Three Thousandths

It seems like every meeting I go to these days includes a conversation concerning the spelling out of a standard operating procedure into a published policy, or the formalization of an informal procedure into a codified process.  Everywhere there has historically been latitude there is now a drive to narrow the range and make it substantively more predictable.

- I deleted a bunch of stuff here -

When I was a student one of my instructors told us that when you set out to design a machine for scenery that you have two choices: you can design to a mechanical tolerance of three thousandths of an inch or you can work to a much larger tolerance and build in adjustability.  If done properly the machine will work regardless of which design approach one chooses.  The difficulty is that a theatrical shop will have significant difficulty fabricating to a +/- 3/1000" tolerance.  The tolling we have and the materials we work in don't make that kind of precision easy.  The result being that the fabrication probably won't be done properly and a precisely designed machine will likely fail. Alternatively if you take the tooling and materials in to account ahead of time and assume that the high precision is optimistic in our shop and set out from the start to include adjustability you stand a much higher chance of success.

I think about this a lot when we set out to standardize and codify things at work.  So much of what we do is specific: specific to a production, specific to a design, specific to a class, specific to a person.  We can design processes that are highly codified or we can design processes with built in adjustability. 

Don't get me wrong.  If I'm asked to codify processes I will codify them and if asked to spell out what I assume to be a known standard procedure I will spell it out.  I like creating policy documents.  I am really good at it.  Is it the best approach?  Only time will tell.

Ellipses...

Mondays are supposed to be Ellipses.  The problem with doing a lot of Ellipses posts is I can't remember what I have already said in a previous post...  It's looking like we are going to get five, count them five, undergrad TD declarations this year.  That's a new, high, score!  Feels like we should have a declaration party or something...  During PT today I was thinking about plays I had seen happen in Ultimate games I had played in.  It's odd some of the specific instances that stick out...  I think True Blood will make a good musical.  It isn't even a little hard to see those characters bursting into song...  There are all these t-shirts commemorating the Tree of Life event.  I can't seem to get myself turned in their direction...  Sometimes you don't even realize you do something until you see your kid doing it...  Not really sure how the Steelers managed to win this past weekend.  Truthfully I thought I wouldn't watch at all this year.  That didn't really work out...  First forays into cord cutting appear to lead to losing BBC America.  That would mean losing Doctor Who.  I'm really liking the current Doctor Who Season...  For a while now I have been eating very little on Mondays and Thursdays.  For a little while now I've been really hungry on Mondays and Thursdays...  I'm generally not someone that has much of an opinion about trigger warnings.  This weekend I think I might have benefited from them twice, maybe...  Are Democrats worried the President has ulterior motives when pardoning this year's turkey?  I hope the new House oversite will keep that in line...  Interestingly while exploring the cord cutting options the Verizon CSR told me he couldn't tell me the price of naked internet.  That's probably a sound strategy on their part...  I haven't made any progress on the Twitter to Blog pipeline.  That's as much progress as most people are making on it...  I can't imagine how much money a person that buys their spouse a surprise car for the holidays must make.  I'd generate some abrasion if I spent like that without discussion...  HPV jokes appear to be consensus funny; cancer jokes, less so.  It would seem to me to really just be a question of perspective...  Somehow the threads on the stem to one of my car tires just sort of dissolved.  Seems ok for the moment, but it is no longer possible to put air in the tire.  Gonna have to get that fixed...  I have this feeling that we should all be way, way more upset about the reporter that lost his life in Turkey.  This is a really big deal for media everywhere...  I had the Thanksgiving burger and the Pumpkin Pie shake at Burgatory.  I would absolutely recommend both...

Worth a Look

Here are a few posts from last week's Greenpage that might be worth your time...

Jeff Koons Is Found Guilty of Plagiarism in Paris and Ordered to Pay $168,000 to the Creator of an Ad He Appropriated

artnet News: A French judge has found Jeff Koons guilty in his four-year-long legal battle with the creator of a surreal 1980s ad campaign who claims the American artist stole his work.

French ad executive Franck Davidovici created the campaign, titled Fait d’Hiver, in 1985 for the French clothing brand Naf Naf. After seeing Koons’s work exhibited at the Pompidou Center in 2014, he sued the American artist for copyright infringement, accusing him of plagiarizing his advertisement to create a 1988 sculpture that was also called Fait d’Hiver.

Posted by David at 11/13/2018 11:08:00 AM

When it came to racism, the pen was Stan Lee’s superpower

New Pittsburgh Courier: Stan Lee was a seminal part of Miya Crummell’s childhood. As a young, Black girl and self-professed pop culture geek, she saw Lee was ahead of his time.

