Dark Side of the Loon

In which our Hero is up too late and still not very interesting

I finished that history of the War of 1812 and I’m left cold. It rather nicely answer the dilemma of who to root for by detailing the unmoderated idiocy of both sides. The sack of Washington wasn’t so much a British victory as it was an American forfeit. The land war was even more ridiculously mismanaged than I recall from my high school history classes. And the naval war… oh dear god.

Reading both the tactics and the economics and the politics of that time, two hundred years ago, and it is like those headlines are being reprinted today. The laughably tiny US navy held its own against the hundreds of ships of the British Empire. And here’s the part that just kills me to read. They won by the simple fact that they didn’t lose. The US navy held out by using the tactics of asymmetric warfare. That term seem familiar to you, Gentle Reader? Because that’s the one where a tiny force fights an overwhelming opponent by avoiding direct conflict and instead hitting them where they’re unprotected, or where it’s just plain expensive.

So the US success in the war of 1812 was accomplished using the techniques that would later be employed against the US by such groups as the Viet Cong during the Vietnam war, and by the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Iraq.

I don’t know what to say.

I spent my weekend coding. Been learning Microsoft technologies for that side project I’ve been working on. It’s been educational and deeply frustrating. There’s this thing, this browser support issue, where developing for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser is just a little bit different from everybody else. As in, “Every other browser but IE can support feature/technique [X].” A few years ago it resulted in the ridiculous condition where you’d get a message that “This website requires Internet Explorer.”

Now, Microsoft isn’t any more of a team player, but they’ve realized that they can’t actually afford to be that far different because while it used to mean that they were the center of development, now it means that people warn that “The site will work better in a different browser” because it’s trivially easier to do things elsewhere and then you have to fight with IE to approximate the same behaviour

But an interesting change of perspective offered itself when it occurred to me to think of IE not as the boat anchor of unreasonable demands but the handicapped entrance. I don’t know why, but it makes me feel better to think of my struggles as being towards offering service to the less-than-fully-able-bodied. I think that it’s about feeling more like I’m being considerate, rather than working on something futile.

So two followups to the wedding.

First was that a family friend attended with us and stayed with us after the wedding. But he also found my sampler bottles of old scotch and decided to try the 25 year old. Which I didn’t object to, I thought we could taste it together. But no. I discovered afterward that he’d packed it to try at home.

That’s just rude.

Second is that my godmother has apparently been taking angry complaints about how bad the food was at the wedding. I’m a little surprised only because I can’t help but wonder what the point of complaining is. Not like there’s anything to be done, not like the caterers are going to refund. Just makes people feel bad.

How’s my mother? She’s got a brutal cough that comes and goes and nobody can explain. Her blood pressure “issues” have now continued over a long enough time that her doctors feel this is just kind of a normal cycle for her. Her medication keeps her relatively normal and at semiregular intervals, it spikes up. But now we have the shape of it, the normal daily progressions, the spikes and ranges. And she’s back to a routine and better rested so… things are normal.

How’s my watch? I was standing at parade easy at a point while I was at the wedding a few weeks ago, hands clasped in front of my jacket. I was nominally just acting as an usher, in a space and pose that both allowed me to find people needing help and equally allowed people needing help to notice me, but I specifically noticed that my right hand was resting on my watch, and I was just happy to feel it and know it was alive and ticking.

I don’t know what happens next. The smart watch is something I’ve been interested in for two decades, so the sudden appearance of a race to produce a mainstream product is of great interest. On the other hand, the combination of battery, display, radio and processing technologies makes me lack optimism about the products reaching my threshold of purchase. They’re cool, except for having to charge them every day or two, like a phone.

My watch is analog. It ticks. It’s beautiful, in a way that even as a gadgetophile, I can’t see the smart watches doing for a long time.

How’s my relationship? Nothing to report. And a request to not report. So that’s all I’m going to say on the matter for a while.

A suggestion for a legal-themed peep diorama? That’s a difficult one, only because much of the environment for the practice of law, that I’ve seen in person or in media, is rather statics. The three sets are a meeting room, a jury deliberation, or a court room. The court room is the most distinctive, I think, but if I was going to do it, I’d go with the old style, with the wigs. It’s visually distinctive.

How about a supreme court diorama? You’d still probably have to put the peep-stices in robes at least, but that’s likely to be a recognizable set.

The other approach would be law-enforcement, but I don’t think that’d rate as well with the contest.

Oh! Oh! What about peeps clerking? You could have a file room and set up one peep at a desk and the rest up to various flavours of no good. A peep shredding papers marked “evidence,” some peeps getting it on in a corner. I didn’t watch the show much but you could add a little baby figuring and call it Ally McPeep.

My father stopped me to comment on the fact that a Voyager probe may have crossed the threshold of interstellar space. He was excited by it, saying “it’s such an amazing thing, and I don’t think most people even realize what has been accomplished or how long it’s taken to achieve.”

Me either. But my dad does. I find great pleasure in being able to share that appreciation with him.

On the other hand, I think he’d look at me crazy if I told him I was so pleased at how far my little brother had gone, even if this particular milestone is looking disputed.

I’m still working on making this joke run smoothly, but I’ve been laughing my ass off in thinking of it. For the first time in 600 years, the current pope met his predecessor. (As opposed to John Paul I who, I gather, met his predecessor just 30 days after taking office. Except he wasn’t current pope anymore). They were humble at each other. And then they had a private meeting where nobody knows what they talked about.

Well, I do. They actually revived a joke from the Vatican archives for just such an occasion and spent their meeting taking turns telling it to each other:

Knock Knock. Who’s there? Pope. Pope who?

Come on, that’s good stuff!

I’ve been reflecting on my life of late and feeling a little unhappy with myself that so much of my current story is work. Work at home, work for multiple clients, work done free, work done well, but work. Various issues make me sensitive to my ability to be a workaholic, and to the opportunity and ease of being able to bury other problems by focusing on the easier feedback that you can get from the office.

But in the thick of it, I popped out for three hours so that I could have lunch with my Mouse. And Willow is trying to book a time with me which I’ve told her is just a matter of setting her date. Likewise, I resignedly headed out to the wedding because it was important for me to put that time there, and with as much resignation but equally acceptance, I spent a few hours teaching an aunt to use windows 8.

The cousins have, without prompting, commented that they don’t feel like I rush conversations with them and have asked me why I don’t tell them when I’m busy so they don’t bother me. (I startled Willow again by teasing her about an assignment she worked on in high school, simultaneously horrifying her to get teased about it and startling her that I remembered talking to her about homework years ago.)

So taking my own perception and customer feedback together, the implication is that my prioritization is okay. I’m not being a workaholic, I’m not being obsessive, I’m not hiding. I’m picking people first whenever the question comes up. But things still feel unbalanced. So there’s a piece of technique missing, and I don’t yet know what it is.

Btw, the Mouse asked me, to my great amusement, if she would be allowed to buy *me* lunch when she someday has a job of her very own. I told her I’d think about it, because I don’t want her to know how much she can push me around. But yeah. If she asks to buy me a lunch with her very own money from her very own job, I think I’m going to accept the honour and be proud.

Oh holy crap. The reason why I haven’t been able to figure out how to do drag-and-drop file uploads in IE8 (and 9) is because it’s very close to impossible and the answer is, don’t do that. But the client has specified IE8 as a supported platform (and IE9 as the more probably standard), which means that I have to do the dumbass solution. And then if I have to do a dumb solution for those browsers, then why bother making a nice version for the better-but-not-specifically requested browsers?

Dammit.