Dance history

I tried swing dancing tonight, for the first time. I enjoyed every minute of it, once I finally got to the dance floor. A question arose about my dance history, for better or worse, and I felt compelled to enshrine it on my blog.

• Elementary school, sixth grade, end of the year: the principal (male) and several male teachers thought they should encourage the male students to dance before they transitioned to junior high school. We formed a circle, learned to two-step, and learned something they called the "flying Dutchman." I can't properly recall what that move was, but it was silly. I think the male teachers were more uncomfortable than the students, but I appreciated their effort. I also remember my Uncle Marve performing a jig at a family reunion, and I was captivated. I never learned how, though.

• Junior High: my father had cable television, and hence had MTV back when they played music videos all day long. I thought Axel Rose had a cool move in the Sweet Child O' Mine video, and mirrored him in socks on carpet. At school dances, there weren't many guys, so I'd hang out in a circle of girls if they'd let me. Again, I'd dance similar to the girl across from me, as if we were dancing together -- one girl eventually noticed, named Casey Meyer (on whom I had a crush from 4th grade into high school).

  At one memorable dance, we had a DJ and a dance contest. I was surprised when I was among the last 4 people dancing, and very nervous. Finally, it came down to me versus Sean Isaacson (a really nice guy that everyone liked). Sean had the Milli Vanilli moves going, and I was freestylin' with the occasional Axel Rose slide thrown in. I won, and took home Bon Jovi's &dquot;New Jersey&dquot; album (on an LP record -- this was long before CDs).

• High school: not much to note here. I remember being short on cash when it came time for photos at my first real high school dance -- that was scary, and I managed to work things out with Tammy noticing (and I still have the photos). My mother loved dancing at Oktoberfest, and I went along a few times over the years. At one of these events, I learned the Chicken Dance and how to waltz, sort of. None of the adults could really answer a technical question I had about the waltz, and I gave up. I'm solid on the Chicken gestures, though.

• College: went to one Sadie Hawkins dance, and I think the woman that invited me was named Laura. Started dating someone that didn't care so much for dancing, and that kept me off most dance floors for more than a decade. There were two notable exceptions. At Erik Anderson's wedding, the bride's mother taught me to waltz and polka during the reception. This was a Country-Western dance, and the polka moved very, very fast around the room (I loved it).

  The second, enormous exception is that Dr. Read, my undergraduate math adviser, encouraged all the math students to try his wife's Scottish Country Dancing course. I attended the course, and joined the club on campus. I was practicing Scottish Country Dance once a week (or more) for at least two years. Since few people have seen this style of dance, I'll include links to videos (which will eventually break, at which point you should just search for [scottish country dancing] at Google video or YouTube).

  • A collection of reels (fast dances), 5.5 minutes: includes Marie's Wedding, and maybe Reel of the Royal Scotts (I've forgotten a lot since college): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCptMS8IZvA
  • A strathspey (slower dance), 1.5 minutes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLnx5PZpcOI
  • Good example of a formal ball, 4 minutes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osuow59BHdU
  For what it is worth, yes, I wore a kilt for the bigger dance events. No, I won't tell you what I wore underneath.

• The Google Years: The only really notable event, before now, was my friend Jill dragging me to a Tainted Love concert and dance. Jill danced with wild abandon, and I felt like I was in high school again (when I danced with wild abandon and often embarrassed myself -- Spin Me Round, anyone?)

Tonight I can add Swing Dancing to this list. I had a great time. My partners were patient and helpful. In fact, I danced with every women but one (I'll remedy that next time). I suspect I'll be back for more.

No, thank-you.

This might be the most-important story I was told last year.

I was chatting with a good friend, and asked about being open while protecting myself from abuse. She shared a parable about an abusive old man in a small village. I applied the lesson from the parable later that same night, and several times that week.

An old man in a small village enjoyed intimidating his neighbors. He would abuse them verbally until they felt bad about themselves, telling them how lazy they were, or stupid, or thoughtless. Everyone was afraid of him, and this made him feel powerful. Having mastered his village, he wanted to go further and dominate the guru who lived peacefully in nearby hills.

He visited the guru and offered rotten fruit as gift. The guru declined, saying nothing more than "No, thank-you." The old man feigned anger, and began his verbal lashing of the guru. After receiving each abusive statement, the guru simply said "No, thank-you." Eventually the old man's feigned anger turned to real anger, and he lost control, yelling "What do you mean, 'no thank-you'? That doesn't make any sense, I wasn't offering you anything!"

