There are so many things that I could write right now; the difficulty lies in selecting just the right thing. To the observer this would seem similar to my behavior of weeks previous. Jeffrey sits at his desk, staring at the page in front of him. But there is a marked difference. Previously, I was summoning from the void, attempting conjuring up an idea from the depths.

Now. Now I am not starting, I am considering. I am a sculptor, in front of a slab of marble, mind aflame, thousands of future forms flickering. I am considering, waiting for the true form of the stone to speak, waiting for the moment of clarity. I am discriminating.

In a way, it’s all too much. I find myself despairing that I do not possess the tools or skills of conveyance, that my senses will not be fine enough to work the taste and texture of my feeling into something that can be appreciated, let alone understood.

I despair, but I will not be afraid to try. I close my eyes, and lose myself, and let the thought rise. A memory long forgotten that might give body to the intangible, that may give a voice to a feeling beyond the scope of explanation. Rather than a hollow, uninteresting history of events, this memory is the essence of that feeling, and as such might serve.

It is night. A boy lies on his back, staring at the night sky that he has only truly seen for the first time. He is in West Texas on a camping trip, a simulation of a cattle drive. But this does not matter to the boy, nor do the biting mosquitos or the unfamiliar smell of horses; all that matter are the millions upon millions of stars above him, projected upon a cloudless, pitch-black sky, miles from any light. Tucked into his sleeping bag, he sees the sees the endless sea of twinkling lights.

For hours he gazes up. Shooting stars dance in front of him, planets glide through the heavens, constellations gleam. He is in awe; though he wonders if he oughtn’t seem small and insignificant, he doesn’t. He feels right, like he belongs, though he does not understand why. Head full of questions which do not have answers, he slowly closes his eyes and drifts off to sleep, dreaming of an ocean of stars.

Taken June 28, Boston North End.

I know days like these, with every fiber of my being. The details are unclear, but it will be a good day. Not because I wish it to be so, but because sometimes days are good.

Most days contain mysteries, and it is hard to know exactly what will be revealed. Every day an adventure! Other days promise resolution, or at the very least exposition. Oftentimes they don’t deliver on their promise, but they are days where one can wake up and truthfully say, eyes clear, “Today, something will happen.”

These days are the downbeats. They are the beginning of bars, both the start of something new and a direct result of what came before. Everything before creates the energy, the drive to them, and everything after shimmers with the aftereffects. One can’t place a downbeat out of context; it is made special only by its relationships and placement.

This is a mystery of music. Every bar is in itself a reproduction in miniature of the cycles which make up our lives. The explosion of harvest; the lull of winter; the promise of spring; the anticipation of summer, yielding again to another harvest. 1 2 3 4, and 1 again. Every four beats, a lifetime.

Of course, life isn’t in many ways as predictable as that; harvests go bad, winters are mild, accidents happen. But on the wide view, these are ripples, twists that reinforce the regularity of the cycles rather than deny them. So it is with music; syncopations and other rhythmic and harmonic elements serve to break the predictability of the cycle, while at the same time reinforcing it. Even in music which has no regularity, the human ear generally works very hard at imposing them anyway. We are creatures of cycle, and the things we create reflect us, just as we reflect those things that nurtured us.

This is, of course, very long winded rumination, but it is days like this that cause me to reflect on exactly why it is good, and why I deserve these things when there is so much going on in the world and in my life that would perhaps suggest otherwise.

After an unnaturally long period of weather that could have passed itself off as the tail end of Winter, Summer arrived with a vengeance this week, a few days after the solstice. My guess is that it’s not all that hot, but rather that it’s been such a long time since it’s been hot.

Not surprisingly the heat has left me in a rather languid, wilting state. The past two evenings I curled up on the couch and meandered my way through the literary sensation that was Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Watching Harry angst so realistically was a pleasant escape from the fiery furnace outside.

In the coming weeks I’m sure to acclimatize, and am most certainly looking forward to the allotment of beautiful days apportioned to us in New England.

Another day, another dollar, or something like that.

Sitting here, coffee in hand, brooding over a blank page, a jackhammer fires up, ripping through the 7:45 am air. The thought of writing about how much I despise jackhammers comes to mind, but I dismiss it, as it would be preaching to the choir.

My office has been located virtually on top of Boston’s Big Dig since I began working there over two years ago, and I’ve had my share of jackhammers, steamrollers, cranes, drills, and other things capable of loud noises and occasional structural vibration. I’ve fantasized many a time about stricter urban noise pollution law, as the differing level of animosity and strain Downtown with and without the chorus of heavy machinery and their Futurist symphonies is very real. But, it seems, few people think about sound like that.

