Some Personal News!

Interrupting Icecano’s regularly scheduled programming, I have some personal news!

I have a (very) small piece of writing published in Kobold Press' Guide to the Labyrinth:

As part of their Tales of the Valiant Kickstarter to pathfinderize 5E, one of the auxiliary books is a Manual-of-the-planes-a-like guide to other worlds/planes/dimensions. They had a sort of contest/open slushpile to submit world designs for that book, and my “Thaecosia Archipelago” was one of the ones that made it in!

As we all know, “settings legally distinct from Planescape written by former members of the Planescape team” is one of my most significant weakness, so this was really fun. Talk about checking off a bucket list item!

40 years of…

Just about 40 years ago, my Dad brought something home that literally changed my life. It was a computer—a home computer, which was still on the edge of being science fiction—but more than that, it was a portal. It was magic, a box of endless possibilities. It’s not even remotely hyperbole to say that bringing that computer home, which had just been released into the world, utterly changed the entire trajectory of my life.

I am, of course, talking about the Tandy 1000.

That’s not how you expected that sentence to end, was it? Because this year is also the 40th anniversary of the Mac. But I want to spend a beat talking about the other revolutionary, trend-setting computer from 1984, before we talk about the ancestor of the computer I’m writing this on now.

I’ve been enjoying everyone’s lyrical memories of the original Mac very much, but most have a slightly revisionist take that the once that original Mac landed in ’84 that it was obviously the future. Well, it was obviously a future. It’s hard to remember now how unsettled the computer world was in the mid-80s. The Tandy 1000, IBM AT, and Mac landed all in ’84. The first Amiga would come out the next year. The Apple IIgs and original Nintendo the year after that. There were an absurd number of other platforms; Commodore 64s were selling like hotcakes, Atari was still making computers, heck, look at the number of platforms Infocom released their games for. I mean, the Apple ][ family still outsold the Mac for a long time.

What was this Tandy you speak of, then?

Radio Shack started life as a company to supply amateur radio parts to mostly ham radio operators, and expanded into things like hi-fi audio components in the 50s. In one of the greatest “bet it all on the big win” moves I can think of, the small chain was bought by—of all people—the Tandy Leather Company in the early 60s. They made leather goods for hobbyists and crafters, and wanted to expand into other hobby markets. Seeing no meaningful difference between leather craft hobbyists and electronics ones, Charles Tandy bought the chain, and reworked and expanded the stores, re-envisioning them as, basically, craft stores for electronics.

I want to hang on that for a second. Craft stores, but for amateur electronics engineers.

It’s hard to express now, in this decayed age, how magical a place Radio Shack was. It seems ridiculous to even type now. If you were the kind of kid who were in any way into electronics, or phones in the old POTS Ma Bell sense, or computery stuff, RadioShack was the place. There was one two blocks from my house, and I loved it.

When home computers started to become a thing, they came up through the hobbyist world; Radio Shack was already making their own parts and gizmos, it was a short distance to making their own computers. Their first couple of swings, the TRS-80 and friends, were not huge hits, but not exactly failures either. Apple came out of this same hobbyist world, then IBM got involved because they were already making “big iron”, could they also make “little iron”?

For reasons that seem deeply, deeply strange four decades later, when IBM built their first PC, instead of writing their own operating system, they chose to license one from a little company outside of Seattle called Microsoft—maybe you’ve heard of them—with terms that let Gates and friends sell their new OS to other manufacturers. Meanwhile, for other reasons, equally strange, the only part of the IBM PC actually exclusive to IBM was the BIOS, the rest was free to be copied. So this whole little market formed where someone could build a computer that was “IBM Compatible”—again, maybe you’ve heard of this—buy the OS from that outfit up in Redmond, and take advantage of the software and hardware that was already out there. The basic idea that software should work on more than one kind of computer was starting to form.

One of the first companies to take a serious swing at this was Tandy, with the Tandy 2000. In addition to stretching the definition of “compatible” to the breaking point, it was one of the very few computers to ever use the Intel 80186, and was bought by almost no one, except, though a series of events no one has ever been able to adequately explain to me, my grandmother. (I feel I have to stress this isn’t a joke, Grandma wrote a sermon a week on that beast well into the late 90s. Continuing her track record for picking technology, she was also the only person I knew with a computer that ran Windows Me.)

