Zombie Dinosaurs

It’s easy to poke fun at the naivety of our pre-Information Age perspective. That’s why folks love to trot out historical quotes like “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers” [IBM Chairman Thomas Watson, 1943] and “640K is more memory than anyone will ever need” [Microsoft founder Bill Gates in the early 70s]. (It never seems to dampen anyone’s spirits that the second quote, at least, never actually happened.)

It was in this spirit, though, that I recently watched a fascinating news story from 1981 about how someday, we might all get our news via computer instead of by newspaper. The video is notable for being reasonably accurate, level-headed, and smart. It wasn’t alarmist, nor did it make ludicrous predictions – a rarity for tech stories in any decade. Here’s the video:

One thing jumped out at me the first time I watched it, though. Note that the guy the interview is not identified as Richard Halloran, technology expert or Richard Halloran, computer consultant or Richard Halloran, businessman. Nosiree, he’s credited with a status far more amazing, awesome, and rare. Richard Halloran actually owns a computer! And that’s so freaking amazing that it is the label they use to identify him on television:

It makes me imagine that if he had cured cancer in 1980, they still would have gone with the “owns home computer” caption for this particular interview.

Like much of the US, we got hit with a massive winter storm here in the Pacific Northwest. It put our plans to visit Portland “on ice,” as it were, and made the whole Christmas vacation somewhat unusual. Keep in mind that in the five years we’ve lived here, we’ve gotten a total accumulation of perhaps 3 inches of snow, in total. Here are some stats that describe our storm experience this year:

• 9 continuous days of snow
• 2 feet of total accumulation
• 5 hours without power on Christmas day
• 9 days without Internet access
• 1 broken snow shovel

I posted a few photos of the snowpocalypse on my Flickr page.

Evan and Marin made good use of the snow. Just a few days into the storm, when we only had a few inches of snow, they piled the snow from shoveling the driveway into a makeshift sledding hill. The pile got about 4 feet high, which they carefully contoured and buttressed. They even created snow steps to climb up to the top.

…that Muff probably regrets peeing all over our floor.

As an aside, I’m pretty sure this is the most snow I’ve ever seen here in the five years we’ve lived near Seattle. Reminds me of Colorado, almost.

My musical bucket list just got one shorter:

3. Have Kristin Hersh, chief architect of Throwing Muses, the greatest alternative rock band on earth, perform Pearl in my living room.

2. Have lunch with Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters to chat about his views on the 60s and socialism.

1. Play a round of miniature golf with any member of The Monkees, though preferably Peter Tork.

That’s right, we can finally check off #3:

Our home (which Kris affectionately calls Cheddarwood for a rather convoluted set of reasons) was host to one of Kristin’s Shady Circle house concerts this week. On Saturday, Nov 15,  Kristin played in front of our living room’s fireplace to about 35 folks. The audience included my writing buddy Rick (who flew in from Michigan for the occasion), friend of the family Christine, and a varied slew of people from work.

Also among the audience was another special treat – Bernard Georges, bassist extraordinaire from Throwing Muses, who hung around in a non-musical way that reminded me of Tom Petty’s nonchalant appearance on the old It’s Garry Shandling’s Show. (That’s Bodhi, decked out in full cat-hunting gear, with Kristin and Bernard.) For more photos of the evening, check out my Flickr page.

Back in the 90s, I interviewed Kristin and Billy for my book How to Do Everything with MP3s and Digital Music. And then a few years later, they graciously donated a few songs from Murder, Misery, and then Goodnight to my interactive children’s book, The Wild Cookie. And perhaps most surprising, Billy can pick me out of a crowd from 100 yards. Surely, he has a photographic memory for faces. It’s uncanny.

Anyway, I doubt the evening could have gone any better. It was a treat from start to finish. Billy had told me the week before the show that Kristin wanted the show to be more like a book club than a rock show; a musical séance in which everyone hung around and chatted and music would spontaneously occur. And that’s kind of what we got. Billy, Kristin, and Bernard were predictably gracious and friendly and approachable, and everyone mixed together in a pretty natural way. When Kristin started playing, it was intimate and warm and, well, it almost felt like we were all family gathered around the hearth for some music. How cool is that?

