Stupid Software Tricks

Yesterday I wasted a couple of hours trying to install Native Instruments Absynth 5 on my Windows PC. I have no doubt that it’s a great instrument — and overall, I’m consistently knocked out by NI. The installer for this particular synthesizer, however, left a bit to be desired.

I told it to install on the L: drive. That’s where I install all my software now, because C: is basically full. But it insisted that it needed a bunch of space on C:. Like, 2.5 GB in order to run a 650 MB installer. Weird. So I cleaned out a bunch of stuff from folders called Temp. Still not enough space. Next, I drag-copied a bunch of stuff from Program Files over to the M: drive temporarily and erased it from C:. Now I could run the installer.

At the end of the process, I found that Absynth had installed a 1.0 GB library of samples to the C: drive, even though I had specifically told the installer at every available opportunity that I wanted to install on L:. That meant I wouldn’t have enough room to copy the stuff from Program Files back onto C:.

Regretfully, I gave up. I ran the uninstaller for Absynth. But that’s not the end of the story.

The uninstaller did not remove the 1.0 GB library. If I were a less sophisticated computer guy, that huge folder would just sit there gathering dust forever, because I wouldn’t know where to look for it. Also left on the C: drive

Retirement

Thinking vaguely about retiring. Or, to be more precise, about drifting into retirement. Gradually becoming more selective about the kinds of things I do. Turns out this is one of the benefits of being self-employed: You can retire gradually.

I expect I’ll keep writing for the music magazines for a long time to come. For one thing, I love getting free software to play with! But some recent physical problems with my left hand have shown me that my days as a cello teacher are numbered. I don’t know the number, but the number is writ in the place where such things are writ.

I’ve always enjoyed good health, and I’ve always (in recent years, anyway) had a very positive attitude about my activities. My plan for growing older is, I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing.

It occurred to me last night that I’m operating under a false assumption. The assumption is that for as long as I live, I’ll be able to keep doing what I’m doing.

Today I love playing the piano. I play for an hour or so every day. But I’m remembering my parents’ friend Roger. Roger switched to electronic organ as he got older, because the sound of the piano became harsh as his ears deteriorated.

Today I love playing the cello. But why put myself through the wringer by playing in a local pit orchestra? That’s not a peak music-making experience, it’s a grind — a pit experience, if you will. Every hour I spend playing the cello should be an hour of unalloyed pleasure.

Today I love reading. And my eyes still work. But the truth is, my left eye works better than my right one. At any moment I could find myself otherwise healthy but unable to read. Yeah, there are books for the blind, but it’s not the same thing. For one thing, a lot of the things I read are not mainstream. They won’t have been recorded.

So as I contemplate my piecemeal retirement plan, I need to be conscious of the need to create more free time to do things while I’m still young enough that I can physically do them.

Missing Information

Trying to do research into daily life in Chicago in 1885 without spending a ton of money. It’s hard! I’ve spent a couple of hundred on books so far. Ran into another one tonight that looks essential, but it’s $55, so I’m going to resist for a week or two.

There’s lots of good stuff at university libraries, but they won’t let me into the stacks at Stanford without a student ID card, and I’m not about to fly to Illinois to try to sneak into the University of Chicago library.

Tonight I was looking into the question of indoor plumbing. Or trying to. If you’re going to include a scene in your novel that’s set in a kitchen, you’d like to know whether there are faucets above the sink, or a pump handle, or whether the pump handle would have been outside the kitchen door. In that era, a lot would have depended on whether the inhabitants of the house were wealthy, middle class, or poor. Also, perhaps, on the neighborhood. I know Chicago had water mains, but I don’t know which outlying districts were supplied. And I don’t know whether houses would have had wells, because Chicago was built on land that had been a low-lying marsh. What happens if you dig a well in a marsh?

I’ve read that by the 1870s, a hot water tank would likely have been mounted above the back of the stove. The stove would probably have burnt coal, but perhaps gas — that’s another detail I don’t know. I know there were gas lines running under the streets, because when Chicago was digging trenches for cable car lines in 1881, rerouting the gas, water, and sewer lines complicated the process. But what were the gas lines feeding? Street lights? In-home lighting, or only lights in the business district?

