Competing Messages: Not Improving the Silence

I happened upon this at Dave Weinberger's weblog before I hit the road for New York and points east. I saved it in Bloglines with the intention of commenting on it at length, but now I'm not sure I want to.

I had a couple of tentative titles for lengthier replies, like "What's Love Got to Do With It?" Or, "What is Love, (Baby Don't Hurt Me)," but then I figured I'd just be giving attention to someone obviously seeking it. Plus, it occurs to me that among the topics upon which I am obviously not an authority, "love" is near the top of the list.

Suffice to say, Clay Shirky can come back in 1300 years and make comparisons between Perl and Shinto shrines, and I'll give them the attention they might deserve.

Then.

"Fantastic opening presentation," my ass.

More like: "Web 2.0: All bullshit, all the time."

One thing about "love" I do know: It makes us believe what we want to believe. Not necessarily what is true.

Just in case anyone happened to be thinking that I've lost my "edge."

TV: John From Cincinnati... Love it.

I don't really get it, but it's deep enough and chewy enough to keep me interested. I really like the characters. The writing is great, if obtuse. The plot is challenging to the point of being opaque. But I love it.

Which means it's probably doomed.

TV: Saving Grace... (or not)

Okay, I watched the second episode of Saving Grace, and as much as I love and adore Holly Hunter, the show sucks. I'm not sure how to save Saving Grace, but a good start would be to get rid of Earl. I like unlikable angels, but Earl isn't redeemably unlikable. He's just plain hokey. Annoying. A distraction.

Holly can't carry a show that has no soul. It seems like it was designed by committee.

Sucks.

Sorry, Holly.

Cheese Sandwich: iKeg Nano

Mmmm... beer....

"Life's too short to drink domestic beer," someone once told me. With the possible exception of Yuengling. Authenticity, you know.

I've always wanted to try one of these, so we did when I was visiting my old shipmate in Massachusetts. It's really not a good deal, price-wise, it's more for the packaging. I've got one in the fridge, which will ultimately end up as a decorative item at Action Dave's Cool-Guy Bachelor Pad.

Cheese Sandwich: Getting Back to Normal

Things are finally settling back into a routine, though I know "routine" is not necessarily something to be valued. Bodhi seemed to have been affected by the trip somewhat. I suspect he became accustomed to constant human companionship, and going back to my daily absences seemed to depress him a bit last week. He'd be somewhat subdued when I came home at night, and less inclined to want to go out for a walk, and didn't even bring me tennis balls to toss for him! That pretty much resolved itself over the weekend, though the tennis ball behavior didn't return until last night. I think we did about 10 walks yesterday, and he initiated nearly all of them.

I haven't quite gotten back to my own routine yet. I'll return to TKD tomorrow, and I did my first four-mile walk since I've been back at lunchtime today. I ran on the treadmill on Thursday and Sunday, and I was relieved to find that the trip hasn't seemed to have any adverse affect on my endurance. It was very hot on the walk today, and I'm more tired this evening than I usually am on those days. I'd considered going to kickboxing class tonight, but I think I'll try that on Wednesday night. Ordinarily, I'd go to Krav on Tuesday night, but I've got a homeowners association meeting I want to attend.

Anyway, we seem to be back in battery here, and yes, "This thing is on."

Mobile Groundhog

I finally got around to moving the files associated with Groundhog Day onto the MacBook, and it was easier than I recalled the last time I did it, moving from the G4 MDD to the iMac.

It remains to be seen how much this will affect my inclination to write.

Test

Is this thing on?

TV: Saving Grace

While seeing Holly Hunter on any screen, big or small, is something to be happy about, I have mixed reactions to Saving Grace.

Unsurprisingly, I love the theme. I don't mind the appearance of angels, but "Earl" is a little too cute, or redneck, for my taste. And having her brother be a priest, and her sister dying in the Oklahoma City bombing was just too much. And naturally, her sister died because Holly was too hung over to baby-sit her nephew the day before, when she was supposed to go to the federal building to apply for his Social Security card.

My impression of the first episode is that they were trying too hard. We'll see if they get any better.

