Tired of that old Guy Lombardo version?
Try the vintage sound of the Nevermores, taking a whack at the deere oulde Scotsman's wirk. Best played at midnite.
(Tip o ye tam to DJ Matty, natch.)
New Earth Time ... 360 degrees of internet time.
Reminds me, sorta, of WRLDtime. One's decimal, one's duodecimal. Go figger.
I awakened, this morning, to a shitstorm of comment spam. My initial plans for the day were to troubleshoot the connectivity issues on my LAN, but that priority receded when I noted that the spammer had evaded Jay Allen's excellent MT spamfighter, MT-Blacklist, by entity-encoding their URLs.
From 8 until 11 or so I fought the demon on the mountain and in the pit. Once I defeated it, I began to look for a solution. Allen is not updating the MT 2.x versions of MT-Blacklist; so I thought, OK, maybe this is the day I finally upgrade to MT3.
I bought the app and initiated the installation process. All went well.
Until I tried to log in, realized I had forgotten my password, and pressed the helpful-seeming link, 'Forgot your password?'
Ages later, the dialog helpfully informed me that the password had been reset, and that the new password had been emailed to me. I refreshed my gmail screen. Nothing.
Still nothing.
I ssh'ed into my server and checked the mail logs. There was a record noting that the mail had been queued, but it did not make it to gmail. I tried a wide variety of means to access my mail; but alas, it was jammed up tighter than [insert favorite relative here]'s colon the day after Thanksgiving.
So now it's 5pm. The logjam has been cleared, but it's still unclear what the problem was - the symptoms were verrrrry sloooow processing times for certain sorts of I/O on the server. Peculiarly, the CPU monitor on the box was not even close to being hammered - the slowdown was something else. I deleted some lock-tracking files, which may have had something to do with it; or the server may have molassessed by a comment-spam assault. I really don't know at this point.
But that email problem just confirms what I already know - I have to farm out email. Why the hell are all the 3rd party email providers so sucky in terms of features/pricing?
I believe I sense a business opportunity.
UPDATE:
Wow, the spambots are still hammering away. It's war, apparently.
On the other hand, obviously my actions had removed playing poker from the entertainment category and put it into the work category, with the result being that at times it was as unpleasant as any job. Playing tight can actually be pretty boring, and I found myself doing strange things to mix it up a little, like checking the bottom right corner of the card first (checking for the telltale border of a face card, or the blankness that meant either an ace or a 2/3) or checking flops without my glasses.
Ken Goldstein, professional gambler. You know, it really says something about Ken that he utterly fails to mention the late-night coke-fueled slapfights with his stripper girlfriend, the several Mercedes won and lost, and the huge mansion down the coast that he'll forever return to, standing wan and forlorn on the sidewalk, staring.
At least he managed to hang on to the clothes.
Seriously, Ken mentioned to me that he was playing poker for expenses, but it almost seems as though he didn't self-identify as a bound-for--greatness pro. I find this interesting, because Ken is clearly a gifted person in many things.
How Scientists and Victims Watched Helplessly: epic survey of how the tsunami news broke, or failed to. For some reason, right about when the quake had been first reported I adjourned from our Christmas gathering for a moment and walked back in to the living room to announce the quake news. Earlier that day I had IMed with my friend and ex-bandmate Karl, who had been in Phuket earlier in December and was planning on heading back. He was in Saigon when we chatted.
pf.org: Part Man, Part Machine, wherein pf details the wonders of contemporary laparoscopic surgery.
May I also belatedly call your attention to Danelope's fine Christmas roundup, allegedly assembled while frantically scouring the darknet for childhood-memory holiday music and simultaneously burning a btach of holiday cookies. Only via the good offices of the Suicide Girls was disaster averted, as I have it. The elusive creature (like the zebra mussel, a non-native Floridian species) swears that he will attend the impending January 3rd mini-mefi-meetup at PNW North Intl Mefi/Mofi HQ.
Barring unspeakable pain.
Historical tsunamis off the coast of Peru.
Historical tsunami databases (Unesco).
I looked, but found no documentation of tsunamis contributing directly to large-scale human migration.
So, given the climbing death toll in the tsunami and the probable development of widespread disease as a result of sanitation problems, here's a scary thought: the bird flu that we hear annual alarums about gets some sort of foothold in the affected populace.
Just a little nugget of positive thinking to kick off the New Year! How are those resolutions coming?
I actually meant to mention this in yesterday's entry: we were able to locate my missing PDA in the lost-and-found at Virginia Mason.
That's a mixed blessing, but on the whole a good thing. I had been looking at 8mb and 16mb Vx's on eBay (the newly-returned PDA is an IBM-branded 8mb Palm Vx, also an ebay purchase) and while 8mb models can be obtained from $20 to $40, the 16mb model starts at about $80. A brand new Tungsten C, the only current Palm that includes wifi, is about $200 on ebay.
If they had only left that butt-ugly thumb-board off the damn thing.
Anyway, it means one fewer set of technocrap to wrangle in my house.
I am gonna dump a bunch of my old computer gear in January - anubody have any wants? All my stuff is Mac-oriented, so unless you know the ropes or really want to learn, you're not interested. Trust me.
