And so, today, while I was browsing updates for my Debian unstable laptop, I noticed that aptitude wouldn't automatically upgrade python2 and related packages (I don't know why, and at this point don't care). So I decided to dare: I removed the python2 package to see what the dependency solver would have proposed me. It turned out that there was basically nothing I couldn't live without. So, bye bye Python 2. It was a long ride and I loved programming with you. But now it's the turn of your younger brother. (guess what "comando non trovato" means?) And thanks to all those who made this possible!

Review: Paladin's Grace, by T. Kingfisher

Publisher:	Red Wombat Studio
Copyright:	2020
ASIN:	B0848Q8JVW
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	399

Stephen was a paladin. Then his god died. He was a berserker, an unstoppable warrior in the service of his god. Now, well, he's still a berserker, but going berserk when you don't have a god to control the results is not a good idea. He and his brothers were taken in by the Temple of the Rat, where they serve as guards, watch out for each other, and try to get through each day with an emptiness in their souls where a god should be. Stephen had just finished escorting a healer through some of the poorer parts of town when a woman runs up to him and asks him to hide her. Their awkward simulated tryst is sufficient to fool the two Motherhood priests who were after her for picking flowers from the graveyard. Stephen then walks her home and that would have been the end of it, except that neither could get the other out of their mind. Despite first appearances, and despite being set in the same world and sharing a supporting character, this is not the promised sequel to Swordheart (which is apparently still coming). It's an entirely different paladin story. T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon's nom de plume when writing for adults) has a lot of things to say about paladins! And, apparently, paladin-involved romances. On the romance front, Kingfisher clearly has a type. The general shape of the story will be familiar from Swordheart and The Wonder Engine: An independent and occasionally self-confident woman with various quirks, a hunky paladin who is often maddeningly dense, and a lot of worrying on both sides about whether the other person is truly interested in them and if their personal liabilities make a relationship a horrible idea. This is not my preferred romance formula (it provokes the occasional muttered "for the love of god just talk to each other"), but I liked this iteration of it better than the previous two, mostly because of Grace. Grace is a perfumer, a trade she went into by being picked out of a lineup of orphans by a master perfumer for her sense of smell. One of Kingfisher's strengths as a writer is showing someone get lost in their routine day-to-day competence. When mixed with an inherently fascinating profession, this creates a great reading experience. Grace is also an abuse survivor, which made the communication difficulties with Stephen more interesting and subtle. Grace has created space and a life for herself, and her unwillingness to take risks on changes is a deep part of her sense of self and personal safety. As her past is slowly revealed, Kingfisher puts the reader in a position to share Stephen's anger and protectiveness, but then consistently puts Grace's own choices, coping mechanisms, and irritated refusal to be protected back into the center of the story. She has to accept some help as she gets entangled in the investigation of a highly political staged assassination attempt, but both that help and the relationship come on her own terms. It's very well-done. The plot was enjoyable enough, although it involved a bit too much of constantly rising stakes and turns for the worst for my taste, and the ending had a touch of deus ex machina. Like Kingfisher's other books, though, the delight is in the unexpected details. Stephen knitting socks. Grace's frustrated obsession with why he smells like gingerbread. The beautifully practical and respectful relationship between the Temple of the Rat and Stephen's band of former paladins. (After only two books in which they play a major role, the Temple of the Rat is already one of my favorite fantasy religions.) Everything about Bishop Beartongue. Grace's friend Marguerite. And a truly satisfying ending. The best part of this book, though, is the way Grace is shown as a complete character in a way that even most books with well-rounded characterization don't manage. Some things she does make the reader's heart ache because of the hints they provide about her past, but they're also wise and effective safety mechanisms for her. Kingfisher gives her space to be competent and prickly and absent-minded. She has a complete life: friends, work, goals, habits, and little rituals. Grace meets someone and falls in love, but one can readily imagine her not falling in love and going on with her life and that result wouldn't be tragic. In short, she feels like a grown adult who has made her own peace with where she came from and what she is doing. The book provides her an opportunity for more happiness and more closure without undermining her independence. I rarely see this in a novel, and even more rarely done this well. If you haven't read any of Kingfisher's books and are in the mood for faux-medieval city romance involving a perfumer and a bit of political skulduggery, this is a great place to start. If you liked Swordheart, you'll probably like Paladin's Grace; like me, you may even like it a bit more. Recommended, particularly if you want something light and heart-warming. Rating: 8 out of 10

After losing a fair bit of hair due to quality and reliability issues with our home laser multifunctional (Brother DCP1600-series, which we bought after checking it was meant to work on Linux And it does, but with a very buggy, proprietary driver Besides being the printer itself of quite low quality), we decided it was time to survey the market again, and get a color inkjet printer. I was not very much an enthusiast of the idea, until I found all of the major manufacturers now offer refillable ink tanks instead of the darn expensive cartridges of past decades. Lets see how it goes! Of course, with over 20 years of training, I did my homework. I was about to buy an Epson printer, but decided for an HP Ink Tank 410 Wireless printer. The day it arrived, not wanting to fuss around too much to get to see the results, I connected it to my computer using the USB cable. Everything ran smoothly and happily! No driver hunting needed, print quality is superb I hope, years from now, we stay with this impression. Next day, I tried to print over WiFi. Of course, it requires configuration. And, of course, configuration strongly wants you to do it from a Windows or MacOS machine which I don t have. OK, fall back to Android For which an app download is required (and does not thrill me, but what can I say. Oh and the app needs location services to even run. Why Maybe because it interacts with the wireless network in WiFi Direct, non-authenticated way?) Anyway, things seem to work. But they don t My computers can identify and connect with the printer from CUPS, but nothing ever comes out. Printer paused, they say. Entering the printer s web interface is somewhat ambiguous Following the old HP practices, I tried http://192.168.1.75:9100/ (no point in hiding my internal IP), and got a partial webpage sometimes (and nothing at all othertimes). Seeing the printer got detected over ipps://, my immediate reaction was to try pointing the browser to port 631. Seems to work! Got some odd messages But it seems I ll soon debug the issue away. I am not a familiar meddler in the dark lands of cups, our faithful print server, but I had to remember my toolkit.. Sucess in enabling, but self-auto-disabled right away lpstat -t was not more generous, reporting only it was still paused. Some hours later (mix in attending kids and whatnot), I finally remember to try cupsctl --debug-logging, and magically, /var/log/cups/error_log turns from being quiet to being quite chatty. And, of course, my first print job starts being processed: Everything looks fine and dandy so far! But, hey, given nothing came out of the printer keep reading one more second of logs (a couple dozen lines) My first stabs were attempts to get CUPS not to care about expired certificates, but it seems to have been hidden or removed from its usual place. Anyway, I was already frustrated. WTF Well, yes, turns out that from the Web interface, I paid some attention to this the first time around, but let it pass (speaks wonders about my security practices!): So, the self-signed certificate the printer issued at itself expired 116 years before even being issued. (is this maybe a Y2k38 bug? Sounds like it!) Interesting thing, my CUPS log mentions the printer credentials to expire at the beginning of the Unix Epoch (01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 GMT). OK, lets clickety-click away on the Web interface Didn t take me long to get to Network Advanced settings Certificates: However, clicking on Configure leads me to the not very reassuring I don t remember what I did for the next couple of minutes. Kept fuming Until I parsed again the output of lpstat -t, and found that: Hmmmm CUPS is connecting using good ol port 443, as if it were a Web thingy What if I do the same? Click on New self-signed certificate , click on Next, a couple of reloads And a very nice color print came out of the printer, yay! Now, it still baffles me (of course I checked!): The self-signed certificate is now said to come from Issuer : CN=HPC37468, L=Vancouver, ST=Washington, C=US, O=HP,OU=HP-IPG, alright not that it matters (I can import a more meaningful one if I really feel like it), but, why is it Issued On: 2019-06-14 and set to Expires On: 2029-06-11? Anyway, print quality is quite nice. I hope to keep the printer long enough to rant at the certificate being expired in the future!

