TinkerX

For some reason — I hadn’t changed anything, seriously — I couldn’t get into my WP admin module. Which means I couldn’t do anything to the blog. So I upgrade to a later version of WP, updated the database, and deleted (moved) a bunch of plugins. Now, I can get in (as evidenced by this post), but all my categories, permalinks and archives are gone. You can get to any given post by using the “next page” thingy at the bottom of the home page… but everything else is upgehfooked. Search works, too… but not if you then click on the post name.  Weird.

Any assistance from WordPress Gods much appreciated. If I can’t fix it, I may try exporting the whole tham ding and then wiping this build and restarting with a new SQL database, etc.

Or I’ll just start a new blog with a link back to Tinker for old stuff. TinkerX just turned three, and that seems pretty old for a blog with no real cohesive topic. Any thoughts on what kind of more specific blog I might write would certainly be appreciated.

[edit] Dagnabbit. Comments are broken, too. Please send thoughts, ideas, solutions or general commiserations to awhavens@sanestorm.com.

[edit 2] Fixed permalinks, which seems to have fixed comments and archives. Breathing easier. Still working on categories.

Meh.

Yes. The iPod and iPhone are sweet and techno whizbang. But… great googly moogly… how much does iTunes and the iStore have to suck before Steve fixes them?

I don’t even want to go into it. But the process of trying to get some TV shows and games that I bought from the iStore onto my wife’s iPod is a tale of incredibly bad UI, stupdily redundant processes, and time consuming repetitions.

It’s 2am. I’ve been trying to synch the damned thing for 3 hours. I’m going to bed now.

“Connect” is a big word. At my place of work, it ends up in our tagline:

OCLC. The world’s libraries. Connected.

From last Sunday around 4pm until Thursday around 3pm, we were disconnected by hurricane Ike. According to the weather folk, Ike pushed a really large, fast-moving warm air front up from the south. Said front met a cold air mass coming down from Canada (probably due to the good exchange rate, ha ha), and when they met… woosh. We had 75 mile an hour winds throughout much of Central Ohio, knocking out power for something like 1.4 million people in the state.

We were very lucky. We had some limbs down in the back yard, a bunch of twiggy, leafy crap in the front. We lost a fridge and a stand-alone freezer worth of food (which was covered by our homeowner’s insurance — something for y’all to remember), and had some very minor damage to our vinyl siding. No big whoop. And while having no power (or Web or phone or TV) for four days was a pain, it was also kinda fun, as it meant checkers by candlelight, more reading (I’m reading Neal Stephenson’s new “Anathem” on my phone),  and early bedtimes. Again… I’m extremely thankful that all we lost was some electrons and frozen shrimp.

So… we were somewhat dis-connected. Or were we? I still had my cell phone, as did my wife. I had Internet access at work and on my phone. I did have to go to some lengths to retrieve some files off my desktop PC at home (thanks for the battery back-up, Chris!), but that was about the only real, “Crap! I can’t do what I want without these connections!” that really needed to be “dealt with.” The rest was just, well… suck it up and wait.

I might have felt differently if the weather hadn’t been so pleasant, too. Nice, cool nights. Tack another 12 degrees onto the thermometer and Andy would have been a whiny camper.

So to celebrate our return to the connected world, I finally signed up for Twitter.  I have not yet really grokked Twitter. But, as a good corporate marketing wonk, I subscribed to an RSS feed of tweets that refer to my company, OCLC. And that has been very… interesting. Nothing hugely surprising in any given message (or as a whole), but the feeling it has given me is much the same as when I overhear a snippet of conversation in the lobby or at a restaurant. It’s a kind of… slightly guilty pleasure. Of course, all these people choose to twitter about whatever it is… but they don’t know, specifically, that I’m “overhearing” them.

Basically, it just seems kinda fun. Another level of Internetual awareness.

So… the Twitter widget is in my sidebar over there, and you’re invited to follow along, if you like. For the time being, my vow is that all my tweets will be in haiku.

Why? Well, why the heck not.

So I just got push polled on the Ohio Payday Loan Referendum. Kinda hysterical, until it got to be more than 3 minutes long. Which is my personal time limit for confusing the hey-nonny-nonny out of push pollsters.

I’m a sucker for polls. I like being asked my opinion, an, if the person on the other end of the phone has a nice voice, I usually find the experience very soothing. It’s like free therapy. Well, micro-therapy, anyway.

But push polling is, well… you know. Obnoxious. They don’t really want my opinion. They want me to change my mind. This one went from bad to funny to sad pretty quickly.

Last year,  the governor and Ohio lawmakers approved HB 545, a bill that caps the Ohio payday loan industry’s interest rate at 28%. The previous cap was 391%, which works out to $15 per $100 on a two-week loan. Obviously, the payday loan industry didn’t like that so much, and so have a veto referendum coming up in November. It’s one of those complicated things to get clear with voters: Vote “yes” on the veto in order to say “no” to saying “yes” to saying “no” to usury. Hunh? Yeah, that’s right. A “yes” vote means that you are for being against being for being against super-high interest loans. As Kung-Fu Panda says, “Ske-doosh.”

Early on in the call, after establishing that I vote, the pollster asked me, “Do you think that you are capable of making your own financial decisions?” I answered, “Yes.” OK. Who wouldn’t? Then she asked, “Do you think that other people are capable of making their own financial decisions?”

I asked if there was another answer besides “Yes” or “No.” An answer like, “Some people. But not the ones in charge of the mortgage industry, the federal deficit or funding for Ohio public education.” Or, “Some people, but not people who buy lottery tickets.” She was not amused, and we went with “Yes.”

Then it became clear… “Do you think that a person should be able to get a short-term loan of $100 for a service fee of $15?”