One of my favorite things about Pixar's and Disney's The Incredibles, was listening to Holly Hunter's voice.

TV: John From Cincinnati

Love it or hate it, and it seems as though most critics hate it, HBO's John From Cincinnati is definitely weird. I haven't decided if I love it or hate it, but I'm sucked into it enough to watch every episode.

My favorite characters are Kai, the woman who loves Butchie and works in his mom's shop; and Bill, played by Ed O'Neill, a widower and retired cop with a lot of issues.

Mac: It Goes to 11!

One of the things waiting for me upon my return was my new (Black) MacBook.

Ohh, very nice.

2GHz Core 2 Duo, 120GB HD, Superdrive, 1GB RAM, cost me all of $1111 and some change.

Because the HD was 3x larger than the iBook's, I went ahead and installed both my iPhoto and iTunes libraries, along with a full install of Final Cut Pro (As if I need that!). I still have 19GB free on the HD, so I guess I'm okay.

It's heavier than I remembered my daughter's white MacBook. It feels more substantial than the iBook by some margin. And it looks very cool.

I'm going to move the GHD Tinderbox files to the MacBook and we'll be mobile from now on. Lately, I've been spending most of my online time down at my bar. The MacBook has a built-in iSight camera, so I'll make myself more available on iChat, and with the GHD files on that machine, the chances are greater I'll post something.

With respect to my frequency of posting, it's down somewhat from past months, perhaps significantly. While I was writing the previous post my phone rang and one of my dog-owning neighbors invited me to the tennis court for a play date with our respective pooches, and another neighbor showed up when we arrived so we had a three dog afternoon... or something.

Anyway, the point is I seem to be enjoying a much more active social life. Well, there's no "seem" about it, I am. While I can honestly say the last few months have been among the most heart-breaking in my life, they've also been among the most fun. Certainly the most fun in the last couple of decades. It's quite a study in contrasts, and I'm frequently at a loss to kind of grapple with it all. "Best of times, worst of times..." sort of thing. Roller coaster. Wild ride. Heavy seas.

On our way back to Canastota after visiting Chris in North Grafton, I asked Caitie what she thought of my old shipmate? She said something to the effect that, "The two of you act like little boys when you're together." And, yeah, we do. And for a little while, neither of us is over fifty. And life is worth the living.

Anyway, this is supposed to be a "Mac" post, not a "Cheese Sandwich" post, so I'll probably leave it there for the moment. There's more to share, and maybe the MacBook will help me do that. For now, it's enough to say it's that it's my seventh Mac laptop and it's easily the best.

Cheese Sandwich: Back in Florida

"It's great to be back..."

Now I just need to recover from my vacation!

I had a great time from the 12th through the 24th. Today hasn't been bad either, though I did go back to work today.

We went to the ballgame on Thursay night and had a nice time. Had a tremendous, fairly spur-of-the-moment theme party at the pool on Saturday. Recovered and packed on Sunday. Drove north on Monday and Tuesday. Enjoyed Tuesday through Friday with my parents. The rain let up enough to make it to Chittenango Falls to take a few pictures. On Friday we drove to North Grafton, Massachusetts and spent Friday night and Saturday night with an old shipmate of mine. Back to Canastota on Sunday, saw one of my brothers and an old high school classmate, had a nice cookout with Mom and Dad. Monday morning had us back on the road, headed south. Tuesday found us back home.

Yeesh!

While I was at my parents' place, I played around a bit with Flickr and Blogger. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with the Blogger site, I'm still mulling it over. There are pictures there from the party, my parents' house and Chittenango Falls.

Here are a few more pictures:

My old shipmate, Chris Staszak, Caitie and I.

Mom and Dad and I.

Saw this as I was pulling out, and had to grab a picture of them!

My fellow travellers.

