Category Archives: Log

PAD 3/25/2013 – Idyllic

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What does your ideal community look like? How is it organized, and how is community life structured? What values does the community share?

I love impossibilities. The mythical arrangement of Atlantis has always appealed to me. The way I’ve seen possible renditions of that city is a circular arrangement where the different rings were devoted to different zones, like farmland, dairyland, commerce, and residential areas. I also imagine that it was served by super-science and technology served the population in all of it’s needs. No pollution, no noise, no glaring lights blotting out the beautiful night sky. I also imagine people enlightened to the point where crime just doesn’t happen, there aren’t any reasons to cry and the only killer of man is old age. Alas, this is Utopia, otherwise known as “Nowhere” and it’s just a fantasyland. A lovely little ideal that keeps you comfortable when faced with how things really are: Rotting stinking cities packed with wretched awful people.

I really don’t think that humanity can achieve an Atlantean level of sophistication or enlightenment, but that doesn’t mean you just throw away the ideal. There has to be something, even if it’s imaginary that you can grab ahold of and buoy yourself on when faced with just how bleak and awful life really is all around you. So in that, Atlantis will be as real as any of us need it to be, to put all that suffering and wretchedness into context and by doing so, make it appear not as awful as it otherwise would be. In many ways, Atlantis is Hope. Hope is a silly thing, but it’s also a needful thing. Logically then, Atlantis is a needful thing.

PAD 3/28/2013 – Happy Happy Joy Joy

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We cry for lots of reasons: sadness, pain, fear . . . and happiness. When was the last time you shed tears of joy?

It was actually a movie that did it to me. The first time, hell, every time I watch “Rise of The Guardians” there is one part of the movie, near the end that gets me all choked up each and every time. It had been so long since a movie was able to get such a pronounced emotional response from me that I did panic just a little when I felt my cheeks peppered with tears. If you haven’t seen the movie, you really should, and if you have, you know exactly what I mean.

PAD 4/3/2013 – Escape!

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Describe your ultimate escape plan (and tell us what you’re escaping from).

Frankly I’ve never really had to escape from anything in my life. I’ve been thinking about that recently. That I kind of grew up in a very protected place. Upstate New York doesn’t really suffer from any real substantive disasters as the rest of the country does. We didn’t really have any earthquakes (very small tremors every 20 years doesn’t count, it just upsets pets and that’s it), no Tornadoes as the surrounding drumlins, hills, and in a roundabout way the foothills to the Adirondack Mountain Chain just tear thunderstorms apart so they can’t really gather up enough oomph to spawn twisters. Hurricanes are also out of the question because if a Hurricane got that far north, it’d be just a really heavy wet rainstorm at that point. The only real risk is snowfall. Come on! When it comes to surviving a natural disaster, snow is not really on the map. Get to shoveling! Not really that scary. So escape was never really in my head anyways, not growing up and not really now. Now, however things are different. A gaggle of years ago I moved to Michigan and I no longer have one of the sentinels of security protecting me. There aren’t any handy mountain chains to tear up passing thunderstorms and so, I happen to live around the area that could be regarded as the northern tip of Tornado Alley. So now I have to consider escaping where I work because of a Tornado, but I don’t really think about it because there really isn’t ever any chance to actually escape. If I’m at work, it’s into the basement we all go, to die under a mess of torn-apart brickwork. So, no, no real escape plan.

New Kicks

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I recently broke down and bought myself new shoes to replace the old Sketchers that I thought I could gamely patch with hot-glue. That patch did do the trick, but then other parts of the shoe started to fail, splitting apart so much that I could see my socks peeking out when I walked. Thankfully I have not had to ford a lot of slush this past winter or deal with any ponding water now that spring is here, but now that spring is here, it was only going to be a matter of time before I would be truly sorry, with soggy feet.

While out shopping for shoes for Scott we ended up stopping at a Famous Footwear shop in the local mall. As Scott is so fond of saying, I apparently have a thing about shoe shopping. He says it’s a thing, I notice a little bit but perhaps it’s more than just a little to an outside observer. That day Scott didn’t find any shoes to replace his sorry kicks but I did. I always have issues with buying shoes because I have big wide feet and so a lot of popular shoe manufacturers are just out of the question. UnderArmour, Nike, Adidas, the sportier brands just can’t cut it. They cater to little precious narrow little baby-man feet, not these clod-hoppers at the end of my ankles. I was just buzzing around, not really seriously looking for anything in particular but came across a nice pair of leather shoes and I spotted the soles, which bore the distinctive characteristics of Dr. Marten. So, what about English shoes that are made in Vietnam? Well, the english bits are pure marketing hokum, but we don’t pay any attention that they were shipped here on a slow boat from Asia. Anyhow, these new shoes fit surprisingly well and were very easy on my feet. As usual new shoes radically correct the pronation in my feet and so my balance is shot for a few days while I re-acclimate to a proper foot geometry. These particular ones bear the model name of “Sussex” and the more I wear them, the more I like them. Apparently, and I don’t know if this is a real kind of shoe or just some goofy name that the Dr. Marten’s company has invented for these shoes, but they apparently are “chukkas” and they are not as low as sneakers, not as high as high-tops, have very few eyelets for the laces, but have a very comfortable footpad which makes walking quite enjoyable on my feet. They are made of a really nice leather and I was reading around on how to best care for them so they don’t crack and wear-out faster than they should and every pointer suggested cleaning and sealing the leather with baby oil. Frankly that idea worked out tremendously well. It darkened the leather just a little bit, but it also waterproofed the leather which is kind of nice to see when you accidentally tromp through a puddle and your shoes resist every single drop. Anyhow, ever since I bought them and wore them I’ve been very happy with them. My shoes no longer squeak, leak, or look like they’ve been run over by a lawnmower.

