Thought for the day

One day, while staying at a friend's house, Nasrudin peered over the wall into the neighbor's yard and saw the most wonderful garden he had ever seen. He noticed an old man patiently weeding a flower-bed and asked,

“This is a beautiful garden. I'd like to have one just like it. How do you make a garden like this?”

“Twenty years of hard work.”

“Never mind,” said Nasrudin.

Indeed.

Happy New Year

Just a quickie, waiting for a lunch date with friends from high school. It's been mostly grand in Toronto, the "mostly" having to do with the usual mild annoyances that surface when families get together. Weather has been nasty, +4°C and rainy.

I'm flying to Germany tonight, the New Year will strike for me a few kilometres above eastern Quebec. Flying tonight was nearly 600 Euros cheaper than in the first days of January; much as I do like Lufthansa I saw no particular need to give them that money. Realized while printing out my boarding card for FFM that I have a six hour layover there tomorrow, midday to evening. Bah. Might just throw away my final ticket and take a train home, even on January 1 there should still be an ICE every two hours.

Harpier cries, 'tis time, 'tis time. Happy New Year, my dears, may 2010 treat you kindly. Gods and terrorists willing, my next post will be from home (Stuttgart).

Interlude

I forgot to mention a few utterly trivial points about the journey here. I got upgraded to business class again for the second leg of the trip, from Munich to Tel Aviv; as I said before, it's very nice but I would not pay for it. Why me? who knows. Perhaps because I'm a fairly frequent flyer and travelling alone?

The security inspection in Stuttgart confiscated my shaving cream, first time that I've ever had anything taken away. In fairness they did offer me the alternative of checking my bag (i.e. not carrying it on), which would have let me keep the stuff; they would have tagged it with a huge great big label and I would have given it to the gate personnel and received it again on the "finger" in TLV. I didn't know that system and thought they meant that I had to go back to the checkin, wait in line, give them the bag, then fight my way through security once more — which had already taken nearly an hour the first time I did it. Ah well, live and learn. (The reason I didn't give it up to the baggage handlers in the first place is that it contained my laptop, and I felt no need to expose them to the temptation to steal or break it.)

Security did allow me to keep my toothpaste and aftershave, but I had to take them from the plastic bag that they were in and put them in a specific and special 1-Litre Transparent Resealable Plastic Bag, which by an astounding coincidence was available from a vending machine right there. In a package of two, though you are only allowed to take one such bag on board. The bureaucratic mind at work is a thing of wonder.

Oh, by the way and on the subject of security, here's an important Public Service Announcement. If you have a connecting flight, e.g. Stuttgart to Munich to Tel Aviv, do NOT purchase anything even vaguely liquid-ish at your first airport! There is a chance that it will be confiscated at the second airport's security check, even though the goods are obviously bonded and sealed and clearly purchased in the airport, behind the first security check. The duty-free shops all know that this will happen but most of them don't warn you, which in my considered opinion borders on fraud.

Ah, it's sunset, the [forgotten which denomination] are out in their speaker vans calling us to prayer. Israel is very far south, and so sunset is early and rapid: pitch-darkness comes barely an hour after you notice that the clouds are getting red.

I bit the bullet and bought shampoo (400 ml), shower-gel type soap (200ml) and a package of razors to throw away. The latter are utter shit: "Life" brand twin-bladed disposable razors* in a packet of 5 for €2.50. The blades are rough and scratchy, it's like shaving with a handful of broken glass. Avoid. The former are good enough products, but obviously far too large. I will not be able to take them back with me, unless I check my bag and risk losing my laptop. Why do the hygienic article makers not produce small sizes for travellers? Perhaps they prefer for us to buy a huge bottle which gets confiscated? I guess our loss is their shareholders' win. Bah.

And another thing. I'm sure I speak for 99.3% of men when I say that we do NOT want to have to examine an entire stock-island-gondola-thing of shampoo, five shelves high and 150cm long, to find something to wash our damned hair with. Perhaps women appreciate being able to choose between low-fat daily-wash creme-rinse-without-brighteners for curly straw-blonde hair and low-fat daily-wash creme-rinse-without-brighteners for curly wheat-blonde hair, but we just get utterly pissed off by the needless complication. I have been known to leave stores empty-handed and enraged, refusing to play this insulting game of too many fake choices. And it's not just shampoo either: when I was a kid, you bought Crest toothpaste or you bought Colgate toothpaste. Now there are over 40 varieties of Crest alone**. Ridiculous!

Attention makers of shampoo for men: Want to drive your competition out of business within a single month? Produce a yellow package with clear black writing that says

This is shampoo.
It will make your hair clean.

No alternatives, no variations, no phony pseudo-distinctions that are (we suspect) either unfounded or based on differences so minute as to lie within the bounds of experimental error; just one single simple product. We would queue up — nay, we would fight each other — to buy that.

* Google bomb, hoping maybe to save someone else from buying them.

** Really. I counted them in the Duane Reade near Columbus Circle.

Awake

Woke at 5:15 from a strange dream, waiting now for hot chocolate to cook. I left my working glasses in the office last night, so forgive the typoes.