Comments Jeff Epler (Adafruit) 2020-05-11 20:39:17 -0500 why is it Issued On: 2019-06-14 and set to Expires On: 2029-06-11? Because it s 3650 days Gunnar Wolf 2020-05-11 20:39:17 -0500 Nice catch! Thanks for doing the head-scratching for me

Lotte Reiniger. The Unsung Heroine of Early Animation

Lotte Reiniger pioneered early animation, yet her name remains largely unknown. We pay homage to her life and work, and reflect on why she never received the recognition she deserves.

Stephen Wolfram shares what he learned in researching Ada Lovelace's life, writings about the Analytical Engine, and computation of Bernoulli numbers.

Elizabeth Cochran Seaman[1] (May 5, 1864[2] January 27, 1922), better known by her pen name Nellie Bly, was an American journalist who was widely known for her record-breaking trip around the world in 72 days, in emulation of Jules Verne's fictional character Phileas Fogg, and an expos in which she worked undercover to report on a mental institution from within.[3] She was a pioneer in her field, and launched a new kind of investigative journalism.[4] Bly was also a writer, inventor, and industrialist.

Delia Ann Derbyshire (5 May 1937 3 July 2001)[1] was an English musician and composer of electronic music.[2] She carried out pioneering work with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop during the 1960s, including her electronic arrangement of the theme music to the British science-fiction television series Doctor Who.[3][4] She has been referred to as "the unsung heroine of British electronic music,"[3] having influenced musicians including Aphex Twin, the Chemical Brothers and Paul Hartnoll of Orbital.[5]

Charity Adams Earley (5 December 1918 13 January 2002) was the first African-American woman to be an officer in the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps (later WACS) and was the commanding officer of the first battalion of African-American women to serve overseas during World War II. Adams was the highest ranking African-American woman in the army by the completion of the war.

About me Hello, world! For those who are meeting me for the first time, I am a 31 year old History teacher from Porto Alegre, Brazil. Some people might know me from the Python community, because I have been leading PyLadies Porto Alegre and helping organize Django Girls workshops in my state since 2016. If you don't, that's okay. Either way, it's nice to have you here. Ever since I learned about Rails Girls Summer of Code, during the International Free Software Forum - FISL 16, I have been wanting to get into a tech internship program. Google Summer of Code made into my radar as well, but I didn't really feel like I knew enough to try and get into those programs... until I found Outreachy. From their site:

Outreachy is an organization that provides three-month internships for people from groups traditionally underrepresented in tech. Interns work remotely with mentors from Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) communities on projects ranging from programming, user experience, documentation, illustration and graphical design, to data science.

There were many good projects to choose from on this round, a lot of them with few requirements - and most with requirements that I believed I could fullfill, such as some knowledge of HTML, CSS, Python or Django. I ought to say that I am not an expert in any of those. And, since you're reading this, I'm going to be completely honest. Coding is hard. Coding is hard to learn, it takes a lot of studying and a lot of practice. Even though I have been messing around computers pretty much since I was a kid, because I was a girl lucky enough to have a father who owned a computer store, I hadn't began learning how to program until mid-2015 - and I am still learning. I think I became such an autodidact because I had to (and, of course, because I was given the conditions to be, such as having spare time to study when I wasn't at school). I had to get any and all information from my surroundings and turn into knowledge that I could use to achieve my goals. In a time when I could only get new computer games through a CD-ROM and the computer I was allowed to use didn't have a CD-ROM drive, I had to try and learn how to open a computer cabinet and connect/disconnect hardware properly, so I could use my brother's CD-ROM drive on the computer I was allowed to and install the games without anyone noticing. When, back in 1998, I couldn't connect to the internet because the computer I was allowed to use didn't have a modem, I had to learn about networks to figure out how to do it from my brother's computer on the LAN (local network). I would go to the community public library and read books and any tech magazines I could get my hands into (libraries didn't usually have computers to be used by the public back then). It was about 2002 when I learned how to create HTML sites by studying at the source code from pages I had saved to read offline in one of the very, very few times I was allowed to access the internet and browse the web. Of course, the site I created back then never saw the light of the day, because I didn't have really have internet access at home. So, how come it is that only now, 14 years later, I am trying to get into tech? Because when I finished high school in 2003, I was still a minor and my family didn't allow me to go to Vocational School and take an IT course. (Never mind that my own oldest brother had graduated in IT and working with for almost a decade.) I ended up going to study... teacher training in History as an undergrad course. A lot has happened since then. I took the exam to become a public school teacher and more than two years had passed without being called to work. I spent 3 years in odd-jobs that paid barely enough to pay rent (and, sometimes, not even that). Since the IT is the new thing and all jobs are in IT, finally, finally it seemed okay for me to take that Vocational School training in a public school - and so I did. I gotta say, I thought that while I studied, I would be able to get some sort of job or internship to help with my learning. After all, I had seen it easily happening with people I met before getting into the course. And by "people", of course, I mean white men. For me, it took a whole year of searching, trying and interviewing for me to get an internship related to the field - tech support in a school computer lab, running GNU/Linux. And, in that very same week, I was hired as a public school teacher. There is a lot more... actually, there is so much more to this story, but I think I have told enough for now. Enough to know where I came from and who I am, as of now. I hope you stick around. I am bound to write here every two weeks, so I guess I will see you then! o/

