Wow. It’s settled into the classic Atlanta summertime of yore, where we get serious heat and humidity by midday, and if you want to be productive out of doors, it’s best to get up early and get back inside before, oh, 8 or 9 am.

So that’s what we’ve been doing, mostly at Sammy’s wise instigation. Settling into patterns around the patterns.

The early morning walk around our neighborhood, or down and around Piedmont Park can take on a variety of textures, depending on whether you set out at 6:10 am or 8:00 am. The sound itself is different…whether you’re cruising by the soft hissing of southern summer lawns (earlier) or dodging the parade of commuting crossover vehicles (later). Earlier, and you’re more on your own, although there seems to be a distributed team of hardcore people Getting Their Exercise who certainly seem to be exerting themselves more than I am, although any uphill stretches turn me into a fine purveyor of beet-redness and sweat. Later, and you are more likely to run into the folks who who use Orme Park as their own personal dog free-run zone. I guess they think the “pets must be on leash” signs (all defaced) don’t apply to them or their critters, because, like, you know, they’re special. (We use it for our personal let’s-not-exclusively-walk-on-sidewalks-between-home-and-the-park zone.)

So we’ve bent to the pattern imposed by the weather and have had a series of really quite enjoyable morning walks, and, since our return from Michigan, a fairly quiet period work-wise that I’ve really enjoyed. Sammy, it sounds like, has hit upon a vision for her writing and research, and has been very nose-to-the-keyboard. Me, I’m cheering her on.

She’s come up with new and even healthier ways to combine beans and quinoa and tofu and..uh…ketchup and ultra-fresh herbage from the garden, and again, I cheer her on and try to do the dishes and keep the pantry stocked.

Actually this morning, just to break my patterns up a bit more, I’ve wandered down to the Starbucks about a mile from our house (next to the Trader Joes, indeed), and I’ve just been watching a succession of patrons order elaborate coffee drinks and climb back aboard (respectively) their black Prius, their red Prius, their silver Prius, and, uh, a pink bicycle that matches their bike-spandex. I’m sitting at the table where, last week, I saw a guy with a MacBook Pro and noise cancelling headphones editing high-def video, and over across the room from where Bill Ambrose and I sat discussing the modern technology options when you want to be able to edit and create in any of the modern high definition media. (Where once we “did television”, we now acquire. Push pixels. Slam them around. Stack them into beautifully synchronized sandwiches. Manage the huge files we’ve created. And some of us prefer to do it where people drink coffee. Hm, maybe not me, at this point.)

I’m sitting next to where I saw the guy who literally wrote the book on Cocoa programming was hanging out just before our Michigan trip.

Yes, it’s a coffee shop filled with creativity, or so it would seem on the surface. I came down here to bathe in that. It’s an essence that has a soundtrack fileld with Elvis Costello and Simon and Garfunkel, and when I fire up iTunes, it reports that it has no idea what the last song played at this Starbucks was. Hey, I didn’t ask. May I recommend some songs based on your metadata? Nah, no thank you, iTunes.

And then I go home and look at the stack of D1, D2, and Digital Betacam tapes I have in our upstairs closet. What the heck did I use these things for, again? I plan strategies to stack books around the house that add to the comfy feeling (as opposed to looking like we’re prepared for the next tree assault on our property.)

Meanwhile, my sister has upgraded her iPhone to the latest and greatest, my brother is hacking his birthday Kindle and the AppleTV (bought with birthday money), and I’ve upgraded our original-generation iPhone to the 3.0 software, and it feels like a whole new device. Okay, a little slower than the whizzy one we saw on demo at an AT&T store, but for the moment, I can deal.

I feel artificially insulated from the global economic meltdown, but the caffeine has kicked in, so I have other microeconomic patterns to shift, nudge, bump just a little.

Enjoy Monday in your neighborhood.

I really like photography…I enjoy my own blurry efforts, I’m more delighted by Sammy’s visions of the natural and un-natural world, and sometimes, when I’m trying to get some creative traction, it’s easy to stumble near-mindlessly through endless seas of online JPEGs, most quite beautiful, some just tiny doorways into a life I’m not getting anywhere near.

I’ve been talking with Sam about a couple of new cameras that are just nearly almost on the verge of being released, and with luck and a clarity of consumer vision, I might be off on another binge of pixel-gathering in the coming months. I kinda keep telling myself, “self, your older, future incarnations are going to be very happy you’ve captured the soul-moments of these little chunks of your world when you’re sitting in your space future home five or ten years hence.”

No, I really don’t talk like that at all, not even to my future self. But I do like having these representations of what is…for real, for now.

I guess Sammy’s right…

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced the Adobe® Creative Suite® CSOLPC® product family, a breakthrough release of the industry-leading design and development software optimized for the One Laptop Per Child XO machine, running a version of the Linux-based operating system with the distinctive Sugar GUI. The release will, for the first time, enable entire villages of small children to use Adobe After Effects® and Adobe Photoshop® on a computer they understand and use everyday—the OLPC XO—to make a creative contribution to the world by taking on the ever-growing number of film and video industry projects that require rotoscoping, motion tracking, color retouching, and wire removal.

“In tough global economic times, film, video, and print production companies are looking for even newer ways to outsource labor, especially to countries where the technological infrastructure is in a nascent form”, said Shantanu Narayen, president and chief executive officer at Adobe. “We think this is a win-win for production houses and the growing surplus of small rural villages around the globe with bored, XO-trained children, waiting to join the digital production line creating sparkling, state-of-the-art entertainment for global audiences.”

The pricing for the CSOLPC® package is similarly innovative. Users at large, successful design firms in the western world who purchase a copy of Adobe Creative Suite 4 SuperPremium® (USD$ 2299) will be simultaneously purchasing a copy of CSOLPC® for a small child in Ulan Bator, Peru, Bangladesh, Vietnam, or any of 16 other countries which have signed up for the pilot program.

Once entire villages of children have activated the software over the convenient XO wireless mesh network, they will begin to receive 2K and 4K film frames to rotoscope and retouch using the Adobe After Effects® application, which will break the large frames up into dozens of small tiles optimized for the child’s XO and attention requirements. The finished frame will be then reassembled and sent back to a central server in San Jose, where it will be securely returned to the film or video studio who requested the job. The process is seamless and transparent on both ends.

Because of the tight memory and disk space requirements of the ultra-portable OLPC laptop, the standard Adobe Installer program will not run on a single XO; instead, establishing a mesh network of at least a dozen OLPC XO laptops is required. The process has all the speed and convenience that Adobe customers have come to expect.

I would have thought this was the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary edition—this timeless, tidy collection of rules of the writing road seem to have lived among us since the dawn of time.

But, no, it’s just about the same age as my brother (me, I’m the same age as Helvetica.) Yes, the seminal work by William Strunk came out in 1918 (a shade younger than my father-in-law) but the “and White” part of it, the contribution, revision, and expansion by long-time New Yorker contributor and “Charlotte’s Web” author E.B.White made the oh-so-concise rules of his old Cornell professor live again for several generations of succeeding writers.

Some of White’s (and Strunk’s) advice can be ingested and then gently set aside in our new world of marvels like the quickly-burped-out weblog and the vast twitterscape: “Prefer the standard to the offbeat.” “Do not affect a breezy manner.” Heck, what fun is that?

But we can all continue our searches for “one moment of felicity” (S&W quoting Robert Louis Stevenson there.) We can all “omit needless words.” We can all slam the keys with vigor and then hone the result until a bright sheen casts out from our 24″ LCD displays.

Even on weekends, I’m sorry to report that I spend a lot of time sitting in front of the computer, and generally what I’m doing could be classified as “work.”

But what is that exactly? Sure, the stuff I do for income is unmistakably work, but what about the time spent learning new, complex workflows in order to do the things I do? What about the time spent trying to bludgeon my machine into making a computer-generated light cast the sort of shadow that I’ve seen in the real world? What about the time I take looking “under the hood” to figure out how this particular web page does what it does, micro-googling snippets of javascript to try and parse what for me is the unparsable?

Of course, even from my earliest exposures to computers and their possibilities, the experience of learning by trying something and seeing if that works…and then trying something else and seeing if that works…the iterative process is one that can seem…depending on where you’re coming from…as falling into either the “work” or the “play” categories.

I’m not at all sure that it might not be something else entirely. Sometimes it has the unmistakable characteristics of non-productivity…as in, “I’m trying this, and trying, and…uh…trying…and I’m really just spinning my tires and making no progress at all.” Look up at the clock, another hour has passed. And sometimes (maybe the minority of times) it feels like that sort of ostensible wheel-spinning actually puts the rest of my brain in a good place to do the paying stuff. But it’s easy to tell yourself that’s what your doing and then look up to discover it’s 2 am and one really ought to call it a day.

There are definite tradeoffs into how you learn, how you work, how you play, and how you make the transition from one to the other throughout your waking hours, whenever those may be.

Can you tell where I stand amidst those transitions at this very moment?

Well, gotta get back to it. Or, maybe go to Trader Joe’s and pick up some milk. Or maybe…

Sammy says it takes a week for her to get readjusted to Daylight Savings Time and it’s been about a week, and this morning, a cool, quiet one in Atlanta, feels about right. I feel adjusted…I hope you do too. Hi from here, where this weblog journal thingie of mine has been lying somewhat fallow in 2009, a clear sign that my attentions have been elsewhere.

It sure hasn’t been that I’ve been away from my computer—no, I’ve been working fairly steadily since Christmas, on projects as far-ranging as graphics for a Youngstown group of television stations to some last-minute hacking on a sales video for United Airlines to a bunch of web design, including helping Sammy establish a new and dynamic site for the Society for Georgia Archaeology that involved all kinds of delving into the arcana wrapped around javascript, CSS, PHP, and SQL. I can honestly say that it now comes more or less naturally for me to crank out inelegant code to bend a web page to my will, although sometimes I sure end up googling for snippets that I can slice and duct-tape together to get the job done.

But I get a real hit of satisfaction from cobbling and honing a small snippet of code that, for example, adds a just-the-right-size and just-the-right look map (using something called the Google Static Maps API) to articles on the SGA site that are ‘tagged’ with a latitude and longitude, automatically, no muss nor fuss.

Kinda like this, behold:

One of the places I lived in college:

…maps are just fun. APIs to fancy web services willing to belch maps on command are just fun too. Although if I had any substantial concerns (and some folks most surely do) about the long-term wisdom of trusting Google and…well, mostly Google…with my data and my information, maybe I wouldn’t. I mean, wow—I read my RSS through them, I have spreadsheets and photos and maps and code and of course email and now even transcribed voicemail and telephony that passes through the GoogleOmniPlexOverLordEntity, and if they really are evil, I may be screwed, as may we all be. But I don’t think they are. Flawed and human, yes…evil, no.

But if you scale “flawed and human” up to Google-sized über-global proportions, does that equal evil? Does a global economic downturn subtly turn a huge corporation’s rudder just ever so slightly toward the dark side? Um, reply hazy, ask later.

Back to work: I’ve also had projects that require me to come up with elements that look good in one of the most resource-constrained, throwback, arenas out there—the cable set-top box. There are a bunch of people out there trying to do cutting edge interactive TV by pushing code out to ‘legacy boxes’ that are a decade and a half old. Yes, that cable box parked atop or under your TV (a little computer-like thing, of course) is a dinosaur from the nineties! Why can’t it do the honorable thing and catch fire and die? Otherwise, because it has about zero ram and a microprocessor that my phone can run rings around, and because there are about a zillion of them still out there functioning, I have to take really pretty graphics and use all my cleverness to dither and smush them down into color palettes reminiscent of the old Vidifont I labored over in…the eighties. No, not pinker and teal-er colors, way fewer colors than the 16.7 million available before your eyes now. It’s kind of like having to create web pages that would look good on a Mac 128k from 1984. It’s kinda like…well, you get the idea. But it does seem like this is one more area where having lived and worked struggling through those paleodigital days pays off—understanding constrained tech can be a marketable skill.

Elswehere, it seems like there have been a steady stream of computer crises that I’ve been able to help family and friends with, if sometimes just to reassure them (those hardy few friends we have who are not Mac owners) that no, their machine has probably not been infected and their identity stolen and their bank accounts drained. No matter what kind of computer you have, the feeling of being out of control can easily seem to eminate from the whirring box on your desktop that brings you the interwebs…if you let “what my computer is doing” become this thing of mystery.

What’s it doing? Sammy and I were watching TV and something in the cabinet underneath began a quiet low grunting. RRunnnt-runt. Nggg-nrunt. What’s that!? What’s it doing!? Relax, it’s just the hard drive attached to the Mac Mini which is recording The Daily Show for our later viewing pleasure…the drive is mostly full and besides, I have it sitting on that old ice cube tray so it’s well-ventilated, but that’s just enough to give it room to vibrate when it’s doing some heavy record-to-the-platter action…thus the grunting.

There’s always an explanation, usually one too mundane and too tiny to spend too much time on. I get a huge amount of satisfaction of seeing folks I care about set up their digital worlds on machines that are largely hassle-free…and I’m always happy to help in that process, if only to offer a few well-timed “what’s it doing?” explanations.

So that’s where my easily ping-ponged attentions have been through much of The Year Thus Far. There, and, of course, distracted by bright shiny objects like the Twitter and the iPhone and the..uh…Global Economic Crisis. One of those things is not like the other.

Enjoy your Friday…thanks for your attention(s.)

A year ago February I was getting over the silly-ass trauma of losing the Starbucks right down Highland Avenue from us.

I went out in the fog this morning to discover that the sign was going up on a shiny new one which has been built for our upscale caffeinated pleasure down in what we now call the Trader Joe’s shopping center. Ah, life no longer out of balance…de-koyaanisqatsi-ed.

The old one, I can tell you with some precision, was 0.334123 miles by air, or 0.5 mi by road away from here. The new one is 0.974822 miles by air, or 1.2 mi by road. It is in fact a tiny bit further away as the crow flies than the Little Five Points Starbucks (0.895309 miles by air, yet 1.3 mi by road)…but I can count the number of times I’ve zipped over there with my personal jetpack on the fingers of no hands whatsoever, so the stroll to the new one is quite easy and enjoyable…and you don’t have to cross Ponce.

As I think I said back at the start of 2008, I was really in no way deprived by the departure of the old one (nor would I feel much loss over the collapse of the entire chain) except that it was, as designed, an enjoyable place to stroll into amidst clothing shops and beauty parlors that, to be honest, don’t get much of my business.

I thought maybe the store closing was indicative of the times (and well, yeah, things got a lot rougher for SBUX and damn near every other corporation out there in 2008), and maybe the real tell of where we’re at is the sign that said a Krispy Kreme was going in there disappeared quickly and the exBucks property has been sitting unoccupied the whole year. It still looks exactly like the first photo…down to the signage residue.

And it’s not like we’re Krispy Kreme-deprived…an ancient and venerable one (it’s once semi-burned-out sign offered “erica’s Favorite Doughnuts”) is right down Ponce, next to the AIDS hospice.

So what does it tell us that the Starbucksians are confident enough to open another one round here in the current economic climate? Well, I can tell you that the Midtown Promenade shopping center, with the opening of Trader Joes and the subsequent arrival of Richard’s Variety Store has filled in the small shoporama (long ago the home of a sad Winn-Dixie) nicely and made it (certainly over the holidays) a mobbed-parking-lot kinda place brimming with urban disposable-income-disposing. All they really needed to complete the picture was…well, we’re good now, thanks.

Sometimes it’s nice to know when you’re done…

And…what you should do next. Okay, where’s that envelope?

And sometimes, when you think you’re doing just fine, it’s nice to know when a piece of software thinks you haven’t quite measured up…

Why would I want to discard change? Change is good. Change is what I’m counting on as I breathe the last of 2008.

Some Sunday mornings I’m a bit nostalgic. So I give you: the Millennium Falcon landing in WTBS’s West Peachtree studio, circa 1980. Careful study of this frame tells you: 1) I was allowed to play with expensive TV equipment in the middle of the night. 2) I had a large model of the Millennium Falcon…in fact, I was apparently willing to spend some of my meager disposable income on a model kit in my early twenties. 3) Our Grass Valley 1600 switcher really didn’t do that good a chromakey. Oh, and 4) we still had Norelco PC-72 cameras.

What this frame doesn’t show is the blast of “landing exhaust” that came from discharging a fire extinguisher right behind the model. Convincing!

Why, you ask? Bill Tush was interviewing Harrison Ford, and I wanted to do something special.

Hm. Okay. I’m thinking you shouldn’t be in the icon design business when your drawing of a video camera has to have the words “video camera” on the side in order to even remotely resemble what any human might call a video camera.

And I don’t even want to know what it’s plugged in to.

At any rate, rest assured, the Atlanta Botanical Garden’s (controversial) parking deck construction site is really, really, really well protected. Restricted! Monitored!

By what, you ask? Uh…

I’m going to have to figure out a way to pull back from politics and settle back into my usual vast panoply of micro-obsessions with geeky minutiae, and I will, soon, I promise, but for now consider this paragraph of wisdom:

Obama has continually been asked to defend something that ought to be at democracy’s heart: the importance of talking to as many people as possible in this complicated and wildly diverse society, of listening with the possibility of learning something new, and of speaking with the possibility of persuading or influencing others.

That’s unfortunately about twice the size of a 140-character tweet, but I send its common sense out to you nonetheless.

It’s by William Ayers. Bill Ayers. The real guy behind the caricature concocted by the Republicans in order to try and win the election. The so-called domestic terrorist.

And you know what? Even if you completely disagree with every thing he has done and stands for (and I urge you to at least read the short piece I’ve linked to above (right now their server is slogging a bit) before you jerk your knees in that direction) you have (I assert) to respect that he nailed a key difference between the President-elect and the current office-holder, and, at the least, McCain v.2008 (as opposed to the 2000 model, which seemed to have a better listening subsystem.)

Simple for me: we have to keep listening.

Here’s one more chunk:

The McCain-Palin attacks not only involved guilt by association, they also assumed that one must apply a political litmus test to begin a conversation.

On Oct. 4, Palin described her supporters as those who “see America as the greatest force for good in this world” and as a “beacon of light and hope for others who seek freedom and democracy.” But Obama, she said, “Is not a man who sees America as you see it and how I see America.” In other words, there are “real” Americans — and then there are the rest of us.

In a robust and sophisticated democracy, political leaders—and all of us—ought to seek ways to talk with many people who hold dissenting, or even radical, ideas. Lacking that simple and yet essential capacity to question authority, we might still be burning witches and enslaving our fellow human beings today.

and at the end:

In this time of new beginnings and rising expectations, it is even more urgent that we figure out how to become the people we have been waiting to be.

Something to work on while we’re waiting for January 20th.

No, it’s not a real headline, but it cracks me up in a way that I really can’t explain.

There are more here. I think this gets close to the kind of fake headlines and odd stuff we’d stick to the walls of my college newspaper’s office and laugh at over the sound of Warren Zevon and Jackson Browne late into the night. Nice of them to share. Hee, hee.

And yes, we’ve been celebrating all week. I was out getting milk at the Kroger last night and a carful of kids headed up Ponce joyfully chanting “O-ba-ma! O-ba-ma!” This was Thursday night!

And just like that, we’re past Halloween, through the tissue-paper barrier between October and November, and headed down the chute toward the first Tuesday in November…historically, Election Day.

But for maybe as many as 35% of eligible voters, they’ve been there, and, in many cases, stood in line quite a while before having done that…voted, that is.

That’s heartening, to be sure. But here in Georgia, the potential of early voting still collides with the realities of state law (flatly forbidding early voting on Saturday and on the Monday before the election) and our classic oh-we’re-a-sleepy-southern-state-isn’t-it-cute state government that is now forecasting that, aw, shucks, it might be several days until we get that darn avalanche of ballots counted.

Yeesh.

So Sammy, smart enough to see I could use a distraction along with some exercise, took me up to Northwest Georgia for a nice hike, and I brought my Obama-Biden button along to counteract some of the vibes cast by the dozens of McCain-Palin signs that dot the rural Georgia landscape. The leaves were beautiful, the air was clear, and I’ve returned in a good place to enter my final 40 hours or so of focused, intense concern and active internet monitoring of our Tuesday general election.

And yes, we will, as tradition holds, walk down to the library to cast our ballot…in the morning. If we’re still standing in line as the sun goes down…well, we’ll stand, feeling fortunate that we have the kind of schedule where that can happen. And I’ll make sure the iPhone is fully charged.

One linguistic tic that I’m noticing all over the darn place this campaign…but especially coming out at the beginning of Barack Obama’s carefully-crafted responses, is this notion of…this notion.

It’s this quasi-intellectual way of holding an idea up between two fingers, with apparent scientific detachment mixed with a dash of disdain, moments before you toss it aside as not quite what you want to sign your name to.

“we should overcome this notion of North-South…”
“this notion of the little person going up against the big and powerful…”
“this notion of self- constraint is one that is set out in terms of the ability of the self to be governed by pure practical reason…”
“This notion of punishing people by not talking to them has not worked…”
“But this notion of no coal, I think, is an illusion.”

After I started batting this notion around in my election-soaked brain, I came across this AJR piece that suggests that its use is on the rise precisely because Obama uses it as a rhetorical device: “it may mean that Barack Obama’s speech pattern has gotten into our brains…even those of conservative commentators and reporters – all unawares.”

So be prepared for a post-election boost in notional discourse. Or, perhaps, invest now in “items used in sewing, such as buttons, pins, and hooks”…definition three in my Mac’s New Oxford American Dictionary.

Hope to see you at the Starbucks with your “I voted” sticker on tomorrow.

A couple of brief farewells to start this week before the election. Famed CBS Designer (his life forever intertwined with the Eye network) Lou Dorfsman died last week, the creator of, no, not the iconic CBS eye logo itself, but so much else that defined the once Columbia Broadcasting System as a serious force in American journalism and American culture.

His obsession with the details—as they fit into a very big picture—could be seen in his Gastrotypographicalassemblage, which was, to put it simply, a really, really big wall of 3d wood type in the CBS cafeteria. This was nothing a CBS viewer ever saw on the air—yet for Lou, it had to be crafted with meticulous care and style.

Big (BIG!) type, used boldly, distinctively, confidently—that was Dorfsman all over. I was, of course, inspired by him and his work.

And much further west, we say goodbye to Tony Hillerman, born in Oklahoma, moved to go to school in New Mexico, and there around the Four Corners is where he spent most of his life, amidst great visual beauty and immersed in the ancient culture of native Americans…and their very modern poverty and marginalization.

He was able to bring to life realistic stories of Navajo detectives on tribal land…and in some ways, he brought the sights and smells of the land itself to life in books like “Skinwalkers” and “The Blessing Way.” His attention to telling detail in the written word, and spare, yet evocative word-painting earned my respect from the first words of his I read.

One of my enduring memories is traveling New Mexico with Ms. Sam, heading up to Canyon de Chelly, surrounded by stunning vistas, while reading a Hillerman paperback and listening to the soft discordant melodies of Navajo speech come out of the radio. It almost seemed like random tonalities…until the announcer read the phone number and said the word “brake repair” in English.

From Twitter on this sunday fall afternoon, the sounds of change, 140 characters at a time:

Just got a call from my Mom in Denver. She is seeing Barack Obama speak today!

100,000 gather in Denver for Barack Obama rally. My sons called it “life-changing.”

Everything is bigger out west. Over 100,000 at obama’s rally in Denver today! 38 minutes ago

Reading that Obama spoke to a crowd of 100,000 today in Denver. McCain spoke to a crowd of less than 1,000.

Had a great time at the big Obama rally in Denver. No problem getting there – bus from boulder. Saw him from the steps of the capitol.

Over 100K at rally for Obama in Denver today. Seems like a lot of people are paying attention to this election and not just randomly voting.

fortunate enough to meet Barack Obama last night. What an inspiration.

Denver Post says there were 100k at the Obama rally. It was an impressive site and I’ll post the pictures when I get back to my mac.

100K at Denver Obama Rally. Denver, you rock. I’m feeling idealism coming back again.

Meanwhile, make no mistake, there are plenty of tweets out there that link the Democratic nominee to the holocaust, nazis, communists, Timothy McVeigh, Karl Marx, and anything else they can think of to generate fear.

Fear. Of a man running for president. That’s the sole tactic now.

It’s really amazing. And on such a beautiful fall day. Would have like to have seen that crowd in Denver in person (and in Indianapolis—Indy! last week)…but the 140-character-bursts-of-optimism will do.

One Colorado blogger reported “More than half of the crowd raised their hands in the affirmative to the question of whether they have voted yet. That’s inspiring, too! All in all, it was a somewhat effortless voyage into a considerably positive event. It was strong. It was intensely good. It was beautiful.”

Inspiration versus fear. There ya go.

Hey there, we made it home last week, and that feels good. The dumpster is out of our driveway. 99.5% of our house reconstruction is done, and we’ve returned from a journey north to see family and friends, to put The Green Cottage to sleep for the winter, to enjoy the leaves changes through bright shades of maple-red and sycamore-gold.

A meeting with a new client of mine gave us a chance to swing wide through Ohio and wander down through West Virginia on our way back south, and because this is the political season as much as it is autumn, it gave me a chance to—in a fairly non substantive way—get back in touch with my roots and get a sense of how the midwest is faring economically (mmm…not well) as well as get the faintest read on the political landscape—by watching the political signs as they literally dot the countryside.

In Michigan and Ohio, the yard signs were out in force, and I was heartened to see Obama signs in places that were traditionally considered Republican strongholds. Sammy, ever-attuned to the nuances of the landscape, pointed out the difference between yard signs…the ones that you put on your own property and the ones that appear on the edge of public right-of-ways that can be scattered by political operatives and volunteers. We saw both in the upper peninsula of Michigan and the farm country of northwest Ohio. South of Youngstown, down to the Ohio River, where my mom grew up (on the West Virginia side) we saw more democratic signs, and a lot of them tied into the unions—still a force after all the closings and all the layoffs and all the 1980s.

We got as far as just south of Parkersburg, West Virginia for the night, and I had a good chance to watch the political ads for three states there, and Obama dominated the airwaves, along with spots that used Joe Biden in a way to, frankly, say to folks in these parts “I know this Obama guy, and he’s not a scary guy.”

Biden has been doing some very heavy lifting for the campaign, including a series of satellite TV interviews with local anchors—one, for a TV station in Orlando was just beyond my belief. Longtime anchor Barbara West apparently wanted to pose nothing but questions crafted by those somewhere way, way to the right of Rush Limbaugh. “You may recognize this famous quote, ‘from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.’ That’s from Karl Marx. How is Sen. Obama not being a Marxist if he intends to spread the wealth around?” Biden: “Are you joking? Is this a joke? … Or is that a real question?” Was Obama trying to “turn America into a Socialist country like Sweden?” Biden said, “I don’t know anybody who thinks that except the far right-wing of the Republican Party.” I watched and shook my head…this is exactly why so much of local television news is ridiculed, ignored, increasingly irrelevant. Biden handled it with sophistication and intelligence. Any questions about jobs, the economy, our future? Social security? Um…no.

As we drove south of Charleston, West Virginia and down through Pikeville, Kentucky and hard-core coal country, the political signs seemed to disappear completely…and yet I’ve found no laws that prohibit them. Maybe folks are just feeling more disenfranchised there. We dropped down through western Virginia (yes, the real Virginia) and they picked back up again, and again I was heartened to see the Obama name scattered through the political sign-forest. That was less true back in our own red state, at least up in the mountains, but then we got back to our latte-sipping, Prius-loving neighborhood, and we were awash in Obama-hope. And, home.

Rebuild the house? Check. Do a new logo, animation, and station design for some nice people in Portland?

Check.

By the way, the KOIN Local 6 package was delivered completely online…no tape whatsoever…and was the first that I could watch premiere live from across the country, streaming from their website. Nice.

Oh, and I put a few more images up here.

A fellow Postie—that is, of course, someone who worked at the Ohio University Post in Athens in the olden days—made a cogent observation about the Republican ticket:

“Think of all the newscasts that feature the avuncular old pro who’s been at the station for years, teamed with the youthful, attractive female anchor,” said P.J. Bednarski. executive editor of Broadcasting & Cable, as brought to my attention by Chicago Sun-Times media columnist Robert Feder.

“He’s the cranky, old salt who tells it like it is and jokes he can’t figure out that ‘My Friendbook,’ let alone work that damn newfangled fax machine. She’s the breath of fresh air who humors the old coot and draws in the women and younger demos.

“My intention, of course, is not to demean female anchors or older male anchors; the May-December anchor formula is well known. He teaches; she learns.”

Well, exactly, Peej. And that adds a new level of understanding about what’s inspired the McCain TV spots post-convention. Think “news promos.” Maverickwitness news. A lack of substance and veracity…you can count on.

By the way, the photo above is of the troubled Philadelphia May-December (former) anchor team of Larry Mendte and Alycia Lane…you may remember her altercation with the city of New York and his criminal actions that started with reading her email and went further into bizarroland. Not implying that the Republican ticket will have problems like that…they’ll probably have other equally bizarre and entertaining problems.

I’m all for the power of metaphor, but it seems like the folks who write plain old everyday news copy have learned somewhere to “enhance” their work by casting every news event in the terms of a battle, a struggle, a clash, a fight.

Barack Obama “takes it to” John McCain, “pummeling” him in his acceptance speech. Really? I heard a speech full of optimism, idealism, and hope. Democrats “ripped into” John McCain. I hope they didn’t spill anything vital…his VP pick scares me enough as it is. McCain’s been busy “ripping” Putin, Bush, Romney, Clinton, Obama…jeez, the guy must be stopped!

The Clintons “threw a one-two punch” against McCain. Biden, it’s said, gives McCain, a “blue collar punch in the mouth.” The taste of denim? And Biden’s been bashed, and he bashes right back, and I don’t mean a fancy-dress cocktail-party bash, either.

Throughout the debates, the candidates were said to “batter” each other, to “strike first,” to “take shots at,” to “blast”…what’s all this damn blasting? There are “sucker punches.” Someone is hitting someone else “below the belt.” Everyone apparently sanctions “attack ads.” One site asks breathlessly: will Hillary attack Sarah Palin? I think the Alaska governor is now getting Secret Service protection, so that would probably be thwarted. A disgruntled caribou might make some headway, though.

How can anyone from any party have a substantive political discussion amist all this language distortion?

But it’s not just politics. Hurricanes are personified as malevolent, sentient forces, “taking aim” at this coast or that, swerving, feinting, and again with the pummeling and battering. Tropical storm Ike “lurks” just behind Hanna.

It makes me think that the policy of naming tropical storms and hurricanes is a bad idea. Let’s call Hanna “Storm B329X5,” and see how scary it sounds.

Would news writers’ lives become that much more boring if they, uh, merely used words like “said,” “claimed,” “announced,” “charged,” and maybe even “challenged”? Those are words that could bring what’s really going on into sharper focus. It might not make for as compelling a banner at the bottom of the screen, but it might make for a less bruised body politic.

Someone I know who listens to way too much Rush Limbaugh forwarded me a collection of jokes the other day that was topped with some sort of godawful cartoon that tried yet again to play on the Obama/bin Laden muslim crap thing that I would have thought anyone with half a brain would have tossed aside back in, oh, February.

So I wrote him and said “Please do NOT send me any more of this crap.”

So he sends me this today:

Subject: Fwd: Fw: THIS ONE WILL REALLY SHOCK YOU!!!!!!!

John;

An old friend of mine who is a VERY GOOD news guy (and LIKES OBAMA) sent this to me. Please take a look in your spare time and tell me why BLACK people are after him now? This is not an argument on my side, just strangeness to me.

It had been forwarded about 6 times previous to my getting it.

So here’s what I wrote back:

I read Barack Obama’s book “The Audacity of Hope” cover to cover. He’s a smart guy. That’s pretty much case closed for me…he’s the smartest guy in the room, and Biden’s right up there. I vote for guys (or women) who can outthink me without breaking a sweat. McCain doesn’t pass that test.

I really don’t think it’s fair to say “BLACK people are after him now.” he’s just a person. [someone we both know] is NOT after him–a black guy! [another guy we both know] is not after him–a white guy! You can be damn sure that the Karl Rove associates McCain has hired to smear Obama are paying for as much of this crap as they can (hey, way cheaper than TV spots), and they count on well-meaning folks like you to forward it. Don’t play their game.

You’re just doing the McCain campaign’s dirty work by forwarding crap like this…they LITERALLY want exactly what you did to happen over and over again. Their cost? Free. They’re chuckling at how easy it is to put stuff out in a world pre-jaded by the likes of Limbaugh and O’Reilly.

We’re all just “guys”…Barack’s race (which is what, exactly?) is meaningless to me, mostly because we’re all just DNA mixed cocktails anyway. His upbringing is certainly something I identify with more than McCain’s.

Youall have to take a deep breath and realize we need a leader to get us 1) out of our current mess and 2) make our country again worthy of respect around the world. (No, we’re not respected now. Feared maybe. I don’t want to be feared.)

I’m going with Obama.

–jcb

Folks are seemingly oblivious to what extent this machine of destruction has been embedded into American culture, and the internet is just the perfect—almost infinitely cheap—medium for this kind of stuff to propogate. Back in 1972, Donald Segretti and the rest of Nixon’s dirty tricks squad had to work a lot harder to get a meme of evil to extend its tendrils through society. These days, a click or two, and you’re done.

And you know why it works…in some ways, it’s the classic social thing: “I really didn’t want to receive that kind of junk, but I didn’t want to offend him by telling him I was upset.”

Don’t break the chain, in other words. We’re all so polite. It’s time to, instead of simply hitting the delete button or tuning out in a cocktail party conversation, to speak up for what you (and I) believe at your core.

This verminous smear campaign only stays alive if we keep quiet. Are you voting for Obama? Glad to hear it.

Tell your friends why, and what you believe in. And stand by your words.

I’ve gotta stop reading the newspaper..er..the web as a way to spin down after working late into the night. I look up and it’s 2:30. I think about blogging about what I’ve read, and it’s 3. Now, it’s 4.

I had another one of those moments, here, in mid-night, where I had to shake my head not in a casual “tsk, tsk” kind of way but in a bigger, more brain-throbbing, “nooo….this simply can’t still be like this in 2008″ kind of way. But in my frustration, there are growing rays of hope, worth writing about.

Read (and read all of) A Teacher on the Front Line as Faith and Science Clash by Amy Harmon in the New York Times…about today’s challenges of teaching evolution in the Bible belt. That phrase, by the way, appears nowhere in the article, but I’ve lived down here long enough to feel its presence, tightly squeezing the minds of now several generations of youngsters into a contrived vision of the Earth as a giant playset, arranged just so by…well, by God over the last 10,000 years, tops.

The piece hangs its hook on the positive news that there is a fading resistance to teaching evolution as, well, the proven science that it is. Florida, Harmon reports, is just one of the states which has drafted new standards for the teaching of and testing on the scientific (theory of) evolution. (That parenthetical, inserted in the state’s language, to appease the folks who are still back there in 1925.) They’re drafting standards I think as much from fear of litigation as much as fear of humiliation in the greater community of humankind.

So read about a Florida teacher, David Campbell, representative of those who try to reach the unreachable, who gently offer science straight-up, not with contempt but with a compassion that matches the words (if not deeds) of their Christian charges. They are (and I don’t use this term casually) modern heroes to me…I can’t imagine anything much more challenging in the arena of modern education. They have to deliver information with an coaxing approach that allays unreasonable fear and makes it all right to begin to see a broader, more logical, more scientific world view, outside the doctrinaire confines of the family Bible.

These educators have to face almost incomprehensible ignorance, day after day. And contempt and tuning-out too, of course.

How did we get to this point? We’re decades after I was taught evolution as “no big deal”—as established science…decades after we looked at the Scopes trial as a sepia-toned snapshot of how far we’ve come…and chuckled at the backward attitudes that (I was sure, back in grade school) would be as extinct as the mammoth in a very short time.

It’s as if we’ve generationally backslid, and we’re only now slowly getting back to the quality of understanding that was prevalent in the early 1960s. We’ll be able to figure out how to put a man on the moon (again), soon.

Take a close, close look at the photo at the top of the article, which somehow manages to encapsulate the fear, skepticism, and just plain ignorance that these caring teachers face. The boy in the center is quoted in the article as saying “there’s no way I came from an ape,” as if that’s the big takeaway from an understanding of vast but minute biological changes over almost immeasurable time.

