Tilting at windmills for a better tomorrow.
Birdhouse Hosting welcomes brookemaury.org, the personal web site of Brooke Maury: “Masters student at the School of Information Management and Systems (SIMS) at the University of California, Berkeley. My research and coursework have focused predominantly on multimedia metadata management, the intersection of technology & law and more recently, text-based music information retrieval.”
Walking through the courtyard, a student sits at a laptop, gazing into the screen, rocking softly side to side, eyes half-closed. “It looks like you’re composing,” I said, thinking he looked graceful, peaceful, like a sonata. “I am,” he replied. I glanced at his screen, and he pointed to the grey “Compose” button on the Yahoo! Mail interface.
If I gave a tinker’s cuss about advertising, I’d give an award to Hitachi for best ad in a magazine. Doing the usual dump of blow-in cards from the current issue of Wired, encountered a thick page, which turned out to be a standard beer coaster attached to heavy stock. On the reverse of the page, a gen-yoo-ine U.S. patent application form, ready to fill out, tear out, and send. On the back of the beer coaster, these instructions:
1) Ask your waiter/aspiring actor for a pen.
2) Sketch plans for cool new device utilizing a Hitachi hard drive.
3) Fill out patent form on back of page.
4) Raise a glass in a toast to your brilliance.
OK, it’s corny, but it’s also the closest I’ve seen a print ad come to the kind of engagement/interactivity common online.
What are all these duplicate entries doing in the Admissions Request database? Hmm… there’s a pattern here – when there are duplicates or triplicates for the same person, the first one is always short, the second a bit more detailed, and the third or fourth is a complete entry. Aha! Some people get confused navigating web forms and hit Enter/Return rather than Tab to move to the next field. This should be solvable… Yep, there’s a simple JavaScript fix. Works nicely. In fact, this could be useful all over the place.
Rarely find “aftermarket” stuff I think should be built into the HTML specification, but this is a good example of such a case. It should be possible to put some kind of enter_submit="no" attribute into the form tag to save users from themselves. And developers shouldn’t have to code hacks around (and add byte-weight to pages on account of) common user errors such as this.
Update: Once again bitten by users running that infernal Norton Internet Security, which throws absurd and confusing warnings when it encounters javascript it doesn’t know about. Had to disable the work above — it’s more important that all people have access than that we avoid duplicate/partial entries.
Last night finished watching Martin Scorsese’s two-part documentary on the early part of Bob Dylan’s career, No Direction Home — fascinating and beautiful. The film spent a lot of energy not just on concert footage and interviews, but on context — the musical and social environment from which he shot like a weed into mesmerizing strangeness.
Scorsese put a lot of weight on Dylan’s slippery nature, his refusal to be pinned down or labeled. The establishment media was absolutely fixated on making him “The spokesman of a generation,” “The father of protest music,” though relatively little of his output was actually political or topical except in the most obtuse way, and he consistently confounded reporters’ attempts to get him to make political statements, or to actually speak for his generation. Priceless footage of a Swedish photojournalist asking him to “Suck on the arm of his glasses” — wanted to stage Dylan looking thoughtful or something. Dylan walked up to the photog and held his specs up to the guy’s mouth. “You suck on them.” A student journalist looking ridiculous as he demands to know the symbolism of the barely visible motorcycle on Dylan’s t-shirt on the cover of “Highway 61 Revisited,” Dylan looking incredulous that people were so desperate to find hidden meaning in his every move. “Umm, I was just wearing that shirt that day, I really don’t remember.”
Much of the footage is chilling in its beauty, Dylan so in the moment, so completely absorbed by the muse. Allen Ginsberg: “He had become identical with his breath.” Lots of interview footage with Joan Baez on their difficult relationship, and her frustration that Dylan wouldn’t throw his weight behind the protest movement, as she had assumed they would do together. “He was the most complex person I’ve ever met.”
