ihnatko’s posterous

Dearest Philip:

 I've packed a few things and I'm going to be staying with Estelle for a while. I don't know what I'll do after that.

 I know you've worked hard at our relationship. Your passion and commitment are beyond question. But it feels as though it doesn't matter how hard we try to resolve our problems, we keep getting locked in the same repetitive cycles over and over and over again. I've tried to pretend that nothing was wrong with our marriage. I think I've been living on faith that eventually, our relationship will make sense, that over time, I don't know...a larger significance would suddenly manifest itself.

 Instead, I feel as though we've been lulling ourselves into some sort of trance. Solving the problem by "self-meditation," I suppose you could call it.

 But now I must go, Philip. It's simply too much work for someone like me, who hopes to feel joy effortlessly. Lately I've stopped trying to peel the layers and I've begun wondering when this will ever end. The only answer I came to was that this will only end if I simply have the courage to walk away.

 And before you ask, yes: I've found our sex to be methodical. My previous boyfriend -- I know you hate to hear about Ludwig but I think this will help you -- sent me to thrilling highs through stylish flourishes, in movement after movement. Sometimes he could even be outright aggressive on the sheets. I liked that. I even enjoyed our moments of quiet because it allowed me to catch my breath and consider what I've just experienced...and because I knew that Lud was only preparing me for another thrill.

 It certainly wasn't the flat, smooth, gently rolling action that I've been getting lately. With Ludwig, I could count on multiple crescendos in every performance. I haven't experienced that once in our entire relationship. I'm ashamed to have to admit that I've been dishonest about that.

 Please don't try to follow me.

 I know that this hurts you, but take solace in the fact that life goes in cycles. Someone new will come into your life very soon. Perhaps someone who resembles me superficially at first, but who over time, reveals subtle differences over me and your previous girlfriends...little shifts that will intrigue you enough to continue the relationship. I'd like to encourage you to try something fresh, shake things up with some variety, but I know you're set in your ways and you take great comfort in simple routine. It's because of that, and because I want you to be happy, that I'm leaving.

 Have faith. Be well.

  
-- Lorraine

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When you bump into John Malkovich and he's drunk and in a bathrobe and holding a Scotch in one hand and a gun in the other and even though you've never met before, he's rambling about how you're not only an idiot, but "just like all the idiots I've been fighting against my whole life," your day is already not going well. It will probably get even worse, and very, very soon.

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I have a loaner MacBook for an upcoming project. It's a gradual move-in process. First I run Software Update, and then I start installing the apps I need. Inevitably, a few weeks' worth of music and movies go into the iTunes library and some useful Automator workflows are copied and installed as plug-ins.
 
On and on. There's one last thing that I might not get to right away, but always happens...and usually after a lot of cursing.
 
I go into Terminal and type
 
sudo pmset -a lidwake 0
 
...and then I enter my admin password. This disables the MacBook's "Wake from sleep when lid is opened" behavior.
 
"Why the bloody hell would _anybody_ want to disable that?" you might ask. "What, you often open your MacBook just to check your makeup in the glossy screen?"
 
It's a safety thing. Way, _way_ too frequently I've picked up my laptop bag and it felt...warm. I unzipped it and heared a screaming fan. At some unguessable point in the recent past, the MacBook got jostled just enough to twitch the screen sensor and it woke up.
 
Inside a sealed bag whose thick padding acted as thermal insulation. Result: a white-hot $1500 computer. That can't be good. If there are any weak points in the hardware, that sort of abuse will cook 'em right into a hardware failure.
 
Worse: when this sort of thing happens and I pull the machine out, I prepare myself for percolator-like noises signifying a head crash. If I had KNOWN that my MacBook was awake, I certainly wouldn't have run for the train. And when I caught my train, I wouldn't have simply dropped my bag on the seat in exhaustion. Even when it's a padded case and a padded seat, you should _never_ drop a running MacBook. Because -- see if you can follow this, Mr. Wake On Lid Open feature -- IF THE HARD DRIVE IS SPINNING ALL OF ITS DATA WILL GET CREAMED by the jostling and bouncing.
 
Okay? I've only had one unrecoverable drive crash in my life, and it happened when I accidentally dropped my MacBook a whole three-quarters of an inch while it was waking from sleep.
 
