Disinfotainment

I've recently become acquainted with an extremely annoying style of writing. I've written about strange writing formats before, but this one drives me crazy. It's the "3 point writing system." I will give an extremely condensed example here:

I am going to explain that all brontosauruses are thin at one end, much thicker in the middle and then thin again at the far end.
All brontosauruses are thin at one end, much thicker in the middle and then thin again at the far end.
I have just explained that all brontosauruses are thin at one end, much thicker in the middle and then thin again at the far end.

There really isn't much to it. The format works like this:

1. Say what you're going to say.
2. Say it.
3. Say you said it.

It's horrible. Please stop doing that.

Posted by Charles at 11:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was chatting with Matt over at the Japanese Literature blog "No-Sword," he commented on a Japanese translation of James Joyce's "Finnegans Wake." And having had a tipple tonight (as Joyce was wont to do while writing) I was in a loquacious mood and was seized by the urge to write down my favorite Joyce anecdote. Hell, it's my only Joyce anecdote. I may tell it badly, perhaps inaccurately, even drunkenly, but I guarantee it will be more coherent than "Finnegans Wake." Well, it's shorter, if nothing else.
Long ago, I read an article about a scholar at my school doing his PhD in English Literature. At that time, everyone had to write a new thesis on Joyce to be taken seriously in the English Lit field. But there were few remaining new angles on the topic. The scholar had access to the galley proofs of Finnegans Wake, he was analyzing Joyce's revisions when he noticed something interesting. The proofs all had pinholes at the top, but not all the pages had the same number of pinholes, nor were they in the same spot. In a flash of insight, he realized what they were: the pinholes left by the typesetter when he tacked the stack of pages to his corkboard.
Joyce was notorious for incorporating typesetter's errors into his text. Sometimes the typesetter made interesting errors while trying to transcribe the incomprehensible text into lead type. Joyce sometimes took the errors and rewrote them, coining new words out of the errors. Many scholars have argued over the etymology of these strange words, even using these same galley proofs as evidence. Multiple (and similar) copies of the same pages existed, but nobody could definitively determine which revisions came first.
But this scholar had a new approach. He measured the position of each pinhole, and determined the proofed pages were aligned in a stack and the pin driven through the stack into the corkboard. The aligned holes represent one state of the proof at one time. As the revisions were made, new pages would be inserted in the stack, and pinned again to the board. Those new pages would have one less pinhole. Through an incredibly complex procedure, he determined the order that new pages were added or removed from the stack. The scholar had finally determined the order in which revisions were made.
His thesis claimed that the final form of the book was the result of a lengthy collaboration between Joyce and the typesetter. Perhaps "collaboration" is too fine a word, "battle" might be more appropriate. Joyce would find an error, rewrite it, and then the typesetter would mangle it again. The galleys would go back and forth between the author and the typesetter, changing every time a new proof was generated. Eventually both Joyce and the typesetter thought no more revisions were necessary and the book was published.
Of course this discovery galvanized the Joyce scholars of the English Literature community. There was hardly anything new that could be said on the subject, whole libraries of books have been written on any subjective point of view propounded by every scholar with an opinion. But this discovery brought scientific rigor to the analysis of an incomprehensible work of literature. Even I was transfixed by this discovery, and I have no interest in Joyce whatsoever. But I learned one thing for sure: it is impossible to translate Joyce's work into the English Language.

Posted by Charles at 10:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I stumbled across some discussions on the internet and discovered I may be the only one who knows certain facts about a mystery. A little web searching indicates this message will be the only published facts about the mystery. So I suppose it is my duty to post the information. Don't ask me how I know this (ha).
Arne Lein was a famous cartomancer, his book "What's Your Card" is the definitive documentation of the Card System of Olney Richmond and the Order of the Magi. But since Arne's death in the 1980s, his book has gone out of print, used copies go for astonishing prices on the used book market. There seems to be a question about the rights to Arne's books since his death. I wasn't able to find out what happened, but it appears Arne's heirs don't want the book reprinted. Go figure.
The bigger mystery remains, Arne had a second book that was never published, "Planetary Aspects of the Cards." This was to be the ultimate detailed guide to the Card System for advanced students. Arne showed me the book and complained that his computer, an old TRS-80, was dying and he couldn't get the text moved to a new computer. I said I'd gladly help him convert it to a new computer, just to help it get published. But nothing ever came of my offer. I saw Arne a short time before his death, I asked about his book, he said he still had it sitting on the old disks.
I suspect that Arne went to his death with a couple of 8 inch floppy disks sitting on his shelf, his magnum opus unpublished. If the family or heirs of Arne Lein possess these disks, they should know that a lot of people would like to publish them.

Posted by Charles at 4:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I changed the ringtone on my iPhone, it was driving me crazy. I used the "Old Phone" ringtone, it is the loudest sound that comes with the iPhone. But it is muffled sometimes when I keep the phone in my pocket, it sounds distant, I can't quite tell where the sound is coming from.
But what really drove me crazy is that the Old Phone sound is the exact sound effect used in TV and movies. What drove me over the edge was when I watched an episode of Law and Order, they used the sound repeatedly, with several phones ringing at once. So I searched around and the loudest ringtone I found was CTU-ringtone (download is in iPhone format and ready to install).
Apparently this is the phone sound from the TV show "24," I don't watch it so I wouldn't know. It reminds me of the sound of the old AT&T Merlin phones, we had a fancy Merlin rig at an office where I worked.
Fortunately, the new IPhone 1.1.3 upgrade makes custom ringtones easy. I tried importing sounds into GarageBand but it crashed every time I tried to export to the phone. And this is supposed to be the new feature that made it easy.
I discovered I could just import a sound file into iTunes, then re-encode it to AAC. Once the file is encoded, you can change the extension from .m4a to .m4r. New in the 1.1.3 software, you can manually manage files on your iPhone, enable that feature on your iPhone settings. Then dock your iPhone and in iTunes drag your .m4r file to the iPhone's Ringtones directory. Your ringtone is installed and ready to use.
Once I changed to a new ringtone that did not sound like Old Phone, I felt much better, I wasn't listening for that ringtone anymore, the new tone is different enough that it grabs my attention. But I still keep imagining I hear the Old Phone. Some people call this the "Edison Effect." Thomas Edison thought he heard voices in the static of Marconi's newfangled Radio. But it is an illusion, the brain always tries to impose some sort of order on randomness. For example, many people have thought they heard the phone ring when in the shower, the brain tries to pick out sounds from the random white noise of splashing water droplets.
And now I've got a similar phenomenon. My furnace is really loud when it's running, sometimes it makes a faint ringing sound when it runs, just enough to make me wonder if I'm hearing Old Phone.

