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March 2001

Music

Music. It used to be one of the primary ways by which I defined myself, although it was usually more about what I hated than what I liked.

I guess it still is, in a way. But I’m not really an active consumer now. I don’t buy music. I don’t keep up with who’s who and what’s what. I’m not constantly looking for something new. I listen to songs. I like some of them and I hate even more of them. And then I’m done with it.

Music has become a somewhat passive, background sort of thing for me, with certain excpetions. And the idea of owning music was never quite the same after I stopped being the music director at my college radio station. In other words, after everything stopped being free. It’s gone downhill for me ever since.

Which is why I like the idea of Napster, but also see a very real problem with it. Yes, many people sample music there, which they may very well purchase at some later point. But I have a sneaking suspicion that more people are looking for something specific that they really want to hear but really don’t want to buy. Ever.

Anyhow, that’s what I’d use it for, given a fast enough connection to make it worth the effort.

Insomniac

I can’t sleep. Indulge me. It’s been several months since I’ve done one of these…

Things to be worried about at 1:30 in the morning:

  • I’m 36 years old and I’m no closer to knowing what I want to be when I grow up than I was at age 18. I’m coasting along just fine, but with no specific long-term goal nor passion.
  • I’m not convinced that I have much to offer a prospective employer. I know a little about a lot of things, but I’m not an expert at much of anything.
  • I’m even less convinced that I have much to offer a prospective boyfriend, sex partner, or even a casual acquaintance. And I’m not sure that I care, anyhow.
  • My parents aren’t going to be around forever. I live on the other end of the country, and I see them about once a year.
  • I’m smoking more and getting out of the house less.
  • I have a lot of work I should be doing. I’m not doing much of it. Nor much of anything else.
  • I think that my favorite Stouffer’s Hearty Portions entree is about to be discontinued.

I am, however, optimistic that I’ll be sleeping soon and that I won’t be thinking about any of these things tomorrow. But it might do me more good to think about them during the day once in a while…

Percentile

Tonight’s KRON news mentioned a new survey of American cities and their relative merits for female residents. Two hundred cities were surveyed. According to the reporter, several Bay Area cities scored in the 150th percentile. This is apparently a bad thing…

Methinks she needs to look up the usage and defintion of the term “percentile”. She’d probably learn that there’s no such thing as the 150th percentile, but that, if there were, it would be a pretty phenomenal place to be. Scoring 150th out of 200 does not put one in the 150th percentile; it puts one in the 25th percentile…

Sorry. I was a social science major. Sloppy statistics and sloppy reporting both annoy me no end…

The new scanner has now been joined by a new (used) monitor and the long-awaited RAM is arriving tomorrow. I may never leave my house again…

New Scanner

There’s a new scanner on my desk. Tiny. Nice. It’s approximately a tenth of the size of the old one I bought used last year (which never really quite worked anyway). Other than that, and finally getting out of the house on the first non-rainy Saturday afternoon in about a year, it’s been a remarkably uneventful weekend…

I did finally get past my writer’s block and get Adam and Eric a litte farther down the road to, ummm, brotherly love. But you’ll have to pay someone else to read about that…

Guess the Sitcom Character

Thanks Mark. I wanted to stay up all night playing this. Really. Damn you…

I stumped it too, by being Chet, the hippie son from “Wait ’til Your Father Gets Home”. I’d provide a link, but I’d rather go to bed. The picture above is all you get…

I haven’t chosen an appropriate dictator yet…

TV Party

One of those interesting web kinda things: I find this site for a link in yesterday’s journal entry. After digging around a bit, I realize both that I know the guy who runs it from many years ago, and that it originates in my home town. Cool. Someone else to hang out with when I go home next month…

And he’s looking for a copy of the Valleydale commercial now too. Yes, I promise to stop writing about that soon…

My God. Could it be possible that it’s really not going to rain this weekend?

A Thankless Job

I warned that I wouldn’t be very chatty this month, what with all the work I have piled up before my trip back east and all. But then I discovered something: being chatty allows me to avoid doing any of that work for just a little while longer. Cool, huh?

Annoyance du jour: people who email me asking for help with a project, essay, or whatever, and then don’t even bother to thank me after I respond with the information they sought. I know I may not be the best person to complain about breeches of email etiquette, but jeez…

A good portion of the time, the information requested is peripherally-related (at best) to information contained on my sites. Still, I try my damnedest, and almost always respond in some way. And about half the time, the person on the other end even thanks me. Which is a pretty fucking pitiful rate, I think…

Note to assorted high school and college students: I am not getting paid to do your homework for you. I am helping you because I’m a nice guy (no matter what people say). So the least you can do is have the common courtesy to express some appreciation. If you don’t, you may find yourself involuntarily subscribed to several random mailing lists on the subject of etiquette…

OK. I’m kidding about the last part. Really…

Besides. most of the offenders won’t know about this threat, because they never read a damned thing but the one page Yahoo directed them to. Context is a concept surprisingly few web-surfers seem to comprehend. Otherwise they’d probably have found what they were looking for anyway…

Fetch

Ooh. New Fetch beta. Windoze types and those who don’t get all squishy about cool FTP clients may skip that link…

Radio Shack

In my estimation, there are two glaring casualties of the “digital revolution”. The first, of course, is San Francisco. The second big loss, however, is Radio Shack. It’s still here, of course, but it just won’t ever be quite the same again.

What a wonderful thing Radio Shack used to be. You could wander in with the most obscure request and be helped pretty quickly by a rumpled-looking, slightly overweight guy with a pocket protector who really knew his shit. His customer service skills may have been lacking, but he could carry it off. He probably knew more tan you did.

There was an art to it, of course. If you knew exactly what you wanted and how to ask for it, you were all set. He’d walk over to the left rear wall, pull it off a hook, make out a handwritten sales slip for 89 cents, and send you on your way.

If you were less sure of yourself and didn’t know the jargon (e.g. you called your turntable a “record player”), things were a little trickier. You’d still get what you wanted, but not until you’d learned a little about electronics, and maybe joined the Battery of the Month Club.

Now, of course, these rumpled guys have well-paying jobs which don’t involve discussing the superior performance of Realistic™ audio components or helping teenagers steal HBO. Their replacements at Radio Shack are, ummm, not exactly brain surgeons. Hell, they don’t even know what brain surgery IS. And they sure don’t know what you mean when you ask for an RJ-45 female to DB-25 male adapter.

Nor do they make up for this lack of knowlege with superior customer service skills. But what can you expect for nine bucks an hour? Been to Kinko’s lately?