A quick note on my relationship with Neal Stephenson’s work

Perhaps two years ago, I bought Quicksilver, the first of the three volumes of Stephenson’s The Baroque Cycle, and considering the vastness of the world I was entering (more than 900 pages per volume), I decided for a calm and slow approach. No method planned, though. I am ever so often stymied by method(s) when I write, I really don’t want any when I read. So the plan was simply Read as many pages you like when you can. The pace has admittedly been intermittent, with high and low tides in reading, almost always depending on my truly-free time and general disposition.

Now I’ve reached more or less the half of Quicksilver, and I’ve resumed the reading after a four-month pause. What’s amazing is that I remember exactly what was happening before I stopped last December. And I still have a pretty vivid idea of what I’ve been reading so far. I usually have a good memory but it can’t be just that. It’s surely also due to the power of Stephenson’s writing, his ability to draw detailed scenes and passages in such a way that they’re easily retained and you can reunite with the narration anytime as if you just left it the day before. As a writer, this is certainly something to aspire to.

The narration restarts, transformed

These are busy times, and the backlog of things worth talking about, linking about, ranting about, is starting to get unmanageable. Today has been strange so far. A 5-hour sleep then waking up in a middle world — half still in the glistering twilight of sleep, half in the floating wreckage of wake. And, after breakfast, the jetlagged, sleepwalking haze got intermixed with anxiety and tachycardia. I have an assignment to finish, the sooner the better, and all day I felt delayed. Delayed inside. Dragging my brain like a load on my back.

In a burst of activity, like a flickering ember describing an unforeseen trajectory, I had an idea: reviving a frozen project, my interactive webfiction. Since it was just at the beginning, I’m trying an experiment: restarting the narration using a different format and medium, to see if it might work better that way, to see where it can bring the whole project. That’s why I created a Twitter account for it.

Follow, if you’re interested, and feel free to interact if you like. As usual, there’s no haste involved, and no expiration dates. Let’s see if Twitter’s tempo helps things move on.

Gone, with traces

It’s happening often, lately.

Every time I decide to update my journal, something happens, thwarting my efforts, getting in the way, diverting my attention, you name it. This time, after my last update a month ago, was an unexpected prolonged stay at the hospital after the surgery I underwent on January 15.

Usually, a cholecystectomy (gall bladder removal) is performed in one of two ways:

• Open cholecystectomy
• Laparoscopic cholecystectomy

Quoting a medical entry found on the Web, Laparoscopic cholecystectomy is most commonly done. This procedure is less invasive than open cholecystectomy and requires smaller surgical cuts. It uses a thin, lighted tube called a laparoscope, which lets the doctor see inside your abdomen. For this procedure, the surgeon makes about four small cuts in the belly area and inserts the laparoscope. Carbon dioxide enters the belly area, which helps lift the abdomen up, so the surgeon has more space to work. The surgeon cuts the duct and vessels going to the gallbladder and removes the organ.

In complicated cases, an open cholecystectomy may be performed. A larger surgical cut is made just below the ribs on the right side of the abdomen. The vessels and ducts going to the gallbladder are cut and closed with clips, and the gallbladder is removed.

Laparoscopic surgery is often associated with a lower rate of complications, a shorter hospital stay, and better cosmetic results than the open procedure.

I underwent a laparoscopic cholecystectomy but, of course, in my case there were some postoperative complications. So, instead of coming home on January 17, I was transferred to another hospital to do an abdominal CAT scan, because two days after the surgery my stomach and belly were still inflated, I had fits of pain all over the place and, more importantly, I had a fever. The persistence of the fever indicated some kind of infection, but the CAT scan revealed nothing abnormal.

As soon as two surgeons examined me, one suggested the insertion of a nasogastric tube to help empty the stomach which was actually full of fluids (almost two litres of a nasty-looking liquid came out of my nose — yes, the tube is inserted in one nostril and pushed down in a way that reaches the stomach, although it stops right behind the throat). After this procedure, my belly ‘deflated’ and returned more or less to a normal size, and I was already feeling better.