I might post a detailed manifest here. Items will include a Cisco 675 DSL router, two bootable but dead-screen Wallstreets with various accessories, and a g3 upgraded 9500 with firewire, an 18 gb internal SCSI drive, and a ton of ram.
Saw my folks off to the airport today; then Viv and I drove all over town running errands, the most important of which was getting a new power supply for her iBook. A rocking chair crushed the insertion tip in an unexpected side effect of having houseguests.
I very much enjoyed our holiday with my parents, more so than the last Christmas we spent with them, four years ago in Washington DC. I'm surprised that so much time had elapsed. We've seen them about twice a year over that whole period of time, often at Thanksgiving and midsummer. At any rate, in many ways, it was one of the most satisfying holidays that we've spent with them, although my work schedule meant we did not have as much time with them as we might have hoped for.
They arrived the Monday before Christmas and spent the night. Originally, they'd planned to drive over to Yakima, their hometown, that afternoon. We insisted that they use our car instead of renting one. As we discussed the plans, I realized that they were planning on crossing a notoriously snowy mountain pass on the winter solstice - the longest night of the year. Without telling them, I mentioned to Viv that we should plan on their spending the night that evening.
As it turned out, their plane was delayed due to snow back east and their flight didn't come in until about 10pm, so it was good that we'd prepared.
They drove over next morning while I was at work, and returned here Thursday morning, just in time for me to take everyone out to dinner at that venerable Seattle institution, Canlis. Viv and I ate there for our first anniversary or something and it is one of our most memorable dining experiences. The holiday meal that we had this past week was certainly tasty but nowhere near as inventive or memorable as that which my wife and I shared in bibulous romance back in the day.
We asked our old dear friend Spencer to share Christmas Day with us, and happily, he was able to do so. I haven't had a chance to post all the pictures yet, but I'll pick a choice few.
Most Powerful Quake in 40 Years Triggers Death and Destruction
In Thailand, the waves wiped out bungalows and washed through seaside hotels, killing tourists and slamming scuba divers against coral reefs. The government ordered evacuation from stricken coastal areas, including 600 from the tiny island of Koh Phi Phi and the resorts on the islands of Phuket and Krabi . More than 158 people died in the holiday island of Phuket and other resorts, according to the Public Health Ministry's Narenthorn Center, with thousands injured. This was the peak of the tourist season in the area and eyewitnesses described sunbathers being washed out to sea.
My friend Karl is in east asia and scheduled to leave Saigon for Bangkok on the 29th. Although I don't know for certain if he did this time, he often begins his trips in and near Phuket.
Wikipedia coverage, MeFi thread.
Spence came over and shared the day with Vivian, my parents, and me. There was much eating of cheese.
PinkStainlessTail notes he "drives his wife nuts" with a neo-oulipian version of a well-known holiday song. Moments later, a recording of the song is released: may Jingle Rock Bell warm ev'ry holiday cockle.
Well, you see.
A) My beloved Chloe cat has found that she can move the cursor by pawing the trackpad. This is more distracting than disturbing, but may prove dangerous if she recalls my passwords.
B) LAN woes continue, driving me quite batty.
C) Retail hell is concluded for the year.
D) I took my folks out to dinner at Canlis tonight, and on returning, heard from a neighbor about a moderately serious medical procedure he's set to undergo next week.
E) We are catsitting.
Chris Strompolos, of Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation called me today, concerned about some things in my post about interviewing him and seeing the film. I posted a comment to the post summarizing his concerns while we were talking on the phone and will mark up the post as soon as I post this entry.
While he and his partners were pleased by the Stranger piece, he was concerned about my perceptions of "economic advantages," which he - and his partners - strongly dispute. It's clear that Chris and his partners felt the pinch of divorce. It's commonly noted that divorced families experience diminished economic prospects, and though I won't make a linking citation, mothers with custody suffer that economic burden moreso than do, unsurprisingly, fathers without custody.
In my defense, I must note the economic advantages I was thinking of were more along the lines of advantages that may pertain to members of an economic class, as opposed to the specific economic pinch that Chris and his friends were experiencing.
So on this point, it's a matter of opinion, and I do not mean to deprecate the particular economic hardships the kids experienced.
However, Chris pointed out to me that my critical eyes straight-up failed in the matter of a particular part of my viewing of the film.
I said (in part):
"The only other appearance of a person of obviously African descent comes at the end of The Adaptation. The crate apparently containing the Ark of the Covenant is wheeled into a vast warehouse. In the theatrical film, the worker who wheels the ark to its, um, current resting place, is not clearly racially identifiable, as he’s seen in longshot. In The Adaptation, the worker is clearly black, and while his warehouse is impressively huge..."
Except, you know, of course... THAT HE'S NOT.
The worker is played by none other than Chris Strompolos, which more or less deflates a fine bit of critical speculation I had going. So for my next trick, I'll be deflating my bad self on that post.
A big "thank you" to Chris for calling me on this (both literally and figuratively)!
Now, enjoy the spectacle as I eat some crow, kinda. I mean, I'm not unhappy to be factually corrected. But alas for my tower of theory!
