wavenger

The only thing these days which I feel pretty unsatisfied with is my social life. This is not to say that I wish to supplement or supplant my friends. The problem is that I’ve no idea how to make new ones.

I think it would be fair to describe as socially slow, or maybe you could be politically correct and say I’m different. This is a good way to look at it, because while I take to most concievable subjects more quickly than almost every human being on the planet, my social skills, while formidable, just don’t grow at the same rate. I had to work hard to acquire them. It took me many years to really get the hang of the school social scene, and now I find myself in a novel situation and I don’t really know what to do.

I met all of my friends except for Genevieve through school, and even her I would never have known if not for someone I knew through school. Plus, one thing that I did recognize at Berkeley was that it was perhaps the best way to make friends period. You just take a whole bunch of young nerds (because if you went to Berkeley you’re either a nerd or you’re a fraud) and stick them together in a tight space. Then, you add in the fact that everybody’s starting from scratch and has low parental supervision, and that alcohol is pretty readily available.

By contrast, I have no impetus per se to get to know any of my neighbors in this sleepy little Oakland bedroom community, and I definitely don’t want to know anybody in Stinky Downtown Oakland. Most of my neighbors are older people with kids, and most of the people I see in downtown I have little in common with. Or maybe I just think this way because I work above a Veteran’s Clinic and a Free Clinic. Maybe they bat the bums away with sticks over near the trendy Government building and the cleaner streets like Clay. But over on Franklin, the ambient level of insanity is definitely approaching Telegraph - except without the college students.

Really, I’ve just got to find some activities which interest me. Since the environment around my work sucks, and the environment around my house sucks, I’ve got to find some kind of a third place. I just haven’t found that yet, and I don’t have that much free time right now to go looking.

Well, it looks like Speakeasy.net finally came through with 768 kbps. This is a pretty good deal, actually, considering it’s twice what I was getting from SBC. It turned out there was no ground short on the line - that was just a false reading they detected when the line was down and out. Rather, the problem was that while I am just over two miles away from the CO as the crow flies, the aged city of Oakland’s rotting infrastructure is set up in such a way that the actual distance is a full mile longer.

This should surprise no one who has ever tried to drive in a direction other than towards downtown or away from it - going, say, from my place outside of Piedmont to the Berkeley Marina, well, there’s just no good way to get there.

In other news, my boss purchased a copy of Macromedia Adobe Dreamweaver today from some shady company out of Las Vegas (apparently not everything stays there) for a suspiciously low price. I’ve found multiple reports indicating that this is a less-than-reputable company, and that I may receive an “OEM” copy or an educational version. The boss’s opinion is that either:

• This is a legitimate company, and they are getting a bulk discount, or
• Adobe is getting screwed, and we are innocent

For the record, we have every reason to believe that we are purchasing a legitimate copy of this software, and if this turns out to not be the case, we’ll deal with that matter then.

However, it does make me think about my general approach to purchasing, well, just about anything. I wouldn’t say I really buy a whole lot of things - I like to think that I live an “uncluttered existence”. I’m frugal in that respect. However, when I do decide to make some kind of purchase, I get the best of the best, I get it through a legit retailer, and I don’t mind paying the retail price.

In this case, however, it wasn’t my decision. My boss is the penny-pinching type, and he prefers to save money wherever he can. This is understandable. However, it’s not what I’d do, and my reasons for this are not entirely rational.

I suppose that to a certain degree it’s just a product of my upbringing. I was raised to be skeptical and worrisome by my skeptical and worrisome mother. The idea of something I purchased going haywire is positively mortifying to me, and perhaps, to a certain degree, I am falsely analogizing this onto software, where the reliability of the software is more or less independent of the manner in which it was purchased.

But really, I think, it just upsets me that someone may be profiting from doing something which is wrong.

This is, I must add, in no way the fault of SpeakEasy. Before I go into my trials and tribulations, I will admit that the company’s support has been outstanding and friendly, and that the line speed is great - when it’s up. You see, apparently there’s a ground short somewhere along the line which comes and goes according too the Zodiac and the weather. Sometimes it can’t stay synced for more than 10 seconds - sometimes it goes a day with no problems. Hopefully we’ll get a AT&T technician out here soon to fix it.

