Twenty, and smiling.
Wednesday, December 9th, 2009
Today was a special day for Sammy and me. And it was a special day back on December 9, 1989, when we gathered some people very important to our lives together here and made some promises to each other and then went off to lead a shared life, with the usual array of stumbles, surprises, savors, and, always, ultimately, smiles. After rain, wind, and storms overnight, the day shone bright (if breezy) and we celebrated by wandering the Atlanta Botanical Garden and the aisles of a camera shop and a fine grocery store. The result, a celebratory new camera (those are the first two images from it, above) and a homecooked meal that was oh man, so good. And, indeed, every day we get to do simple things like that together is a special one in my book, and I’m looking forward to more smiles, and miles, together, hand in hand.
Compelling-osity.
Monday, December 7th, 2009
Okay, just a quick rant. I’ve been following, at a great distance, mostly via Twitter, this conference here that appears to follow on the heels of this conference here that seem to be part of an onrushing tide of conference-y efforts to “reinvent” public radio (among other media) so that, it’s…I dunno, the word “compelling” keeps coming up. As if the opposite of “compelling” is something to be avoided at all costs. Without sufficient compelling-osity, we are told, the audience—all of it, or at least all of it under 30—will simply abandon it, like totally, dude.
Well, let’s see, some quotes from this ‘The Future of News’ white paper [PDF link]:
Tom Rosenstiel and others pointed out [that] those journalists and news organizations that don’t drop the pose of lecturer and learn how to genuinely engage the audience will be lost.
The pose of lecturer!? Perhaps you’re confusing that with, uh, reporting the news. That is, reading it aloud, just the unvarnished, well-researched, fact-checked facts, the four or five Ws and maybe an H?
That’s really what we have a dearth of. That’s really what we need to re-sanctify in the canon of journalism.
“Draw me in. Engage me. Challenge me, make the radio (or whatever platform) experience as compelling as the journalism. If not, I’ll go somewhere else.”
– Online Attendee Israel Smith
Oh, okay, online attendee Smith. You want the “platform experience” to be as “compelling” as the “journalism.” I think my quote key is getting stuck, or maybe my spittle is getting on the keyboard.
Hey, look. If you’re being offered a diet of Pure Journalism, delivered as actual no kidding reporting, not prognostication or pontification, and you don’t find that compelling, then please oh please go the hell somewhere else.
Chris Worthington, Minnesota Public Radio’s managing director of news, is quoted as saying:
We need to “listen more to the audience” to understand what the gaps in journalism are we need to fill, and what sort of journalism they will value.
This is, of course, along the same vector that compels TV producers to put up real-time ticker crawls of viewer’s tweets. “Hey look, we’re listening to you!”
I’m kinda thinking maybe you’re listening a bit much, and losing the skills of going out and finding out in great and sophisticated detail exactly what is happening. Guess what—your listeners, readers or viewers may have no idea that they want this information until you present it to them. They’re simply not aware of many of the informational gaps in their nutritious daily news diet.
My hope and dream is that we will re-discover the crucial importance of facts, reported without varnish or abuse of the future tense. We will value them…literally. We will fund a vast army of people…let’s call them “reporters” …to go out and lasso those facts.
We will pay for actual humans to report…to go out and do original research and newsgathering, which means sit in chairs at countless boring meetings and don’t talk about your feelings even one little bit…just sum up exactly what happened.
And we will then deliver that information on new media and old. Into microphones and cameras, yes, and onto tweets and into whatever darn other social doohickies you want as well…but the point and the focus of our financial support will be on their gathering, and our presentation will be sober, simple, and unadorned.
Publishing is now even easier than ever. We don’t need to subsidize that.
But we need to pay for folks who will do the craft and hard work of gathering the news.
Okay, you can back to all that “engaging our readers in conversations” tripe now.
Unfriend-ly.
Wednesday, November 18th, 2009
A bit of a twitter out there today and yesterday about ‘unfriend’ being cited as uh, wait, let me check: “The New Oxford American Dictionary 2009 Word of the Year.” Ah, the coveted OxWordie! Or, something like that (it may be connected with People’s 100 Most Beautiful Words of 2009, or I may be getting confused. So many awards, so little brain-cell-space to process them.)
