Wed, January 7, 2004
Burnout, Baby, Burnout
We rant – you decide
Lately it's been very busy at the pH7 media compound, and I haven't had the time that I usually like to devote to writing down my little ideas. However, at this point the demand for new content has reached an uproar, so I'm going to have to do something I had hoped to avoid – show you the unfinished stuff. What follows is a series of unfinished columns that were set to go live sometime later in the month whenever I finally have time to work on them. A few are already dangerously out-of-date, but hey – that's what you love about me, right?
Anyway, here's what you do: take as long as you like to peruse the unfinished columns, then vote for which one you'd like to see finished first. Then I'll take the weekend and whip it into a fine specimen and everyone can enjoy it on Monday. Vote as often as you like, but I think the cookie restricts you to once an hour or something. (I coded it a long time ago, and I forget what I specified for the cookie lifetime. Those of you with multiple browsers or the ability to kill a cookie will have a distinct ballot-stuffing advantage.)
I'm breaking the columns up onto separate pages, just to emphasize the transitions between them, since they often stop rather abruptly. If clicking through the pages is distasteful to you, remember there's always the "printable" link at left. Enjoy!
Untitled
It is so damn hard to buy anything these days. Companies used to sell quality products, so you knew you were getting something good. They also used to make a few things, so that your choices were easier. Now, in a market where there are thirty different SUVs from ten car companies, we get lots of bad options instead of a few decent ones.
My trusty cordless phone died earlier this year, and I couldn't buy a new identical one because Sony doesn't make them any more. I couldn't just pick a company I trusted, because then I still have fifteen different phones to choose from and no idea how to tell them apart. Besides that, I've become accustomed to certain features, and it seems like no single phone incorporates all of them anymore. So, I settled for the next best thing – I painstakingly reviewed my tapes of Alias to figure out exactly which model Sydney Bristow uses, and bought that one. I'd always thought hers was attractive anyway. So far, it's served me well.
Now, this week I decided I need a waffle iron. This seems like a remarkably simple purchase but – whoa, ho! – it's not. I thought my demands were relatively simple. Nice, non-belgian waffles in a sturdy enclosure that's easy to wash. All I really care about is thickness and holes. (Easy...) I don't want mammoth, belgian-style waffles, and I want enough little dimples that I can fill 'em up with syrup just like I like. It turns out, this is a tall order. ...
Untitled
Last week, with the customary accompanying media fanfare, Roy Disney (nephew to Walt) stepped down from his position on the Board of Directors at the Walt Disney Company. He took advantage of the opportunity to level some criticisms against Chairman and CEO Michael Eisner. Stanley Gold, another board member, also resigned in criticism of Eisner. By today, Eisner appears to have sidestepped the possibility of his own demise, something predicted in the media after Roy Disney's announcement. But, I still say he's a stooge.
I don't claim to be an expert on the Disney Company, any more than I do on any other of the myriad topics on which I spew opinions, but I have to agree with Roy Disney that Eisner's leadership – while admirable at the start – has seemed to wander astray from the company's best interests lately. Again, I don't know anything, but if the media can draw a one-to-one relationship between the Disney Company's accomplishments in the last five years and those of Eisner himself, why shouldn't I? The scuttlebutt is that Eisner's micromanaging style and refusal to appoint a powerful second-in-command (since Michael Ovitz's disastrous and highly publicized departure) basically amount to him running the entire company himself anyway, so let's hold him accountable for it.
My first criticism is really the weakest: that Eisner has made Disney into a behemoth conglomerate superpower. From a business standpoint, this is not a bad thing at all. In a creative industry, however, it's important to maintain an image that can successfully overshadow the corporate side. ...
Master and Commander (Review)
Master and Commander is one of those movies that come along that I kind of think I might see but then I don't really pay much attention. It's like an epic event movie but without the hype. I'm somewhat removed from the hype these days since I watch TiVo instead of commercials, but still I usually know which movies have "buzz" and which don't. So, aside from "Entertainment Weekly"'s couple-page spread about it, I had heard strikingly little buzz about Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. I knew Russell Crowe was in it, but I was prepared to overlook that in favor of the Peter Weir/high seas epic angle.
I came out of Master and Commander not that much the wiser. I took a couple of days off before reviewing it in the hopes that once it "sunk in," I'd have a better idea of what it was. No such luck. Because it comes from a series of books (I'm assuming that's why we get the "Far Side of the World" sub-title, รก la The Lord of the Rings. Otherwise, this long title thing has got to stop!), it was hard to fear too greatly for the welfare of Captain Aubrey. If he starred in a whole series of books, it's unlikely that he died in the early ones. There were a few other characters that we met, but again somehow there seemed to be no real threat. I guess because the battle scenes were pretty isolated and most of the "action" was really strategy.
