Superlative Tuesday

So I generally shy away from politics as a rule: I won't discuss them, I don't usually give my opinions on various candidates and issues, and keep my voting very close to my chest. This year's election is different-ish, for two reasons.

1) I'm not sure if it's because my child has reached voting age, or because the interconnectedness of the world has dramatically changed the landscape, or if I'm (heaven forbid) starting to finally resemble an adult, but I'm pretty excited about The Whole Process this year, to the point where I even put the primary election schedule up on our refrigerator at home. Perhaps this labels me as a Wonk, but I'm following things much more closely this year than ever in years past. I suspect, though, it's mainly because of

2) A certain candidate who has managed to evolve from harmless blowhard to punch line to actual potential candidate. I won't mention his name, but it rhymes with "rump" and "dump" and oh I can barely even joke about it. I personally skew on the liberal side of the ballot, but hey! I live near San Francisco, California after all. It's practically required. And I will admit to a certain amount of smugness in the early days of the process, as if anyone could seriously consider such a toxic, bigoted, self-absorbed, pandering egoist as He Who Shall Not Be Named. A little disarray can be healthy now and then. But what nobody counted on, I think, is the breath and strength of the disorder. The populist appeal of a demagogue in a supposedly well-connected, well-informed America. But he's playing the media like a fiddle, and the media happily dances to his tune, because it's great TV.

And somehow, inexplicably, inexcusably, he continues onward. It's no longer funny. It's become a train wreck, watching this self-inflating wind sock of a candidate flap around in whatever direction the breeze is blowing. And during those rare quiet moments, he manages to puff himself up and generate his own breeze. It's an ugly wind. It stinks. No matter what your political inclinations, it's blowing up trouble.

Now we're on the cusp of "Super Tuesday," a day when major decisions are made in several states, determining the future of many of the campaigns. I'm a little sad that California's primary is still way out on the calendar in June. There's a certain feeling of being last to the buffet line, after everything has been picked over by the rest of the country. But this year more than others, I'm despairing at the choices being left to us.

Dimensions

For a short while, I, like so many other reckless young men, flirted with the idea of becoming a mathematician. Luckily I was pulled from the brink by a faculty advisor and an intervention by friends who weren't so fortunate. (Intro to Organic Chemistry was their downfall. I got out just in time.) Anyhow, one of the few things I took away from those fateful months -- other than the nagging sense that I used to know how to do things like find an integral, three times a week at 8:00am -- was the notion of dimension and projection. This is hopelessly mingled in my mind with the other classes I was taking at the time, including a few philosophy courses, so Professor Polt is likely to grade me on this. I'll try to get the essay done while he's still lagged from travel.

In essence, when you're losing a dimension, you're losing information. You're seeing, in essence, the shadow-of-a-thing, projected there on the cave wall, and not the Thing itself. This came up a bit in those forgotten math courses of mine, and tragically for me, in a later computer graphics course when we talked about representing three-dimensional figures on a two-dimensional screen. (This was tragic because it threw me back into linear algebra again, after I'd worked so hard to stay clean.) You lose something, of course, when you try to show a 3D ball on a 2D monitor: the "back" of the ball is gone, flattened out and masked by the "front" of the ball. After the projection, there's no going back. The information is lost.

This is a very long-winded and rambling way for me to rant about trying to copy and paste something off my tablet, which I'm actually typing this upon, with a fingertip, which was a disaster. Left on its own, a single finger is a poor substitute for all ten working together, and I genuinely do have empathy for my fellow comp-sci graduates (and math refugees) for trying to write software that can properly derive user intent from a wobbly fingertip. I certainly got to see this in action, as I watched the poor tablet sweep through menus and settings while I tried to highlight a small section of text to email to somebody. It was a UI disaster, no matter how I tried to sneak up on it.

And that's why I broke out the keyboard, and took a second to do what I wanted with minimal fuss -- each key mapped to the action it represents, not projected down into the pitiful low-res representation. It's no wonder I cling desperately to my keyboard-enabled phone, after comic text-attempts from my wife's keyless phone "Pick up egos, molt, and very from store" is her phone's shadowy projection of "eggs, milk, and bread." The ideas are flattened out by the process, and information is lost. And personally speaking, the fingertip-on-screen barrier is annoying enough that I won't try to do that again.

I wonder if this will turn us into flat-thinkers, too? I see it, to some extent, with my eldest child. He and his friends have marathon chat sessions, but they're largely photos and short bursts of video (a technology we would have loved, back in school, no matter how much information was lost.) Text and words are a dimension that single-fingers alone are poorly situated to navigate.

Weeding Wednesday, and the Battle of the Bloat

The task at hand

This morning I made a start on one of our summer obligations: working service hours at our local swimming pool, as per our membership terms.[1] Ten hours in total of some upkeep-related activity is required, and we habitually choose the weeding/sweeping of the parking lot. Done in the early morning, it's cool and vacant, and given our normally dry summers[2], once weeded, it tends to stay weeded for the duration of our duties, only needing the weekly sweep to keep it looking nice. Little maintenance is required if you do a good job up front.

