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01.31.06 Something really interesting happened at work today. Amidst the grueling, senseless onslaught of meetings, the relentless crush of trying to accomplish more and more with less and less, a tiny spark flashed. Today, someone very high up in my company got called out by someone even higher up for promoting disconnected, unproductive ideas. I wasn't there, I didn't see it; as with everything interesting in Corporate America, it came out (quickly) through the rumor mill. Still, it restored a little something for me. How often is it that you see someone very high up in a corporation call a turd a turd? How often do you see someone in such a secure position ask for the whys behind something, and go looking for solid foundations inside of flimsy ideas? True, it's what should happen all the time, and so it's by no means an inspiring moment; but as anyone who works for a large corporation could tell you, it doesn't happen often enough. So it's nice, and a little relieving, to see someone at the top recognizing the difference between acting, and acting with purpose. # Did they switch out Bush for a look-alike tonight, or did he rehearse more than usual? It felt like he suddenly knew how to use his words. # 01.30.06 John Gruber, who is brilliant if not a little grumpy, writes about Unsanity's Smart Crash Reporter software and the auto-installation approach that it offers to developers wishing to use it's code. (warning to the non-geek: stop now or you'll go blind) Gruber waxes on the form and function of SCR and the validity of an application that will install an additional, third party component onto your system without your knowledge. (A: wrong. Don't do it!) It's a great little article about software v. operating system politics, and brings to mind a few questions for me:
Point number 2, for me, seems like a no-brainer. It would increase Apple's cred among third party developers, who the company have historically not been very kind to, and would make the whole operation feel just a tiny bit more open and helpful. Now's the time for Apple to take efforts to appear less Corporate & Monolithic — the more Mac's and iPod's they sell, the more they're going to start to look like Microsoft to the general public. Make hay, as they say. # I'm going to coachella this year, even though I don't yet know who's playing. Seems like a worthwhile gamble, and plane tickets were still reasonably priced. # I'm home sick today (very sick) and am trying to entertain myself in-between fitful attempts to sleep. Only my neighbors are watching a wall-thumpingly loud (and super bass-y) telemundo program with lots of yelling and loud music, backed up by some really really gross coughing (this coming from me, today, so you know it's bad). I hate to be an old man, since it's daytime and I'm not usually here, but shut that shit off please! update: turns out the gay dance station is the only FM broadcaster with enough bass to drown out the telemundo nightmare. But am I any better off listening to stevie nicks rave remixes? # 01.27.06 Anti has released an mp3 from Neko Case's forthcoming new album, Fox Confessor Brings The Flood. The track is called Star Witness and it's A-MAZE-ING. # 01.24.06 Wikipedia takes on the Marina Girl. # 01.23.06 My favorite local dance band, hey willpower, just recorded (how? when? how?) a duet with annie of her kinda-fun-but-not-as-fun-as-heartbeat-song, chewing gum. You can hear it on their myspace page or follow the link at fluxblog. # Cat Power got her shit together. It's not just a bunch of pitchfork fluff when I say that The Greatest (the new album released tomorrow) is totally stupefyingly fantastic. You Are Free was a really incredible album, but this new album, while not as intimate, is about ten times more confident than anything she's ever done. And involved. It's an involved record, growing the beautiful simplicity of Chan Marshall's music into something organically bigger, but just as stirring. My favorite track on the album (posted on the right) is the album closer Love & Communication and it leaves you with the strongest impression of any of the songs on the album. Check. It. Out. # Bare Bones Software (the BBEdit people) have released a new app called yojimbo (don't ask me why it's called that) which is more or less a digital shoebox. I tend to want to love these programs more than I actually love them, although there's a special place in my heart for the super simple and slightly unfinished feeling Notational Velocity. The quick-add menu for this program looks nice and intuitive though; add to that the "print PDF to yojimbo" function that it installs into the Print/PDF dialog and you've got something that might actually work for keeping all of those web reciepts together. I'll try this program out for sure; who knows, maybe this is the Junk Drawer Organizer App that finally sticks? I feel like the only person who would care. # I plugged my last.fm weekly chart into the sidebar. Keep or lose? update: I've ditched this thing, when I realized that the chart image can expand uninhibited with the length of the artist's name. This variability doesn't work for me, so the chart is gone. Too bad. # 01.22.06 Has anyone used writely yet? I just saw it this evening. 