I just wanna say this!

The Kids In The Hall Are Back!

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 13:48:15 -0400

The Kids In The Hall Are Back!

"How do people get babies out of nowhere?"

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 00:32:22 -0400

“How do people get babies out of nowhere?”

- My daughter Lola tonight, out of nowhere herself.

No Taste The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no...

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 15:07:32 -0400

No Taste

The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don’t mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don’t think of original ideas, and they don’t bring much culture into their products. - Steve Jobs

Overheard:

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 13:58:00 -0400

“Smell my foot, it tastes like ice cream…” - my daughter, Lola (4) to her cousin Belle (3) the other day.

Buckner Comes Home

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 15:38:00 -0400

Buckner Comes Home: Pure class. Boston I love you!

"And the hush was almost deafening"

Wed, 20 Feb 2008 16:23:00 -0500

You’re on national television »

I have no love for Chris Matthews, or the bellicosity of these “Hardball-esque” shows, but the inability of State Senator Kirk Watson to answer this seemingly simple question should be deeply chagrinning to every Obama supporter. I recognize Obama’s natural talents, but I’m still waiting to hear a truly substantive and positive example of what compromise and leadership really looks like for Obama and perhaps more importantly, why the change he wants us to believe in is even possible or desirable. And yes I know about his Senate and State Senate records and while inoffensive for the most part, his accomplishments are few and rather underwhelming, especially in relation to his soaring rhetoric.

BTW I would’ve included the video embedded, but I got stymied trying to customize the width and height of the embed code in both the “Video” and “Text” tumblr postings. I was able to do this before with my We’ve Only Just Begun post… what up tumblr?

Kindling

Tue, 20 Nov 2007 17:46:12 -0500

The hyperbole is astonishing. Businessweek: “Kindle is the iPod of Books”

Yeah… ummm.. no…

Of course, Carl Howe at Blackfriar’s Marketing has already expertly pointed out the multiple failings of this pointless device, but I can’t help putting in my two cents. I mean just look at it! Who even wants something that’s dedicated to removing the tactile pleasures of reading a good book anyhow? Not only is it unbelieveably ugly, but it’s a classic case of a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. Call me crazy (just don’t call me late for dinner), but I’m pretty sure most people are still pretty happy reading plain old printed books. And most people are the “broad and unforgiving consumer market…” that Amazon is apparently targeting and which Howe rightfully points out the Kindle “doesn’t have a chance” in.

Has no one but Apple itself learned anything from the continuing success of the iPod/iPhone platform? Anyone?… Nintendo, yup okay… Anyone else? Hello? Is this thing on?

Hanging our hats

Fri, 16 Nov 2007 14:36:00 -0500

I’m happy to report that we’ve found a new home that while not as quiet and secluded as our current rental, is still a sweet little place near two parks and even closer to downtown Petaluma. We move in December 1st, so yaaay us!

I also finally grabbed a refurbished MacBook Pro and couldn’t be happier with my choice. It’s one fast, slick machine and thus far I’m finding Leopard to be a fantastically useful and powerful upgrade. Now if I could just get Apache2 configured correctly and get our office VPN working I’ll be in web development heaven!

The joke is on me

Fri, 02 Nov 2007 18:43:19 -0400

I seem to remember something about everything being a joke and The Watchmen, and I’ll be damned if I can recall it exactly or confirm it at all, but the iconographic symobolism of The Watchmen smiley face with the blood droplet on it feels like the best metaphor for my state of mind lately.

A couple of weeks ago my trusty old TiBook 1ghz finally bit the big one, and rather dramatically at that. The hard drive ground to a sickening halt and seemingly in the same instant the backlight to the screen went permanently dark. Of course, ever since my daughter stuffed as many rolodex and business cards as she could into the slot of the DVD drive (destroying it in the process of course!) I’d been sort of used to it being on the disabled list, but I still wasn’t really fully prepared for it’s final and spectacular exit.

Although I was backing up, (albeit rather lazily on a once a week basis using Apple’s usable, but not so hot Backup 3 from when I used to have a .Mac account) I’m pretty sure that I lost about a week’s worth of data. After having it’s lifeless hard drive diagnosed (freely!) by the fine folks at MacAdvantage I decided it wasn’t worth the expense of data recovery and that I’d just have to finally bite the bullet and buy a new computer. Thankfully, it looks like one of the best new features of Leopard will help avert this scenario in the future.

On the one hand this is a good thing, because I’ve been wanting to start working from home once a week and I really need a new Intel Mac to run Parallels for Windows browser testing and after all that TiBook was four years old. On the other hand, I am a slave to the tyranny of choice. Even the relatively limited models and configurations that Apple offers have hopelessly paralyzed me thus far. MacBook, or MackBook Pro… and damn those iMacs are beautiful and so much bang for the buck!

To complicate matters futher, when my laptop died I must have missed the reminder email from my nutty, Swiss registrar, Joker.com that my domain name needed renewal, hence the dearth of activity on this blog and a few more gray hairs in my sideburns! Finally, today after only two and a half weeks of failed attempts and email exchanges, the Joker support guys told me that I should try not logging in to my account to get my credit card payment for renewing my expired domian name to actually go through. Obviously, that totally non-intuitive solution did work, but is it just me or is their entire site in need of a major usability overhaul?

