Borrowing a title from the Doobie Brothers, I feel obliged to offer a link, so here it is. Probably my favorite band in high school years, now consigned to the dim, dusty corridors of ancient memory. My, aren't I being a little dramatic this morning?
The cover story of Time this week is meditation. The main article is a kind of flippant piece that seems to exhibit a rather self-conscious desire to not take itself too seriously; something that would be welcome in nearly any other subject, but it seems kind of unfortunate here. But it's worth a look if you're not very up to date on the subject of meditation. More about meditation in a few minutes.
Martial arts is probably 70-80% mental, the remainder physical. That's probably true about any physical activity, ballroom dancing, shooting pool, basketball, golf, you name it. The largest hurdle to overcome is the first one, the decision to begin. As one gets older, one accumulates a set of beliefs and expectations about the nature of one's abilities, and these become a formidable barrier to new experiences. Once over that hurdle, there are other mental barriers that need to be overcome, but they become successively lower with time and experience.
The first obstacle one encounters after making a decision to begin is the assessment of one's performance. Whenever you're doing something for the first time, chances are pretty good you're going to suck. The chances are also pretty good that you don't suck as much as you think you do, but you're still going to believe that your initial beliefs that you overcame to attempt the beginning were, in fact, true; and there's a chance you might quit. We all like to feel that we're "good" at what we do, especially adults, we place a high value on doing things the "right" way. You can often see this in the expressions of children and adults who are beginning martial artists. Kids don't beat themselves up as much as adults do. I haven't been doing this a terribly long time, a little over a year and a half, but I've never seen a child cry trying to learn a new form, I have seen an adult cry.
Any type of physical activity requires constant, consistent practice in order to achieve mastery. This is especially true for older adults, and even more so for those who haven't had a long history of physical activity. The need for frequent practice guarantees there are going to be days when one simply doesn't feel like doing it. One is either too tired, or too sore, or too busy, or too sick, or too depressed or too something to practice. This obstacle is overcome by recalling how you feel after you've practiced. Chances are, you almost always feel good, maybe even great, after a practice session, even one in which you've "sucked." That good feeling becomes an incentive, and it positively reinforces itself over time, so that even on your worst days, you know that if you practice, you'll feel better. So you practice even when you don't "feel" like it, maybe especially when you don't feel like it.
Finally, there's the mind-body barrier. This one is only overcome by practice. When I started Taekwondo, I was shocked to discover I could no longer even stand on one foot. We take our sense of balance for granted, but if you don't use it, you lose it. The good news is, you can get it back. The other thing I think we lose as adults, at least those of us who lead sedentary lives, is a connection with our bodies as an integral unit in space and time. When I learn a new kick, I most often do it in kind of a left-brained, analytical fashion. "Right leg goes here, left leg does this, torso twist to the right, elbows in, knee comes up, jump off supporting foot, extend kicking leg, land this leg forward..." As you might imagine, this is no way to execute a kick. If you have to think about it this much, you'll never do it. But, for the time being, I'm stuck with this habit. Repetition and feedback gradually trains the body how to do it, and the body gradually trains the brain to know where it is in space and time. Many kicks I can do now without thinking about them at all, some I just have to review a little, others I still do the pieces/parts sequence. But I sense that I'm gradually learning to rely less on that, and beginning to just do the kick, even though I know I won't get it right at all.
So I think the vast majority of the challenges one has to overcome to master a new physical activity are all in one's mind. Which brings me back to meditation, and I'm out of time. I plan to finish this later on this evening, or perhaps tomorrow morning at the latest, but for now I have to go.
Well, yesterday's tomorrow is today and before it becomes its own yesterday, I suppose I ought to finish this.
Whatever dedication I may exhibit toward pursuing a martial art, it is definitely fair to say that it has not yet become a habit. Every class I attend is a volitional decision that I have to think about. There are always mental obstacles I must overcome. The office I work at often holds luncheons on Fridays, which is a class day for me. I bring something to contribute to the meal, but I never stay because I choose to go to class. Friday nights are the leadership classes, and I'd often like to simply stay home and relax on a Friday night, or go to a movie. Instead, I choose to go to class. Each time I have to weigh the pros and cons of a decision to go or not to go. So far, going has won every time, but it's not a habit.
I think a behavior becomes a habit when you do it without thinking about it. To be sure, I have many habits and some of them will not lead to positive outcomes. If I were to choose to stop drinking Diet Pepsi or Diet Coke, I'd save a good deal of money, and my health would probably improve. It's something I think about often, but apparently I'm not ready to try to make the change. Another mental challenge to overcome.
Another activity that I began some time ago was meditation. Like Taekwondo, it brought me many physical and emotional benefits, and I recognize it's value to me. Since I've moved into the house to look after the kids, I have been seemingly unable to maintain a regular practice of meditation. Which is at least a little ironic, because I think it would be of even greater value to me in these circumstances.
One of the benefits I noted from meditation had to do with habits, specifically, habituated thinking. Habituated thinking is the recitation of mental scripts in response to similar events. Almost invariably, those scripts are some negative assessment of one's self or one's circumstances. Meditation allowed me to maintain a degree of mindfulness, a state of mind that isn't conducive to habituated thinking, as habituated thinking relies on attention being focused either on the past or the future. Mindfulness is keeping one's attention focused on the present moment.
As I compare my experience in Taekwondo with my experience in meditation, I think I can understand why I seem to have more success in one than in the other.
In both efforts, one of the keys to success is time to devote to the effort with no distractions. In TKD, I go to a school, where distractions are physically excluded, and there is an instructor to help guide and maintain one's attention. In meditating at home, it's difficult to create a distraction-free environment. If I tried to do it early in the morning, the animals all want attention. If I attend to them, and then close the door to my bedroom, the cat will sit and claw at the door, which on a hollow-core door makes an inordinate amount of noise.
Then there is this habit, where I eat my breakfast in front of the computer screen and read the news, or other weblogs and think about whether there is something I wish to write about or comment on.
Just being in the house can be an intrusive distraction, as an awareness of all the things that need to be done lurks at the back of my mind.
In another week, I'll be getting the kids up for school and making sure they're getting ready.
Meditating at home has no social element to it. There is a social interaction, although highly structured and somewhat limited, with the other students at TKD that I value, and I'm sure that often factors into my decisions to attend class.
There are a clearly identified set of goals to pursue in TKD, while there seem to be relatively few, and certainly not very clearly defined goals to pursue in meditation.
From this, I begin to understand why people may choose to form groups and practice meditation, or sitting zazen, in facilities away from their homes. Fewer distractions, often someone to assist in governing attention, a social element that can help make it a more attractive activity than a solitary effort at home.
For an accomplished martial artist, the practice of the art is a form of meditation. I am by no means an accomplished martial artist, nor was I ever a very proficient meditator. I want to resume practicing meditation, and I will make another effort to do so by myself, but I may begin to look to see what might be available elsewhere to help me maintain my practice.
I tried to do a video chat with my brother Mark tonight, and once again we were unable to maintain a video connection. I was pretty sure it was a bandwidth issue, but I didn't have a good idea what my upstream bandwidth was under Comcast.
I found a site that will test your bandwidth, both upstream and downstream, and it came in at about 1.8Mbps downstream, 180Kbps upstream. That seemed kind of low on the upstream side, but I know that cable modems share bandwidth with other users in the neighborhood. I couldn't find anywhere on Comcast's site where they advertised what their upstream bandwidth should be, so I used their support chat feature and spoke to an "analyst." He told me the max upstream bandwidth was 256Kbps. He then asked if I had a router connected and I told him I did, and so he told me I'd have to connect the cable modem directly to the Mac and call them back or go back into chat so they could "investigate" further.
So I plugged the modem directly into the Mac, logged back in and ran the test again. First result was 170Kbps, the second was 210Kbps, so it wasn't really clear if taking the router out of the equation helped or not. I got another "analyst" in their chat service, and gave him the background and he told me 170Kbps was "acceptable" upstream bandwidth, and that there was no issue to investigate.
Typically half-assed support, but it did answer my question.
While futzing around waiting for "analysts," I was reading the iChat AV help files. It recommended setting the bandwidth lower if you kept having dropped connections. It was pretty clear to me I wasn't going to be able to sustain even 200Kbps, though I'd been optimistically setting it at 500Kbps before, so I went all the way down to 100Kbps and tried to raise Mom and Dad.
Success! Mom reports the picture looked fine and we were able to maintain a solid connection.
So it looks like the 100Kbps setting is sufficient to maintain a decent video connection within the constraints of cable modem upstream bandwidth limitations. I'll try to play with it some more on days when I can consistently get >200Kbps bandwidth and see what the improvements may be.
I guess the advantage might be to the person who is trying to communicate the schedule. Rather than maintaining a large group of e-mail addresses, you would just publish a single RSS file that interested people could subscribe to individually.
Of course you could do something similar with an iCal-like application, but people might like to receive that sort of external data in something like a news-reader, rather than seeing a lot of external schedules in their calendar app.
Got Chris registered in school today. It was open registration beginning at 0730, so we got there about 0655. The receptionist last week told me to bring a good book.
On entering the school, the first thing I noticed was the air conditioning wasn't working.
In Florida.
In July.
Apparently, this is a regular occurrence following a thunderstorm, which have been occurring with remarkable regularity the past couple of weeks. They very likely weren't going to work a full day if the AC wasn't fixed soon. Fortunately, some of the support staff were already on station and we were the third group in line. When it came time to check us in, we went down through the list of required documents:
Birth certificate? Check.
Physical? Check.
Tetanus shot? Check.
Utility bill? (Utility bill?) Check.
Social Security card? Check.
Report card? Um, no.
Of course the one thing I didn't have my hands on was his report card. I'm sure it's around somewhere, I probably just misfiled it; but his former school assured me they would forward his transcripts in time for registration today.
A check of the relevant files and mailboxes came up empty.
Big, early-morning, heavy sigh. Back to the car, wondering when the other school would open so I could attend to this matter in person. As I'm putting my sunglasses on, one of the support staff comes hustling out to the car with a big envelop in her hands. Turns out, they did have his transcripts. Back into the sauna.
