Don’t know why it is, but when I try to post to your blogs using my OpenID, it doesn’t work. I’ve also failed with a couple other methods, and the remaining options are overly invasive. Tried two different blogs today (Dahveed, three times) without success.
Probably I’ll give in and use my fuckin’ Google credentials eventually, and hopefully that will work, but I’d really rather not. So, in the meantime, know that my silence is nothing personal.
Hey, if you don’t want to worry about your privacy anymore, why not publish your DNA? The old-fashioned method of publishing your family relationships for the world (and insurance companies) to see still leaves some shreds of privacy and potential for falsification. With this deal, that problem is solved!
Honda has a new safety package on some of their cars. The ads go something like, “Sooner or later you’ll be driving when you’re on the verge of falling asleep. Sooner or later you’ll make a sudden swerve across several lanes of traffic. Sooner or later you’ll be driving and not watching where you’re going. Our car has technology to make it safer to do those things! Yay Honda!”
Wait… what?
Already there are people out there, who, when the moment comes to make a life-and-death decision, will, because of this technology, be more inclined to choose death. Death for themselves and for those around them. Death for me, perhaps. Some of those people will choose death anyway, but now, with the assurance that their car is looking out for her, a teenage girl will veer across four lanes of traffic and be represented at her prom by a table with her photo on it, with candles and little mementos. Elsewhere, some guy is going to decide to cover an extra hundred miles while his wife sleeps in the passenger seat, confident that his car will wake him up, and he will leave his children orphaned.
This technology is part of a larger, encouraging trend towards cars that drive themselves, that plan ahead long before the desired exit, pull over when the human monitor is asleep, and talk to each other to warn of obstacles and negotiate safe passage. Steps like the ones Honda has introduced are valuable in reaching that goal.
But these intermediate steps? I don’t want them on the road with me.
Tonight I came home to discover that whenever I looked at this site, it was wrapped in advertising. Yikes! I was relieved to discover that it was ‘only’ on my machine; I had unknowingly inherited a browser extension that turned Safari into a giant billboard. Panic gave way to annoyance.
The creator of this extension is called Yontoo. They suck. But you can be sure that I didn’t run a Yontoo installer recently. Something else I installed did me the favor of sliding that sucker onto my machine. Tonight I wrote Yontoo this message:
How can I find out how you [sic] software was installed in my browser? I certainly didn’t ask for it, but obviously at some point when I thought I was installing something else, I got your stuff too. I want to know who to yell at.
There’s a general rule in writing, one that probably should go without saying but it is violated regularly. It’s simply this: Everything you write should advance the plot and build your characters. When I criticize my own writing on this metric (which I should do more often), I chunk things by paragraph. Did that paragraph move the plot AND develop character? No? That paragraph’s not working hard enough then.
If Robert Jordan had had a decent editor or some ability to see his own work objectively, his Wheel of Time series might not have spiraled into unreadable disaster, filled with entire chapters of fluff. As the books got thicker, the number of things that actually happened decreased.
Of course, during NaNoWriMo, that metric is thrown out the window. This is about quantity, not quality. It’s perfectly all right to have non-performing paragraphs in a first draft; that’s what revisions are for. Over the last week and a half, I’ve written a lot of non-performing paragraphs. I’m even giving Jordan a run for his money.
I had no intention of writing a procedural, but it turns out I’m writing a lot of scenes that fall into that category. In a procedural, the author liberally sprinkles long passages through the book that are merely lists of things people did. In my case, the procedures are usually medical. First the doctor did this thing, then that thing, then another thing. It’s all very technical and makes the author sound like an expert, but it doesn’t move the story. It’s filler. Filler that procedural fans may enjoy if done well, but the only thing the story would lack without all that detail is page count.
(I’m pretty sure my long scene in which the doctor inserts a tube into the lung of a pneumonia sufferer is ludicrously inaccurate.)
In my limited exposure to procedurals (mostly on TV), all that stuff is used to make a story fit in the expected size. A novella becomes a novel (with a novella-sized plot), a 30-minute drama becomes a 44-minute drama (with 14 minutes of test tubes and music).
