Chicago

Arrived in the Windy City last night after a very pleasant flight: I was upgraded to Business Class because the plane was overbooked. The food was much better, the service almost embarrassingly attentive, the seats comfortable (mechanized things that folded out almost flat). Would I pay the extra for this? No. Because the problem with travel is not the food or the discomfort, as much as having to do it at all. I would pay extra for a flight that was two hours long instead of nine, but not even First Class can offer that.

There was some last-minute (almost literally) change of plans: My father was ordered to remain within car-driving distance of the hospital that is treating his circulatory difficulties, so they will not be at the wedding in Vancouver and therefore will not be in Regina with my sister next week. In the circumstances, my father's comment that "it would be nice if I could visit them in Toronto" felt pretty much like a command, so I dropped the Regina leg of the trip. Sorry Sis, but we'll catch up at Christmas.

Travel confounds expectations. One hears that Chicago is a big and dirty and dangerous city, as all American cities are; yet the first thing that Jubi said was "… and if you want to go out for coffee, just leave the front door open." We are right on a main street, close enough to downtown by American standards of space and distance, and yet it is no more noisy than my own apartment. I do miss hills though, Chicago is as flat as a tabletop.

I watched a tribute to Michael Jackson on the flight (without sound, my headphones didn't work and I couldn't be bothered to ask the crew to deal with them), and found myself feeling really sorry for that cute little kid Mikey. How and why did he end up as that ghostly, ghastly figure? Poor guy. Too much fame, too much pressure, far too much money. I wonder whether he had a life as a kid at all? Did he ride a bicycle and play baseball and hang about the mall exchanging half-truths and boasts? "Rosebud!"

Weather is grey, very warm and humid. Planning to take a boat tour of the river(s) and wander about downtown for a while, then to Milwaukee this afternoon/evening. But first, I shall go to the coffee shop across the street (whose wireless bandwidth I am currently scrounging) to charge up my inner batteries and clear my conscience.

July already

Odd to think that I will be somewhere in North American airspace at this time in a week. Booked several flights, about two years' worth of flying by my usual measures.

The itinerary is unnecessarily complicated, due to North America's inability to offer sensible and convenient train travel. Case in point: Milwaukee (destination two) and Regina (destination three) both have train stations, but one is Amtrack and the other is VIArail. Their networks connect at precisely three points, none of which is in the Midwest. So I will fly from one city which has a train station to Toronto and there take a connecting flight to another city which has a train station. Absurd. This hub & spoke arrangement might make economic sense for the airlines but it is hell on us passengers.

In case you are curious, the list of places I will voluntarily visit is: Chicago, Milwaukee, Regina, Durham NC, and New Jersey. I will pass with gritted teeth and not-only-subvocal expressions of dismay through: Toronto, either Calgary or Edmonton or Denver, and possibly Raleigh NC.

I have started reading Infinite Jest by the late DFW, responding to the challenge/invitation issued by the crew at Infinite summer: to read the whole damned thing, all 981 pages (in this edition) and 388 endnotes, some of which have footnotes of their own. I'm up to page 212 and endnote 74* and am loving it.

I can't for the life of me think how IJ stayed below my radar for these thirteen years***, because it is very much the kind of book that I love: Excursive, discursive, voluble, laconic, fond of words as things in their own right, curious about and amused by the whole world. Probably I was put off it (or DFW, as I hadn't read anything longer than a magazine article by him) by the enormous hype. In this case, surprisingly enough, it was justified. IJ is quite marvellous, it's sure to be one that I keep and re-read.

Other than that life has been going on much as it usually does. Lots of panic this week, with an average of 10.5 hours a day on the first four days. Tomorrow will be easier, Fridays are always only half-days for me (because Susan hosts a meditation session in the mornings) — but architects' half-days are often six hours long anyway.


* I think I've had that one already. It's hard to be sure because I tend to keep reading beyond the end of the note that I flipped** back to read.

