Tech Woes

This has been a tragic week for me and my machinery. A worst case disaster kind of week - my main computer died the death. There I was, innocently finishing Wordle the other day, and when I did, I tried to click off to a different page and Chrome starting spinning. Then it stopped responding - anything. The mouse would not click; I could not even force quit. I finally turned the machine off and on - and got a ? for a disk icon. Not good. I ran a disk repair, and got it to reboot - but Chrome launched automatically, and more or less immediately froze again. Another restart, more disk repairing - I even tried reinstalling the system - no go. An error, hardware it would seem. There is no getting around it - the disk on my rather ancient Mac mini has given up the ghost.

It has been a bad year for me and technology. I already had to replace my iPad, then the receiver I had attached to the TV - now this. Not to mention fixing the screen on my laptop. And just adding insult to injury (though this might in fact be the real injury here, other than to my wallet), I do not have a backup since last January - though I am pretty sure I did an interim backup over the summer. Except - note the theme of this post - the disk I think I did it on won't mount. Good times!

I will try not to dwell on the fact that everything I did this year on the computer is gone. There are some lessons to be learned - the obvious one being, back up, back up regularly, and don't be afraid of redundancy. The other lesson - the one that is about to cause my poor credit card to grown under the strain - is more mixed. The fact is that mini served me very well, for a very long time - 11 years basically. It has grown troublesome in the last couple years, mostly due to trying to get new software to run on it - but though that has been a nuisance, the machine kept on going. What I mainly use - surfing the web and writing - have been as good as ever. Why change? Until the thing dies and you have to replace it. (This complaint probably applies to the iPad and receiver as well - the iPad was ancient, though it didn't die alone, it required gravity and a heavy object landing on it. The receiver was old, a cast off from a friend - who replaced it with another cast off. This does not apply to the laptop, which is less than 2 years old.)

Replacing this machine is going to be a pain. The money is annoying, but not terrible, and I was angling toward buying something new anyway. It is a pain because of the stuff I use with the old machine, that I will have to get working on this one. It is all old - mostly USB - which is no longer part of the basic Mac. So to use the keyboard, mouse, camera, external storage, even external CD drive I have - I need to get a pile of adaptors. Nice. When I upgraded my laptop a couple years ago, I went through the same thing - adaptors and so on to connect monitors and thumb drives and keyboards and the likes - that was less annoying since that is a secondary machine. Though of course the adaptors I bought are not the ones I need for the new machine. Knew that was coming.

All right. I am not going to belabor this. I will pay the piper, find the right connections, get what data I can find back on the thing, and move on. I will probably have somewhere sleepless nights thinking about it - and might even come back in here to opine on the state of computer technology today (mostly about its increasing fragility - try to imagine the equivalent in 100 years of finding a shoebox full of old photographs in the closet) - but you deal. But boy, that's a lot of dealing in one year. 

September 11 Memorial

Today is the 20th Anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. I should say something about that. I have not posted anything about it since 2013 - this is strange, but I suppose I haven't posted much of anything here since 2013. I used to post every year about it - at least since 2006, fifth anniversary - but over time, there seemed to be less and less point. I said what I had to say - back in 2006, in fact, a long rant that, well - sounds right to this day... I could repeat it every year or - remember it, and let it go. Which is about what happened.

But 20 years: I have to say something. What? The event itself was horrifying, created a sense of fear and dread that lingered for quite a while. (A more concrete version of what it was like to grow up in the 70s and 80s under the fear of nuclear annihilation.) As for the day itself - I don't think I have written about my memories fo the day, here. Reading articles about false memories of 9/11 makes you think - how much do I remember wrong? The truth is, most of what I remember of the experience was banal. I was at work - I went to a meeting at 9AM. I think I remember someone saying that a plane hit the Trade Center tower before the meeting, but I don't think anyone seemed all that concerned. When I came out of the meeting, everything was different. Two planes hit - there was no doubt it was an attack - no one knew what was going to happen. I remember people watching news on their computers, a new trick in those days. And that's how we saw the towers fall: on a tiny QuickTime window.

They sent us home. I think I went into AOL when I got home and checked on a couple people I knew in NYC and the DC area - they were all right - so I turned off the news and watched Beavis and Butthead Do America. It seemed like a good time to watch it.

The next day I went back to work, though everyone was on edge. Sometime in the morning, the cops raided the Westin Hotel in Boston, a couple blocks from where I worked. People got paranoid and wanted to leave and I thought, where are we supposed to go? But I think later, most of the office just packed up and went home, not waiting for the company to close or the city to close or anything - we just weren't going to hang around. 

Not very interesting, in the end. But the day lived on in my head. Though I think it was the anthrax scare later that September that really set me off. But that might be a false memory. Walking home one day, beautiful perfect blue sky, thinking, holy shit we're all going to die! 

After that? Nostalgia about 9/12 doesn't impress me - partly because of the way we all abandoned our posts the next day, on a rumor; partly because it didn't take very long for everything to go to shit. Arguing over who was to blame, then what to do about it, ignorant things like "Freedom Fries", attacks on Moslems and anyone who looked like they might be middle eastern, increased surveillance across the board, the Patriot Act. We were divided immediately by 9/11, aAll right. Here we are, 20 years along. We have finally gotten out of Afghanistan - that's amazing ed the divisions were deeper and more aggressive, and are still there. 

We got into wars, which we could not win. We have just gotten out of Afghanistan after 20 years - a war that, at the time, made some sense (getting Al Qaeda and all) - but we didn't get Bin Laden, then we gimped that war to fight a very wrong war in Iraq and - well, we aren't the first Empire to fall apart over Afghanistan. 

And 9/11 has ruined us, politically. I mean, imagine a world where someone could say (however stupidly) that there wasn't a dime's worth of difference between the two parties - imagine that! It sounded shallowed and spoiled then - now, it's flat out mad. (Or flat out a lie; people still say it, but they are mad liars.) Whatever side you're on now, the political scene is much more fractured and dangerous than it was then. Conflicts are open and explicit, and more likely to be violent. Fascism is open and explicit and dreams of violence. We are disintegrating. And the world as a whole is just as bad: far less stable than in 2000 (when things were not ideal, don't get me wrong), but open fascism is on the rise all around the world, conflict and disintegration are taking place in areas that were basically stable in 2000. It has been a logn disaster for the world.

Which brings me to something strange to say about those times: the weird sense (but maybe not so weird) that that time - 2000-2001 - might have been the high point of human existence. How strange! But remember life as you lived it in 2000: there were bookstores! Records stores! video stores! more movie theaters! There were records to buy, movies to watch! It's easy to think that technology has been on an endless upward climb in those years - but wonderful as it can be, losing book stores, record stores, even video rental joints, is a cost. They make life more pleasant - there is no replacement for the joy of going into a bookstore or record store, browsing the shelves, looking at the objects as you decide what to buy.

But more than that - the technology was there in 2000. This choice between book stores and Amazon - in 2000, you had both. Amazon existed; Netflix existed. You could have everything - you could buy things cheap online if you wanted; you could rent movies through the mail, on a fantastic new medium, the DVD. At the same time, mind you, as you could go into a bookstore or record store or a video store and root through their stock. You could even watch movies and listen to music on your computer, even watch TV on your computer - even if the quality was not great, you could do it. All those things existed at the same time for a while. Could they have lasted forever? Is there a way to have Amazon and lots of bookstores? Streaming movies and Blockbusters? iPods and their descendents and HMV and TOwer records? I don't know. But we had them all in 2000-2001.

It's weird to think about, but that might have been it - as good as it was going to get. Maybe the end was coming one way or the other - even without 9/11, climate change was already well on its way, and that might end up swallowing all these other considerations - but things were still better than. For a middle class urban white guy, maybe - but go back to politics - it was better for a lot of people who weren't watching QuickTime videos and renting foreign DVDs and spending hundreds of dollars at a pop at Tower or HMV or Newbury Comix. 

And now? Every two days, as many people die in this country of COVID as died in the 9/11 attacks. This is months after a free, safe and effective vaccine was distributed, which stops most of those deaths. I wonder if we would have been smarter before 9/11 about something like that. We wouldn't have had people like Donald Trump who threw his political capital behind making the pandemic worse. I don't know.

We live in a very bad time.

2020 Hindsight

Happy New Year!

This blog has become a ghost site - I thought it was bad last year, or the year before, but - 4 posts? Why bother at all? Well - if I could get back to posting, I suppose that would be the answer in itself. I won't promise it. As it is - it's as good a place as any to toss some thoughts out into the world, to let them float in the ether on a sea of forced metaphors. It's as good a place as any to welcome the new decade, to bid the last one farewell and all.

