The Underground Man

Dentists and rap

Odd combination, I know. But I spent time in my dentist's chair this morning getting my "adult prophy" (dentist-speak for regular cleaning) and brought my iPod with me.

I had it loaded for my workout tonight so it has (as always) an eclectic mix that ranges from Dido to DMX. Obviously, I start with the Dido and work up to the DMX.

The funny thing was that I noticed that as tense as I normally am in the dentist's chair (hate the bloody dentist) the intensity of the rap had a great cathartic feel to it. I never would have expected that. And I actually listened to the words (much better than hearing the scrape of steel tools on teeth).

I'll probably go out and buy an album or two now -- take that RIAA!!

Flickr

I finally put up some photos on Flickr. Comments welcome.

photo projects

I've gotten totally motivated to start working in "serious" photography again by the loan of my uncle's Rolleiflex. It's funny, now that I think of it. I have (had) two uncles on either side of the family who were Rollei adherents. Sadly, my Uncle Vincent passed away at a young age (must have been in his late 50s) a few years ago.

One of my earliest memories of him, other than his laughter and his strength, was his using a Rolleiflex. I've got to talk to family members and see if I can find out what happened to his Rollei. I have nothing to remember him by other than my memories.. It would be something else to get his old Rollei, recondition it, and keep using it. I think he would have liked that.

In any event, I'm giving some thought to photo projects. Coming up are a visit to the tulip fields in the Mt. Vernon area (famous nationwide) and a visit to Pike Place Market in Seattle. I'm also thinking of going back to the racetrack -- not to race but to do a little photography. I never really had the time (it would have been a distraction) to do much photography while I was racing but I still love the sounds and smells and visuals of a racetrack and bikes. I think it would make a fascinating subject to document.

It's funny, an acquaintance called these large coffee-table books of recipes (like Bouchon) "food porn" the other day when we saw Thomas Keller give a talk. I thought that is perfectly appropriate. 90% of the people who buy them only look at the pictures I suspect.

For me, I find the recipes in this particular book much more accessible than those in the French Laundry cookbook.

I don't know what it says that I picked the first recipe that I would make (a tarte au citron) and it turns out that it is the first one that Thomas Keller says that he would make as well. Perhaps because it is so purely French. Not easy to make well but rewarding when you do.

Stream of consciousness this morning..

Lulu

My uncle is loaning me a Rolleiflex this week so that I can venture into the world of medium format photography. I'm totally psyched. I had about given up on 35mm because of the issues around blowing up the images (I'm in a phase where I want BIG images).

While doing some background research on the camera I found Lulu, which looks like an ace service for binding photographs (and whatnot).

Not that I have a lot worth binding but it would make for an interesting birthday or Mother's Day gift. Too bad they don't have a hardback option but I'm generally ok with perfect-bound.

Thomas Keller and Bouchon

I went to a talk this afternoon by Thomas Keller, a well-known chef from the Napa Valley (he owns Bouchon and the French Laundry).

I'm not sure what I expected, but I think that chefs should probably stay behind the grill when they talk. Nice enough guy but a bit out to sea in front of a large audience of foodies when not talking about food. So he opened it up to general questions from the audience.

What floored me was when someone asked, somewhat aggressively, "Why don't you have more Washington wines on your wine list?" The obvious answer is "They're not good enough, yet." Whatever. He could have answered "We'll look into that."

Instead, he answered "Well, you would have to ask Chef XXX that" (I cannot remember the chef's name). I couldn't believe it. Ask a top-flight French chef, nay.. a European chef that same question and you would get an hour-long discourse on why a particular wine would be best with a particular dish. They would never abdicate the consideration of a wine with a meal.

How could you not consider wine an integral part of any fine dining and have an opinion about your wine list?

Perhaps he was just being diplomatic. But somehow, I fear not.

Revenge is sweet..

A few years ago I had someone rip off the design of my company site (Art & Science W³ Development). I had to remonstrate with them to get them to take it down.

