I Spit at You, New-Bright!

Ah haaah! Chalk up one victory for a guy who's not really computer savvy but is getting better through trial (lots of that) and error (even more than lots of that).

The victory in question is this: I got our legacy printer, an old HP LaserJet 4L, to work on a computer with no parallel ports. And I'm talking the old 25-pin parallels, not those nifty Centronics jobbies. Read more about my earlier agonies here.

I could blame my trouble on the fact that I bought a Chinese-made parallel to USB cable, with its accompanying insanely-translated manual of operation. But I could also blame my trouble on the fact that, the first time around, I didn't even bother following the entire instruction sequence, badly translated as it is. Wrestled with the beast last night, to no avail. Wrestled today. Then I fell back on that old Windows standard: If at first you don't succeed, uninstall all of the drivers and start over again, this time following the instructions. I did so. And the first test page I printed out was a glorious, normal test page, not the 30-page encoded monstrosity I got an hour and a half ago.

So I feel pretty good about my mad computer skillz with a Z. That means that two of the three problems encountered with the new computer I got for Christmas are solved. They are, in no particular order:

1) Getting the parallel-supported printer to talk to either my Windows 7 machine or Michelle's XP machine (I took the wimp's way out and used the XP).
2) Getting my computer to speak to the world, i.e., through powered speakers.
3) Getting SimCity 4 Rush Hour to play properly on my new computer.

The first two are solved, and Electronic Arts, in its arcane and serpentine way of doing things, is "working on a solution," though I'm not optimistic they'll pan through. So if any of you out there in SimCity 4 Land can tell me why I don't have the avenue Y intersection or the building blocks for overpasses, railroads, et cetera, I'd appreciate a ding-a-ling here. Thank you.

I'm just chuffed about the printer. That had been weighing heavily on my mind.

Gumby, I Didn't Know You At All

This is one of those occasions where I’m supposed to say that because of having X or X’s work in my life, I am a changed and a better man.

I can’t say that and be truthful.

But to think of Art Clokey, creator of Gumby, dying this week, made me think about the things we take for granted. Gumby, for one.

I have not watched a lot of Gumby, to be truthful. A few episodes, maybe. The one I’ve watched the most is actually a riff on an episode done by the Mystery Science Theater 3000 crew, “Robot Rumpus:”



Of course, the story and animation hold up on their own without the commentary from the peanut gallery in the foreground.

This is the most striking thing I learned about Clokey and his work, in reading about his death:

Eddie Murphy rallied Gumby's popularity in the 1980s with a send-up of the character on Saturday Night Live. That brought new toy sales and eventually a new syndicated series in 1988. It was only then that Clokey started seeing serious financial returns on his creation.
"It took 40 years," he said.

So maybe this week I’ll spend a bit more time watching some of Clokey’s creations. Here’s his first short, Gumbasia, featuring clay spinning and undulating and rolling out to a typical ‘50s jazzy bongo tune:



And a regular Gumby episode:



Thanks for the art, Mr. Clokey. I wish you well.

Beware, Mr. Porter, Beware . . .

Every once and a while, we go to our friends Jana and Brian Porter's house for a game night. Brian, who is dedicated enough to his gaming that he gives plasma so he can have extra-budget money to buy games, usually takes us to the cleaners except on the nights her parents are there, when they mop the floor with everybody. They're suspiciously good at gambling games for volunteers in the Idaho Falls Temple Visitors Center.

Anyway, I got a copy of Carcassonne for my birthday this year. Michelle and I plan on honing our skills with this game for the next gaming night, when we can sit underneath the motto on their gaming room wall ("The Object of the Game is to Win") basking in our victory. So beware, Mr. Porter, beware. We're not yet at the level of donating plasma, but we're catching up with you on your favorite games.

Perspective

UPDATE: We're back on line. Our tech, who happened to mention he lives in the same town we do, came back over and got us hooked up -- on his day off -- after we, ahem, hunted him down at his house. (Good thing he drives that big BridgeMaxx truck and parked it in front of his house.) He was very courteous and had us hooked up in just a few minutes -- apparently, at the same time we disconnected last night, "the guys" were doing some server maintenance, so we got left out in the loop. Thanks to Jake (who was doing this work because the regular guy who does it is out of town) for getting us hooked up again.

I'm trying not to complain.