Cheese Sandwich: News of the Mundane

I'm having a fairly nice summer. I've kind of hit a pause in the weight loss effort. I suspect it's due to the amount of cooking out and concomitant consumption of cold, refreshing adult beverages I've been enjoying. But I could be wrong. It might be the Ben & Jerry's Vanilla Heath Crunch, consumed a pint at a time. What an insidious confection! You can't stop eating because there just might be another half of a Heath bar buried in there! I'm kind of stuck at 180 for now. Which is fine, I feel great and it's not tending north, so we're good. Once the summer social calendar winds down, I think I'll be a little more consistent in better eating habits and regular exercise, and 175 will be attainable. I'm still doing push-ups because I like how my arms look, and it's actually kind of fun doing push-ups now. Weird. Never thought I'd ever say that. Ab work too.

In the Going Broke Saving Money Department, I've succumbed once again to a weak will and insatiable desire. I noted the rare appearance of a black MacBook Core 2 Duo, 2.0GHz, 120GB HD, 1GB RAM, 6x SuperDrive in the refurb section of the Apple Store for a very reasonable $1049.00 ($1111.94 with tax), so I jumped on it. And shortly after I placed my order, it disappeared as an available offering. A wiser course might have been to wait for the appearance of Leopard and the next iteration of iLife bundled with new stock and buying from Amazon. Then I'd get more up-to-date hardware, the current OS and iLife, which I'll be buying separately now. But it's hard to be wise when you're young and foolish. Well, foolish anyway.

Tonight I'm going to the ball game with my friends. It's been raining cats and dogs this afternoon, so I hope the sky will be clear by game time. We had a good time last time we went, and we've added one more to our number this time. I'll bring the P712 this time and see if I have any better luck trying to focus past the foul ball barrier.

Saturday we have an Around the World Pool Party at the, um... pool. A neighbor and I have agreed to be a country, though we haven't decided which one yet. Vatican City appealed to me. We could serve bread and wine, and I would get to wear a funny hat. Sentiment seems to be running toward representing the good ol' USA and serving spiked watermelon, though. We shall see.

On Monday, Caitie, Bodhi and I hit the road in Shiva, the Destroyer of Worlds, to journey to the far north and visit my parental units, with a side trip to Grafton, Massachusetts to visit an old shipmate of mine from way back. I'm not fond of driving, but I want to bring Bodhi along, and I get to carry more crap this way anyway. I'm bringing both the P712 and the P880, along with a tripod and the 1.4x teleconverter. Stuff I wouldn't drag along on a flight. I may even bring the iPod Hi-Fi and see how that performs in lieu of listening to CDs or FM on the car stereo. I plan to take two days to make it to Canastota. My days of high-speed, hell-bent-for-the-horizon runs are behind me now. So unfortunately a good portion of the trip will be spent on the road, but that's the way it goes sometimes. We'll be back a week from Tuesday.

I've already begun thinking of next year's Groundhog Day party. Only seven months away! I think it'll be Groundhog Day II: Enter the Groundhog. Kind of a martial arts theme. I'll have to get some stuffed groundhogs wearing gis and headbands, maybe some little nunchuks, or something. Ninja groundhogs! Use shurikens as drink coasters. Later, throw them at guests! Lots of fun. (For a little while anyway!) I'm just spit-ballin' here. Lots of time to figure that stuff out.

Well, better go clean out the car. Shiva is the duty driver tonight.

Nothing more to see here, folks. Move along.

Move along.

Cheese Sandwich: In Other News...

I succumbed to some consumer conditioning and caved in to a desire for a new camera.

James Vornov, a fellow editthispage.com alum, who is still blogging at On Deciding...Better 3.0, concurred with my disciplined if ultimately futile resolve to master the cameras I had, rather than buy a new one. I was pleased to see he's still blogging and posting his pictures, and I've finally subscribed to his RSS feed so I can better keep up with him.

Anyway, of my ridiculous five digital cameras, my favorite had been the Kodak P850. It's a 5MP compact super-zoom with a hot shoe and many bells and whistles. The thing that most frustrated me about the 850 was its speed. Bodhi is one of my favorite subjects, but he is almost always in motion, so I rely on the burst feature a great deal to grab a frame that captures what a beautiful animal he is. He doesn't pose well. The 850 was slow to focus, and had a limited capture buffer, slow to flush the buffer and I missed many, many more shots than I might have otherwise taken. But in most other respects, it's a decent camera. Well, apart from the noise curse of all small digicams.

