My big ol' head.

The Indiana Jones School of Management

Fri 31 Aug 2007

links for 2007-08-31

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Thu 30 Aug 2007

links for 2007-08-30

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Wed 29 Aug 2007

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Tue 28 Aug 2007

Blessedly, I have Apple Care

Filed under: — Geof F. Morris @ 22:18

Ouch. My Mac doesn’t recognize that it has a burner. Burner effectiveness has dropped off lately—it’s been creating lots of coasters. Now? The burner acts like it’s not there. Well, looks like I’ll get to check out Apple Care … :sigh:

links for 2007-08-28

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Mon 27 Aug 2007

Import/Export: Email Address as Unique Identifier, Force Multiplier

Filed under: — Geof F. Morris @ 21:29

People have riffed on email addresses as unique identifiers for some time now. Heck, any good user database, in my mind, uses email addresses as the unique identifier, because they’ll nudge the user to keep the email address up-to-date. Rex Hammock’s “Twitter joins the email address as universal-identifier club” is just the latest to cross my radar screen, and he does so interestingly enough (for me, anyway, giving what I’m geeking out on these days):

Simply put, I can upload a list of my e-mail contacts to be bounced against their database of registered users and they will tell me who among my contacts are already users of their service. This feature allows me to jump-start the creation of my personal network of users of the service. Some services like Linkedin and Plaxo allow me to export my list of contacts maintained within their “walls” back into my contact list. In other words, they are — in effect — allowing me to brick-by-brick, tear down their walls: They are allowing me the opportunity to export my social network with me when I start using another service. That’s the type of win-win relationship all sites that are “social” in nature should offer their users…and, in the future, no doubt, some form of “persistent network identifier” will be an expected feature of all sites that want me to share with them who my contacts are.

I’m just an amateur networker, but I am one—just ask any of my friends. I look at my Address Book database on my Mac and go, “Just 658 entries? Is that all?” If I call a number twice at work—BOOM! it goes into the iPhone. [And it did that before with the Treo ... but now that I'm Jobsian, I can "BOOM!" Ahem.] One of these lazy Saturdays, I’ll sit down with my church’s pictorial directory and input every last scrap of data—and maybe even photos if I can get a scanner hooked up to my Mac. [Mental note: ask Misty for scanner advice.] But here’s where Rex really gets me:

I really like this “import” feature [Ed.: GMail contact list import into Twitter] as it provides a benefit to the user while adding to the growth potential of Twitter — we all benefit. However, there needs to be a corresponding “export” feature whereby I can export my Twitter contacts back in my direction.

Y’know, there used to be this beautiful app—a real one, mind you—that pulled data out of Facebook and dumped it into Address Book. I loved the idea, but because I was using a Treo at the time and was having Address Book horkups where the whole DB would wipe out, I never tried it … and then Facebook shut ‘em down. This one-way valve stuff? It sucks. You gotta let me in and out, man.

Data lock-in is just something that gets under my skin, whether it’s at work—oh, the stories I can’t tell you now but will after I retire or leave aerospace—or at home. I’m not quite Pilgrimarian about freedom, but I do nod my head at what he says.

Surging in the ‘nati

Filed under: — Geof F. Morris @ 20:47
Tagged with:

Dear ESPN:

I know that it’s totally cliché to write open letters to you on Weblogs. I mean, I was probably doing it back when I ran TOTK. You know, before I had to shave. [Or before I grew the beard and quit shaving.] Anyway: my beloved Cincinnati Reds have won six straight and eight of ten. They’ve somehow dug out of last place and now are sniffing the division “chase”, which in the NL Central is best defined as “the team least averse to finishing over .500″. Sure, the Reds are 60-70 and maybe only have a 1% chance of winning the division title at this point, but … do you think that you could have found a minute or two to air highlights of their sweep of the Marlins in the one-hour Sunday night Baseball Tonight?

No? Okay. Screw you.

Love,
GFM

It’s About Freedom.

Filed under: — Geof F. Morris @ 19:52
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For what it’s worth, I’ve been promised a copy of a recording of last night’s Caedmon’s Call show, the first real show with Derek Webb back in the band. However, there has been some confusion as to whether or not I’ll get to share it. That said, I say to you, fair friends: if I cannot share the music with you, I will put a video of me opening, confirming the bootleg by playing, and subsequently destroying the copy on YouTube.

