I went to see Eagle vs. Shark because I think Jemaine Clement is one of those inherently funny people. If you agree, you will probably like it. Otherwise it’s an “offbeat” Napoleon-Dynamite-style romantic comedy from New Zealand. What it lacks in hobbits it makes up for in Awesome clothes and nunchucks.
Newport
In April we went a bit north, so this past weekend we decided to go a bit south. I hadn’t been to Newport for quite a while, probably 15 or 20 years, so it was mostly new again for me. As usual, we seemed to fit quite a bit of activity in, but it still felt like a vacation.
We stayed at a little B&B called Polly’s. It was more like staying with your grandmother than visiting a B&B, but it was decent. The breakfasts (yogurt parfait on Saturday and french toast on Sunday) were a little disappointing, but the place was clean and quiet and the backyard was very nice. Considering it was relatively cheap ($339 for the weekend) and we booked just a few weeks in advance, not bad.
Saturday night was a tasty meal at the Atlantic Beach Club, whose history (on the back of the menu) seems to basically be the fact that it gets destroyed in every major hurricane. Pumpkin-seed encrusted swordfish and filet mignon in Bearnaise sauce were excellent.
We decided to do the Cliff Walk on Saturday morning, originally intending to do the northern half and do the other half Sunday. However, we felt ambitious at the halfway point and did the whole thing in one shot. Little did we know that the southern half is mostly unpaved and more like rock hiking than walking.
It was very nice, very sunny, and very tiring, we estimated that round-trip it was about 8 miles. A tasty 7-cheese pizza from Grilled Pizza on Thames and some excellent gelato (Tiramasu for me, Oreo for her) from Cold Fusion gave us the energy to make it back to the car.
After a couple hours of rest, we were back in action, this time taking the last harbor cruise of the day. The narrator Phil was informative, especially when he announced “uhh, if you look to starboard you’ll see a sailboat sinking”.
We dined at Loca. When most places have 90 minute waits, you can’t expect much from a place with open tables, but it was acceptable. Steak stips with Gorgonzola were tasty, chipotle ribs made up in tenderness what they lacked in excitement.
Sunday we hit a couple of mansions. I remembered The Breakers a bit from my trip as a child, but it was good to see again, and it was also good that our 175-year-old tour guide lived till the end. We also saw Rosecliff, which isn’t as impressive, but was still nice. We spent a good part of the tour chuckling at the massive wedgie a fellow touree had.
Lunch was at Becky’s BBQ. The chicken and potato salad was good, the ribs and sauces were mediocre, and the pulled pork had the texture of paste, yuck. Luckily the wine we tasted at Newport Vineyards was mostly very nice, and we even brought a few bottles back. We capped the trip off with a trip down scenic Ocean Drive, and headed home.
52 Word Review: Transformers
Transformers was the coolest, silliest movie I’ve seen in a long time. There’s obviously some nostalgia at work here, but it’s a solid, loud, typically-Michael Bay action movie. If you played with the toys as a kid like I did, rest assured, Optimus Prime is still as cool as you remember.
The Mobile Revolution Begins! (and 3 years later the iPhone comes out)
I find the whole iPhone phenomenon interesting because people are seeing it as a technology advance when it’s really a textbook marketing/branding success (revolution?) in the making. Apple essentially tricked the entire media landscape into doing amazing PR, even “independent” sources like blogs and NPR.
Let’s be clear, the $500+ phone isn’t new. The phone with a google map that you can drag around with your finger isn’t new. Neither is one that can play gigs of mp3s, has a real address book, a real web browser, real email, etc. Having the option from a text message to reply or voice call the person back isn’t new. These things have existed for years, I know because I have it. Oh and mine lets you build/install apps, the sticking point many techies complain about for the iPhone, but very few of these apps have seen any success. It’s also available for any network, uses EVDO, has wi-fi and bluetooth, has handwriting recognition, serves as internet conduit, a real keyboard, etc. The reason nobody had to camp out for my phone, the reason I don’t pimp it to everyone I meet? It’s running a Microsoft OS, ho hum. So from a technology/feature standpoint, the iPhone is nothing new, but even well-informed tech people seem to have fallen for the slick ads, the expert PR “reviews”, and the general fanfare.
