I saw a sign advertising a smartwatch made specifically for runners. I had to look twice at that sign. I thought it was advertising a sandwich made for runners. Still thinking sandwich I noticed that the person in the ad was holding something up to his ear. So I thought this was a unique sandwich that was eaten through your ears. I came up with a brilliant name for this product, consumed into the body via the ear canal: Soundwich. haha.
Another brilliant product name surfaced in this head. An crocodile-themed mixed drink called a Croctail. I’m thinking it’s a rum-based drink that gets its pop from a secret ingredient: Crocodile tears. I wonder if you could actually harvest a significant quantity of crocodile tears. Sounds like dangerous work but in the interest of bringing new booze concoctions into the world it could be done.
I was payphone hunting at the Port Authority Bus Terminal earlier. Not a single one to be found. Until about two years ago there was a somewhat astounding quantity of public phones in that facility. I never counted but the number of G-Tel branded phones at the PABT probably numbered about 100.
I have always thought it hilarious that they pipe classical music into that skunky, sodden place.
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It’s next day. Had ambitions of making a long wander today but seem to have changed course. At the Windmill again. Dreamed about this place last night, that it was completely crowded with humans. It is warm but somehow it feels like it should not be. I have half a mind to take off my shirt, as did the old man who just entered this space.
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OK, I did end up walking to midtown, all the way to 34th Street and back up to Grand Central. I was on Links detail, seeing if my theory from yesterday holds true. It seems like half the time I try to make a phone call from one of these things it just does not work. I thought I might just have been imagining it but it really seems to be true. And I found that they blocked access to those Talkee.com chat lines, which I think is hilarious. Actually it looks like any number in the 712 area code is blocked. I could not summon a phone number from that Iowa area code that was anything other than a chat line. Oh jeez I wonder if this means they blocked the conference call numbers? Yikes, that would be a drag. I can see why blocking the chat lines would be in their interest but the conference call numbers would seem to possess legitimate merit. Hmm, going to be bummed if that’s the story.
Well, I feel fine today, on what was to be my first foray into 2 weeks off the booze. But then my sister e-mailed to ask what kind of beer I wanted while I was there. I guess I never told her about the trouble I got into with this stuff about 2 years ago now. I did not keep it from anybody for reasons of embarrassment or shame. It’s just I don’t think anybody really cares. She probably has no idea I also do vodka now. No sense keeping that from her. Hah.
Still, something about drinking the way I do in the house where I grew up is not OK with me. I remember introducing my mother to Guinness, in particular the way it is poured. She feigned interest but really just never had any desire to drink. She just didn’t like it, the way I don’t like pot.
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Another day. I am bowing out of a meeting of some activists protesting the LinkNYC program, this after spending an hour or so dicking with the Links on 3rd Avenue. My theory holds just about true. When using the free phone calls feature it seems that as much as half the time those things simply do not work. Text matter on the tablet screen makes it appear the calls connected but much of the time they simply do not.
This drew me to the nyc.gov dataset of complaints received by 311 regarding the Links. Hilariously the dataset does not even start until September 2016. That is, conspicuously enough, after the web browsers were removed from the devices, effectively exorcising the plague of encampments and alleged public viewing of pornography. I would have loved to see just how many complaints came in during the 6 or 7 months it took Citybridge to open its eyes to what was happening. I mean, they knew what was happening, with sidewalks essentially becoming toilets anywhere these devices were placed. They just didn’t care.
I also start to wonder just how much money those advertisements are making. The screens seem half taken by LinkNYC platitudes and public service announcements. And with only two surfaces for ads you have to wonder if they even can make as much money as the old payphones. Single payphone have three ad panels, but rows of 2 or more phones have 3 or more. The longest row of outdoor payphones I knew of was somewhere in Brooklyn, where 5 phones stood somewhere on Flatbush Avenue. There is a row of 4 on Steinway Street in Astoria. Those have to make significantly more money than the one Link device that will replace them.
Which brings me to another fallacy about the LinkNYC planning. A set of three payphones will not be replaced by 3 side-by-side Links, although frankly it would not surprise me to see that.
And, not to be any kind of a prude, but I found an ad for the movie “I LOVE DICK” to be a little off-putting considering the Links’ past association with smut (regardless of whether that association had any merit).
Another curio regards the blocking of calls to Iowa. Well, the calls are to those chat lines which exploit an FCC loophole that costs the big phone companies millions per year, even per month. I had tried to call the BBC, which has a phone number you can call to listen. Nothing doing. Message said I did not have enough Vonage credits. Listening to the BBC is one thing but those 712 area code phone numbers are better known for their phone sex and chat lines. I don’t know all there is to know about the tawdry world of talkee.com and phone sex chat lines that use 712 and 515 area codes even though the businesses are not located anywhere near Sioux City, Iowa; or rural Minnesota. An FCC loophole requires large telcos to pay smaller ones some fee per minute of calltime. It’s an old rule that sounds as if it’s been taken over by greedy hucksters. But I don’t quite get why Vonage and/or LinkNYC would care enough to block it from Links. It has to be a Vonage decision, or maybe just a glitch.
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I’m at a bar I haven’t been to in a while. I forget what I used to call this place. The hideout bar? That’s not right. It’s where I go when I don’t want anyone to know me nor I them. I quit coming here when a manager commented on how I sit at the same place every time. “Your seat is waiting” or somesuch.
Funny thing… I did it again. As I made the gesture to sit down I almost started taking off my shirt. So in the habit of taking off the jacket.
Heard on the radio that my friend got shit-canned. CEO of an Internet company, a position I don’t think he ever imagined for himself or really even wanted. That company was the last of its kind, I think, as was he: An Internet titan in a technology field with absolutely no formal training in computers or code. That’s like me, and almost everyone I knew in the early days of the WWW at Time-Warner. The core tech group was highly skilled in that stuff but everyone else had no idea. That made for sometimes frictioned interactions. The company was itself like something from a 1990s dot com. The sharks got into the water long ago but it took them a while to take over this particular company. It’s a tough business model, no doubt, but the takeover people seem to know what they are talking about. Their complaints mirror some of mine, not that I ever gave the site a terribly critical analysis. In particular the search engine just sucked. It was always a somewhat confusing jumble but what really was lame about it was its intolerance for spelling errors. “deck of crads” instead of “deck of cards” would probably return nothing. Spellcheck is a pretty obvious search engine function, and while there are open source libraries for that kind of thing I would think this company had the resources to analyse its search traffic and trends. That’s the kind of thing you hear about Amazon. They study search queries and abandoned shopping carts for clues to what they are doing wrong, or could do better.
I don’t know if the company is doomed or what is next for him. He’ll do well, though. The CEO world is one where failing up is the norm. He deserves some time off, even if I think too much of it would drive him crazy. He always described the CRO world as foreign to him. He’d attend summits and retreats with Bill Gates and that ilk, all the while asking “What the hell am I doing here?” He also suggested, last time I saw him, that he might get fired. I think that was over a year ago. I don’t get the impression there was a golden parachute waiting for him. Certainly the tanking stock price did nothing for however many zillion stock options they gave him. Whatever money he has gets sponged into the child and the non-working wife so I doubt it would last long however much he has.
If anything, maybe I’ll get to see more of the guy. Making time for that was always a challenge, if not an annoyance.
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Going home. Crap, it’s later than I thought.