And finally, as I told Chris on the phone, mea culpa. My mistake, and happy to set the record straight.
A note from an old mentor and certified musical mad genius included the following bit, which is too good not to share:
REDACTED had another very successful year developing new toys for the U.S. military using cutting-edge space-age-type technologies. It’s all hush-hush top-secret kind of stuff; hip sci-fi style survival gear that LOOKS as cool as it sounds. Supposedly the 5-Box Brass want our enemies to be intimidated by our soldiers’ prêt-à-porter as much as by our swift and absolute destructive power, but you didn’t hear that from me….. Anyway, there’s truly NO ONE like REDACTED for making hella-cool shit that also actually works. So throughout the year he received a series of promotions and raises from The Brotherhood of Bosses, and now he’s chompin’ on a fat see-gar, hob-knobbing defense contracts like a big-time baron of business. (as if…)
Redacted, I gather, is the offspring of my correspondent.
Editor B shares some family memories, his family-oriented media projects (which I bet kick deep-seated ass), and his trepidation about an upcoming reunion in a fine, fine blog entry.
Interesting to me was the implicit framing of B.'s family-oriented video projects as intended primarily for family consumption. B is unquestionably familiar with Sherman's March. It's a prime example of how a piece of intensely personal art can emerge from within an unexpected set of constraints.
It's my suspicion that Editor is casting about for something to move forward with artistically; I can't tell from his entry if he's made this connection or not but I bet he will.
Jason Zada's Very Rare Holiday Album includes the long-sought "Frosty the Snowman," by the Cocteau Twins.
[via MoFi.]
Damn, now all I need to do is dig through some old CDs for that El Vez masterpiece, Merry Mexmas.
Tim Dowling visits Tropical Islands - a new indoor resort in Germany [via BB]: The abandonded CargoLifter hangar is now a giant indoor beach. After all, if you can't move the people to the beach...
[previous appearances by CargoLifter here, here, here, and here.]
Next to last day of retail hell. We are finally catching up.
Attempted to attend a planning meeting via IM for a Seattle-based blogventure. Alas, dsl and privacy-setting issues limited my interaction. A participant promised to forward a transcript.
My folks were scheduled to fly in at 3:30 yesterday but snow delays on the east coast held them until 9:30, preventing them from driving to Yakima last night. It was nice to see them, and I look forward to seeing them later in the week when they come back.
A Dinner in Ukraine Made for Agatha Christie [blogerated NYT link]
Toxicologists say dioxins are tasteless, although Dr. Schecter pointed out the provenance of this assertion is uncertain; he knew of no one who had ever tried tasting them.
From the end of the article, which is devoted to a) debunking the Youschenko "dinner" poisoning thesis, which is the word-of-mouth explanation for what happened to the Ukrainian presidential candidate's face, and b) in a roundabout way, justifying the TOTAL FUCKING SILENCE in the western media about what exactly DID happen, thereby absolving the Times from complicity in those self-same popular rumors.
For what it's worth, a city councilman in the town I grew up in once drank a glass of water that he claimed had been contaminated by the dioxin-based chemical, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), that severely pollutes the county. Apparently the stunt was inspired by New York Governor Hugh Carey once claiming that the Hudson was so lightly polluted by PCBs that it was drinkable in an untreated state. A reporter challenged him on it at a press conference, and the governor wisely declined.
In my own experience, I associate a distinct rusty tang with exposure to the greasy, clear fluid. That may come from the rusted casings of the power-line transformers that contained the chemical, originally used as an insulator by the locally-based manufacturer.
The thrust of that hidden argument in the Times piece, by the way, is that there are no verifiable facts to report, and since reputable news source don't repeat rumors and innuendo (unless they come from State or the Company, that is, natch), well, then, the only alternative was dignified silence.
Especially since Judith Miller's gone up the river. Mum's the word, people.
Thriller! [at MeFi] links to a .wmv of a stop-motion animated version of the Michael Jackson video.
Okay, last stretch. Order volume has dropped slightly. We're doing one more death march on Tuesday to try to zero any backorders out - that shift starts at midnight and ends when we have shipped the last item we have that is in stock and ordered.
Our order volume over the past thirty days was more than two times the prior thirty, possibly as much as three.
In other news, I'm closing in on the LAN problem; by New Year's everything should be hunky-dory.
Last night, we were able to spend a couple of pleasant hours chez Sabrina and Chris, which was lovely!
A 747 took a leisurely tour of Amsterdam yestereen. Courtesy Viewropa.
The framing on some of the shots is delish. Keey an eye peeled for the minicar.
All about the Antikythera Mechanism in two parts [via BB].
Ah, I look forward to reading this. A photo of the object in that childhood tome of wonder, Strange Stories, Amazing Facts, long fascinated me.
(Crossposted from Tablet's Siffblog, soon to become Tablet's Filmblog.)
