Since the bus from Asstown, NJ (I guess it’s also known as Secaucus) arrives at the Port Authority in Manhattan, Times Square in particular and midtown in general ended up being the starting point for most non-con adventures. I’m sort of out of my element there, being more at home in the 20s and below, but there is of course Midtown Comics on 40th, and Brenna’s guidebook found us a place at which we could eat delicious brick oven pizza. We visited the Empire State Building, which offered a variety of excellent lines for our standing pleasure, but since we happened to arrive at the observatory just as the sun was setting and lights were coming on everywhere we didn’t mind so much.
Johan, Meg, and Noah joined us in Chinatown, where I hadn’t been since I worked at Globix over the summer. We ate ourselves silly on amazing soup dumplings at Shanghai and I finally got to try green tea ice cream, so really I think the whole endeavor can be called a success. Plus I got to stop by Aji Ichiban, where they sell the crazy fruit-filled marshmallows I love so much.
I’m now scrambling to finish some of the work that didn’t get done over the weekend (although there’s less remaining than I’d anticipated) and appreciating the complexly layered blistering that my feet have developed. I had thought my boots were thoroughly broken in, since I’ve been wearing them for five god damned years, but clearly I was mistaken.
I ended up heading out to Jersey for Ye Olde Ubercon yesterday afternoon and spent some time at the booth with the boys, which was good fun. Some Caoine readers showed up as well, all of whom even pronounced it correctly, which impressed me to no end. I didn’t think to bring any stickers with me, but if I end up heading back tomorrow I might. I’m home for the rest of this evening and probably most of tomorrow writing up a storm, though. Even if I don’t manage to get back to the con, it was good times meeting the gamers galore and discovering that among the other vendors was one who sold Budget Cloaks (as opposed to the more high end cloaks, for real cloak connoisseurs).
I guess it’s an indication of how far I’ve come from my freshman year neohippy vegetarianism that I voluntarily ate a hot dog from a street vendor last night. It wasn’t wiggling or anything, but walking back to the train station I began to feel a gnawing horror as I remembered how exactly they make hot dogs, and that the last time I ate one off the street I threw up. But that was when I was something like seven years old, and it seems as though my stomach has become as jaded and bitter as the rest of me in the meantime, because I actually feel fine.
Today I’ll be wandering around Manhattan with the crew before they head out to that Other State for Ubercon. Several of you have asked if I’ll be at the con myself: it remains to be seen. I can say that I definitely won’t be there all weekend, having (as I do) theses to outline and existentialists to interpret by Monday, but it’s possible that I’ll be around for a while.
I’m busy papering and programming my little brains out, but while I’m off doing that you can amuse yourself with this new game for the iPod. (Only $9.99!)
On Saturday, I ordered a bunch of philosophy texts from Amazon, two of which I needed urgently enough that I paid for two day shipping. I was aware, of course, that two day shipping means two days from the ship date, not the order date (especially if the order date is on a weekend), but I figured it was a safe bet that I’d get them by tomorrow, since that would be five intervening days, three of them business days, and since everything in the order was in stock and ready to ship according to the site.
Today, I got mail telling me that some of my items - my entire order, as it turned out - had been delayed and the new expected delivery date had become 1 March. One of the books I needed to read for a lecture on Thursday, and the other I bought as part of research for a paper that’s due this coming Tuesday - neither of which is feasible if I don’t get my books till the first. I was pissed off, of course, but what bothered me more was that I’d shelled out over fifteen dollars for two day shipping - yet wouldn’t be receiving my order for over a week and a half.
So I figured what the hell, I’ll just call them and get a refund on my two day shipping and go buy the urgent books somewhere locally. It turns out, though, that it’s no easy task to speak to a human - there is no customer service phone number posted on Amazon’s site except on the “Thank you” page you see immediately after placing an order (it’s not in the confirmation email you get later, nor in any subsequent emails). I’m not the only person who’s had this problem, of course, and that brings us to The Amazon.com Customer Service Page, a non-Amazon site that collects relevant contact information for customer service. I called the number listed there (800 201 7575) and, after arguing with the representative for half an hour, managed to get them to admit it was their error and give me a refund on my shipping charges.
