wheatblog

My new iMac arrived last week, so I’ve been busy porting over files, installing software, and learning about OS X and all things iMac (that’s Haden an me, playing around with Photo Booth).  

Back in the day, I was a Mac guy.  My dad bought me a nice Mac Classic II toward the end of my undergraduate studies.  I love it and got very familiar with its ins and outs.  I learned how to program HyperCard and even did some MIDI work with it, though it was mostly a word processing machine (via MacWrite II and Claris Works).  After that, I upgraded to a Mac Performa 631CD, which was a 68040-based machine with a CD drive (rare at the time) and a color monitor (now I feel old).  

When the Performa died, I was in grad school and had access to some nice Quadras via the media production lab.  I could access those at any hour of the day or night.  And I was broke anyway, so I didn’t bother to replace it. 

Since then, I’ve had two Windows laptops (both Dells).  The first ran Windows 98, which I later upgraded to Windows 2000.  My most recent one, which I still have, came with Windows XP Home, which I later upgraded to Windows XP Professional.  

And, you know, Windows XP is fine.  It’s a pretty solid and easy to use operating system.  But my laptop was just too slow and old.  And, since I can run XP on Mac hardware (for those times when I need it), I figured, why not see if the grass is greener?  There’s never been any love lost between me and Microsoft, even though a big part of what I do, professionally, is teach people how to use their products.  

So, since last week, I’ve been busy.  I’ve ported all my photographs from Adobe Photoshop Elements (I was still using version 3.0) to iPhoto.  I ported all my iTunes music, but the external drive where it lives took a dive (thanks for nothing, LaCie), so I’ll have to reinstall that from backups (thank to you, SyncBack) and port it again (the media is the same, but the paths are specified differently on WinXP compared to OS X).  My photos also lived on that drive that went down (and were also backed up, thankfully).  And I had set up WMware Fusion (running WinXP as the guest OS), so I could keep editing them as I had in the past.  But, after the drive died, I pulled everything from backups and dropped it all into iPhoto.  I’ll still need Fusion to run some WinXP-only apps like Sony Acid Pro, but that’s just for legacy audio production files.  

So far, so good.  I’ve been really enjoying OS X, the extra screen real estate, and the overall speed and performance boost.  Thanks to lots of chatting with my Mac friends, I’ve been getting my box lined out with the software I need.  So far, that means TextWrangler, NeoOffice, Skype, plus the aforementioned VMware Fusion and nice built-in apps like iChat.  

And, since I can’t sleep at night without a decent automated backup solution (and since I no longer have any confidence in my other–still working–LaCie drive), I bought a 500GB Western Digital My Book drive and have Time Machine saving all my stuff to it.  

Today’s Krugman is not to be missed:  ”Know-Nothing Politics.”  The term “anti-intellectualism” covers the same ground, but it probably has too many syllables for the people who need to understand it.  Though his words be immediately taken out of context (hell, I’ve done it in the title of this post), the point isn’t that Republicans are stupid.  The point is that the Republican party has earned a lot of political clout by repeatedly asserting that every problem has an overtly simple solution and that thinking things through is both effeminate and ineffective (you could extrapolate this to politicians in general, but it’s currently the stock-in-trade of the GOP).  BushCo’s reign of error has certainly shown the flaw in that “logic.”  But that doesn’t seem to shake people’s faith in the (toxic) idea.   

Because life is incredibly busy at the moment, here’s a capsule summary of recent events, which I may or may not expand upon in later posts (time allowing):

1. We’re back from our Arkansas trip.  Haden’s Christening/Baptism went well, as did the big family brunch afterwards, which was the first time most of my family and Gina’s have come together for one big event.  Pix to follow.
2. I finished William James’ Pragmatism, which I’d long wanted to read.  Highly recommended, both for substance and style.  
3. I finally got to see No Country For Old Men, which I enjoyed, especially Tommy Lee Jones’ character.

That’s the quick rundown.  I’ll expand upon each when I can find the time.      

It doesn’t seem like five years have gone by.  Cheers, Pop.  

Google Docs has long had the ability to publish documents to the web, either to a select group of fellow viewers and editors, or for general consumption.  But two additional features make it a potentially useful and simple way to publish all manner of complicated documents.  First is the ability to easily create links from one document to the other.  And the other is the ability to control the rather lackluster layout of the publish documents via the new “Edit CSS” feature.  

For instance, I’ve been tinkering with putting together some grammar guides for my students, as a little extra help on topics with which they have the most trouble.  So I created this one on possessive nouns and pronouns (you’d be amazed how many college students have trouble with these).  I was pretty happy with that, so I decided to do one on another common problem, pronoun case.  Then I realized I might as well create a table of contents and link these to it (and link out to any new ones I create).  

(I’m still working on the title. The current one seems too stuffy.  I’m tempted to call it “Wheat’s Grammar Book,” but I don’t want my students calling me “Wheat.”)