As much as the original IBM PC was a “home computer”, it was really a small office computer, so IBM tried to make a cut down, cheaper version of the PC for home use, for real this time. I am, of course, talking about infamous flop the IBM PCjr, also 40 years old this year, and deserving its total lack of retrospective articles.

Tandy, meanwhile, had scrambled a “better PCjr” to market, the Tandy 1000. When the PCjr flopped, Tandy pivoted, and found they had the only DOS-running computer on the market with all the positives of the PCjr, but with a keyboard that worked.

Among these positives, the Tandy 1000 had dramatically better graphics and sound than anything IBM was selling. “Tandy Graphics” was a step up from CGA but not quite to EGA, and the “Tandy Sound” could play three notes at once! Meanwhile, the Tandy also came with something called DeskMate, an app suite / operating environment that included a text editor, spreadsheet, calendar, basic database with a text-character-based GUI.

So they found themselves in a strange new market: a computer that could do “business software”, both with what was built-in and what was already out there, but could also do, what are those called? Oh yeah, games.

The legend goes that IBM commissioned the nacent Sierra On-Line to write the first King’s Quest to show off the PCjr; when that flopped Sierra realized that Tandy was selling the only computer that could run their best game, and Tandy realized there was a hit game out there that could only run on their rigs. So they both leaned all the way in.

But of course, even the Tandy couldn’t match “arcade games”, so the capabilities and limits helped define what a “PC game” was. Adventure games, flight sims, RPGs. And, it must be said, both the words “operating” and “system” in MS-DOS were highly asperational. But what it lacked in features it made up for in being easy to sweep to the side and access the hardware directly, which is exactly what you want if you’re trying to coax game-quality performance out of the stone knives and bearskins of 80s home computers. Even when the NES cemented the “home console” market that Atari had sketched in a couple years later, “PC games” had already developed their own identity vs “console games”.

Radio Shacks got a whole corner, or more, turned over to their new computers. They had models out running programs you could play with, peripherals you could try, and most critically, a whole selection of software. I can distinctly remember the Radio Shack by my house with a set of bookstore-like shelves with what was at the time every game yet made by Sierra, Infocom, and everyone else at the time. Probably close to every DOS game out there. I have such clear memories of poring over the box to Starflight, or pulling Hitch-hiker’s Guide off the shelf, or playing Lode Runner on the demo computer.

A home computer with better graphics and sound than its contemporaries, pre-loaded with most of what you need to get going, and supported by its very own retail store? Does that sound familiar?

I’m cheating the timeline a little here, the Tandy 1000 didn’t release until November, and we didn’t get ours until early ’85. I asked my Dad once why he picked the one he did, of all the choices available, and he said something to the effect of he asked the “computer guy” at work which one he should get, and that guy indicated that he’d get the Tandy, since it would let you do the most different kinds of things.

Like I said at the top, it was magic. We’re so used to them now that it’s hard to remember, but I was so amazed that here was this thing, and it would do different things based on what you told it to do! I was utterly, utterly fascinated.

One of the apps Dad bought with computer was that first King's Quest, I was absolutely transfixed that you could drive this little guy around on the screen. I’d played arcade games—I’d probably already sunk a small fortune into Spy Hunter—but this was different. You could do things. Type what you thought of! Pushing the rock aside to find a hole underneath was one of those “the universe was never the same again” moments for me. I could barely spell, and certainly couldn’t type, but I was hooked. Somewhere, and this still exists, my Mom wrote a list of words on a sheet of paper for me to reference how to spell: look, take, shove.

And I wasn’t the only one, both of my parents were as fascinated as I was. My mom sucked down every game Infocom and Sierra ever put out. The Bard's Tale) landed a year later, and my parent’s played that obsessively.

It was a family obsession, this weird clunky beige box in the kitchen. Portals to other worlds, the centerpiece of our family spending time together. Four decades on, my parents still come over for dinner once a week, and we play video games together. (Currently, we’re still working on Tears of the Kingdon, because we’re slow.)

Everyone has something they lock onto between about 6 and 12 that’s their thing from that point on. Mine was computers. I’ve said many, many times how fortunate I feel that I lived at just the right time for my thing to turn into a pretty good paying career by the time I was an adult. What would I be doing to pay this mortgage if Dad hadn’t brought that Tandy box into the house 40 years ago? I literally have no idea.

Time marched on.

Through a series of tremendous own-goals, Radio Shack and Tandy failed to stay on top of, or even competitive in, the PC market they helped create, until as the Onion said: Even CEO Can't Figure Out How RadioShack Still In Business.

