Napkin Entry #1: Things from the 9:30 Club

(Sept. 14, down in the basement bar.)

Went to the 9:30 Club to see Mike Doughty. Didn't have a ticket, but figured it wouldn't sell out (sorry, Doughty). I was right.

I was in line to buy a ticket, when the woman in front of me turns around and asks me if I need a ticket. I say yes. She says she has an extra and hands me a ticket.

I ask her how much she wants, and she says not to worry about it.

She was so nice, that I almost forgot to give her back the receipt portion of the ticket (with her name on address on it).

Anyway, thanks Erin of Great Falls.

So, not really dumb, more of a karmic payback (to the dollar) for leaving my extra ticket from Over the Rhine the other week.

Then again, I left my cell phone in the cup holder of my car, so I fully expect to go back and see my window broken out.

********************

It wasn't, oddly enough.

Good show, though he didn't play "His Truth Is Marching On", which I was really looking forward to. He did, however, play his cover of "Hungry Like the Wolf."

I was struck at how Doughty is once again fronting a four-piece, complete with upright bass, keyboard (with sampler) and octopus-armed drummer.

One incident was kind of strange. This girl behind me was apparently concerned that she was distracting me with her hooting and hollering (she wasn't, I had my earplugs in); towards the end of the show, she actually put her hands over my ears (briefly).

I was shocked enough that I ended up doing nothing. For the life of me, I can't recall what she looked like, to help determine if I should have.

Things Old, New, Borrowed, Blue

Old: Four cocktail napkins worth of entries.

New, Borrowed & Blue: The new blog template. It's one of the Blogger's canned templates -- "Snapshot Sable." I like it. Switching to it also seems to have mooted that stupid MSIE style sheet bug that I haven't had time to diagnose.

All I have to do is come up with some personally-relevant imagery for the header art. Oh, and tint it blue.

(Non) Intelligence in the Internet age

As per boingboing, c(pipe)net News.com is running a thought piece on how technology is affecting our ability to think, asking: Is technology making us smarter, or dumber?

"It's true we don't remember anything anymore, but we don't need to," said [Jeff] Hawkins, the co-founder of Palm Computing and author of a book called "On Intelligence."

"We might one day sit around and reminisce about having to remember phone numbers, but it's not a bad thing. It frees us up to think about other things. The brain has a limited capacity, if you give it high-level tools, it will work on high-level problems," he said.

This is indeed a bad thing. Has the Butlerian Jihad taught us nothing?

(Other than, yes, I will use any excuse to make a gratuitous Dune reference.)

From where I sit, I think that people are pretty dumb (even smart people), and anything that causes us to use our brains less makes us dumberer.

Sure, technology can free us from the mundane drudgery of remembering things, spelling things correctly and doing arithmetic; if you think the brain is a computer with limited system resources, that may work for you. In fact, I'm going to forget how to spell "reminisce" so I can use those resources to go work out some orbital mechanics problems.

Maybe it's just my misanthropic view of human nature. Then again, I think history is on my side. The digital revolution gives us the Internet, potentially the most empowering, democratizing, liberating communications medium out there. It was supposed to be a utopia, and we use it to find porn. (I'm looking directly at you, Mr. Nicholas "Being Digital" Negroponte.)

In my nonexpert personal experience, the brain is more like a muscle than a computer. By doing stupid crap like algebra and spelling, you're training the brain for more rigorous applications. And if you stop doing the scut work, your brain atrophies.

I'm reminded of a Donald Rumsfeld quote, for which he got a lot of flak because it sounded funny, but which always made a lot of sense to me (and not just in the Yogi Berra way):

"Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns - the ones we don't know we don't know."

There's a difference between forgetting something, and not knowing you've forgotten something, or not knowing something, and not knowing that you don't know it. If you don't remember a phone number, is it because you can remember and simply choose not to, or have you lost that capability completely? I think that losing the capability makes us less human.

This doesn't even take into account the observation that technology tends to fail us at the most inopportune times.

