afterSonoma

Black Friday, Black Market, Sony & Hackers

PS3 Salesman, originally uploaded by p0psharlow.

American Thanksgiving Day today. We, at the etail site on top our block-long mother-ship of retail stores, were stressed all week preparing for the busiest retail day of the year tomorrow. The customary shopping part of the season of social events surrounding traditional end of the year holidays has been brought to a new low of crassness by us and others advertising "Black Friday Sales". The black refers to retail businesses' clearing a profit for the first time all year -- getting into the black on the sales charts. All profit from now to the end of the year! Hurrah! Happy Holidays!

I understand that ony profitable businesses can continue to provide the goods and services to the community and that people giving gifts to friends and family is lovely, but the public focus on a businesses' bottom-line is not attractive.

As to the PS3, Sony created a false scarcity in this country by not releasing sufficient quantities to meet expected demand of a previously popular product. Sony further limited the availability by releasing through only a few large retail chains. Sony gained a lot of free publicity to their (some say) sub-standard product.

Whether this marketing decision, made in corporate headquarters in Japan, was designed to draw attention away from the inadequacies of their product or if it was to counter the effect of a year of deservedly bad press stemming from their anti-public decisions, we don't know. We can see that they created a news-worthy demonstration of public demand for their product. In doing so, Sony also created perfect conditions for Black Market resellers. The release was attractive to those with a flexible schedule which allowed them to wait days in line to buy a PS3. After release, PS3s were quickly repurchased at twice or triple the $600 retail price.

Sony could have known, should have known and no doubt did know this would happen. They also knew there was a risk of violence and they chose to release the PS3 this way. The stores didn't like it, the police and civil governments didn't like it, but, evidently, Sony liked it. Interestingly, Sony did not create a scarcity in Japan.

Observers and journalists reported that the vast majority of American customers participating in Sony's stunt, were doing so in the hope of making a payday.

Our store was not chosen by Sony for their charade. Even still, we were adversely affected by it.

• When our store managers arrived to open the stores on the day of the release, they were met by an anxious crowd of over a hundred people who had trouble accepting the managers report that we had no PS3 to sell. The crowd stayed for several hours, making it difficult and scary for employees and customers to enter the stores.
• One guy broke through our inadequate security, went to the middle of the computer store, yelling, "I'm not leaving without a PS3!" Police were required to remove him.
• Meanwhile, online, our website was repeatedly hit by hundreds of thousands of searches for 'PS3", "Playstation", "Sony", "Game Players", "Video Games", "Game Consoles" and other related terms. The overburdened site ground to halt several times during the day. Customers looking for items we actually stocked were unable to make purchases, those of us working on the site were unable to do our work. The site was disfunctionally burdened by the PS3 searchers for two days.
• About noon on PS3 release day, a red van pulled up to the curb in front of our store, the guy in the above picture jumped out holding a PS3 box, shouting, "PS3, $4000 cash!". My friend, Toasty snapped and split. Fearing violence, he didn't wait to see what happened.

Now, after a week, it has calmed down to the more reasonable frenzy of New York retail, I don't know if the event is more typical of the American public or of the management of an unwieldy large corporation suffering bad press and failing product lines.

As to the PS3s themselves, the hackers say, they are a fine piece of hardware with bad Sony software. Strip out Sony's operating system, install a specially modified open-source Linux operating system and they say those who paid 2 or 3 thousand dollars to an unauthorized reseller will have a nice machine which can reach the internet, support common communication and media production applications, play and make HD video, play Blue-Ray, HD DVDs and a bunch of online and offline games.

More power to the hackers! They have the right attitude and are pointing the way to the kind of products the public wants.

Technorati Tags: Black Friday PS3 Sony Black Market hacker

Can I Complain About This?

NYC Downtown Skyline Oct. 14, 2006 4pm, originally uploaded by p0psharlow.

Getting back, getting back into the swing of things -- at home, making new panorama photos of our skyline for a new series of paintings; at work, ramping up the promotional apparatus for the shopping season - that disgusting annual retail event which is the life-blood of all American retail companies.

Sad now, giving up my hopes for a return to San Francisco.

Fall is New York at its nicest and I've been trying to feel good about being here. If my job was less hours, I'd feel more settled. My home, my personal life is in my art. I contact it one hour on work day mornings, one hour on those nights. Four to six hours on weekend days. It has been enough to keep it going, but not enough to get it to another level. I'm thankful to have the time. Of course, less hours on the job, I'd be happier.

If not San Francisco, then where?

Ruth's ten years away from being old enough to retire. At 62, I'm at the age many retire. We don't have the savings. The stocks we bought back when everybody was buying them have been next to worthless for five years or more. Showing some signs of life lately, but we can't expect to get much out of them with the disaster all the Born-Agains and Ralph Nadar visited on this country. We can't expect to produce enough art to have a chance for success that way, shoot -- we can't even blog enough for a strong blog presence. Oh woe, oh sorrow!

