BrockLi Soup

We’ve been sitting on the runway in Buffalo for an hour. The flight attendant asked if anyone on board is engaged, and now they’re collecting marriage advice written on napkins for us.

This week, I’m working from home home - my parents’ house in the suburbs of Buffalo. My brother is getting married this Saturday, and I came up on Thursday for his bachelor party this past weekend. Rather than making the trip twice, I’m staying through the week and working from here for a few days.

This is the longest I’ve worked remotely. Once in a while, I’ll work from my apartment for part of the day if I have a doctor’s appointment or something like that, but I’ve never done it for three solid days like this. I thought it would be great, but it’s kind of weird. Without the office environment, it’s a lot harder to get in the swing of things. I’m working at the kitchen table here, so it’s been a challenge to get comfortable and get the light at the right level (it’s about the only thing I’m fussy about in my office). The time seems to fly by, and I feel like I’m not getting as much done as I usually do, but I can’t figure out why - it’s not like I’m goofing off. If anything, I’m more focused because I’m not talking to co-workers as much as I would be if I were in the office. Maybe it’s just because I don’t feel like I’m working.

I’ve always thought I would like working from home, but I think I would need a decent office if I were going to do it long-term. The kitchen table will work do three days, but I don’t think I could handle it much longer than that. But even if it isn’t very office-y, at least there’s no commute.

You know, out here in the exurbs, I’m not sure other people will get the sarcasm in the song I posted about the other day, and I am reluctant to play it in the car with the windows down, because I think some people around here actually have “God is on our side” bumper stickers.

Twitter’s scaling problems are near-legendary. Ever since it really took off last spring at SXSW, it’s been going down for short periods on a near-daily basis. It’s a cliché, but Twitter has been straining under the weight of its own success.

This most recent spate of problems has been especially bad, though. I don’t know if anything in particular happened to cause it, but the IM functionality and pagination have been disabled for most of the past couple weeks. Even then, it just doesn’t work at all a couple times a day when the load is too high.

Unlike so many other people, I’m not complaining. It kind of sucks, but Twitter is a free service - the way I see it, if I haven’t paid them, they don’t owe me jack diddly. People are getting really upset about the downtime, and I don’t understand the sense of entitlement that makes one believe they deserve some level of service from a company that’s doing it for free.

No, I’m actually kind of thankful. The thing I do have in common with the Twitter-bashers is a mild Twitter addiction, and when you can’t see more then the most recent 20 tweets on your friends page, you start to lose interest. I still love Twitter and check it a few times a day, but now I don’t really worry about the ones I miss - if something important happens to someone close to me, I’ll probably hear about it either way. It’s like a little reminder that, hey, there’s more out here than the Internet.

A couple days ago, Fonny (this Fonny) told me about Defiance, Ohio, a great acoustic folk punk band. I mean, they’ve got a fiddle, a double bass, and a cello, and they release all their music for free on BitTorrent - how could I possibly NOT love these guys?

My favorite song is The New World Order, and I know that no one likes song lyrics in blog posts, but tough nuggins. These were copied straight from their site, without any high-falutin’ formatting:

They say the new world order is just god’s master plan but if the blueprint calls some to starve, don’t blame god’s right-hand man, ’cause the president is holy, and the president is pious, and hallelujah! he’s a good ol’ boy! hosannah in the highest!

The plan is written in god’s hand so only bush can read it, and it calls for battle in god’s name and it calls for bush to lead it, and the blueprint calls to drill for oil, and exterminate the land, and if you can’t hear god’s calling, then you’re probably from france! cause the USA is holy, and the USA is pious, and hallelujah! god is on our side! hosannah in the highest!

And god is great, and god is good, and let us thank god for our food, we may well have more than we need and god well yet have mouths to feed, but god is great, and god is good, and someday soon, he’ll feed you, too, ’cause once we’ve got our yachts and crowns, god planned some food to trickle down, so just keep those thoughts holy, be patient and be pious, and hallelujah! god’ll grant your prayers, hosannah in the highest!

And I thank god for a god so mild, who spared the rod and spoiled the child, and signed a blank check so his boys and girls could buy up the entire world, so don’t think us rude if we intrude, but god in heaven ordained us to, so you best improve that attitude and step aside we’ve work to do and thanks for keeping things in shape ’til we could come and take our place. Oh hallelujah! ain’t life great? Hosanna in the highest!

After a long Twitter hiatus, Fonny returned to MICROBLOGGING, and we got to talking about it online.

