A carnival of technology

Holy crap! Weather!

Last night was our ice storm for the year. Here in the humid subtropical climate of the south, we very rarely see snow, since it’s just too warm, but we get a nice layer of ice once every year or two. This storm started last night, with some freezing rain. As anyone who’s lived through a winter in the South knows, everyone freaks the hell out as soon as frozen rain starts falling from the sky. It’s quite amusing to watch. There’s the denudation of the milk, bread and beer shelves in stores, of course, but more amusing is the battle of egos that ensues. Everyone is an expert on winter weather, whether a transplanted Northerner who’s seen it all before or someone who’s lived here all their lives complaining about how the Northerners don’t understand our lack of plows and salt and such. Everyone has their theories for why everything just totally blows up when winter hits, whether defending or protesting the practice, and no one is ever actually the problem. No one ever admits to rushing out for bread and milk, even though nearly every person where I worked rushed out early when the freezing rain started a little before 4, and there are always the hushed mentions of a need for preparation amidst the tales of that one time when kids got snowed in at school or that other time when most of Atlanta was without power for two weeks.

I, on the other hand, have no qualms about admitting that I’m part of the problem. I, like most other people here, have effectively no experience with driving on ice, and, like any good Atlanta citizen, I react to unusual situations by getting out and driving. The roads were still ice-free on Friday night, so I just stayed until my usual time, which suddenly appeared very late in the empty office, and consumed Mexican food at the appointed time. I didn’t buy bread or milk, but I did wander across the street and bought some beer.

Everything froze Friday night, and on Saturday morning the world was encased in ice. My car was carefully preserved for the archaeologists of tomorrow, wrapped in two distinct eighth inch layers of ice, complete with frozen pine needles and whatever else happened to fall on the car. I was able to free it by hacking away with an ice scraper for a while, but that’s a lot of work, so I, and everyone else, just kind of gave up before finishing the sides, which adds to the fun of driving, since everyone has huge sheets of ice falling of their car, encouraging people even more to leave a safe following distance. I tried heading down to the place where I usually get my hair cut, just south of the mall, but they were closed, so I headed back up to the mall to continue my search. None of the hair places were open, but one of the dozen or stores that didn’t wimp out was a shoe store, so I was able to do one of the other things that I’d been meaning to do. I also drove to Elliott’s place in midtown to watch Day After Tomorrow (a movie about the world freezing over), and didn’t really have any trouble until getting off the interstate. The turn onto Williams street started a couple seconds after turning the wheel.

Returning home emphasized just how unprepared for disaster I really am. The power was out for the chunk of Cobb Parkway I’m on, and the only alternate sources of light I have are an electric lantern that came with a car emergency kit the parents gave me and the backlight of my cell phone. After more driving, learning that Kroger closed, and even more driving up to Walmart, I now have candles. Why are scented candles so popular? It was difficult to find unscented candles among the piles and piles of variously scented and whimsically shaped balls of wax, so I ended up getting some of those religious candles they usually put next to the salsa in the grocery store, since they’re both smell free and self-contained. The power came back on about ten minutes after returning from that.

Someday, I’d like to be able to listen to a new band without it creating within me some sort of perceived crisis.

A couple of years ago, an Australian I knew through IRC introduced me to one of Australia’s musicians, Nick Cave, and his band, The Bad Seeds. I knew nothing about Mr. Cave or his history, and I enjoyed the music. It was full of energy and emotion, yet it retained enough rocking to stay off of the fearsome and regrettable paths of emo, indie and its ilk. I bought Let Love In, and I enjoyed it. I bought Murder Ballads, and, though it was in some respects a flimsy concept album, I enjoyed it, too. Then, I bought No More Shall We Part. Here’s where I should probably explain a bit of The Bad Seed’s history, as far as their music goes. There are two significant milestones in their musical development: The Good Son, recorded in 1990, was was the first album that Nick Cave made after quitting heroin and it took away a bit of his manic-depressive edge while still managing to retain most of his energetic style; and The Boatman’s Call, a calmer, introspective album, marked a shift towards a more subdued, spiritual style of music. No More Shall We Part falls into this lattermost era. The barbs were much more subtle, and I just plain didn’t get it. I still don’t, though I’ve stopped merely dismissing it as a wimpy exception. I’ve listened to this album and the three others he’s recorded in these last eight years a couple of times each, and, though I still feel somewhat lost, they have some quality about them that makes me want to like them.

As part of the effort to understand Nick Cave’s current output, I looked to the past. He started recording with an Australian band called The Boys Next Door, which later moved to England and renamed itself to The Birthday Party. This is where my regret reflexes start kicking in. As it turns out, there are some people who would credit Nick Cave with starting the goth movement. Sure, The Boys Next Door at first sound like any other insignificant band riding the end of the punk wave, but there’s no denying the direction of lyrics like “I’ve been contemplating suicide, / but it really doesn’t suit my style, / so I think I’ll just act bored instead. / Who can contain the blood I would have shed?” I associate the word “goth” with whiny teenagers dressed in black, wearily lamenting their painful middle-class existence, and I can see how the music of The Boys Next Door/The Birthday Party is related to that. Too late, I now realize I own five albums of proto-goth. There, I said it. Three hours and twenty-one minutes of “dark” music, celebrating depression and isolation. My only solace is that they only cost about $6 each. Yet still, I listen. Maybe one of these days I’ll be able to listen to Mr. Cave’s music for the sake of music instead of merely searching for the hidden scene.

