Author Archives: Kyle Kimberlin

Gabrielle Gifford’s First Vote

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http://www.cnn.com/2011/POLITICS/08/01/debt.talks/index.html?iref=BN1&hpt=hp_t1

"One of those supporting the plan was Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Arizona, who cast her first House vote since being shot in the head in an assassination attempt in January.

In an emotional moment, Giffords entered the chamber during the vote and received a prolonged standing ovation from her colleagues. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi hugged Giffords as other House members mobbed her, and the commotion diverted attention from the ongoing vote total showing the measure would pass."

By God, that gives us all a reason to smile in the midst of an otherwise snarkworthy day.

Move On Already!

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I posted to Facebook early today, “Somebody tell me we’ll look back at this someday and laugh.” There’s been no response. I don’t think anybody out there feels that way. We feel used and betrayed, sold out. This debt ceiling business just isn’t any fun anymore.

So I signed a petition today on Moveon.org.

"No cuts. No deals. End this madness now and pass a clean debt ceiling increase so America doesn’t default."

On the petition, which you can access by clicking here if you choose, there is a space for personal comments. I’m always hesitant to sign some things that should really be directed to members of congress other than those who personally represent my part of the country. Living where I do, I am represented entirely by liberal Democrats. They send these petitions to the elected reps of the signer, based on zip code I suppose. And I want to say No! Send it to the asshats who are causing the problem!

But today I’m pissed off at the Legislature in general, both houses, both parties. And I’m not feeling warm and fuzzy about the other 2 branches of government either. Accordingly, with the temperature between my ears being what it is, here is what I wrote.

I know my Representative and Senators are not directly to blame, but I’m so mad right now I can’t stand it. We gave Congress our credit card and you went on a spending spree for wars we didn’t need or want and can’t afford to pay for. That’s why we’re in this mess: huge pork for the military-industrial complex. Knock it off! And make good on what we borrowed! Or it is your job. 

No swear words. I was a good Boy Scout, considering. I mean, how much more of this unremitting anxiety can we tolerate from people who work for us?

I share this as a reminder to my readers that, although my blog is hopefully mostly a literary one, it started out in opposition to George W. Bush’s attack on Iraq, in the days leading up to Shock and Awe.

I remain forever and entirely opposed to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We have seen their effects on the innocents of those countries, on our troops and their families, on our culture and civil liberties, and now on our economy.

I guess my point is basically I told you so. 

Here are a few links to share.

Dwight D. Eisenhower’s speech on the Military Industrial Complex. He warned us.

Squelch – an obscure, anonymous, spleen-venting political blog. I like it – it’s a little like scratching a psychic itch.

Politico – a very good high-end site for political news of the day.

The Nation – venerable, comprehensive, and a favorite news and insight source of mine for about 30 years now. Not surprising, since they’ve been publishing since the Civil War. 

NFL lockout ends: are we locked in?

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I’m glad to see the dispute between players and asshats corporations owners has ended and the season is back on track. But does that mean that we’re all doomed to lose our Sundays, ignore our families, and obsess over trivialities of the sport?

Maybe. At least, this writer at Time raises the issue. http://goo.gl/WVlqE.

But hey, we can record games and watch later, right? We don’t have to burn daylight every weekend. And if you record and watch, you can zoom through the commercials. We have them memorized before they’re produced anyway. Except for the Super Bowl. Those commercials are sometimes better than the game.

Captain’s Blog Stardate 20110727

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P80_19_braid

"Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small, unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea."*

As a little kid I imagined future technology: cars without steering wheels, computers that spoke with us out of thin air. Humans would be different, all the same basic size and shape, carrying little communicators and wearing comfortable clothes.

Well, I was partly right. We’re getting the communicator thing down so well that I even the Sci-Fi writers of my youth didn’t imagine their power and ubiquity. And I don’t think the touchless, voice-controlled computer is very far off. (Our cell phones have voice commands, but they’re more reactive than interactive. Like the government.) We still have to steer the car, though Google is working on a Driverless Car right now; in fact, it already works for their engineers. I don’t think clothes have really changed very much.

