The Pipe and Grumble

Trying to Contact My Senator

2012-01-18T12:46:00.000-05:00

Hmm, this is interesting.

I was going to send senator Kerry a quick email to let him know how I feel about the SOPA and PIPA legislation worming its way through congress. (Quick synopsis: I don't like it.)

Except when I click on his "contact me" link I get a 404 We're Sorry page.

Which is the same thing I get when I click on any link of his website.

So either he's joined the day of protest along with Google, Reddit, Wikipedia, and hundreds of others, or his servers are down, or he just doesn't want to hear what we have to say.

Either way, I don't like it.

If you're not familiar with this legislation, and you're at all fond of the internet (and if the idea of spending 5 years in prison for singing "Happy Birthday" on youtube seems unreasonable to you) I urge you to get educated quick and register your displeasure to your representatives. Google has a handy page set up for this.

Also, check out the livestream of the SOPA and PIPA protests, if you're on today.

Interesting times.

Things to be Thankful For

2011-11-24T12:40:00.001-05:00

An old car with the good manners to break down within coasting distance of my own driveway, on the night before a day off.
A mother out of state for the winter who is willing to lend me hers.
A sister coming to Thanksgiving dinner to drive me from the broken down car to the running car.

Seriously, as far as inconveniences go, this one was coordinated like a ballet.

Then there’s all the other usual stuff we take for granted: a roof over our heads (that only leaks when it rains really hard), a job where I get to work with lots of kind and genuine people, food for the table, a wife who is not only willing but happy to cook it, family to share it with, good health, and of course, also, eggnog.

And whiskey.

I work with a woman who’s mother used to punish her, when she complained too much, by sending her into the corner to count her blessings. I do tend to grumble a lot. (That’s why you’re all here, isn’t it?) But this seems like as good a day as any to take her mother’s advice and reflect on the stuff that’s going right.

So, I’ll be over here in the corner.

With my eggnog.

Reading The Hunger Games feels like Reading Tomorrow’s Newspaper

2011-11-21T15:09:00.001-05:00

I started reading the first book in the Hunger Games series. And I can see why it's so popular with today's teen set. The book reads like a dark-hearted SF thriller, but it paints a frightening picture of the world our children are set to inherit.

Here is a society built on the ruins of the one we live in now. It's seen the return of scarcity. It's seen the divide between first and third world conditions move within the borders of our own country. It's seen martial law in the wake of collapse, with capital punishment for theft imprisonment for hunting and gathering your own food. It’s seen a new world order with poor outlying districts feeding into the wealth of one centralized, prosperous capitol. Meanwhile, for entertainment, the "reality show" is carried to it's logical conclusion: children are forced to fight to the death on television for the public amusement, with a supporting staff of stylists, producers, "game designers," and sponsors to make it all profitable.

Granted, the Japanese got to the conceit of kids fighting to the death on a reality show first, with Battle Royale. But their take on it was campy and cartoonish, their explanation for why it was happening was felt like an attempt to make light of problems in their public schools. But Hunger Games is deadly earnest, building on chilling economic and environmental trends. We've sown conflict around the globe; it seems inevitable that it's going to swing back and hit us at home, sooner or later.

This is the world our children see coming: constant war, rising food prices, ceaseless advertising, the cheapening of human life in pursuit of grander virtual and vicarious thrills, the abandonment of basic rights and dignity for the poor, while the rich extract human blood in the form of tribute paid in human offspring.

You think this sounds hyperbolic? Try starting your adult life under the burden of a student loan you can never hope to repay, from which not even bankruptcy is an escape. Kids today are slaves from the minute they graduate college. (It's a funny twist of fate that today, it's the smartest kids who don't go to school.) Already, teens face an adulthood without dignity. It's not that far-fetched to see their lives as cheap enough to throw away in televised games.

Our kids are facing the collapse of the public safety net as it's raided by the disinterested greed of their boomer grandparents, while they struggle in the moral wasteland provided by the "it's all good" parenting of their Generation X and Y parents. Reality shows show them that success lies at the end of a path of opportunism, brutality, and luck, while advertisements bombard them with tawdry and unattainable examples of what that success would be.

The result is that life is worthless unless you're at the top. So, why not gamble it all for a shot at the prize? (Bankruptcy might not be an option any more, but kids might fight to the death if the reward were forgiveness of their student loans.)

Science fiction used to give us tales of exploration, invention, colonization and prosperity. I'm not sure what happened in the last 30 years, but SF has become something that feels chilling and malicious, more akin to horror.

It also feels a hell of a lot more real.

On the Economy: Shrinking Pains

2011-11-16T11:16:00.003-05:00

Natural systems do not grow forever. Populations either reach a certain point and then stabilize as they rub up against competitors and resource limits, or they drop off a cliff as they exhaust their resources. The real core of the economic crisis we are facing now is that the economy is an artificial system that has been built on a foundation of unlimited growth. At every stage it is simply assumed that growth is the ultimate goal.

Sales had better be up, consumption had better be up, resource extraction and manufacturing and profits had better be up!

Even as we're hoping our economy will generate more wealth and jobs, we're hoping for stabilization in world population figures. And there's actually good news here: we're seeing a slowdown in population growth. We may have passed the seven-billion-people mark, bet getting to eight will take longer than it took to get from six to seven.

But consider: if the population doesn't grow faster this year than last year, how can we have sales that grow faster this year than last year? What happens when we reach the point where everyone simply has enough stuff, and stops buying more? And given that our currency actually represents debt (not gold, not grain, not any naturally occurring commodity), how can it continue to grow if people tire of borrowing to purchase things they do not need.

It becomes harder to make money. The incentive for crooks within the financial system to steal and cheat becomes irresistible, and soon the whole system itself is a farce. (See the Lehman Brothers collapse, the “too big to fail” bailouts, etc.)

So how can we build a financial system without a foundation of constant growth?

Our current situation is unprecedented. The world population has never faced a slowdown in growth, never mind a decline. (The Black Plague may have decimated Europe, but it put just a tiny dent in the world population.) This turnaround is something to celebrate. It's a success of the world's increasing prosperity and education. Given that no population can grow at an accelerating pace forever (just ask any petri dish full of bacteria) we should thank our lucky stars that this is happening.

But can we build an economic system that rewards stability instead of growth? Is it a matter of regulating the money supply? Could we turn back from debt based currency to a gold or silver standard? Or do we need to reconsider what incentives people respond to? Rather than measuring success as taking more profits than your neighbor, can we build a culture that fosters stable communities, humane working environments, and supportive relationships?

That's hippy-dippy, pie in the sky utopia talk, for sure. But the alternative sounds dreadful. If we can't adapt our economy to a population that isn't growing at a constantly accelerating pace, then both the economy and the population are bound to collapse with a viciousness that is as brutal as it is inevitable.

I don't hear anyone else asking these questions. The silence horrifies.

Instead, I hear Bill Clinton talking about ways to restart growth. I see companies scrambling to drive down costs to save their profits in the face of declining sales, producing cheap products that suck in working environments that are inhumane. I sit in meetings where everyone breathes a sigh of relief if our percentages are just a little higher than last year's, and we say, "well, at least we haven't started to slow down yet," in the knowledge that the minute we do, we're dead. I hear European politicians saying things like, "Only growth can lift us out of the Eurozone crisis," but they never say where the growth is going to come from, who is going to buy their exports, or what fuel will power their factories to run faster than they're running now. And then I see reports of entire cities in China, skyscrapes and condominiums and shopping malls, vast and shining and new, without a single person who can afford to live in them. The government is building for the sake of their growth reports, while their citizens live in shacks, five families to one bathroom, not a one of them able to afford the empty prosperity looming above them.

The wealth is there. The buildings are there. Why not just let the people...move in?

An economic crisis seems like the most artificial folly on the face of the planet. Markets crash; the sun still rises, the tides flow in and out, birds still sing, all oblivious to the fact that debt figures hit some number and stocks are in the tank. An ounce of gold doesn't know it's worth ten times as much because people are desperate.

This is a collapse of fiction. But it's been such a rewarding fiction, for so long, that we'll struggle to maintain it for as long as we can. We'll give absolutely everything we can to believe our lives can keep going on like this forever. We'll give everything we can, until we have nothing left.

Room for Second Life in a Busy Life?

2011-10-25T14:42:00.001-04:00

It seems that the more technology I accumulate around myself, the less meaningful work I get done. I used to be able to write a story every week on my typewriter. Now, I’m lucky if I get past checking my email accounts, blog feeds, and facebook statuses.

Then, for some reason, as if I weren’t distracted enough already, I got the grand idea of checking out Second Life. Now, that has sucked up pretty much any free time remaining to me.

Oh, but it is fun! And it’s satisfying, this feeling of being thoroughly engaged, always something to check up on, always someplace to go -- without leaving your chair. And at the end of the day, I have no piles of paper bearing down on me, as I did in the old typewriter days. Am I worse off for not having told a story in the old, traditional medium? Would anyone have read it?

In Second Life, I can listen to a concert performed by folks playing together from three different continents. I can chat with Australians and Englishmen and South Americans all at the same time. I can be told off by an irate Detroiter in one window while psychoanalyzing a graphic designer with low self esteem in another. I make friends with people from around the globe, and suddenly I’m concerned about what time zones people live in. What time is it in Poland? In Peru? There are friends there I want to talk to, when will they all be on?

Second Life is rather like World of Warcraft, only instead of all the dull leveling up and treasure hoarding, there’s conversation, art, and music. Not all of the highest caliber, of course, but that’s true of everything. As Ted Sturgeon said, “97% of Science Fiction is crap. But then, 97% of everything is crap.”

My Puritan Guilt has me thinking this new time-sink is a terrible development. If I go after the Nanowrimo trophy this year, I’ll have to set Second Life aside for November.

Ah, but I am still holding down a full-time job, finding time to visit the folks on occasion, scratching the dogs on the head several times a day. And I’ve even gotten outside to replace that broken window-pane and re-putty one and a half whole window sashes. (Only 20 and a half more to go!) I’m going to play the moderation card on this one, just as with booze and tobacco, and say it’s all right.

Will we continue reading stories in the century to come? Storytelling survived radio and television, although it was certainly changed. But now that the words-on-paper format seems stuck in precipitous decline, just what forms will our fictions take in the future? And will we miss the old ones? Can culture survive a population that is aware only of distractions and diversions, and never focused on real content? How can we remain aware of current events when there’s a party going on every minute?

If Romans had computers, would the end of their world have looked a little like this?

The Growing Length of Novels

2011-10-10T15:27:00.001-04:00

Is it just me, or do books seem to be getting inordinately long, these days?

Time was, people would joke about the fantasy-novel doorstoppers that Robert Jordan and the like put out, as if the girth of their text was somehow indicative of a stretched-out, poorer quality story. When the Wheel of Time series grew to eight, then nine, then ten volumes, it turned into a kind of self-parody, mocking itself just by sitting there on the shelves. (It’s still not complete, although Jordan has passed on.)

George R.R. Martin has been producing similarly sized volumes, and who knows how big Game of Thrones is going to turn out to be before the final tome takes its march across the bestseller lists. The difference is, these books are actually pretty good, and they’re making their way into the mainstream with a little help from HBO. Then there’s Patrick Rothfuss, whose Name of the Wind was perhaps the most beautifully written book I’ve read in the last decade, and who followed it up with Wise Men’s Fear, promising more of the same exquisite storytelling spread across 1,200 pages. I haven’t cracked that one yet, because I needed a break from fantasy.

Instead, I turned to my other great reading pleasure, Science Fiction, and turned to Neal Stephenson’s latest, Reamde, which title references to a computer virus within the book whose name ironically refers to the brief “readme.txt” files which have accompanied software installations since the dawn of DOS. Now, Stephenson has always written big bricks of books – for a more extreme example check out his System of the World saga – and to make his own process even more masochistic he does his first drafts in fountain pen. But I’m losing interest in Reamde about halfway through, and I’m stuck wondering if, having invested so many hours into the first half, it’s more of a waste of time to abandon the story and forget about it, or whether the greater waste would be forcing myself through to the end of a book that I have lost pleasure in reading. (This is an especially Puritanical dilemma and I wonder if anyone besides a New Englander could truly understand it.)

Then I heard that one of my favorite “literary” writers is coming out with a new novel: Haruki Murakami. His early books were spare little gems, perplexing and fascinating, inviting repeated readings and careful reflection. But it turns out his new book, 1Q84, is going to clock in at – you guessed it – over 1,000 pages. I’m not sure I can wrap my head around that much Murakami, and I’m not sure that I want to.

It’s as if someone told me they were going to bring me a fine, single-malt whiskey, and then they delivered a keg of the stuff, and then told me that, to really appreciate it, I’d have to drink the whole thing. Whiskey just isn’t supposed to come in kegs. Some things are meant to be sipped and savored, and when you see that much Murakami in one barrel, well, it makes you wonder just what you’re getting.

David Foster Wallace came out with Infinite Jest in the mid 90s, and at the time that was an anomaly in the literary world: 1,300 pages including 300 pages of rather self-indulgent footnotes. Passages of Infinite Jest were lovely, though, and heartbreaking, and brilliant. I’m wondering if my experience with Murakami will be the same as the experience I had with Wallace. I enjoyed it for about 400 tightly packed pages (including time for those footnotes) before realizing I’d been reading the same book for an entire season without getting halfway through, and so I put it down and never came back. Still, I kept a lot of those characters and situations present in my head in a way that just hasn’t happened with many books, since. Hal, the tennis academy, the AA meetings, the league of wheelchair assassins, the VHS tape that kills you if you watch it…they’ve all stayed safely tucked away in my noggin for the past 15 years, and I didn’t even finish the damn book.

Maybe I can sip my way through half a keg of Murakami and that will be enough.

So what’s behind this trend towards freakishly long books? Did the publication of Infinite Jest win support for a format that had previously been mocked as appropriate only for low-rent fantasy literature? If so, then why the sudden increase in book-girth now, fifteen years later? Have paper and printing costs been dropping? Hardly, paper and ink is more expensive now that it has been in quite some time, and books have to be deeply discounted to become affordable.

Are editors just getting lazy? Or are authors becoming divas, unwilling to compromise and have their words cut? It does seem that, as a writer finds a measure of success, their books grow and grow as editors and publishers seem afraid to ruffle the feathers of their proven cash cows. Which is too bad, because a lot of these books would be better if they were shorter. And these editors should realize that cows don’t have feathers.

There do seem to be several factors that may contribute to this publishing trend:

e-books have no printing costs, and as more and more of a book’s sales go digital, buyers may actually feel they are getting more of a bargain when they download a bigger file. So I wonder, do the increased sales of a digital book offset the increased paper and ink costs of printing a huge doorstopper volume?
The bargain effect probably applies to physical books too. This is the age of Wal-Mart and the wholesale club. When it comes time to buying a book people really want to stock up. The difference between a 300 page paperback and a 700 page paperback is usually just a dollar or two, so it feels like you’re getting ripped off when you buy the smaller one.
People have become accustomed to long serial formats, and this taste has grown beyond fantasy trilogies and those mystery series themed with numbers and letters and gotten right down into the fabric of the single book. Those Game of Thrones books are like trilogies within trilogies.
The rest of our culture is increasingly short and fragmented. We want to set aside our Youtube clips and our Twitter feeds and have something familiar to pick up and read, night after night. People who still read might not be looking to books for an escape into something different, but rather for the comfortable feeling of returning to the familiar.
Computers make it easier to write at length. Authors can ramble on at a PC with words per minute unseen in the days of flowing ink and mechanical type-bars. Computers make it easier to edit, too, but they seem to have the opposite effect. Writers will let it all pour out, confident they can go back and cut and re-arrange. I suspect that, when words seemed more indelible, that more thought was taken in putting them down in the first place.

Stephen King blames the decline of the short story on people’s laziness. Once you’ve invested the mental energy it takes to enter the world of a story, it just seems like an awful lot of work to start from scratch, again, 30 pages later. And while I rather agree with him, that’s not why I’ve never been a fan of the short story. I just find that, after I’ve read a book of short stories, I can only remember a couple of them, and my memory of those is usually gone within a week.

Novels really have time to work their way into your mind and stay with you, to remind you of things you’ve long forgotten, and to even change you if you need changing. They have always seemed, to me, to be the form of art most effective at repaying the investment of my attention.

But 1,000 freakin’ pages? You’ve got to be kidding me. I just don’t have that kind of time to invest.

Canine Capacity

2011-09-14T22:17:00.001-04:00

For those of you wondering how many dogs you can comfortably fit on a 34’ trawler, it turns out the answer is…at least four.

There’s a mother, father, and daughter in that picture, by the way. Plus what you might refer to as a “fuzzy uncle.”

I leave it to the reader to work out which is which.

Back on the Water Again

2011-09-14T22:09:00.001-04:00

…if only briefly. (Hopefully more to come in future years.)

Stepdad traded in his sailboat for a smaller trawler, much more to his liking. And I have to say this thing does invite some serious lounging around.

And look at all the room for a typewriter table out here on the back porch.

Now I have another excuse for not finishing my novel. I need the proper boat to type it up on!

Seriously, though, the potential for serious, distraction free writing out here is fantastic. What better excuse to steer clear of the distractions of the computer than spotty harbor Wi-Fi and the need to run your generator in order to keep your batteries topped off. The more I think about it, the more I realize there can’t be a writing tool better adapted to ship-life than the manual typewriter.

So long as you keep it well-oiled. The salt can’t be good for it.

Meanwhile, the boat comes with a built-in escape from the terrible winter weather. Why use that expensive tank of fuel to heat your home when you can use it to move your home?

Anyone want to trade a trawler for a drafty old half-cape?

Ultimate Writing Software

2011-09-11T12:09:00.001-04:00

We can all agree, I’m sure, that the best distraction-free writing hardware out there is a manual typewriter. However…

After long, careful, and somewhat regretful consideration, I’ve determined that the best word processing software I’ve used over the past decade and a half is Microsoft Word 97.

Marvel as it launches, entire, within microseconds of that second click. Struggle to spot the tiny 50 MB memory footprint. Relax as you discover that it handles novel-length documents without a hiccup. Thrill as you discover the organizational potential of its online layout view. Wonder at what, exactly, software developers have been doing for the past decade and a half to improve on a package that did everything you needed, without complaint.

Granted, it’s proprietary. It’s not open-source. It won’t open the documents your friends and co-workers might email you, since they’ve most likely moved on to pointlessly newer iterations of the office suite. Oh well. Just ask them to dig into their “save as” menu for something more compatible.

Alas! When I think back on the writing tools I’ve tried over the years, only to settle back to this one. But OpenOffice takes a full 20 seconds to launch, consumes eleven times the RAM, requires the Java Runtime Environment, and from what I can tell doesn’t offer me a single additional feature I have any use for. Then there’s AbiWord, the lightweight open-source alternative, but with every machine I’ve ever run that on, the text has flickered as I type. Not only is this distracting, it leaves me with the impression that my words are the merest whispers on a screen, ready to be swept away by the slightest electrical whim. (This is true, of course. But there’s no call for rubbing it in.) Evernote does a nice job of organizing my thoughts, but it invites a bit too much obsessive shuffling around—and there goes my focus. Besides, who really wants to have their every thought and self-indulgent drivel synchronized across internet servers, anyway? That’s what blogging is for!

It was on a lark that I popped this old Office 97 disk in when I found it during a deep tidying-up. I thought, “Gosh, this ran just fine on the computer I was using 14 years ago, and I wrote two novels with it. I wonder how well it would work on a Pentium-4 with a dedicated graphics card and dual monitors?” (Yes, I think I’ve officially “maxxed out” the old PC which I bought from the gentleman who recycles pieces he picks up at the dump.) And it turns out that Word 97 launches faster on this computer than Windows 7 Notepad.

It’s funny how hardware and software have been advancing in lockstep, with applications growing bigger and more bloated just as processors grow more powerful and memory more accommodating. Why does it feel as if it takes just as long to get something done on a computer today as it did 15 years ago? This is patently absurd. But the business plan of selling cheap hardware loaded with the latest bloat-ware—thereby making your new computer feel just a little out of date as soon as you’ve turned it on—has been doing a decent job of driving Moore’s Law into the 21st century.

The best operating environment for me these days seems to be a moderately up-to-date PC (four to eight years old) running software from the generation before. Excel 97 launches faster than the Windows Calculator, and has become my go-to tool for summing columns of numbers or performing basic arithmetic. Photoshop 5.5 (from another late 90s install disk) is more than capable of formatting images for blogging and has the capability of handling more professional photo-editing than I’m qualified to perform, and it, too, runs nimbly on a modern, high-definition monitor.

Notable exception: Windows Live Writer, which provides the simplest interface for blogging on any platform. Even Apple doesn’t have anything to compete with it, for love or money. Which is surprising. People have been blogging for over a decade now and only Microsoft has come up with a simple way for them to edit posts locally and then post them to any service. Who would have thought?

Labor Day Chores and Pleasures

2011-09-05T19:59:00.001-04:00

The guys from N-Star were working on the street that leads down one side of our property last week, running new line to folks who had been out of power since the storm. There were up in bucket trucks, trimming trees and taking down half-broken limbs. I felt kind of bad we never even noticed our neighbors had been without power for an entire week. (We only lost our power for two hours, not even long enough for me to run down the laptop battery playing FreeCell. We had the oil lamps and board games and manual typewriters lined up, and everything, but the lights were back on before it even got dark.)

Anyway, a couple of the linemen walked around to our place. I thought they were going to tell us they were disconnecting power for a while so they could work, but actually they just wanted to chat about how old our house was and how old the trees were that they were trimming up. Answer to both: 300 years, more or less. Also, did we suggest they have lunch at the restaurant down the street. Yes. Awfully nice guys. (Or maybe they were just relieved to be talking to someone who hadn’t been without power for a week.)

They told us they’d be leaving all that wood piled up on the edge of our property outside the fence, so we go around and pick it up if we wanted any firewood.

So today I ran the extra-long extension cord over the fence to fire up the electric chainsaw again. The summer-campfire woodpile is all topped off now, probably enough to keep us going for the next three seasons. (The chainsaw needs a little bit of sharpening after all this heavy use, though. Time to ask the step-father for a refresher course in filing it. I know he showed me years ago, when I was much less interested in such things.)

Later we rode our bikes along the canal and to our usual beach, hoping for an end-of-season swim. But the Labrador Current must have been at it again, piping that ice-cold water back down from Greenland, such that standing in the surf for more than 30 seconds makes your ankles ache. Gussie dove all the way in, which surprised me, but she was out again within the minute.

It was a fine afternoon anyway, with a nap on the sand and some people watching. Plus, dogs are allowed on the beach again, post-season, which makes it a more humane place and encourages conversation. Then a stop on the way back at the hot-dog vendor with the thatched umbrella, two for me and one for the wife, and a stop again at the little ice-cream stand that opened up this year, quite conveniently along our bicycling circuit.

Rode home under thickening clouds to spend a couple hours smoking a pipe and reading out on the patio, watching the chickens and listening to the traffic out front crawling its way home from the three-day weekend.

Ha! We were already home!

Not a bad Labor Day, not at all.

Simple Hand-Me-Down Mower for Hurricane Clean-Up

2011-09-02T19:00:00.000-04:00

Sadly, I didn't think to get any "before" pictures of the back yard. But this pile from the neighbor's place gives you some idea of what we were dealing with, before we chopped out the larger trunks and stems.

So it's nice, now, to step outside and see this, instead.

Thanks, Chief!

Hey, this guy likes his Chief, too! He's got the 3.5 HP motor, but otherwise it looks like the same machine. I love that the mower has been in his family for "almost 30 years" and is considered an heirloom.

Post Hurricane Risk Management

2011-08-29T19:29:00.000-04:00

Any day you get to use a chainsaw while standing at the top of a ladder--without hurting yourself--has to be a pretty good day, right?

Standing Down Here, Dreaming of Up There

2011-08-12T21:49:00.000-04:00

It's nice to know that our local grass airfield is still offering their biplane rides. It's a sign of summer around here when you see this little red fellow buzzing over the tree-tops.

Come to think of it, I haven't seen many private planes at all in the skies this summer. Every time I hear a buzzing and look up, it's this guy. No doubt the economy and high fuel prices are hitting recreational pilots as hard as everyone else.

I once had dreams of a private pilot's license and invested mumble mumble dollars in nearly forty hours of flight time, stopping just a lesson or two and an FAA exam away from the wings when business opportunities placed other demands on my capital. Those hours aloft were some of the best of my life, and I can flip through the logbook and remember every one of them. But it would be hard to come up with a less practical hobby than flying private aircraft. Even most professional pilots don't make enough to provide a decent standard of living.

It would have been a nice day to be aloft. Our own transportation was a little more prosaic.

But our fuel costs were also far more down to earth. And we had a better view of the boats in the canal.

Selectric Robot

2011-08-04T22:43:00.000-04:00

Smith Corona Surgery

2011-08-01T19:45:00.000-04:00

The machine:

The Typecast:

The parts removed:

The rubber bar that that metal piece is meant to jiggle back and forth to make the "Power Space" function work:

The Jeweled Escapement:

The padded carriage return:

The sliding hood, open for business:

iPod Repair Results

2011-07-30T18:41:00.000-04:00

I'm Ready for Florida

2011-07-23T08:23:00.001-04:00

Egad, this last winter was hard. And cold. And long. The old house is drafty and the snows far too regular. The tires are bald and the shovel is rusty. Getting out of bed in the morning was an adventure in endurance, and getting to work felt like the voyage of the Endurance.

