Skip to content

The Word-Processing Niche That Time Forgot

Monday, December 23, 2002

Why is it that newspaper filing system software is so piss-poor? Is there some reason why it all needs to be command-line legacy cruftware, some hidden purpose I’m missing? I swear, I don’t understand it… Do most newspaper higher-ups put up with all this because they haven’t spent a lot of time outside of journalism, and therefore have been passed over by advances in word-processing technology and don’t know what they’re missing? For once I’m not saying that to be derogatory, I’m serious: I’m genuinely baffled by the fact they haven’t mutinied yet.

I was in the office at My Intended, the paper where I’m freelancing and applying for a job, for far too many hours today. The editor I’m working for sat me down at an ancient-looking beige box running Windows ’98 and opened up an editing system with huge text and a set of command keys completely alien to me. No simple copy or paste commands, and the “edit” menu gave no clue as to how to accomplish a “cut” function. I was later told it was a delete-undelete function rather like the one in Pine, but not enough so that it became a habit for me by the end of the day. To make a paragraph break, you had to hold down shift while hitting return. To save an article, you had to hit what they were calling the “command” key (which was actually the furthest right button on the upper row of keys, marked “pause”), then period, then W. Who the hell thought this up?! Did they speak English?)

After four hours working like this — during which this particular box crashed four times in a way that would not be swayed by the three-finger salute — I started to feel completely handicapped. I sought the help of the city editor, who I am supposed to be impressing with my ability to overcome my lack of daily reporting experience.

After executing a few keystrokes that returned me to my now slightly lossy article, he returned to his desk. Not only did I still feel helpless to find my way around the system, I also felt helpless to explain to him what it meant to me to be working with software that was so completely alien. How was I supposed to explain to a man in his sixties that I literally can’t think when the monitor is only twelve inches and the text is huge, because I can’t see where all my thoughts are?

I always want to say it’s like being brain damaged, because my reflexes are so accustomed to standard software by now that it’s almost like having a direct neural patch into the machine, but I didn’t figure someone his age would understand that. I thought about telling him it was like I was being asked to play a concerto with one hand tied behind my back. In the office, sitting right in the midst of the editors, it certainly induced that kind of performance anxiety. Or it was like I’d been playing a Stradivarius and had been handed a banjo. In a moment of poor judgement I told the city editor the latter. He retorted that it really wasn’t that bad a system, considering what they could have gotten.

The horrible thing is he’s not wrong, either. This system at least had a usable mouse. At the small-town paper where I had my first internship, they used old one-piece consoles with spinach green monitors, again with command-line software. Even at the Village Voice they use some arcane software where you have to do all sorts of complicated things to quotation marks and apostrophes to make them come out right.

Anyway, the moral of the story is don’t ask me how it went, because I don’t want to talk about it. I’m not going to get that job. Going three times as long as my space budget and taking a whole day to do so, not to mention forgetting to scrounge up pictures, is not impressing anyone.

So it’s back to the world of occasional communcations jobs, right?

Goddamn.

You know that song Eminem sings about having to do your best when you’re on stage singing your rap? OK, so he doesn’t say it that way at all… It’s the song from 8-Mile — ya better LOSE yourself in the MUsic, the MOment, ya OWn it, rah rah rah? I like that riff… Yeah, I’m gonna write a song like that for all the unemployed yuppies out there like myself, only it’s not going to be You only get one shot, you can’t miss your chance to blow, it’s gonna be all You get plenty of chances, only y’a gonna be stuck doing the shitwork editing for Miramax, HUH! Y’a gonna get stuck under the glass ceiling in publishing, HUH! Y’a gonna code apps for Microsoft, y’a gonna write ad copy, y’a gonna get stuck in a dead-ass nonprofit writing grants for programs with no proven benefit to society — AWWWWW SHIT!

And of course none of it will be any good, because it’s really nothing to complain about, right?

