Tag Archives: suck

Solvent!

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Well, here I sit at Bowle & Bowling, listening to the rumble and clatter of the bowling balls, and a feeling of normalcy is starting to come over me. I can pay rent.

Even the last chapter of my adventure was not as straightforward as I had hoped. The credit card people told me, “you can get cash from any bank with a Visa sign on the door.” This, it turns out, is not true. Not at all. Not even close. What she should have said was, “It’s possible there’s a bank in Prague that will advance you cash on your card, but good luck finding it.”

I started my two-day quest in my own neighborhood, at the largest and fanciest bank. As usual in my neighborhood no english was spoken there, but we communicated surprisingly well. “I need money,” I said in Czech. I didn’t know how to say “cash advance” in Czech, and credit cards are so rarely used here that it wouldn’t surprise me if the bank lady didn’t know the word either. “You can’t use the bankomat?” she asked. “No, it’s an emergency card,” I explained. She thought for a moment. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t help you. I don’t think any bank can.”

I canvassed the rest of the neighborhood and got the same story. It was getting late so I decided to try another approach. I would call my bank and see if they could issue me a PIN so I could restore all the happy ATM-ness to my card.

Naturally, that turned out to be complicated. Then my Internet connection went down, leaving me Skype-less.

Back on the street again today, an earlier start, knowing that I was going to have to go down to the city center to have any hope of success, and I would probably have to visit a currency exchange. There are plenty of them on Wenceslas square and thereabouts. I wandered up and down the street, window shopping. I noticed that the rates most places advertised were for very large amounts; the normal-human rate was much worse. Luckily (an odd sort of luck, I must say), I will be needing a lot of money, so I found the best rate at a 0% commission place and went on in.

After a little confusion because I said “hundred” instead of “ten” we got the deal squared away. “There will be a commission,” the woman said.

I thought of saying things like, “but your sign says…” but I knew it wouldn’t help, and I knew it would be the same everywhere. No commission on currency exchanges. Credit card: get ready to bend over. If asked they would probably say that they have added expenses and whatnot, and there’s a risk of fraud they have to factor in. In reality, it’s because people getting cash off their credits cards are all desperate schmucks like me. I was tired. I just wanted to be finished with this whole mess. I bent over.

This is officially the last time I think about how much I just spent to get my own money.

Now, no more worries! Now I have money, enough for me to cover rent and some of the expenses of filming, and I have time to find another conduit for the rest. Back on my feet, baby!

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The Waiting is the Hardest Part

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Last Friday I finally got someone in the banking world to take up my cause. I really wish I’d got her name, because she was the kind of get-it-done person you want when you are hungry and all your money is tantalizingly beyond your reach. Hours later the call came from Visa: your replacement card is on the way!

Hooray!

She told me it would be delivered the next business day, Monday. I woke up this morning with the sun on my face (solved with a pillow), but then Real Life started to weasel into my thoughts and suddenly I sat up with a jerk and lunged for the computer. What day is it?

The answer: Monday (rhymes with today). I’m getting an express delivery today. I don’t know when.

I live in what is called around here a ‘villa’. It’s a big house built to have a family on each floor. My place is an afterthought; at some point someone realized that the attic was just a lost opportunity for rent. It takes me three keys to get in: There’s the iron gate by the street, then there’s the door to the building, then there’s my own door at the top of the steps. The catch is that someone on the street has no way to signal me to come down. As I type this, the delivery guy could be down there cursing my name.

So I sit now, windows cracked open despite the chill rain outside, waiting to hear the UPS guy. I am hopeful — when I talked to the final Visa operator I mentioned that the driver should have my phone number. “It will be in the information,” she said, “But we can’t guarantee that the driver will have a telephone.” That was the first funny thing that came out of this whole trauma. A czech without a phone. Ho!

But now I sit, my apartment getting colder (a little complicated – my only windows with ears to the street are in the bathroom, where my heater also lives. The heater pump is failing, and makes a racket. If I have the bathroom door open to hear sounds from the street, I can’t have the heater hammering away.)

So now, I wait. And hope. If the weather was nice I’d just take a book and a chair down to the front lawn. Alas, the weather is not nice. So I’m up here, afraid to do anything that makes the slightest sound lest I miss the critical delivery. Today promises to be big fun.

Thanks!

Balaton

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The cheapest (large) beer at Little Café Near Home is now well over a buck fifty. My preferred beer is nudging up against two dollars for half a liter. Therefore I’m spending more time at the Budvar bar next door. Tonight, however, I stopped by LCNH to snag a bottle of wine. Tea, bless her heart, a fine and happy soul who understands that life is but a joke, redirected my eye from the 95-crown wine selection to the hungarian outlier. Twenty crowns. Today, about ninety-five cents.

