• Search

  Enter your search terms Submit search form

  Web Rusted Bicycle

• Admin

  • Log in
  • Wordpress
  • XHTML

This post is based on a prompt from the Oblique Strategies (1st Edition) developed by Brain Eno and Peter Schmidt.

Ask my body? My body tells me I have a cold.

One of the the little surprises about being a parent is the dramatic increase in communicable diseases. This is one of the things no one tells you. Those without children may be shocked to learn that there is anything someone won’t tell you before the day arrives. Everyone has advice. Sleeping through the night, soothing croup, teething, whatever. You get a lot of advice.

At first, the advice is welcome, especially during the pregnancy. After all, this all you want to talk about for awhile. You’re excited. This is the most exciting time of your life. Nine months of anticipation, wondering what little person will emerge from your wife’s womb.

But it gets old. Eventually, you will tire of your neighbor’s aunt rattling off a home-brew concoction for baby shampoo. You nod and smile, but they know you’re not really listening. At this point in the cycle, you get the familiar admonishment: “You’re life is going to change”. A shit-eating grin usually follows.

By the time the nine months rolls around, most people think they know what they’re in for. But they’re wrong. You don’t really understand a three-hour feeding schedule or the compulsion to track daily bowel movements until you’ve been through it. But you figure it out. And then you forget.

Our son is almost a year old and I can hardly remember what it was like in that zombie-like state of fresh parenthood. It’s already hard for me to remember what he was like those first few months, tiny and helpless. Now he’s a fearless brute of a baby, continually grabbing for the dogs’ collars and climbing under tables. And, thankfully, sleeping through the night.

Sometimes I get glimpses of just how small he still is. When I’m changing his diaper, he will sometimes curl his legs in a way that would require me to dislocate hips and tear ACLs. It’s the fetal pose you see in the doctor’s office posters. He curls this way naturally, his body not yet deformed by adulthood. At these times I see how far away from growing up he is.

I think of my own body. In my head, I will always remain twenty-four. My body tells a different tale. I’m fitter than I was was a few years ago, but a much uglier beast than in high school. Hairier, and increasingly odder places. Teeth a little more yellow. Knuckles cracked from winter wind. A shoulder I can’t seem to keep in socket. Bad habits and misspent youth have all marked up this form of mine. I’m still a young man, not yet into my middle thirties. But I understand where my grandfather is coming from when he remarks about my son’s tiny white teeth.

Our pediatrician tells us that a baby in day care will get six to twelve illnesses in the first year. What he–and no one else–bothers to mention is that this means the parents will catch the very same six to twelve illnesses. It’s impossible to be in close contact with a little one and not catch the bug of the month. I hadn’t had a cold in two years prior to our son’s birth. Since then, I’ve had three. And somehow, Mono–a disease I thought you only caught from making out with girls in study hall.

So today, I cannot breathe through my nose or taste anything. The same old cold we all have throughout our lives. This is what my body tells me today. Tomorrow I will feel a little better and by the end of the weekend I will be back to normal. I will forget what it’s like to have a cold, much like I’ve forgotten how it was to survive on four hours of sleep in the early days. Next month, I will get this cold again.

I think of our little boy. Indeed, he’s less of a baby and more of a boy now. Small and perfect, he learns something about his body nearly every day. How to clap, how to wave, how to stand. We watch him grow, amazed at his journey. Every day we get a little glimpse of the little person he’s growing into. And we can’t wait for more. But in another way, I think of his little body and want him to stay this way forever. Perfect and fresh, unmarked and unhurt by the big world out there.

Your life is going to change, they said. This kind of thing must have been what they meant.

I love me some nutty weather. Often the cost is tragic, but bad weather reminds us that we are an arrogant civilization. I think we all need a slap in the face every once in awhile to keep us in our place. A slap from the cold hand of Mother Nature.

As a kid, I was always disappointed after a summer thunderstorm. I remember going outside with my dad after a particularly bad storm. I was seven or eight years old. The power was still out in the neighborhood and the intersections were flooded as the storm sewers struggled to process the deluge. The clouds parted and the sun popped back in full glory, filling the afternoon once again with wet ohio summer heat. There was a rainbow.

How lame.

I don’t much care for rainbows. It means the storm has passed. I prefer the tension before the storm, the chaotic wind of a passing weather front. A rainbow means the excitement is over. You don’t have to be afraid of the clouds. Go back to watching TV.

