Category Archives: Uncategorized

Handwriting

Fitz posted something about handwriting, and linked to somewhere else. Well, now I can’t find his post about it. Oh well.

[UPDATE: No wonder I couldn’t find it. It was JDD, not Fitz.]

Anyways, the gist of it was that, now that we spend 10 hours a day typing, none of us know how to handwrite anything any more.

The funny thing is that just a couple of months ago, if I were to try to hand write a page of anything, by the end of it my hands would be cramped and sore, and every word would be indecipherable.

However, I spent the last 2 hours writing, and my hand isn’t even a little bit sore. What’s the trick? Well, there’s several things.

The obvious one is practice. Until just a few months ago, I hadn’t hand written anything of any significant length for months, perhaps years. When I was growing up, going to a British boarding school, we had to write letters home, long essays, papers, not to mention writing “I will not mock the English royalty” 500 times. But now that I have a computer within reach at any moment of the day or night, there’s little need to hand write anything. And when I do handwrite anything, I then end up typing it in later on.

But lately, I’ve started hand writing stuff, for a number of reasons. Somehow, now that I’ve taken up writing poetry, it just seems to work better when I hand write it. And so, gradually, I’ve gotten back into practice.

The second thing is almost as obvious, and it’s the choice of pen. It’s no wonder people get hand cramps when they write with anything as wretched as the majority of pens that are available in this country. I have found a grand total of ONE store in Lexington that carries decent pens. And since nobody uses real pens any more, they are considered a luxury item, and are therefore grossly overpriced.

There are several other stores that carry fountain pens of some description, but they are primarily carried as art items, and tend to come in calligraphy sets. And some of the office supply stores carry pens that you would buy in order to impress your rich friends, but that you’d never actually write with. Most of these are in the $300 and up range.

My current pen is a Lamy Black, which isn’t a hugely expensive pen, but also isn’t exactly a $5-for-a-six-pack pen either. However, the difference in the pleasure of writing between this and the other fountain pens I have is enormous.

Most of my other pens are Sheaffers, and have come from the afore-mentioned calligraphy sets. You can get a Sheaffer for about $7 at your local art supply store, and they are nice pens.

The big difference between the Sheaffer and the Lamy is that the Lamy nib is so much smoother – it glides around on the paper, rather than scratching. This makes writing much less painful in the long run – a scratchy pen tends to make the hand cramp up pretty fast.

And third, there’s the paper. I wouldn’t have believed this without trying it. I mean, paper is paper, right? But the difference between writing in my Moleskines and writing on a mead legal pad is unquestionably noticeable. I can’t exactly quantify it, but the paper that Moleskine uses makes for writing that is smoother and less of a chore.

And as a result of these various things, I’ve started writing more and more, and enjoying it more, and my writing has started looking better. I’ll bet my highschool teachers wouldn’t believe it.

I might even jump in and participate in the handwriting meme that has been going around of late.

Congress and teh intarwebs

Once again, the government has revealed their complete lack of technical know-how, not to mention common sense.

The summary is that people with open wireless networks (like you and 12 of your neighbors) are required to report any inappropriate content which is transferred across that network.

Ok, I’m a geek, and I don’t have the ability to log all content that goes across my network, much less audit it to find out what of that content is inappropriate, for some as-yet-to-be-specified definition of inappropriate.

And I can see 5 open wireless networks from my front yard, 3 of which have the default admin password on them still. I *KNOW* that my neighbors lack the ability to do the legislated reporting.

Am I to assume that all future marketed APs will be required to syslog to NSA.gov? Who’s going to read those log files? Not to mention the storage requirement.

It continues to amaze me that the government seems to think that something is possible simply by virtue of their having legislated it. This is idiocy. They haven’t given a moment’s thought to how this would actually be implemented, much less who’s going to pay for it. But they’re congratulating themselves on how much this is going to save little Johnny from seeing nasty content when he’s using the WiFi at the local public library.

Now, I happen to think that the kind of content that they’re trying to eliminate is in fact a bad thing, a sickness that turns the unlimited usefulness of the Internet into a morass that I’m reluctant to let my kids use without close supervision. But creating imaginary reporting mechanisms not only doesn’t prevent people from looking at that content, but even if it were possible to implement, in no way addresses the actual issue.

Not to mention the huge freedom of speech issues that are implied by such a mandate. Why should I be obliged to report my internet usage to the government? In what way is it their business what content I choose to consume, whether it be what I read, what I listen to, or even what I publish?

