"Amazingly bad user interface."

In the egalitarian spirit of the "self-correcting nature of the blogosphere," I offer the following in response to Dave Winer's experience with his iPod and iTunes:

Here is my 40GB 3G (the one with the four separate buttons across the top) iPod connected to my PowerMac G4 MDD via USB 2.0 (Note: The 3G iPod cannot charge the battery on a USB 2.0 interface. I charge mine from the dock, using the firewire cable connected to the AC adapter. The dock is connected to a set of speakers.):

Here is the same iPod immediately afterward, connected to my iBook. Note the alert:

I reduced the size of the PowerMac screenshot because it's a 1280x1024 screen and I could easily do it via SnapzPro. The iBook's shot is full size so that the alert could be easily read. (Update: I scaled the iBook's shot. It was just too damn big.)

Both machines are running Tiger 10.4.3, and iTunes 6.0.1. In both cases, the machines had been recently restarted (Last night's security update on the iBook, and struggling to install Epson's scanner driver on the PowerMac last night resulted in a couple of restarts. More about that some other time.) In both cases, iTunes was not running when the iPod was initially connected, but started up in response to the connection to the USB cable.

There may be something wrong with one or more of Dave's installs, I don't know. But Apple does make an effort to keep the user from borking his iPod. It's a side-effect of DRM, unfortunately, and it can be a source of confusion, but it doesn't just wipe out your iPod without warning you.

Unless, of course, the user checks that "Do not ask me again," box. Not sure how you would go about fixing that. I'd suggest perhaps deleting the iTunes preference plist, but I don't know.

Progress

I've managed to capture and archive about two thirds of the old Time's Shadow weblog. I'm up through the end of June, 2001, and I didn't complete a full year in 2002 at editthispage.com, transitioning to .Mac in that year.

One happy coincidence of this sort of tedious process of selecting the text and then using Services to transfer it to NoteTaker has been a brief opportunity to read some of what I wrote. While I'm reminded of the immutability of Sturgeon's Law ("90% of everything is crap"), it's been interesting to see how my thinking has evolved (or hasn't) on different subjects over the last several years. It's given me a few things to think about and perhaps write about that aren't about the topics that have been so frustrating for me of late.

Another interesting project is going to be archiving this stuff in some useful way. Al Hawkins pointed to this new application Journler, which has also been mentioned by Giles Turnbull at O'Reilly's Mac DevCenter. On the one hand, it looks like yet another catch-all, note-taking, information-managing application. On the other hand, it seems to offer some interesting integration with the iLife apps. Something that has been occurring to me as I've been archiving these posts would be to go through and pull other data from my life that corresponds with the dates of the posts. I think that would mostly consist of pictures from iPhoto and e-mail, but I have a lot of iCal data too, which I've been saving for no particular reason. Maybe some documents I created for whatever reason. I'm not sure what value there might be to putting it all together, but maybe that won't be apparent until afterward. Kind of like a Lifestreams kind of thing. And in some of my posts, I either mention a song or quote a lyric (usually Springsteen, what else?), and it might be cool to click on a link and have iTunes start playing that song.

Anyway, it's given me some new things to think about and do with the computer, which is welcome and refreshing.

Update: Just did my daily (well, that's the intention, anyway) sit, and I didn't do much focusing on my breath because I kept thinking about tying this stuff together. I don't know if Journler does this, I rather expect it doesn't, but I think Spotlight offers the means to accomplish something like this.

A page displays the day's weblog entry, and then a Spotlight-enabled, saved-search kind of thing displays the From and Subject lines of e-mails from that day, thumbnails of pictures taken that day, a list of any iCal entries from that day, and links to any documents created or edited on that day (maybe a thumbnail view). If it was really smart, maybe it could scan the text and if it recognized any names, perhaps include links to contact data in Address book for those names. That might be tough to pull off. Everything else is just date information, names are hard to recognize. How about if you receive your bank statements as PDF files, could we get something smart enough to read the transaction dates and put whatever transactions were processed on that date? Maybe your cell phone bill, who did you call that day, or who called you?

Is any of that useful? I have no idea.

Mr. Miyagi

I was sad to read that Pat Morita passed away yesterday.

"Wax on. Wax off."

You Can't Win

I had a long piece that, by the time I finished it, had pretty much lost me. Suffice to say, some things really don't matter, and you probably shouldn't give them that much attention. You'll never get those minutes back anyway. For the record, I never said "Don't buy Tinderbox."

In other news, there are a few good deals over at the Apple Store today, "Black Friday," and all. The iSight and Airport Express are available at healthy discounts. The iMac and iBook G4 are available at discounts below the government employee discount (didn't check the educational discount).

I'm watching my daughter's pets while she's out of town visiting her in-laws. So I'm running back and forth between the apartment and her house, and I'm going to go into the office in a little bit just to check e-mail. I don't have remote access to my government e-mail account. Next year, assuming I still have that job, I'll set it up to auto-forward to me.

I bring my iBook with me to Melissa's, and I've set their iMac up to share their internet connection, but it's been kind of a hit or miss affair. I think I need to enter a DNS server address because some pages load and others just time out, mostly they seem to time out, but then will load, or load partially, on a second attempt. Mail and iChat work fine.

