Travels this summer.
Thursday, August 4th, 2005
We’ve went up north, you know, in late June and early July, and although I haven’t blogged..er, written much about the experience, we do have a few photos. Also tucked away on the Flickr site are some older images from the summer of 2000. All of this is preparatory to some more site reorganization, because hey, it’d be nice to have all of this set up in a way that makes a tiny bit more sense.
Flickr has for me, so far, been an interesting way to stash and share photos. For the more clever among us who can craft piles of Python, Flash, Ruby, or Javascript, the Flickr open API has been an invitation to innovate, which leads to wonderful pages like this Flash-based extravaganza. The whole tagging thing leads toward serendipity and wandering, which is one of the most wonderful things about a bunch of code linked together in a global packetized network—you know, the whole internet thing.
My friends.
Sunday, July 17th, 2005
Greetings, my friends. We are all interested in the future…for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives!
Plan 9 from Outer Space, a classic…perhaps the classic in bad cinema can be yours for a somewhat lengthy download right now. Is this a great internet or what?
We ran this movie in the old days at WTCG (or had we become WTBS at that point?) and of course followed its path toward more well-known infamy.
Wardrobe by Dick Chaney, by the way. Not Cheney, but hey.
A chiropractor. A dead junkie movie star. A man, a plan…and no Panama to speak of. Here’s to the future, 1958 style.
And we’re holding up the bypass.
Thursday, June 23rd, 2005
When Sammy and I honeymooned in London, I discovered that my initials—JCB—formed the name of a big yellow truck and digger and tool company. Kind of like Caterpillar is in the states. Which is kinda cool. (Those three letters are also familiar in Japan and Asia and, heck, some of the US West Coast as the Japan Commercial Bank, issuers of the JCB Card, but that’s another story.)
So I have to be delighted by a single called ‘JCB’ by someone or some group called Nizlopi. Especially when it’s accompanied by a really charming animated flash video.
Back into.
Thursday, June 16th, 2005
There’s no way to get back into writing but to write.
Of course. There’s no way to get back into walking but to walk. There’s no way to get into writing Objective-C programs but to…ah, you get it.
Hello from Atlanta, where summer heat has settled in, but mercifully, the humidity has abated a bit from the weekend, where we had those psuedo-bands of psuedo-hurricane-stuff from almost-hurricane Arlene, making her way up the now-traditional hurricane freeway that starts at Mobile bay and comes on up the border between Georgia and Alabama.
Ah, moisture, humidity, and spectaular, Florida-like clouds at sunset.
I like a girl who gets up early.
Monday, June 13th, 2005
After determining with a certain amount of satisfaction that I can listen to just about any broadcast radio in the world that I want to listen to, from the BBC to the CBC to every NPR station I care about from WGBH to WUNC to KCRW to WOUB and even my old (formerly) 10 watt college station WGDR is online.
(In fact, let me commend you, if I haven’t already, to publicradiofan.com for the most amazing compilation of what’s out there in the land of the commercial-free.)
And a couple of weeks ago what’s left of my once-beloved clear channel AM stations (no, not Clear Channel the company, but clear channel as in they broadcast at night unobstructed by lesser stations, skipping across the ionosphere for hundreds of miles) have gone a-streaming, so I can hear KDKA and WBZ and WCBS, too. For a kid who used to stay up late to pull scratchy AM signals out of the ether through an amazing series of contortions, this is sweet internet heaven indeed.
But there was always one station, one program that was outside my grasp…until recently. My dear longtime friend Kevyn Burger, once serious broadcast journalist, once TV live shot queen has been doing this self-titled show on a Twin Cities FM radio station that stubbornly (seemed to me) refused to put those packets out there.
Well, she’s out there now, from 9 till noon central time. And her voice is coming out of my computer most mornings now. What a treat.
Her show’s kinda…well, extremely oriented toward women, but sometimes I like to catch up with What Women Want. That’s why I have an Ellen rerun on right now.
Bite-sized links.
