Family vacations can be mundane, but today was a little different. We took a little drive over to the Ostrich Farm!
The ostriches start out in the incubator, and when they’re about two weeks old, they wind up outside in the nursery.
Once they’re old enough, they’re moved to their permanent pens, where they pose for pictures. This one says “hey.”
Most of them are paired up. These two wouldn’t leave each other’s sides.
And of course, they love it when vistors come with gifts of food!
A side-effect of my years-long home video project is that I’m sifting through all the old media that’s lying around my hard drives. I found a few recently that are especially funny considering what I do for a living now. Let’s take a stroll through memory lane.
A little history. While all the other kids were outside learning how to play sports, or even play video games, I was too busy messing around with cameras and computers trying to make what the Big Kids did on TV. Around my ninth birthday (judging from file dates), my parents got me this thing called a QuickCam. It hooked up to your computer via serial port, had an apparent resolution of 320×240, and was black & white.
If you were recording live-action video with it, the frame rate was limited to something like 15fps, which is really noticeable to the eye. It had pretty poor optics, too, so the shutter had to be open a really long time. The result was choppy, streaky video that looked nothing like TV. Unacceptable to nine-year-old me.
But wait! It also shot frame-by-frame stop motion, and those movies would come out at 30fps. Big win. According to the files I found, I started doing this the morning after my birthday. Here’s the first attempt:
Not bad. Short, sweet, to the point. A couple months later, things got a little more complicated.
It’s got a plot, it’s whimsical, and it attempts some Looney Tunes-esque gags. Plus, everyone loves a panda wearing a T-shirt, right? Let’s move on.
The obligatory Gumby movie. Now we’re cooking. It’s got action, a plot, multiple shots, and a twist ending. I must have felt pretty good about this, because to my knowledge this was the end of the stop-motion QuickCam videos. Or maybe I just thought black & white was too limiting.
And now a visit to John’s Time Capsule. I found the mp3 of this piano trio the other day. It’s the second movement of a piece called “Recollections of an Aging Secret Agent” (the first movement is, well, terrible, so I’m not posting it here). The file date is December of 2007, so I assume I wrote this as the final assignment of that semester’s composition class. It’s piano, cello, and violin, and the idea seems to have been variations of a theme. I like it, generally, though there are sections and orchestration choices that I would change now. The audio below is (obviously) a computer-played demo that I handed in.
It’s also funny how this demo was created. I seem to remember that it was my first time really using Reason (on a PC!) for anything, and I basically made Finale channel MIDI into Reason’s factory sounds. All things considered, it’s actually decent-sounding, especially since it was 2007. My, how things have changed.
If you’re interested, you can also see the woefully under-marked PDF of the score. It’s cool-looking, if nothing else. And of course, if you want to actually perform it or something, just let me know before you do!
I read the Bits section of the New York Times every day. I like that they lag behind the minute-by-minute tech news, and take the time to write what are generally “big picture” articles toward the end of a news day. However, I’m seeing more and more sloppy copy editing and generally bad journalism over there. I have to think it’s because Bits is technically a “blog” from the Times, but come on. You’re still the New York Times, and I expect a certain level of writing proficiency.
This recent article really got me going. It’s a fluff piece to begin with; oh boy, there goes that crazy Steve Jobs shooting his mouth off again. But what’s worse is the middle school-level writing. To that end (paying respectful homage to The Detritus Review) let’s read Miguel Helft’s gem together. Blue is the article, red is me.
Update: The article has been updated since I first posted this. The most egregious English errors have been corrected. Notably, “dissed” has also been replaced. This all seems to suggest that The New York Times has a “post now, edit later” policy, which still disturbs me. It disturbs me more that they hire writers who don’t know the difference between “too” and “to.”
Steve Jobs: Our Approach is Better Than Google’s
On Monday, I wrote an article about the competition between Apple’s iPhone and smartphones running Google’s Android. The article discussed some of the advantages and disadvantages of Apple’s vertically-integrated and closed approach and Android’s more open strategy.
A little biased, a few too many strung-together clauses, but I get where you’re going with this, I think.
It concluded by quoting experts and analysts saying that while Android, and perhaps other systems, are likely to do well, Apple has little reason to worry.
Apple declined to comment for the story. But on Monday, Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, took time to address the issue during the company’s fourth quarter earnings conference call.
Ah, so this is an I-told-you-so. I see what you did there! You get a pat on the back for that one, Miguel!
This was unusual, as Mr. Jobs doesn’t typically participate in the company’s earnings calls. But Mr. Jobs said he couldn’t pass the opportunity to drop in for Apple’s first $20 billion quarter.
