Categories
Glot-glot

Why I Do Web Design

Often I’ve been asked, in the fifth hour of a project to improve some small thing on my GLOT, why I bother. Why not bother to actually update it, rather than improve something no one will notice anyways? Well, dammit, I notice. I notice that the Rubix cube doesn’t display correctly in Internet Explorer 6. I notice things that don’t match well, like the alignment of the contact form and me-photos. I know that the search was placed incorrectly and used borrowed CSS since I put the damn thing in. And so today, I fixed it. I fixed all of those things. Yet do I find satisfaction?

No. And here’s why: the web isn’t real. It’s not a tangible experience. Up until the moment someone pointed their browser at this particular website and saw this particular thing, it was just an idea. It was information, data stored in a machine of irrelevant location, and will go back to being there once that someone leaves. The data might be slightly different. It might be very different. But it’s still just data, and it doesn’t have a life of it’s own, it doesn’t DO anything that isn’t in its basic nature. It’s not even a thing, it’s an it.

Existential pontificating of digital existence complete. Back to the original question: why do it? Because it’s a challenge. Because it’s one I can usually accomplish, given enough time and tenacity. Because it fits my habits, sitting in front of a computer. Because it’s something I’m good at. Because it makes me feel like I did something. Because I can. And so there you have it: I do it because I can. Sometimes it seems like a pointless exercise. Often it is. But here you are, and for the moment, it’s real. Hm.

Categories
Letters

To Girls

G’morning girls!

Or, knowing us, good afternoon.

I don’t know why I’m writing this. It’s like you said: I’m just not that good at going to bed earlier, like we’ve been saying. Of course, I could say the same for you. Sometimes we do that to each other—we reinforce each other’s negative habits. I think I’ve been noticing that lately, like how when I get caught up in the computer and I’ll be gone away in my own world for a good long hour and I’ll snap outta it and turn around to check up on you, but you’re off in your own world too. We’re both computer nerds, so here we are at our computers. Mostly I think we help each other, but it’s easy to get jaded about what our existing limitations are. I don’t think we push each other enough because we know each other’s comfort zones so well, and comfort sure is nice.

It’s like… I hate it when you say things about when I’m getting a job (not that you’ve really done that, hardly at all). And then I find myself thinking “doesn’t she care? doesn’t she worry I’ll never make something of myself and that I’ll just get another half-bad job that I’ll be ‘ok’ with?” Then I remember just the other night when my girlfriend asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and how she sentimentally gave me $7 toward the bus-movie-night-ticket that I bought her :-). I do remember those things, and then I realize that it’s all up to me anyways, like it always has been. I just forget cause often we act as a single entity.

I never liked seeing some relationships, like those of a few girls I knew in high school, that were just based on comfort. The logic goes: well, it’s nice having someone around to talk to, and breaking up can be messy and feels sad—I’ll just stay with this person until I absolutely CAN’T anymore. And that’s not how I feel with you. I feel like you do push me to complete my goals, and I feel like I might attain a lot of my life’s ambitions with you there with me. Sometimes… sometimes feel like our philosophies are too different. I doubt you, or I doubt how I’d be able to fit in with your family for the next 40 years or so, or even doubt how feasible traveling around the world for two would be. I wanna do that, too.

Once again, I dunno why I am writing this. I was sort of feeling sappy and sort of feeling sorry—I felt like I kept you up longer than you wanted. I feel like sometimes I could be a better boyfriend to you. I could get your website done, and be done with it. I get lazy though, and I don’t give 100%. I become a slave to my moods, I ride long sequences of exploratory online whims and pleasure-surf for hours. Sometimes I disparagingly think “this is who I am, this is how I’ve been for years. I’m an addict. I’m addicted to the internet.” Then a sublimely piteous fantasy enters my head, 10 to 20 chairs circled round, a ring of nerdy, anxious-looking men huddled about shamefully, free coffee and donuts in the corner.

“Hey, gang. Let’s get started. Welcome to our group. Can I ask, why are you here tonight?”

“Hi, my name’s Orin. Orin Optiglot on Flickr. Website homepie.org. I’m a, uh, an internet addict. I spend long hours working on my ‘digital identity,’ my blog, my social networking pages, finding more of whatever else is new. I read a lot of blogs cause I want to have things to say to my friends. Mostly I talk to them online, too, of course. Once, I got fired for using a keyboard, a keyboard to write even more on my computer. And then I stay up late writing emails to my girlfriend, who happens to in fact live with me.”

“Yeah, I think we’ve all been there, Warren. Right gang?”