What’s scarier is the list of words and, to be frank, psuedo-words that you’ll never get me (consarn it) to include in any real dictionary…words that were genuinely considered for this great lexicographical honor. Scroll down and be very afraid of the likes of “sexting” and “funemployed.”
But after a good chuckle over what are, after all, just words, what I really wanted to serve up for your remaining brain cells today is this pondering from Anil Dash, blog software pioneer and, it would seem, free thinker. Mr. Dash is concerned (and I quite agree) that in all this hoohah about the great global social and devices that do everything we wanted our Star Trek tricorders and communicators to do, we neglect or avert our eyes from the reality that we perform this wizardry at the whim and to the largely unregulated profit of those who control the giant tubes:
We cannot say we were not warned. We will not be able to say “nobody saw this coming”. It’s clear that, even those who are privileged by access and wealth and the ability to amplify their own voices have anticipated that we’ll all be disenfranchised by the private companies that own and control our networks of communication. And yet, most of our effort and ambition in the technology industry are not going towards building for the open web. Most communities that are disadvantaged are still trying to win on networks that they don’t own and will never control. Most of us are still cheering when the most powerful voices in culture and society embrace closed networks, instead of properly criticizing them for doing so.
[and he adds]
This, for me, is a social issue, a cultural issue, and a political issue, not just a technological issue. Perhaps we need to speak of it that way more often, to make the stakes clear.
Even more succinctly: we’re at the mercy of AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, and Time Warner, and really, we shouldn’t be. That’s not the way the internet was conceived, and that’s not what was supposed to happen as we spread broadband like creamy peanut butter across this great land of ours. They should profit, sprawl and survive with our permission, consensus and oversight, not the other way around.
Waiting for the light.
Thursday, November 5th, 2009
I was sitting across from Sammy just moments ago, and she lit up with a golden glow. No, this isn’t any mysterious superpower. It’s just the morning sun, finally cresting the ridge of the hill across from us. Well, I say ‘just’, but we’re in a place where the quality of light…how it casts a rich, angled gold at days beginning and day’s end…is why we travel to places like this.
Hello from New Mexico, a place quite unlike Michigan, Nebraska, Wyoming, Washington, Oregon, or any of the California Coast we’ve explored on this multi-thousand mile trip.
And yet the constant (for me at least) through these road days has been a solar (and lunar)-defined rhythm. The sun sinks below the horizon and we take a few minutes to savor the last rays cast on clouds.
Before we see the moon above a ridgetop at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, we watch western mountains bathed in blue, ghostly light, seemingly from nowhere, and then spin around, looking back east, as the tiniest sliver of full-on moonlight breaks above the rock cliffs by the edge of our campsite. Then, over just a minute or two, the moonlight bursts free, and plays, like a roving spotlight, across the desert floor, and its full intensity is enough for even my old eyes to read by.
Next morning, the sun follows a similar route, and provides a bolder range of visual effects. Add or subtract the ocean (and humidity)…take us down to sea level or up thousands of feet, and the visual display continues to delight. Always the same processes at work…always a spectacularly different experience.
Estimated progress.
Tuesday, September 15th, 2009
Rain finally came to Atlanta mid-September, on a day when I focused on trying to make any visible progress I could in the big stack of Things Left Undone.
This included plowing through a bunch of bankers’ boxes to discover, with some delight, that I could throw away some 60% of what I found without even having even engaging more than one brain cell—I won’t need Grandview High School alumni newsletters from 1997, I guarantee you. And that tin of Altoids, circa 1999? Well, let me just try one…mmm…not bad, a decade later.
But the big progress was made by reconciling our various electronic banking and credit card accounts (yes, to the penny,) and sending off the estimated tax payments that the Internal Revenue Service really prefers you to shoot their way every quarter. And for all the computing power around me, I really can’t see into the future for the rest of the year’s income and expenses, so making tax estimate payments carries a level of fuzzy math along for me that kind of unwinds the self-satisfaction I was generating over reconciling and balancing. We’re straight with the Feds, but who knows how many people will call before the end of the year offering work? There’s the possibility of zero, and there’s the possibility of many multiples of what I’ve brought in so far.
Reply hazy, ask again later.
Must. Put. Thoughts. Out. There.
