8:28 AM 5/13/2007

What are you still doing reading this page? You should be reading the New Blog...

last updated 1 year ago #

3:38 PM 5/7/2007

Today I set up the next incarnation of this blog.

http://evanbittner.com/blog/

It was a lot quicker than I thought it would be, because I didn't "Reinvent the Wheel" the way I was planning. Installing Typo on my site was actually very easy. I was shocked. The hardest part was the five minutes I spent looking for help on editing the templates.

I still haven't decided how to handle the posts here on Infogami. I would like to move them all over, but there is no way I am going to get it all done right away.

One major problem with Kiribako was that I couldn't tag posts, and you couldn't comment - at least not without setting up your own account there. And, I've been worried about them falling apart for a while now. Typo runs completely on my server (I think it may be written in Ruby - fun language that). While I will miss Kiribako, I do want everything to be in one place... and I still get to write posts with Markdown, which also means that I can copy and paste old blog posts into the new blog without too much trouble.

last updated 1 year ago #

8:21 AM 5/7/2007

I'm an ambivalent writer at best. There are occasions when I think words are the best way to express a thought, and on those occasions I usually can't stop writing. But the drama of the possessed writer furiously putting down a complex idea takes attention away from how I usually operate: I sit around thinking. And, although I have a tendency to work my thoughts into an interior monologue that might make a good speech or essay, I get the impression that most people wouldn't have the patience for it. So a lot of those ideas just don't get written. In this format - the Blog - I feel more comfortable pushing ideas at you, because it's easy for you to skip around. And it's precisely the hypertextual nature of the Web that supports what I'm about to say next:

I prefer Diagrams. Equations. Charts. Illustrations. Tables. I never once thought the best way to visualize a complex idea was with a bunch of words. For better or worse, we seem caught up in a transition from the word to the image. Part of this is the way language - words - hamper the global interchange. You'll notice a lot more little pictures - icons - and more attempts to elevate a word into a token. Icons communicate faster, but with less precision. They are good stand-ins for an idea the reader already has, but they are a poor way to inform - they rarely snap right into a mind full of concepts the way they are intended. I love the humor of intentionally misreading an icon.

last updated 1 year ago #

7:52 AM 5/5/2007

I woke up this morning to discover that I have the whole day already mapped out. I've got to do laundry before lunchtime, when I'm going to Arlington for Tony's Luchador (Mexican Wrestling) author event. I'm hoping to get good pictures of the scripted farce that is supposed to take place. I don't know if it will be as crowded as the times WWF wrestlers came to tour their books, but I'll let you know.

16th St. had a water main break, and it completely messes up the bus. They leave one lane open in the dominant rush-hour direction (in other words: not mine.) I got off around Irving St. because it was faster to walk at that point, but instead of going straight home, I walked down past the blockade and tried taking pictures of them working on the road. I just kept shooting until the camera was tired, and it gave me a battery warning.

Thursday night and Friday morning were consigned away to complete leisure: At home, I watched a bit of TV, and tried to do some chores around the house, then I went to The Reef for a little bit. Second floor was nice and quiet - It felt like I had the place all to myself. Kim and Corina were a little bored, so they danced around as they worked. I tried the fish tacos, and they were really good. At one point, I decided to check the rooftop, which is much more crowded because it is one of the few places in the city where people are allowed to smoke cigarettes. My plan was to get one Scotch and say hello to Brian the bartender, but soon I was roped into a few different conversations. One couple - Tony and Megan - proved very talkative. (I should take time later to go into a big discussion of the Japanese word "Amaeru" - there's a whole book by a Japanese writer explaining how Japanese people have a habit of indulging each other's childishness. I mention it because I looked behind me to see Corina taking a smoke break. I confessed sheepishly to her that "I got lost", even though I new there was no problem. She indulged me my apology, and it was a nice feeling. After all - I was sitting right next to the door - how could I possibly be lost?)

If the conversations were not so stimulating, I would have dwelled too long on the fact that Brian seemed frustrated with the clientèle - he does get tense working with big crowds, but it was more than that - he seemed genuinely annoyed. The conversation was good while it lasted, but when a particular group of people left, I found myself talking to a really drunk guy who's claim to fame was that he had returned home to DC to work on the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. Brian couldn't get the computer to access my tab from downstairs, so I paid him for the Scotch and went downstairs to drink water until they kicked me out.

Friday I indulged in a lot of extra sleep. It was nice to get the rest, but I was a little worried about throwing off my diurnal rhythms. I was on Tucker time. Which, by the way, did I mention that John and Tucker went to Europe for two weeks? I have the place to myself. I saw their itinerary, and I think it included Copenhagen, Berlin, Munich, Brussels, and Amsterdam. It sounded like a beer tasting tour, which it probably is. She mentioned another Brickskeller somewhere that is supposed to be an archrival of the one she works at here in DC.

The weather has been so nice, it's a shame to sleep so late. I made sure to get out and about for a few hours. I went to Tenleytown for dinner at Guapo's and another one of these plastic file boxes for old letters I'm trying to organize. Guapo's was full of drunken college students. I had a really good plate of slow-cooked pork with plantains and onions.

last updated 1 year ago #

4:31 PM 5/2/2007

I'm going to take this moment to remind you of some interesting blogs about Japan:

• Japundit
• C-Scout Japan
• Pink Tentacle
• Tokyomango

These are all on the sidebar over there ---->

Also, don't forget about Omniglot

But, it doesn't hurt to reiterate once in a while.

---

• Future Perfect - He's Turkish, but it looks like he spends a lot of time in Japan.

There's a new David Weinberger book: "Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder". I read "Small Pieces, Loosely Joined" (Zipf distributions, anybody?) but NOT "Cluetrain Manifesto".

last updated 1 year ago #

9:43 AM 5/2/2007

Yesterday I wrapped up work and ran off to socialize. I wasn't sure if I was on time or not - a problem on the bus can wreck your whole schedule. But despite all the uncertainty, I hit all my marks on time.

There are two buses I can take. They both go downtown from Silver Spring along 16th Street. The S4 is direct, and the S2 takes a jog around the neighborhoods between Walter Reed and Silver Spring. Notably, it travels a segment of Eastern Ave. (the MD/DC border), and Alaska Ave. (Which makes me wonder if I've been to all the State streets in DC). Well, if I'm going downtown, the Subway is the fastest - but it's also more expensive. Bus is perfect for getting to my place, and it's good for a few other places that would require a lot of walking from a subway station. So in the grand scheme of things, the S2/S4 distinction is no big deal. I wouldn't let an S2 go by in hopes of riding an S4. But yesterday they pulled a little stunt on me: I couldn't see the S4 pull up behind the S2 until I was inside the S2. Bus drivers, and the larger planning scheme in general, don't seem to understand why I ride the bus. There's this idea that I want to ride a particular bus. But, I really just want to be transported to my destination the 'best way'. Usually that's the 'fastest way'. I can't count the number of times I have resigned myself to climbing on an inferior S2, only to watch the superior S4 drive past me. I've often wanted a hand-held device that I could use to display real-time information about the buses from a few blocks away. When you plan your day, you want pertinent information, right? Well, so do I. The utter lack of pertinent information regarding the bus system has given me a kind of 'learned helplessness'. I have no faith in the schedule. Two buses that are supposed to be ten or fifteen minutes apart can show up at the same time. If they cluster like that, it means you can expect to see 20-30 minute intervals without a bus, and I find that horrifying. I am also frequently in a position to see the bus leave without me - in these cases, it is nice to know that the next one will be there in ten minutes. But if I stand at the stop waiting, it can be as much as thirty minutes - and if I go to Starbucks for a coffee, I can see the next bus drive past before I've even ordered an espresso.

