Tag Archives: Cox

2020-? Streaming

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I watched MST3K by myself.

Since 1972, when Sue and I first got together in Hartford, we had spent many evenings together watching television. I liked a few shows (including wrestling and Mystery Science Theater 3000) that were too silly for her. She liked a few shows (such as Grantchester, Gilmore Girls, and many old flicks on Turner Classic Movies) that were too schmaltzy for me. On the whole, however, our tastes were mostly compatible. During most of this period we watched whatever was on the major networks or we did something else like jigsaw puzzles or two-person games.

Not for me.

Two developments changed these habits: the ability to schedule broadcasted programs to be recorded easily and the ability to watch programs at will through streaming services on the Internet. Streaming, in this context, means watching over a rather short period of time all (or at least a large portion) of the episodes for a television series in order. In the twentieth century the characters on most television programs evolved very little over the life of the series. Basically the primary characters might change within an episode (or occasionally a few episodes), but eventually they returned to their basic original state. So, if a viewer had missed a few episodes, the plot of the current episode was easy to follow.

In the twenty-first century some series still followed that format, but many others deviated. In those shows plot lines might not be resolved within the episode, and characters might have life-changing experiences or even be seriously injured, contract a chronic illness or die. In any case it was much more enjoyable to watch these shows in order once that became practical.

During the year of isolation for the pandemic Sue and I developed a habit of watching a couple of hours of television together every evening. Sometimes we watched public television or a movie on Turner Classic Movies, but our mainstay was streaming. The research for this entry tuned up a surprisingly large number of shows. My comments about the ones listed below are almost all overwhelmingly positive. The reason for that is simple. If either Sue or I did not like a show, we stopped watching. So, the list includes only well-acted shows with interesting plots and characters and a minimum of violence and schmaltz.

Masterpiece/Mystery

For decades Sue and I had been watching the PBS programs shown under the titles of Masterpiece Theater and Mystery (later combined and labeled “Masterpiece”). Four or five times a year very good British shows were presented, one season1 at a time. The first one that I can remember watching was the version of Sherlock Holmes that starred Jeremy Britt in thirteen episodes that closely followed the plots of Doyle’s famous stories. We also enjoyed the first version of All Creatures Great and Small. These two shows appeared on PBS at about the same time in the second half of the eighties.

Here is a list of other Masterpiece shows that I can remember. They are roughly in chronological order.

  • The Poirot show in the mid-eighties that featured David Suchet was. in my opinion, far better than any of the movies based on the many Agatha Christie novels.
  • Lewis was the sequel to the wildly popular Inspector Morse series that I later watched on YouTube both on the television and on my laptop. My favorite characters were Laurence Fox as Hathaway and Clare Holman as Dr. Hobson.
  • Sherlock starring Benedict Cumberbatch was a spectacular updating of the Holmes stories. At times it got a little too spectacular. My favorite character was Una Stubbs as Mrs. Hudson, the landlady at 221B.
  • Endeavour was a clever prequel to the Morse stories set in the sixties and early seventies. The supporting cast was great, especially Roger Allam and Anton Lesser as Morse’s bosses.
  • Sue and I both really liked Baptiste with Tchéky Karyo, but it only had three seasons. This show was a continuation of a British series called The Missing that was never shown on Masterpiece.
  • We also really liked Press, which focused on the conflict between two of London’s newspapers. The BBC did not renew for a second season.
  • We struggled through a whole season of Broadchurch. It had its moments.
  • Unforgotten was a great series. The first episode after Nicola Walker’s departure was a little disappointing.
  • Guilt was a quirky show about two brothers in Scotland and their dealings with a crime family.
  • A new version of Around the World in Eighty Days appeared on Masterpiece in 2021. It was obviously shot before the Pandemic.
  • Anthony Horowitz’s Magpie Murders, which I consider the best detective novel since A Study in Scarlet, was magically transformed into a great television series on Masterpiece. AH’s comments at the end of each episode were a special treat. The sequel, Mayflower Murders, was somewhat disappointing, both in print and on the screen. At the end of the last episode Horowitz announced that there would be a third book, but he was noncommittal about a third television series.
  • The biggest disappointment was was Roadkill, which starred Hugh Laurie (the star of House and the British show Jeeves and Wooster), as an ambitious member of the British parliament.
  • A second version of All Things Great and Small on Masterpiece resumed the story just before World War II. The new Mrs. Hall, Anna Madly, was great. Tristan was disappointing.
  • Mr. Bates Versus the Post Office was an interesting documentary on Masterpiece about a British scandal. The legal ramifications were still ongoing when it was shown in 2024.
  • I liked Nicola Walker’s showpiece, Annika on Masterpiece, better than Sue did. It also starred Jamie Sives, who played a principal role in Guilt.
  • Maryland on Masterpiece was a fairly interesting portrayal of two sisters’ responses to the surprising news of their mother’s secret life and death on the Isle of Man.

YouTube

The quality of shows on YouTube has always been hit and miss. Most of the ones that I have seen were recorded uploaded one at a time by individuals, not the owners of the material.

The cast of Vera in season 13.
  • Inspector Morse was so popular on ITV in England that in 2008 it was named the greatest British crime drama of all time by readers of Radio Times. It also generated a long-running sequel and a very popular prequel. As far as I know, it has never been shown on free television in the U.S. Fortunately someone uploaded every episode to YouTube, and I watched them all.2 I liked both Lewis and Endeavour a little better.
  • If the poll were run again Vera, which started in 2011, might win. Brenda Blethyn’s performances were just outstanding. Many, but by no means all, of the shows have been uploaded to YouTube, probably illegally. I tried to read a book by Ann Cleeves, who wrote the Vera novels, but I hated it.
  • Sue really liked Rosemary & Thyme, which was about a pair of middle-aged women whose main business was consulting about gardening. People tend to get killed wherever they tended shrubbery, and they solved the crimes. Somehow it worked.

MHz Choice

I am not sure when or where I heard about Mhz Choice, the streaming service that provided (very well done) closed-captioned versions of European mysteries and other shows. It only cost $8.50 per month. The only drawback was that you could either watch on Cox or on a computer. If you wanted to do both, you had to buy two subscriptions. It was difficult to set up the computer to display on the television screen through Cox. In any case Sue didn’t enjoy depending on captions. So, I watched all of the below on my laptop in the basement while using the rowing machine.