From a pointer at The Tao of Mac I've found this brilliant bit of design. (Caution, only run it for a minute or two, I found it slowing down my very fast PC.)

Transparent screens

This officially rocks.

There are some great imaginations out there. This isn't just a Photoshop trick.
Well, it is but that isn't the end of the story. First you take the picture, then you scale it and transform it to fit the laptop visible area. Then you change the desktop wallpaper to use your image..

A little bit more work than simply Photoshopping an image. Lovely trompe l'oeil.

It's just a pity that I don't park my laptop in one place.. Maybe for a party or something. Even my desktop is in an uninteresting area.

It would be challenging to get the colors and perspective right.

Broadcatching and Dr. Who

I was frustrated to learn that the new Dr. Who wasn't picked up by the Sci Fi channel.

However, I do have BitTorrent! The burning question was how to find content. The latest trend (and I'm a little behind) seems to be broadcatching--using RSS feeds combined with Bittorrent files to find and download content.

I ended up getting to watch Dr. Who last night but I haven't yet downloaded the Azureus client for OS X but I'll do so this evening. This client allows you to add an RSS plug-in to the Bittorrent client in order to get notification of the latest downloads.

Here's a tutorial on how to install and configure that I found.

English lions rampant..

I went to my local (20 miles away) to watch England v. N. Ireland this morning. Fantastic game.. This has to have been the best I've seen England play since the last World Cup.

They moved with imagination, pace, and their creativity shone. Other than predictably weak play from Phil Neville, I saw a team that could have competed against even Brazil today.

I think a large question will be how will they handle adversity. In the past, they've done quite well, with the exception of the match against Brazil where Ronaldinho scored that ridiculous goal from 45 yards out.

More to the point, Joe Cole sparkled in the left wing role. If we can Beckham to play with more discipline and stay out wide right we would have a very, very dangerous team in the next year's World Cup. I look forward to seeing what Stewart Downing can do in Cole's position. I've been very impressed with his passing.

Wouldn't that be something -- to go from not having a first-choice left winger to having two that are world-class? The team is pretty young as well, with depth in every position except goalkeeper.

The Tyrannosaurus Rex may live again

How could we not want to resurrect this beastie?

It's not just the king of dinosaurs, it's also the first time that this (cloning from DNA samples) has actually been possible with fossilized remains.

According to this story, scientists found what looks to be viable bone marrow tissue in a T-Rex bone that they had excavated in Montana.

Shades of Jurrassic Park indeed. A tip of the hat to The Tao of Mac for this news tidbit. (Of course, we all know that T-Rex was in the late Cretaceous, right? )

I'm so excited. Is this a guy thing or what?

Friends and acquaintances I've made at SXSW

People I met and had interesting conversations with at SXSW:


Chris Fahey

Alexander Manu

John P. Yuda

Marc H. Nathan

Blair Garrou

Kaliya Hamlin

Mark Danielson

Khoi Vinh

Jock Gill

Randy Silver

David L. Swedlow

Tim Flynn

Scott Haefner

Darleen Wilson

Dr. Jorge Zuniga Sanchez de la Vega


All were great to talk to and my only regret is that I didn't stay longer (and converse longer).

Mozilla adblocking..

I've mentioned this before I think..

It's possible in Firefox to block advertising (based on URLs used to call the ads). This is beta tech from the folks at Mozilla but it's pretty easy to add to your browser.

Get it here. It's wondrous cool visiting sites and not seeing any ads.

worst school shooting since..

I've got to wonder what sort of a culture I'm living in when a broadcast on NPR begins "In the worst school shooting since..".

Since when did we start comparing school shootings? What does that say about our society, our culture, the culture of violence in this country?

This ties in to my disgust for the evening TV news broadcasts. I haven't watched them in years because they just portray a totally evil world. Never mind that there is much more uplifting stuff to report, they pander to the lowest common denominator of our fears.

