A Warm Gun

I know it’s kind of redundant to say that Merkuns are stupid, but here we go again…

Most Americans seem to operate under a default belief that things are supposed to go right all the time. So when bad things happen, it’s reasonable to get upset—either with oneself or at someone else—and when good things happen, well, that’s just the way things are supposed to be, right?

This winds up producing an interesting effect. We spend a whole lot of time thinking about the things that didn’t go right—dwelling on them, rerunning them in our minds for hours, sometimes months on end—but we almost immediately disregard the memory of anything that goes well, because there’s nothing exceptional or worth noticing about a good day.

The result of this belief is that as we Americans go through life, we accumulate and remember a lifetime’s worth of disappointments, anger, and self-hatred, and we have difficulty remembering any times where we were deeply happy. We grant the worst of times a “stickiness” that we rarely extend to the best of times.

Why is it that we spend so much time and effort focusing on the negative? Why don’t we just choose to let those things go? Moreover, why is it that we never savor and dwell on the things that go right, that should delight us? Why don’t we give good experiences the same emotional weight as the bad? Surely that would yield a more balanced view of our lives, and it’d go a long way toward making us happier with ourselves, our lives, and the world around us.

Fortunately, I got over much of my chronic anger and self-hatred during my adolescence, and let it go much more in recent years. In fact, I think I do a pretty good job taking delight in the wonders and joys of my life. Because I don’t suffer from the mainstream blindness toward joy, I can look at our culture with an outsider’s perspective. When I do, I’m struck by the strong impression that most Americans prefer to live with a singleminded focus on the things that have made them unhappy. Is it any wonder our society suffers so much from existential angst?

I hope you’re not one of those people, because we all deserve joy, our lives all contain a large portion of things to enjoy and appreciate, and we are all completely capable of living joyful, fulfilled lives—here, now, and forever—if only we choose to.

Over a third of the Arctic ice cap has melted

Click image for NASA photo info. Click here for Daily Kos article explaining how global warming is already 40 years ahead of predictions. Congrats and cujos to Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on winning the Nobel Peace Prize.

Pointers

Just thought I’d point out a few bits that have made me happy recently.

Angband: It’s the old Moria game, but somewhat updated.
Ares Tube: Take any YouTube video and copy it to your ipod.
jQuery: Excellent javascript framework.
Schtickers: Custom covers for your laptop.

You eye goo rue

Venting about some UI annoyances.

Bad Drop-Downs

When a drop-down is active, typing a letter will take you to the first entry that begins with that letter. Pressing the letter repeatedly will go to the next entry in the list that begins with that letter.

For example, in a list of states, clicking on the drop-down and pressing ‘C’ will cause ‘CA’ to be selected. Subsequently if you press ‘C’, it will select ‘CO’ and ‘CT’ and then ‘CA’ again in a cycle.

Not breaking this behavior is basic usability.

But how many sites have you been to where they prepend a hyphen or a repeating word in front of every single value, making the letter shortcut worthless?

Much worse than that are the sites that use the javascript onChange event to take the user to another page. In that case, when I use the letter shortcut to get to ‘CT’, the first time I hit ‘C’ I’m immediately taken to the ‘CA’ page, in direct violation of the drop-down’s standard behavior and the user’s desire.

Double-click lookups

Being able to look up the definition of any word in an article is nice. However, overriding the default double-click behavior (highlight word) is not. I happen to use double-clicks to highlight words as a visual reminder of where I am in an article. Having to manually close all the popups this generates on the New York Times site is so frustrating that I refuse to use their site.

Meaningless progress bars

Have you ever watched a progress bar get to 100 percent complete, only to start all over from scratch?

Once upon a time, progress bars reflected how far you were through a process. Now they’re just animated gifs, with no correllation to how close you are to “done”. I’ve watched software installs where the progress bar got to “complete” a dozen times. What?

This practice has become so widespread that users are now trained to completely ignore progress bars, so even if you code yours properly, no one is going to believe you.

Great. Thanks, guys.

Remember me?

In lots of web-based apps, the login prompt also includes a checkbox labeled “remember me on this computer”. In theory, it sets a cookie so that the user won’t have to login—or at least not retype their username—the next time they visit the page.

The problem is that almost none of those sites actually remember anything. I have to type in my username and password every time I visit my work email, even though I click “remember me” every time, and that’s not an isolated incident.

Again, this is shit. What the hell are these people thinking? “Gee, that’s a great feature… Let’s pretend we have it!” Fuckwods.

A Moment of Silence

I grew up kinda of as an only child, so I’m sure it’s not the first time I appreciated silence, but one of the most noteworthy times I recall noticing silence took place in 1999.