My entertainment -- and the above photo -- is provided in the form of a hand-me-down smartphone from a relative that was mouldering in a drawer (the phone, not the relative) after being outclassed and out-spec'ed by the relentless advance of its successors, marching to the beat of Moore's Law. As urged by several articles on the Internet, and after being assured at how easy it would be by following the step-by-step instructions, I did what any sensible person of my technical background would do: wasted a lunch break or two trying to unlock it, then surrendered and handed it to my teenager, invoking the ancient ritual of "Root the damn thing for your incompetent father and I'll take you out for burgers." A day later, he dropped it off in my hands with the appropriate response ("Double-Double with an extra large vanilla shake and fries") and lo, it was good. Evidently, so was the burger, shake, and fries.

I've recently been in the phone market, since my current one is now at death's door, and, as the Son gleefully points out, "It's so old the keypad is in Roman numerals." Smart-assery aside, he's right. And thanks to a good decision by the federal government, the market for phones is as broad as the Internet itself. After researching and comparing, I've bought a phone online (Arabic numerals) and picked a carrier, and am getting hooked up. I'll miss my old phone somewhat, as it's dead-simple and survived much neglect at my meaty hands, not the least of which is frequent drops (the new phone is also rugged.)

Alas, in this enlightened iEra of iSmart iPhones, even a "feature phone" as mine is classed is not free of that most dreaded of infections, bloatware, aka, crapware or (politely) handy software add-ons from your truster carrier. Thanks to the "unlock law" cited above, the vendor for my phone is actually not my carrier, so not only am I stuck with applications that I don't want, but they are applications I can't use, since they are tethered to a service I don't have.

The Son was, as expected, not impressed. "Ugh, Facebook? Twitter? What's this 'YP' thing?"

Yellow Pages, I explained, and then I had to explain the notion of a phone book[4].

"Well, can I root this for you?" he asked, angling for another free meal.

"I don't think so," says I. "It's not Android. It's a proprietary closed OS. It's not like there's factory images out there." This is me, trying to salvage my own failure with the music player setup by recycling some jargon I read. It sounded good.

The Son handed back the phone and unconsciously wiped his fingers on his shirt, like they were soiled. Pah.

What's worst, of course, is that he's right. Bloatware really is a nuisance, taking up limited memory on an already low-power device, and I bought the damn thing. Thanks to the FCC, I even was able to snip the software tether that tied it to the old carrier. But the traces remain. Unlike the logo on the faceplate, there's no easy way to pluck out all the weedy code that's infesting my new device. Given my fruitless experiments with the supposedly open Android system. I know that if I suddenly lost my senses and wanted to blow a mortgage payment on a carrier-subsidized phone, it, too, would be saturated with useless and immortal apps and "features," testaments to a business partnership that may not have any relevance to the customer.

I know this is my usual sour-graping. I basically got the new phone for free, by converting piles of loose change from my drawers into online store credit. I'm only one phone-technology generation behind the curve, and because of my inherent cheapness and utter lack-of-being-a-teenage-boy-ness, I am squarely in the boring demographic of phone plans.[5] And this whole discussion is so #firstworldproblem that in the grand scheme, it makes little difference.

But dammit, I want my space looking nice.[6] I want to weed this silly thing down. Every time I have to jog past some useless icon -- looking at you, "YP" -- it's an automatic reminder of the automatic obsolescence that surrounds us, and the silent pressure that we're all faced with to stay ahead of that march. Eventually the teenagers will grow up and move out and buy their own burgers, and then where will we be?

---

[1] Unlike the pools of my youth, which were public, this part of California at least is very big on members-only neighborhood pools, usually the nexus of the other local phenomenon of neighborhood swim teams. "Our" pool is mercifully swim-team-free, which is why this dramatic low-angle photo of the parking lot shows no cars. Swim team practice usually starts at Ungodly O'Clock in the morning. This would have been packed if we had a team based at our pool.

[2] Except this morning, when it was -- and is still -- lightly raining. This is cause for celebration in our drought-stricken state, and especially coming a few days after a patch of baking heat. I have learned to appreciate water like no other resource since becoming an adopted Californian. [3]

[3] Can you tell I've been reading David Foster Wallace lately, he of the meandering footnote?

[4] And then a digression on public pay phones, and how it was amazing to me the first time I saw a major metro-area pay phone with a massive book suspended from a don't-steal-me chain, between those thick black plastic covers. The "Appliances" section alone was easily larger than the entire directory of my hometown. The Son tuned out about 3 seconds into this digression, as I'm sure you have.

[5] You know it's bad when the salespersons look at your current phone, shudder visibly, and then point you towards the Carrier Aimed at Seniors, with Very Basic Phones containing No Sharp Edges and having Large Easy-Read Buttons on them. And you know, I really did consider it.

