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So Crazy Japanese Toys

Mystery envelope arrived today, padded, manila. Addressed to me. No return address. No card, no note, no clues as to origin. Only that the order was fulfilled by King’s Books in Tacoma, WA. Inside, a book titled So Crazy Japanese Toys! — lovely close-up photo pictorials of the most outrageous Japanese heroes and monsters. (“Monsters! Monsters! Monsters! So bothersome, yet so essential!”). I have absolutely no idea who sent me this book. Whoever you are, wherever you are, I am enjoying this immensely. Thank you and goodnight.

Music: Laurie Anderson :: Example #22
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Like an Asteroid Hitting the Earth

Oops, Dave Barry’s finger slipped and he ended up accidentally publishing the phone number of the American Telemarketers Association. Hope that didn’t inconvenience anyone there who, I dunno, maybe didn’t want to be called?

Oops, looks like the ATA got a bunch of unwanted phone calls. Thanks Jeff C.

My new favorite anti-telemarketer tactic: Feign interest and get caller hooked, then ask them to please hold. Put phone down and walk away. Waste someone’s time? Never!

Music: Pablo Casals :: Suite No. 5 in C minor
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Beyond Interview

Andrea “hawksmoor” Scatena interviewed me a bit ago for Beyond Magazine : “BeOS, AmigaOS, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD.” He wanted to know my thoughts about the various BeOS variants floating around today. Pulled no punches in my answers. In fact, I was so candid I half-expected them not to run it, but they did. Current issue is downloadable now (PDF).

Be had more than 100 employees and $25 million in the bank at one point. Full-time engineers and a bunch of committed commercial developers (Adamation, BeatWare, Gobe…). With all of that, BeOS barely stood a snowball’s chance in hell. Without any of that, without any hope of developing momentum — EVER — it’s all so much less than zero. It’s very hard for me to understand why there are still people hanging out in the ghost town.

and:

Look, sometimes we do things in this life for irrational reasons, for love. If you love BeOS and don’t care about the apps or the practicality, then by all means use it, be happy, it’s “all part of life’s rich pageant.” Just don’t start to think BeOS is going to have some kind of renaissance, or take over the world, or provide a means for developers or users to make money. Love is the only remaining reason to use the system. And maybe that’s reason enough.

Andrea is a good guy. His commitment and love is shining – exactly the kind of vibe that made the BeOS community unlike any technology sphere I’ve experienced before or since.

Music: Tom Jones :: Delilah
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Chart Sensation

Spent the weekend with an old friend of Amy’s from Mass Art — Michael Lewy and fiancee’ Erica. Michael is a painter and photographer (samples) and… a PowerPoint artist. The app everyone loves to hate, the source of all meetings boring and tedious, the clip art of presentation software, turned on its head. I love these. Inverting the bullet-point approach of the typical business presentation and transforming it into a means of representation for the convolutions of life. Michael also paints charts, in a similar vein (one hangs in our dining room). PowerPoint, paintbrushes, whatever.

         

    

J&L books is publishing a book of Michael’s PowerPoint charts this December. Michael was kind enough to let me post five teasers here.

Music: Booker T and the M.G.s :: Home Grown
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Sonic Gopher War

Two weeks after installing lawn, it’s being sabotaged by gophers. Little piles and big holes dotted all over the place. Looks like I’ve blanketed over a serious warren. Caddyshack seems a bit less funny than it once did. Brother John said his sonic gopher stake did the trick, so we got one. 18″ long stake with 4 “C” batteries, emits an annoying high-pitched buzz into the earth every 28 seconds, lasts six months. Earth is denser than air, so signal should travel well (claims 6000 sq. feet coverage). Can be inserted so cap is flush with soil, for easy mow-over. Put your ear to the earth and you can actually hear it, though faintly. Allegedly the gophers will be curious about it for first 2-3 weeks, and hole activity may increase. Then they’ll realize the annoying neighbor is here to stay, and clear out. We’ll see. Better than dredging corpses out of the lawn. Another friend reported success attaching a hose to exhaust pipe and gassing them out. Would rather not resort to such dramatics, but listen up, gophers: we will prevail!

