|
|
|
idioms that have existed since 1984
Saturday, August 13 2016
location: Twenty Ninth Pond, Essex County, New York
It was raining enough this morning that Gretchen and I had to have our morning coffee out on the front porch instead of down on the dock. Something caused Gretchen to fetch a dictionary from the cabin's random (though dreary) collection of books. It was an old copy of Merriam Webster's pocket dictionary from 1961, and its pages were the color of coffee with cream. After being dismayed by the definition for "rabbi," Gretchen had me look up "pastor." And then, of course, I looked for obscenities like "fuck" and "shit," but neither could be found in there. And neither, for that matter, was the word "imam." The dictionary did contain the word "nigger," which it defined as "usually derogatory," though there was a second definition applying it to other (non-African) dark-skinned people, and for that no such caution was provided. It blew Gretchen's mind, though I'd been well aware of the fact that there was a time not so long ago when it was more polite to say "nigger" than it was to say "shit."
The rain came in several drenching showers today, and by placing a large pot in a certain spot below the cabin's southeast roof valley, I was able to collect several gallons of rain water. It was bit contaminated by roof debris (grime and pine needles), though I found a large screen on a circular frame to pour the water through on its way to containers. Since the cabin's plumbing system pumps only unpotable pond water, potable water such as the kind that falls from the sky is an important resource. (It's hard to carry sufficient amounts to supply two people's needs for a whole week, and Gretchen would be staying two weeks.)
The more I depend on a smartphone for basic 21st Century connectivity, the more I find myself demeaned and patronized by what, in a post-apocalyptic Donald Trumpscape, would be a shiny flat rectangular tile ideally suited for skipping across a pond. Of course, there is nothing inherently demeaning or patronizing about a smooth rectangular tile; it's the operating system that is this way, and it's that way to minimize complaints among the majority of users. But when I use a computer (even if it's a little tile-shaped one that I use as a data bucket for hauling data back from some random spot in the forest), I want it to do what I tell it to do and not take actions out of concern for thoughts swirling in my pretty little head. These thoughts came to me this afternoon when I was up at the nearby cellphone spot trying to download the latest edition of the Slate Political Gabfest podcast. It's typically 40 or 50 megabytes in size, a bit too large of an ask when downloading in such a marginal reception area. Still, the thing about mp3 files is that you don't have to download the whole thing to be able to listen to it. The first ten minutes would've been fine. But when you've asked Chrome to download a file, not only is there no indication how much has downloaded, but if there is any problem with the download at all, it is simply deleted. That's not the behavior I wanted, though, given the potential for worried thoughts in pretty heads, I could see why it exists. The only workaround to this problem seems to be to zip the file at various stages along the download process so that if it is deleted, you still have a copy of it somewhere. But that's absurd; why should I have to go through all that bother? And why is it so hard to save a copy of webpage in Chrome on Android? It should just be a single tap, but no, it requires four taps, all of them with annoying delays between them. And why does the saved page have to be a PDF with random bits of text missing and no interactivity? Why can't the saved pages be cached HTML and javascript so I can (for example) flip back and forth between Nate Silver's NowCast and his Polls-Only Forecast (both of which currently show a healthy Hillary Clinton lead over Donald J. Trumpsterfire).
This evening I painted a picture of Ramona as the daylight went murky, causing me to have to arrange a bright bulb directly behind me to illuminate my work (as is often the case at other places, all the bulbs here are hot-burning incandescents, which these days seem like an unnecessary fire hazard). Here was the result:
While I was painting that, Gretchen returned from the better cellphone spot (the one on the access road) with news that her parents had decided to move out of their big house in Silver Spring, a house Gretchen had been living in or returning to since her early childhood. They'd be moving to massive 7th floor apartment in the Watergate, yes, that Watergate. While Gretchen was still digesting this shocking news (and after talking about it with Dina on the cabin's old-timey ring-ring landline phone), we had a dinner based on a bean glurp I'd made. I'd accidentally bought vegan "American-style" cheese the other day at Tops in North Creek, and I put some in my burrito. It was pretty disgusting, but the cloying oily flavors were overwhelmed by the other things going on in there.
This evening after Gretchen went to bed, I had another epic struggle with the fucking Android operating system. Unlike my Android smartphone, Gretchen's doesn't automatically act like an external harddrive when attached via USB cable to a computer (and we've been unable to figure out how to make it do that). This meant that to get a photograph out of it, we'd have to hike up to a cellphone spot, email it to my smartphone, and download it off of there. That seemed ridiculous, so I tried instead to get Bluetooth file sharing working. In the process of getting that going, I quickly came to the conclusion that not all that many people use the feature, since it is difficult to get going, and even once it is working, it's impossible to tell what it is doing. There is nothing in the procedure where a user is permitted to tell his device where to put the files it receives this way, so once the transfer claims to have concluded, you then have to wonder where exactly the file ended up. After browsing the usual places (and in Windows 7 there is a folder for files sent via Bluetooth, but it was empty) I finally had to use the file system search feature to look for "all files modified today." That was how I discovered that the sent image had been put in the My Pictures directory, a place I normally would never use or visit. If an operating system forces you to do a file-system search to find out where a file transfer ended up, chances are the file transfer wasn't properly designed. It all would've been so much easier with a simple USB connection, where the procedure for copying and knowing where things go uses idioms that have existed mostly-unchanged since 1984.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?160813 feedback
previous | next |
