Apple gets another boatload of Menick money

Velvet Elvis, the MacBookPro I travel with, is four years old, which is about 54 in people years. It took the Mavericks upgrade (which when all was said and done didn’t change much noticeably), but it’s time to start thinking that it’s near the end of its practical, do-it-all life. So I decided to get a Mini for the chez, and just use Elvis on the weekends, to extend its usefulness; after all, if all it needs to do is run a browser and TRPC, it’s fine. I picked up the Mini on Monday, and threw in an iPad Air for good measure, as my first gen iPad is definitely not keeping up with the times.

Which means, in a word, tech turmoil.

For some reason simply hooking up the two machines to copy files didn’t work, but I didn’t need all that much, and sharing over the wireless did the job. Since I had iTunes on a separate drive, I hooked that up directly, for an estimated day to copy. Using the old Mac as a disk drive, mostly to assure myself that it worked that way, I installed Office. I still need to bring over the rest of my data, including pictures, but most of what I have other than photos is on Dropbox, so there’s not much there. In fact, it always surprises me when I can’t find a file on Dropbox. I work on too many different computers and devices to store much locally, except when I’m not paying attention. (The pix are also backed up on my Amazon drive; better safe than sorry.)

The turmoil comes when you start deciding what hardware to keep and what to toss. I have two little standalone drives that I used for the MacBook backup and the iTunes library. I figure that, once things are set on the Mini, I’ll reassign the backup drive there. I don’t know about the iTunes one. The Mini has enough storage space to handle all my music two or three times over, so I might as well run the music from that machine. I might pass that second drive along to the spouse to use as a backup for her MacBook. No point in wasting it.

As for the iPad, the differences are few except that the weight is very meaningful. Plus some of the things that were dicey on the first gen work fine on the Air. This time the question of what to do with the original is simple. I’ll be passing it to the daughter so she can play Civ and watch movies. So everything remains in the family.

One benefit of a big hardware upgrade is that it gives you the opportunity to survey the workspace and clean things up. I still have attachments for Little Elvis, for instance, my original iBook. I figure that will become my DVD slot (remote) for the Mini. Some of the wires on my desk seem to be attached to nothing; they need to be sorted out. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

While I was playing with this last night, all kinds of things were going on with Vassar, but I totally missed them. Fortunately, things tend to work out fine when you’re otherwise engaged.

Via Boing Boing

Adventures in the First World

So I’m lying awake at 3:30 a.m. thinking about issues with the new tabbing software, among other things, when I hear a woman’s voice coming from somewhere in the house. Given that the only woman in the house that I’m aware of is accounted for to my immediate right, this is mildly disturbing. I hear nothing else. Must be my imagination. After it all, it is 3:30 in the morning and my mind has been spinning thinking about judge preferences. Of course I’m hearing voices.

Some time passes. I hear it again. Definitely a woman’s voice, somewhere in the house. The cat jumps up and heads out to investigate. Then another woman’s voice, on my immediate right, says that my computer must be talking or something, and tells me to go do something about it.

Now let’s face it. Computers don’t start talking all of a sudden. Nor do iPads or iPhones (at least not those without Siri). But I dutifully walk around the house, checking all the various pieces of hardware. No culprit is found.

This is starting to get scary. This is why I don’t have a gun in the house, because by now I’d be loading a cartridge into the chamber and getting ready to put some lead into our home invader. At which point, I’m now in the kitchen, and my Jawbone speaker on the shelf says to me very loudly, “Please recharge your battery.”

If I had been armed, I would have shot it.

I connected it to the charger and went back to bed. The cat was huddled under the dining room table, still trying to figure who else was in the house. I went back to lying awake thinking about judge preferences.

Moral of the story: First, don’t shoot, it’s only me. Second, we are now at the dawn of the age when our appliances feel no compunctions about waking us up in the middle of the night to tell us to feed them. I prefer the good old days, when our appliances were more humane, and waited until waking hours to tell us to feed them.

The best way to keep your phone charged is not to use your phone?

My iPhone was driving me crazy. The battery just wasn’t lasting unless I turned everything off, but what’s the point of a smartphone without location services and GPS? I finally gave up and bought a Mophie case with an external battery; to demonstrate how much I needed it, I couldn’t get the Apple Store app to work correctly so that I could just point at it and walk out with it, because location services were turned off for that app. Jeesh. If that’s the way things are, I might as well go back to a Touch. Anyhow, I charged the Mophie up last night and now I’m putting it through its paces to see how long it takes to drain. It does weigh more than a naked phone, needless to say, but not so much that it’s terribly bothersome. Whether I’ll use it all the time or just occasionally remains to be seen. Either way, I feel better having technology that I can use at its limit, rather than limiting how I use my technology. As I said, if it’s not doing what it’s supposed to do, what’s the point?

[24 hours later]

Used it all day, including a couple of hours of Bluetooth, all preferred location services set on stun, etc., etc. All in all, a typical day. This morning, when I checked, I was finally off the Mophie backup and into the iPhone battery (whieh said 98%). In other words, the Mophie can get me through anything I throw at it, which juice to spare. Excellent. I probably won't use it on a normal working day, because the extra weight is, well, extra weight, but weekends and debate trips? Moph it is!

Meanwhile, JV, Kaz and I are beginning to explore the tabroom tabbing software (which I have to admit sounds redundant). We got off with a misfire Monday, stupidly looking for the application in all the wrong places, but CP, who is too busy planning his trip to London to reclaim the family duchy* to bother with the likes of us, found a minute to set us straight. And so, we're off. I'll report on progress as I see it. If you're wondering why we're doing this at all, given that we have a system that theoretically works already, well, first of all, TRPC is short for this world at the level of Basic being able to run on modern Windows systems. And as we move to MJP pretty much everywhere, CP claims that the new system works much better than what we're doing now, which is at an average tournament of about 100, TRPC finds judges for 75% of them and we have to manually do the rest. As he says, a computer can juggle numbers better than we can, provided the computer is set up right. Add to this the intriguing bells and whistles of online balloting and it's a gimme. So while we are, like all users, fearful of change, we are nonetheless gung-ho about the benefits of the change.

Oh, yeah. I was reading The Second Sex but got interrupted by the new Bertie and Jeeves pastiche. I'll bet that happens to de Beauvoir fans all the time. I'll get back to her as soon as Jeeves gets Bertie out of all that trouble he inevitably gets into. (More importantly, CLG was right: TSS is the book to recommend as a starting point for feminism.)

---

*CP's family duchy is actually in France, I think, but let's face it. France, England, they're all Europe, right? What difference does it make?

Show me the money. Please.

Writing a book is one thing. Publishing it is another thing altogether.

Having gone through the initial folderol to get the book into a Kindle edition, one would like to think that that’s the end of it. Hardly. That was just a bunch more typing, hardly onerous if one has plowed one’s way through numerous drafts of a novel. Mostly it’s just saving it as HTML and looking it over and thinking, okay, it doesn’t look any more or less crappy than any other Kindle book. Press the button, and there you are.

