Like a patient etherized upon a table

Being another dose of dailyness.

Blogging for a break from translation. It's going well, I started earlier than usual today and so will be finished here at 7 p.m. despite doing an hour and a half more than my daily target of five hours. That's actual constructive working hours, by the way: we self-employeds don't get paid for taking coffee breaks or stealing paperclips or discussing football around the water cooler like you office-worker types do.

The weather is changing: the day has turned overcast and windy, and the temperature is dropping fast. The forecast is to return to just-above-zero for the weekend. It's both a good thing and a bad decision, that I seized the opportunity to wear my leather jacket today for the first time in 2008: it'll be a while before I get another chance, but let us hope that I don't freeze solid on the eight-minute walk home.

It amuses me to watch myself becoming part of the neighbourhood of Rose Street, to be on nodding terms with the pram-pushing moms and their kids, to be recognized by the mailman and the UPS guy when we pass. I am glad that I made the decision to move my office here, and extremely fortunate that G and U are so seldom here. Their presence is far more distracting and interrupting than the view through the window; even when they leave me in peace I am disturbed by their actions and interactions behind me.

Spoke to a friend from London last night, who phoned up to invite me to his fiftieth birthday celebrations in three weeks. I am inclined to go, just for a weekend, even if both time and money are short at present. Makes me think again about my own upcoming birthday, and think that I should really consider doing something celebratory-ish about it. At the very least, I should delve deeply enough to establish why it is that I feel such a reluctance to celebrate, and deal with what I find under that particular stone. One step at a time, dear grasshopper.

[Updated a little later] I've just re-read "Prufrock," having googled it to be sure that I'd quoted correctly in this post's title. Damn, but it's good. I had forgotten what a fine poem it was, and what a superb voice Tom had; and I had definitely forgotten that it was rhymed verse. It's been many years since I last read this, because I gave away my copy of the Collected Poems and have never found a replacement.

Read the poem and the Wikipedia article, and enjoy.

Tempus fugit

Third in a continuing series of blog titles that require, but don't necessarily receive, translation.

Taking a break from translating to drink tea, eat chocolate and poodle about in the Internets. Listening to the CD from which tomorrow's Friday Favourite will be taken (wait for it). Dear gods, it's already Thursday again. Exactly seven days until we hand in the competition, and it's still all very wobbly.

I think that some of the happiness in hard and serious work that I wrote about yesterday comes from having been in Flow for much of the day. The ability to concentrate, to work without being interrupted, is an essential pre-requisite for getting into the flow state; it's easily available at home (since I'm doing the translating on my PC which has no Internet connection and nothing remotely gamelike installed) but harder to obtain in the office. Most of the time I'm alone there, since G is busy being a new father and the two new hires also work mostly off-site.

Work on the translation is slowing down as I get further on with it. At the beginning, I could just plough ahead translating words at the drop of a whim, but now the spectre of consistency raises its head. I spend a small but steadily increasing proportion of my time looking back through what I've previously translated to ensure that I always use the same English word for a particular German one. This is of course a Good Thing and the right way to go about it, but it does slow down the work considerably.

Right, that's enough. Back to work. More later, perhaps.

Eight down, twenty-two to go.

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.

Insecurity again

Just over two years ago, I wrote

Fact: the new superduper multilinked know-everything-about-everyone complex of databases that the White House wants, will be just as fallible and easy to compromise as LexisNexis' systems were, because they will be staffed by the same people: undertrained, underpaid, unrespected employment agency temps. It doesn't matter how good the database security is, if a gullible fool is answering the phone. Properly trained people, intelligent enough to hear an alarm bell when a stranger offers them candy, will not work for peanuts; and even in these days of homeland security everybody wants things done cheaply.

A half-dozen recent articles indicate that I was right, for instance:

The Homeland Security Department, the lead U.S. agency for fighting cyber threats, suffered more than 800 hacker break-ins, virus outbreaks and other computer security problems over two years, senior officials acknowledged to Congress.

In one instance, hacker tools for stealing passwords and other files were found on two internal Homeland Security computer systems. The agency's headquarters sought forensic help from the department's own Security Operations Center and the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team it operates with Carnegie Mellon University.

In other cases, computer workstations in the Coast Guard and the Transportation Security Administration were infected with malicious software detected trying to communicate with outsiders; laptops were discovered missing; and agency Web sites suffered break-ins.
source

and

Congress asked Homeland Security's chief information officer, Scott Charbo, who has a Masters in plant science, to account for more than 800 self-reported vulnerabilities over the last two years and for recently uncovered systemic security problems in US-VISIT, the massive computer network intended to screen and collect the fingerprints and photos of visitors to the United States. [...]

