To South Carolina for pig-pickin

So, what’s the story with South Carolina, Greg asked me last night. Well, I’m not sure how best to describe the setup, but here goes:

  • My uncle and aunt live one hill over from my parents on the family farmland in western North Carolina
  • My uncle retired as an executive in a transportation company; his company has an executive retreat in a forest in South Carolina
  • Said retreat features fishing, hunting, horseback riding, and other outdoor sports facilities (when I was younger (11?) I rode a horse for the first and last time there; it bolted and I got a bloody tuchus)
  • My parents, my aunt and uncle, and another couple or two are sharing a multi-bedroom house at the retreat for a week next week
  • I managed to squeeze in two days off next week to join them
  • I will arrive on Saturday, the day before the pig-pickin’

What’s a pig-pickin’, my Northern readers are now asking. It’s something like a barbecue, if by barbecue you mean “cooking and eating a ridiculous amount of pork cooked on a fire.” But that doesn’t do it justice; neither does this (though it gives a little of the flavor and some of the recipe). All I can say is, after you’ve been cooking a whole pig on an enormous grill for a day, you’ll be hungry enough to eat anything. The fact that even without the anticipation the meat (dressed in a vinegar sauce only, please, no “smoky barbecue” tomato sauce here) is ambrosial is icing on the cake. And of course there are all the side dishes, and beverages, and occasionally (if it’s a pig-pickin’ that my uncle organized) live country music.

Why is it called a pig-pickin’? Well, because after being cooked over a slow fire all day the pork is soft and moist enough to be pulled off the pig and eaten with one’s bare hands, if one is feeling barbaric. And after a taste of the stuff, one could certainly feel that way. It does seem to awaken a deep hunger. In fact, I’m hungry now…

So this has been a dry week for posting, partly because I’ve been crazy busy at the office, but partly in anticipation of the stories to come.

Clinton: the story that refuses to die

Salon is serializing Sidney Blumenthal’s White House memoir, The Clinton Wars. It’s amazing reading. Certainly not objective, but after reading everything that the rabid Clinton-haters have slung for almost a decade at the man, it’s interesting to read a perspective from the opposite side, inside the second administration just before all hell broke loose.

I wonder if it’s coincidence that the depiction of the president in the first installment sounds a lot like President Bartlett on The West Wing.

Weblogs.com – Seeing the curve

When I looked a few minutes ago, Weblogs.com was only 50 updates away from breaking over 2400 weblogs in a three hour span. This would be the first time since the war was declared over that we might set a new high water mark (on April 7).

In related news, John Robb suggests that it may be time for Weblogs.com to do a “three-for-one split” (my words, not his) and start displaying only an hour of data at a time. If this happens, of course I’ll restate the traffic curves that we’ve been seeing—but it will only be an average approximation, since there’s no archive of data to tell us what the actual hourly high water mark is.

The interesting part is why the need to move. Take a look at the curve below (last updated 4/7):

linear plot of weblogs.com high water mark growth, 6 may

See the uptick? It could be caused by one of two things:

  • The war and corporate earnings season together caused an upswing in blog posting traffic that may not be repeated
  • We could be on the cusp of an exponential explosion in weblog activity, driven by the virtuous cycle of blogging: publish – subscribe – read – comment – publish.

The above graphic was a linear plot of the traffic to date. Take a look at this log-normal plot, which maps the high water marks on an exponentially increasing scale:

linear plot of weblogs.com high water mark growth, 6 may

This suggests that the hockey-stick shape of the first graph is no accident; there really are some reinforcing loops driving the growth of the blogosphere. If that’s the case, yeah, it may be time to move to displaying a shorter time increment on Weblogs.com…

Own a piece of the Club

campaign chest

The Colonnade Club, that is. I got a circular in the mail today about an auction at Harlowe-Powell in Charlottesville of many antiques and art objects that have been “deaccessioned” from the Colonnade Club at UVA, the faculty club that sits in Pavilion VII.

This was the first pavilion, or professorial residence and lecture hall, that Jefferson built in his original suite of buildings for the university, but it has long since become the permanent home of the faculty club and is now reopening after a long renovation. Apparently the club has to auction some of the items that it’s accrued in the intervening 180 years to pay for some of the restoration work.

The details of the auction are here. Although I’m a member, I haven’t spent much time inside the club, but I do remember a few of the pieces, in particular this spectacular sideboard.

Must be spring

Adam notes that he was hard at work this weekend too. Sounds harder than the stuff I was doing:

… we attacked our overgrown and uncared for backyard. We cleared out blackberry bushes and weeds as well as a dump pile that included 5 sections of fencing, a christmas tree, and a trampoline. In total, we filled 20+ yard bags of waste. We also discovered that there’s a 10′ x 15′ concrete slab out back which is now the future home of a shed or patio.…

Yikes. Reminds me of a time in college when some friends, in their annual cleaning of a house they had rented for several years running, decided it was finally time to clean out the back yard. After bushwhacking all the ivy and other plants back, they found that there was an entire terrace that had been hidden by all the overgrowth, complete with steps.

Bricks and blockbusters

Ah, late spring/early summer blockbuster time. As for the last few years, it’s the time that you’re not afraid to admit to friends, co-workers, and even your wife that you’re still a comic book geek at heart. X-Men 2 (I can’t quite bring myself to call it X2) was excellent last night. Though afterwards I was sad (not for the first time) that I let my collection (which included, in addition to complete runs of various mini-series and spinoffs, included numbers 94 (in which Nightcrawler, Storm, and Colossus made their first appearances, and Wolverine joined the team), 95, a handful of issues between, and then numbers 135 through about 225) go shortly after graduating college. —Sorry; geek off. (But there was something so fascinating about picking up the comic for the first time around #171, then going back and learning where all these friends had come from and where they had been. It helped that my first job was in a comic book store.)

