Spider Season

There's a William Shatner movie from the seventies in which a town is overrun with spiders. In typically bleak seventies style, the heroes lose: the haunting last shot of the movie is an overhead of the small town completely blanketed by the snow-white webs of the freakish arachnids.

Portland at this time of year is like the first reel of that movie. Spiders and their horrible webs are everywhere.

Yep, we're experiencing Spider Weather.

Set a glass of water down on the picnic table, and next time you pick it up for a sip there's a strand of webbing across the mouth of the glass. Set your bike against the fence and two minutes later it's a vital structural support for a bug-catching web.

Every single day I blunder through at least two webs, often ending up with a recently evicted and none too happy eight legged freak in my hair, or rampaging across the lenses of my glasses. Yesterday, my flailing reaction to this ocular horror sent spectacles and spider sailing from my head. Luckily, both found a soft landing on the welcome mat and the glasses didn't break.

As summer transitions to fall, nature will resolve the issue as it always does, sending the spiders back to wherever they go when it's too rainy to spin a nine foot web across my back yard.

I hope.

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Bossman in the Dunk Tank

 

I've been in management for eighteen months, give or take, but nothing has driven home (to me) my status as the boss as much as sitting in the dunk tank at the company picnic, watching wild-eyed employees heave softballs at the target that would put me in the drink.

It's just something I would never have done if I didn't feel like it was the right thing to do. It wasn't fun. There's the unpleasant expecation of the dunk with each thrown ball, then the always physically jarring dunk itself, and the shockingly cold water. The dunk tank machinery was broken, too, so the damn thing dumped me even when a thrower missed the target. Sometimes it dunked me even though no ball had been thrown. Irritating.

Although not an experience I enjoyed, I'm glad I did it.

A Good Day

Today was a good day. Nothing spectacular. Just a good day.

Barb made pancakes for breakfast. I had a brief but good phone conversation with Mark. We spent a couple of hours at the Adult Soapbox Derby at Mt. Tabor, seeing some friends we haven't seen in a while.

Elizabeth wouldn't nap, so I spent the afternoon doing some little 'nesting' chores, like putting up the spice-rack, setting up the microwave, and hanging a produce basket from the kitchen ceiling. In the evening the whole family did yard work until storytime. I got the second camellia pruned, which was extremely satisfying.

Nothing special, just a good day.

(Hot as a mo-fo, though.)

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Flagger Fail

I was amused by this flagger encountered at SE 11th and Hawthorne on my ride home from work today. She kept her STOP/SLOW sign upside down the whole time I was at the intersection, which was like ten minutes. Quite a lot of cyclists built up. I think the guy talking to her may have been her boss trying to figure out what the heck she was doing, because shortly after he showed up we were allowed to roll.

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Portland Signposts

Portland has got a very planned cityscape, which entails the creation and use of some pretty funky signs. I'll present more in the coming days (or weeks), but this one will do for starters.

Plus, this entire post, including the photo, are the product of my (disappointing; but that's a tale for a different post) Motorola Droid X.

Why couldn't there be a Motorola Droog?

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Updated: Typos edited out on the laptop.

The Smartphone Shortage Problem

You can't buy any of the latest generation of smartphones. Why is no one writing about this?

The HTC Incredible was introduced April 29, 2010. You still can't go into a store and buy one. Back ordered. Then comes the HTC Evo in early June. Can't buy one. Back ordered. Apple's iPhone 4 comes out June 24. Can I go into a store and buy one? No. Then in late June pre-orders for the Motorola Droid X are opened and within days Best Buy stops taking pre-orders because the first production run is sold out. Now after the handful that are shipped to Verizon stores on July 15 are sold, it, too, will be back ordered.

So the only "superphone" that one can currently buy is the Nexus One, which came out in January and is on the worst network in the country: T-Mobile. Wonderful.

But for certain reasons I'm feeling pretty desperate to get a family plan and get Mom and Barb and myself cell phones. And of course, because I am a technogeek and can afford it, I want a superphone. So I decide, "Fuck it, I'll get a last-generation smartphone -- the still-pretty-cool Motorola Droid." Got to Verizon's website, add the Droid to my cart, add a free phone to the cart for Barb, then go to find the bare-bones and perfect-for-honored-citizens Samsung Knack for Mom and guess what? The goddamn Knack, the most basic phone in existence, is currently sold out.

