unscriptured

Ah here it is, another Superbowl weekend. So for me, another trip to Disneyland. Though I started this annual pilgrimage when I was living near the Magic Kingdom, it’s been most valuable to me in the years that I’ve lived away.

Walt Disney said that Disneyland would never be finished. For him that was one of it’s big advantages over the making of movies, it was something that he could continue to tweak and improve, to constantly upgrade. As I explained to God, that more than anything else is how the Disney corporation has kept to the spirit of it’s founder. They really have kept it growing and improving. It’s like one of those animal enrichment programs at the zoo, where they hide food and treats around the animals enclosure, because hunting them out helps to keep it mentally sharp.

Now, with John Lasseter in charge, I expect them to be even better at it. Much like Walt, John really lets his inner child loose, lets it out and doesn’t hide it away like most adults. So far he’s been tackling Disney’s California Adventure, which I agree needed it the most. Last year I got to see the World of Color water and light show, and I’m afraid it was a little too much like the first number in Fantasia to hold my interest, it was very pretty but could really use a story. But that comparison does show the promise of John capturing the spirit of Walt.

This year I’ll get to see what his crew has done with producing a dark ride based on The Little Mermaid. And sadly, Cars Land is not yet ready. I may have to make at least one mid-year trip to check that out after it opens this summer.

Anyway, I’m excited and God’s excited right along with me. I’m not sure if that’s because he has insider knowledge or if he just likes seeing me happy.

What goes around comes around. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Fang’s Law: Those who do not learn from science fiction are doomed to repeat it. Those who do not know Unix will reinvent it — badly.

There’s a reason these cliches exist. Like most cliches they’re basically true. God points out that reducing these truths to pithy aphorisms doesn’t make them any more or less true but does increase their value. She says that a picture may be worth a thousand words but a witty truism is worth more than that.

But why are we talking about this now? Well, God and I have spent a little time looking at Apple’s latest initiative, their new revision of the iTunes U concept, with their interactive retake on textbooks. She reminded me that I worked on a primitive version of the concept way back in the 1970s. I went to a school that used Control Data Corporation’s PLATO system. That system allowed you to go through course work on computer terminals and included the ability to take tests along the way to make sure you were picking up the gist of what you were reading. It seemed like a big advance in education but never really seemed to catch on.

Now instead of having to head on down to the school’s computer lab and sit down at a hulking CRT that only knew the color amber, I can pull out my tablet computer anywhere I’m at and bring up full color interactive lessons manipulated by touch instead of keyboard. So sure, history repeats itself, but sometimes the great thing about it is that it’s like a writer penning a second draft, it’s better than it was the first time.

In my last post I was talking about how Apple, while not taking the crown in actual number of PCs produced and sold, has become something of a mindshare leader. There’s another aspect to that that God and I talked about and it has to do with the simplisticness of sophistication.

As I’ve looked around at fashion through the years, one of the things that has endured is the attitude that simply going black can be the ultimate in sophistication. From the classic “little black dress” to Steve Jobs trademark turtlenecks, to the usually wrong declarations that “X is the new black,” it seems like you can never go wrong with just going black. It even worked for Spinal Tap, when they wanted an album cover that could go to eleven.

But Apple bucked this trend. They were advertising that people should “Think Different” and in a form subtly reinforcing that message, instead of black, they went to the other extreme. The iPod stated it’s minimalistic elegance all in white, right down to the wires on the ear phones. For a few months, or maybe even a year or two, after the iPod took off and became the “it” girl of consumer products, there appeared periodic columns warning people that the simple white lines of those wires made them a target. They let snatch-and-grab thieves know that you had something valuable, something worth stealing.

And the copycats at company after company looked at those white wires appearing all over the place and said to themselves, “White! That’s why they’re selling! They’re white.” So they made their cheap knockoffs and flooded the market.

Those knockoffs may not have improved the audio quality of the average lossy-encoding listener, they may not have gained any of the brand reputation of the coattails they were trying to ride on, they may not have done anything other than sell a few more units than they otherwise might have, but they did do something, something of value. They made it so that those iconic lines of white, dangling from our ears to our pockets, no longer made us targets for muggers.

Or at least they got lazy journalists to stop writing articles telling us that they did.

The other day God told me that Apple is the Dr. Pepper of the personal computer industry.

When I was young Dr. Pepper ran the “Be a Pepper” advertising campaign. When the campaign started it implored people to “be original” playing on Dr. Pepper’s underdog status to the colas that were the big kids on the soft drink block. The commercial’s were very successful both in that they were popular enough to become a pop-culture touchstone and in that they got a lot of people to either renew or begin a love affair (or sorts) with the product. In fact, they were so successful that the lyrics morphed from being about being original to be about joining the crowd. They had always showcased that lot’s of different people drinking the soda, but the lyrics added “there seems to be a Dr. Pepper craze,” and it was more than just Madison Ave. hyperbole.

