Haven’t read or thought about the Declaration of Independence in a while. But with the Occupy movement still fresh and successive hotspots around the world (most recently Turkey) illuminating the peoples’ fury at staggering inequality and the ability to effect change within the system… I just re-read it for the first time in a long time.

How about these apples?

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation…

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, —That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Tea Party on the right, Occupy on the left, a bunch of young Wall Street hotshots driving Ferraris on the backs of the general population in the middle.

I wonder what is going to happen over the course of the second half of my lifetime.

Ahhh, Twitter. Love and hate. Mostly hate.

I think there’s a definite generation gap there. I’ve never “not been hip” to the latest in tech—Twitter marks a boundary for me that I have yet to overcome.

As someone that was digital from a very young age thanks to my parents, the world of consumer and high tech has always seemed like second nature to me…until Twitter.

It’s not that I can’t figure out to use it, or even that I’m blah about it. I actively don’t like it even though I have to use it on a regular basis. Something about it just sticks in my crawl.

And no, it’s not the “textiness,” since I was a longtime user of IRC and of Unix similars long before that, stretching back to the mid ’80s. They were not only texty but arcane, unreliable, and completely user-unfriendly.

I think it’s the 140 character limit and the culture that has emerged on Twitter. But it’s hard to say.

— § —

My life is a hodgepodge of social media profiles. Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter, Reddit, Pinterest, StumbleUpon, Digg, FourSquare, and on and on, not to mention a bunch of blogs.

Some of this is personal. A lot of it is professional. And the opportunities on the horizon, both academic and not, largely concern these.

Don’t know how I feel about this.

There is certainly a part of me that still longs to be a fiction writer, and another part of me that longs to be a freelance stock photographer or even a stringer (if there are any left).

There’s also a part of me that would love to sand and refinish boats for a living. That part of me will likely never be satisfied.

— § —

Tough day, for no particular reason, just a giant universe of very tiny reasons that all add up to a kind of phenomenological static that’s overpowering in its volume.

— § —

Just helped my wife to get started with a LiveScribe smartpen. You know that tech has become mundane and accessible when my wife starts using a smartpen.

— § —

For anyone struggling with an AT&T Galaxy Note (SGH-i717) and trying to get it to actually behave, here’s what you want:

– Padawan_JB ROM
– Titanium Backup to remove a whole bunch of AT&T cruft
– Nova launcher to lighten the launcher load (TouchWiz is heavy)
– Phase kernel and SetCPU app to overclock
– RAM Booster Pro app to ensure that you keep some memory around
– All other “optimize” apps (Lux, BatteryDefender, etc.) removed

This marks the first time since I got this damned phone that it has actually been:

– Stable
– Fast
– Usable
– Not butt-ugly or well behind current Android versions

It is an odyssey I will not repeat. I’ll keep this phone since I finally managed to get it working (it’s taken since February) but my next major phone purchase will likely be iOS if it occurs within the next couple of years. I’ve had it with Android.

— § —

Sometimes I think about the fact that I used to be a professional author of nonfiction trade paperbacks—and that that didn’t really become my career.

And that I was a longtime editor—and that that didn’t really become my career.

And that I worked for a long time in software development and deployment and in networking/IT—and that that didn’t really become my career.

And that there was a good year or two-year stretch during which I was making an honest effort to build a photography income, and in fact started to do so—yet that didn’t really become my career.

I often wonder about what might have been. Not that where I am is bad; it isn’t. But I also didn’t consciously choose it.

— § —

I’ll be making some hard decisions in the coming months.

I’ll be glad when this period of my life is over.

I could use a decade without hard, life-altering decisions, in which I just work and play and save and maintain.

Sure, yes, okay, right, I know, that never happens in life.

But it’s also true that life for most people isn’t always about moving cross-country, changing careers, having babies, going back to school, and so on, month after month after month for years.

I’d like to be facing some new set of problems and complications. The ones I’ve been having for the last decade are now old and overused.

I can’t wait.

So you spend a little time on Facebook and it almost makes you embarrassed to have a blog. Blogs are, by comparison:

– Old fashioned
– Narcissistic
– Thinly disguised, mildly unsubstantive navel-gazing
– The embodiment of unproductive time in many ways
– An expression more of what might have been than what is

Yes, I know that these are all critiques that apply to Facebook these days as well, but blogs commit these sins in spades by comparison.