Mr. Jobs stared by pointing out that Apple sold 14.1 million iPhones during the quarter, a 91 percent surge from a year earlier. Apple sold those smartphones at an even faster pace than the overall market for smartphones.
The “even” in this sentence implies that this is unexpected. I fail to see how this is remarkable, since you’d expect any company beating its competition to fall into this category.
Then he made an impassioned attack on Android and forceful defense of Apple.
“In reality, we think the open versus closed argument is just a smokescreen to try to hide the real issue, which is what’s best for the customer: Fragmented versus integrated,” Mr. Jobs said. “We think Android is very, very fragmented and becoming more fragmented by the day.”
Mr. Jobs noted that major Android manufacturers like HTC and Motorola put their own user interfaces on their devices and that different versions of the operating system with different capabilities are built into different devices, causing headaches for both consumers and application developers. Mr. Jobs said that Android sometimes left users to be the “system integrators.”
Interesting, provocative quotation. I assume you’re going to clarify what Mr. Jobs means by that, right?
“We think this is a huge strength of our approach compared to Google’s,” Mr. Jobs said. “When selling to users who want their devices to just work, we believe integrated will trump fragmented every time.”
Oh, guess not. The “system integrators” part did sound very official and intimidating though. That must be bad for consumers.
Then he added: “We are very committed to the integrated approach, no matter how many times Google tries to characterize it as closed,” he said. “We are confident that it will triumph over Google’s fragmented approach ,[sic] no matter how many times Google tries to characterize it as open.”
Mr. Jobs wasn’t just dissing Google.
The New York Times is now accepting “dissing?”
With a bit less passion, and perhaps a touch of disdain…
So, less passionate, but more disdainful. I’m with you. I think.
With a bit less passion, and perhaps a touch of disdain, he also dismissed Research in Motion, the maker of the BlackBerry.
Oh! That’s what “dissed” means! I wouldn’t know, because I’ve never seen that word printed in the New York Times!
Mr. Jobs noted that the iPhone had beat the BlackBerry…
Clearly no need for a participle there.
Mr. Jobs noted that the iPhone had beat the BlackBerry, which sold 12.1 million handsets in the most recent quarter. “We now passed RIM and I don’t don’t’[sic]see them catching us in the foreseeable future,” he said.
Actually, he didn’t say that. Close, though.
Mr. Jobs said that RIM was now forced to move beyond its comfort zone and attempt to become a software platform.
Right, it’s not like they have their own mobile OS or anything. Sillies!
“RIM has a high mountain a head of them to climb,” he said.
The New York Times: illiterate, or sloppily using text-to-speech software to write blog posts?
Mr. Jobs also had a word about those who want to compete with the iPad in tablets.
As opposed to competing with the iPad in, say, a vat of Jell-O.
He said that while many in the media have said that…
Whoa, did you just say that they just said that some reporters just said–oh, forget it. Someone said whatever you’re about to say.
He said that while many in the media have said that an “avalanche” of tablets are [sic]expected to compete with the iPad soon, he believes only a handful of tablets will be released this year.
Maybe this is splitting hairs, but competing with the iPad and simply being released aren’t really the same thing. But I guess we’ll table that for next week and focus on basic grammar and syntax for now.
He said all are Android-based tablets and are only 7 inches,
Me talk good when talk about tablet and are good with the words.
He said all are Android-based tablets and are only 7 inches, far smaller than the iPad’s 9.7 inch size.
(But really, it’s what you do with it that counts.)
A 7-inch screen, he said, is only 45 percent as big as a 9.7-inch screen, and Apple’s user testing has shown that is too small for a usable tablet.
Uh… huh. You mean it has only 45 percent the area of a 9.7-inch screen, right? Because 7 is 72 percent of 9.7.
“The 7 inch tables are tweeners…
The tables are tweeners? Where did the tables come from? And what’s a tweener?
…to big to compete…
Probably a simple typo. We all do it.
…to big to compete with a smartphone and to small to compete with an iPad,”…
Never mind, must be idiocy after all.
…Mr. Jobs said. Lest there be any doubts about his confidence, he added: “The current crop of 7-inch tablets will be D.O.A.: Dead on arrival.”
And so was the editor, apparently.
Somewhat surprisingly, my last entry about Evernote and Instapaper/Readability has been getting a consistently large amount of traffic. I guess it makes sense; I use Evernote for just about everything, so why shouldn’t everyone else? So, to that end, I’ve made a little improvement to the site.
Now, you can clip directly from this blog to your Evernote account. Just click the little “clip” icon on the top of any entry, and a popup will appear from which you can clip the entire post to your Evernote account. This window will also show you what other articles you’ve clipped from this site in the past.
