Technobabbles

2Jun/103

Hypothetical Google Voice Export Format

Google Voice was released over a year ago, and I've been using it as my primary phone number since switching from its predecessor, GrandCentral, which I'd used since 2006 (also as my primary phone number).¹ In the time since making the switch, I've seen the interface revised more than a little — the quality rating buttons for transcripts and calls are among my favorite enhancements — but despite all the new features introduced over the last 14 months, one has been distinctly lacking.

That one feature: Export.

Think about it. Google Docs lets one download all of one's documents, spreadsheets, and presentations in a ZIP archive. Gmail allows both IMAP and POP access to mail accounts, facilitating the complete backup of account data to a personal computer or server. Google Reader offers export of one's entire subscription list. Google Calendar offers export formats compatible with several desktop and Web competitors' products. Google Contacts can be downloaded and imported into Microsoft Outlook, Apple Address Book, and countless others.

I could go on.² Just about every Google service offers some way for users to get their data out.³ Google's Data Liberation Front initiative is a demonstration of their commitment. So why can't I export my Google Voice data?

The Case

When GrandCentral was shutting down, users had to download messages one at a time. There were also large holes in the data that could be recovered due to a glitch in the storage system that irrevocably lost dozens of my messages, and likely thousands more from other users. (Most annoyingly, pleas from users for the company to do something about the data loss fell on deaf ears.) The issue was never officially addressed or explained; all we former users can do is speculate as to why our messages were forever irretrievable.

Fast-forward to Google Voice. The export function is still limited to downloading individual voicemails and call recordings, one at a time, manually. There is no support for exporting the transcripts of these audio recordings. It is not possible to download SMS conversations (save for copy-and-paste to text files). Call logs can only be backed up by painstaking manual duplication into a spreadsheet or other suitable format.

Every Google Voice account is amassing even more data than GrandCentral accounts did, thanks to support for text messaging (a long-awaited improvement, even if it doesn't support ~~SMS-to-email or~~⁴ shortcodes⁵). Billing logs for international long-distance are another piece of the corpus.

All of this information is potentially useful in the future. There is a reason that users have flocked to the service and its promises of one number forever, keeping messages forever, and so forth. It's unlikely that Google itself will enter the deadpool any time soon, but services have been cut before. If Google Voice doesn't meet all the right expectations of Google's higher-ups, it too could get the axe. All those messages that were supposed to be kept forever? Gone.

I like to use the now-defunct Twitter-like service Pownce as an example. When the decision was made to shut down the site, a new section appeared in users' settings. That section allowed them to request a backup of their account data for download. To this day I can still open up a backup file and peruse my activity on the site, though it is long dead.

Unfortunately, I can't believe that Google would have its engineers develop a similar export tool for a service about to be shut down. It didn't happen for GrandCentral, that's for sure. Other companies (*cough* Nambu *cough*) have a similar attitude: Users don't need copies of their data; just jerk the tablecloth off the table, and all the dishes with it. Besides, I can't forget the seemingly arrogant launch of Google Buzz, right into my face. In short, there are precedents for Google violating DBAD.⁶

The Solution

Solving this problem is relatively simple. If a complete and total export feature is developed and released well before Google Voice is threatened with a shut-down, there won't be any issue. The phone numbers assigned to Google Voice accounts (so-called Google numbers) can be ported out to another provider — that was a core policy right from the start — so there's no issue of losing that; I could port my Google number to a cell phone right now. All future issues would be handled by someone else. Google's problem is historical data and keeping their promise to users.

How should the Google Voice team go about accomplishing this feat? I've been mulling over different ideas for the past few months, and I think I've come up with a reasonable export format.

The Format

My hypothetical export file looks something like this:

Google_Voice_export_acctusername_2010-04-30T14:23:47.zip

/Greetings /System Default.mp3 /Call Widget Greeting.mp3 /Robotics Team Greeting.mp3 ... /Notes /nt234.txt /nt601.txt ... /Recordings /cr234.mp3 /cr623.mp3 ... /SMS /sc601.txt /sc728.txt ... /Transcripts /ts142.txt /ts234.txt /ts324.txt /ts623.txt ... /Voicemail /vm142.mp3 /vm324.mp3 ... /call_logs.csv /recordings.csv /sms.csv /voicemail.csv

A few notes:
1) Files in any of the directories (except /Greetings) can be divided into date-dependent subfolders, but it's simpler to not do so. It's only an issue if the number of files in a directory exceeds file system limitations.
2) Obviously the IDs would be much larger in a production setting with thousands or millions of users; mine are just for illustration purposes.
3) I don't know if Google's database maintains separate IDs for each data type or if it keeps a single ID counter for all records, but that's why I prefixed each file type with a letter code indicating what it is: cr = call recording, nt = note, sc = SMS conversation, ts = transcript, vm = voicemail.

The Parts

Files

Within each CSV file are rows with the following data fields:

call_logs.csv: ID,Timestamp,HasNote,Number,Type,Name,StartTime,EndTime recordings.csv: ID,Timestamp,HasNote,Number,Name,Duration sms.csv: ID,Timestamp,HasNote,Number,Name voicemail.csv: ID,Timestamp,HasNote,Number,Name,Duration

All timestamps are in UTC. It is easiest for all IDs to be unique, across all item types, though again I don't know how Google stores the data. I assume that the ID namespace is shared among all Google Voice items. I've used that assumption as the basis for some of my archive structure decisions; because of it, I did not need to disambiguate between notes attached to the different item types.

The exported CSV files contain required, optional, and conditional fields. Required fields must be non-empty; optional fields may be empty and are filled in if appropriate information is available; and conditional fields are required based on the value of another field.

Field notes: The HasNote and Duration fields would be useful to have, but are not required as the values they contain can be determined using other methods — respectively, by checking for the corresponding nt<ID>.txt file in /Notes and by checking the duration of the corresponding audio file in /Recordings or /Voicemail. I've left them in because, in the long run, having them would make it easier and more efficient to write a program to read the archive.

call_logs.csv

Required fields: ID, a unique record identifier; Timestamp, the item timestamp used on the Google Voice website; HasNote, whether the item has an attached note (1 for yes, 0 for no); Number, the phone number of the other party; and Type, the type of call record (placed/missed/received)

Optional fields: Name, the name of the contact (if the phone number can be matched to a contact)

Conditional fields: StartTime & Endtime, start and end timestamps for calculating call duration (empty for missed calls, as there is no start or end time)

ID cross-references: note

Call log entries are cross-referenced by ID to note files in the Notes directory if HasNote is 1.

recordings.csv

Optional fields: Name, the name of the contact (if the phone number can be matched to a contact); and Duration, the audio file duration

Conditional fields: none

ID cross-references: audio, note, transcript

Call recording records are cross-referenced by ID with audio files in the Recordings directory, note files in the Notes directory (if HasNote is 1), and transcript files in the Transcripts directory.

sms.csv

Optional fields: Name, the name of the contact (if the phone number can be matched to a contact)

Conditional fields: none

ID cross-references: conversation text, note

SMS records are cross-referenced by ID to text files containing the full conversation, formatted like instant messaging transcripts:

(2010-03-21T04:12:02) Me: what's up?
(2010-03-21T04:14:53) John Smith: not much, got a test tomorrow fml
(2010-03-21T04:17:19) Me: what subject?
(2010-03-21T04:18:17) John Smith: history ugh
(2010-03-21T04:20:02) Me: ugh indeed. good luck and try not to die
(2010-03-21T04:23:47) John Smith: thx. if u dont hear frm me tmrw its bcuz my brain asploded
…

Again, all timestamps are in UTC.

SMS records are also cross-referenced by ID to note files in the Notes directory if HasNote is 1.

voicemail.csv

Optional fields: Name, the name of the contact (if the phone number can be matched to a contact); and Duration, the audio file duration

Conditional fields: none

ID cross-references: audio, note, transcript

Voicemails are cross-referenced to audio files in the Voicemail directory, note files in the Notes directory (if HasNote is 1), and transcript files in the Transcripts directory.

