Movers

July 26th, 2005

So movers suck, or at least the movers that were contracted to do my move. It has now been 13 days since the date that I originally requested that my stuff be delivered. The date range they came back with was the 15th – 20th, I had requested the 14th or 15th, and I being reasonable accepted that. At several points during the process between then and now they have gone in and out of being sure that my stuff would be delivered at a given date and time. Starting the 21st they startd compensating me and a very reasonable rate for the delay so at this point I’m ok with the fact that it’s going to be late, but they’re still pissing me off with their inability to give me a date or even simply return a phone call. I had almost as many problem with the original packing and loading as they couldn’t set a date before I had to leave so I had to find a friend who could do it and then they weren’t able to pick up the stuff at the scheduled time so I had to scramble from 2500 miles away to find someone who could let them in to do their work. At any rate they’re now 7 days late and I’ll be gettinng a sizable chunk of money assuming they brought my stuff tomorrow, which they won’t. Just in case you are moving and are looking for a company to take care of it for you stay the hell away from Mills Van Lines.

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Edward Tufte, Beautiful Evidence

July 26th, 2005

I’ll call this one a book review even though i haven’t read the book, it’s not out yet, but anyway. Edward Tufte is a
Yale University professor and an authority on graphic display of information. He spoke at a special Tuesday eddition of the Friday Learning Series at Amazon.com today. It was extremely interesting, one of the most interesting talks I’ve ever attended. His work, had I previously heard of it, would of been extremely helpful in my previous job.

He spent most of his time talking about what is required to effectively display information and I have to admit that it was something I’d never put much thought in to. His ideas and principals were very intuitive and put in to practice would, I imagine, pay off immensily. I won’t re-hash them here, as I would totally butcher his points from memory, but I will mention the concept of sparklines. Check out the sample of his upcoming book Beautiful Evidence.

He has strong opinions on Microsoft Power point. He served as a consultant to the boards reviewing the Challenger disaster and offers innsight to why early warnings about the possible problem with the shuttle were partially ignored because of the culture that Power Point created.

He’s a very interesting man and his work should prove interesting to most any one with a general interest in computer and information science.

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Tristan Prettyman

July 26th, 2005

So I had never heard of Tristan Prettyman before I saw an annoucement come across Amazon’s events mailing list. I read a little bit about her and decided to attend her event. I rode the shuttle down to Uwajimaya and grabbed lunch and walked on over to the building where it was happening. She was a bit late arriving, but things eventually got underway. She talked for a second, looked mildly nervous and then started to play. She was really good, had a great and interesting voice, was a decent guitarist and the songs where pretty interesting and fit her really well. It kinda had a Jack Johnson feel two it, perhaps not quite as deep as far as lyrics go, but a good soft voice with character and melodic and interesting songs.

She played two songs off of her soon to be released album and then finished with a cover of a Britney Spears song, of all things, which at the time I took as a joke, but was a hint of the dissapointment to come. There were pre-release copies of her album availiable. I didn’t manage to snag one, got there too early and they weren’t out as I came in, but one of my friends did. We listened to a bit of it (annoyingly DRM’d and bundled with a crappy/crashing player, but we managed to get them to play through MS media player, iTunes would not.) I was extremely dissapointed with it. After hearing her live I was expecting something much better. Her album was genric, like everything else on top-fourty raido, but not quite as catchy. It was way over produced, loud and pop-rock like, Avril Lavigne without the edginess that makes her slightly interesting. I was extremely dissapointed, I heard her play live and acoustic to boot. She’s good, I can’t help thinking that she’s a victim of the rubber-stamp top-40 record industy, she has the potential to be a lot better than what they made of her. I have to hope she’ll get a second chance and make better use of it, until then I’m going to move along and hope to find something better, I guess I’m just not in the record company’s target demograic.

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