I've learned from my mistakes and am getting better at making them.

The end of the Microsoft era?

2008-07-07T08:06:16Z

from The Economist, 26 June 2008:

Watching Microsoft in the company of Google and Facebook is a bit like watching your dad trying to be cool.

As a dad, I understand just how deep that cuts. And I still don't get Facebook.

But I do get this:

Despite all those efforts, the PC, Mr Gates’s obsession, has ended up as an internet terminal.

I have had two copies of Vista sitting on the shelf, waiting to be installed, for 14 months now. And I've yet to find a reason to upgrade. Our internet terminals are working fine without it.

Ten Things We All Need to Learn

2008-07-01T12:25:49Z

I found this a few weeks ago and was so impressed by it I printed it out for my sons, now in high school--although I'm afraid it's one of those things that make so much sense that it takes a decade or two for much of it to really sink in.

Excerpts from Stephen Downes' "Half an Hour" blog, 30 August 2006(http://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2006/08/things-you-really-need-to-learn.html):

1. How to predict consequences: "... People don't think ahead. But while you are in school, you should always be taking the opportunity to ask yourself, "what will happen next?" Watch situations and interactions unfold in the environment around you and try to predict the outcome. Write down or blog your predictions. With practice, you will become expert at predicting consequences....."
2. How to read: "... Oddly, by this I do not mean 'literacy' in the traditional sense, but rather, how to look at some text and to understand, in a deep way, what is being asserted (this also applies to audio and video, but grounding yourself in text will transfer relatively easily, if incompletely, to other domains)....."
3. How to distinguish truth from fiction: "... The first thing to learn is to actually question what you are told, what you read, and what you see on television. Do not simply accept what you are told. Always ask, how can you know that this is true? What evidence would lead you to believe that it is false?...."
4. How to empathize: "... Most people live in their own world, and for the most part, that's OK. But it is important to at least recognize that there are other people, and that they live in their own world as well. This will save you from the error of assuming that everyone else is like you. And even more importantly, this will allow other people to become a surprising source of new knowledge and insight....."
It carries on to:
10. How to live meaningfully: "This is probably the hardest thing of all to learn, and the least taught."

"Living meaningfully is actually a combination of several things. It is, in one sense, your dedication to some purpose or goal. But it is also your sense of appreciation and dedication to the here and now. And finally, it is the realization that your place in the world, your meaningfulness, is something you must create for yourself."

cdpoint @ 2008-06-25T13:45:00

2008-06-25T11:49:54Z

My son and I were watching a DVD last night when the rating notice appeared on the screen. It said the movie was rated R due to "adult situations".

"Oh, no," I exclaimed, "what will you see? Someone paying a bill? Driving a kid to a sports game? Or doing the laundry?"

cdpoint @ 2007-06-12T17:53:00

2007-06-12T16:03:24Z

James Lardner's collective review of three books on the state of American capitalism makes for grim reading if you believe that our future is a linear extrapolation from the past two decades:

The economic policy of the United States has in recent memory been directed almost entirely toward the goal of growth, and treated, accordingly, as the preserve of experts and corporate and financial insiders....

... few Americans would be anything but grateful if our corporations and financial institutions could develop some respect for our non-material and non-individualistic selves. It is hard to imagine such a fundamental transformation of these giant institutions. It is even harder to imagine a better world in which they remain essentially what they are.

I often think of an interview with a member of the American Communist Party I heard back in the late 1970s on Seattle's late, great radical station, KRAB. The interviewer challenged the Communist at one point: "Come on, now: do you really think we're going to have a revolution in America, with people marching in the streets and throwing Molotov cocktails?"

"No," the Communist answered. "The next American revolution will be the quiet disappearance of its middle class."

102 year old gay jazz musician dies

2007-03-05T06:34:21Z

I love the obituary section. I almost always learn about someone whose life followed a unique path. Such as Peggy Gilbert:

Musician Gilbert dies at 102
Saxophonist led the way for women in jazz
By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Peggy Gilbert, a noted saxophonist who helped female jazz musicians gain acceptance over a decades-long career of leading all-women ensembles, died Feb. 12 in Burbank, Calf. of complications of hip surgery. She was 102.

