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Soundtrack

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Late at night, after the kids have gone to bed and progress on my book has run its course for the day, I’ve been working on editing a little family movie chronicling five birthdays. I’m using a way out-of-date edition of Adobe Premiere, software I learned to use years ago. It ain’t broke (except that it chokes on my newest camera’s full-size JPEG files — they need to be resized before import), so why fix it?

As I pleasurably fiddle over fine edits and transitions, I’ve learned a new little lesson: when you pick your background music for a video you’re making, be sure to pick music you really, really enjoy. Forget loops — you’ll go mad. Your eventual audience is only going to hear this stuff once or twice; you’re going to hear it over and over and over again. Choose wisely and lovingly.

CMOS. CMOS run. Run, CMOS, run!

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I seem to be out of the hardware woods, at last. After my old box died, I thought carefully about its replacement. My computer has, among other things, become my chief music library and source; it’s also where I edit family videos. The old computer, an Athlon system I’d rebuilt twice and extended with far too many expansion boards and IDE devices, whirred and hummed like a dilapidated helicopter. This time, I thought, let’s get something quiet. (I know, ye Mac fans, Steve Jobs has promoted silent computing for decades! If it didn’t mean moving 8 years of data and investing in an entire new set of software applications, I’d have switched.)

So I ordered a system from EndPCNoise.com, whose site impressed me as a source of reasonably honest and detailed information about “silent PC” products. I paid a little more money than I’d have spent on a vanilla box, but after my experience with the slow decay of my Athlon system, that seemed a reasonable trade-off for higher-quality components.

I had only one problem: after I installed my old sound card, an M-Audio Delta, the new system seized up with the fast-four-beep distress signal on boot. I did what I knew how to do, which was to roll the system back by removing everything I’d added; no good. I knew enough to pop out the CMOS battery, which should have allowed the motherboard to return to its default settings; no good. I began to fear that I needed to return the system, but a brief conversation with the folks at EndPCNoise solved the problem: to reset the CMOS on my particular motherboard, you have to move a jumper. That, along with a few reboots and trips into the BIOS configuration, did it — everything worked again. (It turns out that this particular kind of professional sound card is highly picky about which of the five PCI slots you put it in. Or I guess it’s the motherboard that is picky. Or the software that configures the interrupts. Anyway, it’s a bit of a Russian roulette game with your system until you find a slot that works.)

I find it highly amusing that, almost 25 years since I first messed with jumpers on a PC motherboard, I’m still at it. Plus ca change… On the other hand, for under $1000 today, I have a system with a gigabyte of RAM, hundreds of gigs of disk space, and more processor speed than most of my applications know what to do with. Now I can get back to work!

The black screen of death

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My blog silence has many parents. There’s the book. And we did take a week off, off to the north coast of California, off the grid, off by ourselves. But there is also — signal the “Taps” bugle — the death of hardware.

Upon our return from Sea Ranch, I was catching up on my RSS feeds, wandering the Web aimlessly, and listening to some music. My gaze landed somehow on an URL I’d filed away to check out — the music of Mountain Goats producer John Vanderslice. And I found this page describing the amusing hoax he perpetrated in 1999, pretending that the minions of Microsoft had come after him for penning a song titled “Bill Gates Must Die.” (No, it’s not the rant of a crazed Linux hacker, or a cry from Gary Kildall beyond the grave — it’s sung from the perspective of a paranoid Net porn addict who blames the wizard of Redmond for his fallen state.)

Anyway, I fired up Vanderslice’s “Bill Gates Must Die” MP3 and started enjoying the fine distorted crunch of the guitar, when, with a sickening, decaying “whirr” of fans cycling down, my box died. Not the Blue Screen of Death, indicating massive software failure, but the Black Screen of Death — instantaneous cessation of all output, followed by permanent inability to reboot. Did my venerable Athlon XP chip, having served faithfully these three-plus years, simply fry a stray register? Did my North Bridge go south, or South Bridge go north? Did my system hit Mean Time Before Failure before its time? Or did the indomitable spirit of Bill himself reach a dark hand into my system’s innards and, seeking revenge on my choice of musical diversion, short out a random slot on my motherboard? I will never know.

I have learned a handful of lessons in 30 years of tinkering with computers; all my data (including every last bit of book work) is safe. But I’ve had to reconstruct a makeshift working system on an old box, swapping out hard drives and PCI cards in the dust of aged system cases, while waiting for a new system to arrive. Radio Userland, being a client-side tool, got swept up in the vortex of this system failure. If you’re reading this now, it means I’ve sufficiently recovered my system configuration to reestablish this small link with my former life, and you, dear reader. A resumption of normal life waits on the UPS person.

