Dogs in the strand

ActionDog.jpg

Last weekend Lisa and I took the dogs and the new hybrid back to Crane Beach for a late winter stroll along the beach. We were hoping to repeat the trip today, but where last Saturday was sunny and warm, today is sunny and hovering around freezing—not ideal beach weather.

Anyway, I brought the camera and took the first decent photos I’ve taken in a few months, including documentation of Joy’s first view of a horse as well as proof that she is a hyper little thing (see thumbnail, right).

(Incidentally, relative to my gripe last night, at least the FlickrExport people have made their nifty iPhoto plugin a universal one.)

Hmm. Or, the downside of Mac on Intel.

I have a very brief report on the quality of the PowerPC emulation layer (Rosetta) built into the new Intel based Macs, like the MacBook Pro. It’s good—it’s very good. I haven’t found any native Mac OS X apps that didn’t run correctly with it.

Except. There is a small catch, which is that plug-ins that are not written to support Intel based Macs won’t load if an application is started in Intel native mode. Apparently the Rosetta functionality only applies to the main process, not plug-ins. This means that productivity plug-ins like Keyword Assistant in iPhoto and (apparently) Sogudi, the search enabler for Safari, won’t work until new Intel versions are released.

Ah well. This has been a small price to pay. There have been Universal binary versions of other important Mac applications, such as MarsEdit 1.1.2 (with which I’m blogging this) and the public beta of NetNewsWire 2.1 that was released today. Now all I need is Office and I’m good to go.

Honestly, though, there have been enough pleasant surprises with the machine that I’m not going to complain at all. For one thing, Spotlight and the Dashboard work and are really fast. For another, so does Quicksilver. I finally see why Merlin thinks it’s the best thing since sliced bread. It was unbearably slow to invoke or operate on my 1GHz, 512 MB PowerBook G4. Amazing what an extra half-gig of memory, 0.83 GHz of processor, plus a new processor architecture will do.

The elements of (online) Typographic Style

I’ve meant to blog The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web for quite a while but now (thanks to a sick day while I fight off the remnants of this cold) am finally getting around to it. The site is just what it says, a work in progress that takes each of the lessons of good typography in Robert Bringhurst’s classic Elements of Typographic Style and shows how to address them online. Some fairly advanced topics like kerning with CSS are covered, and the whole thing is pretty darned cool—and a beautiful site, as you would expect.

QTN™: Harpoon Oatmeal Stout (100 Barrel Series)

The Harpoon 100 Barrel series has been one of the bright lights on the local beer horizon here, with new experimental offerings every few months—a pretty bold step for a local micro-becoming-mini-brewer whose offerings used to be as predictable as the seasons (IPA and the UFO hefeweizen, mostly, with Munich Dark and Ale generally only available in multipacks, plus the Winter Warmer, Hibernian, Summer, and Oktoberfest available seasonally). In the past I’ve only reviewed the Scotch Ale (Wee Heavy) and the Alt, so it’s high time I added to the list. Fortunately Harpoon is helping out by reissuing their very first 100 Barrel offering, the Oatmeal Stout.

If Harpoon doesn’t add this to their standard line-up, they’re dumb. Not only is it a good beer, it’s a good oatmeal stout, a style that’s pretty damned hard to pull off. It’s malty with a touch of sweetness in the nose (even through my cold-stuffed sinuses). The mouthfeel is appropriately weighty without being overwhelming, and the overall impression is very very pleasing. Even Lisa, who feels about stout the same way that society matrons feel about someone passing gas in public, feels it’s an astoundingly good beer. If you are in the distribution area, snap it up before it goes away again.

A Batman Mag Porn Sot

mbta anagram map

That’s an anagram for “Boston T Anagram Map.” Some ingenious soul has anagrammed almost every T stop on the Boston MBTA on this handy map. Exceptions: most of the innumerable stops on the Green Line’s B and C branches, and Harvard, which rather than the lame “Hard Var” sports the rather spiffier name of “Yale.”

Note: This somehow got stuck and never published from three weeks ago, when anagrams of subway maps were hot.

GTD with Outlook Part III: A high level strategy

So far in my ongoing review of implementing the GTD methodology using Outlook XP, I’ve talked about using improved search to make your archives more useful and managing your task views. Today I’m going to take a step back, now that I’ve implemented most of the GTD workflow in my daily routine, and give a higher level picture of how everything has been implemented for me so far and what challenges remain. I will give an outline of my project list implementation but the details will wait for next time.

First: my new strategy to manage stuff in Outlook is simple. The inbox stays clear; I have a list of tasks from which I work on an ongoing basis, and a list of projects that I review daily for next actions. If I’m ever in a place where I can’t make a task note directly, I use my brand spanking new Hipster PDA (a stack of 3″x5″ index cards held together with a binder clip), and transfer any tasks to my task list when I get back to my desk. (The Hipster PDA is particularly useful at the breakfast table, on my bedstand, and other places where the computer should never be.)

