In their quaking fear, my company has not yet noticed the true power of RSS feeds, which lies in a company’s ability to publish their own announcements to several company web sites or technologies. They think that RSS feeds will be used to stream Reuter’s news — and oh, the scandal. Someone could read a story on Obama’s choice of breakfast drink on our company web site, think we wrote it, and sue us for, uh, talking about the wrong stuff.

I’d like to take a moment to point out that in my former blog, Terrifying Tales from Tech Support, my blog-complaints about stupid, tech-unsavvy users were aimed at young, non-IT-majoring college students. Today my stupid, tech-unsavvy users are IT “professionals” who have worked at my company for years. I’m almost sorry I complained about those poor little philosophy majors, because at least they had the good sense not to enter a career in IT if they didn’t know what a URL is. And in retrospect I think those kids were more tech-savvy than my co-workers.

The following conversations occurred at a recent website redesign meeting. As usual, all the participants are IT people.

Random Asshole Number One: Hey, you know what would be cool? If we had an RSS Feed of our announcements at the top of this site.

Me: Our announcements? What announcements?

My Boss’s Boss: RSS feeds are banned, but I might be able to get them unbanned for this situation if there’s a business need.

Me: But — first things first, what announcements would we be feeding –

Random Asshole Number Two: AN RSS FEED WOULD BE AMAZING!

Me: But, an RSS feed from — ?

Random Asshole Number Three: Holy Crap, an RSS FEED? What an INCREDIBLE IDEA!

Me: But –

Several Random Assholes Chanting Together: RSS FEED! RSS FEED! IT’S WHAT WE NEED! IT WOULD BE A BEAUTIFUL THING!

Me: Ok, but, what announcements would we be feeding?

RA1: Our announcements about outages and stuff.

Me: But those aren’t anywhere to feed from –

RA2: We’d type them in.

RA3: Yes we’d type them in.

Me: So… we’d type them into this site, and then they’d show up on this site, where we typed them?

Everyone: Yes! RSS Feeds! RSS Feeds!

Me: Ok, but that’s not an RSS feed.

RA1: Well, it is if it’s scrolling.

RA2: Yes, that’s what we meant. We want it to scroll.

RA3: Yes, scrolling. That’s what RSS feed means right?

MBB: Right. It means something that scrolls.

Me: Oh, ok. Everyone here thinks that “RSS Feed” = “Thing that scrolls”.

Also, everyone here thinks that “Thing that scrolls” is the hottest thing to hit the World Wide Web since spinning teddy-bear shaped navigation buttons.

That’s good.

She caught me hurrying along in the hall later and stopped me, asking “What is it you need to know about my request?” The following conversation ensued.

Me: I need to know the URLs to those links you wanted posted.

Her: What do you mean?

Me: The URLs. The addresses.

Her: I’m not sure I’m following you.

Me: What is this stuff you want posted? Are these links?

Her: Well, the idea is to give visitors one central location to access documents related to [slow hum of lengthy explanation about business purpose of shit I could care less about... hum... hum...]

Me: I don’t know where that stuff is, and I need to know that, if you expect me to create links to it.

Her: What stuff?

Me: I don’t know… Change Management Docs, any of it, all of it. I don’t know where it is, you have to tell me.

Her: I guess I’m not following you.

Me: What is it exactly that you’re asking for?

Her: Do you want me to send you some screen shots?

Me: Are they screen shots of browser windows with an address bar at the top with an address in it?

Her: Uh…

Me: Sure, send me the screen shots.

Her: [More rambling which illuminates the fact that she only wants one link on our portal, to an existing site that I happen to know about, and the rest of the stuff on THAT site.]

Me: OH. You just want one link, out to IT Documentation. And then the rest of your stuff will be on that site?

Her: I guess I’m not sure what you mean by “site”.

Me: Forget it. I’ll put a link out to Greg’s site, but you’ll have to talk to Greg about posting that other stuff on his site.

Her: Are you sure? I don’t know if he knows how.

Me: I don’t give a flying fuck whether he knows how or not, that seems to be your problem, and possibly his. BUH BYE.

No one else can feel it for you
Only you can let it in
No one else, no one else
Can speak the words on your lips
Drench yourself in words unspoken
Live your life with arms wide open
Today is where your book begins
The rest is still unwritten

Why I must be assaulted with this vapid song every time I set foot into Kroger is anyone’s guess. Who is this woman? Who allowed her to sing? Will someone please stab her in the eye with a fork?

No one else can feel it for you

This lyric is really too stupid for commentary.

