lishevita's blog

Over at LiveJournal, Zoethe said that Avatar is a massive race FAIL and her other half TheFerrett basically said that it's a beautiful movie with no actual plot, so I was totally ready to like Avatar only for the geek factor of the CG when my son and I found ourselves at the theater today. Guess what? I think that they both missed something huge here. Avatar isn't just the story of the strong white guy coming in and saving the poor natives, it's a story of a broken person finding wholeness in a new community, becoming a convert and an immigrant, and proving themselves by laying their own life on the line for their new people.

(Spoilers be beyond this point...)

I was supposed to call someone yesterday, but I didn't get around to it. I figured I'd get to it this morning, but I didn't manage that, either. At last I had a few moments to breathe as I sat down on the train to Tel Aviv. I looked at my phone and realized that I was almost out of battery. Deciding that it wasn't a good idea to use the last of the battery on a phone call that might not last long enough to say anything important, I thought I should send an sms instead. Short, quick, and interruptionless.

But then I stopped myself.

Once upon a time, if you wanted to read a book or a short story by one of your favorite authors, you either had to borrow the book from a library or a friend or else you had to go buy it in a store. The key in any of those options is that you had to be physically in the same place as the book. If you lived in a country where that book hadn't yet been published, you may never get to see it. If the book had gone out of print, it might be very difficult to find a copy of the book. These days, you can read out of print books as well as numerous new works by great authors online.

No, don't you go sniffing the dog. The dog's name is Sniff. And he's a combination of really cool and really scary. Cool because, well, I like technology and you can do some really cool things with this dog. I mean, seriously. Scary because, well, you are sticking an RFID reader and a bunch of RFIDs in the hands of your KID. Let's see, can we think of a nefarious way to use that?

Yesterday at the ice rink was really cool. I had an entire night of coaching advanced skaters.

One of the hardest things in running a small programming agency or doing freelance programming work is knowing exactly what to charge. When you are doing something which is essentially creative work and when you know from experience that the customer is going to change their minds about things as you go and you will discover unexpected problems along the way, it's very difficult to decide in advance what to charge for a project.

My first grandson was born on Thursday August 13th just before 4pm. He had a little trouble getting here, so he spent his first night in a special care nursery, but not to worry, he and momma are both fine.

This has been especially wonderful because all three of my kids were together for this. My youngest son and I traveled to the US for the whole summer just to be here for this, and my daughter came up from California as soon as her summer term courses were done so that she could meet her first nephew when he was born. My eldest son is the father.

I have been having troubles since I started doing development for embedded software with the amount of available space in my /opt directory. You see, normally, you put all of your cross-compilers and software development kits (sdk's) underneath the /opt directory. Unfortunately, when I set up my laptop and partitioned the hard drive, I didn't set /opt into its own partition and so it was sitting in the root (/) partition.

My eldest son's father is Guatemalan and my son has spent many vacations down in Guatemala with his grandmother who lives in a small village surrounded by coffee plantations. He says that the people who grow the coffee say that you can't eat the cherries because they will make you sick and you can die.

I am hugely inspired by this five minute talk about Humblefacturing. This is exactly the sort of stuff that's been going through my mind in the last few months, but he takes it a few steps past what I was even imagining.