Category: Uncategorized

“The sweet’s not as sweet without the sour.” – Vanilla Sky

So, yeah. I may not have mentioned this, but a little over a month ago, right after I went way overboard on my minutes, I agreed to an additional year of service with AT&T to get a plan with more minutes. Which meant that I actually agreed to an actual contract with AT&T, as opposed to the one they were trying to hold me to. I hadn’t had any real problems with them or with my service or any of the rest of it (except for the using almost double my minutes in April, which cost WAY too much) since the first week after I moved up here and got my phone set up, so I figured that as long as I wasn’t trying to move even further out of their network in the next year, it shouldn’t be a problem. At most, I might move to Mesa, which would actually be moving into AT&T’s actual networked area.

As you may or may not know, the original problem had to do with the fact that AT&T has no antenna within almost 100 miles of me in any direction. Once we got past that, convinced them to give me a plan and a phone that would roam in a ‘home calling area’ (AZ, Nevada, CA, maybe more… ) for no extra charge, AT&T and I seemed to get along fine. I live in an area that is ONLY serviced by Verizon Wireless. They have the ONLY towers in Pine, and I believe the only ones in Payson, as well.

So … today I was trying to make a call or two and I kept getting a Verizon message telling me to get my credit card ready if I wanted to complete my call. I have heard this message in the past, during prime time hours on holiday weekends, and I assummed it was because too many Verizon (or non-Verizon) callers were using the network. It hasn’t been too big a problem. Except today is not a holiday, and I was trying to call at lunchtime. I tried again an hour later, a couple hours later. I tried calling other numbers, my voicemail, local numbers, long distance numbers, 800-numbers, I tried dialing 611 to get customer service, and got Verizon customer service. I tried talking to them about it and they insisted it couldn’t possibly be their fault and I should call AT&T. I told them the truth; I had tried calling AT&T’s 800 number and got the Verizon ‘get your credit card out’ message. They were sure it was something wrong with my AT&T account, there couldn’t be anything wrong with their network or with the fact that I’m an AT&T customer roaming on their network. Fine. While I was talking to him, my modem hung up anyway.

So I called AT&T on the landline. And the guy went throgh the basic stuff, is my phone on, does it say ‘ROAM’, then he looked up my phone model and walked me through telling it it was a phone, it was with AT&T, and please play nice when roaming… well, you know… I punched in a code or two. And my phone ‘rebooted’ and I tried making a call and still got the Verizon message. And he was sure I needed to get to Flagstaff or Phoenix to get my phone reset, and I explained that first, I’m 100 miles from there, second, I couldn’t possibly get my phone to Phoenix before Monday (my dad is coming up Monday, and I could go with him and/or send it down with him when he goes home), and third, when I first set it up here, there was something they did to get it temporarily recognized up here before I could get to an official AT&T area. The AT&T rep offered to call technical assistance (level 2, really, since I’d punched the technical assistance button on the incoming phone tree to get to this guy) if I didn’t mind waiting. Waiting? No problem.

After a while he came back on the line. He explained that the reason I couldn’t make a call today was that the agreement between AT&T and Verizon was no longer in effect, and that he had no information indicating that it would go back into effect. He couldn’t say for sure it wouldn’t, but he couldn’t say for sure it would, either. This is the sour. I just agreed to a year-long contract with an early termination fee and everything with AT&T, which it did not occur to me at the time was really contingent on AT&T and Verizon playing nice with each other for the remainder of my time in Pine. Sour.

And the sweet, which wouldn’t have been sweet without the sour? Which actually would have been frankly irrelevent without the sour? The AT&T rep offered to let me cancel my AT&T contract and he would waive the early termination fee. The contract I just agreed to no longer held me, and I didn’t have to worry about paying a big fee just because AT&T and Verizon can’t share like good children. Sweet. And he said I didn’t have to decide tonight, he would notate my account that if I decided to terminate my contract for this reason, my early termination fee would be waived. This is sweet.

