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Grandpa’s Vinyl

It is surprisingly difficult to get rid of old classical LPs. When I inherited the capiz shell stereo console, a couple hundred of grandpa’s old classical records came along for the ride. Most of them are very good, but neither Amy nor I are huge classical fans, and we have no place to store them (I’ve already consolidated my LPs to just what will fit in the console).

So I selected out a few keepers and took the rest to Amoeba and Rasputin’s. Each store wanted about 2% of the collection, and offered nickels and dimes. As in, $1 for a big stack of great old records. The problem is:

  • This stuff was being pressed for decades – there are zillions of LPs out there.
  • So few are in good condition today.
  • Most people have replaced their vinyl collections with CDs.
  • Classical music appreciation is at an all-time low.

Put these factors together and there are way, way, way too many classical LPs on the used market. My problem was not that I wanted money for the records – I couldn’t care less. What I wanted was to find a good home for them – I didn’t want them to end up at the dump, or unappreciated. It was the music collection of my grandfather’s life, the LPs I remember him listening to in the 60s and 70s. Amoeba said they would be willing to take them to the dump for me if I agreed to take less money for them. Rasputin’s agreed to take them all for free and put them in their discount bin. I just wanted someone to listen to them again, so left them on a counter and walked out.

It’s over. LPs are over, classical is over, grandpa is 15 years dead. Moving on.

Music: Plastic Bertrand :: Ca Plane Pour Moi
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padding:10px;

Not all bugs are IE’s, and Chimera’s CSS implementation isn’t always perfect. Every CSS spec I read says:

An element’s padding is the amount of space between the border and the content of the element.

So setting padding:10px; should not cause the border of a box to move – it should cause the contained content to be pushed in, as with the padding attribute for table cells. But no… Chimera pushes the DIV boundary out instead, forking up the design. This is solvable by creating a new containing class and applying the padding on that. Not elegant, but seems to work in all CSS browsers.

Update: As far as I can tell, this is the official bug report on the issue. Scanning through the comments is an object lesson in just how difficult it can be for browser makers to interpret the W3C’s recommendations. The Mozilla team really cares, but even with the requisite will-power, some ambiguities are difficult to resolve. Kind of like Biblical or Constitutional interpretation — except that in this case the framers are still alive ;)

Music: John Coltrane :: Russian Lullaby
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Disappeared Content

Since posting a couple of days ago about how Byte has erected toll gates around a decade’s worth of historical computing content (including two years worth of my own), some very interesting threads have been exchanged between Byte authors in private mail.

Everyone understands the advertising crunch, everyone knows that salaries have to come from somewhere, but no one likes the remedy, or is even sure that it is one. No matter how you slice it, Byte has broken probably tens of thousands of incoming links to piles of historical technical content. For virtually every person following one of these links, the “Please register!” page they meet will simply be a dead end.

The author’s rights are just what our original contracts say they were. As it turns out, we have the right to repost content as submitted on our own sites three months after it appeared on Byte. Of course, that would still leave the content hovering in mid-air, unconnected to the rest of the Byte and CMP empires, and without their masthead, without the Byte imprimatur. The meat without the dish.
Continue reading “Disappeared Content”

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Byte Goes Subscription

Byte.com just announced that they could no longer cut it on the advertising model alone, and moved to a subscription model. $12/year gets you into all of the CMP web properties. That’s all well and good, except for the fact that most of the best technical content I’ve written is now stuck behind the CMP tollgate, inaccessible to all but the most committed readers. This effectively punches a big hole in my resume, and I’m already getting mail from people wanting to know how they can read a copy of “Who Controls the Bootloader” and other pieces. There’s got to be a better way. And if I knew what it was I’d be rich.

Music: Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band :: Orange Claw Hammer
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Joe Coleman, Outsider?

The Board of Directors of New York’s Outsider Art Fair has decided to exclude Joe Coleman for exhibiting “an unusual level of awareness of the marketing and sales of his work.” In other words, Coleman is not starving enough to be considered an outsider. The definition of outsider art has always been somewhat up for grabs and in flux, but the board seems almost offended that a so-called “outsider” might figure out how to market their work. God forbid the outsider become famous!

You can sign an an online petition to register contempt for the decision. Or not. I can actually see both sides of this one. Kind of. If “outsider” means outside the art world, and it’s acknowledged that players in the art world are trying to sell their work, then the board may well have a point. On the other hand, Coleman has long been without representation, and has epitomized the outsider in more ways than one.

coleman_houdini.gif
Image: Joe Coleman

Music: Bob Dylan :: Idiot Wind
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Reposting Images

Have been grappling with the question of whether it should be okay to inline an artist’s image in my weblog, when relevant to a post.

Whether I inline an image from someone else’s web site or host a copy of the image on my server, I am helping myself to your “stuff” – either your bandwidth or your intellectual property. Are you concerned about bandwidth? If you’re like most webmasters, you like traffic. Presumably, you put that content online because you wanted it to be viewed by as many people as possible. You (or your work) craves attention. If you didn’t want it widely viewed, you wouldn’t have put it online to begin with. I think that’s fair to say. So if your goal is to have your content seen, why should you care whether it gets seen via my server or yours, my bandwidth or yours? The important thing is that it’s credited to the appropriate author/artist, right?