Much like how Dr. Pepper beat Coca-Cola to market, Apple was selling “personal” computers (and their attendant operating systems) before IBM (and Microsoft). But like with the “Be a Pepper” ads, Apple’s “Think Different” ads played on their underdog status. Today, much like Dr. Pepper versus Coke and Pepsi, Apple is not the leading PC maker but seems to have all the momentum and mindshare.

So if you look around these days, and seem to feel an iPad craze, well maybe you’d like to join me in raising a glass of Dr. Pepper, toasting Apple’s success, and taking a moment to “Drink Different.”

Well, here it is. Another year. 2012. And just like every other year it seems, it’s an election year here in the U.S.

Of course just because the election happens this year doesn’t mean that we haven’t already been in the throes of electioneering; we’ve had plenty of run up as one Republican hopeful after another has tried to push Mitt Romney out of the race.

God doesn’t like me to spend too much time worrying about, or talking about, our elections. After all, he points out, with the de facto two party system that our system unofficially forces it’s not like there’s much to choose between. The choices currently are bad and worse.

Speaking of “worse,” when I’m able to detach myself enough from the reality of it, it’s actually kind of fun to watch the Republican nominating race. The Republicans currently have a system of fielding two kinds of candidates: The insane. And those not actually insane but who know that they can’t get the nomination without somehow appealing to the significant faction of Republican voters that are. Yeah, the inmates may not be running the Republican Party, but the people that are running it know that they do so only by the suffrage of the inmates.

It’s almost New Year’s, so another battle is drawing to a close in the war on Christmas. There isn’t really a war on Christmas, but the American reactionaries seem to want there to be one so bad that I’ve decided that I may as well humor them.

With a little help from God, I figured out that the “war on Christmas” rhetoric has come about because Christmas itself started as part of a Christian “war on paganism.” Sure they won that war, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned from watching how the Bible Belt has treated the Civil War, it’s that American Christian’s, or at least the southern ones, have a hard time admitting that a war is over. Sure they lost in the Civil War, but I can see where they’d have just as hard of a time giving up on a war that they won.

So they just figure that any deemphasis on the Christian mythos is a renewal of hostilities rather than a simple “growing up” of people that no longer need magical explanations for the simple facts of nature. Hey, if you’re not with them, you surely must be against them, right?

It’s almost Christmas. Santa’s no doubt gotten the oil changed on his reindeer and sharpened up their antlers. And an even surer bet is that I’ve been listening to a lot of Holiday music.

Holiday music covers a pretty diverse spectrum. Every genre of artist wants to get into the act, either because they love the holiday or because they see a chance to cash in. After all, you can even find Christmas albums by several prominently Jewish artists. And more than in most other types of music the novelty songs, the comedy songs, get a fair shake. The Chipmunks had their first success with a Christmas album. Everybody knows that Grandma got run over by a reindeer. And Christmas Rhapsody is one of the more amazing parodies that God and I have heard.

Even some “standards” are built around gimmicks. Consider “The Twelve Days of Christmas” and “The Little Drummer Boy.”

And that’s where I want to go off on a rant. I love “The Little Drummer Boy.” It’s an endearing little story with a fun approach and an approachable tune but I can’t say much for most versions of it. More than most Christmas songs, for some reason, performers like to bleed all the life out it. You’d think that groups with serious drummers would latch on to it and back up “pa rum pum pum pum” with some serious stick work. Instead what I keep running into is wimped out back up singers and pianos without punch, groups that seem to think that it’s amusingly ironic to do the song without a drum track at all.

Well it’s not. It’s pathetic. The Stylistics showed that you can do it with smooth vocals and still make it work, as long as you have a good drum track to back up the singers. But if you really want to hear the song done well, look up Bob Seger’s version. Now he showed that you can respect the source material but still make it live.

Hanukkah is just around the corner. Living in a predominantly Christian country, I’ll admit that the Jewish holidays have a tendency to sneak up on me. Sure they move around a bit, but so does Easter and I still manage to keep a handle on when that’s coming up.

Now this is going to go in the completely wrong direction, but I was talking to God about Hanukkah in particular, Jewish holidays in the less specific, and Jewish culture in general and he used the subject to teach me something about queer culture. One of the things that I’ve never quite been able to wrap my head around is the straight friends and acquaintances that I have that show a fair amount of interest in gay entertainment. This includes people that I’m about as sure as I can be that they aren’t just peering out from the depths of their closet, but who seem to have a more than passing enjoyment of movies and music and such that I’m into for their queer content.

God pointed out that I enjoy the Hanukkah songs that have accrued in my holiday collection. He pointed out what fun I have listening to Allan Sherman’s Jewish parody of My Fair Lady, and, as trite as it sounds, how I’ve enjoyed movies like Yentl and The Fiddler on the Roof.

So yeah, I get it now, I get why straight people watch queer entertainment. I suppose I should have gotten it just from seeing how I enjoy looking at alien cultures in science fiction.

But just for the record, Schindler’s List is still an overly pretentious pile of dung.

Candy canes. I get it, I really do. Peppermint has become the quasi-official flavor of Christmas and candy canes are really only partly to blame.

