Ideation Limitation

I think coding a site to upload some photos, automate them into a simple slideshow is a no brainer. Your mom on the other hand thinks that’s about the most fan-futon-tastic thing ever. She and all the ladies in her card group use it religiously; sharing photos of their baby grandchildren drooling and gnawing on the dogs chew toys. Who knew.

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A Diagnosis to Which I Relate (using a word I’ve never heard)

The way you show the existence of just one of these ghosts is you stop dancing and you barrel across the dance floor as hard as you can, shouting and roaring, barging ghosts and dancers alike hither and thither, scattering them and knocking them flying. If you get it just right, you splash a clearing in the ghosts, and if you’re luckier still there’s a moment before they get to their feet where you can grab one, sit on his chest and hold him down by his neck and grab his chin so you can wrench his dirty face round to look straight at yours and lean in real, real close and, panting, whisper straight at him through your gritted teeth: you little fucker: gotcha.

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Physics Romance Fiction

You call and, less another two or three items, it goes something like this:

Press 2 for English.
Enter your card number followed by the pound key.
If you want to dispute a debit charge, press 2.

And then you wait. When the customer service rep answers, he/she asks “What can I help you with”?

I just followed a path that included “pressing 2 to dispute a debit charge”, so I figure he/she should already know that. But instead of pointing that out I just “I want to dispute a charge”. The response: “Let me connect you to the disputes department”.

Crap. This is where, out of my four calls to Visa, I was twice disconnected after waiting for around eight minutes.

The other two times, the successful connections begin a bit better because the rep already knows you want to dispute a charge (after all, they’re in that department). Instead they ask for your card number. The same one I typed in the phone when calling? Yes, the very same.

Why do they have you navigate the system like that when, in the end, you end up talking with someone who apparently is not in the loop? I know that when I’ve had to call my cell phone provider, which uses voice recognition, I got in the habit of just straight away saying “OPERATOR”. And that’s it. Hitting ‘0′ right off the bat on the Visa line didn’t seem to do the trick though.

I guess there’s the automated tracking of “why” and “who” that occurs with telephone menus. On the other end of the line a large cluster of machines is tracking each and every 2 and 4 and 1. At the end of the month, the managers know just how many callers chose to conduct business en Espagnol. So how hard would it be to pipe that information to the customer service rep’s screen?

Picture this as your greeting:

Hello Mr. Thomas. I see you have a charge on your debit card that you would like to dispute. Do you have a fax number or email address where I can send the proper forms?

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Useless Automated Information Gathering (aka Telephone Customer Service)

The Big Word Project is a website to be set in your “my brain no ideas make” bag alongside The Million Dollar Homepage. The nuts and bolts of it is this: you pay a buck a letter to buy any valid word from them, and their site will link to your site using that word. I’ll let Paddy and Lee run a use-case by you:

For example, you may buy the word ‘Donkey’ for $6 and it will link to your site dedicated to donkeys. The word ‘Donkey’ will then be the gateway to your site and the definition will be changed. No longer will the word Donkey mean ‘a woodworking apparatus consisting of a clamping frame and saw, used for cutting marquetry veneers’, instead it will now be represented visually by ‘Chris’s Donkey Site’.

I bought woolie. Like donkey, it’s a six dollar investment. Here’s my badge:

What’s funny about all this is that I had a pretty strong desire to buy the word. There was, of course, the powerful incentive to experiment with link purchasing, and I’m sure that was the push that put me over the top. But there was also a strange need to buy it…some weird send of ownership I had to fulfill.

Kudos to the guys behind this. Great idea.

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Redefining Woolie

Main Entry:
Pronunciation:
    \in-ˈfē-bəl, en-\
Function:
    transitive verb
Inflected Form(s):
    en·fee·bled; en·fee·bling
Etymology:
    Middle English enfeblen, from Anglo-French enfebler, enfeblir,
    from en- + feble feeble
Date:
  14th century

: to make feeble : deprive of strength

Had I not actually come across this word at Merriam-Webster’s site, I would have figured it to be something akin to “Embiggen”, a word coined by The Simpsons which later made its way to a published physics paper.

Thanks Debilitating!

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Great New Word: Enfeeble

We’ve reached the origin, which is the original clusterflock post:

At the beginning of every season of The Wire when I hear the new version of the theme song I think how odd it sounds and how I will never forget the old one. Then I do. Please forgive me.

My wife and I are currently nearing the end of season four of The Wire (in case I never get around to giving it its own entry let me quickly just state that it is one of the best shows ever in the whole world throughout history and stuff). The single flaw that stands out to both of us in an otherwise flawless series is the theme song. For those of you who don’t know (and I don’t feel this is spoiler territory here), each season of The Wire uses as its theme a different cover of “Way Down in the Hole” by Tom Waits. The season four version hasn’t been horrible. The first couple really were just awful. I do like the montage of clips that sort of filter through that season (foreshadowing and reminding), but the whole thing just lasts too long. Or at least it seems to last too long because of the song playing over top.