When the book went live, I got a message asking me if I wanted to build an author page. Okay, sez I, I’ll do that. But this takes 5 days to go live, and there’s all sorts of choices one must make. You can put in Twitter or a blog feed, a bio, a photo (that I did, the standard one of me looking like I just stole the royal baby and am holding it for ransom and nobody has a clue that I was even mildly involved), video, biography, yadda, yadda, yadda. Then I’ve got to start beating the bushes to get people to buy it. That’s the key thing, people buying it. (You’ve bought a copy, right?) I don’t care if anyone reads it, as long as they buy it. It’s not as if I intend to live off the proceeds, but that’s about the only measure there is of how well it’s doing. If people like it, they’ll tell me. If they don’t like it, they won’t admit to having read it. I know how these things work.

Kindle has this plan where, in return for exclusivity, you get a higher royalty and they claim that they’ll do this and that, but I find it unconvincing. I’ll look into it further and report back. Maybe I’m missing something. Let’s face it: I sold my soul to Amazon years ago. What’s another year in hell compared to eternity?

Meanwhile, I was talking to O’C this morning. Apparently he’s been having battery problems on his iPhone. Join el clubbo. Last week I went into Manhattan at 1100 hours with 100%, and by the time I got on the train at 2000 hours, I was totally out of juice. (Like that military time thing?) All I did during the day was send text messages to the people I was meeting up with, corralling and whatnot. No games. No calls. No check-ins. No nothing. Including no juice.

To cure this, I turned off all location services (except for Find My Phone). I also notched down how often it checks for mail, since I have no need for getting my mail instantly, and since then, I’ve got juice coming out my ears. Seeing that it was only the GPS and Google apps and mail that were actually turned on, this makes one realize just how much crap goes on in the background when you’re not using your phone. Google is, apparently, an enormously busy battery hog. (Also, I need to remember to turn off wifi when I’m on the road, as the search for wifi is another drainer.)

Goal: a phone with enough juice that you don’t have to think about phone juice. Do you think there is such a phone, Toto? O’C is also in the market for new hardware like a mini iPad. Moi, I’m seriously likely to buy a new MaxiPad when the next iteration comes out, as my original V1 will by then be two OSes behind, and is already unable to perform as it should (and won’t run some apps at all). Which is why people should buy my book. I think that the least all that writing can do is earn me a new iPad!

Put another nickel in...

Speaking of movies and telephones, one of the key suspenseful scenes in Argo requires that a character be present to answer a telephone, and it seems as if half the movie up to that point has people talking on big old honker phones the size of shoe boxes just to set that idea of answering the phone for viewers who don’t know what a landline is. (Everyone in the movie also wore eyeglasses that took up every bit of their facial landscape from cheekbone to widow’s peak, and had bad hair. Ah, the 70s.)

The evolution of music is another technology worth thinking about. (There’s a wonderful word in a collection of critical Disney essays I’ve been reading: technostalgia.) While we have obviously long ago moved into a mainstream where one need not be in the presence of musicians to hear music, there are ramifications to that that are worth considering. Part of the establishment of the Great American Songbook was predicated on the existence of pianos in the average household, and presumably people who could, to some degree, play those pianos. The software (?) for those pianos was sheet music, mostly songs simplified for amateur players (not a lot of tunes in F#, for instance, whereas E flat was coin of the realm, which I have only understood intuitively in that I find it easy to play in E flat, but maybe that’s because so much music is published in that key: chicken or egg?). Sheet music was sold by song pushers in stores who would play the tunes live, and then you’d buy the music and take it home and play it yourself. Some songs were enormous hits (e.g., Gershwin’s “Swanee” was, according to Feinstein, the biggest success of his career) long before there were people playing them on the radio, much less buying them on records. Recorded media stretches back to Edison, but it was live music that ruled at the beginning of the 1900s.

Recorded media changed over time in great leaps, and each leap had its effect. Records, i.e., vinyl, has its various technostalgics today, but listening to LPs beginning in the 50s and into the 60s, when they really took off, was not the high-toned sonic experience one might imagine. Cheap needles quickly turned the most pristine vinyl into a scratchy, pockmarked and occasionally gauged disk, not to mention that a key feature of many players was a record changer that stacked multiple disks for play one at a time, rubbing them up against one another along the way (and, eventually, forcing the needle to navigate not the level flat of a disk but the wavy oooh-aaaah-oooh-aaaah of a stack of disks). The listening experience required the ear to erase all the extraneous noise to pick out the music underneath. Then of course there was the broken record broken record broken record one never hears anymore, or that sound at the interval between songs pre-echoing the song to come (it was some kind of recording leakage), and worst of all, if you had an album you liked and played it often enough, you could never hear a song on that album again without hearing the next song in your mind. Random play of CDs, when it finally arrive, turned a lot of music fans raised on records into raving lunatics. And, of course, there was a physical limit to the amount that could be recorded on one side of a record, not to mention that if you wanted to hear a whole record, you had to get up and flip it over. Many albums were considered one-sided, that is, one really good side and one stinker side. There was no such thing as skipping a song, short of getting up and lifting the needle and putting it down at the next song (which was clearly differentiated).

It was records like these, played this way, that was the medium of the Beatles, and every other musician from the 50s up through digital recording. That and, on the charts, 45 rpm records. These were little disks about seven inches in diameter, the immediate descendants of the 78 rpm records. (Obviously rpms was meaningful in sound reproduction, the fewer being harder to master technically. Some record players had 4 speeds, from 78 down to, if I remember correctly, 16. I never saw a 16 rpm record.) 45s, costing less than a dollar, were the stock in trade of the youngest record buyers, and maybe if you look at Billboard hit songs for, say, 1968, the youth of the buyers will be in evidence. If you had the $3 (when they were on sale), older kids would buy albums. Parties for teenagers were run with stacks of 45s on the turntable; people might bring their own to add to the mix. That was what they were playing at the hop.

Buying and playing one song at a time has its advantages and disadvantages, but it presages modern music buying for a lot of people, i.e., one song at a time. I think that phenomenon is restricted to the very young still, to tell you the truth. I might like a single, but I buy albums because if I like some of your music, I’ll want to hear some more of it. Maybe there’s some other dynamic at work there; I really don’t know, and can only speak for myself.

The late sixties saw the arrival of tape, and a whole new way of listening arose. Reel-to-reel was ultimately too ungainly, although you could have three full albums on one reel. 8-tracks came out then, but I never saw many of them except in cars. And then cassettes came along, and eventually the Walkman. Music had been portable for a long time thanks to transistor radios, but music players? Not so. Cassettes were a real revolution in listening, allowing you to hear your own music wherever you wanted to. In the case of boom boxes, it allowed everyone within a hundred mile radius to also hear your music, want to or not, but the Walkman solved that for everyone but street buskers. So the Walkman introduced private music, but at a cost. Simply put, mass-produced cassettes sucked. We replaced snaps and pops with tape hiss, which was ubiquitous and made everything muddy. Not all cassettes were bad, and if you made one yourself from an LP, it was fine, but it was a cursed medium in general. At the point where a tape got snaggled and you were in there with your pencil trying to straighten it out, or worse, if it outright snapped, combined with its second-rate fidelity, it was doomed. But it did get the idea of personal player into everyone’s mind. By the end of the cassette run, you couldn’t swing a cat without seeing a cheap player on the shelf of every conceivable store. But the clarity of CDs were the fidelity kiss of death on non-digital tape. (Digital tape never really caught on except with professionals, for cost reasons if I recall correctly.)

