My son, Chris, had been telling me about a problem he was having with his knee for the last couple of days by way of IM and telephone conversation. It wasn't clear from his description just what exactly might have been the problem, except that he had hurt his knee on a dock at a lake a week or so ago, and that there was some infection involved. He lives with his mom, so I wasn't too concerned; but last night he IM'ed my mobile phone and asked me to take him to a doctor. Don't ask me why he just didn't call, I have no idea. Anyway, this was about 11:00 PM and so I asked him what his mom said about it, and he told me she had gone to Orlando and wasn't home. So I jumped in the car and drove over to see what has been bothering him.
I saw a bright red bump on his knee, with an opening that was oozing fluid. It was clearly infected. He had been putting a topical anti-bacterial ointment on it, but that was obviously not going to do the job. This infection was going to take some professional attention. I considered the ER, but the minor-injury clinic would be open at 8:00 a.m., and that would probably cost a little less than the ER and be less aggravating. The upside to the ER would be that they'd take his medical insurance, the clinic does not. I figured it would be at least a couple of hours before he'd be seen in the ER, if not more, and that we could afford to wait until morning to be seen quickly at the clinic. So I told him I'd be back to pick him up bright and early and headed back to my place.
We got to the clinic just as it opened, and we were the first people to be seen, which I always like. The doc numbed up his knee with a shot and that apparently hurt like hell, and then opened up the wound and began to drain it. He was forming a pretty decent little abscess in there. Dr. Hitz, the same doc who treated me when I got kicked in the eye in TKD, was treating him. She packed it with some impregnated gauze and we're going to have to go back and have it re-packed each day for four days. So, that was kind of exciting.
I cancelled my cable TV service yesterday. I'm paid through the middle of August, so it'll remain on for a couple of weeks, but after that I'm through with it. The woman on the phone wanted to know why I was canceling and I told her it was because there was nothing on. It seems like all there is to watch are half a dozen channels showing some re-run or another of Law and Order, or recycling the same movies over and over again, or sports (which I don't watch); and the Sci-Fi channel has turned into the Stargate SG-1 channel, showing nothing but "all Stargate, all the time." This, boys and girls, is not worth $50.00 a month. The news is worthless, local programming is worse than worthless, and I'm sick of commercials. So, no more cable TV for me. Caitie will be disappointed when she comes to stay with me from time to time, but there's no lack of things to do around here. Hopefully, it will also help to relieve pressure on my cashflow situation.
On the Clié PEG-TG50 subject, I did discover the "classic" launcher. It wasn't very difficult to find, but it didn't occur to me to look in the prefs of the newere launcher. Now, if I could just free up the memory it occupied. I still haven't located a num-lock key, but I'm still pretty sure there must be one somewhere. The example QuickTime movies that are on the CD that ships with the TG50 are mux'ed, so I'm guessing that's the conversion I'll have to perform before I can move QT movies from my desktop to the Clié. I'm not sure, but I think that's the same thing as "flattening" a QT movie. I've got a few good QT books, so this shouldn't be hard to figure out. (He said, hopefully.) Haven't located a hack to force Bluetooth to save file transfers to the Memory Stick, but I think I'd just stay away from wireless transfers of multi-megabyte files.
Okay, if you're one of the six people who haven't seen the Will Ferrell Bush parody, you owe it to yourself to run, don't walk, over there and click on one of those links. Ferrell does a near-perfect Bush, and it's hysterical.
I watched most of Kerry's speech last night. I thought I detected a couple of embarrassing slips of the tongue, like, did he say "hair pollution" when he was referring to asthma among inner-city youth? Of course, he wants to increase the size of our special forces so they can conduct more "terrorist operations," which he quickly corrected to "anti-terrorist operations." There were a few more. The fact that none of the talking heads mentioned them, and the generally favorable notices he received for the speech convinces me nobody with an advance text actually listens to the speaker. Unfortunately, Kerry is not a very gifted public speaker. The good news is, especially for people like Dave Weinberger, that's authentic! (Dave made a disparaging comment about Edwards as a gifted speaker, supposedly because such a gift makes one a phony. So a crappy speaker must have the virtue of being authentic, I guess.) Predictably, the good Doctor Weinberger liked Kerry's speech. I did like the "help is on the way" riff, unspontaneous though it was; and the Lincoln quote, and "this flag belongs to all Americans" were solid. But the delivery sucked out loud. I'm still voting for him. (And lest anyone get the wrong idea - Dubyah is a piss-poor public speaker as well. But I will agree he is authentically a dumbass. That's not partisanship, that's just my perception of the guy.)
Enough politics, well, except to say that webloggers are emphatically not the salvation of the American political system.
Sony is getting out of the PDA business, at least in North America. I'm guessing this is because it never garnered a great deal of success, and mobile phones seem to be eating the PDA's lunch these days. But I've had an opportunity to play with a Sony PEG-TG50, which is a Bluetooth-equipped model that came out early last year. I'm always a trailing-edge technology sort of guy. But here are a few observations on a PDA that's no longer current!
It has a hard cover that is removable with some effort, but which is probably a nice touch to protect the screen, and it does give the unit a very nice appearance when closed. The problem is, it's so smooth, the edges are beveled, and it joins nearly seemlessly to the body of the unit itself when closed, that it can be a real pain to open if you keep your fingernails short. My Clié 665C body is all-metal, something I really like about the device. The TG50 has a metal backshell, but the top is plastic with a brushed-aluminum insert. The battery compartment cover is removable, though removing the battery is presumably only for proper disposal or re-cycling, and it is made of plastic as well. The result is the body doesn't feel as solid as the 665C.
The screen features the same resolution and number of colors as the 665C, 320x320 at 65K colors. It's marginally smaller in size than the 665C and noticeably brighter, though I don't know how much of that may be due to the age of my 665C (almost a year old).
I have mixed feelings about the keyboard. It may simply be a lack of proper documentation from Sony, but there are some serious shortcomings. Typing numbers is too hard. I keep looking for a num-lock key of some kind, but I haven't found it yet. I'm quite sure it must exist, because it is simply too hard to type numbers without one, so it has to be operator ignorance on my part. Typing letters is actually quite easy just using one's thumbs, and I think this is probably faster than using Graffiti. The biggest problem is that this is obviously a transitional device, unless this is again an issue of my ignorance of how to operate the machine. When entering a new contact in the address book, you can't tab from field to field. It seems the only way to get to the next field is to pull out the stylus from its silo and and use it to place the edit cursor on the next field to enter data in. This is maddening! I will continue to look into this, either I'm missing something, or someone has written a little hack to allow you to tab between fields, because having to use the keyboard and stylus at the same time is nearly impossible.
Memory. The unit is equipped with 16MB of RAM and 16MB of ROM. The problem is, only 11MB of RAM are available to the user. As other reviews have noted, this is simply too little. One of the earliest manifestations of this deficiency was when I tried to transfer a 6MB QuickTime file via Bluetooth. This may be a problem with the software implementation, but there was no way I could discern to configure Bluetooth to save transferred files to a Memory Stick expansion card. All file transfers are conducted using system RAM only. At the time, I had less than 5MB of available RAM, and about the time my Mac had informed me it had sent about 5MB of data, the Clié terminated the connection and said the file was too large. Of course, I could transfer the file using The Missing Sync and mounting the Memory Stick on my desktop, but where's the wireless love in that? I'm guessing the RAM issue is because the TG50 uses Palm OS 5, though I'm not sure.
