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So I was riding on the commuter train from Boston to Lowell, and the wifi kept cutting out. I am by now inured to losing the Internet connection once or twice during the 40-minute trip (there is a black hole near North Chelmsford), but nine times?

So I found the customer comment form to let them know that the service is deteriorating from 'okay' through 'annoying' to 'why even pretend it's a service?' And I could not submit my feedback on the form they supply. There is a required field called "Topic" with a pulldown menu and the instruction "Please select a Type of Feedback". And there are no options available. Nothing to choose. I clicked "view source" to double check. Hahaha up your nose, Mr. Customer.

So I called them today and waited for an hour to talk to a customer service rep who didn't have a clue what I was talking about, or why I was telling her. But she carefully took down what I said and promised to pass it on.

I guess I'll plan to do only offline work on the train from now on.

               

                    Select One

Speaking so as to be heard

One of my great goals when I was growing up was to be able to speak at least the second language of everyone I was likely to meet. This is a valid and highly laudable goal for a Canadian, but it quickly spins into difficulties if you live in a metropolitan area.

And then I compounded my troubles by spending several years in the Canadian Arctic, where I learned and used Inuktitut and Cree. They are wonderful languages, but they don't travel all that well unless (as Rebekah and I are known to do) you want to discuss something in a Muenster restaurant with a fair degree of confidence that other diners will not know what you are saying.

I live right now north of Boston, and my English, French, and Spanish would seem likely to cover most of the people I run into.  But I didn't realize until I moved there that Lowell, MA, is 20% Cambodian.

I have tried learning Khmer. I got several chapters along, so I could thank shop clerks and so on. And then I met the chapter that laid out the 29 ways you can say "you" in Khmer, and how deploying the right word is important to respect the other person's years/status/relationship to you. I have not gone further.

Oh, and did I mention that the building we live in is about 20% folks from Brazil? I just learned today that Portuguese is in the top 10 of world languages:

1. Mandarin (over a billion speakers)
2. English (about a billion)
3. Spanish (500 million)
4. Hindi (490)
5. Russian (277)
6. Arabic (255)
7. Portuguese (240)
8. Bengali (215)
9. French (200)
10. Malay / Indonesian (175)

 As a kid, I figured that the imperialist languages were the ones to follow, as they would have left speakers of their languages in all their former colonies. Works great for English and Spanish.

What now? I guess the sensible next-language decision these days would be the next biggest trade/commerce/Internet language that I don't now have. So if I'm being sensible, it's off to Mandarin lessons...

Three graces

Our granddaughter Etta, at lower right, communes with two of her cousins at a family gathering in Ottawa.

image caught by Etta's dad, Terry.

On the Concord River

We went out for a bike ride today through a part of Lowell we don't know all that well, Fort Hill Park, Shedd Park, and the Lowell Cemetery area. We spent some time hanging out with the late Senator Paul Tsongas, where he rests on a bluff above an extremely paintable stretch of the Concord River.

Spent some time thinking about people who give theirs lives to public service, and people who use the benefits of their position to benefit others as well as themselves. Case in point is Freeman Shedd, who deeded 30 acres of his land to Lowell for a recreation park about a hundred years ago. He seems to have made his fortune in cologne, among other enterprises, and certainly lived in a grand house on Andover Street as a reward for his success. Nobody said he had to give anything back to the city of his birth, yet he did. I don't know whether he was a pleasant man, or a deeply thoughtful one; but I am grateful to him.

Playing in Midgard

My old favorite role-playing game, Midgard, is becoming active again after a long time of sleep. Turns are being processed and new adventures are beginning!

It's a measured sort of excitement, of course, because this is a moderated, turn-based game. You send in your turn, and then wait and wait to see what turns out. The last time I was active, I spent months, at a rate of a turn every three or four weeks, getting my clans into position to help with the assault on a city--and then the game master died.

One of the challenges for new players (for old players, too) is that the turn sheet is quite complicated. Up to 30 actions, and each action having as many as five arguments, and the arguments have to be in the right syntax. So I have been building the Midgard Turn Builder to help players with their task:

I'm building it in Flex 4 (Flash Builder), and having a lot of fun learning and using the new functions in that tool.

I have just let the player community know that the Turn Builder is ready for testing. Will let you know how it goes.

Oh, about the gore

And there was sufficient gore in Titus to satisfy any vampires in the audience.

Beyond gore

This production of Titus Andronicus, wrapping up tonight, is light on the gore and shock effects, and wrestles with the core of the conflicts between the Roman factions, the vengeful Goth queen, and wild cards like her advisor and lover, Aaron.

Spouse and I were talking this morning about how Titus is all about love of children. Titus, Tamora, Aaron all make their key decisions based on their perceptions of what their children need or what they expect of them. Maybe that's why the characters who have neither parents nor children in the play (Saturnine, Marcus, Bassianus) seem less substantial to me.