The Montalbano series spent a lot of time on balconies of Sicilian restaurants.
  • I learned about the Detective Montalbano made-for-television movies (called “fiction” in Italy) while on our tour of Sicily (documented here). Every one of them (except the last) was outstanding. I tried reading a few of the books written by Andrea Camilleri, but the use of Sicilian dialect in the dialog was off-putting.
  • The prequel Young Montalbano was pretty good, too.
  • I watched the Norwegian drama Acquitted through all of the episodes. By the end I was quite tired of it.
  • Detective DeLuca was a slow-paced crime story about the Mussolini era.
  • I really enjoyed the quirky Swiss show called Allmen. It was about a down-on-his luck thief/con man and the butler who kept him out of jail. There were only four episodes, and they have been pulled from MHz Choice. I discovered that a fifth one was released in 2023, but I have no idea how to watch it.
  • In 2024 I have made it through several seasons of The Undertaker, a story about an undertaker who formerly was a cop. The premise holds up surprisingly well, although I had the impression that he solved more than 100 percent of the murders in the area.
  • BarLume, which means “glimmer” in Italian. was a comedy about an owner of a bar in which three old guys hang out. The two women in the show were fantastic. The premise sort of fell apart after the first season.
  • I absolutely loved Vanessa Scalera’s performance as the title character in Imma Tataranni: Deputy Prosecutor. I would watch her in anything. I also enjoyed the depiction of the amazing town of Matera, which Sue and I visited in October of 2011 (documented here). However, the basic story line went off the rails in the second season and never recovered.
  • I watched two seasons of The Bastards of Pizzofalcone. That was enough. Pizzofalcone is a neighborhood of Naples.
  • Beck was a well-made Swedish cop show. I have watched several seasons. Most of the shows were stolen by Mikael Persbrandt as Gunwald Larsson. I will probably watch more.
  • The only two French shows that I liked featured very quirky women, Corinne Masiero as the title character in Captain Marleau, and Isabelle Gélinas, who has appeared in ten episodes of Perfect Murders.
  • There were a great many German shows that I have not yet watched. Two that I really enjoyed are the Borowski part of the long-running Tatort franchise and Murders by the Lake. Both have very interesting settings that I would love to visit—the port city of Kiel and Lake Constance. Axel Milberg was outstanding as Klaus Borowski, and the show paired him with three intriguing female colleagues. Nora Waldstätten was stunning as Hannah in Lake. She also appeared in one of the Allmen episodes. Unfortunately, she left the show in the third season. I watched a few episodes, but the chemistry was gone.
  • The Bridge was a Swedish production about cooperation between Swedish and Danish authorities concerning serial killers who drive across the long bridge that connects the two countries. The best reason to watch was to see the performance of Sofia Helin as the Swedish inspector who is clearly pretty high on the autism spectrum.
  • I watched one season of the German version of Professor T. It had no magic. I was very disappointed. For some reason MHz Choice does not have the Belgian version.
  • The four seasons of the German period piece Babylon Berlin were mesmerizing. It was set in the Weimar Republic years that followed World War I. The production values were absolutely incredible. Evidently there will be one more season, probably in 2025.

Peacock

NBC’s streaming service was available for free on Cox Cable for over a year during the pandemic. Sue and I took advantage of this nearly every evening. We were disappointed when they started charging for the service, but by then we had watched most of the good series.

Jim, Freddie, and Lance in “Nice Guys Finish Dead.”
  • The Rockford Files, which was broadcast in the seventies, was my all-time favorite television series. The only bad episode was the pilot. James Garner was, of course, outstanding throughout. The two episodes that featured Tom Selleck as Lance White, and James Whitmore, Jr., as Freddie Beamer were truly outstanding.
  • Monk was a notch lower, but the humor surrounding Tony Shalhoub’s character was generally good. I especially enjoyed Monk’s second assistant, Traylor Howard as Natalie Teeger, and Monk’s brother Ambrose, played by John Turturro.
  • The best thing about Psych was the premise that most people can be deceived into believing in paranormal powers. The cast was good, too. The only really bad episode was the musical.
  • 30 Rock won an Emmy almost every year, and it richly deserved each one. The cast was exceptionally good from top to bottom. Nobody but Tina Fey could have played Liz. My favorite character was Dennis Duffy, the Beeper King, played by Dean Winters. Every episode was golden, and they were just as funny the second and third time.
  • Parks and Recreation was not quite as good, but Amy Poehler held it together with her spiral binders. Nick Offerman as Ron Swanson stole most shows. The last year or two were not up to par.
  • Leopard Skin was an extremely bizarre set of eight beautifully shot episodes. I enjoyed it; Sue missed an episode or two, and could not make sense of it after that. I would gladly watch it again, if only to see Gaite Jansen as Batty.
  • The Resort was almost as bizarre, but the plot held together fairly well to a very strange ending
  • The comedy Rutherford Falls started out pretty well, but the last few episodes were tiresome. The best characters were the Indians.
  • The Capture had an interesting premise about being able to doctor the transmission of surveillance videos. I was not that enamored by the principal characters.
  • Vigil was about a murder aboard a nuclear submarine. It was very well done. Shaun Evans (Endeavour) appeared as a navy officer with a beard.
  • Five Bedrooms was an Australian series about five single people living together. I found it very engaging, and Sue absolutely loved it. We saw season 1 and 2 on Peacock. Season 3 and 4 were supposed to be on Amazon Prime, but the only place that they seemed to be available in 2024 is on Apple TV+.
  • Intelligence was a silly low-budget British comedy about the worst intelligence agency imaginable. Parts were funny.
  • The first season of Hitmen, a British show about two female freelance assassins who are also lifelong best friends, was hilarious. I watched every episode twice. The second episode, filmed during the lockdown, was disappointing.
  • Code 404 was a moderately funny British comedy about a cop who died and then was resuscitated with an electronically augmented brain. Sue did not like it much.

AMC+

  • Sue and I watched several seasons of the extremely popular show, Mad Men. on FreeVee. Amazon pulled it from the lineup when we were in the penultimate season. We bought a monthly subscription to AMC+. Almost all of the shows were good, but it was clear that the wind was going out of the writers’ sails in the last few episodes.
  • Before we canceled the AMC+ subscription we also watched the first two seasons of Dark Winds. It was based on the the novels of Tony Hillerman that featured native American cops Joe Leaphorn, Jim Chee, and Bernadette Manuelito. The third season will reportedly be shown on AMC in 2025. I will look for it.

