Diderot's Diary

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

2012-01-22T19:58:00.001-08:00

EBERT directed me (along with countless more of his nearly 600,000 Twitter followers) to this post titled "On Hulu and Respect."

I followed the link expecting a short bout of eye-rolling over Hulu, but that, as it turns out, was the subject of an earlier post by the same author. This more recent one didn't just express irritation over the fact that Hulu — even (and especially) the paid version — dishes up repetitive, annoying ads and then claims in impenetrable corporatespeak that it's doing you a favor by letting you choose which ones you want to watch; rather, the post looked at why Hulu behaves in this way. And it boils down to lack of respect for the user.

Hulu, of course, isn't the only company that denies its users respect. Samsung is another that springs immediately to mind. This is a hastily snapped, slightly distorted photo of the "Smart Hub" on our primary TV:

The bottom half is the only portion of the TV that I feel is actually mine. The top half is taken up almost entirely by what Samsung deems important, including rotating ads (yes, ads on a high-end TV; the one in the picture is for the Yellow Pages) for new apps and – get this – Samsung's SmartTV line. That's right: the SmartTV that you already own displays an ad for itself.

The strip of app icons above the virtual fold is labeled "Recommended." By whom? Of the six, I only use Netflix regularly, and during one so-called upgrade this was swapped out without my consent by a Home Shopping Network app. Quite unbelievably, an angry tweet of mine seemed to get the message across.

Top center is "Your Videos," which aren't really my videos at all. It always has a red New badge next to it. What's highlighted here are movies that are available through some of the services on the SmartTV (e.g., Vudu, Blockbuster) with the exception of Netflix, which is the only service many of us subscribe to. In other words, it's of no use to me and is consequently a waste of screen.

To the right of that is "Samsung Apps." This also constantly boasts a red New badge. It's been featuring those same icons for months now. Another waste of screen. Plus the information it has to fetch and download increases the time it takes to load the Smart Hub.

This no doubt tedious point-by-point dissection is meant to prove a larger point. That is, if the user were taken under consideration at any time during the design process, this Smart Hub layout would be completely different. No executive or engineer seems to have asked, "How will people use this TV?" Instead it was, "How can we bombard the user with messages to get him to buy more?"

The irony is that those ads often have the opposite of their intended effect. When I'm comfortable and content with a device or a service, I tend to explore its features and, yes, even buy content and software/hardware to maximize those features. When I'm feeling pressured by hawkers, I either exit or simply block it out. Hence my avoidance of Hulu except in cases of dire necessity (Portlandia, to name one).

With the SmartTV, I almost feel as though I have to brace myself for this onslaught every time I click on the remote's Smart Hub button. My own TV treats me — by design — like an unthinking automaton, ripe for a shakedown, who responds to flashing images by pulling out his wallet. If this is truly Samsung's opinion of its users, then it is a low one indeed.

To pull the lens back a wee bit further: We see this lack of respect for the user played out elsewhere, and not just with Hulu, or content services in general (think Netflix's recent Qwikster fiasco), or even consumer electronics (e.g., Microsoft, Sony). You'll find it in newspapers. TV sitcoms. Internet and mobile phone service providers. The 10 o'clock news. Politics.

And it's not just the often lamented "dumbing down." There's a level of condescension for the user that borders on contempt. Inveterate cynics will say that this attitude is warranted, and I can't say I'm in total disagreement, but my greater conviction is that everyone, producer and consumer alike, is better served when our dealings proceed from mutual respect.

For a start, I'd like to see a change in the philosophy of Hulu and Samsung whereby, as a general rule, the average user is considered an intelligent human being whose time is as valuable as his money and whose private sphere should not be intruded upon without good reason.

At the heart of such a philosophy would naturally be respect. Just a little bit. Sock it to me.

Moving

2011-12-30T13:38:00.001-08:00

I'M CHANGING my domain and website host (from GoDaddy to FatCow; and no, it's not because of GoDaddy's support of SOPA/elephant shooting/sexist Super Bowl ads, although none of that endears them to me in the least), which means that this site might be in limbo for a few days as I bring all the DNS entries up to speed.

Not that an interruption to normally scheduled service would be anything new around here. Normally I take time around the start of the new year to reflect on basic stats: how many annual posts, how that relates to previous years, which ones brought the most traffic, and so on. With just seven blog entries over the last twelve months — the second-lowest year since I started this blog eleven years ago(!), and that's only because the year with the fewest posts, the first, only included the months from October to December — there's not much on which to reflect, expect perhaps the reasons why I only managed seven posts in twelve months. Which isn't something that can be rendered quite so easily in percentages and hit counts.

The Postscript to the 2130Vn That Didn't Arrive Posthaste

2011-12-08T15:39:00.001-08:00

Back in March, I wrote a review of the DrayTek 2130Vn router and closed by saying that I would "post a postscript posthaste" if my caveats were addressed in a subsequent release of the firmware.

Although it's taken me much longer than "posthaste" to say it, they were. With the final release of the 1.5.1 firmware, the WAN connection issues have been fixed, VoIP call quality has improved slightly, uptime has extended into months, and restarts seem to take far less time than they did before.

But if pressed to put forward a lingering issue, it wouldn't take more than a nanosecond for me to cite call quality. That applies to the newer 1.5.2 firmware (thanks to Tony for the heads up) as well, which has been in release candidate stages since mid-September.

As I've said before, there are a number of concatenated links in my personal VoIP chain (i.e., a SIP provider such as sipGate accessed via SIPsorcery, which in turn is accessed via the DrayTek), and therefore this problem might not be one that rests solely with the Vigor. However, I do notice less delay, fewer dropouts, and less echo when I forgo the DrayTek and call through my iMac and Telephone with a Bluetooth headset. These quality issues are particularly acute when the other party is on a mobile phone (which is more and more common) or, strangely, a pizza place. I've never been able to make it through a conversation with, say, the folks at Pizza Rita without having to repeat myself a number of times. Yet everything is fine when I call from my mobile.

For VoIP and other optimization, another commenter pointed out this blog by DrayTek reseller APB Tech, which features walkthroughs for common setups (e.g., VLANs, filters, QoS) and configuration recommendations. I can't say that their post on preserving VoIP call quality did much to help my situation, but it certainly didn't hurt, either.

Salvaged: Ben Olson, author of Sperm! The Musical

2011-08-19T13:27:00.001-07:00

THESE are the unabridged answers provided by Ben Olson, author of Sperm! The Musical, which is showing at the Panida Theatre in Sandpoint, ID, on August 19 (i.e., today), 20, 26, and 27. I interviewed Ben for The Inlander; the article appears in the August 18-24 issue.

On his previous play, Death of a Small Town in the West, being politically charged and those politics carrying over into Sperm!

It's true that Death was politically charged. It was influenced directly by my lifelong frustration with Sandpoint trying to turn itself into a haven for the rich. It's a common story with "resort towns" with lakes and/or ski hills. Artists and locals give the town character, realtors and developers exploit that character, sell it as kitsch, and pretty soon the whole town is walking tiny dogs in sweaters and wearing those designer workout suits made of crushed velour. The heart of the town dies.

The whole premise behind Death came when I was brainstorming fantasy ways to cut Sandpoint off from the rest of the world. One idea was to release massive quantities of sewer rats on the city streets and let the townsfolk run screaming wild in fear. Although I liked that one, the idea of bombing the three bridges that connect Sandpoint with the outside world won my heart, and that's what Death was written about — a foolhardy attempt to take back a town from the greedheads using violent force.

I used comedy for a couple of reasons, mainly because I love to make people laugh. Also, comedy cushions taboo subjects. The sting isn't quite as sharp. I didn't want to alienate anyone for gratuitous purposes. I wanted them to laugh with each other at their foibles as a town, but when the laughter died down, I wanted them to really think about the underlying message in the play, that these small towns are in fact dying as they grow into the promises written about them in real estate brochures.

Sperm!, on the other hand, wasn't written in a sense of anger and frustration. It was right after the opening of Death when I began mulling over the idea of doing another play. For one reason or another, I really loved the idea of having a play set in a sperm bank. The setting was ripe for possibilities.

At first, I just had fun with it. I tried to make the tone light and easy. A feel-good kind of play. But, as usual, controversies found their way in. I started opening big cans of worms: abortion, genetic modification, sperm mutation therapy, worldwide sterilization. Once again, I used comedy to make light of these issues that normally divide the population. And once again, the audience will have a chance to laugh, but — hopefully — they'll take away with them some of the more important points that rise above the absurdity. It's this intrinsic message, which each member of the audience will have to decipher for themselves, that drives this play and everything else I've written.

On the reasons for his success so far in Sandpoint.

I've been pigeonholed as a bit of a troublemaker in Sandpoint for my active dissidence in regards to realtors, developers, tourists, and general assholes that muck things up. When it came time for PR, instead of fighting against that stereotype, I rolled with it. I created more controversy. I hired artist and journalist Zach Hagadone to illustrate my poster for Death, and it ended up as a scene of the Long Bridge — a very iconic Sandpoint landmark — with a huge explosion and smoke billowing out from it. With the poster for Sperm!, I asked Zach to draw a scene from the play: the hero husband and wife blasting a couple of killer mutant sperm monsters with a shotgun.

Part of me wants people to be shocked, to look at these images and try to figure out how a play will cover such strange subject matter. Part of me wants them to be confused, curious, excited, maybe even a little outraged. Most of all, I like to affect people. I love when people ask me the title of the play. "Sperm!" I tell them, and then I watch a wry smile come to their face and listen to the gears grinding inside their heads. I don't want anyone to be bored, or to walk out with a shrug. I'm aiming for love or hate — to hell with the middle ground, apathy... it's all crap. It's for that reason, I think, that such a large amount of people bought tickets for Death, and for the same reason will come see Sperm! It's not just another play. We really hung our balls out there on this one.

On the Sandpoint, ID theater scene.

There used to be quite a theater scene in Sandpoint. There was an acting troupe that went under the name of Unicorn Theater Players in the '80s. They put on a lot of good plays. Over the years, the troupe burned out and vanished. Theater in Sandpoint lagged. Plays were produced, and it wasn't that they were bad, they just weren't interesting. Attendance was scarce. I have never been particularly into theater, but I recognized that it was a medium that needed a big shot in the arm. Sometimes I'll see that a torch has been dropped, and for one reason or another I feel the need to pick it up. It was like that with me and theater.

One thing I saw was that plays weren't making much money. They usually made just enough to pay expenses, sometimes drawing a small profit. I wanted to change that. I wanted to show that you could write your own play, cast it, and produce it on the main stage of the Panida Theatre — which is such a beautiful venue — and make a good profit. And that's just what happened last year. We covered all of our expenses on opening night with three nights yet to go. I even got to pay out the actors, give donations to the Panida for much-needed restorations, pay my director and stage crew, and keep a little for myself. It's unheard of for a writer to actually make money writing. Unheard of. But it happened.

To answer your question, yes, I think there is a theater scene on the brink of taking off in Sandpoint. The talent is certainly here.

Whether or not my first play had anything to do with this resurgence is up for interpretation, but what I do know is that there is new blood, new passion behind theater now. It's not just a bunch of menopausal women in heavy makeup giving heady soliloquies anymore, it's a chance to experiment with taboo subject matter, to push a few limits, to change the very nature of an average person's theatergoing experience. I mean, the play's called Sperm! for chrissakes.

On the benefits and hurdles of community theater.

Community theater is actually quite liberating. There aren't really any rules or an established order. In fact, people have no idea what to expect when they buy their ticket. When you use this to your advantage and blow them away with something fresh and new, they love you even more for it.

I'm continually impressed with the caliber of talent that Sandpoint produces. The fact that we find most of our actors at open casting calls is proof that there are even more would-be actors and artists out there, just waiting for an opportunity to discover a new side of themselves. Plus, in community theater, there aren't so many prima donnas. Ego is put in the backseat. It becomes more about the experience, where each person finds their part to play and adds to the whole. I like that. I couldn't be happier with the actors in Sperm! And my director, Andrew Sorg, is absolutely amazing at what he does. I like to think of him as a magician. Keep in mind, before Sperm! and Death, I'd never actually written a play and only attended a few. The challenge for him was to transform all of my words and intentions onto the stage and add that extra crank of the wheel to make it work. I rely on Andrew heavily, and he always comes through for me.

On small-scale versus large scale.

I do enjoy the small-scale environment. I was born and raised in Sandpoint, and while I've lived in a lot of big cities and traveled at large around the world, I always come home to where life makes sense to me. It seems like we do something different here in the Northwest. We get something more than the rest of the masses. I have no confidence in a populace that elevates idiots to the top and ignores true talent. If you doubt that statement at all, take one brief look at the music industry in the U.S. right now and then go bash your head against the wall.

There are thoughts to send Sperm! on the road, starting with a run in Portland (Oregon) to see how it does, but I'm on the fence. I really like the idea of showing my work in Sandpoint alone. It was born here, it should live here. I could see a production in Spokane or Coeur d'Alene, though.

On choosing fertility as his subject.

I'll admit, I began writing Sperm! because of the comic potential. I saw how the comedy in Death really won over the audience every night and I thought, That's it, just keep them laughing. While I was still formulating the idea for Sperm!, several of my friends started trying to have children. I always laughed at that "trying" part. I imagined them both suiting up with headbands, stretching and doing jumping jacks before making love. It was then that it dawned on me that fertility was just as funny as it was serious. And it is a serious thing. I've seen the joy that it brings, and I've seen the sorrow that comes when it is taken away. It turned out to be a great subject matter to cover. Sperm is the seed of life, after all, no matter how gooey and gross it is.

On his love of musicals. Or not.

In all honesty, I can't stand musicals. I've never liked them, either on stage or film. Something about a bunch of people suddenly breaking into song and dance... it always creeped me out a little bit. I thought it would be funny to write a musical for people who didn't like musicals. Make all the songs ludicrous. Make the subject matter even more ridiculous. What I've found is that, even though I thought I was making a parody, Sperm! has become a full-blown musical on its own. When I asked Brian Hibbard (of the band Tennis) to compose the songs, I knew that he would hit a home run, but when I listened to the music for the first time, I realized that they were much better than I'd expected. They were actually good. All at once, the parody became real and now lives somewhere in the ether between.

On the underlying message in Sperm!

Beneath all the absurdity and dark comedy there is a very crucial message in Sperm! that does speak to the human condition. As a general rule, I've always had a doomstruck view of our humanity's efforts on earth. Not to say that I've been a pessimist all my life, but faced with the looming weight of history over our backs, it's hard not to think that we're all going to burn up someday like so much rubbish. My method of dealing with this inhumanity is to bury it inside my work, making it so that one has to sift through the traps and whistles and laughter to find the kernel of truth that is always there. I want people to find it. I need people to find it. And while I enjoy hearing a full house laughing at the jokes onstage, they're really just gimmicks that I've installed to distract you. I mean, underneath it all, this play is really about the most serious thing imaginable: life and the continuation of it (and, of course, the callous attitude towards that very survival). The comedy is just the sugar that helps the medicine go down, to paraphrase Mary Poppins.

Doing anything creative in Sandpoint carries with it a whole host of challenges. While more and more people are starting to realize what our town has to offer, they are only seeing the surfaced half-truths that come out of banal invented awards like "Best Small Town to Live in the Country" as well as decades-old stereotypes that arose out of events like Randy Weaver's standoff at Ruby Ridge and Mark Furhman moving here. There is such a strong underground arts scene in Sandpoint, but nobody outside of town expresses any interest in discovering it. Most of the time this doesn't bother me, but sometimes I wonder if they'll ever realize what they're missing.

Cock Blocked

2011-07-29T15:06:00.001-07:00

ON A hike through Palisades Park this morning, we started on the steep climb down to the waterfall only to find this fellow blocking our path:

Yep, one of those fearsome feral forest fowl. Some folks in these parts say they wake up to find their coyotes missing by the dozens.

Another couple had in fact warned us about him beforehand, though at the time we didn't think that the patrolling rooster would pose much of a threat. But he made it clear to us, Gandalf-like, that we would not pass, and with two young ones in tow, we decided to save the grandeur of the canyon waterfall for another day.

Tune In, Drop Out

2011-07-10T12:02:00.001-07:00

Kai Nagata explains Why I quit my job (at 24):

[T]here was a growing gap between the reporter I played on TV, and the person I really am and want to become.

[...]

What the Murdoch model [at Fox News] demonstrated was that facts and truth could be replaced by ideology, with viewership and revenue going up. Simply put, you can tell less truth and make more money. When you have to balance the interests of your shareholders against the interests of the viewers you supposedly serve, the firewall between the boardroom and the newsroom becomes a very important bulwark indeed.

The rest makes clear what we already know from Neil Postman et al or at least suspected. That is, in the cynical and desperate scramble for profits, the news media has infantilized public debate and in turn given policy- and decisionmakers (not always one in the same) carte blanche to act in their own narrow self-interest, not that of the greater good. And some good people, like Nagata, feel so sick and disheartened at the slimy duplicity of it all that they are compelled to abandon an otherwise "promising" career.

His anecdote in the context of the larger NotW scandal makes it all too clear that we, the public, are the biggest loser in this self-perpetuating downward spiral, and the sole winner — a word I use loosely — is the conscience-less privileged in search of short-term monetary gain.

Salvaged: Matthew Dickman

2011-04-14T12:54:00.001-07:00

THESE are answers provided by Portland, OR-based poet Matthew Dickman in an e-mail exchange that was conducted for a profile that ran in the Inlander in anticipation of his appearance at the 2011 Get Lit! festival in Spokane, WA. Aside from chapbooks, Dickman's most recent work is All-American Poem.

On his frequent juxtaposition of the tender and the savage.

I think that often in our lives the tender and the savage exist at the same time, don't you? I have never been to a funeral where there wasn't a reason to laugh and in turn I have never been to a wedding where someone wasn't crying (and not out of joy!). Grief and the ecstatic are bedfellows both mystically and corporally. I'm not sure if I ever consciously intend anything in my poems — only I am trying to explain what I am feeling, trying to better understand my self and the world I live in.

On the intimacy of his poems and his use of the first- and second-person.

In the end I believe two things. The first is that, no matter what, every poem is at its core a love poem. The second is that poets are always trying to write about the unimaginable; that is, death and love. Every piece of art comes out of a very personal place no matter how hard the artist tries to distance him- or herself. My poems come from the same place every other poets work comes from, that of meaning-making, a reaching out into the world, and connection.

On Powell's bookstore as a "hip literary hangout" and a means of inspiration for Portlanders.

I should say first that Powell's Books is not a hip literary hangout. That makes it sound like the Cedar Bar in NYC in the late Fifties. I think, in fact, that this particular bookstore is too big to be one thing. It is full of too many walks of life to be labeled unless you were to call it a kind of literary public transit. But it was very influential to me when I began writing poems and continues to be. Just today I was walking through the poetry aisles picking up books I have never read, poets I have never heard the names of. Your life changes with experience so indeed my life would be very different without the countless experiences, some very intimate, I have had at Powell's Books lifting a dusty volume off the shelf and opening it up.

On hope.

I continue to be a hopeful person. Some things are fucked up but there are others that are worth celebrating. Our world, to pickpocket Whitman, contains multitudes. I think the disparity between the rich and poor in America and elsewhere is one of the major organs that keep violence and injustice alive but it isn't a reason for me to abandon hope for something better. For me, part of the search for something better comes through making and experiencing art, both high and low, because art, in its nature is radical, which is to say that its nature is love.

On films.

I adore movies! And like poetry I adore all different kinds. I am just as happy watching Krzysztof Kieslowski's The Double Life of Veronique, the films of Kurosawa, Fassbinder’s BRD Trilogy, as I am watching Richard Curtis' Love Actually or Michael Lehmanns Heathers. Though I have a severe soft spot for Richard Donner's The Goonies.

Cinema informs my poetry in that it informs who I am as a person. A movie is a powerful thing. It can humanize you, change how you think about something, and most importantly make you relate to someone or something you might feel like you are worlds away from… and all in the dark with licorice and popcorn!

On the connections between canasta, Peter Parker, and Biggie Smalls.

Canasta, Peter Parker, and Biggie Smalls live together in a poem I wrote called "Love." When I write poems I am writing about my life; that is, I am hopefully being open and inclusive. I like the world of "things." I think poetry should not shy away from what the poet Breyten Breytenbach calls "thingness" and the poet Tony Hoagland calls "Thingatude". In the poem I imagine my mother played canasta in the seventies, I get to thinking about how complicated Spiderman is, and at the time was listening to Bach and Biggie Smalls back to back so they showed up. That's the simple answer. The more highfalutin' answer is that we write with and through our lives, so those lives should be explicit in our work.

On current projects.

I'm just finishing up a new manuscript called Mayakovsky’s Revolver, which W.W. Norton & Co will be publishing next year. Some of the poems in the book deal with my older brother's suicide, some with the loss of friends, and some are a range of love poems and what I suppose you would just call meditations. Like the last book I hope the world is in these poems and that it's a world we all live in…

A Review of the DrayTek Vigor 2130Vn

2011-03-26T23:04:00.001-07:00

I FIRST mentioned the DrayTek Vigor 2130Vn back in October in my one-year follow-up review of the company's 2110Vn router.

At that time, I said that, while the 2110Vn was a reliable and capable router overall, it would be difficult to justify purchasing that particular model when its more full-featured successor was available — "full-featured" here being shorthand for things like jumbo frames and IPv6 support, Gigabit Ethernet, USB application add-ons for DLNA/iTunes servers and BitTorrent, and multiple customizable VLANs. All of those are lacking, though not at all sorely, in the 2110 series.

In the end, however, those additional features were enough to encourage me to upgrade to the 2310Vn, which sports a new-ish WebUI (above) and a Linux-based OS. Gigabit Ethernet alone was virtually a necessity with our Netflix- and AirPlay-centric home entertainment setup, but other features like the vastly improved QoS handling and the DLNA server have come in handy.

In fact, the DLNA server (along with its USB app counterparts) is good a place as any to begin looking at exactly what the 2130Vn claims to offer and how those claims hold up to real-world use.

Traditionally, Vigor routers have been able to act as basic but effective local file servers. Plug in, say, an 8GB flash drive to the device's USB port (the 2130 sports two side by side), and you had yourself a 8GB FTP server. The 2130's USB apps are optional add-ons that provide enhanced access to files stored on these attached drives, so that music files are now streamable via iTunes, and media files can be played over DLNA-equipped devices like most midrange-and-up HDTVs.

These days many NAS devices from manufacturers like Netgear, Synology, and Qnap come with these features either built-in or readily available, but NAS drives aren't so commonplace as to make the DrayTek's capabilities redundant. Even with 6TB of storage on a ReadyNAS, I found that our viewing setup was more convenient when we ripped the kids' DVDs and hosted those video files separately on the 2130. And for albums that I had to review but wasn't sure merited a place in my permanent collection, I hosted the MP3s on the 2130. This made them easily accessible to devices like my DLNA-enabled Denon receiver, but I could easily delete them when the time came without fussing with my already bloated main iTunes library.

There's also BitTorrent functionality. The Vigor can be set up to download and seed files to/from the flash drive. However, even though it's using the popular Transmission backend, none of the client's usual fine-tuning is there. In other words, this is for sharing Linux.iso files and not your collection of Lost Blu-ray rips.

So far the 2130 has performed well in terms of these add-ons, and their inclusion is one of the nice perks of owning a Vigor. For casual users who don't care to invest in a NAS, this functionality makes it possible to host some music, movies, and photos on that old flash drive gathering dust in your desk drawer. I suppose it might work with a FAT-formatted external HD, too, but I haven't put it through those particular paces.

IPv6 support is a nice bonus, and the 2130 has handled this well in my very limited testing. My ISP hasn't implemented IPv6 beyond a select group of test users, so I've been restricted to LAN testing only. Fortunately, none of my 20 or so locally networked devices has run into any IPv6 compatibility issues.

The router's Gigabit Ethernet performance has also been excellent. I don't have any previous firsthand experience with Gigabit routers and therefore have no apples-to-apples comparison; yet I can confidently say that the increase in file-transfer speed on the LAN between 1000-base-capable devices has been both noticeable and impressive. I suppose credit should also go to the 24-port D-Link 1024D switch that mediates some of the local traffic.

At this point I ought to note that my concern here is, as always, perceived performance in my specific environment. I haven't monitored throughput or kept a careful log of activity by any objective method. A far more clinical and technical look at the 2130's tested Gigabit speeds and VPN functionality can be found over at SmallNetBuilder.

This, unfortunately, is where the good times come to a halt with the 2130Vn. In many respects, the prefix I previously paired with "-grade" ought to be "retro" rather than "up".

When the 2130Vn first made it into my hands, it had beta (version 1.5.1 as opposed to the current public 1.5.0.1 release) firmware installed. Out of the box, I was unable to establish any WAN connection whatsoever. Countless resets, settings changes, and technical support from my ISP yielded no positive results. Downgrading to the 1.5.0.1 firmware finally solved the problem. I sent an e-mail and system logs to DrayTek technical support; their reply was a facepalm-provoking restatement of what I already knew: the router was unable to establish a WAN connection for some strange reason.

In terms of my personal router priorities, reliable VoIP ranks just behind the simple Internet access I was initially denied. Ninety-nine percent of my daily calling is conducted through the Vigor. In this area the 2310Vn has performed somewhere between poor and terrible. Of course, it's extremely difficult to pin shaky VoIP quality on any one device. There are so many variables at play: SIP provider, codec, packet size, traffic, ISP, and so on. I also use SipSorcery as the One SIP to Rule Them All, which introduces another middleman. Nevertheless, I've never had so many callers and callees complain about quality — issues like echoes, delays, stutter — as when I've been using the 2130Vn. Furthermore, these problems are conspicuously absent when I circumvent the router and call using Telephone with a Bluetooth headset through my iMac.

Once, during one of several attempts to gain even the slightest call-quality improvement, I switched to G.711MU codec/10ms packets and began to have serious call-connection issues and silent calls. This ongoing headache was relayed to DrayTek support, which has since identified a number of bugs, including problems with NAT settings, voice-detection implementation, and certain codec/packet combinations like the one above. The problems, some of which have been solved by simple reboots, persist.

Speaking of reboots, there are issues — much less serious, but issues all the same — with load times. The 2130Vn can take a worryingly long time to restart, and I've occasionally run into problems with an unresponsive WebUI after settings changes. For example, the last firmware upgrade to the 1.5.1 release candidate (RC1) appeared to be taking place but didn't stick despite several attempts in Safari. It only worked after I switched to Camino, which was done with equal parts desperation and trepidation, given how thoroughly a botched firmware upgrade could bork the device.

