Stuff from my Treo 700p

Received 07/06/2008 20:43

New Day

I'll miss this klutzy software and look. Boo hoo. Things change. The Treo stuff is now going here. The RSS link is here.

Received 07/03/2008 20:01

Whored

I'll be changing the web address for new Treo postings in the next couple of days. While installing the Horde framework and other Horde apps I seem to have updated a bunch of PHP libraries to versions incompatible with the software used to run this little place. This turn of events led to a funny conversation. Someone asked me how my day was, and I said "Well, I have Horde." It sounded like I said "I have whored," and while that is not the case here it has been true at other times. Anyway, I am setting up a software that will do what this did. This, of course, involves sending a bunch of test postings. Knowing that *nobody* is reading the test postings has me feeling liberated. I have maintained a handful of completely secret ramblings, some on this site and some in other places. I do not even remember where all of them are any more. I am confronted with them unexpectedly when, once in a while, these places appear via a web browser's URL auto-complete, through a search on 8 years of e-mail, or other such means. When I started posting here I did it with the feeling that it was, like those other places, invisible. On that note, check back soon for the new URL (if anyone still reads this).

Received 07/01/2008 21:10

Does shit stink?

I have not seen it myself yet but that picture of the amazing stained glass probably does no justice to how much I love the thing. I finally found it after first spotting it in February 2006. It was not exactly tormenting me but I spent 6 or 7 hours trying to find it again.

That stained glass is unusual for Calvary because the door to the mausoleum that houses it is completely without glass. So you can see the stained glass inside (and get photos of it) without reflections of your wrist or mouth in the door.

And the stained glass piece seems to be in immaculate condition. That would be unusual to begin with(the glass is about 100 years old) but it is made more remarkable by the arm's reach within which this beautiful stained glass work sits.

Anyway. I am sunburned from today's cemetery trip. I have been restless these days, and the last few days I wandered off into directionless walks just like the old days.

Remembering a conversation from the other night, in which the three of us sought out new universal truths, universal answers to obvious questions.

The most obvious specimen from the genre of answering obvious questions with universal truths: "Does a bear shit in the woods?" While a bear, an individual bear, is not *constantly* shitting in the woods, the answer to the question is always yes. A bear is always shitting in the woods. Somewhere, dear reader, somewhere in the woods -- as the sun sets, as the beer pours, as the twig is bent -- somewhere a bear shits onto the surface of our shared earth, our shared earth.

We entertained other possibles answers. Is Hitler evil? Well, not if you, y'know, worship Hitler. I argued against "Does shit stink?" Shit, I argued, does not always stink. I thought vegetarians' shit never stunk? No no no, Mark, you should eat some asparagus and report back.

"Is the pope Catholic?" seemed like a slam dunk. While there may have been popes who could be proven to have been (by technicality or political motivations) non-Catholic I think it is universally safe to say that at any given moment in time the pope is Catholic.

"Three strikes and you're out?" Instantly shot down. First of all, you can foul tip the ball and the catcher can drop it, giving you a chance to beat the throw to first base. This happens all the time, with many pitchers on the books as having scored 4 strikeouts in an inning. But even metaphorically there is no universal substance to the three-strikes rule.

And the conversation went on and on.

It was nice.

Received 07/01/2008 13:49

Most beautiful stained glass at Calvary

Received 07/01/2008 00:30

Girl with large chin

Received 06/30/2008 21:46

Sewers

I spent much of the day standing on sewer grates, looking for examples of artistry in the placement of paint splotches on the openings to the sewers.

Somewhere in the New York City bureaucracy is a job in which someone drops splotches of paint on the sewers. The splotches indicate that the sewer has been treated for West Nile Virus. A city employee, committing mosquito genocide, drops an insecticide bomb into the sewer, and records the gesture with a couple of paint splotches.

I do not know what (if anything) the colors represent. Lately the paint splotches seem to be white. The artistry comes from the paint splotches dropped on top of already existing paint splotches. Large green spots, topped by smaller, centered red spots, look like bug-eyed cartoon drawings.

Other splotches look artistic on other merits. Sometimes the dripping paint that oozes down the curb forms an elegant passage, dried in mid-ooze. Other times I swear the people who placed these paint stains were trying to say something, to who I do not know, but today I took receipt of the message for future interpretation.

It's a photo essay I've wanted to do for a long time. Maybe it's a little overly precise but I think the series of photos of these paint droppinigs will reveal something.