When my bus reached Irving St., there was a bit of a traffic jam: I could see the police lights, but we could see through - get this - the S4 bus I just barely missed in Silver Spring (or was it an even later S4?). I was close to home, but not quite as far as I needed to go for U St. In a minute or two, I gathered that there was a protest march, and I recalled that there were supposed to be pro-immigration rallies. So I got off to take pictures. I don't know if it was worth it - I need to transfer the pictures and get a good look at them, but it felt like I mainly got shots of other photographers. The march was a bit sparse. They crossed and went up Mt. Pleasant St., and the bus was set free before I could leave the scene.

I wanted to get to L'Enfant on time, because I was expecting my friends Leah and Carolyn to show up, and they wouldn't have recognized anybody else in the group. I walked past my place and down the hill. I overtook Troy without noticing, right before we both arrived. It's a small place, and half-priced Belgian beer makes it even more popular than usual. Troy and I scanned for Valerie and Tomoko, but didn't seem them. We didn't see Stephen and Joe, who were clinging to the far end of the bar. We put our name in for a table, but it was probably going take an hour, so we stepped outside to rethink everything. As we tossed around ideas for other places to go, I was consulting my mental map, and making those mental whiteboard diagrams in my head. We were staring into space and muttering to each other when Valerie and Tomoko came walking down the hill toward us. They were waving, and I didn't see them until the last possible minute, which they seemed to think was very funny. Even one of the waitresses saw them waving. Troy was facing another direction, but I didn't have that excuse. We were looking for other friends to show up, and they were also looking for other friends to show up, so we collected our wits and made a full assault on the room. Which is how we discovered Stephen and Joe, with beers in hand. In a few minutes Leah walked in, too. Carolyn had doubts about whether she could make it, so I wasn't sure how long I could get the others to wait. We didn't have any backup plan to speak of. Everybody has a cell phone but me, so they just call each other for every minor glitch.

Everybody had their beer in hand for a few minutes and we had to keep dancing around to let servers go past. Conversations clustered to save space: Leah and I were talking with Valerie, and I had my back to the others. Suddenly, the others were ready to go, but the three of us were still sipping our beer. Leah, Troy and I all had Kasteel Triple, and Troy told me he didn't like it very much, but he downed it much quicker than we did. They all wanted to go across U St. to "Shi Sha" (gotta check on this - feels like I'm misspelling it - I think it had Xs - Shi Sha is a name for hookah, and there are the hookahs), the place with the couches and the hookahs. We said we'd catch up - It would only take five minutes to finish our beer - but I had a bad feeling. A group of five people is not likely to stick with a decision for that long.

Leah, Valerie and I arrived at Shi Sha and they weren't there. It's bigger that I expected - it used to be a firehouse, so it's like two big garage spaces with thick walls. The front windows are in place of the old fire house doors. My local firehouse is of a similar vintage and design, but this one went disused when they installed a hideous '70s modern replacement across the street. Next door is also an old car dealership that's been turned into a trendy gym. Leah pointedly mentioned to me that she has a membership to that gym and she gets the occasional guest pass, hint, hint. We did a walk-through, soaked up some hookah fragrance, and emerged back on the sidewalk more confused than ever. Valerie's phone suddenly had three missed calls. She rang Tomoko, who was down the block waving to get our attention.

Next stop was Local 18. It looks fancy, and a friend of a friend worked there for a while (maybe still, but I didn't recognize her). The Julia's restaurant used to be there (now they only run Empanada stands), and local lore tells of a pizza place before that. They have a big rooftop level, and it was too crowded to get a table. Downstairs was cool and dark. Tomoko's friend Nina appeared out of nowhere. She was a blonde Finn about my height. Now there were nine of us. I envied the big couch in the window, but Troy said it was as comfortable as a church pew. The table and the chairs were all built on a box - no legs, and no place to tuck my enormous feet. Another round of beers and some snacks arrived. I saw 'Wilted Spinach' on the menu, and I checked with Tomoko to see if she caught the meaning. She wasn't sure, so I said "Flowers wilt. When they're dying. It looks weird on a menu because it's the opposite of fresh." It was probably one of those things waiters really hate, but I needled him about the implications of 'Wilted'. As it turns out, it means cooked. In a particular way. Quick sautee with a sauce. It sounded good. I ordered it. It was good.

Nina explained her career as a jazz musician, and the studio booth in her apartment. Stephen talked about the time he was in Baghdad. Valerie talked about her impending move to Montreal. Troy and I compared notes on a crazy lady who would come into our store years ago, and Leah thought she knew who we were talking about. Everybody was fascinated that Leah was born and raised in DC - like they thought it didn't seem possible; Or that it was miraculous that she had turned out okay after such a harrowing experience. Just after nightfall, we paid the bill and the group started dissolving. Some voices called out for another exciting watering hole, but others wanted to call it a night. Tomoko discovered that the mountain of a man with the bouncer job knew a little Japanese, and proceeded to teach him Spanish. (Yeah, it doesn't make much sense to me either...)

Leah offered to lend me her copy of the British version of "The Office", so we said farewell and went back to her place. What was just a quick stop to grab a video turned into a pleasant one-hour conversation about the old gang from work, and other diverse topics. Leah moved on to another bookstore, so we don't have our afternoon walks through the park with equally rambling discussions on our way home anymore. She decorated her little apartment with masks she brought back from Mexico. She sounded a bit overwhelmed from meeting so many people at once, and I could sympathize: I met all the people we were with that night in manageable waves. Meeting a big cluster of people at a party always scrambles my brain and I mix them all up. To take advantage of my natural abilities to remember people, I need to have phased interactions in cogent circumstances: or in other words, I have to meet them one at a time. I build a mental model of a person slowly through different modes of interaction. Immediately meeting a second person seriously damages my ability to build that mental model. Writing about it helps a lot. But blogging is even better, because it doesn't sit stashed in a binding somewhere on my shelf - Valerie and Tomoko have excitedly greeted me with "We saw our name in your blog!". And, the memories last precisely because of constant refreshing. In a similar way, I'll tell a story about my sister, and she'll email me to correct my errors.

last updated 1 year ago #

5:28 PM 5/1/2007

How did it get to be 5:30 already?

I have lots of ideas to write about, but the day is rushing past me. I've got to leave here to meet Tomoko, Valerie, (and anyone else who got the invitation) at L'Enfant for yet another half-priced Belgian Beer special. That should wrap up at a reasonable hour, and maybe I'll be motivated to write when I get home. My notebooks are crammed with new notes. Something should develop from it.

