Thanks to Rocky for the title. This morning, true to my word, I got on a train that smelled like it was on fire. (I hear the brakes are the trouble.) I didn’t see the conductor or check for rooftop nukes. It was cold outside and the T was warm and crowded - not quite as crowded as the hajj, but well-packed nonetheless.
I still haven’t bought any duct tape or plastic sheeting, or begun hoarding foodstuffs. Maybe next week…
Cool link of the day: a cartoon that could be subtitled same suit, different day. Also, Apple has released the XML schema for Keynote (their Powerpoint replacement).
It’s been a long time since I’ve done a book review. Most of the lag was for a rereading of The Lord of the Rings, which I trust every literate English-speaker on the face of the earth has read by now. Tolkien goes without reviewing. I tried to read The Shelters of Stone, but I was confused by a major POV shift on the second page, annoyed by the frequent infodumps, and bored by the end of the first chapter, so I gave up and switched to the only other novel of the ancient world on my to-read shelf.
Between the Rivers by Harry Turtledove was another one of my Buck-a-Book finds. I hadn’t heard of it elsewhere, not even on that list I once found of books based on the ideas in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. The blurb sounded more interesting to me than his usual histories of wars.
The novel is an history of Mesopotamia at the dawn of consciousness, if you consider The Origin of Consciousness to be the true history. The psychological deities of Julian Jaynes are trotted out as larger-than-life gods and goddesses, jealous of the advances men have made, most especially in the new crafts of writing and bronzeworking. Men from other cities behave as Jaynes claimed the god-possessed peoples of the ancient world behaved, while Our Heros are the fully-conscious modern men who eventually arose out of the land between the Tigris and the Euphrates.
War is endemic between the conscious men and the followers of various regional gods, but as the novel opens the gods are especially riled up and band together against the crafty people of Gibil. Our Heroes strive to find a way to elude or appease the wrath of the angry gods.
The best part of the novel is the style of speech. All the characters sound like they’ve just stepped out of the Bible, with their poetical repetition. The book is at least a quarter longer than the story itself required because each character must restate what he himself has said, or what others have said to him. It sounds terribly annoying but somehow it never is.
The cover art features a man who looks like he’s dressed for an ice age and a woman in a burqa. Neither is appropriate for ancient Mesopotamia; the book itself specifies the minimal clothing of the well-to-do of both genders, and that the poorest went naked. I know cover art is often inaccurate, but this is the first one that actually annoyed me, probably because it reminded me of my recent bad experience with The Shelters of Stone.
Another disappointment was the gods. Having them trooping around, spying on people and tossing boulders, was too fantastic for my taste. The description of god-possessed men was more intriguing than the appearances the gods made outside of people. I would have appreciated something closer to the spirit of The Origin of Consciousness.
The ending was a good twist, but would have had more of an emotional impact for me had I found the gods more believable. Instead, their flaws made them less believable - a fantasy addition to a more realistic history. Nevertheless, it was an engrossing tale.
Cool link of the day: c s s / e d g e, cutting-edge CSS layouts that will probably only work in Mozilla-based browsers. Another cool link is favelets, a collection of bookmarks that do cool things.
It’s after midnight and I haven’t even blogged yet. It’s been one of those days. Besides the usual insanity at work, I just missed a D train this morning. D trains are fast, but it takes forever for another one of those things to come along - that’s what I get for taking the alternate route. On the way home, Park Street station was unusually crowded. At first I thought it was some sort of sick fascination with the street magician, but it turned out that there was a disabled train on the tracks at Arlington. Somehow it was blocking traffic in both directions.
So I stood around and waited, and waited, and waited some more. If it were just the waiting, it wouldn’t have been so bad, but next came the smell. I think they towed the disabled train to Park Street; either that or it was in flames down at Arlington and the toxic plastic fumes drifted all the way past Boylston to us. People covered their faces with their scarves, and waited some more.
Of course, that’s the point where I started thinking about terrorist attacks. Maybe that occured to you a couple of paragraphs ago, but I was still annoyed about my bad day at work. But toxic fumes and terrorist alerts don’t scare off a real Bostonian. I paid $57 for that Combo Pass and there was no way I was walking home from Park Street. If a burning train had come through the station with Osama Bin Laden conducting and a North Korean nuke strapped to the roof, I would have taken it, as long as it was going my way.
It took me a total of 2 hours to get home - I think that’s a personal record. As an extra special bonus, my bad day at work was still going on in my inbox when I got home.
So, about that crate… My crates aren’t milk crates, they’re wooden crates with both the top and bottom open - no good for transporting milk, but marginally useful as shelves. Right now the green crates are concealing my beige plastic crates, which are also not milkcrates but the sorts of plastic crates you buy in college instead of stealing milkcrates. The milk confusion arose from the paint I used, milk paint from The Old Fashioned Milk Paint Co. Those who don’t know what color bayberry green is can look at their color chart.
Milk paint is non-toxic and doesn’t stink up your apartment, even in the winter with the kitchen window barely cracked open. I just made the happy discovery that the blah beige crates could be concealed inside the exciting green crates this weekend, and now I’ve reduced the general crate-count in my apartment, leaving more room for the rocking chair.
The rocking chair has been a floor-space problem ever since I dragged it in off the front sidewalk. The crates are also Garbage Nouveau, as are the low bookshelves. There’s also a large selection of Post-Veronica chairs, and the remainder of my decor is Late American Thrift Shop.
The point being, I’m cheap. I don’t even have a TV or a stereo, just a couple of boom boxes that date back to when they were called boom boxes. No VCR, no microwave, no cable. The only piece of furniture I bought new was a set of black wire bookshelves to match the black metal Garbage Nouveau rocking chair, unless you consider the Powerbook a piece of furniture. (The lamp was provided by Veronica.)
