A random collision with two Indian authors

Last night, at random, I finally started to read my long-languishing copy of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake. She is absolutely brilliant; if you haven’t read Interpreter of Maladies, you are denying yourself a treat. She is also disturbingly beautiful.

Less so is V.S. Naipaul, a writing god who walks among us, especially if you ask Paul Theroux. By chance, I was able to browse the printed-on-paper edition of today’s New York Times, which includes a review of a new biography of Sir Vidia. Good writer; bad man; but you have to hand it to the publisher for including Theroux’s blurb on the back cover: “It seems I didn’t know half of all the horrors.”

This must be my week for Indian and Indian-American writers. Anything by Theroux is a pretty good bet, too.

The bookmark shift

It’s 2008, so I have something like 15 years worth of bookmarks in my browser. I tend them like a garden, move them to new browser platforms, and back them up. Why? I rarely use them. There are a few that are more like convenient shortcuts, like bill-paying, Google Maps, local weather, my county’s library catalog, etc. But I tend to search for just about everything else, even if I know I have a link stashed several layers deep in my own local bookmarks.

So why bother with bookmarks? Two reasons.

They remind me about cool and useful stuff. They point to things I might not normally look at, like this optical illusion or this photo of the only surviving relative of an obscure composer. In this way, the bookmark list forms a composite view of my lens on the world since I started using web browsers, with some world history mixed in.

They sketch a view of my interests when I post them to a social bookmarking site like delicious.com. My delicious collection only goes back to May of 2007, when I started using it. At some point I’ll export the rest to delicious, after I’ve reviewed them for security issues and stuff that’s just too silly to reveal to the world. An individual’s bookmarks and tags are as interesting to browse as their library of books, which fact is not lost on the community at LibraryThing. Bookmarks and tags are a very good way of showing rather than telling, using examples of your interests to build up a comprehensive view of what you’re about. There are a lot of empty promises being made about social computing, but I think social bookmarking has real value.

The galaxy in the laundromat

I have taken the quilt from my bed to a commercial laundromat, because once wet from washing, its sodden weight would reduce my home Maytag to rubbish. At the laundromat I put it into a washing machine called a Huebsch Originator, which seems like an odd name for a washing machine. Odder still is the (manufacturer’s?) name on the coin mechanism: Airpak. When you get back from Google, you’ll see what I mean.

The dryer, which name I didn’t write down, is a front loader. As the quilt spins in the dryer, it arranges itself so that it looks like the arms of a spiral galaxy, with a bunch of quilt in the center and two quilt extremities flung out in curves. It’s become a two-armed spiral entity due to the same principle that makes spiral galaxies of the stellar variety. That has to count for something, although the big galaxies are not, to our knowledge, coin-operated.

The last Windows machine

I’m done, Microsoft. Finished. I will devote no further fraction of my life to coaxing your awful products to do simple, useful things. Enough. Done.

I recently bought a Dell laptop to replace a years-old Gateway that finally expired. The laptop came with Vista. The laptop would not, for love, money, threats, pleading, or force of will, connect to my simple home network. I worked and worked on the problem. I investigated solutions on the net. I tweaked obscure settings in the network stack. I uttered mighty oaths. Nothing. I finally spent $29.95 on a product called Network Magic that instantly connected the benighted machine to the LAN and to a printer on my desktop machine.

That’s not the only reason. Vista, and I say this with a minimum of prejudice, appears to be a stinking pile of of featurettes, pet projects, gizmos, wingdings, and doodads assembled by a commitee and heaped upon Windows XP. It is disorganized and formless. It is without logic. It is an insult.

A great sense of peace has settled over me. This is a decision for the ages. Next time around it will be Mac, Linux, or both. And I will waste no more of my life fixing the car instead of driving the car. Good night.

It’s obvious to me

Read that headline again. It’s wrought unimaginable havoc on my life.

I have this awful habit of assuming that everyone gets it — or at least draws the same conclusion from things that I do. I realized it today. I was outlining a proposal for improving something that, in its present state, is kind of hard to maintain. I wrote the outline heading “Hard to maintain,” and kept right on going to the next outline item. And then, to the cartoon-SFX sound of screeching brakes, I stopped and went back. The following internal conversation* took place:

“Shouldn’t you tell them why ‘hard to maintain’ is bad?”
“Why? Isn’t it obvious? It’s obvious to me.”
“No, it’s not. Hard to maintain means it’s more expensive to keep things up to date. It means that, when the system changes, reality falls out of sync with your description of it. Consistency flies south, and poops on your head as it passes over. It might help to point these things out.”
“Oh. Yeah. OK.”

…and I filled in some more details. I got lucky this time — too many times in my life, I’ve left “self-evident” points to stand on their own, to the confusion of whoever was trying to follow my argument. The writers of the Declaration of Independence had the good sense to enumerate the principles they held self-evident. Otherwise, the interpretation might have been left to King George, whose notion of self-evident truths probably had lots to do with the divine right of kings, tribute from the colonies, and a nice cup of tea.

This is one of the nice things about getting some life experience — you (if you’re me) finally start to take notice of patterns that might not be very helpful. And you can do something about it. Not a bad day’s work.