So if you’re looking for shoes, I can heartily recommend these. I’ve just about had enough with Sketchers as they don’t really last as long as I think they should and how they fall apart is kind of pitiful. I’ve kept them because while they aren’t really good shoes any longer, they’ll do quite nicely when I have to mow the lawn or do gardening. It will be very interesting to see just how long these Doc Martens last. I’m rough on shoes, my pronation is rather, and it’ll be a real challenge to see if I warp and wear these shoes down or if they are as durable as the marketing staff at Doc Martens says they are. We shall see. Due to a pricetag goofup at the shoe store I got these for about $60, when the list is $90. Even still, I think these shoes would have been a steal at market prices even, but I am glad for the accidental deep discount.

Chasing ePub Around Robin Hood’s Barn

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I tried a fair bit of cleverness just now. I found a bit of fan fiction online and copied the text to my Drafts app on my iPad. I’m at Chocolatea on Wifi and no access to any devices other than my iPhone, my iPad, and my Nook HD.

I wanted to get the text from my Drafts app over to my Nook HD. The best way? ePub. Or at least that was the challenge I had set for myself. Now I knew I could probably do it with the apps I had, Wifi, and Dropbox gluing it all together.

I opened the text in my Drafts app in Pages, which allowed me to export it in DOC format to my Dropbox app. So that was easy enough. Now I had my fiction in DOC format on Dropbox. None of the online file converters understands Dropbox, nor how to unpack the Public link URL that you can make with Dropbox. Instead of getting your document, you get HTML gunk from Dropbox. So I have another app on my iPad called Files Connect. I used that app to copy the DOC file from my Dropbox to my Windchilde account, so I could host it online *simply* (hah). Once I had a URL link that worked for the DOC file I went to Online-Conversion.com which provides a public service to convert DOC files into ePub format. I handed it my URL, let it go and it offered to email-attach the results to my email. Off it went. I opened Mail on my iPad, opened the email from the service, found the attachment and tried to open it on my iPad. My iPad gave up and offered to send it to a host of other apps that might handle ePub format, one of those was Dropbox, so I saved the data off to my Dropbox. Then I connected to Wifi on my Nook HD, started the Dropbox app and found my ePub file. I renamed it, then I exported it to my Nook HD.

What a mess. I got what I wanted to do but it took me about 2 hours of head-butting against online services and a lot of rigamarole just to do this one thing. I was half-hoping that Pages on my iPad would be Dropbox aware, and ePub aware, and it isn’t. No free apps exist that I could see that create ePub files from pasted in text or from other file formats.

At least it used up some time waiting for Scott to get out of work. At least there is that. As for interoperability, that’s hilariously not going to happen. At least not between iOS and Nook.

PAD 3/26/2013 – Deja Vu

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Have you ever truly felt déjà vu, the sensation that you’ve already had the experience you’re currently having?

It comes in fits and spurts. There are moments that feel like they have happened before. It’s like the experience of the unfolding events align around a pivot. The nagging feeling starts and then you start feeling very strange. At first it’s not clear what the feeling is attached to because you are approaching the pivot and nothing looks like it does, until you’re half-way along and then what you experience rings with your memories, the memories of the future that became crystallized in that one moment. When it strikes me I have to stop what I’m doing and respect and witness the event coming to pass around me. The feeling of Deja Vu is so powerful sometimes that I become almost paralyzed with the novelty of the situation. I don’t know exactly where the memories of the future come from, perhaps I dream them and in that there may be some untapped clairvoyance active within me that I can only access when I’m dreaming. My dreaming world is very rich and I remember many of my dreams and I write them down before they evaporate under the assault of too much consciousness.

Almost always, when I have this feeling of Deja Vu I will stop and I will remark to everyone around me that it’s happening to me. I don’t consider it to be a very private thing and since it paralyzes me with it’s marvelousness I feel it’s important to explain it to others as quickly as possible so they don’t worry that I’m having some sort of stroke or attack.

PAD 3/30/2013 – Five a Day

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You’ve being exiled to a private island, and your captors will only supply you with five foods. What do you pick?

