“The Fifty-Nine Story Crisis”

Citicorp Center in New York is a striking building for lots of reasons, but the most obvious is that it sits on four huge “stilts” that allow one corner to hover over a church. Less obvious is its massive motion dampening system, developed to reduce wind-induced motion sickness in tenents.

Its most interesting aspect, though, is what happened when its structural engineer realized, several years after its completion, that his structure might not be as safe as it should be under significant wind loads, and what he did about it. Let’s be clear: when I say “not as safe as it should be,” I mean he realized the 59-story skyscraper might fall down.

Seventeen years later, Joe Morgenstern wrote a long piece in the New Yorker about what happened next; it’s online here and is well worth your time.

Dept. of Useless Tomfoolery

The Department of Homeland Security’s Advisory System — you know, that bullshit chart of Green-Blue-Yellow-Orange-Red we’ve all been laughing at since 9/11 — will soon enter its fifth consecutive year at precisely the same level of national alert. It should surprise no one that said level is “yellow” — the one in the middle — and that is has been unchanged since August 12, 2005.

Some makework Bushite drone came up with this goofball idea in the Great National Freakout of late 2001, and nobody has yet had the stones to do away with it. We Heathen wonder how many thousands of dollars have been wasted down this particular rathole.

Update: Mrs Heathen points out that it’s Orange at airports. This is true. It’s been Orange for . . . three years.

Dept. of Annoying Disappointments

So, I got a new iPhone, and it’s big enough to also be a reasonable iPod (32 gigabytes). This requires the acquisition of some new Serious Headphones, since the Serious Headphones I already own have no mic or switch; while they work with the iPhone, I have to take them off to take calls, and I can’t pause the music without touching the phone.

I’ve been very pleased with my existing Etymotics, but had heard good things about Ultimate Ears, so I thought I’d give them a go. MISTAKE. for one thing, even the smallest of their silicon earbud tips made my ear canals ache, and — odder — listening for more than a few minutes produced a vague sense of nausea, which is just plain weird. All symptoms went away when I switched back to my ER-6i set.

Fortunately, Amazon has a liberal return policy, so my UEs will go back tomorrow for a full refund (minus a $5 shipping charge) in favor of a new set of Ety HF2s.

Lesson learned? Stick with what works. Heathen faithful — or, at least, those of you interested in fancy headphones — take note.

Gee, Thanks, Microsoft

Installing recommended updates and patches on our Exchange server resulted in (a) Windows Firewall being automatically enabled, preventing any access to Exchange and (b) the webmail client being completely hosed.

OWA: New frontiers in suck

It is apparently impossible to log out of Outlook Web Access in a browser and then log back in as a different user without first quitting the browser. WTF?

Fuck you, eMusic

We Heathen have been occasionally enthusiastic users of eMusic for some time. They’ve been providing excellent access to indie or nonmainstream tunes in unencumbered MP3 format for years (well ahead of anyone else doing online music without DRM) on an “X downloads per month for $Y” plan, with varying values of X and Y that worked out to the best deal in (legal) online music.

That’s over. In one fell swoop they’ve (a) gotten in bed with Sony and (b) basically doubled their prices without providing any additional value. Additionally, their previous policy of “redownload whenever you want” has been kicked to the curb. It’s a complete conversion from helpful, sane indie provider to pain-in-the-ass faceless corporation.

My friend Hayden wrote this on Facebook. It sums up what many folks are feeling about the transition:

Yesterday eMusic began offering the Sony catalog to subscribers, and incidentally screwed over many of the same long-term subscribers. Here’s what happened.

At the end of May, the eMusic CEO Danny Stein announced that eMusic had inked a deal to offer some of the Sony catalog to subscribers. This led to two changes:

  • New plans with less value for our dollar. Long-term subscribers were forced into new plans with fewer downloads for the same price per month. Some of these subscribers had plans that eMusic had grandfathered some years earlier. My former plan, for instance, was one I first bought in October 2005 for 90 downloads for $20/month. At at least one point afterwards, eMusic had modified their $20/month plan to include fewer downloads, but had allowed me to keep my plan. My new plan, however, is 50 “downloads” (I’ll get into why I put scare quotes up in a minute) for $20/month. So my downloads have gone from 22.2 cents each up to 40 cents each. Still a better deal than Amazon or iTunes, but the effective cost to me has gone up by nearly 100 percent.

  • Album pricing. Some – but not all – albums with more than 12 tracks will now have a fixed price of 12 “downloads,” a term that eMusic has changed to “credits” on some pages. Some albums with fewer than 12 tracks, especially those where at least one of those tracks is longer than 10 minutes, will now cost subscribers 12 “credits” to download. This really hurts in metal and jazz, where the bang for the buck has always been so valuable. For example, I had 4 Albert Ayler albums in my Save For Later list, each of which had 2 tracks per album. Now eMusic wants 12 credits for each. It’s still a better deal than Amazon or iTunes, but a far worse deal than I was offered just the day before yesterday.

