Class

Immediately before the start of a shift I usually get a lot of sleep. This is during the transition from being awake during the day to being up all night. I usually go to bed around 2:00 in the morning that last night off and force myself to sleep until almost 1:00 the next afternoon. (The rest of the rotation I will be sleeping only four to five hours each day.)

I tend to wake up a lot during this extended downtime, and that means more remembered dreams. Yesterday was no exception. But this was an especially odd dream: it was a dream about class distinctions.

In the dream I had teamed up with two of my friends. One of them, a handyman of sorts in real life, had gotten us a job working for the super-rich elite set in Nanticoke. Now, just to be clear: there is no super-rich elite set in Nanticoke. Not even close. But in the dream there was, and they were all gathered in a semi-secret party in one fairly unassuming house.

I don't remember what sort of work we were supposed to be doing in the dream. I don't remember interacting with any of these Nanticoke Brahmins. I just remember looking at them, engaged in their idle entertainments, untroubled by all the economic distress in the outside world. And I wondered what that must be like.

I suppose in the real world there are people who are untouched by the economic downturn. Every so often there will be a news story about some minor privation experienced by the richest of the rich. But there is probably some class beyond even them whose members are blissfully unaware of the sufferings of anyone else. What strings do they pull? What role do they play in the affairs of mortal men?

Once a friend and I mused that the exact position of every individual in society can be specified with a proper application of the notions of "upper," "middle," and "lower" class. Someone may be "middle class," but they may actually be in the "upper middle class," more specifically the "lower upper middle class"...and so on. Until recently I fancied that I was somewhere around the lower upper middle class myself; I had a comfortable amount of money, and I was able to spend it as I pleased. But in the last few years my fortunes have changed, and now I find myself in the lower middle class - or, perhaps, the upper middle lower middle class. That, of course, is subject to change.

Where would you place yourself on such a series of class striations? And in today's economic climate, where it is all too easy to slip down through the strata, what would it take to move up a few levels?

Demonstrate for clean water this Friday!

Friday, February 12, Kayak Dude of the Susquehanna River Sentinel will be holding a pair of demonstrations outside the offices of the Susquehanna River Basin Commission and the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection.

Susquehanna River Sentinel: Who Dat that Knockin' at my Door?

"By standing on their doorstep and making a very public statement in opposition to their current 'rubber-stamping' approach to approving permits - even in floodplains - I will let them know at least a few folks are not satisfied with writing letters and offering public testimony."

If you are in Northeastern Pennsylvania, or any the areas affected by pollution to the Susquehanna and the surrounding water tables as a consequence of irresponsible and unsafe gas mining practices, please consider joining Kayak Dude in this effort to raise awareness in the groups responsible for keeping these areas safe and clean. And if you can't make it yourself, please lend your support by adding your name to his petitions.

Facebook Revises Format; World Thrown Into Chaos

Well, maybe not. Not quite. Not yet.

I haven't been hit with the February 2010 revision yet, but I know it's coming. And lots of people I'm friends with have gotten it already. And none of them are singing its praises. Many of them are actively cursing it out.

I don't know why Facebook revises its format every few months. It's a business decision, of course; and for a business that gives its services to users for free, such decisions must lean towards pragmatic considerations of increasing revenue while at least maintaining market share by not alienating users to the point that they begin looking around for some other forum that provides the same or similar services without subjecting users to things they find objectionable.

So on the one hand, you want to make more money from advertisers and applications developers. On the other hand, you don't want to piss people off too much.

But on the gripping hand, people don't like change.

Since I joined Facebook about a year and a half ago I have seen several changes to the interface format. Based on the earliest comments I saw from my friends, one had just happened a short while before I came on board. As for the others, it seems like they've kicked in just as soon as everyone got used to the previous changes.

Is this perhaps an intentional effort by Facebook to keep things fresh by never allowing users to get too set in the ways of a given revision? Is it part of a master plan to nudge Facebook toward something else? Or is it just a series of really bad decisions?

I hope Facebook knows the cautionary tale of SiteMeter.

SiteMeter was - is - one of the most popular visitor tracking applications out there. How popular, most people didn't realize until one fateful weekend starting on the very last day of July, 2008, when something happened that allowed an untested modification to the program to be unleashed on users - an untested modification that shut down a significant portion of the Internet.

Another Monkey: SiteMeter causing site errors in Internet Explorer

It took the better part of the weekend for SiteMeter to resolve this issue, a late summer weekend when the people doing the resolving had probably already made plans to do other things. It left the company with a black eye and a lot of angry users, particularly the paying users who found their sites inaccessible to customers for much of the weekend.

