Facebook's Fakeness Makes Us Feel Worse, Comedians' Honesty Makes Us Feel Better

'I see the people happy, so can it happen for me? 'Cos when I have no energy, there's nothing that can move me'

-Kate Bush, 'Sat in Your Lap'

Recently a group of Stanford scientists led by Alex Jordan published an article in the 'Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin' about a tendency people have to overestimate other people's happiness, which usually ends up leading to increased dejection and unhappiness. A good write up can be found on Slate, and there has been considerable discussion since in the blogosphere, Twitt-o-sphere, really all the spheres.

The fact that the research was inspired by one of the less-fulfilling aspects of Facebook triggered much of the discussion:

Jordan got the idea for the inquiry after observing his friends' reactions to Facebook: He noticed that they seemed to feel particularly crummy about themselves after logging onto the site and scrolling through others' attractive photos, accomplished bios, and chipper status updates. "They were convinced that everyone else was leading a perfect life," he told me.

I have noticed that I tend to have a feeling of emptiness and disappointment after nearly every interaction I have with Facebook, but hadn't thought thought about the underlying reasons for that so much. It does make sense, although I also hate Facebook for other reasons, including the fact that it's 'walled off' from the otherwise more open web, and the occasional feeling of being pressured to 'friend' people I am not really friends with (mainly co-workers or distant relatives I'm not particularly cozy with), which then leads to a pressure to to be fake about how happy you are and how great everything is, which in turn brings everybody down, as science has now proved, because you forget everybody else is frantically trying to fake being happy, too.

This ties in to a broader tendency I've noticed for people to focus on the positive to an absurd and unrealistic degree, almost to the point of seeing any kind of negativity as pathological, and seeing 'negative people' as pariahs to be avoided at all costs. Not to be too negative, but I think this emphasis on 'positivity' is destroying the world. Some examples:

• Being optimistic that invading a country and establishing a new U.S.-friendly regime and society there will be a 'cakewalk'
• Thinking home prices will go up forever
• Not being a gloomy Gus and worrying about energy dependency
• Believing you are great at multitasking, including texting and driving at the same time
• Thinking you don't have to pay taxes because you are Wesley Snipes

The list could go on and on.

It is possible the over-optimism is a reaction to the over-pessimism of the 90s. I'm looking at you, Billy Corgan. Billy was only one of the many songwriters in the 90s who'd say some variation on the following in interviews:

People ask why my lyrics are so depressing and negative. When I'm happy, I want to celebrate that I'm happy and have fun, I don't want to write about it.

Kurt Cobain was the patron saint of 90s mope-rock. He became a superstar singing about how crappy life is, and then shot himself in the head with a shotgun.

There are some promising signs that a more balanced view of reality is on the rise in popular culture. A good example is Louis CK's show 'Louie'. Louis is a very talented comedian, and the show is very funny, but at the same time Louis does not in any way shy away from talking about some of the unhappy realities of life after 40, including the gradual decline in health and realization that your best days may be behind you. He deals with really nasty people - a heckler, a kid threatening to beat him up, Nick DiPaolo - but on the other hand he really loves his daughters and finds great fulfillment in his role as their father, and he has the respect of his peers and confidence in his capabilities as a comedian.

Marc Maron's very popular WTF podcast includes Marc's honest observations about his life and life in general, including some things that are real downers like career disappointments and divorce. I've also learned from listening to his show that almost all of my favorite comedians are on medication.

It's strange that comedians (except Kyle 'Be positive at all costs' Cease) are the ones bringing us back to our senses, but somebody needed to do it, and best that it's people who can also make us laugh help us deal with it all.

As for Facebook, I can't quit it (yet), but I take some comfort in the fact that I'm not alone in finding it to be not only a time-suck but a soul-suck, too.

I Will Never Eat These Things Again

Today I took my daughter to Target to go grocery shopping while my wife is in London and then Dublin for a week. We went because while we can manage on our own, we decided to get some pre-packaged, easy-to-fix foods (frozen pizza, frozen other things) to get us through the week. You are probably thinking, wow, what a bad Dad, and actually it gets worse. My 7yo daughter decided she wanted to try a microwave meal involving a hot dog (and frozen bun) which had to be prepared in 3 microwaving stages, and yes, I let her try it (she thought it was alright, but didn't eat all of it). If I posted this kind of thing in a parenting web forum, I'd bring down a rain of criticism and misery, which is only one reason why I avoid those places.

We also purchased, and will eat: oatmeal. So back down.

While I was there I saw a package of ramen noodles on sale. It worked out to about 12 cents a pack, and this got me thinking about foods I used to eat which I will never eat again, unless something goes horribly wrong in my life.

Spaghetti-Os

I ate these and other Chef Boy-R-Dee canned pasta food products as a kid, and as somebody who just fed his daughter that freeze dried hot-dog bun thing, I'm not in any position to point fingers. I liked those canned meat-product-balls well enough. The Spaghetti-Os thing got out of control in grad school, and I have nobody but myself to blame. On a more-or-less daily basis, I'd take a can of spaghetti-os and a couple pieces of bread (occasionally a peanut butter and jelly sandwich) to the office, and eat that while I graded papers or sweated over problem sets. It was kind of unfortunate that in my early 20s, when my mind and body should have been at their peak fitness and power, I chose to undermine myself in that way. I believe this stopped immediately after I got my M.S. degree. Graduating meant an end to a lot of ruts, including eating these.

Hot Pockets

Jim Gaffigan does a famous bit about Hot Pockets, so it's really impossible to squeeze any more humor value out of them at this point. This post is not about making jokes, though, it's a confession of past sins, so I shall move forward. This habit started when I worked at AT&T and fell in with a group of obsessive runners there. This coincided with a peak in my own obsession with running. Now, years later, I can say it: I didn't really give a shit about what I was doing there outside of the really intense lunch-time runs that I still fondly remember, even the ones in sub-zero temperatures or the speed workouts that took every last bit of energy out of me.