I am passing through an anti-zeitgeist phase. For most of my days I just touch the surface of understanding things. Lately I find myself looking beneath.

I think it has something to do with this project of learning the Well-Tempered Clavier. This is complex music whose meaning reaches far beyond the notes on the page or the sound of the music.

Many of these pieces have been in my hands since high school, but I never really knew them. I never felt worthy of them, nor do I feel worthy of Bach's other great keyboard pieces.

Long story short (hah) I am getting through to the meaning of this music, and the intellectual rigors required to so are perhaps drifting into other pursuiits.

I see failure, though. I do not think I can memorize this series. And I do not think that I can be free with the Well-tempered Clavier until I can play it in its entirety from memory. Today I can not get through one single piece from memory. Most of the fugues I can not even get through the first entry of the counter-subject from memory without crashing.

I did not approach this project with failure in mind, and it is far too early to resign. But this weekend I had a glimmer of failure in this pursuit.

I began learning the fugues in the way Bach's students learned them: I started copying them out by hand. From the first minutes spent copying the D-Sharp Minior Fugue from Book II I felt the difference in understanding. I felt a different experience.

That is where I am this day with the WTC project. Hah, I remember feeling so clever when I moved to New York and spotted those subway station signs directing passengers to the WTC.

Received 06/29/2008 23:06

Autograph

Received 06/29/2008 21:46

What

Mother called today.

For years now she has claimed that someone comes knocking on her door and ringing her doorbell at 3 or 4 in the morning. She has no idea who has been doing this all these years.

I do not know where or when her memory disconnects, or where it reconnects.

She has little memory of things we have talked about over the last 3 or 4 years. She remembers things that connect with things from my youth. She seems to remember that I am presently learning the Well Tempered Clavier, but she does not remember stories from my school years -- stories which filled not days or weeks but months of conversation, some of it consecutive but much of it spread over years. She knows nothing of my macular degeneration, though we talked of it at length many times since last year. She vaguely remembers where I live.

The conversations start with the same dismal news: "I'm still alive," she says, not with any satisfaction or positive energy but with tired, put-upon disappointment.

What will I do without her? Assuming I even outlive her, who can I talk to? Who else? I find most comfort and freedom in conversations with gay men, elderly women, and Internet chat room lurkers. In other places and with other peoples I feel obligated to be something, to be someone, to produce a character, to embody a personality.

Received 06/26/2008 23:09

I hate onion

Girl's mouth reaks of onion. Wet, thick onion. Should I tell her? Or should I learn to love the taste of onion?

Received 06/26/2008 00:15

What

I need to change my life.

How can I do that?

Nice hot breeze blowing over me.

Received 06/24/2008 22:37

Dreamspaces

Well, I just found a lengthy bit of mental droo that I thought I sent three or four days ago, but I guess not. Now the sequence of my accounts is wrenched awhack.

And none are concerned.

I am at a new old bar in my neighborhood. It's "new old" because it's the same place as before, just renovated.

I find it strange to inhabit a space after it has changed. The change here was not so radical, but memory tells me that the table at which I sit now is on the spot where karaoke stars used to sing their songs. To my right is a row of tables, a space that used to host a dank room with a pool table.

This new place now has televisions everywere. There are two to my right, one to the upper left, and seven or eight to the left. A couple of large wall mirrors create an illusion of even more televisions. You could close your eyes in this place and still see televisions.

The payphones and the ATM are gone.

A hipster pub near here closed down a few years ago. Eventually that small, dark bar was replaced by a huge, brilliantly lit grocery store. It has been a few years since the bar closed, and over a year since the grocery store opened, but when I shop for pork chops therr I still see the things that filled that space when it was the hipster pub. I still see the bar and the bartenders moving through the space where the cash registers and the cashiers sit today. I look to the ceiling, so brightly lit today, and see the barely visible exposed innards of the building as I saw them when the bar was open.

It can be like looking at someone you thought you knew, or someone you once knew, only to find that person dismissed.

I had a dream last night Sam C. died. Sam is someone I went to school with from early grade school through high school graduation. We were never really friends, and we do not keep in touch.

By "not exactly" I mean that his name (and the names of others) surfaces in my e-mail once in a while when there is activity on an e-mail list for alumni from my high school graduating class.

His name rises up along with a few dozen names of people I knew in school. Sam is among a dozen or so from that high school class who I knew from the 3rd grade.

