Author Archives: dsmarley

SOHO Notes and Notelife

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I’ve been trying out the new version of SOHO Notes and the new iPhone app, Notelife, that goes with it. I had to pay $5 for the iPhone but the Mac program, SOHO Notes, has a free 30-day trial. It’ll cost me $25 to upgrade if I decide to keep it.

So far I’m pretty happy. It’s a solid note taking and organizing program with rather more bells and whistles than I’ll ever use. It doesn’t sync with my iPhone quite as effortlessly as OmniFocus does, but it’s still easier than with any other app I’ve used. (I’m not sure why Omni hasn’t created a perfect and efficient note taking program just by stripping everything away from OmniFocus except for its notes function.)

I’ve adopted and dropped a number of such programs over the years. My first one was iOrganize, which may still be my favorite in terms of simplicity and speed. You could only use it for text notes, but I can work with that. A version of iOrganize that worked with rich text files, just so I can boldface headings, would be ideal, but I can live with all caps.

However, for my work routine at the time, I really needed to be able to use the program on both my laptop and desktop machines, so that I could pass my notebook file from one machine to the other. So I paid for a second license online, but I was sent the same license number a second time. Useless — I couldn’t use the software on one machine without going through the hassle of uninstalling it on the other. Despite sending repeated email messages to the creator over a period of months, I never got a single response, never got the second license number (I mean, how hard would it be to fix that? it’s not like I was asking for tech support on some mysterious problem), never got the refund I asked for if they were unable to give me a second license number. Not like it was a huge amount of money, but it left a bad taste in my mouth. And I really needed a way to transfer my notes easily between machines or the program wouldn’t work for me.

Another early favorite was Sticky Brain. It had more bells and whistles than I needed, but I could not only use it on both machines but it would keep itself syncked via my .Mac account without my having to think about it. I could create or edit a note on my laptop and find the change made to my desktop notes 15 minutes later, without my having had to do anything (other than have the laptop be somewhere it would connect with the Internet, of course). I would have been happy to keep using it, but Sticky Brain morphed into the first version of SOHO Notes, which was a more complicated program with a lot of great features but frustratingly slow and buggy once you got a lot of notes into it. The main advantage of a program like this over, say, storing my notes in hundreds of separate files in a Finder folder called “Notes”, is that I can open, create, take, edit, and reorganize my notes at top speed. So if the program is going to pause and spin the cursor for anywhere from 15 seconds to a few minutes at unpredictable times, well, it sort of defeats the purpose.

SOHO Notes couldn’t really get its act together through a number of upgrades, so I eventually gave up on them, and in fact I’m trying this new version out with some wariness. However, reports are good. Some people are reporting problems with importing notes from an earlier version, but others are saying everything is smooth and very zippy. We’ll see how things are working for me after I’ve imported some folders full of text files.

I tried Yojimbo for a while, and I really liked it for a year or so. The problem with Yojimbo, though, is that it’s really for people who are collecting bits of information that have no strong and obvious organization, and not so much for people who are creating notes in the process of planning discreet projects so that each note goes with one and only one project. I make both kinds of notes, though, and Yojimbo is only first-rate for one of those kinds.

Yojimbo doesn’t allow you to nest folders. You can have any number of folders, mind you, but only on a single level; you can’t create even one extra level of hierarchy. You’re supposed to organize everything with tags. So I’d create a folder for a project and keep all my notes in it, and I’d start another folder for another project and keep all my notes for that project in there, and I like to keep my notes for all my past projects handy so I just precede the folder name with a symbol (I use omega, Ω, which is option-Z on the Mac) that drops it to the bottom of the list of folders so I don’t have to keep scrolling past it. And after a year or so I ended up with this ridiculously long list of folders.

If I could have had just one level of subfolders, I could have put all my completed projects into a folder called, you know, “Completed projects”, so that the only folders at the top level of my hierarchy would be that one, one folder for each current project, and my “Reference” folder for all non-project notes.

