From Abacus to Abekas, and more.
Tuesday, May 18th, 2004
There’s a fine Timeline of CGI available at an OSU site, part of Wayne Carlson’s teaching materials. he’s the Chair of the Department of Industrial, Interior and Visual Communication Design at Ohio State, and a one-time VP of Cranston-Csuri, the groundbreaking computer graphics and imaging firm based in my home town.
One of the pioneering firms in developing computer paint systems was (and maybe is) Quantel, based in the UK. They almost legally squished the migration of paint programs to personal computers to protect their multi-hundred-thousand dollar boxes that they sold to the big boys. With all my admiration for Quantel’s technical innovation, I’m glad that lawsuit failed.
Just a smidge of optimism.
Friday, April 30th, 2004
…maybe that’s what Bill Moyers and David Brancaccio have to offer to end a week and a troubling month on the PBS Series Now.
First, a story on the real politics, bribery, and arm-twisting behind passing Bush’s Medicare bill.
Then, an eye-opening account of the Pro-Choice, Pro-Women March in Washington last weekend that makes the point that there are millions of religious…deeply religious, pro-choice people out there, and maybe they’ll make it to the polls in November.
Then, an interview with Bob Edwards, who articulately (and yeah, somewhat emotionally) makes the case that journalists covering the White House and journalism in general is not doing the tough job that was defined in the age of Edward R. Murrow. I think I’ll use my gift from Leslie and Christopher to get Edwards’ book on Murrow.
Not good news, overall, capping a month that is filled with not good news, overall. Then why my optimism? Some journalists were at work on that program. They did precisely their jobs, told compelling stories.
Touched something in me.
And now, minutes from Ted Koppel’s Nightline-long reading the honor roll of our dead in Iraq (another program doing difficult work in the face of rabid, senseless jingoism), I have a bit of hope for all of us. Good night, and good luck.
I raise my Morning Edition coffee cup…
Friday, April 30th, 2004
…in tribute to broadcaster Bob Edwards, who finishes up “24 years and 6 months” of hosting the popular NPR program this morning. I know this with some precision because he mentions it several times in just that way—a small sign, perhaps, of the frustration he feels at not being able to cross the 25-year finish line later this year as Morning Edition host.
Just finished listening to the replay of his final few minutes on the MP3 stream that my G5 faithfully records every day before dawn, and I got kinda choked up when they played the long version of the B.J.Liederman-composed theme at the end of Bob’s interview with CBS’s Charles Osgood (who will “see us” on the radio, he always says at the end of Sunday Morning).
“Do you know why we’re talking this morning?” Bob asked Osgood. Turns out the first interview he did on Morning Edition was with Osgood in 1979. “You’re my alpha and omega.”
I always remember—perhaps over-remember—my encounter with Edwards and NPR’s Linda Wertheimer when they came to cover—and host All Things Considered from—the Ohio University campus in the spring of 1976. I remember Mo Udall campaigning on the college green, Jimmy Carter’s sons visiting town, and Edwards getting lots of attention from the young women who worked at WOUB radio.
I got into the dabbling I do with radio and television from generally romantic notions of what “broadcasting”—make that “Broadcasting”—was all about, born of a time when having an FCC license and serving as a public trustee meant something. I’ve always been impressed with the likes of Edward R. Murrow (guess who’s writing a book on Murrow), the steadfast voices of the BBC and CBC, and Cronkite, Schorr, Kuralt—and Edwards. Like most public figures, those latter men, on close examination, are filled with personal flaws and weaknesses, but they did a job on-air that was—and is—honorable.
That counts for something in my book.
Patron saints of my work.
Saturday, April 10th, 2004
Okay, I admit, I found this quite funny. Perhaps you will too. Perhaps especially of you’ve ever had border tape stuck to your eyebrows in the act of x-actoing a piece of recalcitrant newspaper copy.
Rice, burning.
Thursday, April 8th, 2004
As I type, Condoleezza Rice is testifying before the 9/11 commission–and she’s trying to talk over and obfuscate answers under questioning from the quite capable Richard Ben-Veniste. She’s obviously used to answering things her own meandering way.
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It’s a rainy day, and I really ought to be hacking away at a Flash file instead of listening to Dr. Rice prevaricate, but it’s compelling television, and I’ll take my compelling television where I can get it these days. And as she meanders, so shall I through a few points.
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I regularly check in at Transom.org when I want to imagine another career telling stories on the radio. Now, hey, they’ve won a Peabody, and deservedly so. Discover the complexities behind modern radio reporting on their now award-winning site.
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Would you like to live in Oaxaca for a few months, a year? Our friend Martha Rees has a house for rent.
