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Google, Blogger, Blahhhh!

noreply@blogger.com (The Editor) — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 19:17:00 +0000

As I wrote over here... Blogger Rolls Over, Plays Dead:

Blogger, the Google-owned blogging interface I have been using the last few years to manage my two websites (do I have to call them blogs?), is giving up on "FTP" publishing as of May 1^st. Whether you know what FTP is or not, the short version of this is that: it's a bloody pain in the ass, and would mean that continue using Blogger, I have to switch all my content to Google's servers. I like Google, generally speaking, but there are a variety of reasons why I don't want to hand over my content to their servers, not the least of which is the near-impossibility of getting an actual Googler on the phone whenever problems arise. I like my web hosting company, mia.net; I like their personal service and their attentiveness and the fact that I actually know they're real people. If Google had offered an option to pay for FTP functionality, I might have taken it. They didn't, so I can't.

All of which means: it's quite likely that my writing may slow down even further over the next few weeks, while I work with mia.net to figure out an alternative, easy-to-use blog publishing tool. Bear with me. I hope to be back to Pontifigating soonest.

The Big One

noreply@blogger.com (The Editor) — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 03:29:00 +0000

The day the question came, I flubbed the answer. I had predicted that the question would soon be asked, made a mental note to figure out how to answer it, discussed briefly my prediction with my wife (who agreed on the likelihood), and yet still: when the question was asked, I fumbled for an answer.

The questioner: my daughter, age 2.5. The question: “What is god?”

***

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the experience of watching my daughter learn about Jewish prayer and custom in children’s services. She’s an intelligent child, the kind who actively works to knit together bits of accumulated information. Questions may come days or weeks after a particular experience, when something else jogs the memory of the prior event and she asks how or whether those different things are connected. She will also often assert the connection—correctly or not, but with that self-assurance children possess—when it seems evident to her at the moment.

More recently, my daughter has been learning the lyrics to the song “Rise and Shine,” an old standard in the compendium of mildly religious children’s tunes. It was with reference to the song’s repeating chorus of “Rise and shine / And give God the glory, glory” that I observed we would likely soon be asked about god. After all, she’s been singing this song for a couple of weeks, nonstop (or so it seems); and “god” is hard to miss in that repeating refrain. While we have been able to explain the references to Noah—the flood, the ark, the two-by-two animals, the dry land—as a story coming from the Torah, it’s more difficult to answer a question about god that way. Yes, god is in the Torah, but also of it.

***

There is definitely a part of me that finds this situation amusing, no doubt because part of me also finds it personally challenging. I have spent a good portion of time over the years asking the same question, and working towards answers that feel true, intellectually and spiritually. The fact that we are raising our children in a modern, egalitarian, Conservative Jewish environment makes answering the question no easier, because those three modifiers—modern, egalitarian, Conservative—do not, for me, readily solve this riddle. I have written a number of times about aspects of Jewish “values” (e.g. here, here, here, and here), but not a lot about god. It is difficult enough to express my views to myself; perhaps the best I can say here is that I’m a materialist (in the philosophical sense) with a deeply rooted spiritual side. And despite that description, I still find myself not much closer to a comfortable answer—and by and large, I’m comfortable with that.

The question was asked over dinner, at which were also present a Reform rabbinical school drop-out, and a woman whose views on the subject of god and religion (such as I understand them) have always struck me as the very essence of unexplored contradiction. The immediate answers from those assembled ranged from a complete demurral to “god is a concept.” Thank you, Bauer-Marx-Nietzsche-Lennon! Score one for the toddler. For the immediate follow-up question my daughter asked—boy or girl?—we fared no better. One person answered “Both!”, while another assuredly said “Girl!” The child found none of these satisfying, and who can blame her. In the confusion created over so many different answers, I think she took a hint and, at that point, decided to leave it alone.

I don’t expect this to be the end. Indeed, I expect the question to arise again in short order. I’m hoping that next time, I will be more prepared. But I think it’s difficult to answer such a question for a 2.5 year old in a way that accommodates the range of intellectual and spiritual growth that I would like to have happen naturally. What can I say? “Just wait and see; you will arrive at your own answer(s) when you’re old enough”?

Perhaps.

Remastering Memory

noreply@blogger.com (The Editor) — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 14:46:00 +0000

As much as I am a big fan of The Beatles, it has been a long time since I had much opportunity to listen to them afresh. That gap—all those years of listening to the original 1980s CD releases of the band's catalog, but minus much of the joy of really listening, given their flat sound; or even looking, since the CDs had little of the visual joy of their vinyl predecessors—might have taken their toll. Instead, that time has given me a chance to re-engage, wonder, and marvel at The Beatles all over again, now that the stereo and mono remastering of the albums (and the album packaging that goes along with it) has been released.

***

I bought the mono set first, and the first thing I listened to was the so-called White Album, starting with “Back in The U.S.S.R.” The White Album has always represented the pinnacle of rock music to me. Where other albums offered two sides, the four sides here were like a dream, an opportunity for the joy of listening to go on and on. Back in the day, my parents had a fancy, drop-stack turntable, so I have a kind of memory equilibrium of listening to the White Album in four different ways: with the A sides following each other, and then the B sides, or mix-and-matching, or eschewing the stack and flipping through sequentially.

What you get, right off the bat with the new discs, is the crystal clear sound of an airplane landing. And it sounds like an airplane, with the rumble and the background noise that I haven’t heard since … well, since the vinyl, when the needle probably added some background noise of its own. Even here, there is a subtle but distinct difference between the stereo and mono sounds; hard to describe except perhaps to say that I find the mono version to sound almost more authentic, clearer. Both are, unquestionably, better than the original compact discs.

That feeling of joy continued. There it was again, at long last, in the clarity of the punchy guitar on “Dear Prudence,” pure George Harrison breaking through from underneath the rhythm guitar that has for so long dominated. And “Long, Long, Long,” a song I have listened to repeatedly at some of the darkest moments of my life, now returned to me. That gaping chasm of universe at the end of the song is back, and more powerful than ever; in mono, it sounds like a black hole heading straight at you, while in stereo it is as though you’re about to be engulfed by god from all sides.