Yet the photo somehow conveys the magic of education at work. There’s the surface skepticism—the bred-in contempt the students have for the scientific method is on the tips of their tongues…but they are listening. They are engaged. They’re just the tiniest bit open to the possibility of learning, growth, change.

And I was delighted to discover one hopeful footnote in the comments attached to the article. One of David Campbell’s former students seems to have emerged into a more examinable, thoughtful world:

Bless Mr. Campbell. He was my high school biology teacher, and this article only begins to illustrate all the ways in which he is an amazing teacher. He constantly challenges his students to think for themselves, to analyze, and to test hypotheses rather than simply accept things at face value. He was the first teacher who ever taught me how, not what, to think, and Mr. Campbell is the reason I am now a biologist, studying evolutionary biology. Thank you, Mr. Campbell, and all biology teachers like you, who, in teaching evolution well, nurture the natural curiosity in young minds.

Thanks to the hard work of (at least) one diligent, engaging teacher, 21st century American public school biological education is…an evolving situation.

Sometimes, latenight when I should be actually working, I divert myself with one of the web’s oldest aggregation sites. Slashdot is a festival of “news for nerds, stuff that matters,” and at least some of it emerges from a small town near Ann Arbor Michigan, so Sammy would tell you it can’t be all bad.

So tonight, the headlines are pouring into my sleep-deprived eyeballs, and they read like so much bad tech poetry:

Japan Demands Probe of iPod Nano Flameouts

Flash Ads Launching Clipboard Hijack Attacks

Judge Rules Man Cannot Be Forced To Decrypt HD

MIT Students’ Gag Order Lifted

Teens Arrested For Motorized Office Chair

Leaping the Uncanny Valley

…I took the road less traveled by flaming Nanos and Motorized Office Chairs, and that has made all the difference.

Well, I’m glad that I didn’t drink the particular flavor of Kool-Aid that is the online cloud of services that used to be overpriced when they were called ‘.mac’, and seem still overpriced (and we have serverspace already, thanks) as MobileMe.

I’e consumed vast uncounted gallons of the many other brands of Apple Kool-Aid, anyway.

I applaud what Apple was trying to do…and there’s certainly a market out there for people who need what MobileMe was supposed to do.

But as you may have heard or read in various distorted ways in the mass media, MobileMe has had its problems…and maybe the best thing Steve Jobs could do is admit those problems, and maybe shuffle some folks around and hope for the best.

Well, ArsTechnica’s Jacqui Cheng is reporting that he has done just that:

“It was a mistake to launch MobileMe at the same time as iPhone 3G, iPhone 2.0 software and the App Store,” [Jobs] says. “We all had more than enough to do, and MobileMe could have been delayed without consequence.” [...] “The MobileMe launch clearly demonstrates that we have more to learn about Internet services,” Jobs says. “And learn we will. The vision of MobileMe is both exciting and ambitious, and we will press on to make it a service we are all proud of by the end of this year.”

Well. Yep. Indeed.

And I’m rooting for you, Steve…good luck with the pressing on.

Oh, and by the way…if you’re running Leopard and have a Google account, take a look at Google Calendar’s free offering which now features complete CalDAV support…which means that you can edit your calendar on a web page, your phone, your iCal app…every darn where. If I had actual places to be and real things to do, this would be hugely useful.

And also in the meantime, I’m admiring our fine first-generation iPhone with the latest 2.01 software (just out today), and this fine phone has been all we wanted it to be and more. It’s just an amazing device, and Apple should be as proud of it (and its 2.0x software) as they are ashamed of MobileMe 1.0.

And in one more parenthetical, I have one word for a fine non-game (yet game-ish) app to load for free on your iPhone or iPod Touch: Bubbles. I can now be distracted like a toddler by bright shiny objects…on my phone!

Jane Espenson is a writer and producer on some of my favorite television work of the recent years. She’s done her Fireflys and her Battlestar Galacticas and even her Buffys. And she blogged a bit yesterday about something that, as a caring consumer (and sometimes producer) of the English language, absolutely annoys the heck out of me:

Sir, you mean “unkempt,” not “unkept”. “Whirlwind,” not “worldwind.” You might mean “incidents,” or you might mean “instances,” but you certainly do not mean “incidences.” And, Miss, you must mean “hot on the heels of,” not “hot OFF the heels of.”

And just as I was reading and nodding and feeling all superior over folks who write “for all intensive purposes” and suchlike, she wisely adds:

The only thing wrong with feeling superior about knowing how to use these words is that each of us has a matching supply of words we’re using wrong without even knowing it.

I’ll take her at her word, although I’m not sure where I’ve misplaced my matching supply. I think these kinds of usage errors are a fine indicator of a culture brought up kinda sorta listening to television and hearing-but-not-quite-hearing phrases tossed out…and not bothering to figure out just what was said.

When you pick this stuff up for the first time in, say, a book, the phrase is right there in black and white. But then you may not know how it’s pronounced…until you hear a character in a movie or on TV show say it out loud. (And even then, you may not be getting it just right.)

Her blog, by the way, is a regular in my big ol RSS feed, a consistently entertaining window into the modern world of toiling in television writing.

Sometimes, I just look at an ancient piece of TV I did with 25-year-old technology, and I say to myself, wow, if I could redo all of that in crisp, clean high-res vectors now…

Brap-brap-brap! Kiribati! Islamabad! Nashville! Decatur! The earth! The universe! The news channel. Oh by the way, the original kinda survives on this fine YouTube video.

Growing up in a sixties Ohio white bread environment doesn’t do a lot to provide you with an understanding of what food is good for you (after all, they test-marketed Pringles where I lived) and, well, besides, good information on nutrition seems to have evolved at about the same rate as the commercial food industry has taken mass-market food down a path toward high-fructose artificiality.

But after reading Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma a couple of years ago, my growing concerns about the evils of high fructose corn syrup—in terms of what it does nutritionally, what it does ecologically, and well, it just doesn’t taste that good—reached enough of a threat level that I steer clear of it as much as possible…in everything.

So even my longtime favorites like Heinz Ketchup (for example) have given way to Trader Joe’s Organic Ketchup—not for any huge desire for organicness as much as to get back to a better-tasting cane sugar flavored product.

And the last time a huge tree hit the house, I was regularly buying IBC Root Beer—but I now try and make sure any rooty goodness is sweetened the old fashioned way. Yeah, internally, I know it is better for me…but I think I’m really doing it for the taste. Last summer, I enjoyed an old central Ohio favorite, Frostop Root Beer, while in upper Michigan…but it has that HFCS stuff, but I’m not so much of an absolutist that I didn’t give it a try—and I enjoyed it. So I drink it up there, but I deduct points.

You know, those mythical “points.”

So I was delighted today to see a six-pack of Abita Root Beer at a grocery store down off of Caroline Street, and I’m here to tell you, it is darned tasty on a summer’s morning. In a recent New York Times piece rating root beers, it came in third…right behind my old favorite IBC and its HFCS sweetening. Would IBC and Frostop taste better if they switched (or switched back to) to cane sugar? I sure think so. Will they do it just because I ask politely? Mmm, probably not.

From time to time I get asked to beta-test new versions of software, and of course there’s just the common experience of taking a new online service out for a spin. That’s when I’ll discover something, not necessarily something you’d label a “bug,” not really a “feature,” but a way the thing works that just doesn’t work for me, the real-world user.

I figure if I mention it to the developer, and explain what I was trying to do and why this is frustrating to me, I not only help myself to get an application or web service that works better down the road, but I’m making the lives of everyone else who uses the software easier as well. This might not always be the case—I’m not always Joe Everyman when it comes to how I use my computer—but I try to raise my hand and point out what I see as a problem, as opposed to grumbling to myself or to folks who have no influence on how the product actually works.

It’s amazing how many times in the Mac community this really works well…they appreciate the observation, they’re motivated to make stuff that sets new standards in user interface, they get it.

But lately, I’ve come up a bit against an attitude from software developers that calls to mind an experience when I was doing graphic design for a new twenty-four hour news channel in Austin…which was using some custom software for newsroom automation that was so unfinished at the point of purchase that it required a large team of developers from Germany to come out and live onsite for what seemed like weeks, months.

And at one point as we were trying to make this software work, we came up against a huge slowdown at the very start of the process…when a user dashing to a workstation in a newsroom, under deadline pressure, would log in and enter his or her password, the system would seemingly stop and wait upwards of 30 seconds until the login was accepted.

30 seconds is an eternity in newsroom terms. When this fact was presented to the developers (”hey, this might be a concern”), the unconcerned development lead said officiously—a quote I will always remember—”well, we shall simply explain [to everyone] why it must be this way.”

Um, yeah, that will help.

After the head of the local news group simply explained how quickly they could be sent packing, the software guys tackled the bug with extreme priority, and darned if they didn’t get the login time down to one second.

But that “we shall simply explain” attitude, well, I’m butting up against it in a couple of places lately. (And there’s its governmental cousin, popular in the Bush administration: “People just have to understand that…” —but that’s another story, another annoyance.)

There’s an otherwise great FTP/SFTP client—Cyberduck—which came out with a major revision that took away a key piece of functionality—having all the sites available in a drawer off to the side of the window, always there with one click. When I (and a handful of others) pointed out that this effectively hobbled our workflow, requiring multiple clicks to get where we used to take one. The change also eliminated the ability to just glance off to the side—no clicks, just eye movement—and get valuable information.

Well, the developer wanted to simply explain why it must be that way. Since the initial posting on the forum that tracks bugs and development changes, dozens of people have chimed in to say “we like the old version better.”

This is also the case in the latest release of the otherwise amazing and wonderful Google Earth. They’ve changed the way the navigation works “for the better,” according to all their PR online. According to post after post in the Google support groups, it’s not better, it’s more cumbersome for most users. And the Google Earth support folk “simply explained” that much of the old functionality is there if you hold down the shift key when you click. OK, fine, but that means you can’t just fly it with the mouse..you have to grab the keyboard (if, like me, you’re leaning back in your chair) for one keystroke in a sea of mouse-manipulation. Why!? Why??? Well, they simply explained it was “better” this way.

There’s an even more egregious example—actually several of them—on a product I am under an NDA not to discuss, so I won’t, except to say that like the first example, users who upgrade will find fundamental components of their workflow hobbled in the name of progress. And this app has a LOT of users, cross-platform. It’s big. Huge. Uh-oh.

I think there’s one basic precept all developers should hold dear. If they make a change “for the better,” and they immediately get even a dozen complaints saying “the old way was better,” they are obligated to step out of their own reality distortion field (because, of course, if you’re a developer, you can’t help but be excited by the new features you’ve labored to produce) and see what all the grumbling is about. And then, if there’s a glimmer that they might have broken more than they may have “fixed,” have the courage to roll the behavior back, or provide (at the very least) an option for longtime users to customize back to the old behavior.

Hey, I’m simply explaining.

Okay, so, yeah, we’ve been busy, what with dealing with insurance people and contractors and so on, but on a muggy Atlanta July Sunday morning, I find myself tilting toward optimism.

We have a roofline again. We have a ceiling (well, we have a subfloor) over our dining room again. We have had entertaining framers come early to work (to beat the midafternoon heat) and we (and our house) are standing up to a line of Georgia thunderstorms whipping through town with something just slightly more substantial than tarps propped up on scrap lumber.

We’ve made yet another trip north (in our tree-damage-repaired car). For this up-and-back, we had certain large-ish items on our to-do list mixed in with sociality and conviviality and we managed to check all those to-dos off with a smile…and with new knowledge! Sammy and I now know that if the guy at the hardware store didn’t cut the replacement window glass exactly square, you can sand it down enough to make it fit. It’s easier to buy new toggle bolts than to go up into the attic and try to fish out the old toggles.

These insights don’t have a widespread practical utility, but they do give us a sense that we can push ahead and accomplish a, followed by b, followed by c. Well, sometimes we skip b and go back to it, but it gets done.

It all gets done.

So I went to high school in Ohio with this nice Polish-Italian gal, Michele, who married this guy Dave Daubenmire, who has, in the name of radically fundamental “christian family values”, dragged his family through one embarrassing abomination after another.

There was Coach Dave’s (he was once allowed to coach football at a small Ohio high school) forced, mandatory prayer in the locker room. There was the campaign for bringing churchiness forcefully back into, on top of, and generally obliterating the state. There were his rabid radio shows, and the preaching/protesting at gay pride marchers, and being “in overdrive for the lord”, well, since he lost his last teaching job. There’s his website (nah, no link), filled with connections to groups who want nothing less than a new holy war, a new crusade, a revolution that will replace government with their version of christianity.

He sells coaches’ caps with a cross on them. He is so anti-abortion he says it’s “hedonistic, pagan, and demonic”—and then he really gets started. A woman’s right to choose is incomprehensible to him, and his other written attitudes about women fall into line with the precept that he is the king of his marriage and his family. Terrorism in the womb leads to terrorism in the world. The Constitution never mentions the separation of church and state, he thinks. Income taxes are illegal. Gays make him sick. Judge Roy Moore of Alabama is one of his heroes. The ACLU is…well, you get the idea.

And finally, last year, there was their son, a teacher like his parents, caught with child pornography on his computer. And so I’ve seen Michele’s name, and that of the rest of their family, dragged down through the arrogance of this guy who is just the latest to have the direct line to the Lord’s plan for America.

And just when I thought maybe they would stay out of the headlines, an apparent buddy of his in Mount Vernon, Ohio is now all over the news for, well, teaching Christianity in science class, teaching creationism, and offering extra credit if students went to see the anti-evolution film “Expelled.”

Here’s the Columbus Dispatch article, and an AP report adds:

Freshwater’s friend Dave Daubenmire defended him.

“With the exception of the cross-burning episode. … I believe John Freshwater is teaching the values of the parents in the Mount Vernon school district,” he told The Columbus Dispatch for a story published Friday.

Freshwater used a science tool known as a high-frequency generator to burn images of a cross on students’ arms in December, the report said. Freshwater told investigators he simply was trying to demonstrate the device on several students and described the images as an “X,” not a cross. But pictures show a cross, the report said.

Other findings show that Freshwater taught that carbon dating was unreliable to argue against evolution.

Daubenmire is going to make the rounds of Fox News (his web site says) and defend his friend and talk about the values of his corner of small-town Ohio, which he claims to be uniquely in touch with. Well, sure. Gotta sell those ballcaps with crosses.

His wife and I went to school together, were co-editors of the school paper. We could not now be further politically and philosophically apart, it seems.

How does that happen, exactly?

Oh, please, read the truth about Barack Obama and pass it on to everyone you know. I especially like that it’s in Courier, the typeface of psuedo-truth.

Just seems like they come in waves sometimes. Since June, the obituaries have been piling up:

• Tim Russert, age 58, political insider turned journalist. Prototypical blue-collar Irish Catholic boy made good.
• Stan Winston, age 62, four-time Academy Award winning master of real-world (as opposed to CGI) visual effects and creatures.
• Alton Kelley, age 67, graphic artist and illustrator, known for his psychedelic art, and 1960s rock concert posters.
• Yves Saint Laurent, age 71, fashion designer, businessman.
• Algis Budrys, age 77, Hugo-winning science fiction writer.
• Bo Diddley, age 79, a man with a rhythm all his own.
• Tony Schwartz, age 84, the “media consultant,” ad guy, and jazz preservationist who came up with the LBJ “Daisy” political ad in 1964.
• Jim McKay, age 86, sportscaster, television pioneer.

Meanwhile, we and our loved ones get our tests and try to eat right and stretch and walk and do, you know, all the right things to avoid showing up on the departure board anytime soon.

(Update: Cyd Charisse, the very next day.)

When a big old oak tree hits your house, it gets your attention. It also focuses your attention on a completely different set of aspects of your life.

As you may have heard, we have been thus refocused. The towering oak between our western neighbors and our driveway fell Sunday night in our direction, and now, at the end of the week, we are, amazingly, back into what’s left of our house, living amidst tarped roofs and zipwalled-off sections inside what is usually a comfortable, familiar home base.

There’s a photo album here with captions that walk you through the process from tree to tarp…we didn’t have much in the way of internet, digital cameras, or iphones back the last time an oak tree felled our home, but boy, we have captured the pixels this week.

So I’m contemplating the mental and physical remnants of the last treefall…as shattered drywall and splintered lumber were carefully extracted from the northwest corner of our house, one of the large 2-by-sixes was clearly labeled “to Sawhorse, Atlanta GA”—the contractors who rebuilt this place in 1991, and who may well reconstruct it for its next seventeen years or so of turbulent existence here in this century. As I box up dining room objets-d’almost-art and drag clothes I will never wear again from our amazingly-intact upstairs closet, I take a census of stuff—how did we come to have this much of it? What do we keep? What do we toss? How stuff-filled a life do we choose in our next chapter?

In many ways, we are so fortunate…much more so than our fellow metro residents (down in Clayton County) who were sent a fresh tornado the same weekend. Much more so than the blue-tarped denizens of Cabbagetown and East Atlanta who are still dealing with the mid-March tornado that wreaked havoc on a line east out of downtown (and they were forced to deal with Sunday’s winds and Thursday’s rain with their houses already crushed and tarped). And so, so much more fortunate we are than the victims of natural disasters in Myanmar and China which struck around the time of our little crisis. Their losses, made much worse by governments who pretend (even more than ours does) that they’re doing a heck of a job even as the side effects of the storms and quakes reverberate and revisit. It’s hard for us to even focus on external events this week, but when we do, and when we see pictures from the other side of the planet, we shudder and are thankful just as you are when you look at our pictures and count your blessings.

So in that fine American middle class milieu we seem to have ended up in, we are indeed fine. And will be fine. And eventually, so will our home.

I’m sure we’ll be the beneficiaries of improvements in construction materials and techniques, and I know we’ll have a better-insulated, healthier, more energy-efficient house when we’re done. It’s gonna take most of the summer.

It was particularly wonderful for James, Rebecca, and Brigid to get me the DVD of Helvetica for my birthday. It sat here unwatched, however, “awaiting just the right moment,” until last night, when Sammy and I had a razor-sharp viewing on our fine HDTV screen…even the standard-def DVD looked outstanding.

It was so worth the wait.

There it was, the story of a font as old as I am, the font that seemed so stunningly new and clean to me on the side of NYC garbage trucks and along the multicolored routes angling through Massimo Vignelli’s NYC subway map. The font that probably was my first Letraset purchase, and therefore used in my painstakingly (and crushingly) kerned logo for my high school newspaper-turned-magazine. The font that became the ubiquitous signature of 1970s corporate America. The font that brightened up the sooty Greyhound buses that took me across the Pennsylvania Turnpike from Ohio to New York. The font I brought excitedly to the corporate identity of SuperStationWTBS. And now, the font that greets me in bright Target red when I drive down to Caroline Street to buy toilet paper.

And here were the international masters of modern design and typography discussing their own particular loves and hates of the font that somehow changed everything…and nothing. Kelley’s type teacher Matthew Carter. Gotham god Tobias Frere-Jones. Spiekermann. Scher. Hoefler. Brody. Carson, so many more.

In their self-proclaimed type nerdiness I recognized the pulls I’ve felt since I was first aware there were things called typefaces. I could relate to all their persnicketiness and flashes of ego, their romance with the magic of type on the page and their contempt for all things mediocre (Erik Spiekermann’s evisceration of Microsoft on the DVD extras is so damn entertaining)…and I especially connected with the moments where they paused, looked aside, and seemed to grasp for greater meaning in something that is ultimately an alphanumeric collection of light and dark shapes…and failed, one after the other, quite to put it into words.

Well, exactly.

Up there on my bookshelf, along with my pointlessly-displayed local television awards, collections of caps, and mardi gras beads (a gift from a news director in New Orleans) is something I really treasure…my ABC World News Now coffee, tea, or soup mug, which, I should explain, was not so much earned from the program (they gave them out as prizes) as cajoled from a buddy who was a powerhouse at Good Morning America back at the turn of the nineties when WNN was given license to take over the overnight airwaves at ABC.

Quirky, offbeat, irreverent, the show was certainly a tonic for me—back when I had to do design in the overnight hours in order to make the financial and technological equation work, I usually had the program on in the control room, and the voices of anchors Aaron Brown and Lisa McRee brought welcome sanity to some quiet early morning hours.

The show was largely crafted (cobbled?) together by Brown and then-executive-producer David Bohrman, and featured witty writing, cardboard cutouts of absent anchors, a review of how morning newspapers worldwide would be covering stories, super-sarcastic sports, a cryptic World News Now ‘National Temperature Index’, and, on Fridays, long credits accompanied by a guy on accordian doing the World News Polka.

Really, that’s just about all you need to get you through the night.

And because they celebrated their 16th anniversary earlier this year, I’ve been able to find a couple of YouTube videos which feature Brown and Bohrman talking about what they wrought and where the parade of distinguished anchors are now (Anderson Cooper, Thalia Assuras, Alison Stewart, and a raft of literate Canadians have populated the WNN anchor chairs over the years.)

World News Now owes some large debt to Lloyd Dobbins and Linda Ellerbee’s as-quirky-but-shorter (and shorter-lived) NBC News Overnight, which premiered on the night of a lunar eclipse on July 6, 1982. It might even be said that they both owe a tip of the hat to WTCG/WTBS’s Bill Tush and Tina Seldin, and their beyond-quirky 17 Update Early in The Morning on the nascent SuperStation.

I bring all this up mostly to say: I think that there remains a market for quirk…especially literate quirk, at all hours of the day or night. Bohrman recalls “There were a million people watching this show every night…that’s where Larry King peaks out, at a million people.” There’s a lot of television and internet programmers who would be very satisfied with that much viewership.

Bohrman, by the way, went on to create the short-ish-lived NewsNight with Aaron Brown at CNN and then apparently had some sort of nightmare that involved being trapped with Wolf Blitzer inside a Best Buy, that led to The Situation Room on CNN.

Quirk and wit works—if you can create a hip club that welcomes people in, doesn’t insult their intelligence, and offers a relaxed smile with their buffet of information.

In some ways the best internet commentary sites (oh, okay, blogs) are traceable descendants of programs like this. If cable networks would hand over the keys to the control room to upholders of this tradition of wry information, presented with a chuckle (as opposed to, say, streaming nonstop informercials) my mug of happiness would run over.

We started (well, for me, started) the day yesterday with a 20 minute or so power failure, which appeared to affect at least our whole block. Gee, I guess so:

Squirrel Knocks Out Power in Midtown

ATLANTA — About 7,000 residents were left without power in Midtown Atlanta Thursday morning due to the workings of a tiny critter.

Georgia Power officials said a squirrel somehow got into a substation and knocked out the power in the area, including Colony Square. The power was restored after 20 minutes.

The squirrel was killed during his explorations, officials said.

By electricity, I’d assume…not by the ever-vigilant forces we’ve been told are protecting our valiant homeland’s infrastructure.

Somehow satisfying to be able to figure out—or in some cases, actually watch—“what happened” online, even when the what happened is, as often the case in the big city, violent and unnerving.

I came out one morning to find two news helicopters hovering directly overhead our house…a few days later, some modest Googling brought up this police action (video with siren sounds, btw) around the corner at the same time and date, caught, as they like to say these days, on tape, and then pushed out to the world on YouTube. As far as I could tell from the Atlanta police reports, there was no one actually shot—just the aftermath of a police chase, despite how the video’s labeled.

Case(s) closed?

The Boston Public Library is putting scanned images from several of their collections up on Flickr (as did the Library of Congress before them), and the first few I happen across bring back fond memories of my Vermont past. And, apropos of the Barre High School there, did I mention that my father’s name is Robert Burns? Mhm.

Most of the ones I’ve paged through so far are the work of the Tichnor Brothers, whom I first heard of years ago, from my Goddard buddy and postcard afficianado Alice J.

…but what if the question goes on and on and on? Hm. It’s the same caution icon as is on my shoes.

Just finished reading a borrowed copy of Barbara Ehrenreich’s nearly decade-old book Nickel and Dimed, about the realities of the American working poor, including a section where she worked as a $7 an hour Walmart employee in Minneapolis…and was hard-pressed to find affordable rental housing that microscopic a wage could support.

So it was in that context (and when I think of Walmart, most of my thoughts are along the lines of: Walmart = evil) that I came across this surprising report that would earn a ‘breaking news’ from me, were I in charge of CNN’s Situation Room:

Giant food retailer Wal-Mart Stores Inc. announced that its store brand milk in the United States will now come exclusively from cows not treated with artificial growth hormones.

Wow. And then I read further on down the page:

Grocery chain Kroger Co., with 2,500 stores in the U.S., began last month selling only milk produced without the use of hormones like recombinant bovine somatotropin (rBST). Safeway Inc., with more than 1,700 stores, has switched its in-store brands to non-rBST milk, though it also sells other brands produced from cows given the hormone. And starting in January, Starbucks Corp. has only used non-rBST milk in its stores.

This was one of the main reasons we had walked away from Kroger as any regular supplier of staples like milk and eggs…milk’s not a bargain if you don’t want what’s in it…and folks for whom milk of any kind is a big-dollar purchase are certainly not in a position to choose stuff that may be better for them.

And, as a bit of a rebuke to big corporate PR firms out there, I hadn’t heard Kroger had made any kind of switch…I guess I’ll have to go down to the Wino Kroger (in Atlanta, we’ve given our Krogers various neighborhood-appropriate names, starting with the immortal Disco Kroger in Buckhead) and see for myself this is the case. After all, I don’t want Kroger visits just to be about buying Tab three times a year.

It sounds like they simply heard the drumbeat of a zillion consumers’ demands, or talied the votes-with-their-pocketbooks numbers, or something. At any rate, it’s hard not to cheer on the end result.

By the way, Ehrenreich’s blog has a bunch of thought-provoking fomentations, including her discussion of a Kathryn Joyce and Jeff Sharlet piece in the September 2007 Mother Jones where she wonders whether Hillary’s pastor problem might be worse than Barack’s. The Joyce/Harlet piece says:

Through all of her years in Washington, Clinton has been an active participant in conservative Bible study and prayer circles that are part of a secretive Capitol Hill group known as the Fellowship.

Gulp.

And one final Ehrenreich writing: Welcome to Cancerland is her examination of the “marketplace” that has sprung up around breast cancer “awareness,” and it’s written in the context of her own breast cancer diagnosis and treatment.

Back home in Positively Atlanta, having missed by mere hours a downtown tornado that not only caused all kinds of urban mess at the city’s core, but messed up some in-recent-years-reborn neighborhoods just south of here. I’m sad for the folks with trees on their houses, in part because it seems like just the other day (but no, 1991) that a tree split this very house in half and landed us on the front page of the AJC (in color! Above the fold!)

So we’re catching up and adjusting schedules for the next sixty days or so. I can tell I’m in catchup mode because I have about a zillion browser windows open and I’m reticent to close any of them, because in the mixmaster that is my brain on limited attention spans, I keep thinking about this or that for just a few seconds.

Take ‘fail,’ for example. Or perhaps FAIL, as it’s usually in all caps in the indigenous language of the Lolcats. Huh? Wha? I’m as almost as lost as you are. Start with what this guy says:

In the modern age, we’ve found a much more efficient way to express disdain, distilled into only four letters: FAIL. This usage as a standalone interjection has been around for years, since at least 2003, but its recent explosion in popularity comes from 4chan and the Lolcats memes.

Now, I know about the Lolcats thingie, but apparently 4chan is just some damn site where people post images and then blow them off in vast clouds of succinct jargon. Okay, fine. We’ve reached the point where the quality of interaction online has, in many nooks and crannies, devolved to “here, look at this” followed by “LOL” or “FAIL”. Meme or site X is new, it’s promising, but hey, it has a flaw, so it gets the big ‘FAIL’ rubberstamp and it’s off the desktop, never to be parsed again.

Wow. I’m not criticizing a critical eye (hey, had one myself for years,) but the sensitivity on that way-too-binary rubber stamp has been set way too high in most corners, and it’s kinda sad to see so many promising ideas being strangled in their respective cribs. I can only hope that a bit of greyscaled nuance makes it back into the land of “DO NOT WANT”.

So, I mentioned browser windows. Probably most of these are of interest only to me, but I’ll list a few here, to give you a sense of what I’m distracted with:

• Use Mac APIs to suck things out of the vast Google brain.
• Parse how signed certificates will allow cool new programs to be installed on iPhones starting June-ish.
• Len Lye, an early animator “convinced that motion could be part of the language of art.”
• A new Panasonic camera with a very wide lens.
• One of the guys who worked on the original OS X interface.
• A book of vintage 1970s print logos painstakingly scanned, preserved, shared.
• Which DTV stations appear over the air and on Clear QAM cable in our neighborhood (you can search your own.)
• A blogger for The Atlantic says that the Barack Obama ‘race speech’ was written by Obama alone. Dozens of commenters immediately pour skepticism onto the page. Me, I believe it.

And those are just the browser tabs I’m not too embarrassed by. Have a güd Friday.

Lee Gomes in today’s Wall Street Journal has a plausible explanation for why I can be so happy for so long wading through the endless streams of new information that the internet provides.

What is it about a Web site that might make it literally irresistible? Clues are offered by research conducted by Irving Biederman, a neuroscientist at the University of Southern California, who is interested in the evolutionary and biological basis of the human need for information… Coming across what Dr. Biederman calls new and richly interpretable information triggers a chemical reaction that makes us feel good, which in turn causes us to seek out even more of it. The reverse is true as well: We want to avoid not getting those hits because, for one, we are so averse to boredom.
It is something we seem hard-wired to do, says Dr. Biederman. When you find new information, you get an opioid hit, and we are junkies for those. You might call us ‘infovores.’

I remember having a similar feeling one of the first times I was in a no-kidding newsroom with a no-kidding clattering wire machine. It’s why I enjoy a classroom lecture where a new world is being opened up to me (that really didn’t happen that often in my so-called academic life.) It’s why in the early days of CNN, I’d go downstairs to the main newsroom and just feel comfortably at home amidst the buzz of new stories, satellite feeds, raw news on those ancient computer screens, pouring in.

Now, of course, I have an additional tap for that opiate source in my pocket.

Even this new self-awareness carries the warm buzz of a new-info hit. Mmmm.

This afternoon, Steve Jobs and his very best friends Phil Schiller and Scott Forstall announced an SDK (a Software Development Kit) for the iPhone.

Come and get the beta, they said, at developer.apple.com/iphone. (Click on that link if it’s still Thursday and you want to see “Failed to open page…because the server unexpectedly dropped the connection, which sometimes occurs when the server is busy. You might be able to open the page later.”)

I have never seen a site (the entire developer site, which, by the way, is way more than iPhone stuff) go down so fast and stay down so long.

I mean, “boom,” indeed. As I explained to Sammy, they either way underestimated the demand or failed to plan for it. Apple seldom fails to plan for it these days.

So, “boom.”

To say that software developers are interested in developing applications for the iPhone is..well, they are, and they will, and this growing new platform, powered by what appears to be called the “Cocoa Touch” API, is going to (continue to) change the mobile computing and online experience.

The weather is miserable enough in Ohio that the CNN reporter is holed up inside (C’mon! We want to see skylines behind you! That’s the function of reporters on the scene!) and in Texas, the Democrats have apparently grafted the head of a caucus on the body of a primary, and that just scares me.

Regardless, happy primary day to my former states of residence (Ohio and Vermont) and, yeah, those other two. Get out there and do voting-type products.

Meanwhile, two bloggers way more famous than I have some smart things to say about Barack Obama, and I thus commend you their way. Start with the guy who wrote Mosaic and move on to the guy who plays a PC on Apple commercials.

And for the technology-impaired: Mosaic.

Oh, and a propos of Tools You Can Use, the Google Maps Election Team (didn’t know there was one. uniforms?) has brought election returns together in one place that lets you see data from the state down to the precinct level…or so they say. I gan get it to show me counties (thanks) but not finer-grained than that. Ah, I’ll mess with it later, when I can watch Ohio’s 88 counties (I memorized them in 8th grade) light up.

We’re between weather systems here, so Sammy and I are gonna see if we can get to the library and back before we get Bonus Supplementary Rain. Also, just a note: it smells like Spring outside. Ahhh.

Whoa, I can feel the server churning, rumbling the floorboards, serving up pages at a frenetic page under my feet. Well, wait, it’s actually in California somewhere, not here, and it’s not an old-fashioned newspaper printing press belching soy-based ink, but the effects are much the same when people read, react, and change happens. Quickly.

This leap day is one where my college friend Nancy has, after a moment of curiosity and a few minutes of constructive Googling, turned up a big story that could (we’ll see) cost someone at the White House his job. Nancy’s online home is just one of our little ragtag family of sites, so I’ve been keeping an eye out to make sure the server can keep up with the heightened interest.

‘Copycat’ is a simple story of plagiarism, well told, well documented. Nancy published it on nancynall.com at breakfast-time, and before long, the comments on her weblog post began to fill, with the vast majority expressing outrage at White House staffer and Fort Wayne op-ed contributor Tim Goeglein and congratulating Nance on her efforts. There were a handful (one, really) contrary opinions posted…basically taking the position that Nancy should be as offended by Barack Obama’s ‘plagiarism’ of his campaign co-chair, but that comment itself was quickly (and intelligently) debunked by subsequent comments.

At 10:34, one on Nancy’s commentators posted the results of his googling another Goeglein column, and found yet another case of pilferage, this time (amazingly) from a Washington Post reporter.

It’s no small irony (as the “another cases” start to pile up) that one of Nancy’s favorite shows has a serial plagiarist as one of the recurring plagues cast upon Baltimore.

Although she has never had any admiration lost on Goeglein, I know Nancy does have friends remaining at the paper and worries about the painful steps they’ll have to go through to make it right.

Those steps began at 11:10 am eastern, when the news-sentinel.com site posted:

Tim Goeglein, former Fort Wayne resident and now a special assistant to President George Bush, has been accused of plagiarism over a guest column about education that we carried on our editorial page on Thursday. While we look into the matter, we have taken the column down from our Web site. We are also checking out previous guest columns of Mr. Goeglien’s that we published. We will promptly report what we find.

At 11:34 am, The Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette reported:

A Fort Wayne native and White House official acknowledged Friday he copied large portions of an essay that appeared in a Dartmouth College publication and presented them as his own in a News-Sentinel column.

“It is true,” Tim Goeglein wrote to The Journal Gazette in an e-mail. “I am entirely at fault. It was wrong of me. There are no excuses.”

Just before noon, another nancynall.com commenter has posted more similarities in another Tim column, and minutes later, a guy who knows his way around programming languages produced a ‘diff file‘—the Goeglein text computationally overlaid on that of his plagiarism victim…a great way to use visualization to communicate a point.

At 12:21 pm, the News-Sentinel published a short piece by editor Kerry Hubartt saying in part:

He [Goeglein] has apologized to the editors of The News-Sentinel and also said there may be other previous columns he has written for The News-Sentinel that also may contain plagiarized material. We have found material in at least two other previous guest columns lifted from other sources without attribution and are continuing to check other previous submissions.[...] We will not publish writings by Goeglein in the future.

And with a whiff of arrogance that bespeaks old media, there’s NO mention of the key fact that their former columnist was the one who made this morning’s discovery. I hope Hubartt at least writes Nancy a nice thank-you note.

(Update) At 2:08 pm, Washington Post reporter Dan Froomkin tells the tale…and does mention Nance. At 2:45, word spreads. Drudge. Breitbart. Wonkette, who, tongue in cheek, calls her a “lady blogger” with a “lady blog.” A reader on the News-Sentinel site says Goeglein was caught in the Nall of America…heh. Nance’s post now has more than 150 comments. At 2:57, Terence Hunt of the AP files a story that quotes White House spokesperson Emily Lawrimore: “His behavior is not acceptable and we are disappointed in Tim’s actions…He is offering no excuses and he agrees it was wrong.” The piece mentions Nancy by name, and thus, when it appears on the News-Sentinel site, is the first acknowledgement “in the paper” of the source of this revelation. At about the same moment, Editor and Publisher pushes out a piece headlined “Scandal Involving White House Plagiarist Spreads.”

Wow, internet speeds, indeed.

I rock back in my chair and look at my scatter of browser windows from this morning and I marvel at how this story has moved…with more substance than radio or television and with way way way more immediacy than newspapers or magazines can muster. This is a modern process, and it’s playing out with journalistic quality and the multiplier effects of 1) immediate transmission and 2) many eyes and hands on the job willing to take a little of their own time to push the story a little further down the pike.

