Google Books: Showing value but playing catch-up

I’ve defended Google Books in the past because I think it provides real value. To be able to search across books both in and out of print and offer links to purchase is important, and to be able to access out of print pieces of our cultural heritage on line is also valuable. In that light, I certainly think that Google’s decision to make parts of its Google Books corpus more visible, starting with the complete plays of Shakespeare, is a smart one; it provides some much needed visible value with which it can back up its arguments in favor of opt-out indexing, as Michael Arrington at TechCrunch points out.

My beef with their approach is that it doesn’t go far enough, and there are other offerings that go farther. Example: the Google Books Shakespeare page doesn’t offer an easy way to search across all the plays from the landing page. Even if you click into an individual play there is no Shakespeare-wide search. (Though I did appreciate the verisimilitude of a reader’s finger in the scan of the image on Page 6 of The Comedy of Errors—hypocrite lecteur! —mon semblable!)

By contrast, the University of Virginia’s Electronic Text Center has a fully searchable version of the Globe Edition (1866) online, as well as transcriptions of the First Folio and a side-by-side comparison of the two editions, plus other critical resources assembled in one place on its Shakespeare page. And you can search Shakespeare in context of the rest of the Modern English collection, or within the scope of a given play. There are even ebooks, in multiple formats, for each of the Shakespeare plays.

I certainly see the technological differences between the two offerings (heck, I helped to put the Etext Center one together). For one thing, there are very few scanned images at the Etext Center, while with Google Books you get to see every page in context. For another, the Etext Center is finite while the stated scope of Google Books is infinite. But it seems to me that the Etext Center is doing far more with its limited resources than Google has done so far with its limitless resources.

(And yes, I’m aware that Google provides an advanced book search that allows searching across all books whose author is Shakespeare. But first, doing so exposes results from prefaces, does not de-duplicate across multiple editions of the book, and otherwise returns a lot of extratextual information of dubious usefulness. And second, Google could easily have exposed this as a scoped search on the front page and chose not to do so. What here they miss, their toil should strive to mend.)

A bronze for broken cherries

Looks like our own Cambridge Brewing Company brought home the bronze from the first annual Radical Beer Open. Their Cerise Cassée (“Broken Cherry”) took third place in the Category II (5.1 – 7.5%). The article says that the brewing process “begins with a 100% sour mash for three days. After primary fermentation, brewer Will Meyers adds 300 pounds of sour cherries and ignites a second fermentation with a Belgian abbey ale yeast. A third fermentation with several strains of Brettanomyces lasts nine months in French oak Pinot Noir barrels.” Sounds like it’ll be fantastic. Going to have to check that one out.

Welcome to the alumni club, Scoble

Boston Globe: Blogger who often rapped Microsoft will join a start-up. What a misleading headline. That’s like saying “Man who sent emails daily leaves company.” I saw Robert’s tweaking of Mr. Softie as an important part of his working to build credibility with tech influentials, the people whom Microsoft most needed to win over. If your employer does something stupid, and you are trying to model a behavioral pattern of honesty and transparency through public discourse, you don’t clam up, you call them on it. And Scoble did that, time and time again.

I appreciate Scoble’s honesty. A lesser man would have claimed credit for the groundswell of blogging that happened at the company during his tenure. Scoble wisely disclaims, “I’m not the only blogger at Microsoft. There are about 3,000 of them here. They are not having the plug pulled on them. They changed the world. I just was the cheerleader.” But by his very public risk taking, Scoble made the world safer for them against some old school Microsofties who wanted badly to take them down.

All of which is to say, it’s very odd that the Globe chose to print some random laptop-toting schmoe’s picture instead of Robert’s with the story. Too bad it’s not available on line. It gave me a good chuckle.

Blogaversary 5

As e.e. cummings once wrote, Is 5. He wasn’t talking specifically about my blog, but today, on its blogaversary, he might well be. It was five years ago today, during the summer of 2001, that I got the bug to start writing in this website I had set up, originally on UserLand’s EditThisPage.com service, and I haven’t stopped writing since.

