Tags: CFL, dj, horror, IMAP, spire, video
Posted at 10:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)
September 5, 2007
Nature, 4. Tolva family, 0.
Microscopic to macroscopic, we've taken it the hard way across the full spectrum of natural world nastiness in the last two weeks. Powers of 10 gone bad.
Let us start with the tiniest of living evils, the virus. A few weeks ago we headed out on our first truly long-haul road-trip adventure and final hurrah of the summer. All five of us crammed into one car. Luggage everywhere. Fishing rods strapped to the roof. Hello, Clark Griswold. We left Chicago at 9PM on a through-the-night journey to far northeastern Oklahoma, a friend's lakehouse. Strangely I had never considered OK to be drivable, but in fact the border is only as far from St. Louis as St. Louis is from Chicago. Doable, if miserable.
3AM. All three kids asleep. Bliss. Then, our one-year-old daughter awakens with a cough straight out of a horror flick and inhalation distress that was truly terrifying. She was sick, clearly. Wife says, that's croup. Just a nasty little virus that we usually combat at home with a steamy shower, a jaunt out into the cold night air and/or medication. We had none of these. So, wife then says, we need to pull over right now. I agreed that we needed to, but, see, we were on the freeway squarely bisecting East St. Louis, the city that began the tradition of Illinois towns on the east side of the Mississippi being hellish mirror images of their counterparts on the other side. I protested, citing the well-being of all of us in the face of the well-being of one of us. But thelovelywife threatened my well-being if I did not pull off to assist our youngest and, you know, I'm selfish about my own personal safety, so I did. Here's a short video I shot at this moment.
We survived this escapade but decided we had to stop over the bridge at the St. Louis Children's Hospital. I went to grad school at Wash U. so I knew this was a quality institution, but I was unprepared for just how amazing it was when you need it, even in the wee hours of the morning. Still, seeing your toddler in a hospital gown is a troubling thing. Sleepless and with two other kids in their pajamas in the ER it was all we could do at this sight to keep our composure. She got some steroid shots and we were on our way. But we couldn't go all the way to Okie. Just didn't seem right with Typhoid Mary in the car. So we decided to re-route to Galena, Illinois a small town in far northwestern Illinois where my parents have a place. We rolled in at 8:45 PM the next day. Just 15 minutes shy of 24 hours (minus ER) in the car. More on this at the conclusion of this saga.
Scale up, if you will, from the dastardly virus to the sustaining yeast fungus. As a culture, we owe much to this little bugger, but I'm currently greatly dissatisfied with it. I decided to embark on a raspberry wine fermentation last weekend. (You may recall the bloody mess that was picking these delicacies on my parents' property, the aforementioned Galena residence.) So I squashed and squashed. You can't run these things through a grape press, alas, and have to squeeze them whole in a cheesecloth bag. It was open-heart surgery.
We ended up with five gallons of juice. It smelled heavenly. I added the sugar, took the temp, measured the specific gravity, had the concoction positively yearning for ferment then added the yeast and ... nothing. OK, not a problem, might take a night. But no. No foam, no gurgle, no incipient smell of alcohol. This was a problem because I did this after the kids were asleep hoping to avoid their bacteria-laced touch and endless questioning. It was not to be. The next morning I checked the fermentor -- still no hot yeast-on-sugar action -- and my kids were all over the thing. I had to explain it all, which resulted in this classic quip from the six-year-old: “Mommy, mommy, did you know that yeasts are little critters that poop alcohol!?” I've done nearly everything I know to get the fermentation going, but as of today, no luck.
Scale up again to the charming urban indigene known as Rattus norvegicus. We've had a bit of rat problem of late. Early summer storms knocked our garage door off its track. We fixed it, but the fix left a gap at the bottom where the little nasties let themselves in nightly. We saw them scurrying out when we'd lift the door but only understood the extent of the problem when we peered into the corner where we store some of the 19 strollers we own. Rat shit everywhere. In every nook, every cranny. Son said “Hey Daddy, look at all the rotten raisins in the baby seat.” Um, not exactly.
As soon as they banished the thoughts of the cute vermin from Ratatouille and Flushed Away the kids were immediately obsessed with helping me rid ourselves of the bastards. But of course, as with the wine, they had to be right in the action playing away in the rodent feces. I finally shooed them away and fired up the leaf-blower to shoot out the very last of the Bubonic particulate matter. Stupid. I was immediately in the eye of a small hurricane of enclosed, whirling crap. (Woke up the next morning with a sore throat and some truly Dickensian snot.)
No rat spotted as of today, though we've identified their lair in the foundation of the couch house next to us. Next weekend promises chicken wire and concrete poured into their holes. Take that, suckers! Good fun.
Scale up now from the natural to the Natural. As in Mama Natura. (Bitch.) And rewind to the aborted trip to Oklahoma. We're on our way to Galena moving up the western edge of Illinois through such metropolises as Peoria, Galesburg, and Savanna -- a trip worthy of a Sufjan Stevens album. Just two hours from the blessed relief of a home we know the skies turn apocalyptic. Wife and I were barely coherent from lack of sleep. This was hour 22 of 24 awake. It all went straight to hell as an amazing supercell unloaded on us. We were on the Great River Road that snakes up the Mississippi through tiny towns so at least one cardinal direction, west, was cut off for our escape route should we have seen a twister. Luckily we didn't but it was a biblical torrent. In a way maybe it was a good thing. The adrenalin powered us through the last hours of our odyssey from St. Louis in our roving petri dish of a car.
Moving eastward these storms were on a bee-line for Chicago. They slammed the city as we all convalesced from our road trip in Galena. We didn't realize the extent of it until we arrived home that Sunday. There was evidence of the maelstrom everywhere: trees down, transformers blown, standing water. We arrived in time for our annual block party. A small affair, literally one block of the thousands in Chicago. The funny thing is that because of the storm one side of the street had power, the other had none. Being rather neighborly around these parts about a dozen homes from my side had strung extension cords across the street to power certain vital gizmos on the other side. This ad hoc wiring was made more surreal because there were no cars on the block due to the party. I'll remember this show of support when we're all irritable and threatening each other with a shovel-based death for parking spots come winter.