So I spent the evening going through the new Sony offerings. I should point out that this wasn’t easy, because eMusic’s website remains as clunky and unfriendly as ever. The only way to find out what eMusic had added from Sony was to scroll through the new pages, which list everything recently added in groups of 10. All the Sony additions were made on 6/30/09, and to go through them all, I scrolled through nearly 900 pages. Some of the additions are damn great (Skip Spence, the Clash, Dylan) and some aren’t (wow, the whole Celine Dion catalog plus Kenny G plus the New Kids On The Block, oh my!). The thing is that like many of eMusic’s long-time subscribers, I’m already a hardcore music collector and I already have most of the new additions that I would be inclined to buy. I ended up adding a few Dylan albums that I don’t have to my list, plus some Ellington and Mingus albums. I expect that it will take me maybe 2-3 months to burn through all of the new additions that interest me. At least, at the rate of my newly enhanced plan.

Judging from the 1600+ comments on Danny Stein’s original announcement on eMusic’s blog, I’d say that I’m not alone in being less than impressed with what subscribers are getting in return for the new catalog and reduced-value plans. I understand that eMusic needs to do what it can to remain a viable business, and Stein said that eMusic had been under pressure from the indie labels for some time to increase its per-download charge. I don’t like the suddenness of the change, nor the lack of a response to complaints from eMusic. It is as if they’ve decided that they don’t care about keeping their often-enthusiastic long-time subscribers – or, at least, don’t know how to show that they care – and that doesn’t make much business sense to me.

eMusic also needs to figure out what the per-album pricing means to them and to customers. If many of the albums I was previously planning to download now will cost me either 12 or 24 credits (double-albums are twice the credits), why are all the monthly download plans and booster packs being offered in multiples of 5? Don’t get me wrong: I prefer the base-10 idea, but why not make the per-album credit a flat 10 downloads, then? Not that eMusic would listen to me; I’m merely a long-time subscriber.

As another poster on Danny Stein’s blog post noted, Sony isn’t part of any long-term music business solution. They are part of the problem. See ya, eMusic. We’ll watch you burn, and won’t miss you.

“Senator Al Franken”

The Minnesota Supreme Court has handed down its much-expected ruling in the heavily-litigated Minnesota Senate race from 2008 — and it’s a unanimous one — deciding against Republican former Sen. Norm Coleman’s appeal of his defeat in the election trial and affirming the lower court’s verdict that Democratic comedian Al Franken is the legitimate winner of the race.

More.

Update: Coleman has conceded. It’s over. Sixty, baby.

Achewood on Michael

He was your Elvis, and when your Elvis dies, so does the private lie that someday you will be young, and feel at capricious intervals the weightlessness of a joy that is unchecked by the injuries of experience and failure.

Here.

Cruel and Hilarious

The Onion, on Michael Jackson:

King Of Pop Dead At 12

LOS ANGELES—Michael Jackson, a talented child performer known for his love of amusement park rides and his hobby of collecting exotic animals for his Neverland Ranch, died from sudden cardiac arrest Thursday at the age of 12. The prepubescent singer, who enjoyed playing dress-up and often referred to himself as “the King of Pop,” was celebrated for his naïve exuberance and his generosity toward other children. “This is a terrible loss for music and for all of us,” brother Jermaine Jackson said. “He had so much potential to blossom into a gracious and mature human being. As it is, the world will never know the genius Michael Jackson might have become had he grown up.” The singer leaves behind a large body of hits, 25,000 unopened toys, and nearly $400 million of debt.

New iPhone Acquisition: Two Stories

ONE: I go to the ATT store. They take my name at the podium; as I enter, I establish with the clerk that they do, in fact, have the iPhone 3GS in stock. He confirms this, and tells me it’ll be a 20 minute wait.

Twenty minutes later, another ATT drone starts taking my information and drops into the conversation that “pre-ordering” takes 7 to 10 days. Um, no.

TWO: I go to the Apple store. I have a new phone, activated, with my existing number on it, in less time than I waited at the ATT store.

Things We Could Not POSSIBLY Make Up

Courtesy of Agent L.McHorne:

Gazprom seals $2.5bn Nigeria deal

Russia’s energy giant Gazprom has signed a $2.5bn (£1.53bn) deal with Nigeria’s state operated NNPC, to invest in a new joint venture.

The new firm, to be called Nigaz, is set to build refineries, pipelines and gas power stations in Nigeria.

(Aunt Nel).

Wrong kind of football. Still awesome.

In need of caffeine, I went down to the lobby just now for a coffee; they had the soccer on, to which I paid little attention until I caught a few key facts out of the corner of my eye:

  • A graphic informed me that Spain had not been beaten in 35 games — they’re 33-0-2.
  • This afternoon, Spain is playing the US.
  • The US led 2-0 in the 89th minute of play.

After three minutes of stoppage time, it was over. The US shocked top seed Spain in the Confederation Cup semifinal. The Americans advance to their first FIFA final ever, at any level.

(There will, undoubtably, be more coverage later. This is, I take it, 1980 Olympic hockey territory.)

At once both “handy” and “useless”

JWZ has this rundown of the timelines for popular SF films. We’re already past Clockwork Orange, Escape from New York, Freejack, and (obviously) 2001.

Absent — since it’s not the actual timeline of the film, just of events referenced therein — is the original date of Judgement Day from 1984’s original Terminator film, which will be 12 years ago this August: 8/29/1997. Ouch.

God Bless That Man

Ebert on Transformers 2 is a wonderful thing. He opens with:

“Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” is a horrible experience of unbearable length, briefly punctuated by three or four amusing moments. One of these involves a dog-like robot humping the leg of the heroine. Such are the meager joys. If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination.

More:

The humans, including lots of U.S. troops, shoot at the Transformers a lot, although never in the history of science fiction has an alien been harmed by gunfire.