A Nader article in CounterPunch that features Prof. Matt Crawford's book, Shop Craft as Soulcraft. The book by this political philosopher discusses the borders between consumer culture and do-it-yourself.

http://www.counterpunch.org/nader09032010.html

Microsoft Office's XML format

Some months ago, I heard that Microsoft had introduced an XML format for its documents in around 2007. Fortunately, I was not affected until around 2010, when I was sent a document called "docx."

Now, I might understand having to get new software to support a new kind of computing need. But virtually every document on Earth has pretty much the same features, at least in terms of the user, as it has since the typewriter, or at least since Multimate and WordPerfect. Refusing to upgrade for the sake of what I knew was a document that had regular, mundane keystrokes, I went online to seek a subversive converter for it. I found something made in Russia or someplace that should have worked, but it didn't work at all. I'd installed it correctly, but it decided it needed something more than I had on my machine. I spent 40 minutes fighting with it and gave up. Tail between my legs, I asked the sender to re-send in .doc format.

The next time I encountered .docx was just today, and I knew that this too was a very typical two-page document with all text. Still, it was embedded in XML and in turn embedded in a ZIP file. I renamed the .docx to .zip and opened it in WinZip, then tried to read the XML, but that is a fool's errand, because every change of font or style in the document means the text is surruonded by around 500 to 1,000 characters of packaging, such as font changes and other things, in XML. So, as with PostScript, you're reading far more machine code than actual text.

So I had to try again to find a converter. There was OpenXML Document Viewer, which looked popular enough. What it would do is allow me to view the document in Firefox. But after installing it (and upgrading Firefox once again), opening the document showed me only a blank browser screen. I played with this for 20 minutes and gave up. (The upgrade of Firefox, by the way, made two of my other add-ons obsolete.)

I next found Word Viewer, which would open the file directly and let me view it. This actually worked fairly well in confirming for me that the document was nothing but two pages of text, nothing fancy that really required embedding in XML and obscuring for me.

Text is text. The earliest document formats were pure text, and when formatting came into vogue the game was to index plain text by character position and have the formatting in a separate place in the document. As the volume of possible (note I don't write actual) modifications to the text began to overshadow the amount of text itself, it became practical to wrap the codes around the text as "markup," which made the text harder to read for people but easier to read for other computers. Today, with .docx, there is no reading by people until the computer is precisely ready to allow it.

I've complained before about similar upgrade antics with PDF and PostScript. Still the same documents our grandparents used to read, but now they are enshrouded in layer after layer of abstraction so that, without perfect equilibrium with the rest of the electronic universe, we will never be able to read them.

When I work up the courage, I'll talk about recently using GPS for the first time. In Orlando.

Happy birthday to my brother's cell phone in New York, from my cell phone in Chicago

Dear Brother:

After 25 minutes of:

• dialing your -8881 cell phone number, which, as I was so rudely reminded, simply hangs up on people after they dial, so one wonders (a) what good it is and (b) why you don't destroy it or cancel service or at least have a pleasant message including your forwarding number after so many months, and please don't tell me I'm the only person who ever encounters this problem with your old number;
  
• rifling through seven or eight old cellphones, including not only my stash of stalwart Samsung R225s (which model, vintage ca. 2001, I still prefer because of the monochrome LCD and no-nonsense durability and which I jokingly refer to as "the world's last rotary-dial cellphone" and which includes the latest disabled unit, recently having succumbed to screen damage after this angry young drunk punk kid jumped on it with his Chuck Taylors and yet it works fine except for a cracked screen), and also my new stash of several technicolor Motorola BR50 cell phones which have built-in cameras and which I found in the company of my latest R225 in a recycle bin at a community center, but of course all are perfectly good, including batteries, except one, presumably disposed of only because people either didn't like the color or had to switch services or wanted to upgrade to some device that will distract them from the world even further with its action-packed, hypnotic glow;
• patiently moving SIM cards and batteries among these units -- plugging, unplugging, powering up, testing for the right combination, waiting for several "phonebooks" to initialize (I use sarcastic quotes to emphasize my contempt for the name, see more on my disgust immediately below);
• flipping through each "phonebook" (how many do I own?) looking for the number that would work for you, because naturally there is no such thing as a serviceable Ithaca, New York telephone directory anymore, not even on the Web, at least for cell phones, but even if there was you'd probably unpublish yourself, but also because in all fairness I do have a phone number for you, on my current SIM card (of which it was you, incidentally, who once rather religiously, yea reverently, nay acolytically, pronounced that it is often referred to as "the soul" -- good grief -- of the cellular phone, Let Us Genuflect), but your newest number would not be on that SIM card because it's new, and the old one has always occupied the card space and the new one is not on the phone memory in my screen-crushed LCD but in fact on my penultimately newest R225, the one I retrofitted last Christmas (probably because I had to call you), with a mini-phone jack for power since the Achilles heel of the R225 is its flimsy edge-connector power plug, which has an operating life of around 200 connection-disconnections, and by the way I don't think I've ever before in my life had to use a microscope to dremel and solder;
• finally finding the magic suffix -3823 that I was looking for, which would connect me to you, and making a mental note to actually transfer this number to the SIM card and forever obliterate the old, and calling you immediately (on the good phone, of course), only to be greeted by, not you, but a recorded version of you, telling me to kiss off because you were asleep or driving or otherwise too indisposed to accept a well-wishing telephone call.
  

After all this, I would like finally to say:

Fuck you.

Even if it isn't exactly your fault.

Oh, yes, and Happy Birthday.