It was a strange decade. For me, personally, it began on something of an all time low: my mother died, the day after Christmas, in 2009; 2010 began with her funeral. There has been a lot of that this decade - I am of an age when the generations before me are starting to die. My father, a couple close friends, many uncles and aunts have passed, some of them very hard to process. But - I am of an age when that is going to happen. I am getting perilously close to the age when having my contemporaries die will seem less like a shock and more of the natural way of things. Another decade and I will be there, I am afraid.

But that said: the first half of the 2010s weren't a bad time for me. I moved to a place I liked, a good apartment, where I stayed for 7 years. I took classes, I wrote, I posted regularly, here, and sometimes on other blogs. I got out of the country a couple times, still played softball, sometimes well, I ate well, lived well. My job even seemed to reach a detente with me - though that got me accused of "complacency." That, of course, should have been a sign - was a sign - but - that's the second half of the decade. In all - I lived pretty well in the first half of the 10s. Even just using this blog as indication - I posted regularly; I started up a couple series that carried on a while, and gave me a chance to write some things I liked. History posts - following along with the Civil War, then WWI for a while; music posts, those band of the month posts; movies - screen shots and directors and things like that. It was good. I was, I think I would have to say, satisfied with my lot in life.

The second half fo the decade has been a bit different. Maybe not objectively - nothing really bad has happened to me, except of my own making (sort of) - but a lot of the things I was satisfied with had to go. And the world outside has gone straight to hell. For me - the job is what got me. Things changed. A generation of managers where I worked left, and a new generation came in - people who use words like "disruption" as a positive term; people who openly admitted to forming their management ideas by watching TED talks and reading online management consultants. The results were predictable. And I was not willing to take it, because I did not have to. I had resources to move, and did, though it meant I gave up living in the city - but I could live closer to my family, could support myself on a lot less money, and could engage in other past times - bowling and D&D in place of softball and education! So - not a bad tradeoff, over all. Though it changed me in strange ways. I went from being a fairly obsessive habitual movie goer to almost never going to movies, and barely even watching movies. I went from the blogging you see before 2017 to almost nothing since 2017. Some of this is me - some of this might be the world, the way the technology has evolved (as fewer and fewer blogs seem all that important - Twitter is where all the conversations seem to be happening. That is not a good thing.) BUt there is it.

And the world, of course, has gone to hell. It held on in the first half of the decade - but you could see the disaster coming. The mid-term elections in 2010 doomed us, giving the Republicans completely undeserved and unrepresentative control of the machinery of government that they have exploited to hold power as they sink into smaller and smaller minority status. The GOP, long having embraced white supremacy as a vital part of their politics, doubled down on it. They reacted shamefully to Obama's election, the worst of them used it to build the racist elements in the party. All this brought us to Trump, who has made all the racism, sexism, xenophobia and everything else the whole point of his existence. Was Trump a break from what the GOP had been? Maybe - there is a sense that earlier Republicans used racism as a way to get votes for their tax cuts. Trump and his closest supporters seem to be using tax cuts to keep support for their racism. The white supremacy seems to be their defining point. It sometimes seems like this is so.

And no? Trump himself is a plain fascist - he has all the makings: the racism, xenophobia, authoritarianism, use of violence for politics, corporatism, aestheticization of politics, turning it explicitly into spectacle, and working very hard to make only the spectacle seem to matter. (Though I think the most important element in the aesthetics of fascism is the idea of the dominance of Myth. It's the idea of a mythological justification - Make America Great Again. The red hats are part of it - but the idea of a lost golden age, an imaginary version fo the country that conforms to their political goals, etc, is what really defines fascism. This is an essay I am not going to write just now, though.) The country, of course, is something else - even now, he is only the president, one branch of government, he is a Republican, one party - if the other branches act, if the other parties resist, if his own party decides to try to not be fascists - he is not going to succeed in turning the country into something worse than it is. He has been impeached; there are elections coming; we will see how this goes.

But I don't want to write about the future. This is one last look back at the decade gone. So: the second half fo this decade - 2016 on at least - have gone from worse to worse. All the celebrity deaths in 2026 hit hard. My job went to hell in 2026. And Trump - getting elected came on top of a primary and election campaign that defied my ability to imagine the depths of stupidity possible int he American political system. Trump? The idiotic attacks on Hilary Clinton? Though the defenses of her were sometimes just as hard to take - I mean - how could any Democrat worth a damn vote for anyone who voted for the war in Iraq? why was that forgiven? I don't know. Now - 2020 - big chunks of the country, the Democrats in particular, seem determined to relive 2016. I don't get this. Why does so much of the discussion in the Democratic party revolve around Bernie Sanders (and by extension, Hilary Clinton?) That might be because I read Twitter and Facebook too much - that is a topic unto itself. The point is, 2016 was awful even before Trump got elected; his election just made sure the next 4 years would be even worse.

All right. That is enough. One more thing - just a hint. Technology - here is something I have been thinking about lately. There are major technological shifts going on - streaming, Disney's domination of the entertainment industry, the effects on discourse of Twitter and FAcebook, etc. But have there been any real technological changes in the last 10 years? Twitter and Fecebook existed in 2010; youtube did; streaming services existed. Digital film distribution. Almost everyhting that defines the technological world now existed, was even fairly significant, in 2010. Compare 2010 to 200 - that is not true. The 00s brought us youtube, Facebook and Twitter and MySpace and all the other dumber forms of online communication. It brought ius smart phones, tablets, iPods, it started streaming services. Or the 90s - from 1990 to 2000 we gaines DVDs, the world wide net and the popularization of the internet; computers changed fairly significantly; digital photography and video started to appear (though they became ubiquitous in the 00s). What has appeared int he 2010s that has changed things the way - any of a dozen things changed the world in the previous decades? This has been more about cultural shifts to accommodate technology - which have mostly felt bad: corporate control over all of it; the colonization of places like Facebook and Twitter by propagandists, who have made all of us amateur propagandists and ad writers. Another reason to worry, I guess.

But I won't end with pessimism. I like a lot of what the world offers. I can lose days browsing through YouTube - I don't know why videos have replaced blogs as the preferred method of amateur communication, but it seems they have. 10 years ago, I counted mostly blogs as the most interesting sources of information and discussion online. Now? it tends to be youtubers - Seth Skorkowsky! The History Guy! Scholagladatoria! (All reflecting my recent interest in games and history, no doubt.) Is this better than reading blogs? I won't say yes - but it's still a nice feature of the internet, the ease with which people with interesting things to say can communicate with the world, without a lot of extraneous resources.

And so - happy new year! Happy new decade! And here's hoping I manage to post something here before 2030...

Citizenfour and The Berlin Wall

Today is the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, one of the great moments of the 20th century, and one of the few important events of the 20th century that is altogether good. It is the symbol of a heady time - the end of the iron curtain, the undoing of Communism throughout Europe, a moment that looked like it might usher in a period of freedom for much of the world. It did, for a good part of Europe - but not completely. The Balkans disintegrated in the wake of the end of Communist rule - Yugoslavia in particular dissolved and turned into a war zone. Things didn't go smoothly in the Soviet Union itself - the coup in 1991 basically put an end to it. The coup was defeated, but the winners were the Republics, including Russia itself, and Boris Yeltsin. Years of chaos and gangsterism have led to Vladimir Putin, and a return to the bad old days of Russian oppression at home, and troublemaking abroad. Maybe nothing really like Brezhnev's days, but not what we might have hoped we'd see after 1989. And the US? That idiot Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, and dragged us directly into middle eastern wars, and we have not been able to get out since. Those troubles have poisoned us - with our involvement in the middle east bringing terrorism to the US, and 9/11 serving as a pretense for massive expansion of government surveillance and the undermining of civil rights.

I saw Citizenfour today. I imagine that explains the gloominess of this post. t's the story of Edward Snowden, built around a long series of interviews with Snowden in Hong Kong, just before he revealed his name, though that is just the centerpiece of the film. It's about the massive government surveillance programs that have appeared in the wake of 9/11 - their continued growth - and the government's reaction to the exposure of these programs. It's a gripping tale - and a very distressing tale. I suppose there is nothing new in the film - all this information has been available for the last year or so. It's been widely discussed. It doesn't matter in the least, does it? nothing has changed; there is almost nothing any individual can do to get around all this data collection; there is no sign of a concerted political will to do anything about it. It is as if everything that happened with Snowden was swallowed by the sea of information, that kept rolling on. And he became nothing more than another vaguely recognizable face and name, a weird international celebrity, famous for being famous.

Isn't it? Seeing it today - it raises the unpleasant thought that maybe the fall of the Berlin Wall don't so much let freedom into East Germany, as it let the Stasi out. Which is not to say that the USA is like East Germany, the NSA is like the Stasi to the KGB - but they could be. And the film concentrates on government abuses, government programs and data - but it doesn't take a very big leap to realize that the government is just one agent in all this. Several people talk about the relationship between the government and other entities - internet and phone providers, content and service providers (the Facebooks and Googles of the world), device manufacturers (apple and company), banks, subway systems, stores - you name it. And you can worry about what AT&T or Facebook or Apple or Visa or Target give to the NSA - but you might also give a thought for what all those entities do with the data themselves. What they give to each other. What the government can give to them. We walk in a cloud of data that we can't hide, and who knows who can get inside it? And what they might do with it?