Meanwhile, through a series of maneuvers that, it has to be said, were not entirely legal, Microsoft steadily absorbed most of the market, with the unsettled market of the 80s really coalescing into the Microsoft-Intel “IBM Compatible” platform with the release of Windows 95.

Of all the players I mentioned way back at the start, the Mac was the only other one that remained, even the Apple ][, originally synonymous with home computers, had faded away. Apple had carved out a niche for the Mac for things that could really take advantage of the UI, mainly desktop publishing, graphic design, and your one friend’s Dad.

Over the years, I’d look over at the Mac side of the house with something approaching jealousy. Anyone who was “a computer person” in the 90s ended up “bilingual”, more-or-less comfortable on both Windows and Mac Classic. I took classes in graphic design, so I got pretty comfortable with illustrator or Aldus Pagemaker in the Mac.

I was always envious of the hardware of the old Mac laptops, which developed into open lust when those colored iBooks came out. The one I wanted the most, though, was that iMac G4 - Wikipedia with the “pixar lamp” design.

But the thing is, they didn’t do what I was mostly using a computer for. I played games, and lots of them, and for a whole list of reasons, none of those games came out for the Mac.

If ’84 saw the release of both the first Mac, and one of the major foundation stones of the modern Windows PC platform, and I just spent all that time singing the praises of my much missed Tandy 1000, why am I typing this blog post on a MacBook Pro? What happened?

Let me spin you my framework for understanding the home computer market. Invoking the Planescape Rule-of-Threes, there are basically three demographics of people who buy computers:

1. Hobbyists. Tinkerers. People who are using computers as a source of self-actualization. Hackers, in the classical sense, not the Angelina Jolie sense.
2. People who look at the computer market and thought, “I bet I make a lot of money off of this”.
3. People who had something else to do, and thought, “I wonder if I could use a computer to help me do that?”

As the PC market got off the ground, it was just that first group, but then the other two followed along. And, of course, the people in the second group quickly realized that the real bucks were to be made selling stuff to that first group.

As the 80s wound on, the first and second group clustered on computers running Microsoft, and the third group bought Macs. Once we get into the late 90s the hobbyist group gets split between Microsoft and Linux.

(As an absolutely massive aside, this is the root of the weird cultural differences between “Apple people” and “Linux people”. The kind of people who buy Apples do so specifically so they don’t have to tinker, and the kinds of people who build Linux boxes do so specifically so that they can. If you derive a sense of self from being able to make computers do things, Apples are nanny-state locked-down morally suspect appliances, and if you just want to do some work and get home on time and do something else, Linux boxes are massively unreliable Rube Goldberg toys for people who aren’t actually serious.)

As for me? What happened was, I moved from being in the first group to the third. No, that’s a lie. What actually happened was I had a kid, and realized I had always been in the third group. I loved computers, but not for their own sake, I loved them for the other things I could with them. Play games, write text, make art, build things; they were tools, the means to my ends, not an end to themselves. I was always a little askew from most of the other “computer guys” I was hanging out with; I didn’t want to spend my evening recompiling sound drivers, I wanted to do somethat that required the computer to play sound, and I always slightly resented it when the machine required me to finish making the sausage myself. But, that’s just how it was, the price of doing business. Want to play Wing Commander with sound? You better learn how Himem works.

As time passed, and we rolled into the 21st century, and the Mac moved to the BSD-based OS X, and then again to Intel processors, I kept raising my eyebrows. The Mac platform was slowly converging into something that might do what I wanted it to do?

The last Windows PC I built for myself unceremoniously gave up the ghost sometime in 2008 or 9, I can’t remember. I needed a new rig, but our first kid was on the way, and I realized my “game playing” time had already shrunk to essentially nil. And, by this time I had an iPhone, and trying to make that work with my WindowsXP machine was… trying. So, I said, what the hell, and bought a refurbed 2009 polycarb MacBook). And I never looked back.

I couldn’t believe how easy it was to use. Stuff just worked! The built-in apps all did what they were supposed to do! Closing the laptop actually put the computer to sleep! It still had that sleep light that looked like breathing. The UI conventions were different from what I was used to on Windows for sure, but unlike what I was used to, they were internally consistent, and had an actual conceptual design behind them. You could actually learn how “the Mac” worked, instead of having to memorize a zillion snowflakes like Windows. And the software! Was just nice. There’s a huge difference in culture of software design, and it was like I could finally relax once I changed teams. It wasn’t life-changing quite the way that original Tandy was, but it was a fundamental recalibration in my relationship with computers. To paraphrase all those infomercials, it turns out there really was a better way.

