Britain has talent, and so does Paul Potts

Via Mandy, a UVA friend, I found this YouTube video of Paul Potts, a broken-toothed contestant on “Britain’s Got Talent” who murmurs when asked why he’s in the competition, “To sing opera.” And then proceeds to tear the house down:

I mean, and please excuse my French, but: holy shit.

This is the dream, if you are an amateur musician; for a vocalist, this is the prototypical origin story. It’s how you decide you are going to pursue this for the rest of your life. (As I confessed a while ago.) And he does it. Makes the female presenter take heavy sighing breaths and cry, makes the audience jump to their feet, makes Simon gush like a schoolgirl.

And not only does he pull off this performance, which would have been cool enough; he goes on to win the whole shebang. And: sing for the Queen, record contract with Simon Cowell, get money to pay off his debts. Even get his teeth fixed.

Sometimes the good guys win. But apparently only in Britain. Lucky bastards.

(And, um, it’s OK to be just a little jealous of him, right?)

For a more reasoned response to the whole thing, SJ Reidhead has a good piece on Blogcritics.

Updated 9/26/2007: Had to update the YouTube link. You’d think that the rightsholder would treat this amazingly successful clip as promotion rather than yank it, but no…

iChat and broadband speed

My inlaws and I are trying to figure out why they get such poor iChat performance. We videoconference with them often through iChat, and their sound cuts out, or the picture becomes so pixilated that they can’t see what is going on.

I just ran a Speakeasy speed test and it doesn’t seem that our connection speed is a problem—our speed to their servers in New York (very close to my inlaws) is pretty darned good:

18065 down 1960 up

So that leaves a few other possibilities. One is my inlaws’ speed—I know a few other people in their neighborhood have gotten cable modems. Another is iChat version—they are still on Mac OS X 10.3 and we have made the Tiger move.

The Kendall Band no more?

Der Spatchel points out that the Kendall Band, an interactive musical sculpture in the Kendall Square T station, is not functioning because the T can’t afford to maintain it. While I can sympathize with the T—when I was at Sloan, the piece seemed to be inoperative as often as it worked—it seems a shame for the single nicest feature of any T station to go mute. Particularly since it is right outside MIT.

I had no idea that the piece was by a descendant of Henri Matisse—or that Paul Matisse had other sonic artworks throughout the city. I’m particularly tickled by this description of the musical fence: “Its immense popularity proved problematic, however, in the urban environment. Passers-by played the fence at all hours, causing its relocation to the less residential environment of the DeCordova Sculpture Park.”

Back to the Hook

I have an appointment with destiny tonight in Charlottesville, where I am heading to see Tyler Magill get married. And to congratulate Jim Heaney on his engagement. And to hang out with my sister and take some photos. And maybe have a late night Newkie Brown at the Court Square Tavern.

No, I’m not building this up too much. Why do you ask?

Wildmon on HR 1592: Taking fearmongering to new heights

Ah, Reverend Don Wildmon. Once known for picketing TV shows and comic strips, now turning his attention to hate crime legislation. The latest American Family Association newsletter hysterically claims that new anti-hate-crime legislation in front of the House (HR 1592) and Senate (S 1105) would make it illegal to preach against homosexuality.

The actual text of the bill, in fact, says that that’s not what the bill trying to do. Section 8 says that nothing in the bill “shall be construed to prohibit any expressive conduct protected from legal prohibition by, or any activities protected by the free speech or free exercise clauses of, the First Amendment to the Constitution.” The whole bill targets violent felonies causing bodily injury that are motivated by prejudice. If the Reverend Wildmon would spend more time reading and less time picketing, he might have picked up on the distinction.

Links for June 15, 2007

0613-life-instructions.jpg

I’d love to do a joke about how Microsoft is striking back at Apple’s Safari by releasing a Mac version of their weak iPhoto clone, but (a) they released it back in April and (b) Expression Media actually looks to have some pro-grade features that might be worth checking out. Maybe.

Speaking of Microsoft, the secret to good WPF applications is design, design, design; and Vertigo Labs is pretty damned good at that. Check out their new Family.Show application. I just wish they would publish their tip list and notes about WPF and Expression Blend in a web-friendly format. I can’t read XAML docs and XPS on my Mac.

On a completely different topic, an interesting article on obsolete instruments in Salon talks about some I’m familiar with (the sackbut and the shawm) and others I’m not (the Stroh violin, which is amplified with a tin horn; the Birotron, which uses 8-track loops; and others).

And when I’m done going back to Tom Waits’s Alice and Blood Money to listen for the Stroh violin, I can apply this hint to stop iTunes from nagging me to sign into the store every time I start the application. Yay!

Speaking of things that make me happy, check out these tips for living life shown subway-sign style.

And speaking of iTunes: I’m walking a line, I’m dreaming of houses in motion. Houses that used to host the Berkman Center. Houses that will block Mass Ave for three days.

And speaking of blocking things: I think that the TSA may have lost sight of the rationale behind the war on moisture.

College town

It’s strange being in someone else’s college town. You get all the facets of college life—cheap, unhealthy food; cheaper beer; the unhurried pace of college life. We checked into our hotel in a local college town today and asked about food. The clerk behind the desk said, “If you just want a quick bite, the place across the street has a gyro special today—gyro, fries, and large drink for $3.99.”

