Leon Barrett

I recognize that these are crazy ideas, but somehow I believe them all, at least with a part of my mind.

"Good people are never proud."

"Good people never show off (demonstrate their good qualities) or boast (talk about their good qualities)."

"Good people set aside all self-interest."

"Good people are self-critical."

"Good people are unfailingly diligent and hardworking."

"Good people always do their best. Not just close to their best (that's cheating), but their real best--they could not possibly have done better."

"Good people are not controlled by their emotions."

"Good people transcend their biological impulses."

"Good people are good in all ways. Any failure is all failures."

"Good people make no excuses. Being 'merely human' is an excuse."

"Good people do not believe they deserve things."

"Good people tolerate the failings of others, but not their own."

"When in doubt, good people err on the side of caution with regards to these principles."

Edit: I'd be happy to discuss these crazy ideas, but let's not argue too much about whether I should hold them. I recognize that they're subtly (and not so subtly) crazy.

Lately, I've been waking up early, no matter when I go to bed. Fall asleep at 2:30a.m.? Up at 7:30a.m. Fall asleep at midnight? Up at 7.

Now, that doesn't sound entirely crazy, except that it means I haven't gotten 8 hours of sleep one night in the past week. That's unusual, especially given that I've been physically active like no one's business, including working and dancing outside in the sun for at least 4 hours on Saturday. But still my body wakes me shortly after sunrise. I have noticed one of the telltale signs of being sleep-deprived: I'm more emotional than I would be ordinarily. But still, here I am at 7:20 this morning.

Flying at Dunlap this weekend was good. Saturday had very good weather, and on Sunday I borrowed Jonathan's variometer and stayed up for 1:15. I even got to 800 feet above launch height. I felt like a lord of the air. I could look past the launch ridge and see dry brown hills giving way to the snow-covered Sierras. It was my longest flight ever, and I was so very happy about it. My landing wasn't great (I didn't flare in time, so I scraped my shin a little), but everything else was wonderful.

On Sunday morning, we were woken up by the LZ owner's dogs. Johanna got some good pictures of me in various stages of alertness.

It's a curious fact that here in Berkeley, I feel an aura of failure that was missing while I was home in Tennessee. There, I was skilled and clever and strong. Here, I'm merely mediocre. Whatever it is I do, there's someone better at it than me--so much so that I can never hope to match them. I'm not a fan of being a small fish in a big pond, but I'd better get used to it, because unless I retreat to Smalltown, TN, that's my fate. Not that I face it alone--almost everyone ends up being outshone. That still doesn't mean I have to like it.

They "mis-entered" my order to shut off my internet, so it's shut off 4 days before I leave. It takes them two business days to restart it, even though all that would be required is reenabling my login. They suck so much, it's not even funny. Here, now, when I need to coordinate with people to sell my furniture and get help moving, not to mention finding out where to drop off my hazardous waste (lacquer thinner), they disconnect me from the world.

Thank heaven for neighbors who will tell you their wireless password.

My family was kind enough to spend a whole day letting me fly at Lookout Mountain in northern Georgia, near Chattanooga. I'll tell the story with pictures.

For starters, they have a giant concrete ramp--much fancier than the (still sturdy and impressive) wooden ramp at Dunlap.


The ramp has a pretty nice view, even if the mountains are small and green.
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Unfortunately, I didn't fly terribly well, and I sank out quickly. Since the hill is so short, only 1300 feet, I didn't spend much time at all in the air. But it was still a worthwhile experience, and hopefully I'll soon learn to soar properly.

Even though it was fun, Lookout Mountain's rental service was substantially disappointing. First, they didn't have any intermediate gliders, though they had said they did on the phone. Next, they tried to rent me a harness without a parachute. Finally, they left me stranded at the bottom of the hill after my second flight, and, when I called their office asking about my options for getting my equipment back up to their office, they didn't help me get back up--they just told me about the penalties for not returning my glider by 6pm if I didn't manage to make it up in time. In the end, everything was fine, but I have to say I wasn't impressed.

But, the best part was that my family finally got to see me fly. I wish I could have done a better job of it, but it'll put all my other flying news in context for them. They even got video, but I'm not sure if I'll go to the bother of posting it or not. I guess I should, but it takes a while to upload several minutes of video over DSL.

I was in Tennessee with my family (save for my sister) for two weeks. I didn't take as many pictures as I probably should have, but I'll share what I've got.

I went on a few hikes with these folks


including around a green Tennessee valley
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And, while in Chattanooga, I went flying. But that's another set of pictures.

The frequency of my updates has been dropping lately, so here's what I'm up to:

I've been dancing a lot. Now that the SwingCal class is over, I've been going to the 9:20 Special, a swing dance on Thursday night in San Francisco. I've also been going to Lindy on Sproul as usual on Saturday, and I've made it to a few blues classes and dances; I hope to be a regular at Friday Night Blues.

However, dancing takes a back seat to higher priorities. The next higher priority is hang gliding. I've only made 2 trips this spring, and the weather wasn't quite amazing on either of them. Still, I've been getting as many flights as I can, and soon I hope to soar like a pro.