Throughout all this, DrayTek has been quick to respond and usually forthright and helpful, particularly with the VoIP issues. But if I had my druthers, my regular contact with DrayTek support wouldn't be necessary at all. VoIP capability is one major feature that sets DrayTek routers apart, and if it suffers, then DrayTek's advantage begins to look less pronounced. To me, anyway.

If past experience is anything to go by, these bugs and shortcomings will all be fixed in due course (pessimistically speaking, probably by the time the next wave of Vigor routers is released). Many of the quibbles and caveats in the above-linked SmallNetBuilder review have already been addressed in full and then some. I'm confident, at any rate, that the bugs will be fixed, because DrayTek has some of the most responsive and dedicated tech support I've dealt with — even if they're in desperate need of a few native English speakers. I just wish these issues could have been discovered and addressed before the 2130 series was released or very shortly thereafter. Shipping a VoIP router that suffers from sketchy call quality is like putting out a top-notch racecar with a pie tin for a steering wheel.

The 2130 series has picked up a number of positive reviews and awards (including a "Best in Test"), but at the moment I can't recommend the 2130Vn on account of its numerous unresolved issues with an integral part of its featureset, namely, VoIP. Should that change with the final 1.5.1 firmware, I'll post a postscript posthaste.

The Disappearing Act

2011-01-15T14:02:00.001-08:00

THE silence has settled in so thoroughly around here that I'm almost afraid to disturb it.

Maybe I ought to clear my throat a few times, the way you might wake a dozing grandfather.

Ahem.

Ahem.

Right, then.

This blog, despite having been established before the word "blog" even made it into regular conversation, has never attracted much of a following (though I can't say I'm at all baffled as to why); but there are, I think, a few bored or persistent or loyal visitors who check back on occasion to see if anything new has been posted, and I feel I owe it to them to outline the reasons for the lack of updates. Of which there are many. Though, as always, some of the silence could be attributed to the fact that I didn't have anything that needed saying that wasn't already being said by means of other outlets.

In November I took on a project — or rather, a project was given to me — that involved a lot of research, a lot of detective- or journalist-type footwork, and needed, I slowly began to realize, to be shaped from the inside out instead of having its scope imposed upon it. Which is a roundabout way of saying that, although I continue to believe very strongly in the purpose and subject of this project, which incidentally is still in progress, it's been incredibly time intensive — yet without easily defined, visibly productive work hours. Only lately have I started to make something that might be loosely called headway. But it's the sort of thing that won't come together if every single person who's involved, whether willingly or (more commonly) reluctantly, doesn't make a contribution, and striking the right balance between gentle reminding and oppressive hounding has been a difficult and at times exasperating one.

During this time something else landed on my desk, another research-style assignment. Two, in fact. Digging up the factual information on them was relatively easy. Digging up archival photos was not. Of the dozens of people I've since phoned, e-mail, stalked — people, it's worth pointing out, whose job it is to assist researchers — in reference to these articles, the number who actually helped could be counted on one hand. A four-fingered hand.

This photo should be easy to source. But isn't.

Then came two books for review: Cyber Junkie: Escape the Gaming and Internet Trap and Texture: Human Expression in the Age of Communications Overload. Not thick books by any means, but they deserved a careful read and even more careful consideration. The few days I'd allotted myself for relaxation between Christmas and New Year were spent by the fire with one of these two books in my lap.

At some point during all this, it was determined that our heating system had been re-routed by one of the previous owners. The primary cold air return had been disengaged, and the overtaxed furnace was now drawing from a modest little vent in the downstairs hallway. The way the air whistled through this vent was a small indication that the load on it was greater than it ought to be. So the original cold air return had to be reinstated. But before that could be done, old knob-and-tube wiring, which I had been assured was dead and was in fact hot (and in some cases spliced and simply patched with electrical tape), had to be removed and replaced with more modern Romex.

Oh, and a poorly insulated crawlspace in the converted attic was channelling away a good portion of the heat that the overtaxed furnace did manage to produce.

All of these rather urgent jobs were either beyond me or would have taken more time to remedy than I could spare. So the parade of contractors began.

What wasn't beyond my skill level was taking control of the low-voltage wiring — Cat6, HDMI, coax, RCA — that runs through the house and could be seen spilling from holes in certain walls, like a mass of cable vomit, until I resolved that I'd had enough of seeing low-voltage cables spilling from holes in the walls.

Unfortunately, the previous owners had made all but a small portion of it completely inaccessible and, even more maddeningly, had punched the all-important Cat6 cable in a completely esoteric way that didn't conform to any of the widely used standards. All these cables, maybe 30 or so, had to have their beginning and end points traced with a LAN tester and terminated or, in the case of the Cat6, cut and re-punched on both the male and female ends. Plus the few HDMI cables that were accessible (or could be made accessible with some controlled demolition) had to be re-run with new v1.4 cables to accommodate the vast change in standards over the years since HDMI was introduced.

Even though it will be obscured by a TV or media box at some point, the above result is fairly pleasing, at least relative to what it was, and is the only outward proof of any sort of goal-oriented activity over the past three months. With that exercise in tedium and frustration under my belt, I'm still not looking forward to tackling the main AV discharge for all these wires, which currently looks like this:

Any advice in the comments on the best way to go about corralling all these wires (ideally, a multi-zone, 7.2-channel receiver will sit in front of them) wouldn't go unappreciated. At the moment I'm contemplating some sort of modular patch panel, but the idea of what I want has been easier to imagine than find.

So, after the mad rush of the past three months, I hope to be back to regular blogging, both here and on the Spokane Books Blog. Regular for me, anyway, which has never conformed to the customary definitions of the word. When it does come time for me to plunge into what's left of this AV/IT-type heart of darkness, though, don't blame me for pulling another disappearing act. I'll be lucky to come out alive.

One Year with the DrayTek Vigor 2110Vn

2010-10-28T13:38:00.001-07:00

AN EARLIER review of mine on the DrayTek Vigor 2110Vn was responsible for bringing a lot of regular traffic to this site, but it took over a year for the first comment to appear. My assumption in the meantime was that I'd either answered visitors' questions so that no comment was necessary, or I'd left them with so many questions that they didn't know where to begin asking.

But Tony wanted to know how I was getting on with the router, and I thought it would probably be helpful to tell him — or at least make good my vague intention in the earlier review to post a follow-up about firmware changes and improvements.

The 2110Vn has survived a transatlantic move (and a voltage change from 240 to 120V) and now occupies a centrally located spot in the den closet. It's no longer connected to the Thomson 540 cable modem provided by Kabel Deutschland but instead my own Motorola SB6120 DOCSIS 3.0 modem that gets me onto Comcast's series of tubes. The router functions as well as it ever did, and I consistently have uptimes in the hundreds of hours between firmware upgrades. I can't remember the last time I needed to reboot it for any reason besides that or tinkering with the few settings that require a power cycle.

The firmware — now on version 3.3.5.1, released October 4 — has been updated around five times in the past year, and each upgrade has brought the usual bugfixes (most of which addressed bugs I hadn't encountered) and improvements.

One such improvement is USB disk functionality, which was missing from the 2110 series (contrary to the device spec sheet) when it first appeared. I now have a generic 4GB flash drive plugged into the USB port, and I'm able to access it from the usual run of FTP clients such as Fetch, Flow, and Transmit — all except Cyberduck, which has never interacted especially well with it for some reason. There were once filename issues that truncated everything with "~" but that appears to have been solved for so long I can't quite remember when exactly it was a problem. And the 3.3.5 firmware brought with it a File Explorer, which gives basic access (e.g., upload, download, rename) to the files via the WebUI. My new-ish ReadyNAS NV+ has made the USB disk more or less superfluous, but I still use it for storing small backups and documents that don't have a proper home on the NAS.

It's also worth noting that the USB disk feature allows for Samba file-sharing as well. This was added relatively recently.

The primary feature for me, however, is VoIP. I've noticed distinct improvements in voice quality since owning the 2110Vn, and I no longer have any of the inexplicably dropped SIP connections that plagued the 2910Vg. Features like the dial plan have been offloaded to SIP Sorcery, but I still use the Vigor's call blocking feature to shut out the pesky US telemarketers because it's easier to set up than SIP Sorcery's Ruby-based scripts.

A few words about my VoIP setup. All my US calls are placed and received with Google Voice (with help from Gizmo, CallCentric, and Sipgate.com) via SIP Sorcery. My international calls are received with Sipgate.de or VoIPuser and are placed with Vyke via SIP Sorcery. This means I pay absolutely nothing for any US-based call (yet still get voicemail with transcriptions and e-mail notification, ringing to multiple phones, etc), and I pay 7 cents per hour for international calls while maintaining a phone presence in three countries. What's amazing is that this doesn't come at the expense of reliability. The stability and call quality of the 2110Vn means it's no different in those respects to a conventional landline.

A final, sometimes overlooked, improvement is the clarity of the instructions in the WebUI. The company seems to have made small tweaks so that the English is less awkward and more comprehensible to non-sysadmins. It was once easy to come across laughable (mis)uses of the English language on every page of the WebUI, but most of the errors now are limited to minor things like arbitrary punctuation and capitalization.

In short, if I had a Draytek programmer sitting next to me right now, I'd be hard pressed to name anything that needed to be addressed or added in the next firmware upgrade.

In terms of flaws and shortcomings, I've come across two hardware features that I would like to have seen in the 2110 series: support for jumbo frames and Gigabit (1000-base) Ethernet capability. I've only become aware of their absence since moving all of our media to the NAS, and moderate local traffic can cause brief pixellation of HD (i.e., >720p) videos. I've also had to move my Aperture library from the NAS back to a FireWire 800-connected external drive because the RAW files took forever to process during previews and edits. Granted, some of this sluggishness is due to the limitations of the NV+, but wider pipes on the LAN would give it all a bit of a speed boost.

Another feature that the 2110Vn lacks is IPv6 support. As the pool of available IPv4 addresses dwindles, IPv6 support is going to be almost essential in a router. Like the massive throughput required by centralized media storage, this is something else that hadn't been a concern when I was shopping for the successor to the 2910Vg; now it seems like a no-brainer.

Before I pass final judgement, let me say that I haven't addressed the 3.5G modem support or powerful firewall and monitoring capabilities of the 2110Vn because I either don't use them or only use them in their most basic form. Content and application filtering just aren't things that we desperately need on our home network — or, rather, that we would need beyond OS X's built-in parental controls — and the VPN is only something that I might play around with on a rainy day just to have a bit of geek fun.

So can I recommend the 2110Vn? Yes. Unequivocally. I'm very happy with it and can see myself using it for some time to come. It's a great router that strikes me as 100% feature complete and stable, and I really don't see any reason why it wouldn't be a great fit for the home user who wants to move beyond the blinking box that provides a wireless LAN and nothing much else.

But as a "prosumer" or a small business IT admin, I'd opt for the 2130Vn, released just this month, which addresses all the limitations of the 2110Vn. It's ready for IPv6, and it's got a 4-port Gigabit Ethernet switch as well as a Gigabit WAN port. Those improvements alone are, I have to admit, enough to tempt a contented 2110Vn user like me to upgrade. I've only been able to find one US-based retailer for the 2130 series, Guideband.com, and it doesn't look like the 2130Vn model is in stock yet. The mere hint of availability is better than DrayTek's recent obscurity in the US, but unfortunately, DrayTek is still having a hard time figuring out how to tout its products' benefits:

With the development of NGN (Next Generation Network), you may recently hear the news about FTTx deployment in your local area or even have already subscribed the unbundling last mile service (e.g. VDSL2) from local ITSP for FTTx. That's why DrayTek launches Vigor2130 series — High Speed Gigabit Router, perfectly complied with VDSL2 environment including Vigor2130, Vigor2130n for speed-wanted customer.

Salvaged: El Ten Eleven

2010-10-07T16:04:00.003-07:00

[FOR the whys and wherefores of what follows, see my explanation here.]

The following is almost the entirety of a phone conversation that took place in three parts (technical difficulties) with Kristian Dunn of El Ten Eleven. For background, here are the band's Wikipedia entry and homepage.

On their DIY ethos, acknowledged in the song "Ian Mackaye Was Right" on their new LP, It's Still Like a Secret.

I feel [that ethos] more strongly now, actually. Because things are going well for us and they keep getting better. He (Ian Mackaye) was right and we were right and we're going in the right directions. I mean, who knows, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe if we'd signed a deal with a label or something we'd be doing better than we are now. But I don't think so. This is a really exciting time for musicians because we don't really need labels anymore. We kind of control everything now. The only thing that labels can really offer us that we can't come up with on our own is great marketing — that's expensive. But that's assuming that they're capable of great marketing because sometimes they are and sometimes they aren't. But all that's to say that, yeah, I feel — what would be the word? emboldened? — by what's happening for us.

On how DIY is different to the conventional label-centric approach.

Basically, [DIY is] a much longer path. We have to — I can only speak for my own band, but I know there's a lot out there experiencing what we are — and it's a longer, slower process but it's a more permanent sort of middle-class income for a longer period of time as opposed to shooting to the top, making it big, and then burning out and being gone. For us, that' s meant touring. We've toured our asses off. We've been at it for years. We've done so many laps around the country; I don't even know many tours we've been on. But it works. Nowadays people look for music in places they didn't used to look. In other words, people used to listen to the radio to find out what was going on, and nobody listens to the radio anymore. People find out about their favorite bands via their friends or something online, a blog, reading something in Pitchfork or whatever it may be. That opens up a lot of opportunities for bands like us that aren't going to get played on mainstream radio. It's that sort of 'build-it-and-they-will-come' kind of attitude and that's actually worked for us. We just kept going around and around and people found out about it. And here we are. Things are going pretty well now.

On the unique opportunity offered by Helvetica and other bands who aren't so lucky.

That was fortunate, and also we've licensed our music to tons of TV shows and films. People come up to me after the shows we play, and the most common thing people say about how they found us was either Pandora or Helvetica. Or, you know, 'My friend told me about you and I just was looking online and saw you were coming.' So all of those things help. They all add up to people finding out about us without us ever being played on the radio except for bumper music on All Things Considered every once in a while. Which is great. I'll take that, but it's not like NPR is doing a feature on us or anything.

On relentless touring.

Well, it is [difficult] and it isn't. It's physically demanding, but when we're doing what we love it's not hard. On this tour, for example, we have 35 shows, I think, 5 weeks' worth of shows and we only have one day off. So it's physically taxing, but every night we're playing in front of lots of people who really love our music and they're cheering and giving us really humbling compliments. So it's a lot different than if we were going to some office job that we hated, or if we were laying bricks or something like that. We love it, so it's not hard as far as our brains go. But our bodies are getting a little worn out.

On crowd-funding It's Still Like a Secret, sometimes with donations of $500 or $750.

It went really well. It definitely paid for the record and more. It helped us buy our van. It's incredible. We just asked our fans for help and they helped. It really made us feel humbled and honored, and we're just so thankful that our fans are so generous. Because they paid for the record — they did it. Some people even bought those really expensive ones, which is really incredible to me. Honestly, I didn't think anybody would. And they did. And that was so nice. It was so nice of people to do that.

On the lack of vocals helping or hindering them in non-anglophone countries.

The honest answer is that I don't know, because there are certainly bands that have vocals, their lyrics are in English, and they do well overseas. And there are bands from overseas that are from countries like Iceland or Sweden or Japan and they sing in English, and they do well. So I don't think English lyrics are necessarily a barrier to having fans in other countries. But I don't know. It could be, though, that because there are no vocals there are people who live in these other countries who, if we had English vocals, they wouldn't really grasp on to it. So the honest answer is that I don't know. I hope so. I'll take whatever I can get. And we do get a lot of response from people overseas, and we're dying to tour overseas. We just haven't been able to put it together yet, but hopefully that's coming in 2011.

On the possibility of working with singers and their repeated calls for fans to submit vocals.

I really like being instrumental, but if somebody came along who was a really great singer and really added something to what we did, and I felt like that was the next step we should take, I'd totally be open to it. No one's ever submitted anything. Ever. Isn't that strange? I mean, it's a pretty great opportunity. We're a band that's doing pretty well — I mean, we're not huge, we're not Radiohead or anything — and we have this open invitation. If you can sing, go for it. Let us hear you. Even Chino from The Deftones, he's a fan, and he said, "You know, I'd like to work with you sometime." And we said, "Great!" We actually have a song on our last record called "Chino," and that was a song that I wrote with him in mind, leaving room for vocals." And he never did anything with it. So "Chino" was just a working title, because I figured it was the song Chino would sing on, and I thought, well, it sounds pretty good, maybe we should just throw it on the record without the vocals. Now I kind of regret that because I don't think it's really finished, but anyway, there's an example that even these big guys … I don't know. They're chickening out for some reason.

On It's Still Like a Secret being a working title that somehow became a permanent title, and its significance.

It was always intended to be the actual title. What that's all about is partially what we were talking about before with the DIY ethos and "Ian Mackaye Was Right" and all that. There was a Built to Spill record called Keep It Like a Secret. And I don't know what they meant by that, but what I took it to mean was that they were getting kind of big and they were on a major label but they were sort of saying to people, "Let's keep it like a secret. We don't want to get too big," that sort of thing. And for us it's a little bit of a joke. It's sort of a reference to that album title and that it's still like a secret for us. We're not even trying, we are like a secret. We have our loyal fans — we sort of have a cult following, I guess you might say, so it is like a secret but we embrace that. And that's going back to what we were talking about before — it's like a secret, but it's great because we're all this — it might sound corny — us and our fans are sort of like a family and we have this thing going that's still sort of like a secret that the regular population doesn't know about. And it's kind of cool.

On the dancefloor vibe of some songs on It's Still Like a Secret.

I tend to get obsessed with things. On the last album, These Promises Are Being Videotaped, I was really obsessed with electro music, artists like Justice and Soulwax and Daft Punk, that sort of stuff, so we were trying to do that sort of thing but with live instruments. And on this current record I'm kind of over that. I got that out of my system. But there's still going to be some elements left in there. Part of that comes from our live shows, because those song that are more upbeat and dancey are the ones people really react to, especially when we're playing in clubs or bars where people are having fun and drinking and all that stuff.

Well, ["Indian Winter" is] a good example [of a "dancey" song], because on this new record we decided to go out on tour and play the songs live for a while to refine them before we recorded them, which is something we've never done before. And it's something that's made us really disappointed in all of our records up until this one, because we just didn't feel like we captured what we do live on the record. So "Indian Winter" was one of the ones that people really reacted to when we played live so we tried to capture it on the record, and hopefully we got close. I mean, I don't know if we can ever totally capture it because if you're at our show, you're watching us do everything, you're with other people who are all around you and maybe dancing or whatever. And it's an experience that includes elements other than the music. There's no way we can put that on our disc. But hopefully we got closer this time.

On working with laptops.

We've never even considered it. And there's nothing wrong with people who use laptops; they can be done well. For example, we're touring with a guy named Baths right now, and he's a fricking genius. I think he's the future of music and I watch his set every night and I actually feel really challenged because I think he's better than we are. I really love his music, and that says a lot because very little music inspires me these days. I've just become really jaded. And I hate that, I hate that I'm that way. But it's just the truth. So I'm definitely not dissing anybody who uses laptops on stage. But for us, it's just not what we do. We like to create everything live on the fly. And it's really challenging, but I think we've gotten really good at it. And that goes back to what we were talking about before about the long path, putting in a lot of hours. We've done a million tours. We've been working at this for a long time, so hopefully we're good at it. And people, it seems, are reacting to that, and I think if we had a laptop on stage that already had tracks recorded, it would kind of ruin it. Because part of what's exciting about our shows is that it is live and we make mistakes.

Like last night, I completely screwed up one of the loops and I just had to start it over. But it seemed like the audience really enjoyed it because it was real, and they were sort of on our side, like, "C'mon, you can do it!" And once we did, they all cheered. That's something you're not going to get when you have backing tracks.

There's a trust factor. There's a trust between us and the audience. I think there are so many bands using backing tracks these days. It's surprising some of the bands that would use them — just four-piece rock bands that have backing tracks, and it's like, Jesus, why? I think people, generally speaking, are kind of tired of it because they go to a show and it's not real. Maybe that's part of why we're catching on is because when they come to one of our shows it is real. It's being done live in front of them. I don't know. Maybe they come because Tim looks cool.

Words Count

2010-10-07T16:04:00.001-07:00

EDITORS set word counts. It's a fact of journalistic life.

"I need a story on how string theory relates to changes in koala bear diet and the latest technology trends. Make it accessible, no more than two hundred words. Remember: today's readers hate sentences that are more than five words long."

"Gimme 50,000 words on Lady GaGa's new hairstyle. Oh, and I really need it by tomorrow because we've decided to cut the Politics section this week."

No, word counts aren't always bad things. Low ceilings in particular force someone like me, who's prone to digression and longwindedness and a surfeit of context and qualifying clauses, to focus on the essence of the story, to strip away superfluities. And besides, they keep text from getting in the way of the advertisements.

But there are times when word counts leave a writer with no choice but to stuff one hundred pounds of material into a one-pound sack. Nuance and shading get lost, and the reader is left with an absurdly oversimplified — and at worst inaccurate — distillation of a much richer assessment or conversation. In my time as an editor, I've been guilty of hacking away at some writers' articles to meet an infinitesimal word count, which reflected badly on them (after all, it's their name and their name alone in the byline; there's no "edited by" disclaimer), and in my much longer tenure as a writer, I can recall just two publications that offered me as much space as I deemed necessary: namely, Copper Press and Ink 19. Granted, more words can occasionally prove to be more rope with which to hang oneself; but those were the lessons I've taken most to heart.

This massive pile of text that mounts on the cutting-room floor is therefore a disservice to the reader and the writer. It's also a disservice to the interviewee, who has to take the time (usually in the middle of some whirlwind promotional tour) to respond to the writer's questions and can have considered replies condensed into frivolous, misrepresentational soundbytes. Come the day of an article's publication, the only person who wins is the editor, and this dubious achievement is only considered as such because he or she succeeded in cramming several lines of text into a box of predetermined size.

To make some insignificant, arbitrary, and sporadic attempt to offset the collateral damage of concision, I'll be posting what I end up saving as "Runoff.doc" in a Q&A-ish format on this blog. It'll fall under a heading called "Salvaged." The bulk of it will consist of my occasional interviews with bands — with the possibility of extending to other subjects should I ever break free of journalistic typecasting and be called upon to cover them.

First up: El Ten Eleven.

Updated Ping = Twice the Garbage

2010-09-26T10:35:00.001-07:00

CRIMONY. As if Ping weren't a big enough crapfest, Apple decided to use the iTunes 10.0.1 update to foist it upon users even harder. Now there's a Ping sidebar and a Ping dropdown menu to add a bit of extra clutter to an already bloated app. There was one arguably useful feature added: you can now "like" favorite songs instead of having to embrace whole albums. The whole service is still garbage, though, even if Gruber's charitable musings take into account potential growth opportunities for the future.

You can get rid of Ping in iTunes by downloading and running this app, or by typing the following commands into the Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes hide-ping-dropdown 1

defaults write com.apple.iTunes disablePingSidebar 1

More on those commands, including some additional options, can be found here.

Remembering George

2010-09-17T19:02:00.001-07:00

GEORGE Albert Kowalker, Jr. was, most conspicuously, deaf and mute. In his mid-sixties when I first met him, he had long been a regular at the TGI Friday's on Newbury Street in Boston where I waitered for a time during grad school. He would render his thoughts in very neat handwriting on a notepad he carried around with him; if he were particularly excited or moved, he would let out raw, emotive groans.

At some point not long after we'd first met he began requesting to sit at my tables. I don't know why I became a sudden favorite of his. It might have been for prosaic reasons, such as his previously preferred server moving on to more fulfilling employment, or it might have been because I was generally quite happy to sit with him and carry on written conversations, each of us penciling a few lines and then spinning the notepad around for the other to read. Our chats were never philosophical or cultural by any stretch of the imagination, just basic questions and answers about family and background, since basic questions and answers were really all one could squeeze in between orders and kitchen runs. George was a deeply religious man — he worked for the Jesuits and as far as I know was a regular churchgoer — and would occasionally jot down heartfelt declarations of his faith. For whatever reason, perhaps because of their simplicity and purity, I always found these declarations unusually moving.

George had a habit of coming in rather late in the evening, which wasn't an issue if I had been designated one of the closing waiters, but there were times when I had plans or coursework after my shift, and it was always a challenge to convey to him why I would be in any sort of hurry to leave the restaurant. He was terribly sensitive over such matters, and the few occasions that I reassigned his table to a later-staying server left him sulking over his fries. But George was otherwise exempt from the usual preoccupations of those who wait tables, and it's indicative of my estimation of him that I don't have the slightest idea now of whether he was a generous tipper or not; it's those written dialogues and his ingenuousness that stand out in my mind.

Before I left Boston for good in 1999, George and I met at Dillon's, I think it was called, for a hamburger. After the meal I hugged him goodbye. He issued a plaintive groan and then shuffled down Boylston Street. It was the last I saw of him, though his Christmas cards still managed to find me, even when I lived abroad, for several years afterwards. I can't recall exactly if they were mailed to me directly or came via my parents' address.

It was when I was cleaning out my own address book this afternoon that I came across George's entry — c/o The Jesuits, Watertown, MA—and googled his name to see if there was any news of him. The first two results were obituaries from January of 2009. Another result caught a mention of his name in his stepmother's obituary, which followed George's by eight months.

George deserved more than two remembrances, one informal and meant to point to some larger truth, the other half-hidden behind the greed of a paywall. So let this be my own small tribute to George A. Kowalker, Jr., May 3, 1933 – January 17, 2009. The precise details of our encounters have grown a bit murky over the years, but his kindness and simple faith will live on undiminished in my memory.

Ping is Garbage; Plus More Apple-Related Gripes

2010-09-07T12:38:00.001-07:00

APPLE has always held itself to a high standard and invited its loyalists to do likewise. The company was never overly—or overtly—concerned with market share. Above all, it's a company run by idealists (or more accurately, "idealist" in the singular) for idealists; its aim is to make quality, thoughtful, industry-shaping products, and if buyers recognize that en masse, all the better.

Ever since the iPod took off, Apple has enjoyed the best of both worlds: brand integrity and popularity among consumers. It continued to release products true to its own vision, products that pundits predicted would fail, that tech nerds deemed inadequate, that haters gleefully reviled. Not only did they sell in record numbers regardless, those same pundits, tech nerds, and haters were often forced to recant, however reluctantly, when they stopped looking at the spec sheet and actually held the gizmo in their hands. Longtime Apple champions experienced the repeated thrill of vindication.

