stevengharms.com

I post well-considered, well, better-considered ideas here. For incidental thoughts, check out my Twitter feed.

Posted in Personal, Ruminations | No Comments »

In Pixar’s “Wall-E,” we encounter an adorable robot who is left to clean up the mounds of trash associated with the global spread of the consumerist lifestyle across the planet. Ancillary thereunto with the disregard for the natural world is the disregard of one’s own body and one’s own wellness. Pixar seems to be sugesting: “Hey, stop buying stuff and eating neon-colored food, get back to the basics and enjoy living as an able bodied human.”

In Pixar’s “Toy Story 3,” heart strings are tugged as toys are left behind, subject to jeopardy, or wage petty internecine battles. All of this tugs at our emotional response as they toys seem to say “Remember to play, and play with us, don’t get rid of us — don’t throw away your sense of childlike wonder by scrapping us.”

And so I am confused, Pixar, what am I to think about the acquisition of gizmos and geegaws of plastic and metal?

Posted in Entertainment, Movies | 2 Comments »

I recently got a Cisco Flip camera. It’s awesome, but OSX has a major problem that it launches iPhoto (in addition to the Flip software) when I plug in the device to the USB port.

This means that two applications are busily indexing the contents of a USB device every time I want to use it.

To inhibit:

Plug device in → → Launch Image Capture → Select the device → Change the drop-down for “When device is connected” from iPhoto to do nothing → Be happy.

Posted in Technology and Computers | No Comments »

Yesterday at dinner my dining companion said, when speaking of a certain “bad neighborhood:” “…the smell of weed and hookers.”

For a moment my mind flashed and I imagined one of the Tenderloin brownstones (Ellis and Post-ish) whence a head sticks out the window because it has been awoken by an acrid, herbal smell and a powdery, cigarette-y, smell wafting in the open window and it bellows: “Get your weed and hookers out of here, some decent people have to go to work in the morning!”

Curiously, the other two listeners at the table had also been so aurally misdirected and, upon asking the raconteuse to clarify, much mirth ways had.^*

And here lies the problem in our English, we lack a way, both in speech and typographically, to limit the distribution of a concept across a conjunction. Case in point, and borrowing the C ternary operator structure:

the smell of (weed && hookers) ? “the smell of weed and the smell of hookers” : “(the smell of weed) and hookers”

Now, we at the table took the distribution to mean (the smell of weed) and (the smell of hookers), the first case in the statement above. We distributed (much like the power of distribution over multiplication) across the conjunction. The speaker intended, we discovered, the second case. The interesting problem is that there’s no way to limit this in spoken discourse without an appeal to some sort of visual aid, a gestural cue, or some implicit context.

The problem also appears in written discourse, however:

“the smell of weed and hookers”

To disambiguate we could try “the smell of weed, and hookers.” The “,” is unnecessary here. One could, make an appeal to including the serial comma as in (American) English writing as model: “Tom, Dick, and Harry” might suggest that “the smell of weed, and hookers” is acceptable, but that simply doesn’t scan right to me for a dyadic entity.

The only way I can get this to work is by appealing to computer science, which is naturally under a mandate to be very clear in the order in which statements are processed. “(The smell of weed) and hookers” winds up being very clear, but that’s certainly not standard English writing.

And lo, here is the problem again in the wild from The Sydney Morning Herald:

The same tests revealed that infected men were less intelligent and prone to novelty-seeking behaviour.

Here it’s less distributing across the and. Did that mean the infected men were “less intelligent” and “less prone to novelty-seeking behaviour,” or were they “(less intelligent) and (prone to novelty-seeking behaviour)?

I’m not sure what the right method for disambiguation is, or if it’s even desirable given the humor it can provide.

*: This was actually even funnier than this first transformation because once I disambiguated that it was “the smell of weed” and “hook_something_” I thought she meant “the smell of weed” and “hookahs”. But no, she meant as I originally mis-apprehended: the smell of weed STOP and hookers.