But that was just the dress rehearsal for what was to come. SiteMeter had been investing considerable time that year into a revision to their program, something that would be a dramatic change for the better. But what was released in the middle of September 2008...wasn't.

Another Monkey: The NEW & IMPROVED SiteMeter: ummmm.....

The reaction was overwhelming. SiteMeter heard and responded. They rolled back the revised program to the previous version. And that is the same version that is still being used a year and a half later.

SiteMeter hasn't had much to say since then. At all. Their blog, if you can find it,* is pretty sparse, and the posts referring to the two fiascoes of 2008 are gone. I get an impression that as a company, they never recovered from the massive loss of user confidence spawned by these debacles.

Facebook has never suffered such a loss, and has never rolled back a revision. Perhaps this is because, from a social networking point of view, they are the biggest gorilla in the room. Where are angry Facebook users going to go? MySpace? LinkedIn? Classmates.com?

Maybe Facebook doesn't care. Users will keep on using Facebook, and will get used to any changes, and will keep attracting advertisers and application designers and their money.

Or maybe Facebook really and truly doesn't know. Maybe they think everything is fine.

There exists an official Facebook blog. On it members of the Facebook staff have been posting about the ongoing changes. This entry, for example, details the changes to the interface, while this one deals with changes to the way photos are uploaded. These posts serve as a critical source of information, but also provide an opportunity, through the comments, for users to provide feedback to Facebook itself.

Are the changes really all that bad? Honestly, I have no idea. I haven't experienced them myself. I expect that there will be some things I will like, and some things that make no sense whatsoever.

But no matter how bad these changes are, one thing is certain with Facebook: more revisions are just down the road!



*If you follow the link to the SiteMeter Knowledge Center and then click on the New/Announcements button, you go to a dead page. It took some doing to find the actual blog. And the blog itself has not been without its problems.

Climbing Giant's Despair

The Wyoming Valley offers amazing vistas and panoramas, even to the highway commuter. Interstate 81 rides along the side of the mountains that form the south edge of the valley. From this vantage point you can see across the valley to the north, as well as far along the mountains to the east and west.

I have been commuting along this route for nearly half my life. I have watched things change over time, new construction appear, old landmarks disappear, even whole new vistas presenting themselves when some culm banks and an inconveniently-placed outcrop of mountain were removed as part of a road project some ten years ago.

Lately I've noticed some new lights on the mountains. One group I never noticed until about three weeks ago. It looked like a small city, a line of amber and white lights situated near the top of a mountain ridge called Penobscot Knob, the location of the towers that broadcast radio and television signals to much of the Wyoming Valley.

I've tried to observe these lights from multiple positions, which is not an easy or particularly safe thing to do when most of your observations are being done from a moving car. But eventually I narrowed down the location of the lights. Using Google Earth, I determined that the lights appeared to be situated along a known road. The road running through Laurel Run. The road that used to be an extension of Northampton Street in Wilkes-Barre, once the longest road in the state of Pennsylvania.

The road that goes up Giant's Despair.


I have gone up this road at least three times in the past. I have even come down it once. It is terrifying. Steep, full of twists and turns. Hard on your engine going up, hard on your brakes coming down. Followed to its end it meets up with Route 115 in Bear Creek, which absorbed the remainder of Northampton Street for the long trek south to Brodheadsville. (Route 115 has a long and storied history; it has also been the scene of several fatal accidents recently.)

But that was where the lights were. And, with luck, that was where there would be an amazing view of the valley below.

The snow which crippled so much of the eastern seaboard this weekend barely touched Northeastern Pennsylvania. Nanticoke had less than an inch, other areas just a dusting. The road leading up Giant's Despair was clear and dry. And this evening I found myself in that part of the area. Well, what the hell?, I thought.

The Giant's Despair Hillclimb is an event first established in 1906. Part race, part endurance event, it is a test of a driver's skill and a car's stamina. Here is a dashboard video from one of the participants in the 2009 event:



Pay special attention to the 23 second mark, when the horizon vanishes and all you can see is road. I was doing 15-20 miles per hour for this entire stretch, so my windshield showed nothing but road for very long times. And I was doing it around 8:30 at night. In a fourteen-year-old car with more than 315,000 miles on it.

But I made it.

I caught a glimpse, briefly, of the valley below me; but to see this properly I would have had to be coming down Giant's Despair, or I would have had to be pulled off on the side of the road around one of the left-hand turns, and I wasn't about to do either of these things.

I found the lights, too, I think. It looks like they're coming from a new housing development near the summit of the hill where the houses have randomly aimed white and amber security lights. New light pollution from houses built in a ridiculously inaccessible location. How do they get their water? Where does their sewage go? Who ran utilities up to them? Who plows their roads? Who will come to save their houses when they catch fire?