** Well, I say "flipped" but in fact I have a second bookmark set in the notes.

*** Actually this should be no surprise at all that I didn't read IJ when it was new and highly praised, as that is my usual response. I assume that the reviewers are in fact praising the item's fashionability and up-to-date-ness, and further assume that it will be seen as nearly worthless once the fashion changes and the calendar has shed a few leaves. This spares me having to read a buttload of dross, but means that I occasionally miss out on significant delights. Ah well, better late than never.

Dull, summer edition

The rain stopped, mostly. During the last fortnight we have had sometimes as many as three days in a row without precipitation. On the bright side, the rain and cloud keeps the temperatures low. We haven't had any days above 30°C yet, which is fine by me.

My summer holiday plans are gelling nicely. I booked flights to and from the US (almost exactly half the price of flying to Canada, bah) for mid to late July, and am now trying to get committed dates from the friends I want to meet. (Note: if I haven't contacted you, that does not mean that I don't want to meet you! Time and money are short, and I already have firm dates a total of 4850 km apart, so a fair amount of my time and budget will be spent travelling. Trips to the southwest, northwest and southeast will have to wait for another occasion. Sorry.)

Work is going well at the moment, I'm getting an amazing amount of stuff accomplished. This is in part due to G being often out of the office, so there are fewer interruptions and much less stress. It's odd (but pleasant) that the phone doesn't ring when he isn't there.

Oh yes, my nose. I knew there was something else to say. I had a series of spontaneous nosebleeds over the weekend, sometimes quite intense, so I went to the doctor first thing Monday morning. He looked and prodded, said that it was probably just a minor thing, and sent me to an ENT specialist. He looked and prodded, said that a minor vein had burst, and cauterized it.

More geekery

Three years and a week after I said "by the time the database software is optimised for Mac-Intel, Alberich will be ready to retire," I have bought his replacement: a new Mac Mini named Maimonides (because it's my thirteenth computer. Consider that a challenge, he said and grinned evilly.)

It's a wonderful machine: absolutely silent, even quieter than Alberich, and under real-world conditions it is at least twice as fast. I compiled the database on Alberich and Maimonides as a test:

                     Alberich    Maimonides
Syntax check             10           4 seconds
Compile                  50          19
Generate application     46          29
Total                   106          52 seconds

(I bought the "larger" version of the Mac Mini this time, because it had a significantly better graphics card than the "smaller" one, and increased the memory to 4 gigabytes.)

The betterness of this becomes clear in a computationally and graphically intensive environment, for example in Second Life. Alberich would struggle to get frame rates of 2 to 6 images a second (imagine a jerky old newsreel film), with his little fan blowing its heart out all the while, even though I had turned the resolution and image quality down as far as they would go (no anti-aliasing, no shading, no shadows, no reflections, no texture mapping, no sky details, no water details, nada y nada y pues nada as Hemingway once said).

I set up SL on Maimonides using the same conditions as on Alberich, and went to a site where I would usually get 6 fps. Maimonides got 32 frames per second! I couldn't believe it, that is better than cinema quality. I could see my avatar moving smoothly in real-time as I pressed the arrow keys. That got me curious to see what else might be possible, so I turned up the resolution and turned on all those filters and shaders and whatnots — and still got around 16 fps. Second Life is so beautiful! Who knew?

I have to admit it wasn't all joy. Setting up Maimonides was an unexpected and unnecessary pain in the arse. I can't put it better than Tim Bray, who also struggled mightily and in vain: In the old days, I would have been happily running on the new machine by now, cheerily blogging about my shiny new Mac. As it is, it looks to me like Apple, not to put too fine a point on it, removed a killer feature from a flagship product. This doesn’t feel like a good idea. I will write about this at length another time.

Plus ça change...

I would blame my three-week silence on the pressures of work etc, but regular readers know that there have often been such lacunae in recent years. I apologise to everyone I've been ignoring, all the bloggers whose posts that I haven't been commenting, all the birthdays I have forgotten (or worse, remembered and then put from mind because I couldn't deal with it). My behaviour upsets me at least as much as it does you.

