July 3rd, 2009
Did anyone else see that article from a few days ago where BBC magazine had a kid give up his MP3 player for a Sony Walkman? After reading that article, and after talking about that article with my older daughter. We wound up in a similar situation. Yesterday she started being tutored for her Torah portion for her Bat Mitvah next June.
Her tutor sends home tapes for people to practice with. She doesn’t have the capability to make CDs yet. My first idea was to send her with a laptop and Audacity. The record/stop button interface of Audicity should be familiar to the tutor. My backup plan was to create MP3s off of the tape. I forgot about the laptop until my daughter texted me about needing a tape recorder, so on to the backup plan.
Until I can make the MP3s, she’s using an old portable tape recorder (some sort of late 80’s Walman-style portable tape player.) and it was amusing to see all of the things that I’d take for granted that she had trouble figuring out:
The first issue was to figure out which side of the tape it was recorded on. This involved playing the tape on each side, rewinding, fast-forwarding, playing with the volume control, and unfortunately switching from “tape” to “fm” while the volume was at full. Eventually she figured out which side the recording was on and where on the tape. Then she labeled it and told me that it was unfortunate design (where I pointed out to here that the cassette did have sides labeled “A” and “B”, which she didn’t notice.)
The next issue was how to fit that cardboard track listing sleeve into the plastic cassette holder. She had it folded L-shaped and not J-shaped. It didn’t fit in right and was too tall. Once I pointed out how that there were two creases in the cardboard, she figured it out.
Its been a while since I’ve needed a tape player, but I learned these skills a long time ago. To my daughter, this is all brand new and there is a learning curve.
Tags: family
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June 29th, 2009
Can you picture an artist who claims that they can’t sketch/draw/paint/sculpt or otherwise use tools to manipulate their medium? Or an author who is can’t write or type? That without using these tools can still create world famous works?
The recent news of Michael Jackson passing away keeps bringing me to this question. The news keeps reminding me of Jackson, and when I think of Jackson, I think about the plagerism lawsuit over The Girl Is Mine. In it Jackson claims that although he doesn’t know how to play an instrument, he composes complete renditions of his songs fully formed out of his head (melody, harmony, counterpoint, rhythm.) , through singing and scatting into a tape recorder. No rough drafts, rewrites, editing etc. The tapes then go to Quincy Jones who arranges the piece and writes out parts for the studio musicians.
I find it hard to believe that someone can have that great of a musical mind they can conceive of these great pieces, and yet not have the ability to correlate that hitting this or that key on a keyboard matches the pitch that is going on inside his head. I would think that eventually tying the notes of those melodies into their names would be necessary, if even as a temporary holding space to work out the rest of it. (or more accurately, since I know of people with physical disabilities creating works under extraordinary difficulty: Christy Brown painting with his left foot, or Richard Stallman dictating code to a transcriber, that the effort to create without learning a tool seems far more burdensome than actually learning it.)
Although I think the story that was given seems implausible, I’m not sure what the true story is. It could be that the work was transformed by musicians piece by piece so that Jackson didn’t realize that it was thoroughly transformed. I’ve known some very clever graphics designers who could do that. You start by giving your idea of what you want. They already know how they want it to end up, and all the development iterations involve convincing you that their changes are a refinement your idea. It could be that his private deals with unknown songwriters is that they have to give up composer credit for their work. Whatever the real story is, once I decided he was lying about how his music was composed, I decided that the potential that other statements were lies were high.
Maybe its just me though. There have been too many times I’ve been in disagreements with people that the tools that they need to use are “computer stuff” and so they can remain oblivious too it: Salesmen asking me for help setting up an LCD projector and Powerpoint. Web content producers not understanding or caring that a (table embedded in a table embedded in a table)^n embedded in a Javascript document.write() will not render quickly no matter how many servers are added. That when the web server you are using treats URLs case-sensitively, you shouldn’t put the wrong URL on a billboard facing the southeast expressway. Where is the line though? At what point does something become a system needing a technologist to extend or maintain and at what point does a content producer need to accept responsibility to understand the tools of their art?
Tags: engineering, media, music
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June 25th, 2009
One time Penn Jillette was recounting an anecdote on his radio show. He was on an airplane and then boarding after him was a notable stand up comic. After greeting each other, the comic started asking questions about his career. “How many times did you do the Tonight Show? “Oh about three or four times so far”. “How many appearances on Letterman? Your New York show, is that on Broadway or an off-Broadway show” After answering his questions the comic muttered, “just great. If this plane goes down, the article will read ‘Penn Jillette comedian and magician noted for his Broadway show and his late night talk show appearences died in a plane crash. Also on board was …”
A slightly different collection of on screen credits and Jillette would have been related to the “also on board was magician Penn Jillette and and 175 other passengers.”
