I promised a messy vs. clean steel cage match. Unfortunately, since I'm a bit short on time, I'll just have to give a quick summary:

A Perfect Mess by Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman is a messy book. I found the book far too anecdotal, with too little emphasis on a central thesis. However, the main points are (a) that the world is inherently messy, (b) that there is a large amount of anecdotal and scientific evidence that humans are actually adapted to a messy world and that trying to make things too orderly decreases efficiency and creativity; (c) that our society has a bias towards order that makes people who are disorganized feel as if they have a character flaw; (d) that this feeling is wrong; and (e) most of us live our lives via a mixed strategy, where we mainly live our lives in a messy manner, organizing only critical projects, and that's OK. This is a case that, as a messy person with a messy life, I think needs to be made. I just wish it were made in a more forceful (and unmessy) manner.

Getting Things Done by David Allen is not a messy book and one loved by people who want to get their life on track. Allen's thesis is that stress is caused by keeping too many things within one's head and that these "open loops" of activities can be closed by putting them down on paper, organizing projects and their materials so that one always knows what the next thing to do is, and that by keeping things organized in this way, you can lead a happier, more productive life. His latest book, Ready For Anything, seems to be a rehash of much of the information in the first, but in a list form. My recommendation - just read the first one and, if you feel you really need to read the second one, borrow it from an Allen-head (most businesses have a few running around).

My first bone to pick with Allen is that he discounts sources of stress other than disorganized projects. Yes, lowering the amount of disorganization in one's projects will bring a modicum of happiness, but some people may have more important stressors in their lives and dealing with those might make them much more happy. Allen's retort would probably be that dealing with these issues are projects in themselves. However, let's see how that works out in practice: A low-income mother is over-worked and cannot feed her children on her one and a half McJobs. Allen's approach to problem solving would be to tell her to make improving her life a project, with possible next steps in this project being going back to school to get more training, finding a better job, etc. However, the first step in all of these "first steps" is finding time and resources for performing them. Unless one can realistically have a chance to fulfill these projects, Allen's prescription simply rubs a person's face in the fact that they cannot (and the assumption is always by some moral failing) find the resources to fulfill that plan. Moreover, one has wasted time and energy in trying to do so. In fact, quite often, knowing all of the obstacles can overwhelm and cause procrastination or complete backing away from a project.

The next bone to pick is that not all activities in one's life should be projectized and those that are might not want to be optimized. Working on one's sex life as a project would probably take a lot of joy out of it (and from who worked on that basis when my wife and I were trying to conceive our first child, I can tell you that it does), and quite often removes serendipitous discovery that occurs when one is less organized.

In short, Allen's prescription for ordering one's worklife may work fine for simple projects in a simple environment, but one should not attempt to move this style beyond the workplace, like many Allen-heads (and indeed many newly converted Org-heads) do.

In general, what works best for most of us is a mixed strategy. We live our lives until the mess in one portion overwhelms us. We organize and straighten out that part and move on. Most of us have few "high criticality" projects in our lives and are probably happy living out life with the few "open loops" we have rather than turning everything in our lives into projects. It is good that Abrahamson and Freedman are trying to remove the social stigma from doing so and it's a pity that Allen doesn't seem to promote this.

That's about it. Back to work on the thesis...
Posted 09:30: permanent link

Yesterday, to explain to a friend how writing helped with my mental state, I looked up a quote from Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions and had the pleasant surprise to find that it is available online here. Since I had not read the book in about twenty-five years, I took the opportunity to reread it and I realized that only now, at around the same age as Vonnegut was when he wrote it, do I really seem to get what he was writing about. And though I do not find myself crying "Make me young! Make me young!" as Kilgore Trout (and Vonnegut, indirectly) did at the end of the novel, I do understand the need to clear ones mind of "The assholes, the flags, the underpants," and I thank Vonnegut posthumously for pointing that out. The amazing thing is that the same book that touched me twenty-five years ago can touch me in an entirely different way today. It takes a great writer to work across time, and Vonnegut was one of the few who could work that trick regularly. I believe that Vonnegut is the closest thing we will ever get to the one true literary descendent of Samuel Clemens, in his humor, in his love for what America is and what it can be, and (although he would probably dispute this mightily) his optimism. Each time I read one of his books, he will be missed.

