connatic

I am attending Jesse Vincent's talk on SD, a distributed bug tracker. In his talk, he just made a joke about git's manual pages.

This conference shows that git has totally won the distributed revision control war. But everybody complains that it is hard to learn and understand, and everybody who knows it claims to have a love/hate relationship with it.

I am in the middle of switching to git for some work projects, and so far I am liking it but agree it's hard to learn well enough to get started. I guess the hate part will come later, with experience.

I'm in Pittsburgh today and through Wednesday, for the YAPC::NA 10 (the NA Perl conference). Larry Wall is about to start his keynote.

I arrived yesterday after an uneventful flight (those are the best ones). The bus from Pittsburgh airport to CMU worked well - better than the Newark to NYC bus. I had dinner with Chip Salzenberg (fun and educational).

The conference is just getting started - it'll be fun.

Yesterday morning, the museum of Natural History had a member's breakfast in the museum. The tables with coffee, muffins and bagels were set up in the hall of Saurischian dinosaurs. That was unexpectedly good fun. There were no tours (that's generally an evening thing), but I did get to see the Extreme Mammals exhibit.

The AMNH is one of my favorite museums and things like this make me happy to be a New Yorker.

Heidi and I are off on a two-week trip to Norway. One of her CSI friends, a Norwegian detective, is getting married.

We're flying into Oslo, spend three days there, then take the "Norway in a Nutshell" train across the country to Bergen. We'll have a few days there, including the wedding. After that, back to Oslo and New York.

Our last trip was in August. Given both our job stresses, it's about time we took a break from the city. And what better than to visit friends and a beautiful country?

The weird thing is, all of our trip this year will be weddings. Norway, San Francisco, DC, and Taiwan. We're in our late thirties - wedding trips are supposed to be over by now :-)

Heidi and I don't really celebrate Valentine's day. The main reason is that our first date was on February 11th, and celebrating that instead means restaurant reservations will be easy to get.

This year, we went to Cafe Perbacco, a great Italian place, close to where I used to live in the East Village.

Thursday was beer night with my friends, but on Friday night I brought home flowers and we drank some fine champagne to celebrate the log weekend (Heidi) and 1234567890 ctime (me).

Yesterday, on actual Valentine's day, I brought Heidi a "some assembly required" rib cage and heart card.
(Living with a physical anthropologist and overall CSI girl means that skull and/or bone themed gifts are always appropriate.)

For our Sunday brunch, Heidi is making me poffertjes, a traditional Dutch batter treat. We haven't had those since our trip to Holland, but my mom gave us the traditional cast-iron pan as a wedding gift almost five years ago and I guess it's time to use it.

So now we just need a nice relaxing thing to do tomorrow and we'll have the perfect quiet weekend. WHo said romance was dead?

Ian McDonald, Brasyl. I put this down multiple times and it took me several months to finish. I'm not sure why this didn't appeal to me - it's clearly of on Ian McDonald's better books. Some of the main characters just didn't work for me. The central idea of the world being a simulation in a quantum computer at the end of the universe also doesn't appear fresh anymore.

KJ Parker, The Company. I really wanted to like this, as much of Parker's previous work is brilliant and I like the dark humor and dark fantasy backgrounds of his (her?) books. Two things held this book back: Parker didn't pull off having many distinct characters (they sort of blurred into each other) and the backflashes were more interesting than the main story line. Still, having pretty much all the main characters have a monstrous past is a good idea.

James Blaylock, The Knights of the Cornerstone. Loved it - quirky characters, a town full of Knight Templars, a hidden silver mine subsidizing the town for half a century without anyone appearing rich - just great. Blaylock is not as well known as he should be and I've been enjoying his books for over 15 years.

David Riggs, The World of Christopher Marlowe. A good biography and history, if maybe a bit dry.

Various, Seeds of Change. A nice collection of short stories. Ken MacLeod and Tobias Buckell are great as always, and I really liked Ted Kosmatka's story. There were two weak stories out of nine - not bad at all.

David Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel and Language. A good update on the state of research into Proto Indo European. I read the books by Mallory and Bellwood a few years ago, and clearly the subject is still actively being researched and debated. I'll keep reading the books as they come along.

We have not been out biking for about two months, as it was just too cold. Well, today wasn't - last week we had snow, we're expected to have snow on Wednesday, but today it was in the mid-60s. This is about 25 degrees above average - good there's no such thing as global warming, eh?

In any case, we want out biking to Central Park in our bike shorts and a tees, and did a nice 6-mile loop. Given I hadn't expected to take out my bike until early spring, this was a nice surprise and a pleasant end of a long weekend. I expect that the next few months will only see me biking inside at the gym.

Just finished Anathem. In my opinion, this is far from Neal Stephenson's best work - there's about 500 pages of story and 400 extraneous pages of talking. It could have done with some forceful editing.

Heidi and I were out walking yesterday when we saw a cement truck. I said that I'd always been fascinated by cement trucks as a kid, to which she replied that an obsession with trucks and heavy machinery must be coded on the Y chromosome :-)

This leads to an interesting question, though: in a world before museums with dinosaurs, before trucks, locomotives, airplanes other big machines - what were boys obsessed with? Heidi thinks they were probably too busy working to have time for that, but I am not sure - before the Industrial Revolution (and especially before the Reformation) the pace of life was not so crazy that kids didn't have time to play or days off.

I am afraid there will be very few sources that describe kids' fascinations in the Middle Ages and before (there's little enough on toys and play), but it's an interesting question.

As I was trying to enter a crowded subway car this morning, two women close to the entrance tried to push me out of the car using their shopping bags. I pushed my way in anyway, and they acted most insulted. The car was crowded, but not as badly as on many other days; in fact, our section could probably hold 3 or 4 more people and still not be as busy as the next section one set of doors down. One of women made a point of slamming me with her bag as she left the train at the next station.

I am sure my behavior was quite impolite; but I am also wondering what led them to expect they had the right to an uncrowded subway car during rush hour.