Ansel Adams? Annie Leibovitz? Morons.
Friday, May 04, 2007 • 04:37:20 PM EDT
Woo-Hoo! Another one of my photos made it to Flickr's "Explore" page!
Do you know what this means?
…Well, nothing, really.
It's not like it's prestigious or anything. Every day, 500 photos from the Flickr firehose land on the service's "Explore" page and the selection process is shrouded in mystery. It's some sort of super-secret algorithm that determines a photo's "Interestingness" by factoring in a huge pile of metrics. Like, how many people have seen it, favorited it and commented it; how many groups it's been posted to and tags it's acquired; how quickly it's acquiring new views and comments and favorites...it's all dark magic and deep hoodoo.
It's not "today's best 500 photos," mind you; just the photos that wound up at the top of this Interestingness ranking for whatever reason. So when a picture gets Explore'd, it doesn't necessarily mean that newly-liberated civilians will be pulling down the town square's bronze statue of Henri Cartier-Bresson and derisively clubbing it with their shoes before putting up a new monument to you in its place.
All the same, I think it's cool. Even the smallest Win in this arena makes it a Good Day and every one of my Explore'd photos puts a smile on my face for the whole human race. Over the course of my life I think I've made less money from my photography than I do with a single newspaper column, but still, that doesn't mean I'm not really, really happy when something works out. Even if it is just a shot of freaky, impulsive stack of hardware instead of a diesel-powered attempt to create Ahhhhrrrrt.
You know…the sort of image that heals the world and puts an end to all famine, violence, and despair. That sort of thing. Well, I think I'm well on my way there, at least. I only pray that the Planet can hang on until then.
Speaking of photography, one of my editors just sent me a link to Shorpy: The 100-Year-Old Photo Blog. Holy Christmas is this a terrific site…nothing but century-old photos of real life and real people.
When we think about 19th-century photographs, we immediately blank over to studio shots of soldiers sitting stiffly in chairs. It's a little chilling to suddenly find yourself looking at a documentary photograph — not a recreation, not an engraving — of the execution of John Wilkes Booth's accused co-conspirators. To say nothing about a business storefront in which the sale of slaves is lettered into the signage with the same matter-of-fact casualness as a dancing taco slapped onto the front of a takeout Mexican restaurant.
The Eye Piece
Sunday, May 06, 2007 • 06:37:26 AM EDT
A brief update on the whole "No Eyeglasses" thing, sensation-seekers. It's been more than a week since I stopped wearing my glasses (partly because I had an eye exam and my doctor suggested I give it a try, partly because I broke my only pair a day before, thus necessitating the office visit) and I can report that it's all going swimmingly.
To be honest, I really don't notice much of a difference in my sight, particularly with computer screens and other things closer than five feet away. The glasses/no glasses thing turns out to be a push. Yes, my vision is slightly sharper with the glasses, but without them, I'm not peering through scratches, dust, stray eyelashes, and occasional dots of grease. I think the biggest Win of not wearing glasses is regaining all that time I used to waste every hour keeping the damned things clean. In the past week, I've built four ships inside empty whiskey bottles. A month ago, I barely had enough free time just to empty them.
I do have that new prescription, though. Should I get a pair anyway, just to have 'em? That was the question.
My eye doctor tells me that I have a free choice. I don't legally need glasses to drive. "But isn't that like saying 'I'm not so drunk that I'd blow a .08 on the Breathalyzer' and then getting behind the wheel?" a sensible voice asked. I begrudgingly agreed that all right, I suppose being able to read traffic signs and spot pedestrians from a much greater distance is a Good Thing.
But then a voice that knows me far better than the Sensible Voice clinched the deal by reminding me that movie screens tend to be way more than five feet away. Sold.
Ahh, not so fast: first I needed to find a company capable of selling me a pair of frames that I didn't despise. Which turned out to be much tougher than I imagined.
Observe, please, these sample frames:
If you wear these frames, dear reader…well, God be with you. I refuse to fault your judgement and personal taste.
Nonetheless, these damned things are ass-ugly.