It was my daughter's first soccer game of the season today and they handily bested their opponents 3-0. Of course, it didn't count officially as (a) the parks department didn't have a referee there and (b) as we didn't have our photo id's together yet. All that said, it still gives me hope that the rest of the season will go well. The girls played much better than I've seen them play before. Our current coach is focusing a lot more on fundamentals and it seems to have helped a lot. Go Jack Rabbits!

Finally, Todd Rundgren is appearing at the Aladdin Theater on Wednesday, September 19, and I ordered tickets for myself and my daughter to go see him (and a big FU to Ticketmaster for all of the sleazy surcharges, if i do say so myself). I've liked his music since the A Wizard, a True Star album came out and she learned to like his music from an old tape of his A Cappella that I played whie driving her around to stuff (her favorite song from that album: Hodja). I last saw him at the Assembly Hall in Champaign, Illinois when he was doing his arena sized Oops! Wrong Planet/Ra tour in 1978. His song, Love is the Answer, from the Oops! Wrong Planet album is still one of my favorites (even if you only remember the Hall and Oates version, which he produced for them on their War Babies album). And although he's been in Portland many times since I moved here, family life and/or work always seemed to have prevented me from seeing him. So now that my daughter's old enough to go with me, I'm really stoked. The Aladdin is a small (620 seats) venue, so it should be a very intimate show. I'm really looking forward to it.
Posted 22:33: permanent link

All letters are love letters.

Be it that you are in love with the sound of your own writing or that the receiver of the correspondence is the object of your affection, love is an integral part of any letter. Letters have a narrow target and intimacy that allow you to let your hair down, to talk directly and frankly about matters that you dare broach in no other forum. Unlike poems, those polished gems of verbiage and feeling, letters can be immediate and raw. Unlike essays, whose broad audience forces one to eschew particular topics or feelings in the name of privacy or taste (Facebook and MySpace notwithstanding), letters can be open and particularly poignant.

Sadly, the art of letter writing is in decline. For many years, the telephone has whittled away at the need for written communication and, what the phone has not obviated, shorter forms of correspondence like email and that hellspawn of Hallmark, the greeting card, seem to be contriving to destroy. When you add in the rising cost of postage, it is a wonder that letters survive at all.

This is a horrible state of affairs. From the Biblical epistles to the current-day "Dear John" letter, the letter has been the only written vehicle for deep and untrammelled communication, the loss of which will be a disaster for both reader and writer. The reader is left without frankness and depth. The writer loses not only practice in the expository form, but also loses the opportunity to practice the craft of emotional argument.

How can we reverse this trend? If you currently use the phone for personal communication, switch to email; if using email, switch to the handwritten letter. Increase the intellectual depth of your writing - find a witty quote pertaining to the subject, construct chains of arguments backed with real, cited facts, use the increased space to add color and joy to your writing. Increase the emotional depth of your communications. Tell your reader how you really feel about whatever you're writing about without restraint. Ask him or her how they feel. Do your best to make this emotional communication vector a two-way street and to prolong the written conversation.

In the end, the loss of the letter as a communication form would be tragic. If we continue to practice this "lost art", perhaps we can slow or reverse the trends that are driving this unique written form into extinction. After all, all letters are love letters - for you give the things most valuable, your time and your true feelings, when you communicate in this form.

May we all be writing to each other soon...

So what makes this book so bad? Well, to start with, every time one sees a bit of jargon, the reader is told that "all these fancy terms don't matter because you'll learn them as you go along". There are no actual trading tactics, discussed ther than the use of stop-loss orders and the advice to cut your losses and let your profits run. As for trading discipline, there are the usual bromides - be disciplined, plan your trades, understand your market, etc. - but very little information in the way of how or why you do these things or what resources are available to help you with this (again, you'll figure this out as you go along). It then directs you to find a broker to work with and to get in there and trade, making sure along the way that you know that options are "da bomb"!

Basically, any book that is directed at investors who need to have explained what technical and fundamental analysis are (entire chapters are devoted to this) and what the different types of charts there are (another chapter) and then throw that person into the hands of a (possibly corrupt) broker to "learn the ropes" of these fairly advanced market instruments is little more than a scam to make inexperienced investors think that there is easy money to be made in commodities so they can be fleeced. I've been studying the markets for the past twenty-five years, and I know you need a lot more savvy than this book imparts to actually make money in the commodities markets. Yes, it is easy to trade futures and options on commodities; what's hard is making money doing so. And the failure of this book to balance the latter information with the former is little more than investment advice malfeasance.