* Let’s not go into the whole talking-to-yourself thing right now, OK?

Survey, interrupting

I am reading Paul Newman’s obituary on nyt.com, and suddenly an invitation to take a survey is slapped over the text I’m reading. Annoyed, I close the invitation. It seems obvious that this is a poor way to offer a survey. I’ve just started reading something of geniune interest to me, I’m a paragraph or so into the article, and a popup ad blocks my view, mid-sentence. Remember popups? Remember why they fell out of use? People hated them, and they reflected badly on the site and the advertiser alike.

I could take the survey and tell them how annoying it is, but I don’t want to encourage them. I would like to hear about the response rate of this tactic from someone who actually knows.

Lamenting the death of the friend I never met

David Foster Wallace killed himself last Friday, I learned this morning. He was brilliant; he wrote fearlessly, with a ferocious glee. As people absorb the news of his death, a lot is being said about his fiction, but I liked his essays best of all. “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” is one of the smartest and funniest things I’ve ever read. It is rivaled only by “Getting Away From Already Being Pretty Much Away From It All,” about his visit to the Illinois State Fair, which appears in the same volume.

“A Supposedly Fun Thing” chronicles DFW’s* voyage on a Caribbean cruise liner, on assignment for Harper’s. He describes everything with a clarity and up-close accuracy that is insightful and occasionally vicious, which latter attribute bothered me only a little. The ship, the crew, the food, his fellow passengers, the brochure for the cruise, all are described in ways that link them to the decline of civilization on Earth, among other things. He describes trying to get his tube of zinc oxide ointment out of his luggage before it’s been carried to his cabin by the crew, and realizes he has already committed a faux pas: you NEVER do anything for yourself that the crew is supposed to do for you. By pulling his own bag out of a pile and carrying it to his cabin, he has endangered the job (and, he muses, possibly the life) of the hapless crewman who was supposed to carry the bag.

He obsesses about every detail of his cabin: the vacuum-operated toilet, the endless fruit basket; the mysterious housekeeper who straightens up the room EVERY SINGLE TIME he leaves it, but can never, ever be seen or caught in the act. He describes meals with his assigned tableful of shipmates in ways that, if they read the book and recognized themselves, will scar their psyches forever. He plays ping-pong with the the ship’s hip-hop-crazed tennis pro. He analyzes, and I choose that word deliberately, the underlying proposition of the cruise experience: that you come aboard to be taken care of, pampered, and fussed over, to the point where you start to regress into an infantile state. And this, he believes, is something that many people want badly.

Anyway, you really have to read it for yourself.

I had hoped to meet DFW someday, have a beer, talk about stuff. It wasn’t a specific goal or anything, but the news of his death makes it a permanent impossibility, and that’s sad. What’s sadder still is that his apparently limitless talent to write fascinating prose about anything is no longer part of our world. I don’t know what could have made him so miserable that he took his own life. He didn’t seem like the type — he seemed to know when to step back from the brink. He will be missed.

*Yeah, I’m going to refer to him as DFW just like the rest do. And yes, I’m deliberately and ironically writing a blog post with a footnote.

Hello, three readers

Nice to see you again! Yes, it’s been a while. I admit it — I’ve been squandering my time on Facebook and Twitter and being a dad and working for a living. But now I’m back, rejoining the ranks of the blog world’s long tail, taking my place in the lower 99 percent, and and I mean lower.

I’m reading Endless Forms Most Beautiful, by Sean B. Carroll. I’m barely a third of the way into it, but already Carroll has begun to explain some of the mysteries of genetics that have bugged me for a long time. I already understand the parts about DNA and RNA and genes and chromosomes, but I never grasped how all that gets translated into a living organism. What is the mechanism? How do thumbs and noses and toenails and spleens end up in the right places? And connected to the correct other things? Carroll’s well-written book has begun to lay it out. It’s genuinely exciting reading; as I work my way through the text, the pieces are finally being assembled into a model I can understand. I always figured there was something significant about human embryos having gills for a while during their development. And besides, a scientific discipline that calls itself Evo Devo has to have something going for it.

My Muppet theremin olive dream

I dreamed this just before waking this morning.  I was watching a TV show that featured The Muppets. A voice off-camera, maybe Kermit, announced that the next guest would perform on the theremin. A Muppet character came onto the stage, and proceeded to suspend an olive in midair. A stuffed olive, to be exact; a green olive stuffed with pimento. As the character moved his hands around the floating olive, it made theremin music as if it was an actual theremin antenna.

The character was dressed in hip black, like some avant-garde performance artist. In the dream, I could clearly see the string that was used to suspend the olive, and I wondered why they used a camera angle that highlighted the string.

What does it mean? Shirimasen. I’ve been watching a lot of Dr. Who lately, and the musical opening theme features a theremin. As for the rest, the Muppet and the olive, I have no idea.

An IKEA name generator. At last.

Two of my life’s major themes, IKEA and absurdity, rolled into a single applet.

http://www.blogadilla.com/2008/05/11/the-blogadilla-swedish-furniture-name-generator/