UNDERDOG of PERFECTION

I used to spend a lot of time on deep thoughts. Or at least, what I thought was deep at the time. When you’re in high school and college, you have lots of time, more than you can possibly realize. Gradually it dawns on you that your time isn’t so infinite, but by then it’s being squeezed in both directions… it’s running out and filling up simultaneously.

As I’ve gotten older (now unequivocally in my “mid-30s”), I’ve come to see the world in ways I could never have understood when I sat around indulging my erstwhile sophistry. But the opportunities to really explore my own thoughts are almost nonexistent, occurring mainly while sitting on the toilet (the fortress of solitude) or sitting up in a caffeine-induced zombie state in the middle of the night after the kids have — finally — gone to bed. (Right now it’s the latter, in case you’re curious and/or grossed out.)

Every stage in life seems to pose its own challenges, and presently for me it seems to be about finding a way to just slow the whole damn world down for a second and catch my breath. There’s a precarious balance in your 30s, where the wisdom of age has at long last begun to crack its way through your impenetrable cranium, yet you still have enough youth and health to get out there and do something with it. If only you weren’t consuming 99.999% (give or take a thousandth) of your time and energy on the mind-numbing banality of driving to work or sitting through pointless meetings or trying to keep the kids from eating plastic toys or cutting their own hair.

Are we humans or hamsters? Sometimes I’m not so sure. When we spend our days sitting in a little box, endlessly engaging in routine tasks as pointless as running around a little wheel, sipping at our water bottles and taking our food in pellet form (well, some of it might as well be), it’s hard to see much difference.

It doesn’t have to be that way, of course, but we get into the groove (or is it a rut?), bear down, and charge ahead without really looking around us. After nearly a decade of fairly anonymous apartment dwelling, SLP and I finally settled into a real house in a real neighborhood nearly four years ago, but it still took until this summer, and another looming (although ultimately scuttled) relocation for us to really make a connection with our neighbors.

More and more these days I’m starting to see the third dimension of strangers. It’s kind of like shattering the ancient understanding of the cosmos. I used to see the world with myself in the middle, the small group of people who really mattered to me (first my parents, then school friends, later SLP and now our kids too) orbiting in their perfect spheres, and finally on the outer sphere the vast array of everyone else — tiny, immobile pinpoints of light. Of course it hasn’t taken me 34 years to realize the world doesn’t revolve around me (regardless of what SLP might tell you to the contrary), but it can still be incredibly difficult to process the depth that exists in every face you pass by day after day.

When you’re a kid, everything is new. Every person you meet, every experience you have, is something that’s never happened before. There’s no history, for you or anyone else. (And since so many of the people you know are also kids, that’s a literal truth.) But one of the great things about meeting “new” people as you get older is that each person is a walking vessel of history, overflowing with interesting stories and storied interests.

Everything can change in an instant. Somewhere, for someone, it is. Right now. Babies are born. Grandparents die. People fall in love, others get divorced. Most of the time, these things aren’t happening to us or the people we know. And so for a long stretch, maybe from 18 to 34 (is that why the demographics are broken down that way?), it’s easy to feel invincible, even as our knowledge to the contrary becomes ever more acute. I’m on that line now, statistically poised to enter the next phase of life, and the cracks are showing. That long, smooth (well, not always so smooth, but definitely long) stretch of road is coming to an end. I see the curves ahead, but I don’t yet know where they’ll take me, take us.

For now, the best we can do is embrace the moment, and brace for the next.

No, I’m not talking about fat ladies singing, I’m talking about the most marginal web browser that somehow manages to keep hanging on. I guess it has a niche with certain non-traditional devices. (It’s the web browser on the Wii for instance.) But I don’t know anyone who has ever used it regularly on a computer, and I also don’t know anyone who still has it installed, just as a curiosity (or even more justifiably, for testing purposes).