We do, after all, have a nice, warm house to live in, where we can select two kinds of heat – from a gas furnace or from a wood stove – or select both of them at the same time. We have clean, running water. We have electricity – well, most of the time. We are in Rocky Mountain Power territory, after all. We have all sorts of labor-saving appliances, two vehicles that run well, shoes, clothing, a washer and a dryer, and many other conveniences that make our existence on this planet pleasant, much more pleasant than most.

Still, there is something lacking. And that thing is internet access.

It seems a trivial thing, of course, when compared to the suffering of people in Somalia, the impending flooding of the Seychelles due to climate change and the daily myriad sufferings that people of lesser means suffer. There is good reason to believe I am a capitalist dog ungrateful for what life has handed to me, too expectant for more and too reliant on what I've already got.

Still, being without internet for nearly a week really sucks.

BridgeMaxx, bless them, has tried, in their own bumbling corporate way. We have an ally in the corporate offices in Virginia who has pulled a few strings for us, but from that distance it's hard to tell whether the string pulled made the puppet dance in the appropriate manner. After the technician came last night after three days of trying to get them to come, we had internet access – which we didn't even use, ungrateful scallywags that we are – for about a half hour, until the tech called and told us to unplug everything, then reconnect, to get a stronger signal. We went back to square one, on a Friday night, with no hope of recourse until Monday.

That explains why I'm sitting at the Hart Auditorium, trying to sponge off the university's wi-fi signal, so we can pay the electricity bill and perform some other sundry duties that, left undone, would leave our lives empty and unfulfilled – such a blogging, of course. Trying is the word, however, as we don't have proper access and are trying to get an ID and password out of somebody so we can get into the network.

But I'm able to sit here, staring out the big windows that let onto the stadium field, and enjoy a bit of sunshine. Someone's built a snowman on the field and he looks very happy out there. Footprinted paths crisscross the field, breaking up the even monotony that Mother Nature brought us on New Years Eve.

Life is still pretty good, however. We'd just like all of the capitalist bourgoise accoutrements of our extravagant lifestyle restored.

The Hermit of Iapetus, Part IX

I have a few metaphors for what it’s like walking on the surface of Iapetus.

Some of it is like walking on powdery snow overlaid with a layer of frozen drizzle. Crunch and poof, crunch and poof. I usually don’t sink beyond my ankles, though the are parts of the moon on which the dust is thick and I sink to the shins, or sometimes the knees.

It is mostly ice, though of what kind I don’t know. I do know it’s from these ices that I get the oxygen – and water – necessary for life.

Sometimes the snow is mixed with black petroleum jelly – that’s the consistency. Exposed to the vacuum of space, you’d think it would be firmer. But it sticks and slops and wipes off with a gloved hand. The region where Iapetus shows its black face is where the jelly is more prevalent.

But then there are rocks. Ordinary rocks, shaped into craters, gullies, mountains and valleys. And caves. A cave in the Voyager Mountains is where I built my first shelter, sixteen square meters protected from the surface by concrete foam and plasteel beams. It is by far the largest shelter I ever built, and sometimes I wonder why I was so extravagant, as I rarely stay in a refuge for more than a week or two.

I spend most of my time outside, in the elements, such as they are here. Silicon and iron, petrochemicals rained down from Saturn’s Dark Ring. Dust and pebbles, boulders and layers. I tell the few who ask that I’m no geologist. At best, a guy who has wandered a bit.

A planetary scientist from Pasadena once said he’d pay for me to get a degree – by correspondence, obviously – in geology because he said I was in a unique position to aid planetary sciences through my first-hand observations. I told him I’d think it over. I also told him this:

Once I took my sons, Liam and Isaac, on a walk through an ancient lava flow about fifty miles south of where we lived. It was in a place in Idaho called Hell’s Half Acre. After the first few yards, the trail – dirt weaving between sagebrush and cheat grass and a few scrubby junipers – disappeared into the cracked lava rock, an endless field of undulating, broken fractures. The loop trail was marked by poles topped with blue paint. To proceed, we had to march from one pole to the next, picking our way over cracks twenty or thirty feet deep, one foot, two feet, three feet wide, down into gullies where the lava collapsed, up to level plateaus where the rock had enough rock underneath to stay level.

Liam led the way. He climbed the gully walls. Isaac was the pole spotter. If we couldn’t see one, he’d glance, mouth agape, grin toothy, until he spotted the next pole. Never took him more than a few seconds.

