Am I missing something? I've been to Underhill, Vt. It's less than an hour from Burlington. Which has a gorgeous waterfront on Lake Champlain. Into which the St. Lawrence River flows. From the Atlantic Ocean. Vermont may qualify as "landlocked," depending how you define the word, but you most certainly can get there by boat, and Captain Phillips could very well own a boat where he lives.

Tags: stupidity

I don't hate my iPhone because I don't have one. I have a Treo. The PalmOS is showing its age, and it doesn't synchronize that well with the Mac, so I've been thinking about replacing it, and the iPhones are awfully beautiful. And all the cool kids have one. Maybe I should reconsider, even if it meant leaving Verizon, the only mobile service provider I haven't hated with a passion?

Last month I needed to replace my iPod, so I bought an iPod Touch, which is basically an iPhone minus the phone, but with all other functionality including wi-fi connectivity. It's lovely and I like it very much, but I am very glad it's not my phone. I like plenty of things about it, but I don't need to add to the iPhone gushing. Instead, I now have some solid answers for everyone who says they are shocked I haven't rushed out to buy an iPhone.

( Why I Would Hate an iPhone If I'd Bought One )

There is a new version of the Treo out, but it's only available on Sprint at the moment. When the time comes to replace my current phone, I will most likely buy a Blackberry.

Tags: stupidity, tech

I am peripherally associated with the science fiction community and have been most of my life. As a teenage I was a typical "fan," going to conventions and subscribing to the magazines and idolizing people like Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein and Harlan Ellison. But people like that began to look a lot less admirable as I got older, and while I certainly retain some of the values I learned from them, I outgrew more of them. I still respect learning and science and wit, but I have long since outgrown Libertarianism, infantile put-downs, and the need to have an apocalyptic rant about everything.

As an adult, I have friends who are writers or editors or otherwise involved in the field. So I still spend time in that community, although it's been years since I've gone to a convention (the last one was the Night of the U Turns heading to Lunacon with bobhowe and I think that was nearly 20 years ago) or subscribed to any of the magazines. Bob and shunn are the main reasons I came back to the field; by reading magazine issues or anthologies they were published in, and reading the work of writers they recommended or knew, I discovered a new generation of great writers in the field.

But I've felt no desire to get more involved. Partially, things have changed since I was going to cons; in those days conventions were about writers and books and there were annoying "media conventions" for comic and movie fans. Now it seems that most conventions are what I would have called "media cons" and they actually have cons devoted to books and reading. I don't have time for gaming anymore, I can't keep a straight face in groups of people who took the Lord Of the Rings films seriously, and aside from Art Spiegelman, Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, and Marjane Satrapi, I've never had the patience for comics or "graphic novels."

It's also disturbing that some things haven't changed. SF was founded by white men. There were very few women in field and more than one of them, in the twentieth century, wrote under male names or ambiguous names, in order to be published. Alice Sheldon, for instance, was one of the best writers in the field in the 1970s and 1980s, but it was years before anyone knew she was the real person behind "James Tiptree Jr."

The field is also, for all intents and purposes, racially segregated. I didn't recognize it as a teenager; I lived in an apartheid society and accepted it as normal that my neighborhood and my schools were all white, that the music I heard on the radio was all white, that the characters on TV were either white or comical. (This was, by the way, in New York City, not South Africa or Alabama.) When I was young I believe there was only one nonwhite SF author in the field: Samuel R. Delany. When I was in high school a few others came along and somewhere after I stopped paying attention folks like Octavia Butler and Nalo Hopkinson started writing. The field is clearly more diverse now than it was 20 or 30 years ago, but its progress has been incremental and hard-fought, as progress in this area has been generally.

I'm writing all this because there's ben a huge ruckus in the community over something called "Racefail." I don't really understand what happened because I haven't had the stomach to read through all the links in that post; after one or two I gave up in disgust. I'm even disturbed by the term "racefail." Mostly it seems like the kind of white-on-white racial conversation that makes me want to bang my head against the wall. Angry self-righteous white liberals lob accusations at angry white conservatives, everyone calls each other racist, everyone presumes to speak for other people, and mostly people just harden their positions and congratulate themselves on them.

As a straight white guy I have spent lots of time in self-justifying straight white male communities that get angrily defensive when anyone questions their straight white maleness. I've also spent lots of time in self-righteous white liberal communities where we all congratulated ourselves on how nonracist we were. Mostly I try nowadays to avoid these communities altogether and instead associate with and support communities that behave in accordance with my values. I find that more effective than trying to be an angry change agent in communities that behave unpleasantly. It's more effective, and I'm happier.

