Your Nose out of the Joint of Oscar.
Monday, December 8th, 2003
I was jumping from blog to blog this morning….in search of an obscure tidbit related to Cocoa, and came upon this on some Swedish guy’s blog:
The Joint of Oscar
When I drive to work, I use a road called The joint of Oscar and I remember one year ago, the road was clogged every morning so it took almost an hour to go from the day-care center to work. This fall/winter has been a walk in the park so far…
I just like the idea that a road could be named something like that. Of course, down here it would be named The Joint of Buford. And there would be the Joint of Barbecue right there on the Joint of Buford.
Of course, the phrase “the downtown connector” might sound exactly that unusual to some Swedish guy, and “spaghetti junction” probably doesn’t much sense to visiting Italians. The joint of pasta?
Following the trail.
Sunday, December 7th, 2003
Hi on a sunny but cool Atlanta Sunday afternoon, and I find myself grumping in disgruntlement looking at my site in comparison to writers (okay, bloggers) who really know what they’re doing. Despite installing a system that makes tossing entries into the big stack of history a breeze, I end up not sitting down to write because, it seems to me right now, that my interestingness quotient is at a fairly low ebb and my mom always said, “if you can’t say something interesting, say nothing at all.” Well, no, she didn’t really say that, but somehow I hear it in her voice.
But some folks seem to do just fine saying, in a few terse words and in a lot of daily entries, “hey look at this,” and simply pointing the way. Some other folks (my sister comes to mind) take the “recipient list supressed” approach and email the worthwile links they spot throughout the day. This is way more friendly than big-ass email attachments, and it does, in an odd 21st-century kind of way, give me a daily conenction to my sister, who, after all, is on the other side of the continent these days.
And I find myself taking my sister’s approach and then asking myself, why didn’t I just blog that?
If this site was more bloglike and in fact consisted of a series of quick entries, often links to other sites, then,well it’d probably work something like this. Did you see that Robert Cringely piece about voting machines? For the link-intolerant, it says in pertinent part:
Forgetting for a moment Diebold’s voting machines, let’s look at the other equipment they make. Diebold makes a lot of ATM machines. They make machines that sell tickets for trains and subways. They make store checkout scanners, including self-service scanners. They make machines that allow access to buildings for people with magnetic cards. They make machines that use magnetic cards for payment in closed systems like university dining rooms. All of these are machines that involve data input that results in a transaction, just like a voting machine. But unlike a voting machine, every one of these other kinds of Diebold machines — EVERY ONE — creates a paper trail and can be audited. Would Citibank have it any other way? Would Home Depot? Would the CIA? Of course not. These machines affect the livelihood of their owners. If they can’t be audited they can’t be trusted. If they can’t be trusted they won’t be used.
Now back to those voting machines. If EVERY OTHER kind of machine you make includes an auditable paper trail, wouldn’t it seem logical to include such a capability in the voting machines, too? Given that what you are doing is adapting existing technology to a new purpose, wouldn’t it be logical to carry over to voting machines this capability that is so important in every other kind of transaction device?
This confuses me. I’d love to know who said to leave the feature out and why?
Next week: the answer.
Clearly, the Cringester makes the one key point–who made the decision to omit the paper trail and why? I’ll certainly be tuning in next week, whenever that is exactly. As far as my take on it (gee, thanks for asking,) I really am impressed with Australia’s open-source solution to voting technology that not only has a paper trail, the source code has a paper trail–it can be downloaded and scrutinized for deficiencies and if you find them, they patch ’em.
Can you see the U.S. government doing that? Naah, me either.
I’m not much of a fan of Diebold these days (despite having a friend who works there), because of their approach to the technology, their approach to free speech on the internet, and their general “we’re a big company, we know what we’re doing” approach to something so vital to our nation’s function.
I’m not even sure I’m comfortable with their ATMs these days.
We’re all caffeinated.
Tuesday, November 25th, 2003
Well, if I’m to believe this, we are. And I type this while sipping near-freezing coffee, quite caffeinated, and so cold because it was actually sitting outside overnight on the back porch. According to the thermometer out there, it got down to 31°F last night. Frosty! Well, kinda.
I took a look at The Weather Channel’s map of the 48 contiguous this morning, and it was a remarkably uniform frosty blue, except for the Carolina coast (hi Rosanna, Aunt Rose) and San Diego (hi Leslie.) A bracing good Tuesday morning to the rest of you.