Hot Pockets fit in because I didn't have time to have a proper lunch, and I did have to get work done so I could hang on to the job and keep running. Again, at a time where I was pursuing peak fitness and health, I was undermining myself by eating this garbage. Inevitably I got sick of the taste of them, and when I changed jobs, again, it was a good time to ditch an unhealthy rut I'd gotten myself into. I can't really say enough good things about the mental and physical health benefits of switching jobs (unless you switch to a very shitty job, that is).

Salad

This one is also lunch-time-workout related. Our workplace has a fitness center, which is a nice benefit. There's also a cafeteria, which is competent as far as being a corporate cafeteria goes, but after a workout the only thing they have that I feel like eating is salad. The salad bar is kind of unpredictable, and some days there are only 2 or 3 things I'd want to put on the salad besides lettuce. I've gotten pretty tired of salad, to the point where salad has become a combination of two Mitch Hedberg jokes to me:

Rice is great if you're really hungry and want to eat two thousand of something.

and

You can't be like pancakes. You're all happy at first, but then by the end, you're sick of 'em.

I said at the beginning of this post that I will never eat these things again unless something goes horribly wrong, but I would like to think between myself and my wife, we'd be clever enough to find better things to eat even under serious budget constraints. As I saw today after our shopping trip, this kind of food, while convenient, is not necessarily cheap. It's probably safe to say whatever happens, life will be a journey from one kind of food I get sick of to another.

What foods are you never going to eat again? Don't answer in the comments, just say them at your screen like you are talking to your favorite TV pundit. I couldn't stand it if I asked people to comment and nobody did.

This year, I'll try to be more superficial

There's no point in running it into the ground anymore - my goals for 2010 have been covered and revisited. Overall, I did OK, but it was not the year things really happened for me. In the interest of looking forward, even though that way lies oblivion (it lies the other direction, too, only then I didn't know any better), here's what we'll be going for in 2011, which we've already been in for a week:

Simplify:

• Cut down Google Reader Usage as much as possible
• Same with Facebook. Maybe just never use it again. I never feel good after spending time there. Usually I feel more alone and isolated than I did when I started.
• Same with 99% of the Internet
• Get books I’m not currently reading and stow them away somewhere, so they don’t mock me and stress me out.
• Use fewer variations of the same thing at work (e.g., one version control system is enough).
• Organize the bills/etc. better
• throw away things I don’t need
• Don’t work on 50 projects at the same time, mainly at home, I mean. I ought to finish something occasionally

Learn:

• R
• Audio-related electronics (amplifiers, DACs, effects, circuit-bending, noise making).

Stay the course:

• Spend lots of time with daughter and molding her impressionable young mind and such
• Spend time with my lovely wife also
• Continue to weigh 185 +/- 5lbs
• Continue to not have any major health problems
• Run
• Ride the bike
• Walk the dog, remember to take the time to tell her she is in fact a good dog
• Maintain wall of detachment between self and people/places/things that won't be named at this time

Also, as per the title:

Be more superficial.

What does this mean? As a ‘back end’ guy (ha), I focus on behind-the-scenes stuff nobody notices (data, monitoring, number crunching, etc). I need to do more bullshit front-end things, dress up the web stuff a bit beyond really stark raw info stuff. I had this realization recently that I spend an awful lot of time doing stuff nobody really sees.

I don't really care about that at work (they pay me, so the sting of being ignored is not so great - in fact, they need to have a big sign printed that the HR department hangs up everywhere reading 'Being Ignored Is Its Own Reward', because that's a true story at that place), but it would be nice to get the occasional notice/recognition elsewhere.

On another superficial note, I really ought to do a better job keeping up with movies and music. It's one thing never to have anything to say when people talk about sports, but I look at peoples' 'My 50 Favorite Movies of the 4th Quarter of 2010' lists, and I feel like I'm totally out touch. Who knows how many comic references I'm missing? I may eventually find nothing funny but wordplay and slapstick. The prospect is horrifying.

Wish me luck, or don't, and have the best 2011 possible.

'Something to offer besides waiting to die' or 'why do I live in Bloomington?'

Yesterday on Twitter, @drewmckinney, aka the guy who wrote that cool DrivingBuddy iPhone app, wrote:

Why be a tech professional in Bton instead of SF? "Bloomington is 58% cheaper than San Fran, housing is 81% cheaper"

He linked to bestplaces.net, a handy site where you can find out for example if you are making $50,000 a year in Bloomington IN, how much would you need to make in San Francisco to get by at the same level in terms of housing and so forth? The answer to this question is: $117,735.

These numbers always have to be taken with a grain of salt, and ex-NYC resident @lmcalpin called bullshit on them:

my apt in bklyn wasn't much more $$ than apts downtown here

anyway i've heard people say before that cost of living makes working here attractive compared to either coast

and i think its a bullshit argument and wishful thinking

Fair enough. At this point we turn to blog posts and articles on whether the fact that it's cheap to live in the Midwest is a draw for businesses and talent. The first one was brought to our attention via @benfulton, and was written by Morton Marcus, a retired economics professor whose column appears in Bloomington's Herald-Times sometimes. I like Marcus' work as he seems to me to be non-partisan, in sharp contrast to the regurgitated Cato Institute dreck people from the Indiana Policy Institute serve up in the H-T Op-Ed.

Marcus' article in the Indiana Economic Digest, 'If the brain drain remains open, what's left?' has this to say about the 'It's cheaper to live in the midwest, come work here!' argument:

Housing is cheaper in Indiana because fewer people want to live here and the value of the goods and services we make is lower than in the Golden State. Lower valued outputs lead to lower wages which lead to lower housing prices.

and:

It’s easy to say the problem is a failure of business investment. We could not admit that the failure is a stodgy environment, communities with hardened intellectual arteries, and businesses that feel at home in such places.

Yes, the issue could be the brain morbidity of business and civic management rather than a need for more business tax incentives.

