Category: Words

I would start sentences with “Candy historians speculate that… “

Whenever I look at aggregators that pull in my blog, I worry that I’m totally off topic. For example, Novell has an intranet page that pulls in a bunch of Novell employee blogs, which tends to be software oriented, with the occasional geek-life entry… and then there’s mine, about sex, and culture, and how awesome it is that Shaolin Soccer has finally reached the US.

Or how conflicted I am about Wal*Mart. On the one hand, they’re the logical low-margin high-volume store that caters to the average guy, and having been to them I can’t say it’s easy to ignore that appeal. Reasonable prices, man. Low margins. It’s good for consumers. Of course I don’t like the homogenization it represents, but that’s a taste thing, not a reasoned debate. Their drive for low costs does, however, have a human cost: lots and lots of crappy jobs, managers cheating their underlings out of overtime…. it’s good for the shoppers, and it’s good for investors, but it’s not …. well, it’s not good for society overall. So what do I do as a shopper, investor, employee, manager, human? Buy the stock and refuse to shop there?

I guess I make off-topic blog posts about my indecision. How very Prufrock.

John Gruber complains about the Open Source development model and its supposed failures. I disagree heartily, but before I insult his conclusion, I need to point out that he’s chosen a terrible analogy as well:

The distributed, collaborative nature of open source software works for developer-level software, but works against user-level software. Imagine a motion picture produced like a large open source project. Different scenes written and directed by different people, spread across the world. Editing decisions forged by group consensus on mailing lists. The result would be unfocused, incoherent, and unenjoyable.

Imagine a motion picture produced like a motion picture. That’s exactly how they’re done, dumbass. And while in my opinion most of Hollywood’s output is, in fact, unfocused, incoherent, and unenjoyable, they do seem to be quite successful. The other conclusions of the article are about as insightful: Eric Raymond and many other programmers are egotistical (shocking!), user interface is difficult and underappreciated by programmers (this hasn’t been drilled into everyone’s head yet?) and open source projects are sometimes less organized than closed ones.

I want to point out the “sometimes” here: as far as I can tell, a corporation isn’t going to have much more organizational control than any other group of a few hundred people. Things are done by consensus with the benevolent dictatorship of the maintainer, or, in a company, by the manager. If people don’t like it, they can stuff it– which is called forking, transferring to another department, or quitting, depending on your context.

Finally, the argument that open development projects will by nature lack good UI is the same as the one I used to hear that they will always lack good docs. Nobody claims that anymore because docs nerds like me came out of the woodwork and started writing docs. Good UI is becoming important, and recognized, and is appearing in more and more apps, because designers are coming out of the woodwork and helping out. This is especially true of GNOME, thanks to the work of several dedicated programmers, the GNOME foundation, and corporate backers like (ahem) the Novell Ximian Group, Siemens, Red Hat, and Sun.

Maybe it’s not done yet. But there are a lot of “full-time, well-paid” people working on this software too, and we’re doing it with a lot of part-time, unpaid folks who are chipping in for the greater glory.

Near wild heaven has several good GNOME UI examples, with classy-looking screenshots too. In other words, our UI brings all the boys to the yard. Damn right it’s better than yours.

Ooh! My Novell Connection article is online!

The Vice President has decreed that the loop of influence is under the cone of silence.

With rocks in my dress
and smoke in my hair
I walked into the lake
to get some sleep down in there

-Sparklehorse

Avenue Victor Hugo Bookstore is closing after nearly 30 years in business, and posts an incredibly bitter little suicide note to everyone who failed the store as it was dying. I’d do the same. Screw being gracious and going down with the ship, especially when you’re more or less in a fleet and you’re watching one after another sink as the weather turns against you all. It’s mean, it’s self-serving, and it’s basically true, with the exception of the final prediction that the closure of bookstores leads inexorably to the end of culture and erudition.
Continue reading “Bitter Litte Coda to an Illustrious Career”

So, the first few bits of Status Anxiety are quite good, but I have a feeling that de Botton is going to fail to connect them all into any sort of coherent whole. His basic premise– that status is what we want when we claim to want wealth and material goods, and that modern society comes with a lot of anxiety about status– is more or less obvious to anyone who’s thought about it, which is basically everyone. And rather than use his premise as a starting point, he basically meanders around it for awhile and then leaves it at that. Hence the rather cutting review in the Guardian, and the straightforward but equally negative one in the Independent.

I just started reading Status Anxiety, by Alain de Botton. It’s about how, given the possibility of rising above our stations, we suffer more greatly from jealousy. Serfs were not jealous of nobles, they accepted their miserable lives as part of nature’s way. Once people figured out that wasn’t so, they became fiercely unhappy with their lot, and improved it, by revolution if necessary.

There are two ways to remedy anxiety about your standing: achieve greatness (this is impossible– no matter how great you are, there is still anxiety) or give up (this is either defeatism or buddhism, depending on your point of view). De Botton quotes William James: “How pleasant is the day when we give up trying to be young or slender.”

The specifics of the desired greatness vary from person to person. For example, Pablo Escobar always wanted to be great, by which he meant, he wanted to be popular, he wanted to be admired, he wanted a big house and a fancy car and a big TV and teenage hookers. He had all those things for awhile, before he was hunted down and shot at close range, finally. The book Killing Pablo is an excellent and unbiased account of the hunt and eventual capture. What I like most about it is the way that the author chronicles the good things that Escobar did, as well as the bad, and the ways that the US and Colombian forces had to make compromises with their ethics to eventually capture him. The author doesn’t pass judgement on anyone involved, and doesn’t need to, because the story holds up on its own as a tale of suspense and investigation, driven by Pablo Escobar’s status anxiety– and that of his customers in the US.

Listen, O thou exceedingly foolish virgin, for you will beget difficult teenagers!