Dogs are cool.

Just woke up from a dream in which I was trying to decide which book to buy next to read on my Kindle (I had been doing so in real life about 3 days ago). Was considering Dave Eggers' You Shall Know Our Velocity!, which, in my dream, was described as the story of a dog who is adopted towards the end of his life by a new owner. The dog wants "You Shall Know Our Velocity" to be inscribed on his tombstone, and needs to find a way to communicate this desire to his human companion. It is very important.

You'd read that book, right? I would read that book. I'll probably read the book Eggers actually wrote, too, but can someone please begin writing the book with the dog immediately?

Review: Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream

Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream by H.G. Bissinger

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



Having seen so much of the film output that this book inspired, I expected this book to feel stale, somehow. Not. At. All. I wish I'd read it years ago, but it's no less gripping now.



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a milestone

I started pwnthesat.com exactly one year ago, tomorrow. Right now, the pace of traffic is such that on the page's one year anniversary, it'll pass the 100k all-time views mark. And that's just for the main blog. If you count all the traffic at qa.pwnthesat.com (which is harder to track because of how Tumblr works) that mark was passed a long time ago.

I realize that's small potatoes for a lot of bloggers out there, but I've had a lot of blogs, (notably this one, and the music blog that I toiled away at for years but whose name turned out to be a self fulfilling prophecy) that still haven't reached that milestone. So for me, it's a big deal. I'm really proud of what the PWN the SAT has become, and I look forward to continuing to refine it.

Also, I've missed writing here. I'll probably fail at this, but I hope to get back in the habit of posting here. I've really been enjoying my work at The New School, for instance. Maybe I'll talk about that.

Check out this epic voicemail I received this morning.

What do you think? Should I call him back? He sounds pretty legit.

UPDATE:

I got another a few hours later. It's clearly a scam, and now I'm motivated to put more information up here in case others are experiencing the same.

The calls are coming in from (817) 400-7605, but that's probably a spoofed number and I'm sure they're really coming from overseas. If these guys call you, just ignore them. If you happen to pick up, I dunno, maybe pretend you're a cop? I think that's what I'm going to do if they call me again.

I rule at laser tag.

There's actually a lot going on in my life right now, despite the utter disregard I've displayed for updating this blog lately. Those of you who know me in real life probably already know that although I'm still doing some SAT teaching, I've stepped down from my director role to allow me to head back to school this fall. I'm super pumped about that.

You might have wondered, also, about the "new project" I referred to in my last post about all the javascript I threw together in an amateurish way. I've been trying to put together a web resource for kids who want to study for the SAT on their own, and it's now built out enough that I'm not embarrassed to share it with you. I don't imagine many of you are studying for the SAT yourselves, but if you know someone who is, send them my way.

Neither of those are the reasons I sat down to type this update, though. I got motivated to say "hello" again because I just found evidence of one of the greatest feats I've ever accomplished, and I wanted to post it here before I lose it again:

One day in 2006, I went to Laser Quest with my family and played three games. AND I CAME IN FIRST PLACE ALL THREE TIMES. I am a laser tag master. Read 'em and weep.

JavaScript, Google Spreadsheets, and Ultimate Victory

I like a project now and then. So the other day, I decided I was going to try to save myself some time on this new blog I've been working on. Three days of Googling, reverse-engineering code, and muttering cusswords in my sleep later, I will now be able to save a few seconds every time I make a post there.

The problem:
I wanted certain words to link directly to a dictionary every time they appear with a special link color, and I didn't want to take the time to go to the dictionary myself every time, copy a link, paste it into Blogger, and set the special link class myself.

The solution:
This is so stupid, but since it's a Blogger-hosted blog with no hosting of its own, I couldn't do any backend work. So I decided instead that I wanted to make a list of the target words in Google Spreadsheets (easy to access, easy to maintain), and create a JavaScript that would access that list every time the page loads, find the target words, and replace them with links to searches for those words in Google's own dictionary. That is to say, I wanted the script to change "pusillanimous" to "pusillanimous" when it found it on the page.