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Wired magazine is blogging The Cult of Mac, and as a founding member of that cult, I heartily endorse that product and/or service.
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The metaphors of intelligence are really quite odd. Dr. Rice seems to mention over and over again that they spent lots of time trying to “shake the trees.”
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The esteemed Google has apparently stepped in it with their proposed g-mail service. Internet freedom pioneer John Gilmore points out just a few of the alarming components in the service, and Rich Skrenta looks at the architecture behind the mega-search engine and imagines an operating system that could dominate everything. Hey, I enjoy lots of these Google enhancements–entering bar codes and airplane N-numbers and the like…but individual privacy online is very, very important for me.
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Sunday morning links, no pancakes.
Sunday, March 21st, 2004
Good morning…oh, wait, it’s afternoon already on the east coast. Darn! Well, here’s a soupçon of linkage for your weekend. Oh, no, please, don’t thank me.
- How Offshore Outsourcing Failed Us (a PDF download)
This is from an October 2003 magazine article, but I’m only coming across it now. It’s of note, I think, if only because the debate over outsourcing is beoming a real part of the 2004 presidential campaign. Sam and I spent some time last night watching Thomas Friedman talk (and perform) to Tim Russert last night on the greater subject of offshore job-shift, and, as much of a globalist as I am, I don’t see exactly what we’re supposed to tell people in Buffalo or Weirton, West Virginia to do for a living. We all can’t be web site designers, right? There ought to be something we can make in these former manufacturing places that the world wants enough to pay a living wage for. Food, maybe? - Dude, Get Out of My Namespace
(New York Times, registration required.) In the future, the fight for the intellectual property that is, well, us will become more difficult than ever. James Gleick, one of my favorite writers, talks about the world running out of names…or at least distingushable names. When The House of Tata goes to court, you know it’s serious. - Little Toy Robot: The Passion of the Robochrist
Actually, this links to an almost-as-tiny article from Ananova, but ‘Little Toy Robot’ is apparently my neighbor, so it seems the neighborly thing to do. It refers to the use of, well, a robot in that big, annoying movie. - I’m blogging this fried chicken
One last link to another apparent neighbor. It’s a strange feeling reading posts about stuff that, y’know, we do as well in real life. “Hey, that’s where we had chicken!” “That’s our Whole Foods.”
Eradication.
Thursday, March 18th, 2004
Just got in from the back yard, where the healthy first bloom of spring is also the not-so-welcome first bloom of kudzu in the back yard, and this year I’ve re-developed the gumption to exert a chemical hand over this scourge of the south–at least as far as its domain extends into our property. I bought some Roundup and welcomed the kudzu back from its long winter’s nap. Actually, as nervous as I am about the use of chemicals at all, I just kinda hit the worst of it and will carefully inspect the damage in a couple of days. What are the consequences of this stuff? Well, there’s some interesting web reading out there, but by en large I think we’re OK as long as I don’t go nuts with the stuff or try planting tomatoes or other edible stuff 24 hours after its use.
Once back inside, though, a quick look at the blog edit screen showed that the weeds that have been plaguing our little Peachtree Hills server have floresced again in the form of (yes, even more) comment spam, mostly on Nancy’s blog, recognized everywhere as a home to comments of all races, creeds, and pharmaceutical orientations. The past few days (hey, it’s spring) have been particularly bad for this stuff…it tends to take root in the predawn hours, and the Roundup in this case is the MT-Blacklist filter created by a nice guy (and photographer) named Jay Allen. It works by doing those Perl-y kinds of searches of the content and URLs of comments and where it finds stuff that matches with a huge (800-plus) collection of entries and expressions, it kills that spam dead, dead, dead.
If only the back yard would work with Perl regular expressions:
(kudzu|privet|viagra|chickweed)[\w\-_.]*\.[a-z]{2,}
Homophily run rampant.
Tuesday, March 16th, 2004
I’m surprised Bush hasn’t directed the Supreme Court to outlaw this practice yet:
homophily:individuals with like interests associate with one another.
I found this tidbit in a PDF Sammy sent me (she’s doing research for her writing, of course)–this very academic paper called Information Flow in Social Groups (PDF download), which, as she says, looks at social connections–that Kevin Bacon six-degrees thing–using the emailing of attachments and links as a test medium.