Ergo gnomic

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Two only vaguely related gripes:

(1) I’m left-handed, and I’m proud to be part of the sinister 10 percent, but I’m still waiting for my left-handed digital camera. I’m tired of either holding the camera in my unsteady right hand or having to shoot two-handed. There appears to be a left-handed film camera available, here, but I’m not looking for a retro novelty. In this discussion, somebody suggests holding the camera upside down. Maybe. But look, you manufacturers, there’s a market here! We’re ten percent of the population! That’s millions of potential customers — a big fat bulge near the front of the Long Tail, waiting to be served.

(2) I’ve always bought Thinkpad laptops, in part because they’ve been hugely reliable in the years I’ve had them, but also because I vastly prefer the Trackpoint device to the much more common — and, to me, clumsy — trackpad. Recently I realized that I actually think the Trackpoint is far superior to the mouse as well. As usability experts have long maintained, the big problem with mousing is that you’re constantly switching modes and losing efficiency as you move the hand from the keyboard to the mouse and back. Wasted energy, wasted concentration. With the Trackpoint, you don’t have to do that at all — the “mouse” (pointer control) is right where your typing fingers already are. (Keyboard shortcuts are even better for those apps that support them, but they never give you 100 percent of what you need — unless, I guess, you’re a programming ace who lives and breathes emacs.)

So why aren’t desktop keyboards with integrated Trackpoint more common? I know IBM has made them over the years — I bought an old used one on Ebay — but they seem to be a hugely neglected market niche. Or is my Trackpoint preference even more of an eccentricity than my left-handedness?

Backlog

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I’ve got a big backlog of posts that have languished as I concentrate on my 1000-words-a-day march toward meeting my book deadline. I’m going to try to upload a bunch before leaving this weekend for a family trip to the ancestral homeland (NYC).

Deeply Felt

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Since I spent a good couple of months in 2002 editing John Dean’s e-book “Unmasking Deep Throat,” I had my own interest in today’s news unveiling former FBI honcho Mark Felt as the original deep-background source for Woodward and Bernstein’s Watergate reporting. But if this outcome felt anti-climactic, it’s not just because the conclusions Dean so painstakingly reached — among other things, that Deep Throat was almost certainly an attorney, and that he couldn’t have been at the FBI — were simply wrong (to be fair, it appears that the bobbing and weaving Woodward and Bernstein have done through the years. and Felt’s own vehement disavowals, left a somewhat deceptive trail for the attentive sleuth). And it’s not just because Felt has been the “most likely suspect” for over a decade now.

It’s really because it marks the end of the mystery at the heart of the investigative-reporting act that inspired my generation of journalists. I was 15 years old in 1974; I listened to the Watergate hearings in the car radio every morning as I rode with my dad on the way to my summer job. I chose to become a journalist at perhaps the one moment in American history at which the public’s trust in reporters was higher than its faith in political leaders. The naming of Deep Throat represents the final coda to this old story — and reminds us of how much things have changed.

Meanwhile, the current generation of executive malfeasance awaits its comeuppance. Which public servant will step forward, in shadows, pseudonymously or not, to blow a loud whistle on this decade’s lies? Or has the Deep Throat of the George Bush White House already fed his tips — say, to Seymour Hersh — but we’re simply too fatalistically inured to the “disassembling” of our leaders to do anything about it?

Apres post, le deluge

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I’ve got a ton of backlogged stuff to post about, links and comments, both from D and elsewhere. So tonight, I’ve decided that, rather than try to perfect little posts on things, I’m just gonna start posting stuff in a random flood. Which is sort of what blogs are meant for anyway. I’m still fighting the decades of training in linearity!

Force to farce

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I’m keeping my head down to work on my book, most of the time, but Kerry Lauerman asked for contributions to a package about “Star Wars,” and, well, I couldn’t resist. You can read my thoughts on why I, as a passionate teenage science fiction fan in the 1970s, was never a fan of George Lucas’s epic, here.

On a related subject, I watched “Spaceballs” for the first time during my last vacation, in the company of my family, and while it was as, well, slight as I expected, there was something about the notion of “The Schwartz” (Mel Brooks’ answer to the Force) that really seemed to charm my five-year-old boys, who took up the concept as a rallying cry and did not let it go.

