Apocalypse now...maybe...again...

Oh, crap—Houston, we have an apocalypse. Again.

This time it’s the fault of those pesky Vikings. According to a report in The Independent, tomorrow the Earth will split open, releasing the inhabitants of Hell (Hel in their terms; if you’re a Viking you apparently don’t need no stinkin’ second “l” in your underworld address), and the Norse gods are fixing to rumble. 

It's Ragnarök, baby.

It’ll be the Crips and the Bloods by an order of magnitude, which will naturally cause everything to fall into the ocean. Because, you know, that’s the way it crumbles, Armageddon-wise.

(And if you're waiting for delivery of an online order, perhaps you should have sprung for the express shipping option. Just sayin'.)

I'm a little concerned, though, because apparently after everything goes down the cosmic drain, it's going to be up to two humans to repopulate the world? Does it not seem like we've been through this before? With not very positive results? Why would we want to keep doing this over again? Also, what happens to all the animals? How are we suppose to reboot again if it's only humans? Pretty soon, one will eat the other, and there we'll be. Not very good design, in my opinion.

To tell you the truth—after the failures of such presumed prognosticating powerhouses as Harold Camping and the Maya to separately (and in Camping’s case, more than once) predict an accurate apocalypse, I’m beginning to lose faith in this kind of thing.

Anyhow, I don’t know how you’re supposed to prepare for a Viking apocalypse—am I meant to make sure my house is clean? Sprinkle some sort of herbs about? Drink a lot of Absolut? I just dunno.

Well—see you Monday. 

Maybe.

Cram it, clowny

Let me begin by unequivocally stating my neutrality on the issue of clowns. I find them neither creepy nor amusing.

Well, okay—I must specify: by “clowns” in this context I’m referring to the sort who dress in baggier clothes than high school boys, wear garish polystyrene hair and generally sport big, round red noses. Not CEOs or Congress. Those clowns are both creepy and extremely dangerous.

Regardless, apparently there’s an imminent shortage of the variety not wearing $2500 suits. NPR reports that the old ones are fading away, retiring, slap-foot walking into the sunset, whatever; while there seems to be a dearth of youngsters looking to run away and join the circus.

The World Clown Association membership is down by 1000 from 3500 in 2014, and most of the remaining members are over 40. Damn.

On the up side, people are still applying to Ringling Bros Clown college, although if they’re only training 14 at a whack, I’m thinking there’s some kind of Darwinian elimination process going on here.

We’ll just have to see how this story, uh, plays out, won’t we?

Decidedly NOT Apple-sauce

The other day I hooked up with my friend Amy for lunch at Neiman-Marcus and a foray to the Apple store in Walnut Creek.

The lunch was because we needed to catch up and we’ve decided that N-M’s chicken salad sandwich is great, and the store in Walnut Creek has much better food (and marginally less attitude) than the one in Palo Alto.

The Apple store was because I’m interviewing with a company that has a cloud-based “productivity tool” application for mobile devices, but it only supports iOS and some Samsung Android devices. I don’t own Apple products because their we-are-the-great-design-and-supply-god business model gets up my nose, and it seems to me like every time one of my iPhone/Macbook-using friends has a problem they end up having to schlep into an Apple store to get it fixed.

Oh—and neither my tablet nor Android smartphone is Samsung, so I was kind of stuck when trying to explore this app’s user interface (UI).

The tool is basically server-based versions of Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel that you can access (via the Internet) on your phone or tablet. They claim you can create and edit files in these three applications on your mobile device (freeing you from that pesky laptop), although frankly the functionality is limited, and I can’t see ever using a tablet or smartphone to deal with a spreadsheet or preso except in an update/tweak mode.

Certainly the kinds of files I deal with—product requirements, marketing plans, sales decks, revenue matrices, novels, screenplays, etc.—require the ability to drill deep, insert tables and graphics, which the freemium version of this app doesn’t have.

I also have some concerns about other things (like, who’s their target market); but they’re branching out into a social/collaboration platform, which is interesting. I tried it out in their browser version (only supporting Chrome and Safari, ho-hum) and found it a bit of a kludge.