This discussion reminded me of a blog post by Max Beatty summing up September's 'The Combine' Conference in Bloomington. This was a conference in the tradition of SXSW and other tech gatherings organized by tech professionals in Bloomington, including the people from Humanetrix and SproutBox. Max's post is mostly positive, but this excerpt stung, I have to admit:

Then came the first discussion panel titled “More Than Corn.” The panel of Midwest executives did not deliver. I thought they would be up there boasting about how great it is to be part of tech companies in the Midwest and the opportunities that lie ahead. Instead, they never offered any valid arguments beyond the cost of living being lower and being a great place to raise a family. Working for less and settling down is something very few of my friends under 30 are interested in. By the end of it, I was reaffirmed with my decision to leave Indiana. Indiana’s brain drain won’t stop until there’s something to stick around for besides growing old.

I first read this a few months ago, shortly after the conference, and my initial reaction was to be like Ice-T in the middle of a Twitter beef and invite the author to eat a hot bowl of something. I showed restraint, which is good.

After thinking about this again as a result of the Twitter exchange, I believe there were probably two problems there. First, perhaps having the panel was ineffective for this guy because the panel was showing and not telling, in the parlance of writing classes and lyrics by Canadian Rock Gods Rush. The fact that people in Bloomington put together The Combine, SproutBox, Ignite! Bloomington, and (here comes the plug) Bloominglabs shows cool tech things can and do happen in Bloomington. Having a panel where people talk about things like houses being cheaper is more talk, less rock.

I have been thinking about it some more, and the reasons I like and live in Bloomington have very little to do with the cost of living. We had a house on a lake in Martinsville, IN that cost less than our current place, but I was happy to trade that for living in Bloomington. As I think about it some more, I love Bloomington because it's different from the surrounding area. A lot of people refer to it as an 'oasis', and though I don't use that cliche a lot, I have to admit my reasons for sticking around and loving the place have a lot more to do with Bloomington than the Midwest. Morton Marcus nailed it when he referred to 'communities with hardened intellectual arteries'.

So in the end, I think @lmcalpin and the man Morton Marcus are right. The cost-of-living difference, while really nice, is not enough in itself to draw people here. Further, I don't feel compelled to defend 'the Midwest', and I think cities are more important than states (and definitely regions) when one's deciding where to live.

'Cities' by The Talking Heads

I'm Thankful

...I've been removed from all the 'Obama iz a seekrit Muslim' mass e-mail lists of relatives and colleagues

...I don't have to fly this Thanksgiving weekend and endure 'gate rape' of myself, my wife and my daughter

...my daughter is so cute and funny

...my dog is both affectionate and ridiculous

...my wife is beautiful, supportive, and funny

...the people I spend the majority of my time with at work are cool

...I seem to have managed to change my running form so I can run w/ less pain

...BloomingLabs continues to be a source of fun and mental stimulation, and I've met cool people there

...I don't live in or commute to Indianapolis

...I have a life where my shitty PowerPoint skillz aren't a problem

...I've given up any pretense of knowing anythin about sports. This gets me out of a lot of really tedious conversations

...I left the 'dream team' cafeteria McLaughlin group to hash things out themselves, and go running at lunch instead

...my daughter abruptly left the 'princess phase' when she turned 7

...my daughter has awesome Mario Kart skillz

...my wife would never contemplate making a pumple cake or a turducken, except as a joke

...that 'Delocated' show

...I am 90% of the way to not using the word 'issue' instead of 'problem', god I hate when people do that

...that for that brief window in time Mountain Dew Throwback was available to tickle my innards, although 'tickle yore innards' is funnier, but there's not really a funny mispelling of 'my'

...I have more books than I'll ever be able to read

...I have more music than I'll ever be able to listen to

...I internalized Fugazi's 'you are not what you own' message, so I don't have to listen to Fugazi anymore because their mission was accomplished

...my 'douchedar' seems to work pretty well

...Tom Scharpling came back from his hiatus

...Tom Scharpling has retired 'Do It!' as a show opener

...Superchunk released a really great album this year (not grateful they didn't make it here on their tour)

...I live in a country where I'm free to choose which burrito place I go to for lunch

...I won't see commercials on TV featuring smarmy white douchebags wanting me to vote for them for at least a year

...I got a $26 check as my '5 years of service' award

...I managed to put together this list without every item being '...I don't'

...'Comedy Death Ray' will continue to produce new episodes for the forseeable future

...I can stay up as late as I want, because I am a grown-ass man

...even though I can eat whatever I want because I'm a grown-ass man, but have the sense to not eat crap food all the time because I'm a grown-ass man, I still say fuck it and eat chicken wings sometimes because dammit they are delicious

...I live in a universe where people can get book deals based on Tweets

...none of our favorite 80s and 90s celebrities will ever have to get real jobs thanks to reality television and VH-1's 'Wasn't that Awesome?' shows.

...I am mostly resisting the new trend of ending every snippet of e-communication with an exclamation point!

...we don't have flying cars, because after you flew the car once or twice, you'd probably get over the novelty and just leave it in your garage from then on.

...Eddie Pepitone exists (and has a Twitter account)

...etc

Neologism Squatting: these words/phrases are mine

Oraclown: clowns who use Oracle. Also, consultants from Oracle.

I Googled this one, and I got a lot of results for a fish called an 'Ora Clown' (MySQL has the porpoise, now Oracle can have the Oraclown). I couldn't find anybody referring to Oracle-ites as Oraclowns, though. Surely somebody has thought of or used this?

Scooby Dieu: the dog god of France. This one is nonsense, but it makes a nice username perhaps. I couldn't find this on the Google, either.

Abbot and Skastello meet Skankenstein: the hacky 'ska band names are funny' joke to end all hacky 'ska band names are funny' jokes. I actually really wish a ska band would take this. There have been longer and more cumbersome band names: '...and you will know us by the Trail of Dead' and 'Scandal Featuring Patty Smythe' come immediately to mind.

That's it for now!

'___ is like Jazz' No, it's not.

