Odd Man Out

I've just returned from vacation in Maine and Boston, a two-week trip that accounts for my longest period sans computer in years. Yes, it was hard.

So M and I made a loop through Maine up to the Grand Lake Stream, returning along the coast and ending in Boston. We stayed at a number of B&Bs and ate all over the place. So here's my collection of advice and endorsements on the off chance anyone is interested in a New England vacation.

First, of the B&Bs, all were pretty good. We didn't hit any disappointments. Our favorite was the Peacock House in Lubec, Maine. Lubec and neighboring Campobello Island are beautiful and well worth a visit. Peacock House is well-kept, clean and comfortable. Breakfast was simple but tasty, consisting of a fruit salad, sausage quiche and muffin. On a side note, Campobello is actually in New Brunswick, Canada; you must pass customs to go over, and is notable for a having been the summer home of Franklin Roosevelt. If FDR were running today, would Republicans tease him for being "cosmopolitan" and unAmerican? Lubec also has the Quoddy Head lighthouse, which marks the easternmost point in the US. We had dinner at the easternmost pub in the US.

Behind Peacock House, I would place Nonesuch Farm, outside Bangor Maine. It is considerably more rustic, consisting of one of those rambling New England farmhouses that's undergone two centuries of chaotic additions. It's also an actual farm. There were sheep outside my window, and the innkeeper apologetically let me know the sheep would probably wake us up at 6AM, which they did. Still it was very clean and pleasant and sported the best breakfast we had during our trip. It was in a single course and was composed of fruit, muffins, waffles and optional whipped cream (real), blueberry sausage (surprisingly good) and ideologically pure bacon.

The highlight of the trip, for me, was a two-day stay at Weatherby's at the Grand Lake Stream. It's a rustic lodge about two hundred yards from the Grand Lake Stream. For those not in the know, the waters thereabouts are legendary for landlocked salmon and smallmouth bass fishing. Now this place is an actual sportsman's lodge. It's comfortable but rustic. You stay in one of several cabins on the property and eat in the lodge dining room. You won't see any overstuffed chairs, nor elegant nouvelle cuisine. The beds are not especially comfortable. The cabins are simple. The food is simple. Things are clean and uncomplicated; I don't mean this as a euphemism for "primitive." There's indoor plumbing and running, hot water.

The place exists because of the fishing, which is stellar. I went out one day with a guide (Jeff, the current proprietor of Weatherby's, which is one of the oldest sporting lodges in the US) to the St. Croix River. The St. Croix runs between Maine and Canada, a wide, moderately-paced river stained Earl-Grey tea brown by tannins. We fished most of the day, from maybe 8AM to 4PM, catching quite a few smallmouth bass, several on the large side. In fact, I hit the "20-inch club" twice that day (only the second to do it this year), once with a 23-inch pickerel and again with a 20.5-inch bass. We also caught plenty of chubs, some surprisingly large. Jeff fed a couple of those to the bald eagles that hung around, which is a hell of a thing to behold.

If you're interested at all, I recommend Weatherby's highly. Pay for a guide. It's worth it. Weatherby's does cater to new and even first-time anglers, although the bulk of their clients are old hands. Most have been there before. In the fall, they also arrange guides for hunting birds, bear, deer and moose. I have no idea if they have firearms for rental, although they certainly have plenty of fishing tackle that can be rented and/or borrowed. Check into it.

Avoid Salem, MA. M was interested in seeing it because of the whole witch trial thing but the witch-related sights all sit deep in the most irritating tourist schlockery possible. Beautiful architecture, but otherwise a waste of time. The House of Seven Gables is there, inspiration for the Hawthorne novel, and is moderately interesting. That's the best thing I can point out.

In Boston, Mike's Pastries is worth a visit. It sits in the North End, Little Italy really, and sells a wide variety of really nice pastries. The ricotta chocolate chip cannoli was especially good.

The only real problem with the vacation is that I must now absorb several megabytes of text in order to become current again. I note that Donald posted extensively while I was away...

With reference to my post on lifecasting, and my intense dislike thereof, I stand by my general point. It's an absurd waste of time promulgated by narcissists of the first rank.

However, regarding Frank's site specifically, I believe I have misunderstood the intent of his photo collage. I thought it was the beginning of yet another exercise in self love out on the net. It turns out, according to Frank, that it was merely a family-friends-oriented photo set and not the beginning of a lifecasting project as such. I therefore retract the negative opinion that was specifically directed at Frank. I called him a narcissist, but his blog does not support the charge.

Sorry.

I'm going to take the risk of opposing Donald's views about lifecasting.

I'm a big fan of technology, generally, and I'd love to be able to plug my brain into infinite storage, which would be like having an inexhaustible eidetic memory. I'd like to be able to commit some events to that sort of memory, and I'd probably acquire wearable computing clusters and storage if such things were available. So on that side of things, hey great, so long as you manage to avoid solipsism (most of what I do in a week isn't even interesting to me, and I see little value in recording it willy-nilly).

It's the public-facing side that I find singularly unappealing. My casual consumption of these various lifecasting projects has always led me to say "So what?" It's one thing to lifecast an actual public or historic event, such as a political rally. It's quite another to broadcast the banal minutiae of one's life. Regarding Frank's site, referenced by Donald, I find nothing of historic, artistic, political or humorous value in the little collage of pictures. It is merely narcissism, and it even lacks originality. It's been done. All of this stuff is just noise, and I have plenty of ways to waste time already.

