Tag Archives: entertainment

Blackout…

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One of the walls of the room wherein I’m trapped for eight hours a day features three large televisions. At any given time at least one of them shows a feed from the major cable news outlets shouting the current headlines at us. You don’t realize how little “new” news happens in a day until you spend months with rehashes and repeats washing over you every 30 minutes. It’s possible there’s a lot of news breaking out there somewhere, but it’s an awfully small portion that anyone is going to spend time talking about (and trying to monetize through advertising).

One of the better side effects of this 40-hour a week exposure is that my brain seems to have developed a basic self-preservation strategy of tuning almost all of it out. When someone asks “hey did you hear that?” I can usually respond honestly with, “no.” The other side effect I’ve noticed is that this constant stream of news has left me bereft of the desire to watch or seek out any news for the rest of the day.

With the exception of a few minutes of local weather and finding out the daily body count in Baltimore when I get home from work, the rest of the night is almost completely news free. I should show more of an interest, but I find this newfound disinterest to be a remarkably freeing experience. Sure, I still care what goes on in the world, but I’m becoming a hell of a lot more selective about what I want to burn an increasingly limited amount of mental bandwidth learning about or engaging on.

Some news is good for entertainment value (when bad things happen to stupid people), other bits are good to know because it impacts finances (business news and federal budget stuff), and finally there’s the space allocated to any news or information involving animals. Past that, maybe I should care, but I just don’t. Whatever intellectual energy I have left once I get home is far more effectively spent focused on the next spy novel or great thick books about war.

I intend this self-imposed (partial) news blackout to continue indefinitely.

Doing stuff…

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I’ve mostly accepted that aside from making a quick stop to top off groceries or for fuel, weekdays are going to be mostly consumed by going to, being at, and returning from work. By the time I get home, tend the herd, and have a bit of dinner, my brain has pretty much turned to mush. All I’m good for after that is mixing a decent drink and maybe a passingly interesting blog post.

The weekends, for their part, aren’t much better with their time eaten up with errands, cleaning, yard work, and generally keeping the homestead from falling down around my ears. By the time that all gets knocked out, it’s usually already late Sunday afternoon.

What perplexes me, and in fact makes me a little bit jealous, is how other people seem to carve out time to actually go do things for recreation. Of course I’m not likely to show up in a stadium full of people, but I wouldn’t mind so much getting out to stomp around the high ground at Gettysburg or take the tour at Independence Hall. Those things take time, though, and I know the minute I pull out of the driveway my mind is already going to ticking off the things that are lurking around not getting done.

I’m telling you folks, inside my head is a damned strange place to live sometimes.

Thanks Hollywood or: The Most Important News of the Day…

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I like movies. I don’t like going to the theater to watch them, of course, because people, but still I like the idea of losing yourself to a story for a couple of hours. As much as I like movies, I’ve always struggled a little bit with the “awards show” concept. It’s always struck me as a bit of inside baseball, when the market already does a pretty fair job of telling us what movies are “good” and which ones were “bad.”

Box office receipts aren’t everything, I know. Some movies are made because someone with deep pockets and enough horsepower to get it done want to follow their passion. If you’ve got tens of millions of dollars to spend and that’s what you’ve set your sights on, I say good on you and go with God.

Having a laundry list of insiders telling me what movie was “best,” though, doesn’t really work for me. I find movies, like every other kind of art, to largely be something that largely depends on the eye of the beholder. I like period drama and old masters. That someone else likes comedy and modernism doesn’t make either one of us more right or more wrong.

With all of that said, I’m utterly and completely perplexed by the cry that rose last night from social media and today across the news sites and morning talk programs. I “work live” all day every day and can say with certainly that mistakes happen. You correct them and move on as quickly as possible, which seems to be what they did last night. That it’s something that anyone cares about enough to make it The Most Important News of the Day leaves me with even less faith in humanity than usual. Thanks Hollywood.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Paid subscription to online “newspapers”. Um. No. I’m not paying for content that’s free elsewhere. If I were to pay for access, I would expect the content to be advertisement free, but since you’re not going to do that, I’ll keep my cash right where it is. I don’t mind paying for pay-wallservices and I don’t mind targeted advertising, but I’m not generally going to be willing to pay for the privilege. There’s nothing in the Cumberland Times-News, Baltimore Sun, or Washington Post that I really need to read, so instead of paying them for the service, I end up using news aggregator sites, blogs, and alternative media, which further reduces ad revenue for the newspapers, which further harms their business model. It’s some death spiral they’ve tucked themselves into.