Either we all get to listen to it, or none of us get to listen to it.

links for 2007-08-27

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Sun 26 Aug 2007

Geof’s New Music: 26 Aug-1 Sep 2007

Filed under: — Geof F. Morris @ 09:05

This week, I get the new albums from two artists who mean a whole lot to me:

Last week just wasn’t good at all from the bootleg perspective:

  • Rush - 2112 Rush’s 2112. There are some really amazing things going on here. I shouldn’t even begin to base my opinions on this on just a week of listening. Four stars.
  • 26 Mar 2000 [New Haven, CT, USA] concert bootleg of Feist. You get a sense of the goodness that is to come, but it’s sonically not too much to listen two. Two-and-a-half stars.
  • 5 Oct 2000 [London, England] concert bootleg of Elliott Smith. This sounds like the mic setup wasn’t optimal to the room—probably like some of my own recordings, really. [Haven't invested in cardiods yet.] Despite the fact that it’s omnis and echo-y, it’s still decent. Three stars.
  • Wilco - 20011205 - Los Angeles, CA, USA cover art 5 Dec 2001 [Los Angeles, CA, USA] concert bootleg of Wilco. Man, Jeff sounds horrible. No way that they should have been playing a show that night. The recording is also distant-sounding—it’s hollow and sorta muddy. Two-and-a-half stars.
  • Jeff Tweedy - 20060208 - San Francisco, CA, USA cover art 8 Feb 2006 [San Francisco, CA, USA] concert bootleg of Jeff Tweedy. This was the last bootleg I listened to this week, and I said, “It’s Tweedy at The Fillmore. Someone’s gonna have a great setup.” Unfortunately, no … but it’s good. Too much crowd for my tastes—I like hearing them, but they could have been compressed more to give Jeff more volume. Three stars.
  • 18 Oct 2006 [Portland, OR, USA] concert bootleg of The Decemberists. This recording has a bit more depth than last week’s did [and it's the same band in the same venue on the next night, so they're good comparisons], but … still not up to the quality of some of the better Wilco recordings I have. But very good nonetheless. Three-and-a-half stars.
  • 20 Apr 2007 [Louisville, KY, USA] concert bootleg of Son Volt. I didn’t realize that the breakup of Uncle Tupelo doomed Son Volt to generally have broke-ass tapers without good microphones. Most Wilco shows get at least one quality recording these days, but Son Volt seems to be doomed to get rank amateurs like me. Two stars.

links for 2007-08-26

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Sat 25 Aug 2007

links for 2007-08-25

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Fri 24 Aug 2007

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Thu 23 Aug 2007

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Wed 22 Aug 2007

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Tue 21 Aug 2007

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Mon 20 Aug 2007

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Sun 19 Aug 2007

A Week With Camino

Filed under: — Geof F. Morris @ 21:40

Last week, I vowed that I’d give Camino a week. I’ll be giving it a lot more than that. I’d had issues with Camino 1.5 back in June, but it works just fine now.

Things I like:

  • Speed. Oh my, I didn’t realize how sluggish Firefox on my Mac was being until I switched. [Note: my iBook doesn't struggle as much, because it has 50% more RAM.]
  • Mac-iness. Like everyone else, I recognize that Firefox-on-Mac is not Mac-native feeling. This really doesn’t bother me much, because I spend ~40% of my computing time on PCs at the office. But there are little Mac things that Camino does that Firefox-on-Mac doesn’t. Mainly, it revolves around using Gecko with OS X GUI goodness, rather than relying on XUL and then having a XUL-to-Mac-GUI abstraction layer. If you’re thinking, “Oooooh, abstraction layers, no wonder it’s slow,” well, yes. And it’s also non-Mac.
  • Minimalism. I’m glad that I can’t glom everything onto it. Having been on Facebook since before Applications turned some users’ Facebook pages into MySpace-on-white-bread, I can appreciate minimalism. [Note: the users most likely to have 47 Facebook Applications installed were people who used MySpace before they used Facebook hardcore. When you don't know better, you want the kitchen sink.]

What I don’t like:

  • The lack of a home button/the funky home keyboard shortcut. Shift-Cmd-H? Really?
  • The lack of a keyboard shortcut to take me to the search area.
  • Furthermore, I miss the extensibility of multiple search engines—and yes, I know I can add them, but the process of adding them is such a pain in the ass. One thing I love about Firefox is Mycroft, which allows you dozens of site-specific search engine access points. There are a handful of sites [Wikipedia, MusicBrainz, IMDb] where I find these things very useful, and I miss them on the Mac.
  • No Ctrl-Tab rotating through tabs.
  • Firefox’s Cmd-Return shortcut for taking “cnn” in the address bar and making it “www.cnn.com”.