That is, sweet except that if these two big boys can’t get along I’ll really have to switch to Verizon. And buy a new phone. And agree to a new contract. And get a new phone number. Damnit. Fuck! Okay, I just made a couple of calls to Verizon (no problem, since no matter what number I dail, it goes to Verizon) and found that I can get an equivalent plan to what I have now except with 100 less minutes. Same price, just about the same roaming area, Unlimited nights and weekends, unlimited long distance, but 700 minutes instead of 800 minutes. Which should be plenty, but in light of having to buy a new phone and deal with distributing a new phone number, it seems like a bad value to me. Did I mention that unless I agree to a two-year contract, I have to pay a sign-up fee? Damnit, more sour.

And all their phones suck. Kyocera, LG, Samsung, Motorola? I think it was probably these ugly phones that kept me away from Verizon in the first place. Not one phone without that dumb antenna nub sticking up, waiting to get broken off. More than half of them are ‘flip-phones’ which is an idea I believe should have been nipped in the bud, years ago. Who wants to have to unfold their phone?

And I definitely can’t move my phone number over. And 2/3 of the Verizon people I spoke with today were unhelpful and one of them was downright rude. If this is how they treat someone thinking of signing up for service, how do they act once they win you over?

Sigh. I’m going to take closer looks at the phones they have available, see what I can find out. Maybe take a look and see if Nokia or SonyEricsson is producing a CDMA-compatible phone; one of the Verizon reps I spoke to assured me that as long as the phone wasn’t pre-branded to a particular company and was capable of CDMA, they could work with it. I’ll see. I’m also going to talk to my father about his plan, though I believe I use far too many minutes to join their shared minutes plan.

So … yeah, if you try to call me and just get my voicemail, it’s because AT&T and Verizon are spoiled brats who can’t play nice together. Oh, and depending on how things go, I may never get back to you. Email me instead. I should be able to get email … well, until copper and data stop cooperating, after which point I guess I’ll have to look into getting sattelite internet access.

As you may have noticed, the Save Modern Evil meter has recently reached its goal. Modern Evil has been saved! This is primarily due to the sale of original paintings, as shown in the simple list below:

Income from direct donations: $11 (less ~$1 in Paypal fees)
Comissions from Cafepress sales: $23.23
Revenue from the sale of paintings: $270
Total revenue generated from 2/1 to 7/1: ~$303

I made a huge post about this last night right before my browser inexplicably locked up trying to find me a definition at dictionary.com and I lost the whole thing. The gist of it was that clearly I should work more on marketing my paintings and worry less about Cafepress.

Last night I updated all the paintings in the ‘Art‘ section of Modern Evil to reflect their serial numbers, as well as their new pricing structure. Now every painting’s price is based on the price you’d pay if you walked into my antiques shop/gallery here in Pine (The Old Settlers Shops, 3972 N Highway 87, Pine, AZ), although all internet sales are 50% off regular prices. Every painting has a ‘Buy Now’ button that will allow you to instantly purchase the painting via Paypal, though if you are an Arizona resident we can cunduct the transaction in person and not have to worry about shipping costs and bank processing fees. If you come to the shop/gallery to buy paintings and mention the website, I’ll give you the 50% discount in person.

A certain amount of merchandise will remain available through Cafepress. Their response to my closing over two dozen stores was positive, and they offered to make one of my shops a ‘premium’ shop for a complimentary period – I have not heard back about this, but if they do, you may see some improvements in the ease-of-use of the shop. Also, I am working on re-writing my novel and … probably even if their prices seem a little high, I’ll offer them for sale directly via Cafepress when that service becomes available. I am also researching some other options for generating revenue for Modern Evil.

We’ve tackled one goal, but remember; hosting is an ongoing cost. We need to raise another $300 by this same time next year. I’m going to be updating the banner ads soon to reflect this change; instead of ‘SaveME’ it will be ‘Support Modern Evil’, and instead of a meter that goes to $300 for hosting, $300 for hosting will be the halfway mark. If we can earn more than that in the next year, we can look into adding some exciting new things into production. I’m also looking into offering anyone who gives $20 or more in direct donations an original character sketch of any character from any medium, and anyone who gives $35 or more an original 8″x10″ painting, and anyone who gives $50 or more an original 9″x12″ painting.

