Forbes on Google Base & Google Payments (or whatever the commerce part is called):, a fumetti tool for Flickr, Bubblr.
AskMe question Uses for Automator, linked as a reminder that I need to spend some tinkertime with the l'il guy.
Eric at Fanta points out that Penguin is offering some old great stuff in the Penguin Classics Deluxe Editions line with excellent covers by cartoonists of excellence that rivals the works themselves. Chis Ware / Voltaire. Frank Miller / Thomas Pynchon. Etc. What cool idea.
Note to self: stay out of bookstores for the next 18 months.
It's weird to be back on the Hill for the first time since the shootings. The Stranger just published their minute by minute account online, and the headlines of both the P-I and the Times banner news of the dead.
Walking by Rainbow Grocery on the way to eat from Group Health, I glanced inside and saw an old acquaintance from Bloomington who worked at Madison Market for many years: he must certainly have known the two young men who also worked there who died in the shooting.
The neighborhood feels like it did after 9/11, and something like it did during WTO, but not excited or argumentative or full of any sort of promise. It's a shocked and grieving feeling. I have seen half a dozen folks pause and gape at the headlines blaring from the newspaper boxes.
Two nights ago I was awakened by the quick gunshots a couple blocks north and east of my house.
This morning we awakened to news of a seven-death shotgunning spree at 21st and Republican, in our old neighborhood.
Today we're hosting an open house. Please check your firearms with me at the door.
UPDATE: For some reason, this failed to post. Viv ambushed me with a 40th birthday party. Manuel took some cameraphone pix as well as some Polaroids on really old, screwed-up film.
I'll add these when I can.
Feed Rinse, via League Brother James, with whom I hope to dine of a weeknight at some point in the not so distant future.
The Greatest Bus Driver in the World has a heartfelt rant inspired by the Alan Moore disowned V is for Vendetta.
Platform cairns and stone chambers are a rare and vanishing class of antiquities in and around New England.
This can't last, but: LOTSA GOODIES. Silents, TV shows, copyright violation galore. The stuff I want is outta (c) anyhoo, but, dig.
Eric at Fanta noted this village voice feature on Jessica Abel's La Perdida, which struck me as a unique and successful piece on initial publication. I never read the last couple of issues - maybe I'll pick the book up.
The first thing is something I noted at about 8 am, and have since forgot.
Aha! It was a guy on a bike with an iSight taped to his helmet, facing forward.
The next two are pictures.
"Huckleberry Blue Has a Posse"
"Support our Pants"
Crappe! Yon synkical operation 'pon ye faithfulle communications device yclept ye Treo has cast forth all trace of names, telephonical contact coordinates, &c. from ye device! Fie!
Several centuries later:
I was able to locate a system-level address book backup - from NOVEMBER 2005. So I feel like I'm moving again!
Per request, here is a followup to a previous post.
To reiterate, I'm thinking through the best way to present a uniform UI atop varying data tables. I am reluctant to invest the time and effort into developing import routines for the data in order to apply full normalization to the data tables for reasons which are sufficient and not under discussion.
Therefore the choices are:
Can I present data in an Access UI where the display fields draw from more than one data datatable, using if-thens and string concatenation to present the data as appropriate to the record?
or
Must I create a supertable which unifies the schema without any attempt at normalization in order to do the same thing for each record?
The answer is partially embedded in Access' limitations on tying tables to the UI, it looks like. When I experimented with relating two tables to one "Form" (Access' term for the UI) Access required the tables to contain a join; the data is not inherently joinable. Therefore if I want to do if-thens and concatenation to conduct normalization as each record is displayed (which is conceptually what I'm talking about) I will need to create supertables. Yuck.
One of the issues with doing this is Access is that Access does not permit dynamic column population at import. Therefore I can't test the inbound data for specific characteristics to record the data source in the new record. That's part of the MS upgrade-path strategy which is so irritating - leaving out simple-to-implement features as the consumer-grade app is upgraded forces advanced users to look at MS-SQL, in this instance.
