Month: November 2014

November 12-13, 2014

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I don’t intend to keep doing these double entries, and then fall back to triple entries, and then just give up entirely. But I have interesting days & thoughts, and less-interesting days & thoughts.

To wit: Wednesday the 12th I went to the dentist. I love my dentist, and will recommend her heartily to anyone who is looking for a dentist. Her name is Amy Gadol and she’s just absurdly enthusiastic about teeth.

But that’s not really something that I need to journal about at length.

Likewise the multiple hours I wasted on the phone Wednesday afternoon with AT&T trying, idiot that I am, to order a new phone. They have this program wherein you pay about half the price of a new phone in monthly installments spread out over a year, and then you can get a new phone every year. It’s a complete ripoff unless you’re an unbearable dork who wants to play with new toys every year.

Which apparently I am. AND I’m that unbearable dork who is still on the grandfathered “unlimited data” plan & thus it’s necessary to speak to a human at AT&T – and not just any human, but specifically one of the select subsets of humans who have access to the magic override codes.

All this despite the fact that I have never used more than 3GB of data in a month, and I could actually pay less if I just agreed to give up my unlimited plan & go with the 3GB plan. But I am a stubborn idiot.

See, none of this is worth writing a diary entry about. LIFE this week isn’t worth writing about.

Other things not worth writing a diary entry about:

  • Finally deciding to revert back to Linux for most of the backoffice machines at WXDU, and putting together an order for some sweet Lenovo small-biz servers. I’m a little sad I won’t get to play with one of the new black trashcan Mac Pros, but those things are absurdly expensive & are outfitted entirely to be graphics workstations (Two GPUs standard, when I’d be using exactly zero of them). I’ve disliked many things about using OSX as a server OS, so I’m moderately happy, even though I’ll have to rewrite a bunch of custom scripts and all the documentation.
  • Going back to the dentist Thursday morning to have impressions made of my teeth so that I can get one of those custom night guards that all the cool overstressed middle-aged people use.
  • Health coverage renewal time!

I’d write about how obnoxious that dude from the ESA is, with his stupid hideous lingerie-model shirt, but that’s been covered amply on Twitter & elsewhere already, and I have nothing much to add, other than to say “thanks for undercutting my excitement at your legit scientific achievement, douchebag.”

I’d write about TIME magazine putting “feminist” on a reader’s poll of words to ban, but I’m already stressed out & angry about stuff and it’s just them trying to emulate Buzzfeed or whatever anyway. They’ll be dead by the end of the decade, so enjoy the downward spiral while it lasts, dudes.

Other things not changing lately:

  • No grand jury outcome in Ferguson yet. 1000 cops being armed & trained to crack some protester skulls when the time comes.
  • Women on the internet being threatened, belittled & abused for speaking up about how difficult it can be to be a woman on the internet.

I tweet & RT about that stuff on the regular, so I feel like it’s not as necessary to recap it here. Follow me there if you want the daily blow-by-blow.

November 12-13, 2014

November 10-11, 2014

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Monday afternoon was spent excavating the room at WXDU that’s called the “engineering closet” but which is basically the room-size equivalent of the junk drawer (if the junk drawer can double as a server room). There may have been a time when it was just for storing & working on electronic equipment, but that mission has long since crept beyond any attempt to parameterize it.

So I consolidated a lot of half-full boxes of t-shirts and recycled way too many cardboard boxes. But I also threw away a metric ton of obsolete computer peripherals. I tried to vacuum and learned that my miniature shop-vac loves to suck in styrofoam peanuts, chop them into smaller bits, and then blow them out its rear exhaust port.

I’m realizing now that I should have taken before & after photos. Sigh.

Anyway. There’s nothing like an afternoon of simple goal-oriented manual labor to wipe out all of the nagging thoughts that have been running around your head, clamoring for attention. This can be problematic when your to-do list system basically consists of thoughts running around your head, but I figure an occasional reset of that list is probably for the best.

Showed M “Too Many Cooks.” No response worth memorializing here.

Tuesday at work involved unpacking my new, absurdly wide-screen monitor & setting it up, and then trying to recreate the aforementioned mental to-do list. 

I just spent 15 minutes trying to find a non-crappy handheld magnifying glass on the Internet. That was a lot harder than it needed to be. 