But of late, in my own small sliver of the world, the spec sheets of Apple's offerings have proven more impressive than the real-world use. And for once I'm inclined to agree with those normally wrongheaded loudmouths who accuse the company of prizing form above function.

I'll start with iTunes 10. Icon furore aside (let's face it, the icon really is drab and uninspiring)—along with the GUI changes that once again turn the bloated media app into the black sheep of the Apple software family, and the sudden break with Firefly and OS X's own Automator support—there's Ping.

Ping is one of the most half-baked "features" Apple has introduced in a long time. It's unintuitive, limited, dull, derivative, unambitious — a Last.fm wannabe that lacks that service's basic and essential features like scrobbling. In its current form, there's nothing particularly social about Ping; it's really only a way to publicize one's activity on the iTunes Store.

The list of complaints and shortcomings is about ten times as long as what Ping claims to offer. The service is only accessible through iTunes' bastard interface. There's no way to properly rate songs or albums; you can only say you "Like" something in the inane manner of Facebook (support for which mysteriously vanished a few hours after iTunes 10's protracted debut). If you want to "Like" a particular band, you can only pick from an existing pool of Ping-sanctioned artist pages. Searching for concerts by artist or area is impossible. Interaction with other users is restricted to a simple search field — there's no way to browse for friends or fans by geography, common favorites, or even Address Book entries. The songs in your library, Genius submissions, or "currently playing" notifications are conspicuously absent.

Come to think of it, the very fact that Ping keeps hounding me to follow 50 Cent is proof enough of its inadequacy.

I wish Ping were the only Apple-related letdown of the past few weeks. But it isn't. Since upgrading to iOS 4, my iPod Touch (2nd gen.) has been nothing but pocket-sized frustration. The music library can take up to a minute to load. The whole OS freezes regularly and requires a hard restart. The interface is unresponsive. Last week an important voice recording of an interview became a 29-minute-long, 0kb file, totally unsalvageable, which forced me to have to make an embarrassed call to the interviewees. Text notes routinely vanish, reappear, double, triple. Battery life is about half of what it was with iOS 3. Syncing with iTunes has stalled frequently.

Combine all that with the strange absence of iLife '11, the silence surrounding OS X 10.7, the peculiarity of the revamped AppleTV and the iPod nano (a touchscreen on a thumb-sized device? really?) plus the iPhone antenna issue, and my general impression is that Apple is getting sloppy. Microsoft sloppy. Sony sloppy. Apple has been on a multi-year high, leaping deftly from tech sensation to tech sensation, and I worry that its resulting arrogance, fragmentation, or overreach has caused the company to lose the attention to detail that, for example, timed the pulse of the sleep light with the human breathing, or that earned the brand a justifiable reputation for being one that "just works."

The larger problem here is that, when Microsoft's and the PC world's products got too cumbersome and unreliable for use, I was able to turn to Apple. If the time comes when Apple's products are too cumbersome and unreliable, what's the alternative? Where's the competent, focused, idealistic, visionary underdog to act as the Apple to Apple?

Clear DVD Case for SlipCover

2010-08-09T17:11:00.001-07:00

I DON'T know what odd compulsion lies behind it, but when it comes to multimedia I like things organized and I like them to look nice. That's why I've never been content with standard blank folder icons for my backup movie collection. I always had to give them case-looking icons to kinda sorta mirror the experience of browsing my physical DVD collection. Too bad Front Row just ignores all my anal retentive hard work.

For a long time I used DIY Photoshop templates that others were kind enough to share. But this was a laborious process that involved layers and crops/resizes and exports. Even when I was on a roll, each DVD case could take up to about five minutes to create.

Then SlipCover came along and changed all that. Now "iconizing" was just a matter of hunting for the DVD case on Google Images, then dragging and dropping the image onto the app followed by the folder. Easy peasy.

But I wasn't altogether satisfied with that, either, because none of the cases really looked right or resembled the original DVD in my collection.

So I rolled my own SlipCover case icon based on a Photoshop template (if I could remember where on earth I first came across said template, I'd give proper credit to the original author) that I always liked. I call it Clear DVD. Because it's clear (with a little reflection to wow any geeks in the vicinity). And it's for good ol' fashioned DVDs, none of them newfangled Blu-ray discs.

See above for a preview. If it's something you fancy, you can download it here.

I haven't come across any bugs or rendering issues, but let me know if you do.

"Denmark" by The Portland Cello Project

2010-08-04T14:09:00.001-07:00

I CAME across this today and wanted to share a beautiful song accompanied by a beautiful video. The former is performed by the aptly named Portland Cello Project and opens their newly released Thousand Words LP; the latter was directed by Daniel Fickle. Although compelling in its own right, the video takes on added poignancy when you know that it also serves as a metaphor for a friend of the band who is battling cancer.

Shame that I missed the PCP's gig at the Empyrean here in Spokane two weeks ago.

Discontent with Content

2010-07-30T22:34:00.001-07:00

JOHN Gruber retweeted this nugget of Web wisdom from Zack Rosen yesterday:

... and I thought it worth pursuing a bit further.^[1]

Granted, I'm biased in this arena. To a man with a hammer everything looks like a nail, and I likewise tend to view the world through the eyes of one whose stock in trade is the English language. That said, there's nevertheless an awful lot of bad or sloppy or just plain mediocre writing to be found online, most of it put there by people who view words as content rather than an essential and robust means of communication — as if words were there to fill some of the white space between graphics. Others make the mistake of thinking that the quantity of words is directly proportional to the perceived quality of their object.

Some of the proliferation of second- and third-rate writing arises from the fact that it's something we all learn in school — to write, that is — and there's very little distinction in most people's minds between writing as a craft and writing as, say, an alternative to a phone call. Received wisdom would suggest that every one of us with a grade-school education has the necessary skills to write and do it serviceably well. Which makes hiring a professional writer a frivolous expense. Getting words from your brain to the page? All you need is the word processor that comes preinstalled on your computer. Spelling? Grammar? The built-in proofing tools will catch those mistakes. What more could there possibly be to the equation?

Although quite a few graphic designers I've worked with have harbored a similar frustration with vanilla folks who fancy themselves artistic visionaries, this "anyone can do it" mindset is particularly evident when dealing with text. With visual arts — not to mention handicrafts, manual labor, cooking, and so on — you're far more likely to evoke the response, "Wow. That takes real skill. I could never do that" (contemporary art being the glaring exception). For some reason the proof is easier to spot in that particular pudding.

With words it's somehow different. Good writing is taken for granted, perhaps because its naturalness or lack of exhibitionism is often what makes it good, or again because so many of us regard language as something so familiar and workaday and universal. I remember being told that there wasn't much skill involved with book reviewing because "everyone has an opinion."

And to draw on another bit of received wisdom, we all know that everyone has a novel in him. It's just that we don't all have the time or patience to act on it.

In the same way that I imagine the restorer of classic cars would weep a little to see the gutted chassis of a Ford Mustang Boss 429 rusting on someone's front lawn, the websites that treat text as so much filler evoke a similar reaction from me. Not just because they're simply careless with language, though that's part of it, or because they seem to have interpreted "copywriting" as a command, but because they're not doing themselves justice.

I'll give an example. There's one particular manufacturer of IT equipment whose products trounce the competition in terms of features and price. But despite having a presence in the US, they don't seem to have made much mainstream headway here, largely, I suspect, because they take a "good enough" approach to their English-language materials. There's no cohesive message, no brand identity, no memorable conveyance of their products' features and benefits, just a jumble of words for the visitor to wade through and decipher. Even though the products are great, they take on an aura of amateurism, incompetence, and unreliability.

Rosen's tweet was directed more at websites that are themselves the product rather than tangible goods, but the same principle applies. No matter whether the object is physical or abstract, a good or a service — if the text isn't clarifying or complementing that object, it is perforce obscuring and diminishing it. Text that is only "good enough" suggests your product isn't.

As much as I wish Rosen's tweet would find its way into marketing department presentations worldwide, I do, however, take issue with two aspects of it (aside from the grammatical, I mean). It isn't just startups that need fewer developers and more writers. It's businesses and organizations of all kinds. And beyond that, it isn't just writers they need: they need more good writers. Any typing monkey can have a plaque that reads, "writer" glued onto his office door, but it takes an uncommon combination of talent and skill to effectively engage and inform online visitors through text.

----------

I had a similar impulse to respond as @repliotron did, too, but in my haste I'd probably misspell "misuse" or leave out an article and emerge looking the fool. For once better judgement prevailed. ↩

My First Semi-Plausible Phishing Encounter

2010-07-24T11:04:00.001-07:00

I'VE always been amazed that people fall for the sorts of scams they do, particularly when it comes to Internet-related scams, and even more particularly when those Internet scams are so painfully transparent that one would almost have to want to be duped to end up being one of their victims.

Free money from a Nigerian prince, anyone? Mind if I pay for this expensive item through Moneybookers? Why not log into your PayPal account via this address: www.djvfilsbhdjv.ru?

But I offer the following as a simple heads-up/FYI.

Today I got my first quasi-plausible-ish phishing e-mail, which, when viewed through early morning grogginess on my iPod, looked like a reason for concern. I didn't order anything from Amazon recently, I thought. Has someone got a hold of my account? Credit card info?

Normally, phishing and spam e-mails expose themselves immediately through their crudity, such as spelling errors, poorly cropped graphics, and absurd reply-to addresses. That wasn't the case here. Before following any links, though, I went back and looked it over again. And therein lay the giveaways.

The first of them was the obvious one: the amounts vary widely between grand total ($37.99), subtotal ($44.99), pre-tax total ($20.99), order total ($1.99), and so on. I'm not sure why the author didn't aim for a bit of consistency, but then, these aren't the brightest or most industrious folks in the world, nor, apparently, are the folks they're targeting. There's also a case to be made that the inconsistency could work in the phisher's favor, as it would give the curious one more reason to click on the order link and get to the bottom of things.

The second giveaway was slightly less obvious and takes a few nanoseconds of effort to read the mouseover text: the links all go to ornewsinfo[dot]com. I'm not sure if this is a proper phishing site or just a phony marketing pitch site, but I wasn't going to visit it to find out.

Lastly, and least glaring, was the fact that the message was sent to an e-mail address that I use primarily for personal correspondence and not for Amazon. I have a couple of e-mail accounts, one of them reserved for online shopping and nothing else. That way, if an e-mail like this one comes through to one of my other accounts, I have more cause for suspicion.

To lay my mind fully at ease, I did what most Internet users ought to do. I logged in to my account at Amazon.com through their homepage, looked up my recent orders, and found that there were none. And that put the matter to rest. I flagged the e-mail as junk and moved on to the others in my inbox, the real ones from Amazon that read: "As someone who has recently shown interest in the Ronco Veg-o-matic, you might be interested in..." Which are, in their own way, equally as annoying.

Windows. 32 Bits.

2010-07-08T22:48:00.001-07:00

NORMALLY when I've written about windows on this blog, they've been of the Microsoft variety. But that was a time before I became a fully fledged, card-carrying homeowner, back when I used to sink my money into software and gadgets and books and music, and not things like paint and power tools and, well, windows.

The windows in our house — thirty-two altogether — date from its construction in 1904. Most of them are double-hungs on the traditional weight-and-pulley system. Overall they're in fairly good shape, but over the years they've been begun to rot or peel and the pulley cords have frayed. Some of the panes have hairline cracks. And some windows were painted shut, only to have that paint chipped away so they could be opened again. They also require the glass winter storm windows to be replaced with screens in the summer if any ventilation is to take place.

And thus it came to pass that window replacement jumped higher and higher on our list of priorities after moving in. Finishing the basement was once at the very top of that list. Then it was knocked out of place by the somewhat more urgent matter of sorting out all the AV and IT cables that are sprouting from the walls. That task was then superseded by painting and furnishing the living room. Once the living room started to look as if it was going to be the first home improvement project to actually see completion in 2010, talk of the windows began in earnest. Of course, the case to do so was expedited in part by the fact that we could actually feel several draughts through the upstairs windows. That wasn't something we wanted to experience in the winter.

After quotes from Sears, VPI, and Pella, we decided to go with the second of the three.

Pella's windows would have matched the aesthetics and materials of our existing ones exactly, but they wanted $20k just to do a small number of upstairs windows. Outfitting the whole house probably would have cost $80k. That price, incidentally, didn't even include their charge of $200 per window for lead paint removal, which the other two sellers included as a matter of course. Had we money to burn, Pella would have been our choice, but they're clearly in the boutique window business and they charge boutique prices that are simply beyond our financial reach.

Sears wanted over $30k to do the whole house, which we thought was high but still reasonable. But they had other crucial strikes against them: they used high-pressure sales tactics that we didn't care for (namely, the one-day, decide-now-or-lose-it 10% discount), and offered almost nothing in the way of choice. The Sears window is like the Ford Model T: any color and style so long as it's white vinyl with a standard grid pattern. Because our intention was and is to preserve all the historical features of this house insofar as that's possible, Sears' one-style-fits-all just didn't cut it.

VPI had a lot of things going for it. It's a Spokane-based company with a solid reputation both locally and nationally. Their bid to outfit the whole house was the lowest of the three. Unlike Sears, they offered an exterior color option and grid patterns to match the unique historical grid (something like a Queen Anne/Colonial/ladder hybrid) of our existing windows. And the u-factor of their windows (0.28) was the best of the bunch. In a perfect world, they would have offered an wood option, and one with the same longevity as vinyl at that, but a perfect world it is not. Some compromises — the standard white vinyl interior, the lack of classic bronze latches — had to be made.

All the same, even the lowest bid was still pricey. That significant financial outlay is offset in part by the fact that Avista Utilities is currently offering a rebate of $3 per square foot to upgrade windows with a u-factor of 0.30 or lower, and the federal government is offering a tax credit of up to $1500 for the installation of similar quality energy-saving windows. That's a nice chunk of change that gets returned, and it most definitely lends a certain impetus to a home improvement project of this sort.

The paperwork has yet to be signed, but the gears are in motion and it looks like our windows will be swapped out by summer's end. We didn't have the heart to replace the three large original picture windows in the front and on the side of the house, so they'll remain there with their turn-of-the-century rippled glass for some time to come, though they'll likely get a fresh coat of paint when the new windows are installed. Some before and after pictures of the window swap will find their way online before long.

Jewels in the Inland Northwest

2010-06-22T19:56:00.001-07:00

A SHORT post of mine that explains why we chose Spokane out of pretty much all the Western Hemisphere (it's something we get asked frequently) went up on The Spovangelist yesterday. It was titled "Sweet Spot City" and you'll find it here.

In the midst of everything else, I also had the chance to interview Jewel for the Inlander prior to her show at the Knitting Factory here in Spokane on June 24. The write-up can be found here. I've never been a Jewel fan by any means, and I can't exactly claim to be one now, but I was pleasantly surprised by the concision and eloquence with which she expressed a lot of her ideas. Though I suppose the relief with which she met the end of her back-to-back interview session on that day meant she had plenty of time and opportunity to refine them.

The Sound of Settling

2010-06-09T23:21:00.001-07:00

WELL. May passed without a single entry.

I don't think I've left this blog in such a state of neglect since the early days.

The reason, you see, is that after the drive across the US came to an end, there was still much to be done. More than I'd dared to imagine. And the list of things to do hasn't exactly shrunk since then. If anything, it's grown.

I'm talking here mostly in terms of house stuff. Vacuuming. Mopping. Hauling. Unpacking. Painting the basement floor and walls. Sanding and staining the trim around windows and doors. Moving the laundry sink (which, unfortunately, remains half-finished because I haven't had time to caulk a leak in the extended pipe). Cleaning up the tangle of built-in AV and networking cables and putting the proper caps and keystone covers on them. Battling an onslaught of powdery mildew that's threatening to wipe out the rosebushes that have lived along the side of the house for decades. And so on, and so on. Each little task — maybe an afternoon's work in and of itself — becomes part of a grand project in which the completion of each step is contingent upon something else entirely.

Having rented for the past decade, the joys of home ownership are new to both my wife and me. I don't recall ever having gutters, and if we did, we certainly weren't responsible for cleaning them. The white walls of all our apartments stayed that way because we didn't want any beef with the landlord about color choice before moving out. Leaky showers were the domain of the Hausmeister, not us. There was no lawn to have to edge and mow and wrest back from the dandelions.

Owning a home isn't the only thing that's new for us. The city is too. We've had to find our way around and figure out who to ask to get what, where to get it, and how to get there. What's the best place to go grocery shopping? Where do you get your license renewed and your vehicle — also a novelty to us longtime users of public transportation — registered? Who's the most recommended doctor in town, and how do you navigate the one-way streets to get there? Yet again, the simplest tasks end up involving an hour of planning.

On top of all that, there were and still are loose ends in Germany to be tied up. Money was coming out of our account for things we'd closed and canceled months ago. And the folks who owed us — namely, our landlord — didn't show the same keenness to return our money as they did to receive it. Try sorting out those issues over the phone when the time difference handily puts their opening hours between midnight and 7am.

But even though there was no activity to speak of here, I didn't fall completely silent. My first article (on, as coincidence would have it, a band who'd been in Germany for the past two years) for The Pacific Northwest Inlander, or Inlander for short, was published and posted last week, with more to follow shortly. And my new pet project, the Spokane Books Blog, has garnered a bit of local attention, if not exactly a throng of groupies.

All this tumult is part and parcel of the settling process. Which means that, as chaotic as everything is now, it's all a necessary and inevitable means to an end — the end being a time when I'm not overwhelmed by the list of things that need a fresh coat of paint, when I'm not spending what little remains of my precious free time chasing prospective local clients for a nibble of work, when we're not stepping over and around the lingering boxes that hold items for which we still haven't quite found the right spot, and when the luxury of blogging returns to being one element of my larger routine. Just don't ask for even the roughest of estimates on when that time will come.

Westward, Ho!

2010-04-18T12:14:00.002-07:00

WE SET out from New Jersey on Friday. Since then a number of colorful ways to describe that state have sprung to mind, none of them especially complimentary. In the interest of maintaining an open mind, if anyone can think of any of New Jersey's redeeming qualities — other than that one outstanding pizza place in Jersey City, the name of which I've forgotten — please get in touch and I'll list legitimate ones below:

A Comprehensive List of New Jersey's Redeeming Qualities:

That one outstanding pizza place in Jersey City

Then Connecticut via New York State. A slight detour from our usual route to the Granite State, because trucks, even rental ones like the one we were driving, are forbidden past exit 105 on the Garden State Parkway: over the noisy, congested George Washington Bridge, where we were slapped with a $32 toll for passage. In the end it cost us $100 in similar tolls and gas to get out of New Jersey. Clearly people are willing to pay for the privilege.

In Connecticut, an odd affair. Selectively loading my late grandparents' furniture, and in doing so moving objects that had been fixed points in my mental universe from my earliest memories. The heavy sofa bed with the vertigo-inducing pattern of its upholstery — my grandmother and their dog often occupying opposite ends — that occupied a permanent place along the wall of their living room, the chair by the window in which my grandfather routinely sat solving crossword puzzles and reading crime novels, the polished red wooden bed that they shared for decades: these things have now been uprooted, transplanted, and the soil that they once held firmly in place begins to shift, slide, erode. The present crumbles along with it into the surreal ghostliness of the past.

Fully packed and loaded, our first overnight stop on the westward journey would be Ohio, as it turned out. More specifically, Newton Falls. We ate a cheeseburger and meatloaf at the Kountry Kupboard (I can't for the life of me explain why these cutely misspelled naming conventions are so common in the US) truck stop at the Center of the World, which serves as a nice metaphor for all of America's gimmicky grandiosity. The waitress called us "hon." What'll it be, hon? Anything else, hon? Here's hoping that particular casual custom never dies out entirely.

"Restaurant," Newton Falls, OH

I-80 is a toll road in Ohio. And so it is — even in its dual life as I-90 — in Indiana and Illinois. Each one of our four axles mirrored dollar signs in the toll booth attendants' eyes. By that point, one-third of the way into the overall trek, we were averaging one tank of gas (at around sixty dollars a pop) every two hundred miles. The mounting costs offset the minor thrill of being on the open road. The cost of fuel for the entire trip would, incidentally, end up totaling more than $900.

The second layover, having gained an hour in Indiana that in turn gave us an extra hour on the road, was in Wisconsin Dells, WI. We could hear the sounds of the highway — the steady hum of trucks barreling along — through the night. Around 5am or thereabouts the walls of our hotel room began to vibrate in time with a deep rumble. Must be an earthquake, I thought, still half-dreaming. It went on for several minutes. Then came the lonely honk of a train horn.

Before heading out, we stopped for some famed Wisconsin cheddar in a hangar-like grocery store that took pride in underscoring its employee ownership. Then on into dry, hot, blustery Minnesota. The lasting impression it left was twofold: a flat, dull landscape and the smell of cow manure. I know from past experience that Minneapolis is an exciting, vibrant city, and that other areas of the state are quite pretty; but on this trip, the Land of 10,000 Lakes left me bored and tired. South Dakota was the same, except for the fact that the smell of cow manure was a bit more intense. At least the never-ending parade of billboards for tourist attractions kept us amused.

After the storm (color), Murdo, SD

Speaking of tourist attractions: Wall, SD, home to Wall Drug, was our third stop. Wall is a quiet town whose ambient noise is the whoosh and groan of I-90. The owner of the Sunshine Inn was uncommonly polite and eager to help; in just ten hours, about eight of which we spent sleeping, he seemed to acquire the familiarity of an old friend. After our short post-breakfast walk down to Wall Drug for some watery 5-cent coffee, he sprang out of the motel office, as if he were afraid we'd leave without saying goodbye, and gave us an up-to-the-minute weather report for the mountain passes in Montana along I-90. They'd had heavy, impassable snowfall the previous day, a storm we'd experienced as heavy rainfall and jagged bolts of lightning on the horizon just outside of Murdo, where every restaurant was closed for the season except one with a dingy salad bar, watery soup, a weary waitress, and burnt buffalo burgers.

Underway by 8am, which had by then established itself as our habitual departure time. Strong headwinds into Wyoming and Montana made for depressing driving; eight miles to the gallon would be a generous estimate. The surrounding landscape was the most scenic on our journey: dramatic mountain peaks and undulating hills with grazing livestock and lingering patches of snow. These are some of the reasons why the American west holds such a special allure for us. What better way to live than by spending every day in awe of such natural beauty?

I-90, Wyoming

Later, another lackluster dinner in beautiful Bozeman, home to Montana University and a higher than average number of faded Bush/Cheney bumper stickers. Ah, right, I remembered, Sarah Palin was once rumored to be eyeing some land around here, and sure enough, she had a cameo on Butte's local evening news, where a clip was played of her saying empty, contradictory, incendiary things to people who share the qualities of her rhetoric. Shame that such a gorgeous state has to be marred by the absurdity of its prevailing political mindset.

At last, the fifth and final day. Breathtaking mountain passes between the Sapphire Mountains and the Rockies led the way out of Montana and into Idaho. The panhandle, though only about 75 miles across, brought us through forested mountain passes before us dropping down along the beautiful Lake Coeur d'Alene and into the traffic on I-90 that cuts through Spokane. And this is where the real work begins: cleaning, painting, unpacking, installing, settling. Already the five days spent covering 2,600+ miles in a rental truck with a car trailer in tow have come to seem like a luxury.

Hopes May Die on the Grasmere

2010-03-29T06:02:00.001-07:00

IT HAD been nearly three years to the day since our last proper vacation. A time before children (actually, our eldest was with us at that time but still in utero). Before the chaos of a transatlantic move. Back when we could contentedly laze away entire weekends watching Doctor Who and didn't have to worry about sticking to a strict mealtime and sleep schedule. The point is, we needed a break.

Children in the care of their grandparents, we headed off to the Lake District. Ambleside, to be exact, because it was close to Grasmere but wasn't as expensive. We'd booked two nights before our arrival — with ambient views of wall-to-wall sheep all the way from Yorkshire to Cumbria — at Elder Grove B&B, which, as it would turn out, would be our first choice for accommodation if we were to travel to the Lake District again. Free Wi-Fi, a comfy room, fantastic food, and friendly owners.

On the afternoon of the day of our arrival, we took the short, muddy walk to Stock Ghyll Force, a picturesque waterfall once harnessed by the town's mills to pound fabric, on the east of Ambleside. There and back with leisurely pauses to take pictures and enjoy the scenery takes about an hour. It's an easy hike from the center of town, something to save for the days when inclement weather looms — more the rule than the exception in the Lake District, as our two-and-a-half days there would prove. When I say "easy," however, I don't mean with a stroller filled with food shopping, which is how two bare-midriffed would-be ramblerettes decided to make the ascent.

For dinner we went to the Doi Intanon Thai restaurant, located in a renovated church at the foot of the road that leads to Stock Ghyll Force. Pricey and spicy. Even the items marked with a single chili (out of five) are enough to warrant a glass of milk on the side, and a single appetizer, two-special dinner with juice and aforementioned milk cost nearly £40. We'd been warned about the meager portions, but nothing could quite prepare us for the level of heat, especially after living in Germany, where "scharf" is what most would call "not bland." The place is popular nevertheless; there were no tables to be had by the time we left at 6pm or so.

That evening we took advantage of Ambleside's surprisingly varied cinema offerings and saw Alice in Wonderland in 3D. As I tweeted (which is all the film really merits) after the show, the visuals were stunning but the action took place at seven emotional removes. As far as these newfangled 3D experiences go, Avatar, which likewise only merited a tweet, was a much more solid film.

Day two — our first and only full day. We picked up the sack lunches we'd ordered from reception the night before and did a loop starting and ending at Rothay Park via Todd Crag (with views of Lake Windermere) on Loughrigg (pronounced luff-rig) Fell, Loughrigg Tarn, Loughrigg Terrace, and the Rydal Caves. It began to rain within 30 minutes of setting out and we were soaked before we'd even begun to cross the top of the fell. Fortunately, my K10D is weather resistant, else I'd have a non-functioning camera. Not that there was much to photograph. Visibility was virtually nil. While trying to peer over the outcroppings on Todd Crag to catch a glimpse of Windermere, I felt quite a bit like the figure in Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer, that iconic Romantic painting by Caspar David Friedrich. Only much, much wetter.

Around the point where we were supposed to take the bridleway toward Loughrigg Tarn, we relied on instinct — always a bad idea — to lead us there. We ended up walking within 100 yards of where our wet adventure first began at the foot of Loughrigg Fell. It cost us about an hour of sloshy backtracking.

