Smart. Very Smart

It looks like Smart cars, which I saw for the first time on my trip to Paris in 1999, will finally be making their way to the US market. At least, that’s what rumors and unnamed sources say in such prominent places as the Wall Street Journal and Der Spiegel. Think that’s a lot of fuss for unverifiable rumors? You probably haven’t filled up recently. The nifty two seater Smart is poised to enter the market at a banner time for small vehicles thanks to soaring post-Katrina fuel prices; fuel economy is reported to range from 46 MPG city to 70 MPG highway. Of course, they crumple like an aluminum can if you breathe on them wrong, but honestly—after my most recent $40 tank of gas, I’m thinking that sounds like a reasonable trade-off for a lower fuel bill.

If nothing else, the Smart should set a bar for other automakers as the subcompact market heats up. Maybe now we’ll finally see the Volkswagen Polo in the US.

God bless the tellers of truth II: Museum of Bad Art

When an article about the famed Museum of Bad Art in Dedham opens with the line, “When I heard the Hockney show was closing [at the MFA], we thought we’d pick up some of the slack,” you know the gloves are off. This is apparently my morning to try to piss people off, but I wasn’t really drawn to the David Hockney show at the MFA, and the MOBA’s take on it, “Hackneyed Portraits,” is just brilliantly funny.

I like the new works, but they still can’t hold a candle to Lucy in the Field With Flowers or Sunday On The Pot With George.

God bless the tellers of truth

I thought his book Kitchen Confidential was nasty, brutish, and not short enough, but at least Anthony Bourdain has the cojones to tell it like it is:

[Emeril] looks like [legendary chef Georges Auguste] Escoffier now compared to some of the bobble-heads who are on that network… [For example,] Rachael Ray. She’s paid more and is more popular [than Emeril], and I see a day when the executives say, we don’t need Emeril anymore, even though he built their network. They’ll replace him with some industry-created freakozoid who’s been grown from a seedling into a recognized brand. When you look at Sandra Lee or Rachael Ray or some of the new shows like “Calorie Commando” that are just vomit-inducing — at least Emeril worked his way up and has a real restaurant empire.

Heck yeah. Apologies to her fans, but we really need to have a Beat Up on Rachael Ray week. It’s still not clear to me why she’s become such a Persona when her main talent appears to be talking endlessly and purveying mediocre food.

QTN™: Harpoon Saison (100 Barrel Series)

I’ve written about Harpoon’s limited 100 Barrel series before—including the Oatmeal Stout, the most phenomenal offering in the whole series. But I need to amend that last statement. The new Harpoon Saison is the finest beer yet to come from this particular brewery… and I say that not just as an aficionado of the Saison style in particular and most Belgo-French styles in general, but as a fan of fine beer in all its forms.

The nose is a good start—bready with banana undertones promising good complex esters in the taste. The taste doesn’t disappoint either—up front hoppy brightness, opening into a bready but bright (lemon? spices?) body, with a pleasantly lemony aftertaste.

The more impressive part, though, is the nature of the middle part. If you close your eyes, the Saison could be a French Saison or even a Belgian—Lisa’s comment was “It tastes like LaChouffe.” This is high praise indeed for an American beer in general and a New England beer in particular, this region not noted for its Belgophile beer styles.

This last may be the biggest obstacle to the Saison joining Harpoon’s regular lineup. It’s so different from Harpoon’s regular styles that I can’t get my mind around it. It’s like Sam Adams suddenly brewing a Duvel. But the disjoint in styles may ultimately be a good thing. Harpoon’s regular lineup has been stuck for a long time. But suddenly a raspberry-flavored Hefe has joined the family, and maybe some more will come. I vote for the Saison sticking around for a long long long time.

Friday Random 10: Oh thank god edition

I can honestly say I’ve never been so glad to get to the end of a week as I am today. Of course it’s not over; I have a stack of calls and meetings this afternoon. But as I look at the window in my new office at work I can already feel my blood pressure dropping. Bring it on, rainy weekend! I pwn j00z!

  1. Mitch Hedberg, “Candy Bars” (Mitch All Together)
  2. Beth Orton, “Absinthe” (Comfort of Strangers)
  3. They Might Be Giants, “Narrow Your Eyes” (Apollo 18)
  4. Brodsky Quartet (George Crumb, composer), “Black Angels I: Absence: Threnody II. Black Angels (Tutti)” (Death and the Maiden)
  5. Choir of Trinity College, “Gloria sei dir. v. 3” (In Dulci Jubilo)
  6. Charlie Haden and Pat Metheny, “Message to a Friend” (Beyond the Missouri Sky)
  7. Luscious Jackson, “Under Your Skin” (Fever In Fever Out)
  8. Sufjan Stevens, “Concerning the UFO Sighting Near Highland, Illinois” (Illinoise)
  9. The Velvet Underground, “White Light/White Heat” (White Light/White Heat)
  10. The MDH Band, “Satellite of Love (reprise)” (The Million Dollar Hotel)

DRM or Free’n’Ugly: why Hakon Lie is wrong about web fonts

As I keep forgetting to prove by posting some old work, I was once an ardent amateur typographer before the web rendered that pastime, as well as most desktop publishing, all but obsolete. As someone who used to code my favorite font family into my stylesheets on the off chance that someone would have Minion installed on their machine, I should be right in the target market for Opera CTO Hakon Lie’s write-up on improving web typography.

