(Phaysis)

I’m tired. I hate computers. I had too much dinner, and this coffee is too little, too late. Is this what being a grownup is like? Because I don’t like it. There was a power outage at my apartment today. Lasted almost an hour, much longer than my UPS backup systems can sustain. In other news, my UPS batteries last no more than 7 minutes on my router and 12 minutes on my desktop. I got home from a very long day at work and saw things weren’t right. All I wanted to do was shuck off my stuffy business casual and get very comfortable, but no, the computers were needy. Very, very needy. Is this what having kids is like? Because it’s the closest I’ll ever get. I can hate computers, and I can hate kids, but I can’t hate kids if they are mine. Right? So very needy.

So very tired.

Listening to Sophie & Ives’ song “Awaken”. Fucking phenomenal. Product of a transoceanic love affair between two artists, an american man and a New Zealand woman. An impossible love affair made possible by the internet. The hunger of the lyrics, and embrace of the music. Fuck. This is why I love the net; this kind of stuff exists. This is how I pictured the net in the idealism of my mid-20′s, a scant decade ago.

I dug out my boxes of floppies. Decided that since I have a lot of disk space I should probably backup those dusty pieces of yesteryear onto something a little more modern. Floppies and cdroms are poor mediums for long-term archival. Took two evenings, but I got through everything. Sorted and categorized everything into driver disks, boot disks, and important data. Backed up what I felt important. Found three floppies that contained all of the data I backed up from my three VAX accounts on my last week in school, December ’95. Every worthwhile email, every source code file, every text file, every configuration file. It’s all there.

Found a philosophical op-ed piece I wrote in September ’95 in the VAX lab. Forgot that I wrote that beast. Some generic 20-something blag about “This is our/your life, this is our/your world. Take it, use it, live it!” I obviously had some high hopes about the future although I was in the midst of failing miserably in my own schooling. Had no money for books; was dropping out of classes one by one; was working a night job and distancing myself from the very reason why I was in school, and for what? Some idealistic zeal that I just couldn’t shake even after leaving the religious environment which spawned it.

Yet there I was; writing about how we may come from chaos and shackles but through hope, through grasping onto the Now, through embracing new things (like the Internet), we may liberate ourselves and live the grand life we have all imagined. It’s apparent to me, in hindsight, that I had some obviously unresolved existential issues (still do). But the heart was still there: the desire to connect with others, to reach out, trade strength with people “out there” to build for ourselves a better world. Ten years later, a slim glint of that hope still exists in me, but to be perfectly honest, I’m too tired for idealism.

I’ve spun other yarns over the years about the salvation achieved by friends and strangers reaching out and offering kind words, helpful life advice, providing solace to those desolate and of ill psyche. Yarns about how we’re all on this great worldwide network and that it’s our Tomorrow. But the past six years have tought me, if anything, that such a dream cannot, and never will, be. We have forum users calling each other fags. Image boards are waging war on each other. A genre of websites has spawned that use other site’s content in order to serve their own share of the advertising market. It’s all money and marketshare now. Genuity is out with yesterday’s newspaper, seen as a weakness and as source material for someone else’s website.

I thought anonymity would save us; but it has doomed us to partisan bickering, flames, and trolls. It’s discouraging; gives me reason to not post anything on my blog.

Some replacements that’ve needed to happen for a long time are now happening at once. It’s unsettling.

First is my laptop. It’s old, it’s busted. It has developed a habit of shutting off at random. After some testing, I determined it was either a) that my installation of Windows XP somehow got pooched or b) the power circuitry, cdrom, or battery is intermittently killing it. So, I uninstalled everything, backed up my important stuff to my desktop machine, and reinstalled Windows.

Reinstallation is, for some of us who live on our computers, a debasing ordeal; all your customizations are lost, all the hacks, programs, and shortcuts you take for granted to get your stuff done are completely undone. You realize what it is about the default configurations that drive you to make those changes. And now I’m going back through all that.

