DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

A recent piece of Cingular junkmail contained something I’ve never seen before: an opt-out notice. In boxed, boldface type, on the front page of the letter, it declares:

You can choose to stop receiving “prescreened” offers of credit from this and other companies by calling toll-free 1 (888) 567-8688. See PRESCREEN & OPT-OUT NOTICE on the other side for more information about prescreened offers.

What would possess a multinational telecom firm that relies (at least in part) on buying personal contact information to send out unsolicited and generally unwanted junkmail offers, to allow its victims to request that they stop? I have no idea, but I approve.

The telephone number belongs to the credit reporting agencies’ automated opt-out mechanism, which can also and probably more easily be accessed here: http://www.optoutprescreen.com

They’re now offering a lifetime opt-out. My fuzzy recollection is that in years past they offered only a 5-year term.

In any case, as despicable as I find it that these folks trade my personal information like kids trade baseball cards, I’m grateful they allow me to opt out at all, even if I have to keep doing it for every imaginable variation of my name, my wife’s name, the previous residents’ names, etc.

I’m also grateful that the junkmailers of the world have not yet discovered that we have a baby. (Sshhhh!)

A couple years ago I replaced the disk drive in my Powerbook. The new drive was bigger, faster, and quieter than the stock unit; it added 30% to my storage capacity and shaved about 20 seconds off the boot time. The original drive went into a FireWire enclosure, giving me a convenient and portable backup device. (GeekNote: it’s bus-powered, so I don’t even need to carry a power cable.)

When I replaced the drive, I wondered if I was voiding my warranty. Apple offers a fantastic extended warranty plan, which includes free two-way overnight shipping, including the box and tape, and I didn’t want to lose it. I figured at the time that I’d just swap the original drive back into the laptop, should I need to get a warranty repair.

The time for the warranty repair finally came: the LCD was getting dim. I went through the troublesome process of removing the disk drive from the laptop, and then attempted to pull the original drive — which I’d already backed up, erased, and done a fresh install of OS X onto — out of its home, the OWC Mercury On-The-Go FireWire Portable.

This case is unique in that it doesn’t split open. It’s seamless. The drive is inserted from one end, into rubberized tracks that act like tiny shock absorbers. The problem, I discovered, is that these rubber tracks only slide in one direction. My disk drive wouldn’t come back out.

The manual does warn about this: “The side rails are made of silicone rubber and once inserted, it is difficult to remove.” Sigh.

So, it’s a nice case, but beware if you think you’ll ever want your disk drive back.

Jon Carroll’s column today made me laugh out loud:

Very soon now, our nation will engage in one of its most festive and patriotic days of celebration. Picnics will be held, kids will race around, flags will be carried, fireworks will be set off. The day means many things to many people, but I like to think of it as a celebration of the First Amendment, particularly freedom of speech and freedom of assembly.

Sometimes I’m at the edge of tears when I see these Americans of all different races and religions and ages gathering together freely and openly. That’s when I feel the most patriotic, when people put aside their differences and come together for a giant party celebrating our commonality of purpose.

I refer, of course, to this Sunday, gay pride day.

W00t!

When I lived in the City, I loved the street fairs — weekend-long art and food and music festivals centered in the best neighborhoods in San Francisco. Festival staff would barricade six or eight blocks of the neighborhood, set up stages and booths, and host hundreds of artists, craftspeople, local restaurants, and bands.

I have vivid memories of the Union Street Art Festival and the Fillmore Street Jazz Festival, both of which were walking distance from my apartment. I saw the old Charlie Hunter Trio at one fair. I saw John Handy at another. I saw a hand-carved maple rocking chair, on display at a custom furniture booth; it was the most comfortable and certainly the most exquisite rocking chair I’ve ever experienced. The only thing that kept me from bringing it home was the extra zero at the end of the price tag. (It would have cost me eight months’ rent.)

