Not a test

My wife Elaine and I had a wonderful time last night doing the "open mic" at Jackson Avenue Coffee. With her violin and my guitar, we did two songs from the 1930s--"Boulevard of Broken Dreams" and "On a Little Street in Singapore." (Two's the limit.)

As a musician, I'm mostly in the closet, so to speak, and sitting down to play in public has given me great angst (though I've played in public anyway). This time was different: my angst went on all afternoon, and while playing at JAC I felt amazingly relaxed. Elaine's a professional musician, so she understands what it's taken me a long time to figure out--that playing in public is not a test.

Elaine has written about the JAC audience on her blog, and I'll second what she says there: that it's a pleasure to play for people who are really listening, whether the music is familiar or not, whether the performers are vets or novices. And it's a pleasure to play and listen in a place that's designed on a human scale. We didn't even need microphones. Thank you, Jackson Avenue Coffee.

My version of Amish computing

Paul Ford's notion of "Amish computing" appeals strongly to me, especially in its emphasis on distraction-free writing. But I can't imagine going Amish exactly as Ford has. Using WordPerfect for DOS or getting an AlphaSmart device would only bring a new set of complications into my life.

My own modest attempt at "Amish computing" is focused on a simple alternative to Microsoft Word. Most of my writing begins with a legal pad or a pocket Moleskine and a fountain pen. But I do some composing at the keyboard, and always find the bells and whistles of Word annoying. I know that I can remove toolbars and rulers, and I long ago removed smart tags, automatic capitalization, and other doodads, but I prefer to get away from Word. For me, the program is just not conducive to writing. I object even to Word's black background for selected text, which leaves small-sized text looking ugly and pixelated.

So I worked out a distraction-free writing tool for Windows. I use Notepad2, Florian Balmer's free Notepad alternative. I like Alexander Davidson's metapad too, but the Notepad2 interface looks brighter and more in keeping with Windows XP. I also prefer Notepad2 because line height is adjustable, and I can avoid the cramped look of single-spaced text. Either of these programs is superior to the Notepad included with Windows. There are many free text editors available; you might prefer another.

To turn Notepad2 into my writing tool of choice, I added a free spellchecking script from PC911. This tiny script -- spell.vbs -- sends any text copied to the clipboard to the Microsoft Word spellchecker. I found spell.vbs mentioned in the LangaList, Fred Langa's excellent computing newsletter.

The Notepad2/spell.vbs writing tool appeals to me in much the same way that writing on a Palm with a portable keyboard once did--it's simple and free of complications. If I'm writing a blog post, I can do everything with this simple tool. And if I'm writing for print, I can open what I've written in Microsoft Word and make everything look pretty. For me, separating the work of composition from the work of layout makes it possible to write with far less distraction.

"[Y]ou just need to look more hard-working"

The e-mail exchanges between FEMA's Michael Brown and associates as New Orleans lay underwater make for fascinating, appalling reading. I've seen the following bit reproduced on-line only with the spelling and punctuation cleaned up. Here's what Sharon Worthy, Brown's press secretary, wrote to him on September 4:

Please roll up the sleeves of your shirt...all shirts. Even the President rolled his sleeves to just below the elbow.

In this crises [sic] and on TV you just need to look more hard-working...ROLL UP THE SLEEVES!

Ah, the culture of images: "you just need to look more hard-working." Now that this e-mail is out, will politicians and bureaucrats have to find some new way to look hard-working?

LINK: "'Can I quit now?' FEMA chief wrote as Katrina raged" (from CNN.com)

LINK: Katrina e-mails (a .pdf file from CNN.com)

"The Politics of Penguins"

From Andrew Sullivan's essay on The March of the Penguins, "The Politics of Penguins":

One of the chief campaigners against gay marriage, Maggie Gallagher, also hailed the film. "It is hard not to see the theological overtones in the movie," she wrote. "Beauty, goodness, love and devotion are all part of nature, built into the DNA of the universe. Even in the harshest place on the Earth (like 21st-century America?), love will not only endure, it will triumph." Love? Maybe it's because these beautiful creatures have the shape of Middle Americans, waddle amusingly, fall over occasionally and have heads on top of their bodies that we project our own needs and anxieties onto them. But we do so at our peril. Love, it turns out, has very little to do with the mating habits of the Emperor Penguin.

