the art of writing is discovering what you believe
Interview | Jordan Hubbard Answers Your Questions
If anything has been a surprise to me, it’s been the degree to which people outside of Apple seem to care so intensely about what we’re up to and where we’re going.
Everyone wants to know what the leader is thinking.
It’s a classic trope of American family life: the high-powered executive with a Type A personality who has no problem juggling billion-dollar deals and conference calls in his corner office, but finds himself at a loss when faced with an unhappy spouse or a troubled child at home. Now there is a tonic for this divided soul, beyond the traditional predinner tumbler of Scotch: a cutting-edge management tool that can be used to heal the wounds of the dysfunctional family.
[ . . . . ]
It is an open question whether the mysterious complexities of family life pondered by Tolstoy and Freud and Updike can really be reduced to the jargon of management theory. But with Family360, the misunderstood child of the cold father (think James Dean in ”Rebel Without a Cause,” crying ”You’re tearing me apart!” to Jim Backus) is at least able to get through to Dad in a language he can understand: the spiralbound executive summary.
a friend writes . . . . .
the proposed state budget has thrown the school into a panic. signs of
bureaucratic fraying are evident. i’m juggling tuition deferments until
my subsidy is processed, and i’ve been informed that it won’t be procesed
until after the deadline. translation: “we will pay your tuition, but not
until we drop you from your classes”. i’m told i am far from the only
student in this situation right now. the only reason i haven’t been
dropped from my classes is because a couple of school employees have
agreed to temporarily misplace my paperwork. talk about personalized
customer service….
Ben Hammersley.com: RSS to iCal
In a fit of madness, I made RSS feed of all the homepages of people who have commented on this blog in the past month.
This is an interesting idea: how better to populate a blogroll than with people who’ve commented on your posts?
Spring’s a harbinger of a trend toward concept-centric computing where the concepts—people, places, products, etc—that define your life become the center of your computing experience with traditional applications and documents playing a much less important role than before.
That’s what this book was all about. But instead of an application, Donald Norman envisions activity-specific devices: a checkbook computer and printer, a grocery list organizer/computer/printer, instead of the horribly complicated “jack of all tasks” machines we’ve all been told we need.
I doubt that fragmentation would be useful, but I do like what I am reading about Spring and how it reminds me of my first encounter with the old Mac interface. I’ll have to try this thing out. <sigh> where’s that iBook when I need it?
Spotted here
Ledger-Enquirer | 11/06/2002 | Sonny ends the reign
Perdue refused to talk about the referendum in an interview with The Associated Press. “We’re not going to talk about that tonight,” he said. “You folks in the media have been the only ones who wanted to talk about the flag. I’m going to talk about healing Georgia and bringing Georgia together.”
Confederate flag supporters to next governor: You owe us
[Sons of Confederate Veterans] members dogged Barnes throughout the campaign, showing up at campaign functions waving the old Georgia flag and posting “Boot Barnes” posters along roadways. Now it’s payback time, they say.
“We put out hundreds of signs, worked thousands of man-hours and wrote hundreds of letters,” said SCV Southeast Brigade Cmdr. Don Newman. “The Republicans owe us. And we expect to be paid.”
The usual duplicity as Georgia’s governor-elect disclaims any knowledge of the old segregation-era flag being used as an issue in his campaign. Glad I moved away. I’ve become more aware of the institutional racism of the South now than I ever was, even before this boneheaded but hardly surprising move. I wouldn’t object if the Old South were to secede again (they have a president in Trent Lott): Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia could secede as Cascadia. The dread of all military commanders is a war on two or more fronts: how about two simultaneous secessions?
Continue reading “a dishonorable debt”
This is going pretty well. Only one coaster so far. I forgot that audio CDs don’t have file systems so using mkisofs to make one would be a Bad Idea.
Gramofile handles all the dirty work of converting the audio to wav files, locating the tracks, and processing them. I have yet to move beyond the basic filter. But so far I have been working with vinyl that’s in pretty good condition.
