I don’t typically like to talk about work in detail here. It’s just a fairly dangerous idea considering NDAs, trade secrets, hurt feelings and the fact that, for the most part, my jobs have been pretty boring to hear about.

Of course I didn’t used to work with actual customers. Oh sure I’ve had clients and internal contact points that could, in an abstract way, be considered customers; but I’m dealing with real life customers now—the kind that pay lots of money for a product that they may or may not fully understand but are tasked with making work the way their bosses want it to. And yesterday. It usually has a set up timeframe in the negative. Call it the rapid pace of modern business or call it managerial idiocy, I call it synonymous. Anyway.

The problem with customers is twofold: One is that they’re under a lot of stress when it comes to dealing with the pressures of their job and the fact that our product is extraordinarily complex. Imagine working support for Perl. Not a program written in Perl, but all programs written in Perl. And it’s libraries. Yeah, it’s kinda like that. The other problem with customers is that they pay a load of cash for the product already and had to buy a pricey support contract on top of that. Some people buy the contract “just in case” and most likely consider it a sort of emasculating concession to defeat if they have to call in. That’s how I always feel about support, even the support I pay for. Other people feel like “I paid for it so by jove if I need help—any help—I’m getting my money’s worth!” So the types of people we have calling in are the frustrated, frazzled people who don’t want to be calling or the “regulars” who will call if their shoelaces come untied.

The result is the same either way, and its a special kind of temporary mental defect I call the Customer Crazies. It manifests itself typically with customers who call and fix the problem themselves while they have you on the phone. This happens to me all the time. The conversations go something like this:

Me: Thanks for calling support, this is Paul. How can I be of assistance?
Customer: Uh, yeah. I have a problem with this form.
Me: What kind of problem? Are you seeing an error message?
Customer: Oh. Heh. You know what? I just figured it out. Thanks!
Me: …Anytime.

Another symptom is customers asking questions they know the answers to already. Or asking questions that only they could possibly know the answer to. Or asking questions that God himself only knows. For example:

Me: So I was looking at your log file…
Customer: Oh, do you need me to send you some logs?
Me: Uh, no. I already have them. You sent them to me and I was looking at them…
Customer: Where were those log files saved?
Me: I’m sorry?
Customer: Which directory did I save the log files to?
Me: On your system?
Customer: Yeah.
Me: I have no idea, sir; it’s configurable so you could have put them anywhere. Check your configuration… it will show you where they’re being saved.
Customer: Why don’t I ever just use the defaults? Why am I so stupid?
Me: I’m pretty sure you don’t want me to answer that question, sir.

The Customer Crazies also enable a customer to ask the most broad-reaching, inspecific question in the world and expect a literal answer, hand typed and well formatted. Not only do they feel compelled—in the throes of the Crazies—to ask such a question, but they utterly fail to see why that is inappropriate when dealing with an otherwise impressively well-documented software package. Observe:

Customer: I had a question about installing your product.
Me: Okay, what’s your question?
Customer: How do I install it?
Me: Which portion did you need help with?
Customer: Um… let’s see… okay. All of it?
Me: Uh huh. Okay, well how far did you get before you started having problems?
Customer: Oh, I haven’t started yet.
Me: Wait, what did you want from me again?
Customer: I want to know how to install the product.
Me: That’s a pretty big topic; have you read the Installation Guide?
Customer: No… Can’t you just tell me how to do it?
Me: Sure. Step one… read the Installation Guide.
Customer: Okay. What’s step two?
Me: I will now bite down on my arsenic-filled false molar.

The Customer Crazies are a progressive disease, too. As certain issues become complex or the resolution of a customer’s problem draws nigh, sometimes their frustration can turn to anger or bitterness. This is understandable, they have their agenda and we have our own business to worry about; often these things are not directly compatible. When customers get upset, the Crazies make them behave in ways that would otherwise get them locked up. They say things that I have to belive (if I am to retain any faith in the human race at all) they don’t really consider to be rational, logical statements but are merely a result of their particular affliction. Consider this completely true excerpt:

Me: Thanks for calling support, how can I help you today?
Irate Customer: I have an open ticket already.
Me: Strange, it didn’t come up in my console. Must be a glitch. Can I get the ticket number, please?
Irate Customer: Sure, it’s the one about deleting a record and the data not being automatically removed from all references.
Me: Oh, that one. Actually, ma’am, I’m going to need that ticket number.
Irate Customer: Look, I just got through talking with the person who was working my ticket. They filed it as a bug but he just told me engineering won’t backport the fix to my version because it’s fixed in the latest version.
Me: What version are you using?
Irate Customer: It’s only one version behind.
Me: So why not just upgrade?
Irate Customer: I like the version we’re on.
Me: Then what’s the problem?
Irate Customer: This bug! Haven’t you been listening? It’s a showstopper for us.
Me: So you’re not happy with your version?
Irate Customer: I’m not happy that they won’t fix it!
Me: But it is fixed; in the latest release.
Irate Customer: But I don’t want to upgrade!
Me: I’m not sure I understand what you expect to happen here.
Irate Customer: I want them to fix it in my version. They told me they would support up to two versions back; well I’m only one version back and they aren’t supporting me!
Me: I think we are supporting you, ma’am, but we can’t backport every bugfix into previous versions. At some point the software becomes different enough to be called a new version. We do provide upgrades for free, you know.
Irate Customer: Why do you people keep telling me to upgrade? I don’t want to upgrade! I shouldn’t have to upgrade! Fixes should happen on all versions! Can’t you see that?
Me: Ma’am, have you ever used software before?
Irate Customer: It doesn’t matter. I didn’t call to talk to you, I called to talk to a manager. Get me a manager.
Me: You know, the manager is going to need to know that ticket number…
Irate Customer: They already know about my issue.
Me: I wonder if this plastic fork on my desk is sturdy enough to pierce my carotid artery?

Hands down.

My weekend was spent largely devoted to gaming. As I recap this event, I should warn the non-gamers out there that there will be precious little in this post to keep your attention. I’m about to “geek out,” if you will. If you don’t know (or care) what an NPC is, what a twenty-sided dice could be useful for or you can’t fathom why somone would stay up until 4:00 am after having gotten out of bed at that same time 24 hours prior pretending to be a Klingon, move along.

Everyone gone? I figured as much. Still, I am prone to talking to myself and I do so love the dulcet tones of my fingers clacking against a keyboard, so onward and upward.

Friday night Nik and I checked in and met up with Lister and Whimsy for some Pasta Pomadoro as we waited for the lottery-style games to be announced. The registration process at DunDraCon works like this: For each session (there are several per day except on Friday where there is only one) you can put in a request card with up to three registered game codes written on it: Your first, second and third choices. The all-powerful Con masters then organize the games based on priority and some degree of chance to fill up as many of the registered events as possible. Lister and I put down a GURPS 4th Edition Star Trek game (“Revenge is a Dish Best Served Cold”) and our first choice, a Necromunda mini-campaign as second and a boardgame session Lister was interested in third.

Truthfully I would have probably preferred to put the Necromunda game as the first choice and put GURPS as second, but Lister was very excited about the game, I still don’t have a Necromunda gang of my own and DunDraCon is more of a role-playing convention than a miniatures one, so I figured I should at least get one good RPG in while I was there. We got into the GURPS game after all and in the end I’m very glad I did. Aside from The One Guy who is present in all RPGs involving mixed company of strangers who has some sort of serious Issue (in this case it was a propensity at untimely rules-lawyering and some questionable personal space standards—although his skill at rapidly tabulating the results of a large die roll was impressive), the game was quite enjoyable.

I was impressed by GURPS (perhaps more so than Hero, which I played last year, although the two are quite similar) and its ability to handle the Star Trek world with what seemed like effortless grace. Part of it was helped by the fine work of Mike, our GM, who was not only meticulously prepared but (almost frighteningly) knowledgable about Star Trek lore and Klingon trivia. I did find it interesting that he used the IQ attribute check frequently and often allowing successes to reveal information “known” by the character but not the player. He also had a very clever system for managing space travel (long distance travel is a tricky thing to GM through) using a simple but effective grid-based map and while I felt he went to the well too often for ship operation skill check rolls (the result of which was—by virtue of probability—my Communications Officer character managed to botch one of the transmissions rather badly, but after 46 die rolls it was bound to happen eventually) overall the flow of the game was nicely paced and smooth.

He even transitioned from straight role-playing to minis-and-maps based combat movement seamlessly with well-prepared ship schematics (hex-based, of course) and a cantina setting done with a Chessex wipe-off drop cloth. The story may have been a bit ambitious for a (relatively) short eight-hour adventure, but it was effective and engaging anyway. At the end of the game Lister won the GM-supplied prize of a Klingon-branded mug for best Role-Playing (I certainly don’t want to detract from Lister’s play because he was indeed phenomenal, but he was practically born to play that character). A nervous-looking but well-mannered young couple was originally supposed to be awarded the con-supplied prize which was a copy of the 4th Edition GURPS Characters book (a generous $40 value) and I thought they deserved it, but they already owned the book so it went to me instead and I was more than happy to take it. Free stuff is almost always awesome, but free stuff you’d probably buy anyway… well.

After collapsing into bed for a few hours Nik and I dragged ourselves up and joined Whimsy/Lister and Vext for some breakfast at the hotel buffet before hitting the Dealer’s Room. I must have made two dozen circuits around the room during the con but in the end I only came home with some cheap (but nice looking) pre-made terrain and some assorted dice. Nik, on the other hand, went crazy at one of the game booths nabbing Gloom, a dark, clever card game with transparent plastic cards; Lunch Money, another even darker card game; and The Nacho Incident, a silly game with some strangely backwards strategies. I also stopped by the Flea Market room and got a full squad of Termagaunts, already assembled and primed, plus a stack of Tyranid sprues and a blister of a Chaos Space Marine with Lascannon, all for $6.00.

We played a game that Necroid made up called Ninja Dice: It was pretty awesome, and attracted a lot of attention from passer-by. We tried the Nacho Incident, Gloom, Lunch Money, Blink (all good) and Sneeze (meh) while we waited around for more players. Eventually we settled on Wings of War with Lister manning the AA guns, Vext and I playing the Allies and fwaaa and Necroid manning the German zeppelins. Vext and I won in the end, but it was a great time.

At one point Lister and I got into a discussion about the relative merits of Dungeons and Dragons (3.x, specifically) versus other systems. Now here’s the thing from my perspective: d20 is, from my experience, a remarkably average system. I don’t think it works as well as a universal system as people wish it did (Hero is better and now that I’m looking into GURPS it seems even superior to Hero, at least as a truly generic option) and I think a lot of the mechanics—like the absolute alignments and armor systems—are included too much for historical reasons and not adjusted for actual playability. Lister pointed out that when it comes to monsters and magic, it doesn’t get more complete than D&D and I agree with that.

But here’s my problem with D&D: I think that role-playing systems need to be designed to either be as universal as possible (GURPS, Hero, d20) or as specific to a particular setting as possible with the included rules designed specifically to create situations that match the aims of the setting. For example, Shadowrun’s system is in no way universal but it does implement its peculiarities for the reason of balancing the disparate aspects presented in the fictional world where magic and technology co-exist. Similar systems would be Warhammer FRP, Vampire: The Masquerade, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Call of Cthulu, Paranoia, etc. These games don’t need to have universally applicable rules because their setting is specific and if there are no directly applicable rules to incorporate laser cannons into a WFRP campaign, that’s cool because they don’t really belong there.

Where I think D&D fails is that it provides neither a compelling built-in setting to explain its rules quirks nor does it adequately apply its rules across the board to accomodate any and all possible scenarios. I often wondered why so many D&D adventures were standard dungeon-crawls until I realized that the ideal setting for the rules of Dungeons and Dragons is in a dungeon with the dragon/beholder/lich on the bottom level and pit traps that your rogue better catch if you want to make it back to town with your loot and HP intact.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with dungeon crawls, mind you. They can certainly be a hoot and they’re a good way to go if you have a few players together now and you don’t want to spend forever getting everyone up to speed, especially if you don’t know when you can reconvene again. But I think D&D games end up being more board game than RPG because of this: Characters are often played to stereotypes because everyone is more worried about getting off that next fireball or performing the critical feat to kill the kobolds than wondering what their motivation is (and this is just my experience, I don’t mean to suggest that no one role-plays well in D&D). Maybe it has something to do with the alignment system since it’s fairly easy to fall into a static trap of Lawful Good characters being goody-two-shoes with no shades of grey and so on.

It was just an academic exercise until I started thinking about the merchandising tie-ins with Dungeons and Dragons, like the forthcoming D&D Online Multiplayer Online RPG and the Dungeons and Dragons movie. The problem with those is that I look at it and think, “So?” I mean, what is the tie-in with D&D? It’s not even like they’re doing Dragonlance or Forgotten Realms; it’s just run of the mill D&D. So the big twist is that it’s got… half-elves? I don’t play MMORPGs, but I’m guessing there is very little in DDO that hasn’t been available in Everquest since 1998, you know? They’re billing the game as having improved combat systems but when you have what is supposed to be this huge license and your big marketing point is no different than a wholly original game’s might be, I have to wonder what the “hook” for D&D actually is.

Back to the convention, I was a little disappointed in how little they had in the way of actual RPG materials available in the dealer’s room; I couldn’t even find volume 2 of the GURPS 4th edition books in there. Most of what was available was a wash of d20 supplements, one booth for Hero and a few assorted milk crates full of random discounted games. I had to stop at the comic and games store on the way home to find the book. Dumb.

So the whole thing was quite the success I think; even Nik said she had fun which I was a little worried she wouldn’t. I spent some time on Saturday checking out the armies in the WH40K RTT (which Lister and I decided back in November we weren’t going to do at this con) and decided that while I was pretty sure if this was how other people painted I wasn’t ever going to win any best in show awards, I still want to give the tourney thing a try. I’m planning on making a big push for miniatures for May’s KublaCon. Hopefully I’ll have plenty of time to paint up the rest of my Chaos army plus get the Warmaster guys done enough (I’ve actually made some decent progress on them so far) to try out and finish my other Blood Bowl team for the tournament that hopefully Strahd will resume after a DunDraCon absence. At some point I still have a Necromunda gang to buy, assemble and paint plus there’s a stack of Napoleonic Brits to get set up (maybe for next year’s Shield Con which I took a pass on this year) and I still need to get my Shadowrun adventure series (I’ve dropped the scale back from a full campaign) finished so I can run it. Oh, did I mention I have a new idea for a GURPS-based horror adventure? Plus Nik just got me Gang of Four and Mystery of the Abbey for Valentine’s Day so I’m going to be gamer-a-go-go here.

Except all I do is work and then collapse on the couch to watch stupid TV until I fall asleep. I need to get to work on that independently wealthy thing…

I spent most of the weekend at DunDraCon which really deserves its own post but I don’t have the time or motivation to do the full write-up just now, partially due to the fact that I slept like poo last night and can barely focus on my keyboard enough to distinguish the “T” from the “R.”

However, I did manage to catch a few Olympic hockey games between sessions which got me amped for the quarterfinals coming up. So in response I did some surfing to find commentary about the tournament so far and found a few interesting tidbits. The first of them is Bryant Gumbel grumbling about the Winter Olympics and the second, partially related, is The Spin’s article about the impact of the Olympics on the NHL season.

First of all I have to say that I like the Winter Olympics, but then again I guess a big part of that is that I really like hockey. I’ve already expressed my disgust plenty of times with non-sports like Ice Dancing or anything where subjective artisitic merit is the sole deciding factor between contestants (who may very well be talented and athletic individuals, that’s not the point). This isn’t strictly limited to the Winter games though; witness those Summer Games’ “Floor Exercises” that involve ribbons and balls and prepubescent girls doing what I would normally expect to see prepubescent girls do in the school playground (“frollick,” I believe the term is) only here they earn very prestigious medals for doing so. Whatever.

I would grumble about the coverage of the Winter Olympics over their very existence since they seem to focus almost exclusively on those kinds of artistic competitions. In fact what kills me is events like Ski Jumping where there is a quantifiable way to determine the winner (“Hey look, you jumped farther than everyone else… you win!”) only they don’t use it (“‘Cept not, cause you wobbled your left ski so we’re gonna give the medal to Hans over here who went about ten feet shorter, but looked real good doing it.”).

But the whole racial factor is moronic to me because—and I could be wrong here—to my mind being a legitimately non-predjudicial person means that as hard as it may be to accept, there are going to be things that different people excel at, things that different people are interested in and things that different people can’t seem to bring themselves to care about. What I mean is that it would be ignorant to suggest that a white person couldn’t be good at basketball or boxing, the fact remains that generally speaking the best players and the most predominant examples of great participants have been black. Does that mean basketball and boxing are racist sports? I’d say no, but whether there are genetic tendencies or social constructs that result in black athletes being more predisposed to some sports than others doesn’t mean there is anything inherently evil about it, it’s just different people being different.

I think about it like this: Equality in terms of capability or potential or distinguishability is a farce. There simply is no such thing in a world where no two people are exactly alike as literal equality. Yes, this means women can’t do everything a man can do (don’t get me started on the warped logic that lead feminists to tag “…and better” to that already stupid catchphrase) but it also means the inverse is true as well, and on it goes. Equality in terms of opportunity and racial agnosticism is what should be striven for instead.

So the question is, are non-whites being actively excluded from the Winter Olympics? That I honestly can’t tell you but citing something as n-ist for not having some ludicrous notion of equal representation is not the smoke from the fire.

While certianly having less of a potential impact, though, the other issue brought up by today’s venture through the web’s hockey corners is one I actually think is more of a real concern to these Olympics. On one hand I like the idea that the Olympics represent the best of the best competing for international recognition, but the fact of the matter is that there is a discrepancy here for sports that have more of a consistent exposure level such as basketball, hockey and soccer than there is for events where in some cases their only exposure comes every four years during the Olympics. I’m talking about downhill skiing, track and field or swimming events. How often do you watch men’s 400m butterfly? Yeah, me either; except I watched even the qualifying rounds during the summer games two years ago.

In terms of the more popular (and often team-based) sports, the ideal of a true global competition to see which country hails the best and brightest is a decent idea but countries with the most followers of any such sport are going to have an inherent advantage: That’s why Canada is usually a heavy favorite in ice hockey, South American and European countries tend to excel over the United States in football/soccer and the US by all rights ought to own basketball every four years. If we want to see who is the best team in these sports, there is already an arena for that in the respective leagues for these sports where stronger markets attract the brightest stars. Sure the criteria isn’t national but the pool is larger and it becomes organizational (talent scouts, management, coaching) which means even places like Dallas and Phoenix who, without the aid of modern technology could probably never even engage in ice hockey due to climate limitations, can experience these types of sports. And they aren’t limited by something as unfortunate as national sentiment.

I think the problems that have been introduced by having professional players in the Olympics don’t outweigh the potential advantages or excitement of country-based pro tournaments. What I’m saying is that I’d rather see us go back to an amateur-only Olympics. As a matter of fact, what I’d rather see is the Olympics happen more often (once every two years would be a good start) and have there be a reverse salary cap so that players in minor leagues who make less than x dollars per year from playing their sport (I’m assuming here that minor leaguers still get some sort of paycheck) become eligible. In my estimation this would mean that tomorrow’s brightest stars have a chance to compete on an international and very public stage on a pretty regular basis which could serve as a phenomenal scouting event plus it would not put professional players in a position to turn down the Olympics (which is essentially making a judgement call about which championship means more) or put their jobs on the line for nothing more than prestige which, let’s face it, if you’re earning a million dollars per year you just don’t need. Imagine being able to see Alexander Ovechkin play a couple of years ago before his NHL debut in a tournament of note.

That’s what I’m talking about.

I let little things get to me. I know this. It doesn’t help to be self-aware when you’re grumbling over nonsense, making mountains out of molehills and the like because, by definition, you’re so wrapped up in the minutae that you loose track of the big picture.

So here’s my current annoyances, things that shouldn’t bother me, but do. Maybe by putting them out there I can get them off my chest and move on.

1. I found a nifty homepage-type site: Netvibes. I used to use My Yahoo! as my home page but it annoys me because everything is so centered around Yahoo! that it becomes a pain to do anything if you’re only a halfhearted Yahoo! user/subscriber. Of course the one thing Yahoo! has that I use the most, box scores from sports teams I follow, doesn’t have a direct counterpart on Netvibes. “No sweat,” I thought, “I’ll just go grab an RSS feed for sports scores of a few of my favorite teams.” You know what? I can’t find sports score RSS feeds. What gives? It’s not like this is privileged, hard-to-come by information, and yet I can’t even find a for pay feed that gives me what I want. Listen, the whole point of all this is that I don’t want to have to visit 2,643 sites each day just to see the stuff I want to see. I want to visit one site and choose where I go to get more details based on how much time I have and what looks interesting that day. Totally lame.
2. What is with women who wear several fluid ounces of perfume? I get caught behind these Sinus Confrontationalists all the time and when someone like me who has a pretty poor sense of smell is overwhelmed and choking to death in the wash of (usually putrid to begin with) Combat Potpourri or whatever, I just wonder how the rest of society doesn’t resort to forming lynch mobs. And I hate to stereotype, but has anyone else noticed that the most likely offenders of this are overweight women wearing garishly colored outfits like lime green pants suits? Newsflash ladies: It’s not magic thinning juice, so lay off.
3. I read an interesting article today about writing better. Of course then in the comments the author gets into a mild debate with a poster over “alright” versus “all right” and he claims that using “alright” gives the impression that the writer is 10 IQ points stupider than they would appear otherwise. You know what drops a person’s IQ 10 points in my book? When they can’t realize that English changes and no matter how much you wish it weren’t so, “doh” is an acceptable slang term expressing sudden disappointment; “email” no longer needs a hyphen and “alright” is a word meaning “fair, decent, of midling value.” Sorry.
4. Valentine’s Day. I have a Valentine and I hate this non-holiday. I’m going to invent a holiday: It will be in August and it will be called “Paul Hamilton Day.” On this day you are required to visit my website and pay me money to tell your significant other how you feel about them. Make sense? Exactly.
5. Software really needs to step up and start doing what I want to happen and not what I specifically tell it to do. The reason for this is that I am an idiot; I firmly believe my technology should compensate for this fact. As an example, I burned a half dozen CDs over the weekend. I’ve been on a music-acquisition kick lately (ever since my shopping spree last week, in fact) so I had a bunch more stuff to burn. I pulled the album lists from my “Recently Added” Smart Playlist in iTunes and burned away. What I didn’t realize is that iTunes burns the list in the exact order you put it in; since the Recently Added list goes in reverse order (discs are ripped from first track to last so the last track is the most recent addition to the Library), so do the albums I pulled from that list which means all my burned CDs have the track order backward. Why would I want that? Clearly iTunes should have realized what I was trying to do and corrected my error so I don’t have to re-burn seven or eight CDs.
6. I downloaded Gaim 2.0 beta because the previous version had a few quirks I didn’t care for. One thing they didn’t change that I wish they would was the account set up; it’s not a significant thing but I found it incredibly unintuitive to apply a Buddy Icon to my account. I really like the way iChat handles account set-up; it’s very obvious and simple stuff like Buddy Icons is just drag-n-drop. Of course iChat annoys me, too, because it’s AOL/Jabber only. Since I started my new job my Buddy List percentages have changed significantly: I’m now at around 62% AOL users and 28% Yahoo! with the rest being an assorted mix of MSN, Sametime and Jabber. From that perspective having an AOL-only client wouldn’t be the end of the world, but that significant chunk of Yahoo! users is a bit of a problem and, for the record, I loathe running two different chat programs. My other problem with Gaim is that for whatever reason it only lets me log into my Gtalk account about 5% of the time. That may not have anything to do with Gaim, but I can log in with the official Gtalk client and Adium (which I’m pretty sure uses libgaim) didn’t have many problems with it—other than the intermittent connection drops that I’ve always had with Jabber.

Now For Something Entirely Different

I’m taking a break from both convention and surliness while I give a personal shout-out to Dr. and Mrs. Mac, congratulating them on the birth of their new daughter, Grace. Or, as I shall prefer to call her, Mac mini.

I’m so witty, it pains me sometimes.

I’m sure you sympathize.

I’m Retarded

Have you ever had a spastic moment and realize that someone caught you doing it?

Yesterday afternoon I needed some caffiene. I’ve been drinking a lot of tea lately versus coffee, primarily because it tastes better (at least the free stuff we get here at work) but also because I can get by on a cup of decent black tea—caffiene-wise—and I don’t have to resort to 47 packets of Sweet N’ Low and four fluid ounces of creamer at 236 calories per microgram.

So I’m in the break room with my cup and I pull out a package of Earl Grey and retrieve the bag complete with string successfully. As I try to ease the bag into the cup, I realize that it is swinging as it dangles from the string between my fingers, making it somewhat difficult to control the descent. My first try misses wide right, the bag sliding down the side of the cup. Instinctively, I lift the bag back up, upon doing which the bag catches the edge of the cup and spins as it swings even more. I try to be quick like cat and dunk the bag into the empty cup with a fast snap of the wrist, but I only succeed in hitting the counter with the bag.

My third try results in the bag missing the rim completely and swinging comically around the outer edge of the entire rim, as though consciously circling but afraid to go all the way in. At this point I laughed a little to myself, thinking I was experiencing a solitary moment of surreality. I tried again, and missed. I tried one last time and as the bag sailed past the outside edge of the cup I became suddenly and very intensely aware of a presence behind me.

I turned my head and saw a co-worker, standing in the doorway to the break room with one eyebrow arched high on her brow. As soon as it was clear I knew she was there, she burst into laughter. “I was wondering how long you were going to try and get that in there,” she remarked with eyes full of mocking mirth. I sheepishly scooped the entire tea bag into my palm and forcibly crammed it into the cup.

It took an inordinately long time for that particular cup of tea to brew.

I’m a Jerk

Nik and I watched “Grey’s Anatomy,” the episode that aired immediately following the Super Bowl two nights ago. We watched it on delayed TiVo-vision because she hadn’t finished the previous weeks’ episode.

It doesn’t particularly matter for this story, but I feel inclined to clarify that I don’t necessarily like the show; it drops the soap so often as to be hazardous. If you don’t believe me you only need to watch this one episode in which there are so many coincidences and unfortunate circumstances that probability, rationale and disbelief are not just suspended but actively persecuted and martyred in horrific fashion.

Consider this particular set up: A young paramedic responds to a call in which a man has a gaping chest wound. In order to stop the bleeding she thrusts her hand into the wound. Meanwhile a major character goes into labor and waits for her husband to arrive. In his rush to get to the hospital the husband gets into a car crash and has to be rushed to (the same) hospital. Another lead character goes to work performing brain surgery on the injured husband while the other doctors learn that the wound being plugged by the paramedic was caused by an unexploded homemade mortar shell, forcing them to try and evacuate the surgical ward and call the bomb squad.

Of course the doctor performing brain surgery doesn’t want to be the one who effectively killed a colleague’s husband so he stays in spite of the evactuation and so on. The point is that even one of these things happening would be an unlikely occurrence, but all of them at once defies logic at every level.

Anyway, as we’re watching this the tension begins to mount as the paramedic learns about the bomb and is instructed to keep her hand on it to prevent it from potentially exploding were she to remove her hand from the wound, and also to keep the patient with the wound alive (her hand is supposedly keeping him from bleeding out). She starts to freak out as an anaesthesiologist left in the room with her waxes dark about the effects of a detonated bomb on humans. “Pink mist,” he describes the resulting tissue from close range detonation. The girl starts to panic as he selfishly and stealthily hands off his duties to her and slides snake-like out of the room.

Eventually our heroine tries to convince the paramedic not to pull her hand out and run; but she does anyway and after a slow-motion scene of the rest of the doctors ducking for cover we find the main character standing in place of the paramedic, hand in the wound holding the bomb in place. There is a pulsing heartbeat soundtrack and the camera holds steady on the lead as she stares in horrified awe at her hand, wondering what she’s just done. The film speed slows to a crawl and Nikki leans closer to the TV, riveted.

So what do I do? I tap her on the back.

“Boom!” I say.

I should point out that Nikki hates—hates—to be startled. Part of her loathing of loud noises is the little jolt they give a person. I know this. I’ve known this for more than eight years, and yet I cannot help myself. In my defense, I think that was the first time I’ve ever scared her purposefully since I met her. She hit the ceiling and screamed. Then she shot me the fabled Look of Death. She didn’t speak to me for an hour afterward.

Eventually I got her to talk to me and I pointed out that one scare in six years of marriage is a pretty good track record. I howled as I reminded her that if nothing else I had saved it for the perfect moment. It couldn’t have been better, I mean really. Eventually she conceded, “Yeah, you got me good.” She paused. “You’re still a jerk, though.”

She’s right about that.

I Smell Weird

We got our taxes done last night. There was a pause because the place we go to get them done was pretty packed so we dropped off our paperwork so they could get started and went to kill some time. After lunch we decided to stop into the local Barnes and Noble where they have (of course) a Starbucks and some comfy chairs where you can read books and magazines free while you sip your mostly unpleasant, highly overpriced, coffe-like beverages.

As we approached I saw a new menu item: The Toffee Nut Latte. I’m a sucker for new and different. So without any hesitation at all, I ordered one. A small. I refuse to use Starbucksese, doubly so since it’s completely nonsensical: How is a “tall” the smallest they offer? It’s dumb. Anyway, I got my beverage and settled in with Programming Web Services With Perl to enjoy my beverage.

In the end it was kind of nice, nutty and Nik pointed out that it tasted quite a bit like caramel corn. I sipped it until it was done, read for a few more minutes and then we gathered up to head over and finish the taxes.

After we finished (we’re getting a refund this year!) we headed home to watch a bit of TV before I had to retire for the night. I started winding down, so I headed into the bathroom. I washed my hands, I scrubbed my face and brushed my teeth vigoruosly, like always. Then I crawled into bed and drifted off.

I woke up this morning a bit before my alarm went off. Nikki had swiped a lot of the covers, as usual, so I swiped some back and pulled my head under the covers to drown out the obnoxiousness of the television which Nik leaves on to avoid having to listen to our myriad electronic devices emit that odd electrical bleeping that I usually associate with cell phone signals passing through non-cell devices. She says it reminds her of alien invasions and gives her nightmares, so she leaves the TV on to combat it.

But as I relaxed there under the covers, a sudden but pungent stench hit me and I scrambled for the relief of fresh air outside the confines of the blanket mass. At first I assumed it was simply morning breath gone horribly awry. It happens to the best of us. I drifted back off and woke up to the alarm blaring some idiotic morning show drivel. I crawled out of bed and slapped the snooze alarm across the room, stumbling back toward the bed in a cycle of futility. But on the way I caught a whiff of something; it was familiar, but I still couldn’t place it.

Eventually I got all the way up and stumbled into the bathroom. As I stood there waiting for the water to heat up I did some investigation and determined that the source of the smell was definitely me and what was weirder was that the more I thought about it the more I thought that it was very, very reminiscent of the Toffee Nut Latte.

In the shower I scrubbed my armpits, hands, face and neck vigorously, trying to rid the most likely sources of unwanted odors. When I stepped out of the shower I thought I had finally managed to fix the problem. But several minutes later I was eating my cereal when I caught a whiff of it again. Nutty, but not sweet, it was dry and while it couldn’t be classified as an offensive smell (not like I had bad gas or something) it wasn’t exactly the sort of musty stench I wanted wafting around me all day.

Deodorant and a light spritz of body spray should have done it, but later while I sat in the car singing along to the radio and ignoring the bemused stares of the other commuters I smelled it again. I still don’t know where it came from and it seems to emanate from me in semi-regular intervals, like I’m some sort of funky-smelling human Glade Plug-In with a gnarly Heath bar-like fragrance.

Stupid Starbucks.

I watched the Super Bowl this year with a handful of friends and a peculiar contented certainty that it was costing me $5.

There are a lot of sports fans at my work. They decided to have an office Super Bowl pool whose mechanics were fairly interesting (at least to me, since I’d never heard of it before—apparently it’s pretty common since everyone else seemed to have heard of it). The way it worked was there were 100 squares on a 10×10 grid. It cost $5 for a square and once the grid was full of names, they randomly assigned numbers from 0-9 to each column and row. The columns were assigned to one team and the rows to the other.

At the end of each quarter in the game, the scores would have the tens digit removed and if the numbers matched the resulting scores, the person with the intersecting square would win $100. There was also a $100 reward for the final score, separate from the 4th Quarter result.

At first my inclination was to pass on it. But two things convinced me to go for it: One was that 1:100 odds at a 20x return are pretty decent odds. But since I don’t put much stock in trying to play odds (1:100 is still only 1%) what really convinced me was that the guy who started the pool needed just a few more squares filled to make it happen and was running out of candidates so rather than be That Guy Who Ruined the Pool By Being a Total Stick-In-The-Mud, I decided to chip in. Losing $5 wasn’t going to kill me, at least not outright.

When the randomized numbers came back I had Seattle: 0 and Pittsburgh: 1 which wasn’t as bad as my cube-mates 2 and 5 (2s are really tough to come by since it takes unusual scoring like four field goals or at least one missed extra point and fives are even worse… 35 points is the best hope for a 5 match and that’s pretty high scoring for a Super Bowl), but still wasn’t like 3-7 or 7-4. I decided my only hope would be 21-10 Pittsburgh, which sounded like a 3rd quarter score to me and a fairly unlikely one at that.

So I went to watch the game at HB‘s place fully convinced that I wasn’t going to win.

Now if you watched the game and remember the final score, you know how this is going to end. But what happened was that I kept waiting for my chance to pass: You know, for Seattle to score that third time or for Pittsburgh to break it wide open and pass over the three-TD mark. The game kept going and I stayed in it.

As it came down to the fourth quarter I finally started to let my self hope… just a tiny bit. Most of my efforts to quell it came from the innate knowledge bourne of thousands of “Instant Win” games and hundreds of mocking jokes at the expense of beleaugered Lotto players that no one turns $5 into $200 doing nothing and does it with 1:100 odds. No one.

When the score finally got to my winning point (Steelers 21, Seahawks 10), there were nearly seven minutes left in the game. My hopes sank almost all the way. Surely someone was going to score at least something in that time. But the Steelers plugged away at the ground, killing the clock. They didn’t break free to seal the deal, they didn’t try anything tricky and pass it around, they just wasted time. Then the Seahawks got the ball and I tried not to care whether they scored or not. Of course they were going to score… at least once.

When the pass to the two yard line was caught I threw up my hands in resignation. That was it; a brief moment of hope for glory gone the way of every other chance to win something—anything—my whole life. It was fine. It was comfortable.

Then the flag landed. Penalty. Play called back. I kind of stopped watching the game for a few minutes after that—I just sort of phased out. I wasn’t refilled with hope sprung anew or anything, it was like my brain couldn’t handle that not being the expected crush of inevitable letdown. How could this still be a possibility?

I vaguely caught the Seahawks bumbling their clock management; it wasn’t until the Steelers got the ball back with three seconds left that I tuned back in and it kind of struck me that it had actually come down my way. I instantly decided that I must have misread the grid sheet and I actually had Seahawks at 1 and the Steelers at 0. It was a coping mechanism.

But in the end I was right and when I got to work Monday morning I got a bunch of good-natured envy and an envelope stuffed with bills. $195 profit. I went CD shopping yesterday; no other reason than that I had money I didn’t plan on having and hardly ever let myself go nuts like that. Eight used CDs later and a bit of cash bookmarked for a forthcoming release I still have half the money left.

What’s funny about the whole thing is that I had just days ago offered to give my bi-weekly discretionary fund ($100) to Nikki since she used hers all up. It wasn’t a big thing, I didn’t really think about it. I heard her saying she was having trouble deciding what to do since she didn’t really want to spend all her money and have none left over, so I offered to give her mine. I didn’t have anything special planned for it, she had uses for it so I told her she could have it. As I regarded the folded stack of $20s in my wallet exactly equalling the amount I had given up I wondered about balance. Perhaps there was some universal truth hidden here. Maybe there was something to learn.

Or maybe I should send the extra $100 to the Seattle Seahawks. Thanks for being such a bunch of losers, chumps!

I’ve learned nothing.

There are roughly three people who read this site. I know this because that’s how many people will occasionally email me regarding entries I slap up here. Tonight’s edition lets me empty the ol’ mailbag (of its meager, pathetic contents) and revisit a couple of recent topics a bit. Here goes.

First up Dr. Mac writes in response to my hook:

The fatal flaw in your music hook idea is this simple problem… most people have crap for taste.

You: “So, uh, what kind of music do you like?”
Simpleton: “Oh, whatever. Ashley Simpson, Maroon 5, R. Kelly…”
You: “…”
Simpleton: “So, uh what do you like?”
You: “Er… no hablo Engles.”

Granted this is arrogant and dismissive of other’s musical tastes. But let’s face facts: most people’s tastes suck. That’s why radio by and large is horrible. That’s why people buy entire albums and only listen to the single that they heard on MTV. That’s why there are 10,000 cookie cutter bands out there that get famous for 15 minutes and do their take on the same basic pop/rock song that 9,999 bands have done before them, and yet people buy it.

And yes I have contributed to this madness. I bought Candlebox. I liked Silverchair. I’m not proud (but I am clearly dated). But my point is that until people see the light, talking about music is fairly pointless. And by that I don’t mean they have to like the same music I like, or even like “underground” or “indie” music, I just mean that they have to have a decent opinion. If someone really, truly feels that Nelly is the most brilliant artist of our times I’d love to know why. But most people just listen to whatever’s on, whatever’s popular, and don’t know why.

The man speaks the truth, and this does represent a fairly obvious issue with my hook. But I think about it like this: Musical taste is something that comes from a variety of places. For example, I like some of the bands or even just songs that I do because I have actively searched for music of a particular style and discarded potential options that didn’t quite cut the mustard and finally found things that I like, developing reasoned opinions on based on originality, style, execution, melody, lyrics, etc, etc. This is by and large my current modus operandi. In fact a lot of the music I gravitate toward these days is stuff that one needs to give several detailed listens to before the real point—often musically but sometimes lyrically—becomes evident. Witness Broken Social Scene as an example where I didn’t like it (or perhaps more aptly didn’t get it) upon the first several listens but eventually was able to find the in fact rather brilliant melodies and themes running throughout until eventually I came to like them very much. But some stuff I have listened to came from very different places: I have an old White Zombie disc that I listen to occasionally because it was in heavy rotation during a specific period of my high school days that I recall fondly; putting it in the rotation brings back some of that experience and while the music may be nothing especially noteworthy, I like it anyway.

I’ll let you in on a quasi-embarassing secret that I have ABBA’s greatest hits album and I listen to tracks from it now and then because my parents had an old ABBA cassette tape when my brother and I were kids. We used to listen to it all the time. ABBA reminds me of innocence and being a carefree kid… in a lot of ways the music mirrors that so while it is actually somewhat terrible music, I can’t help but like it still. I have stuff in my library (my stuff mind you, not the albums and tracks that I can blame on Nikki) that I sometimes wonder why I have: Duncan Sheik, Michelle Branch, Journey and Kylie Minogue spring to mind. But the fact is that for various reasons I like the songs or albums or whatever. Sometimes I think it’s okay to say, “You know what, I listened to Boyz II Men back in the day and I didn’t think they were that bad.”

Not that I’m saying that or anything, I’m just making a point. Ahem.

Anyway, I guess I think the hook idea is still valid because even if I met someone (or many someones) that had a flighty, unspecific “taste” in music, as I mentioned before I think part of the beauty of the hook is that it gives an insight to a person’s psyche: Even if that insight is that they are shallow and vapid. If I were to meet someone who claimed that their favorite singer was Ashlee Simpson because they “Really liked her MTV show” or something, my hook is still successful because I don’t have to carry on several conversations to learn that they are a big dull dud, I have gleaned that information with one question and a single reply which is, if nothing else, economical.

Secondly, my dad replies to the pronunciation discussion thusly:

I have exactly the same problem with Vahr-Char and its cousin phrase just plain “Char.” Can’t help it, there is no way I can bring myself to say it that way so I tend to use tedious phrases like “…so is that defined as variable character or just character?” To which the response is invariably in SQL-ese “It’s VarChar…” At that point I just cringe and go on. A recent revelation was that xxx.gif files are not pronounced with a hard “g” as if they were the beginning of Frank Gifford’s last name but (and a book I was reading used this analogy) Jif like the peanut butter. Once again we could surmise that the “g” is related to something about graphics making jif an even stranger pronunciation. Why not GUI as “Jewey”? I give up.

Interestingly I’ve heard “gif” as in the image format pronounced both ways by knowledgeable people. I happen to prefer the hard “g” sound as in “Gifford” which is what I use because I figure in the interest of clarity if it is pronounced that way there can be very little chance of being misunderstood (the only possible way to spell that spoken word is G-I-F while the soft “g” sound could make people think of the letter “J” which is more easily identifiable with “jpeg” (jay-peg) which, perhaps in a very convoluted and twisted fashion, seems confusing to me). There do seem to be some regional preferences with “gif” or maybe social is more what I mean: Most management types or non-graphic artists I’ve encountered use “jif” while a higher number of Photoshop-user-types stick with hard “g” “gif.”

And since he brought it up, I just thought I’d point out that I loathe the pronunciation of “GUI” as “gooey.” It just sounds to inane to me, sitting around having a serious discussion about user interaction and usability while grown men are tossing around a word I most commonly associate with children’s snack food. I tend to speak each letter when I say it (“Gee You Eye”) but lots of people have given me funny looks for that, though no one has yet to speak up and tell me I’m a moron.

I got the new Franz Ferdinand album for my birthday. I’ve only listened to it maybe four times even though my 29th year is down by one month. The reason for this isn’t necessarily the quality of that album but is almost solely due to the fact that it is a “Dual Disc” (I originally mistyped that as “Duel Disc,” which is probably more appropriate—as you’ll see in a minute).

Minus the marketese, what that means is that the disc is a CD on one side and a DVD on the other which allows it to include both a 5.1 surround mix of the album plus some bonus video footage. It’s a nice idea, I readily grant you that. In fact the album comes in a traditional CD-only format and when I saw that the gift was the more feature-rich version I was pretty amped. That would be a short-lived reaction.

The CD plays just fine in Nikki’s car, which is where I heard it a few times on a fairly lengthy car drive. She had left it (wrapped) on the front seat for me. When I got home I did what I always do first thing when I get a new CD: I went to rip it to iTunes.

There are two reasons to rip all CDs I have. One is that I love digital music. The flexibility of it to have every song in one big list or mix it up with themes or clever correlations; the portability with iPods (and iPod-style devices) and the fact that you can burn mp3-only discs which lots of new CD players can interpret which gives you roughly 80 songs per disc and so on. The other reason is that—having iTunes, AirPort Express and a smallish apartment—I hardly ever never listen to CDs at home anymore. But I do listen to them at work and in the car (listening to the iPod in the car is a sort of adventure… potentially its own post so I’ll spare you today) yet transporting CDs is a risky game. I’ve ruined several CDs; some of my longtime favorites have had to be replaced several times over the years. With digital tunes I can burn copies of CDs and carry around cheap, replaceable discs without worrying about it.

Of course when I put the new Franz Ferdinand disc in, it acted goofy. Specifically, it acted like it wasn’t sure what to do with the disc. This was odd because, being a disc drive, that’s pretty much its only function. After several minutes of whirring and chirping and clicking away, the disc slid out as if the system were saying, “Ew.” I tried in vain for quite some time to get it to work, trying to trick the system or the disc into working together, for the betterment of my music library. Alas, failure eventually overtook me.

My next thought was actually rather enticing: For once, I had a legitimate use for Peer-to-Peer software! Here I had a perfectly legitimate copy of a CD which simply wasn’t working the way I wanted in terms of getting a digital backup. There was no legal problem with me downloading the songs from Bittorrent or whatever because it was an honest backup being downloaded. Even if the FBI kicked in my door and witnessed the download in progress they could do nothing: I had every right to download that album. Brilliant.

Of course despite the album being only a few months old it was remarkably difficult to find a full and compete copy of it online. The fact remains that most people who download stuff do so either illegally or quasi-legally (at best), depending on who you talk to. So in order to avoid trouble there is a cartoonish game going on at all times between the content owners who want to catch the downloaders and the downloaders who want to keep doing what they’re doing without consequence. It reminds me of those scenes in Looney Tunes where Bugs Bunny runs into and out of several (seemingly) unconnected rooms while being pursued by another character who can never quite seem to get the combination of doors and rooms and staircases quite right. The side effect of this is that people who are sort of outside the game (like me) have to futz around to an excessive degree to get what they want.

Eventually I found two torrents that theoretically had what I was looking for: One had an “Advance” copy in mp3 format, the other was a regular ripped version in FLAC, an obscure mp3 alternative that iTunes doesn’t understand (and whose file size is a bit large for my tastes). Unfortunately the “Advance” copy had a lot of seeds and downloaded quickly; but the files themselves were either corrupt or something else had been done to them because my tests revealed that they played only the sounds of silence. The FLAC version had no seeds, only two peers and took me almost three days to finish downloading. When I finally got it I found out that iTunes can’t cope with FLAC so I went about trying to convert them to mp3s.

The process of going from FLAC to mp3 on OS X may be as simple as the click of one button. But that’s not what I did. Instead I downloaded three seperate utilities, converted the files into at least four intermediary formats (three of which ended up being useless conversions) and was only finally able to get the results I wanted by downloading an application that had a 30-track or 30-day decoding/encoding limit, of which I used twice as many as I should have because my first attempt failed miserably. Of course.

Most frustrating about the whole thing is that I’m fairly confident that there was something screwy about the original CD. I’ve put all kinds of wacked CDs and DVDs into the Mac drive and never had a problem with it not recognizing the media as being what it is. The forced necessity of going online to find a copy of a CD that should have just been ripped in five minutes got me to thinking about all the problems people have had with Windows and purchased CDs that have included copy protection schemes and DRM insanity (which are conveniently ignored for the most part by Macs, but that could easily be a short-lived luxury) and I realized that this is why the music industry is so reviled online. I want to buy my music legitimately; I want to support the artists that I like monetarily; I want to have acceptable options for digital distribution and consumption (iTunes is pretty close, but it has no real competition and its DRM scheme is pretty good, but still potentially annoying). I want what the recording industry wants me to want, and yet they still manage to stymie my efforts to simply enjoy my music the way I’d like.

After all this, it better be album of the year.

So after whining about staying up late to watch the Sharks game the other night I found out it was a TiVo special which had actually been played the night before meaning that my midnight-pushing determination to see how things panned out was… misguided at best and downright stupid from most perspectives that don’t involve me not really caring to think of myself as an absolute nincompoop.

And of course after suffering through three straight miserable games, the one that wasn’t televised last night turned out to be a goal-scorin’ rip-snorter with a pleasant outcome. Figures. Stupid sports.

My Hook

I was thinking the other night that I need a hook: A thing that I can use to engage other humans when the need arises because the fact is that I don’t do conversation very well. You may not be able to tell by the fact that I could write a 10,000 word essay on toothpaste, but comfort with a keyboard (and a non-interactive “audience”) and comfort face-to-face with another homo sapien are two very different things.

I admit that part of it is that I don’t care for nor appreciate small talk. It is one thing when I talk to my parents on the phone and they tell me what kind of weather they’re having. They live a thousand miles away in a location that has a very different climate than what I experience every day. To a certain extent those discussions of the weather are interesting. But talking about the weather with people who are standing in the same room… I dunno, it just doesn’t compute for me. I feel like the same result could be accomplished by us turning slightly and looking out the window. There, conversation over.

So what I need is something to get me started or—more specifically—something to get other people started that can lead into a reasonably engaging conversation but that doesn’t necessarily have to delve into deep and potentially dangerous or uncomfortable subject matters. For example, I could walk up to relative strangers and say, “So what are your views on the Death Penalty?” That’s a conversation I’d be interested in having perhaps, but most people are more likely to gaze at me as though I had just sprouted a second head and back away slowly, being careful not to show any fear or break eye contact.

The line between “trivial and dull” and “uncomfortable yet engaging” can be fairly thin I’m afraid.

My thought is that I should talk to people about music. My theory is multi-layered: Almost everyone listens to music. Even people who don’t think they listen to music probably listen to something, even if it’s just some carols at Christmas time or a few oldies in the car. Since it’s nearly universal that makes it a lot easier to ask people about it; I could hold some interesting conversations about the latest Mac news or Settlers of Catan, but the odds of any given person being informed (or interested) enough in those subjects is too remote to qualify as a “hook.” The other part of my theory is that you can tell a lot about someone by what they listen to. Sometimes this is easy like when someone likes Contemporary Christian music (“Religious”) or The Grateful Dead (“Tone Deaf”); other times it isn’t quite as clear (“I like Mozart, Coltrane and Eminem”) but that can make it even more interesting.

And as a third layer and the real benefit (aside from the whole being more social thing) is that there’s the chance I could get some good tips on new music to try out. I might even find someone I have a lot in common with who could serve as my surrogate hipster fellow in place of Dr. Mac who has very similar musical tastes as I do, but lives on the other side of the stupid country and therefore is frequently unavailable to attend awesome shows that no one else I know wants to see or, really, would be caught dead at. I’m referring to shows such as the recent Decemberists’ concert, last fall’s missed Modest Mouse/Killers/Arcade Fire show (missing that was—no hyperbole—tragic) and the forthcoming Belle & Sebastian/New Pornographers venue.

Plus when I think about it most of the great music I’ve discovered has had very little to do with my hunting skills and has almost universally been because a friend turned me on to it. Some of my favorite bands are Radiohead, Interpol, The Shins, A.C. Newman, The Wrens and Arcade Fire: All of which were originally Dr. Mac recommendations. Cajun Blue introduced me to Big Head Todd and the Monsters; a friend of Fast-Track revealed Concrete Blonde; HB is responsible for my fascination with As I Lay Dying and The Casket Lottery; Gin‘s influence can be seen in some of the more girly stuff I find sneaking into playlists like Fiona Apple and Aimee Mann; Nikki has probably turned me on to more bands than I could even count and so on. The point is, there can be an ulterior motive at play here that is happily benign but potentially bountiful.

I’m telling you, this could be a great hook.

Just Because You’re Paranoid…

People tell me sometimes that I’m paranoid. I think paranoia is sometimes just a side effect of cynicism: The more often you think people are inclined to be scum the more likely you are to assume that everyone is up to no good and eventually that nefaroiousness could be targeting you. It’s just a logical progression.

However sometimes paranoia can be a good thing, such as when it motivates action to prevent these schemes and manifestations which admittedly may or may not exist from coming to fruition. Even if something was just a remote possibility, that’s not necessarily a reason not to fight against it. That said, read and be afraid.

I had a discussion—not really heated just sort of warmish—with a co-worker a few months ago over the correct pronunciation of the common Unix directory name “var.”

According to him, and he is a long time Unix admin who has worked with a lot of other Unix admins and has been around the whole scene probably three to four times longer than I have, the correct pronunciation rhymes with “bar.” For the sake of the argument I’ll spell that particular pronunciation as “vahr.”

My point in the discussion was that it was stupid to pronounce it vahr because no one pronounces the extention of that obviously abbreviated word “vahr-iable,” they say “variable” where the “var” in that word rhymes with “fair” (spelled out as “vair” here). My logic extended that the correct pronunciation of the directory should be “vair.”

My co-discusser then fell back on the weak argument that it didn’t matter what made more sense, only that he had never heard it pronounced “vair” by anyone other than me so if I wanted to avoid looking a fool I needed to start pronouncing it correctly, where correct in this case was equivalent to popular.

Later I came up with an alternate extention to the “var” abbreviation where it could actually stand for “variety” (the var/ directory often holds a slew of assorted junk) in which case vahr would be a more appropriate pronunciation. But today in class I noted during a discussion of database data types that the instructor used a variation of the “var” pronunciation in relation to the “VARCHAR” type.

To me, that has always been pronounced “vair-care” since it clearly stood for “variable characters.” Our instructor was pronouncing it “vahr-char” as in the supposed correct pronunciation for the Unix directory and the verb meaning “to burn the surface of; scorch.” Even if we did the same variable/variety swap for the “var” in this instance, there is no way anyone pronounces is “Char-acter” with the heavy “ch” sound like in “chop.” So why would you pronounce it that way in abbreviated form? But no one seemed to bat an eye at his choice of pronunciation so I’m now wondering if that’s just the way everyone else says it.

The whole thing started me thinking about pronunciations based on written-word exposure because the reason most of this came up was that I learned about all these things from reading online documentation and not from being taught in a lecture/classroom environment so whatever pronunciation came out in my head as I first learned of these things is how it “ought” to sound. It’s like Gin who saw a street sign for Carnegie and read “Cahrn-ee-edge” which sounds very similar to “Carnage” rather than the correct pronunciation which is “Cahrn-ih-ge.” Now, even though she knows how it “ought” to be she still thinks “Cahrn-ee-edge” in her head.

Computer terms I think are most commonly introduced to people with those text-to-mind pronunciations which may be why I find these discrepancies in vocalizations in that field more often. In fact I’ve started to see some software or technology websites that include pronounced acronyms or new nomenclature references to help people sound out their product or technology names to avoid confusion later. For example I haven’t seen it in a while but there used to be a lot of sites that described how to pronounce “Linux” (lih-nucks) after it became apparent that tons of people were misreading it as “line-icks,” probably because it was invented by Linus Torvalds and people just assumed.

Linky Linky

• There is a sweet OS X Terminal app floating around that mimics old 70s glass terminals with screen warp, amber text and brightness glitches and everything. Pretty cool even for a relative n00b like myself who didn’t ever have to use any of that hooey. I did use the old Apple IIs though and they had those nasty green screens with the wicked burn in. Mmm… fifth grade computer class.
• Here’s a pretty fascinating article comparing Last.fm to a competitor. I never used the other site mentioned, but the article is interesting anyway.
• Also, if you’re into the whole Linux thing you should check out this site that lets you build a custom Linux ISO from several distributions. I’ve heard the Ubuntu installer is about as foolproof as Linux has ever been, but it does look nice for getting Debian rockin’. Then again, I’ll grant you that I haven’t even used that in several versions because I’ve been all “FreeBSD this, OS X that” for a couple years. Still, the installer back in the day was bellbottom pants, so unless it got an absurd amount of attention this has to be an improvement.

Bah

Dumb Sharks. I stayed up stupid late last night watching the nailbiter against the Stars, and they had the Stars pretty much reeling in Overtime (where they absolutely had to win it because if it came to a shootout they were toast) only to watch them blow it with like 30 seconds left. Then I had to go to bed all grumpy. I hate that.

