Awake (New York edition)

I'm in the Big Apple, in a moderately lousy (but also moderately priced) hotel. I woke just before 5am local time, 11am my time, after getting to sleep around 6am my time. I'm unsure whether or not to call this "insomnia", but it is far earlier than I hoped to rise.

I have to give a kick in the head to the airport bus service (can't remember the name, will update this if I do) for lousy service. The driver put people down near, not at, the stated destinations, e.g. one block east of Grand Central Station. In the rain, mark you. For Penn Station the miserable son of a bitch actually dropped us at Times Square! I took a taxi the nine blocks south to the hotel, grumbling all the while. The driver was cool about the short fare, fortunately; he left the meter off and just charged me a fiver.

My parents are arriving today (with the rest of the opera tour group), I'll move to our common hotel and then go to the airport to meet them. The tour operator has apparently stopped providing transport between airport and hotel, which seems to me a pretty stupid decision given their customer profile (elderly and rich). The justification was that it was too difficult to arrange, but that sounds like horseshit to me: the world is full of bus companies. I suspect the company that does the actual grunt work is getting lazy and the coordinator/guiding light/überboss, himself elderly, has chosen not to spend his energy on disciplining them. So there are going to be two dozen elderly Canadians standing in the taxi queue for hours and hours, wrestling with their oversized luggage and foreign manners and diction. Meh. Anyway.

I flew over on an Airbus 380, for the first time. It really is huge, but one doesn't always notice this because its proportions are similar to a Boeing 727: it can look like a small plane if you don't notice the details, for example that the tailfin is in fact larger than a 727's wings, or that when you are seated and looking out the wing obscures the three-storey buildings beside the taxiway — and I was on the upper deck, so in theory I was looking down on the wing.

It's a fine plane, the ride is very smooth. But in the end it's just air travel. There is no fantasy or romance in the A380, flying to NY in one is like spending the day at a tedious conference in the meeting rooms of a pretentious-but-only-middle-range hotel. The seats are the same as on any other Lufthansa plane, the food is the same, the general discomfort and annoyance before and after the flight are surely the same. Actually, having said that: Boarding and disembarking were quick and easy, and I got my luggage within 15 minutes of the plane landing. I should give some credit there.

The coolest thing about the A380 is the live camera views on the entertainment system. There are three low-resolution videocameras built into the aircraft: in the nose pointing forward; in the belly pointing down, and at the top of the tail looking forward over the back and wings of the aircraft. The latter plays on the overhead monitors during the flight. The belly camera is pretty useless, to be honest, the low resolution and the air haze make the ground images close to worthless. Should have hired a photographer-consultant to tell them about polarizing filters. But the view from the tail was cool, and it was quite exciting to be able to watch the plane landing and taxiing to the gate from the nose cam POV.

I'm going to try to sleep a little more (no hot chocolate for me, alas; it's typical of the Hotel Pennsylvania that while there is a minibar, it's empty. There is an ironing board and iron in the closet, but no kettle. My recommendation is to avoid the hotel unless you are stuck for a place to stay. It is at least clean and central, but has nothing else going for it.

Tokyo: tenth day

Trainblogging again on the way home from Tokyo, heading into the sunset. For the first half-hour or so out of Tokyo, the train follows the coastline; as when travelling along the Mediterranean coast of France/Italy one gets tantalizing glimpses of the sea between the tunnels. [Written on Wednesday, but I was too tired to post it. It's funny, I am not having any of the usual jetlag symptoms, but I am tired all the time.]

I was mystified for a while by irregularly-occurring flashes of diffuse reddish light, off in the distance, well above ground level. Were they aircraft warning lights on hilltops shining through low cloud? Eventually the train changed direction and I worked out that they had been caused by the sun reflecting on pylons and posts by the trackside, which were themselves flashing past too fast to see.

I've taken many photos from the train, one or two of which might turn out. I have quite a few shots of sound-protection walls and the broad and featureless sides of huge buildings, and a surprising number of shots of the insides of tunnels. The Shinkansen goes so fast that there is no warning at all of these things as they approach. Even the tunnels come as a surprise: on the ICE one usually has time to note the ground rising before the train plunges into darkness; here the first you know of a hill is when you dive under it.

I guess I won't see the peak of Fuji-san this time either: we aren't yet in Mishima and it is already pitch-black outside. I saw the base of Fuji on the way to Tokyo: even with its shoulders lost in clouds it is unmistakeable, not just tall but broad, truly massive. It's very much bigger than any other mountain in Japan, a sumo wrestler among schoolboys.

Tokyo was … well, where to start? It was many things: "huge" is one; "new" another; "exhausting" a third. There was simply too much choice for such a short trip. I found it hard work in a way that Kyoto wasn't. I certainly had more luck in finding English-speakers in Kyoto. (That is probably statistically insignificant, btw: I guess that every foreign visitor to Japan goes to both cities; given the cities' relative sizes those N visitors encounter, and infect with the meme of English-speakingness, a far higher percentage of the population of Kyoto than of Tokyo.)

I walked around Akihabara last night, checking out the otaku/manga/animé/geek culture. At first I was taken by the stores selling electronics and gadgetry (e.g. a tiny shop selling only sixty different types of electricians' pliers) but eventually the animé/manga scene captured my attention. The stores selling manga/animé figurines were a revelation. I'd heard about them, about the collectors and their seriousness, but I wasn't prepared for the reality. There are differences of quality and purpose (for want of a word) in the figures that even an outsider like myself can see, and the prices reflect this: from around 800¥ for a simple, static, two- or three-inch figure, to 2500¥ for a six-inch articulated figure with exchangeable heads/hands/accessories (i.e. different gestures and facial expressions), to around 5000¥ for the Gundam weaponized cyborgs that we Westerners call "Transformers," and on upwards to 20000¥ for a seriously creepy foot-high too-young-even-for-Lolita figurine.