I was in SL, talking about unhappiness with Beta (from the wedding party). I decided to visit them at their RL home, which was not suburban Milwaukee but a cottage rear the river Thames in the village where AH lived. Beta was in the garden, sitting under trees at the end of an ancient, crumbling red-brick wall (not sure where Noctis was in the logic of the dream). We talked for a while there, then the scene changed and we were walking down curving streets of north London, near Highgate Cemetery, talking about a book that zie had written; then we were back indoors and zie showed me hir latest rejection letter: a YouTube-type video by e-mail from a school principal. I replied that it was wonderful that zie had written a book at all, and not to be worried about rejections. I told Beta about my father and the realities of the publishing business, and somehow the dream changed to farming! I was a self-aware cow, walking around a farm talking to other animals and looking at the new barn being built to replace one that had blown down in a storm. The place where it had stood was occupied by the house my favourite cousin grew up in, which was now painted yellow and in use as a Portuguese restaurant (yes, in the midst of the farm); by this point I was in my human body again. The owner was possibly a disguised AH since there was a dog that held my hand tightly and pulled on it to get me to play, and the other people (guests?) reminded me of his friends after Pat died.

Speaking of books, I am 200 pages into my second reading of Infinite Jest, and am both appalled and amused to realize how much I missed the first time. IJ really does need to be read twice, at least, to understand it. The thing is full of clues and hints about what is going on, but these can only be recognized as such by someone who already knows the story. Fascinating. I'm enjoying it even more this time around. Highly recommended to patient readers with a lot of time on their hands.

Dull, summer edition

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

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

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

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

Blather, Monday edition

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

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

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

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

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

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

Still

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The play's the thing

I've started reading my Christmas present books, beginning with Bill Bryson's biography of Shakespeare in the Eminent Lives series. It's well written (of course, Bryson hasn't disappointed me yet), amusing and erudite. The book is a kind of meta-biography, it talks about how we know what we think we know about Shakespeare, and how little is actually documented of the life of a fairly significant person of that time. There are several stretches of up to five years where there is no evidence that Shakespeare was alive at all, bar that he demonstrably did something later on. (On the other hand, it is also true that we know more about him than almost anyone else who was alive then.)

Here's Bryson talking about Shakespeare's "Globe" theatre in Southwark:

The Globe itself didn't last long... But what a few years they were. No theatre — perhaps no human enterprise — has seen more glory in only a decade or so than the Globe during its first manifestation. For Shakespeare this period marked a burst of creative brilliance unparalleled in English literature. One after another, plays of unrivalled majesty dropped from his quill: Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra.

We thrill at these plays now, but what must it have been like when they were brand new, when all their references were timely and sharply apt, and all the words never before heard? Imagine what it must have been like to watch Macbeth without knowing the outcome, to be part of a hushed audience hearing Hamlet's soliloquoy for the first time, to witness Shakespeare speaking his own lines. There cannot have been, anywhere in history, many more favoured places than this.

Aye.

Life etc.

Yes, I'm still here despite the silence. Time is flashing past at a frightening rate, even faster than usual. I will be on my way to Canada in ten days, for two weeks of family and food and properly cold weather.

Speaking of which, it continues to snow lightly (as I twittered a few days back), but the ambient temperature down here in the valley is still too high for the snow to settle. I am trying an experiment this year: I am only heating the living room (because I sit here for hours on end) and the bathroom (because I'm a wimp), letting the other rooms do as they wish. (This is Germany, there is no danger of anything in the apartment freezing). Getting undressed for bed is pretty grim, coming as it does after a few hours in the warm living room, but I find that I wake up toasty warm and very comfortable despite the temperature. This was prompted by reading a claim that central heating and suchlike actually make us more susceptible to colds and the flu by de-training our natural bodily resistance. We'll see.

That last tweet should not worry anyone, nothing happened, everybody is safe. But there were a few long and quite harrowing late-night conversations until X arrived at that safe point. I'll tell you this for free, dear friends: whatever therapists earn, it is nowhere near enough. [Updated: Dervala writes movingly about loneliness and unhappiness: "I’ve come to believe that Starbucks may be the largest private mental health organization in the country, a place where anyone with two bucks for a drip coffee can get smiled at and can sit safely next to other human beings for a while." Go read.]

Just finished reading a kind of autobiography, "Istanbul" by Orhan Pamuk, he of last year's the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature. It's a strange book, no more a true autobiog than say "Tristram Shandy" was. It is actually about Istanbul and anger and melancholy, in nearly equal measures, with young Orhan popping up now and then to point to things. Very well written, at least in the English translation, recommended for readers who aren't after cheerfulness or action.

For those who do want some cheerfulness: put on your headphones, close your office door, and watch this video. Very funny, pix are harmless but the words are definitely not safe for work. Enjoy.

Disorganized

Sneaking under the wire again. I have to organize things a bit better around here. Woke far too early, tossed and turned for nearly two hours, then slept again far too late, and the day never really got back on course.

That is all.

Eight down, twenty-two to go.

