I’m spending tonight in another anonymous hotel room; the kind that has an ONCOMMAND television at one end of the desk and a Mr. Coffee at the other. Eventually the unstoppable homogeneity of these places gets under your skin.

(I remember a couple years ago, halfway through a three-week business trip to New York, San Francisco, Las Vegas, and somewhere in Canada, waking up in a hotel room with the blinds drawn. Sleep-dazed and work-drained, I spent maybe a full minute trying to figure out what city I was in. And then opening the blinds and seeing all the lights of the Vegas strip below me, and this horrible sinking oh yeah….

Or, not quite as depressing, being on a conference call with a partner in Europe, planning a meeting, and saying "well, I’m in California now, but in a few days I should be back in Boston," and then, two minutes later, "wait, I’m actually in New York right now.")

The Fiat in winter.

The reality is, I’m probably just oversensitive about this kind of abuse. “Just because I’m whining doesn’t mean I’m unhappy,” seems to have become some sort of unspoken weblog motto.

But I liked my phrase, “unstoppable homogeneity.” I think I got the idea from that Simpsons episode where the family goes to Brazil, and Homer wears a T shirt that has a picture of Uncle Sam taking an enormous greedy two-handed bite out of the earth, with “TRY AND STOP US” emblazoned underneath.

The Corrections is getting worse. He’s dropping too many little implausible intellectual jokes all over the place, like the cruiseship having a “Soren Kierkegaard ballroom,” and the stern midwestern father quoting Schopenhauer at every opportunity. The section with the talking turd was just painful.

Impromptu winter art.

Did I mention it snowed?

Out our window.

My sister Peach is in town to do a poetry reading tonight.

Peach and Joe at the office.

Once you graduate to that stage in your life that requires you to buy your own toilet paper, get into the habit of buying the thinnest, roughest, most sandpaper-like tissue you can find. You will find that after not very long, your apparatus will adjust to the harsher conditions. Then, when you travel to Europe, and especially Germany, whistle happily as you painlessly apply the foreign cloth, while your American comrades wince and bleed.

Plus it’s a nice bonus when, in the stall of a fancy restaurant or bar, you happen upon a roll of Charmin.

"Ari & I" continues to amuse.

A couple of days ago I finished Travels With My Aunt, which someone who reads my web page recommended to me after I said I was looking for more funny British novels. It was decent and somewhat amusing — I’m a sucker for travel writing, fictional or not — but I don’t remember laughing once.

There were a couple of good passages at the end about how being scared of dying means you’re probably not really living. Which contradicts some things that Aaron was telling me recently about how just “getting through the day” is an accomplishment in itself. I don’t think I agree with Aaron.

The book, along with Jimmy K’s weblog, has me thinking about travel stories again. My last non-business trip was to Costa Rica, nearly a year ago now. It was a much-deserved two-week vacation, and I’d been so busy at work, I hadn’t planned a thing. Which was perfect.

I had expected to bounce around frenetically, to absorb the whole country in 15 days and jet back to Boston at the end, more worldly and relaxed and tan than ever before. But I ended up spending about half the time stuck in a tiny Caribbean village called Cahuita (population: 600) and hanging out with a bunch of Europeans.

On my first day in Cahuita, I met a Finnish boy named Antti who was covered in golf-ball-sized mosquito bites and who spoke freely about the large house near Helsinki that he would inherit when his parents die. He even carried a photo of it in his luggage.

Antti’s house.

Antti had just graduated from college, borrowed $7500 from his sister, and was planning to live on said money in Costa Rica for a year. Like me, he’d anticipated that he would hop around the country. But Cahuita sucked him in too. In fact, he ended up renting a house (on the beach, four rooms, $150/month) and sticking around for several months.

Python hacking continues apace. But it is 3am, the time for NyQuil and subsequent haze of sleep.

But it’s so much nicer than writing with objects-in-C. The thought:typing ratio is a lot higher in a real object system with modern idioms. One difference, though, is that C is so messy that you force yourself to structure it heavily, and now I find myself being slightly sloppier in Python, because rigor just doesn’t feel as critical.

People bitch a lot about the semantic significance of whitespace in Python, and they’re right. Style and semantics should be decoupled. But if you can look beyond that, it’s a pretty good framework for light application development.

Desktop application integration would be so much easier if all the common tools were written in something like Python instead of C. Adding remote-control interfaces to things like your IM client, your file manager, etc. would be a breeze. Performance sensitive codepaths could be written in C if necessary.

In another plug, I’ve been enjoying the wallpapers from digital blasphemy. Two of my favorites are below:

 

It’s nearly 4am now, but considering I woke up at 7:30pm today, I may not be sleeping for a while. I’m not even sure what timezone waking up that late puts me in. Asia/Phnom_Penh, I think.

Speaking of which, my friend Jimmy K has been prancing around southeast Asia for the last couple months, and has been updating his web page as he goes.