Journal of a Sabbatical

June 23, 2000

computers continue to suck

Today's Reading: Summer: From the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau edited by H.G.O. Blake, The Herring Gull's World by Niko Tinbergen

Today's Starting Pitcher:
John Wasdin (why is Jimy with one M not pitching Tim Wakefield? Just wondering.)

About 300 or so pages into Hokkaido Highway Blues I developed a powerful craving for green tea. By the time I finished it - the book and the tea - I was positively homesick for Japan. I searched around my desk for my diary from the Hokkaido trip, which I didn't find, and leafed through my photo album. Then I set about finishing the book, which really has little to do with Hokkaido as by the time the author reaches there he's pretty burned out on hitchhiking but the first couple of pages of the Hokkaido chapter absolutely capture the omnipresent bamboo grass, the rolling hills, the dairy farms...

I had a weird insight this morning as I was sitting on the toilet listening to The Connection. They were talking philosophy - part of a summer philosophy series - and the topic was justice. Somebody says: "Justice is an abstraction." Suddenly it hits me like a ton of bricks. Philosophy is an abstraction! An abstraction in the business of analyzing abstractions. This demolishes the entire argument set forth in The Future Does Not Compute, which I've been trying to understand for 5 years. Not only that. Combined with yesterday's insight into optical illusions, this finally lays to rest the puzzlement I experience over the introduction of perspective in western art. The Jungian philosophical argument over perspective is an abstraction! The eye does not have to have been trained in one or another style of art to experience an optical illusion. The illusion is a physical thing and physical eyeballs perceive it. Perspective in art is just the artists way of trying to convey the optical illusion - not to convey so-called reality. Someday I will revisit this paragraph and try to make it a little clearer, but for now I think I've understood something even if I can't explain it well at the moment.

So like what does all this have to do with computers sucking, which they do big time?

In a moment of idiocy, I decided to buy MacOS 9 and also shop for a CD-RW to add to this Mac.

On the CD-RW: they had none in stock with SCSI interface, only USB. However, oddly, they had one that connects to a PC by the parallel port! The lying little cretin at the Framingham store denied such a thing existed as did the much friendlier support guy at WinBook. But there it is, right there on the shelf. Do I buy it now or do I wait 'til it goes on sale next week (and after I've had a chance to tell Zsolt about it)? I'll wait. After all, nobody is in a big hurry to buy something that doesn't exist.

On MacOS 9: I bought it, paid for it, realized I can't install it because just about all the software I use every day will stop working until I buy new versions. Well, duh! What was I thinking? This reality dawned on me down the street at Computertown after I'd already shelled out the $99 at CompUSA. I was browsing iBooks while some woman was asking questions about OS 9. I eavesdropped and did not like the answers. I decided to simply upgrade to 8.1 for now. Back at home I downloaded the 8.1 upgrade without the modem hanging up but then couldn't install it because the installer kept finding disk problems. Oh well.

I guess I'm in one of those fear of obsolescence funks. Everything is changing too fast for me to keep up with. Evidently also changing too fast for lying little cretins at CompUSA to keep up with too. Now that's a comfort.