While I agree with most of your post, I'd like to add a comment to this one point: internet radio is hard to find
One neat feature of iTunes is its radio menu. Click on the "Radio" label and you get a list of hundreds of internet radio stations, grouped by genre. iTunes lists the station's name, a blurb about the kind of music it plays, and its bandwidth. Just click on the station and voila, it's streaming through the iTunes interface.
It's thanks to this feature of iTunes that I've discovered a lot of small, specialized internet radio stations. Windows Media Player 9 has the same thing. So, internet radio stations are easier to find than you'd think.
Numerous bands are being scheduled to play Friday in apple stores
Where did you get this info? When I go to the Apple retail page, all I see is that some DJ is scheduled to play at a store in Chicago. I want a link to the dirt!;)
True. And on this subject, while I was in London in 2000, I saw special paperback editions of the HP books especially for adults. They had more subdued cover art, with the title and author in small print (for example, book 2 had a photograph of a car against a sky background). I heard that the publisher created these so adults could read them on the train and not be embarrassed by being seen reading a "children's" book.
Very interesting. So, is it possible (or even necessary) to take into account the fact that the sun, from whence the photons come, is moving too? Or does the sun's gravitational pull make it essentially stand still as far as the sail is concerned (i.e. the sail and everything else in the solar system are moving with the sun, within the galaxy)?
You gave us RGB colors in the specs, so I'm assuming you want the entries in RGB color mode? Or am I allowed to submit a design in CMYK, to ensure that the final design gets printed in the colors I had in mind? And on that subject, how fancy can we get within the 5-color rule? Are metallic inks OK? Please let me know what's allowable.
I worked for Casady & Greene one summer during college. I typed product registration info into the database, answered phones, beta tested, stuck labels on disks (OK, that should date me), whatever needed to be done. Working there was great - everyone really was like family, and the programmers' dedication to their craft was inspiring. I was always amazed that software created in a little storefront next to the pizza parlor in my neighborhood was so globally popular (my friends in college played Crystal Quest and Glider).
Some random memories of C&G: - Seeing my first IBM computer with a full-color monitor and GUI. The PC tech support guy was amused that I thought all IBM's had green screens. - Beta testing a paint program that simulated natural media. It was at least as good as Aldus SuperPaint, the Mac favorite at the time, but for some reason I never heard of it again. - The intraoffice instant messaging system that one of the programmers built. Everyone spent so much time sending messages to each other, the boss shut it down after just a few days.
Not sure where this is available, but Digit Wireless' Fastap Keyboard is the best small hunt-and-peck solution I've ever seen. It's primarily designed for thumb-typing on PDAs and phones. They put convex diamond-shaped letter keys between concave round number keys.
The problem with Ritalin is that it tends to remove a person's sense of right and wrong.
OK, troll, I'll take the bait: that's just ridiculous. My husband has ADD and was on Ritalin for several years (just switched to Strattera this month), and he has the strongest moral compass of anyone I've ever met.
One thing you might consider is that very often people with ADD suffer from clinical depression. Ritalin does not treat this completely, but professional counseling and awareness of the problem can help. Untreated, undiagnosed depression causes all kinds of problems for those who suffer from it and the people around them.
The Fastap Keyboard is still the best mobile keyboard I've seen to date, in that it fixes the problem of having to hit a number key repeatedly to get a letter, and is accurate even when typing with one fat finger. I've decided that I'm not buying a new mobile device (phone or PDA) until someone comes out with one that uses this keyboard.
My brother took an acoustics class at MIT taught by Bose. He said it was interesting, and a good opportunity to see the practical applications of theory. Though I don't think the class was good simply because the professor was famous, that was an incentive for someone like my brother, who might not otherwise have taken that class as an elective, to sign up.
Like you said, sometimes the most well-known people in their field can be lousy teachers. But they can also draw students from other programs into their classes, thus increasing enrollment and making the dean of whatever college it is happy.
"The Hobbit" stage play: a warning
on
LOTR The Musical!
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Around Christmas of 2000, I went to go see a stage production of "The Hobbit" in London. It was one of the worst plays I've ever seen. I think their mistake was trying to portray the entire journey as literally as possible on the stage. The actors were running around like crazy, trying to keep up with the moving scenery and costume changes. As a result, most of their lines were shouted so you could hear them as they dashed from place to place. If I hadn't known the story well beforehand, I would've had no idea who the characters were, what they were doing, and why.