So yes, my furniture was discarded by other people, but it’s still nice. If it’s not nice, I paint it green and then it’s nice. I’m also picky about food - you won’t catch me cooking store-brand pasta. Barilla is the brand for me. You only live once, and there’s no excuse for anything less than the genuine Italian article.
So it never ceases to surprise me when people complain about their PC’s. I don’t mean people (like me) who get paid to work with PC’s - I mean non-geeks who buy these things and bring them into their homes and sit in front of them for large chunks of their free time. If you don’t like PC’s, or if you can’t get them to run stable, then you should get a Mac. You only live once, and you shouldn’t be wasting your time fighting with your computer, or retyping the last hour’s work that it crashed and burned. In the long run, the aggravation is just not worth the (apparent) savings. If you’re really all that poor, buy a used mac. The virtual thrift-shop is open.
Life is short. Switch.
I’ve been mocked for painting crates and mac advocacy. News at 11.
With RSS, my virtual finger is on the pulse of the A-list blogs. Real Blogger Phil Ringnalda linked Clay Shirky’s article on Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality, in which the power law is applied to blogging and most of us end up at the skinny, low-audience end of the hit distribution.
I read a couple of other articles on Shirky’s site: The Price of Information Has Fallen and It Can’t Get Up and Weblogs and Publishing, both of which deal with the devaluation of the electronic word when the market is, essentially, glutted with blogs.
Here’s a section from the original article:
Note that [the power law] model is absolutely mute as to why one blog might be preferred over another. Perhaps some writing is simply better than average (a preference for quality), perhaps people want the recommendations of others (a preference for marketing), perhaps there is value in reading the same blogs as your friends (a preference for “solidarity goods”, things best enjoyed by a group). It could be all three, or some other effect entirely, and it could be different for different readers and different writers. What matters is that any tendency towards agreement in diverse and free systems, however and for whatever reason, can create power law distributions.
I thought first of LiveJournal, in which the tendency is toward short, name-dropping entries aimed at one’s friends:
LiveJournal had this figured out years ago, by assuming that people would be writing for their friends, rather than some impersonal audience. Publishing an essay and having 3 random people read it is a recipe for disappointment, but publishing an account of your Saturday night and having your 3 closest friends read it feels like a conversation, especially if they follow up with their own accounts.
Then I thought, fanfic! This explains it all: Perhaps some writing is simply better than average (a preference for quality), perhaps people want the recommendations of others (a preference for marketing), perhaps there is value in reading the same blogs as your friends (a preference for “solidarity goods”, things best enjoyed by a group). Some fic is actually good (quality), some is famous or recommended (marketing), and the rest is cranked out to satisfy the voracious and undiscriminating appetites of subgenre fans (solidarity goods).
In another sense, all fanfic is solidarity goods - best enjoyed by the fannish group. Non-fans don’t even understand the concept, never mind value the results. Anyone, within reason, can read an A-list blog, and anyone, within reason, can read a sci-fi novel off the bookshelves. On the other hand, you have to be in a certain group to follow most LiveJournals, and you have to know and love Star Trek to read Trek fanfic.
I’m not much of one for solidarity. I’d rather write original sci-fi than fanfic. I’d rather read an A-list blog essay than a LJ about last Saturday night. I tend to write essays like this one, no matter how low my power-law standing. That’s not a matter of audience but of author preference.
Instructions are now up at Ranchero.com for using NetNewsWire to post to a MovableType blog. This will spare me the trouble of trying out EspressoBlog, another Mac-only program that lets you post to MT and (theoretically) Blogger weblogs.
On the down side, I can’t try either of these blogging interfaces yet, because both NetNewsWire (as opposed to NetNewsWire Lite) and EspressoBlog require MacOS 10.2 (Jaguar), and I’m still running OS 10.1.5 (here, kitty, kitty?). I’m getting a new 17″ iMac soon, and my folder of Jaguar-only things to install and/or do with my new Mac is growing daily.
If I weren’t getting the new iMac, I’d be getting annoyed by now. I can understand Apple doing the Jaguar-only thing with new software like iCal - Apple is the one who gets the $129.00 when someone upgrades to 10.2 - but I don’t understand why other mac developers are following in Apple’s upgrade-forcing footsteps. It used to be that mac developers went out of their way to support every version of the OS back to 7. Now no one even feels obliged to provide an excuse for not supporting 10.1.5.
I’m a geek, so I can imagine what sorts of technical difficulties would come up with supporting 10.1.5 and excuse developers for not surmounting them. What I can’t imagine is going around saying you only support 10.2 without saying why, or whether you expect to support 10.1.5 in the future. It makes the buyer nervous. Am I going to have to buy 10.3, and 10.4, and so on, just to run your software? Say it isn’t so.
Using dive into mark’s RSS 2.0 template for MovableType, I’ve added a feed with the full entries:
During my unplanned week of not blogging, my apartment got cleaner and cleaner and I got further and further behind on the blogables. Here’s my current backblog list:
That’s not as many as I thought. I may even catch up soon.
iBlog is a great idea. It lets you both blog and subscribe to RSS feeds. As far as I can tell, iBlog publishes to a .mac account, not to a pre-existing blog.
I have just one question: how long will they get away with using the Apple website’s look-and-feel? They had me fooled until I looked at the URL.
The Blog Realm has cleared up the mystery of RSS for me. Now I can tell people Rich Site Summary when they ask.
For those unfortunates without a Mac who cannot run NetNewsWire, here’s a popular RSS aggregator that runs on Windows (as well as Mac and Linux): AmphetaDesk. I’m trying it out at work now - the option to run it on a server sounds useful.
I’m still working on that full RSS feed for the blog. I’ll use RSS 2.0 for it, but it won’t happen today. For now, my feed is just extracts.