mh-z | web-log

I’m at the Santa Monica Public Library, and the “City WiFi” wireless ‘net connection here is actually working decently this time. I’m sitting outside next to a cafe in a large patio surrounded by the library itself, typing and eating a bad turkey sandwich. I’m not eating the sandwich anymore, because it just wasn’t edible, so I got a fork and I’m just eating the turkey, because it’s past time for lunch and I need to eat something, since this is my breakfast, too. The turkey’s not bad eaten this way, just not great. Too dry. Even though I like things dry. It’s cold, in the shade, even though I’m wearing a jacket. It’s mostly peaceful here. But I’ll go inside when I’m done. Inside, now. The barrier between in and out isn’t solid, so energy must be lost keeping it warm in here. Unless the area retains heat by virtue of its architecture. I wonder if they close the passageway to the outdoor patio when it gets colder than this. Probably not; the barrier is one of those metal roll-down doors that are used to seal up shops in malls when they close. Or the back entrances to street shops, where they connect with an alley. Roll up the door so that the delivery truck can back in and be unloaded. Not the chain-link kind, which perhaps are more prevalent in malls, so the public can see in and see what’s in the store, even when it’s closed. This is a nice library. One of the nicest I’ve been in. Very modern. There are power outlets next to me on the edge of this desk, for when my laptop’s battery runs low. I really could spend all day here. But considering that I’m working on my computer, how much does it matter what specific location I’m in? From a logical standpoint, that seems almost a subtlety. I wonder how much it really matters, though. I couldn’t have truthfully written the above (about that sad excuse for a turkey sandwich) without having been here (and I probably wouldn’t have thought of it or have bothered to write about it otherwise), but it’s not exactly a world-changing bit of writing. Sure, one less person will order a turkey sandwich here. Next time I’m here, the fact that the turkey sandwiches served in this library’s cafe are bad will bubble up more prominently from the depths of my memory, and I’ll probably order something else. Now, in written language, the meaning of successive sentences build on each other, putting together a complete thought, but that thought is sometimes ambiguous. Is the first sentence meant to stand alone, or is it meant to contribute to the second sentence? The prior sentence obviously doesn’t work if it stands alone. Neither do sentences which refer to other sentences. That thought came about because I said that “one less person will order a turkey sandwich here”, followed by “next time I’m here…”. I could have been intending to refine the meaning of “one less person” with the subsequent sentence, implying that that “one less person” is me. Or you could (and are meant to) consider both sentences as separate ideas, where the “one less person” is a reference to some unlikely Web surfer who will, after stumbling upon this meaningless meandering morass of mental micturition and subsequently finding himself at this particular branch of the Santa Monica Public Library system and hungering for a bite to eat, who would ordinarily (or due to the randomness prevailing that day) have ordered a turkey sandwich for lunch (or breakfast) and might very well have ordered that turkey sandwich here, given that that’s where he was, specifically not order that turkey sandwich because of my influence. It is my hope that, should said unlikely chain of events occur, that that person would comment here and share with us all his experience and opinion on whatever other dish he happened to order, so that I can decide to either avoid or seek it out should I be in the same situation I was in some fraction of an hour ago. But enough about turkey sandwiches; back to the interrelatedness of sentences. Refer to the difficulty of building some sort of “artificial intelligence” which can understand written human language by having been programmed with grammatical rules and ways to break down and analyze sentences, and can therefore draw reasoned conclusions or make observations based thereupon. Because the question is, what happens when said a.i. encounters a sentence or phrase such as, “this sentence does not refer to itself”? Or the ambiguity of meanings in reference to my two-part turkey sandwich comment, above? Or just ambiguity in general? Therefore we’d have to create flexible intelligence, not bound by rigid rules, just fuzzy guidelines. After all, we have no trouble understanding ungrammatical writing, even in the most horribly mangled of forms. And when I write:

This sentence refers to all sentences which do not refer to themselves.

…your brain doesn’t start smoking and explode. At least I should hope not. Maybe it just starts smoking.

Title: The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Author: Moshin Hamid
Amazon

First of all, let me get the obvious out of the way. The main character and narrator of the story is not really a fundamentalist. He’s just a guy, and doesn’t claim any strong religious or moral beliefs (as we might automatically associate with that particular f-word). He seems to be using fundamentalism (which I believe is mentioned nowhere but the title, and so that could have just been something slapped on by the publisher as an attention catching sales device, in which case the title is as much misleading as perhaps an outright lie, although there are plenty of meanings that can be ascribed to the word, which just means, literally, “pertaining to basics”) to mean “a longing for home, and for one’s family, despite the lack of prosperity and limited opportunities therewith”. When I think of the colloquial meaning of “fundamentalism” I think of closed-mindedness, simple-mindedness, a fear of newness or of anything which challenges existing belief, a clinging rigidity to existing belief in an often irrational way. So he’s not what I’d call a reluctant fundamentalist because fundamentalism has absolutely nothing to do with anything in the book; he’s just a successful hard-working man who’s homesick and feels guilt at his success because his family is in danger, and he’s reluctant to give up his world of prosperity, although to him it comes with a price, to go be with his family.

