The image above is from the Michigan Ave. Apple Store a few days before the camping began in earnest for the iPhone. I did camp out a few hours with my friend Steve at the Northbrook Court store to wait for his phone. The wait wasn't too terrible and we were joined by his significant other. He's been very excited about the phone and I just wanted to watch the whole circus. The Northbrook crowd was smaller than the downtown Chicago one, but it wasn't insignificant.
When we finally made it through the line, Steve got into another line to buy the phone and I played with the floor models with Aliza. I am very impressed that Apple did make a phone that lived up to all of the hype, even though I didn't pick up one myself. I don't have any immediate plans to get one of these things, and I'll probably hold off for a couple of revisions before making my purchase. This will give Apple time to work out the kinks and add features such as an IM client and it will allow me to pinch some pennies while I wait for the phone to go down from its current price.
I'm curious - did anyone who reads this site pick up one of these phones? What do you think about it so far?
Early last year, at the encouragement of a buddy of mine, I decided that I would watch from start to finish the entire series of "Stargate SG-1". I had seen the movie, but thought that it was a bit mediocre, but before new episodes of "Battlestar Galactica", I would catch the occasional SG-1 or Atlantis episode. Before I began watching the show, my primary question was, "How does the U.S. Air Force go from contemporary technology like the F-22 Raptor to faster-than-light space carriers sporting shields and transporters and other sci-fi goodies?" The first episode of SG-1 begins with the Air Force beginning to use the Stargate once more. The final episode ten seasons later has that same Air Force traveling between galaxies and defending the Milky Way from beings a smidgen less powerful than gods.
Make no mistake, "Stargate SG-1" may be my favorite science fiction series of all time. The strength of the series is the mythology and incremental history built episode by episode that explains puny Earthlings end up being the fifth race of beings devoted to protecting and defending countless worlds. My favorite episode that illustrates the incremental construction of this history is "Prometheus". In this episode, a journalist begins confronting members of SG-1 about a top-secret government project and Stargate Command has to deal with the situation. The show writers very cleverly manipulate the viewer into believing that the project in question is the Stargate program, but in a surprise twist, we find out for the first time that US gov't has been building the first generation interstellar warship built upon technology and knowledge gained by the Stargate teams during their various journeys to other worlds. This episode is the point where the fictitious world sharply diverged from the non-fictitious world. It was an abrupt revelation, but one that made sense when considered. Richard Dean Anderson and team weren't mixing it up with otherworlders for kicks and giggles.
The second strength of the show was it's cast and how well the ensemble worked. In the first eight seasons, Richard Dean Anderson was the core of the group in his role as Colonel Jack O'Neill. He played the role with the right mixture of seriousness and levity. As a friend of mine remarked, he was never without an appropriate smart-ass remark when needed. After eight seasons, his character was promoted and he left the show. The first few episodes following his departure felt a bit rudderless, but the new additions of Ben Browder and Claudia Black playing the roles of Cameron Mitchell and Vala Mal Doran. In some respects, these characters both embodied parts of what made Anderson's character so interesting, but they also grew into respectable characters in their own right. If I were forced to choose my favorite incarnation of SG-1, the O'Neill team would only narrowly edge out the Mitchell team that finished this last season.
In the end, I managed to extract a lot of enjoyment out of this show. I've picked up most of the DVDs and they are now a central part of my video collection. I often joke that I'm looking forward senility - that way, I can watch all of my DVDs again as if it were the first time. I'd better make a note for my future self to check out "SG-1" first. In the meantime, there's going to be a big hole that's tough to fill.
Late yesterday afternoon, I was killing some time and decided to take a crack at refreshing the look of my main website. I was using a blue and yellow scheme and decided that the page needed to be updated. I wanted to make the page tighter and more consistent with the design that I'm using here at Vox.
This is the result:
I managed to spice up the banner a bit by including seven random photos from my Flickr account. This is something that I've always liked at O'Reilly's Radar. The left section of the page contains aggregated content from sites that I use regularly. The top-most section contains posts to this blog. The next section contains the past five links posted to del.icio.us, and the bottom section contains recently added books to my LibraryThing catalog. The image floating at the upper-right of the main section is the last photo that I posted to Flickr. The right side of the page is dedicated to shorter content, such as the new bio, latest Twitter, links, and contact information. Finally, the footer of the page contains the ever-dynamic Lovecraft quotes.
