It's probably just a grotesque lack of self-discipline, but I haven't managed to do anything more with the QuickTime/Tinderbox experiment. But, the weekend's just begun, so I should be able to get to it eventually.
Just a couple of asides before I get on with the day's chores:
This round of computer virus/worm infections is troubling for more reasons than just the inconvenience they cause. They help promote ideas like MS's trusted computing initiative, which also imposes burdensome digital rights management features that are skewed heavily toward the "rights" of "content" producers, and against those of citizens who pay to "consume" it. If I were a suitably paranoid conspiracy theorist, I'd say MS has a vested interest in having a few of these bugs cause widespread disruption. It's kind of odd, in a fortunate way, that none of these payloads have been truly destructive, in terms of erasing people's data. They're "just bad enough" to help create the kind of environment that is receptive to a more "secure" computing platform. It is a double-edged sword, in the sense that it helps create a certain amount of ill-will toward Redmond; but with more than $40B in the bank and a monopoly market position, they can probably weather a few months of harsh language.
The built-in insecurity of MS's applications and operating systems is very likely what will prove to be the engine of the next major round of hardware/software upgrades. We're at the point where increasing clock speeds aren't going to deliver a phenomenally different computing experience, and there are only so many ways Office can slice and dice words and numbers, so what else can cause corporations to chuck their existing computer infrastructure and invest in new hardware and software? In the post-9/11 world, the answer is security! We'll pay through the nose, and be damn glad of it. What a world.
In other news, word has it that the White House is considering re-thinking its space policy following the report of the COLUMBIA Accident Investigation Board, perhaps including some bold new initiatives in manned interplanetary space exploration. If so, the cynic in me would speculate that such an idea comes from the Bread and Circuses department of the current administration. As strong an advocate for manned space exploration as I am, I must question the ability of this administration to craft a coherent vision of space exploration when it is becoming patently obvious that they utterly failed to do so for something as important and as difficult as Iraq.
Although some hopeful signs are beginning to emerge, an economy that has thus far managed to do little more than shed jobs remains a potentially major vulnerability for the president; and Iraq is rapidly becoming more unstable and will require greater resources and sacrifice. Since striding around in a flight suit seemed to work so well last time, maybe they think if they can get the Chief Executive in a space suit, it'll push the economy and Iraq into the background for a few news cycles. Preferably just as the pollsters are checking on the White House's approval ratings. Just another shiny metal object to distract people's attention for a little while.
I've been playing around some more with QuickTime text tracks, figuring out exactly what the various text descriptors do. Sometimes they don't exactly work as advertised; I can't seem to make dropShadowOffset work correctly.
I've also gotten sucked into Advance Wars on Caitlin's Gameboy. A battle usually lasts 30 to 45 minutes, and one last night lasted well over an hour, so that rapidly becomes a huge time sump. But it's fun.
Elaine of Kalilily linked to something I wrote a few days ago; though "wrote" is almost certainly the wrong word, more like "jotted," not even up to "dashed off" standards. I was in a hurry, as I always seem to be these days, and I wanted to get something down before it left my head. But I felt it was so weak, I was glad when it scrolled off the front page. I'll return to the ideas in it someday, maybe soon. I owe Rys a rather long piece in a similar vein that I wrote to her in an e-mail. She'd like to comment on it, but I told her I wasn't ready to put it up yet. I think I will be soon. The days are getting shorter, the nights a little cooler, and there's change in the wind again. I haven't always done well with change, but I think I'm better now. Anyway, enough about me, (as if), what I meant to point out was that while I was flattered by Elaine's link, she posted it in connection with a very cool poem she wrote. You should check it out, and that's not just a courtesy link.
I found out today that mobile phone and PDA cameras have some parts of DOD in a very cross mood. The policy of at least one agency is that if you are found to have a camera-equipped device in your possession while on the premises, it will be confiscated and destroyed. Hmmm... I wonder if insurance would cover that? Along similar lines, these pocket USB drives are starting to worry some people, and apparently one now includes a digital camera! I like the one that comes embedded in a watch. You pull a USB connector cable from the side of the watch to connect to the USB port on the computer, very 007.
I've actually been considering getting a mobile phone after the first of the year because they're starting to look interesting to me, with all the features, especially the camera. Now, I'm not so sure it's an attractive idea. In my current job, I'd run afoul of that camera prohibition fairly often and I'd hate to forget one day and have some over-zealous security-type smash my toy.
I'm looking forward to Panther, aka Mac OS 10.3. His Steveness is keynoting some event in Paris next month. The usual suspects are prognosticating new 15" Powerbooks and refreshed iMacs, and while I certainly don't rule those out, I'll wager Panther will be unleashed as well.
Five out of six of the preceding paragraphs began with the pronoun "I." That's probably my cue to shut up. While the timestamp of this post says 6:49, I didn't actually start writing it until much, much later.
Squeaky, one of my two cats, the whiny one, has this problem with not getting her derriere entirely within the boundaries of the litter box. The litter is fresh and the box is clean, so it's not that. I think it's because the litter box is under a counter in the bathroom (Oh, come on. There is simply no place that is a "good" place for a litter box.), and it's rather dark. Squeaky is a very timid cat and I think she simply doesn't like to get her head all the way back in the corner, which is where it would need to be for her ass to be over the target area, so to speak.
Fortunately, I guess, I seem to have lost my sense of smell following that bout of whatever I had back in June. I can only faintly detect odors now, and then only when the source is literally right under my nose. I couldn't smell the belt burning up on Maria's vacuum cleaner a couple of weeks ago, which must count as a downside when one thinks of the whole fire thing. I guess I'll have to become like Dan Aykroyd it Ghostbusters, "Shhhh! Listen! Smell that?"
It occurs to me that this must count as something of a new low in weblogging subject matter -- writing about the potty-habits of one's cat.
QuickTime for the Web arrived today, and I'm impressed. It's an outstanding reference if you want to do anything with QuickTime, whether on the internet or not.
I started a Tinderbox document on Sunday to collect all the notes I've been making about text tracks in QuickTime. I was struggling for a bit because when QT Player Pro imports a text file, it bases each frame on paragraph breaks, carriage returns. This would not be good for a note that was intended to be a list of some kind. The answer turns out to be to use time stamps to delimit the text you want to appear within the frame.
There are two flavors of time stamps, absolute and relative. Absolute time stamps mark the start and end time of each frame. So Frame 1 would have a time stamp of 00:00:00:000 at the beginning and 00:00:02:000 at the end, if it was supposed to be on the screen for 2 seconds. Relative time stamps simply specify the amount of time the frame is to appear on screen.
It would be a bit of a bear to maintain absolute time stamps in a Tinderbox document, though it could certainly be done on a strictly manual basis. That's too much work for a lazy guy like me. Fortunately, relative time stamps are much easier to maintain. For most presentations, the movie would be presented as a slide show, so how long each frame is on screen can be up to the presenter; but we need time stamps to delimit our text.
I was having some trouble getting the time stamps to properly delimit the amount of text I wanted in a frame, so I just exported a text track from QT Player Pro that I had previously imported with just the {timeStamps:relative} descriptor set, and then edited the exported output. That seemed to work, but it was late and I haven't gone any further yet. Today I want to make sure I can create a text file by hand that QT Player Pro will import and display properly with relative time stamps. If I can do it by hand, then I can configure TB to do so as well.
QuickTime Player (Pro version) imports .pdf files and displays each page as a separate screen in a kind of slide show. I didn't know that. I just checked and it does get a brief mention in Stern's and Lettieri's QuickTime for Macintosh and Windows, but it also mentions that it only works in Mac OS X. It is kind of cool to use the Present Movie command, and select "Slideshow" in the dialog box that follows. The PDF page expands to fill the entire height of the screen, and the background goes all black, so it's a very clean display. Perhaps if you were to use two projectors in a presentation and you wanted a nice, uncluttered way to present a PDF file, it might be nice. I'm not sure if linking with the PDF works in QT.
