Month: April 2004

10 years gone

So this is the tenth anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s suicide, just a few miles from where I now live.

I remember hearing the news, as I drove home from work on my 32nd birthday — it took three days before anyone found him — thinking how bad a thing it was but how I would now have a reminder every year. I could not have foreseen moving here back then, so that adds a little extra poignance to it. I wasn’t a huge fan, but no one could deny the talent and the raw power he — and the band — brought to bear on the age-old feelings most of us forget as we get older. I can still see the blurb in the weekend planner of my then-local paper, with a mention of Nirvana, a not yet famous but much talked about band, appearing at a club.

Skimming through the news articles (for some reason, today’s paper was delivered when we only take the Sunday edition: perhaps I need to read more about it?), I’m struck by how sick he must have been and how little he did to hide it. I think of how people like Cobain and Layne Staley, who mean so much to so many people, yet die alone at the height of their power and popularity. It’s easy to second-guess those around someone in obvious pain and wonder if anyone could have done anything to change the outcome. At the job I held last year, a world-renowned human rights advocate on the faculty took her own life and there were similar questions: why was she left alone, who talked to her last, and how did they leave her, etc. Unprofitable but understandable.

Fame doesn’t guarantee much, it seems.

totems

~Life Paths, Birth Totem Falcon, Animal Totems & Earth Medicine

Gary made a reference to his totem creature and I looked mine up.

I can’t complain about what I see, and looking over the others that correspond to my family members, I’m struck by how they resonate with the reality I see everyday.

It could be seen as astrology but I think it has a different dimension: the totem schema seems more geared to self-awareness and fulfilling one’s potential, where astrology tends to be about wish-fulfilment.

The Guardian on weblogs

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | New kids on the blog:

From the mundane to the thrilling, the blogging phenomenon has produced some of today’s most innovative and engaging writing.

But on the other hand,

Last year, a survey of 3,000 blogs by the software company Perseus concluded that in the United States 91 per cent are maintained by those under 30 and ‘the typical blog is written by a teenage girl who uses it twice a month to update her friends and classmates on happenings in her life’. It estimated that by the end of this year there will be a million web logs, although most won’t last a year and, like clasped diaries in the physical world, the majority will be abandoned within a month.

why design matters

Daring Fireball: Ronco Spray-On Usability

A well-reasoned rant on why freeware interface “design” is so shoddy (if Eric Raymond can’t figure out to print to a shared printer on his home network, what does that suggest?).

Coincidentally, I had a similar problem this week with some installed (and at one time, working) software going south and finding it was going to take the better part of 3 days to resolve it. But when it worked, it’s been flawless.

And there’s a sidenote/reference that suggests it may not get any better: if all the geeks who care about such matters have adopted OS X as their desktop OS, what will happen to KDE, GNOME,et al?

I think John has a valid but by no means new point: I would rank some aspects of the freeware OSes higher than Windows (installing on a bare machine is no easier on Windows and can be less friendly, by a long shot), but for Raymond to claim that Linux et al have overcome their complicated “touch a million config files” roots is ridiculous.

selling experiences is different from selling commodities

Somewhere A Cow Is a Weeping…
From the Sign Of The Times Department: Gateway closes all of it’s Country Stores, which once numbered over 300. 2,500 workers laid off.

[metafilter.com]

Buying a Wintel PC has been all about computers as (aggregrations of) commodities for years: surely no one can claim to be surprised that buyers aren’t finding a compelling reason to buy a PC from a specialty retail store as opposed to big box discounter or even a reliable screwdriver shop.

As noted on a mailing list tonight:

Isn’t it ironic that while Apple keeps opening new stores and consistently turning a profit, Gateway is losing money and closing its stores?

Apple doesn’t just sell hardware that’s interchangeable with any number of other manufacturers: they sell an integrated experience from the hardware design, software/human interface guidelines, to the customer-facing retail channel. Apparently, people are willing to pay for that level of attention to detail . . . .