There was a time when I would open up a new blog post and it would all just come pouring out, a flood of thoughts and feelings and words and ideas.

Now I have to mine myself to try to see what’s going on inside me, and much of the time I can’t access it.

That’s what years of relationships and years of graduate school will do to you.

— § —

For a time after our separation, whenever I was home alone, I would camp out on the couch, swill beer, eat pizza, and watch Top Gear.

Those times have, happily, gone by the wayside. But I do sometimes miss watching Top Gear.

On the other hand, I’ve seen pretty much the entirety of the UK series at this point, and I’m not really all that interested in watching the non-UK series.

— § —

All of us, every last one of us, even The Very Serious People with The Very Serious Outfits that give everyone else advice and instruction, and often even get paid for it, are human.

Pants one leg at a time.
Guilty pleasures.
Insecurities.
Daftness.

— § —

Speaking of, my wife turned me on to a paradox in myself tonight.

I’m totally unjealous of anything she does as long as she shares it with me, even just in passing.

On the other hand, if she gets up to things and I find out about them only second-hand, I know that I do tend to get jealous in those cases.

Purely because she didn’t want to share and then I feel somehow excluded from something.

It’s daft and silly. It also is what it is.

— § —

When I was in the seventh grade, I wrote a paper on Dickens’ Oliver Twist in the semiprivate “program for gifted and talented children” that I attended. The instructor (I forget his name now, but he had a lisp and always came with dirty hair) returned my paper with a note at the top, saying that he could’t accept my paper because it was Ph.D. level work and I had obviously copied from someone or reused their work without citing them.

I had to have my parents visit him at home with assurances that I’d been working on it for a week before he’d even consider entering it into the gradebook. When he did, I received an ‘A’ grade.

The paper was on the structure of the relationship network in the book, and the way in which Twist himself was entirely incidental to the rising action, climax, and denoument, but for serving as a kind of fulcrum around and through which various other relationships and social tensions could be explored.

— § —

On a related note (and my reason for bringing it up) is the fact that my five-year-old daughter came to me tonight and said, out of the blue, that “Harry and the Bucket Full of Dinosaurs” and “Julius, Jr.” are “really just the same underneath.”

These are two animated childrens’ series that (1) she hasn’t seen in some time, and (2) aren’t particularly educational.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

She proceeded to explain that in each program there was a “most important person” (Harry or Julius) and that in addition to this most important person in each case, there were secondary charcters that paralleled one another in the programs, each one having a mirror in the other with similar characteristics like “coolness” or “scaredness” or “silliness,” and that together these secondary characters help the “most important person” to see, and then solve, a problem of some kind that “lots of people have,” each character representing a particular feeling that the most important person also has.

She’s five. And without language to work through the details, she nonetheless made a very convincing argument for the very clear structural similarity between, and formulaic nature of, two distinct and unrelated programs, and the way in which their casts of characters together represent the psyches of their protagonists.

Familiar. Masterfully meta.

I hope she gets better treatment than I did.

— § —

Right now my life is full of little details that remind me of my wife. So many things in it are things that she chose and that I’d never have chosen, yet that I very much appreciate.

It all causes me to miss her, quite often.

I wish and wonder if there was some way we could have arrived at a better “us” without all of the heartache and complexity. I suppose not.

— § —

Once in Chicago, a friend and I broke into an abandoned church in the dead of winter in the middle of the night. It was freezing cold and damned near impossible to see.

I don’t mention that for any particular reason; it’s just a memory.

— § —

All of those classes on “memory” in my Ph.D. years, and all of those very earnest students, mostly from Europe, a few from Latin America. So earnest. So much concern.

I don’t suppose any American, myself included, can ever really understand at a fundamental level what that’s all about. Not without having lived there for a long period of time. We can conceptualize it rationally, but it doesn’t resonate.

Memories are just memories. The world is only 200 years old. A few generations back there was nothing but wild turkeys and bison. Live and let live.

We’re all future oriented here, concerned with what gets built next and who builds it. Because we have precious few “already built” things to consider that weren’t built within time spans that directly touch us in some way. Precious little need for social memory.

— § —

In another life that I’ll never have I want to be a nonbelieving priest.
And in yet another life that I’ll never have I want to be a federal agent.
And in yet another life that I’ll never have I want to be an organic baker that sells overpriced, second-class but always rationalized pastries at a farmers’ market.
And in yet another life that I’ll never have I want to die young in a car crash, like James Dean.

