Home of the Snarkmaiden

So, Hal has reminded me that having all my old journal posts saved only at a Russian-owned journaling site might make them vulnerable to the repercussions of our current geopolitical situation.  Fair point.  So I've taken the precaution of importing all my old posts over to Dreamwidth so that all these snapshots of former days needn't disappear even if this journal does.  Heck, I might even start journaling again, though mostly, I suspect, over there.

My phone was stolen on Monday.

I was distracted at the time, so I wasn't 100% sure it was theft because anybody can do stupid shit when distracted. But I was like 98% sure, because I hadn't gotten far from the point of loss and my phone was absolutely, positively, completely not there. It had a bright pink flip cover, so it's pretty hard to miss.

So I filed a report with my insurer to start the process of getting a new phone. I tried to file online, but their website kept giving error messages toward the end of the data entry process. I tried a different browser, just in case, but got the same file error message. So I had to file by phone. I reported the error message through an online webform (that worked fine) and then called Assurant. That seemed to go fine, and the operator told me that she would e-mail me a "Proof of Loss" form and instructions for same, because when you file a loss/stolen claim you have to say "Mother May I?" while froghopping widdershins on one foot, and seal an oath in blood, as protective nostrum in case you're trying to pull some scam on the insurance company. The form was supposed to come within 5 minutes to an hour. Never arrives. So I go online again, requesting a re-send. No response. I guess I could have called again, but by this time they had worn me down for the day.

Next morning, I finally get an e-mail response to my request for a re-send of the "Proof of Loss" form saying the form had already been sent. Hmm. Back in my e-mail in-box, yes, yes it had. Whole seconds before the response to my online request. Once I open the form attachment the scales fall. Apparently, the woman who took my claim misspelled my name and so by extension presumably spelled my e-mail address wrong. Original send got lost in the ether. No, by the way, it wasn't my first name she got wrong. I always spell that for people. She misspelled "O'Brien." Oh, Eff me.

So it was Tuesday before I completed filing my insurance claim, and paying the usurious deductible. The Fairy Godmother Department finally gets off the bench and the replacement phone shipped out the same day, arrived yesterday. Whereupon Practical Jokes tags in again for a final go: when I called T-Mobile to transfer my number to the new SIM card, get transferred three times and put through multiple identity confirmation confirmations, it turns out that the final confirmation involves texting a verification code to me, and they can't text that to the phone I'm activating the SIM card on so if I don't have the other phone on the account nearby (I don't, it's Hal's, he's at work) they can't send it and I'll have to go in to a store to activate. Wowsers. What do people with only one phone on their account do? Go in to the damn' T-Mobile store, I guess.

By this time, it's gotten to be just after 8:00 and the local store (naturally) closed at 8:00 sharp. So, I hie me out into the freezing gale and drive up to the East Hill store where, thankfully, the activation process is quick, simple, and painless.

Also, thankfully, I for some inexplicable reason decided to charge my new phone on the kitchen counter last night, rather than in the more usual spot on the bed stand right next to my head. That was lucky because around 1:00 in the morning, some woman acquainted with the guy who has my phone started calling my cell number at intervals throughout the wee hours. The one I actually answered came in at 6:15 but there had been a half dozen before it. I explained to her, and the next caller for the same guy, that the person they were trying to reach had my stolen phone but now that I had replaced it and wrested back control of my number he could no longer be reached at it. Asshole. So at least now I'm 100% sure it was theft.

But this started out as a post about silver linings. There are silver linings. For one thing, it looks like eBay can cough up a replacement OEM S-View flip cover case for the replaced phone, and that makes me happy. I really prefer the S-View style because it has a handy little window you can see the time and weather through even when the cover is closed. But the really exciting discovery as I was downloading apps and setting them up to achieve something like my preferred configuration was realizing that all the handwritten notes in S Note that had been on prior phones and I had thought lost forever turn out to be archived in the cloud by Evernote. I didn't realize the two applications talked to each other. A whole host of little scribbled story ideas and observations that I could never have reconstructed in a million years are mine again. So there's most definitely that. Which enables me to share this tidbit of business:

Misheard from an eavesdropped conversation at the pub meet: "Prostituting attorney."
"They wear the really big wigs."
"And glitter. Lots of glitter."