So far, everything is fine. The power did zap off during the install so I had to restart, which makes me wonder if it’s actually the hardware instead. If it is, and if I can’t get this thing to run confidently, then I’m essentially without a laptop again and I’ll need to replace it, which is a pricy possibility.

Second, yet foremost on my mind, is The Dragonfly, my 1993 Mitsubishi Mirage. It’s thirteen years old, smokes like a train, fails emissions tests, and is falling apart. So, after eight and a half years of faithful, everloving service, I have to give it away.

In that regard, it’s time to replace it with another car. After very little looking around, I’ve found the car I want: a green 1999 Honda Civic LX. Four doors, five speeds. I test drove it yesterday, and it does well. I put a deposit on it to hold it, and the dealer offered $200 on a trade-in of my Mirage; basically giving it away (with a car that old, I’m pretty sure, the wholesalers will sell it for parts).

What I’m worried about most is this: money. The car, after all taxes, title, license, and dealer fees, will be $9321. I can swing that through financing. And I have $1000 available in my bank account to go towards down payment. But the dealer, it seems, wants $1500. I’m trying my bank’s financing to see what they can offer. A $500 difference won’t make much of a change in the monthly payment amount, but it’ll affect my interest rate. I guess if I can borrow out of my 401(k) plan at work, I can make it all work out, but everything will have to wait until Tuesday when the work week picks back up.

I know that I want this car, and that it’ll treat me well for years, but I am completely full of trepidation. There’s this feeling I get when it comes to dealing with large amounts of money, like I’m in trouble with my superiors or something. I felt it twice every semester back when I was in college: once at the beginning when I signed my promisory notes for student loans, and once at the end when I was signing another loan to round out my account for finals. I felt it when I signed the financing for my Mirage. And I’m feeling it now.

Am I making a $9321 mistake? Did I make a $200 mistake on the non-refundable deposit? Am I outstretching my reach by affixing my signature to the dotted line without more research, more digging, more financial wisdom? I hope not.

Late last night I was in a discussion with a friend on the current state of computers and their usefulness to the general public. By general public, I mean to say the people we know, such as our families or friends, who are less technically proficient than we are. Computers are our hobby and livelihood; however, to them, they are confusing tools, boxes of the Unknown. The transcript which follows is from that conversation.

