There is one of those movie theaters near me where you sit at a table and can order food (including alcohol) while you watch the movie. AMC Fork and Screen they call it. You might have been to one of these places yourself. The joints serve inevitably terrible food.  Although I haven’t been to this particular incarnation of this particular movietaurant, I wouldn’t order the lobster.

That’s all fine and good, or, well, ok and mediocre. I don’t mean to imply that I’d rather die than be caught dead at the AMC Fork and Screen– I like crappy food as much as the next guy. And actually, now that I mention it, I actually have been to that theater, when it was called the “Buckhead Backlot”.

I went there with my pal Rob and his Wife, and we saw “Flushed Away“, a CG movie about mice. Most of the mice lived in the sewer, but it wasn’t a REAL sewer. It was one of those movie sewers where it’s just water and cute little boats made of driftwood. No poop or mysterious irridescent bubbles at all.

Contrast that with the current crop of films a-flickering ‘cross the AMC Fork and Screen. Not a happy family CG film about anthropomorphized mice within five miles of the place. In fact the flicks they’re showing right now seem specifically chosen to be unappetizing. Check it out:

1. District 9 – gory scifi flick, where aliens eat people, people eat aliens, and people get splattered by laser guns. Splattered all over the place. Oh, and a guy’s fingernails fall off, among other things. You gonna eat those potato chips?
2. The Final Destination – horror movie about people getting killed by Rube Goldbergian contortions of the physical world by Death itself. Haven’t seen it, but I hear some guy gets sucked inside out by a pool filtration system. Pass the chicken wings!
3. Gamer – scifi about a military videogame that uses real people. Real people getting blown up and esploded. Esploded real good. Some more sauce on those spare ribs, perhaps? Some mac n’ cheese maybe?
4. Halloween II - Horror movie by Rob Zombie. ‘Nuff said.
5. The Hangover – “adult” comedy, admittedly the least suspect of this list, however I’m pretty sure at least one dude vomits on screen. And there’s a mostly naked Zach Galifianakis, which nobody should have to see. How’s that french dressing lookin’ to ya now?
6. Inglourious Basterds – people get scalped. Seriously scalped. A bunch of people. Oh and Brad Pitt sticks his finger in some lady’s bullet wound. Finger lickin’ good!

I’m not against any of these movies– I’ve seen most of them, and Inglorious Basterds is freakin’ brilliant. But I think it would be kinda hard to choke down crappy bernaise sauce while watching one of the guys from the Office strip the skin off a dude’s head.

Dorie was restless, wondering what to do. Movies? Nothing playing we could agree on. All our friends were out of town (how does that happen). All of a sudden she turns to me and says “Is 8:30 ok?”

“For what?”
“Dinner at Woodfire Grill.“
“Uh, ok.”

We had been wanting to go there ever since we saw the executive chef, Kevin Gillespie, on this season’s Top Chef. Yeah, we were hoping for a little bit of lookie-loo at the cable celebrity, but we don’t have many vices so give us a break. We’ve already been to Flip to goggle-eye Richard Blaise.

I looked up the menu online, and was moderately interested. Although I’m addicted to the Food Network, I’m not a foodie. I’m kind of a picky eater, scared of things I haven’t tried before. I like what I like and will pay for quality, but I don’t branch out much. After looking at this menu, I figured I could find something to eat on there although it was more expensive than I was expecting it to be. Kind of pricey for an impulse dinner out, but what the hell.

We got dressed (I actually tucked my shirt in!) and headed out to a Cheshire Bridge road, following the loopiest Google directions ever. Rather than just telling us to “Go to Piedmont road and turn left on Cheshire Bridge and it’s up a little ways” our Google overlords had us winding all through the back woods of not-quite-Buckhead. Pretty tony neighborhoods, I have to say.

We got to the Woodfire Grill early, so they had us take a seat at the bar. Dorie got a glass of wine and I got a glass of water. We kind of expected the place to be packed, because Kevin is one of the favorites to do really well on Top Chef. Two weeks in, he’s pretty much kicking ass consistently. It was fairly busy, but not packed. And we got a reservation an hour in advance, no less. It’s too soon to tell, but if he stays in there like Blaise did I expect the Woodfire Grill to be packed before long.

After a short wait they led us into the dining room and sat us at a four-top right on the other side of the wall from the actual woodfire grill area.

FIrst thing we noticed was that the whole place smelled like a burning fireplace in winter. It smelled so good we found ourselves sniffing each other once we left because we were hoping it rubbed off. We went to Borders books afterward, and I could definitely smell it on my clothes. *inhale* mmmmmm.

Second thing we noticed was that Kevin Gillespie was standing at the grill. I pointed him out to Dorie, who was compelled to immediately Facebook. I Tweeted. What’s wrong with us? Sheesh.

It took longer than we’d have liked for the waiter to get around to taking our drink order, but while we waited we eavesdropped on the grill, and heard some people wishing Kevin well as they walked out. So we snarked a little, and chatted about Top Chef and Project Runway and the differences between them, and whether the contests are friendly off-show. Dorie was nursing her house cabernet, and I eventually had my standard unsweet ice tea with sweet n’ low.

They brought out a basket of mixed bread, and despite our determination to stick to our diets, we caved and split a slice of dark bread, with garl/herb butter. That was the start of our glide down the slippery slope.

Then they surprised us with an amusee bouche– a little spoon with two pieces of fried okra on top of some aioli. This started my adventurous streak for the night. I’m always a little trepidatious of “greens” because I find them bitter and slimy. But I tried this, and it was pretty good. Dorie was more impressed than I, having had fried okra more often. She said they didn’t spice the breading too much, which is apparently key as okra has its own flavor that you shouldn’t mask.

For our “First” (that’s what they call it on the menu) we split a plate of two pan seared diver scallops on top of a local field pea salad — $15 in a celery vinaigrette. micro celery. I couldn’t tell that it was celery, much less micro celery, but it tasted awesome. It was cooked peas, not a “salad” salad, kind of like a bed of beans in a sauce, under the seared scallops. Hard to describe but really good– we didn’t expect the combination to work, but we were about to lick the freaking plate when our “Main” arrived:

Dorie: wood grilled local bobwhite quail. braised greens, with a smear of brown butter sweet potato puree under the fowl and a little pile of coriander spiced pears to eat with it. — $26

John: wood grilled grassfed beef strip loin. skillet roasted cabbage and beans, a little pile of candied vine peach salad and a smear of butterbean hummus under the slices of beef. — $32.

I had some of Dorie’s quail, and it was perfectly done and so tasty with the sweet potato. She doesn’t eat red meat, but I’m here to testify that the beef was perfectly cooked. I don’t usually eat cooked cabbage, but I was being my version of adventurous, and had some of each side with my bites of beef. It was so good. I ate it all, when I usually leave that kind of side item on the plate.

This is what I always hoped a fine restaurant would serve– something that I had to like despite my fear of things I’ve never had, or items that in other forms I don’t like. Like cooked cabbage!

The portions are “fine-dining size” (as opposed to like, a Lonestar Steakhouse with gigantic piles of mashed potatoes and two chicken breasts at a sitting), so we were in excellent position to be tempted by dessert. Our momentum on that slippery slope was unstoppable by now, so we just nodded dumbly when the waiter handed us the menu.

But it wasn’t a Dairy Queen banana split or anything. It was a couple of small banana fritters with milk chocolate mousse, Bavarian creme stuff (it was like a flavored whipped cream, not a custard), on top of schmears of salted caramel, and… a strip of candied bacon. Which I got to eat all of, since Dorie, bless her heart, doesn’t like bacon. Holy moses this thing was so good it almost killed us. — $8

Our total bill was about $102, with a $20 tip and $3 for the valet (gave him extra because the parking lot is across a busy street).

As we were walking out, Dorie just couldn’t resist catching His eye and offering our best wishes for success on the show. Well, ok, actually she just kind of nervously said “we hope you win!” as we walked by. He was gracious and thanked her very sincerely. Just as on the show, so far at least, he seems to be a really nice, professional, down-to-earth guy.

