The New Normal, or Is That a Summer Hiatus Coming On?

For those readers not accustomed to the ways of academic blogs (which is mostly academic only by virtue of its association with its author), there is a tradition called the “summer hiatus.” People spend less time on the internet reading blogs and writers take time away. I tend not to announce such things but since my last post was more than 10 days ago, it appears I am at the very least slipping into at least a summer slowdown. Today I leave for Brazil and while I sometimes think it would be cool to blog while away, that rarely if ever happens. When I get back, it’s a 20 day sprint through social events, defences and various wrappings-up to the 31st, when we again board a plane (this time with a bag-full-of-cat in hand) and fly to California to begin our sabbaticals.

I can assure you there will be a “special California edition” of superbon once we’re settled but August does not look promising.

The headlines:

I have no idea what the “new normal” is but even though I expect my body to continue to change over the next year, I appear to be feeling it. I still have some side effects but most of the time I forget about them, apart from my “new” voice, which I notice every day. I sleep a regular amount (I do tire out if I’m in loud spaces for too long without the voice amp), and I am effectively “back to work,” though “normal at work” is also hard to fathom since I was last not an administrator more than five years ago in June 2005. I have been spending my days doing scholarly things: writing, getting books together for a reader (which the help of an RA, of course) and reading people’s work. Sort of what my summers are supposed to be like. Evenings have been very social, which has also been great but not conducive to blogging.

The voice:

As I said above, the voice still isn’t where it “should” be in my mind. Part of it is probably me going out too much and talking too much. The more rest it has, the better. I practiced my keynote Saturday and talking for 45 minutes straight with long sentences is hard. I am really glad I have a year off from teaching the big class. The best analogy I can think of is a musician relearning an instrument. My old style of performance just doesn’t work and I haven’t quite figured out my new one yet. And speaking like that takes enough out of me that I can’t simply practice it over and over. So I will wing it. At least the ideas are very cooked.

Work:

I’ve cleared a couple essays off my desk, finally begun revisions on the mp3 manuscript, and am making penultimate decisions for the Sound Studies Reader while I still have access to my library. It is really nice to be able to think again and to be lucid. I also have a bunch of defences in August as students try to wrap things up before I go, or so they can move on to new things like postdocs.

Music:

The lo-boy CD cover has been designed and the whole thing will get shipping to the pressing plant in August, for a September “release” (watch this space). My new band (now a year old), tentatively named In the Unlikely Event of a Water Landing (aka, two guys who make mostly instrumental rock and electronica), is finishing up a 5-song EP which should be done but not out as of September. Again, watch this space. And I have another “art” project based on the cancer experience in the work that will get finished this fall.

Entertainment:

Summer blockbusters are totally disappointing, except for Inception, which is like The Matrix with a script. I was going to write a comparative blog post about bad action movies versus the spectacle of circus, as we saw three shows in July (in part because of the local circus festival). Let’s just say this year the circus won, by far. Of course, it’s not Ringling Brothers stuff. It’s much more avant-garde than that, and there are no animals other than people involved. The best show was definitely put on by les sept doigts de la main (literally, the “seven fingers of the hand”). If you like live spectacle (if I say “acrobatics, contortion, juggling and music” it doesn’t quite have the same impact), I can’t recommend them highly enough. They do tour.

We also went to our 2nd live Canadian Football League game, and I could see that becoming a regular thing. I am not as fond of it as NFL when it comes to TV, but live you are much closer to the field, and the vibe is just, well, different. We sat in the end zone which means that we couldn’t really tell what was happening when it got close to the goal line on the other end of the field, but the rest of it was just outstanding, and when it was close to our goal line it was line you could touch the players. Carrie says it’s more like a college football atmosphere, which makes sense since the Montreal Alouettes play on McGill’s campus. It helped that it was a beautiful, temperate night. I was smart enough to bring the voice amp for that (occasionally having to hold the speaker up to my neighbor’s ear so I could be heard) and I half hoped that the “dork-o-phone” would appear on national TV. It’ll get a shot at appearing on Monday Night Football later in September when we see the New Orleans Saints play the San Francisco 49ers in San Francisco.