It seems odd that Sam would rise up in my dreamlands, but there he was, not rising up at all but instead fallen down dead of congestive heart failure at 40.

In the dream he had owned a sandwich shop. The sandwich place did not open that day on account of his death.

I looked through the glass doors of the sandwich place. No one was there. I imagined him behind the counter with the white chef's cap on his bald head. I remembered his huge, butt-like nose.

I turned around and found that the sandwich place was in a mall in Tampa. I stopped to talk to some people about Sam's passing. After talking to said people I found that one of them had stolen my camera. I could not figure out which of the people had taken my camera, but I did not care. Cameras, like all electronics, are disposable junk, so I dismissed the loss of the camera with plans to get a new (better) one.

That is how I woke up: planning a trip to B&H Photo to get a Canon G9 to replace my point and shoot lost in the morning's dream. I was planning that trip to B&H until I remembered that Sam had died.

Or had he?

I looked up Sam's name on the Internet newsfeeds and found no death notice. I found nothing on the blogs, nothing on Usenet, nothing in my e-mails.

I do not know Sam at al any more so it made no sense to pursue this with a phone call or an e-mail, or with anything more than that paper-thin surface of knowledge known as a search of the Internet.

I never fully woke up today, so it is not until now, 10:30pm, that I write this out and alert myself to the fact that Sam is (probably) alive and well.

Dreams can last a long, long time. If you do not sit down and talk to yourself about your dreams they can linger forever, like underwear on the flagpole, twisting in the winds.

Received 06/23/2008 21:34

Breezes

The other day I paid rent on my parking space. It has been one month since I got the treasured reserved parking spot in a driveway on my street.

Having that reserved spot has fundamentally changed the pace of my life. It has not changed my life -- no one thing can ever do that -- but it has changed the paces of these weeks.

I had thought that I would use the car a lot more, knowing that I have a place to park any time of day that I return. Instead I let the car sit there, gathering pollen blobs and other detritus from the large tree that looms.

The payment of the rent on the space took an amusing turn, though I didn't thinnk it was funny at the time. I called the woman who rented me the space. We agreed to meet at my car in 5 minutes. I got there first, and started the car engine. A man appeared, and knocked on my car window. He gestured at me to give him the money, which was visible in my hand. I did not know who he was. I say "You don't look like Susan." All the while he is gesturing at me to just give hime the money.

I call Susan, who laughs and says that's her husband. He and I laugh about it as he takes the money and says "Thanks for the money, I'm going to the bar!"

Maybe it's not as funny as I thought, but it seemed high-larious at the time. I imagined I was being mugged by someone who somehow knew I would be sitting there with 200 dollars cash.

The arrangement for me to park there is so informal that it's a little weird. No contract, no papers, no nothing but 200 bucks cash per month and a parcel of land on which to store my vehicle. I don't live there so I guess there is no reason for the property owner to deal with me any more than to get the damn money.

I feel boring. My words today shall hum with the boredom that is me.

I walked all over the place yesterday, directionless, like the old days. I don't do so much aimless wandering these days. Not as much time. I walked up Northern Boulevard then over to Sunnyside, and back again. No point to the journey, which covered only familiar ground.

Someone was having a garage sale. I saw the sign and expected the garage to be at someone's house or apartment building, but the garage was one of a few dozen garages in a large building that contained nothing but garages. A long row of garages, originally intended for cars, but now mostly used for storage. I do not know, but I imagine this is the case because cars and SUVs have gotten large enough that many of them do not fit into the garages built 30 years ago, nor do they fit between the narrow alleys and driveways that lie between buildings.

Heartburn sucks. For much of today I felt like I was on fire inside and out. I forgot to take the Prilosec two days ago. I noted no ill effects for this, so I thought I'd try going two days without. Bad idea. Bile and acids, brewing in the cauldron of my lower digestive tubes, seem only to be deferred by the work of these Proton Pump Inhibitors. The heartburn now is far worse than the heartburn before I started taking Prilosec. I never used to feel like I would burst into flames. Then I started taking Prilosec.

I should check in with the doctor about all this. I do not want another tube-down-the-throat procedure, though one could have far worse things to confront.

Can the acid and bile just be drained? Poke a hole in my side and pour it out? Use it as a bean dip substitute? Sell it for hundreds of dollars a fluid ounce.

Today was a good day for my new web server. One of those social bookmark type sites linked to something, sending a firehose of unexpected (and, frankly, unwanted) traffic to a part of my site run by software which is the likeliest of any softwtare I use to collapse under heavy volume.