Part of this process is the active commenting, and a bigger part is the ecosystem of larger-readership bloggers picking up the story, linking to it, advancing it. I suspected premier journalism blogger Romanesko would pick up the story and run with it…and its not surprising that high-visibility blogs like Atrios and Talking Points Memo would get on the story. These “liberal” blogs of course don’t think much of anyone at the White House (nor do I), but they perform a valuable distribution function, getting the story out there in front of eyes of people who would be outraged by the conduct. The question is, if you only read “conservative” blogs, will you be getting this story? Will you care?

After my last weekend at the Computation & Journalism conference a week ago, where I developed concern that the modern online equivalent of journalism—let’s just say ‘blogging’— doesn’t necessarily have the hard work, precision, and impact of its ancient-age predecessors…well, if we had a world of people doing good work like this from their kitchens and home offices, I wouldn’t miss any of the old media, not one bit. Now, we just have to figure out a model to pay them for their efforts, or economically grant them the independence so they have the luxury of being able to do this kind of work and keep the kids in nice clothes.

(End-of-the-day-update:) Just like the finale of All The President’s Men (the movie, not the book)…except accelerate it to 21st century speeds. The dominoes continue to fall, until a press release at dinnertime brings the inevitable end to the story. 250+ comments from Nancy Nall’s readers—an essential part of the equation, but probably a footnote in the mainstream media coverage. The server didn’t go down. One more of the president’s men did.

[Previously! On Positively Atlanta Georgia! Part one of my visit to the C&J conference is right here.]

Saturday dawned cold and overcast in Atlanta, and I decided to bring our OLPC XO to the second day of the Computation & Journalism conference, just to test out the wifi reception and to see how annoyed I’d get typing on the tinyish keyboard. Short answer: not that annoyed, and the “ooh, aah” reception the machine got was an education in itself. It’s amazing how many people evaluate the XO for themselves—would this machine work as a high-powered yet portable laptop for me (answer to you, probably not, but if you are 10 years old and living in Somalia, this is a really good tool for your world.) It was clear that folks had not had a chance to physically get their hands on one…which made me wish that the Apple Stores all had a little OLPC exhibit off in a corner, just to let people get a sense of it.

Panel: Advances in News Gathering

Bagel digested and mediocre coffee downed, I went into the first panel, chaired by Medill School of Journalism—that’s Northwestern—professor Rich Gordon, who had that “pleased to have a substantial budget for scholarships” smile on his face as he briefly talked about his part of his school’s graduate program, which takes computationally-minded folks and teaches them the craft, ethics, and smarts of journalism. My take-away (augmented by chatting with some of the academics at this conference) is that a lot of them youngsters are willing to take on the mantle of responsibility that comes with being a no-kidding journalist for one of the same reasons my post-Watergate cohort did: they see problems in society and see the potential for societal good that journalism offers.

And some of them see the powerful computational tools unimagined in the days of manual typewriters and wire tickers and really want to take hold and use them for something more significant than aggregated tweets, pings, diggs, or shared spreadsheets of stultifying somnambulism.

But, back to Gordon, who says his work “playing around in this intersection of journalism and technology” gives him some sociological insights about those two very different constituencies that ring very true to me:

“We don’t understand each other terribly well…many of us in the journalism field don’t appreciate computer science is a creative discipline, and think that computer scientists—programmers—are people who should do our bidding…to build things we want…and I think maybe on the computer science side there is not quite enough respect for the intellectual rigor that a good journalist goes through…or an appreciation of the intellectual and creative challenges of doing that job well.”

Indeed. And I’ll extend that mutual disregard to graphic designers, who at journalistic organizations must have technical and j-school chops: “Crank out my graphic, font boy.” Some of the news execs ordering up tools in yesterday’s session seemed to have that attitude, and I can only hope that Medill and Georgia Tech (and my own almae mater) create a new generation of hybrid newsfolk who will get past that old myopia.

I was sorry to see that the New York Times’ Michael Rogers was unable to make this panel—I think the Times and Times Digital are doing a lot of innovative work and have created an online product with enough depth, vitality, and innovation that it would certainly be my “desert-island choice” if my iPhone could only pick up one broadband feed in the middle of the Pacific.

But speaking of picking up feeds from remote places, CNN’s Paul Ferguson, next up, brought along a compelling promotional video (hey, I used to make those for CNN back when cameras weighed three thousand pounds) that showed just how liberating a smartly-assembled kit of any DV-ish camera, Powerbook, and satellite modem can be to a team of television news reporters trying to get important stories out of war zones, drought zones, and other places hostile to human life in general and journalists in particular. One of the liberations beyond reduced weight and greater portability: the relatively much cheaper cost of broadband/satellite time versus satellite video time (I’d love to know exactly how much that amounts to) makes the decision to cover much less financially-dictated.

I found it telling that his video, loaded with substantial, important reports, was almost all coverage from CNN International—the domestic feed (this is becoming a consistent rant for me) carries far, far, far less world news…in fact their story count in general is an embarrassment and I think if you could choose between the CNN Celebrity-Studded Domestic feed and the much more BBC-esque International feed on your local cable system, you’d pick the world over the hype in a second.

Reuters Media’s Nic Fulton followed Ferguson, and seemed to have one of those fun jobs in Big Corporate where you get to back up your “what-if”s with a halfway decent budget, and right now his what-ifs say “why don’t we just shoot short ad hoc interviews off of cell phones and point-and-shoot cameras,” and my answer would be “because then people would have to try and watch crappy video of self-conscious people shot on cell phones and try to hear what the heck the interviewee is saying and not be distracted by noise and passing busses and so on.” (He has several on his site, go on, watch, try.) I have no doubt that one day we’ll be able to hold up an iPhone-like device and end up with stunning, stabilized, beautifully compressed high-def video online…but we’ll still need something substantial to shoot.

The panel closed with Andrew Haeg, who is Michael Skoler’s associate at American Public Media, and he provided a useful behind-the-scenes look at the Public Insight Journalism project. I was again impressed by the use of social-y technology in service of newsgathering professionals. They seem to have a clear separation there where these tools gather the raw stuff, then real pros with brains sit down and figure out what it all means.

The potential downside of course, is that this reinforces the old-fashioned role of the reporter as gatekeeper that I learned in school (oh, maybe gatekeeping 2.0). What does it all mean? We’ll be the judge of that. The younger social-computing folks kept asking the Minnesotans “is there any way to get all of your source people into a conversation amongst themselves?” —and that doesn’t seem to be the Public Insight they’re going for here. Also, to recap from yesterday: privacy concerns, and how good are your passwords?

Panel: Sensemaking & Information Visualization

Let me quote conference organizer Brad Stenger here: “Computer science researchers talk about sensemaking when they’re exploring the role computation plays in helping people to organize information and find meaning in data. A related subject, information visualization, deals with the interactive, graphical presentation of information.” This panel provided some high-protein tastes of the work being done in taking vast seas of data, and probably their offerings were tempting to journalists faced with parsing meaning out of endless rows of columns of..uh..rows and columns. That sensemakes, I guess.

Let me veer off one moment and link you to my favorite site for a beautiful (literally!) ongoing overview of what’s being done in visualizing information. I go here sometimes just to be able to say “oooh, pretty data.”

Georgia Tech’s John Stasko showed off some data-connection-node-y goodness that had me grumbling about the Windows OS primitive, edgy, annoying user interface that gets wrapped around data when you work on that platform. I’d like to introduce his team to the silken wonders of Mac OS’s CoreAnimation, CoreVideo, and CoreImage, but…oh, wait, he’s on leave at Microsoft. Uh-oh.

Berkeley’s Jeffrey Heer has worked hard in the land of Java and Flash to provide much more aesthetic and interactive work. His sense.us “site” (what the heck? it redirects to a page about the project…so we can’t actually work with the site and the data itself) takes decades of census (get it? heh.) data and does a remarkable collaborative interactive visualization thing that allows comments and random exploration. Or it would, I guess, if it were an actual site. Darn those academics.

Jeff and John went before Newsweek.com’s Xaquin Veira González, who had another Powerpoint/Keynote/laptop-not-working-with-the-projector meltdown. Veira’s work (here’s a fine example) earns my respect as he and his colleagues go in every day to news meetings and try to find ways to tell stories that burst out of mere words, pictures, and paragraphs. Me, I’m waiting for the day that HTML5 and Web Standards make more proprietary stuff like Flash fade away (with a lovely transition effect).

Panel: News X Roadmaps

After some recaffeination, I was ready for ‘News X Roadmaps.’ Normally, I’d avoid a session that has ‘X’ in the title, but I saw Jacob Kaplan-Moss’s name and said, hey, I’m there.

Neil Budde has a long resumé that includes WSJ.com and Yahoo News, both in the past tense (and some lovely photos here.) His prime thesis could have been the topic of an entire conference: “It needs to be a focus of the news industry—how are we going to produce enough money from the viewing habits of people today online to cover the cost of people to go out and gather news.” Well, exactly, ca-ching. Sure, the cost of “the printing press” has plummeted…but the economic model, where someone thinks they’ll get enough money from somewhere to pay reporters actual non-second-life dollars or euro remains elusive. Budde asked the question. I’m not sure there were a lot of answers presented, although Google News would like you to look at their AdWords and AdSense and Yahoo…well, let’s see how that shakes out, shall we?

Fortunately for my waning optimism, Wally Dean was next…a legendary TV news director from an age before graphics made loud swooping sounds as they arrive and depart. Dean now works for the Committee of Concerned Journalists…they’re concerned that their craft is going into the dumper in the face of new economics and a national attention deficit disorder.

The night before the conference, I reread my Christmas present—Bill Kovach and Tom Rosensteil’s The Elements of Journalism, aptly subtitled “What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect”—Kovach always did love upstyle capitalization. Dean gave the conference a solid grounding in the idea of the discipline of verification (never add anything; never deceive; be transparent, be original; and exercise humility)—and reminded us that it’s not naive to expect objectivity in journalists’ methods—not in the people, but in the tools they use.

My scribbled notes as Dean talked could be printed in bold type on post-its and stuck on the screen-edges of journos’ laptops everywhere: “Do not confuse communication with news…do not confuse news and information with journalism…fact is not wisdom…do people need more information…or more knowledge? How can we move from giving them more stuff to giving them more knowledge?”

This is the kind of central idea that points to the value of trained, ethical professionals in the pipeline…even in a world where a lot of the pipeline contains algorithmically-aggregated stuff. I want some knowledge with my stuff too, please.

Django co-creator Jacob Kaplan-Moss’s roadmap was entertainingly-crafted in Keynote, cleanly-designed, and told a compelling story even if a lot of the journalists in the audience had no idea what a web framework really is, what the heck an API is (oh, please, Wikipedia that one yourself) or who Linus (who he quoted first-name-only, as if he were Plato or something) is…wow, sure enough, the first result to a Google search on that single name. Jacob was lucky and talented enough to get into the right place at the right time to create a tool for web developers to get structured data out there in a fast, modern, python-y way.

And to his credit, he didn’t talk much about that. He instead tackled considering what happens as a newsroom evolves into producing content in new ways, and he cleverly punctured a prominent evil in newspaper and television newsrooms in the process: vendors of proprietary software. The bane of my existence for many years. Vendors and the Microsoft or Oracle-encrusted, over-licensed, high-priced, locked-down, resource-hungry stuff they perpetuate just makes my life harder. So…he introduced and elegantly defined the term Open Source…and then, for good measure, rammed it into the heads of the attendees about 17 to 20 times. Big logo on the screen. Here’s why it’s good. Here’s why it’s vital. Ask for it by name.

Then Ramesh Jain from UC-Irvine talked, and I found the breakroom calling.

Panel: Information Mashups: Aggregation, Syndication, and Web Services

This panel, again missing one speaker, seemed to divide neatly between one thoughtful mashup and one tech-minded academic’s vision of what television is.

First, the sunshine. Or the Sunlight. CTO John Brothers explained that the organization was focused on using publically-available data (again “available” does not mean “easy to use”) to correlate Congresspeople’s contributions, spending, earmarks, and hanging-out with lobbyists. This kind of journalism-via-data-analysis is exemplary, and unfortunately but understandably, it sounds like they’ve decided to focus on doing that one thing well—looking at the US Congress—where conferencegoers suggested that this could and should scale down to the state, and local levels…you might say, down to EveryBlock.

Next, “isn’t it about time your nightly news was delivered by an avatar?” Truth be told, Nate Nichols, recently minted from Northwestern University’s InfoLab, probably just enjoys exploring the worlds of text to speech and developing one of the most elaborate webs of scraping, parsing, and scriptaculously mashing up something into what just oh so vaguely resembles a television newscast. Hey, research is fine, but I’d like him to stop, take a long drink of his favorite beverage, and think intelligently about presentation of information and break out of what seems like a shockingly limited mindset: “we want to have news on something like TV, so we need something like a talking head there on something like a camera doing something like reading.” No, you don’t. No, you shouldn’t. No, that’s not what people want.

Avatar-y online synthnews IS NOT television IS NOT radio IS NOT newspapers and attempts at mimicry DO NOT breed familiarity but instead, creep people out. You’ll figure that out eventually..it might take two or three long drinks, but you’ll get it…and turn this powerful tech into a compelling news presentation.

Panel: Improving Journalism Workflow: Automation & Productivity

At this point, I began to think that I was getting to listen to a variety of really interesting speakers mixed somewhat less than logically into more-or-less interchangable panels. Here, at midafternoon, we were presented with:

Alexander Hauptmann from Carnegie Mellon, who presented their News on Demand project, a very sophisticated system that absorbs vast amounts of traditional television news, text-to-speeches it, indexes it, translates it if necessary, does really smart stuff with image recognition—are we looking at an anchor or at B-roll?—and then shoves it into a fairly-easy-to-use yet kinda Microsofty UI.

Then, from high-tech to high-human-factors: Solana Larsen of Global Voices, basically a really big, multilingual Wordpress blog that “aggregates, curates, and amplifies the global conversation online”…ooh, great modern online jargon there. Basically, she has developed an amazing network of bloggers who know bloggers who know bloggers worldwide, and her site is kind of an ongoing review of what’s being said in the blogosphere where the sphere part in this case is in fact the whole damn world. Absent from her talk: any concerns that her people might not write about other totally legitimate bloggers who they might not be friends or fans of…that’s the problem with socialness, it’s so selective or exclusionary sometimes.

The afternoon stretched on, getting…sleepy…wha?

“I used to be a yoga teacher, so, okay, everyone on their feet, it’s time to stretch.” Well, okay, good idea, Carol Minton Morris of the The National Science Digital Library. The attendees were grateful for the 15 second break, and listened to how a targeted blog could help elementary teachers teach kids about the polar regions of our planet—beyond the clichés.

And then, well, remember what I said about Open Source vs. the evils of vendors? Well apparently they brought on Rob Lamb of Clickability to reinforce that point. Actually, his company may be worse—they appear to be leveraging Open Source software for their own profit—and giving, uh, well, nothing back to the Open Source community. Arrrgh.

Panel: Participant Journalism & Journalism Participation: Interacting & Authoring in New Media

Okay, last panel, long day, big finish, right? Well, sorta.

We started with the bombast, snark, and sheer entertainment value you’d want from a videogame designer. Ian Bogost, Ph.D., game designer, critic, proud father, fellow Atlantan, and apparently mediocre speller (he was concerned that his presentation slides would be correct…better check your Persuasive Games bio, Ian.) I think he communicated successfully to me, a complete non-gamer, that a) games are fun, useful, and can carry the opinionated subtext of an editorial cartoon and b) The New York Times liked his company’s games…but only up to a point. Probably a point well taken.

Then Ezra Cooperstein from current.tv had the kind of complete MacBook cursor-freeze meltdown/presentation failure you just hate to see if you’re a Mac fanboy like me. He gave us a lesson on how to be a cool San Francisco kinda management guy by handing it off to a Georgia Tech volunteer and saying “Dude, here, you fix it,” while explaining that Current gets an enormous amount of user-created content..er..video that they don’t have to pay for.

And so does fellow big media person Lila King of CNN, who is a key manager behind iReport and CNN’s new completely unfiltered and uncensored beta.iReport.com site that is a treasure-trove of usefulness to CNN, and hey, they pass the savings on to…their shareholders? Ms. King, who is, I’m sure well-intentioned, gave us some insights as to her under-30 definition of “news” (clue: more diversity in Barbie princesses) that made me want to mandate some lengthy remedial classes with Wally Dean, with the Kovach/Rosensteil book as required bedtime reading. There will be a quiz later, for all of our sakes, lest that Lila’s Sense of News creeps any further into the CNN ethos (it may be too late.)

It’s unfortunate then that one of my top three favorite graphic designers in any medium, Wilson Miner, was next to talk about EveryBlock. Project: fascinating. Approach: compelling. Graphics: impeccable. My annoyance with Lila King: residual. Concentration ability: on the wane. I stayed for most, but then staggered out and summoned my patient chofera in her fine Prius to take me away from Journalism’s future for a while.

Ultimate conclusions? Well, not yet. Gotta get the guest room cleaned up for my sister’s visit. Good thing this is just a weblog, right?

I hold a real fascination with what’s happening to the craft/profession of journalism because, well, I come from a time when journalism functioned, and I appear to be living in a time where the first rough draft of its epitaph is being crafted online.

Premature? Most probably. Persistent, those rumors of its demise? You bet.

I have an odd and diverse set of interests in newswriting, media, television, graphic design, journalism, computers, databases, and open source software…and I was thus surprised to see a conference organized that seemed to dump all of those interests into one big ol’room for a day and a half…barely two miles from my house.

Georgia Tech, seldom regarded as an incubator for journalists, sponsored the mashup, the mixup, the remix, the…oh, all right, A Symposium on Computation and Journalism. Ask for it by name.

It’s an ambitious attempt by Tech’s School of Interactive Computing professor Irfan Essa, Wired’s Brad Stenger, and Essa’s grad student colleagues to swirl together the hard-to-emulsify bastions of journalists and computer scientists in order to…to…save journalism as we know it via the responsible application of global raw computing power?

Well, no. Of course it was couched in terms like “start a conversation,” and “begin a dialogue.” The computer scientists by en large made nice with the unsettled lot of journalists, disclaiming loudly and often that they were not journalists, that many of their projects were in no way journalism. But in some ways the organizers of this confabulation did their jobs too well, and attracted a large audience and participants that ran the spectrum from old to new journalism, with lots and lots of looks at online entities that are if not journalism, than a batch of fluffy, frothy, quickly-consumed substitutes for the real thing.

And depending on where you’re coming from (and by that I mean whether you remember Watergate or not…okay, whether you’re geezery like me or not), you can find these new concepts engaging or deeply threatening. I saw the spectrum of emotions on the faces peering above the sea of laptops at the conference, which, as many modern meetings do, featured the soft, near-constant clattering of keyboards and the embarrassingly clumsy setup and interchange of Powerpoint and Keynote presentation images between speakers. Often, the reactions to the Brave New World were amazingly predictable by age.

Let me take you though some of my notes from the gathering, hastily scribbled on MacBook, iPhone, and oh yeah, our OLPC XO, which got some attention for being, well, the greenest laptop in the room.

Keynote(s)

They started strong, with Georgia Tech alum Krishna Bharat, who was instrumental in bringing Google News to life. He explained its computationally complex workflow in a way that seemed calculated to reassure journalists that its function really is to accumulate—like a lens—interest in a certain story and focus and transfer that concentrated attention directly to the linked site. No evil issues, here, old school journalists! To paraphrase MST3K, repeat to yourself “it’s just an algorithm; I should really just relax.”

Fellow keynoter Michael Skoler from American Public Media (aka Minnesota Public Radio) described a fascinating and clever way to aggregate public opinion to form the grist for APM/MPR’s day-to-day mill of stories. By creating a database of lots of people from diverse backgrounds and experiences, and asking them open-ended questions instead of inane online surveys, and making smart, targeted inquiries of these people at the right time, they’ve created a cool multiplier effect on the conventional reporter rolodex, and their reporting breaks way, way out of the mold of the classic “soundbites from the handful of the same experts” mold we’re fast becoming sick of on cable television news and other mainstream media. In some ways, they’re only starting to plumb the depths of the information they’ve harnessed…and it seems almost sad that the output of this prodigious new engine for storytelling is in some ways the most traditional of media: plain ol’ terrestrial radio programs.

I also hope Skoler and company, as their Public Insight Network grows, manage to “have meaningful conversations” amongst themselves and experts on the security and privacy concerns that any large geolocated, demographic-rich database of people can engender.

Panel: Ubiquitous Journalism

Sanjay Sood’s allvoices.com site is one of those aggregation sites that make journalists nervous, yet he too tried to reassure scribes that their approach just broadens the canvas and provides a place for rumors, blogged ideas, and traditional news reporting to all, ahem, get on the same page.

Leah Culver, one of those young developers well-known in certain circles outside the journalistic mainstream, talked about her development of Pownce, a service for sharing messages, files, images, and random thoughts around and among your social network. Yeah, there’s another service similar to that out there. And the old-line journalists (including the panel’s moderator) seemed to use her as an interchangable placeholder for a whole raft of “social conversation” services—his questions seemed to stroll right on by Pownce and saunter on to other hip young sites he’d heard of. That’d annoy me if I spent months of my life slaving over a big ol’pile of Django code.

Finally, Mark Hansen is one of those people you could spend hours to just listening to as ideas spin out and layers of possibilities emerge. The UCLA-based creator of sensorbase.org seems endlessly fascinated with the questions that can be raised and answered by ubiquitous inputs—cell phones, traffic-sensors, webcams, networked thermometers—scrape in vast quantities of raw data, massage, visualize, and pluck insights out of the results. Nice work if you can get it…and I mean ‘get it’ in the comprehension sense…not sure how many folk there did. Hansen is also part of the duo that created Moveable Type, the art piece that provides a “A world of news? You’re soaking in it!” experience in the NYT’s fancy new lobby. Very cool to meet him.

Tidbit from Hansen: the name of the original ‘zipper’ ticker-like news light-brite thingie around the base of the old Times tower? The Motograph News Bulletin, of course.

Panel: Social Computing and Journalism

The next panel probably had some members that could have been swapped out with those of the previous one. Michigan State’s Cliff Lampe is a pure-academic researcher well-prepared to dive deep into the underlying (and unruly) behavior of the social networks created by sites that allow commenting, rating, and ranking stories, posts, and ideas. He pries up the lid of Slashdot or Facebook and tries to figure out what the scurrying white mice are doing with each other in there. It’s part online economics, part human factors psychology, all duct-taped together with sloppy Perl scripts. Great presentation, despite a complete Powerpoint meltdown.

Like Culver, but with a degree in Physics and a fascination with the power of social dynamics that would blend right in at Google, Digg’s Lead Scientist Anton Kast took attendees behind the scenes of the news(ish) aggregation site that does magic with the power of vast numbers of upraised or downturned thumbs. Kast (he too, loudly not a journalist) made the telling point that Digg’s credibility pretty much lives and dies on the trust that its users have that 1) it’s an egalitarian, if not a democratic system, and 2) they’re getting unfiltered, unmoderated raw content to process. This is a point that a lot of traditional outlets miss.

Finally, David Cohn has to work on his resumé. Not that it’s insubstantial, it’s just all over the new media map. During his brief, entertaining talk about being a j-school grad who moved through citizen-journalism into the world of, uh, paid content providing, he mentioned about 329 affiliations, all of which sounded like “dubya dubya new blogger assignment zero dot beat net com” to me, but it was getting late in the afternoon and I am, like, totally about 50 years older than he is.

Panel: 21st Century Editor in Chief

In contrast, this panel served to remind us that a lot of the money to pay journalists involved in creating the raw material that, through whatever modern or ancient alchemy gets turned into content..uh..stories still comes from big ol’ corporate America, and a lot of the thinking in their newsrooms is maybe even beyond old school.

Christopher Barr of Yahoo (and before that, Cnet/ZD Networks) came at The New Journalism from a management-y perspective, ordering up a laundry list (are you taking notes, youngsters?) of technology that would facilitate his work. I kinda wanted to sit him down in front of a text editor and see how his raw HTML skills were.

Mitch Gelman of CNN.com saw the world with familiar (to me) Time Warner-colored glasses, and seemed unaware of the disconnect between the relatively sober content of CNN online and the vapid, increasingly substance-free CNN and Headline News mix of on-air wolf-crying.

And Shawn MacIntosh of the AJC, our hometown paper, seemed to miss the subtext in one of the questions from the audience: Why the heck is your website so poorly designed, so user-unfriendly, so content-free? I hesitate to link to the Cox-owned paper, because non-Atlantans might conclude that in a time of drought and dead-serious concerns about overdevelopment and sprawl, we Atlantans want to read about lottery winners, American Idol contestants, NASCAR, Wal-Mart, and Florida gator-promoting license plates. Uh-oh. (Looks around nervously.)

* * * * *

And all that was just Friday afternoon. Let me down a tasty beverage or two and then come read part two about the Saturday session. Satellite modems! A wise dose of newsroom perspective and common sense! A Django wake-up call! And some guy trying to leverage open source software for some very one-sided profit!

Sometimes, a movement can be defined by a typeface. But sometimes, good typography just allows the truth to speak in a clear, unflavored voice. I know the first time I saw a ‘Change we can believe in’ banner behind Barack Obama, I was pleased and inspired by his team’s smart choice of Gotham, a typeface I’ve been (over?)using a lot lately, and one that, for some reason, gives me a centered, unsubtle sense of well-being every time I gaze upon its sans-serifed geometries. Ahhh.

Even though, as the font’s designers explain here to ‘Helvetica’ filmmaker Gary Hustwit, the font’s origins (and those of its creators) are firmly of the windy streets of New York City, I think the face transcends the Grande Pomme and in fact speaks to me as confidently from snow-filled Iowa and sun-drenched California as it would from the deep shadows around the Port Authority Bus Terminal or the glassy trendiness of, well, what I imagine the headquarters of GQ magazine to be.

It’s just a darned pretty sans-serif. It stands up to abuse. It’s modern indeed. And thanks to the 2008 campaign, it’s everywhere you look.

So, we (and by we I mean Sammy) were punching around trying to find actual content on the television last night, after perhaps having had our fill of Anthony Bourdain and before Wolf Blitzer’s magic Wall of Counting Down (not to be confused with Keith Olbermann’s Countdown) was willing to call Wisconsin for Obama, and, okay, I’ll admit it, we watched thirty seconds of Hawaii Five-O on WSB’s second digital channel, a seemingly random collection of ancient reruns, from Perry Mason to Knight Rider apparently provided as a trickle of revenue stream to broadcast channels.

At any rate…we saw Steve McGarrett questioning a Hawaiian security guard in the lobby: “Are you sure you saw him come in at 9:41?” The guard said: “Positive. All three of us saw him.” “Three of you?” “Yeah, me, my partner”—indicating another guy at the table—“and the computer.”

The role of the computer is being played by—I’m not kidding—a consumer-grade Akai reel-to-reel tape deck with a small silver box duct-taped to the side, from which he clumsily yanks a card that says in typography much more 1970s printing house than 1970s computer: “9:41 PM”. They didn’t bother to dub in bleeping or adding-machine sounds.

The IMDB entry on this episode says in the comments “The teleplay by Jerome Coopersmith is from Malle’s Ascenseur Pour L’Échafaud, a sort of translation by way of homage.” This site dismisses it as a collection of unlikely events that strain belief. Me, I just like that it was so cheap a show that when they asked the prop guy for a computer, that’s what they got. Apparently in a different episode, they shot a scene inside a US Post Office that was supposed to take place in a shop in Hong Kong …and then flipped the film so the “Use ZIP Codes” and “Buy Stamps” signs were..uh..more Chinese?

Piedmont Park, according to Tele-Atlas.

Piedmont Park, according to NAVTEQ.

Well, the more you depend on technology, the more you can be tripped up by the errors in data that technology can seamlessly present to you as “fact.”

You may not know that Google uses more than one set of map data for its various products…Google Earth, their online maps, and the iPhone Google maps application, just to name three.

In order to save money (or something involved in the byzantine licensing structures involved in using map data for purpose ‘A’ versus using it for purpose ‘B’), they provide you with seemingly ‘the same map’—but constructed from data from different providers…and sometimes they don’t agree. Take these two images. The one where the body of water is labeled ‘Lake Clara Meer’ came from NAVTEQ, and the one where it’s labeled ‘Piedmont Lake’ comes from Sanborn Tele-Atlas.

The naming disagreement aside, the images are interesting in how much else is subtly different…the outline of the lake isn’t quite the same…in fact, NAVTEQ depicts it as two separate lakes, and shows a road or pathways all around the lake. Tele-Atlas seems to think those paths stop part of the way around the lake. NAVTEQ thinks the cluster of buildings at the NW corner are not part of the park…Tele-Atlas disagrees. NAVTEQ includes several small buildings inside the park…Tele-Atlas leaves them out but shows you the shopping center (’Amsterdam Walk’) on the eastern edge (I’ve largely cropped it out, though.) NAVTEQ has a second ‘Piedmont Park’ label on the small cluster of buildings in the center…go figure.

Fortunately for them, I am the ultimate arbiter of all things geographical in our neighborhood, and I have my verdict.

And (ripping envelope open), the winners are:

• The name of the lake is, of course, Lake Clara Meer. (Sammy and I walk around it all the time.)
• The lake is actually one body of water, with a pedestrian bridge across it where NAVTEQ shows a break.
• The buildings on the NW corner are those of the Piedmont Driving Club (a snooty private club), and are indeed outside the park.
• The pathways are much more as NAVTEQ depicts them but don’t try to drive on them.

(By the way, ditch the plain ol’ map completely and take a look at Google’s very high-res airphoto/satellite imagery they have of the park to see all of this in excruciating detail.)

The good news here is that you can at least do good for your fellow navigatees by reporting these errors. The trick, of course, is to get the correct info to the correct data provider. Just complaining to Google doesn’t, in general, help. If the data copyright (in tiny type at the bottom of your map) says “NAVTEQ”, then you can report the errors here. For Tele-Atlas (the copyright says these days ‘Sanborn Tele-Atlas’), use this website.

Semi-amusingly, both sites have verbiage that implies that their data sets started out absolutely perfect to begin with, and it’s just the sturm and drang of our changing world that necessitates having a place where corrections can be made (”In our changing physical world, where a significant percentage of roadways are altered every year, the Tele Atlas database must undergo continual enhancements to reflect factors ranging from navigational changes caused by construction projects to the creation of roads in new housing developments…”) Well, some stuff comes and goes, but Lake Clara Meer has been there for a century or so…and last I checked, it still is.

Let us now take just a small moment and praise the product now known as Adobe After Effects, which started life as a rudimentary—yet breakthrough!—product at the Company of Science and Art. Three (or is it more?) guys named Dave created this program, which launched into the world in January of 1993…that’d be fifteen years ago.

What it does (for those of you who don’t do layered television graphics for a living) is make layers of Photoshop and Illustrator and type and Quicktime movies (and nowadays about three dozen other types of files) move, bend, arrive on screen, depart with elegance, pirouette, take bows, and do all of this without the need of a big television control room.

This was huge and profound for me back then, right after I had gratefully moved away from the world of $170,000 Quantel Paintboxes to Adobe Photoshop. I remember rendering out a short sequence of frames…they took forever…but when they were done they were (gasp!) fully realized, fully broadcast-quality. I could begin to move away from booking expensive control rooms at several hundred dollars an hour and do it all…at home. It was a big wow moment.

Nowadays so much of what you see before you in television and feature films has passed through After Effects…well, you’d be amazed. From subtle color correction to creations of hundreds of high-res layers smushed together, AE is a fundamental tool even at facilities that claim to only use gear that starts at six figures.

That’s why when some of the Adobe programmers dropped by years ago to treat me like a lab rat, I got them to..uh..sign the box, shown here (to the right…click on it for a larger version.) Hey, they’re celebrities in my world. And there, on the screen of my ancient Powerbook, is that first version of the software…running this very afternoon! CoSA lives, indeed. And Adobe deserves a considerable chunk of credit for encouraging this product’s development while somehow keeping it, at its core, what it is. Flexible, fast, fun to use.

Happy birthday DaveS, DaveH, DavidC, Dan, and all you Michaels and Jameses and Ericas and Steves and Saras and Wills and Vlads and Colemans and Guptas and all the other folks who have made it the fine product it has been all these years. Sincere thanks for making me a fine, fine tool to do what I do.

I’m starting to take it personally that local news and 24 hour cable news—which I certainly had a small part in and made a living from—adding moving colors, shapes, and typography over the years—is not only unwatchable, but is verging on the toxic.

A news consultant (who I went to school with, if memory serves), offers this tidbit to would-be reporters in this morning’s ShopTalk (read by lotsa TV folk):

Ask questions that elicit an emotional response

Facts are easily written into the script. What’s not easy to convey in a script is emotion. That’s what the soundbite is for. In doing an interview, reporters and photographers should ask a question that will elicit some emotion, and the response is what should be used in the story.

This explains a lot of what I’ve been seeing, and I wonder where the heck consultant-boy got that idea, because we sure didn’t learn in journalism school that our job was to elicit or extract emotion…to sidle up to interviewees and figure out how to leech every bit of emotion—true or otherwise—from their souls. There must have been some seminar—in the mid-80s?—that established new rules that I missed.

But it explains a lot.

I think somewhere along the line the idea that storytelling requires an emotional component got miswired into the DNA of a generation of broadcast journalists.

Sure stories can carry an inherent sense of tragedy (as Super Tuesday’s tornado deaths do), but to go on and revisit that tragedy again and again…to fly out the next day and go live, literally picking through the pieces of people’s lives for a moment or two of “good television,” well, my emotional response is that’s just sad..for us, for journalism. Yes, I’m looking at you, CNN Newsroom.

The consultant (a “morning news specialist”!) even offers examples of good soundbites and bad…the bad ones, in his book, are the ones where the interviewees just give you the facts of the story. The good ones, the ones you are supposed to wring out of exhausted fire chiefs, would be like this: “I had 6 of my guys on roof. I wasn’t about to let them get hurt, which is why I pulled them off right away. It scared the heck out of me when we heard that explosion! I sure was relieved when I saw all six standing safely on the ground!”

Where is my giant padded polo mallet of common sense when I need it?

What happens, of course, is that we have a media-savvy generation of people who have watched too much of this crap (and movies that have much the same) and they end up giving reporters precisely what they’re looking for—something that seems as if it conveys emotion, but is probably recycled dialogue from last night’s CSI. This cycle, of course, feeds on itself, and here we are.

So. Where do I sign up for a 24 hour news channel whose mantra is to offer Maximum information, Minimum emotion? BBC World News and the News Hour with Jim Lehrer only get you so far, but in the midst of our spreading TV substance drought, you take what cool water you can get.

I knew things were going to be interesting when I was picking up some Cold Dairy Product for our Super Tuesday night dessert at the grocery store we generally avoid. A thirtysomething African-American woman and a thirtysomething pasty white woman were chatting in the aisles. Said the former:
“I just don’t think he’s ready yet. It’s gonna happen. It can happen now. But he doesn’t have the experience, and she does.”

On the other hand, Fulton County went overwhelmingly for Obama (as did I, by the way, with a friendly goodbye wave in John Edwards’ direction)…so what does any of it prove?

The nice thing is that we have all kindsa great online tools to look at the returns. I’m annoyed as heck at CNN, who puts all these powerful visualization tools in the hands of John King and Wolf Blitzer (”Wolf! Step away from the multitouch display!”) and yet on their massively-promoted website, all we get are county-by-county results in tables…no map!

This just in. Maps are good! Visualization is good. These maps showing winners by counties can be illuminating, thanks very much New York Times.

Even more illuminating though is the breakdown of results by margins..that is, the colordot is small if the candidate won by a tiny amount, more huge if he or she took the region decisively:


It’s pretty much that way from sea to shining sea…a lot of counties, on the democratic side, where the margins are razor-thin…this really is turning out to be a 51/49 kinda thing, Obama here, Clinton there. (On the Republican side, I’m unnerved as usual by the amount of fervent Christian politics that surrounds the Atlanta metro area. They like Huckabee, yeah, I can see that. So sure, go ahead, run him in November.

So what to do? Unleash the spinmeisters! (Just you wait.)

