Back in college at The Ohio State University, I took a non-fiction writing course, and decided for one of the assignments that I would write a short memoir about growing up in a funeral home. My father was a mortician in a 4 generation family business, and my family lived in the house connected to the funeral home.
Whenever I recount a story from my childhood, people inevitably ask me, “Oh my gosh… What was it like growing up in a funeral home?” My response is, “It was just normal. When you see dead people from the time you’re born, you don’t think of it as strange or creepy.”
There are many stories that I’ve collected over the years of growing up in a funeral home, apprenticing with the family business and returning home over the holidays and pitching in to help when needed. But for this piece I wanted to answer the question above, and the selected vignettes represent my experience as a mortician’s son from the ages 4 through 8:
I attended college at The Ohio State University, where I graduated with Bachelors degrees in English and Italian. My senior year I worked on a self-study course where the sole purpose was to translate 20 of Giovanni Pascoli’s poems. It has been 7 years since I translated these poems, but felt it was time to make them publicly available so that others could explore the works of Pascoli.
Giovanni Pascoli was a 19th century poet who lived in Tuscany, Italy for a good portion of his life. I chose to translate Pascoli because I felt he wrote beautiful, approachable and sometimes adolescent poems that captured the peasant life of rural Italy. It often juxtaposed the excitement and fear of the effects of the industrial revolution on his homeland. I focused my endeavors on translating selected poems from Myricae; in particular the chapters Le pene del poeta and L’ultima passeggiata, as well as the poems Novembre and Orfano.
Translating poetry is terribly challenging. A successful translator will do his or her best to translate each word, while at the same time mimicking syllable counts (e.g. rewriting endecasyllibo lines into iambic pentameter), alliteration and rhyme in order to capture the various minutiae that makes each poem sing. But as I am sure you are well aware, Italian and English are quite dissimilar; Italian floats off the tongue like a song dancing from cloud to cloud, while English can often sound like you’re banging rocks together. It is no easy feat for a translator to mimic a poem in another language, and at times he or she will make certain sacrifices in the translation in order to carry out the poem’s meaning.
In these translations, I focused primarily on attaining the proper translation of each poem, with a slightly lesser focus on matching each poem’s sound. I strove to write in blank verse, and believing that end rhymes are too constraining, I used internal rhyme when possible, but not if it adversely affected the poem’s meaning. In these translations, I do my best to honor Pascoli’s voice, and hope my efforts come across as such:
Giovanni Pascoli: Myricae Translations in English
I am especially grateful for the mentoring of Dr. Charles Klopp throughout this process.
Foodgeeks Thanksgiving Recipes
In October 1998, my homebrewing buddy Ken Hahn convinced me to buy the domain name Beergeeks.com. We launched a simple site in December 1998, and at the time it hosted homebrewing information and all of our homebrew recipes.
I gobbled up a few other related domain names, notably Foodgeeks.com and Winegeeks.com, and gradually published sites on those domains over the years. But Beergeeks was a short-lived venture; we ran the site for a few years, but never really found the time nor energy to push the site forward. The original Beergeeks.com was retired in early 2002.
In the summer of 2009, I was introduced to Lucy Burningham by mutual friends. Lucy has a captivating personality, and to top it off, she’s written numerous beer articles for many a publication. Even the New York Times. So, as our conversation flowed over macchiatos at The Red E, I mentioned the Beergeeks.com domain that I had lying stagnant, and said I’d boot up the site if I could find the time. She said without hesitation, “Let’s do it”, and by the look in her eye I knew we just had to do it.
For the love of beer, Lucy and I started working on the site in June 2010, each spent about 100 hours getting it ready, and today we’re proud to announce that the new Beergeeks is live! Woo! And I can’t forget a special shout-out to Crystal Beasley, who created the look and feel for all of the *geeks sites.
On Beergeeks you’ll be able to rate and review beers, find information about breweries and beer terminology, and you’ll be able to earn badges to represent all of your hard work. You can friend others on the site and follow their progress and reviews through activity streams and feeds.
We’re trying a bit of a different approach than normal by placing more power in the Beergeeks members’ hands. Any member who is logged-in to the website will be able to add and edit any beer or brewery on the site.
Beergeeks features a rudimentary mobile site which will allow you to quickly look up as well as rate and review beers. We’ll gradually open up our data, time permitting, and plan to make all of our data available via an API.
Give us a shout and let us know what you love, what you hate, or what you can’t live without. Hit us with your feedback and ideas at Get Satisfaction, follow us on Twitter or fan us on Facebook.
And don’t forget to friend me up on Beergeeks while you’re at it :)
Shortly after the Shizzow crew began ramping down our efforts, I began contracting with Mozilla, starting in the summer of 2009. I’ve mainly been performing PHP development for a number of projects, including the Crash Reporter, Creative Collective, Jetpack Gallery (now a part of Mozilla Add-Ons) and the Bespin Plugin Gallery. Today, I’m excited to say that I’m joining the Mozilla team as a full-time employee.
The Mozilla web dev team has been gradually migrating a number of their projects from PHP to Python, many of which use the Django framework. Although I’ll still be writing PHP, I’ll also be following their lead, and have started pitching in on one of their Django projects, the Input Reporter.
