Author: Charles Céleste Hutchins

Supercolliding since 2003

My life lately (is tl;dr)

Tuesday and Wednesday Last Week

A week ago Tuesday, I taught my module in Cambridge. The next morning, I got on a train to Birmingham for BiLE practice. I’m a co-founder of BiLE, the Birmingham Laptop Ensemble. We formed in February and we have a gig next week. The technical hurdles to getting a laptop ensemble going are not minor, so there has been a lot of energy going into this from everybody. We have got group messaging going, thanks to OSCGroups and I wrote some SuperCollider infrastructure based on the API quark and a small chat GUI and a stopwatch sort of timer, which is controlled with OSC, so there’s been a lot of that sort of tool writing. And much less successful coding of sound-making items, which will eventually be joystick controllable if I ever get them to work. All my code is written for mono samples and all of the shared samples people are using are in stereo, so I spent a lot of time trying to stereo-ise my code before finally mixing the samples down to mono.
I’m a big believer in mono, actually, in shared playing environments. If I am playing with other people, I’m playing my computer as an instrument and instruments have set sound-radiation patterns. I could go with a PLOrk-style 6-speaker hemisphere, if I wanted to spend a boatload of money on a single-use speaker to get an instrumental radiation pattern form my laptop, so I could just use a single Genelec 1029 that I already own.
Anyway, after the BiLE rehearsal, a couple students gave a group presentation on Reaper, which is a shareware, cheap, powerful DAW. I’m quite impressed and am pondering switching. My main hesitation is that I expect my next computer will be linux, so I don’t know if I want to get heavily involved with a program that won’t run on that OS. On the other hand, I don’t actually like Ardour very much, truth be told. I haven’t liked any of them since I walked away from ProTools.
After that we went out for socialising and instead of catching a train home, I went to stay on the floor of Julien’s studio. He lives way out in the country, up a lane (British for a single-track country road). It’s quite lovely. I would not be a fan of that commute, but I might do it for that cottage.

Thursday

The next morning, Juju and I set back to campus quite early so he could meet his supervisor. I ran a couple of errands and got a uni-branded hoodie. I haven’t worn such a garment for years, because fabric clinging to my chest in the bad old days was not a good thing. But now I can wear snug woven fabrics, like T-shirts, hoodies and jumpers! It’s amazing! Also, I remember the major student protests about university branded clothing made by child labour, but this was actually fairtrade, according to the label, which is fairly impressive.
Then all the postgrads met in the basement of the Barber Institute to start loading speakers into a truck for a gig. We were moving a relatively small system, only 70 speakers, but that’s still a fair amount of gear to muscle around. Then we went to the Midlands Arts Centre to move all the gear into the venue and set it up. The gear is all in heavy flight cases, which needed to be pushed up and down ramps and down hallways and then the speakers inside needed to be carried to where they would be set up, as did the stands to which they would be attached and the cables that connect them. It’s a lot of gear. We worked until 6 or 7 pm and then went back to the studios at uni to get a 2 hour long presentation from Hans Tutchku about how he does music stuff. I tried desperately to stay awake because it was interesting and I wanted to hear what he was saying, but I did not entirely succeed in my quest.

Friday

Then, Juju and I went back to his place, 45 minutes away and then came back to the MAC early the next morning to finish rigging the system. We put up the remainder of the system and then people who were playing in that evening’s concert began to rehearse. I hung around for the afternoon, trying to get my BiLE code working. Kees Tazelaar, who played the next evening came along to see how things were going and recognised me from Sonology and greeted me by my old name. I like Kees quite a lot, but it was a very awkward moment for me and I wasn’t sure what to do, so I spoke to him only briefly and then mostly avoided him later. This was not the best way to handle it.
There were two concerts in the evening. The second of them was organised by Sound Kitchen and was a continuous hour with no break between pieces. The people diffusing the stereo audio to the 70 speakers took turns, but changed places without interrupting the sound flow. It was extremely successful, I thought. The hour was made up of the work of many different composers, each of whom had contributed only 5 minutes, but somehow this was arranged into a much larger whole that held together quite well, partly because many of the different composers had used similar sound material. A lot of them used bird sounds, for example, so that was a repeating motif throughout the concert.