Scrolling further out I'm sure you can find a meteor headed straight for my home, but this has not happened yet so please post it as a comment when I am but a mixture of carbonized ash and interstellar dust. Thanks.
Tags: powersof ten, yeast, wine, storm, virus
Posted at 9:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
August 9, 2007
Thunderbolts and thievery
Dear Internet,
Don't take this the wrong way, but lately it seems that you think all I do is travel the world and party (as-a-verb) with friends. This is not altogether true. You see, this blog is really a carefully pruned excerpt of a mostly mundane and often exasperating life (in-progress). People sometimes read this blog and say “I want your life.” Well, Internet, I'm here to tell you that all is not rosy at 1¢ Stage.
Recently we've had some intense summer storms here in Chicago. We lost power during a lightning strike. This was initially charming in the way that the buzz from one beer is fun where the stupor from eight really is not. Several hours later, well into our gridless stupor, the lights came back on and I realized that my two networked media drives were no longer accessible.
This is, perhaps, the worst technological calamity which could befall my home. For this is what happens when you have digitized all your CDs and DVDs and wired up the whole place to access it from the network. And this is what happens when you were midway through a really well-intentioned, disciplined backup strategy but couldn't afford that second terabyte of space.
So now we are a home of disconnected media islands. The kids' Apple TV only has on it what was synched there before the electrical storm. The only music in the house is what I had on my iPod at the time. My hope is that only the controllers are fried and that I can get the media off the drives. Damn you, Zeus. We hurl our fists at you from the Archipelago of Re-Runs and Tiresome Playlists.
Oh, but it gets better. You may have read about how wonderful the iPhone was overseas as a conversation-starter. Well, here's a conversation for you. I had assumed that international data roaming rates were only going to be as bad as the highway robbery of international voice roaming. In fact, it is grand larceny. While AT&T offers an international unlimited data package for the Blackberry, the iPhone gets a lovely two-cents-per-kilobyte surcharge. That may not seem like much, but the iPhone was made to view the regular web, and regular maps, and suck down regular bytes -- not watered-down WAP-py data. 2.7MB, for instance, comes out to $54. That's a hefty 10 minutes of web browsing. So what did the entire week of intermittent data access run me? Over $800.
When I called to complain I had to slog through the Three Stages of Customer Service: Encounter with the Script-Reader, Argument with the Pablum-Spewer, and Anger Management Therapy with The Middle Manager. Well. They certainly weren't going to waive the fee. Heavens no. Just because I didn't know it was two cents per KB didn't mean I could get out of paying for such lunacy. If only I had drilled several dozen pages into the byzantine innards of the miscegenation that is the merged Cingular-AT&T website to learn that international data roaming is their dirty little secret. Seriously, it took two separate agents over 15 minutes to figure out what the rate was. And they work there.
Turns out there is a plan for international data. $25 gets you 20MB. Then it is a half-cent per KB after that. That will still bankrupt you if you are trying to do much more than, say, nothing -- just more slowly. I switched to this plan and they “re-rated” my past charges to it. Ultimately I “saved” over $700. Oh, and I am now paying $25 more per month.
I swear, the irony of a user-focused company like Apple working so closely with a it-ain't-my-problem company like AT&T gets more and more bitter every time I pause to think about it.
So, Internet, that's what's been going on. My life isn't all warm, mixed nuts on trans-Atlantic airliners, you see.
Yours Sincerely,
John
PS - I also have a toothache at the moment.
PPS - Are you really just a series of tubes?
Tags: at&t, iphone, lightning, failure
Posted at 12:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
August 1, 2007
Back alley transaction
This Saturday we're participating in a multi-family garage sale here in Roscoe Village. Hopefully beery Retro on Roscoe festival-goers will stumble by and lighten their wallets. Update: An address might help. Stop by 3537 N. Leavitt between 8am and 2pm, Saturday, August 4.
Garage sales in the city have always seemed odd to me, given that garages are in the rear on the alley. But I do like them, having grown up with a grandmother pathologically addicted to scouring them. But then, who doesn't enjoy sifting through their neighbors' detritus? Socially-acceptable dumpster-diving.
In advance of the sale I figured I'd offer up some of the geekier goods we hope to offload. Consider it an early-bird special. Let me know if you want more detail or photos or if you want to make an offer.
SOLD! Harmon Kardon HK3270 Receiver
Basic stereo receiver. 65w/channel, A/B speaker switching, five stereo inputs. Makes a great second-zone or audio-only amp.
$45
SOLD! Sony VHS-C Camcorder
Includes extra battery, recharger, carrying case, and VHS adapter.
$35
SOLD! Audiotron [Note: A friend of mine has two units he's willing to sell for the same price each, if you are interested.]
Network audio player. Scours network for playable audio files and offers a variety of ways to access them for playback through your stereo system. Mint condition. No moving parts. This is a choice piece of hardware. More info here.
$45
Roku Photobridge (formerly HD-1000)
Network media player, akin to Audiotron but for photos and video (including HD). Includes image packs. Also mint condition. More info here.
$45
SOLD! Canon Powershot G1
3.3 megapixel camera. Includes 1GB microdrive. You may have this camera, but you may not have the love in my heart I have for it. More info here.
$65
Sony Wireless Stereo Headphones
Infrared-based, 40' range. For use with stereo or television at home.
$15
Gateway VX1110 20“ CRT Display
1600 × 1200 max. resolution. It ain't flat, but that's still a lot of screen real estate.
$75
Nokia 447Xi Plus 17” CRT Display
1280 × 1024 max. resolution. Best CRT I ever owned.
$50
Pronto TS1000 Universal Remote
Screen-based, highly-configurable universal remote. Download templates for your A/V components from the web. More here.
$20
Tags: chicago, garagesale, yardsale
Posted at 11:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
June 25, 2007
Moodbuster
Been in a funk all day. But the funk has broken, so to speak.
I was playing tennis with my brother, getting my ass handed to me on a platter on a crappy public court (massive weed-strewn fissures down the hardtop, sandstorm-grade dust blowing over from an abutting dog track -- nice design there, city, net two cranks too low) and it was freaking hot. Perfect to maintain my stroppy disposition.
