Category: Serious Stuff

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Music Serious Stuff Toiling In The Pixel Mines

Why I hate election season.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t for a moment begrudge our ability and our privelege to choose our own leadership. Sure, I’ve spent 6+ years really questioning whether or not the infrastructure by which we do that actually works, but I’d rather have the ability to vote, and to question the system, than to not even have the ability.
That said: I completely f’ing hate election season when it comes to work. I hate it. With the white-hot passion of a billion dying suns. On an ideological level, I hate that campaign advertising has essentially become a vituperative exercise in misdirection and stuff that would be considered actionable slander if it wasn’t a campaign ad. This helps no one. This informs and enlightens no one. It merely plays to passion, knee-jerk reactions, and polarizes communities rather than inciting them to ask questions. There is an equal time rule for news coverage of candidates running for office, though somewhere along the way this seems to have become an “equal time for Democratic and Republican candidates only” thing.
And how do the respective campaigns monitor the equal time process? Why, by watching our coverage, of course. And this is where it gets blisteringly, brain-boilingly ridiculous. Several years ago, I came up with a solution: anytime we do a story on, say, candidates for governor, I put together a multi-split-screen montage showing every candidate for governor. There’s your equal time right there – you’re all up for exactly the same amount of time. This year, though, it’s already sunk to new levels of pedantry – let’s say, for the sake of argument, that a transition from one story to another within the same promo takes the form of a lens flare that starts at lower left and moves to the upper right. Now you’re likely to hear from some campaign that the lens flare obscured their candidate for a split-second longer than it obscured the other guy.
It’s enough to make me fall back on that most impartial of methods: Text On A Screen, Showing No Candidates. It’s also enough to make me scream, but the soundproofing in here, such as it is, couldn’t silence a moderately noisy mosquito.
It’s a month before the election, and I’m sick and tired of it already.
L.E.O. - Alpacas OrglingIn tonight’s good news: check out this upcoming CD from a group called L.E.O. (warning: the page that link goes to will begin playing music to you immediately, just in case you’re at work or something), a sort of all-star collective of folks ranging from Andy Sturmer (ex-Jellyfish) to Bleu (??) to the Hanson brothers (!!) and numerous others, all put together in a style paying homage to ELO. Tasty stuff, actually. You can listen to the whole thing online (lo-fi of course), but some of it is really good if you’re into that kind of music. I’ll be trying to pick this up as soon as funds permit. Damned if there isn’t a lot of good music coming out right about now – and again, mostly not on the major labels.… Read more

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Cooking With Code Home Base Serious Stuff