Most of the smaller stores specialized in a single animé "franchises;" in the case of larger stores these were displayed on different floors. I'd guess that there is little overlap between the fans of e.g. Evangelion and those of Gundam, or between them and the fans of Dragonball and the Sailor Moon imperium. Not to mention the Star Wars imperium, which is nowhere near as present in Japan as in the west.

When I first started walking around Kyoto, looking at the Japanese, I thought that Japan looked like Second Life; having been to Akihabara and Harajuku, I now think that SL looks like Japan. So much of the common dress and appearance in SL is rooted in Japanese styles: the thigh-high boots, the straps and buckles, the stripes of fur along the touchable edges of jackets and boots, the mini-skirts that are hardly more than wide belts worn low. The "sexy schoolgirl" is common in Japan, but then she was already an erotic archetype in England thirty years ago so that doesn't really count towards my view of SL. (There sure are a lot of them, though most seem to be in their early twenties. I admit to enjoying the six or more inches of bare skin between the tops of their over-the-knee boots and the bottom of their miniskirts.) Even the tiny heads and bulging muscles of many male SL avatars have a Japanese root: most male action-animé characters have heads far smaller than their biceps. (Bishonen and yaoi animé characters, and the male supporting-cast of animé featuring women, are improbably good-looking but do have realistic bodies.)

In sadder news, I left my kangol (flat hat) on the subway train on the way back from Ueno, so I'll have a chance to investigate a question that puzzled me all last week: Kyoto is full of hat shops, I noticed at least six of them while walking around — yet nobody wears hats. No-one. So who buys all the hats, and what do they do with them? Is there a secret indoor hat-fetishing scene? A mystery.

One more point about the JapanRail pass: I forgot to mention that you should allow at least forty minutes to have it validated before you first use it. In Tokyo there is a special office for this near the Yaesu central exit; in Kyoto it was just a desk (singular) in the ticket office, where a young woman struggled valiantly against the tide. And note this too: visitors to Japan, especially those who don't speak Japanese, should allow a good fifteen minutes extra time in each station for getting lost and misdirected (or rather correctly directed to a misunderstood goal).

Kyoto is next, I'll pack up and get ready.

[Later: An amusing thing happened during the subway journey home to Uda-san's B&B. While standing around on Kyoto subway station platform waiting for the train, I was approached by a pair of Europeans with a map and a problem: Which train should they take to get to their B&B, and how would they go about finding it when they got there? As it happened we were heading the same way, so we talked for a while in the train. I was able to tell them roughly what to do, and how to go about getting the information they'd need to get to the rest of the way. Being able to help them promoted me from "stranger" to "insider." Nice.]

Balconia, 2010 edition

It's been a long, chilly and wet Spring. This weekend marks the first time I was able to have lunch on my balcony! In previous years, I'd been sitting out there as early as mid-April. Bah.

The job presses on, we are barely keeping ahead of the construction workers — and now have to stop for a week to submit a building-permit application to add a waterslide to the project. This must go through straight away so that the concrete-laying company can get the shell finished before the steelwork starts, because once the frame goes up they will be unable to use their crane to transport the roughly 80 tonnes of concrete needed. Shifting that lot by wheelbarrow is not feasible.

I've been mostly off-duty this weekend, bar an hour today finishing up two drawings that I didn't get done on Friday evening. Had sushi for lunch on Saturday, then went on to the Skybeach for an iced coffee in a deckchair with my feet in the sand; today, walked downtown again to meet G and U and the kids for a cappuccino on the terrace of the Kunstmuseum, then made it back home just in time before the rain started.

I've been reading Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, in the newish translation by Volokhovsky and Pevear, and am approaching the end. It's a good read, despite Tolstoy's manifest disapproval of Anna's life and choices. What a prude he was. I get the impression that he was surprised and shocked by the way the story unfolded as he wrote it.

I mentioned some time back that I had started playing Dragon Age: Origins. I'm finding it hard to get the time to play it: unlike Second Life I feel that I can't just drop in for a half-hour or two, it feels like I need a block of two hours or more to be able to get into the story, so I have let it go. As far as I can judge, it is a very good game: the characters are well written and their interactions are interesting and surprising, the world is visually very appealing, there are plenty of side quests to intrigue and entertain; but it's just not Second Life. I can determine which of several train tracks the story will take, the decision tree is a veritable labyrinth (to mix my metaphors), but the fact remains that the story does follow along a path that someone else has set. It's brought into focus something that I had felt but not fully realized about SL: my joy in it is based in personal contact and conversation. I'm also becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the relentless killing. I guess I'm just not a gamer.

I will be running a workshop in Second Life this autumn on "the SL-ness of SL," and have started making notes for discussion topics and practical exercises. It is all theoretical stuff about identity and shared culture, and would be of very little interest to non-Second Lifers; there's nothing about me and little about Susan in that blog. Nonetheless, if anyone is interested, let me know by e-mail and I'll send you the URL — on the condition that you never mention it (or the avatars' names) here. To forestall unhappiness: please note that I will mercilessly and instantly delete any comments made here that break this condition.

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.

Surrender

I tried not to do it, truly.