I recall reading one of those 'change or be killed' stories about a guy who got fired from his job (I believe it was a journalism type job). He asked his employer 'Why are you firing me? Aren't I doing a good job? I'm producing a lot!'. His employer answered 'You are great at what you do. The thing is, what you do is like Classical Music, and we need Jazz. We need somebody who can do Jazz.'

Myself, I have this undercurrent of fear of being told '...what you do is like Classical Music, but around here we're more about the Artificial Fart Under The Arm'.

LoL news scrolling thingy

I recently attended the Mitch Altman/Jimmie Rodgers soldering workshop at Bloominglabs here in town. Both Jimmie and Mitch brought kits to sell, and I bought one of Altman's famous brain machines, and Jimmie's LoL Shield (lots of LEDs, lots of lights, lots of laffs) in the then brand-new extra bright blue.

Once I'd put it together I had to do something with it other than the test pattern and the game of life. There is a pretty nice implementation of Tetris for it - you can use a potentiometer as a paddle to move left and right, and a button to rotate it.

Anyhow, I wanted it to display scrolling messages, and not the hardcoded kind. To that end I first obtained this nice library: guyzmo's LoL shield dynamic banner. If you want to use it, you have to pull the other Charlieplexing.h and .cpp files out of your library files, b/c otherwise you'll have a conflict.

This pretty much reads whatever comes in via serial port over the USB cable connecting yr Arduino to yr computer, and then scrolls the message on the display. This could be adapted to be either wireless or over the internet. Go nuts.

W/ version 1 of this, I noticed weirdness with only getting the latter half of a string when a headline changed. After futzing around, it seemed to be due to a need to 're-init' on the change. So I changed this function in the LolGlyph.cpp file like so (there may be a better way to achieve this end):

void UpdateTextFromSerial() {
int i=0;
char c;
while (Serial.available() > 0 && i < 140) {
  c = Serial.read();
  Serial.write(c);
  disp[i++] = c;
  delay(1);
}
if (i != 0) {
  disp_len = strlen(disp)*6;
  disp[i] = '\0';

  ScrollLeft_setup(); // this is what I added - SDC

}

}

Aside from this, I use the dispfont.pde file in guyzmo's code pretty much as is.

On the computer side, I used the New York Times API, because it's a nice API. If the New York Times is too liberal for you, there are many other ways you could get headlines: scrape RSS feeds, use a different API, whatever.

This piece is really simple. It's in Python, so obviously you will need that.

First file is for grabbing the headlines (times_news.py).

Second file uses the first and communicates w/ the Arduino via pySerial. You may have to install pySerial. It's been a while.

Have fun, and this stuff falls under the WTFPL (as does the original), so do whatever the fuck you want with it.

Here's the exciting git-hub location for this. No guarantees or warantees are explicit or implied. Or however that goes.

http://github.com/sdcharle/LoL-news

Steam-powered cars with the gardens in the back

Some people were arguing on Twitter as to the sucks vs. rules category Steely Dan belong to, and one of the debaters linked to this essay from Donald Fagen about Science Fiction's impact on his youth: The Cortico-Thalamic Pause: Growing Up Sci-Fi.

That Fagen was a sci-fi guy in his youth is not exactly a shocking revelation, especially those who've heard his 1993 solo album Kamakiriad. Leaving behind Steely Dan topics like washed-up drug dealers ('Kid Charlemagne'), old pervs showing dirty movies to kids ('Everyone's Gone To The Movies'), not going back to your old school ('My Old School'), doin' it with the Fez on ('The Fez'), and whatever 'Aja' is about, this album was a concept album, and the story here was that Donald was going on a road trip in his futuristic car, 'The Kamakiri', steam-powered and featuring a garden inside the car. It also had a link to the 'Tripstar' satellite.

It seemed a bit ridiculous at the time, but here it was, 1993, and Donald Fagen anticipated XM radio and steam-punk, as well as the Locavore movement (no shitty road food for Fagen - and nothing's more local than the back of your car).

It was a fun and silly album, with that usual Steely Dan slickness to it, but perhaps overboard with the lightness. The album was lighter and more fragile than balsa wood. From yacht rock to balsa rock. Sadly, the Kamakiri was not to be, although my Prius is not too shabby.

The man himself.

This was hardly the first sci-fi concept album. 1990's 'Sex Packets' from Digital Underground (known today for their wonderful one hit 'The Humpty Dance') was supposedly inspired by a project at NASA to help astronauts who have been in space a long time without doing it. The 'Sex Packets' contained pills which, when taken, would give the astronaut a very realistic wet dream, featuring the girl or girls featured on the packet. The packet could presumably also feature dudes, but the lyrics were very andro and hetero centric.

As William Gibson tells us, 'the street finds its own uses for technology'. Somehow the packets ended up in the hands of drug dealers who sold them to eager fiends.

In this case, the concept doesn't run through the whole album - it really only appears in songs 10-14, most notably 'Packet Man'. Aside from those songs, the album is pretty much all party fun time (Doo Whutcha Like, Humpty Dance), with the legendarily pornographic 'Freaks Of The Industry' thrown in. It's broken down track for track in the book 'Check The Technique', for the curious.

Another hip-hop sci-fi concept album of note is The Infesticons' 1999 album Gun Hill Road. The Infesticons were actually Mike Ladd and many of his underground hip-hop friends, including El-P from Company Flow, the guys from Anti-Pop Consortium, and others. The opening track lays out the story: In the late 80's Poof Na Na convinces his smart friend in high school to build him a set of robots which could turn the Five Boroughs into a 'jiggy man's paradise'. The robots end up stowed and forgotten in his mom's basement, until she discovers them in 2000 and turns them on.

This album really deserves a post of its own - the lyrics are brilliant and it's one of my favorite things ever - I actually get mad when I see it in the used CD bin. Who let this go?

