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Aaargh! But I agree with Chris. The juice went out of Dee a while back. Can’t wait to see the next adventure.
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This makes me very angry. The initial Recovery.gov didn’t have a lot of functionality, but it was well constructed and standards compliant. Then some hack of a consultant charged the government HOW MUCH? to shift it to an unfunctional platform (I’m sorry, Sharepoint, but you weren’t made for this project) that didn’t even meet the government’s OWN STANDARDS for accessibility. This is a travesty.
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Awesome: “And you don’t need to be rich or powerful to lift your voice in song or get out of your seat and shake your groove thing. (Laughter.) You don’t need to be a Van Gogh to paint a picture, or a Maya Angelou to write a poem. You don’t need a Grammy or an Oscar or an Emmy to make your work on the cultural life of your community or your country a valuable one. And to people who might not speak a single word of the same language, who might not have a single shared experience, might still be drawn together when their hearts are lifted by the notes of a song, or their souls are stirred by a vision on a canvas. That is the power of the arts — to remind us of what we each have to offer, and what we all have in common; to help us understand our history and imagine our future; to give us hope in the moments of struggle; and to bring us together when nothing else will.”
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I think this is an important note that has been lost in the debate. Part of what is being done in the healthcare reform proposals is to try to address the uninsured–and the 44000 deaths each year that result from lack of health coverage. When someone tells you that the new plans will cost more, it’s because they’re trying to solve a problem that the other side hasn’t begun to address.
New project: Addition
Well, I guess we’re about to get started.
While Zalm was going condo, my wife and I were planning for a little addition–namely, two floors, office below, bedroom above, with two bathrooms. We’ve known for a while that it would be good to have a little more room in our Cape-style house, and this seems to be the best way to go.
In the process, we’re going to accomplish a few goals:
- En suite master bath
- Dedicated office space
- Finished utility room (at last, at long last–no more plaster chunks falling on us in the laundry!)
- Fixing the drainage in the back driveway (this will merit a post by itself)
- Removal of the old fixed concrete trash disposal from the backyard.
- And getting more space in this tiny little Cape.
And, you might ask, how much of the work are we doing ourselves this time around?
Um. Well. We’re planning to lay a floating floor in the basement. We’ll certainly plan and assemble the storage ourselves. And I think that’s about it, really. Yeah, this time around we’re planning to let the professionals do the work. Because after the last few projects, I think we know our limitations.
So tomorrow, excavation starts in the back yard for the addition foundation. Photos, I guess, to come…
Grab bag: the old order passeth away
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End of an era–the decommissioning and eventual tear down of the Langley Full Scale Tunnel, one of the largest wind tunnels in the world, after 80 years of service.
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It’s always good to hear that reasoned debate wins out over incitement to riot and assassinate. Unfortunately, with NewsMax columnists advocating a military overthrow of our own government–“to protect the Constitution,” no less–I don’t think that reasoned debate has too much life left in it.
Grab bag: creative crisis
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I find myself wondering how much of my time I spend in Creative right now.
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Signs we are back in the 1970s: Jerry Brown is the frontrunner for the 2010 California governorship.
Grab bag: Tosca at the Met and other fiascos
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The occasionally cranky Cory Doctorow is spot-on here. First they came for the rectal-cavity terrorists, but I didn’t speak out because… wait a minute…
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One side effect of the steady downward spiral of newspapers: two hours of choral singing get two sentences in an otherwise nice, if brief, review.
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Ouch: “By all means, then, let’s have a new ‘Tosca.’ But it needs to be good. And this is not. Although Bondy has conceived potent stagings of ‘Salome,’ ‘Don Carlos,’ and Handel’s ‘Hercules,’ among other operas, he has failed to find a clear angle on ‘Tosca,’ and instead delivered an uneven, muddled, weirdly dull production that interferes fatally with the working of Puccini’s perfect contraption.”
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Nokia’s new platform documentation includes a pretty good chapter on mobile application security.
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The meltdown as a system dynamics problem.
Double-header: Symphony of Psalms and Mozart Requiem
It’s been a few days since I posted anything, but I have good reason. Not only did we push a big release at work at the end of last week, but it’s season opening time at Symphony Hall. This week’s concerts feature two choral masterworks, Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms and the Mozart Requiem.
Both works have particular demands on the singer. The Stravinsky is challenging because of the combination of rhythmic precision and intensely fervent power, not only in the loud passages but in the quieter fugues of the second movement. Theologically, Stravinsky’s re-imagining of the Psalms reclaims both the desperation of Psalms 39 and 40 (“Hear my prayer, O LORD, and give ear unto my cry”…”I waited patiently for the LORD”) and the ecstasy of Psalm 150 from their normal status as platitudes. The texts are made over into cantica nova, new songs, and the singer’s challenge is to bring those songs to life against the structural challenges of the work, which include unusual harmonic modes and slow tempi that can either transport the listener or bog the work down into the mire.
When those challenges are surmounted, the work can be amazing, a deft 25 minute masterpiece. I felt good about our Saturday performance but am keeping my wits about me for the final show tomorrow night.