But then I see a couple near a park bench. One or both of them is deaf because they are signing like mad. Not sure if they were arguing but whatever they were saying it was intense. And then one of them gives the sign (I'm guessing here) for “Screw this, let's SMS” and they pull out identical smartphones. They regain composure, sit down and start texting back and forth, right next to each other, happy as clams.
It was the most beautiful thing. I think I broke my brother's serve after that.
Tags: mood, signlanguage, sms
Posted at 6:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Instant messaging peeves
In a bit of a mood today so here's my chat annoyance list.
When status says “not available” or “do not disturb.” I have never understood this. If you are using a chat application but not accepting messages what's the point? Log off.
“I just e-mailed you.” Yes, thank you I see your note sitting right here in my inbox. This is only slightly less annoying than people who call you to let you know that they've e-mailed you right after clicking send. E-mail is asynchronous, people. Look it up.
“On the phone” or, worse, “otp.” Yes, that's why I chose to ping you instead of ring you. And if you can't do two things at once, why are you on chat? IM isn't for uni-taskers.
When people treat IM like an e-mail. “Dear John, I am writing you to follow up on the matter we discussed ... [18 lines later] ... Sincerely, Mary.” Nice selection of medium there, Mary.
“Are you using [insert app here]?” This would be like asking people if they are using Outlook before sending an e-mail. Who cares?
| 12:51 PM | Mary: you there? | |
| 12:51 PM | John: yes | |
| 1:47 PM | Mary: just seeing if you are around |
And the obverse:
| 2:15 PM | Mary: there john? | |
| 2:15 PM | Mary: hello?????? |
When you know someone is typing (“Mary is typing ...”) and it takes forever. People, put down the Strunk and White and hit return. Chat. Not oration.
OK, all done. Damn you, Mary.
Tags: annoyances, chat, im, etiquette
Posted at 1:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)
June 10, 2007
Set trimmers to kill
Buzzed my hair down to the scalp today. Up yours male pattern baldness!
Update: Best comments on new buzz:
"Did you get lice in Russia?"
"Overclocked brains require better heatsinks, right?"
"Your back hair is now officially longer than your head hair."
Posted at 9:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)
June 5, 2007
How to know you're in trouble for the web demo you're about to give
Your co-presenter says the following things during set-up. Let's call this person a she. Let's call her Pauline. Let's also call her my boss.
- In establishing a wireless network connection she said “Oh, we're not connected.” The status said connected 100% and it clearly was. I looked at her funny. She said “See, the little lines aren't making it all the way across.”
That's eye-candy, Pauline. An animation. To make users feel warm inside. It means nothing. But that brick wall there, that really does exist. Best way to keep out viruses is to run your connection straight through solid brick. Kills 'em right off, I tell you.
- I ask her to find an empty spot on her desktop and drop a file there. She responds “There are no empty spaces.” Wha? Looking over I see she's right. Not a single square of available space. I think everything she's ever downloaded is crammed onto this single screen. Half of which are the executable installs for the very program icons that follow them. And, since Windows often uses the same icon for installs and for the program itself she reinstalls apps about as often as she means to run them.
- “Wow! How did you just switch programs that fast?” Um, I clicked on the other window. (No Alt-Tab sorcery here folks!) "I didn't know you could do that,“ she says. ”If I need to go from one program to another I just close the window and open a new one.“ Hello, MS-DOS!
I'm doomed.
Tags: inept, windows, techsupport
Posted at 2:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)
June 1, 2007
Enough already
I'm sure there are some readers sick of the baseball and genealogy posts. Suffice to say that my blissful month of no travel (OK, not much travel -- I'm in NYC right now) is coming to an end. This means new posts on things like Russia when it don't go dark, travels with Oprah Winfrey, certainly a trip or two to China, and a few other new destinations.
My loss, your gain.
Posted at 6:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
May 27, 2007
Why go tapeless?
No moving parts.
Imagine what the tape looked like when I finally got it out.
Update: You know this whole thing reminds me of the hell of getting my data out of Outlook a few years ago. People care about the data, not the app. Same goes for hardware. I didn't think twice in destroying a videocam in my pursuit of a stuck videotape with Christmas 2006 on it.
See also: Canon Fodder.
Tags: failure, gadget, tape, video
Posted at 8:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
May 16, 2007
Birds, bees, Burger King
On a recent trip to visit my parents I drove by this Burger King and it immediately came back to me. This spot, this very location, is where my mother explained to me the concept of human intercourse. It is burned into my memory.
We had just grabbed some BK to go and, apparently, mom thought discussion of sex was an appropriate topic to share over french fries. I believe I was mortified and intrigued and that I lost my appetite.
And before you ask, this little life event was decades ago, not in the last few weeks.
Tags: lifelesson, burgerking, sex
Posted at 5:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
March 21, 2007
Velcro tie
So I'm at Starbucks, behind a cop waiting for his double mocha-frappa-hoohaa. His tie is a little askew so the baristas, who clearly know him, start giving him a hard time about it, saying it looks like a clip-on, ha ha ha. Schoolyard-bullying (of a man with a loaded gun). He goes along with it and then yanks it off completely. Velcro! Oh then the name-calling really begins.
And then he explains that the last thing a cop wants around his neck is a built-in noose.
Duh. Laughing stopped.
You gotta think this was learned the hard way after some cop-on-bad-guy fracas, somewhere.
Apologies to ZZ Top.
Posted at 2:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
March 20, 2007
A group is its own worst enemy
Lots of people and companies want to know how to put together a great online community. Or scale an existing one way up. Not as many people consider what happens when a community goes bad. This was the topic of a great presentation by Chris Tolles at SXSW called When Communities Attack.
Here are a few points I found interesting.
The tone in discussion forums gets more friendly if posts are geotagged. The rationale, while not proven, is that a degree of anonymity is lost this way and that no one wants to associate a shameful post with their vicinity (or perhaps even suffer being located).
Lots of people have “conversations” with themselves in online communities using alternate screen names to establish credibility.
