Archive for the ‘i hate technology’ Category

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Spend enough time at the pool, eventually you’re gonna get wet.

2010/12/21

I know, people are assholes on the internet. Back in the days of Orkut I used to encourage engagement with such folk, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve mellowed down. Happy, medicated, more mature, I rarely interact with the flame war ilk.

But I do still have a temper.

So I bought this thing on etsy, a sticker for B!’s laptop, and I gave it a “neutral” review. The seller reacted by giving me, the buyer, a “negative” review. I thought this was a dick move, and I told him so in a message.

I gave a neutral rating because it’s much larger in real life than it is on your store site, and I felt the image was disingenuous. You can leave my negative review up, but that’s a pretty lame way to retaliate.

He comes back and says that I should have let him know what size I wanted, and that he gave me the “standard” size. After some more back and forth, he provides this as an argument:

Next time you go to Wal-mart, Kohls, Target, etc and you buy a shirt or something similar that is sized related…let’s see if they ask you on the way out if you got the right one to fit you. If you get it home and it doesn’t work, is it the stores fault because they didn’t ask you if it was the correct size? or let’s go to best buy and purchase a macbook bag or case. Say you have a 13 inch but buy a 15 inch and didn’t notice it until later. I guess it is the stores fault for not making sure you made the correct size choice while in the store? Seriously..

to which I reply,

This might be a hard concept for you to grasp: your store is virtual. Customers can’t pick up your item, touch it, look at it, as they might in a Wal-Mart, Kohl’s, Target, etc. And also, these retailers have a RETURN POLICY, in case someone makes a mistake. You might take a tip from their service managers as well, because I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t talk back to their customers like this.

After a few more exchanges he offers to let bygones be bygones if I just admit I was wrong, which, of course, I’m not about to. I tell him so, and bid him good day. As a final kiss-off, he adds three more negative feedback entries for products I had bought and rated as “positive”. So now, to the outside world, I look like the asshole.

This may be all, oh, ok, whatever, who cares if I have negative reviews on etsy.com, but seriously? I GAVE THIS GUY MONEY. AND HE TOTALLY SCREWED ME OVER. It’s the online purchasing equivalent of Dick’s Last Resort, if Dick’s Last Resort was funded by Haliburton and they served your meal with a side of red-hot nail files. Comments, anyone?

Posted in anecdotal, free advice, i hate technology, manifesto, personal hell | 17 Comments »

PHIL GIORDANO WILL RUIN HIS CHRISTMAS PRESENT IF HE READS THIS POST.

2010/12/03

Fair warning.

So two of my friends got married this summer, and, as their wedding present, I offered to document the ceremony and reception. I thought it would be a cheap, fun present, right? I just bring my camera down there, shoot the thing, bring it home, digitize, cut at my leisure, then get them the final edit by fall. A fine idea it was, until my camera broke. Then a cheap, fun present turned into a rather expensive and stressful present, depending on how you split the cost of rental, repair, and tax offset.

But let’s put that aside.

I rented a camera, covered the wedding, digitized the footage, and then got very, VERY busy. Super busy. Too busy to work on this cheap, fun, expensive, stressful present, no matter how much it called to me. Which, let’s be honest, it didn’t.

Lucky for Phil and Christina, work’s lightened up until after the holidays. I just completed my last freelance edit of the season, and lately (read: this week) I’ve taken to staying up very late while working on my new (!!) computer. Suddenly, their cheap, fun wedding present becomes a cheap, fun, insomnia-driven Christmas present. Right? Right!

UNTIL!

Both the bride and groom are pretty big Phish fans, and, after soliciting advice from their two best friends, I decided on a song for the final montage. It’s one of my favorites, and, after cutting no less than six wedding montages to “I Gotta Feeling”, seemed a welcome break. I worked on it for about four hours last night, sipping wine and tweaking edits, and tonight, at midnight, I sat down at the laptop for another session of quasi-manic late-night adventure. I was really rolling, man, I was just making things HAPPEN. I was sliding edits one frame at a time, I was doing motion effects and time remap, I wasn’t even stopping for cigarettes. The song built to its final crecendo, I quickened my cuts in anticipation of the blissful, inevitable release, and then…

and then…

those fucking hippies jammed into a whole other song. A song I didn’t download. A song I’m not about to cut a whole other wedding montage to. I mean, COME ON, Phish. Your shit may rock at live shows, but, from a postproduction standpoint, YOU TOTALLY SUCK.