Sullivan's essay is useful reading for anyone tempted to find models for human conduct in the animal world. LINK: "The Politics of Penguins: A March to Nowhere" (from AndrewSullivan.com)

"This is your brain on e-mail"

A new twist on the now-familiar theme that multitasking makes you stupid:

Researchers asked two sets of subjects to take IQ tests. One group had to check e-mail and respond to instant messages while taking the test. The second group just sat down and did the test without distractions. Surprise, surprise, the distracted group didn’t do as well on the test--10 points worse than the control group. In similar testing conditions, people intoxicated by marijuana had scores 8 points lower. So researchers drew attention to their study by noting that multitasking is worse for your ability to concentrate than getting stoned.

LINK: "E-mail Making You Crazy?" from Discover (via Lifehacker)

Words in pixels

I tweaked a section of my post on how to e-mail a professor this weekend, for a reason that's interesting enough, I think, to note here. Before revision:

Avoid direct requests. They tend to sound more like orders in e-mail. For instance, "Please send me the next assignment." Even worse: "I need the next assignment." It's much better to ask a question: "Could you e-mail me with the page numbers for the next reading? Thanks."

After revision:

Ask politely. "Could you e-mail me the page numbers for the next reading? Thanks!" is a lot better than "I need the assignment."

Why the change? People who are linking to this post are often extracting the main points (in bold). Without the accompanying explanation, "Avoid direct requests" looks rather strange and counter-intuitive.

It's wonderful to contemplate the differences between words in print (amended by corrections that always stand at some distance from the original) and words in pixels.

The Torture Question

The Torture Question, from the PBS series Frontline, is available for online viewing.

I was just astonished to find that many of my students had never heard of Abu Ghraib--this link is for them, and for anyone else who wants it.

LINK: The Torture Question, from PBS's Frontline

Reality trumps the Onion

Reality trumps the Onion once again:

For years scientists at Philip Morris USA have studied how the human lung delivers a highly addictive chemical, nicotine, to the smoker's brain. Now, these same scientists are quietly laying plans to use their findings to enter, of all things, the business of treating illness.

A team of Philip Morris engineers and scientists is working on a new design for a hand-held inhaler to treat a variety of ailments, including smoking-related lung disease.

LINK: "Rx From Marlboro Man: Device That Delivers Drugs, Not Smoke" (Wall Street Journal, subscription required)

"Amish computing"

I'm getting so much spam. Hundreds of messages a day trying to seduce me by appealing to my darkest lusts and my greed. So I've gone back to basics. I stopped using my fancy word processor and installed WordPerfect for DOS, which was last updated about a decade ago, and which lets me type in gray letters on a blue screen without using any windows and without the need of a mouse. It never crashes. I also bought a little device called an AlphaSmart Neo, which is mostly sold to schools. The Neo is just a keyboard that stores text as you type it. It does nothing else. It doesn't tell the time or let me play games. It runs off of double-A batteries and the batteries last for hundreds of hours. Using the AlphaSmart and WordPerfect I've started to enjoy computing again. There is no Wikipedia, no email, no constantly changing the MP3s I'm listening to, no downloading going on. The spam still piles up but I'm not aware of it, because my email program is shut down until I want to send a message.

From an essay by Paul Ford, "Followup/Distraction." Having switched from Microsoft Word to Notepad2 for writing on the computer (as opposed to "wordprocessing"), I'm in strong sympathy with the idea of "Amish computing," as Ford calls it.

LINK: "My version of Amish computing" A related blog post

LINK: "Followup/Distraction" An essay by Paul Ford

LINK: "Are there 'good' distractions?" Further thoughts on distraction from Paul Ford: "I want to feel like I did something during my brief life besides check my email." [Via 43 Folders.]

Sanity and contemplation

David Levy, a University of Washington professor who studies high-tech communications and quality of life, acknowledges that the young have become adept at managing multiple sources of information at once, but he questions whether the ability to multitask has curbed their "ability to focus on a single thing, the ability to be silent and still inside, basically the ability to be unplugged and content."

"That's true for the whole culture," he said. "Most adults have a hard time doing that, too. What we're losing is the contemplative dimension of life. For our sanity, we need to cultivate that."

From a New York Times article with a slightly misleading title. David Levy's Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age is sitting in a stack of books I'm planning to read.

LINK: "Parents Fret That Dialing Up Interferes With Growing Up" (New York Times)

SEE ALSO: "Attention", "Multitasking makes you stupid"