Category: general

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First lines from my books and stories, presented without commentary

“I pulled the VW Rabbit off the road and killed the engine.”

“You’re probably wondering why I did this.”

“I’ve always had a great interest in reference material.”

“I love Las Vegas, and I still have trouble telling people why.”

“There were riots in the streets, people gunning down cops, escaped prisoners dragging motorists out of cars stopped at intersections and smashing their brains in the pavement, Klansmen burning crosses, kids lighting bags of shit on fire and even people eating the brains of the undead.”

“I rented a room at the Vista Hotel in DC on January 18th to celebrate Marion Barry’s crack cocaine arrest with her, found an old black and white camcorder to hide in the wall, and bought enough narcotics to keep Peru in the black for months.”

“I’d do the same thing every weekend: get high on fiber, design a robot.”

“This all started back in the summer when KFC came out with that sandwich made from an entire bucket of fried chicken, two bricks of lard, and a pound of bacon.”

“Kilimanjaro is a snow-covered mountain 19,710 feet high, which makes it almost as high as I am as I write this story.”

“I snorted another line from the Oracle 11g promotional coke mirror I kept in my desk drawer, a fine row of crushed-up Claritin-D tablets rendered into a chunky dust of near-legal speed. I’d need every milligram of go-powder I could snort, shoot, or shove to get through editing this PowerPoint deck, a status report of status reports we submitted to the status committee on change management procedures currently in status.”

“I’ve never fucked anyone in a Chuck E. Cheese bathroom, I said to the anchorman from the Channel 4 News Team, a portly ghoul of a man wearing blackface and a stylish plaid suit made of velcro and tin. “

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The Evil Pink Mistress

Trying to shake a benadryl hangover, the evil pink mistress clogging every mental channel in my head with dizziness, apathy, and the dark grey dread and doubt and apathy that logjams any serious attempts at life. I remember waking at two or three, after the cursed recurring dream of being back in high school again, decades after escaping that hell, and spending hours in the parking lot, trying to find my car, the kind of realistic dreamscape that makes me worry if my car got towed or stolen for twenty minutes after waking, until I can convince myself that the torture of being back in Bighikistan and dealing with the preppies and assholes and evangelical christian taliban groups is nothing but an evil burn pulled on my conscious mind by the demons of my subconscious.

And then I did the infamous dizzying mental math of “it’s three, and my alarm goes off until seven, and this pill fucks me up for eight hours, but maybe I can cut it in half, and then shotgun coke zeroes when the alarm tries to fracture my sleeping brain.” And benadryl knocks me the fuck out, but plays with those REM dream settings, steps on them and fucks them so I sleep too deep, and skip the important step, the one where my subconscious plays, let loose on the playground with no recess monitors, just a blank brainscape occasionally jarred by the footsteps of a nocturnal cat that wants her breakfast four hours early. I can’t do this stuff every day.

I remember a fragment of a dream last night, where I returned to 414 Mitchell, and met some guy that lived there, tried explaining to him my previous tenure at the boarding house. He looked like one of those meathead hippy types, like the old bass player from Van Halen, a stocky guy with a mullety hairdo and a Jack Daniel’s obsession, who listened to jam bands seriously and called strangers “brah”. He acted antagonizing when we first traded words, but became a guarded friend when I mentioned my residence there decades before. He asked me why I left, implying some greater community at the house now, a fraternal bonding among the roommates, a utopian kinship. I started to explain the problems when I was there, the infighting and thefts and hostility, a dozen people living a dozen disparate lives under a single roof, endlessly at war with each other like a score of micronations feuding over a single set of vital resources. His look of doubt and hurt made me realize something changed in the last dozen years, either some transformation in the membership of the house, or more likely, a social failing in my own interpersonal skills. I left without pursuing it further, went off to find whatever the dream brought me to find, a distant landscape a common trope for my unconscious rambling.

But the night I first took Huperzine A — three nights ago — the dreams were markedly different. The shrink recommended the supplement, an ancient Chinese moss said to improve cognition, and I ordered a small vial from Amazon. The tiny pill, a 200 microgram dose, went on top of the usual gabapentin (the anticonvulsant probably causing my memory problems) but with no benadryl. The night’s sleep furtive, I couldn’t tell if I was asleep or awake for hours of the slumber, except my dreamscape was completely abnormal.

My usual boring dreams always take place in familiar scenery, the parental house or the aforementioned high school, or the constant theme of working at Wards. But this time, the altered sets were completely unfamiliar, an unrecognizable stage. I worked at an Alaskan factory, far north of the Arctic circle, making guns or weapons of some sort, and had a long conversation with a secretary about the kinds of doors required in an environment where it snowed eight feet a month. Then I took a car service in a city melded from Bloomington and Denver, a strange grey Vauxhall car with mini side wings like a Star Wars rebel ship. Inside, my co-rider started massaging the driver, a therapeutic massage tracing the various degenerative disk damage a frequent driver would have. The dreams continued like this, a lucid state between life and unconsciousness, and I woke untired, but also unrested, wondering if the drug would always have the effect, wondering how I could capture these dream-slips onto paper.

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Nuke from orbit

I did my first clean installation of OSX today, which is weird, given that I’ve been using OSX Macs since 2005.

The reason I’m not in the habit of nuking a machine and reinstalling everything is twofold.  One is that I’ve bought three Macs in that time period (a Mini in 2005; a Macbook in 2007; a MBP in 2010) and each time, they were factory-new machines with the OS preinstalled.  Prior to that, all of my desktop machines were built from pieces, and involved me installing an OS on a bare drive.  Most of the time, it was Linux, and when I first started, I’d have to find every blank or blankable floppy disk in the house, bring them all to work or campus, and download all of the floppy images for SLS or Slackware, using rawrite to create disk A1, A2, A26, B1,B2,N1,N2, and so on.  And then I’d get them all home, and halfway through the 27th floppy disk, I’d hit a bad sector and it would crap out and I’d have to dig around for another AOL floppy disk I could relabel and reuse.