And now we're hammered with this heat wave. 101+ degrees today and enough humidity to sweat the paint off the car. I step outside and think, this feels freaking great!

The Wife wanted me to take a swim with her, but I couldn't. The water in the pool, which she insisted was comfortable, was just too bloody cold.

I just needed to hang out in the yard and be comfortable for a while.

Our Day In Court

2011-07-22T15:35:00.000-04:00

For free entertainment, you could do worse than going to your district court on hearing day and watching the proceedings.

We weren't there for fun, although I was determined to enjoy the experience as much as one can. Obtaining an execution to evict a tenant who has not paid rent in four months isn't a pleasant experience, but at least it can be interesting.

This district court handles civil and criminal matters together on the same day. It wasn't what I was expecting, and it had me wondering if we were sitting in the right courtroom as docket after docket was called to the bench with "The Commonwealth Versus..." I kept leafing through our paperwork to satisfy myself that "Main Session Courtroom" had to mean this big one with the double doors in the center of the building, and that I had the date right. Our tenant wasn't there either, which added to my confusion. She turned up half an hour after the appointed time, which turned out to be early enough. The criminal matters ran on and on.

So here's a question: if you're summoned to court to appear before a judge because you're accused of shoplifting, say, or operating under the influence, or assaulting your sister ("We just don't get along..."), wouldn't you want to put something on besides flip-flops and baggy shorts and a ratty tee-shirt? Maybe, if you're on probation and one more offense means a mandatory 60 day stay in jail, you could cover the gang-letters tattooed down your forearms, or take off that baseball cap? I think the reason that cameras are forbidden in courthouses is so nobody ever has to see a picture of the doofus with the puffy sneakers, the sports jersey, and six inches of boxer shorts showing above his sagging swim-trunks.

"Good grief," I said to The Wife, "a third of the people in this room have neck tattoos."

She said, "That's how you know who the bad guys are."

Having never sat through criminal court proceedings before, it amazed me just how practiced and knowledgeable all the participants were. I'm not talking about the judges and the lawyers - of course they know what they're doing. But there wasn't one criminal defendant there who didn't know where to stand and what to say. Nobody seemed confused about their instructions to contact this probation department or that district attorney. Public defenders were appointed, phone numbers were exchanged, dates were set for further hearings...it was like watching a dance and trying to figure out the moves. I realized that there really are two classes of people in this country: those who regularly participate in the criminal court system and those who don't.

Things sped up when the judge switched over to civil matters. It turned out all the civil cases were about deadbeat tenants and unpaid landlords. I was nervous when my name was called, but I didn't even have to open my mouth. The judge asked our tenant if she owed the rent and she said, "Well...yeah..." and he actually laughed and sent us to mediation.

Later, outside the courtroom, waiting for the mediator, we saw some tenants (not ours) who had just been complaining to the judge that they didn't have money to feed their kid, never mind move out and rent a new place. Out here, they were showing off new tattoos to their buddies. One on the shoulder, one on the back, one on the leg. Who did they go to and how much did it hurt? Talking shop, sharing the hobby of self mutilation.

I'm thinking, huh, maybe your kid could eat those tattoos, he's going so hungry.

The result for us? Well, it seems senseless to talk about "winning" or "losing" in this situation, but let's just say that we have reached an "agreement." And we've got a piece of paper to take to the Sheriff's office in case anyone thinks about changing their mind.

And we also got to watch a couple hours of our court system in action, which was more interesting than I expected.

Young Women Today

2011-07-16T09:00:00.001-04:00

It doesn't take long, after a shift, for some of the women I work with to get into trouble.

Today's women behave like yesterday's sailors: they work so hard just to blow their pay in a few quick hours of bad decisions and terrible behavior. Then they get up the next day to haul themselves back to work for more service to The Man.

They may not spend months at sea harpooning whales or pulling up nets. They discard their lives in shorter-interval mistakes which usually have greater consequences.

We were programmed by evolution to be stupid, impatient, and rash. The gene-pool does not reward the patient, the thoughtful, or the careful. Women used to be a civilizing force, doing what they could to temper the stupid of the human race. They were the ones who had to live with most of the consequences. This doesn't seem to be the case, any more. Either that, or they have been sold on the idea that the consequences are actually rewards.

Then again, it seems many of the people who have the most satisfying lives are the ones who started off stupid and then came to terms with their "mistakes."

The question, I suppose, is at what age do you have to start getting smart?

Neither Hoarding, Nor Collecting

2011-07-15T12:30:00.000-04:00

When we were at the dump swap-shop the other day, getting rid of three loads of dusty and undesirable goods, I watched a man step out of a car right in front of me with a Smith Corona typewriter case and deposit it on the floor, free for the taking. Unable to resist, I opened it up to tinker and test, and found that it was clean, little used, and almost factory fresh shiny.

Only problem was the carriage mechanism, which pulled all the way to the left and would not stop, so that it took a bit of finagling to close the case again.

Still, I was tempted. Surely it had to be an easy fix, something I could piece together again in the back yard of an afternoon with my swiss army knife and my determination.

But then I remembered all the typewriters that have already, and recalled our purpose for visiting the dump: to reduce our quantity of stuff. My plan for the typewriters I have is to cart them all up to Cambridge Typewriter and beg Tom to trade them all in for one shiny, well maintained, and portable machine. Everything I've got works well as-is and could just use a bit of adjustment and lubrication, so I'm really happy to come out behind on the deal so long as I come out lighter. It seemed like adding one more maybe-functional machine to the pile would be pushing my luck.

Even the price of free was too high.

It struck me that my collecting days are well and truly over. After months of cleaning, yard-selling, and hauling the accumulated crap of three households out of our barn, I'm really, really happy to be through with collecting.

Which makes me all the more grateful for the type-o-sphere. You all have such lovely machines. It's such a pleasure to look at them.

So long as I don't have to carry or dust them.

Antique Typecast - "Rejected"

2011-07-04T18:38:00.000-04:00

Another bit of ephemera from the family box of old documents.

I'm not as up on my historical presidential politics as I would like to be, but a quick googling of the Nine Old Men makes me think this document has been sitting around since the 1930s. Which makes the age of my previous typecast suddenly likely to be a bit greater.

It seems my ancestors were opposed to the New Deal. Again, I'm not sure if this was composed by some ancestor, or just copied out of a newspaper or magazine. I like that the level of political discourse is such that you couldn't fit it on a bumper sticker (or several) though.

Ephemera Find

2011-06-27T07:30:00.002-04:00

All right, Typosphereans and ephemera lovers. Have I got a treat for you.

A humorous poem, hand-typed at some point in the first half of the last century, fresh from a storage box that has sat in an attic for longer than most of us have been alive.

The Wife and I have been learning a lot about my family history as we've been cleaning out some spaces. I suspect my grandmother might have typed this during her education at Lasell Junior College. I doubt she was the author. More likely she was just practicing a bit of copy, or she read it in a book or newspaper somewhere and found it humorous enough to reproduce and save. That woman saved everything. But she wouldn't let us look at anything until, well, until she couldn't stop us any more.

We've got lots and lots of other documents and pictures: civil war letters from the family that adopted my great grandmother, letters to great-uncle with special needs who died in a school fire as a teen, newspaper articles about old family businesses. The Civil War stuff deserves a blog all its own, though it would take a herculean effort to scan and transcribe all those old letters. (1860s handwriting is so pretty but so hard to read.)

Anyway, this brief bit with its bellyaching about progress seemed an extra-special fit for you typewriter lovers, so...there you go.

Accelerating Change

2011-06-26T12:58:00.000-04:00

There are times when the realities of the world really bowl me over. Like when I realize I can sit in my backyard and use a cheap four year old netbook to publish anything I want to say to a worldwide audience. (Sure, that audience consists of maybe a dozen people, but still: the potential is there.)

These kids these days, they have no idea how revolutionary this is. Brats. We'll see how they'll deal with the accelerated change that's coming in their lifetimes, after they roll their eyes at our stories of computers with keyboards and cars that burned oil and couldn't steer themselves.

They'll probably deal with it fine, actually.

Huh. So this is how it feels to be middle aged.

Yard Sale

2011-06-25T15:45:00.000-04:00

Having a yard-sale. Brought my laptop out into the yard, once I remembered it was portable. Going on Craigslist to see what I should charge for things. 27" TV, $35? IBM Selectric I Typewriter. $60, maybe? That's less than I paid. An original Xbox with a huge stack of games. Sold the Xbox to a guy whose 11 year old son has been wanting to play Halo, but has a Wii. So now he's all set up with Halo I and II, and four controllers. The thing with the kid makes me feel a lot better about selling it. Not that I've turned it on more than a dozen times in the last six years. Most of my save-game files date from 2004.

Chatting with neighbors and lookie-loos about our antique house; it's 300 years old and unique, so hopefully somebody will want to buy it. Also the sun is out for the first time in days and days, so moods are bright and people are friendly. Buttons the chicken has let herself out into the yard. She is the only chicken smart enough to do this, and so she gets to eat all of the bird-seed that the bluejays knock on the ground. She'll actually hold still long enough to let children pet her. How many yard sales do you get to go to where you can pet a chicken? Kids love to hear the rooster crow, and they're excited about the koi pond, too. I'd worry more about them falling in if it were deeper than 18". Maybe we should start charging admission and set up a petting zoo. Then we could sell the property with a pre-established business.

I have mixed feelings about selling the Selectric typewriter. Until I try to pick it up. Then I hope somebody buys it right away.

iPod Touch Repair Challenge

2011-05-26T22:59:00.000-04:00

I ended up getting a co-worker's cast off first generation iPod Touch. Like I need another gadget, I know. But the price was right (free), and it came with an added bonus that many gadgets don't--it didn't work. Stopped working a year ago, actually. The screen turns on and the battery holds a charge, but the touch-pad is completely unresponsive. We can't even push the "slide to unlock" bar. Because I like to tinker and I hate e-waste, it's a challenge I couldn't refuse.

At our local mall there is a kiosk that sells protective cases and screens for "smart" phones. They've got a big poster that says, "Screen broken? Fix it here!"

Surprisingly, getting the young fellow's attention was a challenge. Usually those kiosk guys are shouting at passer-by, doing the hard sell. This guy was too wrapped up in his own iPhone to notice the passing crowd.

When I did get his attention, and he did see the gadget, he said, "Oh, sorry. We can't get the parts for those old models any more."

"Old models?" I said. "These things were released under four years ago."

"Yeah, but we see it all the time. Touch screens stop working after a while."

"All touch screens?" I said. "On everything?"

He said, "Hey, it's like life. Things wear out and stop working."

"You're a philosopher," I said.

So...challenge accepted. Even Apple can't make a product so crappy it's unrepairable after just four years.

Can they?

Will My Computers Ever Do Anything Besides Update Themselves?

2011-05-23T20:38:00.001-04:00

I know this might sound a bit Andy Rooney, but Good Grief!

I use the damn things so infrequently these days that it seemsevery time I turn one on, it sets itself so single-mindedly to attending to its computer business that I can’t seem to get any people business done.

First the antivirus starts updating, then the operating system, then when I launch any single goddamned program I’m asked if I want to update to the latest version. Heaven forbid I want to play a game. By the time they’re done downloading new “splash screens” and game data, my supper’s ready and free time’s over.

Then I realize the reason it’s grinding to a halt is it’s performing a virus scan. “Last scan performed over one week ago!” Thanks for the warning, jerk. I last turned this piece of junk on a week ago!

Even my word processor is out of date! Open Office has become something called Libre Office, and the Windows Live Writer I use for blogging just encouraged me to help Microsoft develop their products and switch my default search provider to Bing. Apparently it wasn’t happy just composing blog entries.

When I give up and shut the things down, they tell me I can’t turn them off because they need to finish installing their updates.

Tell me why I shouldn’t go back to using my typewriters again?

Core Inflation vs. Reality

2011-04-24T13:54:00.001-04:00

So it’s hard to miss that we’re paying $1.50 more per gallon of gas these days then we were a year ago. It’s also hard to miss that, at the grocery store, a package of butter costs a dollar more than it did just a couple of months ago.

So it’s no surprise to read news reports about rising food and fuel prices, or to hear experts say they’re concerned about the chilling effects of such rises on the economy.

What is surprising is to read that core inflation is chugging along at a modest 2%.

Gosh, that hardly seems like anything to worry about.

Until you learn that “core inflation” specifically excludes measures of food and fuel prices.

Um, excuse me, but other than mortgage payments and internet service, food and energy are actually the only things we’ve spent money on this year. I drive to work, then I drive home to a house where I get a nice hot meal in a house that’s heated, hopefully, to a temperature that’s tolerable if I wear long underwear and two sweaters. Ben Bernanke will have to forgive me if I’m not stocking up on iPods and furniture and designer shoes to take advantage of this modest inflation rate.

Anyone else out there get the feeling that our government experts aren’t really acting with the best interest of the citizenry at heart?

Either that, or they simply have no idea what they’re doing.

I’m not sure which is scarier.

High Tech Hallucinations

2011-04-16T20:24:00.001-04:00

When I think about it, it seems like a lot of energy was expended in the second half of the last century trying to get high in one way or another.

Drugs, literature, art, music. Choose your poison. A lot of it came down to the pursuit of that wow man, far out, sort of experience. Jimi Hendrix playing an electric guitar with his feet, Jackson Pollock splattering canvases with house paint, Philip Glass droning on with his repetitive rhythms and harmonies, Phil K Dick blurring the boundaries between the real and the hallucinatory, movie directors translating those visions to the screen, quantum physicists seeking the cracks in the fundamental laws of nature.

There was this sense that we were constantly on the verge of something fantastic and abstract and mind expanding. Much of the time, this something didn’t seem like it could come from outside, in the world. It was just waiting to burst out from within us, if we could just find a way to give it permission. If only we could nurture our inner child and rub the right crystals and find the reiki practitioner with a light enough touch.

Well, the quest goes on, I suppose. Because, well, let’s face it: if we find these moments at all, they never last. That’s why the addict always needs another hit, and why yesterday’s paintings don’t evoke the same response the second or third time we’ve seen them.

Fortunately, there is this: the portals into these sorts of experiences seem to be everywhere now, and most of them are a good deal safer than the pills and needles so many resorted to in the past.

I just lost a couple of hours messing around with a few free gizmos on my PC which I hadn’t even been aware I had. I’ve long used Winamp, for example—it’s a far superior media player to the toxic ITunes disaster that Apple foists on the world—and I’ve used it to rip, play, and organize my audio files for years. I just hadn’t bothered to click on the little “Visualizations” button before. Which, in a moment of idleness, I did today.

At which point these images you’ve seen here started cascading across my monitor, in full high definition, at a rather dizzying 30 frames per second, and pulsing and dancing in sync with the music. Screen edges crumpled, vortices spun, fireworks launched, fractal ferns swayed, clouds and stars fought for dominion of the moon.

It helped that I was listening to Ludovico Einaudi, who tends to be fairly meditative and soothing. But the program transformed my easy listening background music into something utterly captivating.

And I thought, hell, any one of these frames puts to shame anything Jackson Pollock ever threw against a canvas. The Evernote screen capture utility did a nice job catching a few of the stills, since I had the odd compulsion to grab some of this stuff that was being generated on the fly. But after a few minutes of doing that I just sat back and listened to the entire two-disc album.

Far out, man. The things I’ve seen. And it’s nice that I didn’t have to drop acid or otherwise put my neurochemistry at risk to do it. William Burroughs should have been so lucky.

Swearing at Citi Mortgage

2011-04-15T21:17:00.001-04:00

We get this letter from our insurance company. They say they haven’t received payment for this year’s premium, and our policy is going to be cancelled in a couple of weeks.

Only our insurance company is paid by our mortgage company, which holds funds for such in escrow. So I try calling up our mortgage company to ask them why they haven’t made a payment.

It takes some time to get through to an operator, since none of the menu selections have anything to do with escrow or insurance payments. But hitting zero enough times finally gets me a live one, who offers to transfer me. Only he comes back on the line after five minutes of hold time to say that the escrow department is backed up right now, so why doesn’t he give me their phone number so I can call them later directly?

Reasonable enough. Instead of being put on hold, I’m prompted for my account number. I have a mortgage statement in front of me, so I punch it in.

Only the system won’t accept my number. “This number cannot be verified. Please try again.” So I do.

Eight times.

This turns out to be a very tight, closed loop. There are no options, except for entering the account number again. But even though I’m looking at the account number on my statement, apparently I don’t have an account. At one point, a voice suggests I make sure to enter all leading zeros, but I’ve been doing that all along.

Pressing zero doesn’t work, and neither does speaking the word “operator.” I’m not sure why it would, since there have been no suggestions that this is a voice-activated system. Regardless, I’m so frustrated at this point that I swear, at the top of my lungs, into the cell phone. And I’m in the middle of a rather long string of uncharacteristically vile words (many of which I haven’t used since my sheet-rocking days) when an operator comes on the line.

I had read that some telephone systems had been programmed to register stress and anger in a caller’s voice, but I’ve never encountered it before. And I actually felt a little embarrassed. The operator has a hard to understand Indian accent, but however I feel about outsourcing, she doesn’t deserve to listen to that. She seems very eager to help, though, and apologizes multiple times when it takes her a few seconds to locate my information.

She authorizes a payment to my insurance company and confirms they have the correct account number. “Just give it a few days for the payment to go through,” she says.

Only today we have another letter saying the insurance is being terminated—today—because they still haven’t received the payment. So I try calling the mortgage company again, and get in the same account number loop. This time I only try twice before launching into my vulgar tirade.

Magic! It works.

And the woman says, “If you have to call again, don’t enter the final digit of your account number. Skip anything after the dash.”

“It’s not zeros,” I say. “It’s a four.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she says. “Just skip the final number and press pound.”

Okay.

Anyway, it’s all straightened out. Probably. The check cleared after the final warning letter was sent.

But what really gets me here are three things. First of all, how is your average caller supposed to know not to punch in part of his account number?

Second, When we were approved for this mortgage, it was about eight years ago. We used a local bank, who actually did the full-on credit check, employment verification, etc. We had a local mortgage officer we’d dealt with on two previous deals, and we frequently called her up with questions and received excellent service. Then, as the world proceeded to go crazy, our mortgage was sold four times before landing with Citi Mortgage, a corporation we would never have borrowed from. Each time our note was sold, we went through a nightmare trying to get the escrow department of each new bank to connect with our insurance companies and our municipal tax collectors. It was demeaning and unnecessary.

Finally, and most importantly, what does it mean that the only way to receive service from a massive corporation (and one which holds a great deal of power over you) is to scream profanities into a telephone? It just seems like another failure of decency in culture, when the system demands you act like an asshole in order to be treated like a human being.

Recent Reading: Nonfiction

2011-04-08T21:42:00.001-04:00

I’ve been reading a lot less fiction these days. Books about reality have gotten more interesting. Or maybe my tastes have changed as I’ve gotten older. Or maybe the world has gotten scary enough that we don’t need horror novels to give us a thrill any more. In fact, the sorts of fiction that always fascinated me in the past have, today, come true.

Today’s Internet, with its MMORPGs and virtual economies and cyber-warfare, is more strange and fascinating than anything William Gibson predicted in the 1980s. If you disagree, you know nothing about piloting predator drones from halfway around the world.

Likewise, the heroes and villains of cyberspace show complexities and transformations that a novelist would be hard-pressed to invent. It’s strange to find yourself rooting for an identity fraudster even as he’s draining your accounts.

Let’s think about the other side of the speculative-fiction spectrum: Fantasy. You’ve got knights, you’ve got pirates, you’ve got wizards. All right, fine. But how many of those pooftas could actually found a colony in a nation of “savages?” And how many novels could convey the desperate tragedy involved in such a triumph?

The Wordy Shipmates does a nice job, too, of treating with the complex and gloomy world-view of Massachusetts Bay Colony’s Puritans. And for such gloomy subjects, they’re treated with a great deal of humor.

Here’s something that gets at the darker side of one of our newly beloved (or loathed—pick your side) folk-heroes:

Julian Assange—who knew he could be a real dick to his friends? Well, his friends know, apparently. But that hair, that style, that reckless abandon…I’m still inclined to like him, even if I wouldn’t invite him to my house.

All right, let’s finish this survey off with an optimist who thinks the future is going to be indistinguishable from magic.

No, not Arthur Clarke, who actually coined that term, but a real live physicist who starts his book by saying we can find hints about the future by talking to real scientists instead of science fiction writers, and then cites Vernor Vinge regarding artificial intelligence and Isaac Asimov on robots, and winds it all up with potential doorways into parallel universes.

All of this has me wondering. Do we really need to escape into fantasy and the supernatural to tell meaningful stories and to entertain? Is there not enough wonder in the real world to enchant the reader? Or is it, perhaps, that the real world is so overwhelmingly wondrous (not to mention monstrous) that "nonfiction" fulfills the role even better? Wired and Scientific American seem to contain more miracles than the average mind can comprehend, and the newsstand prints more drama and conflict than you can get out of a season of high-octane TV.

Wallace and the Tyranny of Irony

2011-03-24T07:08:00.000-04:00

I so wish that David Foster Wallace had stuck around a bit longer. What a waste of a fantastically perceptive mind.

I know that the tyranny of irony was getting him down. I don't think he understood that the age of irony was coming to a close.

We're not going to have time for irony when energy becomes expensive. We're going to be too busy working, and hopefully working together, in earnest, to be looking for snide little ways to put each other down. When we say something, it’s going to be what we mean, because we won’t have time for anything else. Good manners and well-defined roles will come back into style when, after a hard day in the fields, we want to settle down to good food and pleasant conversation. If we manage the transition without killing each other, life is going to start to seem very hokey by 20th century standards. And there’s lots of ways in which that could be a good thing.

But maybe that was just it. DFW was invested in the age of irony, as much as he lamented it. He excelled at it, even as his characters longed for stability and meaning. The ironic age was the only age he knew. It may have been too much for him, to watch it start to crumble in 2008.

Or maybe he was just really, really depressed.

Damn, but I bet he’d have some interesting things to say about the next few years.

Mixed Reaction to Evernote Software

2011-03-23T17:53:00.001-04:00

As a devotee of writing tools—let’s face it, I spend more time messing about with typewriters and computers and operating systems than I actually spend writing anything—it’s hard not to get excited about this free Evernote software.

On the one hand, it seems to do just about everything I've ever wanted a note and information gathering piece of software to do. Screenshots? No problem. One-click gathering of content from the web? Easy. Drag and drop image collecting? Even easier. It’ll sync up your notebooks among as many devices as you install Evernote on. If you think of something on the go, you can just email it to your Evernote address and it’ll be waiting in your notebook when you get to it later.

On the other hand, it pushes all of my paranoia buttons.

Forcing me to register before first use. Why should I need to give out my personal information before I even know I like you?
Encouraging me to "sync" all of my notes to the cloud, so that I can access them from other machines. Yeah, I understand this is a benefit, but it’s one I’m not entirely comfortable with. I’d rather the program default to not syncing. Consider: are these servers secured? Do I need to assume that anything I save in Evernote will be accessible to their staff? Or aggressive government investigators? Granted, I know that once I've registered I can set certain notebooks to not sync, but given the share-happy nature of the program I'm not optimistic that this wouldn't be easily switched by accident at some time in the future. And it’s creepy that anyone who guesses my email and password has instant access to all the notes I’ve collected.
Loading the interface with features that can only be used by upgrading to a "Premium" account. The free version is plenty functional, but there’s plenty of buttons cluttering up the interface which you can’t remove. When you click on them, you get a pop-up asking you to upgrade. I'd almost be willing to do this, except for
The monthly payment model. Sorry, but I'd be much happier to purchase your software all at once, rather than a little bit every month. (Yes, I know I’ll save money if I pay for the year in advance. That’s still a period. That ends.) Say I come upon hard times? Do the notes and content I've created under Evernote's premium functions become inaccessible if I don’t pay?
The use of ads on the interface. They're small and tucked in the dead space at the bottom left. They even provide you with a little "x" to click on, to close this part of the window. But clicking on that “x” brings up the offer for the premium package again. This feels like a bit of a slap in the face. Does the ad come back if my subscription expires?

This is why I never get anything done. Nice tools come along, and instead of using them to make anything, I work myself into a paranoid frenzy.

Think I might make an exception this time, though. For gathering web-clips and doing any kind of journalistic work or blogging, this program is hard to beat. It’s one of the few cases where I’ve found something new and shiny to use on my computer that’s better than the software we had fifteen or twenty years ago.

It difficult to begrudge the software engineers’ their business model. I guess I’ll just bite my tongue and use the free version for a month or two and see if it becomes indispensible, doing my best to ignore my privacy concerns.

After all, I’m just not that interesting. What snoop is going to care what I think about ■■■■ ■■■ or ■■■■■■’■ role in ■■■■■■ anyway?

TMI as a Meal Ticket

2011-03-17T20:24:00.001-04:00

I heard something on the radio the other day about employers demanding that job applicants sit down at a computer during an interview and log in to their Facebook pages and their blogs.