So we got some snow last weekend. Quite a bit of snow, actually. They call it a “blizzard”. This is something. Although local weather reporters jump all over any kind of inclement conditions, I note that they hold this word in reserve. Like if misusing the word causes the jet stream to cancel one scheduled tornado warning for your viewing area later that spring.

It’s March and we the sky just dumped more snow on us than we’ve had all year. This was unfortunate, especially for my step brother who had scheduled his out of town wedding for this weekend. Instead of celebrating with family and friends, we were stuck inside, watching the local news team dispatched to all corners of the city for an in-depth look at White Death 2008.

To children, snow means snow days and snow men and snow ball fights. As adults, we are conditioned to dislike snow days like this. Adults tend to think more in terms of longer commutes and shoveling-related coronaries. But there is a part of me that finds it all very exciting.

Here’s the thing: We have a media industry geared around self-help and control. Lose weight, find a mate, control your finances, curb your addiction. I myself spend a lot of time thinking about very geeky first world organizational problems. There’s a talk show guest and self-help section for every area. But it’s all a myth. There is no control. You can make lists and plan all you want. You may improve yourself a bit and become a little more efficient, but there is nothing in the universe that will prevent twenty inches of snow from falling on your wedding reception.

I don’t take pleasure from any of this, but I think it’s good to get a little perspective. The universe is a grand and chaotic beast. We are silly to think there’s anything we can do about it.

For the record, I spent my snow days re-reading Alas, Babylon. Maybe it’s time to make some supply lists for the next storm….

Just a few days following my anxious post pondering the futility and utility of keeping a journal, I started catching up on some Tivo’d episodes of Torchwood (warning: gratuitous flash). Lo and behold, the first episode I watch is one where the agency is infiltrated by an Alien who can alter memories. The guy sneaks in and makes everyone remember he was always there.

Pretty clever. I’d like to try that at my next job interview.

The interloper is ultimately caught because one of the team checks his diary and can find no mention of the new guy. So, perhaps I should view a journal not as remedy for instant amnesia or an egotistical artifact for my progeny, but as a defense against alien infiltration.

Scary to think my daily musings about cubicle life and poor drivers could one day save humanity.

Some habits are hard to break. Especially for people with addictive personalities and proclivities toward organizational paranoia. People like myself.

For me, keeping a journal has been tough to get over. Sure, some of my friends scoff at journal keeping as a ridiculous pursuit. But, until recently, I’d been doing it for some time. It was part of me. When I started writing on this site a few months ago, I noted how I had stopped with the journal business. An activity that started out to help me grow had started to hinder me. So I quit. I was quite content with the decision at the time, but now it’s starting to nag at me, creeping in around the edges of my brain like the third day of nicotine withdrawal.

Sometimes I write to figure things out. This is one of those times.

I first started keeping a journal in fifth grade. This was an assignment from my English teacher, Mrs. Clark. At the beginning of class each day, we had to sit in the little nook of books and write for ten or fifteen minutes. Five lines were required. I believe she read these. I think I remember notes from her about what we wrote. I can’t even remember what I wrote and would give a large sum of money to find one of these spiral bound notebooks today.

It was a good idea. A new approach to get kids to write a bit more, think a bit more. The flaw was in her reading. Sure, a teacher couldn’t really judge an assigned task without checking up, but the whole idea of a journal is something private. For such a diary to be up for judgement really kills the whole idea. You can’t let your mind go when you know Mrs. Clark will be reading it over her lunch break.

Still, the idea stuck and a habit was born. Throughout the rest of school, I kept a personal journal. I wasn’t good at it. I didn’t write regularly or about anything important. Mostly rants about girls or parents, as I recall. Looking back, I regret I wasn’t more intense in my examination of life. But hey, who is at fourteen? Complaining about homework is really all the stress a kid needs. My journals at the time would be a testament to a fortunate childhood.

In college, I got a little more serious. Everyone thinks they got a little more serious in college, right? The girls were older now and no parents were around. Things were bound to get serious. But I wasn’t any more dedicated to a daily ritual like record keeping.

Around twenty-three, I got serious. I started writing every day. This was kind of a low point for me, but the journal helped. I used words to figure things out, to dream, to motivate. Oddly, my outlook seemed to improve in step with the physical quality of my journals. I started with cheap spiral bound notebooks, then on to composition books, then to leather books, and finally to hipster Moleskines. I filled eight volumes in nine years. Then I quit.

As I said before, the journal keeping had become something of a drag. It was a chore. The book was only serving to hold me back. The journal had become a surrogate for actual writing. So I quit, challenging myself to write other things, in other ways. And this has worked.