I cruised past the housing development and then through the towers on Penobscot Knob. That's an eerie feeling, slipping between these enormous towers like a football through giant goalposts. Then a slight rise, and a long, shallow cruise down the other side of the mountain to meet with 115 and continue my descent back into the Wyoming Valley.

It was scary. But it was also somewhat exhilarating. And I think I solved a mystery that has been bugging me for the past few weeks.

A film for a snowy weekend

A few films of the 1980's have held up really well. Ghostbusters, from 1984, is probably the most quotable film in history. But on a weekend like this, with snow falling from the Carolinas to a point just a few dozen miles south of here, I think a lot of people would truly appreciate John Carpenter's 1982 "remake" of The Thing. (It's not so much a remake as it is a more faithful adaptation of the original source material, John W. Campbell's "Who Goes There?")

For those of you who are not familiar with this film, here is the trailer:


And if you are familiar with the film but find yourself without the DVD this weekend, here is a Lego version to tide you over:

They're not toys, dammit!

I've been reading up on a fascinating dinosaur called the Therizinosaurus lately. While it's known from just a few bones, including ridiculously oversized claws, some educated guesses have been made about its overall appearance based on the body plans of related dinosaurs. Safari Ltd. has a nice-looking model of it, though the sculpt actually seems to be based on more closely resemble this image of a Nothronychus.

Speaking of dinosaur toys models, I recently became antsy wondering when (or if) the Safari Prehistoric Sea Life Toob might come out. So I e-mailed their customer service department with a query. Four days later I received a response which read, in part:

The item is still in production and will not be available for distribution to store retailers until the middle of March.

Please see below some suggested retailers:

You may visit the following online retail sites:
http://www.safariltd.com/ (press the green button and it will direct you to Shopatron for retail purchases)
http://www.thebigzoo.com/
http://www.healthstonehobbies.com/ (Hmmmm, this looks like a bad link...I wonder if she meant http://www.healthstones.com/ ?)
http://www.store4knowledge.com/

Also the following large retailers carry our products:
Michaels Arts & Crafts
AC Moore
Learning Express
HobbyTown USA

Thank you for your interest in Safari’s products.

...which I though was pretty nice of them.

While we're on the subject of educational...stuff, the Everhart Museum in Scranton is currently exhibiting The Art of the Brick: Sculptures by Nathan Sawaya, featuring sculptures made out of Legos. I hope to get up there with my nephews, who are both big fans of Legos. They may find the rest of the museum pretty interesting, too.

And speaking of art, I recently had a memory bubble up of a blog post someone wrote a few years ago about cigarette vending machines being repurposed as vending machines for tiny works of art. While I found the website for the project - Art-o-mat®, "vending art and culture since 1997" - in less than a minute, I wasn't able to actually identify the original blog post. It was from perhaps five or six years ago, maybe longer, so the blog where I originally read this may no longer exist. I'll keep checking on the blogs of old blog-friends to see who might have posted this way back when.

Books that are actual books are better than the other kinds because...

About a week ago I joined the Facebook group Books that are actual books. Anybody who knows me knows that I have a lifelong love of books, and have a collection that puts some public libraries to shame.

With the advent of electronic reading devices like the Kindle and the iPad some people are declaring the printed paper book dead, or on its way out. And the book publishing industry certainly has its share of challenges, much like the newspaper and magazine and music and movie industries. But books have their fans. They also have centuries of proven success behind them, unlike gadgets that will be obsolete by the time their warranties expire.

I started making a list in the discussion board for "Books that are actual books" called
"Why are books that are actual books better than the other kinds?" Here are my half-joking, half-serious reasons so far:

- You can drop an actual book and it (probably) won't break.
- You can access books from decades or even centuries ago with very few compatibility issues.
- If you are reading a book in the bathtub and it falls in, you won't get electrocuted.
- If you leave a book on the front seat of your car in the hot sun, it won't be destroyed.
- If you leave a book on the front seat of your car under any circumstances, odds are no one will break into the car to steal it.
- Battery life is usually not an issue with a book, and you don't have to worry about where you left the charger.
- If you're reading a book poolside and someone does a cannonball and your book gets completely soaked, you can just let it dry out and keep reading it - or even keep reading it wet.

Of course there are many more, but for me it really comes down to obsolescence - ten or twenty years from now, your Kindle will probably be as much an object of ridicule (and just as usable) as a TRS-80, Commodore Vic-20 or even a Playstation. The information stored on it will also probably be just as accessible as a Commodore program on cassette tape or your college term papers on 5 1/4" diskettes.

