When Work Swallows You Up

Where have I been? Why, with the excep­tion of that bit about Arnold men­tion­ing BC in his appear­ance at Meet the Press last Sun­day, have I been so silent? It’s noth­ing very excit­ing. I’ve been work­ing, head down, pretty much every day for about 3 weeks. Aside from going to the Van­cou­ver User Expe­ri­ence (VanUE) meet­ing on Tues­day night — and not even stay­ing for the after party, as I had to get back home and to bed in order to get up before 6 AM the next morn­ing, and I knew that if I didn’t get enough sleep, I’d have got­ten sick again—I’ve kept to bed, com­puter and client site (this past week).

I’m finally look­ing at a day off tomor­row, and all of the weather fore­casts are for a day like today, full of rain. Pam has class for most of the day, so I think I’m going to do some­thing I haven’t done in a long time; I’m going to go to an after­noon mati­nee. I don’t even know what I’m going to see, but the prospect of pop­corn in a nice warm movie the­atre tak­ing in a lit­tle bit of enter­tain­ment on a rainy day sounds awfully good to me.

I’ve checked the local the­atre list­ings, and am not sure what I’m going to see, but I can tell you it won’t be a big, depress­ing movie or a love story, and it cer­tainly won’t be any­thing that in any remote way reminds me of Infor­ma­tion Archi­tec­ture, Pro­to­typ­ing or User Testing.

Except for bit­tor­rent, I haven’t watched all that many movies. Why do I resort to bit­tor­rent?  There is no Net­flix here in Canada, and I’ve heard many peo­ple tell me that the equiv­a­lent, Zip.ca  is not very good. There is also no stream­ing of movies over TiVo here and unlike the Amer­i­can ver­sion of the store, there are no stream­ing movies on Amazon.ca either.  Even the iTunes store doesn’t the vari­ety of movies for Cana­dian accounts as it does in the Amer­i­can store, so the AppleTV is not as use­ful either (unless you buy gift­cards on the other side of the bor­der and load up an Amer­i­can account). So CRTC or who­ever is respon­si­ble for our Cin­e­matic Rights Time Warp, don’t you real­ize that you’ve actu­ally forced me into bit­tor­rent­ing movies, because there is really no con­ve­nient, reasonably-priced alter­na­tive? Video rental stores are kind of a pain (and seem so…20^th cen­tury), and I’m not really inter­ested in buy­ing DVDs (and cer­tainly haven’t popped for a Blu-Ray player).

On the sub­ject is Video Rentals, I couldn’t resist shar­ing this lit­tle nod to Abbott and Costello by Chris Gavaler, that I saw a while ago:

Who’s on First?

