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barton cole :: veni, vedi, vero scripsi
 Friday, January 09, 2009
The other day, I wrote about technological compression (see kilobyte, mb, gb, tb, pb...); I was talking with someone about barley and alcohol, and thought some more about how our tech tools have given us so much of what would seem to be power…
Being the youngest of four children (in five years! My mother was pregnant nearly the entire time…), I absorbed all that I could from my siblings - including learning how to read, which I did when I was three (my only claim to precocity).
Once I learned how to read, I never stopped. I read everything I could get my hands on, and lived in a bibliophilic house, so there were lots of books around.
Librarians have always, apparently, recognized my passion for books and reading, and one of them frustrated the hell out of my step-mother: she never charged me overdue fines, since she didn't want to discourage my devotion to reading. My step-mother, on the other hand, wanted me to learn responsibility. Sorry - looks like the dreamers win again!
I read all kinds of stuff, but acquired an early interest in science-fiction; fostered, likely, by watching Neil Armstrong stepping onto the moon when I was six years old, so I grew up in the space age.
An early favorite was John Christopher's excellent Tripods Trilogy, in which humans have been enslaved by aliens, The Masters, who traveled in little vehicles with three, long, tall legs - when I was a boy, we used to pass a water tower standing among the firs by the highway, and it would f*r*e*a*k m*e o*u*t.
Three boys evade being "capped," a rite-of-passage in which the young submit to The Masters' mind control, becoming like all the adults. They meet up, learn of the Resistance, hook up with them, and volunteer to endeavor to infiltrate the alien city, hoping to discover a weakness.
Which they do - don't let me spoil it for you -
The Resistance learns that the Masters are extremely susceptible to alcohol, and manage to communicate this to the lads, who are enduring heavy servitude in the alien city, the gravity being artificially enhanced, and the atmosphere poisoned, to duplicate the home planet of the aliens.
All they need to do is introduce alcohol into the Masters' water supply - but how to smuggle in the alcohol?
Impossible. They'll have to manufacture it.
How?
By making a mash of the starchy biscuits they are given to eat, and then fermenting it.
They do, and the plan succeeds.
So there I was, six years old, and wondered: what's a mash?
I was completely intrigued - a "mash" must really be something, if one is able to make it out of crackers and ferment it.
Books in the library were no help - I remember asking an uncle, but he had no idea.
I grew up with this quest, occasionally and profoundly curious.
Finally, I don't remember how, I learned that a mash was a means of heating crushed grain in water until enzymes had converted all the starch to sugar - which you can ferment.
I suppose it took me about twelve years to answer that question (and once I had the information, I began brewing beer, and never looked back - in fact, perhaps tomorrow I'll write about how one starts with a field of barley and ends up with pale ale, or lager).
Not long ago, I was curious - how long would it take to answer that question with today's tools?
Twenty seconds - I used a stopwatch, even.
That's about 19,000,000 times faster.
It took more time to open Firefox and type in the Google search than it did for the browser to return the links.
Never take access to information for granted.
Thursday, January 08, 2009
In December, we had over a foot of snow, the snowfall spread out over a few days, which was uncommon for my region (although more common in the last several years - is that what the onset of an Ice Age looks like?). It hindered Christmas travel plans, so there were parties and events we didn't get to - since we seldom have much impact from snowfall, the authorities are underprepared - hardly any snowplows, and when they did come through town, they just skimmed off the recent snow to get back down to the dangerous, icy layer.
Looking at the weather reports, I could see that rain was forecast for the week after Christmas, beginning Christmas Day. The National Weather Service pointed out that the temperature wasn't going to rise dramatically, so there wouldn't be a rapid melt, which would result in flooding for sure.
This week, though, things are different. We had a bit of snow the other night, but it was wet and minimal, and now, the rain has begun in earnest. Out on the Pacific coast west of me, they're expecting up to twenty inches of rain over the next few days, with as much as three inches in the interior - where I am, poised on an island north of Puget Sound. That's a lot of rain.
We can use it - on our island, we have a "single source aquifer," which means that all our drinking water comes out of the ground. The only way to recharge the aquifer is rainfall, so we're looking at our future tap water.