Doing some more looking around on how one might go about turning a Tinderbox document into a presentation, I found Apple has documented Keynote's file format very extensively. I suppose it may be inconvenient not to list the links here, but it's really quite simple to go to Apple's developer page and just enter "Keynote" in the page's search field. The first five hits are all the relevant documents.
Depending on how much time I have this weekend, I'm first going to go the route I'm a little bit familiar with, and output text a text file that I can import into QuickTime Pro. Next, I'll try to create a couple of simple slides in Keynote. There are a lot of tags associated with a Keynote slide, so it's not as simple as QuickTime; but the good news is that one should be able to access and control all of Keynote's features. Plus, once in Keynote, it's possible to save your presentation as a PowerPoint presentation; so one can go from Tinderbox to PowerPoint by way of Keynote.
SMIL looks to be just a bit more complex than Keynote, so I will probably get to that last.
I believe I read that Keynote uses a subset of SVG, with some Apple extensions.
I've been reading a lot of stuff quickly, just to get a sense of what might be involved, so don't take my word for all of this, chances are I've gotten a lot of it wrong. I believe that Both Keynote and SMIL separate the actual content from the markup. Within the text that describes the markup are pointers or references to what the content is supposed to be, and the actual content is in separate files. I'm guessing this means that each slide must have a separate text file associated with it, which seems kind of burdensome. While QuickTime won't "open" a text file, it can import one containing all the content and the "markup" which are descriptors QuickTime can interpret to determine how to display the text. This type of output is very simple to create in Tinderbox. It's also relatively simple to do separate text files for each slide as well, though I have to believe it's slower and not very efficient.
Of course, none of this really gets to what I was originally looking for, which was a way to draw pictures in a web browser. I guess the standard answer these days is Flash, but that's not "just text." SVG is supposed to be the way to go for drawing pictures, while SMIL is supposed to be the open-standards answer to Flash.
I don't expect to get much beyond the QuickTime experiment this weekend. Next weekend I should have some more time, since it's a long weekend, and I should be able to find enough "quiet time" to put something together. I'm sure this is quite trivial to do for many people, but it's all pretty unfamiliar territory for me so I'm slow. And it's entirely possible I could get distracted by some other shiny metal object before I even get to next weekend, and I'll forget all about this. It's happened before.
Of all the "personalities" in the so-called "A-list" of weblogging, Doc Searls has to be the nicest. His mom passed away the day before yesterday. Doc's been posting some pictures and memories.
Watching the trailer, it occurs to me that Agent Smith acts more "human" than Neo. At least, he seems to have a sense of humor. Neo hasn't exhibited anything like that since the initial interrogation in the office with Agent Smith. Contrast the two: Agent Smith seems to be having a pretty good time since his "liberation;" Neo's been Mr. Serious, what with having to save the world and all. It's interesting. Of course, I can't wait for the Reloaded DVD. When's that supposed to come out?
He's Collin Chou as Seraph, the guy who looks after the Oracle; and that's an amazing kick. I'm pretty sure there's no wire there, but I could be wrong. I've watched it frame by frame, it looks pretty damn genuine. You can read more about Collin Chou here.
I was listening to Talk of the Nation on NPR this afternoon, and they were interviewing some author about the nature of evil. It's been a while since I've consciously thought about evil, but something must have been going on in the background, because some ideas came to mind fairly quickly.
Just because I seem to be thinking a bit out of order right now, I want to get something down that I just recalled that the author said. He was describing the situation of the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, and that for a long time they held on to a kind of hope that ultimately they would be rescued, or something, I missed exactly what he said - but it was definitely about how hope had somehow impaired them, because he said it was only after they had given up hope that they began to fight back. I think he was discussing someone else's work at that point, but it resonated with me, it makes sense in the way that I understand the world. I think I'm going to get back to that in a minute.
Anyway, he and a caller were kind of struggling with where evil comes from, and whether or not it's a kind of "force" in the world. I was thinking about how fear and ignorance are part and parcel of evil, but then something occurred to me that I hadn't thought about before, and it's given me something of a new perspective on fear as well; a small, but important, epiphany.
I think evil does come from fear, which I've believed for a long time. What is new to me today, is that I think it specifically comes from the denial of fear. I've been aware for some time now how much fear has dominated the choices I've made in my life. For a long time, I've thought I've had to learn to "let go" of fear. Just now I think I understand that's not possible. What is possible is to know my fear and acknowledge it, but not to let it exclusively determine the choices I make.
Fear is something we don't wish to know, we don't want others to know we're afraid. Somehow, if we're afraid, it means we're weak, or we're vulnerable, we can be exploited. It turns out that we are anyway, even if we try to hide it, and we're often exploited by ourselves. But to go further and act out of fear, while also willfully denying it, essentially lying to ourselves, this is where evil comes from I think. We hate feeling afraid, so we kind of have an inversion, and our fear becomes our faith. We think we're acting out of faith, doing good, when we're really doing evil, to ourselves or others.
Later, I found it interesting that the author was saying that his last chapter was called "Hope," and that he believed love was the only answer to evil. I think it's kind of odd that the chapter is called "hope." I tried to think of what it would mean to deny our faith; if evil comes from denying our fear, then what comes from denying our faith? I think the answer is - "hope." It's pretty counter-intuitive, almost ironic, isn't it? We seem to believe that faith and hope are closely related, and that hope is a virtue. "Faith, hope and charity, and chief among these is charity," is a phrase that comes to mind. But if evil is an adverse consequence of the denial of fear, how is hope an adverse consequence of the denial of faith? Hope is, in a way, a denial of the way things are, a refusal of the call. In the show, the author suggested it was hope that kept the Jews from actively resisting the Nazis for as long as they did. I don't know whether that's true or not, but it would seem to make sense to me if it is. If we choose not to act because we hope that some external agency or event will intervene, that's a denial of faith in ourselves to be adequate to what we must face. If we hope that a given outcome will obtain, again, it's a denial of faith in ourselves that we will be adequate to the result no matter what; and, if you wish, it's a denial of faith in God, that what obtains is a part of God's will. Hope is a distraction of our attention.
But I think I agree that love is the only answer to evil, because I believe love comes from faith. We all will know something of both faith and fear, and they each have something to offer us. The only power we have is the power to choose. How we choose always depends on what we know about ourselves, our faith and our fear. To begin to know, we must pay attention.
The statisticians who report to me here at Time's Shadow World Headquarters, have noted a marked increase in domestic productivity the last couple of days. Tuesday night I came home and didn't seem to suffer from the evening energy "brown-out" I've been experiencing the last few months. It was even a TKD day, which makes it more remarkable. I managed to clean the kitchen and mop both the kitchen and TV room floors. I still have the "junk counter" to clear off, and there's some clutter on the bar I haven't managed to find a home for yet, but it's damn near 4.0 otherwise.
Last night I cleaned the half-bath and then finished straightening up the TV room, which admittedly mostly consists of putting away DVDs, videotapes, video games, throwing away catalogs, junk mail, handing over everything that belongs to Caitlin to be put away (presumably where it belongs, which she seems to think is the floor of her bedroom), and then vacuuming underneath the couch, and all the cushions. It wasn't a lot of work, compared to mopping the floors, but it's been more than I could muster the energy for recently.
I'm not sure what to attribute this new vitality to, I haven't taken any Geritol or anything; but I did start taking my vitamins again. I'd stopped back in June when I was sick. I simply got out of the habit for some reason. But I seem to recall I'd had the "brown-out" effect back when I was taking them anyway, so it may be something else. Whatever it is, I'm happy. Tonight I'm going to do the living room and the computer room. Friday night is TKD testing, but I should be able to just spend Saturday morning on the yard and then enjoy the rest of the weekend. Maybe even get to ride my bike, which has been sitting in the garage for weeks. That is, if it doesn't rain.
