My Whole Expanse I Cannot See…

So, last night, the Alanis concert was spectacular. Her voice honestly sounded even better than it did twenty ago.

I didn’t feel so spectacular today, so I’m going to write my full take on the evening tomorrow.

So, tonight I see Alanis Morissette, it’ll be the third time I’ve seen her live. The second time I saw her live was actually the first time I’d seen her in concert, she was doing a tour for Jagged Little Pill Acoustic, and that was a great show. Obviously, she mostly sang songs from Jagged Little Pill, but she also did a few songs off of my personal favorite Alanis record, Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie.

However, the very first time I ever saw Alanis Morissette wasn’t in concert, it was during her U.S. tv debut, on The Late Show with David Letterman. Guest-wise, it was a really off-night, it was David Brenner, an astonishingly boring (God rest him)… comedian? intellectual? raconteur? I don’t know. Then, the musical guest, some girl from Canada, Alanis Morissette. I knew who David Brenner was, but Alanis Mori-who? I’d never heard of her. I didn’t care about the guests anyway, I was just really excited to be there, and really nervous. After the show, I was going to meet and photograph Dave. I was so nervous about meeting Dave, I didn’t even notice Alanis setting up, but once she started singing… you HAD to notice. She sang You Oughta Know, full-blast, absolutely raw, intense, totally un-edited for tv. Well, she had me at and are you thinkin’ of me when you fuck her?

Jagged Little Pill was massive from then on, and Alanis joined the lexicon of singer/song writers that truly changed music.

So, like, seven or eight years ago I picked up this book, Vellum: The Book of All Hours. This was during the infancy of ebooks, back before iBooks, before Kindle, back when Palm was the platform for ebooks. I can’t imagine a worse device for reading books, but they developed a Mac app, and an online ebooks store, and for a very little while, Palm was “it” for digital reading.

Anyway, yes, I bought this book, Vellum, I read, maybe, fifty pages, and I put it down. Then a few years later I bought it in Kindle format and I don’t know if I ever even opened it. Now, today, I’m into Vellum again, and this time, I’m going to finish it or die trying, which feels kind of possible. I think it’s called The Book of All Hours, because it takes all the hours of your life to get through it. I’ve been reading since I nabbed from iBooks three days ago and it feels like three years. I feel like it’s never going to stop, and the constant shifts in time, in perspective, in reality, they don’t help you feel like your moving forward or even backward, or even fucking sideways. It’s like reading words written on the tread of a treadmill. You just keep going ’round and ’round, world without end, Amen.

I’m going to finish, then I’ll write a full review, as opposed to this pre-review rant.

So, in January I got to go see The Both (my brother’s birthday present to me), a band started by Aimee Mann and Ted Leo as a side-project to their solo work. It’s a good band, their self-titled debut record, The Both, is a great record. It’s a good mix of dark and light, you can hear Aimee and Ted’s individual styles, yet they blend so well. If you’re looking for something new, check out The Both, you won’t be let down.

They played lots of good stuff that cold January evening, but Aimee’s stuff will always be my favorite. Their joint rendition of Goodbye Caroline, off of Aimee’s fifth studio record, The Forgotten Arm, was SPECTACULAR.

So, TLC is possibly the most intellectually bankrupt network on tv. They have not one but TWO shows about dudes with multiple wives. There’s 19 Kids and Counting, a show about the Dugger family, Michelle & Jim-Bob, raising 19 kids. Aside from being boring to watch, the Duggers regularly use their “fame” to spearhead anti-gay and lesbian campaigns, including a state-wide robo-call against marriage equality in Arkansas. They have a late-night talk show, All About Sex, during which the hostesses seem to go on and on about how they mostly try to avoid sex with their spouses/lovers. Well, except Margaret Cho, she’s down for anything. All these shows have pseudo-intellectual catch phrases, “We just love each other,” “Love should be multiplied, not divided,” “…somehow, we just make things work,” “Dirty, filthy, fucking.” Okay, maybe that last one isn’t so intellectual, pseudo or otherwise, but the others are just things stupid people say to sound smart or profound, or to make their lives sound provocative. These are all pretty spectacular, in an awful sort of way. Dirty, filthy, fucking just might go on my epitaph. However, we might have a new top of the heap from one of TLC’s new reality train-wreck, My Big Fat Beautiful Life, it’s a show about this lady who’s overweight because of a medical condition. but loving life just the same. Now, anybody who puts their life on tv, or on a blog… is open to criticism, medical condition or no. Myself included. THAT SAID… This lady’s, sort of, life motto, just strikes me as totally vacuous, “I only have this one life to live, and it damn sure better count.”

