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OK, I forgot to mention that my Internet radio show on MacRadio.com started last week. I've a couple of sterling excuses, though:
1) I got a bunch of new equipment to play with last week, and kept getting distracted by shiny objects;
2) Putting together Show #1 involved a lot of very late nights and lot of chucking things away at the last minute and re-doing them and a bit of wondering if it wouldn't be possible for a neurosurgeon to locate that bit of the human brain that controls the impulse to jump in over your head and try new things and cauterize it or something. So it occurred to me that much like that dog you ran over on the way to an anniversary party, maybe it's something you shouldn't just go and blurt out right away.
(Though I stress that as I sat back and listened to it being broadcast, it came off much better than I had imagined. Room for improvement, certainly, but then again I'm sure that Mrs. Picasso took one look at little Pablo's first effort and decided that it wasn't good enough to adorn the family Norge. "Progress is our most important product," et cetera)
3) The first show "aired" on October 3, which would have made it this the first YellowText posting of the month, and this event is always a minor passion play. "You know," sez I to myself, "you really ought to add a feature to the blogger so that the app can take care of a monthly rollover all by itself." As is, I have to close out the previous monthly archive and create a new file for the next one, and update the software's file references to keep up.
A good idea, and I've told the high-school kids who man my Support line that this is our most-requested feature and is right there at the top of the Team Flowchart, unless we've switched to that system where you use different markers to denote tasks of different importance and it's all about how close the thing is to the center of the diagram. We sent our Director of Enterprise up to Nashua on a three-day management retreat and he came back all agog over this particular system. We sent him to represent us on a W3C standards-review board just to get him to shut up about Alpha-Spokes and Deferred Purple Items.
Anyway, the point is, I've been meaning to add that feature since the first time the last week of a month has become the first week of the next month. The key obstruction is the fact that writing this code will take me a few hours, whereas it only takes me about ten minutes to twiddle the files manually. At that rate, it'll take three years for me to pay off the time I invested in writing that new code, and in this economy, is that really wise?
Still, I'm perfectly willing to spend the first few days of the month wringing my hands over the situation.
I did get going on that new feature, actually. The code is 99% complete. All I have to do is add a couple of lines of final code. Should be a two-line deal, something like this:
on thatFatalErrorThatBringsTheWholeWorksToASpectacularFireworkeyCrashingFailure
forgeHeedlesslyAheadAnyway
And I'm sure I'll get right on it.
OK. The radio show. It's a QuickTime stream so all you need is the browser you're using right now, assuming it's got Apple's QuickTime plug-in. Go to MacRadio's site and you're good to go.
The show airs "live" on Thursday nights at 9 PM EST, but the stream is available 24/7 so by all means don't feel as though you need to miss an episode of "Will And Grace." In fact, I pre-record it...so if I can't be bothered to be on the stream at 9 PM I don't see where I would get off demanding you to.
(Why pre-record? Because I wanna have some fun with this. I can have more fun recording the show whenever and wherever than I can if I'm chained to a desktop and a broadband line. You will certainly see why with next week's show.)
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An important note, sensation-seekers, specifically for any sensation-seekers seeking sensations via YellowText's RSS feed: the URL of the feed is changing.
When I created the feed, it was:
http://www.cwob.com/channels/yellowtext.rss
From now on, it'll be:
http://www.cwob.com/channels/yellowtext.xml
I'll be keeping this message up at the old address so that anyone you might have passed it on to will be informed of the change in location. But all future entries will use the new URL, which is the "official" URL for the feed.
Why the change? Because apparently I jumped the gun. I picked YellowText.rss as the name of the necessary file because it made sense, but in fact everyone else uses the .xml filename extension.
It doesn't affect the operation of the feed — your newsreader doesn't care what it's named — but hey, I'm all for mindless conformity and subverting your selfish impulse to struggle for personal identity.
| | Something just occurred to me. The Beatles are missing one lead singer and one guitarist. The Who are now short a drummer and a bass player. Should these four guys at least take a meeting together or something?
| | Another note for people accessing this site via news aggregators. I made a simple but dippy mistake with my blogger code the other day: my software was updating the old file (http://www.cwob.com/channels/yellowtext.rss) and not the new one (blahblahblah.xml). So those of you who obediently pointed their aggregators to the new URL but didn't see any updates, um...whoops. Sorry.
| | My brother-in-law passed along his extra copy of the Northern Tool & Equipment catalogue. I hope the boys at NT&E don't find out he put one in my hands because if they do, he'll never receive one ever again.
Clearly, I'm not meant to receive this. It's absolutely hands-down the most intensely manly dirt-butch catalogue on the planet. You think you're a man just because you shop at Home Depot? You're a wuss. The tools at Home Depot might as well have Teletubbies molded into the handles, compared to the stuff NT&E sells.
You're Matthew Freakin' Broderick compared to the guys who buy from NT&E. Men who shop here are the guys they hire for truck commercials, the ones who load up the pickup bed with only a half-ton of angle-iron, because after all, on the way from the steelmill they have to swing by church for their youngest sister's wedding. They shower with their hardhats on and they spend their leisure time in a noisy, squalid ring in Thailand, fighting one-on-one with heavy leather belts soaked in glue and broken glass.
For a moment — only a moment, but the fact that it occurred to me at all reveals my foolishness — I thought I actually deserved this catalogue. "You know, I've been meaning to build a couple of bookcases for the office," I thought, flipping through the thing. "I bet this 18 horsepower 1.5-ton capacity mini-excavator with changeable flowrate pump, 9 RPM platform swing speed and 30 degrees of gradability would be just the ticket for that project."
Then I got my mail, which contained two catalogues which were actually addressed to me: Light Impressions, the #1 resource for acid-free boxes and folios, perfect for storing postcards, artwork, and scrapbook items...and the Snoopy Etc. Catalogue.
The girlish squeal I made when I saw the red Snoopy "On The Go" embroidered throw blanket on Page 39 made me realize that the Northern Tool & Equipment Company probably knew what they were doing.
| | How's this for a "Why Do I Even Bother?" sort of day? The only thing I had to do today was make sure that a 20-megabyte file had been successfully transmitted to someone who was counting on it. And because my neighborhood is controlled by EvilLizardScumJerkbag Cable, I have no broadband. So I had to spend a couple of hours transmitting it over my dialup connection.
This is a perfect way to make productive use of your sleeping hours. Start the transmission going, hit the sack, wake up 4 to 12 hours later, and find that a half an hour of high-quality audio has arrived hundreds of miles away. And! The piles of unfinished leather and grommets on the workbench have been transformed into dozens of pairs of handsome new shoes, ready for sale!
So when I got a phone call yesterday afternoon asking if I'd be available for A Very Cool Thing today, I readily agreed. That's one of the many advantages of working for yourself. In addition to the crushing loneliness and steady tapering-off of your social skills, you get to take a Personal Day for any damned reason at all. "Hey, my neighbor got a new attachment for his riding mower...snow daaayyyy!"
Naturally, I woke up this morning to find that the upload aborted itself after about an hour.
Here's how I spent my morning: restarting and restarting and restarting the upload, before giving up and breaking the file apart and FTP'ing the segments to a new directory on a remote server one at a time, cursing all the way from "The Today Show" through "The Price Is Right."
Here's how I had planned to spend my morning: as an extra on the set of "Mystic River," the new Clint Eastwood movie shooting around town.
Bit of a letdown.
Let's get things straight: being an extra is not a glamor gig. Think of the last time you were travelling and a sudden storm shut down your connecting airport, forcing you to spend 12 hours pacing around in one confined space with absolutely nothing to do, but you can't allow yourself to get too bored because someone on a loudspeaker could chirp up at any moment with some vital info on something you need to do right now. Add a free box lunch, $60 a day before taxes, and the chance that in eight months' time you might be able to point to an out-of-focus blob that's behind Sean Penn's head for three seconds, and you've got the Extras experience down pat.
My own call was both better and worse: they wanted me and my (highly proletarian) car. This isn't as glamorous as when they call and say "You have long hair and thick red sideburns, right?" would mean a definite chance at oblique stardom. "You have a 1992 blue four-door, right?" means that there's a scene that takes place while the actors are driving around, and naturally there needs to be traffic all around the Talent. So the aforementioned moment where you point and say "See that blob back there? That's me" becomes "See that blue blob back there? That's the hood of my car."
It is an improvement in that while your day is still going to be spent sitting around doing nothing, bored out of your skull...you'll be sitting around inside your car, on a comfortable reclining upholstered seat, with a CD player and a 12V outlet for your PowerBook and lots of places to safely and securely ditch your book and your laptop while the scene is being shot. Without the car, creature comforts are few. As for amusements, you're limited to whatever you can stick in your back pocket...ideally a book that you can throw away if a third assistant-director points at you and asks a fourth assistant-director "What the **** is that thing in that guy's pocket?!?"
I'm surprised by how disappointed I am. It's been years since I've done extras work, so there was that. But on the whole, I'm realistic about the Glamor of the position. What pisses me off more is that I was phoned yesterday, I was asked if I could be there, I said yes, I'll be there...and I wasn't. Where was I instead? Babysitting a file transfer.
Granted, this was a sign of Maturity. When you show up as an extra, you're on the set for the whole day of shooting. If I wasn't released by 4 or 5, I wouldn't have gotten home in time to do the upload and tonight's MacRadio show would have been 30 minutes of public-domain music, with commercials dropped in here and there to give the listeners a break from "Oh, Suzanna." One commitment had to get shafted and I chose the less-important one.
Still, I feel like a damned punk. I said I'd be there. Instead, I cancelled at the very last minute.
Rats.
| | See, this is like the scene from "Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory," when the "W-O-N-K-A" lights on the smokestack of the dark factory light up in sequence, suggesting that the long-dormant facility is about to come alive again.
I noticed something similar going on with a local diner, actually. Diners have a way of making their admittance policy clear. It's impossible to really quantify it but with one glance, the facade says either
We got good eats that can't be beat! C'mon in and let us pour ya a cuppa the hot stuff, hon!
or
Warning: Patrons will not be served unless they can speak personally of how a boy instantly becomes a man the morning he wipes the brains and guts of his best buddy off his face and continues to run across a foreign field of battle, instantly realizing that he is at that moment the Hammer of God's will and that the Anvil is unworthy of sympathy or mercy. (Note: See posted sheet for list of approved wars.)
There's a diner within walking distance of the post office where I get my mail. It's been there as long as I've known the area...but it's never occurred to me to check it out. Unusual behavior for one who occasionally drives two hours on the basis of a thirdhand recommendation of a meatloaf platter in another state, I know. See, the diner always seemed to be sending me the message that I'm precisely the sort of person whom the lunch-rush is picturing when conversation inevitably turns to the reasons why things are the way they are today.
Something was different the last time I drove by, though. One, the windows had been cleaned, and two, the neon sign had been illuminated. Or at least the bits of it that were still operational after forty or fifty years: an "E" and an "R"...but not in sequence.
I might have to take lunch there sometime.
| | Greetings from Amtrak. According to my handy laminated Northeast USA Passenger Rail map, I'm somewhere near Perryville, Maryland, on my way to Greenbelt. I'm giving a talk at NASA tomorrow on something or another. I've got a set of notes outlining my theory that neutrinos are more easily correlated as packet energy akin to the effect of a capacitor in a circuit than as a simple transient, and another set that tells the story about my being pointedly ignored by Steve Jobs at the last big Apple party. So it's a bit of a toss-up regarding which way I'm going to go.
| | Is this working at all?!?
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