And while you’re at it, unleash the headline-writers. I’m entertained by this page of post-SuperTuesday front pages from across the country, which seem to empty the thesaurus in search of words that indicate a lack of decisive numbers…at least for the most part. Sprint marathon attack fight surge near-knockout epic battle…and then, in New Orleans, it’s simply carnival time.

I mentioned that I watched a fair chunk of the results come in using that increasingly antiquated device, the television. Let me just take a second to jot a few notes about what the traditional media outlets put before our eyes:

• Best visualization of exit polls: the virtual floating 3d chart thingy next to the quite caffeinated Ann Curry on NBC (and MSNBC). Clean, dimensional, and when the director let the camera man stop drifting back and forth to show us “hey, look, it’s 3d!”…quietly effective. And Curry, who I often find unwatchable, had her bullet points honed, focused, and clear every time I watched.
• NBC’s leaderboards, on the other hand, started with beautiful, clean, high-def columnar backgrounds marred by a repetitive twitchy spinning choreography of foreground elements that was beyond pointless. When Brian Williams had to plow through a set of a dozen projections, many for the same candidate, we got Hillary’s face spinning dizzily to reveal…Hillary’s face which then spun dizzily to reveal…well, you get the idea.
• NBC’s lower-third results: extremely clean, especially in HD.
• Worst verbal setup of exit polling information: Diane Sawyer on ABC. She seemed to be fumblingly reading every third bullet point from her misshuffled notecards, and the result was mass confusion. Was she saying that this number was “all evangelicals” or “all evangelical Republicans” or…well, even Charlie Gibson and George Too-long-a-last-name-for-me-to-type-here were looking baffled, gently correcting her, and in one case, disputing the numbers flatly.
• Most pointless, as usual: having a young woman (apparently only women are capable of this) read and summarize Facebook comments to us. Next, have an old geezer summarize the editorials in our nations’ newspapers! They’re both left to their own..uh..medium, thanks.
• NBC and CBS’s leaderboards had static images of the candidates faces…ABC had moving clips. Somehow the moving clips were much, much better. ABC’s graphics were quite clean in general, although in some cases way too sparse. Sammy kept imploring them to tell us “how many delegates? How many delegates!!?”
• CBS’s graphics get a big thumbs up for focusing on the delegate count again and again. They get a big thumbs-down for having some strange-ass scroll-like shapes and noodle-wobbly checkmarks and in general some graphics that looked like squared-up edges were anathema in CBS-land.
• And I just don’t get CNN’s approach of creating a principal election font that looks like it was pre-smudged while being drawn. That whole CNN=Politics look feels like “we spent all this money on high-resolution imagery so we could show you…behold!…smudgy stuff!” But man, they sure know how to count down to the next..uh..thing, whatever it is. CNN, your countdown clock channel! We know timers!
• At one point, WSB had squeezed back ABC’s coverage here to show, in an extremely unattractive way, results of how many people (13!) voted for…John Edwards in Arkansas!? In general, local graphics were lame…and WSB’s were the worst.

Well, yes of course I read all the stuff about Howard Schultz returning to take control of the wayward Starbucks and in a Jobsian way, bring them back to their roots…I just kinda figured that the one closest to our house was safe. Damn! This now means the closest ones are 0.9 miles (Little Five), 1.5 miles (Ansley), 1.5 miles (Emory) and 1.9 miles (Midtown) away. There was a point where our little stretch of Highland Avenue was choked with coffee places…we had a Caribou, a Starbucks, an Aurora, and a San Francisco all fighting it out within easy walking distance. That trendy moment in VaHi history has come and gone, I guess.

(Oh, and a footnote: replacing it is a Krispy Kreme. Yes, really!)

* * * * *

In other news, it’s Super Tuesday, and it actually gave me a moment’s pause, staring down at the evil Diebold voting machine as it displayed the Democratic candidates on the ballot…Gravel, Richardson, Edwards, Kucinich, Biden, Dodd…and the two actually still running.

* * * * *

And because it’s Fat Tuesday, I commend you to watch Nance buys Paczkis! In color! Hey pocky away, indeed.

In the midst of the brouhahah online (relatively muted, actually) about Microsoft acquiring Yahoo, Sven S. Porst, a German blogger with an interest in Mac OS X and good design, took a quick look at his server logs.

It seems that the entities who suck down the most of his bandwidth spidering his site (all sites are regularly accessed and indexed by the search engines at Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and others) do not correspond with the ones who return the most visitors to the site (”referrals.”)

Care to guess? Yahoo is yellow. Microsoft is red. Ask Jeeves is purple. Google is blue, and Google Images is green. So, there’s always the hope that if the most bandwidth-consuming competitors merge, they might not feel the need to hit his site quite so often for minuscule results.

I write this from the right seat of our car as we head down US 23 towards central Ohio, Columbus, the city of my birth. Had a great time last night with Nancy, Alan, and Kate in GPW, and my mission to Canada later in the morning went as well as any sojourn to Canada does these days…I swear, even some of the Canadian customs people are severe and grumpy in these paranoid times.

Nancy captures a telling moment about the postmodern nature of our getting together around a table laden with laptops and phones and cameras. We’re there, able to capture content at the drop of a bon mot, which is almost too much capability.See something you want to preserve, no matter how fleeting? 3 seconds later, you’ve grabbed and saved…and you hope you attach enough metadata to find it later in the rapidly-filling-up terabyte hard drive hanging off of your machine. At its best, having mucho life captured gives you the capability of illustrating your anecdotes almost parenthetically…holding up the iPhone as you say “and then we left Spriggy outside,” and there the dog is, captured in digital amber, just as he was, shivering.

A small handful of pre-MacWorld speculators hoped that the new MacBook Air would feature the same ubiquitous networking as the iPhone…no matter where you go, if you’re within faint wifi range or a cell tower, you’re online. But no, as network-y a machine the MacBook Manila Envelope is, it, like the iTouch, still only has wifi. Sad, because that ‘packets anywhere’ concept, especially on a long road trip, is a compelling proposition. Time and time again now we (if nothing else) reassure ourselves and alleviate stress by knowing to a Google Maps certainty that the Hampton Inn we seek is precisely where we think it is…and we can call them to reassure ourselves even further by poking that doohickey there.

Aahhhh. Peace of mind through packet presence.

I’m starting to get a lot more Google search results that are, well, a lot like this one—attempts to appear relevant, only we know they’re just faux-sites laden with bottom-feeding ads. I’ve been showing some older folks (yes! Older than me! Hard to believe!) lately how to use their computers, which these days has to include some intensive search engine instruction…and it’s hard to explain to a person who thinks that the whole machine on their desk is ’some kinda magic’ that a link like this really represents subhuman scum trying to subvert the true ways of the internet.

The ‘you are looking at this’ reminds me of a classic story from my college TV station. I’ll be brief. In the days of live booth announcers, we had versions of our legal ID (”You’re watching WOUB-TV Athens and WOUC-TV Cambridge”, or simply “You’re watching public television.”) in varying lengths, from fifteen seconds down to three. You chose the right one to fill the time. What happens when the duty director calls for a two-second ID? The young woman in the booth intoned, “You’re watching television.”

Indeed!

Continuing my theme of being awash in nostalgia for the old days of television, I came across this wonderful collection of scanned-in photos, meticulously annotated, of television stations and facilities in Atlanta, Columbus, GA, New York, and elsewhere. Wow…the gear, the clothes. There’s even a photo of an actual Vidifont I have sweated over in a noisy tape room on West Peachtree Street. So, I was inspired to clean up my Vidifont brochure pictures a bit. Mmmm…Vidifont, is there nothing it can’t do?

It’s the day of the Iowa caucuses, and as a designer who has been there (“on the scene! Live! With boots on the ground!”) to design two television stations over the years (I’ve been annoying Sammy with “that’s my eight! that’s my three! Those are my county outlines!” as we see an Iowa newscast or two on C-SPAN) I can verify the one tangible piece of reporting emerging from the Hawkeye state.

It’s damn cold there.

Heck, it was damn cold there last April, when I made a midnight run to pick up a denim jacket from a 24-hour Wal-Mart in Mason City just to keep from shivering in meetings.

Beyond that, it’s anyone’s guess how the actual caucusosity will play out (at this moment), but folks seem to think there is a real role for retail politicking (as opposed to the tarmac-politicking that Tim Crouse delineated in 1972 and reporters have been re-characterizing since then.) But as New Hampshire proves, you can have small-scale retail politicking and then go and, like, y’know actually vote, like most of us do in the primaries.

One of my favorite Crouse-like moments of this campaign thus far, accurately capturing the cold, fatigue, and caffeine-craving is chronicled here at the CJR.

Why can’t we get together and come up with a system that assures we, the voters, of much more of a retail experience, where we might actually be able to go somewhere and hear he or she speak, no matter where we are?

It’s not like there hasn’t been a truckload of reports on how poorly this primary structure is gonna serve us this year. And Iowa just serves as this odd, frozen offbeat way to get the mania started.

Christopher Hitchens tells us that the caucuses are a sham, the Times says that they empower just a few people in a state that has just a few mostly white people, but most of the network news promos breathlessly say “the first votes are cast!” Well, yeah, if by ‘cast’ you mean people standing around in one corner…then another…then they’re lured over by the living room fireplace by warmth and cookies.

Brr. We went for a walk today to the park and it was substantially less windy and cold than yesterday, but I still got an Iowa flashback or two. Here! In Atlanta!

“Well, you just know it’s gotta be a better year than 2007.”

That’s the compiled fervent wish of the websites of people I either for-real know and therefore visit or think I know and therefore visit. If wishes were a renewable energy source, we’d be all set, because I can feel the collective semiconscious out there wishin’ and hopin’ for a bright sunny day with every ‘page down’ I press.

I share that optimism—although a quick review of last year’s early posts will show you that I generally evince a slight default optimism—even in the face of the sad events that started last year, so, well, another data point toward the theory that blog posts don’t mean much of anything.

I think we have a chance in the next 45 days or so to set a political course for our fellow US citizens that will lead us to brighter times, although I’d say this year’s slate of republicans and democrats has a much higher goofball ratio than any I can remember…and I can remember Barry Goldwater. That’s gotta be a good thing. I’m going to be studying the weather mapping databases to see if the added hot air masses over Iowa and New Hampshire disrupt the jet stream.

New Years 2008 did transition for us from foggy dampness to bright, clear and cold, which is a practical improvement, if not a portent. We’ve done all the right year-end-transitioning things—I tweaked the CSS on Sammy’s site, made note of the end-of-year mileage. We went over to my brother’s house for a New Year’s Day dinner packed with those good luck foods that southerners revere (although most of the diners were transplanted midwesterners.) Black-eyed peas, greens, mashed potatoes. Dark-chocolate-coated Edamame. You know, the traditions.

On the way back, I realized we now have a car that alerts us—while driving—when the temperature drops below 37ºF, but isn’t smart enough to realize that if the roads are bone-dry, there’s nothing too threatening about those conditions.

So in many ways, Sammy and I are set for 08. Our bills are paid. We have lots of friends we care about and (often) get a chance to visit. We have the stuff that some covet—a cool car, a cool phone, lots of cool computers, ipods and a cool HD set. Our house is warm (enough) and we’re saving water from our dishes and showers.

The decks are thus cleared for positive consequences. Well, let’s see, eh?

Wow, here I was thinking about early alternative video last week or so and now, a few of the surviving pioneers of early handheld television…the heroes of helical, the visionaries of vidicon tubes, have gone and put the preeminent journal of that technology in that time, Radical Software, up on the web in a near-flawless example of preservation, giving us searchable, downloadable riches. The wise communiards of the Videofreex and the Raindance folks, live again, in earnest black-and-white pixels…this time in PDF, not NTSC.

This publication (and no, ‘Software’ did not refer to computer programs in that far-distant context) was one of my textbooks, one of my guides during my Goddard days, and paging through the Letraset-ty, IBM Composer-typeset and typewriter-type pasteups seems to not only nurture my nostalgia centers, but get me to thinking more about Big Ideas in the realm of communications perched here comfortably into the 2000s.

The portable videotape camera-and-tape deck system, or “portapak,” has been called by some, the most revolutionary breakthrough in media since Gutenberg.

—Philip Lopate in “Aesthetics of the Portapak,” in volume 2 number 6. And he was just getting warmed up. I wonder how many times Gutenberg’s name has been invoked in the context of new communications technology, say, since Gutenberg?

There are some real surprises here, and I’m gonna have to plow systematically through here to glean all the cool stuff. (If you’re interested in the basic history, this page does a fine job of pulling that together.) Did you know that Seattle glass artist Dale Chihuly was an early force in independent video as he tried to use the new medium to broaden and illuminate the older one? Mhm. Looking at pages packed with experiments-in-video-as-public-art (”walk through a room full of monitors showing scenes from around the world, and…”) …well, I wonder what they’d make of The Situation Room.

Wolf Blitzer ≠ Nam June Paik, in my estimation.

Boy, if the early Whole Earth Catalogs and Mother Earth Newses would be given this quality of online preservation (nicely-scanned PDFs with searchable, cut-and-pasteable texts), I would be in seventies heaven, and maybe some Ideas Worth Sharing would be given new lives.

I’ve written about (without laying hands on) Amazon’s Kindle and of course I’ve been exploring with our new OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) XO, poking and prodding it through external connections, reconfiguring it so that it chats with the outside world correctly, calling up page after web page (”hmm, that looks quite readable and fine.”), but I didn’t draw any dots connecting the two. This O’Reilly Radar post does…it considers the OLPC as a reading machine (which, indeed, it is.) Purchasing the XO represents the same cash outlay (although the Get One, Give One program provides two machines—you keep one—for that price)…its screen is larger than the Kindle’s (had no idea), the OLPC has terrific wifi reception versus the Kindle’s ‘free’ EVDO cellular networking…and of course the XO will display web pages, feeds, PDFs, ebooks, pretty much everything you throw at it…and that’s where the Kindle steps aside.

Oh, and the XO’s screen has color (except in bright outdoor light) and more dots per inch.

And is all open source.

At any rate, I stayed up late reading last night on the XO, depleting its batteries for several hours. I’m worried that the clicking of the ‘page down’ key might be just a bit too loud for extensive in-bed reading next to a sleeping partner, but it worked well otherwise.

Hand me the universal translator, Mr. Spock. Google launched almost-instantaneous translations in your chat client today, and the Mandarin one is already clogged up. But hey, my Spanish is improving!

There are buses that go from downtown Oaxaca out to Xoxocatlán, which is, I guess you’d say, a suburb of the capital city of Oaxaca state, perched on the south side of the huge hill the archaeological site Monte Alban sits on. It’s pronounced “hoho-caht-LAN”…and folks know the bus is going there because a simple ‘XOXO’ has been scribbled high up on the windshield. A bus with hugs and kisses.

I think of that town, for some reason, when I look at the OLPC XO that Sammy and I bought as part of their “Give one, Get one” program. It is a cute, tough machine whose logo is a merger of an X and O into a human shape (some have said the Cingular guy got work after he was laid off), and Xs and Os permeate the clever user interface.

It arrived Saturday in the rain, and the UPS person tucked it up against the front door, where we first spotted it Sunday morning (we’re glad neighborhood thieves were out partying elsewhere Saturday night.) Out of the slightly damp box came a cleverly-designed computer, the work of a devoted team of people who are trying to put these in the hands of as many of the world’s children in as functional a way for as cheap a price as they can.

As part of that mission, for a bunch of obvious political reasons, they want to make it 100% open source, resilient, and accessible. It is a minimalist machine by many folks standards—only 1 GB of Flash memory instead of a hard disk, and 256 MB of RAM, and a single-core processor. And yet, because of the hard work of a determined team that cannot be said to be in it for any reason other than to help, it is what it is, a fine machine for a child to use to work with, to learn, to paint, draw, write, communicate, and oh yeah, play. There are a lot of smarts inside and behind this machine, and plenty of Python-y juiciness to play with (what other machine lets you examine the source code of running applications with the touch of one button?)

One of the people who saw it at James and Rebecca’s holiday open house on Sunday paid it the ultimate compliment: “What kind of Mac is it?” Several said they could see using it as a small coffeehouse writing and surfing machine. (This speaks, by the way, to a general worldwide desire for a powerful, light subnotebook, that I hope will be satiated by a new kind of MacBook in January.) Many liked the idea that you could buy one while simultaneously buying one for a kid somewhere for whom the XO might open all kinds of rich doors.

I’m certainly a Mac guy, an admirer of clever design, and yet I have no trouble extending that admiration to the work of the folks who made the OLPC XO. There are some really smart choices and decisions made here (and a few dubious ones, but hey, it’s version 1.0.) Thanks for doing something.

…back in 1983, I would have been just nerdy enough to buy one. And sit, broke, in my apartment, creating documents no one would ever read on the first no-kidding GUI-based computer (I exclude the Xerox Alto here), not to be confused with its successor, the Mac, which really, really changed everything.

And made me $2500 or so poorer as it did it.

Now, thankfully, I can simply download a free Lisa emulator and party like it’s 1983. LisaWrite! LisaCalc! LisaTheWebHasn’tBeenInventedYet!

(Click on image to see it larger, by the way.)

There’s a great site that pulls together software that allows you to run dozens of old computers, calculators, games, and doodads in emulation…I am astonished, heartened, amused by the accumulated urges of long-time computer users to recreate the digital homes they left behind so many upgrades ago.

I understand that urge. It’s irrational, but I share it. A machine very much like my old IBM Selectric is on sale at eBay. I hear it’s call, I have no need. Maybe someone will write a Selectric emulator…

Sometimes I think I have Seasonal Nostalgic Disorder. I correlate it fairly closely with my attempts to clean our house…to remove the layers of clutter that come from the deadly combination of being alive for a good long time plus being fans of the printed word. The plus side of that is you come across stuff you think has long left for the dumpster. Like this book.

I have long been, as you know, a fan of television, and I remember getting very excited when Guerilla Television came out…this now thoroughly antique 1971 publication posited a world where television would be democratized by these newfangled “portapaks”—we’d all walk around with tiny video cameras, recording everything…and that would lead to A Better World.

Quoth Shamberg and company:

It may be that unless we redesign our television structure our own capacity to survive as a species may be diminished.

Wow. Far out, man!

The “first how-to book for new media tools” got me excited by the prospect of being able to create videos just like the big guys, but by the mid 1970s when I went off to college and actually tried to use a Portapak and looked at the results—blotchy, fuzzy black and white images that couldn’t even cleanly transition—in a cut—from one shot to another without additional hardware, more tape, a good deal of luck, and the willingness to put up with even more analog generation loss. That’s correct…you couldn’t cut…even that caused a roll and bounce of the wobbly helical videotape recording.

From my standpoint, this vision arrived well ahead of the technology, and in what may be a telling piece of self-realization, I knew that the only television I wanted to make was crisp, clean, and what was then called “broadcast quality.” I was willing to go work at “big media” (although it turned out to be a baby version of that at Ted Turner’s WTCG) to use (expensive) tools that made good-looking product…it didn’t bother me (again, tellingly) that my message was “watch Casablanca, tonight at 8 on the SuperStation.”

It took an extra decade or two for the vision of democratic television to become realized, but I think we are now living in a post-YouTube world, where it really is easy to put video “out there.” Yeah, maybe too easy.

But here, amidst a big-media writers’ strike, amidst consolidated big-media’s attempts to put out cheaper programming in as many monetizable (is that a word?) forms as possible, amidst endless uploads of water-skiing dogs, it a treat to be able to reread this early attempt to characterize what must have seemed like a far-off world…where everyone can do TV.

And the author? Well, he went on to become pretty big, old media—he produced The Big Chill, Pulp Fiction, and..uh..Reno 911. Wonder what he thinks about the strike? Or, about YouTube as the democratizing of television?

Ah, the holiday shopping season. Amazing deals everywhere you look…but it helps if you put your brain on ‘pause.’ (from Consumerist.)

Okay, let me first explain the joke…when my brother and I were working latenights at an Atlanta TV station on design stuff, along about three am they’d rerun episodes of The Fugitive, and over several cycles, we became very familiar with Barry Morse’s oft-spoken line of dialog, bellowed in desperation as David Janssen excaped him yet again.

“Kimble!!”

And now, on to the Amazon.com-created reading device that is all the talk since its introduction yesterday. My take on it is short and sweet: I’m glad they’re experimenting, trying things out, but the DRM protection and the restrictions on use/sale/trade fly in the face of everything that Jeff Bezos has historically said about the nature of books (stuff said when he was trying to rationalize Amazon’s selling used books.) The device itself seems a bit clunky for a reading-only tablet…you’d think that it wouldn’t need full alphanumeric keyboard if all you were doing was navigating a well-designed interface.

It kinda looks like the 1960s Star Trek reading tablets (’PADD’s), where I’d want something more like the 1990s-era Star Trek the Next Generation reading devices. Although the 1968 reading tablets from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 would do nicely as well.

And I think once folks do the math (including paying for ’selected’ RSS feeds), you’ll find out that the cost of the tablet’s EVDO-like cellular connection is no great bargain. Just like Apple with AT&T, doesn’t seem like Amazon has made much headway in breaking the broadband wireless providers’ stranglelock.

All that said, I think I’ll hold out (not that I’m really gasping in anticipation or anything) for a small tablet-computer, about the size of a large paperback book, that reads web pages and PDFs and Word documents and connects to wifi and…well, you know, like my phone, but with a bit larger screen.

Ah, wait a moment and someone will cobble together the gem of an experience that had occurred to you and take it and run with it up there on the internet.

For some reason, on a cold grey Michigan morning a few years back, the breakfast spread at my in-laws just cracked me up: “Move over Butter”, with a pissed off cow, surely akin to the arrogant chicken that served (still serves?) as the University of Delaware mascot (who, yes, I just checked, used to look like an actual, if aggrieved, chicken..uh, in a sweatshirt, but now looks a lot more like Woody Woodpecker’s spawn.) Cartoon ad animals…they’re just more fun when they’re…upset.

And of course, the fact that it’s just one attempt out of dozens to create and market artificial stuff that is not no way no how butter…and yet, you still want those magic six letters up there. Reminds me of this current trend of frustrated advertising copywriters who boldly banner the words “legally, we cannot say…” and then go on to make the most outrageous claims in hopes that you’ll chuckle at their little lawyer evasion and get sucked in by the claim.

Hey, move over, copywriters.

As you may have heard, television writers are on strike. This means, among other things, that we’re deprived of topical political writing. It also means we’re deprived of witty Daily Show-like coverage of the strike itself.

But wait, not so fast:

What I get from this video: the writers deserve what they’re asking for (of course I thought that before the strike), and two or b, when you strip away the TV production hoohah, the core of what makes anything funny, interesting, great, entertaining is the writing. It’s right there.

And, of course, I love the over-the-shoulder graphics.

Over the weekend, dozens, nay, tens of thousands of Macs worldwide were upgraded to Mac OS X Leopard, the latest version of an operating system that has been refined in five major releases since its introduction early in this century. Have I, yet? Well, actually, I first installed (a beta of) Leopard back in June (see photo at right…our little MacBook at WWDC)…marveled in its features, delighted in its potential, and then reverted that puppy back to 10.4 as soon as I could so that it would..uh..work.

And since the official release, we’ve been waiting for our ‘up to date’ copy that comes with Sammy’s new machine (a lovely large-screen iMac, purchased last week.) So have we leapt, at this moment? No. But soon, very soon.

Since my beta taste, the hard working folks in Cupertino have been working hard, and we can add this new milepost on their amazing parade of major releases:

• Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard 10/26/2007
• Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger 04/29/2005
• Mac OS X 10.3 Panther 10/24/2003
• Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar 08/23/2002
• Mac OS X 10.1 (internally, ‘Puma’) 09/25/2001
• Mac OS X 10.0 (internally, ‘Cheetah’) 03/24/2001

By comparison, Microsoft Windows XP was released in October 2001, and its successor in major releases, Windows Vista, came out in January of this year.

Apple has a challenge in marketing this latest version of their OS: do you tell the truth and talk about the staggering number of underlying improvements and innovations that are, for the most part, beneath the surface? Or do you play up a couple of whiz-bang, comprehensible features that the average joe will want? (The promotion of Time Machine gives you your answer.)

The reality is: you should buy Leopard for the underlying work, because it lays the foundation for huge amounts of whiz-banginess in almost every aspect of the apps you use in the future. I would also add that the shipping product..10.5.0, is really in some ways just a way to get in the door…I predict the refinements and bug fixes and tweaks in the next six months will be 1) essential and 2) a big part of getting your money’s worth.

The Apple developers, when not distracted by things like iPhones and Apple TVs, have been working hard to add powerful new core functionality. And with a hard end-of-October deadline, they’ve pushed hard and delivered a product that is both astonishing and probably a little bit rough around the edges. But for many of us, the improvements will be worth those edges:

Take Core Animation, a framework for making interface stuff move with fluid elegance with very very little effort on the part of an application developer will eventually make everything in the land of Mac have that elegant dynamism you see now on the iPhone. And then there’s the capability to create and run 64-bit programs, which is a boon for the scientific and technical computing world…and also makes it possible to use all of your microprocessors’ power in ways that take pages to explain. They’ve added filesystems and frameworks that make backup and working with the metadata contained in the zillions of files on your hard drive much easier.

But any of that added functionality only comes with an upgrade to Leopard. Yep, you’re gonna start to see a lot of “Mac OS X 10.5 only” labels on downloads.

Ironically, the two application suites that were once at the fingertips of many, many mac users—Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, and so on) and Adobe (Photoshop, Illustrator, inDesign) are now the programs that least take advantage of these under the hood refinements. It’s hard for them to leverage Mac OS X 10.5-specific functionality—if not impossible—because they’ve committed themselves to a single code base for multiple platforms…Windows and Mac…and because Apple hasn’t given them much of a developmental head start.

They (sometimes stubbornly) have their own way of displaying text, holding on to internal data structures, and even dropping menus—and it’s not that their ways are bad, they just don’t take advantage of what the underlying operating system and the Cocoa frameworks (libraries of reusable code that, if used, give you that head start) have to offer. There’s waste there…there can be a performance hit as well, since code to do the same thing is loaded yet again into memory where perfectly good code sits, ignored, lonely.

So what does this mean to the end user? There’s a real benefit to “buying in to Cocoa,” and using Leopard along with applications—like Apple’s own iWork apps instead of Office—that take advantage of the new underlying goodness.

I’d also call to your attention new Cocoa-wonderful apps like Gus Meuller’s Acorn—a lightweight, inexpensive, clever alternative to Photoshop, that may be part of the key towards living a zippy, Microsoft and Adobe-free life. It gets no small part of its speed and wonderfulness by “buying in” and embracing as much Cocoaosity as it can.

I think an argument can also be made if that you’re a contrarian, who lives their lives in Office instead of iWork, in Firefox instead of Safari, who doesn’t think much of iPhoto…well an upgrade of operating system isn’t going to bring you much in terms of added performance or functionality…and in fact may cause more trouble for you than its worth. Stick with Tiger for a while. It’s fast, stable, relatively lean.

But eventually the siren call of new underlying functionality will get you to upgrade…you’ll find one app you just have to have with that “Mac OS X 10.5 only” label…and there you’ll be.

The real Steve Jobs said today “Let me just say it.” Okay, go ahead, Steve, say it.

We want native third party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers’ hands in February. We are excited about creating a vibrant third party developer community around the iPhone and enabling hundreds of new applications for our users. With our revolutionary multi-touch interface, powerful hardware and advanced software architecture, we believe we have created the best mobile platform ever for developers.

This is, of course, a very different sentiment than laying out an obstructionist approach: “they break in, we lock em back out,” rinse, repeat.

Jobs (and his company) may have had this general strategy all along—let’s see how much excitement there really is; let’s see just how many people are battering at the door.

Turns out, quite a few. Estimates of the number of people who have unlocked their phones to allow 3rd party apps onboard vary, but they’re large enough to constitute interest and enthusiasm.

Apple would have been foolish to ignore the sheer energy that comes from big crowds of youthful developers who want to craft coolness into the device they pull from their pockets to impress people at coffeeshops, airports, and meetings. Those enthusiasts are out there now, breaking down the door every time that Apple re-bars it, and I’m glad that Apple has decided not to waste that creativity and word-of-mouth buzz, juice, whatever.

So next February, they open the door, under some sort of (as yet still) mysterious parameters, they stand back, and oh yes, they will reap the rewards.

It’s not that Apple doesn’t have or couldn’t hire enough developers to create the amount of software that is showing up for this “best mobile platform ever”…but if piles of apps are just handed out from Cupertino, sometimes, dare I say it, the bounty gets taken for granted. Apple actually runs the risk of this with a steady release of new revs of all that iLife and iWork stuff. “Oh, yeah, I have those programs on my machine. Not sure what they all do, but yeah, they’re on there.”

If packages emerge (with some real sparks of new ideas) from the third-party community, that software seems to arrive encapsulated in a heightened, shinier quality of buzz, juice, spark.

Often, the development has been open. We’ve read about it in the land of blogs. Other 3rd party developers have enthused. It may even be open source, which may do exactly nothing for the end user but generates a whole other level of enthusiasm online.

And finally, of course, sometimes a small but powerful idea of uncommon originality will emerge and catch fire from completely outside the Cupertino mothership…and those more fragile, more important ideas are fanned into life more successfully in the nurturing environment of the third party world.

If Apple succeeds in constructively channeling this energy, well, then get ready for all kinds of multi-touch doohickies from the land of Apple that will work much the same way as the iPhone and the iPod Touch did…but in your car, on your kids’ school desktops, and so on.

Hello from Seattle, where the skyline looks like an ad for ABC’s Thursday night lineup. How dare they co-opt the space needle!

Hey, I love it when I see signs out there in the real world that use those fine punctuation marks, the quotations, to create a sense of emphasis (in lieu of a bolder type, or an underline, or red ink, or something.) Of course, to me, it looks like when they say ‘we only use the “freshest” meat’, they’re kinda implying it might be just the opposite of “freshest.”

That’s why I’m “chuckling” at this fine “blog”, here.

It’s hard to believe that this is for real…yet it is.

You know, I’ve really enjoyed the tiny pocket-sized chunk’o’ user interface magic that I’ve been toting around the past couple of weeks…as much because I can connect to it and its UNIX-y file system via standard tools like ssh, grab screenshots thanks to enterprising third-party developers, and install programs that can do, well, darn near anything.

The iPhone is a wonderful, thoughtful, game-changing piece of design. My fingers are crossed that Apple won’t screw that up by screwing down the pathways that access all of its internal delights. The best UI in the world won’t succeed in the marketplace if the experience of the users is that they have to work in the shadows to use the device to a fraction of its full potential.

I read somewhere that the overwhelming majority of iPhone users within Apple (every employee got one, you know) have unlocked the phone (which is, by the way, not the same as cracking it so that it can be used with every carrier.)

How could they not? It’s too much fun.

Will greed or bad deals (with the likes of AT&T) take that fun away? Hard to say. But on a day where Amazon pushed out a fine, promising DRM-free competitor to iTunes, the answers are likely to become more and more interesting. I’m hoping Apple again will choose the paths of openness…there’s way-plenty of revenue to be gleaned there, from a universe of happy users.

I still remember the smell of oily, non-soy-based ink and huge rolls of newsprint down by the loading docks at The Columbus Dispatch. When I first got to see the presses roll, with semi-cylindrical plates poured as liquid metal into forms cast from linotype-set chases, well, that was magic.

It felt like the news was this unstoppable force, like a freight train, loud, powerful, smelly, indomitable. Get the heck out of the way, here comes the news.

And in their own way, television news opens of the 1970s imitated that “unstoppable force” effect with thundering news opens, dramatic cuts of video, and galloping symphonies. Out of the way, here comes television news.

Barry Diller interviewed by Lloyd Grove, via Romanesko:

“I don’t think there are easy solutions [for newspapers]. It’s hard when you use the word newspaper. If you mean news-gathering, or just news, take the paper off, then I’m very hopeful. …The problem for print is print. I mean, it’s paper, its current distribution, and it’s going to be supplanted by other paths. So I’m optimistic about the paths but you certainly can’t be optimistic if you’re running a newspaper.”

The best image I can come up with now is the absolutely silent cascade of flickering lights on an internet router. LEDs in red, gold, and green, blink-a-blink-blink. Maybe a soft clatter of a keyboard here or there, or the sounds of two thumbs texting.

Here comes news on little cats’ feet.

I guess I got over my romance with newsprint after driving through Canadian forest-land being stripped to feed those thundering presses.

Does this gentleman (at left) look familiar? How about if I said he was a “gentleman’s gentleman”? Well, I might be confusing the point, because he’s in fact one of Britain’s acting treasures…holding his latest tech treasure.

Turns out Mr. Fry is a long, long, long-time Mac user, and a first-time iCaller. He has seemingly tried out, used up, discarded, or simply mocked more personal portable devices than I will ever see, let alone own, and in his first blog post he manages to lead us through a thoughtful, clever summary of them all, and how we (all) got from a 2-bit smiling Mac icon to the OS X-based pixel glory that is, well, my first phone.

My favorite paragraph is perhaps one of the most parenthetical, where he says he’s “never had fewer than ten working Macs on the go since the late 80s,” and bought the second Macintosh to be sold in the UK…care to guess who snagged the first?

He manages to roll through the promise of device after device, ending in disappointments galore, and then funnels all of that into exactly how the iPhone meets his deepest wants and desires—and how it doesn’t. His thoughtful analysis will, I hope, reach CEO Steve’s bespectacled eyes at some point, if not because of Fry’s celebrity, then because of his alacrity. And besides, Mr. Jobs is hopscotching Europe right now, right?

I’m stunned, shocked, pleased, and hoping for more. Do click over, as perhaps the UK folk would say.

We got a new camera when we were up in Michigan…and then, of course we got another “new camera” when we bought the iPhone. I’ve been shooting some pictures, with varied results, and hope to keep adding to this small collection. It’s kinda ‘ehh’ now, but, well, we’ll see.

The phone’s most intriguing and redeeming photo feature (besides the fact that it’s always there) is, of course, that it’s a fixed-focal-length shot…no zooming in for a composition.

Additionally, the inherent verticalism that the iPhone UI brings to the party is an interesting counterbalance to my natural tendency to shoot horizontals, because of course, in the land of television, everything is horizontal.

Tonight, WPBA aired three parts of the American Masters series completely out of order. Baffled viewers saw part two of Edward R. Murrow, part 1 of Murrow, and then one on Walter Cronkite, which was supposed to air first.

Maybe it was just baffled viewer, singular. Maybe I was the only one watching.

I called master control. (They seemed surprised an ordinary viewer could get through their phone tree.) “Tape problem,” they said. “We had to do it.”

I was about to launch into a diatribe that would begin “how could a modern station let this happen,” but then I remembered WPBA is barely a station at all, held together with duct tape, and misspent school board money, and anyway, uh, there was that time in the early eighties where WTCG master control (that would be me and two others) aired the reels (yes, film reels) of Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” out of order.

So, instead, I said, “Good luck, and good night.”

After a morning (or the latter part of it) outside on the ladder, I came inside and poured Starbucks coffee carefully into the McDonalds cup I picked up the other day in Newberry. What kind of retro brand chic is this? Fancy coffee in an unfancy cup (because the Starbucks venti cups—I brought two up north with me—are too biodegradable to hold up in constant use. Two to three fill-ups per day, over nearly a month, and those saying-embossed pieces of marketing are stained with the rich brown of whatever coffee I’ve been pouring into them. Starbucks, Trader Joe’s, and yes, Maxwell House French Roast.

The ‘McCafé’ cup (interesting…absolutely no golden arches branding on these at all) are more styrofoamy…they’re actually some sort of styrofoam/cardboard hybrid…it’s been holding up well for a couple of weeks now. I look down at my shirt and hands, and there, spattered down my front are the other shades of brown that have been the theme of this Upper Peninsula visit.

Most of you know that Sammy’s family’s famed Green Cottage hasn’t been, in fact, green since about 1990…it’s a redwood-stained brownish color, with a faded trim that has become a light chocolate. And as Sammy has been hard at work this month redoing the considerable trim around the window-filled porch…scraping and sanding down past faded brown to 1950s green to some sort of grey leadish dust, carefully filling and layering bright white primer, I’ve been restaining the siding with this redwood-tinted stuff (made in Ohio!) that looks like melted milk chocolate in the five gallon can. The new trim paint Sammy adds as the final coat(s) is a bit darker…it looks like melted Trader Joe’s Dark Chocolate in the can. Or maybe UPS brown (what can brown trim paint do for you?)