This paper does some interesting things with how people share information in this email-connected age. I know that I can count on my sister for a certain number and certain style of links, often related to politics and the general idiocy of Folks Out There. There are other dear friends who send me (and the 80 other people in their address book) pictures they’re excited about–only to discover later that they’re hoaxes. This study concludes, among many other things, “most URLs and attachments are not passed on more than once or twice. The ones that do reach a significant fraction of recipients are passed on involuntarily by the sender (advertisements embedded in email messages sent from free email accounts) [or] passed top-down through the organizational hierarchy (an effective way to disseminate information that we do not account for here).” Ah, science explaining social patterns. In the future, our evolution will be algorithm-ized. (Why does this remind me of the Asimov social scientists in The Foundation Trilogy?)
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This started out to be one of those rainy day entries, but the sun come out and brother James and I went out for a nice stroll today, where he got to talk out his frustrations with making our sister’s site look nice on evil Microsoft Windows browsers…among other things…and I got to talk about my attempts to understand the powers and mysteries of Cocoa. Mmmm…Cocoa goodness everywhere.
85 percent busier.
Thursday, March 11th, 2004
i’m going through one of those periods where I think I’ve started and accomplished 85% of many, many tasks…but it seems harder to take just one of those up to one hundered percent. I’ve:
- Loaded tons of video onto my machine and have been editing content
- Composed 85% of a fine piece of music with my keyboard and some fine software
- Squashed comment spam moments after Nancy points it out on her site
- Organized 85% of my photos, tapes, CDs, and DVDs in my office
- Finished a goodly part of the jcbd site
- Planted grass seed in most of where it needs to be in the back yard
- Put together the majority of a new demo tape (or ‘showreel’ as some call it.)
…and, well, you get the idea. If you’ll excuse me, I’ll post this, and be 100% done with…well, this entry.
And we pass the value on to you.
Monday, March 1st, 2004
One of those quick price/value comparisons that makes me happy that I’ve moved up to a G5, but started with a lowly 128.
>
Macintosh 128 Power Macintosh G5 8 MHz 68000 2 GHz PowerPC 970 (two) 128KB RAM 512MB RAM 400KB floppy 700MB/4.3GB optical No hard disk 160GB hard disk 9-inch black and white display (512×342) 17-inch LCD color display (1280×1024) No dedicated graphics hardware 64MB graphics accelerator 230.4Kbps LocalTalk 1Gbps Ethernet One mouse button (it’s all you need) One mouse button (it’s all you need) $2495 (1984 dollars) $2533 (1984 dollars)
Kerry is so very.
Monday, February 23rd, 2004
“On Foray Into the South, Kerry Gets a Spirited Welcome,” says the NYT this morning, and I suspect we were a little tiny part of that hoorah. Our niece seemed a little dubious about the nearly nonstop parade of standing ovations, but hey, that’s what a political rally is about.
Me (and I suspect Sammy) went there to be convinced that this man is who we want as our next leader and I came away with no qualms about the guy’s intelligence and commitment to the process. I think that’s what it comes down to for me…and it’s easier to assess in person than through television: the man’s intelligent, and even more these days, that means a lot to me.
It was I suspect a little like going to a Lincoln rally, because there is something of the quiet reserve about the guy, although I think he as doing everything he could to be energetic, just this side of tipping that over into Howard Dean hooaaaaggghh-land.
My fellow Atlantans seemed to be taken by him, offering warm welcomes and praise, topped by a healthy couple of dozen standing ovations. Our local democratic politicians were out in force…former senator Max Cleland used the word hero about a dozen times in describing his fellow Vietnam vet, and Kerry repayed the compliments in full.
He demonstrated good advance-prep briefing when he said “We have people listening to this outside…the fire marshall would only allow so many in here. I thought ‘everything goes’ in Buckhead?”
Yeah, almost everything. The Roxy theatre is where Sam and Nance and I saw Warren Zevon a few years back…good memories, there.
Sammy cleverly planned ahead by bringing the new camera along, and as you can see on this fine page of photographs, anytime the AP needs a new third-string campaign photog, I’m their man.
Unshuttered.
Friday, February 20th, 2004
Hey, Sammy and I did the appropriate web research, sat down and thought about our needs, calculated, visited the photo store, and, yesterday, made a sensible and yet quite thrilling purchase that takes our shared interest in photography to the next level. Please, have a look at the first 12 hours or so with the new tool/toy.
jcburns dot-dash-dash-dot-dash-dot jcbd.com
Thursday, February 19th, 2004
from The Associated Press…
Morse code is entering the 21st century — or at least the late 20th.
The 160-year-old communication system now has a new character to denote the “@” symbol used in e-mail addresses.
In December, the International Telecommunications Union, which oversees the entire frequency spectrum, from amateur radio to satellites, voted to add the new character.
The new sign, which will be known as a “commat,” consists of the signals for “A” (dot-dash) and “C” (dash-dot-dash-dot), with no space between them.