Posted in aberrant behavior, charming neurosis, hippie crap, i hate technology, manifesto, phish, weddin' | Leave a Comment »

Microcenter gives me angst.

2010/11/29

It’s not often you get to witness the total evisceration of another human being while waiting in line for a merchandise exchange. But today, it happened. At Microcenter.

I have a real love-hate relationship with this particular retailer. The array of computer products makes me positively giddy, but, each time I go, the staff sets new standards for complete ineptitude. I once bought a scanner from a man who could barely speak English, and this other time the salesman talked my boyfriend into buying a 15″ case for a 13″ laptop. Waiting in line takes about as long as getting a cavity filled, and yes, you can bet, it’s just as painful. If you need somebody to help you there’s nobody around, but if you’re set on your own they swarm to you like flies, and (I swear!) they will only let women ring register. I’ve never seen a girl on their salesfloor. Walking in there is like playing roulette with close-range paintballs. You’ve gotta brace yourself for the worst.

Given all this, it gave me a sick kind of pleasure today to listen as this bespectacled middle-aged woman gave the manager hell. She was also unhappy with the level of customer service we were being provided, but, unlike me, she wasn’t about to take it lying down. “What is your MANAGEMENT STRATEGY to deal with this?” She howled, referring to the extra-long queue at the drop-off counter. “Why don’t you just HIRE MORE PEOPLE?”

“Ma’am, we’re trying to do your best for people, we have strict tests-”

“Don’t give me EXCUSES!” She shrieked. Her voice quavered, as though she were on the edge of hysteria.

“- we have strict tests to ensure that our associates are qualified. We get over a hundred applications a week, but people can’t pass the tests!”

Tests? TESTS? They TEST these people? Like, the one guy couldn’t even do basic MATH – there is NO WAY a 13″ MacBook Pro is going to fit in a 15″ case – and, while listening to the argument, I watched another salesclerk count $1,200 (in twenties) at least seven times. I mean, fuck, they don’t even answer the PHONE half the time when you call! What kind of tests could they possibly be GIVING, and who are these “unqualified applicants”? AMOEBAS?? I mean, seriously!

Eventually, the manager turned tail and fled, and, eventually, I made it to the counter to exchange my laptop sleeve for a spindle of CD-Rs. “Maybe you should apply for a job at Microcenter,” I suggested to B! on the way out the door. He said he didn’t know. I mean, we hear they have this really hard test.

Posted in i hate technology, personal hell, progress? | 4 Comments »

Tell Your Twentysomething To Do Something Practical.

2010/11/09

I will always – ALWAYS – be grateful to my parents for letting me go after my dreams. When I said I wanted to be a pianist, they got me lessons. When I said I wanted to be an actress, they took me to auditions. When I said I wanted to be a singer, well, that’s what the last post was about. When I said I wanted to major in acting instead, they signed loan forms and sent me.

Problem was, I hated acting.

On a whim, I’d auditioned at Syracuse with a monologue I couldn’t remember the name of. Like literally, when asked, I couldn’t remember the name. It was very embarrassing. But they took me anyway. I was surrounded by passionate people who’d done Shakespeare in the park and staged their own versions of Rent. My year in the drama department is a book in itself, but suffice it to say that I knew I was out by the end of first semester.

So there I sat: eighteen, undirected, faced with the unexpected choosing of a new life plan. “I like Rolling Stone,” I thought. “Maybe I could like, write for them or something.”

I enrolled in the Newhouse School of Communications (my GPA was stunningly high, going in) as a magazine journalism major. Problem was, I couldn’t type. Not at all. In-class article deadlines? DAILY writing exercises? So not happening. I didn’t even last two classes before switching to film. “Television, Radio, and Film”, to be exact. And it was there I discovered my penchant for documentary.

So I went from pianist to singer to actress to independent documentary filmmaker, with a brief stopover at Rolling Stone (in my mind).

I mean, honestly. At some point wouldn’t you want to have just sat me down and laid shit out? Listen girl, someday you’re going to want money. Maybe you should consider going into marketing.

Posted in free advice, i hate technology, life story | 1 Comment »

Correctly capitalizing this post may have been the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

2010/02/22

So, I have this problem. A few days ago, my 16g 3G iPhone crapped out. I couldn’t hear my calls, I couldn’t hear my voicemails. No speaker. I called Apple tech support, who told me to restore my phone, which I did promptly, tongue firmly lodged in cheek. Of course, the restore didn’t work. Whatever I was dealing with was a hardware issue.

