Disorderly Content

I was in Los Angeles yesterday to participate in a panel discussion for my day job. I arrived pretty early for the talk, LA traffic being somewhat unpredictable, and sat down in the speaker's room to relax and to enjoy the free WiFi. Another panelist arrived, from Microsoft as it turned out, and immediately went into sell mode with the other attendee in the room. He was trying to get this gentleman to fill out a lead form (name, company, contact details; you know the drill), and was offering the chance at a great prize: a Microsoft Zune. I had to snicker when his victim said he had no interest in a Zune, as he'd just bought a new iPod. Mr. Microsoft had clearly heard this sort of thing before, and trotted out the Zune's best feature, one the iPod couldn't match: FM radio! More snickering ensued, since neither he nor I listen to FM much these days. Not even NPR?, we were asked. That's why we listen to podcasts, we agreed. And watched as Mr. MS deflated a little.

Eventually it was time for the talk, and Mr. MS again used the possibility of a Zune as an inducement to fill out the lead form. And there was more and louder snickering, as most of the audience joined in. And for just a very brief moment, I felt sorry for my fellow panelist. Needless to say, it passed quickly enough.

I spent Memorial Day weekend in South Lake Tahoe. My original plan was to head down to the ghost town of Bodie on a little photo exhibition, but gray skies and rain forced me to rethink that idea. So instead I stayed around town. And I went to the movies for the first time in a long time. Twice, even. First to see Iron Man, and then to catch Indy IV. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Iron Man; aside from not being remotely surprised by the identity of the villain, I thought it was a superior superhero flick. Robert Downey Jr. can act, can't he? And Gwyneth Paltrow was everything a superhero's girl Friday ought to be: beautiful, devoted and even heroic when called upon to be. Highly recommended, in case there's anybody reading this who hasn't already seen it.

As for Indiana Jones, well, the best I can say is that it could have sucked a lot worse. It was derivative, it was unbelievable (and not in a good way, like the earlier films), it was predictable, it was incomprehensible (which everyone I've read blames on George Lucas, who is, one can't argue, the king of incomprehensible and pointless blather). It was fun to see Indy again, even if this time it's both the years and the miles. But I begin to appreciate the restraint of the first Indy film, and even the third.

I also appreciated why I don't go to movies more often. No, not the prices, and not the commercials, which were absent from both theaters. (There were trailers, but I like trailers.) No, it's the getting older, and having need of a bio break, and not being able to hit pause. Without getting graphic, let's just say that the credits arrived not a moment too soon. New plan: sit on the aisle in future.

I was shocked and saddened to read of the death of Robert Asprin. I discovered Mr. Asprin quite by accident, via a slim specialty press volume with the punny title of Another Fine Myth. I like punny titles, you understand, and I liked the book, a very funny fantasy about a magician's apprentice who has a surprising encounter with a demon. AFM was followed by more Myth books, some very good, some less good, some... well... let's just say I kept buying and reading them in hope they'd get better. And even when they didn't, I still enjoyed them for what they once were and might again be. Except now they won't, because he's gone. And to misquote John Rhys-Davies in Raiders of the Lost Ark, Bob, already I am mything you.

I actually had to use my BlackBerry as a phone when I was in Calgary a few weeks ago. Problem was, the company pays that bill but not my iPhone, and I didn't want to get hit with big roaming charges. (For some reason, AT&T treats Canada like it's a whole 'nother country. Imagine that.)

Okay, as much as I love my iPhone, how bad could using the BlackBerry be, especially for just a few days? Pretty bad, as I discovered that the thing had no ringtone, nor could I figure out how to set one up. So I had to keep it in its case, so it would at least vibrate when a call came in. Or watch it carefully while I was charging, since it can't go in the case when the cable's connected.

Anyway, later I discovered I'd lost speakerphone capability. That's when I realized that it wasn't bad design; it was screwed up. So I tried the usual things, like powering it off. When that didn't work I pulled the battery. And when that didn't work either, I went to the Intertubes for a little guidance.

Ignoring the posts about giving the phone a hard reset, which would wipe out some things I might actually care about, I found the magic combination for a soft reset: Alt + Right Shift + Delete. And suddenly I could hear all the ringtones I'd found in the phone. And my speakerphone stopped not speaking to me. And, since I'd found the place to set the ringtone, and that was actually working, I went to the site Crackberry.com, where I was able to email the Robot Chicken closing theme to my phone, and where it is now my ringtone. So if anybody ever calls it, I'm gonna know about it. And that's a good thing, right?

Having crossed the threshold of fiftyhood a while back myself, I can both laugh and sigh over the superheros-past-their-prime graphics on Donald Soffritti's blog. Laugh 'til it hurts...

(Thanks to io9 for the pointer.)