That all sounds simple, but the devil is in the details. As I outlined last time, something as simple as how you view your tasks makes a big difference. And the really difficult part, as the GTD methodology attests, is keeping your task list clean and free of multistep projects, which are treated differently. The problem is that Outlook doesn’t provide a good form for project management. So I’ve been running with this recommendation from the Getting Things Done In Outlook page, which provides a modified contact form as a way to track projects together with a customized contact folder and view. Then I build out the project plan in the description field (or, if the project is to write something, I’ll brainstorm the outline right there), and click the “New Task for Contact” button to add the next action for the project to my task list. Doing that adds a link to the project form into the Contacts field at the bottom of the task list, and makes the task show up in the Activities tab of the project form.

So that’s all the major areas of GTD—except that there are a ton of additional details and neat features that I’ve glossed over. Next time I’ll talk about more task tips and tricks, including features in tasks that support the creation of deferred tasks.

Let’s Talk System 7

While I’m on tenterhooks about my new Mac hardware waiting at home, a quick shout to System7Today, a site about using your pre-G3 Apple hardware to its fullest extent. (Pointer via the Cult of Mac blog at Wired.)

The site makes the cogent point that nothing much useful happened in the Mac OS world between System 7.6.1 and Mac OS X (with, of course, the major exception of early Mozilla builds). I mean, if I recall correctly, the only reason they moved to Mac OS 8 rather than System 7.7 was a marketing decision that Apple needed to put the years of vaporware around Copland behind them. But at the time there was such hype for all the new features as they were released: QuickDraw GX! OpenDoc! Cyberdog! Open Transport! The Control Strip! All of which of course are deader than doornails now.

But I grew up with that OS. My first computer related job involved managing some Macs at NASA Langley, which I upgraded to System 7. I was so thrilled when I could run System 7 on my first Mac, an SE/30. I made the PowerPC jump in 1995 to a PowerPC 7200/90, which ran systems 7 through 9, and held onto it for five years until I got my PowerBook G3 (FireWire) The G3 ran Mac OS 9, dual-booted the Mac OS X public beta, and then ran Mac OS X 10.0 through 10.2. The G3 lasted three years until I got the 1GHz G4 TiBook that is my main machine today, and has so far been the only Mac on which I have never booted into Classic. Of course that won’t be an option at all with the MacBook Pro.

Life’s little ironies

I got a phone call from Lisa a few minutes ago that my MacBook Pro arrived this morning, one day ahead of the promised ship schedule and six days ahead of the originally projected delivery schedule. I’d love to be really excited about it but I can’t right now—my head is so stopped up that I can’t really think about it until I get home.

I’m also doing everything I can to keep my expectations realistic about how the experience will be with this machine, so I’m linking without comment to varying user reports at Macintouch about extra noise and possible display and networking issues. But there appear to be many more positive than negative reports about the machine, so I’ll throw out a gratuitous link to a set of MacBookPro unboxing pictures, for those of you that enjoy that sort of thing.

John Cale, blackAcetate

john cale blackacetate

John Cale is one of a handful of lesser known legends in music today. A founding member of the Velvet Underground, then a year later forced out of the group as the first professional victim of Lou Reed’s prodigious temper, he went on to a career as a producer (Nico, the Stooges, the Modern Lovers, Patti Smith’s Horses, Jennifer Warnes, Squeeze, the Happy Mondays, Jesus Lizard, the Mediæval Bæbes’ Undredtide) and guest musician (with appearances on albums by Nick Drake, Brian Eno, Gordon Gano, the Replacements, Super Furry Animals), as well as a prolific solo career (23 full length albums since 1970, plus 17 released and 15 unreleased movie soundtracks). The most consistent thing about Cale’s work is its unpredictability; as you might guess by looking at his producer or guest credits, his musical tastes span a wide range of genres, with the result that picking up a new John Cale record can be a little like rolling the dice. 1996’s Walking on Locusts was largely straight-ahead country-inflected pop with a few weird exceptions like “Crazy Egypt,” but 2003’s HoboSapiens is all over the map with its sounds and influences and reflects Cale’s fascination with ProTools.

All of which is to say that when I put Cale’s latest record blackAcetate into my CD player and then had to doublecheck to be sure that I wasn’t listening to Big Star, I wasn’t surprised. The lead-off track, “Outta the Bag,” features Cale’s rarely-heard falsetto over chugging horns and rhythm section, and sounds as though Cale spent a lot of time in Memphis during the session. “In a Flood” is a slowly smoldering evocation of the late summer Mississippi that sounds as if the early Cowboy Junkies were in the next studio. And “Gravel Drive” is a balladic evocation of domestic loss that is majestic in its sweep. The arrangements on most of the songs are a lot more organic than on the cut-and-paste HoboSapiens: there’s even some Prince-inflected funk on “Hush.” The common thread stitching the album together is Cale’s magnificent Welsh voice.