I got one thing about future tech very wrong: I imagined that future being farther away that it turned out to be. I imagined the new world without me or you still in it. I thought the world of my childhood – in terms of our tools and toys – would be basically the same in my middle age, that technology would advance more slowly. I – we – would be long gone before cars looked like this.

2009 Cadillac Converj Concept

That’s a 2012 Cadillac. Click to enlarge.

They say that one sign of intelligence is the ability to hold two contradictory concepts in the mind at one type time, and accept them both as possibly valid. So I give you a couple of concepts to ponder: A typewriter and an Apple iPad. (The latter, you’ll notice is just a screen with keys, no keyboard at all.)

royal ipad 

Click to enlarge.

Who would have thought that in a short time we would type without buttons or keys, and publish without paper? But if you sent out today to buy either a 1937 Royal desk typewriter or an Apple iPad, which would be easier to find? And easier to use? I’ve used a Royal typewriter and it was hard to make it work! People who did it for a living were called typists. It was a hard job for low pay and it no longer exists in the world, as far as I know.

Do any companies still have people who do word processing – transcribing dictation? I don’t know. That was common in the 1980s and into the 1990s. Guys like me would dictate memos, letters, etc., with recorders, then take the little tapes to be transcribed. Then we got our work back printed on thinly pressed slices of tree.

Which reminds me of one Fail in the future tech that’s here so far: The paperless office we were promised 15 or 20 years ago. I’ve been trying to accomplish it for years but I can’t get other people to cooperate. I guess that can be a rant for another day.

I guess one of the most compelling ways in which computer technology has changed our lives so far is that anyone who wants to do it can be a writer and a publisher. For example, you’re looking at a page of a digital periodical, an occasional publication for which I do the writing and publish using a free medium. And over the years, Metaphor has been read over 20,000 times. That’s right, over twenty thousand deliveries. Not too shabby for a little blog with one frequently complacent writer, no paper, no costs, no charges, no advertising, and a very passive delivery system. And anyone can do it.

What do you suppose would have been required for Benjamin Franklin to put his Poor Richard’s Almanac into the hands of 20,000 citizens? A lot of money, time and effort. A lot of trees, too.

So here we are, the same bunch of primates who thought push button phones, the TV remote and the CB radio were pretty cool. And we’re blogging and using VOIP and feeling thankful that the VCR went the way of the Dodo before we had to take an adult ed class to program that sunofabitch.

It occurs to me, though, that it’s all teetering on a house of cards. I have a copy of Leaves of Grass that was printed before the Great Depression, and it survived on shelf somewhere because no special system was required to sustain its existence there. Not so with the Great Terra of Infinite Terabytes of human thought that we now have suspended around the planet in vast server farms and countless hard drives. All of that requires an economy to keep it going. What would it take to make all the stuff we know as modern life online just go blip and disappear? Not much. 

planetoftheapesendingIf Congress and the President fail to keep the lights of our tenuous, practically fictional economy burning next week, how far is it from default of the US to all the whirring drives of the Internet falling silent and blank? I mean we’re talking chain reaction, global economic meltdown, am I wrong?

I worry more about things like that, than whether Google+ is better than Facebook; more about America without Social Security and Medicare than about keyboards without keys.

New prime directive: the cloud must be sustained.

 

*Quote: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.

It’s So Fluffy!

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Hey, who knew about the new Note Links feature in Evernote and didn’t tell me?

I was just sitting down to write one of my mildly snarky software I hate to love posts. Tonight it was going to be about Evernote, and what I hated most about loving it. But I discovered that my complaint is no longer relevant. I couldn’t be happier. … Well, I could be happier. I could be a hell of a lot happier, but not about Evernote.

For those not familiar, Evernote is a note-taking and organizing platform. Wikipedia says, “Evernote is a suite of software and services designed for notetaking and archiving. A "note" can be a piece of formatted text, a full webpage or webpage excerpt, a photograph, a voice memo, or a handwritten "ink" note. Notes can also have file attachments. Notes can be sorted into folders, then tagged, annotated, edited, given comments, and searched.”  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evernote

Pretty cool, right? But until recently, notes could not be linked-to from other kinds of software. The only way to find, see, and use ones notes was to open and use Evernote. For example, if I was working on a document and I knew that I had a note about it in my Evernote program, I just had to remember it and go find it. I could make a note in the document. “See note about this in Evernote,” and that’s it. Evernote was a walled garden, a function unto itself. I was frequently creating notes then exporting them to Word, Notepad, Photoshop, etc., so that they could be part of projects that existed in those other formats. Extra work!