37Signal's writeboard is nice for simple-simple document collaboration, but writely is totally feature-full, pretty much everything I would want out of a word processor (let's be honest, I don't use 90% of the features in Word). And it's all live online (notice how I did not say web two-point-oh, thanks). Between applications like this and suite's (albeit server-based instead of hosted) like joyent, why even have an office anymore? Give me a spreadsheet solution that's not Excel (please, someone, anyone) and I've got a mobile office. Nice. Maybe I should think about freelancing. # Are you on dodgeball yet? It's time. Do it. # 01.19.06 Can I be a little jessie for a moment? By which I mean that I'd like to break format (what's that? nerd-news?) and talk about something gross and off-color. I'd like to discuss poop. Have you noticed how totally different other people's poop smells sometimes? I mean, everyone shit smells a little different for sure (mine: roses). But sometimes you walk into a bathroom just as someone else is coming out and it's just totally foreign. Has this happened to anyone else? Is this weird? # 01.16.06 I'm a little creeped out by the name (come on, how could you not think that's what it is?), but the flash-based web app Rasterbator is very cool. It will take any photograph (uploaded or grabbed from a website) and blow it up (according to your scaling specs) to print off a regular laser printer as a massivly titled image. Very cool for your lo-fi hipster art ambitions. (Thanks to Portland-Johnathan for pointing this site out!) # 01.15.06 Interesting application of the day: MemoryMiner, a kind of iPhoto for the (digital) scrapbooking set. # 01.12.06 Microsoft has abandoned Windows Media for the mac. It never really supported it anyway, with a clunky player that rendered WMV videos in blocky, choppy messes contained in an ugly window that you couldn't touch without the video cutting out completely. But how will I play all those WMV (i.e. p0rn) files on my mac, you say? Well, it appears that Microsoft paid off or bought out or subsidized Flip4Mac's quicktime plugin, which allows WMV files to play seamlessly inside quicktime. And it's nice, too. I was using the previous "trial" version, which only played half of the file, but was helpful when I encountered an embedded WMV file on a webpage (plays through the QT plugin) or was browsing movie files in the Finder (plays through the QT "preview" feature in Finder) or whatever. Grab the free version of this software and throw out that ugly old player, then never ever think about media file formats again (unless their divx avi's -- any suggestions for plugins there?). # 01.06.06 I got to see Wolf Parade play last night at the Independent here in SF. It was the last show on their tour, and it was pretty wild. I'd love to know if anyone else has seen them play any other shows, because this one was really...loose. By which I mean that the show was good and fun, but the band was kind of all over the place. The first thing to know before you see them live is that there's a lot more Spaceman in their live show than there was on the album. (For an example of this, check out the original mix of modern world that's available on iTunes, versus the album mix.) The Spaceman thing is neither here nor there, but the unstable tempos and running together vocals and such was just a little too "really drunk band" to be considered "high energy exuberance." Believe me, there was a point where it was still on the fence. The one song they really really knocked out of the park, which surprised me and gave me a whole new appreciation for the track, was Fancy Claps. I've posted it on the left in case you haven't heard it before. Good drunk rockout song, if I've ever heard one. # 01.03.06 Monkey's are often scary, but always funny. Have you seen the commercials for trunk monkey? It's also worth noting that my sister believed that there were scary monkeys living in her closet when we were younger. They were not trunk monkeys. Just closet monkeys. # 01.02.06 I've been (slowly) catching up on the first season of Lost (thanks bittorrent). I see why it's so well received. The writing, acting, direction are just stellar. I just finished the third or fourth episode — the scene when you realize that Locke (the old man) couldn't walk before the crash? Totally amazing. Takes all of the various aspects of the character and sews them together perfectly, all with one little reveal. # 01.01.06 Old news for sure, but just as relevant today; helpful tips from Slate on how to manage your angry rapper entourage. # Happy 2006. Here's hope for a brighter year than last. # « December 2005 | archive index | February 2006 » built with movabletype |
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