Category: Burningbird

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Just Shelley

What the bluebirds and the cardinals say

The St. Louis metropolitan area lost its last chance for a White Christmas when the major storm headed our way was actually pushed to the south of us by our cold, blustery weather.

A few years back, I would have been disappointed, but now I’m philosophical, having learned to let go of all holiday expectations. Now I see the lack of snow giving me an opportunity to spend Christmas out in the hills. My holiday icicles will be splashes of stream frozen in mid-air, my bright spots of color red cardinals in among the few southern green pines. There will be no church and no yule pudding, and my Christmas dinner will be sandwiches made with the Honey Baked ham I splurged on earlier in the week.

Big ham, too. We had salad and ham on Monday and ham and crunchy bread and artichoke and spinach dip on Tuesday and tonight we had the ham with sweet potato souffle and steamed broccoli, cauliflower, and carrots. This will work through tomorrow, and Friday it will be ham and cheese omelets and Texas bread.

Saturday then will be sandwiches on the hill, with the pecan and apricot fruitcake my Mom sent, left over veggies with dip, and hot tomato soup in a thermos, and maybe a small bottle of wine–just enough for a glass, as I’m driving.

By Saturday night, we’ll be down to the bone, which I’ll use to make navy bean and ham soup; combined with fresh cornbread, this will serve for a few meals in the coming week. I’ll have a glass of eggnog and a bit of fudge a friend of roommate’s sent home and I’m saving, and watch a good movie on TV–after calling a few friends and family and giving them my love.

I’ve been reading the various debates about religion and Christmas that have been argued here and there among some of the more popular webloggers. Who would have imagined that such passion and acrimony could result from something as simple as what holiday we celebrate, and what greetings we give each other. We had a red and blue election, must we now have a red and blue holiday season, too?

Happy Holidays, Happy Chanukah, Seasons Greetings, Merry Christmas, Happy Kwanzaa–it doesn’t matter what you say to me, as long as there’s a smile in there somewhere. I’m a sucker for genuine expressions of affection.

I think these people should consider putting away their aggregators and their iPods, turning off their computers, and join me on my hill for the day. I’ll share my sandwiches and soup and we can sit quietly, and hear what the cardinals and bluebirds call the day.

Happy “whoit, whoit, whir-a-chee!” everyone.

Categories
Just Shelley outdoors Photography Places

Listening to your inner monkey

The photos in the last post were from a hike I took to Crane Lake on Sunday. I read in this new hiking book I bought, that it was an ‘easy/moderate’ hike, with a north loop of 3 miles around the lake; a southern loop 2 miles in length, with an end at the dam and around yet another shut-ins.

I had hoped to make both loops, it being easy and all, but ended up getting lost on the way. I ended up on a dirt and rock road leading into the interior of the Ozarks, past national forest land and small, old homes tucked into hills and hollows. The homes had signs posted on them–the usual with ‘Keep Out’, and ‘Private Property’. All except one that had a skull painted on a black board with ‘Keep out…or else’.

Finally I found the parking lot for the lake. It was cold Sunday, but a beautiful sunny day, so I was surprised not to see anyone else there. Still, I like having hikes to myself, so made no never mind to me. (That’s a genuine Ozarks expression — I’m adapting.) It was too late, though, for both loops and I’d have to settle for just the north one around the lake.

The hike started out easy, until reached the first hill to climb down. I found the ground covered with inches of dead leaves, and I couldn’t see the footing. I ended up sliding on the gravel and tripping over rocks. The little monkey in the back of my brain was wide awake, and though it wasn’t banging at my head, it was trying to make me aware that all journeys have an option: to go on, or turn back. I thought about turning around, but remembered that the hike was ‘easy’, and I wanted to see the shut-ins.

The rest of the trail worsened, obstacles buried under too many leaves to see, twisting my ankle, and constantly having to catch at the hiking stick to keep from falling. Again I thought about turning around, but figured it might be easier returning on the other side of the lake. Besides, I wanted to see the old dam, take some photos of it.

The trail turned into the forest away from the lake, and connected up with the Maple Creek section of the Ozarks Trail. It flattened, which was good. Unfortunately, while keeping my eyes down to avoid rocks, I also managed to miss the trail markers. Another aspect of hiking in the winter, just after the leaves fall, is that they can obliterate an already hard to see trail.

No worries, though — when you hike around water, you can always find the path again. It’s just that sometimes when you go off the path, the way isn’t always easy going. Still, I headed in towards the water, found the dam, struggled through the trees and branches and grabbed a picture of it from the side, turned around, and noticed a half torn off white diamond on a tree. I’d found the trail again.

Above the dam was the beginning boulders signaling the shut-ins, but I couldn’t see any indication of where the trail led. The sun was going down, a lot faster than I thought it should, and the path was further obscured by the long shadows of the white oaks I was walking through. Long shadows are not a day hiker’s friend.

I didn’t need the monkey to tell me to turn back–my common sense had finally decided to make an appearance. However, while exploring around, I had again lost the trail. In fact, heading back to the car, I lost the trail a third time, and managed to get back to the car just as the sun started to set behind the hills.

