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Interesting outline of the direction that Obama would like to take with the American economy. It is probably a little premature to speculate about post-recession economic policy.
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A fairly brilliant hack to “encourage” people to upgrade away from IE6. I say, the sooner the better.
Grab bag: Web geekery and bacon torches
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A spec proposal for tying short URLs in a persistent way to an HTML document.
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HTML 5 introduces additional link relations to enrich documents.
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Burning a hole through a steel pan with the power of oxygen + bacon. Well, prosciutto, really.
Grab bag: All kinds of revolting
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Protesting taxation with representation.
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The specific URL format for Rally burndown charts is provided for mashing with other web sites.
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The constant ripples of undirected communication as a metaphor for what is lost in working remotely is only a beginning for this insightful post about how to manage a remote worker successfully.
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Heh. See “Requirement: n. A statement of need by a Product Manager, seen as a loose suggestion by Development, and as a firm commitment by Sales.”
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Alas. I knew I wouldn’t get a chance to go but I’m disappointed anyway.
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Cool series of real (not digital) tilt shift photos of the University. My two favorites are the one showing the endzone in Scott Stadium, and the aerial view of the South Lawn project.
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Watch out, all you command line hackers! Thanks, BC, for making Boston look ridiculous AGAIN.
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Capsule review of “Love is a Mix Tape,” a new memoir by a UVA grad about his wife, their love and life in Charlottesville, and her early death, told through old mixtapes.
Sammy’s Steak Den up in smoke
It’s a bad morning for old friends. It seems that Sammy’s Steak Den suffered a pretty bad fire this morning. A family lunch destination in Newport News when I was growing up for years, I remember the food almost as much as I do the waitresses and the clown painting on the wall. My dad had been going to it since before I was born.
It was a classic Greek burger and steak joint, with big burgers, mountains of fries, tasty (and cheap) steaks, and Greek salads (though honestly mostly I remember the burgers and the fries). I hope they’re able to rebuild; I was looking forward to taking my family some day.
Update: The original link is borked, but there are two follow-ups: it was an electrical fire sparked by a faulty outlet, and the structure has been condemned. So if they’re going to reopen it won’t be there. Waaaaaah, indeed.
Remembering Steve Bognaski
I learned this morning that a Virginia Glee Club friend, Steve Bognaski, died two months ago on Valentine’s Day of a heart attack. He was 38, and left a wife and two children.
I’m kind of flabbergasted. Steve always was one of the most bighearted guys I knew, full of life, a dedicated singer, and capable of highly vocal joy. It doesn’t seem fair that he’s gone.
I count myself fortunate that I was able to meet up with him when I was in Charlotte in September 2007 for the iTSMF show. He was excited about his family’s upcoming move to Suffolk, Virginia. I am sorry I didn’t see him more often in the time since graduation.
I’m alive
I apologize for the plethora of linkblog posts here over the past little bit, and for their relative paucity. It’s been a busy few months. I got a new boss and transitioned from a “second product manager” to more of a lead role, at about the same time that we launched a set of significant initiatives (c.f. press release if interested, if not, c.n.f.). We launched last night, a day after I got back from a holiday visit to my in-laws, and two days into the rehearsal cycle for the last Boston concert of the 2009-2009 Tanglewood Festival Chorus season, the Berlioz Te Deum.
Like I said: busy.
Not too terribly bad, though. I’m batching it for a few days and enjoying the ability to just sit and catch my breath. Did you know that there’s this thing called television? And that, mercifully, Google Reader maxes out at reporting “1000+” unread items?
Grab bag: Digg and ROM
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Using the referrer to send special content to Digg as thanks for framing your page and stealing your link.
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The prosaic origin of a (somewhat) iconic toy. Definitely the strangest critter to ever get its own comic book.
Grab bag: Fail, epic fail, and copyright fail
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Wonder how many web CMSes use hyperlink based deletes and no access control?
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OMFG. When even the AP can’t remember what it’s given its affiliates permission to do, there’s a problem there…
Grab bag: O’Reilly, ORLY?
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Wow. Ebert kneecaps O’Reilly: “Dear Bill: Thanks for including the Chicago Sun-Times on your exclusive list of newspapers on your ‘Hall of Shame.’ To be in an O’Reilly Hall of Fame would be a cruel blow to any newspaper. It would place us in the favor of a man who turns red and starts screaming when anyone disagrees with him.”
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Underscores the need for much stronger focus on computer system security. Hopefully the response won’t be as closely tied to “network security” as the Bush administration’s was. This is a network, systems, and applications problem and needs to be addressed at all levels.
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Time to check out Astra.
Thank your local optometrist
I may owe my optometrist my vision.
