malvasia bianca

I had not realized until recently that carpaccio only dates back to around 1950.

Quite a launch today. The Galaxy launch had its moments, too – it got people ready to treat Sun seriously as an x86 systems vendor, and the machines were quite nice. But, at the end of the day, they were 1U and 2U Opteron servers, and those aren’t exactly hard to find.

Today’s launch, however, is quite a different story: three significantly different products all landing at once, and all quite different from anything that you can get from other vendors. Galaxy 4 (a.k.a Sun Fire x4600) is, I suppose, the most straightforward of them: 8 Opteron sockets in a 4U box. Dual core now; when quad core comes out, you’ll be able to slide out the two-core CPU modules and slide in the four-core modules. 64GB of memory now, 128GB later. If you need a lot of compute power, it should do the trick; we sold a bunch of prerelease units (plus some Thumpers) to Tokyo Tech, and now it’s the fastest supercomputer in Asia.

The one that I understand the least is Andromeda (Sun Blade 8000). I’ve simply never worked in the sort of data center environment where blades’ virtues are at a premium, so I can’t say I entirely understand the pros (and cons, I suppose, but I don’t really know what they might be, other than perhaps its 19U height) of this versus our competitors’ designs. As a good object oriented programmer, though, the separation of I/O and processing elements sounds pretty interesting, with both sides independently replaceable and manageable. And they’ve done a lot of work towards increasing the lifespan of the chassis and various design elements, so it shouldn’t go obsolete on you soon: it should live up to the blade promise of simplified management combined with ease of growth. And once we, say, release Niagara blades for it (I haven’t heard any details about that, but it’s got to be coming), the ecosystem will get even richer. (And all you fan fetishists will enjoy standing behind it and feeling the wind blow through your hair.)

But by far my favorite is Thumper. (Sun Fire x4500.) I’ve been using prototype versions of the hardware for the last two years, and I still love to take off the cover and look at all those disks. (Jonathan put up a picture.) 24TB of storage in a 4U box; to put it another way, if you take four racks full of Thumpers, you have a petabyte of data. That is a lot of storage in not very much space.

And you also get a couple of dual-core Opterons in each box. (Or: you have 160 quite powerful cores to comb through your petabyte of data.) Next to Galaxy 4’s 8 sockets, a mere two-socket server doesn’t sound like so much, but let me assure you that it’s quite a lot of compute power to manage, mine, and process that data. I’m not creative enough to envision all the uses that the world will find for that, but early reports are already surprising me with their ideas, and we’ve certainly had a lot of fun playing with them.

My first computer was an Apple ][+. I can’t remember exactly when we got it; some time around fifth grade (1982), I suppose. I used it through the time I graduated from high school (1989); I got a Mac (SE/30, woo-hoo!) when I went to college.

I have very fond memories of (among other things) many games for the Apple ][+. Some of my favorites were various Infocom games (with their glorious packaging!) and Ultimas 1-4 (with their glorious packaging!) But there were many others that I enjoyed. (A piece of trivia: in Temple of Apshai (I think that’s the right game), the levels were generator from a random level generator with fixed seeds, because that used less disk space than storing the levels whole.)

I didn’t have a lot of money to buy games – mowing laws helped, but I couldn’t just go down to the local video game store whenever I got bored with my current game, like I do now. (Not that video game stores really existed back then, but never mind that.) Fortunately, my mom was willing to buy games for me if they somehow qualified as educational. Including games that were in French; fortunately, there was a publisher out there that took others’ games and translated them into French.

And it turns out that some of the games that have stuck most in my mind fell into that educational category. One was The Prisoner, a rather bizarre graphics/text adventure game. I originally played it in French, and my French wasn’t quite good enough to make it all the way through it – conversational skills and reading skills are somewhat different from the skills necessary to convince a primitive computer parser to do your bidding, especially in as surreal a game as that one. But what I played of it has stuck with me through the years. Another was Robot Odyssey, a graphical adventure game (English-language) to teach you about circuit design; I’m not an electrical engineer, and circuit design wasn’t really my thing, but that game was awesome. (I never finished it either, alas – I couldn’t get through a puzzle at the start of the last level, and this was before the days of GameFAQs.)