I was a wreck, too — absolutely exhausted, badly overheated from the cold weather gear I was wearing, dehydrated because I hadn’t taken enough water, and barely able to walk after twisting about on the rocks. And I all I could think of was how hungry I was, and how I wanted some onion rings. Water, too. But I wanted onion rings. Yes, indeedy — deep fried, corn dipped onion rings, fresh out of the oil. I ended up stopping along the way, and bought some from a fast food place and wolfed them down. I then came home and promptly became sick.

After 24 hours of oranges and bananas and rest, I checked the hiking book again, actually reading the front matter this time, and found that though a hike in the book might be rated ‘easy’ this was the Sierra rating system, which is based on elevation and length of hike — not ground surface. You have to read the hike details to get a better idea of trail conditions. According to the details on Crane Lake, though the elevation change is slight, the trail itself is ‘rugged’ and often times, easy to lose because of the poor markings.

The author also mentioned in the front matter about avoiding hiking in conservation land during November and December, because of deer hunting season. I had totally forgotten that Missouri Conservation lands allow hunting, and sure enough, Sunday was right in the middle of hunting season. However, not Iron County, which was where I was hiking. No hunting was allowed at Crane Lake.

Well, no hunting, except for the feral hogs known to be in the area. Feral hogs. I’ll be damned.

Categories
Writing

Technical writing and thankless tasks

I think that both Dana Blankenhorn and Marius Coomans will be good for open source, as they both question the concept without worry of offending the legions of open source fans, and seemingly without any axe to grind.

Dana recently questioned the lack of documentation and support associated with open source projects. In particular documentation, writing:

Documentation, I thought, is the Achilles Heel for open source.

It’s baked into the process. Great coders volunteer to write great code, but documentation is a go-to-market process, and when you’re giving stuff away that’s not part of the strategy.

His statement isn’t without merit; when you access many free, open source applications, the first thing you read is something to the effect that “this is free, so don’t expect support”. There’s some justification to this philosophy; it becomes a warning to users that the software they’re using is free; however, they’ll have to hunt around for support on their own, because there’s no one paying the bills for either documentation or support.

Marius agrees with Dana, but takes it a step further. In response to my push to have users be more responsive to those who provide both documentation and support for open source tools, he writes, in comments at his shared weblog:

Shelley, when was the last time you rang the phone company to thank them when you successfully placed a call? Documentation will never be appreciated because most of us only use it as a last alternative, when all else fails. Being a writer is a thankless job, so are garbagemen, car mechanics and loss adjusters. Live with it.

Ouch!

Having focused much of my time this last decade in technical writing, either for books or articles, tips, how-tos, and yes, documentation, I can agree with Marius, in that it seems to be a thankless task, at times. But there’s also something else implicit in his statement, whether it was intended or not: that it isn’t necessarily all writing that is thankless; it’s primarily technical writing that is thankless.

That leads me to wonder: is technical writing, or more specifically writing about technology, valued less than other writing? In other words, if we place the poet, the journalist, the writer of romance or the pundit on one scale, and the writer about technology on the other, will the scales tilt away from the technical writer, every time?

Categories
Burningbird

It’s the oddest thing

It’s it the oddest thing how you start to write one thing, but end up writing something completely different. My last post was to be about a new facility here at Burningbird, but ended up being anything but.

Anyway, before I lose this post, I wanted to point you to Planet Burningbird. This is a site that provides an aggregation of all the posts at all the various sites I maintain, including Wordform, Practical RDF, Tinfoil Project, IT Kitchen, and Burningbird. I’m using Planet software to manage the aggregation, and to provide outputs in HTML, as well as RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 (no template for Atom, yet).

I also plan on creating Planet incarnations for comments and various other interesting groupings of syndicated feeds. It’s just too fun to stop.

Planet is written in Python, and quite easy to use (holler if you want more details). The software includes template files you can edit, similar to WordPress and MT or TextPattern, to alter the appearance, or the data, of the output. For instance, for Planet Burningbird, the HTML template has been integrated with the Burningbird look, and the syndication feeds adjusted to provide excerpts and not full content.

(I had merged Practical RDF into Burningbird but have since split it out again, since I can now easily aggregate all my writings in one spot.)

The feeds are generated once per hour. Now you can easily keep up with ALL my writings. I am mistress of all you see!

(Now, this was what I was going to write about in the last post. )

Categories
Diversity Just Shelley

I am mistress of all you see

I grew up in an age when playtime was a time for our parents to get rid of us so they could do whatever they needed to do without us underfoot. Our parents seldom monitored how we played together, and even in the school yards you rarely heard, “Play nice, children!”

Kids were scraped and scratched daily, and cuts were usually only treated if pus oozed. Our swings were wooden and dangerous; if we fell off the slide we’d land on dirt and get hurt; and if you made it out of childhood without something broken, you were lucky, bigger than everyone else, or weren’t playing hard enough.