Tuesday, February 15th, 2005
This is darn funny because it’s so true-ish. And this is some of the planet-destroying equipment I used to use (except that that photo at the bottom looks like no Grass Valley switcher I’ve ever seen.) This is just a wonderful implementation of online mapping (but if you use Safari, you’ll miss out. As much as I love and use Safari, please download Firefox and keep it around for uses just like this.) This is where I’ve been uploading photos, and this is where I’ve been dropping off links I want to find later. It’s all part of that social RSS smushed together interlinky stuff the kids are talking about these days.
Saturday in Miniature.
Sunday, January 23rd, 2005
I’m both chagrined and pleased to say that I stood in line early Saturday morning with Bill Ambrose outside the Apple Store Lenox and chatted with people who were similarly excited to get their hands on the new Mac Mini. (iPod Shuffle enthusiasts had to wait–the store didn’t have any in stock.)
And in the best consumer tradition, I walked out with the cute package that contained a cute package, which, when plugged in, just worked…quite well for having a tiny 256 MB of RAM. And as part os some strange sort of discipline or science experiment, I’m gonna stick with the stock memory allocation for now.
This small box with a hardwired 10/100 Ethernet cable is playing (using VLC) DVDs and Divx videos over our local network without complaint. It plays Keynote presentations happily…as long as the screen size isn’t gigantic. Yeah, I probably wouldn’t edit videos on it, but I would have it sit in our living room and serve up the world.
So we’re all iLifed and iWorked and networked. Digital hub realized.
Tipped off.
Friday, January 14th, 2005
The hoopla of Tuesday’s Macworld announcements has come and gone, and now we’re left with that interesting interregnum where we wait for the products to be actually available in our malls or in our living rooms (Apple’s saying January 22nd, Bill Ambrose has checked the Atlanta Apple Store and he says more like the actual end of the month.)
And one guy—Paul Nixon—has put together a terrific infographic called Apple’s Tipping Point: Macs for the Masses that analyzes how that clever fruit/computer company places products in the marketplace that overcome the psychological resistance most of us have to price versus the natural attraction many (not most) of us have toward the coolness of the new.
He says “These things do not happen by accident. The graphic [linked above] illustrates extreme patience and foresight from Apple to bring users to the platform by innovating increasingly towards the mass market over time without sacrificing the middle or high-end markets.”
Meanwhile, speaking of tipping, the lawsuit filed against the long-time proprietor of a Mac rumors site is beginning to show signs of being a public relations nightmare for Apple. We’ve learned (out here on the internet) that “Nick de Plume” is in fact a 19 year old Harvard undergrad (!) who has been doing this since he was 13 (!!). He’s positioning himself well to be the David to Jobs and company’s Goliath. Danger, danger. Me, I think sites like this are protected speech, especially against big confidentiality-obsessed corporations, even as I acknowledge that they can take some of “the fun”, whatever that is, out of surprise announcements. So maybe the “hold everything til Steve’s keynote” approach isn’t that great a plan, year-to-year? Jobs himself seemed a bit tired of running through OS X Tiger’s new features (“behold! the Dashboard!”) which are terrific, but are great mostly in a greater context that doesn’t involve surprise. Apple’s greatness now, is revealed more in the sense that it has a roadmap (as Paul Nixon has shown, above.)
And although a 99 dollar iPod is a very neat thing (that I might pick up as an impulse buy), my niece, who has been saving up for a big purchase, is still drawn to the pink iPod Mini, because (need you ask), it’s pink.
Christmas day, the 11th of January.
Tuesday, January 11th, 2005
Most of you know that the Apple Macintosh has been an important part of the tools I use since 1984, and my admiration for the machines Apple makes extends back to the Apple ][ days.
And since the Second Coming of Steve Jobs, the annual announcements in January from Jobs-san, onstage, clad in blue jeans and a black turtleneck, have been eagerly (to say the least) anticipated by the Mac faithful.