So what it looks like I will be doing is recoding Access applications for each datasource and requiring the user to switch between them as they work with the data, which kinda sucks. Oh well.
In How Pop Sounded Before It Popped, the NYT's Judy Rosen brings the rest of the country into the secret knowledge of the fantastic greatness to be had online amongst the mp3 transcriptions of early recordings of popular tunes, a topic I have gabbled on about here previously.
I had an epic dream last night in which I visited Bloomington for the first time in five years and made it out to my childhood home to see it from the inside due to the generosity of its' new owners.
While there, a party started. Amidst the ruckus I found a set of bookshelves that my dad made for me and my sister around 1972. On the bookshelves remained a broad selection of detritus from our family's life in Bloomington.
When the new owner arrived home from work, we spoke breifly, catching up, in the basement. During the course of our conversation the basement grew massively, eventually morphing to an outdoor airport tarmac, on which sat a large collection of antique airplaines of all ages.
The house my friend had bought had become a grounded 747, and he and his family were living within the plane. As I wandered around the aviation boneyard, I accidentally activated smallish two-engine prop plane, and the silvery relic plowed into and through the wing of my friend's formerly airborne home.
After this debacle, my party decided to leave the premises, climbing back up the stairs into the rest of my childhood home before driving away. I was seated in the back seat of the automobile, and looking up and back toward the house and airfiled we'd just left, I saw a small craft with NASA markings launch another craft. The carrier was clearly inspired by the recent news coverage of a secret space plane.
This second craft rocketed away and then a series of craft issued, all different, one after another. Each of these craft catapulted some distance from the carrier and began to unfold, improbably. As their falls slwed, then stopped, it became apparent that each was some sort of lighter-than-air craft, all built on different plans.
Soon the sky was full of these pseudo-zeppelins, in many shapes and sizes. Somehow it became clear that they were some sort of alien invasion fleet. After this was realized, we found ourselves able to clamber aboard one; as we ascended we noticed other groups of people doing the same on other ships, all about us. Once we arrived inside the fuselage of the ship, it seemed that the party I'd dreamt of earlier has come aboard the craft.
Lately I have been working my way around the sprawled furl of moss and crabgrass that is our lawn, where it intersects with and overlaps the mysteriously vast expanses of slurred and broken concrete aprons and purposeless cement curbs that measure our property's internal geometry. The tools I use as I ruthlessly demarcate, again, the boundary between the organic and the architectural are a square-end spade and a half-moon edger, the geometer's straight edge and half circle, Apollo's rule and Diana's curve.
Reclaiming the formerly fringed and fronded concrete is hard work, and leaves me sore and winded each evening before I clamber up the steps to the kitchen to cook dinner. It's the only exercise I have been getting since moving out past the end of the sidewalk.
The mats of mossy grass and grassy moss I dismember are generous in scope, in some cases nearly a foot wide and a couple of yards long. Some of the trimmed flash is nearly pure moss, and has the soft, light texture of human hair. Loth to simply chuck the trimmed turf, I have been laying it atop areas of the lawn previously denuded due to shade and root competition, expecting to prune the overhangs shortly.
As I step, hard, onto the lip of the edger, feeling the satisfying 'chunk' of the blade as it scrapes along the edges of this concrete coffer or that cracked pavement, I muse and curse. I don't believe the work I'm performing is moral. I believe it's an expression of the spirit of evil in the world, of territoriality and division and inorganic order over biological diversity and lushness. I'm the executioner. I'm the enforcer. I'm wasting my time and at the same time committing sins against my nature and that of the world.
I'm probably going to need some pretty decent pruning shears when I get to the bushes and the trees.
Attention, geeks:
I have an interesting database problem that I must grok to determine a course of action.
I have set N, a set of n datasets. The datasets are consistently formed flat-file tables. For each of the sources of members of N, there is a distinct schema.
For reasons of data purity and to minimize the differentation between the source set and the working set, I have chosen not to normalize the tables when I bring them into a workspace and add a presentation layer. Currently, the presentation layer is recoded for each dataset's schema.