Interface. Sony has implemented it's own launcher that relies on the jog wheel to locate and launch applications. It's pretty, but it sucks. There's no way I want to scroll through a list of apps to find the one I want. With my 665C set to display all, and using the small icons, I can see nearly every app on my handheld at a glance and can launch one with a single tap. Hopefully, someone has figured out a way to make this thing go away. There are also some software bugs with the scroll wheel implementation. When scrolling through the contact list in the address book, some entries will appear twice. Tapping or selecting either one will open the relevant record, but if you think there are two records and delete one, you'll find you've deleted them both. So I guess it's a bug in the display routine. At first I thought I was getting some doubled records from iSync, but it's a software issue in the Clié.
This device doesn't have a camera, but it does have a voice recorder, so it's not the kind of thing I'd be allowed to take into a secure environment. (That and the Bluetooth interface.) But I did play with the voice recorder, and it works well. My Nokia 3660's voice recorder seems to produce better-sounding recordings, but the Clié's Memory Stick expansion allows them to be of much, much greater length. Not that I like to ramble on to myself. Much.
Sofware. Supposedly, this device allows you to play QuickTime movies on it. I haven't figured out how to do that yet. If I do, I'll let you know. Again, Sony's documentation sucks and there's no help in the app itself.
Now, on to the big show: Bluetooth. Bluetooth rocks. The biggest weakness in this implementation is the requirement to use limited internal memory for file transfers. If you stick with the smallish files you get from camera phones and the like, you're probably just fine. Just don't plan on moving multi-megabytes of data wirelessly to a TG50. Bluetooth implementations in other devices may not have this limitation.
I installed the Salling Clicker on the TG50, and it worked like a champ. There is a lot of JPEG compression of the views of your photos from iPhoto, so they tend to look like crap if they're especially dark. But it works remarkably well. I transferred a photo from my Nokia camera to the Clié and it worked. I didn't work the first few times I tried it. The file would transfer, but the Clié wouldn't open it, it kept claiming it didn't know what kind of file it was. I installed some software updates and Documents-to-Go on it, which includes a Pictures-to-Go application, and one of those may have resolved the problem, because subsequent transfers worked fine. The reason why this is cool is because the phone's screen is about 170 pixels across, while the Clié's is nearly double that at 320. The phone takes pictures at 640x480 resolution, and they look much nicer on the Clié than they do on the phone. Unfortunately, the little .3gp movies the Nokia records don't play on the Clié. I then transferred a photo from the Clié to a Windows XP machine, and went on to print it. Very nice.
This weekend I hope to experiment with connecting the Nokia and the Clié via Bluetooth for some SMS messaging and maybe a little web browsing. We'll see how that goes.
So those are just some impressions of a PDA equipped with Bluetooth. If I were looking to buy a new PDA, I'd look at the Zire Z72, which is a camera equipped device with Bluetooth and 32MB of RAM. While it doesn't have a keyboard, it appears to avoid some of the weaknesses of the early implementation of OS5 and a keyboard in the TG50.
In other Groundhog Day technology news. My networking woes continue, as my Netgear wireless router has started dropping the connection every few seconds. Hardware resets and lots of salty sailor-talk have not resolved the issue. Efforts, and epithets, continue.
I received the repair estimate from Canon. It's going to cost about $125 to get the PowerShot A70 repaired. I'm waiting for the approval from Visa to go ahead and fix the thing. If they turn me down, I'm inclined to just say no and wait a little while and buy a newer camera with more features, capability - and durability. But we'll see what they say first.
I confess I'm not paying very much attention to the convention, and only slightly more to the webloggers who are paying attention to themselves, pretending to pay attention to the convention. Attention being the coin of the realm these days. As indeed it has been for most of our history.
There's something a little unseemly about political conventions. It's not so much about political decision-making, even from a "wisdom of the crowd" point of view. It's more about fabricating a belief system around a couple of figures in order to compete for some of the votes that went to the other couple of figures last time. Well, that and to try to make sure the election doesn't get decided by the Supreme Court again. Politicians may love ambiguity, but politics doesn't. Or something like that.
So each side builds up their guys into heroic proportions; though, true, some genuinely are more heroic than others. While at the same time, they try to demonize the other guys; though, true, some genuinely are more demonic than others. And all the time some precious quantity of our limited attention is focused on our guy, or the people who would bash our guy, and whatever else commands our attention; and there's little left to be devoted to the things that might actually make a difference in the world - ourselves.
We worry about our nation's debt, while we swim in a sea of personal debt. We fret about our national security, while we drive our cars with one hand holding our cell phones to our ears. We lament the loss of civility in civil discourse, as we tune in to listen to Limbaugh and O'Reilly and Franken. We fact-check the other guy's ass, while we never critically examine our own cherished beliefs. And who can blame us for these and the many, many other ironic things that might be observed about our existence? We don't live in a free economy, we live in a command economy. Our attention is commanded by the authorities, and we willingly give it to them, leaving very little for ourselves. As long as they've got you worried about taxing your money, you'll never notice who's taxing your attention.
Gandhi said, "You must become the change you wish to see in the world." Those words were, and remain, an enormous threat to the established social structures that seek to prevent real change. But those social structures learned to use the power of technology against the weaknesses of the human psyche. As long as your attention is commanded by external authorities, things will never change. Perhaps that's part of "the wisdom of the crowd."
It was inevitable, but I finally downloaded and installed Salling Clicker on my Nokia 3660. Very cool! Registered immediately. Bluetooth is starting to look very interesting! There are Bluetooth GPS receivers too...
My daughter Caitie has been spending the weekend with me, and last night we went to the movies. Fortunately, Caitlin gave me a break and didn't require me to see A Cinderella Story. Instead, we saw Napoleon Dynamite. What an odd little movie. It's hard to really characterize it, but it is definitely in the vein of "stupid" movies, but with a slightly different approach. The main characters are all over the top, but they never let on that they know it, and they all play it very straight. Strangely, it works. It's painfully funny to watch, but at 87 minutes, I was worried it was going to be about 15 minutes too long, because it was becoming more painful than funny as time went on. Fortunately, the "climax," relieved much of the pain, and all the loose ends were wrapped up in the closing scenes. It's just an odd little movie, and probably worth watching.
