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Okay, long time no update again, but I am currently sporran-deep in work, with the second book of the Ihnatko Series due in about a week and with therefore only a little more then seven days left in which to either (a) finish said book, or (b) get a good fake passport together and choose once and for all whether to flee to Australia or South America.
(Advantage to Australia: pleasant, productively-intoxicated populace is hard to offend, can get away with anything up to and including impregnating somebody on an escalator; South America: say what you want about druglords, but as a manager of a coca processing plant you'll never wake up some morning and discover that your job has been outsourced to Pakistan)
Compounding matters is the fact that Travel Hell started in April, right on schedule, and will continue more or less unchecked until October. I finish the second book a week from Monday. On Wednesday, I head to Kansas City to give a talk, I come home Thursday, spend two or three days catching up on work, and then I fly to California for three days of diagnostic-grade sun in the Mojave Desert to watch the launch (takeoff, actually) of SpaceShip One.
Hopefully I'll have some cool screenshots to show off sometime in...well, let's say "sometime" and leave it there. While in London a couple of weeks ago (372 photos...much will be written when many photos are edited down) I finally had a long-needed brainwave regarding the (long-stalled) Next Edition of my blogging app. Because this is a big-time professional commercial software development project I've whiteboarded the following generational path for the product, to inspire the engineering team:
CWOBber 1.x: AppleScript code that automates the updating of the blog, using an existing text editor and an FTP client.
CWOBber 2.x: AppleScript Studio application that updates the blog without any need for outside apps.
CWOBber 3.x: Generalized standalone blogging app that can be used with blogs other than mine.
CWOBber 4.x: Sell the product to anyone who has their checkbook open; fire entire staff; retain company publicity firm to start promoting me as an Eccentric Internet Billionaire, which was pretty much the plan all along.
When I revealed this strategy — I left the last item off, actually — I also announced that we'd be using an orange rhino as our project mascot and that each week, one member of the development team would be declared the "Big Horn Of The Week," winning a $20 gift certificate to Bugaboo Creek Steakhouse and the right to display the mascot in his or her cubicle. This motivational campaign was announced during our usual Thursday all-staff but attendance was pretty damned poor so I'm not sure if it actually had any effect on the project timeline. Well, that's the great thing about a random firing: it keeps the staff at peak productivity and attendance is actually quite counterproductive.
(I'm lying of course. As always, Ten Thousand Nuns And Orphans remains a one-man creative house. Though the upgrade path is dead-on, as is the ultimate goal of firing a lot of people and then becoming an EIB.)
The biggest hitch to CWOBber 2.0 was the simple question of What The Thing Should Look Like. I'm taking all of its functions in-house, so I needed to ask myself just what I wanted to be looking at every time I wanted to post something. Tricky and immensely subtle question, that. Do I want it to work like a document-based app, where I do a Command-N, an empty window appears, and then I click menus to make things happen? Do I want all of its functions in one window, like an iApp? I went through a lot of iterations before I hit upon The Right Way.
And thanks to AppleScript Studio, I was able to create and wire up the user interface pretty quickly. It looks like it works. The editor is fantabulous. Mac OS X understands the concept of a scrolling text-editing view, so as soon as you plop one in a window (and write five or six lines of code to initialize it properly) you get: automatic spellcheck-as-you-type; cut, copy and paste; drag-and-drop insertion and editing; unlimited file size...well, I'm sure there's more but I've made my point that this is a bit of a step up from my first "real" programming language, in which I really wanted for my app to draw a circle, but at the time I only had fifth-grade math and drawing a circle required that I do a lot of trigonometry and then translate cartesian coordinates into base-8 and then do a series of bitwise operations to actually put the dots on the screen.
The alpha of CWOBber 2.0 now has a working text editor, so bang, out goes BBEdit; I don't need it any more. Uploading files via FTP is a two-line affair, so out goes Interarchy. The rest of CWOBber 2.0's functions are inherited from CWOBber 1.x, so all I actually need to do is cut and paste some blocks of code from 1.0 and hey presto, 2.0 will be a working blogger app.
But writing software is a lot like being a homeowner who acts as their own unlicensed electrician. The idea is to keep adding things and adding things and adding things until everything goes all hot and glowy and then you get the opportunity to rebuild everything from the ground up. I've been enhancing 1.0 for a couple of years now, so CWOBber's code doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Plus, I have a couple of ideas for new features, so bring CWOBber 2.0 to its Working Beta stage will be a (highly positive) adventure.
Took a day off today. A good friend is visiting from down south so we drove up to Maine and I introduced her to the majesty of The Maine Diner in Wells. Oddly enough, during my frequent picturesque tours of the Maine coastline, my desire to see more of the picturesque Maine coastline tends to be forgotten when the Maine Diner's neon sign appears and the words "Lobster pie" dislodge all pre-existing desires and intentions and I find myself muttering "And a nice bowl of crab bisque" as I swing the car into the gravel lot.
Therefore, it came as a complete surprise when I discovered that just 1.3 miles north of the MD there exists a (quite lovely) wildlife preserve with a (really very quite lovely) meandering mile-long trail through deep, lush, lively woods and salt marshes. We took a walk and ogled the aforementioned wildlife (Spotted: chipmunks (several); geese (3); trout (dozens, judging from the rilles in the placid river); the Great Blue Heron (one, in the visitor's guide); and finally a rare sighting of the Harbery Plover, made all the more rare because instead of flying around or nesting it was wearing a chipmunk suit and scampering around the forest floor acting very much like a chipmunk. But we knew...we knew.)