Here's to finding glitter linings.

This morning I dreamed that a man came to my door, asking if he could take a look at some books that he had seen through my window. I told him that the books weren't really in my house, they only appeared to be there. They were visible when you looked in through the window, but not from inside the house. They were, I explained, due to a ghost -- various things around the house would appear to be there that really weren't. These were signs that the house was haunted. About as I said this, it occurred to me that the man at my door was the ghost. I also realized, in the way that you do in dreams, that he needed to find a way to get to those ghost books to get a crucial piece of information, and that I was going to have to help him. And then I woke up.

The afterimage of the dream feels like the kernel of a story to me. I wonder if I'll write it?

Today I am doing a bit of housekeeping, mostly of the non-literal sort. Little projects I meant to take care of sooner, but didn't, like getting all the photos from the Paris trip copied onto my hard drive -- more of a chore than I'd hoped because for some reason my card reader at home refuses to read one of my two SD cards without formatting it first, and as you can imagine, I'm not loving the idea of formatting a card full of photos, even if most of them are backed up on my laptop. So instead I'm using my laptop to transfer the photos to a known USB drive and porting them over that way. I would just send them over the house network, but for some reason the network won't let my laptop access my desktop and my support guy is still asleep. Oh, woe, the complications of modern life. I'm sure someone will chime in to explain how none of this would ever ever happen if I used Apple systems but 1) I don't actually believe that and 2)bite me.

All of this project was precipitated by my getting a mug of tea earlier and being reminded that I wanted to take a picture of my Whitechapel Bell Foundry mug next to my Bofors 350th Anniversary mug, in commemoration of the sad shut down of Britain's oldest operating manufacturing business, and still hadn't done that, and so I got the mugs out and took the pictures, only to discover that I had managed to grab the wrong Nikon and so my card reader wouldn't read the card in question, because see previous paragraph. Quite a lot of bother just to be able to post a picture to Facebook. On the other hand, I've been wanting to make sure my vacation photos are properly backed up and that SD card formatted to use, so it's all stuff wot needed doin'.

How do you train a dog to do what you want when you ask it? This does not seem like a political question, but bear with me.

There are a great many techniques for training dogs, and historically they often involved punishing "bad" behavior: shouting, threats, violent leash jerks, swatting with newspapers, and so forth. These techniques work, but perhaps mostly because dogs are incredibly biddable animals. They don't tend to work well with "difficult" dogs (or, indeed, with "difficult" children). The range of approaches for training animals who are, unlike dogs, too large and powerful to readily correct by force is much narrower. When you are training, say, a dolphin or an orca, applying violent correction is impractical, and potentially lethal for the trainer. So some highly effective, positive reinforcement training methods emerged in part out of human beings learning to train cetaceans to do tricks, and these methods work well when applied to dogs, too. The neat thing about that is that along the way, we learned that positive reinforcement works better than negative, not just for whales and dogs, but for pretty much anything with a central nervous system, including planaria, and human beings.

The key to these methods lies in "shaping" the behavior you want by reinforcing things the trainee does spontaneously, using immediate application of a positive reward when the trainee does something, anything really, in the direction of the desired behavior. At first you reward whenever the trainee does something close to what you want. Then only if the behavior is closer to what you want. Then only when it's exactly what you want. And then only occasionally even when it's exactly what you want. This produces reliable execution of exactly what you want from your trainee. The main art lies in finding what reward the trainee is most responsive to.

There are stories of classes of students training their professors using positive reinforcement. One class of colluding students trained their instructor to lecture with his hands on his head by using active listening (nodding, smiling, acting attentive and engaged, leaning forward in their seats, etc.) whenever his hands moved higher, and acting bored and inattentive whenever they moved lower. Karen Pryor has taught behavioral shaping to all sorts of groups, and when she taught a class of teens, some of them apparently took the techniques home and retrained their own parents. And I know from direct family experience that my aunt turned my hyperactive monster of a cousin into the most polite, interested, engaged and respectful teenager I ever met when she switched to only ever using praise with him. So yeah, this stuff, it works on human beings.