The new sign is the first in at least several decades, and possibly much longer. Among ITU officials and Morse code aficionados, no one could remember any other addition.
“It’s a pretty big deal,” said Paul Rinaldo, chief technical officer for the American Radio Relay League, the national association for amateur radio operators. “There certainly hasn’t been any change since before World War II.”
The change will allow ham radio operators to exchange e-mails more easily. That is because — in an irony of the digital age — they often use Morse to initiate conversations over the Internet.
Geolocated on a Friday.
Friday, February 6th, 2004
I’ve had one of those moments where I zoom back—from my own body and space—and have a good look in me in my environs. Feet up, warmed by the fans of my turned-around-G5, fancy new pianoesque keyboard to my left, cup of Starbucks to my right (brewed fresh this morning on my back porch), Sennheiser headphones for the moment sitting on the piano keys, and a lamp on in the corner compensating for the grey dampness outside. Yes, I have some sense of where I am, here on earth, and that’s even before Sammy and I get a fancy new GPS unit to show us the way. Sam spent a chunk of this morning surfing for GPS information, and I have to admit, I’m getting the purchasing jones, although it doesn’t take much research around here to reveal that my purchasing jones gets going way too often for way too much—or so it seems to me at this particular moment.
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Maybe I’m just set up for a Friday afternoon rant-ette: And what’s the damn deal with my hair? Even after dropping twenty bucks on a fancy Ansley Mall haircut, I still look like I just rolled out of bed. It’s almost as if when a certain side of my brain starts working harder than the rest, the static electricity generated clumps all the remaining strands atop my head into a little off-center thicket of thinking. It’s not pretty.
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I think when I get in this frame of mind, my energies are best spent spinning out some internet tidbits for youall, separated, of course, by five asterisks.
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The best Usenet newsreader I’ve ever seen is, fortunately for us Mac users, a new one made just for OS X. It’s called Unison. Why does that make me think of Steve Wozniak’s attempt to teach us all to sing in perfect harmony?
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Don’t design on spec. It’s not just a good idea, it’s—well, it’s not the law, but it ought to be, and Mr. Zeldman makes the case well here. As budgets tighten, designers get…well, okay, desperate…and they make bargains with various representatives of satan disguised as potential sources of revenue. It’s (in my experience) never worth it. My sister’s site (beautifully re-crafted into CSS-y goodness by my brother), has some more words of wisdom for freelancers. She’s focusing on photographers, but writers and designers would do well to pay heed.
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Did you know Todd Rundgren recorded samba-ultralounge versions of some of his big hits? Well, I didn’t, but I find them oddly…hypnotically…listenable..and..
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(slap!)
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Oh, sorry. Sometimes my taste in music does kinda betray a life spent around too much white bread, or, at the very least, a pair of ears that have survived more than four decades of music.
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Hmm. Todd Rundgren? Maybe I’m spinning this stuff out just to avoid commenting on the real watercooler fodder of American life this week or to get too let down by the decline and subsidence of one candidate I’d feel really good voting for. I’m going to refill my coffee cup, get the mail (just plopped in our living room), and try to get some perspective on my perspective.
Look up.
Monday, February 2nd, 2004
Sometimes I think there’s too darn much stuff out there available at the click of a mouse.
There’s a site that tells you how much clear sky we’re getting here today and in the near future, there’s one that tells you who else is writing blogs near me, and there’s a site where the creators of the Mac are posting anecdotes, a sort of preemptive strike against the amnesia of lost time.
There are all kinds of fine stories about my life at TBS, or at my old company, or elsewhere that are just sort of fading away in the mist, while the exact wording of the WOUB-TV signoff or how one operates an Ampex ACR-25 stay vividly intact. Just doesn’t seem right.
We had a great dinner last night prepared by master chef Bob and dessert chef Susan, who know how to take guests’ minds off the Superbowl, I tell you.
Not six feet under.
Wednesday, December 10th, 2003
I’ve done my share of logo designs, and I’ve seen more than a few go off to the great logo graveyard in the sky. Well, turns out there actually is such a place, and it’s right here.
Actually, I’m amazed when one of my logos (largely for television stations) survives past the point where its associated design has been ripped down.
For the most part, television stations hurl fresh paint at the screen every few months–but some of my logos have persisted for years.
Once or twice they’ve had to put up with the indignity of being crammed into a circle or rudely italicized, but they’ve hung in there, stalwarts all.
But some corporate logos last far, far longer–in the range of decades–and are usually finally yanked for absurd reasons and at incredible cost. How much did NBC’s redesign in the mid-seventies cost in 1975 dollars? Millions.
Here’s to the logos, dead and gone.
