Category: General

Wabi Sabi

I happened across a book today at the store called Wabi Sabi Simple. It introduced the aesthetic of “wabi sabi” — which is, among other things, the idea that “things that have been handled, that are aged have more value than things that are pristine” as a friend who studies Japanese language and culture put it. That’s the “wabi” side of it. The “sabi” side is about the beauty of alone-ness, melancholy, sort of. Well, they’re very culturally loaded concepts and nothing I’m going to do justice to in a blog entry. Suffice it to say it was something I wanted to look into further and learn about.

So I go to the glorious Web. And this is why I’m blogging it. What do I find when I look for wabi sabi on the wonderful world wide freaking web?

  • At the top of the list, this wiki article which starts as a straightforward discussion of the topic and ends up in a big debate over whether or not Extreme Programming is Wabi Sabi. I kid you not. Freaking hacker culture, thinks it owns everything, even Japanese aesthetics. Ptooey.
  • But that was nothing. The real horror begins Here, at Fox News:

    NEW YORK — Imperfection is beauty.
    That’s the concept at the heart of wabi sabi, the new “it” theme in popular design that brings nature to everything from cars to kitchen countertops….in People magazine’s 2003 spring fashion hot and not list, wabi sabi was described as “in” and feng shui, the once-chic Chinese art of positioning objects to create positive effects, as “out.”

Kami preserve us.

Small personal bummer.

I interviewed for a job last week, and got the “sorry, we found somebody else” letter yesterday. A bummer. I’m working right now but it’s a weird situation — I’m doing contract programming for a company which keeps promising it’s going to hire me on as a salaried programmer soon, but says they’re not financially ready to take on a new employee right now. So that’s a non-ideal situation, and since I can’t force them to change their minds on that I’ve been looking around at other jobs. This one seemed like a real winner: a local Perl programming job.

I’d actually turned down two jobs I was interviewing for before this one because the salaries offered weren’t quite what I needed. So I had high hopes going in to this one. I was offered those other jobs, why not this one? But no. Not this time.

I’m grateful I’m not on a real job hunt where I’m doing this all day every day and getting rejections constantly, I guess. But this seemed like such a great possibility.

TextWrangler

Once upon a time, Bare Bones Software, makers of BBEdit, ruled the Mac text editor world. They had a free version, BBEdit Lite, which hooked you in, and then you’d get so used to it, you’d pay mucho buckos to get their pay version with added extra features.

Eventually they looked around at all the people using BBEdit Lite and realized, “we’re not getting money from these people! We must eliminate BBEdit Lite and only let people use BBEdit, which costs three digits of dollars. Then we will be rich, and the mooching will stop.”

They found that people were not willing to go from “free” to “three digits of dollars,” so they added TextWrangler, a chopped down wussified version of BBEdit which was only in the mid two digits of dollars.

However, people also weren’t interested in something which was both “wussified” and “two digits of dollars.” So the ones who weren’t willing to go with the three digits started looking elsewhere, because it turned out other developers were working on modestly-two-digit-priced text editors which weren’t deliberately wussified, substandard versions of a better editor. SubEthaEdit, TextMate, and others.

Finally Bare Bones Software achieved enlightenment, and they started giving away TextWrangler for free and adding some features to it, thus returning things to the way they were when BareBones was king.

And there was peace in the land.

TextWrangler rocks.

Fake Credentials for Government Information Systems Pooh-Bah

Reason: Cut-Rate Diplomas: How doubts about the government’s own “Dr.
Lauraâ€? exposed a résumé fraud scandal — If this sort of thing is widespread, it explains a lot about the government’s relationship to computers and software, and the laws and corporations that deal with them. (Equal opportunity outrage! This fraud not only was in charge of information systems for Homeland Security under Bush, she also covered up lost emails that were subpoenaed for the Lewinsky scandal under Clinton!)