billpalmer.net

When we last left our fearless blogger, he had just escaped from being trapped inside a laundry room. Armed with his trusty screwdriver, he headed off to the depths of the laundry room again, and wasn't heard from for two weeks...

What a two week period that was. I'm not even sure where to start. Every time I thought I was going to be able to sit down and write a blog post, something else happened that changed the game yet again. I'm watching television right now, something I haven't done in three months, and yes I have television now. I have three remote controls suddenly, I can't remember what any of them do, and I'm pressing random buttons like I'm somebody's grandpa. Oh, I have internet too. Real internet that works. My good friends at Time Warner somehow managed to waif on all three appointments they scheduled for me the day before I left for New Media Expo, but one fearless installer showed up the day after I got home and took care of business. He also wanted advice on buying his first Mac, wanted to know how much I was paying for my apartment, I think maybe he wanted to be my roommate. I'm not really sure. But my internet works now.

And that's changed everything. The latest issue of iProng Magazine actually went out the door three days early (which is what happens when my internet works consistently and I can actually get that work done without having to trudge down to an internet cafe I don't know how many times a day), we somehow managed to get Olympic gold medalist swimmer Natalie Coughlin on the cover, which wasn't supposed to happen, not the day after the Olympics ended, but there you are. Don't worry, the next issue is back to music on the cover - and it's a band you've all heard of.

New Media Expo? Wow, it's still a blur. I'm still catching up on my post-Expo networking, which is later than usual for me. I've got two stacks of business cards, and the one I've worked my way through is finally a little taller than the one that I'm still working on. Coverville 500 concert at the Expo? That was fun in too many ways to express here. I'll have more to say about it once I can wrap my head around any of it, but that won't be this week.

LeRoi Moore is dead. I just wrote a long, long tribute, and it's still not all out of my system. I could write about Dave Matthews Band all day, but twenty-seven hundred words later and I still don't know what to say about it.

I've got nothing to say about Apple's rumored September 9th press event until I'm sure that they're having one. I am sure, however, that the iPhone 2.0 software, even at 2.0.2, is unacceptably buggy and slow - to the point of making third party applications so useless that I'm not even using any of them. The only reason I haven't downgraded to version 1.1.4 yet is that I've been too busy since I got home from the Expo. Busy in a good way, though.

Thank you, Time Warner, for giving me a remote control whose "Guide" button brings up a guide that isn't really a guide, and whose "Exit" button doesn't actually exit you from the guide that isn't really a guide. And the off-putting Mario Brothers sound effects are a bonus. That kind of crap drives me nutty, and it'll help prevent me from wasting too much time watching television. No sarcasm. I mean it. Too much potential here to accomplish too much to waste it sitting in front of the tube.

1:15 am Conclusion came to me: I'm locked inside a laundry room. Literally. Now what?

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Heading to New Media Expo in about thirty-six hours so I thought it might be a good idea to get the laundry done now instead of waiting til the last minute. Yeah I know it's the middle of the night, but my building's laundry room is located in an offshoot of the parking garage, isolated from the actual apartments, so it's not like I would be disturbing anyone. Plus, all the machines would be available.

So I take my clothes down to the laundry room, start up two washers worth of clothes, set a timer on my iPhone so I'll remember to come back and move them to the dryer, turn off the light, and head out. Except the door doesn't seem to want to open.

"That's kind of funny actually," I think to myself, "because it's one in the morning and if the door really were stuck shut, I'd probably be in here all night." But after a few minutes of playing around with it I can see that the door knob really is busted, and I am in fact stuck in a laundry room. In the middle of the night. With no one around. This is new territory, even for me.

You know how I like to joke that overwhelmingly improbable things tend to happen to me as if it were impossible for them not to? How many of you have ever been locked inside a laundry room in the middle of the night? You see my point. I knew I could call the building manager to come get me out if it came down to it, but I really didn't want to have to wake anyone up unless I was out of less severe options.

So I thought hey, I just started up my laundry anyway, might as well sit here for a bit and let the washers do their thing for now. Anyone who comes home and parks in the garage is going to have to walk right past the windowed laundry room door on their way to the elevator, so I'll wait for someone to do just that. In the mean time I've got my iPhone with me, which means that A) I can have some fun telling people about this on mobile twitter, B) it's time to play some Crash Bandicoot, and C) there's really nothing much to worry about because I know I can fix this with a phone call if I eventually have to. And because I've got a really sick sense of humor about these things, I fired up that old Nirvana song in which Kurt Cobain incoherently sings about being stuck in a laundry room. All these years I never knew he wrote that song for me.

