Cringely sez the mini Mac is “all about the movies,” and he’s pretty persuasive. Speaking of movies, Bart, we saw Sideways this evening.
It was by no means a hard sell – I love wine, and have been raised to, and I have loved Paul Giamatti onscreen since seeing American Splendor at SIFF in, what, 2003? 2004?
As you intimated, Bart, it was great. We both loved it very much. Viv looks forward to identifying and trying the wines seen onscreen.
‘Epileptic’: Disorder in the House, by Rick Moody.
It’s not uncommon now for readers of literature to admire Chris Ware or Julie Doucet or Joe Sacco or Joe Matt with a partisan vigor formerly reserved for renegades like Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan. Among the reasons for this popularity is that comics are currently better at the sociology of the intimate gesture than literary fiction is.
A big, fat, Sunday-Times wet kiss from Moody to the Fantaboys in the little grey shed on Lake City. MMWAH!
Or is it? The book is translated by Kim T. of Fantagraphics, but published by Pantheon.
Aha! The indispensible Egon has the scoop (January, 2004):
Fantagraphics will not co-publish (with L’Association) David B.’s “Epileptic” Vol. 2 as originally planned, Kim Thompson confirms in a post to the Comics Journal’s message board. “The complete EPILEPTIC will be released all in one volume by Pantheon in January 2005,” says Thompson. The book will include the totality of “Epileptic” Vol. 1 and what would have been “Epileptic” Vol. 2. “It’ll actually be priced about the same as a L’Association-published EPILEPTIC VOLUME 2 would have been, so no one’s out any money… the art will be shrunk a bit to make for a smaller, more novel-sized book. (Which will also make it less unwieldy.)”
Just finished (finally) watching The Fog of War. I found McNamara’s early background to be in many ways strikingly similar to my father’s early career. I have a vague recollection of Mom and Dad telling me that they’d recently seen the film – something of a red-letter event, as they are not really big movie watchers.
McNamara went from an assistant professorship at Harvard to the Army in World War II. Dad recently told me that he turned down a permanent position teaching at Harvard around 1973 or 1974. We lived in Boston during 1973 and 1974; my dad had a visiting professor position. What he told me is that he was offered the job on a permanent basis.
It’s unclear in my memory if we discussed whether the position was tenured or not but I suspect it had to be by that point in his career. He told me that the most important aspect of his decision making process was his and my mother’s concern about raising kids in a big city.
I believe I goggled visibly at this news; I still turn it over in my mind trying to make sense of it.
I suppose the turmoil and uncertainty of the times must have strongly influenced their concerns. That fall, the September 1973 Chilean coup would have been fresh in their minds, as would the first rumblings of Watergate with October’s “Saturday Night Massacre.” One can imagine that some of the folkways of the Yard in 1973 might have been a source of interest to my dad at the time, given his teaching experience in the polarized atmosphere of the Chile in 1969. Of course, the next school year, 1974, was the first year of the tumult in Boston around busing, and surely the newspapers had coverage of the political battles that preceded that unpleasant episode.
I think, possibly, that the business school actually is on a physically separate campus from the location of the Yard, I should note.
Finally, I have asked if Dad recalls teaching a certain well-known HBS grad who was enrolled the year he was a visiting prof. His answer is “No.”
I should note that I found amazingly little analysis of W’s degree out there in web land – that one opinion piece was all I could come up with. I seems that most folks are content to refer to it offhandedly and let it mean what it already means to he reader, left or right.
The Movable Type Publishing Platform: Movable Type ‘nofollow’ plugin has been implemented. So, you hear that, spambots? Go away, and do not trouble me again!
SPI S&T #19- ZEPPELIN Unpunched, on eBay, via the comments a few days ago from Matt.
This 1993 turn-based hex-paper strategy game should not be confused with the computer game.
Manuel has followed up on the “unsecured webcams” meme and has a personal tale of righteous, mighty battle in the service of, um… Well, the morality is complicated.
