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HTML Email: The Poll

Reader Kiernan recently contacted me about my old (and apparently much-linked-to) Why HTML in E-Mail A Bad Idea document, saying:

I do not believe HTML email is going to disappear any time now. In fact, I expect we will see an increase in HTML email which suggests we need guidelines, not proscription. I think in the interests of furthering discussion on this subject, a poll would be useful.

Personally, I care a lot less about this subject than I used to. I’m still no fan of HTML email, but it doesn’t bug me the way it once did. Formatting in email can be useful and attractive. The security concerns it raises aren’t very relevant to me since I use a Mac (though I’m still concerned for all the Outlook users out there). Even command-line pine displays the plain-text alternate properly for most HTML emails these days.

At its best, HTML email highlights the strong points in a message. At its worst (for me), HTML email is a minor annoyance, sometimes resulting in tiny font displays — but nothing I can’t get around by punching Cmd-+ on the keyboard. There are a thousand things under heaven and earth more worthy of getting het up about. What about you? Have your feelings about HTML-formatted email changed over the years?

Have your feelings about HTML email changed since 2000?

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MP3s Generate Apathy

I’ve been musing on and off about this topic for years, but now there’s some research to back it up:

“Internet downloading and MP3 players are creating a generation of people who do not seriously appreciate songs or musical performances, British researchers said.” Music downloading creates listener apathy. A combination of forces is at work here, but there are three I’d put at the top of the list:

1) Quantity. Once upon a time, you’d save up your $7.99, buy the LP you had been wanting for weeks, and listen to it dozens of times over. This saturation fostered a personal relationship with a piece of music that I just don’t think people are experiencing today — or at least not as much. When people possess way more music than they can possibly listen to, there’s a tendency to wade through it all in a random fashion (guilty!), and the music has a resulting tendency to become background. This is one of the reasons I’m now trying to put more emphasis on pruning my MP3 collection than on growing it (though I have only been mildly successful, and am in fact currently planning a multi-jigabyte RAID storage solution just for my music; collecting is far easier than pruning).

2) Cost. The bulk of most people’s MP3 collections has come to them for free. When you can download 40 albums overnight rather than purchase one or two or even five a month, the personal investment in the music is further devalued, and you never get around to fully digesting all the new music before yet more arrives.

3) Aesthetics. The visual involvement of the LP cover gave way to the lesser involvement of the CD sleeve. But at least we still had something. When you go all digital, you give up the visual aesthetic accompanying the music altogether (with the possible exception of the tiny album cover thumbnails stored in ID3 tags, which are no replacement). Not to mention all of the extra information you get about an artist by reading liner notes and lyrics, which was always a big part of developing a relationship with an album.

Quantity and flexibility are so seductive. It’s so easy to not notice how much we give up.

Music: Silence :: Nothing
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reelblue.net

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes reelblue.net, a starter site promoting the coming documentary film “Reelblue” by J-School graduates Sachi Cunningham and Jennifer Galvin. The film investigates the relationship between healthy oceans and healthy humans, as seen through the eyes of surfers.

Music: Brian Eno :: Cavallino
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The Price of Platinum

The monetary value of minerals is generally predicated on how rarely they occur in the natural world (though this value is sometimes faked; diamond companies sit on large stockpiles to artificially inflate rarity in the marketplace). But expand your definition of “natural world” to include the universe, and the formula gets turned upside down. The value of the platinum, iron, nickel and cobalt deposits in an asteroid could top $20 trillion. Cambridge Conference (halfway down page):

John Lewis, who co-directs the Space Engineering Research Center at the University of Arizona at Tucson, studied one C-type asteroid, a 2-km-wide NEO called Amun. He concluded that the monetary value of Amun’s platinum group metals (pgms)-platinum, iridium, osmium, palladium, and so on-is more than US $6 trillion. Amun’s iron and nickel might be worth something on the order of $8 trillion. Add another $6 trillion for Amun’s cobalt deposits, and the asteroid’s value totals a spectacular $20 trillion! … Some M-types, like the unassumingly named 1986 DA, are mountain-sized blends of iron, nickel, and cobalt — in other words, naturally occurring stainless steel. In all, roughly 2000 NEOs [near-earth objects] about the size of 1986 DA are known to exist, with as many as 50 more being discovered each year.

Was thinking today with a cow orker that at those prices, it would probably make financial sense to crash an asteroid into [name your city]. Sell the asteroid, pay back the city for damages, and pocket the diff. But don’t do it too often, or you’ll drive down the price of platinum!

Music: Paul Bley :: Opus 1
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Parsing iTMS RSS w/Magpie

Apple kindly provides RSS feeds of “Top 10” and “Recently Added” items to the iTunes Music Store. The version linked above is for the general public. Partners/affiliates use a separate interface to generate RSS feeds with embedded affiliate IDs. Either way, the feeds they generate display by default as … wait for it … a series of HTML tables including all kinds of information you probably don’t want to display on your site — stuff like price, release date, and copyright holder all seem locked into the feed.

