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Flipping Through Covers

Itunes Artwork2 Playing around with the new iTunes Artwork screensaver in Tiger — generates an array of all albums in your collection for which you have cover art, randomizes, throws them up in a grid, flips/replaces covers at random. Sounds a bit silly, but in reality feels like a sort of reclamation — the vanishing romance of thumbing through piles of LPs, cover art scattered over the rug. Feels good.

Of course you quickly realize how little of your MP3 collection even has cover art. Clutter solves that, but grows your database by about 1MB per album (art is added to metadata of each track) and it would take weeks to add cover art to an entire collection.

You need to use the CLI screencapture utility in OS X to shoot screensavers. Be sure to silence it with the -x flag — without that it hoarks forth an ungodly loud noise when it snaps.

sleep 25; screencapture -x cap6.png

Interesting that Apple has switched from PDF to PNG as the screen capture file format with Tiger. Would be nice if they offered a preference for that.

Music: Tim Buckley :: Gypsy Woman
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Orangelo

Met a woman yesterday in an office building, complimented the cute picture of her daughter on the wall. “What’s her name?” “Special.” “Her name is Special?” “Yes, she has two sisters — Unique and Lovely.”

My interest was, um, piqued, but didn’t quite know what to say next. She filled the silence. “Sometimes when someone asks Special her name, she tells them, ‘Oh, what a unique name!’ and she answers, ‘No, Unique is my sister.'” So her kids are trapped in an endless game of “Who’s On First?” with strangers.

Don’t get me wrong – I think unusual names are great. Shows balls, shows art. But this trio of monikers brings so much built-in difficulty for the kids.

Reminded of a story I heard about a woman who gave birth to twin girls and named them Orangelo and Lemonjelo (orange jello / lemon jello)… after the post-labor food she had just enjoyed. No idea whether the story is apocryphal, but I actually don’t entirely doubt it.

Music: Meat Puppets :: Fruit
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josephhall.org

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes josephhall.org, the all-purpose site of Berkeley SIMS PhD student Joseph Hall. Joseph’s got an interesting B2 Evolution weblog running at Not Quite a Blog, at which I found a reference to a neat trick: When using a Mac in bright sunlight, hit Cmd-Ctrl-Opt-8 for instant super-high contrast inverted display – a shortcut to one of the accessibility features, sans rummaging around in the prefs.

Music: Brian Eno :: Passing Over
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Another Day on Earth

It’s been 15 years since Brian Eno released a vocal album. All of the ambient stuff in the years between has been interesting and even gorgeous at times, but not sustaining in the way records like Another Green World have been (Green World still has the power to take me far, far away). Out of the blue (or into it), the just-released Another Day on Earth revives some of that spirit — ethereal synth washes, complexly layered vocals, Fripp-like guitar, melodies that simply float without sounding anemic… It’s not Green World, but it’s great to have the old Eno back again.

emusic has it, iTunes doesn’t. Amazon review. There’s also an Eno interview available for download (billed as a podcast, though I think content should have to be serialized to be billed as a “podcast”).

Music: Brian Eno :: Under
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Lion’s Mouth

Miles Lionhead2 Miles Lionhead1

30+ years ago, used to spend summer afternoons at Atascadero Lake and its adjoining zoo. It was a crappy little lake, but it was what we had (spent a lot more time in the ocean than in the lake; this is where we’d go for company picnics, playdates with cousins, etc). Hadn’t given a thought since then to the fiberglass lion head / drinking fountain at the zoo entrance, and was amazed last weekend to find it still intact, despite total reconstruction of the zoo (much for the better). Miles ran right up to it, worked the handle himself, got totally doused. A rush of memories came flooding back. Comforting to see that a few good things occasionally withstand the ravages of modernization.

Music: Mekons :: Psycho Cupid
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8% Tanker, 92% Us

At the zoo last weekend, an info kiosk presented by Dawn dishwashing liquid on the effects of motor, crude, and other oils in the oceanic environment on wild birds (Dawn has always been the detergent of choice in bird rescue efforts). Interesting factoid: Of the roughly 24 million gallons of oil humans introduce into the world’s oceans yearly, only 8% can be attributed to tanker spills. The rest comes from jet skis, boats, airplanes, and runoff from cities.

Tip: “Place cooking oils and fats in a sealed container in the garbage rather than pouring them down the kitchen drain.” Have to confess, I had never made the connection on that one.

Generally skeptical of corporate attempts to appear as enviro do-gooders, but can’t fault Proctor & Gamble for donating thousands of gallons of detergent over the years to clean up birds.

Music: Segun Bucknor :: La La La
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Heads on a Platter

Video archives from our last New Media Training Conference are now up, and the streamer is getting hit hard with requests for a presentation by Bob Cauthorn — an industry analyst who virtually handed newspaper executives’ heads to them on a platter for 90 minutes re: the madness of perpetuating business models that have resulted in a steady 30-year slide in product popularity. Cauthorn took ’em to school, no holds barred. Quite an amazing performance to watch live, but plays well on video too (though his slides are tough to read). E-Media Tidbits says of Cauthorn’s presentation, He May Never Get a Newspaper Job Again!. Quickly shaping up to be the most-trafficked video stream we’ve ever served.

The webcast of Amgine from WikiNews is also very worth watching, though a bit dark – didn’t have time to brighten it in post.

Music: King Tubby’s :: King Tubby’s Patient Dub
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New J-School RSS Feeds

Built RSS feed generators for the J-School’s student and faculty stories databases today. Nice to be able to test RSS feeds directly in Safari. These will probably be lightly updated now that we’re into summer. Now that these exist, I’d like to build a custom Dashboard Widget for J-School RSS feeds in time for next semester, and load it onto all of the new incoming Macs.

Finally got approval and backing to undertake a massive re-creation of the J-School web site this summer, glory be. We’ll be hiring a designer; the hard work is going to be cleaning up and prepping 1500 pages of static content, taking it out of 1997 mode. Design tables, font tags, non-existent standardization on how pages are constructed. By the time I’m done, every page should be XHTML compliant, lightweight, and with total separation of design and content. We’ve got a heck of a lot of custom PHP/MySQL stuff interleaved, which could make choosing and integrating a CMS tricky.

Now that back-to-back conferences and jury duty are over, nose to the grindstone.

Music: Magazine :: shot by both sides
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Stale Mail

In the eternal quest to clear the inbox (aka The Impossible Dream), I responded to a message today dated June 2003, with something like “Let’s face reality – I’m never going to give this the thoughtful response it deserves, but thanks for the energy you put into this thread.” It’s a cop-out I know, but also necessary/pragmatic. This got me thinking – is there, like, a statute of limitations on the age of email messages? After what point is it just pointless to bother responding? Can you delete unanswered messages after a year without having to apologize for it? I know I’m not alone in this dilemma. How old is your oldest unanswered message? The one you keep around because you just know one night you’ll get around to responding (I actually have some older than June 2003 and would love an excuse to just can them).

How old is the oldest unanswered message in your inbox?

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Jury of Peers

Jury duty. Foolishly expected that, as usual, I would get in, not get selected, and get back to work. What unfolded instead could be called a comedy of errors, but that would be too charitable a description for the expanse of waste and idiocy (and yes, comedy) that I encountered today.

Update: I’ve added the end-game to this post.
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