I am unwritten, can’t read my mind, I’m undefined…
I break tradition, sometimes my tries, are outside the lines

Oh NO. On top of it all, she’s one of those. I’m a bitch, I’m a lover, I’m a rulebreaker, I am 21 flavors and then some, I never win first place, my socks are never clean. I want to color outside the lines, they love to tell me to color inside the lines, I do color outside the lines, I won’t color inside the lines.

Thanks to these radicals, the fucking coloring book is ruined. How dare they.

She’s a unique snowflake. Sometimes she shaves her legs, sometimes she don’t. She’s the kind of girl who takes a second dose of Tylenol before the four hours is up, who might switch laundry day from Tuesday to Wednesday, who bites into an apple without even washing it first. MY GOD! STOP HER!

Oh, I forgot. No one cares.

But more importantly, what is this trendy backlash against imagined foes who would have teenage girls smelling fewer roses? Where are these lines they must color inside? Who has stepped up and demanded they take more calculus II classes? Don’t we have the opposite problem?

Go out and stand in the rain, Natasha, especially if it keeps you out of the studio.

Me: $9 pint of ice cream?

K: Don’t you go deflating the price. That pint of ice cream was $12.

M: Oh… Is that how much it was?

K: Oh yes.

I remember because that’s what made it ludicrous.

$9 ice cream would have been roughly twice the price of Haagen Dazs. It would have been too much. But $12 is just ludicrous.

M: Yeah. I hope we don’t like it.

K: It is perverse to spend $12 on a pint of ice cream and then hope to not like it.

M: I don’t want to like it. I can’t be paying $12 for ice cream.

K: I don’t want to like it too much. I just want to eat it and say, “That was great! But I don’t necessarily need to do it again.”

M: I don’t tend to like things without doing them again.

Since I’m losing money, it now makes sense to spend more on Altoid gum, whose packaging does not fall apart.

Don’t think you have to build a metal tin to compete, however. The good old fashioned paper/foil wrapping found on all gum was good enough for me and others for the last, what, fifty years?

Stop overengineering your packaging. Frankly, I’d prefer black printing on recycled paper in this age of waste and excess. But I’ll settle for a package that holds the gum in place rather than trying to be all rad and cool.

However, I had to share the baddest ass song I’ve heard in a long time:

Me and the Devil by Gil Scott-Heron.

For those who haven’t heard of it (and I hadn’t til researching Christmas gift ideas), the piecepack is “a set of boardgame parts that can be used to design and play a wide variety of games.” It contains tiles, coins, pawns and dice in four colorful suits. It’s public domain and a couple hundred rule sets have been published out on the web.

Here are the photos. It was easy, as supplies came fit for purpose from http://www.craftparts.com.

The booklet contains a dozen or so top-rated games as reviewed by the “piecepack mailing list”.

Not recognizing the scale of the event, I tried to tune him out. But then I heard the words “thousands of feet” and “live coverage”. Before I knew it I and two co-workers were huddled in my cube, rapt at MSNBC’s coverage of the papery silver flying saucer twisting and turning in the wind at 6,000 feet above the earth.

Thoughts of how much fun he was having with his unlikely caper quickly turned to stomach-churning agony. My heart dropped every time the flimsy edge of the saucer did; it looked for all the world like it might capsize and plummet at any moment. People started to point out that the air is thin up there in the cloud cover. He had probably passed out. He might be breathing helium and asphyxiating. He might be freezing to death. As if the thought of him tumbling out of the sky wasn’t sickening enough.

We watched the craft move precariously across the sky at breathtaking speeds for the entire two hours, right up to the “soft” landing that still looked to me like it could have broken some bones. We watched as the rescuers took an agonizingly long time tying down the balloon and ripping it open. When we heard that there was no boy inside, I immediately believed that he had fallen to his death earlier in the journey.

Few news outlets have considered the possibility that the event was a hoax; most have dismissed the idea citing the parents’ hysteria and the brother’s eyewitness account of the kid climbing into the craft. I say this:

• If reports are to be believed, the dad called the media before calling the police.
• The family has been on reality TV shows, has produced YouTube videos of their kids rapping, loudly promotes the view that humans are descended from aliens, and apparently says on their web site that they are destined to become stars.  You could say that they are fame-seekers.
• The dad says that the balloon was never intended to fly, but to hover around the house. That guy’s not a bad engineer if he unintentionally designed a craft that could rise 10,000 feet into the air and travel 60 miles.
• The once-attached basket that could have held a person was clearly missing in the two hours of footage. We didn’t know about the basket, but the dad did. Maybe that’s why he says he didn’t watch the footage.
• His dad didn’t watch the footage? Who doesn’t pay attention when their kid is hovering on the brink of death for two hours, chased all the while by rescuers who admit they don’t have a good plan for saving him?
• Experts said the craft didn’t move like it was carrying anyone.
• I just did a final search, and it now seems that the kid admitted that the stunt was done “for the show”, making all my speculation fairly redundant. His family is pretending his comment meant something else.
• The media might be embarrassed to admit to giving serious, lengthy coverage to a hoax, especially with so many holes in the story.

