perfidy

When I was a boy, my grandfather had a beautiful brick farmhouse in rural southern Ohio.  It was built before the Civil War, and was one of the nicest homes in the county.  My grandfather had grown up, poor, not more than a mile from that house.  He moved away, got married, started a business, bought a brand new Cadillac every other year, and eventually, that gorgeous house.  Not bad for someone who never made it past 8th grade.

Now back when I was a kid, grandpa had a dog, Jeremiah.  Jeremiah was a tri-color collie, and fully the brightest dog I've ever known.  He understood English, even if he couldn't speak it.  He guarded the house, kept track of the kids, helped with the horses, and, on weekends, killed chickens on neighboring farms.

There was also a family in the neighborhood, the Wickhams.  The Wickhams were famous in the area for the staggering quantity of their offspring, and the amazing incidence of mental retardation in those very offspring.  The Wickhams were also renowned for their short tempers, alcoholism, lack of good manners and judgment, and poor fashion sense.  My grandfather used the Wickhams as a personal touchstone and tutelary exemplar.  Had he lived longer, he could have recast this as, "What would a Wickham do?  But he died before the WWJD craze hit, and so had to make do with charming stories of Wickham misadventures, the moral of which was invariably, "Never marry a Wickham."

Tommy Wickham was one of the dimmest of the immense and stupid Wickham brood.  He was dumb as paint but much more violent.  I'd guess he was somewhere in the neighborhood of 85 IQ - not dumb enough to be clinically retarded, but not smart enough to be useful.   I'd wager that Jeremiah was smarter, and I have no doubt that the dog was more useful, and had more sense, loyalty and kindness.  Except, of course, to chickens.

I told you that because Steve Jobs just announced the iPad.

I've read a lot of hot air about how the iPad is disappointing.  The announcement is just over 24 hours old, the actual product hasn't shipped, but we already here the familiar litany - much like this time three years ago, when they were aimed at the iPhone.  It doesn't do this, doesn't have that.  It's full of fail.  Lame.  You could get a netbook for less money, and be able to do more.  I'd like to address that latter complaint.

I've been moving the family over to Mac for a little more than a year.  I got the original iPhone back in 'aught 7, then a 13" unibody MacBook, then an iPhone 3GS, then a Mac Mini for a media server.  Since the mini stays hooked up to the tv, the MacBook is our primary computer.  If I'm working at home, no one else has access to the computer.  If I'm away for more than a day, I take the laptop with me - which means that no one has access to the computer.  The kids want to do video chats with grandma.  The wife or the kids want to play games.  The wife needs to check email.  Und so weiter.  For a significant amount of the time, we have less computer than we'd like.

Up until yesterday, I was thinking that we'd need to buy a whole 'nother computer.  At some point, when the stars align and omens are good, we'd perhaps get a nice 27" iMac, and I get the MacBook; or (more desirable) leave the MacBook on the desk and get a MacBook Air, which would be nice and lightweight and portable for when I'm away from home.  Either solution would cost in the neighborhood of $1800, which is a decent chunk of money.  Sure, I could get a cheaper laptop.  But I want light weight.  I could get a netbook, though that would mean going back to windows and I'd rather gouge out my eyes with a blunt spoon than do that.  Even Linux is less than ideal.  (For a perfect description of why I like the Mac, read this.)

But what we need is not another full computer.  I need to be able to write a bit.  And have access to the web, email, video, music, etc.  My iPhone gets me much of this, but by no means all, and in a cramped screen.   I need that something in between, that I can use profitably and easily - but yet is small and convenient enough to carry around and use on the subway too.

If someone gave me $500 and I could get either a netbook or an iPod, this is how I see it: assume that the processors, onboard storage, weight, battery life are all equivalent, or near as dammit.  Which do you choose?  If I'm going on a hike in rural southern Ohio, I could have my choice of traveling companions: Jeremiah or Tommy Whickham.  Both are about 85 IQ, can carry about the same load, have similar food and water requirements and take up about the same amount of space.  But one is highly intelligent and well adapted (except in regard to chickens), loyal, useful and friendly, a happy genius among dogs.

The other is just a retard.  Jeremiah would protect me from bears, warn me of trouble, and go get Timmy if I fell into the well.  Tommy Wickham would utter a constant stream of profanity, pick fights with the bears, and then fall into the well.

My choice is clear - at a similar price point and performance level - get the system that is supremely adapted to what it is.  Don't get something that is in essence a fat chick stuffed into size 0 spandex biking shorts.  A full operating system and apps aren't meant to run on a minimalist system made by commodity PC makers trying to cut every corner to scrape up some margin from the bottom of the barrel.