The Dargon Writers’ Summit is always a hectic time, and holding it in the middle of New York City made it doubly so. Insane cabbies, brusque shopkeepers, and swarming crowds all added to the chaos of spending the weekend with seven other somewhat manic writers.

The trip up to the observation deck of the World Trade Center towers was no better: huge lines, then crowds of people shouldering each other to get close to the windows on the top floor observation deck.

One thing that still amazes me is that even in New York in 1999, they let tourists out onto the completely open roof of the tower. As I stepped out there, 1370 feet above the street, the one thing that struck me more than anything else was the absolute silence.

All I could see was an immense mass of urban congestion from one horizon to the other, but none of it reached me. There I was, smack in the middle of one of the biggest cities on the entire planet, but I was surrounded by near total silence. The contrast with the street level I’d just come from was intense. No buses, no trains, no cabs. No street vendors, no panhandlers, no public cell phone conversations. No horns, no shouting, no construction noises.

Here’s the pertinent section of my travelogue from that visit:

     From there we drove downtown and took some time finding a parking garage that could hold the mega-van. […] We were actually kind of directionless, but Max really wanted to go to the top of the World Trade Center, so we wound up moseying in that general direction. We walked right by Wall Street and Trinity Church and up Broadway for a while, then found the WTC. […]
     Inside, we made our way through the underground mall and up some escalators to the place where the tours began; the area had a good view of a nearby building bearing a sign "Amish". We paid and most of us successfully slipped by the photo op guys, passed through the metal detectors, got accosted by some Chinese good-luck hand-stamper, and stood by a railing overlooking the lower floor, waiting for the others, who didn't have the bluster to walk past the photo-op guys.
     At this point, Rena, who had pushed her sunglasses up above her forehead, as seems to be eerily popular these days, leaned back against the railing. The glasses slipped slowly from her hair, and she turned just in time to see them fall the forty feet to the floor below. While she went down to retrieve them, the rest of the group clustered by the railing, estimating how high it was, and how Rena would get by the security gates and into the secure area where her glasses had fallen. Many times other tourists queued up behind Stuart, who was at the end of our group, thinking we were in line for some special treat. We all took pictures as Rena slipped under the gate and picked up her glasses. Finally, she caught back up with us and we were herded into the express freight elevator headed to the top!
     On the 107th floor is a glassed-in observation deck, with odd ski-lift-like seating compartments which allow you to look nearly straight down. We started with a northeast view, and I identified the Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburg, Queensboro, and 59th Street Bridges. I also noted Roosevelt Island and LaGuardia airport (near where Linda used to live, sandwiched between LaGuardia and Rikers Island). Looking north: Fifth Avenue, Washington Square Park, the Chrysler and Empire State Buildings, and the GW Bridge. Directly west was New Jersey and a great view of the office towers where Sapient's old and current Jersey City offices have been housed. And south was Ellis Island, the Statue of Liberty, Governors Island, and Staten Island. The view was fantastic, but I couldn't see the west side pier where the USS Intrepid was docked, because the other WTC tower blocked the view in the northwest direction. While we gawked, several of us stopped at the gift shop, and Max bought a set of clear NYPD shot glasses to go with the blue ones he's obtained at the airport!
     But the real treat was still further up. There's an escalator that leads up to the 110th floor, the open roof of the building! The view from up there was breathtaking, and I never had any sense of fearful heights. People are kept a good 12-15 feet from the edge of the building by a railing, a 12-foot drop onto another platform, a big cyclone fence topped with razorwire, and a couple electrified rails, which also makes it impossible to see straight down, as you could on observation deck. Max was telling us about all those precautions against "jumpers", and also pointed out the two-foot markers on the edge to document where people jump, and the automated cameras maintained by local television stations to capture any jumpers on tape, when a woman came up and expressed her disbelief at all those precautions. Max sent her on her way before reassuring us that the marks were probably as much for window-washers as jumpers, and that the video cameras would also be useful in capturing a bird's eye view of the whole city, not just jumpers!
     For myself, I was surprised by the lack of wind on the roof. I had been expecting as much wind as you get in the canyons at street level, but there really was very little wind at all up there. In addition, there was much less smog, and virtually no noise of traffic or anything else! In the summer sun, it was a wonderful treat, and we hung around up there for more than half an hour, talking, resting, taking pictures of one another (including the infamous recursive group shot), enjoying the view, and just lounging in the sun.
     After passing the photo op booth on the way back out, people stopped at a bathroom on 107. Meanwhile, I found and pointed out an empty four-foot square closet with a glass door bearing the logo of an interior design firm -- very odd. Returning to ground level, the group got drinks while Alan went to fetch the van. In the pizza joint I'd gotten lunch from, as I ordered my Coke I noticed one of the cooks by the pizza oven yelling through a two-foot hole cut in the tile floor; apparently that was their cellar access, and he was asking someone down there for more Snapple! Outside, Stu and Jon went in search of a drug store to procure film […]

I guess it’s a bit silly trying to communicate the value of silence through words, but it really was something quite special. I think everyone recognized that, because we stayed up there quite some time, just enjoying the quiet and the open breeze.

