March 2006 – Page 3 – Jarrett House North

Dying slowly

As the Tindersticks once sang, “So this dying slowly… I’m just tired, darling/I just need to lay down.” Oddly enough, when Stuart Staples sang those words he sounded like I feel: so congested I can hardly move my head.

So while I wait for the decongestant-induced colored light trails to vanish, a quick pointer to a pair of goodies courtesy of Doc Searls: egosurf.com and isolatr. The former is apparently designed to show you how much you write about yourself vs. how much others write about you (I’m solidly in the middle of the gauge), while the latter… well, see for yourself.

Mash your way to fun and profit

Via the Comics Curmudgeon, I bring you Balloonist, a cross-platform application designed to do comics lettering and layout. But wait! It also features “gouache mode,” in which you can lay in word balloons over existing comics. Like, ones that someone else drew.

And for an example of how cool that can be, I give you (via Sue Trowbridge, via the Comics Curmudgeon again) Mary Worth sings My Humps. Which remix got some ink in the Associated Press (including the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette).

Which inspired me:

garfield

Unfortunately, as you can see by the acne that the Garfield strip sprouted, Balloonist isn’t free, and its $88 registration fee is a little steep if all you want to do is to poke fun at moldy 80s icons. But hey, it’s interesting at the very least.

Can there be happier words…

…than “Apple Store Shipment Notification”? I don’t think so. As I predicted, Apple is jumping the gun on my anticipated ship date by a good five days. My MacBook Pro is currently in FedEx’s system (though not picked up yet) and scheduled to arrive by Thursday.

Of course, Thursday is the busiest day of my week, so I probably won’t be able to do a detailed unboxing report until the weekend. But still… yay.

Update: Apparently new MacBook Pros (MacBooks Pro?) come from Shanghai, China (at least according to FedEx’s pickup records). Who knew?

Friday Random 10: The 400 Blows

So titled because for months, ever since losing my iTunes statistics, I have been steadily working my way back through listening to my entire collection, a process that will take years. I’ve gone about it in two ways, first listening to all my mixes in order, secondly using a set of smart playlists. The most significant of the latter is my “Never Played” playlist, which selects 400 unplayed tunes at random from my library for the iPod (400 was experimentally about the right number to fit the playlist, which might include a large percentage of losslessly ripped songs, onto the iPod and still have room for other content). And the 400 “blows” because I will continue to see numbers like “now playing 21 of 400,” “now playing 16 of 400,” etc. until the library is all listened to. To mix a rarely stirred metaphor, I feel like Sisyphus even thinking about it.

Choosing the “Shuffle Songs” menu option on the iPod, which shuffles through the entire iPod, is kind of a relief. Of course the only time I do this is on Fridays, but it’s a nice reprieve nonetheless.

Sufjan Stevens, “Come On! Feel the Illinoise! Part One: The World&rdsquo; Columbian Exposition; Part II: Carl Sandburg Visits Me In A Dream” (Illinoise)
Sheldon Allman, “Schizophrenic Baby” (Folk Songs for the 21st Century)
Doves, “Words” (The Last Broadcast)
The White Stripes, “Fell In Love With a Girl” (via the Peel Box)
John Cale, “Reading My Mind” (Hobosapiens)
Mission of Burma, “He Is/She Is” (Peking Spring)
PINE*am, “Gymnopedie 0.1” (EP)
Dntel, “Last Songs” (Life is Full of Possibilities)
Tori Amos, “Parasol” (The Beekeeper)
Radiohead, “Fog” (Knives Out EP)

What a bizarre assemblage. The Sheldon Allman track is the worst kind of novelty, a catchy one. The John Cale track includes about a minute of vituperative Italian dialogue over motorcycle noise. The PINE*am track is some sort of clanking electronica track with wispy female vocals over it, and bears no resemblance to the Satie composition by the same name. There are also some serious songs, mostly owing to the Doves and Dntel albums finally surfacing on eMusic.

But “Fog.” Hmm. Might have to do something with this song.

