rants: tele

Color me confused, I guess. I was reading some articles on CNN.com while I'm here getting paid to wait for the phone to ring. Americans today have such interesting and strange concerns, habits and feelings, don't you think?

For instance, the article was about television. NBC had its worst two weeks EVER last month, and ratings are generally down across the boards. Okay, they said and tried to figure out why this was. Perhaps because of the early daylight savings time. Maybe because television sucks. Or, maybe because people are simply using their DVRs to record and watch later, when they choose, sans advertising. Well, advertisers hope it isn't the latter.

I'm going to side note on this topic for a minute. Now, don't get me wrong. Since moving into my apartment in January, I began to discover the joy of DVR. I can tune in to GREY'S ANATOMY at 9:15 and watch the whole episode, sans commercial interruption and still be done by 10:00. "Wowza!" thought innocent little me. Now, four and a half months into this charade I've come to realize that in fact, *I AM MISSING OUT!* Sure, I get done with my program in 3/4 of the time, but I am oblivious to society. I don't know what movies or new television programs are coming up, I don't know if I should buy Scott or Charmin, and I don't know what my brain looks like on drugs. So, maybe I should go back to watching the commericals again. Or else hire an assistant to watch them and report back.

People then were able to respond in blog-like commentary about the article's merits. Anonymous responders commented they don't waste their time watching television (but they do waste it reading and writing about television online?). Or that they'd rather read a book. Or read the paper. Or get their news from online sources rather than the commercialized-we're-reporting-this-with-sexy-pictures-just-to-get-you-to-watch evening news, no longer with anyone we care about by the way.

Okay. Well. You can find some nifty, educational and exciting programs on television. Take the Discovery Channel's recent PLANET EARTH series. Damn nifty if you ask me. And what's the difference between spoiling your mind in front of the tele or surfing the net? Same difference, I'd say. And, if the technology we currently have at our fingertips had been invented back in the days when writing was invented, maybe there wouldn't be so many books. And would that be a bad thing? You can get some pretty sh*tty books and magazines out there.

I guess it's all in the way you look at it. For Beedow, I know after spending a week of staring at the internet from 10-7:30 each day, I like to go home and actually (gasp!) not turn on my trusty MAC. Instead, I spent the time on the subway home reading my book or magazine, and when I get home, I make dinner and sit in front of the television. It's relaxing. It's nice. It's comforting. And it's the same as sitting in front of a computer, or wasting one's time in a tabloid or bodice-ripper of a novella.

Tomorrow: how to cook a creamy chicken dinner and get drunk on an entire bottle of wine at the same time.

Sorry, I'm Texting . . .

A boy and his dog just walked by me. There's a man big coat sitting on a bench across from me. A kid is standing near that pole listening to his headphones and sipping a smoothie. There's a suit just talking to himself, strike that, to the person on the other end of his bluetooth headset. A girl sitting against a concrete wall is scratching her neck while an old geezer stares.

Of course! You guessed it. I'm in the JetBlue terminal at New York's JFK. (Why am I here? Well, it's a surprise, and Mom, if you read this in the next couple of hours ... well, there goes the surprise.)

What a shock! Remember the days when a person in a strange surrounding (like this, an airport terminal full of strangers) would have to actually read a book to keep busy. Or, better yet, speak to the guy sitting next to him. Say hello and make friends with that person who just might be a friend of a friend or something. But, no, not in today's "advanced" day-and-age.

Today, we sit here (probably 60% of the waiting passengers) with our laptops on. The other 40% are divided between their cell phones or mp3 players. The ones who aren't involved there are watching Grey's Anatomy or Family Guy on one of the flat panel televisions hanging from the ceiling. (I, of course, already checked and found out that Grey's was a rerun, otherwise, yes, I would be there too.) It's distressing.

It is distressing, well, and exciting I guess. Sort of exciting because from that first paragraph you thought I could have been talking about Bryant Park. But, from the rest of this, it's clear that it isn't a park. And, even if it was, do you think it would really be any different? We're not in tune with each other anymore as people. We would rather all turn on our electronics and "talk" to someone who isn't even here or play tetris again than actually try to become involved with someone else in the room.

"Of course, Beedow, you're such a hypocrite! You complain about the inhumanity and non-connectedness of this world, and here you are, sitting in the middle of it all."