I highly recommend a road trip up Route One. The Rachel Carson Preserve offers a glimpse into a rare segment of Maine coastal ecosystem ("Maine's rugged coast has few sheltered bays where waves slow to ripples and cordgrass can take root and build a marsh," advises the trail guide, and who am I to rock the boat?) and the act of walking a mile in fifty minutes' time will give you a solid excuse to order the peanut butter pie for dessert.
Last comment. Reagan's dead. OK. My comment is actually about the problems of Google News. Google News is fairly unique because (unlike cnn.com, for instance) it has no real editors or directors as such. Software assembles news pages (more or less) automagically using software that determines most-linked-to and most-linked news items. Headlines are accompanied by photos, also chosen by the software.
Good stuff. But if a human were calling the shots, would he or she have seen the headline "President Ronald Reagan, Dead at 93," looked at all available images, and chosen to accompany it with a photo of Ronnie and Nancy posing with Michael Jackson and Bubbles the Chimp?
I'm not saying it was inappropriate, mind you. But perhaps Google needs to put another couple of interns on top of this.
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Pictures from the Rachel Carson Nature Preserve are now up. It ends with a shot of one of the photos that greets you as you enter The Maine Diner. See if you find it as thought-provoking as I do.
In the last posting, I failed to mention that on the drive back from Wells, Maine I finally found a replacement for a loaner Pentium 4 box that needs to be packed and shipped next week. I know that many of you envy my lifestyle as an Internationally-Beloved Industry Pundit, and why not: last month I spent a fabulous week in London, solely because I've developed a knack for explaining multiprocessing architecture in terms of The Dick Van Dyke Show. I've mopped floors in a post office and I worked in a department store and I manned a tech-support desk and in all those jobs, the best I could really hope for was that they'd pretend not to notice that I was padding my time card/walking out with inventory/opening people's mail until I was ready for another career change. The gig I have now is a big step up.
But it's not all skittles and beer, sensation-seekers. (Except for last March, when Motorola sent me a pound of Skittles and a gift certificate to a local microbrew as part of their new "Life is all skittles and beer with Motorola's new KL-9 'Swingo' Phone" promotion). Yes, Hewlett-Packard sent me a Pentium tower to try out, but what happens eight months later? They start making all sorts of noises about how they're going to need to see either the computer or $2800 within three weeks' time. I mean, as though I have nothing better to do, right?
This particular machine played an important role in my organization and I was wondering how I was going to replace it. Fortunately — miraculously, one might say — we stopped off at a church thrift store and I found a squat, narrow table that was practically an exact match for that HP. As I write this from the comfort of my sofa it's keeping my drink and the remote within easy reach as well as, if not better than, that Windows machine ever did.
So it's true what they say: adversity + determination = growth. A valuable lesson for any orphans or recent car-crash victims who might be reading this.
| | Among the usual PR mumbo jumbo in yesterday's mail was a new game called "Space Colony." The PR people included a pack of Astronaut Ice Cream, bless their hearts, but I had far too much common sense to actually eat it. It was oppressively, desperately, militantly, hot yesterday and I suppose eating ice cream in any fashion would have had a psychological impact on my sense of temperature, but Astronaut Ice Cream — like getting a piercing in a Very Special Place — is the sort of delight that you should only experience once.
Plus, there's a neighbor who's been getting on my nerves recently and I shall greatly enjoy throwing the dessicated treat at him. If he's unlucky I'll get him right in the eye with it. If he's _very_ unlucky it'll miss him entirely and then he'll open up the foil baggie and eat it.
(He got a reprieve, though. It was so hot yesterday that by the time I got back home, the stuff had melted. Not the Astronaut Ice Cream...the foil packet it came in.)
Surely the live coverage of Reagan's hearse down Constitution Avenue has seen no equal in terms of drama and excitement since OJ's 15 MPH chase down the freeway. I had dinner plans but I punched the TiVO button to record what I missed, and am now fast-forwarding to the good bits.
(Hearse stops. Pause. Pallbearer approaches back. Door is opened. Pause. Casket is rolled out. Crowd starts applauding while it's set on a table-like caisson. Which is a respectful gesture but I wish it wasn't so familiar. It's almost exactly like that point during the wedding reception when the caterers roll out the cake for the first time and for a moment it made me wonder if all those people lined up in the street were hoping to get a corner piece.)
| | The Republican Convention isn't for another ten weeks, but we might as well start spreading the word right now:
1) Every time there's a moment of silence for Ronald Reagan, you take a drink.
2) For every twenty seconds that the moment of silence is awkwardly extended to ensure that every governor or senator with a shot at the 2008 nomination receives a somber close-up on national television, you take another drink.
3) Every time a convention speaker claims that s/he can Feel Ronald Reagan's Presence Among Us Today, you take a drink. Take a bonus drink if the speaker pretends to blink back tears; take a third if the speaker is also male.
4) Every time the crowd is challenged to do something "for the Gipper" — re-elect George W. Bush; support statewide referenda banning same-sex marriage; stop tossing chicken bones into Oklahoma's seating area (Texas delegates only) — you take a drink.
5) Every time George W. Bush (or one of his designated proxies) attempts to create the impression that he's Ronald Reagan's son and not George Sr.'s, you take a drink.
6) Every time there's a video montage that ends with Ronald Reagan in cowboy attire, strolling and/or riding a horse in slow motion across a sweeping prairie in which the sky has been electronically replaced with a seductively rippling American flag, you chug.
