Month: March 2006

celebrity as its own reward

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The latest blog scandal — a young conservative partisan is hired to “balance” the Washington Post’s left-wing opinion pages (I haven’t found them yet?!), is discovered to have made a career as a serial plagiarist, and resigns, all within a week — calls to mind the post-modern nature of celebrity when one can be famous for being famous, not for having done anything. Where past generations looked to and took inspiration from Lindbergh, Peary, Earhart, we have Paris Hilton and Kato Kaelin.

Now playing: 96 Tears by The Stranglers from the album “Greatest Hits 1977-1990”

all grown up

Mac OS X turns Five:

Isn’t that about time to start kindergarten?

John Siracusa has a nice look at five years of OS X on Ars Technica today.

Coming on the heels of MSFT’s announcement of a delayed VISTA launch, it makes for some interesting comparisons. As Siracusa says, “Apple’s ability to plan and execute its OS strategy is not open for debate.”

In the 5 years since the Public Beta, we have seen 4 major releases, with a 5th due in June, a raft of updates and patches, parallel development in applications (the iLife and iWorks suites, the pro products — Aperture, Final Cut), and a some hardware news as well.
No sign of them slowing down, either.

she deserves better

Following up on a podcast I listened to the other week, I am reading this book:


“Parable of the Sower” (Octavia E. Butler)

I’m pretty disappointed in the editing of the book.

The editors let stuff slip like peddling instead of pedalling for the way you propel a bike. They have left out numerous open quotes following attributions, so I’ve had to go back and re-read passages to see if the bit I just read was a descriptive passage or a continuation of the speech. Sloppy stuff, really. Some random words are capitalized, and not in a way that makes sense within the story.

It’s all pretty distracting. The book itself is OK: passes the 50 page test (you give a book 50 pages to hook you before you give up on it). I think I have Kindred on order as well, and those are her best-known books, I think.

Continue reading “she deserves better”

machine interaction/intermediation

Social bugs and localities:

According to this blog post research has shown that people talking on IM treated users they considered to be geographically far away in a way different to those considered geographically near by: they trusted them less, were less likely to be persuaded by them, and were more likely to give deceptive portrayals of themselves.

So maybe we’re doing the wrong thing. Maybe the way to reduce trolling is not to display real locations, but to fake them – increasing the number of users who appear to be from the same town as you, in the hope that you’d take more care in your own backyard.

They (you know who I mean) have always claimed that the elimination of distance, where everyone was proximate to everyone else, would Make Things Better.

Turns out people can be jerks no matter what. Color me gobsmacked.

I expect it’s a case of “I’ll never see this person in the flesh, nor anyone they know, so I can act out as much as I like.” It’s probably below the level of consciousness, but no less indicative of the type of person they are. Conscience being defined as how you act when no one is watching, what do we call this kind of response?

Flaming Lips followed by The Shins on Austin City Limits

set your TiVo accordingly.

PBS: Austin City Limits – TV Schedule:

The Flaming Lips followed by The Shins
April 1 Austin City Limits
explores the world of indie-rock with performances by two
innovative bands: The Flaming Lips followed by The Shins.
The unique emotional, artsy, acid rock of The Flaming Lips
has brought this Oklahoma-based band pop culture icon status.
Since the late ‘90s, The Shins have been building
a following with their clever, cryptic pop songs.

obsolescence (not mine)

So how overmatched is this laptop by the work I throw at it? I had to reboot to try and complete a task in iPhoto (uploading a book to Apple’s print services). Within 15 minutes of rebooting, it’s already had to create an additional swap file.

white:~ paul$ uptime
22:09  up 14 mins, 2 users, load averages: 1.16 1.69 1.22
white:~ paul$ ls -l /var/vm
total 262144
drwx--x--x   16 root  wheel       544 Mar 20 11:41 app_profile
-rw------T    1 root  wheel  67108864 Mar 22 21:55 swapfile0
-rw------T    1 root  wheel  67108864 Mar 22 22:04 swapfile1

Here’s hoping the new iBooks live up to my expectations.

de-scratching damaged CDs

Re-surfacing CDs so they work again.:

A simple way to remove scratches from a cd so you can get your data back off the disc again.

Seen on the MAKE blog. I tried it but no luck: I suspect I didn’t polish long enough. The disk I am working with shows up in the OS just fine, all tracks are identified: one of them can’t be read reliably. Where does a CD read from, outer to inner or inner to outer? The damaged track is the last track, so perhaps that would help me locate the scratch. I don’t see anything serious, just the usual scuffs . . . .

speaking of suburban safaris

I was looking at an Automator script that resizes images (a handy thing to have) and realized I hadn’t posted these images: during one of the recent snow incidents (I can’t call them storms), we were able to document some raccoon tracks.

Dscn1478

Children’s hand prints and cat tracks might useful for scale comparison purposes.
Continue reading “speaking of suburban safaris”