***

The early parts of The Beatles’s catalog are a whole other kind of pleasure. Hearing “Little Child” (one my early favorites) in a new mono remaster is an emotional throwback, to a much earlier time—when I'd absconded with my father's LPs and played them on the horrible, kid-friendly turntable I had in my room. Indeed, that turntable—with its single, built-in speaker in a red-and-white plastic casing—is the reason I wanted to have the mono version of the albums: some of my earliest, best, most personal and meaningful experiences of listening to The Beatles were through a mono system.

I think the mono remasters make a stronger impression for the first five albums, perhaps because that (re)mastering is better suited to the music itself, a kind of all-in rock-n-roll sound that still holds together well. It isn’t until Rubber Soul that the impact of the stereo really takes off, and the use of the technology matched the desire of The Beatles and their producer, George Martin, to achieve a certain lush sound. (For an aural reference point, think of the sitar on “Norwegian Wood.”)

***

Looking through the box sets, I found myself entranced by the pictures of the band in Abbey Road. And all of a sudden it just flew out of me, this flood of conflicted feelings about that album: the sense that for everyone's hype, it actually holds together the least well, pulled apart by the fraying in their personal lives, which is reflected in the songs. This notwithstanding a quote from Ringo that the end of the album is “one of the finest pieces” the band did, which may be true.

On the one hand, the album as a whole feels weak for a band capable of the conceptual brilliance of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. “Come Together” matches the John Lennon of the era: just look at the pictures there, him like a hippie-Hasid. “Maxwell's Silver Hammer” is such a prefiguring of the even greater goofiness that would emerge from some of McCartney's later song-writing, especially in the Wings era, that it is only my sentimental attachment to The Beatles that lets me listen. “Octopus’s Garden” belongs on a (blissfully, unmade) Beatles children’s album. Have you ever heard such a brilliant break-up album, before or since? George sounds like he would as a solo star; Paul sounds like he would as a solo star; John sounds like he would as a solo star. (Ringo is, was, and shall remain Ringo—and thank goodness.) Four, barely united as one, for the last time.

Yet, to Ringo’s quote, credit where credit is due: the last ten minutes, from “Mean Mr. Mustard” straight through to “Her Majesty,” is brilliant, lush, and (yes) symphonic. This remastered version brings out details one longs to hear and follow along with, like the bass line on “She Came In Through The Bathroom Window,” which changes at about the one minute mark, doubling up on certain chords. What once sounded smudged (how else to describe the first CD release?) is now clear and strong, and it keeps that song moving. This 10 minutes brings Abbey Road to a conclusion that saves it from itself.

***

Revolver. My beloved Revolver. From its composite cover to its stellar collection of brilliant songs that helped to define so much of what rock is about, it remains one of the best albums of all time. It is also the essence of what The Beatles were about, too: from the lyrics about life, love, sadness, or joy, to the relentless musical experimentation, it is an exquisitely produced 35 minutes.

I could go on and on about the album or the songs, but instead this may be the moment to mention the value of the Fifth Beatle, producer George Martin. What would these four Liverpudlians have come to be without Martin’s talented ear guiding them from their earliest Parlophone recordings? No idea, but certainly not The Beatles as we know them. And just as I think Rubber Soul represents the moment when stereo came to be a better conveyance for The Beatles’s sound, Revolver seems to me to be the album around which both the band and their producer converged fully, and together advanced beyond mere chart-topping rock to create music that was pioneering, musically and technically. Without Revolver, the rest—Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band included—doesn’t happen.

***

I have had some great Beatles moments over the last two years, mostly related to musical rediscoveries as a parent: introducing my daughter to the band, the players, and the music, and sharing in the experience with her. But the last time I had real cause to consider the group as a whole in a new way was at the time of the release of the Anthology discs and the companion book; that was more than a decade ago and, frankly, more thrilling as a Beatles fan than for the music itself.

These remastered box sets deliver a better experience on many levels; even the casual listener should be able to hear the difference in these songs over the older CDs, while the diehard fan will surely hear (and see) the kinds of details that reward on many levels, emotionally and aurally. It’s all long overdue, but well worth the wait.

Not a Granny Smith

noreply@blogger.com (The Editor) — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 04:08:00 +0000

A couple of weeks ago, I tried to upgrade my MacBook to Apple’s latest operating system, nicknamed Snow Leopard. Theoretically, this should have been as easy as popping in the disc and clicking a bunch of “Continue” buttons. In practice, that was not true at all. The installation software said that it could not proceed because my hard drive wasn’t the disc used to boot up the computer. Hunh? Web research ensued, and I came to the conclusion that the only solution involved erasing and repartitioning my hard drive, and then installing Snow Leopard. That sounded drastic; I put Snow Leopard away.

A few days later, I called Apple support, to try to resolve this. The guy on the other end of the line was patient and helpful, and walked me through a series of tests, before coming to the conclusion that, yes, the hard drive needed to be repartitioned. Why? He didn’t know, but he acknowledged that I was clearly not the first person to face the issue. He assured me that the Time Machine backup I had made prior to the call would work as promised, and he led me through the process.

This has a happy ending: it took about a half-hour to reinstall the original Leopard operating system, another 90 minutes to restore everything from the back-up, and then another 45 minutes or so to add Snow Leopard. Time Machine restored my computer perfectly—everything, down to each tweak, setting, and file. It was a reminder of the genius nature of that system, and credit to Apple for figuring it out: a back-up system that allows both a system-wide restoration and a file-by-file exploration, under one built-in software umbrella. And now my machine runs faster, courtesy of Snow Leopard.

***

Earlier today, I went in to the Apple story to have them check out my iPhone. A couple weeks ago, the little switch that controls the ringer just snapped off. I’ve been able, with the aid of finger nails, to flick the stub of the switch around when desperately necessary but it is a drag.

The “geniuses” in Apple’s Upper West Side store were terrific. My phone is in great shape, and it was clear that this was both a small problem—and not a reflection of serious abuse. Plus, the phone is covered under Apple’s extended warranty program.

Or so I thought. I bought the extended warranty after I bought the phone, but the salesman at the Apple store told me that just by purchasing it, the warranty was in effect. Not so: I needed to activate it, and I hadn’t done that. Today, Apple took care of that for me—it helped that I had the receipt, showing I’d purchased it last February—and then, when finished, replaced the phone. No more questions asked. Then they let me sit there while I connected the new iPhone to my laptop and “restored” the settings from the old phone to the new one, courtesy of another smart Apple back-up tool.