Stinklines

In college, my friend Joe and I had a pretty good way of coping with annoying classmates (the ones who would waste the time of everyone else in class by talking out of turn and trying to get into pissing matches with the professor). We'd draw them (or, stick figure versions of them), and then draw wavy lines emanating from all the places stink could possibly come from on a person. Armpits, feet, butt, mouth, etc. It was good fun, and we still occasionally reference Stinklines #2 or Stinklines #4 when we get together.

I've just started doing some post-bacc work at City College of New York to ease myself back into academia and to shore up some holes in my undergrad work as I'm applying to grad schools, and while I've only had three days of classes so far, I'm really enjoying it. Really and truly. I had no idea how much I've missed learning. It's funny because I've spent so much of the last few years teaching kids SAT strategies, so I'm in classrooms a lot, but I totally forgot how great it is to be in the seats, instead of at the front. I have not missed, however, being in a lecture of 300 people and discovering that 2 rows behind me, there is a Stinklines.

My microeconomics professor tried to illustrate a point today about impure public goods by asking us to imagine a system by which, instead of countless umbrella vendors taking to the streets when it rains in NYC and countless hapless New Yorkers buying cheap umbrellas with a 10 minute lifespan, there were simply buckets of umbrellas at the door of every building in New York. Umbrellas would become essentially valueless. Nice job professor, point made.

No. Wait. Someone behind me wants to argue that such a system wouldn't work! She says, in increasingly exasperated tones, as though she's impatiently explaining something to a child, that people are lazy, and would just keep the umbrellas instead of dropping them in the buckets. Duh! No amount of explaining from the professor that it's a simplified example to illustrate a point will do. She is steadfast; she will accept no further explanation. Such a system is deeply flawed. It's ridiculous. She knows. She is a Stinklines.

A Stinklines will not back down once she's begun. She operates as if the only way she'll be satisfied is if she's able to extract an apology from the professor for ever saying something so silly in the first place. She knows only her own concrete reality, and will not suffer others who might see the world differently. She is smarter than the professor, and in reality should be teaching the class herself.

Lest you think I'm intolerant, I feel I should clarify what a Stinklines is not. He is not just someone who speaks up a lot in class. Questions are wonderful and encouraged, and often I was wondering about the same thing myself. He's not even someone who argues with the professor occasionally.

A Stinklines is a person who argues without thinking critically, so convinced is he of his righteousness, about minutae usually only tangentially related to the topic at hand. He sits in wait for the entire class period for the professor to say something he finds suspect, and pounces. He is almost always wrong. He is never convinced of this.

We speak in simplified terms because that's how we massage ideas in our minds. That's how we learn. High school physics students learn the principles of Newtonian physics and how to apply them in frictionless vacuums, even though real life scenarios are anything but. Students of philosophy perform thought experiments in theoretical constructs that could never in a million years exist. In the same economics class, we operate under the fictional universe in which all economic actors make fully-informed decisions motivated by self-interest 100% of the time. But a Stinklines thinks it's really necessary to argue about the viability of a free umbrella exchange system in New York City.

What a pain it is to cancel an eFax subcription.

I know I kinda ask for this kind of treatment by seeking out a free trial of a service that I plan to use once and then cancel, but I just tried to cancel my membership to eFax and I'm wishing I never got involved with them in the first place.

You know you're into something shitty when there's no "Cancel My Account" option in the "My Account" section of the site:

You know you're into something even shittier than you thought when you go to the FAQ section of the site, find that one of the most frequently asked questions is about how to cancel your account, and find that the answer is to chat live online with a customer service representative. And when you click the link to do so, you find this:

Not only is the image broken there, the link is too. Click it all damn day. It won't work.

I suppose I could get on the phone (and I still might have to), but since I hate talking to people I decided to look around for a back door to the chat.  I found one on the "Contact and Customer Service" page:

And then I had the following conversation (Note: I did not actually buy a fax machine as I indicated in my reason for leaving; I just thought that would be the option least likely to prompt a save response offering me a discount -- I was wrong).

