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without seeming to make proprietary statements
Tuesday, August 9 2016
location: Twenty Ninth Pond, Essex County, New York
Gretchen loves nearly everything about lakes. They are her favorite bodies of water, nay, geographic features, in terms of swimming, camping next to, or perhaps owning property adjoining. But there are two things that commonly live in lakes that completely skeeve her out. One of those is snapping turtles, which she irrationally fears will chomp down on her while she is swimming. The other is leeches, which she fears will attach themselves to her (perhaps in great numbers). I don't have any experience with being bitten by snapping turtles, though I have had leeches attach themselves to me (and, in one case at a Hudson Valley lake in the summer of 1989, they did so in great numbers). They're gross and surprisingly difficult to remove, but they don't hurt, so I don't think about them all that much. But for Gretchen, just knowing they (or snapping turtles) might be in a lake is enough to ruin it for her. So you can imagine her horror (and, for different reasons, mine too) when she thought she saw a leech actively swimming near the dock during our breakfast. "Are you sure it wasn't a fish?" "No," she said, "it didn't have any definition like a fish." "Maybe it was an eel," I suggested. That seemed to work for the time being, but then the thing came swimming through again. I tried to pretend I hadn't seen it, since it definitely looked like a large (that is, four inch) leech. But she saw it again and pointed it out to me. It was surprisingly ornate, with speckled markings on the sides. But it was clearly no vertebrate; its head ended as a narrow featureless acute angle. It moved by wriggling, which was the only location available to something without appendages. I said that I didn't think it was a leech, that it was probably one of the many species of benign freshwater worm. That seemed to satisfy Gretchen, especially since there only seemed to be one of them. And it's possible I was correct in saying that. But it sure looked like a leech — a large leech — to me. (It also bear mentioning that leeches are generally considered to be among the worms, a non-taxonomic category into which many unrelated forms of appendage-free invertebrates are placed.)
I can't do much work for The Organization without a cellphone signal or internet connection, though I have brought copies of the webtrees and databases of the sites that are largely my domain. Yesterday and today I went through the dull work of documenting the API for the mass mailing system. By early afternoon, I'd completed the Microsoft Word document I was using to create this documentation. So I loaded it onto my smartphone via a USB cable, and in the process felt vaguely patronized when Windows 7 asked me if I was sure I wanted to do that because it was possible the file (that Microsoft Word document) wouldn't "play" on the device onto which I was loading it. This suggested that smartphones aren't simply computers in their own right, and we must be concerned (enough to perhaps cancel a file copy) with whether or not they can interact with data that may only be passing through them.
With that file in my phone, I hiked down the access road to the ridge crest where suddenly a strong cellphone signal appears. I hadn't been able to figure out how to save a copy of a webpage in a smartphone browser to its local storage, so among the things I did once there was download an app called Website Downloader, which claimed to be able to do this in exchange for some highly annoying advertising (the kind that flashes constantly while urging me to "repair" my lack of storage space). I used Website Downloader to supposedly download some files, logged into Slack to say hello to my colleagues at The Organization, checked my email to see if anything was blowing up (it wasn't), and tried multiple times to attach and send that Microsoft Word document to an email to send to two of my colleagues. In all cases, it was never clear whether or not the email was ever attached. And in one case, I was told my file was too big (over 20 megabytes) when in fact, even with Microsoft bloat, it was only a little over 20 kilobytes. I'm sure my colleagues thought it hilarious that I was having such trouble with my smartphone, but the truth of the matter is that there's no excuse for any operating system to give so much trouble when doing such a straightforward thing. Why can't there be an indication whether or not an attachment has been made? And if an attachment fails (say, when clicking on the networking icon and then selecting mail or Gmail from the options), why can't an error come up saying why instead of no indication that anything has happened one way or the other? In the end, it turned out that the only way I could figure out how to send the document was by uploading it via Slack. Is the inability to send Microsoft Word attachments from Android smartphones Microsoft trying to fuck Google? Or is it Google trying to fuck Microsoft? In any case, why can't they just do their jobs without seeming to make proprietary statements like they do in the world of desktop computers?
Back at the house, I tried to look at the files I'd supposedly downloaded (with much advertising annoyance) using Website Downloader. But the HTML documents were unreadable and the _cache document was a bunch of encrypted data. If there was a way to view the supposedly "downloaded" webpage, I couldn't figure out what it was. Later in the day, a Google search would teach me that the best way to save webpages locally was to view them in Chrome (as opposed to Opera Mini, which I've been using for its ad suppression) and select Print from the cairn menu (the three stacked dots). The page ends up as a PDF in the Download directory, where it can be viewed by a desktop's PDF viewer.
In my description of these technical issues, I've simplified what actually happened, since it involved two separate walks to the cellphone spot. For the second one, I was under the influence of a 50 milligram recreational dose of Vyvanse.
This evening Gretchen made Korean tacos using kimchi and gochujang sauce. After eating them on the deck, we went on a paddle around the pond in the two-person kayak. The dogs appeared on the dock when we were well out on the water, and soon gave up on us and went off on another of their sundown adventures.
Later this evening, I watched the movie Rubber, which my boss had told me I would like. I thought it gratuitously self-aware and annoyingly fourth-wall attacking. It could've been either funnier or scarier, but in trying to be both, it wasn't even really mediocre. On top of all that, it took itself far too seriously.
While I was watching that movie and Gretchen was nearby on the couch reading something, Neville deftly captured and immediately killed a mouse he'd seen running across the floor. I never got a good look at the murdered mouse, but, based on its companion (who I later saw; I got the feeling that he or she was distraught), it had been a deer mouse.
At somewhat past 11:00pm, I hiked out again to the cellphone spot to download the latest Donald Trump outrages, particularly his latest seeming tacit-endorsement of a Hillary Clinton assassination.
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