It’s so weird using Windows regularly again. So much has changed in the years since I’ve used it. I almost feel like a kid in a candy store. As if I had been living in India for a decade and had no idea what was going on in the U.S., and then returned. And I know that similar changes have gone in Linux over the past few years, tons of cool stuff just waiting to be discovered.
Absinthe
Christian turned me on to ZeFrank.
mneptok pointed me to MetaSpy, which lets you see what people are searching for at MetaCrawler. Fascinating surrealist glimpse into the collective consciousness. I’ve always loved the collision of disparate elements… seeing all these very different minds using the internet at the same time for such different purposes… the poetry of the unseen surfer.
mneptok also turned me on to Absinthe Radio.
Cut
Well, that’s it. Just got the call from my editor at Byte. My column has been cut, as well as their Mac column. It was bound to happen. Interesting that it wasn’t directly related to Be’s demise (only partially) but to their own internal funding cuts. Now I am officially without any income beyond a couple hundred a month from kissthisguy advertising revenue, which is about 1/15th what it was six months ago, even though traffic levels haven’t changed.
Tech carnage everywhere I look. The destruction seems unstoppable. And I’ve been in its path in three dimensions over the past week alone. Feeling glum. But I hate that my happiness should be so connected to money. It’s not supposed to be that way. Just tacked this onto the end of the column I submitted for the first Monday of September:
Final Column
I am sorry to announce that this, my 30th column on BeOS for Byte.com, will be my last. It’s been a fantastic ride, and I’d like to thank CMP, Byte, and my editor Daniel Dern for having the wherewithal to sponsor monthly coverage on a niche OS not because they thought it was going to take over the world, but because they believed it was worthy technology. This kind of dedication is a too-rare commodity in the tech press, and I think I speak for the entire BeOS community in thanking them for their persistence and courage. Thanks also to the loyal base of readers who have generated ongoing traffic on the Byte.com site as a result of this column, allowing it to continue for as long as it has.
My love for BeOS is deep, but not blindly unswerving. It is time for me to move on and pursue other interests. Please let me know of interesting career opportunities for which you think I may be suited.
Until we meet again, keep the faith. There is life beyond Windows.
Out of Words
Memory:
My grandfather had a very husky, slow, quiet voice. When I was very young I took this to mean that he was running out of words – I thought he had used up his lifetime supply. I thought I had to be very careful because I didn’t want to run out of words too. I went through a period where I didn’t say much, because I was trying to be careful and not run out.
White Boy Dreadlock
What I don’t understand is why most of the posts here are complaining about people who are critical of white dreads, when none of the posts here are critical of white dreads! And in fact, the original post that started this discussion (which I wrote) does not criticize white dreads. So… uh… is there like, a persecution syndrome happening here?
Teeth butcher
“Deep cleaning,” my dentist calls it. So deep they only do half the mouth at a time. Had the left side done two weeks ago, and the right side done today. Sawing between the teeth with diamond dust to make more room for floss. Incessant grinding with sinister looking tools. Polishing, scraping, nitty gritty mouth madness. Such a complete and thorough brutalization of the mouth that I walked out of their office with… get this… another Vicodin prescription. God, what’s happening to me? I used to be immortal. Now I’m just broken all over.
Interior Desecrators
Just bought a home? Thinking of buying one? You’ll need some decorating tips and examples, and I am convinced there is no better guide than this 1970s Better Homes and Gardens book, reproduced in full with hilarious commentary. Prepare to spend hours reminiscing and fantasizing.
Two-armed typing, MP3 fidelity testing
The arm is slowly healing. Have discovered that if I take off the sling I can use the right arm to hoist the left onto the laptop keyboard, where it receives enough support to allow me to type two-handed. I can’t do it for a long time, but it will help me dig out of the backlog and start getting productive again. One-handed typing is NOT 50% of two-handed typing, because you have to move your arm back and forth over the keyboard and have to look at all the keys. Two-handed is about four or five times faster for me.
Mike and I have been talking about finally coming to an unambiguous conclusion about optimum MP3 bitrates – we want to find the rate at which MP3 is indistinguishable from the source CD. Neither of us are tolerant of MP3 compression artifacts and neither of us care about keeping files small enough to trade over the net – we just want as much compression as we can get without compromising a drop of fidelity.
I’ve done some experiments before, but we’re going to do this one right. He brought over some of his best hi-fi selections, including some of the RCA Living Presence stuff. I contributed three of my own favorite fidelity test tracks, and used my little TestEnc script to encode six sample tracks at a variety of bitrates with the lame encoder. Then I burned those tracks back to audio CD. This returns them to PCM, but with the compression losses now built in.
The weak link in the chain is Be’s built-in decoder which I’m forced to use to translate from MP3 back to PCM when burning the disc. It’s based on blade, which is OK, but definitely not the best, and certainly not what I would use for a test like this given my druthers. If I suspect it’s getting in the way, I may have to do this in Windows with CDex or something that lets me choose the decoder.
Before burning, I randomized the track orders and printed out a key listing all the actual bitrates. Folded this up and sealed it. I also printed out track lists w/o bitrates and we’ll use those to write notes about our impressions. Tonight I’ll take these to his house and listen to them on his system, skipping around between the track variations and making notes. We’ll see how the notes compare to the key page.
OK Soda, Baffler, Hermenaut
Anyone remember this soda? It appeared on the market for about six months in the mid 90s and then promptly disappeared. Today I saw a reference to it on my favorite news and culture site Plastic.com:
http://www.plastic.com/article.pl?sid=01/06/29/1729221
Only to discover that the reference is due to the recent appearance of an article by my old Boston friend Josh Glenn in the Baffler:
http://www.thebaffler.com/glenn.html
Way to go Josh – you got plasticized! Very good article, too. But The Baffler competes with Glenn’s own magazine Hermenaut (www.Hermenaut.com), which, incidentally, used to be hosted at my site birdhouse.org. Sleeping with the enemy again Josh?
Tow truck
CycleTow just came and hauled away my bike to evaluate whether it’s totalled or repairable. Seeing it in the light of day, it’s more messed up than I thought. The subframe is tweaked, which may tip the scales toward totalled. So sad to see it being hauled off like that. Like watching a best buddy move away or something.
Such a beautiful morning… I should be going for a ride. Sigh.