CPUnk I write right. Right? Aye.

toodledo add testing123

Now, open AppleScript Editor and put this into it:

(*
 A script to allow Quicksilver to send text to a Ruby on Rails "Gem" named toodledo.  It implements a CLI statement based on the gem - toodledo add <text> to create a toodledo entry.  

 Typing "toodledo setup" on the CLI creates the authentication needed for the gem to work.

 v0.2 - added syntax for silencing "Task <number> added." response from Toodledo

# I have a blog entry on how to use this - http://www.cpunk.com/?p=774
# http://toodledo.rubyforge.org/toodledo/ is where the basic tool comes from

*)

using terms from application "Quicksilver"
 on process text qsText

 -- qsText is the text fed in from Quicksilver, this cleans it up
 set toodleTask to quoted form of qsText

 -- build the command line statement (Example: toodledo add "my thing to do")
 -- uncomment the one you want

 --this version returns confirmation
 #set unixToodle to "toodledo add " & toodleTask

 --this version silences the confirmation feedback by redirecting output to /dev/null
 set unixToodle to "toodledo add " & toodleTask & " 2>&1 >/dev/null"

 -- run it on the command line, as the current user
 do shell script unixToodle

 end process text
end using terms from

Flight day — I did WHAT all over the Russian air? (Part 1)

The day of — Pat and were picked up by Irena, a very nice (and pretty) woman who was our pri­mary trans­la­tor, and she and our dri­ver, Sergey, took us to the airfield.

On the way to the air­field, we drove from “upper Nizhny”, where the uni­ver­sity and hotel were located, down into “lower Nizhny” which is the indus­trial cen­ter. Dur­ing the entire drive, Irena recited fact after fact about the city, it’s out­put, it’s fac­tory types and capac­ity — it was amaz­ing how much she knew, and also very clear how proud they all still were for the sig­nif­i­cance of this city.

Dur­ing Soviet times, Nizhny was incred­i­bly impor­tant to the USSR. This city was a pri­mary source of MiG devel­op­ment, test­ing, and pro­duc­tion — as well as also being a major man­u­fac­tur­ing loca­tion for their higher-end cars. It’s clear that the peo­ple liv­ing here are still adjust­ing to the idea that they have a dif­fer­ent mis­sion now — and are not a cog in a machine as much as they are a cog sit­ting in the mid­dle of a field that is the open market.

As Irena put it quite a few times, lower Nizhny is very “soviet” still. That means that it’s basi­cally very util­i­tar­ian, very factory-centric, and now it’s also quite run-down. There are many ten­e­ment style build­ings that are in mixed states of dis­re­pair — but peo­ple are still liv­ing their lives effec­tively in this envi­ron­ment; it’s a scram­ble to make ends meet, I would guess, but they all look out for each other as well — and I’m sure that the influx of rev­enue related to the Sokol Test Facil­ity has some pos­i­tive effect on the area, but the best resource cur­rently is an IT devel­op­ment infra­struc­ture that includes a plant from Intel. How­ever, with a city of 1.8 mil­lion peo­ple, it’s still a lot of mouths to feed in a down econ­omy. As I said to Kathy, in many ways it felt like Africa, with bet­ter infra­struc­ture; lots of peo­ple liv­ing at the poverty line or just above, going from day to day and not hav­ing the lux­ury to think about tomor­row or next week.

Nizhny, and Sokol Air­base, btw, were deep dark mil­i­tary secrets dur­ing the Soviet era. Even up to 6 years ago, it was a chal­lenge to visit cer­tain areas because of this tra­di­tion of secrecy; so get­ting onto the base was amaz­ing to begin with — but the level of access was profound.

As we entered the Air­base, we did the stan­dard secu­rity check, which was done by guards, not mil­i­tary per­son­nel — the test facil­ity has become a joint own­er­ship pri­va­tized endeavor with the Gov­ern­ment. They con­tinue to make MiGs and so forth, I believe (we didn’t get to see that part), but it’s very clear that a facil­ity that was orig­i­nally set up to employ and involve thou­sands of peo­ple is now hold­ing a hand­ful at best … it was often very eerie. Lots of rust and chipped paint, but still an oper­a­tional facility.

After mak­ing it onto the base, we were escorted to the base museum. This was a build­ing of high former-Soviet pride that greeted State dig­ni­taries and basi­cally pro­pa­gan­dized the impor­tance of this par­tic­u­lar facil­ity. A LOT of amaz­ing things came out of this facil­ity, includ­ing the entire line of MiGs (13,000 vari­a­tions (I double-checked that num­ber)). It served as a pri­mary base for the com­mu­nity, and until the fall of the USSR, the idea was basi­cally that the fac­tory existed, the city existed for the fac­tory, and you as a worker were part of the fac­tory, and thus lived in this city.