Or, in the case of my NaNoWriMo effort this year, 10% plot, 30% procedures, and 60% aimless drifting and tedious conversations about things not germane to the story. (Some of the conversations are interesting, I think, they just aren’t connected to anything.) Not my best November effort. Not by a long shot.
This morning I came across this brief article: FTC settles PC spying charges with rent-to-own computers. To paraphrase the text: The FTC caught people participating in jaw-dropping invasions of privacy, and brought the miscreants to justice.
Before we get to the penalty phase, let’s review some of the things these people did without the knowledge of the people using rental computers: They captured screen shots (that could have personal information like bank statements and legal documents), they captured user’s keystrokes (a technique for stealing passwords), and they even used the built-in cameras to send back pictures without the knowledge of the users. Apparently (according to other articles) pictures of children and of people having sex were collected.
There’s no reason to do this if you don’t plan to use that information, and there’s no use for that information that isn’t simply evil.
We can be happy then, that the boys at the FTC are on the job! At the very least, you’d figure Washington wants a monopoly on invading our privacy. So what was the ‘settlement’ they reached with these thieving bastards?
Oh, it was severe all right. They got the bad guys to promise not to do it anymore.
Shit, at least make them pick up litter for a weekend.
I’m hardly an expert on the subject of marketing, but sometimes you don’t have to be one to notice when someone does a terrible job. In addition, I came across an interesting marketing idea that I may well end up using.
Let’s start with the bad. When I first saw the trailers for Cabin in the Woods, it looked like a fairly standard horror/slasher type of flick, and not a terribly interesting one at that. Perhaps there were hints that there was something deeper going on, but nothing that came anywhere close to telling what the movie was about. Nothing to hint that there is a lot of humor inside that scary package.
Had the preview shown the guy in the white shirt and tie shouting “We have a winner! Redneck zombie torture family!” I would have given the flick more than a second glance. Bare-bones slasher movies don’t do much for me — even the ones friends and family helped make — but Cabin is much more.
Note: There are redneck zombies, and there is blood. A lot of blood. You can’t dissect the genre without dissecting a few people. If you’re OK with that, and, like me, weren’t excited by the trailers to Cabin in the Woods, go back and give it a second look. One of the worst-marketed films I’ve ever been aware of deserves a bump.
While we’re talking about marketing, I read the first two chapters of a novel today that I had no intention of reading. How did the writer accomplish this trick? With cleverness! You see, I have one of those electronic reading devices you’ve heard so much about. I’ve been catching up on my classics, because I should and because they’re free. Recently I downloaded H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine, and cracked it open the other day on the bus to work.
Before the beginning of the public-domain text was a brief foreword by one Félix J. Palma, saying (roughly) “This is one of my favorite stories ever, and I hope you enjoy it. I have included the first chapters of my novel at the end; if you feel so inclined I would be delighted if you would give them a read.”
At the end of Wells’ classic Mr. Palma returns, saying how much he loved The Time Machine when he was a kid, but how it failed to delight as thoroughly when he read it as an adult (an experience that echoes my own). Without denigrating the master, he talked about his time-travel story for a couple of paragraphs. With a turn of the next ePage, we come to the title page of Palma’s work, which proclaims beneath the title The Map of Time, and after some Victorian-era histrionics:
YOUR EMOTION AND ASTONISHMENT ARE GUARANTEED.
To which I said, “Hell, yeah, Félix.” Chances are, I’m buying the book. The first two chapters haven’t blown me away, but they’re solid and have a distinctive style. I have one more free chapter to go, and there’s a collision coming. He gets that right and I’m in. And heck, it’s guaranteed.
So now I’m wondering: What public-domain work would most attract readers who would enjoy Munchies?
I try to set aside an evening each week to go to a bar, relax, and write up a couple of blog episodes. Thing is, I’ve been completely crushed at work (it’s the end of the fiscal year, and I work in the finance department). Finding time to sleep has been a challenge for a couple of stretches lately.
Yesterday my team released not one, but two software tools. A big day! One of those tools is perennially caught in the confusion of fiscal-year shifts, and so today was about last-minute fixes.