It’s sitting on the table in front of me as I write this. I’m a little bit afraid. I will open the bottle tonight. I will drink at least some of the contents. It’s just my imagination I know, but I already feel the hangover coming on. But for science, it must be done. Wish me luck.

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Travelers Tip: Don’t Use Raffeisen Bank

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I am still struggling to recover from having my bank card eaten by an ATM at the bank closest to my house. In fact, this is the second time it’s eaten my card, but the first time I had a backup. As my tale of woe spreads, I’ve learned that several of my friends have had their cards eaten by the hungry bankomat machines of Raffeisen.

My theory on the matter is that Raffeisen is more sensitive to fraud than other banks, so if the slightest thing goes wrong on the transaction (say there’s a glitch in transatlantic communication, or, as is the case with my bank, one of the card-processing networks that serves them goes down), that’s it – card eaten. For locals this is an inconovenience, for travelers it is a major pain in the butt.

So, while before I thought it was bad luck that my first card got eaten, now I know that there is a difference in banks, and I will never use a Raffeisen bankomat again. I encourage you to do the same.

Meanwhile the emergency delivery of a replacement card has been far less than swift. First told I could even have a card the next day, now it’s been a week and I’ve been riding a ridiculous merry-go-round between San Diego County Credit Union and Visa Emergency Services. My nerves got a bit frayed on the phone last night, as the credit union seemed to have gotten confused somewhere along the way about a check card I never activated and in fact don’t have. Sure wish I did. Or that I’d applied for a Paypal card. Or anything.

“I’m getting hungry,” I tell them over the phone. (Thank the gods of telecommunication for Skype.) Now I’m waiting while (once more) Visa Emergency Services seeks permission from my bank to issue a new card.

So, lessons learned: First, don’t use Raffeisen Bank. Never. Second, don’t don’t count on two organizations to work well together. Hound them relentlessly until things are fixed. Third, don’t tell your landlord you’ll have the money on a certain day. I never thought I’d be the one tip-toeing past the landlord’s door. That’s out of a sit-com, right? Except that was me today. And just like in a sit-com, I got to the bottom of he stairs, realized I’d forgotten something, and tip-toed back up and down again. High comedy.

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The Language of Omission

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She was surprised when I mentioned that I knew she was sweet on the guy, but it would be pretty dang obvious to anyone who paid attention. I haven’t seen her in a few weeks since but she’s here now, sitting next to the man of her dreams, and he’s being friendly but is also being meticulously careful to not give the wrong idea. Case in point: she pulled out a cigarette, slipped it between her lips, and waited. No lighter came. That has to be a sad moment.

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I’m Boned

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I’ve been under the weather the last few days, but last night I resolved to get back out into the world. I had a plan: visit the bread and cheese store, visit the bankomat, then on to the friut and nut store, then sit down for a nice pizza.

Mmm… pizza.

Step 1 went flawlessly, but they were short on stuff for my classic recipe “Rice and Stuff”. No worries. On to the bankomat (rhymes with ATM). After some deliberation I punched in a large number (rent is due) and the machine replied, “Unauthorized use. Card retained.”

So much for pizza.

I wasn’t terribly worried; I figured I’d be able to drop by the bank in the morning, communicate my predicament in broken czech, prove I was the same guy that was on the card, and recover my cash lifeline. Those who have been around a long time may recall that a bankomat ate my card once before. That was long ago, and I had a backup, so I just started using that one. Time has made me complacent, and now I have no backup.

There will be no pizzas until I get my card back.

This morning bright and early I popped down to the bank and spoke to a rather gruff person there. She spoke no English, but I’d mentally gone over the vocabulary I’d need. It took a couple of tries to get across that my card had stayed in the machine and that it was not a card for their bank. She went off for a brief conference with her colleagues and came back to tell me, “you have to call your bank and get a new card.”

No pizzas for a long time. Rent is a bit of a problem as well.

I left the bank in a bit of a daze, turned in the direction away from home, not sure what to do. Western Union? I’ll call the bank and we’ll figure something out. As I was walking I was stopped by an old man who asked me to help him across the street. So I’ve got a little karma working anyway.

Now I at Little Café near home, squandering pocket change on tea, thinking of the upcoming release of Jer’s Novel Writer (long, long overdue) and about scheduling problems with Moonlight Sonata, and generally moving my worry into channels I can do something about until business hours in San Diego.

But, yeah, I’m boned.

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AppleScript Sucks

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Here’s the thing: the idea behind AppleScript is actually very cool. That I can write a (theoretically) simple program that harnesses the power of several applications on my computer is the Next Frontier in Computing (Apple is not the only company doing this stuff). Now Apple even has a program called Automator to handle some of these tasks without you ever having to write any code. That’s a good thing, because AppleScript the language really, really blows. So much for the next frontier. It’s like the covered wagon is being pulled by an armadillo.