The tour was pretty cool, there were quite a num­ber of per­sonal arti­facts from sig­nif­i­cant peo­ple, and we even got a chance to sit in an ejec­tor seat that is iden­ti­cal to the one in the MiG-29.

I took a lot of pic­tures and showed respect and inter­est for each facet. The leader of our adven­ture (Oleg) even­tu­ally barked about mov­ing faster (in Russ­ian), which I think was an indi­ca­tor that not many guests take time to really peruse the museum — so I hope our museum host was prop­erly hon­ored — it was an impres­sive tour.

So, off to the air­base itself!

We drove across the facil­ity, into snowy woods that looked like James Bond was going to leap out of them at any sec­ond, chased by dogs, to run across the road we were on. Even though he didn’t appear, the approach was still sat­is­fy­ing — it was REALLY trippy know­ing that I was basi­cally just, you know, rolling up into the heart of the Soviet machine … you know … fer like a chance to play with one of their toys and stuff?

It’s impor­tant to under­stand some­thing at this point. I think, for the most part, Rus­sians have been “pro­grammed” to align them­selves to the rules for the record, and then com­pletely dis­re­gard them in operation.

When we got to the main admin­is­tra­tive build­ing (which was some­what run-down, but not ter­ri­bly so — there was no rust, but the paint on the floors was shot, for exam­ple) … we were lead to a meet-and-greet with the pilots.

This is where things got a lit­tle interesting.

All through the trip, Pat was putting his hand behind his ear and say­ing, “What?” — he’d been doing it for days. He admit­ted (which I already knew) that he is hav­ing trou­ble hear­ing… but I think it was the rich Slavic accents that really did him in. So, instead of hear­ing “Moose and Squir­rel will put on G-suits for prepa­ra­tion to fly­ing MiG” — he would hear “Moo — irrel — put on — G-for para­tion to ing­mig” … and then turn to me, at which point I would say the exact same thing and he’d understand.

The unfor­tu­nate result of that was a LOT of wor­ried glances from all the Rus­sians, who were con­cerned he might not be able to hear the comms dur­ing flight. He (and I) assured them that he didn’t have a prob­lem that bad, and when there wasn’t a lot of extra back­ground noise, he could often fol­low things.

How­ever, in addi­tion to this, Pat does not like change.

So dur­ing the brief­ing, his pilot, Yuri, was obvi­ously wor­ried about Pat’s age and said that they would do a num­ber of maneu­vers, but Pat would not get the stick. Pat had been hop­ing to do an Inverted-S (ha), but aside from that was pretty desirous to not be treated like a lit­tle girl.  Well, Pat didn’t respond well, and I had to diplo­mat­i­cally face down the pilots and con­vince them to let him fly the way he wanted.  Which they did.

How­ever … dur­ing the con­ver­sa­tion, he got very tense — which was just great … because right after that, we went for our blood pres­sure test.  His read 186/120 or some hor­ri­fy­ingly high thing … so let’s stop the flight, right?  Of course not — this is all fake any­way … the lady explained to us that his pres­sure was high because he was excited — get in plane, give us money … trust me.

So, for the right amount of money and cajol­ing, ANYBODY can fly a MiG, I promise you — it’s per­fectly safe.

MiG Takeoff Audio

Here’s a small sam­pler — headed back to Moscow, get­ting ready for plane.

Time dilated dur­ing the take­off — for me, the expe­ri­ence will always be remem­bered as “woooooooooooooooooooooo haaaaa­haaaaa­haaaaaa!!!!” … but clearly it was not quite that long

After­burn­ers, Ver­ti­cal Take­off, wooha!

Notes:

1. We taxi, then we fly down the fun­way at 600km, then we go ver­ti­cal in afterburner
2. When the take­off begins, the sound gar­bles for a minute — but then it clears — so hang in there
3. When he reminds me to put my head back, that is when we go vertical
4. The alarm you hear is indi­cat­ing we have tra­versed the 7G rec­om­mended limit line (we went 8G)
5. 4.5km is 2.8 miles — from the time I put my head back to the time to the time I fin­ish my “woo” is about 4km
6. When he asks me how I am, that is to ensure I have not passed out
7. Please note that the file takes a minute to start load­ing, but it will stream after it buffers some at the beginning

…and so it begins…

Freakin’ Out!