Shawn: Personally, I still think the PC has a seriously long way to go before it’s as intuitive as a television.
Clarkk: Indeed it does.
Shawn: Anyone who has done technical support can testify. PREACH IT!
For every “I tried to download my webpage to my cdrom, but the kids can’t play this game,” there is an equal but opposite, “It’s…I…hold on…no, see it’s…let me just do it for you, ok?”
Clarkk: Yeah. :0 VNC is wonderful for that. Esp. over VPN link to offices half-way around the planet.
Shawn: Yeah. I find myself praying that my sister and bro-law never ever get another computer ever again.
Clarkk: Do they not have one right now?
Shawn: Nope. They’ve had two.
Clarkk: Ah.
Shawn: Granted, they have three kids. But if they have to maintain a computer and keep it running, they’re better off having an Xbox. Actually, if my family gets computers, those machines need to be the most simple, most dumbed-down surfing-the-web devices. Web browsing, writing school papers, storing digital pictures, maybe tracking money. And that is all.
The I-Opener had so much potential because of its extreme simplicity. Perhaps down the road I can build a mini-itx system with an lcd screen, small keyboard, and a stripped-down OS. And hand them a set of USB keychains to carry files on. They understand things like that. Like memory cards for game consoles.
When they log in, a window pops up giving them access to their own file bucket. And they can drag files between their keychain and their bucket, or to a shared bucket. I don’t want them to see a single piece of OS filesystem.
Clarkk: Yeah.
Shawn: They don’t understand guts. They understand objects. Things.
Clarkk: Which is why people came up with the file and folder abstractions. Though, when you have enough files and folders, things still get “interesting”.
Shawn: Yeah. Even now, the file and folder idiom is obsolete.
Clarkk: Well…it has been around since the early 80′s.
Shawn: Yeah, it was created to resemble the idioms of the office to better help offices in their transition to using computers. And HFS held some promise, but Apple is letting it die. A folder for programs. A folder for the system. A folder for prefs. A folder for personal files. Clean.
Clarkk: Apple isn’t letting HFS die…HFS+ is still the native install format for OSX.
Shawn: Ah. heh. Still, it relies on folders and files. Say you have a ton of pictures. You have them clumped together in a pictures pile. Some of those pictures are from a visit to Big Bend. You also have video from your visit to Big Bend, and a pdf brochure of the Big Bend area. How do you organize this?
Most people would clump all the files into one big folder. Others, in a naive effort to be more savvy, might create a subfolder called “Big Bend” and dump everything related into it.
Clarkk: Yeah…
Shawn: The problem comes when you want to view all the pictures you have featuring your little brother. You’d have a clump of pictures to search through, but if you’re not so savvy, you’d probably accidentally skip the Big Bend pix. So a cure would be to copy the pictures, make duplicates in each relevant subfolder. When you ultimately run out of disk space, you go on a cleaning jihad, wherein it’s likely that you’ll unwittingly delete all copies of a duplicate, sending the image off to the aether forever.
Clarkk: The major problem is sheer amount of stuff…and wanting to put it multiple places.
Shawn: Yeah, exactly. I’ve observed people behaving in ways that tend towards this while they were using their laptops. Watch people long enough, you see their habits.
Clarkk: Yeah.
Shawn: Everything gets dumped into “My Documents”, and they scroll and scroll until they find their item to manipulate.
Clarkk: Flickr has some interesting ways to work on things…though you end up working with the images as files until you upload them.
Shawn: Exactly.
Clarkk: Yeah… But i’ve been used to organizing my files for a long time…and can keep enough of where stuff is in my head, that it isn’t painful to do.
Shawn: Yeah, I have my files stored in a certain prescribed, yet inconsistent, hierarchy. Anyone who is unfortunate enough to use my computer will be lost.
Clarkk: Yeah…sounds like me. I can find stuff, but other people would have to grep and so forth.
Shawn: A folder for images. A folder for music. A folder for video. Etc. But even within and between those folders there’s relation and inconsistency. So. What is a solution?
Clarkk: Tags?
Shawn: All the files go in a bucket. When you put them there, you can give them tags, quick blurbs of what the items are. If they’re pictures, you can say where it was taken, who’s in the picture, etc. If it’s a song, the ID3 tag adds detail.
Clarkk: Store all the data in a DB, and access it via other interfaces…. :)
Shawn: Then, you can sort and retrieve. It’s possible to have a user interface that handles “things” in a way that’s relational.
Clarkk: True…but we’ve not moved to interfaces that handle things relationally, and in some cases where we have, they’ve occasionally broken, so there need to be ways to fix them.
Shawn: Yeah, as far as administration of a machine goes, yes there can be an expert mode, just as a webserver has both a public-facing and an internal-facing interface.
The Web is giving us a slew of new ways to handle things. It will be a good day when that flexibility reaches the desktop. Google Desktop is a start.
Clarkk: Other than it stores things off your computer, creating privacy issues.
Shawn: That’s why I said it was a start. :)
Clarkk: :)
Shawn: So users can potentially store, retrieve, and manipulate things of various predefined “types”. If a new thingtype comes into existence, they can add that capability through the UI. More advanced users can create thingtypes as well. This is kind of the tack I’m taking with my website engine, as we may have discussed before.
Clarkk: Ahh. :)
Shawn: Internally, all the Things are in one big bucket. Each Thing is of a certain Thingtype. Each Thingtype has a certain set of ways to look at and manipulate it. You can take Things and put them into Collections. A Thing can be in any number of Collections. I assume Flickr is similar in allowing you to assign an image to any number of sets.
Clarkk: Yeah. Any number of sets, any number of tags on the image, any number of pools (shared sets, basically). Search by tag or tag set.
– Shawn nods
Shawn: This is the methodology people are getting savvy to. This needs to be on their computers. Windows Search, Macintosh Sherlock (or its modern variants), Google Desktop…those are getting close. But not close enough for the Daily Joe or Sometimes Sue.
Clarkk: Yeah. Spotlight is the later variant of Sherlock on OSX. Though I think Sherlock is still included.
Shawn: Once people are in a web browser, they understand things. Once they close their browser, they are lost in their own front yard. It’s not a condemnation on them, it’s a condemnation on the technology.

