大黑狗

Axoplasm.com

2009-12-31T12:30:00.000-08:00

I've moved all my blog posts back onto my own domain, www.axoplasm.com.

I started 大黑狗 three years ago when we were living in China, as a means to circumvent the Chinese Great Firewall which had blocked axoplasm.com. At that time, blogger.com wasn't blocked (although blogspot.com sites were), so I could at least post to the rest of the world, even if I couldn't read what I had posted.

At any rate, I intended this address to be a temporary fix until we moved back from China (or the gubmint unblocked axoplasm.com, whichever) ... which event occurred some 2.5 years ago.

So. I've revved Drupal up on axoplasm.com, and that's where I'll be blogging. Again. When I actually blog. Which is practically never these days. There will be no more new posts here. All the new posts will happen at www.axoplasm.com, just like 3 years ago.

Thanks and have a joyous New Year.

Time isn’t Holding Us

2009-12-01T09:18:00.000-08:00

If a really strange kidnapper ever asked me at gunpoint to name my favorite song, I think I’d say “Once in a Lifetime”

Everyone knows this song as an anthem of midlife crisis. (“This is not my beautiful house.”) A few people pick up on the existential theme. (“Same as it ever was.”) I think they’re missing that this is a song about the irrational absurdity of natural reality, which is utterly indifferent to a human life. (“Under the rocks and stones, there is water underground.”) Byrne himself makes this connection explicit in the video, and in his twitchy marionnette dance, evoking images of voudoun possession — the rational mind completely consumed by a primal animism. He also stares in the depth of infinity, and comes away with what Milan Kundera called the unbearable lightness of being. Against the unimaginable span of infinity, the ethereal nonsubstance of our lives provides us with liberation. “Time isn’t holding us, time isn’t after us.”

For years — from 1980 until today, in fact, when I looked up the actual lyrics on the Internet — I thought that last verse was “Time isn’t holding us, time is ineffluous.” There is no such word as “ineffluous” (I checked), but there should be.

Things Orion Says

2009-10-12T10:34:00.000-07:00

dig
dada
mama
big
baby
mine
banana
apple
cheese
more
mouth
eye
that
up
down
dog
ball
bubble
no
Bob [the Builder]
duck
owie
uh oh
hi
bye

animal and machine sounds:

dog panting
cat meow
sheep baaa
cow moo
duck quack
pig snort
fish gulp
horse gallop
lion roar
peacock yelp
bird caw
car/motorcycle vroom
airplane/ helicopter zoom
beep beep

And motorists wonder why cyclists are so combative...

2009-09-18T09:15:00.000-07:00

So this morning a guy yelled at me for signalling a legal lane change.

I made a (signalled, legal) lane change into the far right lane on a one-way street. Then I noticed that on the next block, this lane was closed for construction. So I immediately signalled a change back into the lane I had been in. I noticed the car that I had just changed in front of was immediately to my left (i.e. in my line of travel), so, while signalling my lane change I gave him a little wave-wave gesture meaning “you pull ahead so I can pull in behind you.”

At which point he rolled down the window and shouted at me: “You just changed out of this lane!” (For the record, he was driving an Acura, which I’m fast learning is the preferred car make of egotists with entitlement issues.)

I knew he couldn’t see the lane ahead like I could (cyclists have good visual command of the roadway, being up at SUV height and having no blind spots). So I said, as politely as I could while being yelled at, in traffic, with only one hand on my handlebars: “The lane ahead is closed, you fucking moron.” (OK, I left out the last part).

He dropped back (!) so I changed lanes in front of him. As we passed the obstruction I pointed at the lane closure and mimed “This is what I was talking about. You fucking moron.” I don’t know how well this translated, especially that last part.

But here’s what gets me: everything I did was completely, totally legal. Courteous, even. And we were all moving at the same (downtown rush hour) speed: about 13mph. There were a great many nonlegal, noncourteous things I could have done in this situation, including ride through the lane closure past the construction equipment, cut the guy off without signalling, or ride down the lane stripes. I didn’t, but got yelled at as if I had.

On my last few blocks into work, I tried to parse exactly what the Acura guy wanted me to do, and the best I can figure is “vanish from the face of the Earth.” Not just me, specifically, but all traffic between his present location and his intended destination. It’s just that I was on a bike and therefore a) unprotected and b) available for yelling at in a way I wouldn’t have been were I in a car. So he felt he could yell at me without fear of retribution.

So this reminds me of two stories.

Story the First

When I was in elementary school, all the teachers held the boys in my grade late one day. Someone, they said, had pooped in a urinal in the boys’ room, and we would all be punished until the culprit(s) stepped forward. No one stepped forward, so we were all punished. (I forget the punishment.) Indignant, all the fifth grade boys met at recess to find the bad guy, but again, no one stepped forward. While we were meeting, some of the popular girls came over and asked what we were doing, so we told them. They started laughing: because one of them had pooped in a urinal one day. (In thinking about it now, I wonder if she — one of the really pretty teacher pet types who teachers would never imagine doing such a thing, but who was one of the chief psychological tormentors on the playground — hadn’t done this particular deed to achieve just this effect: to get some boy(s) in trouble.)

A few days later, a couple of the more-troublesome boys pooped on the floor in the girls’ bathroom. The logic was flawless: if we’re going to be punished regardless of our behavior, we might as well do the things we’re being punished for. Of course, we were all punished again, but this time we knew who did it, and why, and we felt triumphant, not indignant.

So the next time you see a cyclist blow a red light, remember this story about fifth graders pooping, and my altercation with the Acura guy.

Story the Second

At some point in the 1980s, when systemic homelessness was a relatively new problem, I recall watching a talking head TV show about the subject. One of the panelists was a lady Reaganite, someone in the Phyllis Schafly mold. Hell, it might have been Phyllis Schafly. She offered no useful solutions to the problem of homelessness beyond, basically, “people shouldn’t allow themselves to be homeless.” When pressed about confounding factors like drug addiction or mental illness, she had no quick answer and kind of got flustered. She blurted out something like “if we quit feeding the homeless, pretty soon they’ll all go away.” The subtext was obvious: they would either clean up, or die. (This might actually be a workable solution, I dunno. This story isn’t really about homelessness, so lets don’t talk about that.)

Her “solution” to homelessness was exactly the same “solution” that many noisy anti-bicycle commentators (and I imagine Acura Guy) offer: ”couldn’t you all just vanish?” This is the de facto behavior of many drivers. They cut me off, hook me while turning, jump stop signs in front of me, refuse to yield right of way. They fail to see bicycles as legitimate traffic. They may (like Acura Guy) hold this view consciously, which is bad enough, but I have enough faith in humanity to assume most of the people who honk and yell at me won’t, when pressed, actually murder me.

But most drivers hold this view unconsciously, like the woman who damn near right-hooked me (i.e. turned right across my line of travel) this very morning at the Vermont/Capital Highway intersection. She wasn’t mad at me — she didn’t even recognize my humanity enough to hate me. I was not even worth looking for. These are the people that scare me, although they don’t make me nearly as mad. I have such encounters — which could quickly injure or kill me — probably two or three times a week. I’m still alive after commuting by bike in this city for nearly a decade, because I have to make the sad assumption that I actually am invisible, unless I’m directly in front of someone’s bumper, pissing them off. I’d rather have a motorist angrily acknowledge my existence than accidently kill me. Equal road access isn’t just an abstract principle; to someone on a bicycle it’s a matter of life and death.

In the “war” between cyclists and motorists (which I think is bogus, BTW, but let’s just play along for now), cyclists “win” if they continue to exist. Conversely, motorists will “win” when all the cyclists have either given up and quit riding, or died gruesome deaths in traffic collisions. These are not morally equivalent outcomes.

So the next time you hear a pro-cycling commentator bluster about equal access to the roads, remember this story about the lady Reaganite and homelessness, and my altercation with the Acura guy.

Most People Don’t Know How To Drive

2009-09-01T12:59:00.001-07:00

By which I mean: they don't understand basic principles of operating a motor vehicle.

This has been a painful realization for me. For most of my life, most bad drivers were people who either knew the law but chose to drive otherwise, or who simply didn't know the law. It was only a tiny subset of drivers who showed no indication of, for example, the size of their vehicle, or how long it would take to bring it to a stop, or how to park. (Not parallel park, just regular park. Like the kind of parking where you just point the front of your car at the place you want to park it, and then put it in that place. I see someone stymied by this intractable puzzle almost daily.)

The last couple of years I've noticed a rash of people who not only don't know the law, they show no clue of knowing how to drive. They don't know how wide their cars are, whether their turn signals are on, how fast they're going, whether the stoplight is green, or other basic driving facts.

I don't think we need to outlaw texting, or improve road safety with hinky methods with roundabouts or somesuch. I just think that getting a driver's license should be at least as hard as passing seventh grade.

An open letter to Patrick Appel (writing on Andrew Sullivan's blog about cars and bikes).

2009-08-10T13:26:00.000-07:00

Responding to Ryan Avent on the subject of cars, pedestrians, and cyclists, Patrick tosses out this old chestnut:

but the roads for bikes wouldn't exist without the cars

Which prompted me to reply:

If this is the best argument you can muster for the continued existence of cars, I heartily endorse the alternative.

I have two bikes that frankly ride better without any roads at all. And the other two bikes would do just fine with a strip of concrete about 4' wide (OK, 8' wide for two-way traffic). You know, the kind of sidewalk you can pour for yourself on a weekend for a few thousand bucks.

Roads exist for the health and pleasure of cars, and if the “price” we pay for a car-free world is no roads ... crap, hang on, “price” isn't the right word at all. It’d be like walking into a nice restaurant and the waiter says, “please take this food off our hands for us. We’ll give you $5 if you’d just eat some of it for us.”

I think about this particular issue a lot, because every so often someone will have the brilliant flash that cyclists should “pay for their share of the road.” Let’s set aside the fact that, in Oregon at least, roads are subsidized from the general fund (so therefore cyclists pay more for the road than motorists); and let’s also aside the relative wear-and-tear a car causes a road vs. a bike; and we won’t even get into the degree of engineering required to build a road for such wear-and-tear. And the incidental costs of collisions (and resulting funerals), and the police patrols required to reduce same. Let’s just set that all aside. If the alternative to “bicycles should pay road taxes” is “let’s not have any roads,” well Option Number Two works just fine for me.

Let’s be clear: I own a car and like driving places. I like living in a civilized world where we can drive to the hospital when we’re ready to have a baby (instead of ride bikes, I guess). But this is a crap-awful argument, both against bikes and for roads.

Hot enough for ya?

2009-07-29T11:37:00.001-07:00

Orion had a rough night of it two nights ago. Jenny and I do ... OK ... in this heat but he just wasn’t having any of it. Anyway he “slept” in our bed, if by “sleeping” you mean “alternately dozing and awaking and then jumping up and down and expecting Mom and Dad to play with him.”

Last night he made it through the night. (Well, until about 4:30 am which is when he always wakes up.

No, we don’t have A/C, although yesterday we discussed getting a window unit for Orion’s room. I am not above that.

On July 29, 2008, we were wondering if summer would ever arrive in Oregon ... I recall riding the Soma up Hessler Drive and taking a picture of the brooding rainclouds over Mt. Hood.

Anyway, one of the super-fun things about having grown up with Nebraska weather (“Florida summers, Alaska winters!”) but living with Oregon weather is watching the locals fold after two days in stuff that I used to endure for weeks on end. Right now I’m remembering June to July, 1995, when I was working in Arkansas City, Kansas. There were 6 or 7 (I forget) straight weeks of weather above 95°F ... with 80% humidity ... and no nightly temperature drop (last night it got down to 72°F) ... and mosquitos ... From that perspective, Oregon gets about 8 months of weather that would qualify in Nebraska as “Spring,” 1 to 2 (noncontiguous) months of “Summer,” about 5 months of something like “Fall,” and a few weeks of “Winter” every other year or so.

The short bursts of extreme weather in Oregon are perfect. A week of 90°+ heat is just enough to remind me what “summer” feels like, but not enough to make me hate the sun. I couldn’t (and didn’t) cope with that always–74°–and–sunny stuff they get in California. I like my seasons, thank you, preferably in small polite doses. Without mosquitos.

Things my Bikes Say

2009-06-26T09:04:00.000-07:00

My mountain bike says “Explore.”

My ’cross bike says “Let’s have fun.”

My commuter bike says “Let’s stop for donuts.”

My road bike says “You ain’t tired yet.”

I just wrote this in an email and I think it’s funny

2009-06-11T13:39:00.000-07:00

“Both versions [of the graphic you requested are] encl., in JPG and PNG format. PNG has a transparent background which might be easier to work with (and a superior format generally). However Microsoft programs are notoriously fickle about using PNGs, probably because they actually make our lives easier. So I included the JPGs as well.”

An Orionese Dictionary

2009-06-10T08:09:00.000-07:00

Orionese	English
Burrrrmmm	Balloon
Mamamamm	Mother
Dadadadada	Father
Nana	Banana
Vrrrrrrrm	Automobile
Dat!	That object interests me

The Last Day of the First of My Life

2009-06-08T15:06:00.000-07:00

In most ways, it was like a dozen or a hundred Sundays of our lives before.

I woke up early and mowed the lawn. Then I cleaned the house: kitchen, bathrooms, sweep and mop; vacuum the stairs.

We went swimming in the morning, Jenny with her Master’s Group, myself in a lane nearby. I splashed out early to lift weights. While I was standing poolside a woman in the pool asked, “Is that your wife, the really really pregnant one?” “Yes,” I said. “Well, she’s amazing.” Eight-plus months pregnant and she lapped the others in her group.

We stopped at the grocery on the way home. I saw several former coworkers in the parking lot — they were waiting for a bus for a winery tour — and reintroduced Jenny. One of them said: “My God, you’re about to pop!” “Well, we’re a week away from our due date, so not quite yet.”

That afternoon I took a short randonee out Skyline to Rocky Point Road, returning through Hillsboro on Walker Road. Jenny and Michelle went shopping, I think.

I remember ascending the stairs to our bedroom that evening. The swimming, the weightlifting, the lawnmowing, the cleaning, the groceries, the 60 mile bike ride: typical Sunday stuff. But tiring. Climbing those steps took a lot of effort. I willed myself up to bed, thinking, “please don’t let that baby come tonight.” I barely had the energy to make it to bed; I couldn’t imagine having to get up and help bring a person into the world.

That person had other ideas.

Don’t Ride Your Bike on the Sidewalk (A Public Service Announcement)

2009-06-04T10:31:00.001-07:00

Yesterday saw a dad with trailer in tow on the sidewalk (presumably b/c the bike lane is “unsafe” i.e. near cars). I’m thinking to myself: “drivers won’t be looking for him and they sure won’t see that trailer.”

He’s riding parallel to me about 80-100 feet ahead and I’m trying to think of a non-nagging way to tell him to get off the sidewalk with his Inviso-Trailer and out where cars will see him.

As these thoughts pass through my skull he damn near t-bones a car pulling through a right turn — only quick brake work on his part saved his neck. Lucky for his kid that car wasn’t 1 second slower. And lucky for me that I didn’t have to tell him to get off the dang sidewalk.

The moral of the story

Don’t. Ride. Your. Bike. On. The. Sidewalk. I know it seems safer because you aren’t right next to the cars. But it’s actually more dangerous for exactly that reason.

We now return you to your regularly-scheduled Internets.

A Young Friend is Graduating High School This Week

2009-05-28T12:19:00.000-07:00

Which occasioned me to reflect that this year is my twenty year high school reunion.

The year I graduated from college:

The big summer movies were Indiana Jones & the Last Crusade, the first Batman movie (with Michael Keaton), and the Abyss. Only the Abyss used computer special effects to any great degree, and then only in one scene.
John McTiernan filmed Hunt for Red October because the Soviet Union represented a safely evergreen nuclear threat.
There were two Germanys and one Czechoslovakia.
China was a hermitic third-world country with a troublesome democracy movement.
There was no World Wide Web. The industry where I have made my career did not yet exist.
Futurists like John Naisbitt and Alvin Toffler thought industries like finance, media and publishing would lead the new Information Economy.
HS advisors said journalism was a solid career choice for the future.
Cell phones cost about $3/minute to use, and weighed about a pound.
Colleges would accept neatly-handwritten application essays.

The shocking thing about the non-profit biz

2009-05-27T11:49:00.000-07:00

The shocking thing about the non-profit biz is that we have to fight the same battles as for-profit businesses, but with both hands tied behind the back.

Imagine trying to run a business where you can’t compete with the competition (because our “competition” has the same noble goal of humanitarian assistance), you can’t cover your operating expenses from accts receivable (because the great majority of our income is legally dedicated to program expenses), and you can’t pay competitive wages (because some donors expect nonprofit employees’ motivations are better than mere money). Oh, and the people who give you money don't receive a product for it.

On the other hand, we actually have to compete for donors’ dollars in the same way for-profit business compete for sales; our offices still need heating and plumbing (which, sidebar: barely work here in our old HQ); and Mercy Corps CPAs or VPs or IT support staff (or, hell, receptionists) could just as easily get jobs for Intel or Dan and Louis Oyster Bar. Which would pay more. And have less constraints.

How long would such a business last?

Worth thinking about: this is pretty much the opposite of the way Google runs its business.

Please understand: I’m not complaining here. These are fair constraints with solid legal rationale, and every non-profit has to deal with them. But it irks me that some people seem to think nonprofits obey a different set of economic laws than other organizations.

Mercy Corps’ Four-Quarter Full-Court Marketing Press

2009-05-13T14:49:00.000-07:00

Crossposted from the new Mercy Corps Blog.

In a recent New Yorker article, Malcolm Gladwell wonders why more basketball teams don’t employ a full-court press. Instead of dropping back to your own net and defending, you press the other guys on the inbounds pass and at the mid-court line. You don’t defend 30 percent of the court (inside the 3 point line), you defend the entire court. This surprising strategy gives underdogs a fighting chance: it keeps the stronger team always on the defensive, and makes greater virtues of speed and endurance (as opposed to ball-handling and shooting). Gladwell’s article has sparked a little interest among webheads, like Martin Kelley of O’Reilly Media, who sees the web enabling a sea change in marketing and communications:

“Traditional marketing campaigns are batch: we plan out a commercial, pick its theme, hire directors, do audience testing and months later air it on broadcast television. Even low-budget nonprofits operate this way: they create a schedule of newsletters to distribute by postal or electronic mail, with carefully constructed branded templates and standardized lengths and formatting ... Many of the most adept citizens of the new web culture don’t sit down to write pre-planned blog posts. Twitter has taught us to capture the moment, to express the thought now and just move on. ... Most of the ubiquitous ‘how to make money on Twitter’ posts fail to make the difference between real-time and batch processing. If you’re real time, you’re part of a conversation and building a community that might be virtual and asychronous but is authentic in its own way.”

The rise of social networking gives organizations with underdog marketing resources (like, um, certain non-profits) a stellar chance to press the full court. In Ye Olden Days (ca. 2005), marketing was planned around calendars (monthly, quarterly, etc.) or for “windows” like Holiday, Mother’s Day, Back-to-School. But with flexible and rapid media tools like Facebook, Twitter and blogs at our disposal, Mercy Corps can substitute speed and effort for ad buy dollars. My colleague Floyd has already written about how our newish design makes this much, much easier.