— § —

Oh come on, don’t get all smug on me.

It’s all nonsense anyway.

The notion of accountability, often misimagined as by endusers as transparency, was a key item of discussion in my dissertation.

When it comes to technology, questions that users may not even think to ask impact in significant ways technology’s usability. What is it doing? How is it doing what it is doing? What are the ground rules and operating parameters? Can these be expressed in simple, intuitive ways?

These things are the keys to predictability and interactivity, and they are questions that are also critical in human-to-human interaction, though we don’t often think about it in these terms. But they come up (as Garfinkel pointed out) when they are violated or when exceptions occur. This is one of the reasons that mental illness is so difficult and problematic for us; we struggle to interact with those that are mentally ill because they violate assumptions about precisely the questions above, rendering us unsure about the effects of our actions within the context of the ongoing interaction.

So I’m here to point out that the Google+ transition (from old to new) and Amazon’s author pages are amongst the most recent examples I’ve found of poorly accountable technologies. It’s not clear why they do what they do, what they’re doing, or what will happen as we interact with them. Only after the fact do we know, and of course by then it’s too late to make a decision about whether or not we’d like to do the things that we did—make the gestures that we made—as we related to one another.

Such accountability is often misframed as “transparency” or “documentation” and users tend to bemoan the lack of these when outcomes are unexpected, but in fact, nobody really wants transparency (i.e. understanding of the actual operations at the machine level). Those things are best left to machine state diagrams of the sort that I used to do as a computer science student all the way back in 1991 (when departments were still teaching in C and Pascal and assembly).

Instead, what people really want to know is what the ground rules of an interaction are and what the outcomes will be, as an interactive totality, of any particular interactive choice that they make. So—not “what is this software or hardware doing”—but rather “what will be the result for this interaction and relationship of any particular action that I might take in response to the system’s actions?”

On this level, these two bits of software fail miserably.

— § —

As a supplemental note, the term “accountability” does not imply “responsibility” but in fact Garfinkel’s discussion of the ability “to provide a sensible and defensible account of” what each party to an interaction is doing. Accountability is essential to interaction as it enables parties both to explain themselves (to others and to themselves) and to come to grips with the very same kinds of explanations provided by the counterparty. Unaccountable activity, particularly in social interaction, tends to lack sensibility—that is to say that people cannot make sense of or integrate the sensations of what has occurred. An “accounting” by both parties and the “accountability” of each party’s actions are thus critical both to individual and to mutual understanding.

One can easily see the ways in which such accountability is at the core of most problems in usability and interactivity in the technology space, as has been pointed out by both Suchman (first) and Dourish (later). As it turns out, this concept is also at the core of most of the problems we’ve had building AI systems, though such a point is beyond the scope of a complain-complain post like this one.

Here’s a note on academic and especially adjunct life.

I continue to receive mail, both electronic and printed, from every institution where I’ve ever taught (with the exception of St. John’s University). Some of it is even quite official, while other items ask me every semester to submit my syllabi (despite having no appointment), and still others inform me of “mandatory” processes, appearances, etc. for adjunct faculty or even for all faculty in general—which I regularly ignore, being in no substantive way involved in academic life just now. But they keep coming.

I haven’t taught anywhere at all, in fact, in well over a year and I haven’t taught at some of these institutions for half a decade.

This demonstrates just how much attention institutions pay to whom they count amongst their faculty at the adjunct level. They haven’t noticed that they didn’t renew appointments or that I didn’t ask for any, that I have moved half a nation away, that I haven’t set foot on the campus to scan-in with my ID card in years, etc.

No doubt I’m still sitting here and there on some websites listed as “faculty” in one way or another (they represent to students that adjuncts are faculty, though they clearly represent to adjuncts with their actions that we are not).

I’d like very much to teach again, and at the same time, I am as bothered as I ever was by the strange labor economy of the university. Yes, I know all the details, I’ve read countless articles in the Chronicle, papers in the journals, etc. on the nature, troubles, and future of the system, movements for change, administrative and economic realities, etc. Hell, I lived it. In multiple ways. For a lot of years. It’s a mess.

In an ideal world, I’d love to be an academic. But in the real world, as I pursued that option, I was pretty clearly undervalued, with little hope of advancement sans tremendous (and generally ridiculous) sacrifices that I wasn’t prepared to make. Finishing a Ph.D. was more than enough sacrifice for me. I might give the academic world a go again over the next couple of years, but in an entirely different way.