Gilbert was infatuated with the jazz she heard on the radio growing up in Sioux City, Iowa. But when she tried to learn the saxophone in high school, she was told girls could play violin, piano and harp but not wind instruments.

So she turned to a local bandleader for lessons.

"The first time I picked up a sax, I said, This is it!" Gilbert told the Los Angeles Times last year. "I loved the feel of it free and loose."

A year after graduating high school in 1923, she formed her own all-female jazz band, the Melody Girls, before heading to Los Angeles. It was the first in a string of women ensembles she led over the next several decades at a time when jazz culture was often hostile to female instrumentalists.

Her band performed under various names -- including Peggy Gilbert and Her Metro Goldwyn Orchestra, and Peggy Gilbert and Her Coeds -- at popular nightclubs, sometimes sharing the bill with jazz titans such as Benny Goodman. It appeared in Hollywood films and toured the vaudeville circuit with George Burns and other stars.

Along the way, she became known as an advocate for women in jazz.

"She often went down to the union and demanded equal opportunity for women instrumentalists," said her friend Jeannie Pool, a musicologist who recently completed a documentary and a biography of Gilbert. "She was always calling for an end to discrimination."

More recently, she was known for the Dixie Belles, a Dixieland band of older women she formed in 1974 at age 69 and that performed together until 1998, appearing on several TV shows.

Gilbert is survived by her companion of more than 60 years, Kay Boley, a “former vaudeville performer and contortionist whom she met when they appeared at the same nightclub.”

In fact, Peggy has a whole website about her life.

In defense of second-class novels

2007-02-11T22:51:15Z

from John Berryman's afterword to the Signet Classics edition of Theodore Dreiser's The Titan:

Thank the Lord for second-class novels, or what would we read after the age of twenty-one, and how insufferable would be a criticism that devoted itself solely to first-class novels (the fifty-two or eight-six there are).

I like this line, particularly the bit about reading after the age of twenty-one. I think less than perfect works tend to be better companions as time goes along.

Knowledge and Uncertainty

2007-01-10T06:36:13Z

from The Prophets of Israel, by Edith Hamilton:

Still it is true that much of what the prophets said belongs to their own day, not to ours. The politics they threw themselves into with such vehemence are comprehensible now only to the scholar. When they said an earthquake happened because God had arisen to shake terribly the earth, they were offering their own scientific explanation which long since yielded to others as every explanation does. Old ideas are continually being slain by new facts. There is nothing stable in the conclusions of the mind, and it is impossible that there ever should be unless we hold that the universe is made to the measure of the human mind, an assumption for which nothing in the past gives any warrant.

Keats once said that he saw in Shakespeare "the power of remaining in uncertainty without any irritably reaching after fact and reason." There is no foe so deadly to the truth as complete intellectual assurance. It substitutes an easy and shallow certainty for the deep loyalties of faith. It puts an end to thought, which can live only if it is free to change. Uncertainty is the prerequisite to gaining knowledge, and frequently the result as well [Emphasis added]. Greater knowledge does not mean greater certainty. Oftenest the very reverse is true. We are certain in proportion as we do not know. We seem, indeed, so made that intellectual certainty is not good for us. We grow arrogant, intolerant, unable to learn and to attain better grounds of certainty precisely because we are certain. The right attitude for the mind would seem to be humility.

I can't recall a passage that has resounded so strongly within me. This may come the closest to my personal credo as anything I've ever read. The passage from "There is no foe..." on could well be posted at the front of every school. What better explanation of the need for learning to be a lifetime quest?

cdpoint @ 2006-06-06T17:50:00

2006-06-06T16:17:40Z

When I was in my junior year of Air Force ROTC, the Colonel in charge of our unit decided to combine the classroom sessions for the junior and senior class, and put himself in charge as the instructor. These three-day-a-week classes usually consist of some pretty dry material--Air Force organization, missions, a bit of management and leadership, a bit of history. At the first session, he told us that he would be trimming the mandatory content down to a bare minimum. In its place, he would be bringing in his own material. As you might imagine, there were plenty of stifled groans at this news.