I should clarify: I'm not proposing a Republican National Convention Drinking Game. I'm just saying that I plan to have a lot of alcohol on hand the week of August 30th and unless you're planning to unplug all of your radios and TVs and stay off the Internet that whole week, I suggest you start hunting for the best deals on tequila and gin.
| | I don't know if you watched the Reagan funeral service last night — oh, Ronald Reagan died last weekend, by the way; have you heard? The four networks have stayed on top of the story since then and report that his condition is now stable — but if you did, please tell me that during the 21-cannon graveside salute you had the same reaction that I did.
People watching the broadcast at home heard this:
BATTERY CAPTAIN: Cannon stand ready........FIRE!
SFX: (deafening burst)
After the third or fourth report, people watching the broadcast in my home heard this:
BATTERY CAPTAIN: Cannon stand ready...
ANDY: For THOSE uh-BOUT to ROCK...
BATTERY CAPTAIN: ...FIRE!
SFX: (deafening burst)
ANDY: Weeeee saaaa-LUUUTE YOUUUU!
(repeat above sequence 7x)
I don't claim that this was in any way classy, but I couldn't not do it. And come on: it's been six freakin' days. Even when Jesus Christ died everybody pretty much stopped making a fuss about it by Day Four, if we can believe the Apostles.
Still, I'm relieved to finally discover that there are actually some limits to the power of Ronald Wilson Reagan's (legacy, stature, Praetorian spin guards...pick one). Check out this week's People Magazine. Ronnie's smiling face and twinkly eyes peer out at you from the magazine rack, laid over a lush American Flag background and the magazine's logo. But (apparently) after a long and intense debate the editors decided that as responsible infotainment journalists they couldn't let Ronnie's death push J. Lo's surprise wedding off the cover completely.
Oh, well. Hey, better luck with that whole "put his face on Mount Rushmore" project, guys. That was probably a more practical goal, anyway.
| | I took a lot of pictures during my walk through that Maine nature preserve. Partly it was because I had a new 6 megapixel camera to play with but mostly it was because I'm a total photo wonk. Yes, I was that miserable tourist in the British Museum blocking an aisle in the Greek gallery last month, effectively holding the flow of traffic hostage until a young woman — any young woman — strolled close enough to a group of statues to look like she might have been part of the display.
(And when none did, I cursed the British and the British Museum and I cursed their whole pathetic so-called Empire and barked that you'd never catch the Democracy-loving people of the United States of America rolling through the world, imposing our way of life upon the locals and strolling off with their lawn ornaments. "Plunderers! Thieves! Pillagers!" I barked. Then I stormed off into the Asian Antiquities room, where I insisted that everyone step away from the Silk Road treasures so their reflections wouldn't ruin my shot.)
So there in the Rachel Carson Nature Preserve there was a lot of stopping and squinting and hoping to find a flash of color among a contrasting background, and deciding that if the Humans are going to go to all this bother to preserve Nature, then Nature shouldn't keep flying away whenever you get close enough for a picture. I mean, that's just simple courtesy, you know?
Anyway, as part of my ongoing quest to Capture The Total Sense Of Place (and thus touch hearts, minds and souls and help the whole of Humanity to coalesce into a higher, unified Being, blah blah blah) I found myself squatting on the balls of my feet above a steep ravine, shooting downward.
I was with a good friend. An inconsequential force vector applied to my backside would have sent me tumbling down through moss and leaves and splashing spread-eagled into a shallow salt marsh, but I knew I could trust her not to apply it. And this trust was well-placed; I walked out of the nature preserve no moister than when I walked in, and with a reassuring lack of broken vertebrae.
She admitted later on that the thought did occur. I didn't think any less of her for having thought of it. Not one bit. It was just too good an opportunity.
This memory flashed through my mind when I learned that former president George Bush would be jumping out of an airplane to mark his 80th birthday (and raise money for a cancer center among other charities...rock on). Reagan was a two-term President and — for good or bad — his legacy and Presidency will be discussed for generations to come. He passed away after a terrible decade-long illness but somehow managed to hang on to his dignity, and when news of his death spread, supporters and detractors alike could only speak with admiration and respect.
George Bush, Sr. was Reagan's Vice-President. As President, he was noted for merely riding along on the momentum of the previous administration and then getting the US involved in a manufactured war, one which we're still paying for more than ten years later...with interest. Despite onetime record-approval ratings, a persistent economic downturn let to his being bounced out of office after one term and today, Republican party strategists more or less pretend that he never existed.
"A week after the death of Ronald Wilson Reagan, his Vice-President died in an airfield in Crawford, Texas during a failed skydive. Absolutely everyone including his own wife told him that this was a really, really bad idea for an 80-year-old man with limited skydiving experience to jump out of a plane solo, and when news of his death spread, supporters and detractors alike could only say 'God, what a dumbass!'."
I'm really surprised that after Reagan's death, Bush went ahead with the jump. After all, Karma isn't anywhere near as kind as my friend Barbara...and it was just too good an opportunity.
| | You ever get a new toy and you've had to be patient and wait until later to play with it and the temptation damned-near killed you but you knew it'd be worth it because man oh man, were you going to enjoy this...and then the time comes and you tear open the box and that's when you discover that it's missing one key component? And it's a trivial problem and the store could swap you a new one in to time, but it's late at night and the store's closed and that's it?
(sigh.)
I finally finished the last book in the first wave of the series of books I'm writing and editing for Wiley Publishing. Lotsa last-minute stuff to do and while I was this close to completing the first functional alpha of CWOBber2, I was a good boy. "I shall celebrate the completion of this book series by gorging myself on software development," I swore.
I finished at 2 PM and by 3 I was working on CWOBber. I'd actually been cheating a little for the past week. Every time I took a 20-minute break from the books, I scratched out a few lines of code. So I had a folder of individual subroutines and all I really had to to was integrate them all and fill in a few blanks.