Folders

The folders should be pretty self-explanatory. /Greetings contains recorded greetings (the only files with "real" names, though I'm sure they too have IDs on Google's end), /Notes contains the text of notes added with the Google Voice website's "Add note" feature, /Recordings contains recorded calls, /SMS contains full transcripts of text-message conversations, and /Voicemail contains voicemails.

The Greetings folder doesn't have an associated CSV file because I think the files it contains should just be given the same name as the corresponding greeting in Google Voice's settings. None of the other items really have names, so they can all go by ID and be indexed in CSV files; but the user is likely to name each greeting descriptively and that name shouldn't be hidden behind an abstraction (read: obfuscation) layer in the exported backup file.

Alternate Ideas

I toyed with the idea of somehow including time zone information to help put timestamps in context, but there's no good way of doing it. Put a time zone at the account level and you lose changes. I doubt there's a user-preference history somewhere in Google's database. Try to put it on each record and you have a nightmare, since most of the time there's no indication that the user changed time zones. The user can figure out where he/she was on any given day and mentally adjust the UTC timestamps given if it's really that important.

Similarly, I thought about including preferences, caller groups, and so forth, but I don't know enough about the data structure to come up with an estimated export format.

It occurred to me that the exported CSV files could also contain a ContactID field, matching up with the corresponding Google Contacts entry. That way, external applications could hook up to the GData Contacts API and pull the contact's information to enhance the information display. For example, a third-party app could emulate the way Google Voice's website places the contact's photo next to each related entry. I left this out of the above spec because of the potential for inaccurate ContactID values; who knows what the user will change in her contacts between exporting the Google Voice data and trying to use a third-party app with it.

Speaking of third-party apps, that's why I've tried to keep my hypothetical format so machine-readable. What if Google or another developer wrote a Web app or cross-platform application that could import the archived data and present it in a graphical interface? It'd be a great way to access archived information while offline — of course, Google could also add offline support to the site, but it's always good to have alternatives. The possibilities are truly endless; my contact-photo example above could be done with the export format as-is, though it would take a little more API work.

The Goal

My objective is not to have Google implement my solution verbatim; I know there are glitches in my reasoning, holes in my contingencies, omissions in available fields, etc. I wrote this specification (for that's pretty much what it turned out to be) to prove that it's possible to come up with a reasonable way to export all the data currently trapped inside Google Voice accounts.

Like I said, I know this isn't perfect; it's just a starting point. If you think the way I designed some or all of this format was unreasonable, go ahead and tell me. The comment form is there for a reason: That's where you can say, "I think you're wrong; here's why."⁷

Anyway. If I can come up with a data export format that includes most of the information Google has tucked away in a database somewhere, the engineers who work on Google Voice can certainly come up with a format to include every last scrap of data. After all, I'm just an amateur.

Update (06/11): Navarr, in the comments, reminded me that I left out the billing logs, as well as the per-call cost data. Since it would just add another CSV file and a field in call_logs.csv, I'll declare it an omission trivial enough to not bother correcting.

Notes:

Unfortunately, GrandCentral was notorious among many of us users for "losing" messages from before November 2007, so I have no records of my first year-or-so using the service. [↩]
Google Page Creator, though discontinued, offers ZIP downloads of the entire site and a redirection facility to keep links from breaking. (I myself have used it, along with an excellent WordPress plugin, to migrate files I uploaded to Google Pages to bits.technobabbl.es, their new home.) [↩]
Blogger offers an export as well, but so far as I know it can only be imported into another Blogger site. [↩]
Update (06/11): Thanks to Nathan Brauer for correcting me about SMS-to-email. Sometimes it's dangerous to write blog posts too far in advance: things slip through during the proofing process. [↩]
It does support a few Google-controlled short numbers; I know of three: 46645, 466453, & 48368 [↩]
DBAD was an essay on the English Wikipedia, formerly known as WP:DICK or WP:DBAD; in the months since I was last really involved in the Wikimedia culture, it was apparently moved to the Meta wiki. Surprised the hell out of me. [↩]
Obviously, if you're not reading this on the site, you'll need to take an extra step to get a comment form. [↩]

Filed under: Google, Google Voice, ideas, technology 3 Comments

25May/103

Sneaky ATM Fees with US Bank

OK, I've about had it with ATMs. It's bad enough that some of them charge ridiculous $2 and $3 (or more) fees for transactions, but at least when you're making a withdrawal they tell you about it. Always.¹

So imagine my surprise when I logged into my bank's website today to find a $2 fee from US Bank for a transfer I made using one of their ATMs. When I made the transfer, no mention was made of a fee.

I'm more than a little irritated with this — I think justifiably so. Since when is it acceptable to charge a hidden fee? This is the kind of thing that gets customers angry enough to switch banks, and I'm very glad that I don't do business with US Bank.

Here's a note I wrote to Customer Service, in the hopes of resolving this particular situation:

I used a US Bank ATM last Friday to transfer funds between two of my accounts. On checking my transaction records today, I found a $2 ATM fee that had not been disclosed to me at the ATM.

It is extremely disappointing to me that US Bank would charge a fee without explicitly notifying the customer that a fee would apply and giving the option to cancel the transaction. When I attempted to withdraw cash, I was presented with an information screen noting that there would be a $2 charge for the transaction if I continued with the withdrawal; I canceled.

How can I trust US Bank's ATMs if I get charged fees without any notice? Please get in touch with me to arrange a refund of the undisclosed fee.

Thank you,

[signature]

I'm going to consider this an "open letter". I'll continue to provide updates on this situation.

Also worth mentioning is the fact that their email form wouldn't accept my email address with only one character before the @ sign. It was "not a valid format". My letter included a postscript about that, don't worry.

Notes:

Which is to say that I've never withdrawn money and gotten a charge that I wasn't warned about. Doesn't mean it never happens. [↩]

Filed under: complaints 3 Comments

20May/100

Goodbye, Albert

The students of Saint Bernard's School put on a fine production last week. After starting a theatre program eleven years ago, the school is shutting down this year (like Folwell Middle School, where I played Cinderella) and I think the year's ending with a decent bang.

As with Carnival!, playing Bye Bye Birdie made for an intense week. Even more intense, in fact, since I had fewer rehearsals in which to learn the music. I joined the St. Bernard's pit at the last minute, following an eleventh-hour decision at Lion's Gate Christian Academy that cut out most of the pit orchestra for Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor® Dreamcoat. I could have had four rehearsals before tech week, but I thought I was already booked this past weekend. Heh. Fortunately the Birdie score is a lot easier on the strings than Carnival!.

So, the Tuesday tech was my first rehearsal. I had to share music with another player, as the school only rented three scores. (Their original plans included only three violins, but looking back the orchestra's conductor was glad to have added another.) To say that I muddled through would be pushing it. Frankly, I sucked on Tuesday; I couldn't read half the notes, but it did get me familiar with the music. I took home a score to use the next day; one player wouldn't be there on Wednesday.

Score Issues

At rehearsal time on Wednesday, I got set up with my borrowed score. I arranged to get a copy made for the next rehearsal. My playing was better, mostly because I had my own music and could actually see the notes. I was also more familiar with the cuts and so on.

Thursday, I had a photocopy waiting for me. It was excellent, save for about ten pages that had notes cut off the edge. Apparently the copying was done by a student… I made do and listed the pages that needed to be recopied after rehearsal.

Friday, I got replacement copies of the unusable pages. Oddly, two were blank save for a large black rectangle, but fortunately they were the two least critical replacements. I never asked to have them recopied properly; by that point in the process, it was easier to fill in the missing notes mentally.

Evolution

I would like to do an abbreviated version of what I normally do for shows I'm fully involved in. This being a high school production, there were a lot of happenings that I would like to record.

Unusually, this production placed the pit orchestra on the stage, behind the action. That decision made for some interesting events over the course of the week.

Tuesday

Not a whole lot to write. Some set pieces and props were still under construction, and the actors weren't yet used to doing all the technical bits; it was only the second time they'd had any of the extra material. The performances, however, were already quite good. The run-through had to be stopped part-way through the second act, so I didn't get to hear all of the music.