Tech news:

I got an iPad. For music-making and as an e-reader, it’s amazing. I can lay my hands on my music software now, because it can act as a controller for my main computer. Awesome. The productivity apps are a revision or two away from being very good though I managed to get my talk for Brazil onto it and projected correctly onto a screen. It’s not quite a full laptop replacement, yet, though it’s good enough already for travel, and much lighter than my laptop. I wouldn’t try editing an essay on it, but then I rarely do that kind of writing on the road. It’s a great reader but not a proper newspaper replacement because who wants to spill coffee (metaphorically speaking; I drink tea) on their electronics? My rating: extremely useful for your digital recording studio, a fun reader and tech toy. But academics could wait six months or a year for the productivity software to catch up to reality and not miss much. Also, one wonders about the competition when it comes out. . . .

Brazil:

What’s there to say? it’s winter there and the weather appears to be exactly the same as here, except the days are shorter. And we are very overdue for an adventure.

Asthma, Text, America

My medical appointments are slowing down, which is a good thing, but Monday I went in for an asthma test to see if I still had it, or whether the breathing issues were a side effect of the cancer. Turns out it’s a little of both. My test scores without medication were similar, but I respond much better to the drugs. So drugs it is. I also had the latest blood test so we will see what that says about my hormone levels. I imagine I’m pretty close to kosher at this point, but you never know.

My head is clear and I’ve been writing, though, which is delightful. It’s going to be hard to get into a groove with a month left of summer and moving to do, but even a little bit will get me good and warmed up for California, where I will have to spend the first couple months doing the final revisions on the book.

In other news, my passport ran out of blank pages, which turned out to be a real hassle but only because the information on the US passport site is unclear. After a bunch of calls to phone menus, completely incorrect information from an American agent I had to call via Skype because the 1-800 number doesn’t work here, and the operator at the embassy in Ottawa refusing to allow me to talk to a human being, I took a leap of faith and made an electronic appointment with the US consulate for this morning. The consulate is a bit of a fortress downtown and the entrance is super high security. On their website there are lots of warnings as to what you can and can’t bring in, so I brought my papers and a book to read in a clear plastic bag.

After the body cavity search (A JOKE–the security guys were actually very nice) I took the elevator to the 19th floor where it looked more or less exactly like where I go to get my driver’s license and healthcare card renewed, on down to the chairs and the strange ticketing technology where you get a number and a letter. $82 and about 30 minutes later I walked out with 20 new pages sewn into my passport. The moral of the story is that if you’re not in the US, and you want to figure out what to do about a passport issue, just make an appointment and go to the consulate. Then again, that may not have worked as well for the guy ahead of me in line, who entered Canada with a driver’s license and birth certificate, but who couldn’t get on a plane because his passport was expired. I felt bad, but then I also felt like issuing the following public service message.

Dear Americans,

Canada really is another country.

And why did I need extra pages, you ask? Because I can travel again. First up: Brazil.

If I had liveblogged last night’s circus performance, it would go something like this

(Outside, before the performance)

It sure looks like one of those clowns is going to hit a child with a pin.

(Inside, waiting for the performance)

This place looks like a school. Oh wait, it is a school. A circus school.

A torrential downpour. Wind is blowing over flags and stuff. And the title of tonight’s performance is “Downpour.” That’s not irony, it’s just coincidence.

Oh look, wet clowns trying to prevent a tent from collapsing.

(Inside the auditorium)

Waiting for the circus to begin: simple fact or existential condition?

(As 5th person gets up to “say a few words” before the performance begins) OMG. Please kill me now. It’s just like at the beginning of a conference.

Opening act is a clown. Now I understand that whole “clowns are scary” thing.

A circus of 4 people. Cool. It’s like off-off broadway.

Hoops. Not bad, but not anything I haven’t seen before.

Foot juggling. Now that is something I’ve never seen before.

Good music selection, but I wish there was less prancing and striking of poses.

Men contorting on hanging things. Impressive.

OMG, they turned off the air conditioning. It’s stuffy in here. I am feeling light headed. Too much prancing.

More foot juggling with spinning umbrellas. Awesome.

“Downpour” may have been based on a Dostoevsky play, but it looks suspiciously like other circus performances with mild sexual suggestion (enough for adults but not so much as to be noticed by kids), the usual attraction-refusal-reconcilitation with male and female performers, oh, and guess which woman gets more attention from the male suitors: the bigger one or the smaller one? I know that the performance was supposed to be laden with existential meaning and all that, but really I have to say the main attraction was not the plot.

Show’s over. Friends gotta go, we stay for the fire eating.

