the tool shed
On Red Meat and Granola
Wanted to share something that I caught linked in this MetaFilter post about Occupy Wall Street a few days ago. Originally I was going to just have this as a quick one-off to pass it along, because it made me re-evaluate a few prejudices of mine and take a second look at some of the cultural and economic issues in my country that tempt me to become one of those guys who walk around with a sandwich board, muttering into a bullhorn.
I’m still going to do this as a short-ish one, but it’s no longer the standalone one-off I first expected it to be. Don’t want to get into it too much yet, but I’d previously written a post about intelligence and then spent a couple of days writing a post about fear that I pretty much figured I’d never publish.
Well, then I read something yesterday that jabbed at my forebrain more than a little. It was a speech, a speech I’ll share with you soon, and it tied together that bumf on intelligence and this splorp on the culture war and that thing about fear that was never going to see the light of day, and my perspective shifted, just a little. Something clicked, there was what I’ll call a brief moment of ohhhhhh, and suddenly I discovered words for a few things that had been rattling around in the back of the cupboard for a while.
So I’m going to rewrite that next one, and while I figure out how to do that, I’ll link you to Tim Kreider’s[1] open letter to the Tea Party, something I found to be one of the few sane and honest appraisals of the Tea Party/Occupy Wall Street divide I’ve come across. A few snippets:
The only consensus in this country, the one thing absolutely no one on any side will dispute, is that things are fucked up, and no one in power seems to be even trying to do anything to fix them. It seems to me the main difference between conservatives and liberals anymore is that you blame The Government and we blame Corporations. It’s past time we noticed that those two antagonists are literally the same people. They’re frat brothers and golf buddies and they go back and forth from corporate boards to government regulatory agencies and back. Wall Street donates money to political campaigns so that the government will use our tax money to bail them out when they cheat and make bad gambles and crash the economy. Meanwhile we’re distracted fighting among ourselves, having the political equivalent of the “Tastes great!/Less filling!” debate.
Look: I’m not pretending to like you, and I don’t expect you to pretend to like me…. We have radically different ideas about the kind of country we want this to be…. But we also have a lot in common, if you think about it; we’re both considered “extremists” for fighting for what seems to us like common sense and decency; and we both care passionately about what kind of country we want to live in….
So you can go on sneering at all those smelly, spoiled little trust-fund hippies whining for a handout, and we can go on shaking our heads at all you obese suburban rednecks who’re too dumb to know when you’ve been swindled, and in a few weeks it’ll get cold and the protests will dwindle or disperse, or the national media will just get distracted by some other, shinier story, and we’ll all forget this ever happened and go back to business as usual. If business as usual is what you want.
Fairly sobering take on things. The whole thing’s worth a full read.
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If you are remotely easy to offend or do not like jokes about conservatives, stay out of his comics. You have been warned.
Internet Am Hard
I spent several hours trying to write a post about what a disruptive technology simple portability has been to my life. It was going to start with the transition of my adoration from laptop to tablet (particularly when traveling), describe how it brought to my attention a thousand little annoyances in life that I’d gotten far too used to, segue to the deplorable state of my cluttered home, and end with a discussion of my growing resolve to apply what I learned from computing and travel and simplify my life as much as possible. I’d blather on for a bit about some of the ethical implications therein.
Then I realized I was unconsciously attempting to rewrite this excellent post by Ben Hammersley, and immediately felt embarrassed, because his is far better than mine would have been.
So go read that one instead. It’s brilliant.
Plain Is Sexy
An earlier iteration of my blog featured a “tool of the week” bit that I abandoned after cracking under the pressure of coming up with one every single week. But I loved writing those posts and have never given up my fondness for tools, so I figure I’ll keep doing them sporadically here. If for no other reason than that all posts can’t be as navel-gazey as the last one.
So I’ll lighten the mood a little and bore you instead by talking about writing workflows and software. Six of you will care, but this is where I spend most of my day, and I feel like talking about it.
Still around? Hokay.