Review: The Piper's Son, by Melina Marchetta

Series:	Francesca #2
Publisher:	Candlewick Press
Copyright:	2010
Printing:	2011
ISBN:	0-7636-5458-2
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	330

Tom Mackee's family has fallen apart. The impetus was the death of his uncle Joe in the London tube terrorist bombings, but that was only the start. He destroyed his chances with the only woman he really loved. His father's drinking got out of control, his mother left with his younger sister to live in a different city, and he refused to go with them and abandon his father. But then, six months later, his father abandoned him anyway. As this novel opens, Tom collapses while performing a music set, high on drugs and no sleep, and wakes up to discover his roommates have been fired from their jobs for stealing, and in turn have thrown him out of their apartment. He's at rock bottom. The one place he can turn for a place to stay is his aunt Georgie, the second (although less frequent) viewpoint character of this book. She was the one who took the trip to the UK to try to find out what happened and retrieve her brother's body, and the one who had to return to Australia with nothing. Her life isn't in much better shape than Tom's. She's kept her job, but she's pregnant by her ex-boyfriend but barely talking to him, since he now has a son by another woman he met during their separation. And she's not even remotely over her grief. The whole Finch/Mackee family is, in short, a disaster. But they have a few family relationships left that haven't broken, some underlying basic decency, and some patient and determined friends. I should warn up-front, despite having read this book without knowing this, that this is a sequel to Saving Francesca, set five years later and focusing on secondary characters from the original novel. I've subsequently read that book as well, though, and I don't think reading it first is necessary. This is one of the rare books where being a sequel made it a better stand-alone novel. I never felt a gap of missing story, just a rich and deep background of friendships and previous relationships that felt realistic. People are embedded in networks of relationships even when they feel the most alone, and I really enjoyed seeing that surface in this book. All those patterns from Tom's past didn't feel like information I was missing. They felt like glimpses of what you'd see if you looked into any other person's life. The plot summary above might make The Piper's Son sound like a depressing drama fest, but Marchetta made an excellent writing decision: the worst of this has already happened before the start of the book, and the rest is in the first chapter. This is not at all a book about horrible things happening to people. It's a book about healing. An authentic, prickly, angry healing that doesn't forget and doesn't turn into simple happily-ever-after stories, but does involve a lot of recognition that one has been an ass, and that it's possible to be less of an ass in the future, and maybe some things can be fixed. A plot summary might fool you into thinking that this is a book about a boy and his father, or about dealing with a drunk you still love. It's not. The bright current under this whole story is not father-son bonding. It's female friendships. Marchetta pulls off a beautiful double-story, writing a book that's about Tom, and Georgie, and the layered guilt and tragedy of the Finch/Mackee family, but whose emotional heart is their friends. Francesca, Justine, absent Siobhan. Georgie's friend Lucia. Ned, the cook, and his interactions with Tom's friends. And Tara Finke, also mostly absent, but perfectly written into the story in letters and phone calls. Marchetta never calls unnecessary attention to this, keeping the camera on Tom and Georgie, but the process of reading this book is a dawning realization of just how much work friendship is doing under the surface, how much back-channel conversation is happening off the page, and how much careful and thoughtful and determined work went into providing Tom a floor, a place to get his feet under him, and enough of a shove for him to pull himself together. Pulling that off requires a deft and subtle authorial touch, and I'm in awe at how well it worked. This is a beautifully written novel. Marchetta never belabors an emotional point, sticking with a clear and spare description of actions and thoughts, with just the right sentences scattered here and there to expose the character's emotions. Tom's family is awful at communication, which is much of the reason why they start the book in the situation they're in, but Marchetta somehow manages to write that in a way that didn't just frustrate me or make me want to start banging their heads together. She somehow conveys the extent to which they're trying, even when they're failing, and adds just the right descriptions so that the reader can follow the wordless messages they send each other even when they can't manage to talk directly. I usually find it very hard to connect with people who can only communicate by doing things rather than saying them. It's a high compliment to the author that I felt I understood Tom and his family as well as I did. One bit of warning: while this is not a story of a grand reunion with an alcoholic father where all is forgiven because family, thank heavens, there is an occasional wiggle in that direction. There is also a steady background assumption that one should always try to repair family relationships, and a few tangential notes about the Finches and Mackees that made me think there was a bit more abuse here than anyone involved wants to admit. I don't think the book is trying to make apologies for this, and instead is trying to walk the fine line of talking about realistically messed up families, but I also don't have a strong personal reaction to that type of story. If you have an aversion to "we should all get along because faaaaamily" stories, you may want to skip this book, or at least go in pre-warned. That aside, the biggest challenge I had in reading this book was not breaking into tears. The emotional arc is just about perfect. Tom and Georgie never stay stuck in the same emotional cycle for too long, Marchetta does a wonderful job showing irritating characters from a slightly different angle and having them become much less irritating, and the interactions between Tom, Tara, and Francesca are just perfect. I don't remember reading another book that so beautifully captures that sensation of knowing that you've been a total ass, knowing that you need to stop, but realizing just how much work you're going to have to do, and how hard that work will be, once you own up to how much you fucked up. That point where you keep being an ass for a few moments longer, because stopping is going to hurt so much, but end up stopping anyway because you can't stand yourself any more. And stopping and making amends is hard and hurts badly, and yet somehow isn't quite as bad as you thought it was going to be. This is really great stuff. One final complaint, though: what is it with mainstream fiction and the total lack of denouement? I don't read very much mainstream fiction, but this is the second really good mainstream book I've read (after The Death of Bees) that hits its climax and then unceremoniously dumps the reader on the ground and disappears. Come back here! I wasn't done with these people! I don't need a long happily-ever-after story, but give me at least a handful of pages to be happy with the characters after crying with them for hours! ARGH. But, that aside, the reader does get that climax, and it's note-perfect to the rest of the book. Everyone is still themselves, no one gets suddenly transformed, and yet everything is... better. It's the kind of book you can trust. Highly, highly recommended. Rating: 9 out of 10

