I'm taking a class in Flash at the same school that I teach at.
Many years ago, I was pretty good at Director. And guess what, things have changed. I am already frustrated and having to read the damn textbook. Anyway, this small slideshow is both meaningful and meaningless. Sorry to put you through the learning curve with me.
But not really that sorry, I guess, or I wouldn't post my exercises.
When the robots leave me a message, I always get annoyed.
They usually say something like this "This is the Citicard early warning system. Did you make a charge for $4.95 to ... USPS.com?"
I get crazy-irritated, because, duh, that's just me printing out postage.
So when I was running late for work this morning (I know, I don't work Fridays, but I had some stuff to do and was going to meet a friend for lunch) and a robot called me, I swore at it.
"Did you ... charge ... $65.20 ... for ... general mershandy?"
"*&^%$ that's general merchandise you piece of T^%)) machine!"
But the machine did not understand what I was trying to ask it, which was for more details. My memory doesn't work as well as it used to and while I didn't take my card out of my wallet yesterday, I also wasn't sure it wasn't just something taking a few days to post. When was the last time I used my credit card? Couldn't tell you. No idea. But I'm sure I used a virtual account number so I wasn't too worried.
The robot hung up on me after a while, so I called the bank.
A nice fellow in India went through the charges with me. Apparently they were all online and the number-snatcher had been entering the wrong expiration dates. Had I charaged at meijer.com, some kind of executive gift place, or at a kids toy site? No, no, no.
I was glad at least I was nicer to the bank guy this time. Usually, I'm pretty obnoxious.
How the hell does this happen? My ATM card was compromised once too. I didn't use these in Mexico or and certainly not in other destinations over the holidays. I don't send the numbers flying over unsecured networks or public wifi, and anyway, I use virtual numbers online.
It's all kind of a mystery, but maybe I'll be a little nicer to the robots in the future.
Meanwhile, guess it's cash only for a while.
A few years ago, I got the bright idea that I needed to be more professional. That my filthy, massive backpack that had been around the entire world with me for a year—then zigzagged across the oceans as well as along from California to NYC in the back of my old car—was somehow inadequate for my work-related expat jaunts to Kuwait and Cairo.
This notion lasted exactly 10 hours, during which time I learned that one must consider the shape of subway turnstiles when purchasing luggage, and one should treat wheelie bags gently if one doesn't wish to break their handles.
I'm hell on wheels. It's true.
I ended up with a tall-and-skinny $35 wheeled duffel that I bought in the Outdoors section of a Barcelona department store.
This bag serves me well when I need to take my entire worldly goods along for months, and my backpack is perfect for shorter, rougher trips.
But now I wanted more.
'Cuz now the airlines are charging for bag-checking. Which is just silly. I want FEWER people to be dragging the kitchen sink onto the plane, bashing people in the head and clogging up the aisles. But the airlines are looking to save money, not thinking about passenger comfort and safety. And if I'm going away for the weekend, I don't want to pay an additional fee to throw a small duffel into the baggage hold.
So I bought a new bag. It's thin enough for the subway turnstiles and cute enough that I don't mind that it's a wimpy wheelie bag. I love it. I hope I don't break this one.
Denise, Dave, and I went up to the restored 1929 movie palace at Journal Square last night, to watch a nutty, surreal, fabulous film from pre-code days. Ginger Rogers even sang in Pig Latin in "Gold Diggers of 1933."
I forgot my camera and had to settle for a cell phone photo of the organist. And from my cheap phone, since I haven't gotten into the habit yet of using my iPhone.
I was in Cancun the day my friend Ursula got married (I'd planned that trip more than six months ago) but that didn't stop me from seeking out a calavera symbol for her and her new husband.
I hope she knows about the Day of the Dead or she might be a little confused.
I was thinking about the effect piracy had on music once mp3s became readily available. And I was thinking about books. Will the new methods of ebook distribution make books as easily pirated as music? Is the printed book going to end up facing near-extinction?
"Information wants to be free," said a friend. Which is true to an extent. I can type a few words into Google and locate all kinds of free facts, though some are of questionable accuracy. I can read magazines and newspapers online. I use free software to blog for free, Twitter for free, socialize for free, and I've even paid thousands of dollars to travel for a year so that people could read my stories about the world for free.
Putting aside the point that me getting paid for books is barely different than me not getting paid, am I participating in my own demise? Does information inevitably mean to be free?
Yes. No. Maybe. Nothing is free. "Free" is an illusion. Content creation in terms of expertise, music, art, and writing has lost traditional methods of support. Information, however, isn't free. It exacts horrific prices in other areas, most notably in power, raw materials, and environmental impact. When banks try to tell me how "green" it is to get my statement electronically, they are neglecting to mention that the burden of impact has merely shifted. When we talk about information being free, we overlook the cost to Congo which produces minerals for cell phones, or the cost to Sudan where oil continues to drive corporate and governmental interests to terrible ends, we overlook the damage of coal-burning power plants to our environment, and we gleefully talk about how green it is to get our information at the click of a button because we no longer cut down trees, in spite of damaging our environment in dozens of other ways.
