Is there any other endeavor besides Rock, where the pursuit of authenticity, leads us all the way back around to the horribly fake?

Way back in the day Eddie Van Halen, lead guitarist of Van Halen, was a musical Edison, constantly experimenting in an attempt to both attain his desired tone (the Brown Sound) and to get more tuning stability when using "dive-bomb" vibrato effects. To this end, Halen built his own "Frankenstrat" guitar, using spare parts that had been discarded by the manufacturer.

Halen did an ugly job of routing out the guitar's wooden body and installed a humbucking pickup in the bridge position, cut out the tone control leaving only the volume control functioning, and installed a prototype of the Floyd Rose tremolo. Over the years the guitar collected paint jobs, knocks and dings, cigarette burns, and reflective panels on the back (to reflect the stage lights back to the audience ... Lord, I do I wish I had gone to one of those shows).

The guitar looks ugly, but plays just the way Halen wanted it to play.

Now, if you wanted to, you could pick up a cheap guitar and then experiment with it — cut out the pickups, install new ones, bang it up, paint it, bang it up some more, paint it again. After a few years you would have your own "Frankenstrat" (or "Frankenpaul") that would represent your own sound, experiences, and years of living.

Or, you could fork over around $25,000 and get an Eddie Van Halen replica.

As you may have heard, a company has professionally, painstakingly re-created Halen's beat-up, ugly guitar in a 300 limited edition production run. Apparently so folks can hang them up on the wall instead of playing enough guitar to turn their own new guitar into a battle-scarred relic. I mean, really, you think someone is going to play a $25,000 guitar — risk breaking something that looks like its going to fall apart?

I don't mean to beat up on Halen, you can also get replica guitars that look identical to those used by Andy Summers, Rory Gallagher and others. And they are also a lot more expensive than a standard guitar.

But you can't purchase authenticity, not even for $25,000.

Now, I understand that most of these guitars are going to very rich Van Halen fans, and probably even the folks that made them didn't expect them to be played much. But looking past our $25,000 straw man, there are plenty of examples where we fetishize gear used by specific players (or gear designed to produce a sound specific to certain players). And that sort of thing worries me, a bit, for two reasons:

First off, heck people, Halen paid about $150 bucks for the body and neck of his guitar. Be a musician, not a guitar snob (I know ... this coming from a gadget freak).

Second, learning from people like Halen, Hendrix, Clapton, Vaughan and others is fine. But their talent isn't in some beat up guitar and their sound is their own. Even if you are going to be doing covers, please folks, make your gear and sound your own.

And don't be afraid of a few cigarette burns and dings along the way.

For most of my life, except for a brief stint in a V8 Plymouth Satellite station wagon as a teenager, I've driven kind of un-macho vehicles.

I went to college in a random little sedan (does anyone even remember that one?) and went from it to an old orange VW Bug — certainly not a fire breather, but a fun little car. When the Bug left me by the side of the road for the last time (at 3 in the morning, thanks for picking me up Jason!), Dad offered his 1987 pre-Tacoma Toyota pickup. The 1987 model is not the big-ass things that trucks have tended towards today, but instead a modest, low-sitting vehicle with a V4 engine.

While these Toyota's have an excellent reputation for reliability, this one had a hard life before I got it (used for a lot of start and stop delivery driving) and leaked just about everything that could leak — including transmission fluid. So after a few years I had gotten a little concerned about reliability and was looking at needing to have the engine taken apart to replace the seals and having the source of the transmission leak found if I were going to continue to use it as a daily driver.

I could do that, or get a new daily driver vehicle — but who really enjoys playing used car roulette?

As luck would have it, the company I work for was getting rid of a Ford Bronco they had purchased for our outdoors and hunting editor, who had since retired. I put my name in the hat to have a chance to purchase it for a really good price — and won the drawing!

Hop in OJ!

Okay, this isn't the exact model OJ used — he was in a 1993 — this is the 1996 full-sized Bronco, the last year Ford made this brand. It is also just about the nicest Bronco they made — I got a pretty sweet deal. They even threw in a set of new tires.

This thing is huge! It isn't as long as the Toyota, but it is probably the widest thing I've ever owned, and certainly the tallest passenger vehicle I've owned (not counting the National Guard's 915).

The Bronco has a 5.8L V8 engine (similar to what they were putting in the Mustang, but geared for torque instead of absolute speed), 4 wheel drive (with high strength manual locking hubs) and the usual gang of suspects like power windows and mirrors, window tint, cruise control, compass/temperature display in the rear mirror and all kinds of other stuff. It even has an after-market Sony CD changer, located right next to the driver (in a storage compartment between the driver and passenger). So far though, I've mostly used by iPod, connected through a cassette tape adaptor.

The vehicle is in good condition as well, the only thing really wrong with it is that the cruise control is a bit finicky and sometimes won't work the first few times you try to set it. Otherwise everything works, which is a very strange thing for me.

I'm used to cars with broken or missing AC and radios.

Okay, so the Bronco is a bit of an anachronism in these days of hybrid cars and fake off-road SUVs. Certainly fuel efficiency might be a bit of a problem, but right now I'm enjoying the Bronco way too much to worry. I'll probably do a bit more driving on the weekends, just because I know I have a reliable vehicle, but during the week it will be the same old back and forth to work.

Of course I will have to go off-road at least once, the Bronco deserves it.

