Six Hours in the Rain in Line…
August 29, 2009
… in West Roxbury, no less. The Community Center was the place to be. It was due to open at 9, and I’m told the line started forming at 2:30. Now, the Center is pretty cool, with its own Facebook page and all, but what made people wait for over six hours in the rain?
It was enrollment for courses. I arrived at the official opening time of 9am, hoping to be able to get my kids into a swimming class. It was convieniently timed and very reasonably priced. Unfortunately, I wasn’t the only person who thought that. Someone I know emerged from the center just after I arrived: she’d arrived at 3:30, and hadn’t been first in line. She wanted to make sure her kids got into their swim classes, since there are only 5 kids per class.
At that point, I called back to base and we decided that it would be silly to wait in a long line, with a significant chance that the kids swim classes would be full by the time I got to the front of it. I went back at 11 to find the place almost empty, save for a few people and some signs showing which classes were full. Swim classes were at the top of the list.
There are many consoling thoughts. I didn’t spend the rainy night in line, or waste much time in line at all. There are other swim classes in the area. I like some of the photos I got, such as the one of the chairs of the determined (see above), the one of the wet spot on the wall that looks like a dog (see Flickr), and the one of the sign that told me I could have purchased a ticket in a “jump the line” raffle for $10 (not posted).
Foaming About Phones
August 28, 2009
I currently have three phone numbers. I must confess that one is a landline. It’s on the same Verizon bill as our internet access. It’s pretty reliable, but seems expensive, and I doubt that we’ll have a landline after we move.
We recently got some voicemails from Verizon about voicemail. Apparently the system will soon be upgraded, and the upgrade will not be completely automatic for all customers: some manual intervention will be required.
I’m surprised that I haven’t heard about this upgrade from other sources. I can find nothing about it at Verizon.com. I’ve seen nothing about it in Boston media, although I should confess that I haven’t made a systematic search of either old or new local media.
My second number is for my cellphone, or was until my cellphone recently died. I use a T-Mobile prepaid plan. I previously posted about T-Mobile’s customer service, or lack thereof. My more recent experience is that service is pretty good once I get through to a human being, but that I have to provide my phone number an inordinate number of times before that happens.
My third number is on GrandCentral. It will become a Google Voice number if I am ever able to access it.
But I can’t access my GrandCentral number. I’ve forgotten my password. Attempts to reset it just lead back to a page that prompts for the very password I’ve forgotten.
While I’m not thrilled with the service I get from Verizon and T-Mobile, at least there is service. That’s more than can be said for GrandGoogle.
Stream of Keyboardness: UK
August 19, 2009
Has there ever been a better name for a political party than the Official Monster Raving Loony Party? Or a better name for a candidate than Screaming Lord Sutch?
Maybe the above is rather too British for most of my readers. But, dear readers, if you ever see a candidate named Loud Viscount Watson, it will probably be me. That is the only name under which I will ever run for political office.
I was reminded of the Loonies by Moody. Glyn of that ilk posted about the UK Pirate Party. Said pirates hold the radical notion that “when creative works are sold, it’s the artists who [should] benefit.”
Jobs in DC, Indeed
August 18, 2009
It’s looking more and more likely that we will be moving south so that my wife can take up a new job in Washington DC. I have mixed feelings about this.
It’s good news that Washington DC appears to be the best city in the USA in terms of job postings to unemployed people. My source is Indeed (via TechCrunch, where there are many comments pointing out ways in which the data may be misleading). Third on the list is nearby Baltimore. I have to like the data, and I like the graphic.
For those who are wondering about Boston, and why my feelings are mixed, I’ll add that Boston: is tenth on the Indeed list; and is positively balmy compared with DC. While the usually prolific Universal Adam can’t even finish his own post about how hot it is in Boston, it’s about 10 degrees hotter in DC. It’s almost a consolation that more thunderstorms are forecast for down there than for up here.
Short Link to Resume
August 14, 2009
WordPress.com now generates a shortlink for every post, as Matt announces and illustrates. It also generates a shortlink for every page. For example, this cute little URL will take you to my just-updated resume: http://wp.me/P36q6-ef.
This is good news, because the shortlinks will work as long as WordPress.com works: I think that’ll be a long time. I have less confidence in the longevity of small shortlink shops (such as tr.im, to which Matt refers in his post).
To conclude with a little buggy detail… The new feature shows up on the New Post page as a Get Shortlink button. When I clicked this button to get the URL, up popped a box with the shortlink nicely highlighted. So I used browser (Chrome) copy to paste it into a tweet, what actually got copied and pasted was the string “URL:”. I’ve dutifully reported this to wp.com support.
The Free Bestseller
August 3, 2009
The bestseller in question is Free: The Future of a Radical Price. It’s by Chris Anderson, whose earlier book, The Long Tail, I posted about a couple of years ago.
Chris recently posted that Free made the New York Times bestseller list (number 12 on the nonfiction charts, to be specific). That of course means that there have been rather a lot of copies of the book exchanged for money. People seem willing to pay money in order to read about things being available at a price of zero.
There are ways of obtaining Free itself for free, within limitations of time and space.
The ebook and web book will be free for a limited time and limited to certain geographic regions as determined by each national publisher; the unabridged audiobook will be available free forever, available in all regions.
Whereas the unabridged audiobook is free, the abridged audiobook isn’t. Audible.com presents a “time is money” argument for the abridged audiobook being worth $7.49: it gives you the good stuff in half the time (3 hours rather than 6).
This may arouse the suspicion that the full Free is padded. My experience has been that business books often are. On the other hand, I found The Long Tail to be a book with a book’s worth of book.
So I’m going to read Free. The questions are: when? in what form? at what price? In a sense, I started reading Free over a year ago. I also started writing about it: one of the more successful posts on this blog applies Chris’ framework about free to WordPress.com.
I expect that Free will come out in paperback some time next year, with a new chapter or afterword. At that point, I’ll probably buy the paperback, just as I bought The Long Tail paperback.
Hardback publication is seen as perhaps the major event in a book’s lifecycle. In terms of my reading of Free, it’s the halfway point in a process that spans more than two years. No, that’s not because I’m a slow reader. It’s because the two most interesting publication dates are that of the Wired article (in 2008) and of the paperback book (in 2010?).
In case it isn’t already obvious, I find the Free project interesting in many ways, including its subject matter and publication process. And I like those old-fashioned things that tend to cost money: books.
Newport Folk Saturday
August 2, 2009
We did go to the Newport Folk festival yesterday. I provided a Saturday sampler playlist in a previous post. Things went better than expected in some ways, worse in others, but the good far outweighed the bad.
We arrived during Billy Bragg’s set, having made great time from Boston to Newport, and then getting stuck in traffic for the last few miles. His banter/polemic, like his music, was a mixture of the traditional and the topical (or of the trad and the fad, as we sometimes say).
Billy made the traditional remark about the people who couldn’t afford tickets, and so had to watch from their boats. Then he added some kind words about sailboats, and their eco-friendliness, but reverted to traditional with some unkind words about jet-skis.
Next up were the Avett Brothers, for me the most must-catch act on a very strong lineup. They were tremendous. My video clip doesn’t come anywhere near doing them justice, but I include it hear because it does go some way toward capturing the weather and other aspects of the setting.
Neither the video nor the photo captures how hot it was. For reasons of sun and heat and son and daughter (almost 3, and 5 respectively) and of being on our way down to Philadelphia, we missed almost all of the remaining music. That means that I caught very little of Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. Even worse, I completely missed acts such as Fleet Foxes, Pete Seeger, Iron & Wine, and The Decemberists. Luckily, NPR captured some of The Decemberists’ set.