This is pure silliness, of course. I’m not an addict, I just don’t put forth enough mental effort to realizing the time, analyzing my own patterns, asking what I actually really want to be doing right now. Man, I know that I could do so much in this world and I feel like I’m wasting all my chances while I’m learning more ABOUT the world. I feel like you and I could be so much more… cool. Why aren’t we more amazing? Why don’t we have more friends and lovers? It seems sometimes like our problems are so petty and small (cleaning our room!?) and the reason we get tripped up by them is that we have nothing more to blame them on than our own shortcomings, and that’s painful.

I want more from life, and the only way to get that is to take it. But that means I wouldn’t have the fantasy anymore, and the fantasy is so nice… are people who are polyamorous happier? Not that I’ve seen. They just have more sex. So why even bother? It’s another recurring pipe dream that I could get over, like being a musician. And that would be that, it’s over, no more silly fantasies, no more getting hopes up to be let down, no more grasping for wants. But I want it! And so I have to take it, and for it to work, you do too, and that means learning to work together, but that’s so HARD, and the dynamic we have now is so FAMILIAR and easy! But if we want something, I shouldn’t rely on you, I need to push, and once I start pushing you might push me, and we’d get there together. That’d be nice.

I mean, I LOVE you SOOO MUCH, sometimes it’s just unnerving. If there’s anything that makes me like my parents, it’s having the relationship that I have. It’s stable, it’s loving and affectionate, but it’s also separate jobs and shared living space, with domestic responsibilities and common (almost suburban) dreams.

So, again, I don’t know why I stated writing. I guess I just wanted to reflect, and you happened to be asleep—with plenty of reason, to be fair. I didn’t get too sappy, but I’m happier anyways. It’s really good to have you. You know we can be more awesome, though. You know we can. I love em a lot. I’ll be there with you. You, Girls.

Love,
-Boys

Categories
Glot

Small Discovery

'Mander from Below I discovered a small colony of creatures under refuse of broken cactus plants the other day. I thought they were earthworms at first, those dark slimy shapes squirming around under the wet debris. But they squirmed wrong. I looked closer—very close in fact—and saw, oddly, that they had legs. Tiny, tiny legs with minuscule fingers. I thought they were skinks as their bodies were so long comparatively. After research, however, I have concluded that there is a population of California Slender Salamanders living in my backyard, in urban San Francisco. They’ve probably been there a very long time. I’m told they have a lifetime range of about 14 square meters—less than the backyard. Salamanders in the garden make me happy.

Categories
Glot

Wishing Away the Smell

Project Room Full of Projects There’s a room in my house that smells like abandoned building. I know this, because I’ve been in many, many abandoned buildings. For the past few days San Francisco has had (while not quite “Biblical” as described by some) torrential rains, and the normally warmer drier Mission has seen as much as the rest of town. And I love my apartment; my neighborhood is great despite some evidence to the contrary.

It’s just that the place is a bit of an old girl, you know. She does the job… the job of being inhabited… just, sometimes she shows her age is all. One room at the back of the apartment I call the “project room” (pictured, to the left) despite the fact that no “projects” to speak of have been completed there. We just called it that when we moved in. Besides, it’s easier than calling it the “sitting slash storage slash plant slash kiln room.” It’s actually one of our cooler rooms and used to be outdoors in fact, which is why it has two windows looking in on it from other rooms of the house (err apartment—a personal history of single-family home residency is apparent in my mental constructs). Perfect RoomIt also doesn’t really hold in warmth too well which makes it not-too-handy for sitting in seats as far as “sitting room” goes, but which is pretty handy when Lynae’s kiln hits the 2400 Fahrenheit mark. Except of course when it rains and water starts coming in under the door, which doesn’t fit because it’s swelled up in the rain.  And as far as the rain goes it doesn’t stop at the door. The roof hasn’t started leaking… yet; however, one gets an inkling of why I might notice a little aroma of dilapidation. I think you kind of get the picture here: the room is neat for its uniqueness and its feeling of history, but has its disadvantages as concerns actually taking care of the place.

Well, I did want to live in an abandoned building once. I guess we ought to be careful what we wish for.

Categories
Glot

This Keyboard I Got

I’ve been thinking about it.

I don’t really write too often. I enjoy writing, and always have. It’s a pleasure to create and speak and I attest (as someone who enjoys the sound of their own voice very much) that I enjoy talking as such.