The guru replied, "When you offer me rotten fruit, I say 'no, thank-you' because I know it is bad for me, and I do not accept it. Then you have to carry your own rotten fruit while you return home."

Almost every application I have had for this lesson has been in defense of myself, from myself. While listening to the story, I missed an important call. When I discovered this, I made myself feel guilty for not returning home sooner. Then I saw how I offered myself that rotten guilt, and accepted it. Finally, I told myself "no, thank-you" and refused to accept the guilt any longer.

The story's abstract lesson, for me, is that I can protect myself without building defensive walls. There's no need to create one-size-fits-all boundaries. Instead, I can remain open but discriminate between good and rotten fruit. Of course I will make mistakes, most likely accepting rotten fruit due to an assumed obligation. When I observe myself compounding those mistakes with additional self-abuse, I simply tell myself, "no, thank-you."

Toll Evasion

FasTrak was kind enough to send me a photo evading the Golden Gate Bridge toll. As it turns out, I was in violation, but only because the toll attendant waved me through after I stopped and asked about the toll for motorcycles. This isn't the best use of my time, but I can't stomach paying a fine after trying to do the right thing. I'm contesting the ticket, and I'm recording my response to FasTrak here because I need to vent to someone (or everyone, it seems):

As I approached the toll both, I looked for information about HOV/Carpool lanes, and information about how motorcycles are classified. Not spotting anything relevant, I entered toll lane that accepted cash, and waited my turn. I came to a full stop next to the toll booth, and asked the attendant about motorcycles. He waved me through.

Having received this ticket notification, I researched the toll rules for motorcycles crossing the Golden Gate Bridge. I see now that carpool hours end at 6pm for the Golden Gate Bridge, as opposed to 7pm for the Interstate freeways in this area. However, I didn't have access to a computer and the internet while on my motorcycle at the toll booth, and chose to trust the attendant instead.

I am requesting that this ticket be waived, on account of misdirection by the employee collecting tolls. There is no danger that I'll repeat this violation, because I have memorized the bridge schedule, know it is different than the Interstate schedule, and am unlikely to trust a toll booth employee unless they refuse to take my money.

Scripts for the "Labels" links in my sidebar

There is probably some good pre-fab way to get Blogger to publish links to your blog labels (when you host the content on your own site), but I did not find anything official. Because I have infinite time to waste on web development, I wrote my own scripts instead of using someone else's. I figure I'd share these scripts, so that everyone else can look at them then decide to write their own, too. You can see the finished result in my sidebar on the right, in the Labels section.

There are 3 steps:

1. Get the labels and make html (bash script)
2. Make the resulting html embeddable in a webpage (javascript)
3. Modify my blogger template

It was pretty easy to fetch all the labeled content, using the ls command in the labels/ directory (I am running my webserver on a GNU/Linux system). Then I massaged the output until I had line breaking, label separators, and number-of-posts per label. I put these steps together in my label_lister bash script, because I didn't want to use php (or similar) to access my filesystem. It might be useful to look at the raw output from my labels_lister script. Of course I had to enable cgi scripts in my apache config.

The next step was harder: getting the bash script's output into my blogger-generated index.html file. I chose not to use Server Side Includes to embed the labels html into the blogger-generated index.html file, because I thought I would have to enable SSI for all .html files and that was discouraged by the apache manual.

Instead, I used XMLHttp with javascript. I've done this in greasemonkey scripts in the past, which hides browser implementation details and some other stuff I did not previously realize. Still, the javascript was not too hard. Here is my script: get_labels.js.

Finally, I modified my blogger template. In the blogger template's head, I sourced my javascript:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://notes.komarix.org/js/get_labels.js"></script>

Then I added one extra CSS class in the template's head:

#sidebar div {
  margin:0 0 1.5em;
  padding:0 0 1.5em;
  border-bottom:1px dotted #ccc;
  }

Finally, I added my Labels section to the sidebar, below the links section, and above previous posts section:

  <MainOrArchivePage>
  <h2 class="sidebar-title">Labels</h2>
  <a href="/">(click here to undo label selection)</a><br /><br />
  <div id='labelsList' class='sidebar-div'>
    <ul>
      <li><a href="/labels/yoga.html">Yoga</a></li>
    </ul>
    <script>getLabelItems(document.getElementById('labelsList'));</script>
  </div>
  </MainOrArchivePage>

And that's it. Possibly more work than it was worth, except that I refreshed my memory on javascript and cgi details, and learned a little bit of new stuff. If I were doing it over, I'd probably start with the bash script and tell apache to do SSI for all .html files. I doubt the server load would be that large, especially for my blog. =-)

First Cars

Someone recently asked which of two 200+ horsepower cars was appropriate for a first car, on a mailing list inhabited by car lovers. From my perspective as an "old man" (I'm 34), most of the conversation bordered on ridiculous, with comments like these about adequate cars for commuting and errands (paraphrased):

My daily driver is an IS250 with a whopping 204HP...But honestly I would call it gutless

For a daily driven street driver? ...The [200+HP, sub-3400-pound] C230 and GTi do just fine for street cars.

