Running After My Hat

Taking Off #6: International Tech

September 21, 2019 by John Leave a Comment

[Stock image by Gerd Altman on Pixabay: thanks!]

Although I’ve been what one could call, generically, a “technology professional” for over forty years, I have intentionally limited the scope of technology I pay much attention to. (My thinking: if I control what I know about, I’ll limit what I’ll be expected to know about.) Consequently, I’m always behind the curve — I might (indeed, do) know about Tech X, Y, or Z, just not enough to be confident enough in making recommendations or providing support.

Here’s the current general configuration of our electronic stuff:

Two computers — a six-year-old desktop PC which alternately boots into Windows 10 or Linux Mint, and a… well, a maybe nine-year-old laptop (also dual booting, but most often into Windows). The desktop is “mine”; the laptop (nominally The Missus’s) I have used myself on a few trips here and there. (Update, 2019-10-19: The Missus mentioned this week that she’s thinking of getting a new laptop.)
Two not-really-conventional “computers”: The Missus’s iPad Pro (now a few years old), and my Pixelbook (just got it over the summer). The iPad can be used in either WiFi mode, or in cellular mode if no WiFi signal is present; the Pixelbook does WiFi only.
Phones: an iPhone 8 and an LG G6. Our cellular provider for years has been Spr*nt, but we’re still with them now more or less just out of inertia.
A variety of media-related tech — several Roku boxes and a Chromecast.

So given all the above, what would we have to give up for a six-month trip to Europe? And of what’s left, what should we leave behind anyhow?

The need to answer those questions has bumped me out of my comfort zone. But this is what I’ve got a handle on so far…

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Dotting Your ‘I’

September 20, 2019 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Causeway Bay Last Day – Hong Kong Umbrella Revolution,” by Studio Incendo (found on Flickr, and used here under a Creative Commons license; thank you!). See here for more information about the stirring context.]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book (“the psychic theater”):

We have curious ideas of ourselves. We think of ourselves as a body with a spirit in it, or a body with a soul in it, or a body with a mind in it. Mens sana in corpore sano. The years drink up the wine, and at last throw the bottle away: the body, of course, being the bottle.

It is a funny sort of superstition. Why should I look at my hand, as it so cleverly writes these words, and decide that it is a mere nothing compared to the mind that directs it? Is there really any huge difference between my hand and my brain? — or my mind? My hand is alive, it flickers with a life of its own. It meets all the strange universe, in touch, and learns a vast number of things, and knows a vast number of things. My hand, as it writes these words, slips gaily along, jumps like a grasshopper to dot an i, feels the table rather cold, gets a little bored if I write too long, has its own rudiments of thought, and is just as much me as is my brain, my mind, or my soul. Why should I imagine that there is a me which is more me than my hand is? Since my hand is absolutely alive, me alive.

(D.H. Lawrence [source])

…and (“the pursuits of fantasy”):

Writing in the Dark

It’s not difficult.
Anyway, it’s necessary.

Wait till morning, and you’ll forget.
And who knows if morning will come.

Fumble for the light, and you’ll be
stark awake, but the vision
will be fading, slipping
out of reach.

You must have paper at hand,
a felt-tip pen, ballpoints don’t always flow,
pencil points tend to break. There’s nothing
shameful in that much prudence: those are our tools.

Never mind about crossing your t’s, dotting your i’s—
but take care not to cover
one word with the next. Practice will reveal
how one hand instinctively comes to the aid of the other
to keep each line
clear of the next.

Keep writing in the dark:
a record of the night, or
words that pulled you from depths of unknowing,
words that flew through your mind, strange birds
crying their urgency with human voices,

or opened
as flowers of a tree that blooms
only once in a lifetime:

words that may have the power
to make the sun rise again.

