this is a land of mystery and wonder
The no-fly list — a list of people so dangerous they are not allowed to fly yet so innocent we can’t arrest them — and the less dangerous “watch list” contain a combined 1 million names representing the identities and aliases of an estimated 400,000 people. There aren’t that many terrorists out there; if there were, we would be feeling their effects.
Pat Buchanan suggests parallels between NATO’s treatment of Russia and the predicate of Italy before World War II. His overarching point is sound — we can’t continue to bait the bear and escalate the situation without thinking through the endgame, and the potentially disastrous consequences.
Every time I read Dune, I become hyper-conscious of the water waste all around me, of the beautiful life dripping, roaring, splashing, torrenting down the drain everywhere I look, wasted and ignored, never recognized for its miraculousness.
Now I’m reading The Dispossessed, and I find I can’t finish my dinner. So much for one person, such extravagance! And my possessions! The massive ego that possesses me to decide that I deserve to squander so many resources to travel alone in a hulking multi-ton vehicle that spews out noxious fumes and burns through precious fuel at a prodigious rate, just to get to a massive distribution center where muffins by the dozen and socks by the package and computers and refrigerators and power tools are all mine for the taking just by plunking down a plastic card.
And then after a while I come back to the real world, and I take another bite of my sandwich.
Mr. Tow, a former chief executive of Citizens Communications, and Century Communications, said he decided to fund journalism for two reasons: he was worried about the industry, and, as a native of Brooklyn and a graduate of Columbia, he was annoyed that an Internet institute at Harvard seemed to dominate new media.
This is what YouTube was made for!
These last few weeks I’ve been working on an outside project that is written in Django (thanks to the involvement of one of the two coders behind Polihood). When it came time to deploy this app to our dev server, we started looking at the Capistrano deployment tool. Unfortunately the documentation for Capistrano is lacking, but the tool itself is darn slick, so I gave it a go.
Capistrano was built as a deployment manager for Ruby on Rails applications, but it has been expanded with additional functionality, and seems to be slowly moving towards being a general-purpose tool. I’ve seen other tutorials written about using Capistrano to deploy web apps that aren’t Rails, but generally they consist of sticking a bunch of shell commands into a Capfile and letting it run, which doesn’t really seem to be the “Capistrano way.”
What I’ve done is use Capistrano’s built in Rails deploy functionality and have been writing overrides as I find that I need them. Right now the script only does a basic deploy or rollback, but eventually I’ll probably extend it to do other things as well.
Remarkably, very little needs to change in the standard deploy library to work with Django. Here is my Capfile as it currently stands.
One of my favorite things about my cat Oscar, who is quite the talker, is his tendency to break into a big yawn right in the middle of a meow, and then continue it when the yawn is finished. “Me–ahh–oww!” Then he stares at me, daring me to laugh. Or perhaps comprehend.
I was thinking today about how much benefit I get from the New York Times, my favorite newspaper. I just got another one of those NPR renewal letters in the mail, and I figured I might as well give to the Times while I’m at it. Then I remembered that the New York Times Co. is a for-profit corporation, and they don’t do membership drives. The only way to give ‘em money seems to be to subscribe, but I have no interest in the dead tree version of their product.
Beyond the station gates, a priest dreams of a vineyard. A car bursts into flame. An ancient sign in a boarded-up window opposite the platform reads “Wrestling Weight.” A stuffed bear mans a betting window in a struggling OTB parlor. The dead lie in rows uncounted, and the living mourn and wait and work and love and strum guitars on the front stoop, annoying the neighbors.
There are 24 stops on the New York City subway system past which you can ride no farther. For those who get off somewhere else — almost everyone — the end is just a sign on the train.
The best part of this article is the last line.
I'm Danny Silverman, a guy in Cambridge, MA with an interest in law, culture, media, and using technology to bring people together even as we work ever harder to push ourselves apart.
My day job is maintaining computer systems. I like exploring the outdoors. I catch and throw flying discs for sport. My cat is fuzzy.
To contact me: zeno@ this site.
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