|
Sunday, November 8th, 2009
mrissa
|
7:04a
Mt Goats good, audience stupid
Dear Mr. John Darnielle:
Thank you for a lovely concert. Are you sure you weren't one of my lab students 10-12 years ago? You don't look like any particular one of them, just a representative of the type. In any case, well done. Thanks also to your band.
Fondly,
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) mrissa
Dear audience at the concert of Mr. John Darnielle:
Okay, look. I know some of you are apparently new. I know that in the cave in which you were raised, all entertainment came with mute, pause, and fast-forward buttons. But here in adultland, we have this thing called live shows where both the performers and the fellow audience members are fellow human beings. This time even the opening act qualified as a fellow human being! It's astonishing! What does this mean? It means:
If the venue has a very small number of seats off to one side, approaching those seats to ask, "Are these reserved/taken?" is quite reasonable (and thanks to the vast majority of people who handled that as polite members of society). Sneering, "Are these for special people?" at the people already seated in them is not quite the same thing. It is already such a special experience to require assistance to get into the concert at all, to worry whether one's needed accommodations will be handled gracefully despite one's calling in advance (they were), and to have one's particular special condition exacerbated by the decadent overindulgence of sitting in dark halls two nights in a row. What I really need to make the experience complete is your open resentment that I have been permitted something so flagrantly self-indulgent as a chair. Then when we indicate that it's because of disability, what I need even more is for you to recoil as though I have whipped out graphic pictures of some surgery or internal organ. Thanks ever so.
Do not answer your damn cell phone. If it rings during a quiet moment in the music, your course of action is to look extremely sheepish and mute it or turn it off, as you should have done at the start of the show. If they call for which you are waiting is truly life and death important, please stand close to the doors so you can duck out into the lobby to answer it.
If you are taking pictures, do not turn your flash up to "everybody take your iodine, there's been a nuclear event" level. I live with one photographer and see quite a bit of some others socially, and so I am pretty sure that this is not necessary. And if it was necessary, it might be a sign that you should just not try to get that picture.
This is a rock show. One of the things that means is dynamic variation. You can pretty well guarantee that there will be a loud bit at some point, and then there is a loud bit, you can say things to your companion in a loudish conversational voice. You can rummage around in the purse you have apparently filled entirely with cellophane. You can make impatient little noises with your water bottle. What you should not do is to perform these irritating little acts compulsively when the music is having quiet, contemplative/emotional moments. If something in your purse is that important and takes two full songs to find, perhaps you should go out to the lobby, where there is better lighting. Or perhaps you should stand closer to the individuals in one of the paragraphs adjacent to you, as they were augmenting the lighting on a fairly regular basis.
If you must light up and stay lit up for the entire concert (which, frankly, I doubt is quite as imperative as you seemed to find it), do us all a favor and spring for the good pot. "But Mris," you may be saying, "you do not smoke pot. How do you know which is the good pot?" I have said this before, but since some people are, as I said, apparently new, I will repeat it. In fact, this is general advice from Auntie mrissa, applicable to sweaters and roommates and cupcakes and quarter-scale reproductions of the SF-MoMA porcelain statue of Michael Jackson and his chimp as well as to weed: things that smell like burning unwashed ass are bad. You do not want them.
If you wish to be in full control of which songs you hear at which times, I have some wonderful news for you! It is now possible to purchase a number of devices that facilitate this behavior. You can, for example, use a CD player. You can use a music player on your computer or on a portable device. You can even, should you be inclined, make cassette tapes and fast-forward or rewind them as you desire. If that is not retro enough for you, some bars feature machines into which you may feed money for this purpose. However, this is not the jukebox option. That being the case, will you please permit the performers to perform more than one song before you begin shouting the names of their one or two most popular pieces? (Or any others. But especially those.) They arrived for this event aware that their engagement in this venue was for the purposes of providing music. They have therefore given some thought to music they know or might remember some of, and if they don't say, "So what d'you want to hear?" or otherwise seem to be flailing, let them play. If the show appears to be winding down, you may then express your enthusiasm for the performers' one or two most popular songs if those have not been played, and if you feel that they may be unaware of which pieces catch your particular individual fancy and the particular individual fancy of every other person who has ever heard of this band. But give the poor musicians at least a few minutes to get settled in onstage before you shatter their illusion that you might be here for more than just the one three-minute song.
I'm so glad we've cleared all that up.
Sternly,
mrissa
|
(28 comments | comment on this)
(comment on this)
(1 comment | comment on this) Saturday, November 7th, 2009
timprov
|
11:56p
Mountain Goats in Five.
They're gonna find intelligent life up there on the moon,
And the Canterbury Tales will shoot up to the top of the bestseller list
And stay there for 27 weeks.
And the Chicago Cubs will beat every team in the league,
And a Mountain Goats crowd will always be unfailingly polite.
