no waves please

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The earthquake in Chile today is awful. I feel sorry for the people down there. And these terrible earthquakes lately have me thinking that we could be next, here in southern California. Heaven forefend. So no thanks anyway on the tsunami.

I realize we aren't in serious jeopardy here, but there's nothing but a pitiful sand berm protecting the homes on Sandyland Road. And not much is left of that, with these storms we've been having.

It's kind of amazing, how tenuous life is on the coast, considering that people have been living here for several hundred years.

I see everything twice

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Without warning, the patient sat up in bed and shouted,

“I see everything twice!”

A nurse screamed and an orderly fainted. Doctors came running up from every direction with needles, lights, tubes, rubber mallets and oscillating metal tines. … A colonel with a large forehead and horn-rimmed glasses soon arrived at a diagnosis.

“It’s meningitis information overload,” he called out emphatically, waving the others back. “Although Lord knows there’s not the slightest reason for thinking so.”

OK, I changed the diagnosis, but otherwise that’s all from my 1961 copy of Catch-22. Chapter 18. The price on the cover is 75 cents. Retail paperback, not used or thrift store. I think the original owner was my Dad, and I remember being told to stay out of the book when I was little. Maybe it’s got some naughty bits, maybe Dad thought it was too weird, I wouldn’t understand it.

Come to think of it, maybe it wasn’t Catch-22 that was Taboo. Maybe it was a Joseph Wambaugh novel. The Blue Knight or something. Doesn’t matter

Today I don’t understand why we’re subjecting ourselves – willingly, hungrily – to so much information overload. It’s making us stupid. Don’t believe me? Well, I’m getting distracted by the message count on my Google Buzz, so I’ll let this funny guy make my point.

That’s a pretty good catch, that Catch-22, and that’s a pretty good trick, seeing everything twice. I’ve been doing it a lot lately, on Buzz and Facebook.

It has been suggested on Google Buzz that Buzz is the thinking person’s Facebook. No Farmville! is the battle cry. But Buzz users are re-posting their Buzz posts on Facebook, to reach the rest of their readership. So I’m seeing everything twice. A new surrealism for the digital age.

How many networking tools do we need? None. Well, at most I need 2: One for fun and friends, one for professional contacts. I use Facebook and Linkedin, respectively.

Google Buzz is only worth keeping, even sitting there in my Gmail interface, if the content it offers is unique. If I’m just seeing the same content I’ve already seen somewhere else, what’s the point? It’s a waste of time.

So if we’re going to do the Buzz thing, can we make a pact? Keep the content there unique?  Otherwise, Buzz truly is redundant and superfluous. 

"You have no respect for excessive authority or obsolete traditions. You’re dangerous and depraved, and you ought to be taken outside and shot!"
— Catch-22, Chapter 27

got soap?

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Watch your mouth, California, or the State is going to wash it for you.

ralphie_soap

The nation’s most populous state is asking its 38 million residents to stop using four-letter words for an entire week beginning Monday.

Assembly Approves Cuss Free Week – The Fresno Bee

Now, I thought I really ought to share this with you for 2 reasons:

I say fine, let’s do it. But if we’re going to do it, I insist we have Talk Like A Deadwood Character, just to be fair. I think the week of March 15 would be good. First week of Daylight Savings, St. Patrick’s Day, green beer. Perfect.

Second, this is the fist time in the long and storied life of Metaphor that I’ve had the chance to quote The Fresno Bee.

So, this is going to be really nice. Next week, while cities up and down the state are laying off cops, we can all speak politely about it. 

It’s a nice gesture, at the grassroots level, and I kinda have to respect it. But it’s ironic to note, as does The Bee, that it “comes four months after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger sparked headlines with an acrostic veto message that began with the letter "F" and ended with "You."

urgently urge

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Several times each day, I receive an urgent e-mail from an environmental or political group, urgently urging me to click a click or a button to send an urgent message to some elected official, urging them to do something. I receive these because over the years, I’ve acceded to many such requests, and they tend to spread like mushrooms.

I care about animals, the environment, and justice for all, so I click.

A few days later, here comes an e-mail from Washington – my congresswoman or one of my senators – thanking me. And it never says, “Oh spare me, I wouldn’t support saving the burping barbaloots if my life depended on it.” In fact, it almost always turns out they supported my side of the issue all along.

Sometimes, it turns out I have dramatically urged them to support their very own bill.

Basta. No more of this. It makes me – and the people who sent me the urgent e-mail – look very stupid. So henceforth, such pleas must include some affirmation that the representative to receive our petition is presently wrongheaded and needs to be set straight. Urgently.