Over the next few weeks, however, we discovered this wasn't just an excuse to give free rein to his megalomania. Instead, it turned out that his curriculum was what today would be called life skills. We went through the process of buying a car and getting it insured. We learned about the different types of life insurance ("What do you buy?" "TERM, sir!"). We reviewed investment options. He took us through the practical steps involved in getting married and then the steps involved in getting divorced.

One of the lessons I often think of was an exercise in buying a house. He gave us each a budget and then presented us with the features and costs of three choices and asked us to make a business case for one. He was pretty clever in how he structured the three alternatives. One was clearly a poor choice; one was right at the middle of the road. The last was full of attractive features--age, style, amenities, location--but about $5,000 over what the budget could allow. Most of us picked it, arguing that somehow we would find the money for it.

He shot us all down for that choice. The budget was a real budget, he pointed out. It was all the money we had to work with, and no matter what the attractions, the nicest house was $5,000 more than we had. "Money has hard limits," he said, "and wishful thinking won't change them."

I'm grateful I had the chance to learn that lesson in a classroom.

Web technology notes

2006-06-01T14:15:58Z

Over the last six months or so, I've been running a couple of projects that are using several variations of web-based collaboration tools, and I wanted to jot down a few observations from the experience so far.

On the first project, we are using a COTS tool called Groove Virtual Office to share files among a team distributed in three countries and two timezones six hours apart. The contractors love it, as they themselves are split across the two timezones. We (the customers) hate it because it doesn't work with our firewall. We have to use our laptops and WiFi network instead, which might be nice if it actually covered our offices and not just a few conference rooms. Groove has several different features, including a form of instant messaging and chat, but no one ever uses them. It's just used for sharing files. It does this well, and securely. But it's a memory hog and does not work easily with other applications. I agreed to try Groove at the recommendation of a colleague, but I will never use this on a project again. I understand Microsoft bought Groove and has grand plans for it.

On the second project, we are using Microsoft Sharepoint Portal Server to share documents among a team distributed in two locations but on a common internal network. Sharepoint also has a number of other functions, such a discussion board, calendar, and announcements, but again, the only thing we use it for is sharing documents. I've tried several times to adapt the layout and add some pages, but it's very cumbersome to use and limited in how much content--aside from uploading files and posting announcements--a mere mortal user can provide. NATO has a big enterprise-wide project underway to push most of its web content into Sharepoint. I think it will be a huge effort with only slight gains over what it's got now, which is mostly static HTML. Then, of course, we will be stuck with it for years to come.

On the third project, we have a distributed team of internal and external staff putting together a bunch of process documentation. Having suffered with Groove and lacking the money (or desire) to go with Sharepoint, I decided to set up a Wiki. Our IT staff said the effort would take weeks. Frustrated, I did a few searches and located a hosting company called SiteGround which would allow me to host a MediaWiki server for $60 a year. I paid for it out of my pocket and got the thing set up and running in about an hour.

Roughly half the team members were very reluctant to use the Wiki at first. They just emailed their files around for a while. But the other team members dipped their toes it, found it very easy to add content, and charged off. Two months after I installed the Wiki, we have over 400 pages of material online.

For me, the huge advantage is that I can pop in and out and add material in sessions as brief as five minutes. From the Recent Changes page, I can see that quite a few others are doing the same. On the other hand, its support for file sharing is a bit lame--basically, you have to call everything an image regardless of the file format and you have to enter all the expected file formats into a config file to make it work. It also tends to get a bit messy and disorganized, as threads can take off in unexpected directions. But the Wiki is the hands-down winner when it comes to encouraging content creation, and I am still a strong believer that content is king.

I keep wondering if blogging technology also has a place at work, but I can't find a natural place to fit it in. I do think, though, that the key to any of these technologies is the impedance it presents to various methods of communication. Like with water or an electrical current, the less work it takes to put the information into the medium, the greater the likelihood that the information will naturally flow in that direction.

Reading.dot

2006-06-01T10:52:54Z

Among the piles of papers on my desk is a small pile of papers, each bundled folded in half down the middle. This is my reading pile.

