Possums have 13 nipples. Six on one side, seven on the other.
Young sloths are so inept that they frequently grab their own arms and legs instead of branches, and fall out of trees.
Evolution likes freaks.
Jackson Five
Christmas shopping with Amy yesterday.
She: “Why don’t we get a Jackson Five record?”
Me: “Yeah, why the hell not?”
It was such a good call. We both grew up with all those original J5 songs on the car radio. I had forgotten just how good this stuff is. Great wake up music. Great pop songs.
I feel so sorry for Michael Jackson, to have done all his best work before the age of 10.
MightyAssembly
Just when we thought all the dotcom parties were over… went to a book release party last night at the loft of MightyAssembly. Our old friend Colleen co-wrote Macromedia Flash: Art, Design, and Function and they threw a bash to celebrate. Felt like the old days – saw lots of people I once knew, hung out with some of the movers and shakers from the glory days of the SF dotcom scene, drank mojitos… very fun. Good to hook up with Colleen again.
Year Attribute
When I’m encoding CDs I’m always amazed at how few of them come back with metadata from cddb that includes the year of recording. I always take care to read through the liners and find the year and key it in before I start encoding. But why do so many people leave it out when submitting to cddb? And why is the year that comes back so often wrong? (Like a 1997 Sun Ra collection of stuff from 1958 will say 1997). I can’t be the only person who considers the year important. How else do you make era-based playlists? Music happens and evolves on a continuum. The year is as important to know as the genre. I hate this sloppy attitude toward music history.
TinyApps
Over time, I’ve slowly been expanding the content on a page I maintain, Why HTML Email Is a Bad Idea . Today TinyApps.org (which is dedicated to simplicity in computing) linked to the piece in their email newsletter (archived here ).
Big Fish Eat the Little One
Just before going to bed last night, I went to turn off the aquarium light and noticed the plecostamus acting weird, sucking feverishly on something. I realized he was sucking the guts out of the guppy, which he had somehow corralled and caught. This was a bummer because it was the longest-lasting guppy I had ever had (~six months). I thought the scene would make good source video for something, but by the time I got a tape into the camera he had abandoned his prey. I waited a while and he came back to it, but backed off every time I moved the camera close. Usually, pleco is dumb as a doornail. I never thought he had any awareness of my presence at all. But suddenly he seemed hyper-aware of my every move. I think that doting on actual prey rather than the usual algae tablets triggered some million-year-old self-defense instinct. For 20 minutes I tried to tape him sucking on the guppy’s belly, but couldn’t get a single good shot.
Permission
Interesting piece by David Weinberger, Out of Control on the fact that the web was conceived by Berners-Lee as a place where scientists could link to each other’s work without permission, and that the web is a permission-free environment in general. Kind of obvious and old hat in a way, but then again, I never thought of it quite in those terms before either.
But I do not count myself among those who are aching for the death of copyright.
Visit to a Sad Planet
Finally got around to compressing and putting online the first (and so far only) actual DV movie I’ve made (as opposed to travelogues and personal mini-documentary things).
This 4-minute mock “sci-fi opus” is a video accompaniment to Leonard Nimoy’s 1969 monologue “Visit to a Sad Planet,” which is but one in a long series of monologues, poems, and spoken-word pieces recorded by Nimoy and Shatner in the late 60s.
If you’ve got the bandwidth, definitely go for the 30MB Sorenson version. It looks and sounds much better than the 10MB version. Of course, both of them suck compared to the uncompressed 720×480 original, but you can’t just go putting 1 GB movies on the net… dammit.
QuickTime and IE
So it turns out the reason my QT movie didn’t work properly under IE/Win is because MS burned Apple with the release of IE 5.5/6 by dumping the old Netscape plug-in methods. Nowadays you have to wrap your embed tag inside an object tag, and set all the parameters identically for each. Fine if you find out, but I feel sorry for all the people with legacy QT content online which suddenly no worky no more. Anyway, the trapeze page should work for everyone now. Sorry about that.
Got my UC Berkeley staff ID card today, which meant I was able to order BBEdit at an educational discount (you have to fax proof to BareBones).
OSX Guidebook
If you think you know all there is to know about using OSX, you’re probably wrong. Rob Griffith’s OSX Guidebook is out , it’s great, it’s worth the shareware fee (I helped edit it ;)