But more importantly, these tools allow us to turn a liability into an asset. Mercy Corps’ world doesn’t always obey the calendar. We can’t predict when or where the next cyclone or earthquake will strike. We can’t hope that military conflicts will helpfully schedule themselves between the Dads-and-Grads and Fourth-of-July windows. But each of these events represents a unique moment to communicate, with little filtering, what Mercy Corps is doing. Not some abstract brand promise, or mission statement, but the daily reality of our recipients and fieldworkers: yesterday we delivered aid packages to displaced people in the Mardan and Swabi Districts of Pakistan. And here are the pictures. They might not be the studio-quality portraits the art director I used to be would have chosen for the Memorial Day E-Blast, but they show what is actually happening right now.

I came to Mercy Corps almost two years ago after a decade working in the for-profit sector. I’m a great believer in commerce, but I can’t recall ever getting as worked up about printers or software or t-shirts the way I am about giving blankets to cold children. I have a (perhaps naive) faith: the best way to “sell” Mercy Corps to our constituents (and trust me, non-profits have to make the same marketing and branding and sales decisions as for-profit companies, but with the hitch that we don’t actually deliver products to the people who give us money), is to talk about what Mercy Corps is doing.

Thank you, Subconscious!

2009-05-05T00:23:00.000-07:00

It’s midnight and I just woke up from a dream about a movie that Hollywood™ should totally make. It would win Best Picture, hands down. The elevator pitch:

Modern-day Rashomon with gays in the military, careers on the line, each retelling progressively more unbelievable. Did I mention: Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt make out? Topicality bonus: Abu Ghraib!

Gonna hafta take a shower

2009-04-25T21:23:00.000-07:00

It’s Saturday Night and I’m gonna hafta take a shower.

I never take showers between Friday and Sunday. Or shave. I like to get really stinky and hairy on the weekend. Then on Sunday night, just before bed, I take a long shower and shave my head and face and voila! new me for the new week.

But since Orion joined us, I’m a little short on time during the week to shower (or shave, or brush my teeth for that matter), so I generally get a shower in every-other-day. Or maybe I’ll skip two days, I dunno. This leads to weird hiccups in the schedule.

And, to tell the truth, since I quit doing the kind of work that involves sweat and dirt and weather — ten years ago this month, actually — I kind of don’t see the point. I kind of dislike bathing, when all I’m washing off is cubicle stank.

So now it’s Saturday night and I realize I haven’t had a shower since Wednesday. And I have to go to the grocery store tomorrow where there will be other people and I’m not sure I can count on all of them being anosmic.

Everyone should shave their heads. At least once in your life.

It has been twenty four days since my last blog post.

No Fooling

2009-04-01T12:49:00.000-07:00

We just launched the redesign of MercyCorps.org. Like half an hour ago. I've been itching for this change since I started ... 18 months. The project has been in the works since last summer. We've had to shelve the redesign for three emergencies, and it was postponed for Christmas last year.

As a personal milestone, this represents the largest project I've ever executed from start to finish. This is my biggest project by any measure: pageviews, content nodes, dollars transacted, good contributed to the world.

So: take a minute or two and check out the the Brand! New! Drupal-powered! http://www.mercycorps.org. Send me feedback, thoughts, comments. And please consider making a little donation.

“I cannot be a liberal:” An open letter to Andrew Sullivan

2009-03-12T16:07:00.000-07:00

“I do not have liberalism’s confidence in government activism, I do not share its collectivist instincts, I find its interest groups unappealing.”

— Andrew Sullivan, “Clinging To The Wreckage”

Neither do I, or most of my “liberal” friends. It is only in the last 30 years that “Liberalism” has come to mean this, and it is only because “conservatives” have framed the term in this fashion.

To Enlightenment thinkers, “liberal” was an a priori positive term, denoting principles like free enterprise, learned curiosity, libertarian virtue, and progress. We see vestiges of this meaning in “liberal education” or “market liberalization,” or (my favorite) the description by foreign media of American gun control attitudes as “liberal.”

Whether you cling to the Catholic Church is between you and God. But for Pete’s sake just let go of “conservatism.” It has come to mean exactly nothing other than “I identify with other people who call themselves ‘conservative.’” In the last decade it has acquired the awesome corollary definition of “seeking to alter reality through applied semantics.” That you cling to the label bespeaks the awesome power of such meta-voodoo.

Importantly, liberals never had similar angst at all, even in the very dark period in the wake of the 2004 elections. They spent plenty of time talking about how to regain political power, or the relative merits of individual programs, or the ideological purity of certain attitudes, but they seldom spent time arguing who was most worthy of the label itself, or what it meant.

Speaking for myself: since early teenager-hood I have though of myself as a “liberal,” despite having your inclinations re: government activism, collectivism and interest groups. I came to think of myself this way precisely because identified liberals saw that crocodiles like government activism and collectivism were in need of wrestling. Liberals may wrestle them badly, they may even love wrestling them, but if you just let them those crocs lie there on your patio, sooner or later they’re gonna eat your poodles.

The a-ha moment for me was when I was old enough to think rationally about supply-side economics (around age 14). By loudly and proudly espousing such transparent nonsense, American conservatives were pretty much saying: “the best way to deal with crocodiles is to call them lizards.” Then the croc would eat another poodle and some liberal would say “look, we really need to wrestle those crocodiles.” To which the conservatives would reply with a non-sequitur like “what are you, pro-crocodile? Just ignore those lizards on the patio.”

The First Album I Ever Bought with My Own Money

2009-03-03T16:35:00.000-08:00

The first album I ever bought with my own money was Men without Hats’ Rhythm of Youth. (1983)

I grew up in a rural place with square parents who listened to stuff like Floyd Cramer and Patsy Cline (not that there’s anything wrong with that...) I didn’t have a cool older brother whose taste I could emulate, in fact I barely knew people older than me at all. We didn’t have AOR in Scottsbluff Nebraska ca. 1980 you were lucky to get the Top 40 countdown on Sunday nights. On AM radio.

So I pretty much missed the 1960s and 1970s musically. In college I was shocked to learn that David Bowie had a career before Let’s Dance. I also thought So was Peter Gabriel’s first album for a long time.

In Middle School my family moved to the big city (Lincoln) which had actual top-40 radio stations and MTV on cable, and a bunch of colleges (and college radio stations) and even a few punk rockers. It was like an earthquake caused the shoreline to recede in my musical brain and this fertile delta absolutely devoid of life was exposed to any seed that might land there, and God knows what kind of crap would grow.

So I pretty much had to discover what music to like. There was a point in my life where’d I’d whiplash between Cyndi Lauper, Hüsker Dü, and Tangerine Dream, and not see anything inconsistent in it at all. I didn’t need to impress anyone with my musical taste because I had no idea whether it was cool or not.

I just knew that I really really really liked “The Safety Dance.”

I have always caught shit for my musical likes and it has never bothered me. I conquered this land all by myself. No one told me what to like or dislike.

Bicycle Accessories: Dorkiness vs. Cycling Efficiency

2009-02-11T11:55:00.001-08:00

The Most Insulting Preference Pane in the World

2009-02-06T15:48:00.000-08:00

... because the hardest part of using MySQL is turning it on? Seriously, the only GUI they cared to provide for a production grade database was a single button. This is like making cars easier to drive by writing “put hands here” on the steering wheel.

I spent three hours getting MySQL running on my Macbook today and now I’m cranky.

Postscript:

The icing on the cake is that this button doesn’t appear to work anyway. And pushing it hangs System Preferences. Although, to be fair, it does accurately reflect the state of mysqld if I start it by typing mysqld_safe & in the Terminal.

New Year 2009 at Washington Square Mall

2009-01-02T16:12:00.000-08:00

For the New Year, Jenny, Orion and I took a trip to Washington Square Mall. This marks the first time I’d been to an indoor-style mall since, I dunno, months? Years perhaps? The last time I can definitely remember visiting a mall with a roof was when Jenny and I bought matching cel phones at the Verizon in Lloyd Center the day after we returned from China. So: July 5, 2007?

I’ve made more than a few visits to Bridgeport Mall however, which despite not having a roof is definitely a mall. I’m not on some anti-consumer high horse here. I like consumer goods.

Washington Square was sufficiently crowded. But not crazy-crowded. It seemed like shops were doing pretty good business. But I couldn’t help playing a mental guessing game: which of these stores is gonna go outta business first? As much as I love the Lego store it might be hard to argue for its continued existence after another year of economic carnage. I hope Build A Bear dies before Orion learns of its existence.

Weird to imagine, also, that this particular economic activity undergirds America. And, by extension, the whole damn planet. I can’t help but wonder if the dismal performance of our retirement funds doesn’t actually reflect a realignment of fantasy to reality. Everyone talks about how many more “points” a particular market will slide — what “percentage” of pain will we endure before housing prices, stock prices, commodity prices, wages, etc. etc. resume their expected trajectory of up, up, UP!

Over the last eighteen months I have come to wonder whether the “correction” to the American economy won’t so much be fractional as geometric. As in, maybe we’re not overvalued by n percent, (where n < 100); maybe we’re overvalued by a factor of n (where n > 1).

Seeing first hand how “middle class” people live (happily and prosperously!) in places like Malaysia or China, and thinking a little bit about peak oil and other probably-not-unrelated scarcities, I wonder how much fat we can actually cut here in America.

Answer: a lot. I once knew a person who lost half her weight: she went from 300lb to 150lb. She was an entire person overweight. We might be talking about that kind of financial weight loss. If our standard of living declines by a whole magnitude, we’ll have whole different conversation about wealth and money and possessions and jobs and time and priorities. Our household budget can withstand a pay cut of, I dunno, 30% maybe. But what if we had to live on a third of what we have? Not just a third of the money but a third of the stuff: a third of the house, a third of the car, eight hours of electricity a day, a hot shower every third day.

That’s still a pretty luxurious lifestyle in most of the world.

Despite all of which, Orion really loves the mall. (He has a little more experience than I, because Jenny has an occasional Mommy Boot Camp at Lloyd Center.) Lights and people and that huge huge cathedral ceiling, perfect for games of airplane, much to the horror of onlookers (including Jenny). We didn’t spend any money on Orion at all and he had the time of his life. I hope I get to take this memory to heaven: holding my six-month-old son face-forward against my shoulder, zooming through the crowd at Nordstrom, while he shrieks for joy at the top of his lungs.

About the Snow, Randomly

2008-12-22T09:19:00.000-08:00

This much snow, right now, interbedded as it is with slippery slippery ice, would shut down any city, even the ones that own snow plows.

I am getting pretty good at this “working from home” thing. Just now I SSH’d via VPN into my work machine (which I have trained to turn itself on and off every day) and committed a bunch of files to the SVN repository that I neglected last week. I had a fine through-the-looking-glass moment when my remote box dropped me into vi for a commit message — vi in a Coda terminal window, running remotely on a desktop machine. A text editor on a desktop box running inside a terminal inside a text editor inside another desktop box. This was the WIRED magazine crap I used to dream about ca. 1994.

Driving in this stuff is like skiing. You don’t so much steer as suggest a direction to your car.

I feel especially bad for Jenny in this. Inasmuch as I am not a homebody or an indoorsy person at least I have the experience of being stormbound in a 10' x 15' hut in Alaska for a week as training. Jenny and Orion are used to being out — running, running errands, swimming, shopping — from 9am to 5pm every day.

Lately I don’t regret buying such a big house after all. Or a TV. Or the kinetic trainer Jenny bought me for Christmas (in direct contravention of our mutual “no gifts” agreement.

Kid’s Albums I Didn’t Know I Already Owned

2008-12-12T16:17:00.000-08:00

Well, Orion seems to like them, anyway...

	Dr. No Monty Norman
	On and On Jack Johnson
	The Music of... Raymond Scott
	The Latin Side of... Vince Guaraldi
	Storytellers (live) Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash
	Rushmore Especially the Mark Mothersbaugh tracks
	Flood They Might Be Giants
	One Cello x 16 Zoë Keating
	Little Creatures Talking Heads

What Bugs Me About All the Damn Bailouts

2008-12-08T08:44:00.000-08:00

What if Americans aren’t buying American cars because they aren’t buying any cars?

What if no one else on Earth is buying cars either?

What if this has nothing to do with gas prices?

What if mortgages are failing because the houses are mainly vinyl shacks built fifty miles from economically-productive cities?

What if the cost of owning a car was too great for most families, even if gas were free? (And what if gas prices went up again?) What would happen to the value of those vinyl shacks then? (And why haven’t all the mortgage-company bailouts fixed that problem yet?)

What if cars are a fantastically stupid thing around which to organize America’s productive activity? What if we talked about organizing it around something else?

Domains of My Life

2008-11-24T22:02:00.002-08:00

I’m scoping a little extra freelance right now for some former clients, and one of them asked for a portfolio. A portfolio! I suck at those things. Off the top of my head I figure I’ve produced 650 to 1300 client-approved deliverables in my career. Some of these I have all my production art for. Some of them were produced for dynamic websites with exotic server environments, so there’s nothing left to look at but unexecutable source code. And some have just plain gone missing: not on my dusty old hard drives, not on my stacks of CDs, probably long gone from clients’ systems.

Not counting the hundreds of unique webpages and emails; and not counting the boxes-and-arrows information designs; and not counting intranets or extranets; and not counting the dozens of comps or concepts or templates or moodboards or spec designs; and not counting the art-directed work someone else designed; and not counting sites I developed but did not design; in the last ten years I have designed sixteen web sites. Web sites where, if you typed a URL that ended with a TLD, you’d land on a page that I designed. Of those sixteen websites, only three still use anything remotely like my original design. Five of them are entirely deceased: the domain registrations have lapsed. One is still in development but very very close to hatching.

ecoartspace.org (b. 1999 – d. 2002)
medianet.quakeroats.com (b. 2000 – d. 2001) †
nwnatural.com (b. 2000 – d. 2004)
capncrunch.com (b. 2001 – d. 2002)
techtracker.com (b. 2001 – d. 2002)
flashbackgames.com ? (b. 2001 — d. ?) †
thesmallerthings.com ? (b. 2002 – d. 2003) †
chalkboardproject.org (b. 2003 – d. 2003)
chalkboardproject.org (b. 2004 – d. 2005)
stylemetrics.com (b. 2005 – )
adrianandemily.ca (b. 2006 – d. 2007) †
actioncenter.org (b. 2007 – d. 2007)
globalenvision.org (b. 2007 – )
thefilmconnection.org (b. 2007 – d. 2008) †
sitkatech.com (b. 2008 – )
mercycorps.org (?b. 2009) ‡

†Domain no longer active
‡Design still in development

I am absurdly proud of about ten of these designs. With two exceptions, none of these websites aren’t even close to my best work.

My longest lived design (nwnatural.com) lived four years. I can’t guess which was my shortest-lived design. Perhaps the design I did for an unscrupulous agency for a client called “Flashback Games,” which I recall seeing exactly once, and which had been so depressingly bastardized by the agency’s Flash developers that I literally destroyed all files related to that design. Or so I had thought, for the last seven years, until I stumbled across this:

Clean

2008-11-17T09:33:00.000-08:00

I spent the whole weekend cleaning. I mean like the whole weekend because I got up at 6:00 each day and fell into bed exhausted at 8:30. And I mean like cleaning as in rake up all the leaves and windfall from last week's storm, and pick up the dog poop in the yard, and sweep the porch and the patio and the street in front of the house (and did you know red cedars lose about half their needles in the fall? I did not), and mulch the garden¹, and air out the garage, and scrub the bathrooms and kitchen, and vacuum the basement and stairs.

Then last night I shaved my head and shaved my face like I do every Sunday night and I woke up this morning feeling new born.

¹So I have this theoretical method of garden mulching inspired by a phrase I heard somewhere: “compost is what happens when you pile up organic material.” In September, I cleared the vegetable garden (which had become badly overgrown under the previous owners’ tenure) and have been fighting weeds there ever since. So instead of spending the winter fighting those weeds, I piled up all the pine needles and leaves from the yard, which cover the garden to a depth of about 8 inches. My theory is that some of those leaves will compost into the soil (which is pretty rich already), and the rest will a) discourage weeds and b) encourage earthworms. I can pull away the mulch in the spring and add it to the compost pile, which should be pretty mature by then anyway. We’ll see how that works out...

The Event Horizon of Memory, In Honor of the Ten Surviving Veterans of the Great War

2008-11-11T15:29:00.000-08:00

...who are:

Claude Stanly Choules, Australia
John Campbell Ross, Australia
Fernand Goux, France
Pierre Picault, France
Henry William Allingham, United Kingdom
Netherwood Hughes, United Kingdom
Henry John Patch, United Kingdom
William Frederick Stone, United States
John Henry Foster Babcock, United States
Frank Woodruff Buckles, United States

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surviving_veterans_of_World_War_I

The last surviving veteran of a Central Powers Nation, Franz Künstler of Austria (Austro-Hungary), died in May.

Of the greatest war that had — in its day — ever been fought; the war that unmade four empires, rewrote the maps of Europe, near Asia, and Africa; the war that destroyed the last great age of globalism; the war so total that it was called, for fifteen years, the Great War: almost no one remains who remembers that war first hand. In four years, the last vestiges of the medieval Europe of kings, fiefdoms and peasantry were unwritten. In only a few years, no one alive will remember that ancient world.

Before I was born, November 11 was Armistice Day. These men were elder statesmen, gentle retirees, and they were everywhere. Today we look over the boundary of oral history and history. A thing we lived through will become a thing we read about.

We can turn the wheel forward: sometime around my own retirement, no one alive will have fought through World War II.

And we can turn this wheel backward: when my father was born, the codgers playing checkers in front of the feed store were Civil War veterans.

When we measure history in lifespans, it becomes shorter. By this measure, Napoleon conquered Europe only three lifetimes ago. For almost a century, when people spoke of “The Wars,” they meant the ones Napoleon started. (When I was a kid, people said “the war“ and meant WWII. No one says “the war” anymore, unless they mean “this war,” that is, the one we fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.)

With that new span of measurement — lifespans, not years, or decades, or generations — the progress of the last five hundred years takes on a frightening dimension. For 17 lifespans, the people of Europe toiled in varying states of serfdom within a religious and political framework that transcended all memory: living and written. Think about living within a social order that was almost exactly like your parents’ social order; who in turn lived almost exactly as their own parents had lived ... for seventeen lifetimes.

On an archaeological timescale, agriculture — the foundation of almost all existing social order — is ten times longer: 170 generations. Only one tenth of that time — those 17 endless lifetimes — have passed since the fall of the Roman Empire. But agriculture is itself but a blink: human beings, in their present shape, have been making tools, singing songs, telling stories, hunting, fishing, building: for 900 lifetimes.

Of those 900 lifetimes, we have lived with “modernism” (capitalism, democracy, equality, science, and progress) for only seven lifetimes. The United States is only barely three lifetimes old.

I think the men whose names appear above fought for the victory of Modernism over Feudalism, although they almost certainly didn’t see it that way. In 1900, serious thought about history and politics contended with the fate of empires: British, Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, Chinese...by 1919, only one of those empires mattered. As the Great War slips over the Event Horizon of a Single Lifetime, we might start to think that the modern world order — the one with capitalism and science and so forth — is here to stay. When we consider the weight of all the lifetimes before, however, our modern world order may feel a little fragile.

