Sunday, August 28, 2005

Over and out

Somehow in the hustle and bustle of the past few weeks, I missed the sign-off of Virulent Memes. Thanks for all the good reading, Graham.

Do you know what it means…?

I'm stuck at work and keeping track with increasing horror and worry of the reports on Hurricane Katrina. Good friends, including the two most beautiful men in Louisiana, are in my thoughts.

And to all you circuit kids out there, hang on to whatever you were gonna spend on Decadence this year and give it to the Red Cross instead. NOLA's gonna need it.

Sunday, August 21, 2005

Of course, size doesn’t really matter…

Five years ago, I won a free TiVo during a promotion. Two years ago, I upgraded the original 30-hour unit to 203 hours. Earlier this year, I acquired a cheap 40-hour box on eBay and a couple of weeks ago ordered another upgrade kit, bringing its capacity to 230 hours. We now have three units in the house, with a total capacity of 573 hours of digital recording goodness.

There'll be probably be a fourth unit acquired before the end of the year, bringing the total household recording capacity to over 900 hours. (Before you dismiss this as some sort of compulsion or sickness, know that two of these machines are being used as part of an ongoing research project. I don't watch that much TV.)

Once again, I am pleased to recommend the products and service of the folks at Weaknees if you are seeking to upgrade the capacity of your TiVo DVR. Their do-it-yourself kits and easy-to-follow instructions make it a snap; the hardest part for me was finding a Philips screwdriver on my messy tool bench.

Saturday, August 20, 2005

In 3-D!

Mena Trott and the Movable Type posse put together a nifty custom ViewMaster and reel set for a recent conference. (I honestly had no idea they still made ViewMasters. With the return of real wooden Lincoln Logs, my long-past childhood lives again!)

Behold: If Bloggers Had Been Around Throughout History.

(And yes, you can order your own—spendy!—custom ViewMaster reels and viewers.)

Beautiful transit

I've linked to other parts of this site before, but a lot of weblogs are discussing this page about beautiful subway stations around the world.

My overall favorite of the many cities I've visited remains the DC Metro. My pal Drew takes some fantastic pictures of it.

Death by Dew

Proposed epitaph: "He died the way he lived: alert but twitchy." It would take 192.34 cans of Mountain Dew to put me down.

How much of your favorite caffeinated drink would it take to kill you?

Thursday, August 11, 2005

Pitfalls

The Intermission Escape Artist
Or, How One Lifelong Theater Devotee Learned to Stop Worrying and Hate the Form.

Theater has openly flirted with suckiness since Thespis sassed back from the chorus line. The possibility of disaster is inherent in the form: Every great theatrical event requires harmonious excellence from an array of people, from playwright and director to the various designers; with actors and technicians, the requisite proficiency must also be simultaneous, and produced anew night after night after night. But the risk amps the reward: Yes, nothing sucks like bad theater, but nothing thrills like good theater, and the threat of the former only compounds the joy of the latter.

But beyond the suck potential brought by the high-wire aspect of the form, live theater faces other deadly risks�threats far more insidious than a dumbstruck actor, or a director whose vision consists of transposing The Two Gentlemen of Verona to the antebellum American South. The worst of these threats can abort even the possibility of real theater in utero, and the name of this most heinous threat is romance�specifically, the romanticization of the theatrical form.

Peeved

An open letter to software developers:

You know what I hate? I hate when you go to a company's website, buy a license for a piece of software then discover you have to wait "24-48 hours" for them to e-mail you a license code to unlock the application. Why is that even necessary in this day and age?

If I've reached the point of punching in my credit card number on your site, it means one of two things: Either your marketing pitch worked so well that you had me at "Hello" and I can't wait to use your product or, more likely, I've been using your crippled demo for enough time to know I like and need it and want to use it right now.

Which I can't. Because I'm still inexplicably waiting for you to e-mail me a license code.

Please, do two things:

1. Tell me before you've got my money that I'll have to wait.
2. But don't make me wait.

Step 1: Do not undertake this project downstairs.

How to build a Dalek. [via This is Pop!]

Stationery Orbit

Classic Star Trek business cards (Photo by Kevin Trotman).

Monday, August 8, 2005

Keeping it together

To-do lists have been very much on my mind recently and, in my continual quest to tweak and refine my own personal organization system, I've been on a quest to find the perfect task management system for me.

Notice I said "for me", for this sort of thing is a very personal endeavor. No one tool or system works for everyone and, as in my case, often no single tool completely does the job for anyone.

