Journal: News & Comment

So far

• Yesterday
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• Tomorrow

Probably won't blog much, but you never know, since I posted this with the free Wi-Fi poolside at the Red Lion Riverside in Portland:

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Shapes in the pan

Okay Tod, we know you like working at the CBC, but it's starting to get out of hand. It's starting to remind me of Richard Dreyfuss and his Devil's Tower of mashed potatoes in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."

Except, well, the CBC isn't run by aliens.

As far as I know.

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Why you will never understand your kids

Here is a rule: as soon as an article like this (via Kottke) about teenage slang appears, that slang is deprecated and the teenagers will move on to something else.

That's because it is a jargon whose only purpose is exclusivity. When adults (or other kids who aren't in the right clique) begin to understand it, then it has lost its value.

Speaking of jargon, I've always hated the phrase user-generated content, and Tim Bray does a great, short job today of explaining why.

Twenty-three skidoo, daddy-o.

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New semi-favourite diet pop

It's not quite on par with Jones Sugar Free Black Cherry Soda, but Diet Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper, which has recently become widely available around here, almost makes up for the complete absence of Diet Cherry Coke in Canada.

Almost.

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City gas guzzler

What does your car say about you? (Via GMSV.)

If you own a Hummer, in particular, you'll find a lot of this sort of thing.

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Okay, Mac nerds, go to town

Here are 140 pages of free technical history of Apple's operating systems. It's an expanded version of a chapter from Amit Singh's massive book, since it didn't fit in its original form. For free!

And here are some Web 2.0–style redesigns of famous logos. I actually prefer a few of them to the originals. They're certainly all cheery and gummy.

Both links via John Gruber.

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Why hidden fees won't just damn well go away

One of the idealistic assumptions of introductory market economics is that citizens are well informed and thus can make reasonable decisions. Via Brian Chin, here's why that often isn't true, and how it leads to unsavoury things like exorbitant minibar prices in hotels, hidden mobile phone fees, and "resort charges."

Sorry, market economy. Sometimes you suck.

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Jealousy

My podcast co-host Paul has central air conditioning in his house in Cloverdale, B.C. Few people in Vancouver, except in some condos, have AC, because it's not generally hot here.

Except right now. I like hot weather, but when the air is stagnant and it's still 25°C and humid in the middle of the night, I envy Paul and his ilk.

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GarageBand improvements

Sent to Apple's GarageBand Feedback form today:

One frustrating feature problem with GarageBand is that when you move an audio region, the panning and volume automation (if any) doesn't move with it. It can be quite difficult to select a set of volume changes and match them up exactly if you've moved the region they apply it, and it's hard to imagine when their NOT moving would be all that useful, since the volume is usually keyed to the particular audio segment.

Also, you can't zoom out far enough, especially with podcasts. If you have an hour-long show, moving segments around gets tired really fast from all the scrolling.

Finally, while it's okay to have GB export podcasts as M4A files, MP3 export is also necessary for many podcasters who want a decent audience (especially for those who listen on phones or other devices that don't support AAC). I find it puzzling that, once you're in Podcast mode, you can't export as anything BUT M4A, not even AIFF, even though that's possible in Music mode.

I know these things work in Logic, but for GarageBand to work for podcasters (for whom it is much better suited than Logic), these are pretty key features. And we musicians would like them too.

P.S. Why is there no "Podcast" option in the "What do you primarily use GarageBand for?" drop-down on your feedback form?

I'm hoping Apple will improve some of those issues in GarageBand '07. I'll definitely shell out the money for iLife if they do.

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Hello, I'm Ingemar

My setup has changed a lot, but I still have my four-year-old Ikea Jerker desk. And while I have done a lot with it and even been featured on a Jerker desk fan site, I've never had this kind of experience (via GMSV).

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Comparisons

Did you know that Canada and Morocco have roughly the same population, but Morocco has 15 times the population density? That Afghanistan, Nepal, and Peru are pretty close behind in populations? And that Argentina, Kazakhstan, Sudan, and Algeria are of roughly similar area—all are not that much smaller than India? Same with Cameroon, Papua New Guinea, Sweden, and Uzbekistan, all of which are slightly smaller than Spain?

Oh, and the greatest population densities? Monaco, Singapore, the Gaza Strip, Vatican City, Malta, the Maldives, Bahrain, and (the monster in the list) Bangladesh. This map (via Darren Barefoot) tells you all sorts of neat things like that.