The list of such albums is too long for a low attention span blog post, but of course Dan The Automator's contributions must be mentioned (Dr. Octagon, Deltron 3030). Billy Idol's 'Cyberpunk' serves as a horrible warning as to the dangers of taking on this genre, although Billy was pretty prescient putting his email address on the album cover way before anybody who wasn't a college student or an engineer had email. The sci-fi concept album is still alive and well, most recently represented by Janelle Monae's The Archandroid (Suites II and III, Op. 67, P.O. Box 91978) and nerd-core hip hop is doing more to keep it alive than anyone. As nerds continue to dominate the world and pop culture, there's no sign that it will go away anytime soon.

'I had always heard that building a word processor is one of the hardest things you can ever do as a software engineer.'

So says this guy.

That is probably a good test of a person's aptitude toward software engineering. If you can somehow look past the crushing and pointless dullness of developing yet another word processor and instead groove on the intrinsic challenge of the task, clearly you've found your spot in the world.

Increasingly I am more and more interested in having some kind of concrete (useful or fun) end result, which is why I've gravitated toward the hackerspace world of late.

Second Quarter Report

At the beginning of the year I did a brief post about what seemed like good goals for 2010. This is something lots of people do. I am doing New Year's Resolutions wrong, though, because I followed up 3 months later, and am back to do it again 6 months later. This is turning into the 7up of self-absorbed blogging. Here we go now...

1) Get out of the I.T. ghetto

As mentioned in our last entry, this has been revised a bit. Inspired by actors who take on really shitty movies and TV shows to finance their theater projects, I was motivated to go out and find fun and interesting things to do around town, stuffing my day job into the 'get paid so you can do fun things that don't pay' box . One fun thing has been being part of Bloomington's new hackerspace. We're just about to decide on an official name, which means great t-shirts are not far behind, and we're doing a series of workshops all through July. So essentially, I'm working to live, not living to work, and that's OK.

Additionally, my least favorite person at work quit a few weeks ago, so that's one of those little gifts life gives you sometimes.

2) Write more

This is a big failure. I don't think I've ever written less in my life than I have this year. I do post on Twitter several hundred times a day, and have started a PLOG (personal log - something that's electronic but locked away and private) that I write in every morning. Usually, though, these are one or two sentence blurbs.

3) Find someplace other than Soma to hang out

Actually I think the hangout of choice now is going to be the hackerspace. Since I don't spend much time writing or pretending to do so, I am not spending much time at coffee shops.

4) Go to Disney World

As before, we did this one in March.

5) Learn more about electronics

The hackerspace thing went a long way toward helping me out here. I have learned about OpAmps recently, which are very useful since a lot of times with sensors and such you have a weak signal that you need to boost.

6) Call in to The Best Show on WFMU.

I did actually achieve this goal, although my debut was not what I hoped it might be. A couple weeks ago I called while Paul F. Tompkins and Wally Wackiman were on, which was probably not the best time to make a first call. I made it past call screener Mike, then waited on hold for a couple of minutes.

I noticed while on hold I could barely make out what people were saying. I'm not sure if this was due to nerves, or my phone, or the line. When I got on I did the 'is this me?' rookie mistake. After getting my bearings I suggested Wally (a puppet) make corporate training movies like the Muppets did for IBM before they got famous. Tom and Wally started riffing on that, but again, I couldn't really hear what they were saying, so then eventually I got an opening to talk again and said 'hey you can do this, I bet you get a call from Jiffy Lube tomorrow', or something similarly lame, and Tom said 'I'm not going on this guy's flight of fancy' and hung up.

Actually it was kind of funny, getting hung up on, but the whole thing was very nerve wracking and essentially I turfed out. I may try it again, but will try to actually focus on what's being said, which will probably help a lot.

7) learn to 'hover' on the unicycle.

I don't know about this one. I think I just felt like I had to add more to the list.

This Book About the Atari 2600 Reminds Us That Programming These Days is Really Candy Ass

I recently read 'Racing The Beam: The Atari Video Computer System'. The book introduces a new field: 'platform studies', which sounds academic and dry, but if you are a technical person, what it is is a nice break from the told and re-told video game mythology those of us who came up in the era of classic video games (roughly the late 70's to the '83 crash) have heard and re-heard: the Pong coin box overflowing, the pizza with a slice missing as Iwatani's inspiration for Pac-Man the truckloads of the hated 'ET: The Extra Terrestrial' cartridges being dumped in a pit in Alamogordo, New Mexico which was then paved over.

Today's programmers, whose 'hello world' programs written in Java require the memory of millions of early 80s Sears Department Stores' Electronic sections full of VCSs have heard stories of the amazing programming feats in the days of old. The Atari 2600 (code name: Stella) featured a whopping 128 bytes of RAM. Not 128M. Not 128K. 128 bytes. You can't even fit a whole Twitter Tweet in there.

'Racing the Beam' gets into the gory details of the platform's design. Of particular interest is the TIA (television interface adapter). Screens were drawn line-by-line (with 192 vertical scan lines), and horizontally the screen was divided into 'color clocks'. 'Racing the beam' refers to the need for code to do all the necessary calculations in these tight time constraints.

Aside from the memory and time constraints, the games were mostly built under tight personnel (usually one person per game) and schedule constraints (although in the chapter about the game 'Adventure', we learn that after a very intense month of prototyping (and essentially laying the groundwork for a whole genre of games), Warren Robinett had to take a month-long vacation to let his brain recover).

How Deep Does It Get?

As I mentioned before, the book does cover the architecture of the system in a block diagram sort of way. While there are no extensive code listings, the chapter on Combat gives a high-level overview of the program's structure and discusses the building blocks for game graphics: 2 hardware sprites, two 'missiles', a 'ball', and a playfied (by default, this was symmetric, so the field could be specified in half the space it would otherwise take).

Brave souls who want to dive deep into Atari 2600 programming can do so now that we have the internet. See the complete disassembly of the Combat code by Nick Bensema and Roger Williams. This is at first horrifying, but after the initial fear I was struck by the thought that this was the product of a single mind, in contrast to the 'product of many minds of varying levels of skill and levels of giving a shit' nature of enterprise software, which can end up being horrifying in its own right, no matter how many new programming wonder-fads and tools are thrown at it.