I should really be living elsewhere.

respect for animals

Had an interesting conversation this morning about hunting. We were talking about how hunting with a rifle wasn't sport in any sense of the word and a friend put in that he had thought about hunting with a knife - giving the deer an equal chance to gore him.

Now, they aren't predators but I thought that was closer to sport.

But that thread continued in my mind and I thought again how the Greek gods were frequently associated with animals (Apollo was associated with dolphins, for instance).

That led me to the thought that maybe we would treat animals better if we still had that sort of polytheistic religion in our society. For all that people pretend to be Christians they are quite immune to the pain and suffering our actions cause animals daily.

Did any one of the 51 Senators who voted to allow drilling in ANWAR yesterday give any thought to the wildlife that would be injured or destroyed by this decision?

I'm appalled.

But then, that's a daily occurrence with this administration.

Edward Tufte and Project Management

I've written of Edward Tufte's work in visualizing information before. But I was revisting a particular thread on how to represent information in a project last night and I thought I should post the URL again.

A lot of very interesting ideas in this forum around "wallplans". The idea that the output of MS Project simply isn't enough to properly inform project stakeholders and that it should be augmented by a host of other datapoints to get an accurate picture of a project.

I'm not doing project plans at the moment (sadly) but when I do, I'm going to dig through these ideas and use a lot of them.

NASA WorldWind

I just discovered this product as a result of a conversation I had with a new SXSW friend, Scott Haefner. He's working for the USGS in Menlo Park and mentioned this technology to me over a beer.

Just going through my notes I fired up the browser and headed to the NASA site. Here it is.

I have yet to figure out how to get good granularity on the images (some are down to 1m per pixel resolution). I figure with that level of detail I should be able to see something of my parent's farm on Camano Island.

TIVO moves to Comcast

Interesting, the news today mentioned that TIVO has done a deal with Comcast to move to the Comcast DVR platform.

So where does that leave Microsoft? My current DVR says Microsoft TV on it. Microsoft's strategy of late seems to have been focused on getting into people's homes, in preparation for an eventual move into a multimedia play.

I think that TIVO's move to the Comcast platform may well spell the end of Microsoft's ambitions (at least temporarily) in this segment of the market.

Yet no one has said anything about this in the press it seems. Weird.

scarcity vs. abundance mentality

What do we do with content that we want to Podcast?

This question came up after a conference session I attended. Basically, the issue was how does one manage the content provided on public radio. Why not podcast it ? The problem apparently lies with the RIAA and that they will want money for things like the backing music. Each time this is played the artist in question has to be paid.

So if one puts podcasts of NPR broadcasts on the Web one has a problem with the payment model. On one hand, one could dramatically expand the coverage/exposure of a particular topic using viral marketing (podcasting). On the other, you would have a hard time figuring out how many people had listened to the podcast (and thus how much to pay the artist).

So we are restricted (in general) to podcasts without music. Which means that much of what NPR broadcasts cannot be podcast. (Nb. the BBC has one show podcast so far and that is a sports talk segment.)

One wonders what this means for the professional radio industry. Will they be left behind as a host of people start recording and distributing their own podcasts because of the scarcity of professional recordings?

What happens when the first fan records a podcast of Lord of the Rings or the new Harry Potter book and puts it out on the Web. Is that a clear violation of copyright?

SXSW Opening Party

It's interesting. I must be getting seriously older.. I went to the Handwire party on Saturday night with a couple of new friends and we picked up a few more people on our way to dinner before the opening FrogDesign party (these are the same folks who flew me down to Austin for a job they didn't give me last year).

So we had a decent dinner and a great free-flowing conversation about technology over the jazz quartet (see Inman Flash Replacement - one of our topics of conversation) and then headed over to the FrogDesign party.

In retrospect, we agreed that it was a mistake. I mean, I came to this conference for intellectual stimulation and to learn new bleeding edge tech, not to chase girls and booze it up (I can do that at home). So our conversational threads were lost (party was way too loud) and we didn't see much of each other for the rest of the evening.