Interarchy is now a thing of the past. I actually integrated FTP uploading a couple of weeks ago, when my FTP client obnoxiously kept asking me to buy a new license every time I started it. This is like when one of your least-useful employees doesn't know that layoffs are in the offing and chooses a very poor time to demand a raise. So I taught Interarchy a damned good lesson by removing the one reason why I was keeping it around in the first place.
Removing CWOBber's dependence on BBEdit was a bigger issue. BBEdit handles all the file management and some advanced regexp-based search-and-replace routines that takes a generic template file and turns it into a complete and correctly-formatted HTML blog page. But by dinnertime, BBEdit was out of the picture, too.
Before tonight, CWOBber2 was at revision 2.0d4. It looked good but did nothing. I only had to do one trivial thing and I'd have 2.0a1. Features incomplete, but I could use this standalone app to write and post items to my blog. Just three lines of code to write files to disk and I'm home and dry.
Blame the humidity: I'm still furiously towelling off.
I don't know why AppleScript thinks that a certain file is still open for read access and thus can't be written to. I will probably find that it's a stupid mistake that I can correct in ten minutes' time. But it's nearly 1 AM and I have to fly to Kansas City early tomorrow morning and I have to concede that for want of a common 100-watt light bulb, my brand-new Easy Bake Oven will be producing no warm treats tonight.
Double-sigh.
Boy am I looking forward to this trip. I've spoken to MacCORE before and they're a swell group. One star. I have two friends in KC and I'll be having meals with both of them. Two stars. It's merely an overnight, so instead of packing a mobile rolling assault pod for the trip, I'll be taking along roughly as much stuff as I carry when I walk from the office to the kitchen to fix lunch. Three stars. And I get to use this incredibly cool new backpack I got in London. Four stars.
What a contrast to the London packing. I was delivering a keynote address, so I needed to take my black Road-Less-Travelled casual blazer. I was also attending a black-tie event, so I needed to take my tuxedo — jacket, shirt, vest, pants, and patent-leather dress shoes. I boarded the plane with three bags and took four bags home.
Tomorrow morning, I will have my Macworld UK backpack. It will contain a toothbrush, a change of skivs, a change of shirt, the back half of David McCullough's biography of Harry Truman, and a spiral notebook containing a work-in progress. Oh, and a pen.
I am saddened to conclude that I probably will have to take Lilith with me. I have been informed that my Sun-Times column needs to be in a couple of days early this week, and unless I have a breakthrough tonight I'll need to finish it in my hotel room. I am compensating for the added weight by taking my sunglasses only, leaving my regular glasses and their added weight and bulk back in Boston.
Still there's plenty of room left in this backpack. So what the hell: I'll take the ukulele too.
Agenda for my talk:
1) Thank Kansas City-ans for inviting me.
2) Talk about a recent personal project.
3) Use RPP to lead into a talk of future Apple products.
4) Use talk of future AP to talk about products that don't exist, but should, if only the rest of the Industry were as sharp and insightful and visionary as yours truly.
5) Plug the holy hell out of the upcoming books.
6) Play "I'm Always Chasing Rainbows."
7) Instrumental reprise.
7a) Encores, if necessary: first four bars of "Honey Pie," first eight of "The Window Cleaner's Song," "Amazing Grace" in its entirety (audience choice)
8) Q&A.
9) Snacks: KFC provided my KC K of C.
| | Greetings from the waiting area just outside Gate 12 here at Kansas City International Airport, where a fueled and empty Boeing 727 continues to mock me from the other side of the window. This barnstorming (access on the Storming) visit to the Midwest was an unqualified success and while I did indeed accomplish what I came here to do (speak to the MacCORE user group and get out alive, with minimum casualties) the source of my glee is the shockingly high number of ongoing life-missions that I was able to make progress with in the past 24 hours:
1) Every time I travel, I have to obtain A Certain Common Object.
("Oh, a snowglobe or a postcard," you're thinking. You are thinking incredibly wrongly and are only distracting yourself from enjoying the rest of this. Let your brain go limp and read on, I advise. Tensing up only causes greater damage.)
It's common enough, but it's not dead common, so when I'm on one of these little overnighters and I only have...let me do a little math...21 hours to obtain the thing, there's a minor undercurrent of tension. I'll only have one or two opportunities to get it and if both of 'em are a wash, I might have to improvise. And I hate having to improvise here this is concerned.
There's a shelf in my office that's creaking under the weight of dozens and dozens of Objects. And when I dust them, or fear imminent collapse and move them somewhere else, or am simply in the mood for a little nostalgia, I go through the Objects and when I hit the four or five Items (I refuse to dignify them by calling them Things) that are clearly last-minute copouts, I tsk myself for not having been more cunning or more resourceful. "Destiny favors the brave" is the epitaph inscribed on my favorite brand of antiseptic-grade gin. Wise words, dear readers...wise words indeed, second only to "If vision is affected, immediately induce vomiting."
But there were no regrets from Kansas City. Sure, it would have been perfect if I could have stolen this Thing. But petty theft stopped being a charming trait when I became an old person and at that time I reluctantly amended the Protocols Of The Object to read "Although stealing The Object is no longer a mandate, it is still desirous to not have to pay for it." Last night I was able to sweet-talk someone into giving me an Object. Thus, when I get home, I'll label it with the date and location and add it to the collection with my head held high.
2) I now own a Rand McNally EasyFinder Map of Kansas City. I've been here once before but I didn't get one the last time, or perhaps this was before it became a priority to maintain a map library of places I've been and places I may come back to.