We completed the check-in and Chris was handed a packet of materials including the Code of Conduct, and was told that his hair won't fly. I'm not sure if it's the mohawk, or the blue. Chris tells me it's the color.
We're led in to the guidance counselor's office and she reviews Chris's transcripts. We knocked out the basic necessities, and then we looked at electives. He's been going to private schools for the last three years. The schools he's attended had very limited offerings in the way of electives. Chris is handed an 8.5x11 sheet of paper that is filled with courses that he can choose from. Combined with the fact that during the summer his brain doesn't boot up until sometime after the sun has transited the local meridian, the number of choices seems to overwhelm him. Chris asked if being the team mascot counts as an elective. I refrained from doing my Hank Hill impersonation. I don't think the counselor had ever heard that question before. Eventually, he chooses Philosophy/Law and Photography as his electives.
Another advantage of going in early is you get to see the Guidance Counselor before she's had to deal with fifteen other kids who can't make up their minds. She was very patient.
Then we're ushered off to get his photo ID. Except the lady that does the photo IDs wouldn't do his with his hair the way it was. Well, Chris is going to have to work that issue out tomorrow.
All in all, it wasn't bad. We were done by 0800. Now we'll just have to see what kind of year he has.
Another neat site I discovered via Feedster: DV for Teachers. If you're interested in Digital Video, or you're an educator interested in technology, it's worth a look.
Update: I managed to bump into Scot Gellock's blog again in another Feedster search, and I started reading some of his archives. Turns out he's actually a Mac user, but he works for Microsoft. He's a pretty interesting read. Much saner than someone like Scoble, and less in-your-face than Joshua Allen. Very nice.
For those of you still stopping by here based on RSS, Tinderbox and Your Calendar, be sure to check out this RSS application at Docnotes. It's not Tinderbox, in fact, it's .Net (ewwwww...), but it's a pretty useful application I think.
Update: Jacob comments that the RSS feed is offered in place of, (or in addition to) a .Net client that did much the same thing.
Ken uses Tinderbox to produce Notes of Doubt, which at this moment means he also uses a Mac. Sounds like an okay guy to me! Stop in and say hello.
Well, I guess you can't really say hello, because Ken doesn't have comments, which is okay - I didn't have them for a very long time, and they don't get used very often. Which is also okay, because sometimes they don't work. Anyway, just stop by. Looks like he'll be an interesting read.
What I want in my next generation RSS news aggregator is the ability to save searches from Feedster.
As it is now, I must subscribe to whatever RSS feeds I care to read. In some of them I read every post, others I just scan. Some I seldom read and end up unsubscribing just to save time and space.
What I want is to have a saved search grab every RSS feed that deals with specific set of search terms. You could specify how far back in time you want feeds displayed.
For Tinderbox fans, it would be like an agent that gathers RSS entries that match the agent query.
I was checking out Feedster again today, and I love it! Tried typing in search terms of things I was interested in like Quicktime, iSight, LaunchBar, Mac OS X, and you get so many great hits! It really brings up some interesting weblogs. I'd give you some examples but, ahem, I was doing this at work. Let me just suggest that if you haven't tried it yet, do try it soon. It's great!
And don't forget there's a Sherlock plug-in so you can search Feedster from Sherlock if that's your preference.
Among this weekend's many tasks was getting this thing working. It's pretty cool, but need a little bigger "pond." What is kind of astonishing is how quickly the water level goes down with this thing running. There doesn't seem to be a lot of splash-over on the sides, but apparently it's enough; or evaporation is vastly greater from the ball because of the increased surface area and energy of the water in motion. Either way, I'm going to have to be adding water to this thing nearly every day if we're going to keep it running.
I plugged it into a remote-control outlet so I can turn it off from inside the house.
There's something in this piece for all of the people who frequent this place, and even many who don't, especially, I think, The Happy Tutor.
There is a lot here to discuss, but I'm faced with a daunting day of house and yard work. I hope to return to it at some point, but until then I think it's important enough to just get some attention directed to it.
What both of these ideas seem to overlook is Sturgeon's Law: Ninety percent of everything is crap.
In one of the slides from one of the many PowerPoint presentations at the MyLifebits project, the question "Why?" is answered, "Because we can." That's what I was afraid of. What makes these people think we need to keep all this stuff around?
Already I'm too much of a packrat. I keep my credit card bills going back four years. I don't know why I do that, I just do. It's not like I ever look at them. Assuming I was to scan them and store them as images, what good does that do me? I have over 2500 images in iPhoto. Sturgeon's Law suggests that 2,250 of them are crap. Why do I want to keep the crap? Because I can? How often do I look at those 2,500 images? Not very often. This weekend I'm going to go through and try to cull some more of them.
I think a good use of computing power would be to identify crap and help users decide to get rid of it. Computers, digital cameras, desktop publishing, e-mail, weblogs, broadband, they all allow us to create far more crap than ever before. Exhibit A: Spam. It seems only fair that some of that technological know-how be directed toward getting rid of some of it. Otherwise, it seems to me we'll end up getting into some kind of technological race where our ability to store, sort and classify our crap will be in a perpetual tail-chase with our ability to create crap.
I had an interesting voice chat with Doug Miller the night before last during my brief fifteen nano-seconds of fame. We talked about personal information management and the applications we use to manage it. Rob McNair-Huff has an article forthcoming on some of Doug's applications, so I'll try not to steal any more of his thunder and I'll just offer my thoughts.
The traffic spike here was prompted by mentioning how it would be relatively easy to publish your schedule data in RSS format to be picked up by a news aggregator. It wasn't clear to me why that would be more advantageous than simply using a more conventional application, and it still isn't.
The main device I use to keep track of my schedule is my Visor. It's a black&white display, no camera, no wireless, no phone and no GPS. It doesn't play MP3s, and you have to use Grafitti to enter data. It's almost antiquated in terms of where handhelds are today, but it does the job I intended it to do. When I remember to use it, but more about that part later.
Most of my data entry for contact, schedule and to-do items takes place in the Visor. It's small (but not small enough!), so it can go with me nearly anywhere. Even when I don't have access to the 'net, I usually have my Visor. It has an audible alarm so it can prompt me when I have a meeting or a phone call. And I can synchronize the data I enter with applications on my desktop and laptop computers.
The Visor has a CPU faster and probably more powerful than the 68000 chip it is closely related to that shipped in the original Macintosh. It has way more memory than even the Mac Plus. And it fits in my pocket. In other words, it's a computer. To use it with simply its built-in applications is doing little more than using an expensive pad of paper. It seems to me that you want to use some of that computing power to help you manage your personal information.
Well, there's an application I've used since I had a Newton MP 130 that kind of does that, and that's Life Balance from Llamagraphics. To this day, I'm not sure I buy into some aspects of the "philosophy" behind the application, but it is far and away one of the neatest and most useful ways to help you manage your time and tasks. I think I have to credit Dr. James Vornov for turning me onto this, probably sometime back in 2000. (Actually, thanks to the power of Google, here's the entry where I mentioned I'd downloaded and installed Life Balance on my Newton, 26 June 2000).
What Life Balance does that is kind of unique, among some other things that I think are probably less important, is to incorporate location data in your task lists. You then tell Life Balance your location, and it prepares your to-do list on the basis of what you can accomplish from your present location. This has the effect of paring down your task list into something less intimidating, and it reduces the chance that you'll overlook a task that should be accomplished at a nearby location, often saving another trip and the time it would consume.
Locations can be logically linked. Some tasks can be accomplished over the phone or the internet, so I have locations for each. I have access to a telephone or the internet at the office or at home, so those two locations are linked to the phone and the internet locations. My office location is also linked to service locations that are in close proximity to my office, such as the credit union, the post office, the barber shop and the like. When I tell LB I'm at the office, I get a list of tasks I can accomplish there at the office. I have a location called Commute, that includes all locations that are on my route between home and the office. Before I leave at the end of the day, I can set my location to Commute and see if there's anything I can get accomplished on my way home from work. I link together the stores that I frequent that are in close proximity to one another. I have an ATM location, and every location that is in close proximity to an ATM is linked to it.
Life Balance has a desktop client that I recently purchased as well. It includes a significant update to the handheld version, and I haven't made the upgrade in my Visor yet. The two are supposed to be able to sync with one another, but I haven't tried that feature yet either. I expect I'll get to it shortly.
Now what about the "personality" bit? I bought my first computer, an Apple ][+ back in 1981. I told everyone who shook their heads over the $2500.00 I spent on it (48K RAM, 134KB 5.25" floppy, 40 column, upper-case text, no monitor) that I'd use it to balance my checkbook and all sorts of useful things. It turns out, I did none of those except word processing. I never kept an accurate checkbook balance when all I had was a paper checkbook, buying a computer didn't buy me an infusion of self-discipline to begin doing so just because it was on a computer.
I'm still that way today. Most of the time, my life is pretty simple, and I can manage most of my tasks in my head. Yet I still forget some things, and I often have to make two trips when one might have been sufficient. I simply don't have the kind of personality, or the self-discipline to use something like Life-Balance on a daily basis. But there have been occasions when I have used it, and it has been a tremendous resource for me. Most recently was last Christmas when I was responsible for our annual Christmas Eve party. When I was getting ready to retire from the Navy was another time of relatively high stress, and a lot of tasks that had to be accomplished. While I lack the self-discipline to use LB on a daily basis, I know I can turn to it in times when I'm feeling overwhelmed, and it will help me bring a sense of order to a seemingly chaotic and impossible list of tasks.
So it seems to me that one of the major factors in the success or utility of any given personal information technology is the personality of the user. If you're not a list-maker by nature, technology won't make you one. But if you can makes lists when you have to, then technology can make you a better list-maker if you find the right tools. If you are the kind of person who enjoys making and using detailed lists, something like LB is what we called in the military, a force multiplier.