The audio went out on their home theater audio system. It's an older Pioneer rig one of their friends gave to them, and I think the amp just died. I've got to re-wire the audio back to the TV so the dogs have something to listen to while I'm out of the house. I brought my iPod with me, along with the JBL Onstage speakers, so I have my own music with me.

While I sympathize with Dave Winer's experience with iTunes on his iBook wiping out his library on his iPod, I don't think Apple wrote software that "brutal." I maintain my main iTunes library on my PowerMac, though I have plugged my iPod into my iBook to access files I've stored on the iPod and to charge it. iTunes always gives me an alert box that asks if I want to replace the music on the iPod with the music from the iBook, and I always click "No," and the iPod doesn't mount in iTunes. I'm guessing the alert flashed and Dave clicked "Yes" without really thinking about what it was telling him.

I do this a lot, but I didn't happen to do it with the iPod because I really didn't know what was going to happen the first time, and so I didn't have any expectations other than a certain amount of caution borne of ignorance. But I have clicked "Yes," or the equivalent "go ahead" choice, on a lot of dialog boxes that I hadn't read because I had certain expectations about what was supposed to happen, and a few times I've regretted doing that.

I've been using NoteTaker to archive Time's Shadow, and it's working pretty well. I'm up through all of June 2000, and I expect I'll have the whole thing done before the site goes dark. I'm kind of glad I'm grabbing it, because I did record some events from my life that might be useful to recall one day. Then again, who really cares?

I hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving. The weather here was stunningly gorgeous. Very clear, not just clear as in "cloud-free" but that crystalline kind of clear where everything appears so much sharper and the colors are richer. Temperatures were in the mid-70s. Just beautiful. On the other hand, it was cold and snowing in upstate New York where my parents had Thanksgiving dinner with my sister! I'm thankful my brother John drove them out there and back! I spoke with my parents via iChat after they got back home, and also with my brother Mark after he got back to his place. My brother Eric called me and we chatted by phone. It was nice talking to all of them.

A Point of Clarification

Al Hawkins and Doug Miller (obliquely) commented on a reference I seemed to make to Tinderbox being a "walled garden." I'm going to re-post the comment I made at Al's weblog in case anyone else came away with that impression:

I wasn’t being clear. I don’t regard Tinderbox as a walled garden, but .Mac.

As for Tinderbox files being XML and therefore not being proprietary, they might as well be in Mandarin Chinese for someone who doesn’t write code that parses XML. What Tinderbox does do is export its data in two easily edited formats that the programming-impaired can use, text and html.

But it’s the for-pay, integration and ease of use that makes .Mac something of a walled-garden. Someone else tends to all the technical issues of maintaining the servers, seeing to security, and making sure my machine can maintain connectivity with it. Anybody who has not paid cannot use it the same way (except for the free trial, I guess), and anybody who isn’t on a Mac cannot use all of its features. I’m guessing that meets Doc’s definition of a walled garden.

But it’s something that is very convenient for me and makes it much easier to be creative, to the extent that whatever it is I do may be considered “creative,” which, I agree, is dubious at best.

Tinderbox is great and as a content management system it does about the most you could expect any CMS to do, it allows you to get your content out in a format you can use, unlike Manila, which was a walled garden with a proprietary format with no easy way to get out.

Sorry for the confusion.

As the World Turns

I was going back through the old Time's Shadow archives, and I noticed things were a lot more fun back then when doing this wasn't about doing something important.

I bought a new scanner from Amazon, the Epson Perfection 4490. (Parenthetically, if may be sort of semi-serious for a moment, isn't it just like a marketer to name a product "Perfection?" Even though it certainly isn't. Markets are conversations only if most of your conversations are fish stories or are about sex, because everybody lies about sex. Anyway, I digress.) I note that Amazon is now selling the damn thing for $12.00 less than I ordered it for. Since it just shipped today, can I suppose they'll charge my card today's price, or the $249.99 list price it had when I ordered it on Saturday? Oh well. I tried to buy one at Office Depot on Saturday, intending to pay list price plus sales tax, but they didn't have one in stock. So much for instant gratification.

Anyway, the reason for buying what is, to me, a fairly expensive scanner when I already have three of the damn things laying around the apartment (1 SCSI, 2 USB), is because this one has a lighted lid that supposedly does a decent job scanning slides and film negatives. I hope to scan some of my old slides and negatives, as well as some very old negatives that I got from my father. I want to start preserving and sharing these pictures.

I started a Yahoo group for my high school class, and we've managed to get about 19 members signed up so far, including a few people who didn't make it to the reunion. I've uploaded all the pictures I took at the reunion, firmly establishing once again that I am not a photographer, I take pictures. But I also created a new album called That 70s Show, and I uploaded some slides I had scanned by Ritz Camera a year or so ago, of a party of some kind at a classmate's house. I went digging around through my box of pictures and found some more of some friends of mine at another friend's house, in his basement like the TV show, and I want to scan them and upload them as well. I hope it will help attract more classmates and encourage them all to do likewise with their pictures. One of my classmates had a class picture from kindergarten and I added that in another album for pictures from the Sixties. I wasn't a part of that school district until the sixth grade, but I recognized a few of my classmates. It's kind of fun to look back at what we were like what seems like not so very long ago.

Dad's pictures I want to get scanned and share them with the rest of the family, and have Dad identify the people in the pictures for us. Hopefully this scanner will do the job. Unlike my other scanners, this one uses a USB 2.0 interface, so it'll be a lot faster.

