Nostalgia: Bleecker St, Tekserve, Blueberry iBooks, and old SF magazines

I went down a rabbit hole this morning, following a couple of threads from a couple of articles I was reading, which stirred up some old memories and made me do a bit of spelunking on the internet. I thought it was interesting enough to justify a blog post, so here we go.

I think the whole thing started with this article about all the empty storefronts on Bleecker Street in NYC. This led me into a reverie about the “old days” of cool record stores and book stores and computer stores. Which reminded me of Tekserve, which went out of business about a year ago. (Tekserve’s collection of old Apple hardware is now owned by MacPaw, an Apple development shop in the Ukraine, which seems kind of crazy to me, but that’s probably because I’m old.)

I’ve also been reading through old TidBITS newsletters, and hit one this week that mentioned Tekserve’s closing, and linked to this video from an old Sex and the City episode that includes a couple of scenes shot at Tekserve. I’ve never actually watched Sex and the City, but that clip is kind of fun.  Aasif Mandvi (from The Daily Show) plays the Tekserve employee who handles her laptop, and there’s a bit with a Blueberry iBook that made me a little nostalgic for my old Tangerine iBook.

And, going back to the Bleecker Street article, Sex and the City was apparently one of the main reasons for the beginnings of the real estate bubble on Bleecker Street, after Magnolia Bakery made an appearance on the show. And that got me thinking about the changes in Greenwich Village, in general, over the years, including Bleecker Bob’s getting replaced with a yogurt shop in 2013, and Kim’s Video closing down in 2014.

The Kim’s Video article includes this quote: “Manhattan in the 21st century is this Disneyland for the superrich,” from Richard Hell. And that reminded me of a science fiction story I read in 1989, which basically used that concept as its premise. The story was called “Do You Believe in Magic,” was written by Paul Di Filippo, and appeared in the January 1989 issue of the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. And, no, my memory is not nearly good enough to have remembered any of that. I had to do a bit of searching to figure that out. (I’m glad to have found The Science Fiction, Fantasy, & Weird Fiction Magazine Index, by the way. I may need to use it again some day.)

I’d like to reread that story, but if I still have my copy of that issue, I have no idea where it is. (I looked around my apartment a bit, and did find some F&SF issues from 1964, but none from 1989. I can’t remember where I got those 1964 issues from, but the covers sure are nice.) I found that it’s contained in a collection titled Fractal Paisleys, which is available on the Kindle for a little over $5, and contains a bunch of other stories that are probably also pretty good.

So I think that brings me full-circle, back to 2017, where I use the internet to track down old SF stories and then buy DRM-protected digital copies of them from a giant global monopoly retailer, without ever leaving my apartment. (Which I guess is why we don’t have book stores, or record stores, or independent computer stores anymore…)

online account management hall of shame

Since I’ve been changing my email address on so many different online accounts over the past few weeks, I’ve developed some strong feelings about best practices and worst practices for how companies handle this stuff.

It’s generally a good practice to send out notifications to both old and new email addresses, preferably with a confirmation link in the email sent to the new address. And it’s a good practice to avoid including any key details in the email sent to the old address, in case the user is changing the address because the old account has been compromised. That’s the way most services handle things, but I’ve seen some that send no confirmations at all, which is a little alarming, from a security standpoint.

The weirdest thing I’ve seen so far in that area is from one of my credit cards, which has sent me a daily notice that I’ve changed my email address every day for the last four days, to both addresses. I’m hoping that’ll stop eventually, but I think maybe they’re caught in a loop, and I’m going to get a notice every day for the rest of my life.

Another bad practice that a lot of companies seem to do relates to email newsletters. Changing your email address for an online account should really change over any newsletter subscriptions that are related to that account. What I’ve seen instead is usually one of the following:

  1. The systems are entirely separate, and changing the account address has no affect on newsletter subscriptions.
  2. The change automatically subscribes you to newsletters at the new address, but doesn’t stop the newsletters going to the old address.
  3. The change automatically subscribes you to newsletters at the new address, even if you’ve previously unsubscribed from newsletters at the old address.

And, also, most newsletter management systems don’t provide any way to change your email address. So you need to unsubscribe from the old address and resubscribe with the new one.

I found that the NY Times did a good job in this area, smoothly migrating over all of my newsletter subscriptions when I changed my email address on my account. The New Yorker, on the other hand, required me to unsubscribe and resubscribe to everything. And their subscription management system somehow subscribed me to all of their newsletters at my new address, so I’ve had to unsubscribe from a bunch of them.

Another bad practice is related to handling “plus alias” email addresses. These are supported in both Gmail and FastMail, and I often use them when subscribing to newsletters to make filtering a little easier. But I’ve found that a lot of online systems don’t recognize a plus sign as valid within an email address. (At this point, I could go down a rat hole, complaining about bad practices around email regex validations, but I’ll restrain myself.) It’s not so bad when the address is rejected on the front-end, but I’ve gotten into some situations where the email address is accepted initially, but then causes some problem later on down the line.

FastMail also supports something they call “subdomain addressing”, which allows you to get around the “plus sign” issue, but I didn’t want to start using that, since I didn’t want to set up a lot of stuff that would make it too hard to switch my domain from FastMail to a different provider. (Plus aliases are supported by multiple providers, including Google and ProtonMail, but I don’t think subdomain addressing is.)

Also, I just read the FastMail support doc that I linked above and noticed this statement:

If the part after the “+” matches the name of one of your folders (see below for how the matching works), the message will automatically be delivered there instead of your Inbox. You don’t even need to create an explicit rule!

That’s really cool, but I’m kind of annoyed that I didn’t know about it until now, after I’ve already set up a bunch of rules. Oh well. I’ll keep it in mind for new stuff.

Speaking of rules, I now have about sixty of them set up in FastMail. I could probably cut that down a bit by getting a little creative with them, but that’s not a ludicrous number, I think.