In a fog.
Sunday, November 16th, 2003
No, really.
It’s Sunday morning (as Charles Osgood intones in the other room), and I’m having trouble seeing the back end of our back yard out my office window. It’s a fine fog we’re in. No, indeed, I’m not complaining. There’s something nice about fog and autumnal colors…they fade away elegantly, stepped down into greyscale, as if vignetted by an expert 1940s cinematographer, while the close-up leaves pop out as if it was all part of some cosmic lighting plan.
But truth is, it’s probably just the dew point. Or something.
We just got back from a couple of days in Charlotte, where I checked in on a news channel I designed last year and Sammy attended the Southeastern Archaeological Conference meetings, where, I’m sure, the papers presented are important and profound, but for me, the taste of Rob Benson’s fine home-brewed stout (in considerable quantities) will be my lasting memory.
It was a fairly painless trip. The iPod kept us company (although, remarkably, we weren’t dark silhouettes rocking out on bright flat-color backgrounds) by sending Music for People Our Age out the iTrip and thus out the radio in our iHonda. We journeyed past twin towering fireworks outlet stores that sit on I-85’s entry to and its exit from South Carolina, twin bulwarks of our Constitutional Right to bear explosives. We beheld the enormous peach (some say it’s a water tower) that guards Gaffney, SC from high gas prices, and we shook our heads in incomprehension that Charlotte would actually name a road after Billy Graham.
Once there, we enjoyed the company of some fine archaeologists, most defying the cliche of tweedy-jacketed pontificators, sherry in hand. This was more the blue-jeaned clan of big hand-gesturers, opining with a homebrew at the ready. There was dancing. There was conviviality.
And although there wasn’t out-and-out dancing at News 14 Carolina Charlotte, there was plenty of conviviality amidst folks working hard to crank out 24-hour news. And there was feasting–Meteorologist Jeff Crum brought in homemade candies that were amazing, and there were homemade chocolate chip cookies in Jim Travers’ office. So we were all on a sugar high amidst discussions of typefaces and colors.
Not bad for a quick trip.
Surprised by the calendar.
Saturday, November 1st, 2003
It always catches me napping, but hey presto, it’s November!
Seems as if it was just last night we were sitting on the steps of James and Rebecca’s lovely Avondale Estates home, watching a steady stream of kids make their way past the foamcore tombstones lit by colored lights and…hey wait, it was last night! I’m still burping the pizza! What’s all this about November, then?
Oh.
Sometimes the steady clunk of the days into the ‘completed’ bin of life just lulls me into a state of complacency, only to be startled by the arrival of yet another month’s worth of bills–didn’t I just pay those the other day when we were in Seattle? Oh, our west coast trip was how long ago? Amazing. This explains the leaves in the yard.
I think we get–okay, I get–a little disoriented by the travel. When we get the opportunity to have several tastes of fall–starting with a soupçon of leaf-color in Ontario, just north of Sault Saint Marie, and savored in the next course as we drove up the Keewenau Peninsula towards a small town called Agate Harbor–all of these small morsels set me up for the big “huh?” when autumn finally makes it down here to latitude 37, Positively Atlanta.
But it’s here, complete with leaves to be raked, and since we’ve dispensed with the birthdays and trick-or-treating that marks the tenth month, hey, why not the eleventh?
Here in town, it means we get to vote in a few days for a County Commissioner from a slate of candidates of whom none of which are flaw-free as far as I’m concerned. Sure, none of them are an action movie star either, but that’s small consolation.
And it also means (it seems) that more folks are calling to have fine graphic design work done at reasonable prices, so I suppose it’s a good thing that the new G5 is humming along beautifully, flawlessly, aluminum-y.
But i just wasn’t quite ready for the view of Miner’s Castle when Sammy flipped the calendar on the refrigerator (yes, twelve months of the Upper Peninsula, courtesy of Sam’s parents.) November it is, then.
Gee, five, and one black cat.
Sunday, October 26th, 2003
Sammy came in and asked, “how’s your new computer working?”
I motioned toward the screen and pressed F9.
“Good God,” she said, as the screen became a gallery of dozens of tiny windows.
My new G5 showed up at 7 pm on Friday. Switching over was a snap. No, it didn’t come with Panther installed, but about an hour later, it was. Yes, I certainly have been and remain a Mac enthusiast, but “enthusiast” doesn’t quite contain my reactions to the new operating system. It does the job, it stays out of my way, it’s robust, it’s fun, and it didn’t break anything I’ve used so far, including some fairly obscure television stuff.