Thoughts About Material Possessions Occasioned by the Purchase of Our New Refrigerator

2008-11-10T07:17:00.000-08:00

Of the two big life changes we’ve made in the last year — buying a house and having a baby — the really stressful one (so far) is turning out to be the house. One of the fun aspects of our particular house is our refrigerator, the previous owner’s “beer fridge,” unhelpfully located about ten vertical feet away from the kitchen. Which is to say, our only refrigerator is in the basement, and cannot be moved upstairs without deleting a few walls. (Among the previous owners’ skills was a knack for building walls in what should be an unfinished basement). Because the previous owners didn’t leave their kitchen fridge, this means a lot of trips up and downstairs at dinner time.

Anyway, long story short, we need a new fridge. This expense has been a long time coming, and Jenny did a good job researching refrigerators and picking a suitable new model. We have learned that one of the reasons home ownership is so damn stressful to me is that I have an almost religious dread of spending more than about a hundred bucks, so I can’t be trusted to do something like shop for a refrigerator. (This is true even for purchases of things that I really like purchasing — like bicycles or computers. It takes me months to get up the nerve to finally buy something like a new bicycle.) And when you own a house, you spend bucks by the thousands. Ouch.

But the weird thing is that I’m not a frugal person. At all. I don’t clip coupons or reuse tea bags. I like buying my groceries at the chichi yupippy organic grocery. I drink the expensive beer. I have no qualms about picking up the tab when I’m with friends, or spending any amount of actual money on any number of impulsive purchases. In some ways my behavior is anti frugal. I hate shopping and buying things so much that I’ll pay a premium to procure them from somewhere that streamlines the shopping process. I’d rather walk into the Levi’s store and pay whatever price they ask for the exact jeans I always wear (model 527, size 32/32), than dig through the extras bins at TJ Maxx or wherever to save big $$$.

My particular tight-fistedness was the source of a certain relationship friction — not so much because we disagreed about the expense (we really need that fridge), as because it hurts me so much to acquire an object. It makes me grumpy. But in our, ahem, discussion about the new fridge I had a realization. Jenny likes nice things. I don’t mean she has high tastes or likes spending money, but just that, if she needs to own something, she would just as well that thing be nice.

But that’s not actually the realization. The realization I had was that my ideal relationship with possessions would be to have none at all. Like, literally. I suppose I really really need a pair of shoes and some sweatpants or something, but otherwise, it would be nice to have no responsibility for any physical objects whatsoever. So when I actually do really need something (and, as it turns out, modern life requires more accessories than a pair of shoes and some sweatpants), my inclinations is to buy them as easily, and, more importantly, as disposably as possible.

So when Jenny and I have a “fight” about “money,” we aren’t really fighting and it isn’t really about money. We’re having a conflict of worldviews about the importance of physical objects.

Of the two attitudes on display, Jenny has the more grown-up. Responsible adults can’t conscionably sit on the floor and eat from plastic plates (← I am describing my bachelorhood here). She has come by her attitude honestly and organically. Which is to say, she has always been like this, and she knows it.

I don’t know if I’ve always been like this, and I’ve always felt conflicted about it. As a teenager and young adult I was recklessly acquisitive. For example, when I got my first real paycheck at my first real job (as an archaeological fieldworker in North Dakota), I spent the whole thing — $800 — on a single shopping spree at an outdoor store in Billings, Montana. At literally the same time, I harbored fantasies about losing all my possessions in a disaster.

This whole thing is a little bit mysterious to me. It’s like those cartoons where Sylvester has an angel cat on one shoulder and a devil cat on the other. The little Acquisitive Angel is saying “Paul, buy a new backpack! You have the money! You deserve it!” and the Destructive Devil is saying “Don’t be a sucker, that’s just more crap you’ll have to schlep around. Carry your stuff to work in a paper bag! Why the hell not!” When I was younger, I guess the angel was winning. Maybe because, when you haven’t owned nice things, it’s fun to buy those things you’ve always wanted. As I age, the devil has pretty much taken over. Probably because by this point in my life I’ve owned already owned all the things I’ve ever wanted, so there’s no fun left in buying something new.

奥巴马 2008!

2008-10-28T09:24:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of James Fallows, I learned that the Mandarin transcription of “Obama” is 奥巴马. I’ve written previously about the danger of “translating” foreign words from Chinese based on their characters, which are chosen primarily for their calligraphic appearance, not their semantic meaning. But it’s fun to do anyway.

Also, as soon as I saw this t-shirt I realized “I can read those characters!” Of course, those characters say “Obama,” helpfully translated above, but still: a fun party trick.

奥 is a common character for foreign transcription, usually for the long o or ah sounds. You find it in the Chinese words for Austria (奥地利), Australia (澳洲), and Olympics (奥林匹克). It means “mysterious.”

巴 is (I think) a noun particle (and thus essentially meaningless); dict.cn also translates it as “hope” which is very fitting indeed. I recognized it as the sound-part of the second character in 酒吧, which is the Chinese word for “bar” (as in “the place where you get drunk”).

马 means “horse,” which is the core of a common Chinese tongue-twister. Again, this is a common character for transliterations of foreign words; last year for example, Jenny and I ran in the 厦门国际马拉松.

So, the literal, direct, character-for-character translation of the Chinese transliteration of “Obama” is “Mysterious hopeful horse.”

…

This post comes in the midst of a little nostalgia Jenny and I are feeling for Xiamen. For example, scarcely a week goes by when we don’t lament our inability to get noodles from Bu Er Zhai.

One of my coworkers is leaving this week for a tour of Afghanistan and Pakistan, which prompted some conversation around the office about life as a foreigner or outsider. In relaying this to Jenny I realized what I really missed about living in China: I am no longer special. In Portland, I’m just another white guy on a bicycle, a demographic pretty well represented here anyway. In Xiamen, it was impossible not to attract a lot of attention everywhere we went. So, to our neighbors we were special, because we were 老外. And to our friends and family “back home,” we were the exciting couple living an adventurous life in China.

Excitement Potential of Bicycle-Related Purchases

2008-10-27T15:10:00.000-07:00

Helmet
Shorts
Cables, pedal cleats or chain (tie)
Pedals, shoes, or saddle (tie)
Weird specialized tools, e.g. crank puller
Jacket or messenger bag (tie)
Bar Tape
Replacement drivetrain
Retro team jersey
Bicycle

All My BIke Crap Is Disintegrating

2008-10-20T21:47:00.000-07:00

Shoes: insole shredded, sole worn down, need new cleats, no longer waterproof, left ratchet failed today, velcro no longer velcs
Jerseys: mostly see-through
Shorts: ditto
Lock: tumblers worn, occasionally refuses to unlock
Rain pants: no longer waterproof
Saddle: (Vanilla): leather worn away, frame poking through under left asscheek
Cables (Soma): rusty
Cables (Vanilla): rusty, frayed, stretched
Drive train (Vanilla): cogset worn, chain slips and sucks, front derailer cage bent.
Drive train (Soma): still can’t get the right balance between tension on the front derailer and the outer limiter. It’s either: can’t shift onto big ring, or throw the chain off the big ring
Frame (both): paint chipped, rusting
Hubs and headset (both): squeeeeeeaky
Helmet: cracked

The rain is exposing some bike wear I need to attend to pronto.

My Vanilla has almost 10,000 miles on it. The Soma has mebbe 1400 miles. I have been putting off a lot of bike purchases for a long long time. This is gonna hurt.

God’s Reputation

2008-10-14T09:29:00.000-07:00

I’ve been watching this video of the convocation at a mccain/palin rally with a certain degree of ... fascination. like so many things happening in politics right now, it’s a train wreck of logic and common sense. let’s unpack it a little:

REV. CONRAD: I would also add, Lord, that your reputation is involved in all that happens between now and November.

So right away the hon. Rev. Conrad takes a tone with God, the supreme being, our creator, that resembles the kind of lecturing you hear from some of your less inspired high school football coaches. Step it up, Jehovah! Your reputation is on the line!

Because there are millions of people around this world,

Billions, actually!

praying to their god, whether it’s Hindu, Buddha, Allah,

OK here’s where it gets ... weird. First, The right hon. Rev. Conrad seems to think there’s a god named “Hindu.” There isn’t. I checked. “Hindu” is an adjective. It describes the native religion of India, and its adherents.

Second, the Buddha is not a god, and Buddhists would be the first to point this out. The honorific “Buddha” comes from an ancient Pali word meaning “enlightened.” The Buddha Siddhartha Gautama was an ethical philosopher in India in the sixth century B.C. His followers revere him as a great person who attained spiritual perfection, but Buddhism, like Hinduism has room for many gods, one God (note capitalization), or no gods at all. None of which, it bears repeating, is or would be “Buddha.”

Moreover, neither Hinduism or Buddhism make any claim to exclusivity. They have no equivalent to the First Commandment (or the Second, if you’re looking at Deuteronomy). So it’s unlikely that very many Hindus or Buddhists are praying that Barack Obama wins just to show up that smartypants Jehovah.

And “Allah” just means “God” in Arabic. The Quran takes some pains to spell out that the God it discusses is the same God of Abraham, Moses, and Jesus. So the people that the right hon. Rev. Conrad imagines praying to “Allah,” presumably for the humiliation of the Christian God, are also praying to the Christian God.

In just nine words, Rev. Conrad has demonstrated he doesn’t know bupkiss about what I would presume is his primary area of expertise: God.

that his opponent [i.e. Obama] wins, for a variety of reasons.

None of which we need to discuss, apparently.

And Lord, I pray that you would guard your own reputation,

Again with the hectoring. Here he sounds like the father of a teenage daughter on Prom night.

because they’re going to think that their god is bigger than you. If that happens.

It’s a four-way deity-on-deity smackdown! Because religion is like a pro wrestling match played out by proxy through presidential elections.

So I pray that you would step forward and honor your own name in all that happens between now and election day.

Because God the Almighty, omnipotent and omnipresent, sole creator of the entire Universe, needs a little poke from the right hon. Rev. Conrad every now and then, or his reputation is gonna go to shit.

Some of my lefty friends object to Rev. Conrad’s convocation on grounds that it invokes hate speech. To which I reply: whatever. Sometime in the 1980s “liberals” ceded the topic of religion to “conservatives,” presumably because lefties spend less time in church. Our implicit assumption is that, because the other guys spend so much time talking about God, they must know a lot about Him. To which I would offer: maybe they just don’t know what they’re saying. With twenty minutes on Wikipedia, I can demonstrate more insight into God than Rev. Conrad, and that’s his f-ing job.

“My Favorite Band Is...”

2008-10-13T06:35:00.000-07:00

Nebraska’s New State Motto

2008-10-10T09:33:00.000-07:00

Just now a coworker and I were discussing Nebraska’s surprising status as a potential swing state in the presidential election. I was trying to describe the cultural dynamic of a state that is “Western” on one half and “Midwestern” on the other (with a little bit of “St. Louis” in the Second District, I guess). Then I realized I had inadvertently coined a new state motto:

“Nebraska: where Wyoming meets Iowa.”

Shorter Vice Presidential Debate

2008-10-03T12:35:00.001-07:00

Sen. Joe Biden: I’m not gonna be the only person in this race without a compelling personal history.

Gov. Sarah Palin: I’m a human firehose of words

Seasons: Pacific Northwest vs. Midwest

2008-10-03T07:39:00.000-07:00

The rains have started.

I like this. This is why I moved to Oregon. I moved here for the cool and gray and damp and peaceful. And the seafood. Everything is better in Oregon in the “winter:” the beaches are empty, the trails are empty, you can go snowshoeing, less traffic when I ride my bike. All the wimpy people who dislike moistness are indoors now, at Powell’s or McMenamin’s. Which are also better in the “winter.”

It is, however, very dark. People here are pale. And let’s not kid ourselves: it starts raining in October and it doesn’t stop until about July. June if we’re lucky.

The really great thing about having grown up in Nebraska is that I have extremely wide latitudes for what I consider “bad weather.” Nebraska gets Florida summers and Alaska winters. The lousiest winter days in Oregon (sleety snow/rain driven hard from the southwest) are about like a typical March morning in Nebraska.

Oregon gets like five or six days in the summer where the mercury tops 90 degrees. But it’s a dry heat.

In 13 years in Oregon, I’ve never lived in a place with air conditioning, or insulation, or double-paned windows. Or bug screens.

Oregon shorts Fall a little bit though.

My Proudest Piece of Writing Ever

2008-10-01T21:41:00.001-07:00

On Stumptown Coffee’s Facebook Page:

I traveled back in time from the 28th century and constructed an elaborate cover life solely for the purpose of reviewing Stumptown coffee on Facebook. ITS THAT GOOD. ID GIVE IT ELEVENTY MILLION STARS IF I COULD.

In the 28th century Coffea arabica is extinct so we have to get all our coffee via time travel. Panda bears are also extinct but weve genetically engineered an even cuter kind of Chinese bear. Also weve stopped using apostrophes in contractions.

Otherwise life in the 28th century is just like the 21st century. Except for the cyborgs.

And Now: Politics!

2008-09-24T21:59:00.000-07:00

I watched some of Katie Couric’s recent interview with Sarah Palin just now, and I had a sudden aha moment. I had previously seen some clips of Palin interviewed by Charlie Gibson and Sean Hannity, and had a weird sense of deja vu that I just couldn’t put my finger on. But when Palin squirmed around the question about Rick Davis (she even repeated herself: “well, here’s the answer I’ve prepared. Oh, you want a clarification? Allow me to repeat the answer I’ve prepared.”), it suddenly came flooding back to me. Sarah Palin 2008 reminds me of George W. Bush 2000.

Let me explain: in the 2000 elections, especially in the Republican primaries, poor Dubya just got a merciless drubbing. Remember when he was on Larry King with John McCain? Ouch, that was painful. I want to be clear: I don’t think he did so badly because he was stupid so much as he didn’t really want to be president. The signature Dubya 2000 look was this deer-caught-in-headlights stare which made me think a) he was kind of out of his element and b) someone had talked him into running for president.

Imagine yourself in Bush’s (or Palin’s) shoes. You’re a moderately competent politician in a state where politicians don’t need to work very hard. You’re doing OK and thinking, “hey, in a few years this politics stuff might lead somewhere.” You get a call — from the RNC or the current Republican presidential nominee, perhaps — and the guy on the other end says, “listen, we think you’re [vice] president material. Do you want to run for [vice] president?” Suddenly, “a few years” is “right now” and “somewhere” is “right here.” It would have to be really flattering. And no matter what your own opinion of your own abilities, or even your actual desire to be [vice] president, would you say no? Seriously? Some important-type guy from the national office just offered you the [vice] presidency! Maybe you’re actually way ahead of the curve here!

After a few weeks though, of people asking you tricky questions about your campaign finance manager or your opinions about countries you’ve never heard of, it starts to sink in: even if you make it through the campaign — which sucks — you’re gonna be [vice] president — which would probably suck even more.

I remember watching Dubya’s inauguration in 2001 and thinking, “whoa, this guy has already checked out.” Why do you think he takes so many vacations? It’s not because he’s lazy. It’s because he hates his job¹ but he can’t quit. For most of the last eight years, for all that I’ve disagreed with his policies and style of governance, the primary emotion I’ve felt for George W. Bush has been pity. He got his job through connections, he hasn’t been very good at it, he can’t quit, and he’s only really wanted it maybe 15 or 20 months out of the last eight years.

Which brings me back to Sarah Palin.

People who really, really want a job, even a job they might be unqualified to do, try a lot harder than Palin is trying right now. They try so hard they screw up and say things they shouldn’t have. They depart from their prepared responses. They ad lib. They take every opportunity to prove how much they want the job, even if they can’t prove they’re capable of doing it. She’s not-trying so hard that she’s basically anti-trying. You could make a case that the McCain campaign is shielding her, but again I return to: if she really wanted this job, she’d be all over the media like stink on a monkey. You might also argue that she’s just avoiding the press because they’re so hostile, to which I would reply (again): if she really wanted this job, she’d be begging to get back on top of the news cycle.² This is what John McCain does every day with his latest wacky stunt.

Notes

¹ That is to say, he hated it in early 2000. I think after September 11, 2001, he was really loving the job — which showed in his performance in the 2004 elections. After that election, though, he kind of checked out again, especially after the Harriet Miers and Katrina stuff, which was like ultra-boring president-job stuff, not ultra-cool Commander-in-Chief stuff.

² And also: are you freaking nuts? She’s given three interviews to Charlie Gibson (slow pitch), Katie Couric (whiffle ball), and Sean Frickin Hannity (T-Ball). Oh, and People magazine (I think.) This is not the hostile press. Crap, McCain went on the View and Obama went on O’Reilly. They went willingly and gladly into the freaking lion’s den because they really want the job of president.

Namesake

2008-09-05T22:25:00.000-07:00

While dumping a bucket of compost at 5am this morning I looked to the southeast and saw my son’s namesake rising ahead of the sun.

Orion is a lot of people’s favorite constellation. Almost everyone knows it from the bright stars in the belt, and it’s visible from most places on Earth. It has a nifty nebula and lots of bright stars. In the northern hemisphere’s fall, Orion is visible in the early mornings to the west of the sun. The sun falls gradually behind it, and Orion rises earlier and earlier. By midwinter it’s at the zenith in late evening hours.

The character Orion is usually depicted as facing away from the Earth, with a club in his left hand overhead and a lion skin hanging from his right arm (stretched before his body). My astronomy software shows him holding a shield in his right hand, which I’d never seen anywhere else. I always pictured Orion shooting a bow left-handed (the way I shoot a bow), stretching the string from behind his ear, like a samurai. From Orion’s famous belt (the three bright stars Mintaka, Alnilam, and Zeta Orionis) hangs a sword. At the end of the sword is the purple Great Nebula of Orion, M42. He faces Taurus the bull, and is backed up by two hunting dogs (the Canises Major and Minor). They are all standing, with a motley menagerie of other sky animals, at the river Eridanus.

As a kid fascinated by astronomy (and a lifelong insomniac), I spent a lot of time outside looking at Orion in the winter. This was easier in the dry Nebraska winters than the rainy Oregon kind. My father would drive me to the ridge north of our house, with a thermos of cocoa, where we’d stargaze with a pair of binoculars. Because we’d do this in the winter, we always found Orion, and the Great Nebula made a good target for the binocs.

Decades later, living in northwest Portland (and just before meeting Jenny), I would get up early to ride my bike up Montgomery and do laps on Fairmount drive. On clear mornings, at certain points of the road, I could pick out Orion’s belt and sword through the trees.

The constellation Orion is like an old friend — I always know where to find Orion, at any time of day, at any time of the year, because he rises just ahead of the sun on my birthday. I can find a lot of things in the sky by finding Orion first — the Hyades and Pleiades in Taurus, Gemini over his left shoulder, and the really bright star Sirius in Canis Major behind his left heel.

When we were in Bali, one sweltering night in Padang Bai I stepped outside for fresh air. On the equator, with no cities nearby, the sky was ablaze with unfamiliar stars. (The southern stars are much brighter than the northern ones, because the south pole points toward the center of the galaxy.) I looked all over the northern sky for Orion’s belt, but it was probably too late and Orion had set. Eventually I made out Leo and had the disorienting sensation of seeing it upside down. Which had the secondary effect of making east and west reverse themselves.

