Oblomovka

2006-12-12»

I'm in complete denial. I'd like to think that if Leslie were here, she would be the same.

Kass says that in this situation Leslie would make herself useful, and make us all feel amateurs, in the nicest possible way, which is true.

The last time I saw Leslie, she was mad at me, but hiding it. We were up impossibly early because I had an appointment to make, and I'd asked Leslie to give me a lift and she'd said yes because she always says yes and then it was hideous o'clock in the morning and she'd been working along all night in the dark on her monitor doing some godawful freelance work, and I was staying on her couch, and she gave me a lift in her awful, medical-lawsuit-required beaten-up car which she couldn't get rid of because the fucking medical establishment would have gone "look, you see, you're doing okay, therefore we shouldn't give you a penny for throwing you into a coma". And we drove around looking for the Caltrain, and there was a look of such grim determination on Leslie's face to forgive me for putting her through this, to get through the pain, and to *do a good job*.

And what such good advice came out, concentrated, from that! Leslie gave me and everyone tips about fonts, love affairs, music, etiquette. She ran the drunken sub-committee that decided my daughter's name one night. She told me what to do in New York; she showed me, by example, how to bear San Francisco.

Leslie didn't talk much about the terrible shit that kept. on. happening. to her. I got the sense that this was because she didn't want anyone else hurt, even by merely the retelling of it: the death of her husband, loss of her domain, her apartment burning down. You could piece it all together, if you of were determined. She didn't hide anything, but she didn't want to tell that kind of story. She wanted to tell stories of optimism and beauty, and they would have to wait. In the meantime, forgiveness, grim determination, getting through, doing a good job. Marking time, until the good times came, and then seizing on them like a joyous animal hid there in the dark.

Mark has the best first last word. Leslie still has the best pictures, and the right answer.

2006-12-02»

So I've made an important life decision to spend more time with Python. I think this may be a sign of middle age. I'm of the opinion that there comes a time in one's life when one should settle down with one language, and slowly encrust into COBOLic fuddy-duddyism in preparation for barking at youngsters about Lisp, and my time has come. I'll still flirt with Ruby, and Perl, and Smalltalk, but I'll try and actually get good at Python. Also, EFF is, if you really tied it the ground and submitted it to extraordinary rendition until until it admitted a preference, a Python shop at heart (with scads of PHP littering the floor).

The one painful goodbye from the fun I've been having with Ruby was the lovely gems package system, which, as so much of Ruby, was like Perl's CPAN in rehab. But I've just discovered that Python's setuputils utility includes an easy_install program that does much the same as gems: seeks out packages by name, downloads them from the ether, seeks out dependencies and downloads them too, and then drops it all sensibly in your site-packages.

Easy Install and setuptools were going to be included in the latest Python 2.5, but for good reasons the author decided to withdraw them. It sounds like the infrastructure is being slowly put in place though. I'm looking forward to finding out what else the Pythonistas have been doing in the past year or so.

And now I'm going to look at Eclipse. Christ, what's happening to me?

2006-11-24»

"The secret of success is sincerity. Fake that, and you've got it made."
- Bob Monkhouse

I remember hearing Monkhouse say this as a child, and even then it stuck with me as painfully self-referential joke. At the time, Bob Monkhouse's performing career was stuck in the wilderness: not because he wasn't quick, or funny, or prolific, but because he came across as appalling insincere. The secret of Bob Monkhouse's failure right then was he was trying hard to be sincere, and looking more and more false the more he attempted it. Not because he wasn't underneath it all, truly sincere - but because in England insincerity is best described as the presence of any sincerity at all.

A friend of mine came to America from Britain before I did. He stayed for a year in Houston, Texas in the Nineties. During Thanksgiving at a local's house, he had to bear each of the assembled take a turn very sincerely expressing, in monologue form, what they had to give thanks for this year. They spoke of their health, their family, their neighbours, their friends. When it finally came to him to make his homily - and this, mind you, is one of the nicest politest people I know - he could only say "I'd like to give thanks that I'm finally getting out of Texas next month."