I’m using Magpie to display columns of genre-specific artist images on pages in The Archive of Misheard Lyrics. At first thought I’d have to scrape the feed to get just the data I wanted out of the tables, but then discovered that all of the data elements actually are atomic – they’re just stored in a subarray. Since this isn’t documented and Google turned up nothing useful, thought I’d share the code I came up with for the sake of future searchers.

Music: Pere Ubu :: Slow Walking Daddy

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Google Earth for Mac

Skipping commentary on today’s righteous MacWorld announcements, but this is probably drowning in the noise: Google Earth is finally available for the Mac. And they’ve done a killer job with it. For severely directionally challenged knuckleheads like me, it’s one of the best spatial visualization tools available.

Music: The Streets :: Could Well Be In
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13 Things That Do Not Make Sense

New Scientist: 13 Things That Do Not Make Sense. Summary collection of observable phenomena for which real scientists have no clear explanation. The placebo effect, the horizon problem, Viking’s methane, dark energy:

IT IS one of the most famous, and most embarrassing, problems in physics. In 1998, astronomers discovered that the universe is expanding at ever faster speeds. It’s an effect still searching for a cause – until then, everyone thought the universe’s expansion was slowing down after the big bang. “Theorists are still floundering around, looking for a sensible explanation,” says cosmologist Katherine Freese of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. “We’re all hoping that upcoming observations of supernovae, of clusters of galaxies and so on will give us more clues.”

Music: The Streets :: Fit But You Know It
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The iPod With X’d Out Eyes

Boot up iPod for first time in two weeks and the icon of a sad Mac stares me in the face, with (most excellent) Xs for eyes, its tongue lolling out. An ominous clicking sound emanates – telltale sound of a shot drive. Hmm… just enough time to race to the Apple store before work. Genius notices that I bought AppleCare for it, calls me “his hero” (yeah, right). Goes in the back, pulls a brand new replacement unit from brown cardboard, sends me on my way with a new unit 10 minutes later, no questions asked. The experience could not have rocked harder. Always buy AppleCare.

Interesting: Asked if I could cross-grade to a Nano, and he said no. What I didn’t know: All Apple hardware replacements are like-for-like. Even though my iPod model is no longer sold, they still manufacture them as replacements. Apparently, Apple keeps manufacturing every device they make for seven years after they stop selling them, for just this reason. Otherwise people would intentionally damage their Macs to score upgrades.

Music: Belle And Sebastian :: A Space Boy Dream
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Yosemite 2006

Yosemite 2006 Just spent an amazing (and much needed) three days at Redwoods in Yosemite outside Wawona, with family. No cell phone, no laptop, just endless trees and indoor fires, good food, a second Christmas, lots of hiking, and tons of old family movies. Miles and I found an excellent natural see-saw — a smooth log fallen, perfectly balanced, into the “Y” of a redwood, axis lubricated by moss. Chilnualna Falls even more stunning than the classic Bridalveil. Deer practically kissing our hands. Yosemite nearly empty this time of year, which was perfect (dealing with crowds is not my idea of vacation). Arrived just after a week of rain, but weather for us was nearly perfect, and the falls were engorged. Fully recharged and ready for anything (images).

Roger reminds me that, while away, I missed the start of the second chord of John Cage’s 639-year-long composition ASLSP, currently being performed at the abandoned Buchardi church in Halberstadt, eastern Germany. Dang!

Music: Joe Strummer & The Mescaleros :: WhiteMan in Hammersmith Palais
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Projector Notes

Between Dad and I, we brought three film projectors and one slide projector to Yosemite to review old family footage. Turned out the take-up reel on the one I just bought didn’t work, and it didn’t do Super 8 (fortunately most of our films were regular 8). One of Dad’s projectors did both formats, but its bulb was shot. Dad’s other projector had a working bulb and take-up reel, but rewind was broken. It was our best shot, but framing alignment went out continually. So after much experimentation, we sort of cobbled together a workable solution and watched old footage all three nights. Slide projector was badly broken too, but got the job done, more or less.

Even when working, threading a projector and dealing with its many foibles was a reminder that just 30-40 years ago, the general public was expected to have a level of mechanical confidence that you just don’t see today. The iPod has a single wheel, the DVD player just a few controls. The film projector, in contrast, wears its guts on the outside. Moving parts in modern gadgets are totally hidden, if they exist at all. The world has become increasingly slick. Things tend to work better overall, no doubt, but at the expense of the user being in touch with the mechanics of the device. We spent almost as much time wrestling with equipment as watching film. It was a fun object lesson, in a way, but not one I’m eager to repeat.

Anyway, some amazing old footage of Dad hard-hat diving with mixed gasses, of him doing rodeo trick roping in the 50s, of my brother and I’s first scuba experiences… One highlight: A guy Dad worked with had worked on the movie set of Creature From the Black Lagoon and had been given some discarded portions of the five rubber Creature suits they had constructed. Dad and friends used to don the suit and snorkel up behind surfers on their boards to scare the daylights out of them. And when sailing into a tourist port, they’d tie the Creature to the mast of their ship and pretend to whip him, for the benefit of diners in waterfront restaurants.

Music: The Fugs :: CIA Man