So, happy birthday, to both of my most influential computers of the last forty years. Here’s to the next forty.

But see if you can pick up some actual games this time.

New Calendar Weekend ’24

Moving a little slow this year, but it was new Calendar Weekend. Something very satisfying about getting the whole year up on “The Big Board”, blank and full of possibility.

Related: Anyone else back to writing two digit year numbers? There was a long stretch after the turn of the century where I always wrote or said the whole year: “Two thousand five”, 2012. Partly residual habit from the averted Y2K situation, partly so that years would sort correctly in lists, partly because getting to say “two thousand and something” felt very futuristic.

But at least since we entered the twenties, I’m back to two digit years. “That’s a wrap for ’23”, “Sounds like a January ’24 problem”, etc. This is retroactive too; at the time I would have never said “next year is oh five”, but that’s the only form I use anymore.

I Had A Dream Last Night, And I’m Mad About It

Not mad that I had a dream, but at the contents, you understand.

I used to have very vivid dreams, but those have become fewer and further between as I turn the corner into the back half of my forties. However, I had one last night! I swear to you I am not making this up:

In the dream, James Cameron was half-way through making The Abyss but had run out of money. So, he was having a meeting with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Linda Hamilton to loan him the money he needed to finish the movie. (This didn’t really happen, by the way, but presumably this dream is set in mid-1988?)

I was there because I was also a filmmaker (?) and friends with all of them (??) so I had been invited as a kind of friendly neutral party to act as a mediator (???).

The one part I remember very clearly was Arnold was getting very hot under the collar that Cameron was “just expecting” a loan, and I made the timeout T-sign with my hands and said something like “you know, Terminator was your big break, the least you can do is hear him all the way out even if you say no.”

There was a side-scene where over lunch, I was trying to convince Arnold to be in the movie I was filming at the time, which was a sword-and-sorcery movie, and I thought it would be funny if he had a cameo as a tavern owner who got robbed by the main characeters.

“These are all little skinny guys, and it’ll be hilarious when you get all scared and say ‘I don’t want any trouble!’”, I said doing a terrible austrian accent, “let people see how funny you are!” Because I guess Twins hadn’t come out yet?

I don’t know how it all ended, because I woke up at that point and refused to go back to sleep so as to avoid any more dream meetings.

Who does this? Who dreams historical fiction about business meetings?

Station Ident: 2024

This is Icecano. The name comes from a mis-remembered line in a mid-70s Doctor Who story.

My name is Gabriel Helman. I’ve been making computers do things since the late nineteen-hundreds. I also write things on the web.

Welcome to 2024. Let’s see what happens.

Year in review, self-linkblog-edition

A long time ago (longer now than it seems,) I used to write a lot. Flash forward a few lifetimes, I sat down at the end of last year to try and do something a little more complex than normal, and realized that I’d basically forgotten how to write everything other than technical specs or slack messages.

I needed to get back into shape, and to do that I needed some practice. A lot of practice.

So, I triggered the Genesis Device on this URL and relit the blog as an explicit project to re-teach myself how to write. I had a vague goal of doing about two pieces a week, focused on covering tech and pop culture; maybe Tuesdays and Thursdays, respectively?

Well, it’s been a year. How’d it go?

Including this one, I ended up with 117 pieces, which is just over two a week, but a cursory glance at the archives reveals very very few times I ever hit exactly two a week, and certainly never Tech Tuesday / Pop Culture Thursday.

The schedule wasn’t the actual goal though, the goal was to just keep playing the scales and see where the wind took me. I ended up just north of 110,000 words for the year, which is a lot more than I would have done without the blog.

It really look a while to get going. I’m a much slower writer than I used to be (or at least, remember being,) so one of the hardest parts has been finding the time to actually do the writing, and then building a habit around it. The other big thing I had to re-learn was how to actually finish things.

By the end of the summer I was posting little things on a fairly regular basis, but a deep backlog of half-finished drafts. As a piece of self-deprecating humor, the tag for “the big ones” was for pieces that stayed stuck in draft form for more than a month. For example, the first draft of Fully Automated Insults to Life Itself had a file date in February, and the first draft of Fractals was at the start of July, and 2023’s strange box office was half-done before Barbenheimer even came out. (They all turned out pretty well, I think?)