A slightly different collection of credits, and Farrah Fawcett’s passing would be all over the news tonight. Ed McMahon and David Carrodine are off of everyones notice entirely.
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June 24th, 2009
I got told one of those “all of the other kids…” lines and I responded with “if all the other kids jumped off a bridge, would you?”
The reply I got was “if all the other parents used the same lame analogy, would you?”
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June 4th, 2009
I’ve had this link hanging around for a while, wanting to put it into a story. http://briandavidphillips.typepad.com/brian/2008/10/how-to-fold-a-t.html I still haven’t written anything about it, so I might as well post it as is. Sometimes the best engineered solutions aren’t the best solutions.
Tags: engineering, funny
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June 4th, 2009
I subscribe to Boston.com’s BostonUpdate twitter feed over RSS because although some people feel like it isn’t a good twitter feed, its a better RSS feed than what they supply. (Some of the feeds seem autogenerated and are too noisy, the rest are too special purpose and have few updates if not ignored entirely.)
Yesterday I found tweet: Ooops, we ought to update our SEO title on the Political Intelligence blog. Calling the title the “SEO title” makes me think that the person who sent this knows very little about the web or how web pages work, about blogs or the Movable Type system used for the Political Intellegance. What they are calling “SEO title” is normally just called the title, or maybe “the page’s title” or something like that. Anything that needs a short description of a web page will likely take it from the web page’s title. Its used on the window title bar in most browsers; If you bookmark the page, the title is used; When a search engine displays its results most will show the pages title (which still isn’t what I’d call SEO at this point.) I’d hope that BostonUpdate would have noticed these things before while using the web and made some connection between their content and how it is used. Its because the page’s title has such importance that search engines may tend to put some importance on the words title which gives it some effect on the pages ranking.
As a reader I shouldn’t even care what a site is doing for Search Engine Optimization. (except to the extent that I want their pages described well so the appriate content show up high enough on search results.) I really shouldn’t know or care what they are doing for SEO. Google’s Search Engine Optmization Starter Guide seems to agree with me: “Even though this guide’s title contains the words ’search engine’, we’d like to say that you should
base your optimization decisions first and foremost on what’s best for the visitors of your site.” If they think of the title as the “SEO title” it just shows that they are trying to game the system; And game a system that they don’t fully understand.
When a person is working in some sort of creative work, it seems to me that they don’t only need to have skills in isolation, but they also need to understand the media that they are working in. I writer needs to work differently depending on whether they are making a novel, a coffee table book, or a comic book. A photographer and a cinematographer have different concerns, especially about movement. Thinking of the title as just “some SEO thing” and not understanding what a <title> tag on a page does implies that the person who wrote that tweet has never recognized a connection between what they wrote on the web and what happens if they bookmark a page they wrote, never recognized a connection between the content they are working with and what is in the title bar of their browser. To be effective producing content in a media someone should see what sort of effects their actions have in that medium. This comment doesn’t give me a very good feeling of the understanding of the media they are working in.
Tags: media, newspaper, web
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May 26th, 2009
I have this big mondo blog post about the state of the media. I keep adding to it and never getting to a point where it can be finished off. I figure that I need to break it into pieces before it becomes a Gordian Knot that I can’t untangle. Here is one easily extracted piece:
Who in the world is the GlobeReader product designed for? It promises the reader “an experience similar to your newspaper’s look and feel.” Is there really a market people who would prefer to read their news on a computer rather than paper and ink but find the web too cumbersome?
The only other possibility that I could initially think of is the other side of news media marketing. They really have two sides to their marketing: marketing to their readers and to their advertisers. Since newspaper advertising produces far greater revenue than web advertising, it could be a product that appeals to advertisers. From what I could see of the demo, no. At the most they show a single standard banner add at the bottom of the page. (The demo for TimesReader, that this seems to be based on shows no advertising at all.)
For the features that GlobeReader seems to have that Boston.com seems to lack :
- Resizable text. (can be done to some extent with a web browser’s text resizing, but there is too much absolute positioning within the boston.com site design and you wind up with small boxes of large text.)
- Offline access. (can be done with some RSS readers or predictive caching.)
- Mac OS-X Aqua style transitions.
- An alternative, utilitiarian site design.
Is there anything else that I’m missing?
