Learning how to use a new type of computer is fun!

Upon my return to the eastern coast I was greeted by family, some friends, about ninety minutes of Tisha B'Av, and my recently described new lappy. It's nice; I like it. It doesn't do all that much more than my one did, but it's nice that it only turns off when I want it to.

I've spent pretty much all of this day in my room at my parent's house playing around with the computer. I feel like such a blogger. But, unfortunately for all nine regular readers of this blog, I didn't spend my time furiously blogging, but, rather, learning how to use the new OS and transferring my documents, photos, videos, music, etc., to the new compy. And I'm happy to report that, after about eight hours, I've learned how to "right-click" and that about 80% of my music made it through the transfer process. And I think I'm well on my way to developing a serious case of carpel tunnel syndrome. Laptops: the gift that keeps on giving.

I feel OK spending my day learning how to use a new computer; many great things have come about through just such an exercise. I can think of one. But I imagine there must be more out there somewhere. Anyway, the one that I know about is this: Stephen White, the bestselling author of thriller novels, started writing back in the day when home computers were brand new. He started writing just as a way to teach himself how to process words. And he kept at it and was very surprised when he realized that all those pages he wrote looked about as long as a book. And even more surprised when he showed this book-length pile of papers to a few friends who really liked it. And even more surprised when this work got acquired by an editor. And so on until he became famous enough to come visit the Denver Publishing Institute in 2008. So, perhaps, I'll go on to become a world-renowned something in a field I never imagined I had any talent for, and I'll look back on today as the day this all started.

Of course, I didn't spend all day with the computer; I managed to witness the implosion (or at least, the latest iteration of implosion) of the Mets's bullpen. And I emailed some folks in my continuing quest to find someone to pay me money to assist an editor or two. I think it would be a bad move to blog about work, so this'll be the last time I'll mention the job search in this forum. If you feel the desperate need to hear about office life from this source, then you're even more delusional than I realized. But, also, if you really critically need a lighthearted take on life in an American office, I remind you that summer is almost over which means that new TV shows are just around the corner which means that you can get your fill of comedic office hijinks from the funniest show on television which not insignificantly is set in an office. I'm referring, of course, to 30 Rock. I'm excited. And I feel I should mention explicitly the link I just linked to 15 words ago, just because it's a terrifically named fan-site.

Sorry for the posting delay; there'll be more tomorrow, probably on the Olympics.

Thanks for stopping by.

You had me at "David Foster Wallace"

Enjoy the bonus Friday post, and have a good weekend.

Friday Collection of the WorldWide Internet

The founding principle of this blog remained just as true yesterday as it was nearly 20 months ago when this blog was founded. And it continued to be true during the frequent four-month hiatuses. The principle I'm referring to, of course, is: This blog suffers from a serious lack of direction.

But today marks a hesitant baby-step towards a modicum of internal structuring. For today witnesses the beginning of a new feature at TDS. And it's the first ever recurring feature at TDS. I proudly present the inaugural Friday Collection of the WorldWide Internet. Every Friday that this blog, the internet, and the universe exist, you'll receive a smattering of the things that I found interesting from the week that was. Most of these things will be collected from either deadspin.com or kottke.org because they most consistently deliver the goods. You should probably just read those sites instead of mine. And judging by their daily hits, you probably are doing that already. But only here, at TDS, will you be able to find my pithy remarks on the stuff I find cool. Sorry, joseph, for the blue, underlined words.

Let's get right to it.

• A kid I went to high-school with is a big NY Giants (American Football) fan, was planning a trip to Nicaragua, and decided to search out the Patriots Super Bowl Champions (they lost) paraphernalia which was sent to Central America to clothe the naked. He found one. And wrote about it for the Boston Herald. Which was reported by Deadspin. I'm not at all surprised by this: he had one of the best jump-shots in the Yeshiva League. Speaking of bitter Boston sports memories, I have a pennant at home proclaiming the Red Sox to be the 1986 World Series Champs, which they, famously, were not. I didn't have to go so far to get that, but I did have to spend time in Boston.
  
• My favorite of the hundreds of reports being filed by American reporters on the utter weird- and gross-ness of China.
• Thorstein Veblen wrote this awesome book in 1899 called The Theory of the Leisure Class. He talks about how in cities, where residents are surrounded by strangers, objects which communicate economic and social stature grow in importance. He calls this conspicuous consumption. Here's the best example I've ever seen of that.
• This article is nothing so special, but, my God, look at the comments. I never knew there were that many possible donut puns.
• Didn't Ennismore do this for a color-war breakout once?
• I'm sick of Favre already--SportsCenter this morning devoted the opening twenty minutes of their hour to only Favre--so it's good that the NY media tends to be a laid-back bunch.
  