There's another aspect to this personality/technology piece that Doug and I talked about, and I want to mention it. I'm not sure how quantifiable it is, but I'm quite certain it exists, at least in my case. There's a dimension of a software application or platform that affects one's engagement with the application. One of the reasons I use a Mac instead of Windows is because I find the Mac draws me in, in a way that Windows simply does not. I use Windows 2000 Professional at work, and I've seen XP. I think XP is better than 2K Pro, but it's no Mac. Windows looks like work. Maybe that's just because I have to use it at work. The Mac looks like fun. I have AppleWorks and Microsoft Office on my G4 at home. Both have spreadsheets, and Excel is kind of the gold standard of spreadsheets, yet I bought Mesa. Partly because both AW and Excel leave me cold. I'm not a spreadsheet person by nature, and perhaps it's just an interest in how a Cocoa application might be different, but I was able to sustain my interest level using Mesa long enough to actually complete development of my budget spreadsheet.
When I was at Fleet Training Center, I bought one of the first Windows handhelds. It had gotten great reviews in all the PC magazines, and I wanted to investigate using them at FTC. At the time, I only had my Newton to compare it to, which was huge and very slow by comparison. But where the Newton had one, just one, button, the Windows handheld had something like eleven of them! You could hardly hold the thing without clicking something. And it didn't draw me in, it was too much like using Windows. The thing went into a drawer and there it remains I expect.
Palm apps are kind of sterile, but they can draw you. Life Balance draws you in. First by asking you to outline your goals in life, and I love outlining even if I don't love making lists; then by asking you to tie together all the locations in your life. It was fun to sit in the car somewhere waiting for Caitlin to finish Girl Scouts or something, to keep looking at the locations and adding new ones and connections between existing ones. It keeps you engaged. Of course, I still don't launch it very often, but when I need to use it, it has some valuable data already entered in it.
So if reading your calendar data in a news aggregator keeps you engaged, maybe that's the way to go. Mainly I use my handheld; but when I'm on the computer, I'd prefer to see the data there, in applications designed to handle that kind of data, rather than reaching for and firing up my Visor. But none of this stuff is any good unless you have the discipline to use it. My discipline tends to be situational. I don't need them often, but when I do, I need them badly and they're there to help me keep entropy at bay.
A week ago last Saturday, I went to Books-a-Million and ended up walking out with two books on Cocoa, a software development framework for Mac OS X. I picked up the current edition of Cocoa in a Nutshell and a remaindered copy of Learning Cocoa, both from O'Reilly. I had looked at some books on learning Objective C, but they all did presume I already knew C, and it quickly began to look as though Objective C was going to be in the "too hard" category.
But you can use Cocoa from AppleScript, which is not quite in the "too hard" category, though it is often in the "very frustrating" category. So I picked up the two Cocoa books to go along with an AppleScript book I bought a few weeks ago that introduces AppleScript Studio and using Cocoa frameworks in AppleScript applications.
But today, O'Reilly debuts a new column at the MacDev Center: C is for Cocoa, a tutorial on learning Objective C with no prior C experience required. Cool! Not that I'll ever actually write a program in either AppleScript or Objective C, but who knows? I might.
Note the usual hit count, down there in the comfortably obscure mid-fifties. I do not deserve all this attention. It was just an off-the-cuff reply to something AKMA had noted. If anything, I expected it would garner even less attention than the other things I comment on; which garner even less attention those mid-fifties figures suggest, since most of my hits are Google hits from people looking for answers that I don't happen to have. Go figure.
Anyway, I got a couple of e-mails from people asking if I had an RSS feed, and of course I do. Of course, I also don't have a link to it on this page, which kind of makes it hard to find, doesn't it? Bad form on my part. If I did this right, you'll find the link over there on the right somewhere, looking like one of those heart-shaped pieces of candy.
Of course, if this whole site implodes and disappears in a shower of malformed html and ascii text, we'll know I screwed up. Won't be the first time. Here goes...
I set up iChat AV on the iMac along with the headset that came with IBM's ViaVoice so Caitlin could do voice chats with Gramma and Grampa. Well, there's nothing Caitie likes to do more than to sit at the computer wearing a headset connected to a computer and talking to her grandparents.
She's sitting here right next to me so I get hear her half the conversation. Of course, Gramma and Grampa are very polite and listen patiently to her as she makes her little chit-chat. I hope this was a good idea.
We've been batting about .400 on getting live two-way video. I can usually see and hear my parents just fine, they often can't see me. I'm not sure what the problem might be. Tonight I tried after Caitie signed off and it worked just fine. So I'm still quite pleased with it. My brother Mark had a good connection with them earlier this afternoon too. It may just be a function of network loading and some times are better than others, I can't say.
You can use Tinderbox to manage your calendar, though I haven't tried to do so myself. I think it would be relatively easy. You could basically create an outline organized by year/month/day and simply enter notes for those dates when you have something you want to remember. I don't think it's essential to have namespaces or the like for all the various pieces of calendaring data, though that would probably be nice for a web service application that doesn't rely on the browser and would display the data in a traditional calendar-like layout. In an ordinary aggregator, you'd just read the text: "Tues. 11:30 Lunch with Bill at Sullivan's," or something like that.
A feature suggested by Mr. Paquet is to have a reminder published a day before an event. In Tinderbox, you could set up an Agent to gather notes whose due dates are the next day. That agent would have an RSS template assigned to it as its export template, and you would simply export the file to create the RSS feed. The manual part of the Tinderbox solution is usually publishing, though I think even that could be automated relatively easily using either something like iKey (formerly Youpi Key), or Applescript running a GUI script. What's cool for me as a .Mac user, is I just export to my iDisk and it's one less step, though you could do the same thing to any WebDAV service.
You could even set up a separate template and Agent to publish your calendar to iCal using the iCal/vCal spec, though again, I haven't tried this. Alternatively, you could have an html template of your own that you could export your Tinderbox calendar data to and have it appear on a web site that you have access to in whatever type of format you prefer.
While I think this is all very cool, I also think that if you plan on using your RSS aggregator to track your schedule, you could just as easily use a real calendar application. The exception might be when you can access an aggregator on a machine that's not your own, in which case you could still use the browser.
Still, it's something fun to think about. I might play around with it, if I find some time, and see what I can do with Tinderbox.
Update: It occurred to me that you could even script iCal to publish the RSS event from itself. It's already configured to send an e-mail, but Apple tells you how to modify iCal to execute a different script in response to an event. Using iCal, you should be able to just script something like TextEdit to save a .rss text file to your server whenever you want the alarm published.
My knowledge of history is sketchy at best. My fault, I never liked history when I was in school, and though I've since acquired a bit of a taste for it, I'm reading much more philosophy these days. Though sometimes philosophy and history go together.
I'm reading about Nishida Kitaro (or Kitaro Nishida - I'm not sure what the appropriate convention is, I've seen it both ways. Jonathon Delacour, where are you?) and what was happening in Japan in the years leading up to the war. It's just a quick and admittedly incomplete summary, but it did raise something of an interesting question.
Does history record any case where a group of citizens of a nation were able to stop or reverse a transition to a repressive, militaristic civil society, at least before a military or economic disaster? We know what happened in Japan, Germany and Italy, and in somewhat different ways in China, Russia, Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia. Are there any examples where something like this was avoided, or is that like proving a negative? If there are, they may prove helpful in our present circumstances.
I promised Caitie I'd take her to the movies this weekend, but last night was a non-starter after the yard kind of left me all done in. The 3:00 PM shows would have been a good fit, I could have seen a movie I actually wanted to see, but Caitie was napping and I was head-down in the budget and it was 2:45 when Caitie surfaced and asked what time we were going to the movies.
So it looks like the 5:25 showing of Legally Blonde for her, while I'm going to have to settle for Terminator 3. I wanted to see either League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, or Pirates of the Caribbean, but the schedules are incompatible with LB. LXG is pretty much getting panned by the critics. One critic was extraordinarily upset about the liberties they took with the actual layout of Venice. As someone who has actually driven a ship up the Grand Canal and moored in the Plaza de San Marco - I don't care! I'm going to the movies to be entertained, not to learn about Venetian geography! Still, it looks like I'm stuck with an aging bodybuilder for the afternoon. Almost makes Legally Blonde look appealing.
Well, upon reflection, I think I'm going to set through LB with Caitlin. It can't be any worse than T3, and I don't have to worry about some predator groping my daughter in a dark theater that is showing a movie that is likely to attract young girls. Guys like that can have my compassion after I get done kicking their ass. I'll make sure they'll need it then.
Update: Well, it could have been worse. It made me laugh; and frankly, it was probably a better movie to see than T3. Plus, it was cool because Caitie thought it was cool to see it with her dad.
Wow, I used to be able to get a better deal as a federal contractor at the Apple store than educational customers. Apple just increased the discounts to educational customers fairly substantially, at least compared to what they were before. The low-end eMac was $767.00 at the federal employee store, and I want to say it was about $779.00 at the education store, but I'm not certain. It's now $749.00 at the education store, price remains the same at the federal store. Time to go back to school, I guess.
You know, if it weren't for the beaches, the relatively warm winters, and no state income tax, there'd be damn little reason to live in Florida. It sure as hell isn't the enlightened government. Actually, that's not quite true, but it's close. I bet if you let your yard go for three years here in Florida, it would revert back to whatever the local ecosystem supported before humans showed up. I like to say "jungle," but I know that's not right. About as as green, chaotic and dangerous though. In ten years, I venture to say you would not be able to tell humans were here from the air, at least in the visual spectrum.
The secret to living in Florida is proper hydration. Unfortunately, beer does not count as proper hydration. Neither does Diet Pepsi. Proper hydration and sunscreen. And air conditioning.
The back yard has been mowed. I whacked down a vine that grows over what passes for an arbor I built more years ago than I care to think about. There's a picture of it around these parts somewhere. I hacked my way back along the side of the house to the back fence gate we had installed last year, only to find two Winn Dixie grocery carts parked there. I asked my neighbors if they knew anything about them, they said they didn't, but they'd been there for a while.
Well, it's either Chris or my neighbor's kids. They have two girls in high school, who often have high school boys hanging around. I've put them down by the road where things seem to disappear all by themselves. Hopefully, these will too.
