Into the Wild Spaces

When I hear “stream” I think of piss.

You’ve got streaming audio, cloud repositories of millions of tracks, probably from more artists than you’d have time in a lifetime to fully appreciate, much less listen to a single time. This is as good as life gets, isn’t it? Any song you want, on any device?

Wrong.

After spending nearly a decade in a warehouse, a box of old cassette tapes and my old Walkman arrived on my doorstep. Even a decade ago cassettes were old technology, but I hadn’t gotten around to sorting and discarding them before moving overseas, and then they were forgotten. So suddenly, in 2015, I found myself sitting before a stack of mix tapes made as early as 1987. Some worked perfectly well, others were squealing messes that went straight into the trash. And let’s face it, in the age of digital media, the audio quality was truly degraded. I wouldn’t go back to the cassette era for any price.

But the mix tapes … wow. There’s no equivalent today. Continue reading "Paean to the Mix Tape"

It's hard to imagine a better day-to-day keyboard to put in front of a serious work computer. The Happy Hacker keyboard skips some of the novel innovations of other alternative designs, and focuses instead on two simple things: keeping as many useful keys as possible as close to the hands as possible, and relocating Control and Escape to positions useful for Emacs and Vim users. But those two things alone make this a super-natural keyboard to use for extended periods. Continue reading "Review of the Happy Hacker 2 Keyboard"

It's been a day of crappy user experience with software. The only known remedy for such state of affairs remains unchanged over the decades: ranting about it on the Internet. Rant mode on.

Hey Skype, your shitty code brings my relatively decent Android almost to a crawl. When I quit your app, I want you OFF, dead and buried! You don't have permission to continue running in the background, sucking the cycles out of my processor and making everything else slow to a crawl, too. Microsoft, quit means quit!

Hey Tapatalk, if your software doesn't install easily and cleanly on my forum, I won't install it at all. Imagine the privileges of access I am granting you to a server I'd like to remain unhacked. Those are privileges I don't give up lightly, and when your stupid plugin fails to install correctly the first time, I get suspicious and reach for /dev/null. Oh, and if your forum keeps forgetting my login? Fuck you. I'll forget you in a heartbeat. Stop being clever and fix your code. Continue reading "Rant mode: ON"

I've been a fan of PC-BSD for a long time, because it takes the pain out of installing FreeBSD on a desktop computer, but it's been rapidly gaining features of its own that enhance the Unix desktop. I installed PC-BSD 10.1 and gave it a test-drive, and it's going to stay installed for a long time (and will be good company for my FreeBSD/FreeNAS storage server and my FreeBSD VPS. Yes, I'm a fan.) Continue reading "Review of PC-BSD 10.1"

We emerged from the ridiculous luxury of air-conditioned 4-wheel vehicles at the beginning of a patchwork of sandy trails and the thin speckles of Acacia shadows, many hundreds of kilometers from the coast and even farther from home. This was truly the Sahel, and I've never experienced anything like it. Perhaps I never will.

It's easy to dismiss the far-flung corners of earth, the difficult places where you'd never in a million years ever want to live, where you can't imagine how people get by, where it seems life is too hard to be worth living. But that discounts the fact that people already live there, and they're there today, and it's hard. This is the Sahel. Continue reading "The Sahelians"

I was in Kolda, in Senegal's Casamance region, waiting for sundown and the cool of the night. A rustling in the treetops surprised me, and looking up, I watched four shadows go leaping from the branches of one tree to another. Primates! Turned out, the shadows comprised a family of monkeys, and they seemed to be pretty much at home in the trees of the hotel. Who knows, maybe they were there first! Who cares, though: after so many years at the edge of the Sahel, disappointed with the paucity of wildlife and the encroaching of the desert, it was a thrill to be face to face with some happy-looking animals. Continue reading "The Senegal Green Monkey"

The year was 1992 or so, and on the front counter of Cornell's Ag & Life Science Library was a terminal that offered easy access to all sorts of resources and information, including weather (useful in Ithaca, where morning sun could turn to 8+ inches of snow by afternoon on any given winter day), sports scores, and more. Some of those services were offered using gopher, a cross-system information system that disappeared when something called the World Wide Web overran it with a more compelling interface, graphics, and a less menu-driven approach. I got used to using it, and grew to like it. Continue reading "New gopher on the prairie"

An Open Letter to Barnes & Noble:

Greetings. I've been a customer since I first decided to take the plunge and enter the world of digital books (e-books), and I made a conscious decision to buy from Barnes and Noble over Amazon for two important reasons: First, your epub format is an industry standard usable on a wide variety of devices when the books are unencumbered by DRM, and second, your web interface allowed me to download copies of my purchased books to my desktop for archiving and backup.

Two years later, I'm back to Amazon. Why? Continue reading "An Open Letter to Barnes & Noble Bookstore"

Of course the Casamance has its own name: though technically it’s part of Senegal, it’s not just another region, it’s practically another world. And that yin-yang of belonging while remaining separate is at the heart of the Casamance experience.

