A Movie Without Enough Male Presence?

The NYT has a fairly unfavorable review of the Sex and the City movie; while I haven't seen the movie, have no desire to do so, and am sure several of the criticisms are valid, part of the review rubbed me the wrong way:

Unlike the show, which allowed the men to emerge occasionally from the sidelines with lines of actual dialogue, the male characters in the movie stand idly by, either smiling or stripping, reduced to playing sock puppets in a Punch-free Judy and Judy (times two) show. I’m all for the female gaze, but, gee, it’s also nice to talk — and listen — to men, too.

Uh, right. Men don't have enough screen time?

Not according to another NYT article by the same author (!), xkcd, Jezebel, or indeed, anyone with half a brain who watches blockbuster movies (or even their advertisements). It's nice to talk and listen to men in movies, sure, but you have every other movie coming out this summer for plenty of that.

Urban Biomes

One of the things that I like the most about living where we do is that we're within walking distance of so many urban and suburban "biomes" -- different population levels and feels, from dense forest to downtown skyscrapers.

Our apartment is in a neighborhood that's reminiscent of suburban residential areas (though the houses are closer together). When I go running, I can go to the commercial-suburban-feeling strip malls and highways near Alewife and feel like I'm in the sprawling exurbs. Or I can go to almost the opposite extreme, the parks surrounding Fresh Pond, where I can be surrounded by trees and water and out of view of human-made structures. The Cambridge and Somerville squares have almost a small-town downtown feel. Stretching "walking distance" to a few miles, Allston is a bustling urban neighborhood. And then there's the financial district, full-scale city.

Everywhere else I've lived, and most places I could live, have a much more homogenous five-mile radius around them -- but variety is just one of many perks of living in the Boston area.

TV Suspense

I've grown enamored of watching TV dramas; I love being excited about finding out what will be revealed in the episode I'm going to watch next. But there are a couple shows that I started watching and grew tired of before the suspenseful questions were answered: Weeds and Desperate Housewives.

I think part of this is due to a split between different kinds of suspense. On the one hand, there's what I think of as forward-looking thriller suspense -- basically, "how will they get out of this?" On the other hand, there's backward-looking mystery suspense, or "how did they get into this?".

Weeds excelled in building up "how will they get out of this" situations. How will Nancy escape the cadre of drug dealers with guns pointed at her? But it eventually grew tiresome, at least to me, because it seemed like there was no "so what" or larger structure behind it. Desperate Housewives built up some "how did they get into this" questions about the past of Wisteria Lane. Why did Mary Alice kill herself? What happened to Dana? Yet with the forward-looking storylines much less compelling, I didn't feel motivated to keep watching.

I think the best suspense interleaves both styles: like one of my favorite shows, Lost. Lost mixes "how did they get into this" questions (why is there a polar bear in the tropics?) with "how will they get out of this" questions (how, if at all, will they get off the island?). The answers to both questions are often intertwined. Who built the hatch in the jungle? What will happen when they open it? Both types of suspense are given more emotional depth with flashbacks and flashforwards that show just enough to keep you curious.

Which is to say, OMG I am so impatient for Thursday night!!

Harbor Islands

It's not a T stop, but today I went with a group for a local Boston adventure -- we took a ferry to Spectacle Island, in the harbor, for a picnic. It was a beautiful day, albeit a little windy, and our picnic, hiking, and beach football-throwing were fun. I was a little disappointed that the island seemed so landscaped (it had wide paths, and few if any trees), since I'd always thought of the Harbor Islands as a crazy wilderness -- but what do I expect from an island mostly made of landfill. It's also apparently one of the highest points in the harbor -- we saw a nice view when we climbed the south drumlin.

Familiarity Now vs. Effectiveness Later

It's a familiar adage that an effective user interface is designed to be familiar; users don't like to encounter systems that make them think on the first try, which usually means they like to encounter interfaces that are as close as possible to the ones they've encountered before. This is on my mind because I'm currently learning the interface for a new music player; it has quite a learning curve, based in large part on its unfamiliarity (not that "File" is the most reasonable choice, in hindsight, for a menu name, but is "Engage" really any better?). But the more I dig into Amarok, the more I realize that it's incredibly full-featured, and it's just not possible to display every feature in a commonly-understood way; once I learn the basic operations, they seem straightforward and natural.

I'm reminded that the high learning curve is a common criticism of Linux -- you'll have to learn the command line, or my favorite text editor (of course! Ctl-@ Ctl-n Ctl-n Ctl-w Ctl-y to copy and paste a couple lines!), or the Gimp, or any number of unfamiliar solutions to familiar problems. But many people, once they learn these solutions, realize that the initially tricky solution can be more efficient in the long run, and that difficult-to-figure-out interfaces are often so because there are so many things you can do with them (Photoshop's advanced features aren't too intuitive to figure out, either).

Building a familiar interface will allow quicker adoption of your product; but a lot of the software people are loyal to the longest doesn't necessarily have the most intuitive interface, but the one that helps you get things done once you've learned it.