Work has changed direction. I stopped the translation for half a year after the mess last summer, with them wanting me in Münster and then withdrawing the offer shortly before we signed contracts. Last month I realized that I had (relatively) enormous debts and no chance to pay them back without doing more or different work, so spoke seriously to G and U about my work in their office. The theoretical 20 hours a week had been creeping upwards, reaching an average of 35, which was a break-even level but no chance to repay or save anything. I explained all this and said I'd need to cut back to a real 20 hours in order to take a second job, terribly sorry. They thought about it overnight and made a counter-offer: 45 hours a week, slight raise in the hourly rate, and a productivity bonus guaranteed for 2009 that would let me pay all my debts.

I have to admit, that option hadn't occurred to me. I took it, and am now working fulltime and fairly happily. But it means that my lovely mornings at home have gone, so I am seriously behind on my blog- and book-reading, riverbank-walking-down-to-ings, and Second Life play. A fair exchange, perhaps; in any case I was glad to take it.

With the change in hours has somehow come a change in my style and manner. It feels as though I've shifted up a gear, or crested a hill and am now running on the level. I've started taking the job more seriously, sometimes arriving first and often leaving last, and am taking on more management and steering. Much of the technical discussion with structural engineers and HVAC planners and others that ilk, now devolves to me, and to my surprise I am enjoying it.

Second Life is changing direction too. I have stepped back a bit from the meditation group discussions, which lately had been more philosophical discussion than meditation. I often couldn't follow the sense of the conversation, for example the idea that the image of a chair on a screen is not distinguishable from the one that you are sitting in right now, dear reader, and I found that stressful. I have joined some more traditional groups to get back to calm and centering: "Sit down, shut up, just breathe."

Time for work. Let me leave you with a truly marvellous video (a genuine cinema short, btw, 16 minutes long) called Validation which offers exactly what the title says. Highly recommended, do watch it!

Shabbat shalom, dear friends. I do think of you fondly, even in my silence.

Awake

Listening to a single bird somewhere up the street (out in the street itself, surprisingly; not in the back garden where the trees are) and the occasional cars. I woke from a bad dream: riding the subway through a maze of half-underground sidings, a cross between the railway cuttings near Liverpool Street and the cut-and-cover "tunnels" of the Toronto TTC, then the scene changed to a new subdivision being built at the edge of town, walking with L through scraps of wheatfields between the half-built houses, being menaced by a pair of hyenas/wild dogs/lynxes and my utter inability to fend them off or defend us. Meh.

Blather, Monday edition

Alone in the office, after hours; sun's still up but the day is drawing to a close. It has somehow devolved to me to be the office dishwasher (except Fridays, when the cleaning lady comes), presumably because I am the least afraid of water and the most annoyed by dirty dishes. I wish that someone else might gather the courage and the wit to wash up once in a while, but I don't actually mind doing it and I do enjoy being alone in the office in these bright evenings.

<rant> for a friend who will never read this: Peel the bragging-labels off your damned glassware, already. It doesn't impress anyone, it just looks really tacky and nouveau-gormless. If the glasses are pretty, then we will admire them no matter how cheap they were, but if they are ugly, then our scorn will only be increased by knowing how much you paid for them.</rant>

Walking home the other day, I discovered a positive proof that time travel will be possible (and actually used) in the future: I found a door where there had never been one before. I have walked past a particular blank stone wall every other day for the last fifteen years, and until then it had always been blank. Now, there is a door in it. The door is clearly very old: the stonework is weathered and crumbling, the paint is chipping, the wood is shrinking with age. Nonetheless, regardless of how old the door may be in world-time, in the personal time of my memories I know with absolute and unshakeable certainty that it is new. Somebody travelled back in time and had the builders put that door in, for reasons that I cannot know.