Johari

Settling back into home and routine after three days away (it felt much longer somehow). Here's a simple make-weight post to keep up the NaBloPoMo routine. Play along at my Johari Window by selecting the five or six adjectives from the list that you feel best describe me.

More later perhaps, now it's time for work. We have to form a plan of action for dealing with this new project!

Shabbat shalom, my dears.

Seven down, twenty-three to go.

Preparing

To Munich tomorrow for two nights, for the database toolkit's nearly-annual developer conference. Will spend the evening and tomorrow morning preparing a new Windows version to install on my favourite customer's system on Thursday. I hope I will be able to get an internet connection on all three days, to keep NaBloPoMo'ing. Time will tell.

Lovely day today, sunny and blue skies, temperatures around 10°C which is warm for this time of year. G and I went for a cappuccino on the terrace of the Kunstmuseum after delivering the model to the competition headquarters, where we were joined by U and Ralph. Very pleasant.

I mentioned back in February that there was something odd about the way a competition from November 2007 had ended. Well, something very unusual and exciting might happen tomorrow evening in a small town near the Rhine, which I can't tell you about yet (and possibly never in all the details). Watch this space.

Three down, twenty-seven to go.

Seth on losing

Seth Godin wrote a few days back about different ways of winning and losing:

Actual conversation at a local shoe store: "Do you have dress shoes in a size 6?"

"No, I'm sorry we don't."

"We're from out of town. Do you know any place we can get some?"

"I'm sorry I don't. Perhaps you'd like some in a size 8?"

Now, what are the chances that someone who wants a size 6 is going to buy an 8? Zero. The game is over. You lost. […]

It seems to me that this is the perfect opportunity to be a statesman. This is when you earn the right to be seen as a trusted advisor, not a self-interested shill. Two months or two years from now, when you interact with that person or organization again, we'll remember that you were the one who spoke up on behalf of the competition, the one who helped us find a better fit, the clearly disinterested advisor who helped us choose between the two remaining good choices.

This is absolutely true, it has happened before my very eyes.

The best salesman (highest-volume and highest-profit) at the Great Big Computer Company was a guy who would recommend products from the opposition when they were better suited to his customers' needs.

Do you think his customers trusted him? Do you think they called him back, and called him first, next time they needed something?

(Management at GBCC was furious, of course, but what could they do? He made nearly a fifth of the company's turnover.)

You can win in the short-term by forcing people to do what you want, to buy what you sell; but the way to win in the long term is to be the enabler of goodness.

Two down, twenty-eight to go.

It's that time of year again

Sneaking under the wire to post the first of this year's NaBloPoMo entries. This might be something of a lost cause as I will be in Munich for two or three days next week and may therefore fail to meet the target. We shall see.

One down, twenty-nine to go.

Finished

At last, and just barely on time too.

Alone in the office now, winding down to Moby and frankincense.

Shabbat shalom, my friends. Know that you are very dear to me, even if I often seem to ignore you.

Duration

It occurred to me the other day that I have lived longer in this apartment in Stuttgart than I did in the house where I grew up in Toronto. I found this quite shocking, because my childhood years in that house feel much longer than the time I have spent here, and also to compare the way I live with the comfortable, welcoming, sheltering home my parents managed to create in the same amount of time. Ah well.

Warming up slightly, sunny and 18°C today.

That is all.

Daybreak

Literal and metaphorical. Up early to meet the tax collector (they make house calls), now posting while I consider whether to walk downtown to the Cafe Eberhard for breakfast despite the rain.

I'm making myself start doing that Life thing again. I began by writing some invoices, which I hadn't done since the end of June, and discovered that I have done less than six weeks worth of billable work during the last three months. OK, I knew that I'd been slacking, but I didn't realize how bad it was.

Translated a few wiki pages for the Münsters, and made a start on the second phase of the second competition, due in three weeks.

One step at a time, grasshopper.

Rain has stopped. Breakfast.

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.)

Sunday

The second competition has been judged already, in a manner of speaking, and we were among the winners. It was the first stage of a two-part competition: in the first stage, 45 competitors presented ideas for improving the centre of a small town and some sheltered housing, all in rough and simple outline form. Fifteen have now been selected to develop these rough ideas into reasonable, feasible projects. In other words, what we won was the right to take part in another competition. Better than the proverbial kick in the head, but not by much.

I spent two days in Hamburg last week, visiting with Ageing Yuppie and his crew, and doing a bit of work too. Eleven hours in the train for three hours of customer hand-holding? not quite right somehow; but flying would only have been about an hour shorter door-to-door considering security lineups and waiting for baggage and all that crap. I'd rather spend the time on the train, where I can at least walk about and look out the windows.

Time for sleep, it's been a long day.

Trivia, Tuesday edition

The second competition, for the rejuvenation and prettifying of a town centre, was handed in yesterday, and we are now entering the final stages of the first (a park-and-ride centre in a large Bavarian city (no, not Munich)).

Weather is clear but significantly cooler, a mere 18°C at present, and the first leaves are beginning to turn, so it looks like summer is over for 2008. Ah well.

Other than that, life goes on. Nothing new to report. I hope your lives are more interesting.