Hi everyone! I said in my last post I’d like to do daily blogs, and the immediate next day I spend 3 and a half hours backing up CDs to my media server so I have no time to make a post. Go Knicks! Win the finals!
Month: June 2026
This will be another short post. But this is my formal apology to the band Genesis, for I have greatly underestimated their work. I listened to a Genesis album for the first time about two months ago. Before this, I had known of the later hits such as “Misunderstanding” or “Follow You Follow Me,” but despite being a prog rock fan I had not listened to any Genesis album in full, also knowing the band had two distinct eras: a prog era led by Peter Gabriel and the later “pop” era led by Phil Collins.
So about two months ago, I finally listened to a Genesis album in full, listening to Selling England by the Pound. I thought it was OK, but I thought the album’s bits of greatness in tracks like “I Know What I Like” and “The Cinema Show” evened out with overlong clunkers of “Dancing with the Moonlit Knight” and “The Battle of Epping Forest.” Shortly after this I listened to the album preceding that one, Foxtrot. This one I thought was more consistent, and yet again liked, but also thought that it didn’t really reach a greatness I see in tracks by other prog bands like King Crimson’s “Starless,” Yes’ “Close to the Edge,” or Pink Floyd’s “Dogs”.”
I was willing to see the band out, though, and I listened to the last album of the Peter Gabriel era, The Lamb Dies Down on Broadway. This one I couldn’t really tell what I thought, so I promised myself I’d relisten. Boy am I glad I did that. On relisten, Lamb just clicked with me. The experimentation musically on display is fascinating, especially with how easy it is to listen to comparably to other prog bands. This started the revelation that led to this apology. I can’t stop listening to Genesis now. I listened to a later album, Duke, from the Phil Collins era, to see if I’d like the poppier stuff or if I thought the band would fall off past a point. Needless to say, I loved that one too. That one is interesting because while I would still lean to call it pop music, there is still a significant amount of prog elements, to create almost “progressive pop” if you will. It’s a gorgeous sound that is incredibly unique and I cannot recommend enough.
To loop this back, after Duke, I relistened to Selling England, and that album clicked so hard, I’m wondering how the hell I could have ever thought “Moonlit Knight” was not a great song. In fact, I’m listening to this album as I write this post!
To close, I’d like to recommend you listen to Genesis: especially Selling England, Lamb, and Duke. These albums are filled with such a unique sound and such fun experimentation that even if they don’t click on first or second listen, they are worth going back to anyways. Maybe you’ll discover some new favorites. This is only my second blog post on this blog, so I don’t know how well this promise will age, but I’d like to try to write one post every day, even if rather short like today’s (I was busy, OK?). I hope you will enjoy reading it as much as I enjoy writing, because to me it’s fun to just yap into the void about something I love. Have a wonderful rest of your day, and listen to Genesis!
dingus. 🙂
I’ll try to keep this one short, although it is my first post on the new site, so who knows how well I’ll keep that attempt? This post, I’d like to talk about one “mistake” a lot of people make when either learning how to use or while using a computer. I put mistake in quotes not because it’s truly a mistake, but more of a misaligned viewpoint that hurts how much you can really “get” the computer: people try to adapt entirely to the computer, instead of using the computer to adapt to themselves.
Now, that may sound paradoxical. How can you learn something without being willing to actually try it out? My response to that is that in interacting with the computer, and unlike the computer itself, things aren’t binary. There’s more than one way to approach a task. Is it possibly more “correct” to learn the Microsoft way, or the Apple way? You can certainly argue so, and it would be hard to argue against you, but from a more philosophical standpoint on interacting with the computer, the question should not be is a method “correct,” but if a method is functional. Functionality, in this case, I shall define as something that makes sense for the user, and leads to efficient interaction with said computer.
Finding the Link: How do you understand the computer?