As a straight white man I have the privilege of deciding when to engage with problems like this, and when to ignore them. If I were, say, a speculative fiction writer of color, I would have to choose between having to be an angry change agent in order to follow the vocation I'd chosen, or giving up something I loved because of the resistance I was meeting. That's an unfair choice for anyone to have to make.

Everyone in the community is responsible for how the community behaves and the way it is excluding people. And make no bones about it. People are being excluded, or the community would not look the way it does. I'm responsible too. I'm choosing to not engage in what to me is aggravating nonsense. But that POC SF writer has no choice but to engage in it, because to him or her, it is a challenge to his or her very existence.

We all have to choose our battles and I've obviously chosen otherwise. I am fully aware of the privilege that allows me to make that choice. Everyone in the community should be aware of the privileges they have, and how they are exercising them, because you are always exercising your privileges. Even just by choosing to live your life and do what you do the way you want to, without worrying about these kinds of issues, you are exercising privilege. Be aware of how you are exercising it, and don't deny that you are, every minute of your life.

I'm a straight white guy. It's not that I have no dog in this fight, because I do; there are writers I'd love to be reading, and people I'd love to hear from, who are being suppressed by racism and other forms of bigotry. I am more likely to buy books, attend readings, or otherwise support writers who come from outside the mainstream. I do that because I like that kind of work and because I want to support their efforts to be heard. I will not buy books by people whose views I find offensive (sorry, Orson, but all those books of yours on my shelf were bought used). As much as I love Tolkien or CS Lewis, I won't let anyone discuss their books without questioning the disgusting passages in them.

But I'm not going to try to speak for people who are perfectly capable of speaking for themselves. If there are communities of writers working to change the composition of the field or to broaden what's discussable within it or challenging the sick stereotypes still so prevalent in SF, I'd like to know who they are, so I can buy their work and pay more attention. Again, I'd rather do that than yell at a bunch of people who clearly don't want to listen anyway. I would be grateful for any pointers to SF communities that I would enjoy supporting.

(Edit: I am grateful for the thoughtful posts and links to non-bicker reading, but at this point, the boorish commenters have sufficiently confirmed my lack of interest in getting too involved with this community or this debate. So comments are now screened. I will unscreen anything that's not rude.)

(Another Edit: Thanks to those who have suggested some good reading. I've unscreened the comments that were not rude, and corrected one serious error in my original post.)

Tags: politics, sf, stupidity

Facebook's recent changes to its terms of service, which now claim ownership of content you upload even if you cancel your account, are parodied in "Property Of Facebook," my latest song for February Album Writing Month. The situation is probably not as bad as it sounds (see http://blogs.computerworld.com/facebook_tos for some good discussion) but sober reflection should be no impediment to parody. Or continued use of a tremolo harmonica.

Tags: songs, stupidity

So yesterday I dropped into the Best Buy on Sixth Avenue and 23rd Street to see if I could pick up a CD for my mom. (I couldn't -- neither they nor two other stores had a copy of the Grammy-winning Raising Sand; if you can't buy the album that swept the Grammy three days after the ceremony, you know things are bad for the CD industry.)

Anyway, they had a game system set up with Guitar Hero ready to play and a kid or young guy (16? 18? 20? Who can tell these days?) was playing. He was pretty damn good and I watched a while and we started talking and he invited me to try it. So I picked up the other controller and set it to "beginner" and we did some heavy metal song I'd never heard. The "beginner" level is basically just strumming in time, which took me a while to master because the controller feels so weird; it's nothing like strumming a real guitar.

I got the hang of it, more or less, and we moved on to "Easy" in which I played the rhythm line for a Billy Idol song while he played the lead. Guitar Hero is an unforgiving game. If you really suck, the song stops, your character's guitar drops onto the stage, and Billy Idol gives you a disgusted wave of the hand. It was funny but after a few of them we shook hands and I went looking for my CD.

I'm a reasonably good guitar player, especially for basic rhythm, but I found it quite difficult to play the game. First of all the controller feels and works nothing like a guitar so I had to keep looking at the "neck" to make sure my fingers were on the right buttons. Second, it did not seem that what I did with the controller actually made any music. If I hit a note early or late or hit the wrong button I didn't hear a wrong note. The screen would give me visual response, but I don't want that. I'm playing music. How can you learn to play music if your hands aren't making it? It was like playing with earplugs in and someone flashing lights to tell you if you got the note right.

