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Blast from the past

September 10, 2004 /

The College Reporter, the student newspaper of my alma mater, Franklin & Marshall College, has digitized all its issues from 1987 through 2001. Score one for the anal editorial staff that kept a good archive all these years. The archive is scanned images of each page of each issueânot the most versatile format, but a nice preservation method.

I was a longtime Reporter staffer: weekly columnist, then editorials editor, then editor in chief through my senior year. Somewhere in that digitized archive are all the columns I wrote during my tenure. A few of them are quite good; I’ll try to hunt them down.

In the meantime, let me direct you to my first-ever newspaper editorial, on page 7 of the October 12, 1992 issue (here’s the engine; direct links don’t work). Be forewarned, it’s pretty trite, although I’m pleased to report I wrote with a strikingly similar voice.

Update: My all-time favorite column was on February 21, 1994, page 5. Unlike most of my writing from a decade ago, it still holds up.

While we’re at it, here’s my all-time favorite unpublished college essay, on a typical David Wertheimer paper-writing night. I’m pleased to report my business school assignments are usually done around midnight.

Internet as proper noun

September 9, 2004 /

Wired News: “It’s Just the ‘internet’ Now.”

Wired News, long the place of record for online notation, has decided to drop the capital letters from Internet, Web and Net. All well and good; this has been happening elsewhere for years (I recall debating the merits of the capitalization with the editors at The Economist back in 2000).

What it references is the acceptance and commoditization of the terms. This happens frequently with new words that lose quotes or hyphens as their meanings become universal. Consider, for example, the slow conversion from “e-mail” to “email.”

However, Wired News’s justification is all wrong:

The simple answer is because there is no earthly reason to capitalize any of these words. Actually, there never was.

That’s not necessarily true. These words were capitalized because they were once considered namesâthat is, Internet was a proper noun, not just a noun. By dropping the caps, the writer has acknowledged that there is nothing personalized or particular about the word in use.

Example: “xerox” is often used as a noun and a verb as well as a company name. In print, one would write, “My photocopier is a Xerox home-office model,” but drop the capital letter to say, “I need xeroxes of this document.” The same lowercasing is now being applied to the web and the internet.

The problem here, for this author at least, is in the singularity of the terms. There’s only one Internet, one World Wide Web; these are still proper nouns in many ways, despite the increased commonality of their usage. The typical use of the article “the” before these words gives increased value to their status as proper nouns, not just nouns of ordinary use.

Personally, I am okay with the shift away from the capitalization, but I’m not ready to let go of it just yet. I do like Wired News’s assertion that internet and web each define a medium, not unlike radio and television. Still, the Internet and the Web still denote specific locations to me. Think about these analogies:

The Internet:Broadway vs. internet:street

The Internet:Manhattan vs. internet:city

The Web:Central Park vs. web:park

Even if the terms’ commoditization is complete, Wired News’s assertion that they never deserved their capital letters forgets the era when the Web was a fascinating new world, a destination in its own right, rather than a common vehicle for airline ticket sales. Perhaps the Internet’s maturity is just about complete.

Mostly back

September 6, 2004 /

The TWC folks are scheduled to come to my apartment on the 14th and identify once and for all what’s wrong with my service. I have a joint call scheduledâboth a service foreman and a line technician converging on my homeâwhich was no small customer service coup.

In the meantime, the spotty service continues, but you’ll be happy to know (come on, I can see how happy you are from here) that I haven’t paid for my cable modem since July, which is apparently both the least they can do for me and the only thing they can do for me.

More news if it ever gets fixed.

To high heaven

August 30, 2004 /

Five service appointments and uncounted phone calls later, Time Warner Cable has classified my digital wire servicing as “complete,” and instead has informed me that a “huge outage” hit New York City last Monday-Tuesday, the aftereffects of which I will be noticing for an indeterminate amount of time this week.