Alewife

When I first moved to Boston I decided that before I move away I want to visit every train station on the T -- my rules are that I have to get on or off the T at the station as well as explore the immediate surrounding area.

This week I made my first deliberate visit to a T stop I hadn't been to, though in a somewhat anticlimactic way -- Alewife is one of the closest T stops to my apartment, just in terms of distance, but I'd never taken the T there because there's no bus from my house to there and biking to Harvard (which is close to the same distance) is usually a lot faster overall given the extra time I'd spend on the T.

On Friday, I decided to get to Harvard by biking to Alewife and taking the T from there. Alewife is the last stop on the red line and boasts a large parking garage where commuters from the northwest suburbs leave their cars while taking the train into the city; I was pleasantly surprised to note that they also have huge bike racks, which were totally full in the middle of the day. I took the T back around rush hour, and watched a lot of people get out to go to their cars and bikes -- the people in cars probably live in places like Arlington or Lexington, but since Alewife is kind of in the middle of nowhere I'm curious where all those bikers come from.

Gender and Politics: Followup

Seeing the following in Slate (in, of all things, an article explaining why it's righteous for liberals to vote for Obama just because he's black) helped me clarify some of why I think it was important to bring up the issues my previous post:

(The conservative brand identity also doesn't have much room for opposition to sexism, another legitimate source of liberal guilt. But Hillary Clinton's problems, it seems to me, stem less from sexism than from Clintonism.)

Um, what?

Nobody is calling other presidential candidates bitchy, catty, shrill, or emasculating. Nobody is opening an article in a leading national newspaper with a comment on how much skin the other candidates are showing. Nobody is producing novelty nutcrackers modeled after other candidates (and displaying them prominently in places I run errands). Let me guess -- could cultural perceptions of gender be at work here?

Yes, there are a lot of reasons not to vote for Hillary that aren't sexist. If I didn't think so, I would have voted for her myself. But to say that her gender isn't a liability in her political career is an attitude both obtuse and harmful.

A lot of older feminists who voted for Clinton seem to think that young people who voted for Obama are naive about the issues of sexism Clinton and other women in politics face -- but that's not true of all of us. And a lot of young men who voted for Obama seem to think that their legitimate, non-gender-related reasons for disliking Clinton mean their perceptions are totally untainted by sexist cultural mores -- but that can't be true, either. People who support these two candidates are fighting when they should be uniting -- uniting against racism AND sexism.

Gender and Politics

Like many peolpe my age, I voted for Obama this year. But while I didn't vote for the female candidate, it's not because I think we've reached some sort of post-feminist utopia. I'm not choosing any candidate based solely on demographic factors, but I don't think these factors are irrelevant to the effects a candidate's election will have or the way a candidate is presented and perceived.

I've heard some of my male peers say that Clinton "wasn't a good feminist candidate" because she gained political power partly through her association with her husband; I've also heard them say that it doesn't matter whether we elect a woman president, because there are already female governors, senators, and world leaders in other countries. But I think it does matter -- I think there's a lot to be gained in terms of public perception from having a woman elected president of the United States. We still live in a country where men shout "Iron my shirt!" at an accomplished professional woman -- if they think that's funny, they don't get it, and the day we do elect a woman president is one day closer to people like that "getting it".

The New York Times describes some ways in which Clinton's gender may have affected the race:

Mrs. Clinton’s supporters point to a nagging series of slights: the fixation on her clothes, even her cleavage; chronic criticism that her voice is shrill; calls for her to exit the race; and most of all, the male commentators in the news media who, they argue, were consistently tougher on her than on Mr. Obama.

The reasons I have for voting for Obama don't make me blind to these factors -- I very much do think that Clinton's campaign has been presented differently because of her gender and that she's had to contend with obstacles and perceptions that are never an issue for a male politician. This primary has been framed as a divisive, either-or situation, but it's a false choice. Obama supporters and Clinton supporters are painted as people with no common ground, when in fact most of us agree about a great deal. Just because I ended up preferring Obama doesn't mean that I don't recognize the challenges Clinton has endured solely because of her gender or that I don't see the value in having a woman president for the sake of having a woman president.

GeoHashing

Today's xkcd outlines an algorithm for generating a new random set of coordinates every week; it generates only the decimal part of the coordinates, so there's a separate location in each "graticule" (block of space with the same integer coordinates -- 80-some miles on each side, it looks like) for local meetups.

This is pretty neat! It seems scavhuntesque, in a way -- I always enjoyed going on road trips whose destination I didn't know until I left. Now I can do that every weekend if I want!

Economics

It's hard to graduate from the University of Chicago without getting just a little indoctrinated in the virtues of the free market. While I'm not a libertarian or much of a small-government advocate (I tend to think government-funded programs are a good thing), it does bug me when people think free trade should be restricted for humanitarian reasons.

This blog post from some UChicago economists points out that both Wal-Mart and trade with China drive the prices of basic goods lower than they would otherwise be. While there are plenty of things to dislike about Wal-Mart and its effects on local economies, it's actually beneficial to the poorest people in the communities, who are effectively less poor when prices go down and their purchasing power goes up. The goods may be shoddy, but their availability is a boon to people who can't afford higher-quality versions. The same argument in reverse applies to working conditions (both in Wal-Mart and in developing countries that are producing cheap goods) -- the jobs may be low-quality and low-pay, but they're the best options available to these workers (if Wal-Mart's employees could find better jobs, they would).