And yet, I find myself with some misgivings. Not because there aren’t problems with web typography. To cite one example, several sites that I visit from my home browser used to appear strange to the point of being unreadable because Safari read the type family and found the nearest match—but as you can see, Myriad Wild is no substitute for Adobe’s elegant Myriad sans serif, and when the browser identifies the music-font variant of Minion as the right text in which to set a page of text it’s time to give up.

But the biggest problem with fonts online for me is the same as the biggest problem offline: quality and readability. And for this cause I think Hakon’s suggestion that free fonts should be accessible by browsers to render web pages is not the best idea. The best example I can think of is the one Hakon used: Goodfish. I may be a font snob, but I can’t help but think a web page set in this font would drive me to turn off font downloading—or stop visiting the page. It’s not a bad font, it’s just not a good font for setting text. In fact, it was the general unavailability of good fonts for reading text on screen that drove Microsoft to commission Verdana, Georgia and the other fonts in their Web type set in the first place. Display faces are a dime a dozen, and I happily use freely available ones where necessary—but good fonts for setting text are worth their weight in gold, and the odds of them being released for free use without some sort of DRM are minimal. (That I can name only two exceptions, the highly useful Gentium and Bitstream’s Vera, proves the rule.)

And speaking of DRM and free, there are two unattractive possibilities that would come from the institution of standards for downloading Web fonts. First, there is a long history of ripping off and undercompensating font designers (think of all those collections of 1001 free fonts that consist entirely of cheap knock offs of gold standard fonts that cost money) that can only get worse if the pressure to provide free fonts for Web use grows. I think that a flood of even more cheap knock-off fonts falls in the category of really bad unintended consequences. At the same time, the last thing I want to see is an even more restrictive set of DRM schemes around font technologies. And think of the challenges of enforcing “web only” font licenses through DRM when more and more of the user’s desktop applications are migrating to the Web.

I also think the point that is made on Big Patterns about the difference between free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-speech fonts is well made. But at the end of the day what I want is good fonts that can be used online without resorting to PDF, Flash, or various CSS image replacement techniques—and without paying an ASCAP-style yearly license for the right to do so. I don’t see this happening under Hakon’s suggestion without some extremely creative thinking on the part of the font foundries and software engineers.

In which it is discovered that I am an idiot, albeit a funky one.

Color me careless, but slightly funkier: the RSS feed on the new Funky16Corners web site is, in fact, set up as a podcast, with proper enclosures and everything. You may want to subscribe if you have a yen for funk that tastes so good it like to make your tongue beat your brains out, as my pan-Southern uncle would say. (Well, not about funk, but anyway.)

Best track so far on today’s Funky16Corners Radio: “I’m Mr. Big Stuff (Big Deal),” the “answer” record to Jean Knight’s “Mr. Big Stuff” (of Burger King commercial fame).

Sox, Bruins, ESPN, and NASCAR talk IT

One of the more unusual panels this year at MIT Sloan’s CIO Symposium has some speakers who aren’t usually at IT conferences. We’ve pulled together the VP of Media Applications at ESPN, the Managing Director of IT for NASCAR, the VP of Technology and eBusiness for the Boston Bruins and TD Banknorth Garden, and the Director of IT for the Red Sox to talk about the Future of IT and Sports. Talk about mission critical: when the scoring system goes down, IT is facing mobs of angry fans along with their usual constituency. It should make for an interesting discussion.

As discussed previously, we also have a keynote from Google’s VP for Google Enterprise, so between discussions of consumer software in the enterprise and enterprise IT for sports it should be an interesting day. If you haven’t registered, there are still a few spaces available; though we’ve officially sold out, it’s still possible to register as a walk-in on the day of the event on a first-come, first-served basis. You can find us in Kresge Auditorium starting at 7:30 am on Wednesday, June 21. Hope you can make it!

A farewell to Gates

I haven’t said anything about Bill Gates’ announcement that he’ll be stepping out of day-to-day work over the next two years, yielding the chief architect reins to Ray Ozzie. Primarily it’s because my life has been pretty busy, but partly it’s because Gates has seemed, from the outside at least, like a non-factor in recent years. With Vista coming to market without big features like WinFS and several years overdue, and with Microsoft continuing to struggle to get customers to re-up for the newest versions of Office, it feels like Bill hasn’t had anything really new and compelling to show the market in a really long time.