Camino is going to be my main Mac browser for the next little while. Firefox could win me back with better performance [unlikely, given the bloated nature of the FF codebase], or maybe going to a faster Mac in the late fall will help things. Not sure. But for now, me and Camino are good.

Geof’s New Music: 19-25 Aug 2007

Filed under: — Geof F. Morris @ 20:25

This week, I step out of my comfort zone and into a classic progressive rock album:

Last week was very good to my ears:

  • Feist - The Reminder Feist’s The Reminder. Another solid effort from Leslie Feist. Four stars.
  • Amy Winehouse - Back to Black Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black. Now, I am not your typical R&B / soul music listener, but I bought this on a lark and am relatively pleased. Three stars.
  • 28 Sep 2000 [Nantes, France] concert bootleg of Elliott Smith. I didn’t know that recordings this awesome of Elliott with a full band existed. I think it’s the best recording of Elliott I’ve heard. Four-and-a-half stars.
  • Wilco - 20011005 - Detroit, MI, USA cover 5 Dec 2001 [Detroit, MI, USA] concert bootleg of Wilco. Ahhh, persic, how I love your recordings. This is not my favorite era of Wilco by far, and yet I give this four stars. It just sparkles.
  • 1 Oct 2006 [St. Louis, MO, USA] concert bootleg of Son Volt. Yes, this struggles from being an outdoor recording—not only from the taping environment but from the general poor quality of outdoor event sound systems. Despite that, the taper does a good job getting sound balanced appropriately, and the band does a good job with playing outdoors. Three-and-a-half stars.
  • The Decemberists - 20061017 - Portland, OR, USA cover 17 Oct 2006 [Portland, OR, USA] concert bootleg of The Decemberists. The recording sounds distant and indistinct, which certainly does a band as layered and engaging as The Decemberists an injustice, and the crowd is surprisingly chatty for a hometown show. It comes in overall just a bit above average, so I give it three stars.
  • Beck - 20061022 - New York, NY, USA cover 22 Oct 2006 [New York, NY, USA] concert bootleg of Beck. This is a crisp, effervescent bootleg—kinda summery, like that Shiner Hefeweizen I had earlier. The crowd is audible, but in all the right ways. There probably isn’t enough bass roll-off, but then Beck his the low frequencies heavily, so it has to be authentic. This taper knew what the heck he was doing, and the sound guy clearly was on the ball, too. Four stars; would probably be higher if I were fully up on all of Beck’s newer releases.

links for 2007-08-19

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Sat 18 Aug 2007

links for 2007-08-18

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Fri 17 Aug 2007

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Thu 16 Aug 2007

High School Kids Are Not Equipped to Choose a Career

Filed under: — Geof F. Morris @ 17:07

I originally posted this just to del.icio.us, but the more I thought about it, the angrier I got. There’s apparently a movement to have high school students “major” in something as they progress towards college.

Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.

I attended a magnet high school for science and mathematics. So did many of my friends: Jonathan, Rick, and Jess went to MSMS with me, Kat went to ASMS, and Brian went to NCSSM [which I didn't know until a few weeks ago]. I think that most of our friends very definitely could have gone to those schools if those opportunities had been available for them when they were ready for them. All of us lived away from home for two years in a magnet environment, but I bet that we’d all feel the same about this: specialization at that age is a bad, bad idea.

When I look at my curriculum, I made a bet going in that I would be an engineering major in college, so I was very, very heavy on physics and mathematics, taking every course offered by the school in both curricula. I discounted everything else that I could to focus as much as I could, forsaking AP courses in the humanities that I really wish that I’d taken because they would have interested and challenged me. [Some of my peers did take those courses, but they weren't able to take all the physics courses I did or able to do research at Mississippi State as I did.] At this point, you’re thinking, “What’s your point, Morris? You have an aerospace engineering degree and work in aerospace. You’re the prime candidate for this idea.”

Well, that ignores the fact that, for a period of time between 18 and 23, I felt like I’d been called into ordained ministry. [I now think that I was wrong, but man, the guilt messed me up for years.] I thought that all I’d done was very wrong for myself. I had a time of crisis, and I was ready to change. But because I had built up this massive momentum—insert your favorite fat jo