19 June 05
Geospatial Geekery
I’m back now from my open source geospatial conference in Minneapolis, completely jazzed about the experience. There were a little over 300 people attending, a very good size for a conference, small enough so that you can interact with many of them. Yet it is a community that is growing quickly and is really starting to come of age.
I think of all the the open source communities I have some relation to, however tangentially, the geospatial community is the one with which I feel the deepest sense of connection. Naturally that’s because I’ve been in geography for a long time now, and also because of my distaste of the overwhelming dominance of the field by a certain 800-pound industry gorilla (no, it’s not Microsoft). Anyway, it was great to be able to attach faces and voices to familiar names.
The next such conference is in September 2006 in Lausanne, Switzerland. Pica and I might just plan a trip to Europe around that!
17 June 05
Smiles, Applause, and a Wolf
Last night I attended the Graduate Commencement Ceremony at UC Davis, an event I used to be in charge of coordinating. I casually volunteered to help in case my help was needed since my replacement in Graduate Studies hadn’t done this before; my help on the night probably wasn’t, but thanks so much for offering; suddenly, on Monday, desperately it was, there being so many special circumstances and just not enough people to handle them: there were two hearing-impaired students (one with a dog, an apparent Portuguese Water mix) who needed to sit in front by a screen where they could read the live captioning by the bearded, smiling Devon (who afterwards gave them both beautifully wrapped gifts, such a mensch, he) and be told when to join their lines, especially since the non-dog owning one was getting two different master’s degrees and wanted to walk twice; a faculty presenter who had shattered her kneecap (ouch) and was on crutches, also needing to sit up front with her student so she wouldn’t have so far to hobble; a student in a wheelchair who wanted to process with her class and who also had a dog (a loopy golden retriever, not that there’s really any other kind) who’d be joining her for the photo (a special before-ceremony arrangement) but who’d be sitting (the dog, that is) with her family during the ceremony; and David, a PhD candidate in Comparative Pathology in a wheelchair whose guide dog was a wolf. Timber wolf mixed with something-Valley-wolf (Siona could probably tell this by looking at the wolf, but I can’t). No dog. No domestic dog involved at all in the genetics, at all. At ALL. I think her name was Ohlona. She mostly slept through the ceremony on a fleece pad he brought for her.
My job last night was to make sure all of them were where they needed to be, plus run and get water or escort any one of them to the bathroom or what have you.
As arbitrary as it might sound, PhD students at Davis process onstage in order of faculty-presenter-last-name. David’s presenter’s last name started with a Z, which put him onstage last, even though they both started from the front row.
He went up the ramp at rear and crossed the stage in his powered wheelchair with Ohlona at his left, so the entire 6,000 people or so gathered there could see her. He stood up from his wheelchair, unsteady and swaying somewhat, to be hooded.
The entire place exploded. I mean, really, really went nuts.
Ohlona smiled a knowing, wolf smile. I cried. So, I think, did David, and I’m going to bet we weren’t the only ones. This was why, I thought. This was why I used to do this. Doesn’t mean I can’t in the future. I just don’t have to lose months of sleep beforehand anymore. But this is why the work I did there was important.
13 June 05
Woven Threads
A huge thanks to Numenius for getting us up and running on TextPattern. This was really painless for me: I was off counting scoters in Bodega Harbor while he slaved away. This system is “lean and elegant” (programmers apparently know what that means); it’s certainly easy to use and no spam so far.
While at my mother’s I helped her go through some papers, among which were my grandmother’s birth certificate, her marriage certificate to my paternal grandfather, the latter’s induction into the Blackburn Grand Lodge of Masons (interesting date system they had/have, those chaps), his obituary, a note attached to the obituary listing a relative, I’m assuming, whose address changed mid-note. I have never heard of this relative.
This kind of thing is the stuff of nightmares for declutterers: how do you know what someone might want later on? The answer is you don’t so you keep it, at least the pieces of this that aren’t duplicated elsewhere.
Such as the fact that my grandmother’s mother Augusta who was born in Halifax, Yorkshire, was living with her unmarried uncle, a “wool sorter,” in Bury, when she was eleven. Plots arise unbidden in my mind.
