Category: Personal

For a non-employed man who spends an awful lot of money on games, Adam Vandenberg sure talks big

Nick Hornby (and why do I always think there’s an S missing from his name?) has tended to write what might be called male romance novels (High Fidelity, About a Boy), stories about men and their modern lives, all arch, somewhat comic, and, except for the power of love, empty. This time out he’s strayed a bit off that path, which is good, don’t want to get repetitive, and written about a female version of his protagonist characters. I’ve quite enjoyed his other novels but feel he didn’t quite meet the mark with How to Be Good. I don’t think it’s just the gender change, though, but more that Hornby has apparently aimed at the Great Novel target and not hit it.

The title is square on to that purpose. Katie Carr is, to the eye of anyone except herself, a good person, a doctor, a wife, a mother. Okay, she starts out by having an affair but it’s brief and she realizes she’s done the wrong thing quite soon. In any case, she is married to an angry, bitter, unloving man named David. Quite literally, his job is writing a newspaper column called “The Angriest Man in Holloway,” and he never has a good word for anyone, even former friends and family, all of whom he’s managed to drive away (not counting his wife and young children). Then he meets DJ GoodNews, a man who is called that for no good reason he can explain, who lays his hands on David and somehow cures him of all the bile.

This is the key to Hornby’s purpose, turning normality and convention upside down, prompting David and daughter Molly to question the basic premises of suburban life. Why do we have a spare bedroom? Why do some people sleep in the street? Why are some classmates slow and, well, needing a good punch? David and GoodNews plot ways to change peoples’ attitudes, holding a neighborhood party to appeal for the use of spare bedrooms to house street kids, debating details for days to be put down on paper in the book they plan to call How to Be Good.

Everyman stand-in Katie, of course, is going bonkers over her inability to reconcile the feeling that David has gone over the edge but that maybe it’s her whose lost humanity. His questions are superficially straightforward (for example, why shouldn’t everyone donate any earnings over the national average to charities?) and impossible to answer without appearing selfish or uncaring or stupid. Even though she can’t put her finger on why, she is driven to her own edge, and finally surrenders to a life that is simply lived and not understood.

So far, so good. This, though, is where Hornby leaves the Great Novel approach vector and veers off into the Land of Not Quite. There are passages along the way that had me thinking the target was in view and would be reached in due time. He is in the end, though, unable to find an ending that teaches anything, that shows us something new, or even has left his characters wiser. One thinks, after reading Katie describe her surrender, that Hornby will find his way to a meaningful ending but he doesn’t. Perhaps he should have had the ending focus on Molly and her brother Tom, or Katie’s depressed loser of a brother Mark, but he doesn’t. I would recommend either of his other novels over this one, sorry.

If you check the California Lottery – SuperLotto Plus Draw Results (before 8:00 p.m. PST Saturday 4 May 2002), you will see that the winning numbers for last night’s draw were the oddly clustered set 39 40 45 46 47 Mega 11 and that one person won the top prize of $35 million. Unfortunately, that person was not me. I do have, however, one of 69,047 tickets with three matching numbers (but not the Mega) and have therefore won the estimable sum of $10. Homer says Woohoo! I will not reveal how much I have spent over the past few months to win this princely amount but let’s just say you ought to be on the floor laughing about this point.

Definitely an excursion into chick flick territory, Angelina Jolie takes a strange ride in Life or Something Like It and most men will enjoy the ride as well, even if she doesn’t show off her hot naked body. Edward Burns reminds me of someone here, another actor from years past, with the wisecracks and the big smiles, but I can’t quite put my finger on who. Tony Shalhoub is turning into one of the great character actors of our time (Men in Black, The Man Who Wasn’t There, TV’s Wings) and his streetcorner prophet sets Jolie off with his vision that she will die in less than a week. Since the first scene is Jolie on an operating table, the odds that she will seem reasonable. Then again, this is a Hollywood movie.

Director Stephen Herek does a much better job this time around than he did on last movie, Rock Star, getting strong performances and keeping the pace flowing. So does writer John Scott Shepherd, whose only previously produced script was last year’s Tim Allen clunker Joe Somebody, giving Burns a son as to foil his hard edge.

A big shout out to my homeboy Byron for making the movie and a terrific dinner at Don Giovanni my first birthday present of the year. For those of you still waiting, there are only four more shopping days until the Big Event.

Last year, one of the ‘cool things’ in the weblog world was “getting Scobelized.” This either meant reading Robert Scoble’s weblog or being mentioned in it, I can’t remember now, but everyone was mentioning it and the vibe only got more intense when he did the really interesting and far too short-lived Talking Moose weblog. I actually read and was mentioned in both and this website still get hits from a TM discussion forum message I posted, although I never claim to have been Scobelized.