Saturday

After that, we hung around the bar for a bit afterwards. The next morning was not so early, thank goodness, when we went back to the MAC and then back to the uni for the BiLE hack day. The idea was that we would do a long group coding session, where people could write code around each other and ask for clarification or feedback or help or whatever from band mates. However, it started really late and everybody was really tired, so it was not entirely successful in it’s goals.
Then we went back to the MAC for the concerts. I was sitting in the hallway, trying to figure out why my BiLE code had failed so completely when I got drafted into being in charge of the comp tickets. It turns out that this is actually somewhat stressful, because it requires knowing who is supposed to get comped in, getting tickets for them and then distributing them. Which means approaching Francis Dhomont and speaking to him.
The first concert was curated by Kees Tazelaar and started with a reconstruction of the sounds played in the Philips Pavilion at the Brussels Worlds Fair in 1958. He found the source tapes and remixed them. Concrete PH sounded much more raw and rougher than other mixes I’ve heard. It had a gritty quality that seemed much more grounded in a physical process. I was surprised by how different it sounded. Then he played Poem électronique and a his own work called Voyage dans l’espace. I hope he plays these again on large multi-channel systems, because it was pretty cool.
I was feeling fairly overwhelmed by the lack of sleep, my lack of success with BiLE and getting stuck with all the comp tickets, so I was not happy between concerts. The next one was all pieces by Anette Vande Gorne, a Belgian woman who runs the Espace du son festival in Brussels and who has very definite theories about how to diffuse sounds in space. Some of them are quite sensible, however, she thinks that sound can start at the front of the hall and be panned towards the back of the hall, but sound cannot originate at the back of the hall and travel to the front. Hearing about this had prejudiced me against her, as it seems rather silly.
She always diffuses standing up, so they had raised the faders for her, with one bank slightly higher than the other, like organ manuals. She started to play her pieces… and it was amazing. It was like being transported to another place. All of my stress was lifted from my shoulders. It was just awe inspiring. The second piece was even better. I was sitting in the back half, so I could see her standing at the mixers, her hands flying across the faders dramatically, like an organist, full of intensity as her music dramatically swelled and travelled around the room. It was awe-inspiring. Then I understood why people listened to her, even when some of her theories sound silly. She might not be right about everything, but there’s quite a lot she is right about. This was one of the best concerts that I’ve ever been to.
The last concert was a surprise booking, so it wasn’t well publicised. It was Jonty Harrison, Francis Dhomont and Hans Tutchku. It was also quite good, but I wouldn’t want to play after Vande Gorne. Tutchku’s piece had several pauses in it that went on just a few moments too long. It’s major climax came quite early. It worked as a piece, but seemed like it could be experienced in another order as easily as the way it was actually constructed. I talked to him at the party afterwards and he said that the pauses were climaxes for him and ways of building tension and that he had carried them out for too long in order to build suspense. I’m not entirely positive they functioned in this way, but the idea is quite ineresting and I may look into it. He also asked me what I thought of his presentation for two days earlier, so I was hoping he hadn’t noticed me dozing off, but I think he did.
After the final concert, there was a large party at Jonty’s house. I got a lift from Jonty, so I was squeezed in the back of a car with Anette Vande Gorne on one side of me and Hans Tutchku on the other side with Francis Dhomont in the front. They all spoke French the whole way. I’ve been filling out job applications and one them wants to know about my foreign language skills and now I can say with certainty that if I’m stuck in a car with several famous composers speaking French, I can follow their conversation fairly well, but would be way too starstruck to contribute anything.
Apparently, the party went on until 4:30 in the morning, but I didn’t stay so late. I talked a lot to Jean-François Denis, the director of empreintes DIGITALes, a Canadian record label. He flew from Canada just for the weekend and showed up without anyone expecting him. He is extraordinarily charming.