Since I post more content regularly to sites like Vox, Twitter, and del.icio.us, this page serves as a nice aggregation point for the stuff I'm doing on the web. In some respects, it's "The Daily Me". I don't really have many plans to add a lot of new pages to this site, though I'll be posting a CV and archived versions of my Lovecraft copyright blog posts from the old site.
Personally, I like the design quite a bit and I think that the page is an improvement over the old one. There are some tweaks that I can still make to help with making the page as readable as possible (such as altering the default link color) and I'll probably be making small changes throughout the weekend. I'm curious about what you think: is it an improvement or is the old site better?
I promise that this blog won't become a 24/7 Lovecraft affair, but I wanted to share some recent reviews of Lovecraft-related media. In this post, I'll be covering print, audio, and video.
The print entry is August Derleth's "The Cthulhu Mythos". This is a Barnes & Noble compilation of Derleth's Cthulhu mythos tales. For those unfamiliar with Derleth, he was a late entry into the Lovecraft circle and after Lovecraft's death he (rightly or wrongly) assumed control of Lovecraft publishing. "Mythos" is a collection of Derleth's tales that build upon the Lovecraft mythos, primarily centered around the entities Hastur and Cthulhu. In Derleth's adoption, Hastur and Cthulhu are members of the "Ancient Ones", a collection of powerful evil entities that rebelled against "The Elder Gods" and were cast to the four corners of the universe. In Derleth's tales, Hastur remains imprisoned among the stars, while Cthulhu is cast below the depths of Earth's seas. Despite their confinements, the Ancient Ones find ways to war against each other, using lower races as proxies and soldiers. In this collection, the big conflict is between Hastur's circle of humans and Cthulhu's fish-like Deep Ones.
I'm not going to get into the debate of whether Derleth's injection of a Christian-inspired good versus evil into the Lovecraft mythos was appropriate. (That's a bigger debate than this post could handle.) I will say that I found Derleth's tales to be a mixed bag. The book opens up with several almost identical stories about a Derleth-created entity called Ithaqua that I found to be rather poor and boring. I really didn't start enjoying the book until I read the short story about a guy and his buddy summoning and dismissing monsters and botching the process. I don't know if the story was meant to be dark humor, but I found it pretty funny.
The other highlight of the book was the collection of Professor Laban Shrewsbury stories that finished the book ("The Trail of Cthulhu"). These short stories are each part of a much larger story describing a mysterious professor working to eliminate Cthulhu's avenues of exit from the city of R'lyeh. The story begins in 1938 and continues past the end of the second World War with the professor and his recruits bombing and assassinating Cthulhu agents around the world. The series ends with the climax where Shrewsbury convinces the American military to detonate a nuclear weapon over the island first described in Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu" to seal the Ancient One in the R'lyeh under the sea. I think that this single act (nuking Cthulhu) is probably the point in the extended mythos that separates the classic Lovecraft and Derleth stories from the more modern interpretations by creators like Charles Stross and Mike Mignola.
In the end, I found the book to be a mixed bag of stories that kept me riveted to the book and stories that put me to sleep. I originally picked up the book for a single dollar, and I believe that I got my money's worth. Certainly check out "The Trail of Cthulhu", but feel free to skip the rest.
My only complaint with the film is at the end where Cthulhu emerges from the island to pursue the human interlopers. The film's producers used a form of stop-motion animation to create the monster, but it didn't really work for me. I know that they didn't have a special effects budget, but I wonder if they might not have been better served by showing less Cthulhu and keeping the Ancient One in the shadows. I think that hinting rather than showing would have been more effective. (The way Galactus is presented in the most recent Fantastic Four film is a good example of relying upon the audience's imagination to present the unpresentable.)
In the end, I really enjoyed the film and it's an interesting addition to my DVD collection. The whole retro-schtick completely won me over, and I liked the style so much that I purchased a copy of the movie poster for the day when I have my dedicated movie room.
The HPLHS website has a CD and MP3 version for sale, and I'd highly recommend the compact disc. You'll have to wait for it to arrive via post, but included with the disk are prop photos, drawings, and a newspaper page related to the story. These are fun additions to have while listening. My only complaint was that the audio editing was a bit weak in the section where the radio newsman is interviewing members of the expedition via radio. It was hard to hear in parts, and I think that realism could have been sacrificed a bit in this case to facilitate easy listening.