I didn't forget about "Consumed" by Benjamin Barber - I've nearly finished reading it, and it made me think about a lot of things.

Also, I have a few more photos and stories from Ohio.

last updated 1 year ago #

4:53 PM 4/30/2007

last updated 1 year ago #

2:13 PM 4/29/2007

I opened up the Washington City Paper this week to see a familiar looking object in the page 3 photo. Severed electrical cables hanging in a store window. I might not have paid it much attention, except for the street address: Wilson Blvd. I don't have a copy of the paper with me at the moment, so I'll append/edit when I get back home. I didn't see the picture on their website, but there is a photo blog for Darrow Montgomery, so you can see a bunch of his work in one place. He takes pictures for a lot of the feature articles.

This is from about the same spot as the DM photo in the City Paper...

And here it is from the opposite side. I was really liking the double-exposure look of the sky in the window reflection masking the shadows of the store...

And, incidentally, I thought about this blog entry on Thursday, but only today did I know to use this long title; did the title condense from the mist of idea into the hard shell of implementation. My work computer's screen saver is set for 'My Pictures Slideshow'. I was sitting at my laptop when I looked over at the pictures flashing by - you see, it's meant to inspire me with serendipitous recall: I use all the photos from my camera (that I've bothered to upload), and among those photos are some shots I took of the time the band 'Someone Still Loves You, Boris Yeltsin' played at Olsson's. I have to thank them for the cheekiness of the delivery, even though I wasn't excited about their music...

last updated 1 year ago #

9:03 AM 4/29/2007

Well, this week has been relaxing. Returning to the office is always an odd experience. I feel the pinch of time once more. It looks like everything has been calm while I was away, and that means I can settle in a get things done in a predictable fashion, instead of run around putting out fires like a normal day.

Yesterday I slept really late. I woke up at 11am. Tucker's line: "It's been a long time since I considered 11am late." Well, today is a fairly normal day for me, and I got up at 5:45. But, never mind all that: I was missing out on some seriously nice weather. I know it rained overnight, but when I left the house it was a beautiful day. I went in search of a new electric razor. Best Buy, Tenleytown was calling my name. I waited for an H bus. People were waiting for it by the church. I wasn't going to wait there, just look at the schedule, which would no doubt tell me that I had twenty minutes or more until the next bus. A different bus pulled up - it was going some weird place that wouldn't help move me toward my destination. I looked at the schedule, and only saw weekdays. There was a blank panel on the box - was that where the Saturday schedule should have been? As the doubt propagated through my conscious mind, a young lady walked up to have a look herself. "I don't see any Saturday times - maybe this one doesn't come today." -- "No, it's right here on the bottom half. But, it's all compressed... I can barely read it." Oh. Yeah. She was right. The next H4 was in 10 or 15 more minutes. Instinct told me that I should walk 'upstream' toward 14th, or 'downstream' to Mt. Pleasant (now I think there are more frequent H8s), but everyone seemed content to wait, and I wasn't in any big hurry, and I thought this girl was striking up a conversation. Then she started calling people on her cell phone.

I pulled out my copy of "New Art City" and started re-reading some bits. I must've deliberately moved the bookmark back, because it wasn't where I left off. This helped me cope with the bus being late. I learned from overhearing cell phone girl that her name was Elizabeth. When she wasn't talking on the phone, she had her iPod in her pocket. At some point when the bus was inexplicably late, I decided to bolt. I took four or five steps when I saw the bus emerge around the corner where the road bends from the one grid system to the other older one that matches Columbia and Mt. Pleasant. I turned around and went back to where I had been standing. I remarked to 'Elizabeth': "I guess I had to threaten to leave!" She took out an ear-bud and said "Huh?"

A young couple were sitting on the bench in the bus shelter. Quite spontaneously during the wait, before our bus appeared, the woman got up and walked away. They were most definitely together. Not that I was watching them closely, but I noticed that they functioned at a mostly nonverbal level. I never heard them speak to each other, they merely shared an understanding. Probably they muttered coordinating signals to each other. They certainly sat closer than two strangers. And yet - there she went! Just up and left. In kind of a hurry, too. I wanted to read my book, but I was now involuntarily obsessed with analyzing this new development. Had I misunderstood what I had seen? Were they really together in that sense? I hypothesized that they delegated her the task of retrieving something left behind. They didn't seem to require much discussion over it. Somehow she was just triggered. It could've been a bathroom break for all I knew. She moved quickly, but didn't run. Did they have better knowledge of the bus schedule than me? Enough to budget their time better? You can never really know when those buses are going to show. And guess what? She returned in five minutes to rejoin her companion. We were all still there.

Even though no bus had shown up, more passengers continued to arrive. I got anxious enough to alter my whole agenda. Even worse, I started to sneeze repeatedly. I was people watching; starting to loose interest in the painters or 50's Manhattan. One other young woman arrived to examine the schedule. She was dressed a little like a painter. Except the sandals... you wouldn't really want to paint in sandals, but no worries. She was cute, but not happy. I am always much more fascinated by the inscrutable - in both people and ideas. Anyone a little shy - or even hostile really makes me think about existence, self-presentation, misdirection, style. This woman wasn't about to smile. Her cap covered her eyes in shadow (not such a bad idea in the brilliance of that sunlight). She had on a clean white t-shirt and khaki cargo pants - a glossy sort of treated fabric like parachute with darker stitching. I wondered whether she thought she looked ready to go paint the walls inside some house. And then, I wondered more abstract thoughts about the efficacy of imitation. Mimesis, costume and role. But that stretched out to cover much of the day. This is how I decided to walk somewhere else, and as I've already mentioned. That came to nothing. Once the bus was actually visible, my patience was renewed.

The park was a luscious green again. One advantage of the H bus is that they are practically all those newer style buses. The front it low to the ground and the seats in the back ride much higher. It might just be my imagination, but the windows seem bigger too. And with the jog through the park, along with the overall sylvan look of northwest DC, it makes for a generally more pleasant ride.

