But Enough About Me

A brief history and reflection on the (un)popularity of the memoir. I liked this part in which the author talks about the affect changes in technology have had on the outpouring of personal narrative:

So if we're feeling assaulted or overwhelmed by a proliferation of personal narratives, it's because we are; but the greatest profusion of these life stories isn't to be found in bookstores. If anything, it's hard not to think that a lot of the outrage directed at writers and publishers lately represents a displacement of a large and genuinely new anxiety, about our ability to filter or control the plethora of unreliable narratives coming at us from all directions. In the street or in the blogosphere, there are no editors, no proofreaders, and no fact-checkers--the people at whom we can at least point an accusing finger when the old-fashioned kind of memoir betrays us.

make test

Invoking make test in a project and watching as 1000s of successful tests scroll by, culminating in the All tests successful. message, gives me the same thrill of satisfaction as when I used to paint houses, and having finished a long day of sweaty labor at sanding and chipping old paint off, I could stand back and survey the structure, primed and ready for a fresh coat of paint. It's the anticipation that thrills, in the same way that a trip to the grocery store and a full fridge, or several loads of clean laundry folded and stowed safely away in drawers, thrills me. The knowing that I am prepared, belt cinched tight, all tests successful.

The Patch

John McPhee's Personal History piece is poignant and flashes like a fish in sunlight. Reminded me of the best of Annie Dillard.

Non-Stop News

My work colleagues and I just spent an intense day and a half effectively locked in a room, talking about our work together and vision for where we want to be. I was reminded of this piece by Ken Auletta on the current state of the media vis-a-vis President Obama. A lot of what he has to say about the impact of the internet, the pace of the news cycle and the breakdown of the 20th century business model around journalism is part of my daily grind.

History in smells

David Owen's piece The Dime Store Floor is a bit of nasal nostalgia. The sense of smell is a vivid memory evoker. A couple of summers ago I walked into a lumber yard's warehouse and had a sensory hit so vivid that for a moment I was 8 years old in my great-grandfather's woodshop/garage next door to the house where I grew up. Something about the old wood and sawdust and heat. The force of that memory surprised me. Owen's piece is like that too.

New Yorker

I rarely have time to read these days, but when I do I read The New Yorker magazine. It's the public radio of magazines: eclectic, in-depth, personal, funny, thoughtful. The average length of the pieces and the editorial tone gives writers the freedom to stretch out and find a rhetorical stride that is smart, engaging and wide-ranging.

Ok, enough plaudits.

I'm starting this new category to take note of pieces I want to remember later.

Yahoo! Learning to Rank

Yahoo! has announced a learning to rank contest and has put up some actual dollars in addition to some data sets.

Duck Duck Go

Found out about Duck Duck Go via Benad's Blog. I'm hoping to experiment with LSI at $work in the coming weeks.

Trailhead

E. O. Wilson's fiction piece in the New Yorker reads like a National Geographic article, not the kind of fiction I expect from the New Yorker. But then, that makes it the kind of thing I expect to read in the New Yorker, which is a wide-ranging publication. I liked the piece.

The Apple Store

I was at the Apple Store just now getting a bad RAM chip replaced in my MacBook. All in all it was a very pleasant experience, and aside from the inconvenience of having to drive 40 minutes round-trip for a 20 minute errand, pretty painless.

I took the bad RAM chip, which I had identified and yanked from my machine a couple of weeks ago, in an anti-static bag I had in my desk drawer. My desk is full of them, along with spare parts and adapters and such, many for machines that haven't been manufactered or supported for over a decade. I'm a packrat for old computer junk, though to my credit I have tossed/recycled lots and lots of old "beige" computer parts in the last few years, especially now that the city/county has good recycling for that kind of thing.

Anyway, when I handed the bag with the bad chip in it to the young man at the Apple Store, I didn't think anything of it, but on returning the bag to me he joked that it was a vintage piece. I chuckled and replied, Well, I'm feeling kind of vintage these days.

The bag had the original label attached: 32MB Apple Quadra and Centris Series.

The chip I had replaced was a standard-issue 2GB size, roughly 1000x more memory than the bag had originally held.

You know you're getting old in this business when you can distinctly remember the thrill of a 32MB chip of RAM and how much pure computing power it held.