— § —

Oh well.

— § —

One of the oddest things on Facebook is the way in which you can stumble across people you haven’t thought about in years, usually in conversations or interactions with mutual friends.

For some, this is one of the delights of Facebook.

Me? I’d rather forget, in most cases.

— § —

Spent a great deal of time triaging journal articles and conference papers tonight for the next chapter in the dissertation. For reasons related to my previous post, my notes and files are a mess when it comes to the body of resources I’m using.

If I was naturally organized like my wife, they’d be in great shape, but I’ve never had that skill. I began life as a child of the digital age, and those have always been computing system functions for me.

This is a weakness—bad software or no software for me equals bad capability or no capability. I am utterly dependent on my tools for organization and planning tasks, and when the tools available for these tasks in a particular domain are completely inadequate, my ability to carry the tasks out is also completely inadequate.

I hate you, Sente. (But I hate Papers, Zotero, Mendeley, and EndNote more, so take heart, at least there’s that.)

— § —

I am trying to resist the temptation to have another beer.

I drink to much beer on too many evenings.

— § —

Temperatures are scheduled to ramp up here next week. I’m trying to prepare myself for the onslaught, but even at this (twenty degrees cooler) level, I’m already suffering.

Every winter I begin to think that I may be a summer person, but when summer comes around, I am quickly disabused of this notion.

— § —

Funny thing has evolved in my Facebook life: I start interactions with “my” people, but then my wife comes in and continues them as I fade out, leaving my Facebook page in many ways to be a catalog of interactions between people I’m friended-to and my wife.

This is how my dad interacted with the world, too—always in the end through my mother. Only he did it without technology.

It’s only strange when I sit back and thing about it; otherwise it feels troublingly normal to me.

I suppose this is what it feels like to be an introvert. I’m perfectly content to let someone else come in and finish my conversations—to outsource my social interaction.

— § —

Final thought of the night: standardization is a good thing. I’ve been trying to get a watch connected to a band for more than a month now. Getting the watch, band, and pins to match (even though all specify a length or width in mm) has been an exercise in frustration.

Apparently, watch manufacturers, watch band manufacturers, and pin manufacturers are all using slightly different rulers, turning the whole thing into a giant, repeatedly-frustrating crap-shoot.

— § —

Oh, actually, this is my final thought of the night:

Before moving to this place I’d done limited drilling of any kind in my life (not a tools or power tools person), but since I’ve been here I have had occasion to use five different masonry bits and acquire a high-speed drill.

Suburbia and “house” living has a lot to answer for.

And at the same time, I’m not convinced now that I’d be immediately comfortable if I were to go back to the city. I am a lifestyle exile, with no place to call home.

Can I get a tune to whisle that in?

Okay, coders who are also academics, I’m giving you a gold mine here. There is not a single academic reference database out there that doesn’t completely suck.

I’m serious. There is a huge opportunity here for something that:

– Is a database
– Stores PDFs and imports citation information from major data stores
– Supports categories, tags, and smart groups
– Supports reading, highlighting, and annotating in-flow
– Enables citation and bibliography building using common styles
– Synchronizes to platform clients (Mac, PC, iOS, Android)
– Has a robust but easy to use query UI (click-based)
– Doesn’t crash all the time
– Obeys the basic UI guidelines for each platform

This isn’t a totally trivial task, but it’s also not rocket science. Really, it isn’t. It would appear that the academic reference managers that are out there were written by monkeys.

— § —

I have Sente and use it. It sucks. I hate it. It is unpredictable, has a million billion field-creation features, but basically no query UI at all (you can tag, flag, keyword, categorize, group, etc., but once you apply these to records, you can’t actually do much with them, not even a simple two-factor search or exclude, without building out smart groups as your ad-hoc search, then performing your task within the group, then deleting the group again). It is not robust. Its annotation features are broken (no way to get notes and highlights out of the UI as plain text; no way to note and highlight in-flow, or even keyword in-flow).

I have also tried Papers. I couldn’t keep it running through more than a couple of operations at a time.

The open source and classic stuff (Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote, etc.) all have limitations that make them non-starters, plus tend toward being ungainly and unusable and overly clicky/wordy.

Evernote just isn’t suited for the task; it’s the wrong tool and it does no citation/referencing. Pointless. DevonThink is entirely overkill for a simple task like this, plus it does not citation/referencing.