[6] "My" meaning "really I'm licensed to use this device and theoretically don't own it, due to some Byzantine click-through contract, oh and by the way, the carrier now owns my teenage son in perpetuity under the terms of the Family Plan." They're welcome to him, I say. He's expensive to feed, and awfully smug.

Glassholery

Faux-typecast courtesy Richard Polt's Oliver Printype font

The Manual Typewrite[r] Ideal, Rebuttal

• 'The Manual Typewriter ideal,' or why Linda Holmes thinks you are a moron (at Strikethru.net)

I appear to be an idiot

...because I simply cannot get the comments thing to work on various blogs, specifically Monda's, Joe Van Cleave's, and his grandson's (Line Writer.) It's some kind of voodoo with the embedded comments form, and I thought that it might have to do with a browser plugin -- I'm using NoScript -- but I'm unable to do this even running other browsers.

Normally I have nothing but love for Blogger, but if I can't leave snarky, irrelevant comments on your blogs, what motivation will you have to leave the same on mine?

Big Value, Small Package

Sorry for the half-letters. This is the ribbon found with the machine, and the vibrator and some of the keys still require some de-gunking. I'd also like to note that the iPhone comes with no user-serviceable parts.

The Future of the Past

Kind of random today, I should never post before the brain is fully awake. One of the most imperfect things about the Kindle is its name. I'm sure some marketing wonk was thinking "kindling a spark of excitement" or the future, or something, but books + flames = bonfires in my mind, and that never ends well. I think the Kindle is a first step, and if it succeeds, we'll see much better steps down the road. I've been a big naysayer of the small version, but this bigger one... nice.

Look out below!

Crossing the Span

• Strikethru: Keitai shosetsu showdown: Quillpill vs. Textnovel

The death of Mom and Pop

• Stacey's Bookstore closing
• Is the Library a Museum? (blog entry)
  

'Tis the season

A distracted ramble

The irony of publishing a typo-laden first draft is not lost on me.

Vanishing touch

I will blame most of the mistakes in this typecast on the fact that this is really the first time I've used Zsa Zsa for anything longer than a typing test, and so was distracted by a drying/fading ribbon and not knowing her touch. Yes, the irony is not lost on me. What is very much my fault is that Strikethru said that pinkies will go away, not ring fingers. This is a much more sensible, and a mistake I did not see until I was several lines down the page.

Curse the first-draft nature of typecasts!

• Apple keyboard
  

Moore's Gnaw

I'm becoming more aware of the natural tempo of using mechanical things. Most of my professional and personal life is spent interacting with electronics in "standby" mode, waiting for the slow human to do something. Thanks to Moore's Law, the computer that I'm typing this entry on can now wait for me over one hundred times faster than my ten-year old laptop at home. Although this is convenient for my job, it does tend to add a certain note of guilty urgency to anything I do. I try not to think about it: I have enough angst without fretting about my machines sitting around waiting-waiting-waiting for me to tickle one of their buttons.

Computer chip designers are constantly working to improve the speed and performance of their devices; I suppose they're driven by the unconscious guilt of breaking the Law, of falling behind that 12-18 month doubling benchmark. I call this guilt Moore's Gnaw: it's that constant nagging push-push-push to make it faster-faster-faster because... well, because Faster is Better, I suppose. I'm not complaining about this upgrade cycle, as there's not doubt that I can do a lot more tasks on my computer more rapidly, and as a software guy, I like being able to run all my tools in one place, in a reasonable amount of time. Retro-minded I may be, but I'm not crazy enough to want to go back to running FORTRAN batches stamped out on punch cards. Thanks, but no. What I am disturbed about is how the hungry maw of the Gnaw has eaten into our culture, and how it's changed us into an instant-consumer as well. The things we make now are designed, used, and disposed of with munching of the Gnaw in the background.

I've proselytized about mechanical machines having a "soul" which microprocessor-based machines lack. It's easy to make comparisons: this computer? Soulless. The Underwood on my right? Full of soul. My cell phone? A husk. Rotary phones? Packed with the stuff. Why? Why does something with a microprocessor on board (my car! my TV! my microwave!) very obviously have no "there" there? I've puzzled about this for a while, and then it hit me. It's been Gnawed away. The tendency to imbue all of our devices with sparkly anxiety-inducing microbrains-that-wait has caused that intangible quality of soul-ness to be eaten up. Without a soul, we don't really care as much about the things we use, or how we're using them, and this gets us on the dreaded upgrade cycle, gathering in new devices in magpie fashion: new phones every year or so, new computers to feed this-year's operating systems, new cameras that double the capacity and quality of last-year's model. Just a lot of husk-swapping, really. And I don't think we're doing ourselves any favors in the process. I am distressed by the trend/fashion statement of wearing Bluetooth headsets permanently stuck in one's ear, little blue light blinking away as the device Gnaws into the owner's brain, waiting-waiting-waiting for some human to pay attention.