Death and Dying

This is the third night of this test, and so far the results have been predictably the same. I read an article (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16964783) recently that challenged my understanding of a “good night’s sleep,” suggesting that getting eight unbroken hours was actually a rather modern imposition, and that our bodies more naturally tend to rest in shorter chunks of time.

As it turns out, our species is more prone to a “major sleep” of several hours following nightfall, a brief period of waking, then a “minor sleep” to get back into the daylight hours. The article suggests that, culturally, we have conditioned ourselves to sleep all the way through the night, and this may be why we often wake up feeling more exhausted than when we went to bed. The secret to successfully waking up at the end of the major sleep period is having a certain amount of slightly uncomfortable external stimuli. Our bodies become rather deadened to the outside world in the depths of our sleep cycle, but towards the edges (just after falling asleep and just before waking up,) they are sensitive enough that very subtle changes can make the difference between consciousness and slumber.

I have tested this by intentionally falling asleep on my couch, rather than in my bed, with a lamp on in my living room, and for the past three nights I have woken up around 3:00 in the morning after originally going to sleep between 10:00 and 11:00. The last two nights, I simply turned off the lamp, went back to bed, and woke up again at six feeling exhausted. Tonight (rather, this morning,) I decided to try to be a little more productive. See, I’m not entirely convinced that the minor sleep is necessary. I think it’s a holdover from a time when the lack of electric lighting restricted our productive hours to daytime. The literature suggest that our bodies rest in sleep cycles that roughly correlate to two or more hour and a half chunks, and that there’s no scientific reason the number should add up to eight. In fact, science suggests (http://howto.wired.com/wiki/Cheat_on_the_Need_to_Sleep) that people who only sleep between six and seven hours a night tend to live longer than people who sleep eight. So here’s the bottom line: I’m not going to go back to sleep this morning. I’m going to go ahead and start my day. If I get incredibly exhausted, then that will be a valuable learning experience about the merits of minor sleep, but if I don’t, then I will have six extra hours a day that begin with me waking up naturally, without an alarm, feeling quite refreshed and invigorated. Wish me luck.

Apr 18

Found Poem

And lo, I stood transfixed between the mounds of rounded peaks
Betwixt the mindless squawking rabble and the one who never speaks
Both were beckoning to me From mighty in their towers made of memory and bone
Atop narcotic swirling hillsides, with the finitude of stone
They laid their case that I would make each one of them my home
But lo, I stood transfixed

Both were beckoning to me With the stumbling slurring stupor of a lonesome snakebit boor
Whose appendages were frozen, though they once had moved before,
While the din of recollection quickly rose to deaf’ning roar
I regurgitated “never” and I vomited up “more”

Apr 16

AirPlay Magic

Allow me to paint for you a picture.

Currently, I am using my iPad to stream a movie to my AppleTV.

The movie is not stored natively on the iPad. Neither is it coming from the internet.

No, the movie is being streamed from my computer, to my iPad, to my AppleTV. As a matter of fact, it’s even a little more complicated than that. You see, that movie is stored on an external hard drive that is not connected to my computer. It’s connected to a wireless router that connects remotely to my MacBook Air.

Okay, it’s slightly more complex than even that. The movie is stored on an external hard drive in a format that is unsupported by iOS or any native Mac video player. It’s an .avi video.

To recapitulate, there’s an .avi that is stored on an external hard drive accessed wirelessly by my MacBook Air which, in turn, is running a video-hosting app that can convert video formats on the fly to send to my iPad that is streaming it, again wirelessly, to my AppleTV.

Despite all of these switches and turns (four degrees of separation, plus live conversion,) I spontaneously reach for the remote control for my AppleTV to pause the movie while I go to refill my glass.

Instantly, intuitively, the movie is paused.

Thank you, Apple, for getting me.

Apr 06

Please explain further

Facebook began as a simple way to find out what was going on at a college campus without having to ask every single person what they were doing. You knew what they were doing, because they posted it to their profile and it showed up on your wall. Organizing events and meeting places was fun and easy. It felt like you were genuinely connected to your entire campus, beyond just your own personal group of friends.
Then, Facebook opened the floodgates to people who weren’t in college. We saw kids attending our old high school add us as friends. We couldn’t decline their friendship, that would be rude! We were accepting people back then.

When our parents started adding us as friends, we began to get a little worried. While we used to only have a hundred or so people filling our walls with interesting stuff that affected all of us, now our list of friends was approaching nearly half a thousand. It took real work to stay on top of our ever-growing news feed, and it got harder to find out what was actually going on. We tried to trim our friends list to just those people we truly cared about, but we didn’t want anybody to feel left out. So we kept them all. Facebook promised us the option of putting our friends into groups, but that felt too divisive. Sure, I could put all of my family members in one group and my college friends in another, but I’m not even in college anymore and the few college friends I’ve retained are more like family to me than half of my relatives.

