The Raven

Saturday, August 17, 2002

The Code Effect
Has this ever happened to you? You want to make a small, almost insignificant change to your template
- (because the last time you tried a big change, you had to reinstall the software)

And no matter where you look in the documentation the thing you want to do isn't addressed
- (actually, it is, but very - very - obliquely)

And so you spend an entire day cursing, going through manuals, drinking too much, and developing a profound desire to hurt someone, preferably the person who was responsible for writing the documentation, but the guy next door with the leaf blower might work by proxy.

Then, after wheedling a bit more time at the keyboard
- ("What in God's name is going on back there...?" "Be done in just a minute..." "You said that two hours ago!" etc.)

Finally, after brute trial and error, you succeed by accident and want to eat broken glass it was so damned obvious a 5-year-old could have figured it out
- (a slow 5-year-old at that)

And you stagger out of the back office, dizzy, eyes refusing to focus and feeling totally disoriented and you realize that this must be the way programmers feel after work.
- (probably a small fraction of what they feel after a day at work)

The worst part? Because you succeeded, you know you're going to try the next "little tweak" you've been planning, and it will be just as fun and relaxing.
- ("Honey? Come to bed now!)
8:03:33 PM

Neuromarxism
If anyone is holding a contest for bad proposals, then Cambridge's Bill Thompson has provided a strong entry with his article "Damn the Constitution: Europe must take back the Web," which argues for a protected European Internet free from American influence. The political aspects of Thompson's suggestion are adequately skewered by Steven Chapman, among others, but I'd like to point out where Thompson undermines his own ideas through his misuse of language. The key paragraph is as follows:

I believe that the time has come to speak out in favour of a regulated network; an Internet where each country can set its own rules for how its citizens, companies, courts and government work with and manage those parts of the network that fall within its jurisdiction; an Internet that reflects the diversity of the world's legal, moral and cultural choices instead of simply propagating US hegemony; an Internet that is subject to political control instead of being an uncontrolled experiment in radical capitalism. It is time to reclaim the net from the Americans.

Reading this, I was reminded of George Orwell's 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language," in which he observes: "In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing... Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions and not a 'party line.'" Well, Thompson can't be accused of a party line, can he? A look at Thompson's site, however, reveals a strong Marxist bent to his activism - and now back to Orwell: "Orthodoxy, of whatever color, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestoes, White papers and the speeches of undersecretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but... one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases -- bestial, atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder -- one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker's spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them."

And there's Thompson, droning along with his "regulated network... diversity... US hegemony... radical capitalism..."

Other phrases Thompson uses that weaken his authority are "cyberspace," "phonespace," and "meatspace." The first and third are William Gibson's coinages, the second is Thompson's nonce usage. That these are all dated-sounding is a given (when's the last time you heard "cyber-" as a prefix or "-space" as a suffix?). But when Thompson bills himself as an Internet Consultant, he should know that these terms are shopworn and likely to resonate only with those who know what a gopher search is. For that matter, one shudders to think of the confusion one of Thompson's lectures must propagate. Near his conclusion he says:

In the end, William Gibson was wrong: cyberspace is not another place, it's just part of this space.

No one to my knowledge is banking on Gibson being right in this or in any other context. The gratuitous invocation of his name at this point merely seems designed to reinforce the notion that Thompson "gets it," while simultaneously underscoring the fact that he doesn't. Thus the language he employs to construct his argument succeeds only in painting a prominent bull's eye on an already large, slow-moving target.

Don't Try This at Home.

I was looking at an article on homemade sushi a day or two back and ran across this blatant falsehood: "In Japan, sushi can be found in the finest restaurants, in subway kiosks and in most places in between. About the only place sushi isn't prepared in Japan, in fact, is in the home." [Italics mine.]

Doesn't the NYT fact-check these things? Surely they could have dug up a Japanese employee or someone who's lived over there and verified that both sushi and sashimi are nippon kitchen standards. Over 110 million people over there and not one of them makes home sushi? Pshaw!

Here, though, that's not the case. If home cooks from New York to Iowa to Los Angeles are any indication, Americans are embracing sushi-making with abandon and, like the generations that introduced pizza and lo mein to home kitchens, are tinkering with the original recipes and creating a hybrid food that is a lesson in technique, flavor and - most important - freshness.

The Raven has helped out at sushi parties and found that access to fresh fish is no problem - even in the boondocks. I've used Sushifoods.com and can vouch for their quality, and had even better luck with Korean markets. Find the right source, and you're in business at less than one-fourth the cost of a trip to the sushi bar. Back to the article: "My first experience making sushi wasn't enjoyable," reports one at-home sushimaker, "Once we tried it, we liked it, and nobody died, so we moved on." We try to avoid killing the guests, too.
2:09:56 PM