Just got back from the lunch buffet at Monelli’s in Portage. So much food, the prices are great and the food is pretty good, but it’s all carbs so this afternoon is going to be a bit of dragging anchor. Dear Keurig Wan-Kenobi, you’re my only hope… LOL!
A few months ago while talking with a friend about technology the conversation turned to throwback items that we enjoy using. I brought up my fondness for fountain pens, which always seems to surprise people. The idea of a pen as a writing instrument goes back a really long time. Around the turn of the last century, there was an explosion in patents related to fountain pens and how they hold and dispense ink as you write. After my conversation with my friend, I was inspired to go shopping a little bit. I had some money that I set aside for small little gifts to myself that I had set aside over the past number of years. I never really touch it, so the money sits in my accounts. I came across a company that sells a highly regarded fountain pen, called TWSBI. As I got to browsing the options on Amazon, I looked at my Lamy branded Fountain Pen and realized that it was good as entry level pens go, but I wanted to move up a notch. TWSBI seemed a good option. The pen I selected was the TWSBI Diamond 580AL Silver Fountain Pen with the medium nib. I also got the “Broad Nib” as many reviewers expressed pleasure at writing with both.
TWSBI 580AL Fountain Pen
I have to say that writing with it is quite an experience. I started writing with fountain pens back in college and found that the way the ink flows beat any other sort of pen hands down. Plus the way the nib moves on good paper makes writing longhand a pleasure. It can still work on rough stock, but it struggles with the rough material, and there is more skritch-skritch-skritch while writing on some of the lowest class papers out there.
The Lamy I have uses a piston-convertible insertable tank, while the TWSBI has its piston tank built into the frame of the pen itself. I find that the TWSBI holds more ink, way more ink than my Lamy ever did.
Another little bit to note, fountain pens aren’t meant for left-hand writers as far as I know. The ink doesn’t dry fast enough for the way a lot of left-handed writers have to use a pen. Although I don’t have many folks I know that are left-handed writers, so there is no way to see if they could use it or not without making a mess of their hands with the ink.
If you have a little bit of spending money, this pen can go a long way in both its look and its function to add a little something to your workaday life. It won’t solve problems or anything like that, but it is something nice to have that a lot of people appreciate. I always chuckle to myself when people remark on how I use a fountain pen, and what I do for a living, which makes people think I should be keyboard bound. Sometimes old things peak, and iterations afterward are all downhill from that peak. In a lot of ways, just like Windows 2000. LOL.
A while ago I was laughing about the sort of silly output that you can expect from Keyboard Autosuggest on iPhones when you give it a subject word to start with. This turned into a free-range idea and I left it alone for a while.
Several nights ago, awaking from a dream that I no longer recollect, it occurred to me quite all of a sudden that I could merge Keyboard Autosuggest with Haiku, the Japanese poetry of 5-7-5.
Obviously this is gobbledegook, but I suppose on some level it is rather funny.
Haiku Autosuggest: Keeley
Keeley thinks it will / take me about an hour more / than a week ago
After I reminded people that I offer a complimentary attachment checking service through my office I got a submission from one of our warehouse operators in Texas. It was an oddly-named attachment called UmjSJCk.zip. I saved it to my Mac and opened Terminal. Then unpacked the zip file and it unpacked to Quotation.exe. I giggled a bit when I ran the file command on it and saw that it was a Windows executable. Exactly what I expected. So I put it in a folder called sandbox and started my copy of Windows XP that I have in VirtualBox. The OS has it’s hard drive set to immutable, so any changes or write activities that the OS does is not sent to the VHD image, but rather to a “snapshot” VHD image on the side. Each time I start the OS, it’s as if I am starting it for the first time, because when an immutable VM finds something (anything) in the snapshot folder, it dumps it first then creates a new snapshot image for writes. I make sure the sandbox can’t see anything beyond my Mac by assigning it’s LAN connection as a Host-Only Adapter. That means that the VM can only see VirtualBox’es fake network host and nothing else.