Sunday

The next morning, we went back again to the MAC and then there was a long concert with an intermission in the early afternoon. Amazingly, none of the concerts over the entire weekend featured overhead water drops. There were barely any dripping sounds at all.
After the concert, we de-rigged the system and packed all the gear back into cases and loaded it onto the two rented trucks. Then we went for curry in Mosely, which we seem to do after every gig. Shelly was talking about how it was her last BEAST gig and I wasn’t paying much attention until I realised this meant it was my last gig too. I really should have signed up to play something. I thought there was another gig coming later in the year, but it was cancelled. I’m seriously going to graduate from Brum having only played a piece at a BEAST gig one time and never having diffused a stereo piece. That is extremely lame on my part.

Monday

Juju was completely exhausted, so we left the curry early, so he could go home and catch up on sleep. The next morning, we all went back to the Barber Institute to unload the trucks and put everything away. Then we, as usual, went to the senior common room to have cups of terrible coffee. Their tea is alright, so that’s what I had, but most people go for the coffee, which could double as diesel fuel. I guess this was my last time of that also.
Normally, I would then gather my things and go home, but I did not. I worked on code and faffed and worried about my lecture the next day and then in the evening, we had another seminar. Howard Skempton came and talked for two hours about Cardew and Morton Feldman and his own music. It was quite good. We all went to the pub afterwards, but that dissipated quickly as people left to sleep it off.

Tueday

I got the train home, finally and got in after midnight. There’s a large stack of mail inside my door. I woke up early the next morning to assemble my presentation for my module. As luck would have it, the topic was acousmatic music, so I talked about BEAST and played them some of the music from the weekend. I also pointed them at some tools. I was supposed to have them start their task during the class time, but a surprising number of them wanted to show their works in progress, so that didn’t happen.
As I was on the train back to London from Cambridge, I wondered whether I should go out to a bar that night to socialise when I fell completely asleep on the train. Drooling on my backpack asleep. I completely crashed. I woke myself up enough to get the tube home and then thought I would sort out my BiLE code instead of going out, but I couldn’t concentrate, so I just faffed around on the internet instead of sleeping or going out. Meh to me.

Wednesday

Then, the next day, which was Wednesday, a week and a day after all of this started, I got on the train for Birmingham to go to a BiLE rehearsal and to go to a seminar. I got my code working on the train and was feeling somewhat happy about that, but when I got to the rehearsal, it just gave up completely. I managed to make sounds twice during the entire rehearsal, one of which was during a grand pause. When I tried repeating the sound later, it wouldn’t play. Also, Shelly found a crash bug in my chat application, when Juju typed a french character. On the bright side, however, all of the MAX users got all the way through one of the pieces we’re playing next Thursday, which is quite encouraging. Antonio, our graphics guy got the projector sort of working, so I was able to glance at what he was doing a couple of times and it looked good.
We took a break and a bunch of the postgrads were dissing live coding, so I guess that might not be a good goal for the ensemble. They thought projected code was self-indulgent and only programmers would care. I need to link them to the toplap mainfesto. Actually, they were more dissing the idea of live coding, having barely witnessed any themselves. Non-programmers do seem to care and, while it is a movement that does require some thoughtful understanding to fully appreciate it, the same could certainly be said of acousmatic music. I like the danger of live coding, something that I think a laptop ensemble ought to appreciate. It’s a bit like a high wire act.
The presentations at the seminar were interesting and then we went to the pub. I was so tired biking home from the train station that I got confused about which side of the street I’m supposed to be on.

