Yes, that’s the same shirt from my profile pic, and no, I didn’t plan it that way.

I acquired this fez today. There’s a story, but I’d rather remain mysterious at the moment.

So here I am, sitting, looking at the fez, and realizing: I’m only assuming it’s not real leopard skin. I’d have to tear the thing apart to find out for sure.

I got an amazing massage today.

There’s this muscle, you see, called the psoas (pronounced: SO-az). It attaches to the base of the spine runs across the pelvis, and attaches again to your inner thigh. It allows you to do things like bend over, and raise your leg. You have two, actually, one on each side. But that kind of goes without saying.

The way they get massaged is to have someone poke their elbow deep, deep in your groin while you lay on a table, writhing in agony.

Ah, but the release is worth it, especially if your left psoas is as screwed up as mine.

During the non-massage times, I can help out my psoas with these nifty yoga poses I found on the web. Woot! I especially like the dangle-your-leg one (‘Standing Release’).

And looky here: How to sit at a desk, without screwing up your psoas.

I’ve ‘blogged about Mushy The Mush Client before. It’s a programming project I’m working on halfassedly.

Tonight I overcame some kind of internal hurdle and, at least as far as the Cocoa framework is concerned, I’ve quit being Thomas Anderson and I’m beginning to be Neo.

CUE: Green Objective-C code dripping down the computer monitor…

There’s an interesting point of consciousness, where you know enough about a topic to be able to start surfing it, rather than just taking in the raw facts. In the case of Cocoa, I’m finally able to code up a window and its associated data model within an evening, without subclassing NSDocument.

This point happens when some kind of threshhold is reached. The threshhold can only be reached by practice and doing. Details fade away and implementation becomes opaque (to use an OOP metaphor). There’s just doing, and knowing how the pieces fit together. Like building a house: If you know how to build a wall, and you know how to build a roof, you can build four walls and a roof and you’ve built a house. You’ve passed the threshhold.

The downside is that I always wimp out at these moments. For a sort of backwards value of ‘wimp out’… I can feel how the learning curve is levelling off, and so now the challenge is creating something, not learning how to create something. I usually face this challenge by abandoning whatever I just learned, and finding some other unbelievably complex thing to learn how to do.

It’s interesting how we limit ourselves. Someone might look at all the codehead gibberish I wrote above, and think ‘never in a million years would I understand whatever the hell he’s talking about.’ But that’s not true. It’s not that hard. If you wanted to, you could figure it out. And if I could see the horizon beyond the forest for the trees, I wouldn’t be planning for how to stay interested in Cocoa.

This man controls law enforcement for the whole of the United States Of America.

Your caption: ??

So dig.

I’m listening to Heart. Their ‘Greatest Hits’ CD.

I saw an interview with the Wilson sisters a while back, and thought they’d be nice to run into in Bellvue (city of malls near Seattle where they’re from). And I just now saw them on the PBS fund raising crunch show. They did a show at the historic Paramount Theater in downtown Seattle in, I think, 2000, and this special was the result.

So the strangeness of seeing Heart on PBS aside, they rocked! They walked a distinct and fine line between dinosaurs who have to play old songs irrelevance and vital, accomplished musicians. I’d pay to go to one of their shows now, I think.

Maybe that’s a reflection on me.

Anyway. I’m ripping the abovementioned CD, and I’m listening to ‘Magic Man.’ ‘Magic Man’ is a song I remember hearing when I was a little kid. It has that synthesizer break in the middle, and that blew my mind, because it made me think of science fiction movies that I liked.

There’s something else Heart makes me think of, and that’s skanky rock and rollers who think they’re cool because they’re snorting coke off a Miller High Life mirror made into a table. Not that I ever saw anyone do this, but it’s an image that Heart used to evoke for some reason. This is similar to the fact that every Lynrd Skynrd song evokes for me the image of a dive bar on the gulf coast of Alabama where a bunch of drunk guys in greasy Caterpillar caps are saluting the stars-and-bars and laughing at jokes making fun of faggots.

I’m not a Skynrd fan.

But I’m digging Heart at the moment, even without cocaine.

Yesterday this rose was still wadded up, almost a bud, not quite a flower. Today it has opened its perfuned genitals for all passing pollen-passers to fondle.

Unable to pass pollen, but not wanting to disappoint, I took this highly erotic photo, hoping to add to the yellow rose’s slutty reputation. If you want a higher resolution image of this vegetative smut, please let me know.

Translation: “Pretty rose. I took a picture. It’s kinda neeto to use as a desktop image.”

I’m watching my mind get caught in loops. It’s fun.

It’s like when you get a song stuck in your head. You don’t know the whole song, or most of the lyrics, but you have part of it, and it’s somehow endlessly fascinating to some part of your brain, while being annoying to your conscious self. So it’s in there, on endless loop.

That’s how my thought processes work much of the time. Like, just now I was looking at a backup CD I burned of the source code to a project I’m working on.

I made a nifty label for it and everything, complete with the application icon. That icon is (in part) stolen artwork, and part of an immense in-joke-suffuse-with-irony that would be too complicated to explain here. But the whole story is looping in my brain, as if it were a pop song.