Audiophiles were up in arms when CDs first arrived, bemoaning the loss of warmth one heard in analog recordings. The first CDs and players were expensive to boot, so it took a little time for the format to catch on. But catch on it did, as more and more catalogs were digitized and the prices became relatively reasonable. The thing is, they sounded (and sound still) perfect. No hiss, no snaps, no skips, no nothing. I’ve gotten maybe three defective disks in my life, after acquiring thousands. Most people hear them and think they sound great. And you could put a lot more music on them than on a record, which meant that performers and producers could think longer form. (Tapes also could go longer, but seldom did unless you made the tape yourself.) There was no more Sides A and B. You could store a lot of them in a small space (unlike records, which are big and weigh a ton).

There was a problem with personal CD players, in that if you jostled them, you got skips, so CDs and cassettes sort of coexisted for a while. But if you taped your CDs, they did sound great, and then you could pop them into your Walkman and go for a run, and you were quite satisfied. I would bet that the CD age was pretty golden for album sales, because everybody had to update their White Album, plus older or less popular stuff could fill the disk up to the brim (I’ve got all sort of compact compilations). And it all sounded great. A disk played over an hour before you had to get up and change it (much less flip it) and then multi-disk players came along. You never had to get up again.

The greatest joy in all of this, for music fans, was the music store. In the evolution we’re discussing, that store or department went from private piano rooms where you could try out the music (I remember doing that) and song pluggers, to layouts of records to, finally, the megastores where there were thousands and thousands of albums for you to look at and think about, and all kinds of listening stations, and interesting music being blasted (in the appropriate genre) while you were browsing. I would figure a minimum of an hour in any Tower Records, back in the day, and that I would exit with a bagful of goodies. The experience was, obviously, analogous to bookstore shopping (although as a general rule the superstores for books were never as satisfying as smaller, more specialized stores with a mind behind the stocking of the shelves).

MP3s changed all this again. Fidelity is fair to middling in that you can only squeeze so much data into that size of a file, but most people don’t care, if they can even hear the difference in the first place. MP3s offer portability and good price, and on top of that, instant availability. Want a song? You can have it on your iPod in a minute, signed, sealed and delivered. Goodbye music stores, welcome back singles.

I started this by comparing the way changes in telephone technology have changed our lives to the way changes in music technology have done likewise. Once, you had to make your own music, and home pianos were ubiquitous. Now they’re rare. Who do you know who buys sheet music? When was the last time you were told you sounded like a broken record? When was the last time there was a music phenomenon that stopped everyone in their tracks because a given performance was the only way to share in it (from Sinatra at the Paramount to the Beatles on Ed Sullivan)? When was the last time you were at somebody’s place and sat thumbing through their record/CD collection? When was the last time you read the liner notes? What’s a liner note? What’s a liner? Have you had the tactile pleasure of removing an LP from its sleeve by the edges, laying it on the turntable, swiping it clean with a special brush and fluid made just for that purpose?

Has the immediate availability of all music had an effect not only on our personal playing but on our pursuit of the playing of others? Do we go to as many live events, not just arena events but local clubs? Is there a pianist in the background of your favorite spot, or just a lite playlist coming over the speakers? Do as many of us really learn to play instruments (aside from the forced playing in schools that is simply the grammar school’s revenge on the parents for all their kids’ misbehavior prior to the annual concert)?

I really don’t know about a lot of the ramifications of what I’ve been outlining here, and I certainly can’t make too many value judgments. In a way, we are probably in what will be an ongoing golden age of music insofar as it’s accessibility (although I could do without social apps that tell me that Joe McDoakes just listened to Lady Gaga: may they both rest in peace, out of range of my hearing, but then again, I have no interest in any social apps that tell me what my friends are doing willynilly). Good music will be made and distributed, and we can all tune into whatever we like pretty easily, and discover new things to like pretty easily as well. I am, personally, enjoying that immensely. This morning, my gypsy music station on Pandora. Tonight, my obscure 60s rock podcast. What’s to complain about? If I’m lucky, I’ll even find some time to play a Gershwin tune or two on my home (digital) piano. I’m only documenting how much it has all changed. You can decide for yourself if it’s teleological.

Not to mention GPS...

I made an impassioned plea ages ago at the DJ that we not look at the world through multi-app glasses. IOS apps were all the rage, and people were running around at the DJ trying to parlay everything we owned into something we could sell for ninety-nine cents, although they were thinking that maybe they could get five bucks, and I was telling them that even free would be asking too much. My belief was that the bloom would quickly be off the app rose, and that while people would find a handful useful and would no doubt always keep their eyes open, the market was crowded and getting more crowded and there were other ways of succeeding with out content. Now the statistics show that 60% of all the apps in the App Store are never downloaded, and a quarter of those that are downloaded are quickly discarded.

Right again, Cassie.

One thing that amazes me is the number of people who are so plugged into Facebook that, if I even breathe over there, I get a comment or a like. As a matter of fact, almost everyone I know is on Facebook, and to be honest, I’m hard-pressed to distinguish old use versus young use. There are farts every bit my age who are as active as the kids on my team. There may be an initial age-related buy-in algorithm, but I’ve met as many kids who refuse to join Facebook as I have lawn-yellers, and for roughly the same reasons, a mix of misunderstanding, autonomy and general crankiness. The point is, start with possession of a portable device that allows you to be virtually 24/7 in touch with everyone in the universe, and throw in a playing field (FB) where that touching can take place, and you’ve got what most people are doing instead of buying the latest apps. I’m not saying that FB is it, as there are variations on the theme in Twitter and simple texting and Foursquare and the like, but in general, users have decided that mobile devices are social tools. Everything else is secondary. (By the way, businesses today, looking to succeed in the mobile marketplace, have all decided that they must be “social,” so there is a Facebook page for every product known to man. In the earliest days of the web, there was a homepage for every product known to man. Same concept, different medium. The fact that every man, woman, cat and dog up and down the line mostly have better things to do than “like” Heinz Baked Beans, and even if they do “like” Heinz Baked Beans, they will hardly be dependable repeat visitors except insofar as beans do repeat in their own musical way, does not deter businesses from taking the paths of the least resistance. Don’t they realize that Disney faked that lemming footage?)

So all these apps are all well and good, and everyone no doubt finds a few useful beyond the social arena, as well as a game or two to pass the time and maybe something to read, but in essence, mobile devices have become communications instruments in ways that could never have been imagined by someone of my generation. It’s a wondrous thing. Think about it. When I was little, we had a telephone in our house. It was a party line, which meant that if you picked it up, there was a chance that someone would already be having a conversation on it. If you wanted to make a call, you gave the number to the operator. If the call was any distance away, you had to use a special operator. The arrival of our first dial phone, with our very own number, was a step into the modern age. Phones developed in all sorts of ways, but until you could carry one in your pocket, here was the bottom line: if you called someone up, you had no expectation of always reaching them. In the earliest days, it would ring until you gave up. Later, you might have a message machine, which at least meant that your call wasn’t totally in vain. But at the moment when you put the phone in everyone’s pocket, you are now in a world where there is an expectation that, if you call someone up, they will answer.