Some years ago, I got tired of the amount of paper wasted in printing a typical article or page off the web. I started clipping the text of articles I found on the net, pasting it into a blank Word document, and formatting it into two columns of 9-point Times Roman. It seemed to be a handy size for reading and to conserve paper. I eventually saved the format as a template (Reading.dot) to make the process faster.

At least once a week, when I'm in the office, I surf through a few favorite sites such as Arts & Letters Daily, collect up the text of a few articles, and print off one of these reading copies. Usually I take one down with me when I go to lunch, in case I find myself dining alone. I loathe eating by myself with nothing else to do, though I suspect some would say I should savour the food and enjoy the moment of quiet.

From AL Daily this week, I collected this article on happiness, sparked by Daniel Gilbert's tour for his book, Stumbling on Happiness. In it, Gilbert remarks, "It's the frequency and not the intensity of positive events in your life that leads to happiness, like comfortable shoes or single malt scotch."

On one hand, this sounds pretty insipid. My first response was, "This sounds like something I'd find in a catalog or one of those insufferable magazines like Real Simple that celebrate the joys of a life enriched with 800-count Egyptian cotton sheets and artisanal olive oil."

But then I remembered a thought I had just the day before. I was sitting in a very long and slow line of cars caused by major work on the route I usually take to work. "I can't wait for summer," I thought. The volume of traffic here plummets for at least six weeks starting in early July, and it's really nice to zip up to the autoroute, slip onto it for two exits, and pop off again, arriving at work in about ten minutes or so. If the weather's sunny, the night cool just burning off, the grass and trees vivid with green, it's a very pleasant way to start the work day. A little thing like that gives me a big boost. Not just as I'm experiencing it--the knowledge that a good moment isn't too, too far away also keeps me from ruminating over lousy experiences too long.

This may just be a reflection of an optimistic temperament. The same situation probably does nothing for someone in a seriously depressed state. But insipid or not (and, by the way, speaking as one who bought a set of 800-count Egyptian cotton sheets on sale a few years ago--they really are great to sleep on), Gilbert's statement is true for me. Why, just heading off to lunch yesterday with an interesting article on happiness to read helped make it a better day.

....
The Toronto Star article led me on to Gilbert's book site, which includes a few excerpts. I like this quote in particular:

But as bald men with cheap hairpieces always seem to forget, acting as though you have something and actually having it are not the same thing, and anyone who looks closely can tell the difference.

The eCrock-o-Crap

2006-05-05T13:22:17Z

I saw a notice about an upcoming lunchtime lecture here at work on "Blood Sugar Disruption," which the notice claims affects 5-6 times more people than diabetes. Out of curiosity, I googled the phrase. 27 hits. Not a good sign.

Many of the hits seem to relate to the following product:

Clear Essential Energy eMug (13 oz)
Assists the body to eliminate chemicals, allergens, and pathogens!
When any substance is placed in or on the Essential Energy eMug (also known as E Mug), the "energy information" is transferred from the eCrystal technology within the eMug to the water in the new liquid or solid. Bovis levels of 30-40K may be obtained within minutes and the very balancing 90 K within minutes instead of hours. The electrons in the substance take on a positive left spin. Their free radical nature is virtually eliminated! The body can more easily process and eliminate chemicals, allergens, or pathogens. "Negative memories" within a liquid substance formerly retained are wiped away within seconds!

This is some seriously deep bullshit. I'd forgotten that crap like this still exists. How could I have survived this long imbibing fluids lacking in positive left spin?

I then googled "Bovis levels." One of the hits was from the "Crop Circular," which informs us that:

The Bovis scale is an intuitive scale created by a French scientist at the turn of the century to measure the natural health of organic objects, a system which is now being used in resonance therapy- along with crop circles images- to treat diseased environments and people. The higher the Bovis count, the healthier the system; an average person emits 15,000 Bovis.

Bovis, I also learned, developed his scale while researching the therapeutic effects of pyramids. So here we see eCrystal technology validated by crop circles and the healing power of pyramids--it's polynomial bullshit!