I highly recommend both the "The Call of Cthulhu" DVD and the "At Mountains of Madness" radio play. Both can be purchased online at the HPLHS online store.
Last night, I finally got around to deciding the fate of the Lovecraft copyright paper I've been holding and I sent it out for consideration for inclusion in a journal. The paper's abstract:
Howard Phillips Lovecraft became a major figure in the horror, science fiction, and fantasy genres when pulp fiction magazines published his stories in the 1920s and 1930s. Since his death in 1937, confusion continually surrounded the ownership of his seminal works. This paper analyzes two prominent hypotheses concerning these copyrights. The dominant hypothesis describes how August Derleth and Donald Wandrei obtained control of Lovecraft’s works via the 1941 Morrish-Lewis contract and the 1947 Weird Tales contract. An alternative hypothesis explains that the works became part of the public domain when no renewal records were filed. Because both hypotheses rely on unverifiable claims, this paper introduces a new hypothesis showing that the works are effectively in the public domain on the basis of court filings in a 1974 lawsuit between Wandrei and his dead partner’s estate. The difficulty required to firmly establish the copyright status of these works illustrates a major problem of American copyright law.
This paper was originally written for a course I took in the fall quarter and the instructor liked it and encouraged me to seek further publication of the work. I've been sending it out to various people to solicit feedback (with mixed results) and I felt that it was finally time for me to push it out the door and get the work out there.
In the end, I decided to send it to Hippocampus Press in hopes that it might be suitable for inclusion in one of their Lovecraft journals. This probably won't do too much for me in terms of the CV, since the field of Lovecraft scholarship is still somewhat obscure and niche. It won't win me the institutional recognition that comes with sending it to a more mainstream communications or American studies journal, but I'm fine with that.
The main reason that I decided to go with this press is that their journals are edited by S.T. Joshi. Joshi's life work has been Lovecraft scholarship and his publications on Lovecraft's life, works, and collaborative circle are as authoritative as they come. His Lovecraft biography "H.P. Lovecraft: A Life" is more complete and detailed than any biography that I've seen. The secondary reason for submitting this paper there is that I wanted it read by people who actually give a damn about Lovecraft and his writings. The copyright question was one where a variety of theories held sway among Lovecraft scholars and enthusiasts. Some believed that the works were copyrighted by Arkham House, while others believed that they were public domain. Some believed that the copyrights stayed within the Morrish and Lewis families, while others believed that they were acquired by Arkham House. My paper is a contribution that clarifies this confusion by deeply digging into the history and documents to discover what's actually known (and what is not).
To be honest, I don't know what the odds are of the paper being accepted for publication. Chances are that the copyright question is not one that interests other Lovecraft scholars and no one cares whether "The Call of Cthulhu" is in the public domain. Despite my work and research on this topic, it may be that there are letters and other references I don't know about that contradict my claims. I've submitted it to the one authority who would know this. Perhaps there is not enough criticism or interpretation. There are probably a myriad of reasons that this paper could be rejected that I don't even know. The important thing is that I've started getting it out there.
PS. I'm still looking for readers, so if any of the above piqued your interest, send me an e-mail and I'll send you a link to the PDF.
In a few hours, the Steve Jobs reality distortion field will kick into high gear as Jobs delivers the 2007 World Wide Developers Conference keynote. Here's what I want out of it:
1. Updated and consistent GUI themes in Leopard.
2. Updated .Mac service.
3. Updated iLife / iWork '07.
That's all. I figure if I keep my expectations to a minimum, I'm less likely to have my heart broken. Does anyone have anything to add to this list?
I spent a good deal of the morning working on a "this is what I've learned in/about graduate school" and wasn't making good headway on it until I realized that without some context, the post would be too generic and not that interesting. Probably the most important piece of information are my future plans, and here they are for your amusement.
Short term (summer 2007)
I may have turned in my last paper on Thursday, but I have a number of pots on the stove that need tending and stirring. In no particular order, these are my plans for the summer:
1. Write a paper with a faculty member about a new information collection method we developed earlier this year and have been using since. (This description is vague for a variety of reasons.)