So, most days here, I’ve been clambering up on an aluminum extension ladder, first with a broom to blast away layer after layer of spiderwebs (you can’t do this in advance…those damn spiders rebuild ‘em nightly) then, often, with a damp rag to finish the job and to generally clean the windowsills of crap. Then, I load up a roller and spatter great swaths of milk chocolate on the siding, which absorbs it hungrily. And finally (did I mention I descend from the ladder and walk around and squint at my handiwork for a few minutes between each of these steps) I take a two-inch stain brush and dollop the milk chocolate up and down in the seams (gutters? troughs? The jargon eludes me) between the siding runs and more or less the job is done.

And as a lovely side benefit, I’ve given myself, my hair, my shirt, and the ladder a fine spatter of stain that makes it look like I’ve been sloppily into the Hershey’s syrup.

Oh, one more ‘brown’ that has been a part of this August at the Green Cottage…Connie’s general store, down the road in Helmer, has been carrying a brand of root beer from my childhood…Frostop, which was the name of a handful of root beer stands in Ohio, has been reincarnated by someone called ‘C-B Beverage Corp’ of Hopkins, MN. Go figure, but it’s tasty and more or less as I remember it.

We were having a nice glass of wine with Sammy’s cousin Susan and her husband, and Susan added another data point to a disturbing trend: almost everyone we know with 12 inch Powerbooks have had them fail, and the diagnosis, by experts or amateurs, is that it’s dead for good.

The power supply to the logic board expires, or some other ailment causes the machine to “lock up hard,” and most folks take it as a sign that it’s time to get a new laptop.

Adding Susan to our list, we have more than 7 people we know to whom this has happened; ironically our own 12 inch (’El Libreto’) had a different problem within the first year of its life—the DVD drive went out—and because the Apple store in Atlanta had trouble finding a replacement (or so they said), the nice folks there offered us a new black MacBook in replacement.

It’s interesting that this convenient size (writers in particular seem to love it) has not migrated to the land of Intel-powered MacBooks…it’s more interesting still that those who hung on to the ‘old technology’ are being forced to jump ship.

One of the side dramas (for us) since coming up north to the fine Upper Peninsula of Michigan is that a big chunk of the north end of the county we’re in—Luce County—is, uh, on fire.
We’re on the south end, so that’s somewhat reassuring, but the consequence has been much like in Atlanta earlier this year when forest fires ravaged the swamplands of south Georgia—the smell of fire is often in the air. Sometimes, at night, the wind will shift and, whoosh!…we’re sleeping inside a campfire. Five minutes later, the air is fresh again.
Like South Georgia, this part of the U.P. is basically swampland, but swampland in a drought is a lot closer to tinder than fire retardent.
* * * * *
In other news, we’re working hard on renewing the Green Cottage so it can withstand the harsh winters, and as a result a big part of it is actually green again…
* * * * *
And this sunday’s NY Times magazine has caught up with my excitement (if that is the right word) about the fine, fine new typeface making its way onto freeway signs across the country…and particularly up here in Michigan.

…you can’t make new cars. One reason I’m glad we got our Prius when we did:

Quake Forces Toyota to Halt Production

TOKYO (AP) — Japanese automakers, including Toyota Motor Corp., called production halts Wednesday at factories in Japan because of quake damage at a major parts supplier.

The temporary closure of auto parts maker Riken Corp.’s plant at Kashiwazaki city, near the epicenter of Monday’s magnitude 6.8 quake, has forced Toyota, Nissan Motor Co. Mitsubishi Motors Corp. and Fuji Heavy Industries to scale back production.

Toyota, Japan’s No. 1 automaker, will stop production lines at a dozen factories centered in central Aichi prefecture Thursday afternoon and all day Friday, said Toyota spokesman Paul Nolasco.

The company will assess the situation at Riken, supplier of key transmission and engine parts to Toyota, before deciding whether to resume production on Monday, he said.

Me, I always loved how the town of Derby Line, Vermont thrived in a happy world where “our neighbor to the north” is indeed treated as the best, most open, most intertwined of neighbors.

A bunch of people are building an ambitious library of the world’s books online, more or less how you’ve always expected a web-based library would manifest itself…with a catalog we all edit. The number of books that exist online now in full-text is really quite amazing. So, a grafting of Wikipedia concepts onto a really, really big card catalog, linked to full-text or where you can buy, borrow, or just read the book. Hey, now we’re all librarians! Sssh!

I miss comic book covers where the villains would, in dialogue, laboriously explain the entire convoluted story: “I’ve got this game rigged so that every time Flash makes a move, a member of the Justice League disappears from the face of the Earth.” Behold, a site with easily-searchable comic book covers…thousands and thousands of them!

There’s a compelling five part blog posting (start here and move forward in time) from one of the inventors of the Chumby about getting an assembly line for his product set up in China, more or less next door to where gazillions of iPhones and iPods are being expertly, rapidly, and obscenely cheaply cobbled together. Culture! Technology! Food! The terrors of globalism! It’s all here.

There’s now a Mac app that allows you to create your own subliminal messages that are flashed oh-so-momentarily on your screen. Don’t eat pizza! Buy Tab! So you…uh…hypnotize yourself? Dangerous, I suppose, if you can get your hands on someone else’s machine.

What the heck is electronic mail? I like to think this guy’s expression depicts the horror of the very first recipient of spam.

Meanwhile, Wired writes about how Google maps is changing the way we see our world. Boy, I’ll say. Google Maps (and Earth) find their way into all sorts of aspects of Sammy’s and my lives, both professional and not. Once your start overlaying your data on their imagery, it’s hard to stop.

But I’ll stop here.

This is one of those weeks where I’ve started to post about eight times, about burbling demi-thoughts ranging from the technological to the political to the societal. Unlike others who can effortlessly sit down and summon the blog muses (a distinctly less powerful and magical set of inspirers than, you know, book or movie muses), I have to kind of wait for sufficient haze of quiet inside and outside of my brain to settle in and dampen, sharpen, soften.

So here we are. Big surprise that it’s ’round midnight and I’ve made sure Sammy is tucked in and sleeping comfortably and I’ve talked long-distance (as we used to say, as if that were a big deal) with my longtime friend on the eve of her first chemo session about many things that seemed to ultimately add up to the power of serenity. I hung up confident that she had done her inevitable homework, reaffirmed the love of family and friends, developed ways to be at spiritual peace with the challenges ahead and now just basically needs to get up tomorrow after a good night’s sleep and do the day.

I think we face the daily prospect of ‘doing the day’, with infinite variations, mostly overlaid with anxiety and fear and the clutter of the insignificant, and it’s much easier when you can get to a self-realized quiet place and tap into the power that comes from that kind of serenity. (Not to be confused, of course, with Serenity, but a big ol’ fictional spaceship brings its own power, solace, and peace-of-mind.)

That’s as crunchy granola as I’ll get. It’s been raining a bit more this month here, and this afternoon the moisture made it smell somehow sweet like an office park built atop an old orange grove in Sunnyvale, California. I looked out at our front yard, a tiny bit less shabby after Sammy’s herculean weed-pulling and my grass cutting. The house is clean, one of the side benefits of having company. The new car sits outside, bravely defying any roving criminal element. The maps are almost done.

This would be something like my serenity of home.

If it doesn’t moderate the weather or advance criminal indictments against Dick Cheney, what possible use could it be?

–from ‘Redneck’ on the Textdrive user forum.

Well, exactly. Maybe it’s because it’s so hot. Maybe it’s because we’re having to deal with insurance junk on our old car and add-on games with our new one. But to somehow go through all of this during the apparent extended national holiday known as iPhone week just kinda makes life for me all the more bizarre.

To quickly sum up: yeah, I love the design…it’s easily the most spectacular breakthrough in UI design since the Mac in 1984. The downsides can absolutely be attached to the deal with the devil now known as AT&T that Jobs struck. Charge em up the wazoo for SMS? Sure. Slow cell data speeds? Sure. Stuff like that keeps me away from joining the rest of the world: I think I’ll remain mobile-less a bit longer.

I’d buy a phone-less (and therefore AT&T-less) iPhone in a New York minute, however.

In the meantime, it’s fun to read blogs that discuss the various pluses and minuses of the überdevice, and of course I read all the early reviews, and very much enjoyed, in spite of myself, NYTer David Pogue’s satiric look at the cloak of secrecy Apple drapes over their new baby in the wild—and the video-review manages to get the main points out there as well. It’s, dare I say it, almost Daily Show-ish. Yes, play the video! Sit through the ad!

I just hope we’re not going through one of those silly summers again where our national attention (such as it is) is captivated by something trivial only to to be struck, hard by a fresh, cold, jolt of reality in the fall. You know, like in September of 2001.

Truth is, all those horrors are still out there in the world, happening now, happening daily. D’ja read the four part article on Cheney in the Washington Post? Well, call that up on your iPhone Safari browser and a startlingly cool breeze might just whistle through the halls of whatever branch(es) of government the veep thinks he’s in these days. There? See? iPhone useful.

UPDATE 4:30 PM eastern:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate Judiciary Committee subpoenaed the White House and Vice President Dick Cheney’s office Wednesday for documents relating to President Bush’s controversial eavesdropping program that operated warrant-free for five years.

Did I mention that Senator Pat Leahy of Vermont, the committee chairman, my senator for a brief moment in the mid-70s, a guy I interviewed in my first newspaper job…did I mention that I’m so proud of how he’s standing up to the Bush administration? Well, give that man an iPhone.

I’m so heartened to hear Kevyn back on the air this morning, talking about her experiences of the past month, about the change in her life that now adds “breast cancer survivor” to her lengthy collection of accomplishments.

“There are going to be days when this [her radio program] will be the high point of my day,” she told her listeners this morning. She’s looking toward her first days of chemotherapy with something like steely nerve: “This poison will be like golden honey dripping into my veins.” That both gives me chills and a small smile because her resolve—to get through this, to see it through to the other side—is what I’ve witnessed firsthand in Ms. K in the many years she’s been my friend.

The folks at her radio station have made downloadable versions of her last show pre-surgery and the one today available on their website. Hefty downloads, but worth it to hear something way more than a ‘podcast’. Kevyn’s show, at its best, is a testament to the power of radio as a discrete form of communication…a person speaks into a microphone in a tiny room and, nearly simultaneously, people all over hear that voice as if in one-on-one conversation. It’s a personal, intimate, amazing experience when done well…I believe they once called it broadcasting.

Well, I can see I have some work to do to capture the eyeballs of all those people walking around looking for design firms near 30306.

Pinch me when all the hoopla is over.

Greetings from a quite non-humid, beautiful, sunny San Francisco, quite a contrast from the heat-plus-humidity of (positively) Atlanta. I’ve said I wanted to do this once and so I have: I’m at the Apple WWDC, that would be the Worldwide Developers Conference, and here I am, arguably not a developer.

However, this kinda works because Apple has said they want to expand the definition of ‘developer’ to include (embrace, even) content developers alongside those who write boxcarloads of lines of text like:[jcbView setFrame:thatFrame];Content developers. That would be the people who write and create podcasts and, on a more professional level, work in the creative arts to create what is unfortunately called these days, product.Most of these folks, the actual code developers, are laboring to create new generations of the tools that make the tools, and so mixing them with tool users might be a little awkward. Do they have much to say to each other?I am amidst a polyglot group, wearing a staggering variety of t-shirts festooned with logos of Apple Developer Conferences past and companies present, struggling with laptop-laden bookbags and waiting for the next session or meal (cocoa or pizza?)I’m also in a strange parallel world where every laptop is an Apple laptop, where every computer screen displays the beautiful OS X (Tiger or Leopard) interface, and thus Apple’s marketshare is 100%.

This is, of course, quite unreal.Here’s one more unreal thing. A guy wrote the blogging app I’m using. Another guy owns it now and is making the most of it. They’re both here, in this very room, as I type. The code they slaved over is making these words flow from me to you.This is also a world (maybe this part is quite real) where a group of people can sit in a circle, MacBooks out in every lap, and have a “social” gathering where the sociality is all directed into and out of the screen.

Even at the sessions, there are the “edge sitters,” folks who grab the seats by the aisles so they can stretch power cords over to wall outlets and run their machines for hours without draining their batteries. On their screens are almost-ubiquitous chat windows and web browsers, calling up sites and documents mentioned by the speaker, or, as frequently, working on their own code, only glancing up when the speaker cracks a joke or perhaps, performs a song (this was a great treat to see in person, by the way. That probably says more about me than about the musicianship.)

So I’m here, Odwalla juice in hand, wandering off on day three of this experience, learning a bit, but mostly observing a world that I usually only visit online.

Well, by now you’ve probably heard the general shudder of revulsion heard round the world over the London 2012 Olympic Logo. It has been called…well, everything you can imagine, except “nice”.

I don’t really want to add to the chorus, except to generically slap my forehead in despair. It brings to mind the transition from the wonderful “bid” logo designed for Atlanta’s attempt to win the Olympics to the more pedestrian logo developed (at considerably more cost) for the 96 games themselves. There is something about the process of logo design for large organizations that inherently creates resentment and ends up reflecting and amplifying the egos of the designers and purse-string holders.

Maybe it’s because we ask a simple mark to do too much heavy lifting. Why is it, for example, that each Olympic games needs its own identity, “brand”, logo? Isn’t that five-rings thing sufficient to sprinkle around the games’ site on banners and number-bibs?

There’s also universally a hue and cry about the money spent to design such a logo (which tends to get muddy because the figures quoted often involve designing a whole system of elements, not just the logo.) Me, I think you ought to get a good chunk o’ change for a logo design—way more than Guy Kawasaki spent on his Truemors’ website logo ($399!? That’s so, so wrong.) but way, way less than the likes of Wolff Ollins and Landor and other fancy firms want to charge.

Something as big as an Olympics? $80,000 US for the logo, tops.
Just the logo. A small logo for a tiny website? Maybe $8,000, no less. There’s a range that probably more accurately reflects the resources available, time spent, and so on.

Maybe I’m just feeling mercenary today. But for that London logo? Not a farthing from me.

Hi, we’re back home after a long weekend trip to Ohio and Michigan, an exercise in quality time with my father and Sammy’s parents. Once again, I’ve checked the archives, and my post about our trip this time last year used the same wording: quality time.

This either means my life is becoming way more cyclical and predictable, or that I need to get out and romp in the garden of fresh nouns and adjectives for a while.

I drove up with my father. We took the back way, through Asheville, NC and up U.S. 23 through coal country to Ashland, KY, and then along the Ohio River through Huntington up to Ravenswood, WV (where the Ohio University Post was printed many years ago) and then north up I-77 to old twisty 2-lane U.S. 22, which we followed northeast back to the Ohio River, up by Steubenville and East Liverpool Ohio. From there, we rolled north to Youngstown to spend the evening. The next morning, we did my father’s traditional visit to the town he grew up in, which involves visiting the cemeteries where his parents and grandparents are buried, and playing 9 holes of golf between rainshowers with his childhood friend.

If I have time I’m going to go back through those last sentences and remove half of the ‘up’s. It was a northern trek, though, and although the elevation rises and falls several times during our travels, it feels like an ascent to those states that sit atop the Mason-Dixon line.

Meanwhile, Sammy headed directly north to her parents’ place in central-ish Michigan, and the plan was for Dad and me to head west across Lake Erie to Toledo and then Detroit and then Windsor, Ontario for an hour (where he can get exactly the imported gin he likes). Finally, he was to bring me to Sammy’s family’s place to drop me off and see the Smiths.

I’m pleased to report that complex plan went quite according to plan, and we had a good time with everyone en route, from Dad’s friends (all over 80 years old) to Nancy and Alan (looking good, sprightly, youthful) who we dropped in on before crossing the international border, to Sammy’s mom and dad, who had such a tough end of the year, health-wise at 2006’s close.

Shot some great pictures, celebrated Nick and Manette’s birthday, and then rolled down, down, down I-75, stopping to enjoy the company of Maureen and Billy and young daughter Gillian in Lexington–again, great food and conviviality.

I would, in fact, be even more upbeat relating all of this if I didn’t have to pass on the news (I received this morning) that my very dear and longtime friend Kevyn Burger has taken up blogging theraputically—she’s been diagnosed with invasive ductal carcinoma—yes, that’s breast cancer. I suspect she may have some important things to say about the battle she faces in the days ahead.

So she’s way in my thoughts as we rolled back down home quite safely in our little rental car.

Rental car? Oh, yeah. The day before our trip north even began, our 1996 Honda Civic was stolen out of our driveway. Seems kinda insignificant in the greater context of life here, now.

photo by Steve Pyke for Time Magazine

I was vacuuming my office this afternoon and looking around in dispair at the piles of undone stuff and accumulated ideas and general mess and thought no one, no one could have a more cluttered, Mac- and video-filled workspace.

I bow to you, Al Gore.

Be sure to click through to the fine Time photo gallery to see the entire expanse of clutter, huge Mac displays, and high def screenage. Yegads!

Me, I have two modest 17 inch nonmatching LCD displays, and I’ve been told it looks like the bridge of the Enterprise in here. Hmm…just imagine….three fine gigantic displays! Hmm…

I wrote an entry with ‘Hed to come’ a year ago, much to my surprise. Today, we cover totally different territory, but quite chuckle-worthy, whether you’ve written headlines for a living or not:

Skywalkers in Korea cross Han solo

By BO-MI LIM, Associated Press Writer

Thu May 3, 3:34 PM ET

SEOUL, South Korea – They came from all over the world, poles in hand, and feet ready to inch more than half a mile across a high wire strung over the Han River in a spine-tingling battle of balance, speed and high anxiety.
As part of its annual city festival, the South Korean capital staged Thursday what was billed as the world’s first high-wire championship, drawing 18 contestants from nine countries for three days of supreme feats of concentration.

And the Asian theme summons from my dusty mental archives this great Ohio University Post headline, circa the Vietnam War:

Cambodians move arms

Two chuckles for the price of one!

There are days I’m glad I didn’t waste a lot of time at some fancy college (forget that, it’s too much to read) that an audio book of complete world knowledge is all I will ever need. Problem is, it’s a risk listening to comprehensive collected compendia of hobo names delivered in a near-monotone while one is driving by an enormous drowning Jesus on I-75.

I nearly fell asleep at the wheel. Funny, soporific comedy, I was soaking in it, much as the enormous Jesus is soaking in…well, in midwinter, he looks very very cold.

Can you tell my brain is kinda only half-connected this afternoon? I thought so. Code monkey must go get some coffee, or Tab, but please, no Mountain Dew.

I swear, I grabbed these two images more or less at random, and I was stunned how well they fit together.

There’s a website, Deaniacs for Edwards, that asserts that Edwards is the guy “who seems to best capture the spirit and values that activated so many ordinary Americans four years ago to support Howard Dean.” I’m not sure about that, but I do like Edwards a lot—he seems to be smart on the issues that matter to me, and me, I like smart.

It really was that simple so many years ago when I first saw George W. Bush…ten seconds of watching him on camera and I came away with: “dumb guy.” Amazing how a judgement like that gets processed by some part of your brain that one may not even have direct control over. The thing for me is I have big trouble visualizing the opposite…I can’t put myself, and I’ve tried, into the mindset of seeing Bush for the first time and thinking “lead me, oh great one.” Nope, can’t do it. My own limitation.

Okay, one of these is an airline and one of these is a plumbing supply company. Do their logos give you an overwhelming sense of either flying or, uh, drinking?

And if Delta Air Lines’ new logo is pictured upright here, why is it falling over on the tail of their new planes? Actually, they do have a logical reason for going to this design from the (I thought attractive) flowing flaglike colors on their previous livery:

The previous “flowing fabric” design introduced in 2000 required eight different colors when applied to aircraft – four shades of blue, two shades of red, one white and a clear coat – while the new livery requires only four. There is less paint layering on the new livery, which will help Delta trim paint cost costs, reduce aircraft weight and subsequently achieve additional fuel savings. The new livery also will save Delta approximately one day in each paint cycle and reduce by 20 percent the number of man-hours and out-of-service time needed to paint a Delta aircraft.

And, of course, whenever there’s a change, management people love to jettison the logo. Elsewhere in town, huge cranes are removing the circular bell logo and BellSouth type from skyscrapers in Midtown and Buckhead. And the perky Cingular guy is on life-support. I have no answers this late in the evening, I just wanted to stick these two logos together and make a low hmmmming sound.

So Monday night, we were sitting down for dinner with our guests from Oregon who wander the US in their fine camper-plus-trailer type thing, and I get a call from Sue. Turns out Bob Page and John Cocuzzi are playing together, tonight around the corner at Blind Willie’s, and all real videographers are otherwise occupied, but Sue knows I can be ready to prepare mediocre shaky recordings of incredible two-piano performances with only a half-hour’s notice.

And indeed, I was. Yeah, the battery in one of my two cameras only lasted 10 minutes and there was only a tiny tiny amount of light up on stage, but it’s amazing what Final Cut will let you pull out of a picture.

And then there’s the “get it out there on YouTube” thing. Well, we did that too, here, here, and here. And darned if folks haven’t been watching it! Ah, the democracy of internet distribution.

On a day when Sammy’s dad turned ninety (!), I finally succumbed to one of those fine internet deals and went out and picked up a fine new Samsung 26 inch high def LCD for our house. It is just the right size for how we watch movies’n'television’n’stuff.

(I mentioned this to Nick on the phone yesterday, who, after all has had a long history of television…he saw it when it was first publically demonstrated, at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. He probably doesn’t see ‘more pixels’ as quite the revolution the TV industry does.)

Yes, we’ve gone high definition, and with a TV that accommodates our $70-from-Target DVD player (Y,Cr,Cb component), our Mac Mini (VGA until I get a DVI to HDMI adapter) our now-ancient VHS/DV deck (S-video) and pulls in analog cable in standard def while interleaving the QAM-modulated digital cable signals, and, oh yeah, does a very respectable job of pulling ATSC signals out of the air, which is a good thing, because for some reason Comcast isn’t providing WXIA in HD on QAM right now.

Holy petes. If you handed me a piece of paper with that paragraph on it in, oh, 1989, I’d have understood, well, almost none of it.

Oh, and all this entertainment wonderfulness is under the control of one amazingly uncomplicated remote. I may get annoyed at it or the TV later, but I have to give Samsung credit for designing TV software (since really, that’s what it is…it even has a USB port for Flash drive software upgrades) that hugely simplifies the process of getting all this TV craziness squared away. Aspect ratios snap to where they should be…data is presented in a nice (did I say that?) Helvetica, flush-left, and the remote, as I say, is quite unbaffling.

And all this niceness is happening without a cable set-top box, which I consider to be a huge plus.

My favorite thing to watch so far? A selection of our 24,000-odd pictures on the Mac Mini’s screen saver, which come up in startling clarity, with elegant dissolves. Makes looking at slides look amazingly low-res.

So we’re all set for company. (After having just had company.) My sister is riding the rails, even as I type, and will be here in the morning. It’s been quite an April.

Do you design websites or other online things? Well, then, this banner’s for you:

The A List Apart people (from whom I’ve consumed lots of tasty kool-aid regarding web standards and so on) are trying to do some meaningful research, and I’m honored that they tossed another pasty white guy’s opinion into the mix.

With luck and time, the design profession in general and web geeks in particular will be much more diversely populated than they are now. Maybe we’ll be looked upon with respect as pioneers. Maybe they’ll just be glad to have us out of the way. But in any case, I hope I’ve made some mark indicating I was here—even if it’s ticking radio buttons on this fine survey.

It is both embarrassing and comforting to be able to tell you that the highlight of this day for me was being able to walk with Sammy “down the hill,” westward towards Monroe Drive, a Oaxacan market bag dangling from my wrist. We strolled to our brand-new-yes-finally-open Trader Joe’s, the intown one, the midtown one, the one we had been promised for more than a year.

It is, of course, a festival of upscale-y natural-y food and cheap wine that has figured out a way to get a Steve Jobs-ian Reality Distortion Field to extend across a modern american grocery store. It is, for reasons I’ve not sufficiently introspected upon, a fun place to buy comestibles that seem vaguely good for you…a place where the high-fructose corn syrup is consigned to the margins and the byproducts are mostly bygone.
It is in some ways the strange alter ego of Aldi, the bad-for-you-ingredients midwestern grocery store that older pinching pennies people prefer. Trader Joe’s is (according to this Business Week article a while back) owned by a trust created by the guy who cofounded Aldi. There’s a connection in a bunch of subtle ways—both places basically exclusively sell store brands, but we’re much happier that the one we live near—just over a mile from here sells foods that would not chase Michael Pollan away in abject terror. The nearest Aldi, on the other hand, is well outside the Perimeter. Phew.

But maybe I was wrong in that first paragraph…the highlight for me wasn’t just the nice jaunt out to shop, it was the lovely chicken and pasta meal whipped up by Ms. Sam from TJ ingredients (along with some fine fresh basil and pesto stick-blendered from that basil, brought back from the DeKalb Farmers Market.) It was warm, tasty, comforting, good for us. So, from the source of that food, let me shift the highlight back here where it belongs—to the experience of enjoying it with Sammy.

So, hey…we’ve got the DFM, we’ve got Whole Foods, we’ve got the best baguettes in town over at Alon’s, we’ve got Trader Joe’s. Let’s eat!

Sammy and I were walking in the neighborhood a couple of days ago and we were talking about my birthday (I’ve started writing this in the waning minute of my very extra special 50th annual celebration of my natal day, but by the time I hit the ‘Send to weblog’ button in MarsEdit, it’ll be the 12th, for sure.)

Sam did a wonderful job of (first) listening and then facilitating and arranging and making sure that my day went just as I might possibly want. And indeed it did. I received wonderful birthday wishes in blog-comment, email, snail mail, and telephonic form…we had a great informal dinner of Doc Chey’s takeout, capped by Sam’s Killer Brownies, or at least the incarnation of them she was inspired to make after coming across a feature on brownies in the April 11th New York Times. Lots of beautifully handmade cards, a two-page reminisce about, well, me written by my father (!), great gifts, just…wonderful.

Anyway, we were walking and I was talking in that way I have of making big pronouncements and sweeping observations about my life and our lives and where we are and where I’ve been and what being with Sam means to me and she drily noted “you’re in a reflective mood,” and I thought, well, true enough…but it’s familiar terrain, a place I spend a lot of time inhabiting.

And, indeed! I remain reflective in the wee hours of this day, after a great late-evening phone conversation with my friend Deb (I’d link to her blog, but no, it would be more of a stress generator than a stress reliever for her to have one, so you’ll have to be content with her occasional comments on Nancy’s site or once in a great while, here.) She pointed out that in addition to Helvetica, 1957 also spawned the International Geophysical Year, which, if nothing else, gave the world a nearly endless supply of Donald Fagen lyrics.

As we talked, I clicked to the front page of the NYT, and I was greeted by the world-weary face of Kurt Vonnegut, whose body apparently grew weary enough of this world to depart yesterday (late April 10th, according to the article.)

So, to quote Linda Ellerbee quoting him, it goes.

I am indeed one of the people who carried tattered copies of Mr. Vonnegut’s paperbacks with me in my denim jacket on long bus rides in my late teens, and I’ll never forget riding through upstate New York, bound for Vermont—through the towns inhabited by huge General Electric factories that inspired him to create fictionalized versions of those places in novels like 1952’s “Player Piano” (inexplicably one of my favorites) while the landscape about which he wrote unspooled outside the bus window. Amazing…he says it here and I see it there.

(It’s like reading Tony Hillerman while bumping along a dirt road in northwest New Mexico. There’s probably a ten-dollar word for that quality-of-experience, but it remains one of my favorite ways to connect with the written word. You’re soaking in it!)

One of the best attempts to get Vonnegut captured in the world of the moving image happened at WGBH in the early 1970s. “Between Time and Timbuktu” was produced on videotape by Fred Barzyk and a talent cast and crew, and I think it survives, barely, on deteriorating videotape. Boy, I’d love to have that on DVD, just as I treasure Ursula LeGuin’s “The Lathe Of Heaven” in its Barzyk/PBS video incarnation (on DVD!)

But Kurt Vonnegut was most at home wading deep in a stream of his own written words and narrated ideas, swirling them with his feet, getting lost and found along the way. I will of course take out the tattered paperbacks and put one of them in the pocket of the denim jacket I bought last week in Mason City, Iowa. But probably only during one of my more reflective moments.

A quick late-evening email from Nancy says:

You share a birthday with…Helvetica!

Famous typeface reaches 50 (from The Times Online)

And just like that, the meaning of the last fifty—yes, on April 11th, it will indeed be fifty—years of my life snaps into razor-clear focus.

All those years of a love-hate relationship with a typeface that is ubiquitous, beautiful, and intolerable in its ubiquity. Ah, Helvetica. We are of a common time, if not a common place (very few lasting typefaces have emerged from Central Ohio.) By turns functional and detached. Icy and daring. Pedestrian and urbane. Ah, just let this guy tell you about it. I am but Helvetica’s fellow traveler through this world.

But in other news, I have about an hour of my forties left, according to my carefully crafted Hypercard stack, written maybe 18 or 20 years or so ago. (I remember being amazed when I could actually write code—Hypertalk script, actually—that did something meaningful on my small, smiley appliance computer.)

I’m delighted that the code I worked hard on still actually runs (inside a layer or two of modernity) on my machine, and I have enough brain cells left to construct a modern, universal, Cocoa application that does, well, much the same thing. It’s a tiny date calculator called Date Arithmetic and it’s my birthday present to you.

(By the way, the font in the ancient Mac dropdown menu? No, it’s Chicago.)

Hugs and warm thoughts to my amazing wife, family and friends. Thanks for each and every year thus far. Let’s do more.

My television design business used to be tied to the cycles of Federal Express and the costs of blank D2, Betacam, and Digital Betacam tape. Those days are largely…yet not completely…gone. If you had told me that my current project, a state-of-the-art traffic, weather, and community events channel for a really large phone company that has dipped its feet in the land of cable, if you told me that it would bring me back to the days in 1997 when I recorded high-quality animation via firewire to a tiny Sony camcorder and then rushed the tape off to the local FedEx, I’d express a healthy skepticism.

And if you added that in order to do the sports programming they’re planning on, I’d be forced to return to the not-so-halcyon times when I created elements for the Chyron Infinit (which used to be spelled, as I recall, with about eight exclamation points), I’d start running in the opposite direction.

And yet, this device (which showed such promise when I first heard Chyron’s VP of Engineering Roi Agneta describe it in an excited voice) and its half-baked implementation of the FTP protocol lives on, the bane of the existence of every TV graphic designer in the last 15 years or so.

It’s a fine enough character generator, but it uses a file format for its zip disks and 3 1/2″ floppies that no other machine, not Mac, nor PC, can read. There’s nothing Infi-neat about that.

Yes, I’m going through a busy period, and my mind is filled with this stuff, and I’m wondering why, exactly.

I could be railing about the administration or learning Ruby on Rails, but no, I’m rolling a (very tiny) tape, laying down color bars, and cut after cut of carefully hand-crafted animation. Just as I’ve done in one form or another all my adult life.

And we’ll use jet fuel to get it to Stamford, Connecticut in the wee hours tonight. There ought to be a better way. They are, after all, bits.

Geez, I would hate to be a librarian or a provider of web services/storage these days. You want to enable, empower others. Your government may call upon you to let them look at your folks’ private property at any time, and part of the law says—may say—hell, it’s hard to say these days—that you, the innocent intermediary, may not even tell your cherished client or user that their rights have been tromped on by the Feds.

These are awful times, in that way alone.

So how do you offer any reassurance at all? Well, one new approach seems to be steeped in that old deep-background j-school tradition…paraphrasing Dustin Hoffman as Carl Bernstein, working out indirect signals from source to reporter: “so, if there’s a problem with the story, you just hang up now.” FBI informant: “got it?” Well, no, the secret nod and a wink were too complicated. Oh, yeah, sorry, bad 1970s flashback there.

The post-Patriot Act approach: a warrant canary. Yeah, as in a canary in a coal mine. An indicator, a flag in a flowerpot, that if things aren’t right, this textfile won’t be in this place with this high-tech key doing this kind of job anymore. It looks like these guys were the first to do it. It’s telling that they have to do it at all.

But I’m especially of a mind to appreciate an act of quiet yet strong legal defiance after watching Tom Morello (of, yes, you’re hipper than me, Rage Against the Machine fame) lay out the case for George Bush as hangable war criminal on Tavis Smiley…which I seldom watch, but it was one of those odd, off days. I’d never seen Morello talk about much of anything before, but I was impressed. In the pantheon of activist musicians (a crowded house), he stands tall. And he also seems to be (I shake my head in amazement), through accidents of background and choices far more decisive, blazing a trail for Barack Obama to follow…when he’s not playing old-timey twangy folk or chaotically flanged-out electric guitar.

Morello quotes Howard Zinn as saying “You can’t be neutral on a moving train,” and adds, “…this train is definitely moving in the wrong direction. So we can either sit in the dining car sipping cocktails, or we can throw something in the gears to try to stop it and turn it around.”

He says a lot more, too. Worth reading or listening to. And keep an eye on that canary, while you’re at it…the air’s getting more than a little stale around here.

One of the joys of Mac OS X is that there’s this hugely powerful UNIX-based operating system lurking beneath the fancy GUI.

Came across this timely tidbit (here) today:

Want to see on which days your computer is planning to switch to daylight savings time and back in 2007?

Put this in your terminal window:

zdump -v US/Eastern | grep 2007

or for those in the pacific time zone:

zdump -v US/Pacific | grep 2007

…and if you’ve been updating your system regularly, your Mac should be hip to the fact that Daylight Savings Time changes this year earlier—on March 11th.

want to find out what the ‘zdump’ command does? Call up the UNIX ‘man’ (for ‘manual’) page:

man zdump

…which of course works for any UNIX command. I should probably post more of my accumulated terminal fun, because, you know, it’s fun.

I had a chance tonight to watch part three of Lowell Bergman’s Frontline ‘News War’ opus titled What’s Happening to the News, and like the Linda Ellerbee documentary of a couple of years back, it chronicled the ongoing demise of American Journalism in the hands of publicly-held companies, whose managers in spasms of simplemindedness, throw up their hands and say that “Wall Street says make more money this year than last.”

Doesn’t matter if you’re making refrigerators or investigating pedophile congressmen. Make more money this year than last. Show growth. Grow…or…die?

On a day where Wall Street rode a plunging roller coaster fueled apparently by fears about the Asian economy and a “computer glitch or two” (we’ll see how that plays out), it seemed even more absurd to have any respect at all for a system of capitalism that preaches blind growth above all.

“Cutting, cutting, cutting is not a strategy for survival.” I’m paraphrasing the former editor of the L.A. Times, John Carroll. Well, exactly right. By definition, in fact. But it’s one of the only tools moneymen have to show growth. There are only so many ways to pull rabbits from hats.

Bergman, himself a relic and refugee from the old, pre-Lawrence Tisch CBS News, has no shortage of greying heads to choose from to talk about how broadcast journalism used to be a mission of public service, and no shortage either of slightly younger shareholder-friendly replacements (like ABC News head David Westin) willing to redefine news as “anything people are interested in.” Westin also gives us the (I’m paraphrasing here) “what do you expect? We have so many hours to fill.” rationalization that he thinks excuses himself. Sorry, no.

It’s a rationalization that accounts for about 85% of the shiny moving objects we’re distracted by on YouTube, and of course embraces prime time television “newsmagazines” that have, like Dateline NBC’s “To Catch a Predator,” have gone full Chayefsky on us, with shiny abominations that are placed in a container marked journalism, but which fulfill none of the minimum daily requirements.

When our local affiliate carries more American Idol coverage than any other content in their 10 o’clock hour (I am not kidding) we see the New News Managers, guided by that memo from Wall Street, in full flower. Oh, well, there’s so much time to fill, and so relatively few apartment fires and car crashes.

The broadcast recounts the sad decline of network news almost in passing, and then turns to the youthful-ish Yahoo and Google managers, who seem to back away, way away, from the prospect of having a payroll-full of their own darn reporters, but who also recognize that if newspapers and their reporting staffs evaporate, they are so screwed.

The broadcast tries to assert, in telling the increasingly ugly Los Angeles Times/Tribune Company story, that more voices on the national and international stage—covering the big Pulitzer-worthy projects are needed…and I don’t disagree, but I also see those same entities as being the best places for micro-scale, hyperlocal journalism. I think you say yes to both.