I'm hamstrung by my ignorance of html and I'm screwing around trying to make the main text area of this page a little wider. I'm a big fan of white-space, but I'm also a big fan of not wasting display pixels. There's a certain width I like in a column of text, and I'd like to be able to make my windows smaller in Safari and not have a terribly narrow column of text staring at me. I seem to have found the relevant bit of html to adjust.
There is more than the usual amount of crap flying around the weblog world over the issue of "accountability." Like "power," this is another word many people misuse and misunderstand. Unsurprisingly, the misunderstanding, like that of "power," relates to the notion of authority.
For those of you who may not frequent the same circles, I'll try to put the issue in a nutshell: There are a number of high-profile webloggers who work on internet applications, creating specifications for ways to write software so that different applications can talk to one another. One of those people is Dave Winer, author of Scripting News and one of the developers of the Really Simple Syndication (RSS) specification. If you don't know what RSS is, don't worry about it, it's not central to this issue except to note that it's a big deal for most of the principals in our little morality play.
One of the other players is a guy named Mark Pilgrim, of Dive Into Mark. He's another smart guy with a great deal of interest in internet technologies, and he's Dave's antagonist in this matter. Though I suppose it's fair to say they're mutually antagonistic.
Dave Winer is a volatile writer, he sometimes writes things, especially about people, that offend some people, especially the people he writes about. From time to time he's been known to write something offensive at Scripting News, then remove it some time later, usually within a matter of minutes or hours, not days. Presumably, this would be a "good" thing, as the offending words are no longer in the public arena. But in the wacky world of the web, "good" is "bad," and "bad" is "good."
When Dave posted something offensive, often someone would respond to it and include a link to the offending words. If Dave later edited the words, or removed the post, the link was meaningless and one would be left to wonder who might be telling the truth. To preclude this possibility, Mark Pilgrim employed a clever technical solution using RSS (which is what was really clever about it - talk about being hoisted on one's own petard) called the Winer Watch that recorded everything Dave wrote and then posted the changes on a web page so if Dave decided to remove something unflattering, there was still a public record of his having written it.
Understandably, this infuriated Dave and he made his case at his web site, basically saying that if Mark didn't stop, Dave would stop writing entirely. It was a hopeless display of powerlessness, but that's how these things go. Allies of the respective camps engaged in the usual bickering back and forth in weblogs and comments, and Mark first made Winer Watch accessible only to people who registered with him in some fashion, and next apparently stopped the system entirely. One would hope the issue is behind us now.
Except it's not.
There is this lingering notion of "accountability" out there, that's fogging up the atmosphere. Winer Watch was intended to make Dave Winer "accountable" for his words. While it obviously did make Dave uncomfortable, it's not clear it would have made him accountable. So let's do the definition thing, shall we? This one should work:
From WordNet (r) 1.7:
accountable
adj 1: liable to be called to account; "you are answerable for this
debt" [syn: answerable]
2: being obliged to answer to an authority for your actions;
"governments must be accountable to someone beside
themselves"; "fully accountable for what they did"; "the
court held the parents answerable for their minor child's
acts of vandalism"; "he was answerable to no one" [syn: accountable(p),
answerable(p)]
(I love OmniDictionary - and it's Cocoa too!)
Okay, see if you can spot the key word in this definition? Right, it's "authority." Authority is an important concept and one we misuse and abuse all the time.
What Mark Pilgrim and his supporters wanted was for Dave to stop saying bad things about people or subjects that were important to them, or, failing that, to be able to point to Dave's most egregious words to use them against him. In effect to show what a bad person Dave was by pointing to offensive or intemperate things he had written, especially those he had subsequently removed. In short, Mark Pilgrim and his supporters wanted to be able to exercise authority over Dave.
This is a big deal with "community" types. There are always people in any group who think they know what's best for everyone else, and they try to arrogate to themselves some measure of authority. One way of doing that is to simply act like you have it. We're such an authoritarian society, it often works! The other way is to invoke vague notions like "community," and then proceed to act as though you have some authority and bludgeon your antagonist with it. Sometimes it works, especially if you can get enough attention. Authority and attention go hand in hand. We pay attention to authorities, and in order to become an authority, you must either already have, or otherwise attract, a certain amount of attention. People often confuse attention with authority as well. One need only point out the number of celebrity spokespersons, and the occasional testimony of some Hollywood type before Congressional committees (which itself is merely an exercise in attention-gathering), but I digress.
Mark cannot hold Dave accountable for his words, unless Dave recognizes Mark's authority. Now, Dave can be intimidated, and that's not the same thing as making him accountable by any stretch. What Mark wanted to do was intimidate Dave, and to some extent Dave was intimidated. He called upon the people who regard him as something of an authority to act to make Mark stop Winer Watch, and they did. We think it's "bad" to intimidate people, so we use words like "accountability" to obfuscate our actions and our intent.
I also think that's pretty powerless, but this is just a pissing contest between two guys who probably ought to know better. Really, they're no worse than >99% of the rest of the population. We really are a nation of children in many ways, always expecting to be told what to do, or trying to tell others what to do.
There is an authority that can be made to hold Dave accountable, if one cares to appeal to that authority, and that is the law. As citizens of this nation, if we care to avail ourselves of the protections of the law, then we must recognize its authority and submit to it ourselves. Dave invoked a legal argument around copyright in his dispute with Mark, so presumably he recognizes the authority of the law. The next time someone has a beef with something Dave writes, they ought to investigate what the law offers in the way of accountability. If the law offers no relief, then perhaps the answer to rude behavior is to ignore the offender and have nothing to do with him.
In my opinion, "accountability" is misused to impart some patina of authority to an agency that has none. I am accountable to the laws of my nation, state and city. I am accountable to the mother of my children as my children's father. I'm accountable to my employer within the context of my employment. I may or may not be accountable to an entity commonly known as God. That's an issue that we need not go into here. But I am not accountable to Mark Pilgrim or Dave Winer or any "community" that wishes to exercise some authority over me. I recognize my choices have consequences, but I do not recognize the authority of vaguely defined groups of others over my choices and actions.
This "community" of webloggers is trying to exercise some authority over other webloggers over how they choose to write and what they choose to post or take down. Screw them, I say.
It should go without saying, but once again, the usual disclaimer applies: I'm an authority on nothing. You should do your own damn thinking.
I've been enjoying playing around with Mesa from P & L Software. It's got a couple of rough edges, but I like it. I reported a glitch I had with hiding rows and columns and heard right back from the company, which is encouraging. The problem isn't solved yet, but they heard me, and it's not a critical problem for me. For $39.95, I think it's an excellent value.
I like Cocoa apps. There's nothing wrong with Carbon apps, but developers have to stretch a bit in Carbon to exploit Cocoa features and many of them don't, Office X being a case in point ([cough] Tinderbox [/cough]). I've got Mesa for my number-crunching needs. I'm considering Mellel or Nisus Writer Express for my Cocoa-based word processor. I've got Keynote for all those presentations I'm never asked to give. I've got NoteTaker 2003 and Notebook for organizing stuff, and I'm looking again at DevonThink for a different approach to organizing and finding stuff.
Had some severe, though brief, thunderstorms roll through this afternoon. Lightning struck right outside the building where I work, literally. It hit two palms and blew the driver's side mirror off of a car parked near one of the trees, and rendered a Ford Escort unable to start. One of the palms lost a section of what passes for bark on those things, about four feet long by one foot wide. The other palm has a crack in it. Pieces of side-view mirror and bark were scattered for a radius of more than fifty feet.
The strike left all the computer monitors with a purple-green hue, which was easily resolved by hitting the degauss button. On the other hand, several of the machines appear to have have had their NICs fried, mine included. I missed all the fireworks. I came back from lunch and I was offline, so I went outside and looked at the trees and the pieces of mirror and bark. There were parts of the car scattered inside the car. Pretty weird.
Had success last night doing a video chat with my parents again. Solid connection both ways for almost an hour. My brother Mark bought an iSight and when I logged in tonight I noticed he was online with a camera icon, so I tried a video chat with him. I could see and hear him perfectly, he couldn't see or hear me nearly as well. He had a similar problem when he tried to chat with Mom and Dad, he could see them, but they couldn't see or hear him very well.
I tried having Caitie do an audio-only chat with Mom and Dad using my old iMac, while I was doing both an audio and a video chat with Mark on the G4. Available bandwidth seems to support two audio-only chats simultaneously, but problems persisted with the video chat. Can't really draw any firm conclusions at this point, except to note it is probably overly optimistic to hope that the upstream bandwidth of a single cable connection can sustain both an audio-only chat connection with one party, and an AV chat connection with another party, even on separate computers.
I was consistently able to crash the iMac by opening the Sound preference pane and adjusting the mic gain. Before it would crash though, I could observe the input gain slider move on its own, presumably in response to iChat. Shortly thereafter, I'd get a kernel panic and I'd have to reboot the iMac (which takes forever - iMac DV/400MHz G3, 512M RAM). I had Caitie using the analog headset from Via Voice. It has a nice noise-cancellation mic which works a lot better for audio chats than the iMac's built-in mic.
But I'd like to see iChat automatically mute the iSub subwoofer when a headset is used, or offer a button that'll mute the iSub from iChat without having to go into the Sound preference pane in System prefs.
A hint I read at Mac OS X Hints, I believe, is very valuable. Mom kept complaining that she couldn't hear us through the headset which gave us excellent service the night before. Just hit the "Mute" button in your chat window, and then hit it again. iChat will reset the mic gain, and all will be well.
I'm probably using the word "gain" incorrectly here. It's a technical term with a specific meaning that I used to be passingly familiar with, and in another context I'd look it up and make sure I was wasn't misusing it. But I'm in a hurry, and I'm lazy.
I'd like to say this was "fun," but I was trying to carry on a conversation with Mark, while at the same time facilitating Caitlin's connection with Gramma and Grampa, and it was fraught with glitches for much of the time. I finally signed off with Mark and got her up on a solid connection. I was trying to do too much, I think.
Anyway, I remain impressed with the tech, and I think it's a wonderful thing for families.