And the big steam engines that provided power for the factories — coal or gas? It makes a difference, because coal smoke was a major pollutant at the time. When not choking on the coal smoke, however, Chicagoans in 1885 rode bicycles. The high front wheel bicycle was the latest fad. Citizens were sometimes arrested for speeding on their bikes (the slang term was “scorching”), because of course the bikes were the fastest thing on the street, short of a galloping horse.

And yes, there were a lot of horses. They pulled streetcars, private wagons, and so on. I found a wonderful little 30-second clip of a film of a Chicago street, made in 1897 by Thomas Edison (or someone in his employ). Amazingly dense crowds, and horses in the foreground.

What I really want is a time machine!

Beastliness

On May 4, 1886, a contingent of police marched into Haymarket Square in Chicago, bent on dispersing a peaceful labor rally. Someone (it was never determined who) threw a bomb into the midst of the police squad, killing half a dozen men.

Seven men were condemned to death on account of the bomb-throwing. Four of them were eventually hanged. But no evidence was ever presented showing that they had planned the bombing or knew who did. They were hanged for having exercised their supposed right of free speech. In spite of the manifest injustice of the convictions, an appeal to the Supreme Court did no good.

In the course of a wonderful, if rather hefty, book called The Rise of Industrial America, Page Smith discusses the Haymarket affair and numerous other atrocities. In the chapter on immigration, he describes the vicious treatment of Jews in Russia during that period. He lifts the lid on the sheer terrorism unleashed on former slaves in the South, the murders and beatings and robberies carried out, with impunity, by white men determined to retain their pathetic power and pitiful prerogatives.

When I was a kid, my father had some highball glasses with cartoons inked on them. The caption beneath one of the cartoons (by now I can’t recall the image itself) said, “People are no damn good.” That’s about the sum of it, I think. For every Shakespeare, a hundred demented monsters. For every Mozart, a hundred vile fools. For every Monet or Van Gogh, a hundred policemen swinging their billy clubs.

And you think you’re special?

Responsibility Run Amok

Headnote (not footnote): The analysis of the contract shown below is, for the moment, still accurate, or as accurate as I know how to make it. But today I spoke to an individual at the City Attorney’s office who seemed to be more than willing to make changes in the contract. So for now, I’m very optimistic. To continue where we left off:

Two weeks ago I wrote about being asked to sign a contract that included an indemnification clause. I would have been required to sign this contract in order to be allowed to teach cello at a local music studio. I said no, thanks.

Today we have an even more amazing example of creeping indemnification.

I contacted the local library and volunteered to give a free 90-minute presentation to interested library patrons on the subject of interactive fiction. The librarian in charge likes the idea. She sent me two pieces of paperwork to fill out and return. One is a simple equipment checklist; the other is entitled “Hold Harmless.” (Ominous rumblings in the timpani.) Here’s the text of the latter document, in its entirety:

“The undersigned shall defend, indemnify, and hold harmless the City, its officers, officials, employees, agents, and volunteers from and against all claims, damages, losses, and expenses, herein, caused in whole or in part by any negligent act or omission of the undersigned or anyone directly or indirectly employed by any of them or anyone for whose acts any of them may be liable, except where caused by the negligence of the City, its officers, officials, employees, agents, or volunteers.”

Below this text (which was pasted into the .doc file as a graphic, so that it can’t be edited, thereby saving them, I suppose, the trouble of having to proofread it to make sure the signer didn’t try anything sneaky) is a space for my signature.

By doing a little research online on indemnity and contract law, I was able to spot ten or twelve separate problems in that one seemingly simple paragraph. And it was given to the librarian, for her to pass on to prospective volunteer presenters of free (that is, unpaid) programs, by the City Attorney’s office.

The individual I spoke to today (Sept. 22) said, in the course of the conversation, ”That’s a standard form. We’ve been using it for years, and no one has ever asked about it before.” What I didn’t say to him, because he seems a very nice, reasonable person, was, any time someone in an attorney’s office says the language in a form is “standard,” check your wallet.

The biggest problem with this contract is so huge that I read the document a dozen times before I noticed it. Have you spotted it yet? The difficulty is

What Was

Becoming fascinated by history. Specifically the latter part of the 19th century. It was an amazing period. I started out reading about Chicago, which is fascinating enough, but Chicago was only a microcosm of the whole period, a sort of Petri dish in which the diseases of the time festered and bloomed.

