20 August 03
Fellow Achilles Sufferer…
In June of this year a piece of mine was published in Faultline. The subject was the competition for the design of the California quarter (twenty-five cent piece) and the invitation by the hapless governor for Californians to vote for their favorite. Tied to the article were cartoons by Keith Knight depicting alternative suggestions for the quarter design.
Well, as many of you know I snapped my Achilles tendon on my wedding day, August 10, a week ago Sunday, and I’m recuperating from surgery—slowly.
Chris Clarke, Faultline’s editor, noticed that Keith had suffered the same injury on August 12. We are all three in shock at the news and Keith and I are comparing stories about narcotic painkillers. Keith wasn’t getting married, he was playing tennis, but he was celebrating his first wedding anniversary. He has a funny strip about this which you can see on salon.com (if you don’t subscribe you’ll be subjected to a million annoying popups; beware).
19 August 03
Tufte On Powerpoint
As long as we are ranting about various pieces of Microsoft Office, it’s time to recommend reading Edward Tufte’s recent essay The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint. As somebody who has lived through far too many Powerpoint presentations, I am appreciative that Tufte has taken on the fundamental cognitive limitations of talks given using Powerpoint (or, to be fair, other but similar presentation software). Such a style has become a clich, and I am thankful whenever somebody eschews slides for notes on a chalkboard. As Tufte points out, you can put far more information on a printed handout than in a set of Powerpoint slides, so why not pass out the handout and actually engage your audience in conversation? My worst Powerpoint peeve is gratuitous use of animation: I will automatically give anybody who uses animated text fade-ins 15 demerits.
18 August 03
Not Just Annoying
Warning: Extended Rant Follows
A story on BBC online this morning highlighted the security risks of using Microsoft Word. Especially in documents that are edited by more than one person, a perceptible trail of who did what is apparent to anyone with the knowledge to go in and look for it. This is the case with the plagiarized document which is embarrassing Tony Blair’s government—the document which supposedly “sexed up” the reasons to go to war with Iraq.
I don’t work in a field that’s very sensitive in this way, and I don’t share Word documents very often. They get sent to me as attachments all the time, so I have to have it on my computer at work. But I almost never write straight into Word any more: a text editor is fine for my needs, and if it needs to be designed, I use Adobe InDesign.
I am sure that hundreds of thousands of hours are wasted each year by hapless office workers trying (and failing) to disable the default automatic formatting features in Word. I share an office with someone who practically bursts into tears wrestling with this horrible software on a regular basis. I offer my copy of the O’Reilly Word 97 Annoyances (now apparently out of print).
Word used to be not too bad when it didn’t try to do everything for executives. (Word Perfect was better, back in the mid-80s, and I’m sure it still is.) It’s just that Word is now so powerful, so bloated, so full of features that most people never use, that it’s simply too cumbersome for ordinary office use, which is where it gets installed by systems administrators following orders from executives.
(You know, the people who love Power Point.)
Then there’s the infantile phallic paper clip helper who seems to be trying to establish a relationship with me. Yes. I know how to type a letter. I even know how to type a memo. There used to be a way of strangling Mr. Clippy by sticking him in a folder named “Dead Actors”; Microsoft has capitulated to demand and made it somewhat simple to turn the feature off.
But why should we have to? Why should we have to buy books to figure out a way simply to do our jobs without having the *?!* software get in our way? Why does Microsoft continue to churn out software that ignores the abilities and needs of most of its users?
And now, like the rest of its products, it turns out that Word is full of security loopholes too. I’m investigating Open Source alternatives to Office. My Mac runs Jaguar; it’s about time I became more familiar with Unix.
17 August 03
Tomato Season
Trucks like the one at right are a common sight these days around Yolo and Solano counties. Not all the tomatoes stay in the bin, and road intersections are dotted with the carcasses of tomatoes that flew off from trucks making the turn. The squished fruits will make for a nasty slick on the road come the first rains. The scent from a tomato field is a slightly evil one: they are, after all, nightshades.