Thursday

I slept until 2 this afternoon and I was supposed to sort out my BiLE code and fix up my CV and write my research portfolio, but all I did was send out email about Monday’s supercollider meetup and fix the crashbug in the chat thing. SuperCollider strings are in 7 bit ascii and fuck up if you give them unicode, which is really quire shocking and not documented anywhere.
Then I went to Sam’s to get Xena back and I wired up part of the 5.1 system she got for her daughter and sorted out her daughter’s macmini so that she could connect to it with VNC and so it was wired to the sound system and the projector and quit asking for the keychain password every 5 seconds. Then I came home and spent ages typing this up. Tomorrow, I will do my CV stuff for real, because I have to get it done and then work on my BiLE code. Saturday I’m going back to Brum again for a 5 hour rehearsal in wich we sort out the rest of our music for the gig. Sunday, I need to finish and job application related stuff and write my presentation for Tuesday. Monday is the job application deadline and a SuperCollider meetup. Tuesday, I teach. Wednesday, I need to get Xena back to Sam’s and then go to Brum again for a rehearsal and will be there overnight to practice the next day and then play the gig and then get stonkingly drunk. Friday, I go home. And then start sorting out the tech stuff for the next two pieces, which at least are by me and count towards my portfolio. And I need to sort out my stretched piece which is a disorganised mess and start writing a 20 minut piece, which I haven’t done at all and needs to be done very soon because I need to graduate and I have not spent all this busy time working on my own music, although the tools I’ve written should be kind of valuable. All I can think about now, going over and over in my head is all the stuff I have to do. And snogging. That thing about men thinking about sex every 7 seconds has never been true for me before, but it is now. And it’s actually quite annoying except that as the alternative is thinking about everything that I have to do, I actually prefer it.

Attention: Single Ladies

Are you a straight or bi woman between 29-40, who has given up on the single scene? Feel like all the good men are taken?

Despair Not!

Meet eligible postgraduate men near you!
Yes, your area may be teeming with unpaired postgrad men. Men with exciting and interesting hobbies such as:

  • Working on their dissertations
  • Doing fake-work
  • Facebooking
  • Procrastinating
  • Feeling guilty about facebooking and procrastinating
  • Deconstructing re-runs of The Simpsons
  • And More!

Yes, you too can be let into the life and the flat of a man who has stacks of books everywhere and mutters to himself about conference submission deadlines. You can experience the joys of wonder of hearing him say, “I really should be working right now.” You can go to fun parties with academics where your date shows up exceedingly late and then drinks only lemonade in case he decides to do more work at 1:30 AM.
Do you find gaudy material tokens of success like nice haircuts and shoes without holes to be shallow and off-putting? Have you always wondered abou the finer points of spectromorphology carried out with open source software and the communities that produce those artefacts? Does your heart go pitter-patter for somebody reading theory textbooks on the beach on holidays? Yes, postgraduate men are waiting to meet you!

Or

If you’re a bloke and you’re still reading this far, why not meet postgraduate women who are pretty much like the men described above, but with the added bonus of being female.

Act NOW

While supplies last! Yes, nab them quickly before they finish with their writing up year or drop out of uni or meet somebody else (haha, just kidding on the last one)

Why note date a postgraduate near you TODAY?

You’re going to have to make the first move here, and be as blatant as possible about it, or else they might not notice. But give it a go. Soon.

A dream I had

I had a friend who had an inverse fairy godmother. She would always grant the opposite of whatever he wished for. If he wished to go see a concert somewhere, she would wave her wand and it would guarantee that we wouldn’t get to the concert, but something else really good would happen, always better than whatever wish he had. His life was always full of unexpected and amazing events.
This made him very popular, because when you were hanging around with him, you never knew what was going to happen, but that it was going to be good. His friends thought this was awesome and it seemed like his fairy godmother was benefitting them more than him. It’s not that he didn’t also benefit from his inverse wishes, but he was constantly frustrated that none of his wishes ever came true. He seemed unaware that he lived a charmed life. He wasn’t even aware that his fairy godmother existed, but I had seen her.
Still, he was relatively happy despite himself and had a good sense of humour. He never learned to stop wishing for things, though or to wish aloud for the opposite of what he actually wanted. He just smiled and carried on, surrounded by his friends.
And then I woke up and all the specifics of this dream faded from my mind, as dreams do, but the general plot remained. Weird, innit

