Faster is too slow

Technofetish warning: non-geeks should take evasive action now, I recommend this video starring the ineffable JonnyB (read the post first to get the background story).

Funny how one's perceptions change. I used a series of analog modems for over ten years, and found them fast enough for my purposes, until I got ISDN. Wow, so fast! I then used an ISDN modem for about three years, and found it fast enough for my purposes, until I finally got DSL hooked up the day before yesterday. Wow, so fast! How many months of happy use will I have before replacing DSL with ... whatever?

The claims made in the ads for DSL are true, except where they aren't. It is indeed blazingly fast - if you happen to be the only user that the website's server "out there" is handling. If you are one of 93748 simultaneous user at Apple's Software Update, then it just trickles along in third gear. (Still much faster than ISDN, but nowhere near the speed claims.)

A real disappointment with DSL is that uploading stuff happens at the same speed as ISDN. I'm a software developer, so I spend an awful amount of my online time uploading files (sending e-mail attachments amounts to the same thing). In fairness, that shouldn't really have surprised me, it is sold as "asynchronous DSL" and the fine print clearly states that uploading is slower than downloading. I hadn't expected the difference to be so drastic.

DSL has also pointed out a change in the meaning of size in computing. I bought my first gigabyte hard disk about eight years ago, and didn't manage to fill it before replacing the computer that it was in. The disk was a huge investment, I believe it cost half a Deutschmark per megabyte. Skip forward eight years: The DSL tariff I chose has a volume limit of 1 gigabyte per month. Think of that: I can pull an entire hard disk each month through this skinny black cable. And it costs next to nothing: seventeen Euros per month, one and a half cents per megabyte.

There are many different DSL tariffs on offer, I chose this one because I wanted to have no time limit, and a gigabyte per month seemed a reasonable amount: that's 32 megabytes per day, right? how could anyone possibly need more than that?

Well, my dears, I now know the answer to that question: in the 48 hours since DSL was installed, I have used up 261 megabytes (and yes, I also slept, ate, showered, read the New Yorker and did a day's work during that time).

Over a quarter of my monthly allowance in two days. Dear Lord, how can this be? (easy enough when you have three computers running in parallel, each downloading something or other). A gigabyte per month is clearly nowhere near enough.

The main surprise was on this side of the keyboard: my habits. Decades of expensive, slow connections have accustomed me to logging on and off several times per session: log on, grab a bunch of e-mail, log off, read and respond, log on, post the responses, log off. Well, DSL has no "off switch". It's permanently on, ticking away (except that with a pure volume tariff it doesn't even tick, the built-in accounting system can't tell me how much time I have used). It feels odd not having to click on "disconnect" at regular intervals. It feels very damned odd indeed to leave the house knowing that my wireless LAN is active and the DSL connection is still open, as though I were to walk away leaving the front door unlocked. I shall have to work on accepting this new paradigm.

Metablog the third

or, happy birthday to my blog. One year ago today, the person who had just christened himself "Udge" said:

Hello, world. You know you're a geek when: Having created a brand-new squeaky-clean blog, you first look through all the Settings pages before typing a single word.

I was a late adaptor, I had been reading public-diary-thingies on the Internet (I hadn't even registered the word "blog") for nearly a year, before it occurred to me that I might play that game too. This was partly because I had tried to play a similar game a few years previously on my professional website, and found that wrestling with HTML, CSS, RSS, FTP and all the rest of them was just too much hard work. It took longer to debug the entries and crosslink them with the rest of the site, than it did to write the words; plus needing four separate programmes to write, debug and post the damned things - what you might call "a serious cost/benefit imbalance". Naturally, it didn't last long; I stopped updating the site several years ago (without actually admitting to myself that I had done so).

I don't remember what prompted me to click on that big orange B in the early hours of August 20, 2004, nor which blog I had been reading; but I did, and from the start I loved it. Getting immediate positive feedback (my first comment was waiting when I came home from work that day) was probably a major factor in the "feel-good-ness" of blogging.

Blogging and the reading of blogs has become a significant part of my life; as Tim Bray said on the occasion of his blog's birthday, "it scratches an itch that I didn't know I had." Blogging has taught me things about myself and my life that I didn't know before I started, and has introduced me to some great new friends - even if we never meet.

