Long Shrift

goldfish

I recently read William Gibson's latest, Spook Country, and I'd highly recommend it. Gibson's blog is usually interesting, and in one post he talks about some of the music he was listening to as he wrote the novel, including as Brad Sucks. You can download the entire album for free, and pay if you want high-quality audio files. The songs have been stuck in my head for weeks.

I like to think that I listen to a wide variety of music, but I'm prone to leaving the same half-dozen CD's in my car for weeks at a time. Every now and then I fire up Pandora and listen for a while, but that gets annoying...

OK, sidebar on multi-tasking. One of my co-workers recently gushed about something she read about how kids these days are so good at multi-tasking: they can watch TV, poke around on the Internet, and text one another all at the same time - like this is a sign of intelligence or aptitude. That's one view. Another might be that we're raising a generation with the attention span of goldfish, and these are likely the people who are going to forget to change my bedpan about forty years from now.

Anyway, Pandora gets annoying because it's needy. I'll be reading something, or working on something, and then some song I've never heard before comes through the speakers, and I have to go and give it a thumbs up or down. Then I have to remember what I was doing, and then Pandora's tugging on my sleeve again. I suppose it would be different if I could just lay back, close my eyes and listen to music, but that hasn't happened since the incident at the mosh pit during the Revolting Cocks show.

I recently saw a blurb on TuneGlue, thought I'd try it out.

I think I still prefer Liveplasma, except for the garish colors.

By the way, those images were captured with a nifty tool called Jing, which captures images as well as video (Shockwave), and makes it easy to share files as well.

mashups and moving on

I live near Lake Michigan, and lately, on my drive in to work, I've noticed an unusually large number of seagull carcasses by the side of the road. Which got me to thinking about mashups.

For the uninformed, a mashup is basically any Web application that combines data from multiple sources. A number of mashups seem to involve Google Maps, like finding restaurant reviews for a given area, which might be because Google publishes info on how to integrate it with other applications. Others just seem to be a front end for pulling in stuff from multiple applications, which I suppose would be useful if I didn't have to get something done at work and a toddler at home.

OK, that's a pretty simplistic and cynical evaluation, borne out of my annoyance with mashups as the latest geek media darlings. If I see another article that starts with "When you think mashups, you probably think of potatoes," I'm going to scream. These articles invariably go into the promise of mashups, how people will be able to build their own with ease, and how mashups are going to change everything. I think I've read all of this before, but someone obviously took the old articles and inserted "mashup" as a replacement for every occurrence of "Web 2.0." Well, maybe I'll re-read this post six months from now and kick myself, since I'll have become dependent on an app that lets me know how to buy cheap plane tickets based on the weather, Twitter patterns and optimal timing of Circadian rhythms of people who were in my graduating class in high school.

Meanwhile, I note that John McCain is calling out the Democratic presidential candidates for not jumping on the "MoveOn.org is reprehensible" bandwagon:

“Now, they acknowledge that [Petraeus] is an honorable and fine military man, but they refuse to repudiate MoveOn.org,” McCain said of the Democrats. “And as you say, if you can’t stand up to them, how can you stand up to the tough challenges that are presented to you as President of the United States? I don’t know the answer to that.”

Pretty tough words, and obviously he was just reeling that one off impromptu, right?

The Arizona Senator was responding to a question from a military veteran in the crowd at a campaign stop here, who asked McCain how the Democratic candidates will have the courage to stand up to challenges they face in the White House if they can’t stand up to MoveOn.org.

Well, OK, at least he put more effort into the rehearsal than Britney Spears.

As for the MoveOn ad... seems to me that a number of MoveOn's allegations are based on fact, and I can see the logic in saying that Petraeus isn't an objective source of information. I expect any attempt to question the general's assessment would have been spun as a personal attack on the Patraeus anyway, so I can see why the MoveOn people just decided to go balls-out with the 'sticky' headline.

But this got me to thinking... maybe what the world needs is the McCain Outrage Monitor, which would alert everyone to things we should be criticizing. It wouldn't be tough - just pull in RSS feeds from the Daily KOS, Mother Jones, maybe The Onion for good measure, and put it on a map as it happens.

Meanwhile, I've got an idea for a sticky campaign slogan: "McCain - he's Able." Crap, too late. Well, if McCain wants to reinforce his support for Bush, he could go with "McCain: The Denouncer."

master of my domain

A couple of years ago, I reserved the domain for longshrift.com - not that I planned on using it any time soon, but I figured I'd get it before some asshat grabbed it out from under me or something. I went with Network Solutions back then; when it came time to renew this month, I figured I'd go with something cheaper.