And the temperature is up in the forties - call it 5°Celsius. So the snow in the mountains to the east is rapidly and unseasonably melting; the metropolitan areas get their drinking water from reservoirs, filled by snow-melt. As has happened in recent years, the snow melts too much in the winter and spring, so the reservoirs get low in the summer. Too bad for them!
Of course, all this snow melt means the water has to go somewhere, so it does, flowing down the rivers to link back up with the sea. The weather service upgraded the status from "Flood Watch" - which means conditions are favorable for flooding - to "Flood Warning," which means the rivers ARE flooding. I heard flood warnings for several Western Washington counties, including Island County, my own.
I find that rather comical - I live on an island - there are streams, but no rivers, and the highest elevation is around five hundred feet - so there isn't a snow cap that will melt. We're going to be just fine. Nothing to worry about.
Certainly, one of the benefits of living on an island.
And even if the ice at both poles of the earth melts and the sea level rises (unfortunately, it's possible, thanks to our way of living and our impact on the planet and its ability to regulate its temperature), I'm still up at one-hundred-fifty feet - so maybe I'll be able to dig clams just down the street, instead of having to go all the way down the hill to the beach.
An island has other benefits: to get here from America, I have to take a ferry. It's a short crossing, us being only a few miles from the continent, but enough to provide a nice, psychological distinction between the Island and the rest of the world. I recall that in Dracula, the vampire's prey, in London, was able to elude him by exploiting his inability to cross moving water - Dracula could only cross the Thames at the moment of slack tide, when things were briefly static. So the ferry crossing keeps the vampires out, which is comforting, since they manifest themselves in all kinds of metaphorical ways.
I used to live in Seattle - was born there; I grew up in a little town on the water about thirty miles south. I lived in Seattle as an adult, with my family; we gradually moved north, away from the city. The house we lived in from which we moved to the island over fifteen years ago was ten blocks north of the Seattle city limits, in a town called Shoreline, but we still referred to it as Seattle.
That's the way it is with a city. The border is arbitrary, and can even change, when the city annexes neighborhoods, increasing its size and tax-base. Not so with an island - the distinction between what is the island and what is not is pretty clear - you go down to the water's edge, and that's the end of your island.
Islanders, in my experience, are pleased with being so. It's a special thing, to live on one. Culturally, we think of an island as remote and disconnected - the Latin words, "insulate" and "isolate" both refer to the condition of an island. We're isolated, yes, although a mere twenty-minute boat ride to America. And as remote as we need to be.
Wednesday, January 07, 2009
I read an article in a recent New Yorker about a fellow who is ferreting out the dimensions of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan to end the Pacific theater of WWII. An interesting point jumped off the page: a day on which the crews were training to drop the bombs was the fortieth anniversary of Wilbur and Orville Wright having demonstrated that powered flight was possible.
Merely forty years, and a plane was able to fly high and drop an instant sun.
That seems like pretty extreme technological compression - forty years? From limping along the sand in North Carolina and packing the bits of airplane in barrels afterward, to flying high over the ocean and destroying cities.
Add another twenty-five years or so, and Neil Armstrong was landing on the moon.
Other technological marvels include the news I just received yesterday: my brother, the Luddite, not only has a computer, but is online. He called me with the news, and left a message saying he wanted me to give him some links of my web design work; since I had missed the call, he thought he might just get the information from my sister.
Well, jeez, pal, why didn't you just tell me your email address?
I frequently tell my son how things we take for granted didn't even exist when I was his age. There weren't calculators (unless you count an abacus), I seldom saw a color television, personal computers were relatively far off, and there certainly wasn't an internet.
I had an IBM pc back in the 1980's - I bought it used from a friend for $700 (which seemed like a pretty good deal).
The hard drive was massive, for those days - 256 kilobytes. That was the hard drive. The machine I'm working with at the moment has a 320 gigabyte hard drive, which is over 1.3 million times the capacity.
A mere eight years ago, I upgraded from a machine with a 1 gigabyte hard drive to one with an 8 gigabyte drive, and I thought I was really stepping up.