Sure there’s “egg nog” and some pumpkin spilling over from Thanksgiving, and a few other niche stalwarts like sugar plums, but really it’s come down to peppermint. I went grocery shopping this last weekend and I was kind of amazed. There were candy canes, of course. And peppermint ice cream, which I’ve come to expect. But there were also pretzels covered in mint flavored white chocolate, peppermint malted milk balls, chocolate covered mint marshmallows, peppermint chocolates, peppermint bark, and mint mocha frappuccinos.

Yeah, I bought my share of that stuff, so yeah, I’m encouraging the problem, but I also bought some egg nog almonds (which could just as easily have been named nutmeg almonds).

God tells me I shouldn’t be surprised at all this. He’s only surprised it took so long to catch on. Christmas, after all, is just the Christian version of the winter solstice celebration. And there’s a reason that all the gum maker’s like to refer to peppermint as “winter fresh.”

I was starting to ask God about the history of the Bible the other day, and she stopped me, she told me it just wasn’t worth putting in that much effort thinking about it. She went on to give me a new perspective, she equated the Bible to a modern counterpart, so that I could more easily grasp its import.

We’ve discussed the Bible before and she’s explained to me how a lot of the problem is with people who want it to be one thing, and one thing only. Generally that means that they want it to be the inerrant word of God, the first word and the last word, from which all of God’s intent can be divined. But it’s really a collection of things strewn together not so much because they are of a piece as because the book was sort of intended (by man, not God) to be a full curriculum for the scholars of the day. In its way it was intended to be the whole library that you could carry in your satchel. Sort of a farmer’s almanac for the cultivating of humanity.

So scattered throughout the texts that make up the Bible, we have histories, we have fiction, we have genealogies, laws, and gossip. One of the most predominant things though is fiction masquerading as truth. So what does all this suggest as a modern equivalent? Well that last item should really give it away. The Bible is the historical equivalent of a “best of” from the “National Enquirer.” Like any good tabloid the Bible has just enough fact and just enough substantive reporting to cast a thin veneer of possibility across all of its made up stories, just enough to keep people wondering.

Well, yesterday here in the U.S. was Thanksgiving, a day when we’re supposed to reflect on what we have to be thankful for from the past year. The origin of the holiday comes from when the ill-prepared settlers of this “brave new world” were saved from starvation by the generous help of the natives that they later turned on in a near genocide. Like with so many things in United States history I get to be thankful for the aid of those Native Americans because their selflessness and compassion made it possible for me to be here today, but I also have to be embarrassed because of the subsequent abhorrent acts of the settlers greed, ego, and utter lack of humility.

And given all of that, God and I had no trouble this year with agreeing on something for which to be thankful: We’re thankful for the Occupy Wall Street Movement, for those individuals out there putting up with police brutality, illegal arrests, and tear gas, to exercise their basic right to protest and to point out the greed, ego, and utter lack of humility of those corrupting the system so that the obscenely rich can continue to win the class warfare that they’ve been successfully waging since Nancy Reagan pushed her husband to national office.

One thing in particular struck me in God’s comments about the OWS protestors, she told me that they reminded her of Jesus turning over the tables of the money changers at the temple of Jerusalem. I guess bankers have a pretty long history of screwing things up. God may not be one of the 99%, but she’s definitely on our side.

Here in the U.S. income taxes are at the lowest rate they’ve been in something like half a century. Because of that and because of a series of disastrous relaxings and removals of regulations that were put in place after hard won economic lessons, our federal budget deficit is at an all-time high, and the ability of the government to take care of the people is in serious jeopardy.

Yet the Republicans keep insisting that we must not increase revenue.

The Democrats keep offering to cut some of the programs that they fought hard to get in place. They put forward plans that reduce spending by several times the amount of revenue increases that they ask for. They sell short their current constituencies in a desperate attempt to keep the government alive without putting in hock the next several generations.

But the Republicans won’t have it.

I asked God, point blank, what was going on. He put it in terms that I could understand. Roughly, Republicans are the party “of the poor and for the rich.” They’ve managed to all but eliminate the middle class while transferring all the wealth to the rich. Quite simply, the Republicans are now adamantly opposed to any tax increase because they know the only ones that can still afford them are the rich, and the rich, well that’s their minority, the one that they’re there to protect.

It’s Veteran’s Day here in the U.S. A day we honor those who have put their lives on the line hoping to make the world a better place. A lot of them have gone off to war and come back mentally broken.

I asked God why he spent time with me when he could be out there putting these brave souls back together, helping them to get their lives in shape. I thought he might tell me something like, “they have their own crosses to bear, I cannot do it for them.” Or maybe, “I give them what help they are ready to take.”

Instead he told me that he hangs around me because I amuse him.

Well, God may be a selfish pig (and so am I at times), but let me at least take this moment to say, “Thanks, Vets.” Thanks for all your sacrifices and I’m sorry for all the times you’ve been put in harm’s way for stupid reasons.

I was trying to decide what I wanted to write here when God came up behind me, leaned down close to my ear and whispered a number. Seven billion. And of course she was right, that’s what I’ve got to talk about.

