Category: Burningbird

Categories
Just Shelley

Stuckness

Golden Girl has been slightly sluggish the last week, and I wondered if I had taken too long for the last oil change. It just turned 50,000, so I imagine that problems will happen but I’d hoped they wouldn’t happen just now. Tonight, however, when I was driving to the park to walk, the “Check Engine Light” came on. Well, a light in the dashboard came on, but since I had lost my owner manual over a year ago, I wasn’t sure what it meant.

I pulled over immediately and did like I’d seen countless men of my acquaintance do in the past: I opened the hood and stood there, hands on my hips, looking down at the engine and waiting for enlightenment. Sure enough, enlightenment came. I shut the hood, walked to the back of the car, opened the trunk, pulled back the trunk carpet, and there on top of the spare tire was the owner’s manual.

(Later when I was telling my roommate the story, he didn’t bat an eye when I told him the manual was under the carpet in the trunk, lying on top of the spare tire. When I asked him why, he replied, “Well, I was married to you for almost twenty years.”)

According to the manual, the “Check Engine Light” doesn’t necessarily mean a serious problem: it could be caused by water in the gas, poor gas quality, and even a gas cap not shut tightly enough. As long as the light isn’t blinking, there’s no harm in driving the car for a time and the manual recommended driving the car through three complete fuel cycles. If it’s still on, then take it into the mechanic.

When I got home, I searched for information related to a 2002 Ford Focus and the “Check Engine Light” and in most cases, poor quality fuel was the cause. A couple of people had problems with a “EGR valve”, which I guess is also called the “O2 sensor”. A couple of others had some problems with the fuel intake system, but I didn’t have any of the other symptoms to match the problems they experienced.

One person in a car forum suggested unplugging the battery and then plugging it back in. In response, another reader wrote:

Last year sometime I had the same thing happen with the engine light, except when I unplugged the battery and then hooked it back up it still stayed on. When I took it into the dealer they said that a vacuum hose had caught fire and melted.

I agreed with the third person who replied, well that’s not healthy.

I searched some more and found a paper that explained how the Exhaust Gas Recirculation (EGR) system works. The paper is for a Chrysler, but the architecture is consistent with most late model cars. I then found another site that discusses how to use diagnostic tools to determine the problem. Did you know that when a light is signaled in your dash, a code is recorded in software indicating the origin of the problem? When the mechanics hook up the gadgets, what they’re basically doing is downloading this code. (And we thought that mechanics would just listen to your car and know, magically, what the problem is.)

During my search, I remembered that my last trip out I had to fill up my gas tank at a little no-name gas station in the back woods. And my car had been in for a tune-up not that long ago and other than two of my tires getting mighty worn, the car came through with flying colors. Ipso facto: bad gas.

Of course if after three fuel cycles the light doesn’t go away, I’ll take it in. Or park it until I can afford to take it in. Until then, there’s nothing I can do about the light so I’m not going to worry about it.

Problem. Enlightenment and the Search. Acceptance. I have become, in effect, a self-taught mechanic.

Let’s consider a reevaluation of the situation in which we assume that the stuckness now occurring, the zero of consciousness, isn’t the worst of all possible situations, but the best possible situation you could be in. After all, it’s exactly this stuckness that Zen Buddhists go to so much trouble to induce; through koans, deep breathing, sitting still and the like. Your mind is empty, you have a “hollow-flexible” attitude of “beginner’s mind.” You’re right at the front end of the train of knowledge, at the track of reality itself. Consider, for a change, that this is a moment to be not feared but cultivated. If your mind is truly, profoundly stuck, then you may be much better off than when it was loaded with ideas.
…
Stuckness shouldn’t be avoided. It’s the psychic predecessor of all real understanding. An egoless acceptance of stuckness is a key to an understanding of all Quality, in mechanical work as in other endeavors. It’s this understanding of Quality as revealed by stuckness which so often makes self-taught mechanics so superior to institute-trained men who have learned how to handle everything except a new situation.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig

Categories
Internet Just Shelley

Cornered

Tuesday I called Charter Communications to see if I can continue the high speed internet but cancel the basic television lineup. I was informed that I could, but it would cost 10.00 more a month. Since I’m already paying twice as much for Internet access as Charter advertises at the company site and on TV, I wasn’t interested in being further penalized and said that I’ll just cancel both, then.

Only to be informed that to get the ‘good deal’ I have with my current internet service, I supposedly signed a contract in November to carry both television channels and internet for a year; if I don’t, I’ll be penalized 150.00. I don’t remember being told about $150.00 penalty for canceling my account. I asked where it said I had agreed to these terms. The Charter person said that when I signed the work order, I signed the agreement.

Tonight, the roommate and I thought we’d take in the free music concert at the Botanical Gardens. When we got there, I was surprised to find several parking attendants–big, burly, unsmiling, sun-glassed, parking attendants. Not the friendly, khaki clothed Park volunteers. No, these guys all looked like the type of people you would expect to come out of the woods from the movie, “Deliverance”–except wearing blue shirts, tan shorts, and wraparounds. They all had mullet hair cuts. It was surreal.

Following the signals, we found ourselves down one row where we were faced with two attendants, one of whom signaled me to pull into a slot between two cars. I signaled back that I couldn’t park between the cars–one was a very large Cadillac that stuck out in the back, and straddeled the parking line and I knew I couldn’t swing my car around enough to pull in. I pointed to the spot on the other side of the furthest car. The guy just looked at me, shook his head, and pointed at that one spot.

