Tag Archives: Uncategorized

Straight Talk on Poop

Three guys I’ve known for a lot of years have asked me recently about diapers. We’ve used cloth diapers with three kids, and it worked for us. It meant, among other things, less garbage, fewer shopping trips, no diaper rash, … Continue reading

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Finn Faerie Land

I suppose this is most easily described as a story for children, though I am not sure who told it to my children, and it was my children who told it to me.  It’s also not really a story, since … Continue reading

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St. Helens

Thirty years and a day ago, Mt. St. Helens erupted.  At the time, we were living in a one room cabin in Pend Oreille County, in the northeastern part of Washington State.  It was a strange day. My parents, I … Continue reading

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Ghosts

It is a strange and wonderful truth, the way existence remembers our place in it.  There is a painting on the cave wall, and thus the cave remembers we have been there for a time.  There are shards of flint … Continue reading

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Rocks

The beginning of May shouldn’t have been that hot.  It was 1993, my first day working on the Lazy Tc, and it was almost ninety degrees.  Jimmy Mulroney and I had driven out together that morning- it wasn’t his first … Continue reading

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Ralph

Ralph was the fastest, bravest, strongest dog in Klickitat County.  Maybe the entire state.  Possibly the whole tri-state area.  There are those who knew Ralph who would say different, but none of them knew him like I did, and I … Continue reading

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Versioning Bags

I’ve been doing some work recently with BagIt.  BagIt is a specification that gives a directory of files some additional semantics, including a manifest with checksums and some minimal metadata.  I like the specification a lot.  I have recently become interested … Continue reading

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This Note Has No Title

A computer is a machine made only of switches.  We forget this.  We think in computational metaphors: functions, procedures, objects, monads, functors, generators, routines.  Even low-level ints, bools, chars, and floats obscure the facts from us.  A computer is a … Continue reading

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Notes on Pragmatic Language Design

If you are Ed, and you are reading this post: no it isn’t the post I promised (yet).  But it is a precursor, and you should read it before you read the subsequent one in the series.  Not that you … Continue reading

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Memory, Persistence, Reason

Memory tricks us humans into thinking like empirical beings.  We stumble around, babes in the dark, until we bump into a light switch.  Let There Be Light! and we see it, and it’s good, and we remember.  The next time … Continue reading

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