Ah-ha. I’d heard enough about this issue to know where we were standing at this point. I also knew, from the way those questions had been tossed out, that it was a push poll. So… at that point, my goal is to get out quickly, but possibly confuse their system a bit. I don’t like push polling, and endeavor to waste their time a little, up to the point where it’s not any fun for me.

I won’t go into details, but my answers were all over the place. I said, for example, that “saving 6,000 Ohio jobs” wasn’t a reason why I’d vote for the veto. But I said that keeping the government from “creating lists of who gets what kind of loans” was a reason I’d veto it.

Don’t know why. Just went for the random thing.

I hate push polling. Did I mention that? Mostly because they don’t care what I think, just what they do.

Would it change your vote about the upcoming election if you knew that John McCain was a cross-dressing alien from the planet Clam?

It’s been a long time. But I just don’t have anything to say. Which is about the least interesting way to start a blog post I can think of.

I mean… I have things I *could* say, certainly…

1) I’m currently more than annoyed with people who read/write text messages during movies. Noise is bad, yes… so we turn off our phone ringers and don’t take calls during the show. Right? Right. We’ve had that down since about 1998. Now people are doing the IM or email or texting thing during movies, and the bluish-white glow of their iPhones and Pocket PCs is just as friggin’ annoying as hearing a phone ring. If you have to haul out your dang device during the film, hold it in your lap so that the rest of the theater can’t see it. And if you get a message that you must respond to… leave. It’s only about an hour-and-a-half. Give us a breat and get out of your own ego-space long enough to enjoy the film.  I mean, geez. I saw a teenage girl read and reply six times during one show last month. And every time, she held the phone up at eye level, so that everyone behind her could be distracted. I finally asked her to stop, as it was totally pissing me off. She didn’t, and so I beat her to death with my shoe.

2) I think that Time Warner, our cable company, must be training their field repair folks in commiseration skills. We’ve had our DVR break twice in the last month, both times requiring a guy to come out. And both times, when we complained about various elements of the service, the techs joined right in. “Yeah… the new software isn’t as good as the old stuff. We hear that all the time. I use the service, and it makes me crazy, too.” And… “No, these boxes aren’t great. They’re going to upgrade to new hardware sometime next year, and I can’t wait. We get so many problems with these.” Etc. One of the first things they teach you in customer care training is the power of the words, “I understand.” Upset customers, before anything else, want you to admit that they are not crazy, and that there might be a reason why you feel the way you do. They do *not* want to be questioned, harangued or taught a lesson. So, “I understand [fill in the blank]” is a great way to move things forward. These guys have taken this technique to a new level, though. They’ve gone beyond understanding, to joining in. It’s as if they’ve aligned themselves with us — all us folks being put out — against the Big Bad Company. The one that they work for. They aren’t representatives of Time Warner any more, but some kind of moles. They are our spies in the Big House. I got to say… it works. They were nice guys, did what they could, and I felt like they were on “our side.” Weird.

3) Waiting for Spore. Been waiting for four years. They say it’s gone gold, and will truly be in stores by 9/8/08. We’ll see…

4) Not thrilled with the animated “Clone Wars” movie. It was OK for an animated sci-fi movie… but I expect more from Star Wars. Not sure why. Episode One made me doubt the existence of a benevolent God.

5) Have an idea for a YA fantasy series. Don’t want to talk about it here. Oops. Just did. My bad. If you want to help me get it out of my head and on paper, let me know. I find that I need at least one person to talk about this stuff with or I just let it stew for… well… forever (see: three previous attempts at novel writing, all stuck between 70 and 130 pages).

6) Overheard three “nice old ladies” talking politics at Bob Evans last night while eating with the boy. At one point, one of them said that they wouldn’t vote for Obama because he was going to “take away everyone’s guns.” A friend of hers had told her that part of Obama’s presidential platform involved the revocation of fifth ammendment (I assume she meant second). The current president already having played loose and free with the fifth, I can see why she might be worried about the second. I can’t find anything on line, even on the crazy-right sites, indicating that Obama has any dread plans for our right to bear arms. On conversations such as this, in states like Ohio, hangs the fate of nations.

7) Got a new chair for the home office. Nice.

That’s it. Like I said…

So I downloaded the free trial of “Spore: Creature Creator.” I’ve been drooling in anticipation of the full game of “Spore” now for… I don’t know, Will… how long? 3 years? 5? Something like that.

Anyway… played this little mini-preview game-y thing where you create creatures using one of the engines that will be in the final game. It’s fun. And my son really enjoyed it. I registered the trial online so that I could see other folks’ creations, get updates, etc. Registration, as per normal, requires an email address (cue ominous music… why would he point out an obvious bit o’ stuff like that? hmmmmm….)

The free trial of “Creature Creator” only gives you access to like 1/8th of all the pieces-parts. And my boy liked it enough that I decided to upgrade to the full version (never mind that I think this is essentially a marketing tease for the full game, now slated to come out in September, and that, IMHO, the “full version” of this little mini game should be free).

Clicking the “upgrade” button from within the game takes you to the purchase site for EA. OK…. Not exactly what I expected, as I’d already downloaded the large install file. Will they make me go through that again? I’d assumed I’d just pay and get an unlock code. A trick that 3rd-rate shareware peddlers have had perfected for years. We’ll see…

So I add the full version of the program to my cart, fill in all my info for checking out…

And get an error.

“That email address is already in use.”

Bwa? BWAAAA? The email address I gave EA as part of the registration process for a piece of trial software is already in use… Well, DUH! It’s in use by me, who registered earlier today. And now I want to upgrade… but you won’t let me, because my email address is already in use by you.

Mad stupid. Mad-5 stupid. I expected more from EA and Spore and Will and Maxis. This does not bode well…