That's enough for now, I believe.

One last FYI tidbit--I'm leaving Denver on Sunday after having a raucously good time. This may affect my blogging, since I'm not sure what I'm going to be doing with myself come Monday morning. If I find gainful employment, there's a chance I won't be able to continue the every-weekday blogging schedule. But if I remain unemployed for a bit, I might accelerate the pace. But I might pick up some other hobbies--like origami--which will take me away from TDS. In short, don't be surprised if there are a whole bunch more origami-themed posts coming your way.

Enjoy the weekend.

Yo. Science. What is it all about? Techmology. What is that all about? Is it good or is it whack?

Here's a thoroughly modern conundrum:

My three-year old Toshiba Satellite lap-top computer is just about at the limits of its functionality. It keeps overheating and turning off when I don't want it to. (I have taken to propping the thing up with my fairly new copy of Editors on Editing, and that seems to cool it down just enough to stay on so long as I don't have more than two programs running concurrently.) Windows fails to initiate properly at least half the time, bringing me to a scary blue screen, which asks me if I want to retry loading Windows normally or try loading with the last known configuration that worked. All video screens in Internet Explorer for some reason turn green and fail to show the images that should go along with the sounds which I can hear. I use Firefox so this isn't a big deal, but it's annoying for things like Netflix's streaming content which only works in IE. And the wireless doesn't work in most of the places where I live. In short, it's time to get a new compy.

Now here's where the thoroughly modern conundrum comes into play. I decided to buy one of those new-fangled Mac-style computers. They're so white and sleek, and owning one will make me just as cool and different and edgy as all the other dozens of millions of young folks who own one. And, to boot, they have a deal now where they offer $300 off an iPod just for buying a compy. This seems like a pretty good deal, but, from reading the internet, I know that Apple is rolling out their new line of products within like six weeks. And they're going to be the most bitchingly cool computers in the OC. Seriously. The new lappies are going to rock: There's going to be Macbook Touches, and aluminum casings, and new iPod touches, and lots of other cool stuff. Never before in the history of the universe (at least, that I am aware of off the top of my head) has technology moved so fast that people'd be worried about things like buying a product like a month before an improved one came out, and, also, without the worldwide internet, people'd have no way of knowing that new stuff will be released. There's a crap-load of Apple Rumors websites out there which do things like read the company's security updates combing for hints of something new.

As for me, I really wanted a new iPod, and can't really tolerate another six weeks of my current compy situation until the new stuff comes out, so I ordered the current model. So I'll have at least a month of being technologically up-to-date before all my stuff becomes old.

My night at Coors

I've been in Denver for about 3.5 weeks now, with only three non-sabbath days to go. I haven't been yet to the Rockies (the mountainous kind) because all my fellow publishing students seem to have developed a habit of taking those trips on Saturday mornings. I figured, as a fairly decent substitute, I could go see the Rockies (the baseball kind). So last night, with 24 other baseball-tolerating aspiring publishers I did just that. This was my sixth ballpark, after, in chronological order, Shea and Yankee Stadia, Fenway Park, what is now called the Rogers Centre (i.e., the one in Toronto), and Dodger Stadium. But Coors Field was my first ballpark named after a beer; not surprisingly, the beer isn't any cheaper there.

The game itself was pretty dreary, which may have been expected in a contest between a home team eleven games under .500 (and after Monday's defeat, make that twelve) and a visiting squad which ranks as the worst in baseball (the DC Nationals). The stadium witnessed its loudest moment when the club, using the jumbo-tron, welcomed the DU Publishing Institute. Section 207 rocked to the sound of our infamous "We Love Books" cheer. The only other reason the crowd worked itself up was to participate in The Wave. The weird sporting event thing and not the peer-pressure book, that is. Like so:



The Colorado Wave wasn't as good as the one in the video, but, to be fair, Jerseyans are known for their ability to stand and sit in an organized manner. Although, to be fair about this also, we missed the Rockies's first three runs (out of four) because we were doing car bombs. It looked on TV like the crowd was excited about that, but it was kinda hard to tell at that point.

