I struggle with the question of how much time to put into any given piece of writing I come across on the Web. Blogging has helped me to focus my mind. I've managed to accumulate huge lists of interesting references; over time though, these lists become more of a burden than a blessing, something I sometimes feel compelled to organize rather than to just throw away.

Now, before I throw a book or article on my "interesting list", I try to force myself to annotate the item by squeezing out an answer to questions like "Why do I care about this piece? What do I expect to get out of this? What do I hope to accomplish by keeping it on my list?" At the very least, the connections and context I'm forcing myself to build around the item will make it easier to tie the article in with everything else that I care about.

So last night, as I did a google news search on Bach in one of many moments of distraction, I came across the piece to which I referred on my blog. I skimmed the piece and reflected quickly on what I cared about. My little speed-writing exercise produced a little blurb that I found sufficiently satisfying to share on my blog.

When I read Lloyd's reaction to the article this morning, I was 1) glad that I had made the effort to share the reference because 2) Lloyd, in actually reading the piece more closely than I, found something that I just totally missed -- a priceless line about "slump in amateur singing throughout the world with the glorious exception of the Philippines and some Hispanic countries..." If those words had actually registered on my mind, I would surely have commented on them. So thanks, Lloyd, for bringing them to our attention and enriching our collective understanding and enjoyment of our reading.

Krista's second post on Nextbus inspired me to check out the new service -- slick. She wrote, "Well, anyway, I'm getting more curious to see how well it works--now and in the future. Maybe I should sit on the street corner some day and time how often it comes."

Perhaps my comment here will prompt her to start a blog on "the problem of ccomputer-dependency in our culture, and to advocate for solutions and alternatives", but it occurred to me that my trusty wireless phone/web browser Treo 300 could be used to access the info through the wireless access functionality of Nextbus. I tried it out and it seems to work. (Actually, this is quite cool because Nextbus will be immensely useful through a wireless device.)

Let's see when Nextbus makes it to the AC transit routes I actually use....

When whiling my time looking for articles on Bach in Google news, I came across The trouble of entertaining ourselves. The author put into words something I've been pondering for a while. I love listening to Bach recordings and attending all sorts of performances in which the singers and dancers interpret the pieces with much greater fluency and skill than I ever can. So as I consider jumping into the fray with my own voice or body, I hesitate. I dance and sing so in the privacy of my own room and shower, but to share that with others, except as an act of farce, intimidates me to no end.

I don't want to turn this blog into a venting forum (so what I just add a "Rants" category, you might ask) -- but let me rant a bit about one of my favorite whipping boy -- telemarketers. This morning, I picked up our house phone to be greeted by "Please hold the line for a moment while we maximize our calling throughput and eventually get our chance to rile you". I thought about just hanging up on the spot -- I really dislike automated dialing systems that call a whole bunch of people to throw them in a queue. Now I know there is the off-chance that the message I will be getting is worth being put on hold for a few seconds so that I can do my part to make the organization more efficient. But what's the likelihood of that?

Still, I thought that I would hang on so that I could vent my frustration when the caller came on the line. Again, does this serve any useful purpose? I've gone back and forth on whether to complain to the front-line of telemarketers, who are not powerless but who are, in some ways, following orders from those up above (who are shielded from the vents of irate recipients of calls.) But I decided that I would politely express my complaint about automated dialing.

When the caller finally came on, it did seem like a legitimate item of business directed at my fellow housemate. After taking down the number, I then said that automated dialing systems were obnoxious to the those on the receiving end. The caller, who didn't seem to pick up my frustration, proceeded to explain the mechanics of the system and how it increases their efficiency. Fortunately for me, I wasn't as irate as I normally could be in this type of situation; I calmly and courteously did get my point across. The caller told me that a lot of others have been complaining too, which I hope means that the company will get the message to be more considerate.

Now I wanted to dignify my rant by weaving in appropriate references from around the Web to bolster my argument and place the rant into a larger community context. However, I should better things to do than to construct such a tightly-woven narrative. So I just list a bunch of links that I found to be interesting as I looked for greater context on the Web:

1. Confessions of an ex-telemarketer: "Like most telemarketing firms, we used a computerized and automated dialing system. It would speed-dial hundreds of phone numbers a minute, wait for a line to pick up, and shunt the call to the first-available operator... except for when all of the operators were already on other calls, in which case it would leave the person there saying "Hello? Hello? Hellooooooooooo?" into dead air and make them wait for their turn to be REALLY annoyed."
2. I used the term "whipping boy" in my description above though I could probably find a better phrase. I went looking for definitions of "whipping boy" to understand exactly what I'd be implying by using the term. From The Phrase Finder: It used to be the practise in some cultures that the nobility could not be touched and when they committed a crime that warranted physical punishment it was delegated to an unfortunate victim - the whipping boy. The OED says: "A boy educated together with a young prince or royal personage, and flogged in his stead when he committed a fault that was considered to deserve flogging." There is a similar defintion in the hyperdictionary. (I didn't even know about the wiktionary before this serendipitous search.) By using the term "whipping boy" then, I seem to suggest that telemarketers are only scapegoats, undeservingly bearing the sins of someone else. Maybe there is something to that....
3. Hang up on telemarketers -- for good. "Telemarketers have long violated federal law by using automatic dialing systems to ring more victims than they have operators to handle. Now the FTC finally seems determined to kill this practice with tougher enforcement so you won’t have to “wait to be annoyed,” as Catlett put it." [via telemarketer blocking]

