Or Pasadena, at least.
My plane travel went very well, Chicago to Denver, Denver to Burbank, connections on time and no lost bags. A friendly volunteer picked me up at the airport and whisked me to the hotel right away, with instructions to change and walk around the corner to the church right away for my taped interview.
Being an obedient soul, I followed instructions and showed up at the church after only the briefest delay to check in, wash up, and change out of travel clothes — then I waited for two hours for my interview. As a side benefit, though, I had two hours to get acquainted with some of the people working on the video project, and to eat the snack mix and drink Coke. When the interview room was finally ready for me, they ushered me in and asked me to sit there for a while as a stand-in for myself, while they moved around the decor to fit my interview. This involved changing the drape behind me (“I know we wanted it to look ‘Charlie Rose,’ but that’s just too dark.” “What about purple?” “Let’s just use the wood panelling behind him. . . .” and so on, indefinitely), the lighting (several times), the furnishings on the table that would be visible behind me (candles, cross, stoles, chalice and paten vested, chalice and paten side by side, chalice alone, (“It looks too lonely”), chalice and paten side by side again, only with a purificator draped over the chalice), the lighting again now that we knew what would be on the table behind me, and the position of the interviewer.
We did finally get to the interview part. During one of the delays, I asked the interviewer if she knew what she would be asking me, and she showed me her list of questions. I was glad to have asked, since they were’t questions I’d have done well at answering without some advance time for thinking (“What affect has being a Christian had on your life?” “What does it feel like when you celebrate the Eucharist?” “What would you say to people who might be Episcopalians out of habit, but who really don’t know why they come to church?”). Then — in an inspired moment of double-quality foresight — I asked what length answer she wanted, whether a story, a reflection, a ramble. . . and she said, “Thirty seconds. Maybe a minute.” This saved us a lot of frustration, as I was preparing my customary long wind-up for all the questions.
We talked through the interview, and although I disobeyed her expllicit instruction not to move (if you’ve seen me preach or teach, you can imagine how likely “not moving”was), everyone said it was fantastic, it was perfect, it was great, a perfect start for the taping. That would have made me feel better if I hadn’t heard that The Hulk was fantastic, great, perfect, before it was released. I think it was Hollywood-ese for “If we’re lucky, we can use a few seconds of it.”
Then we went to the rehearsal room to go over the spontaneous, lively, after-dinner discussion we’re supposed to simulate tomorrow at about 1:00. The production staff sat around us, stage-whispering helpful advice, and at one point even holding up a cue card for me. Our discussion group involves some pretty pronounced differences over theory-of-interpretation issues, and I’m not allowed to get all down-and-dirty Derridean on anyone because that might scare people away from the church (even more than seeing me in an outreach video would in the first place). We’ll see how gracefully I negotiate the complications of the discussion tomorrow.
Now, I’ll just collapse in the fluffy bed and watch mindless television. I woke up at 5:00 AM Central, it’s now 7:30 Pacific, and I’ve been going-going-going all day. It’s definitely time for me to collapse in a heap.
Oh, and Margaret’s iBook died (so that David Weinberger could leave a comment suggesting that she get a nice reliable Dell). Or, to be more precise (as Billy Crystal wouild say), it’s mostly dead. Si miracled it into yielding a few essential files, so Margaret’s intellectual history and grad-school application process aren’t totally nuked, but she’s feeling edgy about letting her computer go before her applications are finished.
No news about Dad today, so we figure he’ doing well, and church did not get any worse. Now, I really am stopping.
Posted by AKMA at December 14, 2003 09:34 PM | TrackBackAre you filming a pilot episode for a new series? Is this an ECUSA version of SNL?
Posted by: Tripp at December 15, 2003 05:54 AMWhen you answer Tripp's question, you'll have answered mine.
Posted by: NTA at December 15, 2003 05:59 AMIt’s for an outreach/evangelism series; I’m one of the presenters on the Bible (the “Word” segment of their series. I think the other segments are Spirit, Sin, and God — maybe one or two others. They’ll evidently be interspersed with personal interview segments. At least, that’s the way it looks from the sidelines.
Posted by: AKMA at December 15, 2003 01:08 PMSpeaking of one of those other segments, did you hear (this is true) that Willie Nelson, who is doing a benefit for Dennis Kucinich's campaign, has had his proposed campaign slogan turned down?
The slogan? "His middle name is sin."
Posted by: adamsj at December 15, 2003 04:35 PMFor this program, it was a bit of overkill. It's a lot of overkill, actually. There's usually no need to store integers in the Heap, unless you're making a whole lot of them. But even in this simpler form, it gives us a little bit more flexibility than we had before, in that we can create and destroy variables as we need, without having to worry about the Stack. It also demonstrates a new variable type, the pointer, which you will use extensively throughout your programming. And it is a pattern that is ubiquitous in Cocoa, so it is a pattern you will need to understand, even though Cocoa makes it much more transparent than it is here.
Posted by: Mildred at January 12, 2004 10:59 PMThe Stack is just what it sounds like: a tower of things that starts at the bottom and builds upward as it goes. In our case, the things in the stack are called "Stack Frames" or just "frames". We start with one stack frame at the very bottom, and we build up from there.
Posted by: Florence at January 12, 2004 10:59 PMNote the new asterisks whenever we reference favoriteNumber, except for that new line right before the return.
Posted by: Abraham at January 12, 2004 11:00 PMNote the new asterisks whenever we reference favoriteNumber, except for that new line right before the return.
Posted by: Francisca at January 13, 2004 10:26 AMLet's take a moment to reexamine that. What we've done here is create two variables. The first variable is in the Heap, and we're storing data in it. That's the obvious one. But the second variable is a pointer to the first one, and it exists on the Stack. This variable is the one that's really called favoriteNumber, and it's the one we're working with. It is important to remember that there are now two parts to our simple variable, one of which exists in each world. This kind of division is common is C, but omnipresent in Cocoa. When you start making objects, Cocoa makes them all in the Heap because the Stack isn't big enough to hold them. In Cocoa, you deal with objects through pointers everywhere and are actually forbidden from dealing with them directly.
Posted by: Archibald at January 13, 2004 10:26 AMInside each stack frame is a slew of useful information. It tells the computer what code is currently executing, where to go next, where to go in the case a return statement is found, and a whole lot of other things that are incredible useful to the computer, but not very useful to you most of the time. One of the things that is useful to you is the part of the frame that keeps track of all the variables you're using. So the first place for a variable to live is on the Stack. This is a very nice place to live, in that all the creation and destruction of space is handled for you as Stack Frames are created and destroyed. You seldom have to worry about making space for the variables on the stack. The only problem is that the variables here only live as long as the stack frame does, which is to say the length of the function those variables are declared in. This is often a fine situation, but when you need to store information for longer than a single function, you are instantly out of luck.
Posted by: Jeremy at January 13, 2004 10:26 AM