According to some of the best projections and analyses, on Halloween this year, the human population of the Earth reached seven billion. It’s a staggering number. And out of those billions, sixty-percent are in Asia. Is there something about Asia that makes people especially fertile? Living in the U.S., as I do, it’s pretty easy to be egotistical and boast about all of our accomplishments and superlatives, both real and those merely jingoistically tossed out by our frenzied media, but when it comes to population, we’re merely third. And not just barely edged out by numbers one and two but soundly crushed. Number one, China, has more than four times our population, and number two, India, has more than three times the number of people that we do.

Carbon emissions are one thing, but I’ve got to figure that just the heat given off by seven billion people is making a contribution to global warming. Well, maybe not enough to measure but still, I wouldn’t want all of us stuck together in one room without some pretty good air conditioning.

Seven billion. Wow. I just can’t really get my mind around that. I’m pretty sure that it’s more than we need, but then, we’ve never really been big on having just what we need, have we?

As I write this, my fingernails are painted black. That pretty much can only mean one thing, Halloween is just around the corner.

I have nothing against painting my nails, but it’s both more bother than I’m normally willing to go to for my looks, and more ostentatious than I’m normally willing to be. And again, I have nothing inherently against ostentation, but I do have something against calling attention to myself. It goes back mostly, I think, to having been bullied as a young boy.

God says I’m rambling again and should get back to the point. So back to Halloween. Within three miles of my apartment I know of three major Halloween stores. When I was a young man I would go to a theatrical supply store to get makeup for my costumes, and for the rest of it, to various craft and department stores. Now it’s one stop shopping and I’ve got everything I need, and more than a few things that I just plain want.

I imagine the bad economy has actually been pretty good for the Halloween outlets, there’s lots of vacant retail space for them to get on the cheap. But the wealth of costume and prop shops is not just due to floor space bargains, God tells me that it’s also a sign of our country doing a little growing up. We don’t hide from death quite as much as we used to. And we’re a little more willing to revel in the things that our religions tell us are bad. We get to play with it a little on our own and come to our own conclusions, instead of just accepting what the preacher tells us.

Now we haven’t gotten full on into having a Day of the Dead, like some other cultures do. We like a little more variety than that. So sure we’ve got skeletons and zombies, but we also have werewolves, and princesses, and all manner of fetishes. And with the dropping costs and increasing realism of our seasonal latex grotesqueries, I can hardly wait until one of these years I see some some neighborhood kids out on the streets on November first playing a game of soccer with a rubber zombie head instead of a ball. Now that’d be a pickup game worth watching for a few minutes.

God asked me today if I think that panhandlers get together and discuss “best practices.” Have they done experiments to determine the right amount of aggression or the optimal level of pathetic that they should be presenting to maximize return on investment? Have they figured out just how loud to pitch their pleas?

Going about my daily business in downtown San Francisco there’s a gauntlet of these folks that I have to run past anywhere from two to four times a day, depending on what I do for lunch. Well not literally run, I walk. The block south of Market from the BART station that I use, has six fairly regular “donation seekers” with three or four of them there at a time most days. They don’t cluster together but have sort of established stations along the block. There’s one free agent who tries different spots on different days, but the rest seem to each have their spot and if they’re around that’s where they’ll be.

I’m never quite sure of the best way to refer to these people. I could go with beggar, since they’re begging for money, but really they’re more asking than begging. I could go with bum, but that seems to presume more about them then I actually know. I can’t go with homeless, since some of them pretty clearly do have a home that they go to at night. Panhandler seems the best choice, it’s relatively neutral, describes what I do know about them and doesn’t say anything about what I don’t know about them.

But back to God’s question… I really can’t say. At first blush it seems that they don’t, since they aren’t all following the same pitch. Some present a cheery greeting while holding out a cup to encourage us to give what we will or what we can. Some make the pitch that they need money for food. Some little more than mumble leaving not much more than the word “change” loud enough to hear. But then I thought, different people have different natural abilities that they have to work with, so the most effective pitch would be different for one panhandler than another. Some people are naturally intimidating, some are pitiable, so they each have to find what works for them. Even more than that though, by having different pitches up and down they block they’re probably maximizing the overall take. Some of us respond better to one type of pitch than another, so for each of us that walks along that block, there should be somebody there making the best kind of pitch to get us to give.

So do they discuss “best practices?” I don’t know, but they may have figured them out all the same.

So who’s the third? That’s what I asked God this week. There’s been a long standing superstition that the deaths of the famous come in threes and that’s what was behind my question.

Last week the world in general, and the computer world, in the somewhat more specific, mourned the passing of Steve Jobs. While he was only fifty-six, it still wasn’t a surprise, wasn’t a shock; the five year survival rate for the form of cancer that he fought was dismally low, so it was almost certainly a question not of would it be soon, but of just how soon. Probably more than anyone else, Steve is responsible for the look and feel of modern computing. But when you get past the surface and instead get to what all those computer programs look like on the inside? Well, that owes an awful lot to Dennis Ritchie, and this week it was Dennis Ritchie that passed away.