Ideally, "Disable Wake On Lid Open" would be a system pref instead of something that can only be done via the command line. But if this were an ideal world, the normal bumps and jostles that a notebook experiences in transit wouldn't be enough to wake the machine.
 
At least Prefs has a "sleep hard drive whenever possible" option. It's intended to conserve the battery but it probably protects your data, too. The next time you slide your MacBook out of the way a little to make room for your beverage and wind up bumping it right into a wall, think about that option. Ideally, you'll be thinking "Boy, I'm glad I turned it on; there's an excellent chance that the drive heads were safely parked when that happened."

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I can't believe it took me this long to figure out the math:
 
1) With a MiFi in my pocket, there's a bubble of WiFi internet connectivity wherever I go.
 
2) With an Eye-Fi card in any camera, the shots I take can go straight to Flickr, wherever there's WiFi.
 
Thus
 
3) With a MiFi in my pocket and an Eye-Fi in my Nikon...I can effortlessly LiveFlickr from anywhere in the US.
 
And I'm not posting dinky phone photos: I'm posting REAL photos.
 
This is just another reason why I think the MiFi is THE mobile broadband solution. It's not a gadget, it's a resource with huge flexibility.
 
I'm out in Brookline getting dinner. Watch the majesty as it happens:
 
http://www.flickr.com/photos/andyi/

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I had my first Tea Egg in Beijing. It's a tantalizingly simple idea:
 
1) Make some hard-boiled eggs.
2) Reduce the water to a simmer.
3) Add a teabag and some spices.
4) Crack the shells of the eggs by tapping around them with a knife handle.
5) Return eggs to the water and simmer for 2-5 hours.
 
The flavors permeate the white of the egg and also create a neat spiderweb effect.
 
When done right, like the ones I had in China, the taste will inspire you to try making some when you get back home. Even when done wrong like this, it's damned tasty.
 
I did these "wrong" in the sense that I didn't follow a fixed recipe. These were "practice" eggs that were near their use-by eggs. One bag of black tea and a tablespoon each of cinnamon and Worcestershire made a nice, barbecue-ey sort of taste but it wasn't quite strong enough.
 
Also, to duplicate the best I had in Beijing, I think the eggs would have to go in unshelled...so the flavors seep in everywhere at full potency.
 
Still, a solid first effort. And I think if you served this to a 9- year-old boy as a "dinosaur egg" it'd go over pretty big.

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Damn and blast. It's been almost a month and I'm still using Posterous.

 This is practically unprecedented. I've signed up for every blogging service ever released. Squarespace is a typical outing. I signed up, I created a site, I posted to it for a while...and then the testing was over and I never considered signing up for a "real" account. My head remained in "testing something so I can write about it mode" and never wandered into "using a tool that I value and enjoy" territory.

 Which is not to say that Squarespace isn't a fab service. But there's a difference between evaluating an Ariel Atom as an automotive journalist ("What style! What engineering! What performance! What FUN!") and then switching hats and evaluating it as someone whose current car has about 90,000 miles on it ("Oh, man...that open cockpit is going to _suck_ in New England weather. And am I going to have to hook up a trailer just to get three bags of groceries home?")

 But no, I'm still using Posterous and liking it. It makes blogging simple, spontaneous and fun. It also gives me a one-dropbox conduit to all of my most important services: my Wordpress blog, Twitter, and Flickr.

 So: Posterous is here to stay. Now I need to think about what its proper role ought to be. And this sort of musing only goes to show what a wonderful little service it is. The two extremes:

 1) Pull the plug on my Wordpress blog. Just transfer Ihnatko.com to my Posterous blog and be done with it.

 (No, of course I won't. I want to promote my books and other projects through my blog, and design flexibility isn't a goal of Posterous. But maybe more than anything else: using a service like Posterous represents a hell of a leap of faith. I value a lot of the writing I've done on Ihnatko.com. It's no good to keep it all on a server that I can't back up and which (according to Posterous terms of service) could disappear at any moment. But strictly on a technical basis, Posterous could serve as a "real" blog. That's quite a compliment.)

 2) Use Posterous as sort of a "SuperTwitter." I could simply see Wordpress, Posterous, and Twitter as three different tools and use the right one for the job at hand: Twitter for snappy little confections and "interactive-ish" dialogue with followers, Posterous for appetizer-sized observations (longer than 140 characters but still under a paragraph), and send "real" pieces like this one to Ihnatko.com.

 Good. I like this idea. One of my limitations as a blogger is a simple one of mindset. I don't think in terms of Dorothy Parker-esque "doo-dads." I think in terms of articles. That's what I've written regularly since I was 18 or 19. I think I've taken to Twitter because it imposes a HARD stop at 140 characters...otherwise, I get to the end of the second or third paragraph (conventional doo-dad bloggy length) and I just keep on writing.

 (Witness this post.)

 So if I train myself to send something to Posterous when I'm trying and failing to convert an idea or an observation to a molecule-sized Tweet, hell, it might save myself a lot of time and frustration.

 3) Use Posterous as a conduit and not a destination.

 Another great idea. Posterous has a fabulous hidden feature. You post to your Posterous blog by sending an email to post@posterous.com from your registered email address and if you've told the service about your Twitter, Wordpress, Facebook (etc.) accounts, it'll be copied to those other places as well. But! You can put specialized routing information there to the left of the @ sign.

 I'm writing this post in my mail client and planning to send it to Posterous. If I change the "To:" address to blog+twitter@posterous.com, this post will only appear on my Wordpress blog. Posterous will also post a Tweet containing the title of the blog post and a link to it...umm...

 ...Actually, I've never really tried it. Let's see what happens if I send an email to blog+twitter+private@posterous.com. The third is a keyword that says "don't publish this at all; put it on Posterous but keep it private."

 ...

 Hmm. No, that doesn't work. Dash it. The hitch of this is that I want Twitter followers to read the post on my blog, not on Posterous, and I want Ihnatko.com to collect all of the comments, not Posterous.

 Well, you see the sort of things I'm thinking about at the moment.

 Bottom line: I'm blogging a lot more to Ihnatko.com now that I have Posterous. I'd like to either continue those good vibes, or figure out a way to wire up Ihnatko.com to give myself the same sort of functions. But I'd like to do it in such a way that I don't wind up splitting my readership (and their responses) into three factions.

 (Developing Story)

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I'm testing out something with Posterous. I'd like to see if I can send an email to Posterous and have it become a blog post, a Tweet, but NOT show up on Posterous.com.

 Push the button, Frank...

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CNN has just finished airing an interesting piece on a proposal to de- criminalize the sale and use of marijuana in California. Under the proposal, it'd be taxed and regulated like tobacco.
 
The timing might be perfect for this. There's already broad support for decriminalizationin California; after all, this is the state where you can tell your doctor that you have athlete's foot and walk out with a dispensary prescription for pot.
 
("It's the sort of occasional itching that can only be relieved by getting stoned in epic fashion, doc." Uh-huh. I bet this guy stole a handicapped spot from a cancer patient at the dispensary, too.)
 
And California's titanic fiscal crisis creates in the mind of the average Californian both a desire to get stoned and an open mind regarding a move that would bring in hundreds of millions of dollars in new tax revenue.
 
Reactions from the Governator and dispensaries were interesting. I've heard enough politicians speak to know that Arnold's "Let's look at this carefully" statement is a signal that he's ok with this and would sign the bill if it made it to his desk. A fellow who runs a dispensary welcomed taxation because "it's something that legitimate mainstream businesses do." That is, it could go a long way towards changing public perception of a marijuana seller, possibly bumping it up a few notches above "this guy in a van parked just outside the high school."
 
All in all, a nice piece. But I'm posting about the ending. As usual, the piece ended with a pitch to discuss this story using CNN's online presences.
 
"Every time we do a story on marijuana," the anchor said, "Twitter lights up."
 
Then he paused. A pained expression of "I should have thought that one through first" flashed across his face and then he moved smoothly to the next story.

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If the desktop version of Google Wave is "experimental but not without function," the iPhone edition does two and only two things. It shows you your inbox:

Cool. Waves with fresh content are up at the top. Those icons represent users and gadgets that are contributing to the Wave.
 
And then when you tap on a Wave to see its content, Wave for iPhone does its second thing:

Yes, it amuses you. Which is more than many apps do so: Win!
 
(Still experimenting but having lots of fun.)

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