Onions, Pork, Bread, Cheese, Broccoli. I don’t think five is enough as it takes more than these items to maintain a healthy body, but these items are things that I value more than others. Onions are universally useful, you can eat them raw, you can cook them and they can take a lot of heat abuse if your cooking tools are very low-brow. Pork is a good choice because it is an animal protein and has all the amino acids necessary for living, especially the ones we can’t manufacture by ourselves. I’m sure you could swap Quinoa out here, but I love pig parts, so pork is it. Plus pork is leaner than chicken and not as bad as red meat. If there wasn’t pork available I would have to switch out to Ostrich. It’s got a great texture, it’s near pork and chicken for ease of cooking and still helps you avoid the perils of red meat. Bread is a cheat as it’s not a food but rather a constructed food. Water, Flour, Yeast. Bread can keep you alive. It’s not a great life, but it can be done. Technically if bread wasn’t available then I’d have to place flour or oats here and I’d assume I could find some sort of water to make unleavened bread. Cheese is vital, it’s very dense, calorically, it provides calcium and it’s durable and resistant to spoilage. There really isn’t any alternative to cheese, perhaps extra-firm tofu, but it’s not the same. Broccoli is a superfood, a little miracle all on it’s own. It’s dark green and leafy and provides Vitamins A, B, C, Calcium, Potassium, and Fiber. Broccoli, like Onion can be eaten raw and can take a serious amount of thermal abuse before it becomes inedible. It’s durable, like all the other foods and easily carried. I’m sure there are better choices available, but these are the few that occurred to me off the top of my head.

PAD 3/31/2013 – Odd Couple

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Does a messy home (or office) make you anxious and cranky, or is cleaning something you just do before company comes over?

There is a minimal amount of clutter that I can contend with. I don’t keep my house immaculate all the time, and there are certainly phases where I feel like the house has devolved into a mess and it has to be addressed. Quite often it’s when family comes to visit, but they are more of an excuse than anything else. I don’t want to be seen living like a slob, even though I don’t, not really. It’s impossible to say that I’m not at least a little bit slovenly but I will say that I’m at least functionally organized at home. The only bits that make me cranky are when there is too much obnoxiousness all in one spot – a giant heap of dirty clothes strewn about and dirty socks in random places, for example. It doesn’t happen a lot, but when it does that gets to me. The solution is snap easy, just gather everything up and throw it into the washing machine. Dirty is clean, at least in a bin, and it just takes a wee bit to put order to that chaos.

One thing that I will admit to is that a messy or disorganized kitchen does drive me to distraction. I’m fine with making do with what you have, but things should be with other things that are like them, the wooden spoons need to be together, the spatulas need to be together and the knives need to be together. I don’t think I’m too pushy about these things, but they do get to me.

PAD 3/27/2013 – Judgement Day

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If you were to judge your favorite book by its cover, would you still read it?

My favorite book is “What Dreams May Come” by Richard Matheson. The cover art for the book is muted and features a man standing before a doorway in the sky. The words, the art, it’s hard for me to answer this prompt because I’ve read this book and I know I love it. I think that it would engage me even if I had never read it before. It would be better to judge a book I haven’t read and then read it and see if the judgement of the cover matched the experience.

I will say that a book that I saw by the cover, which was George Nader’s Chrome did intrigue me and I judged the book by the cover, at least positively and after I read it I was rewarded with a great experience. So in that case, judging a book by it’s cover, even if it wasn’t my favorite worked out for the best.

There are book covers that, lets face it, are awful. If I had to judge the Wheel of TIme series by it’s cover art I would just yawn myself to sleep. I wouldn’t be interested in any of it because I’d think it was a time travel story told by steampunk amish. Thankfully I was exposed to the books before I got a look at the covers and found myself loving the series despite it’s rather lame cover art.

I hate that books sell by their shiny cover art and not as much by their merits. Perhaps that’s something that eBooks can address as those, like the ones gathered from Project Gutenberg lack cover art, letting the text stand on it’s own for good or ill.

Athletes Behaving Badly

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After the recent spate of athletes and coaches behaving badly it struck me that I don’t follow sports and I don’t think any of these stories are worth my time. Sports has always seemed silly at best and contrived at worst. What has interested me is how other people behave when it comes to sports, that fascinates me. I draw a bead out of NASCAR criticism voiced not by me, but instead by George Carlin: “Who cares who wins? It’s the same five rednecks that win anyways.” and that applies more to the professional sports teams than the college ones. What for them then? Well, you have abuse, hazing, illicit sex, rape… gosh, it doesn’t matter which alley you look down, there is something nasty everywhere you look. A bit of proof to the pudding is that Michael Vick is still allowed to do anything at all with sports. The man who abused so many dogs was punished and released and went right back to playing. If I was a potential opponent of his, I would walk off the field.

Back to why people love these overpaid oafs it could have something to do with cognitive dissonance. Fans buy sports junk and this surrounding junk then establishes a feedback mechanism: “I can’t believe I wasted all this money on this junk! I must really like them! I love them!”

Although I’m sure it’s not that simple. I still don’t get the fascination. There’s far more good to be done with championing the mind, the only thing championing the body gets you is celebrity, distasteful amounts of money, and a blown out life at the end. With the mind, you can carry that for a lot longer and it brings more happiness in the end, as far as I’m concerned.