Despite my weariness last night, I toughed out most of the Sharks pitiful, painful loss to the Mighty Ducks. Everything they had done right Tuesday night versus the Kings they did the exact opposite versus Anaheim. They skated slow, they left things up to Nabokov, they made low percentage passes, they waited until the last period to make a run for some points. Most telling though, was the chink in the Sharks armor that started to show. It was exactly what I was afriad it was going to be—but up until last night it had failed to manifest itself in any exploitable way—I think the Ducks were the first to catch on and they certainly used it to their advantage.

Here’s how it goes: Joe Thornton shows up and the team starts to play up to their potential. They win some good games and more importantly they start to look good. Or at least look better. Then they run across a team that just has more jump than they do; they’re feeling like they’re scrambling too much, their offense isn’t clicking and they’re overworking their goaltender. So what do they do? Give it to Joe.

When the Sharks are looking good, I don’t have a problem with them deferring to their best player: That’s just good play. But when they struggle I think they start to feel like Joe Thornton is their only hope; that if they just let him take over for a while something magical will happen and they can come out on top. So they start making desperate looking passes in Thornton’s general direction hoping for a miracle. Guess what? It doesn’t. Instead smart opponents (like the Ducks last night) catch on and start circling JT and looking for that inevitable pass and jump all over it. Give Thornton credit for staying with it despite the whole team looking for him to deliver a one-man show, but I think we could have a big problem if the rest of the Sharks don’t realize soon that Thornton’s biggest contribution often comes from the fact that he’s dangerous in so many ways that opposing teams will give him too much attention and leave opportunities open for the rest of the team to shine.

The key is, they have to step up in order to do so.

Meanwhile I’ve heard two Sharks-related rumors this week which bear mention: One is that Evgeni Nabokov may be quietly on the trading block and the other is that Owen Nolan is coming back from knee surgery and when the dust settles between him and the Leafs he’ll probably be a free agent and the upper management in San Jose has expressed some interest in bringing him back to the Sharks.

First let’s talk about Nabokov. Should they trade him? No. Look, Toskala is a decent backup goalie but the guy is simply too much of a flopper to be a day-in-day-out guy. He gets some great saves but a guy with that much freestyle is going to get worked more regularly than a technically sound guy like Nabby. Every goalie has their off days, but Toskala has them as often as Nabokov and he plays about a third or fewer games. Nolan Shaeffer was brilliant in his short stint earlier this season and I certainly would love to see more of him but if you put the burden on Toskala I have a feeling you’d be seeing Shaeffer pretty quick and I’m not certain he’s ready for a full-time starting gig just yet. Now put him behind Nabokov and we’re suddenly talking my language. Which would of course mean that something would have to be done with Toskala. I have an idea: Let’s put a trade together for an offensive blueliner in exchange for Vesa, someone who can actually make a few of those distance shots from the point on power plays. I’m just sayin’.

As for Nolan: Look, I was pretty sorry to see him go three years ago. Nolan was an important part of the San Jose Sharks That Don’t Suck revival and it took awhile to get past his absence… for the whole team. But we’re talking about a time when Patrick Marleau was a wet-behind-the-ears n00b and these days… well, these days he’s the new Owen Nolan. I’m not saying I don’t want him back but remeber why they ditched him in the first place to the Maple Leafs: He cost too much money. Now he didn’t do a whole lot in Toronto and he’s coming off a surgery. I’m sure his asking price has cooled quite a bit but if it came down to keeping Joe Thornton into next season or getting Nolan back to stick to the salary cap? I’ll take big Joe, thanks.

Think I’m stupid? Let me know.

You will, I presume, forgive me if I start to ramble and become incoherent. See, I’ve been up since just before 4:00 am this morning. There were some very reasonable and logical reasons behind this unusual approach to “slumber” but whatever they were they no longer seem very important and I honestly can’t remember what they were anyway.

I’ve been working as an official support person for about four days now. I scarcely recall the days now where I thought, “Man this whole training process is tedious… things will be much better once I start getting down to work.” At this juncture I’m too busy longing for the sweet serenity of those halcyon days to contemplate the bitter irony that lies at the center of those sentiments.

It’s not that my job sucks; hardly. The environment is good, the customers I’m tasked with supporting are overall competent and people are understanding and supportive of my necessarily rough transition. Plus I get paid well and the work is interesting. The problem is that those competent customers are more advanced than I (something they’d find delicious were they to ever know, I’m sure) and when I say “interesting” what I mean is that at some distant point in the future I can imagine this work to continue to be as challenging and rewarding as it may be now, only in my current state of ignorance it feels much more like mind-melting avalanches of foreign data and concepts that my already tiny brain holds in the manner that a thimble holds the ocean. Which is to say—not.

I remember trying to learn about Linux (and Unix in general I suppose). It was frustrating because just when I thought I was getting it I’d get stuck or I’d come across a concept I couldn’t fit into my brain as though it were a piece from a different puzzle entirely and could not be forced in no matter which way it was turned. I have the distinct deja-vu style sensation these days only the extra wrinkle is that in addition to trying to put together some kind of sense of understanding on my own behalf, I’m trying to help others at the same time. Eventually I was able to grasp enough Unix/Linux concepts to where if I had to I might be able to do this job for that but we’re talking about something I’ve been fiddling with for around six years as opposed to something I’ve been exposed to for six whole weeks.

I Can See Through the Windows

Another minor perk of the job is my new work computer. The Dell Inspiron notebook is an impressive business machine: 2 GB RAM, 2.13 GHz processor, a hefty graphics card capable of 1920×1200 resolution (on the built-in screen!) and 80 GB hard drive. Okay, okay, so it’s a Dell which means I’m all Windows-bound. Well, so is the product I’m supporting (for the most part) so I have to deal.

It’s funny though because I’ve used Windows for a very long time but it has been these past few weeks where my usage of any alternative system for anything useful has been relegated to a few sparse hours here and there after hours or on weekends. Now this is Windows XP Professional which, by most accounts, is the best version of Windows you can get. I’ve had to be quite familiar with the special little tweaks of Windows in a hurry. Know what? Heresy though it may be, I really am finding it not that bad. The key of course is that I did not pay the $120 or whatever ridiculous fee they charge for a system that is “meh, not too terrible” but as far as an OS I could live in, I admit that by and large it gets the job done.

Neil Stephenson had an essay called “In the Beginning There Was the Command Line…” in which he used an analogy of cars for operating systems. I’d say an apt description of XP Pro is that it’s like a Ford Taurus: It’s not “cool,” it isn’t really fast, no one thinks it’s special but it gets you from here to there. Eventually if you have it around long enough it’s bound to show some rust, but by then you’re probably thinking about a new one anyway. Which is why I’m more attracted to OS X and *nix, because at least there the polish and attention to detail is more pronounced. Or, in the case of *nix, it looks maybe as bad or worse but will last you until the next Ice Age, provided you don’t run it into a tree or something.

Anyway, abandoning the stretched metaphor, here are a few of my gripes in “un-switching” from being primarily a Mac user to being forced into primarily Windows use.