Perhaps it's just my own fears. I rarely use spellcheck, but I was seriously hobbled when AOL's dictionary interface recently changed, disallowing wildcard lookups. I hadn't realized how much I relied on it as a crutch. (Fortunately, it's back now.)

I make a conscious effort to balance my checkbook by hand, but I always use a calculator to check my work. And I usually find something wrong, in the form of a stupid arithmetic error.

I remember working as a cashier at Barnes & Noble; the power went out, so we went to hand calculators and sales slips. (Nowadays, they probably would have just closed the store.) I had an unbelievably hard time making change, especially when someone would give me extra money so they'd get change in a more convenient form. (I do this all the time, and the responses range from disbelief, to a resigned "I don't care, the computer will tell me what to do.")

I'm out of things to say, so using the time-honored device of hacks everywhere, I am going to close with a quote, also from Dune, so I don't have to come up with a conclusion of my own:

"Thou shalt not make a machine in the image of Man's mind"

Quick Hits of Dumb...Stuff

* I have about 4 entries worth of stuff written on paper napkins that are currently sitting in my notebook, waiting to be typed up.

* I've finally left the world of dial-up behind, having ditched my wizard.net account today.

* Baja Fresh guacamole is a lot better the first day.

* Instead of a regular Diet Coke, I mistakenly bought a Diet Coke With Lime Flavor, which is one of the more disgusting things I've ever drankened.

Mellow Burn

It's been a pretty stressful week, with work and the Verizon and hey laaaaaadyyyyy and all that.

To counteract this, I just burned a CD that's very calming. I call it the Mellow Burn.

Here it is, with notes:

 1. Rilkean Heart, Cocteau Twins
 2. Bluer, Over The Rhine (currently obsessed with this song)
 3. Fool For A Country Tune, Dusty Trails (with Vivian formerly of Luscious Jackson)
 4. God Song, Beth Orton (obsessed with this one, too)
 5. The Nightingale, Angelo Badalamenti
 6. More Than This, Bryan Ferry & Roxy Music
 7. Five Room Love Story, Cowboy Junkies
 8. Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space, Spiritualized
 9. I Guess That's Why They Call It The Blues, Elton John
10. His Truth Is Marching On, Mike Doughty
11. Flower, Liz Phair (more on this one later)
12. Thinking About Tomorrow, Beth Orton
13. Prom Theme, Fountains Of Wayne
14. Heroes In June, Echobelly
15. Running To Stand Still, U2
16. No Need to Argue, The Cranberries
17. Stay, Belly
18. Yours And Mine, Fountains Of Wayne

I really struggled with limiting it to two per artist, tops. Otherwise, it would have been all Cowboy Junkies, Beth Orton, Over the Rhine, and Cocteau Twins. But that's why they have groups of songs called "albums."

It is so calming, in fact, that an unintended consequence has been endangering my life while driving, since in DC-metro traffic, a relaxed, nonaggressive driver is otherwise known as a victim, sucker or target.

Nevertheless, I share it with you. Listen while driving at your own risk.

Dumb Purchases I Have Made Recently

My credit card statement is going to be pretty eclectic this month. Also large.

Recent charges include:

* Hurricane Relief

* High-Fidelity Ear Plugs (for better concert-going experiences)

* Replacement batteries for my obsolete 2-megapixel digital camera (ebay).

* Cable modem

* Wireless router

(These last two items will also have me in Rebate Hell)

* Another flashlight that I don't need

Somebody Else's Problem

So the outside line person didn't come on Saturday.

Came around on Sunday. I had been planning to go to the Adams-Morgan Festival, but I was so very, very tired.

Turns out that the line was never properly grounded (which is probably why my phone got fried a year or two back after a lightning strike), though that's probably incidental.

Oh, and there's a problem with the underground splice. Probably.

What's that mean? Well, they have to call Miss Utility, wait a few days, get everything marked, dig shit up, and eventually fix something. Probably get it all wrapped up in a week or so.

I give up.

Have I mentioned I'm one of only three people left in America who doesn't have broadband at home? Which means I'm cut off.

