How to not forget to listen to Today In The Past

You are, of course, of the WONDEROUS PAPERLESS CALENDAR that is Today In The Past, and have subscribed to it in your information-Tunes software, but if you are like me, you often blithely pass an ENTIRE DAY forgetting to remember what happened TODAY IN THE PAST.

WEAR THIS VEIL OF SHAME NO MORE FRIENDS FOR I HAVE INVENTED A TECHNOLOGICAL SOLUTION. We're going to make a thing what on your computer, at a chosen time every day, prompts you to listen to TODAY IN THE PAST.

First we're going to make an iTunes "smart playlist":

(you're gonna wanna righ-click and look at these images on their own) Next we're going to make an Automator action. I think only the newest, fanciest Automa

tor has the ability to make iCal alarms directly, if you can, do this, otherwise, just make "an application". To build this, find the actions in the lists on the left, then drag them over to the right, filling in the options. Use the search box to search for the actions by name.

Make sure you have at least one item in the smart playlist in iTunes, then test the Automator action by clicking 'Run'. If you are now listening to the sonorous tones of Mr. Hodgman, it's working.

Save the automator action either as an iCal alarm or as an application, if you save it as an iCal alarm, iCal will pop up and you can set the time, recurrence, etc. If you save it as an application, go in to iCal, create an event, and set the alarm to "Run a Script" and chose your automator action, set the event to recur every day.

HUZZAH!

Retreat To Move Forward

You hear about this new Windows 7 "Starter Edition"? Apparently it's got an arbitrary 3 concurrent application limit.

Anyway, here's a commercial from 13 years ago about how great multi-tasking computers are.

How My Brain Works

Due to reading too much Apartment Therapy and a bit of spring cleaning madness, I've been on an apartment improvement jag recently. Rather than set myself the task of fixing up my whole apartment, I figured a realistic target would be the very smallest room, the vestibule / mud-room / entryway.

I've got it pretty well organized and functional now, with a landing strip and a good shoe tray and a bench and some plants started. I've also fancied it up a bit, with a floating shelf made from some books I got in Cuba, a roman Hilaritas coin I picked up on the ebays, and such.

What with it looking so nice, I noticed that there was a big blank space above the window, and got to thinking that I could put some black-framed black and white images up ther

e. But what?

I cast my mind and my web browser around aimlessly for a while, and noticed that Dorthy "Cat & Girl" Gambrell was musing about maybe selling a Baba Yaga t-shirts. This got me thinking maybe I could do a cool silhouette image of a cartoony house with chicken legs, but there's a lot of problems with this idea.

Firstly and most obviously, only a fool would beckon the Baba Yaga in to his house. Number b, this could actually be beyond my artistic abilities. Nextly, there's not really a series of images in that idea, just one. Finally, it doesn't really mean much to me, as symbolism.

But this got me thinking about the mythic and the archetypical, and eventually led me down a deep wikipedia rabbit hole following the trail of The Trickster archetype, leaving me with three things.

1. A new life goal: to have my business card bare the title "Bricoleur"
2. A note pile with scraps like "necessary chaos" "Bugs Bunny, Charlie Chaplin" "made hard by the gods"
3. The idea that I could put up pictures of some of the animal trickster gods from different traditions.

After a lot of google image searching, I gave up on the idea of silhouettes, and decided woodcuts were the way to go. Bouncing around various image banks and amazon books of clip art and google image searches, I eventually stumbled upon this amazing resource. And therein did indeed find good suitable images. But how was I to indicate that these were meant to be representations of the incarnations of trickster gods, and not just a cute bunny-wunny? The answer to that, too was contained in the clip art bank.

After a bit of cut-and-paste work, here's my first attempt, Br'er Rabbit.

“We got this huge whiteboard at work but it’s caused a productivity crash. No one can pass it w/o giving a presentation on social networking”

- John Dickerson

Soon I Will Be Invincible

Soon I Will Be Invincible
By: Austin Grossman
Finished: Feb 21, 2009

Any nerd can spot a former bully in a crowd. Even in the grown-up world, when everyone's on the same team, a set of the shoulders and inflection of voice are dead giveaways. The rub of it is, more often than not, the bullies do well. The popular kids turn in to popular adults and shoulder their way to the top of the heap. How much moreso then for the super powered? Super heros, the super jocks, super villians the super nerds.

Soon I Will Be Invincible is a pretty great, fun read. It's funny and engrossing, and sheds some light on how much really hard work goes in to trying to take over the world.

Lobsters: Considered!

