Bloglet, the gentleman's mock turtle soup -- Moss made it sweeter than myrrh ash and dhoup
Over the past few weeks, I've bought seven coffee mugs from four different stores, for prices ranging from $1 to $25. When people told me that mugging was a problem in New York City, I don't think this was what they meant.
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12:56:45 AM,Saturday 31 October 2009
Excerpt from an interview with Roberto Bolano (apologies for leaving out the virgulilla, but it breaks my RSS feed for some reason):
Interviewer: Have you shed one tear about the widespread criticism you've drawn from your enemies?
Bolano: Lots and lots. Every time I read that someone has spoken badly of me, I begin to cry. I drag myself across the floor. I scratch myself. I stop writing indefinitely. I lose my appetite. I smoke less. I engage in sport. I go for walks on the edge of the sea -- which, by the way, is less than 30 meters from my house -- and I ask the seagulls, whose ancestors ate the fish who ate Ulysses, "Why me? Why? I've done you no harm."
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09:40:28 PM,Friday 30 October 2009
Q: How many recordings of L'Estro Armonico does one girl need?
A: A lot. Shut up.
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05:50:26 PM,Friday 30 October 2009
K: It's sort of the double negative of fortifications. "You shall not not pass!"
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10:27:43 AM,Saturday 24 October 2009
Some kid just passed me on the escalator, gave me a grinning thumbs up, and said what sounded like "Dressed like 4Chan?" Uhhh... I don't know what that means, but the answer is definitely no.
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08:19:00 PM,Tuesday 20 October 2009
One day I will learn the proper uses of all seven types of roots outside the bodega.
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08:08:22 PM,Friday 16 October 2009
Job was a victim of statistical clustering.
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09:35:59 AM,Thursday 15 October 2009
How I love Classical CD Album Cover Snark. Tenth in the series. They're all worth giggling over.
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01:29:34 AM,Saturday 10 October 2009
Bad behavior witnessed this week:
A woman bellowing at the top of her lungs about ventriloquism while her boyfriend refused to move his jacket from the only empty seat on the subway.
A Con Ed worker throwing four-foot-long plastic poles across the street to his coworker, who was stacking them in a truck.
A kid signing his name in acid paste on a subway door.
A bartender and his manager discussing a meeting with their beverage dispenser repairman (whether it was for beer or pop or coffee I couldn't tell).
"So he was all yelling at me. He was like, 'You know you've got to clean this thing out once a month.'"
"Yeah. God. I know. He always says that."
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10:28:43 PM,Thursday 8 October 2009
I've been trying to restrict the steno stuff to my Twitter feed, but I already posted it there a few days ago, and I'm still hopping mad, so I'm going to post it here too.
Appalling! They offered him notetakers and an FM system. I've seen the output that notetakers produce, and it's similar in terms of quality and quantity of information to what you get by reading Powerpoint slides. Can you imagine sitting through med school lectures, reading a few bullet points every few minutes, and trying to pass your exams while listening to patchy, staticky audio that contains more background noise than decipherable speech? What a nightmare. I'm glad that Argenyi is fighting, and I hope he wins. I'd love to provide CART for a deaf med student someday.
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04:31:57 PM,Wednesday 30 September 2009
Two nerdy high school girls on the bus. One solved her Rubic's Cube twice in the time it took to go from Lexington to First. The other boggled appreciatively. Their favorite imprecation was "absurd". I have hope for the yoots.
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03:56:11 PM,Tuesday 29 September 2009
So today I went back again to the unnamed co-op coworking floor that will be replacing Green Spaces, unwittingly crashing one of their meetings on how to proceed with the whole thing, and it looks like I'm in! It's going to be $50 less per month than it was under the old regime, which is awfully nice. I got to meet a good many of the people who work there, and they all seem lovely. I pay month to month, so there'll be no pressure if I have to bow out during winter break or whatever. I'm bringing in my check for October on the 1st (Thursday), they'll give me a key, and I'll be able to get down to work right away. I can't wait. The great thing is that it's a block away from the 2, 3, 4, 5, B, Q, M, R, N, and D trains, and three blocks to the G. So basically once I'm there I can go everywhere -- deeper into Brooklyn to visit Pratt; up to the Upper East Side to visit K. at school/work or my mom's apartment; a hop and a skip to lower Manhattan to visit my steno school or J&R Music World or Amish Grocery; home in an hour, taking the 2/3 to the 1; or even to Queens, if I somehow take the notion. It's nice to sit at the hub of the universe sometimes, especially if there's a nice view.
