SmartRemarks

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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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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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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Collapsing industries are hardly an unusual thing this year. Real estate, banking, airlines, automobiles, music and more are all in dire straits. One of the most consequential ones, however, with ripple effects that will last far beyond the pain of this current economic downturn, is the death spiral of the newspaper business.

For some years now, even when economic times were better,a common question in public discourse was “will print journalism be able to survive the challenge of the internet?” 2008 was the year the answer became a painfully clear “no,” and the question shifted to “how long before print journalism gives up the ghost?” Indeed, one of the biggest news stories of the year was, ironically, the death spiral of the industry responsible for coving big news stories.

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Remember not long ago I threatened to write about the process of (re)configuring my home theater equipment?

What, you thought I was kidding?…

What’s frustrating is this:  my girlfriend and I have a system we’re perfectly happy with. Nothing terribly high-end, but carefully researched and assembled. DVD players and recorder and a nice surround-sound setup. In particular, we watch high-definition (HD) signals on an HDTV, aided by a HD DVR. It all works and does what we want. And yet… even though we don’t watch any analog programming, I find that we’re going to be affected by the long-delayed but now impending switch to all-digital broadcasting on February 17th.

A little backstory:

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The internet has long been known as a hotbed of libertarian thinking—a bunch of rugged individualists sitting in their home offices tapping away at keyboards about their right to live unbounded lives. It has seldom spilled over into modern real-world politics, however, because there’s too much internal disagreement over what libertarianism is really about, and what its proponents’ priorities ought to be.

There are occasional surges of near-relevance—Ron Paul’s dark horse run for the GOP presidential nomination last winter, for instance, which generated much greater enthusiasm from the netroots than from any other demographic—but they always fade away again. (America loves to give lip service to liberty, but starts to squirm when anyone gets serious about the implications.) Thus, the relevance of libertarianism to American politics remains, shall we say, contested.

Most recently, this dispute has been dragged into the open again by the spat between Jacob Weisberg of Slate and Megan McArdle of The Atlantic over the implications of the ongoing financial crisis for libertarianism in America.

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I love computers. Really, I do. The Internet is a wonderful thing. E-mail keeps me in touch with people I would otherwise have lost track of long ago. I can’t imagine researching anything anymore, or even following the news, without access to Google.

And yet… sometimes one can’t help but wonder if these lovely life-enhancing benefits really need to come at the cost of so much annoyance and confusion. Read the rest of this entry »