And yet they're the only frames available for sale anywhere in the continental United States. If not for the nauseating sense of horror I felt every time I walked into an eyeglass store and saw nothing but row upon row and tier upon tier of variations upon this single theme, it'd almost be funny. It's as if the Republican Congressional majority, in a final act of spite before handing things over to the Democrats, passed a law mandating that from now on…brown corduroy pants only.
I'm not speaking of this precise style of frames, mind you. But if there's a store selling anything but Ben Franklin glasses, then the GOP's shock troops burned it to the ground long before I hit the road with my prescription in hand. They can sell me wide, flattened ovals in black frames. In silver and gold frames. In a rimless style. Wide, flattened ovals with the edges bumped out into modest corners. Frames in which the wide, flattened ovals are kinked at a slight angle.
A myriad of choices, but no variety. If you have no desire to don period clothing and lead a tour group through the safer parts of Philadelphia and explain why you suddenly got a bug up your butt to invent a new kind of wood stove back in the 1740's, they don't want your business.
Saturday was Free Comic Book Day. I took the opportunity to visit the new home of The Outer Limits in Waltham, one of New England's finest purveyors of geekware. They'd just moved down the block to a spiffy corner location.
I took a moment to wander around Moody Street. And gorblimey…for whatever reason known only to zoning wonks, upper Moody Street is Eyeglass Store Row. And not a LensCrafters in sight, either: they're all mom-and-pop shops. Surely I'd find paydirt here.
There was some added variety in the styles, true. But clearly, the Republicans had done their jobs very, very thoroughly.
I was wearing my prescription sunglasses. Ironically, this pair of glasses counts among my most satisfying consumer experiences ever. "What I really want is a pair of vintage-ey tortoiseshell Wayfarers," I thought, as I walked into some store five or six years ago looking for sunglasses. Whaddya know: they had one pair of exactly that…discounted 50%, to boot. You can see these frames in more or less every photo ever taken of me outdoors:
There on Moody Street, standing inside an agreeably-cluttered little store, I weighed my dilemma. I'd always preferred rimless-style glasses...the sort of frames where the lenses just seem to float in front of your eyes. But I wouldn't be wearing these all the time, so I had already decided that I wanted something different, something older, something more classic this time.
Then the obvious solution hit me.
"Do you sell Ray-Bans?" I asked the shopkeeper.
He led me to a small spinner-case full of sunglasses. Of course: I could just have him make me a pair of "sunglasses" with clear lenses.
I tried on two or three sample pairs, settling on a set of frames that wasn't quite right, but which would do. I finally put my finger on what I didn't like about them: they looked a bit small and out of proportion on my face. I swapped them with my sunglasses once or twice to suss out whether or not the difference was that important. I looked at the sample glasses in the mirror, then at the sunglasses in my hand, then back again.
"Do you do special-orders?"
So it's done and dusted: a pair of Ray-Ban Wayfarer II frames, identical to my sunglasses, is now on its way to Waltham from the mighty soot-belching sunglass foundries of Battle Creek, Michigan (actually, I've no idea where they're made) and I should have them by the end of the week. I did have a minor "Queer Eye For The Straight Guy" moment, when I changed my mind about the black frames and had him rewrite the order. Tortoiseshell would suit my skin tone and the color of my hair and sideburns far better, I realized.
I'm not proud of the fact that this was going through my mind. I'm not even proud of the fact that I'm not proud of that fact. But here we are.
My problem is now solved…but what about America's?
By carefully working through a series of progressively more-difficult Sudoku puzzles I am steadily de-boggling my mind, but it's slow going. Why are 90% of all eyeglass frames available in the stores 90% identical to each other? It's not even a case of these flattened-ovals being simply the most popular things in the shop. You really have to look hard before you'll turn up something radically different from that single style. Even then, it's not going to be what you were hoping for. Not unless what you were hoping for was to take first place in a Napoleon Dynamite lookalike contest.
I've stopped payment on that $50 check I sent to Bono, which he told me he desperately needed to end all hunger and disease everywhere once and for all. A harsh measure, I know, but from now on, all of my charitable efforts must be marshaled against this single problem.