Most importantly, I wasn't playing the music; it was playing me. Your role in Guitar Hero is to match the notes on the screen as accurately as possible; basically you are a human player piano reading the game's music roll. You don't have any opportunity to experiment, to find things that work, to try something, get feedback, and try it again. You are not learning to play music. You are learning to press buttons. The fact that the controller is shaped like a guitar is incidental. You could just as easily be pressing the A S D F keys with your left hand while banging on the space bar of a computer keyboard.

The kid was pretty much perfect, and said that he did play guitar -- level hand, palm down, rocking back&forth. I told him the game can't but help, but I was being nice. What I wanted to say was that if you'd put as much time into your guitar as you did into this game you would have a real word to express your playing level.

I fundamentally do not understand the game, and I can't think of anything I'm missing. Video games usually allow you to do something you can't or shouldn't do in real life -- race cars, fly fighter planes, kill dragons, steal cars. But why simulate something you could do perfectly well in real life? I mean, there are plenty of music-minus-one CDs where you can play along with the greats, and if someone hasn't already done it, a MIDI version of that game is entirely possible, in which you would play a real guitar and make real music and still get to see Billy Idol pump his fist during your solo.

Maybe I'm a curmudgeon about video and computer games. I never, ever play them, but not because I don't enjoy them. I avoid them because they're too addictive and too physically damaging; if I'm going to injure my hands and wrists I'd like to do it for better reasons than a high score. But even if I had infinite time and 18-year-old hands I still don't think I'd have any interest in playing this game. Especially not since it would be taking away time I could spend on really learning the instrument.

Tags: stupidity

I doubt I'll watch the debate ludicrously contrived political spectacle tonight, but I had an idea for a drinking game. You drink if Sarah Palin:

• correctly pronounces the name of a country or foreign leader
• correctly describes a policy of the current president
• cites any concrete examples to support her descriptions of McCain
• correctly names and descrbes a Supreme Court decision

Practicing Mormons could play that one.

Tags: politics, stupidity

Here's how we count people on the Upper East Side:

The three of us reached the Park Avenue median at 76th Street just as the light was changing. The older gentleman approached slowly from the west, using a cane. The older lady approached from the east, being pushed in a wheelchair by an attendant.

The attendant, of course, is not one of "us" and therefore there are only "three of us," not four. (From today's "Metropolitan Diary" feature in The New York Times, which always says more about the city than I think the Times intends it to.)

Tags: nyc, stupidity

On a crowded rush-hour IRT local, I said to this woman, "You're going to hurt someone with that thing," pointing to the six-inch hatpin with a sharp tip protruding at eye-level from her hat.

"I've been told that several times today," she said with a bright smile. "It's an antique." And she went back to reading her tourist map.

Tags: stupidity, subways

I still found that calls regularly broke up on some major streets. In New York City, riding in a taxi along the Hudson, one important call was dropped three times on the new iPhone. Finally, I borrowed a cheap Verizon phone and got perfect reception.

-- Walt Mossberg in The Wall Street Journal today.

There are so many other reasons, but above all, it's a phone! I'm no fan of Verizon but I have never had calls dropped like that in the middle of New York City. Well, not since I was an AT&T customer years ago, when you couldn't make calls anywhere near Penn Station....

Tags: stupidity

A museum for the car's most annoying feature.

Tags: stupidity

Does anyone know why organic eggs are increasingly packaged in these ridiculous plastic containers, that are not only unrecyclable petroleum-based products, not only wasteful (there are three pieces rather than the usual two, with a third inside cover over the eggs after you open the top), but also so flimsy that if you pick it up by one end eggs will fall out of the other?

I refuse to buy them, and today had to opt for the standard brown eggs in the standard recyclable (and recycled) cardboard container shown on the left.

Tags: stupidity

Is Diane Keaton doing the menu for Au Bon Pain? (Shudder.)

Tags: stupidity

I'm in Hershey, PA, for a conference, and am astonished to find that there is a such thing as Too Much Chocolate. You smell it everywhere. The streetlights are shaped like Hershey's Kisses. You get a chocolate bar when you check in. More Kisses on the room-number plaques. And the wallpaper (see photo). I think it would be dangerous to bring M&Ms to this town....

