Punderings

Yes, I realize I’m late. I’m just that way.

Hope everyone had a good weekend, a long holiday weekend here in the US. A weekend at the in-laws was classic American summer – warm, mostly sunny, pleasant weather all weekend. Plenty of family, and lots of good food. And in our case, lots of kids running around. It’s so much more convenient when you have several kids, since they typically entertain each other quite well, leaving more time for the adults to have, well, adult conversations.

In any case, a happy one to all. And in particular, a moment of gratitude to thank all the honorably serving members of the US armed forces, wherever or whenever they may have served.

You can come from all aspects of the political spectrum, you can agree or disagree with the political leaders, but I really think you have to salute and appreciate the serving members of the US armed forces. (Well, at least if you’re a US citizen or ally; opinions in other countries may vary; although perhaps you have your own ‘honor our country’s defenders’ day of some sort or another – I hope!)

And a very special thanks to my grandfather, CPT (Ret.) Edmond H. Curcuru, USMA Jun’43, for his service in combat during WWII.

The “fab” Skoda advert, where you can have your cake and drive it too. OK, I admit part of the pavlovian response is the music – Julie Andrews singing the classic whiskers on kittens, which my daughter loves. But the cake car they built looks fabulous. And the commercial itself is pretty funny – along with the obvious music video editing emphasizing the dichotomy of industrial baking and a finished life-like model of an automobile – includes just one touching moment of one of the bakers taking a fingerfull of batter as they mix.

As RibaRambles points out (via many other sources) there’s a making of video as well.  Ooooh, you have to check out at 4:07 when they’re building such a complete cake replica of the engine itself that someone pours in chocolate engine oil into the top of the crankcase!
Now I need more dessert. Who cares if it’s thirds; it’s a holiday weekend.

That’d be Nova, from Planet of the Apes, of course.  I was just wondering, did she make a lower rate for her role in the film due to the fact she didn’t have any lines?  Likewise, what about the extras?  It actually would make sense for the ape extras – who both might have minor speaking parts, as well as major makeup pain – to get paid more than the human extras, who merely needed to deal with sunblock (or perhaps sunburn, depending).  Speaking of which, I feel for Charlton Heston near the end – on the beach, he clearly looks like he’s starting to succumb from the sun.

Why on earth am I going on about a movie made nearly 40 years ago?  There are two reasons, really.  The obvious one is a love of science fiction.  Although I’ve really only seen PotA a handful of times, it still ranks as a real classic of the genre.  I had forgotten how good some of it is; dated, yes, but still groundbreaking for some of it’s styles and makeup.  And I must admit a love of tiny jokes; it’s the inspiration for the minature Statue of Liberty I made sure to buy for the bottom of our fishtank.

The unobvious is that I’m spending the night at the in-laws, who have cable TV.  The great thing about cable – at least when you don’t have it – is that it provides a high as good as drugs.  And luckily, it’s not addictive.  At least not addictive to the point that we’d get cable ourselves, thus limiting excessive cheezy or science fiction movie watching to when visiting friends and family.

Just to be completeist: it was an amazingly ‘classic’ American summer Saturday.  Warm with just a touch of too hot; family with more kids over to run around outside kicking a ball or playing on the slide; being a little lazy but also doing chores for getting dinner ready.  A good day.  No sunburn, luckily.

I love my friends.  It’s a shame I don’t get to see enough of them these days.  One is a writer – well, he should be a novel writer, with a name like Bret Thorn – a food service industry columnist.  He writes the funniest (and tastiest) stuff, although I have to say he’s much funnier in person.

I guess if you introduce edamame to mainstream America you can afford to be low-key about it.

Read more about the food industry and the latest in restaraunt trends. Heck, I didn’t know that McDonalds was currently introducing Americans to edamame this year!  They are good, but I’ll save my edamame experiences for decent sushi restaraunts, when you can get a nice warm salted bowl as an appetizer beforehand.

More essays on friends later.

It’s national Dog Bite Prevention week here in the US. So be sure to work with your outdoor dogs to help them learn good biting behavior (food, toys: good; hands, feet: bad).

I didn’t know, except I happened to be in the Post Office to send a package this beautiful spring morning. Trust the Post Office to pay attention to human-dog relations.
Or, you could simply get a cat. (smug grin)

Spend a long weekend on the Vineyard recently, and now that Roxanne is walkin’ and talkin’ (a lot), it was a very different experience from a year ago.

See, Amy and I aren’t really beach people, no matter how much my childhood (spend on the bay) and dreams (”Son of a Son of a Sailor”) may beg to differ; tanning is just out, and we have pools for swimming. But now that Roxanne can express her wishes, we visited more than one beach per day of our long weekend. It’s a whole new metaphor for what we do on vacation.