Sincerity is physically painful to the British. Delivering a sincere statement in front of them is like spraying a mouthful of holy water in the face of a vampire. Americans, by contrast, use sincerity as a subtle rhetorical weapon. It was my wife who first demonstrated this to me, delivering an explanation of its place in American society with such doe-eyed earnestness that by the end I was screaming for mercy. She pointed out the little sincerity competitions Californians play; the subtle social markers open goodwill plays in the mid-west. How in Washington politics, there were five hundred flavours of faked sincerity, which, like eskimo words for snow, my English mind could only perceive as one gormless act of yokelism.

I've been here nearly seven years. I'm at Ascension Island in terms of my nationality. I've learnt some sincerity: used it to patch up the social graces that the English universal social solvent, making dumb jokes, don't fill here.

While I've been gone, Britain has been turning slowly and ineradicably alien; it's wandered plate-techtonically from where it was when I lived there. The vein of new-agism that was just beginning to pulse when I left has got more of a hold. The buses seem cleaner. Europe isn't as scary. Sneering at underclasses is more socially acceptable. And people are noticeably more capable and willing to be sincere at me, even when not drunk.

But I'm not there yet, and I'm not here yet. It's hard for me to sincerely say thanks, even though on this best of American holidays, I want to express some sort of gratitude for my genius wife, and my mischevious daughter, and my extended family, and my friends, and my co-workers: Suw and the hard-working people at ORG, and San Francisco, and the mailing lists, and my cat and my computer and music and all the absent friends.

So let me slip it in as a hypothetical at the end of this entry, and just take it as read that I did, okay?

2006-11-15»

Some of you may have been wondering where I've been the last few months. Others, idly mulling on why you haven't seen me much on the Internets for the last year or so. And a few of you might be repeatedly IMing me saying "Where are you? What's happened to NTK? Did you sell the gossip-packaged-in-horrific-web-design-and-courier meme to Nick Denton or something?"

One and all, thank you for your interest.

A core group of you - we'll call them Team O'Brien, and give them a special hypothetical bandanna to wear - have known that I've been, as the English say, poorly recently. It's true I've been sick, and they have been lovely throughout the last few months, and I have gratefully appreciated sucking their charitable instincts dry.

Everyone else - WHERE WERE YOU? Did you not see the signs? I thought we were friendsters! You were in my third-degree linked-in list, dammit! You clicked the "I care about him/her" checkbutton! Yet you never wrote, you never called.

Oh wait, you did, and I kept not answering or going "Mmmm kind of busy, let's talk soon." Almost as though I had a script that wrote that to you. Or was having an in-service-of-denial attack.

Nevertheless. I'm back now to tell you a thing or two. One is that while it's not all better yet, doctors are now smacking their fists in frustration at not being able to prod me any further: a good sign. I am feeling much better, and I hope to become a threat to myself and others again shortly.

I am also having some fun raising my head above the parapet and discovering how much everything has changed in the last year or so. Apparently the dream of "hacking life" itself has become an industry (rather than the hubristic act against nature I originally believed it to be). Indeed, it transpires that almost any batshit idea anyone devised between 2000-2003 is now an industry. People who when last I saw them were living in cupboards and eating the stuff found in their keyboards are now millionaires. Okay, maybe just Linden Dollar millionaires, but still. Geeks who feared to go out lest anyone talk to them have now turned their social software upon themselves, and are now obliged to go to three or four "camps" a week merely to test the scalibility of the calendaring features. Truly, everything is new again, again. Again.

Well, almost. Some things have not changed. Debian is nearly finished, Firefox is still being rewritten. Perl people are nutty, Python people sensible, Ruby are still sensible within their domain, nutty outside it.

And I'm still burying the lede. The point is that last night I marked as unread 7000 incoming emails in my inbox, and sent them into oblivion. Your mail was absolutely right, and I've taken everything you said on board. I can't make it to your thing. But I do love you. Write back, but not soon. I'm okay. I missed you.