Please wait for a site operator to respond. You are currently number 1 of 1 in the queue. Thank you for your patience. You are now chatting with 'Matthew' Matthew: Welcome to our sales chat. How may I help you? Mike: Hello, I'm trying to cancel my eFax membership Matthew: You have clicked on “Live Sales Chat” and have reached the sales department. We are only able to setup new accounts and have very limited access to existing accounts. If you need to cancel, we have a special support team to take care of that.  Matthew: www.efax.com/cancel  Mike: The link to access that chat is broken Please wait while I transfer the chat to 'Beth C.'. You are now chatting with 'Beth C.' Beth C.: Hello, Mike. Welcome to eFax online support. I am Beth, your online Live Support Representative. How are you doing today?   Mike: I'm trying to cancel my eFax account, and the link to do so directly is broken Beth C.: I will be glad to assist you with the cancellation request via this chat session. Would you like to proceed? Mike: Yes, thank you. Beth C.: Could you please provide me your fax number, registered email address and billing zip code for verification? Mike: 1718*******, ************@gmail.com, ***** Beth C.: Thank you for providing your information. Please give me a moment while I pull up your account.  Beth C.: In the meantime, please type the number corresponding to your reason for cancellation: Beth C.: 1) Moving to another provider Beth C.: 2) Bought a fax machine Beth C.: 3) Business or role changed Beth C.: 4) Short term project completed Beth C.: 5) Financial reasons Beth C.: 6) Problems with faxing or billing Beth C.: 7) Dissatisfied with quality of service Beth C.: 8) Too costly Mike: 2 Beth C.: Mike, as we'd like to keep your business, I can offer you a plan that will let you keep your eFax service for just 14 cents a day.  Beth C.: You make one annual payment of just $50 and pay nothing more unless you exceed 30 pages per month. Extra pages are just 15 cents. This deal won't be available once your account is closed. Can I switch you to this savings plan which lets you keep your fax number for just 14 cents a day? Mike: no thank you, I just want to close the account. Beth C.: OK, I will go ahead and cancel your account. Beth C.: Is there anything else, I may assist you with? Mike: no, that's all, thank you Mike: is there a confirmation number? Beth C.: Sure. An email confirmation will be sent at your registered email address. Beth C.: Thank you for contacting eFax online support. I hope you found our session helpful. Goodbye and take care.  Mike: thank you. Chat session has been terminated by the site operator.

Of course, I still haven't received my confirmation about an hour later, and I have been back to the site to make these screenshots (including accessing the "My Account" page) since that conversation. At this point I'm doubtful that eFax has any intention of allowing me to cancel my account without actually getting on the phone and talking to someone.

It's not a really big deal, obviously. I've got the time to do it. But I can imagine there are plenty of people who don't, and who therefore let a few $16.95 monthly bills pile up for a service they don't use before they finally get around to navigating this system.

Really makes me think I should have just found a local place and spent the $0.30 it probably would have cost me to send the one fax I've needed to send in years.

I've done a little Googling since I wrote this all down, because I was feeling guilty about posting this only an hour after the fact, and thinking that maybe I should give the poor folks at eFax a break. Turns out, of course, I'm not the only one who's had a problem. Conclusion: F these guys. Don't get involved with them.




***UPDATE***
In the end, I did get a confirmation email about 3.5 hours after I posted this. So, in fairness to Beth C., she was good for her word. The whole process still left me feeling resentful, though.

The first week of the new year brings...

1. Coffee-related inspiration. I've been putting chocolate milk and cayenne pepper in my coffee for the past week or so, instead of milk and sugar. Pros: a lasting spicy tingle, less sugar.  Cons: I've become a bit obsessed, so I'm back to two cups a day from zero cups a day a few weeks ago.
2. Some good documentary viewing.  Amy and I watched Banksy's Exit Through the Gift Shop via Netflix a couple days ago and I know it's been out for a while but it blew me away.  Then yesterday we went to see Inside Job, which is about our current economic armaggeddon, and you must see it. Trailer at the top.
3. Free time.  I stepped down from my job at the end of the year, so although I'll still be doing a ton of teaching in the new year, that's mostly at night and on the weekends, and my weekdays are free.  I'm using my newfound downtime to apply to grad school, look for jobs, get back in shape, and remain stagnantly horrible at Halo: Reach.

