Dan Dickinson: The Primary Vivid Weblog

I apologize to everyone who has been trying to comment for the last few weeks, as the upgrade to 3.01D broke the Typekey stuff and I was only told about it today. I am sure the 3.1 upgrade this week will break everything again, but maybe I’ll be quicker on the uptake this time. And cheers to everyone who enjoyed the NYT snark; it was a much-needed release and glad so many people have dug it.

Via Gizmodo, this NYT fluffjob may be the single most insipid article about an iPod I’ve ever read. Time to put on the snark boots, kids.

Mr. Angus, a second-year graduate student at Columbia Business School, had selected the Shuffle Songs mode on his iPod, which was connected by an adapter cable to his stereo receiver. By doing this, he relinquished control of his 1,300-song music library – and, as he would soon find out, of his party. Next on Fox: WHEN IPODS ATTACK. Such are the perils of using Shuffle, a genre-defying option that has transformed the way people listen to their music in a digital age. Randomness is going to kill us all and make us defy all genres. I, for one, welcome our entropic overlords. Revere Greist, a doctoral student and amateur bicycle racer in Los Angeles, has concluded that his iPod’s Shuffle command favors the rapper 50 Cent – and perhaps more important, that it knows exactly the right time to play 50 Cent’s biggest hit, “In Da Club.” He finds the dramatic beat, coupled with the lyrics “Go Shorty, it’s your birthday,” inspirational. The next time you are forced to hear In Da Club, please, try to remember this guy, who if he were there with you, would undoubtedly be falling on his knees and screaming HALLELUJAH! Also note, it’s this guy: The iPod “knows somehow when I am reaching the end of my reserves, when my motivation is flagging,” Mr. Greist insisted. “It hits me up with ‘In Da Club,’ and then all of a sudden I am in da club.” Say that quote I boldfaced out loud, with a straight face. I dare you. Lucy Shaw, a social worker in New York, has stopped using Shuffle altogether. “It was totally not reading my moods,” she said. It would play upbeat music when she was feeling low, and dark, somber selections when she was feeling upbeat. I smell class action lawsuit against Apple for not making a mood iPod. Either that, or a fantastic marketing idea. Mr. Cedarholm has contemplated removing all Fugazi songs from his iPod, but he said he fears that “the baton will get passed” to some other band, like his beloved Pixies, “and God help me if I wind up hating them too.” God help us all, Dan Cedarholm. Your love for The Pixies is a national resource we truly cannot underestimate. I have no doubt that no one loves the Pixies more than you do, and were your iPod to spoil this by playing their music too often, the consequences cannot be underestimated. There are ways to circumvent Shuffle – on an iPod at least – by using iTunes, most notably by creating a Smart Playlist. Circumvent? Circumvent?

cir·cum·vent (surkm-vnt)
tr.v. cir-cum-vent-ed, cir-cum-vent-ing, cir-cum-vents
1) To surround (an enemy, for example); enclose or entrap.
2) To go around; bypass: circumvented the city.
3) To avoid or get around by artful maneuvering: She planned a way to circumvent all the bureaucratic red tape.

If making a smart playlist is invoking “artful maneuvering”, I am apparently some sort of iPod ninja. Who knew? Bob Angus, the Columbia Business School student, became enthusiastic at the mention of the Smart Playlist function and wanted to hear more. Once when he and his girlfriend were together in his bedroom, he said, his iPod started blasting the Beastie Boys’ “No Sleep Till Brooklyn.” “I jumped out of bed as fast as I could,” he recalled. “But it had already wrecked the mood.” In the future, he said, he will try not to let his iPod run wild. Take THAT, Beastie Boys! I can’t wait for next week, when I’m sure the NY Times will discover some new way to look like a big fat asshole using technology.