Oh, and Modern Evil contributors: I’d like to put together a compilation of work by Modern Evil creators, not just of work that has been on the site necessarily, but just different work by the people who write at Modern Evil. Short stories, poetry, poignant personal prose, interesting memoir-like segments of your blogs or diaries, maybe some black and white drawings and … well, if you think of something else, let me know. Then I’ll put the stuff together as a book and we can sell it through Cafepress’s POD service. I don’t know what the pricing structure they’re planning on for their final book service will be, but depending on what sort of commission can be reasonably made on such a thing we may want the proceeds to go directly towards paying hosting costs, and only look into dividing up proceeds after hosting costs have been met. Or something else. I don’t know, maybe 50% to hosting directly and the rest divided up… It could come out to pennies a copy for each author, but your work would be out there. Just an idea I had.

I’ll stop blathering now.

Oh, wait. One more little thing. I’ve just rounded up all the prices on Modern Evil’s Cafepress merchandise to the nearest $10. Which means most of it is $20 an item. Remember, these prices as well as these items will stop being available after July 16th, so act now!

Do you remember that episode of ST:TNG where a hyperintelligent life modified Barkley to be not only increasingly and ridiculously intelligent, but to drive the Enterprise to the other side of space, so the hyperintelligent life never had to go anywhere themselves? I don’t really, either, but past a certain point, Barkley begins spending time in the holodeck trying to get some of the increasingly complicated and intricate ideas out of his head and he talks the computer through putting together a system that will allow the ship to access his mind directly … you know, because having to speak everything out is just too slow and troublesome … anyway, he’s not quite got it together yet, and he’s listing off the components that will need to be incorporated, and their configuration, and the computer says something dumb like ‘that is an unknown component’ because he’s asked the computer to put something in (something with a ridiculously future-sounding-in-that-star-trek-way name) that had not yet been invented, and his response was something along the lines of “well here’s how you build one…” and he begins to describe the construction of the ridiculous thingamajig before the shot cuts away.

Relatively often I find myself confronted with something where I can either wait for the world to catch up with what I want to do, or say “here’s how you build one…” and create it from scratch myself. Like, I was looking for a web-based (PHP, CGI, whatever) RSS aggregator… and I guess there are a couple of ‘services’ that are web-based that do that sort of thing, but … well, they’re basically running the same sort of desktop RSS aggregator that everyone else is using and outputting the feed data to customized web pages. There are a few people who have had the idea and said they are going to build one… generally who gave up after a month or two with no results. And I was about ready to just go ahead and wait again…

Except that I guess that while I was searching my brain was working out what a PHP-based RSS aggregator would need to do, exactly, and … I found myself saying “Here’s how you build one…” So, for the last couple of days (on and off – I’ve been doing a lot of reading, too) I’ve roughed out some code on paper and … well, I’m going to be doing two things. I’m going to write a custom PHP application that parses XML from RSS files in a way that is useful to me, and… I’m going to create a new XML namespace to extend RSS with additional information I’d like. When this goes operational, it will mean that every section and blog of Modern Evil (and sites on the Modern Evil Network) will have a useable RSS 2.0 feed that any desktop RSS aggregator that can interpret RSS 2.0 will be able to read, plus if the other part of my plan works the way I expect the little pop-ups that posters see every time they post will no longer be necessary.

Yeah. And … uhh… I’ll probably also be extending the RSS XML to have special tags for online comics feeds, and maybe provide some sort of easy-to-use front end for accessing them … like magic. yes. magic.