Importantly, the actress playing Mae broke her foot. The crew turned out the stage lights during the break and she fell off the front of the stage in the blackout. "Actor down!" That delayed the rehearsal a bit. It was not amusing that she got hurt. However, the cane she used for the rest of the week added to her character. Really too bad that it happened, though.

Scene change music hadn't yet been set, so a lot of experiments were conducted (in both applicable senses of the word).¹

Wednesday

The scene changes were smoother, and the actors' performances improved markedly as they got used to working with the extra pieces. A typewriter was added to the opening office scene, but it was broken; the carriage didn't advance. Half a dozen people clustered around it trying to figure out what was wrong — myself included, since I used to use my parents' typewriters when I was younger. This model was too old for me to figure out, though.

More scene change music experiments.

The light fight, as I believe I will remember it, began on Wednesday. The tech crew wanted the orchestra stand lights covered with blue gels so they weren't shining into the audience so much. They also ruined a lot of the stage lighting with the excessive glow, mostly during scene changes. We got through the run; a sheet of gel sat nearby, waiting to be used.

Thursday

More improvements to all the actors' work.

On arriving for Thursday's rehearsal, we all found sheets of gel taped to our stand lights. The crew had used small pieces of black duct tape — a very bad decision, and a mistake that was never remedied — never mind that some of the stand lights were so dim that the gels made it impossible to read the score. By the end of the first act, most of the gels that hadn't been removed by musicians unable to read their music had all but fallen off; heat from the lights melted the adhesive on the duct tape.

The orchestra was promised gaff tape for opening night, the next day.² One or two brass players joked that they would quit if they didn't get usable tape.

Friday

The show's opening night was great! Musically, at least — the only facet I was really qualified to judge. I know that the acting and dancing were both good as well, but I honestly can't say much about them because we were still making changes to the music between numbers. I can say that every number went about the best it had ever gone up to that point — it was a peak. Timings, coordination, and a hundred other factors all came together.

Somewhere between Wednesday and Friday, the typewriter was fixed. I never found out what was wrong with it.

No gaff tape arrived, however. Many of the stand lights had long strips of black duct tape wrapped around them to hold on the gels so heavily insisted upon by the crew. Of course, it cut down on the light emitted by each light — the desired effect so far as the crew cared — but it also made many of the lights useless. Many gels were ditched, at least partially.

Saturday

From my perspective in the orchestra, the show didn't go as well. There were a lot more timing and coordination issues — we played catch-up with the singers a lot when they jumped cues. Both nights, I had (different) guests in the audience; both nights, the guests were pleased with the show. I think there was some Second-Night Slump going on in both the cast and orchestra.

The violinist to my left brought her own gel and a bunch of clips to hold it on. The rest of us had even more tape added to our lights, and still no gaff tape. Ridiculous. Many resorted to removing the gels and just turning the lamps off when not playing, a solution embraced first by the conductor. (She removed her stand's gel not so she could see her music but so we could see her; the stand light was the only light by which she could be seen by the orchestra.)

Sunday

Both Sunday shows were back up to Friday's standards. Maybe one or two timing issues occurred, but a tiny fraction of what happened Saturday. The show really closed with a bang. So what if Gloria Rasputin lost her balance a bit at the end of her tap dance routine? It just made the moment even funnier.

The light fight was pretty much resolved, too. Turning off the lights when we weren't playing became part of the routine, and the gels no longer fell off. Finally!

Favorite Memories

First and foremost, "We Love You, Conrad" is currently right up there with "Ten Minutes Ago", driving me nuts with its incessant playing in my head. Really, sometimes I wish musicals didn't always have one song that you can't get out of your head for a month. Ah, whatever. It's all Jack's fault.³

I love how Albert's history as an English teacher lets Rosie needle him about his grammar: "You and me, English teacher." Then he's so worried that he'll mess up again, he second-guesses himself: "I'm so glad that you and I — you and me—could [make this trip together]." A classic grammatical mistake, and yet believable because of the joking around just a moment before.

Changes in language usage between the time of the show (1959) and the present (2010) led to a likely-unintentional joke between Albert and Mae. As Mae is exiting after her first appearance, in which she finally meets Rosie (after hearing about her in Albert's letters for years), she admonishes her son Albert to do several things. It's stereotypically motherly. Among the reminders: "Wear your rubbers!" Double entendre much?

His house taken over by Albert, Rosie, and Conrad Birdie, Harry MacAfee's morning is completely disrupted. Doris (his wife, Kim's mother) forgets to make his coffee and offers him a warm 7-Up instead; Randolf (his son, Kim's younger brother) clips out "a few" articles about Conrad Birdie before the morning paper makes it to Harry. Faced with the upset of his routine, Harry declares that "the democracy is over; Parliament is dissolved; Nero is back in town." He escapes the approach of a drowsy Conrad from upstairs by announcing that he is going to "go burn Rome."

The last scene before intermission is the television broadcast on the Ed Sullivan Show. Hugo, Kim's "steady", punches Conrad Birdie out in a slow-motion bit. Everyone on stage did a great job of coming up with something to do. For instance, Conrad's guitarist takes off his guitar and swings it at the oncoming Hugo, who ducks to avoid it. The guitar takes out a television crew girl instead; oops.

Everyone scatters after Conrad is knocked down, save for two people tending to Conrad. Rosie tells Albert that she let Hugo in. Best line of the scene: "Oh, Albert, you're not alone. You're on television." (She exits.)

In one scene, Kim flops down on her bed. A Conrad Birdie lunch box and a bobblehead, both sitting on top of her bed's headboard, fell off on different rehearsal nights. Since they were right over our conductor's head, we all held our breath when that scene arrived and wondered why the props weren't secured. The lamp and alarm clock on Kim's night stand were never in the same place twice, either, and the lamp came close to falling off a couple of times too. Once the set came out with the lamp leaning on the headboard.

Considering the cell phone announcement before every show — "there was no such thing as cell phones in 1959" — there were two very interesting props. In the opening scene, Albert takes "a severe overdose of Aspirin" from a plastic pill bottle with a child-proof cap. (A: "No, that's too much. Break it in half." R: "Albert, you're thirty-three years old. You can take a whole Aspirin." ) Later in the show, as the press men are covering Conrad Birdie's arrival in Sweet Apple, Ohio, at least one of them is pretending to write with a Bic mechanical pencil. I'm pretty sure that neither of those items had yet been invented in 1959…

Mae, Albert's mother, is a great character. Every time Albert does something, she thinks up some remark. When Albert tells her he's dissolving the Almaelou Music Co., she slumps over: "Mama, what's wrong?" "Nothing. You killed me." Later: "And don't worry about renting a limo for [my] funeral; I'll walk." Or: "When you get back, don't forget to come into the kitchen, turn off the gas, and pull my head out of the oven." Or, simply: "Goodbye, Albert." (She lies down between the rails of the train track.) "Don't worry about the coat. You'll have three mink stoles after the train passes over me."

Charles F. Maude, the bartender in Act Two, is also a great character. He has great exchanges with both Hugo (H: "I'll have a double rocks on the scotch, and put some rocks in it this time. [...]" M: "How old are you?" H: "Thirty-two." M: "Get out!") and Rosie (R: "Alvarez is the name, but I want you to call me Spanish Rose." M: "Spanish Rose?" R: "Si?" M: "Get out!").

Rosie rants on a bit about having a right to be in the bar after Maude tries to kick her out. Over her rant, Albert phones the bar. When he asks for Rosie, Maude yells over: "Hey, Fidel Castro, there's a fella by the name of Peterson wants to talk to youse." Rosie tells Maude to "Tell the weasely little rat I'm not here!" Albert shouts over the phone, "That proves she's there! Who else would know I'm a weasely little rat?"

Oh, and there was the one night (I think it was Saturday) that the bar sign moved after the scene had started. Like, the stage manager wanted it flown in further but the fly master didn't pull on the line until the scene had started. It was odd to see the sign jerk toward the deck in the middle of a scene.

All of these memories will be with me for a long time.

