Tech – Page 9

Ugly Phrase on First Bootup: ‘CPU Fan Failure’

July 28, 2013 by John 6 Comments

The new PC I’ve been salivating about arrived yesterday — yes! on a Saturday! I did all the necessary last-minute backups and so on, exported various programs bookmarks/favorites and settings, and even burned a new installation CD for the correct version of Ubuntu (Linux), since I can’t use quite the same version that I’ve gotten used to for the last few years. All I had to do was set up the new PC, hook up the backup drive, and go.

Except…

On the very first startup of the new PC, before it even booted into Windows (which it came installed with, although I don’t expect to use it much), a message appeared at the top of the screen:

CPU fan failure.
Strike the F1 key to continue or F2 to run the set-up utility.

Hoo boy.

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Barbara Stanwyck, Crime of Passion, and What Goes on (and Doesn’t) Behind the Eyes

July 20, 2013 by John 12 Comments

Note: This is a detailed recap and review of a film now nearly 60 years old: I’m not going to be coy about spoilers (including stills from the film). If you don’t want to know what happens, I encourage you to stop reading right now. Every blogger loves getting readers, but only a bad — or deeply ignorant — blogger wants to anger them. Be sure to visit Aubyn Eli’s Girl with the White Parasol blog for much more about Barbara Stanwyck this week.

Barbara Stanwyck differed from most (all?) of her contemporaries in at least one regard: onscreen, she never seemed conscious of herself.

Much though I love Bette Davis, say, I can’t quite imagine her in a role in which she’s unaware of her — Bette Davis’s, not the character’s — own greatness, her superiority (on almost every scale) to everyone within a half-mile. She might dismiss it, she might crack wise about it, but in doing so she couldn’t help acknowledging and drawing your attention to it. Katherine Hepburn I’ll watch in anything, and I’ll laugh at or be heartwrenched by almost everything that issues forth from that Philadelphia Mainline throat. But Hepburn herself, although apparently modest in real life and dismissive of flattery, always radiated unapproachability by mere mortals. The planes of her face weren’t the only things those famous cheekbones cleft into separate regions of life.

But even when playing a character utterly out of the league of everyone around her, Stanwyck’s manner just said: Here I am. Take it or leave it. You’ve got your life, I’ve got mine, maybe they’ll intersect and maybe they won’t, and while I’m happy and maybe even delighted to meet you, I’ll survive if I never do.

In 1956’s Crime of Passion, she brings this manner to a role out of sync with the time.

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A Barbara Stanwyck Blogathon

July 20, 2013 by John Leave a Comment

'Barbara Stanwyck Blogathon' banner I don’t know Aubyn Eli and am not sure how I got to her blog, The Girl with the White Parasol, as I did for the first time back in May or June. But I know what attracted me there: her planned week-long celebration of Barbara Stanwyck’s 106th birthday. Later today I’ll add my own contribution to the blogathon: a review of Crime of Passion, from 1956.

Interested in “golden era” Hollywood films or, of course, in Stanwyck herself? You could do far worse this weekend than to set aside some time to browse Aubyn’s schedule of what’s already been posted by the forty-plus bloggers contributing — and to mark your calendars for what’s coming. Not all of Stanwyck’s eighty-plus films are covered (hmm: a foreshadowing of a 107th-birthday celebration in 2014?), but it’s a pretty impressive list nonetheless. And it covers not just her films, either. You’ll find essays on her TV work, her career, the blonde wig she donned for Double Indemnity, the gown (pictured at right) which inflamed Gary Cooper (and not a few male moviegoers) in Ball of Fire…

(Wikipedia says of that film’s wardrobe: “In World War II, a total of 12 servicemen were pen-pals with Stanwyck; two of them asked for a poster of her in the Ball of Fire outfit for their mess hall.”)

As for Aubyn herself, as I said, I know her only (and only very recently) through her blog, which focuses on “Classic Cinema, 1930-1965.” (Her Twitter profile identifies her as a “Full-time fantasist.” I want that job!)

But I do know what the blog’s title alludes to: an anecdote related by Everett Sloane’s character, named Bernstein, in Citizen Kane. He’s being interviewed by a reporter, Thompson, about his memories of Charles Foster Kane (Bernstein having been Kane’s long-time assistant). Thompson asks for Bernstein’s guess about the famous last word, “Rosebud,” and Bernstein suggests maybe it was a girl. Thompson scoffs — anyone so powerful could hardly have had just a girl on his mind at the very end — but Bernstein cuts him off with this story:

It’s one of my favorite moments in the film, actually in any film — one of the favorites of a lot of people, indeed. Of course Aubyn Eli isn’t suggesting a connection specifically with Stanwyck in her blog title, and I never saw a film in which Stanwyck was costumed in exactly this way. But I can confidently say that if I’d ever seen her as a young woman in a white dress with a white parasol over her shoulder, in any setting at all, yeah: I’d remember the moment at least once a month, too.