The Mozart Requiem has a different set of challenges. The harmonic language is more familiar, though certainly Mozart’s writing was breaking new ground at the time. But the real challenge is breathing a distinctive life into a work that by turns flirts with overuse (the first movement was used as background music for a mock tragedy on “30 Rock” last season) and obscurity (the little homaged “Hostias” movement). I’ve written about the work before, in my performance on September 11, 2002 and my Tanglewood performance in 2006. This time, the major difference was that I knew the work from memory, mostly, already, and that I knew my vocal instrument well enough to keep from blowing it out in the early movements. (Interestingly, this, the beginning of my fifth season with the chorus, was the first performance that repeated repertoire I had already sung with the choir.)
At the end, the big unifying factor in the two works was the expression of deeply personal faith in two very different times and styles. The Stravinsky grabs new life out of old psalm texts, while the Mozart breathes a very real personal terror of death into the mass for the departed. It’s perhaps no surprise that singing both in the same concert wrings one out like an old washcloth.
The food court model of capacity planning
I just got back from the craziness that is the opening week of the new H Mart in Burlington, MA. It was instructive on several levels, not least of which was the personal (note to self: wait three weeks after the opening of a new highly hyped destination before attempting to visit). But there were also some business lessons in capacity planning to learn.
I was curious about the supermarket’s general offerings — always happy to find a new place to get specialty vegetables like galangal and lime leaves, and the prospect of picking up a carryout pint of kimchee fills me with something like culinary concupiscence (Korean takeout being thin on the ground in the northwest Boston burbs). But this visit, at noon on Monday, was about the other big letters on the sign out front: Food Court.
Takeout options are thin on the ground in this part of Burlington, with only a handful of places (Ginger Pad, Fresh City) within walking distance of my office, and only one or two more (Panera) within a reasonable drive. So I was excited that a new prospect was available. And I wasn’t the only one. When I parked (and the amount of time it took to do that should have been a warning flag) and got inside, I saw the big food court, about six counters in all covering various Asian cuisines, packed full of people. I parked myself in the line at the end for Korean food and waited.
And waited.
And waited.
There were some real operations problems happening behind the counter. The wait time to place the order was about twenty minutes, and when I got to the counter I found that about half the selections were marked as unavailable (“No pork,” the harried cashier explained). Average order fulfillment start to finish was on the order of thirty minutes or more, with about ten of that cooking time. The rest was consumed with waiting for someone to pack the order and get it out, a problem exacerbated by un-bussed trays and dishes, only two visible line cooks, and short supplies.
H Mart had, famously, months to get ready for the launch. How’d they goof it up? Chalk part of it up to opening week snafus, perhaps. But easy things like staffing the counters should have been solved problems by four days into the process. I think the real operational lesson is that H Mart neglected to anticipate all the potential sources of demand for its offerings. They didn’t have visible staff problems or lines elsewhere in the supermarket, and even had fully staffed demonstration tables nearby. What they didn’t count on was a large number of office workers eager for a new lunch option. That left-field demand spike apparently swamped their available capacity of workers and their foodstocks.
The general lesson? When doing capacity planning, consider all the possible uses of your service and think day by day and hour by hour how they will be consumed. Then ask: am I ready?
The language is suddenly impoverished
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I mourn the death of Mr Safire, a humane conservative and a great writer, in a time when both seem rare. I read his columns on language with the purest pleasure.
Wergild for the taking
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Makes me want to say Hwæt!
Grab bag: Usability and usefulness
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Interesting practical web usability findings.
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Arguments from a writer in favor of Google Books. I agree–it’s been invaluable in writing the history of something whose history has never been written but which is scattered across hundreds of books and documents.
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Details the legal efforts required to establish that City Hall employees were deleting emails in violation of retention policy, and that the retention policy wasn’t enforced.
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What I should probably be doing this weekend.
Grab bag: Catching up
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Arvo Pärt’s Fourth Symphony–review of the forthcoming recording from the LA premiere. Can’t wait.
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Sounds like some interesting wine choices, from a region I’ve never heard of.
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Quantifying the nadir of the UVA football program under Groh.
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Full video of the president’s appearance on the Letterman show.
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The basic issues: a retention policy with lots of room for leeway, and no automation.
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Description of the basics of the standard encryption algorithm, by stick figures.
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Positive unintended consequences of London’s city streets tax.
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Security moves up the IT stack.
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Fixes “issues browsing the iTunes store.” Not including fixing iTunes Plus and Complete My Album links–still MIA.
Grab bag: Classical change
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Farewell to Ann Hobson Pilot at the BSO. I wish I could see the premiere of the concerto John Williams wrote for her on Friday night.
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Looks like classical music will be alive and well in Boston. Maybe now they’ll play some real music.
Grab bag: Net un-neutrality, 32-bit code injection
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“By contrast, she said, the FCC appeared to be engaging in ‘regulatory intervention into a vibrant marketplace.'” The irony being that it’s the carriers who propose to quash innovation by discriminating based on protocols.
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Using scripting additions to inject 32 bit Safari plugin code into the 64 bit Safari process. Code injection as a feature raises my eyebrows a little, but I suppose this is no different from any plugin.
How not to spend money at the Volkswagen dealer.
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Pictorial guide to replacing the battery in a VW Passat key remote.
Grab bag: Hacked PBS, balancing PATRIOT
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Man, what a nasty thing this is. Someone browsing to the Curious George PBS page is just trying to entertain their kid, and then suddenly they get infected with malware.
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Putting checks and balances into the PATRIOT Act, and curbing the warrantless wiretapping, is finally some real progress on the constitutional front. Yay.