Apart from how amazingly easy blogging is, the most obvious difference to a static website is the presence of comments on a blog. I published a link to my e-mail address on every page of my website but in all these years I have had just one (1) response. The reason why is obvious: it's just too much bother to change to a different programme and type in a response to something that you can no longer see because it's back in the first programme. I know this is true because I do it too: neither Sass nor Mimi allow comments, both say that they love e-mail (and I can confirm that they read & reply to messages, even if in Mimi's case the reply comes two months later ;-) BUT it is just too much effort to write an e-mail reply unless the post is something that got me particularly worked up. (This is probably why bloggers who don't allow comments get large amounts of hate mail: responders are more likely to go to this kind of effort to say "that was appalling" than to say "that was pretty good.")

Lioness once said words to the effect of "let me know whether I can play with the big kids". Well, part of the joy of blogging is that there are no big kids. We are all amateurs here, we are all just making it up as we go. A good blog is a personality (not necessarily a person, Udge is not all of me) and the most trivial pieces are often the most interesting. My pieces about doing the laundry or flowers or the sound of car tyres in the rain get many more comments than the earnest, important, change-the-world ones.

Bloggers who disable commenting are depriving themselves of a great joy. The community that develops around a group of bloggers exchanging comments, is what makes all this worthwhile; or rather, what makes it better than just writing in a book that you hide under your mattress. When I see e.g. Late Edition leaving a comment on Sleeveless in Southern Utah, or DM commenting on the Blue Sloth, I feel a sort of happiness to think that I probably brought them together, Late probably picked Heather out of my sidebar or from comments that she left here. This must be how matchmakers feel on seeing a prospective pair hit it off together.

The world is full of wonderful, interesting people, and I am so very happy to be a tiny leaf on the tree, a fly on the wall of this marvellous worldwide conversation.

Thank you all.

Other Metablogs: first second fourth

Not sleeping

I slept for about half an hour, then woke up abruptly thinking that something in the room had moved. That was an hour ago, I've cleaned the kitchen and made hot chocolate, and am now (in theory) winding down to try to sleep again.

The competition takes shape very slowly, we still haven't managed to fit all the required spaces into the restaurant area. We've all had a turn at planning it now, and none of us has managed to make the thing work properly. My instinct when faced with a problem this close to intractable, is to assume that we have overlooked something pretty fundamental, but that does not seem to be the case. It's just a difficult problem. Once more unto the breach, dear friends.

In other news, I went to the Staatsgalerie on Saturday afternoon for another look at the Picasso exhibition (pretty much as I remembered it, no surprises there) and went on to see the Herrenberger altar again, where I found a surprise and a revelation. First the surprise: in the second panel (depicting Christ's trial and scourging) I noticed for the first time that "Levit. 6" was written along the upper edge of his loincloth. I had to read the chapter twice to figure out the reference, because it is not in any way prophetic.

The revelation was appropriately in the last (fourth) panel, depicting the Resurrection. I had always been puzzled by the posture of one of the guards at the sepulchre (the scene is from Matthew): lying on his back with his feet in the air, coins tumbling from his pockets, jamming the butt of his crossbow into the ground, he appears to be tumbling backwards head-over-heels - but where does he fall to, and why? I had previously noted that the sepulchre stands on a section of ground that appears to be rising out of the plain, with sharply defined cliff-like edges: pushed up by the earthquake that opens the sepulchre (Matthew again). This time I noticed what was beyond the edge in the utmost lower-right corner: blackness, nothing; a very significant nothing, a non-barking-dog of a Nothing. The background to this panel is the Last Judgement, and the breaking up of the ground around the sepulchre is not an earthquake but a reference to this. The soldier is falling backwards into damnation, and neither his wealth nor his weapons will save him.

On the discomfort of deciding

The newest competition is slowly taking form. We have decided on the general urban-form principles, distributed the spaces in a reasonable way, and have got the circulation system so that it almost works. However, I think that this one will not win: the spark is missing. There is no bright idea, no cliffhanger, no unique sales point. It's just another perfectly adequate building, yawn.

What's worse: there was a bright and sparky alternative, a real big-brass-balls proposal. We debated between the two for several hours (honestly) yesterday, and I talked the other one down because I thought it was too risky: a real Ugly Duckling of a scheme. I felt that there was a very strong chance that it would be eliminated in the first round with a cry of "dear God, what's that?". Thanks to me, we have chosen a project which is likely to get through to the last round, but is not likely to arouse the mad passionate "must-have" lust that makes a winner. Mark this down for an Honourable Mention, and colour me sorry.

Group dynamics are a strange thing. Here is how decisions get made: G poses the question "which version do we take?" and nobody breathes. After a few minutes of silence, I say that the big-brass-balls version is a better building but a weaker sell, and the attitude is taken up gratefully. I really wonder, if I had said that the BBB was a hard sell but worth it, would we now be working just as happily on that?

The world expects me to be a Chief, but I'm happier being just one of the Indians.