By Chris Gavaler

(A CUSTOMER steps up to a video-store counter with a stack of videos.)
CASHIER: Hi. Did you find every­thing you wanted?
CUSTOMER: (Hand­ing over mem­ber­ship card.) Yes, thanks. (Pause.) When is this one due back?
CASHIER: The day after tomor­row.
CUSTOMER: Yeah, when’s it due back?
CASHIER: The day after tomor­row.
CUSTOMER: Yes. The Day After Tomor­row.
CASHIER: Right.
CUSTOMER: Right. When’s it due back?
CASHIER: The day after tomor­row.
CUSTOMER: I mean the movie. The Day After Tomor­row. When is it due?
CASHIER: Oh! I get it. That’s funny. You thought I meant-right, OK. It’s due the day after tomor­row.
CUSTOMER: The Day After Tomor­row is due the day after tomor­row?
CASHIER: Exactly.
CUSTOMER: And Before Sun­set?
CASHIER: Any­time before 10.
CUSTOMER: Is it the same as The Day After Tomor­row?
CASHIER: We close the same time every day. Ten o’clock.
CUSTOMER: But what day is the video due?
CASHIER: The Day After Tomor­row?
CUSTOMER: Why are you ask­ing me?
CASHIER: The Day After Tomor­row is due the day after tomor­row.
CUSTOMER: I know, but what about Before Sun­set?
CASHIER: Any­time before clos­ing.
CUSTOMER: But what day?
CASHIER: The day after tomor­row.
CUSTOMER: Before Sun­set?
CASHIER: You can bring it then if you want to, but we’re open till 10.
CUSTOMER: The movie! Before Sun­set. When is Before Sun­set due?
CASHIER: Oh! We did it again, didn’t we? Isn’t that just like that … what’s that sketch called? Any­way. Sorry. Before Sun­set is due the day after tomor­row.
CUSTOMER: Thank you. (Pause.) Is that the same for the oth­ers?
CASHIER: You’re not rent­ing The Oth­ers.
CUSTOMER: Why not?
CASHIER: I don’t know. You can if you want to.
CUSTOMER: Well, I would like to rent the oth­ers, please.
CASHIER: I’ll check the com­puter.
CUSTOMER: For what?
CASHIER: The Oth­ers.
CUSTOMER: What’s in front of you?
CASHIER: (Look­ing through stack.) Well, we have The Day After Tomor­row and Before Sun­set. Then Seven, After Hours, 48 Hours, Ten, and Before Sun­rise. Hey, that’s funny, “before sunrise”-we could have got­ten con­fused about that too, huh?
CUSTOMER: Yeah. Could you ring them up, please?
CASHIER: So you don’t want The Oth­ers?
CUSTOMER: I want all of them.
CASHIER: But not The Oth­ers?
CUSTOMER: I want every­thing sit­ting right there in front of you.
CASHIER: OK, I’ll ring them up. (Pause.) I’m sorry, but your account lim­its you to six rentals.
CUSTOMER: Oh, OK, I won’t rent Ten.
CASHIER: Excuse me?
CUSTOMER: Get rid of Ten.
CASHIER: You have seven here.
CUSTOMER: I still want to rent Seven.
CASHIER: You’re not allowed to.
CUSTOMER: Why can’t I rent Seven?
CASHIER: Because it’s over the limit.
CUSTOMER: Right, but I want Seven. Get rid of Ten.
CASHIER: (Pause.) That would leave neg­a­tive three.
CUSTOMER: Excuse me?
CASHIER: You know what? We’ll just let it slide this time.
CUSTOMER: Thank you. (Pause.) Is that one due back the day after tomor­row, too?
CASHIER: Yes, you have 48 hours.
CUSTOMER: But is it due with the oth­ers?
CASHIER: You don’t have The Oth­ers.
CUSTOMER: What did you just ring up?
CASHIER: You want me to read these to you again?
CUSTOMER: No, just tell me when they’re due.
CASHIER: The day after tomor­row.
CUSTOMER: But what about the oth­ers?
CASHIER: You don’t have The Oth­ers.
CUSTOMER: Is 48 Hours due the day after tomor­row?
CASHIER: Yes, by 10 o’clock.
CUSTOMER: Is Ten due the day after tomor­row?
CASHIER: Yes, by 10 o’clock.
CUSTOMER: What about After Hours?
CASHIER: There’s a late fee.
CUSTOMER: For what?
CASHIER: If you return after hours.
CUSTOMER: The day after tomor­row?
CASHIER: All of them.
CUSTOMER: So it’s due the day after tomor­row?
CASHIER: By 10.
CUSTOMER: What about Seven?
CASHIER: You can bring it then if you want to, but we’re open till 10.
CUSTOMER: The movie! The movie! When is the movie Seven due?
CASHIER: (Hold­ing up each video one at a time.) Seven is due at 10 the day after tomor­row. The Day After Tomor­row is due at 10 the day after tomor­row. Before Sun­set is due at 10 the day after tomor­row. 48 Hours is due at 10 the day after tomor­row. After Hours is due at 10 the day after tomor­row. And Ten is due at 10 the day after tomor­row
CUSTOMER: Thank you! (Notic­ing the last video after a long pause.) But what about Before Sun­rise?
CASHIER: (Pause.) We’re not open before sun­rise.
(CUSTOMER gives up and walks out.)

On the other hand, the movie the­atres here are really nice, and I’m look­ing for­ward to that.

On Sun­day, the sun is sup­posed to come out, but alas, I will have to be get­ting back to work, and hope­fully won’t be too far behind from hav­ing taken a few hours off.

Eight Hundred Year's Young

I’m going to do a lit­tle rem­i­nisc­ing, but for a good rea­son, as you’ll see a lit­tle fur­ther on. Any­way, one of the best things I ever got to do in my life was study at Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity. I went there for my Master’s degree. Intel­lec­tu­ally, it was one of the most intense and stim­u­lat­ing expe­ri­ences I’ve ever had.  The way that grad­u­ate school at Cam­bridge worked was dif­fer­ent from any other school I’ve attended, before or since.

