If you like software and hardware engineering, the Macintosh, or just the early microcomputer industry in general, check out Andy Hertzfeld’s (of original Mac design team fame) Folklore.

Unrelated: this parody of that annoying TinyURL thing made me laugh. (boingboing link, since the actual site seems to be down or gone)

Mandatory Love Gift.

That’d make a pretty good name for a rock band.

I mentioned this a while back, but now it’s been more than one year since I posted this totally throwaway entry, and there are still new random and totally disconnected political comments being posted.

Does anybody have a reasonable explanation for this? I’m missing something and I don’t know where to start in trying to figure it out.

You may disagree with such a pessimistic vision, but if there is a way for the world to be transformed for the better, it can only be done by pessimism; optimists will never change the world for the better.

— José Saramago

“Coming in like El Niño!” by Jeremy Lavine, Period 3.

I don’t often dream, at least of interesting things that I remember. I sometimes envy people who dream often; I’m intrigued by “lucid dreaming”, though my attempts have thus far been unsuccessful. I like dreaming and I like occasional “escapes” from the rational and normal world.

Earlier today I took what I think will be the last pain medication I’ll need for my kidney stone — which I’m about done with, by the way, thanks for the well-wishes, everyone. I’m glad to be finished with the meds because they make me extremely sleepy. It’s been hard to get anything done, even during times when the pain wasn’t very strong because I’ve been spending so much time sleeping. At least I got a chance (and an excuse!) to catch up on my rest.

While I was napping, I had a vivid dream, one which I’ve had in one form or another three previous times, to my remembrance. This is my only recurring dream in recent years; I’ve had a few others throughout my life, but I don’t have them anymore.

I first had this dream at the apartment we lived in before we moved into our house. In fact, this is the first time I’ve dreamed it since we’ve moved, and I had even thought that it likely wouldn’t return because of the change of setting.

That apartment had a sliding door in the back with a vertical lock, the type that lots of places have leading to a backyard or a patio. Like many of those types of doors, it was very common to slide it closed and push the lock up but discover that it was still unlocked — one had to always check it to ensure that it was actually locked, often having to try again, holding the door tightly closed that time.

This apartment was not in the best of neighborhoods, judging by the frequency with which police helicopters hovered low above (and a few times directly overhead), spotlights shining down looking for someone.

It is these two themes that recur in these dreams: imminent danger from some usually unseen but doubtlessly dangerous criminal who will seek sanctuary in my home (it’s only a matter of time, with the police right overhead) and an inability to get the door to lock to protect myself from this danger. This is a terrifying situation because it puts one right where one doesn’t want to be — exactly where the dangerous person is going to be soon. The fear is honed because of the taunting and frustrating feeling of being so close to being in a “safe place”. If only the lock would catch.

(Of course, occasionally the lock does catch to my great relief. And then, of course, I decide to check it one last time to make sure.)

In the worst of these dreams, I’ve even been able to see the person or persons approaching, but in a way that would only seem reasonable in a dream: they were always approaching (getting closer every time I looked up) but never actually reaching the door. One of Zeno’s Paradoxes, only scarier.

Today’s version involved a strange twist: there was a sliding door in back and a regular bolt-locking door in the front. It also failed to easily lock, a trait of the front door at our new place during the hottest summer days. This added one more dimension to it — our two children, who are always present in these dreams, could no longer be positioned “safely” behind me. What to do? My choice in the dream was to frantically run back and forth trying each one alternately, hoping that I could get at least one to lock, halving the chance of an intruder finding easy entrance, at least buying a bit of time.

The whole thing seems a bit curious because I’m not a person who thinks much about crime at all. Physical danger from crime is mostly irrelevant to my day-to-day life and not something I ever dwell on. An example: once at the apartment when police helicopters were near but not right above us, I ventured out to have a look around. Yes, foolish, I know. No sooner had I walked outside than the helicopter rose above the nearby trees and shone its spotlight directly on me. I couldn’t decide whether to run back inside (and look suspicious) or just stand there and wait to be apprehended by either the cops or the bad guy. I think I just scratched my head and walked nonchalantly (“There was a helicopter just a hundred and fifty feet away shining its light on me? No, I guess I didn’t notice.”), and with no sudden movements, back inside.