Needless to say this was another one of those what is the world coming to moments for me. Are you obligated to “friend” your boss? Do they get to read your email, too? Or tap into your Skype conversations? Or paw through your dirty laundry?

Good grief. We used to get worried about big brother installing cameras in our homes to spy on us. Now we purchase web-cams and strap them on top of our computers.

But it has me wondering. Can someone who is unemployed use their unfortunate blogging practices as a way to continue receiving unemployment benefits? Why yes, Uncle Sam, they could argue, I have been looking for work. But nobody will hire me because of some compromising photographs I put up on MySpace in 2004.

Self-embarrassment on social media could be to generation-Y what drug and alcohol habits were to Gen-X and the Baby Boomers: that “handicap” you inflicted on yourself that means you no longer have to take care of yourself. It’s a healthier way of staying on the dole than, say, developing a heroin problem. Eats up a smaller portion of your unemployment benefits too.

Lord, it’s almost self sustaining!

The Quiet of the Future

2011-02-28T21:03:00.001-05:00

[Note: the grandchildren referenced in the following story are unlikely to be mine. Perhaps they will be yours?]

Grandchildren, clamoring for a story? How strange. I would that we had clamored for the same. The advice we got from our grandparents might have been better than anything I can provide for you.

Still. I think I'll begin with the roaring in the ears. With the sound that was everywhere, inescapable, whether you had asked to hear it, or not.

Just another one of those things which are kind of amazing to think about, now.

Sure, many of us chose to listen to music. Or noise. Video games, movies. We had speakers in our homes, our cars, our businesses, and our pockets. If what we were listening to was not what our neighbors or roommates wanted to listen to, we had headphones--personalized speakers that we strapped on to the sides of our heads. And then later on, these were not loud enough for us. If we turned them up loud enough to satisfy, the people around us could still hear.

We were always trying to get away from each other, those days.

So we made the speakers smaller and stuffed them up into our ear-canals, so we could have it roaring loud and personal, just for ourselves. And these little ear-canal speakers were cheap. We could buy a pair for around ten dollars, which most of us could earn in an hour or two, working even the most menial of jobs.

But putting the music aside for a second, consider what the rest of the world sounded like, in America, at the turn of the century. We had a little house that had stood for 300 years. It was built along a main highway, in its day. Its timbers were hewn and raised to the sound of foot-falls and horse-hooves. But when it finally crumbled it was to the whisper of electric cars, the constant rumble of gas burning engines, the throaty growl of diesel trucks. It was a loud place to live. When the traffic backed up out front, it was like a pride of lions purring, all at once. When the traffic flowed smoothly, conversations would have to stop and resume to the whim of the vehicles flying past, vehicles that moved more miles in an hour than you or I could ride in a single day.

Most of us didn't live so close to major roads, of course. But the highways were everywhere. The most remote and isolated of us would still hear them, like a constant, distant sigh. I remember hiking in the mountains, once, and descending after a long day's walk into the crater occupied by an alpine lake. I think the hours we sat there were the only hours in my life where I could not hear any traffic. A single jet passed overhead, trailing it's contrail, too high up even to be heard.

That kind of silence was a treat, a symphony. I remember thinking, a person could become a connoisseur of such silences. The silence of the mountains, the silence of the desert, the silence of the forest. That kind of silence was precious and rare.

What a shock it was, then, when the oil ran out and the engines stopped running, and today’s silence descended, gradually, everywhere. What a surprise to hear it every day, and not even have to travel for it. But it was a cruel consolation, given the hardships we faced.

I say gradual, of course, because the gunfire went on for a bit after the cars stopped. But that was sporadic and eventually it, too, would cease—to make room for quieter violence.

How strange this must sound to you, with your carefully preserved, hand-cranked record players, as you dance at the hall to music my grandparents danced to. Anything as loud as a car or a plane is an alarm, a surprise. And music, music is a treat. There are no digital recordings of the best singers to ever sing—or rather there are, but we haven’t the machines to play them. Pianos only as good as the people who play them, guitars only sing at the hands of their players.

For the most part, that’s enough. I understand our county has a symphony again. Over eighty musicians, playing at once, well practiced and in tune. If you can afford to hear them, do. I doubt you will ever forget it.

And to think, for a hundred years there, we could listen to that sound any time we wanted to. We could turn it up and play it again and again, until we went deaf from it. Even now, I wish that I had listened to more.

But you will forgive an old man his regrets, I hope.

Nymex, Insider Trading, and Peak Oil

2011-02-25T21:53:00.001-05:00

It would be hard to find a more readable account of the financial aspect of our present oil crisis than The Asylum by Leah Goodman. It’s especially interesting (and a little surreal) to read this while sitting in front of newspaper headlines about the unfolding crises in the Middle East, Oil Prices spiking over $100 a barrel again, and a stock market that’s starting to shudder in what, we can only hope, won’t be a repeat of the financial earthquakes of 2008.

Futures trading has long seemed so obscure as to be almost magical to me. Why would the producers of goods allow their stuff to be traded so wildly and unpredictably? Why not just slap a price tag on their oil, their corn, their pork-bellies—whatever—and sell it to a willing buyer, charging what the market will bear?

Goodman does a good job explaining the basic concepts here. Sellers use a futures market because it guarantees them a price for their goods at a future date, and consumers (be they individuals or businesses) can plan their future operations knowing what they’re going to be paying as well. And then if there are changes to the value of stuff in the mean-time, the traders are there to absorb the risk—taking the hit or pocketing the profit depending on what happens during that time.

There’s a conflict here between the producers/consumers who want stability to plan their business, and the traders who want volatility so they can take their cut. This conflict is a good thing. It’s supposed to keep the system in balance. That’s why there’s federal regulations (supposedly provided by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, or CFTC) that are supposed to limit volatility, placing caps on price swings and the like.

What Goodman shows is how little the CFTC has done in performance of their role. Regulatory chairmen leave their positions within the government to head the very exchange they were supposed to be regulating, calling up their old cronies when opportunities to profit present themselves. The conflicts of interest are staggering, and they led to the Enron loophole (which I’d vaguely heard about) and the London and Dubai loopholes (which were new to me) and which played a huge part in the downfall of Lehman Brothers, the troubles with other major bangs which we all ended up bailing out, and the financial bubbles that seem to keep popping with increasing frequency in the 21st century.

There’s a colorful cast of characters here, and more action than you’d expect from such a dry subject. Cross-dressing, hookers, fist-fights, drugs and booze on the trading floor; class warfare among millionaires; politicking and intimidation and death threats. Goodman also does a nice job tracing the history Nymex, the New York Mercantile exchange from its roots in agriculture (mostly potatoes) into the powerhouse that controlled the most important resource ever traded on our planet, all the way to its purchase by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and the changes that hit its players as they went from trading in the pits of the trading floor to the computer screen.

Goodman herself seems to be awfully chummy with some of the story’s players. Even as she reveals their most salacious and rapacious dealings, she shows them a great deal of respect—even affection. She’s reported on these guys for years, attended their conferences and functions and dinners. And in the acknowledgements she thanks them for sharing details that had to be uncomfortable. “To know you was a privilege….Your humor and sagacity transcend your extreme-capitalist alter egos,” she writes. All this after spending 400 pages detailing how they stole from their customers, taxpayers, consumers, and their own market. The assumption being, I suppose, that any one of us might have behaved the same way, if given the same opportunities.

I suppose she wouldn’t have gotten such a good story if she hadn’t been friends with these guys. But her admiration tastes a little funny at the end of a book about insider trading.

Some Good News About Books

2011-02-08T20:19:00.001-05:00

McSweeny’s has a series of articles up on why the rumors about the death of books have been over-exaggerated, with pages about the state of libraries, publishing, and global literacy.

This is nice to hear. I’ve been having, for the past couple of years, mixed feelings about the trajectory of the printed word. Electronic readers finally seduced me with their siren song. I’ve got a Barnes and Noble Nook and spend at least an hour with it each day. Before that, I’d turned my little Asus 701 into an e-reader for catching up on free classics from Project Gutenberg and Manybooks. What times we live in, that the whole of the Western Canon is available for download in seconds, for free.

The old assertion that “People aren’t going to read books from a screen,” fell by the wayside as soon as screens got portable and crisp enough. And then it’s amazing how quickly books change from an object of desire—something we want to handle and collect and accumulate—to something bulky and inconvenient. I’ll find myself looking at a beautiful hardcover in the bargain bin, a book I actually intend to read, sitting there available for just six dollars. And I’ll check my Nook and see that the e-book version is $11.99. This should be an easy decision. On the one hand, an elegant physical product, something I can write in and loan out or pass on or even sell. On the other, and for twice as much: the license to an ephemeral digital file that winks out when the power goes off. But I’m struck by how damn heavy the book is, and how much space it’s going to take up in my house, and how much energy it’ll take to pack up and move it the next time we re-locate.

It’s a bit hypocritical, I suppose, to bemoan the loss of our independent bookstores and the shrinking inventories of our chains, and then refuse to pay even six dollars for an object that, one year ago, retailed for five times that. And it’s petty of me, perhaps, to get irritated with publishers who don’t make the stories I want to read available in electronic form. (I’m looking at you, Europa Editions. I get that you use lovely cover art and high quality paper. But I want to read your stuff, not hang it on my wall. And what’s with you, Haikasoru? Kindle and Apple Bookstore versions only? I’m eager to exchange my pretend electronic money for your pretend electronic content. Japanese culture is supposed to feel cutting edge. So get cutting, already!)

In fact, as I look around at the books that I do have, it’s with designs of selling them, or giving them to friends, or donating them to the library. I realize that I have bought, perhaps, six new books in the past five years. (The Boston Public Library was my favorite place for a couple years, there, and then along came the electronic readers.) The last three times we moved, our library shrunk with each trip.

And then, sometimes, it hits me. Ten, twenty years down the line, I’m really going to miss books. Especially once the effects of Peak Oil set in, and cheap electronic gadgets and the power to run them are a thing of the past.

It’s a matter of both common sense and experience that hard drives and digital storage will fail. That’s fine, when storage is cheap. We backup our data, and copy information from old storage to new. I just bought a one terabyte hard drive for seventy dollars, popped it into a computer that came from the dump, loaded it with everything digital I’ve done during my entire life, and used less than a quarter of the space. When it fills up and wears out in a couple of years, I’ll buy a four terabyte drive and backup onto that.

A few years after that, who knows? Chinese factories might be producing petabyte drives by then, if the minerals and the energy needed to extract them are available. That in itself is a big if. Then, will our dollars be strong enough to pay for them? But will they be shipped around the world on 400 meter long diesel powered container ships that burn 1,660 gallons of heavy fuel oil per hour? Will they be doing this when oil costs $200 or $300 a barrel?

What, in short, is going to happen to our digitized culture when the machines that display and share it become precious and irreplaceable? What is going to happen to culture in general if so much of it is digitized right at the end of the era of cheap energy?

This is what keeps me from unloading my paper library—or at least those volumes which are worth saving and reading again. And it’s what makes me happy to know that 752 million books were sold in 2010, just a little off from the 2009 peak of 777 million. It’s nice to know that those books are still out there, getting printed and purchased. We might have a use for them again.

Even if it’s not me who’s buying them.

How Many Spaces After a Period

2011-01-18T20:04:00.000-05:00

One or two? Because I just discovered, after nearly 30 years of typing, that I've been doing it wrong for about half of those years.

Good grief, but this is going to be a hard habit to un-learn.

Guilty Reading Pleasures: Live and Let Die

2010-12-03T21:04:00.000-05:00

I came across an old copy of an Ian Fleming James Bond novel, Live and Let Die, and decided to give it a chance. I'm not a fan of the few movies I've seen, newer ones that I've gone to with friends from the 90s and on. They strike me as adolescent boy wish-fulfillment fantasy with a sugar-coating of explosions. So I wondered if this book, which came out in the early 50s, would have the same sort of vibe.

Fortunately, it is harder to render explosions in a movie, and authors have less of an incentive to do so. (If our imaginations came with dolby surround sound, box office sales would suffer.) The book was the sort of fun, action based, semi-suspenseful romp I'd expected, with a bit of violence, some suspense (Fleming had the trick down of ending the chapters just where you wanted to keep reading), and the promise of sex more than the delivery of it. But what I didn't expect was the elegant language, the vivid sense of place, and a colorful cast of characters which were not as one-sided as they come out on the screen. Most of all, the book felt like an adventure.

Bond is in the US for most of this one, with a finish in Jamaica. The descriptions of Harlem capture both the grit and the elegance of the atomic age and the racial tensions of the inner city in the mid-century. The train-travel scenes made me long to take a diesel-powered voyage in silvery cars. And there's an underwater raid on a villain's lair with some truly delightful descriptions of scuba-diving amid teeming sea-life. Of course there's the satisfaction of projecting yourself onto the persona of a handsome, cool-under-pressure protagonist with a dashing sense of style.

There's an optimism in these ridiculous plots. There's the sense that we can sacrifice a great deal in the fight against evil, accept our losses, and enjoy a full breakfast or a carefully prepared cocktail when we have the chance.

And it's nice to be reminded that you can read for pleasure and still enjoy some fine language.

It's enough to make me forgive one of the stupidest lines of dialog I've ever read. When Bond and his lady-friend are tied together and towed naked behind the villain's boat, seconds away from being dragged across a lacerating coral reef so that their blood will summon a swarm of frenzied sharks that will both kill them and dispose of their bodies, the lady-friend, Solitaire, comes out with this gem:

"I didn't want it to end this way."

I hope I'm not spoiling things if I tell you it doesn't.

NanoWrimo Update: Week One

2010-11-07T20:02:00.000-05:00

I'm moving through this November's novel-writing experiment at a reasonable pace. It's not a pace that's going to get me to 50000 words by the end of the month. Maybe half that, if I'm lucky. But it's a pace, in the middle of a hectic November, so I'll take my victories where I can find them.

So far I've stuck with pounding it out on the Olivetta Lettera 32 typewriter. It doesn't have the fastest touch. The letter "a" doesn't show up clearly unless you give it some extra force, and the letter "p" tends to stick, which causes a real back-up of keys when you're in a hurry. So I'm well below my usual 120 wpm. But the added effort keeps my upper body and hands warm as the house moves into colder seasons and I resist turning the heat on. And the sound of a typewriter is something I have a fetish for.

I've noticed a couple of things about this effort:

I can't get 2000 words out in the hours I have free in a given day. I tend to think a little more about each sentence before I put it down, indelible as it is, and in many ways this seems to defeat the whole purpose of Nanowrimo.

The words I do get out seem a little less terrible than the words I got out in previous years, using a laptop computer.

Can't say I have a great explanation for this. Or whether another reader comparing the first draft of this year's manuscript to the first draft of another year would come to the same conclusion. (Don't worry. No readers will be subjected to this experiment.) I do have the sense that, by the time my manual-typing fingers have caught up with my brain, I've subconsciously edited out a lot of needless words that a computer keyboard would have obliged me by keeping up with.

So, result #1 of typewriting this year's Nano is, I probably won't be "winning" the project by the standard of pumping out 50,000 words by the end of November. But maybe result #2 is I get back into the routine of setting aside one or two typewritten pages each day. Which is, after all, a much more sustainable pace in the long-term, and a pace that produces 182,500 words in a year (approximately!).

If I'm really lucky, result #3 will be a January manuscript that doesn't require quite as much cutting as previous drafts have. Maybe something even worth sharing. But we'll see.

Perhaps the greatest thing about having a day-job is the ability to enjoy your hobbies for what they are.

NanoWrimo Logo

2010-10-23T21:04:00.000-04:00

I may be taking on the NanoWrimo again this year. Already got some notes together on several characters and a basic idea behind the driving force of what might charitably be called a plot.

And of course, my heart is with the people over at the Typewriter Brigade, who are signing on to pound their 50,000 words out on manual typewriters this year. I may follow suit. Haven't decided. A laptop (preferably a disconnected one) is just such a handy device for organizing the notes, keeping characters and setting straight, etc. But that doesn't mean I can't leave those digitized notes off to the side and pound out the actual draft on one of my beloved old machines.

If I do this, it will by my third time through, and my fourth novel. I hit the 50,000 word mark both in 2002 and 2004, but the only time I've actually completed a story, instead of just a word-count, was sometime in 2007, where I hit 90,000 words, and I didn't do it in November, nor did I complete it in one month. That one was a lot better than the first two, though, and I learned the persistence required to finish it from those previous Novembers.

Perhaps this is the year that I come up with something worth finishing, revising, and submitting. Time will tell, I suppose.

But November is not the time to consider such things. November is the month to put out eight double spaced typewritten pages every day until you have a stack 200 high.

I found an image that captures the spirit of the month quite nicely, and capped it off with my new favorite slogan.

I think that sums the project up rather nicely, don't you?

Kubuntu Installation

2010-10-23T19:01:00.000-04:00

The Wife laughs at my obsession with Linux Distributions. As I'm changing out my desktop wallpaper or re-arranging my applets for the hundredth time, she'll say, "Linux is like home decorating for boys." Why not get some real work done instead of making the screen look pretty? But then again I could ask her the same thing about the furniture in the living room.

Came home for my middle of the day break from work (They call it a "split shift" but I call it "Two days for the wages of one.") and ended up spending hours--hours!--in putting Kubuntu on the desktop, configuring applications, getting the layout just the way I like it. I should have taken a nap, and now I'm facing the ordeal of a six-hour closing shift with very little sleep. Not entirely sure how I'll be getting through it, but I suppose we'll find a way. Adrenaline and coffee, most likely.

Oh, but the Kubuntu. It looks amazing, like it just brought the old computer into the "latest generation" of computer technology. Transparent, window effects, shiny, glowing, fresh, and surprisingly intuitive. Like Windows Vista could have been, if it didn't bog much newer machines down into a tub of molasses.

For such a flashy and attractive Desktop Environment, Kubuntu actually runs rather well on an old P4 with no dedicated graphics card. There's a little hesitation on opening applications, but once they're up, they're up. And I much prefer the overall feel of this desktop environment to the Gnome I was running before. Text displays crisper and smaller, which satisfies me on some strange control-freak level, and I can actually make use of this vast monitor's screen space with various windows, etc.

Strangely enough, the whole package downloaded and installed right from the standard Gnome desktop in about ten minutes. One quick re-boot and I was there. The joy of messing about with all these operating systems and desktop environments is it feels like getting to use a new computer every few days, without spending a penny. (The rest of those lost hours went to the "home decorating" phase.)

I have now spent some time with all the major Ubuntu flavors (Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, and the small and strikingly efficient newcomer Lubuntu) as well as a lot of lesser-known alternatives (Slitaz, Puppy, Damn Small Linux, the craptacular Xandros that came with the Asus Eee). Ubuntu, in it's incarnations, seems to have most of the bases covered, at this point. Every one I try, I like better than the last. Except for esoteric applications (extremely old hardware, custom built solutions to uncommon problems, etc.) it's various flavors seem to do what your "average" hobbyist/user with a little patience and a willingness to experiment would expect it to do, usually with delightful style.

All this distro-hopping has made me start to wonder a bit just what Ubuntu is. Before I started sailing Linux waters, I always assumed an operating system was a whole shiny package. It was, you know, the part of the computer that wasn't made of plastic and microchips but wasn't consumer software from a shrink-wrapped box, either. I assumed that the desktop environment was an integral part of an operating system, since it gave you handles to drag your windows around and icons to click to launch your video games.

But here comes Ubuntu, which is an operating system, I think, but it's not really, it's just a "distribution" of Linux. And you can have a text-only install of Ubuntu (just like DOS before the Windows came along) or you can load it up with your choice of window manager (Gnome, KDE, XFCE, LCXD) to turn it into one of it's derivatives (Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu). Or you can go a whole 'nother route, skip the Ubuntu piece, and build Linux into something completely different like Red Hat, Slitaz or Slackware.

Oh yeah, and the Ubuntu code was all built up by some company called Canonical which is controlled by a man named Mark Shuttleworth, who was one of the first people to pay Russians to go to space as a tourist. (I thought his name was a joke but was apparently, mistaken.) His team built the Ubuntu distribution on top of another distribution called Debian. I'm not sure if Debian's still another layer in the cake or just something that's to the side, at this point. It becomes rather confusing. And just what this Canonical company gets from developing all this software is also unclear to me.

But I am inclined to like them, since it all seems to work despite my not-understanding. It's a tribute to the engineers at every level, that they make it simple enough for a dilettante like me to have so much fun and get so much done with their efforts.

What does become clear from all this messing around is how modular all these operating system pieces are. The different window managers all look remarkably different, but all it takes to change them up is switching out a few packages from the Ubuntu Software Center. If you're clever, or you read the right on-line tutorial, you can do this with a few keystrokes at the command line. There are even tools out there for grabbing all the bits you like from the various distributions, pre-loading it with the open-source applications you prefer, stamping your own name on it, burning it to a CD and calling it your own. The Creative Commons license will even let you charge money for it, which is a nice touch, since it gives you the incentive to add a bit of value in the form of installation and training. (Maybe this is what Canonical is after?) The only thing you can't do is tell the person who buys it from you that they can't turn around and do the same thing.

# # #

Hmm... If I spend more time procrastinating than I do writing, perhaps I should reconsider where my priorities lie. Then again, these are all just hobbies, so it's not like I have to worry about making a living from either of them. That's the freedom that comes from working a full-time job. Then again, if somebody did want to offer me some money...

Which would you rather pay me for? Turning your old computer into a fantastic new Linux machine, or telling you a story?

On The Uses of Quiet

2010-10-22T11:34:00.000-04:00

Old People's Houses

2010-10-20T18:22:00.000-04:00

There is a Sadness when you visit an Old Person's house and you can date the moment at which they stopped engaging with the world. It is the date on the top magazine of the stack by the easy chair, or on the bookshelf of sun-faded paperbacks. It's the date on that first page with the library of congress information, the ISBN and the rest of the numbers. It's the last important book they read, the Pulitzer Prize winner from 1967, or 1974, or 1988. It's the shelf full of James Michener, or James Clavell, or Norman Mailer. This marks the point at which they have not only given up on acquiring the new, but have ceased to trouble themselves with unloading the old.

These old people typically have newer things in their house than these artifacts. Usually the television is less than a few years old, and the microwave might be battered although it's certainly not antique. They might even have a gleaming stainless steel refrigerator with an ice-maker and dispenser built into the door. But you can tell their heart is not in these things. Most likely some child or grand-child or social worker has stopped by, said, "Oh Harold, you can't possibly go on living with this old thing in your home," and taken it upon themselves to arrange delivery and installation of the replacement. And the Old Person likely shrugged and said, "sure, I suppose so," and sat looking over the top of his bifocals with a battered paperback in his hand, a bemused expression on his face, while his caregiver fussed and grunted to attach co-ax and AC power and argue with utilities over the phone.

If it's a good natured Old Person, he perhaps said to his caregiver, "You like to read, do you? Why don't you take this copy of Shogun with you? Maybe you'll enjoy it. Don't mention it, it's the least I can do."

The Lure of Retro Computing

2010-10-18T21:57:00.000-04:00

I want to get Lubuntu working on the old 2000 Sony Vaio, make it a streamlined, stripped-down, responsive old toy. It won't go online without an ethernet cable, which makes it perfect for distraction-free writing. The silly thing is, though, that it runs Windows XP just fine, it's running it fine right now, with OpenOffice and everything that I need, and not going online with it keeps it pretty well free of viruses. Stripping it down to a lightweight package with Abiword/Gnumeric is really counter-productive, since I could be diving in and writing novels on it right now.

But then again, there's the productive writing angle, and then there's the fun of messing about with unorthodox operating systems and seeing how they play with old hardware, and pretending these are both part of the same pursuit is a bit disingenuous.

I've got that Asus Eee netbook, too. My reading in bed computer, almost three years old already but working great, going strong. The small keyboard’s not much of a hindrance; I actually like the minimal feel of it. And the small screen lends itself to a certain degree of focus. It will go online, but it won’t stream YouTube videos without burping along, and I can forget all about watching Hulu on it or looking at any pictures in high resolution. I could have been content with just that, but no, I had to go and purchase a Pentium 4 desktop for $120 from a guy who saved one from the dump and dropped a new hard drive into it. And why didn’t I just get one from the dump myself? Well, because the guy got to it first, the price was reasonable, and I feel good supporting that guy’s lifestyle of local-salvage-and-survive. Of course, that same day, Staples had a great deal on a 22” widescreen LCD monitor to pair with it, so now I’ve got a massive screen dominating my otherwise uncluttered desk that’s constantly calling out to me with uses for its vast tracts of screen real-estate.

These stupid conundrums, I spend hours obsessing over them, when friends of mine might be levelling up their World of Warcraft characters or fragging bots in first person shooters. Or raising children and doing the other suchlike things that adults are supposed to be doing with their time.

All these machines, built for communication. I strip them down and prune them back. Too much communication makes me nervous. Why should we share our dinner plans on Facebook and post our bowel movements on Twitter? Just because there's an app for that?

I like the older machines because I feel they’re not being wasted; I can ask of them everything they can give and use them to the fullest. This is what K. Mandla speaks about when he says he is not a computer minimalist. He’s a maximilst, getting the most out of ten-year old laptops he pays $20 for. And there he is, building, researching, and publishing online (which is a more elegant description of what we do than “blogging,” which is perhaps the most unfortunatly coined term of this last decade) all from the command-line. Whether this makes him any more effective or productive as a writer and journalist is up for debate, but it seems to me he gets a pretty decent load of fun out of the proceedings.