Who could ask for more? It’s my first reaction that the new finder, combined with the Exposé window scurrying thing represents a fundamentally new and sensible way of dealing with gazillions of files, chunks of words, networked machines, and miscellaneous content.
Very nice, youall.
It’s a rainy fall sunday morning in Atlanta–perfect for playing with a new machine, and there’s something nice about waking up and finding that every computer in the house has already recognized that it’s no longer Daylight Savings Time. My Sony DV deck is supposed to set its time automatically (and thus also recognize the change), but it never has.
Technology: great when it works, annoying when it doesn’t.
Office upgrade.
Thursday, October 23rd, 2003
No, I’m not talking about any product to come out of Microsoft, I’m talking about the convergence of hardware and software that will, UPS and FedEx willing, transform my workspace in the next 24 hours.
And yet, in some ways, it won’t transform things at all.
There is a new Mac G5 (yes, dual processors, 2 ghz) headed this way, along with some additional RAM and a stylish new Sony 17 inch LCD display to join the old reliable Apple 17 inch display in desk harmony. When it comes in the door tomorrow I will once again be able to render frames of television at outlandish speeds, to make design decisions in a blur, to check my email so fast that I won’t even realize it’s happened.
(Well, wait, I can render frames of fine tv pretty darn fast now, but…)
And in order to make way for this honkin’ new machine, I cleaned up, well, half of my office today. The other half, the north side, is a sad collection of stacks and piles that is headed for the trash and the storage shed and various containers and nooks and crannies. It’s really amazing what detritus is accumulated when I’m not looking—and I spose that’s most of the time.
Do I really need Adobe manuals from the mid-nineties? How about that Lisa manual? (Well, that’s just a souvenir.) How about that Duet, or that Dekocast? (Don’t ask.) It’s hard for me to throw stuff out, but it gives me a good feeling afterwards, for sure.
But it’s not just a hardware transition we’re talking about here. It’s entirely possible that the new machine will come with the much-vaunted new version of the Mac operating system—10.3—a.k.a. ‘Panther.’ And if it doesn’t, I know some folks who will be camping out at the Apple store for their big software release event thingie, and la Pantera will thus be installed on all our machines soon enough. So windows will be scurrying and users will be switching and, ah, I hear there’s a performance boost, too.
The nice thing out this transition is if it works as advertised, I’ll be able to just copy over a couple of key directories from the old machine and within a few minutes, boot into a familiar world that will be way, way faster.
And quieter too, I think.
Is this the last entry from El Mercurio? Could be. At least it’ll probably be under that name. Brother James gets this machine, drive wiped and personality eliminated. Then it’s up to him to use a dual processor 800 mhz machine for good, not evil.
But as for me, gCinco arrives tomorrow.
Out of doors.
Wednesday, October 22nd, 2003
It’s just too darn hard to stay inside on a day like today, so I’m out here in the back yard amidst the half-raked leaves, listing to the wind through the trees and the quiet, distant sounds of our Virginia-Highland neighborhood.
It occured to me that folks stumbling on a site called Positively Atlanta Georgia will probably be expecting something about Atlanta, and in fact might be baffled on encountering entries about the Oregon coast and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan…but that’s how our life works. Those far-off places are, in a sense, extensions of the 150 yards or so within our wifi (okay, Airport) connection.
But we’ve returned from our most recent west coast wander, and we’re doing the day-to-day tasks in our real and virtual worlds (cleaning, backup, billpaying) that release a certain satisfaction upon their completion. And fortunately for me, some of these can be done in the back yard on a day where it’s a pleasure to live in Atlantatown…mid 70s, low humidity, nice breezes, fall in the air, an environment way removed from the more mosquito and humidity-filled place I find outside our back door in the summertime.
Several of the neighborhoods are doing fall festivals of one sort or another, and I think our Halloween ritual of visiting our niece’s environs to experience trick-or-treat will be just the treat for both of us. We don’t live in a place that experiences this holiday to the Nth degree, but there’s certainly a southern tradition of dressing up (and in some places around here, cross-dressing up that we get a good hit of entertainment just by bystanding (innocently.)
An incredibly tiny ant has just made his way across the first Titanium laptop he’s conquered in his miniature life (I’ll wager) and a leaf or two drops in my lap to remind me that I’m only about half-done with the raking…so maybe I oughta hit the save button and de-leaf a bit more.