As I try to put more of my writing energy today and tomorrow into writing a paper, bit by bit, I resort to copying to this blog quotations that have stuck in my mind -- for reasons that I may explain at some point. Loyal and gentle readers will know that I can't go too long without mentioning Bach. So I must oblige, taking the following excerpt from Jan Swafford's Vintage Guide to Classical Music (p. 81):

In 1850 the Bach Gesellschaft (Bach Society) was founded to collect and publish what survived of this work. In the modern complete edition, that amounts to sixty volumes. It can be argued that those volumes constitute the most profound and magnificent body of work by a single mind, in any field, in the long human chronicle.

In 1985, I told my parents that I would never move to the U.S. I had just returned home after spending four weeks at the Shad Valley Program at the University of Waterloo, where I had just made a lot of new friends who were a lot like me. We were going to be the vanguard of Canadian scientific and engineering entrepeneurs who going to our country prosperous. Key to doing so was not participating in the brain drain to the southern behemoth. I was determined not to sell out my country, which had given me my life and my education. Besides, I had just met these wonderful friends ("kindred spirits") with whom I would surely stay in touch forever.

My parents responded to me calmly. They told me that I should keep an open mind, and that one day, if the best opportunity meant moving to the U.S. that I should pursue it. They also added that although I felt that I had met my best friends that it was unlikely that our friendships would last. We were far apart and had spent so little time together That's the way the world works.

Right then, I felt my parents to be cruel and cynical. Today, thirteen years into my stay in the U.S.A., having lost touch (sadly and regretably) with all but one fellow Shad 85W alumna, I recall words spoken from parents to their eighteen year old son who still had a lot to learn.

On the afternoon of Saturday, April 21, 2001, while hanging out at the bookstore of the San Damiano Retreat Center in Danville, I came across Wayne Muller's How, Then, Shall We Live?: Four Simple Questions That Reveal the Beauty and Meaning of Our Lives. For whatever reason, one question stood above the others, riveting my attention for the rest of my day-long retreat. That question was How shall I live, knowing I will die? The other three questions (Who am I? What do I love? What is my gift to the family on the earth?) are undoubtedly significant and weighty ones -- but they just didn't speak immediately to my situation. I suppose that I wasn't surprised by those questions whereas I had honestly never seriously asked myself How shall I live, knowing I will die?

Always a sucker for a good question, especially a profound and new one, I formulated a methodology for tackling How shall I live, knowing I will die? To make the question more concrete -- and therefore more susceptible to my type of analysis -- I supposed that I knew exactly how much time I had to live and asked how I would then live the rest of those days. I tried to be more specific and made that time period one of the following: a day, a week, a month, 6 months, a year, two years, 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, 70 years. To help me think about what I was going to do given that I was going to live another day or another 20 years, I turned to the list of life roles I was carrying around in my head as a way of partitioning my life at any given time.

I thus converted the question How shall I live, knowing I will die? to a series of questions of the form "If I knew I had only X (time period) left, what would I do in life role Y?" Some examples were: "If I knew I had only a week left to live, what I would do as a son?" and "If I knew I had only two more years to live, what I would do as a board member of Westminster House?" I organized my questions into a two dimensional matrix (with time-to-death on one axis and my life roles on the other) -- a spreadsheet that I fondly called a "death action matrix".

The answers I came up with that day were dramatic, deep, and revealing -- and flowed directly out of the breakdown of the question. The prospect of death -- even hypothetical death -- turns out to be acidly clarifying. If I have little time left to live, most of what preoccupies me and seems so important would instantly be reduced to nothingness. I loved my work profoundly, but when I asked myself the question "if I have a week to live, what would I do with my job?", I answered without hesitation that I wouldn't be spending any time on my favorite project. I would, however, want to say good-bye to my co-workers. Since I was quickly axing various roles I played for cases of a short life expectancy (it's easy to quit my beloved committees when I think I'm going to die in a month!), I was intrigued by the question "how much time do I assume to have in this life (implicitly, most likely) to make a certain activity "worth my time"? For example, how many years would I want to have left for me to consider getting married or having children? If I knew that death was impending for me, would I stop blogging?

As I looked at the answers on my death action matrix spreadsheet, a central theme emerged -- the most important thing in my life, in the face of death, was being at peace with the prospect of meeting my God, Judge, and Maker and letting my family and close friends know how much I loved them. I would add today that I also want to know how much I was loved. The question that raised by my matrix were "Do those close to me know how much I love them? And how do I let them know?"