Freevee

I take back all of the bad things that I have ever said about Amazon. The Internet giant bought IMDB’s free streaming service (with commercial interruptions), added a great deal of content, and relabeled it as Freevee. Some of these shows were really outstanding, and the price was unbeatable.

Giovanni Ribisi was the central character.
  • Many shows and movies have been made about con men, but Sneaky Pete might be the best. Every member of the cast was really outstanding. Sue and I also enjoyed the fact that it was largely set in Connecticut. My idol, Ricky Jay, had a small role in the final season. Because he died during the filming, the last episode needed to be rewritten.
  • Sprung was a very funny show that was about one of the side effects of the pandemic—people being released from prison in order to reduce the spread of Covid. This show only had one season, and the ending precluded any chance of a second season.
  • Alpha House was a comedy created by Gary Trudeau, the cartoonist of Doonesbury. It centered around a house in Washington in which four Republican senators stayed. I found it fairly funny, but it only had two season. Trudeau’s wife, Jane Pauley, appeared in one show.
  • Bosch was a treasurer. It was probably the best cop show ever. It certainly was the best that I have ever seen. Titus Welliver was perfect. The rest of the cast was also outstanding. Crate and Barrel, two detectives whom everyone addressed by their nicknames, were hilarious. I read one of the books by Michael Connelly and was severely disappointed.
  • It was hard to believe that Bosch Legacy, the sequel that focused on Bosch’s daughter Maddie, would be nearly as good as the original. Sue and I kept asking how the producers could have known that Madison Lintz, who appeared on Bosch as a gangly teenager, would grow up to be believable as a female version of Bosch.
  • Jury Duty was a “reality” show that was played for laughs. The judge, bailiff, witnesses, and all but one juror were actors. It was fairly amusing.
  • Taboo was a bizarre British show about one man’s bizarre encounter with the British government and the East India Company in the early days of the United States. Tom Hardy was compelling as the main character, James Delaney. It only had one season.
  • Sue and I both liked Eric McCormack in Perception. He played a schizophrenic professor of neurology who solved crimes as a hobby when he wasn’t writing seven books, teaching postgraduate classes, or doing crosswords while listening to Mahler on his Walkman.
  • The Amazing Mrs. Maisel was probably the best home-grown Amazon show that was migrated to FreeVee. The entire cast was very impressive, and the writing was very sharp. It was set in the late fifties and early sixties. The title character was good friends with Lenny Bruce. Many Emmys were won by this show. We watched season 5 on Amazon Prime
  • We also both liked Mary McCormack and the rest of the cast of In Plain Sight, a show about the federal witness protection program. It was filmed in and around Albuquerque, which made it a little more interesting for me.
  • The premise of Person of Interest was that it would be possible for a genius to write a program that simultaneously monitored all forms of electronic data and analyzed it all person by person in order to recognize people who were a threat or being threatened. Plus, it was completely secure, and only one person knew how to use it. This was, of course, preposterous, but if you suspended disbelief, the writers and actors could get you interested in the plots. Michael Emerson was perfect as the genius.
  • The Mallorca Files was a British show about the police on the island of Mallorca. Ellen Rhys and Julian Looman were cops. She was English; he was a native of Munich who moved to Palma and has gone native. The tone was just right. The second season ended abruptly when production was stopped for Covid. However, a third season is in the can and will be shown on Amazon Prime.

Tubi

Tubi was another free streaming service that was available on Cox. Its commercials were a little more annoying than FreeVee’s. The selection of programs were not as good, but we (or mostly I) found a few good ones.

Robert Carlisle played Hamish. He had two different dogs. Both were named Wee Josh.
  • We originally watched Hamish Macbeth, a show about the constable for a remote Scottish village, on the local PBS station. We recorded the episodes when they were shown late (for me) at night on Saturday and watched them together on Monday evenings. We saw the entire series again on Tubi. This series was very loosely based on a series of novels by Marion Chesney. I read one of the books and hated it.
  • The Prague Mysteries was a short but intriguing detective series set in Prague after the dissolution of the Austrian empire. I thought that it was pretty good.
  • The story line for Vexed was similar to that of The Mallorca Files. A straight-laced blonde female detective was paired with a wise-cracking lazy guy. It only lasted two seasons. The blonde in the first season was much better (and hotter) than the one in the second season. For some reason several of the shows in the second season were captioned in Portuguese.
  • Tubi has been my go-to site for Mystery Science Theater 3000. I did not realize that they had made so many of these shows. I also did not realize that there were so many really bad movies. I mean horrendously awful movies that someone presumably paid to watch. I liked the shows with Mike Nelson better than the ones with Joel Hodgson. The real stars were Joel’s robots, Tom Servo (voiced by Kevin Murphy) and Crow (Trace Beaulieu). I was impressed with Kevin’s singing ability, but Crow held a special place in my heart.

Amazon Prime

I subscribed to Amazon Prime just so that we could watch the second season of Mallorca Files. I intended to drop the subscription after we finished watching. However, we discovered quite a few series that we enjoyed quite a bit.

  • I watched Season 1 of Reacher on Freevee. I did not think that she would like it because it was so violent and she is not into body-building types. However, we both watched season 2 together and enjoyed it immensely.
  • In Plain Sight told the story of a small group of U.S. Marshals who managed members of the federal Witness Protection Program in Albuquerque. The writing was good. Mary McCormack and Fred Weller were both charismatic as the two stars. We watched all 61 episodes and liked them all.
  • We had watched an episode or two of Raising Hope on Freevee. It was created by Gregory Thomas Garcia, the brains behind the one-season wonder, Sprung. Two of the principal actors in Sprung had also appeared in RH. Sue and I liked RH, but Amazon wanted us to pay $3 per episode after the second one in the second season, and we demurred.
  • Mr. & Mrs. Smith won many awards in its first season. Donald Glover and Maya Erskine were exceptional. as was the writing.
  • I rewatched all of the episodes of Endeavour, some by myself and some with Sue. This time around I was greatly impressed by the writing of Russell Lewis, who wrote and “devised” every single complicated episode.
  • We both greatly enjoyed the first season of Deadloch, an Australian comedy/mystery about a serial killer in a beach town in Tasmanian that is dominated by lesbians.