Filed in On..., personal | Comments (4)

Things To Read Compulsively, #34,964

Tuesday, December 17, 2002

Found Magazine. (Thanks, Dave.) See? Abandoned trivia are more interesting than intentionally written coherent thoughts. I told you so. You’ve clicked away from my page already.

Filed in MLP, personal | Comments (6)

Detritus: When The Going Gets Weird, The Weird Crawl Into My Mailbag

Monday, December 16, 2002

Mailbag! Here’s a brief rundown of some of the wide-ranging mail I’ve gotten in the past week:

  • A press release from rtMark/the Yes Men on their latest stunt.
  • A really inappropriate holiday greeting sent by the guy in charge of alumni relations at Hampshire these days. Why the hell haven’t they fired this asshole yet?!
  • A note from a ten-year-old bidding on one of my My Little Ponies. “I love your auction!” she said. Love my auction?! Kids these days… Turns out the kid lives right in Pasadena, too, so I delivered the pony to her door. This happens sometimes with eBay… Jessamyn knows someone out in rural Vermont who found out his winning bidder was right down the street, so he delivered his package by hand to his startled neighbor. What are the odds on something like that happening… It’s a funny way to meet people in your hometown, an indicator of the sort of rearranging of neighborly relationships that the Internet has effected, as further evidenced by:
  • An immediate and lengthy reply from Toshiya Endo in Japan, who runs the African music discography site I linked to the other day, addressing my questions about perceptions of Africa and popularity of African music in Japan (he didn’t answer any of my questions about DDR, alas.)
  • A response to my questions about the Crip Walk. I’ve been fascinated by some of the comments posted to my site, which seem to be written by people who have not understood in the slightest what I was trying to say (witness the comments on my post about Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen — or rather the comment; I know I had another, similar one at some point but I thought it was so stupid I took it down), so when someone posted who actually sounded like he’d read what I wrote, I wrote back. And here is the first-person ethnography Chris George, a 22-year-old guy from Columbia, Maryland, responded about the Crip Walk:

    I am from Columbia, Maryland in Howard County. It is a very unique community. It was planned in a way so that people of all economic classes and different ethnicities can live in the same area. There are neighborhoods where houses selling for 280k are directly across the road from subsidized housing (my immediate neighborhood starts in the low 300s) . There are no real gangs here. No drive-bys, or anything like that. Most people here are very open minded. There are so many different cultures here, no one stands out at all. Groups of friends might have a nickname for themselves, or people give a specific group a nickname to easily identify them. But they are NOT gangs at all. Now that I think about it, we kind of categorize people and groups of friends in a General-to-Specific way. Kind of like this, General first: High School, Village, Neighborhood, Extended friends, close friends. And in Howard County , you can’t always guess the socioeconomic status of a neighborhood, it might not be all the same. My general neighborhood housing go from apartments that are 800/month to 500,000 houses!

    That’s the best way I can explain my area. But, in Columbia, you won’t see some kid start C-Walking on the side of the street spontaneously. But in the clubs, you will. It’s not aggressive at all. You won’t see anyone fighting over a C-Walk circle. If a certain song comes on, and it has that specific tempo that you can C-Walk to (i.e. Dr. Dre “Next Episode,” Clipse “Grindin’,” Xzibit “Get your Walk on” — to name a few.) You might see a person start Walking. Now, this is not a dance that you do in one small area. You gotta give a person AT LEAST a 10 foot radius to really do their thing. Someone else might want to Walk too, but in the same circle. If that person just wants to do it, and be done, he’ll ask “Can I get mine?” or, “Can i walk?” or “Can I get some light?” The person originally Walking will let that person go and do their thing. You are not going to be walking for 3 minutes. I dont care who you are, your calves and legs will be sore. People usually can get all their good moves in 30 seconds.