This is tricky stuff, because the whole notion of copyright is predicated on the right to copy – to keep a modicum of control in the hands of the artist. How can the artist maintain control of something that is not hosted on his/her own server?

On the other hand, can one hope to maintain control of something on the internet at all? I think the answer is probably… no. And yet I am not yet willing to let go of the notion that the artist is entitled to control his/her own work, even after s/he’s put it out there for public consumption. In the end, I think it’s ultimately harmless if I copy your image, host it on my site, and serve it up in my own pages, as long as I give you appropriate credit. The trouble with that is that you are depending on me to give you credit – the artist is at the mercy of other webmasters. And what if I don’t give you credit? Can you control that? Nope. But you can hope for a world where respect counts for something. On that note, I have decided it’s probably okay to repost copyrighted works in my weblog without seeking permission, but with credit. I know that’s not what copyright law says. It’s what I think is morally acceptable.

Music: Rachels :: Third Self-Portrait Series
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Mr. Freeze

Watching Batman re-runs with John late at night – an episode about arch-villan “Mr. Freeze” – skin bluish silver, tanks of mixed gases around his neck, and henchmen with names like “Chill” and “Ice” – his weapon, natch, a gun designed to shoot a stream of liquid nitrogen or similar at his foe and freeze them on the spot. Every few minutes he would run a finger along an S-shaped eyebrow and hiss “W-i-i-i-i-i-l-l-l-d.”

Then the credits rolled at the end of the show and it turned out the actor playing Mr. Freeze was none other than director Otto Preminger, for whom Miles was almost named (Amy tried for more than a year to convince me and others that Otto would be a great name for our kid – only about 10% of people agreed, the other 90%, including me, had a gag reflex to the name). But I just couldn’t believe Preminger was doing Batman. W-i-i-i-i-i-l-l-l-d.

I have such warm Batman memories from childhood – the campiness of it never struck – the late 60s and early 70s were the last period before the dawn of pomo, now everything is boiled in the stew of irony. The original Star Trek and the original Batman share the same kind of cheap sets and (by today’s standards) simple stories that we gladly forgive because of their sincerity.

My dad worked at MGM in the early 70s and got to watch them shooting Batman episodes. He once saw Batman and Robin climbing up the side of a building – on the set the “building” was horizontal and the camera sideways – and this just blew my 7-year-old world wide-open — at once revealing and fascinating, but also the magic was sucked out just like that – a bittersweet process that continues today.

Music: Minutemen :: Spillage
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Catalogs

Mike read a catalog of electronics testing gizmos on the way down to SLO as if it were a magazine. When I got to my brother’s house, dad and brother were reading a catalog of Dremel and other wooodworking tools as if it were a magazine. Why don’t I “read” any catalogs? What catalogs would I read if I did?

Music: Fatboy Slim :: The Satisfaction Skank
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Does Your TiVo Think You’re Gay?

More and more web sites and devices are using associative database programming to try and determine what you will like based on what you’ve expressed an interest in in the past. And what if the algorithms read you wrong? Article at WSJ about such snafus – you watch a movie about a guy whose wife becomes bisexual, and your TiVo immediately assumes you want a steady diet of gay programming. You try to psyche it out by counter-programming a ton of “super straight” content, end up overcompensating… is this the first example of artificial intelligence going wonderfully, terribly wrong in the home? We don’t have a TiVo, but if we did, I’m sure it would think Amy and I just l-o-o-o-o-o-v-e birthing babies.

Music: Freakwater :: Out of this World
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Coming Down at Once

CSS Joy: When the fun wears off, you’re left with a big pain in the nooners trying to make multiple browsers happy. Ultimately had to dig out and boot up a Win box at home — something I haven’t done for close to a year — just to test Explorer/Mac vs. Explorer/Win and to see just where and when that right-nav DIV tag blows up on the Win side. I think I’ve got it smoothed out about as smooth as it’s going to get. If you’re using Explorer and don’t see the right nav, try resizing the window a few pixels – as you can see, the problem is no longer related to content width being incorrectly totalled, but a redraw issue in Explorer.

Have been so busy at work I left this rendering bug hanging in public for more than 24 hours, painful. But no choice. Tomorrow will be worse – haven’t been this stressed at work since before personalStudio launched at Adamation. Literally all coming down at once.

Amazing how subtly different behaviors can have profound ripple effects through a site. Dan (in comments) described my dive into table-free CSS here as a “damn the torpedoes” approach, and that’s pretty accurate. CSS is a both a minefield and a cornucopia. Cross-browser testing becomes even more important than with straight HTML. But in the end, there’s so much good about it that the pain is totally worth it. Time has come to go all CSS. Someone’s got to be first on the dancefloor.

Dan is totally right : I can’t settle on a design because it makes the public happy – please don’t let the polls make you think this is a democracy – it ain’t. I just like taking pulse… and testing polling software. Click on.

Music: Sea and Cake :: Do Now Fairly Well