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I have bad news for sports fans who are like me – the 2010 World Cup will be filled with the droning noise of the Vuvezela. These are those long, plastic horns which are very popular in South Africa. US Soccer fans will know as the things that make you want to stop watching, or at least turn off the sound when the US are playing a match. Why they were embraced by US Soccer fans I do not know, or understand. They are annoying, they are stupid, and they are unending when present.

When it was announced that the World Cup would be held in South Africa there were even some cries for FIFA to ban the Vuvuzela so that fans could endure watching the games with the sound on. No such luck. I am in the middle of watching the US play Australia in a pre-cup friendly (in South Africa) and I am ready to strangle someone at halftime.

’tis but a warning dear friends.

I mentioned in my last post that I am a big user of org-mode in Emacs. This is a full-featured mode which allows for easy note-taking, document writing, publishing, sharing, etc etc etc. It totally changed the way I work once I started using it. Like all things emacs it takes a bit of time to learn the keystrokes and capabilities but once you get about 1/3 of them down it becomes nearly impossible to replace. That’s largely due to the fact that there really is nothing else like it in the rest of softwaredom¹.

When it comes to note-taking, I must put them on paper first. Its essential to me if I am to remember anything that is being said. Its the two-step process which seals something in my memory. First, on paper – then into org-mode. If I follow that, I can remember just about anything that is said or displayed. If I don’t do it… its forgotten. Once its in org-mode it then becomes even easier for me to *use* (big difference between remembering something and actually doing something with it) if I also tag the idea with some useful tag. This is accomplished with the help of remember-mode, which I’ve wired into my org-mode workflow. Then when I am writing a spec or other such document and want to review things I’ve learned within a particular area, I check all entries in all org documents in a certain tag, and copy the ones I like.

What I am describing is a workflow which fits my particular deficiencies well (memory being the biggest). That, to me, is what smart computing should be about. Finding the right applications to aid your particular personality and manner of working.

1. though I *really* need it to export to mediawiki format [↩]

My history with operating systems is fairly simple. When home computers
were new I started out with an Epson computer(!!) that had its own
operating system which was quirky by today’s standards but was quite
nice in its simplicity. I then moved to an intel-driven DOS machine and
had a love-hate relationship with it. I moved to UNIX/Linux in work and
home life sometime later and obviously concentrated fairly heavily on
that until OS X came along.

I got my first Apple mainly to accommodate my photography obsession
because (even still) using a linux machine with photos absolutely
blows. I enjoy OS X but I also enjoy linux/gnome. However, I have
noticed in the last few years that I have slowly moved away from
OS-dependence. Call it what you will – the Cloud, SAAS, whatev. All I
know is that it is incredibly convenient to be able to sit at any
computer and do all the things I would normally do at my home
computer. In fact, about the only apps I use that aren’t cloud-centric
are emacs and my photo-software. Even still, with emacs I mostly use
org-mode for my work and I keep all my org files online. As long as I
have emacs on a machine, I can do my work. But in a pinch, I could use
another editor on those files since they are simply text-files.

That still leaves photos. The only non-standard,
not-practical-in-the-cloud thing I do. I’ve seen the attempts at photo
editors online, I know that one can use online tools to store and
categorize their photos – but none of those services come close to how I
can do it at home with old-fashioned, closed-source, non-standard,
key-on-the-back-of-the package software. Maybe this means there is an
opportunity in the market or maybe it means that camera manufacturers
are behind-the-times… or maybe it means I am particular with my
photos – I’m not really sure.

I’m not sure what this means for Operating Systems – at least, OSes that
aren’t powering “the Cloud” – but it does feel like a trend that would
lend itself to devices that start quickly and get me online. I see this
progress in the direction the iPad has taken us. Whatever your opinion
is on the particular of that one device – the idea that I can have
a small, “instant-on” device that can get me online is incredibly
appealing. I think the future of such devices in grand.

If you were living in the Mid-Atlantic in the 1970s you probably saw that commercial.

The Joon Rhee martial arts schools started in the Washington D.C. area and I guess we had a D.C.-based channel back in those dark ages of “regional” TV. Still, I will always remember the phone number to Joon Rhee’s school. Always.

Yesterday I was thinking about the commercial and I looked it up on the web, as I am want to do. Its turns out that the great Nils Lofgren wrote that catchy Joon Rhee jingle! Yes, that Nils: E Street Band; Crazy Horse. Nils Freakin’ Lofgren! Its listed on his webpage along with a handful of other T.V. song credits. Who’d-a-guessed that?

Makes me want to call USA-1000

The other day my friend Paul and I got onto the subject of songs with whistling in them (I made a playlist). During my search for songs with whistling I ran across “Whistling Jack Smith”. Ol’ Jack had a hit song in the late 60s in the UK – a song of high quality whistling. Here is Jack whistling his way through the incredibly goofy “I Was Kaiser Bill’s Batman”¹:

We watched this and Paul made the claim that this guy is lip-sync-whistling. Paul is correct… it turns out that this isn’t Whistling Jack Smith! Its an actor. The real Whistling Jack Smith was actually a guy named John O’Neill² who was a “session whistler” and was the guy who whistled in “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly”. So now I am on a quest to figure out who this dude dancing and lip-sync-whistling is. Any help would be appreciated.

Update!

My friend John Fleck passed this along to those who read him on twitter and received the following:

After extensive research by lots of people in the TV music business
including people in charge of keeping extensive rock and roll music
clips.

The original whistler is unknown and was apparently a producer of some other artist.
The song became popular.
The production company was asked to have it performed on TV shows
The clip is from the 1960’s German hit show “Beat Club.”
The song producers hired a local German actor who looks sort of like Don Grady from “My Three Sons” but isn’t.
The actor is unknown.
The actor seems to have made up dance steps in the instrumental breaks.
About four different actors were hired around the world to lip sync this song.
There never was an actual ‘Whistling Jack Smith.’

