Craig Berry

Yesterday we held a memorial Gnostic Mass and celebration for Lauri at Blue Horizon Oasis.  The warmth and energy (and just the sheer number of people there) were amazing.  Thank you to everyone who helped see her off right.

Many of those in attendance never knew Lauri in her prime, but a few old Baphomet Lodge hands were there, which made for a lot of wistful story telling, to each other and to those who wanted to hear us old farts carrying on about the golden age.  I brought along some of Lauri's things, which we laid out on a small memorial altar.  One of these was her Deacon book from the early 90s, which included lists of Mass attendees which further fueled the nostalgia.  Another item on the altar was her original Priestess sword, an antique Spanish cavalry sword with a sheath that was in bad shape when she got it, and progressively fell to pieces as she used it.  The last several inches of the blade now show through a gap in the leather.

All of this put me in mind of my favorite Byron poem, which I dedicate to Lauri, to z111 , to leroy484 , to solis93 , to Helena, to sabazius_x , and to everyone else who was there back when everything was new.

News about this is spreading, and many kind and considerate people aren't sure how much they can discuss without my permission.  So, for them as well as those who may not yet have heard:  My wife Lauri, laurellady on LJ, died two days ago on Sunday March 1.  My daughter madelineusher and I are being supported by dozens of friends and loved ones, to whom I am incredibly grateful.

The title of this post, "Memento Vivere", was Lauri's motto in the fraternal order Ordo Templi Orientis.  It means "Remember to Live", and I am sure that is the message she would want to send to all of you.

Nice to see that my darling daughter can rant just as well as her old man.  gridlore  will be proud, too, especially given the subject matter.

My daughter madelineusher participated in the anti-Scientology demonstration in Hollywood last Sunday. You can see her in this video for a moment right around the 1:01 mark.



I was a bit worried about her being involved in provoking a notoriously paranoid and retribution-prone organization, especially with the LAPD also in play, but everything went very well, and she had a wonderful time.

Personally, I'm a little queasy about turning protest into performance art or a net "happening". I'm sure most of those involved didn't care one way or another about Scientology; it was all about an excuse to get together wearing V for Vendetta masks and make a lot of noise. Those who did care about Scientology were basically exploiting a lot of youthful geeky exuberance to push their own agenda, and I worry about how that kind of maneuver could play out in the future. After all, the Nuremberg rallies followed pretty much the same pattern -- the attraction was spectacle and civic pride, not the Nazi program per se, but the latter benefited.

Then again, I suppose it's always been that way; in any uprising you have a few ideologues and a lot of people looking for excitement and group identity. The only difference now is that the net makes it very easy to organize quickly and on a global scale.

We live in interesting times.

We had a wonderful trip to Northern California to visit my rapidly-growing birth family.  I had fun playing with both of my nieces; Regan is a very thoughtful and alert six-month-old, and Kylie is even more a bundle of frantic energy and imagination than your average two-and-a-half-year-old.  Kylie has inherited a few of my own old toys, which she has been told were mine; she very solemnly presented me with one of them while saying "Craig's truck, you play with it."  I did, and we had a great time.

We took the train up and back, which was highly civilized as usual.  laurellady and madelineusher got antsy toward the end of each ten-hour trip; as for me, I would have gladly stayed on board another day.  What could be better than enforced down time, with ever-changing scenery rolling past the windows, enough light to read, and good food and wine always available? 

laurellady decided to nap through dinner on the way home, which meant that madelineusher and I got seated with an old couple heading home from a family birthday celebration for the woman (she just said "A big one"; I'd guess 80 or 90).  We followed our family motto, "Always talk with strangers", and were treated to his tales of service in the Navy during and after WWII.  He was an officer on a destroyer escort in the North Atlantic from 1943 through VE Day, and once he found out I had both modern anti-submarine warfare engineering experience and a pretty deep knowledge of military history, we happily geeked out on the topic.  Then it was time for him to enchant madelineusher with his experiences as part of the US occupying forces in postwar Japan.  He is still wracked with guilt over abusing the hospitality of a Japanese family by pressuring them into giving him an heirloom wedding kimono as a souvenir.  By the time he realized his fault, he'd lost all track of the family.  He eventually donated the kimono to a museum...but he's still clearly looking for penance. 