So start this sandbox Windows XP, mount the sandbox folder as a drive to the sandbox – set as Read Only also, by the way, no baby-backwash here… and then double-clicked on Quotation.exe. It loaded a process and started to grope the network connection. Of course it did. So, with the bug trying it’s best to reach out and fetch it’s payload I clicked on the little red close control and told VirtualBox to power off the virtual machine.
Poof. All gone. Changes and everything. Then I dumped the sandbox contents.
I think whats more concerning here is that my scan using ClamAV on my Mac in regards to this data showed no infected data. Well, it certainly was trying to be nasty.
Then I start to wonder about the inherent usefulness of VirtualBox when it comes to airgapped computing when it comes to privacy and really being paranoid about encryption. But then I realize that when I turn off my Airport on my MBP, that it’s just as good as anything I could screw around with in VirtualBox. An infection in my MBP? Heh… piff.
Safe inside, toasty warm, while water pitter-patters on the roof… describe your perfect, rainy afternoon.
It’s a split between the slow romance of a rainy afternoon or the quiet snuggliness of a blizzard. Either event always carries within it the possibility of power outage and since the last great outage I’ve found myself both challenged and strangely engaged. Without technology, without all of the noise I found it much easier to live and carry on. The nighttime is pitch, refrigeration is a commodity and cooking becomes more challenging with the loss of an oven, but being cut off from the trappings of technology let you get back to what really matters.
I’ve for the longest time felt that technology has shrunk the world and made everything knowable. Even the things that should always remain hidden and unknown. Some people share too much, and we’ve devolved into fetishizing worry and concern over things that we have no ability to affect. Ever since I killed my television, effectively walking away from broadcast TV and all the awfulness that comes with it I’ve found my life in flux, rebalancing and having more access to happiness as a result. The mood of a rainstorm or a blizzard is a perfect setting for considering where I am in life, it’s the perfect moment for introspection and reflection. It doesn’t escape me that both of these conditions glorify the home, things that surround the home are always going to make me happier.
When the power fails, when technology recedes you find yourself sitting alone with your thoughts, if you are with other people you start to struggle for activities to occupy your time. Telling stories, talking, reading books, playing games – the things we all did before all this technology came and made everything “better” are sometimes the very things that we need to get back to. I have always carried a special reverence for old things, older technology that has been supplanted by newer technology. Just because something is new doesn’t mean it’s better. My analog wristwatch and my fountain pen are personal testaments to that very thing. The rain and the snow lend encouragement to the things in our lives that none of us should stray very far away from. I’ve found myself actually fantasizing about turning off the house power to have new oases of freedom from electricity and the trappings of technology. It’s not actually practical as turning off the house mains would shut down my refrigerator and that would make living significantly more difficult and increase misery if I lost all that safety in the box-that-stays-cold.
I think more people should at least play pretend that the power has gone out. Try to reconnect to each other without technology, without social networking and all these little gadgets that have filled up our lives. Break out the lanterns and play card games, play board games, talk, tell stories, relate to one another again without all the structure that we’ve surrounded ourselves with. The irony isn’t lost on me, that I am advocating breaks from technology while typing on the very pinnacle of such technology and eventually posting it into the very thing I rail against. I think it comes to a sense of balance. Not being completely embedded, obsessed, and reliant on technology on one hand and not being a Luddite in the other. There’s a time and place for both and keeping both alive in your life feels important somehow. Electricity isn’t like sunshine, it isn’t guaranteed. It’s important to figure out life without electricity and to be prepared. This balance and respect for older things makes a lot of sense to me.
It’s far afield from where this daily post started – a description of a rainy day and how it makes you feel turning into a pleading that you can see better represented in Koyaanisqatsi. Funny what a little rain will bring.
January 1
Stroke of Midnight
Where were you last night when 2013 turned into 2014? Is that where you’d wanted to be?”
On the last evening of 2013 I was alone with my two boys during the winter storm raging overhead. My partner had the day before left to visit his family in Albany and I was tending to duties around the house and keeping my two boys safe and occupied. Actually I don’t know who was keeping who happy more. I certainly was a warm lap to sit on and the food-giver, but in a lot of ways they were almost always with me, keeping me company and keeping me occupied with their adorable (and sometimes destructive) antics.
