We assimilate another one

Shades of Gray: Back to Mac. My fellow Sloanblogger is seeing the light. Straz, here are my quick thoughts about life with a Mac:

  • Make sure you check out VersionTracker for software downloads—including Keyword Assistant and other invaluable iPhoto plugins; Mac OS X Hints for tips and tricks for getting more out of your machine; and the MacFixit Forums for troubleshooting.
  • MarsEdit is my blog posting tool of choice—it copes neatly with my Manila blog as well as the Movable Type-based BlogCritics.
  • The biggest problems I have with my machine tend to be managing hard disk space—probably because I have over half my 60 GB disk filled with digital music.

Have fun, Straz, and welcome to the other side!

Atmospheres

red sky at morning, sailors take warning

The second batch of photos from our trip. These include outdoor shots around my dad’s property (and my uncle’s house on the neighboring hill) across several days, from sunrise to sunset.

Technical note: the last batch, starting with the wood photos, were shot at twilight, although the exposure makes them look as though it were still late afternoon. This is why they aren’t especially crisply focused—I didn’t have my tripod, so I leaned against a tree where I could and shot freehand where I couldn’t.

Greatest Hits of Greatest Hits of 2004

I’m not sure I feel moved to write my own Best of the Year list as I did last year… but when looking at these two lists by cartoonists whose musical tastes I respect, I know that there will at least be a lasting guide to what’s good from the year. The more complete of the two so far is Jeph Jacques’ top 10 list at Questionable Content, on which I’ve listened to exactly one and a half discs; good shopping list.

Another indie-focused list, in words and pictures, comes from Scary Go Round’s John Allison, who has his character Shelley Winters (no relation) reviewing his top 20 selections (link goes to the first five; looks like he’ll be doing them as a week of comics). The coverage is hilariously honest: regarding Air’s Talkie Walkie, she notes, “This record is nice when you are listening to it but you forget it the second you turn it off,” and she zings Franz Ferdinand with “their songs are about being an androgynous pixie-boy who dances on the dance floor with anything in trousers or a skirt.”

There’s also a meta-post at Blogcritics collecting “best of” lists, and KEXP has posted their collection of DJ Best Of lists—the Top 90.3 won’t be posted until Friday.

Stumbling across history

jarretts press

Continuing to catch up from my posting vacation, here comes the photo flood. This is the art batch. Esta and I went walking in downtown Asheville on the morning of the 22nd. I was looking for textures. I think I found a few.

I also found a mystery. The faded lettering in the picture to the right says “Jarrett’s Press” (the full logo says “Jarrett’s Press Printing”). It’s on the back of a warehouse-like building behind the First Presbyterian Church in Asheville, just off Patton Avenue. Googling tells me a few things, namely that the press was active in the late 1920s, but not much else—and particularly not whether a close family member ran the press. It would be a little too ironic if one of my ancestors was in the printing business.

Go MainStream

From Mathew Gross, GoMainStream.org, an attempt to revitalize the conservation movement. The organization is a partnership between Robert Kennedy, Jr, Gross, and Bobby Sundeen. From Matt’s email:

We formed GoMainStream.org because more than 90% of Americans hold our values in common — clean air, clean water, open lands — yet 40% think that ”most environmental activists don’t really care about people.“

We formed GoMainStream because the corporate plunderers have hijacked our public lands and the public process.

And we formed GoMainStream because they’ve hijacked our language. They call polluting the air “Clear Skies” — and they call it “development” and “access” when they lock Americans out of the public lands that we hike, hunt, fish and love.

We’re going to change that. And we’re going to change it by building a new coalition from the bottom-up — an organization that helps Americans take action and that works to reframe the debate about the future of our country.

We’re going to do it by connecting hunters fighting to maintain access to elk habitat with suburbanites combating urban sprawl.

Because conservation is not an issue of right or left, or urban versus rural, or red versus blue.

It’s an issue of who we are as Americans.

I think that this sort of action is an important first step in reversing the tide of Newspeak that continues to impede progressive efforts in the US—note the careful use of “conservation” rather than “environmentalism” and the nod toward the Bush administration’s successful avoidance of broad public outrage through careful language use. In fact, the only thing I can think of that I would change in the message is some of Gross’s language regarding “corporate plunderers.” He’s emailing to his base, but we learned in 2004 that if you stir up your base using inflammatory language, they’re not the only ones who end up getting mad. As commenters on my site have noted over and over again, the same fighting words that put a fire in the belly of liberals tend to make potentially sympathetic but conservative-leaning undecideds hot under the collar.

Land speed record

We just got in from our trip back to New Jersey from Asheville. It took 11 and a half hours, which is I think something of a land speed record.

On the way, at a rest stop on I-81 in Virginia, I stopped to chat with a nice young man with a microphone and a TV camera who was earnestly quizzing people about their experiences driving on this, the second-worst traffic day of the year. As it was at that point about 10:30 am and we hadn’t seen more than a handful of vehicles, I was probably trying too hard not to laugh to say anything intelligent.