Unlike Mandla, I'm not ready to go back to command-line-only. I've been tempted by the challenge of it, but climbing the learning curve of Unix commands and Vim keyboard shortcuts is a fun exercise that I’ve embarked upon a couple of times, but repeating that exercise enough to comfortably compose a letter without going online to reference tutorials and man-pages starts to make me feel that maybe I am wasting my time, a little. There’s enough distraction-free text editors out there for Linux that I can re-create the feeling of austerity and still wave my mouse around when I want to put something in italics or copy and paste.

Don’t think I haven’t considered getting that old 1980 IBM PC, which has no graphics card, out of my mother’s attic and re-acquainting myself with the keyboard shortcuts of WordPerfect whatever point whatever that I loaded onto it, back in the day, with my buddy's mother's boss's stack of 5.25" floppies. The thing boots in seconds and will output to the dot-matrix printer in near letter quality, provided I can scare up a ribbon and a carton or two of tractor-feed paper. If I bring that thing home, though, I’ll get open-source ambitious and lose a couple of weeks trying to load up a stripped down version of Linux through those 5.25” drives, and then I'll be diving right back into the morass of text editors and obscure, out-of-date printer driver installation. Is there any way to sauter a USB port onto a 30 year old motherboard? Getting anything I write off of that old thing would be a significant challenge.

And now I'm toying with the idea. But if I have to find a place to put that hulk of a machine, I’ll have to get rid of one of these bulky typewriters (probably the Selectric) which call to me, nightly, from beneath their dust-covers. They want me to type something, anything, and they seem to be unaware of the cruel truth that I’ve run out of things to say.

All these computers are four years old, at least (and the typewriters are 40 years old, at least) so it’s not like we’re one of those families that goes around scooping up the latest gadgets and sending last years models off to India and Africa for recycling and reclamation. The problem is that despite whatever planned obsolescence is built into them, they persist in working just fine. Throwing them away doesn’t feel right, but it’s not like we can sell them, either, given that people would rather finance an iPad with their credit card (”It’s like buying a computer with no money down!”) then make do with something that still gets the job done, something they could have second-hand for twenty bucks.

Roller-Blading

2010-10-02T19:32:00.000-04:00

Dusted off the roller-blades (once we found them, hanging behind the winter coats in the closet) for a skate along the canal. We bought two pair of these things about eight years ago because we were living so close to such a nice, smooth paved trail, and it seemed a shame not to try them out. I've used mine about a dozen times over the years. The Wife tried it once or twice and decided it wasn't for her.

Funny, how life was eight years ago, when we'd invest a few hundred dollars sports equipment just to try something out.

They demand a vigorous sort of exercise, these rollerblades; it’s not so easy to have a leisurely adventure with them as it is when bicycling or walking. And they limit where you can go. Long, smooth stretches of pavement are best, and the trails had better be isolated from cars, and they’d better not slope more than a degree or two from the horizontal. You have to carry a pair of shoes along with you if you hope to venture far from the path, and this is on top of the helmet and other protective gear you should have on.

It’s a very first-world leisure activity, rollerblading. It requires a great deal of infrastructure.

Still, we had a good time and I got a good workout while we were at it. The Wife stuck with her vintage bike, of course, as it’s got a pair of brand-new whitewall tires on it and they needed breaking in. The sun was out, the air cool, the wind light. We watched a man land a 12 lb. striper and then toss it back into the water. We spent a good 15 minutes sitting on a park bench, watching the passage of a 30’ sailboat and a 60’ fishing vessel. The fishing boat was remarkably loud with its diesel engines. I wonder if those fishermen keep earplugs in all day, and what the world sounds like to them when they get home and go ashore?

On the way back we found we had the breeze in our face and a slight hill to climb, so by the time we got home I was out of breath and happy we hadn’t gone further before turning around. Time was I could skate all the way to the southern mouth of the canal and back with a lit cigar clamped between my teeth. It seems, perhaps, I’ve let myself go a little.

My own freebie bike needs a new tire. Once that’s taken care of I’ll probably favor that over the rollerblades. It’s easier to zip into town and pick up library books and drink a cup of coffee on the bike. But it felt good to get some use out of these silly old shoes with the wheels on them. When I’m in the mood for jogging, and then remember how much jogging hurts my knees, I’ll just might pull them out again.

Review: Super Sad True Love Story

2010-09-29T07:01:00.003-04:00

OK, so now that I'm done with whining about Franzen, how about a book I loved?

Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story is shelved in "literature," although I think it might qualify as the sort of near-future science fiction that William Gibson used to write until the world caught up with his futurism.

Shteyngart has tapped into a lot of my personal fears and obsessions with this one: the erosion of human relationships in the face of mediating technology, the growth of America's "in your face" military dominance, the rise of military checkpoints within our own country and the sacrifice of personal liberty and privacy in the name of security, the coarsening of communication as we rely more and more on vulgarity and abbreviation to express ourselves, the preoccupation with youth and the commodification of sex, and the ultimate fate of the US as the dollar drops in value and we're further in debt to our trading partners.

His characters parade about in OnionSkin jeans (yes, they are what you think they are) and undergarments from companies like TotalSurrender and AssLuxury that they buy with yuan because the dollar is worthless. Work in America is so hard to find that you've got to have a Master's degree and to through a period of apprenticeship to secure a position in retail. Facebook has been abandoned for the trendier, hipper social networking site GlobalTeens, and people of all ages are so dedicated to texting on GlobalTeens (texting is now called teening) with their hand-helds that, when connectivity goes down for a couple of weeks, several people commit suicide, convinced that a world of "walls and thoughts and faces" is just not enough.

It's a terrifying world, taken all at once like this. And yet it's the world we're settling into, the way your overweight executive settles into his tacky recliner in front of the TV at the end of a long day. Bit by bit, we're reclining towards this disaster. We've all felt it, haven't we? I just haven't seen it portrayed so clearly and believably before.

And yet he manages to find the humanity in his characters and spin a love story between them. People still want the same things, really: community, belonging, good friends, work that's challenging and provides a sense of purpose. It's just that all these human desires are washed under a wave of data and stuff.

The main character, Lenny, is middle aged. He's determined to live forever, and he works for a company that provides life extension to the very rich. Obsessed with youth as he is, he's still attached to his old books. But he's embarrassed by the way they smell. The person sitting next to him on a plane complains about his volume of Tolstoy, "Duder, that smells like old socks." When he realizes the same smell might put off Eunice, his young girlfriend, he sprays his library with air freshener.

How can he remain young and still love the things that meant so much to him in a long ago childhood? And how can he remain young when he can't afford the technology that extends the life of his clients?

His girlfriend, who really is young, wants to feel smart, to understand these books that mean so much to him. But how can you share literature with a girl who has grown up in a cultural vacuum? All the references are lost. It's like trying to read Chaucer in the original Middle English. Possible, but with great effort. And certainly not fun, when there's shopping and teening you could be doing instead.

The connection between these characters is as touching as it is doomed, as they struggle to find common interests and qualities that can transcend their generational gap.

I don't want to give too much else away (beyond the obvious bit given away by the book's title). But I particularly liked Shteyngart's explanation for how the Chinese bankers finally call in their debts. It seemed like a plausible outcome, though hopefully not the one we ultimately end up with. The economists I've spoken to have always told me not to worry about our debt to China, since if they call it in, we won't be able to buy their products any more, and so they have an incentive to keep lending us money on and on forever. Given the collapse of the tech stocks and the housing market and the derivatives market in the last ten years, I've had trouble buying the idea of anything financial going on forever. (Except, perhaps, for interest payments.)

All this is handled with a marvelous sense of humor, and so it really doesn't come off as bleak as all that. (Humor. Something else that was missing from the Franzen title, and might have made all the difference.) Check out Shteyngart's book trailer, which really has very little to do with the book but will make you want to read it, anyway.

Franzen's Freedom - From Literature!

2010-09-28T04:34:00.002-04:00

I gave up on reading Franzen's Freedom after 120 pages.

I just could not make myself care about these characters. These are shallow, petty people of modest accomplishment being mean and hurtful to their families in shallow, petty ways. Afraid I'd be missing something, I jumped ahead a couple hundred pages, and then again, and then to the end. I kept finding myself among the same folks, having the predictable affairs, struggling with the predictable rage.

I get that these characters have failings. I get that sad, unfortunate things have happened to them. I get that they are just like us. I just don't care.

I suppose Franzen has captured something about suburban white Americans at the present time. Maybe folks can come back to this book in a hundred or a thousand years and say, "Oh, so that's how the common people were living in the early 21st century," and they'll have a record of common lives that might have been left out of cable programming and news feeds. A distillation of white, American ordinariness.

Time Magazine built up a great deal of hype over this novel, putting Franzen on the cover even though they haven't featured an author on their cover for a decade. And they mentioned his spat with Oprah, saying that if she didn't feature this book in her book-club, she may very well be passing on the greatest novel of the 21st century.

It was clear that this was a major BOOK EVENT, at a time when BOOK EVENTS are precious and rare. It reminded me of the hype around Infinite Jest, the book event of the 1990s, when David Foster Wallace (Franzen's good friend) was given perhaps the last American book tour to publicize this massive brick of literary ambition. Wallace's book tour was captured rather effectively by David Lipsky in a book-length interview which stands, I believe, as a monument to the end of this particular "literary" era (and as such is just about as interesting as anything Wallace wrote himself). As I got caught up in the hype for Freedom, I started to think that, maybe, the era of this particular BOOK EVENT was not over, that maybe there was room for another novelist superstar or two.

But Wallace's book was challenging, intricate, and absurd. He may have been writing about ordinary folks, but he did it in a way that required being intensely alert and careful in your reading. Wallace was a master of the literary gamesmanship that the 20th century liberal arts education told us we should aspire to consume. Whether the production and consumption of such work was a worthwhile endeavor is still up for debate. Are we really better off for dragging ourselves through Finnegan's Wake or Gravity's Rainbow, say?

Franzen's has sidestepped this whole question about "literary" writing by keeping his prose simple, easy, breezy, and in some places, flat out lazy. (He handles the mine-field of a sex scene by writing "He fucked her like a brute.")

I suppose it had to be done. After a century of post-modernism, someone had to say, "Hey, what if we stripped all the pretentious language games out of the literary novel and saw what was left?" And what we got was Freedom, written with the simple, clear language of a mystery, but without the mystery. An adventure without adventure, a thriller sans thrills.

For better or worse, people had to struggle with Pynchon and Joyce. But one could get through this lengthy novel in a weekend, absorb everything it has to say, shrug, and move on.

Big Plane on Little Field

2010-09-27T15:19:00.000-04:00

I took a scenic route home from work yesterday. It brought me past the little grass airfield, the sort of place with no control tower, the sort of place where pilots radio in their approaches if they feel like it, and overfly before landing to get a peek at which way the windsock is pointing.

There was a huge WWII era troop transporter parked by the offices. It seemed surreal to see something of that scale parked in the grass. It was a tail-dragger, chin up, with the US Army star painted on the tail and the wings. A proud mama-plane looming over her children. I thought, "gosh," and turned around to take a look. When it comes to airplanes I'm a ten year old boy inside.

Unfortunately my cellphone camera does not do it justice. But you get the idea.

The folks out in front of the hangar office were tired of answering questions about her. One of them was kind of a dick about it. Full on sarcasm: "You're the first person to ask about that plane all day."

"I'm sure that's not true," I said.

"You'd think we were having an air-show. Someone else tell him about it. I can't go through it again."

An actual ten year old boy who was hanging out at the airfield obliged me. Apparently it belongs to a wealthy enthusiast from South Carolina, and it's here for some maintenance. (Really, was that so hard?)

This airport offers glider and biplane rides. I joked that it looked like they were expanding their operation.

The kid's father said, "No, we can't give rides on that. The operating costs would be too high."

"I bet it burns a ton of fuel," I said.

"It burns 100 gallons an hour."

Oh, proud mama plane, so noble and strong. Why must you be so thirsty?

Awake and Offline

2010-09-24T11:10:00.001-04:00

Inevitably awake and asleep at the wrong times. Four hours until I get up for a meeting and here I am in bed, typing away.

I think I might try a few days of internet isolation. It's not like I post to the blog on a regular basis. People read the blog on a less than regular basis. If I deactivate or unplug my wireless card... Just to see if I can get the words flowing again. Just to piece together the sort of running internal monologue that used to, I think, flow through my days. Nicoholas Carr has a point. We think differently, in an age of broadband.

It's not like I don't have enough free time. It's just that, sitting down at these machines, these marvelous distraction machines, entire days go by and all I've done is work my way through my Google reader queue and browse for ebooks that I don't buy (or I download a bunch of free, old ones I'll never read) and scroll mindlessly through whatever dreck my subconscious says is worth looking up or clicking on. It's pacifying, relaxing, the way folks used to like to watch TV.

But I used to hate to see people watching TV like that. I couldn't understand it. And I swore I would never be so pathetic, as to do such a thing. But good god. Click click clickety click on the internet, to no end and for no end. I know Cory Doctorow can handle it. Can get books written and blog communities together and build an entire career on it, in fact. The poster child for the distracted but productive modern superman.

But my poor brain. It needs the linear, focused passage. I was raised on typewriters and piano practice, and told not to bother doing something if you weren't going to do it right. In retrospect, those activities and principles were not the best to build a future life on, in the twenty first century. My job is an exercise in multi-tasking. It gets easier with practice, but I'd do better if mom had put an iPhone in one hand and a Nintendo controller in the other.

So, if no internet for a few days... Well, I've got enough content on these computers and in this house to keep myself entertained for a year. It shouldn't be a problem.

Really, I could roll this sort of self-denial into better practices for daily living. Like jotting down the things I need to research (when there really is a thing I need to research), and then waiting for an allotted hour to get the research done. Like back in the day when you'd go to the library to check your facts. My online hour. Just one. Maybe I could post any composed and brilliant thoughts to the blog in that precious hour, too.

Limited access: because when we can do things anytime, we don't respect our time.

Here is a quaint memory: I used to write a monthly newspaper column for our local weekly. I remember mailing mailing it in, stamp and envelope and all, the week before it was due. And if I was running late, I'd ride my bicycle over to the offices and hand it to the editor. This was how content was delivered. Research was done at the library, words were typed up at home, and work was brought to a building.

Newspapers. Were those ever cute, or what?

I remember talking to this girl in high school. She seemed very smart - honors classes and all that - and very pretty. She was the sort of pretty that comes from training to be a ballet dancer for the first sixteen years of her life and then her breasts came in just a bit too grandly and there was the end of the ballet dream. So when we had a conversation I was inclined to talk to her a great deal about everything that came to mind, since when a girl like that is listening to you, you'd better be ready with something to say - especially if you couldn't get by on your looks. I'd go on about Stephen Hawking and the philosophy class I was taking nights at the community college and whether the rules of mathematics had to be the same in all universes and whether piano keyboards would look different if we had an alternate history where the dominant tonal mode somehow settled into a different pattern of whole and half steps.

She listened politely to a lot of this and then asked, "What's it like inside your head when you're not talking?"

"Pretty much like this," I said. And then, suddenly horrified by the alternative, I asked, "What's it like in yours?"

"Really," she said, "most of the time...if I'm not doing something, that is...it's just...quiet."

"No words at all? Just silence?"

"Well, maybe I'm thinking about my homework, or dancing. Just a little. Or, if I'm watching TV, of course there's the TV. While I'm watching it. But no. Otherwise, it's just quiet."

"So, at lunch, riding the bus, taking a walk, lying in bed at night, there's no words gnawing away at you up there?"

"Nope."

"Just quiet."

"That's pretty much it."

It struck me as a tremendous and tragic waste that such a smart and pretty girl could pass through so much life without a single thought in her head. And back then, I had no idea what that kind of silence could feel like. It was inconceivable, like trying to imagine what you're going to think about after you die.

The ironic thing about that girl...today she's at an Ivy League college doing research into brain structure and the physical roots of consciousness. So a mind that was just...quiet apparently worked just fine for her and her career.

I skipped college altogether. And now my brain lapses into long passages of silence that shock me with their breadth, at their conclusion. Some of those silences are filled only with the clicking of a mouse and flashes of content that are gone as soon as they flash across the retina. Maybe if I take away some of those flashes, the silences can open up and fill with words once again.

The Sacredness of Books, The Sanctity of Print

2010-09-22T13:48:00.000-04:00

Is there something sacred about the book, as a format?

We feel there is something special about the leather-bound tome on the shelf, and afford it a special significance that we don't assign to, say, the CD or DVD. Even the spine-creased paperback has been held and fondled and caressed, directly and for a period of hours. Books demand unmediated, tactile consumption that is foreign to other media.

But does this make it particularly special, this format? Or is it simply that it has been around for so long, and used to transmit so many messages that have become central to our culture (The Bible, the works of Tolstoy and Dickens, Harry Potter), that it becomes difficult to imagine life without it, and so we have, in the face of new alternatives, afforded it a protection and reverence we used to show to women, children, and the elderly? Is there a benefit to the physicality of the book that demands we preserve it, even though we've discarded the papyrus scroll, the long-playing record, and the cassette tape?

Burning books has been seen as a horrible, reprehensible act for a long time, now. It's associated with the most ignorant of faith-based thinkers and the most dangerous of regimes. Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 showed us the horror of this wholesale, biblicidal destruction of knowledge.

But a decade into the new millennium, there are signs we are ready to move on. E-readers are becoming affordable and commonplace, digital book sales are gobbling up a measurable portion of the book sales pie-chart, and former book hoarders and collectors are enthusing about the amount of space they can free up in their homes by moving their libraries onto their new digital gadgets. Listening to the owner of a Kindle the other day, I heard, "I'm going to get a game room in my house with all the space I'm saving. First thing I'm gonna do is buy a pool table."

I was confused. Was this person going to re-purchase all the titles he owned in physical format as electronic books, and then throw the physical books away? Or does the fact that electronic editions are available for instant download make him want to dispose of his physical library, secure in the knowledge that, if he wants to read a book again, he can download that title over a free cellular connection in seconds? For whatever reason, the adoption of a new way of reading for this man meant that the old form of his entertainment had to go, wholesale and in bulk.

What happens, though, to the pleasure of running your eyes across a shelf of books you've already read, each one freighted with the mutual significance of content and context, what it said and where you read it, what it meant to you, who you were before and after you turned the pages?

And how much room do books take up, really? A foot in from the wall, here and there? (I wanted to ask: How can you spread a pool-table along your walls?)

Granted, the weight of books can be tremendous. I think that's the greater stigma they carry today. We Americans are supposed to be light and fast and mobile, ready to jump up and follow an opportunity at a moment's notice. "Must be willing to re-locate." Our houses down pass down the generations. They aren't places to put down roots and build histories and collect pockets of significance. They're assets. The last thing we should burden them with are libraries.

I've got an e-reader myself, and I'm noticing there is something sad about a physical bookshelf that hasn't been updated in a while. The spines fade, a layer of dust grows in hard-to reach crevices, the prices printed on the spines start to look quaint and old-timey. And I think that's what today's book-lover, caught in the shiny embrace of digital content, is afraid of coming home to: this accusation from his shelves that he hasn't been reading--when in fact he has, he just hasn't been shelving the artifacts.

But without the artifacts--with just tiny, tiny digital book files (a novel is about a tenth the size of a song) -- can the words carry as much weight, imbue as much significance, as ink on paper?

I know it's silly to bemoan a state of plenty. The amount of information I can access from this desk with a few keystrokes is nothing short of miraculous. BUT. Consider the act of burning a book. The energy and determination and world-view that requires. And then consider the act of deleting a digital file from a hard drive. It's easy, it's instantaneous, and the destruction is no less complete. Even better: there are no ashes, no fumes, and no heat.

When a book is so easy to erase, is it not as easy to forget?

Questions for Corporate America (Typecast)

2010-09-10T20:26:00.001-04:00

I sat down to my manual typewriter and some classical music to unwind after work and ended up writing about...work. So it goes.

* For more on The Wife's beloved 1950's visit The Apron Revolution.

I'm not really happy with how blogger is handling my scanned pages. But clicking on the pages will bring up full-sized, easier to read pages.

This typecasting is a lot harder than it looks.

Let's Stop Tossing Our Kids Into Student Loan Debt Slavery

2010-09-05T17:09:00.003-04:00

American parents: Before you made that baby, did you think about how you were going to send it to college?

We've thought about it, and the costs of college, health care, and housing have been the top three reasons why we've put it off -- and probably will put it off until it's too late.

Because, seriously, how can you bring a child into a world where we're told (1) any kind of success and happiness comes on the heels of an advanced college degree, and (2) a college degree is not affordable for the child of working middle class American parents. To top it all off, the companies which loan you the money to get that degree use some of the most vicious practices in the lending industry, and still manage to bilk the American taxpayer for any money they can't collect from students.

President Obama upset me terribly when he started talking about the importance of increasing college graduation rates. More debt-saddled, unemployable college graduates are the last thing our country needs. How about increasing the ranks of skilled, self-reliant tradespeople and entrepreneurs instead? How about teaching civility, respect, and civic-mindedness at the high-school level, so we can get to work building sustainable communities and raising families, instead of partying, boozing, and drugging through an additional four to eight years of "higher education?" (And then spending a significant portion of their professional lives paying for it.)

This is something I tend to get all worked up and furious about, to the point I can't discuss it without descending into incoherent rage. So instead I'll just embed this handy info-graphic from collegescholarships.org. It does a better job of getting to the root of my anger than I can myself.

Infographic by College Scholarships.org

Macs Do Not Age Well; How Come I Still Have One?

2010-08-20T22:32:00.000-04:00

Macintosh products continue to disappoint me. Maybe this is because I expect the things I purchase to hold together for more than a couple of years. Ever notice how Apple's products are all shiny, smooth, and sleek in the showroom, but after you use them for a few months they get scratched up, grimy, and gross?

The shiny white finish on my Macbook was designed to accumulate damage. They used the softest plastic I've ever seen on a computer. Meanwhile the rubberized, matte coating around the keyboard started to chip away within a year, peeling off in strips where I rest my palms.

The keyboard absorbs fingerprints like a napkin, but I can't clean it for fear that water's going to get in the tiny cracks beneath the keys.

I run Linux on it, of course, ever since Snow Leopard came along and the Mac software I'd already paid for started asking for more money just to stay up-to-date. It's a shame Linux didn't have this level of sophistication four years ago when I bought the thing, because I would never have bought the thing.

Recently I tried putting the Mac OS X operating system back on the Mac, though. There's a couple free-but-commercial programs I've been wanting to run that just don't function on Linux: Netflix movie streaming, for one, and the Adobe Digital Editions software which lets me borrow books from the library and read them on my Nook. I've got other (even older) computers now, so putting the Mac OS back on the Mac that I don't really use that often seemed like a logical solution.

You would think that the system-restore disk that comes with a Mac would, well, restore it to factory settings without a hitch. It did put the operating system back on there. Then it asked me to register a bunch of personal information with Apple. I wasn't really happy about sharing it, but what the hell; it wouldn't hand over control of the system until I filled in an address, phone number, and email address. That's the price of playing with Apple, I guess.

About an hour later I booted into the shiny blue of a virgin OS X install. None of my networking hardware worked. No wireless, no ethernet, not even my bluetooth mouse would function. I had successfully turned my perfectly functional laptop into Jonathan Franzen's distraction-free isolation machine. That's pretty handy in it's way, just not what I was looking for.

So I spent a couple of hours trolling the internet for solutions to this problem. The consensus from boards and forums was that the airport card had probably gone bad, and that a trip to the Apple "Genius Bar" was the only solution. "Or," they said, "try re-installing again." So I spent another hour repeating myself.

Strangely enough, all the networking hardware worked fine during the installs. It recognized my wifi connection and sent all my information to Apple, after all. But once I rebooted for my first proper use of the computer, all of it went wrong. Strangely, the diagnostics provided by the Apple's "System Profiler" listed all of the stuff that should be working with "failed" written beneath it, and the menu where I should have been able to enable the airport card was grayed out, stubbornly refusing to accept my clicks.

So where did this leave me? Putting Ubuntu back on the machine. This took half as long as the Mac install did, and Ubuntu detected all of my hardware by default.

I don't understand why I can get a free third party operating system to run better on this overdesigned piece of junk than the native Mac operating system, but oh well. There were good reasons I switched away from the Mac OS last year. And those grapes were probably sour anyway.

(And then today I realized I should be able to run Netflix through a Virtualbox install of Windows XP. Which may make this the only Macbook in Massachusetts running Windows and Linux, but not OS X.)

Further evidence of Mac Crapitude: we ended up with a secondhand iPod Touch. (It's not so much that I like gadgets, as that I can't resist getting extra use out of other people's garbage.) This thing isn't even three years old yet. Still, it wouldn't download or run any "apps" without a $5 update to its operating system, which required downloading iTunes onto a Windows PC, registering the device, and typing a bunch more personal and banking information into web-forms. This seriously took a couple of hours.

Then, two months after we got it, the touchscreen stopped responding. This thing is an iPod Touch. Without a touchscreen, it sort of fails at its primary function. What's next, Apple? Cell phones that won't make calls?