That’s a big change in our social existence, and you can perm this change across all the other forms of mobile communication, they all being more or less the same thing, and certainly all derived from the same thing. In my lifetime, we have gone from the potential ability to communicate with people at any distance to the omnipresence of communication with everyone everywhere. We have gone from a world of missed connections to a world where connections are unmissable. We are always available, and some of us are not merely available, but literally on. Facebook shows who of my friends are logged on at any time, and I can communicate forthwith, but that doesn’t matter, because if I call them or text them, I know with certainty that they will know it, and more to the point, if they don’t respond immediately, they have chosen not to respond. How dare they!

This is not a small change in our existence. As social creatures in the most basic sense, this transcendent sense that communication is guaranteed at all times in all places changes the basic sense of our socialness. For one thing, everyone you’ve ever met is now linked to you forever. You can’t move on from your friends in high school because they’re your friends online and they keep up with you and you keep up with them. Relatives can’t sort of fade off into the distance because when they announce that they’re “in a relationship” everyone from Uncle Mort to Auntie Minnie knows it immediately. They also know when you were in town and didn’t even stop by for a cup of coffee. Husbands checking into the No-Tell Motel on Foursquare will be immediately discovered by their unsuspecting wives, and vice versa. “I called you but there was no answer” is a thing of the past, because it becomes “I called you and you didn’t answer.” Before, there was a chance you were elsewhere; now, you got a beep on your mobile, so you knew I called, so why didn’t you answer, you crud!

I offer no value judgments on any of this. I’m just writing down some thoughts that were bothering me after reading Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book, where in her future 40 years or so from now, everybody has trouble calling people up on the telephone. The tech of the book hardly matters (and I loved it, don’t get me wrong), but that story could never be written as it is today because if everyone had been able to get everyone else on the phone, much of the narrative would have been pointless. The nature of the world has changed dramatically because of the existence of mobile communications devices. And we have taken to those devices with omnivorous enthusiasm.

Interesting times.

And so we bid a fond farewell to sunny something or other

While I like the Apple environment, where my IOS and OSX happily play together like novices in a nunnery (and okay, I admit, I still don’t get that line in “Modern Major General”), there is the problem of having more IOS and OSX devices in play than I can actually keep track of. I’ve been getting phantom iCal alerts for weeks and just today realized that they’re from my DJ OSX calendar. When did I think it was a good idea to make entries on a calendar I never use? The DJ has its own DJish calendar software, and I tend to run the rest of my life of my iPhone. I really couldn’t figure out where these phantoms were coming from, which I’ll admit is pretty dumb but no less frustrating for all of it. Anyhow, I just cleaned them off simply by opening the app. Finally. Meanwhile, the spouse is apparently weaning herself off of her PC and purchasing a Macbook Pro today, which will no doubt be quite enlightening for her. Her iPhone and iPad won’t be lonely anymore. The 50-pound Dell laptop with the screen that doesn’t work that I think is running Windows 3.0 will finally go to doggy heaven. (Hmmm. Sounds like maybe I should use it to run Bump…)

We’re traveling next month beyond the borders of this fine country, which raises the question of phone use on foreign shores. I’ve looked at what AT&T has to offer, for a price, but given that there will be wireless in both places we’re staying, and I really don’t need to communicate with anyone all that immediate, because worst-case scenario Google Voice will pick up any incoming calls, I can’t see spending the money. I’ll hardly be severing myself from human connection, just from telephone calls that I don’t make anyhow. And, of course, GPS services, which could come in handy, but I’m sure I can live without my phone in my hand for two weeks. It’s Paris and London, by the way, both cities I know well enough to realize that if I’m heading to the West End and suddenly come upon the Eiffel Tower, I’ll know that I should have made that left turn at Albuquerque.

When it comes to travel, we have changed our approach over the years. We used to plan things out to within an inch of their lives, and we’ve become much more go-with-the-flow in our dotage. As a rule, we’ll plan one major thing a day, and then just explore that neighborhood at the conclusion of that major thing. Obviously seeing art plays a big part in any trip, and it’s hard to walk past the Louvre without popping in for the odd peek or two, for instance. Plus I’m curious about the pickpockets that shut the place down recently. I have had my wallet stolen in a crowded subway, making me extra cautious ever since. My favorite pickpocket story is the one about the gypsies in Barcelona, who distract you by throwing an infant at you. As you catch it, they grab your wallet. Which means that not only do you get your wallet stolen, but now you have to figure out what to do with the new infant you’ve acquired. What I don’t know is where the gypsies get all these infants in the first place, so many that they can just toss them away at tourists. I do know that on the immigration lines to get back into the country at JFK, it seems as if every American returning from Barcelona has at least one extra infant in their carryon. Strange business.

Anyhow, I will no doubt bore you to tears regale you with great tales of planning and subsequent adventure as the spring and summer progress. I mean, is there anything more exciting than someone else’s vacation? At least the clock is still clicking away over there on the right. DisAd14 is the one vacation you probably do want to hear about. “It’s a world of laughter, a world of tears…”

Then again, Oreos are the Walter Mondale of mass-produced baked goods

I am not particularly taken aback that my various blogs (i.e., this one and TVFT) attract occasional spam comments, but I am rather bemused that it’s always the same postings that get the comments. In the beginning I would go and erase them, but it’s not as if there’s some vast army of archivists scouring these babies for evidence of past indiscretions, or past discretions, for that matter, so it doesn’t really matter much. It does raise the question of spam in the first place, though. Why do obviously bogus messages from dubious sources with ludicrous misspellings continue to swell the interwebs? The answer is that somewhere there is a small number of people who cannot recognize bogusness, dubiousness and bad spelling, much less combinations of all three, who are the target of these messages. I guess we can presume that it’s the statistical deviation; everybody, except for the statistical deviation, knows a certain thing. The statistical deviation, on the other hand, thinks that a celebrity without spell-checking really wants them to lose weight, earn money and impress the ladies in matters physiological. It’s a funny world we live in. It does seem, though, that spam in general is dying out, or maybe it’s just that spam filters are finally working. Surprisingly, I get my worst spam in the highest volume via my DJ account. Additionally, I get a report every day of the spam that got caught by the filters. That’s my favorite. Who doesn’t appreciate the found poetry of a list of spam subject headers?

