Month: November 2004

Driving on old pavement being ripped up

Lockergnome’s RSS Resource: If RSS is broken, why does PodCasting work?. A very good question, in my opinion, and one I’ve been asking ever since the RSS-is-broken meme crescendoed into the Atom (née Echo, née PIE) movement.

The answer: RSS isn’t broken. It may be clumsy for stating certain kinds of relationships, but it’s not broken. The guys doing Atom are spending time ripping up pavement that, in many cases, hasn’t even fully been driven on yet. I love what’s happened with enclosures and Podcasting. That’s the sort of innovation that XML syndication needs, user experience and business models; not “innovation” in how the underlying content is expressed. Where RSS is broken, in terms of how users experience it, it’s not something that can be fixed by changing the tagset, but must be addressed at the application level and the paradigm level. (For an example of the latter, look at the drag and drop subscription innovations showcased by NetNewsWire, or the built-in RSS reader in Firefox.)

Virginia Recognized for RSS Services

RSS in Government: Virginia Recognized for RSS Services. My home state won an award for its embrace of RSS on the Commonwealth’s official web site, with about 34 feeds (plus more on the way). The RSS 0.91 feeds appear to be auto-generated by the CMS system behind the site and have a few quirks—for one, the XML button on each page isn’t linked to the feed, so dragging it into an aggregator doesn’t work. But they’re making the effort, and in the spirit of truly locally useful content, there isn’t a single feed I’ve found yet that I would want to subscribe to from my current position out of state. 🙂

Turkey Day approacheth

Lisa’s folks are joining us at our house for Thanksgiving this year, and as the one with nothing else to do but a job search, I’m planning the menu. So far it’s pretty straightforward:

  1. Appetizers:
    • Mixed nuts
    • Assorted cheeses
    • Cocktails
  2. First course: light risotto
  3. Main course:
  4. Dessert…

Ah, and that’s where my imagination fails me. What kind of dessert? Continuing the apple theme, I’m considering broiled apples with maple Calvados sauce, but I think we’d all explode. I also have to figure out what kind of bread, and which light risotto recipe.

Rolling into a conference tie

I feel bad about not posting anything after Virginia’s loss last week to Miami—after all, it was one of the few games all season that I watched from beginning to end. But this week’s win over Georgia Tech, which carries the Hoos into a three-way tie for ACC conference champion, lifted my spirits considerably. Makes me actually want to watch the Virginia Tech game, where we’ll be a five-place underdog (we’re at #16 according to USA Today and the AP).

Saturday’s DIY: Don’t try this at home

It was such a simple problem: our dining room radiator had scraps of reflective paper, the remnants of a lining on the inside of the radiator cavity, sitting on top of the radiator, clearly visible behind the radiator cover. The plan: unscrew the radiator cover from the wall, remove the loose backing paper, install some reflective insulation, and replace the cover. What could go wrong?

Pretty much everything, as it turned out. The first thing: when I removed the radiator cover, it brought part of the wall along with it—five one inch by several inch by 1/4 inch irregular chunks of plaster, adhered to a wall by a previously unseen caulk line, even after scoring along the edge with a putty knife. Oy. And this a wall we had already painted. I sighed, resigning myself to plaster repair, and started removing the matter inside the cover.

I quickly realized I was going to have problems. The radiator sat hard against the back wall, making removing the flaking reflective material difficult if not impossible. And the radiator was, as all radiators are, heavy. With a little help from staring at it, I realized that it was only attached on a threaded connection to the steam pipe, with other supports just holding the radiator off the floor but not attached to anything. I was eventually able to lift the unattached end of the radiator and pivot the whole thing out. But it was still impossible to get the insulation behind the attached end.

Our final solution: Lisa ran a double thickness of heavy duty aluminum foil behind the trouble spot, and I cut the insulation, installing one strip on the left wall the cavity and the rest overlapping the aluminum foil and wrapping around the back, top and other side. It took the rest of the morning to finish the job, not counting the plaster repair (done, shamefully, with quick-setting spackle. Sigh.) The final result looks nice and is probably a lot more energy efficient than the previous set-up, but I don’t know how well it will stand up to steam coming out of the relief valve (which I think was responsible for the state of the previous material).

The moral: don’t start home improvement repairs in public parts of the house the same day as a dinner party, no matter how easy you think the job is.