Posted by Charles at 4:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This is my storage closet. It is completely full of empty boxes and other storage supplies.

Posted by Charles at 12:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I started a secret blog. You'll never find it. It's just some silly fiction, I thought I'd see if my anonymous writing would find an audience on its own.
I decided to do some "Journalling," a writing exercise I read in a book by Rudy Rucker, as he interpreted it from Jack Kerouac. You just write down some of the events you see in daily life, as they are happening. But I also follow Rudy's school of Transrealism, so I make the events just outrageous enough to make you wonder if they are true or not.
OK, I gave you some hints, but you'll still never find my secret blog.

Posted by Charles at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by Charles at 12:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Weird things are happening. I was sitting at home watching a movie, when I heard the phone ring. I looked at my iPhone in its dock, it's lit up to announce my friend from Venice, California is calling. So I answer the phone and hit pause on the TiVo to stop the movie, and we chat for a while. My friend says he's at a shop and he's found a book about music he could have written himself, and it's by an author with the same name as him.
So we chatted for a minute, we ended the call and I hung up, so I started the TiVo playing again, and the phone started ringing again. But there was no incoming call, the ringing was a sound effect in the movie, exactly the same as the "Old Phone" ringtone I use. I checked my phone, oops, I left it in Silent Mode, so my phone never rang, it just happened to have an incoming call at the same time the sound effect was playing on TV. How odd.
A few minutes later, the movie is over, I'm watching the TV news. They're rerunning an old "human interest" story they like to play in the dead of winter, a 1990 report from the warm, sunny beach in Venice, California.
I had to laugh, because I moved away from Los Angeles right around 1990, I used to go to Venice Beach occasionally, so it was like my past history speaking to me. The reporter from Iowa was doing his best to poke fun at the beach crazies, while trying to make the rubes in Iowa wish they were vacationing in the warmer climate of California. But I had a shock of recognition when they showed a scene of some street buskers on the Venice Boardwalk. I recognized them immediately, they were a band of Peruvian pan pipers, I saw them in Venice right about the time the story was taped, and then, incredibly enough, I saw them again right after I moved to Iowa, they played here at a local festival.
Okay.. now I'm starting to get weirded out. I don't know what all this synchronicity means, except for one thing: I should change my ringtone.

Posted by Charles at 6:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Snowstorms always seem to make drivers lose 50 IQ points. After observing my neighbors spin their tires trying to get up our steep driveway, I thought I'd offer a couple of tips:

1. If you get stuck in a front-wheel drive car, put the sand under the front tires, not the rear tires.

2. There is only one legitimate reason to own a gas-guzzling SUV, and this is it. Instead of grinding your rear wheels for 30 minutes, switch to 4 wheel drive.

Posted by Charles at 2:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

My first professional article, " How To Copyright Michelangelo," has just appeared online at The Register. Thanks to the persistent efforts of El Reg editor Andrew Orlowski, I finally managed to bang out this article for publication. I showed Andrew a draft of this story as a blog article, he said I should polish it up and submit it to El Reg. So I immediately got to work: I sat on the article for over two years.
As I contemplated the subject over that time, it seemed to expand in scope, I could have written a whole book on the related topics, and maybe I will, someday. But I had to put together something less ambitious, and Andrew emailed me one day and said just take a crack at it and get me a draft in three days. Ouch. So I pulled it together, such as it was, and submitted it with the apology that I was sure I could do a better job if I spent another two years on it.
Andrew would occasionally needle me about what was taking so long, and I would joke about how I didn't want to give up my amateur status. Professional journalism turns writing from blog blabbing into hard work, and I am averse to hard work. My efforts to produce this article even inspired a long bout of Writer's Block, which was why I procrastinated for years. It's ironic, because I used to be a Hollywood writer's consultant, my specialty was setting up those newfangled word processors for screenwriters, and in the process, reworking their neurotic writing habits to eliminate Writer's Block. And now here I was, stuck in the same old neurotic habits.
Just as the deadline was issued, I bumped into a woman who was a writer's coach. I said I might be in need of her services, how does that work? She said her usual form of coaching was you emailed her your draft, then phoned her and she'd tell you to sit and write for an hour, then you'd mail her the new work so she could see you worked for an hour. I thought about that, and it occurred to me, hell, I could sit and write for an hour by myself, why wasn't I? So I did. I told her about it later, I said her coaching must be effective because her remark was just what I needed to get moving. She laughed.
The subject of the restoration of the Sistine Chapel ceiling has long interested me, I worked at the Getty Trust back in the 1980s when the Getty Conservation Institute did the restoration project. It was the talk of the office, especially when Vanity Fair magazine ran an article that criticized the restoration. Agreeing with the Vanity Fair critics, that the GCI might be removing a charcoal/glue wash applied by Michelangelo, was tantamount to professional suicide at the Getty. But I didn't know that, and I blundered right ahead, publicly agreeing that the restoration could destroy original work by Michelangelo. Unsurprisingly, my contract was not renewed. Oops. But my personal reminisces had to go, they are appropriate for my personal blog, where I talk endlessly about myself, but were not appropriate for serious journalism.
Other material didn't make the cut, I had a subplot about the restoration of the famous Holbein painting "The Ambassadors." I've written about this painting before in a different context, it was one of my first blog articles, almost 6 years ago. The restoration of these major artworks costs millions and takes years, my fear is that changes to the interpretation of copyright law might eliminate economic incentives to undertake major restoration projects, while those works continue to deteriorate. And at the same time, I am grateful that those copyright laws allow me to profit from my works as an artist, and even as a writer.