US-VISIT has a long history of security problems and failing government audits. Though the system is supposed to be self-contained,some undisclosed number of US-VISIT computers running Microsoft 2000 were infected by the Zotob worm in August of 2005, revealing not only that the system lacked good patch management, but that somehow the system touches the internet. DHS attempted to hide the evidence, but a persistent government sunshine lawsuit from Wired revealed the infection in the fall of 2006.
source

and

Expect harsh words from the Committee's chair Bennie Thompson who is slated to pound DHS for hypocrisy: with questions like "How can the Department of Homeland Security be a real advocate for sound cybersecurity practices without following some of its own advice?" and "How can we ask the private sector to better train employees and implement more consistent access controls when DHS allows employees to send classified emails over unclassified networks and contractors to attach unapproved laptops to the network?"
source

I told you so. Colour me "smug."

Balcony blogging (2007 edition)

North American readers may wish to avert their eyes at this point. (Don't say I didn't warn you.)

I'm presently sitting on my balcony in shorts and a long-sleeved T-shirt, having just cleared away the dishes from lunch (which I ate out here for the first time this year (though I'd already eaten lunch outdoors per se twice)). Burton is on my lap and a selection of telephones, a book, a cup of tea and a packet of Baiocchi are by my side on the famous braunes Rolltablett aka the summer office.

It is 26°C; the birds are singing, the sky is again/still spotlessly blue; there is a gentle breeze from the north, and the howling of emergency-services sirens from the south nearly drowns out the continuous beeping of car burglar alarms from the west. Ah well, can't have everything. There should be a law enacted to permit people living within earshot of a continuously beeping, ignored, car alarm to smash the car's windows after say fifteen minutes. It's perfectly obvious that the car is not being stolen, and also that the owner is not here to do anything about it; why should we have to put up with this egregious imposition? Bah.

It's absurd that the temperature should be this high so early in the season. The trees in the schoolyard to the east (in my line of vision) haven't yet leaved out; how can it already be 26°? Last year at this time, the last snow had just melted. Call it "global warming" and call me worried that the less thoughtful members of society look around them and say "if this is GW, then let's have more of it," not thinking that warmer might mean different, and that different might become highly unpleasant.

Nonetheless: Life is wonderful.


In other news Thursday's Dilbert is filed under "wishful thinking."

How I spend my days

I'm sorry to report that I did not have fun in the sun today: there was no sunshine. 3°C, cloudy with intermittent rain and moderately high winds. Bah.

Instead, I've had an absolutely fascinating day at work on the database.

The fun started when I noticed that an address book exported from Outlook 6 differs from an address book exported from Outlook 5. Microsoft changed the rules yet again, the swine! The difference is simple but crucial: Outlook 5 used the tab character to separate fields in the exported data. This was a very sensible way to structure the data, because one cannot normally enter a tab character into a text stream: the computer understands it as the command "jump to the next field please." Outlook 6 has thrown that out, to Hell with sensible: it uses the semicolon ; to separate fields. This is an absurd change to have made, because the world is full of semicolons; they occur all the time; there can be several in a single sentence.

How does the importing software know the difference between a content semicolon in the middle of a sentence, and a separator semicolon that marks the division between two fields (e.g. First name;Last name). As a test I exported a few addresses containing random semicolons ("Ud;ge") from Outlook 6 and opened the file in Excel; to my surprise it worked perfectly, Excel was able to tell the difference between content and separator.

Obviously there must be a difference in the file. I opened it in a text editor, and discovered how it works: Microsoft solved the problem that they had just created by inventing a second kind of separator: the pair of characters ;" coming immediately together marks the beginning of a block of text that should be left untreated until the pair "; coming immediately together marks the end of the block. As my experiment with Excel shows, it works fine with normal content.

But what about abnormal content, e.g. He said "Never"; they walked out? The computer would take "; for a marker, and assume that what follows ("they walked out") is the next field, and so would arrive at the end of the line with a field left over and nowhere to put it, and the import would crash and burn. (Excel does indeed fail when importing such data.)

I thought for a long while about how to solve this problem, then decided not to solve it: why should I do Microsoft's homework for them? I implemented the check for ;" and "; pairs, and left it at that. If it crashes, it crashes. I shall tell any complaining users to try the file in Excel and call me back if-and-only-if it works correctly there. But I shall rewrite my database's export routines to solve this issue correctly.

Memo to Bill Gates: Microsoft seems to be running out of common sense; my e-mail address is at the top left; my rates are very reasonable.

Sunday, lazy day

The sky is mottled grey and speaks of gentle rain towards evening; the air is cool and moist with a gentle breeze. I've been awake for a few hours now, drinking coffee and reading P.G.Wodehouse in bed, and would be there still but for my abhorrence for lying amid breadcrumbs. Most pleasant.

[Updated two hours later: the sun is setting and it has started to rain. Colour me "smug."]