Dyker Lights, 2010

We made the annual trip down the road to Dyker Lights last night, which, if you don't know, is what they call it when a bunch of houses in Dyker Heights (in Brooklyn, between 83rd and 86th streets and 13th and 11th Avenues) pay decoration companies to make their houses look like Christmas in Disney Land. I'm being snarky, but it's truly awesome, and we go every year. I love this shit.

This year I decided to take some pictures, because although you see tons of people there with cameras, good pictures of the magic are hard to come by online. I regret to say they still will be, because I'm a terrible photographer. Still, here's what I've got:

This house is actually on 14th Avenue and about 10 blocks north of the action, but I thought it was cool anyway.

I'm a terrible photographer because there's a huge Santa (more than 20 feet tall if he's an inch) and I failed to get him in the shot.

This is a topiary of a dancing bear; there are about five of them in this yard. I kept trying to get a good shot of them, and mostly failed.

The best shot of the dancing bears.

This Santa was moving. I'm pretty sure he was supposed to be waving, but it sorta looked like he was spanking this kid.

This bear (whose skin was falling off in places) was my favorite part of the whole thing.

Cr48(!)

I got home last night and noticed a suspicious package on the front porch of the house whose second floor I rent. It was addressed to me, from someone I didn't know. I spent a few moments wondering whether I had simply forgotten that I ordered something, then remembered that I had to pee, so I went inside.

I guess Google doesn't want to put its name in the return address because then a laptop-sized box might seem like a pretty good thing to steal. I opened the mysterious box to find one of these. I had applied to Google's Chrome OS Pilot Program a few days ago, and promptly forgotten about it since I figured there was no way I'd ever be selected. There was, it turns out, a way. Fist pump.

I've been making a conscious effort for months now to move all of the things to I do into the cloud, but after playing with the Cr48 for a few hours, it's clear to me that I'm not quite there yet. I don't, for example, have an online music provider that I like better than my obsessively curated collection. Grooveshark is pretty good for finding individual songs, and I like last.fm and Pandora for radio functionality, but I really still like to listen to whole records. I did just get an invite to Tubeify, which seems like it might be cool, but it still doesn't do exactly what I want. But I digress.

I'm so pumped to be able to play with this thing. I even took pictures of the whole business as I was unwrapping it, like they do on tech blogs, but it turns out my unboxing pictures are too embarrassing to actually post any of them, for a few reasons. They're blurry, you can see my disgusting couch in the background, and I cut my finger on the box when I got really excited as I realized what was inside, so there's blood on the packaging and the inserts. Corrugated cardboard papercuts are the worst.

Anyway, I'll let you know, after I've been using it for a while, if I have any success in moving myself further into the cloud.

Review: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I can't be the first person to say this since it's so deservedly well loved (and if I am the first then build a statue of me looking insightful), but I couldn't help thinking every time Eggers reminded me that he hadn't started masturbating until college that he was still making up for lost time throughout the writing of this book. I listened to the audiobook, narrated by a man named Dion Graham who was...marvelous. I loved the shit out of this.



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Quite necessarily scatalogical.

I've become obsessed with my advancing age (apologies to any reader older than me) -- of milestones marking time's incessant march.  I am constantly musing that things are different now than they were.  Of course, there are all the physical reminders.  The left side of my tongue feels weird most of the time...because I burned it?  Flexing this muscle this certain way always hurts.  My knees are completely intolerant of abuse.  I have done these things to myself; I am mostly inactive, but occasionally and unpredictably I am active enough to hurt myself, to teach myself again the lesson that I should take it easy.  But these physical twinges, now that I've overcome -- at least temporarily -- the obsessive worry that they mean I'm dying, aren't as interesting as the changes I notice on occasion about the way I interact with the world.  Cognitively, I'm very much not the same as I was.  Which is obvious when you come right out and say it, but which is precisely the sort of thing I can get really going on about after a drink, and which I'm compelled to give an example of here.

