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play some real music

I'm watching Drumline on HBO right now. I've wanted to watch this movie for a while, but it started slow, and scenes of marching band auditions brought back unpleasant memories of my high school days playing trombone in the Jenks Trojan Pride. Watching a movie about marching band is tantamount to watching a movie about root canals. Actually, it is getting better as the film progresses. The band director is uptight and insists on playing Earth, Wind, and Fire - which we played at Jenks - rather than current hits.

normal course of business

When I worked in a Dell call center this summer, customers frequently complained about calling the company and talking to a representative in one of Dell's call centers in India. I worked in the sales department, which received a great many customer service calls. I was unable to handle customer service requests, so I would tell people, "I'm sorry I can't help you; I have to transfer you to customer service."

"Don't transfer me to India!" people would say. "Give me somebody that speaks English!"

I wanted to say, "They speak English in India, you racist scumbag," but all I could say was, "If you want your issue resolved, you'll have to talk to customer service," which didn't improve their attitude any.

Some customers pointed out that dealing with the Indians, who often had thick accents and difficulty understanding American idioms, probably took longer and cost Dell more money than using American call centers, which I suspect is true. Not surprisingly, Dell said today that it was moving its business tech support call centers from India back into the US. The company said it was due to customer complaints.

feedback-laden din

Good gravy, UK paper, The Guardian has named OKC's Flaming Lips the greatest band today. Readers of this website will know that I enjoy The Flaming Lips, but, oddly enough, today I had a little confrontation over the Flaming Lips.

In the lab for the game class., I was playing Notwist over the PA for a little background noise. As class started, a particularly self-absorbed student put on Transmissions From the Satellite Heart, much to my dismay.

"This just isn't going to fade into the background," I said.

"But its the Flaming Lips."

"Yeah, yeah, I lived outside OKC for five years; I don't need to hear this again."

But I didn't get into that album until after Clouds Taste Metallic came out and had finally fallen in love with the band, so I feel a little righteous in telling the kid to take the damn rock-and-roll off the PA.

automated audiences

Awwww yeah, something I've wanted for a while has come to fruition. This site now offers RSS feeds for a variety of comics, sparing me the trouble of checking up on all my favorite comics through bookmarks. In case you were wondering, I use the RSS Reader Panel extension for Mozilla Firebird for all my NewsReading needs.

readership had swollen

As a former English major turned media-studies dude, I'm intrigued by these projects to take older texts from the Western canon and re-situate them within contemporary life. For example, I don't think I would have read any of The Diary of Samuel Pepys, if it weren't for the project to take the diary entry-by-entry and recontextualize as a blog.

Stanford's Discovering Dickens project takes a different approach. Although Dickens' novels were serialized and sold piece-by-piece when they were first release, readers usually consume the fiction as a whole, published as a single volume. With the project, Stanford is going back to the future and printing Dickens' work in its original installments and mailing it out to readers on a weekly basis. This year, the project sent out copies of Great Expectation to readers around the world. Subscriptions for next years novel, A Tale of Two Cities, opened today. Sign up now, and you'll get the book mailed to you week-by-week, starting in January. I haven't read A Tale of Two Cities since high school, so I'm looking forward to the first issue.

Hopefully we will see more projects like these; I can only imagine what someone might do with Thomas DeQuincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater.

manac one

This afternoon I confessed to my thesis advisor that my writing this semester has been leaning toward "stream-of-conciousness Dada poetry." Since I haven't been blogging, I reckon its time to indulge that urge. Here goes: tangram man. tangram man.
how you lust for monster Slavic powerBooty
floorpump. floorpump.
shed for low pressure
no pressure gauge.
it would be nice
to know the right pressure
my transmission needs work