Such a joke -- really!

I'm sitting here, in good health, at my laptop writing into this the wonderful web word-processing service that used to be "Writely" and now is Google Docs & Spreadsheets, connected wirelessly through the free FON wireless router I share with the world, being a "Fonero", I can hook up to any FON wireless I find in the world.

I have my new (Intel) iMac busy stitching together a few hundred video stills to make a panorama photo of the lovely NYC
Downtown Skyline view I have out the window on this fine, sunny, Fall day. My old G4 Mac is busy with some Photoshop actions, tweaking the saturation, contrast and sharpness on about 700 stills which I gathered out of some video panning I did earlier this morning of the skyline and which will make yet another pano-photo for our painting study. The G4 is also playing a fine batch of old country songs through the "Hank Williams Station" I set up on Pandora.

So, I have real problems. I'm keeping two powerful computers automatically assisting my art, another computer sending these words to a server Google maintains and then to this blog which globally publishes them. The room's filled with music that Pandora selects for me based on my history of hitting "thumbs up" or "thumps down" buttons in reaction to its choices. My cute girlfriend, whom I love so very much, is sitting across the room from me busy with her desk work. A fresh breeze flows through the window.

And I was complaining!

My biggest problem is where to eat lunch -- should we pick a spot ten blocks away so we can walk to it or should we make something here, eat it in the bedroom, watch a DVD and maybe nap? Exercise or nap? Home food or restaurant? Man, life is rough!

Calico panorama FON Pandora NYC Downtown

Thugs

I'm glad your Canucks are doing well, I haven't heard the Canuck Outsider recently, I'll have to catch another one soon. That guy is a great commenter. Go Canucks!

Re: Beckett, do you think it was a simple matter of depression? Not that depression is simple, but I wonder because, as you recount what you learned from the bio, he got better during WWII, which I conjecture could have helped focus his attention outside his self, then he got attention for his work and gained some hope. Sounds like the world and the love of other people, for his work at least, drew him out of depression. Is that too simplistic?

Who wouldn't be depressed if they were involved with a Christian belief system. (I'm so impatient with any of these mono-theists religious thugs, the way they degrade daily experience, bullying women and children, projecting life's meaning onto a nether world defined by preachers). I'm with your yoga teacher.

Since you say you don't know how I am with Beckett, I can tell that you haven't noticed yet the blog comments, i.e. you haven't read my comment on "Edgy". I'd like us to start using the comments and their replies to branch off specific discussions. Since our readers are not using them yet, we may as well. Twenty years after my High School drama interest in Beckett, I gained a new interest in him in the '80s when I was reading and reading about Joyce. After dipping into "Finnegans Wake" for a couple of years, I read some of a Beckett novel (don't remember the title). It was fun in a dreamy way. When I read things like that, I'm very pleased by the inner images which spring from these seemingly incomprehensible word strings.

The weather here in New York this morning is about as good as it gets anywhere, low 70s, clear sky, slight breeze. All I can say about the weather is that it is way-whacky everywhere. San Fran and Sonoma, like you, have had too much rain, Hawaii, where daughter, Heather and husband Jim may be moving soon, is absolutely washed away with historically unprecedented amounts of rain. Here, we had a mild winter, a record one-day snow fall which melted away in three days and now, a record dry March. Glaciers melting into the oceans, all these port cities are threatened, no telling what's going to happen anywhere. I'm just glad that the global discussion has gotten beyond questioning whether there is climate change and now is pondering whether we've passed a tipping point. When the oil mafia, which controls this country, is defeated, the world can make some progress towards providing future generations with an environment they can live in.

Centre/Center Gets It Right

Centre/Center
Mary Burns

The settings for Centre/Center are West Sonoma County, California of the late '60s; frozen northern British Columbia of the mid '70s; Vancouver, B.C. and the Oregon coast of the mid '80s.

Centre/Center's cast of characters include: a daughter whose cultural, political choices put her at odds with her mainstream suburban family; pot-smoking hippies with anti-science attitudes and neo-pagan rituals; anti-war protesters; a LSD casualty who liberates a motorcycle from an owner who doesn't respect it's need to be ridden; a woman who permanently borrows without permission her friend's truck because she thinks he can get along without it; a drug dealer; an abandoned child searching for her mother and coming to terms with an uncomfortable truth about her father; a disillusioned and angry Vietnam veteran who lives in isolated northern wilderness and fathers a child with a woman stronger than he and another Veteran burn-out lost to a hobo life.

The novel is in three sections, in the first section the omnipotent narrator drifts through the thoughts and histories of a group of young people challenged by the stresses of the Viet Nam War Era. The second section's narration is tensely focused on a couple in a wilderness cabin. The third and final section is the first-person narrative of a determined, capable 20 year old girl.