That still doesn’t solve the problem of my not having my books for another week, or of Amazon not having any customer service phone numbers on their site. I don’t know why customer service has to be so universally awful - I’m reminded of my Home Depot disaster from this past summer. It seems like some companies go out of their way to make dealing with them as expensive, tiresome, and frustrating a process as they possibly can - but to what end?
Chris and I both seem to be coming down with something, so I’m off to take my vitamins and hit the sack early. Before I do, though, I feel it’s important to mention that I finally received a belated Tokyo book as a birthday present from a reader (thanks!) and that I saw eleven other people with iPods today. And they weren’t even all NYU students.
Because I’m nothing if not slightly obsessive, I attended my third William Gibson signing at the Columbia bookstore yesterday. Chris and I joined Johan and Meg for truly amazing quantities of Japanese food before the signing itself - I was decieved by a bento diagram on the menu that really wasn’t even a little bit to scale, and ended up with a lunch box the size of a coffee table. The meal was fantastic, it’s true, but I spent the reading and discussion portion of the event in something of a food coma which was only exacerbated by the fact that more friends showed up just before and we decided to get milkshakes afterward. Milkshakes! Death in a cute retro glass.
Signings (or readings, or discussions - author events in general, really) usually offer a good chance to observe the Serious Fan in his or her natural habitat. I’m not excluding myself from that group, of course, at least not when it comes to Gibson. I was definitely out of my fandom-depth at the Andy Serkis thing, though. There are people who collect events like that - they can rattle off a list of every time they’ve been within a hundred feet of someone involved with the production of the LOTR films, and are proud of how much money they’ve forked over for movie memorabilia found on eBay. I sit among them in nervous silence, waiting for someone to discover that I’m only there because hey, Gollum was pretty cool.
There were some Serious Fans at the Gibson thing as well, of course - fans much more serious than I am even when I’ve just finished rereading Neuromancer for the five billionth time. Most notable was Beige Trenchcoat Man, whose valiant attempt at doing Darth Vader in a seriously gothy way (from the dyed black hair to the pants tucked into boots) was spoiled by - you guessed it - a huge, belted beige trenchcoat that looked like he borrowed it from his mom’s closet. He explained to Meg that you don’t mess with William Gibson - he’ll erase you from history, man.
In response to my dissatisfied blurbing on SQL: Visual Quickstart Guide, I got the following delightfully snotty email from its author:
Dear Emma (who has always been big on reading),
Your review of my book — which, by the way, contains almost no screenshots — isn’t surprising, considering the caliber and attention to detail of your other reviews. (Slashdot is the perfect forum for them.) I confess that I didn’t make it through your "Mac OS X: Missing Manual" review
completely; it wasn’t, as you might suspect, the 20-odd occurrences of the word "I", but the phrase "It seems pretty definitely" that made me click through it.
That’ll learn me! Although I haven’t actually written a full-fledged review of Fehily’s Quickstart guide, it’s nice to know he cares. (I was pretty awful about his book - but it’s a pretty awful book.) It’s probably worth noting at this point that each of the three times I’ve written critically on a technical book, the author has made a point of contacting me to comment bitchily on my writing, my haircut, or Slashdot and its readership. I wonder, do you spend as much time making sure the reviewers know how you feel about your good reviews?
Of course, Fehily could have said that my complaints don’t really pertain specifically to his book at all but are rather an indication that I’m not the intended audience of the series, or he could have said that no style of book is for everyone and it’s no big deal that the Quickstart guides aren’t for me - both of which would have been true, and neither of which would have made him look like a jackass.
Over the past two days I’ve watched most of Glengary Glen Ross and The Usual Suspects, neither of which I’d ever seen before but both of which I’ll need to see again, because it’s apparently now impossible for me to watch a movie that starts after 8pm without falling asleep during it. Or maybe it’s only impossible if it’s a Thursday or Friday night and I’ve had a long week that hasn’t involved a lot of sleep. Clearly, more testing is required.
End-of-week exhaustion is setting in (since my week ends on Thursday), so I’m about to go and pass out early. I did get a chance to see William Gibson again tonight as part of his tour for the paperback release of Pattern Recognition. He stopped here last year when it came out in hardcover, of course, but who am I to turn down a chance to see Gibson for free? As for the book - it is, of course, great. If you were waiting for the paperback, now’s the time - it’s definitely worth the eleven bucks it costs at Amazon.
