20 Minutes to Midnight

Sat, 15 Feb 2003 04:41:27 GMT

Pattern Recognition William Gibson invented cyberpunk with his early work: "Burning Chrome" and "Neuromancer." Dark, fevered, rich in milieu, these works defined the concept of cyberspace and certainly inspired and enthalled many of today's geeks, nerds, and software wizards. His more recent works, though, haven't been as compelling for me. I've stopped worrying about what's cool. It simply couldn't buy into the worlds he was creating. "Pattern Recognition" is about OUR world, the happening world as John Brunner called it in "Stand on Zanzibar". It's protagonist is Cayce Pollard, a talent in the design world with a gift for knowing what logos work and which ones will fail. It's a talent bought at a price - she has aversions to some corporate logos so strong that she needs a mantra to hold her visceral response at bay. Cayce arrives in London to vet a new logo for an athletic shoe business - a big time and risky proposition for any company and any agency. She stays at a friend's flat and on the very first page Gibson begins one of the motifs that will echo through the novel: "She know, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien's theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hunderds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can't move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage." There is no ice here, no plugged in cyber-deck. Just a woman jet lagged now, and later, we find, culture lagged as her life, transected by 9/11 in a way she can hardly recognize, is also lagging behind her straining to catch up. Cayce has a passion. She has been caught up by segments of what appears to be a film delivered to the net in anonymous places, perhaps structured perhaps not. Groups of people come together to pool their knowledge about these at such places as the Fetish:Footage:Forum, hosted by a Korean girl. These segments, known only by the sequence number in which they are discovered, are incredibly polished, profoundly well constructed. Who makes them? What do they mean? Are they in order? All of these are mysteries, hotly debated. Cayce is fiercely independent. Her father was a CIA spook who retired and then vanished in Manhattan the morning of 9/11. Her mother attempts to hear his words as messages from beyond recorded on blank magnetic tape and Cayce finds him wandering through her dreams. "Pattern Recognition" ultimately succeeds for me because Gibson uses language so well. He seems to like language and he has an eye for detail and metaphor. He takes time to build his characters before launching them - long enough that you may not be sure that he's going to go somewhere at all. And then it takes off, accelerating, developing a pace and a logic all its own. I found myself liking, or at least very interested in, many of the characters Gibson has created even though, at the start, I felt they were cold and alien. Ultimately I found myself caring very much. I'm trying to decide what kind of novel this really is: character? milieu? puzzel? Surely it's a mystery of sorts, but it's not the mystery that is so compelling. Milieu? Perhaps since Cayce finds herself in possession of a credit card "that would buy a car but not an aircraft" and with some wonderfully competent corporate resources that allow her to travel into a world and a luxury that certainly is beyond anything I am ever likely to enjoy. Ultimately, however, it is a novel of character, some seen, some unseen. Like knowing someone on the web so they are constructions of words, yet strangely intimate words, Cayce and her fellows become alive, growing in complexity and finally yielding a subtle emotional payoff that is far more complex than anything in "Neuromancer" or "Count Zero." Because, I think, this is an adult work, one where the "Gee whiz" has been pared away. I have one warning. Do NOT read this novel on a long flight - it can induce a jet-lag of its own, simply with its language. Adding it to even a moderate flight and you might as well have crossed the Pacific. And your soul will take a while to catch up.

Fri, 07 Feb 2003 20:38:17 GMT

Is this the best we can do? I'm 53 and I've been working with technology all my life, computer systems since the late 70s. And I'm increasingly dissatisfied by what I experience. radio-userland software is a case in point: it works, but it's profoundly too geek-intensive. What does that mean? It means that the designers haven't left to the computer what computers do best and leave to the humans what humans do best. Should a human being have to craft XML? No - that's what a computer should do because the repetitive "by the book" nature of constructing the proper syntax is precisely one of the things that a computer can do and do well. So why do I have to go through the complete pain of figuring out the right words so I can have the navigation links I want? I suspect because the pressing need to use HTML as an interface gets in the way. If you have to interact with a WEB BROWSER you're going to get a really crappy human interface because it's the wrong tool for the wrong job. But a web browser was chosen because it's HANDY and because everyone has one, at least if they are going to design a weblog. So right away the choice of an inappropriate tool "dumbs down" the posibilities in the human-interface interaction. We're stuck with what was designed and built a decade ago which was all about display and some minimal interaction and it's being man-handled into doing a task for which it is patently inadequate. Come ON people. This is a computer we're using. It has a graphical user interface. The design of radio-userland is essentially the design for a text-only terminal interface. LOOK at it. Isn't this the case? You get windows to type in but you can't drag and drop things into them. Who is responsible for getting the syntax right? You are. Do we program our computers this way? Not unless we have to. Sure, we still write assembly language. But what we really use are compilers or interpreters to take a higher-level version of what we mean and translate it, the computer doing all the little fiddly-bits, into something pretty useful and reliable. Good optimizing compilers can write some pretty amazing (although definately not human-generated) code. That's what the tool is supposed to do. So why did the designers of radio-userland go this way? For all the classic geeky reasons, I imagine: control, opaqueness, and the need to be set apart. You can say "platform independent" all you want but the underlying code in radio-userland isn't platform independent. So why not use, say, Java, and write a pretty vanilla application that would STILL be vastly more user-friendly than the current version? I suspect because it isn't interesting. The real drive for radio-userland are the XML and SOAP internals - that's what the designers want access to. And, I submit, these are things we should never ever see. Many are involved with the design of projects that use the same kind of technology that is built into this one. If you follow this project as a guide you will make technology that alienates your users. If you think this is GOOD technology then I feel sorry for the folks who have to use the code you write and design. We have to do BETTER. All the time. Everytime. Otherwise we perpetuate mediocrity and the barely adequate when what we need are brilliant projects that inspire instead of distress.