Well, of course I knew that it was inevitable, I'm not a fool*. But I had hoped to spin it out a little longer, delaying the fateful moment: surely it doesn't need to happen now, not yet? I also had a fair amount of pride at stake ("I'm not such a softie"), not to mention money ("Can't afford it") or even the ecology ("Wasting resources!").

But this morning it did need to happen, and so I failed. I gave up. My resistance crumbled. My lofty principles were vanquished by my baser desires.

An hour ago, I swallowed my pride, lullabyed my conscience to sleep, and turned on the heating. Damnit, I had hoped to last until the first of October. Is that too much to ask? Apparently yes.

In other news the Internet connection in Rose Street died sometime Monday night, and is still resisting attempts at resuscitation. (Assuming of course, gullible as I am, that said attempts are actually being made. Pah.) Since G drank the free-telephony-over-the-Internets koolaid, there is also no telephone and no fax connection. It's very peaceful, but for the sound of G alternately weeping and raging into his cellphone at the providers.

In other, other news I've noticed from the weblogs that people continue to visit here, hoping against experience that I might have posted something since their last visit. My deepest apologies to you, dear reader, and my heartfelt thanks that you do continue to come by. Having said that, though, allow me to make your lives a little easier: download an RSS feed-reader and use it to review all your friends' blogs (and magazines, and newspapers, and Flickr photostreams, and the Recent Changes page of your favourite wiki). Most modern browsers recognize RSS too: Safari and Firefox display a little "RSS" icon in the extreme right of the address field of sites that have a feed. The advantage is that you see at a glance who has updated (and who hasn't) without browsing all those websites.**

The disadvantage is, of course, that you don't browse all those websites (unless the author has set the feed to give you only the first N sentences, as I have). You will miss the comments that are posted, and will be unable to post a comment of your own. My apologies here to folks like Dale and PostmodernSass, whose RSS feed includes the full text of their posts: I am still reading, but I am rarely moved to switch from the feed-reader to the browser to reply.

* At least, not that kind of a fool, but that's another story.

** Background info about RSS. I use and recommend NetNewsWire, available for Macs and iPhones/iPodTouch, but there are surely a dozen or more Windows feed-readers out there by now. (In case your browser doesn't display the link, here's the URL to my RSS feed.)

Thought for the day

The main question about strangelets concerns their stability. The known particles with strange quarks are unstable because the strange quark is heavier than the up and down quarks, so strange particles, such as the Lambda particle, which contains an up, down, and strange quark, always lose their strangeness, radioactively decaying via the weak interaction to lighter particles containing only up and down quarks. But states with a larger number of quarks might not suffer from this instability. This is the "strange matter hypothesis" of Bodmer and Witten. According to this hypothesis, when a large enough number of quarks are collected together, the lowest energy state is one which has roughly equal numbers of up, down, and strange quarks, namely a strangelet. This stability would occur because of the Pauli exclusion principle; having three types of quarks, rather than two as in normal nuclear matter, allows more quarks to be placed in lower energy levels.

From the Wikipedia article on Strangelets.

Layers of geekishness

Being an outburstingness of geekitude.

So, I'm sitting at my Mac Mini, looking at its screen. A Mac program called "Parallels Desktop" is running, inside which is Windows XP. On Windows, I am connected via VPN to a server somewhere in the Metaverse, which in turn has connected me to a client computer somewhere else in the Metaverse (but probably not a million meta-miles away from the server). I am running "Remote Desktop" on that client. When I move my Mac's mouse, the cursor of that meta-client moves across its meta-screen.

I am using someone else's computer through my own.

The idea is to tie me into the development of the Münster's software: I have access to their tools and data, without needing to install either on my computer. Münstermeister and Beans and I can all work on the database at the same time, from three different cities, and in theory from any computer anywhere in the world. I could be working from a public machine at an internet café at the beach (were there only a beach within x hundred kilometres from here).

And I think to myself, what a wonderful world.

Not synaesthesia

Being a rumination on memory, human nature and the collecting of junk

Acting on a strange impulse I bought a incense-stick-holder-falling-ash-tray thingy and some sticks of Frankincense in the Weihnachtsmarkt here last Christmas, and incensing the apartment has become something of a weekend almost-ritual. (I was possibly inspired by seeing and smelling Sis do it in her home in October.)

It's very difficult to judge how something will smell while burning from the way it smells in a closed packet, and frankincense is not quite the smell I was after. But how to describe a smell so that someone else, for instance the friendly neighbourhood hippie-goods emporium, might point me in the right direction? It occurred to me to try to identify what frankincense smells like to me, as a step to defining what the as-yet-unknown other smell I had in mind might be.

Frankincense has a somewhat chilly smell; it smells of grey and still and quiet, of soft voices in large rooms, of ancient wood stained dark by many hands, of great age.

I was somewhat surprised to come up with this description and immediately thought of synaesthesia, where impulses in one sense trigger other senses, but realized recently that it is actually just the surfacing of a complex of memories. These associations are my impressions of the churches we visited in England and Europe when I was a child, where frankincense was burned, and which actually were chilly, grey, still, quiet and very large.

I don't know whether I shall bother to find a different kind of incense now; having identified the source of my associations I like the smell much better.

Lioness called me today after leaving a comment on the last post, to say that I should see this as a positive event: the chance to make a new start. I think she's right, this is the ideal impulse and situation for a complete change. I have to admit that working at home has not worked for me, I don't have the discipline to maintain a clean and efficient environment when only I ever see it, and the quality and quantity of my work both decreased as the squalor of my surroundings increased. I will move my office out to Rose Street, and I will get a smaller apartment, and I will keep that one clean and well-lighted. And I will get the post regularly, and I will actually open letters and bills promptly, and read them, and pay them.