Had some trouble getting a video connection last night with the parental units. I could see and hear them just fine, they couldn't see or hear me. I tried an audio-only chat and that worked fine. I'm guessing it may have been network traffic, but I don't know. I'll try again later today and if it keeps up, I'll have them re-boot and see if that makes any difference (not sure why it would).
I bought a cheap desk lamp to add some illumination to my face. Seems to do at least half the job. (I was going to post a picture, but we've wasted enough bandwidth on my mug.)
Back before new spending discipline was imposed on Time's Shadow World Headquarters, I had ordered The 'Burbs from Amazon on DVD. I watched part of it last night while I was filing bills. There are some good audio clips I want to capture, particularly from Bruce Dern, one of my favorite character (and they're always a little psycho) actors. An example, "In southeast asia we'd call this [pregnant pause] bad karma." Cracks me up.
It never really rained yesterday, and the morning was rather sunny, but it turned cloudy in the afternoon and pretty much stayed that way. Seems to be more of the same today.
Just going to toss this out here where it's likely to be missed (hopefully). I think when the final installment is played regarding a certain movie trilogy involving a certain group of enlightened hackers working against a powerful group of sentient machines, we'll discover that the central theme of the trilogy is one of self-discovery. "Know thyself." There will be many metaphors, and clever devices and bits of effective misdirection, but I think it will ultimately be a simple story. Though the process is never simple, or easy, as the story shows.
This is pretty cool. If you go to this link, you'll find a link that installs a Feedster plug-in into Sherlock. You can then use Sherlock to run searches on RSS feeds. Pretty cool.
It seems you can't copy and paste between users with Panther's fast user switching. This would mitigate its value as a workspace manager somewhat, although it probably wouldn't be too difficult to create a work-around using clippings in a shared folder as was pointed out in the linked Macintouch report.
The novelty hasn't worn off yet, especially with Caitlin who loves seeing Grandma and Grandpa (and I suspect she enjoys seeing herself on camera almost as much).
My brother John happened to be at my parents' house yesterday, helping my mom plant a tree in the yard; and I happened to be home for lunch since Caitie is at home and I don't have her in a camp this week. So I got to see him for the first time since Dad's surgery. He's looking good. He was always the brother with all the looks in the family. It was great to see him and talk to him for a bit. My nephew Tyler was there and I told Tyler about how when we were kids Mom and Dad would bring us to New York to see our grandparents, and we would get to beat up all our uncles, so he had to be sure to beat up his Uncle John. Tyler then proceeds to wallop John right in the shoulder, right on camera.
Caitlin broke her practice board for her Uncle John, then Uncle Eric came over to the camera and broke a pencil. It was quite comical.
It's all quite silly and nonsense, but fun. The kind of thing you don't really get to do as much by phone. I think these things are great for families that are widely separated.
Later on, I had another video chat with Pascale Soleil, and she demonstrated her Kilroy Technique. I should have grabbed a screenshot, it's quite well done - especially when she does it on one of the vertical sides of the screen.
I think my brother Mark is going to get an iSight camera now too. I suppose it's only a matter of time before the software will support multiple connections at a single time. It looks as though I'm only using about a fifth or less of the available bandwidth on my cable connection.
We're in the midst of another period of wet weather. It was a pretty rainy weekend, and it's looking as though it'll stay that way for most of the week. We've had a pretty good run of sunshine up to now, even with enough rain that I didn't have to worry about the plants on the back patio. But now it looks as though we're going to have the inverse of that, with mostly clouds and rain, and intermittent sunshine.
Complaining about the weather is powerless. Learning how to work with, or change how you feel about it is not.
I've been messing around with Mesa, trying to craft some kind of budget spreadsheet for myself. I did some quick googling Friday night for some examples of household budget spreadsheets, or templates, but I couldn't find anything that I liked. I suppose if I had looked harder, I might have found something more suitable, but it wasn't looking likely.
So I sat down on Saturday and Sunday and actually banged out something that seems to work. What I used to use in AppleWorks was just two long columns of numbers showing money going in and money going out. Both categories remained largely the same every month, so I'd just copy and paste and figure out how much money I'd be likely to have at a given point in time. It worked well enough for my purposes, which weren't very demanding.
Well, Melissa's approaching nuptials, and my recent spate of profligate spending, which had gone undocumented in the aforementioned AppleWorks spreadsheet, dictated a better approach to managing my money. It would appear that I've accomplished this "just in time." It's going to be a near thing to be able to cover the deposits I have to cover, as well as all the usual monthly expenses, but it's doable. It likely would have gotten rather ugly if I didn't have something like this to give me a clearer picture of where everything was going.
Normally, I don't find this sort of thing very fun. I'm not very disciplined when it comes to personal finance and keeping track money seems tedious and uninteresting. But it was kind of fun figuring out how to create the spreadsheet to do what I wanted. The tough part will be maintaining the discipline to update it every day. That shouldn't be too hard, but it's me we're talking about here. I don't even floss every day.
See, this is what you don't get by phone. Mom loves to show off her quilting. I was also able to see my brother Eric, his girlfriend Heather, and my nephew Tyler today. Caitlin and Tyler spent some time chatting with one another. They're both 10, it was kind of cute. It was the first time they'd actually "met."
Mark sent me a picture of the eMac set up in Mom and Dad's living room. Here it is:
The iMac is set up and running so Mark can transfer their files over to it. Dad is in his customary position. Looks like it might have been a good thing I didn't spring for the tilt and swivel stand for the eMac, or we'd have had a clearance problem with that hutch I think.
If you're a regular reader, I'm sure you know by now that I harbor few illusions regarding the virtues of technology and its efficacy to "change everything." But I do appreciate the value and utility of technology to solve serious practical problems and, at least sometimes, enhance the quality of our lives. Some significant part of me is, and always will be, an engineer, in the best sense of that word, if not in the legal definition it is burdened with today.
In that regard, the last hour or so talking to my parents on iChat AV has to count among one of the most rewarding experiences with a technology I've ever had. It's probably impossible to explicitly denote the ways in which having a visual connection enhances communication, especially with those with whom you already have a close relationship.
I've heard my mom's voice every couple of weeks for the past year or so since I was last home. But seeing her face adds so much to the connection. Her hair has gone much grayer, but her eyes still sparkle. When I last saw my dad, he was still in the hospital recovering from bypass surgery. His voice has sounded stronger over the phone since the surgery, but it was so rewarding to see and hear him tonight. He even sang a little song for us. Seeing my brother Mark again was fun. Tomorrow I'll see my brother Eric, who I haven't seen in years, though we communicate by phone and e-mail frequently.
I suppose at some point in the not-too-distant future I, along with everyone else, will be taking this sort of thing for granted. But I wanted to record how it felt this moment to use what isn't really a new technology, but one that hasn't been as readily available to ordinary people before, to spend a few moments with the people you love.
As these shots show, Mark made it up to Mom & Dad's and got the eMac up and running with the iSight and iChat and we were able to video conference with no trouble at all. We maintained a solid connection for almost an hour, some minor breakup on the audio channel, we didn't seem to be able to maintain a full-duplex connection.
Mom's showing one of her latest quilts, and later she showed us the blocks she's made for Chris's new quilt.
I may be crazy, but I think iChat AV and iSight will sell a lot of Macs.
I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere before, but Panther's fast user switching can be used by a single user as a workspace manager. At least, it seems like that to me, since most reports suggest all users processes continue to run.
I've been meaning to rebuild my budget from the wreckage left strewn all around the Appleworks spreadsheet that used to house it, but I wanted to try and do a Six Million Dollar Man job on it. You know, better, faster, more expensive.
I have MS Office X, but mostly that's just for being able to deal with work-related documents on the rare occasion when I decide to do work at home. It just sort of pains me to fire the thing up, though I must admit, it sure is pretty. Plus, Excel debuted on the Mac, lo these many years ago, so it's got a slightly better pedigree than your average MS Mac app. It was perhaps the only thing that made Jerry Pournelle say anything nice about the Mac for a long time. Be that as it may, I wasn't looking forward to using Excel for my simple little project.
I wanted something based on Cocoa (I don't know why, it's a silly bias or something), and that narrows the spreadsheet field considerably. Basically, as near as I can tell, there's only Mesa from P&L:software. The good news is, it's only $39.00. So, adding one more bit of wreckage to the budget, I bought it.
I am not exactly hell on wheels when it comes to spreadsheets, so I'll be mucking about with this for a couple of weeks. If I happen to discover anything interesting, I'll be sure to mention it here. I suppose I could have applied that criteria before writing this little bit of fluff, but there you go.
I also decided to finally buy the Mac desktop client for Life Balance, and upgrade my Palm version as well. Just making the pieces of my budget a little smaller and easier to sweep up I guess. It was only $50.00, as I'm a customer from back in the days when Life Balance ran only on the mighty Newton MessagePad.
I have one last piece of software I intend to buy, wrecked financial plan or no, and that's the renewal for Tinderbox, which is supposed to be updated to version 1.3 Real Soon Now, and which promises to bring all manner of improvements to this mindless habit of mine.
I think I will have then poured enough money into this habit of mine until after the new year. (Must...not...upgrade...OmniGraffle...must...resist!) At least, I hope so. But I sure hope all those folks who seem to think "iApps" are hurting developers are spending at least as much on Mac software as I seem to be doing of late.
I heard on NPR this morning the world's only remaining flyable HE-111 crashed on the way to an airshow, killing the pilot and a passenger. Here's a news story on the event.
Apart from the loss of life, the loss of that aircraft is a tragedy as well. The Commemorative Air Force locates and restores WW II era "warbirds," and the Heinkel was one of their efforts.
I got to climb aboard that aircraft at an air show in '97 in Virginia. It wasn't a German Heinkel as I recall, it was actually a Spanish version that had been built under license. I liked the glass-nose cockpit, though it was pretty hot from sitting out in the sun all day. The bomb-bay was a really small affair, and the bombs were stowed in racks, nose-up.