First of all, I had a Tutor assigned to me that I met with weekly or a cou­ple of times a week. They were to help guide me in my research, typ­i­cally focus­ing on a key area or sub­ject. My sub­ject of con­cen­tra­tion for my Mas­ters stud­ies was the music, time, and cul­tural envi­ron­ment of the com­poser Alexan­der Scri­abin, as well as the theosophists and other French and Russ­ian spir­i­tual and lit­er­ary move­ments of the late nine­teenth and early twen­ti­eth cen­turies. My tutor, Alexan­der Goehr, was also my Com­po­si­tion teacher, and he was like no other teacher I’d ever had (or had since). He chal­lenged every assump­tion I ever had about music, the­ory or his­tor­i­cal study, forc­ing me to stretch intellectually.

Depend­ing on your degree — mine a ‘Mas­ter of Phi­los­o­phy’ in Music — but the degree didn’t have any­thing to do with ‘Phi­los­o­phy’, any more than a PhD is a Doc­tor of Phi­los­o­phy — you had some sig­nif­i­cant project to fin­ish.  In my case, it was a port­fo­lio of music that I had to write dur­ing my year there (That was fine with me; I wanted to write music any­way.) I also had a series of essays to write at the end, so I spent a cou­ple of pretty gru­el­ing days in a room doing noth­ing but hand­writ­ing in lit­tle blue essay books.

So here’s where the really unique part of a Cam­bridge comes into play — Intel­lec­tual free­dom on a level I’d never seen: Along with my tuto­r­ial ses­sions with Pro­fes­sor Goehr, I was free to go to any lec­ture given any­where in the Uni­ver­sity on any sub­ject that inter­ested me. Some­times the lec­tures were on musi­cal sub­jects, includ­ing a series of spec­tac­u­lar lec­tures on com­posers through­out his­tory by the com­poser Robin Hol­loway, but some­times it had lit­tle or noth­ing to do with music. I vividly remem­ber a set of lec­tures on the Dutch Art and Archi­tec­ture move­ment called De Stijl, a brief period from 1917 to 1931, whose fol­low­ers included the painter, designer, writer, and critic Theo van Does­burg (who pub­lished a jour­nal by the same name), the painter Piet Mon­drian and the archi­tect Ger­rit Rietveld (who build a fas­ci­nat­ing geo­met­ri­cally inspired chair, called, inno­cently enough,  the Red and Blue Chair:

I also got pas­sion­ately inter­ested in the Com­me­dia dell’arte, a kind of impro­vised Ital­ian sit­u­a­tion com­edy that started in the 16^th cen­tury with stock char­ac­ters and shticks, but those stock char­ac­ters kept turn­ing up later in his­tory from Mozart and Rossini’s operas (The Mar­riage of Figaro and The Bar­ber of Seville) all the way to the set­ting of Albert Giraud’s Sym­bol­ist poetry, Pier­rot Lunaire by Arnold Schoen­berg in 1912).

There were sev­eral libraries on cam­pus, includ­ing Fac­ulty Libraries for cer­tain sub­jects, Indi­vid­ual Col­lege Libraries, as well as a huge, endear­ingly ugly archi­tec­tural mon­stros­ity, the Uni­ver­sity Library. It was designed by the archi­tect Giles Gilbert Scott, who was also known for design­ing those clas­sic red Eng­lish pub­lic tele­phone boxes, and it had all of the charm of those ubiq­ui­tous sym­bols of British util­i­tar­ian design. Scott is also known for the dark, modern-yet-gothic Bank­side Power Sta­tion on the Thames that has been since con­verted into the home for the Tate Mod­ern art Museum in London.

The UL, like the US Library of Con­gress, got a copy of every book pub­lished in Eng­land, and you could fre­quently take out books (although the rarer, older ones obvi­ously had to remain in the building).

So that was it; I wanted to learn? Curi­ous about any­thing in the world? Go for it. Learn.

I had the aca­d­e­mic equiv­a­lent of an all-you-can-eat buf­fet, either in books or lec­tures, not to men­tion a train ride away from Lon­don to hear con­certs or visit muse­ums, which I did sev­eral times. I had friends who were study­ing Met­al­lurgy, Phi­los­o­phy and Crim­i­nol­ogy, a good friend who was also a com­poser (and is now liv­ing in Paris), and met many schol­ars and musi­cians (I even remem­ber hang­ing out at the conductor/harpsichordist Christo­pher Hogwood’s house; his boyfriend at the time was an incred­i­bly good cook.)  At my col­lege, Clare Hall, which was a rel­a­tively recent addi­tion to the Uni­ver­sity, the head of the Col­lege was Sir Michael Stoker, a rel­a­tive of Bram Stoker (yes, the guy who wrote Drac­ula). I also met the great-nephew of the explorer Ernest Shack­le­ton, Sir Nicholas Shack­le­ton (who died a few years ago after a dis­tin­guished career as an expert on cli­mate change and a key fig­ure in the field of palaeo­ceanog­ra­phy). I remem­ber briefly meet­ing Pro­fes­sor Stephen Hawk­ing who was fac­ulty at the nearby Gonville and Caius Col­lege.  Even my college’s grounds had some claim to fame; one of the col­lege houses, on Har­vey Road, was called Key­ne­side. It was the birth­place of John May­nard Keynes, a famous British econ­o­mist. You may not have heard of Keynes, but you’ve prob­a­bly heard of the TARP— the Trou­bled Assets Relief Pro­gram— as well as Obama’s $787 bil­lion fis­cal stim­u­lus. Both of those items have been called Key­ne­sian inter­ven­tions where gov­ern­ment inter­venes in the activ­i­ties of mar­kets that are in trouble.