(Denise Levertov [source])

…and (“359° blind”):

Consider this: in our everyday state of consciousness, we regard our body to be extremely limited. What’s more, we feel that this body is the major source of all our sufferings — the feelings of pain arise in the body, the fear of illnesses and death are intimately connected to the body, etc. On the other hand, we think bright, encouraging thoughts about our minds, and our imaginative capabilities. Whilst the body is weak, limited and prone to breaking down easily, the mind is sovereign, it is our sanctuary and can give us a glimpse of the victory over our humiliating conditions. Our conscious thoughts seemingly know no bounds — we can fantasize to our hearts content about ideal conditions, distant lands, nice, heartwarming events and circumstances. We can easily imagine pigs with wings — something that’s impossible for nature itself to accomplish. What can possibly stop our imagination? And look, it’s not only idle daydreaming — all the achievements that the science, technology, art and philosophy can boast of, all have their origin in our imagination.

Well, the experience of enlightenment changes all that. Strictly speaking, it turns things on their heads. Upon opening our mind’s eye, we see that it is our conscious mind that is extremely limited, feeble, and prone to easily break down. Our body, which we have despised so much, turns out to be the wondrous limitless reality — we can go anywhere, climb any mountain and hill. Our body enables us to truly live.

(Alex Bunard [source])

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Taking Off #5: Updates, and a Resources List

September 14, 2019 by John Leave a Comment

Not really a big post today… What I’ve done is:

Updated the “Need-to-Know and Need-to-Decide” page of questions with some answers (this page is password-protected to minimize traffic from Internet automatons, so to speak; but if you’ve been paying attention to this series — or, really, to RAMH in general — then you can probably deduce the password)
Created a new page of references and resources we’ve used so far when researching all this stuff (did I say “page”? it’s really just a brain-dump list!)

WordPress pages (as opposed to posts, like this one) do not often allow comments, but I’ve turned on the comments feature for that reference-listing page. Or, of course, if you just want to suggest something without visiting the page, please do just comment on this or any other post.

Mistaking the Tool for the Material

September 13, 2019 by John 2 Comments

[Image: “The Day the World Went Away,” by Sabbian Paine. (Found on Flickr; used here under a Creative Commons license: thank you!) The title refers to a song by Nine Inch Nails, and the Flickr writeup quotes from the song’s lyrics and directs us explicitly to a video of the song’s “Quiet” version, assembled from outtakes of the music video for the “original” version. The image itself is one of many created by Sabbian Paine using tools originally built for the Second Life virtual-world social network.]

From whiskey river:

Words tend to last a bit longer than things, but eventually they fade too, along with the pictures they once evoked. Entire categories of objects disappear—flowerpots, for example, or cigarette filters, or rubber bands—and for a time you will be able to recognize those words, even if you cannot recall what they mean. But then, little by little, the words become only sounds, a random collection of glottals and fricatives, a storm of whirling phonemes, and finally the whole thing just collapses into gibberish.

(Paul Auster [source])

…and:

The Goddess Who Created This Passing World

The Goddess who created this passing world
Said Let there be lightbulbs & liquefaction
Life spilled out onto the street, colors whirled
Cars & the variously shod feet were born
And the past & future & I born too
Light as airmail paper away she flew
To Annapurna or Mt. McKinley
Or both but instantly
Clarified, composed, forever was I
Meant by her to recognize a painting
As beautiful or a movie stunning
And to adore the finitude of words
And understand as surfaces my dreams
Know the eye the organ of affection
And depths to be inflections
Of her voice & wrist & smile

(Alice Notley [source])

…and:

Art is an engagement of the senses; art sharpens the acuity with which emotions, and the other senses, are felt or imagined (and again, here, it challenges reality: What is the difference between feeling happy and really being happy? What is the difference between imagining you can taste something and really tasting it? A hair’s breadth; a measurement less than the thickness of a dried work-skein of ink on paper).

And then the kicker is this: in passing from the real to the imagined, in following that trail, you learn that both sides have a little of the other in each, that there are elements of the imagined inside your experience of the ‘real’ world – rock, bone, wood, ice – and elements of the real – not the metaphorical, but the actual thing itself – inside stories and tales and dreams.

