signature experiments
March 22nd, 2005 Filed Under personal
In response to an article on slashdot, I registered and commented thusly:
Two years ago, I began signing documents with a simple graphic that my friends call “the booby lady”, a line drawing of a naked (and extremely busty) female form, nipples included. Since then, I’ve co-signed a bank loan, signed a lease, gotten a new driver’s license, and signed innumerable credit card statements and other documents. I’ve only had about a dozen experiences over these past two years when the signature-requester even noticed that my signature is odd (nevermind that I always sign documents sideways), and only a handful of these make any kind of verbal acknowledgement.
My new signature has only been challenged twice, and both were employers: the first (which was my employer during the signature change) apparently got a complaint from a female employee in human resources, noticed that my signature at hire was different from my current one, and told me to “print my name instead of using my signature” if I needed to sign anything for them in the future. The second (my current employer) simply wanted some official documentation that this was my legal signature before they hired me, so I went over to the DMV and got a new driver’s license with nothing more than a double-take from the employee that watched me sign the license.
So not only can you sign anything you like any way you like, as very few people (less than 5%) will even bother to check that it matches, but also, as far as I can tell, *no one* will prevent you from legally changing your signature to something completely nonverbal and nonsensical.
And my first slashdot remark was moderated +1!
Stumble it!one-second finger
March 21st, 2005 Filed Under projects
Po. De Bono’s book provokes me so much I am compelled to write again immediately.
De Bono’s first part, part B (don’t ask), chapter 11, explains how to initiate his protocol with another person:
The hand signal for Code 11/1 is to hold up the index finger. The palm of the hand is facing the other person and the fingers are folded down leaving the index finger upright. This finger can be seen as suggesting the figure 1.
If the other person responds in kind, I’ve just met another dork with whom I will communicate splendidly.
This spell, as I would call it, resides in my repertoire much more naturally. It means, “stop. one second. i [with humility variant on my restraint and patience otherwise] request that you wait. you will get what you want soon.” I’ve tried this spell on many people and in many situations, and it works remarkably well, even though they don’t specifically know The Pwanson Code (I won’t trademark my eponymous Code). A simple google search shows that the “One Second Finger” has already been accepted into our common parlance, name and all.
DeBono Code Book
March 21st, 2005 Filed Under books
Tonight I randomly pulled The DeBono Code Book off our bookshelf, and immediately recognized its similarity to the Interpersonal Spellbook. De Bono contrived several artificial Codes to communicate many small but nuanced social constructs in an extremely efficient and precise manner. De Bono organizes moods, negotiations, and relationships into 18 numeric (!) Codes with 257 sub-codes, differentiating some subtle distinctions that I had ignored but immediately understood (and probably will change my perception). However, our society won’t voluntarily accept a synthetic language, especially one so intentionally contrived and using a string of numbers.
life-vo
March 16th, 2005 Filed Under ideas
I recently ordered an iPod voice recorder in the hopes that it would fulfill some part of my dream of having a life-vo. The life-vo is apparently nonobvious to some people, but a little search for “audio tivo” reveals this article by Anil Dash from 2003, exactly explaining my desire for a life-vo. That same search also reveals I’m not the first person to invent the term.
The Griffin voice recorder didn’t work out very well, though. Saving a recording takes several seconds, and you can’t use the same iPod forward/reverse mechanism (it’s stored in WAV format), and it won’t record while it’s playing back. It also didn’t seem to pick up any sound over a foot away, but I didn’t mess with it enough, so maybe that was my fault.
Concerto pour piano et orchestre en sol majeur
March 15th, 2005 Filed Under personal
I finally took the time to research some of the history behind the Piano Concerto in G, my favorite piece of music I have yet had the great fortune to discover. I remember walking home in 1995 from the Station Theatre, listening to some cheap Naxos recording, and having a significant spiritual experience. I can still remember the exact measure in the second movement where I saw God, though better performances and recordings thrust me into the same transcendent bliss earlier and for much longer.
I’ve been reticent over the past 10 years to relate my experience, and no one but me knows which bar of that Naxos recording awakened me to the beauty of this piece. Today, I learned that this Concerto was one of Ravel’s last pieces, while he was already suffering mental and physical decline, after a lifetime (he was 58) of critically acclaimed work. Marguerite Long, the first performer of the piano part of this piece, apparently recalls in her memoirs:
“It is a difficult work especially in respect of the second movement where one has no respite. I told Ravel one day how anxious I was, after all the fantasy and brilliant orchestration of the first part, to be able to maintain the cantabile of the melody of the piano alone during such a long slow flowing phrase… ‘That flowing phrase!’ Ravel cried. ‘How I worked over it bar by bar! It nearly killed me!’”
I don’t have strong enough words to appropriately thank whatever God might exist, for the Concerto pour piano et orchestre en sol majeur.