Some time last year I looked into playing these, but I couldn’t get any Apple ][ emulators to work under Linux. (Incidentally, why doesn’t Apple just release the system rom images for those machines? It’s not like they’re making any money out of them any more.) But I took note that several seemed to be available for the mac; I’ve just downloaded OSXII, and I am now a happy person.

It actually turns out that somebody has reimplemented Robot Odyssey in Java, and even added a bit: see Droid Quest. Maybe I’ll play that version, or maybe I’ll play the original; I’m not sure yet. And I’m also not sure if I’ll play the original Prisoner or its reimplementation Prisoner 2. Either way, I should be able to nicely make it through the summer game lull…

(Or, as has happened more frequently in my recent experience, I’ll discover that old games don’t hold up so well in reality as in my imagination. We shall see.)

I’m mostly done with Brain Age now: I’ve unlocked everything, and while I think I’ll finish all the sudoku and might still do a few more rounds of some of the other exercises, I’m starting to get bored of it. (But I still want to try to get 12 on Low to High, or get all 30 on Word Memory!)

Fun, and Liesl’s been playing it as much as I have. Not your standard console game – it and its sequels are a big reason why the DS has been reaching an unusually old demographic in Japan. It’s made up of various puzzles, some “training” and some “brain age tests”, plus a decent sudoku interface. You hold the DS on its side, so it opens up like a notebook; you write on the right side (or sometimes speak into the microphone), with information on the left side.

Some of the puzzles, are pretty good, some of them so-so, some of them boring. (Speed reading is bad enough, but counting out loud from 1 to 120?) The handwriting recognition works well enough (but by no means perfectly); the voice recognition is adequate, but didn’t add anything to the game.

The most pleasant surprises were the little bits thrown in aside from the game play. For example, the second time I played the game, it asked me to draw a koala, a kangaroo, and the continent of Australia, all from memory. It then showed me pictures of the three of them; pretty interesting what I’d forgotten and what I remembered. And then, the next time Liesl played, it asked her to draw the same thing, and both of us got to look at each other’s drawings. Fun; we turn out to both be approximately equally bad at that sort of thing.

I’m glad I bought it; I was happy to spend 15-30 minutes a day on it for a month or so. I’ll probably by the next game in the series; it helps that they’re only 20 bucks. It wasn’t exactly a revelation, and there are ways in which it could be improved, but it’s fine for what it is.

Vacation’s over now; back to work tomorrow. Some random notes:

• Miranda managed to last through all five plays we went to. She fell asleep during one; I, on the other hand, dozed a bit during two. All good, but our consensus favorite was London Assurance, which we’d never heard of before.
• It turns out that High Society wasn’t originally a stage musical: the film was the original form, and its stage adaptation is only a few years old. (With more songs thrown in, from elsewhere in the Cole Porter canon, to make it into a real musical.)
• Stratford is a pleasant place; I’d be happy to go to the the festival again some future year.
• It’s my first vacation where I’ve brought along the laptop and sought out internet connections regularly; that worked well.
• I did my first programming on a Mac. (Or at least my first in a decade and a half.) Which worked well enough; a decent set of tools available. A weird mixture of Gnu and non-Gnu environments – I was pleased to not only find autoconf installed, but even its info pages. (Good thing, since I’d never used it before!) But then when I had a make question, its info pages weren’t installed, even though it was Gnu make. (Fortunately, my brain managed to dredge up the answer I wanted.)
• It’s the first time I’ve done longish driving in the last several years. Surprisingly pleasant.
• We bought a radio adapter for the iPod – surely it won’t be hard to find unused frequencies in the wilds of Ohio and Ontario? Actually, though, the spectrum is pretty well filled; in fact, it was easier to find stations near Toledo and Detroit than in more rural regions. Fortunately, it was easy enough to find decent radio stations in Ontario. I might try using it at home; it depends if I start finding more podcasts that I want to listen to, or run out of CDs that I want to listen to. (I certainly don’t plan to start listening to the radio here regularly.)
• My range of (self-provided) vacation entertainment has broadened – I used to just bring along a ton of books, but this time I had several books, several magazines, the iPods, the DS, and the computer. I’m happy with the new mix: I managed to nicely work down the magazine and podcast backlogs, while still getting a half-dozen books read.
• I still don’t take as many pictures as I probably should, though the digital camera is helping.
• Yosha apparently went on a bit of a hunger strike again at the kennel – he’s noticeably skinner than he was when we left. And his hind legs seem to be weakening a bit. But the kidney dog food seems to be working well, so hopefully he’ll have a few more years ahead of him; we just might have to get used to carrying him up and down the stairs at times.