I have no problem with photo galleries, event-centered and intended for consumption by friends and family. Blogs likewise often involve (not often enough maybe) skill and taste, and at their best have real, valuable content. It's the self-marketing and hubris of lifecasting that drive me crazy. I'm perplexed by imageering marketers who feel their lives are worthy of attention, bored with the ironic detachment of hipster douchebags and frustrated by tasteless artists whose medium is merely tedious images and who lack any semblance of craft or skill.

I hadn't seen the men play beach volleyball, but Kyle's correct. Their outfits are distinctly less revealing than the womens' outfits.

Seems a little silly doesn't it? A bikini or some sort of unitard would seem to be the most practical clothing. Why not have men so attired? It'd be reasonably popular among the female and nontraditional male viewers. Or if not popular, then at least not unpopular.

Is it some kind of weird fashion statement. Is it supposed to resemble the volleyball scene from Top Gun?

As with nearly everything important or interesting in life, there's a Seinfeld reference for this. It's Elaine, explaining why naked Jerry in the apartment is not a good idea: "The female body is a work of art. The male body is utilitarian. It's for gettin' around. It's like a Jeep."

Michael Phelps. Is anyone else getting a little tired of the 8-Golds story? I think it's a shame the quest for 8 has become the prime story of these Games. First, it overshadows the other athletes, the swimmers particularly. Natalie Coughlin defended her 100m backstroke gold medal. Not much airtime for Natalie, even though she's by far the most attractive swimmer in the fold. Second, Phelps has had an incredible career. No matter what happens, he'll leave these Games as the most Gold-heavy Olympian ever. Yet one gets the sense that we'll all be disappointed if he doesn't win 8 this year (as I write, he has 5). It's a shame that one could have such a brilliant career and yet leave under a cloud of disappointment.

Eros. Alive and well at these games (thank god). Womens' Beach Volleyball is really putting asses in seats in Beijing. Apparently the Chinese are quite taken with the spectacle of tall women in next to no clothing playing volleyball. Of course, many of these sporting events have a shade of sublimated eroticism about them. Aside from W's B Vball, you see this particularly in gymnastics. For male and female athletes alike, the camera lingers on bulging muscles and skintight uniforms and vaguely sexual movements. It's a little disturbing when applied to tiny, prepubescent girls, but on the other hand it's powerful when applied to someone like Alicia Sacramone, who is 20 and the most visibly post-pubescent gymnast I've ever seen (I'm talking about women of course; all the men are legal). I'm putting her on my Athletic Dream Girls list next to Katarina Witt.

Questionable Practices. Returning to Womens' Gymnastics, there's no way you're going to get me to believe that all the Chinese gymnasts are 16, which has been the minimum age for about 10 years now. Apparently there's some evidence they're younger though the Chinese government has furnished "documentation" to show they're eligible. I just can't believe it. Some of those girls don't look 12 to me. I note also that the judging seems to favor the Chinese. In my, admittedly inexpert, view, some of the scores for American gymnasts (esp. Liukin's bars and beam scores) were oddly low. Bela Karolyi himself, long retired from coaching, mentioned to Bob "Mr. Treacle" Costas that he couldn't understand where some of the point deductions were coming from.

NBC. Once again US coverage blows. I've mostly been watching the Canadian coverage, which is vastly superior. They don't just show snippets featuring Americans and they cover events many Americans are probably unaware of. Yesterday there was a story about Womens' Trap shooting and last weekend I watched the Korean Womens' Archery team kick ass. They fully covered the medal for that guy from Togo (sorry guy). And of course, there are the completely sappy interludes and personal stories that NBC covers in nauseating detail. I don't mind catching some personal data on the athletes, but I want it reasonably short and lacking the pathos. Thankfully, the sappiness is now being monitored by slate.com. Their geeks have tapped the closed-captioning feeds and are scoring sappiness based on the frequency of words, such as "pride" and "mother", that function as sap indicators. Check it out.

Why is it so often the case the technical decisions get made by people who clearly lack any real expertise?

Well I suppose I know why, but I'm taking a minute to whine about it anyway.

In our office I've elected to solve a data transfer issue by setting up a VPN (please refer to Wikipedia) with the vendor in question. It'll cost us nothing and we'll have live, on-demand access to the vendor's database.

Meanwhile, company HQ has a secure server system that allows vendors to upload files. It works well but requires the vendors to set up accounts, install client software and learn to use it.

For our office, the VPN is certainly the more elegant and useful solution. We don't need to transfer static files because we can get live data instantly through the VPN. The process can also be cleanly automated. But today we got a very terse email from the HQ VP who's demanded to know why we aren't using the secure server.

So my reaction was something like, Good god man, edit for tone! Then I started getting annoyed. This guy is a medical doctor and statistician. Why does he presume to tell me how to transfer data? Do I tell him how to write a clinical trial protocol?

No. No, I don't, and I don't care to be second-guessed by a man who hasn't a tenth of my expertise.

At every office where I've been employed there's always been some Clueless Baby Boomer ("CuBBies" -> new pop buzzword), clearly out of his depth, demanding that we do things his way. It is so tiring. I have ennui.

This post is going nowhere though, so I'll have to hang it up for now.