In the end though, this is what happens when people live together. We have to suffer, on some level, the stereos bleeding through the ceiling, the shrill cry of angry children from the playground down the block, couples quarreling as they walk, the blaring of air horns after certain sporting events, the wail of the ambulance siren, and every now and then, a jackhammer.

I have resumed my running schedule, albeit a bit more conservatively given the trauma my foot endured as a result of my exuberant first attempt. After sitting out for three weeks, I slipped on my shoes and stepped outside, legs limber and eager. Like a wine connoisseur tasting his first bottle of wine in years, my body responded and I filled with energy and fire.

The initial challenge of running for a period of time has been met; my circuit is a bit over four miles, which I can complete without issue. Now, it becomes a matter of being able to do it four times a week for many weeks in a row. It must become both a habit (which will be harder to do I fear given the false start) and a habit that my aging body is able to bear. As the podiatrist said, I’m not 18 any more.

Stepping inside after a muggy evening run, dripping with sweat, I was a bemused to find myself stuck with a wide and silly grin for nearly a quarter of an hour. It’s good to be back, and now it is time to maintain fitness and strength, and build from there.

The trip to the Apple store was a success and I am now sporting a brand spanking new iSight. Mounted to the back of the studio display, it is both smaller, more stylish and much higher quality than its Fire-i successor. Hopefully this will be the end of the web camera saga.

Who watches the watcher?

The Apple keynote today was something else. I believe that the announcement of iSight will have me returning my Fire-i to the shop, as it looks to be a much better solution, not to mention more elegant. Panther looks to further improve the OS, and will be more than welcome when it ships in September.

As for the star of the show, the new G5 PowerMacs, well, they look magnificent. My dual GHz PowerMac G4 is already plenty fast for what I do, but I can’t help but feel a twinge of jealousy by those specifications. It’s nice to see though that Apple has taken the threat of technical antiquation seriously, and with this new line launch I can rest knowing that when it’s time to put Madam X out to pasture, a shiny new 64-bit computer will be waiting for me.

Being a tinkerer and builder by trade, I tend to customize my systems thoroughly, making them fit with my workflow. At work, for development I use a Happy Hacker Keyboard, which befuddles any other soul who dares use my keyboard. When I was actively using Linux, I had a minimal window manager, Blackbox, from which I could do just about anything from the keyboard.

I’ve been using Apple computers for almost a year and a half now. Apple employs a host of User Interface specialists, and their feedback has a direct influence on how the system is organized and designed. This is one of the reasons for the price premium, and one of the reasons for the mighty zeal of its users. When I began my experiment with OS X, I decided to deliberately wait on customization, instead observing and learning from the system itself, making modifications based on the spots that wear against my routine.

After a year and a half, there is very little I’ve changed, which speaks for its flexibility and ease of use. The things I have added have been added without complaint by the operating system. I’ve found that there are a few applications that I can’t imagine working without, applications that don’t come pre-installed. They have all filled an important niche in my workflow.

Without further ado, a summary of the seven most used non-Apple applications, excluding audio/visual software, as they require their own workflow.

Keyboard Maestro

This is the first thing I miss using any other computer. I use it to navigate through commonly used applications with keystrokes, but it has a cadre of other features. Being able to do this allows me to cut down on a vast amount of mousing, saving my arm wear and tear.

Hydra

Hydra fills the space between emacs and TextEdit, and does it with class. Syntax highlighting and line numbering make it fantastic for code. The collaborative features are snazzy, though I don’t use them often. While I don’t use it for long writing or coding, when I need to quickly see or edit, it’s the choice. The ability for it to work through FTP makes it easy to change static pages on this site.

Proteus

I was very hesitant to stop using iChat, the client that was bundled with OS X. What led me to proteus was a friend who was on another service than AIM. Proteus is elegant, displays all of my messages in a single window, and features non-obtrusive notification of new messages. The newest version has a few kinks in it, but even so has quickly become a favorite.

Net News Wire

This is an application that I wouldn’t have thought I needed. It’s a news aggregator, which goes through a list of sites that I check regularly and alerts me when there is new news. Having the news brought to me means that I can stay on top of more things in significantly less time; my news trawl was reduced from an hour or more to just a few minutes a day.