For all their heroics, the programmers of the Atari 2600 had their share of shame. Tod Frye got some big royalty checks for his 2600 version of Pac Man. He posted them on his office door: whether this was because of social ineptitude or just being an asshole will be debated by platform studies scholars for years. Unfortunately, the game was horrible, as those of us who owned it and played it 3 or 4 times recall. Millions returned the cartridge, other people, like me, just never played it again. I should note that this book does a pretty good job describing the technical reasons the game sucked so bad.

So what is it? Academics? Nostalgia? Geexploitation?

I mentioned at the start of this post how a lot of us have heard the stories of the classic video game era many times. Really great stories stand up to retellings and help pass them along to new generations, who may or may not care. This book does provide a freshness by looking at the 2600 from a technical as well as cultural, historical, and business perspectives. I'd like to read similar books about other great machines of the era, both game machines like the NES and early home computers like the Commodore 64 or the legendary Apple ][. With Maker culture getting people interested in working within the tight constraints of PIC and AVR microcontrollers and the Arduino platform, there's even a practical benefit to looking back at techniques that today's web monkey will have little or no use for.

I'd recommend the book to anybody who loved the Atari 2600 but doesn't want to just take another nostalgia trip down memory lane, or anybody who wants to know how grandpa wrote programs back in the old days.

Not quite destroying Jah work: the least offensive attempts at reggae by non-Jamaicans

Reggae is not for everyone. Unfortunately, over the years it has become associated with dorm room stoners and the likes of Ras Trent of 'Are You There Jah, It's me Ras Trent' fame.

It doesn't really help that people unfamiliar with Jamaican patois only catch a few words and phrases ('Babylon', 'sensimilla', 'Jah', 'Selassie', 'I and I', 'mon', 'ting') and decide that reggae lyrics are written by putting these words in a hat and pulling them out at random.

If those misunderstandings of reggae weren't bad enough, 'reimaginations' of reggae by the likes of Eric Clapton (I Shot The Sheriff) and Guns'n'Roses (Knockin' On Heaven's Door) just rub salt into the wounds.

Reggae is music that took a round-trip from the U.S. to Jamaica and back. Jamaican musicians playing their versions of R&B and 60s pop heard on cheap radios created reggae, and then people like DJ Kool Herc took the sounds and ideas of dub and sound systems to New York City, and hip hop evolved out of that. The Selector became the Hip Hop DJ, and the Reggae DJ became the Hip Hop MC. Remix culture and many genres of electronic music have obvious roots in dub.

This is not a history lesson, though. Instead, let's look at some rare occasions of reggae songs by non reggae artists that weren't complete abominations.

Clash - Police and Thieves

As the Don Letts' 'Punk Rock Movie' showed us, reggae is what punk bands listened to when they were off the clock. I loved the 'sparse instrumental reggae' the Clash played while riding in their bus. Later I'd find out it was actually dub.

The Clash took a stab at a classic reggae track on their debut album. Singer Junior Murvin's reaction to hearing the song was "They have destroyed Jah work!", but as well-meaning attempts at reggae by punk bands go, it's the best.

Police - Walking on the Moon

Sting, who used to be cool once, recorded what you could call bubblegum reggae during the early days of The Police. Sting says Miles Davis collaborator and jazz great Gil Evans once told him he loved the bass line to this song. It's simple but effective, and the lyrics go well with the lightweight music.

Sublime - Santeria

This one's more recent. They get points for talking about a different fringe religion than Rastafarianism here. Unfortunately, taking different drugs than marijuana didn't work out so well for them.

Rush - Vital Signs

Rush is hated by a lot of people who don't understand Rush and are idiots. Back when the band Queen put reactionary 'no synthesizers' labels on their albums, Rush took on the challenge of incorporating them into their sound. They've never shied away from alienating people. This song is the last track on 'Moving Pictures', and it sounds nothing like the rest of the album ('Tom Sawyer', 'Red Barchetta', 'Limelight'). It probably confused a lot of the people who said 'fuck yeah!' when they saw the 'no synthesizers!' label, which is great.

Paul Simon - 'Mother and Child Reunion'

This 1972 song features Jimmy Cliff's backing band, so musically it's the most authentic of the bunch. It's tempting to dismiss this as some form of cultural thievery the way some people dismissed Simon's use of South African musicians and styles on the 'Graceland' album, but whatever the case, it is a great song.

The Orb - 'Towers Of Dub'

Early 90s pranksters and plagiarizers The Orb always had a sense of humor that was welcome in a genre filled with people taking themselves too seriously. This song, with the prank call at the beginning ('If you see Haile Selassie, tell him that Marcus Garvey called, and I'll meet him in Babylon and ting'), the dog barks echoing off to infinity, and the floor-shaking bass line from Jah Wobble, manages to goof on dub and pay tribute at the same time. The Orb kid because they love.

Conclusion: check out 'King Tubbys Meets Rockers Uptown'.

Wall Street Douchebags are ready to tear up Main Street

The election of Barack Obama in 2008 has really led to an explosion in chain e-mails, one that might suggest the wise investor buy stocks in a company like Cisco whose products are part of the infrastructure of the Internet that keeps our inboxes stuffed with gems about 'Obama is a Secret Muslim, the Angel Of Death Is Nigh', or 'Obamacare mandates taking over kids' summer camps to turn them into death camps for Grandmas', or 'ACORN is going to take your gun and give it to a Mexican with syphilis'.

In this tradition, we have the hate mail (this article refers to it as an 'Angry Class-Warfare Email') from an anonymous trader who is NOT going to be made a scapegoat for the economic meltdown.