Which also worked more or less flawlessly. (The less: I had to manually put my music, etc., back on the phone. A very slight inconvenience in the overall process.) It took about two hours to do the full restore, but it meant that two hours later I had my iPhone back, with all my apps, settings, old text messages...

***

I finally broke up with Microsoft a little more than a year ago, and thus far, Apple has not let me down. In fact, my household has converted, my extended family has converted, and my office may convert, too. Still—despite reaffirming the high quality of Apple’s products, software, and services—these two experiences highlight the frustrating nature of computers and personal technology when something goes wrong. And invariably, something will go wrong at some point.

My experiences are not unique, but that’s the point. I remain concerned that we rely too much on these machines to (help us) manage our lives, without giving due attention to the weaknesses of the systems, or of ourselves. One lesson in all this is, clearly, back-up regularly. Another is buy Apple: the products and services are better value for the money. The biggest lesson of all may be the one we will never learn: to start relying on less fragile systems, before our collective memory needs to be erased and repartitioned, with little hope of a full, restorable back-up available.

Sensible Reading

noreply@blogger.com (The Editor) — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 19:20:00 +0000

I appreciate effective combinations of quality products and good service. While it’s often more entertaining to excoriate companies that fall down on one front or another, the folks doing good work deserve recognition too—so here’s a short item of support for the creators of the my6sense app for the iPhone / iPod Touch.

I first learned about the my6sense app through a post on Mashable back in August. They gave it a rave review for its combination of features: feed reader; information sharer; and a feature called “Digital Intuition,” that over time learns your tastes and suggests other reading material based on those tastes. For me, the initial draw was the feed reader component. I have discovered, though, that the “Digital Intuition” feature works quite well: having added my own feeds, and spent time reading different items (or not), the app has learned some of my interests, and the main feed page now provides a range of different, interesting items to look at, in addition to the feeds I added myself.

Adding or importing feeds in my6sense is easy, as is creating folders to combine multiple feeds into one reading page, so users can cluster technology items together, arts items together, etc. The top 20 items loaded are available offline, which is perfect for paging through on a subway ride where there’s no internet access.

BUT, the thing that really got me committed to continued usage was the response I received from the company when I did have a problem. Early on, two feeds that I tried to add would not go through. It was odd; everything worked fine except for these two specific, unrelated blogs . I got a range of error messages, some telling me that the items were there already, others just a slightly-too-cutesy “Oh noes!” Oh, noes indeed. On the verge of giving up—the app was free, after all, so I wouldn’t lose much—I submitted feedback through the app’s own feedback tool. That generated a reply within a day, with a person who was terrific on follow-through. She asked for more detail about the problem, and proposed a few different solutions; none worked. She was apologetic and, when she said that the developers were looking into the issue, I believed her. And, indeed, a subsequent update to the app fixed my issues.

At this point, there are a few small tweaks I’d like to see my6sense make, to improve the usability. One is to add side-to-side page scrolling, as in the Wall Street Journal’s app; right now, my6sense makes a reader go back to the top of the screen to change items. Another is just a little more flexibility in controlling the font size. A better automatic information category for the arts would be nice, beyond the celebrity-driven items that are built in. And the real stretch nice-to-have would be a “save” or bookmark feature, to keep track of a few things one may want to remember for later.

So there you have it. Great product, great price, and great service: if you’re looking for a feed reader and information aggregator, check out my6sense.

Political Naches

noreply@blogger.com (The Editor) — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 15:54:00 +0000

With my son's circumcision ceremony impending, my father pointed out that the day of my own bris was also the day that William Donald Schaefer was inaugurated for his first term as Mayor of Baltimore, which apparently affected attendance at my bris.

That's amusing enough, but it gets a little better: Schaefer succeeded Thomas D'Alesandro III as mayor; D'Alesandro lived around the corner from us.

And here's where it all comes together, in some kind of not-quite-six-degrees-of-separation: D'Alesandro's sister is Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives and second in line to the presidency.

1 in 9 Million

noreply@blogger.com (The Editor) — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 16:29:00 +0000

If all you read was the news coverage of AT&T’s wireless services, particularly since the launch of the iPhone, the stories you’d be most likely to see would be along the lines of the big New York Times piece from 3 September, “Customers Angered as iPhones Overload AT&T,” or an item from All Things Digital about the launch of multi-media messaging ability for the iPhone. The tone of these stories, for as long as I can remember, is one of complaint and frustration among the many millions of AT&T customers, including about 9 million iPhone owners.

The thing is: I find it bizarre, and completely counter to my own experience.

I have been an AT&T customer since 1996, with vague but fond memories of the acquisition of my first phone, a seemingly brick-sized Nokia that worked so well it made me a committed Nokia user, until I got my iPhone a dozen years later. Not only did the phone work well: so did the service to which it was tied. It’s precisely because of the quality combination of the two that I have remained an AT&T wireless customer ever since.

While I spend most of my time in New York City, I have also spent substantial time away from here, from very rural parts of New England to middle-of-nowhere spots in Texas between Houston and Austin, to a range of other places around the country. Rare are the times I have found myself without service. More common has been finding myself with better service than Verizon or (more dramatically) Sprint customers.

The quality of my service or experience hasn’t changed since acquiring my iPhone, either. Sure, periodically I get calls that don’t go through; but hardly so frequently as to be a meaningful factor in my general experience, and no worse than ever or, as far as I can tell, worse than friends with other phones on other services. Sure, I have moments where the downloading of my e-mail seems to take forever; but it usually turns out that some idiot has sent me 10MB of photos, and the problem is either not AT&T’s or, frankly, not so unrealistic. The broad problems described by people in the Times and the many other articles one can find with a quick search have never been my experience. At all.

If anything, I continue to find the iPhone an amazing tool (and toy), something out of the science fiction or comic books I read as a kid—and nearly the real-world equivalent of the hand-held communicators and analyzers of Star Trek. Maybe I’m just old enough that, never having expected such technology to be realized during my lifetime, I’m grateful for how well it works, even with its flaws and failings. Few technologies are perfect, and the iPhone—as a unit, and as a tool to access the AT&T service—seems damn good to me.

I spend a lot of time using computers of varying kinds. My threshold for poor products and services is both high enough that I stuck it out with Dell and Microsoft longer than I might have, but also low enough that newly adopted tools that just don’t work well are traded out or discarded rapidly.

