This week at Stuck Between Stations, Roger surveys the history of bad urban planning… with a playlist. Each dutifully dissected example of urban planning gone horribly wrong is accompanied by its own soundtrack. The video of a pair of Norwegian youths lip-sync’ing The Pretenders’ “My City Was Gone” (the same song that “unintentionally made Rush Limbaugh an animal rights activist”) is worth the price of admission alone.
Oak Hymenoptera
By the grin on my face, you’d never guess I just got 14 sparkling new stitches in my right hand.
Headed out for Crockett Hills Regional Park with Miles on a gorgeous November morning – felt like late spring, amazing day. Halfway through the day, arrived at a cache under a giant oak … which we just couldn’t nail. Knew it was a tiny camouflaged micro, but it wasn’t about to give itself up. The clue was “Oak hymenoptera,” which of course was all Latin to me, so called Amy for a lifeline. She described a fungal growth related somehow to hornets or wasps. OK, the tree had its share of tumors and testicular outgrowths, and I searched them all while M ate cashews and an apple from his perch in the tree. But this one just wasn’t willing to be found.
A bit bummed, we moved on. Had intended to do a big loop around the park, but suddenly found ourselves at trail’s end. Realized we’d have to cross a road and hop a fence to continue our circuit – either that or hike two miles back the way we came and miss caching half the park, so went for it. Lifted Miles easily over the barbed-wire fence, then went to get myself over. OK, know this: I like adventure, and I’m not what you’d call “risk averse,” but I don’t think I do dumb things at the expense of safety. Studied the situation carefully to make sure there were no alternative crossings, then carefully got my feet into position on the top rung of the fence. Intended to sort of do a light vault over and spin down to the other side (this was only a 5-foot fence).
Data Detector
Diving into Leopard over the past few days… there’s so much to discover, lurking just below the surface. Kind of overwhelmed. After getting over initial dislike of the menu bar and Dock “improvements,” it’s going to take a while to digest all the hidden or semi-hidden functional changes. Some are obvious, others, not so much.
Tonight, came across an upcoming event in Mail.app, which I wanted to add to iCal. When I went to select the relevant words, a couple lines of plain text grew a magical “more” arrow, and offered to send the event straight to iCal for me. So slick and well thought-out. This is the kind of touch that made Apple Apple. Love it.
Lots more Leopard thoughts TK.
Music: Lafayette Afro Rock Band :: Voodounon
Like a Bonk on the Head
Miles was the baddest cutest little Sheriff for Halloween, finally getting some mileage out of the cowboy outfit I brought back for him from Texas earlier this year (SXSW). Seen here with friends Sako, Patrick and Jackson at school. Went out with him tonight and he cleaned up (of course), even though he’s still so closed-minded about food that he refuses to try candy (what he doesn’t know is great for him!) His dentist is offering a buy-back program, giving kids $1/lb for the candy they collect, so he was mostly interested in racking up the weight (though I confess to having stolen one of his Abba Zabbas).
Unrelated: In the car on the way to grandparents house over the weekend, Miles suddenly says, apropos of nothing: “Sometimes life feels like a bonk on the head.” Followed shortly after with “I’m not listening to you because you have worms crawling up your nose.”
Five is golden.
Music: Amy Winehouse :: Back to Black
Suite Matthew
The Red Hot Chachkas are an eclectic Bay Area klezmer group who, once upon a time, played at Matthew and Stacia’s wedding (Matthew is our dearly departed friend whose life was cut short by an inattentive driver in 2003). Soon after the wedding, Matthew joined the Chachkas as a basisst, and played with the group until his death. The Chachkas have written a song for Matthew: Suite Matthew.
I’ve spent the past few nights converting Matthew’s memorial site from Movable Type to WordPress, getting comments going again, fixing old links, re-embedding media, and just sprucing up the place in general. Working on it has made me miss Matthew all over again. He used to send the most hilarious links by day, then make the most intense music by night. He used to give the best hugs. He used to cook the best chicken. I miss you, Matthew.