Review: Provenance, by Ann Leckie

Publisher:	Orbit
Copyright:	September 2017
ISBN:	0-316-38863-7
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	448

In a rather desperate attempt to please her mother, Ingray has spent every resource she has on extracting the son of a political enemy from Compassionate Removal (think life imprisonment with really good marketing). The reason: vestiges, a cultural touchstone for Ingray's native planet of Hwae. These are invitation cards, floor tiles, wall panels, or just about anything that can be confirmed to have been physically present at an important or historical moment, or in the presence of a famous figure. The person Ingray is retrieving supposedly pulled off the biggest theft of vestiges in history. If she can locate them, it would be a huge coup for her highly-placed politician mother, and the one time she would be victorious in her forced rivalry with her brother. About the best thing that could be said for this plan is that it's audacious. The first obstacle is the arrival of the Geck on the station for a Conclave for renegotiation of the treaty with the Presger, possibly the most important thing going on in the galaxy at the moment, which strands her there without money for food. The second is that the person she has paid so much to extract from Compassionate Removal says they aren't the person she was looking for at all, and are not particularly interested in going with her to Hwae. Only a bit of creative thinking in the face of a visit from the local authorities, and the unexpected kindness of the captain from whom she booked travel, might get her home with the tatters of her plan intact. But she's clearly far out of her depth. Provenance is set in the same universe as Ancillary Justice and its sequels, but it is not set in the empire of the Radchaai. This is another human world entirely, one with smaller and more provincial concerns. The aftermath of Ancillary Mercy is playing out in the background (so do not, on risk of serious spoilers, read the start of this book without having read the previous trilogy), but this is in no way a sequel. Neither the characters nor the plot are involved in that aftermath. It's a story told at a much smaller scale, about two political families, cut-throat maneuvering, horrible parenting, the inexplicable importance of social artifacts, the weirdness of human/alien relations, and the merits of some very unlikely allies. Provenance is a very different type of story than Ancillary Justice, and Ingray is a very different protagonist. The shape of the plot reminded me of one of Lois McMaster Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan stories: hair-brained ideas, improvisation, and unlikely allies. But Ingray couldn't be more different than Miles. She starts the book overwhelmed, despairing, and not at all manic, and one spends the first part of the story feeling sorry for her and becoming quite certain that everything will go horribly wrong. The heart of this book is the parallel path Leckie takes the reader and the characters along as they discover just what Ingray's true talents and capabilities are. It's a book about being hopelessly bad at things one was pressured towards being good at, while being quietly and subtly good at the skills that let one survive a deeply dysfunctional family. There are lots of books with very active protagonists, and a depressing number of books with passive protagonists pushed around by the plot. There are very few books that pull off the delicate characterization that Leckie manages here: a protagonist who is rather hopeless at taking charge of the plot in the way everyone wants (but doesn't particularly expect) her to, but who charts her own path through the plot in an entirely unexpected way. It's a story that grows on you. The plot rhythm never works in quite the way one expects from other books, but it builds its own logic and its own rhythm, and reached a very emotionally satisfying conclusion. The Radchaai, or at least one Radchaai citizen, do show up eventually, providing a glimmer of outside view at the Ancillary Justice world. Even better, the Geck play a significant role. I adore Leckie's aliens: they're strange and confusing, but in a refreshingly blunt way rather than abusing gnomic utterances and incomprehensible intelligence. And the foot-stomping of the spider bot made me laugh every time. The stakes are a lot lower here than in Ancillary Justice, and Ingray isn't the sort of character who's going to change the world. But that's okay; indeed, one of the points of this book is why and how that's okay. I won't lie: I'd love more Breq, and I hope we eventually get an exploration of the larger consequences of her story. But this is a delightful story that made me happy and has defter character work than most SF being written. Recommended, but read the Ancillary trilogy first. One minor closing complaint, which didn't change my experience of the book but which I can't help quibbling about: I'm completely onboard with the three-gender system that Leckie uses for the Hwae (I wish more SF authors would play with social as well as technological ideas), and I think she wove it deftly into the story, but I wish she hadn't used Spivak pronouns for the third gender. (e/em/eir, for those who aren't familiar.) Any of the other gender-neutral pronouns look better to me and cause fewer problems for my involuntary proofreader. I prefer zie/zir for personal reasons, but sie/hir, zhe/zhim/zher, or even thon or per would read more smoothly. Eir is fine, but em looks like 'em and throws my brain into dialect mode and forces a re-parse, and e just looks like a typo. I know from lots of Usenet discussions of pronouns that I'm not the only one who has that reaction to Spivak. But it's a very minor nit. Rating: 8 out of 10

As we walk around with mobile phones in our pockets, there are multiple radios each with identifiers that can be captured and recorded just through their normal operation. Bluetooth and Wifi devices have MAC addresses and can advertise their presence to other devices merely by sending traffic, or by probing for devices to connect to if they re not connected. I found a simple tool, probemon that allows for anyone with a wifi card to track who is at which location at any given time. You could deploy a few of these with Raspberry Pis or even go even cheaper with a number of ESP8266. In the news recently was a report from TfL about their WiFi data collection. Sky News reported that TfL plans to make 322m by collecting data from passengers mobiles . TfL have later denied this but the fact remains that collecting this data is trivial. I ve been thinking about ideas for spoofing mass amounts of wireless devices making the collected data useless. I ve found that people have had success in using Scapy to forge WiFi frames. When I have some free time I plan to look into some kind of proof-of-concept for this. On the underground, this is the way to do this, but above ground I ve also heard of systems that use the TMSI from 3G/4G, not WiFi data, to identify mobile phones. You ll have to be a bit more brave if you want to forge these (please do not, unless using alternative licensed frequencies, you may interfere with mobile service and prevent 999 calls). If you wanted to spy on mobile phones near to you, you can do this with the gr-gsm package now available in Debian.

