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Archive for June, 2006
Pollock’s “pour” technique produced pieces like Lavender Mist, which is frequently derided as the sort of random visual noise a lower primate might produce if allowed unfettered access to a few pots of paint (brushes optional). A comment commonly uttered about such pieces is "anybody could do that". Well, rejoice, lovers (or haters) of 20th-century abstractionism! Now, thanks to technology, you can show the world you’ve got what it takes to be the next Jackson Pollock.
My father had once advised me that, if I was to attend only one reunion, to make it the twentieth; his reasoning was that twenty years provides a solid interval for personal shakedowns to occur. A mere five years, even ten, perhaps, might still find some people in a state of post-teen flux, unsure of their path and themselves. While there would always be a certain percentage of losers who would never get it together, my father posited that twenty years after graduation was a perfect time to get a snapshot of one’s high school chums; old enough that they would be firmly established as whatever kind of adult they were fated to become, but still far from decrepitude and its warping influence. With that in mind, I had planned for some years to attend my twentieth reunion. Yet as the fateful year 2006 approached, I became progressively less interested. After all, I’ve only been in regular contact with two people I knew in high school, neither of whom were in my graduating class. My curiosity was nevertheless still piqued; after all, it might have proved interesting, if not outright amusing, to see how some of the class of 1986 had turned out. My vacillation was ultimately quashed after a couple of visits to Classmates.com, which boasts an impressive and nearly comprehensive list of my former schoolmates. A number of Classmate message boards had been set up earlier in the year to organize the reunion. Of the half-dozen or so people who posted messages, I only dimly recognized a couple of names. Though some posters made some optimistic noise about having the “biggest reunion ever”, this optimism was belied by the paltry number of posts: six. Total. Not exactly a hotbed of enthusiasm and activity. Dispassionate analysis of the situation yielded the following facts:
The practical upshot, then, was the opportunity to drop $150 on airfare for the privilege of spending some more money on a sterno-heated dinner served in a hotel meeting room hosted by a handful of strangers. Yep, sounded like big fun, only without the fun. Or even the big. Pass.
Just on the off chance.
It wasn’t long before he was staring down the business end of the hose, and in very short order my oldest son blasted him with it, giving him a healthy faceful of our municipal water district’s flagship product. The neighbor kid yelped and screamed, which of course was not unexpected—I myself had hollered and protested when I found myself the recipient of a hoseborne shower some minutes before—but I was nearly dumbstruck by what the neighbor kid said next, his brow furrowed in confusion:
It was all I could do to keep from either cussing or throwing my hedge clippers at him, just to punish him for saying something so stupid. Although I can’t bring myself to actually believe he failed to comprehend his situation’s underlying causality, such an utterance was so staggeringly inane as to itself defy comprehension. This kid has got to be missing a chromosome somewhere.
The vendors’ drivers were easy enough to find, but without a working NIC, how was I going to get them over to the server? Why, in this age of ubiquitous optical media, you burn a CD. Except that I didn’t want to. Even at a price of around 25¢ per CD-R, the thought of permanently dedicating a 700MB disc to store a mere 15 kilobytes of data bothered me. I found a couple of CD-RW discs at the bottom of a desk drawer, but they were too scratched up to be of any use. Still, my obsession with data storage efficiency prevented me from touching the spindle of pristine CDs in my den closet. I was pretty irritated at this point, both because I’d given away the wrong freaking NIC, and because I was deliberately preventing myself from solving the problem. Suddenly I remembered that both my gaming PC and the backup server still have 1.44MB floppy drives. Yes, I know, it’s sort of stupid to hang on to those obsolete devices, but I just can’t bring myself to part with them. I think I last used one sometime in 1999. One of them is at least fifteen years old. But… I still have about a dozen diskettes, and the drives still work. Floppies are rewriteable and fast (remember, we’re only talking about 15kB of data here; it would take longer for a burner to write the data, close the session, and verify the burn, than it takes a floppy drive to just copy the files to a diskette), so I transferred the files via the good ol’ sneakernet. My sever NIC is functional, my obsession with efficiency fed, and life is good. Except that now I feel really, really old.
I just happened to check Akismet this morning, though, and I’m somewhat unnerved by what I found. There hasn’t been any comment spam sent my way for a week or so. The ‘bots are leaving me alone. Normally, this would be cause for minor celebration, or at least a wry smile, but instead I find this situation foreboding. It’s like the scene in every zombie horror flick when the ravenous undead horde’s attack upon the mountain cabin/abandoned factory/makeout pad/crypt is successfully repulsed by the teenage protagonists, and all is quiet… |
Detractors of modern abstract art often cite 
Just a few days ago, my twentieth high school reunion came and went. I didn’t attend, though I had intended to at one point.
Just on the off chance that you might find yourself suddenly and urgently desirous of wiping all your data off of a Mac hard drive and don’t have quick access to a 10.3+ system CD, try downloading and burning the ISO image of 
My kids were goofing around with the hose in the front yard yesterday, sending jets of water hither and yon, as young children are wont to do on a summer day. Their gleeful shrieks and general happy hubbub eventually enticed the dumb neighbor kid to check the situation out.
Yesterday I needed to install drivers for a NIC in my home backup server. I’d pulled out the NIC I had been using and gave it away to somebody; naturally, I found the one I kept had never been properly set up. Of course.
I briefly had a problem with