Educational institution punctuation fail.
I just sent this email to the U of M Student Financial Operations office. Does that me a jerk?
Hello,
Thanks for making it so easy to pay online. I do have a complaint, though.
On the Make Payment page of the QuickPAY ASP system, there is a sentence that says:
“Note: This screen is for Student Account payments only – Not for Enrollment Deposit’s!”Never mind the somewhat sporadic capitalization and the use of a hyphen where there should be an em dash (I’m something of a stickler) — the apostrophe in “Deposit’s” should not be there.
Thank you!
-Noah
So You Lied to Them.
Spoiler alert! If you have not seen Wicked but intend to, do not read on!
Two weeks ago today, I saw Wicked at the Detroit Opera House (which was great except for the seating fiasco). Two weeks later, I’m still listening to it — and thinking about it. I already knew the music, but the Original Broadway Cast recording is brilliantly done so as to not reveal the plot; therefore, I had constructed my own version of the plot in my head, one based on traditional character interpretations. I was in for quite a surprise, and two weeks later, I’m still analyzing the story, analyzing the characters, and generally thinking about what made it so compelling.
First, a note on the production. As a theater tech guy, that’s usually what I watch for. It was a very good production: the sets were minimal but great, the lighting during the last scene of Act I was absolutely brilliant (pun intended), the pit was really good (as was the pit mix), and I could hear everyone without straining, although the mix between Elphaba and Glinda was a bit uneven sometimes. And although outside my area of expertise, the costumes and wigs, especially those of the Ozians, were at once over the top and perfectly fitting. But more than the tech, it was the story and characters that drew me in (a highly unusual occurrence), so that’s what I’m going to talk about.
The Oz of the musical (I’m only a few pages into the Gregory Maguire novel on which it is based right now) is based more on that of the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz than the Oz of L. Frank Baum‘s 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. It is actually highly consistent (though not perfectly so — the Scarecrow at the end comes to mind) with the film, which is impressive considering the unexpected interpretations of the characters.
In trying to figure out why I personally found the story of Wicked, and the character of Elphaba in particular, so compelling, I first came up with the obvious answer about how everyone has the desire to be accepted rather than being the outsider, but I think it goes deeper. For me I think it has to do with two things: one is that she does what she knows is right, not what society tells her is right; the other is that I really love how she holds people accountable for their failings, like when she finds out that the Wizard is a fraud. I don’t know; I just think she’s a really cool character. Plus the fact that the story turns something familiar on its head and makes you think about the effect on the social psyche of which labels are able to persist (i.e. history is written by the victors).
This is achieved by adding a tremendous amount of depth to one one of the modern literature’s flattest, and most flatly evil, characters, the Wicked Witch of the West, named Elphaba by Maguire (apparently in honor of L. Frank Baum, whose initials, L.F.B., when pronounced phonetically, are “el fa ba”). G(a)linda, the Good Witch of the North, is still a two-dimentional character, but rather than seeking good, she is really just seeking attention in the form of popularity. The Wizard of Oz himself, we find out, is a fascist ruler intent on keeping the Ozians (an ethnic majority) happy by scapegoating and persecuting the animals (an allegorical ethnic minority). This is the stroke of genius that makes the entire show so compelling: Glinda is willing to sacrifice morals and grovel in submission to the Wizard in order to feed her own ambition, her political career, whereas Elphaba stays true to her sense of right and wrong when she is confronted with the fact that not everything is as she believed, that the Wizard lied to the people of Oz about his power and intentions, and is willing to abandon her lifelong dream of working with the Wizard, becoming more cynical all the while.
In this sense, Elphaba really is a fascinating character, and, I think, the best character in the story. Best in the sense that she (and Fiyero) were the only uncorrupted characters.
In one of the most important scenes of the second act (Wonderful), the Wizard tells Elphaba how the world is and about how he got hooked on power and glory and being “wonderful”, but she knows that it’s wrong and refuses to accept it (“So you lied to them.” — a line brilliantly delivered by Idina Menzel on the OBC recording). He goes on to explain how you’re “a liberator or ruthless invader” depending on “which label is able to persist,” powerful commentary on the power of history. It sort of reminds me of how the world is a much nicer place when you’re young because you’re naïve, then you find out all the nasty stuff that goes on behind the scenes (i.e., behind the curtain).
(At this point I have to step out of the story for a moment to comment on how incredible Idina Menzel’s performance is on the OBC recording; specifically, the way her tone changes from light, airy, and optimistic to dark and cynical. (I only mention this performance because it’s the one I’ve heard the most.) Compare The Wizard and I to No Good Deed. Or the contrast between “I can’t want it anymore” (wistful) and “Something has changed within me” in Defying Gravity. You can hear the growth and transformation of the character in her voice. Wow.)
Everyone else submitted to the Wizard’s very fascist agenda (all-powerful leader, discrimination against an innocent segment of the population as a scapegoat, a literal witch hunt, etc.). Elphaba saw through it all, and made it about the truth and common good rather than about herself. As she says to Glinda, “I hope you’re proud how you would grovel in submission to feed your own ambition.” That’s not what “Elphie” was about.
Glinda, of course, was all about pleasing others; that made her happy. Even at the beginning of Act II, when it becomes clear that Fiyero doesn’t love her, by the end of Thank Goodness she is apparently happy again because she is basking in the praise of the Ozians.
Elphaba does have two lines that have me stumped, though: at the very end of As Long As You’re Mine when she says, “…for the first time, I feel wicked”; and during No Good Deed, when she asks, “Was I really seeking good, or just seeking attention?”
Personally, I think the latter question was a moment of self-doubt brought on by her awareness of her friend Glinda’s personality, but I’m not sure. “If I’m flying solo, at least I’m flying free” would seem to corroborate that.
The wickedness referred to at the end of As Long as You’re Mine, I wonder, may just be a stand-in for “naughty”, which is a wonderfully humanizing interpretation. This is in contrast with the wickedness referred to at the end of No Good Deed (“Let all Oz be agreed: I’m wicked through and through”), which I think is only a little bit about how she sees herself (I’m not convinced she really believes the “no good deed goes unpunished” creed; it’s a heat-of-the-moment passion thing) and more about angrily coming to terms with how she is viewed.
Before I wrap it up, I also have to quickly comment on Stephen Schwartz’s use of leitmotifs. The way the songs reference one another to represent certain characters and ideas is incredible. (I noticed a lot of the subtitles of the score before reading this, but it’s a great discussion of the themes and leitmotifs, as well as the creative process.)
Weird brain typing thing
I was trying to type the word “without”, and without paying attention I typed “within”. I didn’t notice it till I went back to proofread. Is the word “in” stored in neurons near the word “out” or something?
I’m pretty sure that type of “proximity typo” has happened to me before, too. Why does that happen?
What to do about the automakers
Apparently there’s a limit on how many characters can be in a reply to a posted item on Facebook, so I have to post this here.
I’m responding to a comment that was generally in agreement with Tom Friedman’s column of 11 November 2008 about what to do about the automakers, but also frightened of the implications their failure will have on the economy, especially here in southeast Michigan:
I know, it’s a tough one. I feel sorry for all the employees (and retirees) who are being screwed, but on the other hand, if the market isn’t allowed to punish the shareholders (who will in turn punish the management), nothing will ever improve.
I also think that ultimately education is going to have to improved because there is no future for manufacturing in the US; Americans will do R&D, manufacturing will happen overseas. We just need more Americans capable of doing “brain work”.
My brilliant plan (just thought up while typing this): the government acquires the assets of the automakers for pennies on the dollar and auctions them off to the highest bidder (i.e. Toyota, Honda, and defense contractors (the only manufacturing that should stay domestic)).
With the capital raised by the sale, put some into health care, but most of it should go into alternative energy research and training. The white-collar auto workers can be trained to do engineering, etc., and the blue-collar workers can handle the massive deployment of new energy technologies.
(While they’re waiting for the research and engineering to happen, they can fix what President Elect Obama(!) has been calling our “crumbling infrastructure”. The Eisenhower Interstate System was designed to last 50 years[citation needed]. Time’s up.)
Photoshop in the Real World
My dad just emailed me this cool picture of Photoshop in the “real world”.
It’s interesting because it’s cool, but from an HCI perspective it also drives home the importance of affordances: you don’t just pick a tool, you actually grab it and use it; you don’t just choose a color, you actually dip your brush in it.
Proxyless Domain Proxy
The Premise
I have a site for a school project that I’m hosting on a school server. I want to keep it hosted there for reliability/accountability reasons (i.e. if their servers go down on the day of a presentation it’s their fault; if I use my discount host, it’s my fault), but I’d like to use a custom domain.
Neither school nor my host seem to allow proxies (RewriteRule ^/~nliebman(.*)$ http://localchi\.com$1 [P] doesn’t work), so there had to be a different solution.
The Solution
First I need to credit this to pippo over at Dev Shed.
Rather than having Apache rewrite the school URL to my own URL, the trick is to have PHP do all the work, and simply rewrite the PHP file’s URL (on my server) to show the filename from the school server.
On my server, I created the following PHP file, called getRemote.php:
<?php readfile( "http://projects.si.umich.edu/~nliebman/".$_SERVER[ 'REQUEST_URI' ] ); ?>
Then, I added this rule to my .htaccess:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/getRemote.php [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /getRemote.php [L]
I didn’t need to touch anything on the school server. I do take a performance hit since my server needs to get the content from the school server before serving it to me, but it’s pretty light-weight stuff, so it’s worth it for the pretty URL.
Stupid Excel 2008 Bug
I just have to say that there’s a totally stupid bug in Excel 2008′s window handling: like any normal program, you can use Command+` to cycle through all open windows. What’s weird is that Command+` also cycles through documents that have been minimized to the doc. Annoying, seeing as the main reason I minimize docs is so I can cycle through just some of the ones I have open.
While I’m at it, if you have a cell that, say, starts with bold text and is followed by normal text, if you auto-complete a new cell with that same text, it applies whatever the formatting of the first character is to the entire cell.
Who wrights this stuff? Oh yeah…Microsoft.
Orientation
I just have to say that it’s really weird (in a cool, good way) that I’m meeting all these people who actually think about some of the same stuff I do. It’s actually really cool. Full orientation starts tomorrow!
Twitter…
I am now on Twitter as Noleli. Truly, I have no idea why.
The Non-Distracting Nature of Notifications
I had long assumed that notifications, like those served up by Growl, would be distracting. After all, how should I be able to concentrate while being bombarded with pretty little updates on everything from what song just started playing to what that latest IM said to how many new articles NetNewsWire has decided to throw in my face?
Ok, I admit that the NetNewsWire notifications are distracting (I’ll turn them off as soon as I’m done writing this post), but most of them aren’t so bad. There is one, though, that I have found, somewhat counterintuitively, to actually be conducive to staying focused: the new email notification.
The reason is that even without Growl notifications I’m going to be made aware of any new email by the dock icon badge. That is what makes it impossible to ignore. The vast majority of the email I receive is not important, but what if this one is? The curiosity is just too much to handle, and the act of stopping what I’m doing to check that new email is very disruptive. With a notification that tells me the sender, subject, and first little bit of the body, though, without even moving my mouse or stopping what I’m doing I know that I can safely ignore that email.
Who knew that more information could actually help keep you focused?
