Then there’s death. Unlike virtually all other problems, nothing can fix this. I have it on good authority that adding and completing “Read Seneca’s ‘On the Shortness of Life’” on your task list does not make death any better.

On Sunday, my friend Tom Music died after a long and painful fight with cancer. I can’t pretend that Tom and I were best friends, but we hung out every once in awhile after meeting three years ago at Startup Drinks. He and his wife Jana spent New Year’s Eve at our house and part of me keeps staring with disbelief at my kitchen table, knowing that’s where they had their last midnight toast. Jana, your strength is amazing and inspiring and I have no words to tell you how sorry I am for your loss.

(Thanks to Aviel for making this graphic.)

At my 25th birthday party, I put a sign up asking people to list things I should do before I turn 30. Tom put “Write a 10-page refutation of Atlas Shrugged.” I love that Tom loved to challenge himself and the people around him, and I wish I had written it already so Tom could have read it and known how much I appreciate him. He probably would have returned it with comments.

In the last couple years I’ve buried a grandmother, a couple of old classmates, and (horrifyingly) a friend’s child. I had no checklists for those beyond “send a card” or “compulsively re-arrange framed pictures of Grandma until it’s time to leave the funeral home.” But this time, there are a few things I feel like I can do to make a smidgen of good come out of this insanely unfair loss, so I thought I’d share them.

Since the last slide of Tom’s Ignite talk is “Knowledge Turns Monsters into To-Do Lists,” I think a list is extra-appropriate.

• Give blood every 8 weeks. If you’re in Seattle, you can do this at Puget Sound Blood Center. I went a couple weeks ago — I apparently have slow blood (the old lady next to me started after me and finished before me), but it only took me 15 minutes. Beyond the fact that giving blood is a good thing to do, Tom specifically asked this of his friends on his blog. If you don’t like needles or pain, just think about Tom (that shut my inner scaredy-cat up very effectively). I’ve got a recurring Google Calendar reminder to do this.
• Donate other bodily fluids. Sign up as a bone marrow donor or donate platelets. (Again, check out Puget Sound Blood Center if you live around here.)
• Become a volunteer tax preparer through United Way King County. Tom did this every year.
• Build something awesome that you’re proud of and shout out to Tom in your code comments (or embroidery or woodworking or whatever your thing is). It’s our job to make things because Tom can’t anymore.
• Make sure you’re an organ donor.
• Obey the Decider the next time you go out to eat.
• Pregnant or know someone who’s pregnant? Donate your umbilical cord. You have to sign up months before you deliver and have some special collection materials in place when you do, so you can’t just decide to do this last minute (and it’s my impression that most doctors/hospitals don’t ask). Those stem cells can help someone else with cancer to live, all from something you’d throw away or let dry up in a box (eew). Tom asked me to share this link just a few weeks ago.

Bye, Tom.

Clearly his Powerbook is infused with Python voodoo, because I had every intention of working on my PHP skillz over the holidays, yet I somehow found my way to the MIT OpenCourseware’s “Intro to Computer Science” course and its corresponding Python tutorials.

So, here is my first working script – The Socratic Methodizer!

print “Welcome to The Socratic Methodizer!\nThink you know the truth? Let’s test that premise!”
premise = raw_input(“Enter your premise: “)
result = raw_input(“Is there ever a time when this is NOT true? “)
result = ”.join (result.split()).lower()
while result == “yes”:
print “Then you better fix it!”
premise = raw_input(“Enter your new premise, taking the exception into account: “)
result = raw_input(“Is there ever a time when this is NOT true? “)
result = ”.join (result.split()).lower()
if result == “no”:
print “You have found truth!”
else:
print “Huh? I don’t speak your language.”

Sample output:

MyMac-4:~/Desktop apple$ python socrates.py
Welcome to The Socratic Methodizer!
Think you know the truth? Let’s test that premise!
Enter your premise: Apples are red.
Is there ever a time when this is NOT true? Yes
Then you better fix it!
Enter your new premise, taking the exception into account: Apples are red and green.
Is there ever a time when this is NOT true? Yes
Then you better fix it!
Enter your new premise, taking the exception into account: Apples are red, green, and yellow.
Is there ever a time when this is NOT true? Yes
Then you better fix it!
Enter your new premise, taking the exception into account: Apples come in many different colors.
Is there ever a time when this is NOT true? No
You have found truth!

