Editing/writing life, Homeownership, Married life

That Titanic feeling

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It’s a strange feeling, it is. While calling it after a massive maritime disaster isn’t really appropriate–my situation is not disastrous, but hopeful–it conveys a similar feeling. Within five weeks, six at most, I’ll be leaving the state in which I came of age. I look around at all the familiarities, and know that their days are numbered, just as the ill-fated passenger liner’s crew had to confront reality: in two hours, nearly all that they saw would be submerged.

A part of me is tempted to mourn early and often, which is irrational. I should not mourn. I lived thirty-nine years in Washington without considering myself a Washingtonian (nothing against the concept). What is ahead is appealing, reuniting and promising. How many local vendors am I eager never to give one more dime? I will be saying farewell to a city government that is a poor steward of the public trust, a library that cannot find useful volunteer work for an author, provincial myopia about the region’s past and present, complete social stagnation, mostly mediocre dining, and dust storms. I just placed a simple phone call to my ISP and got four different answers from four different people, only one of whom seemed the least bit concerned about the variance. The rest were resigned to it. Said it all.

Yet for a long time it was home, and here I met some of the finest people I’ve known, had many good times, loved our house with its strong natural privacy and kind neighbors. And though I should not mourn, I know I will. My last ride to Boise will be a contemplative and emotional four and a half hours.

Soon we part, Washington. Thank you for all that has been good and wonderful. You’re a beautiful state with many fine folks, and you will always be a destination for those seeking climatic diversity and free spirits. People will also come for the weed.

===

In a complete topic segue, it’s about time I made written record of my usual analogy for my status as a published author.

I am not the sort of published author most people think of, and yet I’m not self-published (though I may change that). I have contributed to a good number of books, but all had other contributors. One might say I’m a freelance writer who is entitled to call himself an author, having done his share of authing for pay and print. I edit, write and proofread. Most of my paid writing work is done on contract, which puts me at the lowest tier of the authorly ziggurat. I usually describe it thus:

You probably saw Titanic. In fact, you’ve probably seen it eight times in reruns whether you wanted to or not. You observed that the ship operated according to a class system, which had direct relevance to one’s chances of ending up in a lifeboat. This has direct analogy to the security of one’s position in the literary world. Thus:

Suppose that the literary world is a Titanic. (The way New York is handling things, the analogy is apt enough). The highest class are, of course, first class passengers, would Madame care for some more champagne, veddy good, sah, socializing in that rotunda with crystal chandeliers overhead and an orchestra playing, more caviar, please, waiter. These are the J.K. Rowlings and Danielle Steels, anyone who is always on the endcap at the bookstore. Almost all of them are getting off the boat.

The next class, second, are the leisure tourists. They do not receive the fawning deference reserved for the big spenders in first class, but they are treated well. They enjoy some amenities and general respect. They are the top-selling science fiction authors, the more famous travel writers, and sometimes the self-help book gurus. Most of them are getting off the boat.

Down in steerage is the third class, the people making their own music who live in a different world than the prominent. This category includes most of the crew. These are most indie authors, history writers, the folks that pen Harlequin romances, cookbook authors, most children’s authors, writers of books on religion, and so on. Most people have never heard of most of them. Most of them aren’t getting off the boat.

Continue into the bowels of the monster and you will come to the engine room, full of people stripped to the waist and sweating quarts as they shovel coal into the boilers. These are the stokers. Without them, the ship couldn’t have set sail, but no one in first class can name a one of them. Not only have they no security, but in time of danger, more important people will shut the watertight doors on them. They aren’t getting off the boat.

I’m a stoker.

Entertainment and music, Human relations, Social comment

Big Brother 15: CBS’s gigantic disconnect

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If you were ever tempted to believe that ‘reality’ TV accurately reflected the events that occurred during taping, this should fix that wagon.

In case you have better taste than I do, Big Brother 15 is the current season of CBS’ reality’ franchise, in which some 14-18 ‘houseguests’ take up residence in a sound stage mocked up to resemble a large ‘house.’ They get little to no news from the outside world except in the most serious cases, such as 9/11, when one contestant had a relative in the WTC (happily, the relative was uninjured). Each week, contestants compete to become Head of Household, which has perks, including nominating others for a live eviction vote. There are more twists and curves involved than a debate with my wife, but that’s the game in a nutshell. It lasts between two and three months, with taped shows airing twice weekly and a once-weekly live show. Live camera feeds are available for subscription, which makes it impossible for CBS to cover up the full story. Even when they cut all the feeds, contestants are sure to discuss events spontaneously after the fact.

Over the years, there has been plenty of drama on the sound stage. With dozens of cameras and microphones inside the residential portion of the sound stage, CBS has a vast surplus of footage available per week, compressible into about an hour and a half of TV time. You’d expect a lot to fall through the cracks, but you’d like to expect that you got a representative sample of how people acted.

Nothing of the kind.

We’ve had a few near-fistfights, a lot of tears, some sexual activity, plenty of nudity, shouting matches, outright delusions, meltdowns, ejections, a knife held on someone, vandalism, and quite a few objectionable comments. We got to see most of that unfold, most of the time, on some level–it was the sort of TV the producers love. (By the way, the production company is called Endemol. Who came up with that name? It sounds like a medication you’d hear about on pharmercials. “I was always listless and depressed. My spleen seemed out of whack. I had lost my sex drive and had a craving for raw leeks. So, despite never having heard of it before, I asked my doctor about Endemol.”)

