Still going after all these years.
Greg Greene tipped me off to the new satellite coverage of Europe in Google Maps, which led to a minor productivity drain earlier today. See: Florence, Längenfeld and Sölden in Austria, the Tower of London, even a certain well-known mouse.
One caveat: you can’t search the map in Austria—or apparently in Romania. And searching in Switzerland is a little funny: Google finds Luzern (but not Lucerne) but Geneva and not Genève, and shows Genève on the map.
On the train back to Boston with my coworker yesterday, I was looking over the sheet music for our next TFC concert when my coworker asked about my next performance. I told him, “The first week in May we‘ll be doing Stravinsky’s Œdipus Rex.”
“Cool,” he said. “I’ll have to bring my daughter. She’s thirteen and taking voice lessons. She’d love it.”
Ah, I thought. But will she—or you—love the story? It’s such a nice story too—just in time for Mother’s Day.
The music, though, is absolutely astonishing. Stravinsky wrote some of the most amazingly inventive, sinuous melody lines for this work, which sports a libretto by Jean Cocteau. I think my personal favorite is the herky-jerky chromaticism of the passage where Œdipus batters down the door, kills his mother/wife, and puts out his own eyes. The music, if you’re not careful, sounds a little like a circus act. Last night in practice it sounded like the arrival of the Furies: after a couple of rehearsals John Oliver’s intensity kicked up a notch and he urged us deeper into the meaning of the music, and the results were unsettlingly good. I am looking forward to hearing the orchestration next week.
Of course, the question is, can I in conscience recommend the piece to my co-worker? I guess I’ll have to do what I would want him to do for me when I have a kid: send him the synopsis and a pointer to some of the music and let him make up his own mind.
I proved that it is possible to work five hours in New York City, six hours on a train, and still get back in time for a 7 pm rehearsal. You have to get up at 4 am to do it, though.
Another discovery: the parking lot at South Station, which is nearly deserted at 4:50 am.
Quick update today. We drove all afternoon down to Lisa’s parents, including one seven-mile stretch around Newark that took about an hour. So needless to say I’m a bit mad at mechanical objects, am seeing red, have no desire to push a shopping trolley, and spent a good part of the afternoon seeing primary colors, mostly a red mix.
Ba-dum-psch.
Paul Thurrott: Where Vista Fails. A long list of major and minor feature and UI issues in the latest (February) community preview of Vista, the next version of Windows. Some of these issues seem minor, but one in particular, the User Account Protection model, caught my eye. It’s good to see that Windows will be moving toward a model of requiring separate point authentications to perform certain actions, but it sounds like they’ve overdone it with the actions that require re-authenticating, not to mention the warning dialogs:
Once Firefox is installed, there are two icons on my Desktop I’d like to remove: The Setup application itself and a shortcut to Firefox. So I select both icons and drag them to the Recycle Bin. Simple, right?
Wrong. Here’s what you have to go through to actually delete those files in Windows Vista. First, you get a File Access Denied dialog (Figure) explaining that you don’t, in fact, have permission to delete a … shortcut?? To an application you just installed??? Seriously?
OK, fine. You can click a Continue button to “complete this operation.” But that doesn’t complete anything. It just clears the desktop for the next dialog, which is a Windows Security window (Figure). Here, you need to give your permission to continue something opaquely called a “File Operation.” Click Allow, and you’re done. Hey, that’s not too bad, right? Just two dialogs to read, understand, and then respond correctly to. What’s the big deal?
What if you’re doing something a bit more complicated? Well, lucky you, the dialogs stack right up, one after the other, in a seemingly never-ending display of stupidity. Indeed, sometimes you’ll find yourself unable to do certain things for no good reason, and you click Allow buttons until you’re blue in the face.
Hopefully this gets adjusted in future builds. Otherwise I think a lot of people won’t get the benefit of the feature—they’ll disable it based on the annoyance factor.