With the parents came the apps and the ads. Someone realized they could make a lot of money here, and companies started getting their own Facebook pages. Now, when you liked an artist, you were subscribed to their news feed so you could hear about every single opportunity to buy one of their tshirts. God help you if you were a fan of Starbucks coffee before Facebook sold us all to marketing. Now, I don’t even know what Facebook is, except that it enables virtual relationships to negatively affect real ones. Everyone who posts to Facebook has their own internal context for the significance of their post, and that significance has to be surmised and speculated upon by their friends, and their friends’ friends, and their friends’ friends’ parents. People are more judgmental and hostile towards each other than before, when we could just ignore one another.

Now our timelines are the fodder of internet focus groups. The daily story of our lives is tabulated as demographic data to be mined for new marketing approaches. The intricacies of our personal preferences and individual idiosyncrasies have been reduced to the binary “Like” or “No comment.” I don’t feel connected anymore.

Apr 01

Drawing

I’ve never self-identified as an artist, but I have these ideas that don’t translate we’ll through words. I can describe things, I have a very capable vocabulary, but sometimes the things in my head are very visual things. Art runs in my family. My sister is currently pursuing even more graduate art degrees. I’ve just never been the one to draw things. But the time has come. With the help of some very neat apps on my iPad (Sketchbook and Paper) I’m slowly teaching myself to draw. It’s a difficult process, but I’m going to share things as they come, to keep track of my progress and stay accountable.

Unfortunately, Paper shares more easily with Tumblr than my other sharing services, so these drawings may not show up here until I’m more confident in my abilities. However, if you should be curious, you can check out my poorly publicized and rarely updated Tumblr page at butterfly killer.tumblr.com

Mar 21

It’s time

It’s time to rethink my computing paradigm.

For the past year or two (I honestly don’t keep track of time anymore; it’s rather irrelevant) I have been using an iPhone, an iPad and a MacBook Air to handle my computing needs, in that order. What Steve and Tim say about the “Post-PC Era” is true; I have far greater need of instant-on, portable, long-battery devices than a traditional computer.

However, I’m still burdened by traditional computer rules. For instance: I have a Mac to house most of my important data and programs, locally. My iPhone has been crashing lately, and my iPad takes an awful lot of time to restore from an iCloud backup. At least, it takes an awful lot of time on my current internet connection.

I worry sometimes that I’m going to lose track of my photographs, but I really only take them to share them, and often forget them as soon as they’ve been posted to Path/Twitter/Instagram/Facebook. I’m not a sentimental person.

While I still have a great need for Pages and Numbers for Mac at times, most of my creation is handled by my iPad. The iPad has made me more creative, inspiring me to take up graphic design and to record the first pieces of music I’ve really cared about in over a year. Or so.

The problem I’m facing is one of storage, syncing, and prioritization. My iTunes media library has grown massive, trying to maintain a record of all my songs (which can now be retrieved on-demand via iTunes Match), movies (which I nearly always pass over in favor of the latest offerings from Netflix) and apps (which need to be stored locally, why?) My documents occupy just a little more space than a free Dropbox account can hold and my pictures are an unruly mess spread across several iPhoto and Aperture libraries.

Now that iPhoto exists for iPad, I see even less reason to care about them on my computer, except for storage.

Storage is primarily handled by a three-year-old 1TB hard drive by Western Digital. I have a lot of anxiety about that hard drive failing and losing all of my precious collection of data, but as I’ve just outlined, most of that data is obsolete. I need a redundant copy the same way I need a savings account: if everything goes to hell, I need a way to get back out.

Most of the programs I use were purchased through the Mac App Store, meaning that they have little reason to live on my computer except as I demand them. In fact, there’s little reason for any of it to live on my computer. My games consist of Minecraft and OnLive; both of which have impossibly small footprints.

I have a pocket-sized external hard drive that is roughly twice the size of my onboard storage. It houses my most recent Time Machine backup, mostly due to the fact that my 2TB Western Digital MyBook Live is notoriously unreliable and maintaining a consistent backup history. Biweekly I get the message from my Mac that my Time Machine backup could not be verified.

The Appraisal

My computer has become cluttered and bloated. My digital lifestyle focuses primarily on my iPhone and my iPad, farming some of the more technically demanding work out to the more sophisticated applications available on the Mac, like Hulu Plus shows that won’t run on my mobile device and Minecraft, with the occasional tweaks and advanced options available in the desktop versions of Pages, Numbers, iMovie, etc.

The most valuable thing I can think to do with my computer at the moment is use it for an iPhone/iPad repository, to hold one periodical local backup in the event that a restore from iCloud takes too long. It also needs to house a localized copy of my photo archives, even if that only means using it as an intermediary between my iOS devices and an external hard drive.

The programs I could take or leave. Few applications are large enough to take more than the slightest bit of forethought to redownload and implement. In fact, I’m sure I wouldn’t miss three quarters of the ones I have installed.