Some days, it’s truly frightening what uninformed and arrogant people we have governing us.

Green

I haven’t recorded anything in a long time – primarily because Habari doesn’t support podcasting particularly well yet. But this evening I recorded a reading of Green, a poem I wrote a few days ago, which I’m actually very fond of.

I’ve often found the question “What’s your favorite {food, color, animal, song}?” to be annoying, because it is very specifically the variety of life that fascinates me, and picking one thing from any category seems almost a tragedy. This poem is a bit of reflection on the my refusal to have a favorite color, and almost-but-not-quite answers the question.

Here it is. Hope you enjoy it.

iPod Chipmonks

I recently discovered that there’s a “faster” setting when you’re listening to Audiobooks on the iPod. What I haven’t been able to figure out is exactly how much faster it is. It is noticeably faster, but the time doesn’t seem to tick by any faster. I timed it on the way to work, and I think I got about 18 minutes of audio into the 14 minute drive, which doesn’t seem like a particularly significant speedup. Something like 1.2 or 1.3. Which means that the 64 hours of War and Peace will take somewhere between 50 and 54 hours. The guy that’s reading it read very slowly anyways, so it doesn’t make it at all hard to listen to. I don’t know how well this will work with other readers.

Goodbye Blakeman’s Farm

For the last 15 years or so, I’ve been buying pumpkins at Blakeman’s Farm, on the right just after you pass 29 on the way north from Wilmore on 68. I’ve also bought vegetables and chrysanthemums from him on numerous occasions.

The last 3 or 4 years, he’s had wretched harvests, due to either too much rain, or not enough, and has planted less and less acreage each year. But although appearing more and more discouraged about the future of his farm, he was always cheerful, friendly, and remembered me from year to year, asking to see photos of the pumpkins that had been carved.

A couple weeks ago, apparently, he made the decision to call it quits. The last few weeks there have been bulldozers on the farm, destroying all the trees, which have been burnt in enormous bonfires. Now the entire farm is flat and unwooded from one end to the other, and there are signs up indicating what kind of housing development is going in there.

It all makes me sad for a number of reasons. I feel just awful for the local farmers who can’t make it from one year to another because the Walmarts are selling pumpkins – not bigger or better or even cheaper, but more convenient to the shoppers. It’s not convenient to drive out to Blakeman’s for vegetables any more, so you get them at Kroger, and the small-scale farmers across the country – heck, across the world – have to close down and do something else, after generations of having a farm there.

So it looks like next year there won’t be a Blakeman’s farm any more, and I’ll have to get my pumpkins somewhere else, paying more for them, and missing the delightful conversations with a kind friendly man who had put his own work into growing those pumpkins.

And I hate to see all those old trees pulled down and unceremoniously burned in huge ugly heaps, belching smoke into the air and not warming anybody’s hearth. It’s a tragedy, truly.

And, of course, one more housing development on my road to work, making traffic worse, the road more dangerous for cyclists, and yet another place for accidents as cars pull out into the narrow winding road.

Yes, progress, jobs, homes for folks, and all that. But it’s sad to watch an old way of life getting ploughed under.

Joost, finally

I installed Joost way back when it was in private pre-release beta. Every time I have attempted to run it, it has prompted me to download a new version. That takes forever, by which time I have to move on to something else, and forget about it for a month or so – by which time there’s another update.

Last night as the very first time I’ve actually run the Joost application, in all that time since the first install.

I was very impressed with the quality of video, and the magic of getting all that content over my meager bandwidth.

I was less impressed with the selection of content. Not that there wasn’t a huge amount of it – there was – but most of it was stuff that had absolutely no interest for me.

We did, however, find some Stan Laurel movies, which were worth watching.

So maybe this time I’ll watch it once or twice before I have to download another update. But probably not.

Your Eyes

For this week’s Weekend Wordsmith:

Your eyes
MB
November 30, 2007

Worth drowning in, these pools.
Worth swimming out to the dark abyss
far out in the middle,
and just sinking to their
depthless depths, their bottomless bottom.

The color of a tropical lagoon
on a stormy day
somewhere off the coast of Lamu
where nobody goes any more.

Treasures lie in their depths
that fools passed by
for so many years.

So I dive
and drink in the heady liquors
only to be found
down deep where the sun seldom reaches.