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Dear Mr. President: [Nov. 15th, 2005|02:26 pm]
[mood |listlesslistless]
[music |Boatsman - Ernie Carpenter]

Back in 2002, Gabe Hudson helped edit a series of letters to the President over on McSweeneys, as an extension of his own book Dear Mr. President.

I submitted the following letter for consideration, but it didn't make the cut.

=========================================================

Dear Mr. President:

I am not a perfectionist (though perhaps I used to be a bit of one), but I do like to bring my best effort to the task at hand. I think: why do something half-assed when there's an opportunity to do better? This attitude brought me success in school, and early in my career, as I demonstrated intelligence, aptitude, and a willingness to go the extra mile.

Then one day I got new boss who, I was told, would be a "better manager" than my previous boss. All of a sudden it no longer mattered how I did the work, only whether it was done or not done. It appeared that he was incapable of assessing (or, at the very least, unwilling to assess) the quality of work being done by myself or my team. I received the same level of recognition whether the work was outstanding or weak or even embarrassingly inept. As long as he could consider the work "completed", either on or ahead of schedule, I got a smile and a slap on the back. When I tried to raise questions about complex, interrelating issues, he would always turn my query around into an either-or question, which when I begrudgingly replied he would tell me that I had answered my own question, when really I had only answered *his* question, which wasn't really applicable at all to the issues that I was raising, but he was done speaking to me anyhow.

Oh, how I hated that boss. I believed that he was an idiot, that he was eroding the company's fortunes by putting out bad product, and that before long he would be fired. I concocted fantasies of getting a job and then hiring my old company, only to cancel the contract at the last moment saying, "See, I am firing your company because it puts out inferior work, and this witless, overpaid fool is to blame."

Then one day I was standing in a Kinko's and picked up a book that they were selling about management techniques, and learned that employees who care about the quality of their work are a business liability (rather than an asset). That they slow down schedules by asking too many questions, or by inserting extra steps to "assure quality." That they take up too much of their managers' time with their detailed memos and their emergency meetings and their insistence that you consult some other department that actually might know the answer to the question being asked.

I was crushed. Here I thought I'd been contributing all along to the company's business goals, by working to make the product better. But in fact according to this book being sold in a Kinko's I was part of the problem, not part of the solution.

In time I did quit that job, but there was no satisfaction in having quit, and after I left everyone (especially my boss) was relieved.

In my jobs since then, I have slowly been learning how not to care about the quality of my work, but it's difficult.

During your campaign, Mr. President, I learned that as governor of Texas you would be presented with 20-page reports compiled by really smart people who cared about all of the issues, but that you wouldn't read them, instead asking the author to summarize the report and to boil it down to an either-or proposition. These aides of yours, I read, then tried to deliver shorter reports, 12 pages, or 5 pages, or even 1, hoping that you might read a single page document outlining the complex web of variables associated with any major policy decision. But no, even then you didn't read the memos. You were just like my old boss.

Some of those horrid talk show hosts and reactionary liberal-types began tossing out accusations that you were illiterate, but they didn't understand like I do.

You're not stupid, you're just a successful manager! You've learned, perhaps better than anyone, how to hold the reins tightly on those earnest, overly intellectual wonks and do-gooders who threaten to bring government to a standstill with their questions and their analyses and their insistence on talking about details or "implications" or decisions you made a week ago. You see the bigger picture, or rather you see that the big picture is a distraction from the real work of sparing yourself and your closest advisors from having to sit through an hour-long meeting because how boring is that.

I fear, Mr. President, that you may not realize, that even though you keep the work environment "collegial", with your winking and handshaking and all the funny nicknames, that these aides of yours, the ones who would rather be writing the 20-page report instead of asking you to answer "yes" or "no" to a single question, that secretly, deep down, they may hate you.

So fucking much.

Sincerely,

Chris Ereneta
San Francisco, CA
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Fucking Nunberg [Jul. 10th, 2005|10:12 pm]
[mood |aggravatedaggravated]
[music |Express Yourself - N.W.A.]

Ok, so I'm a couple of weeks late on this, but what. the. fuck. was with Nunberg's June 21 commentary about the value of memorizing poetry.

Listen if you want to get in a mood to break your radio into tiny shards. I nearly crashed my car.

So fine. The kids aren't forced to memorize poetry in English class any more. Nunberg acknowledges this is a natural evolution in the curriculum, and accepts that there's no academic value to recitation per se.

But then he goes and says what a shame it is, because there is beauty and power in memorizing and speaking a poem through one's self that cannot be replicated by simply reading the words on the page.

Which: you elitist, racist fuck.

Apparently the sounds of the entirety of American popular music have never reached the high parapets of Nunberg's ivory tower.

Since the introduction of radio (or, ok: the 45 rpm single), it has become nearly impossible to pass through one's adolescence and teen years without internalizing, and yes, reciting poetry through one's self.

Here's an idea: let's get together all the people everywhere whose emotional lives have been forever changed by reading Byron (dead people included) and see if they can pack the same size stadium as Tori Amos.

Which, I know this is not a popularity contest, but come freaking on.

And today's kids can spin rhymes "by heart" at Nunberg's head until he gets dizzy, plenty of them with verse they've created themselves.

There's my next idea. Let Nunberg assemble a team of his contemporaries who did endure recitation curricula, and let me round up a half dozen twelve year olds and: Poetry Slam.

I would so fire his ass.
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Vlogging [Jun. 20th, 2005|04:08 pm]
[mood |lethargiclethargic]
[music |Who's That Knocking? - Hazel Dickens & Alice Gerrard]

Which, I am wholly unconvinced that "vlog" will make it into the mass market lexicon, despite the best efforts of its linguistic advocates.

