A January Appraisal

I’ve been neglecting the blog lately. I compose thoughts and entries in my head, but never commit them to the keyboard. It has been a fun and busy last few months, and I have a lot of things to record that I may never get around to recording. Some highlights…

I saw this really amazing interactive theatre piece called Sleep No More put on by Punchdrunk in association with the American Repertory Theatre. It is a retelling of Macbeth mashed up with Hitchcock’s Rebecca, and I had to go back and see it again, and still didn’t feel like I had adequately explored the piece, spread across over 30 rooms in an old school building in Brookline. The show got immensely popular near the end, with people flying in from all over the country to experience it and every showing selling out weeks in advance. I’m glad I caught it early in the run, but am disappointed I wasn’t able to pick up a third showing.

More exciting though, coming out of the show the first time I got a surprise call from Shaina, letting me know that she and Brian chose their three year anniversary as an occasion to get engaged to be married. Wow. My little sister is getting married. I feel old now. And a little behind.

Spurred to competition (kidding!), Meghan and I discussed living together, and then decided she would move in. Now we’re caught in an awkward position where her lease doesn’t end until July 31st, and we have to keep looking wistfully forward by six months. It does give us time to do some redecorating, including repainting and refurnishing the bedroom with a fancy new bedroom set that set me back by a few trips to Iceland. Today is our nine month anniversary.

So no travels abroad in the near future, alas, but there was Christmas fun in New Jersey and then Connecticut with Meghan’s extended family, followed by California with my family through New Years. We explored LA and San Diego, had some nice meals and got to experience the Rose Parade, including a sad Ronald MacDonald when his float broke down. On the outside he was smiling, but I could see through the painted facade to the pain beneath.

It was fun discovering my home state anew through Meghan’s eyes. Venice Beach was a blast, and of course we went to In-N-Out, as well as the Farmer’s Market on Wilshire. We’re planning to hit up the northern part of the state at some indeterminate point in the future, especially San Francisco and perhaps Sacramento, but nothing too soon (see above re: bankrupting furniture purchases!).

All this travel and family time left me feeling a bit cut off from friends, especially in the dreary month of January, but that was delightfully remedied, first by a ski day with Jeremy, and then by a lovely Egremont weekend. We traveled to Meghan’s family’s house in the Berkshires on the New York border, with a dozen friends in tow. There were many board games, some good skiing at Jiminy Peak, bowling, and even some unexpected snow shoveling. My Hanukkah gift of new skis performed brilliantly, and I got to experience the strangest feeling of not being in terrible pain at the end of the day. The joy of boots that fit my oddly-shaped feet!

There has been some trouble at work with a big new deployment that went hideously awry and had to be rolled back. Now the rest of my work plans have been derailed by fruitless efforts to determine what went wrong and how to fix it without making wholesale changes to our environment. It’s a mess and no fun, but hopefully will pass soon, and I will be able to move on to more interesting things.

My Harvard contract expires in mid-March, so I interviewed for some other jobs but ultimately decided that where I am is where I’d like to stay for the time being. We’re going through some complicated renewal/term-to-perm process that hopefully will be resolved prior to my last day.

Those are the highlights, I suppose. Lots more I could talk about, but now I am late for work. Coming one day: pictures from California, and maybe even the pictures from my big Birthright trip to Israel back in August!

What have you been up to?

How The Republican establishment and the Tea Party movement teamed up to bring down Obama’s health care plan

The nascent Tea Party movement continues to show its reach and influence, and the Republican Party is learning how to align itself with and harness the energy of the movement to push its agenda. Scott Brown’s defeat of lethargic Martha Coakley in Massachusetts was a strategic triumph that caught a distracted and stretched Democratic Party completely off guard. Either this defeat will wake up the Democrats and spur them to rally around some legislative reforms that appeal to the “working man” for a series of quick wins that restore the faith of the voters, or it will cause them to fragment even more and sustain sweeping losses in the midterms. I can’t say I’m optimistic about their chances, and it is disappointing that neglect of the economy has once again put the kibosh on badly needed health care reform, doubly unfortunate as unemployment stays historically high.

Somehow I’ve gotten to a stage in my life where I can buy all the tech stuff I want, and it’s just no longer that interesting. I used to dream about new gadgets and imagine how they’d improve my life, but of course they never really did. […] But there’s something to be said for owning beautiful, useful objects that light up your home and make you smile every time you see them—and that always work just as expected, that will never crash, need a motherboard replacement, burn your legs, or talk back to you with indecipherable demands.

Designer Amy Hoy, in an interview about the technologies she uses to do her work.

I know what she means. I guess maybe I’m starting to grow up too.

Walk Away From Your Mortgage!

A columnist in the New York Times Magazine argues that in our current economic climate, with rampant speculation, risk-taking, strategic bankruptcies, failures, and all sorts of other destabilizing and socially detrimental actions being undertaken by large corporations, homeowners have no “moral obligation” to stick with their underwater mortgages. Many people are choosing to walk away from their houses and mortgage payments, and I tend to agree that it is only fair for the little guy to play the same sort of games so popular among greedy hedge funds, investment bankers, and the rest of the people who have done so much to destroy our economy and hurt so many people.

Travel

Cities I visited in 2009

Inspired by Jason Kottke’s yearly list. One or more days and nights were spent in each place. Those cities marked with an * were visited multiple times on non-consecutive days. Those marked with a † were visited for a full day but not a night.

This was quite a good year for travel! See also my 2008 list.