Not that I didn't spend the next forty-five minutes trying to wriggle, jigger, and/or dismantle that doorknob. At this point it's already broken so it's not like I'm doing any undue damage to the building if I, say, happen to destroy the doorknob in the process of springing myself. But Houdini I'm not, and eventually both my iPhone's timer and the sudden silence in the room told me that the washers were done. Okay, time to move my clothes to the dryers. I mean there's only one productive thing you can do while locked inside a laundry room, so you might as well do that while you're there. Good thing I'd brought enough quarters with me.

About fifteen minutes after I'd started up the dryers, after I'd been locked in the laundry room for just about an hour in total, one of the other tenants did indeed come home and park in the garage and proceed to stand right next to the laundry room door while he was waiting for the elevator. Took a bit of convincing to get him to believe that I really was trapped inside and not just messing with him, but he eventually determined I was for real and went upstairs and got a screwdriver and came back down and popped the doorknob open fairly easily. You know, if only I'd thought to take a screwdriver down there with me in the first place, I probably could have done the same thing from the inside. Lesson learned.

The kicker is that now I have to go back and get my clothes out of the dryer. Don't worry about me, I'll be fine, I'll just prop the door open with the trash can. And this time I'll take my toolkit with me just in case.

I get sent a ton of advance CD copies of upcoming albums these days from labels and publicists who are hoping I'll be persuaded to review the album or interview their client. Since most of them arrive unsolicited, I don't feel too bad about the fact that they tend to pile up; I'll get to them when I get to them. Every once in awhile I'll jump on a new one immediately, but those are usually instances where I've already scheduled an interview with the artist and I need to dive in on the music as quickly as possible. Today, though, I received the new upcoming album from Eva Cassidy, and despite the fact that I knew almost nothing about her or her music, she went straight to the top of the pile for one reason: at last year's Lollapalooza, Davy Knowles of Back Door Slam told me that he was signed to the same indie label as Eva, seemingly with some degree of pride. And if she's good enough for the best young blues guitarist out there, then that's good enough for me.

But ripping an entire CD into my computer, followed by manually typing in the track names (unreleased albums are rarely in the iTunes/Gracenote database yet), is enough of a pain that even if the music comes recommended, I'd like to quickly hear a song or two before I go through the hassle of converting the CD into a 21st century format. So I looked Eva Cassidy up on MySpace, which as obnoxious as the site may be, is still the quickest and easiest way to hear an artist's work before deciding whether to explore further. Funny thing, though, she didn't seem to have one. And there's almost no such thing these days as an active musician who doesn't have a MySpace page. So that was a clue that I missed entirely.

I went ahead and ripped the CD into my computer, started listening to it, and after hearing the first four or five tracks, I was totally sold. Before requesting an interview I like to do at least a little bit of homework beforehand (sometimes they reply immediately and ask if you want to do the interview the next morning, so you want to be prepared before you fire off that email request), so I looked her up on Wikipedia (hey, it's just a starting point) and began reading about an "Eva Cassidy" but this one was deceased. And in that final moment of not putting two and two together, I thought about how odd it was that there must have been two different singers by that name, one's still putting out albums and the other one's dead. Then it hits me. I unfold the press release that came with the CD (I never even bother to look at the press release until after I've heard the music), and sure enough, the Eva Cassidy whose brand new album I'm listening to has been dead twelve years. And here I was a few minutes away from sending an embarrassing email to the publicist, asking if she could set me up an interview with her dead client.

It took a moment to get past the feeling of "how did I not know this?" that left me wondering how I could miss such a thing, but of course it occurred to me that the full extent of what I'd known about Eva prior to today was that she was signed to the same label as Back Door Slam; I'd never even heard of her before Davy mentioned her name, and never heard a note of her music until now. Back in 1996 I was in college, nowhere near the music industry, so I'll let myself off the hook for not knowing my music history in this instance. But once I got past that initial reaction, what stunned me is that she was thirty-three years old when she died. I'm thirty-one. Selfishly I thought wow, what would happen if I died two years from now, what would be my legacy? And the truth is that I have no idea.

