Category: Writing

Anything on the process or results of writing as an activity and a passion

VERSeFest 2011

I went to a slam poetry event at Ottawa’s VERSeFest tonight, and it was extremely good. The speakers were very talented, and the crowd was duly appreciative.

For the most part, the poets were very critical of government policy and society in general. I suppose that is normal at these events, which have a certain idealistic revolutionary flavour. At the end, I wished I had a chance to respond to some of the speakers and say that, for the most part, problems persist because they are difficult to solve, not because people are malevolent. More often, they are just focused on other priorities, or blocked by structural constraints and the inherent difficulty of solving enduring problems. All that said, a lack of compassion is definitely one reason why problems like homelessness endure, and poetry is a medium that seems capable of encouraging greater compassion.

This is the first time this particular festival is being held, and it seems to involve a tonne of different events. Tomorrow (Saturday, March 13th) is the last day, with a bilingual poetry event at 1:30pm, Japanese form poetry at 3:00pm, a Dusty Owl Reading Series event at 5:00pm, and a closing ceremony at 7:00pm.

Passes for the day are $10, and available at Arts Court (2 Daly Avenue), The Manx (370 Elgin Street), and Collected Works (1242 Wellington Street).

I have about eight gigabytes of RAW image files from the event to process, but I will definitely put up a link to the Flickr set once I have dealt with them.

Scanner recommendations?

I am happy to say that I continue to endure without a printer at home, though that does sometimes make it difficult to print my Greyhound tickets. What I do think I need, however, is a scanner. Such a machine would let me keep track of my correspondence more easily and also let me archive documents that could be important in the future. It could also be useful if I do find myself enrolled in a doctoral program.

I don’t want to spend a fortune, if possible, and these are the key features I need:

  • Works with Mac OS (ideally with no need for the vendor’s software)
  • Scans text nicely to TIFF or PDF
  • Can scan photos acceptably
  • A multi-sheet feeder would be nice, but is not absolutely essential
  • Relatively small and portable

I don’t need to be able to handle documents larger than legal size, and I don’t need to be able to scan photos at commercial quality. There is definitely some chance I will be moving cities at some point in the next year, so it would be good to get something that wouldn’t be too difficult to bring along with me.

So, do readers have any suggestions?

Mini-review: Pelikan Pelikano

If you like fountain pens, or are curious about them, consider picking up Pelikan’s inexpensive pen designed for European schoolchildren. It costs less than $30 and has a good writing and ink delivery mechanism. It is very bright and simple in its design (they come in primary colours), but there is nothing wrong with that. A lot of fountain pens are designed for people who want to pretend they are General Douglas MacArthur signing a peace treaty aboard a battleship. If you just want something that is fun to write with and a little bit unusual in this age of ubiquitous ballpoint and gel pens, this simple and inexpensive offering is one to consider.

Ottawans can find these pens on sale at Wallack’s (231 Bank Street).

(Note: Make sure to use these pens with cartridges or converters appropriately shaped for Pelikan pens. Cramming in the more commonly available refills available for other brands can lead to inconsistent ink flow and the risk of pen-splosions.)

Feynman and the Trinity test

This post have been revamped in response to a perceptive comment. The old version is available here.

In Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, American physicist Richard Feynman speculates that he may have been the only person who watched the Trinity Test relatively directly, using a windshield to exclude ultraviolet light. Everyone else, he claims, was looking through something akin to welding goggles.

This claim is contradicted in chapter 18 of Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb, in which Rhodes claims that Ernest Lawrence considered watching the test through a windshield, but decided to step out of the car and watch it directly, and that Robert Serber also watched with unprotected eyes.

Feynman does come up a few times in Rhodes’ Pulitzer Prize-winning book. He is quoted on the limitations of human understanding (p.32-33 paperback), the boundaries of science (35), and the status of Seth Neddermeyer‘s plutonium implosion setup in 1943 (479). The book also describes Feynman coining of the term ‘tickling the dragon’s tail’ to describe Otto Robert Frisch‘s dangerous criticality experiment (611), and fixing a shortwave radio being used during the Trinity test itself (668). In one of his books, Feynman describes how he began fixing neighbourhood radios as a small boy.

Quite possibly, people other than Feynman did watch the test without welding goggles and he never found out about it, or at least learned of it after the wrote the speculative comment in his book.

The CBC is growing on me

I wasn’t always the biggest fan of the CBC. I found the argument that we have plenty of diversity in commercial stations relatively convincing. More recently, I have found myself more appreciative of public broadcasters including the CBC and – for international news – the BBC. They do cover politics well.

In addition to providing good content with no advertising, they both run very useful websites.

The Thesis theme for WordPress

My primary focus in blogging is definitely not the coding side of things. I see myself more as a creator of content than as a technology guy. I don’t even know enough CSS to format things the way I want them. As a result, I am grateful that the Thesis theme makes it easy to have a decent looking site that is friendly to search engines.

Avoid messing around with code

With the Thesis theme, you can easily reconfigure things without ever having to dig into CSS or PHP. You can set up sites with different numbers of columns in different arrangements. There is a multimedia box that can be used in creative ways. Thesis also lets you tinker with things like fonts and colours without having to edit any code.