I feel like I missed the boat. Like the internet passed me by. I remember when I first felt it coming, like a wave growing on the electronic edge and growing nearer, and now I look around me and I see that it has already washed over and past me, and I missed it. Back when I was hand-coding web pages in 1994, I was ahead of the curve. In 1999 when I first put together a design for Modern Evil, before I knew what I wanted from it overall, that design was 100% XHTML, CSS2, and DOM compliant, which was unfortunate because browsers didn’t start to become compliant until almost two years later, but I was thinking ahead of the curve. When I figured out what I wanted Modern Evil to be, back in early 2000, I described features that are now common all over the web, but which I had never seen on any website when I wrote my description, and while it took me 18 months to implement it on my own and the internet basically caught up with me by the time I did, in 2000 I was ahead of the curve. When I first put together the ‘ramblings’ section of Modern Evil in March of 2000, I was already blogging although it was another year before I found out other people were doing it and the word for it was blogging, and another couple of months after that before I actually started using ‘blogging’ software to manage my posts, but I was doing what I’m doing now before the other 50,000 blogs appeared on the scene, and at that time (though there were a couple hundred other blogs out there) I was ahead of the curve.

Now, I don’t mean to say that being ‘ahead of the curve’ is what I want. In fact, with all of these things I’ve mentioned, I wasn’t trying to be ahead, I was just doing what I wanted to do and it happened to be ahead. But at any point along the line, when I learned about other people in the world doing some such thing online, I understood it. Perhaps saw how what I had been doing parallelled it. Perhaps integrated it into what I was doing. But now … now I’m lost.

It started with RSS. Something like a year ago, I heard about RSS and knew instantly that it was going to be an idea that would catch on, an information tool that would come into common use and draw information and people together. I could see how it would allow people to see through the increasing numbers of bloggers out there and get what they were looking for. I saw that it could become a highly personalized system for aggregating information from all over the web together not only in a way that one prefers to see it, but from sources and about information that one was interested in, all at once. So I researched it and I found out that there were three (or more) specifications for the idea of RSS that were not exactly inter-compatible. And I found out that the end-user experience for accessing RSS feeds was largely unfinished and somewhat unusable. And I looked into adapting Modern Evil to put out RSS feeds anyway, but between the competing (and changing) specs and the lack of support, I decided to wait until the details had been ironed out. And actually, what I did was learn PHP and build a way for the different parts of Modern Evil to do what I wanted RSS to do, and a clever file that on-the-fly pulled the RSS-like information together into what you currently see on the main page of Modern Evil. See, the information that RSS gives out seems lacking to me in certain areas, and so I built mine to include all the information I was looking for. And as far as I know there’s no such thing as a live RSS aggregator that I can install on a web server that generates web pages on the fly from an unlimited number of RSS feeds, but that’s exactly what I wanted, and what I built. It was rough, and I’ve wanted to re-write it since I first put it in place (moreso since I’ve had to share it with other people on the web; darwinscomplex.com & lofatmo.com) to be more universal, more extensible, and easier to install and use. I may still do that. But … I’ve been noticing lately from multiple sources that people are using RSS aggregators instead of browsers now, and actually forgetting how to surf the web. They don’t even look at the websites of the blogs they read, they just see the information that comes through the standalone RSS Aggregator, maybe use a browser when clicking on links from the entries, but beyond their Aggregators and the links therein, they basically aren’t using the web anymore. Not like a web, anyway. And I uhh… I still read blogs by clicking through a list of bookmarks or typing in URLs. I still surf the web. Sometimes I end up places I have no idea how I got there, which is the heart of surfing, some would say. But RSS? I forgot about it… I didn’t hear about it in between “doesn’t work yet” and “everybody’s been using it so long they forgot how to browse”, and I don’t think I can catch up. Or that I want to, which is weird. Like I said, I just want to build a more powerful and extensible and easy to use backend for the existing Modern Evil system.

Or here’s one: Do you know what a ‘blogroll’ is? I keep reading people referring tot hem like … like everyone has one or uses one or like everyone should know what one is inherently, and aside from such references I have no idea. No idea. People sometimes even speak of blogrolls in the context of RSS feeds, which … like I said … are beyond me. Worse, it’s probably something obvious and easy to understand. That’s the thing I hate the most about being me; all the obvious things I can’t wrap my head around. All the years I spend trying to understand all the things that everyone else seems to take totally for granted. That everyone else understands so inherently that they can’t even figure out why I need it explained to me (they think I’m joking or don’t understand the question), or how they could even begin to explain it to me.

