Being cast into that expanse, without the benefit of near-term signposts to distract from the dire conclusion, seems likely to be frightening and macabre. Perhaps that perspective shows how I am more concerned about risk than excited about opportunity.

All told, certainty is a valuable thing. Similarly, if one wishes to influence the world, it seems promising when there are expectations about where one will be in the future, and what one will be doing. Still, it could be an interesting experience to face the unknown span of all of one’s remaining life without seeing significant set markers.

Moving from GoDaddy to DreamHost

For the last few years, sindark.com has been hosted with GoDaddy – a firm I chose because they were inexpensive and seemed to have a decent reputation. Since then, I have had a number of problems with them. As a result, I decided not to extend my hosting contract with them, and to shift this site over to DreamHost, another hosting provider.

Non-technical people thinking of moving sites, be warned. It is not a painless process. In my case, it involved an awful lot of messing around in command prompts and hair pulling.

The trickiest thing is moving the MySQL databases that actually store WordPress posts and comments. For databases that are small, you can use a web interface to upload them to DreamHost. For larger databases, you need to export the old MySQL file, download it, upload it to your root folder on DreamHost via FTP, login to their server using ssh, create an empty database using their web interface, and then execute a command like this:

mysql -h mysql.examplesite.com -u exampleusername -pexamplepassword newdatabasename < olddatabasefile.sql

While I am sure that is all no big deal for some savvier tech types out there, the whole process was frustrating and a bit scary for me.

Please let me know if you are encountering any problems with the new setup. I know that – for some mysterious reason – photos of the day won’t load in Opera Mobile.

Checklists and checklists

This will be the million-chore weekend. I have been building up lists of increasingly urgent tasks for weeks. This Saturday and Sunday, my focus will be on pushing those lists back down to a sensible size. I have clothes to repair; several C.V. variants to generate; receipts to sort and transmit; books to finish and review; notes to transfer; appointments to make; backups to update; drives to move; lists to update; software to install and update; endless emails requiring response; a donation to make; numerous articles to read; letters to write; websites to alter and update; RAW files to sort through and file; and probably more to do that I have temporarily forgotten.

It is unfortunate that this is also a jackhammering weekend, for one of the houses behind mine.

Some of the chores are blog-focused, and there may be some downtime associated with them.

Essential Mac apps

One thing doing a clean install of your operating system does is remind you of which bits of software are most essential – the ones you can’t go long without missing.

Here’s the order in which I re-populated my Mac’s application folder:

  1. Starcraft II – the game that prompted the whole process
  2. iPhoto – for storage of digital ‘negatives’
  3. Quicksilver – application launcher and superior alternative to Spotlight
  4. TextMate – excellent text editor and coding tool
  5. Firefox – better than Safari, especially with AdBlock
  6. Skype – to keep in touch with phoneless friends

I will make note of when I install other vital apps, like Fetch (FTP program) and the indispensable Photoshop.

One distinctly nice thing about Mac OS is that, because I used Time Machine to backup and restore my user profiles, all my application preferences were preserved.

Recent BuryCoal posts

Increasingly, I am putting my climate change related content over on the group blog BuryCoal.com. There is a bit of a trade-off to that. It’s convenient to have a site on that topic exclusively, and makes things easier for people who only want information on that.

At the same time, I think there is some value to exposing people who are interested in the general subject matter of this broader site to information about climate change. For the sake of those who don’t visit BuryCoal often, here are a few recent notable posts:

Please consider keeping an eye on future BuryCoal updates. You can subscribe via RSS or receive updates by email. We are also on Twitter.

If there is anything about BuryCoal that bothers you (or that you think is especially good), I would like to know about it.

De-cluttering

During the next eight months, I will be moving twice. First, to the Beaver Barracks, in Ottawa. Then, to Toronto.

When I went to Oxford, I brought only a suitcase and a suit bag with me. When I returned, I had those plus two big cardboard boxes I mailed. I anticipate the move to Toronto involving a bit more baggage, but not enormously more. As such, between now and July, I will be selling or giving away most of my bulky possessions.

If you are in need to low-quality furniture, you might want to consider dropping me a line. I will need most of it for a few months yet, but it is never too early to express your interest in something. My free stuff listing is also likely to pick up new items in the next while.