Posted by Charles at 2:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I've been moaning and groaning for the past few days, my back is sore from scraping ice and snow. It took me a couple of days to realize it, I kept hearing this groaning sound whenever I moved around, I wondered where it was coming from. Then I figured out it was me making that sound. I took a couple of ibuprophen and I felt a lot better.
But as I moaned and groaned, I kept hearing myself saying the same thing, "oh, man!" I wondered where I picked that up from, I don't talk like that, I don't know anybody who talks like that. I finally realized what happened, when I was playing one of my favorite video games, Halo 1. When your soldiers get shot at, they either say "yikes!" or "oh, man!" I must have heard that a million times.

Posted by Charles at 11:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I am happy to report my Braun 8585 razor died, it melted down and self-destructed. I am happy to report this because Braun replaced it under warranty, upgrading me to the latest top-end model. I figured I'd owned the razor over a year and was probably out of warranty, but I found out it had a two year warranty, and I was still covered.
When the razor melted down, I had just put it in the recharger. I kept smelling burning plastic, but it took me an hour to locate the source. I feel lucky it didn't ignite the alcohol cleaning cartridge, or catch the rechargable battery on fire.
I received a new Braun 8995, the top of the line. It fixes every minor complaint I had with the old razor. It shaves much closer and quicker. It's quieter in operation, and the recharging base is quieter when it's self-cleaning. The new razor has knurled panels on the side, so it's easier to grip. And of course, software upgrades! The LCD panel has new information modes, full of useful and useless information.
One of the things that puzzled me is how the old razor prompted me periodically to replace the blades. I wondered how it knew if I replaced them promptly, it must have had some sort of timer or calendar, or an accumulative adder that totaled up all my shaving time. It could judge how much wear was on the blades, but it had no way to tell if I replaced them. I was sure I got out of sync when it took me a couple of weeks to locate replacement blades. But the new model has a button so you can reset the blade counter after replacement.
When I considered how much microprocessor power is inside the little shaver, I wondered why it doesn't have a clock. Of course it would be difficult to input a time with just one button, the design would be messed up with more buttons. But the Braun designers did take advantage of that computer power, it now displays the elapsed time of my last shave, possibly the most useless data the razor can measure.
My only complaint was that it took several weeks to get a replacement shipped. During that time, I had to use a regular blade razor. Once your face gets used to an electric, it takes some time to adjust back to razor blades and shaving cream. My skin hated it, but eventually I made the transition. And now that I have the new electric razor, I have to go through several weeks of adjusting back to the electric. Braun gives a 30 day money-back guarantee, since a lot of people would give up the first couple of days, after a few harsh shaves. But it gets better within 30 days.

Posted by Charles at 8:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I have previously written about troublesome Ginko trees on the University of Iowa campus, and how those nuisance trees were removed. But I was astonished when I walked past the site a few weeks ago, they planted new Ginko trees in the very same spots. It appears they planted male trees, so I guess this eliminates all the problems with the old female trees and their smelly seed pods. In a few years, the trees will mature and look just like they used to, without the disadvantages.

Posted by Charles at 2:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Lately bloggers have been going crazy for new Japanese pens. Online vendors started importing Japanese pens so now they're easy to get, so everyone is debating which pen is best for their purposes. Dan Sanderson over at BrainLog wrote about how he accidentally ordered a Uniball Signo Bit 0.18mm gel pen instead of the 0.28mm pen he wanted. I jokingly told him I've been dying to test the 0.18mm pens so if he wanted to get rid of it, I'd take it off his hands. So he sent it to me, and I've been playing around with it.



I think this is a great little pen, as long as you know what it's designed for. There's a competition amongst Japanese pen manufacturers to produce a pen with the finest tip, and the 0.18mm models are the latest and most popular products. They are popular with Japanese schoolkids, they pass notes to each other written in very tiny writing, so their eyeglass-wearing teachers can't read them. And I immediately noticed this effect, I not only have to wear my close-vision glasses to read what I write, I have to wear my glasses just to see what I'm writing.
I'm more of an aficionado of Japanese mechanical pencils, and I've tested out extremely fine-point pencils before. They're commonly used in drafting, but a 0.25mm lead is too fragile for everyday use, it breaks too easily. So I generally use a 0.5mm pencil like the Uniball Logo II 0.5mm. But a 0.25mm pencil is exceptionally useful for making tiny notes inline above a text, like furigana.
Dan described using the 0.18mm pen as like scratching the point of a pin across the paper, except it leaves ink behind. And that's part of the problem with tiny pens and pencils, the tip is so small, it can drag and catch on the fiber of the paper. The gel ink is designed to alleviate this problem somewhat, but it still works better on smooth, glossy paper. Most Japanese notebook paper is somewhat finer quality than US paper, so I guess this is less of a problem in Japan. I have a Japanese college ruled notebook, so I tested it out, and you can see in this enlargement, it's no problem to write two lines in the same vertical space you'd normally write one line.