An example. I took Stay Awake, a collection of Disney tunes done by popular (as of 1988, anyway) artists and converted it. The LP clocks in at 64 minutes and change. Here’s what you end up with.
The side[1,2].wav files are converted from the audio in. The processed files are the tracks, and the number and start/stop points are in the *.tracks files. Those can be edited if the track locator didn’t work the way you expected.
[/usr/home/paul/cdimages/Stay_Awake]:: ls -l
total 1316724
-rw-r–r– 1 paul wheel 56747928 Dec 17 21:51 processedA01.wav
-rw-r–r– 1 paul wheel 36479568 Dec 17 21:52 processedA02.wav
-rw-r–r– 1 paul wheel 34045248 Dec 17 21:52 processedA03.wav
-rw-r–r– 1 paul wheel 36091492 Dec 17 21:53 processedA04.wav
-rw-r–r– 1 paul wheel 18839564 Dec 17 21:53 processedA05.wav
-rw-r–r– 1 paul wheel 147646852 Dec 17 21:55 processedA06.wav
-rw-r–r– 1 paul wheel 232407048 Dec 17 21:59 processedB01.wav
-rw-r–r– 1 paul wheel 44858568 Dec 17 22:00 processedB02.wav
-rw-r–r– 1 paul wheel 59623248 Dec 17 22:01 processedB03.wav
-rw-r–r– 1 paul wheel 338690092 Dec 17 20:36 side1.wav
-rw-r–r– 1 paul wheel 153642 Dec 17 21:37 side1.wav.rms
-rw-r–r– 1 paul wheel 1377 Dec 17 21:37 side1.wav.tracks
-rw-r–r– 1 paul wheel 341704748 Dec 17 21:35 side2.wav
-rw-r–r– 1 paul wheel 155010 Dec 17 21:37 side2.wav.rms
-rw-r–r– 1 paul wheel 1070 Dec 17 21:37 side2.wav.tracks
Takes up a lot of space.
Then it comes down to this:
/usr/local/bin/cdrecord -vv -eject speed=2 dev=0,1,0 -audio -pad processed*.wav
And then I have a new CD to dazzle the children with.
<UPDATE>Aaargh. Two coasters so far. The burner seems not to like something here. The wav files are fine: I played them through a couple of times already. Highlight: Sun Ra’s Arkestra doing “Pink Elephants on Parade” from Dumbo.
Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys
I heard a piece in NPR this morning discussing this book. It was too early to get most of it, but I was struck by the passionate but matter-of-fact way in which the author made his case.
The premise is simple: boys are not allowed to be full-formed, emotional people, but are heavily pressured to deny their emotional and empathetic natures by what they perceive as a man’s role. Men don’t cry, they’re never afraid, they never need help, etc. And 95% of the murders in this country, claims the author, are committed by boys/men who take this message as the way they should live. Other western nations — Canada and Australia were the examples cited — don’t do this to their boys.
It’s on my reading list.
Ben Hammersley.com: Trackback, RDF, and the LazyWeb
Here’s the thing: I want to make a More Like This From Others button for each of the entries below. Clicking on it would bring a list of entries, formatted just like the blog, with excerpts of entries on a similar subject from other people.
Herein lies the rub: following my little investigation into people’s categorisation habits, I can see that everyone calls everything different names: and until we have a universal taxonomy for weblogs (ha!) then we’re stuck on a global “Google for Weblogs”.
Interesting thread. I think they’re on the wrong track and I think Ben has misstated what he really wants. Join in and see what you think.
Young Man, Would You Like That in a Box?
What distinguishes younger buyers, all car companies seem to agree, is that they don’t seem to care as much about cars as young people used to — putting more stock in the style of their cellphones or P.D.A.’s than in the style of what they drive. So the designers gave the Element a back-to-basics look.
I expect I’ll see a lot of these around town.