…but I’m currently drowning in comment spam. I don’t even want to think about what the trackback spam picture looks like right now, too…
I’m about this close (holds fingers together) to turning off trackback on this blog entirely. I can’t remember the last time I saw a meaningful trackback ping.
…go the Bush Administration veterans. Last week it was Andy Card, today it’s Scott McClellan. And buried by McClellan’s resignation, a note that Karl Rove is stepping away from his policy coordinator position to return to his core competency of oozing slime political strategy oversight for the upcoming 2006 elections.
I’d love to see what the internal death pool looks like at the White House. It’ll be interesting to see who else steps up to Josh Bolten’s call to get out of the pool.
Great coverage on this issue in Talking Points Memo, of course, including a note that Turd Blossom’s replacement as policy coordinator was involved in the 2000 Recount Riot in Florida, also known as the Brooks Brothers Riot. Also like the observation that if Tony Snow, Fox News radio host, takes over the White House press secretary job, it would be “more like an interdepartmental transfer than a job change.”
One year ago today, I blogged about my new job with iET Solutions. It’s been a busy year, and we’ve done a lot: launched two brand new product lines; built a product management capability from the ground up; started hitting our release dates; even gotten ink in some fairly serious industry journals (check out this roundtable with our CEO).
I feel like I’ve grown a lot in the last year too. My writing on the blog may have fallen off, but my professional skills and experience have grown immeasurably, and I appreciate all of you who have stayed along for the ride.
It’s apparently Perpetual Motion Day today on the web. Following up my rambling about the Second Law of Thermodynamics and business models that claim to “create value,” I spotted the following two articles. Can you see the common theme?
Yes, folks, trying to violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics as a core part of your business plan is probably a bad idea. In the first case, it’s certainly laudable to try to do something about garbage production, but the question is: can selling methane, compost, and fertilizer produce enough money to offset transportation and holding costs? Probably if the raw material is free… but there’s no free ride in the world and I would expect waste management companies or the supermarkets providing the raw material to eat up any profit margins to be had from converting their wastes to usable products.
In the second case, the researchers have either been misquoted or neglected their thermodynamics education. Heat is always a byproduct of the translation from one form of energy to another, unless that translation does no useful work at all.
Great story today about a guy exploiting (in a positive way) the power of Craigslist, and conducting a series of barter exchanges that so far has started with a red paperclip and ended with a year’s free stay in a house in Phoenix.
Of course, any reader of This Old House Magazine knows that there are many old houses that are available for essentially free, provided you can move them or otherwise improve them. So theoretically Kyle MacDonald should have had his house a long time ago. But this is the rub about Craigslist: it’s not a perfect market, because not every buyer or seller is plugged into it.
The larger economic point that is missed by the article, and by the premise of MacDonald’s experiment, is that there is no way to overcome economic friction. Part of what MacDonald is doing in his “trades up” is exploiting private valuations of goods that are lower than his own private valuation, and thus apparently creating value in the trade. But this overlooks the value of MacDonald’s time and the opportunity cost that he incurs by spending time on this project. The other factor is the value contributed to the project by people like Annie Robbins who acts economically irrationally because she admires the anticonsumerist principle of the exchange, and by the snowmobile company that donates goods and travel in exchange for marketing publicity. In fact, that particular trade may well have destroyed traditional value somewhere along the way.
So here’s the larger economic question: are market exchanges in particular, and the market in general, subject to the laws of thermodynamics? Is it possible to have a trade that “creates value”? Or is what happens merely a shifting of value from one party to a different party with some inevitable loss of friction?
A lot of modern negotiation theory is based on the principle of the “win-win” where both parties at a table derive benefit from a trade. The question is: who loses? Does every win-win have an external party somewhere who is not represented at the table who is disadvantaged by the trade in some way?
These aren’t theoretical questions. A lot of the politics that surrounds business is based on the conflict between people who believe in win-win (or at least tout its value) and people who argue on behalf of the damaged external party. Think industry vs. environmentalists.