In addition, I have a number of accessories for the P850, most of which also work with the P880 (which I also have - sigh). I was kind of lusting after the Olympus SP550 UZ with its 28-504mm (35mm equivalent) zoom. But I had the accessories for the 850, plus some familiarity with how it works, so that kind of argued for the Kodak P712. (Why the "712" was a later, more advanced model than the "850" is a mystery of that imperfect art of product naming, or numbering in this case.) I read the accounts of people who owned, or had owned, both the 850 and the 712 at Digital Photography Review, and by most accounts the 712 was a worthwhile upgrade. And since it's been discontinued, I managed to find one at a significant discount from it's MSRP of $449.95. I paid about $340.00 for mine.

Now, Bodhi may be a favorite subject, but he's also the reason why I've been taking fewer pictures lately. Walking him generally demands a fair amount of attention, and very often two hands. He's an eager pup who loves everybody. But not everybody loves dogs, even dogs as sweet and nice as Bodhi. So I have to be able to contain his exuberance, and sometimes it takes both hands. He listens to commands, but his attention span is measured in nano-seconds when he's around someone he knows, or a new person he likes (which is pretty much everyone). Anyway, I used to just walk around with the camera and while I do much, much more walking these days, it's mostly without a camera.

That is going to change. I decided that I would just have to do it and learn how to carry the camera and manage Bodhi at the same time. While it can hang comfortably around my neck, managing Bodhi involves frequently bending down. I may look for some solution to secure the camera to my chest while I'm not using it. But there's also the small matter of Bodhi jumping up, which we've been working on for some time, with some success but he has lapses.

Anyway, I've had the 712 for a couple of weeks now, and I'm very satisfied with it. Was it worth $340.00? Well, who knows? I think so, but I'm biased. The pictures below were taken with the 712. It is significantly faster than the 850. I managed to get the shot of Bodhi running without using burst mode, though it was more luck than skill. The difference was the 712 was focused when I tripped the shutter, where the 850 might not have been.

Now, having said that Bodhi doesn't pose well, here's one where he kind of did:

Cheese Sandwich: Notes

The Tao that can be quoted is not the Tao.

My iMac (20" Core Duo), which hosts the Groundhog Day Tinderbox file, is upstairs in my loft. Lately, I've been using the iBook at my kitchen bar to do nearly everything online, so I don't get up here as much. Today is the first time in days, but I must say that the bright, expansive screen is such a joy to use that I'll have to stop and think about why I prefer using the iBook downstairs. It isn't immediately apparent to me.

Life has been reasonably good. It remains something of a challenge to focus on the good things and not on the things I have no control over. Fortunately, I have many, many good things, so it's not too challenging.

Had a great time on the 4th, maybe a little too great. The 5th was a little bit, um, unproductive. Took Bodhi to the dog park on Wednesday morning and let him run for an hour before it got too hot. The weather looked threatening, but nothing developed and he had a great time. We pretty much had the run of the place, only a few other dogs showed up.

Afterward, we got ready for a cook-out we'd been planning with some of the neighbors. We were a little concerned that the grill by the pool would be jammed with other neighbors, but I think the threatening clouds kept nearly everyone else inside. Again, we had the pool and the grill mostly to ourselves the whole day.

We had two beer can chickens this time. I am such a fan of this method of preparing chicken. (Note: Remove sunglasses from the chickens before placing them on the grill.) I grilled some sweet potato wedges, they seemed to go over well. Plus the usual corn on the cob, a pasta salad, homemade guacamole dip, some other dips and salsas, and various kinds of chips and crackers. I think we had a watermelon that we never got around to slicing up. Oh yeah, and brownies! ("Mmmm... brownies...")

Cooking out by the pool with an iPod Hi-Fi has become such a regular practice that climbing up on my kitchen counter to take down the Hi-Fi has become a chore, so I bought another one from the Navy Exchange. They had the best price, though I kept hoping a new stock of refurbs would appear at the Apple Store - they were going for $229.99 back in May. The NEX price was $299.99, significantly beating Amazon and every other online retailer at the time of my purchase. I also bought a case for it, the Griffin Hi-Way Case. (Product naming remains something of a mostly imperfect art.) It protects the smooth finish of the Hi-Fi, while offering a more convenient means of carrying it along with its power cord and remote.

