Stars and Stripes Forever (and two more shows for me)

Having sung my first Boston Pops concert last night, I can honestly say that this is the greatest city in the world. How many places do patrons come armed with little American flags to wave when the orchestra will play “Stars and Stripes Forever” as an encore? And how many audiences roar with approval when the chorus stands up to sing the final verse of “Stars and Stripes Forever” (which I really appreciated, by the way).

Incidentally, I now know the actual lyrics to “Stars and Stripes Forever”—and, contrary to popular belief, they don’t start “Be kind to your fine feathered friends/for a duck may be somebody’s mother.” Below are the lyrics that the Tanglewood Festival Chorus sings when the Pops plays the march; print them out and bring them to Tuesday or Wednesday’s show and sing along:

Hurrah for the flag of the free.
May it wave as our standard forever
The gem of the land and the sea,
The banner of the right.
Let despots remember the day
When our fathers with might endeavor
Proclaimed as they marched to the fray,
That by their might and by their right
It waves forever.

The cure for Boston workaholism

In Christopher Baldwin’s moodily brilliant Bruno, there’s a great moment early in the strip’s run where a Minneapolis (or St. Paul) punk says to Bruno: “…but I’m not an emotionally constipated self-degrading punk on a reckless streak. Are all New Englanders so uptight?”

Her reply: “Lemmings march into a drowning watery grave, elephants go to the secret sacred burial grounds; depressed, introverted, workaholic intellectuals migrate to New England. Go figure.”

Which, as Laurie Anderson says, explains quite a few things.

Of course, one of the compensating factors about being in Boston with all the other introverted, workaholic intellectuals is the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Boston Pops. So I thought I’d mention that my debut with the Pops (as a member of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus) is tomorrow. The theme is “Red, White, and Blue,” and the music includes some really nice pieces by American composers as well as about the American experience. There are no tickets available online for tomorrow’s performance—you’ll have to go to the box office—but tickets may be purchased online for the Tuesday and Wednesday shows. Hope to see you there.

MSN Toolbar Tabs – first reactions

screen shot of tab widgets from MSN toolbar

There are other tabbed browsing add-ons for IE, but when I saw that the MSN toolbar had added a tabbed browsing enhancement, I decided to check it out. After all, I still know people at MSN I can yell at if there’s something wrong. And, actually, yeah, there’s a few things I would change.

First things: I can’t stress how glad I am to have tabs rather than the damned taskbar group (multiple browsers collapsed into one toolbar button with a number on it). There’s no good way to do blogging and newsreading with toolbar groups. Tabs are a hell of a lot more usable. I also appreciate that the toolbar supports the standard CTRL-T keyboard shortcut for creating a new tab.

But there are quite a few missing features from the MSN implementation. For one thing, there’s no option to make new links open automatically as a tab in an existing browser window. So if you click a link from email or another application, it still spawns a new browser window. And links defined to open in new windows still do; there’s no way to override that behavior to make the new window open in a tab instead, as there is with Firefox or with Safari. Also, there is no “open in new tab” on the right-click context menu, which renders the tab feature a lot less useful.

Verdict: on a scale of 1 to 5, a 2. The new tab support is better than having no tabs at all, but to call it half baked is too generous. It feels like the team focused on tabs as a feature, rather than looking at the customer problem, which is window clutter and impaired productivity, and thinking about what is required to address that in a tabbed browser implementation. Microsoft is traditionally good at thinking through user scenarios; I look forward to the next version.

Knowing it’s worth it

The HouseInProgress folks are taunting me (probably not on purpose) with their latest post about air conditioning. Our weather looks like that too (well, not that bad—it’ll at least be staying in the 80s), only our AC installation doesn’t start until the 20th. Looks like the Old Man and the Street is in the same boat; their installation happens next week. At least we know we’ll be happy and cool when we’re done.

