When I'm good and damned READY, that's when!!!

Monday, May 01, 2006 • 08:34:04 PM EDT

Two reasons why I love iSquint:

1. It's an indispensable utility for converting all sorts of video files into an iPod-studly format. Drag in practically any video file, click a button, and bango: it's in your iTunes library and ready to sync to your iPod.
2. The following progress dialog. The line of text you see here replaced a conventional "time to completion" projection about a third of the way through the job:

At last…a truly honest progress indicator. I have room for a progress indicator like that in my organization…

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Progress Is Our Most Important Product

Tuesday, May 02, 2006 • 11:15:48 AM EDT

The good news is that I've turned the corner, both workload-wise in general and book-project-wise in specific. The hardest part of a book project comes after you've done all the fun research but before the writing has gained some self-sustaining momentum…and that's where I'd been stuck for the past few weeks.

To illustrate this problem, I invite you to recall the event in ESPN2's "World's Strongest Man" competition where some dairy worker from a Benolux country must pull a freight train a certain set distance. The first ten to twenty yards are an embolism-inducing struggle against universal universal forces of planetary physics. Need I point out that these forces are quite successful at preventing objects much, much larger than freight trains from moving, and they've been doing it roughly since the Big Bang. The dairy worker started training for this event a few years previously. The odds are not promising.

But once he's managed to convince the train that yes indeed, he really is serious about making forward progress, well, for Heaven's sake…it practically starts moving on its own accord. It looks so easy that you half-expect to flip to the upper digits of your cable box some morning and spot Bruce Vilanch pulling a loaded freight train on "Celebrity World's Strongest Man."

That's the good news. The bad news is that I had an overnight trip to Chicago dropped in my lap on short notice. Like, I'm leaving tomorrow and I only found out about it on Friday. Fortunately, at this point in my workload I am once again a steely-jawed man of Action and Destiny, the kind of tough-as-nails go-getter who slams his badge and his gun on his captain's desk and then sets off to save the whole damned town without needing to get some pansy-assed desk-jockey's approval signed in triplicate.

It costs me nothing to admit that if this had hit me two weeks ago I would have reacted with a certain amount of girly sobbing. I mean full-on waterworks; the kind that hasn't been recorded in the Annals of the Legion of Men since Jim Bakker got led away from the courthouse in handcuffs.

But not today. I'm going to take Mendoza down…and neither you, nor his hired goons, nor any of the cops or judges he's got in his pocket are going to stop me!

And hey, this means that I can make a barnstorming tour of a couple of Chicago friends. I go straight from the airport to lunch with Friend 1 to my evening commitment to my morning commitment to lunch with Friend 2 and then straight back to the airport. With luck, I will find time to grab a slice of Chicago pizza. I understand that their true prescription-grade pizza is illegal for export. And because it'll be Wednesday, I'm also going to try to buy some Chicago comics…though I have to assume that the comics they have in Chicago will be more or less the same as the ones I can buy anyplace else.

The other good news is that I'm 70% sure that I've decided upon Emma Kennedy as the future Mrs. Andy Ihnatko. The plan: one day she'll be Googling her name and she'll come across this posting. And at the exact moment when she's thinking "Good heavens…I could marry a man who writes like this," she'll arrive right here, where I say that I felt exactly the same way about her when I read this post from her weblog.

A casual email correspondence will ensue, followed by a promise to get together for coffee the next time I'm in London. Coffee will stretch into a lunch, followed by a delightful musical montage set to Madness' "It Must Be Love," modeled after the one between Emma Thompson and Jeff Goldblum in "The Tall Guy." I have scrutinized this plan from all angles and I cannot see how it can possibly fail.

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Captain Smoooooth...

Thursday, May 04, 2006 • 08:35:00 AM CDT

I'm sure that the folks at Webster's New International and the Oxford English Dictionary will make this change in all future editions, but if you have kids in the house you're going to want to lose no time in updating it yourself, to preserve the authority of this vital reference book.

So:

1. Print out a small photo of me. For convenience, a rather nice one has been provided for you right there in the left-hand column of this website.
2. Open your dictionary to the entry marked "Clever."
3. Paste the photo onto the page under this item.

