Month: March 2005

cool to be uncool

Conversation with the health & fitness teacher at school today, and we remarked on the “cool kids” as the little cliques ebb and flow across the schoolyard: bear in mind these are elementary school kids, no older than 10. And while the H&F teacher is a self-described dork, to me he’s a grown-up version of those guys who drifted effortlessly through what we called PE back in the day: physically fit and totally confident at any sport, able to finesse their way through anything physical. But he thinks of himself as “uncool” or somehow geeky and is OK with that.

We hit on a new meme: it’s cool to be uncool. It boils down to being yourself and not worrying about the cool kids, either what they think or who they include in their little games. Not easy to do, but for some of us, we never had the option of being cool. But over time, it became clear that you could be accepted for yourself. The underlying tension of cool is inclusion — who’s in and who’s out — both being in and knowing who’s in or out. The first is obvious, but upholding the exclusivity by ignoring the out crowd is just as important. You can’t mix with the Others lest it jeopardize your status.

But perhaps there’s a middle ground. Genuinely not caring, either through force of will or by not having any intrinsic coolness, won’t get you admitted to the Elect. But there’s something in being uninterested in being cool that has it’s own vibe. You can cultivate your own exclusivity — a clique of one — and watch the the pack try to justify itself in the face that. Since this is elementary school, most of the kids are too young to care who’s who: once they hit the blacktop of the playground, they’re in it for the fun. I hope that doesn’t change for quite a while . . .

I’ve often opined that there is no crueler creature than an adolescent school kid: nothing much has changed since my own school days. It’s reassuring to see so little interest in the social clique and more interest in games and real play, even as early as it is.

Now playing: There Ain’t Half Been Some Clever Bastards by Ian Dury & The Blockheads from the album”Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll – Best Of” | Get it

The tyranny of sight

NPR : Dining in the Dark:

The Blind Cow Restaurant in Zurich, Switzerland, offers up a different dining experience: Guests eat in complete darkness and are served by blind or visually handicapped waitstaff.

Heard this piece this morning in almost complete darkness, appropriately enough. An interesting experiment: how does sight outrank the other senses?

Now playing: You’re The Storm by The Cardigans from the album “Long Gone Before Daylight” | Get it

system admin notes

After doing all the tuning I knew how to do — messing with httpd.conf and php.ini — I was still seeing ridiculous page load times for dynamic content here. The system didn’t seem to be IO-bound or memory-bound anymore: it looked like the CPU was now the bottleneck. At 700 MHz, it’s not exactly modern. To test that, I backed up the database and restored it to my G3-upgraded-to-G4 (a scorching 550MHz box) and pointed the database queries at it: dramatic improvements ensued. Page load times are way down (my worst case scenario — loading my biggest archive page — used to take several minutes, now down to 90 seconds) and that’s what I hoped for. Perhaps the Apple-supplied binary of MySQL running is optimized for their hardware in ways I didn’t know about on FreeBSD.

And I have cleaned up a lot of stuff on the pages, turned text link menus into dropdowns, and generally tried to polish up the brightwork.

Now playing: Iron Man by The Cardigans from the album “First Band On The Moon”

disintermediation of sorts

Annotating the planet:

Google Maps isn’t just a service, it’s a service factory.

Radical openness is the key. It’s been only two weeks since it launched and already the colonization has begun. Thanks to open XML data formats and open Web programming interfaces, people have figured out how to animate routes, create custom routes with their own GPS data, and display GPS data in real time.

Microsoft could have enabled these same kinds of things years ago. Its TerraServer has been up and running since 1998. But despite Steve Ballmer’s infamous monkey-dance chant, developers haven’t flocked to TerraServer. What’s Google’s secret? Web DNA and no Windows tax. [Full story at InfoWorld.com (14)]

I didn’t realize developers were supposed to “flock” to TerraServer: I always figured it was just a rich man’s plaything . . .

why is the RIAA suing kids?

Because they can and because they have no leverage over the likes of Bill “Axl Rose” Bailey . . .

The New York Times > Arts > Music > The Most Expensive Album Never Made:

Along the way, [Rose] has racked up more than $13 million in production costs, according to Geffen documents, ranking his unfinished masterpiece as probably the most expensive recording never released. As the production has dragged on, it has revealed one of the music industry’s basic weaknesses: the more record companies rely on proven stars like Mr. Rose, the less it can control them.

It’s a story that applies to the creation of almost every major album. But in the case of “Chinese Democracy,” it has a stark ending: the singer who cast himself as a master of predatory Hollywood in the hit song “Welcome to the Jungle” has come to be known instead as the keeper of the industry’s most notorious white elephant.

$13 million would jumpstart a lot of smaller acts’ careers. Interestingly, GnR still sells plenty of CDs, so it’s not like the label isn’t getting any return on their initial investment (their debut alone sold 26 million copies).

