We have become dependent on Google as a part of our Web infrastructure (too dependent, some say), in part because Google’s reliability record is so superb. All of which makes the receipt of any sort of error message from any dimension of the Googleverse worthy of note.

Today I tried to access my Google Calendar. Instead I saw this:

A minute later, my calendar returned. But for an instant, I got to thinking about life without Google.

For something like 25 years I have had a postcard (now tattered and brown-edged) taped near wherever I write:

One reason I became a writer is that I love the sensation of finding connections. It can stun me, make me laugh, or help me feel that I understand the universe just a little bit better.

I’ve spent the last few months researching my next book. I’m nowhere near done (and will continue!). I could conceivably, and profitably, devote whole additional years to further research.

But I’ve also reached a point in my labors that I now recognize from previous large writing projects. My brain feels like it’s overflowing. And everywhere I look, whatever I’m looking at seems to connect to what I’m writing about. Everything is hitched to everything else.

That means it’s time to start writing.

The exhilarating and painful work of trying to preserve that apprehension of interconnectedness on the page always involved some amount of disappointment, at least for me; where the apprehension is oceanic, the written end-product is finite.

But a completed book has one advantage over a vague sensation: it can be shared. So here goes!

We’ve been on vacation this week — springtime on the Pacific coast! — so no posts about Hillary vs. Obama, the transformation of the WSJ by Rupert Murdoch (the original Mediogre) or anything much else.

LATE CLARIFICATION: There was no seal massacre! These mothers and pups are just taking a little break (as we were).

I returned from my travels, sat down at the desk yesterday morning, fired up my email program, and — ffftt!!! — encountered one of those awful Windows system messages (something to the effect that the system had been unable to write back to the disk and it was very sorry but some data had been lost) that can mean only one thing: hardware failure. I took a breath, ran the disk utility, and got another message informing me that there was insufficient disk space to fix the bad clusters, which made no sense, since there was plenty of empty space on the drive — unless, like, massive gigabytes’-worth of clusters had gone south.

The bad news was, this was the big 500 GB drive I use to store basically everything. (Another drive is for the system and applications.) The good news is, I’ve become religious about backups, I have copies of all my important data, including online backups; but it’s scattered about.

I can recall many hours spent hostage to CHKDSK back in the late ’80s, fixing my own or friends’ wayward drives, watching patiently as the little grid filled out with marks for good and bad clusters. This was when the disks held 10 or 20 megabytes. Then in the mid 90s I wrestled with bad Mac disks on the cruddy machines Salon was trying to make do with. But since then, either the quality’s gotten a lot better or I’ve had a good run of luck. This is the first disk disaster I’ve had in a decade.

I took another breath and began poking at the drive with various tools and utilities. Sometimes the system could see it, sometimes it couldn’t. Then, at the lowest ebb of my fight, my system told me that there was zero Kb of data in zero files on the drive, and that the drive, in fact, could not be examined at all because “the type of the file system is RAW.”

Raw? As in, not cooked? By now I was doing all my research on the old laptop. Google told me that this error message indicates that a drive is close to unformatted — in, as it were, the state of nature. Only I knew there was tons of data on the disk, and it hadn’t been erased, and it didn’t seem like the disk had massively failed (a la “head crash”).

A couple of hours digging through the tech forums led me to a fine utility called GetDataBack. Several hours later, this program had painstakingly reassembled the file-system tables of my drive and enabled me to ferry my precious information back to safety in (roughly) one piece rather than having to reassemble it from patchwork backups.

This morning, I purchased and installed a new drive. Spent the rest of the day restoring files. Now I’m back. Phew. Only two days lost.

My motherboard fried during the middle of my labors on Dreaming in Code. So maybe I get one technical disaster per book project, and now the one for my new book is behind me. (I also notice that the previous disaster also occurred after a week away. I wonder whether it’s the temperature change of sitting unpowered after weeks of constant use that’s stressing the gear.)

If you’ve read this far, you don’t need me to remind you of the moral of this tale: you must have a backup plan.

This week I’m in NYC doing interviews for the new book. So posting will likely be light.

I have now been living in the Bay Area so long (over 20 years!) that I have become totally de-acclimated to the east coast weather of my native city.

But I still know when a cabbie makes a wrong turn at the Kew Gardens interchange!

Clive Thompson writes about how software can shape our creative work:

Our tools, of course, affect our literary output. And all this made me wonder how other writing tools affect what’s written. I use Movable Type to write my blog, and I’m constantly annoyed by how small the text-entry boxes are. Whenever I write an entry, the text quickly flows down several box-lengths, which can make it hard to keep track of my argument. The problem, of course, is that the tool was designed with the idea that people would be writing extremely short, pithy entries … whereas my entries tend to drag on and on and on. It reminds me of the writing on one of those old, proprietary-hardware word-processors from the 80s, which were outfitted with screens that only let you see seven lines at a time.

Wordpress lets you set the posting box to any size you want. But for longer posts, I compose in a text editor. It’s just handier. I have no doubt, though, that browser-based editing will eventually evolve to the point where I don’t need to do that.