Yeah, I’m an eternal news idealist. I just want whoever’s left in news management to wake up to the sobering realities and take a pledge. Here’s what I’m thinking, in convenient bullet point form.

• We want, need, and celebrate lots of reporters, at every level, everywhere. There’s money out there in the vast system of internet television and print to pay their salaries. Get lots of them. Get spares.
• Deploy them to Iraq and to every local school board meeting. Scrutinize enormous corporations and petty tyrants in small town councils. Learn the lessons of modern database journalism and pour what all of what they find into vast databases that are easily parsed, leafed through, thought about, and even occasionally printed out on good old fashioned paper.
• Spend the energy and resources on gathering the information, and don’t worry that much about style and ’storytelling.’ That can come, will come. But without the information, there can be no real storytelling—you get something like what cable news is now, which is nonstop speculation and prediction and froth.
• Don’t worry about Craigslist. Don’t forget how to sell advertising by not forgetting the power of simple, local advertising that small companies can afford to try.
• Make a fine profit, but don’t mandate that it must increase year upon year. If that’s a nonstarter in the land of public companies, if that means that these collections of reporters must all be employed by non-profits like the Poynter Institute and NPR, so be it. Maybe Wall Street has no place making a business out of journalism.
• Release their hard-gathered content out there freely and widely into the cosmic mixmaster that is the internet, and be sincerely flattered as it is sliced, diced, repeated, and blogged upon.
• Lobby for openness and transparency in government and business as if our democracy depends on it. It of course, does.
• Be as open in your business as you want government and the corporate world to be in theirs.
• Look upon this as a mission of public service, and do your best to live up to that charge in your conduct and ethics.

Ah, easy for me to say. Easy for me to hope. And, because Frontline (and PBS) is one of those aging journalistic institutions trying to stay as relevant online as on-air, easy for you to watch the whole show and read and view much more on their site. It’s worth your time.

Boy, I love bumpers. Strictly speaking, those are the graphics or animation elements that are the “padding” between a program and the commercials. They “bump” up against the breaks and..well, you get it. The old Late Night with David Letterman on NBC had a great set of them, reflecting humor and a sense of post-midnight in New York City. The Tonight Show had some great ones back in the 1960s.

But the folks at Late Night with Conan O’Brien, the hairs (oh, ok) apparent to this tradition, have surpassed their mentors, and thanks to internet fandom (someone named ‘CZ’, it appears), you don’t have to wait until commercial breaks late late at night to enjoy them. Just click here and enjoy a great (and abundant) gallery of visual puns…great use of design, in my book.

Who are these faceless design humorists? A quick Google says that Chryss Hionis and Jason Kirschner are the NBC design directors, and Marty Geller is their graphic artist.

One of my favorite scenes—almost a throwaway moment—in the movie Broadcast News comes when two composers are demo-ing their news theme for the news execs…it comes together in a symphonic flurry of cresendoes and synthesized orchestration, and at nearly its climax, the music geeks say together: “Big finish!”

Dun da dun!

(Yes, that’s a link to a semi-listenable audio file of that very moment. Thanks, oh internet.)

Well, most days at the end of any of the network news broadcasts, I find myself saying that out loud…and probably annoying Sammy slightly.

But truth be told, my all-time favorite news theme was crafted for the public radio airwaves, specifically by the acknowledged master of public radio music, B.J. Leiderman.

From Marketplace to Morning Edition to my favorite, Weekend Edition Saturday, Mr. Leiderman makes music as varied as radio itself and in the classic tradition of big-B-Broadcasting, which as you may know, is a big deal for me. He has the smarts to use typewriter sounds for percussion when you’re introing a letters segment and to weave the gongs and hubbub of Wall Street into the Marketplace theme…an approach that which may or may not have been inspired by the ancient Wall Street Week theme, “TWX in 12 bars” composed by (I think) Donald Swartz, which featured a real Teletype ASR-33 on percussion.

And now, he has a new website, apparently crafted with the powers of iWeb, which features a great downloadable sampler of his NPR work, suitable for anyone’s iPod (and certainly mine.)

After a quiet evening of converting my business site (well, some of it) to a fiesta of MySQL and PHP, it’s somehow a warm treat for me to discover that one of the many collections of pixels I’ve cast to the wind have connected with some guy I will never know personally, but we have a beat-up old school in Ohio in common. He (’callmebob’ is his nom du net) says:

I went to Robert Louis Stevenson elementary school in the late fifties and early sixties. I had no idea it still existed. I have lived in Alaska for a long time now. A lot of miles and a lot of years. Thanks for the memories.

You’re quite welcome. And I extend my thanks to the people who shot pictures of Goddard College I somehow neglected to snap in 1975, and to the folks who thought Breezewood, PA was as odd a place as I remember, and the many other photographers and random-camera-wielders who are turning this internet thingy into a repository of visual memories—of places where I’ve been, and places I wish I recorded.

Steve Jobs blogs even less frequently than I do. (I’m not counting the fake Steve Jobs here.) But this afternoon, Apple’s CEO has something to say about music and DRM, and that’s significant.

Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy.

That’s pretty plain talk from a fancy CEO. And already, the sphere’o’blogs has started to parse and consider Steve’s words in the light of Apple’s deeds. I’m all for blaming the record companies, but if I were a musician, I’m not sure I’m totally sanguine casting my lot with the iTunes Store.

* * * *

In other news of interest to an enthusiast like myself, Apple released an ad (post-superbowl, imagine how much they saved!) that completely sums up my feelings about the security-by-nagging approach that Windows has always embodied. Are you sure? How about now? now? Allow or deny?

We’ve just completed (well, mostly completed) a move of our entire ragtag fleet of websites…this one, my business, Sam’s, James’s, Leslie’s, Bill’s, the works. Maybe it’s a tribute to the quality of the hosting company we picked, maybe it’s a tribute to my willingness to stay up late and try to puzzle out the mysteries of ssh and public key authentication…but things have gone smoothly and we’re now in the land of Textdrive. I hear it’s a hip neighborhood; I hope it’s not too hip for our crowd.

Meanwhile, the reaction of some in Atlanta to how some in Boston freaked out teaches me a few things about generations and perspective. My first reaction was “geez, how idiotic can you be to do something like this in such paranoid times?” I shook my head and listened for the sound of Time Warner vice presidents being ejected from Techwood Drive windows. (By the way, I never think of [adult swim] or any of those channels as being ‘Turner’ channels anymore since there’s no Ted connected to them, nohow. And yet all the coverage described the execs as from ‘Turner Broadcasting.’)

But after a while of seeing the foomfah rage on, I began to see it in a slightly different light (heh)…less “what were they (the marketing weasels) thinking” than “boy, do they understand their target audience. They (the audience) wants to see the rules broken, convention flaunted. This generation doesn’t protest the sins of our government by standing up and saying “This is wrong.” They do it by punking (punk’d-ing?) the authorities. They do it in ways that would delight, well, hey, the yippies. The ghost of Jerry Rubin is smiling (in digital LEDs) and giving the finger.

Does the world change a whit? Well, [adult swim]’s market share goes up, I spose.

UPDATE: The resumé of one of the Bostonian guerrila marketers. Art major, Final Cut, Mac guy. Well, of course! the Boston Herald reports:

[Peter] Berdovsky is a freelance video jockey and got hooked up with the New York company Interference Inc. through connections in the video industry, Rich said.
“He’s just a really good guy,” said his friend Jeffrey Woodsin. “I think it’s been blown out of proportion.”

Woodin said Berdovsky, the outgoing singer with the band Superfiction, would not want to cause mass panic. He said the pictures of his arrest were shocking.
“Here’s my friend being arrested as part of a bomb scare. I thought ‘There’s got to be a mistake.’ I’m worried for Peter. I’m worried that he’s going to end up with legal repercussions when really it’s the company,” Woodin said. “He was legally hired by the company to do this.”

Berdovsky’s biological father passed away years ago and his mother still lives in Belarus, Rich said. Rich says Berdovsky is in the United States as a political refugee from the authoritarian government of Belarus.

And the Boston Globe reported “an advertising executive at Interference Marketing Inc. instructed Peter Berdovsky to keep quiet while police scrambled across the metropolitan area responding to a series of bomb scares…”

In another era, in the movie version of this incident, Faye Dunaway would have been running Interference.

Those of you know know Sammy and me know that we are the last of our generation to be without a cell phone. I’ve long bemoaned the idiocy of the user interfaces (I hate to glorify them by even using that term) and the entire user experience seemed like one big compromise.

And don’t even get me started on the changes for the worse in social behavior that rampant cell phone use has engendered.

All that said, come June, we’ll be gesturing and pinching and poking and rotating and widgeting and googling and rocking and syncing and presence-ing and photo-ing with the best of them, and we’ll do it using a UI as familiar to me as the one I live with every day—Mac OS X.

Yeah, I was impressed. It was a big wow, indeed. And I can now see how all of Apple’s hardware smarts have come together with all of their clever plans for resolution-independent UI, javascript widgets made easy, Core Image, Core Animation, and all kinds of other object-oriented goodness.

Design pundits prattle on about it being the “little things” that make a difference. Here are just three of those little things, probably each involving a huge effort to get right in practice:

• iPhone’s accelerometer detects when you rotate the device from portrait to landscape, then automatically changes the contents of the display, so you immediately see the entire width of a web page or a photo in its proper landscape aspect ratio.
• The proximity sensor detects when you lift iPhone to your ear and immediately turns off the display to save power and prevent inadvertent touches until iPhone is moved away.
• An ambient light sensor automatically adjusts the display’s brightness to the appropriate level for the current ambient light, thereby enhancing the user experience and saving power at the same time.

The end result hangs together so thoughtfully that I just want to smile at the very thought of it. This is design done well, indeed.

UPDATE: As I say in the comments below, if the phone isn’t open to the vast army of salivating Mac developers, it becomes way less attractive to me, too…but as of Wednesday, we really don’t know much about what’s under the hood. Hmm.

UPDATE II: As a non-cell-user, one thing I didn’t think of (and perhaps wouldn’t miss) is tactile feedback. Folks who live their lives surreptitiously poking out messages and changing the configs while their phones remain pocketed in meetings may well notice. And no one (to my knowledge) asked Jobs and company the apparently important question: does it vibrate?

I’m not much for resolutions or other yearend foomfah, but I do believe in staring one’s year looking optimistically at the road ahead. It’s also a nice antidote when there have been some tough bumps to get over.

There are a raft of positive notes raised in answer to the question “What are you optimistic about?” over on the Edge Foundation’s site, but this one resonates with me, in part because it is a modern evocation of the “sunlight rule” of journalism and in part because geolocation, geocoding, geopresence, and other things geo are fascinating to me right now.

So. One of the answerers, Chris DiBona of Google asserts (hopes?):

Widely Available, Constantly Renewing, High Resolution Images of the Earth Will End Conflict and Ecological Devastation As We Know It

I am not so much of a fool to think that war will end, no matter how much I wish that our shared future could include such a thing. Nor do I think that people will stop the careless destruction of flora and fauna for personal, corporate, national or international gain. I do believe that the advent of rapidly updating, citizenry-available high resolution imagery will remove the protection of the veil of ignorance and secrecy from the powerful and exploitative among us. (more)

Somehow that captures the spirit of more than a few who work at Google, that their work can have positive side benefits for their fellow humans as it brings gazillions of dollars in added stock valuation. Maybe some at Microsoft or Apple or, hell, Time Warner have that same sense of mission (it does, after all, make it easier to go to work in the morning), but at the G-place it certainly seems to seep from their pores. This in itself, however is not sufficient insurance against any large organization of people (corporate, political) suddenly finding themselves, through inertia, the laws of large numbers, or individual fear and avarice, doing eeeeevil.

But as long as we have ways to expose eeeeevil to the sunlight of publicity (meaning in its purest sense bringing it to the attention of the public as a whole), I have lots of room for optimism about the human condition(s).

I was so fortunate to make friends at Ohio University who I’ve laughed with and learned from my entire life.

Now I have to refer to one of them, Steve Korte, in the past tense. I worked with Steve at WOUB, the public TV and radio station at OU that gave us practical experience in what one of my journalism profs loved to call “the workaday world.” That’s Steve at work in this picture from 1977, wearing what looks like an ancient headset and a ‘Hocking Valley Bluegrass’ t-shirt, directing a crew of four through an evening’s programming.

We got an email from Steve’s wife Susan yesterday conveying the sad news that he passed away from an apparent heart attack just minutes into the new year. Susan and Steve met in Athens, worked together early in their marriage at WHBC radio in Canton, Ohio for not much money, and raised a daughter (almost off to college) and a son in a town that had a lot of family connections, but not much in the way of broadcasting opportunities.

He turned his love of pipe organs into a series of gigs (can you call them that?) at churches throughout Canton on Sundays, and used his deep understanding of sound and music to create original compositions, recordings of his and others’ performances, and I can only imagine what albums, tapes, and digital bits of sound he has stashed away over the years.

Like many of the true broadcasters he loved to collect the artifacts that make up radio and television’s young history—classic RCA carbon microphones, old jingle packages from the days when radio had great jingles, and snippets of sound from all over. He took some old audio tapes of mine and his, cleaned them up and sent me a one-of-a-kind CD called ‘J.C.Burns Radio Arcana’, filled with all kinds of wonderful bits from his past and mine, packaged elegantly with a custom-made cover. What a great gift, and of course, its contents wander around with me today on my iPod.

Where some of us would just remember an old song from a Columbus, Ohio kids’ program, he’d sit down and painstakingly, authentically recreate it. Here, please enjoy Steve’s rendering of ‘Wake up Mr. Tree’ from WBNS-TV’s Luci’s Toy Shop, circa 1960-something.

He took a job at Diebold that he was way overqualified for in order to make a good life for his wife and family, but in my mental snapshot he is and was a remarkable father, broadcaster and musician, and I’ll miss him. Our hearts go out to Susan, Lily, and Will.

* * * * *

Found this obit for Steve in The Marion Star, in his hometown.

I am looking at a photo or two of a Cargill plant at dawn in Sidney, Ohio, perched atop my iPhoto smart album labeled ‘Last 90 days.’

So that means, with the relentless clarity that only computer-based metadata can provide, that it’s been 90 days since Sammy and I first headed up I-75 to “help out” as her Dad was scheduled to have a stent put in a coronary artery. As many of you know, this turned into a much more serious triple-bypass operation with extra postoperative complications, and a lot more “helping out” that reached a new chapter this week.

The photo is one that Sam shot from our motel room after a night of conviviality with our friend Martha in Cincinnati. A few short days before Sammy’s birthday. We were driving north into fall, and although we were prepared (I would say) for complications, we weren’t (I would say) prepared for all of what we had to do over the past three months.

We had a good holiday with our greater family (including Sammy’s parents but alas, not including my sister and her husband out west), and then Sammy flew back to Michigan, sheparding her parents safely back to the land of cold winters. Two days later, I loaded up the truck with furniture and other stuff her family will need and headed up the very familiar truck-filled lanes of I-75.

Meanwhile, the very next day, her mom checked into a facility that says they’re especially good at what’s called “memory care” these days. A new chapter begins for her, and for us. She lives now in an AmeriSuites version of her life, with familiar chairs and books and new furniture from an Atlanta Target and a TV she really isn’t interested much in watching and a view of the changing seasons from a large picture window.

By many standards, it has all gone very well, due in no small part to the strength of my spouse; her determination to do a good job for her family. By many standards, this is a process that can’t go very well, because it is a series of compromises brought on by what her mom can and can’t do for herself now, and her dad, now a recovering heart patient nearing 90 (he’s doing quite well with that recovery) can only do so much for so long.

So it’s sad. And it’s hopeful. And I’m just glad I can look back at this photo and reconnect to where we were and what we were thinking then…and I try to carry as much of that as I can, over and through the last 90 days, onward into 2007.

This is why newspapers used to publish multiple editions.

This is what “breaking news” actually is.

This is, well, a relief.

[Update: Ha!! A Mac OS X joke about the Defense Secretary's departure.]

Yeah, it’s still a fairly red state down here, but I’m proud of Ohio and I feel better just generally rolling through the heartland—maybe the message folks are sending will make it to the halls of power.

Always the optimist!

Ah yes, we “can’t put it together—it is together.” “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” One of my earliest influences and inspirations in publishing, writing, design, and living is being honored at a Stanford University Library symposium.

From Counterculture to Cyberculture: The Legacy of the Whole Earth Catalog is a panel discussion with Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly, Howard Rheingold and others, pioneers all, who led me into the idea that with some Letraset and an IBM composer and some homebaked bran muffins, a batch of well meaning..well, hippies could set out a guide to the resources needed to live healthier, more connected, and more productive lives.

Get that composting system started! Repair your VW bug! Discover 1970s-era contraceptive choices! Make your own yogurt! Find out about these newfangled computer things! Somehow the WEC became a part of my house, along with the Mother Earth News and various other journals we’d order from the Catalog’s pages. Their ‘access to tools’ was a powerful key to a vast world outside Grandview Heights, Ohio, and I wanted to read more, learn more, and explore more—inside and beyond their smudgy newsprint pages.

They published in a cobbled-together, semi-underground manner, and they told us (right down to the minutiae of the process and their balance sheets) how to do it ourselves. They linked the planet (or at least a US-centric version of it) before there was a World Wide Web, and in the earliest days of computer-based communication, their pioneering BBS the WELL brought people crouched behind Apple II screens connected by screeching modems closer together. Brand’s attitude was paternal and big-picture-seeing even from the earliest days…was he ever a young man?

By the way, it looks like much of the contents of Brand’s office is now available to researchers at Stanford. If it ends up completely online, then the Whole Earthers’ legacy will have truly come full circle.

Most Mac developers I know tend to talk very little about politics, so when a well-articulated precis of the situation shows up in a blog where where one more usually sees discourse on the idiocies of those who write and sell software, I’m taking it as one more sign that the level of national discontent is higher, higher, ever-higher.

Wil Shipley (co-author of Delicious Library and proprietor of Call Me Fishmeal, says it well: “We have let the fear of violence against us turn us into animals. We’re so frightened by those images of jets crashing into skyscrapers that we’ve forgotten that being the victim of a terrorist attack is, in fact, among the least likely of the bad things that can happen to us. We have to stop.”

And on the way over here (I’m in Chicago), I listened to a couple of Keith Olbermann’s ’special comment’ essays in tasty podcast form. The MSNBC anchor is increasingly outraged, increasingly strident, and yet his rage teeters safely on the side of making an intelligent (and yes, often emotional) case. These aren’t rants, but boy, are they passionate, and I can’t help but visualize a hypothetical George Bush’s face, forced to listen to Olbermann’s modern-day Murrow turn at close range, close enough to occasionally catch an errant drop of spittle. Bush, listening as he always does, without comprehending. His moral disconnect countinues to feed our national distress…and it remains our problem to solve.

Excerpts from MSNBC’s Countdown as an RSS feed are here.

How is Cocoa—the Mac programming language—like the Citroen C4? Well, it’s not. Forget I mentioned it. Hello from Chicago, more specifically, C4, a Mac developer’s conference that is trying its best to inherit the legacy of MacHack and a number of other legendary gatherings of programmers and programmer-like types that I haven’t attended, either.

But I did go to the Drunken Batman ‘Evening at Adler‘ last year about this time and about this locale. And so, a year later, I’ve ponied up actual money to attend this new iteration.

And this year, after Sammy and I have spent most of October on parental hospital support duty in central Michigan, I zipped over here in 3 and a half hours or so and, well, darned if I’m not surrounded by actual famous names in Macdom. Well…famous to people who care where the stuff they run comes from. I’m one floor up off of Chicago’s State street, in a conference center that appears to be above a Panera Bread, and there is a full house of remarkable people.

Take the guy behind it, Jonathan ‘Wolf’ Rentzsch. A Chicagoan who apparently earns his living doing some sort of web objecty high end business custom..uh..well, actually, I have no idea what he does, but he’s up at the podium, trying to demonstrate how to make a program crash in zero lines of code. And doing so in such a way as to invoke chuckles, guffaws, and actual coder laughter.

It’s a vacation from our October for me, and if you asked me why I’m interested in the things they discuss, the languages they hold dear, and the traditions they uphold, I’d have to give you a ‘dunno.’

But I have learned that C4 stands for the Code Culture Conspiracy Community…and apparently I’m part of that collective.

Enjoy your evening.

Hello from Michigan, where Sammy’s dad continues to mend in the hospital after open heart surgery that is daunting even when you aren’t almost 90 years of age.

Experiencing this process from the edge (I’ve only visited the hospital once or twice; Sam has done the heavy lifting of parent-in-hospital care) I’m struck by how providing information to the patient and his/her family about what’s happening now and what’s going to happen next seems firmly rooted in the last century. It may well be that there’s a tradition of a “need to know basis” that comes out of a similarly hidebound attitude about doctors as elevated priests of knowledge.

This approach has its advantages—if you screw up or change your mind, it’s easier when you don’t have to discuss it—but it also leaves patients confused…in a situation where they’re already befuddled about basic questions (”What day is it again?”) enhanced by the cocktail of drugs and anesthetics that they’ve been asked to down.

In the Intensive Care Unit, the monitor that Nick was hooked up to had streams of data—heart rate, blood pressure, and so on—in clear, colorful, antialiased type…it was one of the nicest displays I’ve seen since Dr. McCoy’s Enterprise bedside. But that readout was located behind the patient’s head—he couldn’t see it. He could, however, turn the TV set onto CNBC and get similar cascading streams of real-time data about Wall Street’s health.

I kept thinking that since they described the process of recovering from significant surgery as a progression, a curve to follow, there ought to be a large colorful real-time screen right in front of the patient that displayed that curve and the mileposts along it, nicely formatted and overlaid. Heart rate: 78 and steady. Next nurse visit coming in 04:12:01. Dinner tonight will be cottage cheese, deal with it. Last urination: 37 minutes ago. You slept 4 hours last night. If your hemo numbers drop below 211, expect to get some whole blood. Your daughter last visited you 45 minutes ago. If all goes well, you’ll be released in 2 days, 1 hour and 32 minutes.

Your son-in-law last cut the grass at your house 2 days ago. Your wife’s stress level: 17% and rising.

And perhaps to quote one of the Enterprise-D’s descending bedside metrics: medical insurance remaining: 21%.

It’s always nice to know where you stand—even when you’re flat on your back.

The internet(s) are abuzz this morning with a flurry of accumulated outrage related to the Senate debate on what’s being called “the torture bill”—the bill to authorize Military Commissions in such a way that gives the President emperor-like power to define what is torture and establish procedures that circumvent the centuries-old right of the accused to confront his accuser.

I’ll just leave you with a little auxiliary reading. First, of all, Molly Ivins, as she so often does, gets it right.

Illinois senator Barack Obama made some common-sense remarks about what’s really bad about this legislation. It’s sloppy, it’s steeped in political hypocracy, and it does lasting harm to centuries-old agreed common law.

Outside the political bubble, Star Trek actor turned celebrity blogger Wil Wheaton speaks with a clear, simple voice about the pain of having a representative government making these kinds of bad choices in our name. The responsibility, indeed, ultimately falls on all of our shoulders.

And finally, Vermont senator Patrick Leahy (one of my heroes in Congress) says “we have a profoundly important and dangerous choice to make today.”

He says:

Habeas corpus provides a remedy against arbitrary detentions and constitutional violations. It guarantees an opportunity to go to court, with the aid of a lawyer, to prove one’s innocence. As Justice Scalia stated in the Hamdi case, “The very core of liberty secured by our Anglo-Saxon system of separated powers has been freedom from indefinite imprisonment at the will of the Executive.” The remedy that secures that most basic of freedoms is habeas corpus.

I can’t help but flash back to a generation of my fellow elementary school classmates looking out the window, chewing gum, or falling asleep as we were taught this very fundamental civics lesson.

And today, those grown-up kids’ hands are on the wheel (in our name!) as the machinery moves forward to dismantle this fundamental protection.

It’s probably just as well that I never saw WXIA’s first night of broadcasting local news in high definition, but by happy coincidence with yesterday’s post, WSB, Atlanta’s ABC affiliate “went high def”, and I got a chance to watch the shakeout on their 11 pm broadcast.

First of all, they appear to have picked up an animation package (the ‘our logo is tumbling out of control’ look the kids love these days) from the same folks WXIA has used…except theirs is blue everywhere WXIA’s is red. The exact same kind of busy little doodads off in the corners of the HD frame to distract you from the fact that there’s no other important content there.

Secondly, there were (inevitably) some technical glitches. They left anchor Monica Kaufman stranded, standing alone on camera for some 30 seconds, during an extended reporter package intro where they apparently couldn’t get the reporter in the live shot’s video. (I don’t think you’re supposed to do that with the diva of Atlanta television. She handled it quite professionally, though.) There were numerous incursions into the 16 x 9 shot of floor manager’s hands cuing and we got to see the details of how Chuck Dowdle stacks the green pages of his script (right, bottom.)

I also think the field photographers are going to have to get used to shooting in 16 x 9 and protecting a good shot in 4 x 3. But that’s just part of practicing making mo’better.

More importantly, though, many of the weather graphics were created with elements that were chopped off the right side of the standard-def picture (I had my trusty SD Sony on as well.) As you see in the top two pictures on the right, aspect ratios can be a pain, but you gotta respect them…or you get ‘Highs Tomorro’. If you’re designing for both resolutions and aspects, you have to think about font size…what looks delicate and classy in HD looks mushy and unreadable in SD. Expect some tweaks.

There aren’t that many local stations doing HD news nationwide…now two of them in our down, next-door neighbors on Peachtree Street, are giving it a shot. O, pioneers…

Cory Doctorow may be right when he says that ultimately HDTV will be bad for consumers—and Hollywood—if DRM content (or the people who pay the creators for that content) are allowed to dictate how and under what circumstances it’s played…but right now, the free, over-the-air broadcasts of high definition television, as brought into our homes via the tiny Miglia/EyeTV TVMini HD box are quite addictive.

We’ve been sucking in many many pixels and watching them, Tivo-style, on either our venerable standard-def Sony TV, or, in much better quality, on our small but pixel-rich black MacBook, which is quite happy taking a high-definition stream recorded in my office, via an ethernet cable to the attic, where our wifi transmitter sprays it out and around our house, and into the waiting wifi antenna of the MacBook. I can’t even begin to explain how many transformations of packets this is, but the reality is that it ends up being pretty much the same rich, colorful, high-quality collection of bits representing picture and sound that left the edit room in Los Angeles.

Just as a small example, take a look at this image…it’s three unscaled crops from three full HTDV 1920 x 1080 pixel frames from last night’s Gilmore Girls. These are not paricularly close up shots…that is, there’s a lot more in the frame…but look how much is there. Particularly notice the white points of light in the actresses’ eyes that cinematographers work hard to accentuate…work that’s totally lost to standard def television.

Not only is this a richer experience (16 x 9 is such a lovely aspect ratio) but it solves a number of pesky problems. Take Gilmore Girls (yes, we watch it, we enjoy it, so there you are), now available in Atlanta on the alleged CW network, which in point of actual fact means that it’s broadcast on WUPA (analog) Channel 69, which doesn’t come in well over-the-air and, ironically, is placed on our Comcast analog cable channel 10, which suffers from interference from WXIA’s analog transmitter (not far from our house.) So the picture sucks in both places.

But! There’s also WUPA-DT, the digital television signal for that same channel, free, and over-the-air, and in…high definition! So that means we really only have once choice, and it’s a good one. And it gives us the option of watching House, broadcast at the same time, in plain old Comcast analog SD…although, damn, it too looks a lot cleaner in HD 16 x 9.

Well, I guess we could always buy a second TVMini HD (the software supports multiple units!) and record both shows, but that brings me back to a..well, a bit management problem.

Just as people with Tivos that have accumulated lots of shows that they’ve seen, I need to have a little discipline and say goodbye to these shows after we’ve seen them once…because, well, they are huge files, and they’re beginning to choke my 500GB (half a terabyte!) main hard drive on my G5. Gilmore Girls with commercials trimmed: 5.6GB. Studio 60: 4.7 GB. Both more data than will fit on a single 4.6GB DVD recordable.

So it’s probably better that we get used to viewing these as a stream of fine entertainment that flows into our house…and then flows into the desktop trash can without too much delay. That is, unless of course, I export tinier versions to my iPod…

I mean, seriously?

I love Photoshop. It’s a (one-sided) love affair that has lasted 16 years.

I think Lightroom is amazing and has buckets of potential.

I think whatever marketing person made the decision to rename Lightroom needs to take a long walk on the beach and reconsider.

And then re-study what it means to create, protect, and preserve a brand.

And then, barring all else, allow me to whack him or her on the head with a can of Tab. Not Tab Energy, plain old fashioned 1960s Tab.

A cold one.

There is a point where the heat and humidity of summer can no longer retain its grasp on our neighborhood, and the oppressive Augustness (which has often stretched into September) relinquishes its hold. Cool, fresh air blows through Atlanta while the sun seems to recalibrate itself to a more attractive angle so we may better appreciate what we have.

This is that point for 2006, I’m here to say. The afternoon light was beautiful, and it felt great to be out in it.

The sewer, storm drain, and water line crews who have bound up our street and most of the surrounding ones in their web of orange cones and diesel-belching trench-diggers seem to have picked other targets for now, although there was one drive home Monday that involved about 8 detours (or as Sammy likes to say, desviaciones) of a very, very ad hoc sort.

And inside, more vague lights at the ends of oppressive corridors. I’ve made great progress on desk disentanglement—processing vast stacks of receipts, bills, and stuff that must be reconciled in September into their various database entries, mailed envelopes and file folders that make our household life seem orderly and simple.

The stacks of books (at bedside, in my office, pretty much everywhere) that I’ve been really, really wanting to get to, including a couple by family and friends, has settled down nicely, and my brain feels somehow liberated by all the new ideas, images, and life stories.

And finally, Apple Computer made it right when, after almost a month of refusing to give us back our 12 inch Powerbook, shipped off to hospital (apparently in Nashville, who knew?) with a dead DVD drive, a Lenox Square genius bar denizen gave their cranky RDF generator a whack and we were handed a shiny…no, wait, matte-y new black MacBook, which seems to have several times the processing power of its predecessor. Smiles all around.

This is how the second half of September feels to me. Maybe it’s all influenced by my relief in getting past sad national anniversaries, maybe it’s a overarching feeling of ‘letting go’ that completely comes from stuff I’m processing inside…or maybe it is as simple as the rejuvenative effects of way-less-humid air in sparkling afternoon light.

Well, as in days almost vanished in the mists of time, we gathered around the TV set, our little family of two, and watched the next iteration of what Big Network Television thinks is a roundup of the day’s news. We saw Couric standing, Couric sitting behind a big desk that knew the day’s stock closings, Couric seated comfortably in front of what seemed to be a visual history of the CBS ‘eye’ icon chatting to the NYT’s Tom Friedman as the camera dollied nervously back and forth.

We saw some large stories (the change at the top of Ford Motor Company and the report on the effects of toxics in the air at Ground Zero) dramatically reduced to single-sentence briefs and an almost rah-rah report on new oil finds in the gulf that felt (on most of the networks, actually) like some sort of coordinated PR message from the oil industry, the administration, and the car industry. We took a deep breath and spent a minute-twenty watching filmmaker Morgan Spurlock exercise his First Amendment rights. We saw pictures (ooh, exclusive!) of the Cruise-Holmes baby placed in the..uh, grand CBS News tradition (look, Douglas Edwards held up pictures of baby Prince Charles, so it’s like, OK!)

And finally, we witnessed what appeared to be chapter one of Katie Couric’s Quest for a Sign-off, again self-consciously placed in a historical context that streched from Murrow through Huntley, Brinkley, Cronkite, Rather…and the fictional Ted Baxter and Ron Burgundy (”Stay classy, San Diego!”)

All of that in about 21 minutes of program amidst almost ten minutes of commercials. (The dark blue here on our EyeTV timeline is content, the rest are the breaks.)

Will she be a nightly habit? My quick first reaction…I got a richer news meal from Charlie and the chunks of Brian I watched during the Katie breaks. And I’m still figuring the typography out (Couric’s Evening News seems to fit in the tradition of several shows this season that seem to have unlocked the big cabinet of any-damn-typeface-in-the-world and said “have at it!”) Also, she kept mentioning this ‘web site’ thingie where apparently much more news exists. I guess I’ll have to check that out too.

Oh, and at the end, the new CBS News slogan: “See it now. Anytime. Anywhere.” Ghosts of Murrow, indeed.

Monday morning, Labor Day, and our top story this morning—breaking news, in the modern misdefinition of the term, which doesn’t apparently mean “important” but it means “something we weren’t able to run into the ground yesterday”—is the death-by-stingray of “Crocodile Hunter” Steve Irwin.

Coverage of his death saturated the morning programs, and so I figured “well, holiday weekend, slow news day,” until I went online, spent 2 minutes, and looked at the queue of stories that, were I at the assignment desk, I would have wanted to get onto my show:

• Eminent Psychiatrist Found Slain In Bethesda
• British Files Reveal Hidden Nazi Spy Codes
• Sudan: African Union Must Vacate Darfur
• Scores of Taliban Fighters Killed in NATO Offensive
• 6 Children Die in Chicago Fire; Stranger Able to Rescue One
• Somalia Faces New Refugee Crisis
• Town Backs Kurds Who Sent Money Back to Iraq
• Japan internet boss trial begins
• Avian flu research ‘could be cut’

My point isn’t that the Irwin story is not news…it’s just not an item that should overwhelm the morning airwaves and block everything else out. It’s funny, when TV news got started, it was criticized for being a “headline service”—breadth with no depth. Now, we have a lack of breadth, but no depth, either…just endless repetition, and extensive mixing-in of non-nutritive fillers and foaming agents.

Both NBC ‘Today’ and CNN’s ‘Larry King’ have apparently chosen to use this as an excuse to run extensive amounts of two year old interviews with Irwin from back when he as accused of endangering his infant child by dangling him in the general vicinity of a croc. And showing us this will shed light on…what?

My TV producer friends, what would have happened if you peeled a minute—60 seconds—off the Irwin story to instead say “and here’s a quick summary of the day’s other news” and rattled off the stories above? Would we be better served, better informed, more ready to take on the day?

Well, 80% of the above links were from the Washington Post page 1 RSS feed (just on their front page alone!) and the rest were from NPR. That may tell you all you need to know about where to find news that truly feeds your head these days.

(By the way, I learned about Irwin right when I woke up from my number one news summarizer Sammy, and because the coffee didn’t kick in immediately I had the impression that she was telling me that guitarist Steve Earle had died in some sort of car accident involving a Corvette Stingray.)

Mmmm, coffee good.

Sammy’s reserved copy of The Omnivore’s Dilemma has finally dropped in to the library, so I’m picking up where I left off this summer up north, with how the ‘wet mill’ processing of corn is basically like a huge industrial digestive system. Kinda makes we wonder why we don’t get the soylent green plants up and running and be done with it. Pollan’s book is beautifully done, and I’m walking around the house with it, plowing through it (heh) at a great pace.

When I pick up incredibly pricy red leaf lettuce at the Whole Foods down the way I now think more about the transportation costs and immigration policy and whether we might better get all our week’s lettuce from the Georgia farmers at the Saturday neighborhood market; this Salon article highlights what’s messed up about the supply-and-demand cycle for organic produce at the moment.

Yes, it is possible for someone who loves a good greasy cheeseburger with lots of ketchup to think about these questions…in between cheeseburgers.

* * * * *

But beyond food, let me toss some non-nutritious linkage your way:
any reporter who asks “Were you scared when…” is not doing his or her job. Good reporting? It’s all in what questions you ask.

Clearly experts at The New Marketing, these guys have unleashed a lumpy monster by giving these things away at FooCamp, the annual O’Reilly-sponsored celebration of exclusion. Their hope: attendees will ooh and ahh over them in their blogs…and, why, look, they are!

And the Dread Pirate bin Laden reminds us that stateless persons “at war with all the world” are really nothing new.

‘Chronicles’ author Ray Bradbury dies
—ajc.com, August 22, around 10 pm.

When I saw this headline in the AJC’s ‘news buzz’, I started to gather my thoughts and reflect on the passing of one of my favorite writers. Then I clicked on the link, and decided instead to reflect on the low level of quality control at news websites.

