April 2008 Archives

Every three months (or so), it's maintenance day at Lydia's playschool. It's a co-operative playschool, so the moms and dads (mostly dads) come in to spruce the place up -- spread mulch, put in or take out the air conditioners, fix the bookcases, and scrub a-l-l-l-l-l the toys.

The playschool is in an old house with low ceilings, so a line of dads lumbers into the room, ducking low to avoid the paper umbrellas hanging from the ceiling. We pick up the plastic bins full of toys from the bookshelves lining the walls, and lumber out again in a row, taking the toys to the kitchen. It's like an elephant parade in the tiny space, or a procession of big, friendly golems.

After running the toys through the dishwasher, they have to be sorted back into their plastic bins. That's the hardest part, because there's a LOT of bins, and a LOT of categories: farm animals, zoo animals, sea creatures, dinosaurs, ponies, LARGE farm animals, non-zoo pets, non-dinosaur reptiles. Every bin has a label and one or two pictures laminated on the front, which is often helpful — a picture of a dinosaur, for instance — but sometimes confusing. There's a bin with a picture of a tiger and a picture OF A DUCK on the front. Huh? "Tigers, plus animals tigers like to think about snacking on?" I bet it makes perfect sense to the kids, but sometimes the differences seem inscrutable.

The dads, many of whom have exacting and technical jobs, have a great time coming up with new taxonomies and re-binning schemes as we stand around the 24" high table drying the toys as they come out of the dishwasher. Or just, you know, laughing when a pint of hot water pours out of a hole in the lion's ass. (Those go in the "incontinent jungle predators" bin.)

Though I'm probably going to hurt the feelings of a perfectly nice local graphic designer by saying it, I will declare that the flyer for the upcoming May Day Festival, where I will have my Nerdlepoint booth, freaks me out.

I have less than two weeks until my Nerdlepoint booth at the West Chester Festival of the Arts, which means I have to make a LOT OF CANVASES right now. And also, put together the explanatory materials telling people what a 2D barcode is.

Maybe I can show this video on my iPhone over and over again:



Thanks, Todd Bender, for finding this video.

Whew, what a day! We just got back from seeing Barack's whistle-stop tour at the Downingtown train station. My impressions, in no particular order:

* At the Hilary visit, we saw maybe two black voters. This was an actually mixed crowd, both ethnically and in age (a lot of younger people, too.) I liked Barack's crowd.

* Unlike Hillary's visit to a prosperous suburb, this was an actual working-class spot. Of course, Barack had just come from Wynnewood and Paoli further down the line. Unlike Wynnewood, Paoli, and West Chester, there's no Starbucks in Downingtown (that I know of.)

* The crowd was, frankly, kind of tepid. There were moments of enthusiasm, but we weren't seeing magic being made. I don't normally EXPECT magic, but the lack of magic is relevant here because...

* Barack is running on an outsider platform; that he represents real change. Okay, awesome: tell me more. I'm all for change, but then the burden of proof is on you to convince me that you have a plan (besides "I am so awesome") to accomplish the change. And if your platform is "I am so awesome", you must BRING HUGE AMOUNTS OF AWESOME to back it up. I was ready to listen, but I really didn't hear anything EXCEPT the no-money-from-lobbyists point. That is a big, good point, but it wasn't sufficient for me. The amount of awesome wasn't sufficient to bridge the remainder of the "no clearly defined plan" gap.

So I started the day tentatively voting for Obama, because on the limited amount of information I had to go on, I thought his organization was better run and had more momentum. And I like his supporters. However, after seeing Hillary, I have to come down on her side: I saw her as a seasoned, experienced, practical, and effective politician. I'd hire her to lead a big company, I'd hire her to be chief executive. If Obama were a shining magic man that I really BELIEVED could pull off a populist revolution, I'd be all for it. I mean, hey, who doesn't like the idea of a total second-coming-of-Kennedy badass? However, I saw a competent speaker who, frankly, I thought was saying pretty stock "let's change Washington" phrases without following them up sufficiently. And who didn't really extract a big reaction from folks ready to listen to him.

So, on balance: two very smart, very committed people who are working VERY hard. I'd vote for either of them comfortably in the general election in November. But based on a day of direct contact with both and listening to their messages, I'm going to be voting for Hillary in the primary.