I stepped in shit last night on the sidewalk.  I saw my footprint in it this morning; I parked right next to it and stepped right out of my Yaris into shit.  Old, rubbery shit.  I tracked it into my apartment, oblivious, and proceeded to microwave a frozen dinner.  When I began to smell it, I cursed the garbage in the kitchen, which probably contained some old chicken packaging or something.  I lifted the lid, breath held, sealed the bag, and took it outside.  Then I came back inside, ate my food, and sat down to play Halo: Reach.  I won more completely than I ever have or probably ever will again.

But all the while, I kept smelling poop.  Between games I would sniff suspiciously, moving around the apartment to try to locate the source of the odor.  Did something die in the wall?  God, it smells awful everywhere.  What the fuck?  And eventually, I did find something on the floor of the living room: an offensive little ball that, when I picked it up barehanded (what the fuck?), did indeed smell like and was in fact shit.

Here's how I know I'm older now: I still didn't put it together.  I blamed my brother, or one of his friends, who had clearly tracked it in the day before, when I was staying at Amy's place.  Can you believe these people? I wondered aloud.  Still, even with the decroded piece of crap spirited away, my apartment was uninhabitable.  It was like I could taste it (indeed, I spent much of today still feeling as though I could smell it, as though it had penetrated my very being the night before).  And I continued to play, my performance suffering at the hands of extreme distraction.  I lit candles.  I opened a window.  It never occurred to me to remove my shoes.

I didn't actually figure it out until this morning, when I put on the same pants I had taken off the night before (so what?), and crossed my left leg to put a sock on.  There was shit all over my jeans.  Of course there was -- I sit cross-legged when I play, left leg on top of right shit-smeared foot.  Only then, confronted by incontrovertible evidence and after at least 30 seconds of processing time, did I understand.

I am older because it just didn't occur to me that I could have stepped in shit.  I haven't stepped in shit in years.  I don't remember what it feels like.  My memory hadn't even been jogged by the unmistakeable smell.  I spent all day in an office, probably taking no more than 30 steps out of doors all day long.  When I was growing up, I stepped in shit just about every day.  Barefoot, often.  (We didn't name our childhood Wiffle Ball diamond "Dog Doo Field" because of a generous sponsorship by electronic typewriter magnate Wendell Dogdoo.)  There was a time when I would have known instantly that I had stepped in shit.  Those days are, for the most part, behind me.  Because I'm old now, you see.

Buster, our beloved groundskeeper, in front of home plate.

Tough Guy

I gave someone the finger today in my car. I held it up proudly, wagged it back and forth a bit, slowly, like a wave. The gesticulatory (first I typed "gesticular" but apparently that's not a word) equivalent of a sing-song fuckyou. In fairness to me (for such displays are decidedly not my style -- I'm occasionally accused at work of being an "avoider"), my target fired first, and I was only imitating his own style with the slow wave. Let's back up a bit.

If you must drink such a revolting
amount of soda, please at least find a  
trash receptacle when you're done.

On the way to work this morning, I pulled up behind a black Chrysler 300 with his gas cap hanging off and was considering the best way to signal the driver to alert him when I watched a large big gulp cup fly from the driver's side window, right into the middle of 15th Avenue. Littering sends me into unspeakable rage. It's all I can do to resist ramming a car when I see the driver drop a gum wrapper out the window; I get apoplectic when I see a pedestrian toss an ATM receipt onto the sidewalk. And this...this was much worse. If the crime were measured simply by the size and weight of the refuse, we're talking orders of magnitude worse than a gum wrapper. Not to mention the relative biodegradability. And this was like 2 blocks from my house.  That's my neighborhood, man.  Cups go in cup holders until you can dispose of them properly. I decided to let his gas cap dangle.

I remained behind him on my way to the parkway, and a few minutes later I found myself sitting at a green light behind him, while he fiddled with his cell phone. So I honked. I let my Yaris's horn (not as intimidating as I'd have liked, but you go to war with the army you've got) express, shrilly, my displeasure for a good 3 seconds. I watched him look up at me in his rearview mirror, spite obvious on his face although I could only see a narrow slice of it in his mirror and much of that was obscured by dark glasses, and then came the wagging finger. Without thinking, and with a defiant grin, I returned it. He turned right, I went straight, and went about congratulating myself for such a macho display.