The iPad readers, where they exist, are slow, broken, and crap compared to common iPad PDF reader/annotater programs that, sadly, don’t integrate with any academic software or workflow.

In short, the field is wide open.

Won’t someone solve this problem so that we academics can stop futzing about with this crap for hours?

When I get the dissertation written and get settled into a career, a few years down the road, if nobody else has yet solved this problem, by god I’ll solve it with my own code.

— § —

A word to the wise on “taking a break,” whether as a leisure matter or as a prioritization result, from writing/working on your dissertation:

– Take a week, lose a month
– Take a month, lose a year
– Take a year, go back to school and start all over

In short, you have to work on it every . single . day or there’s no point spending any time on it at all.

a suitable way to blog from an iPad and/or a mobile phone.

The WordPress app is completely unsuited and unsuitable for this purpose; it’s busy and cluttered and just not about writing. It’s about “managing your blog,” which I suppose is appropriate for a blogging app, apart from the fact that the purpose of a blog has much to do with actual, say, content in the first place.

I really thought this would be easier once I got the “Post via Dropbox” plugin installed—just drop a file in a Dropbox folder and it gets posted. Couldn’t be simpler, right?

Except that most apps that sync with Dropbox either (a) aren’t that writer-friendly, (b) don’t actually work properly with a bluetooth keyboard, (c) don’t let you select your own Dropbox folder into which to place files, or (d) struggle with sync when the files get removed.

— § —

Speaking of struggling, why do so many apps have crap syncing?

Working with DevonThink’s sync this afternoon made me pull my hair out. It’s less a feature than a form of torture. I mean, why bother to even create something like that? If it “works with Dropbox,” what’s the matter with getting it to work with Dropbox in a way that actually makes sense, rather than turning it into a series of ongoing file management operations that are obliquely described and documented and that the user needs to continually supervise?

One of the things that made Evernote so successful is that they got sync right. Nobody else seems to be able to duplicate this, even when it comes to simple things like plain text files in a single folder.

— § —

After a few months of very little dissertation work (new gig, family stuff, etc.) I’m trying to ramp up once again. Getting a feel for where I am is part and parcel of this process.

What I’ve learned is both encouraging and daunting. I’m on the right track. I like what I have so far. At the same time, there is much more work to be done. Much more. Basic stuff.

So I am sitting here with a bit of apprehension. There need to be some serious changes in work strategy and there needs to be a serious increase in time commitment and discipline if I am to pull this off this summer, or at least get most of the way there, as is the plan.

It won’t be easy, but it needs to be done. Stay tuned.

Saturday night—a legendary segment of time, canonized by fiction and nonfiction alike. My memories of “Saturday nights” now? Either gone or all of children and sleep, depending on how you want to define “memories.”

— § —

Visited my sister and her husband at their new house today. Interesting experience. It’s quite nice and it’s quite large. I’m not sure it’s for me, but my wife is quite sure it would be for her.

The irony (problem?) here is of course that we have no such house and no such stability. I’m not sure I ever wanted it, but it’s clear that my wife does and did.

These are the “sacrifices” that are meant when people talk talk about the “sacrifices” involved in getting a Ph.D. Other people go on living their lives. Yours is in stasis, in a way—you’re still in school and you have been for years or even decades, and your financial situation is worse than many around you that are ostensibly less experienced and working in conventionally less admired fields.

— § —

It’s important to maintain a sense of urgency about life.

Or, if you lose your sense of urgency for more than a moment or two, you’d better think about getting off the career train you’re on and doing something else.

Because without a sense of urgency, you’re not going anywhere but down if you aren’t standing on a firm foundation or building one already.

Good to be reminded of this, to have my sense of urgency renewed.

— § —

I really hate these “what do you want out of life” moments, because they make it difficult on people that share lives.

Few people want precisely the same things all around out of life. So long as things are moving quickly enough, no one notices the disparities involved.

When things get a bit bogged down, though, everyone begins to ask themselves where they are going. That’s a risky proposition for individuals in couplehood, one that makes everyone a bit sad and a bit uncomfortable.

— § —

Would I like to live in my sister’s house, if it were mine?

Hard to say.

But I would like my wife to be more satisfied with our life and I would like to know more about what the future holds for my young children in terms of life, places, and routines.

This Ph.D. needs to get done, and yesterday.

— § —

There will be a shift in strategy beginning with the first workday of next week. It’s time for a “big push.”