A month ago, we were waiting for our new baby; time seemed to stand still. Now she is here! Martha Goerzen was born recently, and she is doing well and growing! Laura and I have enjoyed moments of cuddling her, watching her stare at our faces, hearing her (hopefully) soft sounds as she falls asleep in our arms. It is also heart-warming to see Martha s older brothers take such an interest in her. Here is the first time Jacob got to hold her: Oliver, who is a boy very much into sports, play involving police and firefighters, and such, has started adding aww and she s so cute! to his common vocabulary. He can be very insistent about interrupting me to hold her, too.

We re expecting a baby any time now. The last few days have had an odd quality of expectation: any time, our family will grow. It makes time seem to freeze, to stand still. We have Jacob, about to start fifth grade and middle school. But here he is, still a sweet and affectionate kid as ever. He loves to care for cats and seeks them out often. He still keeps an eye out for the stuffed butterfly he s had since he was an infant, and will sometimes carry it and a favorite blanket around the house. He will also many days prepare the Yellow House News on his computer, with headlines about his day and some comics pasted in before disappearing to play with Legos for awhile. And Oliver, who will walk up to Laura and give baby a hug many times throughout the day and sneak up to me, try to touch my arm, and say doink before running off before I can doink him back. It was Oliver that had asked for a baby sister for Christmas before he knew he d be getting one! In the past week, we ve had out the garden hose a couple of times. Both boys will enjoy sending mud down our slide, or getting out the water slide to play with, or just playing in mud. The rings of dirt in the bathtub testify to the fun that they had. One evening, I built a fire, we made brats and hot dogs, and then Laura and I sat visiting and watching their water antics for an hour after, laughter and cackles of delight filling the air, and cats resting on our laps. These moments, or countless others like Oliver s baseball games, flying the boys to a festival in Winfield, or their cuddles at bedtime, warm the heart. I remember their younger days too, with fond memories of taking them camping or building a computer with them. Sometimes a part of me wants to just keep soaking in things just as they are; being a parent means both taking pride in children s accomplishments as they grow up, and sometimes also missing the quiet little voice that can be immensely excited by a caterpillar. And yet, all four of us are so excited and eager to welcome a new life into our home. We are ready. I can t wait to hold the baby, or to lay her to sleep, to see her loving and excited older brothers. We hope for a smooth birth, for mom and baby. Here is the crib, ready, complete with a mobile with a cute bear (and even a plane). I can t wait until there is a little person here to enjoy it.

Picture one Sunday morning. Three guys are seemingly-randomly walking into a Mennonite church in rural Nebraska. One with long hair and well-maintained clothes from the 70s. Another dressed well enough to be preaching. And the third simply dressed to be comfortable, with short hair showing evidence of having worn a headset for a couple of hours that morning. This was the scene as we made a spur-of-the-moment visit to that church which resulted in quite some surprise all around, since my brother knew a number of people there. For instance:

Pastor: Peter! What are you doing here? Peter: [jokingly] Is that how you greet visitors here?

And then, of course, Peter would say, Well, we were flying home from South Dakota and figured we d stop in at Beatrice for fuel. And drop in on you. Followed by some surprise that we would stop at their little airport (which is quite a nice one). This all happened because it was windy. This is the fun adventure of aviation. Sometimes you plan to go to Texas, but the weather there is terrible, so you discover a 100-year-old landmark in Indiana instead. Or sometimes, like a couple of weeks ago, we planned to fly straight home but spent a few hours exploring rural Nebraska. The three of us flew to Sioux Falls, SD, in a little Cessna to visit my uncle and aunt up there. On our flight up, we stopped at the little airport in Seward, NE. It was complete with this unique elevated deck. In my imagination, this is used for people to drink beer while watching the planes land. In South Dakota, we had a weekend full of card and board games, horseshoes, and Crokinole with my uncle and aunt, who are always fun to visit. We had many memories of visits up there as children and the pleasant enjoyment of the fact that we didn t need an 8-hour drive to get there. We flew back with a huge bag of large rhubarb from their garden (that too is something of a tradition!) It was a fun weekend to spend with my brothers first time we d been able to do this in a long while. And it marked the 11th state I ve flown into, and over 17,000 miles of flying.