There’s really no reason at all to hold on to a local music collection, except for the odd dozen or so albums that couldn’t be matched on iTunes. Same goes for my movie library; I never watch them anymore. My life would be simpler if I didn’t have to connect to an external hard drive every time I wanted to launch iTunes or iPhoto.

And I really should clean house when it comes to my documents. How many college papers do I really need, seeing as I’ve only ever read one of them more than once?

The Verdict

It’s time to clean house. One last Time Machine backup in case I lose my nerve, and it’s time to wipe out my computer and reinstall the operating system from scratch.

It’s time to rethink the way I think about my computer. It’s not the digital hub anymore; it’s a specialized device that does some things better than my other devices, but is vastly inferior to them for other tasks.

I’m going to erase my hard drive and install Lion fresh. I’m only going to install programs on an as-needed basis from the Mac App Store. I’m going to make my iPhoto Library local, and cull it to make sure it only has pictures I care about. I don’t intend to rely on my externals for anything except for the odd Time Machine backup, and I may actually start paying DropBox for the privilege of keeping all of my documents in one infinitely accessible place. After all, my iPad has LTE now.

I encourage you, dear reader, to honestly evaluate what you do with your computer and your other devices. Don’t waste time or space, because a cluttered workspace clouds the mind. I want everything to be clear and transparent.

It’s time to rethink my computing paradigm

Mar 17

An excerpt

“Okay first, it’s confusing. You’re not saying anything about who’s speaking, where they are, why I should care or anything. You have to introduce your characters and give them some context!”

“Yeah, but you still have to establish something concrete. Look at Homer. ‘Sing to me, O Muse, of the wrath of Achilleus!’ It’s invocative, it draws you in! The opening of the story is crucial. No one’s ever going to listen to you if they don’t think you have something to say. Hell, even Stephen King could write an opener! ‘The man in black fled through the desert, and the gunslinger followed.’ There’s no more concise description of protagonist, antagonist and environment than that! How can you just open in the middle of a conversation?”

“What, you want me to write something like ‘In the driveway between a white Toyota minivan and the rollup door of a garage now reincarnated as a studio apartment for two, Trev and Ian sit on a threadbare thrift store couch lost in a world of their own making, a world that exists only in words.’? I don’t think so, that sounds trite.”

“Yeah, but at least it’s something! You don’t have anything to say about their surroundings? I could fill up entire notebooks describing the feeling of mutual awe and hopelessness that the suburbs of Santa Fe inspire, and you don’t even want to mention it?”

“No, I really feel like the characters speak for themselves. Their setting is immaterial, it doesn’t matter. They could be floating down a river or hiking a mountain or something and the content of their conversation would remain the same. What I’m trying to emphasize is that these guys aren’t anything really spectacular to behold, and there’s nothing particularly compelling about their circumstances. If I started out by describing them, no one would be interested. And fuck Santa Fe, we could be in New York or Milwaukee and the story would be the same. But the story is interesting, and the most interesting part is the significance these guys place on it. Even the events themselves wouldn’t warrant a second glance if not for everything there is to say about it!”

“So you’re saying it’s just going to be a bunch of intoxicated ramblings about ‘the meaning of life’ and how ‘we’re all connected on a deeper level’ when really there’s just two guys getting stoned in a garage?”

“No man, I didn’t mean to say that nothing significant was going to happen, just that sometimes significance is what you make of it. If a tree falls in the woods and no one’s around to hear it, it’s a tree falling in the woods. But if someone’s there, it can be a physical phenomenon, a thing of beauty or even an act of God!”

“Exactly! And that’s just a tree falling! We’ve got real material here. There’s adventure, excitement, risk, love, loss…but none of it means anything if no one is saying anything about it, and these guys just won’t stop talking! Do you see what I’m getting at?”

“But they’re not even saying anything important! Right now they’re just arguing about something trivial, something no one in their right mind would even give two shits about, and you’re playing it up like it’s some profound philosophical insight. It sounds pretentious.”

“Yeah, but I want it to sound pretentious. These guys are young, arrogant, and high off of their own sense of self-importance. They’ve just learned a few small truths about life, so they think they know something, but they’re not men yet. They’re as pretentious as any other liberal arts student would be after graduating. But there’s this wonderful naiveté in their pretentiousness, there’s almost an endearing quality about how little they know about the world, despite the ‘experience’ they like to parade around. This story is about how one of the hardest facts of life is that it keeps going! Well, it keeps going until it suddenly stops, anyway.”

“I don’t even sound like this! You’re putting words in my mouth that I would never say. It’s not my style at all.”

“But that’s honest too. I’m writing a representation of Trev that talks the way I remember him sounding. Part of the narrative is that it’s all my interpretation of people and events. It’s not history.”

“Look, it’s your thing and I’m not going to tell you how to write it. You can do whatever you want. I’m just saying that right now, I’m only reading it because you asked me to.”

Death and Dying

May 17

Things I’ve Learned from Two Hours in New York

Apr 30

3:00