This season, it’s gotten bad. One contestant, Aaryn from Texas, has behaved like a narcissistic ‘mean girl,’ throwing out ethnic and homophobic remarks that have earned her the nickname ‘Aryan’ from recappers. Another, Gina Marie from Staten Oiland, hasn’t been much better. Contestants have sarcastically ordered Helen, the affable Asian mom and political consultant from Illinois, to ‘go cook some rice.’ They’ve mocked Candice, a resilient African American speech therapist from Houston, for the size of her derrière (which isn’t even that substantial). Every season of BB has one visibly gay man; sometimes they also cast a lesbian, though it’s always a lipstick lesbian. This season’s visibly gay contestant is Andy, a witty public speaking professor from Illinois. It didn’t take the bigots long to locate the word ‘faggot.’ And none of the racism and homophobia is any secret to anyone in the house; Howard, a sincere, ripped African American youth counselor from Mississippi, has said on the live feeds that he has to bottle up most of what he feels in order to get through the game. I’m impressed that he can. There have also been anti-Semitic slurs. The more of this I learn, the more I respect the minorities in the sound stage, and the more I want them to win simply because their path to victory will be that much harder, thus more well deserved. I want to see them celebrate as, one by one, the bigots get booted.

And this brings us to the gigantic disconnect: the TV show has shown none of the bigotry. I suspect CBS was told by its advertising sponsors: “Do it and we’re done with you.” It’s not that the word isn’t out. Gina Marie (pageant production) and Aryan (modeling) have already been sacked by their real-world employers; the press release from Gina Marie’s employer was corrosive. Thanks to the live feeds, and those who recap them (my brain would suffer irreparable harm), the whole nation knows or can know the truth. Yet CBS refuses to show it, even though people using vile words like ‘nigger’ or ‘faggot’ would certainly spike ratings as people would watch in outrage. What cannot be hidden is Julie Chen’s obvious loathing for the cast. I’ve never felt much sympathy for Chen until now. I can only try to imagine how she felt when Aryan described Helen as the first Asian she’d ever met who wasn’t doing her nails.

Yeah. It’s that bad.

There’s a movement to have the bigots kicked off the show, and of course the usual “We Hate PC” counter-movement. Here’s the thing: if CBS did boot them, they’d have to field awkward questions about why they failed to televise the bigotry to begin with. That would prove to even the most gullible that what they see is not representative of reality. I myself don’t think the bigots should be ejected from the game, because then we wouldn’t get the joy of watching them crushed. I want the targets of their abuse to have the satisfaction and material rewards of well-earned victory. I also believe that it’s important for us to see that, while these attitudes may be in decline, they are not dead, and they still need to be countered and rejected by honest women and men. I do think it’s dishonest of Endemol and CBS not to show some of the despicable behavior, so that the casual viewing public remains hoodwinked, and so that they can duck some of the controversy–and, if my analysis is correct, keep the ad dollars.

Reality TV is unreal. Never forget that–or if you didn’t grasp it, know it now.

Update: one of my favorite blogs, angry asian man, seems to see this as I do.

Entertainment and music, Human relations

Naked & Afraid, Discovery Channel

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Was watching the first two episodes of this last night. I kind of like the show’s concept, although it’s even more compressed than Survivor–three weeks compressed into forty minutes of edited episode. Short summary: abandoned naked, with a bag and one survival tool of choice. Shortly meeting up with another person of the opposite sex, similarly outfitted. The pair must reach an extraction point within twenty-one days, living off the land.

One trend I do not like so far, in our limited sample base, is the Jerk Male Factor. The first guy was basically a self-admitted misanthrope who had a sort of Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle attitude, looking at the experienced survival teacher he was paired with as Jane. Yeah, it’s no great revelation that women rarely equal men in size, strength, bone mass, skin toughness and so on. And yet it’s a team effort, in which either person could on short notice have to rely upon the other for the most intimate personal care; where two can always achieve more than either alone.

I grant that a good number of men are stupid enough not to grasp this immediately upon peeling down to the Eden ensemble, but it’s hard to imagine this slowness of perception continuing very long. Hoping to see some guys on the show who start the adventure with the attitude that their partner probably has knowledge they do not. So far, as so often in life, the women are turning out to be the grownups in the room.

The naked aspect is cool, forcing them to deal with issues like foot care. The SF guy who made the bark sandals had the right idea, which makes me wonder: why, in an area full of dropped acacia thorns (which are about the size of needle-tipped Olympic javelins), did that not become a priority sooner? “We must focus on water!” Yeah, tough guy, and if you come up lame, you will never reach that water. Hard to fathom–and he spent 2/3 of the experience barely able to walk due to a badly infected thorn in his foot. Interesting that Ms. Minnesota made a fair effort to make something like a bikini, to cover up for Tarzan and the cams. Ms. Alaska just let it all hang out, including sitting in the murky creek with her legs spread, fishing barehanded–catching three catfish. Now you see why I married an Alaskan woman.

This may be a lot of fun to watch, depending on who they cast. If it were on Fox, you know it would forever be brain-damagingly predictable and transparent, and follow the exact same pattern as we have seen: Sexist Pig First Oinks Loudly, Then Learns His Lesson In Gender Humility. Fox is incapable of presenting anything to challenge the minds of the hyenas on the second episode of N&A, much less a human being with an eighth grade education. Not sure how Discovery’s track record is in this area. If they get the right varieties of people in casting, it could get interesting. Let us see some diversity in attitudes, skills, strengths and ethnicity.

My wife, of course, when she learns that I watch this, will probably offer more succinct commentary about my lack of taste. Then she’ll see my observation about Alaska’s women. If there are no blog posts for a week after July 4 weekend, please send someone over to investigate my fate.

Editing/writing life

How a crazy busy ‘lancing day looks

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Freelancing is like Starfleet at times. Weeks of boredom and maintenance, a day or so of holycrapIhaveatonofstufftodo. Today was one of those days, so let’s walk you through it.

