There’s something lovely about Gary’s Fathers Day blog.

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At long last a technology that answers the perpetual question: “Now where did I put that darn sheep?”

And it’s brought to you by Destron-Fearing, Inc., whose tagline is — or at least ought to be — “Fear your Destron, Earthlings!”

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Not that you should give a rat’s tuchus about my personal PC Meltdown Hell, but the local PC store that put the system together thinks it’s isolated the problem. They’ve managed to get XP loaded onto the new 120Gb hard drive, but only by taking out one of the system’s two memory 512Mb chips. The memory chips test as good, but if both are in at the same time, they get the same random hard drive writing errors that kept me up until 3 last night. They’re going to try updating the board’s BIOS to see if it fixes what looks like an incompatibility between the dual channel mobo and the RAM. (Or is it the RAM that’s dual channel?)

FWIW, it’s an ASUS P4P800 Delux motherboard with two Kingston HyperX 512Mb memory chips.

Update: The BIOS update seems to have done the trick, but the store’s going to keep the machine until Monday morning to see if it makes it through the weekend.

Thanks for all the great discussion on the comment board.

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Last night I found myself standing next to Ashok Das at a high school graduation party for the daughter of a mutual friend. Prof. Das, a leading thinker in the field of string theory and a member of the Royal Society, let me pump him with dumbass questions, even though it was obvious that I couldn’t possibly understand any answer that wouldn’t require a cab ride to get within hailing distance of an approximation. It’s tough grasping string theory if you took your last math class in 11th grade, even if you did read half of Elegant Universe two summers ago before it was stolen along with the rest of your luggage on the first day of your vacation. Nevertheless, he was totally gracious.

I said something like: “String theory is a model. Some models are useful because of their explanatory power without any claim being made that they are essentially like that which they’re modeling. Is string theory like that? Do string theorists believe that there are actually strings extended in space, or is that merely a convenient way to talk about the math?” Prof. Das said yes, it’s not as if there are strings, there actually are strings that actually vibrate.

“Actual strings extended in space?” I asked, since I hadn’t expected that answer. Yes, he replied, although of course it’s 9-dimensional space. (Well, obviously!)

“Is string theory believed because of its explanatory power, or is there – or could there be – experimental evidence?” Dr. Das said that there are ongoing experiments in gravitational effects at extremely short distances that could help confirm that matter/energy becomes 9-dimensional, which would help confirm the theory.

“So, strings actually vibrate, back and forth. Which means they’re in time,” I said, not meaning that they vibrate synchronously. “It seems that as we reduce space and matter in scale,” I said, “we get discontinuities: quanta are really really unlike Newtonian bodies. But do we get the same sort of discontinuity in time? At some small interval, does time become as weird as space does at a similar scale?” Dr. Das said that the time in which strings vibrate is so small that it does become unlike macro time. But then dessert was being served. Besides, I’d left my 60 extra IQ points add-on (I got it at eBay) in the pocket of my other pants.

There’s a really good chance that I got part or all of the above wrong.

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Want a puzzle?

I’m sitting here with a new PC. Well, the motherboard, CPU, RAM, and power supply are new. Everything else is from my old computer, including 3 hard drives. The 80MB drive is fine. The 60MB seems confused. The 120 is one day old.

My local computer store cloned the 60 onto the 120. I watched them do it. It all checked out.

They assembled the computer for me; I’ve done it too many times to want to do it ever again. The 120 is the master, the 60 is a slave, and the 80 is attached to an ATA card. I boot up from the Windows XP Pro CD. It seems to go fine until it actually begins installing on the 120. As it’s transferring setup files from the CD to the 120, I start getting error messages about not being able to transfer this or that file. And I have not been able to get past that point even though I have:

• Repartitioned and reformatted the 120 , via the Windows setup disk
• Installed from a copy of my original Windows CD (a copy that makes me liable to the severe penalties of the DMCA, by the way)
• Tried installing from the second of the two CD players in my machine

This makes no sense to me. It sounds like it’s a problem with the 120, but I’ve partitioned and formatted it without any problem.

It’s 2:15am. I’m going to sleep and will take the machine back tomorrow at 9. Anyone have any bright ideas? (“Get a Mac” just isn’t funny.)

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File this under Ego Surfing, but I just saw that my blog is at the top of the list of Daypop “Posts.” Daypop explains: “This Top Posts page is for following the most popular weblogging posts that are making the rounds in the blogging world.” But I don’t get it. The link isn’t to a post but to the top level of my blog, as is true for many of the items on the list. And the DayPop Top 40 now looks like a list of top blogs, not the current set of most linked-to blog entries, which it used to be. Does anyone understand this? My ego wants to know!

Update: As several of you noted, the DayPop home page notes that several of its services are down. That’s what I get for linking to its inner pages.

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I normally don’t write about my daily activities, but I’m so wrapped up in my little world of PC pain that it’s driven everything else out of my mind (except for the occasional negative book review). My computer crashed so hard yesterday morning that the crater on my desktop is still smoking.

The storefront where I’ve bought my last n computers really came through. No, they couldn’t salvage my PC, but they did manage to clone the drive with my backups on it. Tomorrow they’ll put together a new computer for me – a screamer, by the way – which I’ll then bring home and spend 30+ hours installing the software on. But this time, it’ll be with some confidence that it may last longer than 31 hours.

The store is ICG Computer at 358 Boylston Street (on Route 9 at Cyprus St.) in Brookline, MA. Ray helps you figure out what you need, gives you a great price, and remembers you the next time. His staff – two young hardware geeks – are ultra-technical and friendly. If you live around Boston, give Ray a visit the next time you need a computer. Phone: 617-738-5289.