I went through my Dad's old editthispage.com site and basically saved a web archive of every post. That didn't take very long, so I might spend a day over the long weekend basically doing the same thing for my old site. I'm also considering just selecting the text of each post and piping it to DevonThink or NoteTaker via Services, which may be somewhat more orderly. I haven't made up my mind. Most of the other solutions that have been presented to me seem a little too complicated for my feeble mind. (But thanks anyway, Cecil!)

Right Action

I make fairly frequent use of Apple's Services, also available from a number of other developers and accessed from the Apple Menu. I've often thought it would be more convenient to be able to access Services as a contextual menu item, instead of highlighting the text of interest and then mousing up to the menu bar.

A couple of weeks ago, I searched for an answer and found Nicholas Riley's ICeCoffEE 1.4.2. It uses Unsanity's Application Enhancer framework, a haxie that is sometimes suspected of being a source of instability in the operating system. I've been using it with ICeCoffEE for a while now, and I've noticed nothing especially peculiar.

ICeCoffEE is mainly intended as a URL-opening utility, wherein one merely has to command-click on any URL in a piece of text and have that page opened in Safari or whatever browser is specified to open URL's on your Mac. But it also offers the Services menu as a contextual menu item, so that all you have to do is right-click (control-click for single button mice) on the selected text, and the Services menu is right there next to the selection. Saves a little mouse movement, which can be helpful for folks with large screens, or using a two-monitor setup like mine.

Kinda Cool

I used Yahoo to look up an acquaintance's address, and it found it for me. Clicking on the name brought me to another page where it offered to add the name and address to my Yahoo online address book, which I didn't really use much before, but am starting to in connection with the Yahoo group for my high school class. But the interesting thing is that page also offered a vCard link. I wasn't sure what would happen when I clicked on it, so I did and was surprised to see the Mac's Address Book ask if I wanted to create a new entry with the person's name and address. I clicked "Yes," and there it was.

I haven't seen that mentioned anywhere before. I looked at the page source and it isn't clear to me at all what's going on with that link, or how it's passed to Address Book, but it's pretty sweet just the same.

I've been adding some other names, and for the ones where I already have the name, but just an e-mail address or phone number, it updates the record to include the missing address and/or phone number data.

I also noted that Yahoo doesn't know where I live, so the data may not be reliable in all cases.

Update: Well, there's a little less magic involved, it seems. Looking in my downloads folder, I see the little .vcf files for each name. It's like any other application opening a downloaded file. Still, it's pretty cool.

Thoughts on Crooked Frames

Doc Searls writes about saving the net. Implicit in the use of the saving-frame, and explicit in the text of Doc's essay is the notion of loss. Yet, all change is a type of loss. So is Doc advocating no change for the net?

This would seem to conflict with the notion, fallacious in my opinion, that "nobody owns it, everyone can use it, anybody can improve it." If nothing else, it at least implies that not just "anybody" can "improve" it, because "somebody" is going to regard some "improvements" as "losses" from which the net must be "saved." Certainly, that notion about "anybody can improve it" was curiously absent during the whole RSS wars experience. So it must not be true that anybody can improve it, because what constitutes an improvement is subject to some kind of ideological purity test by not just anybody, but by a self-appointed body of one kind or another, usually competing self-appointed bodies who beat each other to a rhetorical pulp online.

It's also interesting to note how Doc frames his "them" against his "us" as "pipeholders" instead of "pipe owners," which would be more accurate, because every single piece of the physical hardware is owned by somebody even if some of it is owned by the government. But by making cable companies and telcos mere "holders" instead of "owners," Doc can make any rights they might have as property owners vanish from the conversation.

Then there's this whole boogey-man theory of "walled gardens" and "silos." Apple's iTunes is often cited as being a proprietary walled garden because it's the only thing the iPod works with, and music sold through the iTunes Music Store only works in iTunes and iPods. About the only legitimate criticism in this situation is on the question of whether or not Apple should license the Fairplay DRM scheme to other manufacturers and music vendors. I'll return to that in a moment, but first consider the idea that the iPod works only with iTunes. Apple sells a complete solution to people who enjoy music, and it works well because Apple can control the entire process. The iPod can play other formats, most importantly, MP3, and people have reverse-engineered the iPod's internals enough to run Linux on the things. I don't know, but I don't believe there's any technical barrier, deliberately imposed by Apple, to preclude another developer from allowing the iPod to synchronize music files with at least the MP3 format through a different application. Perhaps there is, but I don't think so. So the hardware, at least to me, seems fairly open.

The DRM issue is much more complex. It's clear that Apple would have nothing to sell, in the current copyright regime, without offering some form of DRM to the rights holders of the music they wish to sell. We can debate the merits of copyright, and who's really making the money some other time, but for a legitimate online music store offering a large catalog of popular music, some form of DRM would have to exist. There are at least two criticisms I read about Apple's DRM scheme all the time. The first is that it does not allow you to do whatever you want with music you own and paid for through the iTunes Music Store (iTMS). Technically, this is true. But technically, the restrictions are also relatively light. CD players remain more ubiquitous playback devices than MP3 players, and you can burn your music to CD as much as you want, though there are limitations on the number of times a specific compilation, or playlist, can be burned. You can have your music on up to five computers, which seems like a reasonable number for a family. It does preclude you from using programs like Roxio's Jam to customize your compilation, and that's a nuisance, to be sure.