Part of the problem in using a pen this small is that to write small, you must use exceptionally small muscle movements. This gives your tiny handwriting a shaky, unclear look. I have terrible handwriting anyway (as you can see from my sloppy sample above) but at even smaller sizes, it gets much worse. My Japanese handwriting is a little better, so I thought I'd try a tiny "invisible" note. It wasn't easy, it took me a few tries to write legibly at this size, so here's an example, it says "yomeru ka" ("can you read it?") and I've reproduced it at actual size, and highly enlarged. I definitely can not read the original without my eyeglasses.



You can use this enlargement for graphical effects. There's an old graphic artist's trick of writing extremely small and enlarging it dramatically. This gives the text an interesting, rough texture from the ink absorbing randomly into the paper fibers. I tried it out by writing my blog's title, I drew a "blueline," it's a special color of blue that can be easily removed from the final scan, but provides a guideline to keep your text straight. But this 0.18mm pen writes so small, the height of the text is barely as wide as the blueline.



Well that's a pleasant effect, but a little bit too blobby for practical use. Maybe if I wrote on smoother paper, it would look nicer. But my handwriting is so poor, I'm unlikely to improve on it. And there's the problem with this 0.18mm pen, it magnifies all the flaws in your writing, you have to wield the pen with exceptional skill. I'd rather use a small mechanical pencil, at least I can erase and redo it if I make a sloppy mistake. And I make lots of mistakes.
Ultimately, I can't recommend this 0.18mm pen for general use, it is rather specialized, but it is very good at the job it is intended for. The 0.28mm version might be better for general writing, but I don't have one to test, and some reviewers have complained that even the 0.38mm version is too fine. But if you need to write tiny notes, perhaps margin notes in a book, or furigana, this pen is the best I've ever used.
Is this the ultimate limit of pen technology? Of course not, there are finer pens like the Rapidograph 6x0 0.13mm pen, but it's a drafting pen, it clogs easily and requires constant maintenance. The Uniball gel ballpoint pens don't require any maintenance. So I am sure that smaller, finer ballpoints will be produced, I've already heard rumors of a 0.125mm pen. But just how fine a line do you really need? The 0.18mm is already so fine it is almost invisible.

Posted by Charles at 1:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Summer is over, and all I have to show for it are these stupid tan lines.

Posted by Charles at 6:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I went to the dentist the other day, I had my biannual checkup. I don't recall when I suddenly switched from an annual to a biannual schedule, it's definitely twice as expensive. But this appointment was good timing, I have a toothache.
The assistant took an x-ray of my sore molar, the same molar the dentist filled 6 months ago. I figured it was just sensitivity to the filling, but that should have faded over time, this was getting worse. Maybe I pulled the filling loose. But the dentist says he can find nothing wrong with my tooth. It may have a crack which would be almost impossible to see on an x-ray. If it persists, I can go see an endodontist, which will surely cost a packet of money. The dentist said I could wait and see if it would clear up, or get worse, it's not showing any signs it needs urgent intervention.
As I left the dentist, they gave me a little bag with a toothbrush, some toothpaste, and some floss. I didn't look too closely at the bag, it had a cute little tooth pattern on it. But then I got the bag home, emptied it out and set it on a white surface. The bag was transparent, I could see the pattern through both sides, and suddenly my toothache seemed a lot worse.

Posted by Charles at 7:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yes, I bought an iPhone the first week. Yes, I was mighty irritated when they cut the price $200. Then Apple announced a rebate, a $100 gift certificate to the Apple Store. I thought about it a minute, decided I was half-satisfied, and considered it a glass half full.
Then I thought about it a little longer. I realized that $100 of retail goods at the Apple store is likely to be around $50 wholesale cost, so Apple is covering my $200 loss with about $50 cash. The glass is only one-quarter full, I am now 75% dissatisfied.
I've been there plenty of times. I always tell people, if you want to know when Apple is going to drop prices on something, wait until I buy it. Apple always seems to cut prices right after I buy something. I remember buying my PowerMac 8100/110, I bought it the week it was introduced, figuring it would be a long time before a price cut. It took almost three months to deliver the machine, and they cut the price $300 before I ever received it. No, I didn't get my $300 back.
I've seen it from the dealer's side too, when I worked in computer sales. Customers would sometimes express their irritation when their computers dropped in price, and I would use almost the exact same spiel that Steve Jobs used in his rebate announcement.

There is always change and improvement, and there is always someone who bought a product before a particular cutoff date and misses the new price or the new operating system or the new whatever. This is life in the technology lane. If you always wait for the next price cut or to buy the new improved model, you'll never buy any technology product because there is always something better and less expensive on the horizon.