Sunday, September 13th, 2009
It’s late Sunday night and Mad Men is on (but we’re recording it,) and my adverbs aren’t doing as well as they should, but I’m bothered by the number of things I’ve seen, composed words to share with you in my head, and then never managed to get them committed to this fine, surely permanent form.
So, like so many others who do this kind of thing, I write a paragraph like this as much to me as to you: Must. Put. Words. Out. There. They don’t do me nearly as much good bottled inside. They’re happier, free on the internetwaves, banking, packet-colliding, being shunted from switch to router to hub.
So, so much. Local politics. The snowiest of leopards. The most oleophobic of phones. The plans for a journey of several thousand miles that will begin with a single tank in the prius. The art of putting old letterhead in an IBM typewriter, composing, and sending an actual written letter. All of that, bottled.
But, hey, it’s late Sunday night and Mad Men is on (but we’re recording it.)
Not quite over it.
Monday, July 20th, 2009
Frank Reynolds and Jules Bergman and Frank McGee and David Brinkley, and, oh yeah, Walter Cronkite were my guides and edge-of-seat companions 40 years ago as Wapakoneta Boy and Buzz Lightyear (on the backs of hundreds of NASA people) fulfilled Kennedy’s challenge. Even in the age before remote controls I punched (or dialed) around, grabbing coverage from all three networks.
Here’s a collection of things we may not have known then. Then as now, it’s a cool summer’s day.
I hoist my coffee in salute to the late Mr. Cronkite (all the other anchor guys I mentioned above have also passed away) and I sip in contemplation of what we humans are capable of when we hear the call.
The photo above, by the way, is of a theatre marquee in Yellow Springs, Ohio, roughly halfway between where I watched and Neil Armstrong’s tiny home town in Western Ohio.
Studies at Princeton.
Thursday, July 16th, 2009
We drove north just before the 4th via a route that would take us past an archaeological site on the Ohio River near where Indiana meets Illinois, and that would get us up directly through Chicago to suburban Milwaukee to celebrate the graduation of the older brother of the godson, who will go off to change the world via the University of Wisconsin in the fall.
Great visit, great sociality, but the day and evening before we got there was devoted to travel along US 41 through rural Kentucky and Indiana. We stopped and looked at mounds left for us to ponder by folks many hundreds of years ago, we drove around a large floodplain that forms a teardrop-shaped bend in the Ohio just west of Evansville, IN, we dined at an Amish buffet (how many kinds of egg noodles does one need?), and then we spent the night in a small town that seemed to be weathering the global economic whatever-the-heck-it-is better than most. We parked the Prius for the night in Princeton, Indiana.
It didn’t take long to figure out why—billboards deep in this heartland town kept referring to a Japanese car company: Toyota had come to town to build pickup trucks and SUVs. (That explains the Japanese magazines in the lobby and the rice and miso at the breakfast bar at the Hampton Inn.) We saw many examples of the kind of small businesses that spring up around big ones around Gibson County and when we took a walk through the Princeton town park at sunset, the town seemed, well, fairly alive with optimism and energy on a warm summer night. The residents swam, played baseball, and the teenagers (a bit more lower middle class than Atlanta’s constantly-texting youth) socialized IRL (in real life!) by getting together at the pool.
As I skim headlines concerning Toyota’s American operations, it sure sounds like they have a lot of the same challenges as the Big Three do in Michigan (oh, now they want fewer SUVs. Wait, maybe they want more. Maybe the Prius should be built in Missouri…no, make that Mississippi.) There’s talk of furloughs here, retooling there. It’s just plain hard to do manufacturing well in a fickle, changing economy…but the feeling in small towns where folks make things is way different than the vibe in the places where they make things no longer.
So we need to make things, somehow. And although I’m not particularly concerned that the impetus here is coming from a Japanese-owned company, I’m certainly hoping a broader swath of American business figures out how to make things here, in a lot more places like Princeton, Indiana, again.
Patterns in the heat.
Monday, June 22nd, 2009
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.
Keeping pixels present posted.
Monday, April 27th, 2009
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.
Adobe announces Creative Suite CSOLPC®
Wednesday, April 1st, 2009
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.
Let every word tell.
Tuesday, March 24th, 2009
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.
Playing vs. working vs…?
Sunday, March 22nd, 2009
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…
Attention(s).
Friday, March 13th, 2009
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.)
It’s just some snow.
Sunday, March 1st, 2009