But I don’t. And why is that? Writing written off by minutiae. I want to read more about this thing. The laundry needs hanging. I have to work tomorrow morning. When was the last time we ate out? I should clean up the room. I want to wait until I finish the other website I’m designing. There’s a backlog of pictures to upload. I need to do X before Y because Y is not as immediate as X, although Y is a long-term goal so I’ll still feel bad and want to.

I don’t know why I don’t write as often. I guess that I don’t identify as “a writer” much anymore, because I do so many other things. But I still write. As said before and better, by others, it fills all the little gaps in one’s daily existence. It rests in small spaces between cracks in the sidewalk, tiny green life poking through the sidewalk, not defiant, just pleasantly and idly existing. I may not write like a madman, fifty-thousand soldiers strong, but I write.

Today I write anew. Today I found a keyboard in the basement of my place of work, and I took it home and it is magnificent. It is a vintage IBM Model M keyboard with bucking spring design; the keys are pressed, they give resistance, and then they *click* and the moment they click the character is registered. There is no latency. There is no softness. It is a machine and it is mechanical. It’s called force-feedback, and it is totally neat. It is a different feeling, one I’d never expect. I’ve typed this whole thing with nary a typing error to speak. Amazing.

And now I am reading the Wikipedia entry on the Model M and I notice something… this is the keyboard of my childhood. The very keys I used to play “Ernie’s Big Splash” when I was 6, are the keys I now use to blog about not blogging. Incidentally, the former still seems more fun. Incidentally, I still don’t like the word “blog.” And now I remember that I used to write on that thing all the time, back when computers had the one font and the one size, text white on blue, and what-you-saw wasn’t what-you-got cause that was set on the printer itself. A matrix of dots made the things you wrote magically appear, and then they could go on the fridge or something.

All of this does beg the question, though… if something as simple (if sensory) as clicky-typing can cause me to reflect on my writing and gain understanding of why I might do it or not do it, and write this much about writing, aren’t I preoccupied with it enough to put a little more effort into it?

I refuse to make a resolution. How bout a to-do item instead?

To-do: write more. Clicky keys nice.

Categories
Glot

To Do in the Next Year

Categories
Glot

Writing of Dreaming

I had a dream last night, and I had to write it down. It’s sort of complicated. What was weird was it’s dream-within-a-dream recursion, a fake-world created entirely by those inhabiting it, who journey there from the real world, which itself may not be real. Or is it? Teasing logic like that permeated the whole thing, and I only barely understood it myself.

There was dinosaur wrestling. And pet tigers. I should speak about that. I dream things like that a lot. Rarely does it make sense, but it made a lot of sense last night. I wrote four pages this morning, and in the process I figured out how to write the story—I think. I’ve never written a choose-your-own-adventure story of any length, and I think I wrote the last one when I was four. I wouldn’t know where to start. I suppose I could start at the beginning.

It’s harder than it sounds.

Categories
Glot

Thanks Are In Order

I had a lovely birthday. Thanks, guys. You called me on a cold pier as the sun was setting. You called me as I was trying to navigate a radioactive abandoned Navy base. You wished me health, prosperity and success in your studies (even though I don’t have any studies… but thanks anyways). Some made me cake, and damned good cake at that, cake that wasn’t even choco-nutty-poke. Some of you even let me call into work sick with a “head cold,” whatever that is. Twenty-four. I don’t feel the need to look up the number on Wikipedia this year. Just wanted to say:

Thanks.

Categories
Glot

Gluttony and Chastity (in the Brain)

'Firefox Browser Tabs Contest' on FlickrHow many tabs do you have open? No, go check now.

How many of those are things that you’re going to read? Blogs, Wikipedia articles, things linked from friends, searches for places or people or events you heard about somewhere, information of every thinkable sort. There’s a lot of it to be had. When tabbed web browsing was first introduced in the MultiZilla extension for Mozilla browsers in April of 2001, the 21st-century web browser—both the program and the person using it—came of age. A web program that can only view a single website in a single window at a time is ideal for modem connections, who can’t handle much else. Well, tabbed browsing evolved for everyone with something better. Even Microsoft eventually figured that one out (right now we’re all glaring at you, IE7 users). I blame the epidemic of neglected tabs and… well, neglected tasks in this country on these developments. There’s now too much information out there for us to handle with ease. In the interests of full disclosure, I am very familiar with this tab/information overload. I suppose that’s why LifeHacker evolved.

