Garden Of Blog

Houston has introduced me to Psychostick, The Bloodhound Gang, and humorcore, a genre of music hitherto unknown to me but apparently coined by Psychostick (readers: correct me if wrong, this is 1 minute of Google research talking). The Urinal Mints, The Assholes, Insane Clown Posse and others turn up on a search for “humorcore” as well. I’d add The Bloodhound Gang, which I also heard first here in Houston.

Humorcore has, to me, a sharp ironic edge (exemplified in Psychostick’s “Beer!!!” and The Bloodhound Gang’s “New Vagina”) that I hope is not lost upon its 12 year old listeners, but likely is, and totally. Still, who cares. Mistakes are still for each of us to make, only later to appreciate the ironic art that depicts the same imbecilic behaviours.

I love discovering new music in new places. Larry Wall commented today how, growing up in the grid of Los Angeles, all of his childhood memories are paired with the cardinal direction he was facing at the moment, north, south, east or west. This reminded me of my geotagged musical memories.

Update: an alternative to “humorcore” is “tardcore”, which appears in the title of a Bloodhound Gang song. I believe this rather better captures the spirit of the genre.

Branden: from what I can tell, Psychostick is just harder edge speed metallic, although their “Orgasm = Love” is actually a ballad, which can only be described as having a haunting beauty. Check it out!!

Here I am in Houston at my first Perl conference. It’s a cross between Woodstock and MIT (though our host is the University of Houston).

Larry Wall, the creator of Perl, just finished his keynote talk. Larry really is an evangelist of free thought, a metaphor which can be seen extending all the way from Perl’s language design through his cultural musings. The son and grandson of preachers, Larry has founded his own new cult, one that has adopted a distinctly anti-dogmatic motto: TMTOWTDI (There’s More Than One Way To Do It). At one point early in their marriage, Larry and his wife were training to be missionaries, and he joked that newlyweds in this occupation couldn’t resist joking about the missionary position. TMTOWTDI, even for evangelists.

He also pointed out that the job of a missionary is not to erect a little church with a white steeple in the midst of a completely different culture, but to deliver only the core ideals to the community. TMTOWTDI.

I can’t do his whole keynote justice here, other than to pass on that he announced Perl 6 would be released this Christmas.

Update: as it turns out, “release by X-Mas” is a running Perl 6 joke. Yeah, they’ll probably get me next year, too.

Well, our little experiment in marital blogging has failed due to neglect. We did try, but we just didn’t have enough time to maintain our own blogs in addition to the couples’ blog. BlogNchain.com now redirects back to the Zucchini Patch where the curious can generally get a feel for the state of our relationship at any given time.

I still think BlogNchain.com is a great domain name, so please, make us an offer. We can be bought. Jessica was the one who came up with it originally.

In the fall of 1994, I spent the first semester of my sophomore year in Woodruff Hall, one of the “mini dorms”. I ended up dropping out of UNH for a year after that, which is testament to what a great semester it was. Many people who have visited college, lived through the ’60s, or been 19 years old know that “turning on and tuning in” often precede dropping out.

And yes, I did have to scrub every last inch of laundry detergent (which glows under blacklight) off the walls of my single room, to avoid dorm maintenance fees.

We used to get high on the rock ledge over the train tracks, just a stone’s throw from Woodruff, and hope for the train. Then we’d hike down the tracks, through the pitch black path in the woods to the old satellite dish. Someone had cut a hole in the metal mesh at the cradle of the dish, so we’d climb up through it, and relax under the stars.

I have a hundred more Woodruff stories from that several-month stay, which I’d love to share, but many are just “mine”. By December I was a total basket case, seeking treatment, and deciding to drop out of school. Good times. No, really. Good times.

Well, now they’re tearing down good old Woodruff. I’ll miss it. For me the building was a religious monument. While living there I found out that Dickens was right: the best of times and the worst of times are often one in the same.

I’ve finally found the time to teach myself a little bit of Rails. It’s really quite a nice framework and there’s plenty to learn. I’m going to use it for our private archive of family videos, with a CRUD interface for me and videos to browse through for my family.

Being that RoR is an instant immersion in Rails methods, it doesn’t feel like I’m learning much Ruby at all. But I suppose I am.

It’s finally starting to get fun. I’ve spent many hours watching screencasts and reading articles, tentatively poking at my new Rails install. I’m ready to poke harder. This is the same old shit, just perhaps, better organized and conceived? The RHTML feels a lot like PHP and the object data model is similar to Perl’s CGI::Application (and probably 100 others). It sort of has some of the best features of a lot of frameworks rolled into one. I’ll have to report back later if I notice any particular advantages or limitations to RoR that haven’t made themselves obvious yet. So far, it seems to be living up to the hype.

Here is where I am keeping a collection of Ruby on Rails resources.