Factoid from my calendar, which is all about Broadway theatre:

The Sound of Music opened at the Lunt & Fontanne Theatre on November 16, 1959. The seven youngsters playing the Von Trapp children received a group Tony nomination for Best Featured Actress, even though two of the actors were clearly boys.

i’m pretty sure i read a few months back an article saying that (horrible, stupid Flash alert) Vitamin Water was one of the top ten worst beverages ever, but i still like it. i’m certainly under no illusion about its purported health benefits; let’s face it, it’s a “fun” beverage, not a “does a body good” beverage. but i feel like it’s got to be better than coca-cola or diet coke. none of that evil HFCS, for starters.

On the plus side, it’s not heavily, sickly sweet like most such drinks, and it doesn’t have the icky metallic taste that gatorade does. On the whole, the flavors of Vitamin Water are more pleasant than not – i like the dark purplish XXX (açai berry + pomegranate), and the raspberry one (Defense).

I sometimes get Dragonfruit by mistake because the name is so exotic it never loses its novelty in my mind, but I always find myself disappointed by it (and eventually forget that I’ve already tried it and not liked it). The orange one isn’t bad either. Stay away from the green tea, though. Honest Tea is a much better beverage if you’re into the tea stuff.

just to nitpick for a second: the company name, glacéau, has way too many diacritics. also, their copy is really precious, even in the ingredients section.

it’s a good value when on sale, as it was last week at Ralphs (at $.50/bottle, it was cheaper than bottled water!). but i wouldn’t go out of my way to drink it.

I’m digitizing a video right now from 1978, of footage taken during a meeting between a local CRA representative and a public agency.

The public agency rep starts the meeting by explaining that because the meeting has to be bilingual (Japanese and English), it’s going to last about twice as long as a normal meeting. So people need to be concise.

About 15 minutes in, the CRA rep walks to the front of the room and demands that the camera and mic be turned off.

The next eleven minutes are spent as follows:

a) Various people standing up to ask why the man wants to turn the camera off.
b) The man repeating that he won’t explain anything until the equipment is turned off. he also refuses to explain why he wants the equipment off, until it’s off.
c) People continuing to ask why the cameras have to be turned off, and asking if it’s CRA policy.
d) The public agency rep explaining that it has no right to ask the camera to be turned off, because the camera is being run by a neutral, third party.
e) Somone suggesting tentatively they should turn off the camera.
f) Someone suggesting that a vote be taking on whether to turn the equipment off.
g) Someone else suggesting that the camera be turned off so the CRA tool can explain why he wants the cameras off, and then turning it on again while they discuss whether to accept the CRA man’s off-record explanation for why he wants the camera turned off. And then taking a vote on whether to continue with the camera on or off.
h) Old lady interjecting that it would be journalistic courtesy for CRA tool to explain, on the record, his reason for wanting the cameras off.

And then, before they take a vote on whether to go with that final suggestion, the camera gets turned off, because it’s run out of tape.

Oh, and I had to re-digitize this tape, because Final Cut Pro “couldn’t read” what I digitized the first time. It probably got as frustrated watching the meeting as I did.

UpdateLater that day, I found the two tapes that come after this footage. In the first 20-minute tape, people continue to argue about whether anyone has the right to silence “the media.” The people demand a decision “from the leadership,” who fail quite utterly to provide any such thing, preferring rather to defer to “the people,” and so it goes in a vicious cycle. Meanwhile, the CRA tool remains a silent but deadly observer.

The second tape, and the final in the series, begins with ten *more* freaking minutes of these people arguing. Finally, “the leadership” decides that since they won’t be getting anywhere without the cameras on, the cameras should be turned off. And so, at minute ten of tape 3, the cameras are turned off and the tape stops rolling.

WTH!?!??!

after years of dutifully pasting stamps on envelopes and signing paper checks, i decided i’d had enough and signed up for online payments on all my credit cards last month. i assumed that all my banks would email me when a statement was due.

i was wrong.

i had made entries in my gcal, recurring monthly, set at my statement due dates.

but i forgot to set up reminders.

it’s only by luck that i checked my gcal for tomorrow and realized my Amex statement was due.

of course, my gcal goes by date of the month, while Amex goes by… some other method. so my bill was actually due today. i hastily made a payment, in the full amount, but the fine print says it might not be processed until tomorrow.

so now my payment may be considered late.

argh!

so yeah. make sure you opt in for those reminder emails. and that you set up your own reminders correctly. it’s worth the extra ten minutes.