Okay, so that's background I had in my head, owing much to Karen Pryor's book Don't Shoot the Dog: The New Art of Teaching and Training, which I commend to you if you are ever in a position to teach, train, or lead other creatures with a central nervous system.

Then I read a couple of unconnected (well, unconnected, except insofar as they are both responses to the current US political circumstance) posts in my Facebook feed.

First, Avedon Carol wonders out loud whether it mightn't be a good idea to tweet sensible suggestions to Donald Trump in hopes of his taking up some. At the very least, it couldn't hurt. To the response that Trump is not that interested in what people tweet of or to him, she says, "Oh, yes he is, that's why he is constantly retweeting anything positive someone says about him and also constantly attacking people for negative tweets." Note that it's positive and negative tweets he specifically responds to. I'll get back to that.

The second post was a reblogging of Charles M. Blow's op ed piece in the New York Times, "No, Trump, We Can't Just Get Along," in which Blow says, among other things, "You don't get a pat on the back for ratcheting down from rabid..."

And my first thought was, "No, but he should." Not because that's what he deserves, but because that's what he needs. And because if he gets what he needs when he takes steps in the right direction, he might just take more such steps. I may well be wrong, but it seems to me you don't get to be Donald Trump without needing just an assload of positive reinforcement. Certainly he seems to respond to attention. And creatures that respond to attention can be trained.

It seems to me that we are living in a potentially pivotal moment. The ability of many, many people to impact anyone who pays attention to their Twitter stream is demonstrably great. Huge, in fact. Admittedly, most of the examples we've seen have been negative. But that doesn't mean the same aggregation of individual action could't be used for good, if there were a collective will to do so. And we have a President Elect who appears to be particularly susceptible to the power of public attention, even childishly so.

What I'm hinting at here is a simple action that we can all take: tweet directed, training praise at Trump. The downside is that unlike attending a protest (which it's perfectly compatible with, by the way), it will not be a big collective feel-good moment. It isn't cathartic. It doesn't provide the galvanic thrill of vindictive bile. It's work. It's incremental. It's a process. It's something that would require attention and going back to, day in and day out. It's more like a chore. Like doing dishes, or training a puppy. It takes a grown up to swallow their feelings and pick up the poop, clean the floor, and skip the punishment in favor of waiting to praise the puppy the next time she does her business outside. Or at least on the designated pad. Or closer to the pad or the door. And then to iterate that process until your dog always poops outdoors. But that is how you train a puppy. And when the puppy in question is far too large and powerful to be trainable by punitive methods, training it with positive feedback is probably your best bet anyhow. And a lot of grownups willing to swallow their feelings long enough to send a positive tweet whenever anything remotely positive comes out of the White House is just possibly one way to do it.

So yeah. I have to start paying attention to Twitter. Because I mean to praise the hell out of Mr. Trump whenever he does something that moves him closer to where I want him to be. When he backs down on terrible campaign promises, I will praise him for his maturity and vision. When he reflects that the general who told him torture doesn't really work, and a pack of smokes and a sixpack will get better information, is a great guy and probably right, I will praise the living crap out of him. And I hope you will join me. Because it will take a lot of us working together to retrain a President. But with enough of us on task, it could make a crucial difference. At the very least, it couldn't hurt to try.

Well, so I was out in the back picking up apples from the lawn, like you do, and there was another of those rustle-rustle-THUMP! noises that are the syncopated seasonal music in my yard, accompanying the liberation of another apple from the tree and the simultaneous creation of a deadly, apple-shaped kinetic energy bomb.

Only this time it was more of a rustle-rustle-plop than usual. I look up from my crouch to see an adolescent squirrel has fallen out of our big apple tree and landed on the back stoop. After a stunned moment or two, she managed to swarm back up into the tree by way of a propped shovel, the chain link fence, and the straggly rosemary bush, and thus resume playing chase with another similarly-sized squirrel.

Which may be part of why the apples are falling at such a precipitous rate: the squirrels are playing tag all over the tree. I'm sure Kaylee and Tinka both are very sad not to have been out with me at the time. Look Ma, it's rainin' squirrels...

"Whose elephant is that on top of the fridge?"

It did actually make perfect sense in context. Ish.