Not everything works on the album; “Sold-Motel” is a fairly uninspired rocker. “Woman” plays a rhythmic albeit tuneless verse over thin drum loops against a guitar-driven chorus with no real unity between the two parts. “Wasteland” is a frustrating ambient inflected tune that has some promising moments in the arrangement but doesn’t earn the grand climax it builds to at the end. But these are minor quibbles compared to the quality of the other tracks. On balance blackAcetate is a worthy addition to the Cale discography, an album that takes risks that more often than not pay off in spades.

 

Also posted at BlogCritics.

Dying slowly

As the Tindersticks once sang, “So this dying slowly… I’m just tired, darling/I just need to lay down.” Oddly enough, when Stuart Staples sang those words he sounded like I feel: so congested I can hardly move my head.

So while I wait for the decongestant-induced colored light trails to vanish, a quick pointer to a pair of goodies courtesy of Doc Searls: egosurf.com and isolatr. The former is apparently designed to show you how much you write about yourself vs. how much others write about you (I’m solidly in the middle of the gauge), while the latter… well, see for yourself.

Mash your way to fun and profit

Via the Comics Curmudgeon, I bring you Balloonist, a cross-platform application designed to do comics lettering and layout. But wait! It also features “gouache mode,” in which you can lay in word balloons over existing comics. Like, ones that someone else drew.

And for an example of how cool that can be, I give you (via Sue Trowbridge, via the Comics Curmudgeon again) Mary Worth sings My Humps. Which remix got some ink in the Associated Press (including the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette).

Which inspired me:

garfield

Unfortunately, as you can see by the acne that the Garfield strip sprouted, Balloonist isn’t free, and its $88 registration fee is a little steep if all you want to do is to poke fun at moldy 80s icons. But hey, it’s interesting at the very least.

Can there be happier words…

…than “Apple Store Shipment Notification”? I don’t think so. As I predicted, Apple is jumping the gun on my anticipated ship date by a good five days. My MacBook Pro is currently in FedEx’s system (though not picked up yet) and scheduled to arrive by Thursday.

Of course, Thursday is the busiest day of my week, so I probably won’t be able to do a detailed unboxing report until the weekend. But still… yay.

Update: Apparently new MacBook Pros (MacBooks Pro?) come from Shanghai, China (at least according to FedEx’s pickup records). Who knew?

Friday Random 10: The 400 Blows

So titled because for months, ever since losing my iTunes statistics, I have been steadily working my way back through listening to my entire collection, a process that will take years. I’ve gone about it in two ways, first listening to all my mixes in order, secondly using a set of smart playlists. The most significant of the latter is my “Never Played” playlist, which selects 400 unplayed tunes at random from my library for the iPod (400 was experimentally about the right number to fit the playlist, which might include a large percentage of losslessly ripped songs, onto the iPod and still have room for other content). And the 400 “blows” because I will continue to see numbers like “now playing 21 of 400,” “now playing 16 of 400,” etc. until the library is all listened to. To mix a rarely stirred metaphor, I feel like Sisyphus even thinking about it.

Choosing the “Shuffle Songs” menu option on the iPod, which shuffles through the entire iPod, is kind of a relief. Of course the only time I do this is on Fridays, but it’s a nice reprieve nonetheless.

  1. Sufjan Stevens, “Come On! Feel the Illinoise! Part One: The World&rdsquo; Columbian Exposition; Part II: Carl Sandburg Visits Me In A Dream” (Illinoise)
  2. Sheldon Allman, “Schizophrenic Baby” (Folk Songs for the 21st Century)
  3. Doves, “Words” (The Last Broadcast)
  4. The White Stripes, “Fell In Love With a Girl” (via the Peel Box)
  5. John Cale, “Reading My Mind” (Hobosapiens)
  6. Mission of Burma, “He Is/She Is” (Peking Spring)
  7. PINE*am, “Gymnopedie 0.1” (EP)
  8. Dntel, “Last Songs” (Life is Full of Possibilities)
  9. Tori Amos, “Parasol” (The Beekeeper)
  10. Radiohead, “Fog” (Knives Out EP)

What a bizarre assemblage. The Sheldon Allman track is the worst kind of novelty, a catchy one. The John Cale track includes about a minute of vituperative Italian dialogue over motorcycle noise. The PINE*am track is some sort of clanking electronica track with wispy female vocals over it, and bears no resemblance to the Satie composition by the same name. There are also some serious songs, mostly owing to the Doves and Dntel albums finally surfacing on eMusic.

But “Fog.” Hmm. Might have to do something with this song.