Thompson also references Virginia Heffernan’s recent Times piece on word processors, which recommends the Zen-like blank-screen approach of the Mac-based WriteRoom. (Of course, the dominant DOS-based word processor, WordPerfect, offered what was very close to a blank screen; in a pre-Windows world, you didn’t have a browser or e-mail always competing for screen real estate.)

For those of us who learned Basic on a Zenith Z19 and started word processing on a Kaypro (anyone?), the retro green-and-black now takes the breath away. It’s not just the vintage features available on WriteRoom, it’s also that the whole experience is a throwback to a time before user-friendly interfaces came to protect us from technology’s dark places. In those days, the mystery of the human mind and the mystery of computation seemed both to illuminate and to deepen each other.

All of which brings back involuntary, wincing memories of one of my earliest word-processing experiences, at the Boston Phoenix. In the early ’80s the Phoenix had some ancient minicomputer sitting in a back room, feeding the newsroom’s small and much-fought-over handful of dumb terminals. When I say dumb, I mean really dumb. In a limitation that is inconceivable today, these terminals had so little memory that they could only handle a few hundred words at a time. Most Phoenix reviews were way longer than that, yet many of us composed directly on this system (who could afford one’s own PC on what that alternative paper paid its writers?).

To compose a lengthy piece you had to write a chunk (a “buffer”), then save it — sending it on a leisurely journey back to main memory — to make room on the terminal for the next installment of your opus. Unfortunately, these terminals also had a habit of crashing. Too often you’d press that “send” key only to see the screen freeze, and you’d know then that you’d just lost all your work stretching back to the last time you’d saved your work. Only sometimes pressing “save” would itself trigger the dreaded freeze — a tragic Catch-22 indeed.

As a result — in a tableau that somehow seemed to epitomize all the pain of human composition in a technological age — you might occasionally spy some desperate writer hunched over notebook and pen in front of a frozen screen, painstakingly copying the slim remnant of his verbiage that was still visible, rescuing some fragment of inspiration before the inevitable reboot wiped the words clean.

Tomorrow I plan to attend the “Customer Service is the New Marketing” conference that the folks from Get Satisfaction are holding at the Presidio. This doesn’t sound like my normal field but it’s actually a topic close to my heart.

At Salon I was a big believer in customer support as an ambassadorial function for the company. At the site’s launch in 1995, I manned the e-mail barricades, responding personally to most of what came in. (In those days, getting a few hundred messages for a Web site launch was a sign of runaway success.) When we launched Salon Premium in 2001, I handled the customer support myself for the first two weeks. If you’re an executive in charge of a Web launch, there is no better way to get a handle on what’s working and what’s not. And while it’s good to keep developers in the feedback loop as well, you can’t expect them to handle all the response — they’re likely to be busy fixing any of the problems users are uncovering.

Way back in the Pleistocene Andrew Leonard wrote a piece for Salon that I edited, describing a future in which more and more tech support problems could and would be solved by a quick Web search. Today, I don’t even bother attempting to communicate directly with most companies; who wants to navigate phone-tree hell? If I have a problem, I poke around on the Web until I find an answer. If I don’t, I’ll post a question on the likeliest Web forum.

So there’s interesting stuff happening in this area. I’ll see what’s worth reporting on tomorrow.

We’re leaving tomorrow on a brief mid-winter getaway, so I may be absent from these precincts for a handful of days. Before I go, two passages worth savoring from Andrew Leonard’s recent interview with William Gibson in Rolling Stone:

How does it break down for you? Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future?

I find myself less pessimistic than I sometimes imagine I should be. When I started to write science fiction, the intelligent and informed position on humanity’s future was that it wasn’t going to have one at all. We’ve forgotten that a whole lot of smart people used to wake up every day thinking that that day could well be the day the world ended. So when I started writing what people saw as this grisly dystopian, punky science fiction, I actually felt that I was being wildly optimistic: “Hey, look — you do have a future. It’s kind of harsh, but here it is.” I wasn’t going the post-apocalyptic route, which, as a regular civilian walking around the world, was pretty much what I expected to happen myself.

Also:

The very first time I picked up a Sony Walkman, I knew it was a killer thing, that the world was changing right then and there. A year later, no one could imagine what it was like when you couldn’t move around surrounded by a cloud of stereophonic music of your own choosing. That was huge! That was as big as the Internet!

Many years ago, thanks to some mutual friends, I had the privilege of meeting the late George W.S. Trow, and of sitting in on a class he was giving as part of a journalism workshop at Bard College. Each morning Trow would sit down with the day’s New York Times front page and begin to find links between the stories — not hypertext (this was way pre-Web), but causal connections, cross-currents and submerged conflicts, relationships that the newspaper couldn’t or wouldn’t overtly illuminate but that you could make out if you just let the stories rub against one another in your mind.

The author of In the Context of No Context (which I wrote about in Salon a decade ago) was giving us a lesson in how to place the loose atoms of conventional news reporting into molecular structures of context. Once the lesson took, the methodology was impossible to shake.

I got those old Trowvian vibrations again this morning as I scanned the front-page of the Wall Street Journal — crammed as it is these days with four or five headlines where there used to be three, an immediate result of the new Murdoch regime.

