Archive for the ‘Rambling’ Category

"Thank you for calling Brighthouse Networks' help line. How may I help you?"

"Hi, I've been having problems connecting to certain web pages for four days now, and–"

"Have you rebooted your computer?"

"Yes, first thing. Also cleared my cache, deleted my cookies, reset my router, and flushed my DNS. None of it helped, but–"

"Please try rebooting your computer for me."

"But I did that."

"Not while I was on the phone with you, though."

"How is that different?"

"If I hear you do it, I can check it off my little script here."

"Even though it will have no useful outcome and will just waste both our times?"

"But it will have a useful outcome."

"What?"

"I'll be able to check it off my little script here."

Read the rest of this entry »

I like obvious names, I do. Why should I have to figure out your name in order to understand your product/service/intentions?

Along those lines, I'd like to see more businesses understand how their customers are likely to call them, and name themselves accordingly.

Example: there are three small Chinese restaurants within a few blocks of my dayjob: Great China, China Star, and China Village Restaurant. I have no idea which is which, and frankly I don't care. I prefer the one on the corner of Mason and Nova, and I'll bet most of their customers call them just that. So why not plan for it?

I'd like to see a chain of Chinese restaurants called "The Chinese Place," with names specific to the location. "The Chinese Place on 3rd." "The Chinese Place by the Airport." "The Chinese Place Over by the Italian Place." With variations as needed: "The Thai Place Over on Beachside," "The Hungarian Place by the Police Station, Over on District." Someone could even get cute with it and call their restaurant "The Chinese Place You Like So Much."

People would love the advertising and T-shirts. It would make the restaurant more a part of the community by anchoring it solidly to its surroundings. And there'd be no more need to remember which one is the Jade Garden (that you love) and which one is the Jade Palace (that had that bad fish that one time).

Same principle as the naming conventions for episodes of "Friends," which made perfect sense to me (i.e. "The One About Ross' Colonoscopy). It just makes things easier.

And now I want Chinese food.

Tiger Woods, gazillionaire golf star, has finally admitted to being a total skank and has quit golf indefinitely until all the bad jokes go away and he can come back. And I still don't care.

I don't follow golf, I don't make money from his endorsements, I'm not friends with him or his wife, I don't look to him for inspiration for my personal life. Why should I possibly care what he does, what he doesn't do, who he screws or who he screws over? If it was his wife fooling around on him, I still would not care. There is absolutely no reason for me to be interested in this train wreck of a situation, and I'm not.

What bothers me is, why is everyone else?

OK, this isn't my usual sort of post and I'm not trying to be Billy Mays here, but I bought something and tried it and it worked, and that's rare for me when cars are involved. Generally anything more intricate than adjusting the stereo volume bewilders me.

But my brother-in-law, who worked tirelessly — and a wee bit obsessively — to turn my newly bought cheap used car into something worth several times what I paid for it mentioned something I might consider trying on my old and yellowed headlight covers. And since he's spent hours fixing, tightening, or replacing most of the innards of my car for me, I figured I should take some initiative and do something that was supposed to take about 10 minutes. Because that's the kind of self-sacrificing guy I am.

Of course, me being me it took me about 25 minutes, but I didn't actually set fire to anything so I consider it a win.

Crystal View's Headlight Restorer actually freaking works. For about $20 (average retail price around my area) you get some sandpaper, some polishing cloths, some packets of polish and some packets of sealer and in about 5-10 minutes per headlight you get non-yellow, clear headlights. To the right is my car, before and then about a half hour after.

That's it. Not selling it, don't get commissions, and you'll get nothing extra If You Call Now. But if you've heard of this (or similar) stuff and was wondering if it worked, just wanted to let you know it does. Easily.

Adam Levermore, my "Save Hiatus" partner and the creator of such excellent artwork as the "How to Spot a Cylon" poster, the Serenity travel posters, various Can't Stop the Serenity artwork, the Little Damn Heroes designs and many more, just had his hard drive freeze up. With, naturally, a lot of irreplaceable artwork and working files still on it.

From his increasingly frantic tweets:

It's a Maxtor drive, w/ both USB and FireWire inputs. It's making a sound like a ticking wristwatch (both in terms of rhythm and volume)

One possible issue: Power requirement is 12V / 3A, but the supply that's connected is 12V / 2.5A. Could this be a contributing factor?

The sound doesn't change at all, regardless of whether I'm using the USB or the FireWire, or if neither is plugged in.

Finally, it's not making any sort of winding-up, spinning or whooshing noises I usually associate with a working hard drive.

