If you’ve participated in one of the candidate weekends at NYU Abu Dhabi, please join the conversation in the comments section of the post entitled “New Friends in the Desert” below. Click here to go straight to the post.
Sure as Heck
“Now that my focus has been enlarged, I sure as heck better be more astute on these current events, national issues.”
Who made this statement in an interview on national television yesterday?
a) Ben Bernanke
b) Scott Brown
c) Barack Obama
d) Sarah Palin
Click on the continuation link to find out the answer.
Posted in Politics.
– February 8, 2010
It’d Better Be Super
So I’m watching the Super Bowl, and there’s a commercial for M. Night Shyamalan’s new movie, The Last Airbender, which is due out on July 2.
The thought of Shyamalan directing the film adaptation of what in my household is a beloved television series — “Avatar: The Last Airbender” — fills me with some trepidation. I liked The Sixth Sense fine, even though I did figure it out the moment I saw Bruce Willis’s character sitting on the park bench reading a file — and blurted it out, thereby spoiling the movie for my wife. I thought Unbreakable was rather silly, and I haven’t had the inclination to watch any of the films that followed it.
We take our Aang seriously around here: we have all the DVDs, some of us watch them repeatedly, two of us love to engage in “waterbending” in the swimming pool, and one of us has actually been Aang for Halloween:
So we will be pissed if the movie isn’t any good.
On the other hand, the Super Bowl commercial bodes well, I think.
I’ll show it to the boys tomorrow and report back.
Posted in Film.
– February 7, 2010
Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-02-07
- Not sure it's a good sign that in the final season of LOST we are being introduced to a whole bunch o' new characters. #
- NYT on LOST: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/04/arts/television/04lost.html. I think I belong to the first camp. #
Posted in Twitterings.
– February 7, 2010
The Nest and the Stuff
We call my office space “the Nest.” It sits at one end of our apartment, ostensibly screened off by a Japanese shoji screen. It’s a mixture of high-tech and low-tech: two widescreen monitors sit on an L-shaped glass desk, under which are three desktop computers, a number of laptop computers (some decommissioned), piles of books and papers, tangles of cords, various bits of gadgetry and gear. I once hired a clutter expert to help me get things under control, but the imposed order didn’t last long and now things are worse than ever. The biggest problem, in my opinion, is the plethora of paper, most related to professional projects. Can’t bring myself just to chuck it all: need to sort it. And who has the time?
You’d think reading E. L. Doctorow’s most recent novel, Homer & Langley, would make me feel the necessity of mending my ways. It gave me pause. Just not enough pause.
Yesterday, I found a section of Thursday’s New York Times left in the middle of my desk chair by my wife. It was folded open not to the Personal Tech section but to an article called “Weighed Down by All the Memories.” The author, Michelle Slatalla, is appalled to be told by her brother Jack, a long-haul mover, that they had just moved 22,000 pounds out of her big house en route to her new cottage. 22,000 pounds, apparently, is twice what the average family has. “Your stuff is not going to fit in your new house,” her brother informed her.
Determined to reform, she consults Randy O. Frost, the author of Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things, due out this spring.
I finish the article and think to myself, “I should probably get that book.” Except that … I’m not only out of bookshelf space, but also out of piling space. And my wife is just about out of patience.
Posted in Odds and Ends, Uncategorized.
– February 6, 2010
iWant iPad
In his New York Times op-ed piece yesterday, former Microsoft vice president Dick Brass commented on Redmond’s inability to make the kind of hardware that people want to buy:
Not everything that has gone wrong at Microsoft is due to internecine warfare. Part of the problem is a historic preference to develop (highly profitable) software without undertaking (highly risky) hardware. This made economic sense when the company was founded in 1975, but now makes it far more difficult to create tightly integrated, beautifully designed products like an iPhone or TiVo. And, yes, part of the problem has been an understandable caution in the wake of the antitrust settlement. Timing has also been poor — too soon on Web TV, too late on iPods.
He’s right about the iPhone and TiVo: they are “tightly integrated, beautifully designed products.” Here’s how I know: my wife uses — and loves — both of them. And she’s basically a Luddite. She’s not interested in the ups-and-downs of technological innovation. She wants her tech to work, period. She doesn’t like tinkering with computer settings — and she resents ever having to tinker with computer settings. And, no, she could never program the VCR, but she can record and watch shows on the TiVo, because its interface makes sense to her.