‘This just in: Ray Bradbury alive‘—I fired off to the AJC folk. I (helpfully?) included the AP story the headline linked to on the AJC site, which of course discussed Bradbury’s 86th birthday celebration. And I tried not to be too annoying in my notation of this small um…blunder.

Ah, well, I am quite the cosmic picker of nits. Quite the corrector of others’ errors. But as Nancy said when I tossed all of this into an iChat window her way last night, if you can’t get the little things right, the big errors are likely to get through too.

We learned that back in our little journalism school in the Appalachian foothills, and so I shuddered more than a bit as I read via Romanesko about the attempt of the University of Georgia newspaper’s editor, David Pittman, to articulate just why and how the Red and Black screwed up not once, but twice in one issue.

Pittman starts off, with no apparent irony (or maybe my sensors don’t pick up 21st century student irony) by saying the R & B “has been hammered” in recent days for its decision to print two stories that celebrate the concept of going uptown and doing quite a lot of drinking, including of the underage and of the till-you-black-out varieties.

Yep, mistake. Even in our arguably harder-drinking days in our Athens, we knew better than to provide a handy guide to drinking games…and we kept our rambling ‘lost weekend’ new journalism pieces (mostly) out of the paper. But I’m willing to give the youthful editor a pass on his bad judgment. After all, as he admits, he didn’t read either of the pieces before they ran.

But here’s where I want a freshman english professor to slam him up against one of Athens’ brick walls and jam a well-thumbed copy of Strunk and White up his nose. His ‘Editor responds to recent debates’ (a really lousy headline, by the way), is some of the sloppiest, weakest writing I’ve read in a long while. And hey, I’ve been reading blogs.

Here are just a few examples…please read his entire piece to get the full sense of..uh..what’s annoying me.

• He writes: “I’m not saying the initial story idea was taboo…” …he’s trying to convey the idea was a bad one, not a forbidden one. Wrong word choice.
• “some of the behavior exhibited downtown and the reasons behind why one should play those games are flawed.” Reasons behind why one..uh..huh? Are you trying to use ‘rationale’? Reasoning? Rationalization? Awk.
• “We want to pose a call to action for all University students…” I don’t believe you pose those.
• “I don’t see anything wrong with acknowledging the bar scene, drinking games or even what bars have the best drink specials on what night in the pages of The Red & Black.” The specials take place in the pages of the Red and Black?
• “Hopefully, it will reignite an open and honest debate about the University students’ drinking habits and what the administration should be doing about it.” Lose the ‘hopefully’; does it ‘reignite’ a debate if that debate hasn’t happened yet? And…what the Administration should be doing about them…habits, plural.
• “That is not a good excuse for those stories still being there, however.” I think they’re “still” there because, y’know, you printed them, using that ink stuff and those large press-like objects.
• “As for The Red & Black running those stories, I take complete blame.” We’re of course looking for you to take the responsibility…I think the blame will be delivered to your doorstep whether you ‘take’ it or not. Again, use the right damn word!

In one paragraph, he’s speaking in the first person, and then switches to the collective “we” at the paper, and then morphs into “as a community, we want this page…”—who are you? Pick one!

And whichever one you pick, sit down and rewrite this apologia (if that’s what it is) about a hundred more times…as practice, not penance, for what may well be your career.

I’m imagining another time, another Athens, where my dear friend and editing icon Deb, sleep-deprived, would be slumped slightly at the copy desk (note to students: a place where these things are checked and honed!), holding this guy’s piece with disdain, a roll of faded yellow wire copy groaning under a spew of blue pencil marks and typewriter smudges. “Just do it again,” she’d say, tossing it back.

And of course, she’d make sure you were sure whether something slugged ‘Bradbury’ was, in fact, an obit or a celebration of longevity.

OK, we’re flying, we’ve made it through security…hey, take a look out the window, that’s kinda cool…get a picture!

Or maybe, as Josh Simons blogs, not so fast:

On my recent trip back from India on British Airways, I was inspired [...] to snap some landscape photos at 35000 feet. I think we were over Iran at the time. After taking several shots, imagine my surprise when one of the BA attendants closed the window shade and informed me that it was against British Airways policy for passengers to take such photos for security reasons. I thought she was kidding, but the head attendant confirmed what I had been told. And that it had nothing to do with where we were flying.

This seems to violate so many civil liberties my head is spinning, but it also makes me want to check and review how those civil liberties are safeguarded by the power of international law. Could well be..um..not so much.

In New York, the MTA finally withdrew (last I checked) their proposed ban on subway photography. There have been attempts to curtail our rights to acquire pixels in other cities, and more than one building security guard since 9/11 has attempted to prevent photography of city images that feature his or her employer’s building.

We hear that Americans of Arabic descent, picked up for mass buys of Wal-Mart cell phones, had lots of digital snapshots of the Mackinac Bridge…and the conclusion too many people jump to is this is a risk to our security. In the name of all that is American, I sure hope would-be bridge plotters don’t Google this site.

This paranoia is a risk to our continued sanity. We must take a breath and recalibrate. The relatively free flow of images, data, and information—about everything from the specifications of our bridges to what the world looks like from above to the number of atomic weapons the US deployed during the cold war—is not a risk to our freedom…it is our freedom.

Finished something I’d been stuck on for several days and sent it fwooshing (me, awash with satisfaction) off in the email, and then padded into the kitchen for a coffee refill. Came back in, looked at what I sent one more time to make sure I didn’t misspell anything too embarrassing, and then fired up my RSS Reader and caught up on the traffic from the various worlds that interest me. Maclandia, the design world, the world (or what’s left of it) of TV news.

There, amidst the accumulated feedage, one writer fairly new to the specific world of blogging was trying to delineate what her special-purpose blog would be focused on (limited to?) as opposed the typical ongoing accumulative narration of what one had for dinner last night (me? italian meatloaf at Murphy’s; Sam and I went out with our good friend Tom Burton) or how-one-feels-about-the-state-of-the-world (reply excruciating, ask again later.)

And that made me think a bit about how these systems for maintaining a weblog and sharing the thoughts, data, metadata, feelings, imagery, and dryer-lint are packed with lots of extra power and flexibility to view a weblog’s content in myriad ways and thus, represents another toolset that we, well, really don’t use much.

Do you add tags or categories to your posts? The touted benefit of tagging seems obvious—should one want to, one can just click once to look at a nicely-ordered set of posts about political outrage…and then with a second click, the blog takes on a more floral tone.

Sammy has been fairly diligent in tagging (categorizing, actually) her daily posts, enough so I can say that at last glance there are 71 floral entries as opposed to a mere nine on maps. Nancy has a staggering 96 entries in something called same ol’same ol’ which really is way too self-deprecating…her day to day interests are (I find) anything but routine.

Question is, how often do people actually use these alternative views? How many people diligently tag their posts, or put them into categories? And as or more important, do you use these tools to examine the mental subsets of your favorite blogger? From my experience, no matter how much content or aggregation or plain old interesting stuff is shoved into the database-behind-the-scenes, many visitors to a website like this are focused on two simple words: what’s new?

That’s of course the satisfaction of RSS feeds—they’re almost always about what’s the latest buzz, although I like the content systems that allow you to make a feed out of just about anything. And the sensible-URL capabilities built into Wordpress (http://positivelyatlantaga.com/2004/05/ gives you everything I wrote in May 2004, hey presto!…and http://positivelyatlantaga.com/?s=boing lists everywhere I’ve used the word ‘boing’) really do give you the keys to answering sophisticated questions about what a person has contributed to this fine global web’o'knowledge.

But sometimes the classic context—all the darn entries ordered through time—is the best context for me. I just enjoy reading twentysomething cocoa programmers’ blogs with the code snippets interleaved in and around the relationship crises and the agonies of air travel and the perils of exploding batteries and what the blogger had for dinner last night…because sometimes the mundane illuminates (or at least shades in cool ways) the germane.

I kinda snuck up on my passions about ‘the right type’ after becoming aware (at an extremely early age) that my father’s typewriter was different than anyone else’s (father’s?) typewriter.

An old Royal, it typed in italic big and small caps–only. And my mom and dad were all right with that—when I said “hey, why do we have a mutant typewriter?” they just sort of shrugged their shoulders and said “it works.”

And yet, for me, it didn’t. I had a lot of trouble churning out page after page of what looked to be urgent messages…even before the days of email ITALIC CAPS JUST SEEMED LIKE YELLING.

My mom, seeking to encourage my interest in writing (and/or typing), went up to Van Sickle Office Supply on Grandview Avenue and picked up a Hektograph—technology that consisted of an 11 x 14 inch shallow tray of plain gelatin—yeah, the food kind—that would accept the dyes of special pencils or typewriter-created grade-school ‘ditto’ masters…and then, by placing a sheet of paper on the solidified goo and pulling smoothly, you got, well, something very much like a ditto at home…up to about 50 copies before it began to fade.

(Gracias oh internet, I found a picture—and only one—of the very device here, thanks North Dakotans.)

It was, of course, the closest thing we could achieve to desktop publishing, and my mom knew it would let me create a newspaper for our neighborhood, which of course would be named THE DAILY PLANET (a name since used by some..uh, well.) And at a very early age and with only a limited amount of help from my mom, I did just that, setting the type on the damnable Royal, layering hand-drawn images and logos and finding my first frustration over achieving a look that, darn it, just wasn’t close enough to the way the letterpress-solid front page of the Columbus Citizen-Journal looked for my satisfaction.

The echoes of typographic limitation followed me subsequently through my design careen (as opposed to career): sorry, we only have these Letraset sheets in stock; we can only afford two Photo-Typositor headlines a week; the IBM Composer only has the Univers and Times New Roman type balls; the Vidifont has two sizes, large and small, and the Chyron IV will let you create any font you want as long as you can get it straight under the crappy black and white camera and spend the weekend cleaning it up, bit by bit.

One of my early mentors (can you call him a mentor if you really didn’t work with him?) pretty much set the gold standard for turning typographic limitation into design opportunity. WGBH’s Chris Pullman and his mid-1970s design team turned out a monthly newsletter for the staff that was a paean to typewriter type in its many incarnations (meaning, hey, we can set it all on the Selectric). Printed on cheap newsprint, nooz (edited by the late Dali Cahill) hung from a hook in the hallways of Channel 2 and had a warm and inviting style—for me, the progenitor of a type of smart-yet-corporate positivism that I associate with Apple—the little articles and gathered softball pictures sure made WGBH seem like a fun place to work.

Now of course, I have almost all of the fonts of my dreams in pristine vector form on my Mac, and my one remaining font-slash-design roadblock centers around what fonts are available to most browsers, and for that I am the unwilling taste-slave to Bill Gates and the Redmonians. Sure, I like Georgia (good name, too), but it’d be nice to have about a dozen other robust serif fonts you can count on. Make it two dozen. Make it…oh.

Some web designers, fed up with exactly this, have developed an only slightly byzantine system where headlines are imaged into flash vectors (on demand!) and embedded in a DOM structure that does some amazing lifting to remain accessible and gently degrades to plain old readable headlines if no flash is allowed. It’s really quite impressive. (And their sample page has newspaper-y typography any junior jello Gutenberg would have killed for back in the mid 1960s.

It’s the quiet part of Sunday night, and I’ve just returned from the curb, past the smells of shorn front-yard-grass and cats trying to mark part of our driveway as their own. The green trash doohickie and its smaller black recycling cousin are on the curb, awaiting Monday morning action.

If the TV were turned on, there’d be a small clock in the corner of CNN, counting down the hour or so until the Israeli-Hezbollah cease-fire (which I guess is why it isn’t turned on.)

Our neighborhood, which is at what I hope is the tail end of a long hot summer of excavation, is quiet and peaceful in the urban semi-darkness…although I’m sure the crews trying to force-feed an entirely new sewer and storm drain system down apparently random tiny holes throughout Atlanta will resume their noisy labors in a few hours. Their drilling and…well…drilling will be joined by the hammery sounds of house after house around here being awkwardly coerced from bungalowdom to intown sprawldom, in search of the perfect $1.2 million dollar house…all marketed to nice fresh owners new to the neighborhood, who won’t think it all odd that a outsized home with five bedrooms and five baths is mashed onto a teeny tiny Virginia Highland lot.

Although…do I detect the slightest scent of a market that’s turned, of an economy that won’t support that sort of wretched excess? Maybe there’s the first whiff of common sense in the air, where folks just starting out won’t go for the gold-premium cable package and the insane lease deal on the guzzler and the overblown home that will shatter their overheated credit rating.

Or maybe that’s just the crepe myrtles trying to drown out the smell of half-excavated sewer pipes.

Just like gasoline-powered internal combustion engines, big ol’ houses remain the default for modern families across our overpopulated land. They signify something to someone (me, I’m tone-deaf to the message.) And even in the face of smart, sensible, even stylish alternatives, defaults can have a terrible momentum.

We fired up our Honda Default (hey, a 1996 Civic…) and rolled through suburban and rural Georgia yesterday and saw sure signs of can’t-meet-the-payments: Hummers and large pickup trucks with ‘for sale’ signs parked in front yards, a sight that I’ve associated more with places in the rural economically-challenged midwest.

And we saw layer upon layer of tract-developmenty-homes starting-from-the-low-whatevers reach out and fill the once-rural space between Atlanta and Athens. But…are these places selling? There was an air of desperation in the billboards pointing the way, but isn’t there always?

Here at our once modestly-priced home, we’re provisioned, paid for, fixed up, and just generally in a good place…for fall, for a newer economic normal, for hunkering down and doing some work.

The new fridge seems to be living up to its energy star claims. We’ve got a healthy supply of library books, Amazon-ordered books on the way, and even a book I bought the old fashioned way this afternoon (by going down to Borders…it was amazing, really, books in three dimensions for sale!) I have a pile of PDFs virtually piled up also demanding my attention. Our household repairs, give or take a ceiling fan, are under control…our new kitchen faucet and on demand water heater are doing what we demand of them. My coffee collection is down to the remainder of what Steve Kowalewski brought me back as a gift from Oaxaca (mmm…), but the construction of a new Trader Joe’s within walking distance gives me options in that category before long.

But most important among portents and provisions, it’s a cool-ish evening.

It’s not nearly ninety degrees post-sundown. As I said, we were able to go out to east Georgia yesterday and visit friends and enjoyably congregate around the grill—yes, outside!—while not sweating buckets of extra saline onto the food-in-progress. We were able to breathe air that seemed less ozone-laden. We were able to drive without nonstop air conditioning.

It’s a most welcome change. And as usual, I’ll take changes in the weather and use them as my own personal chapter markers where I can find them.

So maybe we’re turning the corner, as we always seem to do somewhere between my Aunt Rosemary’s birthday and my sister’s. And the messy, hot and sticky parts of my life will tidy themselves up at summer’s end.

Sure feels that way, in the near-cool of this evening.

Ah, now it’s gone full cycle: the blogs are writing about how the mainstream media is writing about how the bloggers have had a second large investigatory victory in exposing the Reuters freelancer Adnan Hajj’s retouched photography from the Lebanese-Israeli conflict. “That smoke curl just didn’t look right! Clearly the clone tool has been employed!” (What’s odd to me is that in looking at before and after side-by-side, I come away thinking “there’s really plenty of smoke in the unretouched version—why the heck did he go to the trouble?”)

Meanwhile, up in Raleigh, there’s some debate (drifting outward to the journalistic community as a whole) about whether reporters should clean up quotes like “They was good friends. They killed my young’un for slam nothing” to make them sound less like, well, where they’re from. For a print reporter, that’s a judgement call they’re completely in charge of. With a quick clatter of keys, a print scribe can make them sound as if they hail from Elizabethan England, not Robeson County, NC. Or, not.

For radio and broadcast, it become more of a question of art—can we chop the heck out of the footage or the audio…do we have enough raw material (and time) to rearrange syllables and slice away all the ‘um’s and ‘er’s and ‘like’s? Often, that’s happening, nearly seamlessly, on a finely-honed NPR piece…in video, you end up with dissolves or flashes or cutaways or perhaps loud swooshy graphics to distract you from the chop work.

And without the editing? Well, just one more reason that local TV news is excruciating these days is that when they do point a camera at someone and ask them how it felt to have that tornado rip off the roof of your house or to have your next door neighbor killed gang-style or to have your conjoined twins separated, the response more often than not is staggeringly incomprehensible. Chalk that up to the limited life experience and exposure to adjectives of the answerers as well as the inanity of the questions themselves. And factor on top of that the training every joe on the street has now: if you’re asked an inane question, let loose with a cliché you yourself have heard on television a thousand times before. That’s what sports figures and politicians do, and we learn from them.

Oh, it’s never a good sign when you rub your eyes, press F10, and behold a stacked-up-over-Hartsfield fiesta of just your web browser’s windows reflecting how much you’re holding ‘in the buffer’—waiting to be dealt with, processed, bookmarked, thought about, acted upon, tracked, blogged upon, shipped, and/or understood.

At just after midnight, what, 33 windows? Oh wait, a bunch of those are tabbed windows, too, We’ve been back in town just over a week now and, well, this gives you a fair idea of the state of, oh, my office, my desk, the back yard, my brain.

Sometimes I wish for a nice summertime power surge just to clear things off—to do for me what it’s sometimes hard to do myself—so I can start again. Darn you, reliable G5 running OS X 10.4.7.

Okay, maybe I spoke too soon. Here we are in the heart of the midwest, the center of hospitality, warmth, and apple pie…uh, right? We found an unprotected wireless and took advantage of the link to the wonders of the internet. A gentleman came by politely greeted us, we openly discussed whart we were doing and we thanked him for making the wireless available. “We should make them some muffins,” Sammy said.

Next time I was there a scowling woman came out to the road walked past our truck and started scribbling furiously. Ah, writing down the foreigners license plate number. “Is there something I can help you with?” “I’m reporting you for prosecution. What you’re doing is a federal crime.”
Um, I see. I told her that where I came from an unlocked wireless signal was more of a neighborly thing to do, where we shared our bandwidth happily and hoped that others would do the same, and besides, we checked with another gentleman who came out yesterday and he voiced no objection.

And then that same once-amiable guy came by and he too was scowling. Turns out that the brother-in-law—who wasn’t around—the guy who paid for the setup—went ballistic in absentia and told them that we were using his bandwidth for no good.

Bottom line, of course, I said “sorry, goodbye” and rolled down the road to friendlier portals.

So, is it the neighborly thing to do? I suppose if folks have the attitude of share and share alike, the system works well, and indeed, throughout silicon valley and the pacific northwest, there are abundant unlocked wifi hotspots and a ‘help yourself’ attitude. Everyone benefits, and the incremental casual use of bandwidth (in my opinion) is a blip on anyone’s monthly usage (someone checking their email is not the same as someone running a webserver and pushing video out on borrowed bandwidth, I agree.)

There have been recent stories (no links, sorry, we’re offline) of nasty don’t-use-my-bandwidth fights in Boston and elsewhere in the northeast…and maybe it is one of those distinctable ethics questions where a casual use is one thing, but if you’re using your neighbor’s packets 24/7 it’s quite something else.

But I always like to err on the side of (and reward) neighborliness. So no muffins for them!

Hello from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, which is where Sammy and her parents return like, well, I don’t know, like waterfowl of some sort, every year.

Because it’s July, that means that there was an entire June in there, brimming with events unblogged, after my Memorial Day trip to Ohio with my father and before this one.

So why is that exactly? Well, best as I can figure I get into a certain mode that says “I can’t spend time on recreational writing when I’m behind on my work writing,” and I was, much of June, having trouble writing a work proposal for a client I know will be high-maintenance and yet who doesn’t have enough money to do the job right. So…a sort of paralysis, until finally I send off something just to clear the decks.

And unfortunately, that means I lost the opportunity to pour lighted prose on the fires of new software, comings and goings in the land of the internet (Amanda Congdon leaves Rocketboom!), events in our neighborhood (they cut down the Bradford Pear trees at the intersection of Virginia and Highland!) and missed the chance to wish happy birthdays to my brother, my brother-in-law, my niece…heck, even a cousin or two.

So were I to maintain a strict chronological discipline, much would remain unblogged—the struggle to replace our defunct and spewing water heater with a fancy in-demand model, the art of traveling in an old Ford Explorer through seas of elevated gas prices, and of course all the sadness and criminality that emerges from the doings of the Bush administration in Washington.

But it’s July and we’ve found generous satellite/wifi sharers on the shores of Manistique Lake, and our days are filled with cottage-chores, miscellaneous chopping, sawing, and mowing, and summertime conviviality. We’ve got a lasagne to enjoy over by Curtis, and the sun stays up so very late at these latitudes.

So, with a smile, I guess it’s simply: forward.

Ah, a breath of fresh air after driving through the state of my birth and the states immediately north and south thereof. Sam and I had a nice walk this morning through our neighborhood and down to the park, and we passed dozens of vehicles creatively registering their discontent with the current administration—and even one that said “God is not a Republican…or a Democrat.” Not only would a supreme being not by definition be on your side, I seriously doubt he or she is registered to vote, and if you’ve formed a comfortable fantasy that Jesus is cosmically tampering with Diebold voting machines to assure that the righteous triumph, perhaps you have a particularly warped view of how busy his calendar is.

As a designer, I thought this was a particularly nice piece of iconography. Yes, the phrase represented by the acronym starts with “Impeach the…” and ends with “..Already!” And speaking of peaches (I’m remembering a Robert Grossman comic drawn for New York Magazine in the impeachment season of 1974, but never mind), it’s good to see that even some Republicans might have enough issue with the attorney general that they’d go after him with the legislative branch’s supreme eject button. I’m gonna have to look up which other members of the executive are subject to impeachment…might be quite a party.

Nice to be home.

I’ve been told that posting from a Panera Bread is What Folks Do These Days, and sure enough, here I am, sitting in a Panera in Dublin, Ohio, watching a fierce downpour outside.

It’s a rainstorm not unlike the one I drove through yesterday, heading down I-71 from Cleveland with my father, after accompanying him to his home town (located in extreme NE Ohio) for his annual Memorial Day visit. That thunderstorm, experienced at freeway speeds, was a lot scarier, accompanied by dramatic lightning and almost-cyclonic gusts of wind. All this was after a gloomy, sporadically rainy morning that gave way to a sunny afternoon that gave way to…well, rain like this.

I’m making this Panera my Friday outpost as Sammy drives up from Atlanta for a rendezvous, and from here, it’s, of course, on to Michigan. I’m sure Sam will have braved rainy freeways on her way up, and we’ll probably have further soakingness before the day’s travel is done, but I’m glad I spent some quality time with my father, and will have some quality time with Sammy’s parents (her mom’s birthday is on Monday) as well.

I’m using this morning and afternoon at the laptop as an opportunity to catch up on some reading, and I’m also finding myself, in extra browser tabs, googling people I’ve gone to high school with…an experience that’s sometimes painful when, as in one case, I find that a fairly sensible friend from those days has married someone who is a beyond-right-wing religious ACLU-hating nut case who has taken as his calling the perpetuation of his fanaticism while (as he says on his site) his wife works teaching handicapped kids to keep food on the table as he fights his Goliaths.

Hand me the large polo mallet of common sense, please. I guess it’s one pathetic way of dealing with a midlife crisis—report to your wife that Jesus wants you to have her become the breadwinner while you fight for prayer everywhere, abortion nowhere, and apocalypse soon.

Is the Columbus I’ve come back to visit now more predominantly filled with beyond-right-wing religious ACLU-hating nut cases? Yeah, I think so. Does that make my complex, diverse, flawed, intelligent, contentious southern city intown neighborhood feel just a little bit more like a haven, a shelter, a place to keep from drowning in intolerance?

Yes. For now, for sure.

I bought a 20MB (megabyte!) drive on October 23, 1985 for $1,942.50. That may well have represented the peak of my desperation to shell out for “the right tool for the right job”—my humble Mac Plus was starved for storage, I was filling up floppies as if they were going out of style, which, I guess, they were. 20MB represented an endless horizon of elbow room. Now it’s not fit to hang off of my keychain.

But that was, of course, not the end of my Quest for Storage. It’s almost too painful to do the math, but, all right, my outlay has plummeted from $97.12 per megabyte to $0.00061130581 per megabyte (the most recent half-terabyte drive stores 476,815.36 megabytes.)

Heck, they’re almost paying me to buy the drives now. And my G5 certainly appreciates the real estate…it creates files willy-nilly and fills up space as if it only cost six hundredths of a cent for a megabyte of storage.

On the morning after the death of longtime Timesman Abe Rosenthal—USA Today—the anti-Times, the newspaper-in-a-TV-box, the ‘McPaper’ parodied and mocked routinely by real journalists, broke news about a wanton usurping of our civil rights in the name of post-9-11 security.

NSA has massive database of Americans’ phone calls

The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY.

Kudos to journalist Leslie Cauley and her paper. This is a big, scary story that needs to be explored in greater depth. This is a story the Times didn’t have (in fact, their front page was about as soft today as you’d expect USA Today’s to be.)

So…will the Times pick up the baton?

Well, according to the New York Times (quoting an American Apparel PR person), it’s a Polish expression that roughly means “On the brink of kitsch and absolute beauty.”

Which, on a rainy rainy Atlanta Sunday morning, is about right. It’s certainly better than any number of Banacek old Polish sayings, and contains a lot more nuanced wisdom than I ever learned from my Polish grandparents.

From Engadget comes word of two incidents in the last two weeks where British drivers have trusted their GPS driving instructions over their own eyes, and have attempted to pilot their vehicles across river bridges that exist in the database but not in real life. Doesn’t work well, as you might expect.

Sammy and I tend to leave the “Turn right in 200 yards!” instructions off on our GPS and use it in conjunction with our brains, eyes, and a well-thumbed Rand McNally Road Atlas…but one time driving a straight stretch of road east of Jackson, Michigan when we did have the turn-by-turn activated, we received insane instructions to make a U-turn mid-freeway…and, being stubborn and unwilling to turn south to go north, we did not comply.

On the other hand, driving in the UK is filled with those byzantine turn-south-to-go-north realities, so maybe your average UK driver is open to those computer commands. Me, I kind of prefer the approach of “here’s where you are with great precision on the planet earth…now you figure out what you want to do.”

The Engadget folks mention these incidents while reporting on the large (in this case, huge) new dash-mounted displays that seem destined to serve as yet another distraction layer for drivers who already have too much on their plate.

Hello in the waning minutes of May first. Happy Mayday, happy Reboot day (caution, annoying music), it seems as well.

Apparently there’s some sort of generalized agreement among, well, some web designers to have their act together enough to redesign their site each and every May first, while displaying as much tasty goodness and usefulness in as standards-compliant and, like, y’know, good a way as possible.

And, well, clearly I didn’t get the meme. Or the memo. But hey, there’s always next year…and there may well be some cause to substantially tighten up the sites I do have…I guess we’ll see about that. I’d like Positively Atlanta Georgia to be an even more comfortable home for you to visit and browse. I would, for example, like to make the photos section more enticing (hmm, maybe fresh content would help?) and make the Media Rare section read more like what it is…a series of columns ripped from alt/weeklies I wrote for here and in Ohio.

I’d like this to be more than a place where I grumpily diss those who use adverbs improperly.

I’d like whirled peas, too, but…well.

Until then, let me point you in this and this direction…just two of the rebooted sites who have me thinking about elaborate css and ajax and things above the fold and grids and all else in the land of web design, about a million miles away from sticky border tape, bloody x-actos, fragrant late-night waxers, and fragile handfuls of IBM Composer type rammed into clay-coated paper.

Okay, I typed it in, and here’s what came up, without links because I just don’t want to encourage this behavior: Daal-icious!, Apple-icious, The Market’s Gone Google-icious, Riddle-Icious Books, Scandal-icious Apparel, Jewlicious » Herzl-icious, Dill-icious Cheese Spread, Sequel-icious, People-icious, ya.flickr.icious, Bubbly-icious, Scrumdilly-icious, dexy-licious, Fiddle-icious, Pound iddly iddly icious, Bubble-icious.

No, wait, that’s just the first page.

Sandal-icious, Anderson Cooper is Kerfuffle-icious, MacGyver-icious Speakers, Mall-icious, meatballicious, Bagel-Icious, turtle-icious, six babble-icious years, Devil-icious Halloween, Folly-icious, Turcaret-icious, Maple-icious, nipple-icious, Simp-didily-icious!, Gloopee-icious, Nancy O’Dell-icious, Halo-icious!, Fertile-icious, pUrpLe|iciOus, Chill-icious Frozen Yogurt, ogle-icious, salty-icious, Chocol-icious Bread Pudding Muffins, Kiwi Melon-icious…oh, I can’t go on.

Please, please, think before you suffix.

As part of a flurry of library-book-reading after my finishing Arthur Gelb’s massive “City Room” memoir (a Christmas gift from a couple of years ago), I checked out the huge collection of New York Times front page reproductions called “Page One”—significant front pages from 1900 through 2000.

I think they were inspired by The Onion’s seminal “Our Dumb Century” or maybe it’s the other way around, but no matter.

Paging through, I was struck by how many words…especially headline words…have fallen out of use, just so much abandoned lead on a forgotten composing room floor.
“Parley” for one. And “Bloc”, “Strife”, “Truculent”, “Convoked”, “Pomp”, “Supercilious”, “Waylay”, “Spur”, “Stevedore”, “Hot-Rod”, and of course, “H-Bomb.”

I’m not sure that the all-parsing Google News page would know what to make of some of those…let alone those who parse their news from online aggregations and feeds.

You’ll also find an affirmation of the Times’ remarkably unchanging style in the abundant sprinkings of the passive voice: “Might Is Stressed”, “Rancor Continues”, “Democrats Concerned”, “Resistance Is Noted”, “Trial Data Given”, “Tactics Are Watched”, “U.S. Ties Hinted”, “Firm Grip Mapped”, and “Peace Is Sought.”

That passivity reminds me: my fellow Ohio University Post alums chuckle over the Nelsonville, Ohio paper’s simple one-column headlines to this day: “Meat Burned” (A tragic pot-roast incident on page one!) and “Snake on Square” (reptiles on the loose in downtown!). What was that paper’s name? Um, sorry, don’t remember.

With little other comment, the New York Times quotes our decider-in-chief:

“I’m the decider, and I decide what’s best,” Mr. Bush said in the Rose Garden. “And what’s best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as the secretary of defense.”

Does he even have a vague idea of his job description? Does he even have a vague idea of “what’s best”?

At three past midnight early this morning, our kitchen was filled with revelers singing ‘Happy Birthday,’ and we did not pay royalties to the songwriters.

And I was the sing-ee, which was quite a delight…perhaps a bit more because, well, the chorus included dear friends, friends of friends, and, well, miscellaneous NCTA National Show attendees. Why? Well, Rebecca said with the conference in our town (as opposed to hers) it was high time for a party, and who were we to disagree?

Yes, we had conventioneers over for Sammy’s delectable chili, yummy, spinach casserole, killer brownies, and our well-fortified bar. They left satisfied…and I think they liked the food too.

They also seemed to enjoy being out of the hubbub of the convention center and various hotels downtown. Did they get a taste of the real Atlanta here? Well, no, but they got a real taste of..uh..our world.

And, despite the singing, the party had nothing to do with my birthday (our friend Rebecca was, in fact, the person of honor), and that was kind of a treat too.

Nice way to segue into a fine, fine April 11th.

After a week where, thanks to me sticking my nose where arguably it shouldn’t have been, I have had the delight and pleasure of reading a big ol’ pile of thoughtful, intelligent and clever comments from dear friends and strangers alike…I guess that’s how this web-dude-thing is supposed to work. Special thanks to the nn.c readers who took the time to drop by (this site sits a mere ../ away on the same server as Nancy’s) and to leave some of the intelligence and wit that regularly fortifies her pages. Thanks.

* * * * *

And so on to the weekend, and a collection of linkage, just to catch up. First, let’s stay on the grammar beat…if you think I’m singleminded about correct usage, how about folks who created an entire site to literally discuss the misuse of the term “literally.” It’s the work of two Atlantans who have my deepest respect. Nearly literally. One reason for florescence of this misuse is certainly clear to me, and it goes back to the adverbs the kids use these days. There’s something in the modern, lightly ironic conversational cadence that seems to require a ‘da-DUM!’ moment—often filled with a momentary pause and then a percussive “Seriously!”at the end for the greatest possible impact. The second cousin to that of course, is “Literally!” What they mean, of course, in olden times would have been expressed as “I kid you not!” (or my dear friend Deb’s somehow unique use of “I’m not kidding!” in…well, you’d have to hear it for yourself.)

* * * * *

Google Video is becoming more enticing to me, despite interface issues…but that’s the thing about Googleproduct. You return the next day, and maybe they’ve moved a dropdown here, or javascripted up the menu at the top so it’s much slicker, or made any number of tiny ameliorations. I stumbled upon their collection of National Archives stuff and said to myself, “well, this is nice,” and got all nostalgic for the days when instructional films had titles in bold letters lit with apparent shafts of light, and soundtracks that sound as if the orchestra was hand-cranked, and recorded through a corrugated aluminum tube.

* * * * *

Someone has assembled a collection of fiftysomething magazine covers with Steve Jobs (over the years) pictured. Why? There must have been some empty spot on the internet that needed filling. Now, we can relax. The carefully-groomed his Steveship does provide reassurance that there are ways to lose your hair and grow older in public that aren’t completely embarrassing. Oh, and this cover here, of the very first MacWorld? I have that one, and amazingly, it’s in decent shape.

* * * * *

One of the reasons I struggle over doing design these days for local television news is that the concept of ‘Breaking News’ has long ago lost all meaning, and we do live in a world where local stations (and CNN, Fox, and MSNBC) cry wolf (without the Blitzer) in-freaking-cessantly. Rob Owen of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette covers three news directors in deep rationalization mode, and the result is just sad. Meanwhile, former NBC correspondent David Hazinski calls, not too seriously, for using those little TV ratings things in the upper left hand corner for labeling local news for what it is. By the way, this Breaking News graphic, found on the always-interesting Lost Remote site? I think I did that years ago for WFTV…uh, here? [Update: fixed and apologized for, hey, no big deal.]

I came across some guy’s blog entry and, well, I stepped in it when I attempted to correct his grammar. Yeah, it’s one of my pet peeves—saying something is going “slow” rather than “slowly.”

So, in short, he really (really!) took offense. He wrote:

I don’t expect someone who works in television to understand aesthetics – even someone who purports to work in “designâ€? – so I won’t even begin to lecture you on the nuisances of postmodern/poststructuralist linguistic theory specific to your trite comment on my blog today – I’m fairly certain you wouldn’t understand. I won’t even attempt to explain to you why your archaic notions of grammar are laughable – suffice to say, adverbs (slowly) are slack, boring, ugly and ineffective compared to definitive verb progressives (slow). This is not up for grammar debate, it is a matter of personal aesthetic steeped in research and education.

But, hey, I really appreciate that you took the time to stop by and leave a disparaging remark. It’s nice to know that there is at least one person out there in the world who doesn’t have anything better going on in his life than to be slight or catty for the sake of being such. From one human being to another, man, that was a real hurtful thing to do. (yes – “realâ€? hurtful – not “reallyâ€? hurtful) Perhaps in the future you might think twice before 1) commenting about something you know absolutely nothing about & 2) being rude without warrant. I mean, what good does it do? Do you get a laugh out of being mean? Does it make you feel better about yourself? I feel sorry for you. Hopefully someday you’ll learn that there are better ways to feel good about yourself than trying to put other people down.

Yow. Here’s what I wrote back:

Wow…I didn’t intend to leave a disparaging remark…or if it came off that way, I apologize. I just corrected your grammar mistake.

It’s simple and unambiguous–the correct usage is “slowly”. There’s no such thing as a correct use of “slow” in that context. It’s “a matter of personal aesthetic steeped in research and education”? Um, no. It’s a red mark on the paper. An error. A mistake.

And yeah, “real” hurtful is, again, incorrect grammar.

I can hurl AP, NYT and countless stylebooks at you in support of that…but this seems like something you’re sensitive about and again, I’m sorry. I come from a life experience where corrections are a good thing, not a bad thing. I signed my name…I didn’t leave anonymous snark, I was trying to help.

If you think you’re being a literary pioneer or pushing the language into some sort of a new, better world by dropping perfectly good adverbs—I sincerely hope you don’t succeed. I’m all for language as an evolving thing–I’m just not so happy with a regression…and to me, that sort of usage is a regression.