I would usually try to put it a little more diplomatically than that, but the last sentence is almost verbatim from Apple sales training, and has been conventional wisdom for decades. Most customers would accept this logic, but once in a while, you get a case that is so egregious that you have to do something about it.
I remember when I worked at ComputerLand, around 1985, one of my favorite customers came in just before closing time. She was a young woman with punky purple dyed hair, a college student on a low budget, she'd bought an Apple //c last Christmas. She was so happy with it, she scrimped and saved for months and now she wanted to buy two more computers, one for her boyfriend and one for her mom. I was pleased to help her, a salesman loves nothing more than a happy repeat customer. She paid cash, I loaded them in her car, and left the office for the day with a smile on my face.
The next morning, I arrived at the office and sipped my coffee while reading the morning updates from ComputerLand Headquarters. I was stunned, as of this morning, Apple dropped the retail price of the //c by $200, about 1/3 of the price of the machine. I'd just screwed my customer out of $400. I immediately talked to the store manager, he had the same reaction, "oh crap." We decided we had to find a way to fix this deal, and we better have it in place fast, before she called to complain about it.
Apple traditionally had price protection for dealers, so if inventory in the dealer's warehouse was devalued by a price cut, Apple would write a check for the difference in the wholesale price. But they offered no price protection to buyers. I figured that we should just void the sale from yesterday, so officially the computers would still be in our warehouse, and ComputerLand would get a check for the price protection. Then we would sell the computers to her with a new receipt dated today, at the new lower price. We'd be screwing Apple but they'd never know. Everyone would be happy.
Just as I was on the phone getting final approval from Headquarters to rewrite this deal, the store manager got a phone call.. from the customer's mother. The manager transferred the call to me, so I could look good by proposing the solution we'd already worked out. She said her daughter was so distraught when she heard the news of the price cut, she'd been crying inconsolably for the last two hours, she was so broken up she was unable to speak on the phone. I told her I was surprised and upset when I learned of the price cut, and I'd just spent the last two hours working on a solution, and I was just about to call her. I described the deal, and said her daughter should come in right away and I would take care of her.
Within an hour, the poor girl came in to the store, her eyes were puffy and red, she was still sobbing and crying, but trying to put on a brave face. I told her how upset I was when I heard the news, and that I'd worked hard to recover her money. And besides, you don't think I was the sort of person who would do this deliberately, now do you? If I'd known the price was going to drop, I wouldn't have sold them to you until the next day. She cracked a weak smile, but she was still sobbing.
So I refunded her money and voided the sale, then rewrote the sale on a new ticket dated today, and handed her 4 hundred-dollar bills from the till, the same bills she'd paid with yesterday. I apologized to her for any hard feelings, and said that despite the hassles, she should be happier than ever, since she ultimately paid far less than she ever expected. She said she was happy with how we'd resolved the problem, and thanked me for working on her behalf. But I wondered, why was she still crying?

Posted by Charles at 6:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It was windy so I thought I'd fly my kite, but the wind died down before I could get it in the air. I received this kite as a gift from the Hakodate Sports Kite Club in 1996, but I've never flown it since I brought it back to the US. It is a simple square kite, handmade from bamboo and hand painted in a traditional ukiyo-e design. The kite has a string across the top back to bend the leading edge into a curve for more lift. The string is covered with a flap of plastic tape, so when the wind is strong enough to lift the kite, it produces a menacing buzz.



The reason I never flew this kite is because I could not find the kite spool and rope tails, but now I found them and can assemble the kite. The rope is a light plastic fiber, the spool is made from wood dowels with a wonderful bamboo wrap, I guess that's for a better grip.



The wind picked up the next day for a bit, so I went out to fly the kite, without much success. The wind was inconstant, the kite needs a strong wind to get high enough to put the tails in the air. Until it gets high enough, it just swoops around and crashes. I tried adjusting the bridle, and managed to get it aloft and upright for about 5 seconds, then the wind gave out. But for a brief moment, it was going straight up, producing an aggressive buzzing sound, rising into the sky on its tails.
Update Sept. 14: I took the kite out every day for the last 3 days. Meteorologists predicted increasing winds, but they were never constant enough to keep the kite up. I figure it takes a constant 10mph wind to fly the kite, I got a few gusts higher than that, and the kite went up. Then it went down. It is easy to tell when you have enough wind, the kite buzzes.
But the kite is very unstable. I discovered it had 3 cross-ties that had to be pulled taut and tied, not just the one at the top. Now the whole kite has a more curved and aerodynamic shape. But still it's very hard to fly, until it gets high enough for the tails to weigh it down. Once it got about 20 feet off the ground, the kite flew straight up.

Posted by Charles at 1:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm quite pleased with my houseplant lately. I've grown it for three years and this is the first time it's really done anything. Here's a picture of my plant catching the last rays of the afternoon sun.



I grew this dieffenbachia plant from cuttings. This plant is also known as "dumb cane" and it grows in jointed segments like cane or bamboo. All you have to do is cut one segment and bury it in a pot and it will take root. But my plant didn't poke up through the soil for over a year. The next year, it hardly grew at all, it only produced a couple of scrawny leaves per stem. So I decided to repot it in new dirt, and it just exploded. Each of the 3 plants has leaves continuously coming in, it's growing so fast I have to keep rotating it towards the sun to keep it growing straight up. And it only took 3 years of tending to get to this point.

Posted by Charles at 7:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Merv Griffin is dead, another bloated Hollywood corpse has washed up on the beach. Merv's body will be rendered into fat and reformulated into a special lubricant used to grease palms in the TV business.
I don't have much reason to blog about my contempt for old farts like Merv, except that it is the only excuse I'll ever have to tell my Merv anecdote. I once met Merv face to face, and I laugh every time I think about it. Unfortunately, it is a moment in time and nobody ever understands the context anymore. But I figure somebody will get it and laugh.
A long time ago, maybe around the early 1970s, my family went on vacation to Miami to see the Orange Bowl. One morning, my sister I went out of our hotel and found the Orange Bowl Parade was about to start. We were trying to cross the road, we stood right at the corner but it was too late, the parade had started. The parade's lead car, a big Lincoln convertible, stopped right in front of us, close enough I could stand there and open the door. It had a big sign on the door, "Merv Griffin, Grand Marshall." I looked up and Merv was right there, close enough to me I could reach out and touch him. So I nudged my sister, and spoke loudly so that Merv would hear me, I know he heard me because he looked right at me, and ooh you should have seen the look on his face. I pointed right at Merv and I said, "hey look it's Irv Kupcinet!"