But.

I still carry a little notebook around with me. I have a lot of nutty ideas I want to capture throughout the day. I found myself writing little notes about what was going on in life. We’ve got a little boy who does something different and amazing almost every day. He clapped his hands for the first time and I thought, I should really write this down.

And this moment really captured the root of why I am compelled to keep a journal. This journal keeping is in lock step with my organizational preoccupations, working to prepare me for the day when I wake up and cannot remember anything. The mind is weak. Even if I can avoid spontaneous and inexplicable amnesia, moments of time will slowly leach away in the catacombs of my brain. Today, I just forgot two more people from my high school class. Gone forever. And I don’t even know who they were.

So all this work is really an effort to avoid my mortality.

Another thought behind these journals is the idea that someone in the future will pick them up. Maybe my son. Maybe Mrs. Clark’s great-granddaughter. But this goes back to the problem of having an audience. When you write in a journal as if you have an audience, then you leave out all the interesting bits that people wold want to read anyway, so no one wins.

Someday my present self, past self, and future self are going to meet behind the woodshed and have it out once and for all.

I see I’m at the bottom of this page and haven’t figured anything out, yet again. It seems important that I capture the important points of life somehow. It also seems important I have some place to let my mind doodle around. Maybe that place is a journal again. But maybe that’s just what an addiction feels like.

Over the winter, I played in a Warmachine miniatures league. This was all part of my return to the fantasy gaming of my adolescence that began with a trip to GenCon last summer. It was fun and challenging. And humbling.

Aside from my crushing defeats, I was most surprised with the changes technology has brought to the gaming table. Part of this league involved writing battle reports for the online forum. I’ve never been much of a forum guy, but I enjoyed this. It was fun to write up my stunning and humiliating losses each week. And once I was on the forum, I found myself drawn into lively discussions. (It’s always good to know a guy is not alone in having his ass handed to him.) So, even though this game has been largely a solitary endeavor for me, I still find myself part of a social community.

Fantasy gaming is a fringe activity in any incarnation. Maybe it’s a skirmish miniatures game. Maybe it’s old school twenty-sided Dungeons and Dragons. Maybe it’s a furry-theme live action role playing game. No matter your fancy, there’s probably a game written precisely for you. This is what I truly love about this world. There’s a freedom in these games, a sense of exploration. But the drawback is that an already small community is subdivided into much smaller groups. Aside from GenCon, it may be difficult to find a group of six people in your town who wants to join your weekly Vampires and Werewolves simulation.

In my fifteen year absence from fantasy, it seems the Internet helped smooth out some of the time and space issues facing gaming. You can find an active message board and cluster of blogs spinning around any game, giving game devotees a sense of community. And this sense of community is a large part of fantasy gaming.

But technology also threatens to kill off the industry entirely. Namely, I think you’ll find a lot more people playing video games than D&D on any given weekend. Think about it. It’s much easier to log on for multiplayer online action than to meet in someone’s basement every week. But you lose a lot of the novelty,too. Maybe I’m stuck in 1985, but even with a game like World of Warcraft, where the guild system yields a high level of social interaction, the experience is not the same as running an adventure face to face. Playing a role to solve problems requires a lot more thought than equipping the right sword for a hack and slash. This isn’t even to mention the effort involved to create an adventure from scratch.

Wizards of the Coast, the producers of D&D, are working to bridge this gap a bit. And not without controversy. Wizards is going to release the 4th edition of D&D this year. This edition promises not only sweeping rule changes, but also a focus on online content. Namely, the company has shuttered the long running Dungeon and Dragon magazines, moving the content online. The company is also working on a virtual gaming table that will allow people around the world to run and play in campaigns. For a fee, of course.

There is a lot of controversy over this, especially from die-hard D&D players. Complaints range from dilution of rules to requiring monthly fees for a game that has been free for thirty years. While not every player likes these changes, I think it’s interesting to think about this move by Wizards of the Coast in light of the entire industry.

I’m interested to see how technology will change this. Will the 4th edition make D&D more competitive against video games? I hope so. And I hope other game makers follow suit to shift the paradigm of fantasy gaming. We have enough kids sitting plugging into a video game console for a little passive entertainment. I think they deserve something a little better, something that will teach them a little more about the world.

At a minimum, maybe writing up battle reports will improve their writing skills a bit.

For the past four months, my main job included taking care of the boy a few days a week and catching up on episodes of Battlestar Galactica, Doctor Who, and Torchwood. And keeping up with the Internet.