Neko Case followup

Following my cryptic note from Tuesday, a quick confirmation that the new Neko album is in fact the most amazing thing to happen to me musically in many weeks, both because of Neko’s consistently astonishing artistic evolution and the peerless keyboard work of the Band’s Garth Hudson.

I just got tickets for her show April 5 at the Roxy. Should be a good time.

Analog to digital converters, for great justice.

Fury points to a new (old) way to get old music onto new formats: the PlusDeck 2C, a cassette deck in a 5.25″ PC drive form factor. It’s Windows only and would make more sense as a USB (2.0) drive, but for those of us that are stuck with some music that is only on cassette it’s not bad.

I found another solution, too, which I actually ordered: the now relatively venerable Griffin iMic. This is a USB connection on one side, standard audio in jacks that can accept either line-level input from phonographs or normal output from another audio device, like a cassette deck, on the other. This means that I can get copies of some of that obscure vinyl in digital format, finally. I’m thinking that parts of the spoken word record of Kemp Malone reading Beowulf is a good first start (though perhaps not all four hours). The bad news, of course, is that the iMic is so venerable it is starting to be unavailable, so grab it at Amazon while you can, even with a four to six week lead time.

Wow: Lists of Bests is back, kinda.

That was quick. The new Lists of Bests is up and (aside from some Ruby on Rails related error messages earlier this evening), seems to be cooler than ever. User created lists, clean design…

Um. Waitaminit. My login from the old Lists of Bests site is gone. Hope that’s a temporary thing, guys, but it would be cool if you had a FAQ for us old users to tell us what’s up.

Fortunately the Robot Coop team is looking for comments, so go check it out and post your feedback.

How not to capture the digital music market

A week or so ago, when Apple announced its iPod Hi-Fi speaker system, the Wall Street Journal published a fairly penetrating article about the impact of digital music on the hi-fi audio market. Interesting points: customers seem to value portability over sound quality (home audio equipment sales dropped 18% in 2005 while digital music player sales tripled).

As someone who’s doing a lossless ripping project to turn all his CDs into digital music files, who has spent some time and money connecting his home audio system to his wireless network, and who owns an iPod, I think there are several explanations for this. First, a lot of people can’t tell the difference. Really. Second, the convenience of searching by song on services like iTunes and Rhapsody (but not, ironically, eMusic, whose text-searching facility is horrible), encourages digital downloads for impulse purchases at the expense of other music purchases (no more buying an album just because you liked the single, or a greatest hits compilation because it reminds you of high school). Third, it’s not out of the question that people might want multiple iPods. I keep being tempted by those $99 1 GB Shuffles, for instance. Fourth, there are real advantages to being able to take the music that you listen to on your home system with you on your iPod in the car, on the subway, and on a plane.

Which may explain the last paragraph of the article, which describes a new service, MusicGiants Inc., that sells “lossless” downloads from “the same major-label content sold by services like the iTunes Music Store” for a 30 cent premium. Except, of course, that the files are encoded as lossless Windows Media Audio files (version 9 encoder), which won’t play on an iPod or a Mac and carry Microsoft’s Windows Media DRM; the service is only available for Windows XP computers; major independent acts like Spoon, whose entire back catalog is digitally available elsewhere, or even Sleater-Kinney, are absent from the service…

All this goes a long way toward explaining the last sentence: “Sales,” says the Wall Street Journal dryly, “have been slow so far.” Well, duh. Fighting iTunes’ DRM with someone else’s DRM isn’t the way to go. I would go so far as to say that the only other horses in the race are eMusic, which sells relatively high quality VBR MP3s of independent music with no DRM attached for around $0.25 a track (based on 40 tracks for $9.99 a month), and Rhapsody, who have a deep catalog and an all you can eat business model (albeit with draconian DRM: if you stop paying for the service, your tunes stop working). Those are different business models with different benefits to the customer. The digital music market is big, but so far it’s not big enough to support undifferentiated services offering the same content, only with different DRM.

