Assorted Afflatuses

I have found the perfect pizza. And, even though I have never travelled to Italy, I doubt even those prodigious purveyors of pizza could best the ambrosial pies to be found at Ken's Artisan Pizza here in superlative meriting Portland, Oregon.

Before I go any further, however, I should note that I have atypical taste in pizza. The crust, in my mind, should be thin, crisp and golden. Neither soggy, nor pale nor puffy, like the inferior sort found on those peculiar pan pizzas. The sauce — should the pizza have any — ought be applied gently and with moderation. If I wanted my food to ooze I would eat an eclair. Finally, the prefect pizza has a minimal number of toppings. None of this "Supreme" lunacy with every animal, vegetable and mineral under the sun crammed onto the surface of the pie.

The craftspersons at Ken's Artisan Pizza manage to satisfy those tree criteria with almost frightening perfection.

I ordered a Pizza Margarita, the classic tomato, mozzarella and basil pie, which easily bested the now second best pizza I have ever consumed. Cooked in a wood burning brick oven, which — by the looks of the mammoth hearth — reaches dizzyingly high temperatures, the crust achieved a beautiful golden brown color and crunched generously — though not too much — when I parted it with my knife. And Kudos to Ken's for providing a steak knife, with some real teeth, as pizzerias do in Europe. Or at least France.

The toppings were minimal. My pie had a smattering of savory tomato sauce, and just enough basil that I felt a burst of its fresh aroma every now and again, but not so much as to overpower savor the preternaturally delicious crust. A harmonious balance, really.

Food aside, the legendary Wait was just that: a legend. The only time spent standing came as the charming hostesses attend to the dozen or so patrons ahead in the line.

The restaurant itself looked lovely enough. On a balmy summer evening, the wide open windows let in a pleasant breeze.

Ken's Artisan Pizza. It's pretty great.

Of all the horrible staples of college life, one stands out in my mind as the most obnoxious. Some might focus their attention on the dunderheaded folks who disrupt everyone's sleep by holding loud conversations about meaningless jibber-jabber at 4 AM. Others might (quite erroneously, in my opinion) bemoan the insipidity of the muffins. But neither of those two problems have any relevance or weight when compared to the Internet access here at Bates.

I doubt there exists another system even a tenth as convoluted as the system deployed on the Bates campus. It took me no less than three hours to connect my laptop to the Internet for the first time. Three hours! What is more, had it not been for the serendipitous presence and wonderful benevolence of someone a floor down from me, the process might have taken even longer.

For, to correctly authenticate with the network, I needed to install a security certificate on my computer. But, to obtain the certificate, I needed an Internet connection. It took a second computer, with a functioning Internet connection, to put my computer online. Insanity.

Coercing the software to cooperate, however, is only the tip of the metaphorical iceberg. First, there is the software itself. The Cisco Clean Access Agent, companion software product to the infamous Cisco NAC Appliance, is, at least on the Macintosh, poorly-written, dysfunctional and mildly parasitic. When it fails to do a mediocre job connecting me to the Internet, the Clean Access Agent throws caution to the wind, causing kernel panics, forcing restarts, and crashing iTunes. The software also seems to have trouble realizing it has not successfully connected me to the Internet on some occasions. In the five weeks I have been using the software, I have uninstalled and reinstalled it at least four dozen times because it cannot correctly determine the status of my connection.

Then there is the quality of the Internet access itself. On most days it makes me dream of dial-up. My iPhone, connected to the Internet via molasses-like EDGE and operating on a relatively pokey 600 MHz ARM processor, can usually load pages faster than my dual-core laptop connected to the college network. I suspect the problem is twofold. On the one hand, the college needs to realize that, what with YouTube, iTunes and easy videoconferencing, students use far more bandwidth than the college has. Time to upgrade to a zippier connection, as it were. On the other, the software on the network's routers do an awful job of traffic shaping. I have little doubt that some tiny, self-serving group of people suck up 90 percent of the college's bandwidth downloading reruns of Baywatch after classes end at four.

As if the lamentable software, awful connection quality and convoluted installation procedure were not enough, however, I also cannot connect my iPhone to the campus WiFi network. Despite the fact that no third-party software can be installed on the iPhone now, and the fact that Apple would never be sufficiently insane to allow third-parties access to the kind of low-level APIs an iPhone Clean Access Client would need, the college categorically refuses to allow the iPhone onto the NAC Appliance's mythical "white list." Without any authorization, the phone has no Internet access via WiFi. I particularly like the laconic response the IT department sent in response to my email inquiring into the subject of iPhone WiFi access:

I cannot decide whether the "NO" was intended to be in all caps. Regardless, I would have appreciated the "why" behind the senseless policy.

To me, the fact I cannot connect my device to the network is a breach of good morals. It is as if the college were issuing a ban on filling pitchers of a certain shape with the dormitory tap water. I pay a share of the costs associated with the Internet connection, network hardware and its upkeep, thus I should be permitted to use the connection on any device, so long as it does not harm the group. I hardly see my accessing email, browsing maps of Berlin or reading the New York Times on my phone with the help of the campus WiFi network as a violation of that implicit contract.