The above picture is the blend of the two communities from foss community and mozilla India. And unless you were there you wouldn t know who is from which community which is what FOSS is all about. But as always I m getting a bit ahead of myself. Akshat, who works at NCRA as a programmer, the standing guy on the left shared with me in January this year that this year too, we should have two stalls, foss community and mozilla India stalls next to each other. While we had the banners, we were missing stickers and flyers. Funds were and are always an issue and this year too, it would have been emptier if we didn t get some money saved from last year minidebconf 2016 that we had in Mumbai. Our major expenses included printing stickers, stationery and flyers which came to around INR 5000/- and couple of LCD TV monitors which came for around INR 2k/- as rent. All the labour was voluntary in nature, but both me and Akshat easily spending upto 100 hours before the event. Next year, we want to raise to around INR 10-15k so we can buy 1 or 2 LCD monitors and we don t have to think for funds for next couple of years. How will we do that I have no idea atm. Me and Akshat did all the printing and stationery runs and hence had not been using my lappy for about 3-4 days. Come to the evening before the event and the laptop would not start. Coincidentally, or not few months or even last at last year s Debconf people had commented on IBM/Lenovo s obsession with proprietary power cords and adaptors. I hadn t given it much thought but when I got no power even after putting it on AC power for 3-4 hours, I looked up on the web and saw that the power cord and power adaptors were all different even in T440 and even that under existing models. In fact I couldn t find mine hence sharing it via pictures below. I knew/suspected that thinkpads would be rare where I was going, it would be rarer still to find the exact power cord and I was unsure whether it was the power cord at fault or adaptor or whatever goes for SMPS in laptop or memory or motherboard/CPU itself. I did look up the documentation at support.lenovo.com and was surprised at the extensive documentation that Lenovo has for remote troubleshooting. I did the usual take out the battery, put it back in, twiddle with the little hole in the bottom of the laptop, trying to switch on without the battery on AC mains, trying to switch on with battery power only but nothing worked. Couple of hours had gone by and with a resigned thought went to bed, convincing myself that anyways it s good I am not taking the lappy as it is extra-dusty there and who needs a dead laptop anyways. Update After the event was over, I did contact Lenovo support and within a week, with one visit from a service engineer, he was able to identify that it was a faulty cable which was at fault and not the the other things which I was afraid of. Another week gone by and lenovo replaced the cable. Going by service standards that I have seen of other companies, Lenovo deserves a gold star here for the prompt service they provided. I probably would end up subscribing to their extended 2-year warranty service when my existing 3 year warranty is about to be over. Next day, woke up early morning, two students from COEP hostel were volunteering and we made our way to NCRA, Pune University Campus. Ironically, though we were under the impression that we would be the late arrivals, it turned out we were the early birds. 5-10 minutes passed by and soon enough we were joined by Aniket and we played catch-up for a while. We hadn t met each other for a while so it was good to catch-up. Then slowly other people starting coming in and around 07:10-07:15 we started for GMRT, Khodad. Now I had been curious as had been hearing for years that the Pune-Nashik NH-50 highway would be concreted and widened to six-lane highways but the experience was below par. Came back and realized the proposal has now been pushed back to 2020. From the mozilla team, only Aniket was with us, the rest of the group was coming straight from Nashik. Interestingly, all the six people who came, came on bikes which depending upon how you look at it was either brave or stupid. Travelling on bikes on Indian highways you either have to be brave or stupid or both, we have more than enough accidents due to quality of road construction, road design, lane-changing drivers and many other issues. This is probably not the place for it hence will use some other blog post to rant about that. We reached around 10:00 hrs. IST and hung around till lunch as Akshat had all the marketing material, monitors etc. The only thing we had were couple of lappies and couple of SBC s, an RPI 3 and a BBB. Our find for the event was Aarti Kashyap who you can see above. She is a third-year student at COEP and one of the rare people who chose to interact with hardware rather than software. From last several years, we had been trying, successfully and unsuccessfully to get more Indian women and girls interested into technology. It is a vicious circle as till a girl/woman doesn t volunteer we are unable to share our knowledge to the extent we can which leads them to not have much interest in FOSS or even technology in general. While there are groups are djangogirls, Pyladies and railgirls and even Outreachy which tries to motivate getting girls into computing but it s a long road ahead. We are short of both funds and ideas as to how to motivate more girls to get into computing and then to get into playing with hardware. I don t know where to start and end for whoever wants to play with hardware. From SBC s, routers to blade servers the sky is the limit. Again this probably isn t the place for it, hence probably we can chew it on more at some other blog post. This year, we had a lowish turnout due to the fact that the 12th board exams 1st paper was on the day we had opened. So instead of 20-25k, we probably had 5-7k fewer people pass through. There were two-three things that we were showing, we were showing Debian on one of the systems, we were showing the output from the SBC s on the other monitor but the glare kept hitting the monitors. While the organizers had done exemplary work over last year. They had taped the carpets on the ground so there was hardly any dust moving around. However, I wished the organizers had taken the pains to have two cloth roofs over our head instead of just one, the other roof head could be say 2 feet up, this would have done two things a. It probably would have cooled the place a bit more as b. We could get diffused sunlight which would have lessened the glare and reflection the LCD s kept throwing back. At times we also got people to come to our side as can be seen in Aarti s photo as can be seen above. If these improvements can be made for next year, this would result in everybody in our Pandal would benefit, not just us and mozilla. This would be benefiting around 10-15 organizations which were within the same temporary structure. Of course, it depends very much on the budget they are able to have and people who are executing, we can just advise. The other thing which had been missing last year and this year is writing about Single Board Computers in Marathi. If we are to promote them as something to replace a computer or something for a younger brother/sister to learn computing upon at a lower cost, we need leaflets written in their language to be more effective. And this needs to be in the language and mannerisms that people in that region understand. India, as probably people might have experienced is a dialect-prone country. Which means every 2-5 kms, the way the language is spoken is different from anywhere else. The Marathi spoken by somebody who has lived in Ravivar Peth for his whole life and a person who has lived in say Kothrud are different. The same goes from any place and this place, Khodad, Narayangaon would have its own dialect, its own mini-codespeak. Just to share, we did have one in English but it would have been a vast improvement if we could do it in the local language. Maybe we can discuss about this and ask for help from people. Outside, Looking in What had been interesting about the whole journey were the new people who were bringing all their passion and creativity to the fore. From the mozilla community, we had Akshay who is supposed to be a wizard on graphics, animation, editing anything to do with the visual medium. He shared some of the work he had done and also shared a bit about how blender works with people who wanted to learn about that. Mayur, whom you see in the picture pointing out something about FOSS and this was the culture that we strove to have. I know and love and hate the browser but haven t been able to fathom the recklessness that Mozilla has been doing the last few years, which has just been having one mis-adventure after another. For instance, mozstumbler was an effort which I thought would go places. From what little I understood, it served/serves as a user-friendly interface to a potential user while still sharing all the data with OSM . They (Mozilla) seems/seemed to have a fatalistic take as it provided initial funding but then never fully committing to the project. Later, at night we had the whole free software and open-source sharings where I tried to emphasize that without free software, the term open-source would not have come into existence. We talked and talked and somewhere around 02:00 I slept, the next day was an extension of the first day itself where we ribbed each other good-naturedly and still shared whatever we could share with each other. I do hope that we continue this tradition for great many years to come and engage with more and more people every passing year.
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #budget, #COEP< #volunteering, #debian, #Events, #Expenses, #mozstumbler, #printing, #SBC's, #Science Day 2017, #thinkpad cable issue, FOSS, mozilla

After months of trying, I've finally got my hands on a Nintendo NES Classic Mini. It's everything I wish retropie was: simple, reliable, plug-and-play gaming. I didn't have a NES at the time, so the games are all mostly new to me (although I'm familiar with things like Super Mario Brothers). The two main complaints about the NES classic are the very short controller cable and the need to press the "reset" button on the main unit to dip in and out of games. Both are addressed by the excellent 8bitdo Retro Receiver for NES Classic bundle. You get a bluetooth dongle that plugs into the classic and a separate wireless controller. The controller is a replica of the original NES controller. However, they've added another two buttons on the right-hand side alongside the original "A" and "B", and two discrete shoulder buttons which serve as turbo-repeat versions of "A" and "B". The extra red buttons make it look less authentic which is a bit of a shame, and are not immediately useful on the NES classic (but more on that in a minute). With the 8bitdo controller, you can remotely activate the Reset button by pressing "Down" and "Select" at the same time. Therefore the whole thing can be played from the comfort of my sofa. That's basically enough for me, for now, but in the future if I want to expand the functionality of the classic, it's possible to mod it. A hack called "Hakchi2" lets you install additional NES ROMs; install retroarch-based emulator cores and thus play SNES, Megadrive, N64 (etc. etc.) games; as well as other hacks like adding "down+select" Reset support to the wired controller. If you were playing non-NES games on the classic, then the extra buttons on the 8bitdo become useful.