So I started a new job this week and found myself effectively unplugged. Without realizing it, I’d come to dread the daily trudge through my ever-growing list of RSS feeds. There is some truly interesting writing and insight online. But there is also a lot of recursive linking and repetitive information. I probably wouldn’t read an article about thirteen ways to show Facebook contacts in the Windows Vista sidebar. I definitely don’t want to see the same link on four different sites.

After a few days off the Interweb, I felt refreshed. Liberated. Much better. Better enough, in fact, to venture back online to see what I missed. I opened up Google Reader and found I just wasn’t interested. The spell had been broken.

The saying goes that a project will expand to fill out the time allotted. For me, I’ve found that without Real Work, I’ll fill that node of my productivity with trying capture a ton of online content. I like the fact that I can keep learning things about myself–even if it’s not positive.

I dug a little deeper over the weekend. I had a bookmarks folder entitled “Good Reads” for a bunch of blogs that I had found interesting, but not compelling enough to add to my RSS feeds. I started poking through this list a bit and found a series of snapshots of my online life. I could remember what had drawn me to each site, what particular project or hobby had put the site on my radar. And I could also remember exactly why I wasn’t interested in these subjects any longer.

There are a few things going on here that make me think the web is starting to evolve a bit. We’ve had an explosion of voices online thanks to all the well-equipped publishing tools. Everyone has a venue for their opinions, and everyone has a choice for inputs other than mainstream media. Myself included. But perhaps the novelty may be wearing off. I can imagine how other may be experiencing the same fatigue under the burden of all this content. Maybe the whole thing will collapse. Or maybe a few strong voices will emerge, effectively becoming the mainstream of the web.

Regardless, it’s a true first world problem when we need a word for those sites we find interesting, but not interesting enough to add to our RSS feeds.

Or maybe it’s just winter in Ohio and I’m ready to go outside.

Some links for Tuesday, 19 February 2008:

• Things - Task Management on the Mac: I’ve just tinkered with this a bit, but it’s really polished. Too bad I’m stuck with Windows at work.
• The Anonymity Experiment: via kottke: “We don’t know what information is being collected about us, whom it’s being shared with, what it’s being used for, or where it’s being held.” Scary stuff. Makes me want to retire to my hideout and work on my manifesto.
• OpenCongress: Maybe a web 2.0 look will make people pay attention to what our leaders are up to. Lots of good information here. Information we should all watch. Congress works for us, people.

There’s been a bit of buzz recently about The Commons Flickr pool from the Library of Congress. The Library has posted some of its collection on Flickr so people can access part of the archives and also help in tagging the photos. I like this idea. Not only do we get to see some pretty amazing historical photographs, but this effort is a great example of what the web is good for.

Personally, I’ve been pretty blown away by these pictures. In particular, I find the 1930s-40s in Color collection astounding. I’ve seen plenty of Depression and WWII era photos before, but all in black and white. These images pop in color, the people moving from Historical Subject to Real People. Kind of makes it all hit home. These were all real people, and they look pretty much like we do now.

Anyone with a significant amount of digital photographs and an organizational preoccupation will know what kind of effort can be involved in organizing a collection can be. Imagine having millions of pictures. Imagine having millions of pictures that you didn’t take, of people you don’t know, of places you’ve never seen. How do you organize that? So the Library of Congress has outsourced the work to a group of digital photography enthusiasts. This is harnessing the collaborate nature of the current web in a manner we don’t see much, especially with government institutions. And Flickr users are, on the whole, a communal and friendly lot. Everyone wins.

However, some people are idiots.

Take a look at this picture. Or this one. What kind of person would leave insensitive and rude remarks on photos like these. It’s almost as if we need some oversight to block this kind of digital defacement–but that kind of goes against the spirit of the network, right?

Here’s the thing: We have all these new open communities on the web. People interact with one another in ways thought impossible just a few years ago. Especially young people. The freedom and lack of rules really foster this type of communication. But when the freedom is abused — as in making off these off color comments — it makes our entire society look ignorant. When you see a picture of a guy whose face is black with coal dust from working 12 hours in a mine with inadequate safety equipment, and then proceed to make a joke about the guy’s outfit, the entire group suffers. Suddenly, anyone using Flickr looks like a self-absorbed dolt with absolutely no sense of history.

Those of us on the web today are a pretty lucky bunch. On the whole, we have a lot of the things we want, get enough to eat, don’t lose sleep over bands of marauding raiders. But this wasn’t necessarily the case for people in these photos. This isn’t necessarily the case for a lot of people in the world today. We probably shouldn’t forget that.