Still, I got out of work at a reasonable time, and drove through unreasonable traffic to reach one of my chosen beer-blogging havens. (They’re playing AmeriFootball on a Thursday. Huh.) Anyway, I carved out some space and set up the ol’ bloggin’ box… and proceeded to extend the custom-search feature in one of my work projects. It’s an elegant solution to a problem that had been haunting me, so it’s by no means time wasted.
But holy heck, here I am, at a time I’ve designated for doing pretty much anything but work, and I’m doing work. My head is completely over on the analytical side of my cranium, to the point that I’ve been dreaming about database queries. I’ve gotta unshackle the creative neurons, the ones that never fire the same way twice. Get out the heart-shock paddles! I need to reset my brain!
Long-time readers will remember my story of being awakened in the night to the pounding on my door by guys who didn’t speak English, only to set my foot on the floor with a splash. They lived downstairs, and the charming waterfall cascading down the stairs was already filling up the basement.
On that occasion I found myself standing in water, wanting nothing more than a nice hot cup of tea. There was none to be had.
Fast forward to yesterday morning. After one more snooze-button hit than usual I crawled out of bed and cracked open my eyes just enough to find my mug, the one that would soon hold tea. I staggered toward the kitchen and heard the sound of running water. “Holy crap,” I thought, “did we leave the kitchen faucet on all night?”
In fact we had not. Yet sometime in the night a hose below the floor beneath the kitchen sink had decided to succumb to pressure and just let water flow where it might. “Where it might,” it turns out, was just about everywhere. Beneath our floor is a nice thick layer of insulation. That space filled with water and carried the flood through the house, unimpeded by walls.
It took me a while to get the water turned off (there were two valves on the water line, one camoflaged between two pipes, and the setup looked like a gas line to boot), but it was clear that the deluge had been under way for a good long time already.
I was on the phone with People Who Can Do Something About Things Like This when the lights in the kitchen went out. Oh, happy day. One thing about living in a home that was delivered on wheels: you can get a warranty, much like one for a car. We got one to protect us against just such surprises during the first year in our new abode. The warranty covered a plumber visit to fix the pipe. The warranty did NOT cover “access”. The plumber came out, discovered that he couldn’t get to the leak, and left again. Had I been there at the time (my sweetie has done the lion’s share of the work on this issue) I would have provided him access, no matter how big a hammer I needed. Instead, Father of Sweetie came over and tore the bottom out of the cabinet under the sink, revealing the original floor, and enough of the pipe to reveal the leak. Another plumber arrived promptly.
Tearing out the cabinet floor also revealed the valve to turn off the hot water to the sink. Good thing we never needed it. The previous owner was a handyman of sorts; he installed a lot of upgrades and generally kept the place in great shape. The thing is, when you look close you can find a lot of questionable work. A fence latch that doesn’t line up right. Concrete poured so water pools up. A screen-door pneumatic closer-thingie installed… creatively. Sprinkler heads that don’t work in the right geometry. Add to that list the water purifier in the kitchen and the cabinetry (which he might not have done). Before we moved in the inspector found nails through the unsheltered ends of shingles. A lot of energy put into home improvement but undermined by… I’m not even sure what to call it. Ignorance? Sloth? For all his energy, he took the easy answer often enough.
The ideal home maintenance guy: someone with his motivation and my penchant for getting things right. One reason I don’t do as many fixit jobs as I should is that it takes me forever to get things right. I’m the slowest handyman out there.
Back to the flood. One difference this time around: I live with a good Californian who keeps reserves of drinking water. After the first crisis was past, I had tea. Man it was good.
Now we have a maze of insurance and warranties to figure out. (The good news: insurance covers it. The bad news: we can’t get anything done until the adjuster comes out. The good news: He’ll be here tomorrow.) Meanwhile, the light of my life continues to sop up the flood as the water in the insulation wicks back up into our house.
“Firefox is dead to me,” my sweetie told me this morning. She’s had plenty of bad things to say about it in the past, but yesterday the frustration of her computer completely freezing up more than once put her over the edge. “I thought of calling you to vent,” she said, “but I figured you didn’t need that while you were at work.”