The word for the non-machine-readable letter grid that is often required for users to input to validate themselves is called a “captcha”. Didn't know that.
Registration often works against decorum by keeping out good posters who prefer anonymity and by encouraging flamers since registration implies that this community has something good going on inside of it.
I've been noodling on this question from a different panel, called Bridging the Online Cultural Divide, since Austin:
Do social networks conjoin communities -- i.e., technology facilitates connection where it could not be accomplished before -- or does it merely create closed communities by allowing like-minded folks to cohere and separate from the 'others'? Put another way, is a social network inherently based on segregation or inclusion?
Post title from this great paper by Clay Shirky.
That's it for recaps of SXSW. Back to the other stuff ...
Tags: community, dialogue, socialnetworking
Posted at 12:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
March 14, 2007
Optimism
Kudos to Boingo for treating my request to not be signed up for a monthly charge not as a problem, but an opportunity. No, no. I am an Unlimited Upsell! Consider the possibilities for this hapless day user!
The browser window itself was called Click Capture. At Boingo, they are all about giving it to you straight. Straight somewhere.
Posted at 8:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Texas nerdquake
A great last few days here in Austin. SXSWi has just wrapped up and I've got a bucket of notes, unvisited links, and ideas to sort through. Which is exactly the way I like it. Ingest complete, begin digest. Look forward to a few excreted posts in the coming days.
A few morsels.
Twitter, oh my goodness Twitter, was the darling of the festival. Literally everyone was using it to catch up with one another or just buzz softly in the great hive mind. There were screens set up in public areas that provided a steady flow of tweets. It definitely took the place of the room-by-room IRC channels from previous years. In a way, Twitter is just really slow IRC. But you can already see where this is going. Eric Rice is right when he says that a fest like SXSW is perfect for Twitter (especially given the overloaded WiFi) but that the long-term usefulness of such a dump of minutiae may be questionable.
There was a lot about virtual worlds this year -- more about that soon -- but it wasn't completely dominated by Second Life, which is good. There was a lot of buzz about an impending Google metaverse (what with the Earth renderer, Sketchup, and their purchase of Adscape Media). Of course last week's announcement of Sony's PS3 Home got a lot of people talking, mostly skeptically. And the Wii is simply adored.
Hardware DIY was big, especially given the deification of Phil Torrone for his Frogger hijinks on 6th Street last year. He and Limor Fried provided one of the keynotes. The Open Source Hardware movement is very interesting indeed. Fried demonstrated an illegal cell phone jammer to a room full of astonished geeks. I gotta get me one of them.
Last year's darling -- tagging -- was scarcely heard from this year. Tag: tired.
As always the best part of SXSW is what happens away from the convention center. This year's dorkbot meetup was especially well-done. You simply can't beat drinking free beer to the sound of humming tesla coils. Though the conference grew in size by almost 80% the parties didn't seem any more crowded than usual.
Best way to make a friend at SXSWi: pull a power strip out of your bag.
Overall, wonderful. I knew more people this year, but met fewer. I'd prefer to meet more, but that's the dark side of an expanding social network I suppose. My only complaint is that the size of the fest is such now that they've had to expand into other, very hard-to-reach areas of the convention center. It made for long slogs from panel-to-panel and also cut down on the mingling.
Special thanks to my panelists, by the way. A great discussion.Tags: conferences, sxsw
Posted at 8:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
March 7, 2007
Dude, where's my car?
Some people misplace their car keys. I misplace my car. Often. See, I don't drive very much, commuting to work by train as I do. And I park on the semi-anonymously gridded streets of Chicago. Add to that the frequent dustings and dumpings of snow and loaning it to friends in the neighborhood and it can be damn hard to find.
Enter Twitter. I've been wanting to do something with this much-buzzed, nanoblogging tool, but I really didn't think my daily minutiae interesting enough to submit. (And I still don't.) Hell, this blog is boring enough.
But as a mini-blog of my car's location, it is absolutely perfect. I give you ...
Don't steal my car please. Oh, and someone add geotagging to Twitter. That'd be nirvana. (Update: thank you very much.)
Tags: car
Posted at 7:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
March 6, 2007
Ghana@50
Today, the nation of Ghana and its sizable diaspora celebrate fifty years of independence from colonial rule.
My family, while not Ghanaian, feels a special affinity for the country. About six years ago, we first met Margaret Kumi, an experienced nanny looking for a new family. In short order she was part of ours, and we part of hers. She introduced us to the Twi language, Ghanaian foods, authentic kente cloth and a world much beyond our own. Margaret is no longer our nanny. She's more like a grandnanny, a Poppins-esque treat for the kids.
Seems like just yesterday I was getting emotional for a country I'd never been to as they marched further into the World Cup than anyone thought.
And mark your calendar Chicagoans. Ghanafest 2007 is right around the corner.
Tags: ghana
Posted at 7:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
December 29, 2006
Resolutions 2006 in review
Time to review the resolutions from 2006. Last year I went 7-for-12 with two partials. And this year?
- Cook.
Done. Not every night, not even every week. But a few dozen times is more than zero. And no reports of foodborne illness. - Visit San Diego, Philadelphia, Portland, or Santa Fe, all US cities I have never been to.
Thank goodness for the or. Got to Santa Fe in March. (But Los Alamos was cooler.) - Rip DVD collection.
I'm going to call this complete. I didn't do the whole thing. In fact, not even close. But I did rip several dozen. I did all the children DVD's in the house. (These have been uploaded to TiVo for easy access. No more ruined DVD players from kid-smarm.) I also ripped anything that I knew I'd want to watch while traveling and any I wanted to send back to Neflix immediately to plow deeper into my queue, usually to stock up for travel. - Get to know the south side of Chicago.
Uh, no. Apart from a few trips to the University of Chicago and Pilsen and some bike routes I barely stepped foot south of Congress. - Look into Italian dual-citizenship.
I have the link. Does that count? - Shave head.
Well, not completely. But I've gone quite short. Call it a partial. - Visit Xian, China.
Nope. You'd think with four trips to China this year I could have done it. I even called this a “safety” resolution last year. Jeez. - Find Jim LoBianco.