Once on the right path, we swung around to Loughrigg Tarn and continued on the loop to the famed Loughrigg Terrace, which, given the right weather, offers excellent views of Grasmere and Rydal Water. We were not given the right weather. This sorry meteorological state began to change once we'd visited the off-limits caves above Rydal Water and were making our way back to Elder Grove. When we were finally back, stripped of our sodden clothes, and relishing the after-effects of a warm bath, the rain stopped, the clouds parted, and the sun came out.

View Lake District Getaway in a larger map

At this point, most people would shrug their shoulders, mumble something along the lines of c'est la vie, and continue their relaxation. Not us. Driven by a profound sense of injustice, we put on our only set of dry clothes and marched up to Todd Crag to get the views of Windermere that had been denied us earlier in the day. For the brief period that the weather held, we were rewarded with a wonderful vista.

That evening we ate at Spice of Bengal, just around the corner from Elder Grove. It's a peculiar little joint, staffed by a brusque waitress with a Russian accent and a melancholic Indian waiter who seemed to desperately want a reason to smile. It wasn't half bad. The Butter Chicken was nothing special, but the Lamb Tikka Garlic Masala would be enough to draw me back for a return visit. Reasonable prices too.

On our third and last day, we returned to Rydal Water and set out in the opposite direction of the previous day, moving clockwise along a crowded Loughrigg Terrace, around a virtually deserted Grasmere Lake, through the village of Grasmere (where we stocked up on Sarah Nelson's gingerbread and fudge), and past Dove Cottage, finally returning via our initial route on the banks of Rydal Water.

Our hopes of having any sun at all or decent views and dry hiking died on the Grasmere. As if the weather were on a 24-hour loop, we were hit with rain around 10:30am, not long after starting, and that rainfall was fairly constant until the point when we were ready to retire for the day in late afternoon. We attempted to dry out over fish and chips at the Walnut Fish Bar, which had been given a lukewarm recommendation as "pretty much bog standard fish and chips" by the barista at Esquires Coffee House across the way. We'd drop in there afterwards for coffee and a quick e-mail check courtesy of their free Wi-Fi. Both the coffee and the chai tea were excellent. Then a brief stop for the requisite photos of Bridge House. Soon we were on our way back along the A65 to the rural outskirts of Leeds.

To those contemplating a trip to the Lake District, a stay in Ambleside — and more specifically at Elder Grove — comes with my hearty recommendation. Grasmere would certainly make for a nice, quiet retreat, but it appears to lack even the subdued nightlife of its neighbor, where, as I mentioned, there's at least a full fare of cinema listings and a variety of restaurants for the post-hike evenings. The town also has quite a few open Wi-Fi hotspots throughout, which come in handy for those like myself who lack mobile data plans and are at any rate speedier. In addition to offering cheaper accommodation than Grasmere, it's also more centrally located in terms of walkability to the popular lakes. Ambleside seems to me to strike the perfect balance between the bucolic and the bustling, and that ought to mean that both families and couples can rely on it to provide whatever it is they're after.

The weather? Well, that's certainly much more fickle.

Some additional relevant (and potentially useful) links:

Presenting the Spokane Books Blog

2010-03-29T01:41:00.001-07:00

AS IF I don't already have enough to do (and a hard enough time getting it done), I've just started the Spokane Books Blog, which is everything and nothing more than the name suggests. And because no books-themed blog would be complete without a complementary Twitter and a Shelfari account, I've got those too.

Its primary purpose is to track what literature is coming out of the Inland Empire, who's writing it, and what residents of Spokane are reading. Besides the backs of cereal boxes, I mean. Although I'm quite satisfied so far with the blog layout, I've already failed at properly covering this year's Get Lit! festival, which will be taking place over the week (April 14 to 21) that we roll into Spokane and have to attempt to unpack and settle in; the best I can do is follow it from afar and encourage others to participate in what looks to be a pretty exciting festival.

So visit the Spokane Books Blog. Follow it on Twitter. And check out its Shelfari page. The more active the scene, the more I'll have to blog about.

June

2010-03-23T01:13:00.000-07:00

LAST night as I drifted off to sleep the image of a girl I once knew from my early childhood in Glen Gardner, NJ (we moved away when I was eight) suddenly and inexplicably appeared in my thoughts. Her name was June and she lived on a hilly road not too far from the Spruce Run Lutheran Church. She had sandy brown hair and freckles and a scratchy voice, and if I recall correctly (which I so often do not) a small scar on her lower lip. We may have played on a soccer team together, but I can't be sure; it's in trying to give it context that the particular memory I have begins to disintegrate like an antique photograph.

If you're out there, hi, June. I remember your eight-year-old self.

Limbo

2010-03-22T08:53:00.001-07:00

THE Ides of March of this year was a day we had long been wary of. It began, as I suppose all moving days do, early, and with little sense of tranquility. The air mattress we'd been using for a bed still needed to be collapsed and folded. The food we intended to eat was still lying out on the counter amid stacks of plates and saucers. The children, despite our best attempts at preparation, had no idea what was about to take place, and couldn't quite understand why this day wasn't as leisurely as any other. Partially packed boxes that still awaited the last perfectly shaped object(s) before being satisfyingly shut and sealed were scattered throughout the apartment.

The movers would arrive at 9am, and they would waste no time in dismantling, wrapping, taping, labeling, stacking, and ultimately packing every last one of our worldly possessions in a 20' shipping container parked on a flatbed just outside the building.

That night, after the frenzied rush to vacuum and mop the place (who could have known what monstrous, fanged dust bunnies the vanishing furniture would reveal?) before the vacuum was given away and the flat was inspected, we slept at a friend's house. The girls, exhausted, dropped off almost instantly. We ordered an Indian take-out that we would be too tired to finish — we'd be carrying around the uneaten pakoras like dazed vagrants until reaching airport security, who characteristically failed to find any humor in it, the following day — and gave ourselves to sleep, albeit hesitantly, knowing that only the 4:30am alarm could get us to the airport in time.

Since then we've been a diaspora of four, living in a sort of stateless limbo that is both a liberation and a bother. Three suitcases, no rent, no utilities, no meals to cook, helping hands with the children; and yet not at home, everything pending, with no proper address ("Well, you see," I explained to the confused concierge who wanted to make sure all the credit card details were on the up-and-up, "it's probably officially still billed to a Hamburg address, but we've just left there and haven't yet arrived at the US address, which is technically our current address, and so..."), and eager to begin that warmly gratifying process of settling into the new home and claiming it as our own.

This Zwischenzeit was unavoidable. Not that its mild inconveniences make it something worth avoiding; but still. The shipping container will be in transit for more than a month, making its way from Bremerhaven to Seattle via the Panama Canal. There were friends and family to see. Truth be told, with three years since our last vacation, my wife and I needed the opportunity for a break (which, starting tomorrow, we will get). And in some respects it's only an extension of our time in Germany, where more often than not we were regarded as misfits who could never quite get to grips with the German mentality, with all its inherent Schadenfreude and superciliousness and worship of certificates and Korrekt-ness, and therefore couldn't quite call the place home, even if we had desperately wanted to. Perhaps we've been in limbo longer than I realize, and I was only fooled into thinking otherwise by the lull of routine and the regular visits from the postman.

A Lone Tech Writer's Take on CeBIT 2010

2010-03-05T07:10:00.001-08:00

"CeBIT is the world's largest trade fair showcasing digital IT and telecommunications solutions for home and work environments." That's what it says on the trade fair's website, and publicity bumpf^[1] never, ever lies. Nor does it fib, bluff, prevaricate, or quibble.

Much like any trade fair from architecture to zookeeping, CeBIT has booths — some big, some small — that are manned by smiling people who are eager to tell you about their product lineup and pass on some of their brochures. Usually there's a crowd gathered around the cool, hip startup that's got enough fresh capital to give away free USB flash drives and have the place decked out in pulsing neon; nearby, across the aisle, the folks flogging a niche product like LOLcat-themed server racks watch forlornly from their quiet booths.

I hadn't been to CeBIT in recent years. Between 2002 and 2007, I was living too far away in England and Germany for the trip to be worthwhile. In 2008 I just plain forgot it was taking place. And in 2009, my second daughter was born on the day I'd planned to go. But all the way back in 2001, back when Super Audio CDs were the Next Big Thing (Sony totally called that one, just like they did with MiniDisc), I did make it to CeBIT as part of an agency-sponsored trip, and I came home with a nice goody bag full of brochures, keychains, and fridge magnets.

This year my aim was swag of a different variety, namely, business cards. Doing copy- and technical writing and translation for larger companies has been and continues to be rewarding, and their names certainly add to the prestige of a portfolio, but I was hoping to find smaller companies to work with, folks for whom I'm not just a name in a Rolodex passed on from the previous marketing director. Being taken for granted is, I think, one of the most disheartening things for creative types. So I went in search of those aforementioned niche hardware manufacturers and emerging companies who weren't already equipped with a full English-language marketing staff.

Reactions varied. Some exhibitors met my suggestions with a raised eyebrow, as if they couldn't imagine how their sign that read, "Fast IT solution you need now!" could be improved. But some — particularly those who were keen to break the American, Australian, or UK markets — were really open to the idea and seemed quite eager to have their English materials either written or proofed by a native speaker. To someone for whom gadgets are as much a hobby as they are a profession, the prospect of being able to see and write about what's happening at the forefront of IT (because the biggest names don't always necessarily have the cutting-edge technology) and in specialized solutions like surveillance was an exciting one.

It's far too early to gauge the success of my trip to Hannover, because most of the people with whom I spoke are still at CeBIT manning their exhibition booths. Their friendliness toward the pitch of a freelance tech writer could be the same friendliness they showed everyone who paused for a few seconds to learn about their company. But, if nothing else, it was an opportunity to chat with people that I wouldn't have had reason to chat with otherwise, and to get a cursory overview of some of the things that will be trending in the world of home and business tech in the coming year. And to think I never even made it beyond Halls 12 and 13.

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OS X's spellcheck is telling me that "bumpf" isn't a word. I wholeheartedly disagree. ↩

Some After-the-Fact Thoughts on Suite Française

2010-02-27T15:37:00.001-08:00

PERHAPS it was a false memory, but I was certain that I'd once read a review of Irène Némirovsky's Suite Française that laid out a convincing and damning argument for the alleged strain of anti-semitism that ran through her writing. But the magazine in which I thought I'd read it — Harper's — held only one review of the book in its flawed but mostly searchable online archives, and the author who I vaguely recalled as having written it — female, I think; Jennifer something? Jessica? — was nowhere near the byline.^[1]

And so I recently approached the book, many years after its appearance as something of a literary sensation, prejudiced by this influential phantom review. Before my eyes had even scanned the first paragraph, I'd long developed a dislike of the author, who, I was convinced, was nothing more than a toadying, resentful, opportunistic turncoat. I was prepared to come across loathsome Jewish characters of hers that perpetuated the nasty stereotype on which the Nazi propagandists capitalized during their feverish attempts to exterminate the one race of people that has done more than any other to raise humanity out of its crude barbarism.

But over the course of the novel's 350 pages I found nothing that I was expecting to find. In fact, in the opening movement, "Storm in June," all the characters are equally base and contemptible in their author's eyes, and none of them, so far as I could tell, was explicitly Jewish. The second movement, "Dolce," views, as the name suggests, its principal characters through a somewhat softer and more forgiving lens; and again, none was painted with the broad brush of the Jewish stereotype. While one could argue that it is the conspicuous absence of Jews and their treatment during German occupation that makes Suite Française suspect, the only real piece of evidence to support these half-recalled accusations of anti-semitism were relegated to the appendix, in which Némirovsky's doomed husband, Michael Epstein, in a desperate and ultimately futile bid to free her from the concentration camp, writes to the German ambassador Otto Abetz:

In none of her books (which moreover have not been banned by the occupying authorities) will you find a single word against Germany and, even though my wife is of Jewish descent, she does not speak of the Jews with any affection whatsoever in her works. [... I]t seems to me both unjust and illogical that the Germans should imprison a woman who, despite being of Jewish descent, has no sympathy whatsoever — all her books prove this — either for Judaism or the Bolshevik regime.

Under similar circumstances, I have to say that I would be just as quick to dissociate myself from my Presbyterian upbringing and Italian ancestry, both of which I regard as incidental details to my existence and neither of which am I particularly attached to as an essential piece of my identity. Few, I should hope, would label me anti-Presbyterian or anti-Italian on account of it. Why, then, when such a thing is written under duress on behalf of a non-practicing Jew (and later convert to Catholicism), would the action open itself to the charge of the subject's own anti-semitism? Or if I were to read Némirovsky's David Golder, purported to be rife with Shylock characters, would it all suddenly make sense? And would, say, an American author's use of negative caricatures of his compatriots in his writing therefore automatically make him anti-American?

The author's purported politics and antipathies aside, from a purely technical standpoint, Suite Française as a novel is rather good, though not much more than that. Némirovsky is a deft hand at the sneering aside that cuts through her characters' grandiosity and self-deception, but it has the unwelcome effect of making them so many pins to be knocked down. Although the author's merciless gaze throughout "Storm" was refreshingly honest in many respects, the complexities and ambivalence of "Dolce" made for better reading and more credible characters. In this regard, Suite Française was a victim of its hype as well as its controversy; very few novels could have measured up to the giddy welcome like the one it received upon its first English-language publication in 2004.

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An after-the-fact footnote to these after-the-fact thoughts: The article, I just discovered, was "Scandale Française" by Ruth Franklin in The New Republic. The article is no longer available on the magazine's website, though there are still traces of the feathers it ruffled. ↩

Facebook Login (Hey, Google, Over Here!)

2010-02-12T01:03:00.001-08:00

HAVE a look at this article on Facebook's evolving and increasingly ubiquitous OpenID-type login and then take a gander at the (fifteen pages of!) comments. What amazes me is how clearly the conversation is divided into two tiers — although I'm not entirely sure how many misspelled, CAPS LOCK-ridden pleas for access in the bottom one are legit or are simply rabble-rousing.

John Gruber has one Apple-related take on it. The other aspect to consider in this unintentional social experiment is how much more freely the angry, half-literate users will be able to offer themselves up for identity fraud or move through the lock-and-key barriers of the Web when Facebook's OpenID login becomes more ubiquitous. I'd like to think that the easier access will give them scores of opportunities for self-edification, but the cynic in me thinks that they'll just find it easier to leave confused, irate comments on articles they haven't bothered to read and understand.

"Spenden" heißt nicht "stehlen"

2010-02-08T14:40:00.000-08:00

IN PREPARATION for the transatlantic move, we put all our 240V electrical goods — Christmas lights, universal power supplies, plug adapters, power strips, surge protectors, telephone gear — in a box in front of our flat with a sign saying that it was there for the taking but that donations were welcome.

The shifty bastard on the fourth floor — the one who comes back late at night boorishly drunk with friends and wakes up our kids, the one who regularly watches movies at such a volume that we can hear the dialogue word for word two floors below — cherry-picked the best items and then scurried back to his flat ... though not without returning immediately thereafter to grab a second haul. Probably about fifty euros' worth of stuff when it was new.

He didn't leave a cent.

I'm growing more and more convinced that Germany doesn't want us to miss it. At all. Instead of Auf Wiedersehen, it would prefer our parting words to be, Gott sei dank, dass wir das los sind!

Cyberchondria

2010-02-07T06:50:00.001-08:00

I WAS catching up on old podcasts when I came across the November 13, 2009 episode of On the Media — this segment in particular (audio below) — in which a condition dubbed "cyberchondria" was discussed.

This has some personal significance because it touches on my own experience with being diagnosed with sarcoidosis last October. Confronted with a disease I'd never heard of (imagine me here collapsed to my knees, shaking my fists at the sky and railing, Charlton Heston-like in my anguish, "Where is my awareness month? Where? Where?!"),^[1] I naturally turned to Google to help me find more information. I came across forums and blogs where people discussed sarcoidosis, and more often than not, they related agonizing, emotional, hopeless stories of their lives with the disease. After an hour or two of reading harrowing personal tales in this vein, I became despondent, convinced that my organs were already in the early stages of a grim succession of inevitable collapse.

Seven months after the first symptoms appeared, I'm still alive. My lungs have not given out. I have not gone blind. As I write this, I still have tightness in my chest — it comes and goes, usually along with fatigue and swelling of lymph nodes — but there are no other significant symptoms. The optometrist has said that the granulomas have not spread to my eyes. The radiologist's X-rays show no increased inflammation in my lungs. The pulmonologist has wired me up, stuffed breathing tubes into my mouth, and put me through endurance tests on an exercycle, only to find that everything is functioning as well as or better than it ought to. My general feeling after each one of these appointments is one of mild relief.

That experience differs slightly from rigidly defined cyberchondria, which often begins with self-diagnosis. A pain in the side or, in the case of the reporter interviewed for OtM, a twitch in the eyelid. I had actually been to the doctor that very morning on the day my Internet trawling began, and that doctor had delivered his diagnosis in full confidence. So at that time I wasn't looking to match my perceived symptoms to the appropriate disease, a blind man choosing from a police lineup; I was imagining the already palpable symptoms of a valid disease in their most advanced stages, a morbid exercise in unbridled imagination. However, the feeling of despair that persists despite the accelerated heart rate is, I'd guess, similar to the one that cyberchondriacs feel when they connect the stiffness in their finger to the onset of gangrene.

This is the point where I might be expected to lament that I too was cyberchondria's dupe, to rage at the misleading preponderance of gloomy narratives on those forums, and to curse myself for allowing my vulnerability to cloud my skepticism. Or I might launch into an argument that cyberchondria is yet another media myth, dreamed up by some trend-spotting journalists to shame the gullible, and that nothing but good can come of the surfeit of health information that countless blogs and support forums make available (more often than not via Google) to the layman.

But it's neither of those. And both of them.

I'm grateful to those across the Internet who have recounted their sad experiences with sarcoidosis, because, though dire, they convey the varied and unmitigated potential of this disease. No sugar coating, no punches pulled. From them I know what kind of awful developments the future might hold; though it's mild now, there's no guarantee that sarcoidosis won't take those more menacing forms in my own body later on. And far from resenting OtM for suggesting that we're too irresponsible to handle this egalitarian deluge of unfiltered information, I'm glad to have heard that broadcast, however delayed, because it kept some of those runaway fears I had at the outset in check. Often we need to be shown the extremes in order to find our way to the balance at the center.

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Apparently there is a National Sarcoidosis Awareness Day, maybe in October, and there might even be a whole month devoted to it, which might possibly be in April, but no one seems to know for sure. ↩

The Tragically Hip

2010-02-04T04:24:00.005-08:00

"THAT'S the sort of thing that happens when a Guardian film writer, literary web editor and arts writer get together after hours over a bottle of red wine."

Oh, Dame Higgins, spare us your sophistication.

Not to mention that every suggestion is rubbish.

The 21st Century Digital Bibliophile

2010-01-31T05:27:00.005-08:00

THE Guardian was asking a few days back: Will you ditch print and read books on an Apple 'tablet'?

My answer to that, both before and after the much-hyped device debuted, is a conflicted one. I love the physicality of books. I have hundreds of them, purchased from bookshops all over the US and Europe, and each one bears the additional imprint of the shelf on which I found it: this one buried in a cramped corner of English Books in Hamburg, this one discovered among the lazing cats at Twice Sold Takes in Seattle, this one bought after a leisurely try-before-you-buy read at The Tattered Cover in Denver, these from a massive haul at the Hay Festival, and those from the narrow aisles of the now shuttered Avenue Victor Hugo Books in Boston. I love the sheer act of holding one while sitting in a chair or propped up against pillows in bed; I love the satisfying feeling of progress and propulsion when turning their pages. I even love the spatial relations jigsaw exercise of packing them in boxes when it comes time to move, as we're doing now.

But I'm also an unabashed technology geek. The amazing stuff that can be done with ones and zeroes excites me on the same visceral level as books. The fact that I can automatically log and review the songs I've listened to over the past week, synchronize reams of contact information from my desktop computer to a pocket-sized mobile device, instantly record my precise latitude and longitude and embed that information in photos (shot without any of the concerns and complications that accompany film), browse hundreds of retailers to find the best price and most informative customer reviews without leaving my chair, route calls from three different countries to a single landline at practically no cost, and tally the time spent on freelance projects to the minute and invoice clients accordingly without once touching paper ... these are things that delight me to no end. I love the accessibility that digital information offers. I love the lack of physical clutter. I love, as in the case of upgrades, clicking a button on my mouse and having one set of features suddenly improved and augmented. I love the efficiency, the simplicity, the sleekness, the vastness, the possibility of it all.

eBooks represent the vexed point of convergence of these two aspects of my personality. Books without the teetering piles and crammed shelves. Books you can easily search for the passage you scribbled down on a sheet of paper and promptly lost. Books you can cover with marginalia (searchable, synchronizable) without actually defacing them. Books that can travel almost anywhere with you — an entire library's worth if you like. Books not subject to the indignity and injustice of falling out of print because some publisher deems them unprofitable.

Here is Orhan Pamuk's Snow on my iPod Touch, where it sits alongside The Captive by Marcel Proust, E.M. Forster's Howard's End, The Theory of Moral Sentiments by Adam Smith, and about fifty other titles:

When I later began reading Edwin A. Abbott's How to Write Clearly, downloaded for free on the Stanza e-reader app, also free, it took little more than a click to tweet it from within the app and thus open the potential for discussion:

(It shouldn't be hard to see that this particular title is neither a popular nor a controversial one. But it's the potential I'm concerned with, not this isolated instance that arose more out of curiosity than a desire to strike up a conversation about Abbott's pedantry.)

I'm aware of the multiple drawbacks of eBooks. Digital media is actually more fickle and transient than print, especially when encumbered by DRM. eBooks need to be read on a device that requires power, which can be inconvenient or even impossible at times. Loaning a book to a friend, if such a thing is even permitted by the software and the legal restrictions, invariably requires logins and sign-ups. The physicality — the act of page-turning, the act of serendipitous discovery — is missing. eBooks have thus far been more about content than presentation, and even that all-important content gets shortchanged from time to time.

The iPad, though, for all its shortcomings (which aren't even close to the same shortcomings most fly-by-night pundits would have you believe), looks as if it approaches the sort of e-reading experience I've been waiting for: something that pays homage to the classic book-reading experience, with a traditional bookshelf view, a slick page-turning effect (á la Classics), and a functional design that feels right when held in your hands. A device that will let me comfortably read a full-color PDF version of the Times Literary Supplement each week, or Harper's each month, in a way that rivals their print counterparts. A platform that will open up literature to the integration of supplementary media that is unavailable in print — not just the integrated photos of W.G. Sebald, in other words, but also video and interactive elements. This is where my inner bibliophile and my inner technophile pop the cork and toast to the future.

As excited as I am about the arrival of the iPad and all it brings with it, to answer the question that the Guardian posed last week, no, I don't see myself ditching print entirely. I doubt I will part fully with print books during my lifetime. But, speaking only for myself, I can certainly foresee the iPad helping digital media to encroach on a domain that until last Wednesday belonged exclusively and unquestionably to print. I can see subscribing to an iPad-optimized (that optimization being key) daily newspaper such as the Guardian or the New York Times for a nominal fee. I can see buying a literary sensation or two — a Bolaño, a Littell — on the iBooks store, maybe even along with some favorites (Proust, Sebald, Nabokov, Barzun, Bellow) that I'd like to have with me at all times. I can see — and this is the bit that I find most enticing, because it's the point where searching and marginalia become most practical — requesting iBooks' ePub versions of books for review rather than print copies.

Until now no other device that I know of has made such a compelling case as to why any of these changes would present a significant advantage over more established methods. Which, I think, is as much a testament to the enduring singularity of print as it is to the ingenuity and potential of the iPad.

Is There Life After Journler?

2010-01-07T15:07:00.003-08:00

SINCE reading (admittedly rather belatedly) about the demise of Journler, the best darn journaling app for the Mac there ever was (except MacJournal back when it was freeware, but that's another story that would spoil categorical statements), I've been keeping an eye out for possible alternatives. Not because Journler's sudden move into abandonware rendered it instantly useless, but simply because I'm not confident that Journler will ever be picked up by another developer, and that in turn makes me less than keen to keep plugging entries into an app that will eventually stop working, or work in a partial or glitchy way, after a future OS upgrade. At least with apps still in development, there's a better chance that they'll make the full transition to OS X 10.7, aka "Stinky Ocelot," and beyond.

One of the features of Journler that I used to enjoy was its straight-to-blog posting. This enabled me to use the app as a multipurpose personal diary, highly subdivided catch-all note-taker, and blogging client for anything that I wanted to make public. This very useful feature was removed after my first donation, and I limped along for several years afterwards by composing my blog posts in Journler, then exporting them from there as an HTML document, then viewing the source in Safari, then copying and pasting that source into the Blogger Web editor. As far as workflows go, it probably ranked somewhere near the bottom in terms of pleasure and efficiency. But Journler was near perfect in every other way — Applescriptability, aesthetics, tags, options, iLife integration, etc. — so the whole blogging rigamarole seemed like a minor inconvenience.

With Journler's obsolescence looming, the luster has left a lot of those positive attributes. And the continued inability to blog from within the app is as good a reason as any to start hunting around for a new journaling app, something to occupy the special place in my Applications folder that Journler once did. The only criteria: in-app blog posting.

First, I gave SOHO Notes a try. I tried for more than an hour to set up my blog using all the help that turned up on various Google searches. There is no FAQ on the Chronos website that addresses this particular problem, and you have to register on their support forum to either ask a question or simply view other posters' questions. It costs $40 and the interface only lets you write in an awkward "page" or "note" view. More bells and whistles than I could use in a lifetime, all of which are turned on by default, including a persistent tab-type drawer that I discovered lurking at the corner of my screen and leapt out at me when I didn't want it to. Deleted.

Then I gave MacJournal a spin. Not bad looking overall, and about as cluttered or as minimal as you want it to be, but there are still some clunky icons left over from the freeware days (as is the delightful Taco feature, it's worth noting).