In late November, Viv and I were happy to attend a Cinema Seattle preview screening of Jean-Pierre Jeunet's newest film, A Very Long Engagement. The film stars Audrey Tatou, who also had the lead in Amèlie. The film concerns a young woman's search for her fiancé, missing in the trenches of the First World War. Based on a novel, the film is long and ambitious, and generally succeeds. The nostalgia that Jeunet winked at in his depiction of a lovers' Paris in Amèlie is in full flower. Nearly every frame of the movie tenderly dotes upon the glories of France. Picturesque country farmhouses, the magnificence of Paris in the early twentieth century, and the valor and inventiveness of the French poilu on the lines on the Great War unspool with self-assurance.
All this viewing en rose would be insufferably – ah - cheesy in the hands of any other exponent of Gaul. When he resurrects a demolished Parisian public market, or one of the city's four great train stations on screen, it's like a visit from a loved one who perished in flame and fire. Americans may not be familiar with the landmarks, possibly undermining the appeal Jeunet is shooting for. As for me, I’m a certified cheese-monkey, and gleefully nibbled every stinky slice.
The film is structured as a mystery. After the war’s end, Tatou's polio-lame slip of a girl marshals facts and finds clues to the fate of a group of condemned prisoners among which was counted her beau. As she closes in, Jeunet flashes back to the trenches. The prisoners are all soldiers who have either deliberately or accidentally been shot in the hand and found guilty of the capital offense of self-mutilation. The method of execution chosen is to send the group into the teeth of German fire, alone and unarmed.
The film explores the personal stories of each of the men. The trenches themselves are rendered, as one might expect from Jeunet, with broad scale and muddy, half-flooded relish.
Jeunet intends to offset his nostalgia by slamming us into the trenches, looking at the cost of the Great War. He effectively relates the brutality and filth of the experience. Yet, Jeunet and Caro’s Delicatessen and City of Lost Children gleefully explored fantastic, failed worlds in which the brave face of beauty still managed to face the day, and his trenches are reminiscent of these dystopias. Therefore, the horrors he presents are blunted and easily taken for fantastic exaggeration. Unfortunately, he does not help his cause when a German biplane appears over the lines in a crucial plot point. The plane is verbally identified as a specific model of German machine with an unmistakable resemblance to a certain animal, which I won’t name so as not to spoil a minor plot point. The airplane seen on screen appears to be a postwar model, and is clearly not the plane spoken of.
It’s a quibble, surely; but in a postfilm appearance, Jeunet emphasized the verité of his trenches, the lengths to which he and his crew went to achieve an historicist presentation of the halls of mud. If that was indeed his primary goal (something I am skeptical of) he’s failed. I think it’s a forgivable oversight.
The plot's structure is clearly mythic. Our heroine journeys to each of the cardinal directions, departing on each quest from each one of the great train stations of Paris: the Gares du Nord, du Sud, de l'Est and de l'Ouest all make appearances. She journeys to a farm called the End of the World. Eventually, a character descends to the underworld before returning to the surface of the Earth.
From this unlikely set of elements - a nostalgic look at things past; a missing-persons mystery; a gritty war film; and myth - Jeunet has constructed a lovely, sad, and hopeful film that may well appeal to audiences that first saw his work with the justly celebrated Amèlie. As for me, well, I loved it.
I must note, however, that I am a certifiable Francophile, even against my better judgment. As I watched the film, curious, misplaced feelings strongly akin to patriotism stirred in me. Furthermore, I deeply admire Jeunet's films, even the generally dismissed Alien: Resurrection, and so I would say I am likely to find something to admire in anything he does.
BLOG EXTRA
Moving beyond review and analysis of the film itself, Jeunet was present at the screening we attended. I was able to ask him two questions.
First, as the film is set in early twentieth-century Paris and the plot is structured around a mystery, the work of French comics author Jacques Tardi came to my mind as I watched the film. Tardi drew two celebrated comics characters, both investigators, much admired in French comics criticism, and insofar as they have appeared rarely in English, here. One, Adèle Blanc-Sec, is a turn-of-the-century detective, a sort of cross between Madame Curie and Sherlock Holmes. The other, Nestor Burma, is a gumshoe in Paris between the wars - he's no stranger, in fact, to investigating mysteries that originate in the trenches.
I asked Jeunet to what extent Tardi had been an influence on this film He as much as acknowledged it, saying, “Well, you know,Ii wish there had been some way for Tardi to work on this film, but it did not work out. You know, we are good friends, and he, like me, has a special feeling for this period, for the First World War, but unfortunately we couldn't find a way to work him in. And you know for a long time I have wanted to do a film of Adèle Blanc-Sec, but after this, I cannot. It's just too close!”
I followed up by asking to what extent Jeunet or the story's original author may have been consciously aware of the similarities in the film's structure to the myth of Orpheus. There was a pause while he and the translator worked out that I meant the myth, rather than the Cocteau film Orphée. Once this had been determined, there was a moment of gear grinding. His eyes widened and he blew an acknowledging pouf of breath in to the mike as I said, dryly “I'll take that as a no.” He then nodded his head and said, “No, that's smart! That's very interesting!”
Studies have conclusively shown that shipping infinite quantities of consumer goods is an experience which is best enhanced with the music of Brian Eno's pre-ambient rock gem, Here Come the Warm Jets.
For futher information, enoweb is a handy starting place. Here's another person's view.
