Wow. It’s settled into the classic Atlanta summertime of yore, where we get serious heat and humidity by midday, and if you want to be productive out of doors, it’s best to get up early and get back inside before, oh, 8 or 9 am.

So that’s what we’ve been doing, mostly at Sammy’s wise instigation. Settling into patterns around the patterns.

The early morning walk around our neighborhood, or down and around Piedmont Park can take on a variety of textures, depending on whether you set out at 6:10 am or 8:00 am. The sound itself is different…whether you’re cruising by the soft hissing of southern summer lawns (earlier) or dodging the parade of commuting crossover vehicles (later). Earlier, and you’re more on your own, although there seems to be a distributed team of hardcore people Getting Their Exercise who certainly seem to be exerting themselves more than I am, although any uphill stretches turn me into a fine purveyor of beet-redness and sweat. Later, and you are more likely to run into the folks who who use Orme Park as their own personal dog free-run zone. I guess they think the “pets must be on leash” signs (all defaced) don’t apply to them or their critters, because, like, you know, they’re special. (We use it for our personal let’s-not-exclusively-walk-on-sidewalks-between-home-and-the-park zone.)

So we’ve bent to the pattern imposed by the weather and have had a series of really quite enjoyable morning walks, and, since our return from Michigan, a fairly quiet period work-wise that I’ve really enjoyed. Sammy, it sounds like, has hit upon a vision for her writing and research, and has been very nose-to-the-keyboard. Me, I’m cheering her on.

She’s come up with new and even healthier ways to combine beans and quinoa and tofu and..uh…ketchup and ultra-fresh herbage from the garden, and again, I cheer her on and try to do the dishes and keep the pantry stocked.

Actually this morning, just to break my patterns up a bit more, I’ve wandered down to the Starbucks about a mile from our house (next to the Trader Joes, indeed), and I’ve just been watching a succession of patrons order elaborate coffee drinks and climb back aboard (respectively) their black Prius, their red Prius, their silver Prius, and, uh, a pink bicycle that matches their bike-spandex. I’m sitting at the table where, last week, I saw a guy with a MacBook Pro and noise cancelling headphones editing high-def video, and over across the room from where Bill Ambrose and I sat discussing the modern technology options when you want to be able to edit and create in any of the modern high definition media. (Where once we “did television”, we now acquire. Push pixels. Slam them around. Stack them into beautifully synchronized sandwiches. Manage the huge files we’ve created. And some of us prefer to do it where people drink coffee. Hm, maybe not me, at this point.)

I’m sitting next to where I saw the guy who literally wrote the book on Cocoa programming was hanging out just before our Michigan trip.

Yes, it’s a coffee shop filled with creativity, or so it would seem on the surface. I came down here to bathe in that. It’s an essence that has a soundtrack fileld with Elvis Costello and Simon and Garfunkel, and when I fire up iTunes, it reports that it has no idea what the last song played at this Starbucks was. Hey, I didn’t ask. May I recommend some songs based on your metadata? Nah, no thank you, iTunes.

And then I go home and look at the stack of D1, D2, and Digital Betacam tapes I have in our upstairs closet. What the heck did I use these things for, again? I plan strategies to stack books around the house that add to the comfy feeling (as opposed to looking like we’re prepared for the next tree assault on our property.)

Meanwhile, my sister has upgraded her iPhone to the latest and greatest, my brother is hacking his birthday Kindle and the AppleTV (bought with birthday money), and I’ve upgraded our original-generation iPhone to the 3.0 software, and it feels like a whole new device. Okay, a little slower than the whizzy one we saw on demo at an AT&T store, but for the moment, I can deal.

I feel artificially insulated from the global economic meltdown, but the caffeine has kicked in, so I have other microeconomic patterns to shift, nudge, bump just a little.

Enjoy Monday in your neighborhood.

I really like photography…I enjoy my own blurry efforts, I’m more delighted by Sammy’s visions of the natural and un-natural world, and sometimes, when I’m trying to get some creative traction, it’s easy to stumble near-mindlessly through endless seas of online JPEGs, most quite beautiful, some just tiny doorways into a life I’m not getting anywhere near.

I’ve been talking with Sam about a couple of new cameras that are just nearly almost on the verge of being released, and with luck and a clarity of consumer vision, I might be off on another binge of pixel-gathering in the coming months. I kinda keep telling myself, “self, your older, future incarnations are going to be very happy you’ve captured the soul-moments of these little chunks of your world when you’re sitting in your space future home five or ten years hence.”

No, I really don’t talk like that at all, not even to my future self. But I do like having these representations of what is…for real, for now.