I'm addicted to EasyFinders. Utterly addicted. When I hit a city for the first time I head straight for the airport bookstore and buy one. Not a City Slicker or a Downtown Handy Guide or any other map: the Easy Finders are flawless marriages of function and design and they remind you that GPS and online map services will never, ever, ever dislodge the analog format as a critical instrument of navigation. But sometimes I arrive in a city and discover that the airport bookstores have entered into some form of Mephistopholean deal with the swine at National Geographic or AAA, and have banned the superior brand from its property; I set my jaw and vow to fight the good fight. (But there are men with guns nearby looking for terrorists, so this is more of an inward commitment sort of thing.)
When I get home it'll be tossed into the big ammo box I keep my maps in. This isn't a Collection and there's nothing Nostalgic about this endeavor: I like knowing where I'm going and I like to check things out about places I've been. But even so, there's something about an ammo box packed with maps that makes me feel very, very very slightly less milquetoasty.
3) I have unexpectedly and delightedly added another US state to my Life List. As longtime readers are already aware, when I returned home after the MacMania cruise around Hawaii I realized something: I've been to what are hands-down the two hardest states to get to. You don't simply Find Yourself In Alaska On Business (unless you're me) (or my cousin Darrell, who spent twenty years in the Coast Guard) (or maybe you're in the oil business, or participate in competitive dogsledding).
Well, they're hard, at any rate. So I sat down and worked out how many states I've slept in over the course of my life and I realized that with the two hardest ones out of the way and more than a dozen others in my back pocket already, I've got a good shot at hitting all fifty sometime before I die (conservative estimate; for planning purposes only).
So when I get invited to travel somewhere and speak, a group or company in Ottumwa, Iowa has an edge over Hollywood, California. I've been to California. At least once a year for the past fifteen years and at least once a year again for the foreseeable future. But when will I get another chance to strike Iowa from the list?
But I already had Missouri. I spoke to MacCORE four years ago so this trip was California all over again.
I gave my talk (a captivating 40 minutes within my meandering five hour presentation), they took me out for my second incapacitatingly good KC barbecue meal, and dropped me back at my hotel, where I unpacked Lilith and found a phone jack to dial into Earthlink and get my mail.
But first I needed to know my local area code. The hotel's address and main number were printed right on the phone's keypad: Hotel Fairmont, Gorem, Kansas.
Wait...Gorem Kansas?!?
Yes. O happy day, yes. For reasons I never understood, there is this one city called Kansas City and half of it's in Missouri and the other half is in Kansas. My talk was in Kansas City. My hotel was just a short hop away...but they hopped me just far enough west to put me across the border and one step closer to 52.
Now, look: I don't want to make it sound as though the pleasure of speaking to MacCORE and the wonderful hospitality they extended to me before and afterwards was anything short of spectacular. I'll try to write a little more about that later. But it's important to have goals in life (are you listening, kids of America, and the kids of those parts of Canada that I still like?). Doesn't matter if they're really pretty pathetic. At some point — perhaps when the ballgame's all over and you're standing in front of the Pearly Gates — someone's going to look you in the eye and ask you "Just what the hell have you done with your life?"
Let 'em. I have three answers and any one of them will put him right in his place.
Was rushing to finish this piece because it is now the precise minute at which I'm meant to be boarding my connecting flight to Chicago. But a sprightly representative of United Airlines has informed me (and the 180 people who are listening in on our private conversation via the loudspeaker) that there is a Flow Delay in Chicago. And before anyone could ask just what the hell a Flow Delay is, he announced that it was the result of a software program in Chicago's air traffic control system saying that it's having a really bad day and if everyone could just, sort of, you know, wait for an hour, boy, would it appreciate it.
Which caused people like me to say "But how the hell does this affect my connecting flight?" but before we could get out our newspapers (mob scene etiquette: for maximum visual impact, you like to shake a rolled-up newspaper in the air while you yell such things) the guy announced that this wouldn't affect our connecting flights, because the connecting flights were being delayed as well, so there's no need to rebook or make other arrangements or keep glaring at the check-in podium that way. Yes, you, with the PowerBook. Sorry: the 15" Titanium PowerBook. Oh, it's one of the new aluminum ones? Tell me, does it get better WiFi reception than the old models? Wow, that's disappointing. Well, look, we all have plenty of time now, so please report to the check-in podium and tell me why I can't get iTunes to import these songs off my friends Rio player.
Push the button, Frank...
| | Spent about an hour last night adding a drag-and-drop image control to CWOBber. Or at least that's how the hour was described on the copy of my daily agenda that was released to the press at 4 AM. Couldn't figure out why I couldn't get it to work, then I realized that drag-and-drop was an inefficient user interface for this particular feature.
(Aside: in programming as in any creative endeavor, be careful to understand the reason why you're putting something in there. "Because it'll be fun" and "Because it'll be sooo coooool are both damned good reasons if you're just working on this for your own personal amusement, but once you share your work with others they're going to want a practical answer to the question "Why is this toilet mounted on the wall instead of the floor?"
This is why I didn't like "Kill Bill Volume 1," incidentally. Quentin Tarantino wasted a third of the thing on scenes and conceits He Thought Would Look Cool; yes, cool, you got the guys who did "Ghost In The Machine" to do an extended animated sequence explaining O-Ren's backstory. Slick. But why bother, if this woman barely gets ten minutes of screen time before the Bride converts her from a hardtop to a convertible?
