General Rambling

The New Yorker has a good post, “Remembering Sydney Pollack:” Finding the spine of a story like “Out of Africa” was important to Sydney for many reasons, the most important of which was that it led to what he called “the ache.” The ache is self-explanatory if you’ve seen Sydney’s films. It is the ache of having one chance at deep love in a lifetime of shallow loves, and losing it too early. It is the ache of perfect, private union destroyed by terrible, worldly circumstance. For Sydney, the ache was about the way that the things we hold most dear always elude us. The ache is exactly what I relate to, what I look for and enjoy in so …

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Over the last three months I have fixed four PCs that have had strange browser errors, appearing as dialog boxes to the unsuspecting users. The dialog boxes are usually some sort of failed assertion, whose message only holds meaning in that the user knows something bad just happened. “Why is my computer telling me I’m doing something illegal?” one person asked. The fix? Remove every toolbar installed on their PC. In two cases the Google Toolbar wouldn’t uninstall unless I updated it first. In one case there were four different toolbars (AOL, Ask, Yahoo!, and Google) all competing. And in all cases, when I asked the owner of the computer if they used the toolbars, the answer was “Toolbar? What …

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A complete stranger walks in, looks at me, and utters a mildly panicked “Hey man, can you give me a jump start?” He’s young, maybe 18 or 19. “Problems?” I ask. “Yeah, won’t start. And now the battery is dead.” I walk with him out to the parking lot. The car is beautiful, some sort of 1970s Mustang, a deep shade of blue. “Is this your car?” “Well, sort of…” “Sort of?” No way am I jumpstarting a stolen car. “It’s my dad’s, I thought it’d be fun to take it out but now something’s wrong and he’s going to be pissed.” “Ever seen Ferris Bueller’s Day Off?” I joke. He has. Not nearly as funny to him. I hook …

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A sign I saw last night as I snarfed down a waffle cone full of ultra Oreo cookie ice cream. I appreciate it’s straightforwardness. 🙂

Sitting in traffic today I realized that teams of people are either like stop lights or four-way stop signs. Stop lights are nice because everybody knows the rules, and they aren’t flexible. Everybody knows what everybody else should be doing, which is either sitting there idling, burning expensive fuel, or driving forward full-blast. Big queues build up sometimes behind a stop light, blocking other streets. When the stop lights aren’t timed perfectly (and they rarely are) you get these gobs of cars hurrying, then waiting, then hurrying again. One thing is true, though: that clueless guy talking on his cell phone doesn’t mess things up too much. Even they can figure out when to go. Stop signs are different, especially …

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Minnesota, the land of my youth, is 150 years old today, having been admitted to the Union as the 32nd state on May 11, 1858. Happy birthday!