I made short work of Best Buy. It makes me wince just to go in there. I got a good deal on an external hard drive there once, and I like to pay some attention to the mobile phones, mp3 players, and cameras so I have a vague idea of what's available and at what price. I can supply you with my entire history of shaving in a handful of words: Sometime late in high school, my parents got me an electric shaver. A Norelco. It did a good job. An even shave, if not a particularly close one. I remember picking it up at the BEST catalog store in Lakeforest Mall. Could it really have lasted more than ten years, or did I get a second one? Because it did last a while, and when I went to India in 2000, I definitely had an old one that my parents bought me. India was not kind to the Norelco. Recharging it on different voltages was built into the design, but electricity has some voodoo to it, despite all those differential equations required to analyze it. My guess it that the charger/battery age in a particular way based on the 110 US voltage, then are suddenly stressed by the UK and India voltages, which tended to be 220. Soon after I got back the thing would no longer hold a charge. I could either get a new battery, or... Well, you know, they're made as cheaply as possible: It was time for a new one. When my travel companion Amanda heard me grousing about the shaver, she bought me a new one as a gift. I appreciated it, but as I've said, they're made as cheaply as possible. In fall 2004 (four year run - not bad at all), I packed it for a trip to Ohio. That was the first time I ever flew to Columbus. I've driven it so many times that flying that distance seems weird. Flying is for places like London or Seattle (done both!), but not Columbus. Of course, I don't have a car, I was taking Christina along, and she doesn't drive, so renting one was not going to help. Furthermore, I would get to drive my parent's car everywhere. So we flew. Now, while I know basically what happens to checked luggage, I wasn't expecting a bunch of guys to kick my duffel bag with steel-toed boots. I wasn't thinking about that when I packed: The bag was not full - I expected to shop for clothes at discount stores in Ohio, which I did. Well, dear reader, despite the boot attacks - my electric shaver still functioned properly. It just needed a loving touch. And to this day, after one more trip to Ohio of that sort, it still works, but only if you're willing to squeeze it while shaving to prevent parts from flying off. I had a premonition about it - I picked up a cheap shaver a few months back - didn't want to spend too much - experimented with a flat 'Remington foil' model. It buzzed, irritated my face, and cut some of the hairs. But I wasn't angry per se - the trimmer is narrower that what I had before, and works great. In light of all that, I got another Norelco. It spent yesterday charging, and today I open a new chapter on shaving my face. Oh yeah, maybe you're wondering: I have shaving cream and razor blades. Don't feel tempted to use them much. Maybe I should give them a go once in a while for practice.

Container Store caught my attention. I have those boxes of old letters that I've been meaning to organize better. There is also a big bag full of photos from my 21st century photog renaissance. I've been looking halfheartedly for a storage idea that will work for me in practice. I see things in the store that look great, then when I get them home I can't get excited about them anymore. Small solutions are going to be ineffectual, and large solutions are such a big gamble that I usually put them off forever. So since I was right next door, I thought it might be worth taking another stab at a partial 'small' solution. I got a clear box with dividers and a snap on lid. It describes itself as 'media storage' because it is the same width a DVD box is tall. I'm trying not to own many DVDs, and I already found a nice metal mesh container that I like. I've been toying with magazine storage boxes, but they create a new problem: without a flat top, I can't stack more stuff on top. Magazines on the shelf allow me to cram lots of extras in the space left over. One of my favorite things to do upon leaving Container Store is to figure out what items will go inside what other items. I put the Norelco and the chip bag clips into the clear box. Snappy.

I saw a lot of old photos when I was in Ohio last weekend. As I unpacked the box of letters at my place, I found (surprise, surprise) a bunch of old photographs. I forgot about those. They are mostly from high school. It's becoming ever more difficult to deny that I am a photographer. Even if I've never sold a photograph. There are pictures of my friends, both from school and summer camp (Johns Hopkins, CTY). If you ignore the fact that I dressed in a ridiculous fashion - the hair and clothes were enough to make my parents warn me: "You'll be embarrassed to see old photos of yourself in the future!" - we all look very awkward. I got the same feeling looking at photos of me and my cousins at an even earlier time. The fashion is almost tragic, but more than that, we are total goofballs.

In addition, I shot entire rolls of the railroad near my house in Gaithersburg. Track maintenance equipment, locomotives, freight trains, bridge reconstruction over I-270. Whatever I thought looked interesting. I rode my bike to get there, but later on I drove places to take photos. Even still, there aren't that many photos from the period, so I know that it was the rare occasion that I got shutter happy. All I can say is that I was fascinated by trains. And not because they were on their way somewhere: I wasn't really interested in going to those places, but possibility must have contributed some subtle extra dimension to it. I would probably have explained it more as an amazement that something could be so big, that network of narrow rails, criss-crossing the continent. It's a nice counterpoint to how I think about computer networks, and how they've managed to take over a big part of my consciousness.

At home I found Tucker just waking up around 2pm. That's when she made her pronouncement about waking up late. John had been calling my phone looking for Tucker. I didn't know why. He had her cell phone. Huh? Why have a cell phone if you're not in total control of it at all times? That doesn't fit the profile.

After moving all that correspondence from one box to another, I went out for a coffee. I thought I'd sit at Tryst and read a while. The weather was turning cloudy, but it was still a reasonably nice day, so sitting in that half-in, half-out space of Tryst was an inviting idea. When I arrived to find no seats available, I was disappointed, I stepped back outside to scheme on another al-fresco place to sip coffee, then I looked up at the roofline across the 18th, where I saw that people were on the roof at The Reef. I don't know why I never think of the Reef in daylight hours. They have light snacks, but I don't know if they make espresso. They probably do - but once I see the 16 beer taps and find out there's a fancy new one "Bell's Oberon" that I've never tried, I forget about coffee. Believe it or not, I went the entire Saturday without having coffee - although I did have a can of energy drink at noon. "Monster" or something like that. So I continued reading "New Art City" and ordered a chicken caesar salad. Catherine was bartending, and she is always good for a laugh - if usually a perverted and sarcastic one. Some guy asked me about my book, and we started talking about various things. He moved up from South Carolina with his girlfriend who got a job at NOAA. They had a place in Capitol Hill, but he really liked Adams Morgan. "NOAA... downtown somewhere, or in Silver Spring?" -- "Yeah, you should totally move here.. I ride the bus to Silver Spring every day, and it's faster than the subway." He said he just recently started looking into Douglass Hofstadter, and finally read "Godel, Escher, Bach". He found an article about the difficulties of translating GEB into other languages. I tipped him off to "Le Ton Beau du Marot", which is all about that, with experiments he did getting people to translate poems. It might have been someone else I talked to, but this guy also made some disparaging remark about Hegelian Dialectic, and I was stunned: "The passage in this book is going on and on about dialectics in art" - it was interesting enough, but my resolve was starting to flag. I had an Irish whiskey, and I recalled how my sister used to make cake icing by stirring powdered sugar into Irish whiskey. The flavor will forever remind me of dessert.

Back home I started working on my computer, but I didn't get much done. The sky clouded over, and everything had a gloomy light. I discovered an odd problem with my Firefox browser. It has lost the ability to save an image. Investigating further, I found that it won't save the page either. Thursday I was reformatting a book jacket to post it on the Event Calendar at work. I had to copy the image, then paste it into Photoshop. A bit tedious for the times when I have to grab a lot of stuff. So maybe I just have to reinstall Firefox, but then the problem will forever be a mystery. I really think it should have a simple explanation. I went searching through the "about:config" page, and I still haven't found anything relevant, but that's a long list. All the parameters with 'download' looked clean, but that's just a start. Maybe it's a Windows DLL or something else. I started to to worry about a virus, but the scans come up clean. So far it hasn't caused me too much trouble - I can always work around it, but I get really annoyed with a program command being available, happily running like usual, then having no effect whatsoever. The program normally knows when it is broken, and an error comes back. But with this, it ignores me and keeps going, as if the command actually worked. Maybe the files are being saved to some weird place, but three things argue against that: I saved the same image a second time, and that should have generated an overwrite error "Are You Sure You Want to Replace?"; There are default directory settings that check out; and the Download manager lists every file downloaded, but remains empty. Furthermore, the download manager had a dropdown menu with commonly used destination folders, and it is now an empty list - that's different since I noticed the problem. I have messed with the settings that seem relevant to the download manager, with no success. Am I even on the right track. As I said: I could just give up and reinstall. I started to write something, and then the laptop overheated. I wrote more in my notebook while I was out shopping, and I didn't lose much, but momentum was definitely lost.

