Rant: 5th Avenue Theater, Seattle - UnCool

August 15 and I find myself with a balcony seat to watch the world premier of "Shrek the Musical" at the 5th Ave. Theater in Seattle. The show program includes a very informative article "From the Desk of David Armstrong - Producing Artistic Director" announcing the opening of the fabulous 'Downstairs at the 5th (DAT) Rehearsal and Education Space". It's 14,730 square feet of studios, a green room, stage management and visiting artist offices. David goes on to positively gush about investment made in this space and to thank the grand folk involved.

David, I always thought that theater was about the audience experience and their enjoyment of that which is being presented. Take my advice, go sit in the balcony (in fact go sit in "GT CTR Row: C Seat: 10") for an evening performance of Shrek and then tell me how much you enjoyed the show. That's if you are not then ensconced in a cold shower for the remainder of the evening trying to get you core body temperature below the 25 gazillion degrees to which it has risen as the 5th ave theater has *terrible* air conditioning. I don't just mean a little warm and uncomfortable. I mean sweat pouring down my face and me tossing a mental coin every couple of minutes to determine if I should just bail. And it wasn't me. Lot's of folks sweating the night through Shrek's swamp.

A suggestion. Redirect any money left over from the DAT5 space and invest it in the enjoyment of your visiting public (who do, after all, pay the bills). Sorry if your fancy "visiting artist office" won't get painted this season -- but the theater-going public will appreciate watching your productions in something that doesn't resemble a Thai sauna (without the happy ending).

The good news. The Shrek show program made a passable fan for a good percentage of the audience.

Let's extensivley raise goats in all families

Rant: USPO No help at all

I need to post a birthday card to my Mom in the UK. How much does it cost in postage I wonder? Try asking the USPO. In order to get a price calculation you need a scale that will weigh your mail. Sorry USPO but I don't keep a freakin' postage scale at home. Now that may amaze you but it's the honest-to-god truth. I bet lots of other people don't have a postage scale at home either. While I know that this must astound you (how reckless that the mailing public could possibly be sending missives without accurately determing the weight of said communication) perhaps you could help me (and probably lots of other folks) by, oh I don't know, listing the costs for mailing popular items. Like birthday cards. I bet you carry a few of those each day.

I Finally Succumb to Propoganda

Knowing how information can be easily distorted and manipulated by the proponents of either side of an argument, I tend to apply a critical and somewhat cynical eye to everything I'm told. After seeing the latest Pam Anderson video - which is shocking (and not in the way you may expect ;-) I'm sold. I'm a true believer that KFC is the physical manifestation of the Antichrist (or at best are a bunch of scumbags than deserve the same treatment they meter out to their "product"). I've been a vegetarian for about 10 years now. This just allows me to walk around with an even smugger grin on my face... Really folks - don't eat at KFC.







Watch more videos at KentuckyFriedCruelty.com.

Rant: Plastic bags; oh the Humanity

The Seattle City Council, in a wondrous decision that is sure to be reversed within a few months, have slapped a 20cent charge on plastic shopping bags (effective 1 January 2009). Why? Well they want to encourage the use of reusable bags, reduce landfill oh, and generate some revenue for the city (I suspect the latter reason is the real driver behind this decision). I have a pretty big problem with nanny-state politics. I employ reusable bags for the majority of my grocery shopping, however I do revert to plastic (or paper) shopping bags when I'm caught short. After the initial use of the plastic bags they get recycle via GreenScapes (for which I pay a tidy sum). So as far as I'm concerned, I pay for the recycling of the plastic bags that I use. Charging me 20cents per bag is charging me twice for recycling. No thanks. Oh, and the bags hitherto have been "free" - their cost has been baked into the cost of groceries. Will the cost of the groceries be reduced now that the stores are no longer giving out "free" bags. I can say with almost 100% confidence: Ha!

It's not the 20 cents. It's the principle. I'm sure I'll forget about this until early in January when I'm in my local Safeway and will be facing a charge of a couple of dollars for plastic bags ("no - you can squeeze one more item in that bag - I don't need another 20cent bag to carry a 50cent newspaper..."). Sorry Safeway, but I'm going to be walking away from the stack of filled bags. I don't pay for plastic bags just to line the pockets of the city council. I know you didn't pass the law - but you didn't lobby sufficiently strongly against it. And perhaps if enough folks get pissed off you'll get the message and pass it on to the city council. Or I'll just buy from Amazon Fresh...;-)

Delhi. Wost. Airport. Ever.

Since I'm still fuming over the rank ineptitude of the management responsible for Delhi airport I'll just give you the blow-by-blow account.