Another call to Apple got me transferred to AT&T, who told me that although I wasn’t eligible for a new phone for free, I WOULD be eligible for an upgrade to the 3GS at the low low price of $199. Now, $199 is not an amount I was expecting to be spending on ANYTHING, to tell you the truth, and I need video on my phone like I need another hole in my head. But, c’est la vie, off to AT&T I went. A hundred dollars and twenty minutes later, I walked out with a brand new 8g 3G iPhone. Half the storage capacity of my old one.

Now.

I get home and see a facebook post from my old intern Corey, who suggested I try sticking a 1/8″ plug in and out of the headphone jack. “Why not give it a whirl?” I thought. Lo, behold, magic doth be real, because didn’t my old phone up and start working again. It was a mixture of jubilation and decay in my world then, because hooray, the 16g iPhone works but boo, I just spent $100 on another, smaller, iPhone.

Now.

I see an ad on Craigslist offering to buy broken phones. Dude offers me $100 for my 16g. Which, I mean, I’d break even, which would be cool. Then I see ads on Craigslist where people are straight up SELLING their 16g iPhones for like, three hundred bucks. So if I wanted to sell it, I could make a massive profit. Which would be righteous, because I’m broke. On the third hand, though, I’m notoriously lazy and careless, so having a backup iPhone might not be the worst idea ever. Kind of like loss / damage insurance against myself. In that case, I’d just keep the both of them.

Thus:

Internets, I need your free advice. What would YOU do with your two working iPhones?

Posted in free advice, i hate technology | 4 Comments »

KHW #9: don’t forget to bring a towel.

2009/04/18

Greetings, from Fargo. It’s a bit wet here, these days.

chillin' on the tractor, in the flood

To give you an idea just HOW wet, let’s compare.

then:

Before the flood

and now.

Floodwaters in Argusville

then,

Pusser on the horn

and now.

Van and flood

These are clearly not the same shots, but, I assure you, they are exactly the same roads. And the devastation is equal from all camera angles. My mind is completely blown

Perhaps the best way to convey the scope of this thing is to try and describe the view from the Red River bridge. Normally, the river burbles along some fifty feet below, and as you cross from North Dakota into Minnesota you can look to either side and see a sloping expanse of rolling grass and trees. To your right is a park, to your left a bike trail, both carved into a wide, long valley that stretches from end to end.

This is us, last May, shooting trains from the bike trail.

setup number 2

Yup, nice. That’s all underwater now.

And this is a terrible picture of me, which I’d never post under ordinary circumstances.

Possibly the worst picture of me ever taken. Paunch? Check. Bra line? Check. Next time, I need to be more specific about my contract.

Please ignore my bra as it claws its way through my shirt and focus on the background. See all that space? Yeah. Now it’s all water. Like, if I took that picture today the river would have been mere inches from my feet.

And you know, the thing I never realized about floodwater – it’s not clean. Like, not even remotely. I’m kind of embarrassed that this didn’t dawn on me until now, but when the river floods, it goes through sewage, garbage dumps, farmlands with manure, etc. Basically, when you’re looking at floodwater, you’re pretty much looking at an extremely large septic tank. With a current. We spent about two hours yesterday driving up and down 29, just north of Fargo where the flooding was worst, and at one point the smell actually became chewy.

Think about that.

No, really.

On the upside, I just realized I’m now the proud owner of 1.5 terabytes of portable storage.

1.5 terabytes... and it's mine all mine.

On the downside, apparently there’s a motorcycle convention at our hotel tonight, which has nothing to do with flooding but is annoying nevertheless.

Posted in i hate technology, north dakota, work | Leave a Comment »

KHW #8: There’s no thermostat in Hell.

2009/02/17

I don’t really know what time it is right now, but I’m pretty sure I should be asleep. I also know that the past several hours, which I would rather have spent in blissful slumber, have slipped by in a haze of goosebumps and sweat – a losing battle with the heater in room 122.

This heater has two knobs: one, ostensibly, to control the “temperature” (red for warm / blue for cold) and one to control the flow of air into the room (‘low heat’, ‘high heat’, ‘low cool’, ‘high cool’, ‘fan’ and ‘off’). My 1994 Hyundai Excel had a remarkably similar onboard system.

