Author: fifteenkey (Page 37 of 96)

Remember taking a “spongebath” as a kid? The technique was basically taking a bath with a facecloth or sponge and was usually employed during constrained supply of:

1. Time
2. Water

It’s been quite a week. After release from the refugee camp at mom’s house Wednesday courtesy of Unitil, Kyle and I arrived home to hot air, but no hot water. Oh, and Megan shoved a refrigerator full of castaways down the disposal which caused a serious case of Polyvinyl chloride constipation, but I’m straying…

It seems that draining my electric water heater to protect it from freezing wasn’t such a good idea. When power was restored, the unit fired up inside a dry chamber and burnt itself out. It was fixed for $168 Thursday afternoon…

Now a cold shower has a time and a place, but that time was not Thursday morning and the place not where I shower, so morning at the improv ensued… I’ll spare you the details except to say I have a huge pot where I heated water and it provided 3 liquid sink cycles for shaving, bathing and even hair washing! I was pleased with the state of hygiene I attained, although it wasn’t exactly spongeworthy or the best of hair days so I did pass on after work drinks. Instead I came home and snaked out a clogged drain pipe for an hour from a cramped position on a ladder in my basement. Good thing I didn’t have to sponge off after that.

“YOU CAN GO FUCK YOURSELF!” That was about ½ a song into Wilco’s set opening for Neil Young Saturday night. Yeah, seems I could have been a bit more diplomatic in my request that the woman next to me stop talking in my ear. [Edit: As pal Jeff points out in his comment, the woman blurted out the opening all CAPS barrage, not me…]

Anyway, I won’t repeat Jeff’s review of the show, but I will say I love the sonic booms that curse through the wires of “Old Black,” Mr. Young’s trusty 1953 Gibson Les Paul Goldtop and anyone who can play a guitar and a mouth harp simultaneously is no poser.

I’m about to leave the refugee camp for work, but one quick story will tie all this together… Friday while out with the lovely ex and the kids, Gigi said, “I want to go!” when she heard I had two extra tix. “He sings that Fenway (Sweet Caroline) song, right?” Uh, no. That’s Neil Diamond, the guy whose picture is paired with the Neil Young review in the Worcester Telegram…

…but I do. Posting from my mom’s basement, the entire clan is here, forced from the Hollywood Bungalow by a natural disaster. Since 1am Friday night, I laid awake, thinking a huge overhanging tree would come crashing through my roof into my attic bedroom. Gravity pulled large limbs to a rest on my roof as I listened to trees shatter through the night. The sound of one cracking tree limb is a grabber. A nocturnal cascade of hundreds accompanied by reigning shards of ice crashing down is better than a triple espresso for alertness.

You know when you see on TV stories about people displaced by natural disasters. That’s us, albeit on a small scale… We are fortunate that our home wasn’t damaged and none of us were hurt. And Wilco/Neil Young is still on tonight in Worcester! Here are a few pics I grabbed yesterday just getting Megan and Maddy to their mom’s house and a warm fireplace… There was beauty in it.

My mind was spinning in a black hole collapsing into itself like a “we fucking told you this would end the world” Hadron Collider disaster. Just behind my drive-in movie screen forehead was a low-budget indie flick of a short-circuiting electric wireframed milk crate tumbling through black space… That was what I saw Monday night when I shut the bedside light and closed my eyes. It was beautiful. A “My God, it’s full of stars” 2010 moment, but at the same time, I question what the hell’s going on in there… I suppose a freakish “Tron” trailer is better than seeing a gerbil on a treadmill, but is that activity due to too many hours of computer stare downs, excess MSNBC, or an unhealthy buildup of swimmers? Discuss.

If you stare into the darkness long enough, you see things. Today I’ll flip the energy-efficient lights on here at fifteenkey.com long enough to scratch out a catch-up post.

Mouse In The House
Speaking of scratching, the end of November brought eviction papers for “Templeton,” a mouse that was trading counter crumbs for nano-tootsie rolls. I didn’t want to kill the little guy or gal, so I searched for “humane mouse traps” and purchased the um, “Humane Mouse Trap” from Greenfeet. On arrival, I loaded it with a peanut butter and saltine cracker. Grabbing coffee the next dawn, I noted the trap had sprung, but there was neither a mouse nor a cracker… Hmmm… For round 2, the sliding door opposite the trap door was secured with a piece of packing tape. Templeton watched me pour coffee through green eyeshade the next morning as I contemplated where to relocate him. It was very cold and both Megan and Kyle protested the possibility of a frozen Mickey, so we provided room and board for a few more days. Finally, after the mini-beast nearly chewed his way out of the green plastic prison, Kyle and I drove him a few miles away and released him into a very nice old Leominster neighborhood near a house with a barn. I had envisioned the little guy crawling quarter inches at a time to reach shelter, but as soon as he hit the ground, he leaped like Mike Jordan in two half circles a foot high and two long toward refuge. Of course, any number of wild or domestic creatures could have snacked on him between freedom and sanctuary, but my conscience was clear… as is my kitchen counter.