United States
Cambridge, MA*
Santa Ana, CA*
Mashpee, MA
Lake Havasu, AZ
North Egremont, MA*
Ringwood, NJ*
Baltimore, MD
Cleveland, OH
Niagara, NY
Scotch Plains, NJ
Hull, MA†
Northfield, VT
Huntington Beach, CA*
San Diego, CA		 France
Paris

Ireland
Dublin
Galway†

Israel
Kibbutz Manara
Haifa
Jerusalem
Netanya
Tel Aviv†

 Italy
Rome
Perugia
Florence
Cinque Terre
Lake Como

This movement in the direction of emptiness is profoundly difficult for contemporary culture — and particularly American culture — to grapple with. Occasional recessions and other setbacks aside, we assume that our national trajectory always moves toward fullness, that our cultural progress can be measured by how much new square footage we’ve created and occupied. But that process has completely reversed itself in many of cities hardest hit by economic crisis.

Christopher Hawthorne, “The Burj Dubai and architecture’s vacant stare“

Another Challenge for Ethical Eating – Plants Want to Live, Too

The Times argues for plant welfare. That’s my gut reaction whenever I hear talk about the awfulness of humans killing animals for food, clothing, or supplies. We have to eat something, and, animal cruelty concerns aside, animal protectionists never stop to explain why are animals more deserving of life than plants.

On data permanence, On the Media

A great On the Media radio story I heard today discusses the problem of old newspaper articles haunting sources or subjects forever, due to the permanence of data online, even long after the news in question has faded from importance. Should an arrest a decade ago, in which all charges were dropped, lower a lawyer’s chances of landing a job at a big firm? Should an article a college student wrote about Craig’s List sex make him afraid to teach fourth graders, for fear they (or their parents) will stumble across it while Googling his name?

The conclusion of the piece, by producer Nazanin Rafsanjani, reflects a shift, I think, in OTM’s coverage of this issue, perhaps because our general conception of the issue itself is changing as we all are subject more and more frequently to these online data permanence conundrums.

First this, from Houston Chronicle editor Dean Betts:

It’s an unforgiving world right now, and that’s one price that we pay for having such access, unrivaled, unimaginable access to information. My information is part of that too. Your stuff is not your stuff anymore. You don’t own it if it’s on the web. It’s out there.

And Nazanin concludes the story as follows:

Perhaps there will come a point when we’ll all have something awkward, or even potentially damaging about us on the web. And if it’s public for everyone, then maybe we’re protected by the crowd. All of us, living out our most embarrassing moments, one Google search at a time, in front of one another.

In 2007, On the Media host Bob Garfield told me that he is obsessed, not with the “permanence” of online data, but “with the convergence of permanence, irresponsibility, invasion of privacy, and malice. […I]t raises alarms, because there will be victims.”

My view, at the time, and now, is that we need not greet this revolution with fear. There will be victims, there will be suffering, but the positives will — must — outweigh the negatives. It is all a question of what sort of world we want to live in, and how we choose to live in it. We will lose much of our online anonymity and privacy, we already have, but as I wrote in 2007,

[I]n other ways we are going to gain more, as the community in which we exist extends beyond all geographic bounds, as the amount of information increases faster than the ability of the tools to analyze it, and as we find new ways to “own” and control our own data, rather than allowing others (vendors, identity providers, governments, credit agencies) to own all the data about us.

Geeking Out

Cleaning Technological House

The end of the year for me is traditionally a time to tidy my accumulated digital detritus. As part of that process, I’ve migrated AgBlog to a new server, set everything back up from scratch, and re-implemented all of my customized functionality and design in a much cleaner, more sustainable form. In the process, this blog has picked up some neat new functionality, including better display of photo galleries and automatic loading of additional posts when you reach the bottom of a page.

Enjoy, and let me know if you have any problems. I suspect I’ll have more to say in terms of new content very soon.

Geeking Out

Staying Agile

I have recently been evaluating the new version of a product called 1Password, a password saver and form filler for the Mac that automates filling web forms, entering credit card information, and logging into web sites. The built-in Apple Keychain does this fairly well, once you figure it out, but 1Password provides a lot more flexibility and additional features.

My biggest concern about 1Password’s new version is that it no longer uses the Apple Keychain as its secure backend storage system. There are inherit dangers with creating your own approach to secure encrypted storage, and using well-understood, widely-deployed solutions is generally the best approach. That said, I’m happy to discover that Agile has written up documents explaining why they abandoned the Apple Keychain and how the Agile Keychain was developed. Now I just have to decide if their arguments are persuasive enough to justify the switch.

Three paths to bacon

Mmm, bacon.

The excitement of the week is that Trader Joe’s opened a new location by Alewife. I went over today to check it out and it was pretty exciting. All the employees were friendly and seemed to genuinely enjoy discovering new TJs products that they weren’t aware of. Of course the Trader Joe’s Song was running through my head the whole time…

I picked up some natural organic granola hormone-free pet-safe carbon-neutral bacon, and decided to follow the directions on the packaging exactly. Unfortunately, there were three sets of directions: microwave, broiler, and pan fry. So I did all three, and compared the results.

Continue reading “Three paths to bacon”

Do your shoelaces always come undone? Do your shoelace bows sit vertically instead of across the shoe? If so, you’re probably tying a “Granny Knot”, and one simple change to your technique will result in a balanced knot that sits straight and stays secure.

Ian’s Shoelace Site

My eyes have been opened!

A free bench in Cleveland

Mat takes a breather in a piece of Cleveland art. This huge stamp may have been one of the highlights of Cleveland, but there were somewhat more impressive things to see on our brief side trip to Niagara Falls. While in town we explored, went to the Zoo, visited the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and saw the Springsteen show.

Meghan blogged about the experience: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

View photo slideshow