Music Downloads

Now that allofmp3 is no longer available, I don't know where to buy new music. Allofmp3 was perfect -- inexpensive, DRM-free, convenient to download, and it even let me buy music in my favorite non-proprietary format. But alas, such perfection went hand-in-hand with questionable legality, and US users can no longer add money to their accounts.

Since I manage my music collection on a computer, buying music on CD would require tedious additional steps of ripping the music to my hard drive and leave me with an inconvenient physical artifact. The iTunes store isn't compatible with my computers' software or the OS I prefer to run on my iPod -- I refuse to by any kind of DRM'd music, anyway, since DRM means you don't really own your music. I tried eMusic, which is where I got most of the new songs on this mix, but their selection was constrictingly small, and their pricing scheme (different subscription levels get you different numbers of per-month downloads, that expire at the end of the month) created some perverse incentives. Amazon and Yahoo! sell DRM-free music, but at $1+ a song it's a bit pricey for me (perhaps the conclusion to this dilemma is that I can't actually afford to buy much new music!).

Mostly I've been listening to Pandora and music I already have lately, but if anyone knows of an alternative place to buy music that doesn't have the issues outlined above, let me know!

Command Line Magic

Using the command line rather than a graphical interface is one of the things that a lot of people find most intimidating about the idea of using Linux. While (my last post notwithstanding!) you can accomplish most things without ever opening up the Terminal, I've grown more and more enamored of using the command line whenever possible.

I found gaining fluency with the command line to be like apprenticing to a magician; at first, you utter the magic incantations syllable by syllable knowing only what will result from the whole. But the more spells you learn, the easier it becomes to notice that each part has meaning, eventually acquiring the knowledge to recombine them in ways you've never seen and feel confident that you can predict what will result. Once you gain experience, it's simply faster to rattle off a handful of magic words than to navigate through the space of the graphical desktop.

If you have a Linux or Mac OS X machine, you can try this at home (Windows has a command line too, but it's not as integrated with the rest of the system and uses different syntax). Open the "Terminal" application and give it a try:

echo 'hello world'

will print the phrase 'hello world'

pwd

will give you the name of the directory you're currently in

ls

will list all the files in your directory

cat groceries.txt

will print the contents of groceries.txt (if groceries.txt is a text file) to the screen

man grep

will print the manual page for the command grep


Commands can have arguments that modify their functions:

ls -l

will list all the files in your directory, in a longer format

firefox &

will launch firefox in the background


The output from a command can be piped into another command:

cat groceries.txt | grep apples

will grep (search) for the phrase 'apples' in the printed text of groceries.txt

ls | grep groceries

will search for 'groceries' in the list of files in the current directory

echo 'bananas' >> groceries.txt

will append the line 'bananas' to the bottom of the file groceries.txt



Not only that, but commands can be used to search for other commands:

man -k search

will give you a list of the names and short descriptions of all the commands whose short descriptions include the phrase 'search'

Share folders between two Ubuntu computers on the same LAN with NFS

While most things about Ubuntu work pretty much the way you want/expect the first time, one exception is sharing folders between two computers on the same LAN ("Local Area Network" -- in this case, multiple computers in the same house sharing an internet connection via a router). Surprisingly, it's easier/more intuitive to do this between an Ubuntu computer and a Windows computer! I wish Ubuntu would make a more intuitive, graphical way for non-technical users to do this -- though I certainly have fun tinkering with these things and learning more about networking (or what-have-you) as I go.

Through some command-line magic, I've gotten my laptop to be able to access the music folder on my desktop -- right now I'm playing music on my laptop that's actually stored on my desktop's much bigger hard drive. Sweet! How did I manage this?

Say you have two computers, both running Linux (in this case they're both running Ubuntu and I can't vouch that this will work on any other distro, but I suspect it would) -- the server, which has the folder you want to share on its physical media, and the client, which will connect to the server and access its data.

On the client:
1. In a Terminal window, run

sudo apt-get install nfs-common

-- this installs the software you'll need.
2. Run

ifconfig

to find your IP on the local network; it should look something like

inet addr:192.168.1.101

(If you see more than one instance of "inet addr" in the output of ifconfig, choose the address that doesn't begin with 127.)