The night ended with "All The President's Men" on PBS. I enjoyed looking at old footage of DC.

last updated 1 year ago #

9:53 AM 4/27/2007

Troy suggested we meet for drinks at the Reef. Excellent idea! I was probably going to stop by there anyway. I guess I usually go out to make friends with the bartenders. It seems novel to meet other patrons there. The last time that happened was with roommate Stacey, and Carolyn from work. That must've been back in September(!)

I walked over a little early and sat at the bar on the second floor. I know from experience that you can hang out most of the night and miss seeing people who are actually there. Troy arrived to find me, and then we were waiting for Tomoko and Valerie. Tomoko arrived and I spotted her looking around the room for us. Naturally, I chose a seat at the bar with a good view of the door, so I flagged her down. "Oi! Tomoko-chan!"

As I could have guessed, Tomoko and Valerie had arrived much earlier and didn't know about the first floor, so for them everything was shifted: They were on the rooftop thinking it was the 'second floor'. I should have made a complete survey of the premises before I sat down to drink beer. And yet, it all worked out surprisingly well. Troy and I finished our glasses of beer and followed Tomomko to the roof.

Tomoko and Valerie had a table with their friend Steven - the same guy that was with us at Bohemian Caverns last time. Troy and I made five. Troy was hoping his college roommate John would meet us, and Valerie was expecting a friend to show up too. We were all a little worried about locating them if they did arrive.

The waiter asked us about drinks, and we were all independently studying the beer list, so we didn't notice that each one of us ordered a DeKonick - the illusion of independent thinking with the comfort of conformity! They brought us a pitcher which I remember causing somebody trouble once.

[Under Construction]

last updated 1 year ago #

9:28 AM 4/27/2007

I borrowed "The Last King of Scotland" yesterday. I left the last fifteen minutes or so for later. Suspense!

Of course, it doesn't make me want to go to Africa any time soon.

When I was a kid, I had a knack for geography, and I would occasionally get National Geographic maps to put on my wall. One time I decided that Africa was a neglected area in my knowledge of the world, so I put up a map of Africa, and studied it long and hard so that I could name all the countries. Some of them have changed names since then. I memorized the spatial relationships among countries, and the city names when I could. These days someone will say "I'm from Ghana" or "I'm from Malawi" and I know exactly where they're talking about. On a map.

Uganda, along with Rwanda and Burundi was particularly interesting for how it was wedged in the middle, caught between much bigger countries. What was it about those interior places that they should be officially so distinct. Were there no such distinctions in Zaire? Sudan? Tanzania?

If you think about it, maps are a strange bargain for the knower. So much information there, but not nearly enough for real understanding. You get more than you can handle if you really scrutinize a good map, but it's so flat (literally and figuratively), because the arrangement of things on the surface of the earth is just one way of looking. The harder you look, the less you see of other truths. And, yes - you could produce other maps - sheet after sheet of alternate views. But there we go with more information. Are you sure that would be better?

last updated 1 year ago #

11:06 AM 4/26/2007

At my Aunt & Uncle's farm in Ohio, I took more than a hundred photos in a span of about ten twenty minutes. I only stopped because dinner was ready. There were sheep, barn cats, some chickens in a pen, and the Australian sheepdog.

Just mindin' my own business...

Hey, man... Are you gonna throw the toy, or what?

Now this is even better than fetching the toy...

Maybe a little interpretive dance will explain how I feel.

last updated 1 year ago #

9:02 AM 4/26/2007

I just spent the better part of an hour checking in on Olsson's. Most of my efforts were wasted, though. I usually claim an hour of telecommuting for the Email Newsletter when I take a week off. We use several different systems for "content management", and I've never been all that impressed with the extra work needed to force these systems to play nice with each other. It was more manageable when we stored the author event calendar in a database on our server, and had a script to display current results. But, it meant forfeiting any linkage to the title database that goes with the shopping cart site. They pushed us to move the calendar to their site. So, now we've exchanged a little added content for a major loss of control. The same thing happened with signed books, and bestsellers. By storing it elsewhere, we get the benefit of book jacket art and descriptive text, and we get automatic linking of books to the shopping cart. On the other hand, it becomes an order based only on book number, so we have to beg the customer to tell us when they want a signed book - the server used to flag the order as signed so we would know.

Where I work, I am the only person who knows how to do certain jobs. They are my 'exclusive domain'. This seems absurd, because to me they all seem so easy a child could do them. Not only is it unlikely that I will ever teach anybody to manipulate images, store them on the server, then write HTML tags to display them - It is also unlikely that anybody will bother to learn it after I go. Our site is not so large. I edit the pages in a text editor. One of the benefits of using a text editor is that it doesn't contribute extra junk code. I took a class on Dreamweaver, and I just couldn't get excited about it. I've seen it listed on people's resumes, and it appears to require some effort to learn, but Perl or PHP or something would work much better. You want the ability to manipulate several files at once without worrying about the details, but it's not a devil's bargain - you also have to retain the ability to obsess over details when you need to. If you're going to learn something, why not learn something with some power?

It took me some time to get to this skill level. The biggest problem at first was obscurity: The sources of information were pompous, making assumptions about what I know instead of explaining. Engineering school was a similar experience. Knowledge is some perverted badge of courage to the old men who teach it. That hard won knowledge could be disseminated freely, or guarded jealously. The knowers are vengeful - they want to exact at least as much pain as they endured. But, that's not how a non-zero sum game is played. The pain of learning has to be something you can spare your pupils - if only just a little bit.

I still remember that frustration when I teach others. I know to keep the lessons simple, reinforce the basics, and build up carefully to higher levels. But it never seems to help. I didn't even have anybody to teach it to me. I expect that all good-natured teachers reach a similar conclusion that students are spoiled and lazy - unwilling to commit the foundation of a subject to memory. So much of learning today is vocational. We want a quick fix for our ignorance. We have a specific skill we want to buy for ourselves. I'm not here to argue for liberal arts, but I think no skill can be considered in isolation, and there are times when you have to shift to a lower gear - proceed more slowly to climb the hill. You may need to work at least that hard to master a dependent skill.

The old email newsletter was built around the event calendar. It was all done on our server, so it meshed quite nicely. We moved the newsletter to Constant Contact - yet another server. I'm much happier with the list management at CC. There were just things I didn't have the authorization to do. I spend less time worrying about email lists, and spam reports. But I hate the message editor. It is stubborn and fussy. Changes require posting to server side scripts and big page reloads (They could really use some AJAX: call the server to perform incremental changes and update that part of the page with Javascript in the browser). Sitting there on a tight deadline while the page reloads each time I make a minor cosmetic change leaves me very anxious for hours afterward. I should be able to have it both ways, but because we have to collaborate, online editing is the only solution.