Task complete. Took barely three months. God bless The Google. - Run a half-marathon.
Ha! No. Worst fitness year ever. - Teach sons how to swim.
Gonna go for the stretch on this and say complete. Could I thrown them in a lake and walk away? No. (Well, not without pulling a Susan Smith.) But they can wear floaties and putter around the pool and that's all I was going for. - Call (not ping, not e-mail) my mother more often.
Um. She reads my blog. Ruling? - Return to home winemaking.
Yes, though we made no wine. Our brew this year was cider. Same gear, same principals.
Tags: resolutions, newyear
Posted at 11:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
December 16, 2006
Seasonal smattering
A few trinkets for your stocking.
After over a year shuttered, the Division Street Russian Baths are back open. The “renovation” is somewhat underwhelming. The classic, mildewy old entrance is gone, replaced by a brokerage or something. I sauntered into a room full of cubicles and thought “can't be.” Indeed, it wasn't. The entrance is now through what used to be the women's spa. The new upper floor is a vast, soul-free community era decorated in stunning what-do-you-do-for-style-after-communism Russian cheese. The sauna benches have been rebuilt and enlarged. Yes, the charm of worrying about hooking an appendage (ok, the appendage) on a rusty nail popping through the slats is gone. As is the old tiled Russian and Turkish Baths sign. The eucalyptus steam room ain't working and the cold bath looks like the holding area for the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Granted, I visited two weeks ago, so maybe things have improved, but Russian Baths 2.0 is definitely still in beta.
On a recent ground stop in SFO (weather in Chicago, imagine that) I had a few hours to talk to the pilot. He told me about all the shit that's hit his plane's windshield during flight. Birds, obviously. But also fish over Cleveland that had been sucked up in some Great Lakes equivalent of a waterspout. He's also had a snake smashed into the glass, dropped from a bird of prey presumably. Snakes on a plane, indeed. Then there are the animals in the plane. The pilot told me about all the legally-permissible guide animals -- animals that are not required to be caged. Dogs, obviously. But also guide pigs (small) and even a guide falcon, which sat (hooded) on his owner's shoulder the whole flight. I suggest that the person behind the falconer was not about to complain about a too-reclined seat.
The 'tubes have been good to me this year. I've reconnected with my roommate from Rome in 1993 (one resolution, complete), my best friend from high school who I haven't seen in 20 years, and a student I taught freshman composition to in 1996. Is anyone still saying the Internet makes you antisocial?
The shooting at a law office in the Chicago Loop last week over a patent misunderstanding has gotten me thinking about the value of ideas these days. The business of patents -- creating them, licensing them, suing for them -- is gigantic, billions of dollars annually. And yet, they are only ideas, most never to receive material or methodological implementation. It's no wonder -- though certainly tragic -- that a sociopathic gunman didn't understand that just because a truckers' toilet hadn't been built didn't mean it hadn't been patented. The patent system clearly needs an overhaul, but so do people's expectations of the value of a single idea. Innovation ain't worth much if it isn't paired with insight and implementation. And for those of you who think your life has been ruined because of a stolen idea, perhaps check Google's new patent search first?
Tags: baths, patents, shooting, snakesonaplane, socialnetworking
Posted at 11:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
August 11, 2006
Victory and fear
James Fallows has an good piece in this month's Atlantic Monthly (teaser only online to non-subscribers, alas). Yesterday's events in the UK make it a great piece.
Fallows argues that the "war" on terror should be declared over because of the successes the US and its allies have had (dispersing al-Qaeda, foiling plots, etc) but mostly because calling this protracted struggle a war plays right into terrorists' hands.Perhaps worst of all, an open-ended war is an open-ended invitation to defeat. Sometime there will be more bombings, shootings, poisonings, and other disruptions in the United States. They will happen in the future because they have happened in the past (Oklahoma City; the Unabomber; the Tylenol poisonings; the Washington, D.C.-area snipers; the still-unsolved anthrax mailings; the countless shootings at schools; and so on). These previous episodes were not caused by Islamic extremists; future ones may well be. In all cases they represent a failure of the government to protect its people. But if they occur while the war is still on, they are enemy “victories,” not misfortunes of the sort that great nations suffer. They are also powerful provocations to another round of hasty reactions.
Hasty reactions. A good tagline for what will surely ensue after yesterday's anti-terrorism victory. Boing Boing chronicles the new idiocy:
Check out this article from Asheville, NC. "Maya Leoni, who is held by Angela Perez, cries as her mother, A.J. Leoni, pours the last of her drink into the receptacle while in line for the security checkpoint at the Asheville Regional Airport."POUR IT INTO A RECEPTACLE? Don't you think that some of these potentially explosive liquids might be more dangerous when, I don't know, mixed in a big vat in the middle of an airport?
Christ, why don't they just have people put their liquids into a big bonfire?
If we overreact to this plot -- tremble, retrench, withdraw, not think -- it will be little better than if the bombs had gone off.
Posted at 9:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
August 9, 2006
Snackposts
To tide you over until the next meal.
Voting on panels for next year's South by Southwest Interactive conference is open. Remember this is purely a popularity contest and that I will send you a postcard from Austin if you vote for my panel. (Note that the list of available panels randomizes itself on load to prevent giving precedence to those near the top. Lovely!)
The woman who cuts my hair has no e-mail address. She can only be contacted via MySpace. Now, I don't profess to understand what the hell is going on at MySpace, but this seems a bit extreme no? Also, the name she uses in the salon isn't her real name. The salon gives hairdressers fake names to ensure that they are mutually distinct enough not to be confused over the phone during appointment-making. Persona in MySpace; persona at work.
Propelled by Digg and del.icio.us, the LEGO mosaic post was shooting all over the 'tubes last week. Off to the bandwidth races!
During this deluge Holly posted a link to a similar project of hers, effectively puncturing a hole in the bottom of the tub and flooding her site too. And what a site it is. Cracks me up. Hollyrhea: highly recommended.
Books that, when released, I'll dump what I am reading at the time for: The Echo Maker, by Richard Powers and The Ghost Map, by Steven Johnson. (Oh, anybody know what Neal Stephenson is up to?)