The set list was an almost perfect mix of Appalachian folk songs and Kristin’s own material. And I got the whole thing on video. Woo hoo! Here’s the set list:

1. Jesus Called Me
2. Down in the Willow Garden
3. City of the Dead
4. One Train
5. Banks of the Ohio
6. Teeth
7. Dusty Road
8. Little House
9. Moan
10. If
11. Stone in this Pond
12. Sno Cat
13. Lemon Tree
14. Willie Moore
15. The Cuckoo
16. Tuesday Night
17. Pearl

And Pearl was one of the real, err, gems, of the evening – at least for me. One of my favorite songs of all time, I love both the original Muses version and Kristin’s acoustic interpretation. Billy thought he had discussed a request with me to close the show, but in reality we had never talked about it. So when the last song rolled around, Billy and Kristin assumed I wanted Your Ghost. And while that would have been fine, I asked for Pearl instead. The next three minutes? Watching Kristin trying to remember the chords, with various suggestions flying in from Billy and Bernard. Now that was fun. Ahhh, thank you, Kristin. 

Oh, and the next day, a friend of mine sent me a note that Kristin twittered about us:

I’m not sure why, but our dogs have never felt they should be bounded by human conventions like yards and fences. So a few years ago, we added an invisible fence to keep the dogs back from the actual fence, and that generally works pretty well.

There are some caveats, though. Our late Husky, Tumanna, tested the perimeter like a canine velociraptor, constantly pinging her collar to get a sense of when the batteries were dying. That way she’d know the fence was “down” before her human counterparts, and she could dash off for a neighborhood jaunt before we could refresh her collar.

These days, we have a different problem. Wash, who was recently voted the most adorable doggie of all time, has decided that the somewhat bulbous electric fence collars are awesome chew toys. So while Trance sits nonchalantly in the middle of the yard, Wash stands nearby, grinding away on the collar. He’s completely destroyed more than one of these $75 gadgets this way.

After the first time Wash tried this—and popped the battery out in the process, I thought that encasing the collar in duct tape might help protect it. Well, not exactly. That was like dousing it in kitten sauce. He didn’t stop until you could see what looks like a Heathkit Crystal Radio Kit inside the ruptured shell.

This is what the collar looked like before Wash decided it was yummy.

And this is what the duct-tape encased collar looked like after we rescued it from Wash’s teeth.

The current collar is wound in electrical tape. Maybe that’s less delicious than duct tape. All I know is that cats are not this troublesome.

Last weekend we found ourselves in Spokane, where we partook of a slice of Americana: a fast food restaurant Which I’d previously never heard of, Zip’s. On my Zip’s beverage cup, I discovered they were apparently proud of something. But what?

Since 53… feet? What does that even mean? Did they intend to say that the establishment has been around since 1953? You know, “Since ‘53?” According to Wikipedia, yes… that would be what they were trying to say.

Good grief, guys, since 53’? Really? That’s an epic fail of the same magnitude as Spinal Tap’s Stonehenge. At least they could claim the rock and roll lifestyle as an excuse. That, and the fact that they’re fictional.

How many cups did you print?

I bet the $75 it would have cost you to get an editor to proofread this thing is looking like a better investment now. Though admittedly, any 5th grader probably could have done that for free.

Update: Incidentally, here is another case where $75 for a copy editor would have gone a long way.

On a recent flight, I was thumbing through a magazine and found an awesome advertisement (download the whole thing). Check out the headline:

Well, to be accurate, it’s not quite a headline. It’s more like a massive pull quote that just happens to be where the headline should be. And right next to it? A picture of some dude from 1963. Who is this amazing hasn’t-yet-heard-The Beatles-guy? Who knows? The article never once mentions his name. Did he write the full page advertisement? Good guess. But no, the ad (which, I should point out, is less an advertisement and more a full page of densely formatted text, sort of like a high school newspaper editorial) is attributed to this lady:

Okay, maybe Richard is a red herring. Perhaps I should stop worrying about him and concentrate more the message in the ad. You can get the gist of the ad just from the headline/pull quote/rambling introduction. You see, even though Mr. Wetherill was photographed on his way to his Bewitched-era public relations office*, apparently the author of the article had fully internalized John Lennon’s Imagine, because this is a full page plea to imagine all the people/living life in peace. Try this on for size:

Whatever this thing is, you might want to pull out your checkbook, because it holds the key to eradicating—once and for all–100% of the world’s poverty, crime, law enforcement, lawyers, drug dealers, and locksmiths! You heard me right… locksmiths! Sign. Me. Up.