On the server:
3. In a Terminal window, run

sudo apt-get install nfs-kernel-server

4. Edit the

/etc/hosts

file and add a line that looks like this:

neuron 192.168.1.101

where "neuron" is replaced with the hostname or a nickname for your client (in this case, "neuron" is the name of my laptop) and "192.168.1.101" is replaced with the IP you found in step 2.
5. Test this -- in a Terminal, run

ping -c 1 neuron

(or whatever name you used) and see if you get a response. If you get a response like "unknown host", something is wrong -- re-check your work from the previous steps (and check that the two computers are really on the same network!). If you get a response like "... 64 bytes from neuron... 1 packets transmitted, 1 received ... " then everything is hunky-dory so far and you are ready to move on!
6. Edit the

/etc/hosts.allow

file and add a line that looks like this:

ALL: 192.168.1.101

(again, use the IP that you found in Step 2).
7. Edit the

/etc/exports

file and add a line that looks like this:

/home/music 192.168.1.101(rw,sync,subtree_check,no_root_squash)

where again 192... is replaced with the IP from step 2, and "/home/music" is replaced with the full path to the folder you want to share. Note that for some reason it is important that the parenthesized arguments don't have a space between them.
8. Run

sudo /etc/init.d/nfs-kernel-server restart

9. Run

ifconfig

and get the IP of your server, the same way that you found it for the client.

Back on the client!
10. Edit

/etc/hosts

and add a line like

192.168.1.103 boffin

where "192.168.1.103" is replaced with the IP of your server (from step 9) and "boffin" is replaced with the hostname/nickname of your server ("boffin" is the name of my desktop).
11.

ping -c 1 boffin

to check that this worked, just like in Step 5.
12. Make a mountpoint for your shared directory -- in my case, I used

mkdir /media/boffin-music

13. Mount the shared directory at the mountpoint, like this:

sudo mount -t nfs boffin:/home/music /media/boffin-music

replacing "boffin" with your server's name, "/home/music" with the location on the server of your shared folder, and "/media/boffin-music" with the mountpoint you created in step 12.
14. Now you should be able to browse to the mountpoint and see your shared files, and open them, and use them. Awesome!

Videos

I'm not sure quite how watching videos at parties started to bother me; I know it's much more fun to laugh at stuff with other people than by yourself, so watching funny stuff has its advantages as a social activity. But when someone starts playing videos, I usually have fun, but it doesn't seem quite "social" enough to me. I prefer playing games (though I know people who don't find games "social" enough for their tastes); probably I find it important that you're still interacting meaningfully with your companions in a game.

Videos at parties bother me less if I'm expecting it (e.g. going to someone's house specifically to watch a movie); I guess I get a little disappointed when I expect to hang out and chat, but end up spending most of the time staring at a screen.

Copyright is supposed to "Promote the Progress of... useful Arts", not keep creative works inaccessible!

Article I of the US Constitution describes the purpose of copyright as follows:

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

But as Lawrence Lessig argues in his fascinating, provocative, and well-researched text, Free Culture, the scope of copyright has changed drastically since the framers of the Constitution initially supported it. Now, copyright's reach is much farther than it needs to be to promote the progress of the arts -- in several ways, notably in the length of its term. When copyright was first established, a work was protected only if the author registered it as copyrighted -- and then only for 14 years, with an option (that most copyright holders declined) to renew it for an additional 14 years. Now, all creative works are copyrighted by default -- the only way to avoid it is to specifically release your work into the public domain or under another license. In 1973, when extending the term of your copyright was still an option, more than 85% of copyright holders didn't renew past the initial term, and the average term of copyright was 32.2 years -- in 1998, not only was the term of copyright extended to 95 years, but all current copyrights were retroactively renewed. That doesn't sound like "limited Times" to me!

Copyright's extension beyond the length that is useful in most cases leads to situations like this one, quoted from the FAQ of one of my favorite bands:

I really want a copy of Lolita Nation / Tinker to Evers to Chance / some other long out of print Game Theory album. Where can I get them, and will they ever be back in print?

This is the most frequently asked question of them all, and sadly, the answer is: the only way you'll be able to get a copy of Lolita Nation nowadays is by paying lots of money for the CD on eBay, or by stumbling across one in a used record store (which may take incredible persistence, since they're awfully scarce). [...] Since Scott Miller's music has never exactly caught on with the general public, it's unlikely there will be a full-scale reissue program in the future, but one never knows. (By the way, Scott Miller does not own the rights to Game Theory's recordings, so it's not up to him.)

In this case, the longevity of copyright is hurting everyone involved. The record company isn't benefiting from holding the copyright, since the band isn't popular enough for them to profit from a re-release; the artist is losing out, since they aren't legally permitted to fill the small but substantial demand for their music; and I'm losing out, since I can't legally purchase and listen to their albums.

Like Lessig, I don't want to abolish copyright, and I agree that artists need to retain some rights to compensate them for their efforts and encourage them to produce more. But the current lengthy term of copyright is overkill. Most artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers would have plenty of incentive to keep producing creative work even if they only held the term of copyright for 10 or 20 years. Extending copyright by decades is profiting a few big franchises, but depriving the public of exactly the thing copyright is supposed to promote -- access to creative work. A copyright term closer to the original would protect artists' rights and profits while still allowing later archivists and derivative artists access to perpetuate the creative work's legacy.

Early Summer Playlist

If you haven't checked out Pandora yet, you really should. Their tagline is "Listen to Free Internet Radio, Find New Music", and that's exactly what it is -- and the music it plays is uncannily well-tailored to whatever inputs (mostly song/artist names and up/down votes) you give it. You can store a lot of stations when you log in -- I have one for almost every mood.