(Rick Bass [source: can’t cite any other source at all for this (which drives me crazy… what’s the Internet for if not to answer every question?!? (laughing))])

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Taking Off #4: Glimpses of an Itinerary

September 7, 2019 by John 4 Comments

[Map: zeroing in (maybe) on a vicinity for destination #1; you can skip the brief introduction and skip right to the details if you want.]

Over the couple of weeks since I last posted about EuroTour2020 (as I’ve come to think of it), I haven’t at all been ignoring the subject. Over the next few days, I’ll be updating my page of questions-and-answers with some new information. In the meantime, I thought I’d talk about the process of organizing our list of destinations.

In the previous post about the trip, I covered the first-cut list of “we need to visit here” cities. That list was vaguely organized chronologically, top to bottom (not counting the USA cities at the end), but we hadn’t given really serious thought to much beyond the names of the cities themselves.

The current “official” list includes about a half-dozen more cities (with — yes — a few more thrown in even later). It’s also better organized to suggest, y’know, first we’ll go here, then we’ll go there, and so on.

I tinkered with the sequence quite a bit, and even started to drill down to consider how we might go from place to place. But the more I thought about it, the more I recognized in the process a waste of time and energy: we plan, you see, to plan almost no specific details along the way. We don’t know how long we’re going to stay at place X (or whether indeed we’ll stay there at all, vs. just blow through for a brief visit). We consquently can’t make lodging arrangements much in advance, book transit in advance, purchase event tickets in advance…

…except: we need a place and a time to start. That’s the focus of the rest of this post.

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ADMIN: Broken Audio-Player Gizmo?

September 7, 2019 by John Leave a Comment

If a post at Running After My Hat supposedly allows you to play music, but you can’t actually do so, please let me know via email (runningaftermyhatATjohnesimpsonDOTcom) and I’ll correct the situation ASAP. For details, see below. Thanks!

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Oh, Grow Up — or, Well… Don’t

September 6, 2019 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Dionisio (You’re Almost There),” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) For the full-size version and the #jesstorypix-tagged story behind the photo, see the caption here at SmugMug.]

From whiskey river:

Self-Portrait

Between the computer, a pencil, and a typewriter
half my day passes. One day it will be half a century.
I live in strange cities and sometimes talk
with strangers about matters strange to me.
I listen to music a lot: Bach, Mahler, Chopin, Shostakovich.
I see three elements in music: weakness, power, and pain.
The fourth has no name.
I read poets, living and dead, who teach me
tenacity, faith, and pride. I try to understand
the great philosophers—but usually catch just
scraps of their precious thoughts.
I like to take long walks on Paris streets
and watch my fellow creatures, quickened by envy,
anger, desire; to trace a silver coin
passing from hand to hand as it slowly
loses its round shape (the emperor’s profile is erased).
Beside me trees expressing nothing
but a green, indifferent perfection.
Black birds pace the fields,
waiting patiently like Spanish widows.
I’m no longer young, but someone else is always older.
I like deep sleep, when I cease to exist,
and fast bike rides on country roads when poplars and houses
dissolve like cumuli on sunny days.
Sometimes in museums the paintings speak to me
and irony suddenly vanishes.
I love gazing at my wife’s face.
Every Sunday I call my father.
Every other week I meet with friends,
thus proving my fidelity.
My country freed itself from one evil. I wish
another liberation would follow.
Could I help in this? I don’t know.
I’m truly not a child of the ocean,
as Antonio Machado wrote about himself,
but a child of air, mint and cello
and not all the ways of the high world
cross paths with the life that—so far—
belongs to me.

(Adam Zagajewski (translated by Clare Cavanagh) [source])

…and (italicized sentences):

I have a limited stock of furniture which constitutes the materiel of my pictures. My pictorial vocabulary is limited to one tree, one house, one flower, one sky, one face; with these I render the infinite variety of trees, houses, flowers, skies and faces which exist in nature. You see, I know nothing about drawing. I couldn’t even copy a drawing until the year 1926 or ’27. Then, by accident one day, I discovered that I was able to make a likeness of George Grosz, whose self-portrait I had found on the cover of one of his albums. From that day I took pleasure in using pencil and brush. On good days I can draw with a cleaver. I don’t go in for likenesses any more; I am satisfied with reality. Everyone has their own reality in which, if one is not too cautious, timid, or frightened, one swims. This is the only reality there is. If you can get it down on paper, in words, notes, or color, so much the better. The great artists don’t even bother to put it down on paper: they live with it silently, they become it.