during grad school, i made frequent use of the student commons for the library program. there was a microwave, a fridge full of sodas, and a table of snacks with a jar for students to put in change for whatever they took. and people always put money in the jar (maybe not the always $.50 that’s requested, but you’ll always see money in the jar).

and the microwave wasn’t even chained down or anything!

i say that because a classmate from another department remarked, upon using our lounge, that this was rather remarkable. most other departments have to lock down any and all equipment of any value, because otherwise it’d be stolen in a heartbeat.

people have left computers alone in the lounge, with nobody else to watch it for them, without consequence. i guess it is sort of crazy, especially given how abjectly poor most of us are.

part of it, though, is probably that there are no undergrads in the library school. everyone knows undergrads are the worst (so suck it, Liz Lemon and Jack Donaghy!)

i just got an email (note to self, unsubscribe to those student listservs already!) about an upcoming bake sale for the program’s student organization. they have these periodically throughout the year, and the interesting thing (to me) is that they leave everything out on the table in the commons, and expect people to pay for the goods, without having anybody standing there to watch the stuff or take the money! this is how they do fundraising!

it’s pretty crazy, but kinda awesome, i think. i will say this: studies have shown that the honor system is more effective when you place a mirror near the tip jar or whatever. because apparently, seeing your physical image triggers something in your mental self-image that somehow pushes you to be more honest. or something.

on a somewhat related, if totally pointless note, the metro in LA and subway in berlin also go by the honor system, whereas on BART and in Paris, you have those clangy ticket taking machines. Yet the MUNI and buses in Paris and Berlin go mostly by the honor system, but in LA, the bus driver is ticket-taker, enforcer, and generally merciless ruler of the Bus Universe.

I went to BarCamp LA this year, and had a blast. Since it’s an un-conference, I went with very few expectations, and that may have helped, but it also meant I was open for whatever might happen.

After breakfast AND lunch, the day officially began when the organizers had every last person introduce himself/herself (in a pleasant surprise, the male-female ratio was somewhat healthy – not the typical sausage fest, unlike most tech-centric events =P).

Each person was allowed only 3 tags, and I had some difficulty choosing mine. In the end, I went with “archivist,” “Django,” and “women2.org,” figuring one of these might stick in somebody’s mind. And as it happened, it was the second one! Immediately after introductions were finished, I met with several Django-ologists, and we convened for almost an hour, missing the first set of sessions almost entirely. Later, we had a Django BoF, and that was enlightening.

Anyway, one of hte big sponsors of the event was Dreamhost, who offered free registration and a year of hosting! So I took that offer this morning, and have registered my real, full name. I was even able to take advantage of their birthday promo, and now have unlimited disk space/bandwidth for the life of the account! Not too shabby.

So stay tuned for a change of address and a new design. Now that I’m on my own server, I’m no longer stuck with using the woefully inadequate Wordpress.com templates, or even stick to the…well, not woefully, but still somewhat inadequate Wordpress platform!

Really, now that I’m on my own server, the possiblities are endless. Realistically, for this maximizer, that means the change won’t be soon, but it is imminent!

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

strangest Google search term to reach my blog:

“boba jello shots”

Dogsitting has disrupted my sleep schedule considerably. Working for a media organization (ie., artists) means I can slide into work as late as 11am, so I’ve managed to maintain waking hours more typical of a college student til recently.

But having to wake up to answer the morning wake-up call of nature early every morning (and I found it really amusing how the dogs make this call: they crawl out from underneath the blanket and hop around or otherwise shake the bed to rouse me awake, and then when I’m looking at them, they lift their hind leg to mimic peeing), meant I began to go to bed early so as not to miss out on those precious few hours of the dreamless.

Which is annoying, because I recently learned that the most creative time of the day is around 10pm (the least creative time is 4pm – those siesta-practicing cultures knew what they were on about!). So that means I have to cram in as much productivity as I can into the hours between, say, 9pm – midnight, as opposed to before, when I had all the hours before around 2am sprawled before me.

Hmm. This is probably not making much sense, because it’s almost midnight and I am beat.

The owners of the dogs I sat for a few month ago went on a trip recently, so they asked me to dog-sit for them again. It’s nice, especially as the weather’s gotten cold; the three of us can snuggle under the blanket and stay pretty toasty.

Still, the dogs have been sort of a handful. I’ve always wanted a dog, and still do, but it really is a lot of work to take care of them. At least these two have each other for company when I’m away, but when I come back it’s as though they haven’t seen a human for years. They are pretty attention-hungry, and make me feel guilty when I’m at the computer or playing Rock Band on their owners’ PS3 (hee!).

This is the single most oft-repeated question I’ve had to ask since Friday: “What did you just eat?”

Of course, they never answer.