Adventures in American Healthcare

A few days before I left England, my ear began to itch, in the spot where I used to have a cartilage piercing. I didn’t worry about it, but scratched at it, absentmindedly, thinking I really should do something about it but then forgetting. Then I got on a 10 hour flight, followed immediately by a 16 hour train ride. I got to my dad’s house and felt exhuasted and my ear was irrated to heck. I caught a glimpse of it in the mirror and my entire ear was red enough that I could step in for Rudolph and save Christmas, in case a holiday movie suddemly formed around me.
My dad took me to see a doctor at an “urgent care clinic.” This is American for a walk-in clinic. First, a nurse took my contact details and then told me to wait in the lobby. The primary feature of this was a large flatscreen TV showing adverts for prescription drugs. “Feeling stressed? Ask your doctor about Damitol. Damitol can help with burts of impotent rage. Do not take Damitol if you are already taking Fukitol. Side effects of Damitol may include becoming red faced, excessive sputtering and fatigue. Damitol works best when combined with diet and exercise. . . .” Blah blah blah. They had a 5 or 10 minute advert for a diabetes drug. Then they had a minute or two of random health-related information, then another advert. It was all branded as CNN Health.
“This is weird.” I said to my dad.
“I think it’s just general information about insulin . . . oh. That is weird.”
A nurse took me back, weighed me, took my blood pressure, pulse and temperature and asked about allergies. All interactions with healthcare providers in the US start with weight, blood pressure, etc. I explained about my ear, which was significantly less red by then. She took notes and left.
A moment later, the doctor came in and I repeated my story. He looked at my ear for 5 seconds and prescribed sulfa antibiotics. “They’re cheap,” he explained. I asked something about my ear and he said it was probably a staph infection and they tend to respond to sulpha.
“Staph?!” I thought.
“Unless it’s MRSA,” he continued.
I quit listening to his list of dire diseases. I asked about side effects and he started talking about posssible allergic reactions. “In the worst case your mouth and tongue will swell up and . . .”
“I just wanted to know if it was ok to drink or not.” I interrupted.
“If you drink, it will make the allergic reaction hit more quickly . . .”
I stopped listening again. Then I went out to the front to pay. Actually, my dad paid. It was over $100. Then we went to a pharmacy, where the drugs were only $14. They really were quite cheap.
The pharmacist explained that they might upset my stomach, etc. i had forgotten that in the States, you get this information from pharmacists and not doctors. Probably because we were in Washington state, she didn’t mention that I should stay out of the sun.
So I started taking antibiotics, wondering if my British GP would have prescribed them. he certainly would have poked my ear several times first. I also started putting hot compresses on it. It hurt if anything touched it, so no wearing headphones or hats or sleeping on that side.
Last night, on the 8th day, it was bright red again. And still hurting and warm to the touch this morning, so I resolved to go to a clinic. I called the one closest to my house. They weren’t answering, so I called another which was taking a holiday and then another and another. Every clinic seems to be closed today, except for one 3 miles away, which said it was open, but the recptionist was busy. I cycled over. It was closed.
Finally, I tried the Berkeley Free Clinic and was startled when a person answered. I described my woes. “You need to be seen,” he said, but they couldn’t see me before Monday. “Do you have money or insurance?” The person asked. Money, yes. Insurance, no. He suggested that I go to Highland Hospital. “They have an urgent care clinic. Go to the emergency room and they’ll direct you.”
I faffed around for a bit and finally got on a bus. Highland is an emergency-only hospital with a reputation for highly organised, professional helpful staff in the midst of the complete chaos.
I asked for the urgent care clinic and was told it had closed down. They said they just do it all in emergency now. The intake person said it was fine that I wasn’t having an emergency and took my ID and told me to sit.
I got called up to a triage desk and a nurse took my temperature pulse and blood pressure and asked about allergies and past illnesses. “When was your last tetnus shot?” Then she asked what the problem was and gave me a red wristband to indicate that I have allergies. She told me to wait in a different room.
I got called back to a different desk where I was asked for ID again, address, emergency contact information, mother’s maiden name, social security number, whether I had a job and a GP and many other questions. “Did you come by car or bus?” Then, she told me to wait again.
A nurse called me and walked me over to a bunch of cublicles. “Wait here for a moment.” He said and then vanished. A while later, a woman introduced herself as a doctor and I repeated my entire tale of woe. She looked in my ears and then prodded my ill one a bit. She said it was a minor infection and would probably go away on its own, but decided to prescribe me new antibiotics. She told me to keep sitting there and a nurse would come.
The nurse had the prescription forms. “You have to take these every 6 hours, which is a pain in the ass.” She looked at my warm, but no longer red ear and wondered why I had been given a prescription at all. She lead me to wait for a financial advisor. While waiting, I heard an announcement calling the trauma team to assemble, saying a type 2 trauma would be arriving in 8 minutes.
The financial person asked if I had a job and for ID. I said I worked in England. “So you’re not a resident of California?” Well, I kind of am, I’m just studying abroad. I gave her my expired drivers lisence. It has the wrong name on it. This did not help clarify matters. She said I would need to provide pay stubs to prove my income. I said they were in England. She sent me to wait to talk to her supervisor.
I looked at the information provided to me while I waited. “Cellulitis usually clears up on its own.” No mention of staph or mrsa. The financial person called me back.
“You’re not a resident here.” We began again. I finally gave up. She asked what had happened during my visit. “Oh, that won’t cost much anyway.”
“How much will it be?”
They don’t tally it up for a couple of weeks. In my experience, a trip to an emergency room is at least $400, so I really hope this will be billed as if their clinic still existed.
I took the prescription to Walgreens pharmacy, despite knowing that they have a 1000% markup on some drugs, including ones I got from them in the past. 7 days of the new antibiotic cost $60, but if I spend $20 to enroll on their discount program, I could get it for $30. Obviously, they have a large markup on antibiotics also. Charming. I enrolled in the program. The form I got explained that it was not health insurance. No kidding.