So it’s the morn­ing before flight day — we’re in Nizhny, in a pretty nice lit­tle hotel in the mid­dle of town. I’m totally awake — a blend of jet lag turned around and antic­i­pa­tion. I’m REALLY excited about this — a lit­tle ner­vous, but in all the right ways.

Once com­plete, Pat will be the old­est dude to ever com­plete this pro­gram, which is pretty awe­some. He seems in pretty good spir­its as well.

Oleg, the program’s Direc­tor has offered me the “rare oppor­tu­nity” to upgrade our flight pro­gram to include a ver­ti­cal take-off (which is pretty awe­some, I must admit), a par­a­bolic flight (for weight­less­ness), and some sort of intense land­ing like the Cos­mo­nauts. It is dis­counted “this day only” but you must pay in cash. I’m likely game, but we’ll have to see if I can get the cash.

He has told me that they will give me the raw video footage, along­side their own edited ver­sion — so I got that going for me.

We’re told to have a light break­fast, no cof­fee just tea, and Irena (our host in Nizhny) will come and get us at 8:30am. It is cur­rently 4:50am — so I’m just bounc­ing a lit­tle bit. Pretty stoked, slightly ner­vous, did I men­tion that?

Circus and Caviar

This is just a quick note — on Sun­day, while in Moscow, Pat and I opted to go to the cir­cus. It was quite awe­some, and I had the oppor­tu­nity to see tigers:

…and we had a really neat, if strange time.

After that — we went out to din­ner at a great restau­rant (prob­a­bly a tourist trap, but so what?) — and had caviar. Pat and I camped it up about a Red­neck hav­ing caviar, and fin­ished up the night with some Cuban cigars!

Pretty sur­real being in Moscow with Pat, going to the cir­cus and then hav­ing caviar and cubans — but I guess, if you add it all up — Cir­cus, Caviar, Cubans, and Pat — you get CCCP … which ulti­mately makes sense.

Seattle — Frankfurt — Moscow — Day 1

We arrived last night at around 7pm, and got through the air­port pretty eas­ily.  After so many hours on planes, it was nice to be able to walk around.

The flight from Seat­tle to Frank­furt, Ger­many was quite nice.  We were in busi­ness class, so we had nice lux­u­ri­ous seats and all the ameni­ties short of First Class.  Pat seemed to enjoy that flight immensely.

When we got to Frank­furt, we wan­dered around for a lit­tle while look­ing at stuff, and then found a Lufthansa Busi­ness Lounge to attend.  They served frank­furters, which I con­sider quite won­der­ful con­sid­er­ing the location.

They also had show­ers, so I took one — which, at the time, felt com­pletely luxurious.

Тхе леаст И цан до (“The Least I can do”)

It’s time for me to make and explain an obser­va­tion I am devel­op­ing about Rus­sians.  They ascribe, with seem­ingly no mal­ice what­so­ever, to what I am going to call a global phi­los­o­phy of “the least I can do.”  This is a strange and rough-edged blend of fru­gal­ity, con­ser­va­tion, maybe rebel­lion, and down­right stub­born­ness that is unique to these peo­ple.  As I travel, I will con­tinue to review this theme — which wraps around the idea that if you ask a Russ­ian to open the door, he will open it and walk away, let­ting it close before you get there.  What’s oddly won­der­ful about it all is that well — it’s uni­ver­sal — so nobody seems to mind or care …

The Flight from Frank­furt to Moscow

As an open­ing exam­ple: the flight from Frank­furt to Moscow was a lit­tle dif­fer­ent than the first flight, but still pleas­ant.  In keep­ing with the “least I can do” men­tal­ity of Rus­sia, the plane was not set up with any­thing “spe­cial” for busi­ness class — in fact, all the seats through­out the plane were iden­ti­cal, 3 seats to a side.  Busi­ness class was defined by a cur­tain on a rod that could be moved back and forth — so on one flight, busi­ness class might be the first 3 rows, but on the next flight, move the cur­tain, now it’s the first 10 rows.

How­ever, if that was all — it would just seem lazy and maybe even a lit­tle fraud­u­lent.  But instead, the true mean­ing of “the least I can do” … they put a lit­tle sign on the mid­dle seats in busi­ness class that says you can use this space as well.  So Pat and I basi­cally got two seats with a seat between us — presto, Russ­ian Busi­ness Class.

The flight was quite lovely in that con­text — and a good adjust­ment for the Russ­ian expe­ri­ence of effi­cient “least-iness.”  We were given a nice meal (Pat had the beef, I had the fish, which was really yucky, but that’s on me).  The staff were friendly and we sat it out for a few hours, bring­ing it all home into Moscow for arrival.

