In the program for Summer Opera company’s performance of Carmen (playing now at Harman Center for the Arts), David Grindle, the director, notes that in this performance he wants to focus on the people, so you will know more the characters in Carmen better than you may have ever from a previous performance. This was achieved, but not through the intended means (such as the surprising injection of English dialogue). It was achieved by introducing us to people who were never named, and are typically not the focal points of the show, the chorus.

In the first act, at the Cigar factory, we meet a family (downstage right) having a lot of trust issues. The husband has clearly cheated on the wife in the past, because as soon as Carmen enters what should be her scene, she is upstaged by the marital disputes of this couple. The wife crosses downstage over to her husband, all the while wagging her finger in disapproval. He plays innocent, probably to spare the feelings of their little Asian child, standing with them, but his wife is no fool. She knows he is infatuated with Carmen (because he is singing as much), and she continues to wave her arms wildly in fury scolding her husband, as he reacts waving his arms feverishly  as to say “No, you must be mistaken”. What happens to this couple? Sadly, the story moves on without them, their sub-plot is never resolved. Similar to the mystery sub-plot of what killed the woman in the bar in Act Two.

When Toreador arrives, a woman (again downstage left) faints, which is understandable - he is a dreamy sports legend. But then something goes terribly wrong. She’s not out for just a moment, as would be clinically expected when one faints. No, she doesn’t wake up. The song ends, the people depart, she is still out, limply carried off. I want to believe her faint was so drastic it put her into a coma, but my heart tells me she is gone from this world. Who knows what brought on the sudden loss of life. Was her drink poisoned? Did the man she was sitting with slyly stab her in a fit of jealously. The truth can not be known, for while that was surely the focal point of the scene, once the chorus left, so did this sub-plot not to be concluded.

The third act provided no development of new characters. We, in the audience, were forced to just watch the leads sing their solos and carry out the main plot. Fortunately, the final act rewarded our patience with the richest new character development of the production.

The sheriff of Seville enters the final scene to watch the bull fight and the crowd on stage erupts in hisses and boos. He is clearly unpopular, but there is one man whose loathing of the sheriff is unmatched by his peers. As the sheriff pauses in the threshold, a tall spectator in the crowd (upstage center) finds himself in an opportune location standing right next to to the authority figure that he truly hates. The reason for his hatred is never verbalized, but it can not be disputed, for it is clearly demonstrated when this red-blooded Sevillan spits on the sheriff… twice. It is amazing that this sub-plot got no further musical explanation, (as an incident of this very nature started a full-on massacre in colonial Boston), but Carmen is from a more civilized time, where such things are not extrapolated. At least, that civilized pacifism seems to be the way with the sheriff, who does not call for backup or even arrest the man, but simply ignores his spatting and walks inside to enjoy the bullfight, leaving the audience to forgo Toreador’s entrance to continue to ponder what provoked a citizen of Seville to build up such aggression as to behave so boldly again a clearly weak-spirited sheriff?

Sadly, we will never know. While David Grindle gave the chorus license to develop their characters to add richness to this production of Carmen, providing alternative stories for the audience who were not interested in listening to the songs related to the main plotline, he did not give them liberty enough to add their sub-plots into the injected English dialogue, where they could have been satisfactorily resolved.

It’s amazing what you can do with spin. Chevy Chase Bank is promoting a major deficiency as a feature of the All Access Chevy Chase Check Card. The latest promotion leads you to believe they are simplifying your life by putting all your bank accounts onto one piece of plastic. They equate it to being able to carry your entire music library around in your pocket.

Here’s the difference: it would be like being able to carry your entire music library around in your pocket, but only being able to listen to one song. You can have as many as you want on the MP3 player, but you can only ever listen to the first song, (unless you went online or to a kiosk or on the phone and requested that your MP3 player switch a different song to the first song position).