I still get the alumni mag­a­zine of Cam­bridge, and also a smaller yearly mag­a­zine from my col­lege, Clare Hall. Over the years they’ve got­ten a bit glossier, and my college’s web site is also look­ing bet­ter. The rea­son that my time there has sud­denly jumped to mind is the lat­est issue of the Cam­bridge Alumni mag­a­zine, CAM, which showed up today.   Accord­ing to this issue, as well as some extra inserts, this year Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity is cel­e­brat­ing that it turns 800 years old this year. It turns out that in 1209, schol­ars tak­ing refuge from hos­tile towns­men in Oxford migrated to the ancient Roman trad­ing post of Cam­bridge and set­tled there, mak­ing that year the ear­li­est record of study in that place.

800? I have to admit feel­ing a lit­tle giddy when I read that num­ber. I don’t know of many things that are 800 year’s old. Accord­ing to my brief research, the thir­teenth cen­tury includes sev­eral of The Cru­sades as well as the lives of St. Fran­cis of Assisi, Marco Polo, Genghis Kahn, Kublai Khan, Dante and Alexan­der Nevsky. It was the cen­tury that saw the inven­tion of glass mir­rors and eye­glasses, gun powder-fueled rock­ets (in China and Egypt), and the first Obser­va­tory (in Iran).  Cam­bridge pre­dates The Hun­dred Year’s War, King John’s sign­ing of the Magna Carta, The Ital­ian Renais­sance and just about every­thing else in his­tory.  Being con­nected to some­thing that, well, ancient, is unique for me;  I can’t trace my fam­ily his­tory to much before World War I. I was born in a rel­a­tively young coun­try (the US) and now live in an even younger coun­try, in a city that is one of the youngest and most mod­ern in the world. Boston had some­what of a feel of his­tory and the patina of Colo­nial Amer­i­cana on it, but noth­ing like 800 years!

So, happy 800^th Birth­day, ol’ Alma Mater. Too bad I won’t be around to see your 1,000^th birth­day in 2209, but I’ll bet that if mankind makes it that long, you will.

25 Short Things About Me

I’ve been tagged on Face­book with the 25 Things About You meme by my friend, Rebecca Salous­tros. I guess there’s only one thing to do:

Here are the Rules from this blog meme: Once you’ve been tagged, you are sup­posed to write a note with 25 ran­dom things, facts, habits, or goals about you. Then, at the end, choose 25 peo­ple to be tagged. You have to tag the per­son who tagged you. I was tagged, I’ve been told,  because they want to know more about me, and to those who I will tag, I’ll have tagged you because I want to know more about you.

As I said, this started on Face­book, but I am mov­ing it to my blog, so I am doing a post instead of a Face­book note. Noth­ing in the rules said any­thing about it hav­ing to be on Face­book. So in a sense, this virus has ‘jumped’ species. Ooh, scary.

After I am done, I will prob­a­bly not tag 25 peo­ple. I like to keep the num­ber of peo­ple I annoy to a min­i­mum, just like Rebecca.

