LookIt

Anachronism of the day

When you install .NET Framework 3.5SP1, the installer tells you how long it will take to download the (rather large) system. After it downloads, the installer tells you "Download complete. You can now disconnect from the Internet." Um, no I can't.

Shopping list, found

...on a street not near any stores.

4 lbs sweet potatoes
aluminum foil
best foods mayo: (picture of a wavy container)
acetone cheap brand
nail polish remover
one lime
prescription: synthroid
avocados
sunflower seeds
white / whole wheat small flours
wheat chex
coconut milk

My one cent on Steve Jobs' new job

I am depressed that people are treating him as dead. He will die, of course: all of us will. I guess folks will then recycle what they have said in the past 24 hours. In the meantime, he will be the activist chairman of the board of an amazing company, one where he set the direction and staffed the entire leadership. Apple and Apple's customers are fortunate to have him in that role.

Wanting 5-inch devices

Tim Bray tweets today: "I have high hopes for the about-to-arrive 7" Honeycomb tablets. The original Galaxy Tab remains my face Android device to this day." I have different hopes. I would really like to see 5-inch tablets, which probably means Android and not Apple (although I would be thrilled with the latter). 3-inch tablets like the iPod Touch do not show enough text on the screen to be reasonably useful to me with my middle-aged eyes. 7-inch tablets are too difficult to carry around: there are no pockets that big.

5-inch tablets seem like a sweet spot on the readability-portability scale. The glass is cheap to make (it's one of the standard sizes for GPS units) and they fit in pants pockets. I would not want one as the thing I read books on all the time, but I would certainly appreciate spending a few hundred dollars less than for the 7-inch and 10-inch tablets on something that is used for occasional entertainment and mobile web browsing.

Google not eating dogfood

I got a very early invite to Google+ from a friend at Google. Of my many friends at Google, he is apparently the only one who signed up for Google+. This is not a good sign. Update: A Googly person has informed me that this might be related to a known bug in this early release, in that nearly everyone at Google is using Google+.

Radio Radio, without the second Radio

Before the Attractions, Elvis Costello was in a little band called "Flip City". Someone unearthed a demo tape they made, and you can hear Elvis just before he took on the rough-n-tough nerd persona for his debut on Stiff Records. Flip City had a few songs that later morphed into early EC songs, notably "Radio Soul", which clearly was the genesis for Radio Radio. (Ignore the Jacksons-sounding intro; the lyrics are on par with Radio Radio.)

Paul Simon covers

Was never a huge Paul Simon fan, but loved him as much as most people my age(ish) did. Here's a great collection of covers of some of his best known songs from an wide variety of folks.

How to write a book or other very long document

Do so without a word processor. Use some text editor and splash LaTeX in at the end. I assure you that the LaTeX part will suck; I also assure you that it will suck less than Word or OpenOffice destroying your document and you can't even figure out which previous version to use. The versioning step can also be a bit tricky but worth learning to do, particularly with a good program like Versions. As for backing up: I often tell friends who I know don't back up that they can't call me with any tech support questions until they do. That has worked in more cases than I thought it would...

Sampling Hornsby

We are used to hearing guitar gods in rock. Piano gods are rarer, but Bruce Hornsby probably qualifies, particularly if you count "ability to play live" in your consideration. If you want to hear a wide selection of his live stuff, Bride Of The Noisemakers is a great place to start. There are lots of dance songs, a fair number of tear-jerkers, and a bunch of his hits.

Learning from people who read the Bible

As we (and I unfortunately have to include myself in that "we") spend the next few days making fun of a not-tiny number of religious believers, we should also maybe take a look at where the book that inspires them has gone. In specific, my Kindle- and iPad-toting friends should be thinking about how their electronic books could be radically better than they are today.

This article could open their eyes. If you want to see the future of interactive, useful books (even fiction), you should strongly consider reading one of the many innovative electronic editions of the Bible.

Side note: this isn't a new phenomenon. As people were just starting to really think about hypertext in the early 1980's, one group had already nailed it: Bible concordances. They were mostly ignored because of the non-overlap between strong Bible readers and the hypertext community. Around 1987, I created some hypertext-producing software that I tried to sell to one of the publishers I worked for, and one of the senior editors asked if it could create something as good as what she used at home. I got a copy of the software she was using, was pretty amazed, put my tail between my legs, and slunk off.