How Long Must You Cry

How long must you cry before you wonder why your life’s filled with pain? How long must you cry?

How long must you weep, crying yourself to sleep? Tear-stained memory. How long must you weep?

I know why you cry. I know why you cry. It’s for me. It’s for me. It’s for me. You cry for me.

How deep must you age before you turn the page? Gone is yesterday. How deep must you age?

How wise must you grow before you will know. I’m beyond your reach. How wise must you grow?

I know why you cry. I know why you cry. It’s for me. It’s for me. It’s for me. You cry for me.

When I first wrote this, this was kind of a bitter warning to someone who foolishly spurned my offer of friendship. I didn’t take the song very seriously and thought of it as “you don’t know what you’re missing”. The language is kind of extreme for the actual situation, but it’s stylized.

Years later, I discovered that instead of it being me speaking to someone else, it was someone I’d lost speaking to me. I imagined my father asking me how long I was going to feel sad about him dying. I took it as a statement to myself to suck it up, to repress the bad feelings.

Today, I started thinking of this song as an ideal version of myself, a version of myself who I dreamed I’d be as a child, speaking to myself as I really am. And I’m curious: when will I give up comparing myself to that unattainable ideal? When will I cease entertaining the idea of having a chance to replay the past?

So in this sense, I’m not attacking myself for feeling sad. There’s a version of me that could have been. There were decisions I made that got me where I am, and there were circumstances beyond my control that probably had a greater influence. It’s legitimate to mourn the loss of what could have been. The mourning is a doorway back into daylight. So, I’m pleased to find the song is not a bitter rant, nor a vigorous self-attack. It’s simply a question about when the truth will be accepted.

FreeTime is a Web application written in PHP for MySQL that allows you to keep track of projects. It tracks comments, files and timesheet entries for projects divided up by clients and their divisions. Recently added features, not appearing in previous versions, include tasks, estimates and more reports. There’s also code that allows clients to log in to review work as if it’s a mini-site, but it hasn’t been tested in production. The most well-developed aspects of the application are related to timesheets, both gathering them from staff and then reporting on them.

I’m curious whether anyone will find the code useful, whether for educational or practical purposes. Its purpose was as a highly customized solution for Clear Ink, and it may have no utility outside the same type of consultancy. On the other hand, it could prove useful after some hacking. I would use it for myself if I do more consulting again.

You can download the source code from the FreeTime project page on SourceForge.

Anyway, I installed Karmic from scratch and found that I couldn’t install the Canon drivers because they want libcupsys2. Ubuntu renamed this package. I tried a few tricks to work around this, but the one works is to install the libcupsys2 dummy package from Jaunty. You can get it here: http://packages.ubuntu.com/jaunty/all/libcupsys2/download.

So, the new procedure is get the libcupsys2 .deb file and install it first. Then follow the instructions for Januty, such as Luca Gibelli’s Canon PIXMA MP620 Linux printing and scanning via wireless network on Ubuntu post from last April.

Today, I noticed a new take on this upsidedown theme. This time, Patrick Corrigan shows Obama as pleading for help from the U.N. as the weight of the world bears down on him.

Truthfully, the weight of the nihilistic policies of the people who imagined the U.N. are crushing the wealth-producers of the world. Portraying Obama as Atlas is doublethink. Because it’s the same image Rand used for her famous novel, the misuse of this metaphor is particularly galling.

The following item description seems to disagree.

Tender Vittles® contains no added artificial colors or flavors, additives your cat doesn’t need. Plus, it has the great taste your cat loves. So you’ll love knowing that your cat is getting only the essential nutrients he needs, and he’ll love every delicious bite.

When it comes to convenience, you can’t beat our easy-serve pouch. It’s a cinch to open and pour and it keeps those delicious, soft morsels moist and tasty so your cat will enjoy every yummy bite from the first to the last.

With Tender Vittles, you simply tear open our easy-serve pouch and pour the tender morsels right in the bowl. It’s fast and easy for you and moist and delicious for your cat.

With regret we must announce that Tender Vittles have been discontinued by Nestle-Purina. Once our stock is gone we will no longer have them available for sale.

Even when I was a kid, I was suspicious of the Purina brand because it made both pet food and breakfast cereal.

I’ve learned so much about myself since becoming a father nearly six years ago. Constantly striving to serve these two little guys has helped me understand my own childhood. I am honored to be helping them through theirs. It just gives me so much pleasure to be around their joyful creativity. So, with Father’s Day around the corner, I hope all my fellow dads are having as much fun as I am.

Now that I’m about 80 pages into the book, I thought I’d grab a copy of the PDF version for easy reference whichever desk I’m sitting at.  The print edition comes with a “free” ebook. There are two ways to get this free ebook.

The way they want you to do it is as follows.

1. Cut open a folded paper in the front of the book.
2. Go to the URL printed on the paper.
3. Type in a code they ask you for out of 9×20 grid.
4. Type in another code from the grid.
5. Type in your name and email address.
6. Wait for the email to arrive.
7. Find the email in your spam folder.
8. Click on a link to start the download.
9. Rename the file from “gi” (wtf?) to something rational, such as “Zend_Framework_In_Action.pdf”.