I leave for four months…

…and Google opens an office less than a mile from my old house. Ah well. They’re looking for software engineers, and I’m certainly not that anymore.

So far I’ve had two contacts since posting my resumé online, one for an internally focused IT position and one for a short contract position in Washington State. I perhaps should make this more explicit: I’m looking for a software product management position, or a position in marketing that can leverage my expertise in software development, blogging, and XML content syndication. The position needs to be in the greater Boston area, or a position where I can do much of the job remotely. And I have a travel constraint; since Lisa works in sales, I need to be on the road less than 20% of the time.

I did notice that my resumé now comes up in the second page of hits for “product manager resume” on Google. Progress, but not optimal. Anyone want to help me boost that position? Just point at this page with the link text “product manager resume”…

I take it all back…

…every single last nasty thing I said about the Arlington vicinity and our grocery options. No, Stop’n’Shop(’n’Hop’n’Pop) didn’t suddenly become more attractive. We finally visited Wilson Farms. A farm stand that shops more like a Whole Foods, on acres of actual farm land just off Mass Ave in Lexington (who knew?).

We were encouraged when we saw baskets of chestnuts, thrilled to find two local apple varieties we’d never seen before, encouraged by the general look and feel of the produce, and surprised to note the presence of packages of chicken fat for sale in the freezer. Then we checked out the meat department. Holy cow. When was the last time your supermarket differentiated between fryers, broilers, roasters, and stewing fowl? To say nothing of the duck, the steaks…

Needless to say we’ll be returning. Thanks to Jenny Brown for the tip.

Free music roundup

The Wednesday Morning Download column at Salon just started updating again after an October hiatus. In celebration, here’s my own roundup of free downloads:

If you didn’t snag a copy of this month’s Wired magazine, featuring a CD of Creative Commons-licensed tracks by such artists as David Byrne, My Morning Jacket, the Beastie Boys, Thievery Corporation, and Spoon, you can now download all the tracks from the Internet Archive.

Sub Pop’s RSS feed linked to tracks from the Postal Service, Saint Etienne, and the Shins among others.

The erstwhile author of Salon’s column, Doveman, has been linking some interesting stuff from his blog. This week: an acoustic cover of Tears for Fears’ Head Over Heels by Samamidon. And Metafilter points to a bunch of mash-ups by DJ Riko, including my favorite, Walk Like An Egyptian Devil (which pairs the Bangles with the Rolling Stones and Felix Da Housecat).

Sony Music gets RSS

LockerGnome: Sony Music now has RSS. Following the trail blazed by SubPop, Sony has posted twelve artist info feeds and one tour feed. Sadly none of the bands are ones that I’m interested in, though I suspect Oliver Willis will be subscribing to the Destiny’s Child and Beyoncé feeds.

Like SubPop, the feeds are RSS 1.0 format, though they don’t validate, throwing errors on the content type (text/html rather than application/rss+xml or application/rdf+xml) and not being well-formed XML.

Got R?

Apple Downloads: R for Mac OS X 2.0.1. I hadn’t seen this one before: a Mac OS X implementation of R, the statistical computing and graphics language from Bell Labs. The Mac OS X implementation comes complete with a Cocoa GUI that is pretty damned sexy for a stats package, especially a free one:

r for mac os x

Elections, ballot counting, and the truth

I have a bunch of pages stuck open in my aggregator that I haven’t posted yet because I didn’t feel right about them. They’re all about alleged or actual errors, improprieties, or other issues with the voting in this presidential election. Today Scott Rosenberg at Salon posted what I feel is the more balanced perspective on this: if there was vote fraud, we‘ll report it, but the people who continue to insist that the election was stolen are beginning to sound like the folks who think Iraq had WMDs and caused 9/11. With that perspective, I can comment on these links and then move on—unless, of course, the vote stealing allegations are proven.

A lot of the articles start out with statistical analyses of the variances between exit polls and actual reported results, such as Blue Lemur’s Odds of Bush gaining by 4 percent in all exit polling states 1 in 50,000; Evoting/paper variance not found to be significant. This article sums up a lot of the threads going around as follows: It seems like Bush got an average gain of 4.15% between exit polling and actual vote tallies across the 16 states where exit polls were taken. That seems pretty high, and you can make a probability assessment that it’s pretty unlikely, but the article is careful to point out that the differences between exit polls and vote counts were higher in some paper ballot states than in e-voting states.

