January 30, 2007
Silence of the slot machines ...
Few things are more eerie than trundling through a Las Vegas casino at 5 a.m. while a vacuum cleaner whines in the distance and every few hundred feet you pass some poor, solitary Midwesterner sitting at the slots, trying to coax a fortune from the blinking lights. What happened to all the shouting and jingling chaos that filled the place three hours ago?
(BTW: If you must play the slots, I've found The Munsters is your best bet. Between Marilyn and Grandpa, everything will be alright ...)
Posted by Bob Benz at 9:34 AM | Comments (0)
January 20, 2007
Frosty sunrise
The dogs and I got to witness an amazing sunrise at Melton Hill Lake this morning. Xena had ice clinging to her from her frosty dip in the lake and Gilligan and Ozzy where running around like maniacs. There's something about the cold silence of a January morning, pierced by the occasional shriek of birds as they awaken, that is totally sublime. Steam rises up off the water. My mind's as crisp as the dawn. The day can only go downhill from here ...
Posted by Bob Benz at 8:39 PM | Comments (2)
What the dormouse said
I just finished John Markoff's "What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry." It's been on my list for a while. Overall, it was a great read.
Some of it is a rather dry account of the rise of the personal computer in Silicon Valley. And at times Markoff seems to generalize about the connection between the computer innovators and the counterculture. But there are strong ties in many spots, especially in the way LSD and the counterculture affected the worldview of these folks and their attitudes. It goes a long way to explain the open source movement and some of the collaborative approaches to development that have characterized the rise of the personal computer.
A few interesting notes:
• In the intro, Markoff details an interview he had with a somewhat peevish Steve Jobs, who "explained that taking LSD was one of the two or three most important things he had done in life, and he said he felt that because people he knew had not tried psychedelics, there were things about him they couldn't understand. He also said that his countercultural roots often led left him feeling like an outsider in the corporate world of which he is now a leader." Amen.
• He talks about the first real "online" newspaper, when a bunch of folks at the SAIL lab streamed AP and New York Times content into their system and made it highly searchable. Before Google. Before Alta Vista.
• Before Ebay and other Internet commerce plays emerged, these geeks used their computer network to transact a marijuana deal between the SAIL folks in California and people at MIT's labs in New England. Necessity is the mother of invention, I guess.
• "It's the next thing after acid." Ken Kesey, after spending several hours seeing the text editing and information retrieval capabilities of Augment oNLine System in 1969. This was a major breakthrough in computing, where Doug Engelbart envisioned and demonstrated computer capabilities that went well beyond straight numerical computing. Kesey's observation was, to my mind, prescient.
• I find it stunning how much I take the current state of computing for granted. These folks were struggling to send 30 characters per second through modems. Today, 40 years later, I'm downloading entire episodes of Dragnet. It seems so long ago that I was driving an Amstrad word processor with 256k of memory and a flittering amber screen, and now I'm sitting in front of a Macintosh with gigabytes of storage and hundreds of megabytes of memory. There are times during the book when I was thinking this is so obvious. Why wouldn't someone use a computer for word processing and graphics? Why would folks cling stubbornly to mainframes? It's really hard to keep in mind the framework they were operating within, and it makes you appreciate that much more the visionaries who pushed the boundaries.
Posted by Bob Benz at 8:25 PM | Comments (0)
Facebook goes viral on me
I noticed recently that some students I informally mentor at Ohio University created a Facebook group for their online magazine, the most excellent Speakeasy. That was all the excuse I needed to hop over to Facebook and check it out.
First rude awakening: My workplace blocks Facebook, informing me that it is questionable content and bumping me straight to the company's intranet site.
Undaunted, I waited till I got home to check it out. I registered, poked around a bit and kinda forgot about it.
Then I got a ping from my friend Tiffany, noting she was listing me as a friend in Facebook. That drew me back, and I started messing around with it more, adding a photo and details in my profile. Then I stumbled across a really cool feature that allows Facebook to scan your Yahoo (or Gmail or whatever) e-mail address book for people who are already in Facebook. Once you get the list, you can start adding them to your friends list.
Before I knew it, I had 17 friends in Facebook. Very easy. Very addictive. I'm also on Linked In, but I've never really paid much attention to it, to be honest. Maybe it's because I've always perceived that as a place to look for jobs and I'm pretty happy where I am.
Next rude awakening: The damn thing made me realize how freakin' old I am. I noticed most of my friends are in their 20s. I started searching for folks my age (mid-40s), first by looking for Edinboro grads who would be my contemporaries (none) and then by searching my hometown for folks my age (none). Ouch.
Posted by Bob Benz at 8:14 PM | Comments (0)
January 15, 2007
Donate to a good cause
Joanne's nephew Noah is battling Leukemia and Joanne is planning a hike to raise money for the The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. If you are looking for a great cause to donate to, here's your chance ...
Posted by Bob Benz at 8:18 PM | Comments (0)
January 7, 2007
Anatomy of a Nightmare
I just finished Philip Short's Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare, an excellent biography of the crazed Khmer Rouge leader.
I've been fascinated by Cambodia's nightmare since the mid-'80s, when the first survivor accounts started trickling out. I read several, including To Destroy You Is No Loss. I also read Elizabeth Becker's very good When the War Was Over. I watched the Killing Fields and Swimming to Cambodia. I read extensively about Angkor Watt and ancient Khmer civilization. One of my travel goals is to one day visit Angkor Watt. And then I moved on to other things ....
