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.
16 June 05
Unplanned Museum Outing
As soon as I stepped off the plane yesterday, I saw an ad outside the gate for an art exhibit entitled Illuminating the Word: the Saint John’s Bible at the Minneapolis Institute for the Arts. As Pica puts it, the creation of the St. John’s bible is the calligraphic event of the last half-millenium, so I figured if I could possibly try to make the exhibit in my crammed schedule, I would.
It turns out the museum is open in the evening tonight, and there is a ticket slot available for a 6 PM visit, so off I go! The logistical complication is that there is a conference social event this evening at historic Ft. Snelling going from 5:30 to 10 PM, so rather than take the bus running from the conference hotel to the fort, I’m going to make my way there after my museum outing using bus and light rail.
All the running around will be worth it—I don’t think this is an exhibit to be missed since I’m in town.
15 June 05
Knackered; Or, Why I'm Behind on Lots of Things But Especially Reading Blogs
December: Maine/Boston
January: Washington/Oregon/British Columbia
February: Texas, San Francisco, Berkeley
March: Palm Desert, Anza Borrego
April/May: Boston
May/June: San Francisco, North Carolina/Virginia, Bodega Bay, Berkeley
[Of special note: we live less than 20 miles from Sacramento, and I’m not sure I’ve been there once this year… just in case you think putting down Berkeley or San Francisco is trivial for a Davisite.]
Numenius left today for Minneapolis and an open source GIS conference. This is the first time he’s gone somewhere without me for ages; I, on the other hand, have been doing some running around, most of it alone. All of it was fun, though. (I’ve seen seventeen new North American birds this year, which is more than in the last ten years put together. Edging toward 700…) What I think I need to acknowledge, though, is that these short trips take me a long time to bounce back from, in terms of retrieving my focus. I can slip back into work, I can slip back into blogging, but I’m not really here yet. The settling takes longer these days. Eh oui.
So today, especially, I’m happy to stay put, having had a massage this evening to deal with sitting on too many planes and not doing enough exercise and generally pampering myself after a physical exam yesterday, of the routine variety but never, ever pleasant…
15 June 05
A Pink Dinner
We had dinner at Natalie and Ben’s this evening, a small get-together to start organizing the next efforts of the Davis group of Code Pink. This will be a campaign to bring home the state National Guard from Iraq, a movement that has started especially in the Pacific Northwest, where the National Guard always plays an important role in summer forest fire control.
I have done nothing remotely activist since the elections, which surely sent a lot of us into deep torpor. Thankfully, there are those who have been carrying on the good work all along, and we left a bit more inspired, not to mention delighted to have met Natalie and Ben’s two new year-old kitties, who even have their very own scratching post trimmed in pink.
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.
12 June 05
View From The Train
Today I took the train down to Berkeley to have brunch with my family. (Pica joined us in Berkeley after staying overnight at her mum’s in Bodega Bay—it was something of a family weekend for both of us.) The train ride offers good views of rural Solano County, and to the south Mt. Diablo (3849 feet high) in Contra Costa County is ever present. At left is a sketch of the peak looking over the Suisun Marsh.
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!