Michael Hanscom

Enthusiastic ambivert. Geeky, liberal, friendly, curious, hopepunk; trying to be a good person. (he/him)

Well, it sounded good…

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Y’know, I seem to remember hearing some old aphorism along the way…something about counting chickens before they’re hatched.

I really should start paying attention to that.

That camera I won? Nevermind. Turns out that that was the prize for the account manager — in fact, the entire contest was between the various account managers, and when the memo announcing the contest was forwarded to me, it was just forwarded to let me know that the contest was going on and that my assistance in collecting positive comments would be appreciated.

I, as the valued employee who interacts with the customers on a daily basis and provide the customer service that gets such high praise, get the hearty thanks of the company for a job well done.

Woo.

On the bright side, though, my account manager does realize that I’m the one there every day doing the work, and was kind enough to get me a \$100 gift card to Best Buy out of her own pocket as thanks for the work I do, which was very appreciated. No, it’s not a new camera — but at the same time, it is \$100 towards getting a new camera, and when I finally can afford it, I can be sure that it’s the make and model that I want, so it’s not all bad.

At least, that’s what I keep reminding myself.

Bleah.
iTunes “Our Lips are Sealed” by Fun Boy Three, The from the album Trainspotting #2 (1983, 2:52).

Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika

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Washington State

Very cool: an early 1950’s pictoral map of the United States of America, apparently issued by the US Government to introduce our country to the people of Germany, most of whom knew little of us outside of what they’d picked up from GIs in their country during World War II.

Relevant commentary from the MetaFilter thread where I found this:

So the State Dept. handed out these maps to give Germans some idea of what the US looked like? I’m interested in their intentions, and the history behind this map give-away.

— thirdparty

well, smackfu suggests that the map is from around 1951. There was only a vague image of the United States in Germany then.

For many Germans Americans were huge, well-fed guys handing out chewing gums to German post-war kids. And some of these guys even were black. (I remember my grandmother telling me how amazed she was when she saw the first black G.I., the first black person she ever saw.) Now imagine what people must have thought of the United States then. Of course they knew about cowboys, the Liberty Statue and so on but that was about it.

I think the map was supposed to give a somewhat more detailed look an the United States, but then again not too sophisticated. The Secretary of State probably imagined that Germans would be overwhelmed otherwise. Maybe they really would have been. I assume that’s why it’s designed like a children’s map.

Then again, in the early fifties Germans started to go on holiday again. So it might be a promotional map for the American tourist industry.

That’s what I can think of.

— heimchen

Check out the full-size (7 Mb) map here.

Popular Public Potties

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According to the PI, our new space-age public restrooms are a success:

Seattle’s automated public toilets program is flush with success, averaging more than 600 uses a day in Pioneer Square and near Pike Place Market.

The usage is “about 10 times higher than what is considered normal in Europe,” according to a report given to the City Council’s Utilities and Technology Committee yesterday.

I’ve still not used one of these things — but then, I’m still convinced that they’re eating people.

Found slides from 1979

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Checking out the view

The room that I work in is huge, and most of it’s being used to store furniture at the moment. Every few days some of the furniture is moved out or shuffled around, and I’ll take a few minutes when it’s slow to go through some of the cabinets looking to see what supplies were left behind when the previous tenants left.

Most of what I find is general office and printing stuff, some of which I can use for my job, some of which I can’t. Yesterday, however, I found an old box of slides.

I can’t be sure when they were taken, but the date stamp on the slides from when they were developed is April of 1979. Most of the slides were horribly overexposed and unuseable, but seven of them were good.

They appear to be a small group of people admiring the view out of their window towards the top of the office building I work in at Seventh and Pine. Their view looks to the east over I-5 and up towards Capital Hill. Kind of fun to be able to get a glimpse of part of Seattle from around twenty-five years ago.

The seven slides that were good have been scanned and uploaded to Flickr.

iTunes “You Don’t Love Me Anymore” by And One from the album Virgin Superstar (2000, 4:16).

