Over the weekend I decided to be really smart and improve this blog. When I announce big plans like that people in my house run for cover because they know from past experience blood will be likely spilt, usually mine, and tears of frustration will flow, always mine.
The run-for-cover gang were right.
The other day I had two book deliveries from Amazon go missing in transit. UPS had no idea where the packages were three days after their scheduled delivery date. I asked UPS to put a trace on the package and when they started to do that for me the system stopped them.
UPS told me "according to our contract with Amazon you have to contact them for tracking information.
I was surprised UPS would not help me. UPS then proceeded to rattle off a long URL where I was supposed to go to get help from Amazon. I asked if there was a phone number for Amazon and I was told there "was no phone number" and to go to that long Amazon URL.
The Amazon URL is a dead-end. You cannot find a live person to help. There is no phone number on the Amazon website you can search for and call for help. You spend time on that long Amazon URL filling in long form boxes. You then click a button to send Amazon your inquiry.
UPS is a great company and I had my delivery within a few hours of calling them. Obviously they put a trace on my package even though their contract with Amazon did not allow them to do that for me.
Four days after the delivery I had a response from Amazon that was created by an auto-responder and I was told to "check with your neighbors to see if they accepted your package for you."
It was frustrating I could not get a quick answer to track down two expensive deliveries and if a real person had bothered to check my inquiry they would have seen the deliveries had been made four days ago.
Amazon is a great company for selling books but hiding their phone number from customers and failing to offer a live online help system where one can find a person and not an auto-responder is not good business.
I did a web search and found a toll-free number for Amazon that I could not find on Amazon.com proper: (800) 201-7575. Use that number and you can eventually find a live person if you hang on the line long enough and refuse to abide the recorded instruction to go to a long Amazon URL for help.
If you have a tough time finding a phone number for any company you can always head over to the Federal Consumer Action website and do a search to find the right method of contact for customer satisfaction.
One of the harbingers of how fruitful the continued marriage of technology and research can better serve the future is found in the status of the New York Public Library's position on electronically borrowing books.
One can head off to the NYPL eBooks online library and actually check out books by downloading them to your home computer.
Joan Didion is one of my favorite writers. Her writing style is barbed and cool.
My graduate students and I had a great time last night discussing her On Morality essay in class.
Didion makes an interesting claim that morality is not individual. Morality is shared. Morality, at its core, consists of the promises we make to each other. Alone we can be self-righteous. Together we must be moral.
Didion then goes on to pick apart how the definition of morality has been politicized and ruined and misunderstood over the centuries. On Morality is must reading for those who wish to share the same space, neighborhood or planet.
You may not agree with her argument but you will be forced to consider her thesis in order to intellectually spar with her ideas. Creating that pathway for thinking is the role of the writer in society.
I finally was able to touch a Sony Playstation Portable and it is a wonderfully imagined machine and it feels good in your hand and it works wonders on your eye.
The PSP Value Pack comes with a memory card and five games:
Wipeout Pure
Ape Escape on the Loose
Twisted Metal
World Tour Soccer
NBA
I don't play games like those so I quickly became familiar with the loser's screen.
Even the Ape Escape game, obviously intended for young children, was impossible for me to control. I don't have any Xbox or Playstation experience so I have no idea if the problems I was having controlling the action was because I had no experience or if it was because the machine controls were too tiny to use.
The screen on the PSP is rich and incredible. The sound is bassy and clear.
The entire machine sits well in your hands. I especially like the Wi-Fi capability for network updates or peer-to-peer gaming with friends and family.
I also really enjoyed the movie playing capability of the PSP. Spiderman 2 was included with Value Pack and it was fun to watch the movie on a gamer device. You can also turn on subtitles if you are Deaf or Hearing Impaired and the subtitles play in movies and in the games. That is a nice touch.
You can also play home videos and music on your PSP. The instruction manual is small and ineffective but the onscreen help is clear and concise.
On July 9, 1896, the great Nebraska statesman, William Jennings Bryan, who ran for and lost the Presidency of the United States three times during his life, stood up at the Democrat National Convention in Chicago to defend rural American farmers from going into debt against the idea of a Federal coinage of silver against gold at 16 to 1. Here is part of that famous speech that would later be known as his Cross of Gold:
As the world changes and the requirements of living progress, the truly impressive thinkers must come to terms with the need to present a multitude of repeating lives in one body.
I'm not getting metaphysical here -- I am merely stating a fact of living in moments -- and this is not an easy thing to conceptualize because it means starting over from square one over and over again in order to change the intent of your life and to move upward.