1. Let’s start with the easy stuff first: My favourite colour is Beige. Yes, wheat, light brown, call it what you will. I like the feel of it on my eyes, and like to wear cloth­ing that color, espe­cially if it is soft, because it is sooth­ing in both the visual and tac­tile sense. Besides, every­body’s favourite colour is blue and they make fun of beige, or speak ill of it, as if it were bland or weak. (I even remem­ber an Apple Ad that said that Beige wasn’t even a colour.) Nah, it’s just subtle.
2. My first mem­ory was when my par­ents took me to the County Fair in West Vir­ginia and we hap­pened to be walk­ing by the pen when they took out the piglet for the ‘greased pig’ con­test (where con­tes­tants try to catch the quick, young pig cov­ered with grease). The piglet let out a high-pitched squeal. I’m told that when I was star­tled by it, I cried for hours.
3. I have a scar on my left eye­brow, from stitches put in when I was 3 or 4 year’s old and attend­ing the birth­day party for a neigh­bor­hood boy named Frankie (I learned later that it was really Rus­sell) Cyz­ick.  The stitches were from watch­ing a Mar­ble race game, try­ing to fol­low the mar­bles too quickly, cut­ting a gash above my eye. Rus­sell Cysick grew up to be one of the Marines who died when the bar­racks in Beirut, Lebanon were bombed on Octo­ber 23, 1983. Some­times I think of that scar when I hear about that inci­dent in history.
4. I wrote 2 books about per­sonal com­puter soft­ware. One was called ‘Cool Mac Stacks’, which was about Hyper­card, a ‘soft­ware erec­tor set’ from Apple in the late 80’s that per­haps antic­i­pated Visual Basic (and, I sup­pose in turn, .Net script­ing, the Web, Apple­script and Javascript). It had (get this:) a floppy disk in the back of it.  The other was co-written with Michael Murie, and is called ‘Quick­Time Hand­book’. I’ve con­tem­plated writ­ing a med­ical action thriller (Think 28 Days Later meets a hard-boiled Detec­tive Drama) and a cou­ple of recipe books, includ­ing one for Maple Syrup (with atmos­pheric pho­tog­ra­phy) or more recently, an updated cook­book for the Granville Island Pub­lic Market.
5. I’m not a big fan of cars, but I’ve always liked Corvettes, espe­cially the ones from the 70’s. It’s the design.
6. The only veg­etable I don’t like is beets, and I pre­fer mush­rooms cooked. The only fruits I’m not crazy about are Pineap­ple and raw apples (they are fine cooked, though). Man­gos seem too much trou­ble, with that big pit.
7. My favourite painter is the sur­re­al­ist Yves Tan­guy, who painted metic­u­lous but vast land­scapes pop­u­lated by strange, multi-coloured, vaguely bio­log­i­cal shapes, cast­ing long after­noon shad­ows on plains with the hori­zon far in the dis­tance. Seri­ously, it’s amaz­ingly trippy stuff.
8. I some­times have a freak­ishly accu­rate mem­ory, but at other times, seem to draw a blank. I fear that my accu­rate mem­o­ries are begin­ning to wane with age.
9. I also have a freak­ishly good sense of smell. This is actu­ally as good as is has ever been, and I now know that if I had known it was that much bet­ter than every­body elses, I could have got­ten a job as a ‘Nose’ in a per­fume fac­tory, or per­haps a whiskey blender in a Scotch distillery.
10. There are sev­eral places in the world that I want to visit. Hope­fully, in 2010, we will go to Viet­nam, Thai­land and Hong Kong.  I’d also love to tour Den­mark, Ice­land and Swe­den, as well as Prague, Budapest and Tallinn (Esto­nia). That last one because one of my favourite unknown com­posers, Eduard Tubin, is from there. (Tubin wrote 9 Sym­phonies and 2 Piano Sonatas, and much of his music is so good, I can’t believe it’s unknown. The Fourth Sym­phony should be a sta­ple of the lit­er­a­ture, and the Piano Con­certino is really fine.)
11. Some day I’d like to be able to get really good at mak­ing short pas­try crust from scratch. I always  panic when a recipe calls for this (i.e., any pie, pasty or tart).
12. I like cats. I appre­ci­ate that they decide to like you on your mer­its, rather than start out help­lessly depen­dent on you, just because you’re the per­son who shows up at the door.  I think that cats can sense this about me, per­haps through my body lan­guage, or the way I approach them or smell;  Fre­quently, cats that hiss and run away from oth­ers will cozy up to me. This is not to say that I dis­like dogs, but I have to admit that I really do dis­like that many dogs leave an odor on your hands after you pet them (or at least one that those with a freak­ishly good sense of smell — see above — can detect).
13. OK. About halfway there. Speak­ing of 13, unlike a lot of peo­ple from North Amer­ica and Europe, I have no fear of the num­ber 13. It’s a fam­ily thing; My brother and I were both born on the 13^th of the month, exactly 3 years apart. My par­ents were mar­ried on the 26^th of the month (twice 13). 13 keeps crop­ping up my life, but it never both­ers me as it would some.