But when I saw a review of Short's book, I couldn't resist. It's fantastic and gets a lot closer to why this happened. How the fuck does a smiling, amiable guy named Saloth Sar go from getting handjobs from old King Monivong's concubines to laying waste to an entire nation? It just seems inconceivable that something like this could happen.
Piece by piece, Short shows the roots of this horror, from the seething violence the simmers beneath the friendly face of Cambodian culture to the Theravada Buddhist rejection of the individual to the world politics that were playing out in Southeast Asia.
Pol Pot's wfe, Ponnary, dissolves into a paranoid schizophrenic haze, fearing Vietnamese conspiracies in every corner. Odd the way her affliction serves as metaphor for the Cambodian-Vietnamese relationship.
Other interesting points in the Short biography:
- He argues, compellingly, I think, that this wasn't genocide. The goal wasn't to wipe out the Cambodian people. It really was more a program of systematic slavery.
- The complexities of Cold War politics are brought startlingly to light. Even after the Khmer Rouge have been run off, the United States backs them, working in league with China to keep Soviet expansionism (via Vietnam) in check.
- Cool quote: "Pol Pot has died like a ripe papaya (falling from a tree). No one killed him, no one poisoned him. Now he's Wnished. He has no power, he has no rights, he is no more than cow shit. Cow shit is more important than him. We can use it for fertilizer." Mok, another worthless piece of cow shit who was one of Pol Pot's two main military supporters.
- I took particular interest in Laurence Picq, one of two non-Asians to live though Pol's reign of terror. She was a Frenchwoman married to one of the Khmer Rouge officials. Strange. Very strange. I've already Googled her and intend to read her book about the experience. Apparently, she came into it a believer. I wonder what she's thinking now ...
Posted by Bob Benz at 12:11 PM | Comments (0)
Dreaming of a white trash Christmas ...
So while I was at the park yesterday morning, watching to dogs loop wide orbits through the wet grass, a pickup pulling a trailer full of Christmas trees sputtered in. A redneck hopped out, dumped the trees and went on his merry way. Clearly, the world is his trash can. I didn't get a look at the license plate (it was hidden by the trailer, which had no plate), but It was hard to miss the Jesus/fish license plate on the front of the truck.
I guess that's one way to put the Christ back in Christmas ...
Posted by Bob Benz at 11:30 AM | Comments (0)
Tivo goodness ...
Via PVRBlog, I stumbled upon what I believe to be the coolest Tivo-related gadget yet to enter my arsenal. It's called TivoDecode Manager, which bills itself as being "for Mac users stuck using third-party workarounds."
In short, this allows me to move shows recorded on my Tivo to my Mac, and it also has an option to format them for viewing on my video iPod. Best of all, it worked flawlessly. Once I downloaded it, I just entered my Tivo's IP address and Media Access Key. It instantly found the Tivo on my wireless network and got it talking to my Mac.
To test it, I downloaded a copy of a Monty Python episode (the one featuring Dinsdale, the thuggish Piranha brother who is terrorized by Spiny Norman, a giant hateful hedgehog. I'm not sure exactly how long the transfer took since I walked away from my computer, but when I came back an hour or two later, the Python episode was in my iTunes library and ready to be moved to my iPod.
Very cool. Very, very cool. This will make Travel Bob very happy.
Now playing: No More Buffalo from the album "Live In Aught-Three" by James McMurtry & The Heartless Bastards
Posted by Bob Benz at 11:27 AM | Comments (0)
January 1, 2007
The Last Kingdom
Returning to work tomorrow after 10 days of blocking work out. It's been great, providing lots of time to read and post inane crap on this blog.
The latest reading is The Last Kingdom, an historical novel by Bernard Corwell. Overall, it was a great read, set in the 9th century when the Danes were running amok through Britain and conquering damn near all of England. It has a Little Big Man thing going on, with the main character, Uhtred, being from England but ending up with the Danes. He moves back and forth between the two camps, providing insight into each group and rubbing shoulders with the famous.
The think I found most amusing is the portrayal of Alfred and the rest of the English as a bunch of effete bozos who are enslaved by priests and Christianity. The Danes view of all this is pretty amusing, and they seem perplexed by these strange, largely ineffective warriors. But of course, the tables turn as Alfred makes his stand and begins turning back the Danish tide. Worth a read if you're interested in this period. I'm assuming it's pretty historically accurate. Cornwell provides detail on the history behind the novel and license he took in writing the book.
It moves quickly and is action packed. My one quibble is Cornwell's reluctance to delve into the sexual situations behind a lot of the plot. I'm finding myself agreeing with Marlon James' recent post on Space Break Sex, that phenomenon in literary fiction where two characters embrace and clearly are heading toward a sexual encounter. But all the reader gets is a space break and the after effect. I'd like to know more about Uhtred's relationship with Brida and there are several other relationships that could do with more detail. Overall, the novel gets lost in all the action and the relationships get very little explication. Not a deal breaker here, but a bit of a disappointment.
Damn, I'm dreading that return to work ... I already have travel scheduled through most of January. Back to the grind and the hell that is Delta Airlines. Happy New Year, I guess.
Posted by Bob Benz at 8:07 PM | Comments (0)