I knew the rock was basalt. There were bits of obsidian. Basalt and obsidian, because that’s what I knew about. The crack in the earth where the molten rock came out, we didn’t walk to. But with an extinct volcano on the horizon, I kinda had the idea from where all this stuff came.

The boys were thrilled. We clambered over rocks and climbed cliffs and peered into the cracks and marveled at the prickly pear cactus and the owl pellets we found, stunned at the wildlife in this remote place: lizards, beetles, birds galore. And the silence. We could stand on a rock between the cracks – rocking it gently to and fro with our weight – and hear only the soft rumble of rock against rock, and the calls of the birds. A little breeze. No other interruptions.

Then we went home and told Mom. She was not impressed.

I can learn, the told the man from Pasadena. But it’s not like being there. And the only reason I need to know what kinds of rocks are out there is so I can find the right stuff to feed the molecular strippers so I have oxygen and water.

He’s trying to find a university willing to work with a correspondent student more than a billion miles away, who could only communicate in a roundabout way by radio and couriered messages. I came without computers, other than shiftless drones that run my equipment. No word processors. No video cameras. No way to send digital photographs, not only because there’s no wireless Internet, but because there’s no camera. Hermits have no need to record the places they see. They see them most every day. Or never return to them.

He said he’d send a package to me. I haven’t seen it yet.

ISP Blues

BridgeMax/Digital Bridge Communications needs to know this: My wife is fed up and isn't going to take any more.

You read earlier here about the pricing snafu, which we got fixed. Well, mostly fixed. They told us the modem was included in the new price. The next bill says otherwise. So, strike one.

Strike two is that our service is out. Out since Tuesday. It's now Thursday, 12:30 pm, and as far as I know, the tech hasn't appeared yet to diagnose the problem. Worse, the people she talks with there can't seem to fathom why having our service out for two days is such a problem. Maybe this is what customer service is coming to: squeeze the most money out, but if the customers actually excpect service, then make sure it's done in a way that's much more convenient to you than to them. When she called them Tuesday, they said, we'll send someone out Thursday. She asked for Wednesday. They said maybe. Then she had to call them Wednesday for news. Nope. We'll come Thursday. And we'll have our guy call when he's enroute. So basically my wife has to stay cemented at home so we don't miss the guy. If she leaves, as Dave Barry says of such shenanigans, the tech, hiding in the bushes, will emerge and leave a note on the door, expressing dismay that a customer couldn't obey his schedule more than hers.

Is it too much to expect promptness and competence? Why should expereinces that are prompt and competent be the exception, not the norm? I know I'm putting the cart before the horse here. Maybe when the tech comes today, the service will be competent. I just hope he doesn't mind tromping through the snow and cold for the diagnosis, because I'm sure not shoveling anything for them.

Here Comes Everybody. Hopefully to Uncharted

What I find most fascinating about Clay Shirky’s 2008 book Here Comes Everybody is how outdated it is.

He barely mentions Twitter – he says it came into being while the book was being written. Facebook is mentioned in passing, in favor of MySpace – though he does observe that Facebook is white collar, while MySpace is more blue collar.

And though I think he overemphasizes the impact social technology – the Internet, e-mail, mobile phones, et cetera – has had on removing obstacles for organizing and distributing, the book is amply filled with astute observations that make the book a good starting point for anyone trying to wrap their heads around the phenomenon of social media. As he says – this stuff isn’t a fad; it’s not going to go away. It is the new reality.

I’m anxious to apply some of the things he and others recommend in this book to Uncharted and any other web-based or social endeavors I may fall into. It’s certainly an excellent reminder of many of the things I’ve spent the past 2 ½ years learning and applying as I earned that masters degree in English with an emphasis on technical writing from Utah State.

I’ll try to pick out some of the book’s more interesting bits. From page 65:

As they surveyed the growing amount of self-published content on the internet, many media companies correctly understood that the trustworthiness of each outlet was lower than that of established outlets like the New York Times. But what they failed to understand was that the effortlessness of publishing means that there are many more outlets. The same idea, published in dozens or hundreds of places, can have an amplifying effect that outweighs the verdict from the smaller number of professional outlets. (This is not to say that mere repetition makes an idea correct; amateur publishing relies on corrective argument even more than traditional media do.) The change isn’t a shift from one kind of news institution to another, but rather in the definition of news: from news as an institutional prerogative to news as part of a communications ecosystem, occupied by a mix of formal organizations, informal collectives, and individuals.