We got through pass­port con­trol pretty eas­ily, and then found our host, Alexi.  He is a very nice man, and our true host’s hus­band.  She has the flu and couldn’t make it.

The feel I imme­di­ately got was that our host was sick, asked her hus­band to come and get us, he called a buddy and went to the air­port to get the Amer­i­cans — no pomp, no cir­cum­stance, just “go and get them and be quite pleas­ant.”  Any other tour of this mag­ni­tude would likely put on a show, but this was quirky and fun … clearly effi­cient and low cost — very Russ­ian, very leasty.

We chat­ted on the way in, had some fun look­ing at Russ­ian things, and made loose plans for the next day and the day after in Moscow, prior to the train-trip.

We saw the Krem­lin on our way in (every city in Rus­sia has a krem­lin, btw — it basi­cally means “cas­tle” in Russian).

Once we got to the hotel, there was some fun try­ing to get the men inside to come and well … open the door for us — they could see us, they stared right at us — but seemed momen­tar­ily bewil­dered that we would want them to, you know, come out and help with our bags … being porters and all, I expect they fig­ured if we brought the bags TO them, they’d be happy to move them some­where else.

We checked in, and I was momen­tar­ily bemused that the front desk of this high-end hotel (which has housed all the major stars and dig­ni­taries, accord­ing to the pic­tures on the walls) was sport­ing a CRT mon­i­tor, non-windows based check-in soft­ware (like “black screen, punch a func­tion key, no mouse”) and big IBM clicky key­boards.  In least­i­ness, this is “why fix?  it still work, yes?” — see?  Least­i­ness isn’t nec­es­sar­ily a neg­a­tive — it’s just highly dif­fer­ent and often fru­gal to the point of shock.

We got to our rooms and basi­cally passed out.  Inter­net was work­ing for a while, they have wifi — so I posted a few pic­tures to Face­book and went to bed.

The Inevitable Room Change

So, when I woke up this morn­ing, I wanted to take a shower.  I went into the bath­room and real­ized that the sink is tiny and the shower is dark — the bath­room was laid out strangely because of the shape of that par­tic­u­lar room, which was on a cor­ner.  Well, as every­body who knows me knows — it’s time for the room change.

Pat and I had made a plan to email each other in the AM say­ing we were awake, so nei­ther of us would unfairly wake the other.  But with Inter­net out, he called me (I was already awake) and told me that there was no restau­rant food for break­fast, but they did have room ser­vice.  This, plus the tiny room, were begin­ning to acti­vate my worry light a lit­tle bit.

I took my strange lit­tle dark shower, in my strange lit­tle bath­room (pic­ture it this way — you come in and the sink is to your left, with the walls to the sink DIRECTLY at the sides of the sink, so it’s in a lit­tle alcove, basi­cally.  Next to the sink, off to the left a bit is the toi­let, and then lin­ing the back wall is the shower.  Now when you turn on the light (the light-switch is out­side in another room (pre­sum­ably because wiring a switch in a bath­room would take extra work and void “least­i­ness”)), when you turn on the light, a sin­gle bulb flick­ers on over the sink, in the alcove — and in a deep and flat-faced slavic blue, it reflects as much as it dare give you against the walls to the shower.  Dark shower, small sink — 6 and a half foot tall Amer­i­can man — room change!).

Once the shower was over, I was going over the options in my mind calmly (yay!) and Pat called back and said there WAS break­fast, in fact he was headed down there now.  So, I headed down also!

This is what greeted me:

As you’ll see, that is a mar­ble work­ing foun­tain behind Pat, and in the video that I’m post­ing to Face­book, you’ll hear the live HARP MUSIC that was play­ing in the background.

This brings me to item num­ber two of the Russ­ian motif…

Тхе Мост тхат цан бе доне (“The Most that can be done”)

Some­where in the blend of this entire process, there is a deep-seated line of rea­son­ing that Rus­sians have to con­tinue offer­ing opu­lence when asked for it, as if the Romanovs still ruled.  This is The Most that can be done.  I’ll  call it “mosti­ness.”  In this motif, they go to the very top, treat­ing your eggs to a suite of Harp music and antique glass, with hand-pulled cap­puc­ci­nos and smoked salmon buffet.

I think that least­i­ness and mosti­ness go hand in hand … it’s seems as if a Russ­ian can’t do any­thing but the most — so they must offer you noth­ing … or die of exhaus­tion.  So, in mosti­ness, if you ask a Russ­ian to hold the door, he will get three of his friends and carry you to your room on a vel­vet lit­ter like … well… a Romanov. Since act­ing in this fash­ion reg­u­larly would surely kill him and all his friends — the Russ­ian is, instead, forced to pur­sue least­i­ness, which means open­ing the door and walk­ing away.