John Wiley and Sons, you get the suck of the year award for publishing this awful book.

The other book I finished was The Wisdom of Zen (you see how well my inner peace is doing with the preceding paragraphs) by Roger England and Anne Bancroft (no, not that one). It's a short book, with the authors writing a few introductory paragraphs to each chapter and letting the sages of the past and present do most of the talking via quotes. As to the wisdom part, I'm not sure I'm qualified to judge. For example: a well known koan goes "All things return to the one. To where does the one return?" My answer is "The one has never gone away. Why should it need to return." This would probably be seen as a glib and facile answer by a Zen master, who would see this as a sign that my "monkey mind" had not moved beyond simple word games. A better response would probably be to burn down the temple or to pick up the Zen master and throw him into a pond. In any case, it's a short read and a good overview of the religion. It made me want to check out the other books in the series such as The Wisdom of Christianity, The Wisdom of the Quar'an, The Wisdom of Judaism, The Wisdom of Baha'i, The Wisdom of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (upcoming, I'm sure), etc. Maybe they can send one of their editors over to Wiley - they seem to need them.

So what next? I picked up a copy of David Allen's latest, Ready For Anything, at the bookstore, and in preparation for reading that, I started to reread his Getting Things Done. Also, my hold copy of A Perfect Mess by Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman came in - a splendid example of dialectic synchronicity. Maybe next time, I'll have the organization vs. disorganization face-off!
Posted 15:08: permanent link

So here, without further ado are some odds and ends for the past few weeks:

• Michael Moore's SiCKO is a great movie, if you're a liberal. If you're a corporatist or insurance company executive, it's probably not going to be high on your rating list
• The Simpsons Movie is better than Ratatouille. They're both fine movies and worth a see, even at full theatre prices, but Brad Bird's preachiness about the big, bad world coming down on those who are special is getting tiresome, and dammit, sometimes you just need to laugh.
• I finished off the summer reading challenge. The additional books were Golf Monster by Alice Cooper, as told to Keith and Kent Zimmerman, Phil Gordon's Little Blue Book of Poker by (oddly enough) Phil Gordon, and Whose Freedom? by George Lakoff. Now I hope I win the drawing.
• Also on the reading challenge topic, I'm sorry to disappoint those who were hoping for me to read E. F. Schumacher's Small Is Beautiful, but after reading through the first couple of chapters, I couldn't bear it anymore. The bottom line is that, if you've been at all exposed to the slow food, local food, peak oil, or environmental movements over the past thirty or so years, you've heard all of these things before. Plus, information from complex systems theory seems to give a heck of a lot better arguments than Schumacher's polemics. The bottom line, unless you've been living in a cave for the past three decades, or you're so technophobic you can't stand to look at any argument that might use math higher than 1+1+1 < 2, or if you're interested in seeing how far ahead of his time Schumacher was, you might want to read it. But, unlike Bucky Fuller's books (which are still ahead of their time), this one hasn't aged gracefully and I needed to throw it back. You may now revoke my membership in liberalism.
• Gosh! It sure is a big country. And, it takes a long time to drive across it and back. But that time is good for thinking and reflecting. If you can stop by and see a couple of old friends along the way, it's even better. I should probably look at making this road trip a regular thing just to clear my head (at least until peak oil price pressures put a stop to it).
• So quick question to anyone who knows about this - if I use a PC for my home studio, Sonar or Cubase for the sequencer? If I'm using a Mac, Cubase, ProTools, or Logic?

I finished Reading Bruce A. Hathaway’s Organic Chemistry: The Easy Way. I can hardily recommend this book to anyone who needs a study guide for this subject. I would tend to typify his presentation as "mechanism-based", which to me seems the best way to teach it for a class interested in synthesis and drug design. He also has a good section on aromatic benzyl activating and deactivating groups. In addition, the books layout is clear, the editing seems crisp and I found no typographic errors (!). All-in-all, this is the best book I’ve read in a long time, and I’d rate it 4.5 out of five.