I guess Sammy’s right…

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced the Adobe® Creative Suite® CSOLPC® product family, a breakthrough release of the industry-leading design and development software optimized for the One Laptop Per Child XO machine, running a version of the Linux-based operating system with the distinctive Sugar GUI. The release will, for the first time, enable entire villages of small children to use Adobe After Effects® and Adobe Photoshop® on a computer they understand and use everyday—the OLPC XO—to make a creative contribution to the world by taking on the ever-growing number of film and video industry projects that require rotoscoping, motion tracking, color retouching, and wire removal.

“In tough global economic times, film, video, and print production companies are looking for even newer ways to outsource labor, especially to countries where the technological infrastructure is in a nascent form”, said Shantanu Narayen, president and chief executive officer at Adobe. “We think this is a win-win for production houses and the growing surplus of small rural villages around the globe with bored, XO-trained children, waiting to join the digital production line creating sparkling, state-of-the-art entertainment for global audiences.”

The pricing for the CSOLPC® package is similarly innovative. Users at large, successful design firms in the western world who purchase a copy of Adobe Creative Suite 4 SuperPremium® (USD$ 2299) will be simultaneously purchasing a copy of CSOLPC® for a small child in Ulan Bator, Peru, Bangladesh, Vietnam, or any of 16 other countries which have signed up for the pilot program.

Once entire villages of children have activated the software over the convenient XO wireless mesh network, they will begin to receive 2K and 4K film frames to rotoscope and retouch using the Adobe After Effects® application, which will break the large frames up into dozens of small tiles optimized for the child’s XO and attention requirements. The finished frame will be then reassembled and sent back to a central server in San Jose, where it will be securely returned to the film or video studio who requested the job. The process is seamless and transparent on both ends.

Because of the tight memory and disk space requirements of the ultra-portable OLPC laptop, the standard Adobe Installer program will not run on a single XO; instead, establishing a mesh network of at least a dozen OLPC XO laptops is required. The process has all the speed and convenience that Adobe customers have come to expect.

I would have thought this was the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary edition—this timeless, tidy collection of rules of the writing road seem to have lived among us since the dawn of time.

But, no, it’s just about the same age as my brother (me, I’m the same age as Helvetica.) Yes, the seminal work by William Strunk came out in 1918 (a shade younger than my father-in-law) but the “and White” part of it, the contribution, revision, and expansion by long-time New Yorker contributor and “Charlotte’s Web” author E.B.White made the oh-so-concise rules of his old Cornell professor live again for several generations of succeeding writers.

Some of White’s (and Strunk’s) advice can be ingested and then gently set aside in our new world of marvels like the quickly-burped-out weblog and the vast twitterscape: “Prefer the standard to the offbeat.” “Do not affect a breezy manner.” Heck, what fun is that?

But we can all continue our searches for “one moment of felicity” (S&W quoting Robert Louis Stevenson there.) We can all “omit needless words.” We can all slam the keys with vigor and then hone the result until a bright sheen casts out from our 24″ LCD displays.

Even on weekends, I’m sorry to report that I spend a lot of time sitting in front of the computer, and generally what I’m doing could be classified as “work.”

But what is that exactly? Sure, the stuff I do for income is unmistakably work, but what about the time spent learning new, complex workflows in order to do the things I do? What about the time spent trying to bludgeon my machine into making a computer-generated light cast the sort of shadow that I’ve seen in the real world? What about the time I take looking “under the hood” to figure out how this particular web page does what it does, micro-googling snippets of javascript to try and parse what for me is the unparsable?

Of course, even from my earliest exposures to computers and their possibilities, the experience of learning by trying something and seeing if that works…and then trying something else and seeing if that works…the iterative process is one that can seem…depending on where you’re coming from…as falling into either the “work” or the “play” categories.

I’m not at all sure that it might not be something else entirely. Sometimes it has the unmistakable characteristics of non-productivity…as in, “I’m trying this, and trying, and…uh…trying…and I’m really just spinning my tires and making no progress at all.” Look up at the clock, another hour has passed. And sometimes (maybe the minority of times) it feels like that sort of ostensible wheel-spinning actually puts the rest of my brain in a good place to do the paying stuff. But it’s easy to tell yourself that’s what your doing and then look up to discover it’s 2 am and one really ought to call it a day.

There are definite tradeoffs into how you learn, how you work, how you play, and how you make the transition from one to the other throughout your waking hours, whenever those may be.

Can you tell where I stand amidst those transitions at this very moment?