Bono doesn't give a crap about this sort of thing. I bet he has those wraparounds custom-made or something.
Songs in the key of "Ewwwwww!!!"
Tuesday, May 08, 2007 • 06:37:24 AM EDT
Lilith is back together again after a very, very long Monday. It all started with the letter "R," or with the intermittent lack thereof.
Lilith is nearly three years old. In terms of career longevity, if Lilith were in a buddy-cop movie she'd be giddily showing other cops pictures of her brand-new retirement property shortly after the opening credits and she'd be dead ten minutes later, the victim of a car bomb that was (apparently) made from three fifty-gallon drums of jellied gasoline. So honestly, I ought to forgive her for these little quirks. Over the past few months, various keys would take the day off. They'd either come back hours later, tanned and refreshed, or else they could be put right with a bit of pipe-cleanering.
But this "R" had been causing trouble for the past few days. So I got out my dental tools — I've been told that people often use these things on human teeth, but that's ridiculous — and popped the keycap.
Err…
Um…
It was pretty horrifying.
I popped the adjacent keycaps to see how far things went. Before long, I'd removed all of the other letter keys.
It looked like a crime scene under there. Not a tidy, efficient one from "Columbo." Not a even preciously-detailed one from "CSI," either. More like the raw, unaired footage from a news report that ends with the phrase "Police are seeking the ex-lover who packed the victim's parachute."
Yes, it was a carnival of DNA evidence. Damn these he-manly hairs all up and down my arms and sweeping just across the tops of my hands! They make the women swoon and ensure both priority seating and a free cocktail or two on most domestic flights, but they're no good for keyboards. And if only the collection stopped there. Name a hair from the neck up, and it was in my keyboard's inventory.
And that's to say nothing of the gunk. Oh, dear sweet Lord…the gunk. I was duly reminded of every meal and every snack I've enjoyed either over or near this keyboard over the past few years.
There was nothing for it. I spent hours poring over the keybed with dental tools and other delicate implements, teasing out and then grabbing and extracting every last little hair, scraping out all of the crumbs, cruft and gunk, and swabbing out everything in sight with Q-Tips and a miraculous electronics-safe cleaning fluid that mates the oxygenating power of oxygen molecules with the unstoppable fury of raw hydrogen. But I couldn't get at all of it…so I sighed, and removed all of the little plastic scissor-hinges under the keys to expose the bare plastic underneath. And then I repeated the process all over again.
Over the course of an afternoon, I extracted enough organic material to create either a large cat toy or a small cat. One often wonders if there's anything so useless that it couldn't even be sold on eBay. I think this ball of grim tidings would finally settle that question once and for all.
The results: a sparkling-clean keybed that nobody will ever see because I went and decided to put the keys back on. Thank God for the miracle of photography.
Well, yes…I did take a "before" picture. You really want to see it? Honestly? Look, I have enough to answer for in this life as it is.
I put everything back together and crossed my fingers. The keyboard feels a million times nicer but dammit, the "R" is still giving me guff. And now the "I" is joined the walkout. No big surprise; the U-I-O troika have been regular troublemakers. With a 3 to 2 majority over the vowels they feel as though they can just do whatever the hell they want.
I believe that the problem with these keys is in the nipples. Damn those nipples.
See, there's a soft, skwooshy silicone nipple under every keycap. It's what provides that "bounce" to the keys. The problem is that there's barely anything keeping them in place. Each one has a tiny lip on its base less than a millimeter wide; this lip slides under a sheet of plastic about the thickness of a good grade of garbage-bag material, and that's all that holds it in place.
Five of these nipples were floating loose when I took off the keycaps and I found them utterly impossible to re-install securely. I'm convinced that they simply were never intended to be installed by human hands and tools. The nipple isn't firm enough to be forced under the plastic, no matter what you do. I dunno, maybe I should have tried blowing in its ear or something.
Another possibility is that Lilith is simply nearing end-of-life and is impatient to join Liliths 1-6 on the Shelf of Honor here in my office. Lord knows this keyboard has suffered plenty of abuse over the past few years. You think it's hard reading my columns? Well, at least I'm not pounding on you while all this is going on. Just now I've tried to figure out just how many words I write on Lilith every year. At least 300,000 published words alone, and that doesn't count web stuff, emails, code, or that time I tried to play "Like A Rhinestone Cowboy" using the Caribbean instruments in GarageBand.