We also had a lot of trouble recently with character sets: One person writes the author event descriptions on a Mac, and posts them into the event calendar editor. The odd quote marks, apostrophes and em dashes store and display properly, until you try to copy them out. Then they become clusters of euro symbols and accented vowels and other junk. You can't paste those into Constant Contact - it can't deal with them.

last updated 1 year ago #

8:17 PM 4/25/2007

Today I borrowed a Japanese Movie: Warui yatsu hodo yoku nemuru - which you might know as "The Bad Sleep Well".

It's one of those Kurosawa movies that isn't about samurai. I worry that I don't fully appreciate it for that quality. I like those samurai movies - at least the Kurosawa ones, and a lot of his movies were about wartime and contemporary Japan. High and Low is one of my favorites. I have a copy of "The Emperor and the Wolf", which is a joint biography of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune. It can be annoying to read extensive descriptions of the production and storyline of films you've never seen. I guess I'll just have to see them all... - and I really like having text to support non-textual experiences. It helps sharpen the mind.

Even so, there is a particular pleasure in watching old movies. Not everybody enjoys it. It can be disappointing for someone raised on Hollywood blockbusters to see stories told another way, but enlightening also. I always have to work a little harder to sort out which character is which in a black & white Japanese movie. This one begins with a wedding reception, and a group of about fifteen reporters is trying to cover a story on business corruption involving some of the guests. Police detectives are there to arrest someone, but have to wait for the right moment. Start with a banquet room full of people all dressed the same, and a confused flow of attention to as-yet unremarkable players giving toasts and speeches. It's a lot to keep track of. Have I been a victim of plot oversimplification in mass media? Consider a typical television sitcom: A core group of about five people, with additional characters making clear entrances and cogent transactions. Maybe I've been intentionally handicapped so that I cannot follow complex scenarios like an international war on terrorism or electoral politics either.

last updated 1 year ago #

3:24 PM 4/25/2007

I have a quick complaint about Photoshop. Maybe I just need to dig out the manual, but I have found that figuring it out yourself can be a more rewarding exercise sometimes.

As with many programs, PS allows you to record, edit and play back Macros. Don't want to memorize the steps to do something you do frequently, but you still want to execute it precisely every time? Store the sequence as a macro. PS calls them "Actions". One of the preset actions is called "Sepia Toning". You can guess what that does. I recorded a handy one to rotate a picture left 90 degrees, close and then save. I make sure to take all my sideways photos with the trigger end of the camera pointing up, and that action puts it back in the desired orientation. I encountered a problem: I take pictures both ways, so I can't simply rotate every picture. It would be nice to select the images I want and have them all rotated. That action combined with the "Batch" command offers me this power. I knew about all these pieces, and one day I put them together: I selected a bunch of sideways photos that needed to be rotated, I brought up the Batch dialog, set all the controls and let her rip.

It didn't quite work.

Each picture opened and rotated, then the Save As dialog box popped up, waiting for me to click OK. Well, I don't want to click OK. I feel that by running the action in batch mode, I have explicitly OK'd every single image. That's what batch mode means. What else could it possibly be for. I can already open several files at once, rotate each one with a function key I programmed, then confront the Save As dialog when I close the file. I don't need any special mode to do that. I'm perfectly capable of operating in manual mode.

This is where we get to the problem of control semantics in human-computer interfaces. Follow along with me here - you'll love it: In Batch, you specify the action to be performed, the source of the files (selected items in the file browser is an option), some opening options that don't affect me, and then the destination. I want to overwrite the files in place. "No Action" is an option, "Save and Close" is an option, and "Folder" is an option. "Folder" would suck - I want to put the modified file back where it was. The other two aren't so hot, but one of them has to be right. "Save and Close" sounds like the way to go - except that my recorded macro both saves and closes. So, I'm left with "No Action". The Batch processor doesn't need to bother because my little action script does the deed. And, that didn't work. Every time, I had to click OK.

Oh, here we go - I though that I made this work once before the great disk crash of 2005, but I never figured out how I did it: Batch offers to save and close, so don't include those in the action script. At first I thought it would do the same thing, so I was reluctant to try it. Eventually I convinced myself that there were no other choices left.

But, even now that I made it work, my complaint is still valid: This expensive, carefully crafted piece of software did nothing to assure me that one way of saving would wait for my input while another way would not. I wouldn't know to make the distinction, and nothing visible marks the difference. They are both only indicated as "save and close". While we're being explicit about what steps go into an action, I expect to have to supply my own save and close, but the only version available for me to supply is the interactive one. I want to "interact" with the computer as infrequently as I can get away with. I think of my computer as some sort of flying monkey that runs off to do my bidding in cyberspace. Any extra interaction robs precious time I could use for something else. (yes, I would probably just use the time for watching television, but that's not the point!)

Do you think the manual would have been any help here?

last updated 1 year ago #

8:29 PM 4/24/2007

Tonight I'm back home. It's been a quick four days and I've fallen behind in everything. I got back around four, spent some time unpacking, took a walk, read for a bit, took a nap, then remembered that I was supposed to call and tell my parents that I made it home safe. They say the cat (my sister's cat) looked around the house for me and was disappointed when she couldn't find me. So a word or two on the pet situation:

Back in 1995, my sister Vanessa was living in Russia - as she has for most of the time since - but that summer I was 23 years old and still living with my parents in Maryland. She breezed into town with a job teaching at GW. She has spent enough time in Russia to qualify to teach first-year Russian. There were also these basketball players the school recruited, and they didn't know enough English to get by, so she had to teach them a hodgepodge of subjects. We found an apartment and moved in together. I was taking Japanese classes at GW back then, and the departments were down the hall from each other. Convenient. She also brought along a new cat - Brunhilde - about a year old, probably less. She was - and still is - a perfectly black cat, with all her claws. They only spent a year here. The GW job did not renew, and Vanessa found something to do back in St. Petersburg. The facts of her life are irrelevant to the story, so I'm not making an effort to get them perfect. Suffice it to say that the cat stayed with me for one year almost eleven years ago. For about a month during the winter break, Vanessa went back to St. Petersburg for a 'vacation'. I was stuck taking care of the cat. I also remember that there was a big snowstorm in DC.

On Saturday when mom let Brunhilde out of the guest room to roam free in the house, she came running up to me and rubbed against my leg like I was an old friend. Some cats are just that friendly - she is spending most of her day cooped up in a guest bedroom, so you might explain it away as 'starved for contact'. But it's also possible that she remembers my smell and that formative year we lived in this apartment in DC. There is also that month I was responsible for feeding her. Even today, when the cat couldn't find me, I realize that she might just miss having me there. But, cats largely ignore you, so it takes a while for me to get the sense that I've bonded with a cat. Is three days really enough?

Well, she isn't the only cat living at my parent's house. She's really just a recent addition.

last updated 1 year ago #

8:13 PM 4/23/2007

There's been some time lag while I've been in Ohio. It is not so easy to get a good Internet connection, and I haven't seen my parents for over two years, so it seems rude to huddle with my computer for the many hours it takes to get any work done. I brought the computer fully expecting to use it, but the real opportunities are rare when you consider that the days are packed with driving, visiting folks, eating meals, playing with cats, sorting through stuff, and sleeping it all off. It can be so quiet here, but there are still many distractions. It is barely any better than my normal life of hurry-up-and-wait. You have to program extra time into everything, so what seems like an eternity gets firttered away in short order.