“What a computer is to me is it’s the most remarkable tool that we’ve ever come up with, and it’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.” – Steve Jobs
To admittedly leech off of Jobs’ quote about the computer as a “bicycle for the mind,” I would like to ask a simple question. Does everybody ride a bicycle in the same way? No! We learn to ride a bicycle on training wheels. Why would we throw our mind into the deep end, and hope everything works out? That approach is why I think computing can be so overwhelming to some; by looking at it from a perspective where you have to learn everything, you overload the mind and end up not being able to gain anything.
If I can propose a method for gaining an effectiveness at computing, take the operating system you want to learn, and break it into pieces. I will concede that simply saying “break it down into smaller bits and just get it” isn’t all there really is to it. Learning isn’t quite that simple. But what may help people get over the hump, so to speak, is by finding pieces analogous to their real world experience. For example, explaining a computer’s file system is simply something that an average person is not going to understand. But if you were to compare it to a filing cabinet, with each file and folder like the papers in folders in labelled drawers of said cabinet, I think it may help that concept come into perspective for people. You can also use this logic once you’ve learned a little bit, and learn something new. For an example I recently experienced, the jump to the Linux GNOME desktop environment was a very strange one coming from Microsoft Windows and the traditional “desktop metaphor” (pictured).
And I will admit, trying GNOME for the first time felt akin to having to launch a spaceship with no prior knowledge of physics while simultaneously having to play Beethoven’s 5th Symphony. It just wouldn’t click: the problem was I was trying to learn all of GNOME at once, and was fundamentally missing the point. Understanding it wasn’t a matter of knowing the ins and outs of every feature, but comprehending the workspace-based workflow. I was recommended a YouTube video that made that link fall into place. The workflow was like sorting a desk, and keeping each “group” together. That image of a sorted desk made the workflow make sense, and I’m currently typing this off my laptop using Debian Linux on GNOME, because I made that workflow work for me. Of course, there’s a little more to it, and I’ll get into actually adapting to a system, but once you’ve figured out that basic understanding of a computer, I think you have done 70% if not 80% of the work already. And really, you can be perfectly competent with that. But the other 20% is where I think the magic of a computer is truly revealed.
To wrap my thoughts on that fundamental understanding, I just want to make a small clarification: the link doesn’t have to be a file cabinet or a desk. It can be anything. Physical objects were for my purposes, and in my experience, easier to understand and write about, but some people may find understanding in a more abstract way. That’s fine! It is not how you get there that matters so much as that you can reach that fundamental understanding. Once you’ve reached that, you’ve opened a door to something brilliant.
Adapting the Computer to Yourself
If somehow the heading didn’t make where I was going obvious enough, that aforementioned last 20% to effective computing is yourself. This is the harder part to describe, because obviously everyone is a different person. Everyone doesn’t ride a bike exactly the same, even if those differences are very subtle. So this section will read more of a small list of one or two tips to try out, as a suggestion. Maybe they’ll work for you, and everything will even further click into place.
One very popular method is the keyboard shortcut. By hitting Ctrl+C followed by Ctrl+V (Cmd+C, Cmd+V on Mac), you have just done what was previously done by right clicking, hitting copy, right clicking again, and pasting. It’s a small change, but over thousands and thousands of copies and pastes, it will start to add up. The natural extension of this is macros, which are shortcuts that execute a series of commands, such as typing out a sentence.
Another method I enjoy to speed up computing is workspaces. Windows, macOS, and most Linux desktops have had a form of this concept for some time now. I believe on Windows it is called Task View, while on Mac and Linux it is called workspaces. The concept here is a little more abstract, as I alluded to in my explanation of how GNOME clicked for me, but it functionally allows you to have multiple desktops to switch between, each with its own applications. This separation of applications helps with dealing with a very cluttered desktop, and being able to just have what you need for each task, instead of 8 apps overlapping all serving different purposes at once.
Just as different computer apps have different purposes, different people also have different outlooks. But I believe a fundamental change of perspective to finding an understanding of computers can help people break through and find a greater efficiency with it. I hope you may take away something from this, and want to try finding that spark, if it seems that it just isn’t making sense to you, or you know someone with that problem. Thank you for reading.
