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Urban Raspberry

It sounds a little like a synonym for the expression “Bronx Cheer”, but we’re being completely literal here.  We are talking about a raspberry in the city: a regular raspberry, the kind that grows on a bush in clusters.

I was walking to the Noteflight office this morning, a walk which meanders through Cambridge’s various ideas of upscale, downscale and industrial-scale before terminating in a neighborhood one could describe as biotech chic. It’s ironic that what we call the “life sciences” seem to require, for their successful pursuit, a sterile environment purged of all life. This notion seems to have leaked outward from their labs and glove boxes into the architecture, which is designed to convey that same sterility.  I much prefer the industrial stretch of my walk, right at the boundary of bio-land and the residential neighborhood preceding it.  In this area, a disused auto repair shop looks exactly like what it is, lying just outside the zone in which it would have been cleaned up to reflect its rows of newly minted  equipment inside.

On that walk today, I met an urban raspberry.  Like the auto repair shop, it looked exactly like what it was. I ate it, looking at the cracked and broken windows of the buildings around me. A perfect moment unfolded on my tongue, fading half a block later.

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Faulty Paradise

Here are some photos from a recent trip my wife and I took to the Northern California coast. We traversed the whole length of Marin and Sonoma, and covered a good bit of Mendocino as well.

This was our room in the first B&B we stayed in.  It is nestled in a canyon the tiny West Marin town of Inverness, just south of the Point Reyes Peninsula.  The room was exotically situated, perched on top of a spiral staircase and accessible via the top from a long wooden bridge.  Mist is burning off the bridge in this picture because the entire structure was covered in rime ice when we woke up.

This looks all cool ‘n’ everything, and the structure was neat, but the place was very sketchily decorated on the inside considering its high cost (faded blue shag carpet does not belong in a B&B that costs over $200 a night), and the breakfast cook was kind of grumpy and weird.  The owners were not to be seen — other people manage the place.  To get to the bathroom in the night required a trip across the icy, slippery wooden bridge, which made the whole tower shake.

Not that this mattered.  The area is beautiful and we spent all our Inverness days in the outdoors.

The Point Reyes peninsula casually jutting out into the Pacific, hoping to trip up a ship or two.  Peninsulas these days are so ill-mannered.

This one traveled some 300+ miles north on the Pacific Plate to get to its current location, sliding along the San Andreas Fault.  It took its original rocks and plants with it — never leave home without your ancestral flora and fauna!

This looks like some kind of vegetable that Benoit Mandelbrot’s mom probably made him eat until he invented fractal geometry.  It’s a type of cauliflower that we picked up at a neat organic grocery in Point Reyes Station.  It tasted exactly like… cauliflower.  Fresh cauliflower, though!

We saw a lot of little orange salamanders walking around.

On the last day of our trip we took a spectacular hike through the northern reaches of the Marin Headlands, just south of Muir Beach.  The fog and light were spectacular:

Not much more to say about this!

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Flexcover Branches Out

Just dropping a quick note to followers of Flexcover and the ongoing AS3 code coverage adventure. It’s been a super busy time at work for me, but I’ve found enough spare cycles to put together a working branch coverage feature. It’s pretty cool: instead of toting up the number of lines that were executed (and highlighting lines that didn’t run in the source view), it counts “branches” that were executed: every conditional that affects program flow is tracked to count whether it has evaluated false or true, and how many times. In other words, if (a == 1) {...} else {...} counts as two different branches, one for the if clause and one for the else clause. Even better, if (a == 1) {...} also counts as two branches: you will be able to tell if the if clause ever got skipped because a was equal to 1. Try doing that with line coverage! [Continued...]

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Mountain Biking In Mexico’s Copper Canyon

I just returned from a week-long mountain bike trip in Las Barrancas Del Cobre (Copper Canyon), a canyon system in southwestern Chihuahua state of truly remarkable scope and scenery:

The trip was organized by Western Spirit, a bike expedition company about which I have only great things to say. [Continued...]