Scott Rosenberg does a good job of connecting the dots in his supposition about Bill’s role in the Vista slip: on the one hand Bill had to watch as the scope of Vista was pared down and many revolutionary features were put aside, and on the other the culture that Bill and the Windows team had fostered meant that slips in the schedule were never acknowledged until it was far too late (thanks to Microsoft blogger Philip Su for some incisive and honest observations about the management culture in Windows).

My perspective from a greater distance is this: Bill and Steve Ballmer centralized Microsoft’s strategic decisions to an enormous degree, despite the generally broad operational freedom that individual product units enjoyed. And it’s not clear that that organizational move paid off. Might Microsoft be further along the path in dominating the enterprise software market—a place where the company does well with SQL Server and Exchange but has yet to make a splash with other business and IT apps despite years of investment—if the enterprise business had been able to duck the Windows tax? And by that, I mean the internal Windows tax that every business at Microsoft faces: every business has to show how it’s relevant to the corporate cash cow, and heaven forbid that the busines s plan suggests that the new initiative should embrace a multi-platform, multivendor view of the world instead of the Windows party line.

The result is that Gates rides off into the sunset as the champion of the desktop, but with many goals for Microsoft in the enterprise, on mobile devices, and in the home left unrealized. And with many users frustrated by years of vulnerabilities and diminishing returns.

Can Ray Ozzie turn this around? Maybe. He certainly has more enterprise cred than Bill. I’m not convinced that his vision is as broad as Bill’s, but that just might be a good thing for the long-term health of the company.

Misson of Burma in the Berkshires

Hat tip to reader Kate, the blogging intern at MASS MoCA, who commented on a recent post that unfrozen rockers Mission of Burma will be playing a gig at MassMoCA on Saturday, July 1:

Mission of Burma has an upcoming show you may want to check out. It’s at MASS MoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art), Saturday July 1 at 8:00 pm. It will be outdoors in Courtyard C if the weather permits, otherwise in the Hunter Center. Tickets are $22 advance, $26 day of show.

If you’re not familiar with MASS MoCA, it’s in North Adams, in northern Berkshire County. Directions are available on our website at www.massmoca.org.

Tickets may be purchased online or by calling the box office, (413) 662-2111.

Normally I don’t really post commercial advertisements in this space, but hey, it’s Burma. Thanks to Kate for the info.

Friday Random 10: Sir Nose edition

So I get all jazzed up about Funkadelic and what does the iPod turn out for the Friday Random 10? With two exceptions, the most unfunky collection of tracks that never moved a booty. Somewhere Sir Nose is laughing. At least Gil Scott-Heron and the Felaesque Talking Heads track are holding him at bay.

  1. The Mendoza Line, “Throw It In the Fire” (Fortune)
  2. Gil Scott-Heron, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” (Evolution (And Flashback))
  3. Gemma Hayes, “Day One” (Night On My Side)
  4. Brodsky Quartet (Dmitri Shostakovich, composer), “String Quartet No. 12 in D flat Major: I. Moderato” (Shostakovich: String Quartets 11, 12, 13)
  5. Talking Heads, “Double Groove (unfinished outtake)” (Remain in Light)
  6. Paul Westerberg, “Looking Up in Heaven” (The Wired Cd)
  7. Robert Shaw Chorale, “Medley: Good Christian Men, Rejoice; Silent Night; Patapan; O Come, All Ye Faithful” (A Festival of Carols)
  8. Dave Brubeck Quartet, “Pick Up Sticks” (Time Out)
  9. R.E.M., “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” (Monster)
  10. My Computer, “Hole in the Road”

Standing on the verge of downloading

As if eMusic’s value proposition wasn’t already compelling (subscription prices as low as $0.22 a track, DRM-free 192bps MP3 downloads, a wide catalog of jazz, indie rock, and classical offerings), there’s now an even more compelling reason: many of the classic Funkadelic recordings on the Westbound label are now available for download from eMusic.

That includes the absolute masterpiece Maggot Brain, the fine self-titled album, the political party album America Eats Its Young, and the finest album title ever, Standing on the Verge of Getting It On, which features some really tasty Eddie Hazel guitar work as well as the stone classic “Jimmy’s Got a Little Bit of Bitch in Him.” Missing are Funkadelic’s earlier classic “Free Your Mind…And Your Ass Will Follow,” and the late “One Nation Under a Groove,” “The Electric Spanking of War Babies” and “Uncle Jam Wants You.”

There’s a lot to explore in what is there, though. Standing on the Verge and Maggot Brain alone should keep me occupied for weeks. Now if y’all will excuse me, I need to free my mind.

Apple store moves ahead, no Copy Cop whining expected

Boston.com: Apple gets green light on Boston store plan. The store design, which was revised to overcome objections about how well the store would fit in with its Boylston St. neighbors, will feature interior stainless steel columns that divide the three-story glass facade into sections, which apparently is going to help the building blend in better. Hmm.

That’s OK by Copy Cop, the building’s current occupant, though; they already have a FAQ document for their customers about the move, though nothing on their blogs. (Yes, Copy Cop management has blogs…)