“At the time, he wrote ‘Black Panther’ when segregation was still heavy,” said the 27-year-old New Yorker who is a graphic designer and independent comic book artist. “It was kind of unheard of to have a Black lead character, let alone a title character and not just a secondary sidekick kind of thing.”

Posted by David at 11/15/2018 11:14:00 AM

Dancers Finally Have More Brown Pointe Shoes

jezebel.com: When I was in kindergarten, I was in ballet class and I loved it, mostly because I would get to goof off and there was a “free dance” period every so often where we would all get to goof off because we were five- and six-year-olds. My mom sewed extra flowers into my leotards and I did exactly one show. I never went back to ballet or dance after that, and I think that was the right call for me

Posted by David at 11/13/2018 12:30:00 PM

The idea of intellectual property is nonsensical and pernicious

Aeon Essays: The grand term ‘intellectual property’ covers a lot of ground: the software that runs our lives, the movies we watch, the songs we listen to. But also the credit-scoring algorithms that determine the contours of our futures, the chemical structure and manufacturing processes for life-saving pharmaceutical drugs, even the golden arches of McDonald’s and terms such as ‘Google’.

Posted by David at 11/13/2018 11:15:00 AM

Harassed Out of Hollywood: A Veteran Stuntwoman Reflects on Life in the Movies and on the Blacklist

themuse.jezebel.com: Throughout the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, Jean Coulter was a leading stuntwoman in Hollywood, racking up hundreds of credits on shows like Charlie’s Angels, Wonder Woman, M*A*S*H*, and Days of Our Lives. She is perhaps most recognizable from Jaws 2, in which she played the ski boat driver who attempts to set the villainous shark on fire. Coulter rarely acted; she preferred to stick to stunts where her likeness was obscured and tailored to be indistinguishable from the stars for which she doubled. She worked in the shadows and experienced routine sexual harassment on set. She was among the first women in Hollywood to speak out about it publicly—in the 1980s she filed a lawsuit against stunt coordinator Roy Harrison and Spelling-Goldberg Productions.

Posted by David at 11/15/2018 11:36:00 AM

Ellipses...

This writing every day thing is a real commitment.  Looking back I have not the faintest idea how I ever did it...  These governors races were never really looking like they were going to come out blue, even with all the extra-curriculars...  We had a half dozen toddlers over for a movie night tonight.  It's the rare evening activity that everyone can go home and then still have time to go out after - although I didn't (but Mrs. Tanbi did)...  Some of these stories coming out about Facebook might very much encourage me to drop Facebook...  I think part of the reason it has been so difficult to write is that I've become monumentally gun shy about writing around politics.  I should probably get over that.  It's not like there aren't links to older posts here...  The Pittsburgh HQ2 bid was released to the public yesterday.  It's actually a nice esteem boosting read for Yinzers.  And not getting the business might not have been a bad thing anyway...  I read an article yesterday about the most recent UN climate report.  That sort of thing really makes me wonder about how to prepare for the future...  I'm currently watching the Penguins get shellacked on a 90" projection screen in the living room.  The projector is being driven by a Roku.  The Roku is passing a signal from a Slingbox, and the Slingbox is passing a signal from the cable box.  Somewhere in the middle of that is my phone, but I'm not sure it is actually doing anything.  That's a lot of technology to see your team get beat...  Please, please someone in Florida do something about the election management in Broward County before they get in the news again...  Nissan stopped making the xTerra.  That's too bad.  I liked the xTerra...  When my students make the switch from email to text all in I think I am going to have difficulty making the change.  I'm all about he email, but I don't think I want my phone to chime every time I get a work message, and I'm also uncertain I don't want my phone to chime when I'm getting a non work message.  I'm going to need a dual number phone...  The only place there was snow left today were the places I had piled snow clearing it yesterday.  I probably should have just left it...  

Down the Rabbit Hole

I read my own blog post last night and decided to try to get a solution to the aggregated blogging of tweets.  It turned out to be a little bit of a rabbit hole.  I started out looking into new services that would have this functionality.  I found third party applications that publish tweets to blogs, but I couldn't find one (admittedly with not too much effort) that would do a daily digest.

I poked around inside IFTTT a little bit and came across a skill called "email digest" which does, can you believe it, exactly what I was looking for: it accumulates content and then emails it.  The summaries can be hourly or daily or weekly, so I could set up what I'd had before.  Blogger has a publish by email function.  Using IFTTT I could link Twitter to the Email Digest function and viola I would have daily aggregated twitter posts on the blog.

