Monday, September 9, 2002
More heat, same story
Nice localized piece on blogging by the St. Petersburg Times. Linkless, though. Thanks to Dave for the link.
[Later...] Woops, here are the story's links.
Wear it proudly
If you care about the constitutional foundations of copyright law, you need to buy this shirt. It comes from here. I explain more here.
There is also a Jr. Baby Doll T-Shirt (so you can show that AOTC belly button ring), a mug and a mouse pad (here's the nice, readable enlarged version).
Bonus link: Eldred v. Ashcroft. The Reply Brief for the Petitioners is a .pdf that is well worth reading. Backthanks to Dave Sifry at AOTC for the pointer.
Customer Report
This isn't a big bitch on my part. It's a little one. I try to make them small when they don't matter a whole lot, and even smaller when at least some of the mistakes involved are mine.
Anyway, it's about Consumer Reports.
I've been a subscriber for most of my life, and I'm a Fall chicken at this point, so we're talking a good thirty years here. Maybe more.
Anyway, the magazine stopped coming in March.
They don't provide a toll-free number for customer service, so I went to the Web site, changed my address there, and waited for something to happen. Nothing did. I sent emails (through their browser form interface). Again: nothing.
So I've been going back and noodling around my subscription profile page to see if I can figure a way to elicit a human response. Today I hit paydirt when a window popped up with this text:
Our goal is to assist you as quickly as possible.
We can best assist you over the telephone. If your inquiry relates to your ConsumerReports.org subscription, please call us toll-free at 1-800-xxx-xxxx Monday - Friday, 8 a.m. - 11 p.m. ET, and Saturday, 9:30 a.m. - 6 p.m. ET for immediate assistance. A representative will gladly assist you.
If your inquiry relates to your Consumer Reports magazine subscription, please call us toll-free at 1-800-xxx-xxxx, Monday - Friday, 8 a.m. - 11 p.m. ET, and Saturday, 9:30 a.m. - 6 p.m. ET for immediate assistance. A representative will gladly assist you.
I've x'd out the phone numbes because the nice woman who came on the phone said they don't publish those numbers because they don't want to overwhelm their few staffers.
"We're a nonprofit. We can't afford to publish any toll free numbers or the costs and call volumes of the responses would overwhelm us," she said.
Seems a bit strange, but I'll take their word for it.
The problems, it turned out, were several. First, Consumer Reports Online only looks like Consumer Reports the magazine. "It's a different service." There is no way online to make an address change for your magazine subscription. They're "working on that." My address change in the online mode changed it only for that service. Makes me wonder why they need my address at all for that. Second, I always drag my butt about changing magazine subscriptions. It's pretty far down the priority list every time I move. Did it again here, at least somewhat. My bad.
Anyway, they are kindly sending me my missing magazines.
And when I move next month, I'll know what number to call with the new address.
Bonus link: Here's Mitch's tale 'o woe.
Widening fi
John Saxton clarifies what's up with not-exactly-broadband over cellular connections.
At least five days, I hope
My latest Suitwatch newsletter for Linux Journal is up. It's dated 9/5 and its title is "Shelf Life."
elgooG has a rorrim etis
See here. And thanks to nietsneerG drawoH for the link.
Not speaking of which, drawoH, who is Director of Technology for the Twin Towers Fund, will be on hand while family members of the Fund ring the opening bell of the NYSE. Which means he'll be on CNBC and other channels for investing obsessives
Ground Zero for what?
The term Ground Zero has haunted me lately. Originally the term for the point in time and space where a nuclear explosion occurs, it has come to mean other things as well: a starting point, for example; or the locus of a great catastrophe.
The site of the World Trade Center is both. My questions are about what started there a year ago, and what is still starting there.
I just tore myself away from the television, where I had been watching Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero, an amazing Frontline program on PBS. Television doesn't get much deeper than this. The program quietly works the what starts here question over and over again. It probes the linked mysteries of evil and death that were given a new measure in our lives on the morning of 9/11 one year ago.
As often in programs like this, two hours isn't enough, and the Web provides a handy way to rescue non-video material from the cutting room floor.
Check out the Interviews page. The ones with scholars Kanan Makiya and Khaled Abou el-Fadl, with Rabbi Brad Hirschfield and with photographer Joel Meyerowitz. Here's one sample from Meyerowitz:
I've had five months of restless sleep. I don't sleep a whole night any longer.... The empathy that arises from being in that site repeatedly, the empathy with the way people died is, it's just connected. I can't get away from it. Just witnessing and photographing the remains of these towers and the strewn-about quality of the wreckage. The mangled quality of it puts one inside the fall. You can see your own soft, vulnerable, fleshy self twisting down in the dark and the screeching horrifying noise of it, and the compressing, mangling quality of it. It's evoked for me by looking at that.
Words are my medium here, but basically I'm a visual guy. I think visually. I locate memories visually. I empathize that way too, and my soul's heart has often followed my mind's eye to the top floors of the towers, and to what the end might have felt like for the thousands trapped there.
Now what? was the question that followed on 9/11, rising like smoke from the wreckage. It still is.