My two pre-Mac laptops were both Windows machines from the factory.  I reimaged the Dell laptop and reinstalled Win98 in a different partition, and had to re-re-install it a half dozen times over the years.  The Toshiba laptop stayed with XP for Tablet and never got a Linux install, which was good because when that XP installation rotted out and required re-installation, Toshiba’s factory install DVD did not work, which is fucking genius.  (It would install a version of XP and drivers that would immediately BSD on boot.  Stock hardware, stock DVD, all stock settings.)

The other reason I never reinstalled OSX is I never needed to.  Windows is like a carton of milk sitting on a kitchen counter: it works for a while, but it will eventually make you puke and shit blood if you don’t completely replace it on a regular basis.  I guess I’ve kept a copy of Windows 7 going for two years now without a reinstall, so maybe those days are over, but who knows.  (Windows 8 actually has a feature that completely reinstalls the OS, which seems like a cop-out to me.)

I screwed up my current machine, though.  I’ve been using the migration assistant to move all of my apps and libraries and prefs and files from old to new machines, and installing new versions of the OS on top of the old one.  I think it’s probably fine to do that here and there, but I think I did it too many times.  I started with 10.4 on a PPC Mac, then migrated that to a 10.4 intel Mac, then upgraded that in place to 10.5, then migrated to another machine running 10.6, then upgraded in place to 10.7 and again to 10.8.  Somewhere in there, I fucked up a library, and my machine started getting flaky.

So, reinstall.  I cloned my machine onto a USB drive, and then made a USB installer for the OS on a memory stick.  Apple doesn’t ship their OS software on physical media anymore; an install lives in a recovery partition, or you can create a USB installer, which is what I did.  The actual reinstall was painless, and a lot of my config and stuff like my bookmarks and contacts magically reappeared on the fresh install, because it just goes and grabs all of that stuff out of iCloud.  I then copied over a subset of my apps, without installing every single thing I’ve ever installed since 2005.  Most Mac apps are a single monolithic archive file, and don’t have a bunch of loose files scattered all over the place.  The one big exception was Microsoft Office (of course), which I had to reinstall from DVD.

The only major bummer about reinstalling was actually copying over my music and photo collections.  Actually installing all of the metadata for both libraries was easy enough; you just copy over the libraries.  But the copies themselves took a few hours;  there’s no faster way to sling a quarter-terabyte of data from one place to another.

The only real snag I ran into during upgrade was that after rebooting, my external monitor didn’t work.  I freaked the fuck out on this, unplugging and plugging back in things, looking at if I needed to reset the PRAM or whatever, before I finally found out that I’d knocked the monitor cable and it was just slightly ajar, half of the pins no longer connected.  When I plugged it back in, it was fine.

The machine seems to be fine now, and is running much better.  Battery life is back to the pre-Lion levels, and I haven’t seen a beachball yet.  So, knock wood.  (Aluminum, whatever.)

BTW I went to the local Best Buy last night to get a new memory stick, which is probably the first time I’ve been there in a couple of years.  The place looks pretty damn destitute.  It looks like maybe 40% of the floor stock had vanished, and they just widened the aisles and put in a big-ass customer service counter to take up the extra space.  The only thing that was still densely stocked was the pre-cashier chute of high-calorie snacks that they make you traverse before you pay.  Maybe Best Buy should stop selling electronics and media and just focus on 5-Hour Energy and candy bars.

 

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Apple TV

So last night, as an early anniversary present, Sarah got me the new Apple TV.  Not the rumored buy-a-whole-TV-from-Apple Apple TV, but the third-generation set-top box from Apple.  My first impression is that this is an interesting little piece of machinery, and will largely replace my first-gen Roku, plus do a whole lot more.

The Apple TV is a very minimalist piece of hardware. It’s black, not much bigger than a hockey puck, and has no markings or logos other than a low-visibility logo on the top, and a light on the front that isn’t visible when it’s not illuminated.  The back has jacks for power, ethernet, HDMI, optical audio, and a mini-usb that is for “service use only,” whatever that means.  Other than the dust cover on the optical audio jack, there are no moving parts; it does not contain a mechanical hard drive or a fan. The whole thing is very low-key.

That’s the weird impression I get about a lot of Apple hardware and software. You plug everything in and think “ok, now what?”  And then suddenly, it becomes irreplaceable, because it Just Works.  That’s the way the iPad was.  I got it, fired it up, and thought, “okay, I have a web browser and all of my phone’s apps on a big screen.  So what?”  And then a week later, I was using it constantly, for everything. It’s the big appeal of ubiquitous computing; there’s no dazzle or show, but it’s something that’s always there, and totally utilitarian.

So, what’s it do?  Well, I plugged it into my TV, and when it fired up, it asked me how to connect to the internet.  I’m out of ethernet in my living room, so I pointed it to my wireless router.  (My first minor complaint is having to type in the password with the remote arrow keys on an onscreen keyboard, but that’s what I get for not having a wireless password of ABCDE.)  Then it asked me for my Apple ID and password, which is what I use to buy content on iTunes.  And then, main menu.