But David, you say, I am reading a post about going down a rabbit hole, not a series of republished tweets.  If you really did have the solution you would have implemented it, yes?  Or are you just lazy?

Well, I am extremely lazy - and I could blog about that - but that isn't what happened here.

If you've used IFTTT you might have an idea what happened.  When you link a process to your IFTTT you have to configure it with a singular setting.  I had previously set up the email digest function doing a couple of other things - I was getting email digests of the daily agenda of the US Congress - using one of my personal email addresses.  In order to use the publish by email I would have to reconfigure the skill from my personal email to the publish by email address.

I could live with that.  All of the email digest recipes I had configured I had also turned off.  Re-configuring the address would be doable.  That wasn't the sticky bit.  The sticky bit is on the Twitter end.

I have two Twitter accounts.  One of them is the home of my sarcastic curmudgeon.  The other account is the Twitter home of my News From the Real World blog.  Even though my personal twitter has really slowed down the @NFTRW_Feed Twitter is still plugging away.  It tweets at least 10 articles each day and many, many job listings.  All of that activity is passive, automated through an application called Buffer and an application called IFTTT.

To use IFTTT with my personal Twitter account I would have to delink it from the Greenpage account.  I wonder from time to time about the utility of the job postings, and I might be willing to let it go in order to get this blogging functionality back, but there was enough friction there to keep it from happening.

There are other paths to follow, but not being able to get at the Twitter content with Twitter makes it more complicated.  For a while Twitter ran RSS feeds for every Twitter feed.  In that case I could write a recipe that scraped an RSS and then published it through a daily digest email.

Ok, do that, you're saying.

Well, I would, but Twitter stopped burning RSS feeds for all their feeds.  And not only that, but they've significantly complicated the process for third parties to generate the RSS feed themselves.  Upon further consideration I think something in this area might be a big part of why LoudTwitter disappeared in the first place.  I did find one service that would construct a custom RSS from a Twitter feed, but it was a pay service and the free level only included five entries per day.  I guess on most days five or less would be swell but there would likely be many days where that would wind up being truncated.  I might do it that way, but I'm not ready to compromise yet.

So there's that.

I Used to Like Twitter

I was a fairly early Twitter adopter.  I had a Twitter account long before I had a Facebook account.  I think as someone who did a personal blog the micro-blogging aspect of Twitter was appealing to me.  I never really worried about how many followers I had, it was just fun to be able to bring my particular brand of snark to the masses.  As a sarcastic curmudgeon the quip is one of my strong suits.  Twitter very much played to my strengths.

There used to be this service called LoudTwitter that would aggregate one day's worth of Twitter posts and post them to a blog.  This was something that seemed tailor made for me and lead first to the "Shorties" posts on this blog - right up until the service disappeared.  Later it supported the "140 Characters or Less..." posts when the service returned - right up until the service disappeared again.  I keep wondering if there's some way to recreate this functionality myself using IFTTT and Google Sheets.  I wonder about it a lot, but not enough to try to solve it.  I should look to see if IFTTT has a community where you can suggest recipes for someone else to write.

I used to have my Twitter feed linked to my Facebook feed so that whenever I posted to Twitter it echoed the post to Facebook.  Recently as part of tightening their privacy and security setup Facebook disabled this functionality.  It looks like they've disabled any third party posting functionality.

A significant amount of my tweeting used to be about work.  Each time after class I would tweet out what we'd done that day, things like "Technical Direction 3 - Transportation Protection."  I liked doing that primarily as alumni outreach on Facebook.  The tweet would crosspost to Facebook and then occasionally former students would have something to say about that day's content.  I'm not sure why, but without the crossposting element I've found that I've stopped putting the content on Twitter.  Beyond that, I could just put that content directly on Facebook, but I don't want to.  I have no idea why not.  It almost feels petulant, like I am refusing to adapt to the new landscape purely out of stubborness.  (Even stupider, Twitter allows third party posting such that I could easily implement an IFTTT recipe to crosspost a Facebook entry to Twitter.  But I'm not gonna.  Can't make me.)

As a result of the changes my Twitter activity has dropped to almost zero and my Facebook activity has been reduced to mostly posting web articles from Feedly.  I'm really in a position where I could, probably, just drop both services and not miss them much.  Maybe I should.