Fonny: I think Twitter is a little silly personally

Fonny: I’m making fun of my friend who told me that lately he’s been “getting into microblogging”

Brock: that’s like saying concerts are a little silly because you don’t like boy bands

It reminds me of that line in Team America: World Police about “use your acting,” as if “acting” was the solution. A few years ago, people were going on and on about how “blogging” can give your company a good image, and be used for personal branding, and will groom your dog. Now, microblogging will solve everything! And widgets! WEB TWO POINT OH!

I don’t want to name names, but some people I’ve seen around the Internets seem to attribute a lot of power to reasonably abstract concepts. “Blogging” isn’t a thing anyone can really pin down, because it means different things to different people. It’s not a solution, or a problem, or anything specific even - a blog is a means of delivering content, and anyone that tries to give it a more specific or meaningful definition probably doesn’t understand it as well as they think they do, or at least works in marketing.

It drives me nuts when I hear people say things like “blogs are stupid,” because it’s so generic. I think the concert analogy I made to Fonny makes sense: one would sound pretty stupid if they dismissed concerts altogether because they didn’t like a particular band that’s playing. Fine, you don’t like the band, but that doesn’t invalidate the idea of public performance. It’s the same thing with blogs. Fine, maybe you don’t like the way Heather Armstrong writes about her life, but that doesn’t mean blogs are worthless - it means you shouldn’t bother reading dooce. There’s a ton of really good stuff being put out there everyday, and I hate to see people dismiss it all because they’ve only managed to find the crappy parts. The same thing goes for Twitter: there’s a lot of crap, but that doesn’t make the service or the concept inherently worthless.

Anyway, Fonny and I had a nice chat about it, and I don’t mean to imply that he’s one of the people doing this. He just got me thinking about it, and I wanted to include him because really, and how can you not love that face!

Yesterday, I went the Dupont Circle Farmer’s Market with Erin and her sister Meghan. We picked up some fruits and vegetables, fresh bread, and - more importantly - buffalo burgers, lamb sausage, and lamb steak. I wanted to put something in the fridge to thaw for dinner tonight, so I asked Erin if she wanted buffalo or lamb for dinner.

“Why can’t we do both?”

“What, like one for lunch and one for dinner?”

“Yeah, we’ll just eat meat all day.”

Have I told you, dear Internet, how much I love this woman?

I can’t help but wonder if other people do this: any time I find a TV show, or podcast, or book or magazine or any kind of media that I like, I feel compelled to catch up on all back issues before I move ahead. Like, if I catch an episode of an interesting TV show, I want to watch all of the previous episodes before seeing any more new ones, so I know the back story. When I find a new podcast, I want to listen to all the previous episodes, and the same with books by some author. I feel like I’m missing something if I don’t get the whole back story.

Arrested Development is a great explanation for this. That show constantly referred back to previous events and made countless in-jokes and callbacks. People that didn’t see the previous episodes would miss half the jokes, and that’s probably why it failed - people who watched the show were undying fans, but anyone who came into the middle of the series wouldn’t find it entertaining.

Increased serialization of TV shows may lend to this. For example, I wouldn’t bother to start watching Lost, or Heroes, or The Wire without catching up on the old episodes, because I would be missing big parts of the back store. This seems to be true of most popular shows these days, and not just those that are generally considered to be serials like that - even sitcoms like The Office and My Name Is Earl have a good deal of back story that come up in jokes and plot lines again and again.

Maybe other people don’t feel the need to catch up like this, but I almost never take people up on it when they recommend a TV series to me, because I know I won’t be able to enjoy it without first putting in the time to get caught up. Entertainment is hard work.

At some point in our lives - let’s call it “college” - many of us downloaded illegal copies of software because we didn’t have the money to purchase it, or because we needed the money for something else - let’s call it “beer.” Not that I would do such a thing, of course.

Now that I’m not flat broke, I’m more willing to pay for well-designed software that I find useful, and much less likely to spend a lot of time trying to find and figure out flaky free alternatives, or consider “other” means of acquisition. These are some of the Mac apps that have been deemed worthy of my purchase lately.

AppZapper

Uninstalling applications on a Mac usually just means dragging them to the trash. It’s a simple method, though incredibly difficult for PC users to get used to. However, not all applications can be removed so easily. Sometimes, configuration files lurk in your Library or elsewhere. Furthermore, it can be hard to get rid of things like plugins and widgets if you don’t know where to look.