Hope you enjoy your Wednesday afternoon.
Sunday roast.
Sunday, October 19th, 2003
We got a organic-y whole turkey from Whole Foods this morning on the theory that its roasting would warm up the house–probably a good idea since we awoke to a Sunday in Atlanta that was chilly, to say the least.
It’s autumn! It’s cool! And we’re back on the east coast.
Got in last night from Hartsfield–or is that Hartsfield-Jackson?–brother James was pulling up (thanks!) just as we finished picking up our bags. Returned to a house that featured a big pile of mail, which we might get to sorting today–we’re trying to have a quiet, low-key Sunday.
And perhaps a slightly warmer one, now that the oven is on, bird inside.
Furnace? Oh yes, we have one of those. Two of those, actually, one downstairs and one up–but for some reason, we celebrate the “good sleeping weather” in late fall and early spring and try not to fire it up until we see our breath–inside. Yes, I’m cheap.
We had a great visit–the last leg of our multistop west coast trip–with Leslie and Christopher in sunny (for the most part) San Diego–they took us (at night) a block down their street to see yet another incarnation of the Pacific Ocean–glowing iTrip blue with Red Tide…an incredible experience, watching the edges of the wave-crests bloom with light in the darkness. We also wandered around the Cabrillo National Monument, surprisingly high above San Diego Bay, and had a drink or two at the Hotel del Coronado; later, waiting for our return flight, I read the hotel was being sold from some rich guys to some other rich guys on the very day we were there.
So we saw the Pacific from high and low on the west coast…in bright sun, under that darn marine layer, in driving rain, on the rocks, off the beach, you name it. Nice trip.
Now, back to it, whatever “it” is.
Leaving the Depoe.
Wednesday, October 15th, 2003
Well, it’s been a short visit, but the rains parted and the sun came out and the Oregon Coast is nothing if not attractive, especially late in the year when the tourists have gone and it’s not too cold and rainy.
We’re here, not far south of the 45th parallel, in Depoe Bay, Oregon.
Well, actually it was cold and rainy this morning when we started our day at a B&B in Astoria, Oregon, perched astride the mouth of the Columbia–which is one wide darn river as it dumps into the Pacific. We drove down from Seattle yesterday and enjoyed the views of the coast, and when we got to Astoria (yes, John Jacob Astor had something to do with that name) the evening light made the riverside and the low bridge across the wide river just sparkle.
We climbed the Astoria Column (should I be linking to all of these?) and watched the sun set over the city, and then enjoyed a seafood dinner down in town.
Today, we awoke to rain and more rain, and we drove through it down the coast, through towns with familiar names (Seaside, Tillamook) and came to rest here, in a small house-turned-office next to the What-Not Shop, the library and workshop of one of Sammy’s Mesoamerican colleagues. His brother owns the shop, and his family grew up in this part of Oregon, but until now, I had only seen him in Oaxaca.
So here we lunched with that selfsame Mesoamericanist, talking the peculiar mix of gossip, planning, and anthropology that seems to be the main sustenance of these folks.
Outside the restaurant, in the sun, the waves crashed and the wet rocks glistened, oblivious to the talk of people who lived long ago, people who walked mountain ridges in southern Mexico.
Tomorrow, we’re off to Southern California.
Yes, again!
Dim summed.
Sunday, October 12th, 2003
Hello from Seattle, where it’s been (surprise!) blustery and rainy, although today the sun has come out in well-defined, discrete, miserly chunks. This portion of our western trip has been a fine family visit so far, with lots of time and attention spent with our very vocal 2.5 year old nephew.
This sunday morning we’ve read the New York Times and taken a walk and yes, sipped some Starbucks Kenyan (Karny’s favorite), and we’re about to head out for some Dim Sum, which we remember as a favorite of our niece (back in Atlanta), who as a wee one loved that it was just like fast food–you sit down and they pull up tableside with a cart and there’s all this food!
I’ve done a goodly amount of preventative maintenance on Karny’s powerbook and consulted with Gordy on how to program his car’s scanner radio to just get the Mountain Rescue frequencies, skipping the Weather band–and those of us under 80 went to the family gym, where there was lots of treadmilling and swimming and playing in the day care.
In the meantime, reports from back east are that my father’s procedure–one of those balloon angioplasty things on his coronary artery–have gone well and he’s back a home, taking it easy.