Tags: media, newspaper
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May 23rd, 2009
My wife just said to me: “You have all of these ideas. If only the could be used for good rather than evil. Actually, I never see them used for evil either, but if they could wind up being used for good…”
It all started last night when my mother-in-law called saying she misplaced her mobile phone and her keys, again. (I know there are limits to how much I can I can laugh at this.) I was thinking “well a thin RFID tag could probably be taped to the back of her phone.What’s the range of a RFID reader.” Apparently not far enough. I see 10mm and 20mm versions for an unpowered RFID tag, and I’m afraid that a powered tag will run out of battery just when we really need it. So I started asking Michelle if she new what RFIDs were and described them. (they are different than security tags, explained how they can be used in the supply chain, a bit about privacy concernts, etc. Not quite what she was expecting for breakfast conversation, if she has any expectations of what I might come up with anymore.) But the distance thing was a problem to still solve. Then it came to me, The iRobot Create! Its basically a Roomba without the vacuum cleaner parts. It can wander around the house with the RFID reader and stop when it is close to the lost item. Michelle then points out that the keys may have been outside while gardening, and my response to that was that I’d just need a different sort of device to wander outside.
OK, so now my plan is to have , if not quite an army at least a tactical team of special purpose robots scouring the property for a set of missing keys and a mobile phone. At this point, I’m willing to concede my wife’s original point. Especially since its been done before and failed like in WoZ , and several products currently on the market.
The phone was found. It was underneath the drivers seat of the car. (when those luxury car ads boast on how quiet they are, they are usually describing how little of the engine and traffic noise gets from outside the car in, not how you can’t hear a phone ringing inside the car when you are outside.) And probably enough metal betwen it to thwart a low power RF reader. Hm, the phone probably has bluetooth built in, that can give it a bit more range. I’ve seen apps for Bluetooth proximity detection before, but usually the other way (set the computer screensaver on when the phone (and the person holding the phone) goes away from the computer.) For that matter, as long as the phone’s battery is still good (which is what has thwarted me in the past) the phone itself is a long range communication device and aGPS, we could just leveage geolocation stuff that people are already working on… (and here we go again.)
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May 20th, 2009
A friend of mine sent me a link to the Wayback Machine’s scrape of the old Boston.com Haiku site, pointing out that I reached the Haiku Hall of Fame. That was a fun little site. The way it was set up is that one person would create a five(ish) syllable phrase as a “seed” and others could finish it with another seven(ish)-five(ish) phrase to create a complete Haiku. From any haiku you could the other haiku based on the same seed or other haiku from that particular author. People wishing to read could still vote on the haiku and there were pages for most popular haiku and most popular author.
It was fun in the way that there were many entry points into the all the haiku, (latest haiku, latest seed, by author, etc.) and each item was linked in many ways (others with this seed, others by this author) etc. so that you could end up wandering around the site for a while being amused by everything you saw. Compare this to all the content that I read from my RSS aggregator now and just slog through the list until I’m at the end and then leave the web for something else.
Unfortunately, the site took too much time to maintain and became unwieldy. Some work was put into alleviating it (the most popular list had become filled with such highly voted items that new items could never reach, so it was split into a “most popular this week” and “hall of fame” for the most popular of all the previous weeks. The developer of the site probably should have thought ahead of time to add pagination to everything.) I’d bet that the first time that some used “I didn’t have time to …” with something their editor cared about, if any time was spent on the Haiku site instead the whole thing got the ax.
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December 1st, 2008
Yesterday, I was talking with my sister about the mobile phone market, and how it seems to be hitting some sort of new phase. (Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android platform, Blackberry etc. are sparking interest in mobile phone applications. Treo and Nokia who have been doing this stuff forever now seem to be aftertthoughts, etc.Windows CE plays its part) Its in sort of its gold rush phase. Fortunes will be made and lost, but you can’t entirely be sure where. For developers, right now the cost of developing a small mobile phone app to sell at a small price seems like a reasonable investment.
Then this morning, I suddenly remembered. The original iPhone had very little ability to create programs for it. (people were wondering if it could be called a smartphone if the only development environment available for it were bundles of HTML,CSS,and Javacript built into widgets.) Steve Jobs said that they didn’t want custom apps because they didn’t want a bad app taking down Cingular’s network. So then you have the hackers figure out how to modify the phone with their “jailbreaks”, people start developing apps for it and eventually Apple comes up with a software development kit, and their app store. It seems like the market seemed to know where it wanted to go,and Apple just had to figure out where to position themselves to take advantage of it.
Just because you are in the front, it doesn’t make you a leader. Especially if everyone behind you has torches and pitchforks.
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