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They're Ba...ack

They're Ba...ack:

... [H]igh school does not provide 'the best years of your life' to adolescents. Even the best high school is a miserable place where cliques make or break self-esteem, where administrators check for cell phone use and midriff exposure, and where sleep-deprived students move through the day pretending everything's fine.

It’s also where all teachers think their class is the most important one in the school, and can't understand why students should want to sleep, pass notes, or daydream during their riveting lessons.

My Mom is quickly becoming my favorite blogger.

Save Al's Comics

My friend Mike is trying to Save Al's Comics, which is being priced out of it's Mission location when their lease is up. They want to raise $10,000 in the next month or so.

This really touches a nerve with me - although I was never a "capital G" comics geek, but I did love our monthly trips to the comic and baseball card store, and I certainly think being allowed early alternatives to school and reading helped fuel the intellectual thirst that has carried me through my life to date. So save Al's!

.Mac 2.0

I love my new Apple. My old ones (yikes, plural) are fine, but once I sat down at a G5, I knew I didn't want to do the majority of my work on a G4 anymore. Configuring a new machine used to be a pain that could take days, but with OS X it's almost instantaneous. I'm usually pretty quiet about how much I love Apple (on this blog, at least) so please forgive me this moment of fanitude.

• .Mac has a bad reputation, and I have no idea why. At any moment, I'm five minutes away from having all of my mail <sagan>gigabytes and gigabytes of messages<sagan>, my contacts, Transmit favorites, Netnewswire subscriptions, calendars and keychains up and running. There's always a hiccup, but it's never that bad. And .mac offered the first really good decent photo sharing software, before typepad and flickr.
• Apache is installed and running on every computer shipped, and it has been for years. For my money you can go from zero to running a modern web app - Movable Type, a java servlet, Rails, Catalyst, and so on. - as fast as any other platform, including most flavors of linux.
• All of the little UI touches that Ajax fans rave about are ripped right out of OS X's Aqua styling. Which in turn Apple ripped right out of Kai Krause's Power Tools. Kai, wherever he is, should be earning a nickel for each slow yellow fade on tadalist (and Paul Bausch should get a dime for each permalink (and I don't want to fall too far down this rabbit hole)). Likewise, we take big icons on the web for granted, but before the Dock (also unfairly maligned) we were squinting into the windows taskbar, and/or sorting our Apple menu by renaming applications to start with spaces and numbers. Remember that before you grouse about the dock (or Spotlight, for that matter).
• And speaking of spotlight, allow me to peer across the room at Tim Bray's Ongoing. His accomplishments are indisputable, but this weekend within the same 24 hours he dives deep into the internals of perl vs. java regular expressions but then offers a cursory insult to Tiger when he refers to it as "pretty lame."

  I love the Dashboard, it's more or less the perfect implementation of "push," and spotlight is the best search application on any platform - it runs circles around Google & MSN Desktop, with half the processing power. But besides those two features (and I agree with Tim, those are the biggest two), there's Quartz Composer, Automator, Core Data, new Safari, new Xcode and all the little things that Apple is known for. Some of these developer features (especially Core Data) may not see the common usage in mainstream apps until 10.5, because it's customary for developers to support the current operating system release and the last one, but the changes under the hood were substantial, and the fact that they don't always make themselves known is a feature, not a bug.

• Through a sort of contorted path, today I stumbled upon Michael Sippey's "three c's of computing" - creating, consuming and connecting. Apple already owns (at least in mindshare) creating and consuming, so connecting is the final piece of the puzzle. However, notice the date of Sippey's post - Apple is already 10 years and 8 days late!
• One more note about Dashboard and the third "C". We know that Nokia is releasing a browser for mobile phones based on KHTML. Dashboard apps are just little bundles of Javascript, CSS, and HTML (Ajax, anyone?), the mobile application market (despite the deafening hype) is still vastly underserved, and Apple is very good at syncing data with your Nokia phone. It's suddenly easy to see hundreds (thousands?) of dashboard apps running on millions of Nokia phones. Not just the flight tracker and the phone book, but also Ms. Pac Man, singing Jared, flickr uploader, google base search client and on and on. That's the microcontent thing I'm really excited about.

Related: Anil Dash's Blortal 2.0, Michael Sippey's tada list and Andrew Anker's last speech ever.

Blogging all Open Tabs

Today's Rocketboom is pretty exciting. Camera "2" is back!

we make money not art returns to form with Architecture for bicycles and Video-game rapid prototyping

The first fiction collection on Lulu that I actually think I'm going to buy: How to Leave a Place by Ariel Gore. (PubSubbing Erik Benson - you are going to like this too)

U.S. President George W. Bush shakes hands with Albert Hubo (robot). Apparently there are some bones from eyebeam in that skeleton.

Jeff Chang is Still Recovering From Hurricane Meters. I didn't even know they were touring! I'm a shadow of my former self (as I listen to a "leaked" copy of Shakira's new CD (I love it)).