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Flickr colour contest: clogged tubes oh my!

Flickr, the photo sharing site I use, had some significant problems today. They turned it into a neat little colouring contest, where those who saw the error screen can print it out, colour it, upload it back to Flickr now that it's working, add the flickrcolourcontest tag, and maybe win a prize.

Rock on with the Canadian spelling of "colour," too! Even though they're owned by Yahoo! and live in Silicon Valley now, Flickr's founders started it when they lived here in Vancouver. So woo-hoo! Yay for downtime!

Did I just say that?

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Links of interest (2006-07-19):

• Back in 1987, Jared Diamond of Pulitzer prize fame argued that the very concept of agriculture is the worst mistake humanity has ever made. Seventeen years later, in Harpers, Richard Manning made a similar argument. (Via Kottke.)
  
  
• James Chung, one of our co-op students at work, found two informative videos online today: The Science and Art of User Experience at Google (28 mins) and Jared Spool on How to Design for Branding (47 mins)
  
  
• Via Tony, a scale model mountainous landscape built as a presumably secret military installation by the Chinese government, found by people looking at Google Earth satellite photos.
  
  
• My co-host Paul and I from Inside Home Recording were interviewed by Mike Kaye of Switching to Mac recently, and the audio is now online.
  
  
• It was crazy hair day at my daughters' art camp last week.
  
  
• Channel 101's Yacht Rock (not kid-safe), just ending its year-long run, ranks right up there with This Is Spinal Tap as one of the funniest musical satires I've ever seen. It imagines a world where the Doobie Brothers, Kenny Loggins, Steely Dan, Toto, and others were swearing, infighting denizens of a shorefront marina, battling it out in a contest for who had the smoothest sounds. (They all cup their hands over one ear when singing a high note.) My favourite episode has Van Halen (Eddie, in this universe, is entirely mute) forcing smooth-music producer Ted Templeman into recording their first album by hypnotizing him into screaming in pain at the sound of Michael McDonald's voice. Which is something I generally do without hypnotism, by the way.

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Mac nerdery

Graffletopia provides a whole bunch of excellent stencil object templates for the OmniGraffle diagramming application for Mac OS X. Lots of cool stuff, though some don't seem to download at the moment. (Via John Gruber.)

Also from Mr. Gruber, a link to the absolutely massive Mac OS X Internals, a book that probably tells Mac nerds everything and way way way way more than we'd want to know about how Mac software systems work, from the ground up.

And it is a mere 1680 pages long, weighing 2.5 kg, or about the same as a small but still healthy newborn. It is also, therefore, not available for free Amazon Super Saver shipping.

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Hot hot heat

Ars Technica makes some good arguments that Apple's upcoming pro Intel-based desktop computers, expected to replace the now-isolated Power Mac G5 line, will use the Xeon server processor family.

On another note, someone has posted instructions on how to cook breakfast on the back of your MacBook laptop. Mine does get pretty toasty warm, but I don't think I'd be willing to fry an egg on it.

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How to find podcasts you like

Here are some good tips on finding great podcasts, via Robert Scoble.

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Latest episodes of Inside Home Recording, Lip Gloss and Laptops online

I guess the title says it: IHR #19 (hosted by Paul Garay and me, posted today) and LGL #20 (featuring my wife and her co-host KA, posted last Wednesday).

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Jack White, look out: it's my free MP3 blues guitar instrumental "Alpaca Cheese!"

I wanted to see whether my new guitar, with its single vintage-reissue hum-cancelling pickup, sounded as good as I had thought it did in the store in Seattle a couple of weeks ago.

The best test of that was to pick a single amplifier sound, plug in, and start playing. And now there is "Alpaca Cheese," a live-to-disk recording (MP3 file)—with no overdubs, edits, or other instruments—that I made a few days ago and have now published on my podcast and at the Podsafe Music Network. Thanks to Les Thorn for mastering it for me. As usual, you're free to share, podcast, remix, mash up, or do what you will with the tune, as long as you give me credit.

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Big big photos

In the tradition of the Gigapixl Project, and a couple of lovely panoramas of Vancouver and Paris (via Darren Barefoot)—plus the photo of Vancouver up above—here is a super-zoomable stitched panorama of downtown Sydney, Australia, comprising 169 images taken over 52 minutes and assembled into a single 720 megapixel shot.

Thanks to Tony for the pointer.

P.S. Want more panoramas of those cities? Flickr will oblige: Vancouver, Paris, Sydney.