The obvious use for the Apple TV is for consuming content you’ve purchased within the walled garden of iTunes.  So if you’ve bought movies or TV shows or music in iTunes on your computer, or your iPad or iPhone, you can navigate the menus on the slick interface and see all of that stuff, and stream it to your TV.  The unit does not store any of the content on the box itself.  (It does have 8GB of SSD storage that it uses for buffering/caching, but those details are hidden away to the user.)  Of course, if you’re living in some rural outback shithole with a 56K modem, this is an issue, but for me, it isn’t. All of this works fine, and of course you can do stuff like peruse the iTunes store from your living room, and click on things to rent or buy them.  Part of the reason for doing all of this is to make it easier for you to throw money at Apple with very simple clicks, and this part, of course, works very well.  And any of your purchases here are added to your Apple ID, so when you go to your iPad or iPhone or MacBook, you’re going to have the same purchases available.

There are a number of other non-Apple streaming services available from this menu.  The obvious is Netflix, and if you’re already paying them, you can log in and stream all of their stuff.  There’s also MLB.TV, Vimeo, NBA TV, Flickr, and the biggest win for me, YouTube, which was not available on the Roku.  I spend a lot of time watching obscure UFO conspiracy theory documentaries on YouTube, so I will now be able to watch them on the big screen.  The one missing feature, for obvious reasons, is Amazon.  That’s a huge one, since we use Amazon Prime, but the PS3 offers that now, so all is not lost.  Another minor quibble is that there isn’t a way to add any channels.  I don’t know why I miss this feature though, because the Roku has it, and has a million channels to add, all of them being garbage.

The big feature that is not as obvious is that the Apple TV will stream whatever is in your iTunes library.  This means that even if you never bought a single thing from Apple, you can still stream all of the stuff you’ve ripped or stolen off the internet, from your computer to the TV.  This is big for me because I rip a lot of my DVDs so I have crap to watch on planes. Once the Apple TV found my laptop on the local network, I had a catalog of movies waiting for me when I plugged in.  Also, a lot of comedians have been doing this Louie CK model of a $5 downloadable concert, and I have all of those sitting in iTunes, ready to roll.  My former CD collection, which is now all ripped and sitting on my hard drive, is also available. Also, iTunes works as a conduit to iPhoto, so I can look through all of my pictures on my computer on the TV.

The other interesting thing is AirPlay.  Basically, the Apple TV acts as an AirPlay receiver, and any iDevice that supports AirPlay or has a program that does can pipe its output to the TV.  This is an extremely freaky and endlessly useful feature.  For example, if I’m sitting in the living room with my iPhone in hand, looking at a baseball game in the MLB At Bat app, if someone hits a home run or whatever, they will post a recap video.  I press play, but I click a little AirPlay logo and choose my TV set, and suddenly, I’m watching the video in 42″ glory, instead of on the tiny screen.  A bunch of games and apps support AirPlay, and will pipe their audio or video to the Apple TV.  This is also cool if you have the Apple TV plugged into a receiver, so you can use your stereo’s speakers as an output destination for audio from your computer or iOS device.

What gets even more mind-blowing is AirPlay mirroring.  If I’m on my iPhone, I can mirror my entire display to the TV wirelessly, regardless of what I’m doing.  The one downer to this is that the only device I currently have that supports AirPlay mirroring is my phone; neither of my laptops or my first-gen iPad have the GPU power to do this.  But it’s interesting, because if for example, I had a company that was an all-Apple shop, I could put an Apple TV on a projector in a conference room, and when a presenter needed to connect, instead of fucking with cables and adapters, they could just beam their stuff right into the projector.  (And of course, this is password-protectable, so your neighbors can’t suddenly shoot pornos at your TV at three in the morning.)

Like I said, this thing comes with a remote, and it’s a tiny piece of shit IR thing that I will probably lose in a week.  If I was smart, I could reprogram my all-in-one that drives my DVR so it would also work the Apple TV, but I’m lazy.  Luckily, there is a free app called Remote that I already have on my iPad and iPhone, that enables me to use them as glorified remote controls.  So when I have to search for something on the TV, I can use the keyboard on the iPad to do it.  (I suppose I could also bluetooth in my real keyboard to the iPad, like if I had to type a dissertation into the Apple TV, but I’m not there yet.)

All of this works perfectly and is an entirely disruptive technology if you’re using all Apple devices and have a bunch of crap in iTunes.  If you prefer registry fondling and DLL conflicts to usability and getting work done, I have no idea if the Apple TV plays well with the Windows version of iTunes.  And I’m certain there are some hidden DRM nightmares that prevent you from doing certain things, although the system seems perfectly capable of taking torrents you pirated off the web and playing them in 1080p glory.  (Not that I would ever do that, Mr. MPAA intern scouring the net for possible lawsuits.)  If you have philosophical issues with iTunes, cloud computing, wireless networks, and not owning physical copies of media, this isn’t for you.  But for me, it’s an almost perfect solution.

There are some minor issues, like the lack of an app store or method of adding channels.  The Apple TV uses the same processor as the iPhone, and a customized version of iOS, so I would suspect some kind of app store in the future, with the ability to add games and whatnot.  (There have been some jailbreaks for the first and second generation that enable you to do some freaky stuff like this, but nothing for the new version.)  Or maybe the philosophy is to keep the platform as just a receiver, and focus on iOS and Mac apps that use AirPlay.  There’s huge potential for kick-ass games that use AirPlay as the main display and your iOS device as a controller.

Anyway, it’s a cool little present.  Now I just need to go buy a new iPad to get mirroring to work.  Maybe that’s how they’re able to sell these things for so cheap.

 

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Wonder Bread Gorging and the Ceiling Toaster Distraction

I want to mount a toaster on the ceiling.  It’s a really tall ceiling, seventeen feet or some shit like that, and there’s a thin pipe with a metal box on one end, one of those electrical boxes with four plugs on it, just staring down at me when I sit on the couch.  There’s a ceiling fan installed on the same piece of conduit, this ever-spinning thing that’s supposed to look old or antique or industrial, but it really cost something like $800 when I bought the place, which means it cost the builder 27 cents, and it’s going to cost me $14,000 by the time I make my last payment 30 years from now, except the fucking thing will be 22 years dead by then, rotting in a landfill while I make some fucker at CitiBank that much richer every month.