I don't mean here that the NSA (or Facebook) is the Stasi - they aren't killing people, or, not a lot of people (wonderful caveat that, huh?) But they have the ability to be the Stasi. What stops them? Their goodwill? well - one problem with people like Snowden that I noticed at times in this film is that the act as though there is something new about government surveillance government overstep, and so on. Maybe we should remember the Stasi; and maybe we should remember how our government acted for much for the cold war. It is probably true the government has more information now than it had in the 60s - but that didn't stop them from spying on Martin Luther King or John Lennon or whoever you want. I think - that while what Snowden talks about is terrifying, and while all this cloud of data we can never get out of, and is increasingly vulnerable to use and abuse by entities of all sorts around us - all that is true, all that is terrifying - but all that is still not where the battle has to be won and lost. Why aren't we like the Stasi? we aren't using this information to crush dissent, to impose a constant oppression on the population. And why? Because the government is full of nice guys, honest and honorable and trustworthy to a fault? You answer that....

But what is relevant is it is all political. In this country, the government comes from the people - it is, still, in however imperfect a way, an elected government for the people by the people and all that. I think - you can't rely on the good will of government: but you have to rely on the political engagement of the people. It's hard to muster much optimism - but I think this is the only thing we have and probably the only thing we have ever had: to vote; to speak; to act, politically. I think, even if the NSA and company continue to do what they have been doing - even if the government still trots out the specter of terrorism to scare people into accepting these programs - even if the public, as a whole, doesn't care all that much about the possibly inconvenience of someone reading Jihadist websites somewhere - or even about all the other people who had to get new credit cards after Target got breached (and what the government can do to everyone, criminals and hackers can do to a good number of people - they can get that data to).... Even with all that bad news, what people like Snowden did, or Glenn Greenwald and Jacob Applebaum and Laura Poitras do, is crucial. Stories like this, films like this, keep a wedge in there, an awareness of the presence of all this data, and the degree to which we depend on the goodwill of the government (and corporations, and individual data thieves) not to abuse it. And then, I hope, somehow, people remain just political committed enough to keep things controlled.

It's hard to be optimistic: it's hard to say what this kind of optimism even looks like. I don't expect this to change: I think government will continue to collect all the data they can get, and look for ways to use it - and they will always be able to abuse it. I think companies will always have this data and will always abuse it, and will always be in danger of losing it, with nearly catastrophic consequences. But I also think that this abuse is, in the end, mostly a political question: do we have a government that benefits from abusing this data? (Or - since governments always abuse their power - what level of abuse will they be willing to commit?) The reason the NSA is not the Stasi is that the United States is not East Germany - complain all you want about our government, but it is not a dictatorship, it is not totalitarian. It is not because it is, still, a democracy - elections matter. They are at the root of our government and they are where our salvation or damnation will always lie.

Which means what I should really be worried about is last Tuesday. But that's a topic for another day.

Music Friday, With Associated Technological Musings

Rather shocking to notice the date - how far along this month, and year, has gotten. Time is passing! We have had a week of bloody bad weather - winter is coming....

Meanwhile, I have a new computer, a new Mac Mini; the first time in a long while I have gotten a piece of hardware the minute it showed up in the stores. For all my love of computers and such, I generally wait - partly, I suppose, because once I have something that works, I am willing to keep it as long as I can. I did get an iPhone 5 as soon as they showed up (mostly because the old iPhone I had was becoming noticeably low) - before that? you might have to go back to the beginning - the first Mac I bought was a Classic, 1990, which I also got the minute they appeared. I hope that's not too portentous - the first Mac I ever bought; now the last one? I wonder sometimes. Companies these days seem to be pushing users to mobile devices - operating systems these days seem to be trying to look like mobile devices - Yosemite has the same ugly flat design the new iOS's have; it gives you things like the "launchpad", which acts like an iPad screen - just a flat array of icons. I have been able to avoid Windows 8, but by all reports it is even more atrocious. Lawd, lawd, won't these kids get off my lawn?



I don't know; maybe I'm old and stubborn and set in my ways; or maybe the point is that I was smitten by macs in the first place because they were a better way to write - whatever it is, the core of the computer experience for me is still sitting down at a keyboard and firing up Word. (Or, these days, Scrivener, as much as Word; in the glory days of the early 90s I went through word processors at a dizzying rate - Word Perfect; MacWrite; Nisus - which still exists? there's a nostalgia kick for you...) Phones and iPads and such are good in their way - what they are and do is very nice indeed - but they are something apart from computers. I have yet to find any way to write on them: at least not in the satisfying way I can write on my computer. Which adds up to this - that I am very happy with this new machine: a very pleasing setup: desktop computer, driving 2 big monitors, with a good keyboard (I bought an Apple wireless keyboard for this machine - and I find it to be very good. I have found Apple keyboards in the 21st century to be flimsy and unsatisfying devices - but this one is very good; it feels right, which is what you need in a keyboard), giving me plenty of room to open up a dozen folders and documents and carry on to my heart's content. It is hard to deny that for me, the computer reached its moment of perfection 20 odd years ago - all I really needed was a good word processor, a good keyboard, a decent monitor, and a connection to the outside world - this machine might as well be the old Mac Duo I had back then, just a lot faster for some things. (Though not everything - partly because back then I set up a RAM disk on the duo, and so approximated the fusion drive this one has; and partly because no one has really improved on Word 5.1.) I wanted a computer to write on - I was very happy when the internet developed to the point that I could read on it too - and that's still what I want it for. Music and movies and things like that are nice, but they are gravy - TV and stereos work perfectly well at what they do...

I suppose that's ironic in a post about playing music on my computer. So what? I contain multitudes, just like my Mac! and so enough of that - iTune! Randomize!

1. Deerhoof - Cooper
2. white Magic - The Light
3. Big Boi - Buggface
4. Neil Young - Comes a Time (from Live Rust)
5. M.I.A. - 10
6. Grant Hart - Morningstar
7. Nina Simone - Jelly Roll
8. Tim Rose - Long Time Man
9. Rocket from the Tombs - Foggy Notion
10. Flaming Lips - the Observer

Viudeo? Here's Grant Hart, performing live:



And - say - Nina Simone, playing I Want a Little Sugar in my Bowl (since I can't find a good live performance of Jelly Roll.)



And end with Nick Cave performing Long Time Man:

Woe of RSS

I am in a terrible state of anxiety. I read blogs through RSS, not quite exclusively - but it's where I start for almost everything. Having Google Reader go away at the beginning of the month was a terrible blow - but for the most part, I made a simple enough transition to The Old Reader, and went on my way. I'm not entirely sold on it - it has some quirks I could do without, or that I haven't entirely figured out how to work around - but mostly, it's a nice replacement. Quick, stable, usable... no complaints.

But suddenly - they are down. From the looks of it, they moved their databases to a new set of servers - and things went pear shaped. They were offline a while over the weekend (irritating, but that's life) - but now, they have gone down, server issues, and have been down a while now. I am left without an RSS feed!

I tried out Bloglines before Google reader went away - it has some nice features, but it was noticeably slower than the Old Reader, and always acted a bit odd, so I went to the old reader instead.... and now, trying to go back, use it for a day, I see why I picked the old reader. Slow! weird stuff with logging in! took forever to bring up the last month's worth of feeds (since I haven't used it) - but then didn't mark them read right when I did. Oy. What a pain.

It's depressing how set in my ways I become sometimes. And a reminder of one of my hobby horses - that while the hardware keeps getting better and better and better, software does not. Software may add capabilities that it never had before - the way everything has integrated sound, pictures, video over the last 15 years or so... But I don't see the basics ever getting better - or even maintaining their quality. All this trouble with RSS has not made anything better - none of the alternatives are better than Reader was when I started using it, whenever that was. (08 or 09, somewhere in there, I think; though I don't know - I've been doing this a hell of a long time, and I lose track of how long it has been since I have changed some habit or other... I could probably figure it out by looking at how long it's been since I updated my blogroll...) It's more dramatic, I suppose, with things like word processors - I have expressed my opinions of MS Word from nearly the incipience of this humble blog - Word 5.1, back in 1991, ran better than anything I have on this machine now. Computers get more and more powerful - the hardware supports more and more things (from faster connections to cameras and sound to etc.), which find their way into programs - but while you can stick a video in a word document, here in 2013, MS Word itself does not run any faster than it did in 1991, nor has it added any word processing features that were not there in 1991. Indeed, the current version of word is markedly inferior to word 5.1, even in terms of features. Slower; less customizable; uglier and more confusing (those fucking ribbons!); not very compatible with older versions of word (and as might be apparent from these comments I have word documents reaching back to 1990; I have some word perfect and .rtf documents from 89....) Files have gotten bigger and bigger through the years, even for just text, though I'm not sure how much of that is real and how much is due to new disk formats. Etc.! I could go on... It is very frustrating - I use Word more than anything, this side of the internet - and am a lot more fussy about it than I am about browsers, and the latest version of Word (Office 2011 for Mac) is junk. Better, by a damned sight, than Office 2010 for Windows, which I'm saddled with at work, but that is no accomplishment - though even there - I never minded office 03. I skipped 07; I loath 2010. Here - one of the results of last year's (really bad) technical disaster was that I bought a MacAir (a device that delights me as much as anything I have used in years, I have to admit) - I wanted to get Office on that, but could not find my 2011 DVD (if I even had such a thing) - so I loaded 2008 on it. Office and Word 08 is actually a pretty good piece of software - certainly better than 11.