And in a way, it is a pop song, since I made a little jingle that plays when you run the program. So I’m watching the story go on over and over, and hearing the jingle, and reading the text I put on the label, which is written in curvy text. That is, it’s normal text that follows a curved path, so it’s kind of mildly fascinating in that way, to think about an algorithm that would be able to print text along a curved path, so thinking about how that would work loops around in my mind for a while, too.

And then there’s the list of problems that will be solved in the next revision, the ways I feel clever for having found solutions to the last set of problems, the debate over whether I should release it under the GPL, BSD, or Artistic license, wondering whether I’d need to get another icon to distribute with it given that I want it to be pure open-source… and so forth. All at the same time.

So I’m sitting at my desk, and staring at a CD. The inner world of my brain is quite rich and active and maybe experiencing such a thing would be overwhelming to someone with a more normal neurology. But my outer world is me sitting still, barely even breathing.

It’s because it’s late. I’m tired enough to be able to watch all these things loop around in my head. When I’m more awake, conscious-me sort of coalesces into a more unified, singular purpose of a personality. I prefer the free-association version, for the same reason that many people are addicted to heroin. But I suppose it’s important to have a life outside my skull, as well.

Speaking of the debate over conservation, I spent a few hours today at the Juanita Bay Wetlands Park, on Lake Washington.

It’s a reclaimed wetland. It was drained and used as a golf course for a long time, but eventually it was purchased and repurposed back to it’s original purpose.

It’s in a tremendously affluent neighborhood. It’s the sort of place that gets created if members of the community have political clout and bux to back it up. Similar places exist in less affluent neighborhoods in the area, but few so well conceived and maintained as this one.

The Big Deal here is twofold: A maintained, bona-fide park, with manicured rolling green lakeside hills, left over from the golf course days, where bike commuters can zoom to their neighborhood on the paved paths. And boardwalks out into the dense marshland that is the water’s edge.

Being me, I chose the boardwalks. Ubiquitous blackberry bushes and evergreens gave way to tall grasses, which gave way to cattails and then lily pads in a protected lagoon area. It was red-winged blackbird mating time, so they were all making a ruckus. In fact, I got dive-bombed by a male. He wouldn’t give up, either, until I was out of the running for his prospective mate.

The diversity of wildlife was really amazing. Here we were a few blocks from a major highway, a half mile from a major strip mall colony, in the middle of affluent suburbia, and I’m seeing herons and red-winged blackbirds and there’s a beaver swimming by, and… Up there, on top of the second snag from the left, a bald eagle.

So I’m standing on the terminus of the boardwalk, the wide portion at the end, out almost in the lake, and if I look up the tree that’s 5 feet away from where I’m standing, there’s a freakin’ bald eagle up there on top. So I look at it for a while. It’s just sitting there watching the sun set or something. It turns its head from time to time, maybe shifts its body, scratches its underside with its beak.

A pack of girl scouts come out the boardwalk. They’re looking at the blackbirds and the swallows and the beaver that makes an appearance. I’m making it a point not to draw attention to the eagle. I want to see how long before they notice.

It takes only about five minutes, and a wave of excitement unifies all these girls into being jazzed about a bird in a tree. My science experiment completed, I head back for shore, sure in the knowledge that conservation R00LZ.

The other part of this story is that while I was on the *other* boardwalk, I had a short chat with a woman who came out there all the time, and was informally keeping track of what was going on there. A propos of nothing, she asked me if I had seen the blackbird nests, which I hadn’t. There were two within 3 feet of the walkway.

I asked her about the interpretive plaque, and the supposed osprey nest that had been set up about 50 yards away. The sign said to watch for osprey that live nearby, and the ‘nest’ looked like a leftover telephone pole in the middle of the lake with a platform-y thing on top. She said, “Oh, that thing. The Audobon society put it up. The osprey perch on it sometimes, but they don’t live there. I think it’s too exposed, so they don’t like it.” About this time another person spoke up, “It’s because of the eagles. Too much competition.”

Could I believe my ears? Neighbors arguing about why ospreys weren’t nesting in their neighborhood? Endangered species osprey? Endangered species bald eagle? In conflict over habitat?

Indeed. Conservation R00LZ.

I just discovered one of the many things I like about Canada is the Tree Book, guide to various types of trees created by the BC government’s Ministry Of Forests.

I thought: The US has to have something similar… So I looked around for it. I started with the US Department Of The Interior, whose website looks like one of those Photoshop how-to tutorials.

There, I learned that June 17th is the centennial of the Bureau Of Reclamation. This is the bureau that sought to address the increased water needs in the American west by damming up rivers and digging canals. Yay. But I didn’t learn how to identify trees.

I also learned that we just passed the centennial of the Fish And Wildlife Service’s National Wildlife Refuge System. Yay! I can imagine the debates going on and on, contentious politicians arguing about whether they should focus on public works or conservation. What a great debate it must have been.

I did find a number of ID-your-tree guides, but none put out by governmental agencies. And it wasn’t for trying.

So it seems Canada has us beat! Perhaps the US government believes tree identification to be a terror-enabling skill. After all, who would care but some eco-terrorist?

Roses are kewl.