I keep imagining Jerry Cornelius is gonna turn up.
Fourteen hours of shipping the goods yesterday and we're just barely keeping even. Ten more days. Just ten more days.
On December 10, things turned in a hell of a post, beginning with the prophetic word "interconnections," and going on to examine the process of 'gentrification in London, with bonus beats by "Electric Avenue" Eddy Grant, eventually sprawling over into eugenics, which leads (of course) to a short discourse on Alexander Graham Bell, and thence into a lovely concluding phrase, "the links between post-war urban reconstruction, demographics, and social engineering are murky but probably worth exploring," upon which the thingmaster moves to the more commonly nibbled verdant pasturage of linkbrowsers everywhere.
Damn, that's some good link.
... and several days later, I have some pictures to share!
Ms. Dayment, our hostess.
Manuel and Hopkin, together at last...
...at least until Tara got her priorities straight.
Samantha started out with the most amazingly hideous holiday nutcracker of all time (a tugboat captain garishly highlighted with sparklies). In the end, though, she wound up with a different sparkly thing, and Heather made off with the good captain.
And for whatever reason, my camera (well, Viv's camera) was selected for the ritual group flipping of the bird.
If you have a fast line (Or you have some affiliation with the Tiny Plastic Hut Empire) please raid my video vault. I don't know why the streaming/preload isn't happening. I'm just pleased I figured out how to rotate the shots. Hint: “john laughs” is good.
Chilean Judge Says Pinochet Is Fit for Trial [NYT].
A Chilean judge ruled Monday that Gen. Augusto Pinochet was competent to stand trial for human rights abuses that occurred during his nearly 17 years as Chile's dictator and immediately charged him with nine counts of kidnapping and one of murder.
Well, I guess I'll believe it when I see it. But I'll be watching with glee if it goes down.
I have been enjoying Mark Frauenfelder's transcription software links at BoingBoing over the past couple of days, and had reason to correspond with Mark about something unrelated this week. In the course of the correspondance, I mentioned to Mark how I was enjoying his stuff, and that he might be interested in my homebrewed transcription solution.
I also mentioned that on my last round of interviews, I had explored online transcription services; given the non-existent budgets I have access to, the lowest rates were the absolute determinant in my search. It was also one-hundred percent necessary that I be able to upload audio files directly to the service; if the account setup process was also fully automated, then I was in heaven.
In the end, I settled on both iDictate.com and escriptionsist.com. iDictate's primary rate is one cent per word, and they offer same-day regular service turnaround (but don't get too excited, because there are some caveats). Escriptionist offers a flat rate based on the length of the audio files; that rate is $50 per half hour of audio.
Both offer uploads.
iDictate's fast turnaround and low rates are apparently enabled by offshoring; the scuttlebutt on the internets is that the service breaks up inbound audio files into shorter pieces and sends them to multiple typists. Whether this is true or not, the fast turnaround is quite factual. I submitted three files to iDictate.
All three files were two-speaker interviews conducted over the phone, and each file was approximately 30 minutes in length, in mp3 format. The first file I submitted was rejected for audio quality reasons; I was billed for the 400 words or so that had been transcribed and that appeared in my returned document. Checking my account, I saw that that failed experiment was going to cost me $4.
"Excellent!" I thought to myself, rubbing my hands together with glee. I decided to submit the rejected file to escriptionist.com, but would hold off until I had a completed file in hand from iDictate.
The next file I submitted was accepted, apparently - at any rate, I did not get a rapid rejection notice, accompanied by an incomplete transcription.
A day later, the file had been transcribed. It wasn't pretty, and there were many instances of roughness in the file (skipped words denoted by asterisks, both speakers unidentified, etcectera). But it was more than sufficient for my needs. Excitedly, I submitted the next file, the second half of the interview. My eyes bugged out of my head when it returned to me in three hours.
I checked my account balance. It reported a total cost of about $100 for all three files. I fairly danced with glee.
Next, I initiated the submission process with escriptionist.com. The process was slow and unwieldy, requiring a personal phone call and many email messages before I was okayed to upload my 31mb mp3. For reasons unrelated to my current DSL problems, the upload took forever - the ftp server on their end was only accepting material at 6kb/sec. Realistically, this doesn't matter if you can upload overnight. Psychologically, it was frustrating as all get out.
I settled down to wait. On the third day, I emailed to enquire if my file was done. It was, and was emailed promptly to me, along with a PDF invoice for $54, billed to my credit card.
On opening the file, I was overjoyed. While the iDictate files were quick-and-dirty, costing (I thought) a penny a word, and yielding about 5,000 words per half hour, the escriptionist file was meticulous, beautifully formatted, and scrupulously accurate. It was also 7000 words long, rendering the per word cost considerably less than 1 penny.
I thought I was done, and had happily established relationships with two differing, but comparable in value, services. iDictate's speed makes it valuable in deadline-sensitive situations; escriptionist's attention to detail makes it valuable if you have a week to wait.