Recently I stopped doing some of these things. Well, I stopped doing them for isolated 30-60 minute periods during my day. There’s a thing I discovered called I-Doser that I started experimenting with, and it’s a stimulating break from much of the stimulation. It’s based on binaural beats that are designed to affect the mind, so that you’re on drugs. Pretty much. You know, drugs? I’ve had some experience in the past working with binaural beats, starting with CoolEdit in 1998 and then Brainwave Generator in 2003. For those who don’t care about those last two factoids, they weren’t for you… they were to prove my cred to those in the know. To those not in the know, allow me to explain why this whole thing isn’t as stupid as it sounds.

It’s based on our lovely hominid brain structure. Two sides of the brain, each synced with the other; two sides receiving signals from the different sides of the body. They sync up with each other at regular intervals, depending on what state you’re in and how active your brain is. Solving math problems is Beta, pretty high at maybe 30-40 cycles/second. Normal operation might be between 15&20 Hertz. A light siesta would be Alpha about 11-8 Hz, and then—my favorite—Theta, where dreams and daydreams happen, ideally about 6-3.5 Hz, where the world slows down and external awareness nearly drops away. Then of course there’s Gamma, where external awareness does drop away and people like me tend to snore. It happens. The odd thing is that at any given time we have an eternally variable state, where all four co-exist. The brain’s internal communication is itself communicating on different levels. Weird that such a thing needs to be, no?

But back to the drugs, anyways. The idea behind brainwaves is simple and that is that if you can stimulate only one side of the brain (by stimulating one side of the body—like one ear, one eye) and signal the left and right at a specific pulse, eventually the brain can sync up and replicate the pulse. 6Hz dreamstate? Voilà, an enchanting 6Hz pattern. I-Doser takes this notion up a conceptual notch and presumes “well, if you could read a brain and see what kind of state it’s in, and then replicate that, couldn’t you essentially copy that state/mood/outlook/disposition from one brain to another? Well, let’s try it! And then sort-of maybe market it to teenagers as a substitute for recreational drugs.”

That last little bit is my own personal “disposition” on account of what I think of some of the descriptions on their webstore. Sure, I tried Peyote. I liked it. I maybe got some pleasant visuals and felt a bit out of it for the next hour, but possibly nothing that couldn’t be accomplished by a dose of lying quietly awake but with eyes closed, thinking intently of what kind of experience I was having. Who’s to say? Ultimately, that’s the reason this sort of thing is legal (and is going to stay legal, for the foreseeable future), is that the brain has a choice. You aren’t hypnotized, although it’s a little like it… one cannot make a hypnotized person do anything they have a moral objection to, nor to put themselves in bodily harm. Once something, like, say, Cocaine is inside you, your body pretty much has to deal with it till it’s processed. If I wanted to, I could take off the headphones any time. Or the browser too. Really.

Sometimes I just don’t want to.

photo credit to Inju, casamanita and Drunken Monkey on Flickr

Categories
Stuff-n-Glot

Flowers and Trees

A long while back, way in April 2004, I made a school project to impress a girl. +20 Dork points.

Good news and bad news about the outcome: it totally worked, she and everyone present thought it was a masterpiece. Even better, afterwards she wanted to get the software I used. From me. Bow-chicka-wow. Bad news: when I met her in the library, I acted the total dork-azoid. Had it not been for the timely appearance of my good friend Emily, I am certain I would have tumbled headfirst-chairlast into a piece of abstract art. Bad abstract art. Thankfully, Emily also gave us the topic of couples with matching hair (she and her dood both sported Pepé le Pew styles at the time—neither knew of the other’s current look until they first met—aww). The nervous klutz-ass factor, despite the presence of awesome friends, and combined with the fact the software later might’ve got that girl a virus (oops)… all of them accounted for why I didn’t do so well that season.

But that’s alright. I later learned on some pseudo-date with her roommate that she was a massive sto-o-oner rivaling Tommy Chong. Some things aren’t meant to be. Now that is hearsay and if you’re reading this, business major Maria T., you do have a chance to defend yourself. What totally reasonable explanation can you think of that we shouldn’t have worked out, other than the fact I acted like a doofus (the bad kind)? Cause that doesn’t count.

At least I got a movie out of it. It is what those involved in online, remix and collage culture might call a “mashup,” and what my parents might call “pretty neat.” Normal people might call it “putting the sound from one thing with the video from something else.” Your pick. Samples include:

  • 1932 Disney classic (now public domain) “Flowers and Trees”
  • Air and Jean-Jacques Perry — Cosmic Bird
  • Malagena something mourning song
  • Secret Chiefs 3 — Dolorous Stroke
  • Joan Jett

That’s all I have to say on that. I didn’t get the girl, but I did get the A+. Go figure.