myspace sockpuppets

They're so boring!

When I look to see who's close to my zip code, the view is clogged with people alleging themselves to be characters on "The O.C." How original.

Here's something funnier. When I browse by people who attended UCLA when I did, which should be a much smaller group on myspace at my age, I get... Jack Bauer, protagonist of "24."

a jaded hack is me!

Okay, so you all read "Perry and Me," my account of how a $2.50 blurb caused famed rock star Perry Farrel to stalk the fuck out of me for months. I just ran across evidence of another bit of similar hilarity.

Another $2.50 blurb I wrote was for Henry Rollins in 1987. This was when Henry was just starting out on a literary career by doing "spoken word." "Spoken Word" meant rock musicians doing standup comedy with occasional blank verse.

One of the regular venues for music and other things was BeBop Records, a little store on Reseda Blvd owned by a guy named Rich. In the mid to late 1980s Rich booked an impressive series of events there: live music, performance of all kinds, and art. Henry was slated to do one of his "spoken word" gigs there. I'd just seen Henry do this thing at UCLA and I wasn't very impressed, but I didn't pan it or tell anyone to avoid it; I just described in a very few words what it looked like.

Henry's response is here: Hack Writer (.mp3, 5.3M). It went into a book, too, not sure which one.

The funny part was that not much later I interviewed Henry for publication. He actually came to my apartment in Hollywood on the bus from where he was living in Echo Park. I opened the door to see a very tentative and anxious rock star in black t-shirts and black shorts. He was clearly worried that I had taken his shtick to heart, but we had a good laugh and did the interview. I was impressed with how serious he was about publishing and writing.

By the time I saw him again, for another interview when he and Weiss were putting out Wartime, it was a running gag.

And now, of course, he's Dick Clark. But that's another story.

Kaboomistan

The Counterterrorism blog has a chilling update on Pakistan. If this and similar reports are largely true, the American people are in for a big surprise. My guess is that most of it is accurate, because similar reports keep popping up.

They're one coup away from a nuclear-armed and unapologetically pro al Qaeda regime that could trash Afghanistan, re-start the Kashmir war with India, and provoke China into God knows what. Invading and subjugating such a nation is probably impossible and would require the cooperation of nearly the whole world.

The news from Pakistan is a Le Carré mess of garbled signals and spooky tidbits. It's pretty clear from everything you can see that bin Laden and Omar live there and are protected, that their "tribal areas" are not in any way governed, and that Musharraf is the classic doomed dictator trying to play both sides of a losing game.

And nukes. If Seymour Hersh is to be believed, Bush Sr. just barely kept Pakistan from attacking India with nuclear weapons during a particularly bad time in those two countries' relations. Personally I'd much rather worry about a nuclear Iran than about a place that's barely a nation and dominated by mobs and "tribes" owning nukes and F-16s.

I wonder how much bourbon they go through in the Pentagon when they play out these scenarios.

apple blues

The hard drive on my 15" Aluminum Powerbook G4 is clearly defective and has been for some time. It likes to hang and say "disk0s3: I/O error" into the logs at times when certain files are touched. The Disk Utility thinks the drive is fine and so does the "SMART" status. Maybe a cable is loose in there. The voice of authority in the form of dr_strych9, who knows, told me to get it replaced but I didn't.

Now of course it's worse. An unknown number of my music files now make this thing happen, and the new iTunes insists on doing a "gapless music analysis" on each file on startup each time that can't be disabled and keeps hitting the problem. I remove a file and it "finds" another. Plus, the update prebindings thing that installers like to do sets it off. My computer is becoming less and less usable.

I realized that I haven't fixed this mainly because I hate dealing with AppleCare and the Apple Store. The last couple of times I went to the Genius Bar, the Genius gave me the third degree. Well sir we might have a K key to replace this broken one, we have some in the back, but if we don't you'll have to pay for a new keyboard. Yes I know you have AppleCare but the wear & tear, sir. Pointing to the spots where the sweat from my wrists had pitted the aluminum and talking about "moisture corrosion damage issues," looking for anything that meant I had been using the thing to hammer nails, etc.

They've clearly been told to be hardasses and refuse AppleCare to anyone they can, especially laptop owners. I understand that they're plagued with people who pour a Coke on their computers and try to get a new one, but being treated like a criminal isn't fun. Considering the expense of the computer and the AppleCare plan itself, I'm aggrieved to find myself having used car lot conversations with a supercilious geek every time I need help.

Plus, of course, I put in my own memory which invalidates everything because Apple wants to insist on selling RAM at a huge markup over retail.

It's hard not to see the whole thing as a scam, and it makes me angry, and I don't like being angry. It's particularly humiliating to have to defend my computer maintenance skills in public to someone who's just going to win if he wants to and has poor enough social skills that he's going to push all my buttons.

So I guess I'll just buy a new hard drive with cash and try to transfer the data over somehow. I'm not sure I'd buy a new Apple now, though, and I'm certainly not very jazzed about AppleCare. It has been useful before when undeniable problems happened early in hardware ownership, but I don't any longer think it's better than another computer vendor's warranty.

I needed native x86 and Windows for radio stuff so I ordered a cheap-ass low-end Dell this week. I paid for the accidental destruction coverage on it. Maybe Apple should offer that separately from the service at a higher rate, instead of making us fight with their employees about whether we're good stewards every time something goes wrong.

I freely admit that my own problems with conflict and my button pushes are at least as much the problem as Apple's policies, but I'm also tired of bait and switch, and tired of Apple's denial about actual design flaws like the AC Adapter. They do so much so well, and then the Reality Distortion Field intervenes and says "We're perfect, and you, the customers, are imagining your problems."

Ma'ap

The Kabbalah's Tree of Life as a London Underground map