i have finally finished reading fast food nation, and even though i’m now better informed about what goes on there, and more importantly in it, i must say that i’m pretty disgusted at it. i have tried to eat fast food once since i finished the book and i couldn’t finish the big mac i tried to eat; it tasted different. i wouldn’t have thought that a little knowledge could actually change the way something tastes like that, but it did. i felt almost nauseated the whole time i was eating it. even now when i think about it i get a little quiver of ickiness (excuse the quaint term). again, if you haven’t read it already, do so now.

on to the real meat… i’ve moved onto another book called high tech heretic by clifford stoll. i read another of his books a little while ago, called the cuckoo’s egg and it was very well written. this book, however is a cry out against the use of computers in classrooms, and to a lesser extent, education in general, although most of his examples and issues are targeted at primary and high schools. i worked for several years writing educational software and until i picked up this book, i never even considered the possibility that having computers in a classroom would be anything but great. stoll is giving me a quick hard slap to get my viewpoint back to neutral where i can look at both sides with a more even judgment, and he makes some extremely compelling and very lucid arguments. as i’m working through this book, i had a very interesting conversation with an old friend of mine (in this case, i say old friend because i have known him for almost 10 years, even though we have never met in person. – how alien a thought that would be to someone of my parent’s generation). we are both young (~30) technical professionals, and we both are coming to realize that the role that computers are starting to play in our lives represents a very radical departure from what it used to be, 10, 5, or even 2 years ago. an example that i put forth is this: a couple weeks ago i bought a computer game from the bargain bin at a local store. i wanted to go home, try it out, and play for an hour or two. if i had a device that was designed as a tool to perform this task, then it would have been simple. fire it up. pop in the disc. play. instead, i spent 2 hours checking the requirements. installing. installing drivers. installing directx. tweaking. and swearing because it didn’t work. i was ready to chuck my pc and go buy a playstation. that was where the idea took root. i had previously looked down on game consoles in general, thinking that they were for the ‘less technically skilled’ (i’m just now realizing how elitist that sounds), and that they were somewhat beneath me. the more i thought about it, the more i realized that if i was tweaking, or playing around with my computer, that’s fine, as long as i’m doing it just for the sake of itself. when the time comes to run a game, or an application, then i want it to just work, instead of having to muck through an hour or more of setup. i want a computer to be just a tool that performs the functions that i require. as i was discussing this with my friend, i started to consider that that was one of the things that i really, really like about my macintosh. i don’t have to fiddle. i don’t have to look for hidden settings, or do anything like that. i click, the program installs. i click, the whole os updates itself. if i need a shell, it’s there. it’s really so much more usable than my pc. back to the computers in classrooms thought: a child has a huge amount of exposure to the internet, and within 10 years it will be integrated so deeply into our culture that it’s possible that the next generation of people won’t know what it’s like to function without it. i don’t think i like that idea. i don’t like the thought of my daughter being completely integrated with computers from such an early age. i know that when i started to ‘really’ get into computers, around age 13 or so, i threw myself head first in them, and it’s really only this year, at age 28 that i’m starting to come out and see that while there’s a lot of cool stuff there, that there is so much more. i also worry that with so much emphasis being put on our ‘bright shiny new future’ that we are going to lose sight of things that are or were considered so important just a few years ago. how many people do you know that are studying latin, or archaeology? how much knowledge that has been passed down for hundreds or thousands of years is going to be lost in the next 50 years? what’s more, i’m concerned with the availability of the internet. on the net, every single idea is instantly available, and with no regard to quality of content as recently as 50 or 100 years ago, books were still reasonably hard to come by for the most part, and any type of knowledge that had been handed down in written form was carefully chosen, thought about, deliberated over, and chosen to be in print. now, anyone with any idea can put up a web site, or make his ideas known, and it could be available forever. that thought really scares me. i realize that i’m rambling and this is pretty long so i’ll leave off here. ask anyone of your parents generation about the holocaust. they may have been alive, and have their own memories, but more likely they have learned about it, from books and people, and it has a very strong impressions about it. next think about your own impressions of the holocaust, ones that aren’t drawn from schindler’s list. now ask someone you know that is 10 or 15 years old. do they even know what it is? in hong kong, people were using nazi memorabilia and images as part of a marketing campaign. a marketing campaign for clothes. just think about that. a brutal reign of terror in europe, 6 million jews slaughtered because of a madman. hmm, just the thing we want to represent our fall line, right? sigh.