I’ve always had a very strong appreciation of silence, and I think it’s kind of interesting that one of the most compelling experiences I’ve had was experiencing it in the middle of the biggest city on the planet, atop a pair of buildings that no longer exist.

New York memories

My first trip to New York was on November 11, 1984, for a gathering of Internet chat users. Mind you, this was well before IRC was written, or Relay (IRC’s predecessor). In fact, the Internet really wasn’t there yet; it had no interactive messaging facility. I grew up on something called BITNET, one of the consitutent networks that eventually evolved into the Internet. Anyways, this was arguably the first ever Internet chat get-together.

I wasn’t in the best of situations going into it. See, there were these two girls from UConn—Cathy and Randi—whom I was flirting with. Oh, and then my good friend Lothie was coming up, and she and I were kinda getting together somewhat, too. Oh, and have I mentioned that amidst all this bounty, I had my eye on this really cute chick who showed up with someone else? Yeah… That was Linda, my future wife. Those were the days, huh?

That was also the visit where Lothie and I went over to Godiva Chocolatier on 5th Ave, then got caught in one of those abject NYC downpours.

The next trip I remember was three months later, when I took the bus down from Maine to surprise Linda at the computer center at Queens College. I managed to get from Grand Central onto the subway line to Queens all by myself very late one night. Then at one stop, all these huge dirty black guys came on the train with axes and picks and stuff. I eventually clued in that it was a track crew, but it was enough to really scare the little boy from Maine!

There are various memories of trips down to the city while Linda and I were together. Initially, Linda’s parents refused to meet me, so I had nowhere to stay. I remember staying one night at the Bitnic offices, and other nights at a student hostel near Madison Square Garden. In the meantime, I bowled a nearly perfect game at MSG’s bowling alley. I stayed one night on Staten Island with my friend Hillary, and spent several nights during Purim in the basement of an orthodox Jewish household. That was the setting for the worst illness of my life, after I was food poisoned after eating bad Chinese food in Chinatown.

One morning Linda and I were supposed to meet at a subway stop in Manhattan. It was the morning of Hurricane Gloria, in October 1985. Linda didn’t venture out in the storm, but I did, waiting several hours for the storm to pass before I finally gave up and took the train out to her parents’ house. Meanwhile, Linda had left to go look for me, and her folks had no other recourse but to actually answer the door. Thereafter, they loved me, and we didn’t have any more problems with their denying my existence.

Those trips to New York with Linda were great. Hanging around the Village and Washington Square, ice cream at Swenson’s. visiting Tower Records and Forbidden Planet and Star Magic and the Compleat Strategist. Hanging around Astoria and Ditmars Boulevard. Taking the Merritt/Hutchinson River Parkway to the Whitestone. New York pretzels. Each time we returned from Pennsic, her parents’ house was where we got out first warm showers in more than a week. Watching the Superman balloon’s severed hand floating gently to the ground when he got caught in the trees when we went to see the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade…

Her parents were… unique. Her mother would buy us all kinds of garbage which we had no use for from the Home Shopping Network. In a house with only three people, they had four televisions, and all of them had to be on and blaring at least 98 dB, or else one of them would come into the room and turn it on and start flipping channels. “What! Don’t you like television! Here! Here’s a science program! I love science programs!” And wearing rubber boots is bad because they’ll make your feet swell up and they’ll have to cut them off your feet. Yeah. What do you want; they read and believe what’s written in the New York Post.

After Linda and I separated, I went down to New York a couple times with my buddies Barry and Sean. We did a little clubbing, and I remember hitting a show at the Knitting Factory. We also caught a Blue Man Group show back around 1992 when they were still a small three-person local outfit, and we sat in the absolute back/top of the multi-floor theater, so we got to initiate the big TP-storm at the end. More good times. Well, except for the Fourth of July, when you couldn’t differentiate between the fireworks and the gunshots, and the concussion made all the car alarms in the city go off simultaneously…

Around 1995 I spent a week living in co-worker Steve C.’s West Village apartment while working on a project for Wells Fargo out of Sapient’s Jersey City office. That was a fun time. And I seem to recall hitting a BDSM club on the west side sometime around then.