For a long time, I was very happy with Now Up-to-Date for the combination of calendaring and task management, but somewhere along the way to building a version that would run under OS X, they critically crippled some of the very features upon which I had relied. Still, it'd remain a pivotal part of my worklife if not for one damning flaw: For some reason, "alerts" just don't. I can't get the computer to make a sound, pop up a window, anything, no matter how forcefully I click the mouse when setting the alarm in the first place. I've re-installed, deleted preferences, checked my audio settings seven ways from Sunday...nothing, and no joy from the support department either. They're just as baffled as I.

Meanwhile, I've migrated to Apple's iCal for my calendaring. It's another flawed (but free!) program and has the added benefit of .Mac synchronization, which manages to keep the files on my home and work desktops, my iBook and my Palm singing from the same page.

For to-dos, though, iCal just doesn't have to oomph. There are a lot of things I like about Microsoft Entourage, but it's too much application, really. I don't need it for e-mail or contacts, and the real deal-breaker is that there's no simple way to synchronize across computers.

I'm test-driving three web-based applications, all by the same company: Tadalist, Backpack, and Basecamp. The last is a project management application, aimed at whole companies and departments; the former two are more personally aimed, Tadalist just does lists, while Backpack puts lists, notes and some modest file management, along with e-mail reminders into the bargain.

Each has its strengths and drawbacks, some of which I can already see after just a few days with them. And it's a bit frustrating that identical tasks (making and maintaining a to-do list, for example) are accomplished in three subtly different ways among the three applications. I'd expect more consistency from apps that came from the same place. (That said, they're also all three fairly young applications, so perhaps their feature sets and implementations will grow together.)

None of them will serve me perfectly, nor will I expect it to. Right now, I'm just looking for something to add to the mix, serve the need that's going unserved. But I'm slowly developing my idea of what the Grand Unified Personal Information Management Software for Brad is and when I have some extra time (ha!), I'll promulgate it and challenge someone to build it.

Nomenschclature

Confidential to He-Whose-He-Must-Be-Renamed: Why does he need a new nickname? What's wrong with that one? If he's such a good Catch—and so far we all think so—you'll still be calling him that while you hold hands in your rockers and that'll be just darling.

Besides, when I read "Lovebear", I think I threw up a little in my mouth.

Sunday, August 7, 2005

I feel a bit like Penfold, I do…

I had a chance this week to fiddle a bit with the new Apple Mighty Mouse and came away impressed enough to get one for each of my Macs. It feels good in the hand, although the side button is a bit awkward to work but I don't imagine I'd have much use for it anyway.

Still, I might have waited to make my purchase if I'd known this would be available so soon afterward. Crumbs!

Ah, well. I shall simply have to content myself with ordering this DVD collection instead.

I also considered “The Fabulous Barrett Boys”…

Cameron and Damien Barrett—the Blogger Twins—are making a bid to be contestants on the next season of The Amazing Race.

Friday, August 5, 2005

Swamped

Rehearsals start Tuesday for the season, a front-loaded whirlwind that includes seven openings in 12 weeks starting next month. (Get a glimpse of the madness: the mini-site for our new series—a site, incidentally, built in one manic day by yours truly and before anyone says a word, the splash page was not my idea—or see the whole shooting match on our mothership site.)

I just did my daily review of my to-do list for the next two weeks, and my calendar through December. There is not one free day, weekends included, until well into November. Fortunately, I'm too tired to cry.

And I've never had so much fun in my life.

Wednesday, August 3, 2005

Pair.com dedicated hosting

As I have noted on several occasions, this site and about a dozen others I maintain is hosted by the marvelous folks at Pair Networks and I simply couldn't be more pleased with their whole operation—uptime, service, price, the works.

Sometime in the next year or so, I'm going be managing a project that requires a dedicated box and my first inclination is to stick with Pair. I'm aware many other companies and have heard testimonials on their behalves, but I'm interested to know specifically if any BradLands devotees have experience with Pair's dedicated hosting.

Please share your experiences in the comments or, if you prefer, by mail. Thanks ever so.

That word again!

Rebecca asked about the citation I mentioned in this entry, and whether Peter was, in fact, credited with the coinage. I went to look again and realized that, in fact, my reference to Peter's comment appears to pre-date the comment itself. That may be because his quip was in an undated sidebar on his site. Anyway, here we are, sic transit gloria mundi, caveat lector, etcetera etcetera...



Note also that this appears to be a draft entry which, I take it, means it hasn't moved into the printed edition of the Oxford English Dictionary just yet.