Mac faithful! That, of course, is the phrase everyone uses. In fact, the jargon of religion and cults seems to suffuse most online writing about Apple, the Mac, the iPod, and the people who buy and advocate them. I guess in some ways it’s easier to shortcut understanding of this kind of enthusiastic loyalty over a company and products that are, after all, American consumer goods, designed to be manufactured and sold at a profit, to the benefit of stockholders. It’s just a company, like Ford or BMW or Sony, right?
Well, yes and no. There doesn’t seem to be a single company out there that does as good and consistent a job of providing the opportunity to purchase a 21st century future in the form of hardware and software that, for the most part, just works…no muss or fuss. And it works in a cool way, in cool dress. Yes, the Consumer Electronics Show just concluded in Las Vegas has, taken together, more cool stuff from more cool places—but there’s a lot of crap in there, and it takes several dozen companies gathered together to generate the buzz that one fruit-named company can in one presentation.
And that presentation—the Steve Jobs keynote at the annual Macworld show, with what up until this year has been a live webcast of the product unveiling, has been a special day in the lives of Mac folk. Here, in a cascade of wonderment, was “the new this, and the upgraded that, and oh yeah, just one more thing–this doohickey here may well change your life.”
Ooh. Aah! And the 2005 version of that event happens today, at noon eastern time, in San Francisco. And the rumor websites have it that this year, well, boy oh boy, this year the thingies and doohickies and doodahs are going to be more spectacular and life-changing and ultimately cool than ever.
But this year, immediate gratification has been delayed by nine hours, to 9 pm eastern time. Rumors abound as to the reason for the delay, but it might be as simple as Steve doesn’t want to spend the money on the extra bandwidth a live webcast consumes, with the technological flakiness that might result. or, like David Letterman and unlike Bill Gates (who keynoted at CES), he’d like some hours in post to tighten up his performance and remove any flubs or blue screens of death. One guy (nicknamed ‘blueflame’) commented on MacRumors that the delay “sucks, i usually look foreward [sic] to this day more than christmas.”
Yes, well, perhaps that’s a symptom. It might not be a good thing to let today’s even become too special in your life. And don’t forget, the only gift Steve is giving us is the opportunity to hand over some cash in exchange for coolness. Hmm…where did I put that cash, anyway?
So gather ye collections of rumors and possibilities, and settle down…relax! …for what on the east coast will be an after-dinner treat.
Soggy in Southeast Ohio.
Sunday, January 9th, 2005
Back in the late sixties, the US Army Corps of Engineers spent a bundle moving the Hocking River out from the center of Athens Ohio, the home of Ohio University. They assured the town, with characteristic bravado, that its flooding problems were over. Over, I tell you! Well, apparently it didn’t work.
According to data from the National Weather Service, the Hocking River near Athens had reached 22.28 feet early [Thursday], more than two feet above the flood elevation level of 20 feet. The flood elevation level is the point at which water begins to come over the riverbank, said Ray Hazlett, assistant service/safety director for the city of Athens.
Cold and soggy…glad I’m not in classes there this winter. Of course, I think I’m glad I’m not in classes anywhere…I’m fortunate I can lead a life of downloading obscure academic papers (that’s a PDF) referred to me by my wife and jumping around on the internet trying to figure out what the heck an exploratoid is (see first paper under ‘preprints.’) Yes, an education worth every penny I pay for it.
The life quixotic.
Tuesday, January 4th, 2005
Calendar flips, and I had the experience this year of being at a New Year’s gathering where, to be frank, I really didn’t know these folks all that well and they really didn’t come from the same world that I inhabit…and so I found it all the more profound that as the seconds ticked off on CNN or on the Regis-as-Dick-Clark show or wherever the heck the TV was at year’s end, I heard a general and profound sentiment–expressed, right out there in the room–of good riddance to 2004 and to all the godawful stuff that happened in that year and maybe we could all just do a bit better for ourselves and each other in this bright shiny new year we’ve just popped the bubble wrap on.
A murmered plurality of “let’s move on.” A basic human optimism that things will be better in the next time period than in the last. A sarcastic, under-the-breath “they couldn’t get much worse, now could they?”
