The Adventures of Bloggard

Been Around the Block. Got Some Stories. These are Them.

A Tale of Toblerone …

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Barbarella Reflects Upon LifeA Movie Theatre near Picadilly, London, 1968: Funny how memories come back to you. Pointless little things, a turn of phrase, the way some trees looked against the clouds on a dim horizon.

One of the moments in my life that I remember, from time to time, from 40 years ago, and still laugh each time, was a snippet of conversation overheard, when I first sat down in a theatre in London, to watch the film Barbarella.

The film had not yet begun, and I gradually became aware of the two guys in the row right behind me. Being American, it seemed to me that their cockney accents were thick as bad pudding.

Said one: “I’m going to the confession, mate.”

Said the other: “Get us a Toblerone, eh?”

“Save me seat?”

“Guard it wi’ me life, I will!”

Yearning Has Faded

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Such feelings come and go,
as tides from an unseen sea
touch, spread, then withdraw.

San Francisco, Spring 1982: In the house on Tenth Avenue that I shared with Quinlan the photographer, I had a dream one night, that I saw Carolyn my high-school sweetheart. I’d like to say she came to me and that she cared for me, but she just passed nearby with a glance. And I was filled to overflowing with yearning. I awoke, and the dream left me with the yearning, as if it had been yesterday.

Last night, I had another dream …

As I crossed the street in front of the English building, I saw the Beatles in a large open Cadillac convertible parked across the street, along with three other musicians in tuxedos whom they had added for the concert. The new musicians had orchestra instruments, but they were singing along with the Beatles, a complex, multipart harmony. It was quite lovely

By the time I’d crossed the street, the car had become a bus. Good thing, as there were so many of them in the vehicle. The bus door was open, so I climbed in and sat in the first seat. Paul waved. And then I realized that the driver, in uniform, was actually Arnold Schwartznegger, the governor of California. Apparently he was showing the Beatles around. Politics.

“Hello, Arnold,” I said, as I struggled to take off my hat, but the hat’s chin cord was caught and I had to fight with it, and then realized Arnold was scowling at me. Maybe I’d been too familiar. “I mean, hello, Mr. Schwartzenegger,” I said, “Is that better?”

His expression told me it was better. Apparently, despite his behavior when he was Conan the Barbarian, Arnold is a guy who really appreciates proper manners.

And then as I mused on this, I found myself sitting at a table in a dim cafe, almost deserted. A cup of coffee sat cooling, I had the funny papers from the newspaper, and the late-afternoon light slanted in through the window across the room. I glanced up to see that at the next table, the Beatles, and everybody who had been sitting there, were all gone.

The light from the window had faded, it was hard to see clearly, and the comics were not very interesting.

Remembering John Lennon

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Entrance to John Lennon's home at The Dakota

New York, December 9, 1980: In the evening, John Lennon returned from the recording session at The Record Plant in New York. The limosine let him out in front of The Dakota, the gothic stone building pictured in the movie “Rosemary’s Baby”, and as he and Yoko Ono approached the building, Mark David Chapman called out “Mr. Lennon?” and shot Lennon five times with a .38 revolver.

Lennon was hit in the torso and the back. He called out, “I’m shot,” took a few steps, and collapsed. When policed arrived, they found Chapman standing nearby, the gun on the ground. A building security guard asked Chapman, “Do you know what you’ve done?”

Chapman replied, “I just shot John Lennon.”

Police rushed Lennon to the emergency room at the Roosevelt hospital, but he could not be revived.

Something died for many of us that day.

The sound of the Beatles, coming from the radio, startled us, back in the day. Those were college days for me. But perhaps you remember when you first heard their harmony, the enthusiasm, the sound was new and fresh.

A memory floats, quiet, like a blossom in a busy stream, and rushing around a bend, is gone.

Bloggard Travels to Squidoo

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Squidoo.com, May 31, 2008: For those as may be interested, the Bloggard, in his persona as Traktor Topaz, mild-mannered musician at a great metropolitan newspaper, has posted an article at Squidoo.

For some reason, the Squidarians call an article like this a ‘lens.’ So really, the Bloggard has created a lens. So now we know.

The name of the article is Play Guitar How To: Tap Guitar or Pick Guitar?

It has a story of a poor monkey, and some suggestions for fellows as would like to play a normal guitar. (Not everybody needs to play a Megatar. Different smokes for different folks, we say.)

If you enjoy the article, please put a nice commento on the commento formo. Gracias!

Law 23 of Project Design: Successive Refinement

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San Francisco, 1976: I got my first computer! It was a high-class Cromemco, in a kit, and had a lightning fast Z80 processor that ran at (gasp) 3 megahertz, and a full 64K of memory.