I thought I would take on E. F. Shumacher’s Small is Beautiful next, but after reading the first couple of chapters, I got distracted. His main points, that (a) ecological costs and other externalized costs should be included in economists’ analysis and (b) the scale of current corporate entities and their basic paradigm of growth über alles is not particularly conducive to life here on the mudball, are fairly widely acknowledged, even by many economists. Ultimately, I was not hearing anything I didn’t already know and the presentation, though workmanlike, wasn’t particularly exciting. Basically, I got bored. I will probably make my way back into the book at a later time, just to make sure I haven’t missed any insight in later chapters, but it might be a while.

In the meantime, I read The Jasons: The Secret History of Science’s Postwar Elite by Anne Finkbeiner. It’s an OK book, but given the subject matter and the reluctance of the subjects to talk about still classified information and projects, there really is little insight to be gained from this book. If you’re interested in the structure or basic history, this is the source. If you’re interested in insight, I don’t think there’s any to be found anywhere. The book was disappointing to me, so it only gets a 2 out of 5 rating.

I'm not sure what’s going onto my reading list next. Of course, I am always reading something, but I’m not sure if putting books on the reading list that didn’t come from the library is kosher (more on my own account, because I'm pretty sure the library doesn't care much). I will let you know as I figure out what to read next.

For my books so far, I've read Chess Bitch by Jennifer Shahade, a look at women chess players playing a "man's game", and Extinction by Douglas H. Erwin, about the near collapse of the global ecosystem during the Permo-Triassic boundary, about 250 million years ago. I rate both of these books at two stars out of five, Shahade's because although the subject is fascinating, the writing and editing just aren't that good. Erwin's book only gets two stars because the writing is a lot more pedantic and repetitive than a popular science book needs to be.

Next on my Summer reading list will be Organic Chemistry: the Easy Way by Bruce A. Hathaway (what can I say... the Diels-Alder reaction rocks). This one may make it up to three stars. It's very well written, the subject matter is well organized and put forth succinctly, and the editing and graphics are first rate.

As for the next few books, I'll figure that out as I go along, but a couple of them are likely to be Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered by E. F. Schumacher and Whose Freedom?: the Battle Over America's Most Important Idea by George Lakoff. Schumacher's book is considered a classic and I've got on hold the twenty-fifth anniversary edition which has been updated with his and others' commentary. It should be a good read. Lakoff is the top progressive in the subject of political framing. His book, Don't Think of an Elephant is considered a very important one in progressive political circles, and this book looks as if it too, will be very important, exploring as it does, the concepts of freedom held by the political left and right in this country. In any case, I'm looking forward to reading them both. On the other hand, they may come later in the list depending on whether or not I want to tackle politics or something else first.

As you may have noticed, I'm a non-fiction sort of guy. It's not so much that I don't like fiction, but I'm often disappointed with the stories. At least with a non-fiction book, if you're unhappy with the plot, it's usually because the world sucks instead of the author and then you don't go away feeling ripped off. I'll keep y'all posted on my reading progress.
Posted 22:13: permanent link

So, again, Happy Fourth and eat a hot dog for me! See you tomorrow...
Posted 10:57: permanent link

I run my servers under Ubuntu (and I already hear the hard-core nerds out there saying, "Why don't you use RandomDistro Linux?". To them I say, "Because I don't want to spend even more time ministering to my system than I already do.") and was still running Breezy.

Since I upgraded from Hoary a few months ago, my Spamassassin system had not been working, so I spent most of Saturday getting that cleaned up. And, since I had already gotten my spam act back together, I thought that this would be a good time to get ClamAV filtering going, too. I had downloaded the package many months earlier, but hadn't gotten around to integrating it into my procmail system. To do this more easily, I wanted to use the Clamassassin Perl script. This is where my trouble began...

I downloaded the source package and tried to compile it. Sadly, as I had never compiled a custom package on this machine, when I typed make install, the system happily told me that it didn't know what the heck make was. I went to download make and found that the Breezy repositories were no longer there (So that's why I had no updates for so long! So that was what all of the error messages telling me the repositories were missing was about! The clueless one is suddenly enlightened...). At that point, I made the decision to update to Dapper.

Sunday, the downloading of the packages and the upgrade itself went fairly smoothly. The two main issues? Shorewall (excuse, me - Shoreline) and Dovecot. In between the release of Breezy and Dapper, both of these packages changed their configuration files radically. Needless to say, they changed them so radically that I had to rewrite them (or, as we say, life sucks). In any case, after I finally got these programs working, I was able to download make and get Clamassassin running. Of course, I could have stopped at this point...