The All Access Chevy Chase Check Card does bundle all your accounts onto one card, but forces you to choose only one account as the primary account of the card. This is the only account that can be used in the real world: at restaurants, at gas pumps, at convenience stores or at any ATM that is not a Chevy Chase ATM. The other accounts: your other Checking, your Savings, your Home Equity Loan are associated with the same card, but are completely unreachable.

The only way to get to these accounts is to call their phone system or online banking and transfer the money. This means you need to either know what you want to purchase before you go out and transfer the necessary funds from the secondary to the primary account, or have enough money in the primary account to float the bill until such time as you can get online or on the phone with the bank to make the transfer.

No matter how you slice it, it’s an inconvenient two step process - 1) paying and 2) transferring.

I contacted Chevy Chase customer service and told them that All Access was not for me, and to please de-couple my individual and joint checking accounts, and send me separate Check Cards for each. The representative, (and subsequently her supervisor and her supervisor), all gave the same response – this is not possible, it goes against Chevy Chase Bank policy.

I was astounded to find out this wasn’t an oversight, but a policy, and am more appalled to hear it now being spun by their marketing department as a benefit. If you are comfortable only being able to access a primary account, then it will work brilliantly for you. But if you are like me, and wish to be able to access your money from any of your accounts when you need it, you will find this mandated approach by Chevy Chase extremely frustrating.

When I downloaded and installed the All-in-One SEO plug-in for Wordpress and it didn’t work quite right. The new <meta> tags were being displayed, but the <title> had not changed from the Wordpress default setting. The reason was the tag <php wp-head()> was in the wrong place.

The All-in-One SEO plug-in interacts with the page through the <wp-head> tag, if it is missing; the plug-in cannot work at all. My plug-in was working, just not fully. That led me to test the placement of the <php wp-head()> tag. Sure enough, it was above the <title> tag in the <head> section of the page.

So, if you want the All-in-One SEO plug-in to work on your site, make sure that the <php wp-head()> tag comes after the <title> tag in the <head> section.

Today I was asked by my book club to join GoodReads. Trying to circumvent the tedium that is part of new membership, (having to enter in every book I ever read), I turned to Facebook. I had already gone through the mind-numbing exercise of finding past readings with iRead, the Facebook application, so I expected I could save a ton of time simply exporting that list and import it into GoodReads.

I was wrong.

While there are forum discussions praising the idea of adding an export feature to iRead, it has not been added. So, while you can import a book list into iRead, you cannot pull your list back out. The same is true for another library listing Facebook app, Visual Bookshelf.

But this is not apps behaving badly, this is how Facebook rolls. Don’t believe it? Just try getting finding a way to print or even get a copy of a photo someone tagged of you in Facebook. It cannot be done.

I am typically a strong advocate for Facebook, but I find it exceedingly frustrating that what goes in cannot come out.

At first I thought I was just noticing the as the new Google favicon because it’s a letter found twice in my name and I have a heightened awareness of it. But two days later, I am realizing it is not me, well, certainly not just me. The web is aflutter with posts and speculations about Google changing it’s favicon from an uppercase to a lowercase .

I never thought much of Google’s branding, but it’s clear if this single change to just the favicon is that distinctly noticeable and remarkable, then they really have some of the most powerful branding on the web.

I go to get a haircut and explain the cut I am looking for, she responds ask the following questions:

• Would you like your hair shampooed?
• Would you like the scissors or the razor?
• If the razor, what settings do you want? A 2? Maybe a 3?

I just looked at her perplexed and wondered why I, the customer, the client, was expected to have these answers. Isn’t she the specialist in this field? It got me wondering how my clients would react if I had them on the hook for a website redesign and asked them:

• Would you like an external style sheet?
• Would you prefer tables or CSS-based layout?
• If the CSS-based, what level of doctype do you want? Strict? Transitional?

It would be completely inappropriate to assume that a web design client would have these answers. They know what end results they are looking for, and it is up to the expert to determine what it will take to get them there.

