www.post-hipster.com

..so I’ve just surfaced from a couple Kafka-esque evenings spent in xbox tech support limbo. I won’t bore you with the details of why (suffice to say, Microsoft’s policy of rewarding its long-time customers by deleting their access still has some kinks to work out), but I’ve gone from xbox tech support, to xbox level 2 tech support, to email support with Windows Live ID, back to Xbox tech support, to billing, and back to xbox leve 2 tech support, where online game gambling casinogame casino online slots,best casino slots online,online casino slotsgambling casino online,internet casino gambling online,online casinobaccarat ruletelechargement gratuites casinoles crapsvideo poker machinesnouveau casino bonus sans depotjeu video de pokerles règles de la roulettenouveau bonus casino770jeux gratuits roulettela roulette jeux gratuitescasino en ligne sans depotnew casino bonuscasino bonus sans depotsbonus sans depot des casinojeu de casino gratuitslogiciel video pokercertificat bonus casino 770jeu casino en ligne,jeux casino en ligne,jeu de casino gratuites en lignebonus casino pokerreponse casino on netjeux slot machinejeu gratuites casinobonus casinos en lignecasino avec bonus de bienvenuejouer au poker casinojeu pro poker tourtelecharger poker holdem gratuitesjeu tour de pokerjeu de poker pc gratuitesjeu de poker gratuitementstreap poker gratuitespartie de poker en lignetournois de poker en lignela stratégie texas holdemtournoi poker onlinejouer au stud pokerjeu poker portablesjouer streap pokerregles poker omaharegle poker omahatélécharger texas holdem en lignemastery series texas holdemjouer au poker francaispoker hold hem en ligneclub pokerpoker a telechargertélécharger gratuitement des jeux de poker the last guy I talked to hung up on me (”accidentally” I’m sure). Irate, I called back, trying to bypass the Mike the X-Treme!!11! voice-activated computer phone menu by shouting “OPERATOR! OPERATOR! OPERATOR!” at it until stopped trying to sell me upgrades and connected me to a live person. So, after about 4 hours of holding, transferring, re-explaining the problem, re-explaining why their proposed solutions won’t work, re-explaining the problem, re-trying the proposed solutions so I could re-tell them the exact error messages, holding, listening to the Most X-Treme!!11!est Of All Hold Music, transferring, etc… this last person fixed the problem in 6 minutes. She said, “hmm. well, we could do this….” and it was done.

I’m sure you can tell by the subject of this post that the problem here is that the difference was the last person I talked to and the first 6 was that she was American. And it really makes me feel awful that, when I heard an accent I recognized as not-Indian, a tiny little part of me went, “oh, thank god.”

Intellectually, I know it’s not India’s fault. Intellectually, I know that the people who man these tech support lines are given a strict script to follow and are probably not allowed to vary from it too much. I know that, for every phone operator out there, there are probably 100 people who want their job, so the pressure to fulfill the time quotas and to never veer from the script must be intense. And that the scripts probably work for 95% of the callers, and that I only call tech support for those issues that the script can’t handle.

But still, it reinforces a subtle racism when, if the Indian front-lines can’t solve the problem, and they bump you up far enough up the chain, you eventually reach an American voice with actual authority to make changes. I think that’s what gets me most. Because before I talked to Honkey McPersonable, I talked to an Indian in the billing department who said what I was asking for wasn’t possible. It’s like they get the Indians to do all the dirty work, sending customers through endless loops of transferring and holding and red tape, and they ride in like a Great White Hope, bestowing clarity and authority to those who have risen above the fray.

So F— you, Microsoft, and F— you, BellSouth (another, much longer story). F— you for making me dread hearing what I used to think was the Most Awesomest Accent of English Ever. F— you for reducing your tech support to reports on time-per-call and calls-answered-per-day. F— you for not giving your farmed-out Support Centers any authority to act on customer’s behalf. F— you for your whole poopy Tech Support system.

…so I wrote (what I think is a) clever little function (well, two functions) to take a complex php variable and turn it into a json-ized string, ready to be passed back to javascript. It works on the principle that json really only has a couple rules if text formatting: strings go inside double quotes, with both slashes and double-quotes escaped, iterative arrays are comma delimited inside brackets [obj1,obj2], and associative arrays go inside curly-brackets {key:val,key:val}. Using these three points, and a little bit (ok, a lot of) recursion, and voila, an elegant little function.