2. Small talk. Not surprising for a guy who writes as a hobby/inspirational career, I don’t consider myself much of a talker. Most things I have to say tend to come across better in writing anyway, although that’s not really the point. Maybe it’s a social failing on my part, but I don’t like small talk. I don’t want to engage in it. If I’m not showing the least interest in your monolog about the week you’ve had, please take the hint that I legitimately don’t have any interest in the conversation. That should be your cue to back away slowly and let me get back to doing something that’s nominally productive. I’m happy to talk when something needs to be said, but idle chatter just for the purpose of having something to say isn’t my style. It’s never going to be my style. And if you force it on me repeatedly, I’ll consider you an irredeemable asshat and proceed to ignore you as much as possible, while seething silently inside because it’s considered bad form to punch you in the throat.

3. The New Friday. It’s finally New Friday here, which roughly translated means on this first week of furlough, it’s officially furlough eve. While I usually await time off with great anticipation, I’ve been sitting here ticking off the list of things I wouldn’t mind getting done around here. That’s good. I like having lists and like checking things off of them even more. Then, of course, the practical implication of why I have this abundant free time occurred to me and made most of the checklist a moot point. Since getting productive things done generally seems to cost money, well, let’s just say I’m sitting here looking at the first of what will probably be eleven remarkably unproductive weekends. Maybe it’s time to sit down and start the editorial and design work on the 2013 edition of the What Annoys Jeff this Week eBook. At least that’s more or less free entertainment.

Today’s feature presentation…

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downloadThe next posts don’t need much in the way of introduction. I think we’re getting into one of the parts of the old MySpace blog that everyone seemed to enjoy. Yes, we’ve reached the end of January 2007 when the old blog took on a real “Jeff’s gonna bitch about work in almost every post” flavor. Like most of these other old posts, some are better than others. A few might actually rise to the level of being insightful in their own way, but even the least of them is jam packed with snark… and after all, isn’t that really what you want to see? So go ahead and grab a cup of coffee, sit back, relax, and enjoy today’s feature… posted live in and color in January and February 2007.

Mission Complete (minus nine)…

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The great heroic project of our age is more or less finished. For all practical purposes, I’m calling the effort to transfer my DVD collection to hard disk mission complete. With the exception of nine disks that I’ll need other software to rip and encode effectively, I managed to bring down the curtain three weeks ahead of my self-imposed deadline of the end of the year. As far as those couple of outliers go, well, I’ll get to them when I Screen Shot 2012-12-11 at 5.12.24 PMget to them. For the most those few disks are fairly oddball titles that you’d really only want to watch once or twice in a lifetime anyway. Still, I have them, and it would be nice to go from finished to really finished eventually.

So, you’re asking, what’s the tale of the tape? Weighing in at a grand total of 1.21 TB (1210 GB), I’ve got 123 movies and 1380 separate television episodes, and 1185 songs available for streaming to every television and iDevice in the house across my own network. Put another way, that’s 10.5 days of back-to-back movies, 44 days of television, and about 3 days of uninterrupted music. That’s certainly not the biggest personal audio-visual library out there, but I’m proud of my little collection. That should prove to be more than enough to keep me entertained during the impending apocalypse.

It’s alot like having a 24/7 commercial free television station that plays only content that you know you’re going to like. I had a real geek-out moment there when I realized just how awesome it really is. Using the Apple TV interface makes it very similar experience to actual channel surfing. When you get bored with one show you can switch immediately to another and then back again even on a TV in a different room. Basically, it’s what TV would be if television wasn’t just an avenue to put eyeballs on advertisements. It’s possible that I’m in love.

In the interest of keeping things safe and sound, I’ve got a redundant copy on site and an offsite backup ready to go into rotation. It might seem like overkill, but iTunes, as we all know, sometimes does funny things and this isn’t a process that I want to go through a second time. I’m not there yet, but I think I’ve taken a big step towards making cable television pretty irrelevant in my life.

Sadly there are still several large boxes of CDs stashed in the basement that need to be ripped since I seem to have lost alot of content dragging it from computer to computer over the last five or six years. Since I seem to have finally stumbled on a solution that’s is going to stick, it might just be time to go ahead and rebuild my audio library while I’m at it… but that’s a project for a later date. I don’t think I can stomach seeing any more shiny plastic discs just yet.

Research, Test, and Evaluation…

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Almost a decade ago a colleague who will remain unnamed started conducting a groundbreaking, though slightly less than scientific study into how large a ball of paper he could make using only class handouts. As this research effort got underway at a time before cell phone cameras, I don’t have any physical documentation, but as I recall it ended up being slightly smaller than a basketball and packed enough weight to be deadly when flung in the direction of your head. Trust me, in the far back rows of a dark, musty auditorium this is what passed for in class entertainment.