My grandma used to give us a gift subscription to Capper's Weekly every year. This was a tabloid published for the farm population, coming to us from Topeka, Kansas. It was a mix of homilies, recipes, gardening tips, and pure filler news items. The best part was the ad section in the back, which always had at least a page or two of ads for healing copper bracelets, magic elixirs, and down home equivalents of the Orgone box.

It's nice to see that some folk traditions have made the leap into cyberspace.

I shall have to figure out how to insert the phrase "Bovis levels" into my conversation now.

Oh, by the way--the eMug is now only $59.25, marked down from $79.00. What a deal!

cdpoint @ 2006-05-04T08:39:00

2006-05-04T07:25:42Z

I stumbled across the archives of The Manas Reader a few months ago and have enjoyed digging through its issues. As described by Richard Grossman in his "A Man and His Paper",

MANAS, a "weekly journal of independent inquiry," ceased publication on December 28, 1988, not quite 41 years after its first issue. Henry Geiger, the man who conceived the publication and wrote almost every word of each eight-page issue, died February 15, 1989, at the age of 80.

An article from an early 1952 issue quoted the following fascinating story, which George Orwell originally wrote in a column for the London Tribue:

Among the German prisoners captured in France there are a certain number of Russians. Some time back two were captured who did not speak Russian or any other language that was known either to their captors or their fellow-prisoners. They could, in fact, only converse with one another. A professor of Slavonic languages, brought down from Oxford, could make nothing of what they were saying. Then it happened that a sergeant who had served on the frontiers of India overheard them talking and recognized their language, which he was able to speak a little. It was Tibetan! After some questioning he managed to get their story out of them.

Some years earlier they had strayed over the frontier into the Soviet Union and been conscripted into a labour battalion, afterwards being sent to western Russia when the war with Germany broke out. They were taken prisoner by the Germans and sent to North Africa; later they were sent to France, then exchanged into a fighting unit when the Second Front opened, and taken prisoner by the British. All this time they had been able to speak to nobody but one another, and had no notion of what was happening or who was fighting whom.

Orwell went on to comment, cynically, "It would round the story off neatly if they were now conscripted into the British Army and sent to fight the Japanese, ending up somewhere in Central Asia, quite close to their native village, but still very much puzzled as to what it is all about."

I was struck by this story in part because I just received a copy of an odd and certainly neglected book, The Long Walk of Samba Diouf, by Jerome and Jean Tharaud, a novel about a Sengalese native who is impressed into service in the French Army and finds himself in the trenches on the Western Front.

cdpoint @ 2006-04-28T15:44:00

2006-04-28T13:51:45Z

In a meeting yesterday in which we were collectively complaining about the pitfalls of working under a strict fee-for-service regime, one of my colleagues remarked, "Much of the time, I feel like I'm a mercenary or a prostitute!"

Our director tipped his head, stared across the top of his reading glasses, and asked in a quiet voice, "And what experience do you have of either?"

cdpoint @ 2006-04-26T17:03:00

2006-04-26T15:28:34Z

from Wikipedia:

Flow is a mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing, characterized by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity.

I sometimes wonder if flow isn't just a fancy name for distraction. I agree with psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's view that flow--compared to other states--is an optimal, or at least, preferable, experience, particularly when working.

But one of the factors he associates with flow is "A loss of the feeling of self-consciousness." I think the roots of all self-consciousness lie in an awareness of our own death. We feel self-conscious because we feel vulnerable and we feel vulnerable because some tiny or large part of our consciousness is screaming, "I'm gonna die! I'm gonna die!"

So does that make flow, in effect, just another way of, as Neil Postman put it, amusing ourselves to death?

There is not yet, that I know of, any evidence to suggest that the most enlightened and spiritually aware Buddhist monk managed to pass any of himself beyond the moment of his death any more than a gaming geek who spent most of his time absorbed in play.

But other than the fact that it feels better when things are flowing than when they're not, is there any genuine advantage to flow?

Lost Hours

2006-04-21T15:47:58Z

When I finally snuff it, how many hours will I have lost:

Fighting with "Styles and Formatting" in MS Word as tiny changes blow long, detailed, and incredibly important documents all to hell?
Playing around with color schemes and shading and transparency effects in Powerpoint?
Bouncing between "Fixed Work," "Fixed Duration," and "Fixed Units" in attempts to make itty bitty changes in resource allocations without messing up my three-year plan eleven months into its execution?