I realize that I have been living a deeply strange life for the last year or so, behaving quite bizarrely in certain regards. This behaviour is what has caused all of my current problems opportunities. It's time to change, and life has presented me with the chance to do so.

As a first step, I have already been cleaning up and throwing away boxes of trash, mostly paper: three wine-bottle cartons full of paper from the surface of my desk alone! Lioness asked at one point how it would feel to have a perfectly clean and orderly apartment at my fiftieth birthday, and I nearly cried. It would be the best present anyone could give me. And just think: it is within my power to give.

(And as a second step, I spent only one hour in SL this morning, and shall go to bed after posting this without logging in there again.)

I did indeed buy a KVM adaptor (a kind of Y-switch, it lets you connect two computers to the same keyboard, monitor and mouse rather than filling your desk with duplicated items) as I mentioned yesterday. Took it back to the office, and discovered a serious problem, a show-stopper: The KVM adaptor and my Mac Mini both have DVI connectors, whereas the older monitor in question has an ADC connector. Can't attach it to the KVM! What to do, what to do? Went online and discovered that I could buy an ADC-to-DVI converter for 100 Euros—or a brand-new 22 inch widescreen TFT monitor for 250 Euros. I looked at the older computer (i.e. G and U's office computer that sits in my space) and discovered that it has both DVI and ADC ports. Aha!

So I bought the 22 inch etc, and installed it in the office this afternoon. It works perfectly, of course: plug it in—at one remove, through the KVM—and the Mac just automatically throws the right signal at it. No drivers to install or update, no settings to configure: genuine real-world plug-and-play compatibility. I am saddened to say that it's not even that much uglier than the Apple monitors—from the front; the rear view is a miserably bodged disaster, but the user never sees that.

Weekend off, in a way.

Lazy weekend, which as usual actually means being quite busy in non-financially-productive ways. I spent some more time in the office cleaning up and interfering with offering helpful advice to the model-building team for the second competition. Apparently the first will be judged tomorrow! How exciting.

I finished reading "Lonesome Dove" and found it wonderful but very sad. The ending is quite grim and has a sad taste of loneliness and defeat. Nonetheless highly recommended, the best book on the settling of the West that I know.

Wrote a few new Second Life scripts (a chiming meditation timer for M2, interior lights that turn themselves on when the sun sets) and made my first small contributions to the SL scripting-language Wiki. Waiting now to attend the next in the occasional series of seminars on avatars and identity that I blogged about some time back, after which I shall go straight to bed without passing Go.

The weather has changed again and is now blowing violent gusts of wind in all directions, and the coffee and biscuits that I had with G and U in the office an hour ago is sitting heavily in my stomach.

It feels odd not to have any numbers to write down here.

On the road again

Rolling home in the afternoon on a cool and misty day, under a seamless, colour-suppressing light overcast. There are some patches of snow on the ground, in the shade of trees and buildings and along the thicker limbs of particularly stable trees. Munich was almost bare, only a few shreds and patches remained. The rivers are flowing fast and high, presumably the runoff from this recent snowfall.

It is cold, though: ponds along the way are frozen over.

Spent the morning with Georgette and colleagues (though not my unnamed partner, who is in Spain at a trade fair), discussing the state of the database and a few future improvements.

In geekish news the purpose of yesterday's conference was to present the forthcoming version of the database toolkit, which is going to be very exciting when it gets formally released next Spring. (Non-geeks are encouraged to stop reading at this point.)

It is already very stable: although what we saw was officially beta-test software, it didn't crash once during the demo. The engine has been substantially rewritten, the indexing has been separated out of the datafile and completely rewritten using newer techniques, and the application now runs natively multi-threaded on multiple-core processors; together these changes bring astonishing performance improvements.

The lead developer spent a quarter-hour demonstrating how to optimize databases using the new indexing: text search in 100 million records using old (B-Tree) indexing: 34 seconds; recreate the index as a Cluster, unload the cache, same search was done in 0.6 seconds. (Sound of 80 jaws clattering on the floor.) And that on a normal MacBook! not even the Pro model. So you can imagine what a server with a fast disk-array and 16Gb memory would be able to do.

The best improvement in indexing is that plain-text fields are now fully indexed and searchable: the database can generate indexes on every single word in a 2Mb text field. This allows clever, user-pleasing tricks like live real-time searching. To demonstrate this, they imported some 10 gigabytes of data, three million records' worth, from the various Wikipedias into text fields, then searched for "macintosh." The database engine filtered the records in real-time: type "m", 3m records; type "a" to give "ma", 2m records; type "c" to give "mac", 1m records; type "i" to give "maci", 600k records; and so on. Very impressive.

But possibly the biggest news is that this version finally has a built-in SQL engine, it's no longer a plug-in. SQL searches now run as fast as native-language queries. Watching this part demonstrated took me back twenty years to my first computer experiences, using SQL databases on mainframes and large UNIX systems. The language hasn't changed a bit (ha).

Heady stuff. It's going to be such fun to get my hands on this software.

Twenty-one down, nine to go.

On choosing the right word

There's a particular event which recurs as you learn a language (assuming that one takes the learning seriously), which reminds you that you continue to learn and improve: Every now and then, you have to buy a new dictionary.

My first German-English dictionary was purchased in October 1984 in London, as I started taking evening courses in German. It wasn't a real dictionary in the Johnsonian sense but simply a list of equivalents: Pferd = Horse, Dog = Hund and so on. 20,000 entries per language, small enough to fit in a large pocket.