Sometimes I drive myself crazy wondering what stories like that I'm missing from the thousands of people I meet, but don't get to sit down and talk with.

My niece Kylie appears to be following in her dad's and my own footsteps. Now I just need to convince her that Oracle is a much better choice.

This wasn't staged, by the way -- my sister really did find her like this, and ran to get her camera.

It was a busy weekend.

Saturday, I attended an excellent "Psychology of Initiation" workshop at LVX Lodge.  The best moment came as we were discussing the behavior of repressed individuals, those incapable of expressing some aspect of their personalities.  An attendee asked, "What is the opposite of that called, where people dump personal details on everyone around them with no sense of appropriateness or self control?"  With no hesitation, another attendee replied "LiveJournal".

Saturday evening laurellady and I drove down to darkest Orange County to pick up madelineusher for her winter break.  It's still not quite sinking in that my daughter is halfway through her freshman year of college.  I've found that everything about raising a child is like that; you finally get used to their being at any given stage just as they're moving into the next one.  You always feel like you're behind the beat.

Sunday was mostly devoted to computer tasks for myself, for my day job, and for the OTO, in roughly that order.  The task for myself was scrubbing the last remnants of the Ubuntu dual-boot configuration off my PC.  This involved booting from the Windows CD and using the recovery console, which is a rather nerve-wracking experience.  To get to the tool I needed, I had to ignore several "For the love of God, turn back before you destroy your system!" warnings.  When I finally ran fixmbr, it gave me little information about what had happened, so when I went to reboot the system, I was prepared to see no change, or (more likely) a disastrous error.  However, for once Murphy was on a coffee break, and XP came up smoothly without the GRUB boot selection menu along the way.  After that it was just a matter of recovering the abandoned partitions previously used by Ubuntu, which Partition Magic made trivially easy.

The day job tasks revolved around our ongoing fight to improve performance.  I had a sudden insight based on some odd test results we collected on Friday, and dove deep into Tomcat connector-configuration documentation, our source code, and examples on various technical forums as I gradually put together a new and radical hypothesis about where our "lost" throughput is going when under heavy load.  The new configuration resulting from hypothesis is under load testing right now; please cross your fingers.

Finally, the OTO work involved handling the usual small requests -- address changes, content tweaks, and the like -- along with some long-overdue system maintenance activities.  I also did some more thinking (and reading) about my medium-term goal of migrating the public site from Perl and Mason to Ruby on Rails.  I think Perl will remain my favorite language, but modern practice is leaving it behind.  And Ruby was built by Perl zealots, so most of the same aesthetic values are there.

My next big decision is whether to work on completing a paper inspired by my "Humor and Initiation" talk for the NOTOCON proceedings publication.  I have the material organized, and I could easily have something ready for the 12/31 deadline.  The trouble is that a lot of other commitments are competing for that time.  I also don't know whether I can both strip out degree-sensitive material and convert a humor-filled presentation from spoken to written form and still have anything left that's worth saying.  I need to decide by Wednesday...maybe I should find my lucky coin.

I had a relatively calm and happy four-day weekend.  It started well with a pleasant Thanksgiving dinner at laurellady's parents' place in darkest Riverside County.  During the drive out there we introduced madelineusher to the cheesy glory that is the musical Chess.  We're not sure whether our car works if people inside aren't singing along enthusiastically with loud music; it's never been tried.

The remainder of the weekend mostly involved catching up on sleep and working on various computer projects, with a commando shopping raid on Westside Pavillion on Saturday for variety.  During the many hours I spent in front of my monitor, I got mostly caught up on various OTO updates and fixes, solved a lingering sound card driver issue on my new PC, and spent an inordinate amount of time puttering around in Second Life, enjoying the enhanced environmental rendering provided by the new "Windlight" client.

As a result of that puttering, the Cathedral of St. William Blake in the Isles is ready for visitors; it's not done by any means, but it's close enough to be presentable.  If you have Second Life installed properly, clicking this link will take you to a web page from which you can click another link which will open your Second Life client and present you with the opportunity to teleport there.  You'll arrive just west of the Cathedral, on the next small island over, so you can see the whole facade.  There's no bridge to the Cathedral; you'll have to get virtually wet (or fly) to reach the Cathedral steps.

