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more enigmatic and homuncular
Friday, October 18 2013
Increasingly, I've found Facebook to be a time sink. It's not so much the conventional checking in and reading other posts or making my own posts that's the problem. My problem is all the trolling I do of right wing pages, sometimes with the help of my sock puppets, or the various projects Sara Poiron goads me into undertaking. So today I decided to not check Facebook at all and to never check it again on any future Friday. For me, Facebook is an addiction every bit as problematic as alcohol, and if I can do without booze on Mondays and Tuesdays, I can do without Facebook on Fridays. I have feeling that I am in the early stages of accruing a long list of arbitrary rules dictating what I can or cannot do on any given day. Absurd as such a system seems, it wouldn't be such a bad thing.
Off and on for the past couple of weeks I've been working on that plugin for Adobe Lightroom. The more work I do on it, the more I feel constrained by the limitations of its platform (the Lightroom SDK). I'm used to the limitations of the web, where (traditionally, at least), one had to be content with clunky user interfaces, non-harmonious frontends, and the slowness of the internet itself. In recent times, most of those problems have been fixed and now, from a developer's perspective, the web feels like a friendly place full of power and potential. I hadn't realized how close to perfect it had become until I started working in the Lua-based Lightroom SDK. I've already complained about the slow asynchronousness of database queries that don't even happen across a network, but the problem is more fundamental even than that. Things that are effortless, say, in Javascript (scanning through a thousand-item array) seem fraught in Lightroom. Things that happen instantaneously across the global internet in AJAX (the web) come with annoying delays when taking place across a single computer's SATA interface in the Lightroom SDK. There are also numerous hobbles regarding the user interface. Today I discovered that there is no way in the Lightroom SDK to programmatically override keyboard functionality or to do such things as expand a drop-down menu. I hadn't even considered that not being able to do these things was a possibility, and to discover these limitations came to me as something of a shock. It had me wondering if this plugin I was writing was even doable, at least in any form that a user would want to use. The only good thing about all of this is that the client called today and rescheduled our fortnightly meeting for Wednesday. That meant I could go down to the greenhouse and have my weekly marijuana-based staycation. Usually I do that in the greenhouse upstairs, but this evening I hung out with my tunes (and Julius — aka Stripey the Cat —) in the basement. Lately my preferred method of procrastination has been to continue covering surfaces down there with Portland cement, especially near the door. Ideally I'd use that material to cover all the surfaces in the basement that aren't either stone or glass, but for now I'm just worrying about making the inside-corners near the door look like they're made of solid concrete instead of wood partially-laminated-with-cement.
Being stoned, I had my usual stoner thoughts. I was feeling manipulated not just by Stripey and his need to be petted, but also by the incredibly vigorous Plantago plant growing from the bottom of a drainage ditch I'd hewn into the shale bedrock at the base of the western wall. Normally I'd consider members of this species a noxious weed, but this individual had colonized its spot in the late winter and sent up inflorescences over two feet in height (much taller than normal). Over the summer it had grown such a gorgeous rosette of leaves that I'd decided to place the weathered Buddha I'd found near Reichel Road on a stony bench directly behind it. Though small, it looks great there, particularly if you've smoking the marijuana. I actually think it helps that the statue has been effaced by erosion. It's more enigmatic and homuncular this way.
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