Pointed threats, they bluff with scorn
Suicide remarks are torn
From the fool’s gold mouthpiece
The hollow horn plays wasted words
Proves to warn
That he not busy being born
Is busy dying.
– It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)
Focus on Dylan’s transition from folk to rock, and how his freewheeling mixture of the genres frustrated folk purists. Crowds booing, hollering “Traitor!” Pete Seeger admits wanting to take an axe to the power cords at one electric performance, Dylan today talking about how painful it was to learn that one of his own heroes was rejecting that music so completely. But truthfully, some of the electric performances are painful to watch in contrast with the solo work, even as they’re tremendous in their own right.
The doc stops abruptly in 1966 with Dylan’s motorcycle accident, and you’re left hungry for another four (or more!) hours covering the years that have gone between.
Just came across this .sig in someone’s email:
A: Yes. | Q: Are you sure? | | A: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation. | | | Q: Why is top posting frowned upon?
Geeky, but reminded me of a conversation I had with a friend a while ago – he was the first programmer-type I had encountered who actually advocated top-posting comments in email threads. Why? Because most email conversations are very short, and the information you want should be the most visible. With top-posting, you can usually see the info you need in your mail client’s preview pane, without having to open and scroll through the message. Sort of for the same reason that virtually all weblogs post most recent info at the top, rather than in true chronological order. He was right — top-posting does make most email conversation more fluid. The system backfires when:
A) The two parties don’t agree on a protocol, and the thread wanders up and down the page willy nilly.
B) A brief top-posting thread evolves into a longer thread, with the need to respond to individual bits rather than to the message as a whole. In this case, there is sometimes an awkward transition as the posting order turns itself inside out.
I’m a switch-hitter on this one, and go both ways depending on message content and mood. Anyone out there adamantly top or bottom? (Cue the sub-dom jokes :)
Miles was sick recently, voice went hoarse, started talking like Marlon Brando in “On the Waterfront.” In fact, so much so that we couldn’t help ourselves from encouraging him to learn a couple of lines from that famous movie.
This actually made for a nice opportunity to do quality/size comparisons between h.263 and the new h.264 codec in QuickTime 7. With default settings, the h.264 exports definitely looked much better, but also had larger file sizes. But by twitching the quality slider from High to Medium, the file size was chopped dramatically, resulting in simultaneous higher quality and smaller files.
h.264 version (requires QuickTime 7)
h.263 version (everyone else)
Birdhouse Hosting is pleased to welcome realdramadocs.com, a site promoting “Nine short documentaries about nine different things” for a public screening event Oct. 8-9 in Berkeley, CA. All documentaries produced by J-School students.
While Birdhouse’s datacenter is in Texas, far from the reach of any West-coast earthquake disaster, it’s now sitting in the direct path of Hurricane Rita. Fortunately, EV1 sounds very well prepared:
As an extra precaution, we have even sourced an additional rental generator. While this unit would not be needed for a brief outage, if we were to experience a loss of power lasting several days, we would need to perform normal maintenance on our generators, and this would give us a generator to run while that maintenance is taking place. All total, we have in excess of 10,000 gallons of fuel on site. We have guaranteed contracts for fuel delivery and two fuel depots are located within 2 miles of our facility.
Of course, all of that fuel won’t help much if the whole facility is ripped from its foundations… Many EV1 employees are heading out to be with families, but core staff is planning to weather the storm in the datacenter. Now that’s dedication.
Mortality meets technology: Caught a few minutes Wed. night of the emergency landing of the JetBlue airliner with twisted landing gear. Discovered this morning that those nifty TV screens in the back of every JetBlue seat came in extra-handy for the passengers, as a means to watch their own imminent deaths on live TV. Glued to the set for the stunning conclusion of TV’s ultimate reality suspense drama. Trying to imagine whether I would have watched if I had been on the plane. It would be hard not to, but like to hope I’d put my mind somewhere more introspective in such a moment. Can only imagine that the spectacle contributed to on-board emotional frenzy.