Last night, I purchased and installed from the Mac App Store the program Network Logger Pro ($9.99). 

Despite my belief that the Airport Time Capsule is not the problem with our connectivity, I still had to consider the possibility that it might be. So I started researching wifi problems with Airport Time Capsules. I compiled a small checklist of wifi settings to try in the Airport Utility (such as changing ipv6 to "link-local only"). 

I also discovered that the ATCs have a lifespan of 3-5 years -- not only for the hard drive, but also for the wifi components. Apparently, they get hot and wear down over years of being on all the time. So the ATC could be part of the problem after all. That is disappointing, but good to know. Time to start pricing another external drive and a new wifi router.

But let's take the ATC out of the equation: if I was relying just on the Frontier modem, would I still  experience network outages?

So I started looking for programs or terminal commands I could use to create a log file to show that the outages are coming from the modem, not the ATC. It was during this research that I discovered Network Logger Pro. 

Therein followed a series of brainwaves.

• Brainwave #1: I already have an extra-long Ethernet cable running from the ATC to the back of the iMac, so that I don't need to be on wifi. 
• Brainwave #2: The modem has an Ethernet port.
• Brainwave #3: If I connect the iMac to the modem via the Ethernet cable, then I'm bypassing the ATC and getting the data directly.
• Brainwave #4: With the ATC out of the equation, the Frontier tech guy has one less confounding variable to deal with.
• Brainwave #5: If the modem-to-Mac connectivity is solid and steady, then the problem is the ATC. If the modem-to-Mac connectivity is choppy, then -- if the line and signal are all working correctly -- then the problem is the modem. (Just thought of another variable -- the Ethernet cable. But it's not pinched or bent anywhere, so that shouldn't be a problem.)

It takes a while for me to put things together...

I installed Network Logger Pro, which has graphs and stuff I can't begin to decipher. 

  <img src="http://tempblogfood.files.wordpress.com/2019/08/2e4c1-network-logger-pro.jpg" alt="" />

Now that my iMac is slurping data directly from the modem, Network Logger Pro records in its log the network up- and downtimes. Yes indeed, connected directly via Ethernet to the modem, I can see that I'm getting outages of several minutes at a time. 

  <img src="http://tempblogfood.files.wordpress.com/2019/08/2c5fd-log.jpg" alt="" />

So now I can call the tech guy, show him this log, and make the case that we should try a new modem. Once we're sure the modem and line are working well on my iMac, then we can tackle any wifi problems the ATC may have.

Update: the Internet went down as I tried to post this from home. So I'm posting this from work.

 

For Lent, I gave up listening to podcasts and adopted Mark Forster's Fast FVP at work. 

Fast FVP worked great and accommodated a couple of enormous changes that occurred to me at my workplace. 

A pile o' podcasts also silted up such that I could spend the next 50 days listening to them all. But I did get back to listening to audiobooks and other long-form items and webinar recordings I'd put off for "later."

Accd to the calendar I'm referencing, Eastertide runs from April 1-May 20. So here's what I'd like to do:

• Continue using Fast FVP at work
• Use the Next Hour (or other No-List system) at home
• Interleave one audiobook a week with my podcasts. I usually listen to these things when I'm commuting or doing the dishes, so I can get through an 8hr audiobook in about 7-10 days. So maybe alternating weeks of audiobook and podcasts. We'll see.

 

We've had very patchy Frontier DSL connectivity for over a week now. 

It's uncanny that the DSL can work so flawlessly, so invisibly, that we take it for granted. But when connections are dropped and apps that normally update instantly instead stall out, then frustration rises.

I should say that everyone I've dealt with -- Frontier's telephone customer support and technicians -- have been polite, respectful, and seem knowledgeable as they work through their troubleshooting steps.