We’re going back to the Woodfire Grill soon. We’re taking people with us. It’s our new “you gotta go” recommendation for dining in Atlanta. Normally we suggest people go to Watershed, for its southern take and its “semi-fine-dining” feel. But Woodfire Grill is the real deal.

Angels & Demons– Domestic haul, $133m, foreign haul, $351f-ingm!!!

This was a record B.O. summer, but as much as I liked Star Trek and Up, I can’t say I fell in love with anything. Well, not anything on that boffo B.O. rundown. And that “Wolverine” movie made almost $350m worldwide makes me fear for mankind.

Atlantic Station from 17th and Peachtree, originally uploaded by Singrrr.

This is the view from my cubicle, around dusk. It’s not always so photogenic, but when it is, it is.

I’ve been trying to give conservative thought its due. There has to be balance after all, there has to be some validity to the precepts of an entire ideology at least at the fundamental level. Let’s leave aside the fact that because of John McCain’s behavior throughout the Bush administration I’ve started calling him “Snakeface”.

But any iota of credibility the *campaign* may have had in my esteem, if not the candidate himself, was lost an hour or so ago when I read this New York Times report, which actually physically disgusted me.

Seriously. I got all queasy n’ shit.

Apparently, contrary to John McCain’s vehement denials, his campaign manager was on the payroll of Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac until August at a rate of $15,000 per month. That’s under his new *decreased* contract– previously he was being paid $30,000 per month as president of a sham coalition designed to lobby (maybe they don’t call it lobbying, but it IS GOD DAMN IT) congress to keep the runaway mortgage companies from being yoked down by regulation.

Absolutely disgusting. I want to give each candidate their fair shake, though anybody who knows me knows I lean to the left. And there’s the whole “Snakeface” moniker I’ve laid on the dude. But still, I don’t think anybody’s so terrible right off the bat. I really don’t want to be a fervent partisan. Now I can’t help but be convinced that everything the Republican campaigners in this election say is an outright lie, because they have time and again proven that NOTHING they say can be trusted.

And I believe that such vast amounts of untruth can only be aimed at self-service, and not a bit toward public service. I take this to mean that they don’t even mean anything they claim to stand for. I believe they have no integrity, that they don’t care about anything past the immediate effect it will have on their audience.

They lie, and they dissemble, and I am as close to hatred for their actions and philosophies, and unfortunately their persons, as I have been to anything for such a long time.

I want to know why YouTube thinks they’re going to take over my TV. Actually, to read that post it sounds like they expect to take over my freakin’ life. But have you watched a lot of long-form video on youTube? I don’t think I’ve successfully watched anything over ten minutes. I tried to watch some longer stuff, like political documentaries or some such, but it’s blurry and the content wasn’t interesting, and that is not the future of my TV.

And the rest of it, that’s not professional material pseudo-legally posted onto the site? Crappy home videos and shit. Sometimes literally, shit. I mean come on now. This cannot stand!

The future of my TV should be stuff like Dr. Horrible. Professionally (if rapidly) produced and acted, with good production values that looks awesome (ok at least passable) on my giant HDTV and sounds awesome on my surround sound stereo. I want to see laser beams and shit!

Not literal shit.

Shit as a metaphor for “more stuff like laser beams”.

I guess what I’m saying is really that I lament the idea that sometime in the future the only way to satisfy my entertainment jones, which mostly consists of science fiction, documentaries, and lifestyle television (y’know, like Project Runway and Mythbusters and Top Chef), will be watching short-form videos shot on consumer-level equipment (you know, real TV cameras cost like $100k), written, if they’re written at all, by amateurs, performed by amateurs, directed by amateurs, sound recorded by amateurs, lighting by amateurs, set-design by whoever’s house it was shot at, post-process done on somebody’s MacBook, etc. etc.

Granted, YouTube’s video quality will improve, bandwidth will increase, equipment will get cheaper (but it’s a function of size sometimes, lenses are physical things that have to be a certain size to be really really good). But that really doesn’t matter if the people making the material aren’t of a professional grade.

I want to be entertained by professionals, or people who have skills at a professional grade. Amateur videography, when it’s entertaining, is almost alway entertaining only because it’s shocking or unusual. Like crazy people who have cable access shows. By and large, amateur videography is not good drama, it’s not good sci-fi, it’s not good comedy. It’s usually the video equivalent of listening to a college radio talk show. UGH!

I think this is often because amateurs just don’t know how hard you have to work to make something professional. In their own day jobs they might know what a professional standard is for, say, making paper. Smooth, rich, creamy, perfectly bleached paper with little hearts printed in faded out pink at the top. But how far you have to go in some other industry is just plain lost on so many people who refuse to acknowledge their own ignorance.

How do you get that pristine video look, like watching The Big Bang Theory in its pristine glory in 1080i? The set is decorated with lots of detail that plays into the characters and backstory. The actors are dressed in complementary colors that go with the set and play up their character features. Everything is well-lit for the camera, everybody has the appropriate amount of makeup on to look natural on camera. It’s a professional job by a team of professionals.

Now, it could very well be that somebody might make something on a recurring basis that is amateurishly presented and yet hilarious, or gripping. Maybe people feel that way about Lonelygirl15. But we know now that the people behind that Web show are pros. And we have an idea, from interviews, how much time, thought, and work went into making the show work. And I would bet dollars to donuts that they’re constantly struggling to make the next piece, financially and creatively. It’s hard.

If it were easy, everybody would be doing it. And that’s exactly what I’m afraid of. I dread the day. Dread. It.

I think YouTube is the Great White Hype of entertainment. The professional entertainers are over there smoking and drinking and getting all fat, and betting on themselves anyway because they know the amateurs when it comes down to it just don’t have the skills to compete.

God I hope I’m right about that. Or if I’m not right about that then I hope I’m wrong about the other thing too, and amateur videography/filmmaking turns out to be just wonderful and content-rich and the blessing of my existence.

I invite examples that assuage my fears.

I have a couple of serious problems I’m trying to address here. One is my electricity bill, which in Atlanta in August was like $250. This is only partly because we run the air conditioning pretty heavily and our windows are old. It’s also because we’re always opening and closing the fridge door, and putting items away and checking to see what’s in there and deciding what to get out.

There are good fridge-user habits that we could adopt, and I really try, but inevitably with a couple of people using the thing there’s a lot of energy wasted re-cooling items because all the cold air got out. And then there’s the horror of freezer burn, which is caused by the very slight melting-and-refreezing cycle that occurs when you open the freezer door and close it again. The more you open that freezer, the more freezer-burnt stuff’s going to get.

You can get glass-door refrigerators, and space-maximizing “French door” refrigerators too, both of which I want I want because I am an acquisitive American who loves kitchen toys.

But even these awesome fridges don’t quite measure up to what I think is the Ultimate Fridge.

This concept fridge, which is designed to compartmentalize a refrigerator so that students can make sure nobody else gets into their stuff, is pretty close, but no cigar. For one thing, it assumes that only students want compartmentalization in their refrigerators, and it assumes that they want it just to keep other students’ grimy germ-laden mitts off their leftovers. It’s a fantastic piece of concept art, but I find it shallow and immature in its ambitions.

So, with a great deal less artistic ability, here is my rendering of what I want in a refrigerator. It’s my Dream Fridge.

Refrigerator Concept

The clear glass windows would allow me to see the contents without opening the compartment and losing cold air. I’d actually rather have the whole door be glass, but it seems more efficient to minimize the glass space, and anyway all I need is a peep to serve the purpose. And portholes are cool lookin’.

Compartmentalizing the fridge allows me to retrieve items from one area without compromising the cold air in another section, resulting in less freezer burn for frozen items and less spoilage for refrigerated items.

Giving each section its own thermostat lets me manage the space in the fridge more efficiently and keep items at their optimum temperature. If I’m stocking up on ice cream for a party, I may dedicate one compartment to be a really really cold freezer, and another to be not as cold. If an icemaker were installed in one compartment, that one might be kept at a lower temperature to freeze ice faster.