I feel like this past year I'm doing the best work I've ever done, and a lot of the feedback I've gotten seems to confirm that, but I don't know what happens the next couple of years beyond the fact that they feel really important. Not because this singer died at age thirty-three and I'll be that same age in two years. After all, fixtures like Hendrix and Cobain checked out at a much younger age than I am currently. For all I know I could step off a curb and get hit by a car tomorrow, or I could live to be a hundred and ten. It's not a life or death thing at all. It's more to do with the fact that I'm on the cusp of something, I've got a foundation laid now and at least a rough blueprint for moving forward, and these next couple of years I've got to step it up and I know it. Not because I'm getting older. But because it's time.

Sometimes you get that buzz, and by the next morning whatever motivated you is long gone and it's back to business as usual. But I don't think this is one of those times. I'm staring at this album cover and the late Eva Cassidy is staring back over her shoulder, looking right at me, and trying to tell me something. Which is interesting because I don't ever, ever get that existential kind of feeling from anything. I don't know what she's trying to say to me. Not yet. I'm not going to find it in the cover photo, nor in the liner notes or the press release, nor likely even in the music itself. What she's trying to tell me is in my head, somewhere. I think it has something to do with the fact that I've gotten things to this level, in fact I've gotten the routine down pretty well at this point, and it's time to take it to the next level.

Just don't ask me what that is. Not yet anyway. But maybe soon.

Twitter made an interesting policy change announcement this week. Users can choose to keep their updates private and approve follower requests on a case by case basis, but this has always been pretty much a two-way street. For instance, if your updates are protected but you start following me (my account always has been and always will be publicly available), that means I can automatically follow you back without having to get specific approval. It always made sense to me; if you want to see my updates, it seems only fair that I get to start seeing yours.

But according to their blog, Twitter has reversed that policy, meaning that even if you start following my updates, I'll still have to specifically request to be allowed to see yours if you keep them protected. For someone like me who follows nearly everyone back if they're an actual human and not some kind of automated regurgitator (I have 2887 followers and I follow 2765 people), this is a problem for me. Why? Because generally speaking, the only followers I don't follow back are the autobots. I'm not saying that they're not of value, and in fact we'll soon be launching one for iProng Magazine due to public demand, but it's not what I signed up for on Twitter.

So my problem is, if you follow me and I have to decide whether I want to request to follow you back without first being able to see any of your posts, how I am I supposed to know whether you're a real person or an autobot? I can look at your last five posts and figure that out immediately, but if I'm limited to having to make a guess based solely on your username and follower ratio, I'm going to guess wrong sometimes and pollute my already-crowded Twitter stream with stuff I don't want. The real trouble comes with the fact that some autobots actually go so far as to make it appear that they're real human user accounts by using a person's name, a stock photo, and even throwing in the occasional random human-sounding post in amongst all the automated links.

Twitter's blog makes the case for someone who wants to keep their updates private but want to follow a legitimate autobot such as @CNN. That seems fair, as someone who's concerned about privacy may not want to expose their personal day to day activities to the anonymous face behind an account representing a multi-billion dollar corporation. But that just tells me that whether anyone wants to make it official or not, there are now two different classes of Twitter accounts: humans and autobots. And before this starts to sounds like a good-vs-evil Transformers sequel, I want to reiterate that I don't have a problem with legitimate autobots. I just don't want to follow any myself, and I certainly don't want to waste anyone's time by following them by accident.

My point is that instead of dealing with the automated accounts in a way that makes it more difficult for us real people to use the service effectively, how about creating a separate class for the automated accounts? I really don't know how that would work, and seeing how Twitter has much bigger and more immediate fish to fry, I'm not sure I even want them to try. But I know how I'm going to deal with it. For the time being, anyone who follows me with a protected account and then doesn't allow me to follow them back within a few days, I'm going to block them. Those folks will still be able to see my update history (as can any non-Twitter user) simply by viewing my page, but I don't want them following me from one minute to the next. Which is big for me, because I've never blocked anyone. I'm not trying to take a stand, not trying to protest the policy change. I'm just not comfortable with the idea of anyone following my updates if I can't see theirs.

Any other Twitter users having as hard of time wrapping their heads around this one as I am? Anyone think Twitter should look into creating a separate class of user accounts whose sole purpose is to post automated links to a certain site's content? I'm not sure if I do, but this week's policy reversal has gotten me reconsidering.

So I woke up late this morning when the dog jumped into my bed and made the bed shake a little bit, and wouldn't stop jumping around so I sat up to shoo him off and at that point I remembered I don't have a dog, so it must have been an earthquake instead. It was about time to get up anyway, so I wandered into the bathroom with the building still shaking, begun brushing my teeth, and by the time I was done it was done. Talk about a non-event.