Yet, someone at Apple must love Opera. I just got a new MacBook and I’m presently going through the ritual of tweaking settings so, for instance, all of the web-type files (.html, .php, .js, .css, etc. and no that last one isn’t a filename extension) open in my text editor of choice — which at present is TextWrangler, the free version of BBEdit. I’ve used BBEdit for years when my employers were buying it for me, but now that I’m on my own, I took a careful look at the feature set comparison chart between the two, realized that I rarely, if ever, used any of the features that BBEdit had but TextWrangler didn’t, and decided that it was ridiculous to pay $125 for features I don’t use, when I could get the ones I do use for free. So there you have it.

All of which has nothing to do with the reason I’m writing this today. My point is, as I was going about the business of telling Mac OS X to use TextWrangler for these file types, instead of opening .html files in Safari, .php files in Dreamweaver (which I only have because it came with CS3), and .js and .css files in Dashcode, I noticed in the list of possible applications not one but two versions of Opera. Neither of which (I verified) is installed on my Mac. So what the hell are they doing in the list? For one of the file types, the only options it offered were the two Opera versions plus TextWrangler. WTF?

Although I had for the past several years been an unabashed devotee of the iTunes Store (it’s Apple, after all), lately I’ve been finding myself buying more and more of my digital music on Amazon MP3 instead. Why? Let me enumerate the ways:

1. No DRM. (OK, surprisingly enough that one doesn’t really matter to me that much, but I definitely prefer not having DRM.)
2. Higher quality. iTunes does have “iTunes Plus” which, at 256 kbps AAC, is higher quality than Amazon’s 256 kbps MP3. But 256 kbps MP3 beats 128 kbps AAC, and it’s not tied to Apple. (Again, not that I care on the last point.)
3. Cheaper. Yes, cheaper! Almost always! Individual tracks are sometimes 89 cents instead of 99 cents, but I usually buy the whole album, and so far I’ve found that if the album has less than 10 tracks, they almost always just charge the per-track price instead of $9.99. Sometimes it can be a lot cheaper, such as when I downloaded the remastered version of Bitches Brew for $7 instead of $20!
4. Selection. Early on Amazon’s selection was paltry, but I’ve been finding more and more obscure ’70s stuff lately, such as what I sought out tonight: the first two Greenslade albums. Well, OK, I just looked on iTunes and they have them both now too, for the same price… but at the lower bit rate.

OK, I hope it’s not as pathetic as Navin Johnson, but UPS just delivered my new order of CDs from Kunaki. I ordered five more copies of ÷0, three more copies of Unnatural Disasters, plus twelve copies of my latest, Mellotronic: Far Out Sounds! (And Other Space-Age Hyperbole).

I have to say, Mellotronic turned out pretty well. I’m really proud of the design on this one.

Granted, this is probably four, two, and eleven copies, respectively, more than I’ll ever actually need but, you know, positive thinking. (And right now there are more commas in that sentence than potential buyers of my music. No, Scott… think positive[ly].)

The upshot is that now you have an additional option for purchasing these albums (since I know you want to! [positive])… you can order the CDs from Kunaki, download them (some of them, anyway), or you can buy them directly from me, if you happen to be within a several-foot radius of where I currently am.

Sweet.

I’ve been a full-time freelancer for about 6 weeks now, and one of the challenges an independent worker faces is tracking time, most notably for the purpose of being able to bill clients for it! My business isn’t big yet, and the number of projects I’m working on is easily manageable with a few text files and a little dedicated mental real estate, so I don’t have a formal tracking system set up yet.

Since I’m a web developer, and in particular since I’m looking for opportunities to work more with frameworks (most specifically CakePHP), my intention at the outset was to devote my first couple of weeks to building my own feature-rich project tracking web app, but the real projects started piling on more quickly than I expected, and within a couple of days I had to set that project aside.

Today I was thinking more about keeping myself organized, so I took a few minutes to research pre-built, web-based (so I can work with them both on my iPhone and my computer) time tracking tools. I still haven’t found the ideal solution, but I did find a radically different approach that I find extremely compelling, especially since I already have a couple of buckets of Legos on my desk. Unfortunately I also have a couple of kids who are frequently in close proximity, and the risk of inadvertent data tampering is just too great for me to use this method myself.