I stare up at this junction box, and wonder what the fuck it’s used for.  I mean, I guess if I didn’t have the ceiling fan, I’d get a big a-frame ladder and plug in one of those chain lights, the dangling ball with a bulb in it that hangs from a chain or a stay or a pull or whatever the fucking word is.  But I have this fan up there, so I can’t do that.  The cord from the light would get shredded the first time I turned on the fan, unless I creatively duct taped it and ran it down a wall.

I thought about a toaster.  I could sit on the couch and throw bread up at the ceiling.  Eventually, some of it would catch.  Then it would bake, or toast, or roast, whatever the fucking word is, and then I would put a plate under it and it would shoot a piece of toast down seventeen feet onto my plate.  I’d need to keep a catcher’s glove handy, and trap the toast so it wouldn’t ricochet away.  All of this involves a toaster with some kind of positive retention system, and careful aim, of which I have neither.

I don’t even eat toast anymore.  I used to eat it fairly often; we’d go through at least a loaf a bread a week, minus those two end pieces, “heels”, which we’d never touch, except my mom would throw the usual fit, “YOU GUYS NEED TO EAT THAT GOD DAMNED END PIECE, WHAT THE SHIT, IT’S PERFECTLY GOOD BREAD.”  Except it wasn’t.  I don’t know if I was pro-crust or anti-crust at the time, but I probably fucking hated crust when I was seven, and when you think about it, the heel of a loaf of bread is an entire side of crust.

Aside: we once visited the Wonder Bread factory, in the first grade.  It was when I lived in Edwardsburg, and I think we drove to Elkhart, although it’s possible we drove to Niles, because that’s the time of my life when I didn’t know left from right and north from south, and I assumed any drive anywhere was a drive to Elkhart, unless it was a drive to Florida or Kosovo.  Anyway, we went to the Wonder bread factory, and I now know that there are a thousand Wonder bread factories all over the country, and every different store also has its own brands, and there are regional brands, and some stores only have four kinds of bread, and others have like fifty.  But I didn’t know shit about regional brands or franchises or anything; I think I assumed that every single town had a Kroger store, and every single Kroger store contained the same damn stuff, so if you went to a Kroger in New York City, you could buy Big K cola, when of course there are no Kroger stores in Manhattan, and an Albertson’s or a Safeway or what have you is going to have different shit.  I also think I assumed that the one bakery we visited was the one place that made all of the Wonder bread in the entire country, because I had no knowledge of industrial operational scale or how hard it is to transport and ship perishables cross-country.  I just saw the big robot machines stamping out loaves of white bread, and stared in awe.

And at the end of the tour, the plant foreman or supervisor or whatever the fuck gave each of us a loaf of white bread to take home.  And I started eating that goddamn loaf of bread on the bus ride home, and it was so fresh, it tasted almost as good as eating a fresh slab of angel food cake.  (It’s also possible I was on the brink of starvation from not eating our shit school lunch.)  I must have eaten four or five slices of bread before that yellow Bluebird bus got me back to my mom’s house.  And maybe she was pissed off that I ate all of this damn bread, or maybe not, I don’t remember.  In retrospect, I think she was pissed off at everything.  Or maybe nothing.

I also remember some exercise where we all had breakfast in the first grade, like in the afternoon.  Maybe it was to teach us how important breakfast was, or it was because this was Michigan, and Kellogg’s is in Michigan, so they had an upstart cereal indoctrination program that programmed young kids into thinking they had to buy five damn boxes of cereal a week, and the same evil executives knew they’d eventually jack up the prices to seven or eight bucks a box and gradually make the boxes thinner and smaller and more full of air until eventually that $7 box of Life cereal only actually contained like twelve of those little cereal squares.  (And yes, we all believed that kid Mikey died of coke and pop rocks, or maybe it was cocaine.  We didn’t have Snopes back then.)

So everyone in the class had to vote on what cereal they wanted, and there were maybe a dozen choices, and everyone chose frankenberry or fruity pebbles or one of those cereals that’s 100% sugar and is basically a candy you’d eat at a movie theater, except you added milk and ate it with a spoon.  Nobody chose cheerios, because cheerios are basically inedible unless you added fourteen tablespoons of sugar and turned the milk into a sugary mud, which is what I had to do on a regular basis, because my mom always bought cheerios.  But on that day, I voted for frosted mini wheats.  I don’t know why.  But I think six people voted for it, including the teacher, who was some ancient woman, although ancient probably meant 24.  She seemed to agree with my choice though, saying “these are good.”

Some people had to settle for other cereals, because they lost the vote.  This one kid, I think his name was Skip, wanted some cereal we didn’t even vote on, like count chocula.  I think he did it as a write-in, and it got one vote, so no count chocula.  But on the day of the big breakfast, as the teacher poured out bowls of cereal, there was no count chocula, and Skip threw a fit, cried and bawled until tears and snot ran down his red face, screaming “I want count chocula!  I have count choclula!  I voted for count chocula!”  And the teacher tried to appease him with some boo-berry or fruity pebbles, but he wasn’t having it.  The whole thing reminded me of when someone votes for Ross Perot or some fringe libertarian.  Well, maybe not.  But I bet Skip ended up voting for Ron Paul or Ralph Nader or something.