Morning. Finish second and final editing pass on true-life romance manuscript. What? If people hire me to edit their work, it usually gets edited at least twice? Am I that inefficient? No, that’s not the issue. On the first pass, I fix everything that’s obvious, but about halfway through I have spotted some trends, and realize that in the early going, unaddressed instances of those trends exist. I must normalize these so that the overall editing is consistent. In the ideal world, I would make the book sound like the author, only smoother. With good writing, one can do that. When it’s not so good, if it sounded like the author, well, they don’t pay me to maintain mediocrity. This one was pretty good even before I got my inky paws on it. Finish around 2 PM. Refuse to send it off. Want one more quick whirlwind read before I sign off on it as completed work. I hate making any mistakes.

During morning, receive inquiry from fiction author about rates and editing. Exchange e-mails. We agree that author will send me ms, I’ll look it over, I’ll sample edit a few pages and send it back along with a quote. This one will be somewhere between editing and rewriting, so there may be sticker shock, but if you want a great book that’s what it’ll cost. Receive and begin sample edit. I can’t tell what a ms really needs until I sit down and actually edit some of it.

Early afternoon, hear from author of true-life romance ms, who is about as calm and patient waiting for me to send him the finished work as he probably was when his children’s mother was eased onto the obstetric bed to have his first daughter. He is stuck on his blurb, which is his least favorite aspect of readying a book, and randomly mentions that if only someone would just take $x and do it, he’d be happy. With calm irony, I mention how unfortunate it is that he doesn’t happen to know anyone who writes for money. My author is not a fool. I advise him, however, that his price is outrageously high and that I won’t do it for more than $.6x. He complains that it’s well worth $x to him, and wants to pay that. I remain impassive and unmoving; $.6x, not a penny more. Unfortunately, I have no leverage, as in the end I can’t prevent him from writing a check that overpays me, so if that happens, I’ll just have to smile and thank him. However, he still only owes me $.6x for it. Let’s not forget that. In the process I learn that his wife–whose story he is writing as told to him–is enchanted at the many new words I have coined from her name. Encouraged, I start to lean into that and make a real effort to coin them just for fun. I like her story, and I respect the candor of her narrative.

Real life intervenes: wife has just come from home inspection for our soon-to-be own private Idaho. Problems are relatively minor, but here’s a chance to extract from the seller a little of her own overly hard bargaining. Drop everything, attend to review, discussion, and authoring of letter to real estate agent presenting a suggested offer regarding home’s flaws. Make wifely corrections. Day is crazy. Miss Big Brother premiere. “Sorry, dear, buying your dream home is less important than watching a really trashy reality show,” said no happy husband ever. Will watch later online. Someday.

Make grocery run. Welcome break. Buy the usual unhealthy stuff, though at least I’m eating less of it lately.

Whirlwind final review of romance ms, then birth the baby and hand it to author. Pretty sure author drops everything else in his world, except the woman about whom the story tells, to examine ms. I hear nothing back, so he’s probably happy. He’s probably still awake reading it as I write this, after midnight.

Not even close to done for day. Finish sample edit on fiction ms, so as to have eyes-off time to review tomorrow for presentation to author.  Reckon I’m on the right track.

Time for physical therapy. Having discovered that during 2/3 of the exercises I can read a book or magazine, I get in some reading on a travel bio sent me for review by a pleasant Australian DJ. When I’m sent a review copy, my rule is that it’s automatically at the top of the stack until I finish it and post a review. To me, that’s just simple fairness and gratitude to the author. Just about finish it as I am doing resisted hamstring curls–it’s not a thick book, in fact not as thick as I wish it were. By now it’s 11:30 PM, and in some form, I have been at work for twelve hours.

Still not done. A blog entry is way overdue. Regular readers don’t know I was in Idaho for three days with a 4.5 hour drive each way, and unless they’re personal friends, may not be moved by that. They just know nothing’s happening here. This cannot be tolerated, and I am somewhat understandably a bit tired, so I pull up WordPress and begin a blog entry. About what? Remember, there is no writer’s block. You want to write or you don’t. Obviously I want to write at this time, because I refuse not to write. Then decide that a busy literary day might be interesting to concierges, engineers, nurses, electricians, homemakers, lawyers, game wardens, activists, campground managers, cashiers, and all the other folk who take time to read what I write. I put on some rap and get to work.

At half past midnight, my workday is done. Productive day. If this was my every day, I’d have a lot less spare time, but I’d deal.

Good morning, dear reader.

Scumbag studies, Sports

Myths and facts not commonly known about the Black Sox Scandal

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Eight of the 1919 Chicago White Sox gained infamy for involvement in throwing the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds, who were the underdogs. Their names were “Chick” Gandil, “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, Fred McMullin, “Buck” Weaver, “Happy” Felsch, “Lefty” Williams, Eddie Cicotte and “Swede” Risberg.

However, it didn’t go down the way many assume.

Facts:

There were only supposed to be seven players involved. Fred McMullin, a substitute infielder who fielded well and hit meh, overheard the talk and threatened to rat if he wasn’t cut in. He only got to bat twice, both times pinch hitting, with one base hit for a .500 average.

Most were stars. McMullin was the only scrub involved. Gandil was a fine-fielding, good-hitting first baseman. Jackson’s hitting is a thing of fable and fame, and he wasn’t bad with the leather either. Weaver could hit and field third base very well. Felsch was a great hitter, especially in the clutch, but as a center fielder he was lockdown with a rifle arm. Williams was one of the league’s best pitchers. At his best, Cicotte’s array of pitches could give the league’s best hitters fits. Risberg was a decent-hitting young shortstop with good range, a future star.

The overall effect of the ban seems to have been to allow the public to believe what it wanted: that the rot was all excised, that the grand old game (which, remember, wasn’t that old) was ‘clean.’ This might explain why, in the late 1920s, Commissioner Landis wasn’t eager to have another scandal involving Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker. Imagine the damage that would have done–including making Landis look less effective.

It’s unlikely there’d have been a fix if ‘Commy’ hadn’t been the worst cheapskate in baseball. Sox owner Charles Comiskey (yes, the ballpark’s namesake) had some of baseball’s best players and paid them very poorly, knowing that the reserve clause prevented them from becoming free agents. It may be a myth that Comiskey rigged matters to keep Cicotte from winning thirty games and getting a big bonus in 1918, but the problem here is that even if it’s not true, anyone who knows much about Comiskey would believe him capable of such.