I’m still enjoying the new William Gibson. He unabashedly jumps right in with this unexplained mechanism involving 2-way electronic communication between the present and some alternate forked past, and I’m fine with that. My big problem with Interstellar, in retrospect, was that it wasted so much time acting all sciencey and *then* totally abandoned science when it really counted. I felt like I’d been dragged through an advanced physics course for no good reason.

November 10-11, 2014

November 9, 2014

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Sundays are ultra-predictable for the most part:

Like literally I could cut/paste that list every Sunday & it would be accurate.

Reviews this week: Jenks Miller & Rose Cross NC at Hopscotch, and the brand new T0W3RS record. Sorry, not going to paste those reviews here – they’re “reviews” for WXDU meaning they’re mostly intended to provide a small amount of context, a wee bit of insight into which songs sound like what, a list of any bad language, and a ranked list of fave songs to play on the air. They’re highly utilitarian & by longstanding tradition aren’t published outside of the station.

Anyone who has ever done college radio will likely know what I’m talking about – it’s a tradition that transcends.

Dinner at Geer Street, which was wilder than usual on a Sunday night. 

Tried to start reading the new Paolo Bacigalupi, but 10 pages in it was just unbearably YA, much moreso than Shipbreaker/Drowned Cities. That’s partly because it’s set in something much closer to the present – it was a Banksy reference that finally made me put it down in disgust. It was done in that facile, covertly condescending way that makes me hate Cory Doctorow’s books.

Paolo: More flooded future-world speculative fiction, fewer insta-dated popcult references, please!

In that moment of weakness I went ahead & bought the new William Gibson. I had persisted through the Bigend trilogy but was so nonplussed by the time I reached the end that I hadn’t really even paid attention to the press around the new one.

But hey, so far, 30-40 pages in, it’s pretty darn good. Not remotely as glib as the Bigend books. I’m sure I’ll report again as I progress through the thing.

November 9, 2014

November 8, 2014

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Drove to the mall to see Interstellar in IMAX, despite an increasing sense of certainty based on reports from professionals & amateurs alike that it was likely to be kind of a trainwreck.

It was. Unlike everyone else whose writing I’ve read so far, I feel no particular compunction to avoid spoilers, so down here at the end of this arrow, there will be some. You have been warned.
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Interstellar falls into that category of movies which look to investigate the meaning of life from within the scaffolding of science fiction (as opposed to more straightforward space opera, like Star Wars).

I’m more or less equally interested in both categories in my reading of sci-fi books, although I think I hold the philosophical ones to a higher standard, because bad philosophical sci-fi is really really bad.

And there have been plenty of great movies in this category, to be sure: 2001 (which is overrated, but that’s a conversation for another time), Blade Runner, the Alien series, the first Star Trek movie, plus more recent smaller entries such as Her, and Under The Skin.

But there have also been a decent number of wretched overambitious muddles, most recently Prometheus. And now Interstellar.

To catalog all of its offenses would take far more time and space than I’m probably interested in taking here. But some highlights:

  • Endless didactic exposition during the first earthbound hour – I felt like I was sitting through some kind of pro-science, pro-NASA propaganda flick whose authors thought they had cleverly disguised as a fiction film.
  • An obnoxious (and highly publicized) allegiance to pure science & the laws of physics right up to any of too many various points in the movie where they just threw it out entirely
  • such as the climactic moment when McConaughey plunges directly into a black hole, but instead of being crushed instantly, he instead finds himself inside of a tesseract composed of an infinite number of discrete views into his daughter’s bedroom, arranged along a timeline, such that he is able to communicate with her younger self by shoving books out of her bookcase in morse code sequences
  • this resulting in a fairly elemental time-travel paradox which the filmmakers don’t even bother to be embarrassed by.
  • Uncredited major Matt Damon role.
  • Matt Damon in a spacesuited fistfight with McConaughey on an ice planet that is nearly as stupid-looking as that dumb Spock fistfight in the last Star Trek movie.
  • Anne Hathaway giving an earnest speech in defense of love which we’re kinda-sorta supposed to scoff at but clearly also kinda-sorta supposed to wholeheartedly believe in, particularly when she’s kinda-sorta vindicated in the end.
  • Ex-military robots which are literally 6-foot-tall rectangles which have to do this sort of weird shuffle in order to move around, except for in emergencies when they turn into crazy spinning asterisks.
  • IMAX sequences which look like, well, the movies, intercut with non-IMAX sequences which are soft & smeary & look in places like Super16 blown up to 35.