The other big software news is disappointing: I'm over Ubuntu.  All was going reasonably well with it until last Wednesday night; I'd had some disturbing signs of instability, but nothing bad enough to put me off.  Then I was offered the chance to install a boatload of automatic updates, and naturally took it...and the update process froze in the middle, completely locking up my computer.  I finally had to power-cycle it, and when Ubuntu tried to start affter that, I got a screen full of random video with a half-off-the-screen warning box saying something about "operating in low video mode".  I tried booting in recovery mode, and it still didn't work correctly.  Finally, after a lot of reading and a couple of questions posted to the Ubuntu forums, and with great trepidation, I decided to try a from-scratch reinstall of ubuntu.  I booted from the Live CD, then started the install tool, where I planned to either revert to a single Windows partition as a fresh starting point, or figure out how to reuse the existing partitions.  But I needn't have worried about that decision, since the installer locked the entire system solid at the 33% loaded mark.

Sorry, rodneyorpheus, but I just don't think Ubuntu is ready for prime time; it seems like more effort has gone into UI eye candy than system plumbing.  Reading commentary on the web, I find I'm not the only one to reach this conclusion; here's one pithy example.  I think began to lose faith when I discovered that gcc comes preinstalled, but you need to apt-get a separate package to get the standard C headers.  There's no coherence to this system, no architectural vision; it's a bunch of very interesting pieces thrown together with little thought to the whole.  If anyone can recommend a more coherent Linux distro, I may give it a try.

Meanwhile, my next task is to figure out how to safely uninstall the debris of Ubuntu, recovering the partition and removing the dual boot controller.  The latter will be the trickier task of the two.  I'm thinking of it as a distorted echo of my favorite line from "Battlestar Galactica: Razor", which we watched on Saturday night:  "Get that thing off my boot sector."

My daughter madelineusher is now a high school graduate; the ceremony was yesterday.  She picked up one of three special awards for academic excellence at her extremely challenging school, which made me just a tiny bit proud. :) 

Later that evening, after a great dinner at the Stinking Rose with several other families, her mom and I had the white-knuckle experience of bidding her farewell as she went off to a graduation party at some friend-of-a-friend's house in Malibu.  I kept telling myself that she will be spending every single night away with strange kids starting in mid-August, but somehow that thought was also less than comforting. 

As it turned out (and as I expected), I had no cause for worry.  She and her friends got to the party, found it to be decidedly not to their tastes -- too much show-off drinking and bad rap music -- and left within an hour. 

Every now and then I get the feeling that I just might have raised her right.

leroy484 and I have been having an email discussion today; in one of his, he casually mentioned that a nice picture and bio of madelineusher in today's LA Times.  I nearly injured people in my rush downstairs to the corner to grab a copy; I got the last one.  Sure enough, her private high school has a two-page ad in the center of the California section, listing the whole class of 2007.  But only eight of the kids got their own little boxes with pictures and full academic information; my daughter's was at the top center of the spread.  Two of the others were her two best friends.

Beyond my general paternal pride, I am especially tickled that among her various extracurricular activities is listed "Staff Member, Cleft of Dimensions (multiuser online environment)".  Translation:  She was a wizard (in-game administrator) for a role-playing MOO.  Sweet sixteen, and already padding her resume.  This kid will go far.

On the bus into school and work this morning, madelineusher and I were talking about Emily Dickinson, her favorite poet. Apparently Connie Willis wrote a humorous story in which she pointed out that many of Dickinson's poems can be sung to the tune of "The Yellow Rose of Texas", e.g.

"Oh, because I could not stop for death, he kindly stopped for me!"

madelineusher sang several other examples; she has much more Dickinson memorized than I do. Then I tossed in

"Oh, I burn my candle at both ends, it will not last the night!"

And madelineusher, in a tone of barely-controlled outrage, said "That's Edna St. Vincent Millay, not Emily Dickinson! Don't confuse your dash-monger with my beautiful bisexual poet!"

One has to wonder what people sitting nearby make of our bus conversations. Oh, and I love the epithet "dash-monger" for Millay.

