mike.whybark.com

Fellow small-scale retail entrepeneur Steerforth holds forth on “Brand Wheels,” an infographic abomination I have thus far thankfully missed out on.

His judgement is law.

Totally digging Mitchum in “The Big Steal,” 1949, which appears to have been shot on location in Veracruz and elsewhere.

Huzzah! A comical-book themed story by the estimable Michael Chabon in the new ish of the New Yorker, “Citizen Conn.”

“Though he was at the time unknown to me even by reputation, I soon learned that my own husband had been among the millions of American boys in the nineteen-sixties whose minds were blown by Feather’s art work in comic books such as The New Frontiersmen and Mister Arcane.”

Sounds like he’s doing a Ditko take, mashed up with some other folks. Yes, that first fictionalized title is a Watchmen shoutout; in Moore’s comic, the title is a right-wing scandal sheet trusted by Rorshach with his memoirs. Ditko is legendary for his ground-breaking work for Marvel (on Spiderman and Doctor Strange), and for his eccentric legend as a big fan of Ayn Rand.

I haven’t read more than the first couple sentences, but the clever layering of Moore’s fictional right-wing publication into a Ditkoesque career seems amusing and appropriate. Among other things, Watchmen was a fictionalization of comics history, and that is a thing that Chabon has delighted in giving us for years now.

UPDATE: The story is more a take on the Stan Lee – Jack Kirby – Ditko thing, with Kirby and Ditko compressed into the single character of Mort Feather.
WITH a full-on cameo by none other than Seattle’s own Comics Journal, an issue of which is described as featuring a Gary Groth endless interview with the story’s Lee-alike, the “Citizen Conn” of the tale’s title.

The New Yorker has a discussion with Chabon on the piece up.

He sez Lee-Kirby, so I guess my Ditko stuff up top is off base.

Many incremental successes today.

A troubleshooting session with a software vendor went smoothly enough, and now orders are flowing, more or less, directly into Quickbooks. This will inevitably dramatically increase accounting issues but it also transforms my inventory monitoring and reordering into something to which I can apply Quickbooks analytical tools. Which, well, they are what they are.

I taught myself how to strip, crimp, and verify cat-11 telephone cable. I also installed and verified a couple of additional phone jacks.

I reviewed my annual haystack of tax reporting forms and it looks like I am only missing a couple, which means I am probably a week away from filing.
I am clearly noticing my heart rate improving while running. I still need to check with the docs about my sacroiliac stuff.

I began working through some products in Amazon AWS, specifically EC2 server setup and usage. Some fiddly bits defeated me, as I was using downtime on the tech support call and it has been years since I had to use PuTTY for ssh and the like.

This past week, I started working on getting Viv set up to use her iPad as an A/V playback device, installing an ElGato TV receiver on the media Mini and then banging on antenna reception. I managed to rewire the existing forty year old roof aerial and currently we are missing only the Kitsap-located tower signal that carries channel 13 and the signals from Tacoma that carry KBCT. This is kind of aggravating because I like KBCT’s programming more than KCTS’.

We do receive it in the guest room, which makes no sense: the five dollar antenna there gets it but the six foot aluminum kite on the roof does not. Electromagnetic waves: how do they work?

Anyway the upshot of all this extreme retro nerdery is that our iPads and iPhones are now portable televisions. The EyeTV app only supports one viewer at a time, though, so you can steal the broadcast away from other users on the LAN, which has delighted our inner brats no end.

Some time in the past couple weeks I also moved all of our object-based playback media into a more useable setup, so we can easily get to the vinyl and CDs and cassettes. The stuff still needs to be organized, especially the CDs, but at least it is no longer hidden from sight. I’m sort of contemplating some roofline shelving for the discs, but am not totally sold on the idea.

Running still going as previously noted. Looks like I am settling into about a mile and a half a day, plus a mile walked with the pooch. Still puzzled about what people mean when they describe exercise as something that makes them feel good. An interesting aspect of watching the time of the run and my heart rate is how similar the time needed and apparent personal physical effects are to my father’s longtime exercise regime.

I have a hard time imagining I will get into the same kind of shape he was when he was my age, though. That guy would bust his ass every morning for twenty minutes, and so far I would not describe what I am doing as ass busting.

It is sort of motivating me to work on the room the treadmill’s in, though. Next thing: music.

It must be over 60, sunny and warm!

Another beautiful day wasted down in the basement. This was the third amazingly sunny warm day in a row and neither Viv nor I had time to go enjoy the weather.

I can’t recall if I blogged this or not, but I bought Viv a decent midmarket treadmill off Craigslist for her birthday. It’s a Smooth 6.25, about six years old, and in pretty good shape, new-looking at first glance.