P.P.S. Here's some weird synchronicity: that amazing red Harbour Centre photo from Vancouver was taken by Warne Livesey, who now lives in this part of the world but is best known for something he did in Sydney—produce Midnight Oil's two best-selling albums, Diesel and Dust and Blue Sky Mining, along with their swan song, Capricornia. I had no idea that he was the photographer when I found the picture.

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Avoid clipping

Sony's new PCM-D1 digital recorder is too expensive ($2000), has some design flaws, uses Sony's proprietary memory storage, and has a bunch of other problems—primarily actually being from Sony—but it has one particularly cool feature I wish all of these devices did.

As Dan Misener notes by quoting a review:

...a brief shadow recording is continuously made 20 dB down from the normal input and stored in memory for a short time. If a transient peak clips the standard input, the lower level audio is normalized and inserted instead to prevent peak distortion.

Very clever.

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Burn the pedants!

In my early days of becoming a writer and editor, when I was old enough to be skilled but too young to be wise, I delighted in correcting people's errors, reveling in my knowledge of how to use "presently" and how not to split an infinitive. But much of the time I was wrong: language is a living thing, reflecting how people use it. Many of the "errors" I corrected simply aren't.

Still, there are reasons many rules exist, and they're worth sticking with for clarity and meaning. It's a sometimes-delicate balance to strike—and why I still find wordsmithing fun.

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Blank canvases in North Vancouver

Here's a neat "visual jam session" known as the Blank Canvas Collaboration project, at the Seymour Art Gallery in North Vancouver, where five painters will interact with musicians, poets, the public, and each other over a period of several weeks while they produce three paintings each (15 total).

Steve Horvat, one of the artists, was at one time the regular guitarist in my band, but I had no idea he had become a painter until now.

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Guilty pleasures

I like the Georgia font (via Kottke) too, although I don't use it here.

Seven years on, Ricky Martin's "Livin' La Vida Loca" is still a kick-ass song, especially with that tuned-down surf guitar in it. (I do think the mix could use some more bass.)

Oh, and a hard lesson from Robert: "Link to your enemies. It takes away their karmic power."

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Audio from onscreen editing workshop available

Last Thursday I ran one of my semi-regular, full day onscreen editing workshops, largely but not entirely focused on Microsoft Word, for Simon Fraser University's Writing and Publishing Program.

I've now posted selected audio files from the workshop that you can listen to for free:

1. Part 1: A history of Word: how it looks at documents, and why it works the way it does (MP3 file, about 1 hr 15 min).
2. Part 2: Wrestling word to the ground: preferences, Track Changes, and other nastiness (MP3 file, about 1 hr 15 min).
3. Part 3: Editing for the web and email: what's the same, what's different, and how to make it work (MP3 file, about 30 min). Also see my previous podcasts on the topic.

My latest workshop always appears at penmachine.com/word, and you can look at the top of my Editors' Association page for links to all of them on various web and editing topics.

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I love this quote

Doc Searls:

In a crisis like this, the flack might as well go out there and say "My client is curled into a ball right now. Please come back when you're ready to believe my happy face button."

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Never a better time for music

Chris Anderson (of Long Tail fame) in Wired:

Music itself hasn't gone out of favor—just the opposite. There has never been a better time to be an artist or a fan, and there has never been more music made or listened to. But the traditional model of marketing and selling music no longer works. The big players in the distribution system—major record labels, retail giants—depend on huge, platinum hits. These days, though, there are not nearly enough of those to support the industry in the style to which it has become accustomed. We are witnessing the end of an era.

I think he's right.

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Jammin' with the podcasters

UPDATE: MP3 audio and photos now available too.

Here is Chris Pirillo's video of Dave Dederer of the Presidents of the United States of America (geetar), Doug Kaye of IT Conversations (big lowdown bass), and me (many drums) playing "All Blues" in the Gnomedex Jam Band at the Experience Music Project last week:

I know our playing was a bit sloppy (I'm no jazz drummer), but I don't think it really deserves the PG-13 rating at the website.

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How to remove spyware, or not

Here is a dismaying tale describing how a company in New York that makes spyware and adware does business (via Brian Chin). Brian also points to a big list of instructions for how to remove various types of malware from your Windows PC.

Even looking at those instructions now, I don't think I would have had any alternative to what I had to do and the end of 2005 when my aunt and uncle's computer became infested with spyware: format and reinstall.