Or I can simply unsubscribe. That’s a good idea too.

oh blog me

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Today I tried out a little piece of software. It’s an add-on for Microsoft Word called Blogger for Word. Don’t’ bother clicking the link, the thing doesn’t work. It installed a toolbar in Word, but … you know … FAIL. 🙂

If it had worked as advertised, I would have been able to:

“…use Blogger right within Microsoft® Word. Just download and install the Blogger for Word add-in and a Blogger toolbar will be added to Word …”

This would be extremely cool. I like to use Word to write stuff, but whenever I want to write for Metaphor I have to use something less robust.

I wrote this post in Word, then pasted it into Windows Live Writer. It works great. Nice Preview feature. I can publish from here, but if for some reason I need to edit the post in Blogger, I’ll have to reformat the paragraphs. Why can’t we all just get along?

What I learned is that the product was never completed. It came out several years ago, then was discontinued. It was supposedly, “no longer available for download.” But obviously Google never took down the download site; it’s still sitting there, like something moldy and smelly in the back of the fridge.

Come to think of it, I seem to remember trying Blogger for Word several years ago, and it didn’t work then.

It’s not that it’s a big deal, it’s just indicative of the fact that we need the companies that are providing our tech goods and services to cooperate on some level. The people who make aftermarket stuff for cars make stuff to work in certain cars. Otherwise, their stuff wouldn’t sell, right?

Why are we tolerating so many disparities in our computing lives?

OOo Oops

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Last night I was pretty perturbed at OOo – openoffice.org. To clarify, I wasn’t miffed because the site was down. You have to take them down sometimes, to migrate to a new server. Or so I’ve been told. I don’t care.

I was peeved because the page they put up to let us know that OOo was down didn’t mention OOo. There was no way to tell if you were reaching the right address, and finding the site under repair, or reaching the wrong address altogether. 

It’s like calling your friend Bob and hearing a voicemail greeting that says Dave’s not here right now, call back tomorrow. Ha ha ha.


Maybe you keep trying to call Bob, in case you mis-dialed. You waste time trying in vain to get through. I wasted time trying to reach OOo, because I had no good reason to think that it was really OOo that was down. It said CollabNet was down.

Then I starting to worry that my PC had another pharking virus, because a few years ago, my old Dell got a virus that started sending me to the wrong sites. The address would be right, but I’d wind up somewhere else. And then it killed the operating system and I had to reformat the hard drive.

That’s what I was thinking about last night, when the OpenOffice.org site said “CollabNet is currently down for scheduled maintenance….”

And I don’t care if CollabNet hosts OOo on its servers or something. They should have gone to the trouble to be clear. The Internets are big and slippery tubes, and we should have zero tolerance for fools who waste our time.
Lookin’ for Bob? Dave’s not here. Ha ha ha.

OOo was back up this morning, with no explanation for their sudden, apparently psychotic overnight name change. I guess they got back on their meds. Collabnet went back from whence it came. And I’m still not amused. 

arrrrghl

OpenOffice: fubar

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OpenOffice.org is down. Offline. And redirected. They just released an upgrade, which I was going to download tonight. I guess I’m not. The text that’s there doesn’t even say it’s OpenOffice, it says:

“CollabNet is currently down for scheduled maintenance.
As part of CollabNet’s expansion and improvement plan, we are upgrading the space in our datacenter to help better serve you as our customer. CollabNet is making improvements and expansions to the network, power, and the overall infrastructure of our datacenter space.
The maintenance is scheduled to conclude at 7:00AM PST Saturday morning. Please check back later.”

Who the heck is CollabNet? And why are they parked like a 75 Chevette on the OpenOffice site? I found CollabNet on Wikipedia, and it looks like they have some relationship with open source, which may explain something.   Tomorrow is cool. If it said OpenOffice is currently down… I’d have no complaints. But to take down a major site, with no mirror, and no splash to hold it’s place and confirm the URL and destination, is profoundly unprofessional.

I was really hoping I could escape the hamster wheel of MS Office this year, but Oracle bought Sun, leaving OpenOffice’s future uncertain, and now this. Disappointing.

cool stuff

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web sites of 2 artists

Public Gallery | Aaron Ristau

Glenray Tutor – Photorealist

Both are great. But the latter, espeically, spins memory back into childhood.

I remember staring into the depths of a marble and I wish I had a handful now.

I have noticed that many successful technical innovators have toys in their workspace. 

Since I’m writing a novel about 2 kids, maybe I need to scatter a few toys around in here. Maybe I’m using one now.

a quick note to e-mail subscribers

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The e-mail version is not the full presentation. It’s basically just the text, nicely presented by Feedburner, and links to the original content.

I sometimes post YouTube videos, photos, etc., and those will not show up in the e-mail you receive.

If the topic in the e-mail looks interesting, you might want to click the post title or the word Metaphor at the top of the e-mail. This will take you to the original blog.