Still going after all these years.
Boston Globe: Church’s new sound is meant to be appealing. The new bell wheel, which will allow the bell at Old South to be properly tolled, is beautiful—it has been at the front of our sanctuary for a few weeks. I’m looking forward to hearing it.
And looking at the picture in the Globe, I’m wondering when we can do a tour of the tower. Very cool.
It’s a big milestone birthday for Esta this year: she turns twenty-something 
. Happy birthday to my favorite seminarian.
New York Times: Princeton Stops Its Early Admissions, Joining Movement to Make Process Fairer. This change hits oddly close to home. I was a beneficiary of one of Princeton’s early admission processes. At that point they came in two flavors: early decision, which was a binding agreement that you would go to the school if they accepted you, and early action, in which the college announced its decision early and you had until spring to decide to accept the offer. It’s not clear whether one or both of these options was discontinued.
It’s also interesting to me that Princeton is following this road so soon after Harvard’s decision. It wasn’t that long ago that major university admissions organizations were in trouble for collusion when they made major changes to their admissions systems. I’ll be curious to see how this goes, since it looks like the trend is definitely spreading beyond the few schools that started this process.
I have to confess, though, that I was surprised to see the link between early admission and disadvantage for lower income students. I never felt at a disadvantage in the process, perhaps because I was insulated from it—I only knew one other student who was applying to Princeton. But I think that the college admissions consulting industry has gotten much stronger since then as well.
Just a quick note that I did, in fact, make it in last night. It’s taken me a while to get things going today thanks to the over 300 email messages in my personal account, many of them spam comments that needed managing.
Salt Lake is just as beautiful as I remember it. I haven’t strayed far enough from the hotel to determine if it’s just as weird too…
My flight from Boston arrived at 9:30 last night, something like two and a half hours past our planned departure. Of course, I had feared something like this, but when they were announcing the delay I had seen my bag loaded onto the plane and figured I was stuck with it for the long run. And of course the gate agent pointed out that there was a general delay at O’Hare, so most of us would make our connections. Right?
Heh. The flight to Salt Lake had left a half hour previously.
So I spent an hour in line to rebook my flight, twenty minutes walking to the airport Hilton, a quick four hours sleep, then back into the terminal to see what I could do. I missed my first opportunity on a morning flight—I was #3 on the standby list, but the flight was oversold and they actually had to forcibly rebook a paying passenger. So now I’m waiting for the flight I did get booked on, which will get me in after the first day of the show is over, in clothes I have been wearing for 36 hours, unshaven and bleary.
I don’t know why I still get upset about this stuff. The airlines have repeatedly proven, particularly at O’Hare, that keeping a schedule going is an art that exceeds their grasp. But it’s not funny any more.
When will I learn to stop saying things like “it looks like clear sailing”? My flight has been delayed two hours to Chicago, which makes me nervous about my connection to Salt Lake City. The good news is that everything in and out of Chicago is delayed, so I might actually make it. The bad news is that I probably won’t get there until well past midnight, and I have an early morning phone call the next day. And let’s not even think about luggage…
Traveling on the day before my wife’s birthday sucks.
Fortunately that’s the suckiest thing about this flight so far. I got here in plenty of time, have a seat (albeit a middle) to Chicago, and it looks like it’ll be clear sailing to the ITSMf meeting in Salt Lake City.
The last time I was in Salt Lake City, aside from connecting through the airport, was some eight years ago when I stayed there while doing some consulting in Ogden. I recall that they had some pretty good local microbrews, in spite of the Byzantine local liquor laws. But I can’t find any of them using BeerAdvocate, so I’ll have to hang loose and hope for the best.
I’m happy it’s Friday; so happy that I’m about to fall asleep sitting up. This week’s Random 10, drawn using iTunes 7 from my full library, has a lot of good time tunes, for whatever reason, but I’m not complaining:
Boston Globe (yesterday): Panel OK’s 2 rival wiretapping bills. Ok, I’m very unhappy of this trend of the senate to roll over for the Administration’s power-mad citizen surveillance schemes. “What, the covert warrantless wiretaps were illegal? Well, let’s just make ’em legal!!”
But here’s the rare thing, at least where Virginia senator John Warner is concerned: I have a small amount of new respect for a few of those senators, namely the senators from the Senate Armed Services Committee (McCain, John Warner, Lindsey Graham) who announced their continued opposition to proposals from the White House that limit an defendant’s access to evidence if it is classified. I can think of no system more ripe for abuse than one in which the Executive Branch collects evidence without notifying the judicial branch through a warrant application; classifies the evidence; then uses it to convict someone with no opportunities for challenge.
Overall the picture out of judiciary as painted by this article looks like total disarray and a complete lack of inclination for the senate to fall in line behind Bush’s police state measures. Thank goodness, democracy is messy.