    BUT, if someone is on a competitive vibe, they won’t ask to jump in. They will most likely stand on the inside of the circle and stare at the person’s feet, kinda like an inspection of skill. The person who is currently walking will let that person go when he sees him. When the new person goes, he will most likely brush his shoes with his hands and show what he’s got. If the original guy who was walking thinks he is better than what the second guy could do, he’ll give it another shot. Some people spell their names with their feet. If anyone else wants in, they will do what the second guy had to do to get in. You know who won when the last guy in the circle stands uncontested. All the people who walked in that circle will dap (shake hands) for mutual respect, and go their own way. There won’t be 30 dudes tryin to Walk. Maybe 4 if you’re lucky. If a guy steps in that is an expert, no one will jump in and embarrass themselves. If someone is at a Baltimore club wearing Converse All Stars or “Chucks,” that is originally a West Coast style. So in a way you are implying that you can walk on a expert level and be ready to fascinate the crowd. And if you come weak, you will get made fun of. Because, if you wear Chucks and can’t walk, that’s like someone saying they are a doctor, but they dropped out of high school. It’s a phony front. If someone is wearing Chucks with blue shoestrings, that’s a Crip. Red, a Blood. White, neither.

  • Just another maxi-pad ad forwarded by Jenn Pozner? No! It’s the Genius Lady, “The product which allows womens to urinate from a standing position”! “It will be… your fellow-traveller!” Hey! How deeply #1! And yet how deeply #2, because this is not the first of its kind — I found a similar product from the 70s in Kim Edel’s basement just the other day. Someday soon I will scan it in and put it up, because the heavily-perfumed promo copy on the packaging is priceless. When will these people learn to say VULVA? Or even CROTCH? (Note, mind you, that these are neither ingenious Japanese gadgeteers nor Puritanical, disease-phobic Americans selling the Genius Lady — this is an Italian product.) Never mind, I want one anyway; peeing on my feet when I go camping got really old years ago.

    (Hey, what’s that phrase again? Fellow Traveller! Does anyone remember the McCarthyist connotation of this phrase?? Is it consigned to being just another piece of dot-com jargon? (I want to be an “Extreme Fellow-Traveller!” Sign my ass up!) Oh, how hip — it applies to nasty parasites, too!

  • A questionnaire from Glamour Magazine, whose poll list I am on, asking me the following, among other things, about my orgasms:

    12. What’s as good as an orgasm?

    A. A chocolate brownie sundae

    B. An amazing shopping find

    C. An exhilarating workout?just you, the road and your sneakers

    D. Nothing is as good as an orgasm.

    My response? Performing open-heart surgery with my bare hands beats orgasm! (Yeah, Xephreniaq, you know what I mean.)

I think I need to start writing to more strangers. The response from the guy in Japan, in particular, made me realize that I’m not really taking advantage of the Net. (Of course, I ought to get better about writing back to my friends first.)

Filed in Detritus, personal | Comments (20)

Mainstream Comics To Watch Out For

Wednesday, December 11, 2002

Marvel is re-warming an old TV show spinoff as The Rawhide Kid: Slap Leather. From the article:

The Marvel honcho said the Kid won’t make any pronouncements about his sexual orientation but promised readers will “know it from the moment you see him.”

…While the story has “a comedic slant,” Zimmerman said he hopes the 21st-century kid is “an empowering character that the gay community would be able to embrace.”

One tipoff about his orientation comes in the first issue, when he’s asked about the Lone Ranger.

“I just want to meet him. I think that mask and powder-blue outfit are fantastic,” he says. “I can certainly see why that Indian follows him around.”

I’ll wait for the general consensus; until then I think I’ll stick with Hothead Paisan, thanks. (The official site appears to be down.)

Filed in Comics, personal | Comments (0)

Photographing Your Plastic Nag For Fun And Profit

Tuesday, December 10, 2002

(OK, clearly most of you regulars at this watering hole are going to be baffled by this, but just for the sake of cross-promotion, in case anyone who cares happens across this:)

I’ve got some Breyer model horses up for sale on EBay. More to come; I’ve got some good vintage ones I’m giving up waiting in the wings.