"Pretty words, Ihnatko," you say. "But we already know that you are CWOBber's sole user. So this whole 'If you're sharing your work with others, things must always serve a purpose' riff in itself serves no purpose and thus demonstrates the same pointless self-indulgence that you decry in your betters." Feel better about yourself now that you got that off your chest, big man? First off, one of the many reasons why I stick with my own weblogging app is that it forces me to eat my own dogfood. It's one thing to snootily complain about other programmers' software without having to develop and maintain my own. Secondly, while "Kill Bill Vol. 1" was a hit-or-miss undertaking, Tarantino more than redeemed himself with Vol. 2 and even if he hadn't, anyone who can put himself in the sort of position where he gets to hang out a lot with Uma Thurman is hard not to admire.
Third: you're fired. You've screwed up my sandwich order for the last time. Good luck with that comic book that you're working on. You know, the one that's totally going to kick butt when you finish it and will get you a deal with Marvel and then you're going to be rich and famous and then you're going to tell me where I can get off? Tip for future reference, kid: if you're going to IM on company time, you'd better learn how routers work. End of aside.)
See, this feature is for adding graphics to the mix, and to be honest, dragging the JPEG's icon into an image well looks cool but is actually a lot more trouble than simply clicking a "Choose File..." button and navigating to it directly. But this is a Mac app, so I will indeed by adding a more or less needless image preview. It won't bother the user any, and It Looks Pretty.
But there's no time for such things today. I need to finish editing a few book chapters and close up the office again, because at 8:30 AM on Sunday I take off for LA. I will arrive in LA at 11:35 and then hopefully a friend will be waiting for me and then hopefully we'll successfully navigate through the desert to the site of the SpaceShipOne launch. Where hopefully my VIP credentials will be waiting for me.
This is going to be a hell of a trip. It was laid on rather quickly. Three or four weeks ago The Twilight Bark rippled across the planet. The Humans heard a vague sort of chirp but it didn't distract them from network coverage of European League American Football. But the Geeks! Our heads snapped toward the window and our ears twitched: Rutan is making his play. And we send the Twilight Bark onward. My friend (she stares at the Sun on behalf of NASA) called me on my cellphone and within the space of a ten-minute conversation we went from "It's not an official X-Prize attempt, but still!" to her Expedia-ing for hotel availability and jumping on a nice cheap place close to the site.
Honestly, this is what it must have been like in the Seventies, when Jerry Garcia decided it'd be fun to just drop in on...on...well, Garcia is the only member of the Grateful Dead I know by name and I have no idea what band he'd choose to just drop in on and jam with. But let's say it was...and again I'm blanking on musical groups of the Seventies. Yes, obviously I know and love The Who, but if Jerry Garcia stepped on that stage his flesh would be thrown backwards off his skeleton in the form of dry ash.
Well, imagine that there's a minor band that barely attracts 700 people to each of their shows, and Garcia — who went to Band Camp with the drummer — told his manager to arrange for a rental car when the Dead are in town because he wants to drive over to his friend's gig and maybe sit in. Somehow, the Deadheads know. Don't try to trace it back to the rental-car guy who was a fellow Deadhead and happened to recognize "Waylon Flowers" as Garcia's usual nom-de-travel. Everyone just knew. And beat-up VW Microbuses started rolling in from all compass points.
This launch has much of the same mojo. At last check, there'll be three or four people in the room and the more we talk about this, the more people we know who happen to be coming. It's a hootenanny. It's like Woodstock, only the people caravaning in have marketable job skills.
I have to get a lot of work done so I can (more or less) take three days off to go to Geekstock. On top of all that...I have to learn how to use a $3000 Nikon digital SLR kit.
My Job Is Not Like Your Job, chapter 91:
After that momentous cellphone call from my pal, I got home and I called a guy at Nikon. He'd emailed me a couple of weeks ago to see if I'd be interested in playing with a D70. Now look, I like getting new stuff to play with. But when we're talking about high-end stuff I prefer to hold off until I've got a column scheduled for it. Otherwise, I'm just taking some slick gear out of the hands of someone who might be on deadline, plus if it takes me three months to find a column topic for it, the info might be out of date.
"But you know what you can send me," I said, remembering a question that had come in from a reader earlier in the week. "Send me the best digital camera you have that retails for less than $200." The reader was on a budget and wondered if I could recommend something affordable. When was the last time I wrote a column about cheaper as opposed to higher resolution or smaller?
So here it was, calling him back, sheepishly explaining the situation and that if he could send me some gear suitable for shooting a historic spacelaunch, well, that'd be great.
It was a bit of a rush job. At the last minute it was discovered that they'd sent me the wrong form to fill out and the warehouse wasn't releasing the hardware. I desperately faxed an updated form yesterday and it arrived just a few hours ago. Thus, I'm about to break one of the most fundamental rules of cameras: spend at least a week messing around with a new camera before you take it on an important trip. I dropped the battery into its charger and snapped the lens onto the body. I, um, recognized the shutter button and I imagine that the square glassy thingy at the back is where the pictures come up. Come up on. Through?
Well, I clearly have my work cut out for me. The camea and the flash came with a stack of manuals 3/4 of an inch thick and I'll be reading all of them on the plane.
Even so, I can't leave for Mojave without picking up some experience. I'm telling you, folks in my town are going to wonder why I was running through downtown desperately taking a great many shots of what appeared to be absolutely nothing, as though Madonna had invested some of her millions in a tracksuit with built-in stealth technology and I was a paparazzi armed with an inside tip and a set of infrared goggles.
| | Back from a quick trip to test out the new Nikon D70. Initial reaction: I gotta get me wonna these. It's a real SLR, not a digital camera with SLR-like handling. You raise the viewfinder to your eye and you look straight through the lens and when you see what you like, you press the shutter button. And get this: there's an audible click and you feel a very slight vibration as the image in the eyepiece winks to black for just a split second. Freaky, huh?