Here's what has happened since that first call:

• The first customer support person did all the standard checks and nothing worked. She created a trouble ticket. (We've learned from past experience with Frontier that a trouble ticket number is crucial to getting some action taken.)
• The first technician checked the lines and the signal was strong. He replaced the ADSL filter on the phone jack in my office (the only phone jack we use in the house).
• He helped me set up a newer-model modem we got from Frontier in 2016 during another patchy DSL period. The connectivity problem at that time mysteriously resolved itself so we kept on with the old modem. If it ain't broke, etc.
• Even the technician had trouble activating the modem. So it was good I didn't try it myself.
• He introduced me to Speedtest.net, which Frontier techs like to use to test the line. I installed the free Speedtest app for my iMac, also. Works great.
• I had 10 trouble-free minutes of internet and then it slowed and got patchy again.
• We tried accessing either the Airport Time Capsule and the Frontier modem's wifi networks, with disappointing results. The Time Capsule has been our default wifi/router for the past three years and has given us no trouble.
• Called customer support this morning, fiddled with the modem settings per her instructions, and no joy. (She suggested I replace the 10' cord running from the jack to the modem with a 6' cord. The sys admin guys at work laughed their heads off when I told them that.)
• The second technician met me at the house a couple of hours later (same-day service!). He rewired the box outside so only the one phone jack is connected to the DSL line. Prior to that, all four phone jacks in the house were receiving data.
• Both technicians reported that the signal coming to the house and from the jack is strong.
• The second technician's hypothesis was that the Frontier modem installed last week had wireless turned on, and its signal was interfering with the Airport Time Capsule's signal. So when we experimented last week with first one wifi signal and then the other, we made the problem worse because those signals were colliding and slowing all traffic down. He turned off the Frontier's wireless signal.

The connection is still patchy, unfortunately. When the connection is up, the speed is acceptable. But the connection is not stable; we're losing connectivity a couple of times an hour -- sometimes a brief hiccup, other times for 20 minutes -- which renders the download speed (we're provisioned for 3 mbps) a moot point.

Today's technician really thought the problem was the Time Capsule. I pushed back on that. Why would it suddenly go wonky after three years of no problems?

Our set up is this:

• Phone cord from the jack to the modem. 
• Ethernet cable from the modem to the Airport Time Capsule. The TC broadcasts the wifi signal.
• Another Ethernet cable from the TC to my iMac. This effectively wires my iMac to the modem; I can turn off the iMac's wifi and still access the internet.

I prefer having a wired connection to the modem so I can verify whether the patchy connectivity is coming from the wifi or the modem. If Liz's iPad loses connectivity, I can verify via Speedtest whether I've also lost connectivity. If I have, the problem is the signal from the modem, not the Time Capsule.

Liz and I are both getting our internet via the Time Capsule (she via wireless, me via wired), so it could be the weak link. But I'm more suspicious of the Frontier modem. We're an Apple household and I'm frankly loathe to believe this problem lies with the Time Capsule.

Connectivity is better today than yesterday, but not as stable as it was two weeks ago. We will give it a day or two under the normal stresses of email, transactions, streaming video, downloading, etc. 

Until I can take my connectivity for granted again, I will likely roam the Frontier for some time to come.

We saw a trailer for an R-rated movie, and one of the rating justifications was for "pervasive language."

"So that means it's a 'talkie'?" my friend said.

Apparently this odd wording has been remarked on since 2005 or so, but I had not noticed it till then.

Following is a paragraph from a 2009 MovieChopShop post on the MPAA's vernacular:

And we all know about their little one-fuck, two-fuck rules that bump a PG-13 straight up to an R.  But why does Reservoir Dogs have “strong language” while The Departed has “pervasive language,” and Pulp Fiction has “pervasive strong language,” when they really all seem like they might as well be about the same?

The Merriam-Webster site says pervasive can be neutral ("a pervasive sense of calm") but "is most often used of things we don't really want spreading throughout all parts of something," such as "a pervasive stench."

The M-W site ends with a shoutout to the MPAA:

... Beginning in the early 1990s, the MPAA started giving the R rating to movies with "pervasive language." Most movies have language throughout, of course. The MPAA is using the phrase "pervasive language" to refer to the frequent use of a particular kind of language: profanity.

Strong language? Profane language? Bankrupt language for an obsolete and purposeless ratings system?

Build a man a fire, he stays warm for an hour. Set a man on fire, he stays warm for the rest of his life.

The Internet

I complained I had no starter fluid, till I met a man who had no chain saw.

J.R. “Bob” Dobbs

The Situation

At my day job, there's an email I need to send every week. Same subject, same message. The recipients stay mostly the same, though sometimes there are changes in the lineup.

I don't want to have to manually create this email every week. I want the computer to do what computers are supposed to do: remember and do stuff for me so I don't have to remember and do it.

