Month: November 2004

I’ve got resignations

Today: Colin Powell. Also William Safire, from a position in the other camp. And then there are people being let go from the CIA for being “disloyal.”

Let me make this clear. I, unlike the administration, believe in science. I believe in “prove it to me.” I believe that even in murky situations like interpreting intelligence reports—especially in those situations—how you proceed should be about whose interpretation best fits reality, not whether the analyst is a “soft leaker,” “liberal Democrat,” or a person who has been “obstructing the president’s agenda.”

This makes the disturbing New Yorker article about how selected intelligence reports that fit the Administration’s rosy scenario were fasttracked to the President, while less rosy reports were suppressed, look like child’s play.

Let’s not even get into appointing Condoleezza Rice, the National Security Advisor during the worst failures of national security in history, to the State Department. She failed, folks. She tried to tell the nation, and the 9/11 commission, and did tell the president, that an August 2001 memo entitled “Al Qaeda determined to strike in America” meant no imminent danger to the country. She should be fired, she should be brought down, not rewarded. But then I said I wasn’t going to get into this.

It only takes three…

…original letters, that is. Three original letters, plus a bunch of people xeroxing one of them, to levy a $1.2 million fine against a network. For showing a bachelorette and a bachelor party—tamed down, undoubtedly, for TV.

Nice reporting by Jeff Jarvis. Now, I agree with there being some accountability for outlets that have broadcast licenses, but I feel that upholding things like, oh, equal time for political broadcasts is a hell of a lot more important to enforce than whether someone removes a garter belt with his teeth or gets spanked on network TV.

Snow weekend

Over the weekend the house held up well to the snow, as did the dogs. I wasn’t able to get pictures of Joy hopping out the door in her sweater and booties (which lasted about two minutes before she left them one by one in the snow). Our own psychic survival is probably more endangered. Saturday night we probably inhaled a ton of carcinogens from our first proper (successful) fire in our fireplace, and Sunday afternoon we were pleasantly giddy from scores of VOCs from various painting projects. After I finish the second (or fourth) coats on everything tonight I should be good and addled… just in time to figure out how to add the DVR functions to the universal remote.

Snow daze

We’re getting our first snow as I write this. It’s pretty, big white flakes, and fortunately everything is so warm that it’s not sticking to anything.

Serendipitously, we bought our snowblower last weekend and had it delivered on Tuesday. In reading over the owner’s manual, I’m reading the safety section very carefully, having never operated a machine like this, and came across the following warning (relevant parts bolded by me):

Keep area of operation clear of all toys, pets, and debris. Thrown objects can cause injury.

Somehow I think that if your pet gets caught by the snowblower, the injuries caused when he is thrown at you will be the least of your concerns.

Armistice Day (part 2)

Paul Simon
Paul Simon
Capitol/Warner, 1972

On Armistice Day
The Philharmonic will play
But the songs that we sing
Will be sad
Shufflin’ brown tunes
Hanging around

No long drawn blown out excuses
Were made
When I needed a friend she was there
Just like an easy chair

Armistice Day
Armistice Day
That’s all I really wanted to say

Oh I’m weary from waiting
In Washington D.C.
I’m coming to see my Congressman
But he’s avoiding me
Weary from waiting down in Washington D.C.

Oh Congresswoman
Won’t you tell that Congressman
I’ve waited such a long time
I’ve about waited all I can
Oh Congresswoman, won’t you tell that Congressman

Macintosh True Story: Audion

Cabel Sasser at Panic Studios writes about Audion, arguably the first industrial strength MP3 player for the Mac—certainly the coolest—and his decision to retire it. It’s a pretty fascinating story, replete with “interrupt time,” Steve Jobs meetings, near-mergers with giant mega-corporations, and the market forces that led to the retirement of the app.

I downloaded Audion when I went to business school. It was one of the first apps on my first PowerBook (a G3 Pismo), and it was always on. I downloaded a bunch of wild skins before settling on the one that was the smallest possible space, and proceeded to raise eyebrows every time one of my Windows-using colleagues saw my screen. (“What is that? Oh, cool!”) I loved that it was hard to crash, that the music kept playing no matter (well, almost no matter) what I did to it in the foreground, and that it was just so damned cool.

And then… the Mac OS X Preview Release came out. And Audion wasn’t OS X native, but iTunes was. And I agonized over it for a while, but iTunes kept adding more and more stuff. And its library management was frankly a hell of a lot better than Audion’s, which relied on the filesystem. With iTunes, I could sort and search by all kinds of obscure attributes, and it didn’t move around the MP3 files in their folders when I did so. And so Audion shuffled slowly off into obscurity. I just recently got around to deleting the playlist files it left behind.