But of course, I didn't. Instead, I decided that Monday night, I was going to upgrade to Edgy and, on Tuesday night, upgrade to Feisty. I figured that doing that would ensure my being up to date for a few more months and allow me another year or two where I wouldn't need to worry about updates. So Tuesday evening, I started the upgrade to Edgy... Again, the switching of the repository went fine, as did the upgrade itself. But when I booted the machine - nothing. OK, a little bit of something - it showed the startup screen and froze. I restarted in recovery mode, found a couple of error messages and Googled on my other computer to find out what went wrong. Essentially, Edgy had tried to update my /boot/grub/menus.lst and /etc/fstab to use UUIDs instead of device names. And, of course, it had gotten the UUIDs wrong. I edited the boot menu entry back to its original form and after a few panicked moments when I thought my entire disc had been lost somehow, I was able to reboot, bring up nano, and edit the fstab file. After rebooting again, all was well. Having that under my belt, I started to download the packages I would need to upgrade to Feisty and went to bed.

I had planned to do this final upgrade Tuesday evening, but I had a few spare moments at work, so I logged in with SSH and started the upgrade. Happily, everything went fine and, after a reboot, all was sanity again...

The morals of this story? First, system administration never gets any easier. It always has been, is, and will remain a painful experience. However, in these days of various and sundry malware, anyone who owns a computer (and especially a server) has the responsibility to do his or her best to keep it maintained and secured. Next, system upgrades on Linux often break. In general, they do a fairly good job, but the application upgrades would have gone more smoothly on a Windows system (of course, I'd have to pay for upgraded software, but...). Try not to get too much out of date. If I had done this in three steps as the new versions of Ubuntu had come out, I would not have had three days of panic in a row. Whether or not three separate days of panic spread out would have been better is, for better or worse, a subjective experience. Finally, none of this should be taken as a slam against Ubuntu or Linux. I still think that Linux is one of the most transparent systems out there and, of all the distributions, Ubuntu seems to offer the best tradeoff between flexibility and ease of use. And having upgraded with various Red Hat derivatives, I don't think it would have gone more easily with any of the other distributions.

So, in honor of getting my server up to date, I am launching my Big Blog o'Irritability. You can access it either through the ancar.org web page, or link to it directly. Tell your enemies. I have had the software around for a while, but never got around to exposing it to the public. I now consider myself exposed...

I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoy writing it. See you around.
Posted 21:51: permanent link

However, being charitable, I simply place my order and drive on.

While deftly swimming between the Scylla of "How may I help you?" and the Charybdis of "May I take your order?", it is clear that the order taker at this dining establishment has spawned a new phrase. Sadly, his creativity is wasted on someone like me who views common English usage as usually sufficient.

Now, I would never want to steal from the users of our language their creative outlets - the minting of new phrases must create the currency of every living language. But in order to be a beneficial addition to the language, I believe four tests must be passed.

First, the usage must actually be new. English tends to recycle words at a breakneck pace, especially on the outskirts of respectable usage. A word or phrase that is simply recycled from past use, though its meaning might be useful and clever for the day, is simply reused. Our erstwhile order taker's verbiage is definitely novel and so passes this first test.

Second, the saying must be useful. Here, our server's words again fare well, the sayings replaced being highly useful for his job.

Next, the neologism must be unambiguous, either as it stands alone or in context. Again, my desire to make a sarcastic riposte seems to indicate that ambiguity arises from the new phrase. Am I to instruct him on how to place my order? Am I to go in and perform his job for him, sparing myself the trauma of both broken speaker and English? In either case, the ambiguity between what is spoken and what is meant seems to indicate that it flunks this test.

Lastly and (at least to me) most importantly, the phrase must be an improvement on what is available in the language already; and this phrase, most assuredly, is not, as either of the phrases so artfully merged by our speaker seem to do the job much better than his melange.

So, in closing, it's fairly clear that this phrase should not be a candidate for linguistic canonization just yet, as it fails two of my four requirements. And so my request, dear order taker, is this: Please stop. You sound like an idiot and it's getting pretty fucking annoying.
Posted 21:50: permanent link