Recorded

I had read Lonesome Dove, the truly epic novel by Larry McMurtry, twice before it was shown as a four-part made-for-television movie. It was the most entertaining book that I had ever read, and the movie was just as good. It was very true to the novel; only one character, Charles Goodnight, was left out. It won seven Emmy awards, but somehow Robert Duvall was denied one. We bought a tape of it and watched it a few more times. Prequels and sequels have also been made, but none was as good as the original.

Tom and John Barnaby hardly made a dent in the ongoing bloodbath in Midsomer.
  • Midsomer Murders has been on British television for over twenty years. It was set in an imaginary county called Midsomer that had only one town, Causton, which seemed to be surprisingly crime-free, and a large number of villages in which murder was as common as gossip. For the first decade of the series every single actor was white. Then the producer was changed, and subsequent every episode had one or more actor who was not white. Many of the murder weapons were outlandish. My favorite one was an episode in which two people were trampled to death by dairy cows in a barn.
  • Elementary was another Sherlock Holmes update. This one was set in New York City and featured a Dr. Joan Watson (Lucy Liu) and a suitably British Holmes (Jonny Lee Miller). This was a really good show that ran on CBS for seven years. The last few shows were weak. We recorded reruns on an off-brand network.
  • Sue and I discovered Resident Alien on Peacock. We watched the first season there and the second two on recordings of showings on the Syfy channel. Alan Tubyk played the title character, who came from another planet who took over the body of a doctor in a town in Colorado. Tubyk has been perfect throughout, and the rest of the cast has also been very good. It must have been difficult to come up with plausible scripts with this premise. The second and third seasons were, however, only slightly inferior to the first.
  • One of the first British shows that we watched on PBS was Father Brown, based on the mysteries written by G.K. Chesterton. The shows were set in a village in the Cotswolds. Mark Williams was perfect as the priest, and I especially liked Nancy Carroll as Lady Felicia.
  • Shakespeare and Hathaway was set in Stratford-Upon-Avon. The shows were mildly amusing, but the plots were never gripping, and—aside from haircuts—the characters never developed.
  • We watched two different versions of Wallander. The first season of the Swedish version was excellent, but it went swiftly downhill. I did not like the British version that starred Kenneth Brannagh. He even changed the pronunciation of the chief character’s name.
  • The Belgian version of Professor T. was weirdly delightful. Koen De Bouw played a criminology professor with extreme mental problems that included frequent interactions with hallucinations. The rest of the characters put up with him to varying levels. I missed some of the episodes. If I had a chance I would love to see them. Apparently it is available on PBS Passport.
  • Sue and I enjoyed the first season of Marie Antoinette, which focused on the teenager shipped from Vienna to live at Versailles. Evidently a second season has been filmed.

1. On the major networks a “season” once consisted of twenty-six or even more episodes. It was designed to run from the middle of fall to the end of spring. In the summer reruns or pilot productions were show. In other countries a season might consist of just a few episodes. Most of the Masterpiece and Mystery shows had only four or five episodes, but sometimes they exceeded the expected length of just under one hour.

2. I did not provide a link because when I looked on YouTube in 2024, I was unable to find the set of uploaded Morse episodes that I had watched.

3. I was astounded to discover that the screenplay antedated the novel. Many years earlier McMurtry tried to get it made as a feature film with John Wayne, James Stewart, and Henry Fonda. The project was scuttled when Wayne insisted on playing Gus McCrae.

2001-2006 TSI: Weekly Partners’ Meetings

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Agendas for meetings. Continue reading →

Between January of 2001 and November of 2006 I met pretty often with Denise Bessette (introduced here), who was by then my partner and VP of Application Development. I found a folder of Microsoft Word files for the agendas that I wrote up for these strategy meetings. Starting in 2003 the meetings became more regular. They occurred on many if not most Wednesdays, the day that I was most likely not to be at a client’s.

We generally ate lunch together at an order-at-the-bar restaurant on the west side of the river. It had picnic tables near a small stream. I can’t remember the name of the place. I took a drive in the area that my memory associated with its location, but I could find no trace of it. I suspect that it closed, and the land was bought by a developer who put it to another use, perhaps condominiums.

The following summaries are mostly in chronological order. Almost every AdDept client is mentioned at some point. Separate blog entries with much more details have been posted for each of them. They can easily be found using the 1948 Project’s master index program, which is available here.

Many items on the agendas are repeated on subsequent agendas. A few of them persist over years. These were issues for which we never found solutions. The most obvious examples were the efforts to find additional uses for AxN that would benefit newspapers and/or advertisers.

By 2001 the nature of and name for AxN1 had been decided. Our focus was on how to roll it out to the AdDept clients and what we could do to make it more attractive both to the advertisers and the newspapers. We also discussed potential support issues and how the new model 170 that TSI had recently purchased could handle the load of handling the traffic from AdDept clients and newspapers. Occasionally we talked about personnel and other business-related matters.

By 2002 the business environment for large department stores had changed dramatically. Before listing the agenda for one of the meetings I wrote, “We need to change our attitude 180 degrees. Previously we had excess demand and were struggling to increase our capacity to meet it. Now we have excess capacity, and our customers are frugal.”

I had used Net.Data2 extensively for AxN. At the time it was the only thing available on the AS/400 that could interact with the database. By 2002, however, IBM was telling people not to use it. However, it was several years before IBM provided an equivalent tool. Java3, which I had studied extensively and had concluded was not suitable for what we wanted to do, was IBM’s solution to everything.

I was surprised to read how uncertain we were about the willingness o AdDept clients to use AxN. The meeting in March mentioned the need for a second installation. Before reading this I was pretty sure that Belk4 was the first, but maybe someone else had used it on a limited basis.

In 2003 Denise and talked a lot about what kind of programming was marketable to our clients. We investigated quite a few products that claimed to make it easier to make native AS/400 programs web-based . We also talked about what features could be added to AxN so that it would be more valuable to advertisers or newspapers. Usually one of the last items on the list was whether we should spend time converting our code from BASIC to RPG or something else.

In May Sue and I took our first vacation in Italy. I wrote a journal about that adventure and posted it here.

The meeting of November 5 was the first mention of Bob Wroblewski, who has been introduced here. The next few agendas mostly consisted of the same items.

