Pleonastic Ephemera

10.11.2003 posted by William 20:20 link	I'm not a big sports fan, but this year it's hard to ignore the excitement of baseball's postseason, especially when you're friends with Cubs and Red Sox fans. Jaime, being from Boston, was directed to this article about the Riviera Cafe in the West Village where Sox fans congregate to get their hearts broken, and so I went with him to watch today's game there. The atmosphere was amazing -- get all these beleaguered Sox fans, so used to getting out-shouted and spat upon, together in one place and the camaraderie rises above even the standard our-team-is-in-the-playoffs-and-I'm-drunk-even-though-it's-still-light-outside level. People who were turned away because the place was packed stood outside the wide-open sidewalk windows next to where we sat and watched and cheered from there. When Pedro showed Zimmer the quickest way to find a dropped contact lense, the joint went crazy. Cheering the shoving of a geriatric = classic! But the Yanks had their revenge, and at the end I was glad I didn't have much invested in the game, unlike those poor Boston fans. I'm still holding out hope for a Sox vs. Cubs World Series, though -- it'll be the first time in history that both teams lose!
10.10.2003 posted by William 20:58 link	Over the past three days, the blackbox I coded, running at less than 1/3 capacity and with no optimizations, has earned almost $600. That's excellent news, since my compensation for this particular project comes out of its earnings. The client who cooked up this strategy came in today to check things out and he's very happy with our progress thus far, and when he's happy, I'm happy. And in today's PowerBook news: I qualify for the heavily discounted upgrade to Panther since I purchased my computer just a few weeks ago -- awesome! Now I just have to cancel the somewhat discounted "educational" order I already placed...
10.08.2003 posted by William 18:37 link	I was sitting on a bench in Union Sq Park, taking advantage of one of the dwindling number of warm weather days left in the year. I brought the PowerBook but the public network, run by Emenity, wasn't working -- I could get to a page that asked me to agree to their terms to use the network, but after that, nothing. The feeling of frustrated impotency this brought reminded me of back in the day when major web sites would sometimes go down for hours or even days for no apparent reason. I guess that's what one should expect when one dances on the bleeding edge, but, c'mon, wifi is hardly bleeding edge -- it's been big for a couple of years now, and these free networks are nothing new. Despite the disappointment, it was still cool to use the machine outside of the apartment -- outside, period, for that matter. It's a first for me. The truth is that for most of the year -- October through April, with a few exceptions -- I'm sure that the only place I'll use it will be in the apartment, the same place I would be using the desktop with a faster processor, more memory, bigger hard drive, and larger display I could have bought for the same money. Isn't a laptop something of an extravagant waste, then? I suspected not and my suspicions are echoed by this guy over at Ars Technica, whose situation is almost identical to mine: a lifelong desktop user who just purchased a PowerBook but will probably use it mostly at home. In fact, he customized his PowerBook in exactly the same ways I did: 1 ghz processor, 80 gig disk, combo but not super drive, etc. His review is as illuminating as our backlit keyboards, though I feel kinda sorry for him in that it sounds like his perfectionism borders on OCD. As far as all the problems he mentions with reluctant latches and stuck pixels, well, I guess I got lucky because, aside from the ubiquitous gap issue, my machine seems to be one of the few, the proud, the perfect. Random park fauna seemed to share my affection for the new PowerBook -- two ants, in separate incidents, tumbled from the branches above onto the trackpad, a few gnats alighted on the screen, and squirrels kept darting between and around my feet. I was afraid that at any second, a pigeon would deposit a load on the keyboard in a horribly misguided attempt to signal its approval. Don't worry, my tendency to write about the PowerBook is sure to diminish over time as it works its way into my normal consciousness and I learn to take it for granted. Update: I actually wrote this as a text document while sitting here in the park, just figuring I'd post it once I got home, but another network has appeared that is different from the other one in that it does what it is supposed to do, so I can upload it now. Thanks, 105East16ST, for making my day complete.
10.07.2003 posted by William 23:42 link	The inside story of Dazed and Confused. It seems no last minute miracle has materialized: The Post, Times, CNN and everyone else say Davis is out and Arnold is in. Ah, well, at least he's a moderate Republican, er, uh, he says he is, anyway. I guess we won't really find out his politics until he tries to get some legislation passed. He'll need some luck though -- he gets no honeymoon with the press or the public and the conservative wing of his own party hates him. And how long will he last, anyway? The LA Times has sources who say (scroll halfway for relevant paragraph) that a Recall Schwarzenegger campaign may be in the works. I feel like I haven't seen nearly enough Arnold-related humorous material floating around on the net. Then again, I haven't looked hard, but it must be out there; the possibilities are endless. It makes me laugh just to see him on TV giving an interview or speaking at a rally.