Before I start my story, let me tell you how I'm a big Sun snob and I like Sun's attitude (a bit changed recently) of building workstations that are bare-bones general purpose computers - where the user is in charge and can add what software he wants and decide where and how he wants to install it. I also mostly approve of the "UNIX Way," which favors small user-configurable tools over monolithic shrink-wrap applications. I even prefer to work with the command line when I'm working with a Sun machine and am already nostolgic over the simple GUI of OpenWindows.

That said ... say you want to install a user application on a Macintosh - which is, at its heart, a UNIX machine. I'd expect to double-click on a compressed file I downloaded and have that file open up into a disk image. The application icon would be in the disk image. To install the application I'd drag the icon to some directory on my computer's hard-drive (but normally my user directory or the system applications directory). The application icon would actually be a folder that would contain all the application's support files, including libraries. Simple, quick, easy.

So, last week I wanted to install a Perl application on a Sun computer, an older computer true, but I'd rather use an 8 year-old Sun computer running Solaris than an 8 year-old PC running Windows.

Perl is an interpreted language - you have to have the Perl run-time installed to make a Perl application work. I don't count that as a drawback, however, since it means that Perl programs are their source files. This makes it easier to modify them and you don't have to maintain separate source and binary files. The Perl run-time is, of course, regular compiled executable.

I had a bit of trouble installing the program - I was, of course, missing a few libraries.

Perl is very extensible and practically anything you can write in Perl (or any other language) can be used as a library for another Perl application. There is a huge number of publicly available Perl libraries so it is fairly common that any Perl application you download will be wanting something you haven't installed yet.

To help you make sense of all this the Perl folks have this CPAN which is both a sort of Perl package manager program and a Internet-based repository of Perl libraries. You can have the CPAN module automatically pull down, compile and install libraries in case you are missing one (or two ... or twenty). The Perl CPAN package manager also helpfully points out any dependencies and will happily download all of those as well.

Can you guess where this is going?

First off, I had compiler errors. After a few Google searches I realized what I was doing wrong. When Perl finds a library that has to be compiled (normally some kind of C code) it tries to use the same compiler and compiler settings that were used to compile itself. Which makes sense.

But I was using the Sun-supplied Perl runtime, which was compiled with Sun's own C compiler -- which until very recently was an expensive software package ($1,000, I think). Like most people I had installed the free "gcc" compiler instead, and of course it used different compiler options from Sun's compiler.

Which meant I had to also install a separate copy of Perl that had been compiled with gcc. I had already done that, back when I first started using Perl, I just had forgotten that I needed to specify the use of the local copy.

Some people, for maximum safety, will first download a binary install of gcc, use that to compile gcc from source, then use the locally compiled gcc to compile Perl from source. Sun meanwhile makes a big deal about the binary compatibility of their SPARC platform, but ... oh well.

Anyway, I'm running the local Perl's CPAN module to track down the missing libraries (four total) for the package I want to install and I notice that CPAN is griping about missing some libraries itself and noting that it should be updated. Thinking perhaps I'll avoid any additional install problems I tell CPAN to go ahead and update itself.

It lets me know its going to update itself in place and gives me a command to issue once it is done so that CPAN can reload itself without interrupting my session ... nifty.

CPAN then starts working through it's little list of things it wants and all of the dependencies involved. It handles dependencies pretty well, adding them to a list, downloading them and installing them. A very happy little package manager. After a while of sitting there waiting for it to finish I notice -- to my horror -- that it had decided to update the Perl runtime and all of the support files. I was at 5.0 and apparently Perl wanted to be at 5.8.8.

I didn't even know it would do that, CPAN was just a library manager right?

So just about a whole day is blown with the machine sucking down the source code for the new Perl and spending hours at 100% CPU compiling the thing. Meanwhile CPAN is getting a little confused about what it had started to do in the first place, as it is upgrading both Perl and itself - in place, without ending my CPAN session (a little command line Socratic dialog). It also tests everything as it installs things, which causes problems because, of course, the test libraries are out of date or missing (but at least CPAN can spot all the dependencies for those libraries).

More downloads, more compiles that end in failure, more libraries added to the dependency list.

Things look like they are slowing down, but CPAN isn't done yet. It really, really wants to install some cryptographic tools, so I (grudgingly) say yes. After all, it had been complaining with almost every download that it couldn't verify the MD5 checksums of the libraries it was downloading. And, as it does with everything else, it tests the crypto code ... by running some big prime numbers or something ... on this 8 year old computer. So another day or so at 100% CPU.

By the time it was all over I'd almost forgotten why I started the process in the first place.

And the application I wanted to install? It makes some wrong assumptions about the environment it is installed in, trying to use command line arguments to external programs -- including talking directly to sendmail (with a hard-wired and wrong path to the application) instead of using the SMTP protocol (which Perl has libraries for).

(RouseWorld Labs) — Back in college I had a roommate who surfed. He threw his board and wetsuit into his Civic and went to the beach whenever conditions were the least bit favorable. There was a certain number of people at UNCW who bought into the surfing lifestyle (they had nice boards, board carriers on their cars, t-shirts, posters, etc.) who never seemed to do much surfing. My roommate called these guys (and they were nearly always guys) "Surf Men."

Poseurs.

Generally, you don't want to be a scenester, you want to be the real thing. Not just because you look like a tool, but you are wasting good gear and making the companies who build the gear turn into fashion and toy companies.

