Velo, Rapido: Going Places

Ben is looking for a new home. Maybe you know just the place?

As most of you know, I’m returning to school this fall at the CUNY School of Law, in Flushing, Queens. The hardest thing about doing this hasn’t been the LSAT, the application, or even the decision to apply, but the reality of leaving my beloved East Village tub-in-the-kitchen 6-story walkup, possibly the last unrenovated tenement apartment left in the neighborhood. Sadly, though, between my rent more-or-less doubling and the reality of a 2-hour round trip commute to Flushing, my treehouse in the Museum of Bohemia (aka the Heaven on Earth Building) will soon be part of my past. I’m savoring every minute I have left in the place.

Meanwhile, I’m trying hard to find a new place to live, and having had a very frustrating time with the Craigslist red herrings and trolls, and really wanting to avoid going through a broker if at all possible, wanted to appeal to the word-of-mouth / mutual aid society of my ever-resourceful friends (and their friends). My deal is, I can pay up to about $1000 / month, but need to have a quiet place where I can dependably study, and where my 2 cats will be welcome. My top neighborhood is Downtown Flushing, but would be cool with most areas near the 7 or E train.

Soooo, please help me find a place! My confidence in miraculous coincidence is stronger than my desperation, and with good reason — serendipity works better than despair!

There isn’t a good term for gale-force winds that flatten your tent out on the plains of South Dakota and send you running to your car, realizing that it isn’t necessarily so safe either and running farther to the cinderblock bathroom structure to wait out the thunder and lightning that linger overhead, deafeningly, for an hour, illuminating the whole campground with each flash, revealing that everyone else’s tent is stronger. It turns out that if there isn’t an actual twister involved, there also isn’t a precise term for 90 mile an hour winds, hail the size of nickels and a three foot flash flood in downtown Omaha either. Did you know that the first cheese/macaroni product was packaged in Omaha? I didn’t either. Highlights: the Bemis, the Badlands, KILI. The Star, which makes pies from scratch.

Skippable: Crazy Horse, which I really wanted to see but then I wasn’t ready for the Americana of it all. A lot like Space Farms (which you can find at http://www.spacefarms.com/, which is loud and cheesy so I’m not linking to it direct-like) in its total lack of context for the huge (huge) array of artifacts. A mighty jumble of bottles, razors, books, moccasins, guns, arrowheads, bead work, paintings of bison and wolves howling at the moon and Lakota leaders of yore. A mighty jumble of Americans with big cars and sugar sodas. I buy that Mount Rushmore needs some sort of counterweight, and maybe this is it. Maybe one carved mountain deserves another. I just couldn’t dig it. What is really too bad (besides the more obvious too-bads out there) is that the Badlands within Pine Ridge are covered with unexploded ordinance and the visitors to the White River ranger station are few and far between, which means that most visitors to the Badlands spend very little time thinking about what we’ve done. About forcing children off to boarding schools and about mass murder and about treaties upon treaties that were empty lies and about using the reservation as a bombing range, just because we can. You can hike the whole of the north unit and never consider the history of America’s role there, a role that isn’t finished yet. You actually have to drive down to Pine Ridge to even find out that the reason there aren’t hiking trails in the Stronghold or Palmer Units is that they’re blanketed with UXO we dropped not all that long ago.

Our big regret was that we didn’t find KILI in time to hear the list of specials at Betty’s in time to find it and dine there. I’m hungry just thinking about it and I already had too much black eyed peas, biscuits, garden salad and chocolate cake tonight.

I’ll post some photos of the flood in Omaha, maybe, if N. can figure out how to send them from his crackberry to me. The rest are all film-only and since we still haven’t developed the roll we took on our honeymoon, I wouldn’t expect miracles.

Mostly, though, I wanted to give thanks for CSA vegetables after a week of diners and what you can cook on a backpacking stove.

PS. Congratulations Arif. You’re glad we didn’t get stuck in Minneapolis because I was all set to phone you guys up and I think you were busy.

I got all worked up about Many Eyes until I discovered that I couldn’t quite load any of the visualizations because my Java setup isn’t what it should be. Then I actually met someone from Many Eyes and got inspired to ask for advice. I got some:

One of our developers uses Ubuntu and here’s his Java set up: Sun-java6-plugin on Hardy in the multiverse. It can be installed via the package manager directly (sudo aptitude install sun-java6-plugin) or via Add/Remove Applications (”Sun Java 6 Runtime”). The info page on the package is here.

So now you can check out Many Eyes, too. Except that nothing is so simple. That plugin for Gutsy? It doesn’t exist.