I am always confronting my notions of what to do with time, and why it isn't tenable. I would never have said that I have a work ethic or a sense of propriety, and yet I just can't transplant my work habits to this place. If I were living here, maybe I would fall into a better rhythm, because I can't say that what I do at home is particularly productive. The real problem is that my easily distracted mind travels with me. Here, as there, every serious block of time is under attack. The great pressure to divide and conquer makes for an endless stream of subtasks. I can't seem to put any time into anything before there is some new urgent problem - or I get sleepy.

Saturday I arrived in Columbus. My parents were there to pick me up at the airport, but I couldn't see them. The walk from the terminal to baggage claim was crowded, and I walked past where they were. There is just something hypnotic about walking in a crowd of people all headed the same direction down an enormous corridor. I didn't realize it, but the whole way I was trying to weave my way through the people. They were spaced out in such a way that you couldn't slip between any two, but there was no room left on the sides either. Most people have rolling luggage, and when they alter course the suitcases become a hazard if I want to maintain my pace. Is it any wonder I try to stay away from places with crowds?

My parents must not have known that I would check a bag, but who knows where they got that idea. I did pack fairly light, but I planned to do some shopping and bring back a few books from their basement, so I needed a big duffel. Without any cellphone, I had to go back upstairs and buy a coffee to make change for the phone. I didn't see a phone there, so I went back downstairs to call from a payphone. 50 cent is a lot just to ping somebody who might be somewhere nearby. I don't actually want a cellphone - I really want a handheld email client. But that's not really feasable because of the volume of email I normally get. I called my mom's cell, and it went to voicemail. I just assumed that they were on the road, running late, but she would have been ready to pick up the phone if that were true. I sat where I thought I would be most visible and pulled out a book to read. In a couple minutes they arrived in baggage claim. That's when I found out I passed by without anybody noticing - and that they didn't hear the phone ring because the crowds were too loud.

We went up to the roof of the garage and got into the car. I made three mix CDs to put in the CD changer. My dad's Jeep is secondhand, and it came with a 10-disc player, so this time I needed to bring some music that I would want to hear while driving. Last time I was here, I had to teach him (ahem! - discover, then teach...) how to pick up the signal on the car stereo. Now he doesn't even use it any more - he's got his iPod with him at all times. He could get set up to play the iPod of the car speakers, but he contents himself with the earbuds, so it's just as well that I brought some CDs. But - calamity! - the music played okay for a few tracks, then started to make clicking sounds over the track. A production defect! My CD burner messed it up. I had given those discs a cursory listen the night before and they sounded fine. But, I didn't have enough time to scrutinize them to that level, and I certainly didn't have enough time to try burning them a second time.

We had lunch at Buca di Beppo in Westerville. It was not crowded at all. We had a coupon. Monday night there are still leftovers. Perhaps I'll take care of that soon.

last updated 1 year ago #

10:39 AM 4/21/2007

Sitting in Philadelphia airport without wifi. Since I don't spend much time here, I don't feel like finding out what I would have to do. In Baltimore it seemed to be free, but I didn't feel like turning my computer on.

I have an entire hour to return to the same gate. I went looking for espresso, and I didn't see any. I'm probably better off without it.

I'm trusting Tucker to bring in my mail for the next few days. I don't know if it's a good idea. I considered asking someone else. This way was definately simpler. Tucker and John stop at home briefly between drinking bouts. Today they arrived home at 4:15am or thereabouts. My alarm was set for 5:15. I heard them thumping around and I didn't want to fall entirely back to sleep. So far my scheduling has worked out well. I was anxious about the 96 bus to Union Station. It seemed like the weakest link - on the other hand, I could have grabbed a cab if I thought the bus was running late. And, that bus turns around to go back downtown just up the street from me, so I saw it heading to the turnaround.

It's a sunny day at least, good for flying. And the bright morning light and clear skies really makes the ghetto look nice on my bus ride. At Union Station I looked at the Amtrak ticket kiosks and one of them sat there saying "Internet Explorer has caused an exception error and mus be shut down." I talked to a real human being instead. Time meshed better than I expected - maybe the bus didn't get me there as soon as the schedule promised.

The short $16 train ride reminded me that I should have begged someone to give me a ride. We are still suffering from a world where people are scattered inconveniently. I try to combat this tendancy by living in a city, but it hardly matters. The airport experience is well known, even if it seems new to me - It's not really new at all, though - there's nothing fresh about it.

last updated 1 year ago #

9:15 PM 4/20/2007

It's getting late, and I have to get up super early for a Saturday. Who knows if the Metro even runs that early: When I try to look at the PDF file of the train schedules my browser hangs. Now I see the 96 bus will take me at 6:42 to get to Union Station at 7:03, which is plenty of time for the 7:30 Amtrak, which should get to BWI with plenty of time for my 9:30 flight. The next train would have been way too late, and the next bus would have been way too late fot the train. But I love waking up at 5:30, don't you?

last updated 1 year ago #

1:00 PM 4/20/2007

Sir, I don't know why you are complaining - we offer so many poor choices!

Okay, nobody actually said that to me, but they might as well say it. I was trying not to pay $16 to sit for 26 minutes on an Amtrak train, but I eventually gave in. I found out there was a bus from Greenbelt Metro to BWI airport, but the first one on Saturday leaves at 8:45, and probably arrives ten minutes before my flight. The PDF of the bus schedule is broken on the Metro site, so I had to call. After talking with the computer for a while, I thought I was making some progress, and then all of the sudden it stopped understanding me. I had to bail out. By the time I got to the human being, I was fussy: I know where the bus goes, I just need to know the times. They seem content that it leaves every 40 minutes. That's somewhat vague. I don't see how BWI is convenient. I didn't want to have to wake up before six, but now I'll have to.

This morning I went for a walk, and I had a strange vision of the future of work. Employment is a bad deal from where I sit, and every job listing I ever saw looked flawed somehow. There are many scams out there, and it's downright difficult to tell the difference between real job postings and gray-area work-from-home pyramid schemes. I am in the paradoxical position of wanting both job security and unpredictable work. The most radical idea I had was something beyond temp work: The web would seem to allow effort to flow back and forth instantaneously like electricity flows on the grid. I think commuting is a total waste of my time, and a tragic loss of human productivity/leisure. If you think of time as a choice between work and play, you're forgetting the third option: Oblivion. Where you get neither. Is it wrong of me to want more of both work and play? And why would I want to be paid extra to spend hours in a car every day? Or maybe be paid the same ammount? Big paycheck or not, we probably need to stop encouraging that kind of dead-weight loss. Sure, a lot of people have strategies for squeezing a little bit of productivity or relaxation out of their commute, but I don't accept the bargain.