But! The rust finally started to come off for real as I was recovering from COVID in October, I refocused on actually finishing things in the backlog at the start of November, and as of this post, the drafts folder is empty.

(And I’m not going to say there’s a direct correlation with the blog output hitting a groove and twitter imploding, but that’s not a total coincidence either, you know?)

My biggest surprise has been that I was expecting to do a lot more tech & software engineering writing, and that didn’t end up being where the inspiration flowed. Eyeing my tag stats, I have 66 pieces for pop culture, and 42 for tech, and so hey, thats a fun number to hit, but I was expecting the ratio to go the other way.

In roughly chronological order, here’s some of my favorite pieces I did this year.

On the tech side of the house:

• Space Glasses and Apple Vision Pro: New Ways to be Alone works as a solid pair, and was me washing a half-decade of work out of my hair, as it were
• Drobo Ragnarök
• Why didn’t you just use…
• What was happening: Twitter, 2006-2023
• Don't Guess When You Can Ask
• I spent most of the year steaming about AI, and finally wrangled a whole pile of drafts into Fully Automated Insults to Life Itself and its prologue, You call it the “AI Nexus”, we call it the “Torment Pin”, which ended up with a bunch of material that was originally going to go in the main piece, but worked better there.
• Layoff Season(s), which I originally wrote in March, didn’t publish because I thought it was too grumpy, and then by December I realized it wasn’t grumpy enough.

And on the pop culture side:

• Wild Things at 25
• Correct, Orcas are not our friends
• Wait, Which Hundred?
• What seems to be your boggle, citizen? 30 years of Demolition Man
• Apple Music vs(?) The Beatles
• Still out there: The X-Files at 30
• Fall ’23 Good TV Thursdays: “The real TVA was the friends we made along the way”
• Email Verification
• My four Doctor Who reviews:
  • Doctor Who and the Star Beast (2023)
  • Doctor Who and the Wild Blue Yonder
  • Doctor Who and the Giggle
  • Doctor Who and The Church on Ruby Road
• 2023’s strange box office
• Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
• Good Adaptations and the Lord of the Rings at 20 (and 68)
• It’ll Be Worth It
• “It’s accurate, Captain”; I’d been meaning to write something about Strange New Worlds all year, and finally found an excuse right at the end. It was also a nice example of why I was doing this blog in the first place; at the start of the year, that piece would have taken me weeks to put together, languishing through draft after partial draft; by the end of December I was able to go from “hey, that might be a funny post” to “scheduled for publication” in about 90 minutes. Practice really does pay off, y’all!

All that said, I don’t know if it was the best, but my absolutely favorite piece I did this year was Fractals.

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A few other stray observations.

You can really spot the period in late summer/fall where I wasn’t getting enough sleep and the blog got extremely grouchy. Favorite Programming Language Features: Swift’s Exception handling with Optionals was the result me realizing I had written way too may grouchy posts in a row and telling myself, “go write about something you like! Anything!” I’m not sure it’s obvious that the blog has gotten less grouchy since then, but that’s the point where I started paying attention.

Meanwhile, my posts with the most traffic were:

• The Enshittification Curve
• What seems to be your boggle, citizen? 30 years of Demolition Man
• What the heck happened to Boing Boing?

All of which popped off on one search engine or another; I was Google’s number 2 hit for “enshittification curve” for a bit over the summer, so that was exciting.

Like many, many podcast listeners, I’ve been a (mostly?) happy Squarespace customer for many years. This project has really stretched what their platform is good at, though; it’s great for infrequently updated sites—restaurants, small businesses, portfolios, and the like—but daily blogs with complex formatting is outside their wheelhouse, to say the least. I spent the year slowly realizing I was trying to recreate wordpress inside squarespace’s editor, and “hmmmm”.

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I have a few loose piecs queued up for the start of the year, but then I think I’m gonna pump the brakes a little. I’ve got a few longer-form things I want to try and do next year, so I’m going to see if I can redirect this habit I’ve built in a slightly different way.

So Happy New Year, everyone! This year was pretty good, all things considered. Let’s make the next one ever better.