But let's go a little further. Apple hasn't plugged the analog hole, and if there's legislation or regulation to be concerned about, it might be efforts to constrain how computing devices use analog data. But I think it's far too late to stuff that genie back into any bottle. For a long time, it was recognized that you could burn your music to CD and then re-rip it to MP3 format if you wished. It's even more trivial than that, and less time-consuming. All one simply has to do is play one's music and have an application convert the audio data to another format. On the Mac you can use at least WireTap Pro or Audo Hijack Pro. This isn't strictly an "analog hole" per se, as most of these applications work from the digital stream. Application accessibility to that digital stream might be an easier hole to plug than the purely analog hole, but it would create problems for legitimate creators whose applications rely on access to the digital data for a number of things. So, yes, it's inconvenient. About the most that can be said about Fairplay is that it's a lot like a lock. An inconvenience that helps to keep honest people honest, and deters the casual, opportunistic criminal, but not the determined one. For the honest user, it's an inconvenience that can be worked around, although you technically might become cross-threaded with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. I don't lose much sleep over it.

The second criticism deals with whether Apple should license its Fairplay DRM scheme to other vendors. This, it seems to me, is a business decision, more so than a question of what the right thing to do is. There are other DRM schemes, there are other music players, and people certainly have a choice. As a practical matter, it's a far lower monopoly barrier to overturn than Microsoft's was when they were imposing punitive licensing deals on hardware manufacturers. I don't believe it's the ideal situation by any means, but I don't see Apple acting as a punitive monopolist in the same context that Microsoft has in the past. At the moment, Fairplay remains one of a number of competitive advantages, perhaps the weakest one, Apple has in the marketplace, and it's acting to try to preserve that. But I can agree that this point can be debated.

To return to "silos" or "walled gardens," a better example would be a service like Editthispage.com. This is not intended as a criticism, but it is to demonstrate that the purportedly negative characteristics of so-called "bigcos" are also exhibited by the purportedly more virtuous "little guys."

Editthispage.com was a free service, and free services are generally worth what you pay for them, sometimes more. Editthispage.com was a good deal. That free service, that good deal, is going away on 1 December because somebody sure as hell owns it, and therefore has the right to do with it as they please. They offer the opportunity to get your data from their servers, but the service ran on Frontier/Manila, which dynamically created web pages from a database on the server. Your data is in a proprietary format, although the program itself has gone open source. I've downloaded my data and a copy of Frontier and thus far I'm unable to open it. If nothing else, it will require an investment of time and effort on my part to recover that information in a non-proprietary format. If I were a more clever man, I could go the equivalent of the analog-hole route, and merely have Userland serve each of my pages one at a time, and save the resulting HTML files to my HD, but I'd have to automate the process or be prepared to sit here for however long it took to load nearly three years' worth of posts. I don't have that kind of time, and I'm not that clever.

My current solution uses Tinderbox, which uses a nearly-proprietary format, based on XML, but the application itself can export my data as either text or html. And it's hosted on .Mac, presumably a "walled garden" of some kind, but one which I have reasonable access to and I can take down my entire site with a couple of mouse clicks, something I could not have done with Editthispage.com, at least up until the time I stopped using it.

Finally, the point of this is that Doc is appealing to fear, and is framing his arguments just as much to his own advantage as those he's afraid of have. None of the players in this little internet drama have a mortal lock on virtue or even ideological purity. "Silos" and "walled gardens" often exist simply because there are trade-offs made between competing virtues all the time, not necessarily because of pernicious greed in all cases.

Promoting fear is never, I think, a good thing, and Doc is promoting fear. Embracing framing, even though we often do it unconsciously or intuitively, can be problematic; but it's what marketers do and that's why markets are conversations, passion merely means enthusiasm, and authority without responsibility is no big deal as long as it's "just marketing." I would say it's better to abandon deliberate efforts at framing and try, instead, to embrace, however imperfectly, sincere efforts toward clarity, which would seem to encourage dialog, rather than merely initiate a round of frame-wars. (That was almost punny, as well as being a run-on sentence.)

Just my $.02. What do I know? If I were smart, I'd be rich.

Transient Nature of All Material Phenomena

My first blogging effort will soon vanish into the ether. As of 1 December, Userland will no longer be hosting editthispage.com sites for free.

I've downloaded something that is purported to be my site, but I can't seem to open the downloaded file in Frontier. I'm sure I'll figure it out eventually, but I don't know if I'll ever get the whole thing rebuilt as a static site. If I do, I'll host it here.

If not, oh well... Not a big deal.

Early Christmas Present

I bought myself The Complete Calvin and Hobbes. The thing is so heavy, Amazon won't even ship it for free. B-A-M was offering it for 30% off, so it cost me about a $15.00 premium to have it immediately, with no chance of it being damaged in shipping.

I think I admire Bill Watterson for what he has done with his creation. More specifically, I suppose, for what he hasn't done with it. In the introduction, he explains some of the difficulty he had keeping Calvin and Hobbes from becoming a franchise industry filled with plush dolls, dinnerware, lunch boxes, and Happy Meal toys. He had to be turning down a lot of money, and it seems not all of the people he worked with were terribly happy about it.

