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Some Days in the Life - April 21, 1999

 April 21, 1999

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I slept pretty badly last night, and I don't know why. Sleeping is the oddest part of my life. I never seem to have control over it. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. Yesterday, I napped from about eight thirty to about ten, because I felt exhausted and my ISP was smoke. It let me connect, but I couldn't even see my own internal router. I would have happily stayed asleep, but my brain said "get up," so I got up. Check online, and hey -- I can connect, but there are huge chunks of the internet just missing. One of those was Brewster Academy, which meant that annotations.com was missing too. Which meant my mail was too. I had to figure out if the Academy was dead or just what was around it, and I wanted my e-mail.

Well, the Academy wasn't dead -- I dialed in directly and got my mail and made sure I could ping routers outside of Brewsternet. But they died immediately after getting out of our provider's control. As near as I can tell, Cable and Wireless, Alter.net and BBNPlanet all died or had massive problems last night.

The Internet has become very strange. It's a part of my life, totally and completely. It's a part of our society, woven in very tightly. It's a part of the cycle of instant gratification we've become used to. And when it's gone we feel it like we would feel if our television and telephones died simultaneous. Last year's ice storm (remind me to tell you the ice storm story) reminded me how ephemeral our technological infrastructure is and how different our lives would be without it.

This wasn't the same, of course, but it still reminded us of things we'd rather not be reminded of. The dark isn't that far away from our electric lights. And when I'm tired and just want to connect, get my mail, and talk to my friends after a nice but tiring day, it sucks not to be able to. And when you're not able to, who do you hold accountable? My local ISP? Oh sure, they started it, but they also fixed it after I called in. Beyond that... what rights do you have? Who would you call at BBN to demand access to your mail, your chat room and your online porn? Why would they possibly care about you. They care about the big money people paying them for the avenue for packet data.

It's like the (probably apocryphal) story about the Asian country that contacted an American ISP to find out who the president of the Internet was, so they could negotiate a connection. We expect things to have people responsible for them. We forget that the Internet doesn't -- it just is. People are responsible for pieces of it. Infrastructure. I'm responsible for brewsternet.com and making certain that's connected, that people can access it from the outside, that people inside can get out. I'm responsible on a personal level to annotations.com and roundrobin.org -- to make certain they're accessible and active and working. If I'm going to mention them to people, I need to make sure people can reach them.

Except once it gets past our router, it's out of my hands. Especially if Vitts is working fine -- then it's a matter of calling Vitts, having Vitts yell at people out and beyond us, who in turn yell at others....

Most days I love this fact. It's like... we have an entire proof that if people follow standards and agree to very basic principles, monumental things can be accomplished by working together. The Internet is the ultimate collaborative project. But at ten thirty at night when I'm A) tired but B) not sleepy, I want it just to work.

I went to bed well after one, then lay there until about three. Woke up at twenty of eight, showered, made it in on time. But I feel old and creaky today, likely because I ate strange foods and drank strange liquids last night.

So, on to that....

Dominic and Annie did indeed make it yesterday, both looking good. Dominic looks like he's been working out. Oh, and he has short hair. Dominic has never had short hair in the time I've known him. He's always had Travolta "Welcome Back Kotter" hair or Adrian Paul Highlander hair.

"Friends don't let friends get Friends haircuts."

Annie looked lovely. Her hair looked right for her, so I felt more comfortable. We wandered around Wolfeboro, and went to the Wolfeboro Inn (in honor of my Seattle guests, I had Seattle beer. However, the Redhook was served in a pint glass that read 'Budweiser.' There are days I wonder) and we had sandwiches. I had the fish, which is what my systems administrator, Eileen, always has when a vendor takes us out to the Inn. It was good. You the reader are bored.

We wandered the town and the school, and they seemed impressed with the 'niceness' of Wolfeboro. It's a beautiful beautiful town with a beautiful lake. They saw it up close down on the docks.

Midway through the visit, they kind of leaned close. "Hey Eric... I know it's cliche but... are there any lattes around here?"

We went to Rumours, which is a cafe which has live music in the evenings. We tried to go to Jo Greens which has coffee drinks, but they seem to be closed until the summer, which surprised me. They were open not two months ago. Rumours had "French Vanilla Cappuccino," which we all had. Mmm-mm, that General Foods International Coffee. There aren't decent espresso drinks any closer than Portland that I am aware of. While there, we ate a plate of nachos we had to wait an hour for and talked, and watched CNN report on a massacre of school kids out in Colorado. Another random shooting by students/former students who are now dead.

In In Nomine, one of the bands of demon are the Shedim. A Shedite crawls into the brain of a victim and commits crimes and slowly corrupts his host, who remembers doing everything that happened. That's about the only think I can think of to explain something like this.