I’ve got the unit test framework cleaned up a bit: its interface should be relatively stable now, there’s some amount of documentation, and doing ‘make install‘ should work. Still more stuff to do before I want to announce it more widely – at the very least, I should make a tar file available, but some rpm’s and a bit more cleanup would also be nice – but I’m happy with what’s there, and would recommend it to anybody needing to write unit tests for C++ code in a Unix environment.

From the preface to the revised edition of How Children Fail, by John Holt:

After this book came out, people used to say to me, “When are you going to write abook about how teachers fail?” My answer was, “But that’s what this book is about.”

But if it is a book about a teacher who often failed, it is also about a teacher who was not satisfied to fail, not resigned to failure. It was my job and my chosen task to help children learn things, and if they did not learn what I taught them, it was my job and task to try other ways of teaching them until I found ways that worked.

For many years now I’ve been urging and begging teachers and student teachers to take this attitude toward their work. Most respond by saying, “Why are you blaming us for everything that goes wrong in schools? Why are you trying to make us feel all this guilt?”

But I’m not. I didn’t blame myself or feel guilt, just because my students were so often not learning what I was teaching, because I wasn’t doing what I had set out to do and couldn’t find out how to do it. But I did hold myself responsible.

“Blame” and “guilt” are crybaby words. Let’s get them out of our talk about education. Let’s use instead the word “responsible.” Let’s have schools and teachers begin to hold themselves responsible for the results of what they do.

I held myself responsible. If my students weren’t learning what I was teaching, it was my job to find out why. How Children Fail, as I said, was a partial record of my not very successful attempts to find out why.

• We feel fine.
• Ed Felten goes ski jumping.
• Lean healthcare.
• Trained to fear.
• Visual complexity.
• Files are not for sharing.

One of the things I’ve been doing on vacation is going through my backlog of magazines. There are too many ways to make your suitcase heavier on a trip; might as well find ways to lighten it, by bringing discardable reading material along.

They only make some of their issues available online, so I can’t link to all of my recent favorites, but I thought these articles were pretty good.

I’m in the middle of reading A New Theory of Urban Design. Not one of Alexander’s best (though it’s interesting enough); it’s hurt by problem that, as he comments, part of the theory that he’s discussing “remains unpublished. It will appear in a later volume of this series, “The Nature of Order”. Which turned into four volumes, of course, but who’s complaining? At least he’s avoided the Grothendieck problem (hardly unique to Grothendieck, of course) of publicly sketching out grand plans of future volumes which then divide further and remain unfinished. (Or maybe he has sketched out many future volumes, and I’m just unaware of it.)

The book presents the following “Overriding Rule” of design:

Every increment of construction must be made in such a way as to heal the city. (p. 22)

This gets recasted as follows:

Every new act of construction has just one basic obligation: it must create a continuous structure of wholes around itself. (p. 22)

He then talks about how each piece of construction affects the field of centers of the work: each increment should simultaneously work to support some center larger than itself, while fitting in with the adjacent centers and being made up out of smaller centers. (The notion of “centers” gets explained in The Nature of Order.) Which is an interesting way to think about programming: can we program in such a way that every chunk of code that we write heals the code base, developing a harmonious interplay of centers?

As in all of his work, this design is done collaboratively and incrementally. Which are both ideals that are dear to XP’s heart. Except when they aren’t. You can talk about a program’s design in terms of either how it behaves towards the programmer or how it behaves towards the user. The former sort of design is done collaboratively and incrementally; the latter is done incrementally, but isn’t done collaboratively. Instead, XP says that there should be a Customer speaking with a single voice, either being a single person or being filtered through a single person.

Why is this? And do I think it’s a good idea? To start with the latter: my tentative answer is no. If I’ve drunk the collaborative kool-aid elsewhere, I don’t see why I shouldn’t drink it here; if a city can be designed collaboratively, then surely a piece of software can be as well?