Contrast Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes with this report from The NY Times of a children's book that is really a marketing vehicle for Saks Fifth Avenue. With all the things that are being written about advertising being the business model for nearly anything associated with the web, with even our "conversations" supposedly somehow serving the commercial needs of the market at the expense of our social needs, it's becoming increasingly clear that we are about to drown in a sea of marketing.

I'd say Bill Watterson believed in Calvin and Hobbes. He believed in something about them that was more than simply a means to put bread on his table. It seems apparent that he even suffered for believing in them. I'd say he was passionate about them.

What do marketers believe in? Anything? Do they believe in themselves or in some ability to compel others to desire what they're paid to supposedly make us desire? What do they respect? Is it merely the things that can be counted and measured and calculated, mostly to determine its potential value in dollars? What do marketers regard as sacred or out of bounds? Anything? Is there any venue, any time when it's not appropriate to deliver a marketing "message?" Is there any word, any topic, any subject, any work that shouldn't be exploited to seek a temporary competitive advantage in the marketplace? Do marketing messages make us smarter? Do they help foster critical thinking? Are slogans the most appropriate answers to the most difficult questions?

Do marketers know when enough is enough?

If not, maybe we should tell them.

Intimate Planet

I heard a pretty depressing story from my daughter the other night at dinner. I was asking her about this truck that ended up in the retention pond at the condo complex where I currently reside. She told me the story, and then she told me another one about a guy who died a couple of weeks ago in the unit I live in.

It seems there was this guy, whose name she told me but which I've forgotten already, who had been going through a divorce and had recently moved into the complex. He was a diabetic, and he wasn't very happy about the divorce, I gather. At any rate, one day some family members show up, desperate to get into his condo. Apparently he hasn't been heard from in days, and hasn't shown up for work or anything.

So a couple of the staff go over and use a master key to get into his place. The kitchen is apparently a disaster, with beer bottles and cans everywhere, and the trash hasn't been taken out in a long time. No sign of the inhabitant until they go back into the bedroom where they happen to spot a discolored human heel on the floor poking out from around the corner of the bed. Much freaking out ensues. I was surprised that the smell of decomposition hadn't alerted a neighbor, but I gather he kept the AC set at a chilly 65 degrees. I guess that kind of kept the air circulating and slowed the decomposition.

Turns out it was likely an accidental death. The theory is the victim had neglected to take his insulin, perhaps because he was drunk. At any rate, it is speculated that he awoke in the night in the throes of a diabetic attack, tried to get out of bed and instead fell or stumbled, striking his head and dying as a result. I don't know if he died from the blow to the head, or if his diabetes killed him while he was unconscious. They figure he died on Monday night since he was last seen Monday afternoon, and he wasn't found until Friday afternoon.

So here's this guy, 35 or thereabouts, who's going through some tough times, and he's pretty well off financially, I guess. These places aren't cheap. (I'm just a renter.) He's in my socio-economic stratum anyway. He lived probably 50 feet from where I'm typing these words. And not only did I not know him, or know of his problems, I didn't even know he died until my daughter told me.

But here I am. I know all about Doc Searls' sore back from getting ready to move into yet another house (What's up with that?), I know about Dave Weinberger's Office files being unavailable or something, I know that Halley Suitt seems to want to know how other people manage. (Halley, apparently some don't.) I know a lot of shit about people I'll never meet, and I don't know a damn thing about this guy who died all alone less than 50 feet from where I sit; and was dead for four days before anyone cared enough to get off their ass and knock on his door to see if he was all right. Maybe he needed an "accidental sensei," because it sure as shit doesn't seem like there were people in his life who were there for him.

I don't really know what that says about me. Nothing good, I'm afraid. I don't know what it says about my community that none of my neighbors mentioned it to me. I don't know what it says about our society that a guy can die and we can efficiently collect the body quickly enough that most people won't even notice. Of course, I'm absolutely certain at least a few people will deign to opine that if the guy had only maintained a weblog, he'd probably be alive right now. The guy must not have gotten the memo or something. Must have missed the ClueTrain™, I guess.

Anyway, just another reality-based data point for those of you who like to wax rhapsodic about certain consensual delusions regarding this being an "intimate planet." Chances are there's someone within a stone's throw of where you sit who could use a little intimacy of some kind right about now, and you don't know it. Worse, you never will.

The Tao of Joe, Abridged Version

I started writing a long movie review of Joe Somebody, but it occurred to me I could probably offer the same take on it much more briefly with a couple of sound clips.

Joe's an everyman type of guy who's feeling very uncertain about himself. His wife left him for a younger man, an actor, and she seems to be enjoying some success in her career. He's been at his company for 10 years and was promised a promotion, and some Timberwolves tickets, a year ago that haven't materialized. Then he gets physically humiliated by the company bully in front of his 12-year-old daughter in a confrontation over a 7-year associate taking the last parking space in the 10-year associate parking lot.

Joe isn't exactly moving up in the hierarchy.

The plot has him deciding to rectify the situation by trying to win back his dignity by fighting the bully again, demanding a rematch. This catches the attention of everyone in the company, and a lot of clearly good things begin to happen to Joe as a result of all that attention, and he's clearly enjoying them.