You had to be tough to survive being a kid when I was a kid.

Our games were as tough as we were. When we played Red Rover, people ran fullspeed, with an aim of victory…or else. If we played Dodge Ball, we threw with all the power and precision of a Patriot Missile. Many a party was enlivened with mock Roman battle recreations, otherwise known as “Musical Chairs”.

Not with today’s kids, though. Playgrounds are strewn with shredded rubber, school yards are shadowed with liability law suits, and mothers and fathers hover over their precious dears, ready to throw themselves in the way if a stray comet happens to fall to the earth.

As for children indulging in rough ‘n tumble, I saw something on television a few days ago showing a bunch of first graders playing today’s version of Dodge Ball. Under the close supervision of the teacher, each kid would put the large, soft, squishy ball on the ground and then push it, ever so gently, across at the other side. From what I could see, the only kids who were hit were ones who put themselves in front of the ball; probably deliberately losing so they could go play computer games, instead.

I can just imagine how Musical Chairs are played now. First, there’s the polite version, whereby kids get goodies for Demonstrating Good Behavior:

“Oh, pardon me! Did you want this chair?”

“No, I couldn’t. You must take it.”

“I insist that you take it. You were here first.”

“No, seriously, I’m not tired. Please do take this chair.”

Or the more likely:

“That’s my chair!”

“Is not!”

“Is too!”

“Is not!”

“Is too!”

(repeat forever)

Now, I will say that today boys and girls are encouraged to play more together — sort of. This wasn’t the case back in my childhood, where girls weren’t encouraged to engage in tough, contact sports. Still, our play was just as aggressive, if less painful, physically. Each girl would gather her Barbies and meet with her friends to compare accessories, and who had the most dresses and shoes.

A popular ’sport’ if you want to call it that, for girls when I was growing up was “Best Friend”. In this game, you would get mad at your current best friend, and then go and be best friends with someone else. Next week, the newest pair of best friends would have a quarrel about something trivial, and the original best friends would either make up and become the ‘old’ best friends — or some new soul would be dragged into the mix. Usually someone who didn’t have a lot of friends, and would be grateful for the attention, even if only temporary.

(These mix-n-match girls, everyone’s favorite temporary best friend, are the ones that grow up to be CEOs of major corporations or Secretary of State. Nothing like childhood to toughen you up for future challenges.)

Of course, girls could indulge in ‘rough housing’ if we were tomboys, which I was. I hated dolls, loved to climb trees, and was incredibly scary at Dodge Ball; god help you if you were on the opposing side if we played Red Rover together.

As for King of the Mountain — well, to be politically correct for today’s youth, it should be Person of the Mountain. And the ‘mountain’ is really soft straw or pillows, not a ‘real’ hill. And you can’t do more than circle around each other until someone gets dizzy and falls down on their own.

Or do they hand out numbers, just like at the Deli?

“Number Six! Number Six! It’s your turn to be on top!”

No, back in my day, we were left alone; to indulge our little “lord of the flies” natural savageness as much as we could wish. Usually, doing so out of sight of adults, so as to avoid creating a spark fear in our parents that they may be raising the next Hitler or Atilla the Hun.

Now my generation is all ‘growed up’, and our legacy of uncontained aggressiveness shows up in the boardrooms of most major corporations, as well as in government and in the military. Some would say that it is this that feeds our continuously insatiable need to go ‘…fight someone in defense of (fill in the nation/religion/way of life of your choice)’.

It is true that my generation has grown up to be pugnacious, angry, defensive, aggressive, and even, unfortunately at times, intolerant. Yet, the same impulse that drives these ‘negative’ behaviors, is also the same impulse that led many to stand in determined isolation on top of a hill, even when faced with hordes of kids just as determined to throw down their mangled bodies. It can breed courage; it can breed change.

You can see this impulse in people around you, and perhaps even yourself. It’s based on knowing that no matter how high up you are, there’s still places higher; no matter how good you are, you can always do better; no matter what you’ve accomplished, you can always do more. It’s holding firm on our beliefs, and standing by what we see are our truths.

It is a restless impulse. It is a tenacious impulse. It is an insatiable impulse. And it can either create great good, or great harm, because it is nothing more than raw determination to be molded into whatever shape our beliefs and our truths and aspirations dictate.

Every person who becomes a leader of his or her people, whether dictator or saint, is a person who is standing on top of a mountain. Every person who creates great works of art, or great works of destruction, is a person who is standing on top of a mountain. Every person who is willing to die for their beliefs, is a person willing to kill for their beliefs, and is a person standing on top of a mountain.

I also remember back to my childhood at the end of the day, when our parents would call us home, dirty and battered and scratched and scrapped. False night would touch the sky around us, and we could barely see our own bruises much less the faces of our friends. Yet before we’d break up, we would turn, one last time, to look at the kid who held the top–holding it against all odds–as they stood dark against the sunset. Turn and look, with respect or despair, knowing that they held the hill not because they were necessarily the biggest or the meanest or the best; but because they wanted the top of the hill more than anyone else.