One of my neighbors had brought her iPod along and we swapped mine out for hers in the Hi-Fi as her music selection was a bit more, um, contemporary, shall we say? Still, good times. We took a stab at playing volleyball. I haven't played in years, and it showed. Well, the quantity of cold, refreshing adult beverages we had consumed might have had something to do with the quality of play as well.

We were poolside for the better part of seven hours or more before the party broke up. Three of us rode bikes to the beach to watch the fireworks. We could see three separate shows, two to the north and one to the south. I had brought along my tripod and one of my cameras. Unfortunately, I assumed the P880 had a Fireworks scene mode, and it doesn't. I hadn't done any homework on how to choose the proper manual settings, so no pictures this time.

After the show was over, we pedaled home and mostly avoided the huge traffic jam that attends fireworks at the beach. A1A gets pretty packed, so it moves slowly and people were kind enough to allow us to cross on our bikes since they weren't really going anywhere anyway. Got home, walked Bodhi and went to bed!

I have some great friends, neighbors, an outstanding dog, a nice place to live and lots of reasons to be happy and grateful for my good fortune. It was an excellent holiday.

Cheese Sandwich: 4th of July, 2007

Some shots from the Fourth:

Competing Messages: The Meaning of Life

I got a note the other day from a correspondent who noted the time here in Florida and asked me if I got the 4GB or the 8GB? It was perhaps a facetious question, playing off my enthusiastic use of Apple products and the intense and irrational interest in the iPhone. As it happens, I have neither. While I'm interested, they're a little too pricey for me, and I'm not inclined to be a pioneer when my only telephone is my mobile phone. My Nokia 3660 is almost an embarrassment these days, but it works reliably. I've been looking at newer phones, but they're almost all crap, so I'm sticking with the crap that's already paid-for.

But what has happened around the launch of the iPhone is telling us about something. Read this, and tell me if it gives you pause:

Hanging out with Robert and Patrick Scoble. Two of the best people you'll ever know. What an amazing experience for a father and son to have together. You should read Robert's quick recap of the event. What a great thing for a father to do with his son. Patrick was so proud to be #1 in line. They made a big deal about it when they let him into the store first. That's a memory that he'll have the rest of his life. What a great dad to make that happen.

To be fair, the writer is likely also referring to some of the famous personalities who also happened to be in that line, but I'm not sure that makes me feel any better about it. Famous personalities behaving that way is not exactly something that inspires confidence.

Back when Doc and I had our actual telephone "conversation" (if that word has any real meaning anymore) a couple of weeks back, this was something I referred to, the "commercialization" of life itself. When being a "great dad" involves getting one's son to stand in line overnight "to be #1 in line," to buy a gadget. When an "amazing experience" is centered around the launch of a consumer product, likely to be obsolete and hopefully recycled, if not lying in a landfill, in 36 months.

I can't prove it, and I'm tired of making the argument, but I'm convinced our lives grow more impoverished each day as our commercial and consumer cultures condition us to orient our lives ever more tightly around commercial interactions. "Amazing experiences" are sold to us by companies competing for our time and attention and authority. And we willingly surrender all of it to them, even believing we are somehow participating in something larger, something greater, than simply being a good little consumer.

Now, I will say that I think the iPhone is probably a great mobile device. Perhaps the first one that doesn't suck out loud as anything more than just a phone. But I rather think there are other experiences that might have been less "amazing" but perhaps more "meaningful" that a father might have shared with his son.

Finally, my correspondent had earlier directed my attention to this article in the Wall Street Journal (part of which you can apparently read without paying for a subscription). The money quote:

"We live in a marketing-oriented society," says Bruce Lansky, a former advertising executive and author of eight books on baby names, including "100,000 + Baby Names." "People who understand branding know that when you pick the right name, you're giving your child a head start."

We should be careful what we wish for.