Joe knows that he might be at some disadvantage in this competition with the company bully, who appears bigger and stronger and likely younger; so he enlists the aid of a martial arts instructor, a washed-up B-movie actor played delightfully by Jim Belushi.

The movie has a nice, if somewhat predictable, Taoist ending. But here are two audio clips that kind of present the distilled wisdom of the movie. In the first, Joe, played by Tim Allen, is about to receive his first lesson in self defense and offers what might be thought of, perhaps, as his marketing plan (You'll note he hits all the au courant memes.):

The next audio clip is two weeks later after a session where it is clear Joe has acquired a certain modest competence in protecting himself, and Belushi, as kind of an accidental sensei, offers the central message of the movie.

It's not great cinéma by any means, and it pretty much was panned in the reviews. But I liked it a lot, and it's resonant with some current themes in my life. For those who care to speculate about such things, I identify more closely with Belushi's character than Joe.

Boss, Part 6

Wow, I guess I'm not keeping up! Part 6 of the Born to Run 30th anniversary podcast series is up.

Boss, Part 5

The fifth installment of the Born to Run 30th anniversary podcast is up. The covers of both Time and Newsweek?! I remember it well.

Daily Desktop

Just to post something, I figured I'd help answer Rob Fahrni's question. Here's what I run at least daily:

Mac:

Safari

Mail

NetNewsWire Lite

iTunes

Tinderbox

iCal

iChat

Dictionary

Spell Catcher

Preview

LaunchBar

Dashboard

I suppose we could count Finder

Stuff I run more often than weekly but less than daily:

Halo

iPhoto

Excel

And there are a host of other apps I run at less frequent intervals, including Word, QuickTime Player, Snapz Pro, WireTap Pro, OmniGraffle, DevonThink, NoteTaker, Remote Desktop, Corel PhotoPaint and a bunch of others.

On Windows at work, the list is much shorter:

Explorer

Outlook

Word

Adobe Reader

Excel (not always daily)

PowerPoint (not always daily)

80% of my computer time is probably spent in Explorer in one online database application or another, I have several I have to use, 15% in Outlook, and the remaining 5% is spent in the rest with Word probably being the largest of that.

A little help, please?

Jon Garfunkel sent me and several others an interesting e-mail that points to this analysis of the actual size and relevance of Technorati's supposed 20 million weblogs. I must say, it appears to be a fairly rigorous and illuminating analysis, but I must also confess that I don't really understand all of it, nor am I exactly certain what it all means. The one thing I take away is that the actual size of the "blogosphere," that is, the number of blogs that actually have any relevance when it comes to determining something like rank, is vastly smaller than 20 million. What that might mean, in terms of weblogs' relevance, Technorati's importance (or relevance, or potential worth) I have no idea, except I suspect it can't be happy news for Technorati and everyone else infatuated with (relatively) large numbers.

I would be interested to read what either Phil Edwards or Adam Marsh make of the analysis, since both of them seem to have a better grasp on the numbers and statistical analysis than I do. Me, I'm just an engineer, and not a terribly good one at that. I tried to find an e-mail address for either of those two gentlemen but I couldn't. Hopefully someone reading this might know how to reach them, or failing that, they may track links to their blogs and discover this post and that of Christian Mayaud, the author of the analysis linked to above, and be moved to comment on it.

Boss, Part 4

Turns out that Boss, Part 3 was actually Part 7, so the correct Part 3 is supposed to be re-posted to that same URL soon. In the meantime, Part 4 is available. It is interesting listening.

Boss, Part 3

The third installment in the Born to Run 30th anniversary podcast series is available here.

Visiting Hours

A friend of my daughter's had surgery recently. She was still in the hospital and Caitie had promised to visit her. I thought that was very commendable, and even though the hospital is all the way downtown, it wasn't a bad drive with light Sunday traffic. I brought a couple of books with me and a GameBoy to pass the time.

I think we were there for more than two hours. As we were getting ready to leave, her friend's mom came out and thanked us for coming. Apparently that was the longest her daughter had stayed awake since the surgery last week, and I gather they were pleased with that.

I spent most of the time reading about Kurt Gödel. Reading about all of the salons and circles in Europe at the turn of the last century, I couldn't help but think of all the n-camps and unconferences and such that go on around the internet. Somehow, the guys from the last century seem so much smarter. Maybe it's just me. I probably have a bad attitude or something. Or perhaps I'm just comparing apples and oranges.

On the way home, we had to pass by the St. Johns Town Center mega-shopping-plex, which is the location of the Jacksonville Apple Store. Since it was Sunday, I figured I'd stop by church.

In one of the main windows, they had an iPod nano resting at the top of a column or pillar that made the nano seem even smaller than it is. I got a chance to look at them in the store and noted that most of the nanos had the small scratches that many have noted and some have decided to sue over. I wondered how many of them had been acquired by people trying to see for themselves how easily they scratched? I refrained from further investigation myself. I also looked at the iPod with video, and they looked pretty sweet. Is it just me, or was there some effort to make the physical form of the new iPods and iMacs similar - clear finish fronts with sharp edges, and rounded backs?

Played with the new iMac G5 (with iSight) as well. The 20 inch looked very nice. Caitie and I played around with PhotoBooth and had a lot of fun with that. I can't say I was overly enamored with the mighty mouse, but I was able to right and left click with no difficulty. I'd read where some people had problems with right-clicking. The scroll-pea wasn't awe-inspiring or anything. It was nice, but I wouldn't call it "mighty nice." I think that was almost a pun, or something.