Apple on Intel: what it means for customers

I’ve had some time to reflect on yesterday’s Apple-Intel announcement and the subsequent commentary, including the surfacing of my offhand comment about delaying a Mac mini purchase on a BusinessWeek blog (thanks to Dave’s quoting it, I suspect). My conclusion is that, from a customer perspective, I shouldn’t be worried about the move—should in fact be celebrating, cautiously. Why?

First, Apple wouldn’t be making this move unless it knew it could deliver serious price/performance benefits to its customers. After all, as Intel’s CEO was kind enough to point out on stage yesterday, they are having to eat a fair amount of crow over this deal. So the new machines are going to be freakin’ awesome.

Second, as Dave and others point out, the choice of processor inside is a non-issue to many customers, as long as their apps still run—and quickly. Along those lines, my potential Mac mini purchase, which I wanted to get for a home music server, is an excellent example of a machine that would deliver the same benefit to me today with a PowerPC chip and a year from today with a Pentium chip.

Third, if Apple has any brains at all they’ll avoid an Osborne effect by doing a good job of telling a forward migration story … and discounting existing PowerPC based models. On the former point, I was impressed by both the purported ease of porting and the promised emulation layer (mostly—see below for some caveats); Apple needs to keep the momentum going by publicly tracking apps that are proven forward compatible and by working with developers to ease migration paths for customers of apps that have problems.

The potential caveats I mentioned? First, there is a risk that some existing apps won’t move forward. Daring Fireball points out one potential source of problems, found on a page in the Universal Binary Programming Guidelines: AltiVec code, code that inserts preference panes in System Preferences (my God, what is it about System Preferences?), kernel extensions (didn’t Apple just announce that API?), applications that explicitly depend on a G4 or G5 processor being present; and Classic (this just in: Classic is still dead, finally).

Another potential source of problems is the whole “endian” issue, which affects files containing binary data, and which Microsoft Mac BU’s Rich Schaut explains much better than I can do here.

As a user, I still think that I’m right to be enthused, and Dave is right—the upper layers of the OS is where most of the excitement is. But not all. And I think we’re all still permitted a moment of silent mourning for the demise of some great technologies: Classic, AltiVec, and Open Firmware (thanks to Steve Kirks for the last pointer).

Okay, enough mourning. Time to start watching for Mac mini prices to dive.

Manila 9.5 hits the streets

Congrats to the UserLand crew on shipping Manila 9.5. This release adds a ton of industrial strength features to UserLand’s industrial strength web app, including email validation of new members, version control, and multi-level access control. There are also some killer blog features, including (finally) support for adding enclosures to RSS feeds (aka podcasting), support for the MetaWeblogAPI’s newMediaObject method (meaning that posting an image from MarsEdit to a Manila blog should now become possible) and some good spam management features for both trackback and comments.

Congrats to the team. I look forward to trying out some of the features, once my web host makes the new version available. (Pointer via Scripting News.)

It’s true: Mac OS X on Intel

I found Paul Boutin’s liveblog on Engadget from the WWDC just in time to read these words:

10:28am PDT – “It’s time for a third transition. And yes, (puts up slide that says): It’s true.” Next slide is one word: “Why?”

10:29am PDT – “I stood up two years ago and promised this (3.0G PowerMac), and we haven’t been able to deliver.” Steve says it’s bigger than that, though. No roadmap for the future based on PowerPC – they can’t see a future.

10:30am PDT – Intel offers not just increased performance, but reduced power consumption. Transition will be complete by WWDC ’07.

10:31am PDT – PowerPC – 15 integer perf units (not sure what) per watt. Intel does 70 per watt. “Mac OS X has been living a secret double life” for the past 5 years.

10:32am PDT – Satellite shot with crosshairs shows building where a team has been working on the “Just in Case…” scenario. Every release of Mac OS X has been compiled for Intel for the past 5 years. Here comes the demo!

10:33am PDT – “As a matter of fact, this system I’ve been using here…” the keynote’s been running on a P4 3.6GHz all morning”

Pretty big news. Sets the conventional wisdom on its head.

