DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Here’s something to do while you’re waiting… you can watch Tony Levin and the California Guitar Trio perform three sets of finger-busting acoustic music courtesy of primeticket.net.

Tony Levin’s home site: www.tonylevin.com

If you don’t recognize his name, you’ll probably still recognize his work — just take a peek at his discography.

OMIGOD it’s been weeks, how have you been?!

I have been within an acceptable range of comfort, but severely preoccupied learning how to type. You might think I already know how to type, and you’d be correct — I learned to type in 1981 from a 7-foot-tall man whose other job was coaching the school’s basketball team. Spending a disproportionate amount of the intervening 20 years at a keyboard has improved my typing speed, to about 8 characters per second as near as I can tell… not a record-setting rate, but fast enough that I realize a significant productivity benefit as compared to a casual user, especially considering just how much I type in a typical day.

I rarely even type letters any more; entire words and phrases leap onto my screen, the result of short hand-spasms and interstitial twitching. UNIX commands, SQL and PHP keywords are particularly deeply ingrained, both because those vocabularies are tiny and because I use them so frequently.

But I decided to throw it all away and learn the Dvorak keyboard layout instead. Why I would do this is a question I would probably ask myself frequently if I wasn’t so distracted remembering where all the letters on my keyboard have moved to.

One reason is that I’ve had several brushes with RSI, and an occupational therapist suggested that making changes before I do permanent damage might be a good thing. Another reason is that the qwerty arrangement is inefficient; the goals it was designed to meet did not include the reduction of motion for the user. (Example: on the qwerty layout, all the letters in the word ‘typewriter’ appear in the top row, to save typewriter salesmen of the 1800s the tedium of hunting and pecking during product demonstrations. [source: Grolier’s, via Dylan McNamee’s Dvorak page])

Compounding the challenge is a simultaneous switch to a bizzare new keyboard, one of the Kinesis contoured models.

So, until I regain some speed, updates to this site may be infrequent. The story ideas are stacking up, but it still takes me too long to write them.

Chank is having a font sale. Stock up today! $10 for a great Type 1 font is cheap.

People who know me know I rarely go anywhere. Local friends still tease me about something I said a few years ago, only partly in jest, that most days the furthest I got from the house was to the end of the driveway to get the mail. That was one of the few tasks of an average day that required me to don shoes.

My life is not so home-centric any longer, because I get out to the gym at least three days a week, and to breakfast twice a month. Still, I don’t do what most people do all the time, which is drive to work.

Occasionally there is a need for me to be somewhere in person. Sometimes the prospect of becoming presentable and driving 60-100 miles is attractive, as a change of pace and an opportunity to get stuck in traffic three times in three hours, suck down some exhaust fumes, and at the end sit through a meeting that, if its essence were bottled, would outsell Sominex at 24-hr drug emporia. But, other times, I just don’t want to leave the house.

This week there is the added glamour of being able to tempt the fates. Will someone blow up the bridge just before I get there? While I’m on it? Or after I’ve crossed, to leave me stranded in a city of terror-crazed maniacs until I’m able to cross two more bridges in a grand loop that might, a half-day later, lead back home, assuming no more airliners have fallen from the sky?

So I did cross the bridge today, although not near rush hour and therefore not, as far as anyone can say, with much risk, aside from the usual risk that someone coming the other way will dribble some cereal on his tie, or cut himself while he’s shaving, and in a spasm of shock, cross the centerline to mow down the first four or five other commuters who serve to slow him down. But that risk is somehow easier to accept — after all, those guys don’t mean to kill anyone. They’re just trying to groom, or finish their breakfasts.

I’m sure you’ve heard the expression “People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.” There is a corollary to that expression: “People who live in stone houses shouldn’t.”

You might have expected the corollary to end “shouldn’t throw glasses.” Well, that’s dumb. Nobody should throw glasses; I don’t care what kind of house they live in.

People who live in stone houses, shouldn’t. Period. Unless everyone else lives in a stone house too. Because if you are the only one in your community who lives in a stone house, there won’t be a contractor within 100 miles who has any idea how to work on it.

“Oh, your house isn’t wood?” they ask, but not until they’ve seen it, because… why would they ask?

All we wanted to do was install some new windows. Any $20/hr apprentice carpenter can cut a hole in a wood-framed wall and install a new window, but we can’t even have an existing window replaced. Guys who own glass shops come by and tell me they’ll sell me the windows, if I want to install them myself. “If I had the tools, the skills, and the confidence to cut enormous holes in my house and install replacement windows,” I ask them, “do you really think I would type for a living?”

After weeks of searching, I found a general contractor who was willing to take a chance. He bid on replacing a few windows, and although we pretended we were shopping around, we’d already mentally agreed to pay whatever he asked because he was the only chance we’d have to get the work done before winter.

A few weeks later, the windows arrived, and the general contractor came by to introduce the guy who would actually be doing the installation. “I’ve never done anything like this before” is the first thing the guy says to me. Note to everyone in the construction industry: this is not an ideal way to build customer confidence.

He did an excellent job, though. We quickly ordered three more windows and begged the contractor for another bid (which is a 3-week process, even in this economy).

Finally the new windows arrived, along with the contractor and two new guys who will be doing the installation. (General contractors, generally speaking, don’t do too much actual work. They mostly drive around and oversee the $20/hr guys with toolbelts and paint on their jeans.) “This is Rodney and Gabe,” says the contractor, motioning to two guys with toolbelts and paint on their jeans. “They’ll be installing your windows today. I’m going to Disneyland.” And off he went.

Rodney extended his hand. “I should warn you, I’ve never done anything like this before. I’m a carpenter.” What a shocker.