The vehicle for the story is somewhat novel, which is refreshing, but this also allows it to be thoroughly condescending: The narrator (the so-called “fundamentalist”) is telling his story to an American tourist visiting Lahore, a city in Pakistan. The two are initially strangers, and we, as the tourist, do not have a speaking role anywhere in this tale. The narrator, a pleasant young Pakistani man named Changez who attended Harvard Business School and through hard work and determination aced just about all there was to be aced, intersperses his tale with a couple paragraphs at the end of each chapter in which he comes back to the present in a Lahorean cafe and offers us tea, an ordered meal, or a local delicacy. But presumably we (the tourist) are very uncomfortable in this foreign land. Changez continually needs to reassure us in an extremely polite way that no, the waiter means no harm, that no, the bulge in his jacket isn’t a gun, that it’s perfectly safe to walk after dark but still, I’ll give you a ride back to your hotel because you’ll feel better, and on and on. This is perhaps a caricature of some kind of xenophobic world-unwise nervous American, brought to his knees by the reverberating sound of words like “terrorism!” and “Islamic fundamentalism!”, and here he is, in a Muslim country, and so he must be… scared! So let’s explicitly reassure him, by calling out and interpreting his every blink, and saying “ah, I see you’re blinking, you must be a little nervous, I totally understand, I would be too were I in your shoes, but I assure you, there’s nothing to be nervous about”. Over and over. Somehow, this doesn’t speak to me. Perhaps the author is implying that we, as Americans fumbling about in what we incorrectly perceive to be a world fraught with fundamentalism (as in the colloquial sense), are in fact the “reluctant fundamentalist(s)” of the title. But why “reluctant”, then? I can bang this round peg into this square hole some more, but Ockham’s Razor says that the book’s title is a marketing gimmick.

I’ll sum it up as: A coming of age story in which a young man finds out what really matters in his life, against a distant backdrop of political events following the 9-11 terrorist attacks, and a not-so-distant backdrop of his tangled love affair with a depressed young woman. Reluctance, I’ll give him that, but not fundamentalism. And the story’s condescending, somewhat moralizing tone didn’t add anything, but didn’t detract from the enjoyable aspects of the tale.

I was expecting a little more from this book, but it was a fast read and hard to put down, so I won’t complain.

Over time, as I’ve added and removed extensions, it seems that Firefox (which wasn’t all that fast to begin with) has been getting slower and slower. Windows users (myself included) are familiar with the effect, where garbage builds up in the registry, since most uninstallers are far from perfect. What’s the incentive for a software creator to write a good solid uninstall program, anyway? Or to debug their uninstall utility beyond the minimum? Perhaps many do (and most software uses generic installer/uninstaller systems, anyway), like the Nullsoft Install System (used by Google), or IntelliShield (you used to see that one a lot), but that doesn’t mean that the software vendor’s configured the (un)installer system properly with the correct list of files and keys to remove, etc. (This is why I maintain that it should be the OS’s responsibility to manage installation and removal of software in an automated way, like a neutral third party, tracking exactly what is added and changed in an installation, so that those same things can be uninstalled completely later. And if it’s one of those “easier said than done” things, it certainly shouldn’t be left to the whim of random software vendors.) Maybe most software uninstalls itself completely, but over an OS’s lifecycle there are plenty of instances where something goes wrong and useless files, registry keys and other junk gets left around. Same thing with Firefox. A clean profile, like a clean Windows install, is lean and fast. But if I take my existing profile and uninstall all of the extensions, I still get those odd half-second-long freeze-ups every 10 seconds or so (despite having disabled session/crash protection and history), and creating a new tab with Ctrl+T induces a several-second freeze, and so on. Tolerable, but could be better.

Just like the Windows registry problem, when I type “about:config” into the browser’s location bar, I see tons of preferences listed for extensions which are long gone, but there’s no interface in the browser to remove said preferences from the list. Instead, you can open prefs.js in your profile folder, and delete unnecessary items. I got rid of about half the stuff in my prefs.js file, and Firefox seems a bit faster, but it’s still freezing every once in a while as I type. Oh well.

I ran into this orange, the other day. It was pink inside, like a pink grapefruit. Everything else about it proclaimed navel-orange, especially the navel and the thickness of the peel, and I’ve eaten many-a navel orange in my day, just none any color other than orange on the inside.

It even tasted like a navel orange, just perhaps less dry, and maybe a hint tangier. Almost a bit grapefruity, but there was absolutely nothing else grapefruity about it, other than the color of the flesh and that hint of taste which could just as well have been my imagination. What was this deliciously mutant fruit?

Minor site redesign. Now you can comment. Importing old posts. Writing new. Vacation is nice. Reading. Got an iPhone.

iPhone has interference issues when placed next to electronic things with speakers. If it’s within a couple feet of my alarm-clock-radio, the radio emits a low morse-code sort of noise every few minutes. You may have heard this kind of interference sound caused by someone’s BlackBerry. If within a few feet of my music keyboard (e.g. in my pocket), I also get this through the keyboard’s speakers. Electronic resonance.

Activating the iPhone, I tried the “999-99-9999″ Social Security Number trick (as referenced in the Ars Technica iPhone review and elsewhere, which didn’t work. “Invalid Social Security Number.” So I tried “111-11-1111″. Same. So I tried “111-11-1112″. That worked, and I was kicked over to AT&T’s contract-less GoPhone service, paying a little more per month but avoiding a two year contract. Such half-heartedly cat-and-mouse-like disabling of a couple SSN’s is silly. I can’t call myself a l337 h4xx0r when the h4xx1ng is just barely so.

Skybar. Raising the bar.