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12:51:23 AM,Tuesday 29 September 2009
Interesting article on coworking, which starts as a book review, continues as an odds-laying on the success of the movement, and concludes by bringing in comparisons with the Victorian/Edwardian system of clubs in Britain and its colonies. It's quite a long article, but that last bit is magic. It's definitely the vibe I'm looking for, which should be unsurprising, and it looks like it might even be attainable, if everything works out the way I'm hoping it will. It's relatively likely that I'll be trying out a lounge-only membership in the as-yet-unnamed replacement for Green Spaces. The guy I spoke to said that the co-op would let me know a little before the beginning of October what the deal will be. Hopefully it'll be around the same price for the same benefits. I'm pretty excited. I might only use it for a month or two; fortunately there's no contract for lounge-space members. But if I like it enough and I get enough work done there, and if next semester is as Brooklyn-heavy as this one is, I might extend it at least another semester. And then, if I can get remote CART work for summer instead of transcription work, since I don't have a land line at home... Well, anyway. I'll take it as it comes. But I love the smell and the feel of the place. The businesses that work there are all pretty inextricably 21st-century outfits, and the ethos of Green Spaces is aggressively modern, though what the co-op will turn it into remains to be seen; but the building itself is delightfully old and dusty and ramshackle in a sprawling, comfortable way. Lots of old mismatched furniture, natural light, high ceilings, and a view overlooking the industrial rooftops of Brooklyn. It feels a bit like the British clubs referenced in the article, a bit like the offices in stories like The Red-Headed League and Bartleby the Scrivener (oppressive in context but quaint in retrospect), and a bit like something all its own. I worry that it's a waste of money to get a membership there when I could spend far less to get a mobile broadband card and just work (at somewhat reduced internet speed) in the university library. But for all that I really like CARTing at that university and enjoy the classes and the students greatly, its campus is not... Gemutlich. It's nothing I can put my finger on. It's just not my style. I'm not at ease there. The Metropolitan Exchange Building, on the other hand, makes me happy the instant I walk into it. It smells of old books and damp concrete and dignified dust.
I'll see what happens.
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04:43:01 PM,Sunday 27 September 2009
I was on the crosstown bus at Lincoln Center, going East.
Adorable Moppet: When is this bus gonna get fast?
Moppet's Mom: Soon.
AM: When?!
MM: Right now we're going Adagio, but we're going to speed up.
AM: Now we're going Adagio... Oh! It's getting faster.
MM: Now we're Moderato.
AM: Ooh! Ooh! And then Allegro! And then Presto! And then Superfast!!
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(7)
01:29:34 PM,Friday 25 September 2009
I know that we cantankerous old grumpybutts are traditionally supposed to say that this music all the kids listen to nowadays just sounds like noise and cacophany, but it doesn't. It sounds like bland, boring cookie cutter pabulum, with the chordal complexity of '90s pop-punk and the emotional range of hold music. It's not offensive enough, damn it! Where's the rebellion? Where's the adolescent fury? Be more unlistenable, you pathetic whelps! This post brought to you by MTV-U and Quizno's.
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(6)
09:41:57 AM,Thursday 24 September 2009
So somewhere in my latest flurry of upgrades and reinstallations and renewing my annual $600 upgrade/support contract, Bridge, the free realtime viewing software made by the company that makes my steno software, has stopped working. I suspect it's to do with a change made in the latest version that makes it more refreshable when I change stuff in the original transcript file. What happens is that it'll work fine, then suddenly both the Bridge display on my tablet and the Eclipse display on my laptop will freeze for a good 30 seconds or so. Then sometimes, if I keep writing, the laptop display will fix itself after 30 seconds to a minute and go on as normal. The tablet display will be off until I close everything, power cycle my steno machine, and restart the job. Or sometimes the laptop display will freeze indefinitely, and I'll have to either end the job (which will make it hang even longer) and restart or kill the entire program, load it up again, and then restart. This has happened a good half dozen times over the past week. I've basically given up on using the tablet and have instead been looking off the laptop, which gives me an almighty crick in the neck, since it's positioned for the viewing comfort of my clients and not for mine. The students have lost valuable class material and I've been made to look like an unprofessional fool who doesn't know how to use her own equipment. I've been on the phone to tech support and they advised lowering the baud rates, which didn't work. I'll call them again today. A handy solution would be to run Eclipse on both computers, since my steno machine has dual Bluetooth outputs. That would also give me the advantage of being able to use all the fancy realtime tricks I've developed, which work with Eclipse but aren't compatible with Bridge. Now, as I've mentioned many times before, I paid about $4,000 for Eclipse. This got me a CD containing the software and an irreplaceable dongle which gives me permission to run it. If I pay the company an additional $300 or so, they'll send me a "convenience key", a spare dongle I can keep at home while I carry the genuine one around in my backpack. The convenience key expires every three months unless I refresh it from the original, but okay, fine. A good solution to my Bridge problem, right? I'll just use one on the laptop and one on the tablet. Wrong. Eclipse has a policy against using both dongles simultaneously. If I attempted it, both dongles would stop working and I'd have to plead abjectly to the company to get them reinstated. I don't know what I'm supposed to do, or how exactly it would hurt their profits if I used my $600 tablet PC with my steno machine's dual Bluetooth outputs instead of letting them both molder uselessly for the foreseeable future or until the company fixes their viewing software. I am not pleased.
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09:08:59 AM,Tuesday 22 September 2009
Photo by K.
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06:24:41 PM,Sunday 20 September 2009
Michelangelo was sooooo gay.
(How gay was he?)
He was sooooo gay, he wanted to call it the Homocysteine Chapel!
*rimshot*
This entry brought to you by Pharmacy transcript editing.
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07:37:52 PM,Friday 18 September 2009
The 24-hour supermarket plays the best reggaeton in the neighborhood.
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10:50:43 PM,Thursday 17 September 2009
I'm sitting in a McDonald's in downtown Brooklyn, across from a table of Buddhist monks eating breakfast. I do love this city.
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(4)
11:03:11 AM,Thursday 17 September 2009