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Ranch K-hole

Yesterday was a shit day for writing, not only because I still don’t have a project and I’m entering month three of the one month I decided to take to shore up an outline for the next book, but because my afternoon schedule was truncated by an chiropractor’s appointment, and after a couple of days on airplanes, my knees feel like they’ve been beaten repeatedly by a pro wrestling with a steroid addiction.  (I guess I that’s a redundant sentence.)

I lived in the era of bar soap, which apparently started a slow death in the late 80s, and now everyone showers with various liquid soaps, probably because, as my wife the product developer for a large commodity grocery item manufacturer tells me, the best two things to sell people are air and water, and if you can sell people less product and more water and charge them a premium, you introduce that much more money in the sacred vaults of the Cayman Islands banking system.  Anyway, back when we used bars of Zest or Dial to take showers, we’d end up with these little slivers of soap, thin remnants of a big rectangle eroded to almost nothing, but leaving enough of a pairing that my cheapskate parents needed some solution to the problem.  They bought this thing that looked like a cheap plastic version of a medieval weapon designed to cripple horses, or maybe the thing the California Highway Patrol extends across the road during a high speed chase to blow out a culprit’s tires.  The thought was that you’d impale the soap husks onto this ABS caltrop, and after you skewered enough pieces, you’d have this composite soap bar.

(Side note: this didn’t work.  The core of a soap bar somehow loses all lathering properties, and you’d only end up scraping yourself on the spikes, like some torture method devised by a splinter faction of the Catholic church in the Philippines that whips themselves bloody on Good Friday.  File this under “things my parents did to save a buck that probably permanently scarred me psychologically” and move on.)

I wish I had some functional version of this soap spike thing for my time, though.  I seem to have these few minutes here and there, and I should be using them to research a book or find new topics or new readers or new communities or whatever, and instead I spend them doing the Control-R knuckle-shuffle on my Facebook page.  Or, if I’m lucky, I dredge the web for some useless pursuit of knowledge, like trying to find the number of times each crew member shit on the Apollo 10 mission.

So, I ended up spending an hour trying to find out if anything was going on down by my land.  I own this 40 acres in southern Colorado, in the middle of nowhere, and every few months, I start the windmill lancing by pulling it up on google maps, hoping by some miracle that they put a Target store two miles away, even though the nearest town is maybe a dozen miles up the road, and has 739 residents, with a per capita income of $8,887, which is roughly the amount of money I spend annually on vitamins that do nothing except turn my piss a bright yellow.  There’s always hope that each visit will bring higher quality google aerial data.  This isn’t entirely in vein; they recently added Street View data on state road 159, the nearest paved road to my land.  Take a look at the screenshot above – if you turn onto that dirt road, drive a quarter mile, hang a left, and drive another quarter mile, you’ll be at a cul de sac with my land to the southwest of you.  But the hope is always that a combination of growth and satellite moore’s law-ing will allow me to see the trees I planted in 2007.

One thing I found recently was that a biodiesel plant opened a couple of miles from my land, in Mesita.  I drove through that city ten years ago; it’s not a “city” as much as it is a collection of a half dozen buildings, like a weird black lava rock church.  It feels like a ghost town, or maybe the outbuildings on the back half of a farm, long forgotten.  I guess in 2004, they plopped down a new prefab steel building that looks like a giant five-bay garage, and started smashing up sunflowers into oil that’s processed into diesel and purchased by the county for their vehicles.  I don’t know if this is sustainable, but it’s either that or meth, so good for them.

Another k-hole I haven’t fully fallen into is that the Southern San Luis Valley Railroad ran through this area.  I don’t know exactly where or when, but it seems like they originally had something like 30 miles of narrow-gauge rail out there a century ago, which almost immediately went bankrupt and got passed around in a game of insolvency hot potato for decades, finally being fucked into nothingness in the mid-1990s.  I do not have the patience to stumble through the geocities-level-quality web sites of railfans to piece together a history, but I am curious where the rails originally went, and if any of that is near my land.  I would drive out there and look around, but seeing as I can stand on my land and have no idea there’s a river just a thousand feet west, there’s no way I’m going to be able to find abandoned railbed that was torn out in the 1920s.

There’s also some vague connections to the UFO community in the San Luis Valley.  I think one of the cattle mutilation incidents happened in Mesita, but there’s not much in details.  There was a book, called “Enter the Valley”, that had a listing of various UFO phenomena in the area, and I used to have a copy, but it was a very open-ended list of reports, which wasn’t that meaty to me.  I have never been a huge UFO nut, because most of these reports are the same trope, the “I saw a bunch of lights, and I drove 17 miles down a dirt road, and saw some burnt grass, end of story”, and that doesn’t do much for me.

I haven’t been back to my land in five years, almost to the day.  When I lived close, I never went, because I sort of figured I’d always be able to go.  And when I lived further away, I never went, because it’s such a pain in the ass to get there.  I can now drive there, in 20 hours, which is a hell of a long haul.  Or I guess I could fly to Albuquerque, rent a car, and drive four hours; same for Denver.  (My sister in law now lives in Albuquerque, which probably means I should learn how to spell it.)  The issue is that when I’m far away from the land, I have these grand visions of building geodesic domes and digging wells and planting trees and paving roads and constructing camps and buying a dozen wrecked cars and erecting my own carhenge, but when I get there, I look at all of the desolation and nothingness and factor in that 49-minute drive to the tiny town with the nearest grocery store, and think “fuuuuuuck” and want to go back to civilization.

The idea of living on my own land is romantic, but I can’t deal with how to repair the stupid fucking dime-sized bubble that appeared at the seam of the laminated flooring in my condo; there’s no way I’ll be able to dig a well and trench out a septic field and run some power and do all of the basic crap I’d have to do to even drop a double-wide on the property.  (And I warn you in advance, please shut the fuck up about building a yurt or a haybale house or a tire house or whateverthefuck hippy idea you have about sticking it to the man by not using dimensional lumber.  They have zoning out there.  I’ve researched this far more than you’ve ever researched anything in your life. Not gonna happen.)