However, I really wanted to try it out on an actual, you know, mobile device, since that’s really the whole point. I know three people (in this area) with iPads. One of them didn’t volunteer to let me use hers, I can’t reach the second and Amy’s is apparently an antique. When she tried downloading the app, she was prompted to install iOS 6 (which isn’t the latest version). And her iPhone has a cracked screen.

So the idea was to sidle up to the display iPads at the Apple store and see if we could get the app (which is free on the iTunes store) and I could try it out in its natural environment.

Well, of course that’s not possible—they’re all disabled from downloading anything off the Internet, for obvious reasons, but here’s the point of all this verbiage:

The store was a zoo, and it was hard to get the attention of any of their employees. But Amy roped one of them—I’ll call him BJ—over so we could ask. He explained that the display devices are all locked out from downloading, even though it’s from iTunes and even though it’s free, etc., etc., etc. I looked him in the eye and said, “Here’s the deal: I’m interviewing with his company, X, and their app only supports Samsung Android and iOS devices. I was really hoping to get a feel for the UX on a mobile device before I talk with them again…”

BJ barely hesitated before he took his personal iPhone out of his pocket, downloaded the app and handed it over to me. He then went off to deal with actual, you know, buying customers. I messed with it for close to 20 minutes (and the session confirmed my sense that you’re not going to use a smartphone for massive inputs; unless maybe someone’s holding a gun to your head), and then we looked round to return it to him.

Well, it seems he’d gone on break, and his break lasted for 15 minutes. A couple of employees offered to take the phone for him, but I said no, I wanted to return it to him personally. So we spent time with Amy trying to persuade me that I totally cannot live without an iPad. She’s an excellent salesperson.

Finally, BJ came out, looking a bit queasy; but massive relief ensued when I handed him back the phone with profuse thanks. (He’d forgotten about having given us his phone when he went on his break.)

I mean, seriously, can you imagine anyone—anyone—handing you their personal phone and leaving you with it so you can mess with an app they know nothing about? When I clearly wasn’t about to pull the trigger on a MacBook Air or iPhone? We were completely blown away, and I have to say that BJ has redeemed a considerable amount of esteem for his employer in my eyes. I’m just not seeing that happen at BestBuy, or the Microsoft store.

And between him and Amy, the 32Gb iPad mini, with case/keyboard and possibly cellular capability is really looking nice.

I’ll just check under my sofa cushions for $600.

But, BJ—really, what a mensch!

Open That Bottle Night coming up Saturday

Former Wall Street Journal wine columnists Dorothy J. Gaiter and John Brecher used to designate the last Saturday in February as “Open that Bottle [of Wine] Night”. The idea was to get you into the framework of actually enjoying what you’d bought, for whatever reason. You make a meal around it, open it and drink it, for heaven’s sake.

It’s a great concept, and one I think people should take up. Including myself.

I was reminded of this last week, when I looked at six bottles of dessert wines that friends had given me long ago. Those bottles went from Virginia to Great Britain, to Virginia, to Washington and then to California over a number of years. The thing is, I don’t really drink dessert wines, and I’ve never had an occasion where it seemed right to announce to dinner guests, “Well, let’s just have a splash of really sweet alcohol, shall we?”

Anyhow, I looked at them and thought, “You guys are dead, aren’t you?”

That suspicion was confirmed when every single one of the corks (except the sole plastic one) crumbled when I tried to pull them out. The wines poured out brownish, like water out of long-disused rusty pipes, or from your bathroom tap at a Sochi hotel, as I dumped them down the drain.

With the last one, it occurred to me that, since I don’t drink this stuff, maybe it hadn’t actually gone totally, you know, off. So I poured some into a glass and tasted it. I think it took a few layers of enamel off my teeth, but I dunno—maybe that’s what it does?

But then I looked at it in the light.

If it were a nice fresh craft ale, I think this would present an excellent appearance. But I just had a Bad Feeling about it, so that bottle-load followed the other four.

I feel really bad about it—there’s nothing at all good about dumping wine. But since the smell of the stuff filled my flat for a few hours afterward (cathedral ceilings and all), I think I made the right choice in the circumstances.