Dear Friends, I have shared a few times that I had a privileged childhood. I never had led a hand-to-mouth existence but more than that I was privileged to have made the acquaintance of Jaipur wale Mausaji while I was very young. I have been called miserly by my cousin sisters whenever they write letters to me and I don t answer simply because whatever I feel for them, words feel inadequate and meaningless. The same thing applies in this as well. I am sharing few bits here as there are too many memories of a golden past which will not let me go till I have shared a few of them. First let me start by sharing the relation I had with him. By relation he was my mother s-sister s husband. In English, he would probably be termed as Maternal Uncle although he was much more than that. My one of the first remembrances of him was during Madhu Didi s Shaadi (marriage). Madhu Didi is uncle s daughter and I would have been a impish 4-5 year old at the time. This was the first time I was gonna be part of The Great North Indian Wedding and I didn t know what was in store for me as I had grown in Pune. I remember finishing my semester tests and mummy taking me to Pune Station. I was just excited that I would be travelling somewhere and had no clue what would be happening. We landed in Agra, took another train and landed in Jaipur in the middle of the night at their home at Sangram Colony. While I had known few of the cousins, I was stumped to see so many cousins jumping out of everywhere. The look on my face was one of stupefaction and surprise . The only thing which would closely resemble that would be Bilbo s 111st Birthday party in Lord of the Rings (Part 1). In fact, by a curious quirk/twist of fate, I came to know of a Naniji or somebody like that who by relation was far elder to me, while she was either my age or below my age. As was customary, had to bow down sheepishly. As a somewhat alone boy, to be thrown in this rambunctious bunch and be the babe in the woods, I was quickly chopped and eaten up but had no complaints. I would get into trouble onto a drop of a hat. While Mausiji would threaten me, Mausaji would almost always defend me. While Mausiji could see through me, the twinkle in Mausaji s eyes used to tell me that while he knew what I was upto, for reasons unknown, he would always defend me. Mausaji s Sangram Colony s house became my cricket ground, football ground and all and any ground to play and be. Mausaji and his brothers used to live near each other and the lane they had, had hardly any vehicles on it, so all the cousins could play all they want with me being the longest, perhaps unconsciously trying either to make for lost time or knowing/unknowing this was too good to last. Today s Pokemon generation might not be able to get it but that s alright. They also had a beautiful garden where Mausiji used to grow vegetables. While playing, we sometimes used to hurt her veggies (unconsciously) or just have shower with the garden hose. Mausaji used to enjoy seeing our antics. One of the relatives even had a dog who used to join in the fun sometimes. When mummy and Mausiji expressed concern about the dog biting, Mausaji would gently brush it aside. One of the other things in Didi s marriage is we got a whole lot of sweets. While Mausiji tried to keep us in check with sweets, both Manish Bhaiya and Mausaji used to secrete sweets from time to time. When I was hungry and used to steal food (can t wait till the appointed time) either Bhaiya or Mausaji would help me with the condition I would have to take the blame if and when we got caught as we invariably did. Mausaji s house had a basement where all the secreted sweets and food used to get in. Both me and Manish Bhaiya would be there and we would have a riot in ourselves. We would enjoy the adrenaline when we were stealing the food. As I was pretty young, I was crazy about the Tom and Jerry cartoons that used to come on Television that time. I and Bhaiya used to act like Jerry and/or his cronies while Mausiji would invariably be the Tom with Mausaji all-knowing about it but acting as a mere bystander. I remember him egging me for many of the antics I would do and get in trouble in but as shared would also be defended by him. The basement was also when I was becoming a teenager where Manish Bhaiya showed me his collection and we had a heart-to-heart about birds and bees. While whatever little I had known till that time was from school-friends and my peers at school and I didn t know what was right or wrong. Bhaiya clarified lot of things, concepts which I was either clueless or confused about. When I look back now, it is possible that Mausaji might have instructed Bhaiya to be my tutor as I used to be somewhat angry and lash out by the confusing times. As we used to go there for part of holidays, I remember doing all sorts of antics to make sure I would get an extra day, an extra hour to be there. I never used to understand why we had to go to meet the other relatives when all the fun I could have was right there only, couldn t Mummy know/see that I used to enjoy the most here. Mausaji was a clothier as we understand the term today and a gentleman to the core. He was the co-owner of Rajputana Cloth Store in Jaipur. Many VIP s as well as regular people used to visit him for getting clothes designed and stitched under his watchful eyes. I never saw him raise his voice against any of the personnel working under him and used to be a thorough gentleman to one and all. Later, as I grew up I came to know and see that people would phone up and just ask him to do the needful. He would get the right cloth, stitch it right and people used to trust him for that. He was such an expert on cloth and type of clothes, that by mere touch he could talk/share about what sort of cloth it is. One of his passions was driving and from the money he had saved, he had got an Ambassador Car. Every day or every other day or whenever he felt like it, he used to take either the gang or me with mummy or me with anybody else. Each ride used to be an adventure in itself, with a start beginning and an end. I always used to watch out for the car-rides as I knew we would get sweets or something as well as he would regale us with stories about a place here and there. There was a childlike curiosity and interest in him which was infectious to one and all. The only weakness that he had was he liked to drink wine once in a while. When I was a kid, I was never able to give him company, only few years back, for the first time I was able to share wine with him which was also a memory I treasure. Those who know him closely knew the many up and downs that he went through, but as a gentleman he never let on the hurts he had or didn t curse his fate or anything else that we do when things go bad from our perspective. While there is much to write about him, it will not accomplish anything that is not known about him. I ll add with the private joke that was between him and me. When I was little, I used to call him Mausaji, Samosaji for a) I liked Samosa and b) Samosa has a bit thick skin outside and underneath it s all gravy. In reality though, he was butter all the way. I miss you Mausaji and wish I could turn the clock back and come with Mummy to visit both Mausiji and you. I hope your new journey takes you to even further heights than this life. Savouring the memories mummy and I, hope we meet you again in some new Avataar
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #antics, #growing up, #holidays, #Manish Bhiaya, #Mausaji, #Sangram Colony