I've been doing some more investigation into wireless network troubleshooting. I've downloaded and used MacStumbler, iStumbler and KisMAC. MacStumbler could only see the nuisance LinkSys router, iStumber saw the Linksys and two Netgear routers (mine and one other), and KisMAC detected all three and a fourth wireless network in the vicinity. The Linksys is putting out the strongest signal by far. I'm wondering if someone has installed new antennas or something. I am able to get four full "waves" on the menu bar Airport status icon on the iMac at the opposite side of the apartment now at the lower channel, but the iBook still seems to be having difficulty receiving the signal. I reseated the Airport card and the antenna cable in the iBook on the off chance that something was amiss in the physical connection. That may have helped a bit, or it's just selection bias on my part, but it seems to have improved a little. It tends to stay up in the two "wave" region, with more frequent excursions to three waves. I can get four if I walk into the room with the router, but in the living room, it's two to three with occasional losses of signal. KisMAC looks to be the most useful tool, but it wouldn't quit cleanly and it caused a kernel panic when I finally forced it to quit. The investigation continues.
Apple and MS are being sued for patent infringement for their automatic software update features in their respective operating systems. This is another patent that I find hard to accept as awarded. There is prior art for automatic software updates aplenty. Hello? Anyone ever hear of America Online? It was constantly downloading art and updates in the early 90s. I think the Newton had some feature where if you had a modem connected to your Newton, it could dial into a number at Apple and automatically download and install new software. It's been said before, but the patent office is broken and needs to be fixed.
It's getting crowded in the wifi spectrum at my apartment complex, I think. I've always seen a Linksys router on my iBook, while I'm using Netgear, but it hasn't been a problem for me, apart from somebody piggybacking on my bandwidth every now and then, when I'm trying to frag noobs in Halo. (Adding more users to my DSL line increases the latency of data flowing in the network. Usually not significant unless somebody decides to download Auntie May's PowerPoint presentation of the family reunion, complete with soundtrack by John Tesh. The result is, the online gaming experience turns to crap. Not that I play that much, and it hasn't happened but once or twice. But still.) Now my signal strength appears down significantly (one to no waves in the menu bar Airport status icon) in the iBook and the iMac, while another Linksys router is showing up; and I had two other unidentified devices siphoning bandwidth from me yesterday. Changing the channel in the Netgear (I went from 11 down to 1), hiding the SSID and restricting access by means of MAC addresses seems to have solved the problem for the moment. Signal strength is back up though it's not as high as it used to be. I used to get the full four waves on the iMac on the other side of the apartment, and now I'm only getting two or three. I haven't enabled WEP yet, but I suppose I'll be getting smart about that shortly as well. That won't improve signal strength, but with the increasing number of wifi users in close proximity, the possibility of some snooping and bad behavior goes up as well. I may consider relocating the router a bit too, get it more toward the center of the apartment and away from the exterior wall. Damn settlers!
Caitie was going to taekwondo camp last week, and on Friday there's a little graduation ceremony. I was there and took some pictures with my Kodak DC 290 and Caite had her camera there and she took quite a few as well. The instructors asked us if we would provide them with copies or prints because our school doesn't have any up at its web site. Naturally, we said we'd be happy to.
Well, Caitlin wanted to see where I worked and what I do, despite my protests that it's nothing to see and what I do is incredibly boring to a 12-year-old, but I relented and brought her along back to work. Since Friday afternoons are often so quiet as to be insensate, I thought we could try to figure out how to get the pictures from her camera onto a CD so we could drop them off at the school on our way home. I borrowed the card reader that didn't work with my iBook, but which worked just fine with the Dell. It's a multi-media card reader, so it took Caitlin's SD card. We loaded the pictures onto the Dell, and then I transferred them from the Dell to my Lexar Jumpdrive, a flash-memory little USB device, and from there to my iBook. The guy who runs the office allowed us to print a few of them on the office color laser printer, so I stuck the Jumpdrive into another office computer which is on a separate network, and used it to print to the color laser. They turned out pretty nice. I was also able to burn them to a CD. So on the way home from work, we were able to drop off some prints and the digital images for the instructors to edit and post on the web site. None of which is especially remarkable from a technical perspective, but it was something fun to do and a lot more interesting than my usual Friday afternoons.
That's probably enough photographs for a while. It'll take forever to sync my iDisk now. (Well, longer than a minute, which is "forever" to my jaded, 21st-century mind.) I was happy to discover that it wasn't, in fact, the camera that was screwing up; though it was kind of odd, OS X recognized the Dazzle card reader I was borrowing at the office to try to view the pictures on my iBook, but the Finder, ImageCapture and iPhoto all had problems reading the pictures from it. Smaller ones I took in Burst mode were transferred just fine, while the larger ones either had large artifacts introduced, or failed to transfer at all. Plugged the same reader in the Wintel box on my desk at the office and they all transferred just fine. Go figure. And, of course, my SanDisk CF card reader at my apartment works just fine as well. So, I'm relieved I'm still in the camera business for the moment.
I finally went ahead and re-did my budget spreadsheet in Excel from MS Office X. I was getting more than the usual flakiness from Mesa, and it looks as though that application is never going to be updated; plus, I wanted to use Documents-To-Go to place a copy of the spreadsheet on my Clié. I was somewhat pleasantly surprised that that went quite well. I'm still playing around a bit with it, but apart from the rather small window afforded by a 320x320 screen, and very slow recalculation speeds, it works perfectly. I'm having to watch my nickels and dimes more closely these days, and hopefully this will help me to avoid any financial train wrecks, but I suppose anything is possible.
I have another new instructor in TKD. I'm growing somewhat used to this constant turnover of instructors, but I can't say I'm enthusiastic about it. The upside is the exposure to new drills and training techniques. That is, if by "upside" you mean new muscle aches and pains. I've also become comfortable with being the only student in class. Naturally, as soon as that happened, another student has been attending class at lunchtime. Which is just fine too.
Still waiting to hear from the body shop on the parts coming in to repair Shiva, the Destroyer of Worlds. And I should expect to wait at least another week before I might hear anything about the estimate to repair the Canon PowerShot A70.
I noticed that Target had a number of DVD video collections by music artists, and they all ran about $9.99. I ended up buying Cher's, and I was pleased to discover it contained the (in)famous If I Could Turn Back Time video. I love Cher. I know that makes me some sort of cultural rube or something, but I love her voice, and I admire her success. Of this collection, the Half Breed video is the only real stinker, but it's about what you might expect for a 70s video.
(As an aside, I predict 80s hair will be coming back in a big way fairly soon. That's a scary thought, but it's been about two decades, so I think we're due. I think the only reason why we haven't seen it yet is because it was so extreme, many people are still recovering from the trauma. But consider the fact that Mohawks and other forms of early-80s counter-culture, (i.e. "Punk") are back already (though I suppose they never really left). It's only a matter time before the rest of it shows up.)
But back to the Cher DVD, one other curious thing to note was that I found Song for the Lonely, which I was unfamiliar with until this, very affecting. I normally don't have that sort of response to her music. I enjoy it, but it's just entertainment. But this song really connected for some reason, like any number of Springsteen songs. (I've just committed some kind of rock 'n roll sin here, I think. Mentioning Cher and The Boss in the same paragraph - "That's not right." Oh well.) The video is very well done, kind of interesting and unique; and the song is very uptempo, but with a kind of a bittersweet edge to it that made it something special. That's probably putting much too fine a point on it, but I liked it. I don't know. Go figure. She's still "da bomb."