I had a buddy who knew computers in and out — he wrote code for our satellites to determine whether a field in russia had wheat or alfalfa — and he put the kit together for me, cause I didn’t know how to solder back then. (He’s rich and retired long since, because he went to work for a new startup called Cisco, and they gave stock options; but that’s another story.)

He also gave me a book about beginning to program in Basic.

It showed a simple technique called ‘successive refinement.’ If you are a programmer then you know this technique but for non-programmers here, it’s really simple. And mongo useful.

Here’s how it works …

You first state what the program is to do, in one sentence:
“Manage a mailing list”

Then you refine that, as precisely as possible, still in ordinary words —
“manage a mailing list
input of an address
finding an address
editing an address
sorting the addresses
printout of the addresses
printing addresses on envelopes
printing addresses on labels

And then in similar manner you break these down. Pretty soon you discover that stating what it’s to do starts to look like code, eg:
“bubblesort( addresslistname, ascending )”

After a while it’s all code, and it will have these virtues —
(a) It’s structure will seem logical to a human
(b) therefore it’s easier to debug and later modify
(c) you tend to avoid can-of-worms code that goes everywhere

Now, and here’s my point, what’s really lovely is that this approach will work fairly well for most any project of any kind.

Successive refinement.

With this, you can become … refined. Cool.

Go Thee Forth and Prosper!

Where does dirt … go?

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Weed, California, Sunday June 8, 2008: About a week ago, Glenn the Magnificent and two of his beer-guzzling crew (Big Bob and Jesse the Bulldog) came and ran the water line into the shop.

They dug around in the yard until they found the water line, and then while I wasn’t looking they somehow tapped into it, then dug a narrow trench across the yard and past the old rock walkway, and then connected it up with a line they’d put into the foundation last year.

But that’s not my point. The point is this …

After they’d finished, I took them to the Pizza Factory for pizza and beer. While I was there, a fellow called me from Jerusalem, but no, it wasn’t Jesus, and that’s another story anyway.

(When I was a child, sometimes when I’d make mischief, a grown-up would ask me, “If Jesus was here, do you think he’d act like that?” To this day, I do not know what Jesus would have done. It seemed, sometimes, that yes, he would have done the very same thing. Of course, these days, when I ponder about this, it raises questions such as what kind of cell phone would Jesus prefer? Would he watch television? If so, would he prefer Survivor? American Idol? The Simpsons? You see? It’s very difficult to figure out what Jesus would do. And why those grown-ups thought a little kid could figure it out … well, it’s just beyond me.)

So there we were, eating pizza and drinking beer, and then they went off to some other project. I went home and looked at the yard. The trench was all filled in. Great. Life goes on.

Now over the week, the dirt in the trench has sunk in some. No problem. But it’s also blown around a fair amount, and so today I had put a dog bowl outside because Daisy looked thirsty, and since I had the hose and water, I thought I’d water down the dusty ground where the trench had been, so that the powdery dust wouldn’t blow around so much.

Well!

Daisy thought that watering was the greatest thing since bones.

She was chasing the flying spout of water. I began leading her on, spraying the water here and there while she chased it, trying to bite it.

I laughed and laughed as she ran and snapped, and she’s getting wetter and wetter and wetter.

Finally, I took pity on her and stopped. She was now muddy from her toes to her belly, her white fur showing off the mud really, really well.

We went back into the shop where I had some little task, and she was tracking mud all over. That’s fine. It’s a shop.

A little later I realized she might get cold so I fetched a towel and dried her off as best I could, but I couldn’t get the black-colored mud off her feet and legs.

Now here comes the puzzle —

Later, when she’d dried off, her feet and fur weren’t dirty.

She was a white dog again. In fact she seemed cleaner than before.

Now what’s puzzling me is this:

Where did the dirt go?

Follow Your Bliss, Know Thyself, Change the World

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On the E1KaD forum, December 13, 2008: I enjoyed the following, which was posted today by Steve in Texas. Maybe you might like it, too —

There has been a lot of talk on [this] forum about focus, building your business, marketing and so on, but I have seen little about being self employed, knowing yourself and getting the most out of yourself and your life.

Heres my brain dump on “being” for you to use or disregard as you choose.

Why are you here?
Lets face it, working for someone else is ultimately easer than working for yourself; no accounting, chasing payments, marketing or product creation. Turn up, put the nut on the bolt, get paid, go home. So why are we working for ourselves?

For me its the need to create, plus I dont play well with morons, sorry managers. I used to write and record songs for a living. A couple thousand later I got it out of my system. Now I create other stuff. I love houses and remodeling (who knew), I bang out web applications, websites and and other apps on a regular basis I cant help myself. As my mother said when I was debating whether to build my first recording studio, “of course you should, its what you do dear”.