Shesaiddestroy.org offers an .avi of The Clash, onstage in 1977, performing “London’s Burning.” [via The Cartoonist, again!]
For reasons unclear to me, there has been a subcurrent of Joe Strummer in my mediasphere over the past week.
This clip is interesting to me for several things:
Mick Jones looks at his fret hand the whole time he is playing the basic chords of the song and only looks away when he freestyles.
They must be hot in those jackets.
What is up with the oddball flat-and-bright lighting?
The cameraperson might be new to the game, not varying the shoot at all. Could this be from Don Letts’ footage? Is it a rip from “From Westway to the World”? Is this one of the art school gigs? The original site says it’s a gig in Munich.
I remember as a thirteen-year-old thinking those spring-coiled patch cords were the shiznit. Later in life I actually used one for a while, and they suck: they tangle in epic manner, and when they age, the cables snap in the coil. Avoid them.
I love the film scratches. What gear was this shot with? That really seems to be the live audio, and with that static camera work I’d guess this is an 8mm shoot; in which case the footage may have been shot silent. Whatever, it would be interesting to get the backstory.
LiveJournal.com, for much of today: “Our data center (Internap) lost all its power, including redundant backup power, for some unknown reason. (unknown to me, at least) We’re currently dealing with bringing our 100 servers back online. Not fun. We’re not happy about this. Sorry… :-/ More details later.”
I recall looking at some hosting facilty just when they opened, looking for facilities for our tiny set of boxes. I think we may have gone with them too. I had the stupid role in the movie where the other people get to fiddle with the gear and I answered the cell phone over and over again, hand holding increasingly far-removed-from me upper-ups.
The best one was when we sweet-talked our way past the night-time security guy even though we didn’t have any good credentials or the passphrase, and then talked our way into the on-site tech-staff’s glass room to get a clean test connection to our boxen from outside our class C.
It sounds like a bad movie from the eighties, huh? Apparently we got everyone in trouble there because of this but I went to bat for them, since I could have yanked our account there.
Other things I remember from the hosting center: the deep chill of the rooms, cooled to keep the hardware from overheating. The black-enameled hard wire mesh that enclosed many other clients’ systems, keeping information caged, as it were. The dizzy-headed 3am feeling that somehow we’d become ensnared in some sort of hacker wet dream or pulp novel. Arriving onsite as the sun set and leaving as dawn pinked the sky. The 2001-like all-over flourescent brightness of the space. The plastic-and-lacquer gas-off smell of new computers and freshly installed network paneling.
Battle Lesssons, by Dan Baum, in the January 5 issue of the New Yorker.
In March of 2000, with the help of a Web-savvy West Point classmate and their own savings, they put up a site on the civilian Internet called Companycommand.com. It didn’t occur to them to ask the Army for permission or support. Companycommand was an affront to protocol. The Army way was to monitor and vet every posting to prevent secrets from being revealed, but Allen and Burgess figured that captains were smart enough to police themselves and not compromise security. Soon after the site went up, a lieutenant colonel phoned one of the Web site’s operators and advised them to get a lawyer, because he didn’t want to see “good officers crash and burn.” A year later, Allen and Burgess started a second Web site, for lieutenants, Platoonleader.org.
Fascinating. It would be interesting to look at the sites to see how they are similar to and different from less life-and-death online communities.
This week’s issue also includes a pretty wonderful profile of Miyazaki by Margaret Talbot, in which we learn that the great man is quite the pessimist. Talbot seems surprised by this, as Miyazaki’s films are notable in their lack of mean-spiritedness. This surprises me, as in my experience, it is optimists that create many of life’s small cruelties.
Apple’s Tipping Point: Macs for the Masses is a beautiful visual analysis of Apple’s business strategy by Paul Nixon. Persuasive and elegant, it appears to summarize Apple’s business strategy, and if it’s accurate, presents a strong case for Steve Jobs and company as businesspeople of the decade. Remarkable.