And so we shall. I’ve been getting back into some beginning of the year, short-deadline, get-it-done design work, there have been sounds of writing productivity from the archaeologist’s office upstairs, and there are reports of fine, fine new Mac products about to be announced just around the corner.
And here in (positively) Atlanta, it’s warm outside. An optimist would find that reassuring…
This house has been arborized.
Wednesday, December 22nd, 2004
Well, we bought the tree this morning, because we heard it would start raining in the afternoon, and so it has. Yes, we’re late tree-buyers, but we make up for it by leaving it up through most of January, as if we’re just sorta in another time zone.
Seems as if there are a bunch of things I want to blog about, but (also seems) like I’m less than inspired when I actually sit down here and try to type. I could tell you about the cross-country drive with my father, more than 2200 miles each way in search of my sister and her husband in San Diego. I could tell you about Sammy’s father’s arthroscopic knee surgery. I could tell you about our cool new DVD player that plays Divx files, MPEGs, Mp3s, the works. I could tell you about running into TBS colleague Glenn Boyette at the Wino Kroger the other day.
But um…not just yet.
A non-hi-def experience.
Tuesday, December 7th, 2004
Shelley Palmer, a NY based composer and technology maven who does a blog on the latter for NATAS (the Emmy people) is not having a good time with the High Definition DVR set-top box provided by Time Warner in New York, the SA8000HD:
What is your personal tolerance for losing your recorded material? In the pre-DVR world, you might lose a videotape. In a DVR world, you may/will lose your hard drive. Do you care that every hard drive error is going to cost you everything you have recorded for the past week or two? Time Warner Cable is extremely nice about replacing SD8000HD boxes. They will make an appointment to swap out your box in about a week. More of a pain … how do you feel about reprogramming all of your recording preferences and profile preferences when they give you the new box? I’ve done it eight times in 45 days and you know what … it sucks!
Oh, yeah you know your DVR is always recording, right? Of course you know, thats why the resolution of your already degraded, compressed signal looks even worse on a DVR box. It must constantly record what you are watching to function (otherwise you could not have pause and rewind available all of the time) so when you loose a hard drive, you dont have television. Small problem? I dont think so!
How do you feel about paying extra for HD programming? Yes, you already subscribe to ESPN but that doesnt entitle you to ESPNHD. Nope, thats part of an additional package $8.95 more monthly. Now how much will you pay? The good news is that youll also get InHD and HDNet in the package, if you call that good news. Just how high can your cable bill go? Theyre testing the limits of my endurance, but I dont think there is an upward limit.
How often will you want to make a VHS of something (like the kids or someone you know on a local news channel or a friend being featured on some game show)? Not with a Time Warner Cable SA8000HD box. Thats simply not possible unless your consumer VHS machine has a component input. If youre wondering if yours does, trust me it doesnt! How about the 300 plus non-HD channels, they must be available through the video outputs or the RF out or the S-Video out? Uh, what part of not possible didnt you understand!
And last, but not least just how bad can standard definition look? Watch any of the 300 non-HD channels and form your own opinion. Forget about the two second channel changing and aspect ratio adjustment, just watch. It is a sub-optimal experience in the extreme.
BTW, there are only four local television stations in the United States that are shooting their local news in HD and none of them are in New York, so all of the local programming on the HD channels is upconverted and it looks like it!
So, this holiday season, before you rush out to buy your HD/Home Theater System, find a friend who has a system like the one you want to purchase and spend a few minutes at watching TV at their house. After all, what is emotionally satisfying to one man well, you know the rest.
When I hear about all cable TV moving to digital, I think about experiences like this. I know that Sammy has little tolerance for slow channel-changing (our analog cable zips through channels as fast as the TV), as do I…so no, I don’t think we’ll be jumping in this direction anytime soon.
Hopped, not hip.
Tuesday, November 23rd, 2004
Rainy rainy day here in the ATL, an election day (one runoff race), a day where Sam and I (accompanied by brother James) walked to our library (our polling place) in a light rain and returned in a really, really substantial downpour. The last third of our walk was what I think Sammy would call a marcha forcada, a forced walk through flooded streets and cracked Virginia-Highland sidewalks, slapped by drooping damp treebranches as we slipped on once-beautiful autumn leaves and water, water everywhere.