Not every tomato is engineered to survive mechanical harvesting and transport at the bottom of these bins. But this is also the time to find luscious organic tomatoes in the Farmers Market and the co-op. People’s gardens are burgeoning as well: yesterday Fernanda brought us over some delicious cherry tomatoes from hers.
16 August 03
The Transformation of the Logbook
Another post on Weblogs As Place for the Ecotone Wiki...
In June 1997 Numenius and I moved into a 1930s cabin in the hills above Santa Barbara. Neither of us had ever lived anywhere like it and we decided to keep a journal, a logbook, of the house, not unlike a ship’s log (this is when we both started reading Patrick O’Brian which might have had something to do with it). We were left with copious instructions about watering the 40 fruit trees (an inventive mixture of graywater from the outdoor and indoor showers and bucketing plus drip irrigation), so this made some practical as well as romantic sense. It was also the dawn of the biggest El Nio for 100 years, and looking back on the logbook we kept for that time (the year stretched into two), the drawings we made of the passiflora and the Channel Islands we could see from bed, the accounts of the arrival of the hooded orioles to nest in the banana tree, not to mention the account of the landslide that closed Highway 154 for weeks, it was the chronicle of an incredible time. Yet it also made us aware that all time is incredible, even when it’s spent in somewhere less inherently interesting than the Trout Club.
This logbook was emphatically not our journal-which we each still kept, individually, not for public or even each other’s consumption-and while there are some cryptic references (the hooded orioles we named Horace and Sally, for instance, might need some explaining to outside readers), it was a sort of halfway house between journal and weblog. We made entries on alternate days, logging rainfall (plenty in that year of floods) and the activities of the copious local rodents.
We continued with our logbook after we moved to Davis, and we continue it still—it’s hard to shake the habit. The logbook is always a black bound unlined sketchbook (we’re now on our fourth), still recounts the activities, birds, and other notable events of the day as they pertain to the HOUSE.
The weblog has extended this place somewhat, but I feel they are related. While anyone is able and welcome to read our logbooks, nobody ever does, because they are physically bound, literally and figuratively, in our living room. Feathers of Hope extends the space that this shared activity has created and also the scope of our joint writing. The weblog is a place where I can write something-this, for instance-and know that at least fifteen, and probably many more, people than that will read it. One of them lives in Davis; another in Sweden; another few in England; another in Australia. Many are in North America.
I write this with a cast on my left leg, on a laptop (which is conveniently on my lap), looking out the back window to oleander bushes which despite the increasing heat are still miraculously blooming. The space makes it seem as though these fifteen (or more) people are in the room with me. The weblog seems to be an extension of my living room. It is always in need of some tidying, but hey, everyone’s welcome anytime. The kettle’s on the stove. I’d get it for you if I could get up…
15 August 03
A Place In Cyberspace
This is a post on weblogs as place for the Ecotone Wiki.
Writing this weblog has really been my first endeavor in online community. I have been on the Internet ever since 1990, but would only post very occasionally to places like various mailing lists or Usenet, and never hung out for very long in IRC-land. Nor have I been inclined to participate in web communities such as Kuro5hin or Slashdot, though I lurk omnivorously. There I sense my identity would get lost in the tumult of voices, whereas this weblog is more my own home, a place where my own sensibilities can emerge.
Is there something special about weblogs that make them possess more of a sense of place than other online fora? Place has always been an important metaphor for the Web—witness the use of “home page” and “web site”—and perhaps the combination of the graphic design elements of the Web and the prominence weblogs give to the individual writer’s voice enables a strong sense of place. And a weblog is happiest when other people stop by—it is always reaching towards community.
To turn the metaphor about, a weblog feels like a home on a street with neighbor bloggers who frequently visit, or at least check if your cat is outside. From outside your neighborhood, people occasionally drive through and comment on your choice of house paint. Outside your town, the world of bloggers is vast, growing unfathomably, but all share a desire to create their own little nook in cyberspace.
14 August 03
O.R. As Place
Yesterday was one of those extraordinary days that was supposed to be awful and turned out to be just amazing… I was scheduled for surgery at 9:45 am and had to be in two hours earlier, not having eaten or drunk anything after midnight. There’s a lot of paperwork and different rooms to go and sit in in a kind of ritualistic sequence. But a morning with no tea for someone who drinks two or three pots before work is definitely starting off on the wrong foot (the left one, in my case).