Bring out yer dead…
Like the The Dead Body That Claims It Isn’t in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” said, “I’m not dead.” That’s my attitude toward the marketing shovel AARP has been whacking me with since summer. Hey, I’m not joining. Check back if I make 60.

“You would make a great Girl Scout!”
Yep. That’s what the note addressed to me said. Over the summer I won 4 tickets to see “The Grinch Who Stole Christmas – The Musical” at a Girl Scout charity golf tournament silent auction. Last week when an event reminder popped up here, I checked Quicken to see what I had paid. $0. Then I remembered entering an amount, but never being charged. I emailed the event organizer and asked her what happened. She took care of it and in fact I paid $345 for 4 great “Dress Circle” seats to a very mediocre production. Megan and I caught intermittent naps, but Kyle and grand-daughter MacKenzie seemed somewhat amused. Oh, the Grinch was okay and young lady who played “Cindy-Lou Who” was a fine little performer, but the songs in this musical made me think there really is a war on Christmas.

iWannabe
Unwilling to bolt Verizon for AT&T;, the Über-cool iPhone was not a contender to replace my “Jack Bauer Edition” Treo 650. The LeoTreo had served me well, but at 3 years old, (that’s like 100 in technology years) it literally had a few screws loose and was on the life support of USB power only. With “Templeton” in the trunk on his way to self-determination, Kyle and I visited the big-red store for one more swing at the Blackberry Storm and another round with the intriguing Samsung Omnia. I really wanted to like the Storm, but after about 2 hours of monkeying with it over 3 days, I have to agree with New York Times columnist David Pogue and many others who conclude, the BlackBerry Storm Sucks.

“Omnia” means “everything,” and my new phone pretty much has it:

• Great call quality
• Touch screen navigation
• Accelerometer for portrait or landscape use
• Super web experience including YouTube clips of Kyle singing the hits
• Corporate email and VPN capability
• Mobile Word, Excel and PowerPoint
• Bluetooth integration to my car
• Wi-Fi! (Storm doesn’t)
• 5 MP auto-focus flash camera

Two uncertainties remained as the boy and I exited, phone in hand for a trip to GameStop: How would the on-screen keyboard experience be and could I customize the phone interface to my liking? Winterface is a sweet UI I’m trying out and the keyboard works just fine. I think LeOmnia may be a keeper…

Some shoppers didn’t get the message about “Buy Nothing Day” and in pre-dawn darkness, a temporary worker at a Wal-Mart died in a 5AM stampede of consumerism.

“Suddenly, witnesses and the police said, the doors shattered, and the shrieking mob surged through in a blind rush for holiday bargains. One worker, Jdimytai Damour, 34, was thrown back onto the black linoleum tiles and trampled in the stampede that streamed over and around him.”- The New York Times

If you are what you buy, today I am nothing. I’m sorry if I got to you too late. Too late to save you from the 5am line at Best Buy to pick up that Wii or sitting there, credit card in trembling hand gobbling up the “Black Friday” deals corporate America tells us we cannot miss. The trembling is nagging doubt of whether you can pay the January Visa bill.

For some, me included, today is “Buy Nothing Day,” although I’m finding it’s not easy to thwart the crashing waves of advertising from TV, radio and my inbox. Kyle wants an iPod for Christmas and I’ve learned in about 14 different ways that apple.com is matching competitor pricing today… That’s not exactly true, but I can save $11 on an 8G iPod nano today… I’d still be out $138, but I’d “save” $11.

The sentiment of “Buy Nothing Day” is dismissed by many as “Un-American,” and I suppose it is. It challenges our unquenchable desire to consume and that hot desire has been programmed into us Orwellian style. “Big Brother” has been overtly and subliminally telling us to buy forever. Nearly all information provided to the American public is supported by endless messaging telling us to buy stuff.

Not today.

Six point five percent doesn’t sound so bad unless you’re one of the one million, two-hundred thousand Americans who lost their jobs in the first ten months of 2008. For many of them, today will bring a smaller turkey, turkey at a soup kitchen or no turkey at all. Downshifting is “un-American.” The thought of less strikes at the angry core of “manhood:”

Molly Brown: Hey, uh, who thought of the name Titanic? Was it you, Bruce?
Ismay: Yes, actually. I wanted to convey sheer size, and size means stability, luxury, and above all, strength.
Rose: Do you know of Dr. Freud, Mr. Ismay? His ideas about the male preoccupation with size might be of particular interest to you.

A smaller bird will be ego crushing to many, but today we’ll waste enough food to feed millions of less fortunate. Our preoccupation with size explains the Hummer and the “Code Blue” status of General Motors. Our capitalist obsession with growth and ever-increasing profit is collapsing our economy and our 401K’s are at the bottom of the rubble.