But we’re all safe and dry and warm now and our civic duty was done (later, the butchers at Whole Foods seemed amazed that there was an election today: “who’s it for? A judge? Judge Judy?”)…and I’m winding down our Tuesday, thinking about the mixed media on my Mac screen.
I’ve been watching a DVD set of SCTV–the first season of their hilarious ‘network 90’ broadcasts from the late 1970s. These folks have always inspired and entertained me in a way that Saturday Night Live never quite could, and their special breed of daring included isolating themselves in Edmonton, Alberta with very little budget–and in that fine “hey let’s put on a show” tradition I enjoyed at TBS, they did. They used television to parody and tell truths about television, and they did it at a time when (let me tell you) television was hard.
Also flowing through my G5 (going through the multiple steps necessary to grab a streaming RealAudio file and turn it into a playable MP3 file–oh, don’t ask) are several episodes of Pop Vultures, a program for Public Radio produced nominally by Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Productions, but really it’s a buncha music fans in their twenties sitting ’round talking–apparently in bulk, and then through the miracle of some inspired editing, it becomes a fresh, original set of conversations about music and our emotional attachments and didactic conclusions about same. It’s conducted by a Drew Barrymoreish young writer named Kate Sullivan, and once they’ve trimmed most of the “you know”s and “like”s out of it and muffled some of the “sh(mmf)t”s and “f(mmuh)ck”s, it’s really quite listenable.
The feeling I get overhearing excited chat about the Black Stripes and OutKast and what the hell breakbeats are reminds me of the pangs I sagged from when my fellow WGDR disk jockeys would talk music and it was clear that I just wasn’t in their league.
But I knew crappy music way better than they did. And see where that got me!
So I’m adrift between the old masters of SCTV and the young Vultures of Pop, and the rain might be picking up again outside.
Time to say goodnight.
North with the wind.
Sunday, November 7th, 2004
We pulled out of Milwaukee this morning headed for Sammy’s parents’ cottage in the Upper Peninsula, the second part of this, our third major car trip this autumn. Sammy’s doing the math as we head out of Escanaba, comfortable that we’ll arrive in time to be of some help to her parents. “Ooh, what’s that?” she asks, pointing off to the right…oh. It’s a mosquito. A big, four-foot, very detailed mosquito sculpture mounted on what looked like a shipping container, there without comment or notice on the side of the road. That tells you one of the things the U.P. folk like to joke about, when they aren’t cracking wise about accents or snowmobiles or, of course, the weather.
The weather has, indeed, been terrific so far, and although there are some grey clouds hovering over Lake Michigan, we’re in the sunshine and we have been, albeit with a cool, stiff wind, most of this trip.
The mission of our first leg—stopping in Milwaukee, was the birthday celebration—okay, the fiftieth birthday celebration, of our good friend Deb, who comments here occasionally and much more frequently (and interestingly) over at nancynall.com. We had a great time, socializing, visiting, and eating Thai food—not quite the indigenous cuisine of a south Milwaukee suburb.
We had a little time on Saturday to take a tour of Milwaukee’s last national mass-market brewery (although since Miller is now owned by a South Africa conglomerate, Milwaukee folks are a little less boosterish about the one-time ‘champagne of bottled beers.’) It was interesting to me because it remains a tour of an actual working place that makes something, as opposed to those companies that now that offer fake assembly lines or mini-theme parks to tourists, along with the obligatory gift shop. (That might have been a trend pioneered by the Universal Studios tour, which surprised me in the 1970s by how little it was, in fact, a tour of Universal Studios.)
We also wandered around the Milwaukee Art Museum, which is this great modernist thing, a bright white sailing ship with unfolding wings, perched on the shores of Lake Michigan (where, by the way, it is cooler.) The art museum gives the downtown of Milwaukee a connection to the lakefront that, on a sunny day at least, is quite pleasant.