The whole family headed over to LVX Lodge for the New Year's Eve Mass-and-party last night. It was great having laurellady along; with her health issues, it's been a long time since she made it to an OTO event, and she sure picked a good one for her re-entry. krishnahermes did such a great job of DJ-ing that we danced far more than old decrepit folks like us should. :) We even got madelineusher out on the floor a few times.

The Mass was great as well; fraterviao acquitted himself admirably in his first turn as Deacon, and magdalena_lvx and scorpio111 were stellar. I can think of few better ways to put an exclamation point on the end of the year.

Now I can't resist posting my results from the "auto-resolutions" meme. ( Be it resolved... )

We Berrys leave a path of destruction wherever we go! I'm proud to have as a brother the redoubtable gridlore, whose post from earlier today began:

If any of you locals were listening to KCBS at around 1000 this morning, you might have heard the traffic report mentioning "metal debris on the connector ramp from Hwy 580 East to Hwy 24." That was me.

Actually, it was pieces of his truck; so far as I know he has not yet undergone some kind of manga-themed transformation which would lead to his being able to shed large chunks of metal from his body. Then again, I haven't seen him for about a year.

The good: My friend Merri's "Wicca in One Easy Lesson" class at LVX last night went very well. People who were expecting fluffy-bunny-ness were blown away; I guess they didn't listen when I mentioned that one of her craft names is "Sister Napalm". :)

The bad: My family is still sick with the lingering flu that's going around. I've avoided it so far, but it's hard watching them trying to slog through life with that dragging them down.

The ugly: I'm watching several people I respect (or have, in the past, respected) doing embarrassing and stupid things before a wide audience. I have no real way to intervene; nor can I bring myself to look away. So instead I'm stuck on the sidelines, cringing and shaking my head.

But back to good: This morning madelineusher made an offhand remark, mostly to herself, in Japanese, and I understood it immediately. I was rewarded with a patronizing "Very good!"; she omitted patting me on the head, but just barely. It's fun being a language sponge. It's one of my favorite parts of my father's genetic legacy.

It was 39 degrees out when I woke up this morning. I seem to recal that temperatures below 45 are actually against the law in LA; below 40 is just plain crazy. Worse, our bedroom is poorly insulated and doesn't get much warmth from our heating system, so despite running a space heater all night I'd guess it was about 55 in the bedroom when I woke up this morning. I tried to think of it as "bracing". It did have the useful side effect of encouraging me to really work hard at my morning exercises.

Poor madelineusher is still sick with the her flu-turned-into-bronchitis. She's been on Zithromax (best antibiotic ever) for four days and is just starting to improve. We convinced her to go to school today, with laurellady driving us in rather than taking the bus as usual. I'm hoping it went well; she's missed more than a week of school, and at her school a week is a lot to miss.

Our Thanksgiving plans have been radically downsized due to the continuing illness of laurellady and madelineusher. laurellady was quite prepared to forge ahead with a full day of pie-baking followed by a two-hour drive, stressful time with relatives, and another two-hour drive home; I had to point out rather forcefully that she was (a) coughing her lungs out, (b) not keeping food down, and (c) having trouble walking before she finally (and grumpily) agreed to fall back to Plan B. She's a little bit stubborn the way the Pacific Ocean is a little bit damp.

So instead we're going to hit up our favorite neighborhood restaurant for their excellent Thanksgiving special, a traditional turkey dinner with all the trimmings. We did this a couple of years ago when a similar plague beset the household, and it worked out very nicely. The only real downside is a lack of leftovers.

Turning our attention from turkeys to other large, noble birds, my result from the "Egyptian astrology" meme that's going around is behind the cut. I can't say I'm shocked.

( Thou, in the light and in the night, art one above their moving might! )

laurellady, her parents, madelineusher, and I went to Knott's "Halloween Haunt" (aka "Knott's Scary Farm") last night. The previous time we tried this, a couple of years ago, it was awful; the park was so jammed with people that the primary fears were of suffocation and trampling. But it had been good a few times prior to that, so we decided to give it another chance this year. Our strategy was to go on a school night relatively early in October, on the theory that this would reduce the number of people there.