Future of St. Bernard's Theatre

St. Bernard's School is closing at the end of the school year, but that doesn't mean the theatre program is going to disappear. Parents are trying to create a community organization out of the current program, one that would welcome all present and past St. Bernard's students as well as anyone else wanting to get involved.⁴ I doubt, and hope, that we haven't heard the last of St. Bernard's Theatre.

More Small World

I seem to keep running into people I know. The actor who played Charles F. Maude (the bartender in Act Two, if you missed the note above) was a former choirmate. In fact, our mailboxes in the choir rehearsal room were next to each other on account of our adjacent surnames.

This is on top of running into choir parents in the cast and audience of The Sorcerer and another former choirmate at Concordia University's Carnival!. The world seems to be shrinking; I wonder who I'll run into next…

Upcoming

Last Monday, the day before starting Bye Bye Birdie, I auditioned for the Rosetown Playhouse summer production of Oliver!. I got my acceptance this past Monday, exactly a week later, via my mother. Apparently, someone at Rosetown misread the email address on my audition form and the message sent to me bounced; last time I checked the DNS, technobabble.es didn't exist… D'oh!

Anyway, I got into the chorus, which has the opportunity for solos and/or a small character role as well. Rehearsals start Monday. (Lots of significant Mondays with these Rosetown people, eh? Three in a row!)

It's worth noting that the title of this post is an homage to the character of Mae. She says those exact words to her son before lying down between the train tracks at the station in Sweet Apple, Ohio. (Don't worry, Albert pulls her back up. He doesn't "have time for that nonsense."

Notes:

That is, 1) experiments were run and 2) they were conducted by a conductor. [↩]
Duct tape and gaff (or gaffers' tape) use different types of adhesive. Since gaff is designed for use in all things theatrical — including lighting, with all the heat that comes with it — its adhesive has high tolerance for heat and doesn't come off the way duct tape's adhesive does. [↩]
A running joke, one of my top memories from this show. Our flautist didn't come to half of the rehearsals, so we blamed him whenever anything went wrong. [↩]
Well, I'm assuming about the "anyone else" part. In the past I have tried to get involved with supposedly open organizations that turned out to prefer that members of certain groups not join. Consider my assumption to be an optimistic hope. [↩]

Filed under: music, musings, theater No Comments

12May/100

Best Beware My Wrap-Up

So, all that studying of lines and mental review of songs and dances actually came to something. In our intense 80-minute performance, we also conclusively proved that more rehearsal makes for a better show. The three hours we spent before the show working through and fixing stuff was probably the most useful rehearsal of the last month.

Best Beware My Sting went off without a— Well, I can't say "without a hitch" because there were hitches, of two types (mistakes and marriages). Actually, three couples got hitched, and uncountable tiny errors crept into, well, everything. We had some bigger problems, too, and I had to cover the biggest one. (Don't worry about it, Nathan. It was fun. )

There were some people who had all their lines down pat — the ones who always do, the ones whose names I expect to see in lights someday — and the rest of us, well, didn't. But we covered each other and made the best of it.

I stick by the "learning lab" description of this particular production. We learned a lot of lessons, most importantly that it's very, very hard to pull off a very polished show with as little rehearsal time as we had. Best Beware My Sting was a longer script than usual, and it definitely showed in the frayed edges between scenes where the stitching couldn't be finished in time. But according to informal audience polling (a statistically insignificant sample, considering that it was only two people) it went all right.¹

My major blunder was skipping about half a dozen lines, most of which outlined a major part of the plot. Really, though, in every show I've done in my 11 years with the program, there's always one person who does it. I was long overdue for my turn. It'd been years since I last made a big mistake, and it had to happen again sometime.

Line-skipping is nothing, of course, compared to dropping a musical number, which is what almost happened. The focal character of that number, Baptista, left the stage just before the music was supposed to start, which left me (Hortensio), Lucentio, and our two servants struggling to cover. Oh, and the four backup dancers came in and huddled up stage right. Awkward… But I just started the next scene, and Lucentio followed. When Baptista came back, I tried to play it as if he was supposed to wander across the stage. Finally the music started and we got back on track. Whew!

"Live theatre is special and exciting. […] Even I don't know what's going to happen!"
— Minrod Mier, director of the Morris Park Players' 2010 Cinderella production

Minrod, I've got a case illustration for you right here…

Anyway, once those two epic flubs were out of the way, the rest of the show progressed pretty well. Call it a rough start, I guess.

The show did have some short pauses — it wasn't quite tight yet — but that can be traced right back to a lack of rehearsal. With no time to really do a whole lot of work on just running the show and getting the transitions down, it was bound to be really loose. The only way to really tighten up a show is to do it over and over, to figure out how the timing, the beats, and all the other million-and-one details can be tailored to fit together perfectly.

So I'm not unhappy with the show. The show would have been ten times better if we'd had rehearsal time for more than three run-throughs over the last four months (that number includes the performance, sadly) and/or more time to do the sort of polishing we did at the eleventh hour over the whole process instead of just at the end. As far as I'm concerned, though, that doesn't matter. We pulled it off.

My feet have mostly recovered from spending seven hours in jazz shoes (no support, at all), and I can now spend the next month with lines and songs from Best Beware My Sting going through my head. That'll be fun while I'm trying to learn the music for Bye Bye Birdie this week. (If I can't play Joseph & the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, I'll play a different show, thank you. Too bad if I missed the pre – tech week rehearsals; nobody got me involved in time.)

As long as these words are going through my head anyway, maybe I can write some (bad) paraphrases. Keep an eye out.

"Well, it's one part of a happy day: You have tamed a 404 error."
— Best Beware My WordPress by Voyagerfan5761

The Extraordinary

As I've described, much about this show was no different from any other I've done: songs, dances, scenes, all performed with varying degrees of polish. I'll not spend any more time describing all that, but there was one very special piece that deserves to have its own section.

One of our cast had to miss last week's rehearsal because of a serious illness that landed her in the hospital. We kept her in our thoughts during rehearsal and through the weekend, and received news that she'd recovered on day. This past weekend she expected to come and perform, but her illness reasserted itself and brought her back to the hospital. While we rehearsed, she was waiting for tests and hoping that the doctors would allow her to come and perform.

We made adjustments to the show in case she couldn't get out in time, and prepared to have her on stage in a wheelchair if she did make it. Showtime came and she hadn't arrived yet, so we put our contingency arrangements into action: three different people (two cast and our director) prepared to stand in for her role in different scenes; dance numbers had already been adjusted to use one less body.

Right as we were all about to go on for the final scene, she made it! Everyone pitched in to clear the way and help get her on stage; I rolled her on just in time to start. That last scene was, in my mind, the best part of the show, because we had our whole cast together again.

In her four years with StageCoach, Breanna never missed a rehearsal. Up until her hospital visit last week, her attendance had been perfect. To hear of her attitude at the hospital reminds me of the Alex Killian story in Colorado Springs last summer. Breanna was chosen as Student of the Year for her hard work and commitment in the past, but I think her commitment to this show made the award twice as appropriate.

Theatre people are tenacious when it comes to making commitments; both Alex and Breanna are terrific examples of just how far we'll go to stay in a show. I can only hope that, should I ever be in a similar situation, I will demonstrate a force of will even half as strong as they have.

Notes:

Perhaps it helped that I panicked as much as possible over the last two weeks, to project the image of a show that quite possibly wouldn't come together at the last minute, as is the norm. [↩]

Filed under: theater No Comments

4May/102

That was fun! Let’s do more!

Three weekends of funny later, the Morris Park Players' production of Cinderella is over. Set strike for the show was Monday. Next on their agenda is packing up all their equipment; the school they've performed at for 25 years — Folwell Middle School — is closing at the end of the year, and so it's time to move everything to their new home, Edison High School.

Aside from having "Ten Minutes Ago" and "In My Own Little Corner" stuck in my head still, I have lots of good memories and a few annoyances. Why did the director (not the music director) want "The Search" to go on for so long that we had to play it about six times in each show — so much that we started calling it "El Searcho Unendo" and I wrote Da Capo ad nauseam in my score? Why is Cinderella (the character) such a wimp that she hides from the prince when he's looking for her to try the glass slipper on her foot?

