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Thursday, April 28th, 2005
Sylvia has played enough Monopoly at this point to be able to make change (sometimes) and add currency (more frequently; she is particularly good at making $90 out of $50 and two $20's, and $70 out of $50 and $20, and has the hundreds down pat). This is fun to watch and help out with. Also: this evening we played backgammon for the first time in a few months, and she knew how to do it -- when we played before, I would need to tell her which pieces to move and to where; tonight I was still helping her quite a bit with which pieces to move, but she understood straightaway how to do the move. Does not sound real impressive written down but again: a lot of fun to experience, and I got an inkling of what it will be like to play with her when she understands the game. She is also very interested in using the doubling cube, I wonder if she will be attracted by gambling. I ended up trying to play a back game and got gammoned.
posted evening of April 28th, 2005: Respond
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Wednesday, April 27th, 2005
Talking with Nathaniel on the phone tonight I mentioned that I am in the middle of Ulysses and he replied that he is too, for a few decades now.
posted evening of April 27th, 2005: Respond
➳ More posts about Ulysses
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"Hades" -- I read half of this episode on the train last night and was having a pretty hard time following it. But this morning restarted the chapter and lo and behold, the story flowed quite smoothly.
posted morning of April 27th, 2005: Respond
➳ More posts about James Joyce
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Monday, April 25th, 2005
As I read Ulysses, I am finding that I enjoy the narrative chapters (so far, "Telemachus", "Nestor" (or about half of it), "Calypso", and parts of "The Lotus-Eaters"), the other ones (so far, only "Proteus" has been a real offender) put me to sleep. This morning while reading "Proteus", I was just finding it impossible to pay attention to the book and was thinking about putting the book down if it didn't draw me in soon. But then this afternoon I started in on "Calypso" and I was back on track. This chapter is actually the one that made the most of an impression on me the previous times I tried to read Ulysses -- when I think of the book, the first thing that comes to mind is Leopold Bloom eating kidney. This afternoon my response to the chapter was to get very defensive about being submissive in relationships; as I realized what I was doing, I was able to let go of that somewhat.
posted evening of April 25th, 2005: Respond
➳ More posts about Readings
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Searched around for a while on Friday trying to figure out how to invoke the UNIX sort command with multiple keys. I eventually found what I was looking for but now can't figure out where I read it. I will make a note of it here as it seems to be pretty difficult to find -- it took me about an hour of Googling to come up with it. Each key you want should be specified as a separate parameter to sort, in the desired sort order. Each can have its own sort order specified. So sort -k 1,1 -k 2,2n sorts on the first column, then the second; the second column is sorted in numeric order. (This is incidentally the behavior I was looking for.) sort -k 2,2r -k 3,3 sorts the second column in reverse order, then the third column. Etc. It looks like there are other syntactic ways of specifying the same behavior; but this one definitely works. (At least with sort in Cygwin and I'm assuming in other non-Cygwin Linuxes.) Note that I'm using "column" in this post to mean "whitespace-delimited field" -- i.e. if you (say) imported the text file to be sorted into Excel, each field would take up one column. There are also parameters to sort that let you specify the field delimiter. Also the -k parameter allows you to specify that the key is made up of multiple fields or of substrings of a field or fields. I did not use any of this and would recommend you examine the man page before you use it.
posted afternoon of April 25th, 2005: Respond
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Saturday, April 23rd, 2005
I spent today putting the chair rail molding into Sylvia's room and spackling various bits in the room to prep it for painting, which Ellen will start tomorrow. (this afternoon when I took Sylvia to the library, Ellen finished touching up the paint job on the cabinets.) The molding is a bit freehand; I wanted to match the chair rail which is in the entry way to the room (the room is part of an addition to the house built in the mid-20th century; the entry way is part of the original house), which is a pretty simple curve. I went to Home Despot and found that all the moldings they sell as "chair rails" are big things with lots of compound curves and would look ugly in this application. However they sell a baseboard cap which is pretty close to what I wanted, except with a lip at the bottom and an extra curve at the top. So I bought that, and just shaved off the top and bottom with a block plane. Not too bad for ~24' of molding, but it would quickly become onerous with much more. (Also while I was at the HD I got hardware for Sylvia's playhouse, which I am certainly going to start on this week.)
posted evening of April 23rd, 2005: Respond
➳ More posts about Sylvia's room
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Friday, April 22nd, 2005
Well having polished off (with mixed but generally positive results) Call It Sleep and Foucault's Pendulum, I turned my attention this morning to the king of the intimidating books, Ulysses -- a book that I tried to read when I was about 16 (and gave up after one or two chapters) and again when I was about 20 (and gave up about a third of the way in). The binding of the edition I owned back then crumbled, and when I turned 28 and was given a Barnes & Noble gift certificate by my parents-in-law, I bought another copy; which has been on my shelf ever since. I was reading Chapter I on the train this morning and enjoying the back-and-forth conversation (actually mostly "forth", I think Buck Mulligan is much more talkative than the other two -- also he seems like a bit of a flamer, is my first impression anyways). A Frolic of His Own made me dig this way of representing conversation -- with dashes and no quotation marks -- and it seems pretty natural now.
posted morning of April 22nd, 2005: Respond
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Wednesday, April 20th, 2005
The revelation (or summing up) at the end of Foucault's Pendulum really was excellent and made the book worth while. (Though I do wish he had spent a little less effort on putting together Belbo's journals -- there could have been half as much of that or less without negatively impacting the effect.) I felt at the end much more in sympathy with Casaubon than I had been before and it makes good sense that I should do -- he is after all the narrator, and plus his relationship to Lia and his son made me flash on my own relationship with Ellen and Sylvia.
posted evening of April 20th, 2005: Respond
➳ More posts about Foucault's Pendulum
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Tuesday, April 19th, 2005
Foucault's Pendulum was bogging down for me a bit in the last third or so but has picked up again near the end, as the narrative came into the present. I had found Belbo's character really sympathetic in the first half of the book but sort of lost my connection to him while wading through all the copies of his journals. Not sure what to make of this -- it makes me feel a little like Saure trying to listen to Beethoven...
posted evening of April 19th, 2005: Respond
➳ More posts about Umberto Eco
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Monday, April 18th, 2005
Well things are going pretty well frankly. I finished Sylvia's cabinets; the flowers are coming up; I'm eating relatively well and losing some weight; and today I got an e-mail from the Columbia School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, to the effect that my application to their Computer Science master's degree program has been accepted.
posted evening of April 18th, 2005: Respond
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