GoDaddy was one obvious choice. They're huge, they're cheap, but they're mildly offensive. Right now, they're pimping Danica Patrick on their home page and their commercials, but GoDaddy's also known for making Super Bowl ads that get rejected for raunchy content. The Web dorks at work recommended them, as we've had good service from them in the past. But I couldn't stomach spending any money with them.

I looked at eNom, which is the #3 domain registrar behind GoDaddy and Network Solutions, and apparently only cost a couple dollars more. But I got lost trying to figure out how to transfer the domain from NS. GoDaddy made the process fairly straightforward.

So I sold out. But I feel a little dirty about it.

Network Solutions didn't want to give up so easily, forcing me to talk to a customer service rep before they would pry their fingers off the domain. She told me that she could match GoDaddy's prices (which was about one-fourth of the price they originally quoted), and pointed out that GoDaddy's support was not based in the US, and that the GoDaddy staff regularly sacrificed baby seals in the employee lunchroom. It was too late by then - if they had given me the cheap rate up front, I might still be a customer.

Anyway, the domain transfer finally went through. If you visit longshrift.com, you'll be redirected here. In the interim, before I had set up the redirect, you'd have landed at a page chock full of GoDaddy advertising, including this search box:

Let me take a moment to reaffirm that I have yet to do a single post about latex catsuits.

the positive sandwich

Tomorrow morning, my wife is giving notice. She has some mixed feelings about it; she has worked there for something like 11 years, most of them decent. But the company changed, and she's off to something better. She asked for help composing the resignation letter.

Unfortunately (and sometimes fortunately), I've been the recipient of a few resignation letters. Most are very short, with the bare minimum that Human Resources would require. If you're leaving, what more is there to say? Miss Manners would suggest leaving out the expletives and veiled threats.

In the business writing classes I took in college, we would be challenged by exercises like this:

You are a customer service representative for a company that makes musical instruments. A customer has sent in a damaged trombone, along with an angry letter demanding either that the instrument be repaired at no cost, or a full refund. The company's engineers have concluded that the trombone was immersed in soapy water, then dried rapidly at a high temperature, which isn't the suggested cleaning method as listed in the owner's manual. You must write the letter, informing the customer that the trombone is beyond repair, and since the warranty was voided, no refund will be given.

This letter was usually accomplished in three to four drafts. The first draft is the one you wish you could write:

Dear Chump - If you believe that washing the trombone in the bathtub and drying it in the oven would be considered proper care, you may want to consider another outlet for your artistic expression, like adapting movies into one-man plays.

After this was out of your system, you'd start composing the letter in the classic 'positive sandwich' form: a good lead, the bad news, a hopeful ending. As in life, the positive sandwich may be worse than just giving someone the straight dope - you don't want to be a couple of bites into the egg salad when you realize it was once tuna salad. But after a couple of drafts, hopefully you'd get it right. My wife wasn't buying it.

"It's two or three sentences. You start with 'I regret to inform you -'"

"But I don't really regret it."

"Well, let me finish. You say that you're sorry to inform them that you will be resigning, effective two weeks from now. Then you close by saying that you've enjoyed the opportunity to work for -"

"Can't I just say 'I resign, effective this date' ?"

We sat down to compose the letter.

Take this job and shove it.
You suck
I ain't gonna work Maggie's farm no more

We settled on the one sentence version, so it's sort of an open-face sandwich, I guess.

Finally, we talked about exit interviews. I got to write one several years ago, and it reminded me of prom: everything's dressed up nice, but there's an inescapable air of desperation. (Well, I suppose not everyone's prom was like mine.)

about your feces

Feces is a plurale tantum, a word which exists only in the plural form. Other examples would be "scissors" and "pants."

Perhaps it would be better if I didn't explain how that came up in conversation.

e-i-e-i-offensive

I cringe every time Quinn wrinkles or tears a page in one of his books. We've tried to teach Quinn to be careful with all his things, but we're probably the most particular about books. There's something sacred about books; book burnings symbolize a society on the verge of darkness (or dark humor, anyway).

So I'm going to throw this copy of "Old MacDonald Had a Farm" into the recycling bin.

I'm not sure where we got it; I don't think we bought it. It's fairly innocuous: An illustration of the song, with a new animal introduced with each turn of the page. Old MacDonald himself is pictured on the cover, complete with kilt and balmoral hat. There are more illustrations scattered throughout the book: MacDonald with a caber, fishing, hunting, golfing. Then there's this image of MacDonald saddened to discover his liquor bottle is empty.

Turns out the book's publisher is out of England. I'm just sayin'.