Cockeyed Optimist

It’s a mixed blessing to be an obsessive-compulsive, even a mild one.

Two days ago I received notification that my web hosting had been set up, so I happily uploaded my WordPress set-up from my desktop machine, where I had been practicing posting and all the rest (all the posts you see here previous to this one were done there). I also uploaded my SQL database, after having to make several phone calls to the other end of the country (I live in Brisbane, and the web site people are in Perth - thousands of km away). The support emails will come through in a day or two, I’m sure.

Of course I had done something wrong, and it took a lot of fiddling to get it right. First of all, the main page came up OK, but when I navigated to another page it went to the corresponding page on my desktop blog installation instead; not what I wanted at all. Eventually I found that the remote host was using “localhost” as its location, and so was my Mac, so the poor thing was getting confused.

So, after a lot of false starts and fooling about, I went through the database changing all instances of “localhost” to the URL of my website. Eventually, about midday today, I got it to work properly, except that it frequently complains it can’t find the database. I found that I could ignore that error page and simply keep hitting the refresh button on my browser, and after 2 or 3 of these, the right page comes up.

Great! I happily browsed through all my previous posts, had a look at the blogroll and tried the links embedded in some of the posts, everything seemed fine (instead of the aforementioned reluctance to show the pages).So, let’s do some posting - Oh no, now the #@$%& login doesn’t work!

To cut a long story short, I tracked down the problem - just a wrong password, and here we are, happily blogging.

Thank you linesmen, thank you ball-boys.

I was, and remain, very impressed by a book I read recently, by Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking.

His thesis is, I suppose (roughly speaking), that our conscious interpretations of what we see, hear and experience are only part of the story. Underneath the surface, there are processes going on that we can take advantage of, providing we learn to tap into them.

Gladwell starts by relating a case that illustrates what he’s suggesting; how several art experts had misgivings about an apparently authentic antiquity, a marble statue of a youth from the 6th century BC, that was being offered to the Getty Museum in California for a substantial sum. They “couldn’t put their fingers” on what was bothering them - on most criteria the statue checked out as genuine; but, in the event, it was indeed shown to be a clever forgery. What Gladwell claims is that there were a number of features that these experts had registered unconsciously, and because there seemed to be no logic to them, or any concrete evidence, they had been disregarded.

The book continues with accounts of a varied list of situations where this sort of concealed interpretation of sensory inputs enabled decisions to be made that, to all outward appearances, were based on nothing more than “hunches”. They cover such diverse fields as how a tennis coach could reliably know when a double fault was coming up; how too much evidence can get in the way of accurate diagnosis of heart problems; how product testing of the traditional kind can lead to marketing disasters, while a few key people to whom they “felt right” could come up with better decisions.

Gladwell does not rest on this series of case studies, however; he builds on them, and on evidence from other sources, to flesh out his convincing thesis. He is a fine writer, easy to follow but scrupulous in his argument; he has been writing substantial articles for the New Yorker for some years, and published in 2000 another fascinating book, “The Tipping Point”. Maybe I’ll post about that later, meanwhile, you can look up his website.

[Later - I did post about it: here.]

What can we bring away from this book?

The day after I started reading “Blink”, I played tennis with my sister, as I do a couple of times a week. It’s not a very serious level of tennis, but we enjoy it and it makes us run about. Now I’m the sort of person who tends to analyse a lot - I was an academic for 35 years, and an engineer before that - so I usually find myself working out in my head how to play each shot. But that day, with the ideas from the book still in my head, I tried to give up thinking and just react. I can’t claim it transformed my tennis into something on another plane, but it did seem to help - I think I won more than my normal proportion of games that morning. I shall have to remember to do it (or NOT do it) on a regular basis.

Going back to Gladwell’s first example, the dodgy antiquity, the experts could have their ‘hunches’ because they were experts. Although they were unaware of their thought processes, these unconscious deductions would not have been possible if they had nothing to work on. While they were applying the tests for authenticity they were all familiar with, and coming up empty, there was this parallel set of processes going on behind the scenes. This is not the same unconscious behaviour that makes us pull our finger away ‘instinctively’ when we touch a hot surface; everybody has that built-in from birth, a legacy, it is said, from our reptilian ancestors.

In a similar way, I have come to believe that top-flight tennis players must be relying on their unconscious as they play; but, unlike me, they possess a whole body of experience that has been built up from playing and being coached over the years. Coaching is aimed not simply at teaching players to reason - to have a game plan - but mainly to reinforce bodily skills and to develop those inherent resources that will enable them to play without thinking up front. There’s no time to analyse when you are playing hard.

I’m sure, like me, that you’ve had the experience of losing track of an important document on your computer. Of course, there are ways of tracking it down, and the hints that follow will help with this. But mainly they will help you not to lose track in the first place.

In no particular order of importance, here are a few things you can do:

1. Give the file a meaningful name: Don’t be lazy and call it ‘letter’, or let your word processor make up a filename for you (otherwise you’ll finish with a lot of ‘Dear Johns’). A file name like ‘John Smith congrats on his graduation’ tells you much more.
2. Put it somewhere sensible: Again, don’t let the word processor put it in a default location, put it in a folder that again has a useful name, like ‘Letters to friends and family’ (if you have any).
3. Manage those folders: If you set up a number of folders with good names, this is fine while there are only a few, but if they multiply, you’ll finish up with chaos. What you need is a hierarchy: ‘Correspondence’, a place for all your letter folders; ‘Saved emails’, ‘Software manuals’ and so on - whatever suits your way of working.