Amazingly, I walked out of there without spending any money.

Workflow

Doug Miller wrote an interesting post about how he's tweaked his blogging system to make things work more efficiently, or with less manual intervention. Doug's more of a roll-your-own kind of a guy, with the Unix background to pull it off, than I am. We both use Tinderbox though, and what Doug describes essentially replicates what I do using my .Mac account to host Groundhog Day. Since it is rather simple, I thought I'd review the things that I do to maintain Groundhog Day.

First, iDisk is a part of the .Mac service. $99.00 a year (cheaper if you buy through Amazon) gets me 1GB of storage that I can divide between e-mail and file storage. Right now I assign about 250MB to e-mail, but I'm nowhere near that by any means. I've also got about 100MB assigned to a family Group, which is another .Mac feature, which I confess I haven't turned into anything of note yet. The remainder is used for Groundhog Day. The best thing about iDisk is that a local copy is maintained on my hard drive, and is automatically synchronized with the one on Apple's servers, although I can also force a manual sync if I want to publish more immediately, which I usually do.

Tinderbox has an Export as HTML... item in the File menu that essentially creates the web pages that make up Groundhog Day. I write whatever it is I do here in a single Tinderbox file that now includes every post since September 2004. As an aside, I've been meaning to mention this for some time. I've been doing Groundhog Day, and before that, Time's Shadow, in Tinderbox since October 2002. Up until last year, it had been my habit to include no more than two months' posts in one Tinderbox file, because once I got up into three or more months, Tinderbox's performance slowed to a crawl in loading, saving and exporting. I don't recall the specific version change, but that problem has been resolved since about September 2004 (Update: I originally wrote "October 2002," which was the last date that was in my short-term memory stack. And it was wrong!), and this single large file is quite responsive. One change I made to how I do this that may have had an ameliorating effect was that I stopped pasting pictures directly into my Tinderbox document, and instead merely add links to them. More on that in a moment.

The RSS feed for Groundhog Day, which is probably not "valid" (though it displays in NetNewsWire Lite just fine, thank you very much), is also created at the same time as the actual web page, through that single Export as HTML... menu item. It is also stored on the iDisk.

Including pictures, sounds or movies in my posts usually involves including some html code in an actual Tinderbox note. I'm not terribly interested in markup languages, so I typically just try to get it right once, then copy that effort, literally, the next time I have to do it again. I made it a little easier by using Spell Catcher to create text macros for pictures or movies I include. For pictures, I just type a forward-slash "pic" and it enters all the relevant html minus the file name, and the closing quotation mark and angle bracket. I can state that remembering to type that closing quotation mark can be a bitch. Same thing for movies that appear here on the main page, forward-slash "mov" enters all the code to get move to appear on the main page and in the archive file. (Update: I got an IM from a someone with the handle I'mnotscott, recommending Textpander instead of Spell Catcher because it'll type in the entire markup string and move the cursor back to where the variable text would appear, thus solving the problem of forgetting to type the closing quotation mark. Spell Catcher does a great deal more as well, but certainly Textpander looks like a useful utility.)

Getting the picture onto iDisk is kind of fun. I use SnapzPro X. First, I open the image in Preview, and then make any tweaks I need to make with the new tools offered by Preview in Tiger. I also scale the image to something appropriate to a web page, just in the Preview window. The actual picture remains whatever size it happens to be, but it's scaled in the Preview window to something that'll fit comfortably on the page. Then I just type CMD-Shift-3 and invoke SnapzPro X. With it, I usually select to grab just a selection, which allows me to crop the image if I need to, and save it as a file. This was the tricky part for me, getting it to save to a folder on my iDisk, since it only likes to save to the Desktop or some other pre-determined location, I think Pictures in the Home folder. Anyway, all the folders in the Pictures folder appear in the choice of locations to save the file, so I added an alias to another "Pictures" folder in my "Sites" folder on my iDisk. I select that, and the cropped, scaled image is saved to my iDisk, ready to be served.

Sometimes a movie can be a rather large file, and it tends to make the page slow to load. So in the case of the two recent boring airplane movies, I just included a link to the movie instead of having them appear on the main page or in the archive. What's cool about that is that QuickTime Pro will do all the heavy lifting for you. I opened the movies using QuickTime Pro, and then selected Share... from the File menu. It then gives you a choice to share the movie by e-mail or on a .Mac web page, with different compression settings for each format. I had never used the Share... feature before, but it's pretty sweet. It puts the movie into one of those spiffy iMovie-type presentation pages, and all the html is done for me, all I need to do is copy the URL to paste into the link in Tinderbox. Cool!

I think Apple should include a license to QuickTime Pro with a .Mac account, because they work so well together. It's definitely a value-added proposition.

One other Ambrosia utility I use here is WireTap Pro. I use it to make audio clips from DVD movies, CDs, web audio streams or the like. I just save them as an MP3 on my iDisk, and use the movie code to display them on a page with the QuickTime player, and they're good to go.

So this has been kind of a Sunday morning informercial for all the products and services I use to put out Groundhog Day. I'm not trying to sell you anything, and nobody's paying me to do this. I think I'll go take a shower now just the same.