So I was going to say there needs to be a way to create a link in another program – such as Word – that opens a particular note in my Evernote program. It dawned on me to Google it first. Viola! The feature arrived last month and nobody told me. Well, Evernote probably did and I didn’t read all the specs on the latest version. It was mentioned on their site and I missed that too.

Here’s a page on the Evernote blog that explains the new feature and how to create links. It’s extremely easy and quick. http://goo.gl/WaVpn.

I left a note on the Evernote blog to say thanks for the feature. We should do that, you know, say thanks for free tools and toys.

Anyhoo, leave us celebrate with a wee clip from Despicable Me, about another way to get what you want and what you’ve got coming to you. Ever since I saw that movie, whenever I get something cool, I think “It’s So Fluffy!” 

Yeah. Sometimes I like animated movies for kids. I’m not sitting around watching Waiting for Godot over and Over and worrying about Schrödinger’s cat. (Not advisible, since the cat just might be me.)

I’m erudite, but I’m whimsical. Shut up. Smile

Alright, just for that, here’s the whole story about the darn cat. No fault of mine.

Inked Well

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Over at Drachenthrax, my friend Joseph has posted a splendid poem of love and death and the arrow of time, called Inklings of Hope. I commend that to you. Go and read it – chew it carefully a few times (always the best way to eat poems) – and come back here.

Joseph’s poem put me in mind of a poem by Pablo Neruda, which begins

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example,’The night is shattered
and the blue stars shiver in the distance.’
The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

And it brought to mind this poem I wrote about 15 years ago.

Sleepy Little Dog

I begin to write: the little dog
is sleeping by the door, breathing
the sour dampness of the yard,
her paws moving slightly, dreaming
of rabbits and the taste of grass….

I have come to know this pen,
the weight of it, the point
which must be turned just so. 
The cheap gold pitted
by the sweat of my hands.

My pen is hard and cold;
with it, I can write only words. 
Your voice and even least
amazing smile are lost
to the physics of thought.

The ink I use is black. 
I used all the blue for failing at love. 
I thought love was soft color,
carousel horses and a rainy day. 
But maybe it’s arc light and violence,
a tiger and a spray of blood.

So I was wrong, and this old
pen is useless, dead
without the rhythm of your step
and the flight of your hands.
But now it’s all I have, because
the dog has drifted off to sleep.

We went very different places when we began to think of ink as a metaphor. He toward hope and I another way. But I affirm that there is something primal about the act of inscribing the world with color, leaving one’s mark.

cave_painting_france

Creative Commons License
Sleepy Little Dog by J. Kyle Kimberlin
is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License.

New Blogger

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Blogger has a new interface for composing posts. It’s pretty cool. PC Magazine calls it “airy,” which seems right. Here’s their complete review, and they have screen shots so you can take a look at the new product. 

I’ve been using Microsoft Live Writer, a free desktop-based program, for quite a while. That’s because the Blogger writing interface was basically crap. It felt more like leaving a comment on a post than actually composing one. This new one seems much better.

You’ll notice the editor has been moved away from a box on the left, to a page view in the center of your screen. I hate typing in little squares of screen space. The post settings are on the right where you can get to them, instead of at the bottom. And all the formatting tools are conveniently arranged across the top.

Blogger automatically saves your work frequently, so you can relax.

There is still a problem entering a paragraph break, and that’s a significant concern. When you reach the end of a paragraph and press Enter to move down, nothing happens. You have to click your mouse button the current cursor location, or press the arrow key on your keyboard, then press Enter again. And I have to tell you, that in itself – if it’s not remedied – could become a reason to keep using more stable software. 

The new blogger is in Beta and not rolling out automatically to users right now. PC Magazine says that will happen this month or next. To try it now, go to draft.blogger.com. I think is well worth a look.