Grr. And because this is an aluminum PowerBook, it's going to be impossible to just replace the keyboard. When Lilith's hard drive went belly-up, replacing it was a horrific, soul-splintering nightmare. I've read a tech note on the procedure for a keyboard removal and frankly, I'd rather just learn how to do without most of my vowels. It'll save me time and hassle in the long run. Typing "Ihnatko" is a problem but I've still got "Andy" without any need for modifications. I can build up from there.
For now, I've pulled an iMac keyboard down off the shelf. I'd really, really like to keep Lilith 7 going until the next Macworld Expo. Now is a terrible time to buy a MacBook. We'll see new hardware soon, and by the end of the year Apple will have fixed whatever silly and inevitable bugs went out in the first wave.
But the clock is running down. Well, the old girl deserves one final season, a victory lap during which her many fans (primarily me) can come out and show their love. And unlike the situation with Roger Clemens, I can give it to her without it costing my organization $20,000,000.
Clu Gulager, Touch Connors and Randy Mantooth
Thursday, May 10, 2007 • 11:22:44 PM EDT
So. I was driving around, running errands that are vitally important to the continued health and prosperity of our glorious Republic, when I heard a phrase in a podcast that somehow struck me as being suitable for the title of a 1970's cop show. The sort where the announcer stings you with the phrase "A Quinn-Martin Production!" right after the title and before the phrase "presented…in color!"
This amused me greatly. "Starring…" I continued, "Trip Howard as 'Moot'!"
No, that wasn't right.
"Randy Mantooth as…"
Nope.
"Starring…Clu Gulager!"
Bingo. I had been unaware of the existence of this iron horse of the Seventies Old Spice prime-time TV cop industry until he started showing up in Mystery Science Theater 3000 spoofs. Well, Clu, if you're reading this: you helped make the drive from Target to Home Depot that much more pleasant. It's practically impossible to invent a title of a Seventies cop show that doesn't become instantly cool and watchable with the addition of the simple phrase "…Starring! Clu Gulager!" at the end of the intro.
And I should know. I kept trying over and over again all the way down Route 1 ("Cranberry Juice Cocktail...featuring Clu Gulager!" "AC Fan Lo-Med-Hi...starring Clu Gulager as 'Max'!"), until I arrived at the Despot's lair.
I pulled into a spot, hid the iPod in a place where crooks and ne'er-do-wells would never think to look (unscramble this phrase to reveal the secret: "compartment armrest"), and headed for the entrance.
I passed a grunting couple who were loading a big gas grill into the back of a pickup truck.
I stopped and blinked. Sometimes, when your brain isn't finished processing an earlier thought, it starts using that thought to fill in some of the details you might have missed in your peripheral vision. I couldn't have seen what I thought I'd just seen.
I turned around and walked past them again. I continued all the way back to my car and gave the door handle an experimental "did I remember to lock up?" tug to cover my true, stalkey motives. Then I walked back towards the store and got a third glance at their gas grill. I even asked them if they needed any help, just to stall for a moment and get a closer look.
After assembling the grill, Home Depot had markered their name onto a big sheet of paper and taped it to the top of the thing.
The name was "Gulager."
Definitely not "Gallagher." "Gulager."
Cool.
It was one of those rich, satisfying coincidences which makes you wonder for just a flicker of an instant if the Old Testament view of the Universe might actually have some credibility to it.
The Scrying Game
Friday, May 11, 2007 • 09:10:48 PM EDT
Attention, makers of Skype. And (what the hell) anyone who might be moved to leap in here and defend it:
I'm not saying that Skype is a piece-of-crap chat service. I'm just saying that when a user is logged into a chat service at Computer #1 and he gets up and moves to the other side of the office and successfully logs into the service on Computer #2, a non- piece of crap chat service doesn't continue to route all incoming chat requests to the first computer.
iChat is not a piece-of-crap chat service. See, when you switch between machines, iChat says "Hey, you're already logged in elsewhere. Would you like to be logged out of iChat on that other computer? Or would you like to be connected to iChat on both machines simultaneously?"