(Henry Miller [source])

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Mortal Satisfactions

August 30, 2019 by John 2 Comments

[Image: “Itinerantes #4: Satisfaction,” by Jon Díez Supat; found on Flickr, and used here under a Creative Commons license (thank you!). I wanted to know what product/service/event the poster advertised, and in what language, but Google Translate wasn’t much help: it said the caption in the center translates from Basque as “Bring your payroll now and bring this exclusive Lotus watch.” (Actually, eraman seems to translate more accurately — especially in context — as “take away” or “get,” rather than a second “bring.”)]

From whiskey river:

beasts bounding through time —

Van Gogh writing his brother for paints
Hemingway testing his shotgun
Celine going broke as a doctor of medicine
the impossibility of being human
Villon expelled from Paris for being a thief
Faulkner drunk in the gutters of his town
the impossibility of being human
Burroughs killing his wife with a gun
Mailer stabbing his
the impossibility of being human
Maupassant going mad in a rowboat
Dostoevsky lined up against a wall to be shot
Crane off the back of a boat into the propeller
the impossibility
Sylvia with her head in the oven like a baked potato
Harry Crosby leaping into that Black Sun
Lorca murdered in the road by the Spanish troops
the impossibility
Artaud sitting on a madhouse bench
Chatterton drinking rat poison
Shakespeare a plagiarist
Beethoven with a horn stuck into his head against deafness
the impossibility the impossibility
Nietzsche gone totally mad
the impossibility of being human
all too human
this breathing
in and out
out and in
these punks
these cowards
these champions
these mad dogs of glory

moving this little bit of light toward
us
impossibly

(Charles Bukowski [source])

…and:

The universe is a great unknown wonderful place, and we know nothing, really, to speak of about it. I think that either depresses and frightens one or is exhilarating. We are very important, and we’re not important in quite the way we think we are. Each one of us is unique, and we can find out a whole lot just by examining ourselves. I think that’s the essential thing. Not paying attention to how you’re going to make money, just paying attention to whatever is around you. Each one of those seconds is your only chance. It’s your life. And it’s wonderful. The more attention that we pay to our ordinary lives leads to a real elation that we’re here at all.

(W. S. Merwin [source])

…and:

Cherries

Fireweed loves the yard
and the fire that conjured it
into the light.

And the scarlet elderberry
loves the old junkpile
it leans against.

The morning glory smothers everything
in an embrace: the fence,
the wood workbench,
the rusted steel.

Here’s a summer day that’s so slow
even the light
moves like honey;

Daisies jump fences
and then just mill around.

Here’s a cherry tree that’s so rich
when it offers its heart to the birds,

every cherry
is a year of cherries.

(Barbara LaMorticella [source: nothing canonical, but found it here and elsewhere])

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Working With What You Didn’t Expect

August 23, 2019 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: Dempsey and Firpo, by George Bellows. The reason for its inclusion here will be obvious once you’ve read through this post. The fight in question is covered by Wikipedia here.]

From whiskey river:

When you’ve lived as long as I have, you tend to think you’ve heard everything, that there’s nothing left that can shock you anymore. You grow a little complacent about your so-called knowledge of the world, and then, every once in a while, something comes along that jolts you out of your smug cocoon of superiority, that reminds you all over again that you don’t understand the first thing about life.