The arachnids featured below are indeed orb weavers. I guess these are called Silver Orb Weavers. There are lots and lots of them at the house where my kids live. Huge webs, each inhabited by two or more spiders. I'm guessing the large ones are the females, and the small ones are the male suitors. I have no idea if the male "takes one for the team," or not, apparently not all female spiders kill and eat their mates.
I took a lot of pictures of them on Tuesday; but I'd forgotten how slow the Kodak DC 290 is, and I kept taking pictures while the camera was still processing them, and as a result, all of them had destructive artifacts of some kind. If I get another chance at them, I'll try to be more patient. They are "amazing" though.
Update: The camera is fine, the pictures were fine. I had a bad CF card reader. Herewith, some more spiders:
One thing patients learn very early, for instance, is to notice when their emotions begin to stir, allow themselves to feel the storm whip up, then let it pass - all without doing anything. This Zen-like self-observation, called mindfulness, is an exercise not in avoidance but in feeling and enduring emotional pain. It dramatizes one principle of the therapy: that what patients do can be independent of how they feel. Emotion does not have to rule behavior.
It's an interesting article on a new approach to therapy, which is much more than just the paragraph I've snipped here. The reference to Zen is not surprising, in a way. Buddhism is regarded as a kind of religion, but it's really about the same things psychology is about: finding ways to reduce suffering. And the Buddhists have had a couple millennia to work on it, while psychology has only had a little over a century.
Buddhism has acquired a lot of other things that tend to crop up when human beings associate in self-identified groups with strongly-held beliefs, but the main ideas are accessible and useful without necessarily embracing all the rest of it. "You don't have to sit on the floor," as someone said. I am not a Buddhist, but I maintain that we are all, myself included, Buddhists. Perhaps that's "cognitive dissonance," or perhaps that's just the kind of paradox one expects in a universe where the fifth fundamental force is irony.
But back to mindfulness! It's about controlling one's attention. "Notice when their emotions begin to stir, allow themselves to feel the storm whip up, then let it pass - all without doing anything." This is not allowing your emotional turmoil to "have" your mind (your attention). Instead, your mind remains "nowhere" (so that it can be everywhere else it has to be) in order to govern what you "do." We learn that emotions, like the weather, pass. It's not necessary to "do something" about every negative emotion, unless by "doing something" you mean "doing nothing." Sometimes there are cognitive things you can do to help them pass more quickly, but sometimes those don't work. Sometimes there are physical things you can "do," like exercise, that make them pass more quickly, sometimes those don't work. And sometimes there are medications, and they also sometimes don't work. But I think what the article refers to here are emotions that are very strong, very intense and rise very quickly, where the habit has been to act out on those emotions immediately. And here is where we must learn to step back and just acknowledge the feeling, anger, despair, whatever it is - allow ourselves to feel it, not fight it or berate ourselves over it; but to be aware that it is just a feeling and it will pass. This is a skill that can be learned (I'm still learning it), but it takes practice (there's that word again). And it's something that you'll find has been part of Zen practice for a long time.
This is not "the highest wisdom," but it's a necessary step along the way.
It was a fairly pleasant, productive morning. Sometimes I suppose I seem as though I'm "down" on technology, but that's not true. I'm pretty negative about the unreasonable expectations many people seem to have about technology and its ability to "change everything." But technology does offer some important advantages to help us in our day to day lives. In that vein, let me say that I can't say enough good things about MapQuest, it is truly a boon, especially to a guy like me.
I had an appointment to have Shiva, the Destroyer of Worlds, aka my 2002 Mitsubishi Montero Sport, looked at by a body shop recommended by my insurance company in order to prepare an estimate of the cost to repair the damage from my recent fender-bender. Since the body shop was a good way from the beach, I thought it would also be a good time to drop my camera off at the repair shop for an estimate on its repair cost. So I went to MapQuest and got directions from my apartment to the the camera shop, and then from there to the body shop. I printed them out, and stuck them in my bag for the next day's commute.
Well, the directions were flawless. I've had some occasions where things didn't work out exactly according to the routes offered by MapQuest, but today was absolutely perfect. I can't tell you how much that makes my life easier. I can plot great circle routes around Magellan, but I'm terrible at finding my way from Point A to Point B by road. Anytime I head out to a new destination, my arrival is more a matter of accident and good fortune than anything I do behind the wheel. And it can be quite stressful for me. So I was quite pleased to arrive at the camera shop well ahead of schedule, and even before they were scheduled to open in fact. I was further surprised when they went ahead and opened early! I'm accustomed to having to observe employees milling about if I've arrived before opening, waiting to unlock the doors not one second before scheduled opening time. This used to bother me, but it doesn't so much anymore. Nevertheless, I am delighted when someone does something like opening the doors a few minutes early to accommodate me. The people that attended to me were friendly, knowledgeable, and efficient. I was out of there more than half an hour earlier than I'd planned. I feel I should mention that the shop was Southern Photo Technical Services, 3247 Beach Blvd, Jacksonville, Fl. Apparently it's a chain in the southeast U.S., and I can't speak for the other locations, but these guys were great.
From there it was off to the body shop, O'Steen's Auto Body. Inc., and I arrived about 45 minutes ahead of my scheduled appointment because of the excellent MapQuest directions and the efficiency at the camera shop. Again, I was pleasantly surprised that this posed no difficulty for the shop. They took care of me immediately and I was impressed with the courtesy of the staff. One of the people I spoke to noticed my ATA bag in the back of the Montero and asked what school I attended. I told her I was at the Neptune Beach school, and she mentioned that her son was a student at another school and we chatted about taekwondo for a bit. I looked at some of the cars they had worked on, and the owner's 73 Ford Bronco, and I was pleased with what I saw in the way of paint work. The estimate came in at roughly $1400.00 to fix the car, but I'm confident they'll do a great job, and it was a pleasure to work with them.
I had a pretty great morning for attending to errands that didn't especially thrill me.
Okay, I called this post Driving as Practice, I should probably get to that. Thanks for staying with me this far.
If you click on the link to the Amazon listing for The Unfettered Mind, you'll see a rather bland review by one reader who summarizes the first essay, or letter, as "practice makes perfect," and then goes on to criticize the second essay, and dismisses the third as irrelevant to martial arts. I haven't finished reading the first essay, let alone the second or third, and it's clear to me that the reader who wrote those comments was looking for something more in the way of relevance to 21st century practice of martial arts. None of that bothers me. But his somewhat dismissive comment that "practice makes perfect" is so beautiful, so on the mark, that it delights me. My only reservation is that the reader misses the significance of his own insight. That's because something else "has" his mind, but pay no mind to that right now.
Yes! Practice makes perfect! But, as with many things, there's more here than meets the (mind's) eye.
There's nothing mysterious or mystical about Takuan Soho's Immovable Wisdom. What he's writing about in 17th century Japanese is the same sort of thing behavioral psychologists and educational psychologists write about in 20th century scientific idiomatic language - how the mind works. Let's consider for a moment something most of us have some recollection of learning to do as a new skill - driving a car.