Since the fridge needs a compressor, that could go on top, like the SubZero example above, or maybe make the fridge shallower and put the compressor along the back. Or even, since I can do anything I want because it’s my dream, why not put the compressor outside the house, or tie it into the heating and cooling system of the house? Let my central air conditioner do the work. I have no idea if that’s a good idea, but without any research or examination it seems like one. Heh.

JB says: Here’s an idea; call it “Web Excursions” (Webcursions?)

You write a blog post, and in that post you have contextual links– hyperlinks –but they’re special, because rather than just linking offsite, these links take you down a pathway, on an excursion which eventually circles back to your blog post, or article or story or whatever.

For example, somehow you link off to Wikipedia, and in that Wikipedia article is some kind of mechanism for you to take the next step down the pathway that the author has chosen, sort of choose-your-own-adventurey style. Maybe the pathway links are a special color or have a special icon next to them

Steve says: Hrm, kind of like the old fan ring networks but different.

JB says: Right. The next step in the path is clearly identified, so you can follow the steps and don’t get lost in branches. Seems kind of semantic-webby.

I was just reading this blog post and it generated that idea. If you scroll down to the section headed “so how exactly did i get here?” where he talks about making a CD rom that contained “excursions”.

We should be able to build “excursions” into any kind of Web content. We can already link offsite, what’s missing is the mechanism to bring the user back around to our context. We can only do that if we build it into our web site ourselves, but that eliminates the possibility of (easily) referring to other people’s work to supplement your own. Maybe it shouldn’t be easy, but I kind of think this kind of reference is what the Web’s ultimate purpose really is.

Steve says: Right. Did you ever watch James Burke on PBS? He had a couple short series

Connections and The Day the Universe Changed

Where he’d start with one thing, go off on a whole series of contextual type links and then bring it back around to the starting point.

JB says: Right. Exactly.

[OK Internets, I have pushed the idea into your ethertubes, now spontaneously generate a startup that will build this for me! Just like you did for the Networked Archive idea. Here is some more chat, in a more practical vein, about how one might actually pull this off.]

JB says: I think you could pull of this Webcursions thing with an Apache plugin. So in the originating page, the links that start a Webcursion point back to your server.

Steve says: ah, yes

JB says: The Apache server grabs the destination page, parses it, and replaces any links to the *next* pathway step with the special Webcursion code, and so forth, so the user never leaves your server.

I mean, this wouldn’t do for a real site but rather for a Proof of concept

Steve says: ah, yeah

JB says: Since controlling other sites like that is kind of evil.

Steve says: spoofing and stealing content… yeah

JB says: but just to show “here’s how it’d work if we all agreed to do it”.

Hmm. Or this is better: other Apache servers could recognize requests for pathway steps. That’s a better proof of concept. You get to leave one site, go to another, but it recognizes a special request and formats appropriately.

Steve says: Yeah, that would do it. Maybe a combination of a web browser plugin and an apache module. The web browser plugin would put something extra in the HTTP header which the apache module would recognize

JB says: Well, it could be a new protocol request couldn’t it? One that’s almost http but with semantic additions for the pathway built into the headers of the request.

Steve says: Yeah, thought about that too, but http is so entrenched

JB says: Well, yeah, i think this would be a whole grassroots sort of exercise.

Steve says: And then you’re talking W3C RFCs and such

JB says: And i don’t think this’ll ever actually get built, so I’m just thinking about what would a good way to do it that didn’t require everyone to have a browser plugin. ‘Cause shit, even Flash isn’t in *every* browser yet

Steve says: right

JB says: But there’s only two web servers to speak of. Apache and IIS. I bet the semantic web people have already done all of this thinking, but i also bet a new protocol is the trick

Steve says: maybe a different apache virtual host

JB says: yeah, kind of like how SSL is done

Steve says: So, rather than linking to www.hogswallowing.com/page.html you’d link to webscursion.hogswallowing.com/page.html

JB says: or instead of http:// you do sttp://

Steve says: A new protocol would certainly do the trick. That’d probably require a web browser plugin, though too.

JB says: really? why?

Steve says: For the browser to know where to direct sttp://  — what port

JB says: hmm, true

Steve says: or, make port 8222 the one used for this and run two instances of apache, the one at 8222 modified to do the webscursion, and link to http://www.hogswallowing.com:8222/page.html (or whatever port)

JB says: yeah, either your destination supports webscursions or not. Any way you link to it, it has to support them, so it’s finding the way to accomplish the link without burdening the reader/user that is key.

Steve says: right

JB says: It would read the page, find the next link in the path, and format appropriately. You would have to figure out “what do you do if links disappear”. On receiving a 404 does it go to the next step on the path? Does it mention anything? Put some kind of coding in the request headers to indicate the health of the path and let the browser or scripting interpret it, and include reference to the “Originator” of the path to allow authors to monitor the health of their paths and make adjustments when necessary.

Steve says: gets complicated

JB says: yeah, but it started complicated

Steve says: that is true

Doors are slamming here right now. People, myself and my girlfriend, are pissed at each other and the world in general.

It started out as a great day. Went to brunch at a nice little place I hadn’t been to before. Really good breakfast, fresh fruit, nice company. It’s kind of a regular thing for my girlfriend and I, brunch with these two other couples.

We had our day sort of mapped out. Brunch, then to Buckhead to buy a thing for the back of our pantry door, so we could put spices there instead of all over tucked in everywhere else. We’ve seen a couple of people who have similar deals on the back of their pantry doors, and we wanted in on the action.

So off to the Container Store we go. We buy our back-of-pantry shelving, and some hooks that we intended to screw into the built-in bookshelves that are in our dining room. These are bookshelves that we had our favorite handyman’s crew build last year, and we love them. Now we want to add some hooks and a canvas pouchy thing so we can sort our mail more easily. I was a bit nervous about screwing things into the nice bookshelves.

After the Container Store we stopped by the mall, where the GF bought a giant fake diamond ring to serve as her wedding band while she portrays Lady Capulet in an upcoming production of Romeo and Juliet. Cool, things turning out so far as we expected.

Then, the Apple Store. Are they really called “The Apple Store”? Outside there’s just a big bitten-apple logo, not a sign that says “The Apple Store”. Just wondering. In the “Apple Store”, if that’s it’s real name, my girlfriend inquired about bringing her iPhone to the Genius bar for some looking at. Her Google Maps application won’t start. Add to that the fact that on her iBook, which she uses to sync her iPhone, the Address Book application won’t start. And she has all her contacts, which she needs for her job, on the phone. We can’t back up her contacts, so what to do?

There’s an hour-and-a-half wait for a standby appointment with a Genius. She puts her name in, but we decide not to wait around. This iPhone thing is a sore spot for her already, and consequently myself as well. I’m frustrated when technology that I want desperately to succeed only succeeds in making my loved-ones lives more difficult.

We get home. The shelving thing that attaches to the door is too short, and there is only one screw-hole that we can use to attach it to the door. GF is all “I don’t want to go the whole way back up there” so I volunteer to take the thing back and exchange it.

Meantime, we’ve begun the process of attaching the hooks to the bookshelves. Remember the hooks? Yeah, well, that doesn’t go very smoothly and now the shelves are marred a bit where we tried to get the hooks to slide onto their attachment thingies only to figure out that we put the attachment thingies on upside down, and so we’ve now taken the screws in and out of the wood about three times, each time lessening the grip of the screws. Great.

We get that sorted out, and I leave to take the shelving back to the Container Store. I’m in my car when GF calls. The hooks won’t go through the eyelets of the mail-sorting canvas thing we got, can I get new hooks please. So now I have marred my bookshelves and we have to take the screws out *again* and I’m getting pretty frustrated. I really hate when my stuff get’s fucked up. Hate it even more when it’s through my own stupidity.

Oh, and GF cut her finger on the god damned hook while we were putting it on upside down. That scared me, not only for that moment but at the prospect that we might have this sharp thing waiting to cut her again as she breezed by unwarily on her way to get some tea from the fridge.

I get the stuff and the other stuff at the container store, and go back home. We take off the bitch-ass too-big yuppie hooks and screw in the new ones I got. There’s an extra hole staring at me from the wood now, just taunting me with “nice work, asshole, you fucked up your dining room”.