It worked out beautifully. The park was eerily empty -- just us and the monsters -- at first, and never got crowded the whole evening. There was little or no waiting for any ride or attraction. And the place really was spooky. The decoration, lighting, and sound effects were great, but most of the pucker factor was provided by "monsters" leaping out at you from dark byways, or drifting eerily toward you and looking curious (or hungry), or (worst of all) silently creeping up behind you and then making their presence known in some disturbing way. This happened out on the normal paths often enough, but in the mazes things got really hairy, literally and figuratively.

The hanging in the town square was a lot more about campy celebrity humor than the old witch-hangings from early-80s KSFs. Most of the jokes were based on current teenage culture, so madelineusher was laughing the whole time, while the rest of us would occasionally laugh with that "Oh, I got that one!" tone. I was very glad they had this at 8pm as well as midnight; I would have been seriously peeved if we stayed until midnight for that show.

The sparsely attended sideshow featuring Zamora (or something) the Torture King was much more fun. He was weak in the patter department, especially at first, but strong on real squirm-inducing stunts, like sticking a thin metal rod straight through his upper arm. As near as I could tell, nothing he and his assistant did was faked. And a lot of it was pretty cool. They closed the act with a series of Van de Graaff generator tricks, The usual things (powering lightbulbs and fluorescents held in empty air, for example) were followed by cranking up the voltage to the point that sparks were arcing several feet from the assistant's (gloved) hands to the floor, and smaller sparks were dancing over many other parts of her body. She seemed dazed when it was all over, and I don't think that was an act.

Then we all sang ourselves hoarse on the way home. All in all, a pretty good night.

Here's a picture o madelineusher on what was to be her first day of senior year at high school. Unfortunately, she fell prey to a stomach bug on the way in, and had to turn around and head home. Fortunately, it seems to have passed, so she'll have another shot at her first day tomorrow.

We watched Kurosawa's film Kagemusha last night.  I had seen it previously, but it was 25 years ago; neither laurellady nor madelineusher had seen it before.  It was even better than I remembered it, and we were all crying at the end.  I can't recommend this film highly enough.  Among its many other merits, the cinematography is just astonishing; shot after shot made me lose track of the plot as I drank in the sheer beauty of what I was seeing on the screen.

We watched it in Japanese with English subtitles, with madelineusher providing a running commentary on nuances of language and culture she noticed which the subtitles didn't capture.  I've been picking up bits and pieces of Japanese from her as she has been learning the language in school, and I had one of those breakthrough moments in language acquisition last night when I, too, noticed a mismatch between the dialog and the corresponding subtitles.  Mine was tiny -- a character exclaimed "What?!" ("Nani?!") in the audio before asking a question about surprising news, but that didn't appear in the subtitles -- but I was inordinately proud of myself nonetheless.  I'm very pleased that I got at least some of my dad's knack for languages.

madelineusher got her latest AP test scores in the mail yesterday:

US History:   5
Calculus B/C:   5
Chemistry:   4

She almost backed out of taking the calculus test because she didn't feel prepared for it.  I guess she picked up that "I'm a fraud" gene from me...sorry, kid.

These scores, combined with her previous 5/5/4 triplet from last summer, qualify her as an "AP Scholar with Distinction", the highest category you can get based on AP scores that doesn't narrow down to a single individual per state/gender combination.  And I thought we were getting a lot of mail from colleges before...

Now the white-knuckle wait is to see whether she makes it into the upper tier of the National Merit Scholar program.  That would unlock a whole lot of college scholarship money, which would be of great help sending her somewhere with ivy rather than aluminum siding on the walls.

Meanwhile, in non-family news, attendance for my "Gnostic Boot Camp" session at LVX last night was gratifyingly large.  After a couple of years when no more than half a dozen people showed up for these, suddenly we're packing the room every month.  I guess persistence pays off.  The discussion (concerning the Collects of the Gnostic Mass) was extremely productive and a lot of fun.  It's amazing how refreshing doing the actual work can be after a few days of reading rants on LJ.

Tonight I'm going to go see A Scanner Darkly with anubis75 and lady_saffir.  I love the book, so I'm praying the movie lives up to it.  Reviewers I trust have been praising it, so I'm optimistic.  I'll post a review tomorrow.