I finally put on my grumpy old man hat and contributed my two cents. Some people got a kick out of my first-car description, so I'm re-posting it here.

My first car was a 1972 VW Super Beetle that my dad formerly used for commuting. Around 50HP if you adjusted the valves and distributor once per week. It was powder-blue, with a giant rust hole just ahead of the right rear fender -- in rainstorms, the right-rear passenger footwell filled with inches of water (I eventually drilled drainage holes). Due to a quirk in the automatic choke, part of the electrical system would short out when the engine got hot (hard to diagnose...) -- if you shut the engine off in this state, you had to roll-start the car or wait for it to cool down. The gas gauge worked some of the time, which might be worse than not working at all.

I had recurring corrosion problems under the distributor cap. One trip across Snoqualmie pass, the heater seemed especially hot (it melted a plastic bag under my seat) and the car was more gutless than usual. When I reached the summit, I pulled over and checked the spark plug wires at the distributor end. One of the connectors burst into a puff of blue smoke when I pulled it out, and another was covered with blue corrosion. The engine ran surprisingly well (I reached the summit, anyway) in this state, all things considered.

I even rebuilt the carburetor on that car, when my dad and I swapped the engine.

The car I learned in was an old Ford cab-over van. It had the "three-on-a-tree" manual gear selector on the steering column. Sometimes the shift linkage (don't know what it is really called) would stick, and my dad would slide under the van (engine still running) and shake stuff around until the transmission worked again. The van was previously owned by a friend that ran a Volvo dealership. The paint crew at that dealership played a prank on him, and painted a Volvo stripe along the body and removed most Ford logos. They also installed a Volvo radio. We kept it this way, which resulted in humorous confusion for many people.

My dad would take us out to back roads, hence I learned to drive a stick on gravel. He was very brave. After recovering from sliding around a corner and fishtailing between deep ditches, he only said "I think you might have taken that last corner a little faster than you should have."

How I started journaling

Midway through last September, I started journaling. I am still writing frequently in my journals, a surprising success given several aborted attempts in the last 34 years. I can identify several reasons I am still writing. I am giving myself permission to write poorly, as if nobody would ever read what I write -- including myself. Grammar, spelling, punctuation, and sentences are all optional. I think of the journal as a terrific listener, and really this is just a reflection of something more important: I am finally willing to listen to myself without judgment, giving myself permission to speak freely. However, none of that is my motivation for this blog post.

My first journal invited me to write on its pages. The cover, the line spacing, the art on the edge of each page -- all encouraged me to hold and admire this originally-empty book. My first entry arose from this visceral attraction. This blog post is motivated by a desire to share that entry.

I chose this book because its art invited me to write on its pages. Tonight I see the sun on the cover, and remember the Phoenix, willing to end its life in fire and ashes, so it may be reborn and rise to a new life. Tonight is a good night for me to give up the life I've had. Once I've let that life go, I'll be ready, and willing, to receive the morning's new life. Again.

How to fix your Panasonic TZ3 camera

My Panasonic TZ3 camera recently malfunctioned. When I turned the camera on, the lens extended and retracted three times, then LCD showed only the message "Please Turn Camera Off Then On Again". The instruction booklet said this indicated a problem with lens extension. I tried turning the camera on and off at least thirty times over two weeks, and each time the lens, lcd, and controls seemed to work fine -- except that the camera wanted to be turned off and on again. Playback mode worked perfectly. It was frustrating to believe that the camera was fine and the error was wrong.

Eventually I wondered if there was some sort of "reset the lens sensor, everything is okay" function. In under a minute, I found it, or something close enough for my needs. I held down the shutter release, then turned the power on. The mode selector was in the "manual" position, though I have no idea whether this was important. After extending the lens, the camera focused as if it were taking a regular photo. When I released the shutter button, the lens remained extended, and the camera appears to be working fine. Note that pressing and holding the shutter release after turning the power on did not help -- I only succeeded once I held it down before powering on.

"Fix" is probably not the right word, for two reasons: I don't know how exactly I fixed anything, and I don't really know what was wrong in the first place. With luck, I'll never need to answer those questions.