Then I got my bill from iDictate. It was for over $200. I logged in and checked my account totals, which were slightly over $100. I fired off a note, requesting that the double billing be removed. I received a note in reply asking whether I hadn't misunderstood the terms - the one-penny rate applies only to single-person, old-school, verbal composition. To dictation, in fact. The terms clearly state that two people having a conversation on the phone qualify for the two-penny rate.
I'd misunderstood the terms of service. I wrote back, accepting my mistake, and requested that my account be cancelled. Two cents can't be justified under the rates I currently get, and I certainly don't want the temptation hanging over my head the next time I'm procrastinating a transcription.
To my irritation, the correspondent wrote back with a cheery "That's fine," referring to my willingness to pay twice what I had expected to and what the site's own publicly accessible billing tools reported regarding my balance. "There is no monthly fee," he cheerily concluded, in what I took to be deliberate disregard of my instructions.
A few days later, another note arrived, telling me how to access my account while the service changes servers. I wrote back politely requesting that my cancellation request be honored.
So, in short, iDictate's low base rate, fast turnaround and lack of competition mean that, for now, the service offers what I would charitably term sucky customer service. As someone helping to run a tiny business myself, I can't say I don't understand the business posture. But as a customer, I'm pretty pissed off, and won't be using them again.
On the other hand, I was frustrated beyond comprehension during the setup and upload process associated with escriptionist.com; the three day wait was excruciating. But the material, when it arrived, was deeply satisfying, and very clearly a significantly better consumer value.
At any rate, I now no longer have the favorite excuse of the dawdling writer for turning an interview into an article - transcription is no fun at all, and highly time consuming (for me, four hours to get a half-hour interview is about right). Having access to the option of transcription is a giant psychological weight lifted from my shoulders as a writer.
Who knows? Maybe I'll even try old-school verbal transcription at iDictate one day - on a new account, of course. If the total time to a first draft is cut by half, it's clearly a possible route to compress composition time.
But on the whole, I'll be carefully budgeting my time and fees to incorporate escriptionist into my copy development process. They delivered a better product for a better price.
The Seattle Times: Saving, sacrificing and selling helps get many in door of their first home: Mikey Cofer and John Poetzel of TYD and flipdingo are profiled in the Sunday paper with regard to Tiny Plastic Huts.
Man, I'm getting frazzled.
Item one: Last night we attended Daymented's annual Blogger White Elephant party. I am too pooped to post the pitchas. I will state for the record that I have very, very entertaining footage of a certain photoblogger enjoying a particular sort of endorphin stimulation. Tara ended up with Hopkin, which she stole from Manuel. I chatted with Samantha, was sorry Jeff couldn't make it, and confirmed that Heather is indeed moving to New Jack central.
It was lovely to see these folks and others, whose lives I keep up with wholly online; I should make a point of arranging for non-group interactions with many. But, oh, the time.
Item two: Please note, the following item has been edited pursuant to a call from Chris Strompolos on the evening of December 22, 2004. Use of the 's' tag indicates original post wording.
Speaking of time, we hadda duck out early so's I could catch Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation at the new Northwest Film Forum location near my house. As I noted earlier this week, I interviewed project creator Chris Strompolos for a piece that appeared in The Stranger this week and was happy to meet him. I will be staying in touch with him as the Scott Rudin movie project progresses.
The video was, as advertised, a low-budget, lo-fi work with numerous technical flaws. But, again as advertised, the wit and ingenuity of the filmmakers in the bloom of their adolescence - substituting a boat for a floatplane, and a dog for a monkey, let alone the less visibly obvious bits of on-the-fly solutions - appealed directly to the capacity audience. Indiana Jones himself won America's heart for his improvisational combination of ability and reflexive, post-modern wit. It's a fair cop to say that these kids from Biloxi give Indy a run for his money.
An unexpected critical subtext cropped up for me during the film. After a cursory investigation into the circumstances under which this ur-fan-film was made, it's clear that economic advantages pertained to one or more of the families of the kids that made the film. Chris's mom was a TV news anchor who eventually married the owner of the TV station that she worked at. His partner (and the film's director), Eric Zala, lived in a coastal Mississippi mansion. Today, when asked, Strompolos notes that the film cost between $5000 and $8000, over the period from 1982 to 1988. The filmmakers were eleven when they started shooting. The film includes footage shot both on a real airplane and a real World War II submarine. they started shooting on betamax and moved to VHS when the format was discontinued. The film was final-edited on the broadcast facilities of the local television station where Strompolos' mom worked.
In short, while the film is justly celebrated for its' improbability and accomplishment, many of the very things about it that amaze and baffle us on first viewing it are equally evidence of wealth and privilege.
AN UPDATE, 12/22: Chris Strompolos called wanting a chance to clarify and share a different perspective on these matters. He - and his partners - were concerned that my remarks above unfairly depict the filmmakers as well-to-do. This is a fair concern. I wrote a post about Chris's call to me which I encourage you, dear reader, to consult. To summarize, my reference to economic advantages pertains to advantages of class rather than to the (non-existent) wealth of specific families. As Chris has made clear to me in our conversations, all three filmmakers grew up in female-headed divorced families, with all the privation that implies. For example, while I cite the use of an airplane and access to the submarine as evidence of privilege, from his perspective it's evidence of childhood persistence, creativity, and ingenuity. He points out that in both instances, the shoots occurred without fee, and due to his persistence. Three years' worth, in the case of the boats. It's a fair clarification, and my fault for not clearly outlining the parameters I referred to. With those parameters understood, however, I don't see that my view and Chris's view are necessarily in conflict. I see things his way, but also in my own.