Speaking of technology, the NY Times today deferred to Feedly as the Google Reader replacement of choice. I’ve been using the app pretty much since day one of the demise announcement, and I have to admit that I’ve settled into it nicely. Breaking in the new app gave me a chance to update my feeds, which was a good thing, as I had accumulated a lot of barnacles. You don’t really need to aggregate a lot of aggregating sites, for one thing. The whole point of RSS is to eliminate the use of aggregate sites, except for a few that have particular value beyond always alluding to the obvious. BoingBoing falls into this category. Sure, it aggregates, but it also has original material, and as often as not, it points to sites that no one else is pointing to (at least, they’re not pointing to them until BoingBoing does). Part of the problem of an RSS reader is that one does tend to overload it, and unless you’re professionally trawling the internet for some reason or other, you really don’t want more feedage coming in than you can reasonably enjoy. If you find something interesting, in other words, you want to read it, as compared to being so overwhelmed by all your other unread articles that you just keep moving to keep up. As I was coming from a heavy need for material when I was feeding the DJ site with content, I had a lot of baggage to dump when it was just to entertain me. I still add and subtract, of course. Feed management is one of those modern chores that never fails to feel productive even though the end result may be anything but. One does need to keep busy during the off season, though.

I admittedly have not been moving as quickly on the audio of Summer Street as I would like. No particular reason, except my own inertia. Although it really isn’t that easy, especially working in the realization that I am far from professional at it. I listen to so many audios that I have no delusions about my own quality as a performer. Still, it is allowing me that one last go-through, and when it’s done, it will be done. I’m still going to publish this summer, and summer is rapidly approaching. That I’ll be away in June means that I really do have to get off the schneid. This weekend. I promise, I will start putting in the necessary time.

Excel at the DJ

We’ll get back to Summer Street next week. Meanwhile, I’ve been up to my ears in Excel at the DJ. As a general rule, my history in systems remains lost in the Primatene mists, but through a commodius vicus of recirculation I have gotten involved in a music project that has required me to export a very sloppy old db out of Lotus Notes into Excel, which, in non-technical terms, is roughly analogous to translating voice recordings of Prakit into written street slang. Notes is moribund, and those who understand its wiles are all six feet under, at least metaphorically. Excel, on the other hand, can do almost anything, if you’re willing to ignore the various international treaties against torture.

You’ve got this list of 35,000 records out of Notes, once you uncover the fields that had formulas where simple data ought to have been, with a small but annoying number of repeat records with one slight differing field, although all records do have a correct unique identifying number. There’s about 30 fields in each record, including rights information; there’s also attachments. You’ve got this independently generated list of royalties that shows annual income on a daily basis, by id number. You need to figure out how much money can be made by the songs earning income in iTunes that do not have rights restrictions. This means that you have to create a lot of moving targets (i.e., lookups) in a very big sheet that, if you don’t save it every five minutes, will probably crash or at the very least go out of memory on you. As it is, it likes to forget itself on occasion while pretending to be working by turning off the filtering or burying the odd overarching calculation. Cleaning it up means lots of calculating then special pasting as values and then sorting and filtering some more and some more lookups and more pasting. I woke up screaming =IF( a couple of times in the night, thanks to Excel’s tendency, if it doesn’t like the way you’re nesting things (and when it comes to Excel I’m a nesting fool), to switch your formula to =(IF for no apparent reason other than to remind you that some day you will die but Excel is forever.

This has, in other words, kept me busy.

In other news, I updated the Nostrum material on my website. Again. I was looking at it, planning for Series 3, which Jules insists is coming down the pike shortly, and I realized that the layout didn’t make that much sense. The thing is, if you’re going to dive into Nostrum, there’s probably an optimal way to do it, and the way I had it didn’t quite highlight that optimal way. I think it’s better now. I’m not quite sure when the new stuff is coming, so there is maybe a missing piece or two on the site, but assuming that Jules and the Nostrumite are marginally reliable, it’ll be there sooner or later.

The website is revised

All right. Enough of this trivia nonsense. Back to business.

I have, for all practical purposes, finished the update of my jimmenick.com website. It doesn’t look all that different from the previous incarnation, but it is better organized. I played around with the design tools provided by my site host, but didn’t really like any of the templates, plus I found them more trouble to adjust than it was worth. I did like the way Squarespace.com allowed me to build the NYSDCA site last year, but I was not interested in porting everything over to them, again in deference to the concept of more trouble than it was worth. So the site is still living inside a very static CSS template I picked up somewhere, using very boring old html that never goes very far beyond a "TD" command. So, it won’t win the beauty prize for site of the year any time soon. But it is, as I say, better organized, and there’s nothing wrong with that. At some point the content of the site is more important than the look of it.

I’ve updated a bunch of things on the forensics page. I find it heartening that most things hold true even as the years seem to change them, and that the underlying philosophies of debate remain the same even as the structures rumble and tumble. I did have to edit a few things here and there to make them viable in 2013, but not as much as you would think. I feel that I can honestly present what is there to anyone putting together a team or to my own students or any other learners and feel confident that they will not be misled. Even some of the occasional stuff like the Geopolitics lecture held up, with a bit of fine tuning to remove it from the immediate resolution that sparked it. There’s a lot of good material at this site.

Now if I could only get the Sailors to take advantage of it…

The newest addition is the writing page, where I’ve tried to isolate things that aren’t strictly debate materials. Granted that a lot of it is debate-based, e.g., Nostrum, but it is nevertheless writing qua writing. It allows me now to push Lingo a little bit, and provides a launching pad for the new book coming out shortly. (I’m self-publishing that one, and I’ll detail its journey here. needless to say.)

I can’t say that I’ve gone and listened to everything on my audio page to clean that one up, but I have, again, organized it better. Needless to say, there’s a lot of overlap on all these pages, and that’s been the hardest thing to keep straight. But I think I’ve done it well enough. In any case, this weekend I took the big old tabbing printer out of the car and put it into the basement, thinking to myself that it is now six months until my next tournament. Holy cow! That’s a lot of time to spend doing something other than tabbing, especially if it’s going to be winter from now until then, as it would appear to be if today’s forecast is any indication. Oh, well. I do have a tendency to keep myself busy enough. And when I fall off the busy wagon, Tik pronounced teek is there to nap along with me. Life goes on.

Feedly is looking good, fellow Reader orphans

Feedly seems to be the early favorite in the Replace Google Reader race. It pulled in a half a million new users right out of the gate following the announcement. I’ve now used it both on my computers and my iPad, and I’m settling in with it. You have the ability to tart things up magazine style, which I might want to do with some content, for instance Disney sites on the iPad, while you can also go straitlaced and just show full article titles, which makes more sense for debate/politics/philosophy sites. It uses Reader as a backend engine, but presumably will create its own engine going forward, which can’t be that big a deal, considering the nature of RSS. For all I know, they already have their own engine, for non-Reader users. It doesn’t matter. The point is that RSS will continue, even if it isn’t as popular as, say, tweeting. I can live with that, provided that, one way or the other, I still get to live with RSS.

(Feedly does seem to be suffering some growing pains, by the way, but that should clear up once they sort out the scaling of their growing numbers.)