He was seventy. So, like Steve, it’s not a big shock. Still, in the world where I make my living he was a giant, and when giants pass, you notice.

With Steve’s passing I can take solace in knowing his legacy lives on. Today the new iPhone goes on sale. I’ll hold it in my hand and know that its look, its feel, and its interface owe an incredible debt to Steve Jobs. Unlike most of the millions who’ll get one in the coming weeks, though, I’ll look at mine and know that it’s Unix inside, that it’s Unix that is part of its elegance, part of its power, and that that side of it owes an incredible debt to Dennis Ritchie.

Rest in Peace, Dennis, you made the world a better place.

My iPad keeps me from going crazy on my daily commute by train. iTunes allows me to slice and dice my extensive music collection in a way that a wall full of CDs never did. Every post to Unscriptured has been written on an Apple device that had gone through the gauntlet to receive a stamp of approval from Steve Jobs.

And now he’s gone.

The real impact of that can never be known. Apple doubtless has products in the pipeline upon which Steve had direct impact. After those are released? Well, it’s a question of how well he picked his lieutenants, how well he trained them, and whether or not what he had is even possible to pass on to other people. If future Apple products suck, well, maybe they would have even with Jobs at the helm. After all, look at the Apple TV. But if they don’t suck? Well, that will be at least in part because of Steve.

Rest in Peace.

David Byrne once wrote “Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens. … It’s hard to imagine that nothing at all could be so exciting, could be so much fun.” And I have to agree, “that nothing at all could be so exciting” is pretty much beyond my ability to imagine. I could take the cop out and say that maybe we should just substitute, say, the word “fulfilling” for “exciting” but that glosses over the real issue, the real issue is that we like excitement and the perfection that we try to claim for Heaven is inherently lacking in excitement.

So I asked God to give me something more to go on, how can Heaven represent perfection without giving up the excitement? He told me to think of the universe as a whole as a writing exercise. See, I understand writing so this is a metaphor I can work with, and God knows that. So God and I talked for a bit and here’s my view for the moment:

The universe is like a great big novel, it’s full of all sorts of things happening, some of them because they move the plot along, some of them because they add color and flavor, and some of them are even there to provide misdirection, to keep us guessing about the ending until it’s revealed.

But the universe is just the first draft.

God is working as fast as he can, getting the universe down on paper, so to speak. When he gets the time he goes back and does rewrites. Some things he can fix as he goes along, that’s part of what evolution is about… The dinosaurs weren’t interesting enough? What if we bring in a big asteroid and give the mammals a chance to move to center stage? But some things you can’t just write around, some things you have to go back and change the way they happened in the first place, in order to make everything fit, in order to make everything work its way to a satisfying conclusion.

Heaven is the final draft. Heaven is where everything happens for a reason. Heaven is where we abandon our free will to better serve the greater good.

And if you’re not willing to do that, maybe Heaven isn’t the right place for you. But if that’s the case, well, you can still raise Hell, while you’re here on Earth.

One of the cool things about the modern age is we often get the chance to sample foreign foods without the expense and trouble of having to actually travel. Don’t get me wrong, I like to travel, but it is work and it is expensive.

An example of this is that right now in my refrigerator is some cheddar that was made in Wales. Now I live in California and we have some pretty good home-grown cheddar right here. In fact having now tried the Welsh cheddar and compared it to a more-or-less equally aged hunk of a more local origin, I’d say that neither one has an edge over the other. But the point isn’t that the cheese from over the pond is either better or worse, it’s that I got to find out for just the cost of the cheese.

Similarly, around St. Patrick’s Day every year I also get the chance to try cheese and butter and other things that come all the way from Ireland. It’s a bit of seasonal fun.

It got me to wondering though, do they do the reverse? Do the Irish sample turkey from California when Thanksgiving rolls around? Do the English compare our cheddar to theirs on the Fourth of July? And when I asked that, God just sort of looked at me and asked if I really thought the English wanted to do anything celebratory in remembrance of our revolting against them?

God works in devious ways.

This is to be expected from the being that created irony, although I have it on good authority that that wasn’t what he was trying to create at the time.

The recent example that I came across is cigarette smoking. Inhaling the fumes of burning tobacco is one of the unhealthier things you can do. In order to help incentivize people to treat themselves better, our legislators have been passing laws to make it more and more difficult to casually engage in smoking. I’ve been noticing all around me lately, one of the current outcomes of this legislative nannying. Smokers are gathering together in the outdoor areas that are among the few places left they can freely smoke. Outside the office buildings in downtown San Francisco they cluster together to smoke and to talk.

And breathe the fresh air.

So the smokers are out breathing in the fresh air and I’m spending most of my day sitting in the office. Somehow smoking starts to come across as the healthier choice.

I’ve taken to stroking my computer throughout the day at work.

There’s a good reason. No, really.