And there's absolutely no lag between pictures. Click. Click. Click. If I remember the literature, you can shoot three frames per second with this rig. All I know I was shooting like I would with my film SLR. With digital cameras — even my really good Olympus ZLR — I'm used to pressing the shutter, putting my brain into Managing The Camera mode, waiting for an indication that the thing was ready to take another shot, and then shifting back to Picture-Taking Mode.
But with the Nikon: click. Click. Click (why won't this guy turn towards the...finally!) Click.
The difference between this Nikon D70 and a traditional digital camera — remember the 32x24 pixel camera that your grandpa hauled from battlefield to battlefield during World War II? — is a good study in how a device's form function defines how you use it. With a pocket camera, you compose the shot through its viewscreen. You hold it in front of you, like it's a shield between yourself and what you're shooting. But you hold an SLR right up to your face. You and the camer are fused into one unit. When I use the former, I'm making a record of where I went and when I did. When I use an SLR, I'm making pictures.
The border between the two activities is a fuzzy one but while film is probably destined to be a niche product — the D70 is no more expensive than its film counterpart and all of its differences are advantages — SLR-style cameras aren't going anywhere.
A gallery of the afternoon's shoot is up for your viewing pleasure. The subject: a restaurant on Route One that probably is going to get a written warning the next time the health inspectors turn up.
I'm very happy with this camera so far, but I'm a little worried about the blowouts on some of these images. I should point out that in every case, I was shooting just a few degrees north of the sun, so the imager should probably be commended for (correctly) overexposing the sky to bring out detail in the foreground. But I'll keep an eye on this.
I predict that I'll have great success with this out in the desert...assuming I just leave it on Automatic and I don't try to outsmart the camera's built-in programs. Offshore bookmaking sites are currently taking bets at 7 to 3 odds against, which I find mildly offensive. But what can you do?
| | What a day!
I've just checked my email and downloaded another two dozen emails from people who want to know what it was like to watch SpaceShipOne and the minting of the first set of civilian astronaut wings but "What a day!" is about as articulate as I can get about it.
I took 480 photos in a two-hour period yesterday. Here are...eight. Just a few highlights, a preview of what's coming when I get home tomorrow and can sit down and put together something meatier. If I did it today, (a) I'd be spending the day inside the Tehachapi Best Western instead of in a rental car with my friends exploring the desert, and (b) I'm still so amped-up that every third word would be "Dude!" or "Awesome!" Which would give prospective employers the wrong impression about my writing style.
So: enjoy the gallery, and I'll see you in a day or two.
| | Yes, I bought the song that the old guy dances to in the Six Flags commercials. You wanna make somethin' of it?
| | Hey, cool...there's a travel site that'll generate a Map Of States You've Visited, viz:
(Create your own personalized map of the US here.)
Hmm. I'm making plenty of progress but clearly I need to keep my eyes on the prize. Do keep in mind that in this endeavour, merely passing through or sleeping in a state won't do; feet must be planted on the native soil and I need to overnight it. (Otherwise I could have colored in Ohio and Indiana, thanks to a 20-hour Amtrak trip from Boston to Chicago, during which I snoozed through most of the Midwest).
It's interesting to see my States colored in like that. It instantly bumps up Utah, Indiana, and Ohio on the Priority List. Once I've added those four, I will mercilessly bisected the continental US and, with the South cut off from vital sources of grain and beef — not to mention several NASCAR Cup events — surrender and capitulation will only be a matter of time.
But I've realized that there's a good reason why you don't go and tell a player that he's pitching a perfect game. It disrupts the flow and he starts working towards The Goal instead of simply focusing on throwing strikes and ground balls. Viz:
I received an invitation to come in and speak in New Jersey. That got an immediate Accept. I would have come down anyway, even if I didn't need The Garden State. But that's the reason why I'm making it an overnight, even though a more responsible reason would be "Because making a four-hour drive at 1 AM is not necessarily compatible with human life."
I'm doing the MacMania III cruise around the Virgin Islands. When I did MacMania II, I chose to arrive and depart on the days when the ship left port and docked; $150 spent on a hotel room was $150 I preferred to spend on aloha shirts, blender drinks, and plastic souvenir things shaped like pineapples. But this time I see the wisdom in boarding the ship well-rested, even if it does mean I tick Florida off my list.
I'm keynoting at a conference right here in Massachusetts this fall. A waste of time, when viewed through the lens of the Goal, right? Well, sure, the site isn't that far from Boston, but it's that much closer to Vermont...and the Miss Bellows Falls diner therein. Time and money are valuable and when the Universe presents you with an opportunity to make progress on two goals at once (1: Overnight in every US state; 2: Eat at the Miss Bellows Falls Diner some day) you shouldn't be caught asleep at the switch.
I'm never shy about imparting life-lessons to the kids out there and so the moral of today's story is that goals suck. Yes, Neil Armstrong would never have walked on the moon if he hadn't set himself the goals of finishing school, learning how to fly, becoming a qualified test pilot, being accepted into the astronaut program, et cetera. But if he just took a step back and considered the Big Picture for a moment, he'd have realized that someone was going to be the first man to walk on the moon and that in the end it really wasn't worth getting worked up over. Who knows how far he could have gone if he chose to simply take life as it comes?
| | Have you ever been the recipient of an email that was just so mind-boggingly, brain-bangingly, hypergoogledimensionally idiotic that you were absolutely stumped for a proper response? Where you suspected that if you even made a basic attempt at parsing its structure and intent and composing a reasoned reply, you would at best be endorsing the sender's clumsy communications skills and at worst, you'd be falling into some sort of insidious trap? Fret no more: I have provided you all with a simple solution. Merely download this JPEG and keep it handy. It's a slightly cropped and annotated version of a photo that I took last week during the drive from Tehachapi to LA.
