Been Too Long

I have not been to SF in years. I need to go back. Every time I go, I love it. MacWorld I think, the last MacWorld I attended was a dark time, pre Jobs return. Yes, I think it is time... I should record my SF visits, from that first strange gaming con one in May of...

Voyage To The Bottom of the Sea

Who else remembers this series from the 60's? Actually today I wanted to talk about the movie. Starring Walter ("Morbius") Pidgeon as Admiral Nelson, with (of all people) Frankie Avalon and Barbara Eden among others. It was one of the early Irwin Allen sci-fi/disaster epics. The movie opens with the submarine Seaview bursting out of the water at an impossible angle (yes sometimes real subs do surface at an angle, but I assume the crew inside is holding on for dear life).

Anyway, the plot concept is that the Van Allen radiation belts catch on fire, causing the earth's temperature to rise dramatically. The ice on the poles starts to melt... (sound familiar?) The brilliant Admiral Nelson, aided by his sidekick Peter Lorre, devises a plan to blast the Van Allen belt into space using a nuclear missile (nuclear missiles solved everything in the 60's). But everyone else thinks Nelson is crazy, so the Seaview is hunted by the other world powers. Along the way in the now-steamy arctic, they encounter religious fanatic Michael Ansara and his little dog on a melting iceberg...

Anyway, it all ends well of course, and at the end the Seaview is sailing away under a blue sky, and the Earth has magically returned to normal. If only it were that easy.

Looking back, I had a little boy-crush on Kowalski, played by Del Monroe in both the movie and the series.

Major Don West was hotter though.

October

Monday comes October, a month I always have mixed feelings about. I like the arrival of the cooler weather (seemingly delayed more every year), the drier air, the turning leaves. Yet my birthday is in October, and a reminder of my ever increasing age--though more and more, I find it hard to remember exactly how old I am.

It seems like an age and a world away when I was a seventeen year old kid in my first year at U.Va.

"My October Symphony"
By the Pet Shop Boys

So much confusion
When autumn comes around
What to do about October
How to smile behind a frown?
It's hard to settle down

It's so bemusing
Will they cancel the parade?
We marched each October
Now they say we were never even saved
We must be very brave

Shall I rewrite or revise
My October symphony?
Or as an indication
Change the dedication
From revolution to revelation?

So we're all drinking
As leaves fall to the ground
Because we've been thinking
How October's let us down
Then and now

Shall we remember
December instead?
Or worry about February?
Mourn our war-torn dead
Never seeing red?

Shall I rewrite or revise
My October symphony?
Or as an indication
Change the dedication
From revolution to revelation?

Spinning Digression

Warning to those of you who have never taken a Spinning class: this will be pretty much meaningless.

Ayway, I've been trying to take a few classes taught by other instructors, since it's been awhile and I wondered how other classes varied from mine. Frankly, the other classes bore me. I did get a comment from a guy who comes to my class sometimes who says, 'well, yeah we know in your class there is a lot of in and out of the saddle; with (some girl) it's more in the saddle and steady...)

In the saddle and steady bores me. Five minutes of light resistance to some trance music bores me. Half the time in these classes I was secretly coming up a little out of the saddle.

In my class I do a lot of intervals: get the resistance up, then up for 30 seconds, down, up, down. I try to vary it with jumps nd some longer stretches, but there is a lot of out of the saddle work. I wonder if it iss too hard?

I also try to time the drills to the songs: put on some speed during that power refrain! And at the end of a song we have a break.

Things I hate: cutting music off in the middle of the song to switch to the next drill; too much trancy stuff with no lyrics; seeming to not have any idea what you are going to do next. Instructors, at least pretend you have a program! Unless of course you are Doug-Doug the cycle stud, you could walk in and say "Okay, first 5 minutes we warm up, and after that your guess is as good as mine." And all the girls (and a few guys) swooned and made their own guesses.




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Meanwhile in Myanmar, they've started shooting at the little unarmed protesting monks... it's scary and sad.

More fun from X-Play

Emperor Palpatine gets a new job!

“Now, witness the firepower of this full armed and operational invisible doggie fence!”