So what does it all mean? A subconscious fear, of crime/criminals/the Other, needing to be expressed? Perhaps the lock symbolizes machines (computers?), often helpful but also the source of much misery? Or social anxiety, perhaps — feeling safe, if I could just get this one more little thing in place to help barricade myself from the outside world? I don’t really feel like any of those are accurate. Maybe it’s just scary having helicopters flying around nearby, looking for perps.

Do you have any recurring dreams? What do you think about them?

My overwhelming feeling that this was the case [please read this link] was the cause of my deepest misgivings about the Iraq war.

I don’t like to just call people with whom I disagree “ideologues”, but I don’t know of a more accurate description of our government as it headed toward war in 2002/2003.

I went to a conservative Christian school growing up and was never properly taught Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection — the treatment of evolution was basically that scientists, who are just running from God, have just had to decide that everything just “happened”, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. No mention was ever made of the theories they’ve created that explain and predict to a phenomenal degree the fossil and genetic evidence; the miniscule fraction of exclusively ideology-driven “scientists” that hold to a non-natural cause of biological diversity (and often a several-thousand-year-old earth) were the only ones for whom an attempt at portrayal was made.

I count it as a personal failing that I never looked much further into it (though I did always feel at least slightly uneasy about this glib indictment of nearly the entirety of the scientific profession) until I was older. In fact, I was only taught the basic fundamentals of the theory for the very first time in that place where many college students “fall from the faith”: college Introduction to Philosophy. It wasn’t the philosophy that got me, though — it was the biology.

Yes, I learned more about modern biology (and how to keep from fooling ourselves) in an introductory philosophy class than in all of my pre-college studies. But I digress.

I said all of that to say this: I learned very well from that, probably better than any lesson I’ve ever learned, to not trust people on topics where they “know” the truth and then look for evidence (implicitly discarding all evidence to the contrary) to confirm what they know. And we were going to go to war with Iraq, no matter what happened. Whether weapons inspectors were barred entrance or let in with open arms; whether the smoking gun was a mushroom cloud over Manhattan or a couple of rockets that exceeded their allowed range by a few miles.

The fact that (as of yet) there have been no threatening weapons of mass destruction found is somewhat inconsequential to me. And I don’t think it was purely oil or Haliburton profits or other nefarious schemes that drove us to war. The sickening feeling that I had through the entire build-up was that there was no single, simple cause, there was just an a priori conviction that it was the “right thing to do”. And it may have even been. (Please understand, I am not endorsing that it was, only admitting that there is a potential argument that, despite the seeming lack of weapons of mass destruction that were a threat to the United States and the possible harm to the national security of the United States and to the Iraqi people, it was the strategically best and/or most morally defensible route of action.)

Nevertheless, even accepting for a moment the argument that it was the right thing to do, I am profoundly uncomfortable with anyone, especially anyone in a leadership position, knowing what’s “right”, damn the evidence, and then trying to make an argument for it.

A Collection of Punched Cards.

Also, the AT&T Annual Report, 1957.

On the pocket music player topic:

If Stanley Kubrick was alive today and making A Clockwork Orange 2, Alex and his droogs would be wearing these.

The keynote address for MacWorld, the twice-yearly event where Apple makes most of their major announcements, was two days ago.

The biggest news in my opinion was iLife ’04, the new edition of their consumer digital media software, iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, and one new addition: GarageBand.

First, the worst part of iLife ’04 — the slogan they’re using to promote it: “It’s like Microsoft Office for the rest of your life.” Apparently this is meant to play off of Microsoft’s simultaneous announcement of their next release of Office for Mac and imply that you can use Office all day at work and then come home and use iLife to work with your digital music, movies, and photos. But it always instills a fear in me of some dystopian nightmare where I have to use Microsoft Office For The Rest Of My Life.

But, fortunately, there’s plenty of good. In addition to needed updates to the existing apps, the new app, GarageBand, looks fantastic. It combines easy recording, composing, mixing, and editing with tons of prerecorded loops, lots of pro quality instruments (give your $100 Yamaha the sound of a $50,000 grand piano), and fifteen different guitar “amps” to make your guitar sound like a variety of miked amplifiers.

