As you can tell from the timestamp of this entry, I have stayed up far too late fiddling with my new equipment. But I did manage to fix the audio problems I mentioned yesterday, so I’m feeling kind of smug about that. Regular and mildly interesting blogging will resume tomorrow.
I don’t splurge on myself often, but when I do, I tend to do so extravagantly. After my DVD player died, I decided to replace my whole entertainment system. One trip to the local big box electronics store later resulted in a hefty commission for a lucky sales associate and a LCD television of embarrassing proportions, complete with all the fixings, sitting in my living room. I haven’t had a chance to play with it much yet, but I expect I will weep tears of reverent awe when I pop in the Blu-Ray version of Watchmen. That is, assuming I can figure out why I’m only getting intermittent audio from my spanking new Blu-Ray player.
If anyone is interested in a gently used Tivo and or Kenwood receiver, both of which are in perfect working order, feel free to e-mail me. My prices are very reasonable. I’m also available for movie nights and televised sporting event get-togethers.
Book club is coming up Tuesday and I still have about 100 pages to go in my reading assignment. It’s like being back in school, except I don’t have to worry about the professor calling on me. Fortunately, I’ve read this book before, but I want to refresh my memory so I can do more than nod and say, “Hmm, interesting observation.” I read quickly, so it shouldn’t take me long. Off I go.
My DVD player died last night, so I made a rare trip to Best Buy today to find a replacement. The place was nearly deserted and a little eerie. I decided to purchase a Blu-Ray player since I’ll probably replace my aging tube television before long. The player also streams Netflix video, which is a nice plus. But when I got home and hooked it up, the newfangled thing produced a shaky, wobbly image.
What follows is technospeak that may assist fellow geeks in offering suggestions to my dilemma:
I hooked up the player using the component video cables that had worked just fine on my old DVD player. This produces a shaky, distorted image. When I hook it up using the red, white, and yellow RCA cables, it produces a stable image. Any ideas?
When I buy a book, I don’t expect the seller to march into my house to take the book away when the publisher wants to remove it from circulation. But Amazon didn’t have a problem deleting electronic copies of George Orwell’s 1984, among other titles, from customers’ Kindle book readers after the publisher got cold feet. Setting aside the epic irony of the story, this is exactly the kind of shenanigans that makes the average reader reluctant to buy e-books. Hell, it makes me reluctant. The only books I’ll be purchasing from Amazon in the foreseeable future will be the paper kind.
I was talking with a friend and colleague earlier tonight about how people with disabilities continue to be marginalized in various domains of everyday life, like employment and education. And then I came home and read Tyler Cowen’s wonderful article on autism and academia. Cowen’s thesis is that the skills and abilities needed to succeed in academia are the same skills and abilities that many with autism possess. Here’s a snip:
Autism is often described as a disease or a plague, but when it comes to the American college or university, autism is often a competitive advantage rather than a problem to be solved. One reason American academe is so strong is because it mobilizes the strengths and talents of people on the autistic spectrum so effectively. In spite of some of the harmful rhetoric, the on-the-ground reality is that autistics have been very good for colleges, and colleges have been very good for autistics.
But the passage that really struck me is this one:
Current prejudices are based on at least two mistakes. First, too often autism is defined as a series of impairments or life failures, thereby ruling out high achievers. It is more scientific and also more ethical to have a broader definition of autism, based on differing and atypical methods for processing information and other cognitive and biologically defined markers. That way we do not label autistics as necessary failures, but rather we recognize a great diversity of outcomes including successes.
If only we could recognize the great diversity found in the whole realm of disability. Each person with a disability has been shaped by a singular combination of experience, opportunity, and innate talent. The disability is only one variable in the equation. But our schools and workplaces consign whole groups of people to lives of ignorance and penury because they cannot conceive that a life with a disability is a life of possibilities.
Health care reform reached a significant milestone today when the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee passed a bill that includes a universal mandate for everyone to be insured, a strong public plan, and government subsidies to assist families with modest incomes to purchase coverage. While this is an important step, I fear that the Senate is currently Public Enemy #1 when it comes to meaningful health care reform. Ryan Powers writes a forceful post illustrating the Senate’s long history of obstructing progressive legislation. The Senate operates in a weird parallel universe where majority rule isn’t good enough. Instead, a super-duper majority of 60 senators is needed to pass most major legislation. Why? Because tradition demands it. Even though the Constitution says nothing about super-duper majorities, the Senate prefers to observe decorum rather than actually, you know, pass legislation.
For health care reform to attract 60 votes, it will have to be watered down to appease so-called moderates who can’t quite bring themselves to confront the true extent of our existing system’s fucked-upness. I’m starting to think that real reform can only be accomplished through the reconciliation process, which only requires a simple majority. And the Obama administration seems to be similarly inclined.
Add this to the “plus” column of having a severe physical disability: I get to avoid the more unpleasant household chores. My shower recently had a clogged drain and one of my nurses kindly offered to clean it out for me. Similarly, I have never scrubbed a toilet or washed a pile of crusty dishes. And I’m not ashamed to declare that I don’t feel like I’m missing out by not being able to perform these tasks. They strike me as both boring and more than a little disgusting. I am, however, happy to supervise from a suitable location such as my computer desk or the general vicinity of the television.
Computer engineers are warning that neural interfaces, like the kind that will eventually control wheelchairs and computers, could be vulnerable to malicious hacks in the future. Great. So a few years from now, I shouldn’t be surprised when some geek hired by the Russian mafia hijacks my neural chip to download credit card numbers. This is why I’m going to demand that my chip run on Linux. The last thing I want is to be turned into a living spambot because Microsoft couldn’t be bothered to patch a Windows vulnerability.
I enjoy reading about forthcoming books that I will buy and get around to a year or two later, so I was perusing this Millions preview of fall releases when I received a happy surprise. Jonathan Lethem has a new book coming out called Chronic City. I’ve been a fan of Lethem since devouring his coming-of-age epic Fortress of Solitude a few years ago. Even better, Chronic City is based on the terrific short story “Lostronaut“, one of the few New Yorker fiction pieces I bothered to actually read. I might have to find a way to sneak this into my book club’s suggestion box in the next few months.