Basically, it’s like a semi-incoherent mashup of 2001, Contact, and Gravity, and you’d be much better off renting those three movies & watching them. Or heck, watch Europa Report. It’s not a perfect movie, but it asks some interesting questions & it does so in about half the time & for 1/100th the budget.

It occurred to me in retrospect that I haven’t really thoroughly enjoyed a Christopher Nolan movie since Memento. He’s such a technician. I think about all these people trying to keep track of the layers in Inception, but I can’t remember anyone really giving a shit about the actual characters & their interactions. Likewise here; everyone is more or less alone in this movie, communicating via narrowband across great distances.

After the movie it took 45 minutes to get out of the parking lot of Southpoint. 

Had dinner at Metro 8, which actually produces quite a respectable steak, and treats its vegetable side dishes with respect as well. I’d be leery of its non-beef offerings, but it’s actually kind of a useful ace in the hole for a last-minute Saturday dinner out.

November 8, 2014

Generation X Doesn’t Want to Hear It

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Generation X Doesn’t Want to Hear It

Earlier generations have weathered recessions, of course; this stall we’re in has the look of something nastier. Social Security and Medicare are going to be diminished, at best. Hours worked are up even as hiring staggers along: Blood from a stone looks to be the normal order of things “going…

By these metrics I’m feeling better than the rest of my cohort, I guess, but still, this, 1000 times this.

Link

November 7, 2014

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One of the many things I do at work is reading resumes. I read a lot of resumes. Like an average of perhaps 10/day, although there are bursts which greatly exceed that baseline.

For the positions that I have posted, the overall hit rate of folks we’d like to interview is maybe 20%. That figure drops to around 3% if the resume is in Microsoft Word format rather than PDF.

I would probably, at this point, be totally justified in just ignoring anything that comes in Word format – but for some reason I’m still fixated on potentially missing that one worthwhile candidate who somehow hasn’t gotten the memo about PDFs.

Does this mean I’m good at my job, or bad at it?

After work we wound up doing the “oh shit it’s Friday night and we need to eat” dance, which is a perennial antipattern in our lives. We’d made a crucial error by eating at Toast on Thursday night, so that was out.

For the first ~4 years of living downtown, things weren’t so fraught, because for the most part you could wander in to just about anywhere & nab a couple of seats at the bar. That is most emphatically no longer the case.

Which is how we wound up at Taberna Tapas, the other tapas place downtown, which seems to be doing a booming business entirely from (a) overflow from Mateo and/or (b) people who have heard there’s a great tapas place on Main St. & can’t find Mateo because it’s technically not on Main St.

At the bar there was literally some dude sitting there telling the bartender, or perhaps himself, that his meal was every bit as good as Mateo would have been.

It wasn’t.

It’s a funny little place, though. It’s very much set-dressed like a “tapas place” and the staff all wear black and look vaguely unsavory. There’s Restaurant Techno playing at a low volume. The food runner brings your food & recites word for word the menu description of each dish.

It’s as if it were opened as a tax write-off or a cocaine front, and then started getting actual dinner trade, and the staff is sort of evenly split as to whether that’s a good thing or not.

The food wasn’t terrible; it just wasn’t particularly great. Take the asparagus: grilled to a nice degree of doneness, with some char on the outside, and a distinct petroleum aftertaste.

After dinner I dropped M at home and then headed up the street to the Pinhook for their 6th Anniversary show. Mostly to see desark, who were in 2-electric-guitars formation (plus Catherine Edgerton on vocals & saw for a couple of numbers). Great set, although it’s always a little weird to see them at these non-headlining shows where there aren’t a ton of young women right down front.

I tried to stick around to see Speedy Ortiz, whom I had never seen, but I couldn’t hack the sold-out crowd, so I only made it through one song. I’d be into seeing them in a half-full Duke Coffeehouse sometime, I guess. That kind of dissonant guitar-heavy 90s indie-rock needs to be heard in a half-empty room on a Wednesday.

November 7, 2014