I try to shake it off, and we manage to attach the new thing to the back of the pantry door without any trouble. Woohoo! We start putting stuff in, and our frustration is kind of evident as we’re very close to snapping at each other over where to put stuff in the fucking pantry and our newly-empty shelves. What a petty thing I am sometimes. God.

I forgot to mention that we had also stopped at Lowe’s where I got some nylon anchor things. I wanted to attach a piece of wood to the wall inside the pantry, so I could add a shelf. There was already a piece of wood on the other side, so all I had to do in my vast manliness was cut a piece of wood to size and fix it to the goddamned motherfucking sonofamotherfucking bitch wall. Cock!

I tried to insert the anchors into the holes I had drilled, carefully following the scanty instructions. Failed. The anchors wouldn’t go the whole way in, and when I tried to push them in they wouldn’t budge. And then when I tried to pull them out they wouldn’t budge either! God damned plaster fucking wall.

While trying to pull one of the anchors out of the wall, I managed to pinch the hell out of the meat of my finger. Then I re-noticed something I had forgotten: one of the hinges of the pantry door is not actually attached to the door. The screws are totally loose in the holes, and you can’t screw them back in. Great, all this effort is going to result in the door falling off.

So by this time I’m completely fed. The. Hell. Up. I decide to try one more time to stick the wood on the plaster wall. I try just screwing the screws in real fast. Of course not. Then I try nails, because it looks like the other boards are all affixed using nails. No good, it just hits something inside the wall and starts to bounce. Like I’m pounding on a rubber ball. ARGH the FUCKING ARGH!

Yeah, I totally failed. I also failed at this same task a couple days ago. In the process I totally bitched up the wall so even someone who knew what the fuck they were doing probably couldn’t put a shelf in there now. Nice work, asshole.

And you know, the handyman I want to call to make it all better has completely and totally flaked on me lately. He did some work on my doors and was going to return the next morning to do the basement door– and never showed up. I called him a couple times; the second time went straight to voice mail. I left a pleasantly perplexed messaged, and he’s never called me back. It’s really frustrating, because I like the guy a lot and he does good work. His crew built the bookshelves, like I mentioned.

Not only because I’d love to call him and have him make my pantry pain go away, but we also wanted to hire him to build us a deck and enclose our little side porch. I wanted to give this guy like $12,000 and for him to help make my house more awesome. And he won’t call me back. Fucking A.

When he was here last week working on the doors (he was kick-proofing them, because it’s a dangerous part of town, another frustrating recent item) we got to talking about how I’m afraid to do handywork myself. I want to learn how to do some basic wiring, and change the light fixtures in a bunch of rooms. But I’ve never done much of this sort of thing– I didn’t grow up in a handy-household. I wouldn’t know where to start in changing my car’s oil. I don’t have much idea how a toilet works.

He encouraged me to just try it. Just try doing something, and let yourself screw up. Well, here I go trying this, attach a board to a plaster wall, and it did NOT turn out well. So that’s frustrating. Yeah, I know the thing to do is try try again but god DAMN it that motherfucking piece of shit plaster wall! And, I didn’t even know it was plaster when I started; I thought it was drywall like the rest of the house. That’s how ignorant I am– I even knocked on it to make sure it was drywall, and thought the “tok tok” I got confirmed my theory.

Sigh.

So we’re cleaning up shortly after all of this goes down. GF is putting stuff away, anticipating that the cleaning service will be coming tomorrow. She’s doing her best to be helpful, and kind of being hands-off with me because I’m obviously at my wits’ end. I start putting stuff away, occasionally scratching at a mosquito bite. Where did that come from? I’ve been inside all this time! Fucking mosquitos! I got five bites this morning just standing in the back yard watching the dog do his morning business. (Yeah, that’s on my tally of frustrating recent things.)

Anyway, we’re cleaning up like I said. Unfortunately, she also is using the tone of voice that you use with a crazy tiger that you’re trying to convince not to eat you. I don’t know why, I can’t explain it, but this bugs me.

I feel like she expects me to explode at any second, which is frustrating because I never explode like that. That’s probably not what she’s thinking, she’s probably just trying to make me feel better about failing a something so simple and yet so masculine as putting up a shelf. It doesn’t work, and I snap at her: “You don’t need to use that tone of voice like I’m about to freak out. That’s almost more infuriating than anything else.”

Why? Why did I say that? Was I lashing out, in this sad little way? Biting the hand that’s trying to rub my back and make me feel better. She sure didn’t have it coming.

I apologized almost immediately. I don’t think it worked, really. I’m going to have to just wait for her to accept that I know I shouldn’t have said that and that I regret it. For now, it’s tense. She’s going around with that air of ticked-offedness about her, doing the same thing I do which is get all uber-efficient and get-things-done-I’ll-show-that-bastard. It would be cute if I didn’t feel queasy at the knowledge that I’m the reason she’s angry. It’s very cute because it’s exactly what I do when I get mad. Well, except not this time, because she beat me to it, so I did the so-weary-at-the-world thing and dramatically paused at the pantry door rubbing my face for effect.

I felt compelled to write this all down. I dunno why. Maybe because I know she’ll read it, and because I hope it exorcises some of this pent-up frustration I’ve been experiencing.

Now I’m going to finish this and go nurse a soda and hope she lets me sit next to her on the couch while I wait for the last few hours of this godawful Sunday to expire, and I’ll try to work the kinks out of my back, and I’ll try to ignore the pinched meat of my finger, and the hangnail on my other finger, and the bitter thorn in my stomach that I always get when the girl I love is mad at me.

So this guy made an iPhone app called “I Am Rich,” which does nothing but show an image of a red gemstone– presumably a ruby. He priced it at $999.99 and managed to get it added to the iPhone App Store.

The "I Am Rich" application icon

When I first heard about this, I thought “hmmm, I guess some people with too much money might want that, as a sort of joke-but-not-really-’cause-look-i’m-so-rich-i-spent-a-grand-on-a-joke.” Or maybe even because they wanted it for its face-value function. Y’know, kind of like any other useless luxury item. People go for that shit. “Look at my gold fingernail clipper with the inset diamond hinge.”

It never occurred to me to get angry at the guy who made the app. I’m still bewildered by the furor.

It’s gotten enough attention that the New York Times has written a story about the whole deal. According to the NYT, the guy who made the app’s been getting hate mail– “Mr. Heinrich was bombarded with e-mail and phone messages, “many of them insulting,” he said.”

Come on now. Really? Yelling at a dude because you “fell” for his joke/art? It did exactly what it said it would do, and it cost exactly as much as it told you it would. It’s the iPhone equivalent of touching a land mine to see if it will go off. It’s pretty and cute, and I know it’s going to kill me, but there must be some way I can try it out and get back to cover if what I know is true actually turns out to really be true.

A modern land mine. I assume the dude isn't going to poke it with that wand...

I use the land mine analogy, which essentially compares stupidly wasting money you didn’t deserve to have in the first place with being rent limb from limb by buried explosives because that’s how important this subject is.

Judging by the amount of press, anyway.

And all this hoopla for 8 people– “I Am Rich” was purchased a grand total of 8 times. So the hooplateers are offended just on principle that anyone would dare create such an application and sell it on the holy App Store. That lofty perch must be reserved for fifteen different applications that all emulate a flashlight. Some of which actually would have you pay them money, more money than it costs to buy a real flashlight, for the privilege of using an application to set your backlight to its highest setting and turn the screen white.

Of course, Apple doesn’t give you a way to try out an iPhone app. Once you’ve bought the app, you’re kind of screwed if it’s terrible. Don’t go purchasing any of those $40 industry-specific applications unless you know they’re going to suit your need. So there is some room for criticism of high-priced applications on that basis.

Nintendo does the same thing. You can’t try out the games on the Wii shop, you just have to spend the ten bucks for SPOGS Racing and then spend the next hour cursing at Nintendo for loose quality control. SPOGS Racing is really horrible.

But anyway, I’m having a  hard time dealing with the fact that

• a) people give a crap about “I Am Rich” and that
• b) the crap they give is flung at the developer instead of idiots who clicked the app to install it and then have the nerve to claim they’ve been scammed, and that
• c) people are really as stupid as I always knew they were.