When I learned to drive, it was an exciting thing, maybe a little too exciting for my father. But let's try to recall what the experience was like. Our intention is to drive the car. We have some idea how it is done, because we've watched our parents doing it for years. So when we get behind the wheel, what do we do? We try to turn our intention into action. So, the first problem is that our intention has our attention. But in order to turn intention into action, we have to do something. So we must attend to those things that facilitate doing something. We're human beings, and so we have this enormous data channel we rely on to tell us what's going on around us, and that's our sense of vision, our eyes. So, much of our attention is on what we see. We see we're not moving, so we know we have to apply pressure to the gas pedal, so our attention goes from what we see, to what we know (about gas pedals), to our foot to apply the gas. Our attention then returns to our vision to see if we are going, and, if we're not learning to drive a stick shift, chances are we are moving. Now we know that in order to move in the direction of our intention, we have to do something with the wheel called steering, and our hands are just enormous attention sumps with all those digits and nerve endings. So our attention shifts rapidly back and forth between our vision and our hands as we try to steer the car, and, if you're like me, it seems like it isn't as easy as it looked when Dad did it!
This is all technique and principle, and we all recall that eventually we were able to drive without even "thinking" about it. That's putting the mind nowhere!
Except, it's not that simple or easy, is it? Do we put our mind nowhere when we drive? Sometimes. But first a little detour.
Putting the mind nowhere, is, I think, what many psychologists have called flow. When we have mastered a skill, we can execute it seemingly effortlessly and the experience can be quite enjoyable and rewarding. I think if you try to recall how you felt about driving shortly after you really felt you had mastered it, you found it was a pleasurable experience. Some people can retain that approach to driving; I, along with many others I think, have not been so fortunate.
Okay, back into the car. Having mastered driving the car, where does the mind go? If you're like me, the mind goes to every other thing that "has" the mind. Usually the things I fear, or the differences between the way things are, and the way I'd like them to be (aka: suffering). Sometimes it goes to other, less unpleasant places. But the result is that I'm not in the experience of driving. Yet I recall it can be a very pleasurable and rewarding experience. Today, my "driving as practice" attends more to what's going on inside me, which is only a little bit better than what it attended to before. This is seeking the lost mind. It's a good thing to do, but it's not the highest wisdom.
I have had recent experience with flow or the lost mind, and it was in taekwondo. I finally mastered my form for my black belt. It was about 44 moves as I recall, and it took about a minute to a minute and a half to perform it. That doesn't sound like a lot of time, but it always felt like an eternity when I was aware of people watching me, and my inner critic was nattering away at every deficiency. At my test for my black belt recommended rank, I performed my form in the experience of flow for the first time. I was aware of my performance, but I was not aware of the passage of time, I was not aware of doing anything to perform my form though I was aware of it being done, I was not aware of the sensation of people observing me, indeed, I was only vaguely aware of other people in the room. When it was over, my mind returned to wherever a mind returns to, and I had to stop and think about whether I had actually done my form or not because it seemed as if no time had passed. It was a very, very rewarding experience. Did it mean that I performed my form flawlessly? No, by no means did I, or could I perform my form flawlessly. What it meant was that I had achieved sufficient mastery that, in a test, where there is no reason or necessity to observe and analyze, I was able to simply perform. I did my best. The rest was not up to me.
I don't know if it's reasonable to expect that we can achieve the state of flow in every activity, but I do know that we are not masters of our attention. I know that paying attention to my attention, at least when I'm driving, can make me a better driver and a saner person. In Buddhism, indeed in life, everything can be part of our practice. Martial arts and driving my car and dealing with difficult people in my life are part of my practice now. And practice makes perfect. It sounds so simple, and thankfully, it is. Because even the simplest things can be very hard. If they weren't simple, we'd have little hope indeed.
As for Takuan Soho and his advice to a master swordsman, perhaps he can be forgiven for his seriousness. I'm certain a day inevitably came when it was necessary for a master swordsman to simply perform; and the day that came when he couldn't - only came once. Perhaps the same can be said for too many drivers.
The mailman (who may well be a woman, I don't know - perhaps I should say "postal delivery person"), came yesterday and brought me three books from Amazon.com. Free shipping absolutely rocks. I bought Mac OS X Panther In a Nutshell (which, at more than 1,000 pages, is some "nutshell"), The Wisdom of Crowds, and The Unfettered Mind.
I started reading The Unfettered Mind, by Takuan Soho (translated by William Scott Wilson) last night, and what follows is an excerpt from the first of three essays, this one being The Mysterious Record of Immovable Wisdom.
WHERE ONE PUTS THE MIND
We say that:
If one puts his mind in the action of his opponent's body, his mind will be taken by the action of his opponent's body.
If he puts his mind in his opponent's sword, his mind will be taken by that sword.
If he puts his mind in thoughts of his opponent's intention to strike him, his mind will be taken by thoughts of his opponent's intention to strike him.
If he puts his mind in his own sword, his mind will be taken by his own sword.
If he puts his mind in his own intention of not being struck, his mind will be taken by his intention of not being struck.
If he puts his mind in the other man's stance, his mind will be taken by the other man's stance.
What this means is there is no place to put the mind.
A certain person said, "No matter where I put my mind, my intentions are held in check in the place of where my mind goes, and I lose to my opponent. Because of that, I place my mind just below my navel and do not let it wander. Thus I am able to change according to the actions of my opponent."
This is reasonable. But viewed from the highest standpoint of Buddhism, putting the mind just below the navel and not allowing it to wander is a low level of understanding, not a high one. It is at the level of discipline and training. It is not at the level of seriousness. Or of Mencius' saying, "Seek after the lost mind." This is not the highest level either. It has the sense of seriousness. As for the "lost mind," I have written about this elsewhere, and you can take a look at it there.
If you consider putting your mind below your navel and not letting it wander, your mind will be taken by the mind that thinks of this plan. You will have no ability to move ahead and will be exceptionally unfree.
================================
I loved reading this. I believe "the mind" is really referring to one's attention. Attention being the faculty that "has" the mind, even though attention is a faculty "of" mind. I loved reading the part about placing one's mind (attention) just below the navel, and not letting it wander. This is, I believe, part of the teaching of Aikido. It is a good idea, and Takuan Soho credits it as such, but it is not the best idea, as the monk points out, because then what has the mind is the idea of putting the mind below the navel.
You may recall the little exercise one of my Taekwondo instructors offered me in Aikido, by having me grasp his arms and trying to remain balanced with both of my feet on the floor. My attention went to my hands where I grasped his arms, and not to my center of mass which is the key to keeping my balance. My hands "had" my mind. When your attention is on something, it is of necessity not on something else, so you're unable to call upon your full range of potential responses. Here, Takuan Soho, points out that whether one realizes it or not, one's mind has been "had" by one's own ideas.