Five years is pretty much forever in blog years, and my blog has started to show its age a little bit. It was last redesigned over two years ago, and the content hasn’t been nearly as compelling in my opinion recently. Part of this is that my job has been very demanding, which is of course a good thing, but over the last six months or so I’ve been lucky if I’ve blogged once a day.

Generally the issue for me is time. I have approximately negative two hours every day for thought, and it’s really making my writing suffer. I hope that next month when I am on some of my retreats with the Tanglewood Festival Chorus to spend some time writing and thinking about my writing and figure out the direction I need to go with the writing.

In the meantime, I think the one thing that will likely stay on the blog is my music writing. Just as soon as I find time to write a couple reviews that I owe for BlogCritics.

But you know, it hasn’t been such a bad five years, as a brief look back over other blogaversaries shows:

  • 2002: “Hard to believe that it was a year ago today that I started this weblog in earnest. At the time I certainly didn’t think I’d stick to it; the title (“Quarterly Update (i)”) indicated a certain… lack of optimism.”
  • 2003: “Since my first blogaversary, graduating from business school, moving 3000 miles, and buying a house, the blog has been a lot less technical and hopefully a little more human (apologies to those for whom either prospect is daunting).’
  • 2004: “I was just getting ready to lament that I hadn’t done so much technology blogging this year, but I really don’t know that I missed it too much.”
  • 2005: “Dear blog, sorry I forgot our blogaversary. Yes, I know you’re mad. This is the second year in a row I forgot …”

Okay, so maybe not the most illuminating tour. Perhaps I’ll just shut up and start working on the next post.

Not that much of a stretch

Found on a future bookshelf, thanks to the fine folks at Wired:

Dianetics Revisited: the Truth About Scientology.

Check the author. (Use the sideways view at BookOfJoe if you need help.)

Hee hee hee.

Especially funny is its placement a few books down from The GTDism Reader: The Last Testament of the Prophet David Allen. (Merlin Mann, are you listening?)

Also good: the byline on Look Young Forever.

Friday Random 10: Not on a damned plane edition

I can’t stop grinning. This may be because I arrived home after 2 am this morning because of delays flying back from my business trip in Milwaukee and therefore am operating on a massive sleep deficit. But it may also be because of the juxtaposition of “Hey Ya!”, “Word Up” and “The Rubbers Song.” Heh.

  1. Louis Armstrong, “2:19 Blues” (Louis Armstrong of New Orleans)
  2. Elvis Costello, “You Turned to Me” (North)
  3. Neko Case, “Knock Loud” (Canadian Amp)
  4. Shannon Worrell, “Jefferson’s Lament” (The Moviegoer)
  5. Neko Case, “Things That Scare Me” (Blacklisted)
  6. Cameo, “Word Up” (Word Up!)
  7. OutKast, “Hey Ya! (Radio Mix)” (The Way You Move/Hey Ya! [single])
  8. New York Chamber Symphony, Gerard Schwarz (Richard Strauss, composer), “V. Le Trophée” (from Divertimento (after Couperin) (Schoenberg: String Quartet Concerto/Strauss: Divertimento)
  9. The Postal Service, “Against All Odds” (Against All Odds [single])
  10. The Pharcyde, “The Rubbers Song” (Stolen Moments: Red Hot + Blue)

In memoriam: Peter Southwell-Sander

I received an email today indicating that a dreaded moment had come: the Reverend Peter Southwell-Sander, member and adjunct staff of Old South Church and husband of senior minister Nancy Taylor, passed away Wednesday night. I didn’t get a chance to know Peter well, but I mourn his loss, and what I do know about him makes the loss the more painful: Anglican minister, author of books on Puccini and Verdi (!), satirist (!!), baptizer of one of Mick Jagger’s children (??!?!?), and to the end of his life a tireless proponent for the inclusive welcoming nature of God’s love—and the need to translate that into this world for the poor and marginalized all around us.