This seems to be a very wise and very obvious way to handle it. Right?
Because otherwise, o makers of Skype and (what the hell) anyone who might be moved to leap in here and defend it…you know what could happen?
Allow me to paint you a picture. Let's say that a Skype user had hypothetically promised somebody (and by extension, their 250,000 listeners) that he'd be available for a podcast interview at 7 PM, and he made damned sure that he had no other plans for those 90 minutes. Despite the fact that it was a Friday night and that this person draws an annual stipend from the city as Boston's duly-sworn Supreme Proconsul of the Ministry of Nightlife.
At 6:55 PM, he gets up from Computer #1 and relocates to Computer #2 on the other side of the office because that's where this hypothetical Skyper has all of his podcast gear set up. He logs into Skype at 6:55 and awaits an incoming chat request…one that never arrives.
But of course he sits there for 40 minutes anyway. Why? Because this man is an optimist by nature and he has an indefatigable faith in humanity. "Humans created this chat service," he thinks, even as he makes yet another check of the time. "And surely nobody would be such a complete turbine-licking idiot as to create a chat service that doesn't automatically route incoming chat requests to whatever computer the user most recently logged in with."
And so, dear makers of Skype and (what the hell) anyone who might be moved to leap in here and defend it, please don't just assume that I'm declaring your service to be a complete piece of crap. All I'm saying is that you should jot down the bullet points of what I've been discussing here. Then. you should look to see if there are any layers of intersection between this picture I've painted and the service you've created.
If you do discover considerable intersection, then the only decent and honorable thing for you to do is fly here to Boston at your own expense and then strip down to your underwear and allow me to fire rotten goat eyeballs at you with a paintball gun until I run out of eyeballs, enthusiasm, or videotape, whichever comes first.
GarageBane
Tuesday, May 15, 2007 • 05:17:00 PM EDT
I leaned back in my chair and I sighed twice. The first time, I did it purely out of reflex. But the second one was deliberate. I was so exasperated that clearly, the situation demanded something much, much more theatrical than a mere slow exhale. So I embroidered it with a sad shake of the head and a slight rolling of the eyes, and I dragged it out for so long that I got a little lightheaded.
"Has it really come to this?" I asked my Mac, when I'd caught my breath.
(Filled with shame, it avoided making direct eye contact.)
"As you well know, I finished the latest episode of my Conference On World Affairs podcast three or four days ago. And ever since that moment, I have been trying and failing to get you and GarageBane to export it into a format that decent men and women all over the world can download and enjoy. And yet, I have been foiled — I won't go so far as to say 'thwarted' — at every turn. Because every attempt thus far to engage any of GarageBane's sharing and exporting features has resulted in a long mixdown process that yields either an audio file that's missing an important track…or no audio file at all."
Here I paused for effect, in the manner of a teacher who is giving the lone guilty party a final chance to come forward before a thick, sticky layer of punishment is spread evenly across the entire class. But to no avail.
"You realize that what I'm about to do — what you now force me to do — isn't that much more advanced than the way I used to record the Dr. Demento radio show when I was just 10 or 11 years old," I continued. "Because WireTap Pro is truly the digital equivalent of holding a tape recorder up to a speaker. Are you telling me that you, a $1500 computer capable of doing so many wonderful things, are no more sophisticated than a $30 1980 mono cassette recorder?"
Another pause. But my Mac kept looking at its shoes and picking at its fingernails nervously. It just wanted this whole incident to be over with.
"Fine, then."
I clicked "Play" in one app and "Record" on the other. WireTap duly began collecting all the numbers squirting through the operating system's audio driver and dumping them into an MP3 file.
I gave my Mac a final glance that said "I'm not angry with you, son; I guess I'm just…disappointed," before scootching my chair over to a different computer entirely and working on some emails while the podcast played out in realtime.