Oooh, wait a minute. You totally had me, but as I continue reading, I start to get a whiff of crazy sauce.

Really? But you just put all the cops, lawyers, and locksmiths out of business a few paragraphs back. What are all those folks going to do for a living, in this Land of Full Employment and Unique Opportunities? Maybe picking beans on the The Leader’s farm. And I’m intrigued; how exactly do we get nonpolluting vehicles out of this deal? Is that like the free toaster that comes with my checking account? Maybe you’ve got a warehouse full of bliss-powered hoverbikes sitting in China, waiting for us to sign up?

But wait.

These people can freakin’ control the weather! That’s right; all the Hope you’ve been saving up for Barak Obama will first cause in wholesale bankruptcy of the global locksmith cartel (okay, I can sort of see that), but then also unexpectedly result in gentle, misty rains and 5 mph winds out of the NNW, every day, forever more.

Seattle will be totally awesome without all the rain.

*Maybe he’s an architect.

You don’t come here for entertainment advice, I get that. In reality, only my mom comes here at all, and even that’s usually only by accident when she’s actually trying to start Solitaire. But, damn. Joss Whedon’s Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog is a masterpiece that will go down in history as one of the greatest works of art ever produced.

Watching Neal Patrick Harris sing his way to world domination as Dr. Horrible will give your life meaning. By the time you see this, it will probably no longer be free, but it’ll be worth buying no matter what the price. (Though that price is just $3.99 for all three acts from iTunes.)

Update: You can now watch it on Hulu for free.

While visiting my parents in New Jersey last week, my sister took me and the kids out to dinner. Marin pointed out a game on the supposedly kid-friendly placemat which, in our collective opinion, is the creepiest thing, well, ever. I might never get a good night’s sleep again. Who designed this thing – Harlan Ellison?

All I wanted was some pizza. Instead, I will forever be haunted by the bone-chilling knowledge that a few strokes of my pencil can endow these that these faceless cornfield zombie children with the power to see me. 

The saga continues. It has now been 5 months since I ordered a Dell XPS 720, and the system suffers frequent unexplained bluescreen crashes. I’ve talked to uncountable tech support techs. I still don’t have a working computer.

Since the last time I described my problems with my order, Dell told me they could not exchange my system for a different model; they would only swap it out for the exact same specifications. So they sent me another XPS 720, which I decided to set up in the most scientific manner possible. I created an Excel spreadsheet and logged every single thing I did to the system. I noted every app I installed or removed; when I rebooted; when I changed the screen resolution; when I installed a peripheral. I discovered that my first bluescreen was a mere 5 hours after unboxing the system, and I had done nothing more complex than uninstalling crapware and installing Microsoft Office 2007. As time went on, I noted the bluescreen error code of every failure.

Want to see the details? You can grab my spreadsheet and read it for yourself.

After the first bluescreen, I called Dell XPS support, and the tech promised, after investigating my issue, that he’s escalate my problem to level 3 tech support and I’d get a call back within 48 hours. That call, of course, never came. I waited a few days and tried again. A second time, I called and let the level 1 tech tell me how easily he would solve my problem with some inane solution like running the hard disk error check utility, and eventually he agreed to upgrade me to level 3 support–with that mythical call back after 48 hours.

No call came. Lather, rinse, repeat–I’ve called Dell four times now, and four times I’ve been promised a call back with level 3 support, and each time I am glad I didn’t cancel any special dinner plans to wait by the phone, because I’ve never gotten any kind of call back.

So after 5 months, what am I to do? I am genuinely stumped. Dell apparently has no "customer advocacy" department designed to solve problems like mine. They won’t call back. They don’t give a shit. Keep in mind that I spent over $3000 on this system.