Makes me want to put those plans for a Mac mini purchase on hold.

It’s good to see that even in this brave new world, some things, like the hilarity of Theo Gray from Wolfram Research, remain unchanged.

(Update: here is the official press release.)

(Almost) live WWDC updates

It appears that the WWDC keynote isn’t being streamed over Quicktime (at least, not that I’ve been able to find). However, MacRumors has set up a special auto-refreshing live site where they’ll be posting the latest keynote coverage (technical details of their AJAX based approach here). There’s also an IRC channel if you can’t wait for a schedule refresh, or if you like your news piping hot and mixed with lots and lots and lots of chatter.

Apple to switch to Sun chips

sun chips. get it? hah hah.

With all the discussion about what Greg called the Pentiac rumor—the rumor that Apple is imminently going to announce a switch from IBM to Intel chips, or a new product line based on Intel chips, or that it just had lunch with Intel, or something—I couldn’t resist pointing to a leak about the real announcement to come today. Thanks, Steven Frank, for the laugh (make sure to click the link for the full sized image). (And thanks to MacSlash for the link.)

Spies in space

I love this story about the discovery of spacesuits for spies (or, less sensationally, training suits from the Air Force’s short-lived MH-7 program) in a locked, forgotten room at Cape Canaveral. As a comment on Slashdot pointed out, it’s a great metaphor for the fate of much of our space engineering work from the 1960s.

A few other memories were dredged up by the Slashdot crowd, including the X-20 Dynosoar, a reusable space plane design conceived in 1957 and cancelled in 1963. I remember seeing models of some of the other proposed Air Force space craft in the visitors center at NASA Langley when I was a kid.

Manned espionage platforms speak of a vision of the future that failed to understand how quickly electronics technology would advance to provide communications and surveillance capabilities without costly human intervention. It’s a more Asimovian view of the future than the Philip K. Dick version we got instead.

Demolition Man

As I ripped lathe after lathe down from the ceiling in our basement, cleaning a sixteen-inch wide strip running the width of the house for our new AC central trunk, I found myself humming the Police’s “Demolition Man” for the first and probably last time. I wasn’t singing it, because my face mask wouldn’t let me open my mouth wide enough.

We have probably found the only HVAC contractor in the world who doesn’t like to do demolition, and the result was a merry two hours figuring out how to take part of a plaster ceiling down. The location for the trunk is planned to run alongside the interior partition wall in our basement that divides the utility and workshop/storage room from the library. Since the ceiling is finished throughout the basement, we had to take the plaster down to make room for the trunk. After much trial and error, we arrived on the following sequence of steps to clear out the plaster:

  1. Locate the nearest crack running along the outside edge of the cut (this was a remarkably good way to locate the “keys” running between the lathe, which was the right place to cut).
  2. Use a Sawzall with a demolition blade (brilliant on plaster, absolutely useless on lathe) to cut along the outside edge of the demo zone.
  3. Use a crowbar to break the plaster off until the end of the lathe, where it nails to the joist, comes into view.
  4. Go to town with the crowbar on the lathe, bringing down a shower of plaster and dust on everyone in reach.

(About the last point: cleanup is obviously a big challenge with a project like this. We used a dustpan and broom, and a new 12-gallon shop vac, promptly nicknamed Artoo, for the floor. For the workers, safety goggles, a hat, gloves, and a mask designated for drywall and insulation work. Plus a thorough vacuuming from head to foot and a shower when everything is done.)

At the end of this, my hat is off to all the other housebloggers who made plaster removal look easy. I was still picking grit out of my ears after the shower.

How to tell it’s summer in Boston

Just as spring in the Boston suburbs is heralded by the appearance of mud and street sweeping trucks removing the sand from the roads, so summer is heralded by clear signs:

  • The temperature spontaneously jumps about twenty degrees overnight.
  • Upstairs floors in un-air-conditioned houses become uncomfortably hot, even if the outside temperature is only in the low eighties.
  • There are major home contractors in every other house on your block.