LotR:TYEBEE update

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A reminder e-mail with directions and details has been sent out to those of you who expressed interest in attending my little Lord of the Rings: Till Your Eyes Bleed Extended Edition deal on Saturday. Looks like it’ll be a rather small crowd of about five or six people if everyone who was interested can make it.

No matter what, it should be fun. Prairie’s baked lots of cookies for us to munch on — the going theory right now is that if the screaming battle cries of the orcs don’t keep us all awake by the end of the last film, the sugar rush sure will.

See y’all then!

iTunes “Reverence” by Faithless from the album Reverence (1996, 7:44).

Quick Review: Dawn of the Dead

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Last night’s fun was the modern remake of Dawn of the Dead. I’ve not seen the original, so I can’t compare the two in any way, but this one was exactly what I expected it would be — a fun, sometimes silly, and very gory horror flick.

No reason is given for the zombies, but then, that’s not really the point. Plausibility, rationality, and logic have no place here. What does have a place is lots of creepy dead and decaying people, exploding heads, and creating a enjoyably icky couple of hours of entertainment, all of which were pulled off quite well enough for me.

About the only bummer for me were some of the special features. Occasionally during the movie we’d see snippets of television news broadcasts reporting on the catastrophe in progress, and these are presented in full on the DVD. Unfortunately, it turns out that there’s a reason that we only saw snippets during the actual film — most of the zombies (who didn’t have to do much more than scream, grunt, growl, grimace, ooze, and bleed) were better actors than the reporters in the broadcasts. The extra background was entertaining enough for what it was, but they were a little painful to watch straight through.

On the bright side, though, the ten minute long featurette exploring the special effects behind the myriad exploding heads was really entertaining. As much as I enjoy computers and digital effects, I’m always fascinated by the real physical effects work — everything from the puppetry of Jim Henson’s films to the blood and gore of horror films — and it’s fun to watch the effects crew geek out when they get a good shot of some zombie’s brains blowing out the back of their head.

Okay, so it’s a little sick. That doesn’t mean it can’t be fun!

iTunes “Drama” by Club 69 from the album Junior Vasquez, Vol. 2 (1997, 3:36).

Quick Review: Timeline

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I just finished watching Timeline, based on the book by Michael Crichton. I don’t know anything about the book it’s based on — I haven’t read a Crichton novel in years — but the movie?

Oooh, ouch. Bad movie. No biscuit.

Bad enough that I spent most of the movie bored and often rolling my eyes, but I pretty much knew I was in for a dud (well, I’d picked it up already by the utter lack of acting ability by anyone in the cast, but…) when the group arrived in the late 14th century and anyone they ran into who spoke English spoke perfectly understandable, if anachronized, modern English.

Given that Geoffrey Chaucer wrote the Canterbury Tales around the end of the 14th century, and it reads as follows (as many people will remember from their high school english classes)…

Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;

Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,

That slepen al the nyght with open eye-
(So priketh hem Nature in hir corages);
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;

And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke
That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seeke.
Bifil that in that seson, on a day,

In Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay
Redy to wenden on my pilgrymage
To Caunterbury with ful devout corage,
At nyght was come into that hostelrye
Wel nyne and twenty in a compaignye

Of sondry folk, by aventure yfalle
In felaweshipe, and pilgrimes were they alle,
That toward Caunterbury wolden ryde.

…and generally needs a translation for modern readers to comprehend it, the fact that the language barrier wasn’t even mentioned in passing, let alone given any sort of (however implausible) explanation, was enough to have me scoffing.

Bleah. Don’t bother.

iTunes “Happiness (Dub)” by Front 242 from the album Mut@ge.Mix@ge (1995, 6:10).

New Styles

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I’ve done very little posting or reading over the weekend, and I’m up way too late tonight (tomorrow morning is really going to suck), but it’s all for a good cause — well, okay, depending on how you define that — as there are now two new stylesheets available in the switcher over to the right.

Simple Green style screenshot

The first is “Simple Green”. There’s really not a whole lot to look at, as I was mainly using it to play with a couple ideas that I had but wasn’t sure if I could quite get them to work correctly or not. Green monotype text on a black background, very little styling aside from that. In all honesty, while it’s kind of fun for a few moments, I wouldn’t want to read my site this way on a regular basis. Who knows, though, maybe someone will decide that it makes me look more ‘l33t’ and Matrix-y.