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The TSA Has Determined That My Cheese Is Not Explosive

Before leaving San Francisco for home in Cambridge, I stopped at the Ferry Building on the Embarcadero to pick up a few gifts for home. Among them was a small muffin-sized package of delicious, creamy Mount Tam cheese from Cowgirl Creamery in Point Reyes, CA, a favorite of my wife’s. I stashed it in my shoulder bag before catching the BART train to the airport.

Arriving at SFO I pleasantly breezed through the metal detector on my way to the gate and waited for my bag and laptop to come through the X-ray machine. The pleasant breezing sensation then came to an abrupt halt, as did the X-ray conveyor belt. My bag went back and forth through the machine several times.

“Can I please open your bag, sir?” a TSA contractor asked me. Her shoulder insignia read “Centurion Security Services, S.A.F.E.S.K.I.E.S.” emblazoned on a ferocious eagle-and-flag backdrop. I wondered what on earth the super-sized acronym could possibly stand for.

“No problem.” I’m not inclined to be overly protective of my bags’ privacy in these sad police-state times we live in. I assumed that the shape or size of something in my bag reminded someone of a sample X-ray they dimly remembered from the TSA X-ray Analysis training seminar. I didn’t want my behavior to remind someone of something they saw in some other TSA seminar, such as that fascinating Strip-Search Profiling Criteria class they took. I put my shoes back on and waited while, after several rummages, the cheese emerged. Much examination and discussion took place as the cheese was passed around and looked at from many angles. It received several prods and squeezes.

“We’ll run your bag through again, sir.”

[Continued...]

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More about Barcelona

As I mentioned in my previous post, I just returned from a 3-day trip to Barcelona. My wife and I had a truly wonderful time there, and I really have to recommend it as a destination. It has a unique flavor as a city, with a lot of cultural, visual and culinary delights. Three days (with much of them occupied by a conference) hardly makes for a panoramic sense of such a rich place, so I’m just going to set down some of my impressions and experiences without trying to do the place justice.

I’ve put together a small photo album with a few of my favorite pictures from the trip. I’m not going to embed them all in this post, but here’s one emblematic building by the architect Gaudi:

There’s a lot I don’t know about Gaudi, but when I experience his work close-up I see a mixture of iconoclasm and daring coupled with tremendous patience, craft and respect for his materials. And this kind of spirit seems to be present a lot in the city in some form or other. It’s an exciting social nexus where people seem to rush around, shop like mad and party until late at night (just try eating dinner before 9 pm), but at the same time attention is paid to the details of civic life. Things seem to work in Barcelona, and work well.

There’s a great variety to the look of the city. It includes broad avenues with spacious Parisian-style intersections, lined with graceful stucco apartments sporting fantastic wrought-iron balconies. It also has medieval warrens of narrow Gothic alleys, mad modernista Art Deco storefronts, and of course some drab blocky buildings. In most places there are many delightful details and touches: someone cared how something looked. And like my hometown, Chicago, there’s a willingness to be playful with civic art and architecture. Playfulness counts for a lot in my book.

The food is truly great (especially if you like seafood), but I recommend getting away from the main drags and finding somewhere a little less geared to tourist tastes. I have to mention one fabulous dinner we had, at a restaurant called Passadis Del Pep. We heard about it from a friend who used to live in Barcelona and got its address on the web, but had some trouble finding it. We finally located it purely by address — there is no sign out front, just an anonymous doorway with no restaurant visible inside. You have to have faith that something is there and just keep walking further into the building. Eventually we wound up in a wonderfully intimate and friendly space with sort of a cellar-bistro look. There was no menu; the waiter simply started bringing food to the table. Eight small and intense courses of local seafood later (I think there were three different varieties of shrimp, each with its own distinct preparation and taste), we barely managed to get out of our chairs and leave. One of the best meals ever! Not for people who don’t like looking at the faces of the animals they’re eating, though.