The iPhone and AT&T are not in that category. Let’s just hope that by writing this I’m not jinxing it.

Radio Reade

noreply@blogger.com (The Editor) — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 19:37:00 +0000

Have any of you New Yorkers ever noticed that the new Duane Reade logo looks a lot like the older Radio Shack logo? I guess it's a compliment to Radio Shack, though I'm not sure I'd have picked them as the brand to mimic.

Even more amusing is that Duane Reade's new logo is prominently placed on its new and remodeled stores - but barely appears on the company's web site! There's even a sub-page that still features their "reward" cards with the old back-to-back DR logo. I guess this campaign still has a ways to go...

Maybe someone from either of these two companies should start watching Mad Men...

In Memoriam

noreply@blogger.com (The Editor) — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 01:06:00 +0000

A few weeks ago, I was reminiscing with a friend about people I knew a lifetime ago (or so it seems) in Worcester, Massachusetts, where I lived for a few challenging years of early adolescence. My father reminded me of an old friend from elementary school, Josh Gold, someone I hadn't thought of in quite some time. In Worcester, we had become fast friends, despite my odd-duck status as the asthmatic new kid; Josh was both smart and kind, the type of person who embraced the odd-duck, something for which I was truly grateful.

The last time I had seen Josh was in Amherst, where we were both in school, he at UMASS and me at Hampshire. We bumped into each other at a bookstore in town, exchanged a few pleasantries, talked about our various interests, and went our separate ways. At that point, it had been probably close to eight years since the last time I had seen him - since I'd left Worcester. Amherst is a small town, but we had different schools and different circles, and I didn't run into him again.

Several weeks have gone by since the conversation about Worcester, but yesterday I went to that magic tool, the internet, to see if I could find Josh. It was a true shock and deeply saddening to learn that Josh had died on June 3, 2009. I feel terribly fortunate in all sorts of ways - lucky to be alive, to have a healthy and happy family around me, and to have friends with vibrant lives, too. The fact that I have not seen Josh in many years makes his death no less sad or disturbing. He had become someone of significant intellectual accomplishment - hardly a surprise to me, based on the kid I once knew. I can only imagine how much he will be missed by those who knew and loved him more closely than I ever did.

I was struck by the brief bio posted on his faculty page at the University of Connecticut, where he was teaching, so I have reproduced it below; the photo is also from that page, which can be found here: http://languages.uconn.edu/faculty/details.php?id=111

***

Joshua Robert Gold, Assistant Professor of German and Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Connecticut, died on June 3, 2009, at the age of 38.

He was guest editor of Telos 140, "Peter Szondi and Critical Hermeneutics," to which he contributed an article on Peter Szondi's "Hölderlin-Studien." Gold's research touches on literature, philosophy, film, and political theory. His article entitled "Apocalypse From Below," published in Telos 134, offers an account of the work of German-Jewish philosopher Jacob Taubes that explores the theological underpinnings of modern political thought. This concern with political theology runs through his study on Hölderlin, which examines the complex and often fraught relationship between revolutionary political thought and its mediation through poetic language. Gold's work attends closely to the act of writing, particularly to the tensions and affinities between literary and philosophical language. His essays on poems by Rainer Maria Rilke and his publications on Walter Benjamin's writings, "The Dwarf in the Machine: A Theological Figure and Its Sources" and "'Another Nature Which Speaks to the Camera': Film and Translation in the Writings of Walter Benjamin," attest to this particular concern.

Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, Gold was educated in the public school system and held a B.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in German Literature from Princeton University in 2004. As a graduate student, he also studied in Germany at the Free University of Berlin and the University of Tübingen. Before joining the faculty of Modern and Classical Languages at the University of Connecticut, he taught at Washington College and Johns Hopkins University.

His engaging passion for literature and thought, his sense of intellectual urgency, critical precision, and his bright sense of humor will be sorely missed.

***

Contributions may be made in his name to the Worcester Public Library Foundation at 3 Salem Square, Worcester, MA 01608, the University of Connecticut Library at 369 Fairfield Way, Unit 2005A, Storrs, CT 06269-2005, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst Library at 415 W.E.B.Du Bois Library, 154 Hicks Way, Amherst, MA, 01003-9275. If you wish to leave condolences online, you may do so at nordgrenmemorialchapel.com

Manager-Maker

noreply@blogger.com (The Editor) — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 19:47:00 +0000

Yesterday, a post on Gina Trapani's Smarterware blog caught my eye - a link to a piece by Paul Graham titled "Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule." The crux of Graham's argument is this (with my ellipses):

"There are two types of schedule, which I'll call the manager's schedule and the maker's schedule. The manager's schedule is for bosses. It's embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you're doing every hour. ... But there's another way of using time that's common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can't write or program well in units of an hour. That's barely enough time to get started."

Initially, yesterday, I was struck by the clarity of Graham's analysis - and immediately associated myself with a "maker," because (as someone who writes a lot) I can relate to the challenge of wanting and needing uninterrupted time, and am all too familiar with the deadening impact of constant interruption.I woke up this morning and re-realized that I'm a "manager," with blocks of time diced up into neat little segments - an hour for this, a half-hour for that, 15 minutes for something else, all billed in neat 15 minute increments. But something wasn't sitting quite right with me about this; I was still feeling too connected to the frustration Graham expresses.

By this afternoon, I figured out that what was giving me pause is that I am basically a hybrid of the two types, the "maker" and the "manager." And it's probably true for most of my colleagues, too. We are managers: task managers, project managers, client relationship managers, new business-and-ideas managers, and so on. At the same time, we must also do: make calls, write plans and materials, think through how to present ideas or issues creatively and clearly, etc.

Occasionally, the frustration of this hybrid situation can become, well, frustrating; when you're trying to accomplish something that takes concentration, the things that break that concentration can look like skeet begging to be shot. Just as often, though, it's part of what makes my job exciting and engaging - not just the daily challenge of seeing tasks completed, but the dynamic nature of a job with many different facets. I'm rarely bored, and that's a lucky thing indeed.

Love the Bomb

noreply@blogger.com (The Editor) — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 19:00:00 +0000

If you read what I write here, then you may soon begin to notice a shift in this space. Methodical, not radical, but a shift nonetheless. The times, they are a changin’. What follows in the middle here is a bit of philosophizing (read: navel-gazing). Scroll down if you want to skip to the punch line. I’ll never know.