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i read over my previous entry on compartmentalization and realized that i kind of got one tracked with it. by that i mean that i got onto one single track and didn’t really go into some of the other things that i wanted to. i mostly concentrated on how we compartmentalize time, and how we feel the need to know when we are. i also really wanted to go into how we compartmentalize people. this is something that i know i did a lot when i was much younger, but i can definately say that wisdom has tempered me. now when i look at someone i might think they fit into a category (geek, professional, whatever) but i don’t pigeonhole them into that place as being where they actually are, i look at it more like an “i would guess this is what they do, or what they are like, but you can’t really judge someone by how they look”. sometimes i’ll do it when i ride the light rail to or from work. i’ll spend a whole leg of my journey just watching people who get on and off and ride the train. guessing what they do, where they’re going, etc. when 4 adults get on herding 12 kids and they’re all wearing uniforms, it’s not hard to guess that they’re getting off at the children’s discovery museum, or great america. other people are harder. sometimes, more and more often lately, i’ll catch myself and think “tom, you don’t like to be labelled, so why are you trying to label other people?” and that makes me open my eyes even more to people. i’ll look over people that are sitting and think about not just what their job might be, but what do they do in their spare time? what makes them who they are? where did they come from? what do they want to be doing? do they like their job? hate it? why do they take the train instead of driving or biking? do they have to, or just like it, like me? and then i think more about how people in general really need to put people into categories, or compartments. they need to know where someone fits in their world view. if you meet someone and think you know a bit about them, and then suddenly they do something totally out of character of where you *think* they should be, or what you *think* they should be doing, we’re astonished. an example could be: i’m riding the train and a guy gets on, clothes all ragged, smelling of booze, unwashed, sits down, reaches into his bag and pulls out a brand new ibook and starts coding. sure, maybe not totally unusual in san jose, where anyone might be holding up a ‘will code for food’ sign, but in general, that could really throw someone for a loop. frequently i’ve wondered why we find ourselves labelling people from an early age. then i wonder how people label me? arrogant? geek? slacker? freak? do the labels people put on me have an effect on how i see myself? then that leads me down the slippery slope of how i see myself, and like a lot of others, i was tormented in high school and don’t have a very good self-image. i’m not going to go down that path since that’s an entry or two all unto itself. enough rambling.

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on jen’s blog she did an entry based on the idea of your own personal soundtrack. try it! i am :) add scenes you want, remove ones you don’t.

opening credits: wonder boy – tenacious d

waking-up scene: heroes – gin blossoms

average-day scene: under pressure – queen

best-friend scene: if i had $1000000 – barenaked ladies

first-date scene: mysterious ways – u2

falling-in-love scene: romeo & juliet – dire straits

love scene: two of us – aimee mann

sex scene: let’s get it on – marvin gaye

really dirty sex scene: pour some sugar on me – def leppard

heartbreak scene: fire & rain – james taylor

break up scene: leave a message – urban disciples

get-back-together scene: she loves me – stephen duffy

fight-with-friend scene: raining in baltimore – counting crows

fights-at-home scene: boss of me – they might be giants

mental-breakdown scene: save me – remy zero

driving scene: hockey skates – kathleen edwards

deep-thought scene: sullivan street – counting crows

lesson-learning scene: everybody wants to rule the world – tears for fears.