AppZapper fills this hole - it’s the “uninstaller Apple forgot.” It’s true that Apple should have just included this functionality in the OS, but since they didn’t, AppZapper is definitely worth the $12.95.

Transmit

It seems like there should be at least one free FTP client for the Mac that doesn’t suck, but since I haven’t found it, Transmit was worth $29.95. After the 15 day free trial, you don’t get to use favorites and it limits your session to 10 minutes. For months, I resisted the price tag. I assumed that there simply had to be a good free alternative out there, and any FTP’ing I had to do was done in 10-minute increments in Transmit. I don’t know why I held out for so long, because Transmit is a great product, and the developers deserve to get paid for it.

TextMate

This isn’t a new purchase (I’ve had it for about a year), but TextMate has become more and more useful to me lately. I wrote a post about it a couple days ago. It was a little cheaper when I bought it, and $64 seems pretty steep for a text editor, but it meets needs I didn’t even know I had.

OmniFocus

OmniFocus is the kind of thing that I should really use more than I do. It’s a fantastic GTD-style task management app, but it would be a lot more valuable to me if I could just get in the habit of using it to track things I need to do. I’ve made a few well-intentioned attempts at my own GTD system, but I always seem to put a bunch of “I should do this eventually” type stuff into my system (in this case, OmniFocus), and then I never want to open it because I’ll be faced with all this crap that I need to get done, so I just keep making little post-it notes and ad-hoc lists and things still fall through the cracks. It took me about a dozen tries to quit smoking - maybe it will take me a dozen more to start using OmniFocus.

You Look Nice Today is a new one from lonelysandwich, scottsimpson, and hotdogsladies, and it’s my favorite.

Jeff Atwood, in stackoverflow Podcast #5:

So I like to put the disclaimer out there. Because I have a history of mispronouncing things a lot. I think it’s because I grew up in an area that was somewhat rural, and I read a lot. And I didn’t hear people using the words that I was reading, so I kind of had to imagine what they would sound like. And I think that got, at some point just, you know, it became second nature for me to pronounce things however I thought they should be pronounced and not look them up.

This is pretty much the exact excuse I’ve been using for years to explain why I never knew how to say things like “hors d’oeuvres”, and why I’ve always been irritated by people who say things like “could of” when they mean “could have.”

The Treasury Department discriminates against millions of Americans who are blind or have poor vision by printing paper money that makes it impossible for them to distinguish between denominations, a federal appeals court ruled on Tuesday.

This is the kind of thing that most people don’t even think about. I certainly never did, until a couple months ago when I met - pay attention, here - my fiancée’s sister’s boyfriend’s high school friend and her husband, both of whom are blind. He is a lobbyist for a blindness special interest group (I can’t remember now if he’s with American Council for the Blind, who filed the case) and filled us in on this and other issues they’re working on.

A design change in our currency could mean big - and potentially expensive - changes. The most obvious example is the scanners in vending machines that need to recognize different bills, but any kind of electronic money counters may need to be updated. But I’m all for it. As Eric the lobbyist pointed out, there are different options: tactile differences or differently sized bills, for example. He’s not an expert on money, so he’s not trying to say he knows the best way to do it. The Treasury Department, on the other hand, is an expert on money, and it’s their responsibility to figure out a way to make cash accessible to everyone without having a huge impact.

Reuters Article

Sometimes, I feel like I’m having an ideological war with myself.

Half of me is the capitalist. I want nice things. I want enough money in the bank so that I never need to think about it, so I can buy gadgets and the occasional plane tickets without having to worry about the impact on my budget. I want to be able to go out for dinner and drinks with friends whenever I feel like it.

The other half is sort of a socialist. I want everyone to get fair wages. I want everyone to receive the health care they need. I want a college education to be available to anyone who wishes to pursue it.

Those are the reasonable parts of socialism, the parts that don’t conjure images of a hippie commune where everyone shares all the money and belongings - and work. Let’s be honest, something like that could never work on the big scale, simply because enough people would take advantage of it to make it impractical. Even now, we have issues with people exploiting welfare and other public services. The liberal part of me would like to believe that people on welfare have just fallen on some hard times and need a hand getting back on their feet, but there’s no doubt that some percentage of beneficiaries are just gaming the system.

So where is the middle ground? I think everybody wants health care and education for all, but no one is willing to pay for it. The American Dream is to work hard, be successful, and live a good life - forfeiting your hard-earned gains for the sake of someone else’s good life has never been part of the Dream.