1. Arrive at Delhi on flight from Chennai, de-plane and board airport bus.
2. Drive the full length of the runway, cross end of runway, drive full length of runway in the direction from whence we came (total time about 20 mins). [During this time there were no takeoff's or landings - clearly Delhi airport personnel have not learned the skill of using a raidio to get clearance to traverse an active runway]
3. Approach international terminal transfer desk to, well, transfer. Told to pick up luggage that I had checked all the way through to Seattle. Only airport in the world where I have had to transfer my own luggage...
4. Picked up luggage, went back to transfer desk to be pointed (somewhat vaguely) in the direction of a bus.
5. Exit terminal building onto ramp. No directions to follow. No one pointing the way. Many random buses from which to select. No security. I could have gone wandering off within the secure ramp area with no challenge.
6. Found bus. Boarded. Encountered familar pattern: Drive the full length of the runway, cross end of runway, drive full length of runway in the direction from whence we came (total time about 20 mins). Correct. Back to the terminal from where I had just de-deplaned.
7. So bottom line is that it took about an hour and a half for me to travel, with luggage, about 100 yards.
8. And it was hot. And humid. Very, very humid.
   
9. Conclude the Delhi airport authority is run by Bozo the clown and several close relatives.

Weeks Outage for BofA

Attempting to login to my online Bank of America account at 3:29am, Monday 4th August I was presented with the following message:

Online Banking is currently unavailable in your area due to scheduled system maintenance. Online Banking will become available beginning at 7:30 A.M. Eastern Time on Sunday

So I have to wait until next Sunday until I can conduct on-line banking? Nice work Bank of America...

As a long time customer I thought I'd do the right thing and send them e-mail about this mistake. Of course you can't send e-mail to Bofa unless you are logged in, hence there is no reasonable way to report problems logging into the site. Nice.

Maltesers - Courtesy of Billy Bragg

"They rolled rapidly like Maltesers on the floor of a bus that was breaking hard". Bill told me to write this down. (Well, me and about 2,000 other people).

Why is there no Cheese in Chinese Food?

Seriously. No Cheese. See.

Question

How do you hold an idiot blog reader in suspense?

Rant: Rule Governing Arrival Time.

I find it odd that the greater the complexity governing arrival, the closer the actual time of arrival tends to be to the planned time. For example:

1. Send a spacecraft from Earth to Mars (~10 months travel time, Spaceship) and it touches down to the second;
2. Fly from San Jose to Seattle (2 hours, Jet) and the flight arrives within 5 minutes of scheduled arrival;
3. Ask for a Pacific Gas and Electric employee to visit your house (5 minutes, car) and the best they can do is to provide a four hour window.....

Now, I'm sure we can all think of many exceptions to this rule. But it still pisses me off that PG&E scheduling is so crap. Get a day planner!

(4. If your significant other is asked to do a job and has zero distance to travel and zero complexity associated with getting to the site of the intended work (e.g. bathroom to fix a leaky faucet), the work will never get done).

Cool App: Brand Tags

Brand Tags is described as a collective experiment in brand perception. Site visitor are presented with brand names and are asked to enter the first thing that pops into their head. Results are presented similar to 'tag clouds' the size of the font employed for each user entry is proportional to the number of times that entry is made. Fun exercise is to browse the tag clouds trying to guess the brand from just the tags - it's eerily easy to do in the vast majority of case. And boy, do people have a negative brand perception of Microsoft... Amazon does well.

Amazon - "In their own words"

Finished work on editing the Website Platform entry for the Amazon video contest. I've created a cut-down version here with just the animation and staff shots. Enjoy.

Welcome to the 20th Century Award

This week's "welcome to the 20th century" award is presented to Virginia Mason hospital in Seattle, WA. While attempting to pay my bill I followed the VM billing department's advice and attempted to set up an on-line account. After filling in the usual guff I was presented with the scree you see above. The key information here is "Your request is being processed and you will receive an e-mail within 48 hours with your password and login instructions". Really?

Now, "within 48 hours" could mean that I will receive it in the next 30 seconds (that being the average time in my experience it takes the majority of sites to set up an account and send you e-mail confirmation). However I suspect that if this were indeed true, the registration text I received would have gloated in the message "Your request is being processed and you will receive an e-mail within 30 seconds with your password and login instructions - so keep your eyes peeled bucko".

No, I really do believe that it will take them most of their alloted 48 hours to process my request. Given that even my 25 year old Sinclair ZX80 could probably process the account set up in a few minutes (and even run an nuclear power station!) this seems to imply that there will be *gasp* manual processing involved. Plenty of opportunities for them to screw up multiple elements of my personal data. Looking forward to that I can tell you....

Garmin Nuvi 660 & Blackberry 8700 - Bluetooth

When you're pairing a Garmin Nuvi 660 & Blackberry 8700 via Bluetooth, turn off encryption. Only took me 45 mins to figure this out as the root cause of my constant stream of disconnections.

And oh yeah, Garmin's web-based support blows monkey chunks...