I bought our first TiVo on impulse after perhaps a few too many drinks during a faculty recruitment dinner. My two dinner companions spent a considerable amount of time singing its praises. My wife and kids were away, visiting Grandma. I went home, wobbled onto the TiVo website, found that they were having a sale, and the TiVo appeared a couple of days later. My wife eyed it skeptically, but she soon realized that she could not only program it herself but also use it to skip commercials, which she loathes. Instant love affair.
Same with the iPhone, which I persuaded her to get when the 3G came out. She was skeptical about the need for mobile e-mail, text messaging, and the other features that the iPhone offers, though she was willing to be persuaded because she saw it as a souped up iPod (another piece of tech she immediately loved despite never really being a Walkman person), and it would allow her to carry one device instead of two. Now she can’t imagine life without the iPhone: she texts, e-mails, takes pictures, and I think she’s even Twittering.
The Kindle, on the other hand, was a bridge too far. She loves books too much to contemplate reading a novel on a Kindle, despite my assurances that after a little while you forget it’s not a book because you’re engrossed in what you’re reading. For me, the Kindle doesn’t replace books: it’s just another way to consume text, and it allows me to read at moments when I wouldn’t otherwise (because the hardcover book I’m reading is too heavy to carry around or because the newspaper is too inconvenient to take out, assuming that I have it and she doesn’t).
Admittedly, the Kindle isn’t so good for newspapers or magazines or anything that requires color or vibrant images to make its impact. Hence the title of this post: I can’t wait to get an iPad in my hands. I’m not one of those many commentators who is disappointed by the specs of the device, because I don’t want it to replace my laptop computer, and I don’t want to make video calls. I want an iPad so that I can read the digital texts that the Kindle can’t display to good advantage, and I want to be able to read these texts not only on the go but also in bed. (Bringing the laptop to bed immediately results in the hairy eyeball.)
Moreover, I think it’s going to be a great device for my dad, who’ll use it in lieu of a laptop when he’s sitting in the living room, and for my kids (the New York Times pointed out that Apple had perhaps just unwittingly created the world’s greatest toy). Who knows, maybe my wife will even enjoy reading on it: after all, she’s already used to the interface. And I’m quite certain that the iPad is going to be the kind of tech that she has always liked: the kind that just works, and works well. Unlike, say, WebTV, one of my least successful tech purchases ever.
So we’ll be getting a WiFi-only iPad about 60 days from now, with a high-end WiFi+3G version 30 days later. I’ll let my dad and my kids sort out who’s going to end up with the WiFi-only.
Posted in Technology.
– February 5, 2010
Microsoft’s Black Screen of Death
I read today’s op-ed piece in the New York Times by former Microsoft vice president Dick Brass today with great interest. Entitled “Microsoft’s Creative Destruction,” the piece argues that Microsoft has created a “dysfunctional corporate culture” marked by “internecine warfare” among entrenched interests that has thwarted innovation. “At Microsoft,” Brass writes, ” the big established groups are allowed to prey upon emerging teams, belittle their efforts, compete unfairly against them for resources, and over time hector them out of existence. It’s not an accident that almost all the executives in charge of Microsoft’s music, e-books, phone, online, search and tablet efforts over the past decade have left.”
As I’ve documented here, I switched to Apple as my primary computing platform in the past year, but I remain tied to Microsoft: my wife still uses a Dell computer running Vista, and we have a home-built Windows Home Server with which I’ve been quite happy. I’ve even subscribed to Microsoft Technet so that I can play with various versions of their operating systems and applications software, and I’ve installed Windows 7 64-bit on one home-built system and upgraded both a laptop and my media PC to Windows 7 32-bit. When HP released the Windows 7 software for my Officejet 7590, I decided to upgrade the Vista machine that had been my previous workhorse and that I still use for certain tasks such as scanning and some video editing. I was planning to upgrade my wife’s laptop as well.
I found myself in agreement with various reviewers and users who deemed Windows 7 to be a big success.
And then I encountered the Black Screen of Death (KSOD for short on some internet sites to distinguish it from the old BSOD — Blue Screen of Death — that many XP users came to know intimately). You get a mouse cursor on a black screen after login that moves around, but nothing else: no desktop. This happened on the Vista machine. Luckily, I had it backed up on the Windows Home server, so I reinstalled it. Next morning, KSOD once again. I did a little research on the internet and discovered that last fall an computer security company called Prevx had claimed that the problem was called by a bad patch from Microsoft. The folks at Redmond investigated, decided that the problem was due not to their software but to some malware. Prevx issued a retraction of their earlier claim.