And now, I say this.

Gosh, I’ve never felt the way I felt while watching that newscast.  It grabbed the heart of little kid me, who knew no greater longing than to fly. I’d tie garbage bags to stick frames, climb up the TV antenna on the side of the house, and jump — but nothing. I knew a hovercraft existed somewhere, and that one lucky year I’d score one for Christmas. My favorite book was The Wonderful Flight of the Mushroom Planet, a story of two boys who actually built a spaceship that worked. It could be done. I was sure of it.

How must that kid have felt to have climbed into that craft, loosened the ropes and set off into the boundless sky? How must his joy have turned to terror? Was he exhilarated? Was he sick? It seemed fitting that the fantasy of climbing heavenward toward the gods would start to look like a tragedy.

Grown-up me was mesmerized too. A child rescue is captivating enough, but this one provided so many terrifying possibilities. He would live. He would die. He would fall out of the sky. The rescuers would botch the job and deflate the balloon. We’d see his untimely demise on television. A six year old kid. Dying in front of the whole world in a freak amateur space accident.

And then — the whole thing was such a page out of science fiction. The story wouldn’t have been nearly as compelling if the craft had looked like a familiar colorfully-striped hot-air balloon. It was a spaceship.  A whimsical, shimmering, dangerous, deadly little spaceship carrying an innocent passenger into the depths of space. A passenger who, thanks to the hubris of his mad-scientist father, would die in the name of science. Like little Laika.

The story made me feel alive.

When it was over, I wanted the feeling back again. I tried to get it by re-watching footage of the craft tossing in the wind, but my crack-high was inevitably doused by some newscaster mentioning the never-imperiled child and his uneventful stint in the family attic.

I wish I knew how the radio listeners of 1938 felt after they’d learned that Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds broadcast was a fake. Were they angry? Relieved? Or glad to have been pulled out of their mundane little lives for just a moment, into a real-life science fiction fantasy?

I believe that I was duped. And I’m ok with that, because of the big, momentous way that my life felt changed on Thursday afternoon. Even if it was an illusion.

I was given the unpalatable choice of receiving 30 downloads for nearly the same price, paying $360 a year to keep the same number of downloads, or canceling my subscription. I’m paid ahead so I’ll be canceling in February.

While exploring my options I discovered last.fm, Amie Street, Lala, and Audio Lunchbox. You can check them out yourself, but they variously offer streaming radio, cheap Mp3s and free MP3s.  And of course there’s always Amazon’s under $5 page.

My cheap eMusic plan allowed me to experiment. About half my downloads each month were albums I knew I wanted while the other half were whims based on reviews, recommendations or forays into new musical territory. Now that that’s not possible, eMusic isn’t of much use to me.

It turns out that I want to hear tons of new music at least as much as I want to own it, so as my main eMusic replacement strategy I’ll be subscribing to Sirius without ado. XM Radio looked nearly identical, but Sirius boasted slightly “edgier” content and plenty of weird mash-up channels to satisfy my urge for new music. My car stereo is already satellite-ready so we’ll just need to purchase a device or two for the homestead.

With that out of the way, my next move is to acquire more Manu Chao albums. EMusic only had one, and La Radiolina’s been kicking my ass since I downloaded it a couple of months ago. I lack the musical context to give it a proper review, but it’s a festival of pop ear-candy awesomeness with plenty of sirens, punk rage and carribean beats. I’m told it’s politically important too, but most songs are in Spanish so I can’t confirm. And Manu Chao is prolific, with a large catalogue including solo albums and work with several bands. Finally, someone I like is prolific.

I never thought I’d end up on a modern Latin kick, but actually it makes perfect sense. My gateway drugs were ska, Sublime, and the mariachi that’s been creeping into indie bands from Calexico to Crooked Fingers. And maybe it’s just me, but I think modern Latin might be Doing Great Things at the moment.

This morning I noticed that Fosforo, a band I found on Free Music Archive recently, has a song about how great Obama is. Fermin Muguruza has turned out to be fairly awesome too, and jazzy. Who doesn’t need another version of 54-46?