Some excerpts:

'Go ahead and continue to take us down, but you're only going to hurt yourselves. What's going to happen when we can't find jobs on the Street anymore? Guess what: We're going to take yours. We get up at 5am & work till 10pm or later. We're used to not getting up to pee when we have a position. We don't take an hour or more for a lunch break. We don't demand a union. We don't retire at 50 with a pension. We eat what we kill, and when the only thing left to eat is on your dinner plates, we'll eat that.'

This is pretty funny, because around the time of the election, these Libertarian triumph-of-the-will masters of the Universe were threatening to 'go Galt', and withhold their God-given talents from an ungrateful society. Anybody who actually heard this bullshit or bothered to pay attention to it laughed with scorn and derision. 'Oh dear! Who will package toxic loans into opaque instruments to sell to suckers? Whatever will those of us without the Right Stuff for Wall Street do?'

Having been deservedly ignored, now the traders threaten to take our jobs and get up at 5am and work until 10pm or later when most of the people who currently hold these positions can take care of business in 40 hour/week time frames. Of course, management will notice the ex-traders' amazing powers of bladder control when he is able to stay in tedious meetings about new HR policies for hours without demanding a bio break, and he'll end up on top and dominate THE FUCK out of the office supply business in the tri-state area!

Having shorter work hours might mean the trader will have more time to spend with his family, assuming he has one. I am sure he will then parent the shit out of his kids and take the rest of us parents to school. Parenting is, of course, an easy job for women and Nancy-boys, he will tell us.

Which segues nicely into...

'For years teachers and other unionized labor have had us fooled. We were too busy working to notice. Do you really think that we are incapable of teaching 3rd graders and doing landscaping? We're going to take your cushy jobs with tenure and 4 months off a year and whine just like you that we are so-o-o-o underpaid for building the youth of America.'

Don't kid yourself, sir. Even assuming you are ALLOWED anywhere near a classroom, once you pull one of your macho-man stunts like pissing at the urinal from across the bathroom or wrestling a biology teacher to the ground to establish dominance, you'll be lucky if all that happens is you get fired. More likely you'll have to lawyer up, and then we'll see who eats whose lunch.

This kind of overpowering and dripping disdain for the teaching profession will probably be detectable from miles away even if you don't provide that helpful extra step of putting it in writing, like you have here.

Oh, and by the way, a lot of teachers ARE losing jobs due to budget cuts, in part due to all of you and your dick-swinging boys' club shenanigans.

I'm sure writing this stuff was cathartic for the guy, but a better forum may have been a personal journal. To be fair, writing this post was fun, too. It's possible the letter is even a hoax, but it touches a nerve because there are most definitely people with attitudes like this out there. I sometimes have to talk to and pretend to not be disgusted by some of them. I've seen them in the wild.

For now, I can say with complete confidence that on my things to worry about list, Joe Douchebag here doesn't even rate an honorable mention. Try harder, Joe. Looks like you're going to have to get up earlier than 5am and work later than 10pm at scaring me.

Also:

A fun smackdown at Wonkette

At Salon: Wall Street Rage

At the Daily Bail: a response to the email, perhaps, in cardboard sign form

Creation Science and Robotics: A match made in heaven, BY GOD!

I have been wondering recently whether there is a lot of robotics research happening in the world of Creation Science. It seems like a really good fit. If there are answers in Genesis, surely one of them is the answer to the question: how do you make an autonomous entity that will do your dirty work for you (naming all the animals, that sort of thing)? Surely Creation Scientists are not, as their critics claim, merely working backwards from what they've already decided is the truth and trying to arrange cherry-picked scraps of evidence to fit it.

Also, I think we've all seen the list of 500 people who have taken science classes who subscribe to creation science. Robotics is very high on the list of cool and fun science, so surely at LEAST one or two of these people have devoted their lives to emulating God by doing some of their own creating.

Unfortunately, after I downloaded the list from the Dissent From Darwin site, a search for 'robot' or even 'robo' came up with nothing.

Google was kind of my friend in this search. I found a reference to an Ian Juby, the owner of Canada's first Creation Museum (oh, Canada...). Ian is 'a robotics engineer by trade'.

Unfortunately, the trail ran cold on further digging. I was curious to see where Juby had studied, what papers he'd published, or even just messages he'd posted to robotics forums to help enthusiastic newbies out. All I could find was this one. It sounds pretty robotic-y, but you'd think he'd have been a little more active there, or, really anywhere.

Degreewise, I found that 'Ian received a college Diploma in Robotics Engineering from Canadore College, North Bay, Ontario, Canada, in 1989.'

Essentially, all I could find about Ian's career was this quote, from his own site:

The robot itself (remember, I'm a robotics engineer by trade; I know how much intelligence is involved in designing even a simple robot!) requires incredible and precise engineering, design, and intelligence.

Pretty much true, although my daughter and I have done OK with our Lego NXT kit (speaking of which, a kid at Falwell's Liberty University wrote a book about the NXT that's pretty good. Maybe one day he will be the big star of Creation Robotics).

I did considerable digging, and I couldn't really find anything to rank him higher in the robotics community than the cool guy who builds robots at hackerspace and in his basement. That guy will tell you that he is a pharmacist by trade, and it's true, but as a roboticist he is no slouch, not at all.

I may ping Ian and see if he can refer me to some info about his work in the field. Maybe he can do an interview with the people with the people at the Robots Podcast. I really don't want to give up on the idea of a rich and thriving robotics sub-branch of Creation Science, not yet anyway.

And Ian, if you're reading this, I just want to tell you it's OK if you're not a roboticist even though you studied it in school. I was a mathematician back in my school days. I loved math and really immersed myself in it, but today I'm the mathematical version of the guy who was a high school football star 20 years ago, but now gets winded going to the fridge to get a beer. I suppose I could call myself a mathematician, but I'd be lying to myself, and the world. I'd set myself up for all manner of ridicule and pity. Life took a different turn, and that's fine.

More About The Wit of the Staircase

It turns out the French phrase for thinking of something clever too late to use it is 'L’esprit de l’escalier or esprit d'escalier (staircase wit)'.