Probably a bad title, as this is mostly unrelated to Dumb Idea (Part the First), but anyway...
In researching some more about Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), I read about SMIL, which is pronounced "smile," and stands for something with "multimedia" and "language" in it (Stupid acronyms). What is cool about SMIL is that it is a structured text file (XML for you technical-types) that QuickTime can read natively, and Tinderbox excels at creating structured text files. What that means is that one should be able to export a Tinderbox document to a SMIL document and effectively turn your document into a presentation of some kind, a slideshow.
SMIL accommodates a whole range of different media types, so you can include sound and video if you wish, but Tinderbox doesn't natively support those files. What TB could do, I think, is serve as a kind of content management system for SMIL presentations, handling all of the structure and text editing while simply pointing to the other resources.
One of my QuickTime books came in, and it doesn't have a great deal of information about SMIL. I've ordered another one that allegedly may have more, and that's this one: QuickTime for the Web. It's kind of pricey at $41.97 (although perhaps not for computer books, but I generally try to avoid paying much more than $25.00 for a computer book these days - I probably wouldn't have to work if I still had all the money I've spent on computer books that I've given away), but it includes licensed versions of QuickTime 6 Pro for both Mac and Windows, so if you're interested at all in playing with QuickTime, and haven't paid for one of Apple's $29.99 licenses, it's a good deal. Less so for moi, who's already paid for a leesaunse. (As in, "Do you have a leesaunce for your minkee?" - Name that movie, Rob Fahrni!)
QuickTime has a text track that Tinderbox looks like a good candidate for exporting, but you still have to import the text into QuickTime, it won't read it natively. SMIL saves a step, just export your SMIL file and open it in QuickTime to see a presentation. That's the theory anyway, I haven't tried it yet. Hopefully I'll get a couple of hours this weekend to try and put something together.
I think QuickTime offers some neat effects that one might not be able to access strictly through SMIL, so it may be worth the extra hassle to import into QuickTime before putting it on the web. One of those, although it's not really an "effect," is a chapter list, so you can jump to a particular point in your presentation.
Anyway, perhaps more about all that if I have time to experiment with it this weekend.
Here's another one of those hare-brained ideas that I get every now and then but never seem to be able to implement.
I spend a lot of time cleaning up my HD and Desktop. For whatever reason, even though I tell Safari to download new items to the Downloads folder, it never seems to stick. Plus, whenever I save a file, I usually have to navigate to the appropriate folder to save it into. I was thinking about Tinderbox's Agents and how it would be nice to have Agents in the file system to manage what goes where for me, so I don't have to. After all, that's why we have computers, right?
So then I got to thinking the Desktop is just a folder, right? Maybe I could write a folder action script that would act, if not like an Agent from Tinderbox, then maybe like rules from an e-mail program. For downloads, I'd have to find a way to delay action until compressed files were unStuffed, so I can just send the .hqx and .bin files to the trash, .dmg files would go to downloads. When I save files, I could save them to the Desktop, knowing that the script would file them in the appropriate folders.
Anyway, something to think about. As if I didn't have too many of those already.
One of the reasons why attention is often confused with authority is because authority unrecognized by a larger audience is not useful for creating social order. Humans are self-organizing (myself included, anyone who's seen my desk can tell you that), but part of that self-organization algorithm is the identification of authority. Once identified, attention is easily given.
Another dimension of authority is trust. There are two aspects to the nature of trust in authority, and they have to do with outcomes, positive and negative, and often rewards and punishments. In the sense of positive and negative outcomes, an authority can influence the choices of others on the basis of their trust that the choices recommended by the authority will yield a positive outcome. Do you trust the weatherman? Or do you carry an umbrella with you anyway? Do you trust your astrologer? Do you trust your doctor?
Authorities on a larger scale in the social order, like government officials, can use their authority to create rewards and punishments to reinforce their authority. In this case, one cannot ignore an authority one doesn't trust, because the possibility exists that the authority would impose a punishment, a negative outcome, for choices which do not conform to the authority's wishes. "Fear, intimidation, blackmail. These are all useful leadership tools."
Often though, in the absence of other data, trust can be based on feelings toward a potential authority. We're more inclined to trust people we like than people we don't like.
Given the relationship between attention, trust and authority, it's easy to see why Americans often confuse attention with authority. Here is Arnold Shwarzenegger's campaign commercial in QuickTime format. It's easy to give Arnold attention, because as an actor, celebrity and public figure, he is often the subject of our attention. For most of Mr. Shwarzenegger's career, that attention has been largely positive as he has had a number of entertaining and successful movies. He married a member of a high-profile political family that still enjoys a reservoir of public affection, and he's been involved in non-controversial public service efforts relating to physical fitness. Most people like "Ahnold."
This confusion of attention with authority isn't always a bad thing. While Mr. Shwarzenegger probably doesn't have a profound understanding of the nature of the problems confronting California, the same characteristics that may cause a voter to recognize him as an authority are likely to cause government officials to treat him as one, especially if he is elected governor. That is to say, a popular public figure that enjoys a strong reservoir of public affection, without a long history of negative attention, can influence people on both sides of an issue; he is better equipped to build consensus than someone with profound knowledge of issues, but a long history of partisanship or negative attention.
It remains to be seen how the California gubernatorial election plays out; but barring any significant gaffes that attract negative attention, or political statements that appear too partisan, Mr. Shwarzenegger's chances for election are pretty good. How he acquits himself as a leader will then be critical test for California and Mr. Shwarzenegger's political career.
I've been borrowing Caitie's Nintendo Gameboy Advance to play Advance Wars. It's pretty cool, and I can take it with me pretty much everywhere. Well, when Caitie lets me.
I went to Books-a-Million last Saturday for the first time in a month. I walked out with a book about iMovie 3 andSVGEssentials from O'Reilly. For whatever reason, I've been thinking about how one draws in a browser; specifically, how one may draw in a browser by using a text file. Looks like SVG is supposed to be the answer, but support for SVG seems a little bit weak. I downloaded the Adobe plug-in for SVG, and that may be sufficient for what I'm thinking about. Corel Draw 11 can save documents as SVG files. Right now, the save options are kind of confusing for me, so I'm just drawing simple shapes and looking at the resulting text file. It's all XML, so I'm having to become more familiar with that as well. The document that Corel Draw creates includes a URL at one of Corel's domains that is 404, I'm not sure if that would be much of a problem or not. I haven't tried to put one of the Corel drawings in a web page yet. A couple of applications that seem like they would be naturals for SVG support are Tinderbox and OmniGraffle, but they're not. At least not yet. Anyway, perhaps more on that later, perhaps not.
It rained again yesterday, and it looks as though the cycle begins again today. Ugh.
Haven't made it to the movies recently it seems. I'll have to remedy that this weekend. Maybe.
Friday I test for my red belt, and it appears as though I'm on track for black belt testing sometime around December/January. I plan on trying to add an additional class every week. Not sure how I'm going to do that yet, but I'll figure something out. It looks as though my chief instructor and assistant chief instructor will be changing. My chief instructor is already gone, relocated to south Florida. It's a promotion for him, and one he was looking forward to, but it wasn't expected this soon or this suddenly. The assistant chief instructor is expected to take over a new school opening at the end of this month. One of the young assistant instructors is now expected to take over as chief instructor, and he's only 19. He'll be the youngest chief instructor in the organization. He's a fourth degree black belt, and he certainly has the skills, but he doesn't quite demand the same level of effort from the students as his two seniors. He's sometimes been my instructor, and on those days I often welcomed it because it would be a bit of a break. But I value the way the other two demanded more from me. So maybe I make up the difference by demanding more from myself. We'll see how that goes.
Well, time to put the shoulder to the wheel once again. Have a great day!
It's Monday again. Happens the same time every week. Scientists aren't sure why.