Maybe my real problem is that this time I can’t just shrug and be all cynical, because this time people are being stupid in a completely different way than I expected. Like when you kick that landmine and it springs up and decapitates the guy next to you, and you get off with only an amputation or two.

This post on Web 2.0/Startup focused blog “Mashable” seems to make a classic mistake.

A fellow got locked out of his Google account, and couldn’t get the company to respond to his requests for support.

This guy’s experience sucks and Google should fix it, but maybe not exactly for the reasons that you. Always remember that unless you’re paying somebody money, you’re a user, not a customer. Customers pay for service, and Google’s customers are by and large, advertisers.

I have a hunch that Mashable and the commenters on that post are confusing being a user of a Web site with being a customer of that Web site.

One could argue that you are a customer of Google’s because you see the ads they serve. But from that perspective your actions contribute such a negligible amount of value in that manner that it’s not economical for Google to care that much about what happens to individuals. Your Lifetime Value as a viewer of Google advertisements probably doesn’t add up to the hour it’ll take some technician to fix your problem.

Ads are paid for in “CPM”– that means “Cost Per Thousand” views. The “M” stands for a thousand; I presume they use roman numerals for some reason you could look up on Google. So an advertiser gets paid every thousand times you view a page. Over your lifetime, you will view thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of pages of ads. But even though Google doesn’t release the prices of their ads, and some ads are worth more than others, lemme tell you that it doesn’t cost all that much to buy a view thousand CPM ad. So Google’s gotta weigh the probable value of your ad-viewing vs. the time it’ll take to fix your problem.

Actually, they weigh the average value of the average user vs. the average time it takes to fix the average account problem. Apparently, that calculation adds up to only a certain amount of customer support per single-user-affecting incident. They do try, as the Mashable post attests, but they don’t try very hard.

In the case of this poor guy locked out of his account, as Rob mentions below, he’s actually a paying customer of Google– he pays for extra storage. Does the calculation still return a result of ignore-him-’til-he-goes-away? I think it might.

Google isn’t necessarily looking to create the most robust and dependable service online, even when you’re willing to pay them for it. I think Google’s primary focus is page views, and throwing things onto the Web that will increase their page views as much as possible. So the calculation of “should we go the extra mile to fix an individual extra-storage customer’s problem” probably still comes out negative.

Do you think advertisers on Google’s network suffer the same lack of response to their problems?

Now, if everybody on Gmail got locked out, well then Google would respond, because it would impact their volume in a tangible way and pinch their REAL customers in a very painful place. Even then, the user clamor would only be a telltale alert that the ruckus that really matters is on its way from the corner where huddle the wretched masses of businesses whose ads weren’t being served. Ads they pay for in advance.

[Note: I failed to notice in the Mashable post that the person in question pays Google for storage, so now instead of being certain about whether the poster and commenters are making that "classic mistake", the post now just assumes they are and makes its silly point anyway.]

This Sesame Street video, along with bringing a giant smile to my face, got me thinking about how we relate to kids. Young humans, not young goats.

It seems to me that our generation, by which I mean anybody under 50 right now in 2008, to a large extent loves to relate to children on a level that’s closer to a child’s perspective. Previous generations loved to relate to children at more of a remove, I think, at least they always struck me as more patronizing than we do these days, based on observation after and experience during my own childhood.

You could say that more of us these days refuse to grow up, but I think that’s bullshit. You can retain your sense of wonder, curiosity, love of simplicity and penchant for whimsy even as you hold down a steady job, buy a house, care about politics and the environment, and otherwise do all the adult things you must do to survive.

Some people, I think, would have us all behaving like characters out of either Little House on the Prairie or Mad Men. I hate Mad Men. To my sensibility there has never been a more depressing, black-hearted piece of television.

Certainly not everyone under 50 right now in 2008 behaves like this. There are plenty of traditionally-minded moms and dads and the whole gamut between There and Here, so don’t get me wrong. What I’m describing is more accurately visualized as a shift in the continuum, similar to the shift from Blue to Red and back again on a political map. If patronization is Red and camaraderie is Blue (my preferred reading of the situation) then the country seems to be shading a bit more to the bluish purple these days.

There have been articles about “the new parents” that seem to take a dim view of this trend, but there’s a difference between relating to children on their level and dressing your kid like a hipster, treating the child like a miniature version of your ideal self (which is just another form of Jon Benet-style perversity).

Basically, what I’m saying is, old people suck and should mind their own business.

It used to be that whoever was coming up with the Subject lines for spam simply appealed to a need shared by many people. It didn’t matter if that need was the point of their message, they just wanted to get you to open that email up and read the first sentence. Apparently if you get that far enough people keep going to make it worth continuing to spam. You know the like:

• “Upgrade your organ: no side effects”
• “Become the unicorn of your neighborhood”

Ahem. Apparently there are many men out there who are, shall we say, lacking in confidence. Note that those are actually Subjects in my Gmail spam folder right now.

And then there are the Subjects where the writer guesses at our prurient interests. Usually by invoking the name of some unattainable celebrity who is either a naif, wholesome, has been known to almost get naked, or is well-known for keeping his or her clothes on:

• “Miley cyrus naked photos expose”
• “Party scenes with American Idols”
• “Carrie Underwood nude shots exposed”
• “Watch Scarlet go down on Britney: scandalous video”
• “Brad Pitt strips naked for Playboy”
• “Olsen twins caught nude on camera”

Those are just a couple of the more rancid types of spam Subjects, among others that are more direct appeals like “Sapphire crystal watchglass” and “Purchase software at surprisingly low prices”.

All this is understood by most of us, hardly needing reiteration (although it’s not healthy to leave things assumed and unsaid) and those bullet lists will probably make this the most-trafficked post in the history of my blog. But I have a point. Recently I’ve noticed the spam Subjects that my Gmail account receives are often much more compelling to me, the pop-culture movie, news, and politics junkie. Some examples:

• “Brad Pitt confesses to betrayal”
• “Apple files for bankruptcy”
• “Video of rampage in Tokyo”
• “China fires missile in Taiwan’s direction”
• “Angelina Jolie suffers miscarriage”
• “Subprime crisis finally over: feds report”
• “Eminem prank calls LL Cool J”
• “The Mummy 3 movie bankrupt, release delayed”
• “Mccain vows to remain celibate”
• “Plane crashes into White House injuring hundreds”
• “Clinton says: Hillary cheated on me”
• “Obama found dead in shock accident”
• “McCain suffers heart attack”
• “Eminem found dead in disco toilet”
• “Russel Crowe admits to love affair with Angelina”

And the one I just had to click on to make sure it was spam: “Spielberg found dead in freak accident”

I’m on so many mailing lists and such that even though I don’t know the sender, and even though I just know that it’s spam, I clicked anyway, because the supposed headline is just so plausible and whatifit’strueijusthavetoknow!

Somebody out there, some spamming genius asshole, is taking time to figure out a) what topics we (or at least people like me) are all interested in and b) what turn of events would be particularly shocking with regard to those topics. And they’re pretty damn effective, at least when Gmail fails to filter them.

If only they could use their powers for good.

Throughout history man has tried to figure out how to save his works forever, through schemes that usually involved some kind of violence done to some kind of very hard medium. Stone tablets, for example.

With the dawn of the digital age this need hasn’t diminished, but the digital storage mediums devised so far have lifespans far less than forever. You’re lucky if that CD you burned 5 years ago is still readable.

The ease, convenience, and economy of digital media has undermined our focus on making things we create last forever.

I was reading an Ask Slashdot thread about this issue today, and though I read an awful lot of that thread nobody seemed to be suggesting the answer that immeditaely occurred to me.

At the same time that it sabotages our archival efforts by being untrustworthy, the digital age offers us the opportunity to create a truly Forever Archive. Or at least it has since the network was invented.

What prevents a physical, local archive from lasting forever is its very physicality. It’s a popular tenet among techy types that if you really want to back something up you keep at least three copies:

• One you’re using on a daily basis. The working copy.
• One on a separate hard drive or burned to CD/DVD.
• One on a hard drive at some other location.