More Whining and Ranting

I know, it does seem like all I do is complain lately. I guess I'm just in a bitchy mood. Verizon phone customer service sucks (nothing new, remember when they cut the cable so I was without phone or internet for a week, and I kept calling and they kept saying I didn't have a problem?). So anyway, I noticed on my bill the last couple of months that they were charging me $2.00 a month for Verizon Long Distance. I never make long distance calls, so apparently they decided to start charging me for the privilege of having the service even though I didn't use it. I decided to call them and cancel it (in an emergency, I could always use my cell phone). I called. I went into the hold queue. I was cut off! I called again. I waited through 15 minutes of 'unusually high call volume' before running out of patience. I navigated their web site for several minutes before finding an email address. I emailed saying I wanted the service stopped. They said they would get back to me in a day. Three days later I got a reply explaining the service. I emailed BACK and said (again) I wanted it cancelled. They emailed BACK and asked me to call 'for the best service.' I emailed back again and said I'd rather do it through email, and explained my negative phone experience. Finally they sent me an email back saying they would stop the service.

Conversely, Comcast has relatively responsive customer service, but they have other problems. According to this Washington Post article, Comcast cuts off internet users who they consider 'abusive.'

Comcast has punished some transgressors by cutting off their Internet service, arguing that excessive downloaders hog Internet capacity and slow down the network for other customers. The company declines to reveal its download limits.

"You have no way of knowing how much is too much," said Sandra Spalletta of Rockville, whose Internet service was suspended in March after Comcast sent her a letter warning that she and her teenage son were using too much bandwidth. They cut back on downloads but were still disconnected. She said the company would not tell her how to monitor their bandwidth use in order to comply with the limits.

That's the advantage of DSL over Cable: your speed is dedicated to you and no one else. Verizon doesn't care if you set up a network in your home with ten computers, because your bandwidth is dedicated. Comcast used to not even want you to have a network because (as I understand it) the bandwidth is shared in a neighborhood group. So you might get higher spped than DSL at some times, but if everyone in your cluster is downloading movies, it could slow to a crawl.

I do have to say that Verizon internet customer service has always been okay, and I am tempted to try their fiber optic service... but who knows how that could get screwed up.

On a completely different topic... maybe I'm mistaken regarding men's fashion (someone please correct me), but aren't brown shoes with a blue/grey/black suit a no-no? I keep seeing guys with grey suits and brown shoes! And lately I notice guys who are otherwise nicely dressed but then their brown shoes are horribly owrn and scuffed up. Hey, get some polish!

It reminded me of Mysterious Asian Man from way back. I wonder what he's up to now...

I Hate Credit Card Companies

I almost never use a revolving credit card. I use my Amex for everything possible, and pay it off every month. But a few places won't take Amex, so I have to use a VISA/MC. I actually have a bunch of these bank cards I accrued over the years, and I'd like to cancel virtually all of them, but I've been told that closing out accounts can actually be bad for your credit rating.

So the one VISA I use I try to keep close tabs on and set up a payment within a couple of days of making the charge. Well, I had one that slipped 20 days after the charge and they hit me with a late fee! Apparently Bank of America's payment due date is 20 days after the statement closing date (which was the exact date I charged an oil change). So, you don't even have until the next closing date till your payment is considered 'late.' I was furious, since they charged me $15 on a mere $20 'late payment.'

So I called and complained, and the customer service person said "That's how Bank of America does it." So I said, "I have a lot of other options, so you can keep your fifteen dollars and close my account (the limit of which they keep upping, despite the fact that I charge about $25 on it every few months). Then suddenly she agreed to take the charge off. Bah!

The lesson: pay close attention to how they try to screw you, and never be afraid to call and bitch. They count on you to timidly pay their userous penalty charges.

Mortgages

I don't want to go all superior about the mortgage crisis, because I'd probably lose my job and suddenly be unable to pay mine.

HOWEVER.

What were people thinking, getting adjustable rate mortages when they could apparently barely afford to make payments at the rate when they got it? Did they really think their rate would go down, or they would suddenly get a huge raise? How naive. I would never, ever get an adjustable rate mortgage, but then I am paranoid about that sort of thing: I just assume that the minute I signed it I'd be like that woman in the commercial with the crazy monkey on her back.