I have decided to take a more active interest in retrogaming. While at a mall in Rochester today, I saw someone in an EB looking at one of those massive bundle packs for a particular dead handheld. After some investigation, I picked up the following: Neo Geo Pocket Color, Blue – with necessary batteries SNK vs. Capcom: Match Of The Millenium Fatal Fury (Pocket Fighting Series) King Of Fighters R2 (Pocket Fighting Series) Samurai Showdown 2 (Pocket Fighting Series) The Last Blade ~Beyond The Destiny~ Sonic The Hedgehod Pocket Adventure Metal Slug 1st Mission Puzzle Bobble Mini Neo Turf Masters Pac-Man The grand total for this purchase was….$58. Not a bad deal at all, as many of the games are enjoyable – although it certainly makes me appreciate the fine nuances (eg: backlight) of my GBASP a little more.

People may have noticed me being slightly frazzled this week. Let’s briedly investigate why. At work, I have been involved in two large projects. The first has been the deployment of 135 new dual 2.5 GHz G5s for workstations in the college computer labs (and the administration thereof). The other has been to master the hardware that we are going to be using to capture lectures to send to our school in Qatar. Both of these projects need to be completed by the start of the semester, preferably before the students get here on the 24th. This means that this week was to be the last solid week we could get in to work on things. So on Monday, I find that the imaging process we were doing over the weekend had failed. While we’re in the middle of fixing this, there’s a fire. Construction crews in one of the courtyards blew up a transformer. No one was hurt, but we had to emergency shutdown everything so the power could be shut off. Tuesday, everything breaks. Bringing the servers back up is always bumpy, and a number of things we had done were just flat out not working. I left work seriously depressed, around 7. Wednesday, inroads were made, and my impression was that things were fixed. Thursday, everything has broken itself again overnight. Apple engineers admit that there is an issue with the 10.3 server feature we’re trying to use. We’re starting to talk about contingency plans for what features we can drop if we need to shoot lower. Also, someone discovers signifcant problems with our encoding units for the lecture capture. An engineer is called in for Friday. Friday, in a magnificent hack, I work around almost all of the remaining Apple issues. The engineer arrives and we patch up the encoders, but we still have to do more debugging Monday because some signs are still showing up. All in all, its been more work hours than I’ve ever put in at a job before. My body is in horrible shape – I have been in physical pain of various forms all week. We are headed to Ithaca for the weekend. I’m actually typing this from JFK, Joi Ito style. I’ll be back home tomorrow night.

This is a test post that I’m making using Quicksilver and the Atom plugin, now that Rura has managed to coerce CPAN into installing XML::Atom.

Okay, so this just jumped into my head and I have to put it to digital ink immediately. They should make a movie about this village, right. And it can be full of hipsters and punks and people who look at you with spite. They live a simple life, of selling knick-knacks, getting high, and protesting everything. And they have this peaceful coexistence with some mysterious force beyond the boundaries of their little dwelling, but of course at some point all hell breaks loose and people are dying and it’s like OH MY GOD WHAT IS HAPPENING TO OUR VILLAGE. And they hide out inside the hipster video store even though everyone there is an asshole and the prices really aren’t that great. And then some intrepid young slackers decide to trek beyond the edges of the village, and when they reach the outer limits of it they realize there’s a GIANT CITY AROUND THEM, FULL OF WONDERS. And they can call it The East Village. And despite how ridiculous this sounds, I bet you it’d be better than anything M. Night Shaylaman has done!

Just when I was lamenting Mondays and the veritable lack of a weekend I just had, I see this cover on AM New York this morning, regarding the Xbox-induced murder story. I’m sorry, but that just wins.

My Quicksilver tutorial has been updated for B27. A fair amount has changed recently, as Quicksilver has moved to a plugin-based data module system. If you still haven’t tried Quicksilver yet, or are running an older beta, now is a fantastic time to jump on it. Also, the old version of the tutorial is available in O’Reilly’s new Panther Hacks book. It’s part of Hack #4, and I do have an author credit in the front of the book if you look hard enough.

Today is the second anniversary of the wedding of Katie and I. Huzzah for the “cotton” anniversary, where apparently you’re supposed to buy towels and t-shirts and other things we already have too much of! We’ve spent much of the last year in NYC, and that certainly has added to the stress and decreased the amount of time we get to spend together. But we still make it through, we still cuddle (when it’s not 90 goddamn degrees and humid), and we still love each other like crazy. As a special treat, I am going to attempt to rescue our wedding album from Katie’s office and finally scan the damn wedding pictures like I promised two years ago.