14. I’m a fan of sin­gle malts, Port and small-batch bour­bon (Book­ers, Maker’s Mark, and Knob Creek). I rarely if ever drink gin, vodka or rye whiskey and I’m not really fond of Mar­ti­nis (Spe­cialty or Clas­sic). I do like a good Daiquiri, Dark and Stormy (Rum and Gin­ger Beer) or Mojito in the summer.
15. I’m an unre­pen­tant Mac Fan­boy. Prob­a­bly not as vehe­ment as some, but on a scale of 1 to 10 with 1 being a Microsoft Fanatic and 10 being a rav­ing Apple acolyte, I’m prob­a­bly a 8.75. Pam says it’s closer to 9.25. Let’s just say that hav­ing to use a PC run­ning Vista halves my pro­duc­tiv­ity and makes me grumpy. XP, not so much.
16. I’ve got a bit of fear of heights. For some strange rea­son, it appears to be get­ting worse as I get older, and I have no clue as to why.
17. I’m hop­ing that the next car we own will be one that runs entirely on elec­tric power (or at the very least, is a plug-in hybrid).
18. I never wear the colour blue (except for blue denim jeans), and espe­cially not Navy. I once had a Navy-blue blazer, and it made me look like a corpse. I’ve come to the con­clu­sion that hazel eyes and grey/brown hair just don’t go with blue, espe­cially with pasty-white skin. As I’ve often said: I don’t tan; I just try to get rid of the blue.
19. I only once voted for a Repub­li­can. It was for William Weld, the gov­er­nor of Mass­a­chu­setts (in 1990). He was run­ning against a lunatic who never should have been the Demo­c­ra­tic Nom­i­nee,  John Sil­ber.  Weld was later black­balled and kept from being ambas­sador to Mex­ico by Jesse Helms (the racist and homo­pho­bic Sen­a­tor of North Car­olina who died last year), and went on to prac­tice law in New York and write nov­els. He endorsed Obama over McCain after hav­ing backed and sup­ported Mitt Rom­ney, a later gov­er­nor of Mass­a­chu­setts. I stood next to Weld on the T (the Boston Sub­way) once. We didn’t speak.
20. Speak­ing of famous peo­ple I’ve met, as I men­tioned in an ear­lier post­ing, that includes for­mer Gov­er­nor and Pres­i­den­tial Can­di­date Howard Dean, who I had a mar­velous chat with while rid­ing BART to the San Fran­cisco Air­port last year, for­mer Gov­er­nor and Pres­i­den­tial Can­di­date Michael Dukakis (also on the sub­way — nice to see politi­cians rid­ding mass tran­sit, eh?) as well as com­posers Vir­gil Thom­son, Ned Rorem, Aaron Cop­land, Leonard Bern­stein, Elliott Carter, Toru Takemitsu, Olivier Mes­si­aen, Steve Reich, John Williams and a bunch of other less famous names (some of them teach­ers). I met con­duc­tors Michael Tilson Thomas, Andre Previn and Seiji Ozawa and had a friend­ship (through fam­ily) with Sergiu Com­mi­siona, the Prin­ci­pal con­duc­tor of both the Bal­ti­more and Van­cou­ver Sym­phony Orches­tras at one time or another (sadly, he died before I moved here). I have a ton of auto­graphs, some of the peo­ple men­tioned here.
21. I strongly dis­like South­ern Amer­i­can accents. Sorry, I know I shouldn’t pre­judge, but a thick Car­olin­ian or Alaba­man drawl grates on my ears like fin­gers on a black­board. If it’s any con­so­la­tion, I also cringe when I hear the accent from Rochester, New York, with it’s flat vow­els and tight-jawed pro­nun­ci­a­tion of the city’s name itself (which comes out sound­ing like ‘Rachster’)
22. The most unpleas­ant place I’ve ever lived was Rochester, New York, which arguably has the least amount of yearly sun­shine of the lower forty-eight US states due to the ‘Lake Effect’, which is the huge, dark canopy of clouds formed for about 9 months out of the year by masses of colder Cana­dian air meet­ing masses of warmer Amer­i­can air over Lake Ontario. There were sev­eral weeks when I looked out the win­dow, that I couldn’t tell whether it was 4 AM or 4 PM.  Not that it mat­tered; there was about as much to do in that city at either hour.
23. I don’t have much of a sweet tooth, but instead, often crave crunchy, salty things.  Melted cheese on top of or inside a crunchy corn, rice or bread thing is my undoing.
24. I require a really odd shoe size: 11 1/2 triple-A. That’s the nar­row­est size there is. It means that I can never get cheap shoes that fit, and for a while when we lived in Boston, I took the plunge and had cus­tom lasts (those are pieces of wood that are the same shape and size as your feet) made by John­ston Mur­phy so I could get shoes that fit with­out hav­ing to try on 10–15 pairs each time. They no longer do make cus­tom shoes, so I’m out of luck when the shoes I got back then wear out. You’ll never see me in san­dals because they sim­ply can’t stay on a foot with a heel as nar­row as mine.
25. If the rest of these minu­tiae don’t pro­vide a good enough over­all image of me, when I took the Myers Briggs per­son­al­ity test years ago, it pegged me as an ENTP, or Extraverted iNtu­itive Think­ing Per­ceiv­ing, or ‘The Vision­ary’ (I like the sound of that). Accord­ing to one descrip­tion of ENTPs:
    