Of course, this doesn’t handle unicode, or any really special cases, but if you’re looking for a basic object parser, and you dont’ have access to php 5.2, which has it built into the language, it’ll do the trick…

/**
 * input an object, returns a json-ized string of said object
 * @return
 * @param $obj Object
 */
function php_json_encode($obj) {
	if (is_array($obj)) {
		if (array_is_associative($obj)) {
			$arr_out = array();
			foreach ($obj as $key=>$val) {
				$arr_out[] = ‘”‘ . $key . ‘”:’ . php_json_encode($val);
			}
			return ‘{’ . implode(’,', $arr_out) . ‘}’;
		} else {
			$arr_out = array();
			$ct = count($obj);
			for ($j = 0; $j < $ct; $j++) {
				$arr_out[] = php_json_encode($obj[$j]);
			}
			return ‘[' . implode(',', $arr_out) . ']‘;
		}
	} else {
		if (is_int($obj)) {
			return $obj;
		} else {
			$str_out = stripslashes(trim($obj));
			$str_out = str_replace(array(’”‘, ”, ‘/’), array(’\”‘, ‘\’, ‘/’), $str_out);
			return ‘”‘ . $str_out . ‘”‘;
		}

	}
}

function array_is_associative($array) {
	$count = count($array);
	for ($i = 0; $i < $count; $i++) {
		if (!array_key_exists($i, $array)) {
			return true;
		}
	}
	return false;
}

…so here’s something you might not know about me. Even though I have a fancy schmancy music degree from a fancy schmancy university, am an indie rock snob to the point of making my daughter listen to lullaby renditions of Radiohead to lull her to sleep, I, Chip Harlan, Mister “I have no guilty pleasures music,”, Mister “I inwardly scoff at your plebeian musical tastes,” love El Patron, Atlanta’s “regional mexicano” radio station. A lot. In fact, as of late I’ve been listening to El Patron more than WREK, Atlanta’s bastion of all things obscure and indie. A lot more.

And I’m not sure exactly why. I mean, a lot of it, chord-progression-wise is the formulaic of the formulaic, and with very un-indie rock recording values. I’m pretty sure the prevailing aesthetic is to make live instruments (especially brass) sound as if they were being played by Casio keyboards. I guess maybe because, even though it’s music that’s been sent through the Pop Music System, there’s still no mistaking its place of origin. It still retains it’s Mexican heart, I guess. And, not knowing any Spanish (besides the obligatory “mi coracon” that seems to be in every song), it’s easy to forgive horrible lyrics if you don’t know what they’re saying in the first place.

Anyway. So the point is, I’ve been listening to El patron a lot, and for a while there was a song I heard pretty much every time I turned it on called El Papa de los Pollitos. Now, let me reiterate, and this is key to this whole anecdote, that I Do Not Speak Spanish. At all. So the only thing I can get out of the lyrics is the “Pollitos” (and only because of the restaurant on 5th ave), and that it means “baby chickens.” So I figure that it’s some sort of hard luck ballad, you know, “Oh, my life is hard and dusty, I work in the fields for people who don’t respect me, I have no position of stature or authority, the only things I have for my own are these baby chickens I’m raising. Kind of like a mariachi version of Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront, taking care of his pigeon coop, you know? A Sad Sack Ballad.

And I like it, so one day I find the album on Itunes, put it into my shopping cart, and like a month later, I finally blow the 10 bucks and buy the album. And I think to myself, hey, maybe I’ll send a copy of the pollitos song to Oliver, he knows Spanish, maybe he can provide a rough translation. But, you know, iTunes and its DRM, sending him a copy is going to be problematic. And so this is the point where I go onto youtube, and find the video, and find out just how accurate my assumption of what this song is all about actually is:

…so what have I learned here? Do I still like the song, now that I know what the lyrics are about? Yeah, sure, the music is still the music, and it’s got a catchy melody and arrangement, that Nortena vibe, so yes, I still like the song. Do I like it as much? Well, yes, and no. No, because, as one who generally favors the Underdog, finding out the lyrics aren’t about Workin’ for “The Man” as much as about being “The Man,” I identify with the protagonist a lot less. But yes, because I find something so interesting in taking something as endemic to modern urban inner-city life as Gangsta and adapting it to such an non-urban-sounding idiom of Mexican Folk Music. I don’t know if it’s a sense of musical irony or what. It’s interesting, though, that there’s this entire genre of music that, instead of being relegated to guys in Sombreros and Nudie Suits in the back of divey Mexican restaurants, has had new life blown into it by infusing it with the character of modern urban music. Not the sound, mind you, just the character. It might talk like a foulmouthed crack-dealer in the heart of Brooklyn, but it still sounds like the north Mexican desert. And since it retains its heart, I can forgive the crappy boast lyrics.