Nancy and Peter were a model of grace in the face of a long struggle. I mentioned their long dance together earlier in the week; now I believe he dances free of pain in a better place, and I hope that Nancy has some peace after their long shared struggle together.

It’s not opera, but the music that is in my mind now was written by another Briton who found a home in a different religious tradition:

Alleluia. May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.
Remember me O lord, when you come into your kingdom.
Give rest O Lord to your [servant], who has fallen asleep.
The choir of saints have found the well-spring of life, and door of paradise.
Life: a shadow and a dream.
Weeping at the grave creates the song:
Alleluia. Come, enjoy rewards and crowns I have prepared for you.

Lost post: Blogging from 41A

Just found a post I wrote on my transatlantic flight last Friday, June 2, that was never posted, and thought it still was worth reading:

Interesting that on a Lufthansa flight, on an Airbus plane, I am using an in-flight Internet service from Boeing. Somewhat less interesting but more frustrating is that it is as slow as molasses. I am currently experiencing the joy of synchronizing my corporate Outlook account over this slow connection and it’s excruciating. It’s like giving yourself a paper cut and waiting until you bleed to death.

I had an uneventful last night in Munich. My business for the last two days had me at the Munich airport hotel, the Kapinsky, a nice if expensive facility (in room Internet: 20 euros/day; free WiFi provided by what must have been a single router with approximately the same range in coverage distance as your average American Idol pop singer shows in emotion. It was slow in the morning and impossible by the afternoon. Why is it that an $89/night hotel in rural Ohio provides free wireless Internet that works, while a luxury hotel anywhere in the world provides sub-par service and makes you pay for the privilege? Is there a theme emerging here? Am I turning into a Johnny One-Note? Maybe so, but over the last ten years the Internet has inched closer to being an indispensable utility for me, like electricity or conventional telephones, while at the same time hotels and the companies that provide their services remain in the dark ages. At least Lufthansa and the Boeing Connexion service have a technical excuse–they are providing their Internet service over a satellite connection where the base receiver is moving at 600 mph. (Though I should note that conventional satellite-based high speed Internet services provide speeds as much as 100 times greater.)

At any rate, I did something shameful last night. For the first time in eight years of international travel, I had an American fast food meal in a foreign country. (The horror.) My excuse is that our conference wrapped up at 4:30 and I spent the following two hours resolving last minute discussions with our business partners, then had to climb onto back to back one hour calls with the US at 7 pm. With the half hour before the first call, I had to find food quickly, so I took the path of least resistance and grabbed a chicken sandwich from the Burger King outside.

At least I made up for it the previous two nights. My first day in Munich I spent the afternoon at our corporate offices downtown, then headed back to the Marienplatz and a meal of wursts, kraut, and Dunkelweiss at the small Augusteinerbräu beerkellar in the shadow of the Frauenkirche. And the food on Wednesday night was quite good, if absurdly filling.

I’m always torn when I come to Munich. I would love to be able to stay another few days to explore the countryside and the city and practice the language, but at the same time I cannot wait to return home.

Time to save PBS and NPR again

Looks like the majority Congress is back with a big knife for Elmo again: the House Appropriations subcommittee on health and education funding voted to whack 23% from the PBS and NPR budgets next year. Wish they would have thought of the “economic responsibility” argument when they were handing out tax cuts like candy.

Sign the MoveOn petition if you feel (as I do) that noncommercial broadcasting is still important and relevant, and worth paying for.

The Great CD Lossless Ripping Project: Final Tally

After nine and a half months (!) of progress, two hard drives with a total of three-quarters of a terabyte of usable space, and over a thousand CDs, my project to rip all my CDs to losslessly compressed digital files is finished. There are other projects ahead, metadata updates (I have over two thousand tracks in my library with no year, for instance) and ripping obscure vinyl to name two. But the heavy lifting is over.