Of course, the highest priority, putting a hold to both those hobbies, will be my trip to Johnson City to visit my family for two weeks. I leave on Wednesday. If I'm lucky, I'll actually get to do some flying in Tennessee, at Lookout Mountain, but with possible changes pending in my mom's treatment, it might not be possible. My brother has synchronized his visit, so it'll be a bit of a reunion, though as always, my pesky little sister isn't a team player :-P

All this is complicating my move. Because I had trouble finding a new roommate, I'm moving into a 100-square-foot bedroom in a 2-bedroom apartment with someone else who plans to graduate in December. It'll save me some rent, but moving is always such a pain. I'll be spending the weekend cleaning and packing, so when I come back from my trip, I'll be ready to move immediately, I hope. So far, that mostly consists of taking the things I have and giving them away to Goodwill and neighbors, or selling books for pennies to Half Price Books.

I guess I'm busy. Fortunately, I've still been making progress on code I need for my thesis. That's something, anyway.

Last Saturday, Alex and I smoked two ducks. (Yes, we needed giant rolling papers, ha ha.) They were a lot of work, though thankfully Alex did a lot of that before I even got there. (See: purchasing, defrosting, brining, acquiring smoker.) See, this is how lazy I was:

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Eric was getting rid of a barebones computer (no drives, but everything else) he had for $40, so I bought it, since I could just drop my existing drives into it and it would work. Well, my hard drive died, and I spent at least a day and a half trying to make everything work, though that also included a software upgrade. It turns out the drive just had a minor failure, just one error, and given the proper instructions, the drive will work around it. But now, I have backups of that data out the wazoo--seriously, about three backups of it. Should that drive fail again, I won't miss it. But maybe I should back up some of the other precious data I have....

I always feel bad when my technology betrays me. As a computer science guy, it should all just work!

So, allow me to introduce you to Berkeley's South Side. It's where the undergrads live, along with the park-dwelling hobos and "Money for beer"-sign-carrying panhandlers. It also has this awesome vacant lot.



In this lot, there are rats.

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The world is a horrible place. As evidence, consider these creatures.

Dan Savage has written a very good post about why opposing health care for all is anti-family. I was impressed, and decided to share it here.

I hear that crows are some of the most intelligent birds. What I've noticed lately is that they're also some of the most belligerent. Several times in the past few weeks, I've seen crows in what seems like combat. They'll aggressively fight for altitude, then one will dive at the other, which will turn upside-down, so they meet claw-to-claw for an instant before they fall apart. The incident ends when one crow flies away or roosts somewhere. The giant, lovely eucalyptus tree out my back window has been a focus of such activity at least once.

Someone suggested to me that this isn't combat, but instead is mating behavior. Finally today I saw evidence that they're wrong, when a crow chased away a seagull. Unless that crow was pretty broad-minded (and the seagull wasn't), I'm pretty sure that wasn't mating behavior.

And now, a picture of angry crows ten time zones away (where the dominant crow species is the "hooded crow").

I've begun suffering from some repetitive stress ailment in which my right wrist is strained when I angle it right. I've finally figured out that it's from typing--all that reaching to the right for the damn important keys. Enter, backspace, and shift all require that I move my wrist pretty severely, and, especially when programming, those keys get hit quite a lot. I could move my whole hand, instead of just my wrist, I guess, but that's really slow.

Obviously, the right solution is one of those Kinesis keyboards that puts the control keys under your thumbs. I mean, seriously, that's obviously the right design. Why am I wasting two thumbs on one space bar?! Unfortunately, spending $300 on a keyboard seems a little excessive, especially since I don't need all the ergonomic features, just the important keys under my thumbs.

Do you happen to know of a keyboard that does this but doesn't cost an arm and a leg?

EDIT: In the mean time, I'm attempting to get around this by mapping some keys. Caps-lock is now backspace, and the damn Windows key is now a return key. And I'll try to use left-shift, if I can remember. That should be much better on my wrist for now.

2 Sundays ago, I did a fund-raising 5K run for Multiple Myeloma, in honor of my mother. I was pleased with my running (I didn't stop to rest, this time), but more importantly, I raised an astonishing amount of money on my mom's behalf.

I hadn't expected other people to donate much (I really do hate asking for donations), but the total donation was $370! (No, that's not $370 factorial, though that would be an impressive donation.) Thank you very much for your help! That, and not the running, was the real triumph. I am astonished and impressed to get so much support for Ellen.

Thank you!

In other news, I also went on a hike to Mt. Diablo. It was very nice, and pleasantly green for California. I'd recommend it to anyone. Here are a few of the better pictures.

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I've found my first gray hair! It's an arm hair, but that still counts. Hooray! Now all those people who claim I'm not old can finally shut the hell up.

Chester, my one remaining guinea pig, had a tooth extraction on Thursday. His tooth had started growing in crookedly, so it, and the matching lower tooth, had to be pulled. On Friday morning, he was recovering well, but on Friday night he seemed a little lethargic, and when I woke up on Saturday morning he was dead. Recently dead--still soft and floppy, and not yet cold. Within half an hour, though, he began to get cold and stiff.
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"Dance like no one's watching...." -William Purkey

That's a pretty stupid idea. The reason you dance that way only in private is because people will laugh at you for it. Is Purkey trying to make fools of us all? You might as well say, "talk like no one's listening," or "dress like you're staying home all day." We try to control how we appear to other people, and for damn good reason.