But seriously, and I’m sorry I’m making this joke, what is it with Mexicans and the shooting guns up into the air?

…so my contract ended a couple weeks ago, and you’d think that this would be the perfect time for me to sit around in my underpants all day and write blog posts about the menial things that piss me off, but I’m finding I’m too busy trying to find more work. So in lieu of some postings, here’s a charming little ditty, written in 1926 by Lee David and Billy Rose. First made popular by legendary crooner Gene Austin, it’s been floating in and out of the public consciousness for years - I could list the people who’ve recorded it, but heck, you can read wikipedia as well as I can. I even have a copy of Nancy Sinatra singing it I picked up from emusic.com.

Of course, I’ll always remember it from the recording below. Mad props to Christian for a) having this in his mp3 collection, b) playing it at a dinner party he invited us to, and c) sending me a copy.

or download here

And, I’ll try to dig this up, but the first in-a-studio recording I ever made, back in, um, 1994, for a compilation we made of Ithacan indie rock - in addition to being all art-musicy and (I’m the first to admit) bad - the song involved two tracks of AM radio (stereo panned, natch), drifting along the dial, and after all my crappy singing and guitar playing had ended, and this little ditty drifted into range.

Also, for my crappy vocal track I sang into the broken pickups of one of Schtephen’s guitars, because microphones were for squares, man. I really must go find that CD again, because not only is it hilarious, but I can embarrass Schtephen with his first foray into band-music-authorship, the Jesus Super Rodeo…

Now, honestly I don’t know much about Bobby Fuller, but this clip sounds so totally punk rock.

Incidentally, Andrew points out that Bobby is playing Buddy Holly’s strat in this clip. Bobby was a big fan, and had done some work with Sonny Curtis (including “I fought the law”), and Sonny lent him Buddy’s guitar…

Hey, so jessica wrote a blog entry about our fair-weather vegetarianism, and she included my tomato sauce recipe! yay!

Clearly John Lee Hooker was a singin’ hobo, not a stabbin’ hobo..

So every night Jessica and I put Sadie in her crib, and as she looks up at us, we warble out a lullaby for her, often with passages of unintended harmony, kiss her goodnight, and then go into the living room, where we curse a lot and watch R-rated movies.

Our repertoire consists of:

• Home on the Range
• Twinkle Twinkle
• You are my Sunshine
• Plastic Jesus (made famous in Cool Hand Luke, and Transmissions)

But we’re looking for new ones, if anyone has any ideas for sweet indie-rock lullabies…

Of course, there’s always this old chestnut:

1. You should read these periodically to get a sense of how much simpler life was 3000 years ago. Seriously, there’s no “Thou shalt not drive in the HOV lane alone” or “Thou shall pay thine artists for the music they hath created” or “Thou Shalt Thinkest Global and Actest Local” or anything.
2. Most of the “guides for life” commandments (#4-10) can be summed up by the expression “Don’t be an a-hole”
3. Isn’t it weird that God would say he’s “a jealous god” in a commandment? TMI, Dude! I guess He worked on that by the time Jesus rolled around, since He was all lovey-dovey by then.
4. Does that then imply that God can change over time? And how does that work? Does god have a shrink? Or He’s just really good at introspection? I guess just the introspection - He is omniscient, after all. Should be a cakewalk for Him.
5. Wait a second… doesn’t God admitting he’s just a Jealous Guy mean God Himself is violating the “coveting” commandments? Isn’t he just Coveting Baal’s House in this case?
6. The Golden Rule isn’t a commandment, but it arguably should be.
7. #4 (the killing one) doesn’t apply for most folk, so you can consider it a “freebie”
8. Does saying “God Damn it!” really break #3? Since “God” technically is more of a nickname than an actual name. What about “Jesus H Tapdancing Christ?” “Sweet Zombie Jeebus?” Does parody/satire/fair use count?
9. While #6 does in fact admonish stealing, it’s actually OK to steal from big faceless corporations. It’s a little known fact that the Disciples didn’t pay for their cable hookup. Stephen was an unrepentant shoplifter throughout his tenure.
10. “Do not commit adultery,” if you think about it, kinda condones premarital Boning.

(inspired by an intro to a This American Life episode on the prevelance of 10 commandments)