A few years after moving here, I found that I had outgrown that first book. My German had improved to the point that I needed a real dictionary, one that explained the meaning and usage of words rather than just translating them. I chose Langenscheidt's "Großwörterbuch Deutsch als Fremdsprache," a dictionary specifically for foreigners learning German, with well-written, lengthy explanations and many illustrations. 66,000 entries, too big to fit in any pocket. Foolishly, I didn't note when I bought it (I usually write the date and place on the flyleaf of my books); I believe it was around 1999 or 2000.

Seven years (call it that) later, as a result of translating these pieces for Princess, I realize that I have outgrown the GDF: too many of the words that I didn't know in German weren't listed in it, or were inadequately explained. The realization was triggered when the author used the phrase "wehrlos und schutzlos." According to my dictionaries, these words both mean "helpless" or "defenceless," but that's not true. "Wehrlos" is active and means "without means of defence:" unarmed, unable to fend off or counter an attack. "Schutzlos" is passive and means "undefended:" unsheltered, unprotected, vulnerable to attack. Neither of them means "helpless:" If you strip a man and tie his arms behind his back, he is vulnerable and unable to defend himself, but only if you also tie his legs is he helpless.

If you want to measure the quality of a dictionary, look up synonymous words—because there are no synonyms. Humans are lazy: if a culture invented two nearly-identical words, it is because the distinction between them was felt to be important, however slight that difference might now seem.

So I walked downtown this morning, stopping for a cappuccino at the Café Eberhard, to buy a new dictionary. I chose the Duden, the dictionary. Word-nerds use the name "Duden" as a generic term for "dictionary" in the way that thirsty people use the brand-name "Coke" as a generic term for "sweet soft drink." 150,000 entries, too big and heavy to hold on your lap. (I also bought a new one-way translator, German to English; 165,000 entries but quite a bit smaller than the Duden because the explanations are missing.)

The pair of them cost a quarter of what I earned from this job. Hopefully they'll keep me going until 2014 or so.

You would be right to infer that I'm going to try to do more translations. It's relatively good money, as an hourly rate it comes halfway between architecture and programming. We shall see.

Day off

There was a country song in my childhood which began "I put on my cleanest dirty shirt…" and I found that so funny and apt that it's stayed with me. Right now I am wearing my cleanest dirty shirt while the washing machine runs, which is desperately needed and long overdue. My clothes crawl away from me as I try to get into them in the mornings. [Updated] well, I've just spent over an hour waiting for the washing machine to finish up: it was just sitting there, still and silent but full of water at the end of its cycle. Eventually I figured out that "empty yourself" is a separate cycle which one must specifically select and run. What the hell kind of idiocy is that? Under which circumstances could it be useful for the machine to remain full of rinse water? Bah.

Since moving here, I've had a stiff and sore lower back; I assume it's from sleeping on this sofa thingy, a wierd mix of softness and utter inflexibility.

Ingrid and AY are away meeting the curators, so I have the day off. What to do? It's grey and windy and cool out, but not (yet) raining, so this might be a suitable day for a walk around the Alster, the west bank of which is a long thin park. Or perhaps I'll go back downtown and schmooze about, possibly combining this with a visit to SIC and Rose and crew in their office in the Speicherstadt (which I haven't yet seen).

Which reminds me of something I'd meant to mention earlier. Last Monday (the 6th) Ingrid and I had a dinner meeting with AY to discuss the project, because he's too busy and important to visit our office. We met at his second-favourite restaurant, because the first is closed Mondays. This Monday (the 13th) she again met him for a working dinner, which I didn't attend because I was moving in with Rose and Axl that evening. We walked together as far as the same second-favourite restaurant, near to Rose's apartment. As we passed the closed favourite, Ingrid said "My God, another week gone by so quickly;" but I was thinking "was that only a week ago? It seems like ages." Time is indeed relative.

It has been decided that I will work Monday and Tuesday next week, then return to Stuttgart. The probability is high that I'll be back at some time to work on one project or the other, but nothing has yet been planned for this. And I'm still waiting for a decision from the Münsters; I'll have to chase them up next week, but I don't have my contact man's e-mail address here (and don't even remember his name).

In geek news I've been running Windows XP on an Apple MacBookPro during these three weeks, and can report that it works almost perfectly—well, as close to "perfect" as Windows will ever be. I've only encountered two problems: it seems that the Windows OS doesn't always get notified when the battery is empty, because the laptop sometimes falls into emergency save-my-context sleep mode without warning me; but sometimes it does give out a warning, oddly enough.

The second problem is also minor but vastly more annoying: because the MacBook has a reduced keyboard (obviously: it is a laptop) with only one (left) ALT key, the ALT-GR key is missing, so one cannot enter "special" characters like @ directly from the keyboard. The solution is to use Windows' "Character Finder" system utility to copy-and-paste such things as needed; but that means that the previously selected clipboard content is lost. Why doesn't Character Finder support drag-and-drop? Bah. Pathetic.

Still, after three weeks of constant Boot Camp use, those are the only niggles I have found; and chances are very high that a desktop Mac with a full-size keyboard would avoid them both. On the positive side, I discovered that the Windows partition is visible to the Mac (though not vice-versa) so one can transfer files between the operating systems if/when running MacOS.

If I were Dell, Toshiba, Compaq (are they still in business?) etc, I'd be worried: the coolest and fastest Windows hardware that one can buy today, is an Apple.