I’d like to think my “evil skills” — what they called my knack for ad copywriting at my last nonprofit job — are coming in handy as I’m shilling baby ponies… Robert, you’re going to have to wait until I break out the My Little Ponies, which I will soon. Put the microwave away.

Filed in Beasts, personal | Comments (3)

Detritus: It’s Only Ever Detritus When I Go Home And Unclench

Saturday, December 7, 2002

At the end of my flight back I started listening to the white woman seated near the aisle in the row ahead of me, who was talking to the two black men who were her seat partners about her work. She said she was some sort of massage therapist, and the work she did involved entwining her body with her clients’. Not in a sexual way, though, she protested; it’s just a very intimate massage. The men made polite conversational noises. They apparently had not been to LA before, so she was telling them what was what. You really should go to Venice Beach, she was telling them, it’s very New Age.

I swear that never happens to me, encountering people like that out here, even though it’s supposed to be par for the course in LA. It was sort of a nice, if strange, welcome home. My own seat partners were orthodox(?) Jewish guys with hatboxes, and the garrulous one of them kept saying things peppered in Yiddish to the cute one, but they never even made eye contact with me. Are the days of stranger-on-the-plane conversations over?

* * *

I had the fantastic good fortune to return home the day before the Caltech ME72 contest and to be free at two in the afternoon to see it. It’s basically a more genteel version of BattleBots, in case you’ve never been. This year ME72 students were charged with playing a sort of reverse game of Capture The Flag where your team had to remove its flag from a holder on your side of the card-table-like arena (one point), get it to the other side (another point), and plant it in the opposing team’s holder (another point), with an extra point awarded if you knocked your opponent’s flag off the table. More complicated than ones I remember. As usual, it was great fun; the audience filled the Big Wedding Cake and roared mightily for opponents to knock each others’ bots off the table, which was really peripheral to the action.

As usual, the highlight of the event was the frumious Doctor Placebo, usually the Caltech mascot (a beaver, this time dressed in a pink bunny suit) attached to a bot brought in to fill holes in the contest seeding… Since this year’s setup involved two bots per team, the second bot was a Miyazaki-esque device with propellers which was flown into the arena attached to a huge cloud of gold and black balloons. (I wish I had a picture, but I didn’t notice which TV stations had cameras there.) It had a fork underneath it to grab the flag, but since this wasn’t exactly rocket science, and the TAs who made it had been stuck at Caltech while the lead professor, Erik Antonsson, is the one currently working for JPL, the thing sort of floated aimlessly around, misdirected by its propellers… Erik said it had made it all the way up to the Beckman balcony in an earlier test.

Anyway, while looking at the program I had a strange flash where I realized the exact place and time I had learned a word. Back in the days when it was held in Ramo Auditorium, the ME72 contest was where I first heard the word “placebo.”

Unfortunately, the contest was won by men again; all the teams with women on them were eliminated before the final rounds. We’ll have to wait another year for the first female winner. In their absence, I was rooting for Salomon Trujillo, whose blog doesn’t do justice to what a showman he was… it’s always best when the participants jump up and down, grab the mic to announce the birth of new robots backstage and generally ham it up. (I mean, for crying out loud, these are machines we’re cheering on…) The picture the Star News featured was of him blowing on his bot when it wouldn’t move. Alas, my hero’s team lost on a technicality when he bumped his opponents’ flag out of its holder.

* * *

I was going to say that dad and stepmother tend to only display family photos in the house which are very serious, but that’s not at all true. The ones on the fridge and in their room and various other places are frequently silly. They just have this hallway which has lots of photos which for some reason are very serious.. It’s like the Hall of Gravitas. Weddings. Funerals. Aniversaries. Family Vacations. Ancestors. Birthdays, with everyone right there in the picture. Graaaavitaaaas.