10 June 05
Migrations
For several months now we’ve planning to move Feathers of Hope off of Movable Type, mostly because of the plague of comment spam, which finally exceeded our system’s capabilities last week, but also because Movable Type isn’t scaling well for us after two plus years worth of posts. Tomorrow I’m going to finally hole up in the office (the land of broadband) and do the migration to Textpattern. There may be a fair bit of sawdust around so please bear with us as I bring the site back into order.
9 June 05
Cars and More
Last fall I took a class through Davis Adult Education on basic auto mechanics. I was driving a new Honda Element that didn’t need an oil change yet or a whole lot else but I spent many evenings hunkered over other people’s engines, holding flashlights while they changed THEIR oil, adjusted timers, and so on.
Our instructor was Dave Egolf, a slight bearded man in a T-shirt whose attitude toward cars was more zen than not. He taught us to keep a car journal, where to buy quality filters for cheap, why you should buy good quality gas, and what an alternator does.
Dave is on the front cover of today’s Davis Enterprise (no online photo available). He’s the principal of the King High School here in Davis. The photo shows him in a suit, handing a white carnation to a graduating senior: sometimes Davis still behaves like a small town.
8 June 05
Umami
During our visit to North Carolina, Nicole taught us about umami. I had no idea that there is now considered to be a fifth primary taste sensation, in addition to the familiar ones of sweet, sour, salty, and bitter. This is umami (sometimes spelled umame.) This taste sensation is sometimes described as “savory” and is found particularly in soy sauce, fish sauce, walnuts, mushrooms, and meats.
This fifth taste sensation was first studied nearly 100 years ago by the Japanese scientist Kikunae Ikeda who isolated the flavor from kombu seaweed. What he isolated turned out to be the amino acid glutamate, and this lead him to develop the seasoning agent monosodium glutamate. It wasn’t until the 1980s before the discovery of umami was generally accepted, and in the year 2000 scientists identified umami receptors on the tongue that responded specifically to glutamate.
So that’s why I enjoyed my lunchtime mushroom quiche today!
24 May 05
Heading East, Again
We’re off on a trip to the southeast, to see Nicole and Mike and birds and Fred. Blogging will be sporadic. The cats will be left in the wonderful care of Becky, of crow fame, who will now be able to stumble out of bed in her jammies, head over to the roost at 5 am, check on the radiocrows, and stumble back into bed, instead of heading to Davis from Sacramento having at least made coffee and put her contact lenses in.
I don’t know what the cats will make of this routine.
22 May 05
Another Blogger Meetup
Today was one of those perfect San Francisco days: warm, sunny, nothing more than a light breeze. We drove to Vallejo and took the ferry over. It is such a peaceful way to enter a city, by boat. And affords me lots more opportunities to sketch than sitting clenching my teeth behind the wheel on I-80.
We met Siona and Maria at the Ferry Building; sat outside and talked for some time about a different blogger meetup in Boston just two weeks ago (the narrative was illustrated with sketches); moved out of the shade and into the sun where we sat under a statue of Gandhi and talked about books, authenticity, the French, and cheese. It was a wonderful day and we decided that next time we’ll actually EAT some cheese instead of just talking about it…
21 May 05
Gremlins
You know you got ‘em when the electrical igniter for the gas stove top starts clicking away every couple of seconds of its own accord with nobody around to have influenced things. Helpless renters that we are (there’s a reason why we should never own a house), we summoned the landlord, who waved his arms over the exposed stove top, whereupon the stove was back to normal. I’ve seen sysadmins do that trick before many a computer, too.
26 April 05
Enthusiasm
Today, I was enthused—
By the California poppies blooming like mad
By a cat that purred while I woke and another that hid under the sheets while we changed the bed
By a new black horse, sleek and shiny, in a paddock on my way to work
By the singing blue grosbeak
By the displaying Swainson’s hawk
By the hot tofu at the Coffee House
By the hot, sweaty sex scent emanating from a flower whose name I don’t know
By the pair of Western bluebirds and the pair of Western kingbirds outside my window at work and by the brush rabbits and jackrabbits jumping vertically in lagomorph ecstasy
By the prospect of a load of paper being shipped my way from John Neal Books in North Carolina
By my new Enthusiasm Tshirt designed by the fabulous Natalie
And
In spite of the fact that my bike chain needs oil and the fridge is still not clean.