Although many aspects of MacJournal's UI are customizable, I found that much of it lacked the careful polish one expects from Mac apps: spacing on the journals sidebar was too tight, the "Entries" icon in the toolbar grew more and more separated from its text as I fine-tuned my preferred icons, and the entries sidebar wasted otherwise valuable column space when situated on the top in the three-pane view. Like Journler and SOHO Notes, MacJournal offers video and voice recording, but its visual implementation is downright awful. Trying to figure out how to create and then view a video note was a litany of UI no-no's, and when the pop-out movie window finally reappeared, the Quicktime control slider was cut off due to a buggy resize. Journler's AV note paradigm (and for that matter, SOHO Notes') is much slicker, as it shows those notes as both text links and clickable note attachments, and the recording process itself is far more intuitive. For example, the pre-recording window in Journler shows your mug as your iSight sees you; MacJournal just shows a black screen. "Is this thing on?"

MacJournal's Blogger integration was very good (it downloaded all my previous posts from this blog and imported them as entries, but it didn't preserve some formatting, like blockquotes) and the edit screen offered some basic HTML options. However, the blog configuration settings are found under the "Journal" heading in the file menu rather than in the preferences. Test posts worked okay, and the ability to keep the server-side posts in sync with the client-side posts is really handy, but it looks like adding photos or video to posts will involve the extra step of using the online Blogger editor — which is what I was trying to avoid in the first place. That certainly makes its in-app blogging less stupendous.

In terms of a Journler replacement, MacJournal remains a possibility. Yet for a paid app (normally $40, but the Mariner devs are generous with frequent 25 and even 40% off promos) with a long and rich history, it doesn't measure up to many of the features that Journler offered as donationware. I wouldn't migrate gladly, I'd do so reluctantly.

This post is being composed in MarsEdit, which marks my first experience with the app. Its blog integration is excellent; my fifty most recent posts were imported, formatting intact, in an attractive, refined UI reminiscent of an RSS reader like Vienna or NetNewsWire. The amount of customization permitted is just right. I absolutely love the different-colored HTML markup in the editing window and the supplementary live preview. The only problem is, MarsEdit isn't a journaling app. It's a blogging client. And, at $30, a pricey one at that.

At the end of my first foray into Journler replacement territory, I'm not left with a great deal of hope. In fact, it threatens to divide my personal writing workflow even further by splitting my note-taking/journaling and blogging between two separate apps: Journler (still) for the former, and MarsEdit for the latter. Journler might have been left for dead with no hope of rescue in sight, but it still offers the best mix of journaling tools and design relative to all the other apps in its category. And MarsEdit might be a staid and expensive one-trick pony, but it's awfully good at what it does. Although far from ideal, for now that division beats trying to simply make do with the quirks and shortcoming of the aforementioned candidates.

The Doctor, The Master, and the Jumped Shark

2009-12-27T04:10:00.005-08:00

RIGHT. So let me get this straight:

The Master somehow hid a piece of himself in a ring, which also somehow happened to fall off his mummified body as his corpse burned on a pyre, and this same ring was later discovered by one of his followers?

The Master was resurrected several years after his demise only through a bit of his wife's lipstick on a napkin? Does this mean, then, that she hasn't changed or washed off her lipstick in the interim? And wouldn't there be more subtle, foolproof ways to get that lipstick?

The Master can now, for no apparent reason, leap like a flea and shoot beams from his hands? Since we're making completely arbitrary enhancements and changes, why not also have him speak in an artificially high falsetto, just because it would be fun?

The Master's wife somehow suspected this plot to resurrect him and schemed from prison to foil it? Incidentally, her explanation of all this, delivered above the roar of swirling winds and foreboding music, ranks among Russell T. Davies worst dialogue:

"But no one knew you better than I did! I knew you'd come back! And all this time your disciples have prepared! But so have we! The secret Books of Saxon [eh? can you get these on Amazon?] spoke of the potions of life! And I was never that bright! But my family had contacts, people who were clever enough to calculate the opposite!"

The Doctor is somehow linked with Christian mythology, as evidenced by the TARDIS embedded in a church's stained-glass window?

Ordinary families in England are hanging on Barack Obama's every word and can't wait to watch his televised economic policies?

Every thirty seconds it's necessary to repeat that Donna must never remember her adventures with The Doctor, but The Master's sudden propensity for cannibalism and his flashes as a living X-ray are explained in a throwaway line about a half-finished resurrection something-or-other?

The prime minister, though apparently not one of his followers, somehow knew The Master was going to be resurrected?

Anybody and everybody who's got an ulterior motive needs to exchange exaggerated sideways glances with his co-conspirators and speak in grand, breathless pronouncements? Because, I guess, the viewing public is too stupid to guess the baddies or too weak to handle the shock of the surprise?

The worst James Bond is the emperor of the Time Lords?

Now Everybody's Me!

Look, I know this is a TV series about a guy who's more or less immortal and flies through time and space in a blue police box, but there's a difference between science fiction and the absurd. Part two of this finale had better tie up these loose ends and fill in all the plot holes, else this will go down as some of the most egregious shark-jumping in television history.

On the Passing of Time and the Lords Thereof

2009-12-26T11:54:00.003-08:00

AS 2009 draws to a close and I look back on more than a month of blogging silence (which smarts more than it ought to, as I vowed at the start of the year to be more diligent), more than anything else I'm left wondering where all the time went. If the speed with which Christmas approaches, arrives, and grows smaller in the mind's rearview is any kind of gauge of the rate at which the rest of the year passed, then 2009 positively flew. And if, in musing on the swiftness of time's arrow, I were to ask myself one of the rhetorical questions Marcus Aurelius posed in his Meditations, "Stop whatever you're doing for a moment and ask yourself: Am I afraid of death because I won't be able to do this anymore?" my instinctive follow-up would be: "Wait, what is it again that I've actually been doing?" All the chaos and hubbub that distracted me from the rapid advance of the calendar pages is just that: a blur of unidentifiable activity.

Regrets? I've had a few. As our impending departure date draws nearer, my intent was to write a series of posts chronicling my experiences with German culture, in particular the recent frustrations and disappointments that led to us setting a departure date in the first place. Those posts haven't materialized, obviously, though there is still a bit of time left. We'll see if the amount of time that remains is enough for me to make good on my intentions. My suspicion—without attempting to be more pessimistic than realistic—is no.

It might also have been a nice exercise to post daily individual reviews of Christmas films in the run-up to the holiday, as I've become quite a connoisseur of the genre over the years, and, given that I would be watching them anyway, doesn't involve setting much extra time aside. But that possibility only struck me belatedly. More precisely, on Christmas Eve. I wouldn't be the first to compile a list of this sort, but those lists don't often delve into much commentary and analysis; and besides, I wouldn't necessarily be aiming to shape my two cents into yet another vapid "best of" catalogue. At any rate, it's something to keep in mind for late 2010, particularly since we will, I hope, be watching said films on a screen larger than my iMac's, and my daughters will be of an age more conducive to gauging their reaction. I say "more conducive," but perhaps it's worth noting that this year the Abominable Snow Monster from the Rudolph the Red–Nosed Reindeer TV Christmas special scared the pants off my eldest, who's two and is otherwise fairly resilient. As a child I always found the sight of him a bit frightening, too, but never in a way that reduced me to tears, fingers plunged into my mouth, feverishly repeating, "Nahnahnahnahnahnah" while taking refuge behind the recliner. Even his eventual defanging and domestication couldn't assuage her.

Seasonal films aside, there have been so many I've wanted to see over the past year but haven't. The Cove, An Education, Man on Wire, Gomorrah, the last two being continued holdovers from 2008. I only got to Moon last night, Up a couple of weeks ago. Same goes for books. Ron Chernow's biography of John D. Rockefeller, Titan, has been propped up on the shelf next to me since August, back when I picked it up at the English bookstore. The box set of 2666, by now yesterday's news in literary circles, is on the bookshelf to my right, waiting for me to finish Suite Française, yesterday's yesterday's news in literary circles. I've had a book review of Imagining India, not to mention CD reviews of Art Tatum & Ben Webster's The Album and Red Garland's The 1956 Trio half-finished for months now. Why not just finish them, if only to get them out the door and off my mind? Vide supra.

That blur of unidentifiable activity, much of which has been directed toward getting ourselves out of Hamburg and over to Spokane, often seems disproportionate to the actual results. We keep saying among ourselves, "There will be more time/space/opportunity/whatever in the new house," yet I suspect that this, at least in part, is only teeth-gritting positive thinking, a consolation to make the current helter skelter seem worthwhile. Our move ought to bring with it many advantages, but the trash will still have to be taken out, meals will still have to be cooked, the place will still have to be dusted and vacuumed, appliances will still go on the fritz at the most inconvenient times, the kids will not instantly warm to the idea of taking their afternoon naps, laundry will still have to be folded, work will still take up quite a bit of time, I will not magically return to full health, and the day will not suddenly have forty-eight leisurely hours. The only way to solve the overarching problem would be to somehow move outside of time itself, but if the recently aired part one of the Doctor Who series finale, The End of Time, is any kind of indicator, such a place would entail bottom-of-the-barrel dialogue, condescendingly melodramatic acting, and hopelessly contrived plots that nevertheless leave you scratching your head. My one solace in all this is that the faster time goes in this world, the sooner Russell T. Davies will hand the reins of Doctor Who over to someone whose creative well hasn't run dry.

Outsourcing Opportunity

2009-11-19T14:19:00.003-08:00

IN A short piece called "The OS Opportunity," John Gruber emphasizes the importance of software over hardware in the contemporary computing experience, and wonders why more companies don't follow Apple's bundled OS/hardware lead.

I agree in principle with what you might call his "If you want a job done right..." idea. There are really only three OS choices: Mac OS, Windows, and Linux, all of which — even the myriad flavors of Linux — generally follow the aging files/folders GUI paradigm. Google's new Chrome OS and the Litl OS (much like the iPhone OS and Palm's Web OS) are reimagining that paradigm to some degree, but at the moment there still isn't a great deal of choice if you've moved beyond (or never quite caught up with) files, folders, and binary apps. If companies like Sony and Dell, two names Gruber mentions outright, were to create their own OS for their own hardware, we might see more competition, more innovation, more diversity, more tailor-made solutions, albeit not in that order, and not necessarily ordered in terms of importance.

At least, that's how it would work in theory. But such a state of affairs simply would not be worthwhile given the overwhelming levels of incompetence and inefficiency that are endemic among some of these companies. Canon, a company that specializes exclusively in imaging equipment, can't even put together a decent package of scanning software and printer drivers. Their supplementary software for my all-in-one requires five — no, that's no exaggeration — separate installs, most of which demand full system reboots, and looks and behaves like it was coded by the third-graders at the local elementary. Can you imagine if a company like this suddenly got it into its head to design a full-blown OS?

The closest example I can think of along narrower lines would be Sony's PlayStation, but even that GUI, however slick-looking and easy to use, pales in comparison to the sort of giant undertaking that an entire OS would involve.

The reason Apple's integration of hardware and software does work is because Apple is a different kind of company. It certainly has its faults, but a lack of a unifying vision and a tendency to be satisfied with the second-rate are not among them. I find it hard to imagine a computer OS/hardware combo coming from any company other than Apple (or a feisty start-up like Litl) that wouldn't be slapdash and awkward and laughable. As Gruber says, these other companies, the would-be competitors, are too busy dying, but why exactly are they dying? They're dying because they are beset with cumbersome bureaucracy, riddled with mediocrity, and consumed only by dull accountants' dreams of market share. Even if they wanted to — and I'm sure there must be a lone visionary or two within their walls calling for the very sort of thing Gruber is advocating — they'd just never be able to pull it off. Not in their present states, at any rate, and not the way I see them stumbling forward into the near future. Outsourcing their OS is the best they can do; and what's worse, they know it.

MacHeist and the Long-Awaited Dream Bundle

2009-11-07T12:36:00.012-08:00

FOR the next couple of days, MacHeist is giving away $154 in software for free as part of its "nanoBundle" promotion. All you have to do is establish a user account.

Before the sign-up process is complete, a pop-up appears to ask whether or not you'd be willing to pay for the six apps on offer and, if so, how much. As I already own the one application I'd be interested in, I responded that, no, I still wouldn't pay for them. Unfortunately, I wasn't given any space on the form to explain why that answer didn't make me a dirty cheapskate.

Since no one asked, I thought I'd slap together a dream bundle, the sort of thing I'd like to see in the future and would buy at the usual bundle-type discount without a moment's hesitation. Some of these (the ones above the divide) are apps I already own and find to be utterly indispensable. The others I have used in the past and/or would really, really like to own, though I have yet to spot them at a reasonable price. Keep in mind, too, that there are excellent apps like Little Snitch and LaunchBar; or MailTags and Mail Act-on; or Twitterific, CandyBar, and Transmit, that are created by the same developer. As much as I would like to see them all in the same bundle, I've tried to avoid double developer entries.

Parallels / VMware Fusion

----------------------

Bento

BusyCal

DiskWarrior

iRatchet (aka MacFreelance)

MacJournal

Stationery Pack

Toast

Tweetie (registered version)

Unison (given Fetch and not Transmit above)

Yep

No, no games. And no word processors. And no image editors. That breaks with the usual bundle assortment, I know, but once you're the proud owner of — to pull from the latter category by way of example — Graphic Converter, Pixelmator, and Acorn, all from different bundles, it actually dampens the appeal of new bundles that include them. Yet another 1Password license, on the other hand, is something that I can easily gift to anyone who owns a Mac.

What would you like to see? What would the above bundle be worth to you? Is there a bundle logic that I'm not quite following? And is anyone from MacHeist even listening?

A Tour of Hamburg's Burchardkai

2009-11-05T12:40:00.007-08:00

ONE of Hamburg's most renowned and distinctive features is its port. On most days you can see immense container ships cautiously navigating the Elbe, often with the help of a tugboat that seems diminutive in comparison, and when they dock the giant gantry cranes swing into action. Even the largest ships can be fully divested of their cargo, as infinite as the occupants of a clown car, in a matter of hours. The port itself rarely sleeps. It's a 24-hour operation with only a handful of holidays per year.

Recently the teaching company I work for began providing English training to select groups of the longshoremen who work along the port. Although going into the lessons I had no idea what form and direction the actual classes might take, the participants have so far shown a surprisingly good command of English as well as an eagerness to make the courses worth their while. Maybe that's why, having sensed that I'd only culled from books the technical English that I was passing on to them, they invited me to what turned out to be a very hands-on tour of the famous Burchardkai on the southern shore of the Elbe.

It was a cold, foggy evening punctuated by rain showers, and my self-appointed guides emphasized that winter work under similar conditions could be brutal, since they had to make mechanical repairs without gloves to retain a modicum of dexterity when dealing with small parts on the gusty, frozen catwalks, and that the work was much better in the summer, even though the temperature in the cranes' electrical rooms can reach 50°C/120°F on the hottest days. We sped across the HHLA complex in an orange van that wore a spinning warning light: first to see a ship being offloaded, then among the stored containers where the long-legged van carriers slipped in and out like dystopian devices out of Blade Runner, then on to a row of unoccupied gantry cranes.

The cramped, slow-moving elevator took us up to a height of around 50 meters (164 feet), and we disembarked into the cabin, which offered a clear view — straight down — of the spreader (the extendable grip that lowers and hoists the containers) dangling above the river. After the pros made a few test runs to clear the water from the cabin's path along the crane's arm, I was put in the captain's chair and invited to drive the thing myself. Which I did. With great care and deliberation. In a way, the most unsettling thing was the realization that these countless tons of metal and cable could be controlled with virtually the same equipment I once used to play Kung-Fu Master on my Commodore 128.

I wasn't too worried about accelerating so quickly that we went rocketing off the arm and into the Elbe (there are multiple buffers to prevent such a thing, and besides, I made extra sure that they were really, really sure it couldn't happen), but I did wince at the recurring thought that I might raise or lower the spreader too quickly, resulting in whatever insane amount of damage that might cause. For the longshoremen, working at that height and with that massive bulk of equipment was as natural as breathing; they were completely at home in a world where everything is of grossly exaggerated proportions: weight, size, temperature, height.

The last leg of the tour took us to the workshop, where we warmed up and saw some of these Brobdingnagian objects divorced from their equally gigantic surroundings. The spreaders, for example, appeared slightly less imposing on their repair pallets. That still didn't completely alleviate the feeling that I was a dwarf lost on the set of an epic sci-fi movie.

Although they still might not convey the true (or apparent) scale of things, my Flickr page has some photos in addition to the ones shown in this post.

The 7 is for "7 Years too Late"

2009-10-19T13:05:00.011-07:00

A GREAT piece on Microsoft's slide into irrelevance by Fake Steve Jobs, the essence of which is this battery of rhetorical questions:

How did all these billions of dollars slip through Ballmer's fingers? How did Microsoft find itself a leader in nothing and playing catch-up on every front -- in MP3 players, on the cloud, in search. How did Amazon roll out S3 and not Microsoft? How did Google control the search market? How did Apple take over online music retailing and MP3 hardware? How did Microsoft let that market for smartphones get away from them? How is it that everything about Microsoft's business is backward looking?

Sure, Windows 7 is coming out soon. [Cue musical fanfare and cut to vox pops.] After eight years (almost to the day), that'll finally bring Windows users to a level that kinda sorts approaches what's already been available on OS X for quite some time. And then in another two years, as their OS development cycle brings another system upgrade, Apple will once again extend its lead even further. When it comes to checking my calendar for key technology-related dates, the release of Ubuntu's "Karmic Koala" on October 29 holds much more excitement. Windows 7 is merely Microsoft's attempt to recover after fumbling Vista; Ubuntu, however, is making Linux into a viable OS alternative for the mainstream user.

It's also worth reading this New York Times profile, which, as FSJ points out in a follow-up post, dances the dance of feigned deference while trying to get a simple message across: that Microsoft is a lumbering, outdated behemoth.

Calling on the Internet to Do What It Does Best

2009-10-19T10:52:00.010-07:00

MY ELDEST daughter is now at the age where she points to everything, even things she recognizes, or even if it happens to be a vague object off in the distance that only she can see, and asks, "What's that? What's that called?"

She's posed this line of questioning several times with regards to a particular bush that we regularly pass on the way to the park. With both of us unable to give her a satisfactory answer, she's taken it upon herself to name it "yellow fruits."

So, with the aid of the above photos, I'm calling on the collective power of the Internet to help identify this bush, which in late summer began to produce yellow, sometimes orangey, speckled apple-sized fruits, grows about waist-high at its peak (though it appears to have been pruned, as it forms a decorative perimeter to a grassy lot), and is fairly unremarkable as far as its green, rounded, slightly ridged leaves are concerned.

Doing this the usual way, that is, by Googling for "yellow apple-sized fruit" turns up a lot of searches about yellow apples, but otherwise hasn't been very helpful so far. I'm hoping the crowdsourcing/social media method turns up some results.

Please leave any and all useful suggestions in the comments, and thanks in advance.

[UPDATE: We think we may have a winner: the Japanese Quince, aka Chaenomeles.]

Like Punching Pillows Underwater

2009-10-15T11:48:00.004-07:00

WELL, color me impressed. I'm left reeling by a combination of the power of social media (particularly since I've been guilty of calling Twitter's utility into question) and the fact that someone from Creative actively sought me out to rectify things.

Less than an hour ago, as California was just rubbing the sleep from its eyes and my "Simple Solutions to Creative Problems" blog post detailing my customer service saga had been live for under twelve hours, Creative's social media rep contacted me via IM. The conversation started like this:

Hi there, are you online? This is Tawnee from Creative.

I just caught wind of your blog, I'm so sorry to hear about your experience. I was exhausted just reading what all you had to go through

I'm thankful you wrote the blog though, as it gives me a better insight to what our support process is like. I run social media here at Creative-- so luckily, you were able to find help through this outlet.

And then she offered me a superior set of Creative speakers as a means of compensation and replacement.

This level of concern and generosity was wholly unexpected, and, quite frankly, has completely changed my disposition towards the company. Amazing how a gesture like that works. Yesterday evening I'd sworn off anything with the Creative logo; this evening they're at the top of brands I'd consider again when making this sort of purchase in the future. Yes, you could rain on the parade by arguing that their overture was nothing more than a cynical attempt to make a public restitution for a public problem, but that's almost beside the point. I don't think any company truly delights in appeasing unhappy customers. The important thing is that I don't feel that I've wasted money and time, and I genuinely feel like I was listened to, that someone heard my frustration and dissatisfaction and took them seriously.

The most maddening, demoralizing part of any customer service runaround is that you're left feeling like you have no voice, no efficacy, no leverage other than your own sense of indignation. It's like you're punching pillows underwater. Thanks to Tawnee, I don't feel that way now towards Creative. I'm no longer a faceless consumer to them; someone there knows my name. And raising every consumer out of that hopeless anonymity ought to be the incontrovertible aim of all customer service.

Simple Solutions to Creative Problems

2009-10-15T03:01:00.013-07:00

MY RUN-ins with awful customer service are nothing new.

But they seem to be happening with increasing frequency of late; one such recent off-putting experience was with Creative.

It goes like this. About six months ago I bought a set of Creative I-Trigue 3000 PC speakers. I'd spotted them on the desk of a friend. They had a nice design, good sound, and were reasonably priced. Not a bad trifecta.

So I ordered a set from Amazon. The first unit arrived and didn't produce sound from the right channel. My first thought, as it ought to be, was that I'd incorrectly set up a system that by all accounts should be very easy to set up. I carefully re-plugged in all the wires, then did it again. Then I went online to see if, for some reason, my iMac wasn't capable of playing 5.1-channel sound, or if something needed to be adjusted in System Preferences. In the end I realized that the speakers themselves were defective and I got in touch with Creative.

Two days later, I finally got an e-mail response: Take it up with the retail outlet.

Amazon, despite some of their more glaring screw-ups, is a company that does understand the importance of customer service — no matter what you've bought, no matter which Amazon you go to (.de, .com., .ca, .co.uk, and so on). As soon as I lodged the complaint, they offered printable mailing labels with which to send the product back (at their expense), and they immediately sent out a replacement unit. That replacement promptly arrived within 48 hours.

The replacement system was and is not perfect. When I adjust the volume with the desktop knob, the sound fluctuates between VERY LOUD and then very soft AND THEN LOUD AGAIN before finally settling somewhere in my desired region. But it was tolerable, and I was beginning to suspect that tolerable was the best I was going to get from a Creative product.

No knob jokes here, folks. Move along.

After a few weeks had passed, we realized that we were going to be moving back to the States. And, of course, I thought it would be nice to take my new, tolerable PC speakers with me. But Creative, unlike almost every other electronics manufacturer on the planet, had skimped on their cinder block of a power supply. It wasn't dual voltage auto-switching; it was limited to 240V, and therefore only good in Europe.

Internet searches revealed that there was a 120V power supply for the US version of the I-Trigue 3000, so I sent this e-mail to Creative USA in early June:

Dear Creative, I would like to purchase a Creative 12V/2.9A power supply for use in the US (120V). I believe the part number is MAG120290UA4. I'm currently using this Creative speaker system in Europe and the power supply (part number MAG120290TH4) is only for 240V outlets. When I move to the States in late 2009, I'd rather not have to purchase a whole new PC speaker system. Can you please tell me how best to go about this? Thanks in advance for your help.

And I received this reply:

Thank you for contacting Creative Labs. You may order a new 12V 2.9 A power adapter for $11.99, plus shipping and sales tax by calling us at 1-800-998-1000. Someone is available to assist you Monday - Friday, 9am to 6pm central time.

Best Regards,
Flaxn (15745)

Simple and efficient, no? All I had to do was call a toll-free number and pay a nominal price to have working speakers in the US. Thanks, Flaxn (15745)!

As I was preoccupied with the process of actually buying the house we'd be moving to, I put off calling for the time being. In September, though, I was ready to order and called the 800 number.

That phone number, however, was no longer a proper customer service line. It simply redirected me to the Web. Here is the actual message, which loops indefinitely, in its entirety:

Hello, and thank you for calling Creative Labs. For product information, technical assistance, or to place an order, please visit us on the Web at www.creative.com. That's www.creative.com.

In less than ninety days, the company had decided to shift every aspect of its customer service to the Internet. That might not have been such a bad thing if I weren't ordering an out-of-the-ordinary part. But for something like sourcing a replacement power supply, their website is absolutely useless.

So I Googled. I trudged through web page after web page. And I finally came across a Creative technical support number that led me to a real, live human being. The customer service rep on the other end, after hearing a story that was now growing longer and more irritatingly convoluted, told me that he couldn't help me and that Creative USA was now handling all its orders through Amazon.

That's right. The guy at Creative technical support told me to take up a manufacturer-specific problem with Amazon. And to indicate that he was indeed conclusively passing the buck and sending me on my way, he gave me the generic 1-800 customer support number for Amazon. How I longed for the polite, informative helpfulness of Flaxn (15745).

Thus began a continued hunt for this cursed power supply and series of e-mail exchanges with a rotating cast of customer support reps: Zhao Yu, Xu Xin, Xiao Li, although not necessarily in that order. I was forced to repeatedly restate my business before, in response to the exasperated e-mail that follows, I got something that indicated a human mind had actually taken the fifteen seconds necessary to process and comprehend my query:

Dear Xiao, Xiu, and any other customer service rep I will be passed on to,

I am well aware that this item is not available for sale in your US store or through your authorized retailers. Last night I spent more than two hours on the Web and the telephone trying to locate it through one of Creative's formal sales channels.

What I was hoping was that you might find a spare MAG120290UA4 power supply in one of your warehouses (surely there has to be an extra lying around somewhere?) and then sell it to me or, as a gesture of goodwill, ship it to me if it is no longer officially for sale.

The hoops I've had to jump through so far just to get a straight, human, personal answer to this inquiry have left me with a very negative feeling toward Creative, and at the moment I'm not terribly inclined to buy another Creative product in the future.

Please let me know if you can locate a MAG120290UA4 power supply for purchase or as a complimentary replacement.

The final, definitive response had this to say:

With regards to your enquiry, I am very sorry but unfortunately, we do not have replacement parts for the power adapter of the Speaker System. However, if your product is still within warranty, you can send it in for RMA, If your product is already out of warranty, I am afraid that you will not be able to purchase the replacement parts. I apologize for any inconvenience caused.

Which, I have to be honest, still doesn't make a lot of sense. There are power supplies in stock for official RMAs but not for purchase separately? And is the hassle and expense of me sending back a tolerable speaker system as an RMA really better than the alternative, that is, just mailing me the power supply directly?

At the end of every e-mail response from Creative was the text: "To provide feedback on your 'Creative Experience' please click on the following link." Believe me, I tried to provide feedback as many times as I was given the opportunity. But the link, wouldn't you know, was inaccessible for the entire duration of our correspondence. Now, ten days later, I've noticed that it's working again.