I also picked up a Lexar USB flast (make that "flash" - it seems that in addition to being unable to subtract early in the morning, I can't spell either.) drive. One of those things that looks like a key fob, but you can plug it into a USB port and it's like a solid-state disk drive. CompUSA had a 128MB version for $34.00 that I passed on last Saturday; and this one was $39.00, but it was kind of an impulse buy. Another personal weakness on my part, I know. It's not the worst one by any means.
My son Chris saw Pirates of the Caribbean last night. Now he says he wants to "be" a pirate! I thought he was supposed to go through that stage around age four to six? He said it's a great movie, so there you have it.
Chris has a blue spiky mohawk. It just occurred to me why he's got his hair like that and he's suddenly taken an interest in punk rock - it's that phenomenon where "old" is "cool." Kind of like when we were kids and the 50's were "cool."
I really don't mind about the hair. It makes him easy to spot in crowds.
When I first started using iTunes back in OS 9 on my iMac, it scanned my hard disk for all my MP3 files (I didn't have any, or so I thought). It imported the audio files from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri game. For a while, it was kind of cool having these little audio commentaries pop up in the middle of a playlist of songs.
Well, I was playing around with Wiretap from Ambrosia software while I was watching Joe Versus the Volcano, and I had an idea. I'm grabbing the audio from some of the more interesting, humorous or inspirational (mostly inspirational) scenes, and I'm converting them to AAC files and adding them to my iTunes library. I think it will be cool to have them pop up in the middle of a random playlist.
I'm experimenting a bit with the settings in the export from AIFF to AAC. Right now a 5MB AIFF converts to a 1.1MB AAC and it sounds perfect at 80kbps using the "Better" setting for the encoder. I want to lower the bit rate to where it sounds "good enough" and the file size is small enough to post one of these here.
You know how people sometimes have an interesting quotation somewhere near the top of their page? I'm going to have a little Quicktime movie of an interesting bit of audio from my favorite movies - as long as I can keep them down to a reasonable size. I figure I'll change them once a week or so and host them on some server space from my ISP that is currently unused.
This is how I amuse myself. I'm an exciting guy, I am.
I played Stronghold for a couple of hours last night. Every now and then I enjoy playing computer games. I get tired of it after a while, and I really do get this feeling that I'm wasting my time, and there's a certain amount of guilt that seems to go along with it, so I don't do it for very long.
Stronghold has a couple of different ways you can play it. It's part real-time strategy (RTS) game, part simulation a la Sim City. The economic games focus on the simulation aspects. As a sim game, it's relatively lightweight. I chose the freeplay option to become familiar with the game mechanics.
It's pretty straightforward. You start out with a certain number of basic resources, pick your location for your keep and you're on your way. You need villagers to start gathering resources, you get villagers by creating hovels, eight to a hovel. Then you build the requisite resource-gathering structures. As you build each one, a villager goes to it and begins whatever activity the building supports. Then it pretty much becomes a bookkeeping exercise, and it's not a very difficult one.
The one interesting twist is how you approach motivating your villagers. There are a couple of sets of optional buildings you can create to affect how your villagers behave. You can give them "good" things or "bad" things. The good things include community gardens, ponds, dancing bears, may poles, monuments and maybe a couple of other items. The bad things include the stocks, a dunking pond, a gallows and things of that nature. You can also choose to how much to tax your villagers, whether or not to build a church, the amount and variety of food they eat, and you can brew ale and build taverns.
My villagers were pretty productive so I didn't need to tax them. I could sell excess production for gold, which I then used to build the "good" things. I also increased their rations from time to time. I built a couple of taverns and even gave them a dividend in the form of a "bribe" from the treasury. The game reported my villagers were working at 90% efficiency, but there was probably a little too much "idleness." Once you've figured out how many mills and bakeries and dairy farms and wheat farms you need to support your population, it pretty much becomes a self-sustaining proposition and there's really very little point in going on in the simulation unless you just want to build castle walls.
The game gives you the villagers' assessment of your performance, I was "Lord Dave, the loved and adored." They could have added, "...and bored." Next time I may try the "bad" things, just to see if it's more entertaining.
The game has some great little animations of your villagers' activities, and the graphics are quite nice. I'll try the RTS portion of the game some other time, perhaps this weekend. I like the game so far, but I think the sim portion could have added a few twists like a plague or a crop failure or something. I think the developers' main focus was on the RTS portion of the game and the sim aspect was just offered as a nice, kind of lightweight, option because it didn't require any more development. There are economic "missions" and "campaigns" and I may have to amend my comments here after I've tried them. There may be some other events that appear in the course of a mission or campaign that add to the challenge.
Who knows what reality is anymore? I'm not making any claim. But I'll tell you what, when I read this, it read true to me. There's a lot of horseshit out there right now, and there ain't enough of me or anyone else to sort it out for you; but I can point out something that comes along that sounds like it's about right. This does.
I've been watching the prices of LCD monitors slowly drop; mainly keeping my eye on the 17" models. They're still in the $500-700 range. One difficulty I have is that I'd like to run a 2-display setup, and so I either have to buy an Apple LCD display (which I would love to do if I win the lottery or something), or I have to buy one from a different manufacturer and then get an ADC to DVI adapter, which costs less than the $100.00 I thought they ran ($39.00 here). (Update: Looks like I'll be looking for an ADC to VGA adapter, given that most of the less expensive 15" LCD monitors are analog connections. That adapter runs $49.00.)
Now, another potential difficulty is desk space. It'd be difficult to have a two-headed setup on the table I use for my G4 and still have room for everything else I keep up here. But it may not be quite such a challenge with, say, a 15" LCD display. Hmmm...
That might work out quite nicely. I could use the 15" display to keep windows open for Mail, iChat, NetNewsWire Lite, Omni Dictionary, the iTunes controller, Top, and the CPU Monitor. That way I could keep track of all the stuff I'd like to keep track of without switching out of the frontmost application unless I wanted to respond to something. Hmmmmm...
Who needs a stupid budget anyway? (Well, I do, for one. But here I go again...)
Another update: It doesn't look as though I'd be able to pull this off for under $300.00. I set myself a $300.00 threshold, and I can get within about $10.00 of that, but I can't get below it. I'll give it a couple more months. I was surprised at the premium a DVI interface puts on a display. I'd read a number of complaints that the analog interfaces sometimes caused blurred text. Since this monitor would mostly be used for text, I'd like to be fairly certain it's going to be crystal clear. I had an LCD display at work since 1999, and it used an analog interface and the text was sharp, but that was before all the anti-aliasing we do now. I think I'll just pause for a bit and think about this some more.
Tomorrow morning, if it isn't raining, I'm going to hop in the planet-crushing SUV and drive down to the beach. I could ride the bike, but I'm looking for more time near the ocean, and parking isn't a problem at 0530. I'll bring the camera and see if there isn't a decent sunrise to be shared. This time of year, the best time to be at the beach is very early on a weekday morning.
I visited the iTunes Music Store again last night. Came away with a few Blue Oyster Cult, a few Michael Murphy and several Gordon Lightfoot songs. Current iTunes Music Store count: 182 songs. At this rate, I'm paying more for music than I am for cable TV. Which also kind of suggests I probably can't sustain this. I should look to see if there is a "date purchased" in the meta-data of the songs. I suppose I could just go through the invoices and check there. I think the curve has started to flatten by now, sure hope so anyway. I think I could sustain fifteen songs a month, maybe a bit more.
Stay up late, or get up early? Tough call. We'll start this and see where it goes, I'm feeling squirrelly tonight.
What Would the Buddha Do?
The other day, I was reading something that made me laugh. Some gentleman, and I don't recall if he was a Buddhist or if he was merely an authority on religion, was wondering aloud if Buddhism would survive contact with the West. In particular, he was lamenting the adoption of a "kind" of Buddhism in America that wasn't "real" Buddhism.
I have to wonder what Siddhartha Gautama would think about that? By way of disclaimer, I make no claim to being a Buddhist. But then, I am often very inclined to suggest that we are all Buddhists, most of us just don't know it, or care to think about it much. This would probably annoy the gentleman who prompted my chuckle.
I think it's a safe bet the Buddha didn't set out to create an "-ism." He wanted to help people understand the nature of suffering, and to help them find their way to liberation from it. He found a pretty good way of doing that, and he wanted to share it. A lot of other people seemed to agree, and so they wanted to preserve his message after he was gone and continue his teaching. Well, a group formed around those goals, and the rest, to coin a phrase, is history.
I'm inclined to believe that Siddhartha Gautama would find the notion of lamenting the demise of Buddhism a little bit funny and a little bit sad at the same time. It would mean some of the students weren't paying attention in class.
The dharma doesn't exist because Buddhism exists, the dharma will always exist.
We're attached to words and meanings because life is complicated. I think we're often afraid, probably with good reason, if we don't get people to pin down explicitly what they mean then they will try to fool us. I read something today that I can't seem to find now, it was about making implicit things explicit, and how that does violence to the ideas of the things themselves. I think it was by Dr. David Weinberger. When I'm in a particularly ornery mood and I'm arguing with someone, I try to get them to make their arguments more and more explicit, because they will often paint themselves into a contradiction that can be used to confound them.
You see, to some people, a Buddhist must be this, and this and this; or the name doesn't have any "meaning." If you don't get all the checks in the box - well it's just meaningless to apply the name. (At that point, an uncharitable judgment is usually offered that the person is somehow insincere, shallow or otherwise deficient. This may or may not be true, but I'm pretty sure one can't be certain by consulting a checklist. I'm also pretty sure one can be insincere, shallow or otherwise deficient - in other words: human - and still be a Buddhist.) Well, in any case, that's correct in a way. But it's also incorrect. It is correct in the sense that people who meet most of those external criteria could reasonably be identified as Buddhists, as in people who adhere to the particular beliefs and practices of an -ism called Buddhism. But it's incorrect in the sense that someone could independently learn all of what the Buddha learned, and do so having never once heard of Siddhartha Gautama or of Buddhism. You might then argue that such a person could then not call himself a Buddhist, having never heard of Buddhism. Which merely makes my point, what does the name really mean? Who is more "Buddhist?" What purpose does that name really serve?