Had she called, she would have heard me complaining about Firefox as well. The latest release broke one of my sites at work, in a really stupid way. You see, one of the Web tools I work on has a time chart. I keep all the times in the system using the Unix epoch timestamp, which is simply the number of seconds since 1970. It’s a big number, but not unreasonably so, easily managed by any modern computer (and most of the old ones as well). It’s simple and it’s a standard.
Somewhere in the last few releases, Firefox broke my chart. It worked fine in Firefox 7, but not at all in Firefox 13. After some head-scratching, I discovered that the latest Firefox’s SVG code can’t handle numbers that big. Seriously, WTF? I added code to arbitrarily reduce the numbers and things started working again, only now my code is slower and more complex.
Though, to be fair, the only reason I have to support Firefox at all is because Safari sucks at printing tables.
Sad news for fans of the Official Muddled Dog: We’ve been busted. You see, the ol’ gal is substantially larger than the nominal limit for our neighborhood. Even at her ideal weight she would be quite a bit too big.
The rule is very inconsistently enforced, however; so as long as no one complains, management is willing to not see the big dog. Well, we’re getting new neighbors and before they moved in they complained. Management has notified us that our quiet, gentle, well-behaved dog must go.
Looking for a home, once again.
To my new neighbors I say, “The next time your &*$#^*@ fence is on fire, there won’t be a dog around to alert people to the trouble.” (True fact: OMD raised the alarm a few days ago when a fence was burning. Just like in Reader’s Digest.) But, I remind myself, we were the ones breaking a rule, we knew we were breaking it, and the neighbors have every right to be jerks and rat on our dog before talking to us. They don’t know us, they don’t know how we would react. The era of neighborliness is sadly over. How long ago was it that when something bothered a neighbor they just went and knocked on the door before calling in higher authority?
Now there’s someone who’s bed is maybe thirty feet from mine, whom I’ve never met, that has pissed me off. Part of me wants to get a new dog that fits the regulations and barks nonstop.
But that’s not constructive. What is constructive is helping to find this fine animal her permanent home. Apparently our role in her life is an interim stop between old and new homes, so we can make sure she lands in a good place.
Please, especially if you’re in the Bay Area, put the word out that there’s eighty pounds of unconditional love just looking for someone who needs her.
It’s going to be really tough to say goodbye.
The United States Postal Service has opened up a new campaign. “Isn’t paper great!” they tell us. You can put your records in a filing cabinet and everyone loves that!
Way to go green, semi-governmental entity! While I’m at it, should I make stacks of tear-off sheets for this blog, so people can save what I wrote in a filing cabinet, too?
* He’s the guy who inspired this screed. He fought his way past the guy with the ball to get into open space so the enemy could get a basket. Don’t ask me who he was; he’s not exceptional. This is how they play the game.
Side note to Memphis: Your yellow shirts and dark green shorts are the Worst Uniform Ever, in any sport (except maybe the Padres and Astros in the ’70’s). The awfulness is amplified by your total disregard for your team identity. Grizzly? Hardly. How much did you pay your marketing team? I’ll do better for half as much.
I’ve had a bit of a tangle with Adobe recently. When it comes right down to it, their Web site makes it very difficult to find what you’re looking for, or even to figure out what product is best for you. This has led to a few frustrating days of going around in circles, trying to find someone to help me rectify a mistake caused by the “click Mac and get Windows” feature of the site.
This is apparently a pretty common problem for people to have, and there are instructions telling just what to do about it. Much of the time the instructions are not very helpful, however. After a day of futility I decided that I would do whatever it took to get a human on the line.
Easier said than done. For instance, the “Schedule a callback for another time” feature invariably returns with the message “No immediate callback available. Try again later.” I thought maybe the more-secure settings in Safari were causing a problem, so I tried again with Firefox. Same result.
Finally I connected by chat with a nice guy who was not empowered to execute the obvious, simple, and immediate solution to the problem. We had to do it the hard way.
Somewhere during my latest futile rummaging around on the site (“Click here for instructions”, then the instructions saying to go right back where you were, and so forth), a window popped up asking if I wanted to answer some questions about my experience.