Pizza, upgrades, and other adventures in pure exasperation

Saturday is really my one day to rest. I work Mondays through Fridays, and I get to slave away on the farm all day on Sundays (and at some points in the year, I’m expected to work on Sundays even after I do the farm thing). Saturday is it for me. This hasn’t been the best Saturday in the world.
I’m trying to install an upgraded WordPress on my site and my FTP client isn’t just rebelling, it’s crashing with enough force to leave a hole in the floor. You can’t just hit the red X and kill it, you have to go to the task manager and kill it. And it crashes doing the damnedest things – it’ll upload a directory with a dozen subdirectories just fine. Ask it to refresh its view of the remote directory? Splat! I’ve been trying to do this for something like four hours now.
I’ve also been eating pizza during that four hours – pizza that was delivered around 7ish PMish. My wife and I each ate a couple of slices when it arrived, and both wound up in digestive distress not very long afterward. She went to bed after that, and I went back to doing whatever the heck it is that I do around here. I ate three slices later, and they didn’t cause me nearly that much trouble. You know what I think the difference was? The grease. The grease ran off into the wax paper in the bottom of the box. So I guess in the future, if I want pizza, I need to order it with about 12 hours’ notice. 😆
Diet Rite Strawberry KiwiOne bit of good news so this entry isn’t all grump: I can affirm that the drink seen here, Diet Rite strawberry kiwi, has completely rocked my world all weekend. There’s lots of stuff on the market that purports to be strawberry kiwi flavored, but so often it winds up being a slightly sour strawberry flavor. This drink gets it right on the nose. My wife found a case of this stuff at a local “damaged freight” store – i.e. where some of the local retailers consign stuff that’s been damaged not to the point where it’s unsafe for human consumption, but just to the point that it’s cosmetically imperfect. (We shop there a lot.) The price averaged out to a few cents a can. I hope they get some more of this in soon, or maybe Wal-Mart will start carrying the stuff – it’s mighty tasty.
OK, now back to my final rant of the night, as I kill WS_FTP in the task manager again. 🙄 For reasons that some of my closer friends know right now (and reasons that I don’t plan on going into in a public blog, at least not for a while), I don’t exactly love the institution of the bank right now. In fact, I’m getting close to hating banks, everywhere, period. I don’t have a problem with the people who are just doing their jobs there, but whoever the ones are in the head office who are coming up with ways to bilk us, those are the ones who need to die several nasty deaths over a painfully protracted period of time. My wife and I have three accounts at our bank – one is more or less her “vehicle fund,” for fueling, maintaining and insuring her personal vehicle, which she also uses heavily at work. One is the joint account which pays our bills. The third is mine, though it’s also referred to as the “site account” – any revenue from the website goes in there, and any expenses on the website’s behalf come out of there, but that account also fuels up the car I drive and occasionally feeds me. (Not that I’m making enough dough every quarter from Amazon to do that – a portion of each of my paychecks also goes in there. 😆 )
Anyway, here’s the deal. I need gas. The kind I can’t get from eating greasy pizza. I’m going to need it tomorrow. There’s about four bucks left in my account. That won’t cut it. So, after making sure my wife knew about it, I got online and moved about $35 over to my account from the joint account, and went and put the gas on my debit card. Well, okay, I put it in my gas tank but paid for it with my debit card. No sweat, eh? Just the way it’s supposed to be. Not so fast! I checked my balance online tonight, and saw that I’ve drawn an NSF for that gas – apparently the $35 won’t “officially” be moved until Monday. Which is “officially” bullcrap. That just negated the entire point of online banking. I would’ve been better off writing a check which couldn’t be deposited until Monday. But it sure as hell made the bank $25 for an NSF fee, didn’t it?
Oh, wait. Writing a check won’t always do it either. I used to have the “site account” at an entirely different account until they instituted a hairbrained policy whereby, when a check comes to them for payment, they don’t pay it against the balance in your account at that moment – they backdate it and use the balance that was in your account on the date that’s written on the check. So, for example, I write a check Thursday night for an amount that would cause an NSF, except that payday is on Friday, the check won’t hit the bank until Friday at the earliest, so I’m okay, right? Wrong! The bank backdates the $20 check to Thursday, sees that I only had $10 in the account on Thursday (never mind that there’s $70 there now), and uses that as an excuse to steal $25 from me. Oops, so sorry, charges me a $25 NSF fee.
I think you can see why I closed the account at that bank. And why I now want to close an account at this one and just start keeping it all in a frakkin’ jar under the bed.
Don’t get me wrong, folks, living beyond your means is bad – a highway to hell paved in bling that you couldn’t afford in the first place. I’ve always tried to play by that rule and not overextend myself, at least not for something completely frivolous. But every once in a great while, you have to play a game of “float the check” that should be resolved by the start of the next business day; I know that the days of doing that are numbered, with the rise of the debit card, smart cards, and even doing instant electronic funds withdrawal via check, so we might as well get used to it. But it looks like we also might as well get used to the high probability that someone at the corporate level of the banks with whom we do business is actively dreaming up ways to make up their own shortfalls – due to a dropoff in the loan business with rising interest rates – by getting it from the little guy any way they possibly can.
Maybe they wouldn’t be seeing a dropoff in business if they’d show even a modicum of respect for their customers.… Read more

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Cooking With Code Serious Stuff

