Annotations

Some Days in the Life - April 20, 1999

 April 20, 1999

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Last evening was nice. I had to take a run over to Maine -- being an idiosyncratic sort, I prefer to use the bank I have there instead of anything local. It's a nice setup there. The problem is, while Brewster Academy is a darn nice place to work, they miss a few of the amenities, like Direct Deposit.

They tell me it's coming.

Anyway, I need to run to Maine to deposit checks as a result, and I had a check to deposit last night, so I got to take a ride. However, yesterday's stupid meeting took so long and was such a drag that the other things I need to do in my day (you know, drink coffee and stare at a computer) had to be done later, so I didn't get out before six. And I had my new Liber Servitorum to keep me occupied too.

I'm terrible when I have something new to read -- even something I'd read versions of before. My brain wants to soak it in. And when I'm tired from poor meetings with time wasting morons, I generally want to just float for a while, read a bit, drink something... not really do anything. Those are usually good driving days, but the book beckoned, so I pulled off into about three parking lots, opened the windows, smelled the clean, fresh spring air and read a bit. It was nice, even if I got home late.

It's very dry here in New Hampshire. Extremely dry. I've driven past two forest fires (small ones) in the last week. One down in Rochester, New Hampshire and one out in Conway, last night. It makes you think, watching black smoke rise into the sky. On the one hand, it's a chaotic effect. Sheets of flame consuming all they see. On the other hand... there were lots of forest fires before there were firemen to put them out, but the North American Continent wasn't a barren wasteland when the Native Americans were wandering it. When the Pilgrims stepped onto Plymouth Rock, they didn't look around and say "yeesh, didn't anyone put out all the fires?"

I've heard some Wildlife Experts say that forest fires are darn good for forests. I've also heard some Wildlife Experts say that eating pine bark is a good idea, so take that with a grain of salt, but the point is well made. I expect nature is pretty good at regenerating itself without our help. So, when we're putting out big fires, what we're really doing is furthering human needs and ends.

Which I like just fine, and I'm positive the folks in Florida (currently entirely on fire, as near as we can tell) don't mind it one bit. It's just one of those things you think about driving past a forest fire.

One thing I noticed as well -- there were a lot of cars parked alongside the road, and people watching the raging fire burn while firemen dumped water on it. Before television, people only would gather to watch a good house-fire. Forest fires were primal and frightening. After television, people gained the ability to watch anything so long as they have a window between them and it. All I knew was they were making it hard to drive past in a timely fashion.

Time is slippery. Looking over Bill's journal pages, I notice he's got a new/old car which is now dead. Bill has never had great automotive luck. What marked me was his automotive history. He says about ten months passed between his accident with his Geo Storm that he got fixed, and his accident with his Geo Storm that got totaled out.

I suppose it's possible that it was ten months or less... but that stunned me. You see, the Storm accident happened before I went to Seattle. And it seems like Bill changed cars to his first Saab not too long before I left -- certainly within the last year of my leaving. I was in Seattle for about three years, all told.

So, where Bill sees a chain of events that happened in quick succession (and he didn't mention the time his Geo Storm got stolen), I see at the least a huge chunk of my living in Seattle, which is one of the formative times of my life.

What's my point? No point, other than that perception of time is personal, and events that form 'guideposts' of our memory don't match the guideposts of other people. Besides, I have to type something in here.

Dominic and Annie are due in about an hour, so I'll ask Dominic. He won't know the answer, because he won't have any reason to care about it, but at least I'll know I've asked someone else.

A little bit of rain last night, but just a hint. Not enough to cut down on the dryness around here. We need a hard, drenching rain that lasts three days. That should also trigger "spring" around here. Its warm and pleasant, but we haven't had enough rain or water to awaken the lawns and plants and trees yet. I expect we'll have a good storm one night, and then the miracle will happen two days later and the sights and sounds and smells of spring will really kick in. Which will cost me my apartment view of the lake, as there's a tree between me and it, but I'll survive.

Started the official migration to my new machine today -- it's the MacOS X Server referred to a day or two ago. Web functions are now there. My order of migration has been the "Annotations" web stuff, followed by the Annotations e-mail accounts. Then after a week or two, I'll tackle multihoming on it and migrate over Roundrobin.org (which will get a new front page and I'll actually tackle updating its ridiculous internal graphics.) Somewhere in there, work on the Insanity e-zine web site will progress as well. Fortunately, I'm not designing or coding it, nor am I head editor. I expect I'll have way too much to do anyway, but.... Multihoming the Round Robin pages will inform multihoming the Insanity pages. That's me, Mister Informed.