In the grand scheme of things, I’m pretty comfortable. I’ve got a nice apartment, where I keep my college diploma. I’ve got a steady job, with health insurance, that pays pretty well. If I want to pursue the fair, socialist utopia, I should be more than happy to give my share to the greater good. But that diploma came with one hell of an invoice, and weddings don’t come cheap, and Erin and I would like to buy a place of our own before too long, so I’ve got a lot of incentive to keep working to pursue the Dream and amass as much wealth as I can get my hands on.

Do we really need to sacrifice more for the greater good? A couple hours ago, I would have said no. I remembered seeing figures that put our defense spending significantly above all social services, and was going to say that more of that money should be used elsewhere. But, if Wikipedia is to be trusted, the 2008 federal budget is a lot better than I would have guessed. Some highlights from mandatory spending:

• $608 billion (+4.5%) - Social Security
• $386 billion (+5.2%) - Medicare
• $209 billion (+5.6%) - Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP)
• $324 billion (+1.8%) - Unemployment/Welfare/Other mandatory spending

The percentages are the percent change from the 2007 budget. Not bad, really: according to this list, these programs are getting more money than I expected. At some point, I saw a pie chart of federal spending that led me to believe these programs got considerably less money than they do, but I was mistaken. Well, mostly; here’s the discretionary spending:

• $481.4 billion (+12.1%) - United States Department of Defense
• $145.2 billion (+45.8%) - Global War on Terror
• $69.3 billion (+0.3%) - Health and Human Services
• $56.0 billion (+0.0%) - United States Department of Education

Spending on the “Global War on Terror” is up 45% from last year? I mean fine, I can sort of understand the DoD budget, even if I preferred it were scaled back and actually used for defense. But another $145 billion for the War on Terror - up a whopping 45% from last year! - when only $56 billion is going to education? Seems to me we should be able to spare another $25 or so to make sure our kids can at least find the countries they’ll be sent to fight in someday. Even so, I can’t get too fired up about it, because it’s not as bad as I thought. If you expect the worse of your government, it’s easier to avoid disappointment, I suppose.

But let me bring it back to my original train of thought for a minute here: do we need to sacrifice more so that everyone can have enough? Maybe, maybe not. It seems that a hell of a lot of money is going into public health programs already, but honestly, I don’t know enough about them to say whether or not it’s working (my gut says “no”). I would love to see more money put toward education. Our schools are falling apart as it is, and college just isn’t even an option to a lot of people, financially speaking.

I guess I don’t really have a conclusion. I didn’t really have anything in mind when I started writing, sort of how Paul Graham described essays, a concept I really like:

An essay is something you write to try to figure something out.

Figure out what? You don’t know yet. And so you can’t begin with a thesis, because you don’t have one, and may never have one. An essay doesn’t begin with a statement, but with a question. In a real essay, you don’t take a position and defend it. You notice a door that’s ajar, and you open it and walk in to see what’s inside.

So, um…the end, I guess.

It took me forever to figure out what the dropdown at the bottom of the TextMate window is called - you know, the one where you select the language you want to use. As it turns out, “language” would have been a good starting point in the Google, but it took me a while to figure that out. It’s the one that says “Blog - Markdown” in this screenshot:

Anyway, I wanted TextMate to default to Markdown instead of Plain Text, and once I figured out what to search for, I found my answer pretty quickly.

To find the UUID for Markdown, I did this:

% cd /Applications/TextMate.app/Contents/SharedSupport/Bundles/Markdown.tmbundle/Syntaxes/
% plutil -convert xml1 Markdown.plist 
% grep -A1 uuid Markdown.plist 
    <key>uuid</key>
    <string>0A1D9874-B448-11D9-BD50-000D93B6E43C</string>

And once you’ve got that, this line sets the default:

% defaults write com.macromates.textmate OakDefaultLanguage 0A1D9874-B448-11D9-BD50-000D93B6E43C

Disclaimer: I don’t know if the UUID is specific to Markdown, or to Markdown on my machine. I would recommend running those first three commands first and double check the UUID before you try to do this. The UUID is specific to Markdown, so you can just execute that last defaults write line (thanks Drew!)

Also, blogging from TextMate is pretty handy. You may have noticed that the screenshot includes the beginning of this post, because I was writing it just then, right in TextMate. Handy, I tells ya.

Here’s a neat trick I didn’t know about. I already knew that hitting Command+Shift+3 will take a screen shot, and Command+Shift+4 will allow you to select an area of the screen to shoot. But if you hit Command+Shift+4, and then hit Space, you can take a shot of a single window without having to carefully select it.