Cabel’s story is instructive—for small software developers, for Mac developers in particular, for fans of the digital music revolution, and for anyone who wants to work in a small company. It’s exhilarating and heartbreaking and very, very informative.

Blogging in local news

Our very local paper, the Arlington Advocate, just ran an article about local bloggers. I was one of the people profiled, along with Mimi Kirchner, Jane Morgan, and Jen Langley. Thanks to Jenny Brown (whose blog I haven’t plugged before in this space) for writing the article, and thanks to her husband Adam Medros (whose blog seems to have fallen off since his son was born—funny how that goes!) for introducing us.

Delicious Library: second impressions

In my spare time, I’ve been playing quite a bit with Delicious Library, and it remains pretty delicious. As I scanned in 13 books, 71 movies, and 748 761 CDs (to date) I’ve had some time to think about things I would change with the application.

  1. Smart shelves: give me an opportunity to do advanced searches on a bunch of criteria, including signed items, rare items, and other attributes, and save them as persistent “smart shelves”
  2. iTunes integration: There are a ton of opportunities in this area, including:
    • Check the iTunes library to see if the CD has already been ripped to iTunes
    • Smart lists to show albums that have not been ripped
    • If it has, allow playing the CD by double clicking the album cover
    • For music bought in the iTunes store, I’d love to see a way to list them in the inventory, separately from CDs, and using the standard iTunes 99 cent prices, figure out how much I’ve under- or overpaid by using the iTunes store instead of Amazon
  3. Images: I’d love to be able to paste my own cover art in, either for albums that aren’t in Amazon or ones where the cover art isn’t brought back with the rest of the information (um, never mind—apparently you can do this by drag and drop, though I still would like to see paste supported). I’d also like to be able to copy the art out.
  4. Looking up information by keyword: This is probably my biggest gripe. As I mentioned in my original post, I have a lot of CDs with no bar codes as a result of too many years spent in CD clubs. Unfortunately, for classical CDs the search facilities that Delicious Library offers—title and “source”—are completely inadequate. The problem with classical discs is that the title of the disc is often three or four different releases, the “artist” can either be the performers or the composer (or even the conductor), and often there is little or no agreement between two sources about how the release should be filed. This means that I got quite intimate with the search functions on Amazon, trying the advanced classical search but increasingly giving up and using Google to find the album on Amazon.
  5. HTML export of a catalog wouldn’t hurt either.
  6. And how about user definable fields on items? I’d love something to indicate whether I’ve posted an item to my blog already; one or more URL fields for additional info about the item; and even a catalog number (LOC and Dewey Decimal format)
  7. And while I’m asking for silly things, how about skinnability? Normally this isn’t a feature I look for in an application, but the default woodgrain on the library shelves really hurts my eyes.

Traveling around Boston: good week, bad week

First, the good news from the MBTA. Soon the T token is going to pass into history and be replaced by the CharlieCard. As someone whose first subway system only used the little cards, I won’t miss the tokens. A card is a hell of a lot easier to carry in a wallet “just in case” than tokens. And I love the name, having memorized the song at age 8 long before I knew what the M.T.A. was (though I’m grateful I wasn’t there to hear Mitt sing it). Now if they would just bring back Scollay Square Station…

Then the bad news from the Big Dig: more leaks, or, as Bill Cosby said, “How long can you tread water?” If I were the state, I’d sue Bechtel for everything they’ve got.

Meathead

Lisa has an out of town meeting today, and I wanted to do something special for dinner for her last night. So I turned to that old faithful stalwart, roast lamb. We had picked up a boned leg of lamb from Costco (fabulous bargain: tremendously flavorful New Zealand lamb at about $4 a pound) a few days previously, but I didn’t know what I was going to do with it.

Then I remembered: Julie/Julia. I knew I had gone into transports of ecstasy each time I read about Julie’s cooking one of Julia Child’s lamb recipes from MTAOFC. Now it was time for me to investigate the book. With only an hour before I needed to get the lamb in the oven, I knew I couldn’t do anything that required lengthy marinades, but I wanted more flavor than just a plain roast lamb. So it was herb and garlic stuffing. I chopped parsley, plus some fresh rosemary and thyme from our struggling kitchen plants, diced two shallots, and smashed a clove of garlic, then added salt, pepper, and the curiously specified quarter-teaspoon of ginger. I cut the net holding the meat in place, washed it off, unrolled it, spread the “stuffing” over the inside, re-rolled it and tied it with kitchen twine. Then I popped it in the oven (spraying some olive oil over it in lieu of the basting Julia specifies in the recipe) next to a tray of potato wedges covered with some of the same stuffing.