Note here that Shirky says nothing about dumbing down of our culture, of the overtaking of hard news by soft news. He merely says that the definition of the purveyors of news is changing. Jon Stewart is now the most trusted “news anchor” among young people. Specialists in everything from climate science to nuclear energy to Michael Jackson to dachshunds now don’t have to appeal – mostly in vain – to professional outlets to get their news out. The news gets out despite traditional, professional organizations.

From page 79, a scary thought for newspaper journalists:

If everyone can do something, it is no longer rare enough to pay for, even if it is vital.

Shirky says this in the context of scribes being replaced by the printing press, but it applies in so many ways to what’s occurring in the news and music businesses today (and illustrates some of the trade off of bad for good that Shirky says these social technologies bring). The internet took music distribution out of the hands of the studios and put it in the hands of anyone technologically savvy enough (and morally bankrupt enough) to rip a CD and post the tracks online. And with everyone in the news business, the thought of paying for newspaper news is less attractive, even though that news is, generally, more professionally produced than what is offered on the net for free.

Shirky echoes that bad-for-good tradeoff on page 83:

Surveying this vast collection of personal postings, in-joke photographs, and poorly shot videos, it’s easy to conclude that, while the old world of scarcity may had (sic) some disadvantages, it spared us the worst of amateur productions. Surely it is as bad to gorge on junk as to starve?

Trouble is, we’re doing both gorging and starving. We have met the Internet enemy, and he is just as Newton Minow predicted about television: It is us – because, as he says on page 91, “On the Web interactivity has no technological limits, but it does still have strong cognitive limits: no matter who you are, you can only read so many weblogs, can trade e-mail with only so many people, and so on.”

Now on to a few of the things that are pertinent to Uncharted:

First of all, we’ve got to get away from the idea that content is king, because I agree with Shirky when he writes (page 99), quoting author Cory Doctorow, “Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.” Shirky adds:

The conversation that forms around shared photos, videos, weblog posts, and the like is often about how to do better next time – how to be a better photographer or a better writer or a better programmer. The goal of getting better at something is different from the goal of being good at it; there is a pleasure in improving your abilities even if that doesn’t translate into absolute perfection.

Shirky writes a lot about how collectively many amateurs are working together to become better at what they do, and, in the case of Wikipedia contributions, for example, are more willing to make an existing article better than to start one from scratch. Uncharted offers the latter – starting articles from scratch. That may explain why we have so few articles, especially in comparison to photos. Since photos are relatively easy to take – the advent of digital cameras has put taking the occasionally decent photo in the hands of even the greenest photographer – they will be more numerous. Writing, however, has no technological equivalent to the camera; what is written still has to come from the same old unreliable and untrained tool: the brain.

Then there’s the community we’re trying to build with our almost all-volunteer staff (as of now, only our occasional programmer is paid; we’re working to get a paid advertisement person on staff). Shirky writes (page 258):

What the open source movement teaches us is that the communal can be at least as durable as the commercial. For any given piece of software, the question “Do the people who like it take care of each other?” turns out to be a better predictor of success than “What’s the business model?” As the rest of the world gets access to the tools once reserved for the techies, that pattern is appearing everywhere, and it is changing society as it does.

We need more of that at Uncharted. We’ve got part of it down, but not fully yet. And we need to develop it more with our Explorers.

Here’s something we can do to accomplish that (page 264):

Like the proverbial stone soup, the promise would be achieved only if everyone participated, and like the soldiers who convince the townspeople to make the stone soup, the only way to hold the site together before it reached critical mass was through personal charisma. Caterina Fake, one of the founders of Flickr, said she’d learned from the early days that “you have to greet the first ten thousand users personally.” When the site was small, she and the other staffers would not just post their own photos, but also comment on other users’ photos, like a host circulating at a party. This let the early users feel what it would be like to have an appreciative public, even before such a public existed.

So we need injections of charisma at uncharted, in unholy amounts.

So there’s lots of work ahead for us at Uncharted. Hope we’re up to it.

Good Bye, Dog

The elusive dog we've had hiding in our alley and eating food we've set out for it appears to have moved on to greener pastures.

We're not quite sure why he's moved on, through the mysterious and brief presence of a rather bouncy black lab puppy on our property Christmas morning might have been a deciding factor in this first dog's disappearance. The second dog, by the way, doesn't belong to us either. He just appeared, barking and cold, to hang out on our front porch and in the back yard -- eating the alley dog's food and chewing on his Christmas Day chew toy. The lab eventually wandered off as well, which is good, since there's no way we'd want to have a puppy that big.

