SmartRemarks

Two hundred posts! I think that merits a little reflection and reminiscence.

This blog has been an ever-shifting beast since it started, neither fish nor fowl:  I’m as likely to be writing about pop culture one day as about politics the next. I think taken as a whole, though, the selection of subjects says something about me and how I see the world. (And perhaps also about my readers: the niche-fandom posts tend to attract far more hits than the political ones, which may indicate a preference for superficial topics or, more charitably, may just indicate that the latter posts are lost in a sea of better-known political sites.)

Part of what this wide range of interests says, I imagine, is that I’m not particularly settled in life; that I’m always looking for the next thing to occupy my attention. And the thought arises that perhaps this isn’t just true of me; that in some ways it’s emblematic of my generation. The idea is bubbling up lately (if not for the first time) that Generation X is facing its own unique variety of midlife crisis. I certainly wouldn’t claim to offer the voice of a generation—indeed, the very concept of having a “voice of a generation” can’t really be discussed in a GenX context without using quotation marks to signal the overt irony—but I do think it’s interesting to look at where we stand at what’s quaintly called “midlife.”

For instance…

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Tags: adolescence, adulthood, Boomers, Generation X, history, midlife crisis, psychology

As of this week, I can happily announce that I’ve accepted an offer from Indiana University’s School of Public and Environmental Affairs (SPEA) to pursue a Ph.D in Public Policy, complete with four years of guaranteed funding and a research assistantship. SPEA is the #3 public policy school in the nation according to the U.S. News rankings (right behind Syracuse’s Maxwell School, and tied with Harvard’s Kennedy School).

A doctorate is something I’d considered for many years, but I’d hesitated to take the plunge. But the job market had been showing me no love, and last year I decided to get serious about the idea and apply to some graduate programs. I kept this close the vest until now, being unsure how it would turn out. But now it’s real, and I’m doing it, and hoping this will let me shape the kind of personally fulfilling, intellectually stimulating career I’ve always wanted. In August I’ll be relocating to Bloomington, Indiana. With any luck, in five years I’ll have more letters after my name and a junior faculty position somewhere.

But man, let me tell you, getting even this far was not easy, and it came surprisingly close to not happening at all…

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Tags: education, grad school, Indiana, Indiana University, Ph.D, SPEA, University of Chicago

Through many years and many computer systems, I’ve always been the sort of person who likes to tweak and customize my setup. I’m not happy just to make do with the programs that come preinstalled or shipped in shrinkwrap. I acknowledge a point of diminishing returns in this sort of thing, of course; I’ve never taken the effort to learn how to use Linux, for instance, or for that matter even to dip into Terminal on my Mac… but I do like to be able to do my own basic troubleshooting.  I don’t script my own utilities… but on the other hand, I do know how to dig up, install, and use custom scripts created by others, whether I use ‘em through Automator in OS X or through Greasemonkey in Firefox or what-have-you.

Nor have I ever had the inclination (or money or time) to be an early adopter of every new thing that comes along… but that just makes it all the more important to put in the time and effort to properly research and configure my choice of tools and workflow when I do make a change, because it’s probably something I’m going to be sticking with for a while.

So I’ve always been in sort of a middle ground… I’m by no means a Power User compared to the kind of folks who post on SlashDot, but OTOH I am one compared to probably 90+ percent of day-to-day computer users.

With all that said, one might imagine that finding a way (in the course of my latest nearly-from-scratch rebuild of my system) to handle basic PIM functionality wouldn’t be that big a deal, right? After all, managing data like contacts, calendars, and to-do lists is at the very heart of what people do with computers, and there’s been user-friendly software for the purpose for over 20 years. You’d think finding a solution now would be a no-brainer.

Think again…

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Tags: Apple, BusyCal, calendar, computers, contacts, Entourage, internet, iPhone, Mac, Plaxo, software, task management, to-dos, Toodledo, user interface

And no one told me when to run… that’s for damn sure.

New Year’s came and went without me writing a blog post. I was preoccupied with other things at the time, as detailed to some extent in my last couple of entries bookending my computer headaches. But I did make some observations that I think are still worth mentioning, as both the year and the decade rolled over and restarted.

I’m well aware, of course, that both our calendar year and the decades into which we assemble them are completely arbitrary human constructs, and that there’s nothing metaphysically significant about the transition from one random chronological marker to another, despite all the cultural baggage we attach to them. Nevertheless, one of the central components of human consciousness is our capability for pattern recognition, and the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century definitely displayed some patterns that are, at the very least, psychologically meaningful.

To put it all in a nutshell… this past decade sucked. Big time.

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Tags: 2009, 2010, climate, George W. Bush, government, internet, journalism, Mark Morford, media, Obama, progress, the future

It’s been quite a few weeks since my last post. That’s because during most of that span, whenever I’ve had time to sit down with my laptop, it’s been to work on restoring things from the catastrophic hard drive failure I suffered just before Christmas. I’m happy to say that as of now, I’ve finally got the computer back to a state where I feel my life is under control again (as much as it ever was, anyway), and in fact the system is (in some ways) better than ever.

All the gory details below the fold…

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Tags: Apple, computers, e-mail, iPhone, Mac, PowerBook, software

I love my PowerBook. My computer is my life… or at least, it allows me to conduct it, and contains most of the relevant details of it, and connects me with the world beyond it. And using a Mac makes the whole process, really, downright fun sometimes.

Nevertheless, I admit to living dangerously where the safety of my loved one is concerned. I know the mantra that hard-drive failures are a matter of “not if, but when”… but despite that, I’ve never really had a regular backup routine. I have some archived files that are years old, but most of the more recent documents on my current machine (purchased over three years ago now) aren’t backed up.