My friends and acquaintances are all ageing, as most people do. Yesterday was Famous Photographer's fiftieth birthday celebration; there will be three more this year and at least five in 2008. The party was a pleasant jaunt that went on until 3am (for myself, others were still going strong as I left). We danced like untamed gazelles and ate and drank in reasonable moderation (I drank two glasses of Sekt before switching to water, and noticed many other guests doing the same). I met the Czech woman from G's birthday party again and danced for a few hours with her; we agreed that we would join a tango club together, so I shall get that sorted out soon. I shall have to think of a suitable anonym for her.

FP has broken up with his companion of eighteen years, after drifting apart during the last few years. In retrospect it's clear that this was happening: they took separate holidays and had separate hobbies (to the extent of singing in different choirs), and it has been a long time since they attended any public event together. She moved out on the morning of the party, leaving the cat and no forwarding address.

In other news here's another favourite song (6.8Mb MP3) and the Amazon page of the album it's taken from. This will be available until 3pm CET tomorrow. Again, no names or titles in comments please, I don't want any over-eager record company lawyers googling them and finding me.

My sister reports that importing Friday's song into her Mac iTunes revealed all the author/title/album info, I would be grateful if a Windows iTunes user could try this and report whether it works there too (I'm guessing that it will).

In other, other news I've upgraded to the newly non-beta Blogger2. Everything looks OK so far; if you find any problems or oddities please let me know.

On sales and trade shows

Not that you'd know it from yesterday's post, but I was in Munich all day teaching my colleagues the finer points of the database system that they have allegedly been selling for six months / two years respectively, in preparation for our appearance at the Art Cologne trade show next month.

It's odd, I have this image of myself as a non-salesperson, could not and should not do sales, not my thing at all; however I must say in all modesty that I am a far better demonstrator and salesperson than either of them. It's clear that neither Georgette nor Biff has ever worked a trade show before, which is not surprising because it is a pretty unnatural thing to do; what does surprise me is that equally clearly neither of them has ever been to a trade show as a visitor.

How can this be? Tell me, if you wanted to open a restaurant, would you not go eat in a few restaurants first?

I learned to do trade shows by being a visitor at trade shows, it was part of Great Big Computer Company's policy that everyone on the stand had a day off-duty during the week, in which they would turn up in dirty jeans and walk around and look at the show - not the other stands, but the show itself: what kind of things do visitors do, what is it that makes them stay somewhere rather than walking on. It was a great training, watching and learning from those interactions was what made us such a successful team.

Well, Georgette and Biff haven't had that experience, so they simply don't know how trade shows work. They hadn't even understood that they must give the visitor a reason to bestow her time and attention on them, must show her something - look look, a piece of data! - within seconds of her arriving on the stand. They weren't even planning to take copies of the sales brochure to give away! Ye gods, it is to despair. And my income depends on them.

I changed the plan after half an hour of listening to the sort of questions they were anticipating being asked - none of which would ever occur at a trade show, with its walk-by casual visitors - and instead taught them how to do trade shows, with the database as the example. It's an uphill battle, what I wrote this summer is still true:

You have to find out what the (possible) customer wants.

People don't buy features, they buy solutions. They buy "make my problem go away."

Sounds obvious, doesn't it? But I cannot persuade my partner or his assistants to do this. They seem to believe that the customer has to be driven to the sale with pointèd sticks like a sacrificial lamb to the altar.

What I had to say is just basic commonsense, but it is counterintuitive to people who haven't worked a trade show before. A trade show is not at all like giving a demonstration to a possible customer, it is a specific environment which enforces a specific kind of behaviour on exhibitors and public alike. A customer getting a demo in her own office has made time for you, there are no distractions, no interruptions and no competition for her attention. She wants to know every detail of the product, because she is there for a reason: to decide whether or not to buy.

Trade show visitors are not "customers." They did not go to the show to look at your product! Unless you prove otherwise, you are just one more irrelevant distraction among the hundreds of stands. The visitors stream past at a steady pace, and you may consider yourself lucky if they even slow down at your booth. They are surrounded by distractions and interruptions, and the second they leave your stand they will encounter something even more shiny and exciting. (This is why they MUST take a brochure home.)

You cannot spend a minute explaining how the data is structured, while nothing changes on screen! They'll walk away. You MUST show them the three most important parts of the database, and demonstrate how these link together (look, I click here and this opens up there) within sixty seconds, else you've lost them. If the visitor stays with you for more than two minutes, and most of them won't, then you can go back to the beginning and talk about the details and the structure. But you have to earn their attention first.

Most important of all: it's not a lecture hall, you must engage the visitors! Ask them questions, listen to the answers, show them how the product solves their problem. In my experience, if you can get a visitor to talk for say forty seconds (in total) during the first two minutes, she'll stay as long as you want. People love interaction, we want to be listened to, we want our questions to be answered and our needs to be addressed. If you, salesperson, can do that, then you might turn this visitor into a customer.