And lastly, to the terminally dorky I ask: Why is there no way to convert an RSS feed to a webcal feed? C'mon people.
Posted at 2:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
June 26, 2006
E-mail longevity
Today is the tenth anniversary of the establishment of my primary e-mail address . Maybe not such a big deal, but I wonder how many people are using the same address and account after a decade. I don't mean aliases or forwarding services, I mean the actual account tied to an address. Where would you even find stats on this?
Mindspring, by the way, was a small ISP founded in Atlanta in 1994. It was acquired by Earthlink six years later. I've always liked the Athena reference.
Posted at 7:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
April 3, 2006
Bathroom ethnography
One of the best things about not travelling is settling back into the warm embrace of routine. There I said it. Though the over-routinized make up a huge part of the IT geek pool and though they suffer my lighthearted mockery for it, I will admit here, now, that there is something to be said positively for having a bit of routine in one's life. For example, going to the bathroom. Now, this may have something to do with my work in China where toilets aren't -- how to say -- well, they aren't toilets at all. Being back in my office in Chicago reminds me how much I love the facilities here. So, having spent some time getting to know them again, I am reminded that others too have very predictable behaviors, especially as they relate to Human Bathroom Interaction (HBI). Here, then, are the gross (ahem) categories into which I put my colleagues, all male, obviously:
The Bold Enterer - This is the guy who slams the bathroom door open and forcefully strides in as though he were The Law come to confront some poker-playing desperado in a dusty saloon. Or perhaps he's just being strong and willful in case some executive is washing his hands and might take notice of his initiative.
The Stall Jiggler - This is the guy who won't take no for an answer when he encounters a locked stall door. Buddy, if the door doesn't give way on the first pull that means there is someone in there. To continue to try to obtain entrance suggests that you know the throne is occupied and causes one to worry about your motives. Back off.
The Spy - Perhaps the opposite of the Jiggler is this guy, who stealths about in the bathroom peering through cracks, looking under stall walls, and generally thinking he is a lot more sly than he is as he seeks to ascertain availability. What's needed maybe is a red light-green light availability indicator, ala airplane lavatories and old-time Catholic confessionals. And speaking of confessions ...
The Chatter - I'm sorry, but I simply don't approve of cell phone conversations while you are relieving yourself. Do you think the other party can't hear? Do you think I can't hear? The sad part is that most of the discussions aren't personal in nature at all. This guy is carrying on business. While crapping. This is not right.
Mr. Efficient - This is the guy who speeds into the bathroom (not boldy, just hastily), targets the first open stall, and has performed his transaction and washed up in not more than 90 seconds. This man has a goal and he accomplishes it. Task checked off the list. He's most likely a project manager.
The Turnabout - This is the guy who seeks privacy above all else. He's related to The Spy but the moment he learns that the stalls are not completely empty he turns on his heel and heads out or, amusingly, stops to wash his hands -- surely a communication to the other fellow in the stall saying "you think I left because you were here, but in fact I came in only to stretch my legs and wash up." Yeah, right.
Any others that I'm missing?
Posted at 10:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)
March 11, 2006
Verge
Sitting in an afternoon panel at SxSW today I started a post on how I thought my panel in the morning went. I was thinking, gee, it would be nice to have a transcript when I looked up – literally to the guy sitting in front of me – and goddamn but he had one up on his screen.* I asked where he got it. He said, “Oh this is my site. I type fast.” And that is the essence of SxSW.
My panel? Oh it was on a concept that I didn’t really agree with. In fact, neither did my co-panelsts, David Pescovitz of Boing Boing and David-Michel Davies of the Webby Awards. Standing in line as we waited for our credentials a staffer looked at the title of our panel “Convergence and Transformation: A Whole New Creative World” and said quite disdainfully “What in the hell is that?” I shrugged. Sometimes that’s the best panel to be on though.
It was actually a lively discussion. The consensus from the panel was that it is not technology that is converging – tools diverge and proliferate to suit new tasks, after all – but that there is such a thing as convergent experience and in fact human beings crave experiences that unite, filter, and simplify – the more so in the face of multiplying tools, features, and media.
My particular take on the issue was to suggest that designers draw lessons from evolutionary biology. At the species level and above life does not converge at all. And in the rare case that it does – as with the horse and the donkey – it yields infertile life forms. There’s no convergence below the species level either, but there is certainly recombination, genetic in this case, which you might think of as a simultaneous divergence and convergence. A philosophy of recombinant design, I offered, is one where experiences are allowed to emerge by virtue of the remixability of your offering. Or, put differently, recombinant design is design as if your goal was to make designers of your customers. Consumer-as-producer, DIY media. Not terribly novel, I admit, but then no one threw me off the dais either.
[*} Not verbatim. I talked a lot more and made a lot less sense in reality.
Posted at 2:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
February 25, 2006
Social convergence
I've had some amazing moments of social serendipity lately. Call it the "small world" phenomenon or six degrees of separation minus most of the degrees, but frankly it is a bit odd. And, even though I've recently joined LinkedIn to explore my network of professional contacts once-, twice-, and thrice-removed, technology hasn't contributed at all to what's been going on.
Last week at the Special Olympics basketball tourney I wrote about I met a mom of one of the participants, a woman named Alison Leland. She was reading the New York Times in the bleachers so, this being middle-class Texas, I immediately knew she wasn't like most of the other families there. Turns out, Ms. Leland is the wife of the late Texas congressman Mickey Leland. I only knew a bit about Mickey Leland: the causes he championed, the foes he made, the way he died. Forward a few days to New York City where I was meeting with some of the staff of the new National Museum of African American History and Culture and where, just for conversation's sake, I mentioned this small world encounter with Ms. Leland. The team looked at me and said, "You know, the idea for this museum was Mickey Leland's." Hmm, small world.
This week I also learned about a computer scientist doing some interesting work in Arabic machine translation who one of my colleagues holds in very high regard. Her name is Violetta Cavalli-Sforza, a distinctive name to be sure and one that rang a bell. Now, I'm not certain of the connection, but it seems that she must be related (daughter?) to Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, the father of population genetics, author of the seminal History and Geography of Human Genes, and mentor of IBM's globetrotting co-principal on the Genographic Project Spencer Wells -- a project of which I am a part. Genetic forensics, indeed!