But the age of video blogging is upon us, making simple (and low cost) what was previously time-consuming enough that I had pretty much given up on the mini-movie venue I had begun back in 1999.

But it's alive today, with the aid of Blogger, OurMedia and the Internet Archive, Creative Commons, and the instructive tutorials at freevlog.org.

Thus Matchbook Films is born again.

The vlogger community appears to be quite supportive of each other, and of new efforts. But one curiosity of note is a blurring (notable among some of the key vlogger personalities) of the distinction between video blogging as a medium of expression and "vlogging" as a genre as within the medium.

So when Senator John Edwards recently launched his own video blog he met with a couple of vloggers, including the redoubtable Michael Verdi (co-founder of freevlog.org), who then spent a key portion of their three minute meeting attempting to show Sen. Edwards how to hold a DV camera at arm's length pointing back at himself.

The coming explosion, I believe, in videoblogging, will be coming in genres other than "vlogging," which features a great deal of this walk-and-talk direct camera address. Another hallmark of the genre appears to be a tendency away from quick-paced editing. In some cases the absence of an edit creates tension that is ultimately paid off by a moment of small revelation--a refreshing feeling of un-mediacy. It's a tough balance, and one that can't possibly be explored in commercial media.

(My favorite explorer so far: Josh Leo, college student vlogging from Grand Rapids, MI)

Don't know that I'll be jumping into the vlogger genre, but I'm hopping onto their bandwagon.

Short bits. Some repeated/repurposed from before.

So away we go with RSS 2.0.

With enclosures, no less.
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Bite Meme: Book Thing [Jun. 15th, 2005|10:14 pm]
[mood |chipperchipper]
[music |World - New Order]

1. How many books have you owned?

At least a hunnert.

Ok, a couple thousand.

I've got ten boxes full to give away that Green Apple Books wasn't interested in. Want some?

2. What was the last book you bought?

Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell, within which I am finding happiness on nearly every page.

3. What was the last book you read?
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. Which: you can burn through faster than a copy of the New Yorker, so don't expect a lot.

4. Name five books that mean a lot to you.

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, English translation by Katherine Woods. A gift from my first grade teacher Miss McDonough, who recognized that I had already mastered my 12x12 multiplication tables, and thereby allowed me to pursue an individual math curriculum that introduced me to division. I remember the moment when we parted and she handed me this book. There were too many words in it, and the few illustrations looked alien and French, but she was crying, standing there in the open air concrete hallway between the first and second grade classrooms, and then suddenly I was crying, because not only was I moving up a grade but she was moving away to someplace called Irvine, which my parents told me was on the way to San Diego, and maybe we could visit on our next trip down to Southern California.

That summer we did visit Miss McDonough in Irvine, only now she wasn't my teacher, she was just some woman, with a house, who was asking to be called "Jill." All the other grownups I knew were Mr. or Mrs. or Miss or Ms. or Uncle or Aunt. It was confusing, and hot, and we had a long drive ahead of us. As I grew older I had only the fading square snapshot we took there, standing on her driveway. Looking at it now I can't imagine how a girl her age was placed in charge of a classroom full of children.

I didn't read the whole of The Little Prince until high school, when it captured my emotional imagination, and it remained an important touchstone for me through college and a bit beyond, enough that I gave copies to dear friends on special occasions.

Woods' simple, direct translation complements the starkness of the desert and the vacuum of space employed by Exupery to contain his story within a bubble (or is it a glass case?) separate from the messiness and intertwining of human relationships.

One friend I knew in college hated the book bitterly, and its use of the word "tame" to describe the process of interrelating.

I do not know whether Howard or Exupery chose the word, but for someone raised within Catholicism and with a worn copy of Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree, the idea of surrender was for me always going to be a part of loving.

But what meant more to me, I think, was its arbitrariness and lurking dread. The fox gives no reason for leaving, other than that it will help the prince learn a valuable lesson about memory and loss. And the prince, it seems, surrenders to the bite of the snake for no better reason. We have no knowledge that the prince has returned to the rose, nor if he did that the rose is still there waiting. For all we know the prince is merely dead, and the rose is happier for it. The pilot may inject romance into his stargazing, and wish for magic and joy, but even he knows it may all be a fantasy. The consolation of his memories is fleeting and cold.

Lord Foul's Bane by Stephen R. Donaldson. Volume One in the (First) Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever. Thought I'd have included C.S. Lewis' The Lion, The Witch, et al. in this spot, because I read it dozens of times and grew up to make a movie inspired by it. But the Chronicles of Narnia at its core is a Christian fairy tale for children, one which believes in the inherent goodness of children at that. Edmund's crime in the first volume is little more than self-indulgence and sulking. Susan's in the last is choosing adulthood.

From fourth to sixth grade it was Tolkien I was reading over and over and over again (although I never did successfully complete The Silmarillion). Its grand sweep was intoxicating, fleshed out by the menacing evil of Sauron and the dark riders, and by the depth of hopelessness of Frodo's mission to the lands of Mordor.

I stumbled into Chronicles of Thomas Covenant at the age of twelve, not without some effort, considering the floridity of Donaldson's prose (this was the first book I recall reading with a dictionary within easy reach) and the hostile ambivalence and self-loathing of his leprotic protagonist.

Here was a prophesied "chosen one" who willfully rejected not only his role as hero but the existence of The Land itself--not from sheer intellectual disbelief, but out of the emotional necessity to deny the responsibility for choices he has made (badly, in many cases) and for the sacrifices an increasing number of his companions make on his behalf.