How heavy was the lifting? Heavy enough that I prepared a separate page with all the statistics and charts. But here’s the summary:

  • Tracks: 13,978
  • Total time: 42 days, 2 hours, 40 minutes, 51 seconds
  • Disk space: 312.81 GB
  • Artists: 1081
  • Albums: 1029

Would I do it again, knowing what I know now about the time involved and the effort? Yes, in a heartbeat. I’m learning more about music all over again just by listening to things that I hadn’t pulled out in months, thanks to the ability to listen via shuffle (yes, life is random). Plus I can start reclaiming some space from the mass of disks that consumed a massive corner of my basement (don’t worry, they were elevated above the flood stage).

The Academical Potemkin Village?

Tin Man wrote a few weeks back about the planned extensions to Mr. Jefferson’s University. The impetus for Tin Man’s post was a generally good New York Times Magazine article that generally avoided the easy story angles, though there were flavors of architects, both sophisticated and moronic, vs. Virginians both reactionary and preservationist. I was particularly delighted to see the author’s reaction to both Hereford College, though I have to say that Darden is not nearly as grim as he painted it—certainly better than Sloan’s modernist gray architecture. Perhaps the author should have visited Darden during a barbecue. But the description of Hereford College is dead on:

What’s the alternative? Many of the university’s modernists point admiringly to Hereford College, a complex of undergraduate dorms designed in the 90’s by the New York architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien. “There’s an engagement with the landscape and a compositional playfulness,” says Daniel Bluestone, a professor of architectural history at the university. But I found Hereford, which is home to some 500 students, as depressing as Darden: an off-kilter arrangement of towering brick slabs, their slitlike windows resembling gun ports in World War II pillboxes. Unlike the Lawn, which on that same morning was full of students sunbathing and tossing Frisbees, the quad at Hereford was devoid of any life.

The one point missing from the article, though, was the violence that has been done to the Grounds by other well meaning architects, for example Gilmer Hall and the so-called New Dorms. With that context in mind, it’s kind of understandable that we would be a little cautious.

But I continue to be nervous about the overall layout and how the neighborhood to the south will be affected. I think the Glee Club House is immediately to the south of the circular amphitheatre at the end of the terrace. But the lack of a map overlay of the existing neighborhood, even through the extended images on the Arts and Sciences web site, makes it hard to tell.

Happy 35th Anniversary

The_Old_Folks.jpg

Continuing the festschrift in honor of my parents’ 35th wedding anniversary, as started on my sister’s blog:

…erm, well, no one could possibly have said it better than my sister did. But I’ll just say this: When I think about how two unpretentious farm kids from opposite sides of the Mason Dixon line managed to raise a pair of liberal city kids like us, I thank heaven that they didn”t kill us before we reached maturity. Our continued existence is tribute to their supreme patience and skills as parents.

But I will second many of the thoughts that my sister raised in her post. And I’ll raise another one, borrowed from a powerful sermon that Dr. Nancy Taylor preached last December at Old South:

When my husband and I were married, our friend who officiated at the wedding spoke of dance as a metaphor for marriage. He described marriage as a way of moving in synchronicity with another. He said that to love and cherish each other for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, was a kind of dance. For the dance to flow, each partner must be keenly sensitive to the moves and moods of the other.

Nancy and Peter continue to be an inspiration to me as they dance the slow dance at the end of Peter’s life.

I only know one other couple who has anywhere near that grace. That couple danced their first dance in North Carolina over 35 years ago, in a church music conference. They danced their way into each other’s families…as challenging as that must have been for someone whose families had always been in the remote valleys of North Carolina and in the Mennonite farmlands of Pennsylvania. They danced their way through 35 years: through NASA and music lessons and church music and ultimately retirement, of drawings and PTA meetings and ballet and soccer and orchestra. Of MGs that were never quite finished in the garage. Of back deck barbecues, vegetable gardens, church potlucks. Of making music together. And they’re dancing now, probably on the deck of that house overlooking the Smokies. Hopefully after a good dinner.

Thanks, Mom and Dad.