However, even though I knew in my heart of hearts that I am not proficient enough to understand POTS wiring, I had a look. And my, I thought the wiring in my apartment was funny! It really is, by the way. I’m convinced that the previous occupants had some kind of a phone fetish - that they actually derived perverse excitement from having 8 phones in the house on 2 lines. They even wired an extra line in themselves and ran it up along the side of the house! But downstairs, the phone box and the 88-block are a real sight to see. I’ll have to post pictures.

Anyway, I was thinking just now about my approach to the science of HTML. Heck, science is the wrong word. I kind of feel like a witch.

You see, a certain person I’m working with to develop a website emailed me and asked if I used Dreamweaver. And for some reason I didn’t want to respond, “On the contrary, I use Emacs nxml-mode,” which is to say I use a souped-up Notepad. If you say that to the wrong person - that is, anybody non-technical - they’re gonna think you’re a witch or a warlock and need to be burned at the stake, or at the very least think you’re a shitty web developer. Anyone in the know isn’t going to think one way or the other. In fact, the more technical a web developer is - that is, the less they monkey with HTML and the more they write actual code - the more likely they are to code HTML by hand. And when somebody asks me if I use Dreamweaver… I don’t know. It’s just very apparent to me which side they’re on.

Why is this? Or rather, why is there a gap in understanding between coders and non-coders of what coding actually is? Because that’s what we’re talking about, honestly. The reason you want a good web developer to use a text editor is the same reason you want any developer to use a text editor. There are non-textual programming tools out there - a physicist friend of mine uses one - but they’re like Eitzels: neat, interesting, and used by almost no one.

Programming is an exacting discipline. The problems that soak up a lot of time are the ones caused by minute and seemingly insignificant details, and the thought of trusting these details to a computer program - and, by extension, some other coder - is abhorrent.

Also, in order to grasp the medium, you need to understand those minute details. Putting a WYSIWYG editor between you and the details just obscures them more, making easy problems trivial and hard problems much more difficult. Already in most languages we’re dealing with a lot of abstraction - C++ is converted to machine code, Java is converted to intermediate bytecode and then different types of machine code depending on the platform, and HTML, worst of all, is rendered slightly differently on most standards-complaint browsers, and radically differently on Microsoft Internet “We Don’t Need No Standardization” Explorer.

The other reason that sticks out in my mind is that text tends to be more succinct and exact. Ever heard that saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words?” Well, sure. But they’re not always the same thousand words, depending on who you talk to. So really, you have to resort to symbolism. And if you’re going to use a standardized set of symbols, why not just use the words themselves?

Anyway, I think I managed to avoid using a fluffy bunny HTML editor by simply asking the person in question how closely we’re going to work. Because if it’s my job, I do it my way.

I’ve always been a fan of DSL, and I’ve always had a light dusting of misanthropy (or, I suppose, anti-populism) about me. The two go hand-in-hand, really. That’s why, when I finally decided I’d had enough of my shitty DSL, the very idea of going over to The Great Lord Satan’s high speed internet logged my throat with disgust.

Note: If you are already well-versed in the turf war between DSL and Cable you can skip about two paragraphs down. The next few are really just here for rhetorical completeness.

Firstly, let’s discuss a few of the basic realities of the two technologies. Now, when I say that DSL is anti-populist, and by extension that cable is pro-populist, what I mean is that with cable you get a connection which is very fast in theory, but which you must share with everyone in your neighborhood. With DSL, by contrast, you have a connection directly to your local office, from which it’s just a hop, skip and a jump out to the internet at large. So, theoretically you can get 6 megabits a second downstream on cable, as long as nobody else on your block is surfing. The minute your neighbor’s daughter starts downloading an album on BitTorrent^WiTunes, your bandwidth is cut in half.

Of course, there can be system-wide problems with both services, but cable has an additional bottleneck on the neighborhood level. And in many areas this problem is considered solved, but my boss still reports slowdowns right when the kids get off of school in Eugene, Oregeon, so apparently the solution has not reached full penetration. There is, however, the specific problem of distance with DSL. Due to the fact that your line has to go directly from your wall to the central office, as your distance from the office increases, so does the round trip time, and ergo your speed.

