Not Yet Within Range
February 28, 2007 | Arts & Culture | Life | Technology
For some reason, I am now craving a Leica M8 digital rangefinder camera, with the 16-18-21mm, the 28-35-50mm, and the 90mm lenses.
This is absurd, since that would be about $15,000 in camera equipment, well outside not only my budget, but also my socio-economic caste.
Compare and Contrast
February 27, 2007 | Arts & Culture | Business & Commerce | People & Society
Today in links:
Brûlee’s "Brownie Extradordinaire with Saint Louis" is a chocolate brownie made with Italian hazelnuts, dusted with edible gold powder and served with a very rare port. After each bite, the dessert captain squirts a mist of the vintage port on your tongue with a $750 atomizer, which incidentally is yours to keep.
Stock markets around the world plummeted today
In percentage terms, it was the worst day for the market since March 2003. In terms of points, it was the steepest slide since the first day the market resumed trading after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
So it goes.
We Have The Power To Create Our Own Happiness
February 27, 2007 | People & Society
I believe this is something all of us can do: Try to be happy within the context of the life we are actually living. Happiness is not a situation to be longed for or a convergence of lucky happenstance. Through the power of our own minds, we can help ourselves.
—Wayne Coyne
The Joy of Developing
February 26, 2007 | Software
The great Mac RSS newsreader, NetNewsWire, has a new beta out, version 3.0. It's really good, with a ton of performance improvements and nicer layouts. But, they say it crashes some, and they want bug reports.
In fact, it did crash on me once in the past couple of weeks ago, so I sent a note to the developer with the crash log. If you're unfamiliar, a crash log is generated by the operating system, and looks something like this:
Thread 2 Crashed: 0 com.apple.Foundation 0x9297c120 _NSRaiseError + 264 1 com.apple.Foundation 0x9297be5c +[NSException raise:format:] + 40 2 com.apple.Foundation 0x92a44324 mutateError + 172 3 com.apple.Foundation 0x92948200 -[NSCFString appendString:] + 100 4 <<00000000>> 0x000272bc 0 + 160444 5 <<00000000>> 0x00027338 0 + 160568 6 <<00000000>> 0x000b8cac 0 + 756908 7 com.apple.Foundation 0x9298a888 -[NSURLConnection(NSURLConnectionInternal) _performOriginLoad] + 328 8 com.apple.Foundation 0x9298893c _resourceLoaderPerform + 224 9 com.apple.CoreFoundation 0x907dd4cc __CFRunLoopDoSources0 + 384 10 com.apple.CoreFoundation 0x907dc9fc __CFRunLoopRun + 452 11 com.apple.CoreFoundation 0x907dc47c CFRunLoopRunSpecific + 268 12 com.apple.Foundation 0x9298869c +[NSURLConnection(NSURLConnectionInternal) _resourceLoadLoop:] + 264 13 com.apple.Foundation 0x92961194 forkThreadForFunction + 108 14 libSystem.B.dylib 0x9002b508 _pthread_body + 96
Cool, huh?
Well, yesterday I got a note from Brent Simmons, the developer, that read:
Awesome crash log! I've never seen mutateError before, but I love it. Thanks, Michael. (This should get fixed in the next public release.)
And that, friends, is a good developer/customer relationship.
Food Security
February 22, 2007 | Business & Commerce | People & Society
When I say that "the food supply is far more fragile than people realize," this is what I have in mind.
It looks like fruit/almonds/etc. might get pretty expensive soon. Big commercial bee keepers, that provide pollination services worth $14 billion a year, have been experiencing die-offs of 50-90% of their colonies over the last two years.
No one knows why the bees are dying. In and of themselves, one species doesn't really matter much (heh, even humans!), but the interdependency of a living system depends on all things living. In this case, bee bye-bye means everything pollinated by the itty bitty bees will be affected. Wichita Eagle:
"One out of every three bites of food we eat is produced as the result of insect pollination, much of it by bees," said Bruce Broynton, a spokesman for the National Honey Board, which this week released $58,000 for research it hopes will lead to understanding the bee deaths.
Here's a wake-up call about what you can do to understand and prepare for the future. Short version: relearning to make everything more local and smaller-scale.
Stop Buying This Crap
February 15, 2007 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites | Technology
Rant, defined.
Rapid Serial Visual Presentation
February 11, 2007 | Arts & Culture | Software | Technology
Reading this interview with Cory Doctorow (by RU Sirius, nonetheless), I discovered Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (of text).
The speed-read shows you one word at a time, and it shows them at a speed that’s determined by a little slider. And it pauses a little after a comma, and longer after a period, and longer after a paragraph break. And you can crank it way up and it just rockets past. And you’re getting every word. It’s kind of meant for very small screens, and it really feels like you’re doing something weird to your brain. It really feels like you’re tweaking your cognition in ways that it was not intended to be tweaked. It’s very transhuman.