Really hardcore types make one or more of these copies part of a “RAID array“– basically a storage system where the information is spread out over more than one hard disk, and multiple copies are kept of the data, so if any one of the hard drives fails your information isn’t lost.

This 3-copy scheme protects you from your hard drive crashing and your house burning down, but it doesn’t protect you from the media going obsolete, *all* your backups dying because you were too lazy to maintain them, the company who hosts your offsite data going out of business, or a nuclear war. Depending on the location of your offsite backup, it may not even protect you from a snowstorm.

Not to mention it’s kind of expensive.

The solution is to remove the archives physicality. Put the archive in cyberspace. Make it fuzzy, a cloud, an abstract idea that magically results in a concrete actuality of a JPG of my mom through the power of software and algorithms. An Internet RAID array.

Use the principle of distributed computing (for example, Folding@Home or SETI@Home), but rather than using idle CPU power, use unused hard drive space. I’ve got lots, and I bet most people have at least 10GB to spare somewhere.

Take 100,000 participating computers across the world and make a large disk out of them, and put your data on there– redundant and encrypted. Nobody on the network can see what part of the array they have on their computer, but everyone who contributes hard disk space gets some fraction of that amount of storage on the Forever Archive. This would give me…

What I Really Want

1. A way to store information that will always be retrievable. Natch.
2. Not to have to maintain hard drives or archives any more. I don’t mind keeping a local backup, for convenience. But archiving? What a pain, and I can’t personally achieve a true archive without great expense.

In a nutshell:

Everybody who wants in designates some amount of space on their hard drive to be used for the network. Depending on the fraction of space you donate, you get that much space to use on the network, or some fraction thereof to account for redundancy and encryption. I would personally be willing to contribute 10GB of a hard drive in order to get 2GB of storage that would never die.

This kind of (sort of) already exists in the form of Freenet. From Wikipedia:

Freenet is a decentralized, censorship-resistant distributed data store originally designed by Ian Clarke. Freenet aims to provide freedom of speech through a peer-to-peer network with strong protection of anonymity. Freenet works by pooling the contributed bandwidth and storage space of member computers to allow users to anonymously publish or retrieve various kinds of information.

This sounds just like what I want! Except not really. All of that business about “censorship-resistant” and “anonymous” means that only creeps and hooligans want to use the thing. Focusing on the anti-establishment aspects of the cloud completely destroys its credibility. More quotes from the article:

Freenet’s founders argue that only with true anonymity comes true freedom of speech, and that what they view as the beneficial uses of Freenet outweigh its negative uses.

One analysis of Freenet files conducted in the year 2000 (before Freenet had proper support for web pages and chat) claimed that the top 3 types of files contained in Freenet were text (37 %), audio (21 %), and images (14 %). 59 % of all the text files were drug-related, 71 % of all audio files were rock music, and 89 % of all images were pornographic.

So, great. *eyeroll*

Most people using Freenet seem to want to host their illegally downloaded content on this network, in order to hide it from the authorities. And the founders of the system want it to serve as a way for Chinese dissidents to fight their government (which I’m in favor of, by the way). As long as the network is encrypted and I am protected from prosecution, I don’t care that my computer is being used to store that crap as long as I get my share. Besides, I don’t want a Forever Archive in order to store porn– I want to make sure I will never lose this picture:

Therein lies the rub:

If Freenet is full of crap, there’s no way it’s going to catch on to the extent I need it to in order to serve as a Forever Archive. Average people will read the mission statement and think it does something other than what they want, or they will be turned off by the attitude or the bad press.

I really suspect that’s the case, because it’s been 8 years in development and Freenet still hasn’t achieved a 1.0 release. A small band of brothers fighting the good fight, trying to bring their technology to fruition despite no resources and no support. (Or rather no supporters who are actually willing to pay for things, for the most part. Yeah, go ahead, flame away.)

Besides, with their focus on anonymity and Sticking it To the Man (which I mostly support, by the way), their focus will be on those aspects of the technology rather than making the network truly bulletproof as far as what you put in you can always get out. Without looking further into it, what I’ve seen so far definitely doesn’t seem to be designed to serve as…

The Eternal Archive
(or “Cloud Archive” or “Forever Archive” or “Joe” or whatever)

So I think something else is called for. A Peer-to-peer system that will serve this function, and which is truly a mainstream application that doesn’t devolve to the lowest common pornominator for freaking once on the Internet for crying out loud, with the following requirements as its foundation:

1. Data put in will stay in and be retrievable in its original form forever or until the submittor takes it out.
2. Data put in should exist several times across the network, to guard against loss. This is redundancy.
3. Data in the system will be encrypted. Nobody will use it if other people can just paw through their information. This isn’t necessarily anonymous, just encrypted.
4. Speed is not an issue, or at least not in the top ten. If it takes a day to retrieve 1GB so be it– as long as that data is guaranteed to be uncorrupt.
5. Network-agnostic. It would be ideal to have a group of software applications that allow parts of the Forever Archive to be placed on any kind of network– bittorrent, napster, Windows Sharing, Intranets, Token Ring, whatever. Each computer in the system runs a little bit of the archive, and even if France gets nuked the archive survives intact.
6. Focused on preserving information for users, not on ideology. Unless “preserving information” is an ideology, which in some cases, like the Internet Archive, it is.

You probably wouldn’t want to store really sensitive information in the cloud, but even *moderately* sensitive information would be safe for the average person. Diary entries, test scores, everything outside financial information and passwords– which are transient anyway.

If you want a “trusted” Forever Archive, meaning one where your data is stored only by computers you own or people you know own, you can already use Freenet in its recently-introduced “darknet” mode, which spreads the cloud over only those computers you designate as trusted. No one else can get to the information. But for a Dark Net you have to have those trusted computers on the network in order to use them. Which has been a problem for Freenet during the development of version 0.7:

For much of the development process of Freenet 0.7, there was no Opennet mode, so that users would have to find Darknet connections. This was partly because it simply wasn’t implemented, but partly because of developers’ hopes that a true F2F [Friend-to-Friend] network would emerge.

However, this did not work out, because in practice most users didn’t know anyone else using Freenet, so had to use an IRC channel or a Frost board to find total strangers to connect to.

In order for the archive to truly be forever, it’s gotta be spread out and redundant. The Freenet Darknet mode doesn’t seem to quite meet that need for me personally, since nobody else I know is going to care. I want this to be so popular it’s in applications by default. A plugin for iTunes, every Bittorrent client, every eMule client, Windows, Firefox, and my cat. I would totally donate a cat to become part of the Forever Archive.

Now that I’ve put the idea out there into the ether, I have no doubt that somebody somewhere will build it. Just like all those Robert Cringely ideas over the years…

Ties of Blood and Water

(The Ballad of John McCain)

by JB

Click Here to Listen

You survived the fiery furnace son
Saw the Red river fade behind
You heard A Change is Gonna Come
Saw a man name the mountain
We would climb

Today we can almost
Reach the sky

Step aside
Let the sun rise

Through the fog of history
You cannot see the way
Past everything you know
We’re begging you to go
But the ties of blood and water
Bind your eyes
And so
And so
And so

Step aside
Let the sun rise

Let it go
Let them all go
Put them in the ground
Let them rest
We all can be redeemed

Step aside
Let the sun rise

Step aside
Let the sun rise

]]> http://hogswallowing.wordpress.com/2008/06/04/new-song-ties-of-blood-and-water/feed/ 0 JB http://hogswallowing.wordpress.com/2008/05/26/new-song-the-blitz/ http://hogswallowing.wordpress.com/2008/05/26/new-song-the-blitz/#comments Mon, 26 May 2008 18:22:48 +0000 JB http://hogswallowing.wordpress.com/?p=95 ]]>

The Blitz
by JB

Click here to listen to “The Blitz”

The full moon is our enemy
It lights the sky like day
No clouds overhead
Hide us from the fray

Spent shells fall like rain
Upon the rolling countryside
Thundering artillery
And heroes in the sky

We will still be dancing
When our homes are blown to bits
We will make it through together
We will survive the Blitz

Jerry’s on his way, she said
I can always tell
By the sound of rocket engines
And the Warden’s swinging bell

We are young
Let us be young
The waltz won’t wait
For the end

We are young
Let us be young
Or what is there
To defend

So we danced at Covent Garden
Pretending not to listen
For the distant engine rumble
And the siren…

We will still be dancing
When the last explosion hits
We will make it through together
We will survive the Blitz

We will still be dancing
When our homes are blown to bits
We will make it through together
We will survive the Blitz

Note: The lyrics for this song were inspired by this first-person account of British life during the Blitz.