In January of 2004 Bob and I flew to California to visit Robinsons-May and Gottschalks. Bob then started enrolling Rob-May’s papers. After that the process of getting newspapers to subscribe to AxN snowballed for several years. At about the same time our long courtship of Dick’s Sporting Goods finally paid off with a contract for AdDept. So, in only two years the outlook for TSI had improved greatly.

In February it occurred to me that there might be one dominant software company for the newspaper business. If we could create an interface with their system, it could advance the AxN project tremendously. However, I later discovered that each paper, if it had anything at all, had developed its own software or paid someone to do it. There was no uniformity. Fortunately I discovered that this was a blind alley before I wasted a lot of time, money, and energy on it.

The agenda for the February 18 meeting made it clear that the AxN project was about to take off. Most of the long-time AdDept users had at least been contacted. Stage Stores was enthusiastic, and they had just acquired another chain named Peebles. Finally, Dick’s Sporting Goods had finally signed the contract to purchase AdDept. To deal with the expected increase in use of the Internet by the newly subscribing newspapers Denise was arranging for installation of a T-1 line from AT&T with the Cox Cable connection as backup.

The March 3 agenda closed with a mention of the NAA, which was the abbreviation for the Newspaper Association of America (changed to News/Media Alliance in 2016). I eventually talked with someone at its headquarters, but I foresaw that it would take a lot of time and effort to build a productive relationship with the organization. It might have been a good project for Doug Pease (introduced here) or Jim Lowe (introduced here), but at that point they were in the rear-view mirror. I never thought that this would have been a good fit for Bob. Besides, he was busy talking to newspapers, or at least soon would be.

It took me a few minutes to decode this entry on the entry for March 24: “Robinsons: Lower price for LANG?” LANG was the Los Angeles Newspaper Group,.5 a company that printed and distributed tabloids in Los Angeles and its suburbs. Advertising for all those papers was managed from one central location. TSI agreed to send them one bill. We treated them like one large paper with several editions.

In April we were waiting for Dick’s to begin the solicitation for AxN before we approached Macy’s West and RadioShack. The April 21 entry contained positive news about Filene’s use of AdDept for accounting, including the monthly closing process. The next week Denise and I discussed the proposed trip to talk with Hecht’s main paper, the Washington Post. I ended up visiting them on May 14. It gave me quite a thrill, but I don’t think that they ever agreed to use AxN. Apparently we also considered a press release about being in business for twenty-five years, but I am pretty sure that we never did it.

The agenda for May 26 poses this question about Filene’s: “Have they made a big mess?” Bon Ton agreed to send letters to its newspapers about AxN.

In June we discussed various methods of emailing claims. I don’t recall that we ever took any action on this. There was ominous news from Federated that they put all quotes on hold. The total number of orders in AxN exceeded 100,000. The June 30 agenda announced that Dick’s was moving into its new building over the subsequent weekend.

The first item on the July 21 agenda was “Denise’s three issues”. I wonder what they were. Item #10C talks about a follow-up meeting with the Washington Post that never happened. The next week’s agenda explained that they did not respond to my email. A second e-mail was sent on August 4. On August 25 (my dad’s eightieth birthday) I called the Director of Advertising Services.

Something distressing was evidently going on at Parisian, but I don’t remember what it was. That disclosure was somewhat offset by the following good news: “RadioShack: 34 active; 39 testing; 22 Macy’s West; 15 L&T; 4 Parisian; 56 other.” RadioShack did one of its four geographic divisions at a time. The last two entries brought up new subjects: “How can we make better use of my time and Lucia’s6?” and “5-year plan”.

The August 4 agenda was the first to mention SQL7. I used SQL for all of the AxN programs, but the AdDept programs mostly created temporary indexed output files that were populated by one program and read by another using IBM’s recommended approach, ISAM (Indexed Sequential Access Method).

Marshall Field’s (introduced here), the last big installation of the May Co. version of the AdDept system, was first mentioned in the agenda for September 8. We were very excited about the meeting scheduled for September 16 at Hecht’s advertising department in Arlington VA. By this time the work for the Peebles installation at Stage Stores was operational enough that we were ready to solicit their newspapers for AxN.

I was serious enough about contacting companies that sold software for ad agencies that I spent $35 to buy the booklet from the AAAA. I questioned whether we should write to each of them to propose an interface with their system and AxN. I don’t remember ever doing so.

The agenda for November 1 mentioned that Field’s used an ad agency for both broadcast and newspaper. My recollection was that they started using AxN almost immediately and dropped Haworth, the agency that bought newspaper space. However, later entries seem to contradict this. The same agenda mentions that TSI was carrying $55,000 in questionable receivables in the last month of its fiscal year.

I never had to make an onsite visit to our AxN client in Guam.

The November 10 agenda mentioned that—after months of foot-dragging—Federated Systems Group was finally going to “cut over” to their new AS/400 system. During this period we were worried about providing support for AxN for Macy’s West’s newspapers in Hawaii and Guam. This was needless. The papers subscribed for years without any problems. This was also the last agenda that included a mention of a press release about TSI’s twenty-fifth anniversary.

A major issue early in the year was how to handle the process for installing changes that Dick’s had forced upon us. There were other issues, too. The first agenda of the year ends with the question: “How can we get this installation on the right track?”

Two minor enhancements to AxN for the advertisers had been completed: custom emails and downloading of email addresses. However, I had apparently given up on the possibility of interfacing with computer systems used by the newspapers. There was also a process for reconciling the orders on AxN with the schedule on AdDept.

By March 10 we had a big programming backlog because of the large number of difficult jobs for Marshall Field’s. Denise controlled this process. I simply asked, “How can I help?” In the same meeting we discussed for the first time what, if any thing, we should do to forestall Macy’s from replacing AdDept with the system known then known as FedAd that had been developed by Burdines. Our contact at Macy’s West stated that “it did not exist”.

At the March 25 meeting we talked about Macy’s East for the first time in many months. For the April 28 and May 4 meetings there is separate agenda for AxN. For some reason I seemed worried about using it at Foley’s and Stage Stores.