I was just thinking about Gary Larson the whole time. No, that's just a cheap joke. But I actually was thinking about a great movie from 1969 called Doppelganger. It's also known as Journey to the Far Side of the Sun and it stars Roy Thinnes of MST3K fame. Thinnes plays an astronaut who goes on a mission and returns earlier than he's supposed to. Earlier by half. His superiors are all furious because if he's back so soon it means he chickened out and didn't finish the mission. He's upset because he insists that he followed the plan and this is where he ended up. He's also furious because everything is flipped left-to-right. (You see, it turns out there's a "doppelganger" Earth on the far side of the sun, and we can't ever see it because the sun is in the way. Everything is exactly the same on the other planet, except it's a mirror image. So he hasn't returned... it's just that he and his counterpart arrived at each other's planets at the same time.) This leads to a lot of confusion and resentment, and Thinnes is put through tests to prove that he is telling the truth. One such test includes strapping him to a chair, showing him a printed sign, and asking him whether it is backwards or not. I swear I am not making this up. Thinnes, of course, is furious with his doppelganger wife, who doesn't understand him. For some reason, he believes for a really long time that the whole thing is a put-on. At home, in his bathroom, he gets irate at a cologne bottle with a backwards label and hurls it across the room. ...
A Day in Politics And one is just about enough!
[Blurb: With Howard Dean's penchant for "blogging," we may go from our first MBA president to our first slacker web-geek president. (Still, a slacker web-geek is better than an evil, murderous, lying thug – any day.)]
My job has to do with the Internet, and my little hobby (I'm referring to the page you're looking at right now) bears a nominal resemblance to what is known in the parlance of our times as "blogging." I resist categorization as a "blog" or "weblog" per se, because I think the word "blog" not only sounds like a noise your toilet makes when it's backed up, but it's also one of those buzzwords that has been adopted by dopes who want to sound hip and tech-savvy. The practice of serialized, semi-regular personal online publishing is extremely popular right now, and for some that means that they've "gotta get in on it!" Don't get me wrong, I have great respect for bloggers and their tightly knit (while widely dispersed) communities. There are many things about the practice and the style that I like, and when I decided to shift the focus my website toward writing, I picked up a lot of elements from blogging. However, there were some things that just didn't fit with the style that I envision for the site, and so I made some changes of my own. The point is, blogging is great, bloggers are great, but that doesn't mean everyone has to be a blogger. There are plenty of pursuits in which blogging would be useless or even downright counter-productive. But some see the craze as an unavoidable juggernaut – get blogging or get out of the way – with the apparent assumption that a website without a blog is tantamount to a rotary phone. Antiquated; forgettable; yesterday's news. So, I've been assigned to investigate the blogging culture and see what can be done to harness its awesome power.
Another cutesy little buzzword is "RSS Distribution." If you don't know what it means, that's fine; it's not important. There's plenty I don't know about shipbuilding, and I get by. If you're familiar with that cute little grey box on this site's homepage, you understand the basics of what RSS can do. It raises a little flag that says "I've posted something new, and here's a preview!" Just like the grey blurb box, but think of little flags being raised for you from all your favorite sites in one convenient place. Most blogging sites that are powered by blogging software automatically generate and RSS feed and this allows others to "subscribe" to the feed for notification of new content. Again, some see this as The Only Way the Web Will Be Surfed in the Future. I see it as a convenient tool for some, and that's about it. As it turns out, I read a handful of sites which publish RSS feeds, so when I launched my handy new RSS reader, it turned out to be convenient and kind of neat. And, since so many blog sites exist out there, it came with a hefty list of included sites which I could add to my personal list if I wanted. One or two have already become regular daily reads for me. (Wow! It works!) Another that I came across was the Howard Dean blog.
(If you were me, wouldn't you write the column and then come up with a title and a blurb? That's what I would do too, but I don't do it that way. That's why the title focuses on the direction I originally thought this column would go, the blurb refines it a bit more, and then the first two paragraphs veer off in a totally different direction. I'd revise my methods and write the blurb last, but now it just feels like part of the charm. Why ruin that?)
Much has been made of Dean's successes in organizing and mobilizing a grassroots movement. He (and, in this case, I believe we all agree that "he" refers to "his staff and strategy team") saw the potential of the Internet as a way to connect directly with the populace and rally support. It makes good sense. If you look at the 2000 election, the people voted for one thing, and the political system manifested a different result. I'm not going to bitch again about our fictitious, usurping president, but it's an uncontested fact that the majority of popular votes went to Al Gore. ...
Arrested Development (Review)
Only four episodes have aired and already I can't wait for the DVD...
Okay, I haven't gotten very far on that one yet. Some others that are in that germ stage include a column about "having a system," (i.e., liking things my way), which will feature a thesis on a very strong Rock, Paper, Scissors strategy that I came up with. Also on the menu is a possible article on how awesome I am at Taboo and/or No-Limit Texas Hold 'Em. Heh – maybe the Taboo strategy and the RPS strategy aren't so different.
Happy voting!
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