This farce gets an extension of sorts with a steam-venting tweet of mine from yesterday, which prompted the following reply from @CreativeLabs:

@nostartnoend I'm sorry you feel that way about us. Is there anything I can do to help?

To which my own response is: Yes, Creative, there is. On a personal level, find some way to get me a 120V power adapter for my I-Trigue 3000. (I'm still willing to pay the twelve bucks for it, and I'll continue to quietly put up with the fact that the volume knob is dodgy.) On a more general level, rethink your approach to customer service. Your first commitment should be to top-quality products, so that customers don't end up with multiple defective units. And your second commitment, almost on a par with the first in terms of importance, should be to provide first-rate support when those products don't work as expected.

The more barriers you erect between Creative and its customers, the more you try to replace considered responses with blanket autoreplies, the more responsibility you slough off to third parties like Amazon, the more you will simply piss people off. The sour experience will drive them away from Creative, and it will negatively influence potential customers as well. This is not rocket science, and yet it seems like the first cost-cutting measures most companies try to implement, like hacking away at their customer service infrastructure, are the ones that are clearly the most counterproductive.

To put that all in some kind of nutshell: deferential, face-saving replies on Twitter are simply no substitute for Flaxn (15745).

[UPDATE: When you're done reading this, please refer to my follow-up post to see how the situation was ultimately resolved.]

Young Republicans

2009-10-05T05:30:00.002-07:00

"[T]HE modern conservative movement, which dominates the modern Republican Party, has the emotional maturity of a bratty 13-year-old."

I'm surprised that it took Paul Krugman, normally a pretty astute observer of this sort of thing, so long to come to that conclusion. But at least someone besides the Daily Kos is drawing attention to the hypocrisy of this particularly vile strain of Republican thought and behavior. Patriotism, as Johnson's oft-quoted saying has it, is indeed the last refuge of the scoundrel, though one might want to make a further pedantic distinction between patriotism and nationalism; and this juvenile glee over Chicago's thwarted 2016 Olympic bid proves that love of country is not quite so close to the heart of Republican sentiment as they might like us to think. Their complaints of liberals who ambush and then duck for cover behind political correctness (and here I would say, no, President Carter, racism was not behind Joe Wilson's outburst; it was crass, misguided populism) will lack much substance until "I love America" stops being bandied about as though it were a Get Out of Jail Free card.

Diagnosis: Sarcoidosis

2009-10-02T23:51:00.003-07:00

TWO days ago, after two months of on-and-off visits to the doctor, I was diagnosed with sarcoidosis.

I wrestled for some time with the idea of turning something so private into a public announcement, but I thought there was nothing much to gain by keeping it to myself. I'll admit that I'm loath to be even loosely associated with today's hyperconfessional culture, where deeply personal matters are cheapened into Facebook status updates. However, my reluctance to add my own voice to that shameless free-for-all was countered by the importance of raising awareness of a disease that, until yesterday, I personally never even knew existed (it was one of those rare instances where I learned the German word—Sarkoidose, for the record—before its English equivalent) and the fact that other newly diagnosed sarcoidosis sufferers might stumble across this post in the future and perhaps end up feeling less frail and vulnerable than I did. Loneliness and futility are the last emotions anyone wants to grapple with after being diagnosed with a potentially fatal illness.

There are plenty of online resources about sarcoidosis, so there's no great need for me to re-describe the disease in any detail here. The Wikipedia entry, as always, is a good place to start, followed by the Sarcoidosis Research Foundation, the Cleveland Clinic page on the disease, this page on potential Chinese and Western remedies, the SILA support forums, and finally this UK page to restore a tiny bit of optimism to the proceedings. What it boils down to (and please excuse any minor errors that stem from my crash course on the subject) is an adverse reaction of the immune system, particularly the lymph nodes, in which granulomas—that is, clumps of cells that ordinarily fight infection—coagulate and fail to dissolve. They collect and cause inflammation in sensitive organs and, ultimately, internal scarring. If the scarring is severe, the afflicted organs (e.g., lungs, heart, liver, eyes) are irreparably damaged and can fail.

My own experience: In mid-July of this year, I had two back-to-back booster shots (polio, tetanus, and measles; then hepatitis B). A few days later, for reasons that might or might not be related to those inoculations, my ankles became swollen, hot, and extremely sensitive to the touch. Not long after, my lower joints seized up arthritically. It reached a point where I felt as though I'd aged fifty years in as many hours; I could hardly stand when getting out of bed in the morning. By the time I made up my mind to see a doctor, who prescribed ibuprofen (which, incidentally, did work to reduce the swelling and almost crippling discomfort), the worst of the joint pain was over and a dry cough, the result of a tight-feeling airway and a tickling sensation in the throat, had set in.

Some days since then have been better than others. Occasionally I have had long coughing fits, but for the most part it has been mild. Persistent irritation more than anything else.

A series of blood tests in mid-August and again in late September revealed that I had continuously elevated levels of angiotensin-converting enzyme, or ACE (114; "normal" is about 40). While the last round of bloodwork was still being analyzed at the lab, I was sent to have chest X-rays, which, upon the scrutiny of a specialist, revealed swollen lymph nodes in the lungs. Combined with the radiologist's hunch that it might be sarcoidosis, the high ACE levels and previous joint problems—along with additional symptoms such as night sweats and fatigue—pointed almost unmistakably to that diagnosis. There is apparently still a slight possibility that it could be the cancerous Hodgkin's lymphoma, which has similar symptoms and has affected distant members of my family, but for now all signs seem to confirm the initial conclusion.

That pronouncement is something I've been mulling over with mixed feelings. To be sure, I now have a much clearer idea of what's afflicting me and what may come of it, but there was a certain bliss in the ignorance of its true name. With the doctor's utterance of one five-syllable word, Sar-ko-i-dos-e, an annoying cough has suddenly transformed into something serious, possibly debilitating, even deadly. The future that I had no problem envisioning at the beginning of the week has been pushed aside by one that is more uncertain, more ominous. I think of my wife and young children, of the house we've just bought, of a burgeoning freelance business, and I imagine what it will be like to try enjoying all of that in a diminished capacity. And, yes, those unhappy projections constrict my throat and sting my eyes.

There's the past to consider, too. Was that infrequent tightness in my chest some kind of indicator? And when did that even start? Three years ago? Four? Back then, was I on to something when I felt that my breathing had become more shallow, or was I simply noticing the inexorable process of aging? If they were indeed indicators, could I have used them to prevent the more serious symptoms, or would those indicators only have enabled me to identify the inevitable? And what of those inoculations in July? Would avoiding them also have avoided triggering this outbreak? Would it have been worth it, or would I have fallen prey to one of those illnesses instead?

It's incredibly tempting to take these questions, for which there will probably never be answers, and use them to construct an entirely fictional but satisfying narrative. Because I like stories with clear causes and effects. I like things to make sense, to have a logical flow that leads to a generally foreseeable outcome. The idea of my body spontaneously deciding to destroy itself does not fit in to that well-ordered scheme. Nor do the statistics. This is a disease that primarily affects women, North Europeans, and black Americans. So how did I end up squeezing my own sorry self into that slim remaining percentile? And does that mean I will join the equally marginal ranks of those for whom this disease is fatal?

To best combat a disease with no known cure, they say the most important weapon in one's limited arsenal is a positive attitude. To maintain one, I have to leave off this abortive questioning and those grim time-traveling exercises in which I see my children wanting to run in the park with their Daddy, who, for as long as they can recall, has never been able to do much of anything without becoming breathless and tired and grows visibly older and feebler every year. It's hard, though; this kind of mental activity, however counterproductive, is something my brain regards as almost recreational in nature, especially when the conceived world it became so comfortable with has been demolished. Quickly, assimilating this inconvenient influx of fresh data, it sets about creating a new one in which to operate. This is natural, I guess, and in time, as even the abnormal becomes normal, it will begin to subside. But that will not completely change the fact that I would prefer hard answers, that I would like the angels of the future to whisper my detailed fate into my ear, that I would like to assure my immediate family that all will undoubtedly be well. I know those things would elude me even in health, but the inherent precariousness of life seems so much more sinister when each day we awaken to a stark, needling reminder of our own mortality.

And so my mantra: Breathe deeply (lungs permitting). Chin up, chin up.

Toy Monster Review in the TLS

2009-09-09T04:28:00.004-07:00

THE latest (Sept 4) issue of the Times Literary Supplement just arrived in my mailbox, and in it is my review of Jerry Oppenheimer's Toy Monster: The big, bad world of Mattel.

Naturally, if the subject is of any interest to you, I'd recommend buying a copy of the TLS and reading the full review. But to put my take on it in a very compact nutshell, Toy Monster is a brisk, hyperbolic, muckraking, often infuriating read. Infuriating on account of Oppenheimer's sensationalist, self-indulgent style, not to mention the ego and gall and excess of some of the execs he profiles. The mixed reviews on Amazon.com (linked above) would suggest that readers' opinions of the book are determined by which of those two they dislike more.

Two Weeks with the DrayTek Vigor 2110Vn

2009-09-06T03:30:00.005-07:00

AS WE (and by "we" I mean to speak only for the members of our household) drift further and further away from analogue media and traditional hardware setups, the occasional upgrade becomes necessary to accommodate real-world use. To put a slightly finer point on it: now that we've all but done away with our TV by converting our DVDs to movie files for viewing on our computers and an iPod Touch, and we've jettisoned a conventional telephone landline for VoIP, we've experienced a growing need for faster local file transfers and improved call quality. And the only way that's possible is by bringing our hardware—in this case, our router—up to date.

A little more than a year ago, I bought a DrayTek Vigor 2910VG. Unlike many of the routers I'd seen on offer from more established vendors like Netgear, Linksys, D-Link, Belkin, and so on, the DrayTek brought powerful VoIP options and layer after layer of highly customizable security features to a WiFi-enabled broadband router. With the 2910, I could sign onto six SIP accounts and configure a dial plan (by which, for example, pressing *1 would dial Mr. X's landline, and *2 would dial his SIP account), in addition to having a local WiFi network with the usual SSID hiding, WPA/2 password, and MAC filtering, as well as a firewall that allowed me to block data by either IP or content. Furthermore, among so many other little bonuses such as automatic dynamic DNS updating and UPnP, the 2910 had a USB port for printer sharing, storage media (accessible via FTP), or 3G modem support.

In short, it was an advanced little router that, when you stacked up all its features, was also very price competitive. I would have had to buy and configure multiple devices to replicate what it offered in a single package.

Yet that isn't to say that the 2910VG was without problems. For months it wouldn't connect to my Intel-based Macs and I had to host my WiFi network on a supplementary D-Link router. (However, the Canon MP600R printer I own, besides being a finicky ink-gobbling money pit, was for some inexplicable reason wholly incompatible with the D-Link, so I had to turn on the 2910's WiFi network whenever I wanted to print something.) Sometimes the router dropped SIP registrations. The USB storage function, when it finally appeared, didn't play nicely with the built-in FTP support in OS X. I always had to use a dedicated FTP client like Fetch or Transmit. And the router's GUI, not to mention the user guide, was often unclear about the point or proper setup of some functions, as it had apparently been translated from Chinese to English by the same people committing these errors.

A lot of these flaws were either corrected or improved over time, thanks to DrayTek's responsive and patient support team. The last firmware released before I boxed up my 2910VG and set up a 2110Vn in its place was version 3.2.2.2, and it brought my router to a point where I was 99% thrilled with it. The 1% by which it fell short of complete satisfaction consisted of those aforementioned niggles.

The DrayTek Vigor 2110Vn, while ostensibly offering all the features of the 2910VG along with WiFi Draft-n v2.0 support (that is, significantly faster wireless speeds) and superior VoIP quality, has negated some of those advances and is in many ways reminiscent of my first encounter with the 2910. So much promise, in other words, yet so much disappointment.

Spot the white router against the white backdrop.

You could say that the situation is now the inverse of what it once was. The Intel-based Macs running Leopard and Snow Leopard connect beautifully, but my sturdy though long-in-the-tooth iBook G3, with an 802.11b card that seemed light years ahead back in 2001, no longer connects to the password-protected WLAN. When the password is removed, it does manage to hop on, which is just enough success to make its lack of full functionality doubly frustrating. And the Canon MP600R has decided, as with the D-Link, that it doesn't like the cut of this particular WiFi network's jib, either, so it refuses to connect to the WLAN in any form, even though it "sees" the network just fine. (An e-mail to Canon support yielded the usual autoreply followed by inaction. This, incidentally, is why we're going back to Epson next time.) The 2110Vn, unlike the 2910VG, features WPS, which might simplify things if any of these devices actually supported it.

Benson—my buddy at DrayTek support, because by now we're on a first-name basis—says that they currently have no 802.11b Apple devices to test the incompatibilities but will work on getting one.

One thing that I should mention is that the 2110Vn allows the operator to manually switch the WLAN on and off (and, come to think of it, WPS too) using respective buttons on the side. This will conserve a bit of power when all the wirelessly networked computers are shut down for the night, or, in a predominantly wired setup, makes it easy to connect the occasional wireless client.

The 2110Vn offers a few other advancements over the 2910VG, the most important of which (for me, anyway) is its Hardware Accelerator, which the company variously calls a Speed Booster. This is a handy way of ensuring that data-hungry applications using a predictable port or port range have their packets prioritized. A similar feature called Quality of Service, or QoS, also available on the 2910VG, does more or less the same thing, except it works by reserving a percentage of the total bandwidth for a given application. As far as I can tell, the drawback to QoS' percentage method is that if, for example, you've reserved 25% of your bandwidth for downloading LOLcat pictures from Usenet, when you're not doing that, your bandwidth is still capped at 75% of its maximum capacity. The HA is nice because it can be set to "auto" mode, and will sniff out and give special treatment to what it deems to be important packets on its own.

Because aesthetics are an oft-overlooked feature in their own right, it's also worth noting that the 2110Vn is awfully nice looking. Unlike the staid, boxy shapes of most routers, DrayTek's 2110 series has a clean, appealing, Apple-like profile (more Apple-like, in fact, than Apple's own AirPort Extreme) with softly curved lines and a space-saving vertical orientation. There's a practical side to it: the vertical orientation increases its antenna height by a few inches, and it efficiently channels the heat upwards and away through a grill that runs along the entire top. As such, the 2110 isn't a device that makes our front hall look like Mission Control, and doesn't beg to be hidden away like pretty much every router we've ever owned.

At the time of this post, the 2110Vn still lacks support for USB storage, a feature that DrayTek nevertheless touts on several of its spec pages, which is disappointing. I'll try to post a follow-up when they get around to implementing it, with a particular focus on whether or not it beats the lackluster USB storage capabilities of the 2910 and if, say, large automated backups will be possible á la Apple's Time Capsule.

By and large, though, I'm relatively pleased with the 2110Vn. It suits the most urgent of my requirements. Yes, it's a royal pain not being able to connect the iBook and the Canon MP600R to the wireless network, and, yes, the USB storage that the box promises would be nice; but the speed of Draft-n means we can stream uninterrupted high-quality video all over the flat and LAN file transfers are completed in the blink of an eye. The Hardware Acceleration seems to be working, so the stutters we once might have had with video chats are history. Likewise, VoIP reliability and quality appears to have improved, too, so my SIP accounts stay registered and in most cases the call clarity definitively trumps landlines.

The biggest drawback—and DrayTek's marketing and distribution team really ought to hang its head in shame here—is that, for reasons that aren't altogether clear, shopping for DrayTek routers in the USA is a snipe hunt. To my mind, DrayTek is such a clear choice when hunting for a combination of VoIP, WiFi, security, and ease of use (save the awkward English of its manuals and GUI) that the company ought to have no trouble establishing a foothold in a market that caters only to the extremes of the simpleton or the IT expert. A Froogle search yields only two US distributors, DSL Warehouse and Guideband (which both look like they share a parent company; I also found BuyVoIPRouters.com during another search), and neither of them sells the 2110Vn, only its pared-down brothers, the 2110 and the 2110n. Rather than allowing the company to continue to sell itself short, potential US-based users might consider a trip to Amazon.de, which has the entire range of DrayTek routers on offer.

[My one-year follow-up to this review is here.]

On Decay (Briefly)

2009-08-14T00:11:00.001-07:00

I'VE always been fascinated by decay, urban or otherwise; the idea that the building before me, once the mise-en-scène for the living and all their concerns, is now a tomb of ghosts and historical echoes is something that provides a platform for the imagination's flights of fancy. A home with crooked doorframes and paint peeling from the walls, a church with vines curling through the windows, a factory with rusting machinery... all these beg for observers to decipher the clues to their histories, or in the absence of those clues, to attach new stories to them. I suppose that's why writers like Sebald and Proust appealed to me more than others, and why the book In Ruins by Christopher Woodward is one I still enjoy dipping into occasionally.

All that is a long and possibly superfluous segue to this link: Digital Photography School's "20 Beautiful Examples of Urban Decay Photography." And to make wading through those introductory ruminations just slightly more worthwhile, there's this link too: WebUrbanist's "Abandonment: 8 Cities That Might Not Make It."

Misplaced Optimism

2009-08-13T01:49:00.004-07:00

YOU know, in my last post, a review of Kurtis Davidson's novel What the Shadow Told Me, I wrote:

The cultural identity of blacks in America, to which [Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man] helped give shape, is in Davidson's novel being examined from another side, a point in time when, half a century on, the extant racial divides in the United States slowly, finally appear to be crumbling.

Then, not more than 48 hours later, I read about swastikas appearing on the sign at David Scott's (D-GA) office, and the racial tensions that Glenn Beck and Lou Dobbs exacerbate to feed their viewers' maniacal outrage, and firsthand accounts of town hall meetings like this one (with particular emphasis on the passage about Rev. Dixon), and I fear that even cautious optimism has been misplaced.

Review: What the Shadow Told Me

2009-08-09T01:04:00.008-07:00

What the Shadow Told Me
Kurtis Davidson
Eastern Washington University Press
ISBN 1 59766 002 7

A reductio ad absurdum, in the most literal sense of the phrase, of the life of Ralph Waldo Ellison: Born in 1913 in Oklahoma City, he later joined the Merchant Marine during World War II. Seven years after war's end, he published the book on which his entire professional career and literary reputation would rest, Invisible Man, an achievement made possible largely through the support of Fanny, his long-suffering wife. From then until his death in 1994, Ellison rode that novel's coattails through the halls of academe—first Bard, then Yale, then Rutgers, and finally New York University—and worked on a much-discussed, highly anticipated, never-completed second novel, provisionally titled Juneteenth. As if to justify its continued absence, he claimed (falsely, as time would reveal) that three hundred pages of the manuscript were lost in a house fire in 1967.

Much of this reductio, already known to most readers with a vague recollection of twentieth-century American literature, is the thinly veiled biographical backbone of Kurtis Davidson's What the Shadow Told Me. The novel's protagonist, Rufus Walter Eddison, is born in Missouri in 1916. He fights in the Second World War. He marries Maisy May, a devoted woman who encourages his literary endeavors from the very start. (Eddison is nevertheless kinder to her than Ellison was to Fanny, who had to endure her husband describing his extramarital affairs in punishing detail when catharsis so compelled him.) Through her support, in 1951 he publishes the acclaimed and influential novel Darkness Visible, which brings him fame, wealth, and a cushy professorial post at New York College. His house later burns down, potentially destroying the manuscript to the long-awaited second novel from which Davidson's very real novel takes its name. After Eddison's death, the literary establishment scrambles, as it did with Ellison, to cobble together any collection of pages resembling what the second novel was rumored to be.

The absurdum comes in the form of plot ornaments (that is, loosely related sub-stories about yams, Kwanzaa, Chikki Wikki fast food, the Baby Bomber, The Idaho Jenkins Show, and Black Santa) and the supporting cast of characters. Among this gaggle is, to pick the first name that comes to mind, Biminim Strimpoonanamam, who translates Eddison (as well as Bellow and Grisham, we're told) into pidgin English variants of Hindi, Tamil, Thai, and other languages spoken among cultures with a liberal view toward copyright. Through his translation, Eddison's Darkness Visible becomes Who See Blackie?, a bricolage of abstruse poetry and vulgar nonsense; one of the beloved book's most famous passages—"Good news comes in the morning. Bad news comes at night. But really bad news? That comes anytime at all."—is rendered thus by Strimpoonanamam: "News of the happy comes soon. News of the sad becomes later. But excellent news of the sad? That comes always." These translated excerpts serve as cryptic, mildly amusing epigraphs throughout the novel.

Marching alongside Strimpoonanamam in this farcical cavalcade is Eddison's mysterious acquaintance, Henry David Monroe, who may in fact be the author's alter ego. Like the all-too-cute name he has chosen for him, Davidson also can't help but plant more clues than necessary as to this character's identity. The truth becomes clear to the reader long before it finally dawns on Justina Patterson, a sleuthing literary agent and one of What the Shadow Told Me's less over-the-top characters. This exasperating overplaying of what could have been an effective hand is one of the novel's crucial let-downs.

Following Eddison's passing and the emergence of all his life's unsolved riddles, it's Patterson, Strimpoonanamam, Rwanda Evilsizer (along with her sons, one of whom is the Tourette-afflicted aspiring rapper Funky Franks), the academic phony Dr. Edith Lee-Frasier, NYC president Mason Hartwood, embittered writer Timm Clifton, and a host of others—with the notable absence of Monroe—who are trying to capitalize on What the Shadow Told Me in whatever form it might or might not exist. Imagine It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World set in a debased republic of letters. Some are doing so out of revenge, some out of greed, some out of sheer opportunism, and some out of loyalty; few, if any of them, however, are especially sympathetic characters, and many only seem to exist for their ostensible comedic value. Had the second not been the case, the first might have corrected itself. But What the Shadow Told Me—the actual novel, that is, not the fictitious one—sets out to cover far too much ground with far too many people, and as a result the story and all its teeming contents are just a bit too ramshackle and superficially sketched to last the ages.

Then again, maybe longevity wasn't Davidson's intent. Since its publication in 2005 (though the book did win the Faulkner Society of New Orleans Award in 2003; presumably this was in some other form), What the Shadow Told Me has already dated. It references the Internet with an awkwardness that seems at once ill at ease with its newfangled terminology and naively optimistic about its permanence. When Justina Patterson comes to investigate possible links between Eddison and Monroe, she "[checks] both Amazon.com and Advanced Book Exchange"; several pages later, she "[gets] online at Google.com." Later still she "place[s] her faith in directions from Mapquest.com." To avoid having the prose read like clumsy, slightly dated dot-com product placement (and does Google really get a user online?), these online forays could have been described in more general and less ephemeral terms.

Name-dropping turns out to be something of a compulsion in What the Shadow Told Me. In Eddison's hallway there's a who's-who (or who was who) gallery of photographs that Patterson can't help but admire for nearly two pages: Eddison with the likes of Twiggy, Susan Dey, Adolph [sic] Hitler, and, in a gag that isn't quite as meta as it would like to be, Ralph Ellison. The roll call of celebrities attending Eddison's funeral, which includes Luke Perry and Queen Latifah, is either a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgement of these stars' fleeting fame or a wholesale failure to recognize it. The prestige Eddison lends to New York College enables the university to lure guest lecturers like "Amy Grant, Alvin Toffler, […] Martha Stewart, William Westmoreland, Bill Cosby, Andrew Wiles, Abigail Van Buren, and on and on." Indeed. The larger question here is, like this gratuitous listing of notables, when the car Patterson briefly rents on her hunt for Monroe is conspicuously identified as a Hyundai Accent, what purpose does it fulfill, exactly? Do these very specific, concrete references lend more credibility to a text that seems to delight in—nay, flaunt—its absurdity, or is that juxtaposition supposed to somehow augment the comedy of the absurd?

These devices—the cheeky fascination with brand and celebrity, the willfully outrageous characters, the rug-pulling narrative stunts, the playful winks and indulgent self-awareness—are the stock in trade of many contemporary bestsellers, and What the Shadow Told Me does not emulate them so much as it merely resembles them. (The template is to some degree the Brooklyn Book of Wonder, discussed here.) To top off this achingly postmodern construction, the novel even includes the requisite press clippings and heartstring-tugging, neo-Dickensian subplot, which, incidentally, doesn't quite dovetail with the main story when things begin to race headlong to a close. And, of course, closure.

Yet it would be wrong to say that What the Shadow Told Me avoids risks altogether. The book throws custard pies in the face of political correctness; much of its humor is boldly and unabashedly racially charged. Strimpoonanamam, who is besotted with American culture and prone to comically formal speech and malapropisms, and the Evilsizer family, obnoxious, poorly educated, out to make a quick buck with as little effort as possible, are not much more than deliberately overblown racial stereotypes with a bit of stuffing. Even Eddison gets the burlesque treatment. His memorial service ends "with the dead man's favorite song, a little-known Negro spiritual, 'There'll Be Biscuits and Gravy Aplenty up Yonder'," a tune Maisy May later sings aloud in a moment of contemplation. Although Davidson, as he did with the Monroe subplot, occasionally underestimates the power of subtlety and restraint, thereby allowing a handful of episodes to cross over into caricature or outright poor taste, most of the time this works. The intentionally self-parodic racial stereotype—for example, the idea that no one can tell that Funky Franks suffers from Tourette Syndrome when he's rapping—is the punchline; by and large, the humor is droll, not mean-spirited.

Were this all part of a story that took any other literary biography as its trellis, its preferred form of humor would fall under a different type of scrutiny. But What the Shadow Told Me is on several levels asking to be read as a counterweight, a response, or a complement to Invisible Man. The cultural identity of blacks in America, to which that important novel helped give shape, is in Davidson's novel being examined from another side, a point in time when, half a century on, the extant racial divides in the United States slowly, finally appear to be crumbling. (In fact, What the Shadow Told Me seems prescient in this respect, given that Davidson isn't likely to have seen Barack Obama's star in its ascendancy back in 2005.) Does this somehow make What the Shadow Told Me the proper successor to Invisible Man, the book that Juneteenth should have been? No, not by a long shot, for all the reasons given above. But it is worth noting that the attitude of Davidson's novel toward race and all its attendant taboos is in marked contrast to the sombre narrative of its forerunner. Within the confines of its fictional universe it even recreates Invisible Man in its own image, twisting Darkness Visible into a convoluted tale of alien abduction with a homosexual protagonist. Whether or not the author's flippancy is warranted will depend on how far you think civil rights in America have come, and how much farther they have left to go.