While all of this silliness was transpiring, I also had to redo an entire email template campaign at work because I didn’t do my due diligence and only discovered the deep, dark absurdity of Microsoft’s decision to stop using Internet Explorer’s terrible, (but well understood, testable and slowly improving somewhat) rendering engine for html emails in Outlook and start using Microsoft Word’s simply retarded, godawful redering engine for Office/Outlook 2007! I’ve now learned the hard way. Html email is bad voodoo. Never use anything other than completely inline styles and tables for layout… Oy!

To top it all off, yesterday we got a letter form our landlords informing us that much to their “deep regret” we must move out by January 1st, 2008 so that they can have their daughter and family move in. What a Merry Goddamn Christmas I’ll be having!

On a last positive note (with a twist of cranky, New Englander vindictive, snark), the Red Sox swept the World Series again and despite the paranoia of some, I don’t believe they will turn into the new, Yankees. Unlike the Bush administration and the Yankees, the Red Sox seem to be well aware of hubris and hopefully how to avoid it!

Forging The Truth

Fri, 28 Sep 2007 12:46:28 -0400

Sidney Blumenthal writes of Dan Rather’s lawsuit vs. CBS in Salon yesterday:

“In making his case, Rather will certainly establish beyond reasonable doubt that George W. Bush never completed his required service in the Texas Air National Guard. Moreover, Rather’s suit will seek to demonstrate that the documents used in his “60 Minutes II” piece were not inauthentic and that he and his producers acted responsibly in presenting them and the information they contained — and that that information is true. Indeed, no credible source has refuted the essential facts of the story.”

Who would bother to “forge the truth” indeed?

We've Only Just Begun

Thu, 27 Sep 2007 16:43:27 -0400

With apologies to The Carpenters’ sublime sense of melancholy…
This is our stupendous narcissism at work:

“America Number One!” We’re not leaving… no matter what any politician says.

Open As They Wanna Be

Wed, 12 Sep 2007 17:10:01 -0400

The whole idea of what constitutes being “open” in this crazy mixed-up world of software and operating systems, is, like so many things, so much more a matter of perspective, pragmatism, execution and context than many may consider. It seems to be a conventional wisdom of sorts that Windows has always been (and still is) more “open” than the Mac, despite how easily this notion breaks down upon futher scrutiny.

With the burgeoning success of Apple’s iPod/iPhone/iTunes ecosystem and the resurgence of the Mac platform itself it’s becoming quite clear that not only has this idea always been baseless, but that in fact it is a mix of both “open” (OSX’s BSD Unix subsystem, QuickTime/H.264, the use of and lobbying for open file formats whenever possible, etc.) and proprietary solutions (their NeXtStep derived frameworks and development tools which only work in OSX) in concert with award winning industrial design that are the key to Apple’s ability to create great products that very many people enjoy using. Of course great marketing has it’s role to play, but without a burning dedication to designing high quality products that are as close to Arthur C. Clarke’s idea that, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” as anything I’ve ever seen, Apple would be just another HP, or Dell or (enter generic Intel PC compatible company name here).

In his recent article, Six Reasons Why Apple May Never Open The iPhone Daniel Eran Dilger of Roughly Drafted whacks this proverbial nail on the head. I mean really smashes it. I am glad I am not that nail, I tell you.

Great engineering, like great product design (and design in general) is about trade-offs and is at least as much about what to leave out as what to put in, and Apple seems to have figured out how better to act on this than pretty much all of their competitors. And now they are.. errmm.. reaping the fruit of their rewards.

Hope, Memory And Rage

Tue, 11 Sep 2007 16:51:27 -0400

I can’t think of anything more crucial to keep in my mind on this anniversary of September 11th than the hope that we will all remember how our national tragedy was so blatently exploited as justification for the needless destruction of human life in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last four years. How can we not all be absolutely incensed with rage over the biggest lie of them all? Why are we there? Why do we all fail to pursue this most obvious question?

Every justification given to us by the Bush administration has been proven to be not just mistakes, but outright lies, plain and simple. And because the big lie (that we’re fighting in Iraq for any justifiable reason whatsoever) has never been fully aknowledged or challenged, the liars took miles when we gave them that inch. And now there are four years of lies upon lies, successfully stoking our collective fear, paranoia and complacency to the point that we’re now numb to the reality that we’ve become a “democracy” that sanctions torture, and extra-legal prisons and the suspension of Habeaus Corpus and on and on. Is there really No End In Sight?

If we can’t force ourselves to answer the big question honestly, then how are we to prevent being mislead into yet another all consuming war which will likely trigger the end of civilization as we know it?

There is something we can all do, for ourselves and for our children. Call this number (the Capital switchboard): 202-225-3121

Demand answers of your congressresional representatives. And keep demanding until we regain our sanity and our hope. No one can save us, but ourselves.

Jesus Campers

Mon, 10 Sep 2007 14:34:52 -0400

The other night, my wife and I freaked ourselves out watching Jesus Camp. Well worth a viewing, especially in light of the recent “revelations” (pun intended!) about Ted Haggard and Larry Craig. It seems the evangelical, psyche is basically a vicious cycle of child abuse. Sinead O’ Conner was right!