Positively Glorious!

So, now that everyone knows that it’s dead easy to calculate the average azimuth, we’ll all be doing it, right?. There’ll be a rash of Silicon Valley start-ups all generating social networking applications where we all show off our general direction so that we can see if we’re headed in the direction of our friends. But that’s not enough for me. I want to visualize the data. I want at least a modicum of verification,  not just a swallow of the Kool-Aid. Continue Reading »

Recently at work, I needed to build averages of angles for a project. During the past couple days, I stumbled on some things that other people might be able to use, so I thought I’d write them up. It involves some interesting (if simple to the math/physics crowd) findings on angle averages, and the development of a small utility to create rose diagrams using Google Chart. Continue Reading »

I’ve been consistently getting errors using the PyDev debugger with both stock Eclipse and Aptana studio, PyDev 1.4.7.x and Python 3.x. Many times when I try to use the debugger to view the internals of an object, I don’t see any attributes except “Error” with the description “Could not resolve variable.” It was as if the PyDev debugger couldn’t see inside the object. Since looking at the internals of an object is the fundamental usefulness of a debugger, it meant that my debugger was basically useless.

I decided to do some hunting in the error logs and PyDev code to see if I could hunt down an easy solution. Continue Reading »

Due to a scheduling error that I made, I accidentally published this before “The Old Gods.” That post is supposed to be read before this one.

Having visited Germany, having read of such beauty in Pre-Christian Germanic culture, I felt that I wanted to honor those ancestors as well. So much of what Native people here cherish is tied up in stories of Salmon, Raven and Wolf. It’s interesting to know that what Native people in Northern Europe cherished was so similar. Salmon, Raven and Wolf show up a great deal in the stories of Northern Europe. Universality, commonality.

Humanity. Continue Reading »

Ack. This was supposed to be published before the “art as embellishment” post, but I accidentally scheduled that other post and it published while I was on vacation.

Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of historical research on Pre-Christian Germanic culture. Much of this is what people think of as “Viking” culture, but that topic is such a jumble of confused ridiculousness that I try to avoid it. What I’m looking into is not “Vikings.” In fact, it’s a few hundred to thousands of years before that particular subset of Germanic travelers. What I’m seeking is an understanding of the underlying philosophical and spiritual framework of the Germanic peoples… before Christianity.

What I’ve been finding is, to say the least, mind-blowing. The long story is a topic for another post, or another blog, or a book, or even a series of books. It’s vast, as the universe of any culture is vast. One of the most interesting things, however, is that the early Germanic people– far from being the barbaric brutes of movies– were very deeply spiritual, philosophical, and thoughtful. Continue Reading »

Celebrate! Today is Lughnasað.

The word Lugnasað is Gælic in origin and hearkens the Gælic god Lugh:¹

In Celtic mythology, the Lughnasadh festival is said to have been begun by the god Lugh, as a funeral feast and games commemorating his foster-mother, Tailtiu, who died of exhaustion after clearing the plains of Ireland for agriculture.

The word is Gælic, but the time is universal. Every culture that noted the path of the sun knew this time, because it is the cross-quarter day, the midpoint between the summer solstice and the autumnal equinox. The Anglo-Saxon celebration is called Lammas, Loaf-Mass day, the first wheat harvest of the year.

This is the beginning of the harvest season, and Lughnasað is a time for celebration and thanks. The first fruits of the harvest are here, and the warmth of the late summer sun will begin to wane into the golden glow of autumn. In fact, this is autumn. Harvest season. The summer solstice denotes Midsummer.

Each day, we feel the warmest part of the day in the afternoon, yet the sun is at it’s most powerful at solar noon. Just as the warmth of the day falls after midday, so does the warmth of the season fall after Midsummer. In agrarian societies, this cross-quarter day marks autumn, the season of harvesting.

And the season of celebrating! For we are full with the fruits of Earth as well as the fruits of our family and friends, so greet them, share food and wine with them!

Celebrate Lughnasað!

1. From Wikipedia [↩]

This is one of those essays that someone writes only because they have no plans on ever running for any public office, but I think it’s something important and something that needs to be said.

Our soldiers should die in war.

Now, before you fly off the handle and send one of Insitu’s unmanned aircraft to bomb my house, I’m going to lay a bit of foundation.

I’m a disabled veteran who’s served proudly in two branches of the U.S. military. I was in the Army– on the ground– in Operation Desert Storm. My unit was a combat hospital, and I have first hand experience with the stomach sickening experience that is war. So no, I’m not coming at you with some crazy disconnected viewpoint from an Ivory tower. I’m coming at you from the view of someone who was wearing those “boots on the ground.”

And yet, I’d say something at stupid and ignorant as “our soldiers should die in war?”

Yes. Because without that single fact, the toll of war will be so much worse, both physically and spiritually. Continue Reading »

My Original Design

This is the real beginning of the background story on the design of my tattoo, for those interested in the long wannabe epic essays that I tend to write. I thought that a very “Native story style” title would be good, since I tend to write like I talk, and I talk like an Indian. I’ve broken the story up, however, into a series of (fairly) short posts, so that people will actually feel they can digest them.

The story is an in-depth explanation of the primary– at least the most obvious– incongruity of my tattoo design, which is the tail. Most people, seeing this will probably think something along the lines of: “What he hell’s up with the Celtic shit in the tail?” That’s not surprising, and I spent months thinking about the fact that I’m going to be faced with that question for the rest of my natural life (emphasis, emphasis).

Part of the reason for this series is to describe just that– formulate the response at length, in essay format, as a method to formulate the more concise response necessary in conversation. This is post as preparation.

The Original Design

Raven highlighted

As you can see in the image above, my original design didn’t have this European element. That design was, overall, more “traditional.” At least it was in the sense that it might more closely resemble what people would expect to see in NW tribal art. That original version still had Raven in Salmon’s body, as my current tattoo does. Raven and Salmon are so intimately linked that they are very frequently seen in this manner. However, I also originally had Wolf/Coyote in Salmon’s body as well.

Wolf highlighted

I love, and am very proud of, that design, but it just wouldn’t fit on my arm. My goal, in addition to that discussed in the previous post, was to have Salmon’s tail below my elbow so that it moved when I moved my arm– body art is so nice when it interacts with the body. Because the way the tail was angled, this design would make Salmon have to sit essentially upside down on my arm. The tattoo artist and I decided that Salmon’s tail had to be bending upward, rather than downward, for it to fit well on my arm. So I went back to the drawing board with the intention of recreating exactly this design with an upward bending tail.

I didn’t recreate the original design. But what I did was so much deeper and more meaningful than I ever thought it would be.

Time Capsule set up with a networked harddrive on a wireless network?

Pretty simple really, Apple squares everything away by itself. One small thing that caused me problems, however, so here it is– hopefully so that it can be pulled up in a search.

My configuration is a Seagate FreeAgent 1 TB drive, connected to an AirPort Extreme. I can see the drive in Finder, and have iTunes set up to use it as the music folder. Everything’s peachy, almost.

When I tried to set up Time Capsule, it couldn’t find the drive. I searched around a bit and couldn’t find anything, then, on a hunch, I looked at the drive’s name.

The default name is “FreeAgent Drive.” There’s a space in this name. Mac OS X is a Unix system, which deals with spaces well, but specially. I’m making the assumption that the spaces are not properly escaped in the Time Capsule software.

So, I connected via firewire, renamed the drive to FreeAgent, and it came up immediately in Time Capsule.

Moral: Time Capsule can’t have spaces in the drive name used for the backup device.