Come to think of it, I could live without Twitter. I guess I use it mostly to keep up on breaking news when I’m in the office. I have it available in one of my tabs, and I check it every half hour or so to see if anything interesting is going on. The whole hit-and-miss aspect of it is why I don’t depend on it for anything. I’m following 85 accounts, and I would estimate that I see a turnover of about 100 posts an hour. Obviously, when I’m not looking at it, that means I miss 100 posts an hour. Since I never look on the weekend, that’s meaningful. Assuming fewer posts go up at night when I also don’t look, less meaningful, but still, plenty of missed content. In any case, my point is that Twitter is this endless stream of communication that, if I happen to go near it, it’s fine, and if I don’t happen to go near it, it’s also fine.

RSS, on the other hand, is there until you dismiss it (i.e., mark things as read, literally or figuratively). You select a number of sources, and you get the latest updates from those sources. Here I tend to go for sites that provide information on things in which I’m interested. Like, as mentioned above, amusement parks and debate-ish things, plus tech and books and general entertainment. I’m using the switch to Feedly to update my feeds. I had really overloaded when we were doing a daily DJ blog with 4 posts a day. Now that it’s just for my own personal entertainment, and I’m winnowing down accordingly. And then I’ll expand again, as I follow recommendations from the software of the like-this-try-that variety. Reading my feeds is what I do when I go onto the internet, hence my panic losing Reader. I gather others feel likewise.

I know that there are people out there for whom Facebook is the internet in its entirety, but I find Fb way too claustrophobic. I go on once or twice a week at most, unless I want to message somebody (it is a great connector). Otherwise, I really don’t care what my Fb connections are thinking/doing all that much. I don’t think they care all that much about me in return. Fb inflates a certain kind of information that is somewhere between real news and gossip and gives it credibility, when it’s really just empty babbling. And, I’m sorry, the number of people in whose empty babbling I maintain any interest is terrifically small. Fb seems primarily for adolescents, whose sense of community is much different from adults (and maybe this is generational and changing, but I really don’t think so). It's more tenuous and chimerical and still in a developmental mode. You don't really know who your friends are when you're not quite clear who you are yourself, so you experiment and are willing to process a lot of possibilities. The Fb universe is perfect for this. Fb also seems to bring out the adolescent in the adults who are big users, which is almost an oxymoron. Few adults are interested in maintaining large personal networks of marginal acquaintances loosely identifiable as friends of some sort. They have other things on their mind. If Fb went away, I would miss the ability to message alums easily as they keep changing their emails, but not much else.

In terms of internet phenomena, there is one other big deal that eludes me completely, and that’s Pinterest. Why people want a bulletin board of pictures from various websites, or want to look at someone else’s bulletin board of pictures, is beyond me. Even when I like the subject (say WDW), it’s just a bulletin board of random pictures. Yet Pinterest is one of the biggest new things going, and some people seem to love it. Oh, well. Some people ain’t me.

Mark as read: Google Reader goes under

I had heard a lot of talk in the technosphere that RSS was not exactly setting the world on fire, which I guess I understood, when you get down to it. When I had to organize my troops into providing content for our now defunct DJ entertainment blog, it seemed to me that RSS was the thing to do. We could use Google Reader's group features (which went the way of the dodo long ago, sad to say) to pass along recommendations to one another and eliminate duplicated efforts. I mean, it’s not as if content on the internet is in one place and one place only. Half of what I see that’s interesting, if its not personality-derived content, I see on multiple sites, and as often as not, you have to dig like a dog to find the original posting, which was what I was always looking for. (Members of the VCA are well aware—and usually grumpy about—my enthusiasm for this sort of thing, the fires of which have finally been banked.) To overcome the problems of collecting good links, there was Reader, and I trained or attempted to train about half a dozen people in its wiles. Now, as far as I was concerned, using Reader, not just to follow sites but to add them and divvy them and so forth, was rolling off the proverbial log. For most people, however, RSS was a mystery beyond their ken. They certainly couldn’t get the hang of Reader for finding content or passing it along, much less creating a set of their own personal content. I think this was because the core idea, the underlying understanding of the nature of XML and how, essentially, you would automatically go out and grab some pre-specified data, was just too much like rocket surgery. It made their heads hurt. Also, I think, swimming in vast oceans of incoming information also made their heads hurt. They didn’t see RSS as a way to manage the information, but simply as the information itself. You can apply this to the vast universe of computer users out there, seeing (if they even ever did see) those three little letters in their url box.

They stayed away in droves.

While it was there, especially in its earlier iteration, Google Reader was the go-to application. Even when they “updated” it (for which read, dumbed it down and stripped it of a bunch of features but didn't actually add anything) it was still the standard. There are plenty of apps out there that draw on Reader for its content, for instance, either as standalone IOS or Android apps, either as pretty straightforward readers themselves, or more tarted up as tablet magazines of some sort. Surfing the internet, which was what we did once upon a time (and I’ve always assumed that Safari derives its name from the Beach Boys, although I’ve never seen this confirmed anywhere), was a pretty random activity, at best guided by bookmarks. RSS allowed a much broader scope, guided by related content. Simply put, I have hundreds of sites in my Reader feed. At least a hundred of these are of great interest to me and I like to follow them closely. Try doing that with bookmarks.

But, if anyone questioned the popularity of RSS, the demise of Google Reader pretty much proves it. It’s not that an app wasn’t popular, it’s that a whole technology wasn’t popular. Google Reader, the definitive app for that technology, apparently no longer has a reason for existence, at least in the opinion of that up-and-coming eyeglass manufacturer, Google Inc.

Of course, the scramble is now on to find a replacement. When the announcement hit (you opened Reader this morning and got a message that announced that the spigot would be turned off in July), the interwebs went wild. I’ve been out there beating the bushes, and my early recommendation is Feedly. It has a lot of features, making it either visual or more textual, and it already provides an easy transition for any Reader orphan-to-be. If something better comes along to change my mind, I’ll let you know.

As, to some extent, a content provider myself with this blog, I’ll probably start tweeting posts, just to provide a little extra coverage. I probably should have been doing that anyhow, knowing that many of my readers only came when they remembered, not because they followed religiously. (Tsk, tsk. If CL isn’t a religion, then the Pope isn’t Polish Italian German Catholic.)

And so we bid a fond farewell to Google Reader. As Mark Twain once said of the butler who ran into the burning house to save it but ultimately gave his life to the fire, “Well done faithful servant.”

And don't get me started on the idiotic assumption that everyone under the age of 20 is an innate computer genius

Am I the only person in the world who has trouble getting Dropbox docs to sync? I mean, I have them here, I don’t have them there. I look up the problem online, and while there’s answers to obvious usage issues, e.g., wrong user info, there’s not even a hint that, if you have everything set up correctly, you won’t be able to see the file you were working on this morning at the DJ in the folder where you left it when you’re looking for it at the Chez.

Aaaaarrgh!

This one drove me crazy for days. And it was multiple files from different apps. And they were definitely being saved in Dropbox.

The solution? Threaten its life with a railway share. I started syncing files to my Amazon cloud drive instead of using Dropbox, and suddenly Dropbox got that message that, if it didn’t behave, it was going to suffer. It was going to be abandoned and left for dead. In response, it started showing all the files again.