The nachos were okay, but not good enough to wait an hour for. At around eight, the Seattle kids moved on. It was nice. I felt like I had Jalapeno stomach the rest of the day, though. I still do.

The folks just called. This is apparently a good night to go over after work and change the oil in my Saturn. I need to drop some laundry off too (to get it back on Friday), so that kind of works out. Get all my chores done at once, for the week. Free up the weekend which is a good thing, since I need to come in on Saturday. Parent's Weekend. Well, it's only twice a year, and they tend to be fun.

In Spellchecking the above, I discovered that Microsoft Word's dictionary doesn't know "Jalapeno" or however it's really spelled, but does know Budweiser. A perfectly good word used in the English Language isn't picked up because the roots are Spanish, but the brand name....

I use Microsoft Word to generate these, which I don't usually do. However, it likes generating raw HTML better than WordPerfect. I save as to HTML, then open the page and my Journal site into Pagemill 3, which then lets me copy and paste the HTML code into the proper frame on the page. A couple of saves, tweak a couple of links, upload the changes to the site and go go go.

Still no sign of rain, though yet again we're overcast.

1:13 pm

I had a four hour (or so) meeting on my schedule today. It was a "Y2K awareness meeting" for local community leaders. I wasn't running it or asked to participate in it, but I seem to be in the strange position of being a technology community leader in my town. So, I was supposed to sit in there and listen to alarmists talk about how their clock radios would stop working.

But, no one showed up, so it was cancelled. I personally consider this a positive Y2K step forward.

Our flag is at half-mast to commemorate the massacred high school kids out in Colorado. I guess that makes sense -- when you're at a school, you pay attention to people doing horrific things in schools. But no one really knows what to "do" now. The answer is "be horrified, then move on," but that's not enough for a lot of people. They want to know what to do to prevent it from happening here.

At Brewster, we prevent it by involving people in the lives of our students and encouraging a culture of snitches. It's the tiniest bit like working at a school in the fifties. At local high schools... well, I guess I'd encourage parents to pay attention to their kids. If your son has the opportunity to purchase grenades and an arsenal of weapons and store them, and you didn't notice it....

My parents managed to find the Playboys I used to hide. I think an arsenal would have been noticed pretty fast. They also didn't overreact to my minor smut. As a result, it's never been a big deal to me. Score one for education.

1:54 pm

Just got some editing and comments from The World's Coolest Editor in on a story I wrote, hight "Planetfall." Which has nothing to do with the Infocom book of the same name. It's a good series of editing and comments and will make the story heap better. So, I'll do it and ping F&SF with it again. They got it once but it's changed more than a little since then and they answer fast. Then I'll send it to Analog, marry someone, have a child and put them through college and then Analog will respond.

Said World's Coolest Editor is a neat person. She's a lot like a second neat person I know down in Atlanta, who like the first neat person has a really nice, flowing name that contracts down into a convenient four letter nickname that isn't cute. One is Elizabeth, which becomes Beth, the other is Katherine (I presume) which becomes Kate. Not the same Kate who likes screaming in silences from a few days ago. Beth's an editor who does it because she likes it, and she has that perfect blend of support for artistic endeavor and Really Big Hatchet that makes you glad even when she hacks something into little itty bits.

You know, many days I won't have time for so much as a paragraph on this thing. It's nice to have a couple of days where I do whatever I feel like because there's time.

2:36 pm

So why don't I write on this at home?

Well, on the weekends I might -- but it's a pain, because I use Pagemill 3.0. Pagemill's a great program, but bad at two things. 1) Text editing. It's slow when you're text editing in WYSIWIG mode and it's ridiculous to write in Source mode. Might as well use BBEDIT and be done with it. This I deal with by writing in Microsoft Word -- the only thing I use Word for, and the school bought it for me. I save as HTML, which it does passably, I open the HTML file in Pagemill, and I copy/paste into my text window.

Which, by the by, is black on grey because that's a far sight easier to read large files in than the yellow on dark grey I use for my home site/In Nomine stuff etc.

Weak Pagemill Thing #2) It creates a site file, but not a clickable icon for it. So I can't easily just e-mail the files to myself to sit on my home machine and work on over the weekend, then e-mail them back in the week. It loses all comprehension of what a Pagemill site is in translation.

So, it's easier to do it on one machine. I'm going to do more writing in the mornings at work when I'm on the phone with vendors or otherwise doing my job than at home, where I strive to have more of a life. If I write at home, I write. I work on the Historical Novel. I might even plug away at a bit of fluff or role play or the like. Or go out to dinner or hang with faculty members or walk downtown. But I'm not likely to do anything with this.

So -- it'll stay here and on slow days you'll hear a lot from me and on busy days you won't hear from me at all. Nyah.