But if I accept that, then why might XP propose otherwise? (Of course, I could just be wrong about XP.) My tentative answer is that is has to do with XP’s programmer-centric nature: it’s focused on having programmers deliver as much value as possible to others. Given that, it concentrates on the details of how to program (pair programming, refactoring, etc.) and how to make sure that the software that is being written has highest business value (the planning game). But it doesn’t address the question of how the stories are generated and selected – that’s the Customer’s job. Given that story generation/selection is out of scope of XP, it proposes the simplest thing that could possibly work as a programming/Customer interface, namely a single-voiced Customer, and leaves it at that.

I wonder what an effective process with collaborative design on the Customer side would look like? This may be one of the potential advantages of processes where the programmers are the ones actually designing the application – it brings more design minds to the table. (Not that programmers designing software doesn’t have its own flaws, to be sure.)

Of course, one potential problem with multiple designers is a lack of coherence: nobody likes design by committee. Alexander has been tackling this problem heads-on for decades: that’s what pattern languages are all about, after all. (Well, one of the things that they’re about.) There are some interesting additions on that subject here as well. The book discusses an experiment at imagining how a section of a city might develop incrementally, through a series of projects. Each project has a different owner, so collaborative design comes into play for the city as a whole. But each project has one person leading it, and must come with a vision:

Every project must first be experienced, and then expressed, as a vision which can be seen in the inner eye (literally). It must have this quality so strongly that it can also be communicated to others, and felt by others, as a vision. (p. 50)

So that’s the tightrope that Alexander is walking. He tries to get the good aspects of individual design by having each design step be guided by a clear vision. That vision can guide other people working on that project, so the project doesn’t lose coherence. Next, other people working on subsequent projects have to try to maintain the coherence of the preceding visions (and open up the possibility of following visions), working so as to always heal the city.

Works for me. (And works a lot better than Metaphor.) It’ll be interesting to try to carry it out in practice, though.

The Cat Returns isn’t one of my favorite movies. I’m happy for Miranda to watch it, and I won’t normally leave the room just because she has it on, but Studio Ghibli has produced much better stuff.

The theme song, however, I totally love. (Miranda and Liesl agree with this.) Very catchy in a rather understated way; and now I know what a ukelele sounds like. It’s in Japanese, of course, and, judging from one translation of the lyrics, I’d quite possibly not like it as much if it were in English.

I got a CD of Ayano Tsuji’s which contained this song. At first, I didn’t particularly like any of the other songs on the CD, but now they’re starting to grow on me. Maybe I’ll investigate further.

(Speaking of Studio Ghibli, I just noticed that Whisper on the Heart has just been released in the US; we’ll see if I like that movie any better.)

We just spent most of a week in Oberlin, visiting my parents. We got to see two of Miranda’s cousins for the first time in over two years; they are truly excellent. (It was nice to see my parents too, to be sure.)

Downtown Oberlin has changed somewhat since I lived there. More restaurants, which is a good thing – it only had one or two decent non-pizza places when I lived there, while there are now half a dozen or so places downtown where I’d be happy to eat. It seems to have gotten a bit more boutiquey, which I can live with; if they can sustain themselves (which apparently they can – no empty storefronts this time), more power to them. Alas, it’s about to get a good deal harder for general-purpose stores to survive – a Walmart is about to open up just south of town.

Two of the stores, in particular, apparently draw in out-of-town customers. One is called Bead Paradise; it also sells vintage clothing which seems rather decent (as far as I can tell from looking into the window and not being into that sort of stuff). And there’s an art gallery called Gingko Gallery, selling the work of six artists who have studios in the back of the store and several more that don’t; I did go in there, lured by some delightfully whimsical animals in the front window (apparently made out of twigs and seed pods and the like, though they also have very bright paint jobs on them). I ended up with two of those, a very amusing cube made out of angora wool with faces on five of the six sides, and a couple of sculptures that were absolutely gorgeous. Plus, they rescue cats, and had some completely adorable kittens in the back. (Some of whom hadn’t even opened their eyes, but a couple were old enough to be more playful.) It’s apparently been open in some form or another for nine years now; I hope it continues for another nine. Maybe I’ll put up pictures of some of the things we got there.

We spent much of the visit at Kendal at Oberlin, which is where my parents now live. Quite a lot of art there, too: this is what happens when you bring together retirees who either lived in a college town or would like to retire in a college town, and then move them into residences that, while quite nice, are presumably noticeably smaller than the houses that most of them previously lived in. So the result is that people’s art collections spread out into the hallways, the communal rooms, the guest rooms. (The one we stayed in had a couple of illuminated manuscripts, a couple of Japanese prints (which may or may not have been reproductions), a couple of prints of more recent vintage, this all in the size of a normal hotel room.)