All right... Rant off! I am calm. I am annoyed - I have my habits for reading the internet, and don't like them disrupted, but it will be all right. Serenity now!

I think at this point, I am obligated to post a picture of a cat, attempting to help set up a mini-iPad:

Friday Five, Post Holiday Edition

I am back. This has been an adventurous week. Visited the kin on Memorial Day - while I was up there, my brother's car died. He was ferrying me back and forth - so he had it fixed, up there, then we came back - but I guess the fix was not so good. Broke down on the offramp from the highway, happily only a mile or so from home. A tow later it was in the garage and he was stuck here waiting to get it back.... Not the end of the world, I guess, though a definite nuisance. Reminds me again why I am glad I don't have one of the infernal things.

Though I have computers - and had a monitor. But now, though it seems to be on and running, it will not stay on - not recognize a signal. It was working Wednesday; we had a nasty set of thunderstorms Wednesday night; it is not working now. I suppose there are other elements in the chain that could be broken (the cable, say), but that's a mighty coincidence there. What fun.

But we shan't let it discourage us from our Friday music posts shall we! though it seems to have put paid to my scheme for an end of the month countdown... (It's also putting my Director of the Month plan on a bit of a hold too - I suppose I still have a day, but those things are a good deal harder to do on a laptop - I like having a host of windows open for that sort of thing, which is why I'd put it off until I got back. Oy.) Anyway - here goes: Random 10!

1. Creedence Clearwater Revival - Suzie Q
2. Six Organs of Admittance - Goodnight
3. PIL - Flowers of Romance
4. Velvet Underground - Lisa Says
5. George Thorogood - Move it on Over
6. Pavement - So Stark (You're A Skyscraper)
7. Alex Harvey and his Soul Band - Elevator Rock
8. The Flying Burrito Brothers - Christine's Tune (Devil in Disguise)
9. Dungen - Glomd Konst Kommer Stundom
10. Spoon - My Little Japanese Cigarette Case

Here's some Creedence for you, to get summer going...



That being latter day CCR (though in fine form) - I am inclined to throw in some vintage stuff - because, yeah, there is something very summery about CCR - though what it is might just be memories of passing out at a fourth of July party listening to the live version of Keep on Chooglin'... well - we'll leave that... Here's born on the bayou, as a bonus.



And finally - from today's list - another old fart not letting it go, every bit as satisfyingly as Mr. Fogerty and co... Mr. Lydon?

A Friday Music Post this Friday.

This should probably be something else - I have a new toy:



It is a great joy, and a distraction - still can't get my yahoo mail working on it. Hours, days of distraction! Fun fun.... actually, I have a couple new toys - rather more than I should, if I'm honest - it's been an eventful summer on the technology front. Therein may lie a post...

But not today - today is Friday, and today is a day for music. And - being distracted by the iPhone is as good an excuse as any for sticking tot he basics, as usual.

1. Bill Frisell - Ron Carter
2. Young Marble Giants - Brand New Life
3. Television - Torn Curtain
4. Carter Family - Church in the Wildwood
5. Madvillain - Do Not Fire!
6. Descendents - Wendy (live)
7. Fugazi - Merchandise
8. The Slits - So Tough
9. fIREHOSE - 4.29.92
10. Elton John - Tower of Babel

and video? Quietly lovely Carter family song, though with the usual cool stuff going on with the instruments - guitar and autoharp always seem to be trying to jump straight to the 60s...



Or maybe the Slits?

The Geek's Nightmare

I hate to trouble you, world, with tales of my computer woes, but - I have to write something about my computer woes. It has been a trial, this weekend - what you see above is the sight that greeted me when I came home Friday and booted up the old iMac: a black screen - and nothing could change it. It may be complicated - at first I thought it was just dead, but in the process of trying to resurrect the thing, I noticed it seemed to be booting: I hear the start up chime; I hear the disk spinning; all the USB stuff lights up.... There might be hope - I even went the trouble of buying an external monitor, in hopes I could get that to show me whats on the machine - didn't work, but who knows. If some video component is gone, I could still get the guts out of it.

None of this is quite as bad as it could be. I bought a new laptop last year, and was thinking, even then, that I might want to hedge against the age of the iMac. It's 4 years old, and getting close to where things stop working - usually because software stops working - I bought the laptop because my old laptop (vintage 2004) wouldn't run any of the Intel chip software for the mac - or flash - or... On the other hand, I was thinking about similar incompatibilities with the iMac, not a hardware failure. And it is a bitter blow, as one of the things I thought I could do with it, if I stopped using it as an everyday computer was treat it like an region-2 DVD player - that nice screen and all... Looks like that hope's out the window. But - because I had the laptop, I have been able to get back running without too much trouble, and with an upgraded computer to boot.

No - it's the frustration and the panic of it that gets me. And some missing data. That to could be worse - fortunately, I am reasonably careful about backups, doing a couple big ones every year, and enough intermediate ones to keep me from losing to much. Having a laptop helps - I move things back and forth between the machines quite a bit, so again, I have almost everything almost up to date. Even pictures, which could be a worry - I have taken to loading most pictures and video onto both machines, so even though the desktop had the main iPhoto library, it was backed up, and the recent stuff was on the laptop. Lost a lot of cat pictures, but that's about it. The one big exception - and big is the right word - is music. I don't think I have backed up iTunes since 2009 - I guess the Friday 10s could get a lot less varied in the coming weeks. On the other hand, it's probably a good thing that I haven't been buying all that much music in the last few years - if I restored my music from 2009 I'd have 90% of it, I suspect. Still.... I am not sure I am going to do that, though - at least not until I know whether I can get the data off the other one.

Partly because I have all of it loaded on my iPod - which, 5 years after I bought it, is still going strong. (No - that's a lie, though a strange lie. The iPod referred to in that post did not last a day - all that whining about windows? turned out, the problem was the iPod. I took it back, got a different one, and that is the machine that is working as well today as it did then, and that very well indeed. It plays fine, it holds a charge, whether I use it 6 hours at a stretch or leave it alone for a month, and I still have half the capacity to go. I should have loaded my jazz records in there, though that would have been that much more to lose...) And since I don't buy all that many records these days, and when I do, it can take me months to get around to the simple task of loading them in to iTunes - well - I could pretty much continue my current musical existence without missing a beat. So there's that.

Still. Still. That iMac was a nice machine. It is convenient having a desktop and a laptop with separate functions. Laptops, used as laptops, are always vulnerable - much more likely to be lost or broken or something - and that would be a disaster. I have been loose with my backing up (partly because I was moving enough stuff between the two machines) - that has to stop. And - the new laptop being fairly new, and running Lion - well, looks like I will have to upgrade a bunch of software to keep things running. And some of the connections are different. And - whatever. It is a pain. I live on these things, and am quite lost without them.

Oh - and to add insult (and injury) to this injury - this happened to my favorite softball bat! what a terrible week for machinery!

Stopping SOPA & PIPA

I doubt by 5 or 6 readers would be much inconvenienced by me taking my site black for the day - but I don't want to let the day pass without note. SOPA, PIPA, indeed any similar law that would undermine the roots of the free internet, in the name of any of the supposed evils of the day, must be stopped. You must protect the means of speech and communication before you can worry about what the speech and communication might be.... and in this case - you have to be sure that the means of speech and communication remain free of the control of either the government or of corporations. So - do what you think best, oh gentle readers. But oppose this evil.

Here is a petition, from Google, a big corporation that at least is on the side of the angels on this one: End Piracy, Not Liberty

And Wikipedia's information page, explaining the blackout etc.: Learn More.

Good luck, internet! You have been very good to me!