Blue Distressed style screenshot

The second is “Blue Distressed” and is the reason I’m up so late. I’m really, really happy with the way this one turned out. Cool blues and greys, distressed edges, and a lot more visually interesting than any design that I’ve come up with so far. Many thanks must go out to Keith Bowman, whose Photoshop brushes and color palletes made this design possible.

Now, neither of these stylesheets have been tested in anything other than Safari yet, so they may very well look like ass in other browsers (especially IE, and even more so with Blue Distressed, as it uses transparent .png images that I don’t believe are supported with IE). Caveat emptor and all that jazz.

For me, though, Blue Distressed is the way I’m viewing my site from now on.

And now — bedtime. I’m so going to hate my alarm in the morning.

Update: After a little tweaking, I’ve deemed the appearance under IE 5 “good enough” to make Blue Distressed the default stylesheet for the site. If you haven’t already used the stylesheet switcher to pick a style or if you’re a brand-new visitor, you should be getting the fancy-shmancy new design now.

I still don’t know how this looks under IE6, though. That’ll have to wait until I actually bother to turn on the PC in my apartment, something that tends to happen about as often as America elects a Democrat to the White House.

Or so.

It’s close.

iTunes “God is a DJ (Edit)” by Faithless from the album Sunday 8 PM (1999, 3:32).

New camera!

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Nine months ago (yikes!), I was an idiot and left my camera at a bus stop on my way to work. Ever since then, I’ve been using a camera that my friend Rick very kindly let me borrow until I could afford a new camera of my own. Well, it looks like that day may be coming pretty soon — I’m getting a new camera for free!

My current job has me staffing a facilities management (FM) site — running a small on-site copy facility for a company’s local offices. There’s been an ongoing contest for the past few months among all the various FM sites that we run for this company (they operate in a number of states) for the most number of positive customer comments. Each FM site was to send in any customer comments they received, good and bad, and the site with the best ratio of positive comments to income (to keep smaller single-person sites like mine on an even keel with larger, busier facilities elsewhere) wins.

Well, I got a call from our local account manager this morning letting me know that we won! Not only did we win, but it was a virtual shutout: our site got somewhere around 120 positive comments (no word on how many negative comments there were, but I know I haven’t seen any), and from what she told me, all the other sites got zero. Apparently, for some reason, while we were passing out comment cards and following up with customers to make sure their jobs were done correctly and on time, the rest of the sites just didn’t bother to participate in the contest. Seems more than a little bizarre to me, but I’m hardly going to complain!

So next Wednesday, I’ll be heading out to have a little celebration after work at one of the local happy hours with my manager and our account manager, and at some point in the near future, I’ll get my prize — a new digital camera!

Of course, seeing as how I’m a greedy little self-centered sod who’s never satisfied with anything, I’m wondering if I can manage to do myself just a little bit better. According to the flyer announcing the contest from a few months ago, the camera in question is a Nikon Coolpix 3200. Now, it doesn’t look like a bad camera, but is has gotten a few troubling user reviews on DPReview. Also, it apparently comes without a memory card, and the memory cards it uses are SD/MMC, while I have a couple of CompactFlash cards (including one 256Mb) here that I’d hate to have to replace with something else.

What I’m wondering is if there are any local business (Best Buy or something similar) that will take a receipt-less “return” of an un-opened box — this is the Christmas present season, after all — in exchange for a sale on a slightly better camera in the same rough price range (letting me pay the difference if the target camera is slightly more expensive). Since the current retail for the Coolpix 3200 is in the \$200 range, I figure I could get one of the mid-range Canon Powershot series for just a fairly minor out-of-pocket cost — if there’s a place that will let me do this, of course.

Any ideas? If not, I’m certainly not going to turn my nose up at being handed a free camera, even if it’s not everything I might want! No matter what, it’ll be nice to have a camera of my own again.

iTunes “See My Ships” by Violent Femmes from the album 3 (1989, 3:17).