Post Script

The bill from Highland came out to $283, which is a lot less than I’d anticipated.

Ignorance is Strength; Socialism is Slavery

It has recently been put to me that socialism is slavery, because under socialism, the person belongs to the state and not themselves. The speaker’s inspiration was likely the not-yet-implemented health reform, because he wrongly fears he will be compelled to get regular checkups from a physician.
By his logic (and I use that term losely) the entire first world and part of the third world, are currently enslaved. France? Enslaved. Germany? Enslaved.
Of course, America is no stranger to slavery. There are people alive today who grew up hearing their own grandparents accounts of what it was like to be born into bondage. To have no rights and be considered less than human, to fear random violence.
Slaves were compelled to work at jobs that were often dangerous or life-span shortening. The method of compulsion was systemic and grusome violence. People were often brutally whipped. The owner had a “right” to sexual abuse. In the normal course of trade, families could be broken up and torn apart- spouses sold to separate locations, children taken from their parents. And it took just an accusation of sex to cause a lynching – something which did not just include hanging, but also torture.
Slavery in America has never been equaled in it’s brutality, it’s violence and it’s injustice. One race of people systeamtically beat, exploited and opressed another race of people, taking the output of their labour for themselves and providing violence in return. And this system of violence and terror is exactly like . . . Universal access to healthcare?
Stay sane, America.

Quick Scenes From America

I’m unused to hearing my native accent, so I keep looking up in surprise. There are so many American accents, some of which are almost never on TV or heard overseas. I want to record people talking, but I can’t imagine them agreeing to it.

1

In the train station in Emerville (the town between Oakland and Berkeley), there is a young woman eating nori seaweed. These are the flat paper-like sheets of seaweed used to wrap sushi. I’m jealous that I don’t have some. . . . Now she’s reading a book about the oneness of the universe. . . . Now she’s meditating in the busy train station waiting room. . . . Now she’s writing in her journal. I do miss California so much when I’m away.

2

I’ve woken up quite early on the train and gone to the dining car where it’s me and senior citizens. There are cups of coffee with free refills. It’s not good, but it’s not bad either. I have two cups. The man seated across from me asks what a croissant is. Later he makes a joke about shoot black and hispanic people. His wife gently chastises him. I’m unsure how angrily I should respond. I tell him it’s “a bit alarming,” which seems inadequate, but of course, I don’t want to be rude when confronted with apalling racism. There are some things about California that I don’t miss at all.

3

The man seated next to me at my regular seat spends an amount equal to half his rent money on health insurance that only covers sudden, catastrophic illness. He is unemployed. He wishes there was socialised medecine in the US, but understands, he says, that this is incompatible with rugged individualism, and doesn’t see an answer that’s compatible with American culture. We can’t have nice things?