There was no collapse. There was not even a slowdown, as far as I could tell.

This new web server is a bit over the top for one single web site. I may add others later, but for now the specs on this one box are similar to the specs on the boxes we used at cnn.com. CNN, of course, had dozens of load balanced servers, while I have just the one, but it's still a little ludicrous to have this much horsepower waiting to run only one domain.

Whatever. It passed a test today.

As announced, as promised, this is boring. My life hums with this today. Serene breezes of tranquil boredom.

Received 06/22/2008 21:40

Discarded baby carriages

Received 06/21/2008 23:30

What

In a bar full of old women and old men and their 12 year old neices and nephews. It's like Ireland but it is New York. Everyone is swilling beers, including the girls with braces.

Received 06/21/2008 22:48

Window

Received 06/19/2008 18:37

Cablage

Today I found myself organizing my audio cables. Hanging from a shoe rack inside a closet I had what must have been 500 feet of audio cables and adapters.

The audio cables rack got out of control. On top of the various audio cables I piled on USB and printer cables, electrical cords, Mardi Gras beads, telephone wires, and baseball caps. They hung there like tangled dreadlocks. When I needed a cable from the knotty mass I had to reverse-tangle (which is distinct from untangle) the thing. When I opened the closet the mass of cables would heave forward, then flop back against the door, making a dumb thud.

I forgot until today that I originally organized all my audio cables in this fashion during the first weekend after September 11, 2001. I have since heard that a lot of people reacted in that way, finding some busy work to make themselves feel like they had control over something.

At the time the organization made some sense. One type of cable was here, another there, the adapters were all over there, etc. It stopped making sense a couple of years ago, when the maass became too interjumbled to be useable.

That was my afternoon.

Received 06/18/2008 19:19

On my face

We-hell-el, this is getting out of hand. Another partly futile meeting at the bank. I got some stuff done, but only the easy stuff.

This co-trustee nonsense is just getting out of control. Out of rule. The terms of my father's trust (I thought) stated that the co-trustee I appoint has no authority to access or dictate what happens with the funds in this account.

Well, the paperwork the bank wants my co-trustee and me to to sign clearly states that in their eyes the co-trustee has full and equal access to these funds.

As much as I trust my friend (and co-trustee) I simply do not feel like asking him to sign something that appears to grant him full access to my account.

I find it hard to believe the bank is disconnected from the legal language of trusts, but I am also starting to question my attorneys and the language of this 800 page tome that my father left for me to unravel.

I also have eczema on my face. Mmmm, that's gotta be tasty.

I am at an open-air pub filled with members of the local cement and concrete union. My routine in dealing with this estate stuff has been to hit the watering hole as soon as possible.

I ordered a couple of books from Amazon yesterday, making the sour discovery that I had to pay New York state sales tax on that purchase. I had heard about that on the radio but did not think of it at purchase time.

Jeff Bezos, for a bigass entrepreneur executive, speaks like an uneasy college kid. He uttered "um" and "like" and "y'know" many times over during the 12-second sound bite I heard of him saying that Amazon would take this New York state tax thing to the Supreme Court.

I was milling around Rockefeller Center yesterday when some young girls approached me. They asked if I was a New York state resident (which I guess I am) and, if so, would I be willing to talk about how I feel about the fact the New York state has the highest property taxes in America.

I honestly thought these girls, who looked to be about 19, were engaged in a high school or college project for their Social Studies or Communications class.

One of them asked "Are you willing to talk to us?"

I said something like "Idunno, who are you?" They ignored that question as I hunted through the name tags they wore like necklaces. I saw the letters "MSNBC" and the NBC peacock logo and figured ah, whatever. I guess they ignored my question with the assumption that the NBC logo on their name tags would placate and encourage even the most skeptical souls.

The girl in charge held an NBC-branded microphone up to my face and repeated the property tax question.

I had no answer, really. I rent, and am happy to do so, so the high property taxes in New York don't mean much to me. I tried to think of something to help them in their person-on-the-street assignment but I had nothing.

I looked at them looking at me and thought damn, that's a lot of make-up.

Walking away I articulated (in my mind, which is where all the action is) a more thorough answer -- buying real estate in southern New York (including NYC) is far more expensive than renting and financially not worth the investment, as I seem to have found in my (admittedly ambivalent) research into buying property here in the city, and ownership is way over-rated -- but there was no reason to go back and find these kids again just to fill their news blurb.