So I must be getting too old if I thought the conversation was better than the party.

On the photos.. I thought, what, have I stepped back into the '80s? This didn't seem like politically-correct Austin. But then I realized that one of the young women dancing half-naked on stage was a cross-dressing male.. Pretty darn funny. Equal opportunity sexism.

And no, I didn't take a picture of him.

looking over shoulders

It's fascinating sometimes looking over someone's shoulder at these conference sessions. It's unavoidable because the chairs are so close together. Most of us seem to use Macs so I find myself very curious as to what other "powerusers" are using for their day-to-day apps.

This is how I discovered SubEthaEdit yesterday and this led to an interesting conversation.

I'm beginning to wish SXSW was every six months. I'll definitely be here next year.

Folksonomies and microformats

I heard the term folksonomy this morning for the first time. One of the talks I just attended (Emerging Semantics) described how we might use microformats to structure the organization/categorization of information. With microformats we could specify something like "rel=met" in the href tags and build a list of friends that could be traversed by a search engine (and thus understood by a machine intelligence).

A folksonomy is a culture-derived system of these tags. It seems to me that they are pretty closely related to microformats - perhaps microformats are the formalization of thse folksonomies.

a great evening at SXSW

I didn't expect my first evening in Austin to be one of my best, before I ever saw SXSW.

I'm staying with my second cousin and her family. Her husband, Zbigniew, is a super guy with lots of very interesting friends. A couple attended our dinner (steak and a huge salmon and copious amounts of great Polish beer, red wine, Cognac and B&B) last night. Dr. Jorge Sanchez de la Pena is a department chair at the school of architecture of the University of Monterrey (Mexico). He met Zbig in Monterrey about a dozen years ago when Zbig heard him speaking Polish to his little daughters. Turns out he married a woman from Zbig's home town and had lived there for 10 years. He is now a close friend and they visit each other over the border.

We had a rockin' time, with the conversation thick and furious in Polish, English and Spanish. The sort of evening one might have had in any European city with a group of educated friends. A very nice start to the weekend.

And only the slightest of hangovers this morning. :>

Imagination Challenge

The first conference session of the day, "Imagination Challenge: Points of Departure for Design in the Interactive Conference", was just brilliant. The subhead was "How do we address the bigger challenge of overcoming the limits of our imagination?" The only speaker was Alexander Manu, the Industrial Design Chair at the Ontario College of Art & Design.

Absolutely fascinating talk that I came into about halfway through. Everyone I've spoken with who was there is still buzzing about it. Someone actually blogged it as the talk was happening. Kind of odd, but useful if you were there to bring back some awareness of context.

In any event, the basic thesis seemed to be that we could model work as play, approaching it with a more open mind and stimulating our creativity. That this would lead to more productive work. I'm representing the ideas very poorly here but it seems well worth my well to go find some of his papers or texts and read them.

HotSpot VPN

I have done some background reading before heading off to SXSW to look into what I might need to bring (still need to make up new business cards). But I've taken the advice of one blogger and decided to get a VPN connection for my access while I'm at the conference.

Apparently, the Austin Convention Center is totally wired for the conference, allowing everyone to use WiFi to access both each other's machines and the Web. Naturally, since there isn't any individual protection under WiFi this concerns me just a little. So I subscribed to HotSpotVPN yesterday. There is a tendency, I think, at these birds of a feather (BOF) conferences to think everyone is "nice" but I suspect that some people will lose some information this weekend that they would rather not because of bad actors in the crowd (or sitting outside with a good antenna).

It cost me $6.88 for a week (covering the whole conference) and now I have a Virtual Private Network between my laptop and their servers over the ACC WiFi connection. Of course, one has to presume that their servers are secure but since they are a commercial enterprise I'll take the risk.