It’ll Be Worth It

An early version of this got worked out in a sprawling Slack thread with some friends. Thanks helping me work out why my perfectly nice neighbor’s garage banner bugs me, fellas

There’s this house about a dozen doors down from mine. Friendly people, I don’t really know them, but my son went to school with their youngest kid, so we kinda know each other in passing. They frequently have the door to the garage open, and they have some home gym equipment, some tools, and a huge banner that reads in big block capital letters:

NOBODY CARES WORK HARDER

My reaction is always to recoil slightly. Really, nobody? Even at your own home, nobody? And I think “you need better friends, man. Maybe not everyone cares, but someone should.” I keep wanting to say “hey man, I care. Good job, keep it up!” It feels so toxic in a way I can’t quite put my finger on.

And, look, I get it. It’s a shorthand to communicate that we’re in a space where the goal is what matters, and the work is assumed. It’s very sports-oriented worldview, where the message is that the complaints don’t matter, only the results matter. But my reaction to things like that from coaches in a sports context was always kinda “well, if no one cares, can I go home?”

(Well, that, and I would always think “I’d love to see you come on over to my world and slam into a compiler error for 2 hours and then have me tell you ‘nobody cares, do better’ when you ask for help and see how you handle that. Because you would lose your mind”)

Because that’s the thing: if nobody cared, we woudn’t be here. We’re hever because we think everyone cares.

The actual message isn’t “nobody cares,” but:

“All this will be worth it in the end, you’ll see”

Now, that’s a banner I could get behind.

To come at it another way, there’s the goal and there’s the work. Depending on the context, people care about one or the other. I used to work with some people who would always put the number of hours spent on a project as the first slide of their final read-outs, and the rest of us used to make terrible fun of them. (As did the execs they were presenting to.)

And it’s not that the “seventeen million hours” wasn’t worth celebrating, or that we didn’t care about it, but that the slide touting it was in the wrong venue. Here, we’re in an environment where only care about the end goal. High fives for working hard go in a different meeting, you know?

But what really, really bugs me about that banner specifically, and things like it, that that they’re so fake. If you really didn’t think anyone cares, you wouldn’t hang a banner up where all your neighbors could see it over your weight set. If you really thought no one cared, you wouldn’t even own the exercise gear, you’d be inside doing something you want to do! Because no one has to hang a “WORK HARDER” banner over a Magic: The Gathering tournament, or a plant nursery, or a book club. But no, it’s there because you think everyone cares, and you want them to think you’re cool because you don’t have feelings. A banner like that is just performative; you hang something like that because you want others to care about you not caring.

There’s a thing where people try and hold up their lack of emotional support as a kind of badge of honor, and like, if you’re at home and really nobody cares, you gotta rethink your life. And if people do care, why do you find pretending they don’t motivating? What’s missing from your life such that pretending you’re on your own is better than embracing your support?

The older I get, the less tolerance I have for people who think empathy is some kind of weakness, that emotional isolation is some kind of strength. The only way any of us are going to get through any of this is together.

Work Harder.

Everyone Cares.

I’ll Be Worth It.

A Story About Beep the Meep

Up until last weekend, Doctor Who’s “Beep the Meep” was an extremely deep cut. Especially for American fans who didn’t have access to Doctor Who Monthly back in the 80s, you had to be a vary particular kind of invested to know who The Meep was. And, you know, guilty as charged.

We bought our first car with a lock remote maybe fifteen years ago? And when we get home, I’ll frequently ask something like “did you beep the car?” And I always want to make the joke “did you beep the meep”. And I always stop myself, because look, my family already knows more about Doctor Who then they ever, ever wanted to, but the seminar required to explain that joke? “So, the meep is a cute little fuzzy guy, but he’s actually the galaxy’s most wanted war criminal, and so the Doctor gets it wrong at first, and the art is done by the watchmen guy before he teamed up with The Magus, and it’s a commentary on the show using ugly as a signifier of evil, and actually it came before ET and gremlins, and…”

And just, no. Nope, no deal. That’s beyond the pale. I could explain the joke, but not in a way where it would ever be close to funny. So instead, about once a month, I stop myself from asking if the meep got beeped.

Flash forward to this week.

We all piled out of the car after something or other. Bundling into the house. Like normal, the joke flashed through my mind and I was about to dismis it. But then it suddenly came to me: this was it. They all know who the Meep is now! Through the strangest of happenstances, a dumb joke I thought of in 2008 and haven’t been able to use finally, finally, became usable. This was my moment! A profound sense of satisfaction filled my body, the deep sense of fulfillment of checking off a box long un-checked.

“Hey!” I said, “Did you Beep the Meep?”

...

Turns out, even with context, still not that funny.