I have to give the Barcelona Metro some props on their user interface (and on the fact that the trains run very frequently). On some of the lines, there’s a little linear map over each door showing the stations on that particular route. On one side of the car, the map runs in one direction, while on the other side of the car, the map runs oppositely — that is, it’s flipped horizontally. They apparently went to this trouble so that the map’s orientation would always match the train’s direction of travel. On some other lines, the same linear map has an indicator light set in each station. As the train approaches a station, the light for that station blinks. After the train leaves that station, the light remains on (so you can see where the train has been, as opposed to where it’s going). Good design there!

People were exceedingly friendly and there were no logistical problems on the trip. The city seems safe even in its less inviting regions. The prevailing language is Catalan, not Spanish — but everyone speaks some Spanish, and most people speak some English.

I’ve always wanted to go to Barcelona. It took me decades, but I’m glad I finally made it.

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Connected to: Jesus. Signal Strength: Excellent.

Anyone could be forgiven for not knowing Jesus’s MAC address (00:14:6c:a6:23:4a), and for not knowing Jesus’s approximate location (somewhere near Norwalk, CT). It’s hardly common knowledge, after all. I only found out because I was on the Amtrak Acela Express from New York City to Boston yesterday, and decided to run Network Stumbler on my laptop for the entire journey. (Network Stumbler is a free program that logs the names and details of every wireless network that it encounters.)

Altogether I logged 1,660 access points during the train journey, one of which was named “Jesus”. The naming of wireless routers should rightly occupy an odd little niche in social anthropology. When you look at this many access point names, a couple of points become clear. People name these things with an awareness that the names are publicly visible. At the same time, these names belong to private spaces, and a lot of the names have private significance. A wireless name is a little like a button with a personalized slogan, only you can’t see the person wearing it.

As a rough jump-start to this discipline, here’s an organized digest of some of the access points that I rolled past:

Home Sweet Home

• Jimmy's Place
• Kobes-Castle
• rejectbarn
• rockpile
• HoMe
• homey
• DAWGHOUSE

Shout-outs

• CATS_bklyn
• Harrison Represent Yo (near Harrison, NY)
• OakHill_Boomerang

Network Sweet Network

• Mi Gente Network
• YupNet
• Ken's Extreme Network

Screen Names/Handles

• lillamb
• Fruity
• kittyup
• katburki
• spoiledone
• toughguy
• SirKnight
• Sweetness
• Geek06583_Clark

Cultural References

• Hogwarts Quidditch Pitch
• Napoleon Dyno
• Night Rider
• Me van a Matar por las Mujeres

Cryptic

• ManTown
• Sitivity
• apSSIDiointerpol
• Deshmukh (I had thought this could be Klingon, but a reader pointed out that it’s a common Hindi surname. Possibly the network owner is bilingual in Klingon and Hindi.)
• Numbers

I miss…

• Texas
• Florida
• Sonoma
• phoenixarizona
• dakotaboy1
• riven (some people spent a lot of time there)

We Want Your Business

• Pay3$@javajoes
• H@rv3yguns (why the hacker orthography?)
• Holiday inn Bridgeport (also could be read as the very unlikely concept, “Holiday in Bridgeport”)

We Don’t Want Your Business

• Dont Touch This Router
• Mine
• Not For You
• BuyYourOwn (amazingly, this network was not encrypted)
• fuck you

Islands In The Crowd

• redsox (at the western end of Connecticut)
• yankees (at the eastern end of Rhode Island)

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New Mexico, Episode 1: The Church Of Cartesian Space

My wife and I just returned from a glorious 2-week, 2000+ mile road trip in many parts of New Mexico. Now, it’s been my practice to write a post after such trips, with a travelogue of some nature accompanied by a cornucopia of pictures. This trip, however, produced such a wealth of experiences and memories that I feel overwhelmed by the prospect of sitting down and summarizing it. The intensity, the quantity and the diversity of what can be seen in New Mexico are daunting.

At some point I realized the way to go was episodic: whenever I feel up to it, to simply pick some fragment of the trip, any fragment, and work with those images and those memories.

Part The First: The Church Of Cartesian Space, describing our visit to Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field in Pie Town, New Mexico.

[Continued...]

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