Now all I need to do is … figure out how to error-check (my else is a lame cop-out) and then figure out how to make it work outside of the command line (ha!).

Per usual, items in bold are completed. Hat-tip to The Real Gun Guys.

This list seems to disproportionately favor climbing activities.

1. Started your own blog.
2. Slept under the stars.
3. Played in a band.
4. Visited Hawaii.
5. Watched a meteor shower.
6. Given more than you can afford to charity.
7. Been to Disneyland.
8. Climbed a mountain.
9. Held a praying mantis.
10. Sang a solo.
11. Bungee jumped.
12. Visited Paris.
13. Watched a lightning storm at sea.
14. Taught yourself an art from scratch.
15. Adopted a child.
16. Had food poisoning.
17. Walked to the top of the Statue of Liberty.
18. Grown your own vegetables.
19. Seen the Mona Lisa in France.
20. Slept on a train.
21. Had a pillow fight.
22. Hitch hiked.
23. Taken a sick day when you’re not ill.
24. Built a snow fort.
25. Held a lamb.
26. Gone skinny dipping.
27. Run a Marathon.
28. Ridden in a gondola in Venice.
29. Seen a total eclipse.
30. Watched a sunrise or sunset.
31. Hit a home run.
32. Been on a cruise.
33. Seen Niagara Falls in person.
34. Visited the birthplace of your ancestors.
35. Seen an Amish community.
36. Taught yourself a new language.
37. Had enough money to be truly satisfied.
38. Seen the Leaning Tower of Pisa in person.
39. Gone rock climbing.
40. Seen Michelangelo’s David.
41. Sung karaoke. (AND I NEVER WILL)
42. Seen Old Faithful geyser erupt.
43. Bought a stranger a meal at a restaurant.
44. Visited Africa.
45. Walked on a beach by moonlight.
46. Been transported in an ambulance.
47. Had your portrait painted / drawn.
48. Gone deep sea fishing.
49. Seen the Sistine Chapel in person.
50. Been to the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris.
51. Gone scuba diving or snorkeling.
52. Kissed in the rain.
53. Played in the mud.
54. Gone to a drive-in theater.
55. Been in a movie.
56. Visited the Great Wall of China.
57. Started a business.
58. Taken a martial arts class.
59. Visited Russia.
60. Served at a soup kitchen.
61. Sold Girl Scout Cookies.
62. Gone whale watching.
63. Got flowers for no reason.
64. Donated blood, platelets or plasma.
65. Gone sky diving.
66. Visited a Nazi Concentration Camp. (This is something of an epic fail given the time I’ve spent in Germany.)
67. Bounced a check.
68. Flown in a helicopter.
69. Saved a favorite childhood toy.
70. Visited the Lincoln Memorial.
71. Eaten Caviar.
72. Pieced a quilt.
73. Stood in Times Square.
74. Toured the Everglades.
75. Been fired from a job.
76. Seen the Changing of the Guards in London.
77. Broken a bone.
78. Been on a speeding motorcycle.
79. Seen the Grand Canyon in person.
80. Published a book.
81. Visited the Vatican.
82. Bought a brand new car.
83. Walked in Jerusalem.
84. Had your picture in the newspaper.
85. Read the entire Bible.
86. Visited the White House.
87. Killed and prepared an animal for eating.
88. Had chickenpox.
89. Saved someone’s life.
90. Sat on a jury.
91. Met someone famous.
92. Joined a book club.
93. Lost a loved one.
94. Had a baby. (AND I NEVER WILL)
95. Seen the Alamo in person.
96. Swam in the Great Salt Lake. (I’ve sailed in it. That should count.)
97. Been involved in a law suit.
98. Owned a cell phone.
99. Been stung by a bee.
100. Read an entire book in one day. (many, many times!)

This brought up some interesting (and some expected) results. To play along, just type each letter of the alphabet into your Firefox address bar, and note which URL it suggests first.

(There is some code that allegedly does this for you, but it didn’t work for me, possibly because I’m running the Deutsch build.)