Anyway, I’ll be back later today with my writeup on Crime of Passion. [Edit to add: the review is here.]

________________

About the blogathon banner image: Wikipedia says of it only, “Barbara Stanwyck as a Ziegfeld girl (c. 1924).”

Aside: I’m so sorry that the video’s uploader didn’t get the memo about properly sizing a clip’s aspect ratio on YouTube. This squashed look drives me crazy.

Gobsmacked by Natural History

July 16, 2013 by John 7 Comments

[Image: Cover of The Golden Treasury of Natural History, by Bertha Morris Parker. Colors tinkered with a little to match its present look as closely as possible.]

A holiday, a small bedroom in a small house, The Boy, The Book…

I don’t know what triggered the recent obsession, but something must have. Not that I’ve ever really forgotten its object; years ago, I started referring to it this way: possibly the best book anyone ever gave me. I’m not kidding myself, or you: it may not be the best-written, the book I most wish I myself had written, even my favorite book. My original copy got swallowed up into Book Heaven long ago, and I had not (until recently) laid eyes on another copy for maybe forty or more years. But for its long-term impact on me — its staying power in my head — nothing else comes close.

It came to me as a Christmas present when I must have been, oh, maybe nine or ten years old. (It certainly feels like I’ve known it that long.) Dad had always held blue-collar jobs, and Mom — when she eventually went to work (as opposed to, haha, the sheer non-working pleasure of raising four kids) — held secretarial and clerical positions. So we never had anything you could call superficially “privileged.” But at Christmas, they annually went overboard. We got so much stuff.

In retrospect, I wonder if at that time of year they might have been just throwing things at the walls of our minds to see what would stick. I know they loved us — never once doubted it, even — but they’d had little if anything like training or orientation as parents. We were like four aliens deposited in their household: total strangers, maybe even only nominally of the same species. How could they entertain us? Would we like music, maybe? (Get them an LP!) Would we want to become homemakers, or mechanics? (Get them a toy oven, or a garage — made of finger-slashing tin in case they want to become surgeons!) Artists? (A Play-Do factory! a watercolor paints set! colored pencils! crayons and coloring books! heck, throw in a jigsaw puzzle! All in the same year!)

So this one year — again, I think somewhere between third and fifth grade — I found (among the rubble of childhood avarice) two books for me: both non-fiction, both about science. One was a large-format hardcover book, maybe 9″ x 12″, maybe fifty pages long,, entirely about astronomy. I don’t remember many specifics about that book — certainly not the title. It had no paper dust cover. The front, spine, and back were of some ultra-high-gloss material; the predominant color was deep navy blue, scattered with stars. Of all the sciences, astronomy has held my attention the most, and I think to that book must belong a great deal of the credit.

But the other book: ah, the other book. That was the unforgettable one.

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Potpourri, June 18 (2013 ed.)

June 18, 2013 by John 6 Comments

[Continuing in what seems to have become an annual June 18 tradition, of commenting about whatever the heck I want to…]

[Video: Neil Gaiman signs 1200 copies of his newest novel, The Ocean at the End of the Lane.]

—

Medium-lukewarm: I’m still posting occasionally over at Medium. (Most recently, a brief appreciation of Carl Sagan.) But I still don’t get it, quite. The first time I posted there — the “Scribbling in Books” piece — was right after receiving the invitation to contribute to Medium. Within an hour or two of its posting, I got an email reporting that the thing had made a list of Editor’s Picks.

Exciting news, right? It certainly boosted the page’s view count (see image at right; click to enlarge.) And yet (as you can also glean from the image) there was little if any spillover to subsequent posts. I have no way to figure out why the drop-off, alas. All the possible reasons I can think of are sobering, if not depressing. If a post makes either the Editor’s Picks list, or a similar list of those most recommended by other Medium readers, you apparently can count on some good exposure. Otherwise…

Because of the way Medium is organized — very little information about those posting there — aside from their thumbnail photos (and, of course, the topics they choose to address) there is no way to know with any certainty the context in which they write. How old/young are they? What other sites, even what other Medium writers, do they read most often? (No blogrolls.) On what posts have they commented?

I can sorta tell that most of them are young, probably under 40 years of age. They tend to have professions rather than jobs. They’re politically astute. It’s almost charming how willingly they offer life advice: I’ve read numerous posts which begin, not in so many words, something like: Now that I’m 30 years old, I can say with assurance that X is true (whatever the X of the moment). I wonder if I ever had such confidence. (Probably not.)