Over the recent holidays, one of my nephews was excited that he had just acquired a 500 gigabyte external hard drive.
"Is that all?" I said, "I recently picked one up that's 1.5 terabytes." -- (that's about 6.3 million times as large as the drive in that old PC, and the unit is about half the size of a box of facial tissue).
Twenty-five years ago, I couldn't even conceive of a gigabyte. I might as well get used to petabytes [about a million gigabytes, which is a bit over 8.5 billion bits - a bit being the binary unit, a zero or a one - on, or off]). And exabytes: a bit over a billion gigabytes - and zettabytes - over a trillion gigabytes. Yottabytes? That's more than a billion terabytes, which is more than a million megabytes, which is more than a million bytes, which is eight bits. That is a huge heap of zeros and ones, and they all will have something to do, one day.
Monday, January 05, 2009
Today is my birthday.
I had a dream just before I woke up; I was out in the yard by the birdfeeder. It was dim light, nearly dark. I heard a double-thump, which I thought I recognized as the sound of both ends of a deer hitting the ground, having jumped over the fence. I was looking for it, and spotted it discreetly hanging out by the garden fence. There was a section of wooden fence a couple of feet outside the fence, and it was discreetly behind that, too (the wooden fence was in the dream; I don't have such a thing near my garden in waking life). I didn't go over to it, preferring, generally, to experience nature from a respectful distance, but said something soft to it.
And then I saw, coming out from under the grape vines, a little fawn. Wrong time of year for a fawn, I thought. And this was the smallest fawn ever - as big as a Chihuahua - and pulling its umbilicus behind it. The fawn was curious and coming over to me.
But wait - there was a threat - up in the threadbare pine from which the birdfeeder hangs was a large cat, which began to walk along the top of the fence, in that low-to-the-ground way that makes them seem so clandestine.
And it was a big cat - like a lynx, or bobcat.
And then I woke.
I'm not generally a dreamer -- no doubt I do dream, but there's rarely anything fresh in the archives when I wake -- so I'm willing to consider this one auspicious.
Please don't feel like you need to send felicitations; I like to keep it low-key. In fact, that's been frustrating my wife, who's been pestering me to find out what I want to do, what I want for dinner, do I even want any presents?
For me, it's complicated. One of my old slogans is, "No sympathy, no praise." I'd rather be sort of invisible, and hang out in the woods with the flickers, the Douglas Squirrels, the ravens, the crows… and since I was the youngest of four kids, frequently regarded as the mascot or the toy, I definitely learned how to be invisible. I used to disappear into the woods as a kid, even. Still do, when I can. I just don't like to call attention to myself.
But even that confuses my intimates, since I'm an actor. I get onstage, and everyone in the room can see me; the lights are so bright, I can't see them, but they can see me. How does one reconcile that? Being highly visible, for someone who professes to prefer invisibility?
Simple. The guy onstage isn't me. He's whatever character I happen to be playing. Once, even, the actress who played my love-interest asked my young son (he was about ten), "How does it feel to see me kissing your dad?"
"You're not kissing my dad," he replied, "you're kissing Freddy the Bartender!"
This year, I would almost have opted to let the whole birthday thing go, but I tried that once, and it doesn't work:
I turned nineteen, some years ago, and decided I would keep it to myself. I don't know why, something grown up about it? Early-onset intentional jaded lad? But I was content, and smug, knowing that I had this little secret: it was my birthday, and I was the only one who knew.
I finished work that day, and as usual, went over to a friend's house to hang out.
It was a big house, and a bunch of guys lived there, so it was a routine hang-out. We'd muster there, smoke some dope, drink some beer, listen to records, or, in this case, we were watching television.
How ironic: it was a M*A*S*H re-run - remember that show? And the asshole doctor, Frank Burns, was having a birthday. It was a funny episode, and almost made me spill the beans during a commercial break. "Hey guys, guess what?" But I kept it to myself.
And then a friend came over, a girl I was close to - "There you are!" she said. "I've been looking for you everywhere! Happy birthday!"
It was a big surprise to all my chums, who made much of me sharing a birthday with Frank Burns.