MacJournal

I am writing this in MacJournal — most any writing (not code) that requires more than five minutes is written in MacJournal. It has a remarkably clever way of organizing text files analogous to tangible notebooks, and its support for strong encryption means that I can quickly jot down things that should remain hidden (like passwords) and be confident that once I quit or lock it, are not going to accidentally be seen.

Kung-Log

Kung-Log implements blogging interfaces, allowing a user to post to a variety of journals (including my own, Movable Type) without ever seeing HTML or a browser. I tend to write and edit my posts in MacJournal, and using the magic of Apple Services (which would require its own post), import the text into Kung-Log where I preview and post. I could do all of the work in Kung-Log, as it has exactly the same text editing features as MacJournal (again, thanks to Apple’s integrated spellcheck, find/replace, etc.), but it generally doesn’t work out that way.

Pester

Pester is delightfully simple. It’s a program that lets you set a simple alarm for a particular time, and then pops up a window when that time has arrived. I use to make sure that my coffee doesn’t steep for too long, that I check on the soup, make sure I don’t spend too long writing or composing, and for a host of other things. For a scatterbrain such as myself, it’s a dream come true.

Yes, there is internet access at the laundromat.

My mission to acquire a dedicated webcam was a success, and now I have a wee Fire-i perched upon my second monitor. Huzzah.

The mystery at work has been solved. A minor change in the build environment caused a portion of the code to be compiled using an older version of a library, which was incompatible with the newer library included with the product; sadness ensued. Tracing the source of the problem took the better part of three days, and was corrected in a matter of seconds. Such is the way of code at times.

It felt good to arrive at the root of the problem. A solution formed without firm understanding the problem is perhaps workable, but not satisfying. This is also the way of code. In software there is the possibility that problems can identified and ameliorated, objects of influence disempowered, solutions tested, lessoned learned and documented for the future.

In the complex asynchronous system that is living, there is no such guarantee. We are buffeted by the influences others exert; we set out our own, often never knowing the results. We observe and we act, and if we are so fortunate as to discover the source of woe, there is rarely a simple way to rectify things.

She says: Are you investigating the chance this is an inside job?

He says: If we’re all in this together all jobs are inside jobs.

The morning mail brought me my third copy of Robert Ashley’s Perfect Lives (the other two having been lost or loaned). Along with Glass’ Einstein on the Beach, these two works have had the deepest and most complex effect on me. Both works are very intricate and obfuscated, but in different ways. Finishing either leaves me feeling that something has happened, but exactly how and why is hard to say. It’s the closest to being in love I’ve been, musically speaking.

At its root, Perfect Lives is a three hour poem with background music and a chorus in the Grecian sense. At first, all one gets is the pleasant stream of Robert Ashley’s voice, his comforting asymmetrical cadence. There is very little meaning to be found. The story is relatively simple, but before it is recounted, it is shattered into myriad pieces and rearranged in no particular order. I’ve listened to it over fifty times, I’d wager, and every time I discover something new. Meaning and understanding grows slowly and organically.

There is much to be said about the piece, structural, and visually (the opera was designed for television, each movement has a particular geometric element that all shots have in common, etc), but I don’t think that all of that is required to make it compelling.

In a delightfully morose instance of probability in action, The mini-DV camera in the studio decided that it was time to stop working. It turns on, but refuses to display anything but black — I think it is depressed. The repair negotiations will begin soon, which I am not looking forward to, but is a part of electronic ownership, and I shall not shirk from my duty.

It’s a fancy piece of equipment to be used as a webcam, however, and this is a perfect time to replace it with something a bit more durable and less complex. Thanks to the magic that is stock sale, I have a small amount to invest in said product.

Yesterday’s software issues are not resolved, but having spent the morning in attempts to determine the root cause and finding nothing suspicious, I have vested myself with the mantle of Hardian fatalism, and have informed the appropriate powers of the details of the delay. So instead of continuously beating my head against the wall, I can now be content to periodically give it a few quality head-butts a few times a day.

I am certain that if I turned around, there would be a big target on my back which allows the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune to more accurately target me.

The story of this day has parallels the journey of a smile to a frown in time lapse. It is a story starting with a relaxed and calm morning. It ends in an afternoon tableaux which one finds one fuming and scowling software developer wishing he could perform diabolical voodoo magicks on a cabal of other software developers in retaliation for unfathomably malicious crimes against humanity.

My consolation is the sure knowledge that employment is not always like this, and the hope that I can leave my stress at door and enjoy my evening. Verily, I am having a bad day.

For the observant, one might note that the periodicity of my Black Office Moods and the periodicity of product releases is surprisingly similar.