The real injustice is not that “Shoeless” Joe Jackson and his .3558 lifetime batting average (behind only Ty Cobb and Rogers Hornsby) aren’t in the Hall of Fame. The real injustice is that Comiskey, who had good evidence the fix was in and covered it up, is in the Hall–and was never banned. Then as now, if you were rich enough, you could get away with anything. Puta la madre, puta la hija.

Comiskey would have preferred to win the Series, but he had greater concerns. A long series meant a bigger gate. An aggressive investigation from the start would have cost him a lot of money at the gate, wrecked much of the equity in his franchise, and done no favors for the value of other teams. It would have been the right thing to do, of course, but would you really expect a major businessman to do the right thing even when it would damage his financial interests? Here, I’ll hold the ball, and you run up and kick it.

Myths:

Landis’s draconian action largely ended gamblers’ involvement with ballplayers. It is safer to say that the bans made game-throwing far more circumspect. By the 1940s, even being seen with a gambler or organized crime figure could get a player in trouble (as Leo Durocher’s ghost would tell you).

The eight Sox were the only ones banned. Joe Gedeon, a Browns middle infielder with a very promising future, got a lifetime ban just for having known about the fix and not speaking up.

The eight Sox were convicted in court. In fact, they were acquitted. Then banned anyway, as Landis answered to no court.

Before Landis, there was no commissioner’s function. Oh, there was; it just wasn’t very effective. It was a triumvirate involving the AL and NL presidents, plus one other person. In practice, as its strongest personality, AL founder and president Ban Johnson ran the show. Johnson and Comiskey were bitter enemies, a backdrop that affected the entire investigation.

Rumors of a fix came as a surprise to anyone. By 1919, there were such rumors of some sort every fall, with scattered showers of gambling scuttlebutt all season. The difference in 1919 was that money poured into the betting in ways that professionals recognized as contradicting the usual pattern, and the odds favoring Chicago began to drop. And kept dropping, as you’d expect if a Sox star were injured and with an increasingly grim prognosis–which wasn’t the case.

Arnold Rothstein came up with a plan to fix it. Actually, Rothstein–a professional gambler and urbane but dangerous New York underworld figure–was skeptical at first when minions brought the plan to him. Not that Rothstein wasn’t capable of trying to fix it; he had no scruples of that kind. It wasn’t his idea at all. Many in baseball agreed with Rothstein that fixing a World Series was problematic.

Comiskey, his executives and manager Kid Gleason had no idea of a fix until late 1920. The Grabiner diaries show that Sox executives were seriously concerned as the Series unfolded. Gleason, a man as honest as Hal Chase was crooked, knew it in his gut. Catcher Ray Schalk, watching his best pitchers tank, knew it. Gleason was literally ready to kill over the matter.

The eight were banned immediately after the Series. No, actually, seven of the eight played nearly all of the 1920 season for the White Sox–most performing spectacularly. Only Gandil didn’t play again (for anyone in MLB) after the 1919 Series.

All the best players were in on it. Hall of Fame catcher Ray Schalk, Hall of Fame second baseman Eddie Collins, Hall of Fame pitcher “Red” Faber, and standout pitcher Dickie Kerr most certainly were not. Kerr managed to win two games with 3/4 of his infield and 2/3 of his outfield at least party to the fix. There was a social divide on the Sox, and those three were on one side, with most to all of the cheaters on the other. Other capable players on the square were right fielder “Nemo” Leibold, right fielder Eddie Murphy, first baseman “Shano” Collins and pitcher Roy Wilkinson. At one point, Cicotte (normally a reliable fielder; .9415 lifetime, #278 all time) seems to have made a couple of errors himself to help the fix along.

The fixers made bank. This’ll show you how dumb a lot of bumptious 1910s ballplayers were: some agreed to fix it for less than the winner’s share–and most never got enough to equal that. Want more evidence of their full-scale dumbness? When Comiskey and his pet lawyer Alfred Austrian confronted some of them, three signed away immunity, trusting ‘Commy’ and his attack dog to guard their interests. Ha. While I wouldn’t consider illiteracy (Jackson could barely, with effort, write his name, but someone had to read a contract to him, and he wouldn’t understand half the words) to equal dumbness, it sure looks like Weaver, Jackson and Felsch were of below average brainpower.

All eight actually threw the Series. There is good reason to believe that Buck Weaver was never in on the fix, and played to win. The hard part here is judging effort and timing without video evidence, and eyewitness accounts differ. However, it looks as if Jackson played to win. Gandil, by all accounts the ringleader and a cold-blooded customer, may not have. Williams’ and Cicotte’s pitching looks questionable, to go by their catcher’s opinion (and this old catcher naturally tends to trust a brother backstop). Risberg, who like Gandil evidently had a streak of thug in him, may have thrown it for real. Felsch is a question mark. McMullin hardly had the opportunity.

All the games were fixed. For one thing, the Sox won three games, so that’s doubtful. For another, most of the money never came through as promised game by game, so even players who had agreed to the sordid deal quickly became disgruntled. Some never got a dime.

In reality, we do not know and cannot know who played crooked, nor how often. We do know that Chicago was originally favored for reasons of superior talent backed by statistics, and lost to Cincinnati five games to three. And at least some of the Sox were, for some games, in the tank.

Social comment, Technology

A service to the technologically unaware

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It’s pretty common for me to see someone on Facebook, or wherever, complaining that this or that suddenly stopped working. Or reverted back to an older setting or version, or doesn’t work as advertised at all, even though they looked it up in the help. It’s pretty frustrating for them, because they don’t see how that could be. “It’s supposed to work! What idiot designed this?” Some of the reactions seem to personalize it, as if someone is deliberately messing with them; others are just woe-is-me of some sort.