The name Orion was actually Jenny’s idea, but once she said it, it shot to the top of my list. A few people have suggested, either coarsely and in jest or gently but seriously, that it’s kind of a weird name. We wanted a nature name (like “Clay” or “River”), an unusual name (hopefully he won’t have to go by “Orion S.” to distinguish himself from some other Orion in his third grade class), and a name that had some personal significance for us.

At the moment of his birth, we hadn’t chosen a name from the list of finalists. But the anaesthesiologist asked, “do you have a name picked out?” and we both answered “Orion.” A hunter in the sky with two dogs, staring down a bull on the banks of the river Eridanus.

The Laundry is Full of Tiny Clothes

2008-09-03T21:37:00.000-07:00

I had never in my entire life imagined that I would be folding socks that look like sleeping bags for baby hamsters. More importantly: I never would have imagined that it would matter to me.

Hometown Songs

2008-08-26T12:13:00.001-07:00

Two of my most surprising favorite songs are Jonathan Richman’s “New England:”

I have been out west to Californ’
But I miss the land where I was born

...and Neko Case’s “Thrice All American:”

Well I don’t make it home much, I sadly neglect you
But that’s how you like it away from the world
God bless California, make way for the Wal-Mart
I hope they don’t find you Tacoma

It’s no mystery why I love these songs. I’ve had to explain Nebraska to everyone I’ve met on either coast and in most foreign countries. No one in these places knows the first thing about Nebraska — which is OK — but everyone has tons of notions what it must be like — which is not OK. The thing of it is, Nebraska has a deep beauty, but it doesn’t come easy. More to the point, it was made beautiful by people who loved it. As Neko sings: “People who built it, they loved it like I do.”

People in the Pretty Places (like California) have every right to love their home state, but the state itself makes it easy. The weather is good and so is the food, and California has scenery in spades. No one has trouble loving a cute, well-behaved child. It takes a special kind of person to love the kid with the lopsided face who can’t stop biting the other kids.

In my estimation, perhaps the main problem with America is that Americans don’t love the places they come from. We keep moving west looking for something better, but we ran out of West a while ago. This is it, there is no more West. If we don’t resume building our places with love we won’t have any places worth loving.

Why Our New Garbage Can Has Instructions on the Goddamned Lid

2008-08-22T14:26:00.000-07:00

John Steinbeck Project #2: Pastures of Heaven

2008-08-21T12:22:00.001-07:00

After the painful slog through Cup of Gold, I despaired a little for what might await me in Pastures of Heaven. Although I’m reading it in the Library of America collection Steinbeck: Novels and Stories: 1932–1937 which should have been a tip-off that Pastures… is on a higher shelf than Cup of Gold.

And it is. Pastures… is a collection of related stories on a scale similar to Tortilla Flat or the Long Valley. It sort of reads like a less-depressing version of Winesburg, Ohio: small-town vignettes, each focused on a single character who has a remarkable adventure. Each story follows a predictable arc (which I won’t spoil), but delivers a satisfying read altogether.

Steinbeck, like most early-to-mid–twentieth century writers, doesn’t make small town life seem particularly nice. And Steinbeck clearly had a great love of rural lifeways and landscapes ... and still makes the Pastures of Heaven valley seem like a social straightjacket. If this accurately reflects the contemporaneous feeling toward rural life, it goes a long way toward explaining the great urbanization of the early 20th century, and the allure of the suburbs in the last half of the century. Steinbeck underlines the particular haze through which American view country life; the final chapter is a sharp coda that eerily presages the exurban developments of the the early 21st century.

The fictional Pastures of Heaven seems to be based largely on the real-world valley of Corral de Tierra. A quick trip to Google Maps makes that coda seem especially eerie.

Next: 1933’s The Red Pony, the Steinbeck book (other than Grapes of Wrath that it seems everyone has read. Except, apparently, me.

How to Improve Open Source User Interfaces

2008-08-08T10:11:00.000-07:00

Programmer Michael Thomas revisits an old theme: Why Free Software has poor usability, and how to improve it. This was a theme I heard a few times at OSCON as well. Thomas unfortunately gives no space to respond, but his loss is my gain. (Specifically, I gain a blog post on the theme).

Thomas lists 15 reasons for poor usability in FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) programs, most of which can be boiled down to: “designers don’t contribute to FOSS projects” or “programmers are smarter than interfaces and therefore don’t value good ones.” I think he’s right. I also think there’s an important meta-explanation that he kind of dances around:

Interface design is not much like programming.

If FOSS project owners are serious about improving the usability of their projects, I think they need to focus less on grafting interface design tasks into an ecosystem optimized for programming, and focus more on altering the ecosystem to favor interface design. I think breaking down how interface design is not like programming reveals a few potential courses of action for reforming FOSS ecosystems.

1. Interface design is a Gestalt task.

A truly beautiful interface is seamless and uniform. It requires seeing forests more than trees; it may even require envisioning a total view of the entire experience. There is almost no way to “jump in and help out” on an interface design in a meaningful way. Successful projects with many interface designers typically have a small number of lead designers (usually: n = 1) who delegate tasks to junior designers. The beautiful Gestalt is the result, not of democracy and open collaboration, but ruthless tastemaking. Good senior interface designers elicit and accept feedback, and work closely with users and programs in a spirit of collaboration. But in the end, they are willing to unilaterally kill bad ideas and advance good ones. The fundamental nature of good taste is its exclusivity.

My remaining points can all be viewed as corollaries of the theory “interface design is a Gestalt task.”

2. Interface design is not as much fun as programming.

I’ll explore this in more detail in my next three points, but let me dip into anecdote a little here. Of the hats I wear (graphic designer, interface designer, web developer), the only task I prefer to do in my free time is development. I get a happy charge out of starting up MacVim that I just don’t get from starting up Illustrator. I read books on programming when I’m on the crapper. Every designer who works even a little bit with code must, at some point in his or her career, be forcibly kept away from doing yet more code, because it’s so tempting to dink with the code instead of the pixels, even when we’re fucking up the code and making more work for the better developers downstream. Many designers love to spend their free time pushing pixels, of course, but the artsy ones tend to do actual art: painting or woodworking or sculpture or such. The nerdy ones spend their free time writing recursive draw routines in Flash, or making CSS Zen Garden designs. In other words: coding.

Occasionally I’m pressed by a layperson to describe how difficult graphic or interface design is. Usually I fall back on this analogy: “executing a design feels a lot like writing a term paper.” (The bigger the project, the bigger the term paper.) That’s how much fun it is. If you think writing term papers in college was fun, you might like interface design.

3. Interface design offers no “aha” moment

Everyone who has ever written a Hello World program knows what I mean here. We get a little charge when something you built — no matter how trivial — actually works. There is no moment like this for interface design. Interface design is a long process of slow improvement. The design might be better at the end of the day than it was at the beginning, but there was never a moment during the day when you flipped a switch and the UI compiled. The quality of the interface is purely a function of the amount of time you put into it — no shortcuts, no macros, no aha moment, no unit tests to pass, no checksums to verify. Most UI designs are “done” when you hit the deadline to hand it off to the development team.

4. Interface design offers very little glory.

A competent interface design, like the graphic design of the phone book, is invisible. The harder you work at it, the more invisible it becomes. A few interface designs — Panic’s Coda, or Omnigraffle come to mind — have a sparkly beauty or particular twist that really stands out, but most “good” interfaces simply (and properly) fade into the wallpaper.

5. Interface design artifacts aren’t functional.

Some of the best UI designs I’ve ever seen were committed on whiteboards or sketchpads. In the majority of cases, the UI designer produces a Visio document or Photoshop file. The product isn’t functional because there’s nothing to click.

Really tricky designers might use Interface Builder, or Tk, or HTML prototypes, or similar code tools to build a kind of Potemkin Village interface: the taps are all there, but they aren’t connected to any plumbing. You can turn a tap but nothing will come out. Nobody uses the “Interface Design” as anything other than a blueprint to build something else.

A person can gain great satisfaction from blueprinting a garage, I’m sure, but it’s a totally different pleasure than building a garage and then parking your car in it.

6. Interface design tasks scale poorly.

This is not strictly true, as I noted above. Experienced senior UI designers are adept at delegating tasks to junior designers. But the key word here is “delegate”. I can think of few things more counter to the FOSS ethic than the arbitrary elevation of a single person to the status of “senior” anything. But when it comes to good interface design ... there it is. If you break apart UI design tasks without a master vision, the result tends more often to be disjointed and fragmentary — the exact opposite of a usable or beautiful user interface.

The kinds of problems that get solved by UI design are of a different order than those solved by programming. I can write a script that wraps lines in a file with HTML paragraph tags. Then I can add a function to create bullet lists. Then I can add a function to format headers. I can keep adding layers of functionality to my script until it becomes an entire piece of software. From a tiny acorn came HTMLFormatomatic4000, or whatever.

In fact, I would extend this point to read: as a general rule, the more designers who work on a user interface, the worse it will be. Too many cooks really can spoil the soup.

7. Job demand for interface designers is higher.

I don’t mean to imply that interface designers are better compensated (because it’s probably not true). But I do mean that, if I have a few spare cycles, someone is almost always willing to pay me for those cycles. I might find a FOSS project about which I’m passionate enough to donate those cycles, but that poor project is always going to be competing against filthy filthy lucre. For a task I don’t find as much fun as programming. On a project where designers may be treated with active contempt as “decorators” or “icon designers.” And which probably has no resources to buy me, for example, an Adobe Creative Suite license, a new quad core Mac Pro and a 22" monitor.

I have no doubt that FOSS projects fight for developer resources in the same way. I’m sure most developers worth their salt could fill their weekends with freelance work the way most designers I know do. I can’t much speculate why they don’t. I guess I’d theorize that FOSS projects actually do provide a fungible benefit to programmers. If I contribute code to a well-regarded FOSS project, my nameshare rises and my ability to get paid for my expertise on that software would also rise. I’m having trouble seeing how contributing interface designs can provide the same benefits.

How to Improve Free Software Interface Design

I think understanding the nature of UI/usability design as a Gestalt task is key to improving free software interfaces. Make your project’s ecosystem more amenable to seeing and driving the Big Picture, and you’ll attract more interest from A-List designers. And I think you’ll improve your result. I’m still chewing over how to do this, but a few reforms spring to mind.

1. Restrict UI participation in your project

Thomas and others, used to a FOSS ecosystem where More Developers = More Participation = Better Feature, miss the allure and challenge of working on the Big Picture. When the picture is big, the glory is restricted. You can probably name the director of 2001: A Space Odyssey, but can you name the editor? Directors make their careers by not sharing. (When you consider the unfun, unglorious nature of UI design, maybe you’ll gain a little appreciation for why so many designers act like prima donnas. It’s because they are constantly beset with criticism for a task that compares with writing term papers in its pleasurability. Their only nonmonetary compensation is sole glory — best to hog as much of it as possible, by fending off all feedback if necessary. I don’t care to do business this way but I understand why many designers do.)

2. Invite designers to your project

The easiest way to shift a focus to the Big Picture is to invite a select few individual designers to work on your project, and guarantee that they’ll hold the reigns of the interface. If they need help, let them invite their own collaborators (or junior designers). This flies in the face of the Free Software ethic, I know, but remember that while your Interface Guru has veto power over all interface decisions, the community ultimately has veto power over the product. Other designers are welcome to volunteer their efforts, but if your selected designers say they can’t use them, remember the maxim about cooks and soups.

3. Compensate your interface designers

Maybe not with money, but certainly with resources, and definitely with accolades. Prominently feature the contributions of your UI designers on your project website (you do have a project website, don’t you? And no, SourceForge and Google Code don’t count.) Designers, much like developers, attract work through their reputations. What are you doing to massage your designers’ reputations?

4. Assign your designers a programmer au pair

Many excellent designers know (and care) very little about the housekeeping tasks of programming. They might, in fact, be wiz coders but they never use source control and don’t know how to build an executable. Merging forks, installing MacPorts, or editing makefiles will confuse them, and steer their focus away from the interface Gestalt toward the programming equivalent of dishwashing. Programmers are used to doing their own dishes and forget that these are actually complicated tasks that bear little relationship to what you want your interface designers actually doing with their donated time: designing interfaces. Volunteer to help them with these tasks to keep them focused on the things you need them to do.

Afterword

I know I’m hardly the first person to think this stuff through. John Gruber’s 2004 article Ronco Spray-On Usability is a classic, written in response to Eric Raymond’s The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story. David Nichols and Michael Twidale wrote probably the most thorough analysis in 2003, and I borrow many of their themes here. The OpenUsability project in many ways arrived at exactly the opposite conclusions I propose here. Celeste Lynn Paul offers another set of suggestions and provides a little historical context.

The writing on 大黑狗 tends toward the personal and away from the professional. When I write about my job, it’s usually in a “funny thing that happened at work” kind of way. I’m not a pontificatiforous person when it comes to my job. They pay me to push pixels so I push the pixels, and I try to do it with integrity and enjoyment. But as I dig more and more into the FOSS world — I’m running Ubuntu on all my Macs now, and I’ve switched to MacVim fulltime, for example — I’m consistently horrified by the lack of attention paid to interfaces. The FOSS A-listers get this, they know there’s a problem, and they talk about fixing it. But I think they miss that design (graphic, interface, whatever) operates on a totally different paradigm.

I don’t write on 大黑狗 for traffic or fame or money. I literally write it for my friends and family. I would love love love if this post got a little traction in the FOSS community. If you agree, or disagree, or have something to add, or know of similar comments elsewhere ... fire away. But in about two weeks of reading about FOSS usability, I’ve yet to see anyone come out and say it as bald as this: interface design isn’t actually much like programming. The root of the FOSS usability problem is expecting the opposite.

No More Chat

2008-08-07T10:02:00.000-07:00

Or AIM, or Skype, or GTalk, or ICQ. I mean it. I will never again log into these services. If you and I are working on something together and you need to communicate something vital to me you can call me on my telephone or come to my desk and talk to me in person.

The most annoying quality of telephone conversations is their unnecessary urgency. OMG talk to me now Paul! Their second most annoying quality is their tendency to interrupt whatever I’m doing. Like the poster says, “a lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.”

The most annoying qualities of email are its impersonalness, and its tendency toward telegraphic communication.

Email and phone conversation each have their good points, of course. But somehow chat has managed to combine all the bad qualities of both, and none of the good ones. Its urgent but not direct! Its telegraphic but not considered! Rush and go nowhere!

Seriously: no more chat. With me. Ever again.

Nine Women

2008-08-06T12:12:00.000-07:00

...can’t have a baby in one month.

The software and management world has known this since 1975 and yet, what happens every time I’m on a project with a compressed timeline?

Someone has the bright idea that if you add more women, somehow that baby’s gonna get done faster.

The John Steinbeck Project, #1: Cup of Gold

2008-08-02T23:07:00.000-07:00

Today I finished Steinbeck’s first novel, Cup of Gold (1929). About forty pages in, I realized I had attempted to read this book before. Clearly: it had not made much of an impression.

Those first forty pages are hard. They’re mostly about a puddle-headed Welsh boy’s relationship with his slightly insane relatives and a man named “Merlin.” Please note that Cup of Gold is a story about a real-life pirate whose real-life name was Henry Morgan. When I pick up a book whose cover prominently features pirates, I want me some pirates, damnit, not Welsh mysticism. Which is probably why I never got more than forty pages into Cup of Gold on my earlier try, and might explain, a little bit anyway, why Cup of Gold is on absolutely no one’s Best of Steinbeck list.

The boundless knowledge of Wikipedia tells us “Steinbeck wrote Cup of Gold for the film business.” Which is one explanation, I guess. Two films (Captain Blood and Black Swan) depict Morgan in heavily fictionalized form, although neither of these appears to have been based on Cup of Gold. As a pirate story it’s a little too inward-looking, and a little light on the actual piracy.

Like all good historical novels, though, Cup’s... historicity is suspect. The relationship between Steinbeck’s Morgan and the genuine article is about as to that of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator and Caeser Commodus. Apparently there really was a person (or perhaps two persons) named Henry Morgan and that this person certainly sacked some cities in Cuba and Panama and eventually became governor of Jamaica, as depicted by Steinbeck. The way Steinbeck tells it, Morgan lusted mightily for the sea from the early days of his very mystical Welsh childhood. (The source of this lust is only sketchily attributed — but I think Steinbeck generally wrote archetypes more than characters.) Drawing upon all the resources of being a character in a Steinbeck novel, Morgan parlays indentured servitude into a career in piracy. From the start of his career Morgan has his eyes set, absurdly, on the sack of Panama City (the eponymous “Cup of Gold”), and through pretty exclusively the power of narrative fiat he achieves it. Again: none his motive for this is explained, but the last twenty pages make pretty clear that Steinbeck was aiming for something a little more than a mere explanation of things that happened.

Steinbeck picks up a lot of themes, only to carry them halfheartedly or turn them entirely in the space of a page or two. To pick a single example: Morgan’s desire to sack Panama is conflated with his obsession over La Santa Roja, a reputedly beautiful woman who lives there. The first half of the book concerns this lusty young buck literally itching to literally rape Panama (in the symbolic person of The Red Saint); he is a man entirely of action and devoid of introspection. When ultimately confronted with The Red Saint, his personality jumps the shark and we go from Treasure Island to Winter of Our Discontent. In one page.

Even in a stinker like Cup of Gold — and let’s not kid ourselves, if Steinbeck hadn’t written it, it wouldn’t be in print today — Steinbeck displays a few of his uncanny talents that he went on to deploy to greater effect in later works. He excels at portraying the book’s landscapes — the brooding Welsh hills, the plantations of Jamaica, the pestilential swamps of Panama. This is perhaps my favorite of Steinbeck’s qualities, a trait I think a lot of Western American (particularly Californian) authors share. He has a neat motif about mythology and honesty that he plays about three times, in the form of Morgan’s recollections of his first love. Finally, he tops the book with a weirdly touching death scene. I like it when a book ends with the protagonist dying.

Next: Pastures of Heaven (1932) ... but first I have to read Haruki Murakami’s After Dark, because I always read every new Murakami paperback. After that is Dale Basye’s Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go, because the author is a friend and also it is a good book. But after that: Pastures of Heaven.

The Hill

2008-07-31T16:40:00.001-07:00

Every day I ride my bike over the Hill. Well, almost every day. About one day in ten I don’t ride the bike at all — I ride the bus.

About one day a week I’m too tired to ride over the Hill, so I ride “around” it.

In good weather I might ride over the Hill as many as three times (once at lunch).

The Hill is about 1100 feet above sea level at Council Crest. I don’t always ride all the way to Council Crest, some days I coast around the summit on Fairmount Drive, between 900 and 1000 feet. If I don’t ride over the hill, I have to ride “around” it which is actually more direct than going over it, but still requires that I climb to about 500 feet above sea level.

Our house is at about 400 foot elevation, and my office downtown is around 100 feet above sea level. Whether I conquer the hill going to work or from work matters.

The great thing about riding my bike over the Hill, other than being on a bike and making it go up a hill which are a priori pleasant sensations to me, is that I have a sense of accomplishment. I forgot to do the dishes, the redesign at work remains unfinished, I fucked up my breakfast sudoku, haven’t mowed the lawn in three weeks, keep putting off my freelance project, haven’t been to yoga since June 9 ... plenty of stuff in my life is unfinished, hell the state of life is that it’s unfinished. When it’s finished, you’re dead.

