Sententiae

I am continually frustrated by people who put down a book because it is classified as “Children’s Literature”. I love children’s literature. For my money, children’s lit will give you some of the best bang for the buck; as an adult, you can read it quickly, it is often free from the pretentiousness of “Adult” fiction, and unless you’ve completely lost your ability to view the world with wonder, the stories are great.

Now, I’m talking about good children’s literature, mind you, not the drivel that is often passed for children’s lit because it’s a dumbed-down version of adult fiction. Good children’s lit will challenge the young reader — CS Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, Tolkein’s The Hobbit, Lowry’s The Giver are all great examples — and frequently this fiction will have levels far beyond what is attainable for a child; good children’s literature can be enjoyed by adults as well as children.

I re-read the Chonicles about once a year or so. As many times as I have read them, I always find something new. My favorite is The Horse and His Boy, which contains a beautiful representation of God’s providence. Throughout the story, even when Shasta and Aravis don’t know that they’re being guided, Aslan is directing their journey. This realization doesn’t come until the end of the book, however: most of the time they are convinced they are on their own. It is though hindsight that they realize how reliant they had been on Aslan’s help.

When I get home, I’ll get out my copy and quote from a later chapter; there’s a brilliant allusion to the trinity in one of Aslan and Shasta’s dialogs.

Well, after a more thorough reading of the aforementioned article, I have decided that the author tries to prove too much. While I like the direction he was headed, and as much as I would like for his thesis to be true, I think some of his “proofs” were a bit of a strech; in the very least, his conclusions were not warranted by the texts he quotes. Read it for yourself and see. It’s quite thought-provoking, in any case.

One point on which I completely agree with the author: Rowling’s books do seem to have been passed over by any serious analysis from a literary perspective. While they are surely not Dickens or Faulker, there is more to them than meets the eye. I also found it interesting to hear that Rowling has double degrees in Classics and French.

I just finished the 870-page Order of the Phoenix last night, and I must say I enjoyed it. While I was a bit disappointed in Harry’s character development (at times he seemd that he was more mature as a 12-year-old), overall, it was a good story and provided a lot of answers (and more questions, of course!).

I just found (thanks to George Grant’s blog) an article on the Harry Potter series that looks promising. I’ll come back with an more info after I read it…

Having an actively growing 2-year-old, I have been very interested in childhood mental and physical development lately. This fascination hasn’t digressed to the point that you’ll find me in the library reading medical journals (yet), but I have been observing her quite a bit. It’s really amazing; although she’s only 22 months old, she knows most of her letters, shapes and colors. she only has about a 30-40 word English vocabulary, but her ASL vocabulary is probably twice that, and she will frequently string together multiple signs into sentences.

What really intrigues me, though, is seeing her make connections between diverse facts that we haven’t showed her. We were in a toy shop last week, and Fiona found a top on one of the shelves. It was one of the old-fashioned metal kind, with a large corkscrew shaft that you push to get the top spinning. On her own, Fiona took the top off the shelf, set it right side up (how did she know which end was up?), and proceeded to pump the top to set it spinning.

How did she know what to do with that? To our knowledge, she’s never even seen a top like this before. We didn’t show her how to work it. What individual bits of information did she already possess that she strung together to figure this out? Nearly every day she’ll do something like this that takes me aback — “How did she know that?” I have a feeling that this period of accelerated development is only going to speed up as she continues to grow… Perhaps I had better get to the library after all…

I recently found a good article on the SCO-Linux IP violation claims. Assuming the author’s analysis is accurate, his conclusion basically confirms what I have suspected all along about this case; that SCO’s claims are spurious.

What I can’t figure out is why SCO is insisting on pursuing this matter. Do they really think that the companies that are currently deploying Linux or Linux-based applications will suddenly and wholesale abandon Linux and adopt UnixWare? This behavior is very reminiscent of Microsoft, using their legal department to bully smaller companies into “compliance” with their stringent licensing agreements.

What this incident indicates more than anything, I think, is that the US’s current IP laws in relation to software and digital rights (e.g. DMCA) need to be re-examined. I don’t think I would go so far as to say that there should be no IP protection on software at all (they would), but in today’s legal climate I think the emphasis has definitely shifted away from consumer rights and fair use toward the IP-owners.

The lawsuits by the RIAA against four college students for creating search engines on their campuses is the height of this injustice. The students settled, of course; they don’t have the resources to fight a multi-billion dollar conglomeration. Interestingly, the RIAA didn’t go after Google - they could have fought back.