This is not the first time this approach has solved a computer problem. It is, as far as I’m concerned, step two when step one (turn it off and turn it back on again) doesn’t work. Computer stuff doesn’t mind getting a little shirty every once in a while, but those are the times when you’ve got to show it who’s the boss. That is, you’ve occasionally got to put your applications in their place. When you do, they quiet down and go back about their business. I’m not quite sure what the technical processes behind all of this are, but I assure you, this is exactly how it works.

Go figure.

I’ve been thinking about systems and computers in general lately, for reasons unrelated to forensics, but that’s not going to stop me. The business of systems and computers has changed dramatically over the years. It used to be assumed that the users knew nothing and that you had to train them in everything, including where to sit. Over the years, as computers more and more became a part of the average person’s life, the assumption was that people marginally knew what they were doing, and you didn’t have to train them quite so much anymore. Hence the elimination of manuals, for instance, and the assumption that everyone in the office knows every button to press in Office. At the same time, the IT person’s belief that, at bottom, users are pretty much dumber than a box of rocks and really don’t know what they are doing, has endured, remaining the sort of thing the IT folks would all laugh about when they hung out at bars together getting drunk and telling stupid-user stories. In the end, the IT best practices nowadays are, in a word, not so best. The arrogance that the user is, at heart, ignorant, means that, for instance, all corporate software upgrades except the ones that can’t be hidden are, indeed, hidden. The users won’t even notice it, is the assumption. Systems that used to be beaten up in beta, tested to within an inch of their lives, in a universe when you had to tear it out of the programmer’s hands when it was 99% perfect because they wanted to spend the next year ironing out the 1%, have been replaced with launches that are maybe 50% there, and we’ll handle the problems via the help desk half a globe away. One of the standard launch issues, because users are not factored into usage analysis anymore, is that the system only works for the IT folks who happen to have special rights over the system. The average user can’t get the thing to even turn on, and the IT folks laugh at the stupid users, but the problem is that to turn the thing on, you need to be an admin and the admins were too stupid to set turn off their admin rights when they were testing it, if they even bothered to test it. This is what users complain about when they hang out in bars together telling stupid-IT stories.

Of course, this is only relevant in DJ-type situations, but don’t forget, I live in a DJ-type universe. The bottom line is, software (and hardware) is for users, not programmers, not systems analysts (both of which I’ve been, to some extent or another). Really good designers give users what they need, not necessarily what they want, and then they make sure that those users see the benefits of having their needs satisfied and can, in fact, satisfy those needs. Any program that is not clear to the intended user is simply not clear by definition, even if it’s perfectly clear to the designer. If I make you a car that you can’t drive, I might want to blame you for your thick-headedness but, at the same time, I’m not bloodly likely to sell you that car. Who loses in the end?

We return you now to our regularly scheduled program.

c:\

I’ve been sort of buried in the imponderables of tech for a couple of days. I was raised in the era when, if something went wrong, you hauled out the manual, figured out what was what, and then you fixed it. We were all pioneers back then. Our Apple IIs and IBM ATs were silicon Conestoga wagons that we drove into the unknown, and woe be he who didn’t know a C colon backslash from the proverbial hole in the ground. Nowadays, especially in the Apple universe, the pioneer is the old geezer rocking on the porch, gently dreaming of the past with little idea how the present is getting on. So when something goes kablooey, the frustration level is way higher than those olden days. Then, we knew we could fix it. Now, we just hit buttons at random until something happens and everything settles down again. It’s not half as much fun as it used to be.

As I wrote a little while ago, my battery was running down too quickly in my iPhone, and Marc correctly explained about the IOS bug, so I marginally fixed it. Then, when the IOS update came along that really fixed it, I jumped.

Don’t ask. Took all night to sort that one out. Everything back to normal now, and my battery life is better than ever, but I’ve got the scars that go along with it.

As the phone was dancing across its particular minefield, needless to say, it took the computer along with it. Lots of banging head against wall until that got sorted out. The only thing that I seemed to be able to do was go into the Windows 7 shell, where everything was working fine. When Windows 7 becomes your safe zone, you know you’re in trouble. Again, the worst is over, but more scars were incurred.

And what about Javascript, you ask. Don’t ask. I was trying to buy tickets to the local Shakespeare festival, and well nigh selected seats on every computer within a twenty mile radius before I finally gave up trying and lucked into an alternate approach that yielded, sigh, the same tickets I was trying to select manually. Javascript is dangerous enough, but try to upgrade it on a locked DJ machine. I already run half a dozen applications out of Documents rather than Applications to bypass the bureaucracy (they hate when you do that, but the alternative, not having the application, is not acceptable). But some things have to run out of Applications. Again, back to the modern locked world of the Apple or I guess any proprietary universe. Do it their way, or just don’t do it.

I wish someone would get on my lawn. I’d go hang out with them and pretend that I’m young again.

Meanwhile, PJ pointed in a comment to a decent starting solution to my PF issue. I’ll address that formally shortly.

The Menick Upgrade

The time has come to update the old website again. At Sailorville last night I discovered that there was no link to Lingo, or anything at all about writing, which is ridiculous, given that, occasionally, I write stuff. When I pointed the plebes to Nostrum it was a moment of pure WTF, and then the next thing one knew, my voice was coming out over Meh’s iPhone introducing the series. Eyes opened wide. Do you realize I narrated about 70 or so of series one, about half of what Jules and the Mite wrote overall, and all of series two? When the hell did I find the time for that, considering that back then I actually had teams that went to debates every week?

On top of this, the daughter thinks my schedule, which I adapted for the DisAd, simply reeks of Geocities. I thought I was as clever as a monkey when I grabbed the CSS for the whole site and ported everything over last time, except for the schedule, which has a certain Mayan calendar classic appeal that I’m not sure I want to mess with. The HHHS schedule, for many people in the region other than the HHHS team—which fears death by knowledge if they were ever actually to consult it to find out what’s happening—is the event bible and also a source of innocent amusement. I even just buried an Easter egg for— Na’ah. We’ll let him find it for himself.

Nevertheless, when I put together the NYSDCA site using Squarespace, I have to admit I was rather charmed by the simplicity of the interface and the simple elegance of the resulting pages. My own web host has a set of tools similar to those, and I’ve looked at it briefly recently and thought, why not? It’s a job of work porting everything over, but then again, the present organization isn’t all that spectacular. There’s nothing on the face of the earth that can’t be improved every now and again.

As for the writing thing, I do have some new material I want to push out, and it’s mostly been laziness on my part that’s kept it off the boards. And I have a whole waft of stuff I want to write mostly worked out, and it would be nice to have a forum for it. I mean, when you add all this stuff of, it’s not inconsequential. Why not make the most of it?

I will wait until the season officially ends for the Hudonauts, though, probably about a month from now. No point in taking the site down for upgrade when there’s even the slightest chance that one of my oblivious tars might wake up some morning and feel the need to read the Hillary Duff. It could happen, you know?

All right. It can’t happen. But I can dream, can’t I?