The temptation of AppleScript is that I need to take information from iBlog and convert it to a format that WordPress can use. AppleScript makes it really simple to ask iBlog for its data, already set up and accessible. Cool. Then we get to the part where we have to make AppleScript do useful things to the data. Uh oh. Welcome to the worst programming language ever created.

Sometimes with familiarity one learns that although a different language might do things a different way, it has its own strengths. Perl, for instance, is a text monster, but makes sacrifices to be one (so I’m told). AppleScript occupies a unique position in the programming world as I know it by doing everything badly. I challenged myself tonight to come up with one good thing to say about it. For perspective, when I try I can even think of good things to say about Microsoft and the Yankees. Not AppleScript. It’s like Apple is intentionally hiding powerful capabilities I know are there, built into the operating system. Not only that, it hides simple abilities that I can use in any other comparable scripting environment. AppleScript doesn’t want me to get my work done.

On top of that my task this time is made harder by iBlog’s grinding horrible slowness. Is nothing at all happening because I made a mistake, or is iBlog just off smelling the roses right now? What I want to do is exactly what AppleScript and iBlog’s script support were designed for, and I’ve already written some text functions that every other comparable environment has built-in, yet in the end I’ve been wasting my time. Now it’s time to bring in the big guns. Doing this the hard way turns out to be simpler than doing it the easy way. Go figure.

I will be doing a series of propellerhead articles documenting the migration from iBlog to WordPress. The articles might be interesting to someone if I wasn’t the only one on the planet still using iBlog.

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You’re Doing it Wrong!

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This is not beer pong.

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The World’s Worst Writing

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I’m not a big fan of television serials, as a general rule. There was a period of several years in which I never watched a single minute of sitcom. Not counting animated shows, anyway. Over the last few years the cartoons have been able to go where no live show dares. Which isn’t saying much.

As I write this I’m sitting in Pizzeria Roma, an old haunt of mine (the black hole by the oven is still working). They have a plasma TV now, showing network programming without sound. A crime drama just concluded, and it confirmed what I have come to suspect for a long time: There’s a lot of crap coming out of Los Angeles and New York, but the worst television in the world is made in Germany.

Maybe I should qualify the title a bit. This is about the world’s worst writing that people actually get paid for (regularly!). There’s plenty of truly awful writing published on the Web and in vanity press.

The Czechs have Ulice (rhymes with “street”), and old-school low-budget urban soap opera, and they have “Kriminalka: Anděl” (rhymes with “CSI: Prague neighborhood” – Anděl means angel which adds a nice nuance to the title). I am told that this show is actually pretty good if you’re into the whole CSI thing. It might just be national pride, but the locals tell me that the show makes up for a smaller budget with writing and acting. I know the one time I watched it without sound, I found it far less silly than the American franchise that inspired it.

Then there are the German shows. After a while they’re easy to spot. And when it comes to bad, they have taken sucking to a whole new level that American television can only dream of. I know that’s hard to believe, given the state of American TV, but the writing in the German shows is so bad it is a shining beacon of suck even with the sound turned off. (Worth noting here is that I’ve never seen a Chinese television serial. They might be worse.)

The other night I was laughing out loud at the action in a German detective drama featuring a dog. (There is another that features a helicopter, and so forth. In every case the show is constructed so we can say “yay dog!” or “yay helicopter!”) One of the many Toma

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Missed it by That Much

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I’ve been working on a really cool (in my opinion) story, and for once I knew exactly where I was going to submit it. City Slab is a very pretty quarterly that shows up in major bookstores, and they specialize in urban horror, where the city is almost a character in the story. My story, “Haunted City,” fits that bill nicely. While the pace may be a little slow for some editors, I’m quite pleased with the result.

Last week I was at City Slab’s Web site, and I got all the required information and even wrote my cover letter. There were still a couple of things I wanted to check for the story, however, so I did not submit. Good thing.

Today I went back to the Web site to double-check the address, and this is what I found: http://www.cityslab.com

Bummer. If they’d only held on long enough to publish my story, I’m sure their financial woes would be over. Instead, there is one fewer magazine paying real dollars for quality fiction, and therefore another twent-four good stories will go unbought each year. The best stories (or the ones by recognizeable names) will find a home somewhere else, but life on the bubble just got a little more precarious.

The venerable Weird Tales now has my manuscript. I hope they like it. They published Lovecraft, so a slow pace shouldn’t bother them.

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Just Because I Don’t Know What They’re Saying Doesn’t Make it Not Crap

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I’m at the Budvar Bar Near Home right now. There aren’t many people here, and the plasma TV is showing an American thriller movie. Tom Clancy was mentioned in the opening credits, and it seems that Ben Affleck is the star.