Robert is generally cool guy, even if he is having a self-described midlife crisis, but he seems to have fallen into one of the Internet’s hidden traps and gotten himself NetFlixed. This word, which I am claiming right here and now to have coined myself, refers to falling in love with a service/company called NetFlix that seems to good to be true. Like most everything else in this life that seems to good to be true, NetFlix doesn’t measure up although it often takes afflicted individuals a few months to realize the trap in which they have been ensnared. I myself fell for it. I was able to break free from one side of the trap but am still occasionally afflicted by the other.

NetFlix, for the uninitiated, is a service that provides one with DVDs through the mail for a monthly subscription fee. There are several different levels of service but the main offering costs $19.95 and allows subscribers to have three DVDs out at any one time. Once you sign up, you build a list of wanted DVDs and they are sent to you with a pre-addressed, stamped mailer in which you return them. There is no limit on the length of time you can keep a DVD. However, the next disk on your list will not be sent until the company receives one back from you. The library is quite extensive and I went through it with gleeful abandon for awhile, using them as a way to see old films I’d never seen before and seeing others long before they got onto HBO or Showtime. The warehouse was (still is?) in San Jose so the turnaround time was very short. For months I was quite happy.

Until I hit the big problem, the one that cost them my business. Eventually your backlist has been viewed. You’ve seen every Hitchkock and Ford, all the Monty Python TV shows, every newish release. What you’re left with is a list that only gets added to when a new DVD is released. Instead of getting a real deal and watching 10-12 a month, you’re only seeing four or five and starting to question the cost. And some films on your list just never seem to get sent your way even though they’ve been on it for months and even though no others are being sent to you. This is simply because NetFlix actually only has a small quantity of some disks and whenever these do come back to stock someone else gets them first. Complain away, as I did, but it won’t help.

The other side is that NetFlix is a spammer. Maybe not directly, perhaps the unwanted mail comes through some associates or partner program. But come it does, at least a couple of times a week. And we all know that businesses that benefit from spam suck and should be punished. Severely! A minor problem is that the company requires you to let them set a cookie before accessing the site. If you won’t, all you can see is a page cleverly named entryTrap.html.

So Robert, enjoy the disks while you can. Perhaps some of the availability issues, which after all are only exacerbated when more people sign up, have been fixed in the year since I was a subscriber. I think, though, one day you’ll agree with me that you’ve been NetFlixed.

I just want one: Line6 Guitar Port Guitar/Computer Interface

Good thing about having 500 cable channels: Bravo’s series Musicians hosted by “Rolling Stone” Contributing Editor David Wild featured Elvis Costello tonight, presumably in support of his new record When I Was Cruel. You can see some decent streaming video featuring Tear Your Head Off from the new record. Ann and Nancy Wilson, Heart by another name, are the guests next Monday (10 p.m. PST).

Tear Your Head Off (It’s a Doll Revolution), which he performed with electric guitar and drum machine to emulate his home demo process, was from an attempt by Elvis last year to create a TV series. Didn’t quite make it to the fall schedule but he described a very subversive plot. Four women form a band and come to America to bankrupt the country. In every way! I noticed in this setup he was using a Line6 POD 2.0 effects system, very cool box, similar to the Line6 Flextone amp I use.

Picture Elvis sitting on a comfy chair onstage with the interviewer and an acoustic guitar. Takes something to just let loose and sing his songs just sitting there! Recounts his career, telling stories around the songs. Some of the performances: Allison, What’s So Funny About Peace, Love, and Understanding, Mystery Dance, Angels Wanna Wear My Red Shoes, Radio Radio. Closed out the show with an excellent electric version (bouncing bass on tape) of Watching the Detectives! The show barely covered his first few career years, could have gone on for a couple of hours more easily.

Check out Elvis’ music in the OLGA archive to get some guitar music and lyrics. And don’t miss Elvis hosting the “Elvis Costello Hour” on MTV2 Saturday May 4 at 10pm EST!

You know I love the egoboo! The non-virtual Indian newspaper Hindustan Times’ New Economy column QuiteATake linked to my February post on the Nigerian email scam back in March although today was the first time anyone clicked over to my site. Nice to see BillSaysThis get picked up and mentioned globally and professionally!

Blah blah blah. New paradigm. Find your inner blogger. Aim for the stars, hit for the fences. Yadda yadda yadda. Use the force, Luke. The check is in the mail. Location location location. There was a young man from Nantucket. I’ll pull out. Johnny B. Goode, some day your name will be in lights. Stuck between a rock and a hard place. Vote for the honest politician.

