9/12/17
i'm thankful always when monday is over. i'm thankful that this monday went by quickly and productively. i'm thankful that i have a flexible schedule and so have divided up my day in two/two and a half hour chunks of work with hour/hour and a half breaks in between them, which helps keep my energy up and makes the day go by faster. i'm thankful to have opened my computer to a slack message from a coworker praising a choice i had made in a script i made to simplify reading our logging software. i'm thankful to have taken over a customer who had been rude and not listened to two of my coworkers. i'm thankful that though i had customers who were rude to me, those interactions are ephemeral but i am stable, a constant.
i'm thankful for ellen ullman's life in code, which i started yesterday and which is amazing so far. i'm thankful for her pointed descriptions about how women in technology are penalized for being more well-rounded human beings than their male counterparts, for her fears about engineering culture becoming hegemonic mass culture, for her beautiful exploration of the paradoxes of being close to the machine:
Ironically, those of us who most believe in physical, operational eloquence are the very ones most cut off from the body. To build the working thing that is a program, we perform 'labor' that is sedentary to the point of near immobility, and we must give ourselves up almost entirely to language. Believers in the functional, nonverbal worth of things, we live in a world where waving one's arms accomplishes nothing, and where we must write, write, write in odd programming languages and email. Software engineering is an oxymoron. We are engineers but we don't build anything in the physical sense of the word. We thing. We type. It's all grammar.
"Women are supposed to prefer talking. I've been told that women have trouble as engineers because we'd rather relate to people than to machines. This is a thorough misconception. The fact that I can talk to people in no way obviates my desire (yes, desire) to handle a fine machine. I drive a fast car with a big engine. An old Leica camera—miracle of graceful glass and velvety metal—sits in my palm as if part of me. I tried piloting a plane just to touch it: taking the yoke into my hands and banking into a turn gave me the indescribable pleasure of holding a powerful machine while it held me. I'm an engineer for the same reason anyone is an engineer: a certain love for the intricate lives of things, a belief in a functional definition of reality. I do believe that the operational definition of a thing—how it works—is its most eloquent self-expression
Ironically, those of us who most believe in physical, operational eloquence are the very ones most cut off from the body. To build the working thing that is a program, we perform 'labor' that is sedentary to the point of near immobility, and we must give ourselves up almost entirely to language. Believers in the functional, nonverbal worth of things, we live in a world where waving one's arms accomplishes nothing, and where we must write, write, write in odd programming languages and email. Software engineering is an oxymoron. We are engineers but we don't build anything in the physical sense of the word. We thing. We type. It's all grammar.
Cut off from real working things, we construct a substitute object: the program. We treat it as if it could be specified like machinery and assembled out of standard parts. We say we 'engineered' it; when we put the pieces of code together, we call it ' a build.' And cut off from the real body, we construct a substitute body: ourselves online. We treat it as if it were our actual self, our real life. Over time, it does indeed become our life."
His subject heading was 'Thank you!' He was grateful for the 'lovely, wonderful' evening, he wrote. 'Before going to bed, I started reading the essay you gave me,' he went on to say. He wanted to call me in the morning but didn't get to sleep until 4:00 a.m., woke up late, then rushed from meeting to meeting.
i'm thankful for the beautiful story she tells early in the book about the strange intimacy of an email relationship that began with her emailing a coworker in the middle of the night and him responding immediately, suddenly present, at her fingertips. i'm thankful for the moment, after she and her digital paramour finally got together in person and had a strange and awkward date, when they reconnected through the wires:
"For a few hours the next morning, I let myself feel the disappointment. Then, before noon, the email from Karl resumed.
"For a few hours the next morning, I let myself feel the disappointment. Then, before noon, the email from Karl resumed.
His subject heading was 'Thank you!' He was grateful for the 'lovely, wonderful' evening, he wrote. 'Before going to bed, I started reading the essay you gave me,' he went on to say. He wanted to call me in the morning but didn't get to sleep until 4:00 a.m., woke up late, then rushed from meeting to meeting.
I wrote back to thank him in turn. I said that when we walked on the beach I could smell and feel the storm heading for us across the Pacific. How, when the rain's ruckus woke me up in the night, I didn't mind; how I fell back to sleep thinking: Rain, i was expecting you.
Immediately the body in the machine had returned us to each other. In this interchange there is the memory of the beach, its feel and smell, mentions of bed and sleep. 'Bed,' a word we would never say in actual presence, a kind of touch by word that we could only do with our machines."
i'm thankful for the beautiful coda she added to that chapter:
"Two months later, my contract came to an end. Karl and I exchanged messages for a while, then, without our making any agreements about it, we stopped.
"Two months later, my contract came to an end. Karl and I exchanged messages for a while, then, without our making any agreements about it, we stopped.
As time went by, I no longer thought about Karl. Then one day I came across an old article from The New York Times. The Coast Guard was turning off its Morse code equipment. At 7:19 p.m. on Friday, March 31, 1995, stations in Norfolk, Boston, Miami, New Orleans, San Francisco, Honolulu, and Kodiak, Alaska, made their final transmissions and simultaneously signed off.
'Radiomen' would henceforth be called 'telecommunications technicians.' The dots and dashes of S-O-S would no longer be the universal message of disaster. Ships at sea would now hear about storms and relay distress signals via the Global Maritime Distress and Safety System, which includes 'a satellite-relayed signal giving the ship's location.' Signal repeater: just as Karl had thought on the beach that night. I thought about writing to tell him, but no, I told myself to forget about Karl and nights and beaches.
Veteran radiomen gathered to mourn the passing of the Morse code. 'Dots and dashes are probably the easiest things to detect bouncing off the atmosphere,' said one. And I remembered the stormy nights, when Eugene's antenna could not penetrate the cloud cover. He would have to resort to code, which he liked to say aloud as he transmitted: "Dit-dit-dah, dit-dah-dah.'
One ten-year radioman, Petty Officer Tony Turner, talked about losing the feel of the sender. The transmission came 'through the air, into another man's ear,' he said. The code had a personality to it, a signature in the touch and rhythm on the key. For Turner, the signature's origin was no mystery: 'It's coming from a person's hand.'"
i'm thankful to try to find the personality to it, the signature in the touch and rhythm on the key. i'm thankful to send this to you from my hand. i'm thankful you will tap the key or stroke the touchpad or move the mouse and click down with the index finger of your dominate and these words of mine will appear to you, and i'm thankful that though those words are not me, or not all of me, they also are me, a mirage of presence in the desert of dead language. i'm thankful that mirages being illusions doesn't keep them from being beautiful.
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