I use a tiny bit of CSS to make the published versions look more like they do in Google Doc’s word processor’s fairly new “fixed-width page view” (it’s an option on the “View” menu).  You can add it via the “Edit CSS…” command (which is on the “Edit” menu):

body { width: 800px; margin: 32px; padding: 32px; border: 1px solid gray; }

I look for them every summer.  South Carolina doesn’t have a helmet law, so most riders don’t bother with one.  That’s bad enough, of course.  But the hot Carolina summer also encourages light clothing.  Yet, until yesterday, I hadn’t seen the ultimate idiot clothing combination–that rare complete disregard for any sort of safety equipment.  Well, I finally saw it:  no helmet, shorts, tank top, and flip flops!  

You see quite a lot of riders in in t-shirts and jeans.  But they usually have the good sense to wear decent shoes or boots.  Even those dumb enough to opt for shorts rarely go the whole hog and ride with nothing but flip flops.  But, there you have it.  To be fair, the idiot in question did have some aviator shades on.  I guess that counts for something.  

Hey, congressional “Democrats,” here’s another chance to roll over ”compromise” with your fiends across the isle: President Bush to Lift Executive Ban on Offshore Drilling.  Go ahead, you hypocrites.  Time to jump up (again) into Bush’s lap like the good little lapdogs you are.  Otherwise, you’ll be painted as in favor of four-dollar-a-gallon gasoline.  Hurry!  See if you can be first to sell out your party for a short-term, political gain!

In a Zen garden sort of way:  thisissand.com (via MeFi).

I love real-world examples of irony.  Yesterday, I noticed that, here in Mount Pleasant, the local CiCi’s Pizza Buffet is next door to the local WeightWatchers.  There is one business in-between them, but anyone going into or out of either establishment is in clear view of those visiting the other.  I wonder how many people have set off to go to one and wound up at the other? 

I will leave it to my humble readers to guess which of the two I was patronizing.  

As a new parent, I’ve had the dubious pleasure of becoming familiar with children’s television programming, especially Playhouse Disney.  As far as I can tell, most of the shows on Disney’s morning lineup are harmless.  A few are even entertaining (Bunnytown, I’m looking at you).  The best bits are usually the short programs (e.g. Emily Yeung, Ooh & Aah, Feeling Good with JoJo) between the longer-format ones.  

But Higglytown Heroes, despite the They Might be Giants theme music and the excellent animation, gives me pause.  The basic plot of every episode starts with the Higglytown kids finding some problem they can’t solve, at which point Twinkle–the creative but clueless character–proposes some outlandish solution that, contra Occam’s famous dictum, multiplies the number of entities but without coming closer to a real solution.  Not to fear, though, because Fran, an annoying, know-it-all squirrel, is quick to slap Twinkle down.  Though she always leads with a compliment, she never agrees even in part with Tinkle’s solution.  And, in any context other than a children’s cartoon, Fran’s contempt for Twinkle would be clear.  

At this point, the Higglytown kids are greeted by a Higglytown “hero,” who, depending upon the problem to be solved, might be a soccer coach, a janitor, a teacher, Pizza Guy (one of the recurring characters), the woman who operates the street-sweeping machine, etc.  You get the idea:  it takes a village.  We’re all heros inasmuch as we do our jobs and, thereby, help one another out.  

The latter part of that isn’t a bad message, of course.  Communities are interdependent.  And children find learning about different occupations fascinating.  The idea that doing whatever it is you’ve put your hand to might mean more than the obvious commodity or labor exchange is, well, at least putting a hopeful spin our human relations.  

Three things get me about the show, though.  The first is that, while deference to those with more experience or with specialized knowledge is often necessary (hey, I’m a teacher, after all), I’ve yet to see an episode where the H-crew actually put their minds to a problem and solve it by logical thinking or sheer determination.  They are, in fact, so quick to throw their hands in the air and beg for help that I have a hard time imagining a problem simple enough that they might be able to solve it.  

The second issue is the recurring Fran-Twinkle tete-a-tete.  While including Twinkle’s fanciful ideas is probably meant to show the value of creativity, the very clear message is that Twinkle’s sort of creativity is a waste of time, something to be gotten through as quickly as possible, with a wink and a chuckle, so the more rational Fran can tell us the real score (which always boils down to deferring to someone more experienced).  Twinkle’s inability to ever put her ample creativity to any practical use is just further evidence that the H-crew are useless in the face of problems and need to defer to authority as quickly as possible.  

The third, and most significant, issue I have with the show is the abuse of the word “hero” itself.  For, while there’s is something noble in doing your job, no matter how menial, in the spirit of the greater good–rather than just to line your own pocket–doing so is not something that can properly be labeled “heroic,” unless your job is fighting fires or policing the mean streets (and, even then, true heroism is something that happens only form time to time, not every hour of every day).  I certainly don’t object to this idea that “we’re all in it together.”  We are.  I just think H-Town’s producers need to find a better word for it, like “camaraderie,” “community,” “civic pride,” or, perhaps, “duty.”  

“Hero” is one of those terms, like “tragic,” that gets used in so many undeserved contexts that its real meaning is effectively emptied.  And that’s a shame.  Because there are acts that deserve the title “heroic,” and there are people who truly are heros.