As Beautiful as an Airport

Regarding the debacle that is Heathrow Terminal 5:

1. Is anyone surprised that was a monumental screw up? Just take a look at the rest of Heathrow. They've had *years* to get it right with only backwards progress (and yes - I had the displeasure of flying through Heathrow last Monday so I have recent, first-hand experience). Take a leaf from the pages of many other industries (especially the software industry ;-) It *never* works first time; that's why a "soft opening" is so important. Run a smaller set of traffic through the system first to work out the kinks. Then ramp it up over time. Big bang launches are aptly named...

2. Let us bow our heads and remember the words of Douglas Adams (and I paraphrase as it's been years since I read the quote): "no society in the universe has ever come up with a phase that is equivalent to 'as beautiful as an airport'..."

3. Bring back Dennis Howell. Minister of Sport and then Minister of drought. Where are you Dennis when we need you so much...?

It's so easy to hate Comcast

I've had cable network access through Comcast in Seattle for the past 18 months with nary a problem. Two weeks ago I lost all network access. After a fruitless half an hour on the phone with Comcast support it was determined that I had a faulty cable modem (which turned out to be complete bullshit - and I suspect the engineer knew it) and I should swap it out. Ok. Did that. Having plugged in the replacement modem, lo and behold, no browser access. I could ping sites with no problem and I appeared to have reasonable DNS setting etc. Very strange. I placed a call to Comcast (with the usual we'll call you back in 30 mins response) and left my PC directly connected to the Cable modem. Wandering past the machine a few minutes later all of my Firefox tabs I was using to connect to Yahoo, Google, Amazon etc were all now sporting a comcast.net account registration page. Odd - since I've been registered with Comcast for 18 months.... Anyway, humoring the system I went through the badly-designed and excruciatingly slow registration process. Ah ha! now I have browser access. Problem solved. The phone rang with my Comcast call back. No help needed here thanks! Done.

I plugged the cable modem back into my router (remember, the one that had been working fine for 18 months), connected to the router (Linksys) and went to look at the IP, DNS etc setting served by Comcast. Nothing. Zip. Zilch. WTF? Went back to the PC I registered with - all OK. Tried a different PC directly connected to the cable modem. Nothing working there.

Ah.... it all finally makes sense. Comcast don't like you running your own router (they'll sell you their router and access for up to 5 PC's - but you're not allowed to do that yourself). I must have been running under the radar for the past 18 months, someone must have looked at my traffic patterns and reset my account so that when I re-enabled I'd trigger their new security measures that locks your account to a single PC (via the MAC). Yeah - well screw you Comcast. Two minutes worth of MAC address cloning and I was back up and running on my own router. It's rather like the water company saying you can have a water feed - but you can only dispense from one faucet.... Now I know why Comcast stock is trading at the same point they were trading in July 1999. Actually the main reason that I'm pissed with Comcast is that even after asking both support engineers with whom I spoke (and to whom I described my home set up) neither of them flagged the fact that my connection would be locked to the activating-PC and that I could no longer use my own router (ha! that's what they think). Either they didn't know (would figure - given how crappy Comcast is at support - seen their on-line FAQ's recently?) or they knew and were told to keep quiet about it. Dimwits.

Oh, any for any Comcast folks reading this, go fix your packet shaping software that keeps screwing up and turning into traffic "denying" software. Thanks.

Green's - don't dis the Internet

In “Seeing Green” (Wired, March 2008) Fred Krupp says “…clean tech is a much more important revolution. We’re talking about the future of humanity, not how to find a date on the Internet”. He fails to acknowledge that the Green movement has been empowered by that same Internet. Significant funding for Green awareness projects has come from revenues generated by the Internet and that same Internet is a significant source of information about global warming. Indeed Mr. Krupp’s book Earth: The Sequel, is available from Amazon.com via the Internet (unfortunately only as a hard copy book and not as a downloadable Kindle e-book as the publisher has yet to make it available in that format. Shame on them).

Glides like a 2 bedroom apartment

Received e-mail from Expedia yesterday confirming my flights to/from Iasi in Romania next month. The flight from Iasi to Bucharest on 3/21 looks to be very interesting. I will, in fact, be flying not on a modern jet aircraft, rather in a 2 bedroom apartment for 5. No indication if refreshments will be served during the journey. I presume I can just go into the kitchen and whip myself up a snack...

Videora - Tivo Converter

Useful little app: Videora enables you to convert your regular PC video files (avi, mpeg, etc) into the proper video format that your TiVo understands. Once it's complete it will place the completed files in the directory that is synced with your Tivo. You can then locate and transfer the converted files from your Tivo "now playing" screen. One of the additional benefits of Videora is that you don't have to shell out $25 to Tivo for Desktop Plus. Videora conversion isn't quick (depends on the size of the file you're converting. A feature length movie can take an hour and a half to convert) - but that's OK. I just set it running before I go to bed or leave for the office and the shows/movies are waiting for me when I next turn on the TV.

There's a great set of instructions regarding Videora for Tivo on Lifehacker.