    “…the ENTP’s pri­mary inter­est in life is under­stand­ing the world that they live in. They are con­stantly absorb­ing ideas and images about the sit­u­a­tions they are pre­sented in their lives. Using their intu­ition to process this infor­ma­tion, they are usu­ally extremely quick and accu­rate in their abil­ity to size up a situation.

    With the excep­tion of their ENFP cousin, the ENTP has a deeper under­stand­ing of their envi­ron­ment than any of the other types. This abil­ity to intu­itively under­stand peo­ple and sit­u­a­tions puts the ENTP at a dis­tinct advan­tage in their lives. They gen­er­ally under­stand things quickly and with great depth. Accord­ingly, they are quite flex­i­ble and adapt well to a wide range of tasks. They are good at most any­thing that inter­ests them.

    As they grow and fur­ther develop their intu­itive abil­i­ties and insights, they become very aware of pos­si­bil­i­ties, and this makes them quite resource­ful when solv­ing problems.

    ENTPs are idea peo­ple. Their per­cep­tive abil­i­ties cause them to see pos­si­bil­i­ties every­where. They get excited and enthu­si­as­tic about their ideas, and are able to spread their enthu­si­asm to oth­ers. In this way, they get the sup­port that they need to ful­fill their visions.”

    I guess that sounds good to me .

OK, tag’ees’, here I come!

Identity Theft Follow-up

Here’s how things went after I was con­tacted by the com­pany attend­ing CES in Las Vegas ear­lier this month regard­ing some­one using a link to a post of mine in TechVibes tried to scam some free equipment:

I left a mes­sage with the Van­cou­ver police, and they con­tacted me the next day. I gave them the infor­ma­tion I had about the Mark Drucker char­ac­ter in Vegas, and as instructed, I called Equifax and put a 6-year watch on my credit card accounts. Frankly, I’m fine with this. I’d always like to know when a credit card account is being opened (even if I do it), and a phone call con­fir­ma­tion is not that much of an incon­ve­nience. In fact, Dear Credit Card Com­pa­nies, wouldn’t it be seen as an advan­tage that you take some pains to make sure that the credit card appli­ca­tions you are get­ting are legit? Come to think of it, isn’t bad credit on mort­gages what started the whole down­ward spi­ral in the US econ­omy last year?

At any rate, as far as I knew, that would be the end of my brush with a fraud­ster. Silly me, I should have known that it wasn’t just one booth at CES that this guy would try to scam (although I don’t believe he pro­vided my link this time, but sim­ply the Time Mag­a­zine story). This morn­ing I got an email from another ven­dor, who has com­mented below. Here’s an excerpt:

Hello David,
The arti­cle you wrote on ID Thief saved me and the com­pany I work for a pile of money!  Recently, I was an exhibitor at the CES show in Las Vegas.  A man named “Mark Drucker” from TIME Mag­a­zine approached me at my booth and asked if he could write an arti­cle on my prod­ucts and that he would like sam­ples.  He offered me an inter­view on an arti­cle he was going to write.  I thought, great!  This will give my prod­uct line huge expo­sure and PR!  I sent out all of my sam­ples this past Fri­day and began fol­low­ing up with my show leads.  I have been com­mu­ni­cat­ing with “Mark” over the phone and e-mail.

I felt a lit­tle bit wary about this “Mark Drucker” char­ac­ter because when I con­tacted TIME Mag­a­zine, they said there is no one by that name employed with the com­pany! I decided to Google his name.  My jaw dropped to the ground after read­ing your article/blog on Stop ID Thief.  I was able to con­tact UPS and have my sam­ples sent back to me before they were deliv­ered to “Mark Drucker.”

You saved me and I’m blessed to have read your arti­cle just in the nick of time.  It’s unfor­tu­nate that peo­ple like this are going around scam­ming peo­ple like me and you.  I want to thank you for post­ing your blog/article.  You have been a huge help and you have saved the com­pany I work for a lot of money and time.  I will be con­tact­ing GES (com­pany respon­si­ble for orga­niz­ing CES SHOW), the F.B.I. in Las Vegas in regards to this “Mark Drucker” phony, and TIME Mag­a­zine.  I might not get far, but it’s worth a try right?

