The Scaffolding of Life

Yesterday I went into town to get some groceries. The nearest town to me is about 10 miles away and has a population of around 9,000. It amazes me how chaotic and crowded and filled with automobiles such a "small" town can be. Everything moving at a faster pace than I was. Zipping here, darting there.

As often happens to me in grocery stores, I entered a strange trance-like state, tripping from all the colors and words and shapes and patterns. I am probably one of the slowest shoppers to be found. I go up and down every aisle and often stop to carefully decide among several different choices for a particular product. Sometimes my mind is temporarily hijacked by the carefully ordered shelves filled with similar yet different boxes which contain similar yet different things within.

And then there are the people. I guess I am a people too, but WHOA, people are bizarre creatures! The range of body types and sizes, the clothing, the hair styles, the talking, the interactions. All busy with something, in constant states of motion.

Somewhere on the way out of town as I was headed back to my spot in the woods, I experienced a minuscule reality shift. Just a few microns, really not much. But suddenly I was a stranger here, felt like I was on another planet, didn't belong, didn't understand anything. The layout of the world as perceived by our senses is such a fragile paradigm, a mapping of the chaos into a seemingly stable structure we call reality. Light waves (or is that particles) form images on our retinas which are interpreted into familiar patterns and each pattern has a known word label to identify it (house, car, grass, sky, cow). Strip it all away and what remains will blow your mind.

Life is amazing. And strange. Strangely amazing and amazingly strange.

And here I am (am I here?). Alive. Experiencing. The moment. My molecules dancing a tango with the energies of the universe.

P.S. - As I am writing this, my iPod is playing a random selection of music from my large collection. Right now I am getting a full range of Star Trek Sound Effects from a CD I bought years ago. Phasers, photons, bleeps, bloops, energizers, etc. Made me smile. Okay, that is over ...now onto some Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. An ever-shifting soundscape.

Tiny Wisdom

I follow @tinybuddha on Twitter. A daily micro-dose of wisdom.

Today's nugget: "When I'm anxious it's because I'm living in the future. When I'm depressed it's because I'm living in the past." ~Unknown

Right on, Tiny Buddha :-)

Jumbled Neurons

I've been working on a real iPhone project for about a week now. Lots of fun to be coding again! My first app is, I think, a good choice. It is a twist on a standard productivity app.  Nothing ground-breaking or genre-bending. But, it contains many aspects to hone my skills ... multiple navigation controllers, lots of different views to manage, some custom tableview code and my first foray into learning core data. When I dove into it, I had a few unsettling days where I felt like my brain had gone through a blender. I've spent so much time in the last couple of months learning and it seemed like I had forgotten all of it or at least didn't know how to apply what I had learned. Fortunately it quickly started to gel and it is beginning to come together and take form. One step at a time. Today I got basic core data working, which felt great as I was somewhat apprehensive about it. Some crazy terminology and complexity lurks in that stuff!

As I began my first project I had to get a VCS (version control system) setup. Back in the day, I used Visual SourceSafe, a third-party product eventually purchased by Microsoft. It was cumbersome to say the least. The default approach these days is a product called Subversion, an open source solution that is popular and integrated into many developer tools, including Xcode. However, it is a centralized VCS, using delta storage technology (storing only the changes and not a snapshot), which seems prone to problems. And, because it is centralized, all my projects would have been kept in one place. This is too monolithic and messy to manage and goes against my intuitive sense of how to do things. Also, the traditional approach with a VCS is to check-out just the files you are working on. I don't know if Subversion enforces this methodology, but I have never liked it. I tend to work on all parts of a project at once and the newer distributed VCS's have the concept of a working directory that holds an unlocked copy of everything in the project. It is a long digression, but the real power of distributed systems is realized in large projects with lots of people working on things from different locations (i.e., the very definition of open source). However, the approach taken by distributed VCS's is also great for a solo developer.

I did a bunch of research and decided Bazaar, an open source distributed VCS was the way to go. There was another contender, Git, but it seemed more complex and less user-friendly. However, after I installed Bazaar, I found that none of the front-ends worked on a Mac without lots of fiddling around. And some other aspects left me feeling uneasy. I did a bunch more research and ended up choosing Git, originally designed by Linus Torvalds of Linux fame. What a great product! It is well supported and has some pretty good GUI frontends on the Mac, though I find myself using the command line in Terminal most often. One of the things that initially steered me away from it was the strange jargon it uses, such as plumbing, porcelain, detached heads, reflog and so on. I spent some time digging into documentation and playing with it and things quickly fell into place. I'm liking it!

When I first started playing with Git, I couldn't figure out how to do everything I needed (in particular, I wanted to use VCS on a generic library of utilities outside the direct scope of an individual project). I read that Git had an IRC channel, so I downloaded Colloquy (a free Mac IRC client) and was amazed at how quickly I got detailed answers to my questions (git-submodule was the answer). There are also chat rooms for Objective-C, iPhone Development, Mac Development, etc. IRC is cool! A really old technology, but still amazingly useful. Kind of feels like CB radio :-)

I'm Nobody! Who Are You?

Awesome! I'm not much into poetry. Yeah, it is cool and all, but I don't often go there. I found this little gem earlier today, penned by Emily Dickinson. Perfect!

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us - don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

Video Entertainment

I've always been a bit conflicted about TV. So many shows are stupid and pointless. The "news" is mind-rotting garbage. And ads are distracting and time-wasting. So why watch at all?

The past few years has seen the birth of a number of awesome and addictive shows. Complex, mind-bending journeys. With story lines often so intricate and detailed that you need to watch every episode in chronological order. Miss one and you're lost.  With characters that are flushed out and likable.  They sort of become family in a way.

Fortunately, this is the age of Tivo and Hulu and BitTorrent and iTunes and Netflix. TV when and how you want it. That is a big part of what makes it work for me. I can't imagine being chained to a fixed time schedule. Or even watching on an actual TV ... I do all my viewing on a laptop.

I just finished watching the season finale of Lost. A cliffhanger of epic proportions. Frack! Now I have to wait months before the next (and last) season begins. A month or two ago I witnessed the end of Battlestar Galactica. What an amazing show (Frack, so say we all). I enjoyed the first season of Dollhouse. Not "epic" but very good and I'm glad it was given a chance at a second season.

And if something doesn't hold your attention, so what, just let go of it and move on. That is what I did with Heroes. I thought the first season was superb, the second season good, but it got stupid in season 3 and I quit.

Perhaps all this started with Twin Peaks. Remember that? One of the first series I really got into where it was vital to see every episode in order to follow the plot. And it was complex enough to make it fun to talk with others about what was going on. But that was back in the days of broadcast TV and I had to tune in on a given night at a given time. We had get-togethers with friends just to watch Twin Peaks.

And then there are the animated shows: The Simpsons, Family Guy, American Dad, etc. Wonderful shows that are fun to watch just before going to bed. They make me laugh and have a refreshingly cynical view of modern life.

Thank you writers and producers and actors and everyone else involved in keeping me entertained.