I was running low on contacts and considered simply calling in an order, but thought maybe I should go and have my eyes checked. Normally I only change prescriptions every few years, but about a year ago I had an eye infection and a more indepth visit. While I wasn’t experiencing any real pain, I thought I should check in anyway.
It was a good thing I did. My optometrist used a number of diagnostic tools to check up on my eyes, concluding with anterior segment photography. She then said, “You have a corneal ulcer.” She went on to explain that my eye infection had recurred in my left eye, and that a slight cloudiness in my cornea was an indication that my white blood cells were fighting the infection and that the surface of the cornea was opened as a result.
She put me on aggressive antibiotics drops, told me not to wear my contacts, and asked me to come back in two days to check the progress. So I’m not out of the woods yet, but the prognosis is pretty good. On the other hand, if I had followed my first instinct and simply dialed in the order for the new contacts, I might have seriously damaged my eye.
If you wear contacts and you haven’t been to the optometrist in a while, you might want to schedule a visit–or at least write them a note. I think they’re underappreciated.
Grab bag: customer experience edition
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Call me nuts, but I don’t like the idea of a service holding my account information in escrow.
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37% of the UVA first year class uses a Mac, up from 4% in the late 1990s through 2003.
It’s starting to look like the beginning of a reinforcing feedback loop: students have “noticed many more Macs on Grounds recently”, “I like the way that it navigates and I feel like they are very reliable … We can always get my sister’s fixed easily when it has a problem”…
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A set of brilliantly impassioned arguments about how to restructure the Globe for continued viability come down to a few main points: the paper should have recognized that it was doing a poor job of delivering its primary revenue source, ads, compared to the Internet long ago; they aren’t doing a good job delivering their primary VALUE, differentiated stories, either.
Marian Anderson anniversary
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An appreciation of Marian Anderson and her role in music, and in American history.
Grab bag: Application security edition
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Interesting perspective on the success or failure of Fortify’s pitch around government software security, or how not to do it.
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Thoughts toward putting together an application security portfolio. Aimed more at a consultant than a business user.
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Social media and press announcements, or how to break the traditional press release cycle.
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Index of all the Jefferson architectural drawings.
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One of our big initiatives kicks off.
Grab bag: Legos, sculpture, and the arts
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A round Lego building in the enormous New Hampshire Millyard project.
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Monticello in Legos. Dig it.
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More secrets of round buildings.
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Creating a round building with Lego. Hmm. Rotunda?
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Link to Linda Ronstadt’s testimony to Congress regarding arts funding. The focus is on music education, and he’s right, it’s a stronger argument than you’d think. Well worth reading.
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Seeing the sculpture it’s a little incongruous, but it’s also nice to see something that speaks to the 20th century in the middle of the Grounds, just steps from the lawn. Even if it is called “Tripes.”
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To be clear, the students were protesting a policy that had been posted around the Calder sculpture that prohibited photographs of it. So there was a large gathering of students and faculty around the statue–taking photos of it. Clarifications were issued: the ban was only intended to be on commercial photography. Yay?
BSO: Brahms Requiem recording
I finally got around to ordering copies of the BSO’s Brahms Requiem recording (BSO Classics 0901); thanks to commenter SteelyTom for the prompt. I don’t, alas, have a SuperCD player or even good speakers at my disposal and am listening to it in my car and over headphones. But I’m enjoying it nonetheless.
As I wrote earlier, it’s a marathon of a piece, and the astonishing thing for me listening from the perspective of the audience is how little it sounds like a marathon. The opening is a little tricky: it’s a slow meditative movement, and there are distracting audience noises. But the second movement… I was listening in my car, which has superior sound reproduction (I love my Sennheisers, but with or without noise cancelling they trim off too many high frequencies), to this movement this morning, and had the volume cranked up to hear the quiet opening “Denn Alles Fleisch.” Brahms uses low strings and timpani to set the stage for the first statement of the theme by the chorus, then adds horns and an implacable crescendo underscored by the heartbeat of the timpani. When the chorus enters at forte it’s still a shock, a wall of sound that pushes the listener back, but is totally under control and comes back down to a simmer until it erupts again into another reprise, and then into the first fugue of the work. And I knew what was coming, and I had listened to the radio broadcasts, and I still had tears in my eyes.
I’m not an objective judge of the performance, so I’ll just note that despite some technical glitches, the final movement had me in tears again. Regarding the recording quality, I will say that if the rest of the work sounds like the first and second movements did in my car, this is to be listened to on good speakers turned up, where it will transport you squarely into Symphony Hall. If Maestro Levine’s goal was transparency, he got it: if you close your eyes, you can tell from the stereo imaging that the chorus was arranged soprano, bass, tenor, alto on the risers, and each of the instruments are clearly audible, yet there is still that fine sheen of ambience from the hall that places you precisely in the room. It’s a wonderful recording and a great souvenir for me, and I’m hoping to hear how it affects you.