HALP?

He's tried most of the urban legend fixes — freezing, etc — but he could really use the help or extremely discounted services of an experienced data-retrieval techie. Any fans out there with suggestions? Contact him or me if you can help out. Thanks!

Today marks the 40th anniversary of man's landing on the moon. I've been reading and watching a lot of testimonials from people who remember where they were, and what they were thinking, and I've been trying to remember my own reactions. I know I watched it; my dad brought me into the Florida room (in the south, a small room off to the side where the family hung out and kids played, as opposed to the living room, which was for company) and we watched it happen.

I guess. I was 4, and I can't say for sure I remember it.I've seen the footage so many times now that I can't separate that from my real memories.

I do remember the Apollo missions, though. I kept track of them, every one, and acted them out with my plastic Apollo rocket toy with real detachable lunar module and tiny plastic astronauts. And I never missed feeling a launch.

Not watching; I was usually in school when they went up. But the teachers would bring us all out to the playground and wait for the signal. And there, 80 miles north of Cape Kennedy, we saw a star leave the earth with its smoke trailing behind, and then we felt it. A rolling, powerful BOOM from the south that shook windows, pushed against our skin, and ripped through the trembling ground under our feet to let us know that once again, man had shoved the earth hard enough to get away for awhile.

Shuttle launches, while impressive, simply aren't on the same scale. Saw one go up last week, in fact, as we were driving in Oveido and we spotted it through the car windows. We didn't even pull over.

Landing on the moon was a triumph of intelligence, Commie paranoia, and bullheadedness that may never be equaled. But I hope we go back. And I hope there are more booms, to inspire our kids.

This should not come as a shock to anyone, really. But author Bev Vincent — male author Bev Vincent — was just told by an editor that "she" couldn't write convincing male characters.

Two years ago Vincent was asked to write for an anthology. He did so, a very personal story closely drawn from his life, and his editor went over it with him and produced a finished draft they both liked. The contract was signed. Then, just weeks before the anthology was supposed to go to press, it was handed to another editor who sent it back with lots of criticism… of this female writer.

The editor says: “The story seems far too personal, introspective and emotional for a man . . . It is hard to imagine a fellow from a place like [the setting] uttering the following line.” The editor then provides three sentences from my story as examples. He or she continues, “And I can’t think of many guys from [setting] who call home every Sunday afternoon to talk to their family” [Emphasis his or hers]. Another brilliant insight: “Most men don’t think deeply about the dewy greenness of nature.” The ultimate conclusion: “She [sic] needs to write more convincing [sic] from a man’s perspective.”

Don't know why the work was passed to a second editor, although I'd suspect office politics. But I'll bet had it been submitted under "Hank 'Beefy' McMann" those crits would never have been made.

Go read his story, and how it ended, and try to act surprised. I can't.

Wandering through Walmart today – in my defense, my power was out and I needed to kill time someplace full of colorful distractions and air conditioning – I found the next step in subscription begging: Buy a T-shirt, get a subscription.

A table full of Rolling Stone licensed shirts, with images from classic RS covers featuring Jimi Hendrix, U2, Run-DMC and more, plus a few with generic guitar and amplifier designs, were on sale for $10. And each one came with a card for a 12-issue subscription, about a half a year's worth. The magazines cost $4.50 apiece off the shelf, and here for the price of 2 of them you could get 12 plus a shirt! And the card was even postage-prepaid! How desperate do your circulation numbers have to be before you offer your print product as a sweetener to sell a shirt?

These came out last year on sale at Macy's for $42, which is more understandable, but now they're on a $10 table at Walmart (at least Macy's hasn't gone any lower than $14.99) and the subscription offer is still good.

Magazine subscriptions amaze me. I was a bit less impressed when I found out that you can get a year's worth of the Stone – 26 issues – for 15 bucks online (no shirt).  The reason why is obvious: most print products like magazines and newspapers make their money from advertising, and to get/keep those advertisers, they need to keep their circulation numbers nice and high. Actual subscription rates are proportionately a much smaller portion of their revenue. They just need you to help make a specific number nice and fat.