But now I have issued a challenge to myself, and it's at the core of the strange vision: Businesses that are not firms, but still somehow seem respectable. Some other format for human cooperation and endeavor, along with a stable mechanism for reward. My big handicap here is my hatred of all things marketing. They introduced all sorts of quality measurement and certification. A little ISO 9000 anybody?

[Under Construction]

last updated 1 year ago #

4:08 PM 4/19/2007

You know, becuase I haven't left my office yet.

• Miranda July has a new book
• 160 People Killed in Terrible Massacre
• My dad tipped me off to this Jazclass website from Australia.

6:00 PM 4/19/2007

I am still struggling to wrap everything up at work. It's not easy when I keep browsing the Internet and synchronizing my mail on my laptop. But I'm almost done - I just have to leave some notes for while I'm gone and clean up aroud my desk.

last updated 1 year ago #

8:55 PM 4/18/2007

Monday at work, we had a visit from Joe Murphy. He worked with us for many years, then he got a job in California. I had some warning that he would be around. It turned out that a group of people were hatching a plan to have dinner, and by dint of working late, I managed to get invited. Turn your head slightly, and we would have arrived in a parallel universe where I didn't. But as I was packing up to leave, Tony and I piled into Joe's borrowed car and we headed for DC.

The big storm had just torn through, so on our way we had to detour around a closed section of East-West highway. I suppose some large trees came down in the wind.

The motivated faction in this group had decided on 2 Amys Pizza. Somehow I never knew about this place. It's in the Cathedral neighborhood of DC, and I thought I knew my way around pretty good. There's barely one block of restaurants in that spot, but since I have no need to pass along Macomb Street anymore, I haven't looked down the block.

When we walked in, I recognized the hostess. There we are, eight current and former employees of Olsson's, assembling for dinner, and we bump into Debbie, who was briefly a cashier at the Georgetown store. Last I knew, Debbie was working at Pizza Paradiso on P St. but that was years ago. I figured she was long gone. Tony and Joe never worked with her, but she had already recognized some of our party and shuffled them back to the bar to wait for a table.

And wait we did. That place is crowded. The eight of us were trying to stay out of the way, and doing a terrible job of it. People had to squeeze past us to make it to the bathrooms. I started salivating over the plates of food landing at the tables nearby.

Being with people - even coworkers - is odd to me. There, I've said it. Work is about me at a desk with a computer. Three days a week I share the office with my supervisor. We cover the seven days of tech support between us. I leave the florescent lights off and use only my desk lamp when it's just me. (Heck, I'm alone in semidarkness in my kitchen right now.) But I bring it up because these events where I socialize with a group. Can take on vivid significance in my otherwise solitary life.

Once late at night after many drinks, I was lying next to my girlfriend and she asked me: "Why are you such a loner?" In Vino Veritas - But if you'll pay attention, you'll see that I'm not always alone by choice. Or at least the choice I did make had nothing to do with it. Being alone is a consequence I didn't look far enough into. I chose to be myself, and when I was alone, I chose to indulge in what activities were handy - the things I was happy doing alone. So I don't play team sports, I prefer cycling; skiing; long walks. I play music, but never in groups. I write to match how I think, which is about the things that seem only to interest me. Am I trying to change all this? Yes. But gradually. Otherwise, as I wrote earlier today, I feel too much like an observer on your planet.

Soldiers' stories from Iraq on PBS

When I got back home, I was revved up from the wine and the conversation. I turned on the TV. Don't hate me for this - the news was all about the Virginia Tech shooting that happened that morning. I didn't care. School shootings are serious tragedy, it's true - and this one probably the worst of its kind. But with a lot of the tragedy that strikes these days, it doesn't really affect me, does it. I can't predict it or control it, and the odds are good that I won't be a victim of it. The first day of a spectacular event is always the worst for factual revelations. 9/11 will always be my benchmark: I feel like telling the television reporters to not to rush it: Go investigate and don't come back until you can explain the truth to me. But that's the flaw in the model: They will do neither. Newspaper is your best bet for sober analysis. I don't go in for flash. I don't need my news quick, and I really don't need it wrong. Even if the lies are corrected later, somewhere deep in my head the lie will live its own life forever.

I turned to PBS and found soldiers reading poetry. The voices meant a lot to me. I don't like it that we are in Iraq as an army. I wish there was a way to be there more diplomatically. It proves to anybody looking that we have no imagination. We need a way to show others the good life, not to point guns at them. I think we could learn from each other, but we won't. We lock ourselves in this struggle, and that's the first mistake.

There was also a dimension to it - I never finished rewriting the bit I lost about Babel when my battery died - but somehow I connected the two. Is that what the filmmakers intended?

I also thought: There are times when you have to be tough to get what you want; or just what is right. But killing is never right. And, don't think it's okay to kill in response either. In this one moment the term "Peace Studies" that I had always snickered at made more sense to me. We could be the good example, or we could just go on killing. We could find a way out - we could bring everybody to some future - but, why bother? We brought guns. It seems a shame not to use them.

last updated 1 year ago #

8:26 PM 4/18/2007

I decided - and this is going to cause me a lot of trouble, mind you - to write my own blogging tool for my site. It turns out that I'm a difficult person in many ways. And one of these ways is that I turn my nose up at the existing tools. I could be like design snobs - those people with a superiority complex who can't be bothered to stoop to inferior tools - but I'm not one of those. I see the spectrum of good design / bad design, but that has nothing to do with me. I gravitate to anachronisms. Let me start designing, and maybe it will become clear.

I don't just need a blog tool. I need a database. But, now I have a database, so what I really need is a document management system. I write journal entries, with a chronological structure. But, I write a lot of essays on a particular subject, so I need keyword tagging. And, yes, all these things are available to me already, but I've used the existing tools, and they never make me happy. They never feel right 'in my hand'.

I plan to make my site amorphous: a document display system, and widgets. I hope I can make it look snazzy, but the function is for me alone. Who knows - maybe someone will want to imitate it.

Right now I'm using Inforgami and it was hand-rolled by some nerd to meet a need - perhaps we will never know what that need was. For all the textbook talk about separating content and presentation, they're always being conflated by their very nature. Like words without speech or an idea in no language, there isn't any content at all with no presentation. And the presentation you choose puts serious strain on what content will abide. They don't build buildings from a poem an architect wrote. And, you wouldn't hold a press conference in braille - but you could if it somehow became necessary - if all other routes were cut off. Infogami was absolutely free, and then it broke. The guys who run it haven't posted any blog posts in months. If it comes down (and it could happen any moment), all this writing could evaporate. I do have ways to back it up, but then it would all be chronically off-line until I took the time and effort to breath life back into it. I didn't sign any legal contracts that I know of. They are not under any real obligation to save my creative efforts. That is what convinced me to buy my domain name in the first place.

I presume that the Infogami guys did essentially what I plan to do: every page is an instance of the template, and markup text stored with a filename. There is probably one enormous flat file for my account. Plenty of file names to go around, as I explored before.

It reminds me a lot of my database textbook. And it also reminds me of a strange history anecdote I can't place where some grad students contemplated abandoning files altogether in Unix. We're saddled with the file. It's a bit late to change everyone over to another model. In the anecdote, they regret their decision. We can't go back.

last updated 1 year ago #