Here’s a lovely quote from the Introduction of The Rise of Industrial America by Page Smith: “Americans, in the absence of any of the traditional ways of authenticating themselves and finding their places in the system — caste, clan, or ‘order’ — had to depend primarily upon money; making money became the validation of personal worth….”

From what I’ve read so far, that description fits Chicago in the 1880s like a glove.

Maybe one of the reasons I’m captivated by the 19th century is that the dominant cultural idiocies of the day are far enough removed from our own (if only barely) that I can look at the unfolding human drama as tragedy and comedy rather than as a struggle that I need to participate in. What happened, happened. Most of it happened because people, with a few happy exceptions, are cruel and stupid. But I can observe the cruelties and stupidities of the 19th century with a pleasant detachment.

Plus, top hats. What’s not to like about top hats?

Reading: Strangers

Stayed up ’til 2 in the morning finishing J. D. Robb’s Strangers in Death, so I may as well admit it was a good story. The plot is borrowed from an old Hitchcock movie, but Robb (Nora Roberts in real life) has the good grace to admit it.

About halfway through the book, police detective Eve Dallas figures out who done it, and of course her gut instinct is on the money. The tricky bit is getting enough evidence to nail the ingenious killer’s hide to the wall.

The packing material, which is plentiful, is less satisfying than the story. Robb is writing exclusively for women: There are at least four long, steamy scenes (one in a swimming pool) in which Eve has enormously satisfying sex with her husband. Male genitalia are referred to again and again and again, in a variety of contexts, including castration with a carving knife. We might imagine the howls of protest from feminists if a male author wrote about women’s anatomy for a male readership with such unabashed gusto.

Eve’s husband is straight out of a romance comic book. He’s phenomenally good looking, extremely rich, macho enough to scare off muggers, sensitive to Eve’s every mood, and — for dessert – an expert computer geek who cheerfully pitches in to help her solve her cases.

The main characters are all more or less romance staples. Most of the men are rich and good-looking (though not as rich or good-looking as Eve’s husband). The women, likewise, tend to be rich, good-looking, and virtuous, except for the murderers, who are suitably creepy. There are two virtuous poor women. One bakes Eve a lemon meringue pie, the other is a hooker who is turning tricks to pay for her daughter’s ice-skating lessons.

Let’s just say Robb’s moral universe is not extremely nuanced, and leave it at that.

The Eve Dallas books, of which there seem to be quite a number, are nominally set in the future — 2060 or thereabouts. But science fiction writers have nothing to fear. Robb isn’t even trying to write SF. Except for a couple of androids stacked in a closet and the notion that the killer will be sent to a prison “off-planet,” the whole book could have been set in today’s world by using a word processor to search-and-replace “link” with “cell phone” and “glide” with “escalator.”

As a sometime SF writer myself, I’m a bit offended by this, but I think Roberts has made a smart marketing move. Mysteries sell better than SF, and the average mystery reader would undoubtedly be baffled by half a dozen elements that SF readers not only take for granted but demand. The future is just another exotic setting to Robb’s mystery fans. It’s entirely on a par with Ellis Peters’s Medieval monastery and Lindsey Davis’s Rome, though not as well fleshed out as either of them.

The main reason I’m reading books like Strangers in Death is not, in any case, for the unalloyed pleasure that it affords; I’m researching the marketing decisions various authors are making. Robb’s decisions (cross-breed the police procedural with the explicit romance novel, stake your claim to an exotic setting that no one has used yet) are entirely sensible.

And on the bright side, there are no vampires.

The Middle 8

In jazz parlance, the middle 8 is the B section in a 32-bar AABA song form. In the middle 8, the chord progression turns a corner and the song moves off into a different space.

I’ve been working on a plot outline for a mystery novel. Like many mystery plots, it has a middle 8.

Or we could look at it as the second act of a three-act play. Crime caper novels and police procedurals sometimes have more complex structures, but a great many mysteries can be analyzed well as having three acts.

In the first act, we meet the main characters, and Something Awful Happens. In the second act, the sleuth Trudges Around, Interviewing Suspects and Following Clues. In the third act, the Truth is Revealed, the Culprit is Unmasked (which often leads to a Thrilling and Suspenseful Chase), and Virtue Triumphs.