The lead story, “Trader Made Billions on Subprime,” tells of hedge fund operator John Paulson, who has made $3 to $4 billion, personally, by “betting against the housing and mortgage markets.” Since those markets, you may have heard, have been going through a rough patch, Paulson’s “bets” paid off.

Paulson himself sounds almost contrite about his success: he’s “reluctant to celebrate while housing causes others pain,” intends to increase his charitable giving, and thinks that “a lot of homeowners have been victimized.”

This stands in contrast to Los Angeles real estate investor Jeff Greene, the subject of the Journal’s second lead, a friend of Paulson’s. Paulson invited Greene into his housing-crash fund, but Greene went off and implemented the investment strategy on his own. Paulson is irked, but Greene protests, “He never told me, ‘Don’t do it.’ ”

The “bet” paid off for Greene, too. He now has three jets. (What does one do with three jets?) He believes that he is “pretty conservative in the way I spend money”; after all, his newest jet is an “older model” Gulfstream that he got for only $2 million — a steal!

We understand that the financial engineers of Wall Street have always been handsomely rewarded. Lots of people and institutions in the financial industry lost the gambles that Paulson and company won. But I can’t help thinking there is something broken with a system in which Olympian financiers place their bets on incomprehensible financial instruments and risk winning or losing bonuses and jets — while these same transactions bear real consequences that are very comprehensible and tangible for the people whose lives they affect. When the roulette wheel of the derivatives market stops, some people get to buy jet number three; other people lose their homes.

Which leads us to headline number three: “States to Tighten Belts as Weakness of Economy Cuts Into Tax Receipts.” Here we move down from the rarefied air of Wall Street back into the thicker atmosphere of everyday reality, where, it seems, the mistakes made in the mortgage market — all the stuff that Paulson “bet” against — are now dragging down the economy, dampening consumer spending, slowing economic growth, reducing employment and cutting into government coffers. Which means less money for schools and police and children’s healthcare and other stuff that people without three jets — or even two jets! — might care about.

Finally, if your eyes scan down the page, you hit headline number four, “Toxic Factories Take Toll on China’s Labor Force” — an account of the cadmium battery industry. Making the batteries requires toxic chemicals, and when the U.S. started regulating their manufacture, the industry simply moved to a lower-cost, no-hassle home in China, and took its poisonous impact with it.

The story pulls our gaze out from the national to the global scale, reminding us that the U.S. economy now rests, even more completely than in the past, on foreign foundations. James Fallows explains how in painfully clear terms in the new Atlantic:

Through the quarter-century in which China has been opening to world trade, Chinese leaders have deliberately held down living standards for their own people and propped them up in the United States. This is the real meaning of the vast trade surplus—$1.4 trillion and counting, going up by about $1 billion per day—that the Chinese government has mostly parked in U.S. Treasury notes. In effect, every person in the (rich) United States has over the past 10 years or so borrowed about $4,000 from someone in the (poor) People’s Republic of China.

There you have it: the story of the economic world today, from prosperous financial buccaneers to worried middle-class America to the developing-world workforce that can only dream of someday upgrading its problems to the sort we in the United States contend with. It’s all on the Journal’s front page today, but the newspaper won’t connect the dots for you — that work is left to each of us.

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”
– John Muir

I am accustomed to, and accommodated to, the fragility of our electronic gadgets. At best, they are built to have a fighting chance of surviving a few knocks. I have used Thinkpads until their plastic cases began to disintegrate, and I have an unusually durable cellphone — an antediluvian model with a black-and-white screen. But in general, our PDAs, Ipods, cameras and all other manner of digital gewgaw are prone to failure given the slightest abuse. And we accept this as the nature of contemporary stuff: cheap to make, quick to fail, cheap to replace — and your replacement will be faster, cooler, more capacious.

So when my son Jack reported, with a downcast face, that he had failed to remove three Nintendo DS cartridges from the pocket of a pair of pants that had just passed through the washing machine, I figured, oops — there goes $100 worth of ROM chips. I knew Nintendo does a great job of protecting its hardware from the depredations of its puerile customer base; how many times had I seen Game Boys survive impacts that would have totaled any laptop? Yet I had no hope for the laundered cartridges.

“Maybe they still work!” my son proposed, with the look of a gambler willing to bet on a long shot, knowing full well he faced brutal odds. I just pursed my lips and thought, “Dream on.”

I fished the pants out of the washer and located the cartridges — turned out to be two, not three. They seemed remarkably dry, yet I had no hope of their survival. This micro-finery of silicon and contacts, marinated in Tide and then roughed up by wash, rinse and spin? No way, Mario and Luigi.

I handed the cartridges to Jack and left the room, torn between urges to console my son and to chastise him.

A moment later, I heard: “YESSS! It works!” Sonic Rush had survived. So, we learned a moment later, had Pokemon.

Somehow, Nintendo had managed to manufacture a game cartridge that could take a licking from an eight-year-old boy — and his family’s household appliances — and keep on clicking.

To such engineering prowess, one can only bow.