I wasn’t dreaming of a white Christmas

Yesterday, I sat on an airplane for five hours and when I got off the plane, my ears were uneffected, I had no jetlag and my carbon footprint was minimal! Unfortunately, this is because my flight was cancelled.
I was worried that forecast snow might stall all trains to the airport, so I’d arrived hours early. I knew they had de-icing equipment at the airport, so I wasn’t too worried about the planes. But as I was eating lunch, I glanced out the window and saw whiteout snow. I could barely see the airplanes at all and couldn’t see across to the adjacent terminal. It was beautiful, but also alarming. Then, after abuot 20 minutes, the skies turned blue and the sun started shining again. Amazingly, there were a few minutes where the sun was shining and it was snowing at the same time. Does this cause rainbows ( or snowbows)? I wondered.
It was all over very quickly. I wasn’t surprised when my plane boarded a bit late and also not surprised when they said we had to wait for a de-icer. I was, however, surprised by how long we sat at the gate. I read in news reports later that they couldn’t deploy all their de-icers because they had no place to park planes while they were being de-iced. So planes were ordered to stay at the gates. However, this caused a problem for landing planes, since the gates were all full. Thus planes full of arriving passengers sometimes waited for 4 or 5 hours to get to a gate. In the mean time, they parked them near the de-icers.
It might be because I have an undergraduate degree in Computer Science and thus have studied logistics a wee bit, but I could think of a solution to this problem . . ..
After five hours, our plane was delayed so long, I was started to get worried about arriving after BART shut down and this may have been why, with only 4 planes ahead of us in the queue, our flight was cancelled.
It wasn’t all bad spending so many hours on the plane. The cabin crew was helpful and polite and people chatted amicably with each other. The in-flight entertainment system was working. It was exactly like being in the air, except that we weren’t. I think that it would a perfect thing for somebody who was afraid of flying. They could have the whole experience as a kind of a dry run.
Once I got off the plane, however, things were a bit more chaotic. I had to clear immigration, which was a long queue and then the baggage reclaim area was chaotic. It was mobbed with hundreds of people from cancelled flights plus all the people who were finally getting released form their planes that had been waiting. The computer screen which said what carousel to go to was not giving any meaningful information, so I asked an employee and he seemed on the brink of hysterics, from not knowing anything (while at the same time being as friendly and polite as possible). After maybe an hour, there started being announcements, “If you are from a cancelled long haul flight, you baggage will be on carousel 3, 4, 5, or 6 . . ..” Some enterprising traveler and his friends split up, each monitoring one carousel, so when bags marked SFO started appearing on number 4, he got a call and then walked around the reclaim area loudly announcing “San Francisco bags are on number 4!” This is what I love about Bay Area culture, actually. Friendly, helpful and loud!
I went through customs and then got to the arrivals lounge which was heaving with people, who had been waiting for hours for passengers who had landed but not alighted. Frequent announcements indicated that the airline was very sorry that nobody had been given any information whatsoever. Other announcements encouraged those on canceled flights to sort out rescheduling on the BA website instead of queuing at the airport. I decided to follow that advice and got on a tube.
I texted Paula and she told me to come around fora cuppa, so I did, despite it being quite late. I brought my laptop and searched in vain for the rebooking link that British Airways kept claiming existed. I couldn’t find it anywhere, so I handed my laptop to Paula and started trying to call the airline. Paula couldn’t find the link either and a recording at the airline’s phone number told me they were very busy, so I should try calling again later.
Finally, after 2AM, I got hold music! Yay, I was on hold and they hadn’t hung up on me! I stayed on hold for an hour, while trying to find out any information at all about what was going on. I discovered that the best and most reliable way to get information from the airline was via twitter, but their tweeters had all gone home an hour or two earlier.
I use twitter. I think microblogging is fabulous and I’m glad to see somebody making good use of it, but in this case, I have to say that they really needed to also update their actual website and/or their phone message. It took quite some time before it occurred to me to even check twitter. And, indeed, if they’re going to make that the only reliable way to get any information, then they need to announce that someplace else, like on their website or their phone message. It was at this moment that I began to get a bit annoyed. I was even more annoyed when I realised, after 3 am and more than an hour on hold, that their call center was closed and nobody was going to take me off hold until it reopened at 6 am.
I went home and set my alarm clock for 5:59, but when I called, the phones were already overwhelmed and hung up on me. I kept retrying until 7 am, when I finally got through to being on hold. This time, the hold music was accompanied by spoken messages actually telling me that I was on hold. I put it on speaker phone and tried to stay awake until somebody finally picked up at 9:30.
I will be on the same flight on Tuesday, 21 December. This should land before 18:00 and give me enough time to get to Emeryville to catch me 22:00 train to Oregon, which arrives in Portland in the middle of the afternoon on 22 December. I am going to have an alarming odor by the time I arrive. Fortunately, I should be able to sleep on the train and I will still get to see my family, which is what motivated me to wake up after so little sleep.
And now I’m typing this out, in a haze of exhaustion. But hey, no jetlag, at least.