But I couldn’t do that. Nesting folders is not possible. I asked for advice on the Yojimbo forum on how to manage this, and was mocked by some Yojimbo chauvinists for wanting anything as old-fashioned and hierarchical and downright linear as a subfolder. Devoted Yojimbo users explained to me that the really modern and efficient way would be to add a tag to each of these notes with the name of its associated project. Then I could dump all these notes into a single folder. When I wanted to pick out the files associated with a completed project, I just had to search on the tag that was associated with it. Which meant keeping a new note with a list of the names of all those tags. I never could see why this was supposed to be easier than dragging a folder into a “Completed projects” folder and letting the names of the subfolders themselves take the place of the separate list of past projects.

I can see that organizing with tags can make more sense when many of your notes could have uses in many different contexts. And it was explained to me how much time I would save in the long run by setting up this tagging system whenever I had a note that was relevant to two or more projects. But in close to ten years of working on my projects in this way, I could remember only one such situation, and I handled it quickly by cutting and pasting the information from the old project note into the new project note.

So what is so wrong about a (horrors!) linear system of organization if you have data that fall naturally and clearly into groups?

Another suggestion, and a better one, was that I export my completed project notes into folders of text files and archive them in a folder in the Finder. A sensible approach, I suppose, though it irks me not to be able to use a note organizing program to keep all the old project notes at hand that I want to. I do look back at them when a new project comes up that is similar to an old one.

One genuinely great thing about Yojimbo is how effortlessly it syncs between my laptop and desktop via my MobileMe account. But at the same time, my routine has changed in the last several years, and it’s no longer particularly important if I can sync my notes between my laptop and my desktop. My current laptop is a lot more powerful than my old one used to be, and I bought a powerful one precisely so that I could use it for a lot of things I used to do only on the desktop, because I have a long commute now and want to make use of that time. So I rarely transfer project files back and forth; I use the the two machines for mostly nonoverlapping kinds of projects.

However, now that I have my iPhone, it’s very desirable to me to be able to keep my notes on both the laptop and the phone and to be edit them in either place and sync them. Over the last six months or so, I’ve been using the iPhone app Notebooks, which syncs the notes on your phone with a folder of text and RTF files that you keep on your main computer. Want to keep your notes in a hierarchy of folders and subfolders? Notebooks has no philosophical objection to your doing so. I’ve been using TextWrangler to open and edit note files on my desktop, because TW lets you have multiple text files open in one window, and makes it easy to switch among them quickly.

That’s been working well enough, and if I decide against SOHO Notes, that’s what I’ll go back to doing. However, syncking between Notebooks and the folder of notes on my desktop is still not as smooth and easy as syncking between SOHO Notes and Notelife. So that’s a point in SOHO’s favor. Another point is that in SOHO, creating and manipulating and jumping around among notes is faster and easier than using TextWrangler and the Finder, which is the whole reason I want such a program in the first place.

Anyway, I’m giving SOHO a spin for a month and we’ll see how it holds up when I start piling it up with notes.

Well, That Certainly Explains Why He Didn’t Answer My Last Two Emails

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Oh, man. Just got off the phone with one of my authors, who has been through a really awful month. An attack of kidney stones while traveling in the Third World, requiring an emergency flight to the United States. Barely a week after he was out of the hospital from that, a bad accident while bicycling that put him right back in. And family issues that are causing upheaval in his home life.

I’m still a little shaky from talking with him. I’m at Peet’s now, and I could use something stronger, but we’re not supposed to drink on our lunch hours so I’m sublimating my need for a brandy into an eggnog latte.

Down With Holidays

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This time of year is usually rocky for me. This year is maybe harder than usual because it was only a year ago in late November that my mother died, and that brings up old memories that feed too well into the persistent feelings of worthlessness that I’ve struggled against my whole life and that I find myself struggling against again now.

But the holidays are always difficult for me anyway. It would be easier if I could just go about my business without being constantly taunted with it, but of course our whole damn economy is organized around reminding us all at every opportunity that we’ve got Thanksgiving and Christmas coming up. Starting the day after Thanksgiving, every freaking store everywhere turns the canned music up and plays the same fifteen novelty songs over and over again. In December I find myself wondering over and over again whether I really need to make this trip to the market, or can I make the rest of the laundry detergent stretch until after the new year?