What is it that you “do” dear?

Follow Your Bliss
Most people can tell you what they dont like, few can tell you what they do like, or need. What do you need out of your life to make you happy? For me its peace and quiet, nature, security and doing something “interesting”. So far:

* I live in the forest – the loudest noise right at this moment is the wind in the trees and the big ol wind chime outside my office.
* I have multiple streams of income from some unique and not unique sites and products, some cash in the bank and am reasonably secure for now.
* Every day I get to create, improve or rebuild something, something that makes others go “wow, cool”.

My bliss is doing pretty well. Hows yours?

Know Thyself
Even though my bliss quotient is probably above average, there is still stuff I think I should do or actually have to do, but just cant bring myself to do.

I know I should write articles to promote my business but cant bring myself to write them (and yet here I am writing). I know I should take care of my accounting but its like pulling teeth to just do my taxes once a year. I know I should be better organized and not have 5 projects running at the same time and mountains of paper all over my office, but thats just how my brain works.

I know I work better late than early. I should always write an idea down when I get it. I love a programming challenge. I like helping others. I like solving problems. I work in bursts

I know myself reasonably well, but I still have to take action on that knowledge, like hire a bookkeeper!

What are your strengths and weaknesses? Do you need peace and quiet or lots of bustle and people around you? What can you not bring yourself to do, even when it must be done? Conversely, what cant you stop yourself from doing? You can use that knowledge to make following your bliss just that little bit easier.

Change the World
This may sound odd but we all strive for it on one way or another. For some, having children is their road to immortality, for others like myself it is to create something I can leave behind – thats partly why I did music.

I know Dennis preaches that getting that one small step in place leads to others. No disagreement here. But I would suggest thinking and striving for the larger goals of life too, like a new house, new car or to feed the hungry people of the world.

The old Hollywood saying goes “if you reach for the stars you wont end up with a handful of mud”. So if you were to reach for the stars, what would you reach for? Think of something concrete, not just money. Money is abstract and quite honestly meaningless as a goal (if you want a post on why this is, let me know as it was part of my thesis). A goal is one you can describe in detail, like a house for example. Is it a Tudor, Spanish, California bungalow? What color? How big? Does it have shutters?

Getting to know yourself, how you function and what you basic needs are may well be the answer to being successful far more than any piece of software, search engine trick or may I dare say, forum.

You cant build a house if you dont know where you want to live. Theres no point in laying rails if you dont know what will power the train. Theres no point in building up or buying into self employment until you know what your life should look like.

As always, the opinions are those of the author alone, consult a doctor or attorney as needed and dont eat the yellow snow.

Fearless? Or Fear Less?

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Weed, California, June 18, 2008: The other day I woke up thinking about the word ‘fearless.’Have you ever known anybody who was actually fearless?I haven’t. Pretty much any human, any mammal, has fear. And that makes sense, because if a creature didn’t have any fear at all, sooner or later that creature would come a cropper. Adios muchacho.

And critters coming a cropper leave no progeny.

We are, therefore, the progeny of the timorous humans. Or at least of the humans with a healthy dose of fear. Oh we could call it ‘prudence,’ or something that sounds better.

But it’s fear.

However, the other thought is that, over the years, things change.

As I think back about things as a child, I recall fears and even terrors.

As I think back to the adolescent, college, and young-adult years, still fears. Fears a-plenty.

As I recall the late twenties, and the thirties. Yup. Fears.

But somewhere in the forties, a change has become visible. It is just not giving a da*n? The fears about ‘what others think’ seem to have faded away. The fears about ‘the future’ have become weak.

I’ve heard it said that it’s amazing how much mature wisdom resembles just being tired. However, it seems to me that over the years, fears fade.

I have always been afraid to be in places where there are things that can, and would, eat me.

So I don’t go scuba diving in the ocean — well, once I did — and I don’t much like camping in the woods among the bears — well, once I did — I guess I wasn’t terrified of these things, but it bugged me, worrying about them.

And now … I still don’t want to go scuba diving or wander among the woodland bears, or saunter the African savannah amongst the lions, and tigers, and cheetahs, and panthers, and … well, I say the heck with fiddling around with creatures that could eat me.

But, day to day, there is not so much fear. Not like the early years.

I guess it’s … less fear. Fear … less.

So you younger folks, racked by worries and fears. Fear not, for simply by staying alive for a bit longer you will fear less.

I think George Burns said, “There’s nothing very impressive about being old. Anybody can do it, if you just live long enough.”

I guess that’s enough muttering and pondering for today.

And now we return to the studio, and resume your life. Over to you, Chet.

 
 

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