Belated happy birthday wishes to Hal, and good wishes on the anniversary last Friday of his ordination as well. Hal doesn't write as much as he used to, but he's a busy dad with a full-time job and he can be forgiven. But we miss him. Caitie turned 11 today, though we did most of the celebrating over the weekend. My little Dolly is growing up. Fathers everywhere will know what those words mean and the sentiment behind them.
Hey, it hasn't rained for three days! Hallelujah!
I managed to get up on the roof yesterday in the morning before the sun got too high. Nothing is ever as easy as the do-it-yourself types say it is. I managed to patch the area where the tree branch had worn through the shingles and the roofing felt (see, I almost said "tar paper," but now I'm a DIY roofer, so I have to use the correct nomenclature). It's little more than a patch though, it needs to be replaced. The roof is near the end of its service life, which makes it difficult to repair. The shingles are brittle (bad) and fused together (not really bad, but makes it tough to just remove bad shingles and insert good shingles). It's not something that calls for immediate attention, but in the next few years, it's going to have to be replaced. I managed to leave a remarkable amount of the skin from my knuckles on the roof. As you might imagine, this is somewhat painful.
I ordered a couple of books about Quicktime from Amazon. Actually, only one was from Amazon, the other was from one of their affiliate stores. The affiliate store's price was much cheaper than Amazon's for the book I wanted. I also ordered the DVD of The Thing From Another World, they should all be arriving this week. I also just noticed I need to get This Island Earth on DVD to really complete my collection of classic SF movies from my youth. I'd love to use some frame-grabs from that movie to make some amusing illustrations about iChat AV. If you're not familiar with the movie, that won't mean very much to you, you'll have to wait a bit until I manage to get a copy. I just checked Amazon and the lowest price is $169.00! You won't be seeing any frame-grabs from me for a while. Even the VHS tape is $40.00! Sheesh! I think I have a copy on tape around here somewhere.
iChatted with Mom and Dad over the weekend. They were without power for only a few hours on Friday. Mom said it was supposed to be hot on Saturday and that the media was reporting that everyone was being asked to refrain from using air conditioning. I told her "everyone" did not include senior citizens and she could air condition all she wanted.
Well, I'd best be saddlin' up and gittin' along down the trail. (Cowboy talk today, in honor of Open Range.)
I'm waiting for some smart person to write the piece that examines the Great Northeast Blackout of '03, and the latest MS worm to note what the lessons may be. I'm not a smart enough guy to write that piece, but it seems to me we need to do some thinking about our infrastructure. People who place their faith exclusively in the marketplace probably need to explain why the marketplace allows these sorts of things to happen.
If MS weren't the monopolistic monolith that it is, is it reasonable to believe it'd be less of a target to the types of people who write worms and virus programs? If we weren't so drearily dependent on Windows, would it be as much fun for those people to write malicious code? Even if it were, if there were say, three major operating systems distributed throughout the infrastructure, wouldn't the results of these exploits be just a little less spectacular, and therefore a little less enticing? Wouldn't a healthy diversity limit the damage and economic loss?
Has de-regulating the energy industries helped anyone, except former Enron executives?
I'm looking forward to the explanation of why the marketplace hasn't failed.
We just had a big owl land in a tree behind our fence in the backyard. Naturally, I grabbed the Canon and ran out to snap a couple of pictures. I zoomed in all the way because I wasn't sure how close I could get to it. As it turned out, I got pretty close.
Unfortunately, zooming in effectively narrows the aperture and the flash was pretty useless at the distance I was at. I switched off the flash in Auto and of course I couldn't hold the camera steady enough to compensate for the longer exposures.
Oddly enough, the video mode seemed to gather plenty of light, so I've got this little postage stamp of an image.
In this hour of crisis, I wish to remind everyone, well everyone who uses Mac OS X anyway, that REM's End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine) is available at the iTunes Music Store, for the low, low price of just $.99.
You'll find this and other comforting tunes at the world's premiere online music store.
This has been a Public Service Announcement from Time's Shadow World Headquarters, where, "The only reason time exists, is so everything doesn't happen at once."
We now rejoin your regular surfing, already in progress.
Of course, I'm watching the coverage of the blackout and I'm thinking how much more credible and reassuring Mayor Bloomberg would be if he had the Ghostbusters arrayed behind him. Peter Venkman, Ray Stantz, Egon Spengler, and Winston Zeddemore, your city needs you!
Kurt, over at The Coffee Sutras, is writing a bit about Buddhism and he's always an interesting read so you should stop by. I'm going to repeat a few things I mentioned in his comments, and perhaps expand a bit on them if I don't run out of time, which is very likely since I seem to write slower than time passes.
One of the things that makes being a human being both possible and very difficult is our relationship with authority. We tend to organize ourselves into social groupings that have a number of authorities which order the actions of the group. I call them social organisms, and I think they're the real biological entity responsible for the success of the human species, but that's kind of beside the point this morning. We rely on authorities for much of how we acquire and maintain our belief system, our mental model of how the world works, at least the part that is cognitively accessible. We believe the world is round because authorities tell us so. The vast majority of people haven't performed experimental observations to confirm this fact for themselves. President Bush said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, able to be launched within 45 minutes, and we went to war. We follow authority. Sure, there were a lot of people who were opposed to the war, but there was no shortage of authority figures those folks turned to either.
We make a big deal about America being a nation of individualists, but I don't think that's remotely true. For the most part, our society has co-opted the beliefs of what it means to be an individualist, and now "individualists" look to authorities to define what "individualism" means. There are a very few exceptions. I'd like to be one of them, but I'm not so sure that I am; but at least I think I know how the game is rigged.
Anyway, what has that to do with Buddhism? Well, the Buddha's dead, but before he died he became something I'm not so sure he wanted to be. He became an authority. It's not terrible being an authority. We can't all do all our own thinking all the time, or nothing would get done. Siddhartha Gautama discovered some very special insights usually called enlightenment, and he tried to share them with others. I think the fact that Buddhism still exists is a testament to the nature of his insights and his success in sharing them.
But after he died, the central authority was gone and so authority had to pass to others. That's where things get kind of mired in some of the problems of our very human nature. Since no one else could be Siddhartha Gautama, inevitably, people differed on what he meant about this or that. Different individuals became authorities and various groups of individuals formed around them and the different types of Buddhism were developed.
The same thing can be said for Christianity. How many different denominations are there? Each one created as a result of unhappiness with a given authority?
All this would be neither here nor there if each of these authorities adhered closely to the message of their respective founders. To some extent they do, but it seems almost peripheral. And often it seems as if they adhere only to the parts of the message that serve to advance a particular agenda that really seems to be at the core of their reason for existence, because groups compete with one another. They sometimes cooperate, but the dominant mode of interaction is competition and the name of the game is survival.
As a result, it becomes important to make distinctions, to distinguish between this and that; and "this" and "that" often have absolutely nothing to do with what the founding figure's message was.
This may be an uninformed, or unfair comparison, but my impression is that between Christianity and Buddhism, Buddhism has done a better job at adhering to the founding figure's message, if for no other reason than he seemed to anticipate this problem with authority. "The finger is not the moon," is one of my favorite Buddhist aphorisms. We focus almost exclusively on fingers, and lose sight of the moon.
"See! His index finger points to the moon!"
"No, that's his middle finger, as it is clearly stated in the sacred text of blah, blah, blah."
"I'm sorry, my brother, but the blah, blah, blah, clearly shows it is his ring finger that he points with, as is corroborated by the account of blah, blah, blah."
This vision or that vision is the "true" vision, so join my sect, my church, my finger. That's not "real" Buddhism because of this or that or the other thing. If it's your purpose in life to study fingers, I suppose you have a point. But if it's your purpose in life to know something of the message of Siddhartha Guatama or Jesus of Nazareth, I'd say stop focusing on fingers and start looking for the moon. You won't have to look very far, and if you're looking past your own fingertips, you've already gone too far.