2. Begin work on creating a better notification system for modern personal computers. This is related to the work I'm beginning in the area of human-computer interaction and will be described in further detail in a future post.
3. Do a couple of things for the Oyez website. I spent the bulk of last summer creating the latest iteration of the Oyez website and while it is presently being run by good hands, I decided that I would like to continue my relationship with that project and its principal, Jerry Goldman. Jerry has been good to me as long as I've known him in a variety of contexts, and this is my way of saying thanks for the continued friendship and support.
4. Catch up on reading things I had to set aside throughout the school year. On one hand, I still have yet to read Neal Stephenson's "Baroque Cycle". I've been itching to find a decent block of time to knock these three books out and summer may be the ideal time. On the other hand, I have a number of books that I've discovered in my classes on a variety of topics that I'd like to read and digest before the next year begins. These includes Bardini's biography of Doug Englebart and Kurzweil's Singularity books. You can follow along using my "summerreads" tag on LibraryThing.
5. Launch Chicago Stubs. I and a team of other students developed Chicago Stubs as a Chicago-based online ticket swapping site for our Online Communities course. I think that the idea has legs and I intend to get the code up to shape and launch the site later this summer.
6. Continue working and releasing Books. The academic year has kept me busy and I've had to put off quite a bit of development on Books throughout the year. I'd like to get back to the project and continue putting out good releases for the users out there. In my role as a Mac software developer, I'll be paying close attention to tomorrow's SteveNote to see if there's anything of interest in the new release of MacOS X Leopard.
Medium term (through the end of graduate school)
During this last quarter, I did an independent study with a faculty member on the topic of human-computer interaction. The independent study was intended to give me a survey of the classic and current HCI literature and really enjoyed what I read. In particular, I found Mark Weiser's essay "The Computer for the 21st Century" to be both prescient and inspiring. (I'm not alone, as this single essay spawned the ubiquitous computing field.)
One of the most valuable things that I learned during this year is that at my core, I am a "builder" more so than an "observer". I would separate the two classes of people by looking at their motivations. The builder is someone who has a distinct personal vision of what things should be and takes the direct steps to make that vision a reality. In contrast, an observer is someone content to leave the building to others and instead study and dissect that which has already been built to discover post-hoc theoretical insights and other findings. My current department overwhelmingly consists of observers and it's been fruitful for me to discover that I don't want to spend the rest of my life primarily studying things other people build. (I do find such scholarship to be extremely interesting and extremely valuable inputs into the building process, though.)
In the ubiquitous computing field, I've found a really nice spot that allows me to be a builder while being able to make the most of observations and theories coming from other fields such as psychology, sociology, and history. The field is also rich in ideas and potential for original, and I'm looking forward to applying myself in that capacity.
After this summer, I'll be working on doing the things that I need to accomplish in order to earn my Masters degree. This in no way signifies any disappointment or desire to leave my program before earning the Doctorate degree. I figure that going through the process of assembling a committee, forming a proposal, and executing that plan will be a valuable experience that I can do once I finish up with classes and qualifying exams and start to work on the dissertation. (Plus, having a Masters degree apparently results in pay increases when doing an internship.)
Long term (after graduate school)
In the long term, I really want to stay in Chicago and raise a family with Holly here. I think that this city is a tremendous place to live and I think that as a parent, I'd really enjoy taking the kid out to do fun stuff around here. I believe that I would be more bored and less happy if I lived anywhere else and given this discovery, it would be idiotic to go elsewhere looking for happiness. I'm frequently susceptible to the "grass is greener on the other side" views of things, so it's doubly significant that I haven't found another place to live that I think is better than the Windy City.
This decision to remain in Chicago leads to a not insignificant conflict with my current program of study. The department I am in is very much a "publish or perish" place and it's been emphasized multiple times that the primary goal of the program I am in is to develop scholars that can get jobs in top tier departments at research universities. The "publish or perish" philosophy is pushed to doctoral students as part of the process of training to be one of these scholars. The problem arises when the two constraints (live in Chicago, take a research-track job) are combined. Chicago has a tremendous number of good universities, but it is probably fair to say that the local pool of research universities consists of Northwestern University and the University of Chicago. There are quite a few local teaching universities (Loyola, DePaul, University of Illinois), but these are not necessarily on the same tier as the institutions I'm being prepared for, research-wise.