Of course, I'm not an unbiased reviewer, Mary Burns is a friend of mine, my partner on this blog. I first knew her in Sonoma County, California of the late '60's. Although this book is not strictly auto-biographical, several people we both knew are recognizable, in composite and it is dedicated to the mutual friend who introduced us.

The settings, social attitudes and interactions of the first section are all quite familiar to me, she thoroughly manifests the era and illustrates the way we were. The thoughtfulness, the self-seriousness, the moral dilemmas we tackled, all ring true. The shifting, drifting narration of the section accurately evokes the mood of the hippie life-style we enjoyed.

I'm a stranger to the wilderness setting of the second section, though it is clear from the writing alone that Mary is not. Though Mary and I have been in correspondence for decades, I last saw her in 1970 as she and her young daughter drove away, headed north. They continued until they reached the far northern wilderness. Again, she brings authority to this northern wilderness story of a strong woman and a troubled man.

With intimate knowledge from observation, Mary clearly narrates the third section through the voice of a character of the same generation as Mary's daughter. The character's adventures while on her quest have the truth of fiction and brings the novel to an enlightened completetion.

Mary's my friend. She also wrote a great book that gets it right.

Location, Location, Location!

Regarding the play, which I did not see, I could point out the obvious, a one-actor show places a lot of pressure on the actor's performance to carry the intention of the script and the design of the production. Audiences change, the actor's ability varies from night to night, from place to place, no two audiences see the same show. As for the New York reviewer's published response indicating a provincialism in New York, there are so many New Yorks, one person's published review cannot speak for New York generally.

While stereo-types are unfair and harmful, there usually is some truth behind them. If I, for mean fun, applied the prevailing stereo-types to this case, I'd assume the New York reviewer was corrupt and the Washington reviewer envious. But, I should just stick with having no insights.

I quickly researched the geography of people involved with the play: the playwright, Will Eno, born in Jack Kerouac's home town of Lowell, Massachusetts, now living in Brooklyn, his plays were first produced in London; director,Hal Brooks, a native of Philadelphia, who began his career as an actor and director in San Francisco; the actor, James Urbaniak, born in Bayonne, New Jersey; the NY Times reviewer who praised it, Charles Isherwood, was a West Coast critic, formally writing for Variety, recently moved to the New York Times.

Rather than proving this group had little to do with New York, it demonstrates what is typical of New York. The people who work here, particularly the movers and shakers in the Arts, Fashion, Publishing, Advertising and Finance moved here from somewhere else. Careerists, once in New York, seem to put on blinders, only noticing New York work. They think they don't don't need to learn from developments elsewhere, because it won't matter until it gets here, they think. So, yes, that's provincialism, in their career focus, but then since they all have family and childhood friends elsewhere, they do know something about other places. Often those places are on other continents. The native born and raised New Yorkers are generally as ignorant and intolerant as people everywhere, I guess, but, they travel, for vacations or business, the people I encounter move around the globe quite a bit. Add to that, the beloved internet and other media bringing information from all over, is it really possible for anyone to be provincial, truly unaware of happenings outside their town?

Speaking of Theater
I've been to only two Broadway shows, one where I saw the amazing Ian McKellen and Helen Mirren, another where I saw a favorite movie actress, Jennifer Jason Leigh. Both events were during the post 9/11 period when Mayor Rudi recommended attending a show for the health of us all. The smoke and smell from the "pile" wafting into the mid-town theater weighted the theatrical experience with both poignancy and urgency. As a general rule, I'm not willing to give the hours necessary for attending theater. I wish that wasn't true, it's a symptom of being the artist with a day job. If I painted all day, I'd gladly go out at night.

Since You Didn't Ask
My personal, general opinion of New York is that it's a good place for those who don't know better, unfortunately, I do. For the delights of urban life, my experience of San Francisco was better. As for delightful living, any rural place would be better, I experienced rural living in Sonoma County. But, rather than go back to San Fran or to Sonoma, I'd go some place new. There are many areas of the globe I'd like to live, some for city, some for country living, some for excitement, some for tranquility. My ideal life schedule would be to shift with the seasons from city to country to sea side, to small town, to mountains, to cultural centers, to isolated plains, and on and on. A co-worker asked me recently if I had been to any area I didn't like. I couldn't think of a fast answer, although, after a while, I thought of Indianapolis, Houston and Southern California's Orange County. But, I believe I could enjoy any location, even those.