What the Fudge

Do you watch "The Good Place"?  That's one of the shows at the top of our DVR que - something we watch almost when it is actually on.  We like it a lot.  One of the things I like about it is how they decided that anyone in The Good Place can swear, although they still want to and intend to swear.  So when they go to swear some other word just comes out of their mouth, like: "What the Fudge."

It's not like we'd never hear this vocal device before.  There are people that for real in their lives.  But it is nice that they wanted to include for the characters that this would be part of their language even if they couldn't actually use the language, and in this particular case making the inability to use the language on a network TV show part of the plot of the show.

Previously I've been a fan of shows where they found other workarounds.  I think the first time I came across this was on Mork & Mindy long, long ago.  Orkans had an expletive they used: Shazbot.  When I was in grade school we giggled quite a bit over the use of Shazbot, but I don't think it ever really worked its way into our everyday speech as a curse word.  It was more like something that was a joke and a punchline all in one word.

I don't know why, but today I reached for a curse and what came out of my mouth was Shazbot.  Sometimes you never really know what I am going to say next.

My personal favorite over the years I think was feltercarp.  I can still hear the sound of Dirk Bennedict saying feltercarp.  Feltercarp is one of the two made up curses from the original Battlestar Gallactica.  The other one was frack.  I think of the two I prefered feltercarp to frack.  Interesting side note: if you do a Google search on "feltercarp" the second entry listed is a post on this blog.  So maybe it had a limited appeal.  Limited apparently to me.

Feltercarp didn't make the leap from the Dirk Benedict Starbuck to the Katee Sackhoff Starbuck.  On the new BSG frack went from being essentially a placeholder interjection to a full blown implimentation of the word used in context - like a verb: "I'd love to frack that."  Somehow it lost it's charm for me in the utilization.  It was fun when it was a made up expletive, but as an actual word it felt artificial.

It doesn't seem fair that I thought it didn't work on BSG when they were using it in essentially the way I find so entertaining on The Good Place.  In the newest instance they aren't making up a new word, they are substituting a word for a word they know they can't say.  The difference being that on The Good Place the replacement is an actual word being misused rather than putting in an entirely new word.  I guess that since one is being done in a humorous context where the other was in a dramatic context probably weighs in as well.

I bet I would laugh out loud if one of the characters on The Good Place slipped in a feltercarp.

Too Soon

I get it.  Retailers need to have something to push sales and the longer the ramp up the more sales they can generate.  Halloween is over.  Veterans Day does have much of a sales hook, and Thanksgiving isn't much better.  Stores want to start the Christmas season as early as possible.

So from Target to Home Depot to the grocery store as soon as the Halloween candy and decorations are clearanced and moved out in came the end of the year holiday merchandise.  (As an aside, I thought Halloween appeared to soon as well.  Most people don't need more than a week to get Halloween rolling.  Having that holiday hit the stores as soon as Back to School disappears is way too soon too - and I swear Back to School merch started to appear before the end of July.)

We just don't need this urgency to get to the next thing.  We've been swallowed whole by a holiday merchandising cycle that has little to do with the actual holiday and everything to do with maximizing sales.  If the items get on the shelf earlier maybe you'll take on an extra project, or maybe you'll use up the thing (or eat the candy) before the holiday happens and have to buy more.

Walking into the home center on November 1st to a full display of trees and holiday yard decorations was really jarring.  Also, not for nothing, but this warp forward is worse than the others because it is a hard charge into bad weather.  Maybe it doesn't have that impact in fairer climate areas, but in a place that gets snow and cold weather, seeing Christmas decorations on the shelves is also saying that it is time to find your cold weather clothes, break out the snowblower, pack up the patio.  I really want more time in the sun.  Let me rake some leaves.  I'd like the top of the season animal to see its shadow and give me six more weeks of summer.

I am willing to make some exceptions.  Micheal's and JoAnn can put their stuff out earlier.  These stores are about people that need that lead time.  If you are crafting costumes or decorations you might actually need 6-8 weeks and you will need someplace to get your supplies.  I'm also grudgingly willing to give in on Costco (and Sam's Club).  Costco always seems to be nearly a full season ahead.  I guess people that buy in bulk also plan ahead.  I don't necessarily agree with it, but it is sort of central to their brand.

But the rest of you stores, you can do better. The holiday shopping season begins with Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving.  A month is plenty of time.  Don't make me rush into an 8 week wait.

Ellipses...