***

For years now, I have clung tightly to a particular perspective about the online universe—a philosophy, one might call it, born of my era, my own age, and my personality. Old enough to have gone through an adolescence that included computers but no internet; young enough (and technologically minded enough) to have embraced each piece of it as it arrived, and to have incorporated technology fully into my life. Old fashioned enough to believe that public personas matter, and that we must take care in cultivating them; young enough to see that the definition of an acceptable public persona has evolved and expanded greatly, and mostly for the better.

I started “blogging” on 17 September 2000, with this piece. Prior to that, I had done some web site dabbling here and there, but this piece, written while I worked at KPMG, was the beginning of something else entirely. I continued through that fall and early winter, twenty pieces written and made available to the world (archived here; my favorite remains this one), and it all felt slightly thrilling. The process was not without its ups and downs: I got up every day around 5am to write; and I had to convince a few people that my energy (and compulsion) in this arena was about meeting my own internal needs, and not a desire to create an endless stream of Times op-ed submissions.

I did it all using a name that is wholly, legally my own—and yet, not “me” as most people know me. I assumed the persona of my own initials in order to create a space for myself to write that felt publicly protected. I was hiding in plain sight. At the same time, I also drew a very sharp line around my writing world, and have largely stuck to it. Essentially, this meant not much writing about art or the world of my professional life. I have written and published a number of pieces about job hunting and career-related issues—almost one a year; 2008’s is here and the others are available through links at the bottom of that page—but that was about as close as I got. (Moreover, the hiding-in-plain-sight seemed to work too well: precious few of the people I have interviewed over the years ever seemed to have been aware of my perspectives on job hunting, interviewing, etc.) Indeed, it was in part because of the human resources part of my professional life that I felt even more strongly about being so careful about what I did online; I had plenty of examples gathered of what not to do.

***

All that said, it’s time for a change. Methodical, hardly radical, but a change. I recently did a personal “digital inventory,” and the degree to which I’m wired surprised even me. At the same time, I have resisted my own engagement in a few aspects of the digital world, even as I took advantage of what others did. I was stubborn where I should have been flexible, and I drew lines around what I was willing to do that made sense to me but were predicated on the idea that the outside world cares, when in many ways it surely did not and does not. And in hewing so tightly to certain kinds of “rules,” I may very well have missed opportunities that would have been good for me, and for others, too. (Heck, I still don’t really call my blogs “blogs”—because that word carries certain connotations, and I was always happier with the idea that I was just writing, for the web, on my own.)

What all this means is that I intend to use this space to more effectively and productively integrate a range of different aspects of my life—my professional life included. I’ve launched myself over on Twitter, after months of skepticism about that medium, to see whether that helps with this process or not. (It may not.) How all of this will play out remains to be seen; I work in the field of communications, and I want this to be strategic, thoughtful, stimulating, interesting, and not merely (self-)promotional.

Not much will change over on the TTAISI side. Almost nine years later, those initials and that persona are well and truly mine, and I intend to keep them, and to keep doing what I’ve been doing, whatever that is. Writing, mostly.

If all of this seems like a lot of internal drama over something not very dramatic, I won’t argue the point. A few years ago, I wrote about process issues, and to quote myself: “Engaging in a process of self-examination—freed from a concern about a specific end product—is not easy...” That’s what this is, an internal process that for me has not been so easy.

But the gauntlet is down, and off I go.

*Thanks to a certain colleague (and she knows who she is) for reminding me of a certain movie - apt in this instance, and from which I have taken my title.

Business As Usual

noreply@blogger.com (The Editor) — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 20:34:00 +0000

There are a variety of reasons we read books, from the sheer joy of well-constructed sentences to the knowledge that may be gained from an author. In the case of an Oulipian like Harry Mathews, those reasons hold—and more. Mathews' My Life in CIA is, in two words: pure joy.

First, the language is ripe and punchy, descriptive and often inventive, from the names of the characters to his self-deprecating descriptions of his desire for particular members of the opposite sex. The series of Tantric romps with the superbly named Marie-Claude Quintelpreaux are short and sweet, but engage the imagination with passages such as “The tip of my erection settled in her navel; this was apparently acceptable. I thought ‘There’s no place like om.’” Mathews is no Faulkner, and thank goodness. If anything, there are shades of Paul Bowles’ short stories, or the even some of the (adult) stories of Roald Dahl. (Whether Mathews would agree with this I don’t know.)

Then there's the story itself. If you are a fan of spy novels, ones constructed in the cerebral, Le Carre mold that focuses as much on psychological motivations as "action," Mathews delivers on a variety of levels. He is, after all, not a spy; at least, one doesn't think so and Mathews clearly wishes us not to believe it so, since that is the starting premise of the whole escapade. Therefore the antics of an inventive author acting like a spy—selling faked Russian spy plane parts, offering up a coded map of Siberian nuclear installations—while feeling badly for the American-supported overthrow of the Allende government in Chile, and sitting through interrogations with various Soviet and French bureaucrats, all present as hilarity. (This often reminded me of Lawrence Block’s 1966 work The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep, an underrated pulp novel if ever there was one.) You cannot help but get wrapped up in Mathews’ real-or-imagined intrigue, and feel concern for the semi-hemi-demi-hero as the story moves to its climax.

At the same time, the book helped me grasp the nature of Oulipo in a completely different way. Two simple examples of Mathews’ inventive mind and its Oulipian application. First, while addressing a group of dyslexic travelers, he proposes that one means of alleviating their (anxiety induced) disability is to choose only trains or buses that depart on a palindromic schedule, e.g., 05:50, or 13:31. Later, he proposes an automotive itinerary for an American couple that would take them on a scenic tour of France, beginning with a visit to Saint Agr ève and ending with a trip to Saint Zacharie. These work as jokes in the story, and on their own.

I recently read Mathews’ second novel, Tlooth. Together these two books make for terrific summer reading, both absolutely engaging and appropriately—necessarily—intellectual.

Book Tweet

noreply@blogger.com (The Editor) — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 02:47:00 +0000

This isn't actually a Tweet at all - it was a sign posted on the door of the Casco Public Library, in Casco, Maine. And no, it's not a perfect 140 characters.

Still, were I to Tweet something about books (were I on Twitter, and able to Tweet), this is a sentiment I'd be thrilled to echo. So I'm doing my bit by posting it here instead, with full credit to library in which I found it - and to the place from which it apparently originated.