There is always deep history, natural landscape, cultural curiosities which would bring pleasure anywhere. In the way back era of our early adulthood, the Haight-Ashbury Oracle published "The Houseboat Summit", a long transcription of a conversation featuring Tim Leary, Alan Ginsberg and Gary Synder on Alan Watts' houseboat, (Oracle no. 7, Allen Cohen, ed. 1967) do you happen to remember reading it? I thought Gary Synder made the most sense, unlike Tim Leary, Alan Ginsberg who advocated those in out-lying areas make the Haight or East Village pilgrimage, Snyder encouraged young people stay where they are, investigate the historical and present-day life of their area's indigenous people, study their local landscape and meditate on the heavens. His quotes stuck with me through the decades:

"... I say, okay, get in touch with the Indian culture here. Find out what was here before. Find out what the mythologies were. Find out what the local deities were. You can get all of this out of books. Go and look at your local archaeological sites. Pay a reverent visit to the local American Indian tombs, and also the tombs of the early American settlers. Find out what your original ecology was. Is it short grass prairie, or long grass prairie here? Go out and live on the land for a while. Set up a tent and camp out and watch the land and get a sense of what the climate here is. Because, since you've been living in a house all your life, you probably don't know what the climate is ... Then decide how you want to make your living here. Do you want to be a farmer, or do you want to be a hunter and food gatherer? You know, start from the ground up, and you can do it in any part of this country today...cities and all...For this continent I took it back to the Indians. Find out what the Indians were up to in your own area. Whether it's Utah, or Kansas, or New Jersey..."
Excerpts from Articles about the Vallejo Ferryboat

Cell-Talkers, Keep It To Yourselves!
Somehow this all gets to proposals for definitions you wanted in On The Phone regarding the absence/presence issue involving the proper use of modern communication tools. The line of mine which you quoted made it seem that I was advocating someone enriching their present with cellphone calls, I was not. I meant being enriched by education, whether from research or correspondence. I hate cell phones, not much interested in telephones, either. Some people get a lot from the telephone, I do not. However, I do listen to others speak on radio and internet audio. I appreciate well edited reports or well written and delivered speeches. Without these remote inputs into my life, I wouldn't have half the knowledge I enjoy today. I also read -- sites, blogs, email and books. I was suggesting that education from these sources enrich our lives. That's my story, I'm sticking to it.

I seldom use phones, but if others like to, that's fine -- if they don't call me or conduct their calls within my hearing.

Overhearing any kind of conversation in public places is seldom fun, when I can't get away from them, I'm unhappy. Overhearing a cell-talker is the worst. If two people are present there is twice the chance for them to become aware that their voices are annoying others. One person straining to communicate through a constricted cellphone data stream has little chance of being aware of their voice's affect on others close by. The poor connections and the compressed audio forces the cell-talkers to project their voices unnaturally. Add to this, the cell phone technology causes interjections to wipe out both audio streams, neither party can hear either voice making for a lot of "What?".

People talking while walking on the street, I don't mind, I don't hear them over the street noise and I usually think they are either cleverly multi-tasking, perhaps arranging some family or social business while on a routine walk or they are having a carefree strolling conversation with someone who may be walking on another street. My Dad and I regularly talk by cell phone when I'm walking home, often he'll be walking in his park, it's a good thing. But, when in a crowd, in a building, in a bus or train, I expect all of us to hang up. These are the time for texting. Sadly, too often, they don't. My world-traveling son-in-law tells me Americans are the worst, the most rude, the most publically loud cell-talkers. This shame is another in a long list of embrassments for us.

My idea of the internet communications being a help is as education. Either receiving expert advise, quality journalism or commentary. Analogous to reading a book. One's physical body is comfortable in a safe situation, aware of the environment enough to remain safe from hazards and to enjoy the light, air, temperature. The mind is with the book, gaining it's insights, entertainments, broadening one's life experience.

Studying Western Hemisphere's indigenous people I take a lesson about the danger of trusting isolation. For a variety of reasons, the people here were unknowingly vulnerable to European, African and Asian invasion. Because the people of this hemisphere had no contact with the rest of the world's people, they had no immunity to the other people's diseases. At first contacts, the Chinese, the Scandinavians, then the Italians and Spanish, huge populations of indigeounous people died of the alien infections. By the time European settlement began, I understand, as much as 80% of the indigenous population had died. The remaining "Indians" were defensively weak, in small groups, warring with each other. The Europeans, whose pathological religion and advanced technology gave them delusions of superiority, ruthlessly corralled the Indians into starvation camps taking all the best land for themselves.

Lagnappe
I appreciated hearing a conversation with articulate New Orleaneans about the present state of their city on Harry Shearer - 'Le Show' last January 8th. Check it out, it's all still relevant: A conversation about New Orleans, with Ti Adleaide Martin, Clancy Dubos, and Chris Rose. I've been enjoying Harry Shearer's Le Show for 20 years now. Once in a while he does a "different" kind of show like this -- I count on him to give me unique insights, week after week, he hasn't let me down.