March 2008 Archives

MySpace sucks for a lot of reasons, but I admit that recently I went on a tear through its newest (not really newest, but probably biggest) competitor in the FOAF scene, Facebook.  It's not been so much a social service (like MySpace has become), but rather more like a LinkedIn on a less professional level.  I've run into and across a lot of faces and names that I haven't been exposed to for many, many years (15 years in some cases!)

So it's been kind of trippy.  People from high school (viva la Pine Crest), even people from Middle School.  All very jolly.  Some people look so grown up, and some people just don't.  Some people have these super awesomely developed lives with kids, families, and all that crazy jazz, yet in my mind they're still just teenagers.  It's pretty weird how that works... I just see them with their younger faces on. 

In some cases, that's just impossible (they just look all old and grown up and stuff).  There's nothing wrong with that, of course, but I find it most interesting when I reconnect with the people who still seem to be very much the same (in a lot of ways.)  I've been disappointed in some cases (interestingly odd priorities are the prevalent cause of that) but in most cases, the people I've run into have been extremely interesting.  And I'm enjoying the reconnection and (where appropriate) recollection.  Sometimes it's cool to revisit old acquaintances and find out there's more in common there than you might've though.  Sometimes it's cool to reminisce about the ol' high school crushes and find out how they're doing today.  Dunno, but it's been surprisingly entertaining.

So I was driving down the street with a buddy the other day, and we saw an old Porsche 944.  Something in my brain-memory-vault slid out, and I remembered Feinstein, who drove around in a souped up 944, all raced out.  He was into actually racing these cars (not just street-racing, but SCCA stuff) and was a genuine enthusiast, as I recall.  Anyway, I reminisced for a bit, then promptly forgot all about it.  A week later, Harry (a different, unrelated friend) sends me a link with the message "Guess who I found..."  Marc Feinstein now apparently runs a shop in North Cambridge, servicing german cars.  Kudos to you, Feinstein, for (as the article says) finding the way into the business of your hobby.

...than the work?  I was hanging out at Borders, sipping on some coffee and perusing books I have no intention of buying (and even if I did want the book, I'd just buy it on Amazon) when I noticed a strange trend.

This isn't a new trend, mind you, it's just something that I started noticing after years and years of simply ignoring the covers of books (it's true, by the way, that if only books could be as cool as their cover art is, there would significantly less illiteracy in the world.)  The author's name is, usually, significantly bigger than the title of the book.  I'm not just talking a few points of type bigger.  I'm talking about HUGE author's name, tiny little book title.  I might chalk it up to artistic license, but it's freakin' everywhere.  The title of the book may as well not matter.  It is all about the author.

I suppose it makes sense, from a marketing standpoint.  You're not really trying to sell the title of the book, not really.  I think most publishers have come to terms with the fact that there are two major demographics of book-buyers: the ones that ignore the covers and look for 'good authors', and the ones that think the cover art looks cool and therefore buy what is probably a horribly written book.  The title itself?  Kind of irrelevant.  So you make the author's name hugenormous on the cover for the former, and you pay artists to come up with cool-looking artwork for the latter.  And you slap a tiny title on it, just so it fits somewhere in the Dewey decimal system once the book is relegated to the dusty halls of a public library.

I'm going to write a book and publish it.  And it's not going to have a title.  I want to see how long I can get away with that fact before someone notices.  In fact, I'm going to go one further - I'm going to write 4 books.  Novels, probably.  I'm not going to title them.  Maybe I'll color-code them, maybe I won't. 

Speaking of authors, on that same trip to the bookstore I discovered that authors are terrible readers of their own material.  Makes me think that they didn't actually come up with it, they seem so haltingly unfamiliar with their own writing.  Hm.

Oooooh, that's kind of a creepy title.

It's not that summer is almost upon us again, but summer is almost upon us again.  Okay, not quite.  Still more than a few months off.  But the days are getting longer.  And thank God for that. 

How can I tell?  Mostly because I'm looking out the office window, it's 6pm, and there's still plenty of sunshine left.  That's just A Good Sign.  I also don't get home depressed, hungry, and ready to sleep (which happens during the winter months.)

Anybody who visits the site with regularity (all 3 of you) may have noticed that as the days are growing longer, so in fact has the design of the site changed to... basically... a pretty simple design.  The reasons are simple. 