Posted by Charles at 7:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I'm going into the hospital for surgery in the morning. I've been seeing a doctor for a few weeks due to stomach pains, it turns out I've got gall stones, so I need to have my gall bladder removed. I went in today for another surgical consultation, I expected them to schedule it for a few weeks out, but the doctor said they had a cancellation so I might as well have it done tomorrow. This is rather sudden, but I guess it works out for the best, it gives me less time to worry about things.
I'm having a "lap chole" which is a minimally invasive surgery done with laparoscopic instruments. They say it will be all over in 90 minutes. I'm in pretty good physical condition (aside from my gall bladder) so I don't expect any complications. But then, nobody ever expects complications.
I was planning to write a lengthy story about my medical travails, but I was waiting for a definitive conclusion. And now it is upon me so suddenly, there's no time to write about it. So it will have to wait for later.
Update 1PM Tuesday: All done, feeling woozy and sore. Percocet is nice. Need rest.

Posted by Charles at 7:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I just received this threatening email from Rex Bruce of LACDA, the "Los Angeles Center for Digital Art"

From: Rex Bruce
Subject: Disinfotainment post, possible lawsuit

May 30, 2007

Charles Eicher

Dear Sir,

Please delete the "Disinfotainment" article regarding myself, our center and its practices from your blog. It is not accurate. Should you not remove it I will seek assistance through our lawyers. I will make a legal case against you, obtain a cease and desist order and will sue you for damages and legal costs. As well, any criminal charges which may be involved will also be reported and pursued.

This post will also be reflected as "abuse" to its respective host(s) who will be contacted and be held liable as allowed to the extent of applicable law. They may proceed against you with those remedies available to them in the interests of their protection.

Please respond within 48 hours.
Yours,

Rex Bruce
Director
Los Angeles Center For Digital Art
107 West Fifth Street
Los Angeles, CA 90013

And my response, sent via email:

I will not remove the article. I notified you of this article via email the day it was published, almost a year ago. It is too late to complain now.

Note: your email, and all further correspondence, will be posted to my weblog. Your attempt to suppress this article will only draw more attention to it.

        ----
Charles Eicher

Oh how many times have I heard this story before? It is the pathetic war cry of internet flamers and bullies, "you'll be hearing from my attorney!" And of course nothing will ever happen because the guy doesn't even have an attorney. This sort of hollow threat inspired the internet neologism "cartooney," denoting the imaginary attorney the flamer thinks he will hire to prosecute his lawsuit.
And it's obvious he has no attorney, no Member of the Bar would take such a ridiculous case, they would all universally advise Rex to just forget about it. Furthermore, if he had actually consulted an attorney before sending a threatening email, he would have received legal advice not to make those threats, which could be considered barratry, a criminal misdemeanor in California.
But I know how this scenario will play out, I've been through this before. Rex Bruce will attempt to shut down my website by sending a threatening email to my ISP's abuse desk. It won't work. Perhaps then he will actually consult a real attorney, who will advise him that he has no grounds for a lawsuit, I have committed no criminal acts and no civil torts. Even if he does manage to retain a lawyer licensed to practice in Iowa and he files a lawsuit in my jurisdiction (very unlikely) the best he can achieve is a Pyrrhic Victory.
So let me offer you some friendly advice, Rex. You are digging yourself into a deep hole. Stop digging, you're only getting in deeper. Your only winning strategy is to walk away.

Posted by Charles at 6:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

A few days ago, a friend invited me to go see a movie. As I headed out the door, I thought to myself, I should wear my new jacket. I found a really nice black Mossimo jacket at Target for just $25, it fit me perfectly and I thought I looked really great, not too dressy, not too casual. So I grabbed it from my closet, threw it on, and headed out the door.
My friend's reaction puzzled me, he said, "that's an interesting jacket, I've never seen you wear it before." I said, "sure you have, I wore it to your art opening a few weeks ago." I didn't think anything of it until I got home and hung it up, when I noticed the label. It wasn't my new jacket, it was an old Jimmy'Z jacket I bought in about 1983.
This wasn't just any jacket, it was part of a suit and pants set, Jimmy'Z's first and most infamous product, it made their reputation. The pants didn't have a zipper, or any fly at all, it fastened at the side with a velcro strap. It was a beachwear version of a conservative business suit, but cut very wide with big shoulder pads. I wore that suit constantly, the pants wore out but I kept wearing the jacket long after it was out of fashion. I haven't worn it for many years, but I couldn't bear to throw it out. I only grabbed it from my closet by accident.
I had an appointment for a haircut the next day, so I decided to wear it and ask for a second opinion from the women in the salon. I was vaguely hoping the jacket was so retro it was back in fashion again. But I got the same reaction, "that's an interesting jacket." I asked my haircutter for her opinion, she said, "well, it's too big and wide for you, it makes your head look tiny. It reminds me of the jacket David Byrne wore in the movie 'Stop Making Sense.'" Unfortunately, I knew exactly what she meant.

Posted by Charles at 12:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

It took months of painful, hard work to earn my latest sports trophy:



Update: I suppose I should know better than to post a "blind item" like this, now people are emailing me to ask what's in the X-Ray. The answer is: nothing. Absolutely nothing.
I've been jogging for a year and I developed some ankle problems. I went to the doctor and he sent me for an expensive X-Ray, it showed absolutely nothing. The doctor is baffled, I have to go back for more tests.
This is what galls me about working out to improve your fitness, sometimes you just end up trading one set of health problems for another. I've worked hard to get into shape, but after all those miles spent running, beating my feet on the pavement, I ended up with beat-up feet. And an expensive X-Ray. So this image is my little trophy.

Posted by Charles at 8:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by Charles at 12:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Recently I read a blog essay that collected bloggers' excuses for not having blogged lately. I have no excuse, I just haven't written anything lately. I haven't written anything for over two months, so all the content dropped off my front page.
I suppose it could be worse. The first blogging system I ever used had a stupid bug, if you didn't write anything for a month, all your links got corrupted and your blog crashed.
I am writing this entry primarily so there will be something on my blog other than a blank page. I have plenty of new stories, I just haven't written them down yet. If you're really desperate for something interesting to read, you can consult my archives.