Starbucks Hmm

noreply@blogger.com (The Editor) — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 03:01:00 +0000

This ad makes me think that Starbucks (or their ad agency) needs a grammar lesson. My first reading made me ask about the other 97% of Starbucks' coffee beans. My second reading (a day later) made me think that Starbucks hasn't dominated the market for the best beans, which has other implications. The third reading (yet another day later) was no clearer, and prompted the picture.

Best of all: no impact on my patronage! I rarely went to Starbucks before I saw these ads, and that hasn't changed. Maybe, given the economy, that's its own kind of success?

Poor MJ

noreply@blogger.com (The Editor) — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 13:13:00 +0000

I imagine that many people feel about Michael Jackson’s death the way I felt about John Lennon’s murder on 8 December 1980: hard to reconcile feelings of surprise—shock is more like it—mixed with sadness and an immediate, very personal longing. I never met John Lennon, but on that day in 1980, I felt as though I had lost someone very close to me.

I don’t feel that way about poor Michael.

Strictly speaking, I should be more a child of Michael Jackson’s era than of John Lennon’s. The Beatles dissolved the band around the time I was born, while Michael truly came into his own—as an independent superstar, eclipsing both of his earlier incarnations—as I entered adolescence. There was a lot more of Michael Jackson on the radio than John Lennon, and certainly the radio-killing MTV was more attracted to Michael (and various other Jacksons) than to anything as old and dated as the British Invasion.

The sequined glove era just wasn’t me, though. As much as I admired Michael Jackson on various levels, from his stick-in-your-head songs to his dancing to the brilliant theatrics of his music videos and performances, I never found Jackson as compelling as Lennon, because I never found his off-stage persona at all meaningful. Where Jackson was a performer, Lennon was an artist. Jackson always seemed to find his highest level of expression literally moving in the spotlight—or trying to duck it, and the paparazzi too. Lennon spent much of his time in the spotlight, from his performances to his bed-in antics, trying to redirect those bright lights on to the world’s problems and our responsibility to try to solve them.

It is like the difference between Muhammad Ali and Michael Jordan. Jordan remains (to my mind) one of the world’s most incredible athletes; watching clips of classic Chicago Bulls games, Jordan’s maneuvers are still eye catching. However, Ali remains (to my mind) one of the world’s most incredible artists, an athlete who tried to use the bully pulpit provided by his star power to greater social and political ends. Any clip of Ali boxing is incomplete without his corresponding commentary from the beginning and the end of each match, where he was as likely to spout off about the war in Vietnam as about his own (self-granted) title as “The Greatest.” Like Michael Jordan, Michael Jackson never rose above his performances to offer us anything deeper or more meaningful.

Perhaps my definition of art, and of artists, is too narrow. I respect Keats’ construction—that a thing of beauty is a joy forever—as much as the next guy, and by that logic I should take Michael Jackson’s body of work and admire it for what it is. In a way, I do. Jackson’s legacy is assured, and his death is very sad. But it is all the more tragic because what is left behind is as much our collective memory of Jackson’s own sadness, the emptiness that was his circus show life, as our recollection of any single one of his songs.

Foreign Exchange

noreply@blogger.com (The Editor) — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 02:00:00 +0000

I've passed by this ad for a few weeks now and finally got a picture. While Nestea has built a very robust "Liquid Awesomeness" website to carry the whole campaign to its logical and absurd conclusion ... I'm not feeling the love on the bottling-a-foreign-exchange-student concept. It's just odd, and frankly, seems disconnected from "Steve" and the broader ad campaign.

Plus there seem to be some gaps in the scope of the campaign. For example, search for "Liquid Awesomeness" on Facebook and you get to the group for Jones Soda is Liquid Awesomeness. (And I just have no doubt that's true.)

For anyone interested, Adverblog has a longer description of the website and its development. Personally, I prefer my liquid awesomeness in coffee form.

Awesomely yours,

Fireside Spam

noreply@blogger.com (The Editor) — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 21:50:00 +0000

A friend just wrote me: "Can I just say again
how odd it is to get emails from the office
of the President of the United States?"

Which is when I realized: it's Fireside Spam.

Unstructured Summer

noreply@blogger.com (The Editor) — Mon, 25 May 2009 14:59:00 +0000

Let me call it as it was: I had to fight to get my time for myself.

I guess it's the way it is for many kids, the way it was years ago and remains today. Summers could be frustrating. It wasn't a matter of laziness, so much as a kind of frustration over someone else setting the agenda for my time. Whatever it was I was required to do, what I can say assuredly is that all I wanted to do was hang out somewhere quiet, listen to music, and read. Once a bookworm...

In this context, summers in Royalston always had a special feel—and not without its frustrations either. The rambling old farmhouse, and the seemingly endless surrounding woods and fields; the black flies (particularly in May) and the mosquitos; the periodic hammocks and tire swings; the cool inner parlor, with its uncomfortable couch; the warmer, outer parlor, with a similar couch; the childhood bathroom, with an Americana-themed wallpaper, and the childhood bedroom, still mine, with (oddly) a flower print wallpaper but a slate-blue trim on the doors, windows, and molding; and the kitchen, the big, farmhouse kitchen, the center of all activity as it is in most homes, but here (situated at the front of the "little house," for anyone familiar with the classic New England "big house, little house" construction) even more central, providing access to the main house, and with doors out to the east and west sides lawns; all of this reminds me of how much I treasured my unstructured summers, and how much I yearned for them when I couldn't have them. How much I yearn for them still.

Underneath that Faulknerian paragraph-sentence is something simple: the idea of freedom to explore: one's self, one's surroundings, and one's relationship to the world. And as much as we do this in relation to other things, we also need the freedom to do it in relation to nothing so much as our own thoughts. This is what summers are meant for, just the way that Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn found the good weather a supportive partner in their explorations of the world. One can navel-gaze any time of the year, but the warmth of summer is especially good for this. Having spent the weekend in Royalston, in this comfortable, Crossing To Safety-esque sometimes home of my childhood, I’m reminded of the whole dynamic once again.

And I’m reminded of what I want for my daughter—the same opportunity to experience the pleasurable freedoms of summer, to create a set of childhood memories that connect to a place and a time and a sense that the whole world, contained within a backyard, awaits exploration or quiet contemplation.