Charge of the Slight Brigade
Thursday, May 31, 2007 • 08:01:16 AM EDT
A quick post, sensasion-seekers, written chiefly to beef up my stats for the month before May turns to whatever comes after May. I used to be real good at questions like that before the calendar switched to the Metric System back in '81.
Honestly, it's been a tough couple of weeks. Projects are surging furiously and my sleep schedule has been thrown way out of whack. It doesn't really matter if you settle into a natural sleep cycle of midnight to 7 am or 3 AM to 10, so long as you're falling asleep and waking up at the same times every day. But crimeny, I think my sleep regulator needs a new button cell or something. Until Tuesday I was on some hellish "two sleep periods of 2-4 hours per day" thing, which clearly meant that in eleven days' time, every waking moment should feel like a David Lynch movie.
And I freaking hate David Lynch movies.
Alas, deadlines continue to fall like some sort of heavy, clumpy snow that instantly drops down your collar and soaks your underpants with freezing water. So I'm in grin-and-bear-it mode until either all of this work is finished or the Peace Corps accepts the application I filed under a false identity last week, whichever comes first.
∴
Meanwhile, on the other side of the office, an emergency evacuation is in progress. I'm down to one — one — functioning Windows machine and in (rolls chair across office, checks screen, rolls back) 14 hours and twenty minutes, I'll be down to zero.
Which you'd think would be good news. But, you know, I need to have a Windows machine running. My desktop XP machine stopped running several months ago. I just woke it from sleep one day and (what joy) there was no video. I spent an afternoon restarting and resetting and swapping video cards and monitors, to no avail: this machine sounds like it's working but it's being really very annoyingly pissy about actually showing me what it's doing. Like a Method actor who wanders to the far corner of the stage and mumbles his lines, this machine is having a profound experience for itself but if you don't share things with the audience, then are you truly performing?
Jack Lemmon, a wise man in most matters, explained his objections to the Method thusly. Were he alive today, he'd be fully qualified as a technology pundit. But he's dead. So I will happily steal some of his best material.
A second desktop demonstrates that the D in DOA does not stand for "Delightful." It stands for "Depressing" and "Downer" and "Damn the Dip****s at Dell who Designed this."
But at least I have the notebook. Or, "had." Because the HP became my test bed for Windows Vista late last year. I received a developer preview which became a public beta which became a Final Candidate, and it worked just great until ten days ago, when it started throwing up alarming little notices about how I'm running a pre-release version of Vista and it's going to expire in ten days and my Windows machine will stop working and now's the time for me to back up all of my data and/or buy Vista for real.
And here, I'm a victim of my own ignorance. I'm positive that there's a little button or something labeled "…Or, just click right here and I'll happily restore the copy of Windows XP that was already on this machine before you installed Vista" but I'm damned if I can find it.
It must be me, right? Because otherwise, it's as though Microsoft is operating some sort of racket, right?
Counterpoint: "But why don't you just pop in the Restore disc that came with the computer, and put the old OS back in there?" you might ask. "You kept it someplace safe, where you can easily find it, right?"
Counter-counterpoint: Shut up. Just. Shut. Up.
Today is D-Day, so I've emptied a pocket drive and Vista is now busy copying my "Pictures" folder to it. Fortunately, the notebook is by no means a "prime" machine. In fact, after my Vista testing was done with, I was using it exclusively for Adobe Lightroom. Once I offload 60 gigs of photos, I'm free and clear.
Oh, well. Its days were probably numbered, anyway: the notebook would occasionally deny that it had a perfectly fine WiFi adapter built right into it. Convincing it otherwise was much like convincing someone with claustrophobia that this is probably one of those normal elevators that just takes you up to the 18th floor, and not one whose walls are designed to squeeze in from all sides and slowly crush its occupants to death.
I return to something I wrote last year: a Windows machine just steadily deteriorates from Day One and nothing can stop this. You can mending and patching it if that makes you feel better, but inevitably, there comes the day when the damned thing either stops working entirely or develops some sort of quirk that renders it unusable.
Thus, a Windows machine is exactly like a pair of underpants. Enjoy it the first day you break it out of the package, because the clock is ticking and that's probably the last time it'll be running according to factory specs.
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