You scratch my back, I’ll scratch your’s. Why, God, why? I feel your pain. The truth is out there. Clapton is God. Elvis has left the building. The proof is in the pudding. How can I believe you when your hand is in her pants? Don’t give up on us baby. I love you. Keep your tongue in your own mouth. Hands off. Denial is a river in Egypt. I wanna hold your hand. Lay lady lay.

Baby we were born to run.

A tall brown horse clops along, half on the shoulder,

Half on the narrow road in front of a row of tall

Trees. Behind them stand houses and wide green lawns

Drinking in the afternoon sunshine, dimensions sprawling,

Organic fields nearby growing fruits.

The rider wears a tan leather coat over blue jeans and

Black, irridescent boots, curly hair spilling down shoulders,

Smiling as she looks back to her trotting dog. One hundred

chanting pilgrims sit in the field the rider comes abreast of,

lifting their voices to praise the living universe.

My coffee cup is jostled by cracks in the old pavement

As we ride up and down the soft hills surrounded by

Mansions of the wealthy but no hot coffee comes out and over.

Fortunate for me as brown does not go at all well with the

Sky blue shirt I’m wearing, new today.

I thought this was some kind of secretly filmed biography of me. At least that’s what my girlfriend said. Turned out to be one of the latest heavy duty British crime dramas featuring Ben Kingsley as a bad guy to whom no one, even other bad guys, want to say no. Sexy Beast is Gal (Ray Winstone), a retired Brit criminal living in the beautifully sunny south of Spain with a hottie former porn star wife, who gets recruited by Kingsley for a bank vault ripoff led by the even more psychotic Teddy (Ian McShane).

The film easily divides into two acts, Gal’s recruitment in Spain and the job back in London, which have little to do with each other and have Gal as the only character in common. This is the first filmed directed by Jonathon Glazer and the first (produced) screenplay by Louis Mellis and David Scinto and is remarkable more for the performances by the three actors mentioned here than anything else. Avoid it if you have a problem with heavy English accents or expect more in the way of plot.

Furious Kevin Fox writes about The Good of Targeted Advertising today and makes a not unreasonable point about banner ads. More importantly, though, he coins the phrase “private as in…” similar to the open source “free as in…” which ought to be the next major web meme. This is crucial to ensuring the web remains a useful medium and does not degenerate into a complete pit of marketing crap. Here is his full explanation:

“The Open Source movement makes a distinction in the term ‘free’. They note the difference between “free as in beer” meaning not costing money, and “free as in speech” meaning unfettered communications. A similar terminology might befit the privacy world. “Private as in invisible” should relate to not allowing tracking or profiling of any kind, as in cookies, registrations, or server log tracking. “Private as in citizen” should mean the inability of marketers to contact you without your consent, or in a form other than paid advertising in content you specifically request. Somewhere in the middle is “Private as in anonymous” where you can be tracked, but not individually identified.”

Latest in a continuing series of post in which I attempt to express my disgust and disdain for politicians who are so obviously bought and paid for. Fritz Hollings, the Senator from Disney, has given up even trying to hide this. I wish I could get into one of his press conferences and just ask him how he feels about this nickname. Of course he would probably just doubletalk it away. Maybe if I could get some truth serum into his pre-conference glass of water…

– Hollings has introduced a bill that would protect spyware. This article goes into detail on just why Brilliant Digital’s spyware Altnet software is so unsettling and how Hollings’ bill will give corporations legal cover.

– Several media and consumer electronics companie have reached agreement on adding copy protection to digital TVs, removing our rights to do something as simple and basic as time-shifting programs, and now they want Congress to turn their private contracts into law.

– Memo Shows Influence of Lobbyist in formulating Bush stance on regulating carbon dioxide emissions.

I guess it isn’t just the energy companies that are involved in the takeover.

To see what our benefactor has added, check Crazy Browser – What’s New or just save the time and go to the Download page and get it. I have used this excellent Internet Explorer add-on since I became aware of it. Many good features not the least of which is the low, low price of FREE!

Metafilter is an interesting group weblog with built-in (members only) discussion. One of today’s topics is Discover Magazine’s article Guth’s Grand Guess, an insightful, detailed article/interview with Alan Guth, “cosmology’s leading man.” This article is definitely worth reading. The MeFi (as au currant insiders refer to the site) discussion, though, stumbles quickly and unsurprisingly into the paradox of existence–if, as Guth says is likely to be proven true, the universe as we know it came into existence and its current state due to the odd foibles of quantum physics, from where did these odd foibles come? One poster is quick to raise the theological flag (God did it). Others miss the point entirely by claiming there can be a scientific explanation and thereby remaining inside the circle. I myself am quick to recall the Native American mythos that the world sits on top of a gigantic turtle. Where does that turtle stand? On top of another. And so on.

