Tired and lonely

Haven't posted much of late. It's possible the world just isn't generating as much material as I'd like, but I doubt that: almost seven billion people (due to be seven billion and change sometime very soon) living their lives can't help but do at least a few things that excite my interest.

It's also possible that, like Howard Beale, I just ran out of bullshit. And yet, low though my opinion is of my opinions, I can't say that they're bullshit. Misguided, perhaps; ill thought out, possibly; but never disingenuous or fake.

No, I think I've hit my midlife crisis. A ridiculous cliche, to be sure, but why should I be exempt from this first-world problem?

Mine takes a slightly unusual form in that it's centered not so much on a desperate effort to hold on to vanishing youth (though there's some of that going on) as on an abrupt realization that I'm not only alone, but lonely.

I've assumed I was something of a rare bird, able to live without a significant other. It was a win all around, inasmuch as the last thing I would have wanted would be to have driven some poor soul nuts coping with my numerous neuroses.

The last couple of weeks, though, I've been going nuts for lack of meaningful human contact. I've seen people socially, but either they aren't terribly close to me or they are close but I haven't been able to carry on a deep, meaningful conversation with them due to peculiarities of circumstance.

One of the upsides of being a passing stranger is that you don't get so close to people that you find yourself sucked into their lives.

That's one of the downsides, too. You have no claim on anyone else.

Another downside is, you don't get any practice at intimacy. Paddling in the shallow end doesn't develop your swimming skills.

What will happen to me? I don't know. I might find someone: that's certainly conceivable. On the other hand, I'd be unwise to bet heavily on that outcome.

One way or another, this will pass. In the meantime, I deem it to be something of a public service not to agonize further about it here.

Eulogy for Steve Jobs

Courtesy Daring Fireball, the eulogy for Steve Jobs read at his memorial service by his sister Mona Simpson.

His abiding love for Laurene sustained him. He believed that love happened all the time, everywhere. In that most important way, Steve was never ironic, never cynical, never pessimistic. I try to learn from that, still.

Loving his family doesn't absolve him of responsibility for all too frequently being monstrously indifferent to the feelings of strangers. But he must have been a devoted brother to have inspired a eulogy as touching as Simpson's.

My Obsession Now: Jason Collett, "We All Lose One Another"

It's off a six-and-a-half-year-old album, Idols of Exile, but it's new to me. It combines strains of alternative country, folk, and pop to create an atmosphere similar to my favorite Mojave 3 songs. I've been listening to Collett's meditation on death and life (roughly in that order of lyrical importance) off and on for nearly a month, and have yet to tire of its gentle arrangement or lyrics.

So this is the day of the dead
Bound by love, unbound by flesh

...

This is birth and this is death
All in the same breath

As many have observed, we face our darkest hours alone, and Collett echoes that sentiment (from a slightly different perspective than I've encountered elsewhere) with his chorus, "We all lose one another along the way".

Pretty songs don't have to be happy. (Anyway, happy songs are overrated.)

The Isaacson bio

Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs almost literally has become an overnight success. Much of the credit, morbidly enough, has to be given posthumously to Jobs himself: the timing of his death could not have been more fortuitous, from the standpoint of publisher Simon & Schuster.

Amid the largely flattering reviews, including Janet Maslin's for the New York Times, it was refreshing to read Joe Nocera's opinion piece. Nocera was moved to write about his own reaction to the book because he was puzzled: "I was trying to figure out why 'Steve Jobs,' despite being full of new information about the most compelling businessman of the modern era, was leaving me cold." Nocera concluded that Isaacson simply was too close to Jobs to have the requisite historical perspective for a truly compelling biography.

I haven't read Isaacson's book, and I suspect it will be a long time before I do, if, indeed, I ever bother. (Simon & Schuster may well find that its extensive publicity blitz for the book has backfired among people like me, who believe we've heard or read about all that is worth hearing or reading from Jobs' biography already.) I'll hazard a guess, though, that Nocera is right about Isaacson's lack of perspective -- which, let me add, was all but inevitable given his extensive interaction with Jobs, and should not be held against him as some sort of personal failing.

Isaacson's book may find itself playing the same role vis-à-vis Jobs as James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson plays with respect to Johnson. Boswell's work was considered for a long time to be the last word on Johnson; eventually, though, it became merely another source for more nuanced, more thoroughly researched, and more accurate biographies. It hardly seems possible that Isaacson could have conducted the kind of research necessary to gain a balanced insight on his subject in only two years, but his biography (and perhaps more importantly, the forty-odd interviews he conducted with Jobs himself) will be an important, perhaps a uniquely important, resource for future biographers.

Uturuncu

For a few years now I've been kind of worried about the Yellowstone supervolcano. Not that there's anything I (or you) can do about it, but some of us can't help worrying about that which we cannot affect.

But I've moved on. Now I'm worried about Uturuncu in southwest Bolivia.

Researchers realized about five years ago that the area below and around Uturuncu is steadily rising — blowing up like a giant balloon under a wide disc of land some 43 miles (70 kilometers) across. Satellite data revealed the region was inflating by 1 to 2 centimeters (less than an inch) per year and had been doing so for at least 20 years, when satellite observations began.

Now, rationally, it's a bad idea to panic. As noted above, there is absolutely nothing -- I mean nothing -- any of us can do about a supervolcano. (Well, unless you're the President of the United States, who presumably could issue a secret executive order establishing a survival bunker somewhere safe. That's pure speculation, by the way: I have absolutely no evidence that that has happened, although it would certainly make sense to have a survival bunker for more reasons than just surviving a supervolcano.) If a supervolcano erupts, the fallout, literal and otherwise, will be global: there will be no place to hide from it and no way to mitigate its effects (especially its sun-blocking impact) on any significant scale.

But I'll still worry.

Quake of the day, 2011-10-20

Nothing like a quake to liven up your day.

Preliminary magnitude 3.9, centered on the U.C. Berkeley campus. The preliminary magnitude is always subject to change, it should be noted.

RIM needs a clue

I don't like to kick someone when he's down (well, other than Rupert Murdoch), but honestly, what the hell is RIM, the Blackberry maker, thinking with its offer of free apps as compensation for its recent blackout? (It's not even an unlimited choice of apps, but only from a selected set.)

Vandana Mehra, who works for the World Bank in the Indian capital of New Delhi, thought the free apps were "kind of ludicrous." Her apps tend to crash, and she doesn't use them much.

In response to InformationWeek's article on the subject, "Tom LaSusa" succinctly commented:

Sorry RIM, the damage has been done: A free game of Bejeweled isn't going to rebuild your credibility. Being more up front about what happened -- and working to ensure it won't happen again -- will.

Isn't LaSusa's point blindingly obvious to RIM's management team? If not, shouldn't RIM's board look into replacing them? What is wrong with co-CEOs Mike Lararidis and Jim Balsillie that they've created this public relations fiasco?