Steve Jobs (And Me)

I know everyone else has written about Steve Jobs, but I have to too. I try not to be too in your face about it (with strangers anyway), but I am a complete Mac head, a fanatic, a 72 virgin iPods in heaven type, if such a thing made sense - they are the only computers I have ever used on my own dime, and I expect that won't change as long as there are Macs to be used. I am in the cult, and have been from the first time I used one - they have shaped my life, for better or worse.

20 odd years ago I was working part time in a law library (and full time at a book store), expecting to stay there until I'd paid enough of my debts to live on a bookseller's wage - when someone said they might have some work for me in the systems group if I wanted it, and gave me as SE/30. Here, they said, learn this. I sat down at the machine and started typing and was addicted. That is the best way I can describe it - like being given crack, and being addicted on the spot. I had used computers before - a vax in high school, my mother had a commodore, my brother (a few years younger) had an apple, I think (maybe a Franklin, something like that) - I'd poked around on DOS machines, or whatever they were at the time. I could see the use of these things - my brother wrote all his school papers on his computer, and you could see how much better it was than my method of going from longhand to hunt and peck to correction tape and white out - better, but the amount of work it would take to get there - and the amount of irritation and ugliness I would have to put up with, looking at those other screens.... But I sat in front of that little SE/30 - looked at the screen, the desktop, the little pictures you clicked on and they'd open up, the "folders" inside "folders", the way you never had to type a path, type the name of anything, you could se the names there - that made sense. And then I opened Word Perfect [yes - this was a very strange set up - that extreme rarity, a big corporation that used Macs - and a Mac shop that used WordPerfect; I don't know why, but they did...], started typing, and that was that. It was obvious that this is how computers should work. This is how writing should work - this was better than a typewriter could dream of being - this was better than pen and paper! It was easier to compose than on pen and paper - and you could fix your mistakes, change your mind, you could move stuff around, you could make words bigger, smaller, make the letters look any way you wanted - without hacking around with codes, without blocking text first - you just pointed the mouse, you clicked, you dragged, you did something on a menu, you clicked a button - it was right.

That was the end. I was doomed. I started working for systems instead of the library - eventually I did it full time - I am there to this day. It was thrilling for a year or two - the company put computers on everyone’s desk in the course of the next 2-3 years - and I found that that, setting up computers, getting to them to work, to connect to things, to print, showing people what they could do with WordPerfect (and eventually Word) - that was good, a challenge, kind of fun. That first couple years, I went to computer shows, I read MacWorld and MacUser and MacWeek faithfully, kept track of new developments (scanning and OCR! that was a big one, for a while), I got my own computer at home and obsessed over fonts and various word processors and page layout programs and graphics programs - I loved it. I didn't even mind the job.

All of that I can blame on Steve Jobs. If my company had been using PCs, this would not have happened. Some of it would - they probably would have invited me to work for systems, given me a PC to learn, and I probably would have taken it - better than doing pocket parts, after all - but move to full time? It was nice money (compared to selling books), but I liked my bookstore job - liked working in bookstores, liked the people, liked the location (Harvard Square), liked the customers, liked everything - nice as the money was working on computers for a big corporation, if I hadn't loved the computers, I don't think the money would have held me. For that matter, I don't think I would have bothered learning enough about a PC to have the option - I took to the Mac quickly, figured it out, its programs, started building stuff in Hypercard immediately - I made myself useful, because the machines were worth learning. I wouldn't have done that otherwise - I didn't care, really, about computers, in the abstract - I never bothered to learn any programming languages (other than hypercard, some macro languages, some VBA later, some html) - I certainly wouldn't have cared as much as I did on DOS machines.

And that, finally, is why I've written all this, and why it's relevant to Steve Jobs. I was never that interested in the technology - never saw the need to learn to program or put together computers out of old wires and shoeboxes. I was a user, when all was said and done, and almost defiantly so. I am probably pretty close to the consumer Steve Jobs imagined in his heart of hearts all these years - someone who wants to be able to get a machine that will let him do all the things he wants to do, and do them with style, without worrying too much about what's going on under the hood. I loved that SE/30 because I could use it to write, and it looked good on the screen while I was writing, and it created handsome pieces of paper... I could draw things with it - I could do math with it (I didn't have Excel at first, so I built spreadsheets in hypercard - I might have had a book for help, I don't remember) - I could make databases, do all kinds of things, without worrying about the code. That's what I wanted, and what I want - to write, to draw, the make databases and keep databases, to make pictures, look at pictures, look at cat videos, make cat videos - connect all this stuff to other people, argue with people, look at their pictures, find people who share my obsessions and hobby horses and curiosities. I don't care, really, about the machines, I care about what the machines get me to - but I want the machines to get me there without pissing me off. And - 20 years of Macs have managed that, even the Microsoft programs running on them. The Windows devices I'm stuck with at work - a different matter - even now. I like the first comment on Making Light's Jobs post - I too wanted to be a power user, not a programmer. And Macs made that possible - directly, and immediately, in ways (at least in 1990 or so) that were not conceivable on any other machines. It was possible to master the machines, most of the software, just by knowing what you wanted it to achieve and plugging away at it, and paying attention. I could teach myself what I needed - I was quite happy to be able to make a living guiding other people through their problems getting their computers to do what they want to do - so here I am....

The Macs are long gone at work - that experiment was killed off by the Apple's mid-90s woes - but by that time, Windows 95=Mac 89 - so most of the old principals apply. A lot of my experiences are very closely tied to their time and place - the fact that I hadn't been brought up on computers (as kids 5 or 6 years younger than me were) - the fact that the gap between Macs and PCs was still as dramatic as it was in 1990. 10 years later, it is hard to imagine getting a couple years out of college without significant time on a computer - and if it were possible, I'd probably have been as comfortable on a Win 95 or 98 machine as a Mac. But we're here to talk about Steve Jobs, his effects on the world - and those post Windows 95 machines are his babies (though rather ugly and misshapen brats) as much as the Macs are. Job's vision of how computers work spread out, from Apple to Microsoft, through the world - and not just in general terms - WIndows 95=Mac 89 is really not far from the truth.

One of the many things I read this morning about Jobs noted that he had been instrumental in 6 world changing things - Apple II, Macs, iPods, iPhones, iPads and Pixar - that's true, but I don't know if it does justice to his impact. You could put Mac on their twice - the original Macs, and the iMacs - that were almost as revolutionary. They saved the company, created the platform for the iPods and iPhones to follow - but they also changed the way the world looked; they changed the language. And it's hard to overestimate, really, just how important the Macintosh and it's OS really were. GUI's - and the nature of GUIs - icons, in space, clicks and folders and apps and documents, the whole arrangement of data - is the standard now. And then there is The Mouse. Reader - you can click on that blue underlined bit, and your computer will display a page explaining the history and nature of this device - and that - the fact that you go to that page by clicking on it, instead of typing it into a box - underlies another of the world's utterly transformative technological innovations - the World Wide Web, html. This is our world, and it looks the way it does, because Steve Jobs pushed for a particular kind of interface - one he did not invent, including many things like the mouse that other people made and used first - but he made them integral to his computers....

For me - and more or less by definition, anyone reading this - Steve Jobs has shaped the world we look at as much as anyone alive in the last century.

And I haven't even mentioned his effect on film...

The Social Network

It's been another week since my last post - sorry about that. One of the problems with this schedule is when I do write about films, I do it after I have been reading about them on the web, blogs, the media, etc. for a week or more - when there is a lot of conversation about a film, sometimes the discourse around the film can start to seem more compelling that the film. The Social Network has been out a couple weeks now, and sparked lots of discussion, on film blogs, beyond film blogs, and it's been too interesting to ignore. It's a fine film, I should say up from - 12/15 in my little rating system - but I find myself thinking about all kinds of things, beyond the film itself....

Like - how is Facebook different than MySpace or Friendster? I never used Friendster, so I can't answer that part - I poked at MySPace, so I have some ideas there. MySpace was an ugly affair - too easy for people to doll it up with color and music and blinking text - Christ, it's the internet ca. 1997. (Ah - how is Facebook different than AOL? ca 1996 - I mean - there are all kinds of blandly factual answers to that one, but the fact is - somewhere in the mid-90s, AOL took off with much of the force that Facebook has the last 2-3 years. Enough to allow it to screw around with Time Warner before they were done. One might see the future of Facebook there - an unstoppable force! that in a year or two will be replaced by something else, which is not so much a replacement as a refinement.... Anyway - to go back a question or two - the tautological answer to how is Facebook different from MySpace or Friendster is that everyone I know who is online is on Facebook. (As one of my cousins said on the site itself - "I have an account on Facebook, I didn't on those sites.") It pushes the question along a step - why are so many people, from old hands at this internet thing (I got Prodigy and AOL in 1990, myself - well after a lot of people I know) to utter newbies, young and old. I have aunts on Facebook, the parents of friends - if my mother had been well the past few years, she might well have ended up using it. How did that happen? I've always been a bit skeptical of Facebook, but the fact (especially compared to other social networking sites) is that it is better designed, more elegant, simpler to use and navigate, more secure (you don't get the malware threats you heard about with MySpace all the time) - and also, more expandable, more flexible, better integrated with the rest of the web. It's surprising to think about it this way, but in the end, it's simplicity and elegance might be the real answer to its success.