---

What I find most condemning is that no major software or hardware manufacturer has stepped forward publicly to reddress the idioms that they’ve established their businesses upon. A lot of us understand the folder/file/desktop idiom. A lot of us comprehend the guts of our computer systems. But, even with the current state of User Interface design, most of the general public is completely lost and dazed when placed in front of a computer and asked to do a simple search for anything. It becomes increasingly complicated once you have a lot of naive users with a large install base to support (“naive” here is not intended as an insult).

Most operations a typical user needs to do are through a web browser; however, on owning and controlling their own machine, they are left with a heap of confusion. Popups convince them their system needs “cleaning software”. Unscrupulous vendors offer software at premium price to allow users to sort and manage their files, a feature natively offered by their operating system for free. Vendors of prebuilt systems offer “desktop launcher apps” that allow users to click on graphical pictures representing various functions like word processing, music playback, email, etcetera, but once clicked and the main applications launch, users are left to contend with the operating system and its filesystem underneath on their own.

The core of a public-class operating system does not need to be simple; underneath can exist a bulk of maintenance apps, firewalling, networking suites, and so on, things to make the computer work. The user interface, however, does need to be this simplified, object-relative idiom if computers are ever going to be as intuitive as any other piece of consumer electronics.

Read the Anti-Mac Interface, a paper published in 1996 by Don Gentner and Jakob Nielsen, which got me to thinking about the state of our User Interface idioms and where they could be greatly improved upon.

The past week has been something different.

Last weekend was, for the most part, pleasant. I hung out with some friends friday and saturday night, we went to eat, played games, had coffee, talked about stuff, and so on. Was cool. Sunday was just “blah” as almost all my sundays are.

Monday did not start off well. My house server crashed; just completely seized up. This is twice it’s done it in the past 2 months. The last crash completely stopped my personal record “uptime” of 190-odd days. And this time stopped an ongoing 42-day uptime. This was getting to be a hassle, so I knew what I had to do. Most importantly, I rebooted the server, logged in, fought to establish the house’s internet connection, dealt with looking through some of the logs to find nothing logged about the crash, and got up, still groggy and angered, to hurriedly get ready for work. I was late.

After work, I doddled around not doing much of anything outside of wondering what to do for the evening. Some time around 9pm I got hungry for Zen (a local Japanese fast-food chain). Knowing they had wireless, I went with my laptop and ate. Got online and met, in my IRC channel, another person from Austin (finally!). When dinner was done (and Zen was closing), I put my laptop, wireless card and all, in my backpack as I made my way to Bouldin Creek for some coffee and more laptop time. Somehow, the part of my wireless card that sticks out of the card slot got bent and cracked, so when I saw it, I went ahead and completed the damage by pulling the two pieces apart carefully to see what was inside. To my surprise I found that my crappy $50 wireless card HAS AN ANTENNA JACK. I couldn’t believe it. Bonus!

Tuesday, I got the notion to take advantage of the early voting. After work, I cruised by a school near my job thinking it was a polling place. Wouldn’t you know, it wasn’t. The nearest polling place was Highland Mall (how’s that for blurring the line between politics and commerce?). Remembering that I saw a polling place at the Randall’s Grocery on 38th and Kerbey Lane (blurrrr), I drove over, stood in line, showed my id, and cast my ballot on one of the new electronic tablets. I’m not pleased that Travis County is using them, but I still have faith that due process, and governmentally-minded diligence, will keep the ballot records faithful and true. I picked up an “I Voted” sticker and went my merry way with the smugness of being a Citizen of This Great Country(tm).