Update: As I often do, I wrote this quickly, and I'm not sure how clearly I've explained why this is "easy." There is a bit of a learning curve, but it's mostly in the way of just learning how the different apps work. The part that Doug describes, creating all the wiring to synchronize everything with a Folder Action and an Automator script, is handled by Mac OS X and .Mac. As with Doug, everything I write is saved on my local hard drive, so if Apple shuts down .Mac, I haven't really lost a great deal.

F-86 Sabre Jet

I also grabbed a few frames of an F-86 Sabre jet spooling up and taxiing. The audio drop-outs at the beginning I think are a problem with the camera. I think it was still trying to process the Mustang video when I started shooting the Sabre.

The intercaps on "SkyBlazer" is wrong, but don't worry about it.

Crazy Horse TF-51 Mustang

This afternoon I shot a few frames of video using my digital camera of Crazy Horse, a TF-51 dual control Mustang. I exported it to my .Mac account from QuickTime Pro, using H.264 compression, so hopefully your QuickTime Player is up to date. Pretty painless to do, though I need to remember to change the title at the top of the page next time.

The Boss Does a Podcast

Bruce Springsteen is offering a series of podcasts in connection with the 30th anniversary of the Born to Run album. Not sure if they're available via the iTunes Music Store, but the link to subscribe via your usual RSS aggregator (or iTunes) is this one.

It's got pretty high production values for a podcast, and it's not exactly, you know, "conversational," but I think it's worth listening to.

The blog that is associated with the effort is this one. I don't know who Jesse is, who's posting the 'casts, but I think one of Bruce's sons is named Jesse. I could be wrong about that, and if I'm right, it could just be a coincidence.

Still, pretty cool.

The Boss is starting to get the 'net.

The URL to the nominal blog doesn't appear in Bloglines citations yet, nor in Technorati. I guess I'm doing my part to help generate Buzz for the Boss.

Go me.

Buddy, can you spare a dime?

If you can, please help support Evelyn Rodriguez' effort to return to Thailand to report on conditions there, one year after the tsunami. As many of you may not know, Evelyn is a tsunami survivor, and has a unique perspective to offer us. If you're an advocate of "citizen journalism," I'd say it's probably worth your while to put your money where your mouth is on this one.

A Surfeit of SUVs

Apparently Hummers aren't exactly flying off the lot in California these days.

Pretty funny. Link via Q Daily News

10.4.3 Update

Installed yesterday to no ill effect. Ran Disk Utility and repaired permissions afterward. Noted a rather long list of affected files. Nap Mode still works in CHUD 3.5.2 on this MDD 867MHz DP.

Springsteen VH1 Storytellers DVD

I bought this DVD through Amazon. It is well worth owning by any fan, but two songs, and the thoughts Bruce shares about them, make it something I think anyone would find worthwhile.

Any parent will appreciate Bruce's comments on Jesus Was an Only Son from the Devils and Dust album, and there is a great deal more there as well.

Similarly, the commentary on The Rising, while perhaps not as immediately accessible as the comments on parenthood are in Jesus Was an Only Son, is very affecting.

I don't think the Q&A session, which wasn't broadcast as part of the show and is included as a "bonus" feature on the DVD, was especially illuminating. I thought a question from a woman of color was outstanding. Bruce kind of fumbled around a bit for an answer, and came up short. He didn't embarrass himself by any means, but it didn't seem like something he had given much thought to before. One of the questions about the influence of film in his music was kind of interesting, and Bruce's answer suggested he had thought about and discussed this topic before.

The best question and answer came at first from a guy who said that it seemed as though Bruce bared his soul in his music and he felt like he knew him, and so he asked Bruce if he did know him. Bruce's quick reply: "No." He went on to elaborate, but he did make it clear that what he does as a song writer/performer is not all that he is. He offered a funny anecdote about how his wife Patti taunts him with something like, "Let's see you say that in your next interview, Mr. Bruce Springsteen!"

He only performs eight songs, and the performances are very spare, just Bruce and a guitar or piano and a harmonica. Patti joins him on Brilliant Disguise.

The Difference

I'm starting to actually feel sorry for Microsoft. I mean, what good is Web 2.0 if you can't even be troubled to take advantage of it?

Exhibit A.

When only a few weeks ago, Steve Jobs gave two presentations that were examples of how to do it right, and they were written up in a couple of weblogs, Presentation Zen (here too) and Communication Nation.

You know there's more to that attention thing than trying to monetize other folks' and maybe, you know, paying some.

"This is starting to get embarrassing."

"Oh, no sir. It was embarrassing a long time ago."

10.4.3

The latest update to Mac OS 10.4 is out, 10.4.3. It's a pretty hefty update with a number of fixes and improvements. I'll probably install tonight, by then we should know if there are any glitches being widely experienced.

On the subject of Macs, I don't recall which Mac web site brought this to my attention, but I read about a free font utility that followed the iTunes UI conventions, right down to the store, and so I did a little Googling and found it again. It's Linotype's Font Explorer X. I don't know jack about fonts, but I downloaded the program and it seems to work well, and the UI is familiar. The only thing I noticed is that the previews of non-Roman (I think that's the right terminology) fonts don't seem to work. I haven't read the help file, so it's probably just a preference setting or something. Seems pretty cool.

To infinity...

Nicely done, Hal and Audrey.