Then, to complicate things, I caught a bug in the hospital that led to some kind of respiratory infection. Fever was still there and for seven days I was fasting and had three, sometimes four, IVs feeding me. The occasional addition were antibiotics and/or analgesics. Slowly but surely, I recuperated and was finally discharged on January 27. Now, after seven abdominal X-rays, nine vials of blood samples, one ultrasonography and countless IV drips, I’m at home and continuing the antibiotics treatment which should end tomorrow afternoon. I still have occasional pains in the abdomen and in my left shoulder, but the scars on my belly are healing quite well, the fever has disappeared (of course, otherwise I’d still be hospitalised) and I’m feeling generally fine.

The positive side effects of all this is that now I’m on a healthier diet, and that all those days of hospital captivity inspired me to write a new collection of poems. The working title is Resume CPR (heh), but it has really nothing to do with medicine or hospitals, as it refers to the fact that my poetry, despite being rather absent for three full years, isn’t dead yet. I’ll post the finished collection as a PDF in The Rizland Tea Rooms, but probably I’ll post each poem as a separate entry in that very space.

I’ll try to update more often, provided nothing else gets in the way this time around.

Under (re)construction

In this period of economic uncertainty, many companies are trimming their (human) resources. Similarly, but virtually, I’m carrying out a ‘pruning plan’ on my online presence and projects. The verb to prune expresses my intent with utmost precision: to prune is to cut away dead or overgrown branches or stems, esp. to increase fruitfulness and growth. Looking back at how 2008 went, I have not been able to maintain all the projects I started — some, admittedly, on a sudden impulse. Also, I have not been able to update blogs and journals, or to constantly visit and update websites (social or not) where I have an account (ma.gnolia and Shelfari, I’m looking in your direction).

2009 starts with a new angle, and with the need of cleaning up the virtual online mess left behind. I need focus, and therefore I will devote my attention, energies and interest to some selected places, and delete or otherwise abandon other ones to their natural Web-rotting. To avoid confusion, misunderstandings, false expectations, and to help my current readers and followers to keep finding me at the right corners, here is a list of the places/accounts I’m dropping or leaving or abandoning, and the places I will continue to maintain and update:

Closing, deleting, abandoning:

• Wordth: One day, towards the end of September 2008, this neologism came to mind, and with it the idea of starting a blog where each entry would consist of one word only. The tag line of this blog was The width, length, depth of a word. It lasted a couple of weeks, then in mid-October I started to forget about it. It hasn’t been such a powerful idea in the end, so it goes. I cannot delete it at the moment because it is tied to a Tumblr account that also hosts another space I don’t want to delete, but consider it abandoned.
• Ma.gnolia: Not deleting my account, because I’d like to keep reading and consulting other people’s links and bookmarks every now and then, but I haven’t updated it in months and therefore is abandoned.
• LiveJournal: Rizlas of Rick: No longer maintained. I will migrate the contents of that space here, in the Literary Supplement. I will not delete the LiveJournal account for the benefit of those who have ‘friended’ the Rizlas of Rick journal, but I will post a notice pointing readers to the new space if they want to continue reading new material.
• Shelfari: I was invited to join the site by a Flickr’s contact in November 2007. I thought it was cool to be able to give people an idea of what I have on my shelves, which books I’m reading, and so on. And I was tempted to get more involved in the social aspect of Shelfari, joining groups closer to my interests and views, participating in discussions, writing reviews. I soon found out it was too time-consuming. I’m not deleting the account only because of the time I spent finding my books by ISBN and getting the right (or the most similar) covers for my virtual shelf. I’m leaving the social part of it but I may be updating my book list in the future.

Keeping in the freezer:

• Crosslines: A project I started on February 26, 2007. The idea is to write an ‘interactive webfiction’ as a collective work of writing, developed as a Role-Playing Text Adventure, where the parser is not an artificial intelligence (the computer) but, rather, the Prime Mover, who is the creator of the Story and is responsible of the general direction of the narrative (yours truly). The project, as the About Page states, has no expiration date. You’re welcome to participate but be warned that — since it’s not in my top priority list, interaction times may be long and slow. On the other hand, should Crosslines attract enough active and motivated participants, it can definitely return to an active state and updated accordingly.
• My main LiveJournal account, t_pot: I opened this account in March 2001 and spent some amazing years sharing my personal life and thoughts with a selected and lovely group of people I really consider my friends, despite not having met 98% of them in person. Some of them (you know who you are) have helped me through difficult times by commenting in my journal, writing me privately, and chatting online. I met my wife through LiveJournal, for Heaven’s sake! Thus, I will never delete this account (unless the company behind LiveJournal, whichever it may be at the moment, will decide to shut the site off and dump everything in the bin), but I have to acknowledge the fact that my presence and my updates have been dramatically decreasing in the past year, and that I’ve lost that continual ‘being in touch’ with most of those aforementioned lovely people. I’ve given much thought to it and the solution appears quite simple: I will keep doing what I did with the previous post in this blog: synchronise the two blogs from now on. This ‘best of both worlds’ approach seems to me the most efficient: those in the LiveJournal community will be able to easily follow my future updates, plus they’ll be able to take a look here and enjoy whatever additional content I’ll post. And that will help me keep the bond with LiveJournal in return. I will try to read others’ livejournals more frequently.
• My LinkedIn account: I still think the idea of LinkedIn is a good one, and I’m keeping my account ‘just in case’; yet, I’ve kept it for two years and nothing happened work-wise.

Keeping alive and well and living:

• This place: I like it and it’s a good starting hub pointing readers to other site I keep up-to-date.
• My vintage-Mac-oriented System Folder blog.
• My Italian Mac-oriented Autoritratto con Mele blog.
• My Flickr account. If you like my photos, keep looking, I’m not going away.
• My Twitter account, although I still don’t use it daily or on a regular basis. It’s enough to have a faint idea of what’s happening in my life, though.
• My member page at Veer — I still have to refine it and decide what kind of content to publish on a regular basis.

It still seems a lot to maintain, but only a couple of places are that intense and time-consuming. On the whole, I think it’s much more manageable than before. I don’t think I’ll join social networking sites for the foreseeable future, so don’t bother looking for me there — especially on Facebook.

That said, Happy New Year to all of you.

A sideways appraisal

An attempt to look closely at one’s attempts paradoxically nudges one into a distance from the work itself — a sideways appraisal.
(Annabel Nicolson, 1975)

I’d love to say that I’ve spent all this time since my last update doing extraordinary things, busying myself with exciting developments in my career as a translator, writer, tech pundit, whatever. The truth is much more mundane.

First, there were holidays. I went to Italy in August with my wife to spend the month at my parents’. My wife had to study for an examination she wants to take to advance in her job; I needed rest and a good detachment from the routine. So days passed harmlessly, most of them uneventfully, and of course too quickly.

Then, September. I have been under siege. A high tide of work, translating things I have no real interest in, thus making the impact even worse.

During all this time I’ve been thinking and trying to retain as many creative mental notes as I could. My main frustration — guess what — is my writing. It’s not exactly what you’d call writer’s block. It’s more a writer’s leave of absence. My novel is literally taking shape in my mind: I see entire scenes of many still-to-be-written chapters unfold in my head when I close my eyes. Like watching a fantastic movie you’re desperately trying to remember to describe it later in detail. I see my characters, they’re alive, they move, they act, I see the places they’re in, the clothes they’re wearing, how they smell, what they had to drink yesterday. Then, when the day is done and I have, like, fifteen minutes to take my paper notebook out and see how dreadfully behind I’m falling — well, it’s depressing.

And a constant feeling is nagging me — that when I finally have the time to sit and write all the scenes I’ve been watching behind my closed eyes, or even during brief daydreaming sessions, it’ll be too late. Too late for what, I don’t know. But, you know how feelings are. They often nibble at irrationality.

Online I’ve mostly been elsewhere. My Italian Mac-oriented tech blog is having a bit of a success (having an average of 250 visits per day, well, it’s success to me) and I try to take care of it too. I’ve also kept an eye on the so-called “social networks” that seem to be so popular today, but I really don’t see the point in most of them. I think LinkedIn is a good idea and can be useful work-wise. Flickr is nice and I like to post photos there and give and receive feedback, plus there are some film cameras-related discussion groups with experienced and helpful people, so despite the idiotic idea of adding videos, Flickr is OK. Facebook I don’t get. At Facebook they think they’re smart with the idea that you have to sign up even to just see someone’s profile, and I’ve been even invited by friends who are already there: I set up a Facebook profile where I can post my pictures, videos and events and I want to add you as a friend so you can see it. First, you need to join Facebook! Once you join, you can also create your own profile. — isn’t that precious? Well, it doesn’t work with me. Actually, it’s the best tactic to keep me away from something.