When I was a child, the very blackest days of the year were Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter. Those were not the only three days of the year when my family — the portion that ever saw each other at all, anyway — would get together to try to hurt each other. But those three days were especially horrible because instead of a family visit lasting a mere hour or so, the visit on one of these agonizing days would last ten to twelve hours. By the time I was nine or ten, I had learned to dread these days weeks in advance.

One thing that made these holidays difficult is that they included a meal, and my mother’s mother used food as a weapon. Once, for example, when I was maybe ten or so, for some inexplicable reason my parents and my grandparents decided it would be a good idea to take a week’s vacation together, along with my brother and me, to a cabin in the mountains that my grandfather owned. On the second afternoon I was eating a plate of potato salad that my mother had made, when my grandmother snatched the plate out of my hand, scraped the contents back into the bowl, and added several more ingredients while making a big haughty fuss about how I shouldn’t have to eat that and how she would show my mother the way to make potato salad properly. Once she had corrected the defects of the potato salad, she put some back on my plate, handed it back to me, and demanded that I taste it and announce in front of the entire family which one I liked better. I was mortified and the only thing I could think to do was to say that I couldn’t tell the difference, and the result was a bitter quarrel and a sulk that lasted several days until finally some of us left early (I don’t remember now whether it was my parents and brother and me or my grandparents who left).

I learned early in life for incidents like this, then, that it was a very dangerous idea to have food preferences, or at least to express them. Or indeed to express any preferences at all.

For Thanksgiving dinner, Dave and I made ourselves a rotisseried turkey and mashed yams and steamed broccoli and cranberry tangerine sauce and mushroom gravy, and a pear cranberry crisp for dessert, which was very good and all in all not that difficult. Though part of me would have rather made, oh, grilled cheese sandwiches for Thanksgiving dinner and done the big meal on a non-Thanksgiving evening, just to give the finger more emphatically to my childhood memories.

We don’t haul out the countertop rotisserie as often as we ought to, because it’s not really any more difficult than roasting and the results are consistently delicious.

Then in the last decade there’s been the additional factor that another week and a half marks the eleventh anniversary of my brain surgery, and that always sets me to brooding on whether I’ve really done anything since then to justify the truly staggering amount of time and expertise and trouble and money that went into saving my life, and the long period of chronic pain I went through. I know rationally that this is nonsense, that nobody and nothing needs to do anything to justify its mere existence, and that it’s impossible to do such a thing anyway because none of us will ever learn anything about 99% of the effect, for good or for ill, that we have on the world. And yet around this time of year, when I get tired or stressed out, that’s the direction my thoughts take me in, and I find it very easy to talk myself out of valuing anything positive that I’ve done and into magnifying the awfulness of all the negatives.

Plato’s Cave Allegory

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I’m into chapter three of Karen Armstrong’s The Case for God, which is about the classical Greek philosophers. It’s a somewhat different take on them than I got from my college courses in philosophy, so very interesting.

So she brings up Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, which I haven’t thought much about since college, which was 25 years ago. I didn’t really know what to make of it back then and haven’t thought much about it since. To refresh all our memories, here’s what Wikipedia says about it:

Plato imagines a group of people who have lived chained in a cave all of their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall by things passing in front of a fire behind them, and begin to ascribe forms to these shadows. According to Plato, the shadows are as close as the prisoners get to seeing reality. He then explains how the philosopher is like a prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the wall are not constitutive of reality at all, as he can perceive the true form of reality rather than the mere shadows seen by the prisoners.

So far, so good. What most of us think we see is not reality, I can get behind Plato on this part of it. It’s the next part I now find, in my current middle-aged state, that I don’t buy so much.

The Allegory is related to Plato’s Theory of Forms, wherein Plato asserts that “Forms” (or “Ideas”), and not the material world of change known to us through sensation, possess the highest and most fundamental kind of reality. Only knowledge of the Forms constitutes real knowledge.

If I understand Plato right here, he’s saying that you’ve got this oak and that oak and that other oak, and all these oaks are not real, they are only “shadows” of what is real, which is the Ideal Form of an Oak. I can sort of see that point of view. There are all these things in the world, but running through them all are patterns that we can try to discover, by means of observation, scientific experiments, intuition, and so on. Understanding those patterns is what enables us to understand and manipulate our world.

