I’ve been working on a thing. I’ve noticed that if I talk about the things I’m doing, I tend to start viewing them as done for some reason, so I won’t talk about it.

I’ve also been working on this thing to distract myself from the fact that I let myself down. I never called the guy about the other thing, some volunteer work at a national historical site. Again, an example of talking about it being good enough, rather than actually doing it.

Also, it’s such a big deal for me to work stuff out with people that just arranging the setup for the work seems like work enough to some part of me. I want to say, “Hey, I’m showing up tomorrow, and then it’ll be done,” but it’s not like that. I have to email the guy, and then he emails me, and then I email back, and then he emails back and tells me to call him, and then I leave town, and then I’m back in town, and then I email him, and then he emails me back telling me to call him… Sometimes I think I’m being too hard on myself about this kind of thing, but the way I’ve gone about it has been ridiculous, if not rude.

It all comes back to the two mes. There’s the me that’s in the real world, and the me that’s doing all it can to avoid the world. They each resent having to put up with the other. The in-the-world me is the one talking to you now. It has the language and the desire to do things that are at least interesting. The avoid-the-world me is the one that lets me stay seated in this chair, that keeps me in the van while I’m traveling, and in fact enjoys driving for four days down an interstate it’s already seen ten times, noticing the small things that have changed, the manageable ones.

Neither is in charge, though of course they both lay the claim.

The Pain — When Will It End?

(See for instance… and of course… And who can deny the Scum Belt?)

via metafilter.

A few nights ago I went to the video store, because I realized I hadn’t ever seen ‘The Third Man,’ which was mentioned here not long ago.

It turns out there’s a newish Criterion Collection release, and it’s absolutely beautiful. Criterion makes me happy just by existing, and ‘The Third Man’ made me happy by being a really good film that’s ostensibly about black market medicine in post-WWII Vienna, but is actually about all kinds of things all at the same time. It’s a film where every decision was the right one to make, and that’s not often seen.

While I was at the video place, I also picked up ‘The Duellists,’ which I’ve been wanting to watch for a really long time. It’s Ridley Scott’s first theatrical release. It won a bunch of accolades in the European cinema festivals and so forth, but in the US it went nowhere. I saw the very end of it when I was a pre-teen. it was on TV, and again I give thanks and praise to whoever was in charge of late night movies at KTRK ABC channel 13 in Houston in the early ’80s. I saw the end of it, and it was so visually beautiful, with low-contrast lighting and a rainy, wet texture… Exactly the sort of thing Scott has been doing ever since, but it wasn’t until a few nights ago that I actually saw the whole thing. It’s ostensibly about two officers in Napoleon’s army who are always thwarted when they try to finish their long-standing duel, but it’s actually about a few other things that don’t seem nearly as relevant as they were when Joseph Conrad wrote the story. It’s still awe-inspiringly beautiful, and Keith Carradine and Harvey Keitel are good. But the clever, knowing nods to art history don’t advance the story, and, yeah, OK, Keitel’s character is an allegorical Napoleon. We get it. OK?

Having no way to get to sleep last night, I turned on another Ridley Scott picture, ‘Blade Runner.’ Same deal, same attention to detail, same basic art direction (low contrast, lots of rain and moisture), and if you haven’t seen it, then you really should because you’re missing out. I didn’t make it through the whole thing last night, because I finally did get to sleep. Today, I was looking for something on YouTube, and lo and behold I found a trailer for yet another director’s cut of ‘Blade Runner.’ So if you’re one of those aforementioned who haven’t seen it, the release date is in the fall.

Apple sez, of ‘Leopard,’ AKA Mac OS X 10.5:

To open up the benefits of the Cocoa frameworks to a wider developer audience, Leopard embraces two other highly dynamic languages for use in building Cocoa applications: Ruby and Python. These two languages are an excellent fit for integrating with the Cocoa frameworks, and they both have high quality bridges to Objective-C. These bridges allow you to mix and match Objective-C, Ruby, and Python, allowing you to choose the best tool for the job at hand while using high level Cocoa features such as Key-Value Coding (KVC) and Key-Value Observing (KVO).