But my trips to the city were few and far between after that. Alan L. hosted the 1999 DargonZine Writers’ Summit in New York, which included a trip to Fort Tryon Park and the Cloisters, which Linda had always promised to take me to. We also spent a couple hours on the roof of the World Trade Center towers, enjoying the sun, the breeze, the view, and the surprisingly total silence. Two years later, they (the towers) were gone. It’s still kind of an eerie feeling to have been there not too long before they came down. I haven’t been back to the site since.

I don’t think I went back to New York for eight years after that Summit. About a year ago, I took the Acela down in early December to visit a client—a prestigious lingerie retailer—in midtown. I didn’t have much time, but managed to snag a pretzel and wander around a little.

A month or two ago I had to go down for another meeting with the same client, and had a little more time to walk around (and it was significantly warmer than it had been in December). It was nice, although I still would enjoy spending a week or even just a weekend down there.

In case you can’t tell, I miss New York. It is a cool place to visit and hang around, and it was especially good when I had Linda to serve as a native guide. You couldn’t pay me enough to live there—Boston’s a much more manageable and friendly town—but it’s no further away than Maine, where I go every 4-8 weeks, so I really should be making trips down there more often than once every eight years.

Roll on, big mama

Ladies… I don’t mean to pick on you exclusively, but sometimes you are such hypocrites.

Let’s talk about the toilet seat, shall we? You expect male visitors to leave the toilet seat the way they found it: down, right? And woe to the hapless man who forgets even once!

Well, now let’s talk about the grim reality. The protocol in my house is that both the toilet seat and the toilet lid stay down. Yet how many times has a female guest left the seat down, but the lid up? Just about every one.

It’s common courtesy for a visitor to leave your house in the same state it was in before you arrived. So why is it so difficult for most women to honor the same rule you so vocally demand that men live by?

Let’s take another example: the Brita. In some houses, the Brita pitcher stays on the counter, full of room-temperature water; in others, it is found inside the fridge, where the water stays cold. I don’t go around putting your pitcher in your fridge, so why do some of my female friends self-righteously insist upon always leaving the damned thing out on the counter?

And the toilet paper… Given that the 51 percent of America that is female uses 87 percent of the nation’s toilet paper, one might expect them to predictably replace the roll in the same orientation they found it. Results indicate otherwise.

How about the shower head? Do you leave it pointed in the same direction it was when you arrived? And on the same spray vs. stream setting? And did you remember to set the tub/shower toggle back to the setting it was on before you arrived?

Really? You know what? Your sistren don’t.

I guess I’m beginning to see the value in having a guest bathroom. But irrespective of that, can we lose the double standard? You’re not gaining my respect by falsely accusing me of thoughtlessness, then turning around and engaging in the very behavior you condemn all of mankind for.

There’s a reason it was named after Eunuchs

Call me a revolutionary, but I don’t see any reason why we should use an operating system that was intentionally designed to be user-unfriendly, and which was designed 40 years ago, back when 8-track tapes were the state of the art and the two-byte difference between “copy” and “cp” was really, really important.

I still marvel as my Linux weenie coworkers have to kill hours rebuilding their entire file system because they powered Unix down without going through the formal shutdown process. Oh yeah, and don’t forget that it allows users to create a file called “~”. Just don’t ever try deleting it, because the tilde is also a shorthand notation for your home directory! Now ain’t that intuitive? And don’t forget the Windows Find post I made last year at this time…

Unix is a fossil, and running Linux is like making your Twenty-First Century laptop backwards-compatible with rocks. I’m not saying Windows is especially great, but I am saying that Unix is not a serious platform for anyone who wants to actually get work done, as opposed to dicking around with obscure incantations.

That was what I was thinking when the following exchange occurred at work:

Orn: Why don’t my Windows keys work?
Jay: Install Linux
Orn: Yeah, like I want to type Ctrl-Alt-Shift-T-Backspace-U to login.

I think that kind of key combination is pretty typical of Unix. I just made up a completely random and undocumented sequence of keys on the spot to poke fun at Unix’s patently stupid fixation on arcane and unintuitive escape sequences. Jay thought it was funny and used that exchange as his instant messenger away message for a while.

Ironically, one of our senior technical architects noticed Jay’s away message. He runs Linux, and out of curiosity and sheer stupidity, actually typed it into his Linux box.

What did it do? It killed his X Windows. Brilliant! Gotta love a system that’ll let you type a random key combination and crash your whole windowing system.

You may now picture all the Unix weenies who read this post doing the same thing, just to see what happens…

There is only one Stupid Unix Trick, and that’s ever installing that shit.