Day: May 6, 2008

Sometimes the Inside is, Outside…

Sometimes the Inside is, Outside…: What am I capable of… how far can, or will, I go to do Right?  Others times, I feel [right or wrong] like I’m doing this to atone for some stupid, crappy thing I’ve done to someone long forgotten about.  Like an old teacher would tell me when I was teen, “Sometimes you gotta bleed for others… “.

So I go across the street to Skol, buy a bottle of water and a pint of gin, and go back over to the guy in the wheelchair.  In the bag, with the gin & water, I put in some kleenex from my saddle bag, a smallish bag of sunflower seeds and a five dollar bill.  I tuck the whole deal into the guys jacket, after lifting his drooping head off his chest.  His skin feels like dried out leather.  He keeps snoring.

I roll on.

After some more miles, I head back home… and decide to go by that corner again.

He’s still there, still sleeping…

…and the bag has fallen out from underneath his jacket.

The pint of gin is broken on the sidewalk, while the bottle of water must have rolled out and onto the street and has been run over by a car or bus. 

I hope the tissues, seeds and money are still in the bag… [Remarkable. Murphy can be really mean.]
Source: Large Fella on a Bike

Sneaking Ruby Through Google App Engine (and Other Strictly Python Places)

Sneaking Ruby Through Google App Engine (and Other Strictly Python Places): All of these bogus scaling wars and indented code battles are a huge waste of time. Do we still have to be better than each other in 2008? No way, Rufus said, “Be excellent to each other.” [Wow, that would be awesome and awful at the same time. Awesome because less is more, awful because it could easily cause things to stagnate for everyone. But still.]
Source: hackety org

Hey Rails, nice Rack!

Hey Rails, nice Rack!: So i’ve spent this week hacking on Rails, specifically going spelunking in ActionPack and porting Merb’s rack machinery to rails. I figure that merb is a very nice experimentation ground and decided it was time to give some love back to the framework that inspired merb. [Nice stuff. I worked with Engine Yard not too long ago. Recommended.]
Source: Brainspl.at

The Gospel of Consumption

The Gospel of Consumption | Orion magazine: This was the stuff of a human ecology in which thousands of small, almost invisible, interactions between family members, friends, and neighbors create an intricate structure that supports social life in much the same way as topsoil supports our biological existence. When we allow either one to become impoverished, whether out of greed or intemperance, we put our long-term survival at risk.

[…continues]

Rather than realizing the enriched social life that Kellogg’s vision offered us, we have impoverished our human communities with a form of materialism that leaves us in relative isolation from family, friends, and neighbors. We simply don’t have time for them. Unlike our great-grandparents who passed the time, we spend it. An outside observer might conclude that we are in the grip of some strange curse, like a modern-day King Midas whose touch turns everything into a product built around a microchip.

Of course not everybody has been able to take part in the buying spree on equal terms. Millions of Americans work long hours at poverty wages while many others can find no work at all. However, as advertisers well know, poverty does not render one immune to the gospel of consumption.
[A not to be missed article.]