Better than these annoyances are the jokes we constantly made at every show. "The Search" turned into the fun piece; several of us got into altering each repetition of the number so it wasn't so boring, and a couple musicians brought sound effects (like a "quacker" and a slide whistle) for the last two shows. We poked fun at practically all of the characters, especially Cinderella's stepmother and stepsisters. It was awesome.

I even spent one show sightreading the first violin part. Both our viola players showed up that night, too, so one of them sightread my usual second-violin part. That was an awesome night. (The next day, one of my contacts from a few past shows this year covered my part when I couldn't make it.) Of course, we were viola-less for the next two shows; we could never get that balance right…

There are many more tidbits that I don't remember as of this writing. I'll quite likely remember them in a month or a decade, though, and I'll laugh.

Next: On Stage?!

My agenda has an important entry reminding me to replace all the Cinderella music stuck in my ears with Best Beware My Sting tunes, since I'll be performing that show as Hortensio on Saturday.

Best Beware My Sting is a musical adaptation of William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew.¹ It's really cheesy, corny, and all the other wonderful adjectives we as a culture² have come to expect from musical theatre. (It also made me have to skip a Cinderella performance in favor of a dress rehearsal, but fortunately someone could cover my part that afternoon.)

Honestly, I'd rather that another show had been chosen for this spring at StageCoach. This is likely to be my last term in the program — the one that ends in a week — and I had hoped to get a more fun show. But hey, I have to live with what I've been given. Hortensio is a lead, after all, and I have a couple good songs to sing.

That dialogue, though… Oy. It's not quite Shakespearian English, but it ain't American vernacular either and it's closer to Shakespearian. Memorization has been more trouble than usual for Best Beware; usually I know 95 – 98% of my lines by the week before performance (a number that leaves room for improvement), but I was hovering around 70% at the last rehearsal. It's no excuse that others were in worse shape; I've failed in my number one goal for this semester: Memorize early. So this week I'm reviewing dialogue every night, and I'm also hitting the CD to refresh my memory of the vocal harmonies.

As a cast, our lack of memorization likely stems from a lack of rehearsal time; we've gone through every scene exactly twice in four months. We'll have time for exactly one more run-through before the show on Saturday, and we haven't really added in much in the way of props or costumes. In the words of our principal, StageCoach is a learning lab first; education, not polished performance, is the goal. So we'll do our best and it will be fine; the shows always come together at the last minute.

I believe much of my own personal trouble with memorization comes — lack of rehearsal aside — from having a busy life outside of that production; I've had pretty much constant gigs since February, as can be seen from my posting activity these last few months.

The Grand Imperial Cirque de Paris

Most recently, music from Cinderella shared my head with tunes from Carnival!, Concordia University's musical for this year. Last Thursday I substituted for another violinist who couldn't make it. I can't get Paul Berthalet's "I've Got to Find a Reason" out of my head. ("Look, my friend, do what's best for you — do what's best for you! Look, my friend, I'm out of step with the rest of you. Is this the answer to your prayer? Not mine! Your prayer, not mine! Your prayer, not mine!")

Originally I planned to do all of Carnival!, but the violin section filled up³ and two of the four shows conflicted with my previous Cinderella commitments. I thought the music was rather more complicated than Cinderalla. My stand partner, twice my age and experienced on several different instruments, also had some difficulty, and the wind player who got me involved in both The Sorcerer and Carnival! called the score "unplayable". By that, I know that the music really was hard. (Hint: I spent a lot of time trying to fake fifth position — and higher — with varying success.)

Carnival! gave me the rare opportunity to see a show in which I'm involved as an audience member. The last time that happened was during The Sorcerer when I squeezed in one night to actually see the production. So far this year, I've only seen two shows from the house; for all the others I've been in either the pit or the booth.

I went to the Sunday matinée, the last show of the run. It was very worth it, even though I got a ball of confetti dumped in my lap (a prop malfunction; the confetti didn't spread out the way it should have) — I would not want to be on house clean-up for a show that throws confetti into the audience. Congratulations to the cast and crew, and the orchestra of course. You guys put on a great show!

It's a Small World, After All

After spending more time at Concordia in a week than I usually do in a month, I finished playing the Thursday show and grabbed a program. I looked for names of people I know (and noted the misspelling of my own name — sigh). Wait a minute, who ran the light board? Hey, I know him! We were in the Minnesota Boychoir together, back when it rehearsed in New Brighton. (The choir moved to Concordia shortly after he left.)

What's interesting is, when I hurried over after Cinderella to catch him exiting the booth on Friday night, I found out that he's a student at Concordia now, majoring in theatre and communications. We were both homeschooled Trekkers all those years ago; I guess our interests still overlap.

Thanks to Facebook, I plan to continue reconnecting. People I knew through the Boychoir just keep showing up, don't they?

Later: Bye Bye Birdie…Probably

I was one of three musicians to respond when a call went out for a pit orchestra to do a school production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor® Dreamcoat. I've known the show since I was very young, and it would be really fun to play it.

However, a few days ago, the director sent out a message that he might rethink the pit. We three were the only commitments he was able to get. In light of his trouble finding musicians, he's considering scaling back. As soon as I got that message, I forwarded it to one of my new contacts; she knows a lot of people who might have been able to play Joseph, and I hoped that we three early responders wouldn't get cut out of the picture as was implied by the last email.

Unfortunately, the bomb shell dropped today. Strings have been cut out, to be replaced by synthesizers. Bah.

Fortunately, I have a lead on another show, Bye Bye Birdie, that runs the same weekend. My contact there still has to convince the director that more violins would be useful, but I'm reasonably confident that that show will happen.

PS: An apology is in order for my last post. I failed to check its appearance before scheduling its publication, and as a result most of the text was actually part of a very long footnote. I've corrected the problem on the site, but for those of you reading via email I'm afraid I can't fix it. I hope you'll forgive me!

Notes:

Have I said this before? Whatever. If I have, I'll restate it for the people who never read the post in which I last mentioned it. [↩]
"We" being Americans, of course. [↩]
It had "six" violins, two to a part. As it turned out, there were only five, but there wasn't room for another in the pit anyway. [↩]

Filed under: humor, music, theater 2 Comments

1May/100

Reflection Squared: On Clifford Stoll’s “High Tech Heretic”

The other day, I was browsing the computer shelves at a local Border's book store. I came across Cliff Stoll's acclaimed book, The Cuckoo's Egg. My dad's recommended the story to me in the past, and the premise was intriguing. After all, who wouldn't want to read a non-fiction account of cyber espionage that reads like a top fiction mystery? I picked up the book and proceeded to spend the next two hours engrossed, reading right through the soft muttering and louder tapping of the woman in the chair beside me.

Of course, the time to depart arrived and I had to stop. Still, I read about 25% of the book in one sitting. I replaced the book on the shelf, noting to look for it at the library and/or add it to my wish list. (Even if I wanted to buy it, I wasn't exactly in a position to do so.)

The next day, en route to the upstairs computer lab, I checked the public library catalog. The Cuckoo's Egg wasn't in stock, and was checked out until the 21st of April, but I noticed that one of Stoll's other books was: High Tech Heretic: Why Computers Don't Belong in the Classroom and Other Reflections by a Computer Contrarian. On impulse, I checked the book out.

What I found inside, later, was intriguing. My parents have been skeptical of computers for a while. Though my dad uses them for his business, and my mom is warming up to them after years of asking me why I find them so interesting,¹ there's still a big disconnect between us.² I've vaguely known the reasoning behind their conclusions for years, but High Tech Heretic has shed some light on the details — and not monitor glow.

Programmed Instruction

Despite my parents' computer skepticism, I took my entire high school education online. I believe it was a good experience, though not for the reasons one might expect. It's not that I necessarily learned more than I would have in a conventional school — though I probably did, since the online coursework better fit my learning style — but rather that I spent a good chunk of my "school" time correcting the course material. Lazy QA teams had left the text, quizzes, and tests riddled with little errors. Through my teachers, I sent corrections, and my correction work earned back more than a few points that were wrongfully denied me in nearly every course — though I never got so much as a "Thank you" from the course distributors. (A rare few courses were bereft of glitches. I treasured them, because I didn't have to keep second-guessing everything.)