Friday spent far too long waiting for our ferry reservations (yes, you heard it here first: Shane was very early for something once in his life) and wandering around Woods Hole. We walked out on a small pier and looked at the beach, although I won’t count that as a beach.

After the ferry and lunch in the kitchenette, we headed out just a half mile to Beach Rd, where you can do two, count them, two beaches at once! After exhausing the local rock supply on the bay side by throwing them into the water, we headed across the road to walk out the stone jetty on the ocean side. More rocks were thrown there, of course. I’ll leave it to the reader to determine if this counts as two beaches or just one.

After a simple pasta and meatball dinner – having a kitchenette on vacation is a key planning point – we follow tradition and get back in the car for the last-minute drive to see the sunset. Everything is promising: we’re actually quite early, and the sun is nice and full still. But… As we drive across the island to that special spot on South beach, it starts getting darker. And darker. By the time we pass Edgartown to the Katama flats, the fog has settled in so thickly that you can’t even see the windsock at the airport. We went to the beach anyway, of course. It felt like there was nothing else in the world but sea, dunes, and fog. I don’t think we even knew exactly when the sun went down, but throwing rocks in the surf was sure fun.

At this dim and foggy point I fear for boring my readers, so I’ll just skip the rest of the rocks across the wavetops. Saturday included lobster rolls and clam chowder at Menemphsa, throwing more rocks on the beach (just one today), and buying seafood for dinners. Three rides later at the Flying Horses (the third one was free as we caught the brass ring! The attendant asks me if Roxanne wants to “Stay on for her free ride, or come back later?” – what a silly question), we get some cotton candy and head home for fresh bay scallop dinner.

Sunday was Chappy day, and taking the On Time III ferry across for it’s 30 second ride.  Mytoi is a definite spot to visit if you’re out there; a beautiful Japanese style garden amidst the scrub trees.  We spent quite a while on a windy and cloudy Wasqe point chasing the surf; luckily even sans sunscreen we survived, and even managed not to loose Roxanne in the very deep hole we had dug.  Then, since Amy wanted to do dinner out at the Black Dog Tavern (better than expected, but remember it’s Vineyard Haven so you need to BYOB), which required the requisite walking on the beach outside to find more rocks to throw.

Normally, two beaches would have been enough for the day, but we decided at the last minute to take the requisite mad dash, along dirt roads, to try to get to that special spot on South Beach in time for the sunset.  Dashing didn’t help – even running to the top of the dune (not on the grass, of course) and picking up Roxanne as far as we could reach would not bring the sun back into sight.  But the sky, and the sand, and the waves – they were a sight all their own, and one solely to ourselves without another soul in view.  So that makes three.

Monday’s ferry left only time for a few rocks on the ferry beach after we finished our Black Dog Bakery snacks, so sadly we couldn’t muster more than >2 beaches per day.  Maybe next time.

This is priceless. [1]
Of course, arming the key figure behind the GPL is going to be of very differing values depending on your views about just how free – beer or speech? – information should be.

Personally, I salute RMS and the GPL crowd for their ideals, and especially for doing the due dilligence (if not always as organizedly as they could) to come up with good strong licenses that enforce those ideals. But give me the AL for code or the CC-By-NC for writings any old day for most things, since I believe in sharing just a little bit more, as long as credit is given.

Actually, it’s interesting how I feel about licensing code versus personal writings (this blog, stories, photos, etc.). I’m not sure if it’s how much I support the ASF either in their altruistic mission or their wonderful membership and committers, but I definitely appreciate that our code can be reused, even for commercial purposes. However for my personal writing, I find myself very strongly reserving commercial use for myself only. Not quite sure why; maybe I have a hidden writer streak in me that I’m planning to capitalize at some point.

Actually, I think it’s the personal creativity aspect that makes the difference. Coding is definitely creative, although it nearly always tends to creating something that does useful things. Writing (or photos) is creative, but it’s purpose is to amuse or enlighten, although admittedly the object of that amusement is not always clear (the reader or the writer?). But writings are much more personal, since they only true purpose they have to serve are mine and mine alone – and that’s the part I want to keep more of a stake in.

[1] Yes, the geeks are right, it’s not priceless, it probably cost them $20 for the katana, and at least $10 in shipping costs to Cambridge, along with $0.005 of bandwidth costs to read xkcd over the years to get the idea in the first place. Paying for all those items with cold hard cash so you can’t be traced sending weapons through the mail into MA – that’s priceless.

Oh yummy toast

Oh yummy toast

Oh yummy jelly

Mmm mmm mmm mmm

She has a pretty good sense of rhythm and pitch too, since there’s a recognizable melody as she sings it eating breakfast. I attribute that part to her mother, who sings to her at home, and her love of Do Re Me (That’d be The Sound Of Music to the rest of all y’all), wherein she knows all the songs.