Author: matthew

My first realization that my eyes were not completely perfect came at the age of seventeen. There was a lunar eclipse, and I had set my telescope up on its tripod in the back yard of our home in Montgomery County, MD.

My friend, Steve Pratt, was hanging out at our house that night. I focussed my low-power telescope perfectly on the moon, and marvelled at the detail even this modest device could muster.

I had been an astronomy buff since I was a small child, and could easily locate the common constellations in the night sky. I had a mental calendar of all the regular meteor showers, and for several years had pretty faithfully gone out to watch for at least one night of each shower. In those days, even that close to Washington, D.C. we had a clear view of the night sky, with few streetlights to glare out the heavens.

I gestured to Steve to come over. “Just look at that,” I said, “pretty cool, huh? You can watch the eclipse obscure the moon.”

Steve leaned over and peered through the diminutive telescope. “It’s fuzzy,” he replied.

I bent down to check. “No, it’s perfectly clear,” I responded. “But adjust it, maybe your eyes are different than mine.”

Steve adjusted the focus of the telescope and made the appropriate noises of awe and wonder. I could tell that he didn’t think it was nearly as cool as I did, but I didn’t care.

However, the knowledge that he’d had to adjust the focus troubled me. A few months later I went and saw the eye doctor.

“This is what I call a ‘nuisance prescription’,” he creaked in an ancient, wheezy voice. “Your eyes are fine. There’s a slight astigmatism, and I’ll give you some glasses to help you read signs when you’re driving at night or using your telescope, but I wouldn’t advise wearing them all the time. You’ll just get dependent on them, when really, your eyes are almost perfectly normal.”

Thus I received my first pair of glasses. They had bright red frames, flecked with black, and were “schoolboy style” — covering a large chunk of my face when I wore them. I thought they looked cool, but had a strong suspicion that nobody else did.

Well, after a decade and a half, and many lost glasses later, I finally decided to try out contact lenses. Over the years, my minor prescription has gotten slowly, but steadily, worse. There’s a sliding scale of vision, from -5.00 through +5.00 (actually, it goes beyond that, but past the fives you’re pretty much legally blind without lenses). If you’re in the negatives, you’re nearsighted; your eyes focus light a little too well, and the focal point is in front of your retina. If you’re in the positives, you’re farsighted, and your eyes focus light on a point behind your retina.

Anyway, my right eye is -1.00, while my left is -0.75 now. Something contacts don’t seem to be able to do, while glasses can, is correct for severe astigmatism, or unevenness of the pupil or retina. For that, you need glasses, with a certain offset to handle the irregularity. I have a slight astigmatism, but contacts improve my vision enough that the minor fuzziness around the edges of some letters on a chalkboard doesn’t hurt much.

It’s been an interesting adventure, though. The day I received my initial prescription — this past Thursday — it took me over a half hour to get the darn things in and out the first time. Getting them out isn’t too big a deal. You just slide the lens slightly off the pupil, and then it’s easy to pinch it off your eye. But putting it on! What a chore that was. I kept getting bubbles, and it wouldn’t stick. Ick.

I wore them through the afternoon on Thursday, but discovered by the evening, my eyes were actually really tired. I think it’s because they’ve become so accustomed to focussing at a certain point, that having my eyes constantly corrected is an adjustment. Also, I could feel the lenses in my eyes the first day. I could tell they were there, and every time I blinked, I’d feel them shift around. Today, I’m not noticing them, but I also bought some “artificial tears” to put in to help make sure my eyes stay wet. We live in an extremely dry climate, which has been hell on my eyes for years (lots of redness). Maybe having contact lenses will force me to actually take care of my eyes for the first time 🙂

Anyway, that’s it for my adventure (so far) in contact lenses. It’s something new, and I’m already eyeing the tinted lenses with a little greed. I mean, I could be brown-eyed tomorrow, and violet-eyed the next day! How cool would that be?

Well, probably not cool to anybody else, but cool to me.

If you’re interested in some interesting news about Ken Jennings’ winning Jeopardy run 36 episodes in advance, then keep reading. Ken Jennings is the 30-year-old software engineer from Utah who has won over a million dollars playing Jeopardy for over forty episodes, resulting in the highest ratings ever for the show.

Word on the wire is that Ken Jennings has finally lost at Jeopardy in his 75th game taped this past Tuesday. He walks away with $2,500,000 in his pocket. I had no idea that they tape 30-40 shows in advance!

“Labor Day differs in every essential way from the other holidays of the year in any country,” said Samuel Gompers, founder and longtime president of the American Federation of Labor. “All other holidays are in a more or less degree connected with conflicts and battles of man’s prowess over man, of strife and discord for greed and power, of glories achieved by one nation over another. Labor Day…is devoted to no man, living or dead, to no sect, race, or nation.”

Labor Day, the first Monday in September, is a creation of the labor movement and is dedicated to the social and economic achievements of American workers. It constitutes a yearly national tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country.

Just in time for Labor Day, the Bush administration presented its plans for eliminating overtime pay for war veterans. That’s right: if you learned your trade in the military, Bush’s “pro-labor” plan now makes you an exempt, salaried employee, ineligible for overtime.

