Category Archives: Life

So Now It’s Okay…

Leave a reply

…to like Rush? That’s what it says in the Toronto Globe and Mail:

Both the book and the film attempt to come to grips with a band that has had the most unusual career trajectory, defying age and the loathing of critics to fly high for decades, with no end in sight.

I’ve been listening to Rush since they assumed control with 2112, and honestly, I don’t much care for anything they’ve done in about 20 years. I just checked iTunes, and the highest rating I’ve given anything they released since Counterparts is 3 stars. I gave that to “Faithless” on Snakes and Ladders, and “Vapor Trails” and “Earthshine” on Vapor Trails also have 3 stars.

Still, even if their work hasn’t done much for me lately, I’m glad they’ve kept trying. I’d hate to see Rush become a nostalgia act going from casino to casino playing nothing but the old standards.

Ah, but what standards! From Permanent Waves to Moving Pictures to Signals, Grace Under Pressure, Power Windows, Presto, and Roll the Bones: what great records! (Great live performances, too: my Amazon wish list has some of their concert DVDs. Hint, hint.) As an old headbanger, I’m glad that these kids today are learning the awesomeness that is Rush. (Check out this performance of “YYZ” for an example.)

Schneier on Security Theater

Leave a reply

Bruce Schneier weighs in on security theater:

Exactly two things have made airplane travel safer since 9/11: reinforcing the cockpit door, and convincing passengers they need to fight back. Everything else has been a waste of money. Add screening of checked bags and airport workers and we’re done. Take all the rest of the money and spend it on investigation and intelligence.

Kudus: Gruber.

Black Friday – Mac Office 2011

Leave a reply

I’ve been trying to decide whether to upgrade my old copy of Office.

The problem with Office is that I only use Word. I’ve pretty much switched from Excel to Numbers, and Keynote is so good that it’s been years since I even thought about running Powerpoint.

So why upgrade? Well, I do use Word a great deal. And Word 2008 is so slow that I routinely type ahead of it (e.g., when applying different styles to two paragraphs) and get it confused. That’s when it’s running. But it’s so ridiculously slow to load, I always leave it running. Supposedly, it’s faster now, especially launching. (Opening .DOCX files is faster, but I never use those. I would, if the Antiword folks would support them, but I’m content to stick with .DOC until, well, forever.)

So should I upgrade? Probably. It’s not a slam dunk, but with these newly-announced Black Friday prices I can probably talk myself into it.

Palin piece in NY Times Magazine

Leave a reply

I found the NY Times Magazine profile of Sarah Palin pretty interesting. Here’s one of the reasons:

In truth, few are underestimating Sarah Palin anymore. In that endearing manner of the Beltway echo chamber, the prevailing narrative of Palin in 2009 was that that she was an incompetent ditz. This year’s story line is that she is a social-media visionary who purposefully circumnavigated the power-alley gasbags and thereby constructed a new campaigning template for the ages.

I hate to say I told you so. Well, no, not really. In fact, I love to say I told you so.

Google Refine

Leave a reply

A while ago, Google bought the company that made Freebase, a tool for making sense of messy data. Earlier this week, they released a 2.0 version of that software, now renamed Google Refine. Watch the videos to see what that does.

This looks pretty darned impressive. For great chunks of my career, I’ve been doing work like that the hard way. In the 1980s, I started my career by doing data reduction in Fortran, but quickly graduated to sed and awk, and in the 2000s I used perl and ruby. Of course, when I say “the hard way,” that is in hindsight. Each of those was an improvement over what I used before, and this looks like it could be a similar type of improvement.

(I still do some of that kind of work even now. It’s been a couple of years, but I probably spent at least a week, spread across too many evenings and weekends, massaging the church directory from a text format Word document into tabular spreadsheet data.)

Eurology – Now With the Amazing Flute-Cam!

Leave a reply

I happened on this video earlier while looking for Ian Anderson‘s “Eurology.” This is a very creditable cover version, but what makes it worth watching is the amazing flute-camera the artist (Jackinart) put together.

At first, watching it makes you a little sea-sick, but it’s worth watching to see how a flutist holds their instrument. I always thought there would be more wobble than this, but it’s pretty much rock-steady. Very impressive. And a great song, of course.

Chuck Music

Leave a reply

New music is one of the unexpected benefits of having suddenly discovered the awesomeness that is the TV show Chuck.

I hardly listen to the radio, and the radio stations up in the high desert are why. We don’t even get AM radio up here. There’s not much on the FM side either: a handful of religious stations, only one of which has any music to speak of; a country-and-western station, which I don’t listen to; and a classic rock station down in Palm Springs, whose music I’ve known about these last 25-30 years. That leaves KCDZ 107, the only truly local station up here. And, sadly, I don’t care for the music it plays. At all. (Sorry.)

But Chuck has all kinds of music, and I’ve only heard some of it. So, for example: “Now We Can See,” by the Thermals? Great song, and an awesome choice for the scene in “Chuck vs. The Ring” where Chuck and Casey tell Emmett they’ve quit.

Or “Bye, Bye, Bye,” by Plants and Animals? Again, an excellent song, and a perfect for the Parisian ending of “Chuck vs. The Other Guy.” (In part because it foreshadows the following episode.)

Or, from “Chuck vs. the Tooth,” how about — content advisory! — “Right Round,” by Flo Rida? (That link is probably NSFW, by the way.) There were a whole bunch of versions on Amazon (including about a dozen Karaoke treatments) so I got the one that wasn’t marked “explicit lyrics.” Well. It makes me wonder what they could do to make the lyrics any more explicit. It’s a good tune, though.

But there are also gems like “Mr. Roboto.” Kidding. I never liked the version by Styx, to be honest. But this cover version by Jeffster is awesome.