Two wings and very little prayer

A sweet bit of serendipity this morning. Forgot something in the house on my way down the drive, came back, and found this little dude on the door handle. He barely held still long enough for a picture, contrary to mantis’ general rep as very relaxed and nearly immobile. He really dug my TZ3, and kept trying to get atop it, which, since the camera can’t take pictures of itself, made photographing him a challenge.

I left him on a tomato plant, with an admonishment to earn his keep.

After that, off to E’s school for “Parent’s Fun Day.” For me, though I enjoyed being with E, it was more like “Parent’s listen to a dozen kids screaming at the top of their lungs” day. To boot, it was the first day of pool use, and as usual, E has forgotten all about going underwater, is afraid of anything over her navel, etc. So swimming, which is usually a blast, was not fun. I survived. L survived. E survived. That’s about the best we could ask for today.

Got to work at lunch time, to be greeted with news that our office renovations are finished. Which left my office looking like this:



Rugged, dirt-hiding, nicely-shaded but above all clean carpet? Check. (The previous carpet was rarely even vacuumed, let alone cleaned.) Gently-colored walls? Check. Old nail and fastener holes covered? Check. New furniture? Check. (Well, new to me, anyway.) Old monster hutch gone? Check. Blinds back? Not yet. But okay.

So it looks nice. But all my stuff remained to be moved back. Three hours later, it looked more like this:



Directly to the left, hidden from view, is a cabinet with all my tools, gear and files in it. I only had three boxes of stuff. Half a box of that went home with me, and another half a box I'm parceling out to Goodwill. Most of the rest of my gear is in clear plastic shoeboxes. Six months ago, fed up with all the crap in my office, I spent two days cleaning, reducing and reorganizing. It paid off...my coworkers are all barely even started on their move-back. I'm done and working. Kind of nice, really. I've pared my office down to a minimum. Having the new test/bench room really helps.

On the home front, dog-sitter (thanks, Pop) and house/cat-sitters lined up. Major construction projects are mostly tied up and buttoned down. Lawn’s cut. My gear and clothes are together. Mom arrives tomorrow after noon (I should be off work early). We’ll deliver J to his temporary residence, hit the sack early, and head out to the airport Friday AM.

Which is cool. But. I’ve now been preparing for travel, traveling, recuperating from travel (work-wise), moving, reorganizing, thrown out of my office, moved back into my office, etc. for nearly three weeks. It drives me bonkers. My routine is totally disconnected, I’m unanchored from the waypoints I use to mark my days, and I feel completely discombobulated. This will only be compounded by spending the week in a way where the day of the week is largely irrelevant, where I spend most of the day in windowless conference room, and where my only contact with home is iChat. I love travel, but hate traveling. A paradox, I understand, but there it is. Still, one more week, then summer settles in.

Just remember to pack the GPS for caching and navigation, so I'm off.

Everything is Miscellaneous

After six months of dilatory attempts, I have (more or less) finished David Weinberger's Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder.

I wish I could issue a firm pronouncement of my opinions of Weinberger's work, but I can't. So instead, some general observations.

First, Weinberger is in love with metadata, and with systems that mine metadata in an inherently organic, user-driven way. That's all well and good. The problem is that he doesn't seem to see any practical limit to the amount of metadata that's worth accumulating about a given object. I disagree with that perspective, because after a while, the pile of metadata becomes so dense that the marginal return of adding further descriptors is vanishingly small. Pile on enough metadata about an object, and you wind up recreating the object, for all intents.

Second, Weinberger is in love with technology. This should more or less follow from the first observation, because metadata rich organization is necessarily high-technology organization. It is not possible to practically maintain rich metadata sets on index cards. Weinberger's faith that high-technology systems are the savior of organization is touching, but has major flaws. For one thing, it is a hopelessly Western-centric, first-world-centric point of view. It's reliant on broad availability of cheap, high-speed, interconnected computing power that simply isn't a fact of life in the developing world. Weinbergers vision works for me, with my two laptops, iPhone and broadband-wireless-everywhere lifestyle. For Nanook and his sled team, not so much.

Further, for the world to organize (or disorganize) itself in Weinberger fashion, we have to assume bottomless supplies of cheap energy. Energy to build and maintain the technological systems that gather and mine metadata, primarily. I'm not convinced that an energy-rich society is a long-term possibility. If energy goes, or becomes prohibitively expensive, suddenly it becomes a lot less of a priority to have wireless access to a multi-billion record database, compared to, say, walking to the library for a book.

Finally, I think Weinberger is guilty of simply spreading a little technology frosting over old concepts and calling them new. In discussing "new learning," he talks about now in the new information age, recall of facts is a skill more suited to quiz shows than to education. I call philosophical bullshit on this argument from the start, but even if you accept it, it's not new. Instant recall of facts has rarely ever been as important as the ability to know where to find the relevant facts.

Our ability to find the required facts is certainly enhanced by our technology. But the fundamental need is not new or special.

I guess at the core of things, I'd say that Weinberger is a smart guy with a lot of good ideas, and some genuinely penetrating insights. That said, he's also guilty of believing his own bullshit, and that ends up turning what might have been an interesting book into an exercise in pro-technology cheerleading. For me, anyway. Your mileage, as they say, may vary.