Liberal Talk Radio

Slow week. Sorry about the light posts. I’ve been knee-deep in a database upgrade over at the day job, and it’s killing my blogging time. I think I might latently be a database designer. There’s something so rewarding about it. And so very, very anal-retentive. I guess what I like about it most is the permanence of it. The database I’m re-developing has been in place for over a decade. And it shows. My database will have to function properly long after I’ve left this job. Which means making good documentation, built-in flexibility, and robustness.

I guess, thinking about it, that’s what appeals to me in politics and urban design: thinking long-term. So much of our lives is instant and up-to-the-minute, it’s nice to think about investments for which we won’t necessarily see the return. Done right, this database will really be useful once years and years of data get pumped into it. That’s when it will start to shine. And I won’t be there. Much like our parents and grandparents taxed themselves to build the highway system that I enjoy every day.

For more on the absurdity of our short attention spans, see The Long Now Foundation. They’ve built a clock that ticks once every 100 years, and is designed to last 10,000 years. A modern-day Stonehenge. It’s quite a remarkable project. As a kid, I remember my priest once saying that to contemplate eternity, think about a giant rock on a cliff. Imagine a bird flying by once very 100 years and brushing the rock with its wing. Eternity is the time it would take for the bird to erode the entire rock. That image stayed with me.

Anyway, sorry about the slow posts. I’m planning on upgrading our blog software (the trackback spammers have discovered us), so if everything goes away this week, you know why.