For example, when I decided not to maintain a dark room anymore I sold my Hasselblad. If you aren't doing photography professionally or artistically, there is no reason to let one of these cameras just lying around.

On the other hand, stop taking yourself so damn seriously.

A while back I was roaming around Best Buy, marveling at all the plasma TVs and DVDs and whatnot. I said to myself that I could probably run into the last thing I needed right now — then I turned the corner and there was an electric guitar.

Wow — exactly what I didn't need to buy! I love this country!

I didn't get the thing right then, I had already spent too much for a boxed set of Anime DVDs, but I kept thinking about it.

This weekend I went back and noticed that the guitar seemed kind of lonely. I asked the helpful sales chick if they had any more in stock and she said this was the very last one.

Well, then I had to have it.

As she was getting the guitar ready I noticed something kind of odd — it was a kit. You got the guitar (A Washburn HOB-E), a little 8 watt amp, a few picks, a bag to put it in and a CD to teach your dumb ass how to play and a display stand.

Then I realized, this was the guitar player poseur kit!

I mean, realistically, someone who is really interested in guitars is probably not going to buy one in Best Buy and is probably going to want to pick out his own amp and other gear. I still bought the thing. I figure as long as I don't take myself too seriously I can stand to be a Guitar Man for a while.

Besides a lot of those guitar players are really thin, maybe I will lose some weight...

Anyway, here is the guitar:

Pretty cool, eh?

For a while now I've been a little unhappy with my cell phone, an older Sony Ericsson T68i. Through the years both the antenna and sound had gotten to were I couldn't really trust the thing to pick up calls. Initially, however, I had been really pleased. The T68i was one of the first phones that worked with Apple's iSync software, which was the software package that has most satisfied my desire for a way to keep multiple address books synchronized.

So when I went shopping for a new phone I wanted most of all compatibility with iSync (which means Bluetooth) and secondly decent reception. I wasn't really looking for a camera phone, a PDA substitute, or a way to play games.

I first looked at the Motorola Razr V3, which is a flip-phone (which I actually prefer) and very, very cool looking. It is also really, really expensive and doesn't fully support iSync (you can't iSync over Bluetooth, you have to use a cable and some people have reported problems even then). Nice wide screen though, and very posh looking.

Well, I had been pretty happy with Sony Ericsson before, so I went around to look at what my Cingular store had to offer from that company.

The store didn't have a P901i — but I did say I wasn't looking for a PDA replacement, right? The T637 looked to be what I was looking for. It had Bluetooth, better reception than the T68i (which was displaying "No Access" in the cell phone store, poor thing) and better looks than the T68i (which had this baby blue color and feminine curves).

So I got it:

So far I'm pretty pleased, both with the phone and with Cingular's attitude towards Bluetooth. Some carriers have been turning off Bluetooth functionality, apparently in an attempt to get people to use paid services instead of using Bluetooth to send and receive pictures (or ring-tones, etc.) between your phone and your computer.

But with Cingular and the T637 I can browse the phone from my computer with ease (works better than the T68i) and drag pictures, ring-tones and theme files between my computer and the phone. Nice.

As with many modern cell phones, the thing is feature packed to the gills.

The phone accepts regular midi files as polyphonic ring tones, has a ring tone editor with built-in midi loops, a calendar, to-do list, addressbook, stopwatch, calculator, can talk to AIM, ICQ and Cingular's own IM networks through a Java application and has some mini old style arcade games.

Of course there is also cHTML and WAP, and there are menus setup so you can go off and buy new ringtones and games. I don't have WAP on my service plan, so I can't comment on those features.

The UI is a nice evolutionary step up from the T68i menus. I didn't have to re-learn how to get around, but there are some nice touches like a back button, better on-screen labeling of 'soft' buttons and a clearly labled 'back' button. Certainly the addressbook is easier to navigate. There is also better (maybe just more visible) help screens for many functions. Certainly the larger screen with more vivid colors helps.

As a phone it seems to do a good job. Calls so far have been clear and the reception has been good.

Right now the only weak point is the camera. I like the design of the camera, there is a shutter release button on the side of the camera so you can hold it like a regular camera — there is even a little mirror, for when you are holding it at arm's length to take a picture of you and a friend. But the picture quality isn't so good. All of the outdoors pictures I've taken so far show very harsh JPEG encoding artifacts, poor colors and a soft image — especially in the corners. But again, I didn't buy this as a digital camera, so I'm not too upset.

Here is an example:

But if you cut the picture down by about 50%, it should be usable on a webpage.

(RouseWorld Labs) — It has been a long time since I've worn a watch.

The last watch I can remember actually wearing is a little "Stunt" Swiss quartz wristwatch that was a graduation or Christmas gift in 1986. I think it lasted until the early 90s. Before that I remember a mechanical watch I managed to ruin as a child, a few digital watches, and there is a quartz Lorus watch in my junk bin that I might have gotten after the Stunt died.

Since that time I often carry around three electronic devices (cell phone, Palm and iPod) — all of which tell the time. It seems silly to wear a watch, when most cell phones sync with a reliable time signal and other electronic devices are just as capable of keeping accurate time as any kind of wristwatch.

Even still, I do like mechanical things.

Until I got my first digital camera — and left the darkroom for good — all of my cameras were essentially mechanical, from a Nikon FM2 to a view camera. I even bought an old Bolex 8mm camera (sadly not one of the 16mm cameras).