But nuts to all that, I just rode my bike up a big hill. So none of that other stuff is finished but I just accomplished something and it was a little bit difficult.

The art of ascending is deeply mental. You think a little about suffering, which is good for the soul. Really monster climbers, polka-dot-jersey climbers: I think they’re oblivious to suffering. They become hill-climbing bicycle engines and their minds go OFF. I feel that suffering, but kind of don’t hate it. At the least, I know that every hill has a summit, sooner or later I’ll reach it.

Some Random Thoughts About Star Wars

2008-07-28T22:06:00.000-07:00

This video (thanks, Scott) set me to thinking a little bit about Star Wars:

I first saw Star Wars 31 years ago. A friend of the family named Jim took my family to see Star Wars in the theater ... we were living in rural Nebraska and at that time (1977) even blockbusters like Star Wars took a month or two to hit the theaters out in the sticks. So Jim had seen it like a dozen times already (he was from the Big City, Lincoln) & explained it in great detail to myself and my brother. This was (is?) my first clear memory. From that day until puberty (ca. 1983), pretty much the only games that interested me were either a) Star Wars or b) another outer space–related game.

Based solely on the extreme coolness of the Star Wars movies — Empire in particular — I wanted to be an astronomer until I was about 14. Carl Sagan had an influence here as well. It must say something about me that I thought (OK, still think) Carl Sagan is one of the coolest people with whom I have shared the Earth.

One of the awesome things about Star Wars in the 70s and early 80s was that it didn’t have an “expanded universe” in the same scope as it has today. There was a Holiday Special, novelizations, a few scattered novels like Han Solo and the Lost Legacy, some Sunday comics, and a comic book series. I remember a cartoon about Ewoks, and some Ewoks TV specials too. There was precious little “canon” and most of that was hard to get at. On the other hand, the movies hinted at a lot of stuff happening around the edges. Who was the bounty hunter on Ord Nandell? What cargo did Han Solo drop? Why did Yoda live in the swamp? What’s a Womp Rat? For six- to eleven-year-old boys, richly hinted backstory + poorly developed canon = endless possibility to expand the stories. The only game I ever played was Star Wars and I never once played out a scene from a movie.

I think Empire spoiled my generation. It’s really the only undeniably good movie of the entire six-pack. It was so good that it made the first movie deeper and the third movie palatable. I saw Empire when I was nine years old, old enough to understand a lot of the grownup type themes about love and loss. It was heavy and dark in a way that fascinated me.

I have a theory about Star Wars films:

A Star Wars film can be great cinema, or it can have a scene on Tatooine, but not both.

Until the second (prequel) trilogy, I used to phrase this theory as “The cinematic greatness of a Star Wars film is inversely proportional to the amount of Tatooine it contains.” Actually, that theory might still hold, I dunno.

On my college admissions form (1989), I listed my religious preference as “Jedi.” This was actually not too far off the truth.

In college, I lived in a house near campus with several friends, and if the TV was on, it was probably playing a Star Wars video (or American Gladiators).

In 1996, I went to see a movie with my then-girlfriend at the mall in Eugene. One of the trailers was for the digitally remastered series:

At the moment when the announcer says “Now, for its twentieth anniversary...” my then-girlfriend said, “I think I’m going to cry.” I said, “I already am.” (FWIW I’m a little misty watching it again right now.)

I think I’ve seen the first three Star Wars movies several hundred times each. I’ve seen each of the three prequel films exactly once. Pretty much out of a sense of obligation: “oh, it can’t possibly be as bad as they say...” No, actually it’s worse. About 10 of the last 20 minutes of the last movie, and one scene in each of the first two movies, held a tiny kernel of the old Star Wars magic.¹ So maybe 13 or 14 good minutes out of six excruciating hours.

It’s cliché for people of my generation to say, whenever filmmakers recycle beloved ideas from the 1970s and 1980s, that they’re “raping our childhood,” or “molesting me retroactively.” This is especially true on this topic. But after I saw Phantom Menace, that’s kind of how I felt. I lay awake all night — I was living in a hot, noisy apartment directly above West Burnside, not very conducive to sleep anyway — feeling a little like I’d just learned my father wasn’t really my father. I suppose that must be what it’s like for a devout and rather credulous young Mormon to hear about the Planet Kolob stuff . “Whoa, you mean I grew up thinking that was cool? Ugh, now I feel all dirty.

One of my favorite mental games for bored-times is to imagine plot outlines for better prequels. The Internets are awash with nerds pontificating about how the prequels suck, and I’m sure someone has written some plot outlines or somesuch. I haven’t — and probably won’t ever — go that far. But I think Lucas missed two (and a half) really big opportunities in the prequels. My mental plot outlines concentrate on those missed opportunities. In particular:

Obi Wan is almost totally lacking in backstory. Lucas could have filled three prequels with his story: his youth, his Jedi training, how he came to work for the Organas, his involvement in the Clone Wars. That’s two good movies right there, and we wouldn’t just be treading water for two interminable hours on Tatooine. Late in the second movie he meets Anakin Skywalker, and the third movie is all about Anakin’s fall, but told from Obi-Wan’s point of view.
Similarly, Padme/Amidala is a whole lotta nothing. You know what would be awesome? If she were a Jedi. You know what would be even more awesome? If the prequels were all about her in exactly the same way they could have been about Obi Wan Kenobi. You know what would be even more awesomer? If the reason Obi Wan and Anakin fight to the death in a volcano is because they are both in love with her.
(This is the half idea) Lucas really missed an opportunity by failing to introduce any new plot twists in the prequels. The worst thing about watching the prequels (two and three in particular), was the grim inevitability of it. You knew exactly what would happen, and whaddyaknow it did. Perhaps the most memorable scene of humanity in the entire six-pack is when Darth Vader tells Luke he’s his father. So what if he wasn’t? I’m just saying.

Notes

¹ In the first movie, when Liam Neeson is fighting Darth Maul, there’s some kind of force field or something. It keeps interrupting the fight. Darth Maul and Obi Wan are all twitchy nerves jumping around looking menacing or scared but Liam Neeson sits down to meditate. I thought: “there’s something Yoda would teach.” That’s one. In the second movie, Natalie Portman and Teen Vader jump into a spaceship to go rescue Obi Wan. Portman pulls off that scene in such a way that you think “shit, she’s all psyched to go save her buddy’s ass,” and it feels a little Princess Leia-ish. That’s two. And in the third movie, the sequence where the robots are turning Teen Vader into Darth Vader...that’s three.

An Open Letter to Producers of Epic Fantasy Movies

2008-07-18T08:54:00.000-07:00

This past Saturday, Jenny and I saw Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian at the Kennedy School’s “Family Matinee.”¹ It was a good-enough movie I suppose, although a lack of alternatives (most theaters a) aren’t explicitly appropriate places for toddlers and b) don’t serve beer) may have colored both my expectations and experience. Also, Prince Caspian is probably the weakest of the Narnia books, so getting a decent movie out of it would be a challenge I’m sure.

But this isn’t really about Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian. It’s about Epic Fantasy Movies, the Genre. I have a simple request for people who produce movies in this genre (see also: Golden Compass). Not even a request, so much as an observation:

The gigantic set-piece battle at the climax of your movie probably sucks.

It sucks because it’s almost certainly unnecessary. For example, the entire tone of Lewis’ Narnia series is personal, not epic. These are stories about some children and their fantastical relationship with a magic lion (who is coincidentally Jesus). They are not stories about the grand sweep of history in a brilliantly-realized alternate world. When it came to realizing the warp and weave of Narnian culture and history, Lewis was clearly making it up as we went along, because that wasn’t the important part of his books. Sure, most of the Narnia books have a battle, but Lewis frankly couldn’t write a decent battle scene to save his life. That’s why they’re each about two pages long. They didn’t need to be lengthy and detailed because they weren’t the center of his stories — the centers of his stories were the talky bits with the magic Jesus lion. If you’re using a Narnia book for the source of your Epic Fantasy Movie, you better pay more attention to the talky Jesus lion parts than to the gigantic climatic battle. The lion is Jesus: he will make the battle turn out OK, and we all know that.

Yes, we know The Lord of the Rings had one awesome climactic battle after another and they just kept getting giganticker and awesomer and we, the audience, loved it. But, and here’s the really important part, we didn’t love the battle because Legolas surfed down the oliphant’s trunk, we loved it because by the time Legolas was surfing down oliphant trunks, we’d spent six hours getting to know and love Legolas, and we really cared about what would happen when he did that trunk-surfing thing.

Also: Tolkien wrote really awesome battle scenes. They went on for pages and pages. That’s because Tolkien was interested in all the stuff Lewis wasn’t, the warp-and-weave-of-imaginary-history stuff. He made up languages, that’s how much he cared. The battles in Lord of the Rings were not a foregone conclusion, because a) there was no magic Jesus animal who would go and deus ex machina the outcome for us, and b) the battles really really mattered to Tolkien, and to Middle Earth. Peter Jackson could have filmed those battle scenes in claymation and we’d have had the same amount of emotion invested in Legolas, Middle Earth, and the outcome of the battle. That’s why they worked, and yours don’t.

So, to reiterate:

When you’re making an Epic Fantasy Movie based on a book, and the book devotes 1% of its space to a battle, don’t make the battle in your movie twenty minutes long. It will suck and we won’t be impressed. Except with how sucky it is.

Notes

¹ For those of you unfamiliar with McMenamin’s Kennedy School, it features a brew-and-view movie theater, a brilliant concept even without the Family Matinee.

“Brew-and-view” defined: second-run movie theater that serves beer and food (usually pizza). Tickets usually cost $2 or $3, and the beer & food are usual bar prices. We can see a movie, eat a meal, and drink beer at a brew-and-view for less than the admission price (usually $8 or $9 each) at a first-run theater.

McMenamin’s is a Pacific Northwest chain of brewpubs and related venues (such as movie theaters, hotels, and chip-and-putt golf courses — which all serve beer, natch). A favorite Oregon passtime is to bitch about McMenamins’ substandard [beer|food|service|ubiquity], which gives you a sense of how awesome Oregon can be at times. That’s like saying “a favorite Oregon passtime is bitching about the substandard quality of our gumdrop trees and chocolate bonbon bushes.”

The “Family Matinee” or “Mommy Matinee” is a local innovation where families with very young children are encouraged to bring their toddlers to the movie. The theory being, if all the kids are crying, you won’t stress because your kid is crying. It’s a pretty good theory.

(Re) Reading

2008-07-16T15:28:00.001-07:00

Last week, I finished reading the entire Patrick O’Brian Aubrey/Maturin series. (Yes, these are the books that Charlton Heston described as his favorites. I’m probably the world’s youngest Aubrey/Maturin fan.) I think this is the second time I’ve read the entire series beginning-to-end and probably the third time I’ve read most of the individual novels.

I began (re)reading the series last year immediately upon returning from China. So it’s taken me a year to read 20 books. I’ve read a few other books, too — The World Without Us, a couple of Stanislaw Lem novels, and a collection of Haruki Murakami short stories, for example — but this has been pretty much my sole reading project. (In my own defense, pretty much the only time I get to read is for about 20 minutes before falling asleep, and a little bit on weekend mornings.)

Re-reading the series kind of underlines how weak the later entries are. O’Brian’s writing and characterizations remained crisp to the end, but his plotting slacked a lot. I think he fell into a trap where he loved his main characters too much to hurt them. I lost count of how many times either Steven or Jack would lose their fortunes, only to have it returned (usually with almost no effort) about 30 pages later.

Also, a surprising amount of heavy drama (like the deaths of major characters) happens off-screen, or in a kind of flip manner. Again: O’Brian just didn’t want his principals (and perhaps the readers?) getting sad about the tragic loss of friends they (and we) have had for 15 or 18 books.

O’Brian died while working on the 21st novel. Number 20 left plenty of loose ends, but something feels vaguely wrong about reading what amounts to O’Brian’s outline just to tie them up.

So now I’m left without a big reading project. For the past five or six years, I’ve kind of grazed at my pleasure reading, which in my case leads to a lot of mental junkfood habits. (For example, for want of anything better to do, since last week I read Ursula LeGuin’s Always Coming Home — a fine piece of literature but one I’ve surely read 10 times.)

So now, for probably the first time in life, I’m going to undertake a serious reading project. I’m going to read John Steinbeck’s entire oeuvre, beginning (fittingly enough) with his first and only work of historical fiction, Cup of Gold

Technique and Technology

2008-07-11T11:25:00.000-07:00

You can use a Swiss Army knife to cut your fingernails in two different ways. Everyone knows the first way and has probably done it at some point in their lives (usually while camping) you open the little tiny scissors and make scissory motions across the ends of your fingernails. In other words: you exploit the technology of a scissors, which is good for cutting through a thin surface, but not much else. By the same token, the only way you can “scissor” something is using a scissors.

The other way requires a little more finesse. You can open one of the blades — the big one works better — and caaaarefully pare the ends of your fingernails. In other words: you apply the technique of “paring,” using whatever sharp edge is available, in this case the blade of a knife. Importantly, if you know how to pare your fingernails with a knife, you can use anything with a sharp edge to do so, including one half of an open scissors.

In studying material culture, the difference between technique and technology struck me pretty forcefully. In a seminar in ethnoarchaeology I watched several short films on Aboriginal life produced by the Australian government in the 1920s and ’30s. They had catchy titles like “Butchering a Kangaroo,” “Collecting Dew,” and “Building a Fire,” but were deeply fascinating nonetheless. Aboriginal people traditionally carried very little on their persons. In “Butchering a Kangaroo” the protagonists accomplished this feat using a small stone flake perhaps two inches across (which one of the men carried with him), and two straight sticks conveniently lying nearby. The men exploited their own voluminous knowledge of the local environment and kangaroo anatomy. In other words, they exploited technique almost exclusively. If you know the party trick of opening a beer bottle with another beer bottle (or a belt buckle, or the edge of a table), you have a sense what this must feel like.

On the other hand, I completed my thesis work with Eskimo people, who are famous for having had a highly advanced Stone Age material culture. Whereas an Australian hunter might carry on his person only a small handful of very generalized tools with which he could hunt a wide variety of animals in many circumstances, an Eskimo hunter would have very complex and specialized weapons optimized for hunting a particular animal in a particular circumstance. The harpoon you’d use to hunt seals surfacing for air during the winter is rather different from those you’d use to hunt seals from the open water, or on shore during the mating season; all of these are probably different from the harpoons you use to hunt walrus. Eskimo material culture places great emphasis on technology.

Of course, Australian Aborigines and Alaskan Eskimos live in very different environments, which explains almost entirely why they place different emphases on technique and technology. If you tried to carry a diverse toolkit of specialized tools across the outback, you’d never make it from one water source to another fast enough to avoid dying of thirst. And if you tried to pare your toolkit down to something that would fit into one hand, you’d never kill and process enough animals in the Arctic summer to make it through the winter without starving. Surviving in the Outback places a premium on flexibility, which favors technical solutions. (If you have the right technique, you can cut your fingernails with any sharp edge). Survival in the Arctic places a premium on efficiency, which favors technological solutions (given the right tool — a fingernail clipper — you can cut your fingernails much more quickly than paring them with a knife.)

I think the history of technology is about the inexorable replacement of technique with technology, improving efficiency at the expense of flexibility.

For example, many years ago, finding your way around required pretty detailed knowledge about celestial motion and the local landscape. You had to use sticks and shadows, or stars, to figure out where North is, and you had to know a lot about the immediate geography (and geographic processes) just to answer “where am I?”.

Maps and compasses turned orientation into a technological task. Reading a map requires a great deal of technique, of course (as does using a compass), but much less than having to orient yourself without either of those things. You have to learn how to read a map, and you have to learn how to calibrate a compass and compensate for the declination of magnetic north. But maps and compasses allow much more efficient orientation than astronomy and local knowledge. If you have a compass and the right maps, you can find your way anywhere in any conditions ... no need to wait for the right celestial conditions (a clear sky), or spend time learning the local terrain.

GPS renders maps and compasses slow and fussy. If you have a good GPS receiver you don’t need to know how to use maps or compasses, and (more importantly) you don’t have to acquire a map before you start out on your journey. The GPS is much more efficient for the unskilled orienteer than maps and compasses, which are in turn more efficient than astronomy and local knowledge.

My discussion of GPS kind of paints technology as the clear winner over technique, but I can think of at least two downsides to a reliance on technology at the expense of technique. From a practical perspective, technological solutions presuppose a certain number of systemic, social, or other technological prerequisites. For example, if the Hubble telescope exploded and took out half the GPS satellites with it, your GPS wayfinder might become a useless paperweight. It would take a a pretty big systemic failure to render a compass and map useless.

But more than that, inattentiveness to technique means putting a lot of knowledge into a conceptual black box. You don’t even have to know what “north” is to use a GPS.

When the topic is GPS and maps, technique vs. technology seems kind of abstract and quaint. But using low-technology techniques allows a craftperson — especially a novice — to peek into that black box. I would rather, for example, hire a designer who started out coding their HTML by hand, even if they use a WYSIWYG tool to do so now. Someone whose only knowlege of orienteering is “I turn where the little box tells me to turn” is not likely to be a creative thinker about how to get un-lost. Just before Orion was born, I got into a little discussion with David Carson(!) about just this subject on the 37signals blog.

The older I get, the less faith I have in technology. (This is surprisingly common among people who work with computers). My French press broke last week, the fourth such press that’s broken for me. I’ve therefore taken to making cowboy coffee, definitely a triumph of technique over technology. With less prompting, I’ve been using a reel mower instead of a power mower, vim in deference to a word processor, and a bicycle instead of a car. (And I’ve started paring my fingernails, which even I admit is pretty pointless.)

I don’t so much fear a technology’s failures (although, with energy prices rising I think it should be a concern), as I appreciate the unusual attention to detail the low-tech method affords me. With the reel mower I can physically feel the way grass grows. Cowboy coffee has literal texture. My commute by bike connects me to all the places between my home and office. Vim makes me slow down and consider my words.

Outside

2008-07-09T09:00:00.000-07:00

I remember an ad for outdoorsy-type shoes (by Nike?) from some years ago (1995?) that claimed “Americans spend 1% of their lives outdoors.” I’m also pretty sure Nike (or whoever) omitted time spent travelling in cars, or going to and from cars, from that 1% figure. My memory is pretty hazy here, and Google is surprisingly unhelpful. So I might be misremembering.

However! At the time (1995?) it certainly didn’t seem unlikely that Americans really did spend 1% of their lives outdoors. And remember, this was before the Internet was actually interesting so the number may have declined in the interim. At the time (1995?), I was practicing archaeology, which occasionally meant spending as much as 100% of my time outdoors, if you consider sleeping in a tent to be “outdoors.” So on the subject of this particular (hazily remembered) Nike (or whoever) shoe (or whatever) campaign, I could feel a certain sense of moral superiority.

Which leads me to wonder, how much of my life now do I spend outside? Here’s a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation (do I make any other kind?)