A cure for Mad Boss Syndrome

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With the controversy over John Bolton’s nomination to become Bush’s ambassador to the U.N., it’s been possible for the administration’s supporters to paint Bolton’s opponents as whiners. The Democrats, it seems, don’t like Bolton because he’s, you know, tough. Raises his voice. Pushes around his inferiors. Well, ask the Republicans, what’s wrong with that? Shouldn’t we want a tough guy at the U.N.? We’re the strongest nation on the planet! Why should we care if one of our diplomats is a hardass? We’re supposed to reject an appointment because the guy yells?

Of course, if you’ve been following the story, you may understand that the issue here isn’t one of bad manners — it’s about bad management and bad judgment. Bolton isn’t just a tough guy; he’s a tough guy who apparently used his ire to bludgeon intelligence reports into the shape he sought. It’s one thing to push around your subordinates; it’s quite another to push around the information on which the lives of Americans and American troops depend. The reason Bolton’s nomination strikes so many observers, including me, as so profoundly wrong is that it’s precisely Bolton’s management style — one shared by, and endorsed by, the Vice President’s office — that led to the debacle of American intelligence about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction in the lead-up to the 2003 invasion.

In the “whatever happened to those WMD?” game, the Bush team has been pretty successful at shrugging off blame or diverting it at the intelligence community: Darn that CIA! How could they have misled us so badly? But Bolton’s confirmation hearings stand as a blunt reminder of what really happened: Bush’s men hammered the intelligence “community”, raged at their troops, threw fits and tantrums and delivered threats and ultimatums until the information flowing up from the field matched the fantasy their ideology dictated. When that fantasy collided with the reality on the ground in Iraq — look, ma, no WMD after all! — these men turned around and said, well, we acted on the best information we had at the time. First they pushed around their subordinates; then they blamed their subordinates. Classy! And, sadly, genuinely dangerous in the realm of national security, which is why the intelligence field has a strong tradition of trying to keep its reports insulated from the political tide — one more tradition, like the Senate filibuster, that the pseudo-conservatives of the Bush cadres are casually tossing overboard.

The Bolton saga strikes a chord with the American public because we’ve all worked with, and most of us have worked for, a Bolton or two in our time, and we know how it goes: Mad Boss shouts at the top of his (it’s usually, though not always, a male phenomenon) lungs until the things people say to him match the things he wants to hear.

I first encountered the world of Mad Bosses in various jobs I held as a college kid and later as a fledgling journalist. I assumed that this was the way of the world — that somehow the role of Being In Charge carried with it a dose of generic rage, and that all bosses would inevitably, at some point, explode and abuse their employees. The macho culture of old-school American newsrooms certainly spawned its share of Mad Bosses, and I’d have my run-ins with them. For me, one of the grand things about leaving the comfortable nest of the newsroom and helping found a company was doing my small part to shape a different, more civilized workplace culture, in which people treated each other — superior and subordinate alike — as colleagues, not kicking posts.

I came to realize that Mad Bossism was not an inevitability; it is, in fact, an anachronism. It flows less from power than from frustration at powerlessness. The boss explodes because the world won’t bend to his will — and it’s supposed to! What good is being boss if it won’t?

This has given me a tad more empathy for the bulging-veined, red-faced bosses of my past, though I’m firm in my determination never to work anywhere near the type again. The truth is, it’s no longer as easy as it used to be to get away with this kind of behavior: Joe or Jane Subordinate is going to be blogging every last twitch of Mad Boss’s tantrums. Just look at what’s happened to the director of Los Alamos National Labs, G. Peter Nanos. If the postings about him on a largely anonymous Los Alamos insiders’ blog are true, he’s a classic Mad Boss. Yet the scientists and engineers who work for him, having reached their limit, aren’t giving up; they’ve used the Web to shame him. Mad Boss may have met his match in Mad Blogger.

I can’t say I’m sad to see the field so leveled. The Web is criticized, and often rightly so, for the incivility of so much of its dialogue. But here’s one instance in which it can actually help counter the sort of offline incivility that for too long has been simply a given of the workplace.

There and back

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Last week was spring break for the kids, so we went off to Sea Ranch, wandered the wind-swept beaches and spied on baby seals and their mums. It was grand.

I could deal with the 2500 emails piled up for my return (90 percent’s spam, anyway). But the RSS reader backlog is a scary thing. And unlike the spam, these are posts I want to read — otherwise, I wouldn’t be subscribed in the first place. The Net is a harsh mistress: abandon it for a spell and it will have its revenge.