Jim’s Brain Online

Posted by Jim at May 28th, 2005

Ed went to Calvin College. I went to Hope. I ended up learning about the layout of Grand Rapids through visiting him at the various places he lived during college.

One year he lived in a big old house near the corner of Franklin and College. I’d visit him and Joe on some weekend night to hang out or game. Sometimes I’d discover something new about the inner city of Grand Rapids.

For example, I learned to avoid the corner of Eastern and Franklin. Not too far from Ed’s place, that corner teemed with people on weekend nights. In the summer, the sidewalks were full of teenagers and twenty-somethings, almost all of them African-American so far as we could tell.

We had no idea why anyone would gather there. The corner didn’t have any interesting shops. The only open business was a gas station.

Personally, we never had any trouble there, but we referred to it as “the most dangerous corner in Grand Rapids” anyway. It wasn’t totally unreasonable. I later learned that someone had stopped at that corner in his car, had his window broken, was pulled out, beaten and ultimately needed to go to the hospital.

Between college and my moving to Grand Rapids, the corner has changed. I’ve yet to see much of anyone there when I drive through on a weekend night. The only large group I’ve seen there was a church service going on at the carwash near the corner.

When I drive through there during the week, the only consistent presence there is a member of the Nation of Islam handing out copies of “Final Call,” the religion’s newspaper. The guy even holds it out for me to view, something I find interesting. From what I understand whites were regarded to be descended from or created by Satan according to the Nation of Islam–though that may have changed.

Whatever the case, Franklin and Eastern can be declared “just another corner” in Grand Rapids now.

Posted by Jim at May 25th, 2005

Abby recently rode a bike for the very first time. This despite having owned a bike for 3 months. She got it in February, but as February in Michigan is not conducive to riding bikes, I only put it together on Saturday of last week.

My parents gave it to her, assuring me that the person at the counter said it took her only 15 minutes to assemble. I’m going to guess that she had assembled a bike before. I hadn’t.

Within the next three hours I had:
–figured out how to attach the handles to the frame
–taken the tires off at least 3 times
–adjusted the length of the brake line (which is why I had to take off the tires)
–come to hate and I mean hate the manual that came along with the the bike. The manual contained instructions for how to assemble different pieces of every bike Schwinn makes because they didn’t want to give step by step instructions for each individual bike. My personal suspicion is that the sort of person who knows enough about bikes to find that sort of manual useful probably doesn’t need a manual.

Anyway, crankiness aside, interested people (grandparents?) can find a short movie of Abby riding in the folder marked “public files.”

Posted by Jim at May 20th, 2005

Kristen and I went to see “Revenge of the Sith” tonight. It’s worth doing, being much, much better than the previous two films. I’m not going to review it here, but I’d just like to register the fact that it didn’t suck and was in fact actually entertaining.

There was a lot of Yoda in this movie. This is a good thing. The only bad thing is that that means two and a half hours of hearing Yoda talk.

Kristen and I leave the theater, feeling as I often do after a movie–out of place, still half in the theater. Walking through the parking lot, we have the conversation below:

Me: Disoriented I am.
Kristen: Goofy talking backwards is.

Posted by Jim at May 16th, 2005

I’m currently trying to make my Mac useful as a second work computer. For various reasons, Creative Suite isn’t an option–mostly because I’ve already got it on my Windows computer and I don’t want to buy it again for the Mac.

Anyone have suggestions for free/cheap/open source OS X apps for graphic design? Particularly for web design? What about good FTP programs?

I know that scribus and the gimp work on OS X once you’ve got X running. I haven’t gotten around to that yet. I use Eclipse for programming and am happy with it.

Anything else I might try?

Posted by Jim at May 12th, 2005

Taking courses in social psychology strongly affected my view of the world. How? Mostly by causing me to distrust (and test) my own perceptions of reality.

People tend to perceive what they already believe to be the case. Give someone an essay about abortion with an equal number of arguments for and against legal abortion and they are more likely to remember the arguments that support what they already believe. Not only has this experiment been done, but it’s been reproduced.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact I’d argue it might even be useful, helping people to stay on a particular course in life even against contradictory evidence. Contradictory evidence is sometimes merely the exception that proves the rule.

