Resolutions for 2012

The short version:

Read more books.

“Books” defined: Complete, self-contained works printed on paper.

The long version:

The amount of time spent reading books should, by the end of 2012, be greater than the cumulative time spent doing the following:

• Checking, reading, or writing email.
• Checking, updating, or otherwise using Facebook.
• Watching Twitter or any other continuously updating content stream, such as network television.
• Consuming any material, written or video, online or offline, the existence of which I had not known about five seconds previous, e.g. memes, viral pieces, articles linked by friends and strangers, and self-help features in print magazines in waiting rooms.
• Arguing about things that, with 30 seconds of research, can be proved factually one way or the other.
• Arguing about things that are essentially matters of opinion, when it’s obvious to everyone involved that no opinions are going to change.
• Arguing with people who enjoy arguing.
• Arguing with people who could not possibly understand why they are wrong, without reading books that they will obviously never read, or having experiences that they will obviously never have.
• Drinking.
• Dating. This includes everything from reading personals to sex to flirting to engaging in any activity the underlying purpose of which is essentially about finding sex or love, in general or from someone specific.
• Buying books.
• Wandering around in bookstores.
• Going to and from bookstores.
• Reading book reviews.
• Blogging.

Winter Is Coming: Defending Game Of Thrones

This guy spends a lot of time trying not to get killed.

HBO’s hugely successful and expensive fantasy series, Game Of Thrones, based on the popular novel by George R.R. Martin, doesn’t need any help from an independent blogger to prove its commercial worth to HBO, to find more viewers, or to get the green light for another season. But, being the landmark mainstream institution that it now is, I fear that it may be overlooked – or just not given a chance at all – by some discerning, sophisticated viewers who think that it’s mostly gratuitous junk. And that would be a mistake, because Game Of Thrones, at least so far, is a work of remarkable complexity and nuance.

A friend who recently watched the pilot at my urging complained that, owing at least in part to the copious female nudity and explicit sex, he felt “pandered to,” and speculated that perhaps the show’s producers had a mandate from HBO to show “so many tits per episode.”

This would be a bit like hearing, from someone who had just seen only the pilot of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, that the world doesn’t need another vampire show, nor is it satisfying, through watching the series, to participate in the further fetishization of the blonde American high school cheerleader. Both of those complaints may be legitimate as far as they go, but they don’t allow for the possibility of a particular show that turns the problem inside out by using cliched tropes as a springboard to subvert, play with, and re-align the viewer’s expectations.
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Occupy Steve Jobs

Last night, while walking through Zucotti Park, the center of the mico-city that is emerging within the Occupy Wall Street protest, I overheard part of a conversation about Steve Jobs. I thought that maybe he, like Radiohead, had been rumored to make an appearance. Only after I got home and online did I realize that he was dead.

My Twitter feed was full of tweets on both subjects. I follow a lot of tech enthusiasts, and also a lot of people interested in social justice, so the confluence didn’t surprise me. Many other tweeters noticed the combination, and some began to snarkily point it out, as if to expose a hypocrisy. How could anyone who is genuinely concerned about the ubiquity of corporate influence and the accumulation of wealth among an elite few, truly mourn the passing of a man who was a part of that elite, and ran a major publicly traded corporation?

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Excel Custom Number Formatting Explained

For years, I found it daunting to look at the box shown above. It’s not so much the complexity of the character strings, but the complete lack of information displayed about what they mean. The underlying message seems to be that somewhere out there, someone is doing something so complicated and esoteric with Excel that if you don’t intuitively understand what those more complicated formats are for, then there’s no point in trying to explain it to you.

Sure, there are explanations available, both on Microsoft’s official help pages, and on many other sites. But in my research, I have been unable to find one place that actually engages the specific default “custom” number formats and explains what each of them actually do. Most explanations speak briefly and obliquely about certain aspects, letting you know that, say, the # symbol stands for a number, or that a zero is a placeholder for a zero. But neither of those things is really true; it’s just that the real explanation is much longer and more difficult to get across.  One might say that the # symbol represents a digit that could be any number 0-9, unless it is a leading or trailing zero. But to spell that out would be to admit that the whole system is actually complicated and strange, a sort of dumbed-down and more poorly documented version of regular expressions. Without further ado, I present a plain-language explanation for every default “custom” number format that comes with Excel 2007.

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An Open Letter To The Woman Who Tried To Hold The Doors Of The 6 Train Open With A Large Paperback Book During Rush Hour

First of all, I just want to say that I’m sorry I didn’t get a better look at what you were reading before I pushed your book back out at you so that the doors could close and the train could leave the station. When I encounter someone with a philosophy of life that’s clearly far different from my own, I usually make an effort to find some common ground, and reading material is often a great place to start.

But you see, there wasn’t time. I had somewhere to be. And, not insignificantly, so did the other twelve hundred people on the train, to say nothing of the other fifty thousand or so people on the other south-bound six trains behind ours that you were holding up. Read the rest of this entry »