Except not really.

For the first several of those month, you could barely call what I was doing roller skating. It was mostly falling with some rolling between. And there were times when I’d find an excuse to skip practice, or show up late because I was goddamned discouraged and my level of suck.

And, even when I refereed my first bout after six of those months, I didn’t really do much whistle blowing or penalty calling. And I still remember one of the few penalties I did call being totally and completely wrong. Yes, I sucked.

I spent months getting better, reading the rules, watching an sweaty women ram into each other an uncountable number of times, practicing, improving. Go persistence.

And it paid off. I got better. I got to officiate the first WFTDA-sanction bout in Iowa. And the first WFTDA-sanctioned bout featuring all Iowa teams. And the first bout, also WFTDA-sanctioned, between Des Moines’ two leagues. I was accepted to officiate a tournament in Milwaukee in June. And it has made me feel like hot shit. Go me.

Thing is, I still suck.

Feedback from a skater following a recent bout : “From my vantage point, it looked like you often waited for other refs to make calls on penalties it seemed you were looking right at.”

But she’s wrong. I wasn’t waiting for other refs to make the calls. It was worse than that. Not only were my calls were just slow, I was so unaware that I didn’t know other referees were making the same call. Because I suck.

Yes, 17 months of skating and falling down, reading rules and getting confused, scrimmaging and bouting, I still miss a ton of action, and am slow of the calls I make. But that’s OK. I’m going to take my crappy officiating across the Midwest and I’ll get better. Never perfect, but better. Because persistence pays off.

A paperboy hawks his wares just north of the Englert on Washington Street in Iowa City. You’d be hard pressed to find a coin-operated news rack these days.

From The Library of Congress, via Fuck Yeah Iowa City, via Days Gone By

“What are you going to do with all this lube?! Wrestling match? Biggest adult party ever?” the pitch for the 522-pound tub went. “If you are looking for a simply jaw-dropping amount of lube, Passion Natural Water-Based Lubricant is ready to get the fun started with this 55 gallon drum! With its superb formula you will have a natural feel that keeps you moist longer and also works great with all toy materials. Easily washes away with warm water and mild soap. You may never run out of lube again!”

While it isn’t eligible for free Amazon Prime shipping, freight is a reasonable $20.95. There were entertaining customer reviews, often the best part of the odd products for sale on Amazon, and, since it was Valentine’s Day, it was timely.

Amused, I posted it to Facebook with the line “A 55-gallon drum of lube on Amazon. For Valentine’s Day. And every day. For the rest of your life.” And then I went on with my life.

A week later, a friend posts a screen capture and tells me that my post has been showing up next to his news feed as a sponsored story, meaning Amazon is paying Facebook to highlight my link to a giant tub of personal lubricant.

Other people start reporting that they’re seeing it, too. A fellow roller derby referee. A former employee of a magazine I still write for. My co-worker’s wife. They’re not seeing just once, but regularly. Said one friend: “It has shown up as one on mine every single time I log in.”

I’m partially amused that Amazon is paying for this, but I’m also sorta annoyed. Of course Facebook is happily selling me out to advertisers. That’s its business. That’s what you sign up for when make an account.

But in the context of a sponsored story, some of the context in which it was a joke is lost, and I’ve started to wonder how many people now see me as the pitchman for a 55-gallon drum of lube.

But we get the inverse, too: Someone does something different than Apple, has little success with it, and pundits start arguing they need to change course and do what is Apple doing.

First, Siri’s response when I tried to use my wife’s phone to call my own. Yes, I tapped the phone number Siri offered and labeled “mobile” and she gave me a map of Mobile, Alabama. Obviously a bug of some sort, but how is that anything but seriously broken and embarrassing? Isn’t this exactly the sort of task Siri was built for?

Then another short-term memory failure. In moments like this, Siri bears a striking similarity to Leonard from Memento.

These aren’t reliability issues and these aren’t managing expectations issues. These are basic issues that a marquee feature of a marquee product of a marquee company.

I can’t figure out how to get her to reliably e-mail my wife. I’ll ask her to e-mail “my wife” or “Laura” and she’ll start reading off the addresses I have for her, which itself is a long and involved process as she carefully enunciates every letter and every piece of punctuation in all three addresses and there is no way to mark a single address as the default (at least she’s past asking which Laura I want to e-mail). Then I’ll tell her which address I want and then she’ll tell me she has no idea what I’m talking about. And then there’s a moment when we both realize that we’re interrupting each other so we both stop. And wait. And then I realize neither of us is saying anything.

And then I do it again until she either gets it right or I give up.

It’s a joke in my family that whenever I ask Siri to call someone, she screws it up. Because she does. My old Android phone had no problem finding and dialing the number for the local public swimming pool. Siri, on the other hand, thinks she’s got the right number, but it turns out that she’s dialed the recreation center downtown. Or she gets confused and apologizes because she can’t search for businesses in Poland (or Italy). Then there was another time that, well, I’m not exactly sure what happened or what Siri thought I wanted.

I’m gotten wary of using Siri to call anyone, really, because I’m not sure how to abort a call if Siri announces who she’s calling and starts dialing (because while she’ll take five minutes to doublecheck which e-mail address I want, she won’t do the same for phone calls) and it’s clear she’s misunderstood who I want to reach. In a panic, can I starting shouting “CANCEL! CANCEL! NO, SIRI!”? Do I have to get my phone out of my pocket and jab a button? Or turn on the screen and tap the Siri microphone> Can I squeeze the magic button thingy attached to my Apple-provided headphones? I’m not sure, so I usually try to do all of them at once. So, you know, she’s no longer a hands-free assistant.

Maybe she’s great if you’re dictating e-mail messages or tweets or text into some input field, but to me, that’s not Siri. She’s pitched as an assistant. I don’t count dictation. She’s supposed to do things for me. And right now she’s an assistant who not only doesn’t anticipate my needs, which would be asking a lot and is fine, but she needs an awful lot of hand holding.

To be fair, she works pretty well for reminders, though. Except when she’s being oddly anti-Semitic.

“I’m at an undisclosed location. I left because I don’t want some of these crazy people who are reading everything they want to read into my story to know where I am.”

Ten bucks says Bloom, a man I’d consider a mentor, is on pre-planned holiday trip.

Developers target iOS first, and often exclusively, because we’re fanboys.

Fanboy isn’t a helpful term when discussing or arguing anything. But isn’t one part of the success of iOS, and the App Store, that developers build quality software for iOS because they themselves like to use — one might even say the developers are fans of — iOS?

• Layoff 165 employees
• Two weeks before Christmas
• Refer to remaining employees as “content generators”
• To the reporter from your own paper who has to write the story

See? Easy.

I was first struck by this Chekhov quotation in the theater program: “Russians glory in the past, hate the present, and fear the future.” It’s not easy to find that exact quote on the web, but it certainly sums up much of the playwright’s work and his assessment of the national character into which he was born in 1860.

That thought also seems to say too something about news industry today. Those halcyon days of monopoly dailies weren’t as wonderful as the rose-colored rearview memories recall. The present is an unending struggle — the near future, at least, looking as bad or worse than today.

via Steve Buttry