Here's an early summer playlist (well, it's going to be a CD for the car), composed from both new music I found on Pandora and music I already knew about:

1. Cake - Rock 'n' Roll Lifestyle


2. Girl Talk - Bounce That


3. Spoon - Don't You Evah


4. The Presidents of the United States - Peaches


5. Maritime - Don't Say You Don't


6. Delays - Too Much in Your Life


7. Led Zeppelin - Fool in the Rain


8. Of Montreal - Oslo in the Summertime


9. Mark Sandman - Patience


10. Delays - Long Time Coming


11. Field Music - You Can Decide


12. !!! - Intensify


13. Steve Miller Band - The Joker


14. Belle and Sebastian - Step Into My Office, Baby


15. Tortoise - Peering


16. Paul Simon - Graceland


17. Broken Social Scene - Stars and Sons


18. Goldfrapp - Fly Me Away

Gateway T-1628 and Ubuntu Linux

I posted recently about buying a new laptop -- how is it working out, you may wonder?

Pretty well overall. The screen has remarkable clarity, the keyboard is comfortable, and the battery life is okay; on the other hand, the speakers are the quietest and tinniest-sounding speakers of any computer I've ever owned/used extensively. At 14.1" for the screen, it's just a little bulkier than I'd like (the 12" iBook was a perfect size; how come computers that small now seem to be a luxury item?), and I'd prefer a slot-loading drive to the tray DVD drive it has. But overall it meets my needs, for now.

Judging by a quick Google search, I'm probably one of the first people to install Linux on this particular machine. It was a little tricky to find an install disk that would boot correctly; it's a 64-bit machine, but the Hardy 64-bit installer had a problem with xorg and the Gutsy 64-bit disk had a problem with the installer. The Gutsy x86 disk worked fine -- though I had to use the partitioner to wipe the entire disk rather than creating a partition alongside the Windows partition, since this computer came with a hidden partition with a "backup" install of Windows Vista. This seems like a particularly egregious invasion of the user's freedom to use the computer as they wish -- fortunately, blanking an entire hard drive still works!

Wireless and sound didn't work right away; I used Ndiswrapper to install the RTL8187B Realtek driver, which I was able to download from the internet. To get sound to work, I needed to install linux-backports-modules-generic, run alsamixer and turn everything to unmuted/full volume, and reboot.

I did the installation process the day before Hardy's official release; on release day, I used the updater to install the new release, and everything that had been working before still worked fine. I still haven't gotten around to fixing suspend/hibernate, which didn't work out-of-box, but I'm optimistic that I'll get it going when I have more time to tinker.

Coffee Shop Wireless

As someone who works primarily on the internet, I often find myself going to coffee shops that offer wireless to get out of the house. While I wish that more coffee shops offered free wireless internet (those that do get my business more than they would otherwise!), I sometimes find myself paying for wireless internet.

This typically works as follows: while connected to that wireless access point, you can access only a handful of pages, until you create an account and pay on one of those pages. After you've paid, you have access to the entire internet.

Like most online services, these wireless subscriptions have an option for you to generate a new password if you've forgotten yours. But there's a Catch-22 -- they email you your new password, and you can't access your email until you've logged in... with your new password.

You'd think they'd have realized this issue and come up with a different solution, like a secret question, to allow you to reset your password without checking your email -- it's not like this is the highest-security application on the web. Meanwhile, I've learned from some frustrating times and am now storing these username/password combinations in text files on my laptop.

30-day Project: Succeed at Anything!

Most people who read this have noticed that the post frequency has stepped up a lot recently, and I've talked to a handful of you about why: I'm doing a 30-day project where I blog about something I have an opinion about, every day for 30 days.

I first encountered the concept of the 30-day project in fifth grade; we were given the assignment to write something every day for 30 days. There were a handful of rules about what happened if you missed a day (10-year-olds couldn't be held to the exacting every-day-no-questions standard), but the basic premise was the same; thirty days of doing something is long enough to develop a habit.

I've encountered this concept a few other times on the internet. And I think it's true: commit to do something every day for 30 days; tell your friends/family/teachers/acquaintances that this is what you're doing; don't allow yourself to skip a day, or you'll have to start over; and you'll have acquired a new habit.

This 30-day project of blogging is my second recent 30-day project. In March, I determined (while under the spell of the out-of-shapeness that comes to most people who take on jobs that require sitting at a computer, all day, every day, in your own home) that I would go running for 20+ minutes every day. It was a satisfying and successful 30-day project; today, I had my first public confirmation of my success, by completing a 5k charity run. Not only was I able to complete the 5k (under hillier terrain than I'm used to, and faster than I normally go), but I had enough stamina to keep going through Sunday afternoon pickup basketball (which itself exhausted me when I started playing, long before the 30-day run).

I have a lot of ideas about new 30-day projects to try after I finish this one -- and I'd encourage any of my readers to join me! Weigh in in the comments -- what habits do you want to build?