A good visit.

In regards to my last post: the bibliography to the XP book doesn’t seem to mention The Production of Houses, but it has this to say about The Timeless Way of Building:

Outlines Christopher Alexander’s view of architecture and construction. The relationship described between designers/builders and the users of buildings is much the same as the relationship between the programmers and the customer.

Time for me to go and reread that one, I think…

Some quotes from the chapter on “The Architect Builder” in Christopher Alexander’s The Production of Houses:

This requires, then, that decisions about design can be made, individually, house by house, and that they can even be made while construction is under way. (p. 69)

It requires a system of communication in which the building is not frozen, ahead of time, by drawings, but in which rough plans of the building are translated directly into building, step by step; and for this, the institutional powers of architect and builder – the power of design and the power of construction – must be wedded in a single process. (p. 70)

the kitchen be laid out exactly according to the wishes of the housewife (p. 70)

Further, it requires a form of communication between architect and builder which is simple, cheap, and direct, so that the immense expense of fifty different sets of drawings is not required to design fifty different houses. This direct communication becomes relatively impossible when architect and builder are separate, because the communication must be legally binding – exact – and is therefore immensely expensive to prepare. If architect and builder are one and the same person, the communication can be quick, schematic, because it is only a record for “in-house” use. And it therefore becomes cheap enough to do. (p. 71)

Third, in order for the woman to lay out her kitchen successfully, she must be able to enter the process at various times while the house is being built. It is, generally speaking, not possible to make subtle, exact choices about counter sizes, widths, position of stove, shelves, cabinets, in the abstract – that is, long before the building exists. However, once the shell of the building is there, and the kitchen exists, it is then possible to decide exactly where the details should be by simply standing in the real place and imagining them.

This requires that even at this late date during the process of construction itself, decisions about size, position of shelves, counters, etc., can still be made.

And this requires that the building is still actively open to design decisions, even after its shell is up, and that the builder, who is in the building on a day-to-day basis, has the right to make these decisions with the woman. If the architect is a separate person, again communicating through drawings, the process of choosing each of these kitchens on a direct, person-by-person basis would become impossibly complex and expensive. But if the architect and builder are one and the same, and together have control also over the spending of money, it is extremely simple. The same is true for all the other qualities a good house needs. (pp. 71-72)

I could go on, but I’ll stop here; just read the chapter yourself. You just have to do some obvious substitutions and you get large chunks of XP. Is this book cited in the bibliography of the XP book? I’ll have to check when I get into work, but I have to assume it was a direct influence.

I guess I already was aware that Christopher Alexander had these sorts of ideas, that he wasn’t an influence on software development solely through his invention of design patterns, but I’d never seen it spelled out so clearly before. Which raises the next question: Christopher Alexander and Kent Beck have both done influential work in both design patterns and architect/customer interactions; is this a coincidence? I tend to think the answer is “no”. If you take, say, Singleton on the one hand and the Planning Game on the other hand, it’s hard to see any direct link. But both of their thoughts were much more far-reaching: both of them worked not just with design patterns but with pattern languages, which meld individual design decisions into a richly textured, active, living structure. (Using an expansive notion of living.) And once you have that structure in place, you then have the freedom to make late-binding decisions, which in turn opens up the possibility of designer- (or builder-)customer interactions throughout the entire building process, and even past the end of the building process.

Great stuff. And he’s not at all afraid of the details: there’s theory in this book, to be sure, but it’s made concrete at every step with pictures, with descriptions of small steps, with discussions of experiments that worked, experiments that didn’t work.

Are there many agile construction firms out there? It seems to me like a huge need…

About a year ago, I was browsing a local comic book store, and decided to pick up the first volume of Kabuki. Pleasant enough – I’m as happy to read comic books about attractive women beating the crap out of people as the next person – but flawed in its own ways, too.

Still, I was curious enough to read the second volume. Which completely through me for a loop – it was stunningly gorgeous, successfully experimenting with a few different artistic styles, and the experimental narrative was more promising than that of the first volume. Clearly I had to read more.