Consider The Lobster and Other Essays
By: David Foster Wallace
Abandoned: Feb 3rd, 2008

I've never walked out on a movie. Many's the time I've taken a chance at a film festival and seen some really, really risible crap, but I've always stuck it out to the credits. I've paid my money and I've got my seat and these people went to the trouble of making a movie, I can grit my teeth and see it through to the end. Besides, it builds character.

Similarly, I almost never give up on a book. There's a few times where I've gotten a few chapters in, asked "is this really for me?" seen that there's more than a thousand pages to go and put the book down, and a rare few other times when I've abandoned a book mid-way through, through no fault of its own, just my own wandering, waning interest, or having something irresistible pre-empt it. Rare indeed is the occasion that I've had to take a book out to a crowded restaurant, and between the main course and dessert lean in and say "listen, we need to talk, I think we both know this relationship isn't going anywhere. It's not you, it's me, I'm going through some stuff right now, and I need some time to sort my head out, you know?", then leave via the bathroom window.

And so, it saddens me to tell you that, in the parlance of The Facebooks, I am "no longer in a relationship" with D.F.W's Consider The Lobster. If you're reading this, Consider The Lobster, then I want you to know, really, truly, it's not you, it's me.

I got through the first 300 pages of this 350-odd page book. A lot of it is really really good, Wallace has a giant brain and an awful lot to say. Up, Simba, about John McCain's 2000 campaign for the Republican nomination is fascinating, particularly in light of the 2008 presidential campaign where so much of McCain's touted independence and unwillingness to compromise his principles seems to have evaporated. Authority and American Usage, a review of a usage dictionary, with it's eyeball-whiplash multi-page footnoted parenthetical footnotes made me care about prescriptivism. The eponymous essay Consider The Lobster asks some Pollan-grade questions about our habits and mores surrounding the consumption of animals.

What broke me was the book's final essay. Whereas I got through the bulk of the collection in about 2 weeks, I'm 3 weeks in to Host and only about half way through, due to the fact that I can only read about 2 pages at a time. The on-line edition, linked above, has notes in the text as hyperlinks (and some of those notes themselves have hyperlinks to new notes, and it's turtles all they way down). In the print edition, the notes are rendered as boxes with arrows pointing to their referents inline in the text, making it practically impossible to read. Perhaps with this format, D.F.W. was making light of his reputation for exegesis, or perhaps he was trying to imitate back-forward-back-sideways style of Internet reading, but the fact remains: an unreadable essay will go unread, and this is substance subjugated to style.

So, Consider The Lobster, I've met someone new, but we can still be friends, right? Sure we can, I'll totally call you. Ok, ttfn.

So, the first lines of this, what links to this. Go take a look, I'll wait here.

So much of this merits comment.

Number a) the game and the toy from different manufacturers use the same noise, so dollars to donuts there's some licensable sound effects collection out there with "delighted baby noise number 7" in it.

2) Sure, Ms. Scary Angry News Reporter, if you prime people, and tell them that it says "Islam is the light" that's what they'll hear, after listening to it a couple of times, it sounds like "is salami delight" to me, but that's neither here nor there.

iii) Let's posit that the toys do, actually, factually, intentionally say "Islam is the light", in the US, you're surrounded by christian messages everywhere all the time. Is hearing one thing enough to counter all those other messages?

*) Why so scary and angry Ms. Scary Angry News Reporter? Because Islam is evil and going to steal your children?

Book: A Spot Of Bother

A Spot Of Bother
By: Mark Haddon
Finished: Jan 3, 2009

It's pretty easy to compare A Spot Of Bother to that book by Franzen. It's the story of a tight wound family, with a patriarch who goes off kilter when faced with his own suddenly evident mortality, and seeks pharmacological help. But whereas Franzen provides The Corrections, Haddon offers the constructive criticisms (sorry, I've been thinking about that terrible joke all week). This is a family that despite being stuffy, repressed, and dysfunctional, could still make it work.

For anyone that's come face to face with the surprisingly rapid arrival of the ravages of time, going in the space of a doctor's "well..." from an invincible youth to a fragile conglomeration of barely functioning bellows and sacks held together with brittle bones in a wispy veil of skin, father George Hall's panic attacks and "it seemed like a reasonable idea at the time" reactions to disease are shockingly plausible, as are the family's reactions, ranging from recrimination to intentional blindness.

In some ways, this is a book about how family exists as a structure within society. How one generation must recede so that the next can be built on top of it, using it as a strong or shaky foundation, a chain of hand-offs stretching all the way backwards and forwards.