Funny thing is, the KSOD seemed to appear on my system shortly after an automatic Windows update. I’d restore the system from a backup and it would seem to be fine and then the next morning — kabluey! I tried a different saved backup. This time the system started fine, but then after a restart and an endless CHKDSK that found innumerable errors … yup, KSOD. Again. And again. And again. Six times in all.
I checked the media PC in the living room. KSOD. Oddly enough, though, on that computer I was able to use CTL-ALT-DEL to get the task manager, which meant that I was able to execute the workaround provided by — you guessed it — Prevx. It cured the media PC (knock wood, fingers crossed, it still seems to be okay). But the Vista workhorse: forget it. CTL-ALT-DEL produces no reaction from the computer. Can’t get the task manager.
Luckily, I’ve been moving to more of a cloud computing model, so I don’t have any precious data stored on the VW, and I can get whatever I need from the Windows Home Server Backup (at least in theory). So what to do? Well, both the VW and the Media PC were upgrades from Vista, so I’m currently performing a clean install on a spanking new WD Velociraptor hard drive. We’ll see what happens.
Meanwhile, I’m not upgrading my wife’s computer anytime soon. And when I do, it’ll be on a fresh hard drive, so we can pop in her old drive if the new one goes KSOD.
Or maybe we’ll just get her a MacBook Pro.
Posted in Technology.
– February 4, 2010
And the Law Won
My lecture on American Puritanism today included a discussion of Anne Hutchinson and the Antinomian Controversy.
The term antinomian comes from the Greek words for “against the law.”So it seemed it only appropriate that I play one of my all-time-favorite rock’n'roll songs — “I Fought the Law” — in several different versions. You can sample them below. (Enjoy!) Students interested in the controversy should check out the The Antinomian Controversy, 1636-1638: A Documentary History edited by David S. Hall.
The Crickets
The Bobby Fuller Four
Eddie Bo, Raful Neal and Rockin’ Tabby Thomas
Mary’s Danish
Green Day
The Clash (live)
– February 3, 2010
Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-02-03
- The digest function of Twitter Tools apparently decided to work on this blog on the 1-year anniversary of Obama's inauguration. #
- Will it work today on the eve of the Apple announcement. Probably not: I'm having a hideous tech day, about which more soon on the blog. #
- Off to Abu Dhabi. More news in about 13 hours. #
- Feeling LOST watching LOST. #
- Second hour: even more LOST watching LOST. #
Posted in Twitterings.
– February 3, 2010
Reframing American Literature I
Last year, on the eve of my lecture about Anne Hutchinson and Mary Rowlandson, I wrote a post over at PWHNY speculating about how I might change my American Literature I syllabus when I taught it in the spring of 2010:
It might be time to reframe the course. Rather than teaching The Puritan Origins of the American Self (the title of a classic account by Sacvan Bercovitch), I might instead teach the cosmopolitan origins of the American self, shifting the focus from Boston to New York.
Well, here it is, the spring of 2010, and I’ve done a modest bit of reframing, tinkering with the course rather than re-engineering it.
I spoke about cosmopolitanism and Barack Obama’s deliberative democracy on the first day, and I moved the land chapters of Moby-Dick up to the second lecture, so that the course is now framed by Melville’s novel. I used a brief account of Melville’s career to reinforce the idea of cosmopolitanism by describing the way in which Melville reverses both aspects of his own career as a whaler (having the Pequod sail west, when he sailed east) and the story of the wrecking of the Essex (having Ishmael encounter the cannibal first and then the whale). And I asked the question, Why does the novel’s “Loomings” chapter take place in Manhattan, suggesting that it is Melville’s way of aligning the narrative with what Tom Bender has called has called “the historic cosmopolitanism” of New York City.” (See Bender’s essay “New York as a Center of Difference” from The Unfinished City [2007]), one of the touchstones of our Writing New York course and an addition to this year’s American Literature I syllabus.)
But this week we’ve moved back to Boston: Bradford and Winthrop on Monday, Hutchinson and Rowlandson. Explicitly telling the story of the Puritans from the vantage point of New York — perhaps by beginning with an account of Hutchinson’s death in the Bronx — will have to wait for yet another iteration of the course. For now, the more modest reframing will have to do.
Posted in Teaching.
– February 2, 2010
Recent Comments