Posted by Charles at 2:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last week, I found a stack of old business cards. As I scanned through the stack to see which ones I could discard, I saw the name of an old friend. I'd lost touch with David, so I decided to look him up on the internet. I was shocked to discover that David was a passenger on the first plane to crash into the World Trade Center on 9/11.
Here in the midwest, world events can seem so remote, involving nobody we know, perhaps we deliberately cultivate that feeling of remoteness, to isolate us from that horror. But the shock that I felt when I discovered this connection, thinking how my friend must have felt during the hijacking and that awful final moment, reminded me that no event is so distant from my life.

Posted by Charles at 12:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Oh what a lovely holiday. I live right across from the City Park, I had no idea it was the center of activity for the 4th of July festivities. I was living here last year on the 4th, but I don't recall anything going on.
But this year was quite different. Last night, I was treated to a 2 hour redneck suthern rawk concert by the Charlie Daniels Band. My home is the closest residential location to the concert. Even though my apartment is in the basement, facing away from the stage, my walls were shaking.
Oh but that was just the beginning. Tonight was the City's fireworks display. I've never been this close to a fireworks launch site before. It was kind of fun, although I was distracted just as the grand finale started, when a small riot started. About fifty local gangster-wannabees got into a fight, they chased their victims down the street and straight into my apartment building lobby. I tried to shut the front door to lock them all out, but my stupid neighbor, oblivious to what was happening right in front of her, pulled the door back open and let them all inside.
This is the final straw. If I ever needed a kick in the ass to remind me I need to get the hell out of this town, this was it.

Posted by Charles at 10:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This website has relocated to a new address. If you read this site with an RSS or Atom-enabled reader, you may not have noticed that you were forwarded to the new site, so you should manually update the bookmark now. For your convenience, here are links to the Atom and RSS 2.0 feeds:

Disinfotainment Atom Feed
Disinfotainment RSS 2.0 Feed

Posted by Charles at 1:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Disinfotainment is moving to a new webhost! Things are going to get a little messy around here, while I import the site and clean up the details. Some features will be broken for a while, but everything will be put back in place as soon as possible. We Apologize For The Inconvenience.
Update May 16, 2006: I think I have all the links fixed and all videos are up and running. I would appreciate hearing from anyone who can try the videos, and let me know how well they are working on the new webhost. Please leave a comment in reply to this message. Really, please please try some of the videos and let me know how well it works for you. I am working hard to upgrade the BlogTV system, to make it easier to view the videos, and to make it easier for me to prepare videos for the server. But if I get no reports on the quality of the streaming video services, I have no way to judge if the service is better or not. So leave a comment. Please.

Posted by Charles at 1:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Today I toured around Iowa City to see the tornado damage. Most of the city was completely unaffected, the weather was beautiful, the sun shining, and the trees just beginning to turn green. But the areas in the center of town were a bleak contrast, blasted by winds and torn to shreds.
I decided to visit my childhood home in the historic Woodlawn district. Iowa City was a planned community, the original State Capitol, and was designed around a broad boulevard, Iowa Avenue, that would stretch between the Capitol Building and the Governor's Mansion. This plan was copied after Washington DC, where the US Capitol and the White House are at opposite ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. The Iowa Capitol was moved to Des Moines before the Governor's Mansion was built, so Woodlawn was sold and many of the city's oldest homes were built there, many of them are nearly 150 years old.
This photograph shows the view down Iowa Avenue, you can just see the golden dome of the Old Capitol building in the center, and just to its left are the gothic spires of the old State Hospital. This is the view the entire city was built around.



This photograph was taken from the very spot where I would set off each morning to deliver newspapers on my paper route down Iowa Avenue. Each morning I would look down the tree-lined boulevard and look for the rising sun glinting off the dome, it would only be visible during the winter, and for a few weeks in the spring, before the tall trees spread their leaves and obscured the view. But the view never ever looked like this.
Nearly all the trees have been stripped from the boulevard. In their place, electric poles have been hastily erected to restore power to the damaged buildings. Almost all the old homes have blue tarps covering the massive holes in their roofs. Cranes were lifting piles of debris into huge dump trucks, I had to wait a while for them to pass before I could take an unobstructed photograph. Students were moving out of their damaged homes, their cars stuffed full of clothing and books. Just off camera to the left, a Red Cross truck was dispensing food and water to the local residents and emergency workers.
I walked up Woodlawn to see my old home, it was undamaged, but it was heartbreaking to see the 200 year old oak trees smashed to bits. I could not take any pictures, almost every direction was blocked by piles of debris stacked 6 feet tall. The 40 foot tall pine tree that stood outside my bedroom window was snapped off and only the bottom 10 feet remained. Almost every tree was smashed to bits, leaving only jagged stumps barely higher than the piles of debris.
I drove around the city but I could not approach the most damaged areas, the streets were blocked off. Highway Patrolmen were directing traffic down Burlington, the traffic lights were torn down. The most astonishing sight was Green Square Park, I saw an uprooted oak tree that was 6 feet in diameter, it pulled up a huge ball of soil 10 feet across.
The entire landscape of the center of Iowa City has been changed by the loss of the trees in the oldest section of town. I feel more acutely the loss of the natural landscape, than the loss of the houses. A house, even a historic 150 year old house, can be rebuilt quickly, but a 200 year old oak tree takes exactly 200 years to replace, if it even manages to survive that long. Many of these trees were here before any houses were built, the city grew around the trees. That circumstance will never happen again.