(Paul Auster [source])

…and not from whiskey river:

Sunday
(excerpt)

iii at the museum (bellows)
For Alexander Nemerov

The man in the left-hand corner
of Bellows’s picture of the Dempsey-Firpo
fight, the picture a dream, so not a real
fight — a picture of a fight — his flayed hide
just visible under his blue pinstripes,
the watcher and the fighter
indistinguishable, one inside

the other, lion and lion tamer,
the paint daubs faces or fingerprints
and the lights staring and staring across
the fretwork of the ring, and Bellows
himself, next to him, looking surprised,
as if to be there was to give himself up
without our noticing it, as we all do

in a gesture, or word, leaving something
behind we should have taken with us
or even guarded, a way of not letting
something be over and done with.
The fight was over in four minutes flat.
A curious thing about the painting
is that Bellows chose to show us

the moment when Firpo sent Dempsey
careening, with a blow to the jaw,
one of the two times he laid him out,
and we, with the spectators crammed
into the foreground of the picture
have to help push Dempsey back
into the ring where two-and-a-half

minutes later he will defeat Firpo,
who went down four times to his two.
In Assisi, at the Basilica di San Francesco,
in the panel in which Giotto depicts
the moment Francis gives away
his worldly goods, the palm that Francis
raises up to the hand that is reaching

down to him from heaven, a hand out
of the blue, open, ready to give or
receive wonders, is the same hand
in Bellows’s picture raised behind Dempsey
one wing of a dove, the impulse is
to press our own palms to it, and despite
our better judgment to hurl him back.

(Cynthia Zarin [source])

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Taking Off #3: Weather

August 19, 2019 by John 1 Comment

[Image: monthly weather averages for the 30 proposed destination cities in our 2020 “EuroTour.” (Details below.) Click for a larger version.]

As The Missus and I think about where in Europe we’d like to visit, an obvious corollary is: “…and when?”

To some extent, we’re constrained by our personal calendar. We both retire in March, and our lease is up in June, but we’ve got a few family visits in mind in that little ~~three-~~two-month window. Ergo, we assume, we’ll depart these shores sometime in ~~June~~ late May. But with thirty possible cities, scattered all over what’s currently still lumpable together as “Europe,” where to head first? and where second? …and so on.

When one has been working with software as long as I have, one tends to consider thorny questions in terms of data. The data which I think drives an answer to this question: the weather we can expect to encounter.

I started by building a spreadsheet, one row per city, with one column per month between June and January. (We’re not likely to stay that long, but I wanted to leave some wiggle room at the tail end.) Each of those monthly columns was further divided into three columns: average high temperature, average low temperature, and average rain days. I also added a three-column group for “annual” averages of those three figures, across that eight-month period. And for comparison’s sake, I threw in rows for a half-dozen US cities with whose weather we were familiar. (This enables us to observe, for example, “In terms of its average weather, Bath in June resembles Philadelphia in October.”)

When I looked at what I had in the spreadsheet, I confess I felt overwhelmed. So I imported the whole thing into a little database program; from there I could generate a “report” of it all, with color-codings and other ways to highlight information of interest. The result I exported to PDF (converted to a .jpg image) in for display as the image above.

The color coding for the temperature and rain-days figures is explained in a legend at the bottom center. Other things to notice:

The six months we’ll most likely be traveling (June-November) are boxed with a heavy black line.
Three green rectangular boxes start at the top left and then kind of march down and to the right. There’s no magic data analysis going on with those boxes: the rows enclosed in each are those in each proposed “leg” of the tour — British Isles, northern Europe, southern Europe — and the columns cover the approximate range of months we’d be doing that “leg.” [Aside: I really want a better word than “leg.” Ideas?]
The green boxes overlap at their ends, because we don’t (yet? ever?) know exactly when we’ll hop off from one portion of the itinerary to the next.
One interesting thing about those three boxes: across all three of them, we wouldn’t expect to encounter any really severe differences in weather — that is, we only have to pack for one sorta-kinda-the-same climate. This should simplify packing, and make less worrisome the moving around from one region to another.

Of course, the best-laid plans, etc. etc. Famous last words, so on and so forth. If you want the gods to laugh, tell them your plans — all that. But we’ve got to start making some assumptions, on which we can build further assumptions, and so on.