1. Built-in spellcheck. Look, I can’t type. Literally I have no touch-typing skills so I do a sort of hybrid hunt-and-peck thing which mostly just results in me making about four typographical errors per word entered. Which is why OS X’s nearly universal spelling support is refreshing like stepping outside after a spring rain. Typing these posts, for example, requires me to be extra careful because there is no spelling service for webpages. OS X lets you select “Check spelling on this page” once and forever more that same page will check your spelling as you type. Also, Shift-Command-D when hovering over a word brings up a mini system dictionary entry. Anywhere in the interface. Brilliant. Windows has nothing of the kind.
2. AirPort. I had the DSL router provided by SBC which included a wireless component running my home network for a long time. Two things conspired to make me change this, all stemming from the fact that my first few efforts to get the wireless network working (using encrypted connections) were utter failures. One was that the AirPort Express I got several months ago would periodically drop the stream from iTunes. I had no explanation for it other than that at some point during the signal transfer from the SBC router to the APE, enough of the buffer would be lost to kill the stream. The other was that I couldn’t log into my company’s extranet through an unencrypted wireless connection for security reasons. Knowing the hassle it was to try and do the encryption thing from the DSL router, I opted to simply make the APE the access point for the whole house, figuring the set-up for AirPort had to be easier. I was right. 20 minutes, in and out, had the 128-bit encrypted network up and running with both Macs humming along on it just fine. Of course when I tried to connect the Dell to it something went wrong because Dells aren’t AirPort equipped so they need to have the hex password entered by hand. It took several tries to get it to work once I figured out what was wrong and I once again felt a pang of regret recalling all the things that “Just Work” with Macs.
3. Mail.app. Outlook: Thou art mine worst enemy. Seriously, whoever thought that Control-Q was a good shortcut key for “Mark as Read” needs to be set on fire. Anyone else remember what Control-Q is usually reserved for? Yes, quitting an application. What a great time to break with convention! Just in time to make sure that from now on, any time I’m using a normal email client, I’ll be guaranteed to shut it down half a dozen times from my habit of hitting Control-Q all the time! How wonderful. Also, Mail.app includes a very simple set of rule-making parameters that can be set to do all sorts of interesting things. Ever tried to make Outlook do something fairly simple on a regular basis? Exactly.
4. Terminal/iTerm. One of the joys of OS X is that it has Unix under the hood. So when you need to do something Unix-y, you just launch Terminal.app and rock and roll. Windows has festering piles of human remains under the hood, so if you need to do something Unix-y you’re stuck using third party apps. I admit that PuTTY isn’t too bad as a Windows-based command line tool. But the fact of the matter is that even the oh-so-simple Terminal.app is better than PuTTY (in my expert opinion) and most of the PuTTY replacements are not-free-as-in-beer while OS X has to have nearly as many gratis terminal programs available as Linux. And for the uninitiated, that’s a lot. I think every CS major in the US university system is required to write a free unix-based terminal console in their first year or something.
5. Pretty. I’ll admit something fairly embarrassing: I kinda like the bitmappy fonts used by a lot of the Windows system. I think it’s something like Arial 10pt. with no anti-aliasing. It’s just clear, easy to read and scalable, which is nice. But when it comes to non-system stuff, I prefer to look at something a bit more appealing. Web pages for instance. Anti-aliasing in OS X? Check. Windows? Don’t make me laugh. Want to know 99.8% of the reason that nearly every web page in existence looks better in Safari than MSIE6? Anti-aliased fonts. OS X even anti-aliases Word docs for crying out loud. Windows likes jaggies. Jagged edges are business-like. They command fear and respect. Or they command customers to ask, “Why is Windows so lame?” You know, whichever.
6. The Dock. I know, I know. The Dock has its own set of issues. But you know, given the choice between the Windows taskbar (even the new XP “smart” taskbar) and the Dock? I choose the Dock. I admit that I wish the Dock wasn’t the place where app windows minimized; if you have too many docked application launchers and you minimize a few windows your Dock shrinks until your icons are the size of plankton. But at least the Dock shrinks! It at least gives the impression of trying to help you and stay out of your way. Windows’ taskbar gives you the idiotic option of auto-hiding and tries to slurp similar minimized windows together (which is a bad design decision in my opinion because it adds another level of searching to find the window you want), but the size never changes to adjust to what you have going on. I have my taskbar set to twice the usual height so I can fit enough minimized windows down there without killing the preview (I see people with tiny taskbars flip through dozens of windows at about 1 pixel square trying to decipher the microscopic icons and find what they want… compare and contrast to OS X’s using the screen itself as the preview) and have all my application shortcuts visible (why have them if you can’t get to them?). This wastes lots of screen real estate that could better be used for something else, but my options are limited.

But you know what? I bought Dawn of War the other day and it runs on my computer. A PC game! Who knew?

And for the record: It’s awesome.

Awesome.

Awesomer.

Two events in the last two days have gotten me thinking about courtesy.

One was an IM gaffe: Nik IMed me while I was on a Webex session, sharing my co-worker’s desktop and unable to see her message. By the time I got back to her she was incensed that I had not replied and instead had “rudely changed my status.” In fact my IM client had set me to auto-away after being idle for a period of time but the perception was that I couldn’t be bothered to say, “Now’s not a good time” and had instead switched my status as a means of saying, “Scram.”

The second is this article in Wired about courteously using technology (Warning: Article contains some rough language). You might think I’d be in favor of such an article, and the general sentiment I do agree with, but the overall presentation of the article suggests a rudely overbearing attitude that completely undermines the thrust of the message and misses the mark about the root cause of a lot of these issues.

The point I’m trying to make is really a simple one: Technology is presenting us with a completely new set of social problems that need to be thoughtfully dealt with and—in some cases—reasonably adjusted to. The mistake that is often made is applying practices and prejudices to new methods of communication, work and entertainment that really only apply to established routines.

I’ve spoken on the subject of IM before. Aside from the usual trouble of forcing people to be half decent writers who might not otherwise be so inclined and therefore subject to the pitfalls inherent in the limitations of printed text, the method of connecting to and disconnecting from conversations is atypical enough to become open to serious misunderstanding between people or groups who approach the medium with different mindsets.

In the example from above, I obviously made a mistake in not setting my status to “Away” prior to switching my view away from the running programs. But consider this: Nikki herself is nearly always logged in and online in AIM, yet her status very rarely changes from “Away,” even when she’s actively chatting with someone. Her rationale is something along the lines that she doesn’t want to feel obliged to chat with any ol’ person who pops online just because she’s perhaps available. By the same token, she won’t necessarily answer the phone just because it’s ringing and she could pick it up. Communication, to her, is at her discretion.

From a certain perspective one can understand the sentiment. Modern communication is more invasive than ever, thrusting itself upon us almost ceaselessly. The problem with this as evidenced by our (very minor, for the record) misunderstanding is that at some point there will be competition for our attention. Being connected via technology to a massive number of possible people and places simultaneously (not to mention our regular sphere of influence around our physical selves) means that increasingly we run the risk of having to play conductor to a barrage of competing communiques. We have to learn how to leverage our understanding of this phenomenon with our desire to take advantage of the technology that is simultaneously interrupting our status quo.

The problem I have with a lot of people who whine about cell phone use in public is that if some people had it their way cell phones would never be used except in the privacy of one’s home. Which is just retarded. Where I see these cell phone nazis arguments falling short is that they seem to forget that people can be annoying by having distracted, animated, volumous or emotional conversations face-to-face with someone. I’m sure you’ve sat in a restaurant at a booth next to some couple having a serious relationship crisis or next to some oversized sales buffoon with a voice projection range of 2.4 miles: The point is that people don’t need cell phones to be obnoxious.

But somehow the inability to eavesdrop on both halves of an annoying conversation makes it infuriating to some people. To whom I have to say: Get over it. Irritating people are going to find a way to be irritating with or without cell phones, ringtones, body odor, close talking, halitosis, soup slurping, pretentiousness, dry mouth smacking, IM buzzing, email forwarding or any of a billion little things that could potentially drive you crazy. And you know what? You irritate someone out there, too.

Really the solution to any perceived problems with these technologies is to find some method of determining what an appropriate social inclusion standard for them might be. Like saying “Hello?” when you pick up the phone, determining what page most people ought to be on would help ease some of the growing pains of having these types of situations arise.

There needs to be a bit of give and take on both sides: People embracing technology need to understand that circumstances ought to dictate behavior instead of capability. Just because you can have a conversation with someone in a movie theater, doesn’t mean you should. Some people still haven’t gotten the clue that talking through a movie is rude, so this is always going to be a work in progress. But likewise the detractors that spend more time griping about other people’s use of communication than is truly warranted need to understand that just because something changes the way we co-exist with each other doesn’t mean we can’t or shouldn’t adapt to it.

Here’s what I’m getting to: I’m suggesting a window of opportunity for communication exchanges to establish and a second window to keep them active. Not a technologically-mandated window mind you, but a socially enacted one. Because the primary gripes and problems seem to stem from people competing for each other’s attention, here’s what I’m saying: First of all, use the methods offered by the technology itself to coordinate communication exchanges. Set status messages (note to self); leave voicemails; redirect calls and emails, etc. Secondly, I think a rough one minute or one and a half minute delay time in establishing communications is good enough. Think about a phone call: Most phones don’t ring for five minutes straight, waiting until the callee is ready to answer, they ring a few times and if it isn’t picked up, the communication is never established.

This applies to IM easily enough, if I send someone a message that says, “Yo what up” and I get no reply for a minute or two, it’s fair to say that the recipient is not ready, able or willing to engage me in conversation at the moment. Socially I should take that no worse than I would if I called and got no answer on a regular telephone. Sometimes people just aren’t available. No harm, no foul. But the same can be applied to in-person conversations where some party is otherwise engaged in a communication, such as when a person on their cell phone reaches the front of a check-out line. I don’t think it’s unreasonable for the checker to wait for a minute or so and then ask the customer to step out of line until they can attend to their purchases.

The final step is to recognize the end of a communication session without necessarily having received a clear “All done” signal. The delay time there might be a little longer, but interrupted communications will probably be resumed at a later time so I’m actually inclined to say that the window there ought to be shorter. If someone becomes unresponsive for thirty seconds or so, disconnect the communication and re-establish it upon the unresponsive party’s return. Again, the biggest element should be the social acceptability of saying, “I got interrupted when talking to that person, but it’s not a personal affront to me, it’s just a fact of having to deal with interacting with people remotely.”

And of course one’s physical presence and surroundings should always take precedence.

Read Stuff. What Else are You Going to Do?

A couple of interesting things I happened across:

• Here are some screenshots of the Internet Explorer 7 beta. Wow, what a shock: They completely ripped off Firefox. You know what? I bet Firefox suffers for it, too. It’s a shame.
• A curious article describing why the current income tax system is doomed to fail.
• Looks like the new Intel-based Macs aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. Honestly, I kind of wish that IBM could have done what Apple was looking for with the Gx chips. Somehow having to re-code everything, run stuff in emulation (Rosetta) and all that hooey sounds like a big pain in the neck; plus as long as Macs contained a fairly unique chip I could say to myself, “This is why these machines cost so much more than a similar PC.” Now I have no idea why they’d cost as much except that Apple can get away with charging what they do. At any rate I certainly won’t be getting a MacBook Pro anytime soon despite the fact that I wanted a Powerbook up until last week. Not that it matters; I’m getting a new laptop from work today anyway which puts me over my maximum capacity for personal computers as it is.