Getting There

One of the things I like most about living in the Boston area is how much easier it is to get from place to place than in other places I've lived. The city is pretty walkable in general, and most of the time, I can choose between five different methods of travel (walk, bike, drive, public transit, taxi), depending on the circumstances. Circumstances usually also dictate that one or more of those methods is totally stupid -- the weather is too nasty to walk, or I've left my bike somewhere, or I'm planning on drinking, or the bus doesn't go there, or a taxi is too expensive -- but given the plethora of options there's usually a good one that's obvious. Sometimes, however, circumstances collaborate to make my transportation choices much more obscure...

I'm currently hanging out near the Davis T stop, which is also about a 20 minute walk from my house. In a couple hours I am heading to somewhere else which is also accessible by T. My house is a 10-minute bus ride from the T (but the bus only runs every half hour).

I've also left my bike near the Harvard T stop with an underinflated tire; Harvard is a short T ride from Davis and a 20 minute walk/10 minute bike ride/10 minute bus ride (but the bus only runs every half hour) from my house, and I have a bike pump at my house.

PROBLEM: What is the optimal way to get from point A to point B, given that I also want to drop some stuff off/get some stuff at my house before arriving at point B? You may use scratch paper.

Tomorrow early in the morning I'm coming back to Davis. I'd hoped to get may bike back home by then so I could bike here, but that's seeming pretty unreasonable by now -- so I'll probably take the bus to Harvard (which is of course in the opposite direction from my destination), and then take the T to Davis. And that's why the MBTA should start bus service from West Cambridge to Davis.

Market Work vs. Other Work

Jesse recently read a few chapters of Joan Williams's Unbending Gender for school, and recommended that I take a look at them. Although a lot of the more theoretical aspects went over my head, I found it an extremely intelligent and interesting analysis of work/family/gender issues with a lot of practical recommendations that support my own positions about work/life balance.

Williams describes a norm of domesticity based on an "ideal worker" doing market work, who works full-time, is available for overtime, is available for relocation, and takes little to no time off for child-rearing. Especially in cases where children are involved, this ideal worker can only fill this role if supported by someone, usually a partner, who abstains from ideal-worker market work in order to raise children and care for the household (hence the slogan "most women need a wife"). While the feminism of a few decades ago focused (successfully) on giving women access to these types of jobs, it insufficiently accounted for the fact that these workers are intended to be backed up by a partner taking care of family work; most women remain primarily responsible for childcare and household work regardless of their employment status, which leads to a situation in which they can only gain the social power of men through essentially working double shifts, one shift as a market worker and another as a mother and family worker. She describes this as a situation that can and should be legally framed as discrimination. She also points out that divorce laws, which award most of the household assets to the market worker (who "earned" the money) without compensating the family worker who made the market work possible (and who will probably also have to support the children after the divorce).

Williams also argues that this system is not just harmful to women (who disproportionately fill the role of marginalized caregiver, or if they do not, have a hard time living up to the ideal-worker norm because they rarely have partners available for family work), but also to men, children, and society -- she quotes both women who "choose" to stay home with children but would prefer to keep working at a schedule that allows them to have time for their children as well as their careers, and men who "would prefer the 'daddy track' to the fast track". While everyone seems to agree that children should have more time with their parents, employers reward the opposite behavior by promoting workers who spend long hours at work and passing over or not hiring workers they think will try to take time to be with their families.

She points out that work hours have increased in the U.S. over the past few decades; not only is there more overtime, but people work farther form their jobs, so getting home at 5 is unreasonable for most workers -- but an 8-to-7 schedule for both parents is unreasonable for children, thus perpetuating the situation where it's only practical for one parent to work (and since societal norms still punish men who don't work, it's still usually the man).

Williams has a solution to this: more flexible work hours for everyone. She points out an example of a family that decides that someone should be home with the children two days a week; if one parent asks for a three-day week, an employer will usually consider that unreasonable, but if employers were more open to giving both parents a four-day week they could both keep working and still give their children the time they need. She approaches this from an explicitly pragmatic perspective, pointing out that flexible schedules need not disadvantage employers. My position is that this would even be advantageous to employers, who would have a broader pool of qualified workers to choose from and happier (thus more productive) workers at work if they were more willing to give out schedules that accommodate employees' values and non-market priorities.

The book focuses on families with children, but she briefly touches on how a more flexible work schedule would be advantageous for single or childless people. This is something I feel particularly invested in -- as the text points out, the work-hours it takes now to produce a 1948 standard of living are less than half those it would have taken then, yet people are working longer hours and consuming more, in large part because employment structures discriminate against part-time workers, denying them benefits, fair pay, advancement opportunities, and respect. With more flexible opportunities, all kinds of people who are satisfied with a lower standard of living could work fewer hours and devote the extra time to community service, personal projects, travel, family, or any number of other worthwhile pursuits. I've seen a few news articles in the past few years incredulously describing the expectations of "Gen Y" workers new to the workforce -- we want "work/life balance", they scoff. How selfish! Imagine! Market work is not necessarily the most important thing in our lives, and we'd prefer less money to longer hours!

In fact, almost everyone hopes to balance their time between market work, family work, community work, and personal time -- but employers almost never offer schedules amenable to such balance. If they did, everyone would be better off.