Debate: And God said, let there be another God

There comes a time in the life of every programmer when programming one more line of code will put him or her over the edge. Have you ever looked at computer code? Have you ever programmed the stuff? I've done it, years ago, in Basic, and I've watched CP zip away in Perl like a house afire. It's all really intricate stuff that requires you to maintain a line of thought from the beginning to the end of the logic you're trying to effect, and any distraction will send you immediately back to the beginning, and the slightest syntax error could set off bombs everywhere. It takes a certain kind of mind to do this, but even that kind of mind has its limits.

And that's where things go a little nutty.

CP is, of course, the proud parent of tabroom.com. For the longest time he maintained the system alone, which means that not only was he always keeping the pipes fitted and the steam rising, he also had to deal with user issues. Like any systems person, the idea of dealing with users is a virtual nightmare. It's not that they don't like people—CP is rather a friendly fellow, in his overly tall way—but they don't like dealing with the laity about computer issues. It's like the Pope not wanting to explain to a Unitarian where they keep the Vatican's sacred monkeys. They just don't want to get involved in that conversation out of fear of losing their sanity. In CP's case, he enlisted a couple of us to work with the outside world, AKA the users, as his interlocutors. He called this admin status "godlike powers." It means mostly that we can go into the system and help people fix their tournaments or get logged in correctly or whatever. It's logical for me to have those powers because I tab every week, and it makes life easier for not only me but the tournament directors I deal with. And CP doesn't have to get involved in any of it.

Meanwhile, there's O'C. There has never been a person on the face of the earth who is more interested in the minutia of debate than Jon Cruz. He has all his ballots from his novice LD year. Come to think of it, he has all of everyone's ballots from their novice LD year. He tracks every tournament in the country obsessively. He knows who signs up, he knows who drops, he knows how well they do. He knows when they are sleeping, he knows when they're awake, he knows if they've been bad or good, and I wouldn't be surprised if he breaks into their homes on Christmas Eve to check up on them, which is why a lot of debaters leave cookies and milk out at night, just in case.

The fact that I had godlike powers on tabroom and that O'C did not just drove him crazy. If he asked Palmer once, he asked him a million times, to give him these powers too. And every time, Palmer said no.

And then one night, when Palmer hit that time in the life of every programmer when programming one more line of code will put him over the edge, he was reminded of O'C wanting godlike powers. And he decided to do something about it.

One day shortly thereafter, I saw Palmer, for whatever reason, and he took me aside and told me that because I have godlike powers on tabroom, it is within my abilities to give someone else those same godlike powers. I could even give them to Cruz. According to Palmer, he didn't want to do it himself, because if I did it, he could claim plausible deniability. If I did it, sub rosa, everybody would be happy. Just don't do it when Palmer was around: that was the only limitation.

During the MHL Workshop last week, when we had some downtime, I remembered this exchange with Palmer, and when we had a break, I took Cruz aside and told him I had a present for him. We went into a small room with a computer, and I explained that I was going to give him godlike powers on tabroom, but that he had to be very careful with them, and promise not to screw anything up, but that it was all right with Chris as long as O'C used his powers wisely. With great power comes great responsibility, and all that. For Cruz, this was Christmas, Hannukah, the lottery, American Idol and the Lost Ark all wrapped into one. His brain was about to explode at the mere the thought of it.

So I logged into tabroom and turned on my godlike powers. I went over to O'C's account and brought it onto the screen. Right there, as big as day, was the button to grant him godlike powers.

With Cruz sitting right next to me, his eyes aglow knowing that perhaps his greatest dream since becoming a debate coach was about to come true, I clicked the button.

And now you can too:
--> CLICK HERE <--

More links with little comment: Garbo, snake venom wine, the really original Disneyland, how to use the telephone, Flash fights

More good stuff that speaks for itself:

• Scandals of Classic Hollywood: The Exquisite Garbo It amazes me how dead old movies are to most people. Then again, most old things are dead to most people, and it's their loss. As soon as someone can provide for me a link between new and good, I'll change my tune. Anyhow, Garbo is Garbo, and at least film fans will enjoy this one.
  
  
• If you are not a fan of snakes, don't look at this: Asian snake venom wine (It’s a real thing).
  
  
• The original concept map for Disneyland, blown up so that you can load it into a separate tab and practically walk around in it! Herb Ryman's Disneyland Map Artwork
  
  
• Once upon a time, there were no telephones. Then there were. Here's the online user guide: How to Use the Telephone, 1917
  
  
• Caught this one on BoingBoing. My jaw is still hanging open:
  
  
  
  
  
  

Best take on Apple maps

Mad Magazine, of all people.

Pack 'em up, we're going to balmy Connecticut

There’s a Facebook page for TVFT? Who knew? I just got an email from Zuckerberg, or one of his servers, about the TVFT page, telling me that no one likes it, no one is talking about it and it has no weekly total reach.

I’ve got to put an end to those emails.

For reasons that elude me, I decided I should hook up an extra little HDTV that’s been hanging around the chez to my MacBook. I mean, I have an extra monitor at work, which comes in handy when I’m setting pages and need to see things like ,, instead of , although I never use it for anything else. I think the challenge that drew me at home was finding the right cable to the mini-whatever built into the Mac. Easy enough, as it turned out. So I tried it a couple of days, looking at a version of tabroom.com as big as the Ritz. I have to admit, it didn’t look much different from the 13-inch version except, of course, that it was bigger. I watched some YouTube videos, which were a mixed bag, some being of too poor quality to blow up that much, others looking quite good, but as I’ve said before, I’m not one to sit at my computer watching movies when there’s a comfy chair ten feet away and a TV screen that works just fine. I imagine this will come in handy when I’m editing photos, though. We’ll see. In any case, I’ve got it when I want it. Now all I have to do is want it.

I'm going to put off OS6 for a little while; I don't want to head to New Haven with too much new untested technology. Meanwhile, when I loaded Mountain Lion on the chez Mac (which is not the same as Mac and chez) I decided to start using the Mail program, since it now worked with non-POP Yahoo. Well, after a few weeks I'm going back to my plain old Yahoo mail again. I didn't see any great advantage in having another program open, and I've never been that big a fan of threading, so there you are. Simplicity is my middle name.

On the Sailor front, we met last night instead of Tuesday because of the holidays. No new Sailor debaters, and a perplexing inability of the new Speecho-Americans to understand that when I said to send me an email what it meant was that they needed to send me an email. That's a real poser for some people, I guess. They couldn't for the life of them find the information on the Yahoo page that they didn't have access to because, not knowing who they were, I hadn't given them the rights to see it. How do you explain this to people who seem inherently incapable of understanding it? Beats me. I dearly love Speech events and Speecho-Americans, but I seriously wonder if they are, as a species, living in a different dimension.

Anyhow, for the debaters we started at the beginning once again. I do love rights and the social contract. And unless you know this stuff, you can't really move on to more complicated concepts. And given that the Modest Novice topic and October Pfffft both seriously require this initial understanding, it's time well spent. Of course, when I hear myself utter the words legal positivism I know it's time to change the subject...

And off to the Pups tomorrow. MJP opened fine and everyone seemed to get in ok. I haven't looked to see if my imploring brought in some of the holdouts. I hope so, but then again, Rome wasn't built in a dies.