I have a certain appreciation for synchronicity, a quality of the universe that science maintains is merely illusion; but which is nevertheless a frequent source of delight to me. This is perhaps not the best example, but it's close. Last week, in my TKD class, I was mentioning to my instructor that while I know my form quite well, I'm still struggling with my inner critic as I execute each of my techniques, and it interferes with my performance. After doing my form yesterday, he asked me if I was still struggling with my inner critic and I told him I had stopped. I told him my inner critic was still there, but I had stopped paying attention to him. I mentioned to my instructor that it is not good to have an inner critic, but what is worse is to give one's attention to him, even to the extent of trying to get rid of him. Instead, I tried to maintain my attention on my technique (which is itself not the best idea, but it is a necessary step to reach the best idea) and eventually the inner critic will be extinguished by itself. (But, as Takeo Soho would point out, this is not the highest level, as it is equivalent to "seeking the lost mind." At the highest level, one is no longer seeking.)
There is much more to Takuan Soho's essay. Mastering technique is important, and so is mastering principle; as he describes them, they are "two wheels of the cart." Only by mastering technique can we not put the mind in technique, only by mastering principle can we not put the mind anywhere. But first we must put the mind where we must to master those two things.
"Canvas" is looking to be very cool indeed. I was interested in Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) for drawing pictures (charts mainly - with some stuff that might not work well or at all with CSS) through Tinderbox. Unfortunately, there is no reliable, ubiquitous, cross-platform SVG plug-in for today's browsers. Adobe has been neglecting their Mac version, last time I checked. Apple's Keynote application's XML format seems at least partially based on SVG, and it's eminently doable to export Tinderbox files into a text template that effectively creates a Keynote presentation. Unfortunately, it'll only run on Macs and only on Macs that have Keynote. Canvas will be shared with other browser developers, and it's similar to what MS seems to be doing with part of their Longhorn OS. If Opera, Mozilla, and whatever other browsers implement Canvas quickly enough, we might be able to steal a march on MS and get some cross-platform, html-based (XML, whatever) vector graphics capability that people not running the latest monstrosity from Redmond can use. But that's all somewhat beside the point. I think Kevin Schmitt has the right idea about what's behind Canvas and the other extensions to HTML that Apple is creating to support Dashboard. And it's beginning to look and smell a lot like Hypercard for the 21st century, I think. I could be wrong, but it looks kind of exciting to me.
MS's efforts at hyping Longhorn and WMA/WMV to try to suck all the oxygen out of the mindshare atmosphere seem to have failed, or worse. There are lots of exciting, new and innovative ideas coming out for users of all computers, and they aren't all coming out of Redmond, $50B in the bank notwithstanding.
Had a pleasant weekend, last weekend. I hope you did too.
I saw Anchorman. What an hysterical movie! It's "stupid" done well. I loved it, it was definitely worth seeing and I laughed long and hard. Of course, tastes vary, and not everyone will find it as hilarious as I did.
My daughter Caitie spent the weekend with me, well part of Saturday and Sunday anyway. We were at Target for a bit and she said that she liked this little $20.00 USB pen camera in the toy department. I was pretty sure it was going to wind up being a disappointment to both of us, so I suggested we go look at what they had to offer in "real" digital cameras. As it turned out, they had the Kodak 6200 2MP, fixed focus, "point and shoot" digi-cam on sale for $69.99, regularly $99.99. It's a very simple camera, and something a 12-year-old could operate with little difficulty. There are no moving parts that might break and it's small and light. I figured it was just about perfect for her. And, of course, it'll work with iPhoto perfectly.
Her birthday is next month, but I told her I'd be happy to buy her an early birthday present so that she could enjoy taking pictures on her summer vacation. She worried that it was too expensive, and she was a little concerned about having her own real digital camera, what if she broke it or lost it? But I told her she'd do just fine. So I bought the camera, a 64MB Secure Digital card to store more than the handful of pictures the camera's internal 8MB of RAM accommodated, and a set of rechargeable NiMH batteries and a charger.
For all her seeming reluctance, she had the camera out of the box and the batteries plugged in almost as soon as we left the store.
We spent the weekend watching movies and playing video games and taking pictures. We ate all sorts of bad stuff, like Nabisco Cameo cookies, Coke floats (cookies and cream ice cream), pizza, and Cheez-Its. I can't keep up with 12-year-olds anymore, so I hit the rack around midnight. I got up around 3:45 in the morning and turned off the TV and put the blanket back over her. Naturally, the cats thought it was time for them to be fed, so I attended to their demands as well.
For my part, I brought my old PowerMac 6500 (or Performa 6500, depending on the marketing literature you're looking at) back to life. Not sure what I'm going to do with it yet, but I'm fond of that box for some reason. I've got a 300MHz Sonnet L2/G3 processor upgrade card in it (originally a 225MHz 603ev processor), and the maximum 128MB of RAM installed. The HD is the 10GB drive that used to be in the iMac. I've got Mac OS 9.1 installed on it, and it runs pretty well.
On Sunday we did a video chat with Gramma and Grampa, courtesy of iChat AV. That eMac and iSight were worth every penny I paid for them, more than a year ago now. We also experimented with sending SMS messages from iChat. I can send them to my Nokia 3660, but I can't reply to them. Caitlin has an inexpensive Samsung phone, and she can reply right back to me in iChat from her phone. We're both on T-Mobile, so I'm not sure why I can't. A thread at MacOS X Hints suggests it's a T-Mobile issue, but since Caitie can respond and I can't, it must be something other than the carrier.
After I took Caitlin home, my son called me from a youth center he frequents and he asked me if I'd make a burger run for him. So I got to use my mobile phone again. After I arrived at the drive-thru, I called Chris's mobile number and asked him what he wanted to order! Who knew these damn things were so useful? ("He asked facetiously.") But they have been coming in a bit handy. I dropped Caitie off for karate camp this morning and an hour later she called me at work to say that the instructors still hadn't shown up. There were other kids waiting by the door, and I usually drop Caitie off about 10 minutes before the doors open, so it didn't appear as though anything was amiss. It turns out we had our weeks mixed up. There's no camp this week, it starts again next week. But Caitie was able to call me and I hustled back out to pick her up and take her home. So, as they say, "It's all good."
Other than that, not much new to report from here.
You try coming up with pithy titles for all this prattle!
What's new? Well, it appears there is an "issue" with regard to the insurance coverage of the individual who tried to drive her SUV through mine. I'm not to be told what the issue is, but in general, such issues include policies not being paid up to date, and stuff. Which perhaps would be consistent with the sense of urgency the young lady was feeling about getting to her job on time. So it seems I will have to rely on my own coverage to get my car fixed.
The Visa warranty repair for my Canon PowerShot A70 requires an estimate to be submitted with all the other documentation, so I have to locate a camera repair facility that will give me an estimate. I should have looked more closely at the letter I received from Visa last weekend and I would have taken care of that over the long weekend. But I'll just take care of it this weekend instead. I don't think it's going to be a huge repair, I suspect some small screw backed out or a small, nonessential piece has broken off and is bouncing around inside the lens housing. It works fine as long as it doesn't get stuck trying to retract the lens. But I guess there's little point in speculating, we won't know until they open it up and look at it.