Sleepwalking, by JB
(click to listen)

I have wandered through the city
Into the fields beyond
Swum in water clear and dirty
No idea where I’ve gone

I’ve had half a dozen scares
Nearly fallen to my death
All the while I’m unaware
I’ve nearly taken my last breath

Well,
Don’t wake me up
Don’t wake me up
Let me keep sleepwalking

If I never woke again
I would not shed a tear
You can have the world
I like it better in here

Dance in the road
Like there’s music to hear
Let me talk to the sky
As if it has an ear

Don’t wake me up
Don’t wake me up
Let me keep sleepwalking

Over at “Dan’s Data” there is a post about “WiFi Pirate Radio”. The gist is that soon WiFi repeaters will be cheap enough that you can just throw them at buildings as you drive by and have them magnetically attach and create an instant “mesh” network. Essentially spreading one Internet connection to a very large area and letting just about anybody who wants to sign on.

This is probably the future of the world– always-on, always available ‘net connections. Science fiction has been taking it for granted for decades.

But this sort of network implies fewer connection points. No longer do you sign up and pay for your own all-you-can-eat connection. Now one person is signing up for that connection and sharing it with 9 of other people. Even if those other people pay a little bit towards the fee, the ISP gets one payment now instead of ten.

So because fewer people will be maintaining a subscription, and more people will be using that single connection ostensibly working out to the same bandwidth and disk transfer usage, this will necessitate a change in ISP payment structures.

It’s not even a matter of legality. Fewer subscriptions, more efficient use of existing subscriptions, both mean stagnant or even receding growth for an ISP. So your friendly internet service providers would seem to have two choices– cap bandwidth, or have you pay what you use. Capping bandwidth in the face of fewer subscriptions limits growth and profit potential, so while it may be a short-term solution to issues like this, I don’t think it will last very long.

In order to grow, ISPs will start charging people for how much data they use, as web-hosting providers have been doing all along. So you can go ahead and share your connection with whoever you want, but if you let them use your data you’ll still be paying for it.

Since ISPs want to guarantee a level of income, they will probably do *exactly* as hosting providers, and give you some data to use with your base fee, and only start charging when you go over that.

I think that some companies may lower that base fee to the ground, like to a dollar, but start charging you for usage right out of the gate. So, if all you do is check your Gmail once a day, you’ll get off with a payment even less than today– provided you just use your own connection.

Hopefully this won’t involve as many fees and taxes and shady charges as electrical, telephone, and gas utilities have crufted onto their customers’ bills over the last 75 years or so.

This “pay for use” model will generate new applications for WiFi routing to track the usage of people connected to the network. At first, the apps will just let you cut people off at a certain point (I bet there are some that do this today). But soon after, there will be a “mini-ISP” app that lets someone sign in to your network and provide payment info so they can pay for what they use.

This will beget a start-up opportunity for a company that is able to handle those WiFi payments securely in a way where users are reassured that Joe Schmo with a router on his house isn’t actually seeing your credit card information.

Of course, we might run out of oil tomorrow and descend into savage chaos.

Friday 3/14/08

8:30 a.m. JB wakes up craving pizza.

12:45 p.m. JB gets pizza for lunch.

5:50 p.m. D and JB go see “Horton Hears a Who” at Atlantic Station. Horton hears a B- from JB.

7:20 D and JB have dinner at California Pizza Kitchen near the movie theater.

8:30 D, a reporter for an unnamed giant news organization, leaves for work. She’s on the weekend overnight shift, and has to go in early because a coworker injured himself a couple weeks ago. The 9 – 8 shift isn’t fun for anybody.

9:00 JB has decided to watch another movie. It’s “Doomsday,” natch.

9:30 The newsroom is a big open space with desks in it; one wall of the room made up of windows that look out over the city. It’s a beautiful view, most days. JB and D watched the new year come in from this vantage point. But at this moment, the windows are bending in and out several inches at the force of the wind, flapping convexconcaveconvex so fast they seem turned to liquid and surely something’s gotta give and, on other floors, things do. A tornado warning has just been issued.

9:45 D and her coworkers have retired to a sound-recording booth (they do multimedia, you know) to wait out the storm. Outside, all hell is breaking loose. JB rides it out obliviously in the movie theater.

10:00 The storm over, D grabs her ReporterGear (notepad, pencil, unnamed giant news organization-branded rainjacket) and hightails it down to the street to get the story.

10:05-10:45 In between grabbing quotes about the tornado, D calls JB’s cell phone every 5 minutes. She’s quite worried, and meanwhile JB munches popcorn and muses about Rhona Mitra’s similarity to Sandra Bullock and Bridget Moynihan, too oblivious to know he should be worried.

10:46 JB, regurgitated from the theater after being half-digested by the gratuitously disgusting (and not in a good way) F+ travesty that is “Doomsday,” notices lots of calls from D on his phone, calls her back without delay. “There was a tornado. I’m busy. More storms coming. DO NOT GO ANYWHERE.”

11:00 JB tells D to “go get ‘em Tiger,” and promptly heads back into the theater to watch the 11:30 showing of “10,000 BC,” which stands for “10,000 Bags of Crap.” In the meantime, JB’s sister C has stopped by his house and reported that “house is fine, where the f are u”. JB frets, but everybody seems ok. Having missed all of the excitement, he doesn’t even know he should be worried. The picture D attempts to send via cell phone is too large to download. O sweet ignorance! Troubled times thy kiss converts to naught but puzzlement at worry o’erpass’d!

2:00 a.m. JB gets home, and it’s pitch black. He walks the dog and inspects the area in between scrounging for candles and flashlights.

2:30 a.m. JB falls asleep

9:30 a.m. D gets home, barely makes it up stairs before falling asleep

Saturday 3/15/08
12:30 Still no power, JB gets up and putters around; walks the dog, gives him some food and water, grabs a ball of fluffy fur with claws and puts antibiotic goop on poor little CeCe’s eyeball (she has a cold), etc. JB inspects the area, finding only minor damage to premises– awning disconnected on side of house is reattached by passing handyman pal. Roof mostly blown off decrepit shack out back, will need replacing shortly. No other damage to casa JB&D, nor the domiciles to either side.

12:45 At the end of the street, however, it’s another story as three giant trees have blown over. One on top of an empty house on the corner (not gonna get $650k for it NOW are you, jerkwads), one JUST missing a house where someone recently moved in– their Volvo was severely damaged. Poor little Volvo. JB commiserates with the spirit of the automobile.

12:50 Another vacant house, this one across the street from the ruined Volvo, has a large tree draped across its front, one large branch caressing the front porch, little leafy fingers digging into the roof, heavier branches beginning to pull the porch clean off the house in a DEATH EMBRACE. Maybe this will get the absentee realty company to bring the craptastic bungalow up to code. Ridiculous.

1:00 Trees all over the neighborhood– BIG trees –are down, their drought-strained roots sheared off almost at ground level. Hundreds of years old, and weighing multiple TONS, these old trees met their match in the cold breath of mother Wind.

2:30 D’s still zonked. JB wanders down to the Village to see what’s up. Most of the stores are closed, and there is wind damage to some roofing and siding, and some windows are smashed. A vacant lot with a stand of several giant trees is several giant trees short of a stand this afternoon. People are wandering around.

2:35 One corner bar is open without power; their clever management procured a large barbecue rig and is cooking up a storm. God bless America.

2:40 JB appreciates the barbecue ingenuity, but goes to get pizza as usual anyway. The pizza joint has power, as does most of that block. JB sends D a text message with his location.