I must note, however, that not all of these things display the wealth gap. The use of Strompolos' pet dog in place of the monkey, for example, or the amazingly successful, if not authentically persuasive, use of back-alley Biloxi to reimagine the mid-eastern souk of the original pretty clearly argue for the imaginativeness and determination of the child filmmakers.
There's another subtext to this most pomo of all films. The kids were shooting in Mississippi, with the tacit - and sometimes financial logistical - support of what I'll term, for the sake of poesie, the tidewater aristocracy.
To my knowledge, the film contains onscreen appearances of two one persons of African descent: the freighter captain near the end of the film., and one other I'll discuss in a moment.
The freighter captain role was originally written from a post-modern perspective - and it's not a half bad part, using presumptive prejudices on the part of an American audience to poke at us about white women and sexual desire. It's clearly written to tease on the subject. In the original, the part is delivered knowingly, slyly, an object lesson for right-thinking hipsters. In the kids film, the actor is stiff, clearly not comfortable with his innocently salacious lines. It actually leaches a layer of cynicism from the film.
The only other appearance of a person of obviously African descent comes at the end of The Adaptation. The crate apparently containing the Ark of the Covenant is wheeled into a vast warehouse. In the theatrical film, the worker who wheels the ark to its, um, current resting place, is not clearly racially identifiable, as he's seen in longshot. In The Adaptation, the worker is clearly black, and while his warehouse is impressively huge, the credits thank a Biloxi area storage company in a way that makes me suspect that the end of the kids' film is roughly documentary in nature.
UPDATE, 12/22: I was completely wrong about this. The warehouse worker was played by Chris. Which kinda deflates my whole conclusion here.
Why am I harping on this? Well, race is clearly not central to the original film, but colonial relations are. By the same token, the film that the children shot in an intended duplication is not about race. But significant amounts of time were dedicated to depicting the flower of Biloxi's children as Nazi villians, with the apparent blessing of the region's television station.
In light of this, I think it's interesting that the only adult I observed on screen, unambiguously, was the warehouse worker wheeling the Ark into storage. I have many hours of entertaining rants upon this subject, all just beyond my reach this evening, as an exhaustion sufferer.
UPDATE, 12/22: I did, in fact, write this immediately after seeing the film, at around 3 in the morning. After talking to Chris I think this whole riff is just wrong, though. I could still probably find interesting race-and-class material in the film to write about. The blond forest savages in the film's opening sequence, for example, provoked a chuckle in the audience which could well reflect the unexpected juuxtaposition of light hair and loincloths. But based on the material in the film, the argument I sketched out here is based wholly on my own perceptions, not on what the children shot. So, as I promised, Chris: I got this wrong. Mea culpa, and thanks for calling.
Other readers, feel free to post more-specific critiques. Folks who get a chance to see the film are particularly encouraged to post!
There's one more showing in Seattle, at 11pm tonight. If I were you, I'd start lining up right now.
Speaking of The Stranger, they paid me for the article already! That's a surefire way to win admirers in the freelancing community, no doubt about it.
Item three: Last but not least, I have been insanely busy at work, something which has also cut into blogging. I've heard that mainline retailers expect to do between a third and half of their annual revenue during the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas. While I don't know that those percentages hold up for our revenue numbers, this is certainly accurate for our gross orders. The week before Thanksgiving, our daily order rate was just about fifty discrete orders, concatenating about sixty-five items.
Starting immediately before Thanksgiving, our average daily order count shot up to about two hundred, often totaling 265 or more items. One product alone has sold about 500 units in the past six days. We are working our asses off to try to keep up.
Late night update: I actually passed out from exhaustion while editing this this afternoon. Happily, I recalled my changes this evening and was able to complete them.
Continued outages are forecast. It's not clear to me if they originate on my side of the router, or out in the wide world. I have very limited tech troubleshooting time, so expect the solution to unfold in slow, slow motion, at the rate of one isolation step per day.
Today's involved taking a 10/100 dual-speed autosensing hub offline.
The Soviet Exploration of Venus and the debunked Lost Cosmonauts.
Also, this week, the New Yorker is running a long piece by David Grann on the death of R. L. Green, "the world's foremost expert on Arthur Conan Doyle." Oldtimey wrote about Green's bizarre death at the time of his passing, having had interactions with the chap via her antiquarian employment.
Playing Indiana is the title that the Stranger kindly chose to retain for my preview of this weekend's rare screening of Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation.
I could tell you more - much more - but then, I'd have to kill you.
Holy cow, you'd think that ten years after the rise of IP networking it wouldn't take TWO FREAKING DAYS to troubleshoot a router configuration anymore.
Argh. And I'm still not done, it seems.
drunken shoutouts: now available in convenient audioblog format. [via MeFi]
Attn: Jim!