Both she and I have been using it, and to my surprise I have been using it more than Viv. I was diagnosed with a genetic degenerative bone disease this past fall, and the disease affects my sacroiliac. I suppose it might not actually be a great idea to start running but far be it from me to miss a chance to spit in the eye of God, or fate or the cops or whatever you got.

People who actually like exercise claim it makes them feel good. Ever since I was a kid it only ever made me feel sick, headachey and mad at the world and so forth, so I have no legitimate beef to avoid it these days since that is my default state anyway.

So far, yeah, it makes me feel terrible and sometimes gives me the dry heaves. I run barefoot, and am sort of amused that I appear to be developing calluses on my feet that are superior to my stringed-instrument calluses.

If that isn’t conclusive evidence of a moral crisis, of values that fly in the face of civilization and justice, I don’t know what is.

In other news of poor personal judgement and sketchy moral values, Br. Spencer Sundell handed me my ass on a plate in a spirited discussion of my long-term loathing of the political values exhibited by Neal Stephenson in his high period works, beginning with Cryptonomicon. In essence, he made me promise to read some of the stuff since Cryptonomicon, that bible of Ron Paul cryptofascism. I may start with Reamde, since I gather that the bad guys in that book are war blogger wet dream islamofascists and therefore I can continue to hate on the motherfucker as a propagandizing tool.

Googlefish translated link to Eagles’ press video page at niconico.jp.
Aggravtingly, the Yahoo.jp NPB news page and the corresponding Eagles schedule resist the Googlefish.
There does not appear to be an iPad video player app for niconico.jp available in the App store, and attempting to play the videos once registered presents what appears to be a technical compatibility note that mentions OS X, IE, Windows, and Flash, but not iOS.
Additionally, I was able to register at both the English-language niconico.com and the Japanese-language niconico.jp with the same username but different associated emails. I suspect that this indicates a fully-segregated user-management and content system. Backing up that speculation is the fact that the active English-language userid was not accepted as a login from the Bionic Eagles page.
In the past, it seems that the Yahoo NPB Pacific League portal was one of the ways to view the games. The playback was geo-restricted in some way, however.
I have yet to try the niconico.jp playback of the last-season videos on a desktop operating system.

UPDATE: if I am logged in at niconico, the page won’t render in translation. Proceeding untranslated, each individual video will not play despite my being logged in, something I assume which represents geo-blocking.

Therefore, my next steps are to work through the use of proxy servers to provide in-Japan IP spoofing.

As I have been hacking away at this, I am put in mind of my fascination with manual tuning of scrambled pay-cable channels as a kid. My parents wouldn’t pay for HBO as a part of their cable package, and the methodology used to keep premium channels out of view was an analog variable transmission scrambler, or something. The end result was if you manually wiggled the fine tune knobs on the TV and the cable box at the same time, you could occasionally get glimpses of partially unscrambled content.

I would do this for hours, not because of the content, but because I couldn’t get to the content. It seems clear to me that I am in the same sort of dynamic here.

So, last year I forked over for MLB.tv without understanding the minutiae of local area blackouts and the like. I was pissed, and of course the blackouts did not really matter, as I just went ahead and watched the firmly, absurdly illegal video feeds I had started watching the season on. In essence, it was a classic case of a missed sales opportunity – the shitty free product made me want the nice, cushy product.

Well, maybe not a missed sales opportunity.

At any rate, I had the presence of mind to look at my MLB.tv account on January 31, and learned that was in fact the actual day it it was set to auto renew. Naturally, I cancelled.

Out of curiosity, I then went back to each of the devices I had associated with the account last year and to my astonishment I retain access to the 2011 season.

In October of last year, I attended a show by Chicago band Shellac at the Vera Project and during the show, people began sending me texts that maybe I should be watching game six of the Rangers-Cardinals World Series.

All told, this means I can catch that game now.

I have been scrubbing the inarwebs for the equivalent of MLB.tv for Japanese pro ball, and have yet to come up with the solution. Apparently the media provisioning is very robust in Japan, but only for Japanese-located consumers. This means that English language discussion of the material is pretty limited. Additionally, online streaming access appears to be contracted at a team level in the older, more popular Central League and to be centrally administered for the Pacific League (home of the Eagles, the team I follow).

Surprisingly, to me, there does not appear to be the equivalent to the Dubliner or the George and Dragon in Fremont and Ballard, respectively, bars that feature in-house broadcasts of European sporting events, catering to expats. Honestly, you would think at least ONE bar in Seattle, of all places, would offer live or time shifted Japanese pro ball. I suppose there is some sort of marketing opportunity here.