The first item on the regular May 4 agenda was one word: “Lucia”. Lucia was able to handle much more challenging projects than our other administrative employees. The problem was trying to come up with things for her to do. Another issue on the same agenda posed some interesting questions:

We never mastered the trick of Cloud Computing.
  1. How could we set ourselves up to manage systems for our small clients? Bon Ton, Gottschalks, Neiman Marcus
    1. IBM (like Federated)?
    2. TSI
      1. Dedicated high-speed line for each user?
      2. On the net?
        1. Telnet? How would they print? Pdf?
        2. VPN: AS/400 to AS/400?
        3. VPN: PC to AS/400?
      3. High availability?
      4. Disaster recovery?
    3. A third party?

We did not spend a great deal of effort on trying to provide “cloud” computing for our customers. It would have involved a great deal of expense and risk. Just seeing that term “disaster recovery?” item gives me the chills.

Later in May Sue and I took our second Italian vacation with our friends Tom and Patti Corcoran. I wrote a journal again, but this time I had a camera. The results are posted here.

The agenda for June 2 began with the surprising news that Chuck Hansen at Marshall Field’s had asked me to back off on AxN. It also mentioned the agenda for a meeting with Macy’s Marketing on 5/17. It probably intended to say “6/17”. The next agenda, dated July 8, only stated, “Follow up with …” I must have forgotten the name (Robin Creen) of the lady with whom I met at Macy’s Corporate Marketing. There is also a reference to Bloomingdale’s. I suspect that this was in response to information from Tom Caputo, who worked with AdDept at both Lord & Taylor and Saks Fifth Avenue, that Bloomies had never taken the FedAd software out of the box.

The July 11 agenda has some detailed information about a proposed newsletter publicizing how AdDept handled inserts. Some of these enhancements were done for Dick’s.

The August 26 agenda has a new and somewhat mysterious major topic called “AdDept ideas”. The two subtopics are “SpooliT8 ($9K) or other Excel” and “Service Bureau”. I think that SpooliT made .csv files out of spooled output files. It may have had a few other features.

Throughout this period there were references to The Oregonian, the major paper in the Portland area that stopped paying invoices for AxN without canceling and never responded to attempts to find out why.

The agenda for September 14 mentions the long letter that I sent to Robin Creen. Its contents are posted here.

The agenda for October 12 had several tantalizing references. It began by stating that IBM’s VPN9 product, which TSI used for communicating through the Internet, with clients’ AS/400s would be activated on the following Saturday. It also reported that a newsletter had been sent out.

Robin Creen topped the October 24 agenda, but there were no details. The second item referred to renewal of iSeries News, a magazine.that catered to the AS/400 community. It had undergone many name changes, and the content had also evolved. We kept all of the back copies in the shelves that in 2023 are in my office. When we closed down the company (details here), I threw all of them away.

The third item was “SBC Contract”. I don’t remember SBC, but I suspect that it was an IBM Business Partner that had sold more systems than we had or had somehow managed to deal directly with IBM. During this period TSI was not allowed to quote or sell any IBM products. We had to go through a Super-VAR.

The fourth item was “Lucia” with no details. The fifth was “AT&T Global: do we need it?”. I am pretty sure that this product allowed me to get my email when I was on the road. In the days before Wi-Fi I had an AT&T product installed on my laptop that allowed me to use a phone line in my hotel room to sign on to AT&T and look at my email.

We must have received an inquiry from Sport Chalet10 a chain of stores in California that was similar to Dick’s. Until I saw this entry again I had completely forgotten about them. Evidently I wrote them a letter and sent them a newsletter, but nothing came of it.

The last agenda for 2005 was dated December 6. The #1 item was the blitz to get an AdDept system for Macy’s South up and running in time for the season that started at the beginning of February. The second item was an inquiry from Circuit City11. This was another dead end.

The “My disk recovery” entry brought back some really bad memories. I think that I recovered everything on my computer’s hard drive, but it was costly and painful. The best part was that I got an external hard drive12 that made it very easy to back everything up.

There are no entries for 2006 until June. I remember being under extreme pressure to bring the two huge AdDept installations at Macy’s South and Marshal Field’s up to speed. Meanwhile we received the crushing news that Macy’s and the May Co. had merged, and Macy’s would be the dominant player.

The agenda for June 13 began with the word Corum. I am pretty sure that it referred to broadcast buying software. Based on the date it was probably associated with Macy’s South.

That agenda also contained a major item that simply stated “Modernizing and marketing AdDept”. We never did find a feasible way to transform the AdDept screens into something that looked modern. We made more marketing attempts after this, but they did not amount to much. This was the peak period for AxN. More than four hundred papers had subscribed. TSI’s administrative person spent a good deal of time printing and mailing invoices and depositing checks from newspapers.

The agenda for October 11 was startlingly different. It mentioned two AS/400 models, a 170 and a 270. My recollection is that we did development and ran the business on the 170, and the 270 was devoted to AxN. It also mentions recruitment. I am not sure whether that referred to the administrative position or programming. The agendas have gotten shorter and shorter.

This agenda also mentioned the C compiler for the 270. Denise was upset at me for even investigating the possibility of converting TSI’s code to C, which was widely used in the Unix world.

In the agenda for October 18 the scary term “Macy’s North” appeared several times. It referred to the company that was formerly called Marshall Field’s. Evidently the marketing (never called “advertising”) department there had never bought into using AxN for insertion orders. They may have still been using Haworth.

“Maintenance” was often mentioned in the agenda for November 1. We probably never charged as much as we could have for the kind of service that we provided our clients. I was evidently still spending quite a bit of time at Belk.

I was surprised to see Circuit City mentioned again on the agenda for November 8. We must have received another phone call. The term “Foley’s project” also appeared. I am pretty sure that that was the code name for the long and frustrating effort that Denise and I undertook to sell the company.

The last agenda that I have was dated July 10, 2007. It contained only four items:

  1. Trip to Macy’s West
  2. 515
  3. Dick’s quotes
  4. Foley’s
Never even a nibble.

Denise and I continued to meet, but not on a formal basis. By then I had almost given up on selling more AdDept systems. There had been so much consolidation in retail that the number of good prospects for the system had shrunk to almost nothing. Nordstrom and Dillard’s would have looked nice on our client list, but it was hard to think of anyone else that was worth pursuing.

We still did quite a bit of custom programming during the next five or six years, but managing the list of open jobs did not require the juggling act that had characterized the previous decade.

The AxN business decreased for a few reasons. The big stores no longer trusted newspaper ads to bring in customers as they once did. Newspaper readership was way down. Some of the AdDept clients outsourced their buying to agencies or media services. That always meant a drop in the number of papers.