No clue as to where the alley dog has gone, by the way. There are no footprints in the alley, nor has he shown himself lately. It's all likely that someone else picked him up or the reluctant constabulary finally came and took the dog to the pound after someone complained about his presence or his poop or the nine dog/cat dishes it has stolen and decorated the alley with.

Revised Checklist of the Vertebrates of Indiana

Fur. Check.
Teeth. Check.
Backbone. Check.
Hoosier jacket. Check.
Mammary glands or testicles. Double check.
Do you know the way to Cornbread or Muncie? Check.
Did you hear about the bozo who swallowed a yo-yo? Yeah, some clodhopper down in Griffith.
Check.
Participating in the Indiana vertebrate granfalloon? Check.

Note: The title of this poem/post comes from an item I found while doing an Internet search on "hermit of Iapetus," which I did to ensure I wasn't stealing the title of something published on the Internet.

Hermit of Iapetus Part VIII

Earlier installments may be traced here.

I thought, today, I saw squirrels scampering on a ridge in the Voyager Mountains.

Scale sometimes is the problem. Born on Earth, my brain is attuned to thinking that the horizon is far from where I stand. Twenty, twenty-one miles or so. I forget the number. The Moon looks enormous rising over the horizon, be that horizon distant hills or a copse of trees only a few miles off, because of that scale. We know how far away the horizon is. Subconsciously. So with the Moon rising over something so close, it appears huge. When it is not. It is the same size, objectively, at the horizon as at the zenith.

On Iapetus, the horizon is much closer. And Saturn, when it rises, is enormous, in comparison to the Moon, in comparison to the body on which I stride.

So I know the squirrels on the ridge at Voyager are illusions. Landslides. Tumbling rocks. But scampering, fur-lines, sniffing tumbling rocks, chattering at me perched in pine trees as I pass by, warning others of my presence in their habitat.

I have not begun to feed them. Yet.

And Liam is coming. His last letter arrived twelve days ago – I still use Earth days here, as to the crews in the space liners above, the colonists on Mars and elsewhere. He sent it just prior to his thirteenth voyage on the Mars-to-Saturn line, and on that thirteenth voyage Aurora will pass close enough to Iapetus to make a gravity drop practical. I have two weeks until he arrives, if all goes well.

I probably will not mention the squirrels.
I saw my own father slip into dementia as he lay in the hospital bed, weak from congestive heart failure. His uncombed hair, he said, made him look like Cosmo Kramer, a character in an old TV show he loved. He spoke to Jerry and George, despised Newman. He wanted a Heineken from his native Holland, despite his teetotaling Mormon faith. We got one for him, despite ours. He took a few sips. Said, “It doesn’t taste as good as I thought it would,” then asked us to hide the bottle. We did.

Spiders on the ceiling of his hospital room. We couldn’t leave him alone, because if we did, the spiders would drop from the ceiling and crawl on him, something he couldn’t bear. We took it in shifts to stay in his room, keeping the spiders at bay.

I don’t think I’m going insane. As I said, the squirrels I know are imaginary. Tricks of distance and light. But one does not wander alone on the surface of a dead moon for eight years without picking up a few eccentricities. Perhaps the squirrels are mine. My mother had cataracts. I may have something wrong with my eyes. In that case, Liam’s coming is fortuitous. Rather than asking him if he can see the Horse and Rider – Mizar and Alcor, twin stars in the handle of the Big Dipper – I’ll ask him if he can see the squirrels. No squirrels, good eyesight. I can rely on him to by my eyes.

I will wait to see how he likes life on Iapetus first, perhaps, before mentioning the squirrels. We’ll stay away from the Voyager Mountains for a while, as I’ve never seen the squirrels elsewhere. Isolation, even in the company of your estranged father who left you and your mother and your siblings to wander on an icy rock halfway across the solar system has got to be kind of a shock, and I’ve even kept myself beardless and, unlike most hermits, a bit plump. He shouldn’t have to pass the rest of his life with a character from a Zane Grey novel. Especially a slightly crazed one babbling about squirrels.

I could bring it up obliquely, perhaps. Share my favorite French phrase: des ecureuils en cahoutchouc – rubber squirrels – to break the ice.

Maybe not.

We’ll talk about Iapetus. How to live. How to survive. How his mother and his brother and his sister are doing, where they are, who they married, the names of my grandchildren and such. I won’t mention the squirrels.