All right then - the next question is - how would you make a film about elegant design? For that matter - how do you make a film about privacy settings? I could probably answer the second, something about some poor devil's life ruined by internet identity thieves - but that's not really the problem with Facebook's attitude toward privacy. Facebook's privacy issues are more intimate and pervasive, usually not so dramatic, more a question of what happens when your coworkers find out your opinion of Sarah Palin than when some hacker gets your social security number. And I suspect this difficulty is partly why The Social Network doesn't latch onto privacy as its main concern, but does latch on to misogyny. It's easier to show. It may even be true, to some extent (though not necessarily) - and you won't have any trouble getting audiences to accept it - everyone knows computer guys are asocial nerds who resent the jocks who get the girls, especially at Harvard, where nothing has changed since 1636 (or 1638)....

Perhaps I exaggerate. In fact, the film is perfectly believable on most of these things - maybe not "true" but certainly something like the truth (and since it's fiction, that works.) It is a film about college kids, after all - college kids certainly act up, even at Harvard. And complaints about the women in The Social Network being prizes understate the ways that everyone in the film is a prize or an obstacle, or at least, in some way, found wanting. Eduardo is out of date before he starts.... the Winklevii are inbred rich monsters with dull ideas and a clever friend... Sean Parker is an aging teen band star, trying to stay cool (and every bit as much a prize as any of the women, really).... Larry Summers is a clown, former secretary of the treasury who doesn't recognize the value of Facebook when someone lays it in his lap... the attorneys are attorneys, the girlfriends are all crazy except the One Who Got Away. Only Zuckerberg is above it all - and claims to the contrary in and out of the film, he is not so much a nerd or an asshole as he is smarter than everyone else, a visionary, who tries them all and finds them all wanting. Though of course Sorkin betrays him in the end - that final scene, while certainly admirable from a structural perspective (echoing the opening scene, a woman walking away from Zuckerberg with a variation on the same line), is completely false, a complete cliche, overwritten and pat. Sorkin wants his cake and to eat it too - to marvel at genius in all its amoral wonders, and to click his tongue...

All right - that's what I mean about the discourse overcoming the film. The film itself is a thing of beauty. It does have issues - almost all of them from the script, I'd say. Given the script, what Fincher does with it is remarkable. The film is fast moving and slick, yet always clear, what is going on, who is saying and doing what, the performances tight and exciting, the words and visuals all made to pop out at you. I'll refer you to Jim Emerson for more comment on the filmmaking - I particularly like his remark about how Zuckerberg is "out-of-synch with his physical environment." It's true - Zuckerberg is consistently pulled out of his environment, consistently separated from the people around him - physically as well as emotionally, socially, intellectually. (Physical isolation standing in for the inner states. Expressionism lives!) The phenomenon extends to the partying, too - there is lots of it around him, but other than a couple scenes where he is drunk, Zuckerberg is apart from it, watching - thinking...) It's a superbly made film. There was a time when David Fincher's films drove me mad - he had obvious chops, but they were so inane, his talent in the service of such obvious claptrap (I mean, Fight Club, in particular.) But now, I am convinced - he has become something extraordinary. He benefits, as he usually does, from superb work by the actors. All the principals are wonderful - Eisenberg completely sells this portrayal of Zuckerberg - he plays intelligence as well as anyone, especially slightly dishonest intelligence... And the others - Garfield, Hammer, Timberlake - more than hold their own. Yes - a treat.

Though I can't let go of the script - and maybe, just maybe - the overall conception of the film. It is striking - going back to Emerson, talking about the credit sequence, and Zuckerberg's alienation from his environment - it is worth noting that the film has cut Somerville (and residential Cambridge) out of the picture. The Thirsty Scholar (which is clearly seen and named in the film) is a mile away from Harvard Square (and nowhere near BU - Zuckerberg really blew it there, that girl must have really liked him, to go all the way to Inman Square - nowhere near the subway and on the opposite side of Cambridge from BU - for a drink with him), but that mile disappears. I tend to think the film (Sorkin?) is a bit too enamored with Harvard - impressed by the fact that this was a Harvard kid - not another MIT or Stanford nerd - inventing Facebook. (Or Northeastern - that's where Shawn Fanning invented Napster.) So we get constant reminders that it's Harvard, 370 years of History... which I'm not sure is really there, except when they're giving tours. (Which rather undermines the Final Club initiation scene - every tourist and prospective student who goes through there knows that's the Statue of Three Lies.) I don't know if this is Sorkin, or maybe Saverin (who seems to be the source for the book it was based on) - either way, it feels a bit off. Especially when taken as being about Zuckerberg - it makes it seem to be more about Saverin, or Sorkin....

Anyway - it is a fine film - it is not history, but over time, I'd guess its worth as a film will take precedence over the historical questions.

iReview the iPad

Well, another couple weeks of silence on this blog, though this time I am happy to say I have had good reasons - an honest to god vacation, off to Maine and Vermont, seeing sights, visiting family, people I have not seen in 13, 15, 20 years, people I had seen, even then, almost exclusively at funerals. It was a good change to see them for pleasure again. And fun to poke around in the woods again....



I was not entirely off the grid all this time, though. For I have recently acquired a new toy:



And a fine machine it is! This trip was a nice little proof of concept - a chance to rely on the iPad for a week or so, see what it does. And I have to say - I like it. I bought it mostly to replace my laptop, which is growing long in the tooth - it's vintage 2004, badly behind the times in hardware (a pre-Intel mac), and consequently software. It still works, especially for computer type things - nothing wrong with the version of office on it, or anything else I use - but running into trouble browsing, especially. I thought, then, that for half the price of a new mac laptop, I could get an iPad - which would be much lighter, smaller, and could have 3G capabilities if I wanted them.

IN fact, it is fine for most of those functions. It isn't easy to type on it (which, along with the fact that I was on vacation, visiting people, in Vermont, with rather spotty 3G service, kept me from making any posts, here, say...), but it works - it can be made to work for typing. And I found an old,unusable bluetooth keyboard at work, that works perfectly with the iPad - so if I need to type, I can. It is quite good at browsing and email - especially on wifi, but works as well as the iphone on 3G, and you can see it. Some web apps act a bit funky with it - it's hard to scroll, for instance - but it does what I need it to. As it happens, having 3G for a month has sold me on it - it's a nice feature to have around town, and proved very useful in the wilds. The GPS worked like a charm, at least on top of the hills - to the point of helping us find my grandparent's old farm, burned out 50 odd years ago, overgrown into a jungle now.



But the best thing - taking me more than a little by surprise - is how well it works as a reader. It is a bit heavy - maybe a bit bigger than ideal for this sort of thing - but those are quibbles. It is smaller than most books (if heavier), and carries, after all, as many books as you can download onto it. I admit this is something I was thinking about - I take a lot of classes at Harvard extension, and lately, most of the supplemental readings have been distributed as PDFs - it occurred to me that it was a lot easier to load them all onto a machine than print them all out... But now that I have it, and have tried out reading books, I think I am hooked. It is a good size for reading - a good screen, a good interface, and it feels good in the hand. It can hold a hundred pounds of books... and - not to be underestimated - you can read it in the dark. I can sit on my balcony in the middle of the night and read away - an underrated feature.

It helps that I chose good books to try it out on. Prompted by Ta-Nehisi Coates' enthusiasm, I started by downloading a free version of U.S. Grant's Memoirs. That is definitely an inspired choice. He is a remarkably modern seeming writer - never flowery, but sharp, funny, in a dry way. A kind of brisk, unsentimental recitation of his experience, mostly of the war - with many fine asides and details. And a steady attention to logistics - the roads, supply lines, how many wagons and mules and teamsters he needed - the mark of a former quartermaster. A truly outstanding book.

I'm following it up with James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom - another fine book, this time bought from Amazon, for Kindle. That gave me a chance to compare the iBooks app to the Kindle app - not much to choose between them, though I think I would give the edge to iBooks. Little bit better interface, little bit easier to read and use. But basically, both work, and it makes it easy enough to use both to find material. The book - I'm enjoying completely, though I'm still only halfway through.

All this Civil War reading does take me back - rather notably. Back when I was a kid, when my grandfather was alive and living in the Vermont hills, I spent most of my time with my nose in books - Hardy Boys, and then Bruce Catton - so no one up there was too surprised, when they caught me with my nose in the iPad that I was reading more Civil War history. They didn't bat an eye...