Later that night, I reconfigured my wireless router, which normally has the minor task of bridging wireless devices to the house network, to be the router, gateway, and dhcp server for the house while I shut down the main server for repairs. I pulled some unnecessary peripherals off of the server, like the parallel-port ZIP drive and the external 33.6 data/fax/voice modem (sniff), disconnected the server from its neverending umbilicals, and pulled it out of its cubbyhole in its corner of the living room. After pulling the cover off, I saw what amounted to about a pound of dark brown dust (smokers’ dust!). I took the server outside and attacked every nook and cranny of that thing with a can of compressed air and an old toothbrush. The patio is stained from dust smudges. Heh. Went back inside.

I removed the internal QIC-80 tape backup drive (don’t need it anymore, heh), discovered that the heatsink assembly is permanently fused to the CPU (thanks to the wonder of thermal paste), I rerouted the internal power cables and data ribbons for best airflow, and I built another fresh-air ducting hose (my best duct hose yet) and ran it from the bottom-back of the case to the CPU. With everything clean and reconnected and trimmed down, I put it back in place in the living room, reconfigured the cabling, and powered up. Another hour later I had the automatic network configuration scripts analyzed, debugged, and working flawlessly; it now reboots and connects to the internet automatically and completely hands-free. And I am happy.

So happy, I went to bed late enough to get only 4 hours of sleep. I was late for work the next morning.

Wednesday, the night of the lunar eclipse, was something weird. Really weird. It seemed that all manner of things were finally coming together. After work I drove to Fry’s Electronics to see if I could find an adaptor for my wireless card’s antenna jack. Not surprisingly, none could be found. So about half an hour of digging and another half an hour browsing, I left with a new floppy cable for my server.

I get home and check my voicemail. Nothing important; just a call from a local company, Beneficial, asking me (by name) to call them (I had no clue who this company is; it wasn’t until today, after online research, that I found out they’re a debt consolidation place – bastards). Not the message I was wanting to hear; I wanted to hear, “Hi, this is Waterloo records! Your CD is in!” Well, apparently the lunar eclipse did something strange to all the stuff that’s been building up and not happening, because I check my email and 1) get a message from my webhost saying an issue they’ve been dealing with is finally fixed, and 2) I get an email from a company called Tom Binh saying my hardshell laptop case has finally been shipped to me. In my elation, I grab my stuff and was about to leave the house when the phone rang. I answered, and it was Waterloo Records saying my CD was in. SWEET.

So I leave the house and the moon is just over halfway dark. Soooo incredibly weird and creepy and cool. I cast glances at it while I’m stopped at redlights, and only some of the people in neighboring cars figured out what I was staring at. By the time I reached the CD shop, it was completely covered, and it was too cool. People were outside just chattering and watching. I went in, bought the disc, and made my way out to the coffeeshop. Suddenly sick from the coffee, I make my way home earlier than sensible, picked up some food, and got home in time to see these low, streaked, fast-moving clouds swoop in and completely obscure the sky and the moon which was just uncovering itself. In that brief period, something changed.

Thursday, among my emails, I get one from a man I have not seen nor heard from in 6 years. He is one of the people I’ve listed on my Canonical List of Memorable Ouachita People(tm). He found me by googling his own name (as was my plan), found my site, located the journal entry from May 2004, and proceeded to email me. It is a surprise to see a plan like that work that well. So far, that makes 3 people who have found me. I will write him soon. There is so much to catch up on.

Well, earlier that Thursday I get a tip from a friend of mine that there indeed are halloween party plans for the weekend, and we set forth brainstorming costume ideas. I settled on an idea and ran with it. Later that night I went to a big-box store, browsed for stuff for the costume, ended up buying some necessary clothing like jeans, t-shirts, and bought a toy gun for the costume. My idea was to go dressed as Kurt Cobain. I had almost everything I needed; all that was left was a gun, a pair of black square-framed glasses, and a cardigan sweater. Well, I had the gun thing right, but it was wrong – he was killed by a shotgun, not a revolver; an easy exchange. So, friday, I went to another big-box and found the cardigan, and elsewhere found the glasses. Success. Things were looking up.

