Victoria, Werner, roses, and seaplanes

My friend and former colleague Kate has been visiting for the last few days, and on Sunday we decided to visit Victoria, BC, to see an old mutual friend. It takes a couple of hours on a fast catamaran ferry, and we got there at 11:15. Werner Bahlke met us at the terminal, and we headed into town for lunch.

Kate and Werner

The three of us used to work together at Sun Microsystems in Chelmsford and Burlington, MA. Werner moved to Victoria about four years ago, and after some interesting “virtual company” experiences he’s really settled in there. (His office is in a wonderful location overlooking the outer harbour.)

After lunch, Kate and I explored Victoria, cameras in hand. You can see a selection of the pictures we took here. I’ve merged the two sets of pictures, then sorted them by the time they were taken, so occasionally you’ll see different shots of the same object. Two sequences of pictures are worth noting. First, we visited the rose garden next to the Empress Hotel, and I tried a series of macro shots. Then we took a path along the west side of the inner harbour, from where we could see the constant arrival and departure of ferries, kayaks, harbour taxis, sailing boats – and seaplanes! This stretch of water may look like a harbour, but it’s really an airport – and a very busy one.
rose seaplane

Our northbound ferry had been almost empty, but when we lined up to board the return, we could see that the boat was going to be pretty much full. Presumably a number of people had been in Victoria for the weekend, perhaps as an “add-on” to an Alaska cruise package. In the depressingly prefab terminal building we saw new security equipment – airport-style metal detectors and X-ray machines – installed but not yet operational. There were also signs everywhere about the plans to require US citizens to carry a passport when visiting Canada; there are fears that this will hit the tourist business very hard. For now, Kate was able to simply show her driver’s license; I had my passport and green card.

Despite the crowds, we found good seats and had a smooth journey back. At one point everybody crowded out on the stern deck to see the bioluminescent diatoms that turned our wake into a shimmering silver trail. Very cool. What a great day.

How to be a Man of Principle(TM)

Exhibit A: Senator Arlen Specter.
Step 1: First excoriate proposed legislation in no uncertain terms:

Specter said hearings before his Judiciary Committee showed that the military Combatant Status Review Tribunals do not have an adequate way of determining whether suspects are enemy combatants.
He charged that by striking habeas corpus rights for terrorism suspects, the bill “would take our civilized society back some 900 years” to a time before the Magna Carta was adopted. He said this was “unthinkable.”
“What this entire controversy boils down to is whether Congress is going to legislate to deny a constitutional right which is explicit in the document of the Constitution itself and which has been applied to aliens by the Supreme Court of the United States,” Specter said. If the bill passes without habeas corpus protections, it will be struck down
by the high court…

Step 2. Vote for it anyway.
(President Bush as King John? Not implausible…..)

At last! TECO!!

OK, all you EMACS devotees. Who among you know what EMACS stands for? “Editor MACroS”, that’s right. But what language were these macros originally written in? Thanks to Good Math, Bad Math, you can now read all about the World’s Greatest Pathological Language: TECO. I first encountered it in 1970, when the Essex University PDP-10 was delivered.
This extract will pique your curiosity, or send you running for cover. I’ve modified it a bit from the original piece, because when I tried to quote it, some of the special characters were interpreted as bits of HTML. Besides, it looked all wrong to me; anyone who actually used TECO will remember that the ESCAPE key was echoed as $:

[…] The print command to print a string is control-A; so the TECO hello world program is: “^AHello world^A$$“. Is that pathological enough?
Commands to remove text include things like “D” to delete the character after the pointer; “FD”, which takes a string argument, finds the next instance of that argument, and deletes it; “K” to delete the rest of the line after the pointer, and “HK” to delete the entire buffer.
To insert text, you can either use “I” with a string argument, or TAB with a string argument. If you use the tab version, then the tab character is part of the text to insert.

I still remember the illicit thrill that ran through the Computing Centre when we learned that someone had created a TECO macro to invert a matrix. In retrospect, I blame the freely-available hallucinogens and too much Hunt the wumpus….

Bukovsky and Sullivan on torture

Andrew Sullivan quotes Vladimir Bukovsky on the consequences of the toleration of torture by Russian leaders:

… in its heyday, Joseph Stalin’s notorious NKVD (the Soviet secret police) became nothing more than an army of butchers terrorizing the whole country but incapable of solving the simplest of crimes. And once the NKVD went into high gear, not even Stalin could stop it at will. He finally succeeded only by turning the fury of the NKVD against itself; he ordered his chief NKVD henchman, Nikolai Yezhov (Beria’s predecessor), to be arrested together with his closest aides.
So, why would democratically elected leaders of the United States ever want to legalize what a succession of Russian monarchs strove to abolish? Why run the risk of unleashing a fury that even Stalin had problems controlling?

Andy then observes:

It is one of history’s great tragedies that American conservatism, born in part in resistance to Soviet torture, should end by endorsing it in America, by Americans. And not just endorsing it, but brandishing the use of it as a tool to gain re-election and maintain power.

But this what happens when an amoral, historically ignorant clique takes power and seeks to exploit fear for partisan political ends. With the capitulation of McCain and his Republican colleagues, Edmund Burke’s words ring truer than ever….

20 words

I was updating my profile at the UK social networking site, Friends Reunited, and decided to pay attention to a question that I’d hitherto ignored: “What are your 20 favourite words”. This is what I came up with:
love, peace, new, unexpected, honest, whimsy, intense, tranquil, touch, trust, humanism, experiment, imagination, learn, reflection, evolution, revolution, reason, create, teach

Can I take my PowerBook on an airliner now?

The replacement batteries for my PowerBook finally showed up last Friday, which is a bit quicker than Apple promised. The instructions state that you should drain the old batteries before changing them, by (for example) playing a DVD. In my experience DVDs don’t really stretch the machine: I found a nice Java applet at the National Weather Service which did an excellent job of pegging the CPU at 100%. So I changed the batteries on Sunday, and mailed off the old ones today. (Note that you may have to take them to a Post Office in person; my company’s mailroom policy forbids the mailing of personal packages.)

I have found my music

Over the years, I’ve tried to find the best record store wherever I happen to be living. The place to go to browse, discover long-lost musical friends, or find the obscure CD reissue of an equally obscure LP. Yes, I know that I have access to vast online resources, but there’s still a place for physical browsing. When I lived in the Boston area, the best spots were on Newbury Street and places like Mystery Train on Mass Ave in Cambridge.
Today I found what must be the best place in the Pacific Northwest: Silver Platters. I was driving up I-5 to the Northgate Mall, and as I slowed to leave the freeway I noticed a small strip mall close to the highway. I went to check it out, and found Silver Platters.
They have a good stock of all kinds of music and DVDs, but the heart of the store is the section labelled, innocuously, “Popular”.
I started with the A’s. By the time I reached the Zs I had an armful of CDs, and I realized that I’d been there more than two hours! I reluctantly decided to put most of the CDs back; after all, I know that I’ll be back there again. And again. And again….
Life is good.
Just for the record, the CDs I bought were the legendary “Oar” by Skip Spence, “The Best of Manfred Mann’s Earth Band” (so nice to hear “Davy’s On The Road Again” for the first time in about ten years), and “Smiling Phases”, a double-CD “best-of” compilation by Traffic.