And since I've got to have some vitamin geek in this post, here's John Siracusa on consumer RAID options and filesystem architecture. (Mom: He's worried about Dad's iMac crashing and losing all of Lauren's photos. So am I, but I'm not that worried. If we lose the photos, we lose them, right?)

My Wayfaring

Wayfaring is a cool new Ruby/Maps mash-up application. I know these are practically a dime a dozen, but two aspects of Wayfaring stick out. One is that it's the first app that is an in-place replacemnt for the current maps.google.com, if you want it to be. Sure, it doesn't have the local integration, but presumably it will be able to leverage all of the user curated contributions even more efficiently than Google does. Second, they mention on blog that they prescribe to the "release early and often" practice of software deisgn, and they're sticking to it. It looks like they've stomped out some bugs very quickly (and publicly) and there are definitely some rough edges. But it definitely works, and that's enough. (thanks, Finn, for the heads up).

I love the map of the "tough" climbs in the 2006 Tour de France. This continues the precedent of Tour de France maps being the gold standard of mapping hacks. Or at least, I hope they become the standard, because I love them.

randomWalks: Orchestra Pit

randomWalks: Orchestra Pit: "Want to play with Apple's Front Row without buying a new iMac? Check out the hack I'm calling 'Orchestra Pit'"

Adam's Orchestra Pit compilation is brilliant.

Geek to English

LiveJournal loves their users. Not only do they set up a blog to document their data center migration that's far more detailed than necessary, they help you decipher with a Geek to English guide.

Doublespeak in the Record Industry

"Apple is nearly finished with the technical work necessary to enable consumers to transfer music from content-protected discs to their iPods," the label said in a statement detailing its copy-protection plans"This is an important step for EMI and Apple, but even more so for music consumers who will soon be able to legitimately port music from protected discs they own to the iPod."

The tone over at arstechnica is rightfully skeptical of this claim, but neglects to call out EMI on their ridiculous language. As if I can't "legitimately" "port" music from a CD I own to another device now. The logical extension of this logic for the EMIs and Sonys of the world is that eventually their CDs will only "legitimately" play on their own CD players unless a "port" is involved.

Friends 2.0

Kyle put together a Ning app to track Mario Kart friend IDs. No OpenID support yet, but it does have tags.

“This isn’t work, Dr. Jacobs, it’s fun.”

Initially, some students had reservations. They thought of blogs as daily journals where people argue about politics and make public their most intimate thoughts. That didn’t sound like English class to them.

But two weeks into the project, I can visit 108 websites to see student writing: commentaries, college essays, poetry, book reviews.

"It's Not English, It's Just Blogging" is my Mom's first update on her student's blogging project. You can read the story on her blog or on the Washington Examiner's web site. Nice work, Mom!

Jude

Jude
Originally uploaded by david.

Of all my photos, this might be my favorite.

Death Needs Time

Photographed as it rested in the dry mud next to Fats Domino's abandoned house, the one he was rescued from, in the devastated Ninth Ward of New Orleans: a clock.

I won't thumbnail ("excerpt") the photos here, because they should be experienced in the manner Clayton intended. If you aren't subscribed to the Operation Eden feed and you enjoy great photography, I offer my highest recommendation.

Tags: Modern Living, Blasphemy

Me: It's 2005. We should never, ever hear the Indigo Girls in a coffee shop. Never.
John: That's how I feel about Christianity.

John also says:

How bitter to see ads for RENT plastered on the Barnes & Noble at Astor Place. You know, the one across from the new glass tower of luxury condos atop the Chase Bank?

Greenhouse at sunset

Greenhouse at sunset
Originally uploaded by adami.

Adam's PVC Greenhouse is nearing completion! His pictures usually outpace his progress on the blog by a few days.

Tribes

Midwest Perl champ and friend Ed Summers wrote a nice summer of the most recent ruby-chicago meeting. One passage in particular resonated with me:

It’s been interesting watching local perl, python, ruby and java groups and how they regard each other. Chris mentioned that it’s unfortunate when discussion borders on digging at the other guy, and that the real thing that unites these groups is that everyone enjoys programming, and works on stuff on their own time.

And Ed doesn't even mentioned Javascript, which has been turning the web development world on it's head over the past year. The rest of the world must wonder what it takes for programmers to argue about "Catalyst" and "Rails." Ben touched on this in his aptly named post Rails developers kill kittens!

The Eventual Winner

The Eventual Winner
Originally uploaded by david.

Tthis photo of Paul Tergat was my 1500th Flickr photo, which seems like a high number to me. Hmmmm.

Marathon Feet

Feet
Originally uploaded by david.

I watched the first hour or so of the Marathon this morning. Of course seeing runners of all shapes sizes and abilities was inspiring, but I was also filled with a little bit of regret that I didn't get it together to run this year. Next year, we're running for sure.

You can see the rest of my Marathon photos in my 2005 Marathon Set on Flickr.

Fake Money

My blog is worth $12,342,392.12.
How much is your blog worth?