It's all kind of silly really. The idea was that the Buddha's message should be shared with anyone who was willing to listen and embrace it. The idea wasn't that another group would be formed whereby it would draw yet another imaginary boundary between self and other, between "this group" and "other group." Those kinds of distinctions are just another form of attachment, which are a source of suffering and distraction.
But hey, what do I know? I'm an authority on nothing. I make all this shit up.
One definition of fetish is that it is an object superstitiously believed to embody magical powers. Note the word "superstitiously," which seems kind of redundant when referring to a belief in "magical" powers.
It seems to me that a lot of people have a technology fetish. This election will be different because of technology. This war will be different because of technology. This life will be different because of technology. I suppose it all hinges on what your definition of "different" is, to borrow a card from a certain post-modernist chief executive.
I'm old enough to remember some of the things that were written about satellite television and how it was going to change everything. Well, maybe not everything, but a lot of things. Mostly we were going to beam educational television to isolated regions in third world nations to teach them modern methods of agriculture, and public sanitation, and the proper application of pesticides or something. Which they would all watch on their battery-powered televisions, presumably provided by some magnanimous NGO or something. Today, we mostly just beam them Britney's navel to gaze at.
We always seem to believe that the only thing that's inhibiting the better angels of our nature is some barrier that can be overcome by technology. For some people, the fetish is money, but I find money boring while technology is at least interesting, but the same reasoning applies. We'd all be better off with more technology or more money. Again, I guess it depends on what your definition of different is.
We have all the money and technology we need to make the world a "different" place, and we will. Whether or not "different" is semantically equivalent to "better" is an open question. If history is a guide, the outlook isn't very good.
Now, am I just kind of an inverse-Pollyanna, a glass half-empty kind of guy? Nope, I don't think so. I just think the problems we face are the same problems we've faced since the beginning; and technology doesn't solve those problems, just kind of reshuffles the deck a little. The only problems we have a chance to really solve, and the ones that we neglect when we focus our attention on our fetishes, are the ones within our own hearts. If we want to make the world a better place, we have to start there. Why try to take on the world? Why not start out small and take on ourselves?
Why that seems so hard, I'm not sure. Too much fear, I guess; not enough faith in ourselves and in a universe that would see us in it. We're tool-makers. We believe we're no match for the world without our tools. But what makes us a match for the world, is the same thing that makes us a match for ourselves. Here's a clue for those of you enamored with cluefulness: It's not the tool, it's the mind. But we have hands to grasp, and so we grasp and cling to our fetishes - our lucky rabbit's foot, our PDA, our mobile phone, our laptop, our wireless connection. All the while, not paying attention.
Yesterday morning I headed out to CompUSA, just to see what I could see. I looked at the new iPods, and they have gotten much smaller. Looked at a few Sony Cliés, they sure looked nice too. I went back to the Apple section and admired the 17" Powerbook G4. It'd be right at home aboard an aircraft carrier. You could play cards on the thing! Quite nice, but quite out of reach I'm afraid. Maybe next year will be the year of the laptop for me. They didn't have the 900Mhz iBook in stock, but last year's model still seemed pretty snappy. I was looking for a new battery for my iBook, but they didn't seem to have any.
In the software department, I had been reading some good things about Age of Empires II (Gold Edition) as a strategy game. I had saved one "for later" in my Amazon shopping basket at $34.95. I happened to notice CompUSA was selling it for $29.95. Funny thing happened - the box leapt from the shelf and into my hand and kind of got stuck there. I couldn't put it down. I looked at Civilization III, but that looked like it was too much work. I did pick up The Sims Unleashed, because Caitie likes playing The Sims, and this expansion pack allows you to own pets, and Caitlin loves her animals.
I looked at a lot of hardware, but didn't come away feeling there was anything I simply had to have. The 17" Apple LCD monitor did look pretty sweet, but that's probably going to have to wait till sometime well after the new year.
Anyway, back to the waste of time. In between bouts with Chris and the computer on the GameCube's Godzilla! Destroy All Monsters, I installed Age of Empires on the G4. I wanted to see what the excitement was about, so I played through the tutorial scenarios.
It's quite nice I suppose, but it does bear more than a passing resemblance to Warcraft. It's more realistic as it is based on historical events, and has no magic or non-human characters, and the graphic images are much more realistic than those in Warcraft. Gameplay is quite similar though. After I completed the tutorial scenario, I figured I'd try one of the single-player scenarios, so I played Barbarossa. It took me over seven hours, but it was pretty straightforward. Gather resources, build buildings, create armies, research upgrades, keep track of the books, go kick some ass. I united all of Germany and three of the provinces did not survive.
I suppose it will be more entertaining when I learn how to use trade and diplomacy. Mostly I focused on building stuff to see what it looked like, researching upgrades to see what they could do, and blowing stuff up. Or, in this case really, knocking it down. I'm going to reserve judgment for the time being, but I'd give it a tentative rating of Fun, because it's relatively easy to learn and get started. But it could become dull and repetitious if it isn't more challenging somehow.
It has inspired me to get back to Stronghold, and see how they compare.
When I went to install The Sims Unleashed, I decided to go ahead and convert the game over to the Carbon version, so Caitlin wouldn't have to launch Classic on the iMac to play the game. The easiest way to do that is to install the game from the Administrator's account. Caitie had installed it, and I had all kinds of permissions problems. Once you get the game installed in the main Applications folder so everyone can access it, you have to also change the permissions of the User Data folder, so that others can play - they need to be able to read and write. Once I did that, installing the expansion pack and allowing Caitie to play under her own login worked fine. It was about the most amount of work I've ever done installing a game though.
I also did some work on the iBook this afternoon and switching from the G4 to the iBook really brought home the difference in speeds between the two machines. I'm used to working on the iBook after I've been away from the G4 for a while, so I haven't experienced the speed disparity quite so immediately before; other than the time I had the iBook run DiskWarrior to repair the G4's drive after I'd booted the G4 in Target Disk mode. That took forever. But I found myself getting impatient with the iBook for things like LaunchBar, which is just about instantaneous on the G4, it takes a few seconds on the iBook. Oh well, at least I have a portable that runs OS X.
It wasn't all fun and games this weekend. I did mow the lawn, did a ton of laundry, cooked dinner two nights in a row (usually I'll rely on a microwave convenience meal, or I'll go out to Al's for pizza and subs on the weekend), cleaned my toilet, the litter box, and got rid of a bunch more books. Well, they're in the garage now anyway. I'm not sure where they're going next. There were a lot of things I didn't do that I'd have liked to, but that's the way it goes every weekend. I'm pretty sure that's about the same for everyone.
Well, tomorrow it's back to work. I sure could get used to these three-day weekends. When's the next one? September? Sigh.
I bungled my Fourth of July fireworks photography plans. It was exceedingly cloudy all day, and it really looked as though it would rain at any minute. I figured the clouds were so low, they'd cancel the show. Rather than be caught at the beach with cameras and tripod and stuff on my bike, I didn't go.
Naturally, they had the show anyway. I probably could have gotten some shots from my house, but there are so many trees around here that the horizon is non-existent. In my opinion, there is such a thing as too many trees.
Anyway, AKMA has posted some wonderful shots he took Friday night. I'm quite envious, and more than a little dismayed at my trepidation. "He who hesitates is lost," as they say.
I was reading a book review in the NY Times, and read about the Janko keyboard, a revised piano keyboard that makes playing the piano much easier. That sounded interesting, so I did a little Googling and found this site. Turns out the guy who invented it, Paul von Janko, and I share the same birthday. He was born 101 years before me.
I'd also like to think we're both misunderstood geniuses; but then, that would only be half-true.
I'm a little underwhelmed. I'm fairly sympathetic to Dean's candidacy, I always like the underdog; but I haven't made up my mind who the best candidate is to oppose Bush. But once again, the hyperbole is outpacing the reality.
Let's take a look at Mr. Gill's comments as reported in Dr. Weinberger's weblog:
"1] READ THE COMMENTS from the [Dean] blog visitors! This is the best way to understand that the campaign represents a new politics: Connected, Open and Participatory. We are now all becoming PRODUCERS, not merely passive consumers."
I haven't read all of the hundreds of comments, but the ones I've sampled don't seem to suggest anything different from similar online venues in the past. In 1991, there were a lot of people participating on GEnie discussing the campaigns of Bill Clinton and Paul Tsongas and others. I can only assume that similar discussions were underway on AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy, and thousands of BBSs across the country. Americans love to talk politics, this doesn't look extraordinarily new.
As for it being connected, open and participatory; all campaigns are like that. It's after the election that the candidate becomes inaccessible. It's hard to see how this is anything new, or how it will be any different if Dr. Dean ends up getting elected. Now, connected, open and participatory usually only extends to getting people to work on the campaign, it's not like the "hive mind" is going to be writing position papers and policy statements for the campaign. To the extent that comments in a weblog may influence such products, I fail to see the difference between that and focus groups or polling.
It's not clear to me what "we" are supposed to be "producing." I think Mr. Gill is just getting a little carried away.
"2] Dean's campaign shows the smart mobs, hive minds, have more benefits, power, energy, vitality and adapability (sic) than the single mind of any political advisor Ñ Karl Rove comes to mind."
I'm not sure it shows any such thing. Maybe if Dr. Dean gets the nomination and actually defeats President Bush in the general election, we can look for evidence that a "smart mob" or a "hive mind" out-thought Karl Rove. I rather doubt any such thing will be proven.
"3] As evidenced by the front page story in the NY Times this AM, most folks simply do NOT GET IT! The Dean campaign is the announcement that we are at The End of Broadcast Politics with its base of passive consumers. The NY Times item is all from the point of view of broadcast politics: its about counting money. No! It's about counting donors. It's about energized hope, passion, citizens from around the the country who believe in America..."
My, aren't we special? We "get it," and "most folks simply do NOT." To the extent that anyone participates in politics, from working on campaigns to voting, it's hard to see how that's "passive." The only "passive" people are the half or more of the electorate who decide not to participate, or, perhaps more accurately, the portion of the electorate who remain simply oblivious to the whole process. Again, if the results of Dr. Dean's campaign show that large numbers of people who normally would not participate in the process decided to participate, then perhaps there'd a case to be made for something. I'm not sure it would be "The End of Broadcast Politics," though.