MSN Remote Record is a service that interacts with your Media Center 2005 computer if you have a broadband internet connection.
You logon to the MSN television grid website from any computer with internet access and choose which programs you would like to watch on your Media Center 2005 computer.
From my Inbox:
A few months ago a lion and an 8-month-old elephant used by the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus were killed.
Last year Ringling destroyed an 8-month-old elephant named Riccardo after he suffered irreparable fractures to both hind legs when he fell off a circus pedestal.
A few weeks ago 60 disoriented dolphins thrust themselves out of the ocean and into shallow waters off the Florida Keys.
24 of the dolphins died or were euthanized.
The United States Navy refused to comment if the Los Angeles class attack submarine, the USS Philadelphia, was responsible for the dolphin killings while the submarine performed top-secret SEALs maneuvers using high-power sonar 40 miles off the coast of the Florida Keys.
Dolphins are especially susceptible to sonar and submarines routinely use sonar to map and to target and to explore deep waters. A single sonar ping can travel many miles.
In March 2000 a United States Naval battle group experimented with sonar and four different species of whales beached themselves on the Bahamas sands to avoid the sonar vibrations. It was later discovered during autopsies that the whales had internal bleeding in their ears and brains.
Ocean mammals like whales and dolphins are vulnerable to sound and reverberation and sonar rings like an earthquake in their bodies. The proof is in their incredible swimming out of the water to race away from the pain.
High-power sonar kills ocean mammals.
The evidence is in the autopsy.
There is no such thing as a coincidence.
Hard news recently came down concerning the doubling of the HIV infection rates in the Black community. That information is troubling and is directly related to drug use, unequal access to healthcare and low-income living.
The 12th Annual Retrovirus Conference in Boston revealed the doubled HIV infection rates for Blacks was extrapolated from National Health and Nutrition surveys. The Centers for Disease control then compared data from 1988-1994 and 1999-2002 to determine the results.
Another note of alarm is 50% of people infected with HIV are not on a drugs regimen to treat the virus.
The infection rate in the White community held firm and that suggests further proof that Race causes visible rifts between people beyond simple social, educational and economic planes.
Malcolm X was killed 40 years ago.
On the February 20, 2005 edition of Like It Is hosted by the venerable Gil Noble, the life of Malcolm X was presented in a factual, non-emotional and intellectual manner. Malcolm X's words proved him a man of insight and substance.
Malcolm X's involvement with the Black Muslims and the Nation of Islam was difficult for many on different levels.
The most interesting idea brought to bear during the one hour television presentation was the idea that those who were responsible for Malcolm X's death "could not find the courage or the heart to rise up and strike the KKK or the White Citizens' Council but they could find the heart to murder Malcolm X."
My great mentor, Dr. Howard Stein, claims the enemy of the Arts is the Humanities.
I reflect on his statement often.
Dr. Stein's advice is timely and terribly true.
Strength lives on strength.
Heal your weaknesses but do not let them define you.
Your strengths validate you.
Too often we leave our strengths to stagnate and atrophy. Your strengths, not your weaknesses, are what save you and resuscitate you when you are down and in trouble.
Stretch your strengths so they can continue to carry you.
Yes is tough.
No is easy.
To live your life where you say "yes" more often than you say "no" is to leave an important mark on the world.
Yes takes time. Yes means committment. Yes requires involvement.
No is an end.
Yes is eternal.
You cannot get a "yes" unless you ask.
Excellent Teachers are made, not born.
It takes a good six years of teaching two courses a semester or six courses a year to understand exactly what works and what doesny't work in the classroom.
Creating a learning environment where students can engage, comprehend and remember is both difficult and sublime.
One bit of hard advice I received while I was a graduate student at Columbia University in the City of New York was the warning that -- if you are not vigilant and demanding of your talent every day -- you will slowly become what you hate.
Few people choose the life path of significance over fame.
Those who choose meaning over flash are not well-known precisely because of their right choosing.
Look around you and celebrate those who form meaning instead of just tempting definition.
Many are concerned only with their happiness.
I counter happiness is overrated because the world is a miserable place where happiness finds no purchase.
I love the misery of living because that is what marks us as human. I also find the best and most interesting work comes out of misery and not happiness.
The next time you are feeling unhappy -- do something proactive -- create a monument to your state of mind and celebrate the fact that you were able to accomplish something of merit even though you were not happy.
Over the last 12 months there have been seven murders within a one block radius of where I live in the Jersey City Heights neighborhood.