The flat-file tables are saved as text files and imported into Access to an Access table which has at least the same structure as the flat-file, but which also includes additional columns. For purposes of this musing, consider this a generic SQL question.
The presentation layer - the UI - incorporates some minor aggregation and analysis which is enacted when the record is displayed, but not stored.
What I'd like to understand is if it's possible or advisable to add a layer of abstraction under the UI which would permit me to display records from each or all of the members of the datasets without having to either work out the full normalization for all the tables or having to unify the tables' schemas to accomplish a simple normalization. The reason I;d prefer to avoid doing this is to simplify errorchecking in the case of observed discrepancies between the working data and the source data.
For example
table MYPETS and table YOURPETS contain similar data in differing schema.
MYPETS:
Name Nickname Size Weight Breed Species
Chloe Chloe-bo Small 6 lb Mixed Housecat
Simon Sweetypie Medium 8lb Mixed Housecat
YOURPETS
Nickname FirstName LastName Kilos Diet PeltColor Size
Poo-poo Sherlock Smith 6 Vegetarian "White with Spots" Medium
Linus Linus Smith .2 Birdseed "Green feathers" Small
I can discard the unique-to table data in the UI, so what I'd keep is (Name, Firstname, Lastname, Size) for display.
What to do?
AZ posts an unresolved reflection on an acquaintance's puffery, prompting a recollection of my own on the theme.
During the tail end of high school and early college, I was friends with a street drunk named Freddy, "Freddy the Biker," to give his full moniker.
"I'se just a broke-down ol' scooter tramp without a scooter," he'd say, by way of intro or explanation. Fred was originally from "the Region," the megaplex around Gary, Indiana, and had run with a few MCs, according to him, over the late sixties to late seventies. When I knew him, he was a profound alcoholic prone to passing out and wetting himself. Despite this, his weatherbeaten face and inexhaustible repertoire of entertaining stories of rock and roll shenanigans - and his happy willingness to buy booze for underage drinkers - endeared him to my social circle.
One of the many things Fred claimed to have done in his life was to have worked as a roadie for innumerable rock bands. Among others, he claimed Metallica, Iron Maiden, and the Sex Pistols, on their sole American tour until reforming in the 1990s. The Pistols claim, for sheer improbability, was subject to the greatest interrogation and elaboration.
Before I met Fred, I had a photo poster of the Pistols taken during a concert presented in Austin Texas during the 1979 1978 tour. In the shot, Sid Vicious, the band's second bassist, is caught mid-pogo, and his feet are clearly visible. He was wearing full-height engineer boots, the motorcycle boot that has a single buckle and a clearly defined block heel. Full-height boots reach to protect the entire calf and shin.
This image formed my idea of desirable footwear and for twenty years thereafter engineer boots were my preferred footgarb.
The day I first set steel taps to resist the rapid heel wear on the heels of my first low-rise engineer boots, I slipped and stumbled at a party in front of Freddy. He remarked, laughing, "You need to learn to walk on steel, boy!"
That night, I pressed him, disbelieving, about roadie-ing for the Pistols. He told me that it was a fun gig and that "the boys" were just folks. Except, he said, for Sid.
Fred claimed that Sid was the nicest kid most of the time, but that sometimes he would "get an idea" and that you couldn't talk him out of it. The particular example he gave was that in Austin Texas (a city place I knew the band had played but which I did not mention to Fred), Sid had admired his motorcycle boots. They were, it seems, high boots that Fred had just bought, happy to have the money for some durable footwear. Vicious, it seems, would not be put off, and he badgered Fred into giving him the boots.
When I heard this story, I was utterly skeptical, but suspended critique in respect of Fred's entertainment value. A few years later, I heard that Fred had died of complications from an infection brought about by an untreated cut on his foot - he'd contracted gangrene and the amputation came too late to save him. He died, and I understand was buried, in New Orleans, a perfectly appropriate place.