* * *

I’m reading The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood. I would recommend it to anyone who hasn’t read it, but it really is a bit much to bear right now, with religious fundamentalists saturating the various offices of government. I also saw The Stepford Wives for the first time recently. It’s a little strange to be absorbing two somewhat heavy-handed dystopian feminist parables so close together. Really, it’s depressing. It makes me want to pee standing up, in a public place. I’m serious. That’s the first thing that came to mind.

* * *

My dad just came in and asked me to take dictation to a Mr. John Moglia in Arizona. Dear Mr. Moglia, I wrote, Get bent. He has auto parts I want, said Dad. Dear Mr. Moglia, I wrote, after erasing the earlier dictation, We don’t know who you are, but Dad says you have parts. You don’t give good secretarial, said Dad. I aim to stay out of that line of work, I replied.

Dad’s keyboard doesn’t have pgup/pgdn or delete buttons. I HATE it.

* * *

I have to fill out a job application which asks for my typing WPM. I am going to list my score from Typing of the Dead. (Note: That article is outdated… Dreamcast keyboards, and Dreamcasts and the games themselves, are now muuuch muuuch cheaper. Your local school’s job-training programs NEED this game, as tomorrow’s workers must be able to type lightning-fast AND pick off approaching zombies to survive in a Bush economy… give back to your community — and yourself! — this Christmas!)

* * *

If you are in town and wondering why I didn’t tell you when I was getting back, don’t. I had a super-top-secret job interview and I have grad school application essays to write, and I’m not really going to feel free to fraternize until after the 15th.

Filed in Detritus, personal | Comments (3)

Brown Recluse Bites Overdiagnosed

Friday, December 6, 2002

According to a study done by staff at UC Riverside, doctors routinely misdiagnose lethal conditions like Lyme disease, anthrax, and necrotizing bacteria as brown recluse spider bites. This leads, among other things, to outbreaks of arachnophobic “spider-stompings.”

well, I just thought you’d like to KNOW, is all.

Filed in MLP, personal | Comments (4)

Christmas List

Thursday, December 5, 2002

I’ve already had some inquiries into what I would like for Christmas, so I thought I’d start my list. I’ll add to it over time. Here are some things I would like:

Anything at all by Lynda Barry (books, framed art, t-shirts, mugs, anything), except Cruddy, which I already have. I am especially jonesing for the book One! Thousand! Demons! Anything obscure is a plus.

Mashimaro/San-X/assorted Nipponalia car accessories, blue neon car ornaments, or a license plate bracket that says “WEBLOGGERS/ DO IT AT WORK”. (Yes, I am trying to pimp out my car. No bumper stickers, please.)

Subscriptions: Advertising Age, Creative, American Demographics; The Nation, CounterPunch, Multinational Monitor; DoubleTake.

A bird feeder of some low platform type that I can attach to my windowsill (as opposed to attching it to my window, a post, a tree, etc.)

Socks. Not kidding. Funky and/or wool is ideal. I don’t wear tights so much anymore but I am doing the over-the-knee/thigh-high thing a lot lately.

A queen-sized duvet. (No cover, I’m making one myself.)

Media: Mini-DV tapes, minidiscs, blank CDs, and camera film.

Albums: anything by King Chango, Los Amigos Invisibles, Los de Abajo (except Cybertropic Chilango Power), or Nortec Collective; They Might Be Giants’ kids album (called No!); Squirrel Nut Zippers’ Bedlam Ballroom or their first album.

DVDs: Pootie Tang, UHF, Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind.

Filed in MLP, personal | Comments (4)

A sadder and a wiser man/ He rose the morrow morn.

Monday, December 2, 2002

I finally have a name for my car.

It’s Albie.

Short for Albatross.

It was vandals, appparently. Nothing was taken, aside from $250 more from my quickly evaporating bank account, and that’s Geico, not the petty thugs.