"But Andy," you protest. "'Clever' already sports the image of the guy who invented that new kind of disposable party plate…you know, the one where you can flip it over and snap it securely onto the rim of another plate, thus forming a sealed take-home container for leftovers."

I know, and honestly, when I first saw the ads I was just as impressed by the paper plate idea as you were. Nonetheless, it's obvious that I'm far more clever than even he: not 24 hours after posting my last blog entry, in which I identified Emma Kennedy as a likely candidate for the Mrs. Andy Ihnatko position — vacant since the late Sixties, despite many successful interviews — I heard from the woman herself. She says she's willing to "Seriously think about it," and although it's true that I added the word "Seriously" to that sentence to sort of pep things up, it's also true that I've gotten further along with her than you have. I really don't think you're in any position to make snarky remarks.

"You've made me the happiest man in the world, provisionally," I replied.

Immediate results, and I didn't even tell her that I have a beekeeper on staff. I considered slipping that into the previous post, but then I reflected that if there's one thing that defines the Has His Own Staff Beekeeper class — apart from having a beekeeper on the payroll — it's having enough self-confidence that you don't need to flaunt your power and status.

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First Thing

Monday, May 08, 2006 • 12:05:41 PM EDT

Whether your office is a 72-minute commute away or just two doors down from your bedroom, offices are offices. Being self-employed, I can't join in with my co-workers in coming up with new ways to describe what Jessica's done to her hair over the weekend and I can't even sneak into the break room when no one's there and make sure I've touched all of the bagels and pastries.

Still, I have my little rituals that have to be played out before work can commence. Most mornings I detour to the iTunes Store on my way to whetever the hell it is that I do all day. It works; I get a solid twenty minutes of dilly-dallying in, and by religiously following random connections through albums and "Top Downloads" and "Listeners also bought"s and "Top-Rated iMixes" I almost always wind up buying a track or two that I never would have found if I applied that damned Vulcan logic, so beloved by my crew's science officer. I emerge cheered and envigorated for the day ahead.

But boy, did that ever backfire on me this morning. Today's paper had a little blurb about an upcoming club appearance by Ramblin' Jack Elliott. I hadn't heard of the guy, but the piece described him as (a) old, established, and well-respected, and (b) a maker of My Kind Of Music (or one of them, anyway). A search on the iTMS took me to a roots track he recorded (Sadie Brown), which took me to an album of Stephen Foster Songs.

Which in turn led me to an iMix entitled "Long Drive From a Funeral." I clicked on it because I imagined that the title was just sort of a hypothetical theme. Then I saw the description: "Songs I recorded to listen to while driving back from my son's funeral."

Such a quiet string of words. And yet I can't imagine anything more devastatingly evocative. Burying your child, and then having to endure an hour or two immediately afterward, alone in your car with your thoughts.

What songs would you have chosen? Tracks that provoked reflection? Songs that celebrated the life of your loved one? Or would it be a playlist specifically engineered to distract you from the sort of emotions that would force you to pull the car over?

A few years ago, there was a made-for-TV movie about this kid who's all teary-eyed because it's Christmas, and his Mom is terminally-ill, and he wants to buy her these special shoes, but he can't afford the special shoes…well, I'm not really sure what the deal was. But the promo aired three times an hour and I laughed and laughed and laughed every time it came on. Honestly, if you had been sitting on the sofa with me and you showed even the slightest sign that you were being affected by that thing, then we would have had an immediate and frank talk about the future direction of our relationship.

The difference between Genuine Emotion and Cheap Melodrama is the difference between an offhand 13-word description and nearly anything that's produced by the Hallmark Channel.

Hug somebody today.

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Birds do it...

Friday, May 12, 2006 • 12:18:57 PM EDT

I clear away the breakfast paraphernalia, and then I fill an insulated steel commuter tumbler with ice and most of the contents of a can of Diet Dr. Pepper. After completing the grueling .05-mile commute to my office, slipping into the seat behind my keyboard and clicking all four points of the safety harness into the lap buckle, I open a new document window in preparation for the metric tons of aggregate-form Genius that are certain to come spilling down through the sluices at any moment. As I take a sip from the tumbler, I also take a casual glance out of the window near my desk...and I immediately spot two birds making violent, shameless love just ten or fifteen feet away, right out in the open and everything.