This is what the results of time travel look like: Something changes around us, in a way that is both new to us and much older in the world. We presume that it must have always been there, chuckle over our presumed obtuseness and say "Oh, how can I have not seen that every other day for fifteen years?" But that's not true, we were aware and observant. It was not there yesterday, though today it has has been there for decades.

We are surrounded by time-travellers, meddling in the past in ways that seem trivial to us, although to them the reward of getting this doorway put in clearly outweighs the expense and bother of finding and persuading the stonemason. Perhaps it will be used by somebody's yet-unborn grandmother to escape from a future fire?

That'll have to do for now, my dearies. I am still alive and mostly well, I hope you are too. There is another post in the works, the second in the occasional series of What Second Life Is Really About; it'll be up sometime this week.

Micro-career

Hanging about in the office, waiting for a software update to finish.

Let me bring to your attention something quite wonderful, and spin on what I've been thinking about since seeing it. First, the viewing: turn your speakers on and the volume up, and listen to Kutiman's collected works. Do it now, please; it's OK, I'll wait. (If you're in a hurry, numbers 1, 5 and 8 are the must-see's.)

Now have a look at the singer/songwriter featured in the fifth of those, Dadasarah. She's a housewife with a little kid, who happened to study voice in college; she's a woman with a videorecorder, writing and singing her own material for her own satisfaction.

Her twenty videos have been viewed 58,007 times as I'm writing this. Fifty-eight thousand times. Most of her videos get five-star ratings, the rest four-and-a-half.

Kutiman's eight videos have been viewed 1,696,659 times as I'm writing this. Let's say that again nice and slowly: One point seven million times. Most of his videos get five-star ratings, a few four-and-a-half, and one ugly duckling got a mere four stars. He has a fanbase whose size and enthusiasm many "established" artists would envy.

Two quite different people making music &mdash principally for their own amusement — in quite different ways. They have something interesting and very significant in common: They are getting it presented to us, and we are lapping it up.

I think that home-brew distributed on the Internets is the future of music-making.

There is a new kind of career to be had here, which wasn't possible before. In the bad old days when music was a physical object, it was said that there were only two kinds of money that a musician could make: None at all; or More than you would ever believe possible. Getting people's attention, putting the product in their presence, was expensive as all hell. It took a team of a dozen people to bring physical music to the attention of a possible paying audience, which is why the labels took such a large slice of the pie.

Zero-cost bandwidth and immaterial distribution change all that. Kutiman and Dadasarah distribute for free, thanks to youTube; I am bringing them to your attention for free, thanks to Blogger. The only thing missing is a way to turn their talent and our attention into an income stream, but given the size of these viewing figures that is surely only a matter of time.

And when that happens, it will be possible to make a decent living with a micro-career in music. You won't be able to live the rock-star lifestyle — let's be honest though: don't we all know that rock stars trash their hotel rooms because they are lonely, bored and unhappy? — but you will make enough money to continue making music. And for people like Dadasarah and Kutiman, that is what it's all about.

If Apple continues to be as smart as they have been, they will soon let "ordinary people" post music for sale on iTunes. What will happen when Dadasarah and Kutiman get there? Say that Apple gives them half of the dollar that they charge for songs (because there is no record company's share to pay); say for the purposes of argument that they would get fifty cents per song.

If half of the people who love Dadasarah's songs had bought one of them on iTunes, she would have earned around 14.5 thousand dollars. If an eighth of the people who love Kutiman's songs had bought one of them, and if he had then paid out two-thirds of the income as royalties to those whose videos he sampled, he would still have earned around 35 thousand dollars.

This is the future, people. And I for one can't wait for it to get here.

Still

As in "still here," but also as in "motionless."

It's been a busy month, much has happened in my work and social (and Second) lives, though having said that there are few examples that immediately come to mind that I might mention. I'm reasonably calm and not unhappy, and even getting a few things done.

Weather was miserable for most of the last month, cold and windy and raining most days, and sometimes snow on the ridge of the Killesberg when I looked out my kitchen window mornings. Last year at this time it was sunny and warm.