I enjoyed those meetings immensely, and I miss them.

1. The history of the development of AxN is posted here. The system design is outlined here. The description of the process by which it was brought to market begins here.

2. Net.Data was a scripting language written by IBM for the AS/400. It was quite popular, but IBM for some reason decided to drop it in favor of the open source scripting language php, which required implementation of the Zend php engine.

3. Java is an object-oriented language that was developed by people at Sun Microsystems. The company released an open-source version. Java was almost the only thing that IBM talked about at the PartnerWorld convention that Denise and I attended in 2000. It is described here. On the AS/400 applications written in Java required a lot more resources than programs written in the native languages. If run on the same box the Java programs were slower, a lot slower.

4. The history of the AdDept installation at Belk is posted here.

5. In 2016 LANG merged with the Orange County Register and a few other papers. The new organization was called the Southern California Newspaper Group. The third item under the Federated topic was “AxN letter to four divisions”. Since “Bloomingdale’s” was the second item it mus refer to Macy’s East, West, South, and Florida (Burdines).

6. Lucia Hagan was TSI’s administrative person during this period. She was introduced here.

7. SQL stands for Structured Query Language. It was invented by IBM, but the company did not endorse its use on the AS/400 until 2004.

8. SpooliT is still on the market in 2023! Its website is here.

9. VPN stands for Virtual Private Network. The Wikipedia entry is here.

10. Sport Chalet was sold to Vestis Retail Group in 2014 and was liquidated in 2016.

11. The sad story of Circuit City ended with its liquidation in 2009.

12. I still have that hard drive in 2023. However, I recently discovered that I no longer can find the cable that was used to attach it to a computer, and the company that made it was no longer in business.

2006-2014 Learning Italian Part 2: On My Own

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Books and tapes. Continue reading →

Some of the events and activities described in this entry began before I stopped taking classes in 2006 (described here). Some of them continued after I resumed taking the advanced Italian classes in 2014. Also, I might be wrong about either or both of those dates. I can’t think of any good way to check either one. Nevertheless, it seemed appropriate to group all of the extracurricular efforts that I have undertaken to increase my mastery of Italian in one place regardless of whether I was also attending one of the classes when I performed them.

Boxed lessons: I had purchased the introductory Ultimate Italian set after the last session of the beginning Italian class in May of 2002. Almost as soon as I finished its last lesson I returned to Barnes & Noble and purchased the advanced set of Ultimate Italian. I was not under severe time pressure this time, but I used the same strategy as I had before. I read through the textbook in the order presented, and I did all of the exercises. I had a better attitude than I had when I was doing just enough in school to get by. I studied each lesson thoroughly. I planned to go to Italy more than once, and I did not want to sound foolish when I tried to converse with the locals.

Both Ultimate Italian packages contained eight one-hour tapes and a book of grammar lessons and dialogues. The tapes mostly consisted of Italian speakers reading the dialogues in the book. They left time for the listener to repeat the sentence out loud.

I listened to these tapes every time that I was in my car. My trusty Saturn came with a cassette player, and, when I bought my blue Honda in 2007, I insisted—to the amusement of the sales rep—that it too should have one. Cassettes were superior to CDs (or anything else) for this purpose because rewinding the tape back a sentence or two was very easy. I did this often, and I am happy to report that I never had an accident or even a close call while doing so.

My first issue.

Acquerello Italiano: I don’t remember how or when I heard of Acquerello Italiano, a subscription that released—originally every two months but near the end only occasionally—a small magazine accompanied by a cassette tape or CD. The left side of each pair of facing pages in the magazine contained Italian text with numbered endnotes and, in bold typeface, difficult phrases. On the right side were detailed explanations in English of the difficult or idiomatic phrases. At the end were the notes explaining—in English—historical or sociological background for the text. Each issue contained a pleasant diversity of materials. Since the subject of every article was Italy and/or Italians, almost every issue featured some music samples and something about food, often including recipes.

The last issue.

The tapes contained everything on the left-side pages as well as the music. The articles were read by actors, but there were also some real interviews.

I really enjoyed Acquerello Italiano, and I was very disappointed when the company went out of business. I could find almost nothing about the magazines on the Internet. The only thing that I know is that the name of the publisher was Champs Elyssées, Inc., which was a small business that also published similar educational material in German, French, and Spanish. The company’s home base was Nashville, TN. Someone in Italy must have provided them with the material, but I never determined who was responsible on the Italian side.

I saved nineteen issues of those magazines. The oldest one had a copyright of 2004. The last date is 2009. I did not save any of the tapes. I had played each one countless times by the time that I bought a new Honda in 2018. Most of the tapes had eventually been damaged beyond repair because of the playing and rewinding. At any rate Honda no longer offered the option of a cassette player in their new vehicles.

Magazines: I was still doing quite a bit of travel for business in the early part of the “on my own” period of my Italian education. I discovered that one of the bookstores in Penn Station sold a few magazines in foreign languages. My favorites were Panorama and Oggi (which means “today”). Whenever I found one I purchased it and read it from cover to cover. Whenever I found new words I marked them in my Italian dictionary2. I also added them to my flash cards3.

I also found at least one bookstore in a strip mall that sold a few such magazines as well. I have a vague memory that it was in Pittsburgh. I went there to install and train the people in the advertising department at Dick’s Sporting Goods. Those adventures are described here.

Books of short stories: For quite some time Barnes and Noble stocked books of short stories that were written in Italian. I bought three of these books and read all of the stories. They all had similar formats: Italian on even-numbered pages (left) and English translation on odd-numbered pages (right).

Whenever I encountered new words, I added them to my flash cards and marked them in the dictionary.

I read every story and have even returned to ones that were written by people whom I had seen mentioned in other books or magazines.

Miscellaneous learning aids:I purchased quite a few books that addressed things that were not covered thoroughly by the books and magazines that I had read. For the most part these contained lists of words that were important for tourists. Since the need for food necessitated communication with someone more than once per day, many contained items one might find on menus.

The item displayed on the right only looks like a book. It is actually a set of two tapes designed strictly to help the listener converse with Italians about food and to order from an Italian menu. I am sure that there are many restaurants in Italy that have menus that do not also contain English descriptions and hire only waiters that do not understand a word of English. However, in the sixty or seventy days that I have spent in Italy I do not think that I ever encountered one.