Cascading Style Sheets are incredible. If you’re using a modern browser, you should see a pretty page, mostly blue, white and grey, with a menu of links down the right side. If you have an old (or standards-incompatable) browser, you should just see a plain-text page, free of markup and semantically accurate.

It gets even better: if you have one of the aforementioned modern browsers, select your “Print Preview” option on the “File” menu. Ta-da! Through the magic of CSS, an automatic print version of this site, with extraneous menu items and graphic markup removed, and the links even displayed in brackets following the link text (If you have IE5/6 you will see the print-pretty version, but no link URLs).

For all it’s magic, CSS still has spotty implementation across all browsers. For example, the menu to the right works in Mozilla, Netscape, Safari, and IE5 Mac but for some reason breaks in IE5/6 Windows. For some reason, IE Win want to put extra space in between the headings and their menu items. The grey bar above the top item should be flush with the bottom of the heading, creating a box around the headings. Additionally, when your mouse hovers over one of the items, you should see a blue box to the left of the item, indicating where you are in the list; IE Win ignores this completely. Why IE Win alone persists in this broken interpretation, I don’t know, but it is frustrating. I’m just about to give up on it, and say if you’re using a broken browser, you get broken results. Sigh.

I love to watch my daughter walk. Being not quite two years old, she is — understandably — short. Of course, given the fact that neither my wife nor myself are tall people, she’s at a further disadvantage. On top of this sad state of affairs, she has inherited my build: long torso and short little legs. The end result is a comic scurrying about the house when she’s excited, or in a hurry, or, well, her walk is somewhat comic just about all the time.

For some reason, the effect is heightened when she’s wearing some particularly cute outfit, like one of the little dresses that come to just above her knees that my wife likes. I think that my tiny, running 2-year-old is one of the memories of Fiona’s childhood I’ll remember a long time.

I went to said goodbye to a friend today. Joe Dennis was my pastor for almost 20 years, he officiated at my wedding, and I considered him a dear friend. His death at 59 was not something I was really prepared for. He contracted cancer a year and a half ago, and although I realized the inevitability of this day, I still wasn’t prepared for it. I don’t think I have absorbed the reality of it even now.

The funeral was … different. Surreal was the first word that came to mind, but I don’t think that’s quite right. I think I just felt disconnected to the whole thing. The funeral was happening, and I was watching it happen, but I was watching myself watch it. That sounds crazy. I think I just put myself somewhere else to avoid dealing with the reality of the situation. Denial is a good thing.

Joe was a man that was impossible to dislike. I think someone at the funeral expressed it this way: he genuinely cared about everyone he came into contact with. I have come to realize that a man like Joe is a rare find; a man that truly cares for others. Selflessness; that was Joe’s legacy - at least it was one of them.

I’m sure as a man ages, he begins to think about his legacy — what will people remember about me after I’m gone, what have I done that will last — I’m sure Joe was no different. To an extent, this question can be beneficial, insofar as it helps up realize priorities, and what’s really important. At this moment, a lot of what occupies most of my time every day seems profoundly trivial. I interact with people at work every day, but the interaction is completely surficial, and the context of these meetings seems pointless. How long will anything I produce at my job really last? Five years? Ten if I’m lucky? Joe’s interactions mattered. When you talked with Joe, you knew that you mattered. Joe had a legacy.

You will be missed, Joe. You already are.

In memoriam: Joe Dennis
19 Sept 1943 - 4 June 2003

Well, I’m off. After having a static website for many years now, I am jumping into the blog world. Mostly this stems from a desire to home my writing skills, and a firm belief that writing, as everything else in life, will eventually succumb to the adage that “practice makes perfect”. To that end, I will attempt to post something at least every couple of days.

Before I start, though, I do want to take a moment to say what this blog is not:

• It is not a blow-by-blow of my life. Frankly, I don’t think you’d be interested.
• It is not for you. It’s all about me. Honestly, the main reason I’m doing this is for my own benefit and improvement. If you want to read it, great. If you want to argue with me about something, that’s great too (I love to argue). But don’t come crying if you don’t like what’s here or if I fail to post for weeks on end .

What this blog is (or at least what it will attempt to be):

• short essays (heavy on the editorializing)
• rants
• reviews (books, movies, music)
• random thoughts
• links to interesting articles / sites

and not necessarily in that order.

At the moment, I am rather ambivalent about user comments (I thought about turning them off). Since they are here, though, I decided to leave them accessible and see what happens. Who knows, perhaps I’ll come to consider feedback one of the better parts of my site.