Inter­est­ingly, even dur­ing this opu­lence, Pat and I both chuck­led at the least­i­ness qual­ity of putting signs up to iden­tify some of the things on the table.  Like “this is mar­malade, that is but­ter, good luck with the rest.”  We’ve already seen this qual­ity in some of the sig­nage — “the rooms to your left are 4402–4439, good luck with the rooms to your right” and so forth.

After break­fast, I had a final blended expe­ri­ence of mostiness/leastiness all at once … which made my head spin.

I went to the front desk, and asked the Concierge for ideas about what we can do for enter­tain­ment.  This man pulled out a book­let (no silly expen­sive com­put­ers here!) and began review­ing what tick­ets might be avail­able (for cash) … we almost got tick­ets to the Bol­shoi, but then he offered a true Russ­ian Cir­cus — which was most fun …

While chat­ting with this “mosti­ness” man, I think my var­ied ques­tions and desire to bounce ideas was start­ing to give him a minor heart-attack, his hands started shak­ing a bit, and he kept strug­gling to offer me alter­na­tives besides the cir­cus … which basi­cally were … the circus.

Even­tu­ally, we went for the cir­cus — and I’ll be post­ing sto­ries and pic­tures on that in a lit­tle while.

Mean­while — in the least­i­ness cat­e­gory — I moved 10 feet to my right at the same desk and asked if I could change my room to another one (I vis­ited Pat’s room and saw that his bath­room was laid out bet­ter, with a larger sink and the shower posi­tioned in such a way that the sink light gives it ample lighting).

The woman behind the desk did a nice dance of pre­tend­ing to look at some­thing on the ancient CRT com­puter … then said, “No, we can­not give you a room.”

“Really?  None are available?”

Fake click, fake click, click fake click.

“No … no … ummm… no.  Per­haps Monday?”

Now, I’m think­ing about the break­fast room and the fact that there were maybe 5 other peo­ple in there with us.  I’m think­ing that MAYBE, just POSSIBLY, this hotel that has hun­dreds of rooms per floor might have another room somewhere.

“So, you’re say­ing the hotel is full?”

At this point, I’d out­lined a rea­son­ing that she could not deny …

“No.  But you see … no.”

“Ok — what’s the most expen­sive room in the hotel?”

…pause…

“Well, the President’s Suite.”

“Is that available?”

“Well, yes, but it’s about 90,000 per night.”

“So, that’s about $3,000 per night?  Ok.”

Pause — sys­tem over­load — can­not com­pute. (Uh oh — this guy might be a Romanov!)

Then I said, “Ok, now that’s pretty expen­sive — but I could do it if I had to — but maybe there’s some­thing between that room and mine that I could upgrade to?”

“Well, one moment please…”

Pick up phone, talk to some­one at length in Russian.

“Sir, we have a few rooms avail­able that are big­ger than your room.”

“Can I see one?”

…who is this man who is ask­ing me to show him rooms?  He is not even dressed well…

While I waited, I strolled over to my cir­cus friend, who was now cov­ered in flop sweat and fig­ur­ing out how to get the tick­ets paid.  I would have to pay in cash, and he would care­fully put the cash in this enve­lope, and then you come down in two hours and your tick­ets will be in this enve­lope, yes?

Back over to the front desk to check on the rooms … my helper has left the position…

Back to concierge — let me see how much Ruble cash I have on me … not quite enough…

BTW, dur­ing the whole time that the Concierge Sergey, (who is won­der­ful) was help­ing us — there was a young woman stand­ing next to him, who could have been a trainee, per­haps — who never said any­thing — but always looked like she was just about ready to kill him, or per­haps me.  Moose and Squir­rel will die at this Concierge desk today, I am sure.  Per­haps she was the rea­son that Sergey was all flop sweat and shakes … she never spoke (well, until I spoke to her, just to mix it up — asked if she spoke Eng­lish, told her we’re get­ting on MiGs … that likely made her think).

Back to my unhelp­ful friend at the front desk, Julia (pro­nounced Yoo­lia).  She has put on her jacket (which iden­ti­fies her), and is now going to show me rooms.  She shows me one with a big­ger bed, but exactly the same deformed bath­room — so I demon­strate how my gigan­tic body can­not really use the sink … then she does that slavic smile that says “I under­stand and agree with you, I am your friend, until we meet another Russ­ian, then I will kill you.”

She took me to another room, good bath­room, big room — and here I am … Inter­net at the ready, post­ing this post.  It was the least I could do.