OLPC XO (OMG LOL?)

After my trusty iBook's motherboard died for the last, un-practically-fixable time, I thought I might try getting an ultraportable -- after all, I reasoned, I pretty much just want to use a laptop for Firefox and ssh so I can work from friends' houses, coffee shops, heck, even my couch once in a while. I don't want to store a lot of stuff on my laptop; it's more important that it be easier to carry around.

So I ordered an XO (you know! for kids!), fascinated by its charitable side effects and hipness factor, and figuring -- I'm a small person! I want a small laptop!

It's too small. It's just slightly too small to be usable in every dimension -- screen, keyboard, RAM, hard drive... I know, it's for kids with small fingers and small computing needs, and my (relatively) small fingers and (relatively) small computing needs are small relative to those of adult first-world programmers. So I wasn't too surprised or disappointed to discover that this laptop wouldn't work out for my purposes (or when it took months longer than initially promised to arrive -- they're a charitable organization, after all, not a business). But I still don't understand why, especially after they realized that they could profit from first-world demand for a thing like this, the OLPC folks weren't interested in building a slightly modified version usable by adults. I'd think that the adults in the villages where these are being distributed would be interested in exploring them too, and that the kids' fingers will get bigger pretty quickly and outgrow the tiny keyboard.

Still, it's a pretty cool device, with a lot of innovative features -- for kids. I hope the kid who got my laptop's sister through the G1G1 program is enjoying it and learning from it!

Michael Pollan

I recently finished The Botany of Desire, by science writer Michael Pollan, who's perhaps more famous recently for his food writing, in which he coins the mantra "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." His basic premise -- that plants and humans are intertwined in a mutually domesticating relationship -- is interesting, but what really makes the book great is his writing style.

The book is divided into four sections, each devoted to a plant whose history is intriguingly intertwined with that of humanity, paired with a human desire symbolized by our relationship with that plant: the apple/sweetness, the tulip/beauty, marijuana/intoxication, the potato/control. But within this fairly tight framework, the prose meanders into many realms -- journalistic interviews, historical data, personal opinion, amusing anecdotes. He brings flavor to the book by writing about plants he's grown himself and visiting both places that have historical significance to the larger story of the plant and places where the plant is grown now. It's a pastiche of opinion, speculation, expert testimony, storytelling, historical perspective, and more, all while staying true to the theme of each chapter and the broader themes of the whole book.

This book is a lot of fun to read because it's clear that Pollan is having a lot of fun writing it -- despite its wide-ranging scope, there's no information he presents that he doesn't seem fascinated by. Reading Pollan's work is like hanging out with that cool friend who knows a lot of random stuff about whatever happens to come up -- and I'll probably be picking up his other books at my next visit to my local independent bookstore, in the hopes of spending more time in the company of this engaging writer.

Sweet Gnome Feature

When I first started preferring Linux to Mac OS (which was my main OS for about six years before I started using Linux), my main motivation was tweaking the desktop -- I started to hate the Dock's lack of textual information, and I discovered that I could modify the look and feel of the fluxbox window manager to my tastes far more easily than any other desktop environment I'd used. That's why it's kind of ironic that I'm now using the less-customizable Gnome on all my installations (though I'm far from wedded to it -- anyone with window manager recommendations, or tweaking-Gnome-a-bit-beyond-the-usual tutorials, please weigh in in the comments!).

There's a lot of ease-of-use to like about Gnome, though. One thing I'm particularly psyched about is the keyboard shortcuts menu. Not only does it make it trivial to set up the function keys (volume control, play/pause, etc.) on my laptop to do what they look like they should do, but it's customizable for far less obvious purposes. You can essentially assign any key combo or function key to any action. I already have my most commonly-used applications -- the terminal and Firefox -- as ready and obvious icons on the top panel, but who wants to use the mouse to go all the way up there? I have F2 open a new terminal and F3 open a new instance of Firefox. Every one of the several times a day I hit F2 to get a new terminal window, I smile a little thinking of the several seconds I'm saving.

And then I use those seconds to refresh LiveJournal. Every productive action has an unproductive reaction, I guess?

Best Buy Employee Has Never Heard of Linux?

A few weeks ago I decided to buy myself a new laptop. I did everything wrong, and I was aware of it; I didn't research my hardware needs, I didn't research driver compatibility, I didn't comparison-shop on the internet, and I reneged on my promise to myself to vote with my dollars for manufacturers who offer pre-installed open systems as an option (sorry, Dell!). I just woke up knowing that after months without a functional laptop, essentially tethered to my desktop workstation, I wanted a laptop and I wanted it that day.