10.06.2003 posted by William 20:54 link	This evening I went over to the Barnes & Noble on 17th to browse and sit and read a bit, plus I wanted to see if I could get wifi in the cafe and achieve the next plateau of nerdster-dom. No wifi, but the writers of the Onion were having a panel discussion on the fourth floor. Too bad I haven't read it for a couple years and the last time I remember really laughing at it was the post-Sept. 11 issue, but I thought I'd check it out anyway and see what kind of people are behind the laughs, whether they'd say anything about it not being funny anymore (not in so many words...), and maybe ask questions of the AV Club writers, like what their backgrounds are, whether they do most of their interviews live or via phone/email, whose idea was/what happened to Critical Beatdown, etc. The twelve writers of the panel filed in: a varied bunch, spanning the ages of 22 to 30 and the ethnicities of Caucasian to Jewish. Someone asked a question about the AV Club straight away and they said that it's run by a separate group headed by Stephen Thompson from the Onion's original publishing location of Madison, Wisconsin, and no members of that group were present. They took maybe 10 more questions over the course of an hour, none of which were too interesting. In person, the writers were not especially witty, which is probably to be expected. One funny moment came after a question about whether anyone had a journalistic background, and the panel elected to one by one say what each did before joining the Onion. So the first guy says, "I was a cashier at a convenience store," the second guy says, "I worked in a liquor store," and on they go, each talking about the pathetic job they had. Then one guy says, "I just graduated from an Ivy League school," and as I chuckle I realize he looks familiar -- he was in my Lit Hum class! I would have gone up to him afterwards and said "Remember me? I was the guy who never spoke?" but there was a big line of fanboys waiting to get their books signed between me and him, and I wasn't up for waiting. So the panel wasn't all that illuminating, but it made me wonder how often B&N does this type of thing, and the answer, it turns out, is quite often. David Foster Wallace in a couple of weeks -- the pretentiometer should reach a new peak that night!
posted by William 17:39 link	It turns out that my brother started a livejournal this past weekend. How's that for synchronicity?
10.05.2003 posted by William 13:01 link	So my new PowerBook has an 80 gig disk and even though OS X is pretty bloated there's still a good 65 gigs left for me to fill up with mp3s. It's refreshing not to have to choose what to delete in order to pirate something new -- I had to make my own Sophie's choice every time I wanted a new album on my old p3 w/ 12 gigs. Christian suggested the new Outkast and I'm glad he did, looks like this will be what finally gets me into hip-hop, sorta, kinda. Since my rap background is more lacking than a Dirty South album without skits, I temporarily checked my aversion to reviews and looked at a few to get a sense of context. I read three different ones from some of the usual suspects -- the AV Club, Pitchfork, and the AMG -- and they all make analogy to the White Album. One expands the analogy further by making the White Album comparison conditional on Stankonia being Outkast's Sgt. Pepper. I think two of them explicitly call Dre and Big Boi the Lennon/McCartney of hip-hop. Dre himself might even be making a Beatles reference with the name of the last track on his disc, A Life in the Day of Benjamin Andre. Such is the longevity of the impact those boys from Liverpool have had on popular music that even nearly four decades after the advent of Beatlemania, theirs is still the standard by which artists who achieve combined critical and popular success are measured. The Beatles worshipper in me loves this, naturally. But I also have to wonder, is it healthy for this comparison to be the default for all widely popular and/or accomplished acts? It's the most obvious and easiest, which makes it, in many cases, hackneyed and cliched. And when an artist really deserves it, like Outkast seems to, some of the power and impact has been diluted by the thousands of hack reviewers who went for a thrill of the minute, e.g. on the Backstreet Boys ("They write their own songs!") or any four-man band who can roughly sing in harmony and use standard rock instrumentation. It's the curse of being simultaneously the best and most popular at what they did, an accolade few can claim in any field of human accomplishment, that forever condemns the Fab Four to unwarranted comparison and undeserving association, which is a disservice to them, the artist in question, and the reader looking for intelligent criticism. So exercise some restraint, please, critics, and maybe the next time I read that an album has the best collection of melodic pop since Revolver or brings a sense of energy not felt since I Want to Hold Your Hand, I'll experience genuine excitement and curiosity for a new musical gem instead of contempt for mercenary, unimaginative punditry. In the meantime, since this harangue will go unread by the entirety of the critical community, it's back to avoiding reviews like, well, skits on a Dirty South album (the Achilles' heel of an entire genre!).