We flew into Ziguinchor in a ten-seater turboprop under whose spinning propellers I watched pass the Petit Cote, the dust-strewn roofs of Banjul, and then the yawning, immense Casamance itself. The Casamance River twisted and snaked back on itself through a labyrinth of mangrove thickets, brackish backwaters, oxbow lakes, and broad silty plains riven with the tracks of animals crossing what might have been hardpan dirt or meters-deep quicksand, all in a landscape that spanned from horizon to horizon in infinite flatness. If the bold landscapes of mountain ranges speak of majesty, flat riverine landscapes whisper “impermanence.” The river moves from year to year and season to season, haunted by the ghosts of swollen rainfall or the pressing heat. As it writhes, the stains of salt trace its thrashing, and trickles of rainfall cross the mudflats to join the watercourse, lined on both sides with the emerald greens of the young mangroves that will ultimately strangle them. At the edges, small villages and the squared plots of subsistence vegetable farms crouch, speckled with the canopies of the infinite trees that make not forest but savannah. How to build and plan when everything is in perpetual motion, and always will be? Continue reading "The Casamance"

The morning sun was scarcely over the horizon and a cold wind was blowing off the sands of the Sahel when I first saw them motoring up the steely, smooth waters of the Senegal River: Senegal's artisanal fishing fleet, back from a long night – or maybe several – in the cold waters of the eastern Atlantic. A dozen wooden pirogues wended their way, gracefully, past the island of Saint Louis where I watched them from a hotel balcony, towards the tangled knot of ships and men that constitutes the fishing port.

I watched them with a sense of appreciation. Other than the outboard motor and the grey vinyl Wellington overcoats worn by the crew, not much of that scene has changed in centuries, including the long, drawn out lines of the pirogue itself, which was originally a river craft stretched out and sent into the unforgiving ocean in search of bigger fish. After many years of working among the highest levels of political leadership to bring about meaningful reduction in Senegal's poverty, I watched these traditional people going about their traditional craft in the traditional way, and I thought to myself, "I haven't affected these folks in any way at all." That's not totally true, of course: they're the rantings of a frustrated bureaucrat impatient with the rate of progress and all the insalubrious aspects of trusting political leaders to want and work towards change. Continue reading "When the Pirogues Return from Sea"

On a lark, I decided to give the TypeMatrix keyboard a try, having passed it up earlier in lieu of the Totally Ergonomic Keyboard. At a hundred bucks, it was a low-risk gamble, and I am ever-more curious about interesting, innovative, or just curious keyboards. Someday we'll look back on the age of keyboards as a novelty that betrays our technological unsophistication, but that age isn't here yet, and for the moment we are still largely glued to our keyboards, so why not experiment?

Off the bat, a few observations: Continue reading "The TypeMatrix 2030 Ergonomic Keyboard"

Salzburg was magical. Salzburg was lovely. Salzburg was freezing. I'm told the magic of Salzburg is in the hills, but we had trouble looking too far up, as the wind was out of the north and the snow flakes were falling in our eyes as we looked around.

We noticed one of the first miracles of European Union integration as we departed Innsbruck for Salzburg: our train almost immediately left Austria at the border at Kufstein, and traveled the rest of the way through Germany – endless fields buttoned up for the winter with rolls of hay stacked at the margins – before arriving. Imagine how different things were a few decades ago when Germany was divided and Austria represented the frontier and the Iron Curtain that demarked the two philosophies of the Cold War. Continue reading "Salzburg"

I'd hoped to learn all about the speckled history of Innsbruck, "the Bridge over the River Inn" in order to flesh out this story. In reality, between kids and work and other responsibilities, I never really got a chance to learn much at all about the place we spent Christmas of 2014.

That doesn't mean it hasn't earned a very special place in my heart, though: Continue reading "Innsbruck"

Christmas is different in every culture around the world, and while many of America's Christmas traditions come from Germany and Austria, that doesn't mean it's the same thing.

For one, in Austria, it's the Christ Child himself who delivers the gifts to good little children, not some bearded, Nordic fat man in a red suit. And we were lucky – not only did the Christ Child bring a gift or two for us while we stayed in Innsbruck, but we got a chance to see the lighted procession on Christmas Eve. Continue reading "Christmas in Innsbruck"

The kids wanted a white Christmas, sure, but I was also hoping our trip to Austria would yield a little snow. I was hoping to do a little snowboarding for the first time since we traveled to Sierra Nevada, and the second time since my 20s. But as we arrived in Innsbruck in Christmas week, it was beginning to look unlikely, and the forecast was cheerily focused on sun and seasonally warm temperatures.

"It doesn't matter," my Austrian friend said. "We'll just go up and ski the glacier."

My heart leapt. Continue reading "The Stubaital Glacier"