I Didn't Need a Landline, Anyway

My people have a saying:

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me three times, it's time to swtich to Cavalier Telephone.

Fucking RBOC Verizon.

So after cancelling my service appointment on Thursday, I had a super-special manager's service call appointment, with an almost-unheard of 4-hour service window (between 4pm and 8pm).

They'd left me two messages in the morning, and another one at 5pm, making extra sure I knew about this, so I thought I was in good shape.

At about 7:30, I started getting worried.

At 8pm, I was livid.

At 8:30pm, I had calmed down enough to call the service center.

I asked them what happened to my appointment.

"Oh, it looks like the tech had to postpone it to the following morning."

Indeed.

To make matters better, the service window was 8am to 6pm.

So we've gone from 8 hours, to 4 hours, then up to 10 hours.

"Well, you're the fourth call on his list, so he'll probably get there around 11am."

Super.

I went to Cafe Montmarte and got...well, not hammered, but there was some drinking involved.

It was pretty lively there, too. In fact, when I left Lake Anne after midnight, for some reason, it looked like a Fairfax County Police Department social gathering.

Skip ahead to Saturday.

Tech gets there around 11am. So far, so good.

Looks at the box outside. Tests it (which I can't do, since it has an old 4-wire connection, not a modular jack).

He tells me the problem is with the lines somewhere outside the house. That's fine, I already knew that.

Unfortunately, he's an inside-line guy. So he has to call it in. But the outside line folks aren't going to be that busy, so they'll probably get here today, and I don't have to be there.

Saga continues....

An Open Letter to RBOC Verizon

Dear RBOC Verizon,

FUCK YOU, YOU FUCKING FUCKS

There, look, you made me swear.

That's for making me wait 5 days for a service call, and then canceling the service call somewhere along the line because your automated line testing showed the problem was "resolved."

It's not.

Fuckers.

Note to Self

Dear Dateless Wonder,

Before purchasing tickets to a show, please to make sure it's not in the middle of a three-day holiday weekend prior to getting two.

Sincerely,

Joelogon

(Over the Rhine at Jammin Java, if you must know.)

Verizon Will Always Be Hell Atlantic to Me

On Saturday, I discovered my landline was dead.

I called up Verizon. Since it was Labor Day weekend, I figured might be a while until they could get a tech out.

Thursday.

Thursday.

This was on Saturday, mind you.

So This Is Getting Old

Had a kickball double-header on Tuesday.

No sliding. No diving.

Just a little running.

My ribs are still sore.

Internet Exploder

Apparently, this here blog's pages cut off prematurely when viewed in the Windows MSIE browser.

This, I did not know because I am primarily using Firefox.

Viewing source shows all the entries are here, it's just cutting off just below the Google ads.

Hrm.

Attention, Attention Web Site Publishers

Animated gifs should NOT be used to fake embedded video in Web pages.

If you absolutely must do this, if it's so absolutely vital to your cause that you MUST have fake video gifs of penguins getting pushed into puddles or whatever, at least keep it small.

Like under 500K?

Not twelve-and-three-quarter freaking megabytes: http://hideawayknife.com/measurewb160v3.GIF

Man alive.

Month to Month

All this time, I thought I was recording F/X's "Over There" (Stephen Bocho's Iraq series) on my VCR.

Yes, I'm still analog that way.

It had actually caused me some concern, since 1. I had an ever-growing backlog of unwatched episodes, combined with 3 weeks worth of unwatched "Battlestar Galactica", and 2. I had thought that the tape rolled over, and recorded over the Forrest Griffith/Stephan Bonner UFC fight and the PBS showing of "Whale Rider."

Last night, I rewound the tape and settled in for some hard-core, brain-melting television watching.

Hrm, the 15+minute fight was still there. Fast forward a bit. So was the movie.

Now, either something spontaneously happened where you can compress 8+ hours of footage on a 6-hour SLP VHS tape, or I did something wrong.

I checked the timer settings.

Battlestar Galactica was fine.

Over There was also fine. Weekly, Wednesday night. See, starting 8/31?

Oh.

So I was off a month.