The press and tv have been making much in recent times of the need for everyone, including the elderly, to keep going if they want to keep going. Even the government (here in Australia, anyway; don’t know about elsewhere) has jumped on this bandwagon, though it’s possible to suspect that they might have ulterior motives.

The message amounts to this: when you retire, don’t relax too much. There is plenty of evidence, so it is claimed, that those who take on new work or activities, or develop new interests, stay healthier than those who retire to their holiday shack on the coast and fish (that is, do nothing).

I think I might qualify as a positive example. I left a full-time career at a university in 1995, when I was 62. After a few months accompanying my wife and son on a very enjoyable world trip (she was working, on an academic sabbatical), I returned home and looked for ways of occupying myself and bringing in some income to supplement my superannuation. I had a couple of false starts: trying multi-level marketing of dietary supplements (made one sale, to an ex-colleague); trying to sell a scholarship package, a very good one (ASG - we had our son enrolled since age 2, and it was very useful when he was at high school and when he started university a couple of years ago) - again no sales. I really don’t think I have the right personality for face-to-face or telephone selling.

Then I picked up a line that I had been doing very intermittently, since before I left the university: proof-reading and editing. I did a few private jobs, mainly editing books for people I knew at the university, until my contacts started to run out, and then I joined Yaro Starak’s BetterEdit, which turned out to be a very good decision, in several ways. Since then I have been editing student work, ranging from 1500 word essays to 70,000 word doctoral theses. The work is engaging, my clients are grateful, and it brings in some money. 

And, very recently, I have started blogging, with Yaro Starak as my mentor; we shall see …

So, as the experts recommend, I’m not doing nothing and I’ve got some highly-engaging interests; I also try to exercise regularly - I play tennis a couple of times a week, and I attempt to walk every day.

My dog Dylan is another example: he is over 12 years old, which is elderly for a dog, especially a big one (he is a German Shorthaired Pointer), and he has a very engaging hobby, which also makes him exercise - he hunts possums around the house, in a state of great excitement when he spots one. Unfortunately he has caught a couple, neither of which I managed to get to the vet in time, I’m sorry to say.

If you want to work with HTML, XML or their descendants, you can always, of course, particularly if you are a macho type, cut your code directly in a bare-bones text editor (this is also a perfectly OK way for anyone to make smallish modifications to existing files). But you have to be pretty expert to produce a whole web page from scratch like this.  

There are, of course, a number of commercial packages for the general non-geek to use for producing web pages; I have used, in my time, Adobe PageMill (superseded long ago, with the introduction of Adobe GoLive) and Macromedia’s DreamWeaver (now also owned by Adobe). These are best suited for occasional users, rather than for ‘serious’ web designers, but they certainly have their advantages. DreamWeaver also incorporates a convenient FTP function for uploading your site to a server. 

But there are others available which have their points; I have recently used a couple of these.  

Amaya – a free open-source web editor and browser, available for Linux, Windows and MacOS X. In its main screen there is a file-browsing panel, a panel with some of the most useful HTML tags, that you can apply to selected text by clicking, and palettes of Math characters and other symbols for easy insertion. The file you are working on can be viewed as code and/or as a (not very accurate) visual representation. Fortunately, you can also preview the file with any of your browsers, and get an accurate view.There are further features, of course, including the facility to save individual files straight to a server, but no extensive FTP capability.  Have a look at Amaya, it’s downloadable and free! But now, I have migrated to Coda, see next.  

Coda. As it says on the site, this  package incorporates “text editor + transmit + css editor + terminal + books + more”; but it is only for MAC OS X, 10.4+ (pity about you PC users!). A free 30-day trial is available, and then it cost me $79. In the main screen, there is a file-browsing panel, and editing and previewing screens for the file you are producing; the preview is accurate, because it uses your preferred browser, while not exiting Coda. There is also a nice visual CSS editing screen, with drop-downs to change any of the attributes of the CSS file. There is also a terminal and a FTP facility to communicate with your remote site (a bit like DreamWeaver, but somehow more professional-looking).  It has built-in ‘text-books’ for HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP. These are very comprehensive, fully hyper-linked references, which open up within Coda.  

If (and only if) you are a Mac user, try it out!

In my life as an editor, I get to see lots of word-processing files, written mostly by students, but also by a range of other authors.

What I see, all the time, is that blank lines are used to separate paragraphs (not TOO bad), and, more seriously, they are used to pad out the ends of pages, so the next section, or chapter or whatever, can start at the top of a nice new page. What this means is that if there are any deletions or additions done later, this spoils the whole effect, and the writer has to laboriously add or delete blank lines to put it right.

1.  To separate paragraphs visually, it is much better to use a paragraph style with built-in space (before or after, or both). In Microsoft Word this can be done using the menu item: Format/Paragraph. Then you can dispense with the blank line you were using before.
2. Instead of 10, 20 or 30 blank lines at the end of a page, you can insert a Page Break (In Word, use the menu item: Insert/Break/Page Break). This will take you gracefully to a new page.
3. And, finally, if you want a certain level of heading (for chapters or major sections, for instance) always to start at the top of a page, you can add this feature to the heading style. In Word, the appropriate menu item is under: Format/Paragraph/Line and Page Breaks.

Now you can go for it, and your readers (and editors) will bless you!