I turned right at the next light and found him sitting at the light waiting to go the same way I was. Apparently he gets to the highway by turning right then left one block earlier than I do. The intersection we were at is more complicated than your average one, from a traffic light standpoint, so we had plenty of time, with neither of us able to go anywhere, to just stare at each other. And man, he was huge. And mean looking. Bald. If you've seen The Wire, he looked a bit like Herc. Only bigger.

So then I spent about 60 seconds cursing myself for thinking I was a tough guy, trying not to look scared and surreptitiously locking my car door. And then the light turned green for him and he went, and then the line turned green for me and I did. And then I ended up right behind him in slow traffic on the Belt Parkway for a couple miles, vacillating between rage and fear. And then I came home 10 hours later and spent half an hour writing about it for no good reason.

Seventy-six cents

Amie Street, wonderful site though it was, is no longer*. Seriously. Go to amiestreet.com and you're now redirected to the Amazon MP3 store. Amazon, you see, was an early investor in Amie Street, so I guess they got the rights to the domain name when the company folded. I'm getting away from the point, though. The point is that Amie Street had a great model for independent artists to try to get some traction: all your songs started off free, and gradually increased in price as more and more people downloaded them. Users could recommend tracks to other users (and in doing so, could gain credit for themselves if their recommended songs climbed in value). It was a very cool idea and I'm sad that it didn't work.

Amie Street was also the only place I ever made any attempt to sell my own music.  Turns out the full market value of sulky, overly melodramatic and indulgent amateur pop songs is $0.76.  I know, because they sent it to me via PayPal the other day.  I'm pissed because I think that might put me into a higher tax bracket.

* Full disclosure: for a little while in 2007, Amie Street was paying me to write reviews of things in their catalog.  No, I never reviewed my own record.

Review: Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception

Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception by Charles Seife

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I liked this, but I was expecting to love it. I think, if I'm honest with myself, I wanted it to be more heavy-handed in its indictments of those whose faux-mathematical manipulations are the most egregiously misleading. It seemed to me that a few times Seife had his subjects by the balls, and let them get off with little more than a finger-wag.



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Review: Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman

Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman by Jon Krakauer

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Ultimately unsatisfying, because the truth is ultimately frustrating. Pat Tillman is a fascinating character, though. Read this to get to know him, not because you want to understand the circumstances of his death any better.



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What's that smell?

I was thinking the other day about how a lot of movies and tv shows have minor characters that exist basically to be curmudgeonly, and how often there'll be a very quick explanation of how or why said character got to be that way. Oh, don't mind Ed, he's been that way ever since his dog stole his wife, etc.

Anyway, I think a good backstory for a particularly sour character would be that he suffered a head injury in such a way that his olfactory system was thrown out of whack, and so he smells poop, constantly. Like that's his new baseline. It just always smells like poop. That'd put a pretty good-sized chip on your shoulder eventually, I'd bet.

Voodoo Bell

It seems silly to break a multi-month blog silence with something so trivial, but I'm pretty sure I just saw "Voodoo" Tatum (Aldis Hodge) from Friday Night Lights in a Taco Bell commercial.

I've been making my way back through Season 1 of the show with my girlfriend who hasn't seen it, so it's fresh, but it was funny that I had an instant reaction to a villain on screen, before I was able to figure out what villain I was reacting to.

Anyway...hi again.

File under: Things I'm not proud of.

Back in the day when I was working for the promotions department at WBRU Providence, I would on occasion be presented with the power to tell people to do ridiculous things in exchange for cash and prizes.  I was digging through some old backed up files the other day, and came across this primitively shot video of one such time. Needless to say, I was drunk on power. It consumed me.

The prize exchanged for the dreaded half-eyebrow-shave? A shovel and a chance to dig up prizes alongside a bunch of other maniacs in the annual Beach Dig (we called it 30 Grand in the Sand back then).