Levers and gears, shiny bits of metal (or metal with black enamel) alongside leather, can make for both compelling design and reliable equipment. Analog watches, in particular the rare breeds of mechanical watches, are the modern standard bearers of old-style mechanical design — particularly now that almost all professional cameras are either mostly electronic or fully digital.

And yet, the precision and reliability of modern microprocessor electronics is amazing. The manufacturing craft needed to create a 178 million transistor microprocessor seems worlds beyond even well executed guilloché engraving. And although the tiny gears of a watch can be works of art, have you ever seen the mechanism of a modern hard drive?

A reasonable person would just be happy with the cell phone's clock.

I can't remember exactly when and why I started to get interested in mechanical watches. Perhaps the first spark happened while reading about William Gibson collecting watches through eBay. And perhaps he had the best explanation of why these atavistic devices were so attractive:

But mechanical watches partake of what my friend John Clute calls the Tamagotchi Gesture. They're pointless in a peculiarly needful way; they're comforting precisely because they require tending.

So I was interested, but not interested enough. I'm not one who is into jewelry and watches are pretty much jewelry, no matter how functional they are.

A few years later I happened across the Time Zone website, a gathering place for watch enthusiasts and collectors. Aside from the forums there are a number of watch reviews and technical articles that serve as a good introduction to mechanical wristwatches, from history to current manufacturers. Learning about watches, of course, made me even more interested in owning one.

Now the problem was expense.

As a rather extreme example, you can spend $8,000 for a Breguet Aeronavale. This would be a sports watch — not something in gold or platinum but stainless steel. A nicer dress watch from Breguet might cost $34,000. Well, I'm not looking for a watch from a company that has been making them since the 18th century, but even the less exotic mechanical watches can be $1,000 to $2,000 and up.

After some looking around I discovered a company called Glycine that made some almost affordable watches. But even at the time I was looking the they were in the $400 to $500 price range, a bit more than I wanted to pay for a watch.

I eventually discovered the Russian watch company Volmax through (if I'm remembering correctly) a Time Zone article. The company is interesting because it makes its own mechanical movements (in two lines, "Poljot" and "Molnija") and because they are relatively inexpensive.

After looking around, I decided what I really wanted was one of the Molnija 3603s in a Buran case. These watches have clean lines, but interesting faces. A little dressy, perhaps, but they did have a bunch of Cyrillic writing which seemed fun. I talked to the folks at Russia2all and for about $120 they sent me one.

I was pleased with the watch, although the dark dial made reading the hands a little difficult. Then, unfortunately, the mechanism stopped. The folks at Russia2all were really nice about it and let me choose another watch. I choose a watch that doesn't have any Cyrillic on it at all, in fact it is just marked "Classic" and has a stylized knot as a logo. The mechanism is an older Molnija 3602. But it does have a white face, which seems more readable to me.

Here is it is:

I don't know if you can tell from the picture, but the watch face is very Breguet-ish, although the hands don't have a hollow at the ends. The face is engraved (or stamped) in a machine-turned pattern, except for the seconds dial and where the roman numbers are printed. Nice, but hopefully not too blingy.

The design of the face aside, the watch is large and loud. With a movement originally designed for pocket-watches it measures 45mm across and is 12mm thick. Depending on my surroundings the ticking can be audible with the thing several feet from my ear. It isn't too heavy, but does have a substantial feel to it.

What makes it fun is the "Classic" mark. I can't find notice of this brand anywhere, so it could be a grey-market import.

As with many mechanical watches these days, the watch has a display back — a little glass window that allows you to see the watch mechanism in action. The mechanism's finish isn't as nice as more expensive watches (that often don't have the display back) but it does have the Côte de Genève polishing patterns on the big metal pieces, blued screws and nicely colored jewels. Some beveling was done, but it isn't really fancy.

Of course about the only thing that moves enough that you can see it is the balance wheel, which is the "heart beat" of the clock and the escapement, which regulates that heart beat. In the picture the balance wheel is off-center gold-colored wheel to the right side of the watch. The picture was taken at about 1/4 second exposure, so the wheel is a bit blurred.

I've worn it for a few days now, and so far I've been very happy with it. Again, it seems pointless to have one, but it is pleasantly pointless.

So what is next? I'd kind of like to get a HMT watch from India. Those seem like another under-appreciated non-european brand.

(RouseWorld Labs) — I've been a fan of Austin Myer's flight simulator X-Plane for some time now, and I've recently downloaded his Space Combat spaceflight simulator. Like it's cousin X-Plane, Space Combat has ruthlessly realistic physics. It's interesting, challenging and sometimes very frustrating. I hope Myer's continues to work on it.

Did you watch the movie Apollo 13? Remember the scene where they had to keep the earth in alignment while firing the thrusters? Did you wonder if it could really be that hard to keep a spacecraft pointed straight?

Yes, it can be really difficult.

One thing you learn quickly is that most movies (besides, perhaps, Apollo 13) have gotten spaceflight completely wrong. They make space craft fly like planes. We are used to planes flying in an atmosphere, where there are two gross generalizations about flight:

• Your nose is pointing in the direction of travel, to change the direction of travel you point the nose in another direction.
• If the engine is running fast you will speed up, if it is running slow you will slow down, if it quits you fall.

In most movies that is how spacecraft fly, they always have their engines burning and they change directions by whipping the nose around.

In real life — and in Space Combat — that isn't the way things work.