These killings, I have discovered, are an unfortunate part of the fabric of living in Jersey City.
I used to be a big TabletPC fan. A year ago I purchased a Toshiba M205 TabletPC and I found it to be a fine machine. It was reliable. It had a great keyboard. It had a rotten screen for viewing. The screen resolution was incredible but it was like trying to see that resolution through a schmear of Vaseline.
Is grade inflation really a problem at the PhD level?
Isn't the assumption at the graduate level that each student should be expected to do "A" grade work?
The incredible shrinking Newark urban core is disappointing, fascinating and understandable from an economic opportunity point-of-view.
The Good City is one that protects the soul of its people and its visitors by providing the cultural means for intellectualism, morality and aesthetic.
These three conditions of the soul are paramount to The Good City because they are the reflexive results of introspection, protection and invention.
The mistake many make when trying to construct The Good City is one concerning only human magnitude instead of a universal harmony of space, time and condition.
Last semester at Rutgers-Newark one of my students stood before the class to present his idea for a play that dealt with an issue striking the core of Newark.
That tall and lithe black (I do no know his cultural identification) male student said to us the truth as he knew it: "Urban Renewal means Negro removal."
He wasn't trying to be funny.
That phrase has been over-used into a cliche but on that cold day in Newark, in the refurbished second floor Bradley Hall rehearsal space, we all felt a little smaller and colder.
There were a lot of tributes to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. during the last celebration of his birth but one of the finest programs on television was one that presented Dr. King on camera making speech after speech with no outside commentary. The beauty of the man and the mission in the frame of history was clearly and succinctly excited by the inspiration of his poetic forensic.
Wilfred Ruprecht Bion is an interesting researcher who has published a lot of work on group dynamics and he explains why and how groups fail to thrive.
W. R. Bion generally suggests groups are always calculated to fail because of a forced sense of cohesion that is only a cover for competing individual internal desires "unspoken private motives sabotage the public group effort to preserve the self in society."
In my experience groups spend a lot of time arguing over process and not in achieving end product.
It is easy to tear down and difficult to build up and those who cannot build up tear down.
Criticism works best when suggestions for improvement are immediately included in the commentary.
Groups more reliably find success when a hierarchical structure is imposed from an outside authority.
A Group Leader helps get things does as does mandating a clear method from outside the group for enforcing for decision-making beyond group unanimity.
I reflect back a decade to something I read from a Federal land survey that claimed every person in the contiguous United States - including the forest hermit and mountain lurker - is no more than 17.6 miles from a road.
Let's consider that idea of magnitudinal urban sprawl for a moment.
The history of the development of America has been one of extreme Westward movement: We want to get away from each other; we want land of our own; we need private space.
Suburbia is a perfect example of this sort of "lazying out" from the city core - but what happens when suburban areas become tighter and paved and they transmogrify into "Megalopolises" as geographer Jean Gottmann suggested in 1961 or the ever-infringing "Edge City" as Joel Garreau described in his 1991 monograph of the same name.
As the ability to sprawl subsides and we all have the ability to touch a road in all directions without moving a step, we will begin moving on top of each other.
Soon the only way to build new infrastructure will be skyward atop existing superstructures as the paths and the woodlands and the empty spaces become memories and parking lots and superhighways and the final means of transit for storing people.
The other day I was watching America's Black Forum on ABC Channel 7 in New York from 1:00pm-1:30pm and the discussion between Juan Williams, Julian Bond, Armstrong Williams, John Zogby and Cornel West was a difficult and an important discussion about democracy, The Patriot Act and our role as active citizens.
It was mesmerizing watching how Dr. West pressed for, and ultimately required, an apology from Armstrong Williams for a petulant and disrespectful tone he perpetuated in the discussion against Mr. Zogby.
Z39.50 is a network protocol that many universities use to provide remote access to library computer databases so end users can view the details of a book for research purposes.
I have discovered many top-notch universities have really lousy Z39.50 connections.
I am enamored with my lovely and elastic Herman Miller Aeron chair.
The thing you don't realize when you see the actual Aeron chair compared to its imitators is that the weave of the chair is alive. The weave of the chair breathes and moves with you. The weave of the chair stretches and conforms to your body as you wallow within its shape.
Imitation chairs have a rigid weave. The flexibility of the authentic Aeron chair is what sets it apart from any other chair made and you really cannot understand the beauty of the design unless and until you sit in one.
Don't bother with purchasing lumbar support or other add-ons for the Aeron chair. Just buy the basic black Aeron chair with the regular arms and standard leveling mechanism and be happy.