In spite of the insights that came forth that day, I was too easily sidetracked by the realization that the central assumption of my exercise was merely hypothetical. Most of us do not know the exact day we will die. Furthermore, death is usually not like getting on a plane at a pre-assigned time, leaving us active to the very moment of departure. I kept pondering how I could sustain a life lived a daily intensity that I imagined that imminent death would prompt. Funny, how I don't wonder about that point anymore.

Given my own analysis, I continued to wonder a lot about how others would answer the question How shall I live, knowing I will die? On that grim morning of September 11 -- five months later -- I got a partial answer when I learned about the many last-minute love-filled emails or phone calls to husbands, wives, children, friends, or mothers that poured forth from those who knew they were at their end. Few of those who died that day would have parsed the question of how to live into a two-dimensional matrix, but it seems that nearly all of us need to love and be loved as we confront our own death.

True story. When I was showing Tom, the new programmer in my group, the Wikipedia (which I wrote about last week), I turned to the entry on Shania Twain (who went to the same high school as I did -- though I'm sure she doesn't remember me!) to demonstrate how anyone can edit a page on a wiki. I had fixed a link to connect the Twain article to the one on Timmins, Ontario (our hometown) and wanted to show Tom how random persons can improve an article. When I clicked on the Timmins, Ontario article, I was shocked to read at the end of the piece

Timmins natives include well-known country singer Shania Twain, b. 1965 and Raymond Yee, Ph.D., b. 1967, technology architect of the Interactive University Project at UC Berkeley. [archived version].

I burst out laughing with gleeful incredulity! I could not have found a better way to illustrate the power/splendor/weirdness of wikis. And no, I didn't write that sentence -- I'm not that egotistical. One of my readers had obviously followed my blog, pulled together various pieces of information about me, and assembled it all to place on the wikipedia! I jumped in the fray and edited the sentence to:

Timmins natives include well-known country singer Shania Twain (b. 1965) and the not-so-well-known-but-well-meaning Raymond Yee, Ph.D. (b. 1967), technology architect of the Interactive University Project at UC Berkeley.

I fully expect someone to clear the article of any references to me. No one is in Shania's league -- let alone someone like me! Actually, I'm surprised that Andreas Hörstemeier, who continues to clean up the Timmins page and who commented "(Fixed links - but is that Raymond Yee really known enough to be listed?)" didn't actually expunge my name from the annals of Timmins. (Let me go add a reference to this blog entry in the discussion page on Timmins.)

Anyone care to fess up here to being the author of this awesome little stunt?

In May 2000, during a retreat for the Session of my church, we were given the exercise of writing a psalm inspired by our reading of Ps 90. This following poem is what I wrote and read to my fellow retreatants. (I've been recently thinking about how little I read my old journals and how much good -- and not so inspiring -- stuff in those journals. There's also a lot of stuff I can "repurpose" for my blog so that I have material on days like this when I'm less than inspired....)

You are God, more infinite than infinite
We theorize about the curvature of the cosmos, the utter limits of observation
And yet you exceed our theories, our sightings, our vision, our ability even to accept

Instant communication is at hand,
myriad bits of information deluge our eyes,
Yet you are closer to us than our own heartbeat

I came into this world a babe
And will exit alone--lights out
But You were before me
And you will be after me
This is how it has always been
And this is how it shall always be.

Our lives should go on fine without you
We eat, sleep, love, work.
Day after day.
Moments of exquisite pleasure break up the monotony, even makes us have kids, be responsible citizens
It's a pain to be conscious
Why can't we be like robots?
Maybe we are robots after all.

I don't know why you would bother with us at all
Though we have made quite a few advances,
we still are puny little creatures in the grand scheme of things
Though we can fly to the moon, impress our image all over the world
boast our fugues to Martians -- we are a red button or a gas tank away from annihilation
A pathetic species we are, aspiring to the heavens one moment,
slitting each others' throats, violating a neighbor's wife the next.

What hope do I have in all this?

I see no answer emblazed in the sky, no buzz via viral marketing
That satisfies.
Yet I am glad for the still small voice that gently nags
and nags and nags
The voice of love that persists.
I thought that it would be easy to make you proud,
To be one who would never betray you
Everyone else was a fraud
And now, I too am found out.

But you still don't go away, do you?
I should be more grateful than I sound.

I've been wanting to write about Isaiah Berlin's The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History for a while, primarily because it can be the basis of a nice cocktail party question: "Are you a fox or a hedgehog?" Some select excerpts from Berlin's essay lay out the distinction that he makes between hedgehogs and foxes:

For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel-a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance-and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related by no moral or aesthetic principle; these last lead lives, perform acts, and entertain ideas that are centrifugal rather than centripetal, their thought is scattered or diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves, without consciously or unconsciously, seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision. The first kind of intellectual and artistic personality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes; and without insisting on a rigid classification, we may, without too much fear of contradiction, say that, in this sense, Dante belongs to the first category, Shakespeare to the second; Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Proust are, in varying degrees, hedgehogs; Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzak, Joyce are foxes.

Are you a fox or a hedgehog?