But I'm sure the new gadgets have their proponents, and some legitimate advantages. After all, it IS more convenient to carry around a iPod loaded with 10,000 songs (downloaded at $1 a track) than it would be to carry around all the CD's (or cassettes, or records) on which those songs first appeared. (Trust me, moving a library is no easy task.) I'd like to hear any thoughts anyone else has one way or the other. And if you're on Facebook, take a look at the group Books that are actual books.

The Ironmongers

A few years ago I read an article in New Scientist about a new hazard that was cropping up throughout England: open manholes in the streets. The manholes were open (and therefore hazardous) because people had taken to stealing the manhole covers to sell them as scrap metal. (The practice eventually found its way to the U.S.)

Ridiculous, I thought. How desperate for money can someone be that they are stealing a heavy piece of iron that isn't even worth that much as scrap?

Someone has taken to stealing wrought-iron gates from around Nanticoke.*

Nanticoke has a lot of old houses with old spiked wrought-iron fences with gates that make a happy crashshsh when they close. I have one. As of this writing, I have both a fence and a gate, though my gate is missing several of the spikes courtesy of the last tenant, who decided to secure the gate to keep his kids in the yard by wrapping a rubber strap around the gatepost and the gate. After a few years of this, the tension on the old spike that the strap was wrapped around was too much, and it snapped off. So he moved to a second spike. And then a third.

I have no idea how hard it is to remove one of these gates. If it's not too difficult - and, really, I think doing it would require a hacksaw or cutting torch, though professional thieves could probably do the job in under thirty seconds - and if it can be done in a way that doesn't permanently damage the fence, I'm thinking of removing it myself and storing it in my basement for the duration of the economic downturn. (I already took in my Arcosanti bronze windbell for similar reasons.) Once the weather warms up enough, I plan to repaint it with some identifying information added. At the very least I intend to take photos of it, to get "THIS GATE IS NOT FOR SALE" posters ready to distribute to all the local scrap metal dealers, just in case any of them are ethical enough to refuse to buy known or suspected stolen property.

I would not have thought it would come to this, but it has. I wonder how widespread this sort of thing is.

*It appears that England once again beat us to the punch:

Five properties in same road have gates stolen - Northampton Chronicle and Echo

Every day is a new day

It's a remarkable thing - for me, at least. Every day - in some respects, at least - I feel like I am coming at a brand-new world. This may sound refreshing and fun, but it's not: there are so many things that we take for granted, day after day, and it's not fun trying to deal with them anew over and over again.

Today, for example. I spent the night working, drove home with a stop for gas along the way, made myself an omelet, sat down at the computer, and had no real idea what to do next.

Oh, I checked Facebook, and tried to catch up on the hundreds of updates from friends and people I sort-of know and people who are, for the moment, complete strangers. I checked the blog updates on my list of linked blogs. I went to my own blog to do an update.

And I had no idea what to do next.

There are stories I want to tell. One is about the scariest recent piece of news regarding climate change that you probably haven't heard about. But it's hard to phrase this in such a way that it doesn't just sound like fear mongering (which it isn't) or it can't just be dismissed with an "Oh, well, there's nothing we can do about it, so no point in worrying" (which may very well be true.) I have a post in mind that would be called "The Ethical Vivisectionist" which may never see the light of day. I'd also like to comment on some discussions of Civility in the Blogosphere, and an object lesson in what Civility isn't. I wanted to float the idea that some documentary maker could put together an amazing film about all the stuff that's going wrong with natural gas extraction today, but it turns out someone already has.

The problem is, I was just too damned exhausted as I sat there this morning to do any of this. Maybe after I get some sleep, I thought, though I knew that I wouldn't have time after I woke up.

So the question is this: How have I been doing it? How have I been keeping up an almost-unbroken pace of a post a day through all this time of working this same job, these same shifts? Honestly, I have no idea.

Tomorrow will be a new day. Maybe then I'll have the energy to tackle one of the topics I mentioned, or maybe then I'll have something new I'll want to blog about. We'll have to see what tomorrow brings!

Cold and tired

Back to work for four and one-third twelve-hour days. One day down, three and one-third to go. Only not really, since I'll be taking Tuesday off as a "sick day." This is one of my unused "personal days" from last year. The rules state that these days must now be taken as sick days, but they also state that sick days may be used for appointments - including family member's appointments. My mom has lots of appointments with doctors. Tuesday is one of those days.

(This all assumes that these particular rules haven't changed. I've got a new copy of the employee handbook I need to go over. I suppose I should document how much time I spend reviewing this new handbook at home.)

It is cold. Very cold. And I am tired. I am going to brush my teeth, wash my face, and go to bed for a few hours.