A fundamental disconnect from the connected world

And now an explanation of why I bothered with the Livejournal plug-in.
In the past few weeks, I’ve gotten e-mails from a couple of folks I worked with or knew otherwise who had just stumbled across my blog for the first time, and one asked me a question that I found a bit odd – “Why don’t you have a Myspace site?”
It’s time I owned up to my virtual sins: in case you hadn’t guessed it, I’m way behind on the whole “social internet” thing. Which is odd, isn’t it? I was an early adopter of the online world (back in the BBS days) and then of the internet, and then of having a web site. These days, compared to the folks who are on Myspace, Livejournal, Xanga and just about every other “social networking” site out there, it’s actually a bit alarming to find out how far behind the curve I really am. I can say I probably read fewer than 15 blogs every week, and quite a few of those are in the (soon to be extinct) blog section at Digital Press. Quite a few of the friends whose blogs I would read are even further behind that curve than I am.
Don’t get me wrong, I know there’s more to the blogosphere than “dear diary” (though I’ll admit equally to not having found much more interesting stuff to post in my own blog that doesn’t meet that description) – there’s political and technical and ideological discourse aplenty. But the Myspace thing I’m not sure I get. Some of my friends have Myspace pages set up, or Livejournal, but I seldom see much from them on how they’re doing – all the action is in the area where your friends leave you messages. Or, actually, to be more precise, where your friends (and, in all likelihood, total strangers) leave you huge animated GIFs that basically say “Have a nice day” over and over again. Color me old and cranky, but I just don’t see the value of it. Maybe I’m missing something here.
So am I an antisocial social networker? I could actually see that being part of the answer. I’m no social butterfly in person. I put my whole site together so other folks can see and enjoy it, but I don’t expect much feedback. It could just be that my generation – in online terms at least – is falling by the wayside. After reading “Commodork” recently, I was struck by Rob talking about maintaining close friendships with his old BBS buddies, and I got to thinking about it – and nearly the entire staff of my web site consists of people I’ve known for years, back to the Fidonet days at the very latest. Rob’s book also makes a mention of how the old BBS days represented a bit of a technical meritocracy: if you could figure out the modem commands, you were in the club. If not, you were a prehistoric forerunner of today’s net n00bs. These days, that meritocracy doesn’t exist, and it seems like the inmates are running the asylum. Don’t get me wrong, the internet is a great force for good, free thought, free speech, the spreading of ideas, and the spamming of the masses. But it’s also like network television – you’ve got to wade through a lot of Jackass and Blind Date before you get to, say, the first couple of seasons of West Wing.
The internet, in short, has become a Popular Medium. It’s not mine anymore. Not mine alone, anyway. Which means I have to adjust to some new ways of doing things.
I took a look at plugins that might crosspost Scribblings to a Myspace account as well, because there’s some appeal to finally caving in and creating such an account…and then leaving it alone until further notice, posting my dispatches from afar. (See? Antisocial.) As it turns out, there’s no stable way to achieve that; the one WP-to-Myspace plugin that used to work, XrisXros, seems to have fallen by the wayside due to changes made to both platforms, and its programmer got tired of trying to keep up with those changes. Can’t blame him. I hope someone cracks that problem in the future.
If only so folks will stop asking me when I’m going to sign up for Myspace. I just don’t really plan on it until then. Sorry if that’s just me being antisocial.… Read more

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Serious Stuff

You’re no good to us, eggplant mike

The MobilePro crisis has been rectified as best it can be. (I’m writing this entry on it right now, in fact.) It took about 3 hours of
concentrated work to restore what there was to restore – wireless card drivers, various pits and pieces of software, restoring stuff from backups, and putting my Okudagram wallpaper back where it belongs. (Nothing says “this isn’t really a slightly outdated, pre-Palm Pilot handheld PC from 2000, this is a computer from THE FUTURE!” like Okudagram wallpaper.) Can’t replace the articles-in-progress file that I lost though.
I just paid a visit to Spamusement, still my favorite web comic despite Steven F.’s prolonged absence. (Hey, he just got married. I’d find better things to do than update a website too.) Not only are there a few new comics with his Far Side-meets-inbred-inbox-invaders patented style, but there’s also a line at the top of the page proclaiming NEW: NOT AS GOOD AS IT USED TO BE!
Sad thing is, I know how the intarweb works. I don’t doubt that he’s got a bunch of people actually e-mailing him to tell him that. Figures. It’s way too easy to get critical when the guy stops amusing you on command. Homestar Runner took a similar breather for much of the spring this year; I admit to being enough of a Homestar junkie that it took me about three weeks to realize that they were out to lunch until further notice. When that break stretched into two-month territory, my first thoughts were not “damn, Homestar Runner sucks now!” My first thoughts were: I hope the guys are okay. Second thought: I hope they’re not getting too much hate mail for this.
Given that Spamusement is seriously underground compared to Homestar, and Steven F. has apparently taken a beating via e-mail from something other than spambots, I can only imagine what kind of treatment the Chapman Brothers were getting.
Y’know, there are honestly times when I’d love to hit the pause button on this site for a bit; with frantic work going on in the background to transfer the site’s contents into database form, I’ve gotta say it’s really tempting to think about a vacation. But part of me kinda needs that deadline in my life, once a week (as if I don’t get enough deadlines at work every night), to give some small semblance of purpose to my life.
That, and I don’t want a bunch of hate mail that sounds like I just reviewed Cube and still didn’t like it.
Homestar, Spamusement and theLogBook all have one thing in common – they were projects that started out because some crazy nut had an entertaining idea they thought they’d share with you. That there was a way to actually “monetize” that (now there’s a made-up word that I hate) was just a happy accident. So think twice before lobbing a big ball of disgruntlement at your friendly neighborhood webmaster. Even Hollywood goes into reruns. Taking a break and regrouping your creative energies is the difference between a little vacation and hanging it up for good.
I sure hope everyone goes easy on me if I should ever take that break. Though if my site can be as “not as good” as Spamusement, that’s good company indeed.… Read more

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Serious Stuff Toiling In The Pixel Mines

High (alert) anxiety!