Okay, enough about this.  I need to dig myself out of this k-hole, put on some Hendrix, and actually write.

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Half the reason I don’t blog every day is I can’t think of titles

I miss the days when I didn’t use wordpress, because back then, my entries didn’t have titles.  I found it much easier to start brain-dumping babble onto a page when there wasn’t a blank title forcing me to somehow compose my thoughts into a single linear article or whatever.

So I just got back from a quick unannounced trip to Milwaukee, for a family funeral.  I’ve had three relatives die in the last two weeks; both of my wife’s grandmothers, and then my aunt.  I don’t like to write about family stuff, so I won’t, but there’s a lot of that brewing right now, which is not conducive to me sitting down and banging out the next great American novel.

I’m used to being in Wisconsin over the winter holidays, so being there during the end of summer seemed a little atypical to me.  Whenever I travel, I always wonder if my allergies will get better or worse, and it’s completely nonsensical.  For example, earlier this year, my allergies were horrible in the UK, bad in Hamburg, and almost nonexistent in Berlin, despite very similar weather in all three.  So I figured it would be a crapshoot on this trip, especially if I spent the majority of my time sealed in air-conditioned climates.  Unfortunately, the allergies hit me hard, and even at peak allergy drug use, I wheezed and hacked with blurry vision and reddened eyes.  Oh well – win some/lose some.

While on planes and in airports, I read two books that affected me, with different results.  First, I read that new bio of David Foster Wallace.  It was mixed, a bit fluffy, and uneven, with too much detail on dumb personal habits and not enough details on things like writing process.  I appreciated some of the information on the writing of Infinite Jest, but I swear if that dude mentioned one more time how Wallace liked to drape his wet towels over furniture, I was going to open the emergency exit of the 737 and throw the god damned thing out into the jet stream.

One of the things that bothered me the most about the book was that Wallace was undeniably a genius, which caused me far too much to think about how much of an idiot I am.  It made me wish I could go back to 1989 and not fuck around in college and get into grad school and start writing early and get an MFA when it cost as much as a large car and not as much as a large house.  There’s this huge force sitting square in front of me telling me it’s too late to do any of these things, and it’s the same force that tells me the 19 different projects I should be doing, which causes me to lock on doing any of them.  Couple this with a piss-poor reception to my latest book, and this constant thread of people around me dropping dead, and it gives me The Fear in a major way that I’m moving in the wrong direction with all of this writing shit.  It’s a demon that needs a serious beat down, and I’m just barely smacking it with some wet spaghetti.

I also read Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, and that blew my mind.  It’s a nice short 150-page dose of his craziness, with incredible density and a plot that packs a lot of disparate ideas into a little book.  It made me want to sit down and bash out something like it, except I’ve already got at least two projects underway, and no time to work on any of them.  The thing that I liked the most about this book was the title, and how it was almost a plot device in that I wondered what the hell it was, and I didn’t find out until pretty much the last page of the book.  That’s a sneaky way to pull you through a plot.

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Another Friday giant-list update

It’s Friday, and I have no concrete ideas for a larger update, yet have all of these smaller bits and pieces, so here goes:

  • I try to take notes of all of my ideas, but 90% of the time, they make no sense later.  I did this at some point in the middle of the night, and woke up to a note on my keyboard, in red pen and underlined several times, that simply said “ALIENS”.
  • I am going to see Close Encounters on the big screen tonight at the Paramount, which might be part of it.
  • It is now dark enough when I wake that I need to use the full-spectrum light.  This means soon we will reach the nighttime temperatures that involve felines fighting over who gets to sleep on which human’s head or feet to keep warm.
  • I bought this stuff called “miracle noodles”, on my latest diet rampage.  It’s this Asian noodle, like an angel-hair pasta, which has zero calories and carbs and is pretty much just strands of fiber.  They come packed in little six-ounce bags filled with water.  Most reviews said they have a peculiar smell when you first open them, until you rinse them off.  That “peculiar” smell is the smell of stale semen.  Once you rinse them off and boil them for a minute, they’re essentially flavorless, and will pick up the flavor of whatever you mix them with.
  • Another thing I got, while guilt-shopping on Amazon for anything to help me maintain weight, is this stuff called PB2, which is a powdered peanut butter which has had all of the fats and oils pressed out of it.  A tablespoon of the real deal has either 3 or 4 weight watcher points, but two tablespoons of PB2 has one point.  It tastes pretty much like the real deal, albeit the slight inconvenience of mixing it together for reconstitution.
  • I made a salad-type thing with the miracle noodles, the fake peanut butter, some rice wine vinegar and sesame oil, soy sauce, baked tofu, bean sprouts, white cabbage, and scallions.  It was surprisingly good.
  • I was never a big peanut butter person, especially since weight loss, since an appreciable amount of chunky peanut butter is about a half-day of points.  I also never liked putting peanut butter on white bread, and then the knife tears through the bottom of the bread.  And you can’t make a peanut butter sandwich on pumpernickel.  (Well, maybe you can.)
  • My strongest memory of peanut butter is getting a jar of Jif and a box of saltine crackers in a care package in college, sitting in bed between classes on the day of the first snow in 1989, looking out over a white-covered campus, listening to an Art of Noise album and making little peanut butter and cracker sandwiches.
  • I got jury duty.  Day after labor day, but it’s one of those things where you call in the night before and most of the time they tell you not to come in.  I guess this is because Oakland is so crime-free.
  • Every time I go to Rite-Aid there is a commercial playing on the PA saying that you should buy a book of the Forever stamps.  I seldom mail anything anymore, but I also never know when there will be another rate increase, which seems to happen constantly, so I almost always buy a book of the stamps.  (They aren’t really a book though; more like a sheet of stickers.)
  • I remember when first-class letter stamps were only 20 cents, from a brief and fleeting childhood interest in philately. It seemed like forever between 20 cents and when they raised it to 22 cents.  It now seems like they raise it another penny every other time I have to mail something.  I don’t know if that’s a function of inflation or my perception of time.
  • I changed themes here on WordPress, to the latest Twenty-Eleven theme, which isn’t that different.  I did change the font, though, using google web fonts.  I think it’s more readable, but I might hate it in a month.  The biggest problem with changing themes is I always fall down this k-hole of trying different themes and not knowing which one to choose, trying and trying until I eventually go back and use the first one I tried.
  • Someone on facebook started a memorial group for all of the people from my high school that have died.  I didn’t join, but I paged through it, and it’s majorly depressing.  Other than my neighbor Peter that died in a car crash when he was 18, I wasn’t particularly close to anyone who has died yet, but I definitely remember many of them.
  • As far as I know, none of my ex-girlfriends have died.  I think when that happens, I will be freaked the fuck out.
  • Two of my exes are now in Texas.
  • Sarah was in Milwaukee for a week, and while in bachelor mode, I got almost no writing done.  I would sit down to write and fall into these endless wikipedia k-holes that would keep me up half the night, googling about prison food and serial killers and space shuttle computers and obsolete video game systems.  If you ever get to the point where it’s after midnight and you’re furiously searching for a primer on set theory, just go to bed.
  • I bought one of those Apple magic trackpads, which is really nice, but it’s only bluetooth, so I can’t use it through my KVM on both machines.  I have it sitting next to my trackball and use it on the mac only, which is a waste.  I wish the entire right side of my desk was a giant trackpad, and I could use it for gestures and stuff, but I’d probably end up putting my arm or elbow on it too much.