So far my Macs have been unaffected by any of this sort of stuff, and I hope it stays that way.

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Mixmaster Aprigliano and the network discrimination mashup

In the last week, a funny-yet-sad rant from U.S. Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, demonstrating his remarkable ignorance about the Internet, has been making the rounds. A similarly incoherent (but intentionally so) discussion of the "net neutrality" issue appears at Ask a Ninja.

Today, John Aprigliano of diabeticfeed mixed those with the instrumental version of my Gnomedex theme into the brilliant "the Internet is a series of tubes" mashup.

One other related thing. At Gnomedex this past weekend, there was an excellent suggestion from Kathy Gill of the University of Washington, restated by Amazon's Werner Vogels, to change the way the debate is framed: stop being for "net neutrality" (which doesn't excite anyone) and start being against "network discrimination."

And, for the purely frivolous: (a) SeisMac turns your new Mac laptop into a seismograph, and (b) if you want to write, it might be better to use a 15-year-old computer, which can boot in 7 seconds, open a huge document just as fast, and keep up with your typing.

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Degeneration gap

Figleaf has a good point:

...just as no one has ever lost an election for "daring" to go hatless in the 1950s, and just as no one has been denied a job for "daring" to wear a bikini in the 1960s, so I suspect that within 10 years no one's going to be called on the carpet for "daring" to post naked photos of themselves online.

In other words, once all those MySpace kids grow up and start running companies (some of them already do), they'll be no more shocked by potential employees' sordid online histories than they are by their own: not very much. The only trouble will come in the brief time when those kids are applying for jobs supervised by people who are young enough to Google them, but still old enough to be mortified by what they see.

Maybe that point is already past for most people around these parts. A good thing!

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Axeman 2006

Silly me. While in Seattle I bought another damn guitar (I hope this doesn't turn into a once a year event):

So far I haven't had time to play it much, but it's a lovely instrument—I've always been a sucker for a glossy two-tone sunburst finish on a guitar. Plus it seems that the pickup alone is worth about half the price I paid for the whole thing.

Thanks to Lincoln at Emerald City Guitars for the photo.

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Lip Gloss and Laptops Episode #19: Gnomedex interviews and prize draw

This episode of my wife's podcast is unusual, in that it's almost all interviews recorded at the Gnomedex tech conference over the beginning weekend of July 2006. But Airdrie and Kerry Anne do have an H20 Plus prize to give away! Listen to the episode on the web at the podcast shownotes page, or download the MP3 file directly (33 minutes, 14 seconds).

The first interview is with Robert Walch of Podcast411, and took place on the bus on the way to the Experience Music Project. You can see photos of Robert and the rest of our interviewees among all the Gnomedex photos at the photo sharing site Flickr.

Kris Krug was the official L&L photographer a few weeks ago, and also gives us a revealing interview.

Arieanna Schweber (she was Arieanne Foley until she recently married the fabulous Ianiv) discussed her 17 (!) blogs at Blogaholics.ca, her work with Qumana, and her beauty routines. We also have a video version of the interview available.

Finally, Boris Mann, who like KK works at Bryght in Vancouver, talks about Drupal, his groovy hair, and his concept of the Man Bench™.

All the interviews took place on Canada Day, July 1, 2006.

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Come to my SFU editing course on Thursday, July 6

I'm teaching a full-day workshop about onscreen editing this Thursday, July 6, 2006, at SFU Vancouver downtown. There's still some space, so sign up now if you'd like to attend.

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The Maffinizer

Now that Robert "Scobleizer" Scoble has officially left as Microsoft's most prominent blogger, Tod Maffin—also known in Canada as "the Todfather" for his early promotion of podcasting here—has taken on a similar role for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and launched a new, actually-official internal CBC blog, titled (appropriately enough) Inside the CBC.

So far it's a pretty cool look inside The Mother Corp. I'm subscribed.

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Condolences to Adam Curry and family

Adam Curry couldn't attend Gnomedex, and now we know why: his mom just died. Adam, we're all very sorry at the Miller household.

She was one day older than my dad, who is still very well, and currently traveling in Germany.

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All of Derek's Gnomedex 2006 photos

Below are all the photos I took at Gnomedex this year. The big one is my favourite. I've also posted a bit of an audio geek update about my EMP jam session over at Inside Home Recording. Don't forget that many of my posts from the past few days also appear at the Navarik Daily Blog.

Lots more photos from others at Flickr too, of course.