However, you could do the following.

1. Enter “zend framework in action pdf” into Google Search.
2. Click to some blog.
3. Click the link into RapidShare.
4. Wait for your 30 seconds to expire since you are a “free” user.
5. Download the .rar file.
6. Expand whatever’s in the rar file. (I didn’t actually go this far).

Typing in codes from a grid is pretty annoying. I threw down $45 to get the book. Maybe they should just trust me and print a direct download link inside the text of the book. After all, we’re all only a couple of links away from downloading it from RapidShare. What would have been really cool was if I could have downloaded the PDF for free first and then bought the print version when I decided that the book was of great value. I had that exact experience with another author recently.

If you are going to buy Zend Framework in Action (and you aren’t in a rush like I was), you might use the Amazon.com link above. It’s a lot cheaper than buying it off the shelf at B&N.

Most of the book is a rehash of her history and her philosophical work. It doesn’t hurt to refresh yourself on important ideas, but I don’t feel like I learned much from this part of the book. I’ve read all of non-fiction from her and I’ve read Barbara Branden’s biography. Merrill has a different perspective having been peripheral to the core group in the 1960s.

What I found fascinating was the last part of the book where he analyzes the current state of the “movement” and how it could improve. His advice seems to be a sketch of what Stefan Molyneux is almost over-explaining over at Free Domain Radio. That is, find the people who you agree with on the basics (metaphysics, epistemology, …) and tolerate your differences with the benevolent assumption that one of you errs on the facts not that by corruption. This book was published in 1991. It was a big deal then that David Kelley had been pushed out of the “orthodox” circle of Objectivists. That was a strange experience for me having just recently begun studying Objectivism seriously.

Merrill argues that our focus for change must be cultural not political. I’ve been listening to Molyneux’s work during my commute, and he definitively destroys the notion that “working within the system” is a viable option. Neither through electing like-minded politicians nor through academia can we expect to avert our world’s crash course. The most powerful tool we have is the power over ourselves. If we live morally, we will prosper and by that prosperity inspire others. What I appreciated most from Merrill’s book was the reminder that evil’s power is given by sanction of the victim. I cannot count the times when faced with some frustrating injustice (big or small), I find it started with tolerance for injustice.

I don’t have the context to understand whether Merrill was influential over the ARI, but they certainly have oriented themselves on cultural change, and to great success. At under 200 pages, this book is an enjoyable reminder of that things are better than they were and a fresh reminder to shrug off despair.

The logic of Obama’s address to Congress went like this:

“Our economy did not fall into decline overnight,” he averred. Indeed, it all began before the housing crisis. What did we do wrong? We are paying for past sins in three principal areas: energy, health care, and education — importing too much oil and not finding new sources of energy (as in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the Outer Continental Shelf?), not reforming health care, and tolerating too many bad schools.

The “day of reckoning” has now arrived. And because “it is only by understanding how we arrived at this moment that we’ll be able to lift ourselves out of this predicament,” Obama has come to redeem us with his far-seeing program of universal, heavily nationalized health care; a cap-and-trade tax on energy; and a major federalization of education with universal access to college as the goal.

Amazing. As an explanation of our current economic difficulties, this is total fantasy. As a cure for rapidly growing joblessness, a massive destruction of wealth, a deepening worldwide recession, this is perhaps the greatest non sequitur ever foisted upon the American people.

But Krauthammer misses the key principle in action here. Obama is making a fervant plea to our religious emotionalism. We’re paying for past sins? It’s a day of reckoning? This is the type of argument you’d expect from Mike Huckabee, who’s argued that we’re stewards of the earth who shouldn’t wreck something that doesn’t belong to us. Or Pastor John Hagee who claimed the disaster in New Orleans as a result of Hurricaine Katrina was punishment from God for sinful behavior.

Obama leaves it vague as against whom we’ve been so sinful. Let the religious assume it’s God. Let the environmentalists assume it’s nature. It doesn’t matter. It’s the same nihilist rhetoric: you’re inherently evil, you’ve been doing evil things and the universe is trying to crush you.

The only sins we’ve committed are individually against ourselves when we agree to this irrationalism.

Instead of pulling text from wikipedia, I generate the album name and the artist name using the routines I have already. Luckily flickr has an API and they even tell you which images are OK to use in derivative work. I pull recent “interesting” pictures, scan for the ones with rights that allow me to use them and I layer the text over the top.

At any given time there are mayb 10 – 20 images available, but it changes over time. It’s really just another way to view the random text out of the generator. Sometimes having it in the context of an album cover is surprising enough to make me chuckle.

When I first wrote these generators about 10 years ago, they used to make me laugh a lot. After a while, my brain seemed to automatize the rules behind them and they stopped making me laugh. They are vaguely pleasant to me, but they rarely make me laugh out loud.

Original images for the album covers above are here:

• http://www.flickr.com/photos/55307594@N00/3329299405
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/11593231@N04/3329851670
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/12566526@N06/3328146226.