Thu, 06 Feb 2003 17:20:29 GMT

Columbia It seems, in memory, that I was always looking upwards. Up to a passing plane: what was it? where was it going? what was it doing? Up to the moon, to the stars. Eventually I could tell just from the sound what sort of plane was flying overhead: Bonanza, Aero Commander, Aeronca - each had its own distinct sound. As I grew older my favorite smell was the burnt coffee that seems to be a part of every airport's line shack or pilot's waiting room. My heroes were the test pilots. My favorite was Scott Crossfield because he flew the neatest plane - the X-2 - which was bright white and by far the fastest. It looked a lot neater with its elegant swept-back wings than the stubby wings of the X-1. I instantly knew all the original seven astronauts and followed all the stories about them I could. I built a huge model of the Vanguard rocket you could open up to reveal the fuel tanks and piping. And then I watched it crash again and again on television news footage. I watched Alan Shepard's sub-orbital flight. I had been bitterly disappointed when the Russians beat us into space, but I was able to use my uncle's short wave receiver and hear the signals from sputnik as it orbited overhead. I was in college when Apollo went to the moon. It wasn't "cool" in the 60s to be into the space program. It was, after all, a waste or resources. The rhetoric was filled with arguments colored by anger over Vietnam. I watched anyway. I cared. I was in the Navy when the last of the Apollo flights departed from the moon. I had just reported to the PARCHE in Pascagoula and I didn't heed the call that said it was only a day's drive there and back. I could have gotten the time to go see the launch. I did not even try. A few years later we docked at Cape Canaveral as a part of our weapons trials and we took a tour of the old launch sites and the vehicle assembly building. Saw the vast crawler that had taken the Saturn Five's out to the launch pad. Mostly I was shocked by the diminuative size of the rusting launch facilities that marked the early Mercury and Gemini programs. The technology in the launch control facilities was truly ancient. Somehow, at that moment, my dreams receded. Of course I was already in love with PARCHE then, completely captivated by her and she ruled my life. She had become the space program because she was a living thing of men and metal of which I was a part. But I was always watching the skies. Years later when Sky Lab was about to plunge to earth we stood in a field south of Davis and watched it pass overhead, a bright star crossing the evening sky. And later still, in the light blue sky of dawn, I watched the shuttle re-enter, a brilliant purple-white dot of light drawing behind it a ruler-straight glowing line as it streaked across the sky in just minutes on its way to a landing at the Cape. I heard no sound. But there were tears in my eyes as I watched it, knowing there were men and women in that hurtling piece of machinery, and I felt the yearning again, to fly, to Go! Go! Goooooooooooo!. There were tears again when I saw the Shuttle in flight. I was in Orlando for a USA Swimming Convention just outside of Disney World. I watched the launch on the TV but then they showed a picture, taken from an Orlando TV news chopper, showing the shuttle in the sky. I ran out into the parking lot and there it was rising on a plumb of glowing orange smoke from the solid rocket boosters. Tears ran down my face and I could only say what everyone else says when they see it rise: "Go....Go....Gooooooooooooooooo" I watched the boosters separate and fall away, the pin-point trio of lights from the shuttle's main engines lifting her higher and higher into the gathering darkness, leaving behind the spent boosters to tumble into the ocean. I watched until I couldn't see her any more, until she vanished downrange and upward into space. So on Saturday morning I turned on the radio and heard a voice on NPR and instantly knew something serious was had happened. And moments later knew it was about the shuttle, and moments later on the TV the pieces of the shuttle were being spread across the sky - a pyre of dreams and lives. I wept. It was as if a part of me were dying. And yet I also recognized the glory in the path. They risked their lives - they took their chances, balanced the danger because they responded to the same allure of what was Out There that I did. They could have been me. They WERE me -- they were my desire to orbit the earth, to look down at the blue earth and upward to the bright, unwinking stars. And I know if offered the chance I would go tomorrow to fly into space, to ride on orbit chasing the sunrise while the earth passed by. Because I was always looking upward. Because that desire to Go is still so much a part of me. I grieve for the men and women we have lost this weekend. And I grieve for that part of me, now lost, that blazed across the sky. But I know the next time the International Space Station flies overhead I will go out into the farmland, or to my back yard, and I will watch it, seeing it appear out of the gloom to the west, rising, growing ever brighter until it is a golden star, brigther than Jupiter, looking up at the three crewmembers orbiting in her, and feel the joy and excitement at what we can do. Go! Go! Goooooooooooooooo!