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the passage of actual time
Tuesday, June 9 2015
Again today I was dealing with issues related to that site I work for out in California, the one that might have recently experienced the theft of a small number of credit cards. In recent days, my job was to clone the live Amazon Web Services instance to make a staging server that can be swapped in easily. But of course, this being Amazon Web Services, shit got got fucked up, and there was nobody on Earth available to answer questions. The cloned instance was unreachable via ssh, the way one operates Linux servers from other machines. Today, after much fruitless Googling, I decided to changed something about the configuration for the ssh dæmon on the live server. After doing that, clones of the instance were reachable. This made no sense; if the original had been reachable, the clone should have been reachable too. But you can't argue with reality, even when it violates logic.
This evening I watched most of Boyhood with Gretchen. That's the movie whose cast was filmed over the course of 12 years or so so as to depict the growth of Mason, the protagonist, and the changes of his world. There are a number of good scenes involving abusively-alcoholic stepfathers, though the movie is mostly about growth and change over time and how some things stay the same while so many things change. There's also a subtle side-message about the inconsequence of things that at the time seem so consequential. The movie features technology to a surprising extent, and as it changes alongside Mason, it provides a segment of that long arc alongside the briefer arc of a human life. I expected Mason's father's car (the Pontiac GTO) to develop dents and patches of rust over time, but instead it didn't age at all and then it just disappeared. It would have been good to watch trees grow bigger and weedy fields to experience forest succession; there are a lot of possibilities for a movie like this, which derives all its power from the passage of actual time.
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http://asecular.com/blog.php?150609 feedback
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