First thoughts about Second Life

(Home and happy and far too tired for thought. So here's a blog entry that I've been writing in bits for a while. There'll be a real post about Hamburg and other stuff tomorrow, promise.)

I have had a Second Life for a few weeks now, not that I spend much time there. (In case any readers should happen to be or become 2L'ers: you can guess my given name there, and my surname is "Watanabe;" do come up and say hello.)

It took me a long time to start, because I couldn't see the point (and still don't, really): "So you dress up and walk around and talk to people, and buy things, but that takes money so you have to work for a living? Gee, that sounds kinda familiar." My inner cheapskate was also put off by the constant talk in articles and reviews about buying this and paying for that, but it's a red herring. One can choose an avatar and walk around etc etc for free; you only need a paying membership if you want to own property.

It's a strange and surprising place, though less of both than I'd expected and hoped. The first surprise is how few people are there at any given time, the islands I've seen were universally empty. I have yet to land on a place that had as much activity as the newbie getting-started tutorial spaces. The second surprise, which is closely related to the first, is that it's deadly dull most of the time. There is acres of stuff stacked up into the stratosphere (avatars can fly! easily the best part of 2L) but most parts of most islands seem to be predominantly private or commercial.

The third surprise is how few avatars are actually interesting to look at, and how few basic types there are. Any big-city bus contains more diversity of height, weight, age, skin colour and prettiness than all that I've seen of Second Life. This is a feeling that builds up over time, one's first impression is of great diversity because this tall thin beautiful long-haired perky-breasted white 20-something has a cat's ears and tail, whereas that tall thin beautiful long-haired perky-breasted white 20-something has an eagle's wings. It takes a while to spot that they are all tall thin beautiful long-haired etc. Nobody is old, weak, worn, tired, sick or even fat or ugly; nobody is not a successful and productive free-market capitalist democrat.

There are two standard body-types that one meets on every street corner in Second Life. The commonest male ego-gratification-body is the Russian-Mafia bodyguard: biceps as thick as your thigh, shoulder-breadth nearly half of his height, seventy percent of body mass above the diaphragm, cranial capacity less than his shoe size, and a phallic bulge that would intimidate a donkey. The commonest female ego-gratification-body is the Barbie doll: enormously tall and skinny, legs nearly two-thirds of her height, waist narrower than the male's biceps, no hips, would weigh less than fifty kilograms were it not for her enormous but perky breasts.

Body type as wish fulfillment, one might say, and more power to your fingertips, were the bodies not so un-humanly perfect, so insulting to those of our First Life. I haven't seen many experienced 2L'ers yet, for geographical reasons I know mostly newbies like myself, but still I am inclined to very much doubt that one percent of avatars look anything at all like their owners. Which is fine in itself: it's a fantasy world, go ahead and fantasize. What came to disturb me is how relentlessly similar the core of the fantasy is: almost all avatars look like the same one percent of the real world's population.

Yawn and yuck to them. I can't help thinking that wearing such a body in Second Life must make one dissatisfied with one's real body, with its petty flaws and disobediences.

I decided to rebel against this by modifying my avatar to be realistically un-beautiful—meaning, to look like a human that one might meet on any street corner in First Life. Watanabe-San began life as the "Japanese punk boy" readymade type: an animé wannabe, with the usual tall, slim shape but less muscle than the bodyguards. I reduced his height by nearly half (his head barely reaches the ribcage of some of the Barbies), stripped off what muscle definition he had, and gave him a realistic "package;" he has stumpy little legs, a beer belly, love handles and a budding double chin. I couldn't find a way to give him a bald spot or a receding hairline, else I'd have done that too. I think he looks fuckin' great, dude—and he really stands out among the muscleheads and fashionistas.

You know, I think there is probably a great, untapped market in "non-pretty" body types, because I surely cannot be alone in being disturbed by the predominant narrow-minded, exclusionist beautyism. I should learn how to build avatars and introduce a line of Uglies©®™: street sweepers, garbagemen, illegal-immigrant gardeners, can't-speak-the-language office cleaners, exploited-to-hell-and-back maids, bag ladies and cat ladies, back-alley drunks, back-of-the-bus monologuists. Woot. I reckon they would a great business!

How failure looks

Let me quote from three articles. First, David Platt proved conclusively that the iPhone would be a flop:

The forthcoming (June 29) release of the Apple iPhone is going to be a bigger marketing flop than Ishtar and Waterworld (dating myself again, aren't I) combined. [...] Sell your Apple stock now, while the hype's still hot. You heard it here first.

Frightening, what? The bad news was confirmed by Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft:

There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It’s a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I’d prefer to have our software in 60 percent or 70 percent or 80 percent of them, than I would to have 2 percent or 3 percent, which is what Apple might get.

Just by the way, there's an example of Microsoft Truth © in there: Windows Mobile has only 6% of the smartphone* market, not "60 to 80 percent." Ballmer is not actually saying that they possess such a market share, but that they would like to have it. Cunning ratbastards. John Gruber wrote a good rebuttal.

Well, the moment of truth arrived last Friday evening when the poor, doomed iPhone went on sale. Here's a market report from MacNN this morning:

Apple over the weekend sold more than 700,000 iPhones to rocket past analyst predictions and shatter AT&T's record by selling more iPhones in three days than Motorola's RAZR did in its first month. Apple's supply of iPhones depleted at more than half of its retail stores less than a week after the cellular handset hit shelves at 6:00 p.m. ET last Friday night. Buyers cleared out both Apple and AT&T stores in 10 states, with 95 of 164 stores selling out on Monday night, according to Bloomberg.