Worth researching, methought. If you want to see a simple example without loading your own text, here is Cory's book Eastern Standard Tribe pre-loaded into SpeedReader online. Just go to that link and move the slider to the right and set the speed you want. Following are brief instructions to experience RSVP with any text you want.
Download this simple Java-based app that runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux. Then grab some text. I used the text file of Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks, but you can use any plain text file you want. Dump the text into the "speederText.txt" file, add "START_SPEEDER" at the top of the file, save it, and open "textExample.html" in your web browser.
The first thing I notice, reading the Acknowledgments, is that, hehehe, the word "I" is all but invisible. I imagine people hear that invisibility too, when you write with a lot of "I's" in your sentences. So I think I should probably stop using "I" when I express myself.
After ten minutes of play, is there is a difference in perception between fiction and non-fiction? Cory's book seems easier to "read" than Yochai's, but the in addition to being non-fiction, Wealth is written from a legal perspective. It could simply be more dense, no matter slow or fast.
Chopin Polonaise-fantaisie #7 by Claudio Arrau
February 8, 2007 | Arts & Culture
Yesterday morning, waking up at 5:00 but then drifting off to sleep again from 6:00 to 7:30, heard the most amazing piano concerto. Tracked it down via the VPR playlist (thank you!!), and finally tracked down the CD on Amazon. Welcome to my wishlist, oh Claudio Arrau.
Panasonic Lumix FX-01 Digital Camera
February 8, 2007 | Products & Opportunites
I took the Panasonic Lumix LX-1 to Europe last year and loved it. But it was too big for my front pocket and I wanted to downsize to a consumer-grade point 'n shoot. So I bought the FX-01 and loved it even more. Since then I've recommended it to several people (Chris, Jeff, Marc, Graham, Sarah) and they all love it. It's small, fast, high-quality, and easy to use. The two big reasons it's great is that 1) it has a 28mm lens, very wide for a cheap camera, and it's good for indoor group shots of people as well as outdoor scenic shots; and 2) it has optical image stabilization, so you can often turn off the flash indoors for more natural photos. Currently $229 at Amazon.
In getting the links, it turns out that the LX-1 is now the LX-2, and the FX-01 is now the FX-07 or the FX-30. The 28mm lens is the must-have feature. Everything else is gravy.
Notes on Arial
February 8, 2007 | Arts & Culture
If anyone ever recommends to you Arial for a primary typeface, these links will turn out handy.
LifeClever: There are two types of people in the world: those who can tell the difference between Helvetica and Arial, and those who can’t.
The Scourge of Arial: Despite its pervasiveness, a professional designer would rarely—at least for the moment—specify Arial. To professional designers, Arial is looked down on as a not-very-faithful imitation of a typeface that is no longer fashionable. It has what you might call a "low-end stigma." The few cases that I have heard of where a designer has intentionally used Arial were because the client insisted on it. Why? The client wanted to be able to produce materials in-house that matched their corporate look and they already had Arial, because it's included with Windows. True to its heritage, Arial gets chosen because it's cheap, not because it's a great typeface.
Amazon book review: The title page, the headings, the captions and the examples are all typeset using one of the the dullest, ugliest sanserif typefaces ever designed. Arial lacks character and individuality, as it was conceived by its makers (the Monotype company) as a substitute for Helvetica (made by Monotype's competitor, Linotype). Arial was drawn to match Helvetica's character width but to have slightly altered letter appearance. The result is a set of letterforms that, indeed, look like imitation of something else. Since nowadays, Arial is included on practically all personal computers, one cannot imagine a choice for a typeface that would be less original. But it's not necessarily the lack of originality that disqualitfies Arial as a typeface suitable for this sort of book. Arial simply has poorly drawn letterforms, and the Black variant (used on the title page, section titles and in the running headers of each page) is simply ugly. Practically any other grotesque (sanserif) typeface would have been a better choice for this book.
We know you have a choice in typefaces, and we thank you for flying with Notio Typography.
Web 2.0 In Just Under 5 Minutes
February 7, 2007 | Arts & Culture | People & Society | Technology
Tour de force video explaining how Web 2.0 is changing the nature of online interaction.
[Local] Good Thai Food In Concord NH
February 7, 2007 | Travel
Siam Orchid served us well last night. Flavorful, aromatic, and fresh ingredients. 158 North Main Street. 603-228-3633. It's on the same street as the courthouse. If you take the Louden Road exit on 93, turn left to head downtown, then turn left at the first traffic light – it's on the left. I think if you take the earlier ("downtown") exit on 93 then you'd probably be headed down Main Street with the restaurant on the right.