Anyway, as always, I'm an authority on nothing. The only finger I'm likely to give you is my middle one. Do your own thinking. Or don't. But don't pretend to be an authority on fingers, we don't really need anymore of those.
Yesterday morning I went outside to look at the moon. (And no, I didn't bark at it.) It was supposed to be a kind of foggy morning, but it was very thin where we are at the beach, and you could see the moon very clearly with wisps of fog blowing by it. It looked very cool. I'm sure that was Mars right near it as well.
So I went back in the house to get the Canon A70 to try the movie mode on it. I zoomed in before I went to the movie mode, since you can't zoom once you start shooting. 3x isn't enough zoom to make the moon very interesting, and the auto-exposure was dominated by the predominantly dark sky, so the moon looked like a featureless lightbulb. I don't know if I could have used a manual exposure setting before going to movie mode. In any event, I wasn't able to capture a very compelling video sequence. You really need a tripod for these sorts of things as well.
I went out again this morning and the moon was a little higher in the sky, but no foggy wisps. Plenty of breeze though, and Mars was pretty bright. Not as cool as yesterday's appearance though.
If you just want to play around a bit with recording video from your iSight, Apple's HackTV seems to do the job. It can control the iSight's various settings like Quicktime Broadcaster.
"With all due respect," is another throw-away colloquialism that's pretty much a positive indicator that the writer or speaker has no respect for the person they're writing or speaking about, or to.
There is perhaps no better current example of confusing attention with authority than the gubernatorial candidacy of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Another recent example would be Jesse Ventura.
We've established a precedent in this country for high attention-earners becoming authority figures. "I'm not a doctor, but I play one on TV." News personalities interview one another in the name of "analysis." It seems that the first prerequisite for high political office is the ability to gain attention.
I think we're a very authoritarian society, not a nation of rugged individualists as maintained by the dominant mythos of America. If there's some redeeming feature to this American brand of authoritarianism, it may be that we generally try to choose likable people as our authority figures. Tastes and your mileage may vary. I suppose many Germans even thought Hitler was likable. I think Nixon was probably the last genuinely unlikable person elected to high office; though perhaps that's been Gray Davis' major vulnerability, a likability deficit. Of course, many arguably extremely likable people seem to elicit the opposite effect from others. Clinton is well known for his personal charm and ability to exhibit empathy. Reagan was similarly regarded as a very likable individual, yet many people hated him. Many people seem to think President Bush is a very likable guy, but a lot of people seem to hate him.
I think a similar phenomenon holds true for weblogging, where high attention-earners eventually are afforded some measure of authority by their readers. People confuse attention with authority, and authority with power; so at least some attention-seekers are also power-seekers. (Some people enjoy attention for attention's sake; whether it's good, bad or indifferent, they just can't stand being ignored.) The highest attention-earners seem to be polarizing figures with vociferous camps of attackers and defenders.
It's perhaps unwise to ignore attention-seeking, would-be authority figures in politics. But I think it's safe to say it's always appropriate to ignore attention-seeking would-be authority figures who write weblogs. That probably cuts out more than two-thirds of the so-called "A-List." If nothing else, this little theory of mine helps me to read some of the more outrageous A-Listers without getting too exercised about anything they write. It's kind of an observational study of human psychology, so I try to maintain a sort of clinical detachment. Though sometimes I am amused by some of the things these people write.
Just a short note to kind of clean up the front page.
The Taekwondo tournament went pretty well. Suffice to say, I think I'll enjoy the next one a lot more, now that I know what to expect.
While we were in Melbourne, I installed iChat AV on Maria's G4 and updated the OS and did the usual preventive maintenance. She keeps the dock hidden along the left edge of the screen, and it drives me a little batty trying to find things. She didn't have a microphone or a headset, so I brought down one of several Jabra Earphones I bought from Small Dog electronics on a close-out some time ago. They use the Apple Plaintalk microphone connector, so anything later than the G3 iMac can't use them I think. The mic connector is extra-long to make contact with a power connector in the Plaintalk jack that was used to supply the preamp for the mic. In any event, I was pleased to note that it worked well in the G4, and we were able to get Maria up on iChat AV for at least voice chats. Caitlin spends a lot of time talking to her mom on the phone, so that might save a couple of dollars on the phone bill.
I taped some of the tournament on the Sony DV camcorder. Last night I hooked up the Sony to my G4 and played back the tape to my parents and my sister and brother in law and their kids through iChat AV. Obviously, I can't tell what it looked like from their end, but from their comments, I think the limited bandwidth degraded the quality of the video. When you're sitting a couple of feet away from the camera, it's easy to make out features and know what you're looking at. When you're looking at a videotape recording of someone several feet away, I think it's harder for the eye to fill in the details, so the perception of the quality of the image suffers.
Anyway, we're back up here in Jax, and it's still raining, and it's time to go back to work. Till the next time...
Today was the first day of school for my kids. Things went pretty smoothly, with no intervention from me, so I'm happy. I still have to pick up the remaining school supplies ("It has to be a 2 and 1/2 inch binder, Dad!"), but things seem to be under control at the moment. I'm both a little disappointed and relieved that Chris didn't seem to require the Ti-83 Plus calculator. I was looking at one at the Exchange and the Plus is about $60.00 more than the straight-stick 83. It has more memory, comes with the $20.00 USB cable to connect to a computer for uploading software, and it has already loaded a bunch of additional applications ("A $65.00 value!"). Fortunately, it turns out he only needs a garden-variety scientific calculator, which is actually good, not only does it save me money, but it kind of ensures Chris will actually get to use the calculator, instead of trying to pry it from my fingers.
I'm taking Caitie down to Melbourne tomorrow to participate in a Taekwondo tournament. It's not a major event, and it's in the same town where Maria lives, so it'll be relatively inexpensive for a first tournament. She's pretty inexperienced, but she wanted to try this so I said we'd do it. Now she's having second thoughts, but I think she'll do fine. For kids of her rank, it's mostly about having fun and getting a little experience. Chris wants me to bring his surf board back up, so I'll do that for him.
Did some more reading of the ViaVoice manual last night. It's not a model of clarity, but I think I'm getting it figured out. You can only do voice corrections in the SpeakPad application, which explains some of the garble in my Tinderbox effort last night. Even in SpeakPad, however, there are command and dictation modes, and a combined command and dictation mode, and I haven't quite figured out the best way to switch between them yet. I seemed to be able to get SpeakPad pretty confused, a state which I, the user, shared. There are some macro commands that rely on keyboard equivalents that you can create for specific applications. I think this is intended to mitigate the fact that Plaintalk speech recognition and ViaVoice can't be active at the same time.
The weather here is starting to become depressing. On the positive side, we're usually greeted with a sunny, if hot and muggy, morning; but around noon the clouds begin to gather and every day, usually between 1 and 3 PM a thunderstorm soaks the area accompanied by some pretty significant lightning. It's been this way nearly every day for four weeks now, and it's getting old. To say nothing of the amount of mildew accumulating everywhere. I really need to attend to some significant maintenance on the addition but Melissa's wedding has constrained my finances equally significantly. There's another alternative, but it's one of those tasks I'm not looking forward to dealing with, but I think I'll have to in fairly short order. Chris's decision to attend public school has certainly improved the situation a bit, but not enough to address all the maintenance that's required.
My comments service seems to be up and down, but I haven't paid to be put on the "premium" server. I don't get a great many comments, some of which is likely due to the reliability of the service I suppose, but I'm not sure it's worth paying for something that doesn't get used very much. It's not terribly expensive, they basically ask for a donation and I think they suggest an amount on the order of $50.00 or so, but that's half of a .Mac subscription and I get a lot more out of that. Still thinking about it.