Then last night. A friend of ours lent my wife a book she loved to help us in our struggle to find a name for our third child, due in May. It was called The Baby Name Wizard by Laura Wattenberg. This of course is also the name of the much-lauded online app (also known as NameVoyager) from last year that dynamically maps the popularity of names over time and which was created by Martin Wattenberg, Laura's husband, and an IBM colleague of mine. I had no idea there was a book to accompany the site.
What does this prove? If the connections between the pairs of people and myself in each of these examples was a little less random it might suggest a widening professional circle. But two of the three pairs intersect my personal life too.
Oh, how I'd love this web visualized. Martin, are you listening?
Posted at 3:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
February 12, 2006
Rebound
Wow, I didn't exactly bounce back from the Turkey trip like I thought I would. Here's what I have been meaning to post. Unrelated, all of it.
The news that they've found a new tomb in the Valley of the Kings is, well, big news. This is the first such new discovery since Carter found Tut in 1922, though no one seems to mention that Kent Weeks' re-discovery of KV5 in 1995 is actually just as profound -- possibly more so. I'm skeptical that the new tomb, called KV63, will create as many questions as KV5 did and does. From the scanty information it seems like KV63 was a cache or waypoint or merely a lesser noble's attempt to flank the pharoahs' tombs. Time will tell, but one thing is certain: count the references in the media to Zahi Hawass, head of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities, versus the number of references to Edwin Brock and Otto Schaden, leaders of the team who actually found the tomb, and you will get a sense of how things go now for archaeologists in the Egypt.
When was the last time the word "museum" was used to sex something up? Never comes to mind. Well, not at the former Chicago Historical Society which has been newly rebranded the Chicago History Museum. While former director Lonnie Bunch takes the helm of the newly-placed National Museum of African American History and Culture on the Mall in DC, the CHS has dropped the S to seem more inclusive, less upper-crust. Maybe "museum" is better. Though the etymology of the word as a cage for muses suggests old-fashion animals-behind-bars zoos, "museum" at least has an egalitarian sense that "society" does not. Better than the Exelon Chicago History Adventure, I suppose.
On the flight back from Turkey I sat next to a retired DEA agent who had made Istanbul a part-time home. In the 1990's he was stationed there with the task of evaluating the anti-narcotics programs of the former Soviet 'stans. He had tons of fascinating stories and, though we did no drugs, his penchant for drinking scotch hand over fist didn't do me any favors. See not bouncing back from the jetlag, above.
Songbird, the open source, Mozilla-based media player is out in pre-alpha proof-of-concept form. It does little more than play music now, but the interface is awash in non-functional functions that really make you think this could be an iTunes killer if it is sustained and, most importantly, if the development community seizes the add-on opportunities as they have with Firefox and Thunderbird. I am keeping my eye on this one.
Posted at 8:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
January 30, 2006
Group effort
Working together as team with no "I" in sight these four blurbs make up a single post. Let us applaud their selflessness.
- I received an e-mail today congratulating Ascent Stage on being a rare Googlewhack, a search result wherein two terms exist only on that page. My whackedness? Jabberwockys and biosphere. Not jabberwocky singular, mind you; that returns lots of results. But the plural plus biopshere is all mine, baby.
- Coming home from Sunday dinner at my sister's last night I spotted a Macintosh G4 sitting, crying really, in the middle of our alley. As my wife recounted to me later -- I blacked out a bit in excitement -- I swerved into our garage nailing a few lawn chairs and boxes, jumped out of the car without shutting the engine off, and neglected the children in their seats to save the lonely tower. It has no video output and something in it shakes around, but everything is where it should be: HD, memory, chip, etc. It is almost certainly hot as it has Property Control bar code on it, but if I found it in the alley it's mine right? I mean, this is the law of the street. The alleydwellers who pilfer our trash are part of our ecosystem. We don't call them thieves. How do I get this thing repaired without getting thrown in jail?
- As I have a Marco Polo-esque (perhaps Alexander-esque?) series of travels coming up I have ripped a bunch of DVD's to my laptop hard drive. Really this was a series of tests on the Mac and PC to see what's the best way to do it en masse. The short answer is that it is a !@*&load harder to do than MP3's. Sony, for instance, renowned for being reasonable in their anti-copying efforts, load their DVD's up with blank dummy cells that throw most rippers for a loop. This is surmountable, but only after hours of corrupt ripping and a healthy dose of cussing.
- I've begun blogging internally inside IBM. Like I need another timesuck, but hey I gotta tell some people the stuff I can't tell the loyal readers of Ascent Stage (yet)!
Posted at 7:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
January 16, 2006
Less than a million little pieces
Some things I'm liking lately. (I swear this is all true.)
- iTunes 6.0.2 contains a barely-documented feature (see image near bottom) that I am really loving. iTunes can now stream music wirelessly to multiple Airport Express units running firmware 6.3 or, if you have only one, it can play music from your computer simultaneously with the remote speakers. Shoulda been possible originally, but hey I'll take it. This is basically the Sonos system without the custom network, custom controller, and powered speakers in every room.
- Gigabit Ethernet 'tween ThinkPad, Powermac, and Lacie network hard drive. File transfer bliss. Just getting the plumbing right before embarking on mass DVD-ripping.
- Picasa. Hey, I bought iLife '06 merely for the new iPhoto and it is good. But Picasa, Google's desktop image catalog, is even better -- and free.
- Chandler 0.6. This is the best ical-compatible calendar app for PC that is available. Mozilla Calendar/Sunbird has made virtually no public progress in the last nine months so I started looking around. Not sure if Chandler will make it -- and it is a fairly unselfconscious rip-off of Apple's iCal, but for now it does the job.
- LinkedIn. Social networking/contact management. You know you're a loser when you join an online networking site because you see your friend using it, rather than being invited by one of the hundreds of people you know who are already on it. I'm off the grid!