With each successive chapter in Lord Foul's Bane it became clear by contrast that Tolkien's evil had never really developed much beyond a state of intellectual abstraction. While the legend of the One Ring told tales of its corrupting power (manifested in the wasted form of Gollum), it was never clear--beyond the power of invisibility--just why anyone would want the ring in the first place. What was this temptation that was too great for humans or elves or dwarves?

Donaldson answered that question in Thomas Covenant, who time after time is compelled to wield the power of his own ring--to ensure the immediate survival of himself and his companions--at the cost of sacrificing a larger goal. Like Sauron, Lord Foul remains a distant presence, but in practice the true enemy is Covenant's own self-hatred and despair, as he repeatedly is forced to make a choice between two unacceptable outcomes.

Challenging. Maddening. Adult. It made the rest of my fantasy epic reading just so much fireside storytelling.

Strangers From a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans by Ronald Takaki. The first time I really got the point of revisiting the history of America through the lens of multiculturalism--and yet so many years later the mass culture discourse is still frozen in a dialogue about Black and White. Takaki's "habit" of excerpting "short phrases" from "primary texts" makes the book read a bit like a Zagat's survey, but it does keep the prose lively. (The unfortunate result is that it all too often implies that one individual's experience is representative of others', when there is no way to corroborate such a notion.)

Stop Stealing Sheep & Find Out How Type Works by Erik Spiekermann. Sure, it's a commercial for the Adobe Type Foundry, but at the time the book was written Adobe was the only game in town. I'd worked in publishing and marketing for a few years and been witness to a number of discussions of typographic issues. I'd typeset one book using Pagemaker and MacDraw, and had taught myself QuarkXPress, but this book helped illuminate the reasons why Quark was the only typographic tool worth using (and why so many of its typographic features were a waste of programmers' time). While I may not have evolved into a top-notch designer (never really got a grounding in color theory), the font fetish I developed has bloomed into what I consider one of my more developed talents. I still can't define typography, but as they say, I know it when I see it.

Operating Instructions by Anne Lamott. People. Who are going to become parents. Should read this book.
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Cute Boy Report: Talking the talk [Jun. 10th, 2005|02:30 pm]
[mood |productiveproductive]
[music |Late - Ben Folds]

Discernible words spoken by The Boy:
Outsi[de]
Ham
[Ba]nana
Up
Baby
Ab[uela]
Goo[d]ni[ght]
Hot dog

JD and I are not self-conscious about the absence of "mama" or "dada".

Not at all.
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Now About That Shouting [Jun. 8th, 2005|03:47 pm]
[mood |busybusy]
[music |We Didn't Do It - Tegan & Sara]

Having been through this same cycle of angry shouting with The Boy (see previous post) several times in regards to certain of his books:

The Snowy Day
Click Clack Moo
Abuela
and now
Madeline

JD postulated a theory this week that may explain what, from our perspective, is a perplexing set of behaviors:

that The Boy likes to anticipate what comes next in the books he flips through.

He can fulfill this desire when, for example, he opens Yummy Yucky with the expectation that he will find the page on which the baby has just eaten hot sauce, and is exhaling fire.

But with a new book, he gets frustrated because he cannot anticipate what he is likely to see inside. And so the short bursts of pages followed by an angry startover from the beginning is actually, from his cognitive perspective, a rapid-memorization process. He wants to repeat the opening pages enough times in quick succession that he will be able to know what to expect within the cover of the book when he opens it again the next time.

Would it be possible for him to accomplish this without so much frustration and yelling? It's something he may need to work on in therapy as an adult. I can nearly guarantee he has not witnessed similar behavior in adults, so our best understanding is that this comes from some compulsive aspect of his own personality.

Which simply means: do not interrupt The Boy when he is twelve and playing Grand Theft Auto 2016 for the first time.

Is, as often, all I'm saying.
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Resuming [Jun. 3rd, 2005|04:29 pm]
[mood |slouchy]
[music |Ugly And Slouchy - The Maddox Brothers]

Poring back through nearly two decades of small and odd jobs, creative works, and other Experience leaves me wondering how in the holy @#$% I've managed to carve out anything resembling a career.

The answer to which I mostly know, i.e.:

a familiar cliche of talent, hard work, and dumb luck.

What I don't know is how to distill the sum of these disparate activities in my past into a coherent enough form to communicate that I'm qualified to do what I know I'm capable of. But for which I've not previously been given the approval stamp of an appropriate job title.

And since the position I'm seeking is actually one of those difficult-to-describe jobs that would, in essence, be created for my particular set of contributing qualities, the fact that I've established a career at all is perhaps my greatest hurdle.

As a compatriot asserted this afternoon at lunch, my problem is that I have a skill.

More significantly, it's a skill that has an easily definable job description, a position that exists at any number of companies and organizations. And it's one that I practice with a high degree of reliability here at Langley.

So the question of the resumé has everything to do with whether I can successfully reframe my current activities at Langley--those that go beyond my official job description--with the decisionmakers, such that they create a new position based upon the value that I uniquely bring (and have already demonstrated) to the organization, or whether I need to start elsewhere, with a resume that omits or obscures my career path to date.

Based upon the prose of the preceding paragraph it seems clear that the discussion must begin internally, until someone in the decisionmaking chain shuts it down.

