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katydid season
Tuesday, August 2 2005
About a week ago the katydids started cha-chat-chat-chatting, an ominous sound meaning the warmest peak of summer is behind us and now begins the slow slide down the thermometer into winter.
Four or five days ago I planted a Boxelder in the front yard along the stone wall nearest my truck's headlights in the place where I usually park it. (Writing this reminds me that just before I'd completed my toilet training I used to stand in front of the left headlight of my father's '57 Chevrolet every time I was preparing to shit my pants.) The Boxelder had been growing tight against the house's east foundation and I thought I'd move it to a place where it could grow in peace, in a place that could stand to have a few more trees, particularly the kind (like Boxelder) that don't get very big. But I didn't do a very good job of digging up all the roots and it's been in a sad, wilty state ever since. But Boxelders are tough, weedy trees, and I'm pretty sure it will recover. I've transplanted many trees in my life and a surprisingly small percentage of them have died as a result. Many of them are now over twenty years old and quite big.
A couple days ago Gretchen and I watched Ali G Indahouse. It was fairly stupid, no surprise there, but it also wasn't very funny, certainly nearly as funny as, say, Da Ali G Show. You'd think with all the rehearsing and script writing that goes into a movie it would be possible to create a consistently funny experience, but Ali G's movie can't sustain the laughs of the far less scripted series of interviews featured in his Show. Perhaps it's the "reality" aspect of Ali G's humor that makes him so funny, and the moment he's interviewing people who are in on his humor (even if they're acting like they're not), the jokes fall flat.
This morning I was sitting in one of the swinging yard chairs reading an article about Vista, the upcoming operating system from Microsoft that used to be code-named Longhorn. I was amazed and delighted by Microsoft's disorganized view of the future, even though it was presented in an infuriatingly uncritical manner by Information Week's writer. Microsoft, a company that can't get fifty percent of businesses to "upgrade" from Windows 2000 to Windows XP "also wants more-frequent releases of Windows, akin to the way it rapidly streams out updates to MSN Messenger and other apps on MSN.com." If people could be convinced to fork over money for those releases, that might even be a viable business model. But those days ended in 2001, and anyone reading this article should know that. The casual tossing around of buzzwords like "RSS" and the tired-not-wired "blog" obscures nothing. The computer really doesn't matter and to the extent it does matter diminishes with every passing day. There's a massive demand not for features and RSS capability but for an OS that is safe from spyware and viruses, for an inflexible framework that only does a few important things reliably. If QNX would make a half dozen specific improvements to its desktop environment (can anyone say drag & drop?), I'd start installing it on the PCs at one of my client businesses "tomorrow."
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?050802 feedback
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