Author: Aaron Weber

Network related program activities

I’ve been invited to join Orkut, and although it’s cool, I guess, it’s still very obviously beta: I can’t quite get the “friend rating” and “fandom” thing to work, nor is it obvious how to write testimonials to people. Aside from the fact that it’s still new, and therefore only has cool people in it, it’s basically Friendster, which is to say, it’s a huge popularity contest with message boards.

Rye Whiskey

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds have a song called Rye Whiskey, which is the first few results when you search for the song on Google. But it’s also known as a Woodie Guthrie song, and NPR fave John McCutcheon does a version, and the song itself goes well back into the mists of time known only to Alan Lomax and the rest of the music historians.

I haven’t heard the Nick Cave version but the iTunes store has the Guthrie version, as well as several instrumentals that don’t seem related. You don’t hear that kind of folk song much, it’s either earnest politics or silly children’s music and the occasional hippie-church-outdoors hymn. This is the sort of bitter alcoholic wail you expect today to hear from… well, Nick Cave or Johnny Cash.

Anyway, I sure wish I had some rye whiskey right now.

Mortality, Masculinity, and Matriarchy

I’m home visitng my uncle this weekend, while he’s still visitable. At this point he’s pretty jaundiced, and he feels nauseous all the time. His inability to eat much and his illness have meant that he’s lost a lot of muscle mass, although apparently swelling and water retention to keep his weight about the same. And he’s tired more, which I think affects his ability to keep his eyelid over the false eye open, or maybe it’s the weight loss that made it droop like that. Anyway, he looked pretty close to normal, or at least he didn’t look terribly sick. He looked like he was just recovering from the flu, say. Kind of yellow-green, and a little thinner around the face, and a little unsteady, and not as funny, but overall he looks about ok. And he ate plenty at dinner tonight, which was good, although I couldn’t tell if he was doing it just to make us happy or because the acupuncture actually started helping make things palatable again.

I’ve always admired my uncle. When I was little I thought he was cool because he was a race car driver. When I was older and understood the difference between running a race-car team and being a driver, I admired him for his leadership, his incredibly sarcastic wit, and his incredibly deep knowledge of odd subjects: military history, auto racing, economics, dogs, money laundering (as a retailer of extremely-high-end auto parts, he had occasional clients who came to him with bags of cash). I admired him for having dropped out of college and taught himself everything he knew, and for starting two successful businesses, and did I mention the incredibly sarcastic wit? He and my father were quite a pair in a political discussion, burning everything that came into view.

I can tell how bad things are by the way my grandmother acts– if I call and she’s off the phone in under fifteen minutes, she’s really feeling poorly. If you get her going, she’ll usually take you on a random walk through the mid-20th-century, with detours through fifteenth and sixteenth century printmaking, colonial-period philosophy, and University of Virginia interdepartmental politics. But these days it’s “I’m busy I’m tired I gotta run.” And that worries me.

The super bowl should be amusing, anyway. By which I mean, it’ll be more fodder for that ongoing essay I’ve been meaning to write on the nature of masculinity, suffering, and family.

Mortality

Nat writes “And whenever someone else sleeps in my bed, if I wake up first, I’m briefly convinced that they’re dead and have to shake them awake before I’m reassured. This is irrational, this is stupid, but there it is.”

I have the same feeling– the other day I went to visit a friend who was having a dinner party, and I was one of the first to arrive; I knocked on her door and she didn’t answer, because she was in the kitchen making dinner for everyone. For the thirty or forty seconds of slightly louder knocking, trying the door, realizing it was unlocked, going back, seeing her alive… I was … well, not convinced. But the thought crossed my mind.

On one of my first visits home from Boston, shortly after a minor scale-and-plane at the dentist and a moderately painful episode of back pain involving lots of advil and lying on the floor during meetings, I told my father, well, it looks like I’ve inherited your back and your gums (both of which give him endless trouble). I meant it as a joke but I think it was one of the most hurtful things I ever said to him.

I have never seen him look so crushed: he has worked so hard all his life to do great things, for humanity and for his family and for himself, but he hasn’t beaten genetics and he hasn’t beaten the fact that human spines and teeth aren’t evolved to last us much beyond reproductive age before they start to wear out.