What was interesting about some of the corrections, though, was that sometimes it was just a matter of input formats. Most of the graded tests were multiple-choice, but many of the in-text "Self-Check" quizzes featured free-text inputs. Such quizzes were graded by JavaScript code, to give students an idea of how well they understood the material. But some of them had vague or quirky requirements about how answers were entered, and some of the quirky expectations made by the programmers resulted in points lost by students.

Stoll addresses the issue on page 16, in reference to B. F. Skinner's experiments with programmed instruction in the 1950s. Skinner's approach was nothing new, really — it mimicked a popular learning method preached by many educators then and now: repeat a topic until the student demonstrates understanding. Skinner's machines rewarded students for correct answers with further exploration of the topic, while incorrect answers led to review.³ However:

…programmed instruction flopped. The machine forced kids to regurgitate whatever answers the programmer wanted. There was no place for innovation, creativity, whimsy, or improvisation.

This sounds very familiar. Almost too familiar. The quizzes in my online coursework sometimes had bizarre expectations for what was to be typed into the text boxes. I once had a quiz (thankfully not graded) that balked at accepting a floating-point number (0.17 or something) with the leading zero; the expected input was .17 and too bad if you've been trained to put in the leading zero. The programmers were treating all text box inputs as strings, rather than parsing the values into numbers when appropriate. We all know that programmers are lazy, but certain kinds of laziness are inexcusable.

Skinner's ideas persisted, even into the years of my childhood. I had plenty of educational computer games in my youth, and maybe they did help teach me. Very little of what I know comes from conventional schooling — I know that much. Reading, writing, arithmetic, higher math, typing, (amateur) programming — all of it I learned outside the classroom. Reader Rabbit, Treasure Math Storm, and Edmark's Mighty Math software deserve more credit for my education than any school classroom I ever set foot in. Forgive me if it sounds like bragging, but I could read and write circles around most of my traditionally-educated friends all through my schooling. Kumon and my learning-friendly home environment can take the credit for my perfect score on the ACT's English section, not the school system.

Stoll also brings up computers in the classroom repeatedly. One great example is the replacement of science labs with computer programs. My local high school has a chemistry/physics lab, but an unscientific sample of the classes taught in the room shows much greater use of the computers for experimentation, rather than the lab equipment.

Learning the Tools, Not the Trades

Stoll also brings up the issue of learning how to use specific tools rather than the concepts underlying them. Chiefly discussed in the chapter "Calculating Against Calculators", the arguments focus on numerical fields; however, the thread is present practically from the beginning and applied to all subjects.

Through school, students are handed calculators in math class. They're trained to punch in the numbers and trust the calculator to come up with the right answer. Now, common sense dictates that one should always be able to estimate, so as to be able to catch errors in a calculation. In theory, students are taught to mentally check the calculator's results; in practice, assignments are turned in with answers stating that a radio tower is a fraction of a millimeter tall.

On page 85, the University of Illinois is used as an example. The school developed a calculus course centered on the Mathematica software. As such, the students learned how to integrate functions using Mathematica, rather than learning how to integrate. Students trained to use certain software programs for problem-solving often didn't know what to do when the electronic part of the equation (sorry) was removed.

In my math classes, I can remember very few times when I wasn't encouraged to use a calculator. A TI graphing calculator was a requirement for high school math classes, but I got through four years of online instruction with a photoelectrically-powered scientific calculator, used mostly for checking myself and dealing with nasty decimals. (I was fine graphic linear equations on graphing paper, but I did cave in and download a software program to do the parabolic and asymptotic functions for me.)

Learning tools at the expense of the underlying concepts isn't just limited to math. From my own experience, as well as friends', I've seen courses teach how to use a particular software program to solve a problem, without explaining what the program does. Modern English course requirements for electronically-submitted papers just begs for students to rely on spell-checking software. Many of my fellow students routinely misspelled even the most common and simple words. I can't help but blame Microsoft Word; it's the de facto standard for word processing these days, and defaults to automatically correcting a huge list of common misspellings so sometimes the user doesn't even know he's made a mistake. That's a bad idea for software used in education.

Systems Design Philosophy

Perhaps one of the best points made in the book is taken from David Gelernter's thesis: "Technology's most important obligation is to get out of the way." This point, from page 139, illustrates the basic purpose of machinery: making life easier. Bad design and useless features remove the helpful aspect of technology and replace it with nuisance.

Ah, PowerPoint

Following chapters on, among other things, the wiring of libraries and the planned obsolescence of computer systems, an entire chapter is devoted to PowerPoint and its fellow presentation software products. I thought the best part of this chapter was the section discussing the use of presentations in schools.

With my online learning experience, I was thankfully spared most of the PowerPoint junk that has made its way into the school curriculum. However, I had teachers in the offline world as well, and a few of them used PowerPoint to disastrous effect.

One such teacher followed the model for meetings presented earlier in the chapter: Notes for the students, slides on the screen; the lectures consisted of reading the slides aloud, with zero additional information presented in the spoken words. I was always bored to tears in that class. It was ironic that the course title was "Public Speaking", since such a class should be teaching students how to keep an audience's attention instead of how to make the audience yawn.

Another teacher — this was in a public school — taught her AP U.S. Government course using PowerPoint. She read from the slides, often rushing through and/or skipping slides for time (no worries, the slides were available on her personal Web page for study at home). Her habit of putting paragraphs on the slides wasn't exactly prime PowerPoint use, but at least she added extra tidbits to her lectures that weren't in the textbook or on the screen.

I should also note that part of that Government class was a group presentation project, on which I got a good grade just by going up and reading a few of the several slides produced by my group while I was sick. That isn't a complaint — I like good grades just as much as the next guy — but I didn't really have any input whatsoever on the project save for a few grammatical corrections. (I won't get into how my classmates made it difficult for me to contribute, even though I was perfectly willing to do my share.⁴)

I present these examples mainly to illustrate my own personal experience with the problems Cliff mentions on pages 182 – 183. (It's interesting that his main classroom example also involves a social studies teacher.) I'm sure educators would be quick to defend the growing use of PowerPoint in schools by citing technological familiarity for future job use, same as they would for school Internet connections (which are useful, but often inadequately restricted).

Dated Material?

I did have the thought throughout the book, however, that perhaps some of Stoll's opinions would be quite different if written today. In particular, page 189's assertion that professional editors and journalists just don't exist on the Internet is no longer true. That assertion is a fundamental point in several arguments following — arguments that would probably be different (if only slightly) if written from a 2010 perspective instead of a 1999 perspective.

Similarly, page 191 asserts that search engines don't understand concepts and ideas, only words. Today's indexing engines aren't perfect, but great strides have been made in machine understanding of language. Just look at services like Aardvark. (This is, of course, just a tiny subset of the possible examples I could have pulled from the book.)

Of course some things — unfortunately — never seem to change. I stupidly didn't note the location of it, but somewhere in the latter part of the book Stoll laments that search engines rely on correct spelling to find information. Spelling is a skill seldom taught or learned in today's world (it seems), and we rely more than ever on spell-checkers. Many services offer their own (see Gmail & Google Docs as examples) in the event that the user's browser doesn't have one already built in. Search engines have been trained to recognize our mistakes in queries (à la Google's classic "Did you mean?" lines) and sometimes I think they also detect mistakes in pages they index.

Overall

High-Tech Heretic contains a good many well-placed warnings, and I very much appreciate Stoll's opinions on the replacement of human and paper resources with technology. However, I hope that his later writings are better edited. This book has quite good spelling (good, since he brought up that issue) but the grammar is lacking in a few spots; I found a decent number of omitted or misplaced words.

Nitpicking aside, the message of the book is clear and appreciated. Technology has a place, and we shouldn't let it get out of the corner we've set aside for it.

Update (05/04): Corrected missing markup that caused most of the text to appear as a giant footnote. Proofreading failure on my part; sorry!