At first we were able to bring the screen back by squeezing the lower right hand corner, but this only worked intermittently until it stopped working at all. Now, the screen is dead to the world. The internet tells us it's a known problem with first generation iPod Touches; best advice is to bring it in for repair if you bought the AppleCare warrantee.

Um, not happening. At least we can still use it as a 16GB flash drive. Given what we paid for it, we have no right to complain.

Why this animosity towards Apple? Two crappy devices out of two is certainly not a representative sample. And they must be doing something right. People buy enough of their products.

I think it's the designed-to-wear-out aspect that really pisses me off. That one year life cycle, where their crap starts to look like crap just in time for the slightly newer crap to come to market. They've kicked planned obsolescence to a new level, at a time when our country is less and less able to afford it. I have co-workers who are pissed because the iPhone 4 came out, and they just bought an iPhone 3 six months ago. They talk as if they don't have a choice about upgrading. The Apple product cycle is something they just accept, up there with Death and Taxes.

And then there's the whole infantalism of their culture. The cuteness of the products. The little "i" in front of everything, as if branding should be allowed to trump grammar. The "Genius Bars" in the Mac stores where hard working debt-saddled graduate student computer technicians are trained to be pricks. The fact that none of their products come with a manual, but then you can go back to the Mac store and buy "The book that should have been in the box."

I mean, honestly, it's like people can't wait to line up and get slapped in the face.

Franzen on the Cover of Time?

2010-08-17T20:02:00.019-04:00

It was nice to see a literary novelist on the cover of Time Magazine this week (and interesting to discover that Oprah Winfrey has some kind of grudge against him).

Jonathan Franzen's new book, Freedom, sounds pretty interesting, and in the Time article (in the actual magazine, not the chopped-up link salad they give you on the website) he speaks to his overarching theme: having freedom is about what we choose give up to live the lives we choose, rather than having the right to do whatever it is that strikes our fancy in any given moment. Hurrah! to that, I say, and also to his other point: if we're going to define our country as a place that "loves freedom", in conflict with terrorists who "hate freedom", we should really devote some serious thought to just what freedom is.

And we haven't yet, because we're a nation of overindulged, spoiled-rotten eight-year-olds. (That last sentence was all me, not Franzen.)

From a retro-tech perspective, I got a kick out of the photograph (again, only in the print magazine) of Franzen's workspace. He rents an office space, which he keeps completely bare, and writes with an outdated laptop computer on a plain desk. There is absolutely nothing on the desk except for this computer. He's yanked the wireless card out of the computer to make it internet and distraction free. Even without the wireless card, though, there was an open ethernet port to tempt him. So to fix that, he took an old cable, put super-glue on the jack, popped it in, and then cut the cord off of it. Hole plugged; distractions averted.

I admire that level of dedication. Personally, I would have brought one of my typewriters to the office. (But just one, so I wouldn't waste time deciding which to use on a given day.) There really is no better single purpose machine for writing. Then again, typewriters necessitate a supply of paper, ribbons, pencils, etc. Then the accumulations of manuscript pages and handwritten notes have a way of cluttering up the workspace. So the self-contained laptop feels a lot more tidy.

No matter that it took him eight years to do it; Franzen did manage to get to the end of a lengthy novel, so clearly he's found a level of technology that works for him. It takes dedication and focus to write, or read, anything long-form these days, and I'm looking forward to reading this once it comes out -- regardless of what Oprah says (or doesn't say) about it.

Considering The Cult of Less

2010-08-16T17:53:00.000-04:00

The Wife and I are still inundated with stuff. Yard sale troubles, tenant troubles, and house maintenance troubles all have us wishing we could slim down more than ever. Just this morning we were talking about how little we'd want to take with us, if we were to sell it all and move on to, say, an abandoned stone castle in the south of France.

So I can certainly understand the impulse behind the "Cult of Less."

Here's the Boingboing article, the BBC article, and the Cult of Less website.

It's amazing, when you think about it, how much modern baggage consists of CDs, DVDs, and books. (At least we don't have so many cassettes and VHS tapes any more.) All of that stuff can go on hard drives, now, or stream into our laptops from the "cloud". The books seem to be the toughest hold-out, which is funny when you consider how easy they should be to digitize. Just about the only complaint I have about my nook is how few books are available for it. A couple million titles sounds like a lot, but I haven't been able to find Graham Greene on there, or Nabokov, or even very much Gene Wolfe, so I still find myself clinging to a lot of dead tree like an anachronism, at least until I finish a paperback and give it away. (I like to follow Tyler Cohen's example of giving away all the books he loves, and throwing away the books he doesn't like, so they don't waste anyone else's time.)

You can only take the Cult of Less so far, though. And it's a young man's cult, surely. Some of those guys are giving up on housing, relying on friends with couches to put up with them when they need a place to sleep. Which I imagine would be every night. This must foster, at least, an understanding of good manners. You'd better make a lot of friends, and you'd better be nice to them, if you expect to find a warm place to rest. But there is no way around the fact that somebody, at least, must be paying the taxes on the walls that keep the weather out. We can't all own nothing, as liberating as that might feel.

(This also brings to mind a quote by Dave Chappelle: "If men could f*** women in a cardboard box, they would never buy a house.")

And try being a member of the Cult of Less and having children. I can't even imagine the burden of all those baby clothes, diapers, toys, cribs, insurance policies...

Still, The Wife and I are childless, and could theoretically get by with very little. A few changes of clothes, a couple of laptop computers, and maybe the one car. Four walls around us, or maybe the hull of a boat, could do for the rest. I might even hang on to my Olivetti Lettera typewriter. It doesn't take up that much room.

What is the absolute least you would take along, if you had to fit it all into a couple of suitcases?

Yard Sale Reflections

2010-08-08T21:19:00.001-04:00

Two days of yard sale selling have me more convinced than ever that we need to think long and hard over every purchase before we make it. We had a decent take, just about $80 for what were essentially two half-days of exceptionally casual salesmanship. But, as anyone who has ever sweltered through one of these things knows, the yard sale is not about the money you bring in so much as it's about the junk you don't have to haul to the dump. And when all was said and done, we were able to pack the left-overs into the station wagon for a single load to the dump swap shop, where no doubt a couple of the items will be picked back up, lived with for a couple of months or years, and then returned.

Plus we had the added pleasure of sitting under a tree for a couple of sunny days and chatting with strangers.

There's something humbling, though, about seeing goods you've accumulated over the years laid bare across a driveway. Particularly after you've hauled lots of this junk from one house to another half a dozen times. Lots of it is chipped, dented, or covered in dust. If it was pristine or at the least well loved, no doubt it wouldn't be shoveled out for sale like this.

We polish it off as well as we can in a couple of minutes, but we don't take any longer, since, after all, we're only asking a dollar or two. Attempts to clean things off stem more from a sense of self-respect than marketing. Because the folks who stop to consider our junk are not approaching it with the discerning shopper's care for the best deal. They're thinking more along the lines of, "Would I really want this object in my house even if it cost nothing at all?"

And as the purveyor or such an object, the yard-saler is thinking, "What does it say about me, that my irregular, oddly numbered set of Ikea flatware and my stack of five year old home decorating magazines can't even fetch a fiver? I've lived with these things for years. Do my memories come so cheap?"

What it really feels like, when many of these customers wander through without making a purchase, is not that they are so interested in scoring a good deal on second hand housewares or jigsaw puzzles with no guarantee on their piece-counts, as in touring a museum of the recent past of an ordinary life. Many of them are gruff, uninterested in chit-chat. "We'd never get stuck with this kind of garbage," their condescending silence seems to say. And some of them hurry away, as if we had stolen their time.

We did make a couple of good connections, though. The sorts of sales that confirmed our tastes as something worthwhile, and that gave hope our discards could live on for some time.

I sold a folding typewriter from the 1910s. The feet had flaked away and the platen seized up, but the woman seemed to appreciate it's value as an historical ornament. (Working, it would have been an amazing artifact, capable of producing documents mechanically with a footprint smaller than a laptop computer. But it didn't work, and I had not looked at it in a year, so its value as an ornament was zero to me.) Gussie sold some sort of howdy-doody doll to an old man who had met the original ventriloquist and was going to give the doll a place of honor in his home. Another fellow scooped up an abacus for a dollar, and announced that he had found the perfect wedding gift for his sister, who was a math teacher.

Trash to treasure. The yard sale life cycle system works.

I purchase very little with the modest allowance that The Wife allows me. This year I bought an e-reader second hand, and half-price, from someone who had ended up with two. I got this computer on Craigslist from a man who pieced it together from parts he got at the dump. Maybe once a month I treat myself to a bottle of scotch. A pair of shoes lasts me two years, at which point the soles have worn through.

I'm a bad, bad American. But part of my problem is this: I've had hoarders in my family. My grandfather filled acres with junk cars and rolls of old carpet; wooden boats which he refused to sell slowly sunk into the soil.

I've probably spent more time throwing away my family's purchases than I've spent making my own.

So that shiny new widget on the department store shelf, with its hard clam-shell packaging and optional two-year service plan, always comes to me with a vision of the future, from so much of the crap I've kept before: a dust-covered relic in a storage unit, no longer worth the rent of its cubic-footage, just waiting to be hauled away at great effort and expense to the yard sale or the dump. The tragedy inherent in a credit-card swipe is a pile of garbage resting on a mountain of debt.

If we really think about the things we buy, we can minimize this pain. And maybe we can live lives that revolve around people again, instead of things.

Sex Sells ... Math?

2010-08-05T21:15:00.000-04:00

Sex has been used to sell a lot of things. But math?

There's no reason the nice lady teaching your children their algebra shouldn't be attractive. But I wonder. If Danica McKellar was my eighth grade algebra teacher, what would I really remember from that class? Polynomials, or something else?

Honestly, do we need the "boy crazy confessionals" and the Cosmo-style quizzes right on the cover? And the titillation of the letter x? Such blatant subtext: "It's a variable. But put three of them together and it's pornography."

And how about the implication that it's not enough for our daughters to be smart, they have to be drop-dead sexy too?

Regular readers will forgive me, I hope, for putting pictures of pretty girls on my blog. That's actually a lovely dress. (The more persistent among you may find less even modest pictures a google image search away. Not that I checked.)

Hey, remember Winnie Cooper from The Wonder Years? Is it me or does that girl look familiar?

On How We Come to Love what we Love, Including Old Things

2010-08-01T21:13:00.000-04:00

Of those of us who have this attraction to old things – or affliction by them, more like – I suspect there are two types: those who came to it by love and those who came to it by privation. Either way the result is the same.

I originally settled on the manual typewriter because it was the most reliable piece of machinery I could get my hands on for $50. Once I had it, there was no need to pester well-meaning poor parents or tempermental rich grandparents for the likes of upgrades, ink cartridges, repairs, and diskettes. Nor was there any squandering of allowances, the earning of which was far too laborious and dear to apply to faddish devices.

I came to love my typewriters because they were mine, not because I'd had any particular draw to them in the first place. I suspect if the latest computers and printers had been easier to acquire, easier to replace and upgrade, I would have come to love those in the same way, through repeated experience of pleasure in their use. As it turned out, I wrote papers, stories, and love-letters on old machines, and so they worked a fetishistic magic on me.

Is this the healthiest reason to love something: because it is always there, and therefore convenient? But how about this reason: because it is reliable, and steady, and enduring. Certainly, we should take our time with things we are to invest our time and emotion into, just as we should with people.

After all, this is how we form the relationships that endure, among people: not from the hot-headed pursuit of the youngest and newest companion, but from the seasoning of shared experiences that accrue among those we find ourselves, by accident, convenience, or routine, in the presence of most often.

This is why, even though we have virtual access to over a billion souls through social networking sites on the internet, we spend the majority of our time on Facebook chatting with the folks we went to school with long ago. The seasoned relationships are the ones that mean the most to us.

I've convinced myself this is a perfectly reasonable way to come to love something, this circumstance and convenience.

The alternative – determination and pursuit - is overwhelming. It requires constant search and discernment, such a connoisseurs effort which, when it comes down to it (and despite it may feel otherwise) is in the hands of advertisers and marketing men anyhow.

Self-determiners assign themselves labels. They tell the world they are “preppy,” “goth,” “thrifty,” “refined;” they're “Harley” or “BMW.” They seek out clothes, accessories, and friends that match their categories, priding themselves on unique taste. But really they only landed in that category because of the display at the Hot Topic or J. Crew, or because all their friends rode motorbikes and they wanted one too.

I understand this desire to assign myself to marketing categories. I'm not immune. “What are you into?” Classical music, retrotech, science-fiction-literature, hiking, flying. Voila mon profil. Without categories, how can I market my blog? How could it ever be monetized?

But in reality, do I really belong in any of these? I only practice classical music a few hours each week. I don't have the space to accumulate any old junk beyond a few typewriters and old computers. Science fiction doesn't turn me on to the extent it used to, and though I have a yen to re-visit Moby Dick, I can't locate that copy I bought back in 1992. As for hiking, though I think I'd love to spend months charting every mile of trail in Acadia National Park, in truth I only have the time and energy for local pathways like the power-lines across the street. Oh, and I'm a passionate private pilot, having flown a total of 38.25 hours - 19 years ago.

So I've got to stretch the labels to get them to fit. And I came by each of these phases and faces by accident first, and preference only through time. Does it speak ill of me that there have been so many (also sailing, running, and pipe-smoking) that it becomes impossible to define this life with any focus? A more aggressive and motivated sort might have made a choice and followed it through to a level of perfection and professionalism that could guarantee good fortune and career.

Me, I'm left to muddle along as best I can. None of the labels will stick* and I am well-nigh unmarketable.

*Except that I grow old. And shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Motivations for Story

2010-07-27T16:32:00.000-04:00

Writers seem like such unhappy people, especially the ones actually making a go at doing it for a living. The constant pressure, the un-steady income, the long hours and relentless deadlines, it seems to make for some intense, unlikeable folks. You have to be remarkably talented and insanely driven to try and survive this way. Particularly now, as the chain bookstores are slashing their inventories to free up shelf space for toys and games.

I wonder why so many people (myself included) feel compelled to string words together, and like to dream that, someday, they might be able to make a living this way. Would we really be happier poring over page proofs and negotiating contracts, than punching a time clock and enjoying our weekends?

There's a few rock-star success stories that keep us dreaming: the J.K. Rowlings, the Stephen Kings, the Stephanie Meyerses, the Clancys and the Pattersons. These draw us back to the keyboard (though hardly often enough to actually cobble a novel together) in the hopes that such a dream might come true for us. But what blinders we wear, to ignore the fact that these few writing stars have come out of decades of publishing.

Our odds would be better in music, where each year produces a handful of hits and celebrities. Musicians are easier to love, and it's easier to love more of them, since we can consume their products in minutes, and we can do it while we're working, or walking, or driving in cars. While novelists -- well, novelists ask us to shut up, sit still, and listen for hours at a stretch, while they go on and on, unraveling this low-bandwidth string of communication, one word at a time.

How presumptious! Were I to knock on your door and ask you to listen to me for eight hours in a row, I would shudder to consider your reaction. But authors do this to us every day, and they ask us to pay them for the priviledge.

And yet there must be something primal about this particular dream, this aspiration, given that it generates so many reams of submissions to editors and agents, so many MFAs in creative writing, so many purchases of laptops and lattes. We set so much store in the story of the storyteller. Is it for the same reason the poor are so inclined to support tax structures that favor the super-wealthy? Does the same dream that, hey, I might get rich someday, and I won't want the gummint taking a slice of my pie, keep us pounding away at an activity so unlikely to reward us in money, fame, or affaction?

Or is it something even more basic than that? Is it that piecing our lives together in the form of a story is central to our identity? We're happy or miserable, we're successes or failures, and we look to our past for clues as to why this is so. We find them. We gossip. We keep journals and blogs and Twitter accounts. We call this our autobiography. (And it's telling that so many current-day literary successes are shelved under “Biography” or “Memoir.”)

The alternative -- that it's all just blind chance and one moment doesn't have any partiular linkage to the next, and certainly nothing we have control over -- is just too horrible to contemplate. Books give us the certainty that it all makes sense, somehow; that the decisions we make have consequences that make them worth making. Whether we read books or not, they're there, weaving our singular moments into elaborate, meaningful structure.

A proper story is more than entertainment. It's a roof, and walls against the night. It's a hearth.

The average American may not read many books in a given year. But we want them to be written. It's an imperitive right up there on par with having children, and believing that they're going to carry our stories into the future, whether they remember them or not.

Vacation Summation

2010-07-19T12:32:00.000-04:00

It's been a wonderful stay at home vacation. We've combined old with new, relaxation with activity, and time with friends with time alone.

We've ridden bicycles to the beach, swum in ice-cold water and lain in the sun long enough to remember what a proper sunburn feals like. Strange that you can live in a place like this and go to the beach so seldom, but there it is: a few times a year really is enough. Anything more and relaxation starts to feel like routine, and like work. But getting there on our fleet of cast-off and dump-recovered bicycles is a nice touch. And it's liberating to leave your rides leaning on a post at the end of the trail, without locking them up. Anybody could steal them, I suppose. But other than the inconvenience of a long walk home, would it really matter?

We've had an old-school LAN party, networking our five year old computers together to play a ten year old video game around the kitchen table. Amazing how much better it runs on the hardware we have now. Made us reflect on the treadmill of hardware and software advances. You buy a new PC to get a better experience of your favorite video games, but then there's a new library of games to install that'll just bog it down again. Are they really any more entertaining than the last? I doubt it. But they set you to salivating over the next computer you're going to buy. (Hence this sort-of vow of poverty that leads me to buy used or accept castoffs whenever possible.) Given that I hardly ever touch video games these days, our little session was a surprisingly social and satisfying exercize. We may play the game a bit more in the weeks to come, though I'm not sure. It may be like going to the beach, a handfull of hours here and there enough to scratch the itch.

We had a brief road-trip to a neighboring town to pick up a friend of ours. Stopped in a smoke-shop for a cigar and some pipe cleaners. Drank lattes in an unfamiliar cafe. (Eight dollars for two cups of coffee! A rare and precious indulgence, indeed.) Floated around a bit in a pool, drinking cocktails. (Who says watersports and alcohol don't mix?) We ate a few meals at restaurants, and watched a few movies on the couch.

Oh, and there was all that yard work earlier in the week, which turned our yard from a construction site and scrap-metal heap into a pleasant place to sit with a typewriter to and do some writing. So I did some. Plus, I gathered up all the spare bricks which have been mouldering in piles around the yard for the past 100+ years and stacked them up into a hearth on the patio, perfect for sitting around the fire at night and grilling on. So we did a bit of that, too.

Free Books at the Dump

2010-07-14T20:23:00.001-04:00

The Wife has already written of our stay-at-home vacation with its trip to the dump and a couple of treasures she brought home. She left it to me, however, to share this shelf of western culture, left together in one cardboard box for whatever fellows might come along and find it.

Granted, there was a lot more in the box--dated textbooks and such, not to mention the shelves and shelves of mass-market paperbacks which line the entire back wall of the dump's swap-shack, as if, their entertainment value drained, their sole function from this point forward was to provide insulation. But one can't love and cherish every piece of garbage one comes across, can one?

There is always the risk of coming home from the dump with more than we leave there, an occurrence which rather defeats the entire purpose of the voyage. We've scored bicycles, rocking chairs, windows and doors at the dump. We've put most of it to good use, but sometimes storage is a problem.

However, yesterday we discarded a broken koi-pond liner, a metal outdoor fireplace rusted to the thickness of newspaper, several pounds of rusty chicken wire, and a leaky chicken-watering can. This completed the yard cleanup that started off the vacation, and left the backyard looking the tidiest it has since we moved back here, almost a year ago. There was little chance of returning with a bigger haul than that.

We also threw out a 40-pound, 19" Sony Trinitron CRT monitor. This it pained me to part with, since this screen has loyally displayed the machinations of various PCs for the past decade, and despite its bulk it still boasted a generous resolution. It seemed we should have been able to make something of it, like building an old-school television cabinet for it and mounting it inside with a basic internet-connected media PC. But something had gone wrong with its insides, and it displayed its colors washed out, interrupted by a series of sharp diagonal lines. The dump charges $25 to take your old CRTs, but when we renewed our dump sticker they provided us two coupons to cover disposal "hazardous items," which seemed fair to me. So there it is, ready, for the municipality to bundle and pack and process and reap the bounty of its five-to-fifteen pounds of lead*. Here's hoping they don't up and ship it off to Africa or China.

So, having unloaded an entire station wagon, it didn't seem too bad to come home with this shelf. Let's see: Maugham, Melville, Tolstoi, Fielding, Cooper, Whittier, Trollope, an anthology of stories and another of poetry, discussions of Victorian Literature, and a song-book for The Wife and friends to crack open around the campfire. All stuff I'm actually bound to read, sooner or later.

Not too bad a reward for cleaning up the yard.

* Here's something I didn't know: one the reasons CRT Monitors and TVs contain so much lead in their glass is to shield their viewers from the radiation being streamed at their eyeballs. This is where I could get all snobby about how smart I've been not to watch TV over the years. But if you pointed out how many hours I've spent staring at computer screens and video games, you'd wipe that smarmy smile right off my face.

Flying Cars - The Fruits of Progress!

2010-07-11T22:43:00.001-04:00

Okay. I do a lot of bitching and moaning about this mad, crazy future-present world we're living in now.

But just once in a while something comes along that makes it all seem wonderful and worth it.

This is one of those times.

That seems to be a bona-fide flying car. Its manufacturers claim it gets 30 mpg on the highway and burns only 5 gallons per hour in the air. And it can take off and clear a 50' obstacle in 1700 feet.

These were the sorts of gadgets we were promised, back when we started thinking about the future with technological determination: robot wives, holo-decks, and flying cars. Looks like we'll finally be one for three.

I don't care that it looks dorky. I want one. Bad.

If only I had an extra $200,000 lying around.

Ironically enough, there's no place I have to get to on a regular basis that warrants ownership of an airplane. Still, I'm sure I could think of something to do, even if it was the old standby $100 hamburger.

(Link thanks to boingboing.)

The Head Falls Silent in this Middle Age

2010-07-10T18:53:00.000-04:00

There was a time when it seemed I had something to say. But I realize, upon reaching middle age, that I am not as unique and interesting as I once thought. Or maybe it's just that I'm working a very middle aged, middle class job. I used to work for small companies and family owned businesses that hung to solvency by their daily deposits. For a bit I owned one of these businesses myself.

Then there was the hare-brained scheme of several years ago, which was to find a way to make a living from the cabin of a 30 foot sailboat -- or just enough of one that we could call ourselves semi-retired. Come to think of it, that was a great scheme, actually. Just a little short on details. But it made for some great stories.

Now I'm a small piece in a very large corporation, and comfortable there, for all the usual middle-class reasons of security, stability, and health insurance. The thing about big corporations, though: they tend to discourage their employees from sharing stories of their workday with the internet and the world.

On top of that, I'm not a huge fan of all this web 2.x stuff. Facebook, Twitter, microblogging, text-message navel gazing. I could blame my distaste on being a grumpy old man, except it's not just the kids doing it these days, it's the parents and the grandparents. (I will share this story from work: four folks on break in the employee lounge, eating their meals in silence at the same table, thumbing messages into their phones. "How cute!" I said. "It looks like you're all texting each other.")

I liked the static web-sites you could lay out with html in text editors, the wonder of using code to alter layout and style, the puzzle of constructing a consistent navigation system of links.

I was fond of email, but a certain kind of email, longer than 200 words, with punctuation and a certain amount of thought behind it.

And I grew to love a certain kind of blog, the kind that shared a bit of life and story, observation and criticism, and led to lively discussion in the comments.

It seemed, for a bit there, like the internet was going to make the world a more thoughtful, reasoned place. You could get the resources of a global university, blessed with a vast library and an active population of students and professors, for the cost of a broadband connection. (Actually, we made do with dial-up until the end of 2006.) You could save a great deal on postage. You could come out of a long silence with something to share, and if it was interesting enough, you could put it out into the world confident that someone, at least, would read it. Like minds reached beyond the silencing limits of old communications to forge connections and build friendships.

Now, it seems we need to fight for our silences. These kids these days, and their parents, and their grandparents, they're connected non-stop to this abhorrent noise. (Okay, one more story from work: the employee who had to be disciplined because her face-book status update changed when she was working. Since she had "friended" several of the managers, one of them called from home to ask just what she was doing logging on to face-book with her cell-phone in the middle of her shift.) Why have a conversation when you can play a hand-held video game? Why listen to the people around you if it means you have to take your earbuds out?

Granted, I am the sort of person who cannot abide the background chatter of a television, because it absorbs all thought. If there's a television on within earshot, my brain is dead to the world. The Wife, bless her, she accommodates me in this small house by wearing headphones when she wants to watch something I'm not interested in. I don't know if other people are able to keep their minds active in the face of such chatter, or if they just don't care that they're shutting down when there's something shiny to watch.

But I suspect it's the latter. This makes it all the more horrifying for me when I read that 98% of iPad users are surfing on their tablets while they watch TV. How is it possible to be any more distracted? Or any more absorbed with absolute garbage?

Our attention span has become our country's most precious natural resource, and it seems that Apple and MTV and the rest want to deepwater-drill, strip-mine, and extract it. See: MTV Developing 'Co-Viewing' Apps for the iPad.