I think that someone bought the tapes for me. I thought that The Savvy Traveler was the name of Rudy Maxa’s series on PBS, but apparently it was actually the name of his radio show for Minnesota Public Radio. I used to watch his television programs, but I don’t think that I ever heard him and Diana Nyad on National Public Radio.

Books: The first book that I read that was completely in Italian was L’Italia e i suoi invasori by Girolamo Arnaldi, a medieval scholar who studied at both the University of Bologna and La Sapienza in Rome. I found the book in a bookstore in Assisi on our second visit there in 2005. I was determined to find something that I could take home with me, and this volume was perfect. Parts of it were difficult for me, but I managed to get through the entire book. It broadened my understanding of how the fact that the Italian peninsula had been repeatedly invaded changed everything. Subsequently that has colored my understanding of every aspect of Italian history.

I read three other outstanding books. The first was Il Nome della Rosa by Umberto Eco. I had read the English version back in the eighties, and I had read quite a few of Eco’s other works. I had a good time becoming reacquainted with the plot, which was more meaningful since this time I was familiar with Pope John XXII and the two competing branches of Franciscans. I also was well aware of the power that the monasteries in the fourteenth centuries wielded. However, I was a little disappointed that very little was lost in translation.

That definitely could not be said for Il Gattopardo, the wonderful story of the Risorgimento in Sicily and southern Italy written by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. The story itself is extremely compelling. The birth of the Italian Republic is very difficult to comprehend, and this insider view was very useful in helping me get a grasp on it.

It was made into a movie called The Leopard that starred Burt Lancaster TCM allegedly owns this movie. However, my wife Sue watches TCM almost every day, and she has told me that they never show it, not even when Burt Lancaster is the star of the month.

I slightly cheated on both of these books. I owned English translations of both of them—what we called in college “ponies”. Only occasionally did I need to consult the English translation to decipher the original text

I had heard about I promessi sposi, the classic novel of the Church, the nobility, the Italian side of the Thirty Years War, starvation, and the plague, from an article in Acquerello Italiano. Apparently all Italian children were required to read it, and almost all of them hated it. I decided that I had to try it. I don’t remember every having a printed copy, and so I must have purchased it on Kindle or downloaded it from somewhere. I am pretty sure that it was in the public domain.

The book was written by Alessandro Manzoni in the 1840’s. Reading it was a powerful experience for me! I would recommend it to anyone who wants to gain an understanding of the evolution of Italy. If it is not the greatest Italian work since Dante, all discussions of that designation must begin with it.

Andrea Camilleri.

I also read a handful of recent popular novels. One was an Italian translation of a historical novel written originally in English. I no longer have a copy, and I remember little about it. I also read a couple of the Commisario Montalbano novels by Andrea Camilleri on Kindle. They were highly recommended by Susanna Perrucchini, the guide on our tour of Sicily in 2016.4 I have seen all thirty-seven of the made-for-television Montalbano movies on the streaming service MHz Choice. I liked the first thirty-six a lot. The last one was very disappointing.

Camilleri’s novels are written half in Italian and half in Sicilian dialect. This frustrated me because most of the dialogue is in dialect. I often could not understand it, and I did not know where to find out what was going on. I guess that I could have also purchased an English version.

I bought one other massive tome, I papi; storia e segreti by Claudio Rendina. I cannot claim that I read all 864 pages, but I did consult his treatment—which was pretty thorough—of several popes in different eras of papal history. Knowing that the papacy was held in very low esteem in Italy in the nineteenth century, I suspected that Rendina might have access to some sources outside of the Church’s official party line. In the entries that I read, however, I did not find that to be the case.

CDs and DVDs: Over the year I collected a few CDs and DVDs that were supposed to help with conversational Italian. I found them lying around in my bookcase. I have only a vague recollection of most of them.

The “Who is Oscar Lake?” DVD in the lower right was an interactive story. It was a mystery about the a mysterious person named Oscar Lake. It was my introduction to the word “commisario”. I don’t remember much else. Maybe I should try it again when I get done with The 1948 Project.

Videos: For a year or two we were able to receive transmissions from RAI Uno, the primary Italian station owned and operated by the government, with our Cox subscription. After a year or two we abandon it in order to save $10 per month. Up until then I watched some news shows and a few other programs on RAI, but I did not get a lot out of it.

Shortly thereafter I discovered that some of the same shows were available for free on the Internet. This was far superior. If you missed something, you could back up the video and repeat a section.

Imma in high fashion inMatera.

Much later I began watching European television shows on MHz Choice. Thecaptions in English that they provided were ordinarily quite good. In addition to the Commissario Montalbano movies I have watched the prequel series Giovane Montalbano, I bastardi di Pizzofalcone, Nebbie e delitti, Barlume, Commissario Vivaldi, Commissario De Luca, and Imma Tataranni. I liked all of these except Vivaldi. In my opinion Imma was the best, and it is still in production. The action is set in, of all places, Matera. I only pay $8 per month for MHz Choice, and I have literally watched hundreds of good shows.

For me one of the most enjoyable activities when I heard what the character said, and the person who created the captions made a mistake. It did not happen often with MHz Choice.

Drills while exercising: When I was jogging in the evenings or on weekends I would sometimes spend the time counting (often out loud) in Italian from one to one hundred, first with the cardinal numbers: uno, due, tre, ecc. Then I would do the ordinal numbers: primo, secondo, terzo.

When TSI began to close down in 2014 I had time to rejoin the adult ed Italian classes. The semi-annual booklet listed the teacher at all three levels as Mrs. Trichilo. That period is described here.

1. Acquerello is the Italian word for watercolor. It always struck me as a strange choice for the title of a magazine.

2. In 2022 I am on my third Italian dictionary, Webster’s New World Italian Dictionary Concise Edition. The first one that I bought was from a different publisher. The second one was the same Webster’s edition as the third. I needed to buy new dictionaries because the previous ones were so worn out that they were unusable—covers missing, spines broken, pages falling out. I brought them with me on both vacations and business trips.

3. The flash cards were home-made. One side contained a single English word or phrase. The other side listed Italian words or phrases. The cards were sorted alphabetically by the English word or phrase. I created over ten thousand of these cards, which were split into dozens of decks, and I drilled myself on them at every opportunity—at home, on the road, and at lunch when at the office. When I stopped this process I threw away the cards.

4. You can read my journal of that entire memorable trip here.