Listening to Beethoven's Fifth Piano Concerto, a surpassingly wonderful piece of music which I have written about before. Fine accompaniment to a greyish and idle weekend's bloggery.

I've been using Twitter as a kind of microblog, writing sometimes several tweets a day (and occasionally none for several days at a time, yes yes). Unfortunately there seems to be no way for non-Twitterers to access this, my current tweets are displayed on this page but if you don't want to keep refreshing the page you will have to get a Twitter account of your own.

Thinking about summer. Beta and Lumi are getting married in mid-July; I am invited and do want to attend. The SL meditation group is holding a week-long retreat in Berkeley at the end of August; that too I would love to attend. There's no way that I can afford to cross the ocean twice this year, but neither can I spend six weeks hanging about in North America. To further complicate matters, Sis and BIL are planning a tour of Italy in late September/early October, and we have arranged to meet in Venice for a long weekend or equivalent. I guess the Berkeley retreat loses out. Perhaps I could find something retreat-like a little closer to home?

I've started reading the New Testament again; not really sure why, but probably prompted by discussions in the meditation group meetings in SL. We were brought up in the ethics and standards of the Protestant tradition, though neither the Bible nor God were ever explicitly mentioned at home (Sis, feel free to comment on this if your memories differ). As far as I can remember, my first encounter with the Bible was in Grade 6: over the entire year, we read and discussed a chapter of the King James Version every morning. I don't know that this was a formal part of the curriculum, but it was in any case never challenged by us or our parents. Mr. Bowman was a very good and thoughtful teacher: he didn't present Christianity as the absolute truth that we must believe, we simply read this particular book and talked about what "good" or "right" might mean. I found it fascinating and very moving, this was perhaps the class and the subject in which I learned to think.

That experience had a lasting effect, years later I could still quote from memory much of what we had read, and I can see now how strongly it shaped my thinking. I could not have said so at the time, having neither the mental tools nor the necessary critical distance, but at least part of my strong positive response to Camus (and Buddha, and Mahatma Gandhi) was in the echoes of Ecclesiastes raised by their thinking. Right action seemed obvious and self-evidently true when I first encountered it years later, as did the Wu wei of Taoism.

Thinking about that now, I cannot believe that I would not have discussed that with my mother, so much of it would have been new and confusing to me as a 12-year-old, yet I have no memory of doing so. Perhaps I should ask her, while I still can. [Updated: perhaps we did discuss religion at home after all. I remember seeing a particular Playmobil set, of a Roman centurion on horseback with a cloak, and a beggar on foot, and saying to Slim that this was clearly Saint Martin (she, the supposed Christian, didn't know the story). Now, Martin is not a Biblical figure, he dates from the fourth century AD, so I would guess that I did not learn about him from Bible lessons with Mr. Bowman.]

What Second Life is really about, Part one

Shari asked some time back, "I don't really know what SL is, have never looked at it, don't understand it. So please do explain how it had such an effect on you." This is the first part of an attempt to gather some answers to that question. In this piece a dear friend in SL (and perhaps soon RL, gods of finance willing) talks about the community and connection that SL can enable.

It's funny how so many people are suspicious of virtual lives. A textbook I use to teach social problems describes feeling strongly invested in online environments as mentally unhealthy and antisocial. It's said to be isolating.

I came into Second Life socially isolated by disability and sexual status and geography. I found community and connection and love, first inworld, and then crossing the boundary between worlds. When I proposed marriage to my partner Beta a few days ago, I did it inworld so that I could make this move in the presence of dear friends. I know the idea of proposing in front of a computer screen with my love sitting downstairs in front of hirs would strike many unfamilar with virtual worlds as crazy, but we were not separated or alone, we were in the midst of a circle of cheering friends, scattered around the globe, dancing together, bound by love.

Virtual worlds have brought connection and joy into my lives, first and second.

Amen.