The third volume didn’t do so much for me – back to the less interesting drawing and narrative style. But the fourth volume was quite good, and the fifth volume is on my personal short list of potential best comic books ever. (Hmm, what else is on the list? I’d have to think about it. Is anything else on the list right now?)

Everything comes together in that volume. The art is again stunning. (You can see some of the artist’s cover images on his web site; I like several of those quite a bit, but the interior art is much more richly layeed.) It’s very well integrated into the narrative of the story, and integrates text and picture in a more successfully interesting way than anything else I can recall reading. The plot is solid enough to carry the weight of the other features of the volume.

Why had I never heard of this series before? I guess I need to get out more…

I’ve gotten permission from Sun to release a C++ unit test framework that we (largely I, but with significant contributions from others) wrote. Here’s its web page; there’s still a significant amount of work to before I want to announce it more widely, but the source code that’s there works just fine.

I’ll try to get a better version (with usable documentation) done over the next month or so. In particular, I’d like to get it out before Agile 2006. (Are any of my blog readers going to be there?) If anybody wants to contribute, I’d be very grateful.

We went to a (quite nice) party yesterday. Hosted by friends of ours, lots of people around our age present, most of which were couples with kids.

I’m pretty sure that Miranda was the oldest kid there; in fact, she may have been two years older than any of the other kids. Which is pretty weird – I wasn’t the oldest adult there, and in fact I suspect I was younger than the median.

So it would seem that, in the social circles I travel in, having a kid a year after finishing grad school is somewhat unusual. I guess I’d started to realize this – most of my friends have kids now, but frequently that’s a recent development. I just hadn’t had the point driven home so forcefully before.

Anybody have a favorite C++ XML parser? We might need to add an XML/HTTP interface next to an existing CORBA interface soon at work, and I’m not too familiar with the options out there. It’s a very simple interface – a few simple short requests, a few simple, short responses plus one simple, long response. TinyXml seems like it should have all the functionality I need, so I’m leaning that way, but I don’t realy have an informed opinion on the matter.

A month and a half ago, I was toying with the idea that maybe signing up for Amazon prime would actually save me money. I still don’t really believe that, but the general idea of not buying books until right before I’m going to actually read them seems sound to me. I’m going on a trip soon, and will want a car adapter for my iPod; that seemed as good an excuse as any to sign up for the service. It comes free for the first three months; we’ll see how I like it.

It’s kind of scary, actually: now, whenever I visit any page on Amazon, there’s this button on the page, and if I click on the button, the item will appear on my doorstep in a couple of days. I’m really not sure what to think about that – I’m much more in the habit of building up a little shopping cart full of stuff, thinking about it for a while. Which I can still do if I want to, but I don’t think I will want to.

While I was there, I ordered a CD. (Taverner’s Lament for Jerusalem, which I learned about from the Naxos podcast. I suspect that podcast is going to turn into a very effective way for them to advertise to me.) And I successfully resisted the urge to order two CD’s: when I finish that one, maybe I’ll order another. (Would Amazon make money if I ordered one CD a week with two-day shipping? Hmm.)

I almost resisted the urge to buy any books. But then I saw that I could pre-order the seventh volume of Hikaru No Go, and I couldn’t resist that, either. In general, I don’t approve of pre-orders, but I’m completely sure that I’ll want to read that book, and in fact will be happy to drop whatever other book I’m in the middle of reading for the thirty minutes or so that it will take me to read it.

Speaking of books, anybody know of any good TCL books? At work, we write our acceptance tests in TCL, and most of us are far from TCL experts; I certainly feel that my lack of TCL knowledge makes me inappropriately frightened of the larguage, and hurts my refactoring. I’m reading the Ruby book right now, but I should probably put some sort of TCL book next on my work reading list.

(Random coment: I just clicked on my current Amazon book recommendations, and they seem to have changed drastically – All Quiet on the Western Front is number two on the list, because I own The Communist Manifesto. Weird for a few reasons.)

I had hopes for France, but not much seems to be coming of that. But now Norway is stepping up to the plate, and is demanding action fast.

Aside from the DRM issues, I like that they’re complaining that Apple “reserves the right to change unilaterally consumers’ rights to access material already purchased.” Yes, that sounds like bad behavior to me. And “that iTunes has tried to impose English law on the contract” – hardly unreasonable for Norway to be nonplussed by that.