I only have this one life to live, and it damn sure better count, it’s so… motivational speaker-esque. It’s just a bunch of words that add up to nothing. Yes, we only get one shot at life, so far as we know, that’s true enough. It’s the second half of her motivational gold that bothers me. See, every life counts, for good or ill, every life counts, no damn sure betters about it. We leave footprints in the world, it happens without even trying. Whether you’re Steve Jobs, or someone’s crazy cat-lady aunt, you’re remembered, you affect the people around you. Our worry should be that at the end of our everything, we left the world a little brighter than when we entered it, not whether or not we made life “count.”

Zombie Club Girl…

My brother and I, the Conehead and the Zombie…

So, this year we had a pretty sizable Halloween party, I had to dress… big. Hence, Zombie Club Girl… in a bit of a contrast to my brother’s Conehead. I think we both pulled off our respective costumes with flare.  Yet… I’m pretty gorgeous, no?

Rocking the vote…!

So, I went and did my Civic Duty, early voting… We had a lot of important local races, but the race for Governor is by far the most important, and the easiest choice. Governor Rick Scott has done so much damage, all that matters is that he DOESN’T win.

“Vote Charlie Crist for Governor… He sucks less!”

So, I took some time off, but I’m going to get back into the swing…

I’m back in Mac OS X Yosemite, I have it running better than last time, at least. I had to go back, it’s the only way to push forward. I have to be in the OS, so that I can accurately report the issues to Apple and ControlBionics, the issues that need fixing. I don’t want NeuroSwitch users stuck using last year’s technology simply because they have no choice. If we want to upgrade to the latest OS on the latest Mac hardware on release day, that should be a right, not a privilege. If I have to be the one in the trenches, being fucked over by bugs so that other people with disabilities aren’t relegated to technology’s back of the bus… Sign me up, I’m down. The back of the bus is unacceptable, especially on the Mac, a platform defined by inclusion. Apple has always supported assistive technology (AT), more now than ever,  I don’t worry about their internal support of assistive technology. I worry that third-party AT developers might be getting complacent, could maybe do more to keep up with Apple. I don’t want to see developers playing it safe, pushing users to play it safe, to hold back on OS updates, choosing last year’s stability over the innovation of today, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. That way of thinking is antiquated, developers should be pushing toward giving users the right to release day updates. Maybe half their other apps quit working, a risk EVERYONE willingly faces for the chance to stand on the bleeding edge of computing. However, no matter the update, one’s keyboard doesn’t break, one’s mouse doesn’t break. Assistive technology users should expect no less from our forms of the keyboard/mouse. AT developers need to push the envelope as hard as Apple does, choosing innovation and zealous testing that ensures stable access to the technology of right now, and next year, and forever on. I don’t feel that expecting my switch to work on Day One of a major OS release is too much to ask, especially considering that developers have access to testing the OS months in advance.

Admittedly, I had access, I could have tested. I got complacent. Still, at the end of the day, I’m the end-user, the last link in the testing chain. It shouldn’t be that since my life depends on the technology, and I have some developer access, I Goddamn well better test the shit out of my switch… and Kurt Cobain shouldn’t be dead… and Nirvana should have put out a fourth record that sounded like R.E.M. as if heard through the filter of one’s nightmares. However, none of that is reality. Kurt’s dead, that record never happened, and I don’t get to be complacent, because the situation doesn’t just affect me, it touches every other NeuroSwitch user, and I’m in a position to help. Thinking about it in those terms, I have to help, nothing else really matters.

Lesson learned

Wish me luck

Soothe the burn

Wake me up…

So, I updated to Mac OS X Yosemite, and overall it’s SPECTACULAR… with a catch. It doesn’t so much like a piece of my assistive technology. I think I know which piece, and why, I’ll know more tomorrow. No matter what, it will get it fixed. In the meantime, my typing… suffers.

So, Governor Rick Scott and former Governor (turned wannabe Governor) Charlie Crist are both skeezy. Though, Scott takes things a step further as a bonafide skeezy criminal. Our race for Governor here in Florida isn’t about voting in the best man for the job, it’s about choosing the fellow who is less awful. Sadly, that man is Charlie Crist. It’s a sad, sad race. At least now, it’s been injected with a good dose of absurdity…