They’ll be officially supporting python, a programming language I know at least one of my readers is proficient within…

Also, Cocoa Dev Central got a major facelift since last time I looked. It’s pretty swell at the moment. For instance, in the Core Data overview, the infographics are so slick they seem to have already been pre-understood by your brain.

And one more Mac thing: Next time you’re in the Apple store or whatever, hold down the control key on the keyboard, and then scroll with the mouse scroll wheel. It’s the magnifying glass effect, and I find myself using it all the time.

In response to this, I’d like to present this:

No, for real.

Talk to Moyers about it. (Watch the video.)

HomerTheBrave’s Health Class, semester 1:

Giardia is what you’re worried about in water supplies. It’s a parasite that lives for a really long time in fecal matter and water. So basically, if the water you’re thinking about drinking touched someone’s crap, you might not want to drink it. As if this doesn’t come as second nature.

However: It might not be obvious that the water you’re seeing is somehow connected to a cow pie or horse turd or human brown-log-of-doom. For instance, you might be looking at a clear, happy, babbling brook in a pristine old-growth forest, and think, “That’s some lovely water!” But upstream from where you are might be an alpine meadow with a sheep herd, or maybe someone rode a horse through last week, or whatever. All these things could easily lead to giardia in the water.

So you drink the water, and a week later you get diarrhea and cramps and gas, known as Giardiasis, and ever stool sample you leave in the bathroom is now the place to be if you want to get infected. Wash hands, use antibacterial soap, you get the picture. Which is what I’m doing now, because I might have it, and I don’t want my housemates to get it. Though I probably don’t, and they probably won’t. (It’s lucky that I have my own bathroom.)

Now: If you’re camping or hiking out in the woods, you have to dispose of your crap properly, even if you don’t have giardiasis. The rule of thumb is a cat hole 300 ft from any water. A shallow hole, so that local microbes can do the dirty work; too deep and the turd will just end up petrified, too shallow and it’ll just get washed into the river anyway.

One only wishes that, for instance, cattle could be kind enough to dig holes first.

Salmonberries, FYI. Their flavor is very subtle, but their effect is happy-making.

First: Start out on a hike too late in the day. You’re going 5 miles in, and 5 miles out, gaining about 2500 ft., so it’s not a trivial thing.

Second: Have no real clue about the trail. You know it goes from the new Snoqualmie Point trailhead on the east to Rattlesnake Ledge and down the mountain to the park at that end. But beyond that, you really only know that it’s a lovely trail that snakes through old clearcuts and second-growth forest areas.

Third: You can get by on that much water. Really. Same goes for food.

Fourth: You packed spare batteries for the camera, but not for the GPSr.

Fifth: Forget about the time you hiked up to Cutthroat Pass in the North Cascades, when your knee decided to go out.

Sixth: Bring the LED flashlight instead of the Mini Mag-Lite, because you won’t really need it, because it’ll be daylight by the time you get back.

So I hiked and it was kinda fun, and there were some lovely berry bushes to slake my appetite and thirst, and there’s a stream about halfway (which is a quarter of the way on the trail), which helped out with the water. Time will tell if I got giardia.

On the way back, my knee was stressed by all the downhill action, especially at relatively high speed trying to race the sun into the valley. I finally gave up on the trail itself, opting to hike down the service road (the trail and the road lead to repeater towers on top of the ridge). The road was much easier on my knee (and eventually, knees), but added an extra hour and a half to the hike. So I was alone, poking through the empty forest on a logging road, eventually reaching the trailhead and my van at 10pm.

Unfortunately, the gates to the trailhead park are locked at 9pm.

So I spent last night in the van.

However….

That’s a Jeep Travel Bug. It might win me a free GPSr. (For values of ‘free’ that include limping for the rest of my life, giardia-induced diarrhea, and sleeping in my van with only the rug that was covering the floor to keep me warm.)

Ask GoogleEarth.

(The link above will yield a file called geo.kml, which you can then open into GoogleEarth.)

Via. (Follow this link to learn how to construct your own URL.)

Want to see all the mile 23 markers?