Nonetheless sometimes the absurdity of it all, particularly when you receive a notice from an institution that clearly thinks you’ve been there all along—despite the fact that you’re long, long gone—can really hit home and lead you to realize once more just how f**ked up the entire system is right now for everyone. This is particularly true, however for adjuncts. Permanent faculty are suffering as well, but despite claims of worry and solidarity, they are able to throw their hands up and claim helplessness. I don’t hold any particular grudge against permanent faculty for this; the reality, however, is that whatever actions are being taken by them, verbal or otherwise, are not all that useful to struggling adjuncts with bills to pay.

On a full-time basis I make three times annually, as a relatively anonymous marketing manager at a small company—no particular credentials required—what I would as an adjunct with a Ph.D. at very large universities, where I was put on the website to sell tickets to the show and the workload was much, much, much heavier. This even while as an adjunct job security was literally nil (Reapply three times a year for the same job! Yay! Even more work, and with zero guarantees!), respect from colleagues (or even their awareness that you exist) generally absent, and benefits nonexistent.

And meanwhile the departments haven’t even realized that I am teaching no courses, have taught no courses in years, and have not been paid by them in a long, long time. They’re still asking me to submit my syllabus, turn up to a meeting, or manage my ID cards and accounts.

They don’t even know I’m long gone.

Hrmz. A person that many hundreds of handsomely-paying students have called “professor” (appropriately or not) and that has written countless recommendation letters, mentored in dozens of research projects, participated in curricular development and departmental planning, and so on. Surely there was some value there. Yet they haven’t even invested the resources to discern the difference between “is an employee and a member of our faculty” and “haven’t seen him in many years.”

Think about that.

I’ve always been uncomfortable with single issue activism. After decades of watching activist culture play out, it seems as though it merely entrenches both sides of an issue. Open combat and a complete end to dialogue; moral absolutes and the justifications of victimhood rather than actual solutions to problems.

At a deeper level, I also can’t help but feel as though there’s something adolescent about it—as though, as an end result, we have come to live in a society largely devoid of grown-ups capable of thinking deeply about problems or understanding diverse points of view. Instead, the politics of self-absorption, of “my” rights and “my” problems reigns supreme.

I feel that a lot looking at candidates this election. Precious little acknowledgment of the human dignity and legitimacy of different ways of living or points of view, much less of the need to respect, acknowledge, and accept these—and the significant difficulty for all that this involves—if the collective is to thrive. Indeed, precious little acknowledgment of a diverse collective at all. Each view seems to verbally enact the collective merely as an issue-directed aggregate of like-minded selves in pursuit of particular goals.

It’s a kind of instrumentalism with what seems to me to be a childish naiveté about the nature of being woven throughout. You can always get what you want if only you fight hard enough for it and get others onto your team to do the same. The question is one of applied moral, physical, and political force, with no acknowledgment that it may be that nobody ever gets everything that they want, no matter how much force can be applied.

Maybe I’m just getting older and starting to feel protective of my lawn, so to speak.

— § —

– I have transitioned entirely to using prime lenses, which surprises me
– From a distance, the academic world can look like a circus
– But so do the criticisms of it
– Society as a collection of warring circuses
– I’ve always liked Old Spice but not always used it
– The Galaxy Tab S 8.4 is easily the best tablet yet made
– In general, both more stuff and more space mean more work
– I am not looking forward to mowing the lawn at all
– My universe is the smallest it’s been in decades
– Mechanical automatic watches are seductive things
– There are multiple phone calls today that I’m not eager to make
– Diamond polishing paste works very slowly on glass
– I am frustrated beyond measure with my current career status

— § —

It’s been six years since I last used Linux as my main, day-to-day creative computing platform, after seventeen years using Linux and an entire career (that seems aeons ago) as a Linux expert, author, and contributor.

I do now use Linux constantly (as Android) on my mobile devices. In the end, the “OS wars” became entirely moot as personal computing turned into a universe of client/server (mobile/cloud) interactions. I made the transition implicitly in 2010 after getting my first iPhone about a year before that. Somehow I knew that the writing was on the wall right away, and off to Mac OS I went.

— § —

– I am going gray
– Everything in life is destined to become bittersweet one day
– Making music, even if bad music, makes a person feel better
– I need to service my aquarium rather badly

— § —

“Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.”