See I’m using a laptop running Apple’s latest version of Mac OS X, Lion. With the large trackpad and the gestures that Lion recognizes I haven’t felt a need to hook up a mouse. Now besides gestures one of the things that Apple is good at is battery management. I know I can adjust some of the settings for this but so far I haven’t felt a compelling need. So part of the battery management is that on a fairly aggressive schedule the MacBook decides to dim it’s screen, aggressive enough that I’m often still reading something on the screen or pondering some bit of code on the screen, so I don’t want it dimmed. In a mouse-driven environment I’d reach out and jiggle the mouse to return the screen to full brightness. In a trackpad-centric world I reach out and slide my fingers across the trackpad. A move that really is no different than reaching out to stroke the computer, and made all the more enjoyable by the smoothness of Apple’s trackpads.

For all my life cats have trained me that if they stick the top of their head at me, I’m supposed to pet it, to stroke it. Now my computer has found a way to induce the same thing. I asked God if it’s part of Apple’s plan to get us to love our computers by getting us to anthropomorphize them or to treat them like pets. He told me that just because I love my computer doesn’t mean it’s part of some nefarious plan by the computer industry to prepare us to love our new robotic overlords even before they arrive.

And then he told me that people masturbating while looking at pictures on their computers is not them having sex with the machines. I was about to ask him what made him jump to that thought, but then I thought, what if he tells me?

God has taken to walking into the room, looking at the screen of my iPad, shaking her head, and then walking out again.

Maybe it’s ’cause she doesn’t like to hear me swear. Maybe it’s because she doesn’t like to see me upset. Maybe it’s that at those times I’m just not very good company. What she’s been seeing on the screen is a game called “Strategery.” I play it way too much and have done so almost since I first got the iPad. It’s kind of an addiction.

And it doesn’t make any sense that I keep playing. The basic mechanic of the game is great, and the graphics are fairly nice, but almost everything else really sucks. There’s a bunch of different options you can set that can have a fairly significant impact on the game. I’ve settled on a set of them that seem, to me, to be the best trade off between giving me control over my in-game destiny and making it just too tedious to bother. I should probably go with the too-tedious settings and then maybe I’ll stop playing.

So with the settings I’ve chosen: The game generates a random map on which to play and assigns random starting positions to four computer players and me. About 80% of these starting setups are essentially unwinnable or are only winnable if you get lucky on the dice fairly early in the game. Given that it’s a “strategy” game, I don’t see any point in playing a setup that will be decided early almost completely on luck. Of the remaining twenty percent, about two-thirds are so easy to win that it’s more like exercise than fun, you just go through the motions until you’ve done enough repetitions for the game to be over. And in the remaining five percent or so of games the dice can still go wildly against you and you can lose in the most seemingly improbable ways that have little or nothing to do with how well you’re playing.

But I haven’t found anything that fills its niche better, so I keep playing, keep swearing, and keep dying just a little bit inside. God tells me there are much better things I could be doing with my time, but she hasn’t actually told me to stop. I wonder if I would if she did.

To those of you unfamiliar with Avenue Q, it may come as a surprise that I spend some of my relaxation time looking at porn on the internet. God says she leaves me alone at those times, but I think she peeks.

Anyway, if you do enough looking at pictures of naked men on the internet, you’re likely to come across pictures of men trying to suck their own penises, with varying levels of success. I don’t know if it’s (nearly) universal for men to attempt this but I can certainly attest to the fact that in my own youth, before I even knew that porn existed, I gave it a try myself. Now that I’ve seen lots of pictures and even a fair number of videos, I’m pretty sure that most men are not capable of doing this to any reasonable degree of self-satisfaction. They can come close, but just not quite close the deal.

So I asked God why that is, why most men can almost reach their own penis with their own mouths, why we can come tantalizingly close to being able to give ourselves blow jobs, but not really get there. Did she design us that way as punishment, as a cruel joke?

She blamed it on evolution.

Apparently it’s not uncommon for minor mutations to make it possible for men to suck themselves, as is amply shown on the internet, but for some reason men that get such mutations tend not to reproduce, tend not to get women pregnant. I suppose you can imagine why that may be.

Sometimes being a big fish in a small pond is just the right thing.

I’m at a science fiction convention this week. There’s a lot of people at these conventions that are “household names” within the relatively small community of SF fandom, but who are complete unknowns outside the larger, but still small group of people that read speculative fiction. I lamented to God that it must be hard to be here and be “somebody” and then go back home and be just another faceless part of the crowd. He told me that I was looking at it wrong. He pointed out some of the problems that come with celebrity; paparazzi, fans pestering you at inconvenient moments, all your foibles being up for discussion in the twenty-four hour “news” cycle. These writers and editors get to be celebrities in a staged environment, get to bask in the glow of their fans, and then get to go home, live a normal life, and really relax once the show is over.

For a lot of them, it’s like being Goldilocks, they’ve found the bed that’s “just right” and the rest of the night is nothing but pleasant dreams.

The race to become the next Republican nominee for President of the United States keeps trying to heat up. New candidates enter and leave the race on a regular basis, and no one has been anointed as the expected winner. As he and I watch them and their mind-numbing pandering, God keeps reminding me that fortune favors the better bankroll.