That’s a relief.
Lunchtime. Enjoy your sunday.
Cross-country.
Tuesday, October 7th, 2003
We’ve finally leveled off at 35,000 feet and it’s been a bit choppy so far–that’s the bad news, but the good news is we’re going to arrive into Los Angeles 15 or 20 minutes early–late afternoon, Pacific time, the day before Sammy’s birthday.
Yes, we’re traveling again. After a summer that started with Sammy working in Mexico for a month and a half, we took a nice jaunt up north–it seems like just the other day–in early September, to visit Nancy, Alan, and Kate–and Anne, Bill, and family–in Ann Arbor, then on to the Upper Peninsula, then west to the Keewanau peninsula extending out into Lake Superior to visit Sammy’s field school instructor (and archaeocolleague), then down through Wisconsin, stopping for a quick hello to the Mulveys in Milwaukee, an after-dinner chat in Chicago with newly-minted rootless camper-wanderers Robert and Mary Jo (and Robert’s parents), and stopped off for a day at Purdue in West Lafayette, Indiana before getting the little white Civic back into our driveway.
Then, there was the 72 hour trip with all my immediate Atlanta family winging westward to San Diego, for the wedding of Leslie and Christopher, performed by a captain in San Diego harbor. That was two weekends ago.
Last weekend, well, all Sam and I did was drive up on Sunday into the northwest corner of the state–actually, we poked up into Tennessee and took a hard left and came down into Alabama, to see an archaeological site–Russell Cave National Monument nestled right there where the three states joined. Two huge caves going back into a hillside, and plenty of evidence that this is where a good number of folks lived several hundred years ago. And in one of the caves, a river runs through it…and when you have a rain-filled spring as we did in the southeast this year, the waters rush through, rise instantly, and fill up the sunken areas around the caves…and eventually drain out to the Tennessee River a dozen miles or so away.
But that was last weekend. Now, we’re fairly comfortable in exit row seats on a westbound 757, heading for a state that is voting today–right now!–on whether to recall their governor and possibly replace him with an action film star. It’s the start of an eleven day trip that’ll take us up to Seattle to see Sammy’s brother, parents, and family, and down to San Diego to see Leslie and Christopher once more, and we’ll toss Portland, the Oregon coast, and a coast drive from LA down to SD in for good measure.
Tonight, we’ll end up, I hope, in a nice room in Santa Monica, not far from the ocean, an easy walk to a sushi dinner and a chance to sync up with Pacific time, and the state of mind that goes with that.
And right now, at 4 pm eastern, the bumps and chops continue, intensifying a bit, making me glad that we gobbled a quick lunch on the way out the door instead of opting to pay (pay!) eight bucks for a lunch–the new face of a Delta coach cross-country flight. (“It’s a test,” the flight attendant told me, encouraging me to fill out the comment card so that Delta management will know what I think. Can’t I just send them a link to my blog?) Eight bucks for lunch, five bucks for the movie…miscellanous junk fees tacked on to our $175 roundtrip tickets, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money. On the other hand, the sandwiches (made by Atlanta Bread Company) look like a real cut above air fare. And I can see the business travelers–and there are a lot of ’em on this flight–don’t blink at shelling out eight bucks.
And I didn’t blink at shelling out $4.30 (airport prices) for a large Mocha Frappuccino at le Starbucks.
But we’re in a crammed narrowbody plane being shown a movie on painfully misadjusted TV screens (low enough, by the way, for me to whack my head on at least once per flight), in seats that twenty years ago would have been substantially wider. And yes, the tickets would have probably cost more than $175. And there would have been food. Not necessarily great food, but free food.
I guess I’ve been thinking about costs and distances and what is “fast” at a certain point in our shared history. Last night we watched Ken Burns’ documentary on the first cross-continent drive, a 1903 muddy, dusty, mechanically cantankerous ordeal that followed two guys (and later, a dog) 67 days or so to get from San Francisco to New York in an open 2-cylinder automobile–a Winton? a Wilton?–that was made in Cleveland. (Ah, proud Ohio auto builders.) Now we’re leaping across the mountains again (having done this same trip, essentially, just two weeks ago) in four hours and change. Fast. Cheap (certainly by 1903 standards.) And there’s a movie, and if you have five bucks in your wallet, you can hear it.
Damaged goods.