Make no mistake--I remember what it was like to produce documents using only a typewriter; briefing charts using a Kroy lettering machine, an Xacto knife, and paste; and Gantt charts using special wall charts and dozens of different colors of tape. So I am hardly suggesting we turn back the clock. But such is the curse of attempting to do moderately difficult tasks with applications whose feature sets have become so complicated that they now vie with FrameMaker.

It's not the complexity I dislike--it's that the inevitable consequence of all these features is that when you start to push the envelope beyond relatively simple tasks, you face the choice of either devoting several weeks or more to studying and mastering the full capabilities of the app ... or of spending some lost hours now and again as you match the limits of your knowledge against that required to use the features to exactly the desired end--and nothing else.

cdpoint @ 2006-04-19T15:15:00

2006-04-19T13:33:21Z

The boys have had to take a quarter of Home Economics this year, and last night at dinner, one asked what caused muffins to rise or not. I went to the bookcase, pulled out my copy of Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking, and within a minute was reading aloud his explanation of the effects of baking powder.

I bought On Food and Cooking when it first came out in 1984, and it's sat on the shelf with the cookbooks in a half-dozen houses since then. I rarely open it up, but every time I do, I have to admire McGee's accomplishment. He really didn't come up with any new information. Everything in the book was known by chemists and a few academic home economists, and it can all be found scattered here and there across a hundred different textbooks or scientific journal articles. His brilliant stroke was to collect this material, translate it into terms understandable by laymen, and assemble it into a book for the general public.

But for many years to come, On Food and Cooking will remain the authoritative source, the book you will buy if you want to know things like why copper bowls work best for getting egg whites to stiffen.

It's like Bill James' amazing work with baseball statistics or the The Joy of Cooking: some of the rare cases when one of life's little checkboxes can be said to have been well and truly filled in.

cdpoint @ 2006-03-01T11:29:00

2006-03-01T11:04:17Z

In need of a notebook for work, I pulled out an old A5 Geschäftsbuch I used years ago that was only half filled. On the first page, I found this quote:

The only sense that is common in the long run is the sense of change--and we all instinctively avoid it."--E.B. White

I don't know the specific source, but I've seen this manifested so often in organizations it's predictable. No matter what is going on, every discussion about change implies that there will be a time in future when changes stop or slow down, when a steady state is reached and we can all get down to serious business.

It never happens. In one of Gerald Weinberg's book, he suggests taking one change of habit--say, opening doors with your left hand instead of your right--and following it consistently throughout a week, just to keep your brain from reinforcing its tendency to resist change.

cdpoint @ 2006-01-13T10:14:00

2006-01-13T09:48:18Z

Two quotations I encountered in a slim little book, Stefan Zweig: Great European, by the French novelist Jules Romains, and wanted to note down.

Hope is not necessary for an undertaking, nor success for perservering in it."

-- William the Silent

Things do not belong to us as long as we pass them by, as long as we only look at them with unfeeling and cold eyes as though they were a scene in a play, a walking picture.

A thing only belongs to us when it is felt--not so much for us personally--as beautiful, necessary, and vivid; only when we have said "yes" to it. And therefore our whole evolution can only be to admire as much as posible , to understand as much as possible, to let our feelings have intercourse with as many things as possible. To contemplate is too little; to understand is too little. Only when we have confirmed a thing from its very roots, confirmed it as necessary, does it really belong to us. Il faut aimer pour découvrir avec génie. And so our whole effort must be to overcome what is negative in ourselves, to reject nothing, to kill the critical spirit in ourselves, to strengthen what is positive in us, to assent as much as possible....

--Stefan Zweig, from his Emile Verhaeren

cdpoint @ 2005-12-06T17:49:00

2005-12-06T16:51:29Z

I decided to pick up the formidable Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West again.

I've tried this book at least a half-dozen times without ever making it past page 100. Two things have always put me off. First, West does not write like a human. She writes like God. Not even Shakespeare had such authority. Second, unlike God, she has no apparent sense of humor.

