"Please wait while I connect you with a representative."

You know the voice-activated, automated phone systems that are becoming popular? The ones i have in mind tell you the options and ask you to say your choice, rather than press a number corresponding to the choice. When you eventually speak your way through them to get to a Customer Service Representative (my inevitable destination), they always ask you to wait while they connect you (ie, drop you out of the automatic system and into a queue on a human's line).

After having spoken to the menu for the past five minues (often having to repeat myself with more enunciation), when they ask me to wait at that point, I always say, "Thank you." I will considered such systems to have finally evolved when they begin to respond with a "You're welcome."

Ten years in ten minutes.

A friend from high school boiled the interim down to a paragraph. i didn't manage such a feat, but my reply does ok for itself. incase you were wondering, too, i'll copy you on it.

last ten years? hm. well in my senior year at ncsa i applied solely to conservatories (against the advice of my flute teacher, mr. dunigan, who i gathered has retired since). and when i got to the auditions (at manhattan, at juliard you know, i of course was hit with the understanding that i was out of my league... way out. so the next year i applied to colleges, but of course didn't have a safety school then either and didn't get accepted anywhere. in the meantime i lived in jamaica plain, boston (just the name is reason enough, right?) and worked as a cook at a breakfast/coffee shop (Coffee Cantata, owned and run by a meticulous man who plays classical piano, no less).

well in the third year oberlin decided i wasn't a total slouch (got wait-listed at unc-somewhere). by that time i had decide to become a scientist and was trying to decide between physics and engineering. i went with the more applied field and probably saved my GPA in so doing. now, oberlin doesn't have an engineering school (it's not a university, after all), so i enrolled in the dual-degree program. after three years at the OC, i transferred to washington university in st. louis (the school with the ridiculously long name that you have to use in entirety or everyone thinks you mean washington state U). five years of undergrad and i got two degrees, one from each school. kind of neat, though i don't think it really matters that i have a second.

if you count the year i got off (for good behavior) somewhere in there, that brings it up to (3+5+1=) 9. with the spread between graduating last may and not actually landing a job until this april, that pretty much makes ten. i guess i have a way of taking long routes about.

side projects include living in camden, ME for a while, working as a cook at a camp one summer, and falling in love (and then breaking up) with capoeira angola. living crept in through the cracks. fun fact: i applied to jobs in Defense, got several nice offers, and then was denied security clearance. but who wants to build WMDs anyway, right?

Civics 101

Here's a bit of autoporn for the interested. It's a car I consider both sensible and sexy: it's one of the top ten cars of 2006 in fuel efficiency (though, in that line-up it is near the bottom), and it looks good. The dash is split, with the speedometer further forward and closer to the field of view than the less-immediate displays (tachometer, odometer). When i got to the dealer, they didn't have the color i had planned on (dark blue), so what i got was a combination of what they had and what i wanted (it wasn't a compromise because i'm quite happy with what i drove away with). In fact, i went with the intention of spending a certain amount on an Accord. The dealer talked me into the civic and as a result, i got a more fuel-efficient car with more features than the Accord for the same price i planned for.

Features this car has include the sun/moonroof-- what defines a moonroof? i thought it was window glass in the roof that doesn't open, but my coworkers think it is glass that opens part-way, to vent air, but doesn't fully retract-- alloy wheels (which i didn't understand until a few days after i got the car. this means there is no hub-cap, what you see is the wheel. now that i know about them, i see them a lot), and a in-dash navigation system. The nav system is very cool, but i will qualify that. It's cool because it's kept me from getting lost several times and because when i'm driving around and see a body of water, a park, or a road diverging and wonder where it leads, i can use the nav system to name the features or show me a map of what's over the hill.

The qualification is the source of the map information. There is a navigation DVD which holds the data. The DVD that my car came with is already a year or two out of date. Update DVDs can be purchased from Honda for about $200. What foolishness. There is a property in my hometown neighborhood that used to be a psychiatric hospital but has been renovated and made into upscale apartments. The nav-system still reports that it is Appalachian Hall Hospital, even though it hasn't borne that name for several years.

The real problem, though, is the DVD, which by nature will become outdated. The car has some way to communicate with the GPS network to get position and elevation data. The navigation information should be downloaded on the fly, like mapquest or google maps, so that it is always current. And while it would require a larger effort, highways and city streets should be color-coded to reflect congestion in real time. Then i could see that I-435 is at a stand-still all the way to Quivira and take an alternate route.

But I like my car all the same. It's pretty responsive (when the AC isn't on) and the handling is good. The stereo system is solid and has an auxiliary eighth-inch stereo input, so i can plug in my mp3 player or whatever else. I like the color, which i choose to call graphite. And now you've met Sabado.