A classic example of this in popular culture is the Seinfeld episode where George wracks his brains thinking up a riposte to a co-worker's 'the ocean called, they're running out of shrimp', and all he can come up with is 'oh yeah? Well the jerk store called, and they're running out of YOU'.

If the French sounds too pompous for you, or, as in my case, you're not sure how to pronounce it, Wikipedia provides German and Yiddish options:

The German word Treppenwitz and the Yiddish word trepverter are used to express the same idea.

If You Have a Racist Friend...

Back when I was cycling through all the music subcultures of the past 50 years and I was on the ska chapter (2-Tone ska, not the Don Drummond/Skatalites 60s ska - yet), I of course loved The Specials. I still like The Specials a lot, they're just not in the kind of heavy rotation they were 20 years ago.

They had this song called 'Racist Friend':

If you have a racist friend
Now is the time, now is the time for your friendship to end

Be it your sister
Be it your brother
Be it your cousin or your, uncle or your lover

This was a tall order. I had a racist mentor (about whom more later), and at least a couple racist relatives. I also had friends and acquaintances and classmates and room-mates that were decidedly racist. I felt like the song was giving me a hard time for not having the balls to give every last one of these people the heave-ho.

It really got under my skin because it called my attention to a weakness I sometimes have when it comes to people saying or doing hateful shit. At some point you have to say shut the fuck up, or at least I have no interest in your theories about how Mexicans are destroying the country, and if that doesn't work, not doing business with the person anymore is probably the best course of action.

Easier said than done.

(yes, embedding disabled by request. just click thru, don't be lazy)

The Internet: How do I work this?

"Bragging that you're not a blogger is like bragging that you're slow and stupid and probably don't know how to use the Internet that well."

-Jake Dobkin of Gothamist.com

This was something I heard on a not so recent episode of WFMU's Too Much Information, the DEAD MEDIA episode. I'm kind of slow (ouch) in mentioning it, but I agree with the sentiment.

On the other side of the news (although it's not really an opposition viewpoint, more a complementary one), we have this celebration of the joy of reading text on paper : You Can't Wrap A Fish In an iPad

..but you can tune a piano. I got nothin'. Carry on with your day now.

1st Quarter Report: 2010

Previously, I wrote about things I hope to do in 2010.

Now that Q1 of 2010 is over, let's see how I'm doing.

1) Get out of the I.T. ghetto

Pretty much no motion at all on this one. My job continues to be a pointless exercise in futility at a joyless hole (new nickname for my workplace, but if you own a bar in a shitty part of town feel free to use that name), but at least on the 'abandoning your hopes and dreams' scale, it's a couple steps less bad than being a crack addict with hepatitis C.

As far as this goes, my prediction is eventually I'll just get fired and then pursue a much more fulfilling second career. See? I'm an optimist! Stay tuned for updates.

2) Write more

This one started out well, but I fell back into my old not writing ways quickly. I did spend an amazingly long time writing and rehearsing what ended up being a 5-minute presentation for Ignite Bloomington 2 (on the Arduino), and that was really a great exercise in cutting out bullshit and general minimalism (although watch me now, all kinds of superfluous verbiage in this entry). Now that that's over perhaps I can channel the creative energy into less concise writing.

3) Find someplace other than Soma to hang out

Big success here. I was lured into Scholar's Inn Bakehouse on the square by their Twitter account ('free Euros with any purchase!'), and was reminded that in contrast to Soma's basement atmosphere, there's a lot of light and some nice outdoor tables at the Bakehouse, which makes it an ideal springtime hangout. There are comfortable chairs in the back, but they're almost always occupied. The coffee is good, and of course there are the baked goods, too. So I will at the very least add this place to the hang out circuit.

4) Go to Disney World

Done! We went the week of St. Patrick's Day for 3 exhausting days. I got up before 6 every day, which is unheard of for me except for race days. It was actually a lot of fun, and my daughter loved it, so again, big success on this one.

5) Learn More about Electronics

I have been going to the hackerspace meetings and doing more reading, particularly 'Practical Arduino' recently. I need to talk to the super-experienced electronics master there more, though. He was talking about he was going to teach us all about OpAmps but it hasn't happened yet.

6) Call in to the Best Show on WFMU

This one hasn't happened. I have a bad case of 'the wit of the staircase' (le wit l'escalier, I think) w/ the Best Show. I will listen, and then afterwards think 'oh! I should have called in with this story'. Maybe I'll pull it together on this one.

7) Learn to 'hover' on the unicycle

No progress here, although until a couple weeks ago, conditions for unicycling were hardly ideal.

Yours in the pursuit of better living,

SDC

And Jobs came down from the mountain: some analysts hype the iPad

Lest anyone think age and recent health struggles have in any way attenuated Steve Jobs' famous reality distortion field, check out this quote from this article over on ReadWriteWeb:

Mike Abramsky, RBC Capital Markets:

"With iPad, Apple creates a revolutionary e-reading, browsing, media, gaming experience. Newspapers, Web pages, books 'come alive' with video, animation, color and fullscreen touch." And as for the mixed reaction in the tech community? "Not everyone initially liked the Ten Commandments either -- but they endured." (Source: AppleInsider)

The 10 commandments? Really? Personally I would buy Woz as a Moses figure before I'd buy Jobs in that role. Although on the other hand, it's easy to see Jobs raining down plagues of locusts and turning the water to blood and all of that.

And what's not to like about the 10 Commandments? It's the other laws that make you give up pork and shellfish and not wear cotton/polyester blends that are kind of a drag. If I remember the Bible correctly, mainly it was wandering around in the desert for 40 years that really pissed people off, not the 10 Commandments.

Finally, the 10 Commandments took up 2 tablets. The iPad is only one, although with the touch interface paging through the 10 commandments will be a breeze. The iPad will make the 10 Commandments 'come alive' like Peter Frampton.

Thank you, Moses, I mean Steve Jobs, I mean all the engineers at Apple that worked themselves to death actually designing and creating this.