February 2020

I didn’t really watch “The Honeymooners” until the mid 1980s. Back in the day it was shown in reruns on WPIX from New York at 11:30 PM, followed by the original “Star Trek”. After working second shift at a job, my boyfriend at the time and I would watch “The Honeymooners” and “Star Trek” before calling it a night. At the time, only the original 39 episodes were available; it would be a couple of years before Jackie Gleason found “The Lost Episodes” from kinescopes, it would be a little while after that where we could see the original sketches from Jackie Gleason’s Cavalcade of Stars.

While watching the original 39 episodes in perpetual rotation on WPIX, and having done so enough times to start knowing which episode was next and being able to recite lines, I mentioned to my boyfriend that Audrey Meadows wasn’t the original Alice. I don’t know how I knew this at the time; perhaps I had read it in a book or something. When asked who played the original Alice I barked out “Pert Kelton”. I didn’t really know who she was, I just knew the name and I knew she’d long been deceased at the time. You can’t help but bark her name when it’s nearly midnight, “Pert Kelton” just has a barky sound to it.

My boyfriend thought I was nuts (he never really got me anyway) and often scoffed off the useless knowledge in my head. A few months later from this revelation I went to the library and found a book that did indeed show Pert Kelton as the original Alice in “The Honeymooners” sketches on Jackie’s variety show. She was out because of the blacklisting during the McCarthy era. Audrey Meadows had her photo taken after just getting out of bed, all a mess in a frumpy dress, and Jackie gave Audrey the part.

I’ve seen a few clips of Pert playing Alice in various places on Youtube. Many of the comments talk about the bad actress playing Alice and how she’s too old and has such a nasally voice. In reality, Jackie thought Audrey Meadows was too young for the part, but she made herself look older.

From time to time I’ll watch interviews from the classier actors and actresses from a bygone era on Youtube, usually courtesy of the Foundation Interviews at the Emmy TV Legends website. An interview with Jayne Meadows talking about her sister Audrey and the role of Alice Kramden came up on my suggestion feed today, and Jayne tells how Audrey got the part of Alice and the comparison to Pert.

Imagine how much information I’d have rattling around in my head today if I had access to the Internet in the mid 1980s!

Since the first of the year I’ve been trying to take my work notes on my iPad Pro using an Apple Pencil. I’ve tried a couple of different apps designed for this, the stock Notes app, GoodNotes, OneNote, Notability and a couple of others. While they provided a good to very good note taking experience, I’ve never been satisfied with the result. Writing with an Apple Pencil is not as much like writing on paper with a great pen as it’s touted to be. And worse yet, organizing your notes and being able to find things a day or two later can be a bit of a challenge, especially if you’re not completely inside the Apple eco-system.

Prior to this iPad experiment I was using good, old-fashioned pen and paper. I have stacks of notebooks with all my work notes from over the years and the indexing system was by date and in my head. As I get older I find things are falling out of my head faster than they used to.

Enter Rocketbook.

I’ve talked about Rocketbook before. My husband and I discovered their product line a couple of years ago when they were on “Shark Tank”. Dressed in orange space suits, the co-founders of the company presented their plea for money from the sharks for a notebook that could be reused, simply by microwaving the notebook when it was full. Ink would magically disappear and you could use the notebook over again. The only caveat was you had to use a pen from the Pilot FriXion line. These pens use erasable ink.

The Rocketbook Wave was kind of nifty and I used it for a couple of cycles until I realized the pens made an impression in the paper, and even though the ink had disappeared, the impressions were everlasting. After two cycles through the notebook writing on a page was a bumpy experience.

Rocketbook now has the Rocketbook Everlast. This is a notebook that is erasable, but this time with a drop or two of water and a microfiber cloth. It’s like a notebook of mini-erase boards, but the cool thing is, using the FriXion pens, which now come in felt-tip marker-like instruments, there’s no impression. And, better yet, the ink sticks to the page after a couple of seconds and doesn’t smudge or wipe off like dry-erase markers. However, a couple of drops of water and that microfiber cloth and you can wipe the page clean and use it over again.

I’ve fallen in love with this approach.

The Rocketbook app lets you scan the pages and send them off to pre-determined destinations by marking icons at the bottom of each page. I have destinations in the company OneNote for team member notes, project notes, staff meeting notes, etc. And because it’s easy to sort and catalog notes, I can find things easily.

I’m really pleased with this system. They just started a Kickstarter campaign for a new product that involves templates and magnets holding pages in place and the like and I’m supporting their project.

I’m feeling more organized with this approach than I did with the Apple Pencil-iPad Pro system. I know it feels a little counterintuitive from my “technology is the answer for everything” mindset, but I’m really like writing my thoughts down, in my own handwriting, on a piece of paper, and filing it where I want it to be. There’s something memory-invoking about writing versus typing.

I’m feeling much more productive. And that’s always a good thing.

I realize that the evolution is technology is making it more difficult to manage all the things we have going on with our devices. However, when you’re writing your own software exclusively for your own hardware, and charging a premium to be part of that experience, this should not be possible. This is not an example of “It Just Works”.

This screenshot is from the latest version of iPad Pro running the latest version of iPadOS. If user interaction elements just disappeared like this on applications built and maintained by my team at work I’d be calling meetings and having frank discussions with quality control.

There’s a reason I am reevaluating who I invest my money with to maintain my realm of technology.

Cross-posted from Facebook.

So I’ve been a Trekker since The Original Series. When I make my fan movie (which will live in the Voyager era) I’m using the theme from “Star Trek: The Animated Series”. In 1988 I sent storyboards to Paramount describing how the transporter should look in “Star Trek V: The Final Frontier”. (Voyager ended up with a very close representation of what I suggested but I doubt I had anything to do with it). I love the theme of hope, the better future, and the moving beyond many human failings that were depicted in all incarnations of Star Trek through “Enterprise”. 

We’ve been watching “Star Trek: Picard”. We subscribed to CBS: All Access just to watch. I wanted to love it. I was excited about Picard, Seven, and all that is Star Trek in the 24th century coming back to television. But while some of it feels familiar, I’m struggling with the swearing, the constant strife, and the use of very 21st century language. Name one place where Kirk said “groovy” or Deanna Troi said “rad” or “gnarly”. 

Why so much darkness? And don’t get me started on the vaping.

Prior to the 2010s, Star Trek has represented what we should be moving to: humanity getting better, evolving into a more caring species with a thirst for knowledge, exploration, and the betterment of the universe. Poverty, homelessness, the need for money: humans had moved beyond that. The “pew pew” was always a last resort. There were bad guys, there always will be, but Star Trek was classy and polished. I was hoping “Star Trek: Picard” would bring that back. 

I’m starting to doubt it will do that. You can put a fancy label on a cheap wine but sometimes that wine really does belong in a box.

I’ll finish this season but I hope it takes a turn for a brighter future soon.