I joined the Facebook group, Clean Access is the Bane of My Existence, though, with only 13 members as of now, I doubt it will have much of an impact in the near-term. I almost feel as if more direct, outspoken action is necessary to deal with this most troublesome of problems.

There is nothing quite like the smell of alcohol in the morning. But such is life in my dormitory. Or, perhaps, life in any college dormitory. Needless to say, I continue to adjust slowly to life without the luxury of carpet below my feet. (Though that particular problem will be remedied once I manage to pick out a rug.)

Given the less than vibrant restaurant scene in Lewiston, Maine, it is quite fortunate that the dining services folks here at Bates serve food leaps and bounds beyond what I have consumed on other college campuses. In particular, I have nothing but praise for the Bates muffins. They are simply divine. The scones erred a little on the moist side, and the green tea on offer lacks the kind of intense, bitter flavor I like, but the muffins positively cannot be beat.

My second food-related complaint — the lack of luscious crusty bread — may soon be remedied. The fancy new (and mysteriously air conditioning free) commons building, according to one of the officials on hand for questions, has a magnificent oven capable of producing wonderful, hearty bread in the blink of an eye. What I would not give for a just-baked baguette! It has been weeks now, since I have sunk my teeth into something as scrumptious.

More academically speaking, the fine art we call linear algebra, for better or worse, has not posed nearly as much of a challenge as I thought it would. The study of linear algebra, though, has not made me any more fond of matrices. They still torment me like some kind of awful, pestilent disease. Some might argue that, with a calculator, matrices "aren't that bad." But typing matrices into a calculator, or a computer, for that matter, is a process highly prone to errors.

The opposite holds true for my French literature class. Reading Flaubert, Maupassant, Baudelaire and Apollinaire, and writing two six-hundred word literary analyses in French — all in the space of four weeks — takes a certain amount of effort. Having said that, reading French literature makes me feel very smug. Whether I can justify that smugness, however, is another question entirely.

With my vast quantities of free time and the release of Apple's Leopard operating system just around the corner, I thought I would revive my long abandoned effort to build a better piece of computerized recipe organization software.

At some point, as I was debugging a rather troublesome sheet, it struck me that the real coup de grâce of a recipe management program would be the ability to dump a bunch of text into a box and have the software parse it into a recipe. What began as a simple idea has now become a rather bothersome thorn in my side. Despite what some people may think, computers are extraordinarily stupid machines.

My first attempt to teach a computer to decipher a recipe involved a set of fairly simplistic rules, based mostly upon a crude analysis of the first characters on each line. As anyone who knows anything about programming would probably guess, such an approach is more or less useless. My simplistic approach did a fairly good job of parsing ingredients like, "1 cup flour," but it failed miserably when it came to the title, number of servings and just about every other point of data contained in a recipe.

So, I started to analyze recipes from a grammatical point of view, in the hope that I could somehow use grammatical differences and trends in recipes to parse them more effectively. I think I have now analyzed the grammatical differences in about five dozen recipes, and I have found a handful of interesting trends.

When I actually set about programming the parser to test my theories, however, I realized that I had no way to analyze grammar programatically. Sure, Apple added the "hasSuffix:" method to their lovely strings, but hasSuffix: cannot tell me how many words a string contains or whether the string is written in the past or present tense.

Fortunately, Apple has included a wonderful programming paradigm called the "category" in Objective-C. With it, even the most naive programmer can add methods to any existing class without creating a subclass of the class he or she would like to extend. It is absolutely brilliant. And, with any luck I should have some kind of parser working in the next week.

I did not enjoy watching The Wizard of Oz. And that horrible "Over the Rainbow" song tends to give me headaches. But I cannot possibly imagine life without a brain, like that poor scarecrow fellow. Trying to bestow the gift of logical deduction to an idiotic machine is exhaustingly painful.

Everyone loves text-based Internet advertisements. Investors love them, consumers love them and, if koalas could use the Internet, they would love them too. With the promise of fantastic "ROI" (or "return on investment") and the fantastic reach, I thought Internet advertising was the only place to be. So, to promote my fledgling enterprise, I signed up for a Google AdWords account. The results have neither shocked nor awed me. For that matter they have barely perturbed my utterly enervated aura.

Of course, I would never have harbored the delusion of seeing a thousand-fold increase in business after eight hours. I did, however, expect to see some kind of impact. But, as of now, not a single person so much as clicked on one of my text ads, despite the fact that, according to Google, over two hundred sets of eyes have now viewed them. So even if, in the next ten minutes, just one person clicked on one of my advertisements, my total "click though rate," or "CTR" for those in the know, would be around half a percent.

Perhaps it takes time to garner results. Maybe I should have taken Google's suggestion to heart and set a monthly advertising budget of over $100. Or, I suppose I might have chosen the wrong keywords. Regardless, I hope this whole text advertisement shebang managers to have some impact. Otherwise I will have wasted $35 on yet another chimera.