These fairs were the highlight of the summer. The food was exotic, the music was live, the people were absurd. And the open-container laws were nowhere to be seen: not only were people walking around with wine and beer, vendors sold both in commemorative glasses! Alcohol, glass, and asphalt don’t mix well, but there it is, summer in San Francisco in the ’90s… maybe only a tiny shard of the freedom and love they had there in 1969, but we took what we could get, even if the shard was stuck with beer residue to the bottom of my tennis shoe.

Anyway, today we were excited to visit the 51st Annual North Beach Festival.

The bands were rocking. The food booths ran for blocks. (So did the lines.) It felt like old times, except for the stroller I was pushing. I used to silently curse the parents pushing huge baby carriages through dense crowds, so I was sympathetic to the people whose calves I was ramming.

We made our way to a fenced-off area near one edge of the festival, because the fence suggested that more fun could be had on the other side. Large signage declared that nobody under 21 would be admitted — a message I stopped attending to when I was in college, around the time it became a lot less likely that I’d be arrested for seeking access to a tavern. I waved my ID at the burly guard, who motioned pointedly at my 6 month old son and said, “Nobody under 21.”

Oh, that’s very funny, I thought, he’s probably been waiting all day to make that joke. Having matured slightly since those minor-in-a-tavern days of my early college years, I refrained from insulting the guy out loud; instead I smiled indulgently, laughed aloud for the benefit of the other burly guy blocking the gate, and made to ram them both in the shins with the front wheel of the stroller.

They didn’t move.

I looked up from the spot just below the first guy’s knees, where the front fender of the stroller would have hit him, to see him shaking his head. “Nobody under 21,” he repeated.

“Don’t worry,” I said, thinking he was overplaying the gag but determined to get past him anyway, “he won’t be drinking. Unless your beer bottles come with nipples.”

“NO KIDS,” he announced in a tone that suggested that my lack of understanding demonstrated the depths of stupidity to which American society had descended. Meanwhile, I was pretty sure that the fact that it took two big tattooed guys to keep a six-month-old out of a street fair provided evidence of the same thing.

So we contented ourselves with the beer-free zone, which actually worked out better, because the other of the two things that could only be found inside that fence was sunburned drunk people. We didn’t need to go there.

The first booth I saw was another place I didn’t need to go to.

The second booth, while not actually offensive, proved that even something as transcendent, as culturally profound, as horizon-expanding and as cool as surfing can be rendered small, cheap, and embarrassing in the hands of, say, somebody who thinks it’s a good idea to play cellphone ring sounds or emergency-vehicle sirens in radio commercials. Witness Mauna Loa’s cheeseball portable amusement-park ride, which does to surfing what the mechanical bull did to rodeo. With apologies to the guy I happened to catch on camera, I can tell you from firsthand experience that it is impossible to look transcendent, profound, or cool while riding a mechanical surfboard at a street fair. You’ll look like a clumsy wannabe, and then you’ll either get pitched on your head, or you’ll ride it out for 60 seconds and win … a T-shirt hawking macadamia nuts.

I liked it, though. We get a different variety of looney here in the country. I’m thinking about going back for the Fillmore Street Festival in a couple weeks.

Perhaps I was caught off guard because I don’t often listen to the radio. Perhaps the millions of people who do listen to the radio are accustomed to this sort of thing, inured to the constant commercial braying of it, but my virgin ears still sometimes react involuntarily with shock and irritation.

Here’s my message to radio commercial producers: playing cellphone ringtones at the beginning of your commercial is a guaranteed mechanism for accomplishing two things:

1. Getting my attention.
2. Winning my contempt.

I was driving downtown when the commercial aired. The ringtone sounded just like my cell. They even managed to put some reverb on it so the phone sound seemed to come from elsewhere in the car than the speakers.

I reached spastically for the cellphone as I continued to navigate a left turn across the path of oncoming traffic. Simultaneously, I later thought, some percentage of other drivers listening to the same radio station were spastically reaching for their phones too. And I realized, there’s an ad producer somewhere congratulating himself on his clever trick of jarring listeners out of their commute-induced reveries… and across the county there are a couple thousand momentarily confused drivers narrowly avoiding accidents, picturing this self-satisfied but sadly deluded ad producer and thinking, “asshole!”