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On Medium: “The Great Google Books Hack”

June 1, 2013 by John Leave a Comment

I’ve posted a new entry by this title over at Medium.com. Excerpt:

…my ignorance of and fascination with music sometimes lure me into bizarre alleyways of research. The lighting there is poor. Steam hisses up from manholes and storm sewer grates, clouding the air. Sounds are muted, and the air redolent with aromas you pretend not to recognize. Simple nearby geometric shapes, when squinted at, resemble fantastic architecture seen at a distance. If you’re not careful where you walk, you can easily trip on big chunky-Gothic cobblestones of imagination…

It may be of interest to you if you’re interested in:

blogging;
the Midweek Music Break series here;
online research;
obsessions and preconceptions;
country music;
embarrassing public confessions; and/or
humor, of a sort.

It relates directly to a RAMH post from this week — sort of the story behind that post, a story which I at first swore to myself I would never share. (Because, y’know, I prefer to publicly present only my competent side.) But, well, it’s a good story.

Sorta-Kinda Blogging, on medium.com

May 27, 2013 by John 8 Comments

Medium logo I’ve posted my first entry at a new “blogging” site, called Medium. From the post’s title and subtitle — “Scribbling in Books: To ‘deface’? or to ‘annotate’?” — you’ll pretty much know what it deals with: my (evolving) approach to “enhancing” the existing text of books by underlining, highlighting, and adding marginalia of my own.

Less obviously, the post is also about blogging on a new platform. Why bother? Why not stick to Blogger and WordPress?

Medium has been open, on a limited basis, since September 2012. I don’t know if I heard of it back then, but my first actual visit there took place just a few weeks ago, in the days immediately after the Boston Marathon “bombing.” I found the site more or less by accident, when someone or other whom I follow on Twitter posted a link to a piece called “Racing News: Hunting the Manhunt in Watertown.”

On one level — as information, as news — that article didn’t break any new ground: I’d pretty much read and absorbed the important “facts” elsewhere. On another level, it bowled me over. The author, a young man named Taylor Dobbs, says he is a journalism student at Northeastern University; I was impressed not just by the writing, the story-telling of his first-person account, but by, well, by the way it looked. (I’m never so absorbed in current events that I lose susceptibility to superficial distractions.) Was this, I don’t know… was it some kind of magazine? What else were they featuring? What was this?

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Story Up My Sleeve #1: “Farewell, My Lovely Appetizer,” by S.J. Perelman

May 1, 2013 by John 1 Comment

[Don’t know what this is? See the Story Up My Sleeve background.]

“Any customers?”

“A woman by the name of Sigrid Bjornsterne said she’d be back. A looker.”

“Swede?”

“She’d like you to think so.”

I nodded toward the inner office to indicate that I was going in there, and went in there. I lay down on the davenport, took off my shoes, and bought myself a shot from the bottle I kept underneath. Four minutes later, an ash blonde with eyes the color of unset opals, in a Nettie Rosenstein basic black dress and a baum-marten stole, burst in. Her bosom was heaving and it looked even better that way. With a gasp she circled the desk, hunting for some place to hide, and then, spotting the wardrobe where I keep a change of bourbon, ran into it. I got up and wandered out into the anteroom. Birdie was deep in a crossword puzzle.

“See anyone come in here?”

“Nope.” There was a thoughtful line between her brows. “Say, what’s a five-letter word meaning ‘trouble’?”

“Swede,” I told her, and went back inside. I waited the length of time it would take a small, not very bright boy to recite “Ozymandias,” and, inching carefully along the wall, took a quick gander out the window. A thin galoot with stooping shoulders was being very busy reading a paper outside the Gristede store two blocks away. He hadn’t been there an hour ago, but then, of course, neither had I. He wore a size-seven dove-colored hat from Browning King, a tan Wilson Brothers shirt with pale-blue stripes, a J. Press foulard with a mixed-red-and-white figure, dark blue Interwoven socks, and an unshined pair of ox-blood London Character shoes. I let a cigarette burn down between my fingers until it made a small red mark, and then I opened the wardrobe.

“Hi,” the blonde said lazily. “You Mike Noonan?” I made a noise that could have been “Yes,” and waited. She yawned. I thought things over, decided to play it safe. I yawned. She yawned back, then, settling into a corner of the wardrobe, went to sleep. I let another cigarette burn down until it made a second red mark beside the first one, and then I woke her up. She sank into a chair, crossing a pair of gams that tightened my throat as I peered under the desk at them.

“Mr. Noonan,” she said, “you — you’ve got to help me.”

“My few friends call me Mike,” I said pleasantly.