First off, in free space every second an engine is running you are accelerating. Slow the engine down, you just accelerate more slowly. Turn the engine off and all you do is keep that speed.

Secondly, the orientation of the space craft doesn't have to have anything to do with direction of travel. Get going about 3,600 Km/h and then whip the nose around and it takes a long time to get moving in the new direction, and you keep getting faster as the burn continues. Perfectly fine if you are swinging around for Jupiter, but it doesn't give you a nice tight turn.

And, of course, cutting the engine off doesn't slow you down. You either have to use your (weaker) front thrusters to slow down, or spin whole spacecraft around break with the main engines.

So to get from one point to the other you either have to go slow enough to be able to break with the thrusters or go flat out for half the trip and then spin around and spend the last half of the trip slowing down.

For your own personal Apollo 13 moment, try to change direction with the computer controlled artificial stability turned off (which is the default). Here every twitch of the mouse in one direction has to be counteracted eventually with a twitch in the opposite direction — and perfectly balanced. Otherwise you end up with a spin that will continue forever. Just pulling the stick to the middle doesn't stop the yaw, pitch and roll action.

Personally, I found it impossible to control the space craft without a rational set of parameters for the artificial stability. Unfortunately, you have to set those parameters yourself, without too much help from the simulator.

So what do you get to do in the simulator?

Although the program is called "Space Combat," there is only one combat space craft in the simulation. There are four ships available (although there is an editor that allows you to build more, if you are up to it). The Agamemnon, a large, long ship with "nuclear water rocket" engines; the Endeavour another large ship with rotating "bio domes" with plant life inside, it has an "Orion" engine — nuclear bombs push it forward; the Goliath a very big, long ship with multiple sets of bio domes and multiple Orion engines; and the Hornet, the smallest, fastest accelerating craft and the only one with weapons, it has magnetoplasma engines.

You can dodge asteroids, chase comets, orbit the earth and slalom through red rectangles on random courses that test your ability to control the space craft. There is some limited combat in the game, complete with ship damage — but there doesn't seem to be any collision detection between your ship and the asteroids and other ships.

Considering this is a free program and a work in progress, I think Meyer has done a great job.

Here are a few suggestions for making things better:

• Have good artificial stability setup to being with. The player shouldn't have to fight attitude jets unless the artificial stabalizer has failed.
• Make rolls a keyboard thing, leaving the mouse/joystick for pitch and yaw. Currently it is difficult to turn left or right, you have to have to roll around and then turn up or down. Obviously peddles would be a great way to control roll.
• Collision detection. It would be difficult I'm sure but the lack of collisions hurts the realism — particularly when you are dodging asteroids.
• There are green dots that flow past to show your direction of movement, I found them a little distracting. They should be optional, or replaced with a vector arrow instrument display.
• Speaking of instrument displays, there really need to be more. We need a way to orient ourselves between our velocity vector and attitude, and the existing HUD-based vector block isn't always visible. It would also be nice to have some kind of 3D radar display, so we can get a better picture of what's around us.
• A nice feature for the HUD would be a range cursor — a mode that would allow you to mouse over an asteroid or another ship and get the range and closing velocity. What would be even nicer would be something like the fixed multiple eyedroppers in Photoshop, where we could tag several objects and have running ranges for each.
• Last but not least, it would be great to have a full planetary system. It would be fun to take one of those big ships on a cruise to Mars. You might need a way to speed up game time, though, so it wouldn't take 36 real-time months. I understand we might need some help plotting the course, but it would be interesting to see what 22nd century instrument flight controls would look like.

Thanks, Meyer and again I hope you keep working on this interesting simulator.

(RouseWorld Labs) — Must a task be physically difficult or time consuming to be considered a craft? The question comes from people who consider computers an enemy of craft, by making creative tasks too easy.

A recent entry in MetaFilter discussed typewriters and cited Bill Meissner and Harlan Ellison on why they preferred typewriters to word processor computer programs.

Meissner, for the most part, gave practical and emotional points on the positives of using typewriters, while Ellison was firm about the negatives of using computers:

Art should always be tough. Art should demand something of you. Art should involve foot-pounds of energy being expended. It's not supposed to be easier, and those who want it easier should not be artists.

I really don't want to get into a "what is art?" argument. Hopefully I'm not twisting Ellison's words too much by thinking "craft" when I see "art."

To me the arguments that Meissner and Ellison present are, at best, naive and at worst deliberately and most unhelpfully elitist. When you are writing something that will be published (especially published commercially) much more is involved than just putting words on a sheet of paper.

To begin with, the hard part is always inside your head. Aside from experimental works like Naked Lunch, everything written first exists as thoughts in someone's mind. Getting those thoughts together in a coherent and interesting form — to be able understand what you want to say and how you want to say it — is much more difficult that pressing typewriter keys.

Certainly I've spent more time thinking about this essay than writing it, and I'm not even trying to get it published commercially.

Secondly, while tools can make you either more efficient or more lazy, it is the fault of the user for choosing laziness over efficiency — not the tool. It isn't clear why Ellison would want to draw a line at the mechanical typewriter. It is easy to reduce his argument to absurdity. If a mechanical typewriter is better because it makes the act of writing more difficult, then certainly writing using stone cutting tools and marble should be even better.

Third, writing doesn't equal publishing. If you want something published it will be typed into a computer, and removing yourself from that process limits your control over your creation and/or creates a number of inefficiencies.