Tonight I'm playing with my Christmas presents. In particular, the Pyle retro-look turntable (CD-player, tape deck, AM/FM radio, streaming blue tooth bookshelf stereo) that I very broadly hinted to Hal I wanted. And he got it for me, so yayz. I really, really wanted to be able to play music in the living room, and now I can.

Since we moved into the house, we haven't really had an audio system as such set up in the living room for lack of space on top of the entertainment center, and I don't even remember the last time we actually had a turntable hooked up. Admittedly, there's the option of playing single CDs in the DVD player, but that's fiddly, and while the Roku can pull in Pandora, it's set up for Hal's stations which tend to be cluttered up with jazz and the squally stylings of Dave Alvin and whatnot. Ugh. Which has largely meant that I don't listen to music nearly as much as I used to do. Streaming audio on my computer just doesn't fit my work style much of the time, and requires me to actally be in my study to hear it. It always seems like such a goddamned lot of fuss to wade through the zillions of duplicate tracks and assorted cruft in MediaMonkey to load new songs onto my phone or my little mp3 player, and so I don't. Besides, for whatever reasons of childhood imprinting, and the need to be able to dance to my tunes, my lizard brain knows that the music should be housed in the living room.

And now, it is. The huge thing about this is that I can play the rare, oddball LPs that I managed at the 11th hour to find and rescue before we sold my parents house. I had been looking for them for years since my folks moved permanently up to Mariposa, and only found them during the mad final week when we cleaned out the house for sale. These are items so obscure, you can't even find most of the stuff on YouTube: an Israeli folk duo from the late '50s, a Swedish electrified folk group from the early '70s, and like that. The songs of my childhood. Now available in my living room as fresh as the last time I heard them, complete with that authentic analog pop and hiss. It's lovely. But my goodness a standard LP side is short. I had forgotten how short.

I've been continuing to upload and edit photos from our October trip to flickr. I'm just finishing up the photos from Ravenna, and was pleased with how well the Aviary app was able to bring out the color and detail in the amazing Byzantine mosaics in the Basilica of San Vitale, and the Mausoleo Galla Placida. The lush, complex, gradient greens and rich cobalt blues shine right out of the images with a bit of tweaking of the saturation and brightness filters. But most amazing is the degree to which the sharpness filter compensates for the fuzz of handheld photography in dim light. It's just magical watching the photo I wanted pop out of the one I took, especially the ones from the mausoleum whose banded alabaster windows are all quite small and not especially numerous.

Among the photos, this one keeps catching my eye, though, because there's something about the graphical, almost 3-dimensional, quality of the mosaics that make the picture visually ambiguous, or paradoxical. Like the famous visual paradoxes of Maurits Escher or the old woman/young miss, I often see the two different, mutually exclusive possibilities: here the sunburst seems at first as if it's projecting upward, and the undersides of the arches look domed towards the viewer momentarily before the image snaps into place and I can see that the sunburst is actually receding away, above the concave arches.

Weird. Does it have the same effect for you?



And if the image does doe that for you, you can see the section in its context in the image below, which may help clarify the actual orientation for you:

Crossing the transit plaza this morning, I heard the distinctive cries of a juvenile gull clamoring to be fed by an adult. I glanced over to spot an adult gull fussing with some prize in its beak, and yes, sure enough, a gray-mottled juvenile waddling around it, requesting the morsel. About then was when I realized that the "morsel" was an entire pigeon, which the adult gull had clamped in its beak. The pigeon was still fluttering erratically, as the gull gave it another shake. The young gull ducked its head after the prize, begging to be fed. A small cluster of other pigeons formed a staring circle around the spectacle, mesmerized or unconcerned, I don't know which. I felt my gorge rise a little and dove directly into my elevator down to the tunnel platform, struggling to make sense of the image still impressed on my retina.

I don't quite get it, I guess. Was I witness to some sort of small episode of species evolution? Have gulls figured out that if they can eat fish they can eat smaller birds, as well? No reason why not, I guess. Some raptors do, and reputedly crows do as well, but it's not what I'm used to expecting from seagulls. I suppose it's a niche that's been waiting to be filled -- an urban bird that preys on other urban birds, and it would probably be good for urban environments to have pigeons subject to natural predation -- but it's going to take some getting used to if this is the sign of a new normal.