All I know is that I’ve had little to no reliable Internet access since mid-July, and as I type this, my wireless hub keeps blinking into “no access available” for no good reason. When I manage to get through to my Internet connection, things are sluggish at best.

I’m thisclose to moving to DSL for a while. Even its unimaginably frequent outages were more tolerable than what I’m going through this summer.

Please contact me if you have or have not had a similar experience. Oh, and call me on a telephone if you want to reach me with any expediency. Doesn’t look like I’ll be online much this week.

Mostly offline

August 15, 2004 /

FYI: I haven’t had working Internet access since Thursday and will not until this coming Wednesday at the very earliest. The cable lines that feed into my apartment are fried, and despite the widespread existence of wifi, I can’t seem to get anything in my apartment. (I write this scrunched against the hallway window.)

If you need to get in touch with me this week, please be patient with email or give me a call.

Helmut

August 10, 2004 /

My macroeconomics professor told us a great story last class about his brother, Helmut. Helmut was a banker on Wall Street, in a decently successful but nondescript career, when his firm was bought out and mass layoffs upended his job.

Helmut took some time off, and enjoyed it until his wife said, “Helmut, this is ridiculous, you have to do something with your time.” So Helmut got a certification and began driving a school bus. It made him happy, being behind the wheel all day and taking the kids to school and to ball games.

After a while, though, his wife said, “Helmut, you really need a better job, the neighbors are starting to talk about us.” So Helmut shrugged and got behind the wheel of a Lincoln Town Car. Same idea, a little more slick. He could still tool around all day and enjoy it.

Helmut now owns a limousine company with 36 drivers, a 28-car fleet, and a dispatching center. He calls himself an entrepeneur.

Follow your dreams. I’m working on mine.

My grandmother, too

August 8, 2004 /

My father had me read “Are You My Mother?” in the New York Times Magazine this evening, a wistful piece about the author’s diminishing Alzheimer’s patient of a mother. The pieceâcentering around the mother’s ability to remember songs long after she had forgotten everything elseâis a near perfect mirror of my grandmother’s recent history.

Unlike Floyd Skloot and his mother, though, my grandmother has been rather pleasant and good-natured through the later phases of her disease, and even as she dwindled she has left behind memories for the rest of us, things I’m going to remember sooner rather than later, for her sake and ours.

For example: Grandma, age 82, playing Scrabble with me in her one-bedroom assisted-living facility, slowly fading in awareness, but still with a dish of M&M’s on the pedestal next to the table, her hand diving in for a quick fix of chocolate every time she walked around the corner, teaching me rather definitively where I got my sweet tooth.

And Grandma, not wanting to stop driving, until she got lost enough in her Alzheimer’s that we could take her keys without her noticing, and we could count with a laugh the 13 separate dents and scratches her skilled driving had accumulated.

And Grandma contentedly eating the sweets we bring her in the home, even when we make a mistake, like the day we brought her a pastry with raisins and Grandma tossed each and every raisin onto the floor as she ate.

And Grandma, still singing songs and playing the piano, even when she doesn’t know what day it is.

And Grandma, eyebrows raising high with recognition, startledly declaring, “He’s my son!” when the words “Donald” or “Marvin” penetrate her consciousness.

And Grandma meeting my now-wife for the first time, a story that still brings a tear to my eye, as it did the day it happened.

Grandma will be 91 this October, at least ten years into her Alzheimer’s, more than five years confined to a wheelchair at a home, several years beyond recognizing her family, a tiny, shriveled version of her once-strong self, and somehow perfectly healthy and, as far as we can tell, rather at peace with herself and the world. I will see her Thursday, and it will be sad, yet it will still make my day, and I will still smile.

Favorite sighting so far: Rick Bruner, with his hair combed and slicked back, in a suit. Best-dressed blogger here.

Ideapad

Page 88 of 129

Blast from the past

Internet as proper noun

Mostly back

To high heaven

Mostly offline

Helmut

My grandmother, too

No no no

All quiet

In Chicago

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