Day 346, February 24, 2021
Soul in the Machine
Tonight's soundtrack: The Pat Metheny Group, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, and Marcus Miller, Live Under the Sky, 1992 Japan (with Japanese commercials!)
The pandemic has changed my relationship to technology in interesting and surprising ways. I have always prided myself in being an early(-ish) adopter of technology, beginning I suppose when my father brought back a Sony Walkman from his tour in Japan, one of the first hand held cassette players I had ever seen. He then bought me a Timex Sinclair, one of the very first home computers, that incidentally saved programs onto a cassette recorder. I eventually managed to convince my father to buy me an Apple IIc when they came out, and I went to college with one of the early Macintoshes with a monochrome screen and the hard drive that it sat on.
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| Franklin looks like Bambi here. |
In adulthood, I stayed mostly in the Apple ecosystem while also flirting with the early Palm Pilot provided by the college. I was a Palm Pilot fan until I dropped it in the midst of a hallway conversation and it shattered in a gazillion tiny pieces. To think I learned a whole new alphabet to use that thing!
In more recent years, I had a college laptop, but even more transformative was my iPad Pro with the keyboard cover. It was the smaller size one, which is important to mention because, at least at my old college, there was not a laptop culture, so it was always awkward to arrive at a meeting with a laptop when everyone else was working with notebooks. For years, I worked out of the very first Greenfield Community College notepad holder I received on my desk when I arrived at the college. I had a "system" where, when I filled a pad I wrote the starting and ending date at the top and added it to the large stack of filled notepads on my shelf. As long as I had a general sense of when I was at a particular meeting (I could cross reference my calendar on my laptop and phone), I could find the notes. But more often than not, I found myself typing up notes after meetings and that seemed like a silly redundancy.
Eventually, I stumbled onto the iPad solution. It arrived at the same time that the Google software suite seemed to gain in popularity and the two seemed made for each other. At the time, I was working on a grant project with a local high school and at that school there was definitely a laptop culture and the Google suite was tightly ingrained in everything they did. I was introduced to working collaboratively on a document there and once I investigated the software further, I was sold on the system. Eventually, I was able to gain approval to purchase the iPad and it became the main fixture on my person as I moved from meeting to meeting. Anywhere there was wifi, I could access any document I had synced with the cloud, and I never minded offering to keep minutes for meetings because I was always taking notes anyway.
Over time, we build relationships with our technology the same way a musician builds a relationship with an instrument. That iPad was a part of my identity and it was my main tool for work whenever I was not in my office. I developed a Google Doc system that was analogous to my notebook system. Each month had its own document. I wrote all my notes from all my meetings in that document, giving each meeting a new header. Then whenever I was looking for notes from a particular meeting, I would just look up when it was in my calendar and I could pull up the appropriate Google Doc and easily find them meeting. Then, when the pandemic hit, I brought home all my technology, including the iPad, but without the myriad of meetings I used to attend in person on a daily basis, everything was accomplished on my laptop. The iPad sat unused. Eventually, the scarcity of needed technology caused the college to search for resources for faculty and I offered up my sacred iPad to a math professor who wanted an easy way to write out equations on the screen. And just like that, the iPad was gone.
A few months later, I left the college for the university, and in so doing, I had to give up my laptop. One doesn't realize it in the moment, but over time you build up a wide range of shortcuts, customized arrangements, ways of being... that immediate disappear when you are asked to give up the hardware. It is as if the machine has become impregnated with bit of your personality. For a few short weeks I only had my basement desktop, which I suddenly discovered was labeled as obsolete by Apple. Nevertheless, I managed with my 2012 Mini just fine until I was issued a temporary loaner by the University. I've used that laptop for the last 2 months while waiting for my "permanent" machine to arrive. Tomorrow, I will relinquish my loaner and take in the new machine.
All along, I've recognized that this machine was temporary. It is unfriendly in that the "7" key sticks, so it is not particularly useful as a laptop, but I have an external keyboard and monitor and it works perfectly in that capacity as a second monitor. I never bothered to change the desktop image from the standard Luke Skywalker Island looking scene. I resisted the hassle of instlling the latest major system update, knowing I would pass on the machine sometime soon. Even so, I have already made an impression on the machine. I have a working system of using two different web browsers simultaneously, and Safari always seems to know what I am looking for, while Chrome runs purely for the two university applications that seem to have a strained relationship with Safari. I worry that the new machine will not retain that information. It will have a blank persona and all the things that have become easy, will once again be stilted and slow.
At the end of the evening, I will log out of my accounts and delete all the data I offloaded onto an external drive earlier in the day, and after I pick up my new machine at the university, I will begin anew. It is strange to have had a laptop for so short a time that I have never bothered to purchase a laptop bag for it. I do not even know if I have one still from my old laptop (I do have two different iPad pouches). I think my laptop backpack got converted into my emergency go bag.
Someday soon, I'll have to do the same thing again for my basement computer, which mainly functions as my music recording machine. I will try to keep that one running as long as I can so I can keep using my similarly obsolete audio interfaces that connect with a delicate balance of firewire adapters.
Also in the basement is a collection of dead hard drives. Some pulled for old Macs, others in their large external drive enclosures. I've tried to pull data off of them, but to no avail. Somewhere in there is a documentary I made about a former brother-in-law's music festival, all the music I recorded prior to moving to Leverett (2 houses ago), and who knows what else. Perhaps this is the season for letting go of such things.
In this time out of the office, with almost everyone I know working off of laptops, suddenly we are reminded of the benefits of the desk top. The ergonomic advantages of a standalone keyboard and a monitor that is nearly as large as my television. The laptop has become a stationary thing. Though, at least in good weather, I had a colleague at GCC who moved to a different part of her yard or house for every meeting she had to replicate the sensation of going to meetings. I thought that was a marvelous idea.
So, I suppose tomorrow I will miss this loaner and it will feel like saying good bye to a friend who I won't see again. It is strange to have so much change and new beginnings so close together. But, as we've all found these last few months, we will adapt and figure it out, and something will be better than they were before, and of course, some will not be better. But, things will continue and tomorrow's blog will emerge from a new machine.
Until then,
Leo
From Our Friends:
From The UMass Fine Arts Center:
Streaming on Monday, March 1 at 7 p.m.
In her newest performance art piece, born from the COVID-19 pandemic, Kristina Wong details how she went from out-of-work performance artist to overlord of a homemade face mask empire in just ten days! With her trademark wit, she explores how she was able to build a sweatshop of hundreds of volunteer "Aunties" (including children and her own mother) to fix the U.S. public health care system while in quarantine.
Wong hilariously unpacks the American Dream, America's pursuit of global empire at the cost of basic PPE to essential workers and healthy citizens, and the significance of women of color performing a historically gendered and racialized invisible labor at a time of heightened anti-Asian racism in the U.S.
Tickets are $10 per household or device, free for UMass students.
From Mass MoCA:
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From the Northampton Jazz Workshop:
Watch it on YouTube at: https://youtu.be/Nf6hVe_wno0
From the REBLS Network at UMass:
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