Which means if you need or want any magazine subscriptions at all, now's the time. Those deals you see where you can get 2 years of mags for, like, thirty cents and an aluminum can are probably true. Want Popular Science? Don't pay $47 to actually buy the things from a sweaty and possibly diseased retailer, send the company 10 bucks and allow them to mail them to you like a civilized person. Pay $192.50 for a year's worth of Entertainment Weekly? Are you mad? Send them a twenty and make them beg to serve you (may include weekend breakfasts in bed from B-list celebrities, in selected areas). A year of Time would be $277.20 were you foolish/brain-damaged enough to actually pay money for the wretched things, but twenty bucks will get you a subscription, a private guided tour of the juiciest scandals in D.C.  and the junior senator of your choice, to take home. Conde Nast will practically have sex with you if you'll subscribe to anything, dammit, anything.

So I bought a shirt for my son. And I'll send in the free subscription card. If I remember to.

The more alert readers may have noticed some small, subtle changes in the SerenityStuff website. A tiny change in the logo, a slight deepening of the color palette, the fact that it's gone completely…

Well, not gone. All of the posts are still here, but I've combined my other blog with it to create a new one, BashingInMinds.com. There's just not as much Serenity merchandise news these days as everyone involved in the movie has gone on to do more cool stuff and I'd like to talk about them as well. And other things of a geekish nature. So here we are, on the raggedly edge.

As you can see from the tag cloud over on the bottom of the sidebar, "serenitystuff" is still by far the biggest topic. Your old links should still work, the pre-existing RSS feed should still be the same, and with luck all this will mean is that you get to hear me talk more. I'll leave it to you as to whether that's a good thing or not…

Expect some further site changes as I continue to play with this and integrate everything more fully — there's a lot of stuff here. If you're only familiar with my Serenity pimping, welcome! I also write, essays and stories and bad poetry and parodies, and you'll find many years worth here. If you came here looking for cabridges.com or chrisbridges.com, my site serenitystuff.com about merchandise by and for Browncoats has just been folded in (and those old links and RSS feeds will still work as well).

I hope you'll hang around. There's a lot to talk about…

@minnesotian > Hey, how's everybody doing? Temp's dropping like a rock here.

@heapless_in_seattle > Here, too. No bright, fluffy snow, just slush slush slush.

@bostonbeaner > Snow's five feet deep. I'm kinda trapped at the moment.

@cabridges > Hi from Florida! Supposed to get cold this week here, not looking forward to it.

@heapless_in_seattle > How cold?

@cabridges > Down in the 40s, maybe 30s. You know what it's like, having to deal with that?

@bostonbeaner > Um…

@heapless_in_seattle > Um…

@minnesotian > Running out of food, really don't want to go out in that. It's snowing sideways.

@bostonbeaner > The dog was just out for 30 seconds tops, and all his whiskers broke off.

@minnesotian > Ow! Poor thing.

@bostonbeaner > He's huddled by the fireplace now. I think part of his brain may have frozen.

@heapless_in_seattle > Try holding his head in warm water, thaw it gently.

@heapless_in_seattle > With his nose and mouth OUT! boston? boston?

@bostonbeaner > He's OK, I think. He just keeps wandering in tight circles. We're supposed to get three more feet of snow tonight.

@cabridges > Just came back from walking my dogs around the park. Getting serious, I think, I'm going to have to consider putting on a long-sleeve shirt if this keeps up.

@bostonbeaner > Mom just came back inside, car wouldn't start. Looking around kitchen for food.

@minnesotian > Really getting cold, now. Wind is blowing and I think the carport just went over.

@heapless_in_seattle > hey guys? I can't see out of the windows anymore.

@minnesotian > So cold, so cold. Fingers burning. Mom breaking up computer desk for wood.

@bostonbeaner > No food. Thawing frozen tree branches we can reach from the upstairs window for the leaf sap.

@minnesotian > Boston? How attached are you to your dog? I mean, meat's meat, and if the dog is brain-damaged anyway…

@cabridges > This is agony. I actually had to dig out my hoodie and wear it this morning with my shorts. Back up in the 60s by lunch, though, so walking to the deli was no prob. Roast beast sub! NOM NOM NOM…

@heapless_in_seattle > Neighbors banding together for protection against lower east side gangs. I'm the 2-3am lookout for our apartment building. Killed a man yesterday, got 1/2 a Snickers bar.

@bostonbeaner > Cuddlebear will keep us alive for another week, with luck. Good dog. Good dog.

@minnesotian > Front door doorknob just broke in my hand. Entire house frame is frozen solid, starting to crack from the weight of the roof. May God have mercy on our souls.

@bostonbeaner > So sleepy. I'm warm when I sleep.

@cabridges > Just posted pics of our day at the beach. Little chilly to swim, but we did anyway. Can't wait for the warm weather to come back, you know? Guys? Guys?