On a lighter note: we finished the evening yesterday with a glass of Sekt on the balcony, watching the setting sun dye the clouds in fantastic colours. U brought out the glasses, and noticed that one was dusty. She raised it to her lips and blew hard into the glass - and then looked up at us. The look of horror on her face as she realized what she had done, and that we had seen her do it, was priceless.

Not my birthday

Not even my blog's birthday. That will come on the 20th of August. How can I have misread the date on this post so badly? Sigh. I guess I have no excuse for not doing productive work today.

Except that I feel the first vague stirrings of a desire for cappucino.

Still awake

I'm going through a phase of sleep problems. Since blogging about being awake a week ago, I've woken up much too early twice, and now can't get to sleep at all. It's not visions of sugar plums that are dancing in my head, but of unpaid bills and future appointments and so-much-to-do-so-little-time and all the rest of that. There is a great deal of work that I could and should be doing, and must do quite soon, but I just can't be bothered. Five hours is about the limit of my concentration these days, after that I start drifting off-topic.

I stood at the window for a while now, counting the other apartments where the lights were on (one) and thought how pleasant the night air was: clear, fresh, a light breeze smelling of trees and damp earth. I haven't even been for a good walk in weeks, I really just can't be bothered about anything.

Dinner last night was at the last-minute invitation of an old friend whom we shall call Princess, an artist who was one of the first people I met in Stuttgart. An excellent four-course meal with good wine and fine conversation. (Paté and honeydew melon slices, an avocado and rucola salad (unusual combination but it worked quite well), tuna steaks with potatoes done in a way I'd never seen before: cut into thin slices and laid out overlapping each other like a fallen-over row of dominoes, drizzled with thyme and olive oil and roasted in the oven; and for desert mascarpone with fresh strawberries and blueberries.) Princess has mellowed over the years, I believe "ageing gracefully" is the technical term for it: confident, relaxed, non-obsessive, willing to accept the occasional blemish. She could never have managed a dinner like this when we first met. (I still couldn't manage it.)

Among the guests were my former colleague Ageing Yuppie and a book designer who probably won't figure in these pages again so she doesn't need a name. She was a puzzlement to me, because we should have met ages ago: she is friends with Princess whom I see regularly and Yuppie's business partner whom I see irregularly, she designed and produced Famous Sculptor's previous catalogue, and she worked for years in a design studio in Berlin which I visited a few times. Given all of that social and geographical overlap, how can we not have met? A mystery.

Something's missing

I realized this morning that I haven't seen or heard the swallows in over a week. I noticed on Saturday morning, as I enjoyed my cappucino under the plane trees at the Café Eberhard, that there were none in view, but it didn't register until today that there are no swallows anywhere in or above the city. They've gone back to Africa, and I guess that they must have begun migrating around July 22.

Funny how little one knows (I know) about the world around us. I have no real idea whether July 22 is early, late or right-on-time for swallows to be migrating, but it seems to me that this is very early, a very short summer season. Remind me to pay attention in early Spring, to note when they return.

[Updated] The swallows returned on 2. May 2006 after an absence of about 280 days.

[Updated again] The swallows left on 27. July 2006, so I guess that this is not altogether improbable as a departure date. But I still think that they were around much later during my childhood.

Ten five one

I saw this on Green Duckies and thought it was a nifty idea.

Ten years ago I had been in Stuttgart for just over a year. I had been unhappy in London for a long time, it took two years of therapy for me to work up the courage to say "I want to leave", to feel that the person called "I" was entitled to want anything.

I was working as an architect in a partnership which has since dissolved acrimoniously, but at the time we were a great team, almost an ersatz family. The economy was booming, there was lots of work (too much in fact, we were working 60-hour weeks) and we were earning good money - which we then threw out the window with both hands, as the Germans say. We ate in restaurants nearly every night (who wants to cook at 11pm?) and went clubbing every weekend.

I had taken evening courses in German, and so had a basic grasp of the language, but was a long way from being fluent. Richard Powers mentions in Galatea 2.2 an effect of learning a language through immersion in the adult world: the vocabulary one acquires is comically tilted towards the practical and professional. It's absolutely true, I learned the word for "government health and safety inspector" long before I learned the word for "shoelace".

Five years ago I started work (unpaid) on the database project which now dominates my life. It began quite harmlessly, very small and simple, and grew into a monster. I was still working as an architect, but times were no longer so good: it was hard to scrape together enough work to fill a 30-hour week. I started to burn through what little money I'd saved during the fat years.