Mondays will be for ellipses...  I don't understand why everyone was so interested in how aquariums get their salt water...  Is it possible that Miriam Adelson actually did something to merit the Presidential Medal of Freedom and we're all just being unreasonably critical?  I mean it might be possible...  It seems like every Qdoba in Pittsburgh went out of business.  I wonder if there's a story here like there was with Quiznos.  Or maybe it's just a curse for fast food restaurants starting with Q...  I briefly thought about totally blowing off the NFL this year.  It didn't stick...  The other day I purchased a commenrative patch from the Pittsburgh Penguins.  Then Sarah Silverman went on Bill Maher and ruined it for me...  It seems likely that the "taking too long" or the "prevent public confusion" court rulings can't be too far off in a bunch of these election recounts.  We ought to be better at this by now...  Looks like Pittsburgh isn't getting Amazon HQ2.  Not sure it would have been great for us anyway...  I delete a lot of what I type these days.  I wish that weren't the case...  Yesterday Mrs. Tanbi and I were talking about a possible vacation.  Today she got an email offering deep discounts on that vacation.  There was a time I would have thought "what an amazing coincidence?"  But now it made me wonder if we were ratted out by Alexa or our phones...  I've been trying to lose some weight.  My efforts appear to have stalled.  That's happened before though.  I'm trying to stay motivated...  They're going to add a whole bunch of internally locking doors at the daycare.  That's simultaneously comforting and depressing...  Simultaneously is a word I have never reliably learned to spell...  Today somehow plugging my laptop into a projector caused the audio and video on an .mp4 file to come out of sync.  We watched it anyway...  I think I want a smartwatch - I had a Kickstarter Pebble - but I don't so much like the Apple watch and I have an Apple phone.  Here is a problem my father never had to wrestle with...  It is going to snow soon.  I wish it wouldn't...  Why are websites still looking for Flash, or requiring Java?  Get into the 90's already...  I remember getting the Sears Wishbook as a child, and while I appreciate what Target and Amazon are trying to do they are really missing the scale of the experience...  The sports radio folks in town are saying Bell isn't going to play at all this season.  The responsibility of teams, owners, and players to their fanbase is an interesting question to me...  This post per day thing is so much harder than it used to be...

Worth a Look

Herre are a few posts from last week's Greenpage that might be worth your time...

Q&A: Should we keep producing 'Miss Saigon'?

Datebook: If theater were to excise from its canon every problematic work of art — every play espousing racism, sexism, nationalism or some other nefarious belief — we’d not only have a paltry repertoire, we’d also rob ourselves of the chance to learn from our classics’ failures.

Posted by David at 11/06/2018 11:55:00 AM

A Sobering Look at the Production Industry

TPi: In the live entertainment and touring industry, addiction is common. “I wanted to share my story, not for a pat on the back, but hopefully there is someone who can identify and who may be going through the same thing. It’s a tough industry with long hours, high pressure and often being away from home. Much of the time, alcohol, drugs and even over-eating is a coping mechanism. My message is that if you have a niggle in your mind that something is wrong, it’s not a niggle. Something is wrong. If I can do it, you can do it too.”

Posted by David at 11/06/2018 12:01:00 PM

EU Copyright Regulations May Prevent Artists from Sharing Work on Social Media

Artsy: Imagine it’s the summer of 2021, and an artist based in Berlin is uploading an image she created to express her support for the candidate vying to be Germany’s next chancellor—whomever she or he turns out to be—in the style of Shepard Fairey
’s iconic 2008 Barack Obama Hope campaign poster to Facebook. Before the image hits the news feed, a recently introduced Facebook upload filter checks the artist’s image against a vast database of copyrighted materials, turning up Fairey’s poster and countless other images in a similar style. The artist’s upload is denied; she can appeal the filter’s decision, but the process could take weeks, by which time the election will have passed and the image may be irrelevant. She gives up on sharing her artwork.

Posted by David at 11/08/2018 11:21:00 AM

A white artistic director pretended to be black – it would be laughable if the consequences weren’t so damaging

The Independent: "It has emerged that an artistic director at one of the UK’s few black-led theatres has been masquerading as black. Anthony Ekundayo Lennon describes himself as an “African born again” and stated in 2012 that “although I’m white, with white parents, I have gone through the struggles of a black man, a black actor”.

Posted by David at 11/08/2018 11:27:00 AM

The arts are a shadow health service – here's why

theconversation.com: The UK’s Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, has said that doctors should prescribe dance classes and trips to concert halls as well as pills and physio – and set out plans to make this “social prescribing” a reality. He clearly gets how the arts can benefit health and well-being. But there is more to do. The health benefits to be gained from creative practice are enormous and universal – and so need widespread investment.

Posted by David at 11/08/2018 11:22:00 AM