Since it’s Fargo, and since it’s cold, I turned knob #1 into the red, set knob #2 to ‘low heat’ (‘high’ produces something akin to the Santa Ana winds – you could blow-dry your hair in 5 minutes flat), and tucked into bed. I tossed, I turned, and soon realized I was covered in sweat. So I dialed knob #1 down a bit. Still sweating, and also parched. The air this heater kicks out is like, scientifically designed to rob your body of all moisture. Knob #1 goes down a little bit more, and suddenly I’ve got full-on air conditioning, goosebumps, and probably pneumonia, so we notch it up a tad back towards the red, chugging tap water to ward off the eventual drought. This little waltz has been continuing now for well over three hours, during which, like a hypothermia victim in his last moments before the blackness, I have peeled off several layers of sleepwear.

These sheets are like sandpaper, mind you. And I think I’m allergic to their detergent.

Frustrated and exhausted, I’ve just now turned the heater OFF. It’s nine degrees or something outside, so there’s a pretty good chance that some hapless member of the crew will knock on my door in a couple hours, eager to get started on our Starbucks run, and find me naked, frozen, and curled up under the television. (Terminal burrowing. Google it.)

~~~~~~~~~~
edit:

OH HEY WOW AWESOME! When the heater is “OFF”, it will still rouse itself for brief (but loud!) periods to spew COLD AIR across the bed! Life couldn’t get any better. I think I’ll just wander out into the street and die now, jesus christ.

Posted in i hate technology, insomnia, north dakota, personal hell, progress? | Leave a Comment »

Give me Xanax or give me death. Or, you know, both.

2008/12/10

I woke up this morning, flipped on my Krups, and hopped in the shower. As I lathered up, the coffeemaker staged a revolt and brewed 12 cups of Major Dickason’s blend all over the floor. So at 9:30am, I was on my hands and knees, stark naked, mopping up a liter of dark roast.

The thought crossed my mind that, perhaps, it was not to be a banner day.

I slipped into a new pair jeans from Urban Outfitters, bought only yesterday in a wardrobe-related meltdown, and headed over to the studio to work on relinking media in our AVID. It’s worth saying here that I’m no expert – I know enough about the NLE to keep me from being dangerous, but that’s mostly because I don’t mess around with things I don’t understand. I spent several hours with Laura, our sainted editor, perusing a pile of manuals and texting back and forth with my boss from the FRONTLINE days in an effort to get our media back online, and we were really beginning to make some progress when I noticed a funky smell emanating from somewhere around my legs.

“Um, so, sorry,” I said, to nobody in particular. “I think my cat pissed on my jeans this morning.”

We hit a wall after five hours of work, so me and my cat piss pants headed back to Eastie. Of course I took the most asinine route ever, got stuck in traffic on Storrow Drive, and my wipers don’t really work, but I was excited to get home and finish up the Christmas gifts I’d been making for my dad and my sisters.

About these gifts: over the past three weeks, I’ve worked on them every night. Not just like a little work, I’m talking HOURS and HOURS spent crouched over our coffeetable, gluing and pasting and all that jazz. One night last week, insomnia-driven and goal-oriented, I actually worked on them until 5am. No small feat, these presents.

So I let myself into the apartment, toting bags and craft supplies and my computer and my purse, and as soon as i walk in the door I’m assaulted by the same acrid odor that has now become so familiar to me, the same odor that I was smelling all afternoon on my new jeans. And, of course, where would it be coming from but my almost-finished Christmas gifts which, as luck would have it, were piled on my grandmother’s red velvet loveseat. So the loveseat reeks, the gifts are ruined, and I am either going to trade the fucking cat for a pile of rocks or throw myself off a bridge.

On the upside, we just got the official word that the film is fully funded. So I guess I can afford to buy presents instead. But that’s not really any consolation.

Posted in i hate technology, jake, work, worst week ever | Leave a Comment »

I hear that step one is admitting you have a problem…

2008/11/17

and I think I’m addicted to my computer. I fly out tomorrow to spend seven days drinking in Costa Rica, a 30th birthday celebration for my girl Christina**, and all I can think about is WTF I’ll do without my sweet little MacBook. Let it be known, I have no shortage of other crap to worry about: until last week I didn’t have a bathing suit, I don’t have enough cash in my bank account to cover the trip, and still I don’t really know where my passport is, but for some reason the prospect of NO COMPUTER FOR SEVEN DAYS renders all else trivial. Christina tells me not to bring the laptop, that we’ll be zipping around in a rental car and there’s a high rate of theft for all things electronic, but seriously each leg of travel is like eleven hours and I don’t think I can make it through without access to all my work docs, spreadsheets, and inqscribe files.