My wife is an extremely hard worker. Recently she was awarded an iPod Touch from her company for her work on a difficult project. With this, my wife has taken a decisive lead in our household iPod arms race. My third generation iPod is getting a little long in the tooth, so I’m auditioning for replacement in the not so distant future. This little thing goes with me everywhere, making commutes and waiting rooms enjoyable. It would be nice to be able to watch video and maybe look at some pictures once in awhile. However, I seem to have trouble committing to a new model.

On one hand, I like the idea of packing up every media file I own to cart around on an 160Gb iPod. But do I need to carry everything with me all the time? Don’t I have a lot of music that I never listen to? And how often am I away from my computer for syncing anyway? Wouldn’t the sleek form factor of a new Nano much more convenient?

My wife complicated this first world problem further when she walked in the door with this new iPod Touch. To be honest, I never really considered the iPod Touch. Until I touched it, that is.  I just didn’t get it. But once I started flipping through album covers on this device, something clicked. This little object had been solely a music player a few years ago. But now it’s evolving into something much more.

It’s tough at times for our analog brains to make the leap to digital. What was once a music player has evolved into a music and video player, photo viewer, email client, web surfing tool, online mapping, etc. While I was preoccupied with the device as a media player, I was missing out on the idea that devices like these are going to move into a more central role in the lives of many people. Instead of something attached to our computer, these devices become what we use instead of our computers. The relationship between our devices has changed.

What made me pause when I first ran a greasy finger across the iPod Touch’s screen was that it reminded me of something: one device to rule them all. For years, I’ve fantasized about a portable device that would become the center of our computing world. The idea of a work computer and a home computer always frustrated me. This is all my data, so I should be able to get at it anywhere, right? I was totally surprised when someone had created this device while I wasn’t paying attention.

The environment I envision looks like this:

• All your data (documents, music, pictures, etc) exists on the device.
• While on the go, you can access the data in limited ways: listen to music, view pictures, go online, edit text and spreadsheets, enter contacts and appointments, etc.
• Once you plug the device into any computer, the device becomes an attached drive. You can use the applications on the computer to do more advanced file manipulation: edit photos, advanced word processing, watch movies on the larger monitor, etc. You also back up the device while connected.

This vision appeals to me so much because it would allow one to carry one’s whole digital life in a small package. You could use any available computer without ever leaving your own little environment. What’s more, you could actually pull out the item on the bus and access the data. How very Cory Doctorow!

More classic PDAs got close to this. Very close. But not with the grace and UI of the iPod Touch. Even if you can’t edit Word  documents on the Touch — or even access it as an external drive — the UI metaphor still comes closer to my vision than any PDA I’ve used in the past.

The iPod Touch isn’t the end all. There are still significant hurdles. There is no file manipulation on the Touch. And all the music is locked away in iTunes. And  even 32 Gb isn’t nearly enough room for everything. Further, flash memory isn’t well-suited for lots of read/writes. Still, with the software development kit coming from Apple this month, it may not be long until we see a word processing application for the Touch. It may not be long until we truly have a device from Science Fiction in our hands.

Some links for Tuesday, 12 February 2008:

• Organize Yourself- Create Your Own Personal Personnel File: I’m starting a new job soon (on top of our recent move), so this feels like a good time to make sure I’m keeping track of everything I need to. (via Lifehacker)
• Developing an improved online environment for educating computer users: There’s a bigger story here that I’d like to flesh out. Back in my tech writing days, I was always frustrated by the industry’s inability to shift its paradigm of how to present information. Everyone seemed to just take a standard user manual, shove it on the web, and call it online. There is an increasing divide between technical and non-technical users, and it’s about time we started using some new tactics to close the gap.
• Watt Watt: Haven’t had a lot of time to drill into this, but this site talks a lot about energy consumption and alternative power sources. (via Make)
• Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends on Google Video: I used to love Theroux’s show and am delighted to see it online.

← Previous Page — Next Page →

• Categories

  • Books
  • Games
  • Links
  • Music
  • Obliques
  • Organization
  • Site
  • Technology
  • Television
  • Uncategorized

• Archives

  • July 2008
  • June 2008
  • May 2008
  • April 2008
  • March 2008
  • February 2008
  • January 2008

• My Photos

  www.flickr.com
  

  This is a Flickr badge showing public photos from mgdennis. Make your own badge here.
• 
•