What is the deal? Is this a business strategy to keep people in a froth about the latest and greatest? Is it a sign that industry is pushing the boundaries of the technosphere so hard that the infrastructure of manufacturing is breaking down? Or are these companies so dumb that they time after time underestimate the demand for these very expensive products in this depressed economy?

God, I Hate Technology.

Let's start with the Zune HD I'm listening to right now (Carry the Zero by Built to Spill; my goodness, it's a beautiful song). I bought it for Barb last Christmas because she wanted a radio. Poor thing. She just wanted a radio, an FM radio to listen to KNRK and KOPB, etc. Given just this little bit of license ("I'd like a radio, please") I dug into the internet with the fury of a Viking attacking a hamlet of innocent Celtic fisherfolk.

I learned everything there was to know about latest-generation mp3 players, focusing specifically on the disadvantages of the monarchical iPod touch. I chose the mighty challenger, the Zune HD, which is a nice piece of kit, but frankly can't hold a candle to the iPod. Except, the iPod touch doesn't have an FM receiver. You've got to buy a docking station from Bose or someone else to get that. And if you want a decent one (e.g., a Bose) it adds three hundred bucks to the bottom line.

So that sucks. Apple offers the best product, but gimps it. Which seems weird, as their cheapy iPod nano has an FM receiver. Why not the bigger Touch? Oh yeah, because that's exactly Apple's business plan and it has made them the biggest tech company in the USA. That's why. They introduce very appealing products that have a short feature list. Then every year or two they add features, causing a frenzy of buying among their cultish fanbase.

Three or four years ago when I was looking for an mp3 player for myself I chose the Korean iRiver Clix over the American iPod Nano because the Clix had an FM receiver. And it was cheaper. And it had a voice recorder. And it didn't require proprietary software. Three or four years later Apple introduces a new Nano with, what do you know!, an FM tuner. Their business model is to inspire loyalty through fantastic design (they win in that category every time -- their products are beautiful), and then inspire their loyal fan base to trade in their products every year or two as they introduce new models with features that the originals should have had all along.

This business model irritates me enough so I don't want to ever buy an Apple product, even though they are indisputably awesome. I get a Clix, or a Zune, or a Gateway.

Now I want a smartphone. Bad. But screw Apple and it's effed-up iPhone!

Hollywood?

 

This looks like a still from a Hollywood disaster movie, but it's real. This isn't a news post, so I'm not reporting with any accuracy where it happened: Guatemala, if memory serves. Regardless, the image is striking, frightening, and apparently the very real result of subterranean waters creating a sinkhole.

Appearances

This guy J Allard (yeah, he goes by the affected name J without even a period) has been in the news a bit lately because he just quit or was fired from Microsoft, where he was a bigwig in the department that created the Xbox and the Zune (our family owns both of those products). He first came to my attention a few years back during the launch of the Xbox 360 because at some MTV event he infamously wore a sport coat over a hooded sweatshirt. Which seemed to most observers to be an absurd, maybe even pathetic, attempt to merge his middle-aged corporate self with a youthful-hipster image that MS desired in the person who would be pitching the Xbox 360.

The picture below is of J Allard as I've always known him: too-hip clothes and the shaved pate of a bald guy who doesn't want to appear to be a bald guy.


Kinda looks like a jerk. But whatever, he's a bigwig in the cutthroat world of consumer electronics. What do you expect?

Then I saw this picture, of J Allard before he got famous.


Besides leaving me with a vague feeling of depression, this contrast between the two pictures made me wonder whether this was a conscious decision on his part -- a midlife crisis, perhaps -- or direction from his people.

I imagine myself as the earlier J, a smiling goof in a plaid shirt (essentially what I am now), and then one of my bosses saying, "Andy, you need to spruce up the image a little bit. You're the face of the Xbox. Go to the mall. See what the kids are into, what they're wearing, what their hair is like. Try to skew a little younger."

And me thinking to myself, "I got it! A sportcoat over a hoodie!"

RIP, Beautiful Sue

My favorite in-law passed away. Suzanne Bracco was a sweet, gentle person whom I always enjoyed being with. I'll miss her.