I’m patient with it unless/until they try to get me to ‘fix it’ for them, or more or less demand that I (who used to work with computers, thus I must know All Things Technical) take personal responsibility for it. That tripped your BS meter, unless you have ever worked at supporting computer users. They usually want someone to bitch at for their frustration, and the helper/tech will do. Somehow, it’s the helper’s fault that someone else created a flawed thing. This is why a lot of people who could perhaps help you, choose not to. They’ve been through that too many times. Those who have not yet learned, or for whom the validation of successful problem-solving is too alluring to resist, keep volunteering assistance.

The words I hated most, and that immediately marked a user as not grasping the situation, were “I don’t see why you don’t just FIX it.” If that were feasible, lady, and if it were that easy, I would. Your great-nephew would–he’d just overwrite everything you have, break everything you want to use by doing an easy reinstall, and then vanish when it came time to help you get your “e-mail working with your printer, and your software downloading in your drive, and your Works chart colors back the way you want them again.” Or whatever other way in which you imagined that solving computer problems was exactly the same as car repair. (That quoted list of complaints was a fairly typical sample. Most people don’t know what the tech terms actually mean, so they misuse them to try and sound more technical, which makes them in fact sound pretty dumb. Kind of like the non-Spanish speaker who responds to Spanish by saying ‘El grande pantaloons’ or ‘buenos nachos.’)

So I’m going to present some generalized realities that a lot of people don’t grasp. Words of ultimate futility: “But it shouldn’t be this way!” Many things should be and are not, or should not be and are. I don’t care how it should be, because I don’t deal in ‘should.’ I deal in ‘will’ and ‘won’t,’ and ‘can’ or ‘can’t.’ I can, however, tell you how it is. You’d be less annoyed if you knew. Or you might be more annoyed–but at least you’d be less mystified. It isn’t always just you. Sometimes, the situation is just unpleasant. It might help to know, at the very least, that it’s not always your fault.

1) Any large, complex piece of software, be it Facebook, your new Massive Ultracarnage III game, or MS Word, always has major imperfections. There are ways in which the documentation is simply wrong. There are features that are broken from day one. The help file cannot possibly keep up with the reality; no one’s willing to pay that many tech writers.

2) Most major ‘upgrades’ are net backward movements, adding some features but mostly moving the same stuff around so you have to look for it all again. It’s not your imagination. You’re not crazy. That’s reality.

3) Most major changes are a series of additional pieces bolted on, rather than rethinking the whole base concept. Thus, most highly mature software is like a passenger car that was evolved from a tricycle, and deep down inside it, still has that tricycle, which is no longer needed functionally, but it’s too much headache to remove, plus removing it would break everything else, thus the whole thing would have to be rethought and re-engineered as a car from the start. They won’t do that very often.

4) If software is online, such as a website, and is very popular, its information and code are stored across large amounts of computers and storage, with some redundancy and ability to share the load if one of them has a problem. This means that your reality will not always be the reality of everyone else. “It’s working fine for me, sorry.” That’s usually temporary, as they are gradually fixing something, upgrading something, or propagating some change about the system.

5) Sometimes, when something on a website is messed up, or an ‘upgrade’ turns out to be broken, or data is trashed, the easy fix is to revert to a fallback copy known to be good. This means that changes in the meantime were lost. It might be many or might be few, depending on how many people used that and how long it took to realize that the new Doodad had a memory leak that threatened some dire consequence.

6) Information systems management is a lot like generaling a battle. You make some hard decisions on the fly based on the best information you have at the time, and you try to avoid heavy casualties, but stuff happens. Expecting everything to go right most of the time flies in the face of this reality. It’s rather a miracle any of it goes right, ever, for any sort of bearable price.

7) All changes are beta-tested on live users. You are the guinea pig. “Why don’t they test it beforehand?” They do, but what they consider beta-testing is not comprehensive because no one can think of ways to creatively break software like several million people. They don’t have several million in-house testers and can’t get them. The only real way to find what’s truly messed up is to give it to the public and let said public work its magic by diversity of use.

In theory, beta-testing should mean ironing out the major kinks before inflicting change on users. In reality, users are the beta testers. They hand you the car and let you do with it what you want. Some people will drive normally. Some will drag race. Some will repeatedly slam on the brakes to see how long it takes for them to fail. Some will set up ramps and attempt stunt jumps. Some will refuse to drive it over 10 mph. Some will wrap it around the first tree they see. Some will put it on a grease rack and start altering it. What is sure: if there is a flaw, someone will turn it up, either by accident or by using the car in a way it was never intended. Software works like this.

A few years back, I remember, there was a WWII operational game that inventoried each unit down to number of operational vehicles and weapons. Amazingly detailed, and players could create their own scenarios to simulate nearly any battle. There was an enormous argument when someone set up a company of trucks and pitted it against a unit consisting of one Tiger tank (which, in reality, could have taken out twelve trucks without even firing its main gun; just run them over or machinegun them). The trucks always won. You can’t imagine the bitchfight that followed, with people screaming how unrealistic the game was. Never mind that the objective of the game was to simulate divisions and corps moving against each other; this microexample ‘proved’ the game was not realistic. Here’s what’s unrealistic: any competent officer or sergeant–hell, a private–attacking a heavy tank with a bunch of trucks in the first place. The developer (Norm Koger, an exceptionally capable fellow) used the term ‘pathologically strange scenarios,’ and he was right. But the point: someone was going to try that, and claim it to be a Major Issue.

8) In information systems management, sometimes so much goes wrong at once that–like medical staff after a catastrophe–the technical people must prioritize. It’s not that your issue doesn’t deserve fixing. It’s that there may well be five more major issues that you don’t know about, that affect hundreds of thousands of users, whereas yours only seems to affect a few thousand. They will triage the eternal process by number of users impacted, severity, and so on. This means there are numerous small problems that will simply never be fixed because they will never be important enough. Repair and testing resources are finite. If you have one of the small problems, you may just be screwed. Since there is always someone with at least a broken leg or a severed artery, your nagging hamstring pull may not get any attention; you may just have to work around it as best you can. Sucks when that happens.