Music: Elliott Smith :: Alameda
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BarbieOS

As if we didn’t have enough Linux distros floating around, now there’s one tailored to 4-11 year-old girls, allegedly the most user-friendly distribution ever made.

BarbieOS 1.0 is the result of almost a year’s worth of marketing research into what pre-adolescent girls want in a mobile Linux solution aimed at being a desktop replacement.

From what I hear of Barbie’s new technopolitics, I like her a lot more than I used to:

… If Barbie were a career-focused woman working in the IT industry in 2003, she would support open standards,” he says.  “She would be seeking out free and open-source alternatives to current proprietary solutions, saving her company tens of thousands of dollars on management headaches associated with tracking software licenses and preparing for BSA audits.  

Interesting that Mattel hasn’t yet shut this site down; the company was once extremely vigorous about threatening ISPs with customers hosting Barbie trademark violations. I did follow a Google link to another BarbieOS site that apparently had been shut down.

For years, Birdhouse has hosted Mark Napier’s Distorted Barbie, with built-in mirror (so that if necessary, I could cease and desist and the meme would live on). I have yet to receive anything from Mattel regarding the site, so they may have pulled back on their campaign a bit. Perhaps they realized they would never get the cat back in the bag, or that they were actually damaging their corporate image more than improving it, or that the line between satire and slander can be too blurry to define consistently, or…

Music: X :: Sugarlight
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Which Media Player Sucks Least?

Currently involved in a mondo thread regarding the question of whether QuickTime sucks or not, which by necessity also asks whether Real Media and/or Windows Media suck, and if so, how much? As with operating systems, I think all of them have strengths and weakness, but there are no secrets about my leanings: I think QuickTime is more flexible, has better (or at least equal) quality per bitrate, has a cleaner UI, is less big-brother-ish, and is less invasive (is less brash about stealing associations). QuickTime is also, unfortunately, the only one that nags the user till they cough up $30 — something I’m more than willing to do, though I know many/most people are not.

Not everyone shares my opinion. Thought I’d take a straw poll here on birdhouse, where the air is slightly less rarified than on the mailing list. What do you think? If all audio/video media on the web had to be in a single format, which should it be?

Which media player/platform gives the best overall user experience?

View Results

Gorgeous example of QuickTime in action.

Music: Janis Joplin :: To Love Somebody
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rsync backup

Working on new backup systems based on the tremendously flexible rsync, which ships with OS X and Server. Clever details here on utilizing hard links for incremental backups. The trick is shifting gears between contexts all the time; nose buried in man pages one moment, then helping a student discover the magic of File | Open (no kidding) the next, then lugging projectors and plugging in cables ten minutes later. Such a schizo job. Seldom build enough momentum to really sync into a task.

Music: Marvin Pontiac :: Wanna wanna
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Ravi Coltrane

Amy and I had our first real date in over a year — babysitter and everything. Went to see Ravi Coltrane at Yoshi’s. Ravi is the son of the great John Coltrane, though his father died when he was only two, so he didn’t grow up under the influence (though certainly under the shadow). Modern bop, pulsing rhythm section, very moving but not quite mind blowing. It must be incredibly difficult to be on stage with everyone looking for your father in you. Especially when you’ve chosen to take up the same instrument.

Yoshi’s is so genteel — “jazz under glass.” No smoking allowed. Nobody talks, glasses don’t clink, everyone totally attentive. There’s a lot to be said for that, and the sound system there is unparalleled — truly marvelous cahoustics. But it also feels a bit sterile; you find yourself wishing someone would fall drunk over your table, or knock an ashtray onto the floor or something.

Started with sushi dinner. Used to see music so often, felt great to be out at a club; even greater to date my wife again!

Music: Adam And The Ants :: Antmusic
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Sprinkler

Any Ace Hardware has a dozen or so lawn sprinklers to choose from, from dirt simple plastic rings on up to precision oscillating drums with variable scope, built-in clog pick, and snap-on hose attachment. But none are as elegant as the simple anodized aluminum head. Red for rectangular lawns, blue for squares, green for circular (I think). Just like when I was five. How long has this sprinkler been manufactured without alteration? Seems to have looked like this forever. Simple, works, beautiful, why change? Finished final stage of lawn this weekend, installing bender board. Ready to plant the beds.

Music: The Clash :: Washington Bullets