not just like now, but with better gadgets

They say
“The future is now”
A Wallmart boot
in the face of a Target stampede
trampled back friday shopper
Forever.
It used to be
the beach was lurking
under the cobble stones;
Waiting to be uncovered
and realised.
And maybe
thing aren’t perfect now,
but it’s fair to say
it could have been much worse
The future is
not for sale and
not fixed.
We make it and find it
still waiting
beneath the cobble stones.

The 1932nd Psalm

Depression is my shepherd; I am in want.

He maketh me to lie down on park benches; He leadeth

    me beside the still factories.

He restoreth the bread lines; He leadeth me in the paths

    of destruction for his Party’s sake.

Yea, though I walk through the Valley of Unemployment,

    I fear every evil; for thou are with me; the Politicians

    and Profiteers they frighten me.

Thou preparest a reduction in mine salary before me in

    the presence of mine creditors; Thou anointest mine

    income with taxes; my expenses runneth over mine

    income.

Surely unemployment and poverty will follow me all the

    days of the Republican administration; and I shall

    dwell in a mortgaged home forever.

Purportedly written in 1932.
You know what totally didn’t help then? Austerity measures. I’m just saying.

Not Shopping at Amazon

Dear Sir or Madam,

I was distressed to read in the Guardian that you quit hosting wikileaks’s website (http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/dec/01/wikileaks-website-cables-servers-amazon). I had intended to do all of my Christmas shopping with Amazon.com, but instead, I’ll find an online retailer who does not practice censorship. I’m very disappointed by this and I hope you change your mind.

Thank you for your time,
C Hutchins

Sooooo….. anybody got any suggestions about from where I should mail-order gifts for my family in the US?
First of all, I think the wikileaks thing is really cool. On the one hand, it is a problem for diplomats if they can’t write frank assessments for fear of seeing them in newspapers. But, on the other hand, there’s so much unnecessary and undemocratic secrecy that the embarrassment of the diplomatic corps is a small issue by comparison.
Also, the leaks don’t seem to be actually making the US look as bad as I thought they would. The bad behaviour (bombing and lying about it) was already fairly well known. I didn’t know, however, that the US was being pressured by Arab states to declare war on Iran. I would have guessed the opposite. So I’m happy to learn the US has been resisting this course of action. Also, the the cables about Sarkozy and others are really fascinating.
I’m also very happy to hear that banks are next. This is whistle-blowing on a large scale.
They keep telling us that if we’ve done nothing wrong, we have nothing to fear. Well, large, powerful organisations like governments and banks actually should be accountable to society at large, so prying into their secrets actually serves a useful purpose whereas CCTV cameras pointing into our windows do not. If the banks hadn’t destroyed the economy, I’m sure the prospect fo seeing their memos leaked would be much less pertinent. So I hope wikileaks keeps it up. Also, Manning is a hero, assuming he did it.
What’s not cool is Amazon giving in to government pressure. This is part of why I’m very wary of using US-based web services. Certainly EU governments do censor things, but the land of the free and home of the brave seems to be full of corporations who cooperate very easily. Also, as far as government goes, the Patriot Act gives them the right to spy on us, which is also not really what you want from your IT provider.
In short, Amazon pulling the plug makes the US, and especially US-based companies, look worse than the leaked documents do.
But seriously, from where should I order Christmas gifts? And what does one get for a 2 year old, anyway?