So. Bricks. We’re about halfway done with our job, and our full pallet of bricks. There was one scary moment after we did the ramp from the driveway to the section we had already bricked in by the recycling, and started the section from the gate to the side garage door. And then I realized that the bricks were about an inch too high for the gate to close. We had done the new stretch at the same height as the other sections, but it was too high. Swearing, I had to dig out the bricks under the gate path. So now we have a bi-level path. At least until tomorrow. I’ll have to look at it again in daylight and see if I can live with it.

But it’s not all dusty and hard work. We have roses coming into bloom. And irises are starting to come out.

More bricks ahead

It’s been just about long enough since our last brick excursion that we’ve forgotten how painful it was. So we have another order in to finish the job. When we’re done, we’ll have a complete path around from the driveway to the back patio, which is perfect because it includes the major accesses for the garden and the recycling.

Man, I’m boring. How boring? Just put in a composter last night, that’s how boring. But I’ll be a boring guy with the best vegetables on the block. The herbs are growing like wildfire too.

Tonight, though, the X-Men movie.

—Oh, and Esta: impressive stream of consciousness. But I have to disagree with you about one thing: as much fun as it was to mow over the mint, the best part about mowing the lawn each week was always stopping.

More from Storr on Churchill

This morning’s extract from Anthony Storr’s essay about Churchill in Churchill’s Black Dog:

…most of us can tolerate disappointment in one sphere of our existence without getting deeply depressed, providing the other spheres remain undamaged. Normal people may mourn, or experience disappointment, but because they have an inner source of self-esteem, they do not become or remain severely depressed for long in the face of misadventure, and are fairly easily consoled by what remains to them.

Depressives, in contrast to these normal folk, are much more vulnerable. If one thing in the external world goes wrong, they are apt to be thrown into despair.…Disappointment, rejection, bereavement may all, in a depressive, pull a trigger which fires a reaction of total hopelessness: for such people do not possess an inner source of self-esteem to which they can turn in trouble, or which can easily be renewed by the ministrations of others. If, at a deep internal level, a person feels himself to be predominantly bad or unlovable, an actual rejection in the external world will bring this belief to the surface; and no amount of reassurance from wellwishers will, for a time, persuade him of his real worth.

One more…

In our IM conversation, Greg also pointed out that you can use the URL format suggested by What Do I Know, but fetch it with http:// instead of itms://. Why would you want to do that? Because you get the XML package that the server delivers, and you can pull out individual PlaylistIDs, so you can point even more directly to albums. Like: Why Is There Air? and Revenge, and even To Russell, My Brother, Whom I Slept With. (Links only work with iTunes 4.)

Lots of traffic, lots more thoughts about the Apple Music store

Just got off a long IM conversation with Greg, in which he pointed me to, in no particular order:

  • stevenf’s proposal for a standard way, called mtaste, to represent your musical tastes on a blog (more thoughts on this in a second)
  • Jeremy Zawodny’s complaint that Apple’s music store doesn’t already know what he might like to listen to, through his iTunes file (more on this too)
  • The assertion in Business Week that the Verizon piracy records ruling + the Grokster/Morpheus ruling = legislative ruling that piracy is behavioral, not technological. No more thoughts about this one, just thought it was interesting.
  • Lessig’s thought that all the international and state DMCA maneuvers are a way to lock in the DMCA here makes a scary amount of sense. And it makes me wonder whose analysis of the law is right. Is BW right and all these laws are, courtesy the Grokster decision, obsolete? Or is Lessig right and the clawed hand of the RIAA is closing in on my iTunes? Or are both right, and the RIAA is betting that the forces of consumerism will get tired of getting all the laws struck down (or go broke doing so) by the time the RIAA sets them all up?

So, with that note… the mtaste thing. Comparing those files would be even more difficult than stephenf imagines. Basically, he’s describing something like what Amazon does, but decentralized.

The problem is, unless you have an exact match in your mtaste file with the other guy’s, you have to do the music match thing that Amazon does, which is a large clustering problem. To get a good match you need a good sample size—given the number of artists out there (428 in my limited library, probably a lot more in other places), probably thousands. Probably more. Because the record that you’re comparing to someone else’s is at least 428 artists long. By way of comparison, training data sets of around 1600 were needed to predict television show preferences, 5000 for a movie database, and over 32000 for movement around Microsoft.com in a 1998 Microsoft Research study by Breese, Heckerman, and Kadie.

So, it’s a hard problem. You’d need, oh, a large dataset from users and a database to process it, a collaborative filtering algorithm, and a lot of data. And you’d need a standard way to convert the mtaste file (which, as proposed, is an arbitrary flat file) to a standard data structure.

LazyWeb, anyone?

But if you could pull it off… it would disintermediate Amazon. Really. It would do away with one of their powerful competitive strengths.

Which is probably why Apple hasn’t done it. Anyone seen the licensing terms on which they got the rights to use the One Click business method from Amazon?

(Oh, and the traffic… thanks to MacNetJournal and MacSurfer for pointing to this morning’s article. For the record, it’s about 4:1 in favor of MacNetJournal at present.)

Tips on the iTunes store

Some great discussion about how the iTunes store does its magic. From MacSlash, discussions of how iTunes does HTML, and some thoughts about how the information gets delivered from Apple’s servers. Bill Bumgarner identifies some nifty tricks you can do with search and music sharing. And Todd Dominey, at What Do I Know (an almost insanely well designed site, btw, though it appears to suffer when long unbroken URLs are in the content), reports on the format for creating links.