Filed in Uncategorized | Comments (4)

Car Vs. Computer

Sunday, November 24, 2002

I’ve been ambivalent about cars since the day in middle school when our crunchy-granola computer teacher, Mr. Hatridge, told us about a cross-country bike trip he took. The environmental drawbacks of car culture were more than apparent growing up in the LA area. (Dad tells a story about the year he lived in Southern California: he never knew there were mountains north of Los Angeles, because not once during that year was the air clear enough to see them. Marine layer. yes, it’s all “marine layer.”)

The car really doesn’t feel like it’s mine yet. Its upholstery is fresh-looking; the paint is unmarred. It accelerates smoothly, with an unalarming noise, and doesn’t pull to one side or another. Not only does it not feel like it’s mine, it feels like it doesn’t belong in the family. Like a squeaky-clean brother-in-law about whom everyone is skeptical. Though my family has frequently had nice cars, we’ve rarely had new cars. Dad has the faded, delicate upholstery of the old Packard or Triumph replaced, and then it’s never long before he sells it off. A man who came to buy a ’39 Chevy hot rod off my dad at one point asked my sisters and me if we’d miss it. We shrugged. I imagine Gypsy girls felt the same way about their fathers’ horses.

I’m dealing with a novelty curve that’s totally foreign to me. I am waiting for the day when the daily functions of the car are as familiar to me as they are to my dad. Early in my training in the Orange Bomb (a 1972 Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser painted screaming orange with a white racing stripe — has moon roof! seats eight!) Dad called my attention to a barely-perceptible ringing noise that sounded when the car was moving. We’re going to go home and diagnose it, he said. He helped me narrow it down to something wheel-related by the fact that it was a continuous ring… then to the drive shaft… which it turned out was scraping against a misplaced muffler. A thin shaved-silver ring showed where the damage was being done. This is what familiarity means: not just knowing how to fix the problem, but knowing and caring about the noises the beast makes in routine operation well enough to notice a minute change in the first place.

You know how it is with a computer. A new computer takes very little time to break in. I stick an anime graphic on the desktop, set up the menus to display the way I like, configure my text editors and browsers and the thing is mine within a week, purring and clicking to me in ways I quickly come to understand: the timing of loading a Flash animation vs. a site that’s down vs. a system crash — that kind of thing.

Will the car ever be that familiar? It feels like a big metal husk. I’m moving when it moves, and it stops and turns in correspondence with my reflexes, but it’s not like my computer. My thoughts stay in my computer; their contours build up there, like plasticene I have shaped, and they’re there when I come back to them. My computer knows verse and refrain; I think of a question about, say, the vertebral peculiarities of Arabian horses, which I used to know, and know some part of me knows, but my computer knows it better… and the computer sings back the answer. A car like a computer would know how to do some sort of nonlinear dance. It would be awkward, but it would be less like driving and more like dancing, or maybe swimming or flying.

Anyway I am re-developing a kind of consciousness outside my physical person which I used to experience in the early days of having a boyfriend: a feeling that I could sense the surroundings of something important to me which was out of my own sight or earshot, though not well enough to communicate with or protect it. (I just hope I remember to move it on the days when the street-sweeper comes.) Is it going to be like this when I have kids? I want to go check up on that car every five minutes.

A driveway is not something I’ve ever wanted before, but now I do. It’s a slippery goddamn slope, you know? You want health insurance, so you want work, so you need a car, so you have to have a driveway, a carport… which means a house, which means a mortgage, which means regular work, no stopping to write a book. What was that Chief Seattle said about our posessions owning us? Right, right.

coda Yeah, mhmm. wrote that a few weeks ago, and was waiting to post it until I had pictures. enough of this airy fairy bullshit. I suppose any $200 bout with parking tickets will make the novelty wear off real fast…

here’s another shot:

Filed in On..., personal | Comments (11)