In every 24 hour weekday, I always:

Walk the dog for 30 to 60 minutes (total)
Ride my bike at least 60 minutes (total)
Walk to the coffeeshop in the morning and afternoon (15 minutes)

On a “typical” weekday in weather that isn’t pouring down rain I’m also likely to:

Ride my bike an extra 10 miles or so (+45 minutes)
Walk or ride my bike to the grocery (+15 minutes)
Take a lunchtime bike ride downtown (+30 minutes)

So for my usual weekday activities, in pretty good weather (10 months of the year in Portland), I probably spend about 210 minutes outdoors, which is about 14% of a 1440-minute day.

My weekends — especially since Orion’s arrival — are seldom “typical” in any sense, so I’m going to try to pin down a minimum here. This will involve a lot of handwaving I’m sure. But on any weekend I’m pretty likely to do the following:

About 90 minutes of yard work
120 minutes of dog-walking
Perhaps 60 minutes (as a rough average)¹ of bike-riding

So in a 2880-minute weekend, I’m spending at least 270 minutes, or 9% of my time, outdoors.

I don’t think I lead an excessively outdoorsy life, but it looks like I’m al fresco 9 to 14 times more often than Nike’s putative average American. That seems fishy. If the average American spends 1% of their time outdoors (omitting time spent going from car to door and vice versa), that pencils out to just 14 minutes a day.

Do you think most Americans spend less than 14 minutes/day outside?

And does anyone else remember that ad campaign?

Notes

¹ This is a really rough average, especially now that Orion is here. Pre-Orion, I might have gone two or three weeks without a significant ride, with a four to eight hour monster in the middle.

Not News To Me

2008-07-08T09:30:00.001-07:00

Easily Confused

2008-07-07T09:11:00.000-07:00

I don’t think I was the only father-to-be who habitually confused “Braxton Hicks” with “Higgs Boson”.

The Years Are Rolling By Me, They Are Rocking Evenly

2008-07-03T13:57:00.001-07:00

The woman heroically coordinating my 20th high school reunion sent a mass email requesting RSVPs. The putative event is a year away. I’m inclined to just say “yes,” but with my life, it’s hard to estimate my ability to attend something like a high school reunion as much as a year in advance. A year ago, we were living in China with no kids, no car, no house, and no furniture. We have since corrected those omissions.

Tomorrow marks the one-year anniversary of our return from China. We literally descended through fireworks; I saw Independence Day 2007 from above.

It’s been a busy year. I haven’t been on airplane at all in the last 12 months.

From 1995 to 2003, somehow I managed to visit Eugene at least once a year. For eight years, when I thought of “Oregon” the place I pictured, instinctively (and a little bit sadly), was “Eugene.” Since my brother moved to Portland, I haven’t so much as driven through.

I haven’t been back to Nebraska — my home state — since the summer of 2004. Thus marking the longest period of my life that I’ve gone without setting foot on native soil.

Ten years ago, I had every intention of attending my 10-year reunion. I even paid for a ticket, filled out an entry for the facebook, and everything. Then I was laid off from what would be my last-ever archaeology job ... which layoff was approximately coincident with a move from Southern California (back) to Oregon; my first wedding (the less said, the better); and launching a glorious new career in web design. I pretty literally forgot I had a high school reunion to attend.

I Have Had Some Momentary Interactions With Certain Famous People, Mostly Musicians

2008-06-23T16:26:00.000-07:00

I almost ran into Sarah Jessica Parker in West Hollywood. She was coming out of a boutique. As she walked past me I said to myself: “I think that was Sarah Jessica Parker.” This was probably 1999, so before Sex in the City? So I knew her from...Square Pegs? Mars Attacks? L.A. Story? Also: she was theees beeeg [holds thumb and forefinger very close together]

I also nearly ran into Pete Buck in Belltown, Seattle, in 1999.

While riding my bike past Powell’s Books on the day of the Rose Parade (2002) I saw David Cross talking to someone. I didn’t know David Cross’ name at that point in my life, but I remembered seeing Mr. Show about four years earlier. I wanted to say “hey I know who you are,” except course I didn’t so I shouted “Mustardayonnaise!” at him. He gave me a smile-and-nod, the kind of motion you make when a drunken friend yells at you from across the beach.

In 2002 I went with a date to a reading by Michael Ondaatje at Powell’s. My date knew his son, and he recognized her. We only had one date.

I saw Robin Williams running through the Presidio in 1992. He was very sweaty and very hairy. This was at some great distance so I didn’t yell anything at him.

Sitting in front of my office in Old Town in 2000 I saw Tommy Larkin walk by with someone else dressed in leather. I thought, “hey, I could get Tommy Larkin’s autograph.” Then Jonathan Richman walked by. I was far too excited to think anything at all, and completely failed to get his autograph.

At the Rimrock Mall in Billings, Montana (late 1997), I passed a man who presented a kind of conspicuous inconspicuousness. He wore a plaid jacket, a baseball cap, and round eyeglasses. Something about his style and carriage seemed all wrong for Billings, Montana, as if he were a Martian anthropologist trying desperately to look like a Montanan. When I got to County Seat (the shop in the mall where I habitually bought blue jeans) all the County Seat shopgirls were standing outside the shop tittering. Apparently Mel Gibson was in the mall and they were trying to catch a glimpse of him. I think the Martian anthropologist may have been Mel Gibson.

At an all-ages show at Duffy’s Tavern (Lincoln, Nebraska) in 1991, Lori Allison of the Millions sang a capella while standing on an overturned bucket and leaning on me.

I saw Art Alexakis (of Everclear) at a movie in 2003 or 2004. Around the same time I saw Janet Weiss (of Sleater-Kinney) on Hawthorne Blvd. I also saw Marlee Matlin on the North Park Blocks, where they were filming What the Bleep Do We Know.

At Duffy’s in 1990, Nirvana sat at the bar before their set and watched their first episode ever of the Simpsons. I wasn’t there, but Krist Novoselic told this story between songs during the In Utero tour show at Ak-Sar-Ben in Omaha Nebraska in 1994, and I was there.

I never once, not ever, had the presence of mind to ask any celebrity for their autograph.

Theory vs. Practice

2008-06-22T08:18:00.000-07:00

During the eight month run-up to Orion’s arrival we had ample time to think about “parenthood” and “parenting” (also “pregnancy” and “childbirth.”) I knew anything I thought about “parenthood” or “parenting” would remain strictly theoretical. I thus went out of my way to avoid piling yet more theory into my brain, primarily by not reading anything at all on the subjects. This attitude routinely horrifies our highly educated parent-peers, and runs counter to my usual habit when undertaking a new activity. But parenthood is not at all like gardening.

Also, a lot of parenting theory (as manifest in books, magazines, and websites) is panicky, perfectionist nonsense, and the last thing we need right now is more stress. For what it’s worth, we don’t yet feel like we’ve missed something really vital in the shelves of books we’re not reading. After all, parenthood predates literacy by a billion years.

As the koan says, “how can you fill a full cup?”

We accumulated a lot of theory regardless. Most of which is informed by a horror at the passivity of modern childhood, as symbolized by strollers and televisions. This is adjunct to our attitude about adulthood (OK, life), which I might express as: “engage life physically.” I’m struggling now to formulate our exact theories on parenting, e.g.:

children aren’t passengers in or spectators of their own lives
children small enough to carry can be carried
children who can walk should walk
parents can move at kid-speed; don’t use props (e.g. strollers) to accelerate kids to adult-speed for the sake of convenience
conversely, children can be engaged in many (most?) adult activities, like cleaning, cooking, shopping, working, dog-walking, swimming, bicycling, and running
there is such a thing as too much structure
and you can probably give kids too much freedom, too
we aren’t raising a child, we’re raising a person
children learn by example; if you want your child to practice Behavior X, you need to practice Behavior X (and you probably can’t fake it)
the home is a lousy place to hang out
it’s OK sometimes to let a kid cry it out; this is how they learn to cope

However! We are now past the point where theory collides with practice. Reality has already forced us to reconsider our attitudes about:

caesarian sections
cloth diapers (which interfere with healing in the umbilical area)
automated swings (at a certain point you get tired of swaying)
books about parenting (specifically, we often find ourselves referring to a child health manual given to us by a friend)
crying it out (Jenny is much better about this than me, and she also has a finer sense of when Orion is not coping)

On the other hand, we impress ourselves with how much we’re doing with Orion. We know people who didn’t take their newborns out of the house for weeks. Orion’s made one big trip every day since last weekend (when we went to Target). At the minimum he accompanies us when we walk Bismarck to Burlingame park. Yesterday we went to a movie (Horton Hears a Who, at the Kennedy School’s “Family Matinee,” which we figured would be a pretty safe place if he started fussing [which he did]).

I Used to Think About This All the Time

2008-06-17T22:02:00.000-07:00

The fetus grows toward soulhood. It began in the land of the unliving, of elements, of formless matter and energy. It was not one thing, it was many things. It had no spirit and no soul.

The fetus spirit moves into the land of plants and dreams: unconscious, potential, dark and unthinking. It grows larger, it moves, “it” becomes “he,” he flutters, he wiggles, he hiccups. He inverts, his eyes open, he hears murmurs of voices and heartbeats. He wants to be born, he makes himself be born. He comes out of the between-world, the womb, the world of unthinking life of the sea, the world of life between dead things and sentient things. He is coming into our world now, the world of action and form and spirit.

Spirit is the gift of all living things, however low. Spirit is the will to animate, to thrive, to reproduce, to sicken, to die. Spirit is the blessing and curse of life. To be born is to die, and between those two is a constant state of Impermanence.

You cannot remember your birth, you cannot remember your first words, you cannot remember the world of unconnected sensations, of thoughts without forms and structures. My son lives in that world now. The world of insects, of small things that want light, warmth, food, sleep, comfort. Ahead of him is the growth of his soul.

Soul is the gift of sentient beings. We take our souls from God when we structure the world for ourselves, when we say: “here is the boundary between myself and all other things.” To have a soul means to know what it is to be unique, and to know that you will die. This the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil; as long as we draw that boundary we eat that fruit.

Some souls are big and some are small. An adult human, armed with words and math and art and religion and science, has a huge soul that can change the rest of the universe. To shoot an arrow is to strike something with an arrow, that is the Law of Consequence, a law of nature like the second law of thermodynamics. To act without consideration of consequence is soulless.

If animals have souls, they are tiny souls with small aspirations and abilities. Right now my dog has a bigger soul than my son, but that situation won’t persist very long. Maybe other animals have souls like humans, animals like dolphins or chimpanzees or parrots. They have to think about souls in their own way, if they can. I think that all humans have a soul, but it wasn’t given to us in any one instant, we stole it in little pieces from God, we are always stealing more of our soul from God. To Live in Grace is to sometimes, voluntarily, give a little of it back.

“God” is the word we use when we try to understand the soul. We have written about God for three thousand years and we talked about God for tens of thousands of years before that. The Old Sage said “don’t confuse the finger pointing at the moon with the moon.” The Prophet said “the human mind cannot comprehend God.” I used to read a lot about God, but you can’t learn to plow by reading books. I think words are suspect. Human beings said every word ever. I think everyone ever, including myself, has misunderstood the nature of God. I think the most definitive thing you can say about God is: if someone tells you about the nature of God, whatever they say is wrong.

Science is a tool for understanding how wrong you are, that’s why science says so little about God.

I call myself a spiritual atheist, does anyone else do this?

Happy Father’s Day to ME

2008-06-15T12:09:00.000-07:00

My mother called this morning to wish me happy Father’s Day. I had plumb forgot Father’s Day this year (as with most years, sorry Dad). My ungrateful son did not get me the traditional Father’s Day Golf Tie, the little ingrate.

The man on the radio reminded me that I have an especial treat for Father’s Day this year, with not one but two historic sporting events to witness. Tyger Wood is going to win the Stanley Cup and the L.A. Lakers will battle the Massachusetts Celtics for the Triple Crown or something. I know what I’ll be watching on TV this afternoon! Just as soon as we get cable. And a TV.

Now that I’m a dad I need to erase 37 years of indifference to any sporting activity requiring a ball. Or Orion’s gonna be a sissy, right?

Parenting Styles, Part 2

2008-06-15T08:34:00.000-07:00

[The scene: new parents Paul and Jenny are sitting at the dinner table. They pass their newborn son Orion back and forth, occasionally getting up to rock him, bounce him, shush in his ears, walk around the yard with him etc. Orion wails inconsolably. He has recently eaten, had a diaper change, and is a comfortable temperature. Orion has no outward physical need that remains unmet.]

PAUL: OMG this is insanity-making. It’s like someone is simultaneously ripping out my heart and driving splinters under my fingernails. How can you just sit there and eat?

JENNY: Eh, babies cry.

Parenting Styles, Part 1

2008-06-15T07:58:00.000-07:00

[The scene: new parents Paul and Jenny are lying under the covers with their newborn son Orion pressed against them. It is their first morning at home together. Orion awoke with blue hands and feet and a lowish body temperature. Paul and Jenny had left the windows open, as was their long habit, and failed to turn the heat on, because it’s freaking June already, can we have summer now? Orion is now warm and apparently unharmed.]

PAUL: Whew, that was close. Now we know he’ll tolerate air temperatures as low as 60 degrees wearing only a blanket. I wonder how much colder he can tolerate it? Half of me wants to find out.

JENNY: We are never letting him get cold ever again.

Hello World

2008-06-11T22:55:00.000-07:00

Orion Edward Souders entered the sunlit world June 9 at 3:35 in the afternoon. He weighed 6 lb. 15 oz. and is 19 inches long. After 12 hours of by-the-books labor and three hours of hard pushing, young Orion defied convention by refusing to exit in the expected manner, and arrived via emergency caesarian section. He and Jenny are doing well.

The longest twenty minutes of my life: sitting in my scrubs, alone, in the hallway outside the OR where Jenny is being prepped for an emergency c-section. For 20 minutes I can contemplate the worst future I can imagine.

The shortest 3 days of my life: everything between 10:30 pm June 8 and right now. Is this really happening?

I never would have imagined I could fall in love with someone the moment I met them. Especially if they're naked, screaming, and covered in blood.

Sonic Life

2008-06-04T10:36:00.000-07:00

One of the weird and awesome side effects of the imminent Digitalization of All Things is the ease with which I can become an obsessive completist. Between iTunes, Amazon MP3, and the public library, I’ve all-but-completely filled my inner obsessive music dork’s Sonic Youth Whitelist. The bootlegs are just out of reach, but it’s much much easier to find a official Sonic Youth bootlegs on the Internet in 2008 than it was at, say, Trade-A-Tape in Lincoln Nebraska in 1988. In 1988, owning a (vinyl!) copy of, say, Master-Dik put you onto the top shelf of music nerddom. (I would venture to guess that you could count on one hand the number of people in Lincoln, Nebraska who owned copy of Master-Dik in 1988.)

Time was, indulging a taste in a modestly esoteric thing — shrieking and unlistenable guitar noise with free verse, for example — required a lot of time, money, and legwork. Not only to acquire those indulgences but even to know that they existed. People shout up the Internet’s ability to lubricate acquisition but I think the Internet truly shines at the knowledge-gathering part.

Hell, I’ve been a Sonic Youth fan since Bad Moon Rising and I didn’t even know about TV Shit until 30 seconds ago.

The Cost of Things

2008-06-03T05:00:00.000-07:00

Jenny and I recently (re-)read Beverly Clearly’s Henry Huggins (because we’re having a son? because Cleary is from Portland? dunno why, really), which prompted a discussion about the prices Henry paid for things in (presumably) 1950. Life in 1950 was a lot cheaper but conversely money was a lot harder to come by. For example:

In the first chapter (“Henry and Ribs”), Henry pays a 10¢ bus fare. This was well before Tri-Met but we can actually make a direct comparison. He rode from the YMCA downtown to his house on NE Klickitat (or rather, that was his intention until he was ejected), a two-zone fare that today would cost $2.05. (You could make the argument that NE Klickitat in 1950 was on the edge of town, so it might comparable to a three-zone fare today, but I won’t make that argument.)

So from 1950 to 2008, the cost of a bus ticket in Portland, Oregon increased about twentyfold.

In the third chapter (“Henry and the Night Crawlers”), Henry wants a new football that costs $13.95. It sounds like a pretty nice football — perhaps like the Wilson F1100 Official NFL Game Football that Amazon.com sells for $79.99.

So from 1950 to 2008, the cost of a really nice football increased about fivefold.

A ten-year-old with two football’s worth of money could buy one football, and then ride the bus across town 139 times (and still have a nickel left for soda) ... in 1950. A ten-year-old in 2008 could buy the football, and then ride the bus not-quite–across town 39 times (with one penny left over).

So on the one hand, the ability of a young boy to move freely about Portland, Oregon is 28% what it was 58 years ago. On the other hand, his ability to purchase a football is 5.7 times greater than it was 58 years ago.

Or, proceeding from the assumption that the prices of things reflect in some way their actual value — and not to put too fine a point on it — we, as a society, have traded about 70% of our kids’ literal freedom (in the sense of “freedom of movement”) for a five-fold increase in their ability to accumulate stuff.

Rereading Henry Huggins for the first time since the 1970s throws into weird relief how the world has changed since my own childhood. As a kid, I recognized in Henry’s adventures a lot of my own behavior, and that of my friends. In particular, I never felt like I was reading some historical document of childhood from ancient times (something I felt when reading, for example, Peter Pan). Henry was doing things that were recognizably real-world 10-year-old things to do, in either 1950 or 1979. There were differences but they were of degree, not kind: Henry lived in a city where I lived in the country; he rode the bus freely around town and I rode my bike freely around the countryside; he collected night crawlers to sell to fishermen and I collected golf balls from the irrigation ditch next to the country club to sell to, well, golfers who lost their balls in the irrigation ditch.

Could you imagine a kid in 2008 doing any of these things?

Paul Souders vs. a 2008 Subaru Forester

2008-06-02T10:16:00.000-07:00

(A Quick Back-of-the-Envelope Calculation)

P_g = price of a gallon of regular unleaded at the Chevron near our house = $4.22
P_m = price of a gallon of Alpenrose 2% milk at New Seasons = $3.89
P_r = price of a gallon (16 cups) of cooked white rice at New Seasons^[1] = $0.35
D_fg = mileage of our 2008 Subaru Forester (standard transmission) during a typical week of commuting = 24.5 mpg
E_g = energy equivalent of a gallon of gasoline = 31,000 kcal (aka “calories”)
E_m = energy equivalent of a gallon of 2% milk = 1952 kcal
E_r = energy equivalent of a gallon (16 cups) of cooked white rice = 4256 kcal
p = energy I burn in one hour riding my bike on a flat road with no wind at 15 mph^[2] = 704 kcal
D_pg = my mileage if I could somehow consume a gallon of gasoline = (E_g/p) × 15 = 660.5 mpg
D_pm = my mileage on a gallon of 2% milk = (E_m/p) × 15 = 41 mpg
D_pr = my mileage on a gallon of cooked white rice = (E_r/p) × 15 = 90.7 mpg
C_fg = cost to drive the Forester one mile = P_g/D_fg = $0.17
C_pg = cost to ride my bike one mile if I could somehow consume gasoline = P_g/D_pg < $0.01 (greater than half a significant digit [$0.005]
C_pm = cost to ride my bike one mile powered by milk = P_m/D_pm = $0.09
C_pr = cost to ride my bike one mile powered by rice = P_r/D_pr < $0.01 (less than half a significant digit [$0.005]

Notes

^[1] Assumes 2 cups of cooked rice = 1 cup dry rice weighing 8oz
^[2] A pretty leisurely speed for me under those conditions, so I might actually burn fewer calories than this, i.e. get better “gas mileage”

Something I Just Learned...