Email Verification

The best and worst thing about email is that anyone can send an email to anyone else without permission. The people designing email didn’t think this was a problem, of course. They were following the pattern of all the other communications technology of the time—regular mail, the phones, telegrams. Why would I need permission to send a letter? That’s crazy.

Of course, here in the Twenties, three of those systems are choked by robot-fueled marketing spam, and the fourth no longer exists. Of all the ways we ended up living in a cyberpunk dystopia, the fact that no one will answer their phone anymore because they don’t want to be harassed by a robot is the most openly absurd; less Gibson, more Vonnegut-meets-Ballard.

(I know I heard that joke somewhere, but I cannot remember where. Sorry, whoever I stole that from!)

Arguably, there are whole social networks who built outward from the basic concept of “what if you had to get permission to send a message directly to someone?”

With email though, I’m always surprised that systems don’t require you to verify your email before sending messages to it. This is actually very easy to do! Most web systems these days use the user’s email address as their identity. This is very convenient, because someone else is handling the problem of making sure your ids are unique, and you always have a way to contact your users. All you have to do is make them click a link in an email you sent them, and now you know they gave you a live address and it’s really them. Easy!

(And look, as a bonus, if you email them “magic links” you also don’t have to worry about a whole lot of password garbage. But thats a whole different topic.)

But instead a remarkable number of places just let people type some stuff that looks like an email address into a web form and then just use it.

And I don’t get it. Presumably you’re collecting user emails because you want to be able to contact them about whatever service you’re providing them, and probably also send them marketing. And if they put an email in that isn’t correct you can’t do either. I mean, if they somehow to put in a fake or misspelled address that happens to turn out to be valid, I guess you can still send that address stuff, but it’s not like the person at the other end of that is going to be receptive.

Okay great, but, ummmmmm, why do you bring this up?

I’m glad you ask! I mention this because there are at least three people out there in the world that keep misspelling their email addresses as mine. Presumably their initials are close to mine, and they have similar names, and they decomposed their names into an available gmail address in a manner similar to how I did. Or even worse—I was early to the gmail party, so I got an address with no numbers, maybe these folks got 47.

My last name is one that came into existence because someone at Ellis Island didn’t care to decipher my great-grandfather’s accent and wrote down something “pretty close.” As a side effect of this, I’ve personally met every human that’s ever had that last name—to whom I’m related. I suspect this name was a fairly common Ellis Island shortcut, however, since there a surprising number of people out there with the same last name whom I’ve never heard of and am not related to.

But so the upshot is that I keep getting email meant for other people. Never anything personal, never anything I could respond to, but spam, or newsletters, or updates about their newspaper account.

I’ve slowly built up a mental image of these people. They all seem older, two midwest or east coast, one in Texas.

One, though, has been a real spree the last year or so. I think he’s somewhere in the greater Chicago area. He signed up for news from Men’s Wearhouse, he ordered a new cable install from Spectrum Cable. Unlike previous people, since this guy started showing up, it’s been a deluge.

And what do you do? I unsubscribe when I can, but that never works. But I don’t just want to unsubscribe, I want to find a third party to whom I can respond and say “hey, can you tell that guy that he keeps spelling his email wrong?”

The Spectrum bills drive me crazy. There were weeks where he didn’t “activate his new equipment”, and I kept shaking my head thinking, yeah, no wonder, he’s not getting the emails with the link to activate in them. He finally solved this problem, but now I get a monthly notification that his bill is ready to be paid. And I know that Spectrum has his actual address, and could technically pass a message along, but there is absolutely no customer support flow to pass a message along that they typed their email wrong.

So, delete, mark as spam, unsubscribe. Just one more thing that clogs up our brief time on Earth.

And then, two weeks ago, I got a google calendar invite.

The single word “counseling” was the meeting summary. No body, just google meet link. My great regret was that I didn’t see this until after the time had passed. It had been cancelled, but there it was. Sitting in my inbox. Having been sent from what was clearly a personal email address.

Was this it? The moment?

I thought about it. A lot. I had to try, right?

After spending the day turning it over in my head, I sent this email back to the person who was trying to do “counseling”:

Hello!

This is a long shot, but on the off chance that someone gave you this address rather than it being a typo, could you please tell whomever you it from to please be more careful entering their email? I've been getting a lot of emails for someone else recently that are clearly the result of someone typing their email wrong and ending up typing mine by mistake. While I can happily ignore the extra spam, I suspect that person would rather be the one receiving the emails they signed up for? Also, their cable bill is ready.