As I write this one poster (with the strange yet mythopoetic handle of mooncrow) has also come to the turtle story. However, theology is also another case of simply pushing the question back another turtle. If God created the Universe, who created God? To me, there is no possible ‘final’ answer to this question that our minds can comprehend. Sorry. This is not to say that God does or does not exist. I will say that if He does exist, he hasn’t sent me any email lately.

In re BankAmerica Securities Class Action Now children, of course I did not sue the big bad banking people all on my ownsome! No indeed! I sued as part of a big class and out of a whopping settlement of $490 million dollars, I am going to get $16 plus or minus a few pennies. Sometime in the next, say, 12 months. Wow, that’ll help when the unemployment runs out. Actually I did not even know I was suing but lawyers, led by the firm of Abbey Gardy, LLP of New York City, sued on behalf of me (with a big 100 shares of BankAmerica stock) and other stockholders regarding some problems with the merger between BankAmerica and NationsBank back in September, 1998, that resulted in today’s Bank of America. My settlement would be worth about 22 cents/share but the lawyers seem to think their effort is worth $39 million.

I read through the entire eight pages of lawyerly gobbledegook and there is not even one sentence of explanation of what the companies and directors did wrong that entitles me to this money. However, the litigation website reprints an article from Securities Class Action Alert which explains that the “suit had alleged that BankAmerica falsely reassured investors about the strength of the bank’s operation, but hid the huge international loan losses that the bank had suffered and deliberately underestimated the liability exposure incurred as a result of loans to the investment firm D.E. Shaw & Co. These misstatements were an effort to ensure the completion of the merger with NationsBank.” This also turns out to be the second largest shareholder settlement ever, surpassed only by the $3.2 billion paid by Cendant Corp. And I get a whopping big $16. After paying $75.62 per share in May, 1998, and selling it in November, 2001, for $63.00 for a net loss of, let’s see, $1262 – $16 leaves $1246. Aren’t you impressed with the terrific lawyering, children?

Sitting just about at the western end of downtown Palo Alto’s University Ave., this Japanese restaurant features an all you can stuff down your gullet buffet. I did a Google search and found nothing useful to link here (there is a menu from a takeout service but not only can’t you get the buffet to go, not everything on the takeout menu is on the buffet). Still, Minokichi is definitely worth a visit if you have a decent appetite: the charge is only $9.95 for lunch and $12.95 dinner Tuesday-Thursday, $15.95 dinner Friday to Sunday (the place is closed Mondays).

The buffet features a nice but not huge assortment of sushi, fairly light on the rolls other than cucumber, futumaki, California, and one with roe, regular (American style) salad, a couple of Japanese cold salads, two kinds of soup (to be honest I didn’t care for the too-bland miso), several tempuras, a very tasty ginger calamari, beef and chicken teriyaki, sauteed oysters, some steamed and sauteed greens, shrimp foo young, spareribs, rice, french fries, and several desserts. We dined early, right after the dinner service started at 5:30, and there were plenty of empty tables. Lunch time, according to the host, features fewer items on the buffet but I’ll probably try it out in a couple of weeks and report back. The quality of fish was good, the quantity was terrific, and I’d definitely rate this as a good value for your sushi dollar.

Tonight was good, grilled steaks with asparagus and homemade garlic butter. Then I had my butt handed to me on the chessboard. I only really ever play against Byron but his mind is, as Steve puts it, that of an engineer and mine is…not. Byron sits there, having enjoyed my steaks, smug, calculating three and four moves ahead before choosing while I’m lucky to see all the threats to my pieces. This strikes me as funny since in some ways I’m smarter than him but then again he’s forgotten more about computer programming, chemistry and biology in the past month than I’ve ever known. Ha ha on me.

The following is a letter sent to Michael Vizard, the editor of InfoWorld:

“Just curious but do you guys ever get positive comments on the excessive, obsessive dictionary-like linkage in the articles online? For example, I was reading Chad Dickerson’s CTO Connection column The unsung heroes and noticed the phrase software development is linked to the same javascript popup window six times. In case my sarcasm isn’t heavy enough, I’m suggesting that myself and probably most other readers would prefer that this be changed. Perhaps a glossary at the end of articles? This practice gets particularly confusing when the term is part of a longer one, such as the title of the book in this article, and one might reasonably expect the link to resolve to a page about the book.”

Even though three weeks have passed, Mr. Vizard has not replied. Isn’t that just rude?