Mindbat

I recently picked up Programming Clojure and started working through it, trying to wrap my head around this new variant of Lisp.

Installing clojure itself was pretty simple (sudo apt-get install clojure, since I’m using Ubuntu), but I had a hard time figuring out how to make the clojure contrib libraries available from the clojure REPL (I kept getting errors about the clojure-contrib classes not being on the classpath).

Here’s how you do it: start the clojure REPL with an extra argument pointing to where you’ve installed the source files for clojure-contrib. For example:

clojure -cp /home/rontoland/Code/clojure-contrib-1.1.0/src

Since the clojure-contrib libraries are used throughout the book, I put the above code in a small script and saved it in my /usr/local/bin folder as clojure-repl, so I don’t have to remember the longer command.

A few months ago, when Apple bought Lala.com, I didn’t panic. I thought Apple’d integrate Lala.com’s store into iTunes, rebrand the site, and keep things rolling.

I was wrong:

Dear Ron T.,

The Lala service will be shut down on May 31st.

In appreciation of your support over the last five years, you will receive a credit in the amount of your Lala web song purchases for use on Apple’s iTunes Store. If you purchased and downloaded mp3 songs from Lala, those songs will continue to play as part of your local music library.

That’s part of the message I got in my inbox this morning. Apple’s shutting Lala.com down, and offering me “credit” in the iTunes store as compensation.

Fuck you, Apple. I bought music from Lala.com because I didn’t want to buy it from your store. I had a choice, and I exercised it. But you just can’t understand that, can you?

I will never buy anything from the iTunes store. I will never throw my money away on songs in your proprietary format.

Lala.com’s ease of use, free access to every song in the catalog, cheap prices and web-based portability were far superior to the iTunes store. You couldn’t compete with that, could you, Apple? So you bought it and killed it.

Fuck you.

Finished reading Just a Geek. Surprisingly, my experiences and feelings toward NASA parallel Wheaton’s feelings toward Star Trek in many ways: the feeling that I need to prove leaving was the right decision, the odd mix of guilt, excitement and nostalgia I feel whenever I see someone I used to work with, the worry that something went horribly wrong with my life and I’ll never get it back on track.

It’s good, then, to see that Wil has grown into an acceptance of his past and his decision. I feel like I’m still somewhere in the middle of the story, with a sense that I can and should let go of both the image of myself that working at NASA gave to me, and the dreams I originally left NASA for. But I can’t bring myself to drop them, yet.

That’s not to say I can’t dream new dreams. I know I should, and I’m trying hard to, but I’ll be damned if both dreams–NASA Engineer and Novel Writer–aren’t hard to wake up from.

This weekend, a friend of my wife’s was gushing about how her church had just started a program to help the poor in Uganda: they take unwanted clothes from Ugandans, ship them over to the US so her church-members can sew them back together using Christian-themed patches, sell the clothes to people in the US, and then send most of the proceeds back to poor Ugandans.

“Why not help the Ugandans setup a factory to do the clothes repair in Uganda, so they can sell the clothes to other Ugandans (or ship them themselves) for a profit?” I asked.

She looked at me like such a thought had never entered her mind. Why wasn’t I proud that her church was helping the poor, helpless Ugandans?

Because they’re not helpless. Because teaching someone to fish is always superior to giving them a fish. Because what her church is doing is not helping anything other than their own sense of self-righteousness.

Christians in the 19th century were a progressive force: they pushed for the abolition of slavery, they setup workshops for the poor, they endowed schools and universities teaching up-to-date science and technology.

The current crop of Christian evangelicals could not be more different from those charitable pioneers: they want to take rights away from homosexual couples, cheer when Muslims are discriminated against, and want science muzzled.

So here’s my challenge to any evangelical, fundamentalist Christian: What are you doing to make the world more free, to add to the body of human knowledge, to increase the prosperity of your fellow man?

I was going to write up a list of the differences between my three careers (optical engineering, writing, and programming) and post them here, but then I realized what all my differences had in common: they were changes in the way people thought of me.

As a NASA employee I was awe-inspiring, as a writer people envied me, and as a programmer I’m mundane but very very useful.

Is that all a career is to me? A set of other people’s opinions?

What I should talk about is what each career taught me.

How NASA showed me how much human engineering can accomplish, while humbling me by forcing me to realize that decades-long projects are too long for me.

Writing made me appreciate how hard it is to tell a good story, because my own efforts were far short of what I needed to keep steady writing work.

And programming took me back to my days learning BASIC on a Commodore-128, while schooling me in how hard it is to run a company, to compete with other businesses and succeed.

But I keep thinking that’s using the present to justify the past. What I’d like to know is: was I right to leave NASA, at the time I left it?