I use Evernote to store all my bookmarks, so hopefully this will help someone else who does the same. If you’d like to learn how to implement it on your own site, check out Evernote’s Site Memory section!
[NOTE: This post is now woefully outdated. I've added an up-to-date method for achieving this at this post.]
I’ll come right out and say it, I’m an Evernote junkie. My brain lives in Evernote: To-dos, bookmarks, records, receipts, notes, parking space reminders, beers I like; everything. It’s really great, and runs on every computer I use, my phone, and the web. I can get to it anywhere.
I also spend a large amount of time finding things to read on the Internet, but don’t necessarily have the time to read them when I find them. And even more often, when I want to read them, I have only my iPhone, and intermittent connectivity (commuter train, subway, etc.). For a little while I was using Instapaper to save articles for offline reading, but I had to think ahead and sync the Instapaper app before going off the grid. And frankly, another bookmarking service wasn’t something I was really into at all.
Now, Instapaper does this crazy thing where it magically finds the content of an article and formats it so that sane people can read it, but that wasn’t really enough to get me to keep using it. However, I also knew of another service called Readability which essentially does the same thing, minus the read-it-later aspect. And also, I knew that Evernote comes with a web clipper that shoots the content of a web page into your cloud-brain with a single click in the bookmark bar.
How great would it be if I could reformat articles and send that stripped-down version, with only the relevent content, into Evernote to read later? I’m always syncing Evernote on my phone, and I’ve always got it open when I’m on a computer, so everything should stay in sync really well.
Well, turns out that’s possible. Thanks to some helpful articles (which I of course copied into Evernote), I made a little bookmarklet which Readability-izes the current web page, then clips it to Evernote. Just copy the code below into a new bookmark’s URL field and put it in your shortcut bar. Click it on a page you want to read later, and it’ll pull the article contents, then launch the Evernote clipper (you need to install that first), and clip it.
[codesyntax lang="javascript" lines="no"]
javascript:function%20enClip(){EN_CLIP_HOST=%27http://www.evernote.com%27;try{var%20x=document.createElement(%27SCRIPT%27);x.type=%27text/javascript%27;x.src=EN_CLIP_HOST+%27/public/bookmarkClipper.js?%27+(new%20Date().getTime()/100000);document.getElementsByTagName(%27head%27)[0].appendChild(x);}catch(e){location.href=EN_CLIP_HOST+%27/clip.action?url=%27+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+%27&title=%27+encodeURIComponent(document.title);}}(function(){readConvertLinksToFootnotes=false;readStyle='style-ebook';readSize='size-small';readMargin='margin-wide';_readability_script=document.createElement('script');_readability_script.type='text/javascript';_readability_script.src='http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/js/readability.js?x='+(Math.random());document.documentElement.appendChild(_readability_script);_readability_css=document.createElement('link');_readability_css.rel='stylesheet';_readability_css.href='http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/css/readability.css';_readability_css.type='text/css';_readability_css.media='all';document.documentElement.appendChild(_readability_css);_readability_print_css=document.createElement('link');_readability_print_css.rel='stylesheet';_readability_print_css.href='http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/css/readability-print.css';_readability_print_css.media='print';_readability_print_css.type='text/css';document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(_readability_print_css);})();function%20timedCount()%20{if(document.readyState%20==%20%27complete%27){t=setTimeout(%22enClip()%22,600);}}timedCount();
[/codesyntax]
Some caveats though: be sure to turn off the Evernote clipper’s formatting, or you’ll actually wind up with a carbon-copy of the Readability page, with no wrapping text, and some colors and fonts that won’t look so good on, say, a phone. But once you sort that out, you’ve got yourself an Instapaper alternative that integrates with everything else in Evernote.
It was suggested to me recently that I describe why these square photos show up next to my posts, and why they often have little to do with the content of said posts. Simple, really: I do a Google Image Search for (usually) the title of the post, and choose an image from the first page of results. Naturally, I aim for the most preposterous of the lot.
And sorry, if you read this blog through an RSS feed, you’re not seeing the images. It has to do with how the site works – I don’t need to manually resize my images, but the tradeoff is that they don’t show up in the feeds. Sorry!
Call me a narcissist, but one of the best parts of my job is watching the YouTube stats and comments on the videos I make. Good or bad, it doesn’t really matter; I like knowing that people are watching my work, and that some are engaged enough by them to take the time and comment. I work on these spots in relative isolation, so to see first reactions is refreshing, and pretty rewarding.
© John Lagomarsino | All Rights Reserved