1:43 pm

Still no sign of Dominic and Annie. Evil, evil Seattle people. How dare they?

It's grey out there at this point, but not actually raining. Which is a real pity, as its the worst of both worlds. It's grey, so we don't have the pleasant sunshine, and it's not raining, so raging fires aren't being quelled and prevented statewide. I'm sure there's a way to blame someone. Probably S. John Ross.

S. John Ross is an iconoclast and rabblerouser over on the Pyramid boards. He's actually an excellent writer, professional and otherwise, and darn funny. However, he suffers from Opinionated Bastard syndrome, which is far less bad than it sounds.

Opinionated Bastard Syndrome is different from being either opinionated or a bastard. An Opinionated Bastard is someone who goes out of his way to argue about the subjectivity of opinion and experience, then proceeds to assert their opinions as natural laws. Some Opinionated Bastards are just trying to be entertaining. Some succeed. Others truly don't see why people don't accept their opinions as fact, while they assert that opinion is meaningless. Still others are trolling for responses.

S. John's not an aggravating Opinionated Bastard. He's something of a troll, but not a particularly offensive one. The interesting thing about his particular brand of OBS is the number of people who bend over backwards to disagree with it. One of his rants are about people who allow their technical and scientific knowledge to overshadow their enjoyment of something. (Like Star Trek, for example.) He calls them 'geeks,' and he means it as a pejorative.

By S. John's definition and in S. John's opinion, he's not a geek. By my definition and in my opinion, he's so mind numbingly geeky that colors change to geekier shades in his presence. But I don't consider 'geek' a pejorative. Where he finds a geek to be an annoying person who nitpicks to the point that they don't enjoy something they claim to enjoy, I find a geek to be a person who suffers under the impression that role playing games, comic books, science fiction, computer expertise, Mystery Science Theater, video games, the Muppets, the Society for Creative Anachronism, UFO clubs, web site creations, anime, Myth II, most cartoons and South Park are cool. If someone has more than three of those items on a list, they're a geek.

However, geeks generally enjoy each others' company far more than they do most non-geeky people. I have non-geek friends, and I like them. However, my geek friends have a lot more in common with me. If I tell my geek friends to watch The Powerpuff Girls because it's well written, gut-bustingly funny and hip, they're not likely to squint at me and say "isn't that for kids?" Yes, it is. But the point is it's well written, gut-bustingly funny and hip, and they'd enjoy watching it.

If I tell anyone on the Pyramid boards my definition of 'geek,' I'm positive they'll agree it makes them one. They might be sheepish about it, but they'll accept it. They might even feel kinship about it.

However, S. John's definition infuriates them. They scream and argue about the fact that "no, they're not a geek and this is why!" And for the life of me, I don't know why. First off, it's just his opinion. Second off, he's right that people do let their real world knowledge get in the way of their enjoyment of things, a lot of the time. And thirdly, anyone who will nitpick a definition about nitpicking is missing the point in a rather cosmic way.

I guess part of the problem is his term. Geek. Frankly, it's no longer a word you get to bend to your own definition, like Wonk is. Wonk and wonky are my terms for... well, stuff. Wonky is good sometimes, and bad sometimes, and indifferent sometimes. It's like the word "smurf" in the language of the Smurfs on the Smurfs cartoon which I hated as a kid.

Geek no longer has that flexibility. It also no longer means "one who bites the head off of a chicken." It means "a person without social skills." It means "a person good at science and good with computers." It means "a person who likes science fiction and fantasy." Geeks are disliked by the cool, but the cool are liking geeks more and more as the tools of geekdom enter common society and someone needs to teach them.

And geeks, together, form a social clique of their own. To the point where geeks now point at other geeks and come up with names which mean what "geek" used to the general population.

S. John's trying to take a word with all that baggage and make it mean something else. People resist that, because he's changing the rules on them. For my money, it weakens his argument -- because my definition of a geek is a lot closer to society's, and S. John's as geeky as I am by that yardstick. So, while S. John is not a hypocrite, he comes across as one.

Either way, he's entertaining and it's fun to blame our lack of rain on him.