Kissthisguy… Moving On
Twelve years ago, at a party in Boston, I found myself in a friendly argument about how to complete the lyric “Blinded by the light…” Seemed like everyone at the party had a different idea about what the real lyrics were. When I got home that night, I posted the list of responses I had written down to an early version of Birdhouse and invited people to send theirs. Amazingly, responses started to roll in via email faster than I could post them (manually). I opened it up to mishearances of other songs, and before long I was experimenting with publishing HTML out of databases.
I registered the domain kissthisguy.com and, over the course of a decade, went through a bunch of homebrew Filemaker and MS Access solutions before finally learning PHP/MySQL. The site’s been a great platform for learning about and experimenting with database and templating systems, and has always been good for a chuckle (though weeding through the volume of crappy submissions has always been a chore, mitigated only in the past couple of years by the current public voting system). The site’s been tremendously popular for something I work on only in spurts separated by long periods of inactivity, and I even lived off its ad revenue while writing the BeOS Bible. But the volume of submissions – up to 200 per day at points – eventually became a Sisyphysian task I knew I’d never get out from under. And I’ve known for a long time that without a lot more TLC, the site wasn’t maximizing its potential.
Half a year ago, I was contacted by an entrepreneur / investor / music fan who had been following the site for years, who was interested in buying it. The decision was tough – it had always been my baby, and I was proud to have done a lot with a little. But I’m also increasingly realizing that my life is like death by a thousand paper cuts – a zillion small involvements keep me permanently spread too thin, and I’ve been feeling like I want to clear more time for living. So we negotiated for a while and came up with a fair deal that would leave me as partial owner, but without further maintenance responsibilities. A few months ago, I sold kissthisguy.com and began the long process of cleaning up code, converting ad spaces, documenting the back-end, and getting the site ready for its next incarnation. A new company has been created to back the site, and some really solid backing is appearing to push the site in all kinds of directions I never foresaw.
I’m really proud to have created kissthisguy, and it’s been a great ride. But I’m also happy to let it move on in this way – I know that with my schedule, the site would just have lingered in the “lightly maintained” way it had been for years. Now it’s got new life and an inspired new owner. We haven’t said anything about this on the site yet, but check back in the coming months to see where it’s all going.
Fastest Windows Laptop
PC World tests Windows laptops for raw speed, and gives the nod to … Apple’s MacBook Pro.
The fastest Windows Vista notebook we’ve tested this year is a Mac. Try that again: The fastest Windows Vista notebook we’ve tested this year–or for that matter, ever–is a Mac. Not a Dell, not a Toshiba, not even an Alienware. The $2419 (plus the price of a copy of Windows Vista, of course) MacBook Pro’s PC WorldBench 6 Beta 2 score of 88 beats Gateway’s E-265M by a single point, but the MacBook’s score is far more impressive simply because Apple couldn’t care less whether you run Windows.
From the minute I first set up Windows under Parallels, I swore it was the fastest Windows I’d ever used — including boot time — so I’m not shocked by PC World’s finding. But it is just a wee bit ironic.
Music: Patti Smith :: Hey Joe
Be Stoked
Former J-School students Anna Sussman and Jonathan Jones are traveling the world as backpack journalists, and shot this image of the Dalai Lama on a sticker on the dashboard of a taxi floating around Darjeeling. Sage advice to keep surfing those cosmic waves.
Jonathan recently wrote a piece for the San Francisco Chronicle on how American Idol’s Indian counterpart Indian Idol has become a platform for rivalry between many of India’s 2,000 ethnic groups.