All of which is by way of explanation when I say that one of the Feedster principals dropped by and left a note on my most recent Feedster post, concerning case sensitivity in searches. I'd link to the comment, but I can't seem to raise the server at the moment, and I want to say the gent's name was Steve Johnson, but I've probably got that wrong. (Update: It was Scott Johnson, and here's the link to the comment.) Anyway, the gist of it was you can get Feedster to pretty much ignore case if you enter your search term in all lower-case letters. If you use an upper-case letter, it becomes case sensitive. I think I've got that right.
The pheromone effect, if that's what it was, lasted about 18 hours or so. I woke up feeling pretty good, but by the time I left for work I could feel the weight of the world settling on shoulders again. Sort of suggests to me there might be a pharmacological approach I could pursue to my benefit, but for whatever reason I'm disinclined to do so.
I think I mentioned a while back that I bought one of those USB drives, in this case a 128MB Lexar JumpDrive Secure purchased from that consumers' paradise of super values and low, low prices, WalMart, for the modest sum of about $38.00 or so. There was a generic brand at CompUSA, same capacity for a few dollars less, but I happened to be in WalMart and I'd spend nearly the difference in gas to drive to CompUSA and back. I like it a lot, but it kind of points out the need for some kind of file synchronization utility since I want to keep the latest copies of certain files on my G4 and my iBook, because it's possible that I might lose the USB drive. That's something I'll be looking into soon, I'm sure. I put my Time's Shadow Tinderbox file on it and discovered that Tinderbox does some things behind the scenes that can confuse it if you change locations on it. I had a brief iChat with Mark Bernstein yesterday afternoon and he explained what was happening. Mark offered me a solution that I'm sure works, but I think the simplest thing, at least in the short term, would probably be to keep all the export templates on the USB drive along with the Tinderbox file. That would mean that if I lost the USB drive at some point, I would have to tell the HD-resident version of the file where all its templates were again, which might be a bit of a hassle. I'll have to think about this some more. Maybe I'll try Mark's way and my way and see which way I like better.
Anyway, that about sums up the current state of affairs at Shangri La.
Those pheromones must really work. I'm still in a pretty good mood, even though I'm still swamped. But I've managed to clean all the kitchen counters and get the dishes done. Floor's next.
But that's not why I'm here.
No, I'm here because I happened to find this weblog in my referers (no link to me that I can find, it was just some detritus someone left in my referers) and this entry is pretty damn funny. Of course, it is kind of a rip-off of an old SNL skit dealing with Ronald Reagan, but it's still pretty damn funny.
Pascale made a seemingly legitimate comment about ViaVoice based on the the entry I tried to make using it. She said it wasn't ready for prime time. Well, clearly that entry was nearly incoherent, but I thought it was a little funny, so I left it the way it was. In ViaVoice's defense, I haven't had a great deal of experience with it, so I don't know how to use it to its best advantage.
Think a moment about when you first learned to type. Were you immediately proficient, or did you make many typographical errors? Was typing faster than handwriting? You had to train yourself to use a keyboard, one has to also train oneself to use speech recognition software. What I find remarkable is that the program works as well as it does after only reading three of its training samples to it. Furthermore, I trained it in a relatively benign acoustic environment. When I made that entry, Chris was listening to to his stereo at high volume with a loud pounding bass rhythm right over my head. It still worked pretty well. What I haven't taken the time to learn yet is how to correct the errors it makes, and thus help it to improve its recognition accuracy.
To me, the biggest hurdle to speech recognition is not the accuracy of the software, I think it's good enough right now; it's the change of paradigm in composition. I write somewhat differently than I speak because I can often change what I'm about to write before I write it, while I often don't go through that kind of editing when I'm speaking. But I'm sitting in front of the monitor, so my head is trying to think like I'm writing, but routing the output through my speech center, which is not accustomed to such a deliberate pace. It's kind of disruptive.
Plus, it just feels weird talking to the computer. I expect I'll get over that eventually.
As for Inkwell, the Rosetta recognizer is different than Paragraph's cursive recognizer built into the original Newton, it doesn't learn as it goes along. You can adjust certain settings to facilitate your writing style, but it pretty much does the same thing each time it tries to process a handwriting sample. This is not a bad thing, because as it is, it's just about the best block letter handwriting recognizer available. There is learning that will improve the recognizer's accuracy though, and again, that's learning on the part of the writer. It's kind of awkward to find a comfortable writing position on the Graphire. I ended up putting the tablet on my lap, but it still wasn't the best position. If I was going to rely on handwritten text input to a computer, I'd either use a very small writing surface/input device that I could hold in one hand, or I'd have a kind of writing desk appurtenance near my computer so I could properly write, or, more precisely, print. And then one has to train oneself to break the discontinuity between writing here, and having the text appear there. You can gauge where to put your pen down on the basis of what you've written, because the feedback is removed in space and time, so you can become somewhat disoriented as to where your text will go.
If you're just going to post handwriting, a la Don Park's example, then it's just a matter of finding a comfortable location to be able to print clearly. Something I wasn't quite able to achieve in the few minutes I devoted to my little exercise in alternative blog inputs.
So I'd say any one of those means of entering text is ready for prime-time as long as the user is, and right now this user isn't quite ready himself.
I'm not making this entry using IBM's ViaVoice. It works pretty well even with Chris's music blasting.
I'm not sure how much like to do this all the time, but it seems to work well enough. I really need to take some more time to become more familiar with how it works and to drink to my voice well that to.
O.K. enough of this. We don't need to tie scratched at no scratch that by no by a buying given up the pair have
Hello I'M USING handwriting recognition on this one It takes a little PracticeBut it does work
(Back on the keyboard now. Punctuation is tricky in Inkwell. I'm used to the Newton. It had a little palette of punctuation you could call up by tapping on the insertion caret. Not so, evidently, in Inkwell.)
Caitlin had her 6th grade orientation this morning, and I accompanied her to meet her teachers and get an idea of what her schedule was going to be like, more out of a sense of parental duty than anything else. Ordinarily, this would be rather unremarkable and not very noteworthy, except for something unusual that seemed to happen to me.
I've been in a pretty low mood for the last couple of weeks. There are a number of tasks ahead of me that I'm not looking forward to, and I seem to be feeling a little overwhelmed by some of the immediate challenges before me. I cope with this, but I don't necessarily do it very well. Better than I have in the past, but I'm obviously in a kind of funk.
The orientation went about as well as these things ordinarily go, maybe a little better. It was crowded, with probably two-thirds of the students in attendance, each accompanied by a parent and/or sibling or two. I couldn't help noticing how many women there were. Where I work, there is only one woman in the office, and all the people I work with outside the office in the local area are men. There are some women I work with at other locations who I interact with by phone or e-mail, but about the most women I ever see on any given day might be at the grocery store or Target. There are women in my TKD class, but when I take class, it's mostly men. Mrs. D. hasn't been coming to class since school let out. So I'm really noticing all these women.
What struck me as kind of odd, but in a good sort of way, was how these women chose to attire themselves for a 6th grade orientation. It was remarkable to note the number of women wearing low-cut tops with shape-enhancing bras. Also noteworthy were the number wearing tight-fitting tops with no bra. (It is Florida, after all.) Finally, I was kind of surprised at the number of women sporting tattoos. Kind of reminded me of the Navy. But nevertheless, there were a significant number of women in what could reasonably be described as casual attire, but casual attire that was meant to present themselves in the most sexually-attractive fashion possible. There were also women who were casually attired, but much more modestly, although attractively so; and some women who simply didn't care what they were seen wearing (Which is by no means intended to be a slam against them - if I weren't going to work afterward, I would probably have been equally as indifferent to my attire.) All of which is to simply say that I find it curious how much variety there is in choices of attire, and I wonder about the motivation behind the different choices. Are the most provocatively dressed the most competitive? One thing I will note, I saw very few women dressed in what I would call "business attire." From this, I'm inclined to conclude that women who work in occupations that demand business attire are unlikely to attend 6th grade orientation. I noted only a couple of men in business attire, so I'm inclined to believe the same is likely true for them as well.