Music starts. Hmm. Dead Can Dance-ish. I dunno about this goth vibe. Also a little precious.

Women come out with pointy ears, black clothes and makeup. Hmm.

Then they light skewers on fire and eat the fire. AWESOME. I no longer care about any of the trimmings. Just do more stuff with fire, PLEASE.

Group of men in black robes with torches comes out, and leads the audience outside. Hmm.

Performance begins outside. What is the theme? Must be “satanic renaissance festival on Planet Vulcan.”

Fire breathing with wind. YES! But thanks for aiming away from the audience.

Hoops and rope tricks are better with the hoops and ropes are on fire.

But then, pretty much everything is more entertaining when it involves fire.

(Ride home)

Carrie (referring to the fire breathers): drinking the accelerant must taste terrible.

Me: But breathing fire probably makes up for the taste.

Carrie: Yeah.

Apple Mail (Snow Leopard), Entourage And Exchange: A Brief Review

And now a post on workflow and email. Non-Mac users will be bored, so please feel free to skip this one. Like you don’t always feel free to skip posts. . . .

McGill uses Microsoft’s Exchange Server protocol, which allows people to sync their email, contacts and calendar across platforms, computers, and so forth. The thing is, support for exchange on the Mac has been quite limited until last year. After using a fine email program called Eudora for many years, I switched to Microsoft’s Entourage a few years ago as my administrative duties entangled me in the web of various exchange services.

The problem is that while Entourage has a lot of power, it kind of bites as an email program, at least for how I use email. Entourage is essentially some perverse form of project management software, and that is clearly how it is conceived. At its heart is a massive database that holds all your information, called an identity. The problem is that the identity can’t get very big before bad things happen.

In the productivity world, there is much talk of the Inbox Zero philosophy, which encourages swift and systematic email management. I take the opposite approach, “Inbox Infinity.” I don’t manage my email. If I need to find something, I do a search. Each month, I pull all my email off the server and dump it in a file. My theory is that is takes less time to do this and simply do a search than to figure out where everything should go and what I might need in a few days, weeks or years.

In Entourage, this meant that every couple years, I needed to create a “new identity” so that my database would never get too big. The Entourage database was also a major problem for Time Machine to back up, which meant it had to be backed up manually. And worst of all, on more than one occasion, the database got corrupted, causing me a wide variety of headaches. Some things, like mailing lists, are in fact impossible to either export from Entourage or to back up properly. Entourage also didn’t handle multiple email addresses well. To remedy that I had set up Thunderbird to deal with some IMAP accounts I have on other servers. Inbox Infinity Indeed.

So when I had my every-two-years Entourage crisis a couple weeks back, I decided that instead of fixing it, I would export everything to Apple Mail and try that program, along with iCal and Address book. I would have done it sooner, but I had to wait to upgrade to Snow Leopard (the latest Mac OS) because of all the audio software I use (dozens of programs made by different companies, some quite small, and which often lag behind the main OS by as much as a year in terms of being updated). Before this version of OSX, Apple’s programs did not work with exchange servers.

Configuring Mail for Exchange took a few minutes. Address book and Contacts automatically configured themselves. I then began the process of importing all my old email, which took a few hours but wasn’t something I had to attend to (it was fairly automated; every so often I had to click a couple things). Mail treats each email as an individual file, which means it is much easier for Time Machine to automatically back up old email. It also means that instead of having to switch “identities” if I want to find an email from a few months ago, I can simply do a search now. In fact, I now have a searchable 11 year archive of email on my computer that runs seamlessly. No, I don’t need all those thousands of emails, but 20 gigs or so is nothing compared to the amount of disc space available on a modern laptop (I have about 1 terrabyte of hard drive space on my Macbook Pro). And even if you factor in the time I spent on Entourage hassles over the last few years, that is still less time than I would have spent sorting the stuff out in some more rigorous fashion.

Mail, iCal and Address book are also much easier to use in my everyday tasks: writing emails from one of two accounts, making and changing calendar dates and adding contacts. Entourage made all that stuff fussy and difficult, largely because it had some many different capabilities that you had to navigate through a pool of stuff just to do what you really wanted to do. Mail, iCal and Address Book are certainly less capable and not proper project management software, but for a professor, they work perfectly, and sync effortlessly through Exchange. As an added bonus, Mail feels like Eudora on steroids, which is great because I always preferred its interface to Entourage’s.