He then included the guys local address and phone num­ber, which matched the one I had got­ten from the other com­pany. I’ve con­tacted the Van­cou­ver police and left a mes­sage that I’ve got some more infor­ma­tion on the this guy’s activities.

So I guess this is an exam­ple of a blog help­ing to fight back. I’m glad that it worked out, and it also shows that scam­mers may have a harder time get­ting away with their ruses, although it does depend on the infor­ma­tion about the scam get­ting out in time. Still, it gives me a lit­tle hope that a blog can actu­ally help in a sit­u­a­tion like this. And if the gen­tle­man from Vegas is in fact read­ing this, he should now know that more than one ven­dor is on to him.

Stop, ID Thief!

File under P for Pain-in-the-Ass. It looks like I’m yet another vic­tim of iden­tity theft. Here are the details:

A cou­ple of days ago, I was con­tacted by a Pub­lic Rela­tions rep­re­sen­ta­tive, work­ing on behalf of a US com­pany who man­u­fac­tures high-end Home The­atre Remote Controls. While they were show­ing their prod­ucts at the Con­sumer Elec­tron­ics Show (CES) in Las Vegas ear­lier this month, a man approached their booth claim­ing to be a reporter for Time Mag­a­zine.  He asked for some sam­ple units to review and pro­vided cre­den­tials.  Accord­ing to the sales­per­son who I talked to today at the com­pany, the guy  ‘looked the part’.  He said he was ‘Mark Drucker’, pro­vided them with a Las Vegas address, and a link to a post­ing I did for the Bar­Camp­BankBC event last Sep­tem­ber for TechVibes when they asked for “a link to a recent story or a scan of a recent clip from Time.”

The PR Rep. con­tacted Rob Lewis at TechVibes, who imme­di­ately got him in touch with me (Thanks again, Rob!), and that’s how I found out about this inci­dent. I con­firmed with the PR per­son that I wasn’t the guy at their booth, and they got in touch with the com­pany, who for­warded a thread of emails they had with the guy, who had fol­lowed up with them, pro­vid­ing the link to my TechVibes post. They also gave me a phone num­ber to the head of Mar­ket­ing at the com­pany (who met this guy), which I then called.

I’m bet­ting that this guy didn’t fig­ure on the ven­dor doing much of a check on him and gave the link to my arti­cle because I was one of the Druck­ers who came up high on Google (A new peril for hav­ing good SEO!).  If you search for ‘David Drucker’, after my blogs, the Techvibes arti­cle is the third hit, and I’m most of the links on the first page . The fact that I was in Canada was prob­a­bly a nice-to-have for his scam.

As for the dif­fer­ent first name, when asked, the guy said that he some­times wrote under the name ‘David’.  He left his name on piece of paper with the com­pany. Accord­ing to their Head of Mar­ket­ing, he did a quick search on Google and found a Mark and Jill Drucker in Las Vegas at the address he gave them.  Lucky for me, I got wind of this pretty quickly, and their Head of Mar­ket­ing is extremely knowl­edge­able about this sort of thing, even hav­ing writ­ten an arti­cle him­self on iden­tity theft.  I did a Google search as well, and quickly found the same infor­ma­tion for Mark and Jill Drucker at that address. I even saw what the house looked like, and accord­ing to lasvegas.blockshopper.com I  know the value of the place and square footage.

I called the Las Vegas Police. While they took the time to lis­ten, they explained that they couldn’t file a police report for an Iden­tity Theft crime over the phone, with­out the vic­tim report­ing it to them in per­son with ID (makes sense). In the US, it is pos­si­ble to file a ‘Cour­tesy Police Report’ in a dif­fer­ent state, and have it sent to the state where the crime took place. While I don’t know if Canada has an arrange­ment to do this, I’ve con­tacted the Van­cou­ver Police, and am expect­ing a call back later today for them to gather the details. Hope­fully they will for­ward it on to the LVPD Fraud Detail.  Also, with the Police Report in hand, I can con­tact Equifax, Exper­ian and Tran­sUnion, as well as my credit card issuers to put a ‘watch’ on all of my credit cards, and to make sure that if this guy tries to open a new credit card account in my name, he won’t be able to do so. This blog post is another way of fight­ing back, as well as the Twit­ter link that went out when I pub­lished it.

Let’s hope that this guy doesn’t try this again.