Because of course as much as I might like a change in careers at this juncture, I've got JD jumping ship from her six-year job and the house and The Boy for which to provide. So no matter where I jump to, there had better be a salary and benefits on which I can securely land.
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Pre-verbal communication [May. 25th, 2005|11:21 am]
[mood |rushedrushed]
[music |There You Go - Johnny Cash]

The Boy has always been quite good at communicating his needs, even before he could point. This he did by shouting in the general direction of the object he wanted to hold or view more closely, with increasing volume and urgency as Mommy and Daddy handed him objects other than the one he wanted.

On the plus side, when you get it right he is rarely less than appreciative. He practically beams with glee (when he doesn't giggle outright.)

Current hand gestures include pointing (an enhancement to, rather than a replacement for, the shouting), waving, patting the top of his head (a reference to THE SNOWY DAY--"Down fell the snow, plop! On top of Peter's head.), and shaking a pointing finger scoldingly (a reference to GOODNIGHT GORILLA--"All you animals back to the zoo!"). He also can sign "More/Again" quite clearly by pointing a finger at his opposite palm, which mostly means what it's supposed to mean:

- I'd like more (oatmeal, milk, oranges, bananas, lasagna, etc.)
- I'd like to repeat that experience (read the book, watch the video, go down the slide)

but now sometimes means:

- Can I watch TV?

The newest hand gesture is an upwards point with crooked elbow that is nothing less than an amateur theatrical "Aha!", indicating he remembers something similar that he saw or heard previously in another location.

E.g. He points at the image of a giraffe's head on the side of his Fisher Price zoo train (the one that plays a tinny microprocessor rendition of "If I Could Talk to the Animals"). I say "giraffe." He raises his hand beside his face with his finger pointing gently upwards and lets out a quiet "Mm?", which in this case means

"There's a giraffe in GOODNIGHT GORILLA!"

Then, when reading GOODNIGHT GORILLA he points at pretty much each animal or object on the page, followed by this upward-pointing "aha" gesture, which means

"I saw that on the video of GOODNIGHT GORILLA!"

And, often, he follows up with gesture #3: "More." Which of course in this context means:

"Can I watch the GOODNIGHT GORILLA video?"
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Cute (But Angry) Boy Report [May. 24th, 2005|10:02 pm]
[mood |confusedconfused]
[music |Sally Gooden - Eck Robertson]

The Boy walks over to pick up a hardcover book: CLICK CLACK MOO: Cows That Type, a tale of collective bargaining down on the farm by Doreen Cronin and Betsy Lewin. He walks back to me, hands me the book, and sits down, signalling he wants me to read it to him.

I open the book and begin to read. By the fifth spread he angrily shouts, slams the book shut, and yanks it out of my hands.

And then he hands it back to me, as though he wants me to start over.

I try again, improvising this time, a bit more animatedly to keep his interest up.

Again, he stops me a few pages in, hollers angrily, closes the book, wrests it from my grasp, and then hands it back to me.

Perhaps I am going too slowly. Sometimes he gets impatient when I stop too long on any one spread.

I launch into the book again, maintaining a steady pace of brisk page turns.

I barely turn the third page when he yells at me again, grabs the book, and then hands it back to me.

I hesitate, because now I'm thinking this is a test. Do I try the book again? Or transition to a new activity.

He shouts at me even louder, banging on the front cover of the book.

I start to read it to him again, and he eyes me warily as I progress. This time I am able to get farther into the book than we've been able to previously (to the moment when the cows' note asks for additional electric blankets for the hens, who are also cold at night). But before I can turn another page, he once again erupts in anger, closes the book, and hands it right back to me.

At this point I have given up hope of getting this right, but I start again anyhow.

Now he is shouting at me as I turn each page, as he attempts to shut the book closed and make me start over again. Within a few more cycles he is not even giving me a chance to move past the endpapers to the title page before he decides that I need to go back to the beginning.

Finally I reach over for another book that I know he likes, and put CLICK, CLACK, MOO behind me. Time for something else.

He throws aside the new book, shoves me out of the way to pick up CLICK, CLACK, MOO, and forces it into my hands.

He glares at me. He is waiting.
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Cute Boy Report [May. 23rd, 2005|05:47 pm]
[mood |gigglygiggly]
[music |Chittlin Cookin' Time in Cheatham County - Dickel Brothers]

One of the problems of balancing a creative life with fatherhood is the fact that none of my current creative endeavors offers even a fraction of the emotional payoff that is making The Boy laugh.

Acknowledging that I am evolutionarily predisposed to love my own child above any other, I'll also posit that The Boy's laugh is atypically infectious. Other toddlers I have known have had laughs I would describe as sneaky, cute, funny, precious, even adorable. But The Boy's wide grin practically goads his adult companion(s) to laugh along with him.

Plus he often expresses his laughter in a series of halting "g" sounds evocative of Sheriff Roscoe P. Coltrane from The Dukes of Hazzard, which how awesome is that.

But, which also means that creative energy that might previously have been channeled into writing or moviemaking or the fiddle is now expended each day popping out suddenly from behind chairs, revealing an orange that I had been hiding behind my back, or putting a plastic chair on my head.

Better yet are the times when The Boy makes himself laugh unselfconsciously, without expectations of his audience, e.g. by splashing himself in the face with the water in the bathtub. I find myself spending a surprising amount of time watching The Boy in anticipation of this happening.

Oh, and he's walking.
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Feeding the Beast [May. 19th, 2005|05:51 pm]
[mood |chipperchipper]
[music |Bad Dream Mama - Eagles Of Death Metal]

Statistics compiled from iTunes,
the work computer:

Total Songs: 5879 (20.31 GB)
Need Ratings: 2732 (9.29 GB)
Never Played: 180 (.82 GB)
Played Just Once: 1094 (3.8 GB)

( As with many things, a story lies hidden beneath the numbers. )

But the work computer is not merely a subset of the home iTunes database(s). Rather it functions as the portal for an increasing amount of new music, which in turn is fed back home.