After a couple days I was so happy with it that I set Carrie up. One pleasant side effect is that it now became easy for us to see each other’s calendars. For the next year or so this won’t be such a big deal, but it will allow us to make plans and see what the other person is up to.

There you have it. I am sure that Entourage can do things that Apple’s programs cannot, but I have yet to need to do any of those things, and if anything, my professional life should be a little simpler in the coming years rather than more complicated, so the odds of my needing to plunge into the labyrinthine menus of Microsoft’s bloatware email program are fairly low. As if to confirm my own evaluation, Microsoft themselves are discontinuing it in favor of a version of Outlook for Mac. I do not think I will be using it.

All that said, I do have to offer kudos to Microsoft’s telephone technical support (for Education users, anyway). They were absolutely great and knowledgable, and also refreshingly candid about the limitations of their own software — especially the Entourage database. Certainly if I have a problem with Word or some other program, I wouldn’t hesitate to go straight to them instead of starting with on-campus support.

Free, Again

A quick update on the cancer front.

Yesterday the neck bandage came off. The antimicrobial fabric is indeed a medical miracle and apart from the public spectacle part of it, I would recommend it highly. The open wound area was almost totally gone and the remaining area has responded very well to flamezine. That’s a relief. There is still a bunch of black crap on my neck (it looks dirty) and as usual my skin is sore from the adhesive, but I can live.

Otherwise, I seem to be recovering well, my head is clearing after being off opiates for awhile, and my energy levels are up, but only because of shameless use of air conditioning. My voice is still a bit gravelly and doesn’t project well but it is getting better too.

If all goes well, cancer updates will be replaced with some nerdy tech updates next week.

Neck Bandage: Day 2

Is the magic fabric working? Maybe!

In the meantime, I feel like an animal just home from the vet with one of those Elizabethan collars so it can’t lick itself:

They’re hilarious on pets, but it turns out I’m not as fond of them on humans.

Also, the thing hates the heat. I got this creepy crawly feeling on my neck as I was running errands in the neighborhood. Good thing we have air conditioning.

Well, crap

Today was of mild medical interest and greater sociological interest. I visited the respirologist, and neither he nor I are any longer certain whether I actually have asthma, so there’s another round of tests in a couple weeks. It could be a misdiagnosis from when there was a giant dead tumor in my neck last summer.

I also visited the radiation oncology nurses for them to have a look at the skin on my neck. The consensus between them and a resident was that the skin was breaking down in the crease of my neck from the radiation treatment. I was hoping for a really bad heat rash. The prescription was — a dressing! File under “I thought I was done with this shit.”

The dressing consists of some revolutionary new antimicrobial fabric, gauze and some kind of gelatinous goo that is supposed to keep it moist. The whole thing is covered by another bandage that is affixed to the back of my neck and has already come off once. It’s supposed to stay on for 5-7 days but we’ll see how long I make it. It’s supposed to work wonders for open wounds like mine, and it is at least a change from the sticky grey goo I was putting on my neck 3 times a day (flamezine).

On the way home from the hospital I picked up some groceries and some bagels (as I appear to be able to swallow bagels again, at least once I’ve chewed them) and I am pretty certain every single stranger took a good long look at the giant bandage on my neck. So much for the joy of being out in public. I take consolation that it’s insanely hot outside and we have air conditioning.

Then again, Carrie just got home and dropped all the shades because she had her eyes dilated. She can’t see anything but is blinded by the sun.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that said bandage-staring caused a scene at the bagel shop. A young mother sends in her very young child to buy a bagel. He wants cinnamon-raisin, she keeps yelling for him to buy blueberry. I am next in line, and there is a quickly growing line behind me. The woman behind the counter retrieves the requested bagels, first cinnamon-raisin, then blueberry. Except the child has $.75 and this bagel costs $.90. The child is too young to understand how to count money or the concept of price. Or apparently that he wants a blueberry bagel and not a cinnemon-raisin one. By this point, the mother is outside the store, forced out by the growing line. The woman behind the counter keeps addressing the child who is staring obsessively at my bandage and ignoring her. I’m sure this went on for like 10 seconds but it felt like 30 minutes. Eventually the thing was resolved by getting the mother’s attention and order was restored. If I wasn’t so weirded out by the whole situation, I should have had the presence of mind to cover the $.15 difference and thereby end an extremely awkward situation. That would have been totally worth 15 cents.