You can dismiss me as “archaic” (gee, thanks…having a bad week?), but I think an open-eyed examination of good writing out there (start with a little Strunk and White—a festival of good design in its present incarnation!) might re-introduce you to the joy of correctly-used adverbs.

I apologize for the offense, but if you’re planning on writing for a living, I hope you take good usage seriously.

Seriously!

With best wishes, even from a TV guy.

jcburns

[update: oh, there's more. See the comments, below.]

This is effectively the other shoe, the impact of the iTunes ‘Music’ Store as a vehicle for distributing what once was simply broadcast content. Disney(ABC), known for being, well, cheap in their dealings with creatives, has taken what may well be an available loophole in determining compensation to writers for downloaded episodes (versus those bits you buy at Target on a silver DVD platter). A letter to Writers Guild members from their leadership says:

We are writing to confirm what you have undoubtedly already heard: Last week, the Walt Disney Company informed our Guilds (along with SAG and the DGA) that they intend to pay residuals for Apple iPod downloads at an inappropriate, discounted rate.
Needless to say, this unilateral decision by Disney was met with disappointment and righteous indignation by virtually the entire talent community. All the Guilds, jointly and individually, issued public statements asserting their anger and warning of the likely consequences.
To put a fine point on what this means, Disney is claiming that Apple is not the distributor of our content, but merely a “retailer” or “exhibitor.” Disney claims that they are the distributor and, as a result, they assert that they can use a lower formula created for Beta and VHS tapes. Disney and the other companies have refused for years to adjust this outdated formula for the DVD market and now they are trying to do the same thing with the next generation of technology. On each $1.99 download, Disney will receive $1.40 but pay us on only 20% of that amount, or 28 cents. Accordingly, our residual will be less than half a cent per download. On Monday we received the first check for an episode of LOST, which was downloaded nearly half a million times. The amount of the check was $3,688.59. Had Disney paid under the correct formula, the check would have been over $14,000.
We take this action by Disney as a call to arms. Disney purports to be a leader in technological media advances. We support those advances but not without fair compensation for the hardworking men and women who write, perform, direct, and otherwise create the very content that makes their new revenue streams possible. Rest assured, our Guilds will take all affirmative legal action within our power to see that this inequity is resolved to our benefit.

Hmpf! Took me a couple of times to go through it, but what they’re asking for is (correct me if I’m wrong) that instead of a half-cent per download from Disney’s $1.49 share of the $1.99…they want 1.8977441 cents. Or, calculated slightly differently (assume they want a full five times as much), up to four cents. Yee gads, that seems fair to me! Heck, give the creatives five cents of each one!

I would love to see a detailed look how the whole $1.99 pie gets divvied up (including what chunks the directors and actors get)…the outcome I certainly don’t want is that Disney and others take the easy way out and force up the price of individual episodes (I have the same concern in the face of greedy record companies hankering to break up the 99 cent US price point at the ITMS.) These downloads must remain at the “sure, why not” pricing threshold or this clever experiment will evaporate…or go somewhere else.

I’m really amazed how much money the media companies are willing to walk away from in a bid to install a model of entertainment “borrowing” that basically removes the idea that you can “buy” a thing and watch it or read it or listen to it wherever and whenever you want. That draconian approach is, I suppose, the perfect partner to a paranoid government and other rights-deprivations that are becoming part of our daily life.

But that’s just my five cents’ worth.

I casually mentioned in my last entry that Apple had begun selling episodes of The Daily Show (and The Colbert Report) on the iTunes Store (I tend to drop the ‘Music’ from its name these days) using a ‘multipass’ idea that is like (actual, magazine) subscriptions…you get the current episode and 15 more for $9.99.

No, please, allow me to do the math: 62.4375 cents per episode. And by the way, these downloaded shows look just fine on plain old standard-definition NTSC television, playing off of our Mac Mini—or our video iPod if we’re on the road.

My casualness was slightly misplaced. This is a big deal.

Ashlee Vance in The Register channels Don McLean and declares it “The day the bundled cable died.” In a short piece loaded with quotables, she adds:

We’ll all look back on this deal as the day that TV delivery changed in earnest.
Apple has managed to repeat its tradition not of discovering something new but of doing something obvious first.
Plenty of MP3s players existed before the iPod. Apple just made the obvious better design and the obvious better store and backed it up with the obvious better marketing. That’s not to say this is easy. It’s just obvious.
Similarly, pushing TV via the internet isn’t a new idea. Doing it well is an obvious path to a promising business.
Apple receives great praise for moving at a turtle’s pace when the rest of the industry moves at a crippled turtle’s pace.

I guess we’ll take our turtles where we can get them. She mentions CBS’s attempts at selling temporary “looks” at shows through Google. Can’t take ‘em with you, can’t play ‘em easily on the mini, can’t play them a month from now…I’m not interested.

It’s worth making the point directly: it’s not that folks want to keep every episode of the Daily Show forever and ever…it’s that they want complete freedom when and where they can play what they’ve paid for. There is an important distinction in there.

This marks a changepoint and a step in the right direction. And for us, it’s not the magic of Apple…we’ll pay these kinds of prices to whoever will let us download (not stream) the episodes and keep them around and play them on portable devices (well, one device in particular).

As we walked the other day, I ran the numbers with Sammy, and there’s a lot of television we could buy at these prices if you take the just-under-$50 we pay Comcast right now for analog cable.

So now when Scripps does a deal with Apple (no, hasn’t happened quite yet) and suddenly there’s a lot of Food Network available a la carte, we’ll be asking…why do we have cable, again? We get better weather from the internet, we get better news from the internet, and when breaking news happens these days we’re no longer guaranteed that CNN will be all over it (in fact, it’s more likely we’ll see more if we subscribe to their ‘Pipeline’ service).

And I sure would never like to (even indirectly) pay for Home Shopping or Fox News again.

Okay, please allow me to clean off my browser with a few Wednesday linkoids before we go off to walk, dine, and see my old TBS buddy Richard Croker speak about his new book.

* * * * *
First of all, this image is delightful, compelling, odd. And like so many things in this world, it may be invoking references way way beyond my obscurity threshold, but that’d be nothing new. I just like it.
* * * * *

Second of all, what the hell? iTunes, specifically 6.0.4(3), is beginning to get on my last nerve. First there are the reports from Seattle where we’ve just installed a lovely Mini to play my sister-in-law’s music. It’s skipping, mysteriously, and with no apparent pattern, and with nothing else running. I want to get it fixed, but it’s a continent away. Meanwhile, here on the east coast, on my dual G5, iTunes seems to be in deep beachball mode, where what used to be quick starts and stops of our music seem to require thought, consideration, and maybe a check with Homeland Security. A visit to the iTunes Music Store is similarly painful, with scrolling in the main Store window inexplicably clunky and slow. My first attempt to provide a customer review (hey, they’re offering The Daily Show, and have apparently come up with a new option for viewing multiple episodes called a ‘multi-pass’) coughed up this entertaining dialog (pictured above) that is headed MZFinance.addUserReviewLoginRequired.message with the helpful subhead MZFinance.addUserReviewLoginRequired.explanation. Well, I’m sorry, that’s no explanation at all, mister! Actually, to my only-slightly-enlightened eyes, this looks like a place where the localizable strings didn’t localize (or maybe this is something that comes our way through the iTunes Store’s XML pipeline) but definitely isn’t much of a testament to the fit and finish of the Music Store or the app itself. Apple needs to get this right…iTunes is the oft-cited example of Mac software at its best, and lately, at least for me, it hasn’t been.
* * * * *
In other, more positive news, I enjoyed this implementation of a flickr thumbnail browser that this guy came up with. Zippy, clean, ajax-y.
* * * * *
Another positive sign: A Vermont Town Endorses a Move to Impeach The President (a Newsday article). Are people starting to say enough is enough? Well, some are. Read all of the reactions in the article, and you’ll get more of a sense of the non-unanimity that’s always characterized Vermont town politics (at least in my limited experience.)
* * * * *
Well, just heard the mail drop in our front door (you don’t have a mail slot?), so I’ll leave you with those.

I’m trying to think of exactly what convolution of categories and the politics of the movie business that would have earned an Academy Award, or two, or three for Good Night and Good Luck, George Clooney’s ‘little’ movie about the CBS journalist and the struggle for free speech in the McCarthy era.

You’d think in a year without a cavalcade of blockbusters, without a Titanic or a Lord of the Rings, a ‘little’ film would have a chance. But the voters—who makes up that ‘Academy’, anyway?—were distracted by bright shiny films about gay cowboys and uh…what’s Crash about anyway? I haven’t seen either of them.

I’d like to think that the fault, dear Brutus, lays mostly with an Academy that spent a lot of time Sunday night promoting and re-promoting the idea that films are meant to be experienced in big darkened rooms with mostly silent strangers and fancy surround sound systems, not in your home theatre.

As if they don’t make huge portions of their profit for every films off of DVD sales?

We have this little movie shot in vivid black-and-white, a movie that takes place almost entirely indoors. It’s a short film, barely ninety minutes. It was a terrific experience in the theatre. It’s going to be probably equally compelling on DVD.

It deserves honors. I understand that it’s an “honor simply to be nominated” for an Oscar, but maybe they ought to consider a category for Socially Significant Little Monochromatic Masterpieces…and sure, one for Shiny Ang Lee Preconception Shatterers as well.

You don’t have to do everything that’s out there. Seriously. You don’t have to sign up for every social network or inhale all online pop culture, all the time. Sometimes you can just bounce from one thing-about-the-thing to another, and emerge bruised but slightly enriched.There, I used ’seriously’ in one of several ways that People Younger than Me (PYTM) use it, and I’m really only conscious of it because of a television show I don’t watch.That’d be Grey’s Anatomy. I have nothing really against it…I’m certainly not turned off of it the way I am, say, NBC’s Las Vegas or almost any sitcom on ABC. It’s just on at a semi-inconvenient time and the overlay story (young doctors) is just not that compelling to me the way that, say, young Holmesian doctors in New Jersey led by a grumpy guy affecting an American accent would be.But one weblog writer I read regularly (originally because of the novelty that she lived just up Lanier Boulevard from our house, now just because sometimes she talks about library science stuff that interests me) enthused about the show, and then mentioned that the writers for the show were blogging, and my ongoing interest in that (see Serenity’s Joss Whedon and Battlestar Galactica’s Ron Moore) got me over there to read their thoughts, which seemed to be expressed in the arch, apparent-insecurities-showing, twenty-come-thirtysomething way that so many folks online (therefore, people in general) do now.I was impressed by the strong voice of the show’s creator, someone named Shonda Rhimes. And I say “someone named” because, well, I don’t get out much and I hadn’t come across many earlier references to Ms. Rhimes and her work, but as I pagedowned my way through the blog and, for good measure, read a Writers Guild of America magazine piece about her, I found my self enthusiastic for her success, yet still without any great desire to watch the show itself. I was, it seems, impressed with her “offstage” writing skills, in the blog, in the stuff-about-the-stuff. Hey, I’m a meta-fan.One paragraph from the show’s Frequently Asked Questions is representative—it brings me a vivid sense of the ambiance around wherever in LA the Grey’s writers are.

Why do you and the characters say “seriously” all the time?Because Krista Vernoff, one of our valued writers, says it constantly in the Writers’ Room. CONSTANTLY. Like, four hundred and fifty times a day. And it is catching. Now we all say it. Seriously. Krista says she caught the “seriously” bug from one of her friends and brought it to work and spread it to all of us. It’s an awesome word. Said correctly, it can convey sarcasm, dismay, disbelief, a sense of moral and ethical superiority and gentle chastising punishment all at once. Seriously.

So there you are, yet another example (like “dude”, “awesome”, and “like” itself) of the economics of 21st century usage—why use specific words to convey all those different nuances when you can employ the blunt-force trauma of one oft-wielded adverb? “Said correctly?” Seriously.I include that chunk from the show’s FAQ here for you in part to spare you—when you go to that page on the ABC site this music starts playing, and I am in general, way opposed to sites that start blasting sounds at you before you have a chance to say “oh, no, I’d like my web reading in silence, thanks.” And it’s axiomatic: the more annoying the sound, the harder they’ll make it for you to turn it off.I, unwarned, went to that page and although the loud and sudden offering of the music was annoying, it did kind of have a nice tinkly melodic line and beat that reminded me, for reasons lost in the mist of television antiquity, of the old St. Elsewhere theme. So, okay, what was I hearing? If I actually watched the show, I would have known it’s the theme song, or what passes for the theme song, or what you hear during what passes for the opening credits, but I don’t, so, some Googling of the lyrics later, such as I could make them out, brought me to the British group Psapp (which has an intrusive yet helpful audio pronouncer of their name on their site) and to the song—the aforementioned song—called “Cosy in the Rocket”. And, for the same hard-to-define reasons that I enjoy Zero 7…well, 99 cents later(iTunes store link), it’s on my iPod.And on the way, I picked up yet another British spelling I wasn’t familiar with (I don’t drink much tea), so when I write to folks in Honduras about their new logo, I’ll be sure to spell it ‘cosy.’ Seriously! But what I didn’t pick up along the way (as of yet): another television show to watch. Ironically!

Wow. With Sammy hard at work upstairs dicing and slicing population densities in Mesoamerica hundreds of years ago, it’s sobering to switch to the 21st century and see fairly current data depicted so…vitally, at my fingertips.

Behold…Georgia, ablaze in people!

Big compliments to the people at Juice Analytics for putting their efforts at integrating census-y data and Google Earth out freely. Go there, get curious, and download a data overlay of your own. Density! Median age! Male/female ratio! It’s all rolled out on top of Google Earth at your command!

A research company that puts stuff like this (and, for the even geekier, python classes for geocoding addresses…free for the taking!) deserves a fine pat on the back, and I hereby pat.

Friends of mine who don’t live within 100 miles of our fair perimeter sometimes have trouble getting their head around what our city’s all about. Hey, it’s easy…just have a glance at these headlines from today’s ajc.com website.

Man charged with leaving child at Waffle House
Police accused a DeKalb man of leaving his 5-year-old daughter at a Waffle House in the middle of the night and then concocting a carjacking story to explain his absence.

Big hole has big price tag
It may cost the new city of Sandy Springs more than $100,000 to fix a sink hole that’s threatening to swallow Susan Thompson’s front yard.

Cherokee police probe credit card thefts at schools
Police are looking for four suspects who have stolen credit and debit cards from teachers’ handbags at Cherokee County elementary schools. The suspects walk into schools while classes are in session, and look for empty classrooms or offices and take the cards and then go to the nearest stores to make purchases.

Atlanta committee postpones vote on tree rules
A proposal to allow Atlanta homeowners to cut down one tree of any kind and size each year has stalled. Atlanta City Councilman Howard Shook wants to trim the city’s tree protection ordinance, but the council’s Community Development/Human Resources committee decided Tuesday to postpone the vote for at least two weeks.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going out in the back yard to pick a tree and check for sinkholes.

Michael Bierut in DesignObserver:

It was September, 1981, when design critic Ralph Caplan first unveiled the phrase. He was speaking at a Design Management Institute conference in Martha’s Vineyard. His talk was titled “Once You Know Where Management Is Coming From, Where Do You Suggest They Go?”

“I want finally to address in some detail,” Caplan said toward the end of this talk, “a role that I call ‘the designer as exotic menial.’ He is exotic because of the presumed mystery inherent in what he does, and menial because whatever he does is required only for relatively low-level objectives, to be considered only after the real business decisions are made. And although this is a horrendous misuse of the designer and of the design process, it is in my experience always done with the designer’s collusion.”

It’s 25 years later. Has anything really changed?

Well, I try not to collude with folks who hire designers as workers whose job is to “achieve low-level objectives”, but I think that my technical skills and avid interest in the how to do stuff works against me here. My geeky credentials might lead some not to suspect that I have a deeply held belief in design as the highest level of problem solving. There are projects I’ve worked on (especially from-the-ground-up designs of channels) where I worked out how nearly everything would look, feel, and interact…and then (sometimes) would hear a manager type get most of the credit.

Sometimes I’m OK with it, content to sit back and watch the finished product and say “boy, that really looks like what went on in my head,” and other times, well, designers can be a grumbly lot. But you bring design into the process too late, well, sometimes it’s too late, no matter what nice wafer-thin shiny coats of paint we can apply.

Apparently when you put Atlanta’s MARTA rapid rail map through the anagram-o-matic (actually, this guy did the work), hilarity ensues! Also see here. I think ‘Shaby’ is a bit of a stretch, though. Don’t really care that much about the City Too Busy To Have An Opening Day? There are also these maps of other fine cities here and here.

I woke to headlines this morning from the AJC (and the WSJ, and elsewhere):

Turner Quits Time Warner Board

Time Warner Inc. announced that CNN founder Ted Turner has decided not to stand for re-election to its board.
Mr. Turner joined the board after his Turner Broadcasting was acquired by Time Warner in the mid ’90s. But his involvement with the New York media giant has declined in recent years.

Fox agrees to buy Turner South

Fox Cable Networks has agreed to buy Time Warner’s Turner South, most likely to convert the channel from being a home of Southern-tinged entertainment to a sports-heavy operation anchored by games of three Atlanta professional teams.
With Turner South, Fox will have the rights to show all Braves games that aren’t televised nationally by ESPN or TBS, which is a Turner network.
“We’ve been eyeing Turner South for a long time,” said Tony Vinciquerra, president and CEO of Fox Networks Group.
In purchasing Turner South, News Corp. has made what a deal with an unusually colorful history, given the history of animosity between News Corp. Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch and Turner namesake Ted Turner. The Turner South name will be dropped, but a new one hasn’t been decided.
“It won’t be Murdoch South,” Vinciquerra joked.

* * * * *

Oh, Tony, you crack me up. There are some days I just kinda wish the media landscape—especially here in town—was more or less where I left it in the mid-1980s. Then, at least, you could be assured, with a wacky guy like Ted at the helm, that he’d be doing everything he could to make TBS and CNN and the sports teams entities that Atlanta could be proud of. I’m not sure Rupert Murdoch has that on his to-do list.

We went on this terrific trip to Africa in 1999, and, long ago that it was, Sammy shot some three dozen rolls of 35mm slides, which until recently have been languishing in boxes, largely unedited, but nicely sorted and labeled. And although we had a slide scanner, its cranky SCSI connection made it a less than routine operation to digitize the images. Well, borrowing our neighbor’s USB 2.0-connected Nikon scanner took care of that.

But once you have the images, what do you do? I’ve often rhapsodized about the power of metadata accumulated along with imagery in most modern digital cameras. I can, for example, tell you this about the (digital) photo at top-right…

Camera Model Name : Canon EOS DIGITAL REBEL
Shutter Speed : 1/13
Aperture : 3.5
Shooting Date/Time : 2006:02:20 09:22:30
Date/Time Of Digitization : 2006:02:20 09:22:30
Components Configuration : YCbCr
Compressed Bits Per Pixel : 3
Shutter Speed Value : 1/13
Aperture Value : 3.5
Max Aperture Value : 3.5
Flash : Off
Focal Length : 18.0mm

…and so on and so on. Well, our wonderful Africa scanned images don’t contain these invisible ‘tags’ that digital photos do—but they can be added retrospectively, and if we do, that data will live on within the huge 100 MB TIFF scans and to any (much smaller) JPEG versions we create. We can search for meaningful keywords within the photos. We will know what day (if not what time) the photo was made, even if the paper notes disappear. Life will be more groovy knowing that frame 6 of roll 52288 shot with our old Pentax is a picture of the river out in front of our tent at the Mwagusi Safari Camp at Ruaha, Tanzania, shot on February 3, 1999.

How could it not?

So not only have we been winnowing—choosing maybe 30% of the total images as worthy of scanning—we’ve been carefully making notes about the content and location of each image—much of this gleaned from Sammy’s notes during our travels, and all of that goes into a spreadsheet which is then used along with a cobbled-together Applescript and Perl script thingie to embed the data and rename the TIFF file from its original scan name to a name that reflects the roll and frame number of the original.

So, scanning at archive quality (about 5 minutes per slide), metadata restoration, archiving to DVDs, and then conversion to lower-res version JPEGs we can have in our iPhoto and on our iPod. This involves a lot of squinting and using my reading glasses (not a pleasure) and it’s amazing on a certain level that an unorganized guy like me could care enough to do all of this.

But I do, so we do.

The first couple of days of the 2006 Winter Olympics, we watched scenes of Torino come in to our standard-definition analog-cable-connected Sony in dismay. Instead of pristine HDTV pictures smoothly downsampled for our old-fashioned TV pleasure, Atlanta affiliate WXIA seemed to be providing some of the worst digital images I’ve seen in some time…overenhanced, “sharp” or “sizzly” to the point of being painful to watch. The graphics were mushy, barely readable. Snowy scenes had…well, take a bright image into Photoshop and apply the ’sharpen’ filter about 230 times…they looked like that.

Closeups of Bob Costas or, worse yet, the attending US first lady Laura Bush were uh…grotesque.

Clearly, something was messed up, and the only information I could get from a somewhat distracted master control guy at WXIA was “oh yeah, for the first day or two the weather was really bad in New York.”

So what was he saying, snow fade had caused a loss of data between NBC New York and Atlanta? Well, that is possible, and in the age of digital everything, if you lose some of the bits, the black boxes make up for it with fake, interpolated bits that can pretty much have the effect I described. And there was a large snowfall in New York, a nor’easter that blew through and paralyzed air traffic. I suppose that might well have meant the uplinks were hammered too.

But the past couple of days, things have looked pristine. In some ways, it’s amazing the pipeline works at all. And for the curious, one of NBC’s engineers is blogging from Torino [update: that blog has disappeared!] about the whole operation, and he’s doing a good job of discussing the elaborate steps behind the scenes. This same engineer points to a thread elsewhere that discusses, among other things, the amazing (to a more visual guy like me) lengths they have to go through to create and preserve the Dolby 5.1 sound tracks (along with good old stereo like we listen to) that really enhances the HD experience.

I’ve also watched some of the coverage of curling, not because I’m much of a fan…not that I even understand what the heck they’re doing, but because NBC is trying an experiment there much like CNN tried with the last political conventions. They’re backhauling all of the camera and audio feeds from the curling venue (this is in standard-definition) to CNBC/MSNBC’s operation in Fort Lee, N.J. and directing the show from there. Then, of course, they have to send their output back to Torino so that the announcers know what they’re seeing. Sounds complicated (it is!) but apparently there’s big cost savings in not having to have that many more people over there eating fine Italian cuisine.

And there’s plenty of good Italian food in New Jersey, anyway.

I went to college, first in Vermont and then in the southeast Ohio appalachians, and maybe then arguably for a third time in my first real job, at WTCG, Channel 17 Atlanta. Yes, the SuperStation, ask for it by name!

There, in the late 70s, in a beat-up old studio on West Peachtree Street, I certainly found a collegial environment to learn how to do television, and maybe as importantly, to learn how to work with others and live on $3.60 an hour (yes, I still have my first Turner paycheck stub.)

I was hired as part of a push to expand the station’s operations staff (master control operators, camera people, audio) as WTCG began to be transmitted via satellite to all of North America. It’s probably my good luck that they were desperate to expand, hiring unemployed Ohio bums like me, Steak and Ale waitresses, and passers-by to fill out the staff.

And it was definitely my good luck to be teamed with or reporting to some remarkable people in what could be described as a minimalist management structure…it wasn’t until the second year or so of CNN’s existence (several years later) that squadrons of vice-presidents, memo-writers, and org-chart-makers descended on the place. Back then, if you had an issue or an idea, you went to talk to Sid, or Jackie, or Pooch, or R.T., or even Ted, if you caught him in the hall.

It was so educational, intense, practical—that I can’t help but think of it as part of my higher education—college 3.0.

I’m happy that I still hear from some of these folks every now and again. The other day, word came about the upcoming publication of Richard Croker’s new book of extremely historical fiction, much closer to his heart and a far cry from his work cranking out promos and herding cranky baseball announcers. And then yesterday, up pops Mary Brennan (Mary Frazier when I first met her at WTCG), one of the best writers I know, blessed with the gift of producing, which generally means patience, organization, and the ability to simultaneously see fine-grained detail and the big picture as deadlines loom. And yes, she’s blogging, or journaling, or whatever you call the act of casting words online.

That’s just wonderful.

My friend (from college 2.0) Nancy describes her weblog as “as a one-sided few minutes over coffee that we can have every morning.” Well, exactly, and it’s a treat to have that few minutes with the smart people I met as I careened through life, folks that I might have lost touch with otherwise. And when that whole network-webbiness-thing starts to work and I “meet” new people through people who read people who know people…that too is collegial, and educational, and thus maybe life online is college 4.0 for me.

It’s a dark and rainy monday morning in the ATL, but our living room has a bit of warmth and a rich spruce-y smell that comes from, well, that tree in the corner, there.
Yes, we still have our tree up.
And your point is?
I guess it’s almost become a tradition of its own…we get our tree in the very last few days before Christmas, often from the Lutheran church up the street which sells trees and uses the proceeds to help needy folks in the neighborhood. Because it’s the last minute, the pickings are often slim, but there’s usually one tree that has that Charlie Brown unchosen quality that I’m always drawn to.
And so, late to show up, late to leave, I suppose…we usually don’t get around to disassembling the web of lights and ornaments until about the end of January…nowish. But it’s still doing its job…it brightened up my monday just fine, thank you. Our little hedge (well, not a hedge, exactly) against early January Seasonal Affective Disorder.
* * * * *
Elsewhere around here, it’s been a couple of weeks filled with PHP and database backup and terminal windows, and why exactly, hey, can no one FTP in, oh, wait, now they can. The assemblage of system software and open source code that brings this page (and those of several others I know) to the rest of the world is still settling in, and Bill and I are learning more than we ever wanted to know about the underpinnings of web technology. The technical details have moved in and have found space in my addled brain, right next to info on exactly how to load an Ampex ACR-25 quad videotape cartridge machine (circa 1980 technology) and how long to keep a black and white photo in the fixer before rinsing it off. You know, useful stuff.
* * * * *
Despite today’s rain, this has been a great month for walking, and Sammy and I have taken a number of fine strolls off in various directions in our neighborhood. Often, we head for Piedmont Park, which, on a nice day, is choked with dog owners and iPod listeners, all in worlds of their own. En route, we pass a large number of construction/renovation/expansion projects, as our neighborhood of bungalows becomes, one-by-one, a neighborhood of “starter McMansions”—that’s what the AJC called them when they reported Friday that Mayor Shirley Franklin had declared a moratorium on the lot-filling grotesqueries.
These new iterations of intown housing seem to be striving to sell, more or less uniformly, for $1.2 million.
Yes, dollars.
I suppose I should be sanguine about what that means for our little investment we call our home, but I also note that lots and lots (heh) of these are being built on spec, and they sure seem to stay empty, with fancy real estate signs out front, for a long, long time.

Okay, let me explain the joke right off. In the oldest days of computerdom, the dots on the screen were either on or off—there was no in between. It was a very black-on-white or white-on-black world. And one of the earliest computers that let you work with graphics—albeit in this very binary way—was the original Macintosh. It’s screen graphics were 2-bit—tiny black squares on white. And what’s amazing is that these early files (which yeah, of course, I’ve saved) can run on my most up-to-date, 21st century Macintosh. In some cases, they’ll run under Classic…but the most fun is to download and use an emulator called Mini VMac, which makes this little window into history, an original Mac running 1983-1984 vintage software, on my modern G5.

Why would I want to do this, you ask? Well, it’s usually when I’m in a mood to get back in touch with how far things digital have progressed. I’ve finished reading one of my Christmas books, Revolution in the Valley by Andy Hertzfeld, and my head’s filled with stories about getting this then-revolutionary software to work in the tiny memory space that the original Macs had (and yes, I purchased one of those in the very first days from a tiny computer store in Gainesville, Georgia.) Behold my ancient Mac, sitting next to a similarly ancient Apple //e and an IBM Selectric (actually, Electronic Selectric) typewriter. So now, here in my 21st century home, I need only click once to return to those thrilling days where everything was either a black square or a white one.

You don’t need to know what API stands for in order to appreciate the power of some of these new Web 2.0 thingies. For my part, I’m just trying to make sure that this site has some basic functionality/usefulness.

To that end I’ve added a WordPress plugin that enables this fine photo page here. It does an amazing amount of stuff behind the scenes, making XML queries to Flickr and requesting photos, data, and so on. I’ve always heard PHP referred to as the ‘glue’ that holds all this disparate stuff together…now I have a little clearer idea how that actually works.

Some folks use these features to adroitly weave together stuff way more than just images…a visit to their weblog will tell you the books they read, the movies they’ve seen, the music they’re currently listening to, the temperature in their back yard…all in an attempt (I would say) to create a dynamic, interesting place for people to return to again and again. Can that go too far? Mmm, yeah, I think so.

But I might try a few more things until I’m done.

Or, I can just keep concentrating on creating entries folks might actually want to read.

Well, I can see I’ve dropped back into a late-night pattern, at least for now, and here’s one more post just as I start to fade away after a long evening after the evening with Sammy. I loaded up the bread machine for a nice warm mornings’ loaf, I finished cleaning the kitchen, I made sure most of the machines in our house had been upgraded to Mac OS X 10.4.4, I collaborated with Bill over the internet to make sure the server had been similarly upgraded, I fixed a couple of problems on my sister’s blog, and well, now I should be dropping off.

But not quite yet.

I wanted to mention that since the beginning of the year, I’ve been back into the rhythm of walking…and I started out on New Years’ Day with a six mile ’stroll’ over to James and Rebecca’s house in Avondale Estates, iPod in ears, GPS in hand. Since then, it’s been at least two miles a day, and several imes it’s been three, four and five miles at a stroll. And a good handful of those walks have been with Sammy, which is always a treat.

And yes, once back here, the GPS data is downloaded into my machine, converted to GPX and KML files, and displayed on the shiny new Google Earth application that Mac users (with fast video cards) can finally enjoy with the rest of the civilized world. (Although I’ve been playing with the illicit beta, the finished version has been released today on MacWorld day along with all this other hoo-hah.

Lotsa walking and lotsa cool use of technology. Not a bad way to start 2006.

It’s two am, here on the east coast, here on a winter’s night in Atlanta, and I’m awake and at the computer, which, of late, is unfamiliar to me…I’ve been making some effort to align what’s left of my circadian rhythms with Sammy’s.

But we’re making a bit of a transition here, bringing blogs and sites and mail and what have you over to a new machine running Mac OS X Server, and we’ve taken the opportunity for a long-delayed upgrade to a MySQL database and WordPress software? Why? Because of that feeling of power you get when a gazillion transactions occur at once and…well, it’s just way, way more flexible.

So that’s why I’m awake now, because, y’see, it has to happen sometime, and more or less all at once, and that sometime is finally…now.

But there may be a few bumps in the road, and I have a bunch of old content that has to get from the old machine to the new, so please bear with us. And now, I think I could use a bit of shut-eye.

I’d just like to commemorate that 16 years ago today it was a cold north Georgia Saturday, with snow falling intermittently… and a lot of special people in our lives traveled from the midwest, from California, from Seattle, from North Carolina to hold hands and watch Sammy and I exchange some important promises in our living room—and then we went to an art gallery in Buckhead and listened to Bob Page play the piano and talked and laughed and toasted and danced into the night.

And then we locked ourselves out of our house and had to pound on a sleeping Tom Burton’s door to get our spare key.

We’re lucky to still have most of those friends and family in our lives, and we’re very fortunate to have each other.

According to this article which quotes this Scientific-Atlanta survey, apparently half of all High Definition Television (HDTV) owners don’t actually use the HD capabilities of their set, and nearly a quarter think they are watching high definition video when they actually haven’t set it up correctly.

This reminds me of the research I heard about years ago back in the dawn of ‘bugs’—the translucent (or not) logos in the corner that identify what channel you’re watching. Many people who were asked thought that their TVs made that little CNN, just like the TV put up the big green letters that say ‘mute’.

This more recent survey said that 25%-ish admitted “they thought they were watching HD video because, after all, the programs said at the beginning that they were broadcast in HDTV”…!

Now I’m thinking they ought to super “broadcast via brainwaves directly into your cerebellum” at the beginning of shows.

And don’t even get me started on the number of 16 x 9 TVs in public places showing 4 x 3 channels stretched grotesquely to fill the space. It’s become a small obsession of mine to reset them or, barring that, switch them off.

CNN, in what seems to be an approach straight out of the old parse-the-tea-leaves-at-the-Kremlin days, announced the departure of Aaron Brown by not announcing it…they issued a release describing Anderson Cooper’s new schedule and Wolf Blitzer’s new schedule and if you put all of that through the parse-o-matic and divide the number of anchor chairs by the number of available anchors, well, you’d find one name missing.

And so Aaron Brown, smart guy anchor, fellow college dropout and world champion muller, moves on. I lift my ABC World News Now coffee tea and soup mug in his general direction (doubly ironic, since his replacement, the guy CNN has placed its bets on, is of course, also an alumnus of the wacky ABC late night news show.)

I’ll admit it, I want smart people reporting the news. I want people with depth who aren’t afraid to use that depth when putting complex subjects into context. My pride in being associated with CNN (way back at the dawn of time) is way diminished with each broadcast of The Situation Room (Keith Olbermann: “Wolf, we get it, you own a lot of TVs.”), along with the accumulated vapidity of Paula, Kyra, and Daryn and the turgid Lou Dobbs. Nowadays, when CNN carries a brief hour or so of CNN International, it’s as close as I can get to the network of old: a 24 hour news channel dedicated to news of the world.

Aaron brought his intelligence to work, along with (occasionally) some other emotional baggage. In the modern era where television newspeople of substance are becoming a threatened species, his writing skills and on-air processing of complexity were most welcome.

Some other voices:
Harry Shearer: ‘The most trusted Name in what, again?’

Don Imus: “Which means there will be, very soon, ‘The Aaron Brown Report’ here on MSNBC [he's kidding], because the MO for MSNBC is [that] anybody at either Fox or CNN who can’t get it done, they hire ‘em here, thinking I don’t know what… A television insider recently described MSNBC as ‘an elephants’ graveyard.’”

And there’s an online petition, but, y’know, why bother?

Okay, this just in, the do-no-evil pioneers of Google Maps has been joined in cartographic battle by the feisty newcomer Yahoo Maps!

Behold! (if you will), the javascript spittle flying in all directions! Behold the similar errors on both sites (since they use Navteq and Teleatlas for the data)…like Atlanta’s Interstate 285 perimeter referred to as only ’state route 407′. Behold a stunningly sililar color scheme, although the further you zoom out on Yahoo, the crunkier the type looks. And behold the odd floating-ish navigator thingie that I bet Yahoo is quite proud of. Behold Yahoo’s live traffic! Behold Google’s satellite imagery! Behold twin APIs…that is, the Application Programming Interface where other developers can mess and mash and come up with odd mutant varients on these maps to their heart’s content!

For a kid (like me) who used to dream in longitude and latitude, this is almost an embarrassment of riches—that is, of course, until the massive coordination between browser, javascript, and server breaks in a fiesta of AJAX-y failure. Or, you simply move out of range of your broadband connection.

In the future, as long as you’re online, life is good. And you know where you stand. Down to a couple of meters or so.

iPod generations

Originally uploaded by iLounge.

From iLounge’s Flickr page, a look at iPod generations. Mine’s on the far left. Right now, my lovely 20GB iPod does a great job of playing sounds and music, although it likes to be left plugged in as long as possible because its battery’s charge tends to dribble away. So we pamper it, a bit. We keep it warm in its protective case. I try not to drop it too often.

Just like any venerable piece of electronics, I guess.

So am I tempted by any of these newer upstarts? Well, if you’d asked me before the release of the latest one with video out, I would have been unequivocal, but now, maybe I do need one to take up some of the slack. And yeah, output photos and video. Maybe. If you’ll excuse me, I need to tuck the wool blanket around our old pod.

Sammy and I took a look at the new iPods up at Lenox last week, and they’re cute, cool, all of that…although at this point not quite cool and cute enough to compel me to reach walletward. If our venerable first-generation iPod suddenly died, I would buy with gusto, but until then, I’m treating our geezerPod with all the gingerness and TLC that I am our Powerbook, which is considerably more on-its-last-legs.

But the model of a la carte TV show purchasing Steve Jobs and company introduced along with those new iPods really is (for me) the seed of something way more interesting…a way to move away from the tyranny of ad support and somewhat closer to those who want the content (no more and no fewer) paying the fre