December 30, 2004
Happy birthday, dad.
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So one can fill his iPod with music CD's, but the far more interesting use is podcasting: grabbing a daily (or whatever) show in MP3 format and listening to it on the iPod whenever is convenient. The Phoenix explains nicely. The craziest thing about this is that Adam Curry, the guy with big hair from 1980's MTV, has written one of the central pieces of software. He's not really a programmer, which is part of the reason this is so cool: this stuff is getting easy.
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December 27, 2004
Geez, I'm about to be listening to a lot more music again, which is Good.
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This space's excellent inlaws got it an iPod, which means suddenly spending way more time in iTunes ripping CD's than in a browser updating this space. Also, the kid got a kazoo for Christmas (which she even plays!—toot, toot, grin...) so there's lots of music around here and relatively little typing. Then, to compound things, Uncle Adam was here and so we spent a good deal of time swapping iPod notes (and a few tunes) and doing driving tours of Cambridge and Boston and Quincy. Of course, not only did no typing occur here but we furthermore didn't manage to take a single picture of the whole visit (save for a shot of some snow shovelling) but we nevertheless had an excellent time.
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December 23, 2004
Good lord, does polyurethane stink. Only paint thinner makes my eyes burn more. And then when I turned this thing on and started typing, of course Polka Dot Rose by Primus was playing on iTunes. Spooky.
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December 21, 2004
The usual place points us to The Beatles and The Beastie Boys, together at last. This is friggin excellent. I've got a local cache if you go to this site only to find that it's been taken down due to lawyergrams and such. Happy day. (Why, oh why—why, dammit!—couldn't this have been invented when I was in college and could have appreciated it just that tiniest little bit more? Back in continuous sub-pop music days.)
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December 20, 2004
Yesterday's moderate annoyance at the disappearance of the relatively nice previous Big Dig website (now subsumed into the mediocre and nearly informationless Mass Turnpike Authority site) led this space to a fairly cool Flash animation showing roughly what the Boston coastline has looked like over the last couple of centuries. Fun stuff. (Click on #3: History.)
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December 19, 2004
Another traffic item: they finally starting to open the rest of my private fifteen billion dollar highway. Thanks, everyone! Now to ask the good folks at the Mass Turnpike Authority to hire a friggin cartographer or even a guy with a pencil and paper and a digital camera to draw up even a basic map of these lane changes. How hard could that possibly be?
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Jeff Francis continues to be this space's traffic mapping hero.
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So Yahoo has decided to provide traffic information as an overlay atop their regular street maps. Excellent, I thought. Then I went and actually looked at the traffic info. Solitary icons noting lane closures and that's it—no traffic speeds, no travel times, no nothing. And just to make sure that it remains as useless as possible, "Yahoo declined to identify the exact sources of its traffic data."
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December 16, 2004
Canada goes to hell:
It's true. It's rather amazing. Gay marriage will be completely legal in Canada very soon. It's been oddly ignored in much of the U.S. media and hasn't really been much discussed among those in the terrified red states except when, deep in the night, from their respective lumpy twin beds, they whisper to each other across the room as they pop their Ambien and stroke their portfolios and curse their very genitals: oh my God what's wrong with those freakin' Canadians?
That and their revoltingly strong currency.
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Argh. That extra-fortunate Lib is skiing already. This means that I really gotta get the rest of the way in shape (I'm partway there, I think) in order to avoid last year's ridiculousness of having to leave after less than five hours at Mad River. (That last link has video of the first day of skiing, which was today. O my do I need to get me to Mad River.)
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December 14, 2004
Quitting The Paint Factory: On The Virtues of Idleness. I haven't read this yet because...um...I'm too busy at work. Update:
Leisure is permissible, we understand, because it costs money; idleness is not, because it doesn't. Leisure is focused; whatever thinking it requires is absorbed by a certain task: sinking that putt, making that cast, watching that flat-screen TV. Idleness is unconstrained, anarchic. Leisure – particularly if it involves some kind of high-priced technology – is as American as a Fourth of July barbecue. Idleness, on the other hand, has a bad attitude. It doesn't shave; it's not a member of the team; it doesn't play well with others. It thinks too much, as my high school coach used to say. So it has to be ostracized.
The whole thing reads like this. What fun!
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Just as this space was recalling bygone days of putting random living crap in an terrarium and feeding it other random living things, suddenly the usual source screams at us: Frog eats mouse! Not quite as cool as Boa constrictor crushes and then eats a hamster—nor as lame as one doesn't—but it'll do for now.
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December 13, 2004
Note to self: Diet Coke and 3 Musketeers minis do not constitute a nutritious snack.
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December 12, 2004
I thought kids were supposed to get tired and take naps sometimes.
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December 11, 2004
How the Secretary of Defense got grilled about unarmored humvees in front of the press. It certainly is neat hearing about how reporters work. Why don't they just tell us this stuff in the papers?
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Dad has set up his Mac to play DVD's on the television while the DVD control console still appears on the Mac. This space is brainstorming rapidly, and is envious of not having its Mac upstairs near the TV. Alas. Update: He's watching The Gray Video. Holy crap do I need to see that.
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December 10, 2004
A certain one-year-old kid made her first 911 call and then hung up. The police were surprisingly nice when they called back for an explanation.
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December 09, 2004
"As a physicist, I don't really have much cause to use mice in my regular research, which mostly requires the use of theoretical math," said Dr. Thomas Huber, author of the 1996 study Mouse Elasticity And Kinetic Rebound In High-Acceleration Collisions.
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December 08, 2004
Ignore the fact that this space is only updating every three days. All is well.
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December 06, 2004
The Times on how adults—especially adults working in technical fields—can't write, thereby costing companies a ton of money to train their employees in remedial English. It's 100% true.
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This space is delighted to report that its spam filter now flags the word lol as spam.
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December 04, 2004
This space has been a longtime fan of the Zen TV Experiment that Adbusters ran a long time ago (and that is no longer on their site; the link is to what I think is an accurate copy). I thought of a new one last weekend while I was convalescing, and found it far more disturbing than I had expected.
- Step 1: Put your one-year-old daughter in front of an Elmo video or some other thing geared toward young kids.
- Step 2: Situate yourself between your child's face and the television, just slightly out of her line of sight (so she doesn't complain). You should now be able to see your child's blank gaze from a distance of about a foot. In particular, you should be able to see the TV screen reflected off the surface of your child's eyeballs.
- Step 3: Watch the Elmo video in the kid's eyeball reflection for at least two minutes.
During the experiment, smile at your child and note her reaction. Marvel at how well synchronized the sound is with what's happening on the kid's corneas. After this experiment, consider the following questions: Why is this experiment even possible, given that one-year-olds are usually wigglier than a bucket of eels? What is this kid thinking about while she looks at the screen?
(In the immediate aftermath of doing this experiment I half-seriously contemplated throwing the television down the basement steps (for effect), which is kind of the point of Zen TV Experiments, but decided that the resulting shards of broken leaded glass and powdery phosphor mist would probably be more harmful than the images displayed by a still-functioning TV. That and we like to watch TV after the kid goes to bed sometimes.)
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December 03, 2004
Xeni Jardin tested the censorware that Microsoft put on top of their new weblog service, and hilarity ensued.
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