Back in Park City again where winter has begun in earnest. I’ve taken a small respite from my crazy regime of walking, four to six miles a day and usually in flipflops and carrying a camera, using the sudden abundant snow here as an excuse. Why flipflops? I have no idea. My nurse practitioner has advised against it. There are snakes and scorpions. Sometimes there are millipedes and crocodiles. Blowouts. I just really like walking in warm places in flipflops. It keeps me grounded. The never-ending summer. That sort of thing.
I don’t have much of anything to show in terms of improvements to my site since my last post. These things happen. The framework is in place and it allows for adding stuff in all sorts of categories willy-nilly, a very happy concept for me. This is the first entry in an experiment of writing about more diverse things more frequently, and a move away from social media.
Autumn happens fast in southern Nevada. We went down there at the beginning of October when high temperatures were above 105 degrees F for long stretches and headed back to Utah at the end of November when high temperatures were routinely below 60 with lows in the low 30’s.
In Utah our pups have a big yard and so don’t require walking every day. In Nevada they have a tiny yard because most of the outside space has been turned over to the wild critters. Also coyotes and hawks are an issue so they can’t just be left in the yard for a big chunk of time. Snakes are always in our thoughts but fortunately, thus far, never in our yard.
Our wild one, miss Lady, is the nervous type. She came from circumstances that were probably challenging before she joined us as a puppy and missed a lot of youthful adaptation to civilized life out and about in the world because of the pandemic. She gets anxious and acts out. She attempts to dig holes. Even when holes are utterly out of the question, like through tile or hard-wood floors. She lunges at anyone on a skate board. She needs to be petted and consoled when in close proximity to another dog when she is on a leash. She eats furniture. And rugs. She hasn’t eaten furniture or rugs recently. When at a dog park she is quite shy, cordial with the other dogs and well behaved. I love Lady. She is a very good dog with a sense of justice. As you would expect she responds negatively at any time she feels that she is being treated unfairly. She also responds when she perceives that other dogs or cats or humans are being treated unfairly. She intervenes on behalf of our old cat Suki when the other animals don’t treat her with the respect she deserves. Unique among all of our various dogs over the years she seems to be able to reason about things and separate times when life isn’t fair from those when things simply just don’t go well.
Lady requires walking, lots and lots of it. This works well for both of us, but after a couple of months of it following a long Summer of daily walking in Hawaii, Park City and upstate New York, the dire peril of the flipflops came to pass. This involves the cracking of thick callouses that make walking tough. Sort of like walking on knives. Many, many knives. It isn’t pretty. Lotion can solve the problem but only temporarily. Under most circumstances I can take a short break and let my feet heal. But in Southern Nevada I’m pretty sure that if I don’t walk Lady at least five miles a day she will start eating the furniture again.
When I told my wife that I might not be able to walk for a while she reached for her phone with grave alacrity. In a hushed voice she briefly made a mysterious appointment, hung up and then told me that we were having pedicures the following afternoon. I did not take the news well. I am a man of a certain era, from the American middle west. The only other experience I have had involving anything resembling a pedicure was dangling my feet into a Mexican cenote and letting the tiny fish munch away at them.
I’ve been to the pedicure place several times but only to drop off or pick up my daughters when they were visiting. They love the place and rarely visit without getting their nails done, as is also the case with my wife. I had never been inside before. The interior is full of thrones, and oversized massage chairs, and large goldfish in tanks.
A small young man checked us in and asked us to sit on a couple of the thrones and wait. We sat. Around a dozen people turned and looked at me as if I were a rare creature out of its natural environment. Some were women seated in the massage chairs with their feet soaking in small pools of bubbling blue water. Others were Vietnamese women and men tending to the women’s feet. As far as I could tell all of the employees were Vietnamese and spoke to one another only in Vietnamese. A woman was seated on another throne on the far side of the room. She turned and smiled as I was sitting down even though she was facing away from me. A woman was working on her finger nails and the curious glance of that woman must have drawn the attention of the other to me.
The fellow who checked us in went to the row of massage chairs and turned spigots which filled the water basins beneath two of the chairs. He poured a blue powder into each. Then he flicked switches which started the chairs humming. He called us over. We went. We sat. A man came over and sat in front of my wife’s chair on a tiny stool. My wife handed the fellow a small wooden slat painted with a bright orange. I grimaced at the thought of color. Any color.
After a little while a small and stout woman, older than the rest, approached from a room in the back. She had the air of an expert. Someone of experience brought in to handle the complicated problems. I was the complicated problem. She sat on her stool. Her look was stern but comforting. She pulled one of my feet out of the basin and looked at it, turning it slightly from side to side. The massage chair hummed with a vibrating bulge moving very slowly up and down my back. She shook her head negatively and said something. All of the other employees responded. One man chuckled. She turned to him as if to counsel him not to laugh but then turned back smiling herself. She looked at my foot again. Shook her head again. Then she dropped it back into the blue water. She stood up sternly and walked back through the doorway saying something to herself. I looked at the man now working on my wife’s feet. He looked back at me and smiled. The older woman returned. She had a newspaper, two implements reassembling cheese graters and a small power tool. She spread the newspaper next to my basin and sat on her stool. She looked at me and smiled. I was a challenge she would both endure and accept. She was a professional. She said something again and everyone responded. I realized that my wife was talking to the woman on the other side of her about my feet. My flipflops. The woman at my feet plugged in the power sander sort of thing, put on a facemask and leant forward to the task at hand.
