Only a matter of time...

I first saw this years ago and never really forgot about it.

Old person, come over here and teach my kids how to use technology

Kids wouldn't grow up knowing how to use technology unless they had a bunch of old people around to show them how it all works.

It sounds silly, but that seems to be the perpetual position of the public education system. I don't understand why it's not challenged more often, especially considering the expense of outfitting schools with "technology" and keeping it constantly upgraded.

There are some parallels between this and the notion of an undergraduate business administration degree. You come out of school with a business administration degree but no real business to administer when you get there. Business is something you wrap around a basic competence to make it saleable, not really a competence in itself. Professional management may have something to say about that, but I've never seen anything of quality come from an arrangement like that.

Likewise, kids have technology all covered. If you teach them nothing about it, they'll grow up somehow knowing how to use it because they have an interest and because it's now required to functional socially. But what they won't necessarily know about is how to do productive or useful things with it, and this seems to be a topic quite separate from use of the technology itself.

What would an old person more likely be able to help a child with? How to use a computer, or how to go about asking the right questions, thinking critically, and entering into meaningful experience?

It seems like schools could forever guide these timeless abilities without ever having a computer enter their classroom. It'd be cheaper, and probably more beneficial. The kids would figure out how to get it into the computer. It's more of a challenge for the old person.

Can it really be true that the reason such an "old-fashioned" idea fails to gain traction is that there's more effort involved, yet so little opportunity for graft?

Bygone days, indeed.

Everyone has opinions on education because everyone went to school at some point in their life, so that makes it even more surprising to me that the above idea doesn't have more currency.

The raven that refused to sing

More and more, I'm finding that I can agree with certain new music but not with the way it's recorded, and not with how the life and blood is squeezed out of it by having all of the knobs turned up, the dynamics expunged, and all oxygen in the room consumed so that there's no space for anything else.

This is most apparent with the 80s revival currently taking place. It looks, moves, and sounds a lot like the 80s, but it doesn't feel like it. It's too close to your eardrums, and the space between the music and your eardrums is where feeling settles in (I assume illicit drugs can overcome this temporarily [see: techno music, clubbing]).

It's all just too loud.

Here's one that gets it right:

Watch the best album of 2013 being made...

Thankful (2012)

With Thanksgiving 2012 scheduled for tomorrow -- at least in Canada -- I want to list the things I'm thankful for this year in the most honest and unsentimental way possible:

• autumn weather: for good nights of sleep, frosty mornings, and making me feel better about returning to indoor pursuits
• natural gas: for making me not have to panic about the approaching winter, and not have to gather and cut firewood
• oil: that lovely black, natural, and organic product that lets me be able to afford to live so far from the congested area in which I work, and makes most of the other things I enjoy possible, when you get right down to it
• having a normal, traditional family: I know it's not trendy anymore, but it's the best foundation you can have.
• the free market: for keeping food affordable, for providing variety, and for making things that shouldn't be available year-round available year-round
• the global supply chain: for giving me apples when the crop failed in Ontario and hardly raising the price at all
• China and India, in collaboration with the free market: for bringing more people out of poverty by far than any organization I've ever donated money to.
• Steven Wilson: thanks for Porcupine Tree, Storm Corrosion, your solo work in particular, and pretty much everything else you've done
• Opeth: thanks for making me find some value in death metal by applying it only sparingly and making it beautiful by surrounding it by beautiful music, and especially for "Heritage", where you left it out altogether
• Amazon Kindle: for letting me take books with me to places that I'd never normally take them because they were so big. I just wish you'd let me lend books to people, and the Kindle book should never be more expensive than the paper one.
• Microsoft: for getting your act together with Windows 8 and giving me a reason to avoid buying an iPad. I'm not sure I'll easily forget that you killed off Media Center, but I suppose I understand
• Squeezebox: such an amazing music distribution system, flexible beyond what most people have a right to expect. It was inevitable but still saddening that Logitech destroyed your future.
• Halloween III on Blu-Ray: the 30th Silver Shamrock edition with high-def mono soundtrack made it worth the wait
• work: for making all of the above even more appreciable by way of the fact that I have so little time left to enjoy them
• iPod Touch: left until last for a reason: grudgingly, I have come to like this thing. Thanks for making it easy to overlook the things you can't do. And I've also come to tolerate iTunes as long as I don't have to use it very much

I haven't thanked the Lord, but if the Lord made all of the above possible then I thank Him, too.

Good new music: Dr. John, Storm Corrosion, Jack White

It's true that democratization of the music industry via the Internet and cheap and easy recording equipment may not have been the best thing for our culture as a whole, but it's been great for subculture. And at least you have more choice, even if you can't agree with everyone else so easily anymore. Every cloud... So it's worth celebrating the fact that I came across three albums -- two of which I bought blindly, though with some foreknowledge of their concepts -- that were clear winners.

Dr. John - Locked Down

There's not much to say about this album. It's a modernized traditional New Orleans sound veering toward a more African influence. Very interesting overall, even though it's a bit off-putting to hear a 70-year-old still talking about revolution.

Storm Corrosion - Storm Corrosion

This is the anticipated (if by a small audience) collaboration between Steven Wilson and Mikael Åkerfeldt.

I don't really know how to categorize it, but "Death New Age" (in the vein of "Death Metal") seems like a good description to me. It's quiet, eerie, dissonant, and powerful while being sparse and subdued. It's an extension of what "Heritage" accomplished, and also what Steven Wilson accomplished with tracks like the amazingly efficient "Index" on "Grace for Drowning". The puppeteered video they created for the opening track "Drag Ropes" was equally efficient and powerful.

If you didn't like Opeth's "Heritage" and you had no patience for Steven Wilson's "Bass Communion" project, you probably won't like this one. To me, of the three albums mentioned here, this one will probably be my favourite of the three albums and the most timeless.

Jack White - Blunderbuss

I knew I was going to buy this one, but it took me awhile to actually go and do it because I haven't had much spare time lately.

Before I bought it, I had seen it for sale in Starbucks and this made me feel a bit nervous. It reminded me of the story around the song "Little Boys" on Devendra Banhart's "Cripple Crow" album: whether true or not, he had apparently put that song on the album after a friend had warned him after hearing a preview of the album that "they'll be selling this in Starbucks". So, the song, whose full chorus is "I see so many little boys I want to marry", and sung from the perspective of a hermaphroditic pedophile, done in a 50's folk style, was put on to ensure that wouldn't happen. I never did see it in Starbucks. He's a weird fellow, but when you're familiar with his overall strangeness it makes some sense. Don't shoot the messenger.

Anyway, no need to worry about this album -- it is Jack White distilled, with all of the influences of others from his various projects removed. And now he's got a good drummer, too (ahem). It's the Jack White you know from all of his other projects, but focused, and it's a really good album with a variety of influences on display and very few filler tracks.

Maven http plugin error on Windows

I did a quick search for this problem when I first had it and couldn't find anything about it, so here's a solution.

Building a new project with Maven 3.0.3 on Windows, if you get an error like the following:

[ERROR] No plugin found for prefix 'http' in the current project and in the plugin groups [org.apache.maven.plugins, org.codehaus.mojo] available from the repositories ...

...first confirm that you're using the default Windows shell. Using an atypical shell caused the above problem for me, likely due to different handling of environment variables. You don't have to change your shell: just launch the default shell with "cmd.exe" and run the command from within there.