But there is such richness in this book that I decided it deserved a better effort on my part, and so I've managed to make it roughly a quarter of the way through so far.

I find it hard to read without a pencil at hand. Almost every page has something worth marking. Here are a few samples taken at random:

All of us know what it is to be moonstruck by charmers and to misinterpret their charm as a promise that now, at last, in this enchanting company, life can be lived without precaution, in the laughing exchange of generosities; and all of us have found later that that charm made no promise and meant nothing, absolutely nothing, except perhaps that their mothers' glands worked very well before they were born.

Certainly they owed their ascendency not to virtue nor to superior culture, but to unusual steadfastness in seeing that it was always the other man who was beheaded or tossed from the window or smothered.

It is sometimes very hard to tell the difference between history and the smell of skunk.

It [Split] recalls Naples, because it also is a tragic and architecturally magnificent sausage-machine, where a harried people of mixed race have been forced by history to run for centuries through the walls and cellars and sewers of ruined palaces, and have now been evicted by a turn of events into the open day, neat and slick and uniform, taking to modern clothes and manners with the adaptability of oil, though at the same time they are set apart for ever from the rest of the world by the arcana of language and thoughts they learned to share while they scurried for generations close-pressed through the darkness.

There is so little different between the extent to which any large number of people indulge in sexual intercourse, when they indulge in it without inhibitions and when they indulge in it with inhibitions, that it cannot often be a determining factor in history. The exceptional person may be an ascetic or a debauchee, but the average man finds celibacy and sexual excess equally difficult.

We have no real evidence that the peoples on which the Roman Empire imposed its civilization had not pretty good civilizations of their own, better adapted to local conditions. The Romans said they had not; but posterity might doubt the existence of our contemporary French and English culture if the Nazis destroyed all records of them.

Remember, when the nuns tell you to beware of the deceptions of men who make love to you, that the mind of man is on the whole less tortuous when he is love-making than at any other time. It is when he speaks of governments and armies that he utters strange and dangerous nonsense to please the bats at the back of his soul.

Well, maybe she did have a little sense of humor.

cdpoint @ 2005-09-05T12:19:00

2005-09-05T10:26:35Z

Every once in a while, my wife comes up with a brilliant line. After watching Downfall, which was absolutely riveting, Saturday night, we got to talking about leadership and the contrast between the FDR's leadership in a national crisis and George W. Bush's. Summing up Bush's attempts to response to 9/11 with a simplistic "Global War on Terror," she said,

It's what you'd expect from a man who grew up with a remote in his hand.

From now on, I will picture Bush trying to zap our problems away.

cdpoint @ 2005-08-24T18:25:00

2005-08-24T16:29:05Z

from Constructions, by Michael Frayn:

The complexity of the universe is beyond expression in any possible notation.
Lift up your eyes. Not even what you see before you can ever be fully expressed.
Close your eyes. Not even what you see now.

I was talking a few weeks ago with a devout Catholic and trying to explain my concept of God. To me, "the complexity of the universe" "beyond expression in any possible notation" comes pretty close to it. I don't assign that complexity to a sentient being. I just think that what people label as God is that mess of forces that connects the infinity that lies beyond the range of our senses and notations.

No matter how sophisticated and sensitive our senses and sensors, no matter how eloquent our notations, there will always be more than we can grasp. Personally, that alone is a good reason to get out of bed every day.

When Hardware Was Hardware (and Software Ran Scared)

2005-08-16T22:43:28Z

Digging through the basement this weekend, I came across this souvenir. It's the sign from a Univac 90/60 mainframe, one of a network I helped deactivate in the early 1990s.

We had two 90/60s in our computer center, one live, one on standby. Each had its front end processor and disk farm. The whole suite of equipment took up a room measuring around 80'x100'. It was a monstrous thing.

In all, we shut down eight of these. I collected these signs, which sat proudly atop the CPU cabinet, and fashioned seven of them into mock swords, which I handed out to some of the NCOs who played key roles in the project: 90/60 Killers. The eighth I saved for me.