There’s probably nothing you could do with GarageBand that you couldn’t do before with sufficient expense and effort on a Mac or PC with lots of equipment and software. But Apple has combined extremely high quality loops, instruments and effects into a single app with an intuitive interface, and is selling it as part of the $49 iLife suite (or it comes free with any Mac).

Now if they can come up with a way to allow garage bands to put their GarageBand output onto the iTunes Music Store, that will be revolutionary.

But MacWorld wouldn’t be MacWorld without some controversy, and the big one this time is the new iPod mini, a smaller, lower-capacity, cheaper, and more colorful version of the most important Apple product of the last few years.

The near-universal consensus is that the thing doesn’t make sense at 4 gigs for $249 when one can get the 15 gig regular iPod for $299. I may be wrong on this one, but my guess is that the naysayers will be proven wrong.

I wonder how much overlap there is between those claiming the iPod mini will be the next Cube (the ill-fated, overpriced but super-stylish Apple computer of a few years ago) and those that were claiming, two-years ago, that the original iPod was going to be the next Cube. With a $399 price tag at introduction, the consensus on the original iPod was that it would flop (even if it was pretty cool). That obviously hasn’t been borne out.

I think a lot of the problem is that the doom-predictors are treating iPod consumers as Rational Economic Agents who, intent on maximizing their storage capacity while minimizing their monetary outlay, are endeavoring to buy right at the peak of the cost-capacity curve. I don’t think that type of view is accurate of many consumer markets and certainly not of the iPod market: the iPod, like most Apple products (iLife ’04 is an exception), has never been a winner just on a pure cost-to-technical-capability ratio. When the original 5 gig iPod was announced, there were tons of people befuddled that anyone would buy one of them when they could, for a little bit less, get a unit that was “a little larger” (than a portable CD player) and had more storage capacity, too.

I don’t have numbers, but I would guess the average person’s entire computer music library is less than (or at least not too much more than) 4 gigs, which still amounts to around 1000 songs. The iPod mini is over 40% smaller than the regular iPod. And it comes in five different colors. Of anodized aluminum.

I’m trying to be skeptical but I just can’t convince myself that Apple won’t find plenty of buyers at $249; then, when that market is tapped out and the price of one-inch 4 gigabyte hard drives drops, they’ll be able to cut the price to $199 and really effectively go after the lower end music player market.

Time will tell, but (and this is from someone who initially thought the original iPod had a good chance of being the next Cube) my prediction is that it will do very well.

Enough fanboyism. You have to give me this at least a couple of times a year, though.

Last night I started feeling a little pain in my back. In itself, this isn’t an unusual thing: I have a protruding disc in the left side of my lower back, which isn’t a huge deal, though every couple of months I’ll have a day that I’ll have to just lie down and not really move at all. Days like that make me happy to have a notebook computer.

The strange thing about this pain was that it was coming from the right side rather than the left, like it ordinarily comes from. I didn’t think too much of it (other than “The right side of my back isn’t about to go out too, is it??”), but when I woke up this morning, I had a similar feeling — it felt like muscle cramps — but now it had moved around to the front.

I figured I should call my doctor, and based on my description he guessed that it was a kidney stone and wanted me to come in for an x-ray. I sent a few emails trying to cover what I would have been doing at work today and telling them that I wouldn’t be in until later, if at all.

Halfway to the doctor’s office, the pain became so unbearable that Annette and I decided she should take me to the emergency room rather than my regular doctor.

It’s a strange feeling, experiencing the worst pain one has ever felt in his life and wanting more than anything to just lie down, but being stuck as a passenger in a car on a freeway in morning work traffic. It’s isolating and makes you feel helpless as the world moves on around you oblivious.

I signed into the emergency room and, as soon as the nurse was done taking my blood pressure, I laid down on the floor, despite the nurse’s protestations, as she asked me for my social security number and insurance information.

A couple of tests, an MRI, and copious amounts of morphine later, the kidney stone hypothesis was confirmed, so here I am at home… waiting. Waiting, taking vicodin, drinking gallons of water, and bored out of my mind.

At least I don’t have to go to work for the rest of the week, though what I should be doing (learning Calculus in preparation for my Calculus II class that starts in a couple of weeks) has proven difficult to do so far due to distraction. Perhaps I’ll write some more on my unfortunately-neglected-of-late wordparts.