Review: The Kingdom of Gods, by N.K. Jemisin

Series:	Inheritance #3
Publisher:	Orbit
Copyright:	2011
Printing:	April 2012
ISBN:	0-316-04394-X
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	567

The Kingdom of Gods is the third and final book of the Inheritance trilogy and rests very heavily on the events of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms and The Broken Kingdoms. I think it's the best book of the trilogy as well, but this isn't the place to start. The build-up from the previous books is very important to this story. The first book of this series followed Yeine in her introduction to the highly political, abusive, and exploitative world of the Arameri, and her deeper introduction to the complex theology and mythology of Jemisin's constructed world. The second involved fewer theological fireworks and more day-to-day decisions, but it followed the implications of the first book's climax and revealed another important lurking weapon from the past. The Kingdom of Gods returns to a theological focus, this time putting Sieh front and center, and is once again concerned with the fate of the entire world, or even reality itself. Sieh played a significant role in the first book, but only seen from Yeine's perspective. He's the trickster god, the god of childhood, of play and whim and unfairness and practical jokes, of all the chaos and lack of impulse control and impudence of childhood. The Kingdom of Gods opens with him encountering two Arameri children in the abandoned areas under Sky and making an unlikely and impulsive pledge of friendship. One that leads to an unexplained catastrophe, a long blackout, and possibly the end of his existence, since Sieh starts aging. And growing up directly undermines his power. One of the two children turns out to be the heir of the haughty, devious, and deeply racist Arameri, whose position atop the hierarchy of the world has been weakened by earlier events but not shaken entirely. Her relationship with Sieh is much more fraught and complex when both of them are teenagers and Sieh is struggling badly to remain true to himself. But what drives the plot is a deadly new form of magic that is targeting the Arameri family and threatening to bring back world-wide war. This is my favorite book of the trilogy, not so much because it brings a relatively satisfying conclusion (The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms wasn't bad at that either), but because for once I like all of the main characters. Yeine and Nahadoth are hit and miss (the second two books of the trilogy make it clear that Nahadoth can be a real asshole), and as mentioned in the review of The Broken Kingdoms, I found Shiny exasperating. But Sieh is fun, even when he's being obnoxious, and both of the kids he befriends are complex and multifaceted. Shahar, with her hard and complex relationship with her mother, is probably my favorite character in the book, but her brother certainly has his moments. I did not like Sieh's maturation process. There are parts of this story that are squirm-inducing, and not in a good way (at least for me). And he does tend to get whiny in places. But he knows everyone in Jemisin's complex mythology, he has a great first-person narrative voice, and there are some very fun moments of interaction with his sibling gods. It says something that I really enjoyed this story even though books about slow, ongoing illness and diminution are rather far from my favorites (and Sieh's aging falls into that category). While there are some beautiful set-pieces here once the shit starts to hit the fan in earnest, the concluding fireworks didn't really work for me. The final confrontation was too abstracted, too indescribable, and too full of ancillary carnage to be the ending I was looking for. (Perhaps because of what I've been playing recently, I keep thinking of it as one of those chaotic, floating, dream-like cut-scene disasters in a Final Fantasy game that's trying to hint at indescribable magic.) But the denouement made me happy, and it fit the characters. And don't miss the glossary at the end of the book that Sieh has scribbled all over. This book includes, as a bonus, a short story: "Not the End": This is the ending that The Broken Kingdoms actually needed. It (plus some key bits in the rest of The Kingdom of Gods) made me feel much better about the end of that book, and added a much-needed light note to the rather heavy bits at the end of this book. And I do love Oree. It's very short, and it's not in any way a standalone story (more of a belated epilogue to the previous novel), but that's all that was needed. (8) Rating: 8 out of 10

Octagonal Well in the Cloister of Giuliano da Sangallo, Faculty of Engineering,
Via Eudossiana, Rome

In the tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers , Thomas Mann states, Deep is the well of the past... . Sometimes this well is bottomless and it may appear far away and passed, yet all of our actions and everyday decisions come to life by its contents. It is the fundamental substrate, the raw material from which to draw the basic connections of our creativity. The image of the well, used by Thomas Mann, is very significant. In symbolism, the well is the place where you take contact with the deep self and where to get water that gives life. The ancient times remind us of the socializing role of the well, invested with an aura of sacredness, where sharing with others took place. It was <Read More [by Fabio Marzocca]>

This is morning. Time to fly. Two boys, happy to open the hangar door and get the plane ready. It s been a year since I passed the FAA exam and became a pilot. Memories like these are my favorite reminders why I did. It is such fun to see people s faces light up with the joy of flying a few thousand feet above ground, of the beauty and freedom and peace of the skies. I ve flown 14 different passengers in that time; almost every flight I ve taken has been with people, which I enjoy. I ve heard wow or beautiful so many times, and said it myself even more times. I ve landed in two state parks, visited any number of wonderful small towns, seen historic sites and placid lakes, ascended magically over forests and plains. I ve landed at 31 airports in 10 states, flying over 13,000 miles. Not once have I encountered anyone other than friendly, kind, and outgoing. And why not? After all, we re working around magic flying carpet machines, right? (That s my brother before a flight with me, by the way) Some weeks it is easy to be glum. This week has been that way for many, myself included. But then, whether you are in the air or on the ground, if you pay attention, you realize we still live in a beautiful world with many wonderful people. And, in fact, I got a reminder of that this week. Not long after the election, I got in a plane, pushed in the throttle, and started the takeoff roll down a runway in the midst of an Indiana forest. The skies were the best kind of clear blue, and pretty soon I lifted off and could see for miles. Off in the distance, I could see the last cottony remnants of the morning s fog, lying still in the valleys, surrounding the little farms and houses as if to give them a loving hug. Wow. Sometimes the flight is bumpy. Sometimes the weather doesn t cooperate, and it doesn t happen at all. Sometimes you can fly across four large states and it feels as smooth as glass the whole way. Whatever happens, at the end of the day, the magic flying carpet machine gets locked up again. We go home, rest our heads on our soft pillows, and if we so choose, remember the beauty we experienced that day. Really, this post is not about being a pilot. This post is a reminder to pay attention to all that is beautiful in this world. It surrounds us; the smell of pine trees in the forest, the delight in the faces of children, the gentle breeze in our hair, the kind word from a stranger, the very sunrise. I hope that more of us will pay attention to the moments of clear skies and wind at our back. Even at those moments when we pull the hangar door shut.