Plus, I have eczema on my face. No way would a blemished face like this be approved for use on the MSNBC channel -- a channel which I thought had ceased to exist.

This is an interesting place to sit. Windows wide open, the peoples walk past and the car horns bleat at them. I like this. There goes a big-breasted girl with a couple of bottles of wine (baaaybay!). Now someone goes outside to smoke, though he might as well be across the table from me since his smoke is blowing through the open window and into my face. There goes a girl with giant triangle ear rings. There goes a bearded dude with bigger boobs than the girl with the wine. Here comes a guy clutching a balloon.

Received 06/17/2008 14:35

The Strooms

Sitting at a place called Pig & Whistle in midtown. 47th Street. No reaeson to come here today save for restlessness.

There is a large painting on the wall. It is a satire of The Last Supper, in which Marilyn Monroe is where Jesus would be, and James Dean is to her left. Elvis is at the table, too, as are several other celebrities.

The sign pointing to the restrooms is partly obscured, making it look like a sign pointing to the STROOMS. The Strooms sounds like an elemental plain from Dungeons and Dragons. Or is it a digestive disorder? Man I got the strooms real bad.

Seeing as the sign to the STROOMS points downward I imagine The Strooms is an underground night club at which only the most bestest celebrities socialize.

Take a memo.

Re: Strooms

That way we get use of the decapitated first letters of restrooms. That's the trick. See, I'm always thinking.

Received 06/17/2008 14:09

Whig & Pistle

Received 06/16/2008 21:27

Count, or recount?

A problem I have with this project of learning the Well Tempereed Cllavier is that I do not know anyone who cares. No one in my immediate life would have any desire to sit and listen to that stuff.

I play for my neighbors. Occasionally I turn my camera on and broadcast over one of those webcam broadcast networks. That is usually fun.

But mostly this is a solitary pursuit.

My life is haunted by screen names and chat room handles. Most of the people who pass through my life are people I will never see, and who I would not recognize if they sat right next to me.

It may be a self-fulfillilng aspect of my personality. Someone once described me as "keeping the world at a safe distance." Appropriately enough I never knew that person, nor did she know me.

At any rate, the journey through the WTC has consumed most of my past 10 days. I know of nothing else in my life that feels so satisfying as playing the fugues from those volumes. Sunday in particular, after 6 or 7 hours at the piano with that stuff, I left the apartment feeling serene. Something was passing through me, like air through the tips of my fingers.

When I start memorizing these pages is when I will start to feel free. That is when I can stop learning and starting knowing, when I can stop accumulating and start understanding.

Memorizing fugues is hard. For me, at least. I think it has to be done, though. The further I get in to this music the more apparent it becomes that I must memorize it to comprehend and suitably recount.

But there is a dilemma. There in the last word of the previous paragraph. Why am I recounting the works of others? Why am I repeating and recycling? I am a creative person, not re-creative . For whatever creative input a pianist might bring to the works of others that pianist is an interpreter, not a creator. A performer is a critic, even, if that is possible -- one who makes the work of others understandable and through whose point of view the work is known.

What I have started to see in Bach these last few months -- where he differs from other great composers -- is the lack of ego. Music of Beethoven, Chopin & Stravinsky ultimately belongs to the personality and (not to get too lofty but) the greater glory of the composer. With Bach the deeper I go the more I feel that his music exists for the greater glory of something beyond the composer, and beyond the music itself.

And it feels good. It feels good to play the stuff. It's niiiiice.

....

For some reason the last few postings I sent to this place disappeared. That is no great loss, but the only thing I can think of is that the cron pipes the script to /dev/null. But it's always done that. For as long as I've been posting to these screens from this Treo I remain almost completely ignorant about how the scripts that run it work. That is not my usual way of working, but it is just kinda the way it happened when I started doing this.

I was, coincidentally, looking Last night at other ways of doing this, and I am also looking at trading this Treo for something else. At the Samsung showroom at the Time-Warner Center the other day I saw the Samsung Broadband PDA, as well as their strange Ultra-Mobile PC platters. Those things are strange. Too big to be truly ultra mobile and too small to be much more than a novelty.

I think the future of ultra mobile PC or otherwise functional devices is in foldable screenspace. A device the size of a Treo or other cell phone/PDA should connect to a foldable LCD screen that opens up to a usable size.

....