It’s enough to make me wonder if my retirement fund will pay for all that HGH and titanium exoskeleton I’m going to want. You know, maybe I’m not a cheapskate– maybe I’m just saving my pennies for that new spine and pelvis I’m sure they’ll invent, at some point.

Get cracking, future! I’m continually disappointed in the future. It’s just not as cool as I thought it would be. I remember reading in Discover Magazine in the late 80s that there would be personal aircraft that got 100 miles to the gallon and went 400 miles an hour and would be the size of small cars. And could hover.

Instead we get giant station wagons. Dammit. Where did my train of thought go? Maybe I need new brain equipment too.

Blind Eye for the Blank Guy

I was once told that Drinking diet Coke will not make you gay, but it sure as hell will make you look gay. Whatever. Diet soda doesn’t give me the sugar-sleepiness that sugar-soda does. Hence the Diet Pepsi and Diet Coke cans piling up on my desk.

Put on headphones, ready for next frenzy of text generation.

One two three four my baby don’t mess around….

She said her name was Suzy but they all called her Seuss

SUSE, pronounced with an “uh” on the end, like Porsche (Oh! So that’s how you say Por-shuh!). It’s the new black. Now running SUSE 9 with XD2 and, frankly, I’m liking it. Yes, I even like YAST, despite its tendency to try to out-think me and sometimes change settings in unexpected ways.

As I expected, once I’d gotten used to a few quirks (/opt/ instead of /usr/, /media instead of /mnt/, that sort of thing), it seems perfectly natural and effective. I’m lovin’ it.

(Today I saw a poster advertising an indoor athletic event as “Olympic excitement in Boston!” My immediate thought: they’re not affiliated with the Olympics, they’re going to get called on that. I’m already a marketroid.)

Conflicting Tones

I’m writing an article for a Novell magazine, and keeping a constantly friendly but not over-casual tone. And I’ve got several conflicting tones in the random stanzas knocking around in my head:

“This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.”
“LEND ME SOME SUGAR! I AM YOUR NEIGHBOR!”

I’ve also been thinking of slogans. “We Make IT Boring” sounds awesome, because it’s not immediately intuitive, but if you think about it for five seconds it makes sense: IT is exciting only when things go wrong, or if things only occasionally go right. If it just works, you don’t notice it any more than you notice the incredibly complex workings of household appliances. When IT just works, it becomes boring, and you can actually something done instead of futzing around with your IT infrastructure.

The conflict of a slogan proclaiming the boringness of a product is what makes the slogan catchy, and rare– it’s a risk to have a conflict there, especially to have a disparaging comment in your motto. There’s a reason that the app that declared “It Sucks Less” never caught on (Was it Oleo?). But “boring” isn’t the same as “not sucking” — it means predictability, which is not at all bad for things that are, in essence, tools approaching the status of utilities or appliances.

That’s my deep thought of the week, by the way, so savor it deeply.

Baffling Ads

I’ve been hoping Slate’s Ad Report Card feature would take on the IBM Linux ad with the creepy kid, and sure enough, they did.

I spoke with some IBM marketing people about the ad last week at LinuxWorld Expo and they said “the kid is supposed to be a child prodigy, like Linux.” I think the ad is a little better than the first series of cryptic ads– peace, love, penguin– in that it gives you some sort of idea what they’re talking about. People at first didn’t even know the ads were for Linux! Of course those ads were aimed at building street cred with techies, so I guess that makes sense. These ads are aimed at building credibility and image, too– there’s no call to action, like with other ads (“Ask your doctor about the Meat Lover’s Pizza, call 1-900-MEATY now!”).

But really, the ones where Linux was a basketball player against the Bad Guys team (Virus, etc.) were clearer and gave you more of a feeling about what the heck they were talking about. They obviously have some sort of strategy there, and I’m certainly glad to see Linux being promoted so well, and given such a cool face, even if, as the review notes, there’s not a lot of substance behind the ad, and it’s mostly aimed at a very small group of people, leaving the rest of us to feel that we’re kinda out of the loop. Maybe that’s it– we all need to figure out what this is, so we can be cool like that creepy-ass kid who talks to celebrities.