“Mike.” She rolled the syllable on her tongue. “I don’t believe I’ve ever heard that name before. Irish?”

“Enough to know the difference between a gossoon and a bassoon.”

“What is the difference?” she asked. I dummied up; I figured I wasn’t giving anything away for free. Her eyes narrowed. I shifted my two hundred pounds slightly, lazily set fire to a finger, and watched it burn down. I could see she was admiring the interplay of muscles in my shoulders. There wasn’t any extra fat on Mike Noonan, but I wasn’t telling her that. I was playing it safe until I knew where we stood.

[source]

RAMH@5: Cherchez les Femmes (A Playlist)

April 20, 2013 by John 8 Comments

[Image: Fifty-Three Stations of Tokaido: 44 (Yokkaichi), color woodblock print (1841-34), by Utagawa Hiroshige. For more information, see the note at the foot of this post.]

Well, damn. I just couldn’t quite make it to a thousand posts by today: I’m still a couple dozen short. (On the other hand, if you count all the auxiliary not-actual-posts-as-such pages — the About stuff, and the Propagational Library series, story excerpts and so on — they put me easily over the top.)

If you challenged me on the point, I’m not sure I could answer coherently why I’m still blogging (however fitfully these days), in addition to Facebooking and posting to Twitter. On the face of it, the whole blogging transaction model is upside-down (especially relative to those other platforms): the blogger can spend an hour, several hours, sometimes days of work thinking about, possibly researching and writing-and-editing a given post — for close to zero reward. Post provocatively or hilariously (however briefly) on FB or Twitter, though, and you get a dozen acknowledgments of one kind or another, from simple “Like”s to full-blown dialogue on the subject. It’s… well, I don’t know. It’s weird. Unless you’ve got dozens of followers and regular commenters (a circumstance which I’ve frankly never aspired to), and hence something like conversation, blogging may just be one of those aimless pursuits which some humans follow. You go for Sunday drives in the country; I blog.

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The Only One of Us with the Coordinates for This Destination and Its Hardware Is You

April 11, 2013 by John Leave a Comment

Surely I’ve said so before, here and elsewhere, but just in case it’s fallen through the cracks: I really, really like being friends with — just knowing — smart people. I could cite any number of reasons for this (better reading and music suggestions, better jokes, and so on). One perhaps not so obvious (and if they knew, they might prefer otherwise): better quirks.

Consider the case of a woman I’ve known for, oh, ten years or more, but have never met-met. (Our first encounter took place via email while she was doing some tech work for my computer-books agent’s site.) She seems quite level-headed and nice, and also (importantly) smart as heck. She’s published books on a couple of topics — including an excellent reference on using Google, back in the days when almost no one knew all the ins and out. And she also publishes a several-times-weekly e-newsletter of Web-research and -data tips. In all of these venues she’s exhibited an excellent, modestly skewed sense of humor.

Anyhow, on Facebook yesterday she posted the following non-technical status, which I frankly believe too good to keep to myself. (I checked with her before including this verbatim here on RAMH, by the way.)

I dreamed that a job applicant mentioned he had won $2000 solving King Friday’s Rubric. I was curious so I ordered a copy to see what it was.

It showed up as a large printed list, 1,000 large file cards and a hanging cloth, printed with a grid, the size of a shower curtain (in the dream we used shower curtain rings to hang it up.)

The list was a list of saints. The file cards were clues about the saints that you had to match to the list. The clues were in logic format. (“This saint was kind to birds and lived to be exactly 20 years older than the saint who is celebrated in March.”)

Once you matched up the saints to the clues, you had to use the letters on the back of the cards and arrange them on a grid in something that was kind of like Sudoku, only for letters of the alphabet.

I have no idea.

King Friday’s Rubric. I got that far and practically swooned. (Who dreams in words like rubric?!) And it testifies, indirectly, to her Web-research influence that I immediately had to look that up. King Friday, as it happens, is the name of one of the puppet characters in Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood — specifically Friday XIII, don’t you know — but rubric? Maybe it didn’t mean what I thought it meant… [Calm down, self: yes, it does.] It certainly doesn’t seem to be something in need of a solution, let alone a solution someone would pay for… a solution involving shower curtain rings? A Sudoku grid using letters instead of digits?

I have no idea, either. But is that a great dream or what?

_______________________

About the post title: This is a quotation from Twin Peaks. The speaker, FBI forensic examiner Albert Rosenfield (played by Miguel Ferrer), is responding to some characteristically off-center pronouncement by Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan). In full:

Cooper. In observation, I don’t know where this is headed. But the only one of us with the coordinates for this destination and its hardware is you. Go on whatever vision quest you require. Stand on the rim of a volcano, stand alone and do your dance. Just find this beast before he takes another bite.

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