In the face of this kind of noise, what's the point of opening your mouth at all?

Second Hand Computer Adventure

2010-07-02T22:32:00.001-04:00

When last I wrote I was window shopping for computer parts and saving my pennies for the day I could put a decent machine together from components. A new PC is not something I need; mostly I just enjoy putting them together. And I've wanted a desktop since we came back from the city a couple of years ago. Using a Macbook made a lot more sense when I skipped around like a bohemian, doing most of my writing in bookstores, libraries, and parks.

I'd saved money to the point where I could just about build a modern dual-core system for under $400. The plan was to piece it together and hook it up to an ancient (ten year old) bulky CRT monitor, and perhaps start saving for one of those new-fangled flat-screens.

Well, fortunately I didn't drive to Cambridge and blow my pin-money that weekend. Because the next day I came across an ad on Craigslist for a mid-sized tower. It was listed by the name of the motherboard rather than the brand, which seemed suspicious.

But the specifications looked good. The hard drive was small, but there were plenty of internal SATA connectors to add more storage. It had a single-core Pentium 4 processor, but it sits in a "socket 755" that would hold the newer dual and quad core Intel processors should I want to upgrade that. It had a basic on-board graphics chip that probably wouldn't handle any heavy-duty 3d rendering, but an open PCI-e slot to accept a cutting edge graphics card should I ever feel the desire to play games again. It lacked a DVD burner, but those are available for less than a tank of gas these days, and it did have a DVD rom and a CD-RW. And it was housed in a basic, black, mid-sized tower, not one of those flashy, neon-lit monstrosities designed to appeal to hormone-saturated 14 year olds flush with their parents' disposable income. And the fans spin with no more noise than my laptop.

Best of all, it was a complete and fully functional PC for only $130.

I asked the fellow, "You listed this computer by the name of its motherboard. Is it something you put together by yourself?"

He said, "Yeah. I get most of my parts from the dump and see what I can put together from them. The person who threw this one out thought it was broken, but it really only needed a new hard drive."

Now, a lot of folks might balk at paying money for a machine that was another man's garbage. But the fact is, it sounded like a good box, and it was exactly what I was looking for: a computer with parts too obsolete to be available through regular retail channels, but with a wide range of upgrade possibilities. Plus, how can I begrudge the guy for doing what I should be getting off my hump and doing: stopping by the dump and picking up other people's trash and seeing what I can make out of it. (We go to different dumps, so I wouldn't be competing with him.)

Plus, I genuinely liked the guy: his condo was cluttered with computer parts and the deck was stacked with Lobster Traps. He projected the aura of a year-round, local Cape-Codder in the 21st century. Folks like us are scrappy; we do what we have to do to survive.

So I bought the computer. Paid cash. He even carried it to the car for me. "It's part of the service," he said, "and I give you a 30 day money-back guarantee."

He warned me that the installation of Windows XP on the machine might not be 100% legitimate. I told him the first thing I was doing when I got the thing home was installing Ubuntu, so that didn't really matter to me.

I liked that I got to indulge my electronics acquisition itch without generating any new e-waste. Of course, given all the money I saved, I couldn't resist stopping by Staples and picking up a flat-screen monitor that day. There were none second-hand on Craigslist. I checked. I probably could have held out, but I really wasn't all that thrilled with sticking by the old CRT. I'll justify it by talking about how much electricity we'll save with the lower wattage flat-panel monitor. Christ, I bet you could cook an egg on the top of that old Trinitron.

I'm pleased to report the Ubuntu installation on the new/old machine went flawlessly. And despite my grand plans for expansion (dedicated graphics card, 1+ TB hard drive, DVD burner, extra RAM, multi-core processor) those things can wait until the cash re-accumulates in my wallet over the next several months--or years. As it is, the computer has no trouble running the latest version of Ubuntu and pushing the monitor at its highest resolution while playing music and running a word-processor and web browser over wifi and seeding open-source torrents over bittorrent.

That's about as hard-core as I get with my PCs, these days.

Window Shopping for Computers

2010-06-25T17:14:00.000-04:00

My capacity for wasting time on computers seems to be boundless. I would love to make a new one. My latest guilty pleasure is hopping over to the Microcenter web-site and putting together a shopping cart of all the components I need. It's a good thing the store is more than an hour away, in Cambridge. (And that when we lived just across the river from it, I never even realized it was there.)

I've worked out a bare-bones but expandable system for $387 right now. That means using an old keyboard, mouse, and the bulky old CRT monitor from our Dell Dimension (circa 1999) with its faded color, but since I already own all that stuff, it makes sense to use it for as long as possible.

What it comes down to is, I absolutely don't need another computer for anything; it's not like I actually get any proper work done on the machines I have, so introducing another one into the mix is actually going to make me less productive. The main point of the exercise would be the pleasure of putting the thing together and getting to tinker. There's almost nothing I enjoy more than mucking about in the guts of computer hardware. I'm not sure why this is, but we all have our particular fetishes, don't we?

So if I truck up to the city and come back with a station wagon full of PC components, my pleasure's going to last me five hours, maybe ten. A pleasure bought at the cost of about $40 an hour. I suppose there are more dear and destructive dissipations. This one will even leave me with a fully up-to-date computer that can run Kubuntu with all the shiny bells and whistles on.

But given the state of my house, the free time and money should really be going towards glazing putty and roof shingles.

I know what I'll do, since the anticipation's always greater anyhow. I'll jot down all the component product numbers and check back in a month to see how much cheaper all those electronics have gotten. And I'll hang around on Mandla's blog, Motho ke Motho ka Botho, looking for more ideas on how to hack my old Sony Vaio into another perfectly good machine I don't really have time to use.

World Sunlight Map is a Pleasure and a Comfort

2010-06-24T20:41:00.000-04:00

I love this desktop wallpaper application that shows a projection of daylight across a satellite photograph of the world, and auto-updates it every 30 minutes. (It updates the cloud data every three hours.)

It reminds me of my small place on a small planet; it's easy to forget that we're spinning about at such astonishing speeds for ever and ever. It's satisfying, somehow, to say, "well, the sun is setting across Norway and Brazil right now, and the Mongolians are just seeing the dawn;" also, to give shape to our longer summer days with the projected sinusoidal curve of shadow, and to watch it invert itself as the seasons change.

Kind of neat how it works. This is why I love Linux; lots of good folks making interesting things and sharing them. I couldn't find a similar application for Mac or Windows.

A Little Roofing to Prepare for a Lot of Roofing

2010-06-17T09:00:00.000-04:00

I put the roof on the chicken-house addition to the Wife's barn yesterday, which was my contribution to this rather ambitious project. (Not an ambitious project as building the barn itself, which she did with some proper builder help a couple years ago.)

She's really perfectly capable of doing this work herself, except that she's afraid of heights. So, any time she's in a building mood, I know that there will come a time when I have to be the ladder man.

There's so much I don't know about roofing, but I managed to unroll the tar paper and then hammer in 18 courses of shingles, score and bend some aluminium flashing into approximately the right shape, and then top that off with some siding and enough caulk to, hopefully, keep the water out.

When you don't know what you're doing but you want to make it look like you do, there's nothing more masculine and confidence-inspiring than running a bead of caulk.

All in all, a good dry run for the time this fall when we've got to replace the rotting wooden shingles on this 300 year old house, and perhaps a great deal of the plywood or whatever they used before plywood, underneath. When it rains, the leaks are manifold. And roofing contractors want some serious money to take care of our problems for us.

The good news is -- and this came as a great surprise to me -- even though I may not know a good deal about roofing, all of the instructions for doing it properly are right on the packages of shingles. The same way there are instructions for properly applying paint on every can, and for changing your oil right there in the owners' manual of your car. You don't have to call a contractor or check the internet or attend vocational school to learn this stuff.

You can just buy the product and read the directions. It really is deceptively simple!

(Although my aching legs and back would beg to argue.)

Close, But No Ding

2010-06-16T18:20:00.000-04:00

This will no doubt be all over the typosphere within a couple of days (we are by no means the fastest group on the internet) but so far I only see it on boingboing, where I discovered it.

Michael Winslow takes us through the history of the typewriter using only his voice and a couple of microphones. It would be cool to see the actual machines for comparison (and leaving out the carriage return bell seems like a major omission), but the faces he makes while he works are priceless.

History of the typewriter recited by Michael Winslow from SansGil—Gil Cocker on Vimeo.

I'm not sure what it says about me that I actually sat through the entire 20 minute video.

Gadgets and Self-Selecting Communities

2010-05-31T11:17:00.000-04:00

I'm reading more than ever now that I have this electronic reader. Why is a book more compelling when it's blots on an electronic screen? And why is this kind of screen more compelling than a PC or laptop? Is it just the size, the ultra-portability, the comparatively simple, single purpose design of a device that's for reading only? Maybe it's just the sense of control it provides, knowing you can carry thousands of books and access any of them without getting out of bed. There is this momentum that sets in by the end of a good book which compels you to just click through to the next one without pause, and keep reading -- provided any leisure time remains.

A friend of mine has one, too. She lent it to her mother for the weekend and it came back loaded with three romance novels.

Interesting how the introduction of any new toy brings out a crop of blogs, web-sites, and forums devoted to the exploration of its possibilities. We long for these communities, of course, as human beings. In the past we were limited in choice of community to which churches we could walk to and which neighbors we ran into at the farmers' market. Now, we hook up online with the people who play with the same gadgets we do, regardless of physical location.

We gain a great deal of specialisation and depth this way, translating it into pure pleasure with the objects of our desire.

We lose, I guess, the chance encounters, the exposure to subjects and interests that we'll never know would delight us, as well as the chance to win over converts to our own causes. We also lose out on every channel of communication besides text. The inflections, facial expressions, perfumes and body odors, casual flirtations and early warning signs of disapproval -- we're numb to all of those online. Even in a three-dimensional game-space like World of Warcraft of Second Life, the most gorgeously rendered avatar can't hope to convey any of those nuances, when their inputs are merely strings of text.

But this is me merely railing against change, as usual. My psyche requires some guilt and reservation in the face of each new pleasure.

It's a New Englander's characteristic, I think, to be unhappy in the absence of struggle, to distrust ease, to suspect that every joy will be punished by swift and calculated misfortune. New Englanders seek for comfort in the past, a past whose joys have expired so long ago they cannot possibly be punished by any current accounting.

Or a past whose joys have been paid for already. "Things were better then," we say, "when we had to wrest boulders from the soil in order to plant our crops. The work brought us exercise and enduring stone walls." The pleasure of those harvests long paid for, we can dwell in their memory without fear of reckoning.

To enjoy a book, today, without even the struggle of paper and printing -- it's an abundance that makes a New Englander suspicious. Oh, we'll enjoy it, since we have to, but we'll pretend, for a long stretch, that we don't.

Until the next thing comes along to enjoy and worry over.

Spring Smells

2010-05-29T20:35:00.002-04:00

The World Outside has gone from grey-brown to green, green, green, and the air is full of the sweet-grape scent of the locust blossoms. Their flowers which last for three or four days at the most and then scatter tiny petals to the lawn and the gutters. This is the smell of summer vacation riding in, of knowing you've only got a couple more weeks of walking past the locust trees to the bus stop to endure the too-close crowds of your classmates and the interminable, droning lectures of teachers who don't want to be there any more than you do. It's a Friday night smell, the smell of something great on the way, all the sweeter for the raw potential before the break really hits and bogs down with all the little details of how you're going to go about enjoying it, when it's 90 degrees and humid and you're just too tired of swimming to spend any more time in the pond, and you know those lawns aren't going to mow themselves while your spending money is waiting on it.

The lawn here's all mowed, though, and just in time for the afternoon shower to come and apologise to the grass, and pat down all the dust and pollen kicked up by the rattletrap mower my stepfather found at the dump and pieced together and then passed along to us. Lord, but that machine kicks up the stones and the dirt. We leave the dogs inside to protect them from stray pebbles and if I didn't wear glasses I'd put on safety goggles. There was a cloud rising from my metal roar, today. The station wagon's gone from black to yellow and back to black.

There's no more summer vacation for us, of course, no matter what it smells like. At least, no vacation to stretch from June through August. That's all right, though. We've still got plenty to look forward to. There's something to be said for the pleasure of mowing your own lawn after a childhood of cutting grass for others.

Narrator Submits to the Times and Purchases Barnes & Noble Nook

2010-05-20T20:21:00.001-04:00

The hypocrisy! After all the railing I’ve done against conspicuous consumption, gadgets, and waste, I’ve done and ended up with a Barnes & Noble Nook e-reader.

Forgive me if you can. At least before you condemn me, consider the paper that I’ll save and the tiny amount of current I’ll sip from the grid while I power the low wattage e-ink display. I can only hope that not too many civil wars were waged over the mining of the coltan and gold and other minerals utilized in its circuitry.

(And I must shed a tear for all the sacrificed lower case letter “e”s which are going to perish in the future as we discuss e-titles, e-readers, and e-ink. Seriously, can’t we come up with better words for all this crap?)

So, with the requisite guilt and hand-wringing out of the way, I'm happy to report that over the past couple of weeks I've grown fond of this device. This despite that it's a channel for Barnes & Noble to sell me products – and after cutting out television and radio, believe me, I was pretty reluctant to introduce another channel of advertising into my life. Indeed, taking an entire store into my home – over a million titles available for immediate purchase, items which I don't even have to haul my ass out of bed to purchase – is remarkable and terrifying. It seems very similar to the videocassette that circulates in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, the videocassette which contains a movie so entertaining, once a person begins to watch it, they sit entranced, neglecting their bodily needs until they expire in their own filth, entertained to death. (Only in Wallace's novel, watching the video didn't automatically bill the viewer's credit card as it entertained and killed them. Barnes & Noble no doubt wants us alive as we’re more lucrative that way.)

So yeah, I’m entertained by this device. But I’m also pleasantly surprised by the potential for thrift with it. For something that’s clearly supposed to convert users into dedicated customers of one company, it’s remarkably open to other channels of content.

Plugging it into a computer brings up a simple file structure with folders like “My Wallpapers” and “My Music.” Files you dump there are easily accessible from the device once you disconnect and navigate to the appropriate menu. So even though it is convenient to purchase an ebook from B&N with their simple interface, it’s not really that much more difficult to drag and drop a free .pdf or .epub file you download from Project Gutenberg or Manybooks.net. And while the Nook does allow you to download free copyright-expired ebooks directly through some partnership with Google, getting these titles to display correctly seems hit-or-miss. I’ve had better luck with the downloads, and I’ve actually been reading for over a week now without radioing in to Barnes and Noble.

One of the first things I tried when I got this thing home was using it to borrow library books. I’d been told this was possible but again, it seemed unlikely. Why would B&N open another channel for reading without paying? Fortunately, I was wrong.

You can connect to your local community library by downloading and installing Adobe Digital Editions (free, though sadly only on Mac and Windows so far – no Linux). Most municipal library systems allow you to “borrow” electronic editions of their titles for a limited time. The Adobe software manages the DRM so that after a week or two you’re cut off from your borrowed book and the next person waiting gets it.

(I have almost universally negative feelings about using DRM to hinder digital content, but in the case of libraries, it makes some sense. The more people that line up to borrow digital books, the more digital (pretend) copies the libraries will purchase. This seems like a pretty good-faith way to support your favorite authors and maybe your library, too.)

The latest surprise I’ve stumbled on is Calibre, which is available on Linux (as well as your more common operating systems). I discovered it when I started looking for a way to convert longer HTML files into Nook’s native .epub format. It does a great job of this, and Calibre recognizes the Nook when you plug it in, just as easily as Adobe digital editions does. It even simplifies the drag and drop process to a “publish to device” button.

My biggest surprise with Calibre is its ability to connect to hundreds of news sources from around the world. I’m not sure how it does it, but it dropped issues of Newsweek, Time, and Wired onto the device. These seemed to have just about all the content from the print issues, complete with a navigation structure you can manipulate with the touch-screen.

I’m not sure how long this situation’s going to last. B&N only offers about a dozen magazines and newspapers for purchase on the device, so I’m sure they can’t be too happy to have hundreds available for free to anyone who downloads the Calibre software. Nor can the magazines be happy to have their content – stripped of advertizing – dialed up and delivered for free.

I suppose there’s nothing they can do about it. As Cory Doctorow says, information is never going to get harder or more expensive to copy in the future. Still, B&N might want to get off their tails and at least offer a few more of these publications for purchase. The rates on the magazines they do offer are reasonable, so for those who don’t want to be troubled to install software and hook up to their PC to manually manage downloads, and those who feel some obligation to compensate the fourth estate for their efforts, there’s value to be had in wireless, automatic delivery of your subscriptions.

It’s only a matter of time before I start using this thing to purchase content. There’s too many good books coming up these days for me not to. But the fact that the Nook is open to so many other channels of content is kind of endearing.

Anyone else out there setting aside the codex that has served us for the past thousand years or two for something new-fangled and shiny? How are you liking it? What are your thoughts?

Pancake Packing Robots

2010-05-02T22:08:00.004-04:00

Watching these flexpicker robots in action fills me with a boyish wonder.

There’s lots more videos out there of these in action – a quick search on Youtube will bring up dozens. It’s almost hypnotizing to watch them work. It’s like watching a pianist who is incapable of striking a wrong note.

Still, I have to ask: all of that technology, all the programming, all the materials and equipment – all to produce shrink-wrapped pancakes? Why are people buying pre-made pancakes at all, when you can whip them up from raw ingredients at home in about ten minutes?

On another note, isn’t it remarkable who those shiny white flexpicker robots look eerily similar to the murderous infrared gun turrets in the video game Portal?

Life used to imitate fiction. Now it’s imitating video games.

Spooky.

The Immortality in Archives

2010-05-02T09:00:00.001-04:00

On what media is written the content of our days?

We flatter ourselves that we're all written down somewhere. Someone's keeping track. Someone knows about all those horrible and wonderful things you did, even the things you never told anybody.

I think we cling to the legend of Heaven not so much because we cannot comprehend the idea of no longer being alive and conscious (after all, we pass in and out of the alternative every night) but because, right now, while we are alive and awake, we cannot stomach the possibility that no one around in the future will remember us.

It's drummed into us from an early age, this need to be acknowledged and remembered forever. At least it's drummed into those of us who pay attention to the rules of society and long to "do well". We hand in our homework, show up for our exams, and wait with eager anticipation and apprehension for authorities to evaluate and rank us. "The results of these tests will determine which universities will accept you, which employers will hire you, mow much money you earn and where you retire and die. Our evaluation of your behavior will go on your permanent record."

"There's a permanent record?" we say. "Thank Heaven for that."

A permanent record, chiselled into a database of stone.

Once, they only carved statues of legends and heroes. Only Caesar's face would be embossed upon the coin of the realm. But now, we're told, there's a permanent record for each and every one of us.

Is this why we're blogging and tweeting and sharing our most intimate details on Friendface? Look at what we pay for it: the loss of privacy, the marketing, the imposition and potential shame of shared indiscretions. But they're all a small price to pay in exchange for the knowledge that our information is important to somebody. We don't even care that other folks are making money from our data. It's just flattering to consider that someone considers us worth paying for, at all.

We love grades, sales rankings, credit scores. We don't even have to know what they are. We don't even worry about whether they're correct. It's enough just to know they're out there.

* * *

Ah, but bigger minds than mine have touched on this already. In The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, Rudy Rucker wrote:

Lifebox is a word I invented some years ago to describe a hypothetical technological gizmo for preserving a human personality. In my tales, a lifebox is a small interactive device to which you tell your life story. It prompts you with questions and organizes the information you give it. As well as words, you can feed in digital images, videos, sound recordings, and the like. It's a bit like an intelligent blog.

Once you get enough information into your lifebox, it becomes like a simulation of you. Your audience can interact with the stories in your lifebox, interrupting and asking questions. The lifebox begins by describing the retiree's common dream of creating a memoir and ends by creating a simulation of its owner....

A lifebox is a person reduced to a digital database with simple software. So in my book title, I'm using lifebox as shorthand for the universal automatist thesis that everything, even human consciousness, is a computation.

If this were true, our days could be written on anything. (Since we know that we can run a computer processor with checkers -- given enough time.) Elements of my father could still be consciously dreaming in the pages of the three typewritten journals he left behind, interacting wirelessly with the impressions they made upon me when I read them and the memories he left behind in the other living people who knew him.

He's left and lost control over this afterlife, certainly. That would be the appeal of Rucker's lifeboxes, then -- making the effort now to get them right so we're still the people we want to be once we're gone.

I think Rucker's full of crap, myself. There's no way we're going to encode the complexity of our 100 billion neurons with their 100 trillion synapses in our blogs and twitter streams -- even if we live up to our promise to update our blogs at least once a day. And when I go through my old journals, I have to say, the version of myself I've recorded there isn't someone I'd want to hang around with for more than half an hour. What a drag he is! And that's too bad, because this version of me, attached to these fingers typing this up right now, isn't too miserable a fellow.

We may live on in the minds of those who read and study the artifacts we leave behind, but that's not through computation or simulation. That's through metaphor.

And suppose for a moment we could upload enough of our consciousness to a lifebox to be able to live on in the minds of others. Isn't that being just a bit selfish? That folks remember us for a while is fine. But to expect anyone to participate in a simulation of our consciousness after we've gone? That's outright grabby.

No, we're not going to be able to preserve our own lives on foolscap or in silicon -- as much as I'm convinced this impulse is behind so many literary and artistic endeavours. That doesn't mean our lives aren't written elsewhere, though. Maybe in our DNA, or Saint Peter's guest-book, or the weather, or the water.

After all, it's hard to watch the wind fight against the current and the tide, stirring the surface into all sorts of gnarly fractal waveforms, too complex to comprehend even if we could hold them still, which we never can, and yet so completely changed by the drop of a single pebble, dropped almost without thinking -- too hard, I think, to watch that even for a single minute and conclude that it signifies absolutely nothing.

I think you could store a mind in that kind of complexity. I think you could store everything there.

The Costs of Forcing the Anachronism

2010-05-01T10:37:00.000-04:00

It's becoming harder than ever to live the anachronism as the rest of the world turns to tools and toys we have reservations about.

To stay in touch with Facebook, for example. Broadcasting carbon-copied letters with the minutiae of our lives to all our friends around the world for just the price of electricity.

To live second lives in the fantasy world of an MMORPG, Battle after battle bringing a gradual accumulation of wealth, while we don't tire out more than a finger muscle.

To communicate with anyone in the world who wants to follow our Twitter stream. It's a miracle of public relations! The only barrier between ourselves and our audience now is our own vapidity, the marketplace of ideas the ultimate laissez-faire free economy, rewarding the fascinating and clever with eyeballs and attention. (Granted, you have to be fascinating and clever and have the equipment to blog, but these are low hurdles in this age of falling electronics prices and rising unemployment.)

As much as I'd love to get on-board, this all makes me very uneasy.

These electronic readers, now. Folks resist them at first. People have an attachment to books. They're sacred, nothing like CDs or VHS tapes. Everyone talks about how much they want to hold a book in their hands, turn the pages, smell the paper. They say they'll never exchange their library for another electronic gadget. But there's no mistaking the thrill in their eyes when they realise they can hold thousands of books on one machine, or download millions of titles instantly, from anywhere. I feel the thrill myself. After moving house 16 times in 33 years, the argument that this gadget could free up my shelf space and reduce my clutter reaches right into my limbic system and strokes my pleasure center. If it weren't for my stubborn refusal to associate my identity with a credit card number, I'd be tempted to pick one up.

But I've also got the reservation that a digital library can be wiped out in one hard drive failure. (Solar flare? Electromagnetic pulse, anyone?) and that despite every benevolent corporation's promise to maintain copies of every book I've purchased along with my paid licences for reading, we need only look back a handful of years to see how quickly corporations can dissolve, and wonder, what happens to all the precious data I've licensed, if that happens. Who takes care of my digital library when Amazon.com goes away?

Meanwhile, my physical books are my own responsibility, and I need only protect them from flood and fire.

I've got this constant tug-of-war going on between lust for the shiny and new, and a desire to preserve and make do -- and dig in my heels. There's no denying the net increase in pleasure and well being brought about by scientific advancement and the introduction of new gadgets. But am I really happier with my iPod than my stack of CDs? And does this cell-phone make me any happier than the wall-mounted rotary phone I grew up with?

I grew up with a lot of hand-me-downs: grandfather's 8-track players, the Atari 2600 the tenant left behind in the rented room, older brother's reel-to-reel tape recorder. I learned to enjoy technology on its terms, not mine. So I mess around with Linux distributions, making old computers work as well as they can. I lubricate an old bicycle picked up for free on the side of the road. I think: here is the hand-me-down or the estate-sale find. What does it have left within it that I can bring out? I never think, here is a thing I'd like to do, let's go out and get the equipment that'll help me do it. Objects are not so much tools as an obligation for me. Here's an old lamp, better find a place to use it. Here's a stack of old grocery bags. I can't possibly throw them away. What can I possibly do with them?

Is it any wonder that the acquisition of more stuff fills me with trepidation?

So I try to romanticise the stuff nobody wants any more. I may not be able to afford the exclusive experience, the vintage wine, the rare cigar. But I can pick up the furniture at the dump that has been through a lifetime of use already. Nobody else in the world is going to have that. I can spend hours in the musty basement of the used bookshop, sniffing the pages of books nobody is going to buy in these precious years before the shops shut down and disappear entirely. I feel compelled to save these anachronisms, because I hate to see them discarded and turned into toxic waste. Instead, they can be just mine.