I’ve really enjoyed working with Mozilla, and am continually impressed blown away by the caliber of people that I work with. Each Mozillian is not only passionate about technology, but more importantly is passionate about doing the right thing for the web. All of us at Mozilla feel the calling to embrace and protect the open web, and I’m so grateful to be in a position where I can help.
My dear Uncle Craig passed away on Friday from a valiant 10 month fight against brain cancer.
Damnit, I miss that guy.
Before he left us, he took the time to scribble down the words which he lived by every day of his life. He was an ornery kind of guy, but always stayed true to his heart, and when it was time to be serious he would open his mouth and dispense sage advice in simple language. And if he ever started a sentence with, “Son…”, you knew you better stop whatever it is you’re doing, listen and hang on to every single one of his words.
Below are each of the simplified words he lived by.
The past couple months at Mozilla I’ve been plugging away (sorry for the pun) at the Bespin Plugin Gallery, and we’ve announced today that it’s officially live. Yay!
But wait, let’s back up a sec. First we need to talk about Bespin, because most of the people I talk to don’t know about this Mozilla-sponsored project.
Bespin is a code editor that you can embed in any web page. It’s lightweight, easy to use code editor that’s also easy on the eyes. It’s named Bespin after the planet in Star Wars The Empire Strikes Back, where Cloud City can be found. After all, the idea for the project is to provide developers with the ability to write, save and publish code in the proverbial web-based cloud.
The plugin gallery is a repository of plug-ins that are developed for Bespin. As a user of Bespin, you may download a Python Syntax Highlighter or a Vim Command Mapping Tool, and install these plug-ins into your Bespin editor to easily customize your coding environment. To get started building plugins for Bespin, check out the Bespin Plugin Guide.
I had a lot of fun working with Kevin Dangoor on the project, and am grateful for the design work of Sean Martell and Craig Cook, as well as the help from Stephen Donner and the rest of the QA team.
In the initial launch of Icon Rainbow, an icon color analyzer, we featured a small subset of 5,000 icons from the Apple iTunes store. But Crystal and I knew that Icon Rainbow couldn’t be considered a fully developed project until we had the icons for all of the iPhone apps in the iTunes app store. Well, it’s official - the Icon Rainbow now features the icons for all 200,000 apps in the iTunes app store. And I guess that means you could call it a fully developed project now.
I re-wrote the scripts that scraped, analyzed and saved all of the icons from apple.com, and ran those over the course of 4 weeks on our poor little $20 Slicehost server, which is still whimpering from its taskload. Now that everything has been analyzed and saved, the icons have been migrated to Amazon S3 and an aggressive caching scheme has been put in place - the new Icon Rainbow dataset is ready for your perusing.
What’s next? First, we’re planning to open source the code. Next, we want to find ways that we can highlight the top applications from the app store, as well as the interesting colors that icons appear in the icons (my, designers sure do love their browns and periwinkles). And eventually, we’d like to be able to highlight color trends that we notice in the app store. We know we won’t be able to pull off color trending on our sad Slicehost server, so we’ll be looking into ways to efficiently analyze all of the data we’ll be collecting.
For the month of June, I made a number of commitments to myself, including following the guidelines laid out by Michael Pollan in his book Food Rules.
Following these rules wasn’t terribly difficult, as I already practiced a number of guidelines laid out in the book. But where I got tripped up the most was on the days I was working long hours and needed quick, convenient meals and beverages to make it through the day.
Whether your crutch is fast food or packaged microwaveable meals, here are a few of the things I found helpful to plan ahead, so that I did not depend on modern convenient foods when following Pollan’s Food Rules:
Prep Breakfast and Lunch the Night Before
When we’re running late for work, or have to grab a quick meal in between meetings, we simply don’t have time to prepare a meal. But if we think and plan ahead, we can overcome this matter of inconvenience. Prepping breakfast and packing lunches the night before are the best way to ensure we’ll eat proper meals the next day. I try to package small salads in plastic containers to make sure I cover my plant intake needs, and always keep a salad dressing mixture of 2/3 part olive oil, 1/3 part balsamic vinegar, with dashes of salt, pepper and crushed oregano in my office.
Make multiple dishes ahead of time on Weekends
Take advantage of lazy Sundays to prep 2 to 3 dishes that can easily provide lunches for each day of the week. Soups and stews are easy to prepare ahead of time, and ideal for packing a lunch that can be re-heated. I love to roast a chicken for dinner, carve up the remaining meat that same day and create a tasty chicken salad, and then use the bones and carcass to prepare a homemade chicken broth.
Know which Foods are being Harvested
Keeping tabs on which foods are being harvested in your area at the given time will provide you the ability to plan your meals and shopping list in advance. If tomatoes are about to come in season, you’ll have time to research recipes that you can make use tomatoes. And having a set of recipes at the ready will allow you to know exactly which ingredients to add to your shopping list. When tomatoes finally do come in season, you’ll be prepared!
Shameless plug: This tip is the reason that I created the local seasonal foods guide on Foodgeeks.
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