Also, if you want to set up customizations beyond what can be done with Thesis’ various menus, Thesis lets you make all of them in just two files, greatly simplifying the process of upgrading WordPress and Thesis itself. You have a ‘custom’ directory that contains all your special tweaks, and you replace everything else when you upgrade the theme.

Thesis isn’t cheap. It costs US$87 for a personal license (good for one site) or US$164 for a developer’s license (unlimited use). At the same time, that price seems well justified for anyone who is putting a lot of effort into their site and isn’t a web design guru. You want people to take you seriously, and having a decent-looking theme is a big part of that. It would easily take tens of hours to make a site that looks anywhere near as good as Thesis does, and it would be much harder to upgrade your custom setup every time there is a new version of WordPress released (and we all need to keep up with new versions, if only to get security holes patched).

Superior support

Thesis also distinguishes itself in terms of its support community. The theme is updated regularly, maintaining compatibility with the latest versions of WordPress. Rather than having to puzzle over which bits of your site get broken or weirdly modified by the latest WordPress changes, you can just download the updated version of the theme.

Buying it also grants access to support forums, which are extremely useful for both troubleshooting problems and learning how to set up particular customizations. The forums are very useful for helping you set up custom features particular to what you are trying to do with your site, including finding ways to earn a bit of money from ads.

If you are a serious blogger who is still relying on a free WordPress theme, I would recommend thinking seriously about upgrading to Thesis. You will save time that you would have spent agonizing over code; you will present a more appealing look to your readers; and you will improve how your site looks to Google and other search engines, which is critical for building traffic.

Keynote and Pages

Tempted by the reduced prices on Apple’s new App Store, I picked up Pages and Keynote, Apple’s answers to Microsoft Word and Powerpoint.

While it is annoying to have to learn the ins and outs of new software, it cannot be denied that Apple’s offerings produce beautiful output rather easily. In particular, the software comes with templates and typefaces that make it simple to produce documents and presentations that look rather hip and professional.

I have already produced a fellowship application and a job application using Pages (and the attractive Didot serif font). I am also in the process of producing a guest lecture using Keynote and am quite happy with the visual results I am getting.

Technology for content creators

As a technology geek, I can see the appeal of devices like the Kindle and the iPad, especially as far as portability goes. It would be great to have a device small and light enough to carry around all the time, yet less annoying to use than a smartphone.

That being said, the iPad in particular seems to have major disadvantages as a content-creation machine. The web browser has trouble with some parts of the back end of WordPress (creating posts, editing posts, dealing with media, etc). The multitasking capabilities of the device are also somewhat lacking. Rather seriously, copying and pasting on the iPad is far from easy or intuitive – a pretty critical failure for someone who needs to move text between emails, blog posts, blog comments, other webpages, etc.

To me, the MacBook Air looks like a far superior option for people actually heavily involved in the creation of content. It’s a real computer that is fully under your control (you can even install Flash!), and it has a real keyboard and real web browser. If you are doing more extended work, you can plug in a mouse. It lets you take content from a USB key, or plug in your iPod to charge. Alongside all of that, it is remarkably small and compact – especially the 11″ version. It’s not as powerful and capable as a full computer, but it is plenty capable of accessing the internet and email, which would be the critical functions for me. If I need a computer that can do some heavy lifting, I can always go home and use my Core2Duo iMac.

If I wasn’t in the process of saving up for an uncertain financial future, I would almost certainly go out any by one to replace my heavy and increasingly non-functional G4 iBook. As it stands, if I do find myself heading off to join an academic program, it is probably an investment I will make.

Core competencies

If you are primarily a content producer, running a website or a business inevitably seems to involve doing some work outside your area of core competency. You need to deal with clients, negotiate rates, file taxes, manage webservers, etc.

There is one line of thinking that says all such activities are a necessarily evil, at best, and that we should all stick to doing what we are most skilled at. The Ricardo theory of trade may be the purest expression of this idea. It says that if everybody focuses exclusively on what they are best at and sells the products of that skill to everyone else, they will be able to pay others to provide all the necessities of life.

We all do a fair bit of outsourcing. Consider the case of Thoreau, who built his own house and found some of his own food. Compared to him, we are pretty much all more specialized.

Of course, Thoreau’s philosophy is pretty much the opposite of Ricardo’s. Thoreau thought that you should do for yourself even what other people could do better: haul the lumber for your shack on your own back, rather than hiring a man with a cart.

The main question here seems to be how far you should specialize. There are definitely gains to be made in specialization. As Malcolm Gladwell argues, if you spend 10,000 hours practicing the activity you do best, you might become world class at it. At the same time, specialization produces vulnerability to change. A hummingbird with a beak that has evolved to fit only into a single kind of flower is in a lot of trouble if that flower becomes rare or goes extinct. This idea is well expressed in the anime film Ghost in the Shell: “Overspecialize and you breed in weakness; it’s slow death”.

Personally, I think it makes sense to cultivate at least a couple of sets of skills – something abstract and something practical, perhaps, or at least some sort of serious hobby outside of work. Also, even when something isn’t a core competency of yours, it can be worthwhile to know a bit about it. It would be useful for me to take a course on Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), for instance. Web design certainly isn’t a major activity of mine, but it would be nice to be able to customize sites a bit without having to spend heaps of time trawling through forums and plagiarizing the code of others.