You will love the airiness and molded comfort of the Herman Miller Aeron chair.
In a fascinating Reuters news articled dated December 30, 2004, the Indian Ocean tsunami did not kill any animals according to H.D. Ratnayake, deputy director of Sri Lanka's Wildlife department: "No elephants are dead, not even a dead hare or rabbit. I think animals can sense disaster."
In the December 31, 2004 issue of The Jakarta Post, two twins were saved when their rescuer, Riza, who was also caught in the rushing water, said: "A large snake as long as a telephone pole approached me. The twins and I rested on the python and we all drifted down the river to safety together."
In an ABC News report on the tsunami on January 1, 2005, an entire village was saved in Indonesia when the villagers "heard the birds screaming in a way we had never felt before. They were warning us. We followed them to safety in the mountains."
It is curious so many people believe animals are dumb and worthy of not only killing but of eating. Does one not believe the Sixth Animal Sense sounds as the butcher's cleaver falls against their throats?
In 1909 Count Leo Tolstoy placed the dependent relationship between animals and humans in perfect juxtaposition against our shared greater need when he said: "As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will always be war."
With the rise of exclusive online teaching via WebCT and Blackboard where teacher and student are never in the same room together, we are in a rebirth of a strange form of the 1805 Lancasterian Monitorial System in 2005 and beyond where thousands of students will sit and stare at a flickering image of an instructor standing before them.
I was disappointed you so easily let go of your brilliance. It is important for you as an artist to not compromise, to not give in to lesser ideas, and for you to fight for your aesthetic.
Adobe Bridge is a keen image management program I have been using all day every day for the past month as I work on Hand Jive, my American Sign Language book with Janna Sweenie, that will soon be published by Barnes and Noble and distributed by Sterling in early 2006.
Adobe Bridge makes it really easy to re-name image files. I can also preview video files. I can move, copy and manage all my images without leaving Adobe Bridge. I am able to convert files and contact sheets using PhotoShop CS2.
I wish Adobe Bridge provided native support for the Adobe DNG Converter and I hope that functionality will be added in a future dot update.
I just upgraded to Adobe Bridge 1.0.1.46 -- it was a 38MB download -- so be sure to pull down HELP | UPDATES from your sticky menu to see if your bridge needs re-building.
During the Fall 2004 semester Dr. Robert Snyder, publisher of The Newark Metro -- an online journal published by Rutgers-Newark University -- asked me if I had any original student-created work that he could publish on the web as a "recorded live" theatrical performance.
The other day I was riding the PATH train from Journal Square to Newark. 30 seconds before the train pulled into the Harrison stop the train's horn repeatedly sounded and the brakes were applied so hard that several people who were standing in the car lost their balance for more than a moment.
It took four days to get all 1,119 songs transferred from my Yahoo! Music Unlimited account to my new iRiver H340 music box.
The reason it took so long, I believe, is because the Yahoo! Music Unlimited software is still in beta and there is verifiable, repeatable, communication problem between Yahoo! and my H340.
I am pleased to announce my paper, Creating Aristotelian Irrevocable Change in Tourists Touching Down at Newark Liberty International Airport, has been accepted as a part of "Tourism & Performance: Scripts, Stages and Stories" series for the 2005 Tourism Cultural Exchange Conference held at the Sheffield Hallam University School of Sport and Leisure Management, United Kingdom, 14-18 July 2005.
My paper argues every move a tourist makes through the airport is actually orchestrated and directed in an aesthetic way using Aristotle's theory of dramatic construction: Plot, Character, Thought, Diction, Music and Spectacle.
The Advertising Slogan Generator is a silly pause during a hectic day. Go to the site and type in your website name and the system will generate your advertising slogan.
Yahoo! Music Unlimited launched today and I quickly dumped Rhapsody in the middle of my two week free trial for the Yahoo! music client even though it is still in the beta phase. Here's why I prefer Yahoo! over Rhapsody for streaming and downloading and carrying around my music:
Yahoo! integrates better with my Yahoo! Plus account.
Yahoo! is three times cheaper than the same setup on Rhapsody -- I'm sure that will change any minute now if it hasn't already.
I am using the iRiver H10 digital music player with the new Yahoo! Music Unlimited service and the Rhapsody service and I am disappointed in the H10’s performance compared to my two-year-old iPod.
A few months ago a man was killed on the street in my rough neighborhood in Jersey City, New Jersey.
That killing moved me in many ways and I wrote about the experience here in Urban Semiotic in a piece called Murder in the Jer
