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December 21, 2005
Riley's 2005 Christmas Picture
Posted by Lee Clontz at 2:57 PM | Comments (0)
December 16, 2005
Grocery Shopping
I was at Publix last night picking up ingredients to make spinach dip for the holiday party at work, walking aisles, listening to music. The store was mostly empty because it was closing soon, so when an employee who I'd seen stocking the shelves in the cleaning supply aisle approached me as I was picking up some Dial hand soap, I figured he was telling me to get to a register so he could go home or had seen my iPod and wanted to ask about it.
"Excuse me, but what is this for?" He was gesturing to the hand soap. His English was heavily accented. Sounded eastern European.
I was confused by the question. "You mean the hand soap?"
He nodded. "Is soap? How is it like this?" He pulled a package of bar soap off of the shelf.
I pushed on the pump. "It's like for your hands, so the bar doesn't make a mess. My wife likes it in the kitchen."
He pantomimed the act of pumping the soap and rubbing his hands and nodded. "I've been here only two months," he said. "Still learning what everything is." He patted my arm as a thank you and walked back to his cart.
Feeling a little chagrined, I waved to him. "Welcome to America; hope it treats you well." He nodded and waved.
I wound my way around to frozen foods wondering how a guy gets to the US and ends up stocking shelves and yet has never seen hand soap. I pondered it while trying to decide it chopped spinach was the same thing as baby spinach and decided I didn't care all that much. It's just spinach dip for crying out loud.
I walked back across the aisles looking for the guy and he was still in the cleaning aisle, stocking the shelves. Every time he would take something out of the cart, he'd stare at the packaging trying to figure out what it was. I walked back down the aisle, pretending like I had a reason to be there. I asked him where he'd moved from. He said he'd moved from Russia and was living in an apartment.
"Manager here was very nice and gave me a job, though my English is not very good." He gestured around the aisle. "In Russia, we have none of this. I look at it and don't know what it is." He picked up some Arm and Hammer Pet Fresh Carpet and Room deodorizer. "I know this is baking soda, but pets." He pointed at the hand soap and body wash. "In Russia, none of this. We have this." He picked up a package of bar soap.
Now he was on a roll, walking down the aisle and pointing at other products. Glade Plug-in Refills. An absurd motorized Dawn-branded spinning brush for scrubbing the inside of drinking glasses. He pressed the button and it spun inside the package. "I don't know, this is for teeth?"
We talked a bit about how he came to America, but his accent kept me from totally comprehending his story. It was one of those conversations where you're one missed word away from being utterly confused, but I got most of it. He'd been in the Russian army in Afghanistan before becoming a policeman in Russia. I asked him why he left. "Mafia, mafia everywhere in everything." He mentioned his family and three months, but I didn't get what he was saying. If they're not here already, I hope they're on their way.
"Americans, everyone is so polite. Sir, sir, thank you, thank you. In Russia, if something like this," he walked past me and brushed against my shoulder, then grabbed my lapels as if to attack, saying "people give you this. In America, everyone much nice."
I told him my name and that my family was originally German. He thought that was interesting, even though the German goes too far back for me to have much command of that part of my history.
I told him I was glad for that and that my wife and I shopped at that store often and that I was sure I'd see him again. He had a hard time understanding what I was getting at. It's a real effort to drain your language of colloqualisms and to speak very simply, but I think he got the idea. I told him I lived nearby and he was curious whether it was a house or an apartment. Not sure why that was interesting.
We shook hands and said goodbye. When I was leaving, I saw a trainer helping him out, showing him where other products go. I can't imagine what it must be like walking around in thousands of square feet of products when you've never even seen hand soap, or living among such material abundance in Decatur, Ga. when you've served in the Russian police force and fought a losing battle to occupy Afghanistan. Made me forget about the iPod and chopped spinach for a while which, this time of year, can only be a good thing.
Posted by Lee Clontz at 11:05 AM | Comments (0)
December 12, 2005
5G iPod Goodness
My history with iPods has been a little spotty. I had a 10GB first generation unit which I really liked, but I found iTunes too slow and clumsy to be of much use. It prematurely gave up the ghost and I moved up to a 40GB third generation model which I've been using the past couple of years. Still no big fan of iTunes, so I'd moved to other programs -- Media Jukebox, Yahoo Music Engine -- to manage my music, trading the iTunes integration for a different choice of client. Not sure why, but having ituneshelper.exe and ipodservice.exe running 24-7 on my machine has always struck me as bad software design.
I got my hands over the weekend on a 60GB fifth generation iPod, and I guess all I can say at this point is uncle. It's an amazing piece of hardware and iTunes seems to finally be at a point where it doesn't feel like I'm running it through Virtual PC in reverse.
Out of the box experience: The box is much more slender now than previous generations of iPod, but that's mainly because they give you so much less. No dock, no remote (they took the pins off of the iPod itself), no Firewire. Just the iPod, a USB cable, the white earbuds (quickly tossed in a drawer), a dock shim and a software CD. All very nicely designed, all wrapped in plastic that feels eerily like human skin.
The device: The new iPod itself is a great-looking unit with an extremely sharp color screen. Like lots of color screens, it's hard to read with no backlight on, but the backlight comes on every time you touch the controls. I'm not wild about the ersatz Mac OS X widgets in the iPod interface, but that's a minor sin. Videos I encoded look tremendously sharp and bright on the screen, although there are now so many menu options that you can get lost digging around in the multilevel interface.
How's iTunes? iTunes has made huge strides, which some great podcast support. The video integration is strange (why does it default to playing videos in that little window?), but workable. The library and the music store are as slick as ever, even if the product runs those damned services in the background all the time. I had a minor installation snafu, but it was my fault since I didn't close my browser like the Quicktime installer told me to. I had to uninstall and reinstall Quicktime and all was well.
How's the video support?: It's probably no surprise to anyone that the device and software combination is absolutely awesome. I ended a couple of episodes of "Home Movies" with the Videora iPod Converter and dumped them on, bought a song from the iTMS (Ben Folds' hilarious "Bitches Ain't S***"), synced up 4,200 songs and I'm off to the races. It's kind of a pain to navigate that many songs, but that's kinda my problem.
Argh: The only thing I miss, and miss bad, is support for the Yahoo Unlimited music service. Subscription music is unequaled for sampling new stuff -- $.99 per song adds up quick compared to $5 per month -- but no Apple players support it, or, for that matter, WMA. If Apple would suck it up and allow protected WMA music, they'd be unstoppable in this space.
If you want an MP3 player, it's hard to do better than this device. You don't get anything in the box but what you need, but that helps keep the price down and, for what you get, it's a bargain. Nice job, Apple.
Posted by Lee Clontz at 11:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 6, 2005
Taste the Fame
Boy, am I glad this show keeps getting released on DVD. I don't watch a lot of TV, but I'm always glad to catch an episode of Home Movies. The "Camp" episode a cameo from They Might Be Giants that's a riot and the McGuirk character is one of my favorite characters in sitcom-hood. The visual style is distinctive and detailed, even if it looks basically like a Flash movie.
The DVDs looks vastly better than they do on standard TV (well, TiVo), with really bright, clear colors. Great way to watch the shows, although I'm really looking forward to season 4.
I met the guy who did some of the early character designs at Macromedia Max last year. Great guy; I hope he makes some money off of my DVD purchase.
Posted by Lee Clontz at 11:00 PM | Comments (0)