It was a very good show. It deserved better.
|
(comment on this)
markgritter
|
8:19p
Half-Dead Power Supply?
My gaming computer bricked: no lights, no fans. Naturally that led me to be suspicious of the power supply.
The little Shuttle boxes are packed quite tightly so it was not entirely straightforward to get the power supply extricated. But when I did, I noticed that it made a little sparking/clicking noise when the power was applied. Also, all the +12V outputs seemed to be between +6V and +8V. So, diagnosis confirmed. Fortunately I was able to just look up the power supply model number on Google and find many people willing to sell me a replacement.
I was also able to confirm that falling voltage is a common symptom of failing power supplies. But, I'm not clear from an electronics perspective why that should be. I've put together a switching power supply or two from components, but just DC-to-DC. My gut feel is that the order the components would fail in is: (1) fan, (2) "switch", (3) rectifier, (4) capacitor, (5) inductor. But I don't quite see how a switch failure would still provide DC current, just not enough. Maybe it's the capacitors that tend to go first, and thus they don't hold enough charge to reach the desired voltage. I wonder if anybody has done a study... maybe I should ask Patrick, our platform guru. Or my father, an electrical engineer.
ETA: I found this rather dense and jargonish PDF presentation from IBM. Their failure percentages are: ~30-35% MOSFET (amplifier?), 10-15% Choke (inductor), 10-15% Driver (switch?), 0-5% Ceramic (capacitor), 0-5% Poly (poly-propylene capactior), < 2% Fan. So I guess I was totally off base on fans and inductors.
|
(comment on this) Friday, November 6th, 2009
mrissa
|
5:26p
whee, book
So: Reginald Hill! Why didn't any of you tell me? Did you think I already knew, or does he get weird (I mean bad-weird) early or late in the series? I'm halfway through Arms and the Women, which I selected more or less at random from the library's collection in this series, and it has a major character who is writing a novel, and it has bits of the novel in the book, and you know what? I don't even care. I hate novelist major characters, and even more than that I hate the books they write, hate them with the hatey hatefulness, and I am so loving the characters, and so wanting to pop up to my e-mail to send a quote to gaaldine or swan_tower or pameladean or anne_mommy every five minutes (but I am resisting because there is more book to read) that I don't even care about a) the novelist major character or b) the structure of this sentence.
And there are two dozen of them just in this series (which I will read first, and then try the others, as I did with Ruth Rendell, or am doing, rather, as I still have lots of not-Wexford to go), and the library has bunches and also doesn't have bunches, so I've gone and added a bunch of cheap mystery paperbacks to my Amazon list. I feel very virtuous about putting cheap paperbacks on my list before Christmas. "There," I think, "then if my dear little old auntie wants to buy me something from the list, she can have options. Mom can sort by cheapest on up to show her, and if she doesn't want to buy me Saffy's Angel--which she should because it's good--then she can buy me something with nice cheerful deathfulness in it." And the glow of virtue surrounds me like, lo, a nimbus, because of my virtuous potential receipt of presents. And then I putter off to stir spaghetti sauce while reading more of this book. The end. Good story, huh? I did not, at this juncture, find five bucks. But one never knows at an Aho premiere, really.
I was not in a good mood. But now I am. Moral of the story: Reginald Hill, you folks who are not wshaffer are falling down on your telling-me-good-books job, but I have the joy of having found him now , much rejoicing, and soon there will be brand new freakazoid Finnish symphonic music as written by a Finn who has apparently been listening to much North Indian drumming. Here is what about Kalevi Aho: not boring. Weird. But not boring.
So like the rest of my life then. So that's all right.
That was rather an incoherent moral, but a positive one. So again: like the rest of my life then.
|
(23 comments | comment on this)
timprov
|
2:41a
TV for grownups, the Canadian version.
So I'm three-eighths of the way through the Canadian miniseries Zone of Separation, and I'm a long way from having coherent thoughts about it, but so far I'm pretty blown away. It's a very complex show, and also a very adult one; a step up from The Wire, certainly. It's also very Canadian, in cultural ways that I appreciate (and probably some that I miss), but also in not being aimed squarely at people who are not paying attention like so many American shows are.
It's a show about UN observers and peacekeepers in a fictional Balkan city with serious Christian/Muslin tensions. The main character, Captain Sean Kovacs (Michelle Nolden), is a Canadian observer dealing with trying to keep the peace between Muslims and Christians and also ride herd on the newly-assigned Canadian peacekeeping force, who are a bit too aggressive for the situation. Enrico Colantoni plays the completely crazy head of the Christian paramilitary, while Colm Meaney is the mercenary behind the Muslims, and that by itself was enough to get me watching the show, but it's Kovacs who completely steals the day. For those who are on the strong female characters bandwagon, she's definitely one to see.