A practical result of this and other tendencies is that there is a “web of plausibility” for each of us, a collection of beliefs that we have that determine what we see in the world around us.

Thus Christians might see the hand of God in something ordinary and I suspect that an atheist might be able to find the ordinary even in an “obviously” supernatural event. I know that when confronted with stories of psychic phenomena or situations in which horoscopes seem to be accurate, I’m skeptical. Though a Christian, I don’t assume stories of supernatural events are true and tend to regard tales of psychic phenomena as improbable.

Politics provides all too many good examples of people’s willingness to believe what already fits in their worldview. Within the last few weeks, Matt Drudge linked to a story about a 17 million dollar, government funded homeless shelter that contained a movie room, gym, and hair salon.

Now if you happen to believe that the government is generally wasteful and spends too much money on the poor (whether or not you’re right about that), that story would fit into what you expect to be true about the world. You might even write a blog entry about it.

Trouble is, it turns out that it’s not government funded. It’s privately funded. The “salon” is 3 barber chairs, staffed by residents. Far from being “posh,” the floors are concrete. You can listen to a NPR reporter’s account of a night there. It’s not exactly a luxury hotel.

I’m not saying that conservatives are particularly prone to this. Everyone is. To the extent that the media is biased, I tend to imagine it as being biased one reporter at a time. Where editors share assumptions with reporters, those assumptions aren’t questioned as much as they might be. Reporters, like the rest of us, have only their own perceptions to guide them.

Again, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Too much doubt about your abilities and perceptions and you miss opportunities and insights that might have helped you. Too much confidence and you miss the fact that the world doesn’t fit your preconceptions, but at least you’re trying something–the good point about disaster is that it does sometimes point out where you’re wrong.

And sometimes people even learn from that.

Posted by Jim at May 9th, 2005

Recently I was trying to fix a problem with someone’s pc. The pc had mysteriously stopped sending system events noises (email beep, start windows, stop windows…) through the speakers and would only make the rather unpleasant beep that comes directly from the computer speaker itself.

It turned out that it resulted from an entry that a downloaded program (the Weather Channel client) had made in the registry. Eventually I discovered this and deleted the entry.

The amusing thing for me was the stuff that showed up when I was searching. I was putting in words like “windows xp beep system events registry key” in various combinations, but when I searched with one of those combinations what were the first entries?

Stories from alt.sex.spanking. I have no idea why.

Posted by Jim at May 7th, 2005

I didn’t end up doing much blogging this week. I suspect that this is partially due to finishing things for Hunger Walk. I’m responsible for doing the layout of any documents needed for the walk (the map, route directions, the punchcards that indicate how far you walked) as well as photography on the day of the walk.

If you feel an urge to see the pictures I took, feel free…

Hunger Walk (in case you’re wondering) is a walk to raise money for local food pantries and religious, international aid organizations (ranging from the CRWRC to Lutheran and Catholic organizations). The organizations it donates to work not only to feed people now, but also to change people’s situations so that they can feed themselves in the future.

Posted by Jim at May 2nd, 2005

In Neal Stephenson’s book “Snow Crash,” a person who’s decked out in electronic gear to the point that they are online almost all the time is referred to as a gargoyle. In the book, that particular name comes from the fact that the Metaverse/internet is viewed by means of goggles and someone who wears them constantly looks rather peculiar.

Like many things in science fiction, the idea seems real because it feels like we are moving in that direction all the time.

At any given moment I may be carrying a:
flash drive
laptop
pda
mp3 player

and now (as of today):
a cellphone.

It is way too much electronic crap, all of it with slightly different purposes that don’t really overlap. There are redundancies, of course between the bunch of them, but mostly they each serve their own unique purpose in my life.

The newest acquisition (the cellphone) is for work purposes. Due to the fact that I now spend some days moving from office to office, it’s become hard enough to get a hold of me that a cellphone is actually a necessity. Ditto the laptop as I’m sick of leaving files at home (on one of the three available desktops) and realizing that I need them or having no easy way to demonstrate a web page to a client.

Thus I end up carrying piles of electronic junk with me at all times and I have multiple methods of connecting to the internet. We’ll see how I like it. In the meantime, I think I might have to get a bigger backpack. That or breakdown and get a laptop case with lots of pockets.