If you typoed it, obviously, no worries! Hope you found the person you meant to send that to.

In any case, have a great weekend!

I never got a response.

But the next day I got an email telling me my free trial for some business scheduling software was ready for me to use.

“The end! No moral.”

Three and a half years

Well, it took three and a half years, but COVID finally caught us. We’re all fully vaxed and boosted, and by all accounts we had a pretty mild time of it, but my goodness, that’s by far the sickest I’ve ever been. It’s a hard disease to complain too much about, because while sure, I was as sick as I’ve ever been, this thing has killed something like 27 million people worldwide, and mostly all I did was sleep for a week?

I only seem to have two lasting effects, and I’m not totally sure either one is directly COVID’s fault. Weeks later, I’ve still got this lingering cough, but it’s the sort of cough where I’m coughing because my lungs are irritated, and they’re irritated because I’ve been coughing so much, and that’s gone full recursive. As as result, I’ve been living on Ricola cough drops. My second lingering symptom is that my stomach is constantly upset, but I’m not sure that’s the virus as the fact that its been permanently full of the contents of a Swiss apothecary.

One positive lasting effect of the pandemic, if you’re willing to work to turn the frown upside down, is that it is way easier to be sick than it used to be. The home grocery delivery infrastructure is still in place, and you can still genuinely stay inside, not interact with anyone, and get everything you need delivered. (As long as you don’t look at the bill.). The kids’ school has a well-tuned system for reporting that the kids had COVID and would be out for a while, and even work was an easy conversation to the extent of “sure, take the time, let us know when you’re better.” This was not the experience we had when we all got the flu in ’18!

But.

The reason we got it in the first place was that the schools have been stripped of any meaningful way to prevent the spread, and so in a period where cases are spiking they had a gum full of teenagers without masks in close quarters. The only thing worse than shivering through a multi-day fever is knowning you only have it because people you never met don’t care enough to keep it from spreading.

All through the main pandemic, and the “cold pandemic” we’re in now, I’ve been pretty determined not to catch it. And hey, anecdotally, three and a half years is the best run of anyone I know. But now that I have had it, I’m even more determined not to catch it again. I don’t understand anyone who could go through this and then not think “wow, I’m doing whatever I can to keep that from happening again.” If it weren’t for the fact that the school is the vector, I might never go outside again!

So. People. It doesn’t have to be like this. It still not too late to choose a different future.

New School, new lessons

My son started at a new school this year for middle school, and the transition has honestly gone about as smoothly as it possibly could, all things considered. It’s a much larger school than his last one—which is not a euphemism for something else by the way, he went from a class size of about 15 to over 200—and so he is learning how to deal with more people on a daily basis. Which is good! That’s a good skill to have.

Yesterday he finally comes unglued a little and starts to rant “why can’t some kids just do what the teacher asks?”

What do you mean?

His example was they have a chromebook cart, and they’re supposed to take the chromebook with the number on it that matches their desk, and the put it back in the same slot. And every day at the end of class someone else has put their chromebook in the slot his is supposed to go in.

And, you know, I just kinda had to shrug and say, well, there will always be people with an acute case of Main Character syndrome who are convinced the rules don’t apply to them, that someone else will come along and fix their problems, clean up after them, put their carts back for them. Learning how to deal with those sorts is one of the main things we learn in school. Best case, they grow out of it while they’re a teenager and develop empathy. Worst case, these are who grow up to be telephone sanitizers.

New year, new calendar!

Somewhere along the line I started using calendars with 6 week printed to the page.  This started by playing with the early generation of desktop publishing apps in the late 80s, but really gelled up when I was in college a decade later.

At 6 weeks to a page I could fit a whole 16 week semester, plus a week of vacation on either side, on three pages of regular printer paper with no gaps.  Months didn’t really matter, really, it was way easier to have the whole semester just flow from week to week and then indicate the month next to the day in the corner of each box.

At 6 weeks to a page, that fits a whole year in nine pages, which I hang up as a 3 by 3 grid.   The whole year laid out all visible at once.

This week between christmas and the new years is always a strange liminal space; the old year is effectively over, but the new hasn’t started yet.  Perfect time to print out 9 pages and think about whats next.

There’s a trip in august we already planned.  Scout meetings.  School end, school start.

New year.  Blank space.

Potential.

Heading back out of the silos

With the tech world in one of its periodic contractions, and especially with twitter settings itself on fire, it’s time to retrench out in our own personal spaces again.

So. Hello there.