Hooked on a Feeling, Vol. 1
This week, Stuck Between Stations combed through a Denny’s shortstack of YouTube bookmarks to find videos that simply will not escape the brain, no matter how many times you call the sheriff to force their eviction. The visual equivalent of ear-worms, these A/V train wrecks take up residence in the corpus callosum, either because of or despite their badness, and lodge there for keeps, like grains of sand in your Juicyfruit. There are elements of awe and sadomasochism at work here. It’s not just that these videos are “so bad they’re good†(though there’s plenty of campy indulgence); we’ve come to genuinely love these “bad†music videos, and offer no apologies. In Vol. 1, Roger and Scot subject themselves to South Indian breakdancing music, the bizarre-but-relevant soul stylings of Tay Zonday, a troupe of angry geriatrics covering The Who, an airborne David Hasselhoff, the worst Star Wars theme song cover ever taped, and Leonard Nimoy’s foray into Hobbiton.
Comcast Hammer Granny
As a customer just coming out the tail end of a week-long ordeal with Comcast and their army of incompetent technicians and telephone bank operators, I feel more than a twinge of sympathy for Mona Shaw, a 75-year old woman, frustrated to the point of insanity by Comcast’s “customer support,” who walked into the local Comcast office and started smashing computers with a hammer. Washington Post:
Shaw’s opinion of Comcast? “What a bunch of sub-moronic imbeciles,” she says. This was after the company had scheduled installation of its much ballyhooed “Triple Play” service, which combines phone, cable and Internet services, in Shaw’s brick home in nearby Bristow. But Shaw said they failed to show up on the appointed day, Monday, Aug. 13. They came two days later but left with the job half done. On Friday morning, they cut off all service.
My situation: A seemingly simple request to upgrade to digital cable with HD channels, and to have a dual-tuner cable card installed in a Series 3 Tivo. Long story short: Installation tech appears, says he’s never worked with a Tivo before. Installs card, checks out a couple of channels, and leaves, thinking he’s done. I realize that night that we’re only getting 10% of the channels we’re supposed to be getting – and far fewer than we got before the upgrade. Each attempt to call for support earlier than midnight results in being put on the call-back system, my calls being returned at least 90 minutes later. The two times I was put on hold, got disconnected after 20 minutes. Empty promises that they could fix it by sending “a special signal” to the cable card to “wake it up” (electroshock therapy?) They asked me to wait three days for that to happen, then to call back if no change. Waited, no change.
Tried to schedule another house visit and was told there wasn’t a tech available for two weeks. Raised hell and, magically, an appointment opened up for the next morning. The tech never showed. Called in, waited for callback, and was told the visit was actually scheduled for the next day (bull – we were going camping that day). Finally was able to schedule a visit during the work week, between 10 and 2. Should I work from home that day or not? Yep – tech didn’t arrive until 1. Armed with an array of multi-stream and single-stream cards, she babbled at length, placed endless calls to her own tech support system, tried to mix single- and dual-stream cards, placed them in the unit in the wrong order… She finally got a single-stream card working and got up to leave. “You’re going to leave me with a single tuner?,” I asked. “You have another tuner in the Tivo.” “But not one that’s connected to your service.” “Why do you need two tuners anyway?” She places another call to her tech support to confirm that I’m not lying to her. Kid you not. Issue finally resolved after two hours of in-house visits, uncountable time on the phone, and bottomless frustration. And oh yeah – at every turn, operators tried to get me to bolt the Comcast phone service onto my order. Right, I’m going to put our phone service into the hands of a company this clueless, brand new to the phone game. I won’t be walking in to the local Comcast branch with a hammer, but it’s not hard to see where the impulse comes from.
So was Mona Shaw a crazy lady?
From what we can tell, Mona Shaw is not, actually, a raving lunatic armed with construction tools. She is a nice lady who lives in a nice house. She and Don are both retired from the Air Force (she was a registered nurse). They have been married 45 years. She is secretary of the local AARP, secretary of a square-dancing club and takes in strays for the local animal shelter (they have seven dogs at the moment). The couple attend a Unitarian Universalist church.
Get more than your fill at ComcastMustDie.com.
Tip: Comcast lookups for seldom-visited sites going slow? Reconfig your router with DNS servers from OpenDNS.
Music: Sonny Rollins :: Strode Rode