Tags: stupidity, travel

Today's FAWM song is "Plastic Bags," a song I've wanted to write for some time. There are plenty of examples of wasteful excess in American culture, but few more ludicrous than carrying a box of plastic trash bags home in a plastic grocery bag that you're going to wad up and throw out in one of the new trash bags you just bought.

(Oh, and here's the article in The New York Times that got me writing this morning.)

Tags: songs, stupidity

So just after writing a few friends who'd written me FunWall notes (which I won't read, because to do so you have to install the application and I've been down that road already), I got a "challenge" from a friend to take the Princess Bride trivia test in Flixster (which I actually have installed and like, or at least, I used to like it). I took the quiz and submitted it before I noticed that there was a checkbox to "Send quiz to your friends," so once again, I was tricked into spamming people.

But it gets better. After I finish the quiz, it refused to show me my score unless I sent more spam to at least five friends.



This is not Facebook's doing, it's the morons who wrote this application. But they need to improve their monitoring of how third-party applications work.

Tags: stupidity

I was amused to note that in trying to submit a rebate for some new Apple equipment I bought, an error message came up clearly indicating that the site is running on a Microsoft .NET server. The site is most likely run by a third-party rebate-processing company, but it's still amusing. Especially since it didn't work.



(And how annoying is the whole ridiculous rebate process, anyway? I bought all the equipment at the Apple store, so they already know I qualify, so the only reason they didn't take the price off the total at checkout was the hope that I'd forget to file the rebate or fail to follow all their rules correctly.)

Tags: stupidity

I joined Facebook a few months ago, to keep up with some friends and colleagues who aren't part of the other social networks I belong to, and to keep abreast of social networking in general, which interests me professionally. Each of the networks I belong to has a purpose: LJ is a blogging platform and a way to keep up with friends who blog regularly and to whom I'm close enough to share fairly intimate details of my life; its filtering capabilities allow me to have concentric rings of friends who see different levels of detail. Myspace is strictly for music networking, and works quite well for that purpose despite its horrendous user interface.

Facebook filled a gap: it let me keep abreast of people who don't blog or to whom I am not close enough to want to share detailed blog entries. It's the best way for me to keep up with my many former colleagues, and its telegraphic style makes it possible to actively watch a very long friends list.

Or, it used to. Facebook has gotten increasingly problematic. Even though I have set my preferences to the contrary, my news feed is filling up with so much spam and crap that I miss significant updates (like new photos) by friends from whom I really want to see updates. I turned off email notifications because the vast majority of them were notes not from friends, but from applications my friends had installed. I mostly ignore those requests, but I was becoming increasingly puzzled by the amount of spam I was getting. Had all of my otherwise rational friends suddenly turned into junk-mail-forwarders?

I decided to accept a few requests and see what was going on. I went through eleven screens to read a one-line Christmas card message from one person, tried to return a thrown snowball to someone else (and after ten or twelve screens gave up entirely), and tried to share music through iLike. None of these applications worked properly, and all of them did their best to trick me into spamming everyone in sight. I've documented my interaction with one particularly deceptive application below, but this is pretty much standard behavior for most third-party Facebook applications. It is very difficult to install these applications without spamming your friends; they mislead or tell outright lies in order to get you to do so, and in this case, even ignoring it entirely won't help.

( No fun with FunWall )

So, to my Facebook friends, it's not that I don't appreciate your sending me gifts and cards and attacking me with your werewolf. I'm up for a snowball fight anytime you want to come over (assuming we get some snow). But I won't be accepting any more of these invitations.

Tags: stupidity, tech

Especially at this time of year, the word "airport" generally brings to mind long waits, obnoxious staff, pointless routines, and frustration. This is true, apparently, in networking as well as in travel. "Airport" is Apple's brand name for its wireless networking products. Last week, I bought a new wireless router, an "Airport Extreme Base Station," and two "Airport Express" units, small boxes that plug into the wall and let you stream music wirelessly, or connect a computer, or share a printer.

I am a Mac lover. I've been using Macs since the original 128, and now that they're Unix machines, I wouldn't use anything else. But that doesn't mean I'm a fan of Apple, and the past week has been a painful lesson in the value of open standards versus sleek proprietary hardware.

I won't bore you with the details of my wireless setup nightmare, but trying to get these devices working was like trying to instruct Dubya on the finer points of foreign policy. A pointless exercise in frustration, trying to find the nonexistent substance underneath the slick exterior.