For an example of these inefficiencies, consider newspapers during the age of the typewriter — when newspapers were the dominate form of mass communication and the fastest form of print publication:

The reporter typed on a ubiquitous Underwood Number 5. He had to estimate how long the story would be (remembering that the newspaper will be set in a proportional font, while the typewriter produces monospaced text). Corrections and revisions were messy, he either yanked the page and started over, spaced down a few lines and started over (marking through the lines or paragraphs he didn't want) or physically cut and pasted. Yes, everyone had a pot of glue and scissors. He then passed the story to an editor.

The editor would then mark up the story for corrections, using pencil for easy corrections or a typewriter and scissors and glue for heavier editing. The editors also had to closely estimate the space needed for the headline.

The story would then be sent to a "copyboy" who would retype the whole story and send it to the reporter, who would send it back to the editor.

Once the story had finished the write-edit cycle it would be sent to a typesetter who would, of course, retype the story. The output this time would be lines of metal type (usually lead). A small proof press would be used to print out each story and the stories (plus the typewritten pages) would be sent to proofers — who would hopefully catch any errors that had worked their way into the stories.

But that wasn't the end. All those lines of lead type from the stories had to be blocked onto page forms on large tables, where lines of type could be accidentally scrambled or reversed. So more proofers (who had to be able to read left-to-right reversed type) checked things again.

Needless to say, computers have completely transformed the publishing industry. Newspapers threw out the old process for computers as soon as it was practical. And they keep upgrading, not to throw money away, but to see gains in both quality and efficiency.

Of course the Ellison's of the world are insulated from processes like these, but someone has to type his work into a computer and then re-type it when he makes corrections. But his work finally leaves his hands modern computerized publishing takes over, so not too much time is wasted.

Finally, a message from my father, a writer and newspaper editor who's career spans both the age of typewriters and the age of computers :

Writing isn't typing down the first thing that comes to mind, writing is re-writing.

Maybe a genius like Ellison can create the work wholely in his mind, and just act as a typist when he puts the words on paper, but that still doesn't make a typewriter a better tool than a computer.

To me his attitude towards computers isn't about quality of craft, it is about making a fetish out of a particular tool — and that is a sign of amateurism. A professional approaches his tools dispassionately and makes it his business to understand what happens to his work after he done with it.

To the professional it is the final product that really matters, not what you did to get there.

(Durham) — The lads had sent the word out -- one of the last of the hard-core bachelors was getting hitched, and "Frodie" wanted him sent out Durham style. The plan was to get a couple of shorties over and let them bump and grind a little bit -- on themselves and the "lucky" bachelor.

Well that's cool, and I hadn't been up to see the lads in a while, much less been up to tha' Durham, so I made plans to go. Then the day before the party, I get a call from Frodie.

Let me tell you a little bit about Frodie. He's the guy who had to tell everyone a few years back that a stripper had canceled because she was grounded. So a call from him the day before the party wasn't a good omen. Had the girls been arrested? Frodie said they had canceled, but that he would try to find a backup team. I told him it was all good and it would be fine if it was just the fellas hanging out over a few (?) beers.

Not that I have anything against half-naked women, mind you.

In any event, a new team was found -- three girls, two hours, $300. Little did I know, but "HNN" was the point man for the search. I'm not saying the man is a straight out of Durham wigga thug -- I don't mean to slander him, he's one of the lads and all. But would his judgement match up with the Bachelor's taste in hootchie?

I'd say, "we were soon to find out," but the girls were nearly an hour late -- pulling up with this youngish pimp (I mean manager), who was trying to be all nice-guy but firm. We'll call him "Wally."

And the women themselves -- they were truly the Three Crack Ho's of the Apocalypse. We had "Avarice" -- little tiny thing who kept her eye on the money; "Ultra Slim Fast" -- a very narrow chick, who happened to have the misfortune of being knife thin and saggy-boobed; and "Vice" -- a very non-narrow chick with some home-made looking tatoos. These were not their real stage names, of course.

But we didn't raise a fuss, we've all been around dangerous looking women before and knew we could all have a good time -- as long as everybody had a good attitude. So we crowded into the living room and waited for the ladies to get dressed.

The ladies started out with some (mostly) strip-joint typical bump and grind, and the lads started handing out some singles, but most of us were waiting for the action to heat up a bit. After two songs the dancers went to the back room, to change -- or so we thought.

Wally, who had gone in to check on his girls, comes back out and starts a "VIP Dance" sales pitch -- at $100 bucks a pop.

Well, Wally -- it turns out that we really aren't into suckie-farkie action, just entertainment, so we all turned him down. Although we did start raising money for "Thin Man" -- but that was a joke.

Wally then, kinda sad/nervous, says the girls are complaining about the tips and that they are double-booked for another party. In Henderson, of all places.

We look at each other like WTF, is this Delta Airlines or something? We let him know that we do have money and intend to spend it, but figured things were just warming up.

At that point the girls walk out in street clothes and their bags, letting us know that the tips were too low and they were leaving. Most of us were either too stunned to do an anything, or figuring that they didn't want to be in the next episode of COPS.

Avarice says "Have a nice life Mr. Bachelor" as she scoots out the door. And The girls sped off in a Geo Metro.

Wally and HNN followed them out, but they were not able to stop them, and luckily HNN wasn't packing.

Yes folks, all in all -- $300 for about 8 minutes.