Friday, October 3rd, 2003
This ‘lago’ person brings up a couple of funny points, fresh, as it were, from todays headlines. It’s amazing what I’ll do to save a buck or two when I ‘m willing to have a $3000 G5 (well, almost) and that iPod thingie (functioning at this moment as a CPR device for my ailing G4).
I’ll spend money on Starbucks and fret about $20 difference in airfare. We’ll keep the furnace off a few more days (I think it’s 64 degrees in here) and save a few bucks on our gas bill.
So go figure.
It’s a Friday before another few days of travel, and the list of things to get done is beginning to pile up. Some of it is actual television work, to my amazement. And some of it is, well, more fun….like crafting painful CSS and excruciating standards-based design.
I know (damnit!) this is going to come in handy some day on a project. Keep reassuring me. Learning new things=good.
Meanwhile, I’m feeding my brain caffeine so it’ll route around damage.
And speaking of damage, my father’s going in for a coronary catheterization on the 15th, since the chest pains he’s been “walking through” for more than a year are probably more serious than he thought. And you wonder where I get this stubborness from.
Near a finish line.
Thursday, October 2nd, 2003
It’s a brisk fall afternoon in Atlanta town, at a time when I’m doing logistics for our next trip–out west to see family and friends.
Those of you following along at home may well be saying “hey, wait, they were out west last weekend,” and yes, that’s true, but that was of course for the (surprise!) wedding of Leslie and Christopher–a delightful (but fast) weekend jaunt that included a ceremony on a boat in the harbor, travels to the zoo, and lots of food and drink.
Then, dazed, we returned to hereabouts and one of the things I have been meaning to finish was the configuration and design and general CSS-ization of Nancy’s weblog and, of course, this one.
Which of course I’ve done, because you’re reading this. Is it complete? Not really. Can it be tweaked? Oh yeah, most assuredly. Is there time? Amazingly, not really.
Part of it is the technology involved. I’m very happy with the Movable Type engine we’ve installed here to manage weblogs–yet the latest and greatest use of perl and cgi and the delights of Mac OS X (although yeah, Movable Type runs on just about any webserver with enough tender loving care.) It does–will do when we’re done messing with it–a wonderful job of treating all these individual chunks of words as if they were–amazing!–database entries, and completely independednt of the typefeces, column widths, and all those other typographical niceties.
And I’ve only been talking to Nancy about this since, what, May?
But that’s how it is when setting up these websites is not what you do for a living. It’s just (I’m reminding myself of this all over again) fun.
And with this system now online, (with only about a thousand last minute adjustments still to be made), perhaps I can dash off more smaller entries, and bring you up to date on things like the aforementioned wedding, our next trip, and the various other chunks of life I’ve always been happy to share.
But until then…maybe some sleep is in order.
One giant cheese grater, please.
Tuesday, June 24th, 2003
When we first talked about going down to Mexico I thought that the timing would work out well on all kinds of levels. There’s nothing really much to recommend Atlanta in mid-July–and since we don’t live 100 yards from a pool like my brother and his family in Tudor-fancy Avondale Estates, we might as well get outta town and gain some altitude.
And I’d heard that there were going to be some big Apple announcements at the Worldwide Developer’s Conference on the 23rd of June, and my best guess was that they involved systems that you couldn’t get your hands on until August or September anyway, so why not spend that time productively away from Atlanta, away from broadband, away from the fancy Mac machines that support my professional life, such as it is.
And sure enough, with Sammy already in the mountains and me nearly out the door, here comes the new Mac desktops, the G5s. Professional machines, mind you, not for dinking around in Word or sending a bunch of emails, but large, bus-capable, bit-pushing monsters that make slogging around digital video or even high-definition video images easy and, well, fun. The fun comes in the guise of some operating system improvements Apple will release as ‘Panther‘–I’m especially looking forward to this one, which makes your windows scurry about like cockroaches surprised by a sudden light (that’s a line from this website, by the way. I wish my mots were that juste these days, but it’s late and my sleep-cycles are even wackier than usual.) This latest OS X version will also completely restructure the Finder, speed up Mail and Preview applications and allow you to use Instant Messaging with audio and video. (Yes, one step closer towards those picturephones we were promised.)
It’s thoughtful, clever development work like this that will keep me loyally on Macintoshes long past the point that I really should stop doing all this design stuff for television. As long as they keep making things easier and faster and the screens brighter and sharper, well, it’s fun top play in the fields of After Effects, Final Cut, and Photoshop, take it from me.