By this time, my German had improved to the point that it was better than the English of anyone I met, and I could read most books without strain. (I complained to a friend how difficult it was to read Thomas Mann, and he replied with a laugh that the majority of Germans found him difficult too; he thought that my expectations were unrealistically high.)

One year ago I was broke, owing money to absolutely everyone under the sun. The database had grown to a full-time job in terms of hours, but still paid only a pittance. My horseracing buddies and I had just won first prize in a competition, and we spent the summer and autumn working on the project - before the money ran out and the developer put everything on hold, where it remains to this day.

By now, I was reading more books in German, than most of my German friends did. I still had difficulties with grammar, but was amused to note that my grammar was better than that of some native Germans.

One year ago next Monday, I started blogging (there will be more about this on the day).

Yesterday was a slow day. I sat in the kitchen (the weather had turned cool, so the balcony was not an option), drank tea and finished reading John Updike's Licks of Love. I answered some e-mails, read some blogs, and put in a few hours' work testing the database. I can't remember whether or not I walked in the morning.

Today I spent an hour on the phone talking to a possible new customer, explaining how to use the database. I don't really mind doing this, it is always interesting to hear what people actually do on a daily basis and how/whether this fits the way the database works. Most of the best features have been suggested by users.

What I do mind, is when the sales crew hand such cases over to me because "we can't solve her problem" - and the first minute's conversation makes clear that they never tried to identify her problem, let alone solve it. Verdammt nochmal, do I have to do everything around here?

Tomorrow is Slim's birthday. I will send her an SMS at midnight, and call her during the morning to sing a certain song into her delicate shell-like ear.

Five snacks that I enjoy Spanish green olives stuffed with anchovy, I could eat them by the kilo. Pringles sour cream and onion chips. Toggenburger biscuits. Polish sausage, sliced paper-thin. Blueberry yoghurt.

Five songs that I know the words to Sorry, but I know the words to every song that I've heard more than twice. It just happens that way, it's not something that I work at. It used to drive my sister crazy when we were kids.

Five things that I would do with $100 million Go around the family and pay off everyone's debts and mortgages. Buy a specific piece of land in Saskatchewan, and build a winter house on it. Buy a not-yet-known piece of land in Switzerland or northern Italy and build a summer house on it. Take a steamer trip up the Amazon River to the opera in Manaus. Learn to drive.

Five places that I would escape to Switzerland, Finland, Venice, rural Saskatchewan, and Newport RI (offseason).

Five bad habits Laziness. Procrastination (not at all the same thing!) Being content to live like a slob. Lettings months go by before contacting friends (or family), not replying promptly to mail. Not switching the damned computers off at a decent hour.

Five things that I like doing Reading, listening to music, talking to friends, going to the opera, travelling.

Five things that I'd never wear Anything that is fashionable now, or has been fashionable in the last ten years. I gave myself a wonderful birthday present some years back, while I still lived in London: I would in future wear only clothes that I found comfortable, and to hell with how they looked. The funny thing is that people say I dress much better for it.

Five TV shows that I like I hardly ever watch TV; excluding movies, the total is less than three hours a week. There is very little on TV that is as interesting as what's on my computer.

Back in the days when I watched TV regularly, I liked South Park, Married with Children, Roseanne, The Simpsons, Frazier.

Five biggest joys of the moment Planning how to spend my share of the winnings from the competition. Anticipating how much spare time I will suddenly have on my hands, when I wrap up Version 2 of the database next week. That winter is coming, the mornings are getting perceptibly cooler. Blogging and reading blogs. Parsifal by Richard Wagner.

Five favourite toys iBook, iPod, the internet, the local public-radio station, walking around town. Whadda ya mean, "those aren't toys"? <sings>It's my blog, and I'll cheat if I want to.</sings>

The idiosyncracies meme - tagged

Heather tagged me with yet another meme (it must be summer, people don't have enough work to do :-)

Five personal idiosyncracies:

1) I am the world's biggest slob. Anything that gets put down anywhere, becomes invisible and other things get piled on top of it, which then become invisible too. This continues for weeks or months, until I suddenly have a cleaning binge.

2) Nonetheless, my books and CDs are organized thematically and within that alphabetically by author (composer), and I have no trouble keeping them in order.

3) I collect pens and pencils (in the sense that they gravitate into my pockets). I noticed the other day that I was using a pencil that came from a hotel where I had stayed during a seminar in 1981. The eraser was still pliable.

4) I never leave home without a hat, not even to walk across the street to the bakery. My current favourite is a black loose-weave Kangol.

5) I talk to myself in three languages, depending on which inner voice is addressing whom.

Who gets this next? The recently returned Smartmom (if she hasn't already left for the holidays), Ginga and Savtadotty.