Okay, time to get some real work done.

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What happened to hypercard?

Hypercard was released 25 damn years ago.  Has it been that long?

Back in college, I spent a lot of time screwing around on the Mac, and there were certain programs that welded that old-school 68K Classic Mac experience in my mind.  One of them was Aldus PageMaker, which was the desktop publishing program of the day. This was in the very early 90s, in the days of DOS and WordPerfect 5.1, when the most advanced publishing work you could do on the WinTel side of things was using italics.  But the Mac had this funky and advanced program that enabled you to create page layouts and cool newsletters and even newspapers.  I saw many a journalism student slaving away on those old black-and-white Apples with the tiny grey screens, tweaking layouts and dumping fantastic publications to postscript printers.  I later learned PageMaker by doing the last issue of my old zine Xenocide in it, spending months tweaking page borders and reflowing columns.

The other program I messed with endlessly was HyperCard.  This was something included on all of the old Macs, and it was incredibly interesting to me.  Basically, you created a stack of cards, and each card could have a mix of text and clip art graphics on it.  But you could also plop controls on the cards, like links or text boxes.  You could then hook up those controls to link cards to each other, or do other freaky stuff like run scripts.

This sounds pretty pedestrian compared to what we do daily on the web.  And it sounds disturbingly like PowerPoint, which is probably one of the most evil things created in the business world. But back then, in the late 80s and early 90s, these concepts were absolutely revolutionary.  And even better, the interface to HyperCard was not that intimidating.  If you could make basic art in MacPaint or write a paper in WordPerfect, you could easily create a HyperCard stack.

I remember spending a lot of time at work creating a choose-your-own-adventure game using HyperCard.  I forget exactly what it was – I think it was a game about trying to score drugs on a college campus, and you could click on various pictures to move around.  It wasn’t exactly as sophisticated as the Zork series, but it was something I could do at work, under the guise of “learning more about HyperCard.”  I never learned much about the scripting language, but I did work with some people who did pretty sophisticated stacks.  The system was widely used by education majors, I guess to develop learning tools for kids.  I guess the original Myst on the Mac was written in Hypercard, each of the worlds a Hypercard stack, interlaced with heavy-duty graphics and audio, presented with custom plug-ins.

Like I said, the web came along, and HyperCard more or less vanished.  It was one of the products developed by Claris, which was spun off from Apple and then later re-merged.  The last version of HyperCard came out in 1996, but it was one of the projects killed by Steve Jobs after his return.  You could run old versions for a while, but it did not survive the jump from OS9 to OSX.  You could get it to work in Classic emulation on newer systems, but it only worked on PPC Macs.  On today’s Intel-based machines running later versions of OSX, it doesn’t work at all.

Its one big legacy on the Mac is that the HyperTalk scripting language was adapted and added to System 7, and called AppleScript.  It’s still around in modern versions of OS X, and is even more interesting, now that you can run unix commands from within AppleScript.  It influenced the development of HTTP, JavaScript, and Ward Cunningham said the whole idea of wikis goes back to using HyperText.

To me, HyperCard was always a bit of a missed opportunity.  I think it would be very easy for casual users to create HyperCard stacks and then use some kind of tool to push them to a web site; it would potentially be easier to create high-quality interactive web sites with something like that.  There are probably many programs that you could buy to do that, but none that come with your operating system and follow its UI paradigm.  It would also be great to develop mobile apps.  I could see creating a stack, testing it out on your computer, then pushing it through a compiler and shooting out a binary that could be run on a phone or tablet.  You couldn’t write the next Skyrim that way, but for simple stuff, like interactive kid’s books or multimedia guides, it would be great.  Same thing for interactive books on the Kindle or iPad.