This week’s list has a repeat, the CYHSY track (which is included according to the rules of the meme), but the rest is the usual pleasant all-over-the-map assortment. Well, mostly pleasant: once the novelty of hearing Alex Chilton’s once-great Box Tops cover Blondie’s “Call Me” wears off, you’re left with a halfhearted cover that neither illuminates the original nor says anything good about the talents of the cover artist.
Fortunately the Dock Boggs and Blind Lemon Jefferson tracks kind of balance out that track. Happy Friday, y’all.
On April 13, 1743, 263 years and one day ago, Thomas Jefferson was born. Rumor has it that it was several days later that a delegation from Fairfax County was the first to call the infant “Mr. Jefferson.”
I have made something of a semiannual practice of observing Mr. Jefferson’s birthday with an assortment of pithy quotes and other reflections (see 2005, 2003), but increasingly the part that strikes the most resonant chord for me is the Jefferson Muzzles awards, given annually on their namesake’s birthday to individuals or organizations who “who in the past year forgot or disregarded Mr. Jefferson’s admonition that freedom of speech ‘cannot be limited without being lost.’” This year there is a podcast of the award ceremony, along with thirteen lucky recipients, including President Bush for the secret wiretaps, the DOJ for abridging the privacy of virtually every web user, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin for proposing that the government take away our choice of viewing and listening material in the name of “decency,” and ten other deserving cases. It should be noted that the Muzzles are no merely liberal mouthpiece: students who heckled Ann Coulter’s speech slamming Cindy Sheehan at the University of Connecticut are awarded a Muzzle, as is a Florida school superintendant who apparently forced the resignation of a teacher for writing an anti-immigration letter to the newspaper.
Mission of Burma’s plan to do a slow leak to fans of the songs from their forthcoming The Obliterati—as one song a week for eight weeks, each song released on vinyl and CD—has been tripped up twice. First, the band was overwhelmed by demand and sold out of all 500 copies in two days. Second, production problems derailed the original plans to leak one song a week. Instead, the band shipped the CD portion of the limited edition, now called “There’s a Time and Place to Punctuate,” this week, with the vinyl version to follow. The CDs were waiting for me last night when I got home from the airport, so while I was stuck in traffic this morning I listened to them in the car.
The songs are tight as ever, maybe tighter; none of the eight clock in at more than five minutes, and only one breaks the four minute mark. The band continues to evolve their sound, too; while the wall of guitars, frantic tempos, earnest screaming vocals, and tape manipulation are all familiar from previous outings, they sound fresh here thanks in part to some strong melodic writing from Clint Conley and rhythmic and melodic experimentation from Roger Miller and Peter Prescott. The strongest track of the lot, Miller’s “Careening with Conviction,” rocks out like rocking out was just invented yesterday, and Conley’s set-closing “Nancy Reagan’s Head” pulses with dark wit and angular guitar work.
On top of all this, Mission of Burma have put up an official site for the forthcoming album (due next month) that features a front-and-center wiki for fans to post their own information about the band and the recording. It also features an on-by-default music player which will selectively release all eight songs from the set over the next few weeks, so you can get the full experience.
When I got into town last night, I was thinking what a shame it was that I wasn’t here during SxSW and missed all the opportunities to rub elbows with the powerful and interesting. That was before Quentin Freakin’ Tarantino wandered into the taco joint on South Congress where we were having dinner (I had grilled quail with a shrimp enchilada, which needless to say was spectacular).
It was a fairly quiet night otherwise, wrapping up with a drink at the Intercontinental. But I definitely feel like I could come back here and have a good time. Preferably on a trip where I could get away and take in some live music….
So Caltech rescued their cannon yesterday. It took 24 of them, they did it in broad daylight, and there was no indication of a return joke (though the MIT cheer at the end was a nice touch). Also not mentioned: what happened to the big Brass Rat? I’m looking forward to seeing what the CalTech kids pull off in return.