GTD with Outlook Pt 2: Task views

I’ve spent another week and change on GTDsince implementing good search in Outlook. I’ve spent it exploring the core concepts: capturing all (most) of the stuff that’s been floating around in my brain waiting to be done or dealt with. Discovery number 1: while it’s a relief to capture all (most) of the stuff into lists so I’m not spending all the time panicking about things I’ve forgotten, I’ve learned that I’ve made a lot of commitments that need to be fulfilled. Hence my relatively light blogging as I regain some balance.

My capture systems are just now starting to get in shape. I spent much of my airplane time between here and Vegas (and back) setting up some of the systems and have some progress to report.

First thing: my new favorite view in Outlook (XP version) is the Calendar view, with the small Task pane to the side. Something about having the task view shrunk to a manageable size is really helpful in preventing it from being terrifyingly unmanageable. But the out of the box view, which features only in progress tasks ordered by no particular mechanism and ungrouped, needs work. We can do this.

If you right click on the view title (“Tasks”), you can edit the view definition. I found it most helpful to group it by status. The out-of-box statuses (statii?) in Outlook are Not Started, In Progress, Completed, Waiting for Someone Else, and Deferred. That turns out to be just about perfect for GTD task organization. I have yet to use the Deferred status; I keep the Completed group collapsed and open it when I need motivation. That leaves Not Started, In Progress, and Waiting for Someone Else. Email “next actions” that need responses go to Waiting and everything else keeps getting worked.

Okay, but what about when you need better statuses? This is where Categories come into play. I did a quick listing of categories that made sense from a “next action” perspective: phone, email, mail, computer, research, writing, errands. Then I went to the main Tasks folder, went down the list adding categories, and grouped the whole shebang by Status and Category. I also set the view to show the long description column when present, so I could glance at the list and see information like, for instance, phone numbers. Advantage: the main Tasks view can become a printable view to bring with you for errands and phone calls.

Next up: project lists and how there’s not a perfect system for tracking them in Outlook… yet. (But how one kind of project list freed me from keeping project names in the Category field.)

Farewell to the Source: Ali Farka Touré, 1939? – 2006

I was going to write an obituary to Ali Farka Touré, the amazing Mali guitarist, farmer, and village leader who passed away last month (and whose death is just being made public this week). I was beaten to it by a friend in the radio industry who wrote: “Malian musician Ali Farke Toure has died. I play his music a lot at the station, which is how I was introduced to him. It sucks that this great musician played for so many years and I had to actually go work at a radio station to learn about him. We should have two moments of silence: one, for the passing of Farke Toure, and another, for the humungous blinders that shut America off from most world music.”

I feel the same way and feel as though I’m part of the problem. I’ve known of Touré’s music for at least ten years, since the 1994 release of his Grammy-winning collaboration with Ry Cooder, Talking Timbuktu. But I haven’t proselytized him the way I have other musicians like Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan or Youssou N’Dour, or even Kathryn Tickell. I haven’t even put his music on a mix.

There is a great remembrance of Touré on Blogcritics today which gives some impressions of the man himself; well worth reading.

The True Confessions of Neko Case

Harp Magazine: The True Confessions of Neko Case. Great article about the production of Neko’s latest, long-awaited Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, which dropped today. More once I get a chance to actually listen to the album.

How to upsell with poor channel management, by Toyota

As I alluded in passing last week, we made a pretty big personal purchase, finally replacing Lisa’s 12-year old Geo with a new car. We wanted something a little bigger for cargo considerations, as well as for more comfortably hauling more than two or three people—long car trips with her parents are sometimes a challenge in the Passat thanks to the limited storage space. So, reluctantly, we decided to go for an SUV (we aren’t quite ready for a minivan). But we didn’t want to compromise too much on gas mileage, especially in this post-Katrina world.