People are opining that this was Steve Jobs’/Apple’s greatest risk, which I disagree with, because they weren’t really taking a risk because they weren’t doing anything new. They’ve added that Apple shine to devices that have existed for years, that they’ve been able to watch people use, and they’ve fixed the mistakes. They’ve made the interface sexy with effects and constraints, a skill they’ve honed for even longer. They’ve used all their fanboys to turn a device into the Beatles.
I’ve done enough software to know how important (and potentially misleading, though that’s not the case here as far as I know) a well-executed interface is to adoption. I once co-wrote a CMS that was effectively ignored by everyone but its authors, but then I spent a day adding some logos, gradients, and javascript UI effects, and people were immediately scheduling meetings with me just to get a peek at it. Where Jobs & Co. deserve credit is that all of the “news” coverage their product is getting is lauding a revolution, instead of saying “Apple’s new iPhone is almost as capable as a 3-year-old Windows Mobile phone, but they executed the interface much better.” For more information, see the next edition of most marketing/branding books.
Facebook: 200 Hours (of dev time) FREE!
The soup du jour in the Web 2.0/startup community is Facebook’s new API. StyleFeeder has an app on it now, because it made sense and it’s a good fit. You should try it out. Phil did most of the heavy lifting, and we should pity him for it, because it’s very poorly documented, not completely built, and nerve-wrackingly unstable. But it works, and it’s pretty cool to be able to get in to a place people feel comfortable and offer them something we think is useful, that Facebook never would have got around to building. Not everyone is impressed about the whole idea though:
Kottke obviously wasn’t doing any internet development in 1994 or he would have heard “why isn’t my website as nice as stuff I see on AOL?”
“What happens when Flickr and LinkedIn and Google and Microsoft and MySpace and YouTube and MetaFilter and Vimeo and Last.fm launch their platforms that you need to develop apps for in some proprietary language that’s different for each platform?”
It’s pretty clear what would happen. People would develop for Google and MySpace, people are already developing for Microsoft, and the others would be ignored. You need massive scale and a big carrot (Facebook’s is a massive, clean network of users), to pull this off. Everyone else puts their faith in the W3C. Eventually the Facebook API will be deprecated or ignored, and if there are any good ideas in it, they’ll trickle out into the mainstream.
Valleywag has a screed by someone who bought the hype and blames Facebook for it, and is now apparently trying to generate some backlash to justify to management why it didn’t work as promised. Keep in mind that the hype was not from Facebook, I didn’t get any emails from them, see any ads, it was solely driven by tech-pundits, bloggers and VC panic. This person is sad that they didn’t get millions of users overnight and that Facebook “undercut” developers by preventing them from spamming their apps all over the place. If your app is useful or fun, it’s going to grow on its own, just like any other software distribution method. Sure it may seem unfair that some people got in and got big before the rules tightened up, but it’s also unfair that my parents got a house with an acre of land for $32k before I could (I was 3).
How not to boycott
So you may have heard of this guy Barry. Barry plays baseball for a living. Barry is really, really good at his job, and has been for a long time. At a certain point, Barry noticed most people his age weren’t doing so well, so he tried this and that to keep his job. Some of this was good old fashioned exercise. Some of that was kinda-sorta-not-so-legal-even-less-ethical-but-not-illegal (in an unofficial, nobody’s-telling way, of course). We don’t know exactly what happened, but alot of people made up their mind regardless.
Many of these people were at the Red Sox vs. Giants game Friday night. They were easy to spot, they chanted “ster-oids” whenever Barry showed up at the plate, maple in hand. These people also stood on their feet to watch a hall-of-famer bat for the first time in Fenway Park.
Advice: If you want to boycott someone, you don’t spend 30, 50, 100+ dollars to buy a ticket to a game, and you don’t stand up on tiptoes to see every pitch thrown to him.
PuTTY: Custom Icons
PuTTY is the most popular free SSH client for Windows. It’s very stable and very lightweight, due to the developers keeping bloat out of the source. One piece of bloat that I would like to see is the ability to pick icons, which I find very valuable when working on multiple servers, a common task for most developers. Luckily it’s pretty easy to roll your own PuTTY, so I figured I would offer a little how-to here.
- Download and install Cygwin. I’m not sure which packages you need, as I typically just install everything.
- Download putty source code from here: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html
- Open cygwin shell
- cygwin: mkdir putty
- cygwin: cd putty
- cygwin: unzip [wherever download is]/putty-src.zip
- cygwin: mv WINDOWS/PUTTY.ICO WINDOWS/PUTTY_ORIG.ICO
- Now put your icon (.ico) file in WINDOWS and name it PUTTY.ICO
- cygwin: cd WINDOWS
- cygwin: make -f MAKEFILE.CYG putty.exe
- You should now havea nice fresh putty.exe file in the WINDOWS directory, copy this wherever you wish.
- Copy the next icon to PUTTY.ICO and re-run make. Repeat until you have one executable per server.
Savage: The Movie
Saw this over at Matt’s LJ, seemed interesting.
IF YOUR LIFE WERE A MOVIE, WHAT WOULD THE SOUNDTRACK BE?
REMEMBER, DON’T CHEAT!
So, here’s how it works:
1. Open your library (iTunes, Winamp, Media Player, iPod, iPaq etc)
2. Put it on shuffle
3. Press play
4. For every question, type the song that’s playing
5. When you go to a new question, press the next button
6. Don’t lie and try to pretend you’re cool…
Note: I skipped the song if the same artist came up again.
Opening Credits: Dr. Dre & Ice Cube – “Natural Born Killaz”
What kind of movie is this going to be?
Waking Up Scene: Susie Van Der Meer – “Somebody Has to Pay”
From the Run Lola Run soundtrack, not a bad choice for a breakfast montage.
Walking Down The Street Scene: House of Pain – “House of Pain Anthem”
This could be funny, fitting or tragic depending on which street we’re talking about.
Car Driving Scene: The Police – “Don’t Stand So Close to Me”
Eh, not a great fit.
High School Flashback Scene: Mr. Mackey – “It’s Easy, Mmkay”
Nice choice here. Life advice, South Park stylee.
Drug Abuse Flashback Scene: Blue Swede – “Hooked on a Feeling”
Bizarre.
Summer/Beach Scene: Blink 182 – “All the Small Things”
Good beach music.
Nostalgic Scene: Insane Clown Posse – “The Neden Game”
Just can’t make this one work.
Bitter, Angry Scene: Nine Inch Nails – “Where is Everybody?”
Few better choices than Nine Inch Nails for bitter music.
Break-up/Throwing Things/Slow Motion Scene: The Dust Brothers – “Psycho Boy Jack”
If you broke up in a run down gas station with flickering flourescent bulbs, this would be a good choice.
Regret Scene: Ahmad – “Back in the Day”
Title works, song doesn’t.
Bar Scene: Air – “The Vagabond”
Harmonica, hand clapping and Beck, sounds like a good bar to me.
Nightclub Scene: Underworld – “Ballet Lane”
It fits if its a laid back club full of people sipping amaretto.
Fight/Action Scene: Green Day – “Basketcase”
Eh, can’t imagine this song causing any fights.
Sad, breakdown scene: Korn – “Lost”
Angsty, gritty, good pick.
Death Scene: Hüsker Dü – “M.I.C.”
Pacifist punk song, bad fit.
Funeral Scene: Moby – “My Weakness”
Kinda sad I guess.
Mourning Scene: Beastie Boys – “Eugene’s Lament”
Probably the best pick of the bunch.
Mellow Scene: Kittie – “Immortal”
Instrumental Kittie song, I guess that passes for mellow.
Dreaming About Someone Scene: Bjork – “Sod Off”
Dreaming about pre-emptively dumping someone.
Sex Scene: Kompressor – “Vitamins are Good”
Bizarre.
Contemplation Scene: Outkast – “Prototype”
Well he says “i think” alot…
Fancy Party: Ministry – “Psalm 69”
Not too fancy.
Realization Scene: 311 – “Fat Chance”
Realizing one of your favorite albums is almost over.
Flashback/Build up Scene: Howlin’ Wolf – “Moanin’ at Midnight”
This song begs for sepia tone.
Chase Scene: Mudvayne – “Nothing to Gain”
Hmm, wouldn’t work for a car chase, maybe a foot chase through the city.
Happy Love Scene: Marilyn Manson – “The Speed of Pain”
Might work with a loose interpretation.
Happy Friend Scene: Cut Chemist meets Shortkut – “No Mistakes in this Number Son”
Not a bad fit.
Closing Credits: Basement Jaxx – “Same Old Show”
Decent credits song.
Safari for Windows: No Thanks
I’m with many others, including Yuval, in saying that Apple porting Safari to Windows is unfortunate. Web developers have basically got 3 main browsers to deal with right now, and adding a 4th isn’t going to help. IE6 is dying, but still prevalent. IE7 isn’t great, but is obviously a force to be reckoned with. Firefox is bloated and slow, but comfy and relatively painless to develop against. Safari is outdated, buggy and less standards-compatible than IE7 or Firefox, often intentionally so (try styling a submit button).
The big claim Apple makes is page rendering performance. Firstly, I hope nobody takes Apple’s performance numbers seriously, they’ve been flat out lying about them across the board for a decade or more. Even if the stats are legit, picking a browser based on page rendering speed is silly, it’s like buying a car that goes 200mph instead of 150mph, when you live in Los Angeles and spend most of the day in slow traffic anyways.
I think Apple ported Safari to force people to support it, since it’s often sidelined due to low usage and its quirky behaviors. I’m really loathe to support a browser that offers no new features yet has a unique set of drawbacks. The solution here is for Apple to abandon the KHTML core and put it’s overstated development resources into the Gecko engine, giving them the ability to Mac-ify and brand a browser, but not impose increased costs on web developers. They should look to their own successful Airport line for how you can drive adoption, leverage/strengthen a standard, and maintain a strong brand at the same time.
Musical Addiction
Every once in a while, I (and probably most of you) get addicted to a song or album. The day just isn’t complete without hearing it a few times. I’m currently addicted to a possibly-record 4. It’s also very interesting that all 4 songs are available for free, legitimately!
“Truth Is” and “Uncle Sam Goddamn”, both by Brother Ali, who seems to be the second best artist on the Rhymesayers label, behind Atmosphere. Nice beats, plus Ali’s a very talented rapper, and an interesting fellow, a mixed-race albino who’s found himself in an extremely race-conscious industry/genre. You can hear both songs at brotherali.com
The other two are remixes by Ratatat (apparently unsigned), who I came across a while back when someone used them for a World of Warcraft video. “Party and Bullshit” by Notorious B.I.G, and “The Mule” by Z-re, Devin the Dude & Juvenile. Both are available on myspace.com/ratatatmusic.
So this made me think of the albums (not songs, there’s been too many) that I’ve been addicted to over the years. I’m going to set a threshold here of at least 3 months of compulsive daily listening. Albums I just happened to have left in my CD player for too long don’t count either. This means that there aren’t many, because it’s rare to be hooked for a week, never mind 12. I’m actually surprised there’re even this many, but then again, I am getting old. Note: I’m not making any claims to the objective Greatness of the albums on this list, though some are (OK Computer, Odelay), and some are clearly not (Fine Malt Lyrics). It’s just that these are the ones that stuck the longest, for me, when thrown against the wall.
Check your Head by the Beastie Boys
Black Sunday by Cypress Hill
Fine Malt Lyrics by House of Pain
Dirt by Alice in Chains
Murder Ballads by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds
Odelay by Beck
Dig Your Own Hole by The Chemical Brothers
OK Computer by Radiohead
Amnesiac by Radiohead
Reanimation by Linkin Park
Seven’s Travels by Atmosphere
Current: None.
What are yours?