So I found myself at Best Buy. I asked an employee whether I could buy a computer that didn't come with Windows or MacOS pre-installed, and predictably, he said no and seemed confused at the question. This was what I expected. But then, as I asked him to unlock a couple models so I could see how they felt, we had the following exchange:

Me: It looks like the specs on this one are a little better for the price.
Best Buy Dude: Yeah, and you'll need that three gigs of RAM to run Vista.
Me: Oh, I'm not going to be running Vista.
BBD [startled]: Oh! Uh... you know the success rate for installing a new operating system is basically zero, right? For people trying to put XP on these?
Me: Oh, I'm not going to be running XP either. I'm going to be installing Ubuntu.
BBD: What?
Me: Ubuntu? Linux?
BBD: What's that?
Me: It's an operating system. You should look it up, it's free.
BBD: So what is it, is it like, a word processor?
Me: ... It's an operating system. You should look it up!
BBD: Yeah, OK, maybe.

Yikes! I don't expect salespeople at big box stores to be free software geeks by a long shot, but you'd think people who help people pick out computers for a living would at least have a vague grasp of what's going on in the tech world. Or at least, you know, know what an operating system is.

Open Studios

Today I went with a handful of friends to the Somerville Open Studios; we went to the Fort Point ones last fall. In both cases, we got to meet and talk to artists while looking at their work and workspace (which is also usually their home), but in Fort Point, most of the studios were subsidized spaces in dedicated artists' collective buildings, while in Somerville, a lot of the artspaces were run out of people's apartments or garages, and there seemed to be a lot more side project work from people who aren't necessarily professionals. This was pretty neat! I felt like in addition to seeing art, we were seeing a lot of the Somerville community (and Somerville geography -- I'm still tired from walking all afternoon around parts of the city I didn't know existed) of ordinary artistic people. Jesse said at one point that he thought the anthropological aspects of going into these people's homes and workspaces was almost more interesting than the art.

Of course, the art was interesting too. There were a lot of cool things, but a few favorites: a Moomers-esque apartment where we chatted with the guy who makes crazy robot sculptures from repurposed metal, and a couple of guys in a garage, one of whom paints realistic images of suburban scenes, and the other of whom paints surrealistic images of an astronaut moving in a world that's a cross between the familiar and the futuristic, exploring our relationships to prior generations' notion of the future (more at his website, astronautdinosaur.com(!!)).

I'd never heard of open studios before last fall, but it seems like a pretty sweet idea. People from the community can see what is going on in the local art scene and learn more about the art process through talking to artists and seeing their workspaces; artists can get exposure, show off their stuff, connect with each other, and sell pieces.

Bags

Men of my acquaintance are often saying things like "Why do women carry bags? What do you need to put in there?"
Of course, those men then ask women with bags to carry their stuff in those bags. In addition to my own stuff, my bag now contains a book, a bag of coffee beans, a box of pens, and some "housecooling party" goodies that I'm carrying for the boy.
I don't really understand how bags became gendered -- it seems a lot more reasonable for each person to have his or her own bag. I'm definitely pro-"man-purse" in this sense.

Google Reader (alternatives?)

So, I don't actually use an RSS reader to read anything (though for years I keep saying that I'll start subscribing to the sites I read -- I always eventually conclude that it would cramp my procrastination style, which is heavily dependent on "oh yeah I forgot about this site! let me read two months of its archives now"). But, I've recently discovered Google Reader's cool property -- my friends (and of COURSE Google knows who my friends are -- through GChat) "share" things on GReader, and I can easily view a list of things they've shared recently/since I last looked. Neat! A casual way for friends to point each other at websites, without the commitment of email or blogging!

Except it quickly becomes clear that this isn't exactly what it is. A few days ago, I wanted to share a page I'd seen with friends, but because it's not part of a feed I couldn't share it through GReader -- I had to either post it on a blog or LJ, or email it (which is what I did, but that required a more deliberate recipient selection than I'd been going for). Today, I was skimming things my friends had shared on GReader, and I found myself wanting to comment to the people who had shared things, about the fact that that person had shared that item. But there's no way to do that. OK, I could send an email about that, too -- but I thought the whole point of this Web 2.0 business was to facilitate this type of casual communication that's not just on but also about the internet. Everything has comment functionality! Everything has "share this webpage" functionality!

So... if anyone has any ideas how I might hack GReader to work this way, or any other services I might try that are more like what I'm going for, you can let me know... in a comment on this blog post.

Bear Racer IPA

Yesterday we picked up a six-pack of Bear Republic Racer 5 IPA, which is definitely one of my favorite beers (it's my usual at the Common Ground in Allston, home of Monday Night Trivia and Friday's 90s' Nite). It's extremely hoppy, which I always like, but the hoppy bitterness is balanced by a malty sweetness, and the hops impart a floral aroma -- it's simultaneously sweet and tart and smooth and a flavor I can't quite name, reminiscent of earth and wood.

Racer 5 features Cascade and Columbus hops; since I like hoppy beers so much and we're getting more into brewing, I'm trying to develop a more discriminating taste for different types of hops. As far as I can tell, Cascade is a featured hop in many of my favorite bitter-yet-florally-balanced ales (well, some might disagree about "balanced"). The beer we're going to start brewing tonight (from the bible of homebrew) features Cascade as well, so I'll be getting to know that hop better -- Bear Republic's website says that "Cascade is the balance that ties the malt and bittering hops together" in Racer 5, and I hope it will balance our next project as deliciously.