9) Why are nearly all upgrades actually downgrades, or unimportant lateral movement at the very best, as described in 2)? Because you, the user, really aren’t the priority. You never have been. You are dealing with the programmer mentality, which prefers to create the new rather than fix the old. The programmer mentality is abysmal at designing user interfaces–which are the way users interact with the system–because the programmer doesn’t care that much how many steps the path requires, simply that the path eventually leads there. Watch the way a Facebook game devolves and you’ll have an example. It will keep bolting on more and more stuff, in this case to generate revenue, and because programmers like to keep creating the new, but hate going back to rebuild the old. What if most users like it the way it is and don’t want any changes (they haven’t even adjusted fully to the last batch)? Not the programmers’ problem, because the users aren’t what drives the thinking. They can never come out and say that, of course; it’s a shibboleth.

If programmers went back and made everything work correctly, really did it right, they’d get bored. They don’t like doing that. Programming involves more artistry and creativity than most people imagine; creators gotta create. Perhaps more importantly, if they didn’t keep coming up with new stuff they imagined would improve the system, there’d be less need for programmers, with all problems fixed and nothing new planned. Programmers like to have jobs too, even if their job is in fact to make your experience worse. It’s their mortgage payment vs. your happiness; the former wins.

10) Ideal software on a large scale is problematic to create, even starting fresh. In theory, developers would come up with a concept, build it, test it, find all the major flaws, release it, learn about a few that slipped through the cracks, fix those and be done, and move on to re-imagining the next major version. It’s never like that. That takes a long time, and with nothing new being released, there is less new revenue. At some point, everyone who wants it has bought it or pirated it. What happens is that developers wing it a lot faster, and let the world find the flaws, which take longer to fix–and which delay starting on something new.

11) Thousands and millions of users all have computers that differ as much as one human from another. A few humans can’t stand cilantro, for example; it tastes like soap to them. The rest of us can’t taste the soapy stuff, and we keep dunking our chips in the salsa. There is probably someone mortally allergic to kumquats, will go into convulsions if they even touch one. Some people are allergic to everything. We vary.

Even if the hardware were all the same, a different mix of software is loaded on each, and most software does something to the operating system when installed. This means it is inevitable that some user will have some deadly combination of hardware and software, duplicated in only a few cases, that happens to mess with the one piece a given system must have. There is no practical way to troubleshoot or fix that, unless it’s widespread enough to trace to a single item (usually a specific piece of hardware, like a video card, or perhaps even a specific version of that hardware’s accompanying software drivers). Why do the tech people always ask you for a full list of what hardware you have? This is why.

For example: I bought one of the Diablo games. Everyone else loved the new game and said it was brilliant. It hard locked my machine after a few minutes. If this were very widespread, everyone else wouldn’t have loved the game. It probably had to do with some video or sound driver, which I could have upgraded and hoped for the best. Or I could just decide it wasn’t that important, which is what happened. Same with one of the SimCity games: about ten minutes in, just as it was getting interesting, it crashed. Not for most people, who thought it was the best version ever. When you’re in that situation, if you’re in a small minority, don’t count on a solution. It rarely comes.

12) A fresh restart solves a lot of problems, often enough to always do it. Clear the cache, power cycle the modem, reboot the machine, then immediately try what isn’t working and see if it fails again. This is why techs always have you do this: it solves enough problems that it’s nearly always worth a shot. No failure is diagnostic unless it can be reliably repeated from a fresh start, because some failures are a result of an extended, deteriorating operating system session which something else caused to begin deteriorating.

If you can start fresh twice and get the same failure, reliably, you can reproduce it. If you really want it fixed, being able to reproduce it on command gives the propellerheads something to work with–because there is, then, a way to know when it is addressed. Magic words to tech support: “I can reproduce the failure every time from a complete fresh start.” They can sink their teeth into that.

So, you have problems. You always will, here and there. Using a computer is like driving down a highway that has some frost heaves and potholes. Some you will miss, either because you never drove that stretch of road, or because of your alertness. Some you’ll hit. Some will flat a tire or crack an axle. The people who make the software are mainly concerned that most people eventually get there, even if they have to take detours. This may mean that some roads just keep deteriorating, because they are less traveled, and because it was more important to fix a major bridge that was about to fall into a river.

You can still be annoyed about this if it helps you, but the annoyance isn’t going to change reality. But maybe if you at least understand why it’s this way, you’ll be able to guess whether the problem is worth trying to report or troubleshoot, or whether you’re better off just living with it, working around it, or rethinking how important it is to you. Expecting perfect computing is like expecting a perfect round of golf every time, something not even tour pros achieve. Their success is mainly judged by how few major mistakes they make, and that is also true of computing–for developers as much as users.

Human relations, Married life

The fine art of Emergency Anniversary Present Finding

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Having taught this to enough people, I figured it’s time to write it down and help the brothers out.

A lot of men have a hard time with anniversary presents for their wives. What the hell does she want? It depends on her, obviously, and one size never fits all. My philosophy is that she doesn’t want something practical, useful or that will go away (wilt, be eaten, etc.). She also doesn’t tend to want something that isn’t specific to her. The money matters a lot less than the thought you put into it, so there are not easy outs. Flowers and candy? Throwing money at the problem. Anyone can go out and buy that. Jewelry? If you have that kind of money and it’s something that would matter mainly to her, and not to just any woman. If you’re celebrating being married to her, she isn’t just any woman. She’s your wife. She’s special. She was better than the rest, and I should hope you still think so.