Wow! I mean, wow! The power of curious smart people still amazes me. Thanks to the person who passed that along (whom I will keep anonymous unless told otherwise).

1. a batman is a personal aide to a military officer [↩]
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistling_Jack_Smith [↩]

I’ve been to London many times over the years but I have never been around Christmas time and I have to say after being there last week, it suits it. Maybe not quite as much as it suits New York City, but its still quite nice.

The real reason for this trip though was to show my Dad around. He’s never been there and its been a long couple years for him as my Mom has been suffering through very advanced dementia. Since he’d never been we got to do all those things that I hadn’t done in many years: British Museum, Westminster Abbey, etc. Plus we decided to take the Channel Tunnel via train to get a day’s worth of Paris into the mix. While I loved the train ride there, a day is not long enough to see Paris and it really just wore us out trying…. plus, I blame this week’s flu on them, because I can. Nonetheless, I took the camera along and snapped a few photos.

Take a look at the set!

a few of my favs: –>

Vote No! Yes!

Originally uploaded by RubyJi. Used under CC-BY-SA.

Thanks to my friend Ruby for actually remembering to take a camera out and grab a shot of this before it disappears.

These signs are all over Chapel Hill and I love them.

I read today that Apple is going to renovate the Chicago “El” stop across from their store. The run-down stop is in bad repair and the Chicago Transit Authority has no money to do anything about it. In exchange, Apple gets naming rights, control of ad-space in the station, and, of course, a better looking neighbor.

I am of two minds about this news. On the one hand, I think it is a unique model for municipalities (or transit authorities as the case may be) to make some much needed upgrades when our poor economy and our national attitudes don’t provide enough support and funds to do so. At the same time, I cringe at the possibility of the “Apple iPhone North Station”. We have too much corporate sponsorship already. More will dull our senses (not to mention our history and traditions).

This quote from the article sums up the problem well:

“We are selling everything, aren’t we?” says Joseph Schofer, director of Northwestern University’s Infrastructure Technology Institute. “We haven’t come to the point where we recognize how critical the system is to the economy, and provide it with long-term, stable funding.”

Its a choice we have to make as a society – “Macbook Pro Stop West” or preserving our heritage. Unfortunately, in this economy, and with the “tea-baggers” ideas getting the airtime that they do I fear we will simply sell.

When the idea of web-based apps first started to look more viable there was an interesting debate within the open source community. The debate came down to the question of whether it mattered if you had the source-code of web hosted software. For the most part I think it does – especially if the developer wants faster development and more eyes looking at bugs/holes.

Having said that, freedom for a web-app means something completely different when it comes to the users data. This could not be more evident than with the recent news of hapless Microsoft destroying all data on T-Mobile Sidekick phones. After this news broke the tech-blogs were awash with damnation of “the cloud”. How could we ever trust anyone to store our data elsewhere? What were we thinking?

Well, we were thinking that its nice to always have our apps and our data available no matter where we are or what device we are using. We thought, its nice to have someone else provide storage for our ever-growing bits. But they are right in questioning our reliance on others to always get it right when it comes to protecting that data from rookie mistakes, changes in the direction of the app, or becoming evil.

So for the cloud to work, user must always have access to their data. That doesn’t mean the user simply gets to see their data in the app, that means that the user is at all times able to retrieve their data, and in a format that is transferable to other applications. Period. End of story. Anything less than that is a failure due to the reasons the Microsoft case so aptly showcased. Of course this means that the user must also be proactive in retrieving their data from time to time if it is truly important to them, but that has always been the case.

Its important to note that the largest purveyor of apps “in the cloud”, Google, has had a somewhat quiet campaign to provide this type of data retrieval for a while now. Called “Data Liberation” (and tracked at the Data Liberation Blog) they have been slowly making sure all their apps have some way for users to retrieve their data. The newest tool comes to Google Dos which has just added the “Convert, Zip, and Download” feature which allows you to easily grab some or all of your documents as a zip file (converted to whichever available format you would like). This is the most powerful of Google’s data retrieval tools so far and I hope all of their apps make it this easy (including Gmail which can do better than simply offering POP downloads). Still, it is good to point out Google proactively “not being evil” when so many folks currently attempt to disprove their famous motto.

So we are well into the Obama administration now and as is pointed out in this article, Joe Biden is not the gaffe-machine everyone said he would be. To be honest, if it weren’t for that article, I don’t think I would have thought about Joe this week and that’s something the article doesn’t focus on – he’s been well out of the public eye. Whether that is because the White House wants him out of view or its because the press is bored with competence is the question though.

The article is good at showing a strong, confident leader:

Joe Biden had a question. During a long Sunday meeting with President Obama and top national-security advisers on Sept. 13, the VP interjected, “Can I just clarify a factual point? How much will we spend this year on Afghanistan?” Someone provided the figure: $65 billion. “And how much will we spend on Pakistan?” Another figure was supplied: $2.25 billion. “Well, by my calculations that’s a 30-to-1 ratio in favor of Afghanistan. So I have a question. Al Qaeda is almost all in Pakistan, and Pakistan has nuclear weapons. And yet for every dollar we’re spending in Pakistan, we’re spending $30 in Afghanistan. Does that make strategic sense?” The White House Situation Room fell silent. But the questions had their desired effect: those gathered began putting more thought into Pakistan as the key theater in the region.

… but it doesn’t show the great disappointment a great deal of people have at Joe not being a buffoon. Personally, I am glad he is disappointing people.