Damn, I should be giving courses.

So anyway I was indeed in Munich yesterday. I spent today rather gently, trying not to have a headache, walking on the Blauer Weg as far as the greenhouses. It was a fine day, sunny and warmish, with a gentle breeze which made me think of the South of France. Holiday is a state of mind, not a place: I was on holiday this afternoon.

In related news I forgot to mention the most significant aspect of the visit to Munich (and what would Papa Sigmund say about that?) According to my partner, the Hobbyists are dragging their feet: rather than putting copies of the database into every shop, they now want to fit out "one to four stores" as a test. Well, that's just absurd. What is the point of putting us into their catalogue (which was part of the agreement) if Hobbyist's customers cannot then buy the advertised product? I infer that they intend to reneg on the catalogue too. [Updated: they did.]

On the other hand, the Hobbyists still expect to be granted an 80% markup.

Our development and production costs are basically fixed, it costs nearly as much to print up 25 copies for these four stores, as it would to print a thousand copies. Were they to stock all stores at once, as originally stated, that would cover our production costs plus leaving us reserves for the next production run. If they order only a handful, then we still need to pay all of the development costs right now, plus the dilemma of how many copies to produce. It's a huge amount of money.

We pay all the costs and take all the risks, and they expect to earn the same profit as though they too were taking a risk.

I think I would be ashamed to make such a proposal. That's probably why Hobbyist is rich and I am not.

Partner stated that he would "have to reconsider his involvement" if the Hobbyists back down.

Fuck fuck fuck.

On finding out

I've been reading Javier Marias' novel Tomorrow in the battle think on me (though I've been reading it in German, from the library). The novel is hard work, primarily because of its style - not that it is particularly extravagant in its choice of words or metre, Marias is no Proust nor for that matter an F.Scott Fitzgerald nor even less a Henry James, but he does get wrapped up in subclauses, like this, or even like this, which, while never actually leaving the subject of the sentence (I hope you haven't forgotten how the sentence began?) wander all around it, exploring interesting, or possibly interesting, tangents, some of which threaten to become sentences in their own right before finally winding up in a exciting burst of continuous narrative, which, disappointingly, reveals itself to be not the end after all, but then can unexpectedly recover to go on for seemingly near-infinite length: most of the novel is written in page-and-a-half long paragraphs of two or, at most, three sentences; mind you Proust's sentences were, at least in the English translation I read, much longer - but like Proust the hard work of reading is rewarded by the quality of the tale. It's a fine read once you get into the long, loping, looping rhythm of the subclauses.

While reading, I've been pondering. The title recurs in the text every few pages, with variations: Tomorrow in the battle think on me, and may your sword fall blunted from your hand (my translation, bear in mind that I'm reading it in German...) I have been puzzling over this phrase, which is definitely very familiar but I just couldn't put my finger on it.

Until tonight, just a few minutes ago on page 285, our hero returned home late at night and turned on the TV to find a film in progress: late at night, a knight prays outside a tent; then cut to a different tent where the king lies awake and is visited by a succession of ghosts: a man, two boys, another man, a woman "and finally another man who shook his raised fists and demanded revenge."

At which I raised my fists and shouted "hooray" because I'd recognized the film - and with it identified the recurring title phrase. It's Shakespeare, Richard III, and the phrase "Tomorrow in the battle..." is the curse which the ghosts of his previous victims lay upon him one after the other.

I'm very happy to have identified the phrase and solved a minor mystery, though the greater mystery of the story itself remains to be resolved in the next 143 pages.

Reading list for December 2005

Reading list for December 2005

Currently reading
John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany - again
Marcel Proust, Du côté de chez Swann - still

Recently read
Paul Arden, It's not how good you are, it's how good you want to be
Doris Dörrie, Der Mann meiner Träume
Jean-Pierre Luminet, Alexandria 642

Reading Proust is turning into a real marathon, and I'd be lying if I said I was still doing it purely for the pleasure. Not to deny that reading it in the original is nice, but I am painfully aware of how poor my French has become, I'm sure that 90% of the wordplay goes unnoticed by me. And the complicated deep-past-subjunctive verb forms! there are parts that I can only follow because I know them from the English translation.

Every book geek knows what happened in Alexandria in 642 A.D.: the burning of the Great Library by the Muslim invaders. Luminet's book is a historical fiction in this setting, entertaining and thought-provoking for well-read geeks and probably deeply pointless for anyone else.

Summary

The reason I started this reading list, was to discover how many books I read in a year. The answer is (drum roll please) 63, excluding Proust and Irving because I haven't finished them. I have to admit that this is fewer than I expected, I did think I'd average one-and-a-half books a week for the year.

Next month's list
Last month's list