That might have been an ideal place to close, but it would mean overlooking the second, less overt risk: joint authorship. Kurtis Davidson is the nom de plume of two individuals, academic colleagues Kurt Ayau and David Rachels; their first novel, stitched together from the words of two minds working in tandem, hides its seams well. Although there are times when the hand of one or the other seems to be more in evidence, on the whole What the Shadow Told Me is, at least from a stylistic standpoint, an impressively cohesive work. Despite Ayau's and Rachels' hybrid pen, however, or quite possibly because of it, the lingering impression of What the Shadow Told Me is one of a generally entertaining work with manifold ambitions but none fully met.

• NB: Some biographical info mentioned above stems from Arnold Rampersad's Ralph Ellison: A Biography (2007).

Great Minds Think Alike?

2009-07-14T01:33:00.005-07:00

WITH regards to my post from yesterday, Crooks and Liars is reporting on the buzz that Sarah Palin is planning to spearhead her own conservative movement.

For the life of me, I can't quite figure out why so many Republicans continue to champion someone who is so patently the product of circumstance rather than qualification. But if anyone's going to lead a boisterous, self-righteous, radicalized party of racists, xenophobes, hypocrites, self-important and self-styled militiamen, religious zealots, and pundits who think feeble-minded ignorance is the same as being straight-talking, she's definitely the one to do it. Maybe then the proper conservatives, freed of the burden of having to shout over the din of the Limbaughs and Malkins, can get their act together and start putting forward some coherent political alternatives to the Democrats' centrist muddle du jour.

The New GOP Look: Shaved Heads

2009-07-12T23:03:00.006-07:00

NOT more than a few days after some of the more vitriolic members of Free Republic, a conservative blog and sounding board, called Malia Obama "a typical street whore" and "ghetto street trash," and "wonder[ed] when she will get her first abortion" (story here)—comments provoked because she had the gall to wear a T-shirt with a peace sign on it—a slight but distinct majority of the Young Republicans have elected Audra Shay, no stranger to racist comments herself, as their Führer.

The public face of the GOP is starting to look more and more like the BNP. I can't help but think that what would be best for the Republicans—maybe not from a practical standpoint, but an important ideological one—would be to split into two wings: in one, the vile, belligerent chauvinists who wept or threatened to take up arms because a black man was rightfully elected, and in the other, the more rational members of the party who might not agree with Obama's policies but for whom assassination and insurrection aren't particularly attractive solutions. Based on the Young Republicans' vote, however, it would seem that the latter category is quickly fading into a voiceless minority. But is it really worth it for them to continue colluding with the racist arm just to maintain a certain strength in numbers?

Review Roundup

2009-07-11T22:53:00.004-07:00

MOST of these reviews were mentioned on my Twitter account when they appeared, as Twitter's brevity is better suited to quick shout-outs and announcements, but enough of them have been posted recently that I thought them collectively worth mentioning here.

There's the Complete Studio Recordings of the Clifford Brown, Sonny Rollins, Max Roach Quintet (which didn't really exist under that name) over at All About Jazz. Read the review here. The disc is a re-release that combines the original versions, albeit out of sequence, of Clifford Brown and Max Roach's At Basin Street and Sonny Rollins' Plus Four. Even now, I'm still no closer to understanding why they altered the sequencing.

Then there's my review of Warren Buckland's (ed.) Puzzle Films: Complex storytelling in contemporary cinema in the TLS. You'll need a subscription to the archive or a nearby newsstand to read that one. Reviews of Michael Tratner's Crowd Scenes: Movies and mass politics and Jerry Oppenheimer's Toy Monster: The big, bad world of Mattel should be appearing in the same publication soon.

Finally, I've reviewed the first English translation of Me and Kaminski by Daniel Kehlmann for Rain Taxi. That one can be found here.

As soon as I've worked my way through a backlog of editing, I'll be posting reviews (here and elsewhere) that I've been meaning to get to for months now.

More on VoIP: Google Voice and CallCentric

2009-07-11T10:59:00.003-07:00

IT'S a bit after the fact by now, but I wanted to follow up an earlier post on my experiences with VoIP with two bits of info.

The first (and the bit that might seem like old news) is the fact that Google Voice is finally prepping for its ribbon-cutting. Heaven knows it's been a long time coming. Ars Technica posted a short profile of the forthcoming service about two weeks ago, and it looks like it will be of real benefit to VoIP users who also have already linked PSTN (that is, traditional phone numbers) to their SIP numbers. No-cost, reliable voicemail hasn't always been VoIP providers' first priority, but it looks like it's going to be Google Voice's strong suit, particularly the transcription feature.

In re-reading that last line, it sounds like I'm suggesting that Google Voice is a VoIP provider. I'm not. Google Voice is a slightly different beast and will only enhance VoIP. At least at the beginning, anyway. I have no idea what their future plans are. But I suspect that as mobile and VoIP replace traditional landlines, Google Voice will start to offer more in that vein.

The second point is that I forgot to mention CallCentric in my list of recommended pay-as-you-go VoIP providers. I signed up with them not long before writing the VoIP post, and I've been pleased with the call quality as well as the features on offer. Like some of what's to be had from Sipgate, CallCentric offers incoming fax numbers and fax storage, caller ID blocking, call waiting, and more. You can also set up rules as to how certain numbers should be handled, such as forcing calls from a specific person to voicemail. The CallCentric website might look a lot less slick than most, but the important things — e.g., call quality, cost, features, reliability — are certainly there.

"I Have Been Wading in a Long River and My Feet Are Wet"

2009-07-06T00:04:00.002-07:00

SINCE coming across that quote of Sherwood Anderson's years ago in a now-forgotten context, I've been wont to use it when feeling like the slow march of survival is taking more and more time away from the things in life that matter. The quote became lodged in my thoughts early this morning as I was updating my All About Jazz profile page, and I hit up Google to see who else was mentioning it and why. Sixteen hits, two of which are from said profile page. But it did bring me to the author's essay "When I Left Business for Literature," which I'd previously only read in excerpted bits and pieces like this one:

[I]n America things are somewhat different. Here something went wrong in the beginning. We pretended to so much and were going to do such great things here. This vast land was to be a refuge for all the outlawed brave, foolish folk of the world. The declaration of the rights of man was to have a new hearing in a new place. The devil! we did get ourselves into a bad hole! We were going to be superhuman, and it turned out we were sons of men who were not such devilish fellows after all. You cannot blame us that we were somewhat reluctant about finding out the very human things concerning ourselves. One does so hate to come down off the perch!

We are now losing our former feeling of inherent virtue, are permitting ourselves to laugh occasionally at ourselves for our pretensions; but there was a time here when we were sincerely in earnest about all this American business, the land for the free and the home for the brave. We actually meant it, and no one will ever understand present-day America or Americans who does not concede that we meant it and that while we were building all of our big, ugly, hurriedly thrown-together towns, creating our great industrial system, growing always more huge and prosperous, we were as much in earnest about what we thought we were up to as were the French of the thirteenth century when they built the Cathedral of Chartres to the glory of God.

The full essay is available here.

Microsoft: Desperately, Frantically Trying to Do Something Right

2009-07-05T12:12:00.007-07:00

... AND so, in due course, Microsoft ended up pulling the IE8 vomit video (see my earlier comments here). Not because the company recognized poor taste when they saw it, but only "after widespread disgust at the graphic nature of the ad". Is this the first time Microsoft has responded to customer feedback? Must be, because no matter how many crash reports I send and how many updates and bugfixes I apply, Word 2008 is still crashing on me about three times a day.

By the way, did I mention that Firefox 3.5 is now out? It's got private browsing — and doesn't need clumsy attempts at being "edgy" to prove it.

Microsoft's Lack of Taste

2009-06-25T10:15:00.007-07:00

STEVE Jobs once famously said in a 1996 interview, "The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste."

If the Redmond company's tacky, half-baked software weren't proof enough, take a look at their current ad campaign for Internet Explorer 8. This is a still from one of the promotional videos:

In case it's unclear what's happening here, this woman has just vomited in graphic detail. Three times, in fact. Apparently because her husband didn't use IE8's new private browsing feature -- something which, I should note, has been in Safari for about two years, and already exists in Google's Chrome and the new version of Firefox.

Viral videos are all well and good, but I don't think they're supposed to leave you feeling as if you've actually caught a virus. If the sight of someone hurling realistic greenish-brown chunks (and then someone else slipping in it) is right up your alley, you can see the video in full here on YouTube. (Someone who's quite at home staring at puke strikes me as about right for the average Windows user.) I've watched it once out of morbid curiosity, and it didn't leave me amused or convinced of Internet Explorer's superiority. Rather, it left me convinced that Jobs had their number all those years ago.

Jobo photoGPS Software Hangs, Java Bugfix

2009-06-24T04:31:00.009-07:00

BECAUSE an earlier post of mine scrutinizing the Jobo photoGPS has inched its way toward the top of Google's search results, this blog has become a go-to destination for folks seeking all kinds of info on the photoGPS: the compatibility (or lack thereof) of its Suunto SDF data files, new versions of the software, or the efficacy of the device indoors. Not that I mind; I'm happy to give answers when I have them.

Some Mac users who've installed the recent Java update via OS X's Software Update may have been encountering problems with the Jobo photoGPS software. My own experience was that "photoGPS" would appear in the menubar and the app's icon would appear in the dock, but the app would then hang.

I was contacted earlier today by someone looking into the problem and offering a potential fix. He seemed to think that the updated Java was "now defaulting to running applications in 64-bit mode on 64-bit capable Macs, which is a problem because photoGPS is currently 32-bit only."

There's no officially updated version of the photoGPS software out yet, but Jobo has just sent an e-mail around with the following instructions for resolving the hangs:

For the short term you can fix the problem by yourself by entering the following command in the Terminal window:

defaults write /Applications/photoGPS.app/Contents/Info Java -dict-add JVMArchs i386

If manual commands aren't your thing, there's also a small bugfix Applescript app, which you can download here. That will do the job for you. Please note that neither I nor Jobo accept any responsibility if your computer suddenly explodes on account of this. All I can say is that it worked for me, and the only thing it's instructed to do is write that little line of code so you don't have to.

The Case of the Vanishing RSS Feed

2009-06-22T15:15:00.003-07:00

IT'S come to my attention that older incarnations of this site's RSS feed (though not quite as old as when it was still found at charlatan.blogspot.com) are generating errors. This has to do with some odd decision at Google to firmly separate Blogger URLs from personal URLs. If you're one of those clever types who saves yourself time and effort by receiving updates automatically instead of popping in every now and then to see what's changed, I'd ask that you resubscribe by clicking the appropriate box in the sidebar (up at the top under "Subscribe") or by simply clicking here. Then again, if you haven't been using the RSS feed, you won't have been getting any errors.

Bowerbirds Feature + Reviews

2009-06-21T06:59:00.014-07:00

THE feature on the Bowerbirds that I finished nine months ago (and started nearly a year ago) has finally been published in Supplemental #9 of Copper Press. As luck or sad coincidence would have it, that's just in time for the release of the band's new album, Upper Air, on July 7.

In addition to Jennifer Kelly's interview with Larkin Grimm and two artist interviews by Royce Deans, this issue includes my reviews of the Radar Bros. full-length Auditorium and Robert Pollard's album and book Robert Pollard Is off to Business and Town of Mirrors: The Reassembled Imagery of Robert Pollard, respectively. These, too, have seen a similarly long run-up to publication. All of them were submitted in the autumn of last year, which has left several publicists none too pleased.

The protracted delay between submission and publication and the magazine's decision to switch to a freely distributed PDF digital format are, I suppose, effects of the same cause that is driving the radical changes across all print media. Print advertising dollars have dried up, circulation is difficult to maintain when so many online outlets offer similar content for free, and digital distribution is more cost-effective and better suited to regular updates and breaking news.

I don't know if this means that Copper Press will end the Supplemental series and run under its own name in the future, or if the Supplemental moniker marks the magazine's official break with the past, but I doubt we'll see another print issue again. Part of the beauty of CP was the way it felt in your hands, but, if I'm honest, I think the benefits of the Web are more in line with its mission, if it ever had one to begin with.

Download the Supplemental for free here.

Some Damn Good Falafel

2009-06-10T12:19:00.006-07:00

SOMETIME around the age of ten or so I had a vague ambition to become a chef. Nothing ever came of that vague ambition, although today I do still enjoy spending time in the kitchen and giving the odd recipe a whirl. If I woke up to find that from now on an extra ten hours would be tacked on to each new day, I'd probably resolve to devote about two of them to more culinary experiments.

My skills in this area are about on a par with my talent for gardening. That is to say, on occasion I get lucky and whatever whim I've yielded to turns out well, but most of the time whatever I've baked, fried, mixed, sautéed or steamed doesn't quite look or taste like the cookbook said it was going to.

Today it was both disaster and delight. The hummus recipe I was following called for chickpeas, as you might expect, but it failed to mention cooked chickpeas. So I took about a pound of soaked-but-not-boiled chickpeas, added just the right amount of tahini, fresh lemon juice, olive oil and minced garlic, and then plunged in my electric mixer, ultimately creating an unpleasantly gritty, bitty paste with only the faintest hint of hummus flavor. Adding boiling water and microwaving the concoction after the fact did in fact smooth out the texture to something more palatable, but it also changed the consistency in ways that I wouldn't quite describe as spreadable.

My wife hit on the idea that hummus shares many of its ingredients with falafel and suggested that the industrial glue I'd created be repurposed, or less euphemistically, salvaged. In went some diced onion, chopped parsley, and crushed cumin and coriander seeds. I wadded it into walnut-sized balls and dropped them into frying oil. (Well, that's not entirely correct. First I dropped them into some beef fat that I'd been saving in the fridge. Beef fat, however, is apparently not ideal for this sort of deep-fat frying, and the first few wads of falafel just dissolved.)

What emerged, eventually, was some of the tastiest falafel I've ever eaten. Damn good falafel, if I do say so myself. To paraphrase Robert Penn Warren: "Out of culinary mishaps shall come forth deliciousness."

Paul Harris (Wrongly) on the Irrelevance of Woody Allen

2009-06-07T12:09:00.004-07:00

PERSONALLY, I don't give a hoot if a handful of so-called modern, "mainstream" Jews find Woody Allen's throwback Whatever Works irrelevant and passé, as Paul Harris reports (I use the word loosely) today in the Guardian. I didn't watch films like Annie Hall, Manhattan, Radio Days, Zelig, and Deconstructing Harry again and again to the point of obsession because I identified with them as a Jew—largely because I'm not—but because, in addition to being good to excellent films in their own right, they captured something of my own gripes, anxieties, aspirations, foibles, quirks, and passions. To say that his cinematic persona spoke exclusively to the American Jewish experience is a very narrow reading indeed. And judging from the looks of the new film's pre-release ratings on IMDB, I'm not the only one who feels this way. Unless, of course, all those high marks are from aging Jews from the old school who don't realize how hip they've become.

Rereading Harris' article a third time, I'm irked by this idiocy:

The most powerful producer in films today, Judd Apatow, the force behind Knocked Up, is Jewish. So are huge comedy stars such as Seth Rogen, Ben Stiller and Adam Sandler. Not a year in Hollywood goes by without all three of them churning out hit comedies.

The Apatow statement is inane and proves absolutely nothing. Has there ever been a time when there wasn't a powerful Jewish producer in Hollywood? Beyond that, the reason Rogen, Stiller and Sandler are "huge comedy stars" is because they, like Apatow, are churning out dipshit comedies for mass audiences. Once in a blue moon there's a Zoolander or a Punch-Drunk Love to partially redeem them, but a casual onscreen reference to Freud's Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious, Balzac ("There goes another novel"), or Bergman will never cross any of these actors' lips. To appreciate Allen, it helps to have read something besides FHM and the Sunday comics (even the groaners and slapstick gags in Bananas hinge on a knowledge of US politics, and the cornball Love and Death has a whole sequence of one-liners from the works of Dostoyevsky), and this cultured humor, not his religious background, is why Allen's never been completely on a par, popularitywise, with Harris' holy trio.

Whatever Works may have its flaws, but the mere fact that Allen has returned to the style of his earlier work is not one of them. The only thing grasping for relevance is Harris' fatuous article.

VoIP for the Home User

2009-06-07T05:02:00.007-07:00

AROUND the time we made the switch to a cable Internet connection, I began experimenting with VoIP. Given that we had been paying something like 20 euros per month (not counting the cost of any calls) for a Deutsche Telekom landline, it seemed like a far better use of our money to put that basic service charge toward the actual calls instead of using it to pay for the simple privilege of having a phone plugged into a wall. Here are some of my experiences of the past year with VoIP.

First, for the benefit of the novice user, the basics.

Based on this diagram I ganked from a Google Image search and then modified in obvious ways, you can see a rough hardware setup for most VoIP-enabled home networks. Some modems and routers are combined, thereby eliminating one of the devices in this image, and some VoIP phones connect to the USB port of your computer instead of the router. For the most part, however, this is how the device tree would look for a VoIP setup. The modem keeps you connected to your ISP, the router does all the actual networking, the computers and phone perform their respective tasks, and the Internet, as we all know, is just a series of tubes.

VoIP can be as complicated as you like. You can set up your own PBX with call forwarding, extensions, voicemail, dial plans, hold music, and other features, which would be the complicated side of the spectrum, or you can keep things fairly rudimentary and straightforward. My own setup is somewhere between the two.

I use a DrayTek Vigor 2910VG broadband router, which, if you were to browse through some of my previous blog entries, hasn't always been the most reliable device. But the most recent firmware update (v3.2.2) has been nothing if not trouble-free, and I can recommend this router with the up-to-date firmware in good conscience to any home user who's looking to pursue VoIP in earnest. Unfortunately for US residents, DrayTek's foray into the market has been halfhearted at best (just look at their sorry excuse for a company website) and there aren't too many places that carry their products. DSL Warehouse is the only one I know of. This is one instance where Asian, Australian and European residents have it better.

Plugged into that DrayTek—using a standard RJ-11 connector—is your run-of-the-mill DECT (aka digital cordless) phone. Nothing fancy. It's a Siemens, and I think we bought it on sale for about thirty euros.

With the router and phone sorted out, it was time to sign up with different VoIP services. Different providers have different advantages, and this, I should add, is the big advantage of VoIP. Vyke has incredibly cheap rates (something like 3 euro cents per call to select countries) and occasional promotions that will double your credit. Its call quality used to be sketchy at best but is now clearer than most landlines. Sipgate has a ton of features, such as voicemail, SMS, fax receipt and sending, and emergency (911 in the US, 112 in Germany, 999 in the UK, etc.) calling. VoIPuser gives you free 15-minute calls anywhere in the world. Others, like Gizmo, cover everything from PC-to-PC calling to Skype bridging, plus have inexpensive calling to mobile phones. PhonePower, which does charge a monthly service fee, is running a deal that works out to be around $8/month for two years, with unlimited calling in the US and Canada. Until it morphed into something else altogether, Free World Dialup used to offer free calling to US 1-800 numbers; FreeDigits, if it ever returns from the hiatus that began in October 2008, will do the same. And on and on. There's really no limit to the number of services you subscribe to, there's rarely an ongoing charge fee unless you want lots of additional features, and you can always choose the best provider for the call you want to make.

Figuring out what's available just takes a bit of Googling. Sites like MyVoIPProvider.com offer feature and rate comparisons for business and residential users, along with useful reviews, and VoIPProvidersList.com does what it says on the tin. In my experience, you'll have to dig a bit further to find the best pay-as-you-go providers; for me, a combo of Sipgate, Vyke and Gizmo is something no phone company could ever beat.

VoIP's advantages aren't just limited to low-cost outgoing calls and a frequent absence of binding contracts or service fees. Providers in different countries will often give you a free incoming phone number in that country. This enables us to have domestic numbers in Germany, the UK, and America, which means better rates for the people in those countries who are still calling us on ordinary landlines and mobiles.

As a 2910VG, the V being a "voice" designator, my DrayTek router can log into a maximum of six SIP accounts. Initially, I had it signing into as many accounts as it could handle. But what would happen is that the router would get a bit flustered with so many registrations, especially if I was gobbling bandwidth through downloads, and it ended up dropping the connections. If you're not registered with (that is, logged into) your SIP account, it's like leaving your phone unplugged. And an unplugged phone isn't very useful when you want to make or receive calls.

This was solved by moving the heavy lifting to MySIPswitch. With MySIPswitch, I've centralized my accounts, meaning that I only need one login/password to connect to all my VoIP providers. Whether my fictitious friend Zack calls me on my UK number (courtesy of VoIPuser) or my US number (courtesy of Sipgate or IPKall), it comes through to the same phone(s). When I want to call Zack, I can select the account that offers the best rates by using a prefix: dialing "*7" before his number calls with Sipgate; dialing "*1" calls with Vyke. And this works not only with the phone that's connected to my router, but also with the Fring application on my iPod Touch. While traveling abroad, I was able to hop on a WiFi network and use the exact same method to call out and receive calls.

At home, instead of using the traditional telephone, I can also place calls through a softphone like Telephone or X-Lite on my desktop and use a Bluetooth headset to free up my hands for typing or cooking. Just like Fring on my iPod Touch or the cordless phone connected to my router, these softphones log into MySIPswitch too, once again allowing me to receive incoming calls and use the same dialplan (the *7 and *1 example above) for outgoing calls.

If all that sounds a bit confusing, or should the benefits still be unclear, I suppose you could think of it this way: It's not uncommon to have three telephones in your house. One in the kitchen, one upstairs, and maybe another in the den. When someone calls your phone number, all three phones ring. You pick up one, you talk, you hang up. Easy.

With VoIP, it's similar. Only those three phones can be completely different devices, each with its own benefits. One might be a computer, another an iPod, and another a conventional phone. And while the conventional phone stays put, that computer (particularly if it's a laptop) and iPod can be anywhere in the world. So when someone calls you on your "home" number, answering from your kitchen is the same as answering from an Internet café in Outer Mongolia. Without the exorbitant roaming charges of a mobile phone.

To distill it even further, it comes down to cost and flexibility. VoIP in conjunction with a little tech know-how keeps the cost of calling to a minimum while offering us much greater flexibility. The few drawbacks of VoIP, on the other hand, should be self-evident, and are covered on this page in some detail; to my mind, they're still not as bad as mobile charges and the regular fees of traditional phone companies. The best thing about it all? When we move from one country to another, setting up phone service will be as easy as plugging in my router. Everyone will still be able to call us on the numbers they've been using for years.

New Reviews

2009-05-27T22:21:00.004-07:00

A QUICK post to mention that my review of Jenny Barrett's Shooting the Civil War: Cinema, history and American national identity ran in the May 15 issue of the Times Literary Supplement. It's not posted online, so you'll have to pick up a copy if you're keen to read it.

Another review, this one of Rob King's The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the emergence of mass culture (which was in fact extracted from a longer review that included a juxtaposition with Michael Tratner's Crowd Scenes: Movies and mass politics) should run in the same publication this week or next.

Humanity, Ho!

2009-05-20T12:44:00.003-07:00

YEAH, so I was complaining about not being able to find any humanity in our mortgage hunt, and lo and behold, a healthy dose of it appears out of the blue. We haven't yet cleared every hurdle, but we are a bit further along than we were yesterday.

Bancini, You Don't Know Tired

2009-05-20T00:24:00.004-07:00

IT HAD been on the cards for as long as I can remember to move back to (in my case) — or simply to (in my wife's case) — the States when the right time presented itself. In spite of how much the Germans can piss us off from time to time, one thing or another had always managed to keep us in Germany just a little bit longer, whether it was the enticing carrot-on-a-stick of Elterngeld, the quality of health care, the fact that we had established a cozy little niche for ourselves here, or the general quality of life; but when the US housing market plummeted around the same time we introduced a fourth member into our already rather narrow two-bedroom apartment, we agreed that it was high time to make the move. Sure, we could always "upgrade" to a larger apartment, but a larger apartment means more money in rent, and rent is money that we're essentially just tossing out the window each month. We're anglophones. We like to own.

I, in all my naiveté, thought that making that decision was going to be the hardest part. After that, the process ought to be pretty straightforward. You find an area and a house that you like and that you can afford without pie-in-the-sky financial planning, you get some paperwork together and apply for a mortgage, you purchase the house, you move in when you're ready. Everybody—and I mean everybody—lives happily ever after, right?

The world, however, as is its custom, delighted in putting its steel-toed boot to my face as we optimistically charged ahead.

First, there's the fact that, living outside of the US, anything we earn is classed as foreign earned income (FEI) and doesn't count unless we're paying US taxes on it. I didn't—and still don't—quite see the connection here. I'm a fully-fledged US citizen and I fill out and submit my 1040 and 2555 forms every year as a formality and to keep my paper trail above board, therefore that income is officially on record with the IRS. Yet the simple fact is that I reside in Germany, I earn my wages in Germany, I use my share of German resources, my clients are mostly German, and I pay taxes in Germany: why, then, would I be obliged to pay taxes to the US to make that money somehow "valid"? I could have an annual income of six million euros ($8,200,000) abroad and still be rejected for a mortgage because that money is invisible to most US loan underwriters. Not one of the dozens of people with whom I've spoken has provided a satisfactory explanation why this should be so, even in light of the absurd example I just gave.

I'm also self-employed. In Germany, being self-employed (selbstständig) means going down to the Finanzamt (bureau of finance) and telling them so; from then on you get a unique tax number and can work on an ad hoc basis for whomever you like, so long as you punctually send in your paperwork (invoices and expenses, for example) to the Finanzamt. And each month they review those invoices and expenses and you get a typically curt notice from them telling how much of your income you owe in taxes. Compared to the US system, the Germans' actually looks like a shining model of forthrightness and efficiency, and it's quite easy for, say, our financial advisor to look at our year-end documentation, the Steuerbescheid, and figure out where we stand. This has not been the case across the Atlantic. The unrelenting stress and strain of having to prove my income over and over in every possible permutation has literally led me to just curl up on the rug in the fetal position and take a recuperative nap while my daughter uses me as a jungle gym.

I can understand the underwriters' concern about this. Really, I can. A loan of this size can't be a leap of faith.¹ But even the guy earning $500k per year could lose his job tomorrow, and if you can reliably document what you're earning, and you've shown that it's within your means to live comfortably on that, then I don't quite see the need to provide receipts for the pack of gum you bought on June 23, 1996. In our case, the proposed mortgage, property taxes, and utilities would be about two-thirds of what we're currently paying in rent and utilities, which means if anything it will be more affordable for us. And still the potential lenders are hedgy.