You’re damn skippy I wanted to answer some questions. When my latest exercise in circular navigation was complete, the survey came up. “Neutral third party,” I was assured. “No specific identity info recorded.” I took the survey, being sure to give credit in the few places it was due. I answered the essay questions with specifics. In the end, I clicked ‘submit’.
“System not working at this time,” the message said.
First let me say that my experience with Door-to-Door Storage in San Diego was exactly the opposite of the story I’m about to tell. I’m about to tell a story of a business that has proven unable to get even the smallest thing right on the first try. To the best of my knowledge, the absolute incompetence is strictly local — although the corporate HQ hasn’t seen fit to do anything about it.
It started when I moved overseas. I sold my house and disencumbered myself of most of my stuff (so much stuff!) but there was a nucleus of belongings that I thought would be useful when I started my next home in the US. So I paid a monthly charge to have someone else store it. Door-to-Door was awesome because they brought a big box to my house, I packed it, and the they took it away. Because they can store the boxes efficiently in a big warehouse, it costs less than a self-storage place.
Over the next few years I would visit my stuff now and then, and the people in San Diego were friendly, accommodating, and helpful. I never had an issue with them (except the one that was totally my fault, and they were cool about that once we got it worked out). But I don’t live in San Diego, and there’s a Door-to-Door facility up here, less than five miles from my apartment. Eventually my sweetie and I decided it was worth the considerable expense to have the big box of stuff moved up the coast to Silicon Valley.
And then the nightmare began. Before the move I agreed to a new rate based on an annual contract, and made sure that there was nothing else I needed to do. Nope; money was paid, contract was set up, and the box with most of my worldly possessions was loaded on a truck and hauled up to San Jose.
Two months later, I wanted to visit my stuff in its new home. It’s a pretty simple procedure; you call in and make an appointment and they make sure that the box is pulled from the warehouse and waiting for you when you arrive. I called to make an appointment. Confusion ensued.
The system didn’t show my box in the San Jose warehouse. I spent some time on the phone with a very friendly guy in the national office. He determined that the box had been properly recorded leaving San Diego, but had never been checked in in San Jose.
Well, crap.
After a few more days it was discovered that yes, the Big Box of Stuff was indeed in the San Jose warehouse. Hooray! As a way of apologizing the corporate guys gave me two months free, based on my annual rate. After all, my annual contract was in the system. (We actually had an extended discussion about the contract based on a misunderstanding on my part.) At that time there was no doubt at all that I was paying an annual rate.
So, finally, I made an appointment to get into my Big Box of Stuff. The day arrived and my sweetie and I went down to the facility. There wasn’t much in the way of signage, but we found the office and the woman recognized my name. She told us how to get to where the BBoS was waiting.
It wasn’t there. We checked and double-checked, and the BBoS was not there. We spoke to the guy who moves the boxes. He flipped through all his work orders and there was nothing about our BBoS. At the front of the building they knew my name; at the back no knowledge of me had penetrated.
There is obviously a computerized system that manages where all the various BBoS’s are. Just as obviously, the people in the front office of San Jose’s Door-to-Door storage don’t know how to use it.
Anyway, the fetcher of boxes left and some time later returned with our BBoS. The only catch: it was still sealed shut from transit. Usually (according to the very friendly box-fetcher), boxes are sealed with two or three screws. The San Diego Boys had used maybe seven, all clearly marked with spray paint, and Friendly Box Fetcher didn’t have the proper tools to unseal the BBoS.
Our man persevered, and eventually we got to our stuff. The important takeaway here is that Door-to-Door San Jose took more than one try for every single operation.
And then the invoice arrived, charging us at the monthly rate, rather than the annual. Twice as much, even as it showed the initial “incompetence credit” (my phrase) for two months at the annual rate.
It has taken months to get this straightened out (if it truly has been – I got a call the other day that I didn’t pick up). In that time I dealt with friendly and competent people at the national level (email replies in minutes with useful information, with a real feeling for personal attention), but the errors made by the San Jose folks took a long time to erase.
I’m hoping they’re erased, anyway.
Message to Door-to-Door: I like you guys, but your San Jose franchise is awful. Do something about it.
