Author Archives: Ted

Foggy Morning Paddle

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The one good thing about the rapidly shortening days in September and October is that it you can be up for the sunrise without having to wake up at some ungodly hour, like you do in the summer. With that in mind, this morning I took the kayak out for an early morning trip. I was hoping for either a sunrise or early morning fog; I got fog.

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Paddling in Clear Currents

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One of the things I miss about not working in Providence anymore is WaterFire, an art installation running down the rivers in the heart of the city. Over 80 braziers installed in the river are filled with firewood, lit, and stoked over the course of the night, accompanied by music playing along the river. WaterFire runs every couple of weekends over the summer, depending on the tides and funding, and is something you shouldn’t miss.

I was looking at their site a couple of weeks ago, and noticed that they were running a Clear Currents event this weekend, which involves illuminated koi fish mounted over canoes and kayaks paddled throughout the installation. I first saw this a couple of years ago, and envied them then. When I saw the announcement now, I was interested, but balked at the price — $50. Then I remembered the times I’ve thrown a $20 bill into the donation bucket at past Waterfires, and signed up.

It was totally worth it. Continue reading →

Hard to Believe,
and Not Hard to Believe

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It’s hard to believe its been 35 years since the day my Dad died. I remember the summer of 1980 all too well. I remember going to see him at Carney, before his operation, when it was hoped that they would be able to remove the section of his esophagus with the tumor, and I remember coming home from finals to find out that it was inoperable. I didn’t realize then how bad the news was; I foolishly believed the optimistic stories of how effective chemotherapy could be, and wondered why he was getting radiation treatment instead. I didn’t learn until later how intractable esophageal cancer is.

I remember watching him waste away over that summer, in constant pain and fatigue. I remember sitting with my sister in the living room, and hearing him retching in the next room. Should we go try to help? Not much we could do. Would it embarrass him? Probably. We wound up doing nothing.

I remember my uncles and cousin coming to the house to insulate and finish it, and install a wood stove, to make things easier for my mother.

I remember having to explain to my college advisor, after a meeting about not missing any part of student teaching, that my father was very ill, and it was very likely that there would be a problem.

I remember taking the Riverside Line out to the host school the first day of school, and looking up at the distinctive parking garage of the Deaconess Hospital, and thinking that’s where Dad was. And I remember about an hour later, the principal of the school, who surely did not want this job, coming to tell me that my Dad was gone.

I remember the end of that week, after the funeral, walking through the empty house, and feeling how strange it was that he was gone and not coming back, and that this was the new normal.

And yet, it’s not hard at all to believe. Thirty-five years, after all, is a long time, and there’s been a lot of water under the bridge.

His children, who ranged from 21 down to almost 14, are now all grown, and three of them are married. I think he would have liked his sons and daughter in law.

There are now five grandchildren that he never knew, and never got to know him. He’s just a name and a fact and a set of pictures to them, the same way I never knew his father, which is a shame. Dad was great with kids. He would have played with them, and taught them how to do stuff and teased them and explained things to them. He loved having kids around. I remember, still, watching him paint when I was little, and the gentle tone he had as he explained how he created the shading on the sails he was painting.

I think he would have loved to have tagged along on the trip my brothers and my brother’s sons took out to Colorado.

Dad was a great photographer, and in his last couple of years, he was starting to let me use his cameras, and share his interest in photography. I’m not sure he would have gotten into digital photography, but he would have loved SLRs, and being able to compose through the viewfinder and switch lenses and meter automatically. I really wish we could have gone shooting together.

Dad loved the outdoors in general, and the Blue Hills in particular. I remember, about twenty years ago, renting a mountain bike, and riding through the network of paths there, and thinking he would have loved it. I think he would have enjoyed the company of his son-in-law Paul walking through the woods, and perhaps he would have even developed an interest in birding. And often, when I’m kayaking, I think, “Dad would have loved this.”

It’s hard to believe I’m now older than my Dad ever was.

It’s hard to believe my mother has been a widow longer than she’d been a wife.

Dad I am so grateful that we kids, out of ignorance, set up a twentieth anniversary party for them, because we thought that was the big number, rather than waiting for a twenty-fifth than never came.

It’s hard to believe that had he lived, he’d be 88 this year.

It’s hard to believe his brother has grown children who never knew him.

It’s hard to believe his son has a grown son who never knew him.

But it’s not hard to believe that we still miss him.