Bush’s plan also proposes that employers convert exempt employees to hourly employees at a lower rate of pay which, without overtime, reflects their actual work hours.

What if you provide “skilled advice” as part of your trade? You’re also ineligible for overtime pay. Exempt Professionals once included doctors, lawyers, and those with specialized degrees. Now, it covers any person with specialized knowledge.

And you only need to read through 15,576 pages of Federal Register to find this delightful information. Even more interesting? That the “comp time” Bush gleefully extolled the virtues of during his nomination acceptance speech doesn’t exist in this proposed mammoth law, while the pay cuts do.

Happy Labor Day, newly-minted exempt salaried employees formerly known as “laborers”. Welcome to the sixty-hour work-week for forty hours’ pay.

As most of you know, about two years ago I abandoned the religion of my parents. It wasn’t working for me, and since then I’ve been a much happier, healther, more honest person.

One of the unfortunate things I found in taking the Socratic “I know nothing” approach, though, is that of building a “personal ethic”. Many people assume that without a god to lay down an ethic for you, like the Ten Commandments, you’d be left to your own devices and become this wicked, evil person. I’m living proof that that’s not true 🙂 Nevertheless, I’ve often thought that this road would be much easier for other people to grasp if there was a succinct summary of ethics which I could point to and say, “That’s what I strive for”.

Luckily, my acquaintance John B. Hodges penned just such a summary, as “The Ten Points of Ethical Wisdom, an Atheist Moral Compass”:

1. Do not mistake obedience for morality. Ethics is a tool for living with other people. It is not based on authority, but on reason and compassion.
2. Do not seek to deceive yourself or others with pleasing lies. Things are as they are, and the consequences of actions will be what they will be. The wise will be truth-seeking and truth-telling.
3. If you value anything in this life, on this Earth, you should value other people, for they are the only help you will have in times of trouble. Seek friends and allies, do not make enemies unnecessarily.
4. Reason and compassion together imply other commitments: to democracy, freedom of thought and speech, equal rights for all, community support for the disadvantaged and handicapped, humane treatment of animals, and preserving the Earth for future generations.
5. Why does a person deserve the protection of the law? For one thing, we are persons also, and force uncontrolled by law would threaten us as well. We are all at risk, of illness, accident, poverty, and aging; by protecting the weak, we protect ourselves.
6. We find ourselves alive and conscious. What shall we do with our lives? Beware “fishers of men”. If we demand that someone else supply us with a purpose, someone else may DO just that. Purpose is ours to choose.
7. There is a natural “default” purpose, which we may choose if we like. We all have parents, as did they, back to the beginning of life. Every one of our ancestors had children. Health is the ability to survive; the goal favored by natural selection is “promote the health of your family.” We are all the offspring of uncounted generations of family-health-maximizers, so we may find adopting this goal consciously to be congenial. Beyond our near relatives, we may choose to draw our circle of friends and relations as widely as we wish. We are all members of Darwin’s family, all kin from the beginning of life.
8. The Good is that which leads to health, The Right is that which leads to peace. If you want to maintain peaceful and cooperative relations with your neighbors, don’t kill, steal, lie, or break agreements. If you want peace, work for justice. As Shakespeare wrote, “It needs no ghost, Milord, come from the grave, to tell us this.”
9. Fairy-tales about the supernatural are not necessary to give meaning or purpose to life. Meaning is the story we choose to join. Instead of seeking a ticket to Heaven by being an obedient slave on Earth, we can gain meaning by taking a positive role in history, seeking to make this Earth a better place.
10. Enjoy the life you have, appreciate the world you live in, make the best of the opportunities that reality offers you. Do not seek to live forever, for nothing does. The Universe is vast and wondrous, and more than enough. We have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.

Although I realize this will not resonate with all readers of barnson.org, it really resonated with me. It’s a bit too long to hang it as a cross-stitch on the wall, though…

Just wanted to let y’all know I started the new job, and time is short at the moment. Looks like it’s going to be a fun challenge! Maybe after this week I’ll be less of a blogslacker…

News of the weird:

Bear guzzles 36 beers, passes out at campground.

The funniest part of it to me was this:

It turns out the bear was a bit of a beer sophisticate. He tried a mass-market Busch beer, but switched to Rainier Beer, a local ale, and stuck with it for his drinking binge.
Wildlife agents chased the bear away, but it returned the next day, said Broxson.
They set a trap using as bait some doughnuts, honey and two cans of Rainier Beer. It worked, and the bear was captured for relocation.

So what’s weirder than a beer-swilling bear with a taste for the local specialty in a can?

(Yes, I know I dangled a participle.)

I occasionally run across excellent quotes that I simply have to share:

If you want to trick a pointy-haired boss into letting you write software in Lisp, you could try telling him it’s XML. -Paul Graham, “Revenge of the Nerds” (a LISP advocacy piece if I’ve ever seen one, that also slams my favorite language, Python, in this case for very good reason)

Almost makes me want to take up LISP…

Oh, and for those few of us into learning about the latest and greatest operating system, here’s another advocacy piece that, I think, is as good a marker as any for the beginning of the end of the Redmond Revolution. When Wal-Mart carries it, prices it cheaper than the alternatives, and is having trouble keeping it in stock due to demand, you know something’s going right.