In conclusion, I thought the clusterflock “Dear Jesus” was funny.

via clusterflock → Matt → clusterflock.

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A Circular Route Reminds Me Of A Point

And of course, you always have to finish your books. I have a strong tendency to view new chapters as built-in bathroom break reminders and not as logical points at which to say “okay, time to let ‘er rest a bit”. I am not (let’s be clear) claiming to be a voracious reader. There are dry spells and then fervent rushes, with the droughts lasting months and the hot times being two or three books. But even if it it’s just not possible to pull an all-nighter to reach “The End”, I still have a very strong desire to finish that book sometime in the immediate future. It is rare that I get more than a few pages into a book and then not complete it. So this AskMeFi question was new territory for me. It basically boils down to “How do you pick books to read?”. But there is also discussion about knowing when to give-up on a particular book. It’s amazing to me is that the majority of responders actually do this. There are many responses from people who state that they will, very quickly, drop a book if it’s not holding their immediate interest.

Okay, so that’s surprising to me. But there was one sentence in one response that blew me away, more so than those who read the last page before deciding to buy a book. The bold text below is that sentence (as it appears in the wild).

My point is I will quit reading once I know the book isn’t any good. I quit reading Heinlein’s “Fear No Evil” with only 30 pages to go. It was horrible. And like you, I kept expecting it to get better, I kept thinking “this one might change my life.” And then it dawned on me, that even if it did get better, it was too late. One of the only books I can remember throwing. And I like Heinlein.

That is……mind boggling. Here is the book he mentions. Guess how long it is? 512 pages. This guy has read 482 pages of an author he likes and, with just thirty left, tosses the book. That would have driven me insane. Once I reached that point in a craptastic book, I would have to continue on till the last page. It seems like otherwise it was all just a colossal waste of time. I would at least want the satisfaction of closing the book and saying “Done”.

But to end on a positive note, I think this is a nice sentiment:

I don’t know how many people would agree with me, but I say it’s not a waste of time to read bad books. There’s no way I can tell if a book was really for me until I reach the very last pages. A lot of times I encounter a twist that turns it into a completely different novel than i started out with (Atonement and Water for Elephants both come to mind). I’ve also read books that were blandly mediocre until their atrocious end (Digital Fortress), and I still don’t think reading them was a waste of my time. I suppose this is a quirk of how I read — I’d rather be able to be completely certain how I feel about a book, and that’s totally impossible unless I’ve actually read the entire thing.

Always a silver lining, eh?

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Unfinished Business or The Pleasure of Completion

Where’s My Jetpack? has a novel approach: Google News.

Just scan the headlines and pick that which rocks the hardest. Looks like if you need some cover art, Jetpacks might be able to whip something up right nice too.

Here’s some great names I came up with using my locally filtered news:

• Summer Reading Program
• Tough Times For Tow Trucks
• Baked Peaches with Raspberries
• Salute to an urban general

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Band Name Book

You are the only thing in any room you’re ever in

Guy Garvey is a fantastic lyricist. The above is from Elbow’s most recent release, The Seldom Seen Kid. The song is Starlings, and its the first on the CD.

If I had to pick one for you to listen to, though, it would be One Day Like This. Listen to it and tell me it doesn’t force your senses to perk up.

‘Cause holy cow I love your eyes. And only now I see the light. Lying with you half awake. Stumbling over what to say. Well anyway, it’s looking like a beautiful day. So throw those curtains wide. One day like this a year would see me right.

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Recent Elbow

Some Why Nots

• Freedom to go where one liked
• Not forced to visit relatives, & to bend in every trifle
• less money for books

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The positives and negatives of getting married (accodring to Darwin)

…and Drake looked out of the window and said “Those people look really small”.

And the pilot said, “That’s a preschool”.

Good one.

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Small People

“My dad asked me if I wanted to cheer for other people or have people cheer for me,” Creamer says.

I think that’s pretty inspiring. When I asked my seven-year-old daughter if she knew what that meant, she summed it up perfectly by saying basically “Do you want to be the one who scores the points“. That’s such a great way to approach life.

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To Be Cheered For

James Krueger, a 49-year-old electrician, opened the door to look out of the 100-year-old home he was restoring and the wind sucked the door from his hand. He dived onto the ground “as if I was sliding into first.” The house was pulled out from under him — and when it was over, he was on bare ground.

Can you imagine? I could only hope that if in the same situation, it all happens too fast for the fear to have time to take hold of me. And if later asked by a reporter how it all felt, I know my quote wouldn’t be nearly as enthralling as what this man provided:

“It was like God was holding my leg and beating the (expletive) out of me for everything I’ve done in my life,” said Krueger, of Lafayette. “Maybe I tried to question God too many times, but the bottom line is something kept me there.”

I wish I knew what the “expletive” was though. Regardless of how you feel about language like that, there are most definitely occasions where it’s called for, and I would love to have that quote exactly as it was given.