For half the cost - and in the case of the MacBook Air, half the weight - of buying a whole new computer, I could get the top line iPad.  It fits our particular use case perfectly.  If I'm at working at home, the wife uses the iPad to check email, surf the web, and use it for the kids' school.  If I'm at work, I take the iPad with me - and the wife uses the computer.  When I'm commuting, the iPad is infinitely better than a laptop on the metro.  I can carry it around easily.  If I'm staying at my Dad's house to shorten my commute I have access to the web, email, video, games, even work by way of iWork, and of course whatever wonders the app developer community comes up with.  (Textwrangler for iPad would be nice, hint, hint.)  I can even use a bluetooth keyboard.

And I'll be happy with a system designed by a fanatical perfectionist asshole.  It will be elegant, slick, carefully thought out and pretty.  It will make me feel pretty.  (I should have all my stuff designed by fanatical perfectionist assholes.  Just think of all the fanatical assholes who are wasted in the Muslim world!  Just think what they could accomplish if they turned their minds to design instead of underwear and shoe bombs.)

Best of all though, I can tell my wife that we can get the iPad and we'll be saving $800!!

I just had a dream that Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit, came up to my house to tell me he wanted to cowrite an sf novel about a car built with nanotechnology.

He was driving a green Ford F350. The interior was spotless.

He was tired of all the banal means that had been used to imagine inanimate objects waking up to sentience. He said he wanted a book that was "Killdozer meets Old Yeller."

I think I'm feverish.

I was looking at the old Suck website yesterday, and even though it's been most of decade since it has been updated, it still looks cool.  How many sites can claim that?

Perfidy is now at WordPress version 2.8.4, and theoretically safe from blog eating monsters.  That's the upside.  Downside is that some of the old plugins apparently aren't very compatible with the new version, and some things are hosed.  Like the "open sesame" button up there to the right, fer instance.

I think I might just redesign the whole site, seeing as I'm going to be doing that same thing for two others over the next couple weeks.  And seeing as I'm the only one who's posted anything over the last year or so, and damn little of that, well, I'm not even going to solicit input from my fellow ministers.

I am Perfidy.  I control the horizontal.  I control the vertical.  And no one really cares.

'Cause of the scary wordpress-eating-internets-worm, we are upgrading perfidy. Perfidy may behave oddly for a while. But since this will affect, by our calculations, as many as .001 persons, on average, don't worry too much.

I just got the second highest score, ever, in the world, on the iPhone game Drop7.

602,174 points, bitches. If you have the game you can see it in all it's glory, reveling under the name, "bob" on the global score board.

Also, I got a job. [1. Amon Amarth is the mojo - listened to Tattered Banners and Bloody Flags all the way in, and got the call less than 24 hours later.]

Matt Barr, once of the blog BTD, which now seems to be a weird forum thingy, tagged me in with this delightful little meme.

"Go with your gut here. These are the songs that emotionally resonate with you, that linger in your head long after they’ve played. Every time you hear one of these songs, all you can think is, “Damn, that’s a good song!”

Toss logic, reason, and ideas about what music “should” be out the window. We’re going for pure gut response here. Maybe it’s the beat, a great guitar riff, or just the lyrics, but something about each of these songs should really strike a chord inside of you. These may not even necessarily be your favorites, just the songs that really “sock it to you” on a fundamental level."

This is what I came up with:

Conquistador, Procol Harum
Life During Wartime, Talking Heads
Death’s Black Train is Coming, Gob Iron
God’s Gonna Cut You Down, Johnny Cash
Cure for Pain, Morphine
Tremor Christ, Pearl Jam
Broken, Beat & Scarred, Metallica
Lonely Avenue, Ray Charles
One Way Out, Allman Brothers Band
Ball and Chain, Social Distortion
Ashes to Ashes, Tarbox Ramblers
Blood and Roses, The Smithereens
Pride and Joy, Stevie Ray Vaughan
World Leader Pretend, REM
Cinnamon Girl, Neil Young
Soundtrack to Mary, Soul Coughing
Would?, Alice in Chains
Kansas City, Wilbert Harrison

I cheated, and put 18 on the list because I just run like that.

I also just noticed that only two maybe three, songs on this list could be even remotely be called happy. I must be more depressed than I realized.

By the loss of not one, but two beautiful white female celebrities today.

Technical recruiters who cannot speakie de English are annoying. They are also tragically ubiquitous. But that can be dealt with. Speak slowly and clearly, and pray for a good connection so you can hope to puzzle out what they are saying.

But a large subset of the non-English speaking technical recruiter community has absofuckinglutely no social savvy whatsoever, when they're not flat out rude. This drives me bugfuck.

"Hi, Samir, I was calling to follow up on the position we discussed last week..."

"Yes."

"So could you tell me what sort of timeframe we're looking at?"

"I have not received any feedback from the hiring manager."

"Do you have any idea when that might be?"

"Next Monday."

"Thank you."

It's like pulling teeth, and that's a mild example, with all the mispronounced words edited out.