I’m rapidly becoming convinced that John Gruber’s excellent Markdown syntax is one of the greatest things that ever happened to writing on computers. He developed it as an easier way of writing and reading HTML documents by stripping out all the tags and extra cruft and replacing them with simple symbols. Write up a simplified plain-text document, run it through a script to convert it to HTML, and blammo, web page made with considerably less work.
John’s a very smart guy, but I’m not sure he realized what he’d done there, not at first. By abstracting the details of writing HTML, he hadn’t just created a shorthand. He’d damn near created a meta-language, something that could be run through any number of different programs to create any number of different types of documents. With the right set of tools, you could easily turn a Markdown document into an RTF document, a PDF, theoretically anything.
Enter Fletcher Penney and MultiMarkdown, which has utterly changed the way I do business. It takes Gruber’s original syntax and adds very little (I believe Penney only added syntax for creating tables and footnotes), but allows you to process it into a number of formats: HTML, LaTeX (and thence to PDF), OPML, and Open Document Format (which from there can be converted to RTF, Word, or Pages formats).
Gruber’s creation kicked off a minor revolution in writing and developing for the web, and it’s now leaking into offices and writer’s workflows as well. An pornographic amount of software has sprung up around it, particularly for OS X, but really everywhere.
Why use it? Well, partly because you hate Microsoft Office. Yes, you do.
I’m what some might term a “power user” of Office, as I’ve gone so far as to create Excel spreadsheets embedded with hand-written VBA code that creates and emails Word documents on the fly. I’ll be the first to praise Office’s power, as it is indeed as powerful as Satan’s own broccoli farts, but actually using it is about as pleasant as inhaling said farts. It’s the word processing equivalent of going to Walmart.
So there’s that. There’s also the question of portability. I’m writing this right now in Markdown on an iPad, but I could open it on any computer from any decade since punch cards went out. You don’t have to worry about what happens if your favorite software dies out or starts sucking. You don’t have to worry about operating systems or versions.
So on. I’d be willing to bet a lot of you are nerdy enough to be familiar, so I won’t go on. But I love it. I take all my meeting and conference notes in Markdown. I write up reports and quality control plans in Markdown. I rub Markdown all over my chest before bedtime every night. It gets out of my way and lets me work.
But the most amusing effect of Markdown’s growing adoption is seeing a surge in popularity of that nerdiest of tools: the humble text editor.
No frills, no buttons (well, hopefully not), no “ribbon”, no bullshit. A window, a blinking cursor, and what you want to write. Like Markdown itself, a good text editor gets out of your way.
Me, I started with Emacs, the (almost literal) 800-pound gorilla of text editors. I got into it partly for efficiency, partly for nerd cred, but also partly for the glorious wonderment that is org-mode. I left org and Emacs only with a great wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Why? Early signs of repetitive strain injury. Emacs relies on key combinations that require a certain amount of manual acrobatics, and they took their toll on my forearms. So I left for the dark side and learned Vim.
I quickly learned that I loved Vim’s commands, but loathed Vim itself. I began to despair. I found a way to use Emacs with vim’s keybindings, but that was starting to feel like a Rube Goldberg contraption, so I reached out to my fellow nerds. They introduced me to Sublime Text.
Hoo boy, is it aptly named. Runs on all three major operating systems, is easily configurable, and it can even be set up to use (some) vim keybindings. For a guy like me, this is like being given a bisexual Christina Hendricks covered in heroin and bearing a large bag of cash. And then learning that the Star Wars prequels never happened. Something something LEGO.
That’s where I’ve been ever since, Markdowning my happy ass away in Sublime (and Nebulous Notes on my iPad). I could probably count how many times I use Word each month without having to take my shoes off. And let me tell you, brethren and sisteren, that is when you can stop farting around and start building giant killer robots.
Is it for everyone? No. Converting to your preferred document format isn’t hard, but it was built for nerds. If you don’t get a product with built-in MultiMarkdown support, you either need to be able to use a command line without panicking or have a nerd on hand to simplify using it. So there’s a learning curve, but it’s worth it. The reward is the sheer simplicity of writing and formatting text.
So to Mr. Gruber and Mr. Penney, you have my eternal gratitude. You’ve made how I work so much better.