I will continue to try to figure out useful things to say about it. But it's worth putting on your radar if you're interested in TV as art, and not disturbed by difficult adult content. (I don't feel like I can be more specific about that without being spoilery, sadly.)
Lots of other information including a couple of trailers at zostv.com.
|
(comment on this) Thursday, November 5th, 2009
timprov
|
11:10p
Just cause I haven't posted a photo in a while.
Further playing around with the S90:
I'm continuing to be very bad at actually getting out of the house, and being stuck on a night schedule is not helping. I obviously need to start doing some more long-exposure work, though I'm having difficulty figuring out where I want to start with that.
|
(2 comments | comment on this)
mrissa
|
10:44p
Is there a Tom, Dick, or Harry in the house? if the house is a spaceship or an arcology?
Elsewhere--under friendslock, so I can't link it--I have been talking to some people about names. And it got me thinking:
If I was writing a story set in 2040, and the story was about a brother named John and a sister named Mary, I would make some very specific assumptions. I would be looking for cues that either the story was set in a neo-traditionalist society of some sort--or at least one that flirted aesthetically with neo-traditionalism--or else that John and Mary were immigrants from an immigrant group that had not come to English-speaking countries much before. (I have to confess that I would also be more attuned to clues that the author was born before about 1965 and was not very good at spotting social change.)
But why is that? So John and Mary are not a particularly common name pair for siblings born in 2009, or in 1979, which is more relevant to stories set in 2009. So what? If the story is set in 1940, John and Mary are totally normal names for an English-speaking sibling pair. 1840, same deal. 1740, same deal. 1640, same deal. 1540, same deal....
So why is my gut so sure that the recent pattern is more relevant than the longer-term one? And is this just me? What, if anything, would you assume about a 2040 or 2140 story featuring Mary and her brother John?
|
(38 comments | comment on this)
mrissa
|
10:21a
Bleh.
While I am glad that I have health insurance, glad that I can get in for a physical even despite flu season, glad that we are not ignoring the ongoing vertigo, etc., I have to say that fasting before a blood draw and doing vertigo PT were not the best combination. I am now in the seriously nauseated stage of hungry. Anybody with some theories for breakfast, a mid-morning snack, or early lunch? Usually the first thing I eat in a given day is in a very set pattern, so I don't have to make decisions with low blood-sugar. This is, it turns out, a good way to have things arranged in general, and ought not to be underestimated. Seriously. What food is edible today? Inquiring Mrissas want to know.
|
(30 comments | comment on this) Wednesday, November 4th, 2009
timprov
|
8:59p
QOTD.
As an arborist: what are we doing wrong? Why is the tree not exploding? --Kari Byron
|
(comment on this)
markgritter
|
4:03p
Saving is for Suckers, too
Wells Fargo is paying 0.05% on savings accounts. 5 cents per $100.
I did let them talk me into an automatic savings account which pays 3% on the first $500 and then 3% on the first 13 months of deposits, which is way better than the other alternatives I'd seen. And now I get 0.03% on checking, which is admittedly better than nothing.
Still... pathetic.
|
(4 comments | comment on this)
(comment on this)
markgritter
|
12:27a
MinneBar 2009
MinneBar is November 21st--- coming up fast! Unfortunately they have already run out of room and aren't accepting any more free registrations. It's being held at the Best Buy headquarters this year.
I am thinking of participating more actively this year and either giving a presentation or trying to get on a panel. One topic already posted which interests me is "Algorithms and Refutations", trying to apply Imre Lakatos' insights on mathematics to software development.
I think a "Bay Area startups vs. Midwest startups" would be an interesting panel, but I don't really have the contacts to put this together. I'm also considering a presentation/demo of Stasis, a library we're considering using at Tintri--- that would be a more self-contained session.
|
(3 comments | comment on this) Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009
markgritter
|
12:53a
Saving Grace
Marissa watched the pilot of "Saving Grace" as potential workout fodder but was nauseated by the presence of chewing tobacco. (Decomposed corpses in "Bones" are OK. I can kind of understand this.)
I was nauseated by Earl the angel for other reasons. But, let's take him as given. What is the appropriate response to somebody asking about the question of evil? If for whatever reason Earl doesn't want to give a straight answer--- he issues some mealy-mouthed statement about that not being what he's there for or some such--- a better-written angel would suggest that Grace should do her homework first! This seems such a consistent trope in "spiritual" shows; they treat problems of theology as if they are fresh and mysterious "big questions". Just like science fiction shows... and science journalism.
But, humans have actually put a lot of thought into these questions over the years. Obviously Grace is not asking about evil because she wants to know, but because she wants an excuse not to know or believe. But I still think a reasonable response from Earl is to point her at Theodicy on Wikipedia and have her come back when she's figured out what she doesn't like of the (many) answers already devised.
|
(5 comments | comment on this)
|