The OED entry for "weblog", incidentally, cites Jorn Barger—rightly, I think—as being the first to use it in this sense in 1997 on his Robot Wisdom weblog. (Back then, of course, we knew it as http://www.mcs.net/~jorn/html/weblog.html.)

It is defined as "A frequently updated web site consisting of personal observations, excerpts from other sources, etc., typically run by a single person, and usually with hyperlinks to other sites; an online journal or diary."

That's the second definition, of course. The first definition for "weblog" is "A file storing a detailed record of requests handled (and sometimes also errors generated) by a web server." I remember back in the late 20th century when there was some concern people would hear the word "weblog" and not understand which sense was meant.

Thank heavens Peter Merholz came along and gave us a convenient shorthand, eh?

Assorted bookmarks and braindumps

• Battlestar Galactica icons from Iconfactory. Bring on the Cylonicons! (Of course, I guess they'd just look like regular icons now anyway.)


• Leapin' kitties! (Can a Toyota deal be far behind?)


• First look at an impressive QuarkXPress 7. I have a little trouble associating the words "impressive" and "Quark" these days.


• As such things go, the blog set up to build buzz for the movie Rent is pretty well-done.


• Movable Type wonkery: Random page banners, yearly archives, RSS customizations and custom static pages.

Good Morning Wood

What a way to wake up! No wonder Good Morning America is doing so well in the ratings. Today's edition featured not just one but two of my most ardent crushes: Hunky, self-effacing anchor Bill Weir interviewing hunky, self-effacing Seann William Scott about the latter's involvement in the upcoming Dukes of Hazzard movie.


It was, without question, the yum-yum-yummiest breakfast I've had all week.

Tuesday, August 2, 2005

Monday, August 1, 2005

Present at the birth

A couple of months ago, I got an e-mail from Bill Johnston, a professor of history at Wesleyan University, that left me momentarily gob-smacked:

You might have received millions of messages to this effect, but did you know you are cited as the first to use the word "blog" in the OED (1999)? Very cool. Not many people have an honor like that; I'm delighted to see that your site is still going strong.

As it happens, his was the first and, so far, only message about the matter I've received, but I went and looked in the online OED—one of the perks of the occasional academic life is free access thereto—and, sure enough, this little ol' website is the first citation for the word. (I haven't had an opportunity to examine a printed version of the dictionary, so I don't know if it's included there as well.)

Now before anyone gets their knickers in a twist, let's be clear: I am not claiming to have coined the word "blog". I've been dragged along that sort of road before and don't care to repeat the experience. As far as I know, my pal Peter Merholz has to take the blame for it, having waggishly proclaimed six years ago that he was henceforth pronouncing "weblog" as "wee-blog". I made a note of his jape hereabouts and it is to that weblog entry—currently languishing in The Lost Archives but hopefully soon to be republished—that the OED citation refers.

(And I must apologize to Mr. Johnston because, although I transcribed his e-mail here for just this moment, I seem to have misplaced the original and, therefore, his address. I have the distinct impression that I never got around to replying and thanking him for his kind note. Bill, if you're reading this, do be in touch.)

Anyway, I bring this dreary subject up for two reasons.

First, I have been enjoying the Lady Rebecca Blood's interviews with some of the early practitioners of the weblog form, including Matt Haughey (in which piece this site is again name-checked) and Jessamyn West. They are two of the folks I have been privileged to have as part of my life this past few years, thanks primarily to our shared interest in personal publishing, and each has an unique perspective on where the web has been and where it may be going.

Second, despite my rather contrary insistence on referring to this site and others like it as a "weblog" (sans truncation), it has recently come to pass that I will soon be writing and editing a site that is not only called a "blog", it has that word in its name.

Somewhere at this very moment, I feel certain Peter Merholz is either smirking or cringing.

Possibly both.

‘n’ Judy

Some folks took the time to figure out how many punch cards it would take to encode an MP3 file. That's the sort of unrepentant geekery I can get behind.

I have a soft spot in my heart for the humble punch card. A couple of my first jobs required me to use them; somewhere in the basement, I still have a couple of boxes full that I liberated when they were finally retired and used as scratch paper while I was a struggling freelancer who couldn't afford note pads. They were an extremely low-density storage medium but there was something about holding code in your hand, running your fingers over the holes...in the pre-Internet age, it was a way I felt connected to information.

And, of course, they are still in use in many surprising and not-so- places and their cousins, like the piano roll, continue to survive into the digital age.