Does anything more clearly underscore the industry’s failed strategy of backing a small stable of superstars instead of working with a more diverse roster of smaller but more reliable acts?

not what I expected

On my way back from PCC, I heard some guys on my local NPR station talking about Weed, a new online music retailer, and they made the direct comparison to iTunes. Figured I would check it out.

Weed – Download Weed V2.0 Now:

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
Windows PC, running Windows 98, or more recent platform. Or Macintosh with Virtual PC emulator software and Windows.

Well, that’s a buzzkill. iTunes is platform-neutral and has been for quite some time.

And part of their claim for iTunes overthrow was that you can embed a link to a track at their store and sell it on your website, with the implication being that you can’t do that with iTunes Music Store tracks. I’ll concede that you need the (free) iTunes application to get the track, but it’s not quite true that by going through iTMS you’ll end up being waylaid and not getting what you came for. If you were to click on that link, you’d go right to the track I linked to (which is also free this week).
Astaire

And the fact that the files are not mp3 or mp4 — Windows Media are all I see — doesn’t do much for me.

Now playing: Western Stars by k.d. lang from the album “Shadowland” | Get it

Continue reading “not what I expected”

is email worth using?

The on-demand blogosphere:

What if the blogs we read didn’t just scroll past us in our RSS inboxes? What if we could consult the wisdom of our networks of bloggers on demand, in realtime, relative to topics of current interest?

I have been thinking about this a different way. I find that many people on email lists just don’t get information they’re looking for, either due to misconfigured spam filters or whitelisting or some combination.

What if we just dropped email altogether and “delivered” with RSS? You send me a message by creating a post signed with a public key (for which I have the private counterpart) and my client polls your feed so it can fetch and decrypt the messages as needed.

If you don’t know me (ie, you’re not on a whitelist or receiver filter), your client has to exchange keys with mine: if you don’t supply a key, you don’t get mine, and we don’t communicate.

Complex? Kludgy? Is the necessity of a key exchange going to make it harder to spam? I’m not sure. Perhaps if the keys are issued by an authority who verifies people’s information, not just a home-rolled gpg key . . .

What I want — again — is the transparency of email, where anyone can send anyone a message, but without having to deal with an onslaught of tedious advertising and crap.

This sold a subscription to MAKE

10-minute motor spinning for hours:

Mark Frauenfelder:

Picture 2

This morning I spent ten minutes making the motor from the Howtoons cartoon in Make. It consists of one AA battery, two safety pins, a magnet, some Scotch tape, a piece of telephone extension cable wire, a pad of Post-It notes, and a little nail polish. It’s been spinning for four hours so far. I like the clickety clickety sound is makes. I shot a little movie of it in action. (It’s an MP4, so you might have to download it to watch it.) Link

Very cool and there seems to be a lot more stuff like it in the mag. If you let Google help you, you can find a promotional code for a free additional issue (5 instead of the usual 4).

perspective, anyone?

Is it just me, or is anyone else having trouble equating Apple’s attempts to learn who violated their NDA to some fansites with the Pentagon Papers? It seems the righteous indignation ought to aimed at the judge in this case: attorneys try whatever they think might work, and if they find a sympathetic judge, they run with it.

Forbes.com: Is Apple The New Microsoft?:

It’s ironic that a company as innovative as Apple Computer could have such a regressive view of the changing world of American media.

The company, led by Chief Executive Steve Jobs, won a round in its quest to force three Apple enthusiast Web sites to disclose their sources on articles they published regarding unannounced Apple products. In court filings the company argued that the Web sites were not protected by free speech because they are not legitimate members of the press.

The ruling, if it stands, will have a chilling and potentially devastating effect on not only blogs, which are growing in stature and prominence, but online media in general.

This potential threat to first amendment rights and Apple’s crackdown on Web sites that, in general, love the company and its products, do nothing to bolster Apple’s image. In fact, the company’s success of late has yielded accusations of bullying and potentially unlawful business tactics, not to mention complaints that songs purchased from its iTunes music service, the dominant digital music store, don’t work with music players other than its own. To some, that might sound like its neighbor to the north.

So some Apple employees or developers spilled some information to a couple of Apple fansites, in (I assume) violation of their NDA or other agreements. I’m not sure I see competitive business information as being as important as a lot of other secrets. This is not exactly life and death, and while I appreciate the tech press taking their “right to snoop” seriously, I’m not sure I see a connection.
This is not to say I want to see ThinkSecret run out of business or some Apple employee to be canned, but surely everyone involved knew the risk involved.
And as for the “complaints that songs purchased from its iTunes music service, the dominant digital music store, don’t work with music players other than its own” this isn’t exactly a revelation.

A shame the C|Net plug for this piece was so strong: it’s lot of noise about nothing.