It's an easy and affordable way to feel unique, at least, this embracing of discarded artifacts. For those of us who can't afford to play the consumer game as it's been laid out, those who don't have the cash or ready credit to accessorise their iPads with patent leather accessories from Kate Spade, or to keep up with H&M clothing stores' 26 annual fashion seasons. IKEA gives us thousands of ways to customise our living rooms in their 200 page catalogue, but if we have the patience to sift through the garbage, we can put together a space nobody else in the world has, for free.

Perhaps it's because I have no children. Maybe I'm turning into one of those neurotic middle aged men who assign importance to all the wrong things, worried more about the location of their misplaced walking stick than the performance of their retirement portfolio.

But I'm not the only one who is this way. I wrote last week about a co-worker who loves typewriters as I do. (She, likewise, has no desire for children, but loves dogs.) Even more recently I was speaking with another co-worker, a young man who may not be old enough to drink, but who has always impressed me with his thoughtful dress sense, the manner with which he tips his antiquated hats, and the care he takes in hand-rolling his cigarettes.

Despite these cues, it still surprised me to learn that he owns his own antique store already. It was given to him by his grandfather. "It's closed for the season," he told me, "and that's why I'm doing this for the winter."

I asked him, of course, if he had any old typewriters in his inventory. He assured me yes, a Royal, at least, and a Hermes Rocket with the original case and instruction manual. A Selectric I as well, which he knowledgeably described as "the famous electric typewriter from IBM with the ball." I was tempted by the Hermes, of course, and told him so, but cautioned that I collect antique typewriters and have too many already.

"I know what you mean," he said, "I collect them too."

The fact that this strange affectation has struck three individuals in the same workplace must point more to some great yearning in the human spirit than to coincidence. We long for the simple, established, and effective, even as the marketplace tells us why we need the new, the novel, the upgraded. (The marketplace tells us this because it needs to, not because it wants us to be happy or healthy.)

Three employees in the building is not many, perhaps, but it's more than I would expect, and it shows there may be even more unexpected anachronisms among us.

First Impressions of New Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx

2010-04-30T18:27:00.000-04:00

The new version of Ubuntu Linux, 10.04 Lucid Lynx, is now available. I've been running the previous version on my old MacBook and loving it, so upgrading and seeing what's new seemed like a no-brainer. I upgraded through the update manager, which handled everything automatically and took about three hours to do it. Lots of folks like doing a clean install when they upgrade the system, but I spent so much time getting the last version of Ubuntu to play nice with the Macbook that I was hoping to avoid going through all that again. Happy to report that all went well.

The changes seem mostly cosmetic.

They moved the maximise/minimise buttons over to the left side, Macintosh-style. Not sure why, but this bugged me enough that I quickly found a way to put them back.

Now there's a little word balloon next to my name that connects me to all of the social networking services. Since I don't chat, tweet or flickr or digg, it'll go under-utilised. This should satisfy a lot of folks who are used to being in constant "social networking" contact with their, um, social networks, though.

Alas, there's not quick-launch application for any blogging services. My longing for a dedicated blogging application for Linux continues.

Booting seems to take a bit longer - a full two minutes. This is disappointing, but I suspect it's an effect of running on a Macbook with its proprietary hardware. I might be able to fiddle around and speed this up. Or I could just embrace a couple of minutes every day to stroke my beard and meditate. (What's the rush anyhow?)

Once up, though, the system seems to have sped up considerably. Programs seem to load a lot faster, too, and the latest version of OpenOffice seems to have lost its sluggish edge, that icky sense that I was always typing with a time-delay. Even editing this blog in Blogger seems smoother, so maybe that lack of blogging software won't really matter.

Lots of new fonts seemed to appear, and there's new icons, a new splash screen for logging in, and a better organised "software center" where I spend way too much time playing with all the available free applications.

Given that I only use computers for writing and a little light image editing, I'm not really sure how I spend so much time messing around with applications, but we all have to have our hobbies, don't we?

So, yeah, if you're using Ubuntu already, set your PC to update overnight. You won't be amazed but you might find it works a little better than it did before.

If you haven't tried free software out yet, download the latest release of Ubuntu and give it a try. You'll be surprised how much functionality you can get out of your computer without being tied into a monopolistic operating system.

French Typewriter Porn

2010-04-27T09:00:00.028-04:00

Curious about the machine I typed that last post on? Here's a video featuring the very model. (Mine's black, though.)

Frenchwomen, typewriters, and cigarettes -- I really do wish this video went on for hours and hours. (Although you could give the smoke to something a little more attractive than that Burt Reynolds look-alike.)

Little Flower Petals picked up one of those clicky Model-M style keyboards I've been coveting forever. She mentioned that the Selectric just isn't the same as the clicky keyboard, and it's not. It's much louder. I hope she has the chance to turn one on someday and discover this for herself. It's a pleasure not to be missed!

Typecast on Trash

2010-04-26T11:51:00.003-04:00

Found I just couldn't waste this paper, so I typed on it instead. It's all a first draft, appropriate for garbage, but as neat as I could make it. As usual, click on the page for a bigger image.

Wal-Mart Self Storage Facilities? Really???

2010-04-20T21:27:00.001-04:00

Let me explain what we're looking at here:

As the little "A" bubble points out, that's a Wal-Mart squatting behind it's mandatory football-field sized parking lot. What's just 250 feet to the north-north-west of it is a self-storage facility, owned and operated by Wal-Mart.

I never knew such a combination existed until I drove by it today, and I rather hoped it had been a passing nightmare. Alas, Google maps satellite view shows that I was not asleep at the wheel.

This is bewilderingly, mind-bogglingly efficient. With one building they sell you more stuff than you can possibly fit in your home. With the other, they charge you rent to keep it out of the rain.

Is your home already overflowing with crap, but you still can't resist the urge to go shopping? Never fear! You can now load up your cart at the world's biggest superstore, wheel it across a parking lot, and stash your new treasures directly in a self-storage facility, without the inconvenience of carrying any of it home.

I wonder if they let any of their sub-poverty level Wal-Mart Associates sleep in there? It would be cheaper than providing them with health care.

How long do you think it'll be before Wal-Mart convinces congress to privatise municipal dumps? Then we can wheel our purchases straight from the big-box store to the storage unit to the landfill, and pay them three times for the privilege!

Editing Out The Ads

2010-04-19T20:32:00.000-04:00

Evgeny Kissin Concert and Audience Size

2010-04-13T19:53:00.000-04:00

Stumbled upon a wonderful documentary about Evgeny Kissin, one of the world's greatest living pianists. There's a short interview at the beginning, but most of the film is of his historic performance at the Royal Albert Hall, including several encores presented in full. Here's the first of the 11 part series on youtube:

The Haydn he plays in this documentary is a piece I've been working on for the past five months. Mine doesn't sound quite the same, but I'll blame my tools and say it's because my piano has not been tuned in years. (Piano tunings are expensive, and it's something I keep meaning to teach myself to do.)

It's a wonderful time to be interested in classical music, with so many resources available, videos and recordings of just about any piece in the musical canon. It makes me jealous of kids who are just starting to study piano today.

But here's a question for classical music fans to get all steamed up about: How come that Lady Gaga video with the tape over the nipples and the blurred out crotch has over 20 million views, but this historic performance by one of the greatest living pianists in the world has less than a thousand?

Oh well, I guess it doesn't matter. I'd rather be one of a small, exclusive audience, than watch Mr. Kissin hook up with Beyonce in an attempt to boost his youtube statistics.

More Typists Among Us

2010-04-07T17:27:00.001-04:00

History of Mr. Polly, A Surprisingly Modern Novel from 1910

2010-04-04T13:00:00.001-04:00

The History of Mr. Polly, by HG Wells (1910) is a tremendous break from the rest of his oeuvre, being nothing to do with invisible men or Martians or time travel (except in the way that it can transport today's reader back to 1910). The Wife picked this out for me some dozen years ago at a used book shop and for some reason I got around to it this week. (I am nothing if not untimely.)

It concerns a Mr. Polly (naturally) who stumbles after happiness making no particular plans, takes no risks, and really has very little success at it throughout, despite the windfall of a life insurance settlement and the opportunity to open his own haberdashery.

It's got decent slapstick humor throughout, and its characters are unique and memorable. The plotting seemed a bit jerky and uneven, though, and I struggled through the first two thirds of the book with the desire to put it down. Everyone in the book seemed so damned unlikeable -- the main character most of all. This isn't a fellow who does things, heavens no. This is a fellow who things happen to.

I think what kept me going was how shockingly 21st century modern his struggles seemed to be, even with bicycles jockying for space on English streets with horse-drawn carriages.

A fool I was, to have thought that this kind of literary ennui had been invented by the late 20th century post-modernists. Miserable, passive people have been passive and miserable for 100 years, at least!

The last third of the book picked up and made me downright happy, though. Without spoiling too much I'll just say that our hero finally makes a couple of choices, and finds the sort of life that today's Vintage Crowd can heartily endorse. Sort of makes the earlier struggles all worth it, O'man.

You can buy The History of Mr. Polly on Amazon, or get the ebook free from Manybooks.Net. Hey, it looks like they made a movie from it in 2007, too. You should probably read the book first, though!

Dump Find: Typewriter Table

2010-04-03T19:23:00.000-04:00

The Wife picked me up a typewriter table (on wheels!) at the dump today.

I assiduously avoid the swap shop when we go there, at least on grumpy days like today, when a winter's worth of yard-garbage is waiting for us to clear it out. I'm always afraid that I might end up loading up with as much junk as we're unloading, and what's the point of that?

But I have to admit this is a pretty good find. The finish is gleaming, the structure is surprisingly solid and non wobbly (I really thought those wheels would be rolling all over my crooked, 300 year old floor.) and it means I don't have to rearrange my desk when I want to set aside the keyboard and do some proper noisy typing.

She got a new mid-century office chair for herself, too, more comfortable than the one she's been using. And she found a home for some tacky plastic newfangled mop products our tenants left behind. (They're crap, but somebody might as well use them before they end up in the landfill.)

Please don't attach too much significance to the books on the shelf. A lot of those came from the dump as well. (The pipes, however, were all hand-selected.)

As far as dumps go, we're blessed with a pretty special one.

The Horrible Wonderful Weight of Libraries

2010-03-24T17:46:00.000-04:00

    What a wonderful legacy is a library. What better collection to leave your children?
    And yet, of all the books sold in the past fifty years, how many of them are worth passing down? How many private libraries out there are worth heirs fighting over? "Suzie can have the furniture and Marcus can have the cash, but I want the books."
    I'm blessed, I suppose, in growing up with a library I'll fight for. Almost all the books date from the 1930s or before. Many of them are from the nineteenth century. The complete works of Wilke Collins. A six-volume history of The Great War. The world's 100 best short stories in ten little volumes. A similar edition of the world's best 1000 poems. The complete works of Rudyard Kipling. All hardcovers in multi-volume sets, and in good condition. They were so rarely read. It was my great grandfather who was the most recent reader in my mother's family. She kept the books (and packed them and moved them time and time again) because they made such a lovely statement, interior-decorating wise.
    Growing up around these books, I vowed that I would read them all. But between school and piano practice and Dungeons & Dragons, I never really got through too many. As I got older it started to feel kind of arbitrary, that I should read these particular books because an accident of birth left them close to me. There was a brilliant used bookstore in my town, that sold science fiction paperbacks for half their 1970s cover price (75¢ minimum). Then I moved away and figured those books could just wait for me. They've waited this long already, after all. Certainly they'll stick around until I have the leisure and patience for them.
    Is this situation unique? Do any of you have an inheritance of books in your future? Have you received one already? And do you buy your volumes with an eye to the future, thinking, "This hardcover is expensive, but my grandson might enjoy it someday?"
    I don't, to be honest. The life-cycle of a hardcover is, what, a couple of months, these days? They cost a fortune, but have the shelf life of produce. Many of them hit the bargain racks the same time the paperbacks editions come out, leaving me bitter about the brand new ones I indulged in.
    Meanwhile, even the paperbacks are more expensive than they should be. (Adjusted for inflation, about three times as expensive as they were in the 1950s.) They're not as heavy as hardcovers, but they do pile up. Accumulating books seems like a sucker's game, now that I've moved house every two years. Just the thought of boxing all these books up again makes my back hurt.
    In Boston, I rediscovered the joy of the public library. You get to read the book for free and then they take it back from you. Perfect! You don't have to throw it away. You can't give it away, or course, but if you know someone else who might like it, you can tell them where to find it.
    So for all of these reasons I haven't bought a lot of books lately. There seemed to be more of them around every year, and more ways to get at them, purchase them, collect them. Superstores, online retailers, craigslist, ebay, garage sales, used book dealers, library fund raisers. Everyone wants to sell me a book.
    But have you noticed lately that bookstores seem to be slashing their inventory in favor of e-books and e-readers, and toys? For the past fifteen years we have had temples to books in every suburban mall. Will these sanctuaries shrink around their gadget kiosks? Will they become cafes with little bookstores inside, rather than the other way around? Will they abandon their shelves entirely and install a print-on-demand bookbinding machine, where you can select your title and swipe your card, no cashier necessary?
    This coming scarcity of real books makes me covetous again, like I want to hoard and warehouse these paper artifacts. I suddenly want a copy of every book I've ever read - even those ones from the library - on my own shelves, where they can't be discarded because of last quarter's sales figures. How many of these titles will be lost in the move to digital reading? Who else will love them? I'll pile them up among my manual typewriters and obsolete computers - other discarded and neglected artifacts.

Teenage Pregnancy, 16 Years Later

2010-03-17T00:40:00.001-04:00

Overheard in a supermarket checkout line:

TEENAGE GIRL 1: Yeah, so mom says to me, "You're going out again? How come you get to have all this fun? When do I get to have any fun? What happened to my fun?"

TEENAGE GIRL 2: * Snort * Well, her motherly duties kind of get in the way of fun, don't they?

TEENAGE GIRL 1: Yeah! That's what I told her! I said, "You had plenty of fun before. That's how you ended up with me. Teenage pregnancy's a bitch, isn't it, mom?"

There's something very strange and backwards about this, the product of misbehavior lecturing the miscreant about their mistakes. I don't really think anyone comes out looking good.

Back when I was in high school, we had so many pregnant students that the home economics class on "childhood development" ran a day care service so the new mothers would have a place to park their babies while they earned their diploma.

The "honors" kids didn't really talk about this much. Diapers and feeding schedules were so alien to college applications and class rank worries that they might as well have existed in a separate universe.

But in retrospect, the program is a nice community gesture. Cape Cod might have a teenage pregnancy problem (to go along with the heroin problem and the gang problems), but at least we try to take care of our babies' babies.

It was a little strange to consider I could have gone to high school with this bitchy girl's mother, though. I've officially hit that age where I can tell a teenager: "I'm old enough to be your father."

And I'm happy about it. Don't think I'd go back under any circumstances.

So maybe I'll go to the mall and throw my weight around some.

Obama Puts All Our Eggs In Intellectual Property

2010-03-15T16:51:00.000-04:00

This is why we are doomed:

Obama to 'Aggressively Protect' Intellectual Property

Key point from his speech:

"Our single greatest asset is the innovation and the ingenuity and creativity of the American people...It is essential to our prosperity and it will only become more so in this century. But it's only a competitive advantage if our companies know that someone else can't just steal that idea and duplicate it with cheaper inputs and labor."

Unfortunately for us and our children, he's got this backwards. Creativity may be lovely, but ideas are cheap. What's valuable is the execution of those ideas, turning them into products and services and an improved quality of life. We've forgotten this. We think we can draw a blueprint, send it over to China, give it to a bunch of kids in a factory and get them to put together our sneakers and electronics for pennies an hour. Then we get pissed when one of those kids takes the blueprint over to a photocopy machine, makes a few copies, and heads out to start his own company.

Does Obama really think he can make it harder for people to copy ideas in the future?

Obama goes on to talk about licensing, which always makes me shiver. Yeah, you know all that fine print on credit card agreements and software packaging, all that drivel that you click through without reading before you set up your facebook account? Thats our export, now. That's what we have to offer the world. We're betting our future on license agreements.

"There's nothing wrong with other people using our technologies, we welcome it," Obama said. "We just want to make sure that it's licensed and that American businesses are getting paid appropriately. That's why the (U.S. Trade Representative) is using the full arsenal of tools available to crack down on practices that blatantly harm our businesses, and that includes negotiating proper protections and enforcing our existing agreements, and moving forward on new agreements, including the proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA)."

That ACTA, by the way? Turns out the European Union is not as happy about it as Obama hoped. Their parliament just voted against it 633 to 13.

Three Old Bikes

2010-03-08T18:41:00.001-05:00

A lovely off yesterday. Three of us headed down to the canal on three bicycles which cost us a total of $40. Mine was the most recent roadside find, an old Schwinn The Wife spotted in a front yard with a "free" sign scrawled on cardboard, and insisted on stopping to take. It's chain could have used some lubrication. It rattled away like a pocket full of unhappy keys. But it ran fine with no more work than pumping air in the tires. It's a single-speed, old school machine, which you pedal backwords to apply the brakes and hope you've got lots of room to stop, but it doesn't really matter much because you're not going to go too fast on it. And it's got a kick-stand - something high performance bikes omit in the name of efficiency, but which I suspect is just another scam to defraud the consumer.

Another perfect machine for the bike trail along the canal, in other words, and I can even keep my pipe lit as I'm rolling along. We headed all the way to the mouth of the canal to sit on the jetty and watch the ducks taking off and the currents swirling the surface of the glassy water. No ships came through on this particular Sunday Morning, and the sky was clear and mild, so the foghorn on the other side of the water played to an empty house.

It felt liberating to park our three bicycles at the end of the sandy trail without chaining them up, worrying about them. They got some curious looks, certainly, though I couldn't tell whether people thought they were roadside trash or vintage treasure. Still, if someone was inclined to steal them, no big deal. Easy come, easy go. (This is part of what I was trying to get at with yesterday's sarcastically voiced post. Our economy does toss off some pretty good treasures as garbage. There's much pleasure to be had if we tear our eyes away from the advertisements and help ourselves to richer folks' hand-me-downs.)

Certainly the mild weather played a part, but there's nothing that makes one feel more expansive and generous than smoking a bowl of tobacco on the seat of a free bicycle.

Repeating Ourselves (With Tongue in Cheek)

2010-03-07T20:39:00.003-05:00

Really it turns out that we're starting from scratch every single day. Continuity is illusory. This is why we settle into the same grooves, repeating ourselves. Our grandchildren, by the time we have grandchildren, think we're broken records (or maybe outdated, low-capacity mp3 players set on shuffle). Our children, if we're not careful, think the same thing. (But by the time we get to the grandchildren it's hopess.)

This is why a preacher, after a certain number of sermons, doesn't even have to prepare them any more.

This is why you can hand a salesman any product and he'll make it a success. The product is irrelevant, so long as it's better than yesterday's product. If people had memories that stored more than 24 hours of experience, they'd realize this. Maybe they'd wait a few more days, until the product grew into something really remarkable, or maybe they'd wait until the one they already had broke down.

But progress spins through town on shiny chrome wheels, those spinny ones tricked out with neon, and there's bass pounding out of the trunk to rattle the neighborhood's windopanes, and a custom paint-job sponsored by sponsors, and there's so much money wrapped up in all that kit that we didn't have enough left for the brakes. So we're not slowing down.

Which is just fine, because, you know, the economy. It needs us to keep forgetting, now that we've swapped the gold standard for credit and chrome.

* * *

Really we're starting from scratch every single day. Last semester, last fiscal year, last night at the bar: we've got grades and spreadsheets and regrettable text messages to show for them, but they're best left for the machines to analyze. What matters to US are the things we're going to do TODAY. Yesterday is in the can, tomorrow out of reach. Today is all we have.

There's a group of alcoholics out there (I'm sure they have a chapter near you) who have this serenity prayer what talks about knowing the difference between the things you can control and the things you can't. Once, I despaired when I saw this prayer tattooed across a beautiful young mother's shoulders, but that's just because I can't abide tattoos. They're too hard to forget. They stretch today out into too long.

This is the bit everyone knows, that fits on a tattoo:

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

And then there's the rest, that you have to go to meetings (or use Google) to find:

Living one day at a time;
Enjoying one moment at a time;
Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace;
Taking, as He did, this sinful world
as it is, not as I would have it;
Trusting that He will make all things right
if I surrender to His Will;
That I may be reasonably happy in this life
and supremely happy with Him
Forever in the next.
Amen.

The prayer's got a good point. Life hands you garbage, might as well sit back and take it. Can't do much about that. See, what you can control is your wallet, so just throw out all that old garbage and go shopping. Join a support group, trade up to an eco-friendly car, call the cable company and add a few more channels to your plan. All you really got control of is THIS MOMENT RIGHT NOW, so by golly you better EARN and BUY and CHANNEL SURF like there's no this afternoon, because by now I think we can all agree that there isn't.

Some might argue that that serenity prayer's lowered the bar too far, that "accepting the things I cannot change" doesn't preclude us taking responsibility for our future or force us to forget our past. Well, maybe not. But when a nation lets a bunch of drunks and drug addicts dominate the national mood with bumper stickers, meetings in every town, tee-shirts, seminars, and tattoos on beautiful young mothers, it's gotten beyond arguing the finer points, and deserves whatever's coming to it.

So why worry? It's time better spent stocking up on canned goods and ammunition. Not because you want to use it tomorrow. Because it looks shiny in the closet, today! (And doesn't it just make you feel good, knowing it's there?)

* * *

We start from scratch every day. The brain boots up from whatever it's doing at night (Running stress-test simulations? Installing antivirus software?) and you see sun in the windows and maybe there's a woman next to you.

Hello, world!

You may feel the compulsion to take notes. It's better to resist it. Consider: if you spend this moment taking notes, you're missing your one chance to control the one thing you have control over, which is this moment right now. And you're condemning your future self to spend time down the line reviewing the notes about the woman and the window and the sun out there way back right now, if he's unfortunate enough to go through your notebook, which I think we can agree, at this point (and I'm not just flattering you here) he'll be clever enough to avoid. Wouldn't you rather switch on the TV, or go shopping? There are things TO DO, fer heavenssakes!

And as for sharing those notes, well, doesn't it seem like an awful imposition to expect anyone else to read them?

I mean, really, who the hell do you think you are?

Women and Cigarettes

2010-02-28T07:00:00.001-05:00

The Wife asked me last night, did I think there would be any harm in her taking up cigarettes? It would be a 1950s fashion statement as well as a means to help lose weight.

I would love it if she did. I love the smell of secondhand smoke, the ritual of filling and emptying ashtrays, the sense of relaxation and comfort which we've lost in an age of smoking bans. I love the smell of tobacco on a woman's breath, hinting of earth and experience and daring. It's not enough to turn me on to any old floozy at the bar, but the smell of tobacco smoke on a woman makes me perk up my nose and turn my head and follow like Peppy Le Pew on the trail of a civet cat.

So, no, I didn't think there'd be that much harm. Folks who start smoking in their teens tend to develop lung cancer well into their sixties. That means it takes the disease over forty years to get started, if it's going to get started, and then another decade or so to finish you off. "I think if you started smoking in earnest now," I told her, "It might kill you when you're 100 years old."

The real reason she probably won't begin smoking in any significant way is the cost. The taxes on tobacco at this point are astronomical and criminal; the only justification for them would be a fully funded state provided health care system. Unless the state is picking up the tab for my consequences, I don't see how it has the right to collect a fee on my vices.

It seems to me the dishonest cigarette companies ruined smoking for everyone. They committed so many crimes: pumping additives into cigarettes to make smokers crave them all the time, insisting that there were absolutely no risks to smoking at all, and marketing to folks who really were too young to make an informed decision about smoking. They could have been content to sell a moderate quantity of cigarettes to a nation of moderate smokers, honestly explaining that the use of their product carried some risks but that, just as drinking and lovemaking carry significant risks, the pleasures to be had in their moderate and thoughtful indulgence lead many to conclude that those risks are acceptable.

Instead, they out-and-out claimed that smoking was perfectly healthy. They kept this up in the face of so much evidence to the contrary, and made such asses of themselves, that tobacco became the one target that any politician could go after if he wanted to boost his own image. You might not know anything about your candidate, but by golly, if they're against big tobacco, they can't be all bad, now can they?

So now you can't smoke a cigar in a restaurant, or unwind at a bar with a cigar and a cocktail. So now instead of growing up with a generation of elegant, relaxed smoking dames, I get to watch a bunch of wound-up hussies twirling gum around their fingers and chewing like cattle. So now the taxes are such that you can't get a pack of smokes for under $8.00, cigars are out of reach for many, and pipe tobacco will soon be as expensive to obtain as marijuana.

The world really needs to relax and have a nice smoke. Light up a cigar on your morning commute and see just how much road rage you can muster up at the fellow who cuts you off. Stand outside with your fellow exiles during a lunch break and swap gossip and news. (It's been shown that smokers advance more quickly in firms and corporations due to the networking they do during their smoke-breaks.) Clean, pack, and light a pipe before you begin that argument with your spouse and see if you don't spend a little more time listening to each other and less time arguing.