I don’t bitch about work a lot here, or even in my work blog, because most problems that arrive at work are of the personality conflict or mismanagement variety, and I just don’t see a point in trying to fix those things by whining outside of work where they’ll do no good. But this is a case where something went screwy on the public airwaves, and I do feel like it’s an occasion where I need to acquit myself and explain things as best I can.
To boil it down to brass tacks (to mix a metaphor), it comes down to this.
What I wrote:

See why millions of active American servicemen and women are on high alert for identity theft.

What one of our anchors said on the air:

See why millions of active American servicemen and women are on high alert.

I don’t imagine I need to explain why this is a massively gross inaccuracy. The story in question was the discovery that the personal information (i.e. Social Security numbers, etc.) of millions of active duty U.S. service members was stolen in that same incident a few weeks ago when information on our veterans was stolen from a VA official (frankly, I’m really starting to doubt that side of the story too, but let’s stay on course here). But this makes it sound like we’ve jumped up to an even higher war footing than that on which we already – seemingly permanently – are now.
I have quite a few friends in the armed forces. I can only imagine what they and their families thought when they saw this on the air. I can only imagine how many calls their COs got.
Now, please understand – when it comes to the stuff I write at work, I have pretty much zero ego invested in it. If something I wrote needs to be changed for inaccuracy, I’ve told our anchors many time, by all means, change it on the fly. I’m not precious about my words – it’s rather hard for me to invest a lot of possessiveness in four seconds’ worth of news tease copy. But this is ridiculous. It materially changes the character of what we are promising to tell people about – or, to use some smaller words…it’s a lie.
News promo writers aren’t exactly well-liked, in the business or outside of it, because we have to take facts and somehow create an emotional appeal to make the viewers who are sampling Lost or George Lopez to watch our news instead of the other guys’ news. News producers and reporters don’t like it because that emotional appeal runs the risk of oversensationalizing their story, or implying a promise that we’ll show something shocking which simply isn’t a part of the reality of the story. Viewers don’t like it because it’s almost a cliched joke that we’re saying everything in your kitchen pantry will kill you – the gross oversell has made viewers cynical, which makes my job that much harder. And I’ve fought the urge to sensationalize the whole time I’ve been here; the tendency to do so has changed depending on who the creative services director, news director, reporter and on-air talent have been.
And I do get rewritten every so often if it’s felt that what I’ve written isn’t sexy enough. That’s fair enough – it’s out of my hands. But there’s a vast gulf between “millions of active American servicemen and women are on high alert for identity theft” and “millions of active American servicemen and women are on high alert”. But this isn’t a case of a rewrite – the identity theft element was still on the teleprompter. It just didn’t come out of the anchor’s mouth.
For any alarm this may have caused, I apologize, but ask you to keep in mind that it wasn’t read as written.
Is anyone getting even the vaguest hint of why I want out of this business?… Read more

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Critters Serious Stuff Television & Movies

Kitty updates, drowning David Blaine, and porn.

OthelloPoor Othello, he hasn’t been getting a lot of face time, what with all of the other cat-related news going on. Othello celebrates his 12th birthday in a couple of months, and before we adopted Olivia, we took him to the vet to get his shots brought up to date and for a general checkup. The good news is that my little fuzzy guy is the very picture of health – he’s still active and fit, and doesn’t have any major health issues. He keeps in shape with repeated bouts of IMS (Invisible Mouse Syndrome), symptoms of which include chasing across the house after invisible objects at top speed. I think he does this just for the exercise myself. As for Olivia, she’s fine and she’s fiesty and was bored to tears today because I had to feed horses in the morning, take out the trash, and then get what little sleep I was going to get before having to go to work. Life as a kitten is rough! We have bad weather on the way, so Xena will probably be coming into the house. We’ll see how Olivia likes her “big sister” who happens to be a giant dog. (Seriously, at most they’ll probably only get a glimpse of each other.) … Read more

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Serious Stuff Should We Talk About The Weather?

Ten years after the night the sky fell.

I’ve gotten a number of e-mails, and even a call from a reporter, in the past week, all related to the 1996 Fort Smith Tornado Journal that I wrote in the pre-blog version of Scribblings almost exactly ten years ago. (I only just realized that I hadn’t ported this rather lengthy article over to the new, more bloggish portion of Scribblings, so I’ve done just that as of last night.) Generally, everyone’s been upbeat about it, glad that there’s some document on the web from someone who was there when it happened, and I’m glad they like it. In its own way, it’s a document of a time and a place and a mindset, and so I guess that since it’s a document of my mindset at a juncture that was less than favorable for me to hang on to all of my marbles, if I’m to be honest, I’m a little bit embarrassed about it. It’s a bit “overwritten” from a stylistic standpoint, and veers a little too close to angsty emotional overload for my tastes these days. But that’s who and where I was at the time, so I’ve managed to resist my urges to edit it or rewrite any of it.
Anyway, thanks to everyone who’s been reading it and letting me know.… Read more