Well, gotta get back to it. Or, maybe go to Trader Joe’s and pick up some milk. Or maybe…

Sammy says it takes a week for her to get readjusted to Daylight Savings Time and it’s been about a week, and this morning, a cool, quiet one in Atlanta, feels about right. I feel adjusted…I hope you do too. Hi from here, where this weblog journal thingie of mine has been lying somewhat fallow in 2009, a clear sign that my attentions have been elsewhere.

It sure hasn’t been that I’ve been away from my computer—no, I’ve been working fairly steadily since Christmas, on projects as far-ranging as graphics for a Youngstown group of television stations to some last-minute hacking on a sales video for United Airlines to a bunch of web design, including helping Sammy establish a new and dynamic site for the Society for Georgia Archaeology that involved all kinds of delving into the arcana wrapped around javascript, CSS, PHP, and SQL. I can honestly say that it now comes more or less naturally for me to crank out inelegant code to bend a web page to my will, although sometimes I sure end up googling for snippets that I can slice and duct-tape together to get the job done.

But I get a real hit of satisfaction from cobbling and honing a small snippet of code that, for example, adds a just-the-right-size and just-the-right look map (using something called the Google Static Maps API) to articles on the SGA site that are ‘tagged’ with a latitude and longitude, automatically, no muss nor fuss.

Kinda like this, behold:

One of the places I lived in college:

…maps are just fun. APIs to fancy web services willing to belch maps on command are just fun too. Although if I had any substantial concerns (and some folks most surely do) about the long-term wisdom of trusting Google and…well, mostly Google…with my data and my information, maybe I wouldn’t. I mean, wow—I read my RSS through them, I have spreadsheets and photos and maps and code and of course email and now even transcribed voicemail and telephony that passes through the GoogleOmniPlexOverLordEntity, and if they really are evil, I may be screwed, as may we all be. But I don’t think they are. Flawed and human, yes…evil, no.

But if you scale “flawed and human” up to Google-sized über-global proportions, does that equal evil? Does a global economic downturn subtly turn a huge corporation’s rudder just ever so slightly toward the dark side? Um, reply hazy, ask later.

Back to work: I’ve also had projects that require me to come up with elements that look good in one of the most resource-constrained, throwback, arenas out there—the cable set-top box. There are a bunch of people out there trying to do cutting edge interactive TV by pushing code out to ‘legacy boxes’ that are a decade and a half old. Yes, that cable box parked atop or under your TV (a little computer-like thing, of course) is a dinosaur from the nineties! Why can’t it do the honorable thing and catch fire and die? Otherwise, because it has about zero ram and a microprocessor that my phone can run rings around, and because there are about a zillion of them still out there functioning, I have to take really pretty graphics and use all my cleverness to dither and smush them down into color palettes reminiscent of the old Vidifont I labored over in…the eighties. No, not pinker and teal-er colors, way fewer colors than the 16.7 million available before your eyes now. It’s kind of like having to create web pages that would look good on a Mac 128k from 1984. It’s kinda like…well, you get the idea. But it does seem like this is one more area where having lived and worked struggling through those paleodigital days pays off—understanding constrained tech can be a marketable skill.

Elswehere, it seems like there have been a steady stream of computer crises that I’ve been able to help family and friends with, if sometimes just to reassure them (those hardy few friends we have who are not Mac owners) that no, their machine has probably not been infected and their identity stolen and their bank accounts drained. No matter what kind of computer you have, the feeling of being out of control can easily seem to eminate from the whirring box on your desktop that brings you the interwebs…if you let “what my computer is doing” become this thing of mystery.

What’s it doing? Sammy and I were watching TV and something in the cabinet underneath began a quiet low grunting. RRunnnt-runt. Nggg-nrunt. What’s that!? What’s it doing!? Relax, it’s just the hard drive attached to the Mac Mini which is recording The Daily Show for our later viewing pleasure…the drive is mostly full and besides, I have it sitting on that old ice cube tray so it’s well-ventilated, but that’s just enough to give it room to vibrate when it’s doing some heavy record-to-the-platter action…thus the grunting.

There’s always an explanation, usually one too mundane and too tiny to spend too much time on. I get a huge amount of satisfaction of seeing folks I care about set up their digital worlds on machines that are largely hassle-free…and I’m always happy to help in that process, if only to offer a few well-timed “what’s it doing?” explanations.

So that’s where my easily ping-ponged attentions have been through much of The Year Thus Far. There, and, of course, distracted by bright shiny objects like the Twitter and the iPhone and the..uh…Global Economic Crisis. One of those things is not like the other.

Enjoy your Friday…thanks for your attention(s.)