Parapoetica

JDate has published the results of their first membership survey. According to their colorful graph, on a scale of 1 to 5, JDate subscribers rated “ease-of-use” a 4.

At least, I think they rated it a 4. It’s hard to tell. You see, the graph fades out every few seconds and redraws itself with cute animations. Ain’t irony grand?

I’m not sure it matters, though. You see, 71% of all JDate members have subscribed for over a year. Think about the implications of that one.

It rains every day in Boston. It has always rained every day in Boston, ever since the big smokestack incident in the 1950s. I remember learning about it in school growing up.

(Ten points if you catch the reference.)

How is it that, with about four dozen RSS readers on the planet, many in various stages of eternal beta, nobody has started a versiontracker-type weblog listing what’s new with each of them? I’d volunteer, but I don’t have much of an audience – which is good, since this site’s on a home DSL line.

So I finally woke up one morning and realized that there is absolutely no good reason for me to stay in Wellesley. I don’t belong here. I’m young, and single, and I like the city. So I’ve been looking at places in the South End.

But, if you’ve seen my house, you know that I have a nicely-equipped home studio to do projects in. This one’s not soundproof, since I’m in the suburbs, but obviously in the city it would have to be. All serious studios are. You can’t have a garbage truck or a neighbor’s cough interrupt a great take. For the new one, I’m probably talking about 100dB of isolation, no windows, buried in the basement. When I play drums, the neighbor’s water glass won’t so much as ripple.

Yet when I say “recording studio”, for some reason, everyone’s mind shouts: Concert Hall! Festival! Mardi Gras! Loud music and parties and loose women! They soon realize that’s not the case, but their brain just jumps there reflexively. It’s as if I said “I’m planning to record ex-con rap artists from the West and East coasts together, to try to bring an end to the gang wars and violence in our lifetime. In my dining room.”

Now, the South End is not a stodgy neigborhood. It’s young, and trendy, and revitalized, and restaurants are actually open past 8 p.m., and it has deliberately attracted a large gay/lesbian and visual artist population over the past few years. Whereas Wellesley IS highly conservative, traditional and stuffy, but my neighbors never batted an eye during construction. Which leads me to my realization:

Saying “I’m a musician who’s building a recording studio” in the South End gets exactly the same reaction as would saying “I’m a photographer who takes tasteful nude photos of my gay lover” in Wellesley. And vice versa.

Driving eastbound on the Mass Turnpike tonight to South Boston, there was a variable message sign that repeatedly flashed “STATE POLICE ADVISE MOTORISTS TO CALL 911”. I figured it was just some emergency message that accidentally got triggered, but the very next overpass happened to be filled with flashing red-and-blue emergency vehicles of some kind, and so, as a concerned citizen, I called 911 to find out if there was some urgent safety alert that, for some reason, they weren’t just putting on the sign itself.

“911, this call is recorded. Please state your emergency.”

“Yes, hi. I’m driving eastbound on the Pike, and the sign said for drivers to call 911. Someone probably just hit the wrong button for the sign, but I thought I’d check.”

“So what is your emergency?”

“No, I was expecting you to know what’s going on, is there some message you’re supposed to give us?”

“Sir, that message says to call 911 if you have an emergency.”

“No, it doesn’t say that! It just says that motorists should call 911!”

“Well, that’s what it MEANS, sir.”

“Well, you might want to come up with some better wording, then!”

Isn’t that sort of an important distinction? The westbound signs are programmed correctly. Let’s compare.

A: State police advise motorists to call 911.
Message: The sky is falling! Call in for escape routes.

B. State police advise motorists to call 911 if they have an emergency.
Message: We care.

That’s sort of like the difference between “State police advise motorists to abandon their cars immediately and run like hell” and “State police advise motorists to abandon their cars immediately and run like hell, if the engine should catch fire.”

As G.O.B.’s wife on Arrested Development says, “Oh, I should have finished that thought.”

As far as I can tell from the lease, they’re pretty strict on
o holes in the wall", so not only can’t I hang art, but I can’t put up utility hooks, elfa closet systems, etc. And I’m really big on hooks and mounting and such. I’m going to talk to the leasing office about that, but I saw the lease agent in the elevator this morning and she had her hands full with a whole group of visitors from MIT Sloan, so not a good day to ask those sort of questions. I was excited to find a whole collection of magnetic kitchen organizers at Container Store yesterday, but came home to find that, apparently, that backboard is aluminum, not steel. Sigh.

The much bigger downside is that, being an older apartment, it’s not “wired”. We do have high-speed Internet in the building through Comcast or Verizon, but there’s no Ethernet in the walls or anything like that for local-area networks; there’s only one cable jack in the living room. In fact, the bedroom serving as my office has no phone or cable jack at all!

No problem, I thought – I’ll set up a wireless network. Went to CompUSA, bought a router and adapter, came home and set it up. Everything works great. Except, sometimes, when it totally goes off the air. Not just bogs down – disappears. (It does bog down, too.) And this is no ordinary 802.11g setup. No, this is atomic-age super-double-MIMO-with-strawberries, Linksys’s SRX400, which according to the packaging, not only eats interference for breakfast, but reprocesses and repackages it into small hazelnut truffles.

The problem, I suspect, is that I’m sitting here in a building full of wired-to-the-hilt yuppies, and surrounded by financial-district offices. I can see 30 wireless networks from here, and those are just the ones that aren’t running in stealth mode. Add in cordless phones, microwave ovens, etc., and it’s a wonder that I even need to heat up my breakfast.

I’m going to try an 802.11a network, since that’s a less crowded band. But I may have to set up a wired network, and that won’t be pretty. Literally. The way the apartment’s laid out, I’m going to have to string wire straight across the floor (or up and over doorways), and I’ll never be able to shut any of my doors.

Good thing I don’t depend on the Internet much.

During an economic boom, you can’t get good service, because unemployment’s low, employers can’t hire enough people, everyone’s overworked to make up the slack, and they’re not really hungry for your business anyway.

During a recession, you can’t get good service, because morale is low, companies are cutting costs, everyone’s overworked from their second job, and they can’t really take on new business, anyway.

So when do you get good service?

Every few weeks, I see a truck labelled “Graffiti Busters” at City Hall next to the Government Center T stop. This is a volunteer service, run by the city, that tries to eliminate this blight on our cityscape, this self-adulating, cultish vandalism put there by thugs who fancy themselves artists.

But it’s not working. City Hall is still there.