Earthquakes in general are deadly occurrences not to be taken lightly, but whatever this little tremor was this morning, it sure feels like it deserves to be made fun of. After all, according to the New York Times (and ain't it cool when the first news report you can find concerning a Los Angeles seismic event comes from a New York newspaper), two picture frames fell off a wall somewhere, but thankfully, neither one broke. Elsewhere, two people had minor head injuries - not from the earthquake itself but from diving under tables and hitting their heads in the process. Just can't imagine that little bit of earth shaking caused anyone to feel the need to take cover; if I hadn't already been asleep for nine hours and about to wake up anyway, I bet I'd have slept right through it.

So while today marked the first time I've ever been woken up by an earthquake, that's not what today ended up being about at all. I decided that if I'm going to end up doing something as absurd as moving because I can't get reliable internet, then it's going to be because I exhausted every possible avenue of recourse first. So I spent even more time on the phone with AT&T, not getting anywhere with anyone there until they finally decided to put me through to their "Macintosh specialist" - who oddly kept referring to it as a "Macintish" - and while this guy neither had me do anything with my Mac nor seemed to know anything about the Mac, he let it slip that the bizarre sequence of flashing lights on my DSL modem means that the phone lines here are just crap, and the DSL is never going to work reliably until they send someone out to re-wire the place, which isn't going to happen because they're not going to officially admit that that's the case. But then I already knew that.

That takes me back to Time Warner and their cable internet, which they still won't let me have until after I've produced an electric bill with my name on it, and even then they're not sure whether they'll accept that as proof or not, depending on who at Time Warner I'm speaking with. So I take another shot at getting the power company to send me a bill, as it's been two months and they still haven't sent me anything, and they tell me they're not due to read the meter for the first time until next week. This is, of course, after she spends a good ten minutes telling me that there is no account for my apartment and tries to convince me that the electricity hasn't been turned on here for the past two months. You'd think the light bulbs and the refrigerator and the air conditioning would be a dead giveaway that that can't possibly be the case, but you know, if your computer screen tells you that the power has been off for two months at a certain apartment, then it must be true.

However, and perhaps because she felt sorry for me due to the fact that I've apparently been without electricity for two months and I didn't even know it, she said she was willing to send me a statement of service in the meantime which has my name and address on it, so that I can use it to try to convince Time Warner that I really do live here. Which is kind of odd, because the last several times I've called the electric company and asked for exactly that, I've been told they don't do that. But this lady wants to send me one and I haven't even asked, and somehow she knows it's because of Time Warner. Apparently the trick was to not ask for it, and wait for them to telepathically determine that that's why you're calling, and then they'll send it to you. Why couldn't I have figured out that trick two months ago?

In any case, the whole thing's out of my hands now. Assuming the power company really does send me some kind of statement this week, I'll take that down to the Time Warner offices, and they'll either accept it as proof that I live here or they won't. And if they don't, I'm moving to a new apartment on September 1st and that'll be the end of that bizarre little chapter of my life. Plan Z with Time Warner should work, but then again I'm already looking at the classifieds, so that tells you how much faith I have in the whole thing at this point.

You know, it occurs to me that in the two months I've lived here, mail has arrived at this address with between twenty and thirty different people's names on it, never the same last name twice. The building's only about twenty years old, so there's just no way this apartment could have had that many legitimate residents during the entire lifespan of the building, even if every single one of them forgot to forward their mail when they moved out. I have a strange feeling that the previous tenant was subletting this place out to one drifter after another, that's why there's so much random mail coming here and that's why the utility companies jump out of their skin when I call them and give them this address. Time Warner won't touch it, the power company can't figure out what's going on, and it's as if no one even stayed here long enough to figure out that the phone lines are bad, or someone would have had it repaired by now.

Had to get all that nonsense off my mind, and since by late afternoon the internet was completely gone and I couldn't get any work done anyway, I headed down to the subway station and jumped on a train headed eastward. I only made it as far as Hollywood and Western (which is oddly due east of here) before I hopped off the train because I realized I'd never explored that far east. I walked eastward from Western and didn't find anything terribly interesting until I got over to Vermont, at which point I found a whole other little downtown neighborhood-type area (how's that for a description?). Stopped at Fatburger for dinner (didn't even know there was one in that part of town), walked down to the intersection of Hollywood Boulevard and Sunset Boulevard, which a little odd seeing as how the two roads run parallel to each other, and then ventured a little further to where Sunset intersects with Santa Monica, again, roads that are supposed to run parallel to each other. That alone made the area interesting (someone on Twitter joked that perhaps this morning's earthquake knocked the roads out of alignment), but what I found fascinating was that here was this whole area of Los Angeles I didn't even know existed, not very far away from where I live, until I took a random trip on the subway.