More updates will have to wait until I clear my email backlog, which is currently at 36 skillion and counting. It turns out that my current mail load is not maintainable using Webmail over a 28.8 dialup connection.

Vacation means never having to say “Sorry for not blogging”

But I’ll say it anyway. We’ve been busy, of course; who hasn’t? We got two inches of snow and temperatures around 4° Fahrenheit from Sunday to Monday; have already had a turkey dinner, pizza night, and spicy Thai beef soup along with homemade apple and lemon meringue pies, homemade biscotti, and homemade cookies; and will be working on jambalaya tonight, traditional Italian fish tomorrow night, and pork tenderloin with risotto on Christmas day.

Lest you get the wrong impression, we have also occasionally left the house—for last minute Christmas shopping, grocery replenishment, and even a joint photo shoot with me and Esta (pictures to come sometime next week). I borrowed my Mom’s copy of the family genealogy; also next week the genealogy pages will be updated with many of the cousins on her side.

And, it being Christmas with seven people under one roof, we are also swapping new and interesting upper respiratory conditions. If the drive down was a little tense, the drive back should be positively nervewracking with all the blowing of noses, hacking coughs, and “I said, bake a left turd here idto de parkig lot! Why are you laughing ad be?”

Ah, Christmas.

A long day’s journey into …turkeys

No posting for a day or two, because we’ve been on the road. For a very long time. We left Arlington at 7 am Friday morning and for once made it through Connecticut with a minimum of fuss, pulling into Lakewood, New Jersey at 5 past noon.

That was the easy day. The next morning, after spending an hour with a shoehorn in front o four trunk the night before, we loaded four people, two dogs,and a week’s worth of baggage into the Passat and left—at 6:45 am sharp. It was 7:55 PM, after a blockage on I-81 in Maryland and a very long day of driving, that we pulled into my parents’ place in the Asheville, NC “suburbs.”

It may be a while between posts this week. My dad’s phone line only does about 28.8. But rest assured, we’ll fill you in when we get back.

Oh, and turkeys: this morning when we awoke, there was a flock of wild turkeys moving along the edge of the lawn. Gone now, alas, but we have snow to compensate.

Cingular: raising the bar for clueless marketing

As a subscriber of the service formerly known as AT&T Wireless, I have to give Cingular props for not fumbling the technical changeover; my service is just as good (or, at my house, as bad) as it was before. The same, sadly, can’t be said for their marketing.

My plan was a promotional deal through Microsoft, my former employer. I have a Nokia 3650 camera phone and a plan that provides me with data minutes, most of which I use in a given month. So how is it that Cingular has decided that I’d be interested in “upgrading” to a free Nokia 6010 that has a tenth of the capabilities of the phone I have now—no “M-Life,” no camera, no Symbian OS?

Either Cingular doesn’t have access to the data about me which would tell them how to market more effectively to me—unlikely, as my bill now carries their logo—or else they’re just choosing not to exploit it. Dumb, Cingular.

Here’s how to get my business as a cell phone customer: stop sending me condescending direct mail pieces that are based on the premise that my phone is a five year old piece of crap. Show me some cool technology that I don’t know about yet. Tell me how to use the phone I have to better integrate with my life. Direct mail is OK—better than marketing email pitches—but it would be better if you did it in an unobtrusive way, say a blog. Just a thought.

More Mac OS X command line goodness

MacOSXHints: Set system and network prefs from the Terminal. There have always been command line tools for setting prefs in Mac OS X Server; this article shows you how to get access to the same tools by installing the free Apple Remote Desktop client, and walks you through a few sample uses.

This always drove me nuts on Windows XP. If you’re going to have a command line in a system at all, it would be nice if you could do some useful things with it—especially on remote machines.

It’s not just in the red states

Boston Herald: Newton mom ousted for taping gay acceptance ‘lies’. In the middle of an optional student assembly that was put on as part of Diversity Week, a mom in the Boston suburb of Newton decided she didn’t want what she was hearing from the stage, so she started videotaping the discussion—presumably so she could have a record of what she called “propaganda, false information, and lies.”

Lots of nasty bits here. First, the mom, Kim Cariani, had already kept her kids home that day. —Which itself brings a question: why home? The article says that kids who didn’t want to attend could go to the library or the computer lab. Was Cariani afraid that being in the same building with the speakers would contaminate her kids? —Anyway, Cariani wasn’t objecting because of her children. This was definitely a woman with an agenda.

Second, the moment that supposedly pushed Cariani over the edge was when one of the speakers on the stage first discovered that he was gay, in particular describing the first moment he was attracted to another man. Was this the “false information and lies” that Cariani wanted to have a record of?

Third, what was she planning to do with the tape exactly?

I think there’s no question that the principal at Newton North High did the right thing. In general preventing taping of students without prior parental permission is an intelligent thing to do, and especially in an assembly like this where the kids who want to learn, or who may be coming to grips with some feelings of being “different” themselves, could get scarred by feeling that they were being watched by disapproving eyes.

This overzealous parent wasn’t thinking about the children, though. She was thinking about her own agenda, and to hell with anyone who stood in her way.