Today, Hillary Clinton came to the Good Will Fire Company (the same place where I stumbled on the Robot Squad yesterday.) I overheard the CNN camera operators talking to each other: "How many firehouses have we been to?" "I dunno; this makes six or seven." Hillary is obviously going for a blue-collar crowd, which seemed fairly ironic because the Good Will Fire Company serves the seat of one of the highest-income counties in the USA. That's not meant to be all TELLINGLY IRONIC or anything; it's just that the audience was filled with polished, affluent suburbanites, and so the country music over the PA system seemed a little out of place.

Barb got us past the secret service, and we got to meet Ed Rendell, who is just an awesome old-school name-remembering, flattering-story-telling politician "do you have a gym here?" he asked Good Will's president. "Because volunteer firefighters have jobs; they move around. They don't get fat like professional firefighters. You have to keep those guys busy!"

Then the back door opened and in came the secret service, and I was RIGHT UP AGAINST those guys, and they throw off a really intense, scary vibe, and then we shook hands with Senator Clinton, who gives off a very presidential, powerful aura. And then we all went out front and heard her speak.



So at this point, all the standard snarky-blogger stuff goes out the window. Hillary gave a REALLY great speech, mentioning a lot of things that I'm worried about (national debt, energy policy, disastrous foreign affairs, use of the military), and she seemed extremely competent and managerial. I didn't get the Magical Kennedy Vibe from Obama that I was wondering if I'd get. I didn't get it from senator Clinton, either: what I got was a feeling that she was experienced, focused, and capable. Regardless of her electability, I'm persuaded that she'd to an excellent job at the job of being president.

Kate and I have been really lucky about the amount of access we've had to the candidates to make a decision. In about twenty minutes, we're leaving for Downingtown, where Obama's gonna make a whistle-stop. That'll give us a chance to hear a speech in person by both candidates. Right now, I have to say that I'm leaning towards Hillary, which I didn't expect.

After dropping off Lydia at playschool, but before going into the office, I was driving around the southeast side of town looking for the ice cream truck, because I want to lowjack it with a GPS unit and put it on Google Maps (I can't believe I'm the only one to want to do this; Google doesn't have news of others.) How come when you're NOT looking for the ice-cream truck, you see it ALL the time, but when you ARE, you can never track it down?

Anyhow, I'm pretty sure that it parks somewhere down near Bolmar street, so I stopped in at Good Will Fire Company to ask those guys if they knew where the ice cream truck was (you never know, firefighters might be huge ice-cream truck customers, right?)

There was nobody at the front door, and nobody answered the intercom. So I walked around back; one of the big garage doors was open and two fellows -- one a uniformed police officer with a grey buzzcut, and one a rangy, athletic-looking fellow in a T-shirt, were, you know, just tinkering on their ALL-PURPOSE FIBER-OPTIC-CONTROLLED RESCUE ROBOT. With caterpillar treads and a big gripping hook on the front. And spotlights. And video cameras.

They did not seem to mind being interrupted (phew!) working on a kink in the orange fiber-optic control/video cable, and said "sure" I could take a picture of it, but they were shy about being in the picture (I do not think this is because they are Secret Operatives or anything.) Anyhow, any morning when you stumble across a Rescue Robot is an awesome morning.

Then -- and this is the best part of all -- the officer then TOOK MY NAME AND TELEPHONE NUMBER, and promised to call me if he saw the ice cream truck. So, this morning, I:

1) Stumbled across a fiber-optic rescue robot, and
2) PUT OUT AN APB ON AN ICE CREAM TRUCK.

When people tell me "is it nice working in West Chester"? I just sputter. I mean, I cannot satisfactorially express THIS AMOUNT OF AWESOME in one sitting. MOVE TO WEST CHESTER IMMEDIATELY, everybody I know. Pretty soon, the ice cream will be easy to find!

Here's family friend and all around awesome guy Dave Moroz-Henry of Barking Dog Signs made up a five-foot coroplast (corrugated plastic) NERDlepoint banner with grommets in the top for my booth at the West Chester Craft Fair:



Now all I need is to make some inventory to sell! I've been working on the back-end side of things (like TinyURL, except that it will let you change what the target of the URL is.) Here's how it works; I'm trying to come up with a coherent explanation for the craft booth:

• You buy a hand-painted needlepoint canvas at the booth. The canvas has a URL painted on to it, in the form of a 2D barcode that your cameraphone can read.
• The URL painted on the canvas is unique -- it points to "nerdlepoint.com" and an arbitrary three-letter word. The canvas you buy might have "nerdlepoint.com/cat"
• When you buy the canvas, an envelope comes with it containing a secret password for that canvas that only you have. The password is something like "mike23melissa".
• You can go to the nerdlepoint.com site, and — using your secret password — set the location on the internet where your canvas goes. You can set it to your blog URL, your Flickr photostream, or make it a Rick Roll.