Now perhaps some of these people were lied to or deceived by unscrupulous lenders, in which case, yes I don't think they should be held accountable and if possible they should be given the chance to refinace at a fixed rate. But as someone who has been making his payments on time for the last ten years, I don't think I should have to pay for people who were too lazy to understand what they were getting into, or so arrogant or foolish that they just thought they would worry about the rate/payment going up 'later.' People should have bought something they could afford, or wait and save their money.

Now some people might say that these people took a risk because they didn't have a choice, because property values have shot upand made everything unaffordable. Well, why do you think that property values went through the roof in the first place? A run on real estate, fueled by greedy lenders and foolish borrowers.

Okay I'm done ranting.

iPod touch

I stopped by the Apple Store last night after I subbed a spin class, and checked out the iPod touch. I have to say I was not impressed. The bevel around the face is kind of rough, it didn't behave all that intuitively (I thought), and I've heard the screen is not as bright as the iPhone (you'd think they would just use the same one).

One thing that is holding me back from getting either one is that they are not compatible with the radio remote. I listen to NPR most of my walk to work, before I go underground on the Metro. I don't want to deal with a whole separate radio. Bah.

Sleep

Yes it has been several days since I posted. Since I no longer have my mornings free, I'm finding it difficult to get inspired to blog after work--still getting used to the day schedule, and the packed Metro trains. Though, when I read in the Washington Post this morning that DC is the second worst city for commuting/driving, I am glad once again that I no longer have that consulting job that involved driving from Arlington to Takoma Park every day, plus all over the area to clients. Ugh.

In unrelated news, I would have loved to have seen/heard Peng-Peng (pronounced 'Pong-Pong,' cute!) with the National Symphony Monday night. He's been on From the Top before, making a funny entrance in a polo shirt and eating a banana (long story). The reviewer in the Post was almost recluctantly complimentary...

Peng Peng, a 15-year-old Chinese pianist who might best be described as this year's diminutive of Lang Lang, would seem a delightful young man, with a winning grin, an endearingly coltish stage presence, long hands and fingers, and the power to project a loud, glassy sound to the last row of the Kennedy Center Concert Hall. At this stage in his career, is he the most interesting pianist around? Of course not -- but the music industry's prodigy-grinder needs new material. The whole process strikes me as deeply immoral: Talented children are exploited for their youth and then thrown away once they are past a certain age, while polished, thoughtful artists with decades of hard work and intensive meditation behind them are automatically written off as dinosaurs.

In any event, Peng Peng played Franz Liszt's rhetorical and meretricious Piano Concerto No. 1 in E-flat with requisite flash and agreeable derring-do -- and now I hope he continues his studies so that we may hear him at 30 in Mozart or Beethoven. These things do happen, now and then -- and the best of luck to him.

I'm not sure that the classical music industry has a 'prodigy-grinder,' though I guess to some extent these kids are sometimes treated as some kind of sensation. I hadn't realized that George Li was on the Martha Stewart Show which I have to admit is a bit of an odd venue. I also don't think that older performers are written off as dinosaurs. Yo-yo Ma is not a kid anymore, and for all his youthful looks, Joshua Bell is well into his 30's now.

Peng Peng delivered an awe-inspiring performance of a Rachmaninoff piece on FTT, and he seemed mature, poised, confident, and hardly some kind of freak--which the reviewer almost seemed to imply these kids are. Oh and I had to look up 'meretricious,' and after I did, I thought even less of this reviewer. No need to be so insulting.

ANYWAY, I was going to talk about sleep. Monday night I went to bed early, then had one of those wake up at 2 and can't go back to sleep nights. I watched about 2 hours of TV (thank god for TiVo again) and kind of dragged yesterday. Today is better. Tomorrow is class.

Oh and my previous employer contacted me and asked if I wanted to work for them as a freelance consultant in my spare time! I wonder how much I should charge? I'd have to clear it with peoplel though. And I don't know if I want to use any more of my already sparse free time... We'll see.

Kids

Today leaving the house, as I came up to the main sidewalk I saw this little Asian boy, maybe 5 years old (how early do they start some kind of preschool or kindergarten these days?) in shorts and a t-shirt, teetering along the sidewalk towards me at his best attempt at a run. Looking the other way I saw 2 two little blonde girls on the sidewalk with (presumably) their equally blonde mother. The Asian boy was clearly hoping to catch up with them on the way to the bus stop. Way back behind him was a young man I assumed was his (adopted) father. The boy was so determined, I stepped out of his way to let him hurtle (a little unsteadily) toward the girls. As he got closer both girls gleefully called out "Hi Alex!!" And as he arrived the mother said "You were running so fast! Is that a new lunchbox?"