Our house is no exception. With a little luck, our HVAC contractors will be working next week to get our air conditioning installed. It’s exciting for us: not only will this be the first Unico system we’ve been involved with (aside from seeing them on This Old House), it’s also the first time we will have owned a house with air conditioning. Very exciting times, indeed.

I’ll post more details over the weekend. We have some exciting demolition work to do; we agreed that we would tear out part of the basement ceiling in the boiler room to make way for the central trunk. My hand is healing nicely, but I guess we’ll find out if I can handle a reciprocating saw left-handed—or whether Lisa can manage ceiling work.

Apostasy: eMusic is better than iTMS

As a (former) professional online behavior analyst, when my own online behavior changes, I take notice. So when I realized that I am waiting for albums to become available on eMusic rather than buying them on iTunes; regularly buying several 50-tune booster packs per month; and now have a “Save for Later” list containing 47 albums, I conclude that I have developed a preference for eMusic.

What’s changed? Two things: selection and currency. eMusic has added a ton of labels recently, including Merge, Sun, Vice Recordings, the always excellent Bloodshot Records, Misra, Thirsty Ear… a bunch of indies releasing some great music. (Many of these are available on iTMS as well; more on that in a minute.) Second, new releases are now being made available through eMusic on or very close to the street date. Take a look at my purchase of Spoon’s Gimme Fiction. On the old eMusic it might have taken several months to make it there; not any more.

eMusic also, I reluctantly conclude, has a substantial navigability advantage over the iTMS. The iTunes store sometimes feels shoehorned into the iTunes interface: no browsing options other than big column lists and search; live hyperlinks for artist browsing, but not label or year; no user reviews; and so on. I’ve found more good music by browsing at eMusic in the last month than I had for the previous few on the iTMS, primarily by browsing by label, then the artist list.

Other advantages of eMusic: high bit rate MP3s (no DRM); ability to re-download purchased tracks; and price. Yeah, did I mention price? Sure, buying by the track is sometimes no bargain, but when the price is 50 tracks for $14.95, I almost don’t care, since buying the equivalent 50 tracks in the iTMS might cost me $50. If the iTMS had the songs, the convenience of buying a la carte instead of in a monthly subscription or booster pack might make it likely for me to buy there, but it’s not a lock any more, not by a long shot.

I’m not giving up on the iTMS. It’s still the only place for me to find music from most of the majors, for instance. But more often than not, I’m looking for the minors instead.

One final thought: eMusic is even gaining the edge in the “delight” factor for me. This is the technical marketing term for what happens when a business not only fulfills a customer’s expectations and requirements but surpasses them in a big way. I was trying to find a song by the Ukrainians that I had gotten on a mix tape (from Fury, as it turns out) about twelve years ago. I knew a transliteration of the title (“O Sweet Girl”) but not the original Ukrainian title, so Googling it seemed difficult. Eventually I gave up, deciding that while I might be able to find it on a peer-to-peer network, it probably wasn’t worth it. I then Googled another artist, 3 Mustaphas 3, and found a hit to them on eMusic. While it wasn’t the album I was looking for, the description of the album talked about … the Ukrainians. Sure enough, eMusic had the band, and amazingly had the exact song (“Oi Divchino”) I was looking for, which I verified by listening to the sound clip. I purchased it there, of course.

The odds that I could find the Ukrainians at the iTMS? Slim.

Hey, Apple: there’s Long Tail style profit to be made in increasing your depth in some of these indie labels. Why are they listing digital content on eMusic and not on you? And why don’t you make it easier for me to experience serendipity on the store? Is it really helpful for me to know that “Hollaback Girl” is still #1 in Today’s Top Songs? eMusic gives me tailored recommendations, not a top 10 list. Guess which one I’m more likely to buy from?