Let's say you've done that. You've purchased the canvas with the url nerdlepoint.com/cat painted on it, and you've used the secret password to make it a Rick Roll canvas. The user experience then is:

1. Your teenaged nephew with a jailbroken iPhone shoots your needlepoint pillow using his semacode reader.
2. Your teenaged nephew groans in anguish as Rick Astley starts dancing in the YouTube player on his iPhone.

I think I'm going to have to make this explanation less complicated. Maybe explain it like a magic trick, with the user-experience first, then the instructions on how to make that happen, and only then the squidgy bits about what's going on under the hood with the 302 redirects and the electrons and the gabba-gabba hey?

UPDATE: Um... teenaged nephews don't have iPhones, do they? I guess you'll have to substitute "...your twentysomething brother-in-law with expensive shoes and Art Director Glasses."

In order to lock in your sequential and permanent Guerilla Drive-In Member Number, you must send in two things: the seven-digit access code that the MacGuffin is broadcasting, and a picture of you at the location. Here are new Guerilla Drive-In members 018, 019, and 023, skulking around the restrooms in dark glasses and hoodies:



There are a random selection of other New GDI Member pictures on my Flickr photostream; I've been posting the ones that I can crop and blur so they give away SOME hints without blowing the pony TOO badly. Others will follow.

Kate and I got into an argument at Waterloo Gardens this morning:

Kate: "I kind of want to find a planter that's a statue head. I don't know whether Beverley Nichols would have liked it or been horrified by it. And then there's that poem, about the giant head..."
John: "Huh? Giant head?"
Kate: "Yeah, you know, the GIANT RUINED HEAD. You KNOW that poem, they made us learn it in seventh grade! With the giant legs, and the sand, and the desert..."
John: "That poem sounds awesome. But I don't know it."
Kate: "Shut up, you totally know it! Get out your iPhone and Google 'poem statue desert'."

And so I do, and I am introduced for the first time to:

THE MOST METAL POEM EVER WRITTEN

OZYMANDIAS
Percy Bysse Shelley
=============================================
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
=============================================

I mean! Holy. Fucking. SHIT. That is the most metal poem ever. How did I not hear about this sooner? It's got EVERYTHING:

• It's got the Majesty of Rock, with the sneering, and the blowing sand, and the easy, melodramatic, and theatrical irony.
• It's got that twelve-cylinder pomp that you see on Iron Maiden album covers.
• Tolkien nerd art is FULL of ancient crumbling fearsome king dudes.
• Charlton fa' Chrissakes HESTON was influenced by it!

Plus, Shelley's heavy-metal admonition is totally apropos for someone who spends their working day pushing electrons around on a magnetized platter; both in the positive and negative senses. Man, I could have been using this poem on a daily basis since... well, since seventh grade! Was I sick that day? Damn! DAMN!!!

The main reason that I can't believe I didn't know about this poem is because of this blog post in 2003, about our neighbor Todd's placement of a GIANT, CRUMBLING SANTA CLAUS HEAD in his yard. God help us, think of all the cheezy blog-post titles I could have written!

Kate, thanks for finally closing this gap in my knowledge. This is as big, to me, as the Digitas co-worker who finally, belatedly introduced me to the Flashman series, after incredulously learning that I didn't know about them. Sheesh, what else am I missing?

After three years and three broken AM transmitters, I've finally got the Guerilla Drive-In MacGuffin set up and deployed to a HIDDEN LOCATION somewhere in West Chester. Here's what it looks like: If you find the MacGuffin and listen to the secret broadcast it's sending on AM 1700, you'll get the secret information about where movies are going to be shown through 2008. You can find out more at:

http://www.guerilladrivein.com/updates

PS. that picture looks so good because it was taken by my neighbor, professional awesome-picture-taker Harold Ross, who wasted two hours on Wednesday driving around West Chester with his son Jonathan, trying to pick up the MacGuffin's signal. Sorry, Harold! I realize that is totally fair. You should keep hot-doggin' it around town until you pick up the signal.

UPDATE: The successful finds have been coming in steadily. My favorite story is from "Team BQ", a "couple of media-swarthmore kids and a city boy" who didn't know anything about West Chester, but decided to drive out and look around for the MacGuffin. After several hours of static and no luck, they started stopping strangers on the street, showing them their clues and asking for help. Dispirited and dejected, they tried their once last hope on the way back and HURRAH SUCCESS THEY FOUND THE MACGUFFIN! And celebrated with milkshakes.

More great things about suburban West Chester:

My brother-in-law Matt has been rebuilding the wall extensions on local underground skating hangout "The Dust Bowl." This is a place right near King of Prussia that I was nowhere near cool enough to know about as a kid (but Matt was.) It's a concrete-lined ditch with angled walls, and local skaters had poured concrete wall extensions, added pool copings, and otherwise done Awesome Secret Skateboarder Stuff there. I think Bam Margera is at the Dust Bowl at about 0:20 here.

When route 202 was widened, the homemade extensions were jackhammered out. Trees were removed between the Dust Bowl and the hotel behind it, so you couldn't skate there without a hotel manager calling the cops. I can't count the number of times that a hotel manager has called the cops on me. Actually, yes I can, and that number is zero.

Anyhow, the trees have been replanted, and so Matt built a wall extension and installed it there, and posted some pictures to the straight edge hardcore forum where the skaters hang out, and they're all a really courteous and genial lot ("Mind if I add some pool coping, friend?" "Why not at all, my good man! Please be my guest!")



I'm posting this because I'm absolutely certain that my blog readership does not contain anyone that's likely to go blow up Matt's secret skating spot by parking stickered cars in the hotel parking lot and generally acting like jerks. DO NOT PROVE ME WRONG, MOM. Thank you.



Anyhow, that's Awesome Local Thing number one. The other Awesome Local Thing is the tack shop right around the corner from my office. I went in and talked to Joe, and told him that I'm looking to sew plastic to leather, and can he...? YES OF COURSE it turns out he has these giant sewing machines that sew bridle leather together and he makes tack right there in the store:



He got down a patent-leather hide (actual leather! actually shiny!) and we started looking at different materials, and HOLY DAMN there's nothing cooler than custom-made tack. Especially if it has nothing whatsoever to do with anything useful. More on that later. Here's Joe, busy taking notes on all the bits of leather we're sewing together:



West Chester is awesome. New York friends, I urge you to move out of NYC before the recession really solidifies. Come down here (housing is a buyer's market, although real estate prices here remain strong!) and start a vegetable garden. We'll weather the Coming Global Depression in style.

I love special-purpose gear. I especially love special-purpose gear in bright colors. And I freaking LOVE special-purpose gear in bright colors that conjures ADVENTURE. And helicopters.

So I'm incredibly fortunate that firefighter uber-outlet The Fire Store is just around the corner in Coatesville. I went there on a SECRET MISSION this morning to talk to their embroidery department, and I took some pictures, in which I start foaming at the mouth from excitement. Speaking of foam, did I mention they have foam depth charges just kind of casually sitting around next to the special-purpose Pelican Cases? And they have helmet crests (all the leather awesomeness of horse tack, with all the graphical punch of Fisher-Price Adventure People!) And Combine Soldier gear, if you're into that.

Just check out all the helmets: each is heavy, like a motorcycle helmet, with all kinds of mount points for expensive flashlights with triangular cross-sections. And oxygen masks. And radios. Plus, they all have a kind of a new-car smell:



As icing on the cake, Declan the embroiderer instantly picked up on what I wanted to do, unlike every other embroiderer I've talked to who's looked at me sideways and patiently explained to me why I'm an idiot. Plus, anything I do through the Fire Store is going to be just totally STEEPED in Rescue Ranger karma. Wow, what a morning!

Barack Obama was at West Chester University today, appearing on a road tour of Chris Matthews' Hardball. Barb was stuck in Harrisburg, so Kate and I got to use her VIP tickets. Without Barb there, they were downgraded to semi-VIP tickets, but that was even better because we got to sit right next to the band and behind the cheerleaders and it was loud and boisterous and enthusiastic, and just what you would expect!

I took a lot of blurry pictures on my iPhone, but Kate got the only good picture of The Man Himself, looking suitably presidential in the spotlight:



I thought Senator Obama did a decent job with the questions. He kept the answers to the softball questions short ("Have you had any really strange experiences on the campaign trail?" "Daily, until I stopped watching cable news YUK YUK"), and went into more detail on the actual question questions. He came across as straightforward -- when he wanted to avoid answering a question, he would declare that he didn't want to answer it and why. All in all, I was impressed, but I didn't have a Shining Camelot Moment like I've heard my parents' generation describe.

The crowd was the most fun -- outspoken, enthusiastic, energetic, and a definite mix of black and white.