The 90/60 packed a whopping 64 kilobytes of memory and, with the full disk farm, could store up to 24 Megabytes of data. There are plenty of PDAs a fraction of the size of the sign alone that far surpass those stats. Yet there were times when 2-3 programmers and a couple of hardware maintenance guys would be crawling all over the thing trying to isolate some problem.

Made of solid stainless steel, this sucker is over two feet long, nearly four inches high, and weighs about a kilo. And it's only the name of the damn thing.

That was some serious hardware.

cdpoint @ 2005-08-13T01:05:00

2005-08-12T23:40:22Z

A bunch of goodies arrived in today's mail, including my favorite music video--Bert Stern's Jazz on a Summer's Day, his remarkable record of the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival. When Stern shot the movie, he was one of the hottest commercial photographers in New York, the sort of guy that agencies hired when they needed striking artsy shots for Smirnoff vodka or Hathaway shirts.

Stern wanted to make a movie about the festival, but he'd never directed a movie before, so he wasn't sure how he would tell a story. In the end, he never tried to and just trusted his instincts. When shooting his first scene and the opening number of the film, the Jimmy Giuffre Trio playing a wonderful leisurely Giuffre original called "The Train and the River," he thought it would be good to splice in some seagull shots. When he went down to the waterfront the next morning to shoot seagulls, he found none and ended up taking shots of rippling reflections of boats in the water, and used these.

Jazz is like a time capsule. Stern was lucky enough to film when the range of jazz talents performing at the festival was probably wider and richer than anytime before or since: Louis Armstrong, Thelonious Monk, Gerry Mulligan, Dinah Washington, George Shearing, Jack Teagarden, Anita O'Day, Chico Hamilton, Sony Stitt, Eric Dolphy, Terry Gibbs, Sal Salvador, Art Farmer, and Giuffre can all be seen performing, as can honorary jazz cats Chuck Berry and Mahalia Jackson.

But the people in the audience are from a time capsule, too. You forget how neatly everyone used to dress. Many of the women are still wearing hats. Some of the men are, too. All the men have short hair--Gerry Mulligan perhaps a bit too. Men and women still hold hands when dancing. The entire festival audience is probably under 1,000 and fits into just one corner of a fairgrounds.

There is no commentary or dialogue aside from a few Willis Conover introductions and some soundbites from festival goers. All the film consists of is performances from the show interspersed with audience shots and scene from around Newport--which is why it's so perfect.

An Observation from the TGV

2005-08-08T21:32:14Z

Philip Glass's music is perfect MP3 player material for a ride on a fast train.

Some of the 1,000 Names of God ... er, Hasselhoff

2005-07-27T09:48:27Z

Compiled from the continuing Amazon David Hasselhoff CD review comic saga:

Hankipants
Hoopervamp
Happlefrank
Huskerjoof
Hochseltrough
Facilefop
Humblecork
Horseandhoof
Honkerpoff
Hypercraft
Beffenhofs
Hajjerflink
Hattersoff
Hackitoff
Tepelhof
Hoggerprock
Hackerkropftchk
Homelyfish
Hukkerbonk
Huskercolf
Hotchersleigh
Tasselcough
Cunkerplotz
Hilkertrank
Hoppermensch
Hinkerchop
Hasseltoffee
Hosslepants
Hobbittrunks
Hymerschlafft
Humperyank
Haskerskassk
Heroinhump
Hargleswitch
Hesbenadick
Humpmyleg
Clovenhoof
Hofflehas
Halkerpoops
Castletrough
Wigglepumpf
Husseledkonk
Whiskitoff
Menglerhoff
Hepatitisprof
Hasselgrovinnohunkendoveristbittezein
Hasellubergruberstormerstrooper
Hausselponch
Hooberspunk
Hasselbladderfunktrumpet
Happenstance
Pappersmear
Assletassle
Handsfreeturbo
Hardtodistingushwords
Hummertongs
Fistickhoffs
Hamdongskang
Hasselmeman
Hisstuffsucks
Hoshencheeks
Haltertoppfk
HasnocareerbeyondHollywoodSquares

God smiles on the person/people responsible for this.