The mother of my children had a saying that I recall after an intense bout of marital mayhem: “Where do we grow from here?” After recently blogging, “we need to devise a system that moves us back to more local, sustainable economies,” I’ve discovered the concept of the “steady-state economy.” I have much more study to do on it, and Thanksgiving isn’t the day to dwell on it. I will say the growth we need is inward…

Recently I suggested to Megan and Kyle this year’s Christmas would be less “material” than previous years. I asked them to think about what they really want and that I’d “try” to fulfill that request, but that there would not be much beyond that. I explained that the economy was bad and I wanted to conserve our money in case things got worse. I think the imprecision of my reasoning scared Kyle who blurted out, “This is going to be the worst Christmas ever!” My ghosts of Christmas past include the first waking in a place without them, Megan not being home one year, and Kyle struggling with walking last. After putting things in some context, my boy was fine. I think he is starting to understand it’s just stuff and our happiness has very little to do with it.

Happy Thanksgiving.

“Nations are possessed with an insane ambition to perpetuate the memory of themselves by the amount of hammered stone they leave … One piece of good sense is more memorable than a monument as high as the moon.”

Yeah, it’s a cheesy REO Speedwagon song title, but it does capture my current Smartphone dilemma. My “Jack Bauer” Treo is in reruns and the only way it will charge is slowly via its USB “Hotsync” cable. That’s fine when my computer is nearby. (Oh, nevermind. That’s always.), but a couple weekends ago when Kyle and I hit Gotham, I had to lug my laptop along just to trickle the Treo (that sounds dirty) with electricity.

Any cell phone decision is at least influenced, if not coercively controlled, by your carrier of choice, Verizon in my case. They make it difficult and expensive to extract yourself from their 100 year commitments, and therefore thorny for me to bolt for an iPhone and AT&T.; (The side-story is that Apple gave Verizon first dibs, but they couldn’t reach agreement… probably because “the network” probably wanted to kill the wi-fi capability in the new son of Jobs…)

So as I trickle my Treo, I suffer silently the indignity of snickers and sneers from the Blackberry mob at work and empathy from the few, daring iPhone users behind the corporate iron curtain. I like my LeoTreo. The phone works great, getting work email works fine most of the time, but the browser is a bowser and um, since I don’t really like talking to people on the phone, the internet experience is pretty high on my features list. That’s where the iPhone shines for me, especially the part where you can turn it on its side and the “accelerometer” turns all iWideScreen. That’s cool, but it’s on AT&T;, an inferior network to Verizon…

My hopes were high for the new Treo 800w to be released on Verizon, but sadly the fast little Windows Mobile unit doesn’t run on Verizon. It Sprints. Don’t even bring up the Palm Centro. Jack would rather be killed by terrorists than use that toy. From my clouds of disappointment a Storm began to form, and over the past ten weeks or so, I’ve been mercilessly teased by Research In Motion and Verizon about the Blackberry Storm. Now my pal Jeffro swears by his BB after years on a Treo. “It just works,” says Jeff, but he’s geekier than me for gadgets, loves his music, and lusts after an iPhone. Still, if our President-Elect can be Blackberry addicted, that’s cool enough for me.

Yesterday the so called “iKiller” Storm hit the shore, so after work I washed up to the local Verizon brick ‘n mortar to find out sold out was my out. I did get to play with a live one for about 30 minutes, mostly with the virtual keyboard, email and browser and testing the “accelerometer.” My hands on experience left me only B-List dazzled, like seeing Jennifer Aniston instead of Angelina Jolie. It was pretty hot, but a clumsy keyboard experience and a sluggish “accelerometer” give me pause to make sure they can fix stuff with software updates and be certain there are no hardware issues in these early models. Besides, they won’t have any more in stock until December 5th. That will give me time to get my hands on an iPhone demo.

It turns out Gordon Gecko was wrong. Greed is not good. The constant pressure for growth and higher profit has bankrupted us in many ways:

• Health technology and pharmaceutical companies contribute to an obscenely expensive health care system that’s unaffordable to millions.
• Our military-industrial complex drive for higher revenues and profits fuels world conflict and warps our foreign policy.
• The financial and political power of oil companies keeps us dependent on petroleum and the Middle-East.
• Giant media conglomerates control the message and craft it to sustain the status quo and maximize profit.
• The pressure for short-term profits moved the US automakers to produce Escalades and Hummers and now the market is looking to run them down like Biff Tannen gunning for Marty McFly in “Back to the Future.”
• Finally, our financial institutions are teetering because they supplied all of us the crack of cheap credit, but now since they “cut” their product so much, it’s diluted to the point we can no longer get high off the fake financial “reality” it provided.

I can’t say I have a solution to any of this…yet, but we need to start right at the core and address our economic system. I have my doubts whether we can sustain the infinite growth capitalism requires; certainly not at an accelerating pace. On a very basic level, the planet cannot support it, so we need to devise a system that moves us back to more local, sustainable economies and away from giant corporations feeding us Big Bombs, Big Hemi’s, Big Macs, Big Brother on Big Screens, and a Big Gulp to wash down big handfuls of Prozac so we can deal with it all.