I found a bottle of bubbly wine in our collection from M. Lawrence winery up in the Leelanau Peninsula that I had purchased long enough ago that I don’t really remember when. Around 11pm on New Years Eve I inspected and uncorked the bottle and puttered about the house, a small plate of christmas cookies and a champagne flute that I thankfully found hidden in the rearmost of the top cupboard in the kitchen where we keep all our wine glasses.
At 11:50pm, my iPhone rang and it was Scott with an incoming FaceTIme call. We spent the interval from New Years Eve to New Years Day linked virtually by FaceTime. It was a great use of technology and in many ways we had our cake and got to eat it too. Scott got a chance to visit with his family and we got a chance to spend New Years together, after a fashion.
After 2014 had arrived, I disconnected from FaceTime and finished my glass of wine and with cats in tow, padded off to bed.
Was it what I wanted to do? It really was a matter of what I had to do. I couldn’t leave my two boys on their own for a week as the eldest is the most fragile and I frequently worry after his health and activity level. I was able to use technology to cheat around the edges as it were, to be both at home and in New York with my partner at the same time. I’m so glad I was able to take advantage of the technology and it’s just one more, amongst a gallery of other reasons, why I’m so very glad that I have Apple technology in my life. It made it all seamless and easy. I could have done it other ways, but it would have been a mess. The Apple way is smooth and simple and just as easy as answering the phone.
– This is also the first of the Post-A-Day prompts from the book that WordPress.com assembled to inspire bloggers like me to write more and more frequently.
Early bird, or night owl?
Naturally I’m definitely a night owl. I can get started in the morning without difficulty but I do my best work in the afternoon and evenings. I tend to take nice hot relaxing showers before I go to bed, I find it helps me get to sleep easier and it is often during these relaxing times under the hot spray that my best thoughts arrive. I’m a huge fan, and I’ve written before about how useful it is to seed the subconscious mind with work and then reap the rewards when you are doing totally unrelated things. I like the idea that as I am relaxing under the warm water, which is my “home element” and it’s during these times that I have most of my epiphanies. There is more for me in the evening hours than ever in the morning hours. Too early and my mind isn’t running, honestly I’m usually besotted by dreamstuff that I drag into my waking life from my dreams to be useful for very much at all. I’ve found that I can dislodge a lot of the backed up dreamstuff if I journal it out. I used to muse that my mornings are occupied by dull setup procedures and that I don’t get seriously engaged until late morning bridging over to early afternoon and running into the night.
Tell us about a book you can read again and again without getting bored — what is it that speaks to you?
I read both 1984 and “What Dreams May Come” regularly for different reasons. 1984 is worth reading because it speaks to the dangers of NewSpeak. When I was growing up I decided that expanding my vocabulary was the best single thing I could do for myself, to make me a better person. In 1984, that whole thing is a thread the book challenges and it terrifies me. The quality and the lessons it teaches I think are incredibly valuable. As for the latter book, I read that when I was at the lowest point in faith and it helped by inspiring me to seek out a new faith. I enjoy Richard Matheson for his other works as well, but that book really speaks to me.
I just read this article and it reminded me of so much of what I was doing back in November of 2013.
The key to engagement is to be active and honest and produce the content that will get your message across. As the article states, what people want is not really what most organizations really want to share, they want honesty, heart, and (self-referentially) engagement.
A case in point, Jeri Ryan, an actress who has starred in many TV Series in her career. I bring her up as a great example of someone who gets engagement. The platform that she used was Google Plus, but it was only tangential to this topic. The important distinction was how she chose to use the service. She actually engaged individually with her fans, which is something more than a lot of other celebrities are comfortable with doing. I’ve written about this particular thing before on this blog. I have noticed that many people seeking or maintaining a certain level of fame think that they can create a social networking persona and simply use it to dump links and material to their work and leave right after that. It turns them from living people into two-dimensional billboards. When you elect to engage, you really have to pursue the entire endeavor otherwise people will notice your two dimensionality and while the initial surge will be impressive, there won’t be anything on the tail end to maintain your initial levels of engagement. Jeri Ryan proves that if you actually do engage, the rewards continue to build. In the case of a television celebrity, engaging with your fans brings them closer to you and perhaps they are more loyal, more attentive to what you have to say, quite possibly even more accepting of any causes you may want to share with them. Only Mrs. Ryan can answer the question of whether engagement with the fans was a good thing or not, as a fan, it was nice to see from my vantage point.