I agree, o sage master. To combat this, I think fate dealt me a little jab. The woman next to me sneezed. I said, "bless you." She said, "thank you." Just a little humanity, folks, that's all I'm asking.

Tomorrow, how I stoped thinking and wound up not at the airport ninety minutes before my flight. Whoops!

no human contact no more

Technology is something, isn't it?

I spent some time today sorting out my online finances. It turns out, I can transfer funds electronically, not just from my checking to my savings account, but also from a totally separate banking institution's checking account. Just with an arsenal of routing and account numbers, my passwords and some glue, one can easily click money from place to place.

It's something. It's something that we can actually accomplish so much across these invisible waves of the web. I am doing some freelance design work right now, and am actually doing the designs and getting paid for them all across the 'net, without ever having to see a person. OK, well, that's a lie. I'm meeting the guy to get paid in cash, but, I could have done it across the net.

It's brilliant. It's my goal. You know, to make enough money to pay all of my bills and never have to change out of my pajamas.

**********

I was recently the target of an internet heist. My identity was stolen. Well, I think so anyway. I had some suspicious interaction with both MySpace and Amazon, received a couple of emails with bogus links and just had that general "I smell something fishy" sense about the whole thing. So, okay. I took action. I fired back. I wasn't going to let mister (or miss, or missus, or mademoiselle, or senor, or whatEVA!) hacker steal MY life.

I spent a good portion of an afternoon changing my passwords to EVERYTHING. My online banking, facebook and myspace type accounts, amazon and ebay style stores, blogging and newspaper mumbo jumos... all of them had to be re-passworded. Phew. Quite the process. But I did it. I completed the entire thing and changed all my passwords. I felt great.

Then I went to access any number of the just-password-altered sites. BRICK WALL. I had forgotten the password. Of course, I wrote them all down. But the problem is that they were all so similar, and I used to have them all memorized. The email got password XYX for this reason, but the banks were password YXY because all I needed to remember was to invert and reverse the email password. This went on ad nauseam in my brain, of which we don't use enough (perhaps another post in the making?).

Long story short, I'm just now getting the hang of these new passwords.

You probably didn't care, did you?

Journalism Gripe

That's right, now that I can command+shift+4, I will be showing you all different angles of my PowerBook desktop.

Today's topic is a gripe. With writers. Or, non-writers, perhaps.

So, the other day, NYT ran a profile on Kristen Chenoweth. Just a simple follow-her-and-her-dog-around-town type thing. Today, Playbill.com runs a story using a TEENY TINY bit of information from the NYT story, and passes it off as its own. We already learned from the Times that Chenoweth and Nathan Lane are developing a sitcom about talk-show personalities like Regis and Kelly. We know that. So why does Playbill have to tell us that same information, packed inside a "story" which only includes other information (bios) we already know and pawn it off as news? This is not news, this is old information.

I don't mean to pick on Mr Pincus-Roth from Playbill. Sir, I'm sure it's not your fault. I mean to pick on news sources in general. I read something in the Times or other reputable source on, say, Tuesday morning. I've been known to pick up my local Queen City paper up to ten days later and find the same story -- either word for word or simply repackaged. Can't we figure out a way to write our own stories? Doesn't anyone see the point in twelve people not writing the same story for twelve different papers or magazines or news outlets? At least spruce it up.

HOLLER

This is unbelievable! I am so grateful to Brock for his sage wisdom which now allows me to take pictures of EVERYTHING on my desktop (including this calendar picture right here). I love it. I am going to do it all the time. It's amazing. Phew!

Okay, now that I got that out of my system, I went to see Handel's MESSIAH tonight. It was a nice thing to do. I sang it five years ago and haven't heard it since ... but tonight was very nice. The drive home, though ... uh oh! Looks like winter is finally here. The roads were covered with a light dusting of snow and deceptively pretty. I skidded a couple of times before I remembered, "Oh! I'm from here, I should drive like I've dealt with this my whole life." And then I was fine.

I'm (obviously/very clearly) running out of ideas for topics and I'm SO not even really started on PROJECT 365. No one cares what I write. Help. This needs to be passionate and topical. Problem is, I have nothing to say.