We use Outlook 2016 on Windows 10. Outlook lets you create recurring appointments, recurring reminders, and recurring tasks -- but not recurring emails. Fair enough. The other recurrences only bother you, but sending recurring emails can bother lots of other people.

Because our workstations are locked down, I cannot easily install any macro or automation software that could help me with this situation.

Two Solutions

So here are two solutions I cooked up using just the tools available to me from Windows 10.

The first one made me feel like the Professor on Gilligan's Island creating a catapult from bamboo and coconuts. The second one is plainer but gets the job done.

Neither of these are exhaustively tested or vetted procedures, so use at your own risk.

Solution 1: Fully automated

1. Create a contact group

Create a contact group in Outlook containing the message's recipients. Let's call it Recurring email group.

If the recipients list changes in future, then you only need to add or drop names in this group and nowhere else. The email template we create next will still work fine.

2. Create an email template

Microsoft describes the procedure in more detail, but here's the short version.

1. Create an Outlook email with the text of the recurring message and the subject line.
2. In the To: field, enter Recurring email group.
3. If you usually include a signature in your emails, then do not include it in this template. Outlook will add the signature automatically when the new email is created.
4. Save the email as an outlook template file (*.oft). For the purposes of this exercise, let's call it Recurring email template.oft.

By default, templates are saved to C:UsersusernameAppDataRoamingMicrosoftTemplates.

You can specify a different path but it's easier to just accept the default; if you specify a different path, make a note to yourself of the file's location because you will need the file path in the next step.

3. Create a batch file

I couldn't believe this is what I had to resort to, but it was. God bless batch files. Still incredibly useful little tools.

1. Open Notepad (do not use Wordpad or Microsoft Word, use Notepad).
2. Add the following lines to the batch file:

@echo off 

cd C:UsersusernameAppDataRoamingMicrosoftTemplates 

start "C:Program Files (x86)Microsoft OfficerootOffice16OUTLOOK.EXE" "Recurring email template.oft" 

There are many ways you could write the batch file; for example, I could have entered qualified paths to both the .exe and the .otl. In this case, I did what made sense to me to do.

Save the batch file to a folder on your hard disk. An obvious place is your C:Usersusername directory, but anywhere will do. Again, remember where you saved it because you need it for the next step.

Before you go any further, double-click the batch file and make sure it works as intended (a new email is created with the contents of the template file).

4. Create a recurring task in the Task Scheduler

Here's where our elaborate little Rube Goldberg contraption¹ comes together.

1. From the Start menu, open Windows Administrative Tools>Task Scheduler. (If you don't see an icon for the app, then try some of these methods to open it.) The Task Scheduler sports a most horrific UI. Fortunately, we won't be here for long.
2. In the right panel, under Actions, create a Basic task.
   1. The trigger is the time you want to send the email, such as every Friday at 11 a.m.
   2. The action is to run the batch file. Navigate to the batch file and select it.

You can search Google or YouTube for more help on the Windows Task Scheduler.

5. You're done!

Now, every Friday at 11 am, the Task Scheduler will fire off the batch file, which calls Outlook to open the template file, and a new email will open up -- ready to go -- for you to review and send.

6. But just in case...

There are lots of moving parts to this contraption. Glitches happen and a component may not fire off correctly.

So, set a reminder in your calendar for an hour or so after the email is supposed to be created, something obvious like "WAS THE EMAIL CREATED??".

Aside: What methods didn't work

1. Getting Task Scheduler to simply open the template file. The Scheduler wants either a program or script; specifying the .oft file is not enough, even though the file is associated to Outlook.
2. The Task Scheduler would not accept a qualified path to outlook2016.exe (which took a while to find, BTW) with the .oft path as an option.

It was when these two obvious ways did not work that I hit on the batch file method.

Solution 2: Manual but maybe more foolproof

1. Create the contact group, as above.
2. Create the email template file, as above. Open up a File Explorer window so you can see the .oft file you created.
3. In your Outlook folder hierarchy, create a new folder called "Templates" or something equally brilliant.
4. Drag the .oft file from the File Explorer window to the "Templates" folder in Outlook.
5. Set a task reminder or calendar reminder for the date and time you want to send the email.
6. When the reminder fires off on the date and time you selected, go to the Outlook "Templates" folder and double-click the email template. A new email will open up with the template's contact group, subject, and message you specified.