Yeah, that sounds like one hell of a failed product-launch to me. What a disaster.


* The point is the category of "smartphone." The vast majority of those billion phones are throwaways that one is given with a new contract, whether you want it or not. The iPhone is not competing with them, no more than Porsche competes with Yugo.

Musing and mumbling

Today is iPhone day, they will be on sale— in North America only—starting at 6 pm. My inner geek (never far from the surface) got very excited this morning when he realized that there is an Apple Store in Manhattan just around the corner from our hotel! So I can see a real live iPhone!! And maybe even hold it!!! In only sixteen days!!!!

Woot.

Can't buy one, of course, there is no European service plan nor localized software available yet.

Would I buy one? Probably not. I hate telephones as a matter of principle, finding them intrusive and uncomfortable and interruptive; I much prefer e-mail or face-to-face contact, and am willing—happy—to pay the price of the time delay these introduce. Given that I already have an iPod and a cellphone, further given that I don't watch TV and prefer to see movies on a proper cinema screen, it doesn't seem to have much to offer me. An additional obstacle is that I am a cheapskate and hate giving money to telecom companies, to the point of preferring SMS to speech; when I watch the ads my inner geek impressed by the iPhone's features, of course, but my inner accountant is pulling on my elbow and saying "yeah but how much do they charge for the connection? It's a monopoly service, it's bound to be hideously expensive."

It's possible that this only means that I haven't yet understood what the iPhone really is. I think of it as a telephone with features, and was very pleased to have bought a telephone without features a few months back. Perhaps the name is a red herring and it truly is a new kind of urban enabler as the ads suggest, or a laptop that fits into one hand; both of those might appeal to me.

Today's Friday Favourite is a terrific blues by the late, much lamented Stevie Ray Vaughan, from this album. Enjoy loudly.

And finally to start the weekend off right, here are a chuckler from the Savage Chickens, a lion from Questionable content and a tiny, perfect gem from xkcd. May the blessings of your choice from the deity of your choice be upon you all, my dears.

Hail, hail Balconia!

I've spent the day so far in a mix of idleness and mild activity that is quite common on Sundays at Maison Udge: making a backup of Alberich on a newly-purchased external drive, 320 gigabytes for 150 Euros. (Here's a tiny competition: Why is its name "Hagen?" Winner will get, um, a modest amount of satisfaction.) Took nearly two hours to copy 46 gigabytes, almost the entire contents of Alberich's internal drive.

I had been irritated in recent weeks by the variability and weakness of the wireless LAN signal out here (yes, forgot to mention: balcony blogging again. Coffee and sun and birdsong and Baiocchi cookies), it varied from strong to very weak and back over a period of minutes, and would invariably break off completely at some random time. I moved the WLAN router to a new position in line-of-sight from my usual position on the balcony, as far as the cables could reach, with no improvement in strength or stability. As I was looking through a mail-order catalog for a range extender device, I suddenly remembered reading that the router could broadcast on any of twelve channels. So I changed the channel from 6 to 7, and suddenly everything is peachy: signal is very strong and quite stable. I infer that the problem was interference from the near-dozen other WLAN routers in this building or its immediate neighbours. Many of these have been newly installed, because I had no such problems out here last summer.

While sitting out here—and before thinking to change the channel, meaning while I couldn't use the laptop—I have been reading Happiness: a guide to developing life's most important skill by Matthieu Ricard, a French buddhist monk and ex-cellular geneticist. I bought this some time ago to give to U, who is an unhappy and negative person, but kept it because on consideration her English isn't good enough; I shall find an equivalent in German for her. It's a very simply written and sensible book, quite un-mystical and definitely not a religious tract. There will probably be more about this later.

To be honest, reading it is an avoidance tactic, a displacement activity: reading about something I'm already quite good at instead of doing things that need to be done (like Unfilthing) or that challenge my mental comfort (like writing up a CV or deciding what kind of jobs to apply for). I justify it by saying that this is a day of rest (a sound practice regardless of one's religious inclinations) but the truth is that I've only done about eight hours' work since returning from holiday. Perhaps I should become a university prof or a schoolteacher, their long summer holidays have always appealed to me and I did enjoy training when I was at the Great Big Computer Company.

Lunchtime; and after that if the weather holds, a walk around the Feuersee. Enjoy the day, my dears.

Useful tools for Macs

I was thinking about certain blogging buddies who have recently switched away from the Dark Side, and it occurred to me that there are probably many clever little tools and tricks that I use daily which they don't know about. Without further ado, here are sixteen seventeen pointers for new Mac users:

1) Investigate the "Services" menu, which is part of every application. Many useful things can be found here, for instance you can mark text in any application (e.g. while composing this blog piece in Safari) and have the Mac automatically create a new TextEdit file and put the marked text into it.

2) Depending on your work habits and the size of your monitor, you may find Stickies useful. This programme puts little yellow (red, green, ...) Post-Its on your screen.

3) Clean up the dock! Dock space is limited and too valuable to waste on programmes that you don't use regularly (especially if you have TigerLaunch installed (see below). To remove an item from the dock, click and hold on it, and pull the item out of the dock into mid-screen, then let go. You can add items to the dock by dragging them into it: existing items move aside to make a place for it. You can also get any currently running app to remain in the dock: click and hold on the item until a context menu appears, then select "Keep in dock."