My trip to Paris began pleasantly enough. I walked into the airport, checked bags, queued for security, bought some hot chocolate at the Coffee People kiosk and found my gate. Soon thereafter, however, two harbingers of disaster foreshadowed my pain to come. First, I spilled several ounces of hot chocolate down the front of my shirt, which, thankfully, came off after a liberal rinsing in the disgusting airport bathroom. Second, the batteries in my newly purchased Bose QuietComfort 2 headphones died prematurely.

But I failed to see the signs. I shrugged off the twenty minute delay, figuring that in a summer rife with air traffic problems a twenty-minute delay was to be expected. On the runway I silently applauded the pilot's decision to keep us grounded an extra ten minutes, as a brilliantly executed move that would squeeze us into the Philadelphia arrivals schedule. Five hours later a string of unfortunate events jolted me from my naïve reverie.

To capture the epic scale of my disastrous experience on US Airways, I began writing my account of the experience in the form of a Bible chapter. Three hours later, however, I had only managed to account for a fourth of the airline's missteps. So, rather than spend twelve hours writing, I have decided to tell the story with a more conventional form of prose, though, at a later date. Read on for the first fourth in biblical verse.

Rather than begin the account of my latest Parisian adventure with the often comical, but entirely unpleasant, experience of flying on US Airways, I will instead begin with the food, which was mostly wonderful. Some of the eateries, mostly those chosen for their convenient locations rather than the quality of their food, did not serve up the kind of delicacies that I expected. Others, however, surprised me with their delightful blend of value, charm and good cooking.

Read on for the itemized account.

Mention of the Bose brand in conversation usually results in one of two discussions. Audiophiles sneer and assert that Bose ought be called "blows" for the mediocre audio quality its products offer. The rest of the world praises the ear-pleasing audio quality of Bose speakers, but recoils slightly at their inflated prices. Despite these differences, however, everyone can agree that the Bose brand oozes pretense.

Not that Bose does anything to make their image less ostentatious. Their advertising never makes mention of the price, as if to associate their Wave Radio or Lifestyle speaker systems with other super-premium luxury items whose price is only disclosed to the small portion of America's bourgeoisie who can afford them.

And, on one level, I wholeheartedly concur with the audiophiles. Bose speakers always imbue music with an excess of something I can only describe as "cheer." They make Bartök and Kabalevsky sound almost uplifting — something that, to anyone who knows anything about classical music, is conceptually impossible. I also cannot fathom why Bose sets such outrageous prices. They must have fantastic margins. When it comes to noise-canceling technology, however, Bose QuietComfort headphones set the bar for quality. David Pogue could not be more correct when he says, "The world just falls away," in his review of noise canceling headphones.

So, when my previous pair of noise canceling cans — a venerable set of Sennheiser PXC250 headphones — decided to malfunction a few weeks ago, I figured I would splurge and buy the best.

For the most part, the Bose QuietComfort 2 headphones meet my expectations. My Bartök sounds a trifle too jolly to be Russian, and the noise cancelation is marvelous. The included carrying case, however, contained something so incredibly pretentious I burst out laughing.

Inside the padded carrying case Bose provides a dozen business cards, which state:

Bose has redefined the meaning of narcissistic. Not only do they think the customer will love their headphones, they also seem convinced that total strangers, who merely catch sight of the Bose logo painted subtly on the side of the earphone, will inquire about the product's loveliness.

Frankly, I think Bose would probably do better business if they dispensed with their air of snobbery and, instead, appealed to the average American. It is the average American, after all, who would want speakers with a touch of added cheer.

Either I am extremely unlucky or I have done something to offend every consumer electronics manufacturer on planet Earth. For, despite my best efforts, almost every consumer electronics gizmo or gadget I have ever purchased has harbored some sort of defect or gone kaput before it ought to have.

Today, for instance, I took my iPod to one of Apple's famed Genius Bars address the strange buzzing my iPod had begun to emit during music playback. The Genius donned a pair of headphones and informed me that he had, "Never seen anything like this before." What cosmic forces conspired to sell me the one iPod of millions that had a strange buzzing issues I will never know. To Apple's credit, however, the Genius did give me a brand new iPod to replace my defective model that clearly missed its calling as a bee.

But the recent "Defect at the Apple Store" saga does not end there.

A week ago I purchased an iPhone -- hands down the best cell phone I have ever used -- but I had been bothered by a slight looseness on the lower left side of the device's lower plastic antenna cover. So, having waited forty-five minutes to see a Genius, I brandished my steel and black communicator and inquired about the gauche give. As it turns out, that too constituted a defect. So the Genius also replaced my iPhone.

I must commend Apple for so deftly handling this issue. Rarely do I walk into a store with two broken gizmos and walk out an hour later with two fully-functional replacements. Though I would really appreciate it if a consumer electronics company saved me from having to replace the gadget in the first place.