I didn't major in English Lit…tell me, did Steinbeck or Faulkner or Hemingway have to work under such conditions? I know they had to deal with alcoholism and clinical depression and their word processors sucked even more than Microsoft Word 6.0, but still.

On the plus side, I've had Cole Porter's "Let's Do It (Let's Fall In Love)" running through my head for the past half an hour.

Electric eels, I might add, do it
Tho it shocks 'em, I know
Why ask if shad do it?
Waiter, bring me shad roe

In shallow shoals, English soles do it
Goldfish in the privacy of bowls do it
Let's do it!
Let's fall in love!

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t3h w3))1ng R0XxX0RRrrR!1!1! w00t!

Friday, May 12, 2006 • 08:43:09 PM EDT

Welcome to Love in the 21st Century:

Thanks to the couple's mutual reliance on Heavy Technology, their first cut through the list of potential invitees is an easy one to make, provided that they don't tell anybody about the engagement for a week or so. Anybody who spontaneously congratulates them based solely on what he or she saw in their iChat handles, blog postings, and their photoblogs are clearly either (a) good, personal friends or (b) obsessive stalkers. The former should receive invitations to the wedding. The people in the latter group should be given red jackets and the task of parking cars at the reception.

I mean, hell…those people are going to be loitering outside the banquet hall all night anyway. Why wouldn't they want to make some tip money while they're there?

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Watery Fowls

Wednesday, May 31, 2006 • 05:08:01 PM EDT

Taking a short break between the Day Shift, during which I finished a newspaper column, and the Night Shift, in which the stated goal is to finish one and hopefully even two more chapters of this new book. That very goal is spelled out on the sign outside my house, right underneath the painted legend "First Unitarian Church of Medfield" and above the schedule of masses that was in effect when I swiped the sign one rainy night back in March.

But when I fetched the mail an hour ago I noticed that local punks had re-arranged the letters to spell "FAT WONDERFUL HOT PORNO FISHNET WOMEN ON ICKY BEACH LEVEE."

We can take two lessons from this. First, that while the victim of your crime may never find you and the Law may never find you, the forces of Karma and Justice let no deed go unpunished. And second, apparently the delegated agents of K and J have some sort of anagram generator on their smartphones. Cool.

Regardless, there it is, posted in the yard for all to see. And now I don't know if I'm obligated to follow through on this new mandate. I admit that I fully approve of many of those words, but I think that to abandon my original plan in favor of what the sign tells me to do would be needlessly Calvinist of me.

It's also not a Unitarian point of view, if my memory of Unitarianism is correct. But I think I made my break with Unitarianism pretty clearly when I ran over their sign with my car and then threw it in the trunk.

I'm already wrestling with a minor religious dilemma anyway. Today's mail included a package from elgato

Elgato Systems sent me their new EyeTV 250, a USB TV tuner the size of a pack of cigarettes. I sighed the moment I opened the box.

"Am I really going to do this?" I asked myself. "Am I really going to plug this into the iMac and have three TV tuners going at once?"

Hence my dilemma.

I've had the HD tuner set up for a while. Who wouldn't enjoy having full Digital to Digital HD? And it cuts down on my TV watching time because I tend to just watch the stuff I've recorded instead of channel-surfing. But a month ago I was rummaging through a closet and rediscovered my EyeTV 200 box, which was banished to the Island of Unloved Technology when I got the HD box. Yes, I added this to the rig, but for eminently defensible reasons: I don't have cable here in the office, and the HD antenna only pulls in about half the available channels. I can watch Leno in HD, but Letterman can't be bought at any price or resolution.

But If I plug in this new tuner, I fear that I'll be sending a powerful and dangerous statement. "A man should never have to choose between 'America's Next Top Model,' 'Deal Or No Deal,' or one of those cop shows where they just take a 'Dateline: NBC' murder from last month and change the names around," I would seem to be declaring. "What are we…animals?"

When I describe all of this as an enormous dilemma, of course what I mean is that I've already unpacked the EyeTV 250 and hooked it up, and tonight I'm headed to Radio Shack to buy another antenna. If anyone asks, I will state with all sincerity that a second analog tuner will allow me to keep a second antenna pointed directed straight at the tower of the local CBS affiliate, to ensure that Letterman and "The Amazing Race" always come in as clearly as possible.

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