First unexpected thing: they let my mother come in and sit with me in the pre-op room. The anesthesiologist shows up: he’s an affable, chatty guy who after a couple of jokes tries to talk me into a spinal block as opposed to a general anaesthetic. No way, I say. I don’t want to hear, smell, feel, or see anything. That’s what they all say, he says. He explains how he needs to get the muscles REALLY relaxed and in order to do that with a general he’d have to put me way under, which would make me very, very sick. But he can give me an out-of-body experience, half and half, so I’d be like a centaur. Now I’m interested—shades of Harry Potter. He’s selling me this like it’s a truffle.
Second unexpected thing: the surgeon shows up, instantly wants to talk to my mother, wants to make sure I’m okay, wonders if I have questions, is fine with my emailing him. The anaesthesiologist hands him a line and says “hook that up there, will you R—?”-and explains that he has known R- since R—was twelve and that he used to send him all over the Operating Room to get things. They have a very comfortable interaction. I’m instantly intrigued and forget, frankly, to be nervous.
When the time comes to wheel me in to the O.R., after R—explains that he needs to go and get into his pyjamas, the nurses cluck sympathetically to the story of the jig on my wedding day (I am getting a lot of mileage out of this) and then THEY start bantering with the anaesthesiologist, whom I’ll call Dr. F.—and everyone wants to know what music I want to listen to (even though I’m assured I’ll be out cold). Not heavy metal, say I.
The Operating Room, a forbidding, scary, and chilly place I last saw at age seven when I was having my tonsils out when syringes were the size of walking sticks, is now a cozy, mellow haven where Beethoven is welcome. I didn’t ask for Beethoven but nodded an assent when they asked “Classical okay?”. The minute I came to, I was totally alert. They were still joking, two hours later. And I felt elated, elated to be alive, to have gotten through this ordeal, and to have been part of this almost coffee klatsch (even though I was asleep through most of it).
I didn’t hear, feel, smell, or see anything, I say to Dr. F. That’s because I’m your anaesthesiologist, says he, and disappears off into the C Section in the next room.
13 August 03
Tofu-Cilantro
2 bunches cilantro (fresh green coriander)
2 green peppers
2 jalapeño peppers
12 oz firm tofu
soy sauce
Finely chop cilantro and peppers and stir-fry in a large saucepan or wok. Add cubed tofu and 2 tbsp of soy sauce. Cover and let simmer for 10-15 minutes. Serve over basmati rice.
This is Pica’s favorite dinner which she was quite glad to have after returning home from surgery this afternoon, which went well. The jalapeños today were deliciously picant.
12 August 03
A Different Wedding of Place
We weren’t the only people to get married on Sunday: Yuri Malenchenko married Yekaterina Dmitriyeva by video link—from space. See this report from the BBC.
Photographs from ours are dribbling in and making their way slowly onto our gallery—hope to have a huge chunk of photos to sort through by this weekend.
11 August 03
Catching Up On The Baseball
Pica is reclining on the couch right now, left leg elevated, and is happily scoring the Boston Red Sox-Oakland A’s game. This is a key four-game series between the Red Sox and the A’s, since the two teams are very close in the AL wild card race. It’s always a matter of conflicted loyalties when these two teams meet, since Pica is a Red Sox fan and I grew up following the A’s, but I’ll have to admit my loyalities have shifted so that I root for the Red Sox in such matchups. After all, the Red Sox have a longer history of disappointments to overcome.
On the day of our wedding yesterday, one of the rarest of baseball events occurred: an unassisted triple play. Rafael Furcal, the shortstop for the Atlanta Braves, turned the play in a game against the St. Louis Cardinals. This is only the 12th unassisted triple play in major league history. This surely must be a portent for us, or at least the answer to a good trivia question.
Pica will be headed in for surgery on her ankle early Wednesday morning. I don’t think we’ll be catching the rest of the A’s-Red Sox series in person, alas.