Thus armed, the next time one of these pointless and senseless emails arrives in your Inbox you can merely click Reply, drag this selfsame JPEG into the message window, and click "Send" without making any further comment. None is needed; just put that email out of your mind forever. It's as if it never happened. The original message's sender will look upon the image, reflect upon its simple but powerful message, and emerge a better, purer soul for the experience.
No need to thank me. It's what I do. To see a problem and not become the vector for a simple and effective solution...well, that would be difficult.
| | My little acre of the blogosphere has been sort of US-State-Riffic of late, but — and I don't know how sarcastic I'm being how — the states of the Union are important things and it's amazing how myopic you can get once middle school (and basic geography and civics classes) are well behind you.
I was reading The Onion today and came across this article: "Hero Citizen Can Name All 50 States." Area Man is the pride of his community for being able to recite the list from memory without consulting any reference materials, and is feted by town officials.
Good stuff. But before I read the article, I wondered...well, can I list all fifty states from memory?
I opened a new window in BBEdit. Here's the list I wrote, with the states in the exact order in which I wrote them down:
Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Missouri, Mississippi, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, Wyoming, Idaho, Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Kansas, Texas, Oklahoma, Utah, Alaska, Hawaii, Montana, Colorado, Arkansas.
The order itself is sort of interesting. I never memorized a list of the things as a kid, so I couldn't go by rote or by alphabet. I started with Maine and worked my way down the East Coast, up to the Great Lakes, across the Canadian border, down the west coast, and then I travelled through the southwest.
After slapping down Alaska and Hawaii, I knew I was missing one of the cowboy states. Letterman has a ranch there. Nebraska. No, I have Nebraska. M-something. Montana! Yes. Was that all fifty? Hmm. I imagined I'd be likely to skip over an obvious one so I went through the New England states again and then I went through all the states I've personally visited. Ah! Colorado. The spectral voice of Ray Charles rang in my ears advising me to tell my maw, and then to tell my paw, because he intended to send me back to...Oh! Arkansas! OK. I shouldn't have missed that one. But I got it.
The whole point of the mental exercise was to name as many as I could without any help. This included getting a count of how many I'd come up with. So it was only after ten minutes of steamy ponderation that I finally clucked my tongue for the last time and turned on BBEdit's "Show Line Numbers" feature to get my score:
46 lines.
Damn.
Enter Stage Two of the challenge: you know you've missed four states. So which ones did you miss?
A stumper. The four missing states can only fall into one of two categories: the obvious ones and ones that are so obscure (from my New England, tech-oriented worldview) that I just don't associate them with anything.
New York. California. Texas. New England states...no, got 'em all. The 13 original colonies?
...
Damn. I overlooked both North and South Carolina.
But I was still short two states. I walked through the country three more times. Did I lump the Virginias or the Dakotas together or something?
No luck. I was dry. I entered Stage Three: Here's a map of the US, Young Edison: now which two states are still missing?
Iowa. Dammit! It's Captain Kirk's birthstate, the home of Radar O'Reilly in "M*A*S*H" and there was a Mystery Science Theater 3000 in which the 'bots mocked a character for being from Iowa. I really should have gotten that one.
I think getting 46 states is pretty good, in a low-expectations sort of way. Of the four I missed, two were a dumb mistake and I think I would have gotten Iowa had I thought a little harder.
But my friends, I missed Wisconsin. Even when I was looking at a map of the United States with all the states labelled, I could not compare this map with a list of 49 placenames and spot the missing state.
That's the sort of experience that inspires reflection. Clearly, I have a Wisconsin dysfunction. I never even suspected it. All this time I've been going through life with only 98% of my compatriots' ability to road trip. I wonder if back when I was in college I could have used this as leverage while seeking student aid?
Well, no use mourning missed opportunities. At the moment, I'm more curious about where my Wisconsin disability comes from. Oddly enough, during my very trying two years in Junior High, cheddar cheese was one of the few sharp things that were not thrown at my head with penetrating velocity, so I know I haven't blotted out Wisconsin due to some buried trauma. Unless it has been buried so profoundly and irretrievably that I can't even recognize that there's something I've forgotten, in which case I really shouldn't probe into this too deeply, lest I discover that I'm actually a retired deep-cover government assassin, and that the secrets I carry around with me are so valuable and dangerous that should they ever accidentally drift to my conscious mind, I would be instantly shot and killed by my so-called "friends" and "loved ones," who are in reality spies placed in my life by my former boss (played by James Garner or possibly Donald Sutherland, now that Charlton Heston's disease has forced him to abandon his public life...though if we could get Hackman! Man alive, now that's a deadly double-life lived unknowingly at the point of a dangling knife that I'd pay eight bucks to see).
I wouldn't dismiss this entirely but I'm not inclined to support any theory in which my part could conceivably be played by Keanu Reeves.
I'm guessing that I had some sort of stroke that left all the good stuff intact and merely robbed me of my ability to independently recall the concept of Wisconsin. I don't feel so bad, all of a sudden. It could have robbed me of speech, or my ability to make a water-droplet sound by flicking an index finder into my cheek. The former is a big part of my professional life. The latter skill I use when I discover that someone is using "Sosumi" as their system beep sound and I wish to drive them ever-so-slightly batty trying to figure out which one of their eleven open apps is throwing up a Warning alert.
Readers from Wisconsin, you know I love and cherish you all. But if I need to sacrifice your entire state in order to preserve even one of my most minor skills of annoyance, well, at least your legacy shall live on in the form of "Laverne & Shirley" reruns.
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