I’d planned to send the Mac for a short stay in Apple’s care while I was abroad – my DVD burner shit the bed during last month’s clip reel nightmare – so the logical thing would be to suck it up and go analog… but I really just don’t think I’m capable. Send help. Send advice. Or send me to techno-rehab, I just don’t know.

** follow the link to go to her page on Etsy.com! I’m sure she’d like nothing more for her birthday than to sell some handmade loveliness… either that or bodyshots.

Posted in charming neurosis, i hate technology, vacation | Leave a Comment »

I’m not crazy, just a little crisped.

2008/10/17

As a way to explain the insanity of that last post, perhaps a narrative timeline is in order.

We could start on Saturday, when Katsu and I spent the whole day in DSP’s pitch-black edit suite, trying by turns to find a way to get our clip reel (that we hope will wrangle a substantial sum from the powers that be so we can continue filming and not be unemployed) out of the AVID and onto a DVD. “How hard can it be?” I quipped, early in the day. “People burn DVDs all the time. No sweat.”

No sweat indeed. Seven hours, my last Ativan, and a spindle of crap transcodes later, we were no nearer to a solution. To work out the residual anxiety from this technological rubix cube, Katsu and I headed to Central Square to see MARS, my friend’s band. I’d planned on making it an early night, since I knew that the upcoming week would be beyond hellish – but instead I decided to eat an oyster and call it dinner then proceed to get shithouse wasted with my husband and my old boss.

Sunday was a hangover of legendary proportions, even for me, and I laid on the couch sipping ginger ale, throwing up ginger ale, and listening to “This American Life” podcasts. Life sucked.

I was still not in fighting shape by Monday, so it was kind of surprising that my insomnia kicked in and kept my head spinning until 8:30am. Or maybe it’s not surprising, actually, given my history.

So Tuesday, I had to get up at 9:15 (that’s a solid 45 minutes of sleep, for those who are counting) to give me ample time to ponder the DVD quandary before Pusser and his editor came in for their graveyard editing shift. Katsu actually stayed home from work to help out, but we still couldn’t come up with a viable solution. At 8pm, during dinner, I had a nuclear-sized freakout, at 10pm we discovered that, for some reason, Nero Vision refused to burn uncompressed audio, or ANY audio for that matter, and at 3am I finally went to bed, where I stared at the ceiling until my alarm went off three hours later. Our deadline to deliver the DVDs was 5pm Wednesday, and, to put it bluntly, I was a fucking wreck.

My plan: get to work by 7am, export the whole timeline, transfer the resulting file to an external drive, go home, burn the DVDs on a system that WORKS, and then drink this bottle of champagne I’ve been saving since my birthday for just such an occasion.

The reality: Pusser & co didn’t finish editing until sometime near noon, so I spent 5 brain-dead hours finishing up our grant letter and sitting around with my thumb up my ass. The file I finally exported from AVID took an hour to generate, was almost 80gigs, and, when I started the transfer, estimated time to completion was three hours (THREE HOURS!). While watching the status bar on the transfer creep slowly towards “done”, I frantically tried other in-house options in an effort to create a usable disc. We have no internet at the office, so I couldn’t do online problem-solving, and my phone spent the afternoon hours languishing on the edge of battery doom, so I couldn’t call all my tech-savvy friends for advice. I was exhausted, hungry, and utterly alone, with an impossible deadline and no communication with the outside world. Pretty sweet.

I had to call our executive producer at 4 and let him know that we wouldn’t be delivering those DVDs on time after all, and between the trip back to Eastie, the offload from the external drive, and the import into DVD Studio, I didn’t have a burned disc until almost 9:30pm. And, when we watched it, I noticed a small video glitch in the last scene, which forced me to drive BACK to work to see if the problem had an easy fix. The answer, of course, was “no”, so I got home at midnight, burned the 6 extra copies I needed for our funders, and passed. the fuck. out.

The champagne had to wait until Thursday. I feel like it was well-deserved.

Posted in boozin', i hate technology, insomnia, work | Leave a Comment »

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