Notes:

She's begun asking me about websites and such: Hosting recommendations, platform suggestions, that sort of thing. It's kind of cool that she's interested now. [↩]
I used to go to my dad with questions about the computer. Now, he comes to me with his questions and I use search engines to find answers for my own. [↩]
I had several experiences with this type of learning, including both online (with Stanford's EPGY program) and off (with Kumon, a Japanese-originated curriculum in math and reading). [↩]
Schools seem to use group projects a lot without teaching students how to collaborate, kind of like a lot of theatre classes tell the actors to project without getting into the mechanics of doing so. [↩]

Filed under: internet, musings, technology No Comments

30Apr/101

Fraud Much: Follow-Up

Looks like having my credit card number stolen hasn't had too bad an effect on my life. I received and activated my replacement credit card about two weeks ago. Also, in the interim, I found out that my dad had one of his cards disabled, too.

The people who called my dad about his card explained that the latest scam going around is just to generate random card numbers. Looks like my research was right; that was one of the top possibilities I found browsing through discussions around the Internet. Unfortunately, algorithms for creating random, valid card numbers do exist for testing purposes. Since both of us had our cards compromised within a week of each other, I think it's safe to believe that we both were victims of the same scam and there was nothing I could have done to prevent what happened to me.

What kind of grossly inadequate security must credit card processing systems have that someone can successfully (attempt to) authorize a transaction with nothing but the account number? There must be another piece to the puzzle…maybe shady merchants who don't bother verifying any of the information, or something like that. For now, I'm quite thankful that fraud-detection departments are so vigilant.

Even though I was probably just a victim of a random number generator, I'm still going to see if my card issuer supports generating temporary account numbers for use in online shopping. That seems like a good idea: If one of the numbers is compromised, I can just kill it, rather than dealing with deactivating and reissuing the card. (I have long used this same principle for email addresses. I used to use Gmail's "plus-addressing" feature to add keywords to my incoming mail; now I give most sites a unique address at technobabbl.es. Both approaches also allow me to track data leaks — which usually result in increased spam — directly to the responsible party. )

Filed under: musings, security 1 Comment

29Apr/104

Release: Voyagerfan5761 v1.9

It's a few days late, but here's the official announcement of Voyagerfan5761 version 1.9. There have been some minor updates made to this version, but not a lot of major changes.

The most significant updates are in /experience/work/, where several new files have been added to reflect the program's continued evolution. More files will be committed to the repository soon, for inclusion in the next release.

Obviously the /personality/punctuality.php module needs some additional attention in this year's development cycle, as well as the /skills/theatre/tech.php library. We will continue to iterate on these and other components (such as /skills/theatre/dance.php, /personality/gregarious.php, and /assets/income.php) for the next release.

Any ideas for improvements? Think you can write a better algorithm for determining when to leave home than $event->arrivalTime( TIME_MINUTES ) - 15? Feel free to submit patch ideas in the comments.

Thanks to Matt Mullenweg for his inspirational birthday posts.

Filed under: humor 4 Comments

16Apr/103

A Summery Summary: Cherubs

I started writing this on August 22, 2008. I should have started about twenty days earlier and finished at least by the end of the year, but I'm really not good with publishing these things on time, am I? Oh well. unfortunately. This one's for you, Margaret. I've preserved as much of what I initially wrote as possible. Inevitably, there are gaps; I can't do much about that, but hopefully the incompleteness will motivate me to be better at getting these things done in the future.

A lot can happen in five weeks... And I mean a lot! Let's see, what did I really do during my summer at Northwestern University?

(Begin text 100% from 2008; footnotes excluded)

Overview

Lots of things happened at the same time at Cherubs:

I put on a fully-mounted 50-minute show with four weeks of rehearsal time¹
I had a good two-and-a-half hour workout every weekday morning (core classes)
I learned about sketch comedy, how to simplify stories into the most basic possible beats, and about solo performance
I learned about theatrical lighting
I got to help change over the lights for two shows, and ran the light board for a dress rehearsal
I got to watch the other 14 performances completely unencumbered by any cast/crew duties whatsoever, and got to watch the four performances I crewed, as well, because lighting people were basically jobless during a performance unless they were working the board

There's lots of stuff that should be in that list, but there's just so much... I'll leave it at that. Some things are too subtle to list, anyway.

Opening Days: Elective Preferences and Monologues

After arriving on Sunday, we all checked into the dorm and had the first of many meetings, during which we were acquainted with the basic rules of the program and the general layout of the next five weeks' schedule.

Monday morning, beginning bright and early (08:30), we began the tedious and nerve-wracking process of performing 168 90-second monologues in one day. We also turned in our preferences for electives, which we decided on Sunday night using the handy elective catalog provided in the introductory materials. With only a forty-five – minute break for lunch, the process of reciting monologues took until about 15:30, when we had a tour of the campus. Once the tour was over, we were free until the meeting that evening.

At the evening meeting, we received our elective schedule sheets back, along with assignments to core classes and production companies. After the meeting, it was time to go back to the dorm and go to sleep.

The First Day of Classes

Core on Tuesday morning was pretty much the first thing we did after monologues, since it was pretty much time for bed after the meeting Monday night. It was a reasonably gentle class, since it was the first day. (And the rooms were still pretty close together; details later in the post.)

It was then time for the first of many 11:00 meetings, at which we discussed many things. I can't remember any of them; however, I do know that most of the meeting related to the afternoon and evening coming up after lunch. Then it was time for lunch, and then "A" day electives. I had lighting crew for my very first elective period — and crews are double the length of other electives! — of the summer! That day was just a tour of the theatre.

Free time came after crew for me, and I went to the library to check my email and such. Then it was time for Everyday Theatre, which I really enjoyed (this class was also moved; details later in the post).

Dinner was after that, and it was followed by the first rehearsal of Company G, which was putting on a production of Tristan & Yseult. We did some weird team-building stuff and called it a night.

All in all, the first day was pretty chill compared to what was to come... It didn't take long for things to get intense.

The Loss of Fisk B1

Well, it wasn't that dramatic, but it did cause quite a shift in my schedule. After about the first week, it turned out that one of the classrooms we'd been using wasn't actually assigned to our program. It made sense in a way, since it was the only room we used in that building (normally reserved for the journalism program). But it wasn't simple to move to another place.

For a few days, my first core section was shifted to the stage of the theatre, and Everyday Theatre (which had also met in Fisk B1) was pushed to different rooms depending on the day. (Fortunately this happened right before the weekend, so there was time to resolve the room changes without worrying about temporary locations — most classes are suspended on weekends.) I actually liked being in the theatre for core; the space was wonderful, and it was just a hop, skip, and a jump from the second half, just in the other wing of the Theatre/Interpretation building.

It didn't last.

It was announced the following week that the worst was happening: my Voice & Movement core (the affected section) was to be moved to Tech Auditorium. On North Campus. Just under a mile away. So that was fun. Not. But it allowed for a little improvement in my running, so perhaps it was a blessing in disguise. Too bad I didn't appreciate it.

Game Night

You know a program is different when it makes a game night mandatory. Game Night at Cherubs was mandatory, meaning one couldn't go and relax in one's room for a few hours. I wanted to at first, resenting the required attendance, but soon relented after getting into one of the activity choices — one I hadn't played in a long time: Four Square.

Astonishingly enough, I began to enjoy myself. Despite being given the chance to switch games in the middle of the event, I stuck with it. And I got to know a few other people.

Field Trips

There were several field trips during the summer. Two of them were to go see other shows (we first saw Lookingglass Alice at the Lookingglass Theatre, and then Funk It Up About Nothin' (an "ad-rap-tation" of Much Ado About Nothing) at Chicago Shakespeare), and there was an all-day trip to Chicago in the second half of the program.

Lookingglass Alice was actually so good, I went back to see it again after Cherubs was over, and brought my mom. I wasn't quite as impressed with Funk It Up About Nothin'; while it was entertaining in its own way, and cleverly rewritten in rap style, it wasn't my favorite show of the summer.