Years later, I read Jon Savage's detailed account of punk rock, circa 1974-1980, England's Dreaming. In the book, Savage incorporates an anecdote about Vicious on the US tour, in which the Pistol badgers an unnamed roadie into giving up his brand new pair of calf-high motorcycle boots just before the band's Austin Texas show.
Freddy, here's to ya.
On the occasion of receiving the Zero Boys Live 1984 Reunion DVD, Shecky waxes informative yet grandiloquent upon the topic of Hoosier punt rot. Go, implore the solvent.
I have spent a portion of my weekend messing with RSS and The Democracy Player, per the instructions linked, and so far, so good, although my DSL speed is slow enough to consign this to permanent experiment until I finalize the LAN setup and shanghai one of the G4s as a dedicated media server.
The Times has a look at the burgeoning world of IPTV content production: As Internet TV Aims at Niche Audiences, the Slivercast Is Born.
One of my longtime colleagues has been oriented to providing IPTV instructional programming for over a decade now - it really seems like this should be his moment. I wonder if he has rights to all the content he's produced over the past ten years? On a related note, I wonder what would happen if I started considering my weekly pitchlist as the basis for video content as well? In particular, a subset of my story ideas are always how-tos, reviews, and explanatory material. A typical magazine story yields 500 to 700 words and takes less than a minute to read, in my experience. If that 700 words could be recast as a three-minute-script and shot at the time the article is prepared, I think there might be a decent microcontent media property, as long as the subject matter is sufficiently consistent.
Some of these ideas could also very productively apply to SIFFblog, I think. Hmmm.
First Paul, Then MetaFilter note an Aviation Week story covering what may be a now-cancelled black-ops operational orbital space plane.
Well, this is odd. I have oodles of stuff happening and nearly no inclination to write about it.
For the record:
I'm helping a friend to make a short film.
I have a huge pile of brush to cut into 15-inch lengths.
My wife is going to have surgery later this month.
We are having an open house at the new place just before the surgery.
I will be forty in a few days.
Oh, there's more, but as you can imagine, rest and reflection are not my priorities.
It's a perfect spring day here. I took advantage of the unexpected sun to mow the lawn, after cleaning up a winter's worth of twigs. The twigs await cutting to suit use as kindling.
As I finished the lawn, I heard an insistent and repeated chirt sound. A ruby-throated hummingbird was perched in a neighbor's still-leafless tree, declaiming his territory. As he called, he would flare his ruff. When he turned to face me and called his head blazed with light.
Y2K posts The memory of love's refrain at MetaFilter, wherein he has collected the most extensive set of links the world's yet seen on the best-known song penned by one Hoagland Carmichael.
I was bummed to learn of the closure of Bert Grant's Yakima brewpub from the P-I today. From the time it opened to the last time I was on Yakima, about five years ago, a stop at the old depot was a requirement of the trip, in token of Grant's role in the craft brewer renaissance and in celebration of my family's agrarian roots in the Yakima valley. Pears ain't hops, but the incipient vineyards and hops fields of my childhood promised a richer, tastier adulthood, a promise which mostly has been borne out.
I swung by the liquor store on my way to pick up Viv, in need of gin, and wandered aimlessly for a patch. Rounding a corner I was haply surprised to see Clear Creek Eau-de-Vie, a variety of brandy that has been of interest to my family for years (my grandfather was a pear farmer and my dad has a long and lively interest in the manufacture of wine and liquor). So I added it to my forage, traded a small pile of pebbles and such to the man watching the mouth of the cave, and swung up into the saddle of my bantha, the booze in the trunk.
When Viv and I reached home, I picked up the paper bag with the bottles in it, which tore and dropped about five inches to the floor of the trunk. As i reached to pick it up, I was puzzled about the source of the liquid gurgling all over the floor of the trunk. The pear brandy bottle's neck had sheared off.
I was able to save most of the booze by straining it through a coffee filter, and eventually got the pear out. But I'm still bummed, as I had hoped to open the bottle with my pop.