A better one, though, would have been to open and share them while they were still drinkable. So—heads up for this Saturday: open that bottle and enjoy it while you can.

Gratitude Monday: Facebook fan mail from some flounder

As a software product manager who takes pride in what I deliver, as well as a software user with no discernable amount of patience when it comes to actually, you know, using an application, I never thought I’d hear these words coming out of my keyboard, but I’m grateful today for Facebook’s egg-suckingly bad user interface (UI).

Because it turns out that it does have its upside.

First—you understand that Facebook obscures how you interact with it; they really want to keep you bamboozled while they suck down all information about you that could possibly be sold to marketers and advertisers. Not only do they periodically change your privacy settings for you (or at least how privacy levels work) without bothering to inform you, so you have to constantly opt out of changes they’ve made; but they also just plain make things kludgy.

Which makes it a bit of a challenge to keep your account locked down.

It’s like they think they’ll just wear you out so you’ll give up and acquiesce to all their data pillaging. (Like health insurers make their processes so obscure and tedious and endless that they hope you’ll stop trying to use the benefits that you’ve, you know, paid for.)

Furthermore, their notification system seems pretty much intermittent, for both posts and messages, but today I’m concerned with the latter. Because either FB doesn’t notify you if you’ve received a message in your “other” box (i.e., from someone not designated as a Friend), or else the notification comes and goes like Tule fog. So if you’re not actively looking for fan mail from some flounder, you’re not going to find it.

Until potentially much, much later. Because apparently messages never go away, either.

Which (finally) brings me to my point:

Back when I didn’t have my account completely bolted down, I received a query from a former Great Love. (And, tellingly, it was a query, not a friend request, since he would never risk that not going his way.) To wit:

This was in 2009; well, I think I picked it up in 2010. I recall looking at it, snorting and hitting what I thought was delete. (Look—that whole condescending “I understand, and it’s okay” is so typical of his approach to relationships. He never understood a fifth of what he thought he did, and that, sunshine, is not okay.)

So imagine my surprise last week when all of a sudden FB kept telling me I had a message, and I could not find it in my inbox no matter how much I scrolled through the list. That was when I found the “other” category, and it turns out that the little “x” next to a message doesn’t mean “nuke it”, it simply archives it.

And, blow me, but former Great Love was back, this time with something he apparently thought would be more charmingly persuasive:

I have to say, I burst out into such a gale of sustained spontaneous laughter I was afraid the neighbors might complain of the noise. What a drama queen.

And I realized his whole drama queen thing is so…last century. Maybe it stems from him fancying himself a writer; but just listen to him: “…who acted from his own madness”. He couldn’t just stop at dickhead, which at least had the virtue of being accurate? No, no—it had to involve madness. Like he’s freakin' Lord Byron.

And at what point was he “acting from his own madness”? Every instance of dickheadedness during the course of our relationship (which lasted for a brief period during the early 80s)? Or when he tracked me down across the country years later while I was in grad school to offer what was meant to be one of those 12-step amends-making apologies, but he managed it so that it never actually involved the word “sorry”? Or the last exchange a decade ago when I decided there was no upside to dealing with him?

Look—you know the romance has gone out of the relationship when your last words to him are “Just grow the hell up.” And you send them by email. And you delete his riposte without reading it and never give it another thought.

I don’t know what DQ hopes to get out of this, or why he’d bother with me—once, let alone twice. Possibly some internal coup-counting. But if he’d been interested in maintaining contact with me, he should have considered that whole dickhead thing a lot sooner.

Besides—don’t ask if I’m “open” to an apology; either apologize or shut the fuck up. Be a man or a mouse, not Uriah Heep.

I may not always be the sharpest blade in the drawer but I’ve come to realize that being treated with respect and appreciation on a steady basis trumps a load of shite punctuated by flamboyant gestures and crocodile-teary humility. That Anna and Vronsky thing is enthralling for a few months (when you're young), but it’s not sustainable. And my days of contemplating the train approaching the station are long, long past.

And that realization brought a wonderful freedom, shortly after my first outburst of hilarity upon stumbling on his idea of a billet-doux. Which only occurred because of Facebook’s totally crap UI.

God bless ‘em!