OpenOffice Update

noreply@blogger.com (The Editor) — Sun, 17 May 2009 03:32:00 +0000

OpenOffice.org - the free, multi-platform, "office" software suite of programs and tools - recently launched version 3.1. I wrote about version 2.0 back in 2006, and since then the program has only improved further. Rather than repeat the whole structure of my original argument, I thought I would just punch out a few quick reasons why OpenOffice.org can and should replace your version(s) of Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Access:

1. Features. These programs do everything that Microsoft's programs do - and sometimes more. For example, any file / document can be exported to PDF format with one click (and without buying or installing any additional software, like Adobe Acrobat). With two clicks, you can control the quality of the PDF, the file size, the inclusion of bookmarks on the page, how it looks when it opens, and more.

2. Interoperability for imports. In addition to being able to open Microsoft Office documents perfectly, OpenOffice.org has worked for opening a range of other files, including former Microsoft files that have been corrupted or improperly closed. Moreover Microsoft has, in recent years, dropped some of the converters it used to include by default with programs like Word. OpenOffice.org still has them - and they work better than Microsoft's ever did anyway.

3. Interoperability for exports. Want to save a file (yours or someone else's) as a Microsoft Word document? OpenOffice.org will do it, with no problems. Want to convert that presentation into an easy, web-enabled Flash file? OpenOffice.org will do it, no problem. Got an old Access database you can no longer ... access? OpenOffice.org will open it - and let you extract the data into a spreadsheet.

4. Languages. Speak another language? Want to use an office program that knows that language, dictionary and all? OpenOffice.org can be had (for free) in a wide range of languages, from Afrikaans to Vietnamese.

5. Add-ons / extensions. The smart developers at OpenOffice.org use the Mozilla / Firefox model and have opened up a whole world of "extensions," additional items components (from new document templates to new functions), many of which can also be had for free.

6. Stability. Since I started using OpenOffice.org full time in 2003, I think I can count on two hands the number of times the program has crashed. That's with heavy-duty use, for files in multiple formats and across multiple platforms (Windows, Mac OS X, and even Linux). Six years, 10 crashes? When was the last time your software worked so well, Microsoft?

7. Environmental conservation. This may sound silly, but think about it: it's a lot more environmentally sensitive (and cost-effective) to deliver a program that requires no additional packaging. Each new computer you buy with Microsoft Office installed comes with crap you will likely throw out, from the packaging to the reinstallation CDs. OpenOffice.org is free, which means that it's readily available - which means that crap is unnecessary. Need a new copy? Just download it when you need it.

8. Global accessibility. Hand in hand with the environmental message is one of global do-gooding. Free software like this is liberating: classes of people can get easy access to a valuable, high-quality product. Yes, this is limited to people who already can afford a computer; but as the cost of hardware falls, the freedom to choose other software products increases their utility. And there is a reason that governments are also switching to OpenOffice.org: it saves taxpayers money, too.

9. Cost. You can't beat free. Seriously. Especially when free is really, really good.

Every software has some thing bound to drive a user nuts. For me, it's the hidden nature of OpenOffice.org's "Recent Documents" menu: it's only accessible when some kind of document is already open. But that's a small thing, and easily managed. Everything else is great, which is why, several years later, I'm once again back telling people to take a look. It's worth it.

Data Geek

noreply@blogger.com (The Editor) — Fri, 08 May 2009 10:52:00 +0000

Doing some research for a ... well, some kind of article / blog post / op-ed [TBD] about art museum attendance, I happened on a cool feature of the U.S. Census Bureau: the Facts for Features section of their site. Given how much I love their data, I don't know how I've missed this previously.

Essentially, the Census Bureau each year publishes a set of stats keyed to specific holidays, drawing on their deep and rich data set about life in these here United States of America. For example, the most recent is about the upcoming 4th of July holiday, and includes information about cookouts (and the amount of meat we consume, or where our baked beans likely came from), fireworks, and even the dollar value of our annual trade with Britain, our former colonizer ($112.4 billion).

Fun!

And, while I'm on the geek front, also coming soon: some thoughts on the just-released version 3.1 of OpenOffice, my office "suite" of choice.

Class of 1989, Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (The Editor) — Sat, 02 May 2009 21:13:00 +0000

An Open Letter to My Hampshire College Classmates (Revisited)

Dear Class of 1989:

On April 25th, the New York Times ran an article titled "Anonymous Donor Gives Millions to Colleges." Unusually for a news article, the headline was both attention-getting and accurate, and if you read nothing else you came away knowing something inspiring and slightly mysterious had happened.

My first thought was: wow, I wish I could do that. I wish I had the means to give multiple large gifts - of $5 - $10 million dollars! - to organizations I think worthy, and the secondary means to enforce what must be a kind of gleeful anonymity on the part of the donor.

But I don't. And most of us don't have that kind of money, either. (If you do, and you've been hiding, now would be a great time to step forward.)

Yet it is precisely because I cannot make a multi-million dollar gift that I am writing you to ask you to join me in supporting Hampshire College, which was notably (!) absent from the list of worthy schools that received one of these anonymous donations. As alumni, our support for Hampshire matters. The biggest reason is the immediate impact of our dollars on everything from the development of new course curricula to supporting financial aid needs for current students. The equally important secondary reason is that our dollars make a statement to the outside world of foundations and other donors about how much we value Hampshire, the experience it gave us, and the importance of their support, too.

At the end of last year, after hearing that only 14% of the Class of 1989 contributes to Hampshire (a lower percentage than the more recent graduating classes), I did two things. I increased my own annual giving by 20%, to $1,200, and I wrote a letter for Hampshire to share with my class to encourage more gifts. I am gratified that some of you took me up on the challenge and made a contribution, too. Still, the need remains and, alas, the response rate was not enough to make the Class of 1989 competitive with our peers. So, I am asking again. I am asking you to think about Hampshire, what it meant to you in the big picture of your life, and the opportunity - actually, I would say the responsibility - we have to ensure its continued success.

Here is what I consider to be the reality: Hampshire College cannot wait for an anonymous donor to come along and drop several million dollars into its endowment. It's up to us, the folks who went there, to show the world that we care. I am committing here, in writing, to giving an additional 20% this year. What are you willing to do? As the logo says, "To know is not enough."