Fuck.

I’ll stop now. blogrolling is not a universal truth. I won’t get into the two or three other techs that seem to have been absorbed into the group consciousness with no way for me to break in that are leaving me feeling behind the times, an anachronism in this modern age. Fuck. Did you know that almost nothing new has been said on the subject of string theory since I was in High School? And I’m only now getting into it. Then again, maybe I’ll break some new ground myself I can sit on and never do anything with. Fuck.

So, I keep wanting to study things… and then realising I can’t afford it. Tomorrow I’m going to go down to the library and see if some of the books I want can be borrowed through interlibrary loans, because I know my local library doesn’t carry the books I’m looking for. Because of the types of books I’m looking for are the types that might not just take a long time to read, but might require me to read and re-read them after reading other books on the subject, I prefer to buy them, but … well, go do a search for ‘string theory’ on isbn.nu and you’ll see that the average list price for these books is between $115 and $250. Which means that a collection of two or three dozen of them to really get into the subject would be … far, far too much. Heck, one would be too much.

I can get a copy of ‘The Rules’ for a penny, but even a used copy of “An Introduction to Quantum Field Theory by Michael E. Peskin” starts at $50. What I’d really like to start with is “String Theory, Vol. 1 : An Introduction to the Bosonic String (Cambridge Monographs on Mathematical Physics) by Joseph Polchinski” (List: $60, Used: $39) and it’s companion “String Theory, Vol. 2 : Superstring Theory and Beyond (Cambridge Monographs on Mathematical Physics) by Joseph Polchinski” (List: $60, Used: $39). Ooh, and The Quantum Theory of Fields, Volume I: Foundations (List: $65, Used: $49.51), Volume II: Modern Applications (List: $60, Used: $42.99), and Volume III: Supersymmetry (List: $50, Used: $35) would be nice, too.

Plus dozens of other books on subjects such as Algebraic Geometry and Algebraic Topology, Complex Variables, Noncommutative Geometry, Differential Equations and Differential Geometry, all of which need to be learned to really understand String Theory.

You’re all: “Hey, aren’t you paying for a correspondence Art course? Shouldn’t you focus on that?” And you’re right. I haven’t been working on my correspondence art course lately. But, there are no strict timing guidelines on that front, so I should be fine. I just… I just wish information was more accessible. I wish that if I wanted to learn all about string theory it didn’t have to cost me thousands of dollars just for the textbooks, let alone the cost of all the classes I’m theoretically supposed to take along with them. Information wants to be free. I want information to be free. Science shouldn’t be something we have to pay an arm and a leg for, it should be publicly available. Especially science. If you look at my Amazon Wish List, there’s a couple dozen books I just put on it re: string theory, and before that a couple dozen re: learning Japanese, and before that a couple dozen re: the nature of consciousness, advanced holography, and quantum effects in the mind that analog holography. All subjects I still want to study, but … yes, these are mostly textbooks with prices ranging from $40 to $220, USED.

It’s the principle of the thing that I object to, that capitalism should rule raw scientific information to this degree is offensive to me. At the very least, this sort of scientific material should be available for free (or very, very cheap) online, where the cost of an additional copy is pennies of bandwidth, rather than all the expense that goes into creating a physical book or thousands of physical books. Sure, I have the library, and like I said I’ll go there tomorrow at lunch and see about requesting a couple of these books… but then I have to wait weeks to get them, and only get a couple of weeks to try to digest them. It’s fairly frustrating.

Why don’t I get drawn to pulp thrillers or cheap romance novels? Why am I drawn to advanced theoretical physics and difficult languages? I can get used romance novels ten for a dollar at the local thrift shop or any used book sale, but instead I fall in love with books about structures a billion times smaller than an atom and a language with three alphabets (one of which has over 3000 characters to learn).

I know. I need to find a Japanese girlfriend who is an advanced theoretical physicist.