Sambal

Wouldn’t be American; and wouldn’t be, at all.

K has a love of history that we’ve been able to indulge by getting the Story Of the World audiobooks from the library.  She’s listened to all four volumes, from prehistory through about 1995.  (I was a bit reluctant to let her have modern history, 1860-1995, what with the various genocides that cloud the 20th century.  But Danielle and I talked about it, and K and I talked about it, and we decided to go ahead.  Not too many nightmares so far, though I never expected to be discussing the Holocaust in moderate depth with my 6-year-old.)

She was listening to Cold War history the other night when as I was passing by her room and I happened to hear that the topic was the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.  I walked in and paused the narration.

“Your grandma and grandpa were there, you know.  And your two aunts, but they were little kids then.”

“Did they see the soliders coming down from the sky?”

“The paratroops?  No, I think that happened at night, they were in bed.  But I remember my mom saying that N saw a tank in the street and it scared her.”

She paused to digest that.

“Y’know, if it weren’t for the Soviet invasion, my parents probably wouldn’t have left and come to America.  And I would have been a Czech, like my cousins – the children of my mom’s brothers who stayed.  And then you wouldn’t exist.”

I don’t know when I first heard the phrase “Brilliant Flash of the Obvious”. I know I was using it already in the 1990s, in California and I’m sure I didn’t invent it. It has some currency today — David Allen uses it in one of his talks — but only two google hits before 2005.

So what is a brilliant flash of the obvious? It’s an insight, or revelation, or transformative moment that contains absolutely no new information. The world doesn’t change, the available information doesn’t change – but something does change, in your internal cognition.

Maybe it’s easier to give an example. In my senior year of college, in P-Chem lab, I suddenly had a brilliant flash of the obvious: everything is made out of atoms! Normally, you’d hope that a senior chemistry major would know that already. But suddenly in that moment it hit me: I’m made out of atoms, the glassware is made out of atoms, the lab bench is made out of atoms, EVERYTHING is made out of atoms.

I was staggered. I must have said something out loud (e.g., “Whoa! Everything is made out of ATOMS!”) because my lab partner Jeff started making fun of me, and Dr. Cave told him to leave me alone. Which I appreciate, in retrospect, but at the moment I was too blown away to care or notice.

Turning and turning on its aging platter,
The disk cannot answer the controller;
Things fall apart; the server cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the blog...

Sambal.org used to be served out of my house; that server suffered a disk crash about a month ago, on its root disk, which was not RAIDed (not on the data disk, which was RAID-1). I haven’t tried to resurrect that machine yet, having been busy with various other things. We’re now hosted elsewhere while I figure out when to fit in “resurrect blog archives” into the rest of my life.

I’ve been reading Iris Chang’s book The Rape of Nanking — which, for all its flaws, appears to be the best English-language general history available.  I’m only about halfway through, reading about the International Committee’s Safety Zone and the descriptions of the atrocities; critics usually target the last third of the book, where Chang apparently speculates about the Japanese national character.

As far as I know, though, nobody sensible disputes the basic accuracy of her account of the massacre, killing competitions, rapes, etc.  I’ve been having to take it in small pieces.  It was giving me nightmares.

Chang committed suicide in 2004, while working on a book about the Bataan Death March.

Still recovering from the server crash, but here’s a useful thing.

When I brought up dhcpd on my new server, I set its name server option to my ISP’s name server.  I hadn’t had time to set up a local DNS cache, and that was good enough to get web browsing working.

Last night I restored the VPN connection that bridges my network to my principal client’s, and set up a DNS cache so I could resolve names from their internal DNS servers — they use the bogus TLD .internal, so all their machines resolve as host.client.internal.  I tested pinging and browsing to their internal machines, and it was fine.

Today I tried to connect to their internal CVS server and my Windows machine couldn’t see it.

Error connecting to host cvs.client.internal: No such host is known.
cvs [update aborted]: Connection to server failed

It turns out that my Windows box still had the ISP’s name server, even though I had updated the dhcpd config, restarted the dhcpd server, and renewed my IP lease. I didn’t want to do a release/renew because I was streaming movies off that machine for the kids downstairs.

Luckily it turns out to be easy to set the name server on the command-line without disrupting your network connectivity:

netsh interface ip set dns "Local Area Connection" static 192.168.0.200

Setting parameters through netsh requires administrative privilege, so I had to start a new Cygwin and run it as adminstrator.  Minor annoyance.  (Where’s Cygwin’s version of sudo?)