So I came across a little-known (well, little-known to ME) factoid while surfing the web today looking for information about the candidates this year (from this page about silly polls):

THE WASHINGTON REDSKINS RULE. This one has an impressive winning streak–for 72 years, the victory or defeat of the Washington Redskins in their last game before the election has predicted whether the incumbent party holds the White House. If the Redskins lose or tie, the incumbent party loses the election. If the Redskins win, so does the incumbent party. By any measure the accuracy of the Redskin rule is notable. It has correlated with presidential electoral outcomes in 18 of the past 18 elections back to Franklin Roosevelt in 1932.
…the “Washington Redskin Rule” gets a little more respect. The probability of a Redskin victory or defeat correctly forecasting the presidential election 18 elections in a row has been calculated to be about one in 260 million. For those who like to mix football with politics, the Redskins’ last game before the election is with the Packers on October 31.

So it looks like we have a 1 in 2 chance of forecasting a 1 in 260 million chance here! Who do you think’s going to win — the Packers, or the Redskins?

I hate to say it, but as much as I’m planning on voting for Kerry, I really want the ‘Skins to beat the Packers October 31, so I’m going with Redskins…

Running a weblog has a lot of benefits, with some downsides:

• I get to hear the opinions of good friends separated by a long distance.
• I have an easy place to dump technical information for future reference. I can’t count the number of times I’ve accessed my page on building a kernel module from various workplaces as I’ve run into problems.
• Family and friends can keep track of what’s new in my life.
• It’s easy for people to locate me via Google.
• Having an online journal kind of forces me to periodically review my thoughts on various topics, and put them in writing so I know what I’m thinking.
• People can look you up and decide to not like you due to your opinions, resulting in missed job opportunities, heat at work, and general nastiness.

It’s that last point that is painful. You see, the community in Utah is small enough — about 750,000 people in a few hundred square miles — that as a UNIX admin, you gradually come to know, and be known, throughout the area. Every interview I’ve been to while looking for my next job, we’ve known someone in common. That knowledge of somone in common can be the difference between getting the job, and not getting the job.

Running an online journal brings that one level closer to you. You put your life out on display, hanging in the breeze for anyone to examine. It takes a while for you to get your bearings, and in the meantime, those old entries don’t just go away on their own.

People you know can, and do, look you up.

I was recently asked by a friend to modify some data on barnson.org to make it less personally-identifiable. This really brought my thought process to a head: what are we really doing here? In posting news, updates, various rants, and other information to the Internet, we’re taking conversation that would normally take place at the coffee shop and be forgotten about almost as soon as it’s said, and now nailing it down in the annals of history, forever in print for us, and others, to examine, for the rest of our lives. And beyond, maybe.

When I was on my last contract, I posted some information about the place I was working for. It was all information already available on the ‘net, and the kind of stuff anybody could figure out with a few minutes and a calculator. Yet I was pulled into my boss’s office for a potential “violation of your non-disclosure agreement” and asked to change the data.

Now, in my opinion, the information was trivial. I deleted a single sentence, and the posting was appropriate. Had I said the same thing at home, or in a coffee shop, nobody would know, nobody would care.

But the key reason why they objected? The information wasn’t glowingly positive, and my posting showed up in the first page on a Google search for the company name.

I believe it’s not what I wrote, or even the less-than-adulatory perspective it conveyed, that was the problem. It was public exposure. Had I even written “the company is small and unstable, with little money in the bank”, this would all be publicly-available information, but because of the employer-employee relationship, they could have exerted very strong pressure (“we’ll get someone else”, basically) to get me to change the information.

If it was something few other people would see, they wouldn’t care. But because of that exposure, as the Internet becomes increasingly the first source people turn to for news, rather than the television or radio, it’s becoming an increasingly important place for a company to keep a positive “spin” on their activities.

I’m not sure if this is a good thing, a bad thing, or just a thing. But running a weblog, particularly where you expose much in the way of private information, is a life-changing choice. You don’t realize it on your first post, or the fifteenth, but at some point you realize it’s both a good and a bad thing in your life. In my case, at least, far more good than bad; I have a place to post important information, and given my technical specialty, it’s an acceptable quirk for most people.

But I do wonder what will be the eventual fate of traditional media outlets as blogs continue to grow to first sources of information, and continue to dominate the search engine rankings. What do you think the net effect of putting all this information on the Internet will be?

So I’m sitting down to my computer to handle a little electronic mail this morning. It’s my usual tradition, and as usual, Elijah (my two-year-old) watched me type, hung off my arm, and did two-year-old things.

He saw the colorful display of my mail reader, “Mutt” (a text-based email reader that is basically immune to viruses, very fast to use, with a steep learning curve), and said “Daddy, what’s that?”

“Well,” I replied, “it’s a program I use to read my electronic mail. It’s called ‘Mutt'”.

Well, whaddya know, the rest of that session before heading off to work, every time he’d see me pop back to that text window with its colorful text, he’d shout “Daddy! Mutt!”

That’s my boy.