I am on Twitter, and I’m trying to see the cool factor many people see in it. It’s not a bad idea, per se, but sometimes I wonder if this is really being in a “social network”. Some people I follow, mostly tech pundits and developers who keep authoritative blogs about Macs, design, and technology in general, really need a good dose of humility. As I ‘tweeted’ once, Only because your blog is widely recognised and you have 2000+ followers on Twitter, you’re not a VIP. Don’t act like one. I was taking a gander at this Macworld article, when I stumbled on these words, by Claudia Caporal, an ‘urban etiquette and lifestyle consultant in Miami’: Behavior that might be considered rude in person isn’t necessarily rude online. I’ll have to disagree with that. If on Twitter I send some appreciative feedback because someone has written something interesting, useful, or just brilliant, and my message — either public or private — is a bit more specific than just a “Hey, that was great. Keep up the good work”, I expect to receive an answer. Not because I’m an attention-seeker or because I want to be noticed (hell, I’m not a teenager anymore) or followed by Special Pundit or Smart Guy. I expect to receive an answer, even just a quick acknowledgement, simply out of good manners and respect. I took the time to write you something, and you don’t even want to waste five seconds to shoot a couple of words back? It’s because you poor thing are constantly harrassed by the 3,000+ followers you have on Twitter and can’t possibly write back to anybody? Give me a break. You don’t want to be bothered? Lock your updates and have people ask you permission to follow you, then.

Oh well, I’m making it look such a big deal. It isn’t, really. But it’s just a small example of how these supposedly “social” networks at times end up showing only how dysfunctional people are.

An important lesson learnt from the Newton

A real treasure in the Rizland Observer’s archives are numerous issues of MacUser Magazine from the years 1993-1995. It’s good to keep some Mac literature of the last decade, especially things written in a time when the Web was an infant. And it’s surprisingly refreshing to find that, still nowadays, that literature retains some value.

I’ve been reading many of those MacUser issues, and found — along with the sweet savour of nostalgia — quite inspiring bits here and there. Take for example this excerpt from an article by then-editor Caroline Bassett (MacUser March 4, 1994):

The first five minutes with a MessagePad could well be your last. They’re almost certain to display Newton at its least efficient worst. For a start, it won’t recognise your writing. “Bill”, you will shakily write, holding the pad at a ludicrous angle to the light to try and stop the glare. “Burk”, it will sublimely reply. This shouldn’t surprise you because Newton needs to learn your handwriting, and to do that it needs samples. All those Burks and Bulls are Newton’s way of saying “Give us a, break. KO?”. It may not surprise you, but it will annoy you, and it may even undermine you — after all, if a miserable little gadget can’t understand your writing, either it’s stupid, or you are.

Further straining your relationship with the MessagePad, sitting in solitary sales point glory near all the consumer stuff that you know works, is another downer: not only will your MessagePad not understand you; you won’t understand it. All those icons, whose meanings will become self-evident very quickly, will look like blobs and squiggles the first time you see them.

All this is unfair to the MessagePad. Handwriting works, say people who have practised; the MessagePad is simple to navigate around, and the longer you use it the more it exerts a superglue-like grip on the disorganisation of your life. [...]

See? When the Newton MessagePad was introduced fifteen years ago, it undoubtedly had appeal, but unfortunately gratification was delayed. Ms Bassett nails this issue perfectly. The Newton MessagePad’s main feature, the most advertised, and what indeed still distinguishes it from all other PDAs — handwriting recognition — was not something you could grasp and enjoy instantly. Moreover, in the first Newton models running NewtonOS 1.x, handwriting recognition was worse and still not optimised as in the later MessagePads running NewtonOS 2.x.

The fact that the main feature of the Newton was disappointing in the Instant Gratification department, coupled with the price of the device (certainly not “for the rest of us”, at least in the 1990s), was ironically the main factor in Newton’s commercial failure. And it is indeed a pity: only by using the Newton on a daily basis, only by growing accustomed to it can one appreciate it fully.