So I learned then, and told my wife yesterday, that you can't put dynamite in a garbage can and not expect the lid to get blown off. When it's your birthday, the energy can't really be contained and hidden.
But I don't want a big deal made of it, you know? I'd prefer it if my wife didn't tell her friends, or anything like that, since I just want to have it to myself, and with my closest intimates: her, my son, my daughter, my cat. A few others, perhaps, but from a distance.
No guests for dinner.
And what's for dinner?
That was hard, too - I have a notorious passion for food (I used to be well-paid to play with food, having been a chef - it's true, I was a chef, and not a mere cook, but actually the executive chef in a French restaurant); you should see me try to decide what to order in a restaurant. I finally have to practically pick something out with a blind finger, like selecting a number from the phone book to make a prank call. So how am I going to decide what I want for dinner?
[going out to eat isn't much of an option - all those years in commercial kitchens make eating out not so easy, unless I know the chef has a fondness for the classics as I do]
And I don't want to pressure my wife or my kids into trying to execute some favorite dish like cassoulet, or braised chops, or anything like that, so what to do?
Finally, I hit on it - being a High Priest in the Church of the Sandwich - we're going to have my old favorite, Reuben sandwiches. When I told my wife this, "Hey, I know! - " my son said from the other room, "Good choice, Dad."
For dessert? I can't decide. "You get something you'll like, and I'll enjoy it," I said.
Really, I find it surprising that she thinks my whole attitude about this is kind of pathological. I just want to be low-key.
But it's my birthday - so the constellations will be in the pattern they were in when I entered the world, and I'll think of my mother, who died soon after my third birthday (she was the writer, which is partly why I write), and I'll remember other birthdays - my seventeenth, when my estranged girlfriend from another city took me to see a movie, and I was so despondent those days, I was doing a lot of drugs, so I ate a bunch of hash while we stood in line after buying our tickets waiting to see the feature - which was Apocalypse Now - an excellent film to see in my hashish condition.
And my forty-first birthday, the day before I flew to Germany and somehow landed safely in Hamburg while there were hurricane winds. Many others, too -- mostly all memorable, and few of them even remotely disappointing.
One thing is for certain - I won't be working on my birthday - I never have. Even when I was a boy, eleven-years-old and with a paper route, I trained a buddy to deliver my papers - since it was my birthday. I've never worked on my birthday (although my wife was getting so frustrated with my down-playing the thing that she finally said, "Why don't you just work, then, since it's such a no-big-deal?" - I turned and tried to glare at her: "What did you just say?").
But happy birthday to me, and happy birthday to Umberto Eco (the writer), and Hayao Miyazaki (the animator), and Robert Duvall (the actor)… and anyone else who is fortunate to have been born on the fifth day of the year. We're special - but in my case, I'll try to keep it to myself (yeah, right, I'm only writing about it on the WorldWideWeb...).
If you wanted to do anything to honor my birthday, spend some time outside. Feed the birds. Learn the name of one of your local trees. Marvel at the crows. That's what I'm likely to be doing, as I do whenever possible. Let's be outside in the world together, under the same stars, no matter where we are.
The constellations have wheeled around to the configuration they had the day I arrived on this planet; let's gaze at them and make up new stories.
Sunday, January 04, 2009
It's funny - this is a new thing, this "blog" - funny word, that - and working with it will be like having a relationship. No, not like a relationship, but it will be a relationship. And, per yesterday's snippet of a post, I'm working on customizing the thing, so I can have it look and behave the way I want - just like an ignorant man might try to manipulate his wife. But since we're pushing around zeros and ones (with me? the whole electronic binary thing?), I can do what I want. Who knows, maybe I'll spend more time with this than I do with my wife…
Really, though, it's intriguing to develop a relationship such as this. For instance, I bought a laptop a couple of years ago, and since it was a machine I was going to use exclusively as my own, not like my desktop computer in my library at home that we all use, I could customize the interface, install software I wanted, and make it just the way I liked it. Took some time to get it set up to my satisfaction, but we're plenty satisfied with it (and in the interest of full disclosure, it's a PC - which I prefer to Macintosh, but, unlike many of the militant Mac users I know, I'm not going to cast judgments - and in the interest of full disclosure, I know PC owners who are the same way - truly, I would have one of each if I could afford it).