So as I said, the timing works. I went up to the Apple Store at Lenox Monday afternoon and became one of the corpulent t-shirted lemmings lined up in front of the huge video image of Steve Jobs, and I basked in the reality distortion field he still wields masterfully, and I walked out ready to order the big all-powerful one, the dual 2 ghz G5 that resembles (some have already said) an enormous fancy cheese grater.
And I’ll go off to Mexico, and walk around in mountain towns and cruise through the Mayan lowlands and think about just what a big cheese grater does for one’s quality of life, especially in the richer context of being the spouse of the archaeologist and not out there on the 80-hour-a-week fringe of graphic production.
And then (what would you expect?) we’ll come home in August and I’ll whip out my REI Visa and get my hands on one of the damn things, because they’ll be shipping by then.
Streaming less, enjoying it more.
Thursday, June 5th, 2003
A million uses and counting! • No one can be told about PosAtlGa…it must be experienced for itself. • Made of 100% pure green tea extract! • Approved for pet dander and smoke! • Can pinpoint a storm right down to your neighborhood street!
Children we have it right here, it’s the light in my eyes. It’s perfection and grace, it’s the smile on my face. But it’s mostly me getting up early-ish in the morning and making some coffee and listening to Gaucho (in lovely AAC fidelity) on my rehabilitated Sennheiser headphones.
And where yesterday my eyes were burning—a full-fledged allergy attack, today I’m feeling mo’better, thanks.
I’m up and around and messing with Steely Dan stuff on Gordy’s birthday in anticipation of the fine new album from the fiftyish forefathers of precision rock’n’roll. I believe it’s called Everything Must Go, and for those who can’t wait five days, several tracks are on sale now at the iTunes music store.
Yeah, we use that iTunes quite a bit around here, and like many who hold true that more is more and less is less, we were a bit concerned when Apple release iTunes 4.01, which restricted the cool feature that 4.0 offered—where you could stream songs from your home machine to your work machine—or to perfect strangers across the country. It didn’t take long for developer-enthusiasts to hack together ways to actually save those streaming songs, and thus form the architecture (with Apple’s software) of yet another person-to-person sharing system.
This of course would raise the hackles of copyright fanatics like the RIAA, and would probably engender a lawsuit that could do anything from close Apple’s music store to putting the whole damn company finally out of business.
So Apple closed the loophole, and after taking a deep breath, I downloaded and installed the update that incorporated those changes.
So we stream merrily throughout out house (or if you park out in front), but beyond our subnet, it’s no go. And I can live with that. In fact, I think it’s only prudent, because I want reasonable e-commerce to survive and thrive—especially e-commerce that gives artists a goodly share of the profit. I like the 99 cent per song model. I like the fact you can buy songs a la carte. I like that the DRM (Digital Rights Management) system imposed is not draconian—it allows you to have these songs on all the burnt CDs and all the iPods you want—and it allows you to have the music on up to three computers.
Fair enough for 99 cents. And most importantly: it’s yours. it won’t go away if Apple does.
There’s a report that Apple is holding some sort of event today or tomorrow that is likely to announce a deal with a bunch of indie labels—and again, count me in, that’s great.
Whoah!
Okay, in no particular order.
First of all, as one of those geeky people behind the scenes, I’m charmed and pleased that Keanu Reeves has given 50 million pounds (82-ish million dollars) to…no, not charity exactly, but to the effects crew of The Matrix Reloaded! Yes, that’s something like 1.5 million apiece…from an actor who, well yes, was considerably…shall we say augmented?…by this crew’s efforts.
So, wow! It does pay to labor away patiently in the background, carefully arranging row after row of well-behaved pixels. or it pays to work with Keanu. or maybe it pays not to make him look like too much of a goofball when he’s swinging around on a pole, slamming 12,370 Agent Smiths back into each other and various hard surfaces.
I’m beard-free these days, did I mention that? It kinda feels like I have spidey-sense, especially outdoors.
Y’know, when I started this thing eight years ago, it was definitely pre-blog, and I was definitely a proponent of having one ‘article’ on the home page, with previous remarks close at hand. Now, this week I’ve just shoved Tuesday’s entry–a lame effort at best–down. Will I blog-ize this thing? It remains to be seen…I think it come down to convenience and ease-of-use.
Mine, not yours. Sorry…