Paddling to Pomham

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When I was working in Providence, I often rode the East Bay Bike Path after work. It was close by, relatively flat (except for one killer hill) and scenic. One of my favorite pieces of scenery is the the Pomham Rocks Lighthouse, which sits on an outcropping of rock quite visible from the path. I’ve been wanting to see it up close for a long time, and now that I have my own kayak, I can. Saturday, I finally made the trip.

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Hyphenation

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I’ve been re-reading Waiter Rant the last couple of days, and noticed something cool in one of his posts — some of the words at ends of lines were hyphenated. Justified text can cause large amounts of space between words; one way of reducing this is to break long words that fall at a line boundary between syllables so they fit better. So I fired up the Web Inspector, and sure enough, there was a -webkit-hyphens property on <p> tags that I hadn’t known about.

In print, hyphenation is not uncommon. On the web, it’s quite rare, because you never know exactly how a user agent will render text, or whether the user has resized the window, and up until recently, there was no way to automatically insert the hyphens where they belong.

So, I thought, “This looks cool, let me try it on my site,” looked up the syntax, added it to my stylesheet, took a look at one of my posts, and immediately decided it was a distraction.

It did even up the right margins somewhat, but I also found my eye sticking at the hyphenated words, and pausing there, in a way I don’t remember doing in print. Either the browser was applying hyphenation a lot more than a typesetter would (there were three or four hyphens added to my Thoughts on the Bombing post) or it’s a lot more intrusive on screen than it is on the page. Either way, it was taking me out of the post, and I immediately backed the change out.

For the curious, here are the styles I briefly added:

hyphens:auto; /* CSS3 standard */
-webkit-hyphens:auto; /* Target Webkit */
-webkit-hyphenate-character:"\2010";
-webkit-hyphenate-limit-after:1; /* rules to try to minimize widows and orphans */
-webkit-hyphenate-limit-before:3;
-moz-hyphens:auto; /* target Mozilla */

It was a lesson — cool new toys should always be tried, but they also should always be evaluated for suitability.

The Olympics

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I’m very relieved to see that Boston’s Olympic bid is over. Personally, I’m not a sports fan, and have never cared about them, but I’ve also felt that it would be like the 2004 Democratic Convention – great for the money folks, but a huge inconvenience for anyone who actually has to live or work in or around the city. Lots of construction, lots of restrictive security, lots of disruption, lots of money spent on infrastructure with a very short active life.

Given the huge outlays needed to host modern day Olympic Games, I’ve long thought the idea of rotating cities needs to be re-examined. The Olympics need a permanent home. One where they can set up shop with all the facilities the Games need, in exactly the form they need them in. The expense of the infrastructure could be amortized over several sets of Games, and could be gradually grown and improved. Facilities could be custom built for the events they’re designed for, without worrying about winding up with an expensive white elephant that serves no purpose.

The permanent Olympic site would obviously be a draw during the Games, but I also think they would draw tourists during the off years, and facilities could host other events as well.

So where to put the permanent Olympic Games? To my mind, the obvious choice is Greece, their ancestral home, assuming the cost of building it was borne by the International Olympic Committee, and not the Greek government. It would have the added benefit of increasing Greek tourism, which would, hopefully, help the Greek economy dig out of the hole it’s in.

Beta Testing

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I was reading a couple of articles this morning on C|Net about beta testing iOS 9 and OS X El Capitan. Both articles recommended being wary of beta testing because of the chance of running into bugs. There’s more to it than that though.

I used to beta test software, but stopped doing it quite a while back, mainly because I felt it was too much work for too little reward. I beta tested a couple of games and paint programs for the Apple IIGS, and AOL 3.0 and 4.0 for the Mac. It was nice getting early access to software, but to my mind, if you’re going to be a beta tester, you owe it to the developer to really put the software through its paces, note where something is going wrong, and report what you found. This can take quite a bit of time.

A good example was a problem that turned up with AOL 3, which was a major rewrite designed to bring the Mac software to parity with the Windows software. There was some sort of crashing bug, which I mentioned in passing on the beta message board. The project manager (rightly) took me to task for both being non-descriptive, and not posting a formal bug report. I ended up spending the entire afternoon figuring out what steps I was crashing on, then writing up a description of those steps, and posting it in both the feedback form and the message board. The project manager was nice enough to reply that the report was exactly the kind of detail they were looking for, and that they had found the cause of the bug.

This is all well and good, but eventually I tired of putting in that kind of work testing, and it’s not fair to the developer to beta test if you’re not willing to let them know what you found wrong. I’m perfectly content to wait until the software actually comes out, especially in the case of an operating system.