Events: “Today, KAPAO sent the 'KAPAO Car' to Apple Computer, Inc. in Cupertino California. The small compact car had a sign on the hood identifying it with KAPAO. The car was driven by a well dressed fellow, and there were two teenage kids and a dog in the car. The KAPAO Car had been fitted with a sound system. The car drove around Cupertino with this message heard on it's loudspeakers: 'WE ARE KIDS AND PETS AGAINST OVERTIME AND WE ARE HERE TO SHOUT OUT TO ALL OF YOU APPLE EMPLOYEES WHO ARE HERE WORKING LONG HOURS AWAY FROM YOUR FAMILIES ON A WEEKEND DURING THE HOLIDAY SEASON.' They also promised to have an interview with Santa Claus later on.”
It quite escapes me where I came upon this, but it was certainly among the usual suspects.King5 just promo-ed a scare story about someone hijacking an iSight. First I've heard of this, might take a look when the news comes on.
UPDATE: This is absurd TV news bullshit. Here's the (incredibly annoying registration forwarded) link to the King5 website's version of the story. The footage for the show featured an Apple G4 with iSight active, and there is a screencap from that footage on the site.
Allow me to excerpt it:
Cyberstalker watched teen through Web cam
...
The hacker gained access to the victim's computer through an email attachment virus. He started spying on private online conversations, and began sending vulgar, sexual messages to the victim's friends and family.
The teen had the virus and the hacker's spy ware removed from her computer, but the stalker kept coming back. He managed to hack in and turn on the Web cam in her bedroom, and took nude pictures of her without her knowledge.
...
Internet security experts say once someone hacks your computer they can control every aspect of it, including Web cams. Wireless and digital networks are especially vulnerable.
The bottom line: unless you disconnect them, Web cams are always watching.
...
Local police are investigating the crime. They believe they know the hacker's name and are working to track him down.
To summarize: a nameless person watched an unnameable underage person via webcam. Police are investigating. There's literally no useful information whatsover. There's no information about what kind of camera, what sort of virus, or (and this is key) even what kind of platform the victim was using.
So, uh, be scared of the internet. The hackers will get you.
Man, King5 used to be good. But this is pathetic.
I'd like to introduce you to a new friend of mine. I won't mention him by name in order to minimize the goog factor. Shh! No pointing. Be nice.
Viv and I just got back from seeing The Incredibles (finally), and I won't bore you with predictable rantings about its' excellence. I will say, however, that word on a certain Randian subtext is clearly correct. Part of the film's triumph is the remarkable fact that this did not provoke sneering on my part.
I certainly cannot wait for the DVD to begin savoring both the delicious production detail and the depth of interesting referents (such as Syndrome's clear precursor, Heat Miser). The Parrs' living room made me miss relatives and older friends who lived their lives in such mid-century modern homes.
I have only heard one brief comment that compared the film to Watchmen, but it seems clear that the relationship of the two stories should be closely examined. At a minimum, I would speculate that The Incredibles has made it that much harder to get a good version of Watchmen made as a film, if anyone is even trying anymore.
Oh, and apparently, I have a thing for lady superhero pilots. Hearing her issuing callsign update after callsign update somehow involved me in the jeopardy of that scene like no other aviation scene I've ever watched. And brother, I have watched some aviaton movies, let me tell you. The hell with Top Gun's testosterone-addled nincompoops, I'll take The Incredibles any day.
Please accept my sincerest apologies for my shift to linkmongery here of late. Non-blog writing responsibilities are all coming due at oncet and I'm having to put all my words over there.
That said, sometime yesterday, this site passed the 150k lifetime visitors mark. Hopkin continues to ripple out into the world; yesterday a large number of visitors began arriving from European addresses. Watching the traffic is quite fascinating and makes me wish I had the time to do proper traffic analysis. As it is, when I do write about it, my evidence will be largely anecdotal. If I claim a number of vistiors from off-planet addresses or with six-part IP addresses, rest assured, I'm playing the literary game of the unreliable narrator.
Double-Tongued Word Wrester Dictionary is MeFite Mo Nickels' wondrous playground of the word.
Yushchenko remix, courtesy Danelope.
I still say the last image is insufficiently orange!
MonkeyFilter | Firefox Extension: Makelink 2.0: a Firefox widget that adds link-formatting to clipboard data. I have been intending to roll my own for OS-wide contextual menus, but, like, this'll do, as long as it's platform-compatible.
Let's get Adventious!, from taz at Viewropa, looks at advent calendars as a German tradition.
Recently, I noticed a line item on my phone bill for “DSL 640k,” which puzzled me, as I was pretty sure the last service upgrade notice I had on my DSL was to 320k. This morning, I found myself with two seconds to rub together, so I called Qwest to find out what the deal was.
Amazingly, the experience was fast, fast, fast and smooth. Apparently my 4-year-old DSL modem is too old to negotiate the linespeed supported by the DSL already laid to the house; so a new modem is on the way and a service upgrade accompanies it, at the same rate as my current bill.
If I understood correctly, the new linespeed's theoretical max is going to be 1.1Mbps; I did not catch whether this was symmetrical or not.
So, in a week or so... There may be some downtime here.