The other factor I consider odious about cable internet is the very fact that it comes bundled with cable, and that decent cable in Oakland costs about 60 bucks a month. That’s with some good higher-number channels like BBC America and not including, if I recall correctly, any “premium” channels such as Showtime or Skinamax. And really, I only watch the Cartoon Network, Comedy Central, the Sci-Fi Channel, Nickelodean and the World War II Channel. This package is designed to appeal to everyone, from sports fans to teeny boppers to yuppy snobs like me. It’d be like going into the grocery store and finding only 5 packages of groceries available in huge crates, and in order to get a few avocadoes and some nice cheese in addition to the weekly staples, I had to pay $200 and was forced to also get a jumbo sized Captain Crunch, Campbell’s Thick & Chunky, a flat of ramen noodles, horrible processed cheese dip, candy corn, 5 TV dinners, JIF peanut butter, iceberg lettuce, a live pheasant, and man, many other things I hate and would never eat.

But unfortunately, a la carte cable has not yet been materialized, and I am too cheap, stuck up and well-principled to submit to the desires of the masses.

Back to our local problem. I had always thought I was just too far out to get non-shitty DSL. Now, I was talking to my uncle Ted, who happens to be a line technician working for AT&T/Pacific Telesys/Pacific Bell/SBC/AT&T, who told me that he can give people 1.5 mbps DSL to people out to about 15000 feet. I know for a fact that I’m only about 12000 feet from my local office, and the people at AT&T have repeatedly told me that they cannot give me more than 384 kbps. So I asked one of their technical people to look into this. After having me on hold for about a half an hour, he came back and gave me the cryptic response “We just don’t offer that service in your area at this time.”.

Well, at that point, I thought, “Damn, it looks like I’m going to have to submit my soul to Comcast.” And I tried. I almost, almost ordered DSL, but I just couldn’t go through with it. I wasn’t going to pay 60 bucks a month, plus internet fees, so I could watch TV for 4 hours a week. So I called up Speakeasy.net and asked them to assess the situation. Apparently, SBC^WAT&T is pushing for massive growth at this time. They want to expand to compete with Comcast. So they’re jamming tons and tons of people onto one card at the central office, which is why they “Can’t” offer me any more speed. When you go with an alternate DSL provider, you’re running 100% on their hardware, and even though my service will be a little more expensive, chances are I’ll be able to hit 1.5 mbps no problem.

My anger has been welling up lately.

The thing about my anger in particular is that it is not really founded upon reality. I suppose the pop-psychology way of thinking about it is to ask yourself what you are angry about. On the contrary, when I am angry, I am angry about almost everything, and when I am happy, I am happy about many things that I would otherwise be angry about.

As for why, it could be that there is some root cause of my emotions one way or another, or it could be that I simply feel one way or another depending on the weather and my biochemistry, and this colors all of my moods. The pharmaceutical industry has proven, after all, that they can make happy pills, and I feel there is no root cause for my anger. For all my soul-searching, there has been no flash of self-discovery. Also, one would think that if I felt an emotion about something strongly enough to affect my entire psyche that it would be at the very forefront of my mind.

The very idea of looking for a reasoning behind your emotions on a given subject is an inversion of the biological fact of your moods. The reality, as I see it, is that your emotions give you tools for understanding yourself and your opinions.

Let’s take a scenario for instance. When I think about a particular friend of mine, I don’t calmly and objectively think about the entire 3 and a half years I’ve known her, from the first days of Fall Semester ‘03 to the last time I spoke to her. I am pissed off, so I look for negatives straight off, like the fact that I’ve always been a second-class friend to her, or that she’s kind of a fair-weather friend, or that she hasn’t been able to visit me in over 3 years, but is more than happy to play hostess.

When I hold these things in my mind, I become consumed by outrage, and it sends me off on a red streak about every betrayer and fair-weather friend in my life. I think of how it feels to be excluded even by outcasts for not being edgy enough. Then I become even more angry, and the cycle repeats until the entire world is red.

It would be a misstep at this point to write my rage off as irrational or fickle. There is not a word of the above that isn’t true, but had I not seen it while my world was painted red, I might’ve been blind to it. And I decided many months ago, with respect to this particular case, that I couldn’t stand doing all of the work in a friendship just to be less cool than a gaggle of aging, shallow goths.

So, like rose-hued glasses, my blood-tinged spectacles have a purpose. After all, what would we be without the ability to idolize a person, and carry the accompanying flutter in our stomachs for days, weeks and months?