A: Amazon.com
B: BetterWhois.com
C: Make Marina Culturally Literate
D: Damon’s Twitter Page
E: Ethiopian Eats
F: Freedom from Organization
G: GrandCentral
H: Damon’s Twitter Page (again)
I: Identi.ca
J: Jivox
K: Kayak
L: Google Local
M: (I can’t tell you M)
N: Netflix
O: Oh, Identi.ca!
P: Project Dog Food
Q: Amazon.com ListMania: People, Power, and Political Economy in Literature
R: Rain Japanese Cuisine
S: StumbleUpon
T: TinyURL
U: TinyURL (again)
V: VH1 (that’s embarrassing)
W: Wells Fargo
X: Running for Office XKCD Style
Y: Yelp
Z: A bunch of random Gmail emails

Hat-tip to Sameer for pointing this out to me.

Basically, you bold the items that you’ve eaten. Hat tip to Mark Tafoya of ReMARKable Palate for bringing this to my attention.

I’d be tempted to eat all 100 things but dirt and pig rectum just aren’t my style.

Which have you eaten? (Don’t worry, i had to Wikipedia a bunch of terms, too.)

1. Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes (plum)
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin (eating dirt? really?)
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
66. Frogs’ legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant.
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse (tastes like roast beef)
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake

The current list:

@almightduff
@AmyDymond
@andymeadows
@bikerbar
@cadelarge
@CalvinF
@ColleenCoplick
@dacort
@Danacea
@dilvie
@dlpasco
@dschach
@fitnessbyphone
@Jeff_Aceves
@josephholsten
@logiclust
@MarcusWhitney
@MikeyPod
@redmanbluestate
@senordanimal

On October 26, all of us are going to do 100 pushups!

If I missed you – or if you want to join – let me know.

Initial Test (9/14): 16 pushups
Week 1, Day 1 (9/15): 42 pushups

I know who Luke’s father is, and I know what Soylent Green is, but that’s not because I’ve ever seen Star Wars or Soylent Green. I played MYST right when it came out and I “I am rubber, you are glue”-ed my way through Monkey Island but that does nothing for my geek cred.

Help me catch up: What movies must I see? What games must I play?

Submit your suggestions here: http://culturalliteracy.slinkset.com

(If you don’t want to register, you can leave your ideas here in the comments, but SlinkSet lets you vote up/down suggestions, which would be helpful.)

Once I collect your ideas, I’ll make an action plan and explore them all. I promise.

Special thanks to Tony for inspiring my Cultural Literacy Project.

If you’re unfamiliar with federation, my non-technical explanation: Remember back in the days of AOL where you could only send messages to other AOL members? That’s like Twitter/Plurk/Jaiku today. A silo.

A federated system, like Laconi.ca/Identi.ca, means you can seamlessly subscribe/send messages to people on other platforms, like you can send/receive email with people on domains different from your own.

I’m running the “Oh, Identi.ca!” blog and intend to do what I can to help them grow and stabilize. However, in the interim, I don’t expect people to leave Twitter for an admittedly buggy system with no direct messages or easy friend import tool. So, I’m going to be on both Twitter and Identi.ca (not bridging – unique messages on both) until Identi.ca is ready for prom.

I encourage you to signup for Identi.ca and follow me over there, too.

I love them because I love anything even remotely resembling a survey. I live to check the boxes next to my top three interests on warranty registration cards.

I hate them because I rarely read other people’s responses – the joy for me is in filling out the form itself, not in reading the responses. I do not want to be known as a meme sharer.

All that said, I recently saw a meme I just couldn’t resist, which is odd because it has zero questions for me to answer yet the results are amusing enough to interest me in reading other responses.

Here’s how it works: Google “[your first name] needs” and share the first 10 results.

Mine:

• Marina needs a facelift
• Marina needs a home of her own
• Marina needs her rest
• Marina needs better slipway
• Marina needs iDockUSA
• Marina needs a large hole excavated
• MarinaNeeds.com (dock repair)
• Marina needs a drink
• Marina needs sports equipment
• Marina needs nine more feet
Share and Enjoy:

]]> http://marinasmusings.com/10-things-marina-needs-a-meme/feed/ 8 http://marinasmusings.com/reflections-on-moving/ http://marinasmusings.com/reflections-on-moving/#comments Sun, 25 May 2008 01:08:57 +0000 Marina Martin http://www.marinasmusings.com/reflections-on-moving/ Damon and I are moving into a new house this week. This continues my life-long trend of never living in the same place for more than nine months, but it marks the first time in my adult life that I am moving within the same state. (In fact, the new house is a whopping 2.5 blocks away from the old one.)