Content and its Discontents

My weekly post... this is going to be a thin month, even by my standards, with moving - I hope I don't completely disappear... I have a place, and should be able to start moving in soon - but times and efforts are still to be determined.

But, after a week of thinking about nothing but apartments and money and moving and such, I am dying to do or think or write about anything else. So - first - this can serve as my weekly/biweekly, whatever it is, movie post - I've only seen one movie in the last week, but it was a doozy - Bong Joon-ho's Mother. A 13/15, per my little rating scheme... Story is - a girl is killed; the cops arrest a guy with mental problems - he happened to be out and about that night, drinking, flirting with girls - he can't remember anything, and he's easy to intimidate, so off to jail he goes. But his mother has none of it - she sets out to clear him, dogging the cops, hiring a lawyer, investigating herself (with the mercenary encouragement and aid of his thuggish friend) - what she finds.... It's a very tightly plotted and constructed films - everything is very neatly wrapped up - almost too neatly - I mean, too neatly for strict realism. That tight detailing plays as a kind of madness itself, and plays against the hints of swirling darkness in their lives and the town and so on.... Like Bong's other films, this is a masterful mix of tension and wit - everything plays out kind of askew. High melodramatic moments are undercut with odd absurdity, sometimes straight farce. It has, at times, an almost Imamura-like feel - strange flashbacks and flash- something, forward, sort of... lots of imagery of water, sex, plus a retarded kid who sleeps with his mother... and a few giddy shots - directly overhead, that sort of thing - that look like Imamura. Bong shoots a lot of the film is tight closeups - or big close shots with out of focus (but often very visible) backgrounds - especially when the mother is on screen. It's disorienting and unsettling throughout - a beautiful, haunting movie.

So in lieu of movies to write about, let's write about blogs. Film Criticism has died again - Jim Emerson provides probably the best overview. First, there's Richard Schickel acting the fool again; and (a bit) more substantively, Thomas Doherty proclaiming The Death of Film Criticism itself. That one lured in Jonathan Rosenbaum to comment - identifying many signs of cinephilic life... Emerson too seems to have logged onto the computer sometime in the last 10 years - I like this paragraph enough to quote it:

I look at film criticism the same way. Not that one should only write about movies one likes, but that the goal of criticism has nothing to do with box-office or influencing consumer behavior or changing minds. Movies are about seeing things through others' eyes. So is movie criticism. My only hope is that you'll find whatever I wrote about a particular movie worth reading and thinking about, even if you ultimately reject my point of view or have no intention of seeing the movie in question.

I don;t know if I quite managed to say this in my last reaction to a Decline of Criticism post, but to me, the internet is still more like a conversation, or letters to the editor page, than a publication - or mass of publications. I don't really need to have complete, formally structured essays online - for all that I do favor more formalist, academic, poetics oriented writing, I am comfortable reading what amount to drafts, notes, half-completed thoughts. The blogs (and message boards before them, and maybe twitter/facebook, etc. after them) at their best have the tone of something halfway between a seminar class, and a bunch of grad students or bookstore workers arguing philosophy over Sam Adams' in the pub... I think that leaves a gap in the critical world - that for the moment is filled by journals, and books - though I worry about journals and books in the future.. But what's on the blogs is good...

And that brings me to a similar topic: The Ebert Club. For $4.99 a year, you get - something... a bunch of stuff - though mostly, I think, the satisfaction of paying for something worth having. It raises a point though - leaving aside the idea of paying for this as a kind of donation - would I pay for any web content? Would I pay for Ebert, if I had to? or David Bordwell's blog? or Glenn Kenny's? Truth is - probably not. I pay to get on the internet - pay quite a bit for it, maybe... once on - I am not sure how enthusiastic I am about paying for content.

Though it is directly relevant that I buy any and all Bordwell or Thompson books when they appear. And would probably buy a collection of Ebert's essays/columns. (As a critic, I always found him very useful, a good writer and solid guide - but hardly indispensible. As a columnist, he is as good as any I have read in as long as I remember.) And I think a big part of it is - you pay for the delivery system, not the content. (Even if it is the content that is the source of value. Value is not exactly a monetary thing. You pay for content with your time and attention; you pay for the book with cash.) That and the fact that books are still a far better delivery system for really dense data than the web. (Though this too - Ebert, great as he is as a straight columnist, is even better as a blogger - he uses pictures and video and links to great effect... as do Bordwell and Thompson - their blog is a blog....) I am, myself, an odd mix of luddite and anarchist in this - I hate paying for online content; I don't think copying data (or programs or anything like that) is theft; I don't think there are any sustainable ways to make people pay for digital content - anything that can be reproduced and distributed without costs will be... But at the same time - I buy books, and a fair amount of magazines; buy 95% of the music I have on CD; buy and rent DVDs, though I much prefer to attend movie screenings - and have no reluctance to pay for any of these things. I think paper and bits are different things, and have to develop different systems for being economically viable.

Though again - one reason I could do without Ebert (if he went behind a paywall for real) is that the internet provides far more quality material than I can even pretend to read. I mean look - you have:

A Godard interview...

A very old Alice in Wonderland clip, with accompanying essay.

Bernardo Bertolucci on Rules of the Game.

An essay on Andre Wajda's Tatarak.

That's all today. It's too easy to put things on the web - too many people are doing it. It is not going to encourage a direct pay for content system. It is going to require - something else. Possibly, to be honest, semi-subscription systems, like Ebert's club, or even Netflix. Something....

Finally - to loop back to the beginning, and my moving woes, which actually inspired a lot of this: whatever happens on the web, it is in better shape than newspapers. Film criticism may not be dead, but the daily paper newspaper is certainly on the roof. How do I know? I bought a couple papers, looking for apartment ads - and found? on at least 2 days - none at all. And worse - this Tuesday - I couldn't even find a classified ads section - newspapers will not survive without ads. They don't make money selling papers - they make money selling readers to advertisers. That is how it had been for at least a century - if that is gone, the paper is gone.

Windows Sucks!

I know that headline will not come as a surprise to anyone, but I have been reminded, yet again, of this inarguable fault. My new iPod - conked out the first time I tried synching it; so I tried it again, left it running overnight - and of course, it's conked out again in the morning. Now this is very annoying: I'm wondering what's to blame (and how to fix it) - I poked around the documentation and online without much luck. And then I notice, the documentation all says to plug the machine into the USB port. That can't be right, I think - I try to remember what the cable looked like, and start to get a sinking feeling - I take a good look, and yes indeed: USB!

That's annoying. So I try again with the firewire cable the 60gig iPod used, but nothing. So I go online, thinking, Apple has cleverly managed to lure me into spending an extra $50 on a firewire cable for this thing. Typical, I think... Until I realize - there IS no firewire cable! the new iPods ONLY synch through USB! It's NOT apple greed - it's pandering to the poor suckers who bought Windows machines! It'll take me a week to get this thing working and a month to get all my music onto it! Damn it all to hell!

Thanks again, Microsoft, for making the world a worse place.

UPDATE: Rather than add a new post or a comment, I'll add a word or two to this. First - I have to admit that the real problem is the computer: the iPods work with USB 2.0, and this old thing has only 1.1; that's the underlying problem. One I hope I can avoid addressing until next year, though I don't think it's worth trying to squeeze much more than that out of this thing. Second: the other real problem is not so much that the process is slow, but that it died in the middle - and now, I've managed to make it so it won't do a thing: connect the iPod, and iTunes hangs. Terrible! I can't get at any options to restore the iPod, to switch to manual updates or anything like that - nothing. That's a good deal worse than slowness. Third - though I realize now that these USB only machines have been around a while - it's worth noting that I have one, a shuffle - which is slow, but works fine with this computer - so it's not just the hardware.

But all this whining is beside the point - because the old warhorse, the old photo iPod from 2 plus years ago - suddenly started working again, after I charged it all the way. Hooray! It is just the battery! I might get to next year after all...

Technology and a Film or Two

Well - as noted, my iPod died - and as promised, I replaced it, with a 160 Gig monstrosity. Which leaves me here tonight synching the machine with iTunes.... which looks like an all night project. With luck. It crapped out once already. I just hope it gets to the end. It's this initial synch - 45 gb of music, more or less - that causes problems. I fear the days are numbered for my old iMac - I've had it awhile. It occurs to me, I have been using it as my main machine longer than any machine I had before - rather impressive. It's still adaquate - it's just starting to get slow. And the hard drive is smallish - so all my music, for example, is on an external - that can't be helping the synch process. (I'm pretty sure that's what killed it the first time, the externa; deciding to take a nap.) Anything intensive - video, music - is sluggish. It's almost time. I'll gut it out as long as I can - but....