The Chicago field trip was basically just knocking around the Navy Pier area (for my group), since we opted to go see Chicago Shakespeare's production of Willy Wonka (and Chicago Shakes is on Navy Pier). Then we just killed time exploring, and convinced one particularly reticent companion to go on the Ferris Wheel. (I have pictures of us up there, somewhere, but I haven't uploaded them yet.) Oh, did I mention that we got caught in the on-again, off-again, rain? Yeah, the clouds really couldn't decide whether or not to dump dihydrogen monoxide on us.

(This isn't supposed to be a collection of show reviews, but I should say that I wasn't super impressed with Willy Wonka either. Both CST shows were technically good, and the actors were obviously talented; it was the scripts that I didn't really like.)

Electives (My Afternoons)

I enjoyed my elective classes, for the most part (and I'll include crew in here just for simplicity, since it was during the elective portion of the day). The classes I had were (with their periods; A3 was my free hour):

Sketch Comedy (B2)
Everyday Theatre (A4)
Solo Performance (B4)
Lighting Crew (A1&2)
Core Text Classes

Text Analysis (B1)
Performance Theory (B3)

The first three classes were the true electives, which had the opportunity to present at the elective recital in the last week before performance.

Anyway, here goes...

Sketch Comedy

Sketch Comedy consisted of about nine of us trying to come up with ideas for sketches (skits a la Monty Python and Saturday Night Live) that would be funny. I didn't do particularly well at coming up with ideas; my strengths were more in the realization phase, improvising a scene once a premise already existed. We had a bunch of ideas for the elective recital, and ended up picking "Preppy Gangs", which involved a verbal duel between the Ivy League and the J. Crew. (Polo shirts were a must for this presentation.)

Everyday Theatre

Everyday Theatre was a good place to explore the little scenes that happened to all of us every day. Once again, there were nine of us; each class period, we brought in one or two (usually funny) anecdotes. Nine stories were cut down to the three most interesting ones and we then split into groups of three and developed short skits.

For the elective recital, we did a few stories that we had particularly liked.

Solo Performance

Solo Performance wasn't exactly my first choice. It had been #4 on my list for that period, but I got it over Speech and Dialect. I found some of the exercises to be somewhat esoteric, but I at least got a rough poem out of it that I may eventually finish and publish here.

Text Analysis

Text Analysis was just that... usually. We were instructed to read three books before attending Cherubs (this year they were The Play About The Baby (Edward Albee), Offending The Audience (Peter Handke), and Shakespeare's Henry VI. Following the field trips to see shows (only Alice and Funk It Up), we discussed them instead of the books. Occasionally the discussions were interesting, but I usually had very little to say; this was the most English class-like period of my entire two-day cycle, and I'm not fond of English class discussions.

Performance Theory

Performance Theory was more interesting than Text Analysis, if only because we discussed Improv Everywhere for two days and staged a 'freeze' in the cafeteria during lunch one day (using all four of my teacher's sections). We got into much more interesting discussions in this class, and I decided it was definitely a high point of my 'B' days. As in Text Analysis, both shows we went to found themselves used as material.

Lighting Crew

I liked my 'A' days better than my 'B' days, and much of that is due to the fact that I had lighting crew on 'A' days. For a full two hours (well, 1:50, but who's counting?) we all got to mess with lights, cables, fly rail, weights, and R-FU (ARE-foo), among other things. All four lighting crews worked on the same lighting plot, and we used the same lighting plot for all ten shows. So there were a lot of lights to hang. I felt most at home on lighting crew, and I enjoyed it more than any other elective period. (Except, maybe, for my free hour, which was right after crew, during which I usually went to the library.)

(End text 100% from 2008; the rest was written this month.)

Lighting crew was also great fun at the performances. Eight of us were chosen from each pair of shows (AB, CD, EF, GH, & JK) to be on electrics crew for the following pair. Since mine was show G, I got to be on crew for shows J and K. My duties mostly included changing the gobos² and color gels³ after each performance to prepare for the next one, and getting a shot at actually running the light board. (Each of us on the crew got one run, to give everyone a chance.) During the shows, we could watch or hang out, and we all did a little of both since we crewed the shows twice.

Reflections

Looking back on the experience from nearly two years in the future is possibly a good perspective for the writing of some posts. The details above were fresh from my memory in 2008, when I wrote them, but now most of them are new again. Now, when I think of the summer I spent at Northwestern, I think of Tristan & Yseult, David Chapman, and lighting crew. I think of the fire alarm test they did at 22:30, after rehearsals, while some of the kids were showering and getting ready for bed. I think of a lot of things — things that have changed, that I've lost, that I've gained.

Most importantly, I think of how that summer shaped the last two years of my life. Thanks to Cherubs, I discovered a passion for technical theatre that has guided my decisions ever since. I would never have gone to Colorado Springs or to Emerson if I hadn't made the discoveries I did at Northwestern University.

Sure, the show was fun. Yes, it was awesome how the faculty set up the last day of classes so we all ended up together and did something involving twine and a balloon that I still don't understand. Of course it was fun both to hang and to strike the lights for the shows, and to run the light board for a dress rehearsal. And it was fun how the director of show K included the voices of the crews in the ending of his show.

But on top of it all, there's the influence that summer had on me, as a person. It's really stuck, and it was totally worth it.

Notes:

OK, OK, the hours spent rehearsing were equivalent to several months of the usual theatre I would do at home. We had three to four hours of rehearsal, five days a week at Cherubs. [↩]
A gobo is basically a metal template that allows the lighting instrument to project a pattern onto the stage, instead of a flat wash. [↩]
So named because they used to be made from gelatin. A favorite trick back in those days was to send a newbie to "wash the gels" — they'd disintegrate and the newbie would panic. [↩]

Filed under: musings, summer, theater 3 Comments

15Apr/101

Fraud Much?

So. Last Friday afternoon I got frantic calls from both my Falcon office and my bank. Some jerk stole my credit card information and tried to buy $1,300 worth of jewelry¹ with it on Wednesday. Nice try. It set off the fraud alert.

It helped that on Thursday, I tried to renew my cell phone's air time without actually getting the card out of my pocket and mis-remembered my CVV the first time. Then the crook made a $1 pre-authorization at Apple on Friday, which was enough suspicious activity for the card company to call me.

After I confirmed that yes, I bought the Net10 air time, no, I didn't try to buy $1,300 of jewelry or visit Apple, they shut down the card. I won't get another for about a week. Joy. Meanwhile, next thing on my agenda is to find out what happened to the charge for the air time I bought on the day in between fraud attempts. I don't want Net10 to kill my account because of a chargeback, but it should be OK because I did tell the Falcon office that, of the suspicious transactions, that one was legitimate.

The list of possible "mea culpa" breaches is very short: My credit card information was stored in only a few places online. Many more brick-and-mortar merchants' employees have had access to it since the card was activated last June. From Internet research, I see that I'm not alone in having this happen. I also see that there are myriad ways the crook(s) could have gotten my information.

Random guessing is pretty high on the list. Algorithms exist to generate valid card numbers for testing, and mine might have just randomly come up. I use library computers a lot, so one of them could have had spyware on it that was monitoring the information flow. Maybe Net10's website isn't as secure as I thought. Perhaps an employee at one company or another abused data access privileges and stole card information from customers. Could be that a company I bought from was hacked, or the payment processor was. Google Checkout might not be as secure as it claims to be. Maybe funds transferred from bank to credit card company are sent unencrypted and the crook grabbed info that way. (These are getting less and less likely, to the point of pointless speculation.)

Thing is, I don't believe the CVV was stored anywhere except the back of the card and my memory. Armed with only a name, billing address, and an account number, what are the possible ways an attacker could use the stolen information? I don't believe a billing address or CVV are required for telephone purchases, but then how to explain the Apple pre-authorization?

Whatever happened, I've placed a 90-day fraud alert on my credit report (as recommended by the FTC), changed several passwords and removed the deactivated card from all online accounts. Apparently this happens to some people every few months, but that just makes me curious about how lax such individuals are with their information security. I intend to be even more careful than before.

Notes:

Way over my limit. [↩]

Filed under: musings, security 1 Comment

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The Loss of Fisk B1

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Electives (My Afternoons)

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