2008-05-30T13:50:00.001-07:00

The traffic dangers of cycling fatalities are offset at least 10 to 1 by the cardiovascular health benefits.

From John Pucher, via this video (around minute 23)

Update: Also: “For every hour you spend cycling, you add more than an hour to your lifespan.”

I Love This Town

2008-05-30T13:18:00.000-07:00

A little sun today, finally, after what feels like the longest winter evar. Broken clouds, cool, wind smells like ocean. The wet winter makes for the greenest imaginable spring ... plants practically attacking pavement. Some kind of festival — the Rose Festival? — on the waterfront which, has for some reason, attracted a flotilla of, no fooling, pirate ships. With sails.

Over lunch I rode down to Clever Cycles, to look at Xtracycles — and damn, I love this town. We’ve reached bicycle tipping point in Portland, and I offer the intersection of SE 9th Ave and Hawthorne as proof. The street itself is the major bicycle thoroughfare — westbound on the bridge onramp you’ll have actual bicycle congestion, which the city attempted to remedy with bicycle passing lanes. On the northeast corner there’s the Lucky Labrador brewery, where you’ll find more space to park bikes than cars. On the southeast corner is Clever Cycles. Our enormous bicycle market allows shops to specialize to such a degree that we have at least one shop that specializes in bicycles for transportation.

Famous Bicycle Colors

2008-05-28T13:05:00.001-07:00

	Bianchi Celeste
	Pinarello Blue
	Raleigh British Racing Green
	Eddie Merckx Orange
	Specialized Red
	Giro D’Italia Maglia Rosa
	Tour De France Maillot Jaune
	Rainbow Jersey

The Beach, Reached

2008-05-18T07:10:00.000-07:00

First of course: a hearty thank you to everyone who contributed to my Reach the Beach effort. I raised $125 for the American Lung Association, busting my goal by $25. (As a colleague expert in fundraising noted: “You need bigger goals”).

I had a fantastic ride. The weather cooperated beautifully — I’ve never experienced a Reach the Beach that was so sunny. The only downsides to the sun and heat were a risk of sunburng, and I suppose a person is probably not at peak performance when you’re hot (this is especially true when climbing.)

Speaking of climbing: the ride organizers added a new section for 2008. (Actually they substituted a new section, but you get my meaning). Previous rides, after reaching Sherwood, directed bikes onto Highway 99 into Newberg. This was not as bad as it sounds ... the shoulder here is wide, and it makes for a long, steady descent into the Tualatin valley.

In lieu of this trek down 99W, this year we climbed up Kruger road onto the west end of the Chehalem hills — a grueling 900 foot climb followed by a quick descent onto Bell Road in the valley. Simply put, this piece of Oregon is perfect bicycling. Trees, views, low traffic, hellish climbs — oh yeah. On Bell Road — a long, straight piece of asphault whose terrain pretty much epitomizes the term “rolling” — I reached my maximum speed on the ride, 40 mph. During one of the short rolling descents I stoked up instead of coasting, then powered up the next hill, cresting it at this enormous speed. I’ve never gone so fast under my own power.

The middle 50 miles of the ride were, as usual, my least favorite. This is the long long flat flat stretch between Dayton and Grande Ronde, with a lovely detour onto SR 18. (With construction on SR 18, however, the bikes were passing the cars. Ha!) Of course you’re eating the wind during this entire ride however which happens every year.

The back 25 (Grande Ronde to Pacific City) really tested my mettle. My average speed coming into Grande Ronde was 17.9 mph, not bad for a guy without a paceline. My average speed on the last leg was something like 14 or 15 mph (See “by the Numbers,” below. I had front-row seats for the usual circus on the last hard climb of the ride, a 150' climb over about a quarter mile a scant 10 miles to the finish. This would be a minor climb but for two complicating factors. First, it comes after the seasoned riders (those riding the century out of Portland) have already put 90 miles on their bikes, so the strong riders are tired. Second, everyone who rides RTB, regardless of their start point, will be topping this climb. In general, as you approach the beach, the quality of the riders and their bicycles drops, because there are more options for shorter, less-demanding rides. On this particular hill the net result is a lot of riders pushing their bikes to the top. In and of itself this is no big deal, but the marked gradient in abilities leads to cyclists (or rather “pedestrians with bicycles”) spread across the road, making it a little treacherous to thread one’s way through them. This year I saw a rider fall over on his bike because he was going too slow to maintain forward momentum (either that or he couldn’t downshift quickly enough for the climb.)

Jenny, Michelle, Bismarck and Sid met me at the finish line, which was a fine time I suppose but I’m getting tired of that part of organized rides. You know, the part with a sound system and waiting in line for pasta.

By The Numbers

Start time: 7:51 am
Finish time: 2:06 pm
Saddle time: 5:37:45
Final ODO: 98.29 mi. (WTF? The new start at Scholls elementary shaves off about 4 miles?)
Average speed: 17.4 mph
Max speed: 40 mph

UPDATE:

I’ve created a Google Map with the route

China Earthquake and Digging Ditches

2008-05-14T15:24:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I say things like “web design isn’t like digging ditches.” Meaning: more time ≠ better design The past week at Mercy Corps has proven that sometimes, web design is like digging ditches. Fresh on the heels of Cyclone Nargis, we’ve been fundraising for a response to the earthquake in southwest China. That’s meant a constant stream of creative: web pages, banners, logos ... and every minute I’m not pumping out creative is another minute we’re not raising money for our program partners in China.

Mercy Corps’ Response to Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar

2008-05-09T16:36:00.001-07:00

Some of my friends are asking about Mercy Corps’ response to the Cyclone that’s affecting Myanmar. The short version is: Mercy Corps is mobilizing. The long version is: it’s complicated.

Our situation is still in flux right now ... we don’t have a program in Myanmar and we’re working to get people on the ground. The main hurdle is bureaucratic — the government is basically paralyzed and can’t add any new NGOs to their “approved” list, and isn’t really quick about approving visas. We have a partner agency (which I’m not sure I’m allowed to publicize yet) who already operates in Myanmar; in the worst case scenario we’ll be able to funnel aid through the partner.

I’m hopeful Mercy Corps can establish a program. We work at a special juncture between emergency relief (something like Oxfam) and long-term non-emergency development (something like Kiva). There’s an important transition between the two that’s often overlooked. Emergencies bring a lot of welcome aid, but when the emergency fades people lose interest. Mercy Corps has a good record of using emergencies to develop institutions of civil society. We often say “build it back, build it better.”

You can read more about our official response (and give online) at http://www.mercycorps.org/myanmarcyclone.

digg story

The Downside of Home Improvement

2008-05-02T11:22:00.000-07:00

Pretty much the only improvement we’ve done to this house since January is to remove the really horrible back patio roof:

(Michelle’s boyfriend Otto did this for us BTW.)

This has proven a 99% improvement. It lets a great deal more light into the kitchen and back of the house, and we can see greenery out the windows, instead of the dirty underside of a corrugated steel roof. The patio has become more usable in good weather (because it isn’t cold and mildewy), and surprisingly not less useful in bad weather. (Because bad weather generally comes from the southwest, i.e. the front of the house, so the roof overhang provides enough space to maneuver dryly around the patio without the full cover.)

Today I discovered the 1% situation where having a dark, fully covered patio would have come in handy. All that sun washes out the backlight on my laptop so it’s a pain to work outdoors.

Reach the Beach

2008-04-23T11:47:00.000-07:00

I’ll keep this brief.

On May 17, I’m riding Reach the Beach, benefitting the American Lung Association. I ride this every year. In 2003 I rode with my brother. Usually Jenny and I ride it together; in 2006 we rode with our friend Kenny. This is my first year riding solo. It’s also my first year shilling for donations.

Most years, I don’t take seriously the fundraising aspect of the event. Usually I just ride. This year I’m hitting you up for money.

How often do I ask you for money? (And by “you” I mean “everyone except my parents.”) That’s right, never.

So CLICK HERE or visit http://rtb.kintera.org/axoplasm and donate online to the American Lung Association.

p.s. Click here.

I Used to Be an Archaeologist

2008-04-21T09:24:00.002-07:00

I spent a portion of my weekend sorting and cleaning some of my old bike tools. Mixed in with which were the bare core of my archaeological field kit. Said discovery occasioned me to reflect on a life I used to have: I used to be an archaeologist.

I left that life behind nine years ago. After seven years of chasing work around the country, I wanted to put myself into a place first, and a job second. That’s when I took up the website-making stuff.

When people learn about this past life, they wonder either or both of two things:

Why I ever left it for web design
How my archaeological work prepared me conceptually for web design

The answer to the first question is easy: because it’s so much easier to find jobs designing websites. This is not, for me, a matter of income: I could (and did) happily live on my archaeologist salary. No, what makes website design a better career is that no one, ever, has said to me “you’re lucky even to have a job.” I think I heard this phrase, or variations thereof, from nearly all of my archaeology bosses, even the good ones whom I liked and who valued my abilities. The sad fact of having a job title like “archaeologist” is that the supply of people with that title far outstrips the demand.

The answer to the second question is also easy, but most people don’t like to hear it. So I don’t tell them. I think studying anthropology excellently prepared me for heavy-duty brain work, as I’ve written about previously. (Grad school also gave me another headstart on web design, but the reason was historical. I started grad school in 1995 when the web was young and unfettered high-speed Internet access kind of tricky to come by. By virtue of my status as a grad student at the University of Oregon, I had time-share access to Unix web servers, and fast ethernet.) But really, I’d have had (most of) this preparation if I’d have gone straight from my undergraduate degree, through grad school, and into the non-anthropology workforce. It has more to do with the great ability of a liberal education to prepare a person for nothing and everything all at once, provided that person is actually paying attention.

One perceptive person once deduced that archaeology — especially geoarchaeology, which I was pretty good at — conditioned the mind to think four-dimensionally, which was useful lateral training for work with computers. Everyone else sees some connection between the patience or care they imagine archaeologists use in excavation, and web design. I don’t buy that at all, because archaeology really doesn’t require that much patience or attention (just good note-taking), and web design doesn’t require it at all.

No, the real (and very prosaic) answer to “how did your archaeological work prepare you conceptually for web design” is “because it got me working with databases.” That’s really the only connection between what I used to do a decade ago and what I do now.

I often miss archaeology, because it’s a very satisfying job in its daily details. I particularly miss working and living outdoors. The career also provided a good mix of brainwork and hard physical labor, a combination lacking in most other (any other?) jobs. For the sake of reminiscence, I scanned a few old photos of my archaeology self, shaggy hair, beard, sunburn and all.

The Automobile Pollutant Exposure Theory of Bicycling Avoidance

2008-04-19T04:24:00.000-07:00

I have a few pet issues. Some people would call these pet peeves, but pretty much the only pet peeve I have is “beliefs that have not been clearly thought through.” One of my pet issues is an excuse for not bicycling I used to hear quite a bit. (For some reason people offer this less frequently — to me, anyway — as an excuse.) The excuse is something along the lines of “I’d ride my bike more often but I don’t want to expose myself to all those automobile pollutants.”

Which is kind of silly for two reasons:

The research doesn’t support it
It doesn’t make any damn sense

First, the facts. Most people have a skewed sense of both risk and exposure re: automobile pollutants. My reading (some references below) indicates that:

"Gas-phase" (i.e. non particulate) pollutants are at least as high inside a car as outside.
Fresh air controls or air conditioning have no effect on pollutant levels inside a car.
Levels of particulate pollutants are higher outside cars, but the effect drops dramatically away from a high-traffic road.
Cars produce the most pollutants when they’re idling or operating under light load — in other words, at rush hour, or in a parking lot.
The more time you spend in and around cars, especially at rush hour, the greater your exposure.
Children living within a third of a mile from a major freeway are more likely to develop asthma and other diseases, and have less-developed lungs.
Airborne pollutants are lower in neighborhoods with higher residential density and mixed land use (exactly the kind encouraged by a city with lots of cyclists.)

Second, let’s think this through. Consider some other source of air pollution. A steel mill, for example. Where would you find more airborne pollutants emitted by a steel mill: near the steel mill, or inside the steel mill? Generally speaking, how would steel mill pollutants vary as a function of distance from the source? As a function of the duration of exposure to the source?

The explicit premise of the automobile pollutant exposure theory of bicycling avoidance is “automobile pollutants are bad.” The implicit premise is “being near running automobiles is bad.” From these premises we can reason that:

The greater the distance from running automobiles, the better
The fewer running automobiles you’re near at once, the better
The less time, in total, that you’re exposed to running automobilies, the better

Given the premises of the automobile pollutant exposure theory of bicycling avoidance, if your lifestyle necessitates spending lots of time in or near cars (that is, driving everywhere), then you're actually maximizing your exposure to automotive pollutants. Moreover, communities that encourage frequent motoring hit you twice: first, because you spend all your time inside a car; and second, because the town has more freeways, more heavy traffic, more large intersections, more parking lots — in other words, more (and more frequent) exposure to automobiles in situations where they produce the most pollutants.

Finally, and this is the emotional appeal, imagine a scene. Imagine riding your bike down a quiet street, or a bike path, a good distance away from a major highway. Imagine taking a deep breath. What does the air smell like? Does it smell like fresh-cut lawns? Pine trees? Dead leaves? Wet pavement? Bacon and eggs from a nearby kitchen? Coffee roasting in the coffee shop? (That’s what my commute smells like.)

REFERENCES:

(Prompted by a post at the Bicycle Transportation Alliance Blog.)

Free Range Kids

2008-04-17T12:05:00.000-07:00

With a kid on the way I’ve been thinking a lot about my own childhood and the way I was raised. In particular, I’m kind of floored at how few freedoms modern children have. I think a large part of the person I am today — fearless, independent, improvisational, and yet careful and relatively cautious — is a direct result of the latitude I enjoyed as a young person.

New York Post columnist Lenore Skenazy recently let her 9-year-old ride the subway home from Bloomingdale’s, a surprisingly newsworthy event. She described it on NPR as being the equivalent of “Nine Year Old Makes Toast”

the following is crossposted as a comment on Lenore’s website, Free Range Kids.

My young childhood was in rural Nebraska in the 1970s, and I had parents of the “be home for dinner” parenting philosophy, so I enjoyed a lot of freedoms from a young age. These included such mad behavior as riding stunts on our bicycles, building treehouses, swimming in irrigation ditches, and shooting BB guns — all of which I’m sure are roundly verboten to 7-to-10-year-olds in 2008 America.

When I was 10, the family moved to the “big” city of Lincoln, where we lived in a relatively urban neighborhood near the agricultural college. Luckily I was just at the age where climbing trees was becoming less interesting than things like movie theaters or shopping malls.

I don’t remember having any strict boundaries of any sort in either environment. I certainly got in trouble for “running off” but that was because I hadn't told anyone where I was going beforehand.

When I was 11, I rode my bike to Gateway Mall, about 2 or 3 miles distant from our house. I remember vividly that I had three dollars with me, enough to buy a soda, play a video game, and (fittingly) purchase a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book.

None of this behavior was worthy of comment. All the kids I knew lived this way, and many of them were “latchkey kids” so beloved by after-school specials.

The fascinating thing to me is that the world has in most ways become a much safer place since that time. Child abductions are down, violent crime is down, street gangs are quieter, and so forth.

Case in point: I started delivering newspapers when I was 12, just one year after a sensational case where a paperboy in my town was kidnapped, tortured and murdered. I don’t recall anyone saying to me or anyone else that kids shouldn’t deliver newspapers. It was just regarded as this weird and awful fluke thing that happened, but it didn't have anything particular to do with “us.” (I’m sure my mom will remember this differently and chime in on the comments. Also, Mom: what was that kid’s name?)

Should such a heinous thing happen now I'm sure it would be swiftly followed by laws forbidding 12-year-old boys from going outdoors before 6 am or after 6 pm.

You know, “for our safety.”

I always want to get a new...

2008-04-07T13:31:00.000-07:00

...no matter how many I already own, or how nice it is, and how unsatisfactory I know I’ll find its replacement.

Eight Miles

2008-04-05T21:03:00.000-07:00

I changed my clipless pedal cleats today.

I remembered doing this last autumn, right around the time I rolled my odometer over 6666.6 miles. I have the photos to prove it:

Which occasioned me to wonder, how many miles have I ridden since that time (September 9, 2007)?

Well, as of about 20 minutes ago my bicycle odometers (I have two — one for each bike) read 7660 and 690. I seldom ride without a computer, and they’re pretty accurate. Years ago, I calibrated the one that reads 7660 by rolling out my bicycle tire alongside a tape measure. I use the stock calibration for my tire size on the new computer, but its distances pretty much agree with the old one.

So I’ve ridden 1684 miles in the last 209 days, averaging just slightly more than 8 miles a day or 56 miles a week. At this rate I can expect to ride about 2933 miles in a year. That’s kind of a disappointing distance ... I aim to get more than 100 miles a week in good weather. On the other hand, this has been the wettest winter on record in Oregon.

Giving Away UI Design

2008-04-04T03:46:00.000-07:00

Jeff Atwood blogged recently about UI-first software development. I’m a UI designer primarily so this is the only kind of development I ever do, really, but it definitely struck a chord. Atwood makes a pretty strong pitch for paper prototyping, a process I think a lot of people unjustly associate with user testing and not UI design

I’ve had tremendous luck designing UI prototypes with a mix of static HTML (OK you can use PHP templates or something similar to save a little labor) and paper prototyping. If you’re really handy with HTML it’s a lot easier to nest and align elements than doing so by eye or in a drawing tool, and you can fake interactivity with anchors for workflow purposes. If your HTML is clean you get a certain headstart on building templates as well. I’ve kind of grown away from this particular practice in recent years though since web apps have grown in asynchronous interactivity.

Most importantly, you can print out the screens and use scissors, pens, etc. to edit the interface. Which lowers the artistic barrier to sub-Pictionary levels, drawing in lots of players who don’t usually involve themselves in production, such as project managers, account execs, or even the customer. This is the most powerful selling point of paper prototyping: it pushes out the UI design, sometimes to the users themselves.

Another method I've used for almost a decade now is detailed whiteboarding: drawing and erasing interface features with the team or users as you step through a workflow. Capture your UI changes with a digital camera and voila! instant wireframe.

Funnily enough, the more I’ve involved non-techies and non-designers in UI design, the more my UI design business has grown. I think this is because good UI design is ultimately about two things: documentation and communication. Everyone communicates their intentions and desires with everyone else, and everything gets documented.

The method also highlights what has become a key business principle for me: the more I give, the more I have. Since leaving Curiosity three years ago, I’ve basically never needed to show anyone my portfolio, and I regularly turn business away. And yet: I take every opportunity to involve my clients in what I do, hell, I’ll teach them how to do my job.

A lot of people in the software or design biz have this kind of “golden ticket” mentality: “if I just learn Hot Technology X or acquire Important Job Skill Y (i.e. get a golden ticket), I’ll be able to grow my business.” This line of thinking has an important corollary: if lots of people have golden tickets they won’t be worth as much, because the supply of golden tickets might outstrip demand. Which makes my philosophy of “let everyone see how nonmagical my job is” baffling to some people.