Wally came back in and started poor mouthing that the girls had taken all the money, that he hadn't known them that well and now he had barely enough gas to get back home. It was the girls, he told our group of sullen lads, that had ripped everybody off.

"I've got to get out of this business," he said.

Okay, Wally, whatever you say. But HNN knew the guy and said he was "90% certain" Wally was telling the truth.

So what really happened?

• Wally told the truth -- In this case Wally has made a mistake that is white-boy dumb. You gave women you didn't know all the money up front? You don't try to follow them? I don't expect violence -- but heck, no strong language? In this version of the events, Wally is certainly no playa.
• Conspiracy Theory -- The three girls and Wally could have colluded to rip us off. In that case Wally really does have a brass set, for risking coming back and talking to us when he could have "chased" the girls and gotten away quickly.
• Wally rips off the girls -- Perhaps more likely, Wally ripped the girls off. He could have told them that the work was "tips only," but that we knew that and would tip well. Then he looses control of the situation when the girls get angry about the low tips. The VIP pitch would then be him trying to settle things back down, but the girls had already decided to split. What seems to break this scenario is that HNN knows Wally, it would seem risky to rip off someone who can find you again afterwards.

Oh well, certainly a lesson to remember...

Don't hire hookers when all you want are dancers.

(RouseWorld Labs) — They (and you know how they can be) are trying to make a microchip that would cost (hopefully) a nickle or less that could be put on every packaged good sold in America. The chips would start signaling when placed near a special transmitter and would contain a code that could, theoretically, uniquely identify every can of peas sold in America. How cool is that? First off, goodbye shoplifting. You could stuff crap all down you pants and in your coat and still be billed for every can of tuna you walk out of the store with. But there's lots more that could be done with those chips.

Imagine a smart guy making arrangements with a lot of cities and putting those transmitters in every recycling bin and trash roll-out. The city gets to know who's actually recycling what they should and the companies get to know stuff like how long do people hold on to Mac-and-Cheese before they actually use it. Well, those kinds of statistics and maybe a few other details.

Let's say that you live in Colorado and every year in late February or early March you buy a bunch of groceries. But these groceries aren't thrown away in Denver, they are thrown away in California — at, they find, your cousin's house. Checking with your cousin's records they find that you guys watch a lot of basketball during that time. And they know you own a crappy old Passat and you don't fly to California. Hmmm...

So next year in early February, not only do you get coupons for stuff that would be a bit of an upgrade over the crap you buy every year to go to your cousin's, but you get deals on car rentals, airline tickets and maybe even fear of flying counseling (since really you can afford to fly). Your cousin, meanwhile, gets talked into getting that new wide screen and maybe some patio furniture.

The question, of course, is this cool or just really creepy?

(RouseWorld Labs) — I'm the sometimes proud owner of three electronic gadgets — a Motorola StarTac, an Apple PowerBook and a Palm handheld. All three have directory stores, little built-in databases of information. The StarTac's directory keeps names and phone numbers, the Palm's stores that and street/email/web addresses, the PowerBook's stores all that and little photos of everyone (should you want that). Amazingly, the format of the stored information is nearly the same in each device — they all can understand a variant of LDIF/vCard.

Naturally, none of these directories talk to the other.

What I want is the ability to automatically syncronize data across all my gadgets. What I get is a half-day spent running through lists on each directory making sure that the information on each device is correct.

Sure, the Palm Desktop software for the Macintosh is a nice PIM, but it isn't the OS's standard directory — that job belongs to the Address Book application, and every well behaving OS X application that needs a local directory service should use it. A positive example is Smith Micro's FAXstf ™ X, this third-party faxing application uses the Address Book instead of creating its own fax number directory.

In Palm's defence, they do try. The new Palm Desktop can export information in the LDIF/vCard format. Sadly, the format is a little different than what Address Book expects. The result is that I can drag items from Address Book to Palm Desktop, but not the other way round.

But even if the export/import formats were different you would still expect to be able to use the Macintosh standard for automating transactions between applications — AppleScript. It shouldn't take a too complicated script to sync the two applications, especially if Address Book time-stamps changes to entries. Sadly, the Address Book isn't scriptable, a lapse I hope Apple will fix Real Soon Now.

Last but not least is the StarTac. Editing its directory is a real pain, given the small screen and limited keyboard — this is a gadget that cries out to be synced with something with a real user interface, like the PowerBook. The StarTac is capable of syncing with another device, but Motorola has made it very difficult to create software to make the syncing happen. I know of just one effort to build an application that can talk to the StarTac, and it hasn't seen any development since 2000.

All I ask is that our electronic gadgets learn to cooperate better and to give us a little more choice. I should be able to choose my central store of directory information (and calendar information!) and have all my devices that need a directory store use what I have chosen.

Is it really so much to ask?

(RouseWorld Labs) — There have been many changes to the RouseWorld LAN since I last babbled about it, so I decided to waste some time talking about "The Kids". I've got sort of an antique computer collection. Sadly antique computers are about as valuable as antique paper plates — so it makes me a bit of a freak, not a savvy investor.

The keystone of the main LAN (10/100 BaseT) is valis, my Sun Microsystems ss1000 which is the main house file and print server, now that albemuth is down. It's a big, noisy box and currently the only multi-CPU machine. In the other corner of the "office" is harp, a little Sun IPX that is the house web server and dns server. Sitting on my desk is a Sun ss10, bishop, my main Sun desktop — bless its heart. The Sun's use Texas Instruments RISC CPUs.