Finally, there's the matter of moving into the house within 30 days. Some other lenders have said sixty. Either way, it's a stipulation that strikes me as ridiculous. If we've jumped through all the requisite hoops and succeeded in purchasing the house, what difference does it make if we move in within two months or six as long as we do intend on moving into it? Analogously, if I buy a big-screen TV or even something as large as a yacht on financing, do I have to use it within thirty days to make it officially mine? This rule probably exists for a reason, maybe to prevent crooked speculators from gaming the system, but it seems to me that there should be a waiver in mitigating circumstances such as ours. What do domestically relocating families do if they can't sell their previous home or have other obligations that extend beyond that time? This looks like yet another stipulation that, whatever its intended purpose, causes far more agita in well-intentioned folks than any crooked speculator types, who'll always find a way around it.

If we ticked the application check boxes neatly, if I'd never left the US and married an American and worked the same routine nine-to-five ever since graduating university, then I'm sure none of these issues would have surfaced. But we always end up straddling one box and another, and nothing other than a bit of humanity in the application process would make things any easier. Finding even a hint of that humanity has been a needle-in-a-haystack kind of ordeal, and amid the inherent pressure of house-hunting and all its frustration and unfairness and decisions and deadlines it's left me nothing but tired, tired, tired.

-----------------------

^[1] Well, for many lenders it was a leap of faith until the whole house of cards came tumbling down. Now they're erring on the side of caution, which penalizes modest earners and long-term savers like us.[↩]

The Insatiable Gremlin of Guilt

2009-05-03T14:18:00.003-07:00

IN SPITE of all my antipathy toward those who allow their inane chatter to spread across the Web and choke it like kudzu, over the past week I've nevertheless been occupied on and off with trying to think of something, anything, to post here. It wasn't that I was inundated with more pressing matters to attend to, though to some extent I was, but rather that there was no topic or event that compelled me to allot it more than a written sentence or two, most of which I simply passed on to Twitter and its 140-character limit. Either I'm growing terribly jaded or the past ten days have been entirely unprovocative.

On Friday I did have a brief, maybe twenty-minute exchange with a friend about Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke, and about an hour afterward I considered the possibility of posting on the subject of how rare it is that I have satisfying discussions about books—good books, I mean, not the mass-market bestsellers on the Waterstone's 2-for-1 table—with anyone but my wife, and how sad that is, given that before we moved we were both inclined to wax romantic about the surfeit of quality cultural conversation to be had here in Hamburg, but I couldn't think of anything to say except for the few clauses I've just written, which, in case it needs pointing out, are neither insightful nor significant. I'd also intended to post some CD reviews, as I mentioned in my last post all those many days ago, yet I haven't found enough time to sit down and give any of the discs the listening they deserve, and as there are no deadlines for this little pet project of mine, there's no particularly good argument for haste. No deadlines, that is, except the insatiable gremlin of guilt who keeps nagging for content, content, even when I haven't anything worthwhile to give. Q.E.D.

Calvino's Cosmicomics

2009-04-20T04:57:00.022-07:00

PREVIOUSLY untranslated (so far as I know) Calvino—Two Cosmicomics: As long as the sun lasts and The meteorites—can be found in the May issue of Harper's.

From As long as the sun lasts:

It was precisely for that reason, to have a bit of a quieter life, that my grandfather came and settled here—Qfwfq said—after the last "Supernova" explosion had flung them once more into space: grandfather, grandmother, their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. The Sun was just at that stage condensing, a roundish, yellowish shape, along one arm of the Galaxy, and it made a good impression on him, amidst all the other stars that were going around. "Let’s try a yellow one this time," he said to his wife. "If I've understood it right, the yellow ones are those that stay up longest without changing. And maybe in a short time from now a planetary system will form around it too."

And from The meteorites:

At first we were under the illusion that we could keep it clean—old Qfwfq said—since it was really small and you could sweep it and dust it every day. Of course a lot of stuff did come down: in fact, you would have thought that the Earth had no other purpose in its orbiting but to gather up all the dust and rubbish hovering in space. Now it’s different: there's atmosphere; you look at the sky and say, "Oh, how clear it is, how pure!" But you should have seen what landed on us when the planet bumped into one of those meteor storms in the course of its orbit and could not get out. It was a powder as white as mothballs that deposited itself in tiny granules, and sometimes in bigger, crystalline splinters, as though a glass lampshade had crashed down from the sky, and in the middle of it you could also find biggish pebbles, scattered bits from other planetary systems, pear cores, taps, Ionic capitals, back numbers of the Herald Tribune and Paese sera: everyone knows that universes come and go, but it’s always the same stuff that goes round.

Note that it's Martin McLaughlin (who also did Calvino's Why Read the Classics? and Hermit in Paris) translating these, not William Weaver. Penguin Classics UK is publishing The Complete Cosmicomics next month.

Two New Reviews, More on the Way

2009-04-19T06:29:00.005-07:00

JUST a quick post to note that two reviews of mine have recently been published: one of Dave Thompon's I Hate New Music: The classic rock manifesto over at Ink 19 (click here to read it), and the other of Marina Krcmar's Living without the Screen: Causes and consequences of life without television (Kindle edition; some irony in that, no?) in the April 3 issue of the TLS.

I've got a fairly full plate at the moment on account of other books and CDs for review, some of which I'm really looking forward to (such as Nandan Nilekani's Imagining India: The Idea of a Renewed Nation and a reissue of Sonny Rollins' Saxophone Colossus with Work Time), so the cruellest month might also be one that's light on substantial blog posts. I will, however, try to get some original CD reviews on Magic Bullets, Garth Knox, Susan Werner, and others posted here before the end of the month.

Digg's Devolution

2009-04-10T02:31:00.009-07:00

WRITES John Gruber:

Digg sends a tremendous amount of traffic to sites that make it to the top of their front page, but it’s the worst kind of traffic: mindless, borderline illiterates. Good riddance, really.

That last sentence refers to the lovely message that he's coded to greet all Digg users who're viewing Daring Fireball when the new DiggBar is framing the page.

Me, I hate the DiggBar. Hated it from the moment it first appeared at the top of my browser window. I tend to use Digg only as a directional tool that points me to headlines that don't appear in my regular RSS feeds, and so I resent the cocoon that Digg attempts to create by framing external sites. To turn off the DiggBar for yourself, look under Settings > Viewing Preferences on your Digg account.

While I'm on the subject, I suppose it's worth mentioning that the DiggBar isn't the only reason I'm beginning to question the utility of Digg altogether. Gruber's description of the traffic that Digg generates is sadly becoming true in more and more cases; the site's only original content, the user comments, is a torrent of poorly spelled diatribes waxing indignant about the sensationalist headlines to articles (usually submitted by a small cabal of users led by MrBabyMan) their authors haven't bothered to read.

If one of these diatribes should appeal to the mob, woe betide anyone who holds a different view. It doesn't take an awful lot to rile these users who view themselves as advanced, individualistic, twenty-first century, tech-literate types into showing their nasty, juvenile, tribal, primitive sides. So as not to make each visit to Digg cause for outright despair, I often have to avoid reading the comments altogether, and that, I'm afraid, is a sure sign that a site has devolved into a din of arrogance and arbitrary agitation and is no longer worth visiting. Good riddance, really.

Dictionary.com's Free iPhone App

2009-04-08T06:02:00.011-07:00

LESS than a week after I coughed up a whopping $4 for the excellent WordBook dictionary and thesaurus app for the iPhone, Dictionary.com has released its own (free!) dictionary app. Download it here.

WordBook claims 220k definitions; the Dictionary.com app claims 275k. Both feature a companion thesaurus, word(s) of the day, etymologies, and audio pronunciations. The WordBook app also has some bonus features like wildcard search and online integration with Wikipedia, but these aren't particularly essential.

The financial hit is much more tolerable this time around, but this reminds me of the time I, in a fit of reference mania, bought the entire OED on CD for hundreds of dollars. I was using Windows 98 at the time, and the CD was rendered obsolete three years later with the arrival of Windows XP. The publisher couldn't have cared less and made this quite clear. No upgrade discount, no cross-platform discount (for my eventual migration to a Mac), no sympathy. Even if I'd wanted to, I wouldn't have been able to use my OED CD-ROM to look up the definition of sucker.

Faber's 52 Poems for 80 Years

2009-04-07T08:17:00.005-07:00

IF THE Web seems to be little more than a blind and frivolous celebration of ephemera, take comfort in Faber's new 52 Poems widget honoring the publisher's 80th year.

Available ready-made for iGoogle, MySpace, Facebook, Blogger, Friendster, Wordpress, or customizable for virtually any other site, it displays one poem per week chosen from eight decades' worth of Faber archives. This week it's Larkin's "The Trees," well timed with the season: "The trees are coming into leaf / Like something almost being said".

Get the widget from the 52 Poems website.

Jai Agnish • Awake When You Dream

2009-04-04T13:49:00.011-07:00

Jai Agnish
Awake When You Dream
self-released (free download)

Among the small circle of listeners familiar with his work, Jai Agnish is perhaps best known for his electro-pop albums Automata (2000) and Mechanical Sunshine (2006). Awake When You Dream, his third full-length, is an attempt "to see what he could pull off without the machines," leaving Agnish with just barebones instrumentation: a Gibson acoustic, a Roland synth, and the occasional backing vocal by Peg Carlin.

But the music doesn't suffer from this back-to-basics approach; in fact, Awake When You Dream is quite an appealing, tuneful little disc, with just enough diversity—"New Parade" and its pattern of march and glide, "Walls" and its urgent succession of descents—to keep what are quite homogenous songs from getting stale over a 42-minute running time. The album's stumbling point is instead its reliance on repetition, which, coupled with Agnish's odd and not particularly flexible vocal delivery, makes these thin songs seem less substantial.

Repetition can be used to grand effect, and many a singer (Morrissey and Isaac Brock come immediately to mind) has built a career on it, but Agnish's lyrical repetition often feels gratuitous or lazy, as in "Paradise":

Trying to find my way to paradise
To paradise
Trying to find my way to paradise
To paradise

Can't quite figure out this roadmap
And there's too many signs
Too many signs
Can I hitch a ride there with you?
Can I hitch a ride there with you?

Trying so hard
Does it matter at all?
Matter at all?
Trying so hard
Does it matter at all?
Matter at all?

Tie up to the truck
Maybe you can tow me there
You can tow me there

This transcription, abbreviated slightly for the sake of space, doesn't quite capture how often certain stanzas are revisited several times within this sequence, and that the whole sequence is then repeated a second and third time. Had there been something profound or poetic in all these lines it might have been an easy thing to overlook, but "Paradise" is just one of the many songs on Awake When You Dream that takes a long time to say nothing in particular in a very solemn way. "Walls" is guilty of it too:

Concrete walls above my head
Didn't mean it in the end
Didn't mean it at all

Walls above my head (x3)
And in the end (x3)
I guess it's best for the rest of us (x2)

How high is this anyhow? (x2)

Tracks like "Lightning Bugs," "Shopping Malls," "An American," and "Farview" are of a slightly different, vignette-as-narrative variety, and while they do offer something meatier than tepid philosophizing, Agnish sings them in a bemused, distanced way that renders their content flat. Although this doesn't scuttle the songs entirely, it's still tempting to imagine how, say, Sufjan Stevens (who's worked with Agnish from time to time) or Damien Jurado might handle this very same material and imbue it with the bit of heart and conviction that it's wanting.

Awake When You Dream still has quite a bit going for it—not least that it's decent music that Agnish has made available at no cost to you—and some, though not all, of its shortcomings tend to recede after repeated listens. It's not an album for the ages, but it ought to leave you with a couple of melodies that will be hard to shake for the next few weeks.

Listen and download: Bandcamp, Last.fm, Virb

Ve Haf Vays of Makingk Terrible Packagingk

2009-03-29T06:31:00.004-07:00

GIVE the Germans a few weeks and they'll engineer an automobile that is breathtaking in form and flawless in function. They'll design and implement a public transportation system that will be able to dispense you within one meter of anywhere you want to go, efficiently and punctually. They'll establish a bureaucracy so impenetrable that not even God himself could navigate it. They'll invent one hundred new recipes for pork.

But packaging? That leaves them stumped. The "convenient" tear strips on boxes of frozen food shred when they're pulled. The plastic bags that cereal comes in split down the side after opening. The "open here" tab is glued to the container as tightly as all the other corners. The cling film doesn't cling. And then there's the mother of all idiotic packaging, milk containers:

In case it's not clear what the issue is here, that ring is supposed to be pulled to provide an opening. When the ring snaps, you have to use pliers to pull it off or puncture the seal with a knife.

Believe it or not, this is an improvement. Years ago, you had to lift a flap and snip its corner to be able to pour the carton's contents. Because there was no room allowed for air intake when you did this, the contents would come out in an unpredictable succession of geyser-like actions. But now that the packaging incorporates plastic (and still isn't especially easy to pour), it has to go into a special recycling container; you can't just put it out with the paper waste like you used to.

Compare that nonsense with the beautiful simplicity of this:

No plastic, pull rings, screw caps, scissors, or pliers needed. Just one unbroken motion with V-shaped thumb and fingers: press the flaps back to separate them, then bring them forward to create a spout. And how wonderfully easy to pour and shut again.

Is there a country that gets public transportation and milk carton packaging right? That's where I want to live.

These Conchords Have Flown

2009-03-26T07:48:00.011-07:00

THERE isn't a great deal that gets me excited about television. As I was reviewing Marina Krcmar's (no, not a typo; it's pronounced Crutch-mar) Living without the Screen for the TLS recently, I found myself nodding along with nearly every reason her pool of nonviewers gave for washing their hands of the medium, ranging from its vacuity to the grasping industry behind it. That could be why our own set has been gathering dust for about six years now (not forgetting that German programming, which dubs or remakes the worst of American TV, is especially poor).

As a child and teenager I was besotted with TV. It began at a very young age with Sesame Street and The Great Space Coaster; then came He-Man, Dukes of Hazzard and The A-Team; and after that, well, it's a blur of Cheers, Knight Rider, Diff'rent Strokes, Facts of Life, Silver Spoons, Family Ties, Who's the Boss?, Three's Company, and What's Happening!! reruns until I hit college and the tube's blue glow faded from my life. More recently, when there's been a lot of hype over one show or another—Lost, Heroes, Life on Mars (UK), Family Guy, Robot Chicken—I usually make a point of watching an episode or two, only to be reassured that I'm not missing a heck of a lot. Even The Simpsons has gone so far downhill that watching old episodes for the sixtieth time is more rewarding than wasting twenty minutes on the tedious new high definition/lowest common denominator stuff.

But there have been a few series besides the occasional BBC history/nature special that have reined in my pessimism: post-2005 Doctor Who, Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Office (UK), Arrested Development (this, to my mind, was television's apogee), The Daily Show (does that count as a "series"?), Literatur im Foyer, and most recently, Flight of the Conchords. This last shouldn't come as surprise to anyone who pays attention to the changing quotes up in the title bar.

FotC wrapped up—for good, it seems—last Sunday evening, ending what turned out to be a disappointingly lackluster second season on an fittingly lackluster note. When it was good it was very, very good...

Carol Brown (Choir of Ex-Girlfriends) [Season 2, Episode 5]

Fashion Is Danger [Season 2, Episode 8]

... and when it was bad it was boring.

Bret's Day [Season 2, Episode 9]

Rejected [Season 2, Episode 1]

The best episodes were those in which the action moved seamlessly from story to music video and back again (shining example: "Unnatural Love," S02E05). The unsatisfying lows were those in which the story felt as though it were wedged around whatever songs the duo happened to have to hand ("Tough Brets," S02E03), or conversely, when the songs were tacked onto the story ("Prime Minister," S02E07). Or rather, what story there was to speak of. The second season often seemed at a loss for clever new mishaps and drifted between the mundane and the ridiculous.

So as much as I hate to see one of my favorite series come to an end, it's probably for the best that FotC came to an end when it did. And though I might kvetch about its second season, I'm also fully aware that if more shows were even half this good, our TV set would see a lot more use.

Thanks for the Memories

2009-03-17T15:26:00.001-07:00

EVERY now and again a memory navigates its way out of the dusty archives of my mind and, seizing an opportune moment of calm, usually just as I've entered some Proustian phase of somnolence, commandeers all of the emotional and sensory resources at its disposal to make me relive a particular scene from my life, often a scene of excruciating embarrassment or profound regret that had been relegated to the archives for good reason. Why my own mind would wish to afflict me in this way I can't say; my subconscious and I have never been on particularly good terms. I suppose it's meant to be somehow cathartic, a means of coming to terms with the power of the memory itself, which has lost none of its immediacy and keenness over the years, or a means of reconciling the flawed person I was back then with the flawed, albeit older and slightly more experienced, person I am today.

Last night the scene was Valencia, spring, 1996. A victim of my own fish story, I found myself in a small bar, perched on a stool in front of every single person I had met while studying abroad, shakily singing Oasis' "Wonderwall" while Chris, as I seem to remember his name being, strummed out the tune on an acoustic guitar behind me. He had arranged the gig. He had printed out the lyrics on the crib sheet I held in my trembling hand. And he, believing me to be the frontman for an emerging indie rock band called St. Proxy, was the one who had asked me to sing.

Rather than fib my way out of the event in the same way I'd fibbed my way in, I went through with it, thinking that several glasses of beer in quick succession would relax me (alas, by that point they had no desired effect whatsoever), or that the very expert hand gestures I made to the soundman to turn my mic down—down a bit more, a little further please, keep going, no, still not far enough—would be enough to keep the curtain firmly drawn over the figure hidden behind it. The averted eyes and awkward compliments I received afterwards confirmed that they were not.

The truth? There was an exceedingly shortlived band that had loosely agreed to call itself St. Proxy, and I was in it, along with Jay, a remarkable multi-instrumentalist, and Joe, a chain-smoking keyboardist with a four-track in his bedroom. As no better alternative was available, I, who no amount of Auto-Tune would ever be able to save, had fallen into the role of vocalist, bringing an inimitable (on account of choice, not talent) David Freel-meets-Morrissey approach to things. We had even put a few songs (though the title escapes me, I still remember the clunky opening line of our side one, track one: "Young boy, so frail and paranoid") to tape on Joe's four-track; Jay and I listened to them while riding around in his jeep, marveling once or twice at my inspired harmonica—yes, harmonica—solo at the end of one of the songs.

The fictional portion of the story begins with any mention of us playing live anywhere other than Joe's bedroom, or the slightest implication that we had amassed any audience outside of ourselves. These were the sort of embellishments made by one who, emboldened by circumstances, can't really see the harm in inventing such a small claim to glory, and who is supremely confident that he could never, ever be challenged and caught out. It wasn't the first time I'd made a rather sad and bumbling attempt to reinvent myself for new faces in a new place, and though I'd like to say it was the last, I have a strong suspicion the dusty archives will eventually yield some long-dormant memory that proves otherwise.

The Great Tech Sell-Off

2009-03-03T04:25:00.009-08:00

IF YOU live in or near Hamburg and you're in need of a router, hard drive (internal or external), telephone, or any number of other computer/networking devices, then look no further. I'm slimming down my computer setup, and I'm selling off a ton of equipment at fair—in some cases, dirt cheap—prices.

I'm not eBaying or mailing any of this stuff; it's personal pickup (preferably at a café around the corner) with cash in hand.

Here's what's on offer, some with German descriptions:

HDDs:

~~1) 320GB / 7200rpm/ 16MB SATA Western Digital … 15 EUR~~
~~2) 500GB / 7200rpm / 16MB SATA Samsung HD501LJ … 25 EUR~~
~~3) 500GB / 7200rpm / 16MB SATA Western Digital … 25 EUR~~

HDDs mit Gehäuse / External Hard Drives:

~~4) 80GB Mac & More "IceWarrior" / FireWire 400 (x2) / mit UK-Stecker … 5 EUR~~
~~5) 180GB DigitalDrive (von digitalplanet.de) / FireWire 400 (x2) … 10 EUR~~
~~6) 500GB LaCie / USB2.0 (x1), FireWire 400 (x1), FireWire 800 (x2) / mit US-Stecker … 45 EUR~~
~~7) 500GB OWC Mercury Elite Pro / USB 2.0 (x1), FireWire 400 (x2) / mit US-Stecker … 40 EUR~~
~~8) 500GB (2x 250GB) Formac / FireWire 400 (x2) / Lüfter macht manchmal ein komisches Geräusch beim einschalten, sonst funktioniert einwandfrei … 25 EUR~~

Networking-Geräte / Networking Devices:

9) Speedport W 701V / 802.11g WLAN DSL-Router mit VoIP-Funktion … 15 EUR
~~10) D-Link DI-524 / 802.11g WLAN Broadband-Router … 10 EUR~~
11) Apple AirPort ("Graphite" 802.11b) Basisstation … 10 EUR
~~12) ATI Remote Wonder II Multimedia Funk-Fernbedienung für Mac OS X oder Windows … 10 EUR~~

Gratis! (oder 5 EUR Spende) / Free! (or 5 EUR donation):

13) Teledat 331 LAN Ethernet-Router
14) Alcatel Speedtouch 510 USB Broadband Modem
15) Philips Kala Telefon mit Anrufbeantworter / Knöpfe sind etw. versteift
16) Olympia DECT-Telefon / Knöpfe sind etw. versteift
~~17) Hama DVB-T Antenna~~

Above is a slideshow of the Picasa album where you can find photos of most of the devices. You can also go here to view the ad on Craigslist Hamburg. If you've got any questions, leave a comment and I'll respond as soon as I'm able.

Nope, I Got Nuthin'

2009-02-27T12:38:00.004-08:00

DO YOU know what this says?

It says, "Sorry, folks, I got nuthin'. Nope, nuthin'. I tried to come up with sumthin', but all I got was a whole lotta nuthin'. Yeah, other folks is findin' out ways to integrate GPS into cameras, uppin' the megapixels, doin' live view stuff, that sorta thing, but all I could think of was makin' one of our cameras white. Well, not all white. Just bits of it, y'know, so it looks like you kinda slapped it together from spare parts lyin' around yer house. But get this, folks: It's a limited edition!"

And while we're on the subject, what's up with the trademarked "Be Interesting" slogan? Does the consumer think a tacky D-SLR that looks like a Stormtrooper just crapped it out is going to make him someone worth knowing? Does Pentax think it can just command you to start doing something interesting, like you're some kind of dancing monkey or court jester?

Misguided in every possible way.

Here's a couple of useful suggestions, Pentax: Hire an ad agency that doesn't stick you with the third-rate ideas they couldn't foist upon anyone else. Bring the K10D firmware back into active development. Work on making the 18-55mm kit lens something worth owning. Do something worthwhile, anything, instead of stumbling your way through pathetic marketing ploys like this one.

Planning Ahead

2009-02-22T05:25:00.005-08:00

POSTS are few and far between these days because I'm trying to pack in all the cleaning, writing, reading, reviewing, tinkering, tidying, washing, editing, and any other gerund I can think of before the new arrival is here. The birth should be any day now.

I'd meant to make at least one post showcasing a heap of gadgets, routers, and hard drives that I'm about to put up for sale, but before I do I need to transfer some of the remaining data onto larger hard drives. Unfortunately, I don't have the larger hard drives just yet, and every time I spot one on eBay.de for a reasonable price, some sucker comes along and places a bid that's higher than the retail cost — up to 20 euros in some cases. I think it's a case of the "I'm buying it on eBay, so it must be a bargain!" mentality. Meanwhile, I'm also still waiting on Samsung to release their new line of high-capacity F2 EcoGreen drives, two of which I plan to stuff into a RAID enclosure that's been sitting empty for that very reason. The 1.5TB HD154UI has had a taunting "coming soon" label next to it for as long as I can remember. I even tried casting my net as far as Japan, where the HDDs are already available, but there are international shipping restrictions with every retailer I've found so far. If they're not out by CeBIT, I plan on marching over to the Samsung booth, taking some scrawny exec by his lapels and stuffing him into the RAID enclosure. Or would that be too dramatic?

You don't always have to resort to empty threats of violence to light a fire under a company. Stuart Butterfield (not to be confused with Flickr's Stewart Butterfield) of Geotate, the company that's responsible for much of the inner and outer workings of the Jobo photoGPS (a frequent subject of this blog of late: reviewed here, afterthought here), was kind enough to get in touch with me and address some of my mild disappointments. He said that it's likely that the software will remain a Java app, but "[i]n addition to the application data directory fix, there are a number of additional improvements" included in an update that's due to appear in mid-March. No EXIF-writing to RAW just yet, but support for embedding latitude and longitude is in the works after having been removed from earlier (as in, pre-1.0.6.1) beta versions. I'm thrilled that Geotate has been so receptive to feedback—in fact, Butterfield's two e-mails to me show that the company doesn't just respond to feedback, it actively seeks it out—and that it looks as if the software will remain in active development for some time. Quite often companies fail to realize that software is never complete, always in a state of flux; they issue one half-baked release of accompanying software and, thinking their job is done, then let it languish with a growing list of bugs and incompatibilities. That's why it's doubly reassuring to know that Geotate, in addition to compiling user feedback for the forthcoming update, is already thinking another update ahead.

The Jobo PhotoGPS and Programming Etiquette

2009-02-13T11:39:00.009-08:00

ONE more minor gripe about the Jobo PhotoGPS, which I positively reviewed here about two weeks ago.

The Mac version of the software puts its files in the top-level user directory, e.g., ~/photoGPS/.

This is a major programming faux pas.

On OS X, the data required by an application should reside in the Application Support folder of the user's library, in this case, ~/Library/Application Support/photoGPS/. Even a colossal oaf like Adobe more or less adheres to this rule of thumb (although Microsoft Office has yet to move its annoying Microsoft User Data folder out of ~/Documents/ and into there). The Application Support folder exists for this precise reason, and putting the files elsewhere—out of ignorance, out of laziness—would be like storing a frozen pizza in the microwave. In other words, it just isn't right.

Not one to sit idly by as dilettantes violate very clear-cut organizational guidelines, I've sent Jobo an e-mail (in both English and German, no less) asking them to please correct the mistake in an updated version. They replied within 48 hours when I wanted to buy the damn thing, but not one of the five people to whom I sent the request has bothered to respond this time. And it's been a week. And I know that they've visited this blog, which I linked to in the e-mail, in the meantime. If you're planning on buying the device, you might want to factor this incidental information into your decision.

[Update 22 Feb: Geotate has informed me that this will be corrected in a future software release. Read more here.]

Test Post from Blogwriter Lite

2009-02-06T14:37:00.002-08:00

THIS is a test post from BlogWriter Lite.

Test Post from LifeCast

2009-02-06T14:28:00.002-08:00

THIS is a test post from the LifeCast blogging client on the iPod Touch.

Posted with LifeCast.