I love moving. Few things make me happier. Being able to sort, purge, and reorganize my things is a wonderful, cleansing experience. A new house is bursting with untapped potential.

Normally, a move is also an emotional “reboot” of sorts for me. It’s a chance to identify some aspects of my personality/life that could use improvement and decide to change them for the better.

Committing to change while in the same environment is far more challenging than starting on the right foot in a new one. I am truly lucky and honored to have an amazing group of friends that have stuck with me through thick and thin for more than a decade now. They know my history, the experiences I’ve had, and the mistakes I’ve made, and can make educated guesses as to how I would react in future situations.

This can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If I reacted to a situation one way once, it may be assumed I will react to that situation the same way again. Since everyone’s expecting that reaction the second time around, it isn’t always clear that I in fact have free will and can choose to react in a completely different (and ideally better) way.

A silly example to make my point: Say your close friend was in love with a man who died in a sky-diving accident. Out of support for her, and because you care, you would probably alter your future interactions with her in a subtle way. If there is a feature film involving sky-diving, you would not invite her or mention it. You would hesitate to introduce her to your new friend who also happens to be an avid sky-diver. If a sky-diving report came on the news, you would hurriedly change the channel.

Perhaps she would really like that feature film. Perhaps she would fall in love with your sky-diving friend and have a great marriage. Perhaps the news segment following the sky-diving interview would be deeply meaningful to her in some way. Maybe, subtly, unintentionally, you are holding back her personal growth, even though you’re trying to protect her. Maybe what she really needs to do is go sky-diving!

In a new environment that is free of those assumptions, it’s a lot easier to make the better choice. Hence my love of new environments

That said, 2.5 blocks is more of a restart than a reboot. (Pause for laughter at my clever Apache joke.) It has surprised pretty much everyone that knows me that I really haven’t even considered leaving Seattle yet. (See above!) There are a combination of factors at play into this new feeling of settledness, including a number of significant mistakes that I made last year that I very actively never want to make again. However, a key factor not to be overlooked is: I think I rather like the current incarnation of Marina Martin. (Crazy!)

Still, some life-enhancing changes are in order:

• Going back to being vegan. I had quite the year off the vegan wagon, kicked off by a nice hunk of raw horse on a conveyor belt in Tokyo. I always self-identified as one willing to try almost anything once, and never having eaten a hamburger in my life somehow discredited me. I tried anything anyone put in front of me, and for the most part enjoyed the taste. (Exceptions: ostrich and goat.)
   
  I will miss salmon, mozzarella cheese, and Jack in the Box double-bacon cheeseburger ciabatta sandwiches. I will not miss the runny nose I get every time I eat animal products, cholesterol, the sky-high blood sugars that inexplicably followed a can of tuna fish, or the sluggishness that I never felt when I avoided animal products like the plague. (I will continue to make an exception for Guinness, which is filtered using an ingredient from fish bladders, because, well, it’s Guinness!)
• Getting back into exercising. I used to work with a trainer five days a week and do serious cardio seven days a week. Now I get winded going up the driveway. Not cool. This has a four-part action plan: buying a TreadDesk so I can walk all day long while working instead of sitting down; ramping my running back up with the Couch to 5K Running Program; hiring a trainer again; and incorporating some basic sit-ups/push-ups/etc. into my daily routine checklist.
• Natural cleaning products. Always meant to start doing this, never quite got around to it. Now that environmentally-friendly cleaning products are a requirement of our lease, it should be an easy switch.
• Composting. Another thing I always meant to do. The City of Seattle sells composting cones which look simple enough to use. Now let’s see if we actually use them.
• Hiring a cleaning person. I love to clean and have always found it too difficult to justify hiring someone else to do it, especially because it’s hard to live up to my impossible-to-live-up-to standards. However, I have no shortage of work right now, and those extra hours a week are more important than ever, so I’m going to see if I can give up some control in this area in exchange for a greater gain.
Share and Enjoy:

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