Anyway, I'm all for this new development. I think it'll increase our domestic happiness and make the house feel even more like a comfortable home. I just hope she won't have to take up a part time job to support even the moderate use of cigarettes.

Is Happiness the Death of Word Count?

2010-02-27T20:31:00.006-05:00

As The Wife gets happier she finds she has more to say. Bully for fans of her blog and website, who get to hear about all the great dinners she's making and the pretty clothes she's sewing. Bully for me too, since I get to eat the food and look at the loveliness.

But I find that as I get happier, I have less to say. Perhaps I've just grown up as too much of a whiner, and as I run out of things to complain about, I fall into silence. Instead of writing anything, I eat my supper and practice the piano.

Is this a male versus female dynamic? Women are happy to chatter along when everything is running smoothly, comfortable to gossip and find ways to make them run even more smoothly, with the men more likely to settle down with a cigar and call enough, enough?

So much of writing is complaining, when you think about it. Fiction writing is driven by conflict, and all conflict starts with a complaint of some kind. Historic writing examines problems, injustices, and the sacrifices people made fighting them. Even science writing is a story of battle against the unknown, and the frustration of misunderstanding.

If it weren't for dwelling on the negative, I don't suppose written culture would amount to much more than volumes and volumes of "Five O'clock and All's Well!"

Too bad for me, as I find it harder and harder to get worked up about things. On the down side, I don't get a hell of a lot of words down. On the upside, well, there's the whole happiness thing.

How about the lot of you readers? Do you find yourselves more prolific in an up or a down spirit?

The License of Everyday Objects

2010-02-25T18:26:00.000-05:00

It's amazing how we can extract money from people, keep them working beyond the point where previous generations would just give up, go home and toss the ball around with the kid. "It's not so bad. You've got a credit card. Go charge that flat screen TV and that Playstation. It's something to take your mind off the dehumanizing box stores you spend 80 hours a week in."

Then we escape for hundreds of hours every month into World of Warcraft. At $15 a month, that's a bargain!

Why are we shopping at Wal-Mart for our toys when we could be checking out books at the library, taking walks with our children, teaching each other how to cook? You don't need a Playstation to decode a book for you, nor a flat screen TV to display it on. The brain is enough, provided it's been properly grown and seasoned.

And the toys we pay for--we don't even have the satisfaction of "owning" them. They are licensed vehicles for providing us with licensed content. Don't want to click "accept" on that EULA? Well then you've just gone and wasted a couple hundred dollars on that PC, haven't you? (God help you if you financed it and agreed to pay interest on the thing.) These devices connect us up, collect our data, process it for re-cycling and then sell it to marketers who use the very same toys to sell us more toys. It's dazzling! It's brilliant! It's a freak-show!

There's been a lot of talk about the information economy over the past twenty years, but unfortunately it's all a lie. I say unfortunately because we've bet so much of our country's future on this information economy.

We used to be a rich country, the sort of country that imported raw materials and exported finished products. Now we've decided to let China do the making, lowering tariffs and trade barriers so we can get our DVD players and digital cameras for next to nothing, from a land where child labor comes cheap.

All we wanted in exchange was for them to buy our culture. We were tired of making things. (All that sweat and talent and expensive grown up labor.) Better to make music and movies. Spread our message of democracy and high-octane pulse-pounding action to the world! DVDs are so easy to make, any kid with a computer can do it. So we asked China to protect our intellectual property. "Please China, you're so big and handsome. We'll buy all your stuff from you. You buy all our movies from us. Just promise us you won't let your peasants make bootleg copies and sell them on the sidewalk, OK? Because that would mean we've lowered our trade barriers for nothing. Ok? Promise?"

The lie of the information economy is that people pay for content. Most of us pay for form. We pay for the heft and the smell and the texture of the leather bound book. We pay for the newspaper to carry and rattle around on the subway. We'll pay for the CD with the shiny case and the liner notes.

And we'll pay for us an mp3 player or an e-reader too, because it's shiny and new and something to hold in our hands and show off to our friends. But for the books and music that they stack, thousands upon thousands, within their circuits? Are you kidding me? We'd never be able to load our Amazon Kindles up with 1500 books if we had to pay for them all!

Then we look around our homes and wonder: What the hell do we need all that old stuff for? A shelf full of CDs, scratched and dingy with age. What a menace! Newspaper - an ecological disaster! Shelves and shelves of books - if I ever have to move house again the next tenant can have them all. My back hurts. Honestly, the producers of all this stuff should be paying me for storing it here for so long!

So now it's all about the license, with these companies. They've panicked. All this content, it's just digital information now, and they've realized that the information economy is a lie. Information is just ones and zeroes, and the world's full of cheap computers that do nothing better than duplicating ones and zeroes. They want to give form to their content again, but we've decided we're finished with stuff. So they have nothing to sell.

So they make you click "I Accept" before using a piece of software. As if paying for it wasn't enough? And did you read that agreement before you clicked? Because we're all criminals now. That song you listened to over a streaming music service? Your computer had to download it and copy it several times before it could ever transmit the signal to your speakers. And yet if you downloaded it over bittorrent instead, the RIAA could fine you $22,500 for that same song, and call you a thief! They claim this is to protect their artists. But music is so terrifying now I'm not sure I'll ever listen to another song.

I love things that exist in and of themselves. I'll pay nothing to watch Evgeny Kissen play Prokofiev on Youtube, but I'd pay $100 a ticket to have him strike the keys of a piano in the same room as me. Speaking of which, I paid a great deal for my piano, but if someone offered to sell me the blueprints to it I would probably turn them down.

Once you start thinking in terms of license agreements, it's amazing how rich and wonderful the physical world starts to feel in comparison. Spend a day in World of Warcraft (I have not done this in quite some time) and consider that every hut, stone, and tree is some corporation's intellectual property. The entire world waits to be revoked at the whim of a patent attorney.

Ah, but my typewriter, my piano, my library, my bottle of scotch. If anyone comes for those I have at least the dignity of a chance to fight them off with my gun and my bullets. (Confession: I have no gun or bullets.) And I can use them on my own terms, at my own pace, until they're all worn out and used up.

The existence of physical things form their own agreements. That's why you don't have to click or sign before you use them. You have the rights to read that leather bound book, or lend it, or sell it, or use it as a booster seat for your kid, for as long as it holds together. After that you can take the loose pages and heat your house with them, or stuff them into the walls for insulation, for all the author and publisher care. The laws of decay and entropy enforce their own license.

And when we pay for them, for the most part, we know just what we're getting.

Short Walk Through Long History

2010-02-22T16:54:00.000-05:00

Pulled ourselves away from the computers and went for a walk down town. Parked near the library, walked past shops and churches, through a residential neighborhood, down past the grist mill. Walked around the town hall, which is under construction/renovation. Circumnavigated the old cemetery, and marvelled at the hand-carved tombstones from the 1700s. Many of them are illegible now, and some have subsided so that the turf covers the last line or two of inscription. Some sort of preservation project must be going on. There's little blue fragments of painters' tape with numbers marking many of the stones. Is it more respectful to replace them or let them crumble, I wonder? Interesting to consider that even our tombstones don't last that long, in the big scheme of things.

So we may not be around long, but at least in this town we can walk around a lot of neat old things within a mile and a half.

Picked up a free Schwinn bicycle on the side of the road. Looks like it just needs some lubrication and a couple of inner tubes. Talked The Wife out of a second bike, a ten speed, which was going to need new gearshift cables and brake pads. It was free as well, but we'll let someone else have that project.

Now I'm ready for a nap.

Daniel Suarez Provides Fun Reading About The Techpocalypse

2010-02-20T20:59:00.000-05:00

If you want a doomsday scenario highlighting everything that's wrong with this decade and how it could get worse, you really can't have any more fun than with Daniel Suarez's Daemon. It's got the whole generation-gap thing going for it; the disconnect between the folks who grew up with online role playing games and the folks who played Pong or didn't play anything at all; the fusion between virtual worlds and real; the emergent properties and behaviors of distributed networks; the implications of distributed computing as it leads to distributed manufacture and distributed murder.

A wealthy computer game programmer, dying of cancer, writes software that is activated by the news of his death. The software goes out into the internet, establishes corporations, infects the computer networks of other corporations to levy extortion, recruits disaffected computer gamers and prison inmates, and then establishes a world-wide "darknet" to exert control over just about everything. A lot of good folks try to stop it and a lot of those good folks die, but a lot of bad folks try to stop it too, and by the end it's not so clear who the bad guys are.

This is definitely gee-whiz boy book stuff. There were parts near the beginning where the snob in me didn't want to go on, but the rest of me was having too much fun, so I ignored it. There's wild car wrecks and ridiculous violence and stuff that seems laughably absurd because it's just a little plausable. The book reads like Science Fiction, but then creeps you out as you realize that all the technology in the book exists right now.

The sequel, Freedom (TM), gets even better. (I like the ironic (TM).) It's got the relentless pace of the first novel but it touches on some pretty "big idea" territory without slowing down. Don't want to give away too much, but we might want to reconsider our reliance on private milatary contractors, data mining, and corn.

Yes, corn. It's time to take the corn down a peg.

This may seem an odd choice of book for a such a retro community. But trust me, if you have enough fun with it to read into the sequel, you might be pleasantly surprised about the sort of community that emerges, after all.

Missing William Buckley

2010-02-15T03:07:00.001-05:00

I used to be a Republican. I guess at heart I'm still a conservative, but somewhere along the way they moved my party. I got to vote for Dole, at least, and McCain in that primary, back before the "Straight Talk Express" morphed itself into some sort of shambling, bitter death-march.

Seriously, what happened to you guys? Republicans used to be smart. Look at William Buckley.

Novelist, editor, columnist, publisher, sailor, and snappy dresser. I could talk to this guy all day, given the opportunity. Would I agree with everything he said? Of course not! But we could have a wonderful conversation and look good doing it. I certainly wouldn't be embarrassed to be seen with him in public.

R.I.P., alas, so it goes.

Who do we have to explain the finer points of conservative politics and world affairs from the right side of the spectrum today?

A doughboy and a clown, who shouts over anyone who disagrees with him (when he can't just hang up) and who uses snark, insult, and derision to build ideological walls around his party while appealing to the base prejudice and smug ignorance of his audience.

I dunno, maybe you like the guy? If so, how about sharing something in the comments that he's said that you find particularly truthful, virtuous, or inspiring.

Here's something Buckley said about the neoconservatives: "I think those I know, which is most of them, are bright, informed and idealistic, but that they simply overrate the reach of U.S. power and influence."

That seems charitable and fair to me. I wonder what he'd think if he turned on Fox News today? Or picked up a new copy of his once-intellectual National Review?

Valentines

2010-02-14T16:00:00.001-05:00

Happy Valentine's Day to a very special lady and her little dog too.

I won't argue that it makes sense for everyone to get married young. Ladies, I've known a few young men and most of those guys are bastards.

But, if you are lucky enough to find the right one and you do marry young--well, that just leaves lots of time for getting old together. And that's lovely.

Listening

2010-02-14T03:23:00.007-05:00

I seek out silences. I flatter myself that I am the last of my generation who can tolerate them. I may blog, but I will never tweet. I rarely receive email. My cell phone almost never rings--to the point that I am sometimes in trouble at work for forgetting to switch it off when the exception occurs.

I love music, but I listen to very little. Driving in silence gives my mind room to wander over spaces it might not otherwise find. I listen to music in two very distinct ways: with full attention, giving it all the respect it deserves; or with complete disregard, using it as its own kind of silence, masking some more distracting noise, like a conversation at the next table, or a television rattling away.

There are times for the iPods and earbuds. Riding the subway listening to Phillip Glass, for example, or listening to Bach while you navigate Beacon Hill on foot. Airplane rides. Board meetings, perhaps, after the first hour. At the gym, if you're unfortunate enough to be paying for your exercise. But I'll never understand the kids who need tunes the second they punch out for a lunch break. I need some peace and quiet to sit and enjoy my lunch, and perhaps have a conversation with the people around me.

Maybe that's just because I usually have a better lunch packed than they do.

This is all long way round to saying I found a lovely silence this afternoon. There's a couple inches of crusty snow left from the storm earlier this week, but it's been plowed away from the trail along the canal, leaving pure uninterrupted blanket along each side, even down the rocks to the high-tide line. Snow is plastered on the north side of every tree and power pole, and clings in intermittent chunks to the power-lines. The sky is a constant silver gray to match the soft pewter of the water. A single duck floats along the surface at a magical pace, it's motion the only indication of the violent current beneath the surface. You can feel the threat of ice in the air, but it's an idle threat, no wind behind it, clear and cold enough to make you thankful for your scarf and gloves. The traffic on the bridge blends into a steady rumble, a sort of whistle to match the wind the world never knew until 100 years ago. Louder is the coast guard vessel that comes along, labouring steadily against the current, not quite cutting through the waters but agitating them nonetheless, laborously heaving gentle swells out in its wake.

I wonder--every time a wave reflects against a surface it is much diminished but still there. The wake strikes the rocks and heads back to the other side. Before they make it all the way they are too small to see, lost in the swirl of the current and the silent swell of the tide. Water is quick to erase evidence of passage, much quicker than the snow that still holds the footprints I made on the way here. But really, can the waters ever be the same as before that boat laboured through, or that duck? Boats passed here on cold evenings in 1956, evenings that no doubt held silences very similar to this one, and though their passage is long forgotten, the world was forever changed with every one.

There's really no soundtrack that can improve a walk like this, though the jogger chuffing past with the blue spandex and the clip-on eyepod seems to disagree.

Let him have it, then, because this one is all mine

British Baby Boomer Hand Wringing

2010-02-13T15:00:00.000-05:00

Frances Beckett's article over at the New Statesman has an interesting take on the damage the Baby Boomers have done to Britain. The fact that it's written by a baby boomer lends it a bit more weight (I would submit) although I certainly don't expect all the readers of my humble blog or The Wife's website to agree with it all.

Still, as an American who has watched many of the benefits my mother has enjoyed eroding just as I came of an age to appreciate them, it's interesting to get some perspective on how things are going down on the other side of the pond, where the Atlee government took the Beveridge Report to heart and set about eliminating want, ignorance, disease, squalor and idleness. (A shame about the last one. There are days when I'm a great fan of idleness.) Strange to consider that I could have been born to a country where education and health care were provided without question.

The idea that one might have to pay for education, at any level, seemed to us primitive and backward-looking. In the Thirties, my grandmother used to save pennies in a tin in her kitchen, fearfully guarding against the day when one of her children might require medical attention. In the week that the National Health Service was inaugurated in 1948, GPs' surgeries were overwhelmed with patients whose painful and often life-threatening conditions had never been treated or even shown to a doctor. When we baby boomers were ill, we expected, as a right, the best treatment available. Paying for it never occurred to us.

According to Beckett, the reason this is all falling apart now is because that education did not prepare them for the freedom they were growing into. Rather than receiving the training they needed to keep this wonderful world moving forward, they were forced to memorise stodgy lists of dates and lineages of kings who died long enough ago to have veritably no impact on their lives. So when they emerged into the sex-drugs-rock n' roll 60s, their stodgy education seemed a grand lie. Life was so much easier than that, so much more fun.

What did we do with this extraordinary inheritance that had eluded our ancestors, and that an earlier generation had worked and fought to give us?

We trashed it.

We trashed it because we did not value it. We trashed it because we knew no history, so we thought our new freedoms were the natural order of things. It was as though we decided that the freedom and lack of worry that we had inherited was too good for our children, and we pulled up the ladder we had climbed.

So--what you going to do about it, buddy? Wring your hands and say, "It wasn't supposed to be this way?" while you lie in a state-funded hospital bed that they'll decommission as soon as you're gone?

This is the sort of thing the Apron Revolution is working to undo. If we can recapture the optimism and determination of the boomers' parents, and keep it wedded to the discipline, gratitude, and common sense that was lost in the intervening years, maybe we'll have a chance. Otherwise, what?

Unfortunately we have a lot of debts to pay in the mean-time. Maybe not as many as the British, who got to have that century of health care and education that passed us by. Then again, we've had a few more foreign wars to pay for, too. Can we take Iraq back to the store for a full refund? If not, I'd be happy to exchange it for education or health care.

Failing that, I guess we'll just have to tighten our belts and go back to work.

Another Old Computer; Hanging On To Old Things

2010-02-10T12:38:00.000-05:00

Where does this connection with old machines come from? If something still works, I cannot let it go. It's a neurosis. Anything I buy, I'm wedded to for life. If it breaks down to the point that I have to throw it out, the procedure involves full funerary rites and a day or more of mourning.

So we go to the dump, where there's inevitably some machine with some life left, a scrap of utility just begging for use and attention.

I'm an animist: I infuse unfeeling things with human motives and assume they desire for my attention. In a world full of people, this isn't a healthy inclination.

But PEOPLE made the THINGS, though, and it's in their honor that I want to preserve them.

* * *

I'm determined to keep this old Sony laptop going, despite the fact that I have two newer machines, one much faster, one much smaller, all already configured the way I like them. You'd think I was using the opportunity to diddle around with an old computer as an excuse to avoid getting real work done.

I'd agree with you, if I wasn't already working a full-time job.

I bought this Sony back in 2001 (according to the diary entry I wrote the day I got it home) and on it have written hundreds of emails and blog entries and the greater half of two different novels (both of which are waiting to be finished). The machine's a bit bulky by today's standards, and there's a drone and a chirp to the fan I'd forgotten about. But the noise is reassuring rather than distracting, and the bulk actually makes it fairly comfortable to work on. It has feet that fold down to elevate the back. Why doesn't my Mac have those? I'd trade one core of its CPU for a more comfortable typing angle. And the screen, though a little low-resolution, is almost as tall as it is wide. I'd forgotten how much more comfortable that is than widescreen. I'm convinced widescreen is just a conspiracy by manufacturers to make us all purchase new TVs, so that in a few years they can remind us how much we really preferred the older square displays, and then sell us another one.

Back to the Sony: A couple of years ago the hard drive went on it.
It was cradled way in the heart of this beast, and I took out over a dozen screws before I found the two that let me in, but there's nothing you can't get to without a jeweler's screwdriver and some patience. A replacement hard drive cost me less than $20 (including shipping) and doubled my capacity.

Doubling the system memory cost me about the same. This is where the machine is maxxed out, at 256 MB. But it now runs Xubuntu (Ubuntu's lightweight cousin) without complaint. It can handle Youtube, DVDs, mp3s, and mpegs. The addition of a nine dollar wireless card made it convenient to use around the house. So now it does just about everything that I need a computer to do.

If I could just clone myself, I could actually use all these old computers.

What it won't do is play a video in one window while performing web searches in another and scanning rss feeds to blogs in a third. It will do all those things, just not simultaneously and well. I still need to think for half a second about the next thing I want to do before I click on something. So it's effective as an attention-focusing machine. It's a nice, intermediate step between the typewriters and the MacBook. And now I want to spend all of my time with it.

Yeah, it's a bit creaky, but we're all about creaky here in this 300 year old stronghold (cottage) we call home.

* * *

There are people who drive cars and people who love cars. The latter will obsess about them all day and spend every spare minute under the hood, checking their compression ratios, upgrading their spark plugs, and popping in shiny bits of hardware that might make a quarter-second difference in their accelleration - and not always for the good!

These people don't even need particularly nice cars. I'm no gearhead, but I love that I can open the hood of my Honda Civic and see just about every part in there. That engine looks like something I could disconnect and replace, if I wanted to. It's certainly not too big for one strong man to lift alone. The Civic is a cheap car, and because of this, and despite this, there are legions of kids who soup them up and race them and use them for all kinds of things they were never designed to do. Looking under that hood, I see the opportunity for hours and hours of happy, amateur fun.

Any simple, modular system compels you to learn about it. It feels like a moral imperative, to me: once you've paid for something, you should explore its every use, set out across the possibility space unlocked by its structure and function, and discover the marvelous little surprises that others may have missed. I don't know how I got this way. Maybe it was all the hand-me-downs I got as a child: the 1950s Minolta camera in 1984, the 1970s Olympia typewriter in 1988, the original 1980 IBM PC in 1993. The lesson was: something new's just going to break anyway. Get something old, and if it's lasted this long, it'll last even longer. Find a way to take this old thing and have some fun with it.

So now I can't stop messing around with Linux. This nine year old computer runs so much better than when it was new, just with the introduction of a couple of cheap parts and a different pattern of ones and zeroes written on the hard drive. This seems miraculous. It feels like Sony ripped me off when I bought it, and now I'm ripping them off by not buying another.

* * *

The Wife has found a similar pleasure in cooking.

We're sold so many prepackaged goods that we suffer sensory overload walking into the grocery store. There's so much premade stuff to choose from that folks are almost thankful for the advertising that tells us them to buy. But by limiting her purchases to cheap, basic ingredients, she's been able to prepare meals that are surprising, delightful, and delicious. We'll be out of time before she discovers every last thing she can do with butter, flour, sugar, and eggs. (If Monsanto doesn't use patent law to make cooking your own food illegal before that.)

Look at this flour. Just look at it! Same as it was 3000 years ago, and you can use it to bake a cake no one thought of before.

* * *

The Wife and I have opposing but complimentary approaches to computers and cooking.

I could care less about how things work in the kitchen, so long as the end result keeps me from getting hungry. Fortunately she has discovered great joy in the complex chemistry of meats, wheats, and beets, so I'm not required except in the capacity of taste-tester. "What's wrong with the thing that makes the water hot?" I might ask her.

"The kettle? It's right on the stove."

"No, the microwave."

Turns out it was unplugged.

On the computer, she doesn't give a damn what operating system or even application she's using, so long as it gets her words and pictures up in the order she chooses. I'll look at a program like Photoshop and think, "This can do *anything* with pictures. Let's go through a dozen tutorials and learn what they are." She's too busy for tutorials, because she's actually building things with her tools. She might ask, "Winston! What's the thing I'm supposed to click on to make the thing happen? The picture thing?"

I might tell her, "It's the red thing, got a 'P' on it." And I'll know if I was right if they house stays quiet. (We have a sort of intercom system in this house. It's called: "A small house.")

Or this conversation:

"How do I set up the tables in my website so the side part doesn't move while the other side goes up and down?"

"You mean frames? You want to build a website with frames?"

"I don't care what they're called. I just don't want this part to go up and down!"

Her desktop gets so cluttered with shortcuts and files and links that it makes my obsessive little heart bleed. But where I'd spend a day tidying up, running antivirus software, and defragmenting the hard drive, she'll install a forum and open an Amazon store.

That tells you something about who has the better priorities, I guess.

The Pipe and Grumble

Trying to Contact My Senator

Things to be Thankful For

Reading The Hunger Games feels like Reading Tomorrow’s Newspaper

On the Economy: Shrinking Pains

Room for Second Life in a Busy Life?

The Growing Length of Novels

Canine Capacity

Back on the Water Again

Ultimate Writing Software

Labor Day Chores and Pleasures

Simple Hand-Me-Down Mower for Hurricane Clean-Up

Post Hurricane Risk Management

Standing Down Here, Dreaming of Up There

Selectric Robot

Smith Corona Surgery

iPod Repair Results

I'm Ready for Florida

Our Day In Court

Young Women Today

Neither Hoarding, Nor Collecting

Antique Typecast - "Rejected"

Ephemera Find

Accelerating Change

Yard Sale

iPod Touch Repair Challenge

Will My Computers Ever Do Anything Besides Update Themselves?

Core Inflation vs. Reality

High Tech Hallucinations

Swearing at Citi Mortgage

Recent Reading: Nonfiction

Wallace and the Tyranny of Irony

Mixed Reaction to Evernote Software

TMI as a Meal Ticket

The Quiet of the Future

Nymex, Insider Trading, and Peak Oil

Some Good News About Books

How Many Spaces After a Period

Guilty Reading Pleasures: Live and Let Die

NanoWrimo Update: Week One

NanoWrimo Logo

Kubuntu Installation

On The Uses of Quiet

Old People's Houses

The Lure of Retro Computing

Roller-Blading

Review: Super Sad True Love Story

Franzen's Freedom - From Literature!

Big Plane on Little Field

Awake and Offline

The Sacredness of Books, The Sanctity of Print

Questions for Corporate America (Typecast)

Let's Stop Tossing Our Kids Into Student Loan Debt Slavery

Macs Do Not Age Well; How Come I Still Have One?

Franzen on the Cover of Time?

Considering The Cult of Less

Yard Sale Reflections

Sex Sells ... Math?

On How We Come to Love what we Love, Including Old Things

Motivations for Story

Vacation Summation

Free Books at the Dump

Flying Cars - The Fruits of Progress!

The Head Falls Silent in this Middle Age

Second Hand Computer Adventure

Window Shopping for Computers

World Sunlight Map is a Pleasure and a Comfort

A Little Roofing to Prepare for a Lot of Roofing

Close, But No *Ding*

Gadgets and Self-Selecting Communities

Spring Smells

Narrator Submits to the Times and Purchases Barnes & Noble Nook

Pancake Packing Robots

The Immortality in Archives

The Costs of Forcing the Anachronism

First Impressions of New Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx

French Typewriter Porn

Typecast on Trash

Wal-Mart Self Storage Facilities? Really???

Editing Out The Ads

Close, But No Ding