I know you can do all of these things with XCode or by hand or whatever, but there’s something about the ease of use by a non-programmer, and the availability on every Mac, that make this a different paradigm.  There are some conspiracy theories that Jobs killed Hypercard in order to solidify the division between creator and consumer.  I don’t know if that’s true; I think he killed it because Apple had eleventy billion disparate things going on when he returned, and none of them were getting the company closer to profitable hardware sales or a decent operating system.  It’s too bad we don’t have something like this anymore.

 

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Shut The Fuck Up About Megapixels

I hate it when people think that more megapixels are better.  They are wrong.

This has been bugging the shit out of me ever since the latest Mars lander touched down.  Once people heard the probe had a two megapixel camera, the circle-jerk started.  “HEY MAN WTF DID THEY USE THAT CAMERA MY ANDROID HAS AN 8 MEGAPIXEL NASA SUX GLGLGLGLG”

Okay, back up a few steps.  Back in the old days, a camera worked by focusing light through a pinhole and onto a sheet of film, which chemically trapped that blast of light into something you could hang on a wall (after you did some developing process to the sheet involving trays of chemicals in a dark room, or dropping the shit off at Walgreen’s and waiting a week.)  That pinhole then evolved into a glass lens or a series of lenses that could be used to optically process what image ended up on what paper.

Digital cameras do away with the film part by using a computer chip that’s sensitive to light, called an image sensor.  That image sensor is divided up into millions of little pixels.  The number of pixels determines the camera’s resolution.  So if that sensor had 1024 by 1024 little square dots that reacted to light, it would be a one megapixel sensor. The sensors aren’t typically square, though; they’re usually in some rectangular format, which is why all of the pictures in your Facebook albums aren’t perfect squares.  An average cell phone is going to have a sensor that has an active area of about 5.3mm by 4.0 mm.  A consumer point/shoot is going to be a couple times wider and taller.  Canon’s DSLRs are either APS-C (22.2×14.8mm) or APS-H (28.7x19mm).  There are full format cameras that are even bigger.  Obviously, the bigger a sensor, the more it weighs, costs, and uses power.

When you take the size of the image sensor and divide it up by the number of pixels, you’re going to get the size of each pixel.  It’s like cutting a cake.  If I take one of those big sheet cakes from Kroger and cut it into four pieces, each piece is going to have 2876 Weight Watchers points in it, and will put you into a diabetic coma.  If you have to cut up the same cake for an office of six hundred people, each piece would conveniently fit in a thimble.  (A 16×24″ sheet cake cut into 2″ squares feeds 96 people, unless you’re serving it in Indiana, in which case it will serve about two dozen people, provided nobody’s scooter batteries die during the meal and leave them stranded away from the cake.)

The iPhone 4S uses a 4.54 x 3.42mm sensor.  Its capture size is 3264×2448, or 8 megapixels.  The Curiosity uses cameras based on the Kodak KAI-2020 sensor, which is a 1600×1200 capture size on a 13.36 x 9.52 mm chip.  That means the iPhone has a pixel size of 1.4 micrometers (or microns) square, and the KAI-2020 has a pixel pitch of 7.4 microns.  With a cell phone camera, you’re “serving” far more people cake, but with the larger format camera, you’re starting with a much bigger cake and sharing it with far fewer people.  So it “serves” nowhere near as many people, but those are some giant chunks of cake.

What does the size of the pixel mean?  First, you get much more detail with a larger pixel size, because the image that’s transferred through the optics and onto the sensor is going to be captured more faithfully.  It’s why your old 110 or disc film camera took such shitty pictures, and your 35mm camera didn’t; the larger a camera’s format, the more area it had to capture the image.  A small pixel size also limits the dynamic range, or the amount of range between highlight and shadow.  If you’re ever tried to take a picture with your cell phone when an extremely bright light was in the image, and you got  a shot of a bright ball of white surrounded by darkness, it’s because your camera couldn’t handle the dynamic range between the two.  And also, the smaller the pixel, the more noise that’s added to the picture, especially in low light conditions.

That doesn’t mean all high-megapixel cameras are junk, just high-megapixel cameras with small image sensors.  If you go pick up a Nikon D800, it’s a 36 megapixel camera, but it’s got a 24 x 35.9 mm sensor, so it’s a 4.88 micron pixel pitch.  That’s not quite the 7ish of NASA’s camera, but it’s much better than the 1.4 of an iPhone.  Of course, that D800 is going to cost you three grand plus lenses, and it’s not going to fit in your pocket or make phone calls or play Angry Birds.

There are a bunch of other factors involved in the difference between the Curiosity’s cameras and the ones on your phone.  First, your phone doesn’t have to deal with radiation or temperature extremes.  Also, they shopped around for a camera in 2004, and then tested the living fuck out of it before putting it on a rocket for space.  Your camera phone probably has a couple of tiny plastic lenses, while NASA hung much more complex optics off of their units.  And their budget was slightly bigger than that of a cell phone manufacturer, so they didn’t have to pinch pennies on the sensors they used.  And NASA typically takes a bunch of pictures, sends them on the slow link back to earth, then stitches them into the much larger images that you see.

It’s a shame that people are taught to judge hardware by numbers like this, and that we’re marketed hardware based on them.  I remember when I worked at Samsung, a meeting erupted into a giant argument, because everyone but me and another guy believed — KNEW — that a higher megapixel camera was always better, because… it had more megapixels.  It’s like when people talk about how their computer is so much better because it has a higher clock speed, without mentioning that their OS is burning way more cycles running crapware and antivirus software.  The 450 horsepower in a 36,000 pound low-geared John Deere is not better than the 430 horsepower in a 3200 pound Corvette.  It isn’t.