During intermission, I asked a couple of locals (I'm not from England) whether this was one of the "pantomime" plays I'd heard so much about. They laughed and said no, but it might as well be.
Having seen this bomb, I am skeptical that a quality stage version of LOTR can be done. The only way it's going to work is if they pick a part of the story to tell rather than the whole thing, and let the characters really shine through instead of being held hostage to the costumes and scenery.
Good point. I used to listen to the Link back when I lived in Charlotte (and even after I moved, until ASCAP shut down online broadcasts). It's a listen-in-your-car and listen-at-work kind of station. People at either of those places are only going to buy your album if they remember the hook and the name of the band or album. And chances are, they're going to walk into Blockbuster Music looking for the album, not preorder online. The Link's audience is about as mainstream, middle of the road as you can get.
That's what I thought the title of the article said at first glance. (Though it describes what I experienced in the past with a poorly-implemented content management system that ended up becoming a glorified file server for sales proposals because most of the employees forgot it was there, didn't trust the technology behind it, or just didn't care.)
It is quite possible that some of the films which were top grossing lost money and were terrible.
Especially when you consider that "top-grossing" doesn't take into account the increase in the price of movie tickets over the years. It's a metric designed to guarantee that the top-grossing films will always be recent ones, and that as movie ticket prices go up, new movies will have the chance to gain that title.
A better metric for comparing the relative success of movies over a wide span of time is the number of tickets sold. However, as far as I know there's no place you can get this information - it may not even be tracked - since it could favor older films like Star Wars over recent "blockbusters" like the latest James Bond flick.
in many colleges the people learning about web sites do not learn about building decent web sites, do not learn about accessibility, do not learn about usability
It became clear from the rest of your post that you were talking mostly about college design students, but when I read the sentence I've quoted above I thought, "I know what you mean! These computer science/engineering students are taught to program the back-end but never learn how to make a decent web interface."
I know that it's impossible to become an expert in all aspects of web application programming in 4 short years in addition to all the other subjects they have to cover. But I've noticed that even recent graduates of our compsci program are still using nested blockquote elements and don't know what a doctype is. These misconceptions about how to build a web site have apparently been passed down for years and never challenged.
arguably worth the risk considering the spiritually eye-opening experience of tripping
A guy I knew named Fuzzy once described his worst trip ever. He ended up running stark naked down the middle of the street, scared for his life because there were giant horses right behind him with big, sharp teeth trying to eat his clothes. I'd say just about nothing is worth the risk of having an experience like that. Thank you, I'll take starvation over LSD if I want to alter my perceptions.
I thought the article provided some insight into logo design, and why some logos seem to "work" or "fit" and others don't. I.e., our brains are wired to match certain shapes with certain sounds and concepts.
I design logos as part of my job, and so when I see a particularly good or clever one I try to analyze it and see what makes it work. The idea of synesthesia gives me another angle to consider.
I discovered that yes, they are, when I went home for Christmas and used my dad's brand-new Dell with Windows XP and IE 6. Everywhere I went, I got pop-ups. Even worse, IE 6 for XP home seemed to have some sort of adware built in to it so that I got pop-ups at random times that seemed to be unrelated to the site I was visiting (e.g. ad pops up while I'm looking at User Friendly). Drove me nuts.
Dad didn't want to change browsers, so I pointed him to Tucows, picked the first high-rated popup blocker we found, and had him download a trial version. After a day of browsing without pop-ups and adware, he was so thrilled he bought the full version. People just need to know that they don't have to put up with this crap.
especially considering that the entire Renassance happened without copyrights
And many of the inventors of the Renaissance were paranoid about people stealing their work, and thus either reverted to writing everything in cipher or never wrote anything down at all. Leonardo da Vinci is one example of someone who used cipher to obfuscate his inventions.
So I guess you could say they had encryption to make up for the lack of copyright.
No kidding! A friend of mine is interviewing for a job tomorrow. She's perfectly qualified for it, but fears she won't get it because the company tends to hire people they know, or people recommended from within. We all told her she'd be nuts not to call the company's president, who she knows through church, and let him know she's interviewing for the position.
I see it again and again, especially in this tight job market. After all, when a friend desperately needs a job, don't you keep your eyes peeled and let him know about opportunities that could be helpful to him? ("Rachel quit today. Why don't you send in your resume?") Pity the unconnected person who has only one set of eyes and ears working for him.
Microsoft didn't get where it is by trying to be the next IBM. Only a fool buys into the notion of being the next Microsoft.