I spent some time yesterday altering the look of the page, having started with a provided theme, but it's the other stuff, too, that needs modification, as we do the little dance of figuring out how to configure the thing to suit my needs and desires.
For example, I like to type with Word, since, although I made hubristic reference to what an excellent typist I am, I really depend on Word's "autocorrect" function. Yes, I am one of those who types, "teh." Word fixes it for me. Maybe I think I'm a good typist because my tools correct my errors before I realize I'm making them…? At any rate, I can type pretty fast.
I tried that trick - creating the text with Word (I've done that when composing long emails, too), then pasting it into the entry page to make a blog post, but the formatting was all wonky. Selecting all the text and fiddling with the font and size and all that did nothing - the paragraphs, every time I had hit the return key, had lots of space before and after, like a fifth-grader's report ("two typewritten pages" - sure, with 16 pt type, and double-spaced…).
So here's what I've discovered I need to do:
1. type the text with Word;
2. spell-check it;
3. copy it, then open NoteTab (an excellent little piece of software I use for writing html for hand-coded websites -- I use the Pro version, since it was so useful I wanted them to have some money), and paste the text into it.
4. from there, I copy it - which has now stripped all the formatting, except for case and line-breaks;
5. and finally, paste that into the blog entry page -
6. and then post it.
Lots of steps? Not necessarily. I end up with something I like. Easier than trying to get the blog software to overcome the formatting that Word has crammed in there.
We're figuring it all out.
Sunday, January 04, 2009
Here's a little post...
I spent my day working on a nice pot of chicken soup with vegetables and matzoh balls (although I'm a Gentile, my matzoh balls find favor with rabbis, cats, and anyone who sits down at my table). When I wasn't working on that, I was looking under the coding hood of the theme of this site, and making alterations to the template files, the CSS, and the primary image. I should be done with that business soon, so the thing will look a bit more like me, and less like some other developer's theme.
Yeah, okay, when I'm able, I'll write my own theme. For now, though, this one suits me -- with the exception of some of the style, so I'm tweaking it.
Maybe I'll pull a screenshot of the current appearance and post it, so you can check my work?
Saturday, January 03, 2009
A good friend tells me of “morphic resonance” – I won’t explain it as he does (he’s an intellectual), but you’ll get the idea.
For instance, he says, let’s say you’re walking along, and spot a rubber band on the ground. You pick it up, but not after making a conscious decision – not, “Hey, I might need that.” No, you just pick it up and put it in your pocket.
And sure enough, he explains, in a short time, you encounter a situation that requires a rubber band. And you have one.
Morphic resonance.
He told me of this little concept a month or so ago, and I’ve been eager to investigate the phenomenon… which might be a bit tricky, since it seems key to not engage with the object you find, you just pick it up with no agenda or expectation.
Today, just as I was leaving to go work on an outdoor project for a client in my neighborhood, I went into my office and fetched a piece of paper. I thought it was an obsolete printed document from a stash of scrap paper, but it was a virgin sheet of 8 ½ x 11. I folded it in quarters and put it in my pocket.
Not long after, I was working away, and hear, down the hill, my friend – who happens to live next door to the client for whom I was working – calls out and asks if I can help him pick up some furniture from a friend here in town.
I walked down the hill and into his house.
He needed to write a note, but couldn’t find a piece of scratch paper. I had one in my pocket, so I gave it to him. He tore off a quarter of it and handed me the rest.
We got the furniture; a bit later, I headed down at his house for hot tea, but wrote a note for my client, telling her I would be back in half an hour to discuss the project, and tucked it in the window of my truck. Then I headed down the hill.
During our brief visit, my friend was telling me about a Bob Dylan tune he thought I should know, and wanted to write the title down. He remembered that I had the paper.
Now I had a quarter of it left.
When I left my friend’s house, his wife offered me a cookie, a gluten-free Pfeffernuss (don’t laugh, it was a killer cookie). She wanted to roll it in the confectioner’s sugar, and after doing so, said, “Oh, now I need a napkin to put it on for you, so you can take it away.”