‘life’s okay’ scene: closer to fine – indigo girls

flashback scene: superman – lazlo bane

party scene: paradise city – guns n roses

regret scene: tomorrow wendy – concrete blonde

transitional scene: poets – the tragically hip

slow-dance song: sweet surrender – sarah mclachlan

happy-dance song: hold my hand – hootie and the blowfish

long-night-alone scene: here’s to the night – eve 6

epic triumph scene: i’ll be there for you – the rembrandts

death scene: amazing grace – bagpipes version

closing credits: good – better than ezra

leave a comment if you do it too :)

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i’m writing this on the train on the way home, and it’s one of those that i’ve been thinking about for a while. i’ve been pondering compartmentalization and how much it’s a need for humans. there’s a scene in the movie iq where a man is being used as part of an experiment, and during this test he’s kept in a room where the lighting and atmosphere is constant, so there’s no sense of time passing (no lights dimming at night, it doesn’t get colder), and the subject of this test is raving wildly, completely unable to cope with the loss of some kind of marker by which to measure time. this makes me think about the human need to put things in ‘boxes’, if you will excuse the crudity of that term. not just time, although that is the example that pops immediately to mind. we feel the need to break up time into little chunks, manageable chunks, of days, weeks, years, and down to minutes, seconds. i have several peers who can’t move more than 5 feet away from their pim devices, and they have their entire lives (at least as far as they are concerned) broken down into 15 or 30 minute intervals. go to a meeting, have lunch. drive home. work out. watch tv. as much as people may think it is a necessity to know what they are doing, why is such granularity needed? the need to always know, or to quantify not just where we are, but when we are has become a defining characteristic of our modern society. and although everyone can own a watch and know when they are down to any minute, meaningless fraction of a second, the knowledge of where we are has lagged behind in scope. you can know where you are, relatively, simply by looking around. i’m on a train, i’m in san jose, i’m near first street. but how does that break down on a global scale? how does it relate to latitude or longitude? who really cares? how many people carry a device that can show them exactly where they are? even though gps devices are becoming more and more common, they still lag much behind ownership of a wristwatch. i don’t own a gps, or a watch, and although i don’t always know what time it is, i can get pretty close, and i don’t ever know where i am in the grand scheme of things, i’m still pretty sure that i can get home at night. last weekend i went camping in the wilderness, and we drove all night, set up tents as the sun rose, then took a nap. when i got up, the first thing that came into my mind i asked my friend andy, the captain: “dude, what time is it”. suddenly i caught myself and told him: “belay that order. for the next four days, if i ever ask what time it is, the only response i want to hear is: ‘it’s time for a beer.'” it was the most relaxing four days i’ve had in years.

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ok i’m on the train *to* work this time and i’m feeling a bit more inspired to write. it’s amazing how a little change of pace, and some relaxation time can juice the brain into action. this is another one of those topics that i’ve wanted to write about for a while. when i say personal seasons, that has a lot of connotations to me, and this whole idea rose out of a great conversation i had with my mom. i was thinking about how i used to hear that people were most like a particular season, and that influenced the clothes and colors they liked. like if you’re a ‘summer’, you like lots of bright colors, yellows etc, and ‘winters’ liked cold greens & blues. then after thinking about that for a while, it dawned on me that if it’s true, then that must be a much bigger reflection on your personality than just influencing your color preferences. does this mean that if you’re a ‘winter’ that you’re more cynical? harsher? does a ‘spring’ always have hope, looking forward to what’s coming up? or do people go through cycles in their own lives, like the cycle of the seasons, do people who are in mourning or sadness or depression in a winter mood, cold and dark, but with the possibility of a spring (however far away that may be) looming somewhere in the (possibly distant) future? after some of these ideas floating through my head i started to think about what season, and time of the year i enjoy most, not because of any mental connotations, or relation to my personal psyche, but what time of the year i really enjoy. and i came to the conclusion that the season i really enjoy most is fall. not fall in a california sense, though. fall in a midwestern sense, when it’s warm during the day, and a tinge of winter at night, and in the morning. when the leaves turn colors and flood your lawn with a subtle, umber choked rainbow. rainstorms that carry piles of leaves along a slick curbside torrent, only to pile up on the rusty storm gratings at the corner. the smell of ozone and wetness in the air, washing off the heat and dirt and dust of summer, leaving a sad, wistful scent in the air, and knowing that summer has passed for another year. it’s something that i miss terribly. i guess i really am a ‘fall’ person at heart, (and possibly in my psyche – only deep regression therapy can tell me if it’s so :) – guess i better go buy some brown shirts.

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