Whoever came up with that eye-searing blue LED should be punched in the face. You know the one I’m talking about: the mandated annoying blue light on all bluetooth devices. Man, I hate that thing.

After my last keyboard started to stick, I decided to step into the 21st century by replenishing my stocks (yes, I have stocks. input devices keep becoming more and more annoying, so I usually buy three mice and keyboards at a time) with some USB keyboards and mice. Of course, I promptly ran out of USB ports, so today I decided to take a second step with the purchase of a USB hub. It has no bluetooth capability, but it has that same stupid light used as the power indicator. Whatever happened to those nice red LEDs? I don’t care if they’re not fancy and new; they weren’t a distraction.

The hub also has LEDs for each port which I originally thought were activity lights, but some quick experimentation using the input devices and a keychain drive have disproved this hypothesis. After digging the manual booklet out of the trash, I’ve learned that these LEDs are actually there to let me know that the port is working, not that it’s doing anything. “If an overcurrent condition occurs, the LED for that port will turn off, indicating a problem with that device.” I suppose I should keep an eye on them, then, if I decide to try to power my coffee maker over USB. Also, among the pointless and obvious details they put into a table on the specs page (Housing: plastic. LEDs (power): 1), apparently I’m not supposed to operate this thing at a temperature below 5 degrees celsius, whatever that means. Why not? There’s nothing in there that could freeze, and that wouldn’t be cold enough to freeze it, anyhow.

Welcome to 2005, everyone, another arbitrary division of our journeys around the sun. I started the new year out right with a nice check fraud experience. No, I didn’t commit check fraud; I’m on the other end of it. Someone broke into the outgoing mailbox at the apartment complex, and apparently one of the items stolen was my phone bill payment. I found this out on Tuesday after a trip to the ATM returned a balance with fewer digits than I wanted. After calling Wachovia’s 24-hour help line twice and being imparted with the hushed secrets of at least three different methods of resetting the password on the online banking account I may have set up two years ago, I got into the check history and found one what I’m sure will be good for a laugh after I get the money back. There it was: the BellSouth check, but not the BellSouth check. A couple of digits had been added to the amount, BellSouth had been overwritten with a very scribbly name that appears to end in Henderson, and the written-out amount had been altered into a disjoint expression of a bunch of money. Not quite something like sixteeny and 100/18, but still not quite right. Anyhow, this check was available for my prying eyes on the online bankotron 9000 since, of course, this person had managed to cash it. Several phone calls, a couple faxes and a notary public later, Wachovia says I’ll probably have the money back by the end of the week. There has been a single reaction among all the people to help me, one of incredulity, amazement that a branch would cash this abomination, that the check was the hoax and not the computer that displayed it. Since it’s pretty obviously a fake, they don’t expect any delays in the claims department giving me the credit, but I’ll probably call them a billion times tomorrow since I’m kind of flipping out a bit. To Wachovia’s credit, they have managed to, against all odds, keep me from yelling or punching things. Wachovia employees must have a training in psychology, or something.

Sometimes I stop and think that if I hadn’t procrastinated so much about getting a savings account, this altered check would have just bounced right out the bank and I would at least have a little less to worry about, but then I remember that I still have to pay for the parts of Christmas I got on credit, and car insurance, and a car payment, and all those utilities that got me in this mess in the first place, and yeah, I guess I would have had that much just sitting around waiting to be withdrawn. Oh well. Either way, I guess I can get a savings account online now.

For a lesser crisis, I have foolishly (foolishly!) made a music purchase based on a song I heard on WRAS. As most of you know, my radio listening is primarily of the college variety, and I’ve bought a couple CDs of a band I heard on WREK before during one of their rare fits of mundanity (for reference, this “mundane” music was a sort of slow-paced emocore with a long spoken word and guitar segment), but I’d never bought anything I heard on WRAS, mostly dismissing it as a bunch of hipster crap. The song I heard, though, by a local band, United, quite simply rocked. It was fast-paced and full of energy and guitar and bass and drum and some lyrics that didn’t need to mean anything deeper and all the things that a rock song should be. Rather than tracking them down here and demanding they give me the secrets of their rockin’ sound, I bought their EP off of an online indie record shop, CD Baby, which, due entirely to the ridiculous poetic flair with which the confirmation email was written, has become my new favorite record store. Here’s an excerpt:

Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.

We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved ‘Bon Voyage!’ to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Sunday, January 2nd.

I guess this means I’ll have to listen to more indie rock now. As Chris put it, “now you can be more of a music snob!” To top everything off, when I popped the CD into the computer to play it and tried to download the track names, freedb had no match. freedb is run by user contributions, so no match generally means that no other living soul in the world has heard of this CD. I’ve had this happen to me twice before: once with Game Over’s EP, a lovingly hand-made collection of metal interpretations of NES tunes, burned on CD-R decorated with blue magic marker, packaged with some homemade and hand-stapled liner notes and shipped all the way from distant Sweden, and one other time with Across Five April’s eponymous EP, again on a CD-R, which I picked up at a Christian-themed hardcore metal show at the Gwinnett Underground, now known as (I think) Extreem. I don’t think that either of these CDs had particularly wide distribution. To United’s credit, they have the most professional appearance, by far, of the bunch. But I can still feel that slippery slope.