Posted by Charles at 6:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The hailstones were about 1/2 inch larger before I carried them inside.
Update: Tornado!
Update: Five Tornados! I'll post more info as soon as I can.

Posted by Charles at 8:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

The dead hardware saga continues, my PowerBook died. This is getting ridiculous, I've never had such a streak of bad luck. Even worse, it's embarrassing. It's like the old proverb of the cobbler whose children go barefoot. I'm the guy people call for help when their computers go bad, to have my own computer go bad is pitiful. It is especially pitiful considering the machine died due to an upgrade. This upgrade was supposed to improve performance, but now I have no performance, it won't even boot.
My PowerBook has been acting cranky ever since I installed a new 1Gb memory stick a few days ago. It ran much faster with the extra memory, but then suddenly, I saw the dreaded "kernel panic," and now my PowerBook won't boot.



Diagnostics said the hard drive is corrupted, most of the data is irretrievable. I used every technique I knew to repair the disk directory (and I know a lot of them, it used to be my job to recover damaged disks) but nothing worked. My disk is hosed, the data lost. Fortunately I don't use my PowerBook for anything really critical, it's my backup machine for light web surfing and email, so it's not a major disaster. But it is a major waste of time, having to reinstall and reconfigure it from scratch.
After wasting a whole day trying to resurrect my hard drive, I finally realized it might be a memory problem, so I ran the Apple Hardware Test disk, it proved the new memory stick is defective. I thought it might be the infamous Upper Memory Slot problem but my PowerBook isn't in the affected range of serial numbers. I tried installing the RAM in the lower slot, but it tests as defective in that slot as well. The memory module is definitely dead.
Curses to Other World Computing for shipping me a bad memory module that hosed my hard disk! They promised a lifetime advance replacement warranty, but that hardly compensates for hosing my hard disk. My machine will probably be OK now that I've removed the bad RAM, the hard drive is probably not permanently damaged, but I'll have to reformat my hard disk and reinstall the OS. And in a couple days I'll get a replacement module from OWC. But you can be damn sure I'm going to run hardware diagnostics to test the new RAM as soon as it's installed.
Update: I got the replacement RAM, it works properly this time. I reformatted the hard drive, installed everything from scratch, and my PowerBook is working well again. But it was a lot of wasted time and work that I didn't really need to go through at all.

Posted by Charles at 11:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I was surprised to receive an announcement of the 10 year reunion for my university's 1996 graduating class. It's not like a real reunion, it's just the annual Homecoming Week and football game, if I attended, it would be extremely unlikely that I'd encounter anyone I knew. But I was shocked by how fast 10 years passed and I am still stuck here in this town. Tempus fugit.

Posted by Charles at 3:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

My streak of dead electronic devices continues, my Braun electric razor died. As I contemplated the replacement of yet another expensive machine, I came to a realization: I am glad it died. My old Braun Synchro razor must be at least 10 years old, the battery wouldn't hold a charge anymore, and the motor was weak, and finally it completely stopped working. So I replaced it with the new Braun Activator with a self-cleaning base station. Oh boy is it nice, electric razor technology has come a long way in the last 10 years.
And that is what lead me to an epiphany about all this broken machinery. I usually buy expensive, top of the line products, under the assumption that quality products last longer and tend to be cheaper over the long term. But get a good return on your investment, you have to keep them a long time. All my recently-dead products lived a good long life, and proved me right. But there is one thing you don't get when you operate this way: the latest technology. And now it is obvious to me, I haven't really bought any serious new products in over a decade. So it is nice to get back up on top with shiny new machines, they work so much better than the old ones did (even when the old ones were new). I hope the new machines last as long as the old ones!

Posted by Charles at 11:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My beloved Sony SVR-2000 TiVo is dead. Well, not quite dead, but for all practical purposes, it's dead. The early Series 1 TiVos have a notorious problem, the modem circuit dies and then it can't phone home for program schedules. Without program schedules, it can't record the programs you want. Everything works except the modem, so it can still record and play back, it just doesn't know what to record or when to record it. So without a modem, a TiVo is totally useless.
Fortunately, there is a solution. Some TiVo hackers sell a circuit board you can add into the box, it gives you an ethernet port so you can get the program schedules directly over the internet. I've resisted making any upgrades to my TiVo since it was working fine, but I guess now I don't have any choice. I was hoping to make this machine last until the new HDTV TiVos shipped in a year or so, maybe I can do the repair and stretch it out a little longer. I really do not want to buy a new TiVo right now.
My TiVo only has 3 days of programming schedules left, so on Monday, I'll have to get on the phone, order the ethernet upgrade, and have it shipped overnight so I can get it installed before the schedules run out. What could possibly go wrong with that plan?

Posted by Charles at 11:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I have goosefoot. I have heard of pigeon toes and crow's feet, but I never heard of goosefoot. No, my foot doesn't resemble a goose's foot. Goosefoot is a condition named after a group of three tendons in the knee that vaguely resembles a goose's foot. It is more correctly known as Pes Anserinus Bursitis. And it hurts like hell!
The really stupid thing is, I did this to myself. I went power-walking for 30 minutes almost every day, without enough days off to allow my tendons to recover. So my knee tendons are inflamed and extremely painful even when I am sitting completely idle. Even worse, there is basically no treatment, there is not even any effective pain medication, I just have to grit my teeth and wait for it to subside on its own.
After finally getting an appointment an orthopedic specialist a mere two weeks after the intense pain began, I was informed that if I stay off my feet, I might be able to walk without pain in 6 to 8 weeks. I was also told that if my condition doesn't improve rapidly in a few more days (which is extremely unlikely) I'll have to be on crutches for a month or more. This totally sucks. And I have only myself to blame.

Posted by Charles at 1:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)