Talking with someone who has no concept of how to use the phone as a communicatio device makes my hair hurt. What little I have left, anyway. This behavior seems confined to a certain ethnic group that I will not mention (Indian) and I am begining to dislike them as much as I hate bicyclists on the GW Parkway, or the damn herring eating Norwegians.

I would think that a company wanting to attract quality personnel would put socially adept employees who speak the language in these positions. But then, I thought that McDonald's would at least put English speakers on the drive through, and look how wrong I was about that.

Festung Buckethead, located deep in the mountains of exurban Washington, DC, is a place of learning and happiness. Between the racks of weapons and food stored for the apocalypse, we manage to set aside a small space for the education of our offspring.

Our oldest is now six years old, and his education is moving past the difficult initial stages of teaching him how to pay attention and not fidget, and moving into real larnin’. He reads, and ciphers; and planning for the furtherance of his education is in full swing.

Mrs. Buckethead, a public school teaching survivor, is in charge of most of this effort, while I make faces around the edges of her real work. Seeing as she is 1) an experienced teacher, 2) vastly more organized and thorough than I, and 3) not distrac… ooh, shiny! Where was I? Oh, those reasons make her stewardship of education planning eminently sensible.

Nevertheless, she condenses the results of her tireless research and analysis into small bite sized pieces that I can easily gum and swallow.

And last night, we had one of these information dumps. She is interested in purchasing the A2 curriculum, which is a more or less an improved version of the Robinson curriculum; the which to use as the basis for our ongoing pedagogical efforts. The original Robinson curriculum was developed by, you guessed it, Robinson. Who wanted to educate his boys with minimum fuss and maximum effectiveness. He was an engineer, not an education Ph.D, so he went about doing this in a way that appeals to my inner geek. By all accounts, it is a fantastic program, and you can get an entire K-12 education package with public domain resources, worksheets, etc., all on a package of discs.

The sad thing is, a lot of the material is not stored in the best formats - books as folders of .tiff files, and the like. So the A2 people rationalized it, and now it's all in .txt and PDF files, which are more suited for this modern internets age.

So anyway, we're looking to drop a C-note on this program. But there are no books, no preprinted worksheets, just ones and zeros. My wife was saying that she’d either be printing whole books out on our hp officejet 5510 - or we’d have to hunt down live books in the wild, and buy, skin, and mount them for our son to read. And it occurred to me that that kind of defeats the whole point.

Do the math: Print cartridges are expensive. Books are expensive and can stub your toe. Right now, we need new print cartridges about every six months. If we’re increasing our printing by a metric shitload, we’d be changing print cartridges at least every other month on the new plan, minimum, and likely more often. Given the way that hp rapes you on the cartridges (the first one’s always free), that’s $500 bucks a year right there. Buying books - public domain books that are available for free on Project Gutenberg, or that are already on our curriculum discs - would add hundreds more dollars - a minimum, according to list, of $250.

It will actually be cheaper to buy our son his own Kindle DX.

We can fit a year's worth of educational reading on the Kindle, and it is maximally portable. The boy won't be tied to the computer, and he won't have to lug around lots of books. And there are bonuses. The Kindle has a built in New Oxford American dictionary, just select a word, and get a definition at the bottom of the page, without having to leave the book you’re reading. That sealed it for Mrs. Buckethead right there - being able to look up words right when you hit them is key. And having the dictionary right there makes that process easy.

Free 3G wireless for the life of the device, and built in access to the Wikipedias. Annotations and notes. Plays audio files. And, since it uses the fancy E Ink technology, the battery lasts for weeks as long as you have wireless turned off. The screen is huge - like ten inches, and font size is adjustable, so the boy will have no problems reading on it. Also, it’s not like a backlit LCD screen, so you can easily read it outside, in the sun. It has 3 GB of storage, so we could put huge amounts of material onboard.

The downside, so far as I can tell without actually holding one, is that file management on the thing is a real pain in the ass. You are encouraged to email your personal documents to the Kindle’s email address, though you can use the USB. And, on the device, all your personal documents are just dropped into one folder, no sorting, sub folders or tagging allowed. We’ll have to manage the files for the boy’s studies on the computer, and move them over in chunks, so that he won’t have to wade through thousands of files to find what he needs.

I looked at some of the other ereaders, and it doesn't seem that any of them match up, on price or features, to the DX.

What I’d really like, though, would be the Primer from Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age. But failing that, a touchscreen version would be nice - it would make navigation easier. And better file management would probably help. Amazon is marketing this (among other targets) towards college kids, for replacing expensive textbooks. The homeschool market is small but growing - one could probably make some money putting together packages designed to be used with this sort of technology.

On balance, though, one downside does not outweigh many upsides. And it tickles my fancy to think that I will be buying a $500 state of the art electronic book reader to save money. Granted, we’ll still be buying real books, and we’ll still be printing out worksheets and the like - but the volume would be manageable, and the bulk of his reading will be on the Kindle, which means that his education becomes more portable, more convenient; and that means that we can do more of it.