With the iPhone, which is the PDA for the 21st century, Apple didn’t make the same mistake twice. iPhone is all about instant gratification. iPhone’s icons are wonderfully self-evident. Its interface, too. When it was introduced a year and a half ago, some were disappointed that it lacked handwriting recognition and a stylus. But it was wise from Apple’s part, I think, not to provide and boast that feature. I’m sure handwriting will come along with time and future software updates; in the iPhone Software 2.0 it’s already implemented for Eastern languages. It’s something trickling in the background and I expect we’ll see more Inkwell goodness in the future. The iPhone is already a worldwide success as it is; if a future system-wide implementation of handwriting recognition needs the same training and getting accustomed as it was for the Newton, users will surely tend to be more forgiving than they were 15 years ago.

End of the hiatus

The Rizland Observer is operative again. Briefly, April was spent travelling abroad. May was spent in the hospital, since the Maintainer & Director of The Rizland Observer suffered a case of toxic hepatitis. June was spent recovering, following many projects and catching up with work and various backlogs. In short, we’re here. The galleon is again back on course. We apologise for the long, sudden silence and for the interruption of our publications, and for any inconvenience or impatience this might have caused.

How to hold the camera

I love film cameras; I own a small collection and I like to use them, not to leave them on a shelf just for display. Thanks to the Internet, finding manuals and documentation for 30 or 40-years-old cameras is not that difficult, unless the camera is some rare or obscure model. The design of most of those old manuals is priceless, and I always like to search for a section entitled Holding the Camera or How to Hold the Camera. Perhaps it’s just a personal liking, but those black and white photographs of a young woman (of the Far East, most of the times) or man (rarely) are so evocative of their era, have a certain je ne sais quoi, that I thought it’d be a nice idea to showcase some samples here (click to enlarge).

From the Agfa Silette LK Sensor manual

[Link] Shareware and the iPhone App Store

Macworld | Editors’ Notes | What’s shareware’s role on the iPhone?: Peter Cohen at Macworld asks the same question I’ve been asking myself since I saw the iPhone March 6 event on QuickTime.

What Apple didn’t detail, and what’s missing from the documentation provided with the SDK, according to the developers I’ve spoken with, is any mention of how to distribute trialware or shareware software for the iPhone.

[...]

Another possibility according to a couple of developers I spoke with is that they will need to release two versions of their applications—one that’s feature-limited, as a free demo, and another full version for paying customers. That might ultimately too cumbersome for some customers to bear, though, as it’d require them to download the same program twice.

I’m no developer, but another scenario I was thinking doesn’t exactly involve two versions (one crippled, one full-featured) of the same application.

1. You first download a semi-functional, trial version of the software; you visit the application page in the App Store and you find two buttons: demo and buy.

2. You choose demo and try the application.

3. You don’t like it? You delete it.

4. You like it? You return to the application page in the App Store. You tap the buy button, and instead of re-downloading the whole software you just download a small piece of code that unlocks the application.

I thought about this by observing the process I went through when I updated my wife’s iPod touch with the 5 new Apple applications. The applications were already in the software update. After paying for them in the iTunes Store, the following download was very quick — only 9 KB of code or so. Shareware on the iPhone could somehow follow a similar pattern.

Not an ordinary monograph

Author: Hugues Boekraad
Title: My Work is not My Work – Pierre Bernard – Design for the Public Domain
Publisher: Lars Müller Publishers
Year: 2008
ISBN: 978-3-03778-087-9

I’ve just begun skimming through this book, which I find quite interesting. The Preface opening clearly explains that This book is not an ordinary monograph about a designer: it is about the contribution made by a particular designer to the quality of the public domain.

It was written at the request of the Praemium Erasmianum Foundation to mark the award of the Erasmus Prize 2006 to Pierre Bernard. The Erasmus prize is a European culture prize, and the book accordingly not only looks at the aesthetic qualities of Bernard’s oeuvre but also examines its cultural, social and political significance.

Pierre Bernard is the co-founder of the design collective Grapus (1970-1990) and is now leading the Atelier de Création Graphique in Paris. The book presents and analyses sixteen projects for the public domain, divided into six main areas: Politics, Social, Cultural, National heritage, Science and Public Space. I very much like the poster for a cultural festival in Martigues in 1986. The imagery is simple and effective:

(This image is © Pierre Bernard)

But this is just a small sample; the book is full of many other, even more compelling images. Definitely worth of attention and deep delving, starting from the introductory section, Visual rhetoric and ethics.