What makes me good at my job isn’t that I’m handy with PHP or know how to use OmniGraffle. I’m good at what I do because I use my brain. The more transparent I make my brain-using, the better. This is also why I don’t (yet) fear that my job will be outsourced.

For example: most of my Chinese subordinates at Ports had, by traditional definitions, more job skills that I have. At the very least, they spoke at least two languages. And yet: I made five to ten times as much money ... and I was in much greater demand. It turns out my “soft” skills like planning and design are more valuable than the “hard” skills of programming Java applications or drawing Flash animations.

One last story: about four years ago I was replacing the bottom bracket on my Kona bicycle. I had stripped the frame down to just the bracket and headset, but I didn’t have the right tool for the (ISIS style) BB. I took the naked frame to Fat Tire Farm, where I’d bought it. I’d never seen an ISIS BB before and needed to know what kind of tool to buy to remove it. The mechanic delivered a massive lecture about how unqualified I was to strip a bicycle and that I was basically stealing work from him. I told him to, in so many words, shove it.

I promptly took the frame to the Bike Gallery, where the mechanic not only told me what kind of BB I had, he showed me which tool to buy and how to use it, and diagnosed the problem. Fat Tire Farm, because they didn’t want to lose a $50 repair sale, drove my tool-purchasing business ($25) to the Bike Gallery, and lost me forever as a customer. Bike Gallery, on the other hand, traded the $50 repair for a $25 tool purchase. And now every time I need new socks or shoes or lighting systems or pedals or cranks or cables or tools or helmets I buy them at the Bike Gallery.

New R.E.M. Albums

2008-04-02T09:08:00.000-07:00

I stood outside the door of Pickles Records, waiting for opening time, on the day of Document’s release in 1987. (It was also, coincidentally, the day before my 16th birthday.) That event began a pattern that continued through 1988’s Green (released on Election Day), 1991’s Out of Time (sometime in early spring — oh, March 12, thank you Wikipedia!), and 1992’s Automatic for the People (October 6): I would buy R.E.M.’s newest album on its release day.

Archaeological fieldwork (in the vicinity of Buffalo, Texas) delayed my purchase of 1994’s Monster (September 27), but I resumed my habit for New Adventures is Hi-Fi (September 10, 1996). The last R.E.M. album I bought on its release date was the post–Bill Berry Up (October 27, 1998). During the same year, someone at a party asked me who my favorite band was and my then-girlfriend answered for me: “Stereolab.” I recall being a little put off — where did she get off saying my favorite band wasn’t R.E.M., which was certainly the case since at least 1986’s Lifes Rich Pageant? But the hell of it was, she was right.

I bought Reveal several months after its release (May 15, 2001). I knew of its existence during the entire time, but the uneven quality of the band’s last two albums dulled my enthusiasm a little. I eventually bought it on CD — one of the last albums on bought on CD, actually.

I can’t recall when I bought 2004’s Around the Sun. I think I noticed some unfamiliar R.E.M. songs on a coworker’s shared iTunes library, which prompted me to wonder — “did R.E.M. release a new album and I didn’t even know about it?” Yup, that’s what happened. I downloaded the album from iTunes mainly out of loyalty. By that time — probably early 2005 — R.E.M. occupied the same place in my pop culture universe as The Simpsons...their early work had essentially bought them a lifetime free pass in my opinion.

I feel pretty good about being only three days late for Accelerate, which is a stronger effort than any R.E.M. album since 1996. Like U2’s How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, it’s a return-to-form album, with none of the electronic experimentation of Up or the soft-rock coasting of the previous two albums. So in the sense of “resembles older, better R.E.M. albums,” it’s pretty good. On the other hand, at least until 2004, the one thing you could safely say about the newest R.E.M. album was that it wouldn’t sound much like any R.E.M. album before it.

When I was 16, I wrote a screed about classic rock radio called “Fuck Radio” for a friend’s zine (the Subterranean). It used to infuriate me that a young person could turn on the radio and hear great rock and roll coming from at least five F.M. stations, but that none of that great rock and roll was newer than about 1978. I thought I was living through the halcyon years of rock and roll, which had been revitalized first by punk rock in the late 70s and then again by New Wave and the R & B–influenced pop of the early 1980s. I held especial contempt for the Rolling Stones and Eric Claption, both of whom I regarded as way past their prime, holding back rock and roll, filling the airwaves and critical attention with stuff that had already been done. This was part of a larger rubric in my head that kind of loathed the remaindered 60s culture of then-thirtysomethings. What little airspace was left for pop music seemed to be filled with execrable hair metal and junky throwaway pop.

I wonder where that screed is now? I bet it’s funny.

Spring Break and the Power of Preference

2008-03-26T13:20:00.000-07:00

Jenny is on Spring Break this week which means I’m kind of on Spring Break. My usual morning routine gets me up at about 5:00 for dog-walking, breakfast-making, lunch-making, freelance-project-onworking, sun-saluting, and sudoku-completing. All of which must be finished by 7:30 am (in time for my morning commute). Except for items five and six, although if I don’t do those the rest of the day is ruined. Fortuitously I’m between freelance projects so with Jenny around all day to help with items one through three I only have to worry about items five and six.

When I was in grad school (age 24), a friend in her 50s (actually my room-mate’s second cousin) said something like “oh I remember grad school. It was wonderful to have time to read.” I thought she was on drugs — “geez I’m working all the time now, aren’t I?”

Oh man I had no idea. My life is end-to-end full in such a way that I’ve redefined “vacation” to mean “I feel like I have enough time to do the work I have to do.” I can’t wait to see what happens to my schedule when the kid arrives. (How do people with children — people I actually know — have time to watch TV? Or play video games? Luxury!)

The hell of it is, I like it this way. Thus the power of preference: you will do more of things you like. If you learn to like freelance work and dog-walking and making breakfast and lunch for your spouse, you will want to do those things and enjoy doing them. They still feel like chores but I don’t begrudge them.

I was recently discussing daylong bike rides with another young father recently. He said: “get in as many daylong rides as you can, because after your baby comes you wont’t have any more time for fun.” I said: “well I have to learn how to have fun with my son.”

“Bicycles won’t solve any of the world’s problems...”

2008-03-20T08:57:00.001-07:00

“...but they’ll make some of them better and none of them worse.”

(I thought of this on my ride into work this morning.)

Hey, Look at Me! I’m on the Internets!

2008-03-14T08:27:00.000-07:00

And I’m on fire!

Circles, Vicious and/or Virtuous

2008-03-11T10:24:00.001-07:00

The more I work, the more I can work.

The way to make friends is to have friends.

The more I eat, the hungrier I feel.

When I don't yell at the dog, he's more likely to do what I want.

Lonely people never leave the house.

The more I ride my bike, the more I want to ride my bike.

Money attracts money.

Watching TV makes me want to watch TV.

To be loved, love.

The more I give, the more I have.

I can't sleep when I'm tired.

If you want something done, give it to a busy person

Alert!

2008-03-10T16:07:00.000-07:00

Sometimes you're not "wasting time," you're "improving your craft." Yeah, that's what I'm doing today. Thanks, Jeff Atwood.

Punk Rock Music Makes a Terrible Soundtrack for Work

2008-03-10T14:26:00.000-07:00

(...unless of course that work is bicycle repair.)

The problem is not so much the volume or rhythm or meter; it's because of all those devil words. It's hard to concentrate on writing a good Regular Expression when someone is yelling something clever in your ear about Bitchin' Camaros.

My usual work soundtrack is instrumental ... jazz is good, classical and New Age work well, but I really favor instrumental rock like Mono, or brainy electronica like Boards of Canada. Penguin Cafe Orchestra — which I might describe as jazz-fusion electronic classical New Age — provide the very best possible music for working.

Be Courteous and Kind and Forgiving

2008-03-07T16:09:00.001-08:00

So maybe improving my Google ranking means posting more than once a week? So here's something funny to look at:

RESOLVED: Improve My Google Ranking

2008-02-26T13:14:00.000-08:00

This is not meant as a slight against the other Paul Souders but when you Google “Paul Souders” his website is the one you get first. Instead of mine.

This year, somehow, I’m gonna change that.

My New Favorite Word is “Clbuttic”

2008-02-26T11:39:00.000-08:00

And I’m going to use it all the time.

But what does it mean?

You stay clbutty, Paul!

Perspective

2008-02-25T13:37:00.000-08:00

In the past 3 years I’ve totally remade my productivity habits. The key is that I don’t keep “to do” items hanging around. I either do them immediately, file them in a “trusted place” where I know I can’t forget them (more on this below), or just delete them.

Basically the system is about focus and time horizons: if a task is on a horizon of “right now” I just do it. If the horizon is “very soon” I file it in my trusted place. If the horizon is “sometime” I just forget about it. I long ago discovered: truly important “sometime” tasks generally become “very soon” items all on their own. Usually because someone else has a stake in the problem and will ride me for status updates or a deliverable or something. Altogether the system has the effect of focusing me on what I need to do right now, and I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about all the things I should be doing.

My “trusted place” is two things: email (because most requests arrive via email), or a waiter’s notepad. If I’m not at my computer (like in a meeting) and someone asks me for something (like “can you email me the latest wireframe for project X”), I write it on my notepad — ONE ITEM PER PAGE. My notepad fills up a little during the day, but as soon as I’m near a computer I go through it. I either “fill the order” (i.e. do the task) then throw away the sheet, or I send an email to myself (i.e. put it in my “very soon” queue), or I just throw the note away.

It’s very satisfying to throw away all these little slips of paper during the day. And they are very insubstantial, so I don’t feel like I’m wasting paper. I do catch a lot of crap for “taking orders” during meetings or whatever.

You can buy waiter’s notepads by the brick at office depot.

Interestingly, my work philosophy has come to pervade my personal life, but in a less direct way. I don’t generally write down my personal-life “to do” items on a waiter’s notepad. But I have gotten myself into the habit of doing small, easy tasks (like washing dishes, or dropping off library books) immediately, so they don’t clutter up my mental plumbing. By the same token, I’m learning which stuff that seems important (teach myself Django? hange new curtains? switch to CFL lightbulbs?) actually is important (five year anniversary! 24-week ultrasound! walk the dog!)

I’m told this is a lot like David Allen’s Getting Things Done but I’ve never read the book so I can’t say. I do read Merlin Mann’s 43 Folders website from time to time so I’m familiar with the general concept. Unlike Allen’s or Mann’s systems, my system doesn’t have a devoted following or a long-running blog or a philosophy. It does have a name. I call it “perspective.”

(This post was inspired by a recent post on Scott’s Simply Internet Trash.)

Songs in My Head Lately

2008-02-05T08:18:00.000-08:00

...and why they’re there...

“Bruce Philosopher Song” (Monty Python)

...because we live off of Hume St.

“David Hume could outconsume/Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel”

“Where Do You Go To My Lovely?” (Peter Sarstedt)

...ever since we saw Darjeeling Limited last fall.

“When Your Mind’s Made Up” (Glen Hansard & Marketa Irglova)

The film responsible this time is Once.

“An Animated Description of Mr. Maps” (the Books)

Probably the catchiest aleatoric song I know of. Two lines really stick in my head:

“He felt lost but he felt pretty intensely good
and he woke up screaming having dreamed of a color he had never seen before”

“He saw red, but he thought five.
He was pleased to find his road trip was enhanced by number-color synesthesia”

“Blackbird” (the Beatles)

Probably been stuck in there since the mid-1980s. I don’t play guitar, but judging from the number of people who film themselves earnestly butchering “Blackbird,” I’m thinking it appears in Guitar for Dummies.

“Jump” (Van Halen)

Because of this video.

Handy Homeowner Guy

2008-01-29T08:37:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I installed a new (NEMA 10-50R) outlet for our dryer (replacing the old range-style outlet [10-30R] on the same circuit). I hate working with electricity. I've been shocked plenty with 110v and was scared crapless at the prospect of getting zapped with 220v. My fear was that whoever wired the breaker box hadn't properly labeled the dryer circuit, although it was the only 30amp circuit...so why so scared, Paul?

I also figured out, using Science™, why the dishwasher backed up when Jenny ran the in-sink-erator. It backed up for the same reason the in-sink-erator backs up when the dishwasher drains (but in reverse). Except that apparently the dishwasher doesn’t drain on its own, the circulator pump needs to cycle first. The Science™ part is that I figured this out by treating the dishwasher like a black box and drawing a diagram, then testing the black box by running coffee grounds and other stuff through the in-sink-erator. So Science™ has at least two uses:

Asking stupid questions during ultrasound tests
Figuring out really basic plumbing problems.

The “fix” for the dishwasher — such as it was — was the run the dishwasher through the end of its cycle. Also (and FFR): don’t drain a full sink all at once through the in-sink-erator.

I need to point out here that I am not usually a handy person, so this is probably about 50% of the Handy Homeowner stuff I’ve done in my whole life.

Probably Related:I'm trying to teach myself some knots from Knots and Splices. I never remember knots. I remember a few knot fundamentals, like slipknot, double-8, and hitch, but my knot philosophy is “if you can’t tie a knot, tie a lot.” Someday I’m gonna have to teach my son how to tie good knots. I can’t throw a baseball and don’t know jack about cars, so I figure need to pass on some kind of manly stuff.

Buh-Bye Lake Oswego

2008-01-28T11:05:00.000-08:00

After our first week in the new house I am — and whoa, where did this come from — missing Lake Oswego?

Well, objectively, here’s what our old neighborhood had going for it:

It was a great place for walking dogs.

We have Marshall Park now, which is pretty primo dog-walking territory, but our Lake O digs were literally across the street from George Rogers Park, with its open field and duck-infested Willamette river beach. Caninirvana.

But I think the feeling I have right now is not so much missing Lake Oswego as a realization about what my life might feel like in five short months. At that time I will be a father in addition to a homeowner — which are good things, yo, that’s not the point. The point is, five or ten or twenty years after that, when I think back on the carefree, minimalist, jetset lifestyle Jenny and I had five or ten twenty years previous, the last place I’ll associate with that lifestyle will be our lovely but barely usable apartment in lovely but barely usable Lake Oswego.

So I’m feeling what, pre-emptive nostalgia? This is why I have so much trouble with displays of emotion

Science Guy™ at the Eighteen Week Ultrasound

2008-01-24T20:54:00.000-08:00

Yesterday we had our Big Eighteen Week Ultrasound Show. Jenny’s sister came along. The OHSU crew were nonplussed by the entourage, they all said something along the lines of “oh we’ve had way bigger groups than this.” For a Science Guy™ like me, an ultrasound of your own biological offspring is like the Best. Movie. Ever.

Owing to my ventricular septal defect I’d seen ultrasounds of my own heart before, including the cool Doppler ultrasound where the arterial blood is red and the other kind is blue. So I’m kinda used to ultrasounds and they’ve always been kinda fun. Our first two baby ultrasounds were on the same pretty-good-episode-of-Nature plane of cool. This one went in IMAX territory.

If anyone ever asks me why they should learn about science, I’ll tell them: because someday you’re probably going to watch an ultrasound of your genetic progeny, and you’ll want to understand what the hell you’re looking at.

A little knowledge of anatomy is handy, of course, but so is an ability to ask penetratingly stupid questions. The kind of questions I like to flatter myself only Science Guys™ like me would ask. Questions like:

So do you use higher frequencies for better resolution?
Or longer waves for deeper tissue penetration?
Were you really good with Rubik’s cubes? Because of the, y’know, 3D-thinking-stuff?
If bats and dolphins “see” with sonar, does that mean they see through us, like they can see our bones and fluid in our bladders?
If kids can hear higher frequencies than adults (which is true! Remember the special sound that used to distinguish the picture tubes in color TVs from those in black and whites sets? Did you ever wonder why newer color TVs don’t make that sound? Well, they still do [except of course for LCDs] — you just can’t hear it any more.) — anyway if children can hear higher frequencies than adults because their ear bones are smaller, can fetuses hear sonar?
Is that the ventricular septum?

And, yes:

It’s a boy
He has all his parts in all the right places
He doesn’t have a heart defect like his old man
He’s a little ahead of schedule, so either he’s a fast grower or we’re bad at math
Jenny is doing great.

Possession

2008-01-21T18:20:00.000-08:00

This weekend we moved from our Lake Oswego apartment into the new house. The event represents reversals in two of the major trends in my life. Briefly:

I will no longer change addresses every five months
My pile of possessions will grow, not shrink

Constant mobility, occasional poverty, and a tendency toward minimalism drove me, in the last 5 years, to pare my stuff into a tiny pile. Minus the furniture (which I share with Jenny and which was — all of it — Jenny’s coming into the relationship), everything I own would fit into the back of the Subaru. There’s a certain amount of overlap between things that are unequivocally “mine” and those that are “ours,” of course.

Jenny and I fit all our possessions into a 700 sq. ft. apartment, and it wasn’t a tight fit. Now we’ve expanded into three times the floor space. Our shared tendencies to prune and compact led to such comical displays as a neatly organized stack of boxes and storage containers in the far corner of the otherwise empty walk-in closet attached to the largest bedroom in the house — which will itself probably remain empty for several months (if not years).

It’s like when zoo animals are given larger enclosures, but continue to pace around in circles the size of their old cages.

Jenny and I ran new-homeowner errands this afternoon. We discussed what items from this move were to go to Goodwill or Craigslist, coupled with the twin conversation about what new stuff to buy to fill our absurdly empty house. Jenny was keen to replace (upgrade, rather) items already in our possession. I gained a key insight into our different perspectives on the world: Jenny likes to get rid of things, and I prefer not to buy them in the first place.

For what it’s worth, house-buying is (thus far) a scarier and more stressful prospect than parenthood. I wonder how I feel about that in five months.

Non Snarky Update on Recent Life Events

2008-01-10T08:55:00.000-08:00

Yesterday we signed all the papers closing on our new house.

And in mid-June the Souders pack will have an extra member.

The Way They Drink Their Coffee...

2008-01-06T04:13:00.000-08:00

in Malaysia and Singapore: not very hot from a very fine ground in a pot that brews all day, deadly bitter, poured carefully over a thick layer of cream and sugar that you stir into it.

in Belgium: from a stovetop machina, with ice cream.

in the Netherlands: like the French, but with Stroopwaffeln instead of sugar.

in New Orleans: with chicory and a beignet.

in China: any damn way you can imagine it. Usually bitter and poorly-brewed with lots of sugar. Why aren't you drinking tea, you masochist?

in Boston: at Dunkin Donuts.

in Bali: from a powdery grind spooned into a dry cup, over which is poured hot-not-boiling water. Milk is optional. Leave the mud at the bottom of the cup.

in Austin ca. 1994: Americano.

in Hungary: like Italians: a wet espresso served in a demitasse with a little sugar.

in Taiwan: at Starbuck's.

in Nebraska: percolated or drip, one teaspoon of canned grounds per cup.

in Berlin: with many many cigarettes.

in Wyoming, Montana, and the Dakotas: Folger's automatic drip, strong and dark, if you're lucky it's from this afternoon's pot and not this morning's. You better put cream in it.

in Twin Peaks: black as midnight on a moonless night.