sometimes it seems like software does everything possible to get in my way, to get in the way of simple tasks and desires. oh well. i’ve wasted time on stupider things. today i went out in the rain aand misery to see a fancy new payphone in Times Square. it is actually not so extraordinary, and in fact rather diminutive by Times Square standards of LED gigormity, but it was announced as if it was a pathbreaking moment in the history of payphones. all told, one panel of a 3-panel payphone enclosure at 49th Street and 7th Avenue will have an LED screen with constantly changing advertisements. it may not be the future of the payphone but it could be a step toward the payphone kiosk of the future, which is not unlike the newspaper vending kiosk (hah, almost said “chaos”) or the bus stop advertising panels (which i guess could be called kiosks). the technique of an everchanging advertising panel is nothing new, and i’m not even certain it’s new to payphones, but it was there, and i felt restless enough to go out in this shit weather to see it. it was more or less on my way to my 181 anyway, where i picked up a couple of 32gb SD cards.
i recorded 2 minutes of video, showing the changing ad panel. i didn’t expect it to become a slight vignette of Times Square, a “moment in time” in which the ad panel changed as did everything around it. i stood for 2 minutes when, as should have been expected, someone approached me intending to ask for money or food or maybe oral/anal sex, but i shook my head in the negative to answer his question “Can I ask you something?” without saying anything and without turning my attention away from the video recording i shook my head and mumbled “no.” i turned my camera toward him as he walked away, disappearing into the Times Square crowd, apparently taking my rebuff to heart, unlike the more aggressive of that kind.
i never saw his face.
so i got home intending to shovel the video up to lickr using Windows Movie Maker, which has a handy plugin that claims to convert and post huge videos to Flickr and other places, saving you the time and bandwith of uploading a 275mb video straight to Flickr or Youtube. alas, of all the video formats that Movie Maker supports the Sony .MTS format is not one of them. so that was a fun way to waste an hour. then i wasted another hour uploading it in full… by then i was hot from screaming at the software… i bet my neighbors make fun of me for the way i scream and plead with software to “work! just FUCKING WORK!” i have these altercations with software virtually every day. i click on a menu item, and nothing happens. i click again, nothing again. 20 minutes later the menu item thing i clicked on might appear, but by then i’ve moved on to other solutions. oh blahblahblah boo fucking hoo, it’s just impossible sometimes to balance all these fucking things that can go wrong, and that do go wrong. you just can’t depend on technology for any fucking thing.
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