As my colleague said later, “He was definitely a college student. Now that I’m out of college—I’m on an expense account—I don’t care so much about cheap any more. I’m more interested in good.”

Touché. Still, there’s something to be said for the bargain, the “cheap and good” option. That’s where I always felt college students were really good at establishing a market.

Unfortunately, in places like Charlottesville, the positive effects of the students are counterbalanced by parents and alums, who inexplicably kept places like The Virginian alive long past its freshness date. I should note I haven’t eaten there since 1995 or so, but then it felt like it should not have existed because no students were ever there and the food wasn’t really good enough to draw the townie crowd.

QTN™: Dogfish Head Fort

When a beer is made with crushed raspberries, it can be either very good or very bad. I’ve had some fruit “lambics” (you know the ones) that tasted like Koolaid. True to form, Dogfish Head’s Fort is not among these. I’ll be lucky to articulate what it is among, given its fairly high alcohol content: 18% (higher than some Zinfandels).

The name could stem from the Latin for strong (most likely) or from its resemblance to the word port, which the beer somewhat resembles. The intense raspberry aroma of the beer gives way to an incredibly well balanced sweet/malty/yeasty/alcohol flavor combination that makes it very easy to forget that you are drinking the equivalent of three normal beers by volume.

The beer was an outstanding balance for grilled pork tenderloin that was covered with a sweet, gingery spice rub.

Safari for Windows, and for the iPhone

Steve Jobs’s keynote today at WWDC is the sound of the other shoe dropping. All that griping about whether the iPhone would be opened to third party apps just went out the window. There is a third-party platform in the iPhone, and it’s called Safari. Which, incidentally, will now be available for Windows.

As a product manager, this sounds like my supported platform matrix breaking wide open. As a Windows user at work, this sounds like trumpets from heaven.

As a Mac user, it sounds like it did when iTunes and the iPod first came to Windows. New audiences for technologies on the Mac are a good thing because they tend to drive attention, and resources, to those technologies.

Back to the iPhone thing: this sounds strongly like Apple is making a bet on web application development being the future, at least for phones. Based on the explosion in Dashboard widget development, I’d say they may have a point. Being able to code in HTML+CSS+JavaScript has its advantages for a large number of tasks. Interestingly, games are not among the tasks that the AJAX stack has historically excelled at. I wonder if that means that the iPhone will be a games free platform, or if the partnership that Apple announced today with EA will bring further developments in that direction?

Music articles for June 11, 2007

Nice crop of reviews and other music related pieces today:

Blogaversary VI

Six years ago today, I sat at a computer in the Seattle suburbs and updated this site, thinking I would manage to update it again only under extreme duress; hence the optimistic title Quarterly Update (I). A funny thing happened shortly thereafter, and I got the blogging bug. And I haven’t been quite the same since.

Oh, this blog and I have had our ups and downs: three redesigns in the first three years; periods of six posts a day and periods of a post every six days; posts about my family, technology, music, and beer; and our dogs and our house. And occasionally I might have written something worth linking to.

I’ve been through periods where I watched my hit counts and my referrers several times a day. Where I despaired if my month over month readership fell. Where I treasured reciprocal links like signs of friendship.

These days? Well, last year I was a little bummed over the fact that my frequency of posting was falling off. In retrospect that was an inevitable fallout of the Sony Boycott blog period, when I was updating two blogs several times a day. But I also think it was a year ago that I first decided that the important thing wasn’t post frequency or readership, blogrolls or PageRank. It was the writing.

So from here on out I think I’ll just keep writing. One post at a time.

After all, this blog isn’t a sprint. It isn’t even a marathon. (For one thing, no one’s kissing the writer in Wellesley.) It’s more like breathing.

Links for June 7, 2007

Salon: The CIA’s favorite form of torture. Sensory deprivation for fun and questionable intelligence. Remember, kids, true love leaves no traces.

CNET: An electric Porsche at MIT. Going for the full electric with a little appreciated consumer grade sports car. Could the Porsche 914 be the next Delorean?

Since the soundtrack it comes from isn’t on iTunes or eMusic yet, I’m keen to hear this tribute to Zidane from Mogwai.

WSJ: Pen Pals: Letters Laud Scooter Libby, Fail to Spare Him. My favorite excerpt is the one from Deborah Tannen, a neighbor of Libby’s, who “described how Mr. Libby once offered to lend her family a tool to fix the problem with a septic drain field and then fixed it himself.” Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, and Scooter Libby is from the septic field!

NY Times: In Tennessee, Goats Eat the ‘Vine That Ate the South’. Now who’s going to eat the goats, I’d like to know.

MoreConsuming

I finally bit the bullet today and pulled the plug on my old manual system of tracking what I’m listening to, reading, or watching at any given moment. There were all sorts of reasons to do so, but three factors combined to make me make the change. The first was the eleven step manual workflow needed to update each of the entries in that list. The second was an honesty factor; I don’t need to show a movie in the list all the time if I only watch movies once a month. The third factor, though, is how easy AllConsuming makes it for me to track the information. Now all I have to do is tell AllConsuming that I’m listening to, reading, watching, or eating something and it will show it on my site automatically with a single line of JavaScript.

This, of course, flies in the face of what I said two years ago about blog related services. What’s changed is that I don’t have the time to maintain some of the more manual parts of the blog any more, and there are better services available now than there were then.