Posted in Linguistics | No Comments »

I don’t have cable but when I’m in a hotel (rarely) and up late (rarely) and happen to have a TV on (rarely) I like Chelsea Handler’s show. It’s about as much Hollywood as I can really take in a given sitting and, recognition where due, Handler is an able comedienne.

For these reasons, I decided to check out her second book without having read the first Are you there Vodka, it’s me, Chelsea. I was expecting something along the lines of David Sedaris (Me Talk Pretty One Day) meets Stephanie Klein (Moose).

Almost predictably enough, the opening vignette was about female masturbation. Le Sigh. Why is it that every comedienne since Rita Rudner feels the unstoppable compulsion to write about their gear? I get it, you’re post-feminism, you can sleep around, and feel good whenever you want too, just like men, right men, you get that, just like you! A story about menstruation or masturbation serves to titillate (just enough) but also gives enough plausible deniability such that if any backward-looking Neanderthal says “Did you really have to open with that?” the questioner is either a repressive, oppressive, or a pleasure-hating troglodyte.

This vignette, it’s subject matter aside, covered what’s best in Handler’s writing. Her voice is not much different than Paul Feig’s or Stephanie Klein’s: being a young, kinda nerdy kid in America isn’t easy (especially when your family is insert identity class here) and leads to humiliation, often, especially where parents, sex, or worse parents and sex are concerned. Handler’s career in Hollywood seems to have its antecedents in her youth, for as she narrates the occurrences she never fails to mention the pop culture milestones around her: Growing Pains or a Three’s Company lunchbox. It’s a style that we often see in Tom Friedman (who never leaves a brand name out) or, visually, in Quentin Tarantino or Wes Anderson.

The opening story about getting “the feeling” and on the matter of the Cabbage Patch Doll are the strongest stories.

As I said, where her family or her history is the topic, her voice is the strongest. But this book was written after she achieved some level of fame with her first book and her show, “Chelesa Lately.” The second theme is life post-fame, stunts she pulls in Santa Monica on her CEO boyfriend (from whom she is now estranged, as the press has it), jaunts to Turks and Caicos, etc.

It is here that the substance is so thin that it has a hard time being spun into a narrative substantial enough for humor to bounce back off of it. It’s a bit like reading someone’s blog post or email dispatch about their spring break. “Oh man, our taxi driver was so crazy, he roped this iguana…”

Now, to be fair, I didn’t think I was picking up Catch-22 (one of the few books that can make me laugh out loud), but I did want some diversion from the oodles of boxes stuffed in my home and the hours of technical reading I’m doing at work. I guess I just expected this divertissement to be more…diverting.

Posted in Books | No Comments »

I don’t recommend buying warranties on many consumer electronics, but I really must emphasize how lucky I was to have it on my MacBook Pro (purchased June 2008).

In November 2008 on Election Day my battery failed to hold its charge a reasonable amount of time. Trip to Genius bar in Valley Fair + AppleCare → Free replacement. That’s a savings of ~ $100. Yes we can, indeed.

Time passed, in the words of Sid Meier’s Civilzation (tm), and my Employer gave me a MacBook Pro. I handed my old one down to my girlfriend who has used it with great dedication since. On June 20th she IM’d me and said that the video seemed to have gone wonky, scanlines showing up, machine needed to shut down.

We took it to the genius bar on Stockton the 20th of June, Applecare expired on the 21st.

I could feel the air of a displaced bullet swishing past.

They replaced the battery (it had recently moved to holding charge for ~5 minutes), logic board, as well as the video unit. Cost? $0.00. That’s savings of ~$300.00.

So, for the outlay of another hundred, I saved myself at least $400 in repair, PLUS I got 90 days extra coverage for work done (even now that it’s past the AppleCare horizon). I told her to start saving for that new MBP, but she can still type this one into the ground, thanks to the AppleCare investment.

Then, Sunday night I went to do another Goodwill run and as I drove out of the garage I heard something that wasn’t right. I stopped the car and looked out, my tire was barely full. I limped to the Shell across the street and filled it back up. A quick test showed I was losing about 10 Psi per evening. I filled it up and headed down to the Discount Tire in Redwood City. Thanks to my warranty a brand new replacement Michelin was $0.00. This is much less than the cost of one tire. $25 bucks to renew the certification and labor had me back on the road, safe and sure 40 minutes later.

Oh yes, and I noticed some scratches in my hardwood floor the other day that appear to be where some equipment with pointy ends had rested during the upgrade installation of my place. Warranty! Wha-bam. A very expensive contractor who specializes in slat color matching is coming next Thursday.

I know most of the time paying for warranties is a tool whereby to exploit the rubes, but lately, this rube has struck back. A win for one of us is a win for all. Bask with me, won’t you?

Posted in Personal | 1 Comment »

William Gibson said one of my favorite dicta about the future: “The future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed.”

I feel like a wave of the future washed over my shore recently. I received a postcard from my health benefits program encouraging me to take advantage of “an exciting new service…a personalized, confidential genetic analysis.”

A what?

It continued:

“With a simple DNA test,…you can work with your doctor or a Navigenics genetic counselor”

Say what? Is that a job you can apply for, “genetic counselor?” Can you imagine the résumé for the person that applies for that job.

• Completed course in grief pre-mediation for X42 haplogroup with disposition to ALS

And what would the bullet points look like for tomorrow?

• Delivered haplogroup cross-referencing database for training AI voice agents for disclosure of low-IQ offspring prediction

Was this job even imaginable when I, pitiful creature of the 20^th century I am, was born? I must be getting old, present technology is starting to feel bizarre. Read a portion of the flyer yourself:

I’m signing up for it, of course, but it’s amazing to think that the nucleotide pair in my cells can now be used to design a health regimen for my 30’s to improve my 60’s.

Posted in Culture, Life And Death | 1 Comment »

Over at The Signal Watch, Ryan takes a few moments to talk about the latest cash grab from Darren Star enterprises: “Sex in the City 2.”

I think SATC2 suffers from a bout of ill-timing and age. Accordingly, these make it seem tone-deaf to the mood of the country. It’s not the case that this latest offering was exceptionally bad, it’s just that the scales have fallen from our eyes and the inherent ridiculousness shines through.

A certain someone I know told me that she loves “Confessions of a Shopaholic.” I understand why, Isla Fisher is cute and funny (Exhibit A: Wedding Crashers). The movie failed and failed hard. If there was any message the world didn’t want to hear as the mortgage bubble was bursting, retirements were being be-Madoffed, and venerable banking institutions were requiring infusions of tax dollars, it was “sometimes I buy too much pretty stuff!” So perhaps that movie got an unfair shake owing to the vicissitudes of the release cycle.

Yet “Shopaholic’s” message has always been the message of SATC. In 1998 as we danced at the peak of the tech-bubble, that a newspaper columnist’s primary concerns would be a good lay, a good stiff drink, and fancy shoes on her inexplicably inexhaustible bank account (I can imagine Carrie Bradshaw bankrupt and back in Mom’s basement after her 19 credit lines forced her to file for bankruptcy looking at heaps of shoes going: “What the hell was I thinking?”) seemed to be an avatar of the zeitgeist. And contrary to expectation, as real-world NYC went to hell in a handbasket, her lifestyle aligned with the post-9/11 advice of the buffoon, George W. Bush who encouraged America to, in a time of crisis, “go shopping.” Because the terrorists hate our freedom to buy lo-rise pants and belly tops, slap them on nubile jailbait, apparently.

Roger Ebert hit the nail on the head with:

Their defining quality is consuming things. They gobble food, fashion, houses, husbands, children, vitamins and freebies.

In a time when America is generally tightening its belt, to keep promulgating this message takes their lives and actions from “wouldn’t it be great if…” fantasy to “get a grip you bobblyhead” reality. Most of the criticism I’ve read is from those wondering just how entitled Charlotte is to feel that she barely makes it with hired help or what sort of an ungrateful woman doesn’t like that her husband, reformed skirt-chaser wants to spend time with her in their opulent (of course) home — oh right, Carrie.

Anecdote: Success

Bono once said that if you were successful enough in the music business, you eventually become a parody of that (young, hard charging, awesome, gritty, great band) you once were. Ironically, he said this at the opening of Zoo TV.

Or, as Peter Hartlaub of the San Francisco Chronicle said:

A little background for our younger readers: U2 is a band that was cool throughout the mid-1980s, then it briefly sucked, then it became cool again, then it sucked for a much longer time — and then it got sort of cool for a third time but the band members sold their musical souls in the process. This video was taken right at the beginning of their first period of sucking.

I think this has a lot to bear on the SATC universe. SATC clever:

Miranda Hobbes: The only two choices for women; witch and sexy kitten.
Carrie Bradshaw: Oh you just said a mouthful there sister.

not the dubbing of a certain vigorous male “Lawrence of my Labia. (SATC overwrought)”

Question: Why does Kim Cattrall deliver all her lines like Snagglepuss?

Really. Check it out.

Lauren and I, when encountering a situation which is SATC-like, and which calls for a ham-handed double entendre (see above) often deliver it with a:

<span style=”voice:snagglepuss; referenceto:SamathaJones”> Mmmmm, Carrie, you could say that it wasn’t a ham-burger, but a man-burger.</span>

Anecdote: The Gay Vote

I think I knew there was a sea-change afoot on Friday. I went to get a slice of pizza at Marcello’s at Castro and Market and as I walked past the beautiful Castro movie house I overheard three men walking ahead of me one of whom said:

“…God he was like a horse, speaking of horses, we’re all skipping “Sex and the City 2”, right?”

Posted in Modern Times, Movies | 1 Comment »

Yes, yes, yes friends. According to my awesome realtor, Vanessa Gamp, we are aiming to close on the condo on the 21^st. I recorded some footage of us doing the walkthru with the builder with my awesome new Flip UltraHD!

Now this is normally where I put something really cool of the house that I took with the Flip in the blog post.

But honestly, my filming skill was so crappy and jerky i gave myself a seizure halfway through. So, here’s a snippet of Lauren and I getting an early dinner after doing the walkthru.

Here’s a still that Lauren took

Posted in Personal, San Francisco | 1 Comment »

Today was my VP’s quarterly all-hands meeting and much to my surprise, I was honored with an award. Apparently an elf, or several elves, thought that the work I had done since joining the team 7 weeks ago was exceptional and nominated me for being an exemplar of the corporate culture we seek to foster in my organization.

I admit, there was a second where, as the introduction was read, I thought: “Hey this person is doing a lot of work like I do, that’s funny.” But then it dawned on me, the person reading the description was my manager’s manager, my director; wait, was that suggestion from my manager that I ‘be sure to be at the all-hands on Monday’ more than just a pull for team turn-out at the big conference facility…”

And there it was, I was called up, I shook hands with people whose names I read in the industry press. I had a photo taken and was given a sharp-looking certificate and a new Flip camera UltraHD (Cisco owns Flip). I was lucky enough to be sitting next to my friend Jason who’s known me, at work, for 8 years now. It was really nice to be among so many friends and smiling faces. I got a lot of congratulations (not to be confused with the ‘alot of congratulations’) thereafter and it felt really good to know that people in the organization think I do good work, that I make a difference.

What more could make a Type-A happy?

After the meeting was over I went back to my building, back to my desk and opened the email box and I found dozens of congratulatory emails waiting. One of my co-workers said something so awesome to me it made my week (possibly my year).

[The award is] for those who Collaborate, Learn, Execute, Accelerate, and Disrupt. I think you did all of them and it is a well deserved award.

I have to say that while meeting the senior leaders was great, knowing that my peers think I add something to their every-day world, made me feel so appreciated I can only be humbly silent.

I’ve never been a team captain or the guy who made the 3-pointer at the buzzer, but today I knew the truth that they always say at the end of the championship: it’s not about me, it was the team that made it happen. Those wonderful people I work with who tolerate my questions and ignorance are the reason I happened to have had a bit of glory today. I thank them for their esteem.

Posted in Work, Worklife | No Comments »