Sharing space with bishop is a Power Macintosh 6100, aka Power Pizza. It mainly sits there running SETI@home very slowly. In my bedroom (stop looking at me like that, I need to put it somewhere) is a Macintosh Quadra 950, aka Grievous Elder. It also runs SETI and has a analog video capture board, should I ever need one (hey, I got a good deal on it).

On the wireless LAN, naturally, is a Macintosh PowerBook G3, RouseBook purchased just days before the release of the G4 PowerBooks — not that I'm bitter. This is my main machine, since I've sold the iMac to my Mom, who need something a little more modern that the 6100 she was using.

On the LocalTalk network segment are the "living room" Macs, which mainly sit around playing Bolo.

The one Power Macintosh in the LocalTalk group, a PM 6500 known as EggHead, also keeps my financial records (such as they are). All of the other machines use the 68k architecture. The youngest of these machines is a Performa 636CD, a new addition that hasn't been named yet. Then comes a PowerBook 190, or BabyBook, an older, smaller laptop. The oldest member of the LocalTalk group is an Macintosh SE-30, called Owl — it is one of the "Classic" all-in-one Macs.

I've also got one of the very first Macintoshes, the Macintosh 128K, with a 8 MHz CPU and, yes, 128K of RAM. I don't use it much because it can't be connected to any of the networks.

Is that all of the computers? Well, what do you count as a computer?

(Goldsboro) — Different people have different ways of trying to learn computer software. Some people attempt to break down every task into a set of fixed steps and then memorize the steps. The problem is that these procedures are fragile and inflexible — and so are useless if something changes. My philosophy is, well, different.

Here I present a fragment of a conversation (more or less verbatim) from a few days ago:

Student: I don't think I'll ever be able to remember all of the steps of everything I'm supposed to do here.
Me: I advise against keeping such lists of procedures. It is enough to know what is possible, then you will know how to accomplish all things.
Student: Now ... that's impossible.
Me: Yes.

At the risk of taking things to far I think that there are many parallels between learning a sufficiently complex computer application (say Adobe Photoshop, Quark's QuarkXPress or Microsoft's trinity — MS Office) and undertaking a religious understanding. Just as no one person can encompass the complexity of these programs, no one person can encompass the mystery of God (or what have you).

Certainly there is functionality in Photoshop that I either reject or can't find the time to study, much in the same way that an American Catholic might reject some teachings of Rome while allowing other teachings to be learnt by others. But to be a truly proficient user of Photoshop or religion, one must go beyond simple catechisms and plunge oneself into study.

And even if it is impossible to know everything, coming to a broad understanding of how a computer program (or Operating System) works (or, perhaps more importantly, wants to work) may mean the difference between earthly peace or torment.

Sadly, QuarkXPress cannot help with the afterlife.

(Bob Barker's House) — I've got a really horrible idea for a game show, or rather an idea for a really horrible game show. We'll call it Pennies from Heaven.

The game is simple enough, we place someone in a round room about 15 high and 10 feet in diameter with a half-gallon scoop. Spaced equally along the wall and about four feet off the ground are three covered chutes. The person is locked in. Pennies will be dropped from a grate on the ceiling — for 24 hours — enough pennies to completely fill the room up to the grate in the ceiling by the end of 24 hours. Do you see where I'm going with this? Should I make the fill time shorter?

The object for the person inside, of course, will be to put the pennies in the scoop and then into one of the chutes. The person will win the pennies that he or she scoops out of the room and keeping ahead of the "penny rain" will keep the person from getting crushed under the pennies. Naturally if the penny mound gets higher than four feet it will cover the chutes, preventing the person from dumping any more pennies. The game then would shift to seeing if the person can stay above the penny mound.

Some interesting points to consider is how many pennies could someone reasonably scoop up in 24 hours and how many pennies would it take to fill a 15X10 foot cylinder. The host might remark wryly that the current contestant is actually making less money per hour than he or she makes at work.

For commercials promoting the show the network could go out on the streets, drop a penny and then ask folks, "Would you pick up that penny?"

How about 500,000 of them?

(Easy Street) — Everyone has an idea of what they would do if they won a large lottery. Mine is no more silly than most I guess. First thing I would do is zoom off around the world in what would start as mostly reasonable sight-seeing. For that reason I would keep a diary. Slowly, however, my travels would turn into an insane spiral of self-destructive partying and ego tripping. But I would keep the diary, through the worst of it — right up to the moment that the fading spark inside me would illuminate the horrible error of my ways.

About the time my corpse body washes up on some pristine private beach, a traveling writer happens upon the wreckage of my diary. Horrified, shaken and moved by the spectacular tale of my implosion under the weight of sudden wealth he edits the diary and releases it under the title: The USA on a $1,000 dollars a Day: The True Diary of an American Lottery Winner. The book quickly becomes an international success.

People read what is soon called The American Diary and are able to see their own self-destructive paths in my own and are able to pull themselves away and rebuild their lives. Thousands and then millions find in the book cathartic release, a moral lesson and a horrible ordeal of the human spirit. Small poor school districts, able only to afford one book for each child each year will choose The American Diary. The citizens of other countries will read the book and marvel at the resilience of the American people and the incredible pressures that they face.

And hundreds of years later, as historians reflect on a world that took the first hesitant steps towards peace, I will be forgotten — but The American Diary will be remembered as the necessary catalyst.

That's all I want.