***gazing

noreply@blogger.com (The Editor) — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 02:36:00 +0000

I did it again just yesterday: I used three little asterisks in a row, twice, in my essay. I use them copiously in my diary; unofficially, I'd say twice per typed page, though possibly more depending on the entry and what I'm trying to capture about my week. And the fiction I write is filled with them, a preferred alternative to something as pedestrian as chapter breaks.

At some point yesterday, as I typed them out, I wondered quietly to myself why I use them, and so consistently; and I wondered whether they really serve as I intend them, or if instead they're a kind of cop-out, a writer's crutch to help me navigate around an idea I cannot pin down.

Which leads to the question: what do I intend them to mean or be?

In a world of unanswerable questions, that one I can handle: I like my asterisks because they help define and delineate the continuum of my thinking. And my thinking definitely functions on a continuum. I think my argumentative, opinionated writing tends to navigate around my main point, punching in for direct connections, and then moving back out to pull together related but distinct ideas. Over the years, a few people have complained that my writing can be maddeningly oblique (as is often intended); the asterisks help with that (also as intended). They help me separate out the direct points I want to make from those that are less so, and should lead the reader around without completely breaking a train of thought. This is essential of meeting that larger goal of threading together different ideas across a spectrum of perspectives.

Admittedly, they do sometimes serve as a crutch—when an idea just won't quite come together, and something is needed to help both separate the disparate elements and tie them together, and I am running out of time (on my self-imposed deadline) and I want to wrap something up...

I suppose my final comfort factor is: no one taught me to punctuate my writing this way, I just developed it on my own. Which, as these things go, makes me feel more comfortable about doing it. I'm not mimicking anyone's style (though many other writers do much the same thing). It's just me being me. If you can’t handle that, you’ve come to the wrong website.

***

Lest I go for one whole posting without the asterisks, there they are, this time as a segue to four items about writing and language. The first is a brilliant poke, from McSweeney’s, at our contemporary culture (with a hat tip to Liz for pointing it out): "Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era." The second and third are good pieces from the New York Times (here and here) on the 50th anniversary of Strink and White’s The Elements of Style. The fourth is a piece on Orwell from the New York Review of Books a few weeks back, and in particular the section on Orwell’s great work Why I Write. Whether you like writing, find writing frustrating or challenging, teach writing, or are mystified by how people who (seemingly) cannot write get by in the world, these are all for you.

The Letter & The Spirit

noreply@blogger.com (The Editor) — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 02:59:00 +0000

I think there are two direct ways to approach a law: to abide by its letter and (or) to abide by its spirit. We can do both, as we interpret each. Or we can choose one path or the other, also subject to some interpretation. Let's put aside "big" laws, like prohibitions on murder or rape. For smaller laws - let's say jaywalking, or speeding on the highway, I think most of us are inconsistent. We obey certain laws to the letter, devotedly. Others, we choose to view as more flexible prohibitions, deciding for ourselves where the spirit of the law (not going 95 MPH) is more important than the letter (staying at or under 65 MPH). I have been thinking about this issue a lot this Passover holiday, and I'll tell you why.

***

If Jimi Hendrix had been an observant Jew, right now he might be posing the question: have you ever been afflicted? Well, I have.

Six days into the matzah-eating holiday of Passover, I feel fine. I have controlled my intake of matzah this year, and worked to balance it with a slightly higher proportion of fibrous fruits and vegetables than I have in some years past. If you are Jewish, and you've binged on matzah, you know what this is about; if not, I'll spell it out: constipation. (It's almost the opposite of a dirty word.)

Still, even with the occasional burdens of matzah, I love Passover. It's a joyous holiday, that reminds me of many of the best qualities of Judaism, particularly the ability to reflect on the past while focusing on the future - and embedding firmly the idea that part of the key to future success is teaching and exploring ideas, across (and within) different generations.

But part of the problem with Passover is that it seems to have lead contemporary Jewry - almost regardless of the degree of orthodoxy - to make some stark choices between the letter of the law and its spirit.

During this holiday, there is a wide category of foods that are off-limits, which in a short and untechnical description can be rendered as: any grain-based food that may have had an opportunity to leaven or rise, or any food that includes grains or other rising agents. It's that simple, and that simply defines the letter of the law.

The spirit of the rule, however, I interpret differently. We are told to eat matzah because of the symbolism of this flat, unleavened bread in the context of the holiday: it was the bread of slaves, and a reminder of that experience. Therefore, to me, the spirit of the law dictates refraining from other grain-based products that one might normally eat in leavened form - even if they follow the letter of the law in being produced with no leavened grains, as with the kosher-for-Passover marble cake, pasta, and cous-cous pictured above. I am sure the folks at Osem, Savion, and Gefen are all nice people, simply making a product for a niche in the market. At the same time, I think companies like these have helped create that niche where it did not used to exist.

We have these products in my house right now. We have a toddler, and I would rather her eat, and eat according to the letter of the law in this instance, than violate both the letter and the spirit because she needs more food than we can muster under a matzah-only regime. But I find these foods to be problematic; even for me, even with my own very personal and quirky levels of observance.

Mostly, I find them a challenge to the underlying message of this eight-day holiday: if, throughout Passover, we eat foods that are very similar to those we eat the rest of the year, I fear we will degrade the message of the holiday itself, the teaching from one generation to the next that we should remember when we were slaves in the land of Egypt, and the joyousness that came with our freedom. Matzah is that reminder, where kosher-for-Passover faux-Cheerios are not.

We should use less

noreply@blogger.com (The Editor) — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 19:52:00 +0000

Are you interested in "a for-profit company that sells sustainable products and gives 10% of profits to water and sanitation projects. "

Check out useless, a new company with "useless" designed and branded products, from water bottles to really cool-looking bags made from recycled billboards.

The products look great, the premise is solid. - and best of all is that useless is looking to partner with colleges to "help campuses and students cut down on waste and raise money for clean water and sanitation projects."

Their first partner? My alma mater, Hampshire College.

Not so useless after all.

RSS Feed Update

noreply@blogger.com (The Editor) — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 18:44:00 +0000

More technology notes: with the migration to a new server last week, and the other problems I was having with Blogger, the Atom & RSS feeds for my sites were not working.

Those problems should now be fixed. If you need to update your feeds, here's the info:
Atom: http://www.sascha.com/atom.xml
RSS: http://www.2rss.com/atom2rss.php?atom=http://www.sascha.com/atom.xml

Cheers!