I'd be a little cautious about boosting Dr. Dean too much at this point. Right now, what seems to be happening is something similar to the Nader candidacy and the Green Party. Dr. Dean appeals to a different constituency, but they share similar traits. They're disaffected with the more "establishment" candidates, generally more liberal than the top-tier mainstream candidates, and they view themselves as a special group with a unique point of view that isn't represented by the mainstream candidates. All of which is fine, except it doesn't mean you can get your guy elected. Right now, I'm afraid many, if not most, of Dr. Dean's supporters are projecting their hopes and desires onto a candidate they probably don't really know a great deal about.
Bush has two significant vulnerabilities in the upcoming election: the economy and Iraq. If both of those situations improve, even just modestly, he's going to be near impossible to defeat. If either one of those situations deteriorates significantly, he'll be vulnerable, but it's by no means a sure thing. If both situations deteriorate, he'll be very vulnerable and it'll be an ugly, ugly campaign.
Social issues aren't going to drive this election, except as they may be reflected in the economy. Dean's fiscal conservatism is a virtue, but it's not one that's likely to make a significant difference if unemployment begins to decline, and interest rates remain at near-historic lows. National security and foreign policy aren't two subjects that come to mind when one thinks of former governors of Vermont. True, they came even less to mind with a certain former governor of Texas, but he'll have the advantage of four years of on the job experience. And if Iraq begins to improve, and if the Israeli-Palestinian issue improves at all, he'll point to what he'll call a winning record. WMD won't be on anyone's minds if there are the beginnings of a functioning democratic government present in Iraq. That's a tall order, but don't assume it can't happen.
If Iraq goes south, and if we suffer any more major terrorist attacks, Bush is vulnerable; but voters will have to decide who is better equipped to deal with the problem. They'll be inclined to give Bush the benefit of the doubt if the alternative is an inexperienced unknown like Dr. Dean.
At some point, the Democrats will have to decide what kind of a candidate they want. Dr. Dean may make good headlines, but I think if we're going to have the best shot at unseating Bush next fall, we're going to need someone with stronger credentials.
I'm sitting here, considering and rejecting things to write about, and I realize I'm just trying to avoid going into the kitchen and getting the housework done.
The science fiction classic, The Thing From Another World, (commonly referred to as simply, The Thing), is coming out on DVD at last! Should be available in August. This is the last classic 50s sf movie I've been waiting for, to have all of my favorite movies from my adolescence on DVD.
It's clear that the Commander in Chief has never heard of Murphy's Laws of Combat. I refer you to Law Number 10: "Never draw fire, it irritates everyone around you."
I did some work to the List O'Links last night. It was harder than it probably needed to be because I don't understand Tinderbox. The list is created by a note that is just the names of each of those sites separated by carriage returns. Then one goes through and highlights each name and uses the internet link tool to bind a URL to each name. In order to see the links themselves in Tinderbox, you select Browse Links from the Note menu.
Well, if you notice a typographical error in one of the names, and try to edit it in the note, it screws up all the links. I spelled Kalilily wrong, tried to fix it and only ended up screwing up every link below it. I had to go through and re-enter each of those URLs. Just kept me up later than I cared to be. Fortunately, it's fixed for now and I'll probably leave it that way for another six months.
I'm kind of looking forward to the new version of Tinderbox, but I'm really hoping they have some substantial and comprehensive documentation for the application this time.
It seems that the lack of rain in recent years has most frequently been the cause of fireworks displays being cancelled. This year, it looks like it might be rain that douses the show. Rats.
If it doesn't rain, I'm going to take my two digital cameras down to the beach (riding my bicycle so I don't get stuck in the endless traffic jam that follows these events), and try to capture some of the show.
I thought I would save this for another entry some time, but I have little self control when it comes to things like this.
The other night I wrote a little rant about some silly behavior I had witnessed on the web. I commented on what I believed was the basis for the behavior; and I offered my thoughts on how one might choose to behave differently under those circumstances in the future. And I was somewhat unkind in how I went about it. I ended up taking it down because most of the time, these sorts of efforts are unwelcome, and, more importantly, ineffective. But I had closed it with a quip that I really liked, and I wanted to save it for some other time, in perhaps a different context. Well, this is some other time, and it's definitely a different context, so here's how that little rant ended:
"These are not easy things to learn. I'm still learning them. They're even harder to live. Some people never learn them, fear is too much a part of their lives. It is this way for a reason, there is something we're intended to become and this is how we become it. No one will learn these things because of anything I write. Everyone must learn them the same way I did, or they won't learn them at all.
So why do I write them? Because the finger is not the moon. I'm giving you all the finger."
FWIW, I'm playing with a favicon (the little picture that often appears in the URL), and it seems where it appears in the Head of the html template affects whether or not the comments appear - and vice versa. It's weird.
Okay, that seems to be working. Comments and favicon. One of these nights I've got to update that list o'links too.
Or, in this case, MBNA. I'm going to pay off the G4 today. That's one less debt I'll have to keep track of in the budget, which is totally shredded at this point. I'm up to 167 purchased songs in the iTunes Music Store, and the mailman has been delivering a lot of boxes with the Amazon logo on them lately. Then there's the matter of this little camera, the eMac for the parental units, summer school, enrolling Caitlin in karate and so on and so forth. Fortunately, the cash flow situation can keep my head above water for the time being, and I'm largely solvent, so I'm grateful for that. Others are not so fortunate.
Kodak offers its own iPhoto-like software for Mac OS X. You'll have to fill out a registration form to download the application, and be sure to look for the link that takes you to the Mac version. I missed it the first time. I downloaded and installed it yesterday evening to have a look at it, and it looks pretty good. A note in Kodak's FAQ says there is no difference between EasyShare 3.0 and 2.1 on the Mac. You can download 2.1 through VersionTracker without having to mess with the registration process. I downloaded both versions yesterday, but I only installed 3.0, so I don't know if 2.1 is the same or not. Why they would just change the version number to 3.0 is certainly not clear to me.
A cosmetic grumble - I don't care for the sort of monochromatic look of the UI. All the tool icons are this sort of pale blue over a blue-tinted brushed metal bar. A little more color might help distinguish what the various buttons do. They all have little text flags that will appear when you hover over the icon though.
One interesting thing is that it appears to use Kodak's own e-mail server to send your pictures by e-mail. When you select the e-mail tab, you get a client window that is right in the EasyShare application, it doesn't bounce you out to Mail.app or whatever your default e-mail client is.
The interface looks a lot like iPhoto and iTunes, with an album window to the left, and a display window to the right. It has a similar set of editing features to crop and fix minor problems with your pictures.
I haven't tried to import my >2k photos into EasyShare to see how it compares with iPhoto in performance with large libraries, and I'm not sure that I will anytime soon. Mostly, this was a matter of curiosity on my part.
Naturally, the application focuses on Kodak's Ofoto service for ordering prints (who, I believe, are the same folks who actually process the requests through iPhoto). And you can create a web page photo album using Ofoto's service to share your photos online.
All things considered, it seems like a competent little application. It doesn't seem to raise the bar in any significant way when compared to iPhoto, but it's an alternative.
Ric Ford published an appeal for donations to help support Macintouch on his web site today. Ordinarily, I'm somewhat ambivalent, tending toward unsympathetic, when confronted with these sorts of things. For about six months, I'd even stopped reading Macintouch, because I felt that it had become little more than an outlet for people who were unhappy with Apple to vent their spleens. So perhaps it may seem incongruent when I say that I made a donation to Macintouch today.
Earlier this spring, I started reading Macintouch again. Truth be told, I was looking for reports which might help me understand the problems I was having with my G4 MDD. In fact, just before I ordered the machine in January, I scanned Macintouch's G4 MDD reports to make sure I knew what I might expect from the machine. While I found the usual amount of spleen-venting, there were many good reports that were useful to me.
Before I stopped reading Macintouch on a regular basis, I e-mailed Ric and complained about what I saw as a declining trend in the editorial effort. Apart from what I felt was an overly-negative bias, I noted many posts that were complaints about missing features which might be considered glaring omissions in the OS or Apple's software that were simply incorrect, as a quick check of Apple's Help files, or a careful examination of the menu items in an application would have shown. I felt there was no editorial effort expended in choosing to post these rants, even though invariably several readers would write in and correct the errors. Ric replied that although he didn't agree with my opinion on the overly-negative bias, they would work to improve the "signal-to-noise" ratio. (Parenthetically, from the Department of Redundancy Department, I can't seem to find that e-mail on my home accounts, or I'd quote it here. I'm working from memory.) Shortly after that exchange, something was posted that caused me to decide it simply wasn't worth reading Macintouch anymore, and I stopped reading it.
Before that day, Macintouch had been a daily habit for many years, and I found it to be a tremendously worthwhile resource. I regretted it when Macintouch and Apple, in the person of no less a figure than Steve Jobs, went through a period of strained relations, to include various legal threats. That episode seemed to mark the shift toward a very, shall I say, "skeptical" view of Apple. Ric's daily involvement in the writing and editing seemed to decline as well, as did the quality of the site. But I remained a loyal reader for years after.
So when Ric made his appeal today, perhaps because of the news regarding Casady&Green yesterday, I decided to make a modest donation as an expression of appreciation for all the good work Ric Ford did for Mac users, and all the value I received from reading Macintouch. I didn't like it when MacFixIt turned "pro," and I don't care for the changes that have been made to VersionTracker, where it seems like the thrust of the design is to ensure one has to view as many ad impressions as possible before being able to download a file or visit a developer's site. Macintouch has remained remarkably ad-free, and a free resource for Mac users. He's treated his readers with more respect than either of those two other "top-tier" Mac sites. MacCentral has acted similarly, but it receives support of some kind by its affiliation with MacWorld.
If you're a Mac user and a Macintouch reader, I encourage you to make a donation as well.