The thing that appalls me is that the Republican leadership, at least as far back as Ronald Reagan, have been clearly engaged in class warfare, doing everything they can to improve the lives of the rich at the expense of the poor and the vanishing middle class, and yet there are voters who time and again keep voting against their own interests; they remind me of animals kept so long in a cage that they won’t venture out of it even when the door is left open.

I’d like to think that the people engaged enough to actually vote are smarter than average but if they are, then I’m left to believe that the Republican poor are traitors to their class, selling themselves into slavery because they think that they’ll win life’s lottery and end up on the other side. And by God, when they get there, they want to make sure that it’s worth it.

So are they traitors, or stupid, or just bad at math and at seeing how the deck is being stacked against them. Only God knows, and he’s not telling.

I think that hanging out with God may have prepared me for a new level in my career.

One of the things that I’ve always liked about computer programming is that it is possible to understand a program completely, to know every nook and cranny. When you know a program that well, when a problem comes up you can fairly quickly narrow down where to find the cause and what approach to take to fix it.

Not so this week. This week I’ve been grappling with a problem that is only cropping up a tiny fraction of a percent of the time. Unfortunately since the program handles literally billions of transactions per day, even a small fraction of a percent can add up to an unacceptable amount in absolute numbers. Now this is software that I didn’t originally write myself, and that uses tools that realistically I have no direct control over and neither did the original author, all of which makes it harder to know.

So with a touch of whimsy, I’m realizing that dealing with this software is sort of like God dealing with humans. He has granted us free will and has to live with the consequences and unsurety that that produces. In a sense because of the way the program I work on spends its time flitting in and out of the parts that are out of my control, and which are, in fact, the controlling parts of the program, the program manifests an aspect that feels like it has a mind of its own, like it has its own, very limited, free will. Don’t get me wrong, it’s infinitely simpler in its countenance than even the most narrowly focused obsessive compulsive among us, but still, with billions of inputs a day, inputs which, even though narrow in scope, are generated by the web at large and so none-the-less have a large degree of chaos, it manages to do things that I haven’t been able to explain, let alone predict.

So I’m learning to work with it, to accept that I will never know it completely but that I can still guide it and give it the tools it needs to deal with adversity. I just hope that it doesn’t learn to despise me by the time it’s a teenager.

I had the recent misfortune of needing to interview some job candidates where I work. The misfortune aspect of it comes in for several reasons, some of them are: I don’t really enjoy talking to people I don’t know. I don’t like having to pass judgement on other people, especially on such flimsy evidence as a job interview provides. And even, I don’t like feeling responsible for someone not getting a job that they need or want, whether it’s because I didn’t vote for them, I didn’t lobby for them strongly enough, or I just liked someone else better.

Let me just say a little more about the first reason I gave… Sometimes, of course, I do enjoy talking to people I don’t know; it’s just most of the time that I don’t. Mostly it’s due to my own insecurity. I’m afraid I’ll be wasting the other person’s time, either by not being useful enough or not being entertaining enough or just not having anything to say that meets their needs, whatever those needs may be. I try to tailor my banter to my audience, yet with someone I don’t know I don’t know how to do so. Probably I do this tailoring due to some inner need to be liked. I want to be funny, I want to be insightful, and I want to be informative; that’s why I write this blog. But I’m never sure I’m any of those things, or when I am sure, I’m never really sure that anyone else will also perceive it. After all, the line between “funny, insightful, and informative,” and “annoying, stupid, and obvious” is often wide enough to completely cover both sides of whatever it was I just said.

But enough about my insecurities and back to the subjects of my interviews.

Kind of thankfully, but mostly not, even in this downturned economy, we didn’t have a lot of applicants. (Or at least not a lot that made it through to me from HR.) The “kind of thankfully” part is just that at least I only had a few interviews to do, not dozens. A couple of applicants stood out to me though, not so much for what they said but for what they wouldn’t say. I asked God about it and she told me that they were just trying to follow the advice of real estate agents all over the country who encourage people to paint all their walls beige. She said what they were trying to do was to not offend, to not give me a reason to reject them. What they did do was go out of their way to not have strong opinions on anything, to not express dislike for something, perhaps in fear of dissing something that I like, but also to not express a particular liking for anything. When I’d ask questions like “what are the strengths and weaknesses of different scripting languages?” they’d answer something like “different languages can be good for different things, some of them are a better fit for certain kinds of problems than others.” Well, yeah, that was kind of the point of my question. I’m trying to find out if they can see how to map problems to the different available tools, and when they do if they can justify their choices. I’m not trying to find out if they like the same ones I do, although I’m not against finding that out.

So what it really came down to, is that while they weren’t giving me specific things to dislike about them (other than general wishy-washiness) they also weren’t giving me anything that I could like about them. They didn’t seem to understand that if they were a good fit for the job that they needed to show it, and if they were a bad fit than it would be better for everyone involved, including them, for us to figure that out.

So sure, when you’re selling something, be it yourself or your house, you should maybe avoid covering it in swastikas, but that doesn’t mean you can’t show a little color. By being too bland you may avoid offending anyone, but you also won’t inspire passion in anyone. And we all want to feel a little passion.