It could be that Mr. Clancy bludgeons himself whenever he’s reminded of this flick. I hope so. I’ve read several books by him that I’ve enjoyed greatly. But what is happening before my eyes on the television is patently ridiculous.

A pilot is patrolling the desert wastes. He is distracted when the photo of his wife and child comes untaped from his jet fighter dashboard. While trying to recover the photo he lets his guard down and runs into a hostile missile. Words fail me. The photo on the dashboard immediately classified the guy as Dead Meat. But then I am asked to believe that a guy carrying an atomic fuckin’ bomb would be distracted that way. Or even that he would be flying without an escort.

Then I’m asked to believe that those who lost the bomb shrugged and said, “oh, well, we can make another.” Twenty-nine years later, the bomb is recovered by Bad Guys. “It’s warm!” one of the scavengers declares. I am being asked to believe (I think) that the Israelis lost an atomic bomb and didn’t try to get it back. Yeeeeaaaah, riiiight. Tom! Mr. Clancy! That wasn’t your idea, was it? I can still respect you, can’t I?

OK, and as I watch we have the silliest of all action movie conceits. The standoff where each guy is pointing a gun at the other. Only in Hollywood would someone hesitate to pull the trigger. *ahem quentin* Seriously. A standoff occurs when the person who moves first loses. Guns pointed at each other is not a standoff situation – the first to move wins. If I have a gun pointed at someone’s head, and they have a gun pointed at mine, and we’re not old chums from back in the day, I’m pulling the trigger.

It could be that there was dialog to go along with this patently ridiculous standoff to make it make sense. If I was the guard with bad teeth, things would not have got to that point. Here’s the test I give myself as a writer, for every character in every story. Would I have done that? Given that character X has limited information and even less time to make a decision, would any non-stupid human being act the way the author asked this guy to behave? You can’t base a plot on the actions of stupid people.

Nor can you depend on bad driving, but as the movie progresses they have done that too. You can’t make a really stupid driving error a plot point. OK, you can, but you shouldn’t. The car that won’t start should be reserved for crappy horror movies. Please, Mr. Clancy, tell me you’re better than this. I hunger for the reassurance that you were not responsible for what I have been watching.

Although, honestly, I know you’ve already sold out. You flog your name shamelessly, unconcerned with quality. There’s the whole series of crappy airport novels with your name on them that you can’t feel good about. But there they are. You’ve earned your laurels. Just… don’t insult me like this.

Hopefully, when I sell out, I will do it more gracefully.

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Another Brief Message to the Gatorade Marketing Team

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A while back, while on a road trip, I wrote a message to the boys at Gatorade. In a nutshell, I told them that all the flavors were silly, and many of the names of the flavors were downright stupid. To that I have this to add:

Lemon-lime and strawberry mixed together are awful. Making the result the same color as regular lemon-lime is criminal.

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A Legal Recommendation

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When a guy is trying to call his girlfriend after his Internet connection goes haywire, and he discovers that he has no signal, he should not be held responsible for damages when a “more bars everywhere” commercial comes on.

I’m just saying, is all…

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Give ’em the Razors, Sell ’em the Blades…

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I’m hanging with That Girl, and the other day we were out on the town together, shopping for a variety of techno-things for our office. One of those items was a printer. We spent time at OfficeMax looking at a variety of options, and finally settled on a competent-looking Epson for seventy bucks. I was struck by couple of observations as we lifted the black beauty from it’s packaging and set to work hooking it up:

  1. The cable to connect the printer to the computer is not included. This is mentioned in small print. Oddly, It is not possible to tell from the outside of the box what cable is required. You must get home, unwrap the printer to find no cable, then make a separate trip. Thanks, Epson. (Thanks also to the almost overly-helpful people at OfficeMax, who probably should have known about this.)
  2. The cost of a printer, including a full complement of ink cartridges: $70. The cost of a full complement of ink cartridges: $80. It is cheaper to buy a second printer and throw it away than to buy a backup set of cartridges. Wow. Just… wow.

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My Curse, Apparently, is Broken

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For several years the performance of San Diego sports teams was almost frighteningly linked to my proximity to the club. Just watching the game, even remotely, has been well-documented on these pages to be a kiss of death. (In the interest of science, I have on some occasions in advance correctly announced that I was jinxing a game.) There was a period with the Chargers when it was just downright ridiculous.

This year, I have paid almost no attention whatsoever to baseball. I knew that pundits were predicting good things for my team this year, but things have been hectic, you know? Finally I had a bit of time and I thought I’d go see how my boys were doing. There is weekly column at espn.com called the power rankings, and I started scanning the list for my team. I scanned down… and down… and down…

By just about any measure (most notably the ability to win games), the Padres are the worst team in the league, with no help from me whatsoever. If the blessing of my absence is ended, so too must be the curse of my presence. I declare the curse ended.

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