Sure, tickets to her favorite concert are an option, and those go away, which could be okay. But I cling to the view that something she can keep over the years, and remember what you meant, is most likely to be treasured. Five years from now, none of her friends are going to look at concert tickets, adore them and ask where she got them.

If you have time and are handy, making something is nice. Anything that is unique–that there is only one of, and just for her–sends a very welcome message. Something you already have, in a display you made that adds to it, is a good thing. Some years you just spot the perfect thing. And some years, it’s down to the wire, and damn it, nothing has shown up, no ideas, you’re stuck. You went out and looked at all the usual places. Nada. There isn’t any more time to mess around. This is a dilemma.

When that happens, do this.

You are going to deploy the ultimate weapon: women. You won’t even know any of them, and you don’t care. This is a sure shot. All you have to do is think a little bit beforehand, and cooperate when the time comes. I’m not making this up. I have done this more than once.

First: game face. It shouldn’t be hard for you to look a little frustrated, but don’t look angry frustrated. You’re going to a place where you are somewhat out of your element, and it is important to seem a little vulnerable. Many of us don’t do vulnerable well. You must. Drop your guard. There is something about a vulnerable man that lights up the ‘I must help’ indicators in women like a Christmas tree. It’s one of the greatest reasons to value them as relatives, friends and partners–and there are so many. Not every woman, no given woman all the time, but in the main, most of them most of the time.

Second: use your brain. Look back on the last year of her life and yours together, what was major for her. A big achievement? What all did she do? Think of something to celebrate, to commemorate, something you’re proud of about her. Something where she reached a goal, finished something, conquered something. It can involve you in some way but it should center on her role. Have that stuff in mind, because you’re going to need it.

Next, game face on, go to the kind of place she likes to look around, typically an artwork or craft type of place, small business, no chains. Make sure you go at a time when there are several women in the store, including a female shopkeeper/cashier. Go in, greet the shopkeeper politely, and look around a bit. Wait for her to ask if she can help you find anything. Your finger is on the launch button; push it. Keep wandering sort of aimlessly and dumbly, and say something like: “Well, I’m having trouble. Our anniversary is coming up. I’m really proud of my wife, she’s done a lot this year, and I want to get her something that will celebrate that. I haven’t had any luck finding the right thing.” Don’t be loud, but do not make any effort not to be heard by the other shoppers. Most of all, don’t be embarrassed about it. You want to be the man who just showed that he loves his wife and isn’t one damn bit ashamed of that, doesn’t give a shit who hears him.

Ignition. Now it’s a treasure hunt. The shopkeeper will start to ask you questions. Trust that the other women heard you. What does she like? What did she accomplish or do? What colors does she like? Any flowers or animals or symbols that mean a lot to her? What’s your budget range? Be completely honest. Answer anything and everything. If it’s about what she did, let your pride shine a bit. Before you came in, the shopkeeper was bored and most of the women were just puttering around. Now they have a mission.

See, this is the women’s world. It’s different, and this must be respected. In their world, change is swift and sudden, and they tend to handle it more smoothly than we do. Now the lines between shopkeeper and customer tend to blur, even vanish. The other women are likely to ask you questions. Answer everyone. This is fun for them on a couple of levels. Not only are they helping someone who seems like a very nice man, they have a goal. Their shopping day just got better and you are the cause. They like this.

Now all you have to do is come look at stuff when summoned. They will consider your budget, everything you said. Go around and look at the stuff. Don’t be afraid to say something wouldn’t quite work, but obviously, be polite, as to any volunteer taking time to help a stranger. If it surely wouldn’t work, explain why, so that adds to what they know. Keep checking out things, and in between, you of course keep looking, or making a show of it. You won’t be the one who finds it, but you have to keep trying for appearance’s sake.

Eventually someone will find something suitable, the kind of thing you would never have thought of as fitting, because you do not see the world through your wife’s eyes. Sometimes takes only a few minutes. The women are more likely to see it as she would see it. If you think the thing sends a radically different different message than the woman who found it, it’s fine to say so, but if your helper stands her ground, be prepared. That’s the signal for the other women to come over and weigh in. They will all agree with each other about the interpretation, exactly as custom specifies. At this point, custom and good manners require you to bow to their collective wisdom and agree with them. That’s the debate you should lose, and gracefully–because if that’s how they all see it, you probably just found the perfect gift. One year I was doing this, and one lady found a statuette of a female figure in chrome, head back, holding a platter (spiked for a votive candle) high in the air. I asked: “That looks like the barmaid bringing beer. Is that what I should be saying?” The women gathered around to evaluate the piece and weigh in. They all agreed that it looked very feminine and triumphant and strong, and not like a barmaid. Of course, I followed the script, and accepted their judgment without being grumpy. (At anniversary time, my wife loved it. Later, when I told her the barmaid story, she laughed and laughed. More to the point, she agreed with my helpers, and chided me good-naturedly for the utter, sheer, egregious maleness of my own first impression.)

At some point, they find it, and you know it. Now all there is to do is thank the women for their help, tell them you’re sure your wife will love it, pay for your purchase, and head out. Everyone is happy. You’re bailed out. The shopkeeper did some business and had fun. The other shoppers had fun, and helped a nice guy do something thoughtful. They loved the romance of it, the process of it, the newness and difference.

Not much was asked of you. All you did was show up, say the right things, answer questions, be appreciative and respectful, and pay the cashier.

This is not hard. And it will save your husbandly ass from a big disappointment.

If you blow it at anniversary time, it is now officially your own damn fault.

Investing

Stopping out

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When I talk about investing with people, it’s natural that most of them don’t understand there are a lot of different types of orders. Most people know that you can place an order to buy or sell when a stock hits a certain price, but it gets more sophisticated than that. One form of sophistication is the trailing stop-loss order, which is available from any fully equipped discount brokerage.