“No problem,” I said, and whipped out the last of the paper.
I had used it all, and without planning it.
Morphic resonance.
Friday, January 02, 2009
Here we are, on the first day of a new year.
Among many interesting conversations last night at Tom Bombadil’s house at the end of a road in my little town, a bit outside space and time, we talked of the arbitrary nature of our calendar. New Year’s Day? Just another day.
And yet – when we collectively embrace turning a page, wiping the slate clean, you can’t escape it – it’s like planting peas on President’s Day in my part of the world – that’s the day to begin the Spring Garden, and that’s all there is to it (to reduce it to a protocol an amoeba could comprehend).
I don’t go in for the New Year’s Resolution bit, though, but prefer to generate a “Manifest List.” I write down the things I want to bring into my life in the new year, and even try to examine things and determine what ballast I should jettison.
Five years ago today – 1 January 2004 – I again attempted to develop the habit of writing daily. I had always had determination to be a writer, after having learned that my mother, who died when I was a wee boy, was a writer, and not only that, but a good one. I wanted to fulfill her legacy.
Lots of people want to be writers, but it’s like wanting to be a gardener (two samples, now, of my favorite source of metaphor and aphorism) – you don’t talk about it, you clear a plot of ground, plant seeds, and water them!
Want to be a writer?
You write.
So although I had tried the discipline of daily writing, I would peter out after a month, or maybe two – that’s a lot of work.
But five years ago, it stuck. I started on the first day of the year, and kept it up, and kept it up, and never looked back (not true – I read the crap occasionally). I kept typing, and in a sense, learned some things about being a writer. Learned how to type, for one.
[My philosophy, really, is that you don’t tell people what you do: “I’m an actor,” or, “I'm a poet,” [hearing that is like nails on a chalkboard] or, “I'm a ____.” No, what you do, instead, is what you do, and if it matters, people will catch you in the act of doing it – as a wise friend put it to an extreme example of this that he’d encountered, “Who you say you are is speaking so loudly about who you think you are that I can’t hear who you are.”]
But yes, I’m a writer, because I write every fucking day.
I haven’t missed a day in the last five years. I track my word count, occasionally (it will take me a week or two to get caught up on the last quarter of 2008), and discovered last year that if I kept up on my current word count average, I’d hit over two-and-a-half million words in the last five years – which counts all but email and incidental text… take a look at that subtitle up above: “confessions of a compulsive typist;” may you be able to handle being an email correspondent of mine).
In 2005, I spent a couple of weeks in Europe in the winter. I wrote every day. Didn’t have a machine, so I wrote by hand, all the time, everything. Thirty thousand words in two weeks, by hand. That felt like an achievement.
Then, after returning to my island off the northwest coast of amerika, I had to be my own emanuensis and type it all into a file, so I’d have it in the archives.
Last year (summer of 2008), I was in Europe again, but this time, I had a laptop. Not only that, but I had a handsome and ultra-durable (and mildly chunky) Pelican Case – as I have described that to friends, “You can put the computer in it, throw it off Seattle’s Aurora Bridge (a historic destination for suicides, once upon a time, who didn’t mind ending life in Lake Union far below), go down and fish it out of the water, open the case, and get back to work.”
My companions complained, once, about the imposing laptop case – I didn’t have it in a slender neoprene sleeve, as is customary, it seems, but in this sturdy case.
“You might find my laptop case a burden, but don’t you think the Secrets of the Universe should be kept safe?”
It was a bit easier to write daily with a machine along. In fact, I’m fond of this photo of me typing away on the train from Amsterdam to Paris. Now, having completed five years of that gig, I want to diversify a bit, so we’re cranking up this weblog. I don’t intend to be attached to posting daily, but frequently, at least.
Now, I just installed the blog software at the domain a couple of days ago, in anticipation of today’s embarkation, so don’t be alarmed if the appearance is altered now and then – I haven’t had a chance to modify the theme, but I will. The interface might change, but the content will truck on, and right steadily.
Care to join me?
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