But that's not the kind of nice/weird part. By the time I got back to the office, I noticed I was feeling significantly better in terms of my mood. At first I thought perhaps I was simply sharing some of Caitie's excitement at going back to school. (When she woke up this morning, she said with something of a faux frown, "I start school tomorrow." Then she smiled and went, "Yea!") But as time went on, I noticed I was actually feeling better and better. I could think about all the things I have to do, but they didn't bother me. So now I knew something was up. This kind of thing doesn't usually happen unless I do some heavy lifting in meditation, or working out, or a really good session with Sandy, and seldom, perhaps never, have I had a feeling that I can only describe as giddiness.
About this time, I recalled something I had read about an experiment that seemed to show men's pheromones could improve women's moods. It had to do with t-shirts or something, but I believe it was in New Scientist that I read about it. Anyway, I'm convinced that's what happened to me this morning. I was swimming in a sea of female pheromones, and wow! What a pick-me-up! I suspect I was more susceptible than many men because my normal environment is extremely low in female pheromones, so whatever receptors we may have, mine were mostly empty. Because I was aware of my earlier mood, and I'm accustomed now to monitoring what that mood is, I was able to notice the change. Even if I wasn't in the habit of paying attention to my interior weather, it would have been hard to miss this change.
It's got kind of a half-life. The euphoria peaked about an hour after I left the school, and it's been declining steadily since. I'm now about four hours from when I left the school, and my mood is still elevated from this morning, but it's down markedly from it's peak around noontime. I'm not a psychiatrist or a neurologist, so I have little idea what the mechanism is here. I would say that it must have something to do with phermones, chemical messengers, binding to perhaps olfactory receptors, which in turn release other chemicals messengers in the body. "Good news! Lots of women around! Be charming! Smile a lot! Be happy! Look confident and attractive! Let's pass along some genes!" Whatever it is, I like it!
My lack of productivity seems to continue. Part of it is me, part of it is having more to do at the moment. Caitlin is taking Taekwondo now, and her uniform needs to have the requisite patches sewn on it. The school recommended a seamstress that does a lot of their uniforms, so I went to see her. What I got was a somewhat distressed husband working the counter, because his wife had just had surgery. He kept asking me, "Where do they go? You have to tell me where they go. I need a map. They said they were going to give me a map. Did you bring me a map?"
Like I needed that in my life. I felt bad for the guy, but I didn't have a "map" because the instructor said she knew where they all went. So I defaulted to my regular habit of trying to use Stitch-Witch to iron them on. Of course, the fabric store was out of Stitch-Witch, so I bought some new stuff that was supposed to be the same. Well, the instructions were somewhat different, and so I tried to do it the way the instructions seemed to suggest and that turned into a bit of a disaster, as I ironed most of the adhesive to my ironing board.
I managed to get all the patches on, using the guidance included in my leadership manual. I had one patch that wasn't mentioned, so I brought the uniform into the school when I dropped Caitie off the next time. Turns out, my manual is out of date and four out of the six patches I ironed on were in the wrong places. Sigh.
Last night I sewed the two that were correct to her uniform, and that managed to take me 90 minutes. It's a bitch pushing a needle through those plastic-backed patches. I only iron them on so that I can sew them on in the correct orientation, without bunching the fabric up. The glue doesn't hold up in the laundry. Now I've got to finishing ripping off the largest patch that I glued on, which seems to be holding pretty well, as Murphy would have it.
This is all something of an issue because Caitie wants to participate in a tournament this weekend. It's down in Melbourne, so we can drive down and stay at Maria's place and save quite a bit of money. The big expense with tournaments is they're all usually out of town, so there are hotels and gas and food to worry about. This one will be very inexpensive, and she can get an idea if it's something she'd like to continue doing, without a large investment on my part. But I've got to get all these stupid patches sewn on by Friday and the way my thumb and forefinger feel right now, I'm not sure I can get it done.
Plus, I've got a couple other high-priority matters kind of hanging fire right now. Ugh. It'll pass. Always does.
I found out this morning that searches seem to be case-sensitive at Feedster. It would search for "Quicktime" and omit feeds that included "QuickTime." I included both terms in the search query, and that seems to resolve to an "and" query, as it only returned 69 feeds, as opposed to >1K for either of the alternative spellings. I clicked on the Advanced link, looking for an "or" operator, but didn't happen to see one. So I just saved another search as "QuickTime."
Ah, this is refreshing. "First, we are trying to create the future, a major shift with or [sic] R&D. There is no longer any innovation ahead of us and if we don't create it there is nothing else we can burrow from."
Then there's this: "I think Steve Jobs has made the wrong CPU choice for 20 years, he just added a few more years to the life of his bad decisions." My, that's an insightful, nuanced, dispassionate analysis.
Wasn't it Andy Grove who uttered something like "Only the paranoid survive?" I guess you can tell he doesn't work there anymore. It's good to see a healthy sense of corporate arrogance and superiority is growing at Intel. Shouldn't be too long before someone hands their ass to them. May not be Apple, or IBM or AMD, but with dipshits like this running the show, someone will. Can't happen too soon either.
"Deal with it." It's one of those contemporary colloquialisms that I find rather annoying.
What does it really say? Well, it's an imperative, so the writer or speaker is issuing a command, which assumes a certain degree of authority that they very likely don't possess. People with real authority seldom resort to such phrases. What it really seems to be is a dismissive. The writer or speaker disagrees with how someone else is "dealing" with a particular issue, declaring their objections or reservations to be invalid. Presumably this is based upon the speaker or writer's superior insight into the issue at hand, which he or she feels is so patently obvious as to be axiomatic, and any other view is not worth the time to entertain.
It's the sound of a mind slamming shut. It's the utterance of an impatient, intolerant and fundamentally lazy mind. Sad to see so many otherwise intelligent people using it these days.
Early this afternoon, after taking down limbs and finding the hole in the roof, I watched Who's Harry Crumb? the John Candy farcewith Caitlin. The closing tune to that movie was Bonnie Tyler's Holding Out for a Hero.
The subject of heroes is something that interests me, and I always liked that song just because it's a kind of fun, up-tempo tune. I wondered if it was in the iTunes Music Store catalog, because I thought it would be nice to own a copy. Well, I did a lazy search on "hero" and made a number of serendipitous discoveries. I ended up buying:
Holding Out for a Hero by Bonnie Tyler
Be My Hero by October Project
The Hero Dies in This One by The Ataris (great song!)
Hero by Mariah Carey
Hero by Enrique Iglesias (this song actually gets on my nerves, but sometimes I can take it - requires a certain mood I think)
Hero by the Pat McGee Band
Hero (Wind Beneath My Wings) by Gladys Knight and the Pips (I already had the Bette Midler version, but this one is very nice)
Heroes by David Bowie
I Don't Need a Hero by Concrete Blonde
I Could Use a Hero by Bering Strait
There's a Hero by Billy Gilman
Time Loves a Hero by Little Feat (in terms of lyrical content, I like this one the most I think)
Working Class Hero by Marianne Faithfull (whoa!)
And I already had, We Don't Need Another Hero by Tina Turner.
I'm not sure what I think about all these songs yet, but I know I want to listen to more by Marianne Faithfull and The Ataris. Haven't listened enough to some of the others to form an opinion, except to say it's unlikely I'll ever be an Enrique Iglesias fan.
Here's a shot of my pal for the last couple of years. This is kind of a rare event these days, she's taken to staying outside most of the time. I'm not keen on that, but what can you do? Cats do what they damn well please, and Karma's no exception in that regard. You may recall, I first introduced her to you on July 14, 2001.
I was listening to something on NPR the other day, I think it was Talk of the Nation, and they were interviewing an author of a book on stay-at-home dads. He made a comment that I understood, though I'm not sure why he chose to make it quite the way he did. He said something like, "Men are like polar bears, we tend to have fewer friends as we get older."