It works like this. Suppose your shares of Baloney, Inc. (BLNY) are way up. You’re not eager to sell, but you think the markets are high, and you really don’t want to ride BLNY down the chute of a big selloff. Okay. You place a trailing stop-loss order to sell all shares, good till canceled (at Fidelity they expire after a max of six months). The trigger condition is a percentage that you choose. If you pick 1%, you must really want out, because a 1% drop in value is typical on a down market day–and isn’t even remarkable over two days or more.  If you pick 5%, it would take a very big single day of loss to trigger that, or a loss of that size spread over multiple days.

The mechanics of this are a headache for the brokerage, but that’s why they get paid. Suppose BLNY is at 100 when you place a trailing stop-loss order to sell it, trigger 5%. As of right then, the trigger price is 95. However, if BLNY goes over 100, the trigger point is recalculated (each time it gets above the high) based upon a 5% drop from the new price. So if BLNY climbs to 120, without ever declining 5% from its highest price since the order, its trigger point will be 114. That is 5% less than 120. The brokerage keeps this stuff in a separate file so it can keep updating your trigger point. When it sells, we say that it ‘stopped out.’

Seems like cheating, doesn’t it? That’s what seasoned investors do any way they can legally or practically do: cheat. Of course, you have to realize what exactly occurs with this type of order. When your shares drop to the trigger point, your order converts to a market order (and it is not going back; the die is cast). You may not get your trigger price, though it should be close. There has to be someone wanting to buy the shares for that market price. A market order, the simplest form of order, simply says ‘sell this now at what the market will pay.’ No type of order can create liquidity (investor-speak for ‘someone wants this, so I can sell it’) if liquidity doesn’t exist.

Can this hurt you? Well, there is no crying in investing. Big kid tools are for big kid investors. Most people are thinking of crash protection, but remember that once a trigger point is established for the order, it will never go down. If you aren’t serious about protecting some form of profit (or avoiding further faceplant), better not place one of these, because the smaller your % loss specified in the order, the more likely it is that a moderate market shift could trigger your sale.

My own belief on stop-loss orders is that they are for times when you think the market is stupidly high, you’ve profited handsomely from it, and you’re ready to protect the profits. I’m at that point right now. There isn’t really a good reason for the markets to be as high as they are, at least not as far as I can see; banks still aren’t lending much, interest rates on savings are an insult, there’s no big job boom, and the economy is still fought over by the macaques, gibbons, chimpanzees and ourangoutangs in Congress, who are doing nothing to help it, being too distracted by ideological feces-flinging competitions. If there’s a big long market slide, I expect to buy these stocks back at discount prices. It’s not that I don’t like the companies’ prospects; it’s just that in investing, I don’t give a damn about anything but money. I gain no emotional satisfaction from holding Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.B) shares; I just think they are a good investment. However, I’m not stopping out of those, because I think they are such a good investment they will weather a market decline very well. I’m not stopping out of my dividend farms (closed-end bond funds), because I didn’t buy them for capital appreciation. I bought them so they’d pay me money every month. They will still do that, by and large, regardless of what their prices do.

We–you and I–didn’t invent this game. We have the right to play it for keeps, for our own reasons, using whatever tools are available to us. For me, one of those is the stop-loss order.

Editing/writing life

Calling in sick

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First, I offer you this to make this post less of a downer: “Callin’ in Sick Today”

When you are a ‘lancer, can you really call in sick? Depends how bad it is. If you are so sick and weak you lack the mental acuity to do your work in respectable form, well, you have no choice. I was in that state Monday, with a fever probably about 104º F. For you of metric countries, much above that and you have to be hospitalized. There was no way I could work. Sitting up was hard enough.

I could postpone stuff like this, for example. While I’m heartened that people read the blog, I don’t think anyone’s going to unsubscribe if there aren’t any posts for a week. I would have to postpone or cancel on-site stuff, such as a meeting or teleconference. But some of what you have to do, if you can do–even if you have to proofread for an hour, rest for an hour, proof for another hour, etc.–you must do. And for Tuesday and Wednesday, that was what I did. Could barely even eat, nothing sounded good. Lived on mixed OJ and club soda, and cleaned out all the popsicles Deb didn’t eat.

But it got done. And that’s the big deal. If you have a long rapport with a client, proven track record, maybe it doesn’t harm you to have a crisis that delays the result. But when the project is a biography of a nonagenarian who is understandably eager to see the final product, for a first time client, well, the amount of delay one might accept is very limited.

And since you’re a ‘lancer, you do it until it’s done. Your career depends on that approach. When work is there, do the work. You can play Candy Crush or nap some other time.

Entertainment and music

Andina

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…Spanish for ‘Andean,’ is the distinctive sound of the Andes Mountains: Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Chile. Sometimes sung in Native languages, sometimes in Spanish, it is the most uplifting-sounding music I know.

You probably have heard one song of Andina origin, though you may not have grasped this at the time: El Condor Pasa, sung by many but made most popular by Simon & Garfunkel. The Andean condor is, naturally, one of the emblematic birds of the Andes. If you heard it accompanied by a flute, that approximated the pan-flute or pan-pipes that punctuate so much Andina. The genre contains a lot of fingered strings (I’m no expert on the different types of guitarlike instruments), sometimes violin, moderate emphasis on drumming, and rapid changes of pacing. Rarely is it a cappella, less rarely is it purely instrumental; mostly it is both sung and played.

Andina groups I like include Ecuador Inkas, Nativo, Quichua Mashis, Savia Andina, Illapu, K’ala Marka and Los Kjarkas. It can be difficult to find for sale, so when I trip over an opportunity, I buy some.

If you’d like to give it a try, visit this video of K’ala Marka up on some ungodly height just tearing it up. In spite of the modern touches and enhancements, if you are anything like me, you will feel and hear something ancient. If I had to pick a song and setting that emblemized what I love about Andina, that one has it.

Blogging freelance editing, writing, and life in general. You can also Like my Facebook page for more frequent updates: J.K. Kelley, Editor.