It was later to the table than I would like. I had to turn the oven up a bit to get the lamb cooked before 9 pm. But with the potatoes and some green beans (steamed, then shaken in the steaming water with some olive oil and sea salt and drained) and a glass of Crozes Hermitage—fantastic.

Alas, Joy thought so too. There was an unnoticed drip from the cutting board onto the kitchen floor, and as our little genteel girl puppy investigated, then started cleaning the floor, she got little streaks of lamb juice all over her head. Hence the nickname. At least she’s proof against the Angel of Death now.

Armistice Day, part 1

The 11th of November is one of those overloaded days. It’s Armistice Day, the day on which the treaty ending World War I was signed. It’s Veteran’s Day, dedicated to all those who have served our country in the armed forces.

And for me, it’s also an important anniversary. Ten years ago tonight was my first real date with Lisa. I say “real date” even though we had had several dinners together with Shel and had even gone on a winery tour together—“real date” because on this date I thought of her for the first time as more than just a friend. We went to a concert at George Mason—I think it was Emmanuel Ax and Peter Serkin—and then ran out of gas coming off the interstate onto Route 7. (Thankfully Route 7 goes downhill from the exit ramp to the next gas station.) And you know what? We didn’t even care.

Happy Veteran’s Day, everyone, and happy anniversary, dear.

For a more interesting 2008, draft Howard for DNC

Greenehouse Effect: He’s Ba-a-a-a-ack! Greg points to a petition to draft Howard Dean for chairmanship of the DNC. Not a bad idea. He was the only Democratic candidate that got lots of people passionate; he understood the importance of rural voters; and the party chairmanship is a hell of a lot better place for him than running for public office.

By the way, Greg’s headline could easily refer to his own blog. Glad to have you back, Greg.

Goodbye, Singin’ John?

NY Times: Attorney General and Commerce Secretary Resign from Cabinet. Can it be? Are we at long last free of this encumbrance on our liberties? Might we once again see breasts at Justice Department press conferences? Might we once again see due process in criminal cases?

Well, probably not the last one. But now we’ll find out how many of the abuses of the Patriot Act are coming from Ashcroft the man and how many are inherent in the law. Unless of course we get a more conservative attorney general.

Jones does it again

MSNBC: Mashed potatoes, green beans — in a bottle? Apparently last season’s Turkey and Gravy Soda from Jones Soda Co. was so good inexplicably popular that the company came up with new holiday flavors: Green Bean Casserole, Mashed Potato & Butter, Cranberry, and Fruitcake, as well as returning the original offender.

Oh dear.

Well, pardon me: I need to slip off to our local Target to see if they’re in stock…

Joining the 21st century

I just lost my hacker cred: I opted for Comcast’s DVR over TiVo. Ah well, at least we’ll have the capability to record and pause TV. Or at least we will once I:

  1. Figure out how to run the cable box into the amplifier. I used to run our cable box in Kirkland through the VCR, and then into the amplifier, using composite cables. When the VCR moved out of the main setup, things got screwy. For some reason, I was unable to get video flowing through the same jack I had used in Kirkland, and had to switch to a different video terminal, but I haven’t tried to reprogram the universal remote and now things are kludgy. I think the solution will be S-Video; I just need to pick up an additional cable to run from the DVR box to the amplifier.
  2. Re-program the universal remote to add in the DVR functions—fortunately basic things like power and channels seem unaffected.
  3. Investigate the Ethernet port to see if it works. (Very important.)

Not too bad. Plus the cable guy moved our prior box downstairs to the hookup in the media library. So now in the basement I have our 21″ with digital cable and a VCR. Before you say “But the VCR is redundant!,” I note that we still have quite a few VHS releases, including the original Star Wars trilogy. I don’t think we’ll be doing any recording on the VCR, though.

Still unresolved: whether I take a step back and re-run the cable into the structured wiring box. Right now we have two coax lines coming into the house from the street, through an outside splitter. The one in the basement comes in through a hole drilled in the basement window frame and down directly into the cable box. I’d ultimately like either to drop it into the wall and out through a jack, or to fish it across the ceiling and into the structured wiring box for distribution. However, I know that’s going to be a real pain: I’d have to fish it all the way across and then back, as well as running it up into the living room. But at least doing that would remove the outside splitter. I don’t know. Option B is probably not worth the hassle until we add more rooms with televisions.