Now, the parking lot was about 70% empty. Still I started to reverse my car to see if I could angle it into the spot. About that time, a family had gotten out of their car and started walking behind me. So there I was, stuck between a couple of cute little kids, and two big, burly, unsmiling, black-mullet-haired, sun-glassed parking attendants.

I put my car back in drive, and started moving forward, yelling at the attendant to get out of my way, I was leaving.

And that’s exactly what I’m telling Charter Communications.

Categories
Burningbird

How many emails?

If I’m part of the squids, at least I’m a Giant Squid if my email popularity has anything to do with it. I woke up this morning to find 56,770 emails in my general email account. It would seem a host of hackers used ‘burningbird.net’ to send both phishing and virus emails throughout the world. Most of the entries back were those misbegotten, stupid automated replies that say something like, “Your email has a virus and therefore you’re trashed with us, Bud. Have a nice day”.

It wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t in Japanese. And Korean. And Russian. French, too. And German…

Which is my way of saying, if you’ve expected a reply from me and haven’t received one, I would suggest sending the email to my gmail account, listed in the header bar.

Categories
Weblogging Writing

Wincing words

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

There are certain words and phrases popular among webloggers that I’ve grown to dislike over time. Well some I disliked from the start; others I’ve come to dislike only after many repetitions. Whether people continue to use these phrases or not, I don’t care–to each their own. But if we are ever to meet someday and you use one of these words and I wince, you’ll at least know it’s because of the word, not your bad breath or the spinach stuck in your teeth.

The first is blogosphere. What kind of word is blogosphere? Haven’t we done enough damage with ‘blog’ that we have to tag on ‘osphere’?

To me, blogosphere implies that those who weblog live within a bubble isolated from the rest of the known universe. Every time I hear the term, I get a mental image of a huge beach ball floating on the water at the beach: drifting without purpose and soon to be lost. Except that in my visualization, there are millions of tiny little faces looking out at me from within the ball.

Brrrr! Gives me the cauld grue.

If we sail, do we use sailosphere? If we volunteer to help at the library, do we use the term bookosphere in reference to our activities in this environment? Why, then, blogosphere?

The second word isn’t a word, it’s an acronym: MSM. In case you don’t know the term–and goodness sake, how can you not know this term, it litters our pages like candy-shelled chocolate spilled from a bag–it means mainstream media.

First, what is MSM? Seemingly it has to do with professional journalism, but I look around at the people who use it, disparagingly, and notice that many of them are professional journalists–a contradiction leaving me going, “Well, huh.” Do we differentiate between us and this MSM by whether we get paid or not for our efforts? If I remember correctly, some of the more popular webloggers make a great deal of money from their weblogs.

If MSM is specifically professional journalism done by people who don’t blog, do we include all forms of journalism in this classification? If so, then if a newspaper gets a blog, does it stop being MSM? Or is it now, MSM…but with a blog?

How about movies? Are these MSM? They are media. They are main stream. Since most people who use the term MSM do so with a sneer, we have to assume that the ultimate hope is to replace this MSM. Are we saying that today there are podcasts to replace radio; tomorrow there will be vidcasts to replace movies? Look out Tom Cruise, move aside Cameron Diaz: here comes Adam Curry and Dave Winer starring in that blogosphere favorite, “The Odd Couple”?

It’s an Us and Them word, and Us and Them words never lead to anything useful. Besides, every time I hear MSM, I get hungry for Chinese food.

Blogosphere makes me wince, MSM gives me gas, but the phrase I dislike most of all is citizen journalist. I’ll apologize upfront to all of you who love this phrase, but I think it’s the most pretentious piece of twaddle to ever spill out of our brains.

If we’re citizen journalists, does this mean that the reporters down at my local paper aren’t citizens? Do I need to call the Department of Homeland Security on them? Could be fun, true; but I think I’ll pass.

Additionally, how is having a weblog so different from a ‘journalistic’ perspective that we need to have such specialized terms? After all, in this country at least, there’s long been a tradition of personal publications: flyers, underground newspapers, letters exchanged between a network of writers, even Joe the Wacko giving out his mimeographed opinions, printed on bright pink paper. A weblog is just medium, really. Less finger cramping than writing; not as pretty, though, as the bright pink mimeographed sheets.

Some would say that this form of journalism is different, because weblogging gives us a much broader audience. As to this, anyone with a box and a street corner can broadcast. Writing a letter to an editor is broadcasting. Joe the Wacko standing out in front of City Hall is broadcasting. It’s the will to have an opinion and make it heard that’s essential to broadcasting. And who is to say which broadcasting approach has more and lasting influence?

Listen to the phrase, too: citizen journalist. It’s a spooky phrase, and should make your spine tingle in warning. Replace ‘journalist’ with ‘copjustice’ and you have vigilantes; replace ‘citizen’ with ‘patriot’ and you have fascism. Replace both with ‘weblogger’, and you have me.

Categories
Writing

The words we use

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Robert Scoble changes his opinion about the China/MSN Spaces issue, and decides since his wife, son, best friend, Dan Gillmor, Rebecca MacKinnon, and several Chinese webloggers say he’s wrong, he must be wrong.

I don’t know why this irritated me so much, but it has. Perhaps it’s the idea that opinions have a critical mass, and once it’s reached, the opinion must be ‘wrong’. Maybe its because all the people congratulating Scoble on being ‘man’ enough to admit his mistake are doing so because he now supports their viewpoint.

Regardless, it’s nice to be an environment where there are no restrictions on the words we use when we write. That is, after all, the essence of being free to speak: the words we use.