Which brings me back to November. Much of it is water under the bridge but there is still was a lot of work that could have been done. The level of engagement is key, and much like the linked article above, I still strongly maintain that if you have a cause or mission and you want to promote it, it has more to do with understanding your audience than it does trying to carefully construct some framework from which to launch some blind campaign. The difference is that people respond to an authentic message, one with heart, more readily than they do something that was pre-processed, sterilized, vetted and canned. To quote Chef Gordon Ramsay, if you want a successful restaurant you need to provide simple honest fare using fresh local ingredients. This wisdom can be applied to anything else, not just running a restaurant. It can also apply to engagement, with the core lesson being that you’ll get your best bang for your buck if you provide simple, honest engagement using fresh local talent. People want to engage with other people, not with a monolithic edifice. To draw back to the cooking metaphor, would people be more interested in eating a dish that was sourced locally or would they rather eat something sourced from Sysco or GFS?
Another thing that I was working on, was the notion of engaging the crowd. In the previous arrangement, it was a lead-in to the notion of crowd-funding a goal. At least from the company hosting the talk, that was their bleeding-edge analysis of where all this social networking and engagement is actually going in the future. The organizations that engage with the most honesty (heart) will have a better chance at meeting their goals.
Alas, all that is over now, but the article did move me to want to comment on it.
I was browsing through my Feedly app this morning looking at all the feeds I am tracking with the site and I ran across a site which displayed what it would look like if a woman applied 365 days worth of makeup in one day. It was gruesome. She looked, at the end, as if her face was melting. It was downright ghastly.
Which got me thinking about cosmetics. All the things that women do to make themselves “look beautiful” and that of course started me thinking about a chain of thoughts all linked one to another and the further I went the more silly it got. Now, none of this is actually honestly an argument, but it is a inside look as to one way I carry on with coming up with these ideas.
There is a constellation of things that some women do to themselves in order to make themselves look beautiful. Now I would posit that this is a fallacy right from the get go, why can’t a person who is hygenic and unadorned not be considered honestly beautiful? Eh. So let’s carry on with all the playing blocks to this chain of thought. Women adorn themselves with various bits and pieces. High heels, shoulder pads, brightly (sometimes colored) skin applications to the face, lipstick, eye shadow, eyebrow shadow, lip gloss, mascara, and of course, all the shaving. Shave the arms, the legs, the face. Pluck pluck pluck, wax wax wax.
What have women done? They have changed their shape and their form, at least when it comes to high heels and shoulder pads they have elected to become taller and more masculine, especially with the shoulder pads. The accidental overloading of shoulder pads is where the real comedy gold lies, women can sometimes accidentally have too much shoulder and look foolish because they stop looking like women and more like… linebackers.
Oh god, is this where it’s going? Bright colors, ruddy cheeks, colorful lips, tall, pronounced shoulders, it really argubly starts to feel like a relatively unfocused gender warp. Women are attempting to become beautiful by emulating men? Does the application of cosmetics and all the other bullshit that men expect women to go through masculinize them? When you get dressed up, are you on your way to becoming a drag king?
But then there is all that shaving. Denial of body hair. Which creates a very specific condition of masculinized pre-pubescent adrogyny. Male-boy-male. That’s really troubling to think about. At the end, could it be that the entire cosmetic industry, the entire cultural structure that women have been sold, about how they should look, be thin, be hairless, be tall, have pronounced shoulders, look aggressive, look excited… where do you go when you play all this out? Where do you end up?
Do you end up with straight men fetishizing women through the lens of unfocused pedophilic homosexuality? You turn your women into lithe young men who just ran 5 miles. The sheen of sweat (shiny), the red lips, the shoulders, the hairlessness, the ruddy cheeks, the tallness…
Boys who do Girls like their Boys… Ahem.
Not that it actually is this way, but what if it was?