I'll report on its ease of use during or post-conference. But for right now, I'll sleep a lot easier knowing that I can read my email (or make a post to this Weblog) without having my packets sniffed.

a terrible anniversary

I heard this evening on the Beeb that today is the anniversary of the American firebombing of Tokyo in 1945. Over 100,000 people died in that event and most historians think that more died there than at Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

The thing is that many will still try to justify the dropping of the atomic bombs by saying that the Japanese wouldn't surrender if we hadn't done it and we would have had to invade the mainland and suffer 100,000+ casualties.

But if we hadn't dropped the bombs we would still have had little or no difficulty completely devasting the Japanese mainland with firebombing tactics. The American Air Force had complete air superiority at that stage of the war and the only thing slowing down the Japanese surrender (at least on the Japanese side was the American demand that the Japanese announce that the Emperor was no longer a god).

It's sad. Basically, all those Japanese died and their cities were poisoned for a science experiment (would the bombs actually work and how well).

Ah.. spring.

Driving into work this morning I noted that the two bald eagles I wrote about a couple of weeks ago appear to have mated.

Sweet.

SXSW this weekend

Well, it's sinking in that I'm actually going to SXSW in Austin.

I'm trying to figure out what to take. It's a totally wired conference so I'm taking my Powerbook and T3 Palm. Because of security concerns (maybe working in a security group has affected my thinking) I am going to set up a VPN so that I can do things like check email without worrying about stuff being intercepted.

I have to leave a bit early (mid-afternoon Monday) but when I planned the trip I didn't know how much time I would have saved up. As it turns out, I have a lot so I could probably have stayed another day or two.

At least I get to visit family in Austin.

The big worry for me will be pollen. Austin is the pollen capital of the 'States and I suffer worst than most. Thank god for Allegra.

sparklines..

I just found this article on Edward Tufte's site. I don't know if he invents this stuff or just reinvents it for the modern era, but to me its genius.

It strikes me that we have to come up with better information design and representation going forward if we're going to surf the information flow and not just be carried along by it.

Of course, as with a lot of his great ideas I don't think we yet have the technology to put this into place. However, that's not really the job of the visionary, is it?

That's left to us mere mortals..

of funerals..

There is at least one popular self-help book that suggests that we write our own obituary. The idea being that it's good to imagine how our life might be evaluated before it's too late to do anything about it. I keep meaning to do that.

I attended a funeral today of an old family friend. He had an interesting life, born in 1909 at the height of the Austro-Hungarian empire (in Hungary) he became a cavalry officer in that period between the wars. Sadly, he was a man born too late -- as cavalry never played a significant role after the advent of modern trench warfare (at least in Central and Western Europe).

He went through several career changes before landing here in the Seattle area, once again caring for horses. His was an encylopediac knowledge of horses, their breeding, their ailments.

We thought at the reception afterward that there are a lot worse epitaphs than "he never said a bad word about someone". I thought that it was also true that "no one had ever said a bad word about him".

A true gentlemen. We can all hope that we will be as badly missed.

UI rants..

Ok, so I'm working with MS Excel and I find myself doing the same operation several times in a row (as one is wont to do when creating spreadsheets).

Namely, merging a couple of cells. This particular operation entails:

• selecting the cells to be merged
  
• right-clicking to bring up a menu
  
• selecting format cells
  
• clicking the Merge Cells check box
  
• click OK
  

Wouldn't that be a nice advance in UI? No more dialog boxes, no more "are you sure?", or "would you like to create a macro"?

Just do it.

I would love an OS that picks up on this sort of thing. Was there ever one?

color photos from WWI

This is simply stunning. The first color photos of WWI I've ever seen. According to the header on the page, the color photo was first invented by the Lumiere brothers in 1903 and the French Army was the first (and only one) to use it to document the war.

Why have we not heard of these photos before?

I got to this from my Uncle's photoblog site..

These chaps explain the history of the autochrome (the process).

These chaps may be the original digitizers of the photos. Check out their site for 250 odd color photos of WWI vintage.