I have no idea how many friends old polar bears have, but if I plot the number of friends I have against my age, the slope of the curve is consistently negative. This is not a good thing, I think.
Well, I was somewhat more productive today; although that's not saying much. I went up on the second story roof (we have roofs at first and second stories, and I'm usually not very comfortable on the top roof) and cut down several limbs that were touching the roof from one of the (too) many trees that grow around here. Oddly enough, I was pretty comfortable up there this time. Unfortunately, I discovered that one of the limbs had worn a hole through the shingles along one of the ridges where two faces of the roof meet. I'm sure that has some architectural term, but I don't know what it is. I just know I have a hole in my roof. There are also several spots where shingles need to be replaced.
The banana trees took major hits as the limbs dropped to the ground. Fortunately, I didn't break a window. I suppose this was one of those jobs perhaps best left to those people who do these sorts of things for a living.
I guess it's kind of a good thing I found the hole, it hasn't manifested itself as a leak in Caitie's bedroom yet. Time to call contractors again. Hopefully I'll be able to get someone out to look at the job. I think I'm going to lump in the siding, flat roof, shingles, and some kind of protective overhang for the back door off the addition that just gets destroyed by water coming off the roof. (Don't tell me gutters. We did them. Too much roof, too much water, gutters don't do the job.) Putting it all together may make the job big enough for someone to take it. Otherwise, I'll have to go with one of the many one-man outfits that always seem to be available. You just never really know what you're going to get from one of those guys, even if you do check references and the Better Business Bureau.
But it's been kind of rainy most of the day, and I just feel sort of sluggish, or slug-like, or something. It'll pass. Usually does.
Update: Although it is extremely unlikely that anyone who is terribly interested in this phenomenon has actually read this little blurb and either linked to it or bookmarked it, I'll leave it here rather than delete it. It is not correct, or, at least, is misleading and should be disregarded. The author of the paper seems to be asserting that the fallacy that underlies Zeno's paradoxes and other difficulties in physics is that of the existence of an "instant" in time. Nagarjuna, as have many others, embraces the notion of an "instant," or at least that the "present" has no "duration." Perhaps more on this later as I have time to think about it.
There's a bit of a discussion going on over at /. about a paper being published in a physics journal that sheds new light on the notion of time, and resolves a couple of Zeno's paradoxes.
A quotation from the paper reads: "With some thought it should become clear that no matter how small the time interval, or how slowly an object moves during that interval, it is still in motion and it's position is constantly changing, so it can't have a determined relative position at any time, whether during a interval, however small, or at an instant. Indeed, if it did, it couldn't be in motion."
This resonated instantly with Nagarjuna, from the verses on the illusion of motion. Here is Jay L. Garfield's commentary on page 125 of his translation of The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way, following the first verse on Examination of Motion:
"That is, if motion exists, there must be sometime at which it exists. Nagarjuna in this opening verse considers the past and the future. This makes good sense. For motion requires a change of position, and a change of position must occur over time. But the present has no duration. So if motion were to exist, it would have to exist either in the past or in the future. But a thing that has moved only in the past is not now moving. Nor is a thing yet to be moved. One might, of course, suggest that there is a simple tense fallacy here -- that things that were moving in the past were then in motion, that things that will move in the future will then be in motion. But this would be problematic. For that would mean that all motion would be in the past or the future, and this could be said at any time. So there is no time at which it would be true of any thing that it is in motion."
The rest of the verses go on to examine various objections and rebuttals, with worthwhile commentary from Garfield.
Looking through the rest of the article, I'd be willing to hazard a guess that the whole paper is little more than a restatement of Nagarjuna. In other words, I think there's something fishy going on here. It'll be interesting to see the paper.
Of course, that's not saying the ideas are wrong. I happen to think Nagarjuna was every bit as much of a genius-intellect as Newton or Einstein, it's just that the culture and context of his writing has left him obscure to modern physicists.
Today has been, for lack of a better word, non-productive. There was nothing wrong with the day, of course. It did rain most of the afternoon, but that's neither here nor there. It was me that was non-productive.
I think it was a combination of fatigue, habituated thinking, and unreasonable expectations. I was getting into a real stew, watching the hours tick by and seeing all the work that wasn't getting accomplished, and the relaxation that wasn't being enjoyed. One would think it might simply be a matter of will power or discipline, but I don't think it's that simple. I did recognize the negative feedback loop, and the fact that my inner critic was making the situation worse by nagging me about the passage of time and my lack of productivity. I needed to shut him up.
I happened to be reading a comment at a weblog somewhere, where someone quoted Westley in The Princess Bride:
"Get used to disappointment."
Suddenly I realized I just needed to laugh. So I said screw everything else, and went ahead and stuck The Princess Bride into the DVD player and enjoyed the movie. I'm glad I did. I'm not sure I am or I'll be any more "productive," but I'm not too worried about it now.
I still need to go see Pirates of the Caribbean and LXG too. Too late today, maybe tomorrow. The chores will still be here when I get back.
In its present incarnation, Address Book will only export a separate vCard for each contact, so you end up with a pile of little vCard files. Which isn't bad, but if you go ahead and drag the lot of them onto a Map View of your Tinderbox document, you also inherit all the extraneous text that is used to define the vCard.
With SBook5, after you've imported your Address Book file, you can export to a single text file, with each contact separated by a delimiter. Save your exported file someplace where you'll readily find it, like the desktop or your documents folder. You'll have to append a .txt suffix to the file when you export. SBook5 doesn't do it, and Tinderbox won't accept a file without it. After it's exported (takes approximately no time), open the file with Text Edit and select the delimit text (defaults to ====================), and copy that to your clipboard.
Drag the exported file onto a Map View of your Tinderbox document and select Explode from the Note menu. A dialog box will open asking you how to divide up the document, you want to select the second option with the delimiter. Just paste the text you copied from Text Edit into the field. Don't forget to set the little radio button that says to delete the delimiter unless you want it in each of your notes for some reason. It looks like this:
Then just hit Explode, and your contacts will be entered as notes in your Tinderbox document.
You've still got some work to do if you want to make URLs and e-mail addresses clickable in Tinderbox. You'll have to add the URL attribute to your notes, then copy and paste the relevant text into the attribute.
As it stands now, it seems you can't right-click on a text selection in Tinderbox and either use a Service from the application menu, or invoke an AppleScript using something like the Big Cat scripts plug-in. Perhaps that's a feature Eastgate can add in another revision to Tinderbox.
My next-door neighbors are frequent entertainers. They have a small driveway, and the street in front of their house has an island in the middle of it, so people end up parking in front of my house nearly every weekend. I'd ask them to park someplace else, but there's really nowhere else to park. Why this bugs me, I don't know. But it bugs me.
And no, it's not because I'm not invited to the party.
I can tell I'm back to my normal level of interest, and not just because Site Meter tells me so. It's because nobody bothered to point out how you can subscribe to Feedster search results in your news aggregator!
Clicking on one of the ubiquitous orange XML icons below the search summary will give you the URL of your search result in RSS format, which you can copy and paste into an aggregator of your choice. Very cool.
A couple of somewhat minor issues. First, when viewed in the aggregator, you don't get any additional information as to the source of the feed, as far as NetNewsWire can tell, it's all coming from Feedster. Not a big problem, just a limitation of the format, I think. Second, while Feedster the website can return dozens of hits, the RSS feed seems limited to the first 8 or 10 that appear on the web page of the search result. The Sherlock plug-in returns 40. There's a Preferences page for Feedster, where you can specify the number of search results diplayed on a page, but that doesn't seem to work for me, at least in Safari. It may work in another browser, and then perhaps you'd be able to get a link to an RSS file with more than 8 or 10 results. For daily viewing, with results sorted by date, I don't think this is going to be a huge issue for many of the topics I'm interested in.