In the spirit of the upcoming anniversary of this Big Ball of Paper Test, I seem to have unwittingly begun my own research project into how many (mostly) empty plastic water bottles I can stow in the various compartments of my cubicle before remembering to take them down the hall to the recycling bin. As you can see from the photographic evidence, apparently that number is at least four, which given my usual level of OCD about random crap just sitting around is actually more impressive than you’re thinking it is right now.

And that’s where the test begins… to see how many (mostly) empty water bottles I can fit into my cubicle without freaking out and going on a mad cleaning spree or before one of my coworkers notices and asks WTF I’m doing with a metric crapload of plastic bottles sitting around… and yes, before someone asks, that’s what passed for entertainment this afternoon.

In retrospect, maybe I should have gone ahead and bought the desktop pingpong ball trebuchet when it was on sale yesterday. Now that would have been a productive use of time.

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Something corporate…

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I’ve spent the last 90 minutes waging my own personal war against Comcast… the company that we all love to hate. If it weren’t for basically needing to have high speed internet, I’d cut the cable all together. Sadly, there just isn’t a viable alternative to cable internet available here in the back woods of Cecil County and I’d end up paying as much for internet alone as I do for the cable/internet bundle.

Up until I made some changes, I had 300 channels of which I watched maybe a dozen with any consistency… something about paying for something I’m not using just rubs me the wrong way. Since my TV is usually parked on some combination of History, Discovery, and Fox News, cutting way back on the number of channels just seemed like the thing to do. As far as I’m concerned, they ought to pin a bright shiny medal on the guy who finally cracks the code on unbundling television channels. Let me pick five for $20 and I’m on it before the ink dries on the deal. Still, I managed to cut my bill in half tonight and I have the funny feeling that I’m not going to miss much even after “losing” two thirds of the channels I had been getting. With Apple TV, Netflix, and Hulu lined up to fill in the gaps, it’s possible that I’m well on my way down the road to ditching cable television completely just to make a small personal statement regarding my thoughts on the services they offer.

Is anyone else out there using Comcast for internet only? As always, feedback is encouraged.

Newsroom…

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I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about television. Outside of a few shows that I follow religiously, the set usually just runs as background noise. Most people have favorite TV shows or series, but there are probably fewer of us who have favorite TV writers. Still, I’m glad to see one of my favorites making a splash next Sunday night with Newsroom on HBO. Aaron Sorkin’s writing is, well, just dreamy. I loved the super-fast dialog and walk-and-talk’s on West Wing. His characters, for me at least, reach a hard to replicate level of believability for television. If the trailers for Newsroom are to be believed, it looks like he will hit the mark again.

Sure, Sorkin is an evil genius, notoriously hard to work with, and has an ego big as all outdoors, but damn, the man can write. He can suck you in and make you feel the story. Even when you don’t agree with the politics of the characters or even like them very much, he manages to find a way to invest you in the story and in the lives of the characters on screen. Not a handful of other screen writers manage to hit that sweet spot, but he does it more often than not. Plus, he’s writing for an HBO audience now which means the show won’t have to be dumbed down or cleaned up enough to be acceptable to the broadcast networks.

I’m not usually gushy about television, especially a show that hasn’t premiered yet, but I’m going into it wanting to like Newsroom. Come on, I can’t be the only person out there looking forward to seeing the news media through Sorkin’s slightly warped and monolog-ie perspective, right?

Time warp…

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Every morning for the last week or two I’ve gotten in the truck, pulled up one of the “current hits” channels on Sirius and had an immediate and visceral “what is this gawd awful noise” kind of response to whatever song happens to be playing. I don’t want to say what I think I’m saying, but damn it, I remember top 40 songs being, well, better. Since life is too short to listen to music you can’t stand, I almost always find myself gravitating towards “the 90s on 9.” Not that I consider the 1990s in any way the high point of music or anything, it just… well… It just sounds better than what I’m hearing on those other channels.

I can’t help but take a nervous look over my shoulder. I know that dad’s satellite radio is more or less stuck on the 50s channel and only occasionally makes a jump over to the 60s. The thought that this is what’s slowly happening to me, has filled be with an unnatural dread. I’m serious. This is the kind of thing that keeps me up at night.

As much of a curmudgeon as I am, I still think of myself as at least being passingly in touch with pop culture. I’ve already lost my hair and even though I’ve clearly made my peace with that, I’m just not willing to surrender anything else quite so easily to the evil bastard called aging gracefully. I remember liking music from summer well enough, so I’m crossing my fingers that 2012 is just a particularly bad year in music and not the harbinger of worse things to come. Maybe I’ll just leave it on 90s on 9 and call it a day.