The FAQ page for the Associated Press provides an email address to use if you want to contact a reporter (it says the email will be forwarded to the appropriate person). I just wrote the following in hopes of getting the uncensored version of the quote:

I recently read your story “Baby a Sign of Hope in Devastated South” in which you quote Mr. James Krueger as saying:

It was like God was holding my leg and beating the (expletive) out of me for everything I’ve done in my life…

I found the full quote to be one of the most enthralling I’ve ever read and, if at all possible, I would like to know what “expletive” was used by Mr. Krueger. I know that strong language is not appropriate for all public consumption, and the need to edit it is unavoidable, but given the horrific nature of the events, I feel that knowing the exact quote would add more weight to his words. I’ve posted a link to the story at my personal website and, if you permit, would like to be able to provide the unedited version.

I asked that it be forwarded to one of the two reporters responsible for the story. I’ll update this entry if I receive a response.

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God was holding my leg and beating the (expletive) out of me

Main Entry:
  twirp

variant of

Main Entry: twerp
Pronunciation: \ˈtwərp\
Function: noun
Etymology: origin my father-in-law
Date: circa 1980

: an underwater toot

Definition of twirp as given to my wife, by her dad, when she was a kid. This was relayed to me the other night at supper and I laughed for a couple of minutes on the outside, and am still enjoying a sustained chortle on the inside.

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Twirp

Where for art thou mobīle phone?
Someone from inside this home,
Please call the phone so it will ring,
And I can find that %$&! thing.

Please notice the macron over the ‘i’ in mobīle (i.e long vowel sound). Say it long and say it short. I’m sure you’ll notice it’s much better when “mobile” rhymes with “crocodile”.

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Call to Find

Here’s a nice example:

My favorite example is the elevator button. Let’s say you ride the same
elevator every day. You get in, you push the button for your floor, and
you’re rewarded by the doors closing and the elevator taking you to your
destination. One day you get in and push the button, and nothing happens.
Do you immediately say, “Oh, this must not work anymore, I’ll just take the
stairs to the 11th floor”? Or do you push the button again? And again?
And harder? And faster? And in special sequences? That’s the extinction
burst.

That’s a great phrase. Nifty concept too.

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Extinction Burst

One of the most unusual — OK, weird — features of Silicon Valley language is repetitive use of the word “so” to begin sentences when we’re answering questions. “So,” replaces the interjection “well” as it is used in the Midwestern and Southeastern American states and elsewhere.

If you ask someone in the South for directions, they’re likely to start with “Well, you turn right at the corner…” The word as used here implies that the speaker is thinking about it for a second before providing a considered answer.

In Silicon Valley, they’ll say, “So you turn right at the corner…,” which implies that the thinking has already taken place in the past.

The word “so” is used when the answer is very well known — or at least when the speaker wants to imply that his answer has been thoroughly reviewed by a committee and approved for public release without a nondisclosure agreement.

It reminds me of the tendency for people in the northeast (and elsewhere?) to add a rising intonation to the end of every sentence (interrogative or not). Sort of drives me crazy.

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I’m a “Well” Person Myself

Many musicians have understood that all they need to make a (very good) living is to have 10,000 fans. 10,000 people who look forward to the next record, who are willing to trek out to the next concert. Add 7 fans a day and you’re done in 5 years. Set for life. A life making music for your fans, not finding fans for your music.
[emphasis mine]

Lesson number four from Seth Godin’s “Music Lessons”.

That last bit is something beautiful I tell you. It’s such a minor detail that means so much.

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For my 10,000 fans

Busking is the practice of doing live performances in public places to entertain people, usually to solicit donations and tips. Those engaging in this practice are called buskers.

I had no idea. What a great word.

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Busking for a Living

The first is from the Wired blog, in which the author documents canceling his subscriptions to Napster, Rhapsody and Yahoo Music. The process of canceling Napster proved to be the most time-consuming (30 minutes) and humorous:

When she took me off hold again, I told her I wanted to cancel because 2007 was the year 3 of the major labels started selling music without DRM. Back on hold.

She came back — presumably after consulting a manager or the internet to find out what DRM is — and then responded, “I don’t understand, because all of our music contains DRM.”

The second comes from loyal (formerly) Palm user Tristan Louis. When his Treo started having problems, he called tech support prepared for the normal rigmarole. He asked for and was transferred to the initial service rep’s supervisor, and when he made the same request to this second rep:

She told me she was the most senior person at Palm. I asked her again politely to transfer me to her manager. She told me she had none. I asked to be transfered to the person that was reviewing her work, giving her assignments, etc.. I was told she had none. I told her I felt that was odd as, apart from the chairman and CEO, I didn’t know of anyone in a company not having a manager. She told me she was the CEO.

[emphasis mine]

In case you didn’t notice, the pronoun used throughout the quote is “she”. Palm’s current CEO is Ed Colligan

After confirming her statement and requesting permission to record their conversation, Tristan found the line dead.

Both customer service quotes are gems.

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Customer Service Quotables