I'm utterly guilty in the new world order. I own three aged cell phones full of coltan, two smart phones, one worthless laptop, one slower laptop, one usable laptop, one awesome netbook, one broken iMac, an old car, multiple quickly obsolete video cameras and still cameras, and I fly on unnecessary leisure trips. I love the convenience of going paperless and the modern world enables me to run off to other countries for years on end, while maintaining my life in the US by remote control. In the past, it was aggravating and difficult. I had tax returns sent to me in a hotel room in Bangkok by FedEx. I had my mother chasing bills for me. My nomadic lifestyle is now brought to you by Citibank.com, IRS.gov, and Facebook, which by the way, means I no longer have to abandon my entire social life to go off and have a grand adventure in the desert or jungle.
Am I complicit in a system which is killing off the outlets I am creative in? I blogged before we knew what blogs were. I create content for free and give it away. I love new platforms and embrace them. But there isn't a choice, not really. Complaining and resisting the inevitable doesn't help and anyway, I *love* gadgets. I take things apart because I want to see if they'll work when I put them back together. I have a platform online in a way I never had one on paper. The only publishers who will take my articles are here, on the big, bad Internet.
No action is required on my part. My complicity is essentially irrelevant. Onwards we go, into the world where expertise isn't paid and content is free. The world is changing with or without me. Either way, I won't be getting rich any time soon. But I'd rather be marginally relevant than nothing, so let's get a move-on.
Today seems like an opportune day to point out that Stalking the Wild Dik-Dik is available as a Kindle book. That is, you can buy it electronically and put it on your Kindle.
Or you can put it on another newly announced electronic book reader. I mean, when you get one, after you quit pretending you don't want or need one. Which is what I'm doing given that I own three laptops, one netbook, an iPhone, and an iMac that needs a new logic board. (I had a PC too but recently gave it to my sister.)
I first moved to JC in 1988. I think it was February, after I'd spent my first local month up in Riverdale with my then-boyfriend's sister, Glennia. JC was really different then, much more like my old block which was full of character and history.
So it's with great shame that I admit that I'd never been to the local slider dive, White Mana. This burger joint was built for the 1939 World's Fair and opened at its current location alongside the grimy, pockmarked lanes of Route 1 (locally referred to as "1 and 9") in 1946.
(Before you judge me too harshly, half the time since 1988, I was living on a small island across the Hudson or sometimes more exotic places. Like Australia, Cairo, Barcelona, or Kuwait. I even spent a month each in Berlin and Namibia.)
I had Henry the 1990 Ford Taurus repaired last week. His harmonic thingymajig was making a hole in a casing gadget. And Mike—the mechanic that I found years ago on the Cartalk.com forum—sternly told me I wasn't driving enough.
"If you drive at least once a week, it'll keep rust from forming on the brakes."
Or something like that. I wasn't listening past "Drive once a week."
Intent on giving my car some exercise this weekend, I'd wondered "Where can I go?"
That's when I thought of White Mana. I wanted to go to photograph the Pulaski Skyway and look at the Jose Marti statue in Weehawken too, but rain kept my ambitions slight.
I don't like driving over the Pulaski Skyway or under it, so I avoided it by driving the back roads to the Heights and cutting over behind the diner. I turned in at a faded sign that advertised "Curb Service."
"I'll have a cheeseburger and some fries," I told a woman who worked in the back. I'd have told the counter guy, but he was BS-ing with a man trying to sell pirated DVDs and a cartoonist who was there with his kid. I don't think the cartoonist recognized me.
"How many?"
"Uh... one," I stammered. Okay. It was like White Castle or Little Tavern where I grew up. "Buy 'em by the bag." 
She brought me a cheeseburger and fries, then disappeared into the back. I nibbled it, judging it a closer relative to White Castle than to In N Out or Shake Shack. I watched the counter man shooting the breeze with the cartoonist and DVD-salesman for a while. Then they left, promising to return next Sunday.
Right after the other customers left, the counter man suddenly yelled: "I'm going for my beer!"
He tore out the door and raced across the traffic of 1/9 towards Ringside, the bar across the street.
Was he joking? Did he really go get a beer? It didn't matter. He'd showed me that JC's still got it, little pockets of character and quirkiness, which is exactly why I came back here after years in the big city next door. 
A friend of mine sent me an e-mail the other day. "My brother made me a ukelele!"
I demanded a photo of course. I think the strings are inverted but I don't know much about ukeleles. I certainly don't know how you go about making one. But isn't it a lovely piece of work? 
I was at Port Authority, which is a central location for me to meet my pal Marc for a cup of coffee. And since I was there, I took the opportunity to catch a #126 bus to Hoboken so that I could renew my membership at the yoga place I pretend to go to.
(Meaning I go, but not very often and not with much effectiveness.)
After updating my membership, I headed over to the train. Which train? PATH or Light Rail? I don't have a monthly PATH pass until Monday so either one meant paying for a single-journey ticket.
Then I remembered... isn't there a new pedestrian bridge somewhere around here? It connects Hoboken and JC, which are already connected, but in the past the walk was over a kind of desolate post-industrial no-man's land, which eventually turned into Home Depot, Target, and the mouth of the Holland Tunnel. The walk is short but scary even during the height of the afternoon.
I found the bridge and in minutes was across the dead zone and home in JC. And as a bonus, I got to see the small ice rink actually operating. I'd only seen it in summer before. 