On a recommendation from Charlie and Carie we started out looking at the Toyota RAV-4, which has been redesigned this year. It’s much bigger, almost as long as a Highlander, and now has the option for a third-row seat—something that we felt might give us some additional flexibility and was also on our requirements list. Thanks to some clever engineering and flexibility in the on-demand AWD, Toyota claims to be able to squeeze 28 MPG highway/24 city from the 4-cylinder engine that’s the base configuration. Sounded great.

Unfortunately at this point the limits of Toyota’s product design process revealed themselves. Lisa wanted a moonroof but found out we couldn’t get it if we had the third row seat—something about the required headroom for the third seat being consumed by the space for the moonroof to retract. OK, not the end of the world. But the next point was. While it’s theoretically possible to order a RAV-4 Limited, which comes with side impact airbags unlike the base model, with a third row seat, no such models would be in the channel until late April. This was too much, and bad planning on Toyota’s part. After all, if you’re planning to carry older passengers or other extended family and thus need a third row seat, I would think the side impact air bags would be very important. Regretfully, we said goodbye to the RAV-4 and started looking at other options.

We briefly looked at the Subaru Tribeca, their new bigger SUV, but had to nix it; Lisa’s parents said the rear seat felt like sitting on two inches of padding on top of a steel plate, and described the ride in the back as very rough. So Lisa returned to Toyota and looked again at the Highlander Hybrid—and found that at the base trim level she could get a third row seat, side curtain airbags, and a moonroof. Problem solved, and with some aggressive negotiation we got a good enough deal on one that we were able to upgrade it with leather and heated seats.

So we now have a hybrid, with EPA numbers of 31 city/28 highway. We got closer to 24 on a shakedown drive on Saturday from Boston to Portland and back, but we weren’t driving especially cautiously, and early results gadding about Arlington have been very promising on the city side. We’re not foolish enough to believe we’ll totally recoup the cost difference in better mileage—although the payback calculations that are commonly used to determine such periods probably underestimate the five-year increase in gas prices—but as early adopters we feel like just investing in the technology will ultimately encourage the evolution of more efficient vehicles.

In fact, I’ve started to wonder if my beloved Passat might have to go for some smaller, more fuel efficient vehicle, now that we have a big family hauler. Too bad you can’t buy a passenger diesel in Massachusetts; the TDI version of the Golf sounds awfully promising…

Alive

I’m just back from another blitzkrieg trip to Las Vegas. Fortunately there was no food poisoning this time. But I’m so jetlagged that (aside from a post I queued up on the plane) I don’t expect there to be much written here for the next day or so.

New mix: Sting Sundries

At Art of the Mix: Sting Sundries. This one goes back a ways: 18 years, to be exact.

I was just getting started in pop music and was discovering the wonder of the b-side. Since I only listened to a handful of artists and since Sting’s 1987 release “…Nothing like the Sun” was in the process of rocking my world, I was seeking out Sting singles for the b-sides. I found two: the 12″ vinyl of “We’ll Be Together” and the CD3 of “Englishman in New York.” I subsequently went crazy trying to figure out how to get the CD3 to play so I could tape it. You could buy an adapter to make it a 5” disc, but the adapter wouldn’t work in my parents’ CD player so I had to beg friends to let me see if it would play in theirs. I finally managed to tape the songs and in my infinite wisdom sold the CD3 some years later. At least I still have the vinyl.

I filled half a 60 minute tape with Sting rarities and shared it with Fury, who filled the other side with Dream of the Blue Turtles era b-sides and cuts from the Eberhard Schoener album Video Magic. I was hooked. I still have the tape.

Fast forward: many b-sides and the Internet later, I’m still missing five of the songs on the original tape in digital form but decided to release an updated version anyway with some newer rarities added in, including prototype cuts from Strontium 90, the band in which Sting met Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland, and a 1978 single from Sting with a backing band called the Radioactors. For those missing five songs, including the ten-minute version of “Up From the Skies” recorded in the studio with Gil Evans’ band, I’ll have to keep looking.

Friday Random 10: Thank God for Random 10 edition

So much to write about and so little time! I’ll update about Lisa’s new car later, but for now here’s a completely indecipherable list of what’s on my iPod today: