It has been one month since I posted anything to this site. One month. Exactly. Unless I'm mistaken this is the longest I've gone without writing. Combined with the scanty month before, I'm totally out of the habit.
To celebrate my one-month anniversary, I'm throwing a temper tantrum. There's been no progress on getting Blogger to work with the server. I checked out other weblog software -- Greymatter wouldn't be compatible; Moveable Type, turgid with all sorts of luscious, promising-looking features, was completely uninstallable if you aren't one of these people who go to sleep every night in the bowels of your own server, and it promised to be just as frustrating to use in the long run.
James tried to help, and Kellan kept at it very patiently, despite my tendency to lash out at him when the software wasn't working, but with every single step I took towards getting a blog up online I had to go beg help from one of them. I was even desperate enough to fall for the seductive pluckiness of Glyph's claim he could whip me up some kind of blog software within weeks. (Why do I rely on this guy when I know d^mn well he's the same one who used to leave me stranded waiting for him at Port Authority for hours at a time?)
Part of the problem here is that sacco, the server the site has been on for most of its life, has been getting the same kind of one-eared attention from the geeks who run it that I've been getting from them and all my other geek friends for the past seven years. I'm sure I'm not the only one out there who's gotten this treatment; you know how it is: you get this image of the blue light of the screen reflecting off your friend's glasses and the slack line of their jaw -- either because you're standing next to them and can see this firsthand, or you're extrapolating as you talk them over IRC, because you, yourself, are doing the exact same thing, plus or minus some absentminded drool -- and you don't realize it at first, but it soon becomes clear in the long pauses and half-assed quality of answers that you're getting about 20% of an attentiveness that is otherwise devoted to an artcle on Wired, a forward from A-Infos, a game of Minesweeper, or a string of Perl. More likely, all four.
At first I thought it was me, that I was just being a nag and people were trying to tune me out. Now I think we're all just trying to do too much at the same time.
Time was leaking away; sacco was slowly descending into obsolescence. I lost email capacity about last June. I didn't notice. I was busy at writing camp. I came back, was using other people's PCs; started using the graphic interface for my Hampshire email and fell out of touch with the shell; FTP went out of style and I lost access to a lot of my files because I didn't realize there was a secure alternative.
There is a dangerous moment when you're using any computer where the sum of your obsolescences reach a tipping point. I remember when this happened on my Mac Performa. One morning I woke up and couldn't access anything on the web. None of the software I could download was going to work with my browser. I had stopped stealing copies of new OSes round about 7.5.1, and now that I was out of college, getting a bootleg disc was going to be hard. I ended up buying a new computer, my current iMac, a year and a half ago.
Now I'm facing a more personal obsolescence. I don't know how to make a Mac or UNIX system do half the things I used to be able to. Systems have changes, and I'm getting rusty in a number of areas. I wasn't close enough to my geeks to get a heads up on the new file transfer software, SCP, and so I didn't learn to use it until a few weeks ago. I really need to adopt that newfangled OSX, and that promises to set me back quite a few years.
This is not the same kind of obsolescence you hear about people coming to in middle age. It will strike us multiple times, sometimes a couple of years in a row, and it has nothing to do with age, just with the ferocity of our efforts to keep abreast. I have no idea how many times I'll hit it before I reach 30.
I feel like placing the blame (the temper tantrum's still goin' on, everyone's invited!) on software that feels like it has to be "helpful." Moveable Type is "helpful:" it gives you all sorts of features, features which in my experience add up to a bunch of demands for widgetty software plugins I didn't know anything about and options which conflicted with each other. Microsoft Word is also very "helpful." For example:
Me: Copy this piece of text, please, Word.
Word: OOH, let me FORMAT that for you! I will keep some of the formatting but don't you think it would be better if this was in THREE MISMATCHED FONTS with LOTS OF INDENTS YOU CAN'T CHANGE, and maybe in RED? Such POWER I have over your documents!!! Watch as I send a visitation of HORRIBLE LEERING SPECTER OF A PAPERCLIP to provide unhelpful commentary on your EVERY MOVE!
Me: [quits Word.]
OSX is "helpful," or helpful-looking, too. Everything slides and slithers and sashays around the screen as if it was mounted on hover-jets. Program icons bounce in the new "dock" at the bottom of the screen. I end up staring open-mouthed, wondering how much memory is wasted on these parlor tricks. (I think I can feel it. It's slower.) I guess someone decided that the old flash-opening windows put epileptics at risk, and that snaky was the wave of the future.
The thing about "helpful" software is it's not like vacuums, or T3fl0n, or microwaves -- inventions which held the promise of making work go faster with few immediate side effects (of course, we know better now about T3fl0n and microwaves -- but vacuums still seem to be problem-free, right? I like vacuums. So does Robert.) Counteracting the effects of overly-helpful software (damn you, paper clip!) wastes time. Unlearning old systems wastes time.
Even if newer OSes and software packages have a better learning curve, I wish someone would acknowledge that a lot of people have put a lot of effort into learning old systems, and that it will probably be a very long time before someone creates software which is so intuitive as to pose no effort to a new user. Maybe it makes sense to maintain old user interfaces. Change is getting in the way of my motherfsckin' work, you know what I'm sayin'? And OSX is motherfsckin' slow.
Where was I going with this... gadd^mn it, this is not the screed I intended to write -- Blogger, weblogs were my point, and that is this: Weblog software is also a lying appliance. Blogger promises all sorts of fancy automating devices which really aren't much of an improvement over hand-coding a template, slotting things into it, and periodically archiving your pages. Moveable Type promises some real improvements, but you really have to have some kind of sysadmin dark-arts on your side to make it work.
All of this comes back to why I am having a tantrum right now: I am in incredible physical pain. My computer is propped up on a really lovely ca. 1950s Finnish hardwood desk. I love the way it looks, but with the chair I'm using now I can't get my knees under the d^mned thing, so I'm straining my back leaning over my pretzeled-up body to get to the keyboard from two feet away.
Why'm I keeping this desk? Because I'm po', and dependent on the woman I'm housesitting for and her ancestral furnishings. I'm finding myself in a similar dependence on Blogger. It's not just that I liked how it worked, while it was working; I found I was unable to write when I wasn't using that little cramped entry window on the Blogger site. It was totally unhealthy; among other things, if you accidentally moved off that page, you were likely to lose everything you'd written. But my stubbornness about that interface, along with the searing pain in my back, has kept me from writing.
I'm tired of living in a borrowed house. I'm tired of being dependent on other people's software and disinterest in fixing said software. In fact, seeing how emotionally I'm reacting to subtle changes in user interface, I think maybe I'd best do what I can to wean myself off computers for a while.
Posted by Gus at February 18, 2002 11:51 PM