What this means to us today, though, is just that I have some time to kill. A bit too late to start a movie - I can watch the Red Sox and Yankees, but really - those are, I'm afraid, about the least interesting games out there. Histrionics and hand-wringing - it's boring. The rivalry crap overshadows the games. I notice these days, the Yankees seem as into it as the Red Sox - a few years of mediocrity will do that. (What, you say? the Yankees have won the division every year since 1645! how can they be mediocre? - I say, 200 million dollars is a lot of money. It can dress up a pig in the finest silks. And that can get you through the early rounds when no one is paying attention. But have the Yankees won anything in the post season? bluffing their way past the red sox in 03 and alkmost bluffing their way past them again in 04 is all they have to brag about. This year, assuming they get the Angels int he first round, they won't get a chance to face the red sox. All for the best. Yankees/Red Sox is boring. Bring on the Mets!)

Failing that, I will use the moment to do some writing. Movies! reviews! Yesterday, I saw Tsai Ming-liang's latest, I Don't Want to Sleep Alone - set in Malaysia, but otherwise pretty consistent with the rest of his work. Long takes (92 shots in 2 hours, I think it works out to); not much dialogue, none by the main characters, I think; floods, fires, bugs, injury and illness; sexual longing, usually unwisely directed; loneliness sliding toward lunacy; basic bodily functions - eating and drinking, cooking, sleeping, pissing, cycles of bodily fluids, plus work - cooking, cleaning, etc. It's fairly grim, full of physical suffering and deprivation - perhaps the grimmest Tsai film since The River; though it ends as happily as any of his films have. Finally - the main protagonist of the film seems to be a mattress that gets dragged from place to place by the characters - it might be the "I" of the title, not wanting to sleep alone.

That was one thing. On the other hand, there's Across the Universe. I've noticed (and noted) that Inland Empire is a genuinely divisive film - people really do love it or hate it. Well - at least at the showing I saw, that's true of Across the Universe too. Sitting up front were a man and a woman who after gutting out an hour of it, had enough - they went out the front exit, and as they passed out into the street, the man flung his backpack angrily at a wall in front of him. I ca only assume this was a reaction to the film. Meanwhile, when the movie ended, a group behind me broke out into applause! And lest you think they might have been simply glad it was over - they were still there at the end of the credits, one of them declaring, "what a fantastic movie!" My own reaction fall between those extremes - though perhaps the way the letter C falls between A and Z. In fact - my main emotion during the film was disappointment. It could have worked. There are hints and flashes, usually in the dance routines - and indeed, it comes to shining life 2-3 times over it's 2 1/2 hours, though it never lasts. All through the film, the song and dance business tends to pop up, overmotivated, but not really integrated into the story - and quickly abandoned for more dull storytelling. It's a shame. A couple times it's almost criminal - "Come Together" gets a fine treatment - a real singer in Joe Cocker (the mediocrity of the lead actors as singers is a constant nag), and some very cool choreography of salarimen in a subway, then dancing with their briefcases on the street. Bono's bit - doing "I am the Walrus" - is embarrassing nonsense of the best kind, almost worthy of Moulin Rouge or Ken Russell, with Bono mugging and oversinging quite effectively. But the high point - the only part of this thing I hope ever to see again - is Eddie Izzard doing "For the Benefit of Mr Kite" more or less as himself. The film takes off for a moment - then comes back to earth, more bland standing around from the cast....

It's too bad. It's hard to imagine how this could have been a really good film - especially with the awful Forest Gump quality History of the Age story line. But it might well have been a properly over the top piece of shit - Julie Taymor, I think, is, in fact, not far from the Ken Russell of the age - with her biopix and Classics and now this, which at its best, is Tommy or The Wall on valium. Take away the valium, and people could at least have gotten a good laugh out of it. Instead - she is not willing to follow through on the weirder ideas; the dance routines toy with surrealism and general oddness, but they back off. Things start to go over the top, but they don't make it. And, on the other end - she doesn't extend the stylization of the everyday that crops up a couple times - some football cheers at the beginning, those commuters during "Come Together", some of the street scenes in Liverpool, especially at the end - far enough; doesn't extend it all the way. Abandons it completely for long stretches of melodramatic nonsense - dumb looking riots... too bad.

[This post has been updated: the laptop induced typos removed (or reduced), and a Ken Russell link added. And yes, I know The Wall is Alan Parker...]

Despair and 10 Salutes

Today I must mourn the passing of a dear friend - my old Mac 4400/200 PC Compatible. It has served me well, loyally and effectively, since somewhere in the vicinity of September 1997. I have invoked this delightful machine before - in this paeon to Word 5.1 namely - for good cause. I have blogged from it, once or twice! It was - until this week - still rolling along.

It was a matter of time, of course. All it needed was something like what happened this week - a blown fuse - and now, it won't do a thing. No life. That is typical - these machines, macs from the mid to late 90s, were notorious for that very problem. Actually, for two problems - losing the ability to power up, and hard drives that stop spinning. This is the second 4400 in my experience to suffer this fate - the power supplies stop working.

I may get it back someday - or find a working chassis and move the hard drive... But I am resigned to accepting the end. I loved this machine, as much as one can love a machine. I have not used it in the last year - this one (17 inch i-mac - another fairly wonderful machine, that has given me no trouble and better, is a positive work of art) is actually fast enough that I can stand to use it for routine word processing. Amazing. Anyway, in honor of the passing of this wonderful machine, I will post my top 10 favorite pieces of computer related hardware and software. Appalling sentimentality! but if you can't be sentimental at a time like this, when can you be?

1. Microsoft Word 5.1b - this is number 1. Other than spelling, it is still the best word processing program I have ever used. I would probably still prefer it to Word for OS X if it had comparable spelling and macro features. Hell, it had them, back, pre OS 7 or 7.5, or something - somewhere in there, the add ins I was using stopped working. That was when I had to move to another machine to be able to spell... But even without it - it ran on that 4400 as well as Word for X runs on this machine - and probably (with its complete customizability and its magnificent full text searching) had a better feature set. It is by far the best piece of software I know of.

2. Mac 4400 - this machine lasted 7 years. I used it for 3 years at work, then brought it home (we switched to Windows), and used it 4 more - 3 of those years as my main writing computer. I switched tot he internet on other machines maybe about 2001 - but used the 4400 to write on. Great machine. Reliable, fast... it did have power problems sometimes, so I left it running all this time... I knew it could not last forever. I managed to wean myself from it okay - but I will miss it. And - it had word 5.1 on it - and I will miss that more.

3. Mac II-ci: I had one of these for a couple years at work. Most of those early 80s macs had their issues - some because of their architecture (something about their bus capacities, I think); some had bad hard disks, some had unreliable power supplies.... This machine did not give me trouble. I beat on it - I crammed everything I could get into it, used it hard - the system got corrupted every 6 months or so and I would have to reinstall everything - that was a fact of life in those days. But the machine - wonderful thing. Reliable, and probably just as quick with word 5.1 as the machine I have now is. I had to give it up when the powermacs came out - I was disappointed. Partly because I knew that getting the first powermacs off the line meant I would have all the problems, and be the last one to get a new, good one - but partly just because I loved my CI.

4. I have to give props to what I have, though - this 17 inch i-mac is perfectly reliable, and by god - it is beautiful! It really is. Every couple years apple comes out with something just stunning. This is the model. And it works.

5. Powerbook 170 - these were sweet machines as well - great keyboards, reliable, sturdy. I still have one, sitting around somewhere. Unlike my beloved 4400, it still boots up. And runs word like a charm. Surprise surprise!

6. Compaq Armada: There is not much in the windows side of the world that I think is even remotely worth using - but this machine is one. Looks like one of those old PB170s - black, blocky, kind of heavy, but indestructible, reliable, powerful enough. You can’t break them. Great computers. And the last machine of any importance with both floppy and CD bays built in. There are times, even now... Thank you Compaq!

7. SE30. Indestructible little things, quick, functional, and you could get a real monitor on it with a little work. But even without it - those luggable macs had some merits. I would not turn one down now.


8. My new 12 inch powerbook. I know. I love it. Sorry. Tiny, sleek, quick, beautiful. Wonderful machine.

9. Hypercard - this is one I would have to think about some. But when I started using computers - macs - at the end fo the 80s - this was a hell of a program. You could do things with hypercard - I remember building my own spreadsheets, back when I was starting out, and didn't have excel for some reason. I built databases that still work better than databases built in access. It was a great piece of software... I did end up using it mostly to build databases - these days, File Maker has a lot of the same functionality and works about as well - efficient, quick, reliable, easy to work with. I don't know if I can put FileMaker here, but it has a lot of the same appeal. Especially compared to crap like Access.

10. Mosaic. Less because it was a perfect piece of software than because it did things that pretty fucking literally changed the world. The way we interact with the world. Obviously, the way you and me right now are interacting in the world. There may be software that did this back in the 80s - excel maybe - but since I started using computers, this is the one program that, single-handedly, just changed things. And hey - it worked. It did what it did.