Recently, however, I decided to own up to this irresponsible conduct and change my ways. I’ve been putting off a system upgrade (from OS X 10.4 to 10.5; this Mac is from the last pre-Intel generation, so it won’t run 10.6), but I knew that before installing a major upgrade a backup would be a Really Good Idea, just in case Something Went Wrong. This drive has worked flawlessly for as long as I’ve had the computer—in fact, I’ve never had a drive failure—but better safe than sorry, right? Plus, its 80GB capacity was about 75% full, and I know performance starts to take a hit above that level, and I figured before I started weeding out old files I should have everything backed up. And I expected that regular incremental backups would be easier after the upgrade, anyway, thanks to Apple’s nifty TimeMachine utility, so any headaches involved with this “safety” backup would be a one-time thing.

So yesterday I pulled a pristine new 500GB external drive out of its box, and attached it to my trusty PowerBook with a FireWire cable, and downloaded the latest version of the handy freeware backup utility SuperDuper!, and carefully shut down everything else that was running, and had the program begin making a bootable clone of my PowerBook drive on the external drive.

And guess when my hard drive decided to fail?

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Tags: computers, hardware, irony, Mac, PowerBook, troubleshooting

Open sewers run through the streets. Disease is rampant, up to and including recurring outbreaks of the plague. Criminals are routinely castrated, disemboweled, and hacked to pieces in public executions. The rotting heads of political enemies are mounted on public gates. The bloody torture of animals is a popular form of entertainment. Wretched poverty is commonplace. Literacy is not. Deference to a rigid caste system is expected of everyone. Weekly attendance at a church of the official religion is mandatory, with crippling fines imposed on those who abstain. Government censorship is taken for granted. Prejudice against foreigners and indeed against anyone even slightly divergent from the norm is encouraged.

Is this some third-world hellhole? Some imaginary world of dystopian fantasy?

No. This is England at one of its greatest historical moments, under the reign of its most esteemed monarch, Elizabeth the First. This is the England we romanticize and glorify and consider the forerunner of our own modern liberal democracy.

And astonishingly, almost miraculously, this is also the world that shaped the most brilliant literary mind in human history. This culture that would be alien and repulsive to us were we suddenly to find ourselves in it, stripped of the cleansing distance of centuries, somehow gave rise to a visionary who crafted timeless works that speak to us today every bit as much as they did to audiences four hundred years ago. A man whose artistic insight encompassed not just linguistic invention but social dynamics, personal psychology, and humanist philosophy.

How is this possible?

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Tags: history, literature, philosophy, progress, psychology, Shakespeare, writers

In the midst of the cesspool of paranoia and paralogia into which the ranting right is dragging so much of our political discourse these days… the latest iterations thereof being the Fox-driven hypocritical demagoguery about ACORN, and (even worse) the WSJ’s incredible suggestion that this(!) of all things somehow merits a special prosecutor…

…a reader comment about the latter on John Cole’s blog put it all into perspective in a way that can’t help but provoke a grin, and that definitely merits sharing:

…does anyone else think that its great that Obama can have all these Czars and communists in the same administration without them trying to kill each other? Team of Rivals, Fuck Yeah! The man’s a diplomatic genius. After this, solving the Palestinian/Israeli conflict should be a cakewalk.

Really, what more can be said?

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Tags: ACORN, conservatism, Obama

Side note for my countless loyal fans (well, I haven’t counted ‘em, anyway):  today marks the one-year anniversary of my launch of this blog, and this is the 173rd post I’ve published in that time. Total cumulative visits to date are nearing 16,000. Not earth-shaking, but not a bad track record, I hope!…

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Anyway. Today’s topic. As a matter of personal disposition I’m a humanist, so I tend to enjoy works of art and storytelling that dovetail with that philosophical orientation. I believe that in the long run, for all our foibles and shortcomings, human culture moves in the direction of justice over injustice, cooperation over selfishness, integrity over expediency, wisdom over ignorance.

Art is a wonderful means of reminding us of the enduring power of these values and principles. It should come as no surprise, then, that my favorite films include life-affirming works like Holiday, It’s A Wonderful Life, Casablanca, and Inherit the Wind. Such idealistic fare is perhaps scarcer than it used to be—we live in a cynical age—but it’s not yet extinct; I think the Lord of the Rings trilogy qualifies, for instance.

However, I said all that by way of preface for this:  two of the best films I saw this summer were, philosophically speaking, the diametric opposite of life-affirming. They were very different in subject matter, but both were terrific, superbly executed, deeply satisfying movies… and both will leave you with the conviction that “human intelligence” and “human compassion” are oxymorons, and indeed that humanity is a thoroughly despicable species in general. I’m talking about In The Loop and District 9.

[Beware: spoilers ahead!]

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Tags: District 9, humanism, In The Loop, Iraq, movies, Neill Blomkamp, Peter Jackson, Sharlto Copely

The Chicago Reader is a local institution. It dates back to 1971, one of the oldest free weekly papers in the country (preceded by the Village Voice and perhaps one or two others). And it’s been near and dear to my heart since I first moved to Chicago in the mid ’80s. It always provided a reliable weekly dose of irreverent local commentary and, more importantly, it was the clearinghouse for information on what was going on around town where and when, and whether it was worth your attention.

Then, two years ago, it was sold to Tampa’s Creative Loafing media company. It’s been downhill ever since.

Yesterday, after a lengthy court battle, the Reader changed ownership again… in bankruptcy court. And what happens next… is anybody’s guess.

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Tags: Chicago, Chicago Reader, internet, journalism, media