4) Use the Keychain to keep track of your accounts and passwords; allow the browser to save and recall these. However, if you do this, then you must:

5) Set a really good password (more than six characters, lower-case AND upper-case AND numerics AND graphic symbols) for your login account, and disable the automatic login feature. This prevents someone who steals your laptop or walks into your office in your absence from getting at your online banking or whatever. [Updated] Warning: use only characters and symbols that appear on a standard American-English keyboard (i.e. no ä or ß or ñ characters). If the computer crashes and damages your preferences, it may start with an American-English setup on which such characters are not available or in different positions.

6) You can jump between running applications by pressing Apple-Tab. This is faster and more convenient than clicking in the Dock or searching for the other app's open windows.

7) Learn to use Exposé to reveal all currently open windows, or to temporarily hide all windows to show you the desktop.

Here are a few recommended programmes:

TigerLaunch

This is a configurable equivalent to Windows' Start menu: a simple list of all programmes on your computer for easy access. Unlike the Start menu, it is easily user-configurable: you can add or remove programmes from the list, and specify which folders it should include.

EvalService

A very useful addition to the "Services" menu, it performs mathematical calculations in context, in the middle of your e.g. Word document, so that you need not reach for the calculator. You type e.g. Mark owes me 18*3.5+3 Euros and select the expression, then choose "Evaluate expression" from the Services menu. The answer is appended to the expression: Mark owes me 18*3.5+3 = 66 Euros, you then delete the original calculation if no longer desired.

Menu calendar clock

This puts a pop-up monthly calendar in the menu bar, linked to entries in your iCal calendar.

Net News Wire

A simple and very comfortable RSS feed viewer.

Senuti

I wrote about this previously. It's the opposite of iTunes, it copies music files from your iPod to your computer and (optionally) enters them into your iTunes library. Obviously one would only use this to make a backup copy of the iPod, not to "obtain" music from a friend's collection.

Tea Timer

A very simple timer app, which bongs a reminder at a specific point in time (15:33:07) or after counting down a number of hours/minutes/seconds. I use this daily to remind myself that something's in the oven.

SnapNDrag

Makes configurable screen shots of the entire monitor, a specific window, a region defined by two clicks on the diagonal, or after N seconds (which allows you to take a screen shot with a menu open). It's very useful to me when I'm writing user guides for or answering questions about my software. Unlike the built-in screen shot capability (Apple-3 for the entire monitor, Apple-4 for a region) the results can be saved in one of several image formats, or can even be drag-and-dropped directly into an open e-mail message.

Spam Sieve

A spam filter, in case your Internet provider doesn't offer one or their price is too high. Simple, very effective, good value for money.

Super Duper!

Cheap and effective backup software. The basic version is free; the full version (22 Euros) can be made to run backups automatically at specific times, e.g. in the middle of the night. Ya gotta make backups!

Cyberduck

The Finder has a built-in FTP browser which can display storage areas on the Internet as though they were normal hard-disks attached to your computer, but if you often work with FTP you will want something more controllable. Cyberduck is simple to use, cheap and very effective.

Flip4Mac

Lets you view Windows Media Viewer (.wmv) clips in QuickTime.

Wednesday

Ten degrees presently, working towards a high of seventeen (probably the usual three degrees higher down here in the valley); the sky is blue but there's a definite haze of humidity in the air. Windows are open front and back, with the effect that birdsong is drowning out my CD player. For my tastes, this weather right now is perfect, summer need not be any warmer this.

I've finished writing my morning's e-mails and am about to walk downtown for a cappuccino before heading off to the architects' for the day.

I finished the exercises in the Interweb-database book, and appropriately enough arrived through experimentation at the central question, the alpha and omega, of Interwebicity: how do I (the server) know who you (the browser) are? How do I remember what you asked for last time, to give you more of it now? And crucially: how do I distinguish you, dear browser, from the friend to whom you sent an e-mail saying "Hey, look at this cool link"? because much as you like that friend, you probably don't wish to pay for her purchase.

Fascinating, just fascinating.

In other news the countdown is into double figures, only ninety-nine more days until the Ring in New York. I'm already as excited about that as about walking the Camino next month.

Hermitism

Despite the fact that today was indeed cloudlessly blue-skied and very warm, I have at time of writing not yet left the apartment at all. I haven't even stood on my balcony. Instead of which, I worked through another eleven chapters of the Interweb-database book previously mentioned. This is great stuff, it's really exciting to see how all the pieces fit together.

But now I have a sore butt and overstuffed stomach from too much sitting, and a mild headache from too many hours in front of this monitor. I shall go for a short walk and then to bed.

Tuesday work-day tomorrow, I have absolutely no desire at all to go to the office. Sigh.

Ostersonntag

And a sunny Sunday it is too, the weather is brilliant. It has been warm enough that I haven't needed to heat the apartment during the day. I shall go for an afternoon walk after posting this, to get my daily intake of Vitamin D and fresh air.

After—I nearly said "hanging up," as in telephone; I do think of this as a sort of conversation with pauses—posting the last entry, I decided to seize the day night and worked through the first four chapters of a recently purchased book on writing databases for the Interwebs, which is the logical next direction both for my database project and for myself as a developer. Getting a very simple bare-bones web database published was surprisingly easy, being Mac-originated software it does Just Work; but making it work properly, prettily, quickly and above all securely will be dismayingly difficult and tedious. It appears that I shall have to write (and document and debug) many new routines: there will be much less re-use of code than I had hoped.

My iPod's batteries have begun to wear down quite rapidly after some two or three years of near-daily use, they now only hold a two-hour charge. They are of course replaceable (seventy Euros and up to ten working days) which I will have done while I'm in Spain. In the meantime I have been walking without the iPod lately and realize that using it changes the way I experience myself: I think more and better when walking without music.