That night, as I went to have coffee at the usual friday-night hangout, I found some old friends from Mojo’s who, just like me, had exhiled themselves elsewhere. It was good to hang out with them. Got caught up on things, but the conversations went south and things descended into the very same places they would go back when I still hung out at Mojo’s. It’s like nothing changed. My usual bunch didn’t show up at all, and instead I got The Replacements. I don’t want to look at it like that, but that’s how it felt. (Hope you understand.) Loaded up on 3 mugs of iced tea and a lungfull of other people’s smoke, I headed home at closing time, prodded at the internet, and went to sleep.

Saturday, I felt like hell. Absolute hell. I knew I had the party to go to that night, but to be honest I didn’t feel like meeting new people, didn’t want to dress up, didn’t want to go with a plan that was, at best, tenuously made. I had made all these plans on the thin thread that a friend of mine’s girlfriend’s coworker was throwing it. I’d never met this person, didn’t know where she lived, and felt it best if I only went escorted by my friend and his girlfriend.

Well, after some dinner late in the day, I had considered it, and decided that whatever the plans were, if I was going to go out, to the party, to the 6th Street thing, or to a bar, having a toy popgun would have been a hazardous proposition at best. So I returned to the big-box and got a refund on the toy. I later contacted my friend and found out that he and his Other were not going to make the party. They backed out, so I felt kind of relieved and bummed at the same time.

I returned the reading glasses I had bought, got my money back (I’m not returning the cardigan – I’m planning on wearing it still). They announced that they were instead going to the coffeeshop they were going to visit friday night, so I met up with them and just, i dunno, hung out. I didn’t speak much to anyone, and I apologize if I came off distant, aloof, and bored. I was there in body, but my mind was just, I dunno, clicked off. I was still nursing the same all-day headache and the caffeine hangover from the night before, and I was around more smoking again. So when everyone made plans to disperse and watch movies, I shook my hands to the negative and went home. Spent a short time online, then went to bed just as the time changed from 1:59am to 1:00am.

Today, I got up after 7 or 8 broken hours of sleep. Bummed around, chatting online, listening to music, trying to intake some caffeine and a pop tart, and around 3 hours after I woke up I went down for a 40-minute nap. Finally got up when the album I was listening to was finished, cleaned myself up, took a shower, and pulled all the dirty clothes and linens together. Left the house.

Got a sandwich from Thundercloud (the guy got my order wrong and made the wrong sandwich, but fixed it at no charge). As I ate, an accident happened at the intersection right outside the restaurant; the small truck looked ok, the big suburban looked all bent-up bad. As I left, I saw this hot girl who works there (and who, I’m sure, would never give me any time of day). Made my way to one of the smaller laundromats to discover NO parking spaces left, so I went to my usual and braced for the crowds and prices. Did laundry, came back home, unpacked, remade my bed, and frumped online.

Finally left again. As I went to Bouldin Creek, where their wireless is STILL fubarred, I almost got into a wreck with this bitch driving a minivan who thought that using signals was something other people did; she didn’t see me as she swerved into my lane to avoid rear-ending this line of cars stopped in her lane — luckily she missed all of us. So, after a longer-than-necessary drive, I got there, got a coffee, got some code to poke at, got my head good and twisted around this one set of technical problems, got sick at the coffee again and got annoyed by this (apparently) mentally-handicapped person with a political grudge, so I got up and left at 9pm (!!) for home. Got food, came home (almost got into another wreck because of a stupid college jock asshole who forgot courtesy), ate, and now I’m here, writing a journal entry.

It’s been a weird week. And I’m just not happy. Some things are finally working out, stuff is moving, but I’m just not happy. I feel nothing but caffeine addiction, loss of sleep, and no joy in my job, my social life, my lack of interaction, nor my place in this town or this world. I just, bleh.

Damn these public journals.