I don't know why exactly but the whole scene was just so darn cute.

Kathy Griffin on 'Ellen'

Of course Kathy Griffin had to be nice when she was on 'Ellen' yesterday (everyone must play nice on 'Ellen') but then Ellen asked her what she thought of Britney Spears' apparently awful performance on the VMA's (which I missed) and Kathy said, very slowly.... "I think she should have spent more time with her dance coach... Vicodin."

I laughed out loud.

The Time Machine

You know there are some movies you can just watch over and over and over. I remember first seeing the 1960 version of The Time Machine as a kid at my father's place (my parents were divorced when I was 10, and my sister and I did the usual alternate weekend visits) on tv and even then it seemed a little dated (certainly not up to the special effects of even ST:TOS), but to me it also seemed so cool. And even as uber-cheesey as it would seem now, I pop that DVD in on a regular basis and watch it through. George Pal was a an imaginative genius, and his incarnation of the Time Machine is just gorgeous. Hell, I'd have that thing in my living room. In fact, as a kid, I built a model version that had the spinning wheel and everything.

Yes, I was, and still am, a dork.

Overwhelmed

I know I haven't posted much lately, though at the new job I don't feel worried about doing it from work at all, after all I am basically the IT department, and even though I was granted unlimited internet from the IT dept at the last place because I was sort of their Mac stepsister, I still worried about it getting logged.

Anyway, I've actually been pretty busy at work. It's really different from the last job, which aside from the IT work, was fast-turnaround production, bam bam bam. There they had paperwork that told you what needed to get done, when it was due (almost always a rush) etc. Here it is far less structured and formal... and I am finding, a little frustrating. I'm doing a lot of 'preflighting' of print jobs: making sure the images are all CMYK, checking the bleeds, the fonts, the page numbering... But even that is kind of left to me to figure out. And I seem to have to ask when something is due almost every time. One guy (a 'fabulous' queen) is actually pretty organized and gives me most of the info I need, but with most of them it's a game of question and answer (mostly by email, even though we are sometimes across the room). On the fun side, a lot of their clients are GLBT organizations.

All this combined with the kind of jarring switch back to regular day hours (ugh, the packed Metro cars!) has been kind of disruptive. Everyone is very nice, but there has been a lot to learn, and getting used to their way of operating is going to take some doing.

Stouffer's memories

I blogged about Stouffer's once before, but didn't really say much about it. Now the name is apparently only associated with frozen foods (some of which are, admittedly, pretty tasty), but I will always associate that name with a restaurant at the mall near where I grew up, South Hills Village.

Stouffer's was a pretty nice, sit-down restaurant, taking up a large corner spot near the main entrance. It had this asian motif, with these dark wood walls and folding panel partitions, which they sometimes opened onto the mall. There were scrolls and figures on the walls, and it was all very cool to me. For some reason I remember going there with my mother for weekday lunches, having the steak on toast while some of the more 'high fashion' women's clothing sores in the mall had fashion shows where the models would walk around the restaurant. My mother was interested in this more professionally than as a customer, since she was a seamstress and would sew some custom clothes for her clients. I vaguely remember feeling a little awkward, but I enjoyed my little medium-rare steak and having lunch in a 'nice' restaurant.

Many years later during at least one college summer, I worked at that same Stouffers as a grill cook with a fellow UVa guy (and cutie) Zuard (Zuard, where are you?). One night in the kitchen we had a raw oyster fight, slinging them across the kitchen. Too bad he didn't eat a few.

I guess all those restaurants are all gone though.

New iPods

In just a few minutes, Steve Jobs will take the stage in the Moscone Center in San Francisco and announce the new iPods.

I'm more excited about this than the iPhone, mainly because I'm just not that interested in a phone (and the iPhone doesn't have enough capacity to suit me). The rumor is that the new iPods will be 'an iPhone without the phone' which would suit me fine. It may even have wi-fi...

I'm all excited... I'm still a hopeless Mac fan-boy.

Update:
New iPod Nano: fugly!
New iPod 'Classic': eh
New iPod Touch: I WANT!!!