Blog

For the past three weeks the temperature has not dropped enough for dew to form on the grass or the windows of my car. I have even forgone one of the great pleasures of my life — walking to work. At night I sweat myself to sleep and wake up in the morning feeling like I spent the night running.

My apartment is in an old hardware store, built around the turn of the century. The walls are 18 inches of red brick. During the day they absorb sunlight, and at night they expel that light in the form of heat into my apartment. Thus my apartment as night is at least ten degrees hotter than the air outside.

Not long ago I commented that if I ever go into business for myself — building websites — that providing support of any kind for Netscape 4 would automatically raise my rates by 25%. Well, after discovering the breaking point for that browser, I have decided that, no matter the hit my business would take, I will do naught for NS4 other than create a redirect to the Mozilla upgrade page. To Hell with old browsers.

Damn, it’s hot out.

I just finished watching The Shawshank Redemption for, I dunno, maybe the tenth time. Sure, it is one of my favorite movies, and I have seen it enough that it is familiar, and comfortable, and something I can have on in the background while I do other things.

This time a single scene caught my attention; one I have noticed before, but not really *noticed*, until tonight: the scene when Andy (Tim Robbins) locks himself in the library and plays Mozart over the loudspeakers. The looks on the faces of the prisoners. The look on Andy’s face. Red: “I don’t know what those two Italian ladies were singing about. I’d like to think it was something so beautiful that it couldn’t be expressed in words.”

I spent most of this past Sunday sleepwalking, in a haze from lack of food and sleep. As I was stumbling around a supermarket in the afternoon the intercom came on playing “Perhaps Love” — the John Denver/Placido Domingo duet. I have never paid much attention to that song, but at that moment, me half dead from exhaustion, and tiny bits of hallucinogen floating around in my brain, it was…extraordinary. I stood in the aisle with my eyes closed and just listened to those beautiful voices, singing that beautiful song, in a place where I had never before heard music.

Or perhaps I just never noticed it. I was back there shopping this evening and the intercom was silent. Only the sounds of groceries being bagged and lobsters tapping against the glass walls of their peculiar prison. Maybe the weekend manager was a music lover. Or maybe the weekend manager was not there at all. Regardless, that couple of minutes of song at that moment stuck with me, and in trying to tell my friends about it and seeing smile-and-nod reactions I realized that there are indeed some moments of beauty that can’t be expressed in words.

So far the highlight of this otherwise uneventful, mildly boring week was the Blues on the Mall this evening, in sunny downtown Grand Rapids. The Chicago Rhythm and Blues Kings played up a storm and around 500 people danced and jived the night away.

I realized today that I need a vacation. Yes, I just returned from a vacation, but slow days inside, away from the sun and the music and, well, sleep — those days drain my energy and willpower and what little there is to do remains unaccomplished.

In another few days I will have the generic pictures-and-thumbnails template complete. The first gallery will be of the martial arts demonstration my class performed at Festival two weeks ago. We kicked ass.

“…The current spectacle of technology is having an effect on the civilian population of the appropriate classes, although cyborg development in this sector is a little more subtle than in the military. Most people have seen the first phases of the civilian cyborg, which is typically an information cyborg. They are usually equipped with lap-top computers and cellular phones. Everywhere they go, their technology goes with them. They are always prepared to work, and even in their leisure hours they can be activated for duty. Basically, these beings are intelligent, autonomous workstations that are on call 24 hours a day, 365 days a year…”
— Flesh Machine , by the Critical Art Ensemble

I will take no information technology with me on my vacation, other than my cell-phone. And it will remain off except in case of emergencies. Much as I love computers, sometimes I really hate computers. Any need to be on call in any information-related field is a sign/result of mismanagement of resources (optimistically) or stupidity and greed (pessimistically). And that extraordinary effort is so often accepted as “the way things work in this field” is contemptible. With proper management of time and resources, and most importantly, the subordination of individual egos to the goals of “the project”, the 80-hour week will be a thing of the past. Fear and stupidity are the only obstacles to a significant reduction in stress and burn-out in the information/technology sphere.