The authors of the paper want the raw exit poll data. This strikes me as scary, since that data has to be weighted against the actual population before it’s any good and if you’re going to go into the raw data and start weighting it yourself, you can make it tell pretty much any story. The only thing this approach buys is the ability to recreate the weightings that the polling organizations actually used, then second guess their methodology. Nice, but what I would really want is the actual vote counts.

Unfortunately, for every careful but ultimately futile article like that at Blue Lemur, you get a dozen roundups of anecdote and speculation, such as the one at bellacio.org: Too many voting “irregularities” to be coincidence. To which I reply, How many voting irregularities would constitute coincidence? And what is the chance of a voting irregularity in 2004, when we’ve all been sensitized by the 2000 election, compared with earlier days when no one would dream to ask the question? Don’t get me wrong, some of the errors, like the 4,000 extra Bush voters in Franklin County, Ohio, are pretty egregious. But some of the other observations, like the one at Commondreams.org about the correlation between voting for Bush and the minimum wage hike, seem pretty thin.

The frustrating thing about the obsession with the election being stolen is that the general tinfoilhatdom is obscuring some real issues, like the ease of hacking e-voting systems and optical scan computers. That’s where we need to put our time and energy, not re-fighting November 2 for four years.

Thankfully, Fury adds another dollop of balance by exploring the use of tin-foil hat as signifier for conspiracy theorist, including a full survey of current usage. Thank God for the academy.

Review: The Frank Sinatra Show with Ella Fitzgerald

frank sinatra show with ella fitzgerald

In the late 1950s, at arguably the apogee of his cultural influence and artistic powers, the fates (in the form of Timex’s sponsorship) rewarded Frank Sinatra with a set of network television specials. The shows, classic variety shows of the old mode, featured Ol’ Blue Eyes and a variety of musical guests. In December 1959, Sinatra’s show played host to another jazz singer at the height of her career: Ella Fitzgerald.

Both singers had benefitted immeasurably from the skills of Nelson Riddle, who had spearheaded Sinatra’s return to popularity upon his transition to Capitol Records after a career slump and had arranged and conducted Sinatra’s famous “concept” albums In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning and Songs for Swingin’ Lovers, as well as dozens of singles. Riddle had also been the musical genius behind Ella’s series of explorations of American popular songs, the Songbooks. With Riddle in the orchestral pit, the show sounds like one of those Capitol recordings. This is as good as pop music got in the middle of the century.

The format of the show was simple: a little introductory song and dance—here in the form of complaints for the bad weather in Palm Springs, where the show was being shot—followed by dialog between Sinatra and Peter Lawford (who attempts to slip in a comment about his brother-in-law John F. Kennedy but is quickly cut off by Sinatra so that they don’t have to give equal time to Nixon!), a song from Sinatra, and then a commercial break. One of the genius points of this DVD is that it includes all the John Cameron Swayze Timex commercials!

After the break follow guest vocals from the a cappella quartet the Hi-Los, a comic interlude with Hermione Gingold, and finally the divine Ella. The rest of the show proceeds in much the same fashion, with additional appearances from Red Norvo, with whose quintet Sinatra frequently toured in the late 50s, and from Sinatra’s then-paramour Juliet Prowse.

It’s difficult to pick out high points in the material—it’s all pretty darned good—but to my ears Sinatra’s guest appearance with the Hi-Los on “I’ll Never Smile Again,” a reprise of his 1940 performance of the tune with the Pied Pipers and the Tommy Dorsey band, is up there. Low point? While the vocal performance of Cole Porter’s “It’s All Right With Me” is faultless, watching Sinatra sing it in “duet” with the mooning, silent Prowse is painful.

A word about the DVD itself. The image transfer is fuzzy, with lots of visual noise, with some ghosting and edge artifacts. There are also minor sound problems, particularly a level issue at the beginning and during Frank and Ella’s “Can’t We Be Friends.” The extras, including biographies and (where applicable) discographies of all the participants in the television broadcast, are comprehensive. In particular Ella’s discography is lengthy and annotated, though the formatting of the text seems to have disappeared. Similar quality problems plague the ads at the end of the disc for other material on the Quantum Leap imprint, including misspellings. In the end, the quality of the source material far outweighs these concerns.

This review was originally posted at BlogCritics.