The ballyard itself it pretty beautiful. Relatively comfy seats, wonderful sight-lines, and the Rocky Mountains peek up over the left-field foul pole. It always strikes me as nice that most ballgames begin in daylight and conclude after darkness has hit. Bob Costas would make a big deal about how this represents the importance of a boy's game being played by men, with the love of the game being preserved with a child-like enthuasiasm for this pasttime of the nation. But he's kind of an idiot. I just think it's nice to be able to watch the sunset during like pitching changes or whatever.

Weird Childhood Histories, Part 2

Like many folks who earned their college degrees in the field of the literature of England (i.e., English Literature), I have a somewhat strained relationship with mathematics. This, however, was not always the case. This may seem obvious, but I was always good at math that made sense to me, which means that I did A-OK through like ninth-grade geometry, after which point things got a little bit fuzzy. Luckily, the SAT doesn't test on anything past the math I was comfortable with, leading to my scoring of an 800 on the math section of the exam, while earning like a C+ in pre-Calculus or whatever my eleventh-grade math class was called. That was kinda fun, because it made all my classmates who were actually talented mathletes jealous, because they scored something like 790. I still don't know how I pulled it off.

I was never able to articulate what changed, math-wise, until I read Moneyball. This book is seriously awesome, partially because of a train of thought attributed to Bill James, the smartest baseball thinker who ever lived:

The statistics were not merely inadequate; they lied. And the lies they told led the people who ran major league baseball teams to misjudge their players, and mismanage their games. James later reduced his complaint to a sentence: fielding statistics made sense only as numbers, not as language. Language, not numbers, were what interested him. Words, and the meaning they were designed to convey. "When the numbers acquire the significance of language," he later wrote, "they acquire the power to do all of the things which language can do: to become fiction and drama and poetry....And it is not just baseball that these numbers, through a fractured mirror, describe. It is character. It is psychology, it is history, it is power, it is grace, glory, consistency, sacrifice, courage, it is success and failure, it is frustration and bad luck, it is ambition, it is overreaching, it is discipline. And it is victory and defeat, which is all that the idiot sub-conscious really understands."

James said what I started to understand about myself way back in like tenth grade: numbers are interesting only if they tell the truth, if they tell a story. That's why I was wholly uninterested in my stats class of eighteen months ago: knowing the probability of drawing a blue marble from an urn is a parlor trick, which doesn't reveal the truth about anything. Knowing which players really helped a baseball team succeed isn't necessarily of life-changing significance, but the point is that they tell the truth about something. And knowing what leads to success is somewhat of a big deal in a multi-billion dollar industry. At least to the people running that industry.

I had a similar Moneyball-type experience last week. We had the director of online marketing for Random House come present the type of stuff that he thinks about on a day-to-day basis. Some of it was trying to figure out where publishing is heading, and how authors are going to deliver their content to readers, the only two indispensable components of the book-making process. But he also took us on a tour of what the internet (in this case, mostly Google) allows you to learn about marketing. The real trouble with traditional marketing is that no one has any idea if the damned thing worked. I put an ad in the NYT, and it is impossible for me to know how sales were affected by that one ad. Did someone decide to buy, let's say, this book because of the ad in the paper, or did they hear about on NPR, or did their friend recommend it to them, or was it some combination of all of that and more? The effectiveness of a print ad is meaningless because it can't be measured with any type of accuracy. Companies can be throwing away money with unsuccessful ads and they'll have no way of knowing.

Compare that situation with what's possible on the worldwide internet. In this magical place you can see exactly how many people clicked on your targeted Google word-search ad, how long they stayed on your website, how many products they purchased, and a whole lot more. You can submit multiple ad wordings for the same product, and Google will automatically use the ones which prove to be most effective in getting the interwebular traveler to click on the link. I'm not all that fascinated by marketing, but this type of thing, for a change, tells the truth about the real world. You can measure things based on reality, based on how people actually behave. I think that's pretty powerful. These numbers tell a story.

This seems appropriate after a week of Marketing classes

From, again, The Onion:

World's Worst Person Decides To Go Into Marketing
'I'm Thinking...Marketing,' Says Horrible, Horrible Man

NEW YORK—Twenty-three-year-old Louis Deenan, undeniably the most detestable, loathsome individual ever to walk the earth, willfully decided Monday to devote his miserable life and all of its awful ambitions to the field of marketing. "I think it's the career path that will best utilize my networking skills and my ability to think outside the box," said Deenan, whose smug, gloating tone and shit-eating smile just make you want to punch his goddamn teeth in. "So I'm definitely thinking marketing. Either that, or PR." Deenan's mother refused to comment on why she didn't abort the despicable pile of human excrement when she had the chance.