I've never been a fan of Microsoft products, but this is beyond ridiculous. A few months ago I made the mistake of upgrading (a word that becomes ever more ironic) to the latest version of Office for the Macintosh, largely in hope that a native Intel version would outperform the emulated PowerPC version I'd been using up to then. It didn't. And worse, not only didn't it perform better, but it had serious bugs, with graphs that didn't display correctly or wouldn't let me change parameters, and regular crashes. An update eliminated some of the crashes, although it left me with repeated popup dialogues complaining of nonexistent problems. (If I'm out of memory, how come you stop complaining after I cancel the dialogue a few times?)

But, I thought, even Microsoft has to get it right eventually. So when I heard there was a new update out, I couldn't wait to install it. It finally showed up this morning, and it made things so much better, in much the same way that a tornado cleans up a neighborhood. Yep, now even the smallest change to my spreadsheets crashs the program. Every. Damn. Time. Excel has gone from extremely annoying to completely and utterly useless. What's the next update going to do: set my apartment on fire?

Update 05/15: A quick update. I think the problem is Excel's background error checking feature, which, by the way, complains every time I use a range that includes empty cells. I turned off background error checking and was able to get a version of the spreadsheet to update without crashing. So I'm back in business, and slightly less furious at Microsoft for selling me such a piece of utter crap.

Update 05/15: A little later... I tried updating a cell in my spreadsheet and watched it go into an endless processing loop, pegging one of my processors at 100%. After killing and restarting Excel, I discovered that the act of loading another spreadsheet had turned background error checking back on, including for the sheet where I had explicitly turned it off. So not only is background error checking hopelessly fucked, but it insists in being in my face about its fuckedness. Thanks so much, Microsoft.

Update 06/25: Another month and a half, another Office update. And this one seems to have undone the damage done by the last one. My spreadsheets don't crash, at least for the moment. And isn't that what we all don't want?

Daring Fireball points to a wonderful story at Ars Technica about a joint MS/NBC screwup that's keeping Vista owners from recording some favorite shows. If we needed a good example of why DRM is anti-consumer, it's awfully nice of them to give it to us.

Here's one of those stories that ought to make you go "hmmmmm..." It seems that security guards at Kaiser Permanente in Southern California are out on strike. Their immediate beef is that their employer (not Kaiser, but a company called Inter-Con Security that provides Kaiser with contract services) won't let them form a union, which they can do under a loophole in the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 that applies specifically to security guards. And why are these guards so determined to form a union? Because their jobs don't give them health benefits. And there's enough irony for anybody's diet: these guys work at hospitals and they don't get health care! And the law won't let them form a union to balance the power of their employers unless that employer says it's okay. Which of course they don't want to do, because they might have to start treating these guys with respect. And that'll cost them money, which might affect the compensation of the guys at the top. (Okay, I'm inferring that last. But somehow it seems a safe bet.)

I've written before about Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc, which has to do with the assumptions we make that just because things happen in a particular order, there must be some sort of causal relationship among them. Sometimes there is; often there isn't. But assuming a relationship is a failure of reasoning.

But now I'd like to tell you of a different kind of failure of reasoning. Right after Apple updated its Safari browser, I started having trouble logging into my credit union's website. It would just hang; no timeout (although maybe I needed to wait a while longer), no nuthin. When it first happened, I thought maybe their site was down. But eventually I tried some experiments, and discovered that if I deleted the relevant cookies in my browser (the stuff that remembers me from session to session), it would let me in without a pause. And so for the next few weeks I'd follow a new and mildly annoying practice: try to go to the site, remember the problem, delete the cookies for the site, try again and get in. And so I might have gone henceforth and forevermore.

Until one day I changed the process. Instead of trying and failing to access the site, I deleted the cookies first. And discovered that it still hung! I cancelled the access, looked for the cookies (which weren't there), and then just tried again. And this time it worked. Turns out it wasn't anything to do with the cookies at all. No, all I have to do is try to access the site, cancel the access and try again. The second time is the charm, each and every time. And my logic, although excellent, was still wrong.

I had another studio photo shoot last night, thanks to my friend and mentor RJ, who has a talent for finding and giving us access to the most amazing models. Anyway, while it was someone else's turn to shoot, the conversation turned inevitably to equipment, by which I mean cameras and lenses. (Why? What did you think I meant?) I mentioned that I'd been lusting after Nikon's new 24-70mm f/2.8 lens, an excellent but very expensive piece of glass that's in rather short supply. And of course I returned home to an email from B&H Photo in New York, telling me that they finally had some in stock. I had my order in before I could consider my decision to spend so much on what will likely be a small incremental improvement to my images. I mean really: how much difference could it make? Then again, how could I hope my head up at our next shoot with an attitude like that?

Yep, boys and their toys. It only gets worse as we get older.

This is one of those "too much time on their hands" things that's more amazing the more you think about it. A guy named Román Cortés created a portrait of Homer Simpson using the artistic medium of CSS. Then another guy named Ned Batchelder created an animation, so you can watch Homer get rendered. And suddenly, an okay portrait of the Pillsbury D'Oh! Boy is shown to be the work of genius and dedication it really is! Although I have to ask why Ned reversed the accents in Román's name. Carelessness, I suppose.

(Thanks to John Gruber of Daring Fireball for making me aware of Ned's efforts on Román's behalf.)