I was the only student in TKD class again today. But this was a good thing, as I'm trying to overcome that discomfort I feel as the only student. In fact, I had two instructors working with me today. Yikes! But I did get twice as much good feedback. One of the instructors I hadn't been working with before noticed I had a tendency to bend slightly at the waste as I executed a jump reverse crescent kick. This has the effect of making me unbalanced as I'm coming around in the reverse turn, and I struggle a bit trying to remain vertical as I try to get the jump off and the kick around. I was also putting more of my weight on my forward foot which made it difficult for it to slide slightly off to the side in the turn. By putting more of my weight on my rear foot and pivoting on it, I can widen my base just enough that I can get further around in the turn before the jump, which allows the kick to be delivered to the target at the point with maximum power - and with better balance and control. Just as an aside - I still suck. But I suck slightly less! (Dave high-fives himself.)
I was playing with my Clié a bit today, and went searching on the web for ways of connecting mobile phones to Cliés, and there are cables designed for just such a purpose. Unfortunately, none for Nokia phones. According to a sales rep that popped up in a chat window (which was kind of a surprise), Nokia's connectors use some kind of proprietary protocol that they aren't willing to share. Or something. In any event, it looks like IR is the only way to connect to my Clié, unless there's a Bluetooth memory stick implementation I haven't seen yet. I'm not sure how much that would cost, but my guess is, if it's Sony's, it's probably more than I'd care to pay (or can afford to these days anyway).
I've actually used my phone to check my corporate e-mail after receiving an alert by SMS that a new message had arrived. It turned out to be nothing urgent, but it was nice because at the time I was away from my office taking Caitie to TKD camp. It is very slow, but it's better than nothing. So far, the volume of e-mail I receive hasn't made for too many SMS alerts. It tends to come and go in spurts, so that may change. We shall see.
Maybe it has something to do with the Spider-Man 2 movie (And, by the way, has it always been "Spider-Man"? I should know, I used to read him all the time when I was a kid, but it just doesn't seem to look right these days.), but the number of spider webs out and about the places I frequent is truly remarkable. At the house where my children live, there's an enormous one that has grown over the last several days with about six spiders currently in residence. Two large females and four small suitors. There was a rather impressive one across the top of the stairs to my apartment this morning, that I happened to notice before I walked into it on my way to work. I immediately flashed on that old Far Side comic that showed the two spiders talking to each other at the bottom of a child's playground slide, with a web strung across the bottom of it: "If we pull this off, we'll eat like kings!"
Anyway, that's enough from me tonight. Hope you all have a pleasant night and a good day tomorrow.
I saw someone mention the book, The Wisdom of Crowds in their weblog somewhere, I can't remember where right now; and yesterday I heard the end of the author's appearance on the Diane Rhem show. I've ordered the book because I want to see what he has to say.
From what little I heard on the interview, I didn't differ too much with the author. At one point, he mentioned something to the effect that it was as if humans are genetically predisposed to cooperate. I don't think there's any "as if" about it, we are. But it's not "cooperation" in the more idealized, egalitarian, enlightened self-interest kind of view we often have of that word. We all have other agendas, even when we don't think we do. And I would also say that "crowds" have their own agendas as well.
I'll read the book before I comment any more on it. On the one hand, I welcome any sort of thoughtful examination of how humans behave in groups because I believe it's an area that has been largely ignored. On the other hand, I wonder how much of the book is itself a response by the "crowd" to criticism of "crowds."
The other day, I mentioned that my first attempt at syncing my Nokia 3660 to my G4 resulted in all my contact data being deleted from the G4. Well, I've managed to resolve my iSync problems, and there were many. I don't think I'm any closer to really understanding how iSync works, but the Nokia, the Clié and the Macs all now have the same contact data. I also went through and cleaned up my contacts, deleting old ones I'll never use again, and filling in all the fields for which I have good information. I've managed to configure the phone to access my e-mail at my bellsouth, .mac and corporate accounts. It will even send me an SMS message alert when a new e-mail arrives at any of those accounts. I'm not sure I want to be that plugged-in, but for now I want to see what it's like. This is definitely not the way to routinely check e-mail, it's slow and the screen is miniscule, but I think it can come in handy from time to time.
Still on the agenda is getting the iBook to connect to the net via the GPRS service and Bluetooth. I might get to that tomorrow night. I'm also kind of curious to see if I can get the Clié to use the phone as an analog modem via the IRDA port. I rather expect not, and a quick Google turned up little in the way of solid information. I'm not sure why I'd want to, but I am curious to see if it can be done.
I went to taekwondo class for the first time in more than a week yesterday. I'm not sure, but that's probably the longest break I've taken since I started. I go at lunchtime, and that has usually been a good time to go. There would only be a handful of students in class, and I enjoy the smaller classes. Unfortunately, lately the class size at lunch has been extremely small: One. Now, some people enjoy that, because it feels as though they're getting a private lesson. I don't enjoy it so much.
When I'm the only person in class, I feel as though I'm under the microscope. All of my mistakes and defects are plainly visible because I have the instructor's undivided attention. Yesterday my instructor mentioned to me that in my form, the knuckle of my little finger extended away from the other fingers when I was making a fist for my hand techniques. Now, this is good feedback, and valuable, and I appreciate it, especially since I wasn't aware of this one, but it's withering. Plus, I'm only too conscious of all my other deficiencies. It's a characteristic of adult learners. We have unrealistic expectations of our own competency by virtue of our self-image as competent adults, masters of our domains. We're attached to the illusion of our competency, and unwilling to endure a period of incompetency to learn a new skill. In fact, this characteristic is probably the greatest barrier to any adult undertaking any truly new endeavor. I've been through some of the instructor curriculum for the school, and they teach their instructors this, and there's plenty of positive reinforcement and praise, and the instructors are very good. But adult students are their own worst critics, and I'm very critical of myself.
When there are other students in the class, there are moments when I feel as though I'm not the one being observed, and I can relax a little. Plus, I can compare myself to the other adult students, and sometimes their mistakes make it easier to accept my own. But when it's just me, it's very tough.
Of course, this just illustrates something I have yet to learn, in a meaningful way. All martial arts training is at least as much mental training and discipline as it is physical. The first opponent you must defeat is your own mind. And I take some comfort from one of my instructors telling me that it takes five years before you become "any good" at a martial art. By that measure, I'm about halfway to being "any good," and that sounds about right. To be sure, I've come a long way, and I take great satisfaction in that. But I have a long way to go before I'll feel as though I'm a legitimate martial artist.
And, like most things for most of us, there's only one way to get there: you have to do the work. So I'll go to class, and I'm going to try not to think about how much attention I'm getting and try to focus my attention on what my instructor is showing me, and what I'm supposed to be doing. I'm quite convinced that learning to master one's attention is perhaps the single most important thing anyone can do for success and happiness in life. I think it is perhaps also the hardest.
