Author: Tim Jarrett

The fabulous sound of wax

I finally got my record player hooked into my stereo. This is a bigger deal than it might seem: my record player and all my records were in a garage in New Jersey from April 2001 to June 2002, then in a moving truck going across country in early July, then in our garage until yesterday. Plus I had to add an adapter and another cable to reach from where I had to put the record player (too far for the attached cable to reach). But it sounds great. I played my vinyl copy of The Joshua Tree… which I got in 2000.

I hope Craig has seen this…

http://www.naturaltype.com/er-diagram.html

When I was a programmer we would have killed for something like this. There are a ton of business benefits too. It’s really hard to get all the stakeholders in a system design case to sit in the same room for three weeks to come up with the right structure for a data model. This collaborative ER tool provides people with a way to discuss ideas (albeit at a very limited level) from their own computers and collaborate in realtime on the design.

What this isn’t is a sufficient solution. In these sorts of scenarios, especially when building the first-pass data model for a system, you will spend the first week or more just arguing over the right entities and the implications that that has on the software that you’re building. So bundling this with voice collaboration, IM, and certainly a way to save and retrieve your work, might make this a pretty darn compelling product–or add-on to a development environment.

“The dinosaurs didn’t believe in you either”

Okay, the series of billboards signed “God” aren’t as bad as most of the explicitly religious signs you see on the back roads of America (digression: in my home town of Newport News, Virginia, there was a realtor, Paul Lotz, who had a big neon sign with his name on it; below it he had a sign that regularly said things like “I believe Rapture in early 80s.” Driving by it I used to ask my parents, “What does that mean?” When I was old enough to understand it, and it was the late ’80s, I would say snarky things like “I see Paul Lotz is now saying ‘Rapture will come soon.’ Guess he figured out God isn’t on his calendar.”). But things like “Let’s meet at my house Sunday before the game. -God” don’t go quite far enough for some people.

Check out saysGod.com for such insights as “I’m flattered you liked my book so much. Now why don’t you read something new?”, “Just look at this planet! Do you expect me to clean this up?”, “If you seek to know my ways, read a damn science book,” and my favorite, “I never said, “Thou shalt not think.” I hope to see these on billboards soon too.
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Further thoughts on the Requiem and the day

I just finished singing in the Bellevue Rolling Requiem. What a difference from a year ago. Then I had just finished writing a weblog update and had gone into the library to study. Starting up my web browser to download some course notes, I hit the message on Yahoo (images weren’t loading) that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. I went looking for more information and found it at Scripting News. Shellshocked, I left the library and walked into the lobby of E-52, Sloan’s main building, where I joined a gathering crowd of students, faculty, administration staff, and others watching the coverage. I saw the videos, and I saw the second tower go down on live TV as I watched. After a while I walked next door to the E-51 lobby, worried about my friend Kate’s fiancé Oli who worked in the financial district. I ran into my finance professor, who was just coming out of class and had no idea what was happening. I told him that both towers had come down and the Pentagon had been hit. “Oh my God,” he said, as if he had been slapped. I found Kate. At the time she hadn’t heard from Oli (he was fine). We just sat and watched and listened.

Today singing the Requiem I really didn’t think about any of that, just the time I used to spend, lonely from the isolation of my fourth year studies, hanging out in Doug’s dorm with the man now known as Tin Man and some Glee Club friends. Many hands of spades were played, much laughter was had. And I couldn’t believe that this life, and so many others, had been taken.

The Mozart Requiem differs from all other Requiem masses in one of two ways. Later Requiems such as Gabriel Fauré’s close on a note of hope. Earlier Requiems may close on a note of fear, prayer or penitence. Mozart’s Requiem closes on the same theme with which it began, having briefly gone through a dancelike Hosanna to return to the cosmic awe of the request to support the deceased in their new home beyond our knowledge: “Grant them rest, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them.” It is pleading, angry, demanding.

And it’s not Mozart’s, not really. Mozart died while writing the Requiem (legend has it, after singing through the first bars of the “Lacrymosa”) and his pupil Süssmayer completed the mass by taking parts the master had already written together with new material to finish the sequence. The end result is we end the mass without closure, with our anger and confusion and grief still intact. Which is how I feel today, one year after 3,025 lives (what a ridiculously precise number) were taken from us. My only consolation is that I’ve spent so much of the last year thinking about the war, the erosion of our rights and liberties, the madness of unilateral war, and the insanity of suicidal terrorism, only to find today a way to give voice to my grief for those who died without other thoughts and voices drowning out the message.

One Year

It is hard to believe that it has been a year. When the clock radio went off this morning, I sat bolt upright, listening to see if anything had happened.

In an hour I’ll be “on stage” at Bellevue Square warming up for the Rolling Requiem. I dedicate today to Doug Ketcham, my friend from University of Virginia, who was at Cantor Fitzgerald and who was killed a year ago.

A shot across my bow

Brent Simmons, author of the very good NetNewsWire news aggregator software, showed a screenshot of a weblog posting tool today that he’s playing with. It’s Cocoa, it is compatible with the Metaweblog and Blogger APIs, and it remembers your past posts. Plus it will be supported by NetNewsWire…

I have a funny feeling that this as yet unnamed tool will quickly smoke Manila Envelope, and for good reason: ME is my hobby, and software development is Brent’s day job.
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Coming soon: your iPod remote

I got a phone call from Apple today, informing me that they were about to ship my iPod earbuds with remote (my credit card had expired between placing the order in July or August and today). Look for your replacement earbuds and remote joy sometime soon…
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Movin’ to Ireland

Craig points to this judgment from an Irish judge saying that you should assume slow drivers who hold up traffic are idiots. The article concludes, “Judge Harnett said that either slow drivers enjoyed holding up other people or else they were incompetent or their cars were in poor condition.”

Having driven on Irish roads myself, I would include another alternative: the driver was afraid that at any minute an enormous cow would pop out of the hedges and wreck their car. Nevertheless, it cheers me that this judge is standing up for common sense and the rights of the leadfooted like myself.
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