As I was finishing up my visit to the stylist, (and thinking how ridiculous it is to assume the customer would have these answers), someone new sat down in the next chair over. He greeted his stylist, and then told her, “Give me a razor cut, 4 on the top, 6 on the sides”. She questioned his choice “Are you sure a 4? You seem more like a 2.” “No, no,” he insisted, “I am sure I’m a four.”

So, I could be completely wrong.

When you get off the Metro at the bus depot at King Street station, there are six bays which have 2-3 bus lines that stop at each. The locals surely know where they are going, but what about the tourists getting off the Metro who can not or will not walk the 18 block to the waterfront? They are lost in a confusing set of identical choices. Each bus looks alike; the only differentiator is a numbering system that can only be decoded by being super-human enough to translate the line-art maps of the different bus routes. It’s an intimidating and frustrating experience.

But not anymore, enter the Old Town Trolley.

The trolley simply is the bus for the tourists. It goes straight down King Street to the waterfront, and even explains that right on the side of the vehicle. Now, when tourists get off the Metro there is no confusion of what bus number they want, they just have to look for the big red and black trolley car.

A great way to improve the tourists experience in Old Town.

Adobe is killing off GoLive.

This is a somber day for me, because while I have not used GoLive in years, it was integral in my development into a professional web designer. All through college, my only means of HTML coding was hand-coding within a UNIX session. Just as I was graduating, the University purchased GoLive Cyberstudio for the computer lab. It was like a whole new world had opened for me.

Suddenly, with the speed and power of the WYSIWYG supported by hand-coding, I could build out my Photoshop mocks in record time. It allowed me to not only improve me personal site, but build out fan sites for numerous shows or groups and take on small freelance sites, which became the pieces of my first portfolio that in turn got me my first job as a web designer.

In later years, I made GoLive the mainstay of the design department at our agency and even got myself Adobe Certified Expert status with the product. But even as I was acquiring that level of mastery I was becoming aware of the limitations of the WYSIWYG and understood the need to switch to primarily hand-coding. By the time Adobe GoLive 6 came out, I did not push to have the company purchase it.

So, it would be inappropriate to be upset at todays new. I will not be missing GoLive since I haven’t touched the product in nearly four years, but I will say, in eulogy, that I will always remember those last days of college when I discovered GoLive and suddenly realized I could conceivable becoming a real web designer… and I have.

 

Listen, Facebook, we have to talk.

We have a lot of fun together. We go through photos, play scrabble, chat with friends, its great. But lately I’ve started to see a side to you that I’m finding rather aggressive. I am speaking specifically about your new “People You May Know” area on the main aggregate screen that provides a short list of people that you think I have simply overlooked.

Sorry, Facebook, it’s more complicated than that. While they are friends of my friends, I do not know them. Don’t get me wrong, I am aware they exist, the names are familiar to me, but I have yet to be properly introduced and conversed to the point where it wouldn’t be weird to ask them to consider me as their friend. So, I would appreciate easing off the pressure, I will meet them on my own, at some point, in real life.

And while we’re putting it all out there, Facebook. You leave me in an awkward place when you add ex-girlfriends from back in collegeto that list. I’m not sure whether we left things as friends, so asking them to add me as a friend is a pretty loaded request.

So, please Facebook, trust me that as soon as I see a familiar face, I will add them as a friend, but until then, stop telling me who I should be friends with.

It’s a special day for sports fans, the day you remember that ESPN has private content that it won’t show you

Any other day, or rather, for any other sports topics the footprint of ESPN’s private articles is very small, hardly noticeable, but they seem to keep the majority of their NFL Draft content restricted

This doesn’t make sense to me. 

The prime motivator for paying money to ESPN Insider should be a return on investment, which would primarily be relevant for gamblers or fantasy sports players.  But to the best of my knowledge there is no betting line, pool or fantasy league for the NFL Draft. So, what value is there in knowing Mel Kiper’s predictions.  Is there any reason beyond just to satisfy a mild curiosity?