And, no, I’m not bartering a blog mention for computer parts, you cynical bastards. It’s just such a relief to be dealing with a small store crammed with technical smarts after wandering down the double-wide aisles of the local computer megamart. Plus, Ray’s a good, honest hard-working guy…probably just like the people in your own local storefront computer store.

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Michael Swaine, editor-at-large of the estimable Dr. Dobb’s Journal, doesn’t like Small Pieces Loosely Joined. But he doesn’t like it for the right reasons: He disagrees with the ideas in it. The way he disagrees points to a deeper problem with the book. And with my life.

Apparently, I set his teeth on edge in Cluetrain by insisting, in Michael’s words, “that the fundamental unit of life is the group and that individual human beings only have meaning or worth as members.” In fact, Michael is so convinced that that’s wrong that he assumes that I must be doing some well-intentioned lying, in the good ol’ fashioned “The poets tell many a lie” sense:

Now, I suspect that he realizes that this is not the case: He regards it as a useful fiction, and offers it up as one of several Lies to Live By. Personally, I think that valuing bloodless abstractions above flesh-and-blood humans is both antihuman and dangerous…

Actually, I have to agree with myself on this one. I don’t think groups are fictions. They aren’t the same sort of thing as individuals, of course, but a view that says that only individuals are real — and that groups like families and communities are therefore fictions and lies — strikes me as overly strict in its understanding of what the meaning of “is” is. (Who would have thought that Bill Clinton would be remembered as a metaphysician?) Nor do I think groups are abstractions any more than the concept of a self is an abstraction. (Humans aren’t just “flesh and blood.”) But it doesn’t follow from the acknowledgement that groups are real and are formative of individuals that groups should have totalitarian power over individuals. It’s just not that binary. We’ve been working for millennia on getting the complex mix of rights and obligations right.

The same issue arises for Michael in Small Pieces. He says the book recommends abandoning ideas like individualism and that the world is independent of our awareness:

He is only suggesting that we jettison these truths and live by lies on the Web, as I understand him. He’s not talking about “real” life. The Web is a new world that we are creating, Weinberger says. Why not make up better rules than those we live by in the “real” one?

Michael then reasonably objects that we’re unlikely to be able to agree on the new values we’re creating in cyberspace. No arguing with that. As he says, “we can’t settle on rules for running a mailing list…”

But, the book doesn’t suggest that we jettison truths about reality and individuality, etc. Rather, it says that our traditional ideas about such things are alienating. For example: (1) The focus on reality as that which exists independent of us drives a wedge between reality and meaning. (2) This split is untrue to our everyday, real-world lived experience, which is of a world of meaning. (3) The dismissing as fictitious of all that is dependent on our awareness — i.e., the claim that groups are unreal because they aren’t flesh-and-blood — is itself a value judgment. So, in Small Pieces I’m not arguing that we adopt some “Lies to Live By.” I’m suggesting that a description of our life on the Web unveils some truths we already live by in the real world. Further, the Web appeals so deeply to so many of us because it offers a haven free of our real-world alienation from those truths.

Michael thinks I’m up to something different because my description of Web life — and of the real world — seems just so thoroughly wrong to him. He and I are left without a lot of recourse. At one point when discussing my claim that our rugged individualism makes us unhappy and lonely, Michael writes “I’d like to see the data on that, David.” Even if there are some statistics (e.g., Putnam’s Bowling Alone), the correlation of psychology and metaphysics is always going to be, um, a little shaky.

Small Pieces proceeds, to put it grandly, phenomenologically. Phenomenology tries to uncover experience. Of course, “uncover” is a loaded term since it implies there’s something there to be uncovered. So, perhaps I should say that phenomenology points at stuff and says “See?” If you don’t see, phenomenology doesn’t have a way of proving it to you. That’s a huge stinking problem. And, of course, it introduces the observer into the equation: could it be that you don’t see what I see because I’m who I am and you’re not? To which the phenomenologist replies: “Oh yeah? You wanna make something out of it??” After which the phenomenologist puts an ice pack on his broken nose and replies that the whole point is that the observer is always already in the equation and that experience is indeed and obviously conditioned by culture and language and that the idea that certainty is the only acceptable criterion for truth is itself a highly cultural/historical idea. But what it comes down to is: “See?”

I wish I had another way to proceed. I like the cool slap of a clean proof. But for the sort of issues I care about, I’m stuck with a way of thinking that is indeed more like writing fiction than like writing science, not because it’s less true than science but because it’s clarifying only if it clarifies. But that’s inevitable if you want to talk not about the world so much as about our world. And both are conversations worth having, IMO.

If you’re not a subscriber to Dr. Dobbs but want to read Michael’s review, it’ll cost you $5 for 72 hours of access, which strikes me as pretty pricey for a narrow time-slot.

Michael’s blog is lively, informative and opinionated. No surprise there.

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Guess whose hard drive crapped out again? Third time in a week, second time for this particular hard drive.

Guess who’s facing spending another 30+ hours reloading the same goddamn software and rebuilding his work environment?

Guess who’s wishing he’d named his new 180G drive “WESTERN DIGITAL SUCKS”?

Guess who’s ready to take a job pounding used bricks so long as it doesn’t involve any data entry?

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Our local AMC movie theater runs a clip before each movie reminding us that Silence is Golden. Of course, they also slap a “registered trademark” sign on the phrase thusly:

Silence Is Golden®

Oh sure. And I wrote the lyrics to the taunt “Nah nah nah nah nah nah”®. (Mary of Peter, Paul and Mary wrote the music).

Gimme a freakin’ break!

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