On the other hand, I don't know if going into academia as a career is the right move for me. I enjoy being both a researcher and a practitioner and believe that there are some great opportunities for someone who can bridge the theory-practice divide. I find the prospect of building up a nice little business to be intriguing and I think that I would do well doing something like "going indie" as a local tech consultant/independent software developer. I'm a big fan of what Joel Spolsky has built in Manhattan, and I'm keeping a close eye on the guys at Humanized here in Chicago. In the few years since I've moved here, I've built up a decent local network and I believe that I could build a nice little business, should I decide to go that route.
"But, if you're planning to do that, isn't graduate school a waste of time? Are you wasting your professors' time if you're not going to planning on pursuing an academic career?" These are two questions that I struggle with regularly. To answer the first one, I do not believe that I'm wasting my time in graduate school, even if I choose the capitalistic sell-out route. My time in graduate school has been extremely productive, and I think that I've learned as much in the last three quarters of classes as I learned the three years before. I've certainly been exposed to a body of literature that contains a ton of useful knowledge that can be exploited by a practitioner that understands it. In addition to access to the literature, there are quite a few skills that I've picked up during my stint in graduate school that can serve me well outside the ivory tower.
As for the question of whether I'm wasting the faculty's time if I don't go into an academic job, that's a tough one. To be perfectly honest, I've been extremely hesitant to write the previous two paragraphs in a public venue, for worry that one of my instructors would read them and decide to write me off as an unserious student. There is a strong expectation that they are training future professors. I know that this sentiment is not universal, but there are more than a handful of people who I will disappoint by admitting that the life of a tenure-track professor may not be the one I want. I can't do anything to change that, but I have no intention of slacking during my studies or working any less hard researching or publishing. I've fairly been accused of hedging in the past, and I'm not going to do anything to take a potential job in academia off of the table unless there is a good reason to do so. Having my name out on papers and conference presentations will lend legitimacy to me inside the academy or out.
I apologize for the extended digression on what I'm thinking of doing after getting my degree. However, it illustrates the point that my career is not going to be the defining element of who I am and that a good career is only the means to an end. That end is setting up a nice life for me and my (future) family where we can make the most of this great environment we are in. If I find that I'm happiest in an academic setting and it supports a decent life style, I'll choose an academic route. If I find that I'm more invested and interested in building a business of some sort, I'll choose the entrepreneurial route. At this point in my life, I'm primarily interested in keeping my options open while building a solid foundation for whatever I choose to do.
So, there you have it - the contents of my brain translated into bloggy form when queried about future plans. I think that the above fairly completely encapsulates my current thinking on the topic. If anyone's been in similar situations and has some insights or experiences that they'd like to share, I'd love to hear them.
At this time a year ago, I was probably sitting in the barber's chair getting a haircut for my wedding that evening. I had left my job of four years at Northwestern University's Academic Technologies a few days before and I had been spending the days between leaving the job and the wedding meeting people at airports, shuttling them around the city, and helping out where I could with the wedding and honeymoon plans.
After the wedding, Holly and I spent two weeks in Scotland exploring places like Edinburgh and Loch Ness. David and Christine were gracious hosts during the last half of our trip, and I'm still trying to repay that favor whenever I can.
After Scotland, we returned to Chicago. Holly went back to work at the law firm and I began digging in my heels for the summer Oyez rebuild. A couple of months later, I attended my graduate school orientation and school began shortly after. I really had no idea what to expect from graduate school and the last year has been one giant learning curve. I picked up the gist of social constructionism, directly observed daily life in a "publish or perish" institution, and wrote my first machine learner.
Life has been a roller-coaster since then and last week, I turned in the last papers of my first year. I'll be plenty busy over the summer, but for a few days at least, I have some room to breathe. I've been inspired by Matt Wood's return to blogging and I'm planning on making a more concentrated effort at keeping this space up to date.
To kick things off, I'm planning on posting a few retrospective posts on the last year and the lessons learned. (I also changed the name of the blog to "Aetherial Vox" to shake things up a bit.) In the next few days, I'll a few posts on life in a top-tier research institution (and it's not all flowers and candy), the gulf between practice and theory (research), married life, future plans and goals, and some other related topics. So, stay tuned (all three of you).