Marvelous quote. It should be printed on a t-shirt and passed out to every software company with a napoleon complex bigger than their potential customer base.
Slashdot Mirror
While I agree with most of your post, I'd like to add a comment to this one point:
internet radio is hard to find
One neat feature of iTunes is its radio menu. Click on the "Radio" label and you get a list of hundreds of internet radio stations, grouped by genre. iTunes lists the station's name, a blurb about the kind of music it plays, and its bandwidth. Just click on the station and voila, it's streaming through the iTunes interface.
It's thanks to this feature of iTunes that I've discovered a lot of small, specialized internet radio stations. Windows Media Player 9 has the same thing. So, internet radio stations are easier to find than you'd think.
Numerous bands are being scheduled to play Friday in apple stores
;)
Where did you get this info? When I go to the Apple retail page, all I see is that some DJ is scheduled to play at a store in Chicago. I want a link to the dirt!
After all people of all ages read the books.
True. And on this subject, while I was in London in 2000, I saw special paperback editions of the HP books especially for adults. They had more subdued cover art, with the title and author in small print (for example, book 2 had a photograph of a car against a sky background). I heard that the publisher created these so adults could read them on the train and not be embarrassed by being seen reading a "children's" book.
All good points. Probably best to keep the design simple, obvious, and hard to screw up.
Very interesting. So, is it possible (or even necessary) to take into account the fact that the sun, from whence the photons come, is moving too? Or does the sun's gravitational pull make it essentially stand still as far as the sail is concerned (i.e. the sail and everything else in the solar system are moving with the sun, within the galaxy)?
You gave us RGB colors in the specs, so I'm assuming you want the entries in RGB color mode? Or am I allowed to submit a design in CMYK, to ensure that the final design gets printed in the colors I had in mind? And on that subject, how fancy can we get within the 5-color rule? Are metallic inks OK? Please let me know what's allowable.
I worked for Casady & Greene one summer during college. I typed product registration info into the database, answered phones, beta tested, stuck labels on disks (OK, that should date me), whatever needed to be done. Working there was great - everyone really was like family, and the programmers' dedication to their craft was inspiring. I was always amazed that software created in a little storefront next to the pizza parlor in my neighborhood was so globally popular (my friends in college played Crystal Quest and Glider).
Some random memories of C&G:
- Seeing my first IBM computer with a full-color monitor and GUI. The PC tech support guy was amused that I thought all IBM's had green screens.
- Beta testing a paint program that simulated natural media. It was at least as good as Aldus SuperPaint, the Mac favorite at the time, but for some reason I never heard of it again.
- The intraoffice instant messaging system that one of the programmers built. Everyone spent so much time sending messages to each other, the boss shut it down after just a few days.
Not sure where this is available, but Digit Wireless' Fastap Keyboard is the best small hunt-and-peck solution I've ever seen. It's primarily designed for thumb-typing on PDAs and phones. They put convex diamond-shaped letter keys between concave round number keys.
The problem with Ritalin is that it tends to remove a person's sense of right and wrong.
OK, troll, I'll take the bait: that's just ridiculous. My husband has ADD and was on Ritalin for several years (just switched to Strattera this month), and he has the strongest moral compass of anyone I've ever met.
One thing you might consider is that very often people with ADD suffer from clinical depression. Ritalin does not treat this completely, but professional counseling and awareness of the problem can help. Untreated, undiagnosed depression causes all kinds of problems for those who suffer from it and the people around them.
The Fastap Keyboard is still the best mobile keyboard I've seen to date, in that it fixes the problem of having to hit a number key repeatedly to get a letter, and is accurate even when typing with one fat finger. I've decided that I'm not buying a new mobile device (phone or PDA) until someone comes out with one that uses this keyboard.
My brother took an acoustics class at MIT taught by Bose. He said it was interesting, and a good opportunity to see the practical applications of theory. Though I don't think the class was good simply because the professor was famous, that was an incentive for someone like my brother, who might not otherwise have taken that class as an elective, to sign up.
Like you said, sometimes the most well-known people in their field can be lousy teachers. But they can also draw students from other programs into their classes, thus increasing enrollment and making the dean of whatever college it is happy.
Around Christmas of 2000, I went to go see a stage production of "The Hobbit" in London. It was one of the worst plays I've ever seen. I think their mistake was trying to portray the entire journey as literally as possible on the stage. The actors were running around like crazy, trying to keep up with the moving scenery and costume changes. As a result, most of their lines were shouted so you could hear