Most mystery writers can come up with Something Awful. And Unmasking a Culprit isn’t that difficult either. But watching over the sleuth’s shoulder as he or she trudges around interviewing suspects can be fascinating and fun for the reader, or it can be deadly dull. That distinction is what I’m meditating on this morning.

In the classic Agatha Christie model, there’s not much action in the middle 8, although Christie’s formula relied on a second murder (usually the death of the person you think is the most likely suspect) along in there somewhere. Mostly, Hercule Poirot just asks questions and uses his little gray cells. In Christie’s capable hands, this formula worked well enough, or at least it was viable 75 years ago, when she wrote her best stories.

Another writer of the same period, Erle Stanley Gardner, probably offers a better model for the modern mystery writer. Gardner was, by some criteria, a dreadful writer. His characters were cardboard, his prose bland and pedestrian. But he sold millions of books — by some estimates I’ve seen, more than 100 million. He got his start in the ’30s and ’40s, before television really took off, and he was supplying for readers

Idiots Who Vote

The practice of using literacy tests to qualify (or, more likely, disqualify) voters got a very bad name in the United States during the years (roughly from the 1870s through the 1960s) when such tests were used to deny the vote to African-Americans. From what I’ve read, even quite well-educated black people generally failed the tests (which were, of course, administered by whites), while white people who could barely write their names were routinely judged literate.

My goodness, do we not want to go back there!

If, however, a literacy test could be administered in a truly color-blind way, with the results tabulated by judges who did not know the race (nor the political affiliations) of the person being tested, would it be desirable, as a matter of public policy, to require that those who are to vote in elections be able to demonstrate not only basic literacy but a basic understanding of the world in which we live? This is a question that I think can legitimately be debated.

If you’re going to cast a vote on matters that affect fiscal policy, shouldn’t you be required to demonstrate that you know how to balance a checkbook? That you understand the manner in which interest on a loan is compounded?

If you’re going to cast a vote on matters that affect foreign policy, shouldn’t you be required to demonstrate that you know the names and locations of, perhaps, twenty prominent foreign nations, the names of the languages spoken there, and the names of the current leaders of those nations?

If you’re going to cast a vote on matters that affect the environment, shouldn’t you be required to demonstrate that you know a bit about water circulation, toxins, microbes, and the role of the oceans in the life cycle of the planet?

Shouldn’t everyone who aspires to have an opinion about public policy (starting with newspaper reporters) be required to demonstrate an understanding of statistics? The science of statistics matters. The “statistics” reported in most newspaper stories are meaningless. They’re gibberish. Why? Because the reporters, even if they understand statistics themselves, know perfectly well that their readers don’t understand statistics and don’t see why they need to. As a result, the level of alarmist misinformation being spread around is just staggering.

And if you’re going to cast a vote on any matter at all, shouldn’t you be required to show that you can read a newspaper and understand the content of newspaper stories? Not only that, but if you’re going to vote in the United States, would it be too much to ask that you demonstrate

That Windy City

Doing a little historical research on Chicago in the 1880s. If you were awake during American history class, you may recall the Haymarket affair, at least vaguely, but the more I learn, the more I want to know.

The labor movement in the U.S. is responsible for little niceties like the 8-hour workday, paid vacations, and paid overtime. Without the labor unions, we’d still be … oh, wait. That all changed, didn’t it? Today you have to work two jobs to support your family, so we’re back to 16-hour workdays. If we still had a strong labor movement in this country, maybe things would be different, but the moneyed classes have managed to tar labor with a broad brush. Exactly as they did 125 years ago, though generally with a little more gentility. The brutal campaign directed against the workers in Chicago in the 1880s left a lot of people (most of them ordinary factory workers) dead.

A lot of other things were going on in Chicago at that time. It wasn’t all riots. The world’s first skyscraper (10 stories tall) was built. And when the police weren’t taking bribes or hitting the unemployed with their billy clubs, they built an impressive city-wide network of dispatch call boxes. If there was a fire, or thieves, you could run down to the corner and pull a lever, and only a minute or two later a police wagon (drawn by horses) would dash down the street to answer your call.

The police force was predominantly Irish. My bet is that that’s why those wagons came to be called “paddy wagons.”

So there were technological innovations, banks, factories, taverns … it wasn’t all riots. Life went on. It’s important to remember that historians focus on the most dramatic incidents. The lives of ordinary people are generally ignored. Except when they’re rioting in the streets because they’re unemployed and starving, of course.