Too much good stuff. You’ve probably never seen the movie “Brainstorm,” so let me tell you about a bit in it. The premise of the movie is that some scientists develop a way to record the actual experience that someone has in their brain when they, well, experience something. As with all new technologies, someone immediately decides to harness this for pornography and proceeds to record himself having sex. One of the guys on the project then gets ahold of the recording, goes off into a room by himself and splices just the orgasm into a loop. Which he plays. When they find him the next morning and pull the playback headset off of him, he just lays there and twitches. Even days later he has a tendency to blank out, twitch a little, and grin.

That may be the ultimate example of “too much” good stuff.

This week I find myself almost ready to just lay down and twitch a little.

There’s a new operating system (Lion) for my Mac. Spotify, a music streaming service that is highly regarded in Europe, just came out here in the U.S. but I’m not getting to spend much time with it because my music exploration is being taken up by Apple’s iTunes Festival on my iPad. My RSS feeds are overflowing which is making it hard to find time to keep reading the novel I’m in the middle of. I got out to theaters to catch the final movie in the Harry Potter series, which was better than I’d hoped and nearly as good as I’d've liked. And I’m trying to find time in my schedule to see the Billy Elliot stage musical while it’s here. All while I’ve just given up three weekends to a film festival and a science fiction convention. There’s more but those are the highlights.

It’s times like this when I really envy God. He actually does have all the time in the world to enjoy things. He actually can listen to or watch everything that is worthwhile. Me, I barely have time for whatever’s shiniest at the moment, and right now, I’m feeling a little dazzled.

Like most people, I have a lot of faults. One of mine is loyalty. It takes a lot to lose me as a customer once I’ve determined that you have a good brand that meets my needs and has an acceptable value proposition. All the pants I own are Levi’s, despite a considerable amount of bad sewing that I’ve encountered the last several years. I’m still willing to buy Sony, though only after seriously evaluating each purchase against their competitors, since they’ve mostly behaved themselves since that whole root-kit debacle a few years ago. And I stuck with Apple through even their leanest years, and despite their appalling level of control freakism.

But Intuit… They’ve finally pushed me away. I’ve been using Quicken almost since it first appeared on the Mac. I loyally upgraded to every other version, whether it had any new features I cared about or not. But their last new version was in 2007, and because of my “every other” rule, I’m still on Quicken 2006. But that alone is not what finally chased me off. They’ve just announced that Quicken won’t run on the new version of Mac OS X that’s about to be released. The reason why is because all of Quicken’s versions still require PowerPC emulation to run. In the five years that Apple has been shipping Intel machines (after pre-announcing the move by a year or so) Intuit has not been able to produce a new version of what is little more than a glorified general ledger. They’ve put out a similar product, with the dubious moniker of “essentials” but it doesn’t include certain features that I and most other users actually do consider essential.

Even incompetence on the scale of Microsoft can’t explain this. Clearly they decided that the Mac was not worth supporting and have managed to get by on platitudes and promises while Apple has made a stunning comeback that has none-the-less not managed to capture Intuit’s attention. It was just announced this week that Macs have climbed back up to more than ten percent of current PC sales, but apparently that’s not enough.

When I told God that I was finally abandoning Intuit he wasn’t willing to recommend any replacements, but he did tell me it was about time.

I have a love/hate relationship with my fellow humans. I took notice of that anew this week after God pointed out to me that I have a lot of things in my kitchen of which there’s just a little bit left. Enough amaretto to fill half a glass. A scant handful of chocolate covered almonds. One last can of tomato soup.

Sure, things have to get down to being almost out before they can get down to being actually out, but that’s not what God was pointing out. What she forced me to admit is that I’ll often go like gangbusters through the first ninety percent of something and then that last ten percent will sit around for a very long time. On a lot of stuff I get around this by buying more of it, before it gets down to that last ten percent. That way I can keep going like gangbusters until I get tired of whatever it is.

Where does my love/hate relationship with humanity come into this? It’s simple, I just don’t trust that when I get to the store, whatever it is that I want will be there. Sometimes it’s that I’m afraid that I’ll end up really wanting something that I ran out of before I get a chance to go to the store and get more, but more often it’s that I just don’t trust the store to keep carrying it, or the manufacturer to keep making it. I mean, there’s only been one shampoo in my life that worked really well with my hair. I used that shampoo for years. I occasionally tried others but none of them left my hair as nice as the one I liked.

Then I went to the store and they were out of it. It’s been more than twenty years now and they’re still out of it. I know that means it’s not made anymore, but somewhere in the back of my head I keep thinking that if I keep thinking they’re just out of it, that maybe someday they’ll get it back in. But they won’t.

And somewhere in the back of my head, I think I’m convinced that everything I like will go that way. The store will be out of it and they’ll be out of it forever. Which makes that last can of soup kind of precious. At the same time it’s too precious to actually eat, but only precious because it’s something good to eat. This is the kind of cognitive dissonance that I try not to spend too much time thinking about, but when I do… Well I end up thinking that I love the things that modern society makes available to us, but I also end up thinking that I hate that nothing lasts forever.