The other thing we’re having a chance to do on this trip is to commiserate with friends about the outcome of the Presidential election, which, to say the least, didn’t go our way. At Deb’s party, one newspaper reporter talked about the excruciating assignment of covering a Kerry would-be victory rally that started out awash in hope and ended in pain…and I suppose that would be the story for either side in a contest this polarized, nasty, and portentious. Kerry’s unification concession was inspiring, but the ill health of the chief justice and the tenor of George W’s press conference (his first in about three centuries, I think) leads me to believe that his wild spending spree of political capital will be painful for us to finance, and not just in monetary terms.
As I type, we’re rolling around the Big Bay de Noc (Lake Michigan by any other name) and the greying skies are now setting impossibly white snow flurries adrift across the hood of our car! Yes, we’ve gone from a warmish morning to a snowy but still—barely—sunshiny afternoon.
And one last change as we pull into Manistique, Michigan…it’s sleet that’s skittering across the road, as some last shafts of light come in from the west. Sammy looks north, away from the lake, and says “ten miles that way and it’s probably nice.”
We’ve arrived in the Upper Peninsula in November. What did we expect?
Report from Columbus, Ohio.
Tuesday, November 2nd, 2004
Michael Smith (Leslie and Christopher’s friend) checks in from the battleground that is also my home town:
I got up this morning at 5:30 a.m. to make sure I made it to my polling location by the time they opened at 6:30 a.m. I arrived at the Sherwood Middle School at 6:15 a.m. and the line was already from the front doors to the front side-walk (probably 100 feet or so) where it made a 90 degree turn and continued almost the entire length of the school. I would estimate there were at least 200 people waiting ahead of me, prior to the polls opening. By the time the front doors opened, the line extended at least another 100 feet past the school. Just tremendous turn-out.
The crowd was very mixed, just like our neighborhood with a large turn-out of African-Americans.There was only the minor chit-chat about the length of the line and how in past years it was never like this. No one really talked issues or candidates, no activism at all really. There was a group of three in front of me, probably pretty much the average late 50’s Bush supporters. The one woman had the most God-awful “Re-elect the First Family” photo button on her jacket. The photo made President Bush and Laura look like bobbleheads—not a terribly inaccurate photo I guess.
The line had a small laugh when a school bus full of middle-schoolers drove buy and the children began chanting “Kerry, Kerry!” to those waiting in line to get into the building. Of course, Button Lady didn’t appreciate this very much and opinioned to her fellow Bush supporters that “unfortunately children have brains and mouths too!”.
I dare say they exhibited far better use of both than this trio.Once the polls actually opened things went rather smoothly. There was a fair amount of confusion due to the set-up of the sign-in tables and arrangement of the actual voting machines. I am certain none of the confusion would have occurred had there been the typical small voter turn-out. Due to the large number, it quickly resulted in large disorganized lines getting intermixed with people being very uncertain as to where they should be. However, within 15 minutes people began assisting each other – offering tips on what line to go to, etc. Typical Ohio, we tend to be friendly here I guess.
I did not see a single “campaigner” outside the 100 foot line. I also did not see a single member of either party there to challenge voters—an issue that has gotten a lot of press here in Columbus and nation-wide. In fact, on the way home from work at 5:00 on the local call in radio station not one person reported having an issue voting other than lengthy waits in line—some up to 3 hours.
For myself, I was done and out in about an 1 3/4 hours from the time I arrived.
Interestingly enough, on the way back to my car I was asked by two separate groups of African-American middle school children who I voted for. I was really pre-occupied about beating traffic to get to a job that I was already late for and really didn’t want to respond to what were most likely smart-mouth little punk kids. Wouldn’t you know, both groups of kids gave little cheers after I gruffly responded “Kerry”! After the second group did that in the space of 15 seconds, I just stopped dead in my tracks and began laughing out loud—I still don’t know why but it was just so encouraging to see these kids so aware!
Back here in Atlanta, my father had to go to the polling place three times before he was able to get into a line he could endure. An amazing day so far…let’s see how it plays out as the sun goes down here on the East Coast.