Apple's sleek designs are increasingly user-unfriendly. The Airport devices are nearly featureless, with the only status indicator a single unlabeled light. Green means working, and other than that, you need to look in the book to figure out the code. Blinking amber means "unable to connect," according to the book, although in my experience it actually meant "unable and unwilling to connect, either now or at any point in the future, so go away and leave me alone." The reset button doesn't.

The devices were unusually sensitive to interference from cordless phones and other devices. Once a connection was interrupted, it was almost impossible to re-establish without completely reconfiguring the devices from scratch. Configuration can only be done with Apple's software, which is next to impossible to figure out if the standard-setup wizard isn't appropriate for your situation. Apple's support staff is arrogant, yet clueless; at one moment they insist that the device is incapable of doing something that it's already doing, and at the next, give completely contradictory instructions on how to get it to do something else.

I finally got rid of the whole setup, and replaced it with a couple of Linksys devices for half the price. I can't stream music wirelessly, but you know what? I'd rather run a cable; it's less work and less frustration and will work reliably.

I am increasingly skeptical of Apple's hardware skills and more importantly the philosophy behind everything they do; the iPod at least has the virtue of working flawlessly and being vastly superior to any competing device (at least until the battery runs out) but in this case the Linksys equipment is far superior, even if it doesn't look quite as slick. And if it has fewer features, well, at least they all work. I held off buying an iPhone mainly because AT&T's network is so inferior to Verizon's, but I'm not sure I'd buy an iPhone at this point even if it were made for Verizon's network. Maybe I'll wait for the Google phone.

Tags: stupidity, tech

The New York Times published a disgraceful and very short-sighted article in Friday's paper, describing how to see live music in the city without paying for it. The writer visited great NYC music spots, clubs that I've seen both good friends and great stars in -- the Rodeo Bar, the old-time jam at Freddy's Bar and Backroom here in Brooklyn, Hill Country -- and proudly says that he spent only $30 for 27 sets of music at 22 clubs. "Waitresses and tip jars can be avoided, if you can bear the guilt," he says.

Read that again. This miserable little tightwad is proud of the fact that he sat down in a club whose owners are probably working their asses off trying to keep their heads above water, and are booking live bands out of the love of it, because they could make a lot more money hiring a DJ or installing a karaoke system. And he's proud of the fact that he makes their lives a little harder, and makes it a little more possible they'll give up and close down and we'll lose another live music venue.

And he talks up all these great local bands, great local musicians who are playing for the love of it and hoping that the tip bucket covers a cab ride home so they don't have to haul two guitars and an amplifier on the subway, and he's proud that he didn't put any money in. I wonder how all those musicians felt reading that article in Friday's paper?

If enough people follow his advice, there will be no music to see in the city. As it is, I've lost count of the great live music venues that have closed down. I wonder if he got paid for his article, or if the Times has figured out how to stiff writers out of their checks?

Tags: media, music, stupidity

Thanks to the overwhelming hysteria about Facebook's new "Beacon" program -- the one that sends information about what you buy at certain web sites to your profile -- it has been difficult or impossible to find any facts about how it actually works. So I did a little experimenting this morning.

First, I went to Amazon and bought a CD by the Carter Family, one I'd been meaning to buy for a while. I was already logged into Facebook. Nothing about my purchase showed up on Facebook.

Then I went to epicurious.com, and created a new account, using the same email address I use for Facebook. This is important; I use site-specific email addresses normally, so the email address I use at Amazon is different from the one I use at Facebook. As soon as I finished the account creation process, an Ajax popup came and went very quickly at the bottom of the screen. And when I went to Facebook, I had this in my personal news feed:



Nothing appeared in my public news feed, thanks to the changes Facebook made after the outcry I suppose. I clicked "Remove" and that was the end of that.

So the answer to the question I've been asking for more than a week ("How does Facebook know?") is not magic, it's not cookies, it's just a simple matching of email addresses on your various accounts. And at this point, I have no problem with what they're doing, since they placed a big honking notice at the top of my personal feed telling me what they were going to do, and requiring me to click "Okay" before they did it. Which I did not, so my privacy remains intact.

I gather that the original version of the program would have placed that notice in my public feed and required me to remove it. That is, indeed, unacceptable behavior, and much worse than what I had originally thought htey were doing. But to my mind they've sufficiently addressed the issue, and it's nice to see that public pressure can accomplish something.

In addition, it's a lesson once again that the less you spread around your email address, the better off you'll be. Using site-specific email addresses has saved me a tremendous amount of spam (I know who's sending it, and can turn off or ignore the address) but it also has a privacy benefit as well.

Tags: stupidity, tech