Apps with Markdown/MultiMarkdown Support
- MultiMarkdown Composer (OS X)
- Marked (OS X)
- NVAlt (OS X)
- Scrivener (OS X, Windows)
- Textmate (OS X)
- WriteMonkey (Windows)
On the Nature of Intelligence
If you’ve got some spare time, head on over to MetaFilter and check out this link to a video of Stephen Colbert interviewing Neil deGrasse Tyson. It’s an hour and a half long, so make sure you’ve got the time, but it’s amazing stuff.
(Side note for my non-nerd readers: If you’re not familiar with Dr. Tyson, he’s an astrophysicist and a popularizer of science with a podcast and a TV show and another TV show and, well, you can read about him here. I’m more than a little in love with the man.)
I’ve watched it twice now, once while brainstorming ideas for a new application I’ve been kicking around, once just the other day while flying out to a conference. I’ve made a permanent copy on my iPad so I can watch it on the rare occasions that I’m offline. Don’t sue me, anybody.
I did this partly for the entertainment value, but also because it reminds me of how stupid I am.
I am, according to the usually accepted definition, a very smart guy. Been told that ever since I was three years old, when I walked into my preschool and read a book to my class. Ever since then, my life has been one of gifted programs and honors classes and people telling me how smart I am. And I wish they hadn’t done that.
You’ll get about two-thirds of the way through that video before you hear Tyson speak about the nature of intelligence. Absorbing and collecting facts, he says, even having a rare facility for doing so, isn’t intelligence.
Intelligence is about curiosity and searching and asking questions and embracing, indeed loving your ignorance as you find ever more ways to whittle away at it. It’s about puzzling over things and picking them apart to see how they work and, maybe, make them better.
I don’t do that, not much. I’ve mostly been afraid to. Instead, I collect facts like a human vacuum. When I was small, I regurgitated all kinds of data to grownups about weather and the human body and physics and math. It was stuff I devoured from books, mostly because I found it fascinating, but I think also because impressing grownups was a hobby of mine. Is, rather.
When people slap labels like “gifted” on you, now you’ve got a role to play. You’ve got a title to live up to. And that scares you. When things don’t come easily to you, you worry that maybe everyone was wrong. You become terrified of displaying your own ignorance. And you stay in your comfort zone. I absorb facts like crazy, but I don’t do very much with them except talk about them on the internet and at parties. Dr. Tyson is right: I’m not intelligent, I’m a collector.
It appears that science backs me up on some of this. I’ve taken that article to heart, shared it with my wife, and told her my desire that we praise our children for their work, not their smarts. She agrees, so we try like hell to remember not to even utter the word “smart” in their presence. Indeed, it makes me uneasy to think that we should delineate between people who absorb facts and make connections easily and those who do not.
There’s a great quote from the man whose name is a synonym for genius: “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”
I know a man who couldn’t tell you a damn thing about Newtonian physics or poetry, but his skills as a knifemaker are earning him national recognition and may well immortalize him, if he keeps growing. I know another who couldn’t do differential calculus to save his life, but has skill as a pianist that humanity produces only a couple of times a generation. Still one more, this one extremely book-smart and on his way to becoming a university professor, who tossed it aside to pursue his passion of making the music of his home country.
These men found their intelligence and poured their guts into it. They are all driven by a curiosity and a need to create. All of my friends: the glassblower, the jeweler, the woodworker, the singer, the poet, all have a need to channel their genius into making or investigating something every day, and I have never in my life been able to find that. They take their skills and they use them, because of that need.
What I have instead is a sort of meta-need, a need to need to put my hand to something. A hunger to find that passion and pursue it. I’ve been searching for an object of obsession that I can put my alleged smarts to for a long time.
Now, I’ve dabbled, tried music and carpentry and stained glass (I haven’t fully given up on that one) and fiction. The only one that really ever took was cooking, which is about as instant-gratification as it gets—you don’t have to spend three days sanding food, if you’re doing it right. Not to mention that I still don’t have the patience for learning proper presentation or some of the more long-form methods.
So I look around, I surround myself with talented people every chance I get, and I collect more facts.