Took the train home and, well, the day's shot at this point. Which is ironic because now the internet's working, for however long it lasts, and I'm in no mood to do any of the work that needs to be done which requires the internet. Two of the phone interviews I was supposed to do this week happen to be locals so I've turned them both into in-person interviews (in which case you have to ask yourself why I set them up as phone interviews in the first place), and the third one isn't going to be published until September anyway so there's no harm in waiting on that one. In fact, aside from those three, I think I've already done every interview I'm going to do prior to New Media Expo. At this point it's about writing up the ones I've already conducted, getting the next few issues out the door (even if I have to go work from an internet cafe), and preparing for exhibiting at the Expo.

So here's hoping that the bizarre phone call with electric company today doesn't lead them to mistakenly shut off my power just so reality matches up with what their computer screen says (hey, that's exactly what they did to me the day after I moved in), here's hoping that I can finally convince those bastards at Time Warner that I really do live here, and here's hoping that today's joke of an earthquake isn't a prelude to a real one.

This turned out to be an interesting day. Interviewed two different iPhone users today. This morning it was Pat Wilson of Weezer on the phone. Those guys have sold millions of albums, they've been at it for fifteen years, and they're still on top. This evening it was Kina Grannis at a coffee shop here in town. She's known among geeks as the "Gotta Digg" girl, known among sports fans from February's Super Bowl commercial, and in a few months she'll be known to a lot more people when her major label debut album is released.

Talk about opposite ends of the spectrum. And yet a number of similarities. Both down to earth. Both a real pleasure to chat with. And both iPhone users. Then again, who isn't an iPhone user these days? But it's fun when you're interviewing a musician and you can geek out a little on iPhone apps while you're at it. I'd say more about it but I'm just plain exhausted. This has been a long, long week.

On the way out the door to meet up with Kina, the UPS guy showed up with my new iMac. Regretfully I had to take it up to the apartment and leave it sitting there still boxed because there wasn't time to play with it before I had to leave. I set it up this evening just so I could download the near-gigabyte of software updates overnight, but the real playing will have to wait til morning. You know you're tired when you've just received your first Mac desktop in nine years and your first thought is "I'll deal with it tomorrow." I'm keeping the MacBook around for travel purposes, but by the time the weekend is over the iMac will be my primary computer. Let's just say that that twenty inch screen is disturbingly large.

The internet is still more than a little problematic. Bizarrely, when I came home tonight the light on the DSL modem was green, but when I turned on the kitchen light it instantly changed to red. I turned the kitchen light off and it instantly went back to green. Not wanting to spook it but not being able to see anything, I turned on the nearby dining room light, and sure enough, the modem instantly went back to red. Maybe I'm just so tired that I'm hallucinating, but could it be possible that the phone lines in my apartment are such crap that they're sensitive to the amount of electricity running through the walls? As if any repairman would be able to fix that. I really don't know how this is going to play out. But in any case it'll play out another day because I can barely keep my eyes open.

All in all it's been a good week, and I look forward to the next. I swore I wasn't going to do any interviews next week, but Lisa Loeb is calling on Monday, and there's no way I'm saying no to that :-)

Okay, so I needed that. Much as I hate to admit that needed something to go right, the way Sunday and Monday kicked me around left me feeling that the next big thing on my plate needed to go well. Fortunately, it was something that was within my control: this afternoon's sit-down with Candlebox. I spent a half hour sitting with the band's singer and guitarist at the rooftop pool of their hotel, and it went really well. They made it easy.

I thought I might end up feeling nervous or fanboyish due to the fact that these guys were one of my favorite bands in high school, and maybe I was, but I think I got away with it. Near the end of the interview Kevin Martin told me how a fan at a recent concert insisted on getting his money back because he was convinced that the band had changed singers, which caused me to totally lose it laughing, but other than that I mostly held it together. After the interview I stopped at a restaurant on the Strip, and while I was eating Candlebox's "Far Behind" video began playing on the television sets in the restaurant, as the song belted out over the sound system. That's about as surreal as you can get. Wasn't I just sitting at a table with those guys twenty minutes earlier? Hey, I don't know how these things happen, but I like it when they do.