But my immediate reaction to reading about Plato’s Cave the other day was, No, that’s backward. It isn’t the case that most people see the individual oaks and not the Ideal of the Oak. It’s the other way around: Most people look at the individual oaks and they see only the idea of “oaks”. Or more likely just the idea of “trees”. Our minds interpret everything immediately in terms of categories, but in reality the categories don’t exist. There’s no such thing as the Ideal of the Oak, that’s something our minds projected onto the world around us so that we could analyze things and talk about them and manipulate them. There are only really these temporary concentrations of matter, constantly changing into something else, that we’ve drawn circles around and named. And the human condition is that nearly all of us spend nearly all our time in this invented world in our heads. We look at the oak and we think “That’s an oak” and that’s pretty much the extent of our interaction with it.

But in the reality that exists outside our heads, things don’t have names or categories. They just are. Or rather, it just is, because the division of the universe into things is just as much an invention of our minds.

Which is why my reaction to thinking again about the Cave Allegory was that Plato had it backward. He thought the patterns and forms and ideals were what was real and the shapes we actually see are only shadows of those forms projected onto the world around us. I think the great indivisible whatzit of the universe is what’s real, and the patterns and forms and ideals we think we see are shadows that our minds project onto the world around us.

The Case for God

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I just started Karen Armstrong’s The Case for God last night. I laughed out loud at the first line of the Introduction:

We are talking far too much about God these days ….

The whole Introduction is brilliant, but I’ll just quote a few more lines from the beginning.

We are talking far too much about God these days, and what we say is often facile. In our democratic society, we think that the concept of God should be easy and that religion ought to be accessible to anybody. “That book was really hard!” readers have told me reproachfully, shaking their heads in faint reproof. “Of course it was!” I want to reply. “It was about God.”

Ms. Armstrong makes a point in the Introduction that seems important to me: that religion used to be a matter not of what you believed but of what you did. Not in the sense of good deeds, either, but in the sense of what you practiced in order to improve your connection with and understanding of God, or the Tao, or the Kingdom of Heaven or whatever you called it. Faith wasn’t about belief, but about devotion to your practice.

News Flash: Unexpected Rise of Sun in East Delivers Stinging Rebuke to Obama

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Gail Collins in the New York Times on the media’s obsession with the idea that Tuesday’s election results were some kind of huge national rebuke to President Obama:

No wonder the White House said [Obama] was not watching the results come in. How could the man have gotten any sleep after he realized that his lukewarm support of an inept candidate whose most notable claim to fame was experience in hog castration was not enough to ensure a Democratic victory in Virginia?

New Jersey was even worse. The defeat of Gov. Jon Corzine made it clear that the young and minority voters who turned out for Obama will not necessarily show up at the polls in order to re-elect an uncharismatic former Wall Street big shot who failed to deliver on his most important campaign promises while serving as the public face of a state party that specializes in getting indicted.

The very weirdest part of this is that I’ve been hearing and reading over and over that the fact that the voter turnout in this off-year election was lower than in last year’s presidential election shows that America is turning against Obama. Hel-lo? That this happens in every off-year election has been conventional wisdom (oh, I think I made a little joke there) for at least as long as I’ve been old enough to be aware of our politic process, and I’m not a young guy any more.

Well, whaddaya know. Who knew that so many of our pundits are recent immigrants to our country?

Ouch

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Very frustrating. As of two weeks ago Berkeley Opera was working on a grant proposal to assist in the development and production of my next opera adaptation, The Golden Slipper. I was writing up a description of the work and stuff like that for use in the the application.

One week ago Berkeley Opera got a new artistic director. The former artistic director, Jonathan Khuner, is now just music director, and Mark Streshinsky is the new artistic director. I knew this was in the works, so it’s not a surprise. I only know Mark slightly but he’s a sharp guy.

However, suddenly the grant proposal is not happening and I am told that Berkeley Opera will not do The Golden Slipper, end of story. Huh?

Oh well. I didn’t start writing The Golden Slipper because Berkeley Opera wanted to do it, but because I wanted to write it, and the company’s interest came later. So nothing’s really changed. I’ll keep at it and finish it and if it’s good, it’ll get done somewhere all the same.