Or it might. I’m really not sure.

http://packages.ubuntu.com/gutsy/i386/sun-java6-plugin/filelist

Meredith has a sweet room available for short-term sublet:

The room is furnished with a bed, closet and shelving. This apartment in on the Bed-Stuy Bushwick border just 2 blocks from the J train. You would be sharing the sunny apartment with my cat and me. Shared living room and kitchen, roof access, wirelesses Internet. I do not have a TV, but you are welcome to have one in your room. I am fairly quiet. I am an artist; I cook a lot, wake up early. Please be clean, responsible and able to provide some sort of references.

The room is $550.00 plus a one-month deposit. Non-smokers only please.

She signed off with “Please e-mail me and tell me a bit about yourself, what you do and your summer plans.” but instead just leave a comment and I’ll introduce you by email.

Macbooks are fragile. You shouldn’t drop them. If you’re clumsy buy a Thinkpad, and then don’t drop it either. However, if you’re pop had a macbook and he liked it a lot but he dropped it into any abyss of brokeness and wants to replace it (not my pop. He has a desktop computer that you can’t drop because it is already on the ground. Hah!) and then protect it better …

Advice? Cherry crush doesn’t know the answer to this one.

The Frankenserver walks again …

I finally figured out that the frankenserver, which serves web service for example.com and examplefoundation.org doesn’t know that it is not the mail server for these domains. The whole rest of the world knows it, but not the frankenserver.

I’m trying to figure out the right way to tell ye olde frankenserver (or perhaps postfix) that mail must leave the house. To be more precise: if WordPress (or OpenX or Urchin) generates mail for amanda@example.com, that mail can be delivered to some other address as defined in /etc/aliases, but it can’t be delivered to amanda’s actual mailbox off on Dreamhost.

If /etc/aliases sayeth “amanda amanda@gmail.com” then mail generated on the server for amanda will be punted to gmail, no problem. But if amanda isn’t defined the mail evaporates into the ether (or something). I want postfix, locally, to know that it should treat mail for example.com like any other mail–look up its MX record and send it there.

I’m not sure how to convey that to Postfix, however.

In a surprising scientific development, it seems that red wine may be good for you in small quantities.

Or, I’m sorry, is that not surprising at all?

I have this database all defined for postgres. It is complex beyond necessity. Waaay beyond necessity, and it is making me all mad. I’ve been commenting things out right and left just to get something to work somehow.

Because I’m so nice, I’m sharing with you, below, all 580 lines. You can see my mad commenting. What I really want to know is if there is an easier way? Why are these constraint references breaking down? I’m not used to constraints. Also, does postgres just not need commas?

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Here is what happened: I worked too late for no good reason. I looked over at the clock as I was turning on the radio and thought to my self, “crap. It is 8:03. I have an entire hour before Fair Game is over. It really is only on when I want to listen to the news. Grumble grumble grumble.” I turned on the radio anyway and was pleasantly surprised to find On Point on the air instead. It isn’t my very favorite show ever, but I like it enough and when I’m home from work and ready to make some food or play scrabulous and listen to substantive news coverage, I definitely prefer Tom Ashbrook to Faith Salie. It looks from the WNYC schedule like a permanent change.

So whoever did this for me, I give to you a too tight hug and a giant kiss.

Also, I’m monkeying with this blasted postgres create statement that won’t translate properly to mysql, and to make things just that much trickier it has some kind of monkey business with the line breaks. The line breaks look just fine to the naked vim eye, but mysql was giving me errors with line numbers off. So for instance, this table definition (those are line numbers),

123 DROP TABLE IF EXISTS share_types;
124 CREATE TABLE share_types (
125 id serial not null primary key,
126 csa_id integer not null
127 CONSTRAINT share_type_csa_id_fk
128 REFERENCES csas(id)
129 ON UPDATE cascade
130 ON DELETE cascade,
131 share_type varchar(50) not null,
132 account_id integer not null
133 CONSTRAINT share_types_account_fk
134 REFERENCES accounts(id),
135 notes text,
136 updated_at timestamp not null default current_timestamp,
137 created_at timestamp DEFAULT 0,
138 position int,
139 CONSTRAINT share_type_csa_id_unq unique (csa_id, share_type)
140 )ENGINE=InnoDB;

Would generate an error like …

ERROR 1064 (42000) at line 124: You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near 'CONSTRAINT share_type_csa_id_fk
REFERENCES csas(id)
' at line 4


Why line 124 when the problem is at line 128? There were other signs, too. So I did this:

:%s/\n/^M/g

and now the line breaks are good. Whew!

My knee hurts, my neck hurts, there’s no milk for my tea and the quiche I bought for lunch because my lunch date canceled was just so-so. However, between this (via Jenna) and that, I think I’ll live.

Also, I’ve joined Arif’s food writing cabal.