After an hour or so the task was done. The power sanding was followed by much grating with the cheese graters and then a small round block of pumice. I had restarted the massage chair a few times. When she went over the cracked spots it was painful. When she went over the small of my feet, even with the cheese graters, it tickled. I couldn’t help but writhe and giggle and explain, “It tickles”. Everyone else looked at me and giggled back. Toward the end the woman said to me in English. “This is really a lot more than a pedicure.” And “Come back in four weeks.” And then later, “Four weeks.” I tipped her very well.
Ah social media. I remember a moment during the takedown of Flash by the folks at Adobe in cahoots with Apple, when someone, somewhere, probably on Facebook or Twitter, requested thoughts on what would be the state of the Internet in ten years, or maybe it was five. I commented that I felt the major consequence of the demise of Flash would be that the web would devolve into being only one site, Facebook. I was being sarcastic. It turns out I was, to some extent, correct. I also remember working with a fellow who was a technical climber around the time of the beginnings of wide acceptance of Facebook and he was following a friend who was climbing some mountain somewhere and frequently posting both text and images as he progressed. That left me with a strong impression of the coming power of social media. This was around fifteen years ago, before it was called social media. I am beginning to think that it may have run its course and if not about to enter a period of collapse, could become something that sits around in the corner, drawing our attention with lessened frequency and duration only to see what major events have affected relatives and old friends, to witness the occasional figurative traffic accident, or to briefly peruse a coworker’s or fellow traveler’s curricula vitae.
Demise is maybe not too strong of a word for what is befalling most of the social media behemoths that benefitted so substantially from both the thirteen years of money-printing to keep afloat the American and world economies, and the pandemic which made many of us reliant on social media for our everyday interactions with humankind beyond our immediate family or coworkers. Now that revenue is priority one, the connections between family and friends and the exploits of interest involving folks that we actually know must play second fiddle to the base culture of celebrity relationships conducted only to keep names alive in the zeitgeist, bitbros pitching what may soon become worthless coin, sports agents convincing eight-year-olds to riot because their favorite team hasn’t handed over a somewhat-shy-of-a-half-billion-dollar-contract to somebody or another, almost subliminal home and travel marketing via the flash of images within the infinite scroll, product placement of all of the things, and the lowest and least intellectual forms of political rabble-rousing.
Social media is rapidly becoming synonymous with PR. And I suspect we, its audience, are adjusting.
My step away from Facebook was quite accidentally coincident with the exact time when Elon Musk took the reins at Twitter. Hearing the screeching of tires and seeing the mashing of metaphorical metal over at Twitter is indeed fascinating. I’ve used Twitter on and off since the beginning under various accounts whenever I was learning some new big thing. CSS, Flash, JavaScript, Angular, React, ES6, and now Python, all have brought me to Twitter over the years. Unlike Facebook my involvement in Twitter has been very focused on certain technical things and entirely about following and rarely contributing.
Musk has changed that and this time I find myself looking around and into all sorts of weird corners to see what is going on. Of greatest interest is Musk himself, his gutsy though so very very stupid acquisition, and his many small daily scuffles. Right behind him are the bitbros and their reaction to the slow but apparently inevitable fall of their dominoes. A quick glance into the comments following any recent Sam Bankman-Fried post provides all that needs to seen about much of the crypto project and those involved in it. At any rate it all has the feel of being real, if not honest, and not having been manufactured to achieve some preconceived, coordinated, potentially highly profitable outcome. Seeing Musk take shots at Apple has me a tad giddy. Despite not being on board with his politics and somewhat aghast with his ham-handed handling of the company, I am becoming more and more of a fan and am rooting for him while realizing that he is a likely Don Quixote tilting against Wall Street and its new-media PR manifestations.
And so, I find myself wondering what will come next and, for the first time since the Internet became a major thing, realizing that I have no idea. We’ve left the environment where money is free and companies and politicians can continue as viable entities simply based on their ability to give away more and more stuff to more and more people. Musk may or may not save Twitter. If he does establish a large space on the Internet where freedom matters, that could be a good thing.
I remember an era when a million kids made cool and really innovative stuff that evolved almost daily using tools like Flash on an open Internet that wasn’t filtered through social media companies and app stores and folks made projects on sites or blogs and others followed them via now-antiquated means. I am hoping to see a return to something similar which could also involve the technological advances that have happened in the interim. I’ve decided to move in that direction myself.
What does seem sure is that practical tools that can be used to increase efficiencies in practical and profitable industries will be of value. I first started taking a larger interest in Python because of frustrations with the JavaScript charting library D3. Let’s take a deep look at Matplotlib and Pandas and Python I said to myself. I am a long ways in at this point and enjoying it generally. Python also, coincidentally, fits the bill in terms of something that can be used to increase the efficiencies mentioned above. So let the Python continue.