I haven’t really been any less busy in the last week—I was in Pittsburgh on Tuesday, Chicago on Wednesday (hence the no blogging), and have been trying to balance my BSO and church choir commitments. Fortunately our kitchen is in a state where I can’t do anything on it until the plasterers are done, or I’d be a wreck.
But for once I’m breathing easily. I managed to arrange a break in my schedule this morning so that I can help manage the contractors for the plaster work, and I have some time off this afternoon. It’s a short respite—in the interim, I have a trio of meetings and then on Sunday I hop a plane for Salt Lake City. But I somehow have the feeling that I’ll survive now.
I have nothing to say about the new Yo La Tengo album, except that it makes me happier than any record that I’ve heard for a while. And of course I Am Not Afraid of You And I Will Beat Your Ass is an title that instantly joins such fine names as Free Your Mind … And Your Ass Will Follow. One wonders if that’s what the band had in mind. In fact, is any album with ass in the title destined for greatness?
EMusic has a serious take, and a completely not-serious take, on the album as well.
As per usual, I’ve been in meetings and on travel all day (in fact, I was in the Pittsburgh airport at 2:30 pm when I started writing this) and am just catching up on Apple’s announcements from earlier this afternoon. Briefly: new higher capacity iPods with click-wheel driven search, new thinner iPod Nanos, a Shuffle that doesn’t look like a USB stick, new radically overhauled iTunes, iTunes store with downloadable movies and games, and a preview of a set-top box.
So read between the lines. What you see is a company trying to answer to Wall Street how it will follow up the iPod, arguably the most successful new product of the first half of this decade. The answer is content and a wider footprint, and a clear statement that the iPod has become not just Apple’s music brand, but Apple’s consumer electronics brand (to use an awful phrase). The iPod/iTunes/iTV family is now solidly positioned in Apple’s product suite for people who watch and listen, but don’t necessarily create.
That’s not a bad thing, and the devices don’t lock out user created content; on the contrary, the embrace of podcasting within iTunes is as significant a factor of the meteoric rise of that phenomenon as anything else. But what this announcement illustrates is that it’s not just the MP3 player makers and the makers of competing DRM; it’s the living room electronics manufacturers who are squarely in Apple’s sights. And having screwed around with dizzyingly complex products for about 40 years now, these guys have a lot to lose. Should be fun to watch…
One last thought: The momentum with which other studios add movies to the newly renamed iTunes Store will probably be considerably slower than the rate at which music studios signed up, and that might really hurt Apple’s odds in this market. Bet Jobs didn’t figure on that when Disney bought Pixar…
Oh, and confidential to ZDNet’s David Berlind. Given the amount of energy the record companies have put into fighting iTunes, the number of alternative companies that are out there, and the still rapidly changing market, I’d say it’s a little precipitous to call for government intervention in the iTunes/iPod ecosystem. Particularly since there is nothing, device manufacturers’s claims to the contrary, that prevents any content manufacturer from getting their content onto the iPod. The format is called MP3, and it trades off restrictive DRM for support everywhere. Look into it. It seems to be working well for eMusic.
I didn’t post anything yesterday about September 11. It’s not that I didn’t think about it. How could I not? I was in Cambridge, just a few miles from where I live now, when I first saw the news on Yahoo. I am constantly surrounded by reminders of that day, whether the profound (the silent presence of a 9/11 widow in our soprano section, the memory of Doug, the skies over the Charles that were so eerily silent that week) or the mundane (long lines and byzantine security procedures at the airport, five years of online saber rattling by both sides).
But I cannot participate in the sanctification of September 11. And I cannot give the administration a free pass for continuing to drag us into unrelated conflicts in memory of that day. Too much wrong has already been done in the name of this day.
Ironically, I’m flying (on business) for much of this week, so I don’t really have the time or energy to say more. But this column by H. D. S. Greenway in the Globe, calling the administration on their policies, is a good start.
When all content is digitized and free, it might feel a little like this: being able to play PC and Mac games that gripped your attention 10 and 20 years ago on the same platform.
Item 1: DosBox, a limited x86/DOS emulation environment that is focused on the gaming experience. Or more precisely, DosBox plus Thexder, the Sierra Online-published transforming mech warrior shoot-em-up side-scroller. Man, I used to play the Apple II version of this for hours when I was in high school.
Item 2: Abuse, a shooting side scroller published by Bungie in the mid-90s and now available on Unix and Mac platforms. Abuse and Marathon (Bungie’s other early hit, before they got bought by Microsoft and did Halo) together were responsible for many, many lost evenings when Lisa was in grad school.
Both now run on Mac OS X (as well as other platforms), and both are a pretty good nostalgia blast.
Thanks to a link on Fark for this: Billy and the Boingers MP3s. I owned the book that contained the flexidisc with these songs, but we could only play it on my childhood portable record player. Hope these sound better than they did on that record player; I had to weight the flexidisc with a penny to keep it from slipping, and it still didn’t rotate at a consistent rate which lent a warbly quality to the music. If these sound halfway decent, they’re a shoo-in for my next 80 mix.