For the first couple of years of working in an iTunes-centric environment (and certainly prior to April 2004), the primary influx of music came from those coworkers in my immediate vicinity. An ad hoc swapping system developed, as we offered each other the opportunity to rip CDs we'd each brought in from home. When iTunes 4 was announced in April of '04, the greatest influx of music came not from the new $.99/track Music Store, but from the newfound ability to listen to the shared music on the local network.

And while the collective taste was weighted heavily away from traditional and towards electronica, one could often find a new or familiar album of interest amid the collection of a coworker six seats over, or even in the next room. Depending on the level of social interaction I had with that workmate, I could then ask her/him to drop me the album via a shared network volume, allowing me to add it to my own collection. In some cases the request was itself an excuse to initiate social interaction (e.g. "I was listening to your copy of the Jesus Christ Superstar original cast album. Doesn't that rock?").

But of course the technology that allowed for music streaming on a local area network can make it possible to download the MP3 or AAC files themselves. Enterprising programmers have seized upon this porthole ever since, creating tools with which one can acquire shared iTunes tracks without even needing to engage in the social interaction of asking for them.

(Each successive update to iTunes has attempted to disable these and other "helper" programs, but most of the attention has been focused on killing the Windows-based utilities. For whatever reason, Mac tools for downloading shared iTunes tracks have managed to survive.)

Now, imagine that one were to have such a tool in an environment such as my workplace, that features some dozens of computers running iTunes at any one time (this effect would of course be multiplied in a college dorm environment). The need to establish and maintain social relationships as part of the currency of filesharing is removed, and one is free to download shared tracks anonymously. Said downloading would be free of many of the vagaries of P2P networks, with a stable LAN connection and a pre-screening process by your workmates, who presumably wouldn't keep poorly encoded music in their iTunes Libraries.

Of course over time using this tool one could identify trends in P2PLAN downloading, as a scan of multiple users on the network would reveal improbable clusters of duplicated tracks (in the libraries of downloaders who do not take advantage of iTunes' ability to share merely a controlled subset of one's complete library).

But most significantly this would allow a user to expand one's music library at an extremely rapid pace (e.g., 2GB in a week) without cost or emotional investment.

Now should the RIAA's representatives or allies raise a hackle at such behavior, I would remind anyone so hackled that the ongoing clusters of RIAA's lawsuits have not targeted those who download but rather those hosting the files for downloading.

In this case, those sharing their music through iTunes are engaging in what Apple has established with the RIAA as non-infringing activity. It is the hypothetical downloader in this scenario (read: don't look at me) who is prying open iTunes' sharing feature to get stuff for free.

So then is it the creators of the downloading utility that should be targeted as "bad"? This is of course tied into the current Grokster Supreme Court case, in which corporate media is attempting to shut down technologies that are used for copyright infringing activities, regardless of whether the technology has a legitimate application.

Which legitimate application I use at home when juggling music between three computers on a network. For a track I have bought and downloaded from the iTunes Music Store I have been granted the rights to host that file on up to five computers, but there is no straightforward way to transfer that file from one machine to another.

Using one of these utilities to transfer the song seamlessly across the network to another of my iTunes databases makes this non-infringing activity a breeze. In fact, it only highlights the absence of such a feature in iTunes itself.

One of the many ways iTunes makes it inconvenient for me to enjoy the music I purchase, even when I am not infringing anyone's copyrights.

* * * Quick Blessings Count * * *

1:

I am neither a Dave Matthews fan nor a Windows user. Which is good because apparently the current DMB disc cannot be ripped on Windows machines. Upon insertion, a program attempts to install that will allow you to copy rights-protected Windows Media 9 files of the CD's content to your hard drive. But that means they won't play in iTunes and won't transfer to an iPod.

Mac-using Dave Matthews fans have no such problem.

So, I'm just saying if I were a Dave Matthews fan, that would be blessing number 2.
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Before iTunes [May. 13th, 2005|03:59 pm]
[mood |thankfulthankful]
[music |I Found A Reason - Cat Power]

Very few of the millions of iTunes users worldwide have much need for more than a small subset of its features.

I would imagine that for most users iTunes functions primarily in service of the activity of listening to music, whether on the computer or an iPod.

For a smaller, but significant number, iTunes helps feed (or even inspires) a second, distinct leisure activity: acquiring music. Whether ripped from CDs or downloaded from P2P networks or purchased from the iTunes Music Store, hours of time are consumed each month simply adding music to the Library. My coworker KT, a compulsive acquisitioner, bemoaned that the number of songs in his iTunes Library that he had never listened to threatened to surpass the number to which he had.

I'll discurse upon this hobby/addiction in a future post, but would like here to focus on a third leisure activity toward which iTunes applies its computing power, one enjoyed by a passionate minority, the pastime that elevates this "jukebox" beyond web browsing and email to make it my favorite reason to own a computer: database management.

It is a hobby but implied by Nick Hornby's pre-digital High Fidelity, in its leading male characters' compulsion to generate ranked lists of songs, albums, etc. according to a narrowly defined set of criteria. For the most part the characters in Fidelity create their lists in their heads or in conversation, their existence recorded only through Hornby's printed prose.

But place that book forward into 2005 and I expect that iTunes and the playlist structure on each character's iPod would be integral to the story. Moreover the characters would be posting comments to 43 Folders arguing whether their various top ten lists should be entered into the computer using DEVONthink or Hog Bay Notebook.

Because the compulsion Hornby captured so well in his novel of a certain subset of mostly male humans to make lists, to categorize, to sort, to select, to recategorize and recontextualize can turn the at face value humdrum computing task of database management into a thrilling (and nearly limitless) endeavor, particularly when it comes to music, and especially with a database like iTunes.

Before iTunes I had developed my own music database, using FileMaker. Between 1996 and 2001 I had entered 8424 individual records, each representing a song I owned on vinyl, CD, or cassette.

In truth I had created multiple related databases, because FileMaker was at that time a flat (i.e. non-relational) database, and to view the data from different angles multiple databases were required:

Music Tracks: Each record represented a single music track.
Artists: Each record represented a single artist or band, and its associated tracks in the Music Tracks database.
Collection Tapes: Each record represented a single side of a mixtape (or, after 1999, a single mix CD), linked to their individual tracks in the Music Tracks database.
Music Line Items: a hidden database of field relationships that allowed the various databases to speak to one another

(The other thing that allowed the various databases to communicate and to understand, for example, the difference between fifteen recordings of "John Henry", was that I could not create a record without assigning a unique ID#, typically a three letter abbreviation of the artist's name--useful for purposes of recall--followed by three numbers. As the database topped three or four thousand it often took several attempts to come up with an ID# that hadn't already been taken.)

For each track I could record the song's Artist, Composer, Album, Medium (CD vinyl, etc.), and Length (two fields, Minutes and Seconds). Genre was categorized using checkboxes, a system that allowed for easy genre-blending (e.g. Holiday AND Bluegrass). Fields for producer and record label were of minor interest, but I can't think of a time when I actually did a search against these.

In the Music Tracks database the "Artist" field was repeating, so that for example on a bluegrass or a jazz recording I could list all of the session performers, and the track would become associated with each of them in the Artists database.

With that kind of cross referencing, for example, bluegrass/old-time bassist Mark Schatz could have more tracks to his name (80) than The Police (78).

With cross-referencing I was also able to identify which mixtape(s) I had placed any particular song on. I could also determine how many songs I had placed on a mixtape (1205, 14.3% of the total songs catalogued), but not--at least not in a manner I could figure out--which songs appeared on the most mixtapes.

The Collection Tapes database was a relatively comprehensive record of my mixtaping history--53 in all, dating back to 1988 (tapes made from '88 to '96 I had to re-enter from scratch, having no way to port the data directly from the previous music database I had created in, you guessed it: HyperCard).

But of course this Filemaker solution was a database wholly separate from the music itself, which was recorded on a variety of media scattered through several rooms within the house (or in some cases, boxed up in the garage). But in 1996 I couldn't have imagined a solution in which the music was contained within the database.

Enter iTunes.

Title, Artist, Album are entered automatically (drawing on data from the error-riddled Gracenote CDDB). Genre is provided, but is typically wrong. Thankfully corrections can be batch applied. Time is a direct measurement, although it's thrown off by extra silence or other intra-song noise. Point being less time is spent entering data, so more time is available to manage data.

But since the database now = the music, the creation of special custom mixes takes only as long as it takes to apply, rearrange, or filter the data.

Example: Create a mix of music embodying "the Bakersfield Sound", the electrified 1960s country popularized by Buck Owens and Merle Haggard.

Using the old technology I would do a search in my database for tracks by Owens, Haggard, the Derailers, and Dwight Yoakam. I would attempt to remember which of the individual tracks sounded the most "Bakersfield" to me, and narrow the list to under 90 minutes to fit on a cassette tape. I'd then have to spend the time (typically three hours) to make the tape: picking an order, setting levels, etc.

Now I can batch apply "Bakersfield" to the Comments field to all the songs by these artists, and create a Smart Playlist that captures all songs with "Bakersfield" in the Comments field. In under twenty minutes I can probably listen to a few seconds of all the songs searching for ballads, etc., that don't belong, and remove "Bakersfield" from their Comment field, thus removing them from the playlist. Done. It's ready for listening on random play, making it a new playlist every time I listen.

And the beauty of it is that I can add future songs by adding the tag, or remove songs that I don't feel work, at any time in the future, without having to create an entirely new tape.

I can also make further enhancements to the playlist, e.g. narrowing it to those songs rated at 4 or 5 stars (Best of Bakersfield), or to those songs I haven't heard in the past three months.

So with all these productivity enhancements I should be spending a lot less time managing my data and a lot more time listening to my music, right?

Of course what I'm winding up doing is spending a lot more time doing both. And add to that even more time engaged in acquiring music, because the easier you can understand what's in your music collection, the easier you see what's missing from your collection. It's a pernicious cycle, and one that has fed the 450 million songs purchased from the iTunes Music Store (of which I can claim hundreds).

More on this in an upcoming post.
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Making Time [May. 2nd, 2005|04:01 pm]
[mood |sleepysleepy]
[music |Streak of Lean, Streak of Fat - A. A. Gray & Seven Foot Dilly]

The Boy sustained a body temperature in the range of 102 to 104 degrees for more than twenty hours yesterday through this morning. This after a night of fever spikes of shorter duration, high enough (103.8) to launch us into a middle-of-the-night pretend-we're-not-freaking-out-isn't-this-fun-buddy? bathtime.

By the same time last night (circa 2 a.m.) the panic had dulled to a slowly eyeball-gnawing fear, while rocking The Boy as his tiny body convulsed involuntarily every three or four minutes, as the fever sprinted from his head to his neck to his arms to his tummy to his feet and back again.

But as with so many aspects of Parenthood and now Home Ownership all my plans for yesterday and -evening were shot to the outlying regions of Hades. Which plans included a few minutes for Writing.

But my left brain is dragging, and caffeine isn't offering much of a corrective.

Even this shabby attempt at generating words in consecutive sequence continues to be interrupted by random thoughts and their concomitant web searches.

Not finding much of anything I'm looking for, either. But that's also a function of the limited search criteria I can come up with in this impaired functioning state.

Oh, what a useless post.

Better luck tomorrow, I trust.
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Pat Sat on Hat [Apr. 5th, 2005|06:02 pm]
[mood |mystified]
[music |That Right Ain't S*** - The Books]

Now that I have myself become a Homeowner*, I have begun to have new and different kinds of conversations with other Homeowners, mostly revolving around issues of maintenance and repair and of course the concomitant costs.

(Thankfully I have discovered other Homeowners who are not merely ambivalent about these costs, but who have done the math and openly acknowledge that they have become imprisoned in what amounts to a dangerous Ponzi scheme--cf. future post, "Doing the Math." But that is not my main point here.)

Which means that with each minute and every ten dollars spent on a horsehair lobby brush for sweeping up very fine dust in my garage and basement I pull the hat that is Homeowner down more firmly upon my head.

But there are only so many minutes in the day in which to inhabit any particular identity, and in opposite corners of the polygon you have got: Husband (which large multiset encompasses Friend, Lover, Roommate, Financial Partner, et al.), Father, Son, Friend, Employee, Writer, Musician, Band Manager, Filmmaker, and I'll stop now because we've gone past the things I no longer even pretend I have time for.

This is not just a matter of Getting Things Done, because as transformative as that damn *IN* box and stack of index cards have become I do cling to the belief that there are levels to Being that defy the call of the next action.

And while upon the birth of the boy I accepted with no amount of grace that I cannot be good at my Job AND a good Husband AND a good Father, the choice to be merely adequate as a Husband is unacceptable (because, look how well that worked out last time), and the prospect of mere adequacy as a Father seems deeply unsatisfying.

But to the extent that external interactions and conditions work to determine which hat one is wearing, the 55+-hour work and commute week represents nearly half of my available time awake each week. So that to have any chance of properly structuring my priorities I am faced with the choice to consciously diminish my professional competence. Energy that I had previously directed towards a Job Well Done I am now attempting to direct towards Doing My Job Poorly.

I have no way to assess whether I am coming out ahead in the amount of energy and passion available to my roles as Husband and Father but I can gleefully write that this post has been written on Company time.

Which to return to the beginning of the thought I must also now take care not to leave the Homeowner hat on for too long at a stretch. To abandon a degree of conscientia in matters of home maintenance (but not in mortgage payments, because: I am not THAT stupid).

Meaning so while I've got a date marked on my calendar next year for me to drain my water heater:

I might opt to let it slide another year.

*A fiction in which the banks that hold my dual mortgages refer to me as the Homeowner in correspondence, and tell me they're merely holding the title "for safekeeping."
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My new favorite word [Mar. 22nd, 2005|04:58 pm]
[mood |bouncybouncy]
[music |Amie - Pure Prairie League]

"Hootmalalie."

Included in a list of synonyms for "widget" in the oft-repurposed Moby Thesaurus, and for "thing" in Webster's online dictionary, although no online dictionary I can find (including Webster's) offers a word definition (or pronunciation guide).

Supplants my previous favorite word:

"hoojimer"

a synonym for "thing" which I know was made up.

No. Wait. I think it's still hoojimer.
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While we're on the subject of language [Mar. 22nd, 2005|02:19 pm]
[mood |sleepysleepy]
[music |Ladyflash - The Go! Team]

I confess to be a frequent listener of NPR programming in general and Fresh Air with Terry Gross in particular. And while JD and I enjoy swapping impressions of John Powers, David Edelstein and Maureen Corrigan (three Fresh Air commentators with voices meant for print magazines) as much as the next overeducated liberal, I do experience an ambient rise in dander at the commentaries of "linguist" Geoffrey Nunberg.

I understand the surface appeal, and in fact the first handful of Nunberg's pieces I heard did pique my interest. But I now believe it was the discipline of linguistics itself that engaged me—the questions it raises about meaning and culture embedded in a single word, or cluster of words, or interrogatory inflection. In America, especially, the intersection of polyglot cultures, mass media, and information technology has created the most rapidly evolving matrix of language known to humankind in its history.

But the title of Nunberg's trade paperback compilation of his commentaries, The Way We Talk Now, turns out not to have been intended ironically.

In essay after essay (for radio or print), Nunberg identifies a word or turn of phrase that strikes his fancy (something he perhaps read in the NYT), dutifully performs a LexisNexis search to compile some empirical statistics, and adds a dash of cultural musings that don't require him to have to turn on the radio or television, to leave his fancy study, to have reason to interact with or listen to anyone at all unlike himself. The vacuum from within which he writes embodies some of the worst tendencies of the proverbial Ivory Tower. Far from attempting to understand how We (i.e. Americans) Talk, Nunberg appears engaged in a study of how the professional writing class has changed the usage and meaning of certain words in its prose.

Not that those questions are useless—on the contrary, that kind of analysis is sure to spark conversations among those members of the professional writing class who enjoy the Fresh Air. My problem with Nunberg is that he omits the most interesting and dynamic zones of language in actual use, e.g.:

- hip hop
- blogs, message boards, newgroups, chat, text messaging
- business-speak
- dance and club culture
- vertical trade publications (ok, so harry shearer has that copyrighted)
- youth music/television programming
- entertainment news
- the health and death industries
- junior high
- talk radio
- evangelical christianity / jihadist islam
- the gilmore girls

With all these (and hundreds more) to choose from, Nunberg returns again and again to the words of GWB, or Dennis Hastert, or John Kerry. Powerful mostly white capitalist male oligarchs with Ivy League degrees.

( Discurse. )

The most fascinating discussion of language I heard recently on Fresh Air was during Gross's interview with the RZA (aka Bobby Digital aka Prince Rakeem), in which he worked to explicate his serial identities using language she and a public radio listening audience might understand. At times her questions came off as awkward, but it seems to me that part of what we learned from identity politics is that the intersection of interpersonal languages will always create a bit of a mess.

Commentaries on language in contemporary America should unsettle, confuse, anger, and offend us. They should leave us shaking our fists at the generation after us and giving the finger to the generation before. Even Safire knows that. He's been shaking his fist (and generating hate mail) in the Sunday NYT for more than a quarter century, and he's still making up new words (cf. March 20, 2005: "cloturekrieg.").

But Nunberg. "Hmm..." is just not enough.
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M + F style guide [Mar. 17th, 2005|11:23 am]
[mood |testy]
[music |Love Somebody to Know - Hanson]

So some people have questioned (in a wheedling, elder sibling kind of way) my seeming unwillingness to use certain www-slang while uncritically adopting others. What follows, is the first edition Mookless and Frail style guide to language:

likely to appear
words and phrases i use in oral speech (e.g. "timesuck")
excessive dashes and parentheses
sentence fragments
sentences that begin with a single word followed by a comma
words i have made up
words i think i may have made up but have in fact seen before
acronyms i have made up
decapitalization and depunctuation
lists
"which" as an interjection
unflagged sarcasm
declarative voice to myself in the second person
parentheticals employing (with varying degrees of precision) the abbreviations e.g., i.e., and c.f.
aliases representing individuals not already famous or LJ users
multiple asterisks

unlikely to appear
emoticons
parenthetical descriptions of my emotional state
established chat and www acronyms (e.g. OMG, LOL, RTFM, TMTOWTDI)
established blog and message board colloquialisms (e.g. "i tells ya")
references to myself in the third person

Mostly because I don't feel like I could credibly pull it off. My writing style feels deeply encrusted by my early years on the manual smith corona. Perhaps though I'll try on a few of the acronyms as I go. More likely (see above) I'll make up my own.

may appear when i'm not paying attention
"and but so"
"reify"
threats on the president's life

The dashes, parentheses, asterisks, and commas are of course influenced heavily by the woeful fragmentation of language foisted on us by DF Wallace, D Eggers, M D'Angelo, et. al. Which, don't hate me because I'm derivative.

Hate me because I'm privileged and arrogant and because I've never been much good at returning calls.
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Self-diagnosis via the WWW [Mar. 16th, 2005|02:56 am]
[mood |wheezy]

Not much of a fan of self-diagnosis of illnesses using the internet. I am not prone to fantasizing about worst-case scenarios nor, frankly, do I have the patience. (Even when I'm feeling healthy.)

JD can sometimes search the web compulsively (though not maniacally) for health articles, especially now that we have The Boy and his daily infusion of germs (cf. daycare). The seemingly endless string of colds and ear infections he endured this winter (it seems as though his nose was running from November straight through February) can be followed by poring back through our Safari history over the same period.

However a tip from a coworker did steer JD to the following possible explanation of the mysterious ailment she and I have been hit with this past week:

Epidemic benign dry pleurisy

Which form of pleurisy is much milder than those described at the first several sites JD visited (forms associated, e.g., with lupus). This explanation includes the sharp, stabbing pains in the rib cage (although it does not explain the additional wheezing that is currently keeping me awake) and offers soiled diapers (which we handle frequently) as a common transmission zone.

Less confidence-building is the choice by the website's owners (Aetna and Harvard Medical School) to spell "InteliHealth" with a single "l".

I suppose that now if I go into my doctor and ask whether I've got epidemic benign dry pleurisy she will have me removed from her patient rolls.

But then again if that's what I've got there's not a damn thing she can do to help me. Not even if it devolves into viral meningitis.

At least, that's what the internet appears to tell me.
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Getting Dinner Done [Mar. 15th, 2005|05:13 pm]
[mood |hungryhungry]
[music |Thanks A Lot - Ernest Tubb]

Piling upon [info]laurashapiro's kind suggestions to help make meal planning easier in a comment to my previous post, I'd like to offer what was for us (and can be again) a nearly leakproof meal planning system for which everyone should pay me money it is so brilliant.

( Acknowledgments: This was not my idea. )

GETTING DINNER DONE
a stress-decreasing meal planning system
for busy people of sufficient means
to be able to choose the food they eat

1. Create a rotating list of food genres
2. For each day in which you intend to make dinner in the coming week, plan a meal within the next genre on the list. New day, new genre.
3. Shop and cook accordingly.

( Deceptively simple in concept, devilishly brilliant in execution. )
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Timesucks, additional [Mar. 14th, 2005|11:38 am]
going on four days of home ownership
traffic
the flu
sleeping during the day (see "the flu," above)
extreme makeover: home edition double episodes
deciding what to eat
acquiring and making what to eat
deciding (etc.) what to feed The Boy
and sometimes The Boy takes, just, way too long to eat
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