3:00 D joins JB at the pizza joint, and they canoodle.

3:15 It starts to rain. JB is concerned because his basement will flood if his sump pump doesn’t run, and his sump pump needs electricity to run. JB is aggravated, though he and D share a pretty hearty laugh at the travails of keeping that dratted basement dry.

3:20 It starts to hail. Pea-sized. Oh crap.

3:25 The hail is now not-quite golf-ball sized. Is there gumball-sized hail? Is that an official nomenclature for hail? Should be.

3:35 Not to worry, though, it was just a squall. The hail and rain storm has mostly passed, so JB and D scoot home, past the trees, past the broken windows, and into their darkened home.

4:00 JB and D go to Lowes to see if they can find a small generator to power the sump pump. Alas, the cheapest generator at Lowes is $399. WTF, Lowes?

9:00 After getting some comfort food in the form of two small mounds of Coldstone Creamery ice cream, our heroes return home to their darkened abode where D takes a nap and JB stays with her, reading. Power is still out. People have been calling to check on the couple all day. Voicemail and text messages fairly raining down on them, like Love Hail. Softball-sized.

10:45 D goes to work for her second (and thankfully final) overnight shift of the weekend. Despite the lack of tornado action, the night and morning are really busy as coverage continues of the aftermath.

11:15 The power comes back on. The basement, remarkably, has remained dry this whole time.

Sunday 3/16/08

2:00 a.m. JB gives up on making the Internet work.

8:30 D comes home, crawls into bed. Mmmm.

12:30 JB wakes up craving pizza.

I haven’t seen every flick, nor considered every nominee, but I’m an American dammit and I’m not going to let ANYTHING stop me from announcing JB’S OSCAR PICKS. This is who I want to win, not who I think will win.

Performance by an actor in a leading role
Johnny Depp in “Sweeney Todd The Demon Barber of Fleet Street”

Performance by an actor in a supporting role
Philip Seymour Hoffman in “Charlie Wilson’s War”

Performance by an actress in a leading role
Laura Linney in “The Savages”

Performance by an actress in a supporting role
Tilda Swinton in “Michael Clayton”

Best animated feature film of the year
“Ratatouille” : Brad Bird

Achievement in art direction
“There Will Be Blood”

Achievement in cinematography
“Atonement” 

Achievement in costume design
“Atonement” 

Achievement in directing
“There Will Be Blood”, Paul Thomas Anderson

Best documentary feature
“Sicko”

Achievement in film editing
“The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”

Best foreign language film of the year
“Mongol” Kazakhstan

Achievement in makeup
“La Vie en Rose”

Achievement in music written for motion pictures (Original score)
“3:10 to Yuma”

Achievement in music written for motion pictures (Original song)
“Falling Slowly” from “Once”

Best motion picture of the year
“Juno” 

Achievement in sound editing
“Ratatouille”

Achievement in sound mixing
“Ratatouille”

Achievement in visual effects
“Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End”

Adapted screenplay
“No Country for Old Men” (Miramax and Paramount Vantage), Written for the screen by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen

Original screenplay
“Lars and the Real Girl” (MGM), Written by Nancy Oliver

I am pretty pissed off that “Lars and the Real Girl” was only nominated for Original Screenplay. I’m no Gosling fanboy, but he was SO FUCKING GOOD. And the direction was terrific. “Lars and the Real Girl” was my favorite movie of the year.

On Friday I smashed my BRAND NEW GODDAMMIT car up a bit. I’m fine, everybody’s fine, and suffice to say that in the eyes of the Law if not the Lord, it was my fault. However, I emerged citation-free and merely have to deal with getting my vehicle repaired. And then paying whatever ungodly “You Actually Used Your Insurance” fee Progressive decides to tack onto my insurance premium.

A list of what needs to be replaced due to this little fender-bender:

• Front Bumper. One.
• Left Bumper. Two.
• Right Bumper- Three! That’s how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Volvopop. Three bumpers. It’s like a pinball machine.
• Right headlight. Tiny little crack
• Hood. Dammit.
• Both horns. BOTH.
• Valence Panel, whatever the hell that is.
• Core Support, which sounds necessary.
• Reinforcement Bar, which is where I headed after this accident but is also apparently a vehicle part of some kind.

Dude made a mario out of cookies.

I totally want to do this, but my first idea of a character to make was…

The ship from Yar’s Revenge. Which of course, EVERYONE would recognize.

Here are some new Girl Rules. They haven’t been gestating as long as the previous entries, so they may not be as thoroughly vetted. However, I reserve the right to correlate and extend, revise and obfuscate as necessary.

8. Girls like birthdays
Even if they’re going old-school and pretending not to know how old they are, or fussing at you for wanting to know their age– that’s still obssession you’re looking at in the mirror, you young svelte beautiful ageless thing. And if they’re willing to admit to actually having been born on a date (as most girls are, in my experience), then you better hop on a stump and shout your enthusiasm for her existence to every passerby ’cause brother she wants it, she needs it, and you better give it to her or you’ll be sorry.

9. Girls can smell
They’re like bloodhounds, I swear. Uh, beautiful, svelt, young, ageless bloodhounds that look not at all like anything either bloody or houndy. But with an olfactory sense that is keen to the single-digit parts per million. Those day-old boxers you thought you could get away with? She smells ‘em. The remnants of that second cup of coffee you snuck this morning? One cup smells different than two when she gets a whiff during your goodbye kiss. That perfume she claims to wear which you’ve never smelled is to her like burying her nose in a day-lily, and when asked my man, you better agree that its a scent as would rouse kings to battle in defense of the fair one it adorns.

10. Girls are thieves!
Oh yes you are. Grapes in the supermarket are one thing. They’ll grab a bag and gradually reduce its weight as they shop for the rest of their items, shaving pennies from Kroger’s bottom line. Still in the grocery store, they’ll eat any sample that comes to hand and never ponder whether to buy. But the most egregious thievery happens at Bath & Body Works, where they have these bottles of body stuff you can try. Girls will beeline to that goop and gleefully moisturize away, with nary a thought towards purchase. Then they’ll extend their slender limbs towards your nose and ask you if that’s not the best thing you’ve ever smelled. The correct answer, of course, is “You’re totally right, babe! It smells kind of like your perfume.”

11. Girls like containers
I know this seems familiar, but it’s really different than “Girls like bags”. Containers are a completely separate issue from bags, involving less an aesthetic impulse and more an idealistically practical, well, fetish is the only word that comes to mind, for things that other things go into and come out of. Make all the anatomy jokes you like, but if it’s near her birthday don’t forget to conveniently forget your wallet at home when you take that weekend (more fool you) trip to Ikea or the Container Store.

12. Girls like makeup
I know, this should by all rights be chalked up as an artifact of our consumptive (tubercular?) society but to hear girls go on about it you’ve gotta think that makeup, by which I mean lip gloss, lip stick, eyeliner, mascara, blush, “cheek stain”, and so forth and so on, is an ingrained psychological component that’s the result of some gene on that extra little chromosomal appendage in every cell of every girl. That’s right, girls like makeup on a CELLULAR level!

13. Girls are fastidious
We’ve all known a girl or two who’s a slob. Crap everywhere, cluttered house, cluttered bag, filthy car, crammed-full closet, etc. etc. Dishes in the sink. But inside her mind, inside her personal image of herself, that girl is fastidious. She knows it, and you’re supposed to. Being fastidious, even though at this time in her life she may not choose to act upon her nature, she thusly has every right to judge YOUR level of commitment to a life of cleanliness and order. Girls can be kind, and therefore abstain from telling you about your failings, but they take notes. Girls keep track, after all.

When i was a kid my parents tried to get me to eat cooked carrots by telling me that the middle was the “candy part”. And some part of me to this day believes that the middle of a carrot tastes different than the rest of it, just because i never really think about it.

But when I do sit here munching carrots and remember that, I’m like “heh, what a stupid idea”
even as I retain a nagging suspicion that I can detect some difference in flavor when i isolate the center of the carrot and chew on it.

What do you still believe, against all evidence to the contrary?