The Fibonacci sequence tends toward the golden ratio, which is found in innumerable places in nature, even in the standard flour-to-water ratio for making bread.
Electrons behave differently depending on whether their behavior is being directly observed. Because of this, we have quantum mechanics, and so you get to read this on your computer.
Objectivism is generally regarded as a self-defeating philosophy, as its ethical aims are weakened every time another person learns them.
Traditional 12-bar blues music tends to follow a I-IV-V chord progression. The Chinese have a far higher incidence of perfect pitch because they speak a tonal language.
These curiosities aggregate, and I enjoy them, and I enjoy sharing them, and I certainly enjoy looking smart when I share them. But I think I have a sliver of understanding for why most child prodigies never become anything of note. I behold the aggregation of trivia and antiques and God knows what else that is my mind, and I wonder what it is good for, what the hell I can do with it that will hold my anemic focus.
Really, the only project that I haven’t abandoned is myself, my desire to find what is lacking in me and excise it with either scalpel or hammer. It’s my focus on my lack of focus. Masturbatory? Narcissistic? Probably. But it’s something.
I’ll keep looking. I’ll keep surrounding myself with my betters, wherever I can find them. Something’s bound to rub off. I hope I’ll know it when I see it—or rather, that I won’t, that it will become so ingrained in me that I take it for granted. That’s when the good stuff happens. That’s when you’re a smarty-pants.
1001 Proven Methods to Turbo-Hack Your Toddler
Killer iPhone tip for working parents I learned from Merlin awhile back:
- Set your lock screen wallpaper to be a picture of your family. Preferably not a portrait.
- When you get home at the end of a workday, before you open the door, turn off whatever app is running, lock your phone, then bring up the lock screen again.
- Look at it for a full 5–10 seconds and say these words: This is why I’m here.
- Make sure your phone is ignored or turned off for at least the next two hours.
- You may check it while taking a shit. A real shit.
If you are childless and able-bodied, most of the mundane tasks of the day come as easily as breathing. You don’t trip over six difficulties on your way to the car. You can go to work, bust ass all day, leave all of your energy behind, and check out when you get home. You’re allowed to be grumpy. You’re allowed to eat dinner in front of the Internet or the TV.
With kids, it could be that the hardest part of your day is just starting when you step through your doorway. Even if they’re being well-behaved angels, your kids will want you to play with them. They will want you to be on. And that takes energy, energy you’ll probably have to dig for, as does shepherding them through their nighttime rituals.
My son’s favorite game? Jumping off of things and having me catch him, often without informing me that we have begun a game. I mean, come on. But you don’t have a choice, you are required to show up and dig deep. You have to be positive and constructive and fun. You are emphatically not allowed to lose your shit.
So I’ve spent the day wading through the hundred skeeter bites of being allowed to be only half of a software developer, the endless frustrations of working on government contracts, the drama du jour on my team, whatever—and for my kids, now it must be as if it never happened.
So I kill my podcast. I lock my phone. I hit the lock button again.
My picture is nearly a year old now. It is the picture we used on our Christmas card in 2010. It is a series of eight grainy, black-and-white snapshots of my family, crammed into a photo booth. In them, you can see my daughter looking on with the wide-eyed fascination you expect from a one-year-old. You can see my son trying to hog the whole frame to make faces. You can see me restraining him and, in the last shot, pretending to eat his head. You can see my wife, more smirking and laughing than smiling, as captive to the chaos as I, and you would not know that she was probably thinking about her dying mother. None of us are looking at the camera.
People see this picture and say, “It looks like you have a lot of fun.”
I’ll admit that for about half a second after I hear this, I’m partly surprised. Yes, we have tons of fun, but I have a full-time job and two children under the age of five. A lot of the time, what I am is tired. For my wife? It’s even harder.
So I look at that picture, and I remember. I realize it’s a better summary of What My Family Is than I could ever write. There is mess, there is noise, there is struggling, and we are laughing the whole way. I see that, and most days I can lay my burden down.
This is why you’re here, I think, and it’s just a long enough walk to the back door for me to hope that maybe today I’ll be a better husband and father than I am.
