Category: Misc

The J-School is hosting a seminar on multimedia reporting for the Maynard Institute. I’m standing by for technical assistance, and will be teaching an HTML class on Wednesday morning. So far it’s going like clockwork. Assisted some students today getting familiar with a DV camera – took them out into the field…. MacWorld was going on so we accosted some Mac users in a cafe to get opinions. Well, not everyone you talk to has opinions on this sort of thing.

Will attend MacWorld on Thursday. Some pretty big announcements today, but it looks like Apple grossly overhyped the whole thing. Or rather, all of the announcements were for the consumer market – the pro market didn’t really hear anything exciting.

Played with iPhoto tonight. Fairly impressive image database, though in its current form it won’t replace ImageRodeo, ACDSee, or Photoshop for me, so I don’t see myself using it all that much.

There are about a million ways to set and parse cookies, and every browser handles them differently. Spent all day doing PHP cookie tricks for user authorization for our intranet. Think I finally nailed it for all browsers. Days like this, you want to pull out your hair (or pull *some*one’s hair anyway). Then when you’re done there’s this great satisfaction.

I break horses… ( – smog )

Forgot to post the other day what a trip it was that none of my nieces had ever seen a turntable or LPs. I was replacing a belt on Amy’s parent’s old Dual and the girls all gathered around. What’s that? You put a disc in there? I think they were unclear on the concept because I came back later and the platter was on the floor (they had seen me remove the platter to replace the belt). But we had a good dance party. They had never played air guitar before either.

The later you’re born, the more history you have to work with.

Just saw Sting, Jay Leno, and Russel Crowe riding around on Gingers on the Leno show. Dean Kamen was there but I missed hearing him. And this week’s New Yorker cover depicts some Taliban dudes riding Gingers around through an Afghan mountain pass.

Possums have 13 nipples. Six on one side, seven on the other.

Young sloths are so inept that they frequently grab their own arms and legs instead of branches, and fall out of trees.

Evolution likes freaks.

When I’m encoding CDs I’m always amazed at how few of them come back with metadata from cddb that includes the year of recording. I always take care to read through the liners and find the year and key it in before I start encoding. But why do so many people leave it out when submitting to cddb? And why is the year that comes back so often wrong? (Like a 1997 Sun Ra collection of stuff from 1958 will say 1997). I can’t be the only person who considers the year important. How else do you make era-based playlists? Music happens and evolves on a continuum. The year is as important to know as the genre. I hate this sloppy attitude toward music history.

Interesting piece by David Weinberger, Out of Control on the fact that the web was conceived by Berners-Lee as a place where scientists could link to each other’s work without permission, and that the web is a permission-free environment in general. Kind of obvious and old hat in a way, but then again, I never thought of it quite in those terms before either.

But I do not count myself among those who are aching for the death of copyright.

Amy doing her hair in the bathroom mirror:

She: “I’m binding my hair.”

Me: “Why don’t you bind your feet while you’re at it?”

She: “Why don’t you bind your mouth while you’re at it?”

We have this kind of exchange all the time. Simple inversion humor in funny voices. I dunno, maybe it reads wrong on the page, but in real life, these are the gems of daily conversation that keep our relationship continuously surprising, entertaining. It’s all in love.

“If you’re so fond of the simple life, why is there an anti-matter reactor in your basement?”

– Archer