The second solution is more manual, but also less prone to gremlins in the system. Outlook task and calendar reminders always perform solidly.

We just spent hours to save minutes. You're welcome.

1. Search YouTube for "mouse trap game." I was amazed at how many videos there are. Not just of the board game contraption, but many animations recreating the action of the trap. ↩︎

I have been posting a business/productivity/mastermindish type article every Sunday on LinkedIn for a few weeks now. 

Usually, I take a post or part of a post I've published here first, revise it, clean it up, and post it. 

The "Columbo" post is from an idea I read somewhere on Mark Forster's site, though I cannot now find the reference. I put a structure around it, added the Columbo references, a dash of 3 Principles, and there it was.

I had wanted to present this video compilation of Columbo's "just one more thing" tactic, but the studios restricted the video's playback to YouTube only. Shame.

So the only video I could really link to that worked with my article was the following short (under 10 seconds) video illustrating what you need to do when you hear that "just one more thing" gremlin in your ear.

[youtube=://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yM8ixOCpdxw&w=640&h=480]

 

 

A great reminder to stay a little bit awake as I move through the day.

“You gotta try your luck at least once a day, because you could be going around lucky all day and not even know it.”

Frontier DSL experienced a mass outage in Durham, NC, last night, before I was able to make yesterday's post.

I refuse to tap out a token post on my iPhone SE, so I let it go. Thus was my streak of daily posts -- started last Christmas day -- ended. Boo-hoo.

In retaliation, I will post twice today. This post will count as my March 27 post; the next one will be the March 28 post.

The DSL was still down this morning and may not come back till sometime tomorrow, if then. So I may draft another quickie post and schedule it for tomorrow, just in case.

(I'm using The Man's internet till then.)

I cannot remember where I got this quote, but it impressed itself on me so much that I had it posted in my office cubicles for years, on my old Google blog site, and on my old Tumblr site. I love it so much I want to post it again.

“True Work is that which occupies the mind and the heart, as well as the hands. It has a beginning and an ending. It is the overcoming of difficulties one thinks important for the sake of results one thinks valuable.”

My friend Bob told me about Google Photos’ capability to automatically stitch together a sequential series of photos into a panorama shot with mostly good results.

Googling that capability surfaced this amazing photo created by Google’s auto-stitching algorithms. The article shows the series of photos that were stitched together to make that awesome panorama.

Bob told me of another way to abuse the auto-stitch feature. A friend of his was around when someone was photographing groupings of their friends in sequence to create a panorama. “Wait,” the friend said. He then inserted himself into each group of people that were part of the series. They were puzzled as to why he was pushing himself into every photo.

When the shots were stitched together into a panorama, it looked as if there were six clones of the friend hanging out with his/their friends, with each clone in a different pose: laughing, talking, looking at the sky. Brilliant!

(originally posted 2018-03-25, updated for micro.blog)

A bomb exploded in my neighborhood last night on a sidewalk I walk every morning with my wife and two sons. We’re all okay. The boys are oblivious, thankfully, but my wife and I are a little shook. I wanted to get down a couple thoughts…

Writer-who-draws Austin Kleon lives in a neighborhood where one of the Austin bomber’s devices exploded. He shares a bit of the panic and anxiety he felt about his family, and where to find the best information in an emergency. 

Forget breaking news and even neighborhood listservs. The best information was via the official Twitter feeds of the police and EMS departments.

I also admire his taking of the long view; some information is always there, ready for the taking.

Lots of different types of library work happens everywhere—new jobs crop up daily, thanks to evolving tech and shifting community needs—but there are some standard positions that remain eternal.

Kristen Arnett begins a new bimonthly column on the job that never earns enough to pay back the student loans. It has the punchy humor and wry tone that I associate with literary humor (that’s an observation, not a criticism!).

Because I got my master’s at a library school, I have a soft spot in my heart for librarians. Those who love it, really love it. The young folks coming in to the field are energetic, imaginative, and really pushing the limits of what the local public library can offer. Public service is what it’s all about for them.

If I recall correctly, at the time I was in school (2006-2011) the undergrads were overwhelmingly “library science” whereas the graduate students overwhelmingly “information science.” This was trending to an overproduction of information science faculty nationwide, leading some commentators to wonder who was going to teach the students interested in brick-and-mortar institutions? Most librarians get a Ph.D. to qualify to lead a research library or similar institution, they don’t always come back to teach.

After hundreds of voters weighed in, the results came back. Old Portland died on January 21, 2011 — the day Portlandia debuted.

The end of Portlandia is time to look back on a show that opened the door to a type of hipster humor that felt young and fresh until its moment, like all moments, passed.

The Vulture’s article on the death of Old Portland at the hands of Portlandia reminded me of similar stories, particularly how the villagers of Port Isaac are fed up with the Doc Martin series filming in their village. 

Are the shows really to blame? Austin has long had a hip reputation and old-timers lament the passing of landmarks, but I can’t recall any TV shows set there. Our little town of Durham is growing by leaps and bounds yet there’s no TV show fueling that. Maybe Old Portland would have changed even without the attention the show brought to it. 

But there is such a thing as “buzz”; downtown Durham has it for better and worse, and we visited Portland based on watching Portlandia. The buzz will die away eventually, it has its moment, as humor does. In the meantime? Suffer the tourists and techno-nomads, perhaps, or search out the next Portland or Austin or Durham and stake your claim. More fun to create your own scene than hang out at someone else’s.

This is a rather silly little hack but when I do it, it solves lots of little problems. 

The situation: 

• At my workplace, our badges have a chip to unlock the secure doors. 
• The badge also logs me in to my computer. After inserting the badge into the computer, I enter a PIN and wait a minute or two or three for the login process to finish and Windows to boot up. Once booted, I can pull out the badge. 
• People forget about their badges and leave them in their computers. This is such a frequent occurrence that a big window will pop up on the screen after 20 minutes or so if the badge is still inserted. 
• But by the time that window pops up, you have walked out of the locked office area to the bathroom or to get coffee. Returning to the locked door you  realize you left your card in the computer. You are locked out. Much knocking and embarrassed, hushed "thank-yous" follow.  

So, what to do? Here's what I tried:

• I printed out signs with big red letters screaming BADGE!!! Within days, I'd stopped seeing them. 
• I moved the signs to places where I'd be sure to see them when standing up or exiting my cube. I walked past them as if they weren't there. 
• What worked sometimes was simply to sit at the computer while it booted up but...is that boring or what? I would get impatient and walk away, promising myself I'd remember to retrieve my badge but usually I forgot. 

As I've learned from Mark Forster's books and blogs over the years, the first step in plugging a leaky process or system is to not take the failures personally. This is not about correcting perceived character flaws. I didn't fail, my system failed. Failing provides information I can use to tweak my system so it will work with me and not against me.

As I daydreamed about what would help the situation, I remembered a detail from Thomas Limoncelli's time management book. He mentioned that he kept his badge in his hand as he took off his coat because if he ever set it on a desk or shelf, he'd forget he'd done so and walk off without it.  

Hmm. Maybe instead of reminding myself to retrieve the badge, the simpler solution would be to never let the badge leave my hand. 

The following system is what has worked best: After I insert the badge into the computer and enter my PIN, I put my fingers on the badge and I wait for the computer to boot up. After I'm logged in, I whip out the badge, put it into my badge holder, and go about my business.

No need for signs or reminders, no forgetting the badge, no embarrassed knocks on a locked door. It's a pretty leakproof system.

I can't explain why keeping my hand on the badge and waiting works for me while leaning back in my chair and waiting does not. Perhaps the simple act of holding the badge is enough to engage body and mind. I'm actively rather than passively waiting. 

Also, waiting that minute or so teaches me that the pain of boredom is imaginary. Just ignore that feeling and wait, if waiting is what needs to be done.

By 1992, as I approached my 20th year of university teaching, I’d evolved the philosophy that we who taught about religion had two tasks to perform with our students.  One was to shake them up.  The other was to build them up.

David Halperin tells the wonderful story of a Jewish professor teaching a New Testament class in the South to what could be described as a tough crowd.

So many lessons here on the value of shaking things up, yes, and also the responsibility to build something in its place, and the wonderful surprises that can occur when you take a calculated risk. Something alchemical happened between professor, students, subject matter, and dialogue that produced something unique and unattainable elsewhere. 

I had lunch with David recently; he said he had discovered over the years that fundamentalist students were happy to challenge when they were in the opposition, but they shut up when handed the mic. This “interactive method” for teaching a large class neutralized that stance; it also, from his description, called forth from the students resources they did not know they possessed. What they learned they had earned.

He never taught the class again nor deployed that method again. A golden memory, to be sure. 

I have noticed an interesting change in my attitude about Inbox Zero – basically, I’ve stopped trying to maintain it.

When I get home, my priorities are a workout, supper with Liz, we maybe watch some TV (only until 8pm on school nights), I wash the dishes, and I make our tea. A perfectly pleasant and comforting evening routine.

Then, I go up to my office and the first thing I do is write my blog post for the day or – if I’m really productive – for the next day. Some evenings I cycle through several ongoing drafts of posts in Evernote, adding or editing text (Mark Forster’s continuous revision process), before settling on something I like well enough to finish.

By the time I’ve published the post, it’s 10 or 10:30 p.m. and I need to get ready for bed. 

I will scan the inbox for anything time-sensitive. But by and large, I let most emails wait till I schedule time to deal with them, which may be later in the week or the weekend.

For now I’m content to let my bigger desire (writing and posting daily) overshadow the smaller duty (empty inbox). We’ll see how it goes.

For further reading

• Merlin Mann’s Google Tech Talk that started the Inbox Zero wave. Merlin has since renounced much of his gung-ho productivity pr0n writing and thinking. 
• Zero Dark Inbox | The New Yorker
• Why ‘Inbox Zero’ Is a Stupid Time Management Approach | Inc.com – why the pugnacious tone? Who are you getting mad at?
• To Inbox Zero or Not to Inbox Zero? surveys people who do the method a little, a lot, and not at all.

These panels are talking to me about politics, the workplace, life, lots of things. Laugh or get out of the water?

Source: Ruben Bollings' Super-Fun-Pak Comix for March 14, 2018, via Go Comics. 

  <a href="http://www.gocomics.com/super-fun-pak-comix/2018/03/14"><img src="http://tempblogfood.files.wordpress.com/2019/08/d0248-superfun-pakcomix2cmar142c2018.jpgSuper+Fun-Pak+Comix%2C+Mar+14%2C+2018?format=original" alt="" /></a>

Stuff I wanted to read but didn't get to. Maybe this weekend...? 

• Maeve Brennan: On the Life of a Great Irish Writer, and Its Sad End | Literary Hub
• All Men, All the Time: A Former Literary Editor Remembers the World Before #MeToo
• Michael Leddy links to two Youtube recordings of the singer Sylvia Syms.
• Jane Brody’s Personal Secrets to Lasting Weight Loss - The New York Times. Basically, find something that makes sense and works for you, and stick to it.
• Jordan Peterson’s Gospel of Masculinity | The New Yorker. I've enjoyed his lectures on the psychology of the Old Testament; he reminds me a bit of an O.T. prophet. My man Oliver Burkeman suggests evaluating Peterson's book separate from his personality. 
• Frivolous, Empty, and Perfectly Delightful. A Joseph Epstein essay on Wodehouse; will read to see if the Internet needed another potted history of Wodehouse.
• AMERICAN THEATRE | The Many Lives of Jen Silverman. We saw a performance of her play The Moors last week so I want to read more about her.
• Fine Specimens | by David S. Reynolds | The New York Review of Books. Walt Whitman and the Civil War.

 

In writing yesterday's post, I did one of my cheeky searches in the Audible catalog for "The Untold Story of" and discovered 243 untold stories that, saints be praised, were now told.

A search of Amazon's Books area yielded 5,000+ untold stories.

And a Google search for "the untold story of *" returned over 32 million hits for untold stories.

It seems we love stories. Especially untold ones.

 

James Tate Hill's essay is a fascinating memoir of how he went from sighted, sporadic reader to visually impaired omnivorous reader of audiobooks. 

He also examines various facets of the essay's title: do audio books count as reading? Are they instead a performance? Is the physical smell, heft, and tangibility of a book -- beloved by so many sighted writers -- the essential part of the reading experience? We have the same debates about ebooks, he notes.

When I was recovering from a detached retina in the fall and winter of 2003, I was for a couple of weeks unable to watch TV or look at a computer screen comfortably. Reading was out of the question; the page swam in front of me and I experienced vertigo. Audiobooks became my lifeline. I "read" The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance  and Stephen King's On Writing. Many hours of recuperating and resting went by more pleasantly having a good long narrative in my ear, taking my mind away from my troubles. When the reader and the material align, the trance I go into with an audiobook is the same as when I read a physical book. 

For myself, I find that non-fiction audio books go down easier than fiction, and I prefer books read by the author, if possible. They know how they want the story to sound. Alan Bennett's diaries simply have to be read by Alan Bennett to be truly savored.

A satisfying audiobook is made or broken by the reader. I tried recently to listen to The Picture of Dorian Gray and simply had to stop after Chapter 4. Part of it was that this philosophical, talky novel became a closed, airless world I simply did not want to live in anymore. Another was that the reader would read something like, " 'Stop,' he cried," so languidly that I got irritated. The text is telling you how to read it, man! Put some life into it!

I'm trying another novel now: Edward Herrmann reading John Updike's Villages. Herrmann does an excellent job as the omniscient narrator or in close-third person, and manages Updike's stylistic flourishes beautifully. But I have trouble discerning vocal differences between his characters when in conversation. Odd, given Herrmann's skill as an actor.

Despite my occasional ups and downs with audiobooks (and with "real" books; not every papery book is a masterpiece for the ages), I will not give them up. I think we live in a wonderful time when there are so many options for people to take in the stories they need.

For further reading: Hill mentions a book that smells a bit like a Ph.D. dissertation dressed up for the mainstream: The Untold Story of the Talking Book by Matthew Rubery tells the story of audio-recorded literature, including its social impacts and controversies. Available from Amazon and, as one would hope, Audible.

 

 

 

“A performer is asked to do two things,” [the actor Tom Hardy] tells me. “To be disciplined and accountable, communicative and a pleasure to work with. And then, within a split second, they’re asked to be a psychopath. Authentically. It takes a very strong human being to sustain a genuine sense of well-being through that baptism of fire.” Then: “Drama is not known to attract stable types.”

 

Another wonderful discovery from the Public Domain Review: an eye test chart from a 1907 San Francisco optometrist George Mayerle. It not only featured international text and symbols, it had a positive and negative side.

   [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="1024.0"]<a href="http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/george-mayerles-eye-test-chart-ca-1907/"><img src="http://tempblogfood.files.wordpress.com/2019/08/349d4-georgemayerlee28099seyetestchart28ca.190729.jpgGeorge+Mayerle%E2%80%99s+Eye+Test+Chart+%28ca.+1907%29?format=original" alt=" George Mayerle’s Eye Test Chart (ca. 1907) " /></a>  George Mayerle’s Eye Test Chart (ca. 1907) [/caption]

This is a useful tip I've handed out since it was given to me years ago.

At the time, in my 20s, I was excitable, jabbered on and on when talking to people, and was concerned -- given my job at the time -- about the impression I made on people. 

A mentor advised me to lower my voice when I talked. When we're nervous, our heart rate goes up, we breathe faster and more shallowly, we talk faster, and as we talk faster, our voices rise in pitch.

So when I caught myself talking fast or feeling nervous as I talked, I reminded myself to lower my voice. The change in attitude was almost instant. 

As my pitch fell, I could feel my voice's center move from my head down to my chest. Lowering my voice slowed my speech, which slowed my  breathing. I could feel my shoulders relax (I hold a lot of tension in my shoulders).

And I could feel my mind slow down too. My thinking evened out, I took my time, and I usually felt like I was now consciously participating in the conversation, not flailing like a fire hose.

I stand 6'3" (1.91 meters) and wear size 15 shoes.

At the movies today, as I stood to move into the aisle and down the stairs, it hit me again that the world does not quite fit me, or maybe I don't fit into it. 

I unfolded myself, stepped carefully around the seats and railing, arranged my feet on the stair, and then deliberately started down. The little people all around me had no trouble navigating the cramped space.

Left to myself, I stay up late and get up late. But I live in a world where I must go to bed by a specific time so I can get up to go to work by a specific time, leave by a specific time, or otherwise adapt myself to other people's or group's schedules.

What would my own personal world look like, if I were the Dungeon Master?

There would be room. I could move freely without bumping into things. There would be space in my calendar to move freely without crashing into someone else's constraints.

Note: I am aware, of course, that physical reality demands honoring appointments and deadlines, paying our taxes by April 15, etc. I accept that. I just didn't feel like accepting it today.