1. I got sick of the last design. Literally, it was driving me to drink.  Okay, not really.
   
2. It was kinda hard to read, I guess.  I didn't think so, but apparently other people did.  It's not like I do this for a living or anything.  Whatever.
   
3. I decided I was gonna make a new template from scratch.  Because God knows I haven't got anything else on my plate, and I totally love struggling with arcane templating systems.  Man, I don't know why I do this to myself.
4. Do I really need a reason, much less 4 of them?
   

I was just so darned tired of looking at the old template that I'm leaving it on a plain-jane template.  I've streamlined a bunch of other stuff on the site too, but it's nothing anybody will ever see (or probably notice.)  That's okay though, because I know.  Yeah.

Time to go home and finish Healing Light Yoga.  There's still plenty to do on it, but I want to get it to a usable Milestone tonight or tomorrow.  Phew.  Who knew that bringing sexy back would be this hard?

I like small, compact, clever things.  Not exactly sure why, but there's an appeal to it.  That being said, I've always theoretically been attracted to living in a small, compact, cleverly arranged habitation... even though in practice bigger is definitely better.  In the past I've agreed with the notion that a living space need not be the place you spend the majority of your time in.  My freshman college dorm room, for example, was little more than enough space for a couple of beds.  If you're treating 'home' as simply a place to sleep, then living in a minifridge might work out just fine for you.

Treehugger is featuring an article (actually, several) showing a small, compact, clever living space, and admittedly it's pretty darned cool.  But that's not all... apparently the 'movement' (if you want to call it that) to create livable space in 4 square meters or less has had plenty of action, including the Casulo, which crams all the furniture you need in your minispace in one medium sized box.

Traveling (or at least moving to a new space) suddenly becomes much easier when you can cram *everything* you own into a medium sized box or two - including furniture.  You're also (potentially) minimizing environmental impact by compacting the amount of living space a person requires (very Brave New World ideology to me).  At the same time, I don't see any of this stuff being especially comfortable, even if it is super clever.  I guess you could spend most of your time at a Starbuck's sitting on their plush chairs and producing Smug all day, right?

No, no, stop laughing, it's true.  Some guy, apparently a guy who works for Microsoft, thought it'd be awesome if the Vista interface sucked a little less.  So he went and put together one sweet little app called Switcher.

If you're one of those brave souls running Vista, and at any point in your life experienced the joy of using OSX, go get that app.  It's not quite as unrelentingly cool as The True Expose, but it does a pretty bang-up job.  I haven't played with all the options, so it's possible that one might be able to configure it to operate closer to The Real Deal, but even on default settings, I'm more than a little impressed.  It really improves the usability and workflow of Vista's interface, and it just works great.

Wait, wait - aren't I running a Fedora machine?  Yes I am.  And I still love it.  But a few things made me alter my work area.  I had an interview at Fluent, and while we were chatting the subject of Linux, Fedora, Ubuntu, and how much I know about security came up.  Don't ask me why, it just did.  Anyway, while it's true that I can accomplish 99% of my tasks with the GIMP and Inkscape (and God knows I love Inkscape), I forgot to append something to that (and it's becoming more and more relevant.)  I can use GIMP and Inkscape for creative tasks, when I'm starting from scratch.  If I have to import files (logos, graphics, whatever) then these packages fall very, very, very flat.  This didn't used to be the case - but try to import a Photoshop CS2 or CS3 file into GIMP... or pretty much any Illustrator file after Ill-10.  Nothin'.  No love.  And the unfortunate fact is that I get quite a lot of files in these formats, now that they've become all industry-standard an' stuff.

Granted, I could transfer the file to my Powerbook, open it, and re-save each file that comes in so GIMP/Inkscape can Do Their Deed, but man that's just a lot of extra hassle.  I thought about it (a lot) and went ahead and decided to run my beloved Fedora 8 on a little box I keep in the closet as a web server for testing and kicking around, and slap Vista back on the quad-core.  I can always remote into the Fedora box and play around all I want, should I have The Urge.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not hugely happy about all this.  I've been loving on my Fedora box for a long time.  But I have to face the facts, and until I can once again wield the Linux environment as an effective tool, I'll have to use Windows again for production.  It hasn't been too painful, honestly - Vista has such annoying quirks that it makes me a little crazy - but it's been a lot smoother than I expected.  This Switcher app I mentioned help ease the transition quite a bit.  I don't know.  Time will tell if this move was worth it.