Had a little bit of an unhappy incident on my way home from work this afternoon. While stopped at a stop sign, a woman ran into the back of Shiva, the Destroyer of Worlds, my Mitsubishi Montero Sport. One minute, I'm just sitting there waiting for the car in front of me to go and then, WHAM! The woman behind me was late for work and said, "I thought you were going to go!" I'm guessing she wasn't thinking very much about me at all, and was mostly thinking about being late for work. It's that attention thing, I think. Anyway, she was later for work than she would have been otherwise. Her insurance company is Progressive, and they seem to have their act together with this "concierge service" they offer. Shiva is still able to be driven, the airbag didn't deploy and the rear liftgate still opens. But the bumper is shoved up under the rest of the car, and there's a nice big dent in the liftgate itself. I'm supposed to drop it off at their service center (which doesn't actually do the work, it's more like a facilitator) on Monday morning, where they'll take care of getting estimates, provide me with a rental car, and basically do all the stuff I would have to do myself to get it fixed. So that sounds like a good deal, under the circumstances. Of course, there's no recovering the further decrease in resale value, but I expect I'll be hanging on to this car for a very long time anyway. So, that kind of sucked. But it could have been worse, and I'm grateful it wasn't.
This will probably make my uploads really slow again, but they're kind of neat I think. It kind of reminded me of the appearance of the alien ships in Independence Day.
A couple more days like this, and I'll actually be able to find stuff.
I've gone through the crap in what I loosely term my "filing system" and purged a great deal of it, and somewhat organized the rest of it. I don't think I have a complete year's worth of any bills or pay stubs. In a way, I find this reassuring. But what I do have is now chronologically ordered and paper-clipped together. Except for the phone bills, which are multi-page documents more opaque than the Voynich Manuscript. Those just sit in a folder. I really ought to go through and get rid of most of them, and maybe we'll get to that today.
Then again, maybe not.
I saw Spiderman 2 with Chris on Wednesday. It's okay. I don't think it's the best super-hero movie ever, which is one of the blurbs I read. The first half is very slow while Peter Parker's existential angst is built up; but the second half is pretty entertaining. Did you catch the Stan Lee cameo? Look for the old guy pulling some lady out of the path of some falling debris. I'm pretty sure that was him. The scene in the train car was pretty good, better than it might have been anyway. Definitely worth seeing on a long holiday weekend.
I spent some time at Books-a-Million yesterday, after I tired of sorting and filing. Managed to get out of there without buying anything, other than a heart-attack-inducing white chocolate chip cookie and an ironic diet Vanilla Coke. I looked over Tom Negrino's and Dori Smith's Mac OS X Unwired, but $24.95 is too much for stuff I can find on the 'net for free. It's well done, and I'd pay for the convenience of having all that info in one volume if it was, say, $14.95. (I note that the Amazon price is only $16.95, which is darn close to $14.95.) I'll never understand the pricing on computer books. I guess the information goes stale so fast, they have to get the most money they can while it's still current.
I was visiting AKMA's blog the other day, and read this post about the Top 100 Spiritually Significant films. I noted The Big Kahuna, but somehow in my head read it as The Big Lebowski. I've seen The Big Kahuna, but I hadn't seen The Big Lebowski, so in my head I'm thinking I've got to get The Big Lebowski to see what is so spiritually significant about it. Well, after visiting BAM, I dropped by Target to pick up a DVD of Independence Day, because I didn't have a copy and it seemed like a good 4th of July weekend kind of movie. Parenthetically, I also picked up Titan A.E. for about $5.00. It's not a great movie by any means, but the animation is quite nice. At the checkout counter, they had The Big Lebowski, and so I picked that up as well. So after watching Will Smith, Jeff Goldblum and Apple Computer save the world, I stuck The Big Lebowski in the ol' DVD (Digital Video Distractions) player, and prepared to appreciate spiritual significance.
At the end of the movie, I was like, "Hunh?" I figured it had to be something really deep, because I wasn't getting it. I laughed my ass off, but the "spirituality" was kind of illusive. I mean, it does have a certain sort of koan quality about it (by the Coen brothers - get it?), and the whole Sam Elliott character had me going there for a bit. Was the Dude supposed to be Job? I was stumped.
So I went back to look at the list to see what they actually had to say about The Big Lebowski, and found out they actually listed The Big Kahuna. Doh! In a way, it was kind of a relief. But, there's a part of me that's wondering if it shouldn't be the 101st movie on the list?
I received the claim form for the extended Visa warranty on my Canon A70 PowerShot, and I did find my Amazon invoice in my files.
That's great, but I can't say I enjoy filing. I've been trying to do some filing this morning, and it's evident to me that my "system" leaves a great deal to be desired. I'm trying to work up the motivation to sit down and do a thorough re-organization. I really don't have anything better to do at the moment, but still... Yech!
In fact, this post is just a way of procrastinating! (Thank God for weblogs!)
Apple is running a promotion at the iTunes Music Store, giving away various cool prizes as the store approaches 100 million downloads. I'm picking up a few songs with the faint hope that I might get lucky. I believe I'm not alone, as responsiveness at the store seems much slower than usual. In fact, I'm having a bit of difficulty with the store right now. It thinks I've already purchased a song, although I haven't been able to download it; and the Check for Purchased Music... menu item is giving a general failure 504 message.
They must be trying to stress-test the store or something.
My phone arrived yesterday, and I've been getting acquainted with it. As luck would have it, my USB Bluetooth thingie arrived the same day, so I also got acquainted with "pairing." I managed to delete all my contacts from the Address Book application on the G4, unfortunately. I did finally get everything into the phone from the iBook. Now I have to go back and re-sync with .Mac and get everything back into step. There's a trick to that, so I have to make sure I review the documentation again.
Okay, about the phone. It's silver, which was kind of a surprise and a disappointment. I was expecting red. Oh well... It's actually not too big. Compared to all the flip-phones on the market, yes, it's huge. But it fits well in my pocket, even if I'm not about to carry it there. It's a $300.00 phone, which isn't astronomical as phones go, but it's not cheap. I'm certain it's a remarkable feat of rf and digital engineering, and that's probably reflected in the cost; but the controls feel terribly cheap and fragile, especially the little button that serves as the four-way navigation control.
These things need one of those silicone-rubber "skins" like they make for the iPod. The smooth plastic body affords no "grip" when my hands are clean and dry. It feels like it would easily slide out of my hand. Either a "skin" or a couple of rubber strips on the sides to give it some grip would be nice. I think the "skin" is a better way to go, because it could incorporate some protection for what is a very lovely screen.
The Nokia manual is pretty good, with decent coverage of features. I tried to figure everything out without reading the manual. The Bluetooth pairing was the most challenging thing to figure out thus far. I finally decided to just follow along with the setup guide on the Mac, and everything worked great. BZ, Apple! T-Mobile is another story. It's nearly impossible to figure out what the phone can do on the GPRS network, and how much it'll cost. It's hard not to believe that it's intentionally obscure, it's so bad. I find more helpful information on other folks' weblogs than I do on T-Mobile's site.
I've ordered a pouch to carry the thing in on my belt, to keep it away from my car keys and loose change. (I also plan on carrying it on my left side, where I'm minus a kidney and where absorbed rf radiation is perhaps less likely to cause problems down the road.) Along that line, I ordered an earphone/mic combination in a retractable enclosure you also wear on your belt. I'm a little worried about looking like Batman, or a member of the AV Squad, so we'll see how that goes; but I'm also inclined to try to keep the antenna away from my noggin as much as possible. My skull is so thick, it's probably rf opaque, but you never know.