Posted at 8:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
January 6, 2006
Resolved 2006
Recently I have encountered a few people violently opposed to new year resolutions. They say, what's so special about January 1? If you want to change yourself just do. Or they say, resolutions set you up for failure. Change should be gradual and flexible.
OK, fine. But I like to make lists, especially those that I can cross stuff off of. So maybe what I really like is unmaking lists. Here's the list to be undone for 2006.
- Cook. I like to cook, but I have been cursed with a wife who is both more willing and more skilled at doing so. If only she'd let me do it more often. A few of the blogs I read are by cooks, amateur and professional, so I have resources and inspiration. Pass the olive oil!
- Visit San Diego, Philadelphia, Portland, or Santa Fe, all US cities I have never been to.
- Rip DVD collection. A much more daunting task in practice (if not in volume) than the CD collection. Decryption, dumping of extraneous video material, figuring out the best format for playback, getting the video from the server to the TV, and of course the immense storage requirements. I've been meaning to do this for some time, but the final push was purely practical: our kids have already destroyed one DVD player and one CD player and we're constantly washing their drool, half-chewed meals, and finger muck off of the actual discs. Ain't nothing to touch on a video server.
- Get to know the south side of Chicago. Lots of hidden architectural gems and great parks, not to mention restaurants and clubs, down there. If it was good enough for the 1893 Expo it is good enough for me.
- Look into Italian dual-citizenship. My father and my siblings are all eligible. Still debating the merits of this, but I am sure it will smooth the path to my dream of owning a villa in southern Italy. Of course, it also opens up political possibilities.
- Shave head. Or at least near-shaved. The cruel irony of male hair loss is that the more you lose the more often you have to get your haircut so as not to look like you are growing for the combover. There's certainly maintenance involved in a shaved head, but at least there's no mistaking my intentions.
- Visit Xian, China. Should be easy given my travel to China. Gotta have some "safety" resolutions.
- Find Jim LoBianco. My roommate from study in Rome in 1993. In the seminary at the time, most likely ordained now. Why can't the interweb help me find him? May need to appeal to higher powers in the search.
- Run a half-marathon. Once upon a time I regularly ran 25 miles a week. And then the midget squad arrived and my mileage plummeted. Time to ignore the kids.
- Teach sons how to swim. One is terrified of the water, the other thinks he can swim, which is far more dangerous.
- Call (not ping, not e-mail) my mother more often. Because "hi, mom, love u ... brb" just doesn't cut it.
- Return to home winemaking. Made a batch of mostly-swill Mouvedre in 1996. It didn't kill me, so I must be stronger. A decade later I'm ready to try again.
12 resolutions, 12 months. Begin.
Posted at 6:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
January 4, 2006
Nannylessness
Today is the first day since shortly after my first son's birth in 2001 that we've not had a nanny. Things change. The dynamics of our home life are radically different than they were back then when my wife and I both worked full time separated by a commute and had only a newborn to contend with. Now things are at the same time more complex, a curious four-year-old and a precocious two-year-old with an infant coming in May, and simpler, my wife works from home with flexible hours and school is ramping up to five days a week for the older boy.
We hoped to keep our beloved nanny on as part-time help and to this she agreed initially. But the fact is -- and this is the bitter reality at the heart of the matter -- however much you and your children may love the hired help, the parent-nanny relationship is, at root, an economic one. You pay for services rendered, even if a portion of that service is love. And if the economics of the relationship don't make sense, then the bond is broken. There's something slightly whorish when you look at it that way, but there it is.
In a review of Jonathan Swift's 18th-century Directions to Servants in the most recent Atlantic Monthly Mona Simpson notes:
For generations women have been puzzling over the ethics and etiquette of "having" help. The very verb is troubling—what boys of my generation said about the girls they'd laid—because "help" has traditionally helped us with what is still, no matter the opinion of weekly newsmagazines and polite company, our responsibility first and last.
So our nanny moves on and so do we. We'll still need help for sure. Business trips come up. The parent-child ratio is about to swing in their favor. Things change. Hello, 2006!
Posted at 8:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
December 31, 2005
Resolutions in review
Twelve months has passed since I outlined twelve resolutions towards my betterment. So, let's do the numbers.
- Learn how to conjugate Italian verbs in a tense other than the present.
Sort of. I know more verbs than this time last year and I got a chance to flex my conjugator (ahem) on a trip to Rome, but the tense thing. I'm still stuck in the present. (Or, in translated Italian: I stick in the present.)
- Get a goddamn backhand.
Done. No more do I run a half-court's width to ensure forehands. I am whole.
- Fall in love with NASA again.
I admit, I did. Michael Griffin instills confidence, the Chinese provide the neo-cold-war competitive impetus, and there's even a presidential mandate to skedaddle out of low-earth orbit, for what that's worth. Marsward.
- Be nice to political bloggers.
Pretty much. Easy now that the screaming and yeah-what-they-said cross-link lovefest has died down after the elections. I'd love to know how many political blogs withered in 2005 with no election fodder to chew on.
- Learn to match beats when remixing.
Believe it or not, yes. The DJ console helps, of course, but I did have to figure it out.
- When home, watch only high-definition television programming.
I have failed. TiVo, being standard-def (and crappy at that), is the culprit. Plus The Daily Show isn't in high-def, so right there I'm screwed.
- Convert all old mix tapes to MP3.
No, and ain't going to happen either. However, I did complete the digitization of all my old vinyl LP's! So I consider this complete in spirit if not in letter.
- Become able to change my son's diaper with one hand.
Can be done, but is not advised as it takes three times as long and often results in fecal matter where you don't want it.
- Avoid LAX like the Black Death.
Not done. Could have routed myself differently I s'pose. Ah, well.
- Avoid the Black Death.
Plague-free, baby!
- Get to know my nephews better.
Uh, well. I know them better than I did this time last year. Mostly because more time has passed, but hey whatever works.
- Figure out how to make my own oak switches for the Russian Baths.
Regretfully, no. And I should be practicing since they are closed for a bit. Bad John bad.
Not bad, then. I completed 7, got 2 half-done, and only blew 3. I made significant gains from the half-year review, that's for sure. Now to come up with a few for '06 ...
Posted at 1:18 AM | P