Music in the Information Age

I read an article a while ago about LaLa and quickly became a member. At the time, you had to be invited in order to get a membership, but they let you put in your email address in hopes that they would invite you later. It took a few days for my invitation to come. Now they seem to have done away with the invitations entirely and you can simply sign up from the main page. Which is too bad, because i had earned about 50 invitations and wanted to give them out. When i only had five invitations, i spent a lot of time thinking about whom to send them to.

It's a fabulous system, doing for music something like what Netflix does for DVD movies. It's predicated on the fact that CDs, sent in simple clamshells, are very cheap to mail. Like Netflix, which wouldn't be cost-feasible for VHS tapes but works well for DVDs in paper sleeves, LaLa is relatively cheap (possibly the cheapest way to get new music). There's probably other factors, like the survivability of DVDs over audio tapes and being able to skip around on CDs.

But LaLa and Netflix are not the same business model. Where Netflix sends you their DVDs (i've received DVDs printed with the Netflix logo, indicating that they've gained some rights to reproduce the DVDs themselves) and you return them to Netflix when you're done, LaLa provides a coordination service between owners of music. I list the CDs i want and the CDs i have. LaLa matches my Have (Want) collection with everyone else's Want (Have) collection and tells me when a CD of mine is requested. When I choose to send it (i can choose to keep any CD on my have list), in clamshells and mailing envelopes LaLa provides, LaLa provides me the address of the member who has requested it. As i build a credit of sent CDs, the CDs on my Have list come to me from other members. The CDs never go to a LaLa facility, as with Netflix. And you own the CDs you receive through trade.

There's a lot of strategy to this trading. My collection of Hip Hop CDs moves pretty quickly, but some of the more obscure albums (Jimmy Cliff or An Anthology of Big Band Swing) have never been requested. The Music in Twelve Parts (on three CDs) of Philip Glass did go out. There's a fine balance: some CDs are too obscure to ever be requested, while others (Eminem's The Eminem Show) are so popular that they are sent by another member between the time I look to see what is requested and click to actually send it. This has happened on several occasions. It leads me to wonder whether I'll ever be able to move the very popular CDs (which I often don't want anymore) and whether I'm amassing an un-tradable collection by requesting only obscure CDs (Marc Ribot Y Los Cubanos Postizos).

It's a very cool way to listen to a lot of new music. Anecdotally, the little thumbnails of album covers next to each item and the complete track list are very nice features. LaLa does charge for mailing, about $1.50 per trade which supposedly covers mailing cost and operating expenses. At first, I traded about ten CDs a month (both directions), as my have list was at about 50 and Want list about 30. Now it's slowed down because my Want list has shrunk. I'm holding out for several more obscure albums (live jazz recordings from the 60s and Gling-Glo). My Want list is current at 16, some of which have been there since I opened my account.

I recommend it to anyone with a lot of CDs that they aren't too attached to. Caveats are that you should have at least a few dozen CDs (which you're willing to trade) and they should be in good condition (no big visible scratches, no holes in the label through which light may shine). Without many CDs you won't get a lot of activity. With damaged CDs, the receiving member will mark it as received damaged and you'll lose the CD without getting trade credit for it.

Strategy which has occurred to me in writing this: BMG is the time-honored way to build a large CD collection. But BMG doesn't have most of what i want (Gling-Glo or Bob Willoughby). But i could order any number of popular CDs through BMG, with the intention of trading them through LaLa for CDs that i actually want....

I'm not going to touch the legality of CD trading. You can probably work it out yourself.

The success of Netflix and LaLa has impressed me. My plan is to start Bookflix (or Netbooks, or Netboox).

Weigh-in

I have a running joke with myself, concerning my weight. i'm 5'7" and 165 pounds. this gives me a BMI of about 25.8. On a good day, i might be 160 lbs, which would be BMI= 25.05. Now, the CDC defines 'healthy' weight as a BMI of 18 to 25. So i'm just over the line into being 'overweight'.

The joke is, i like to think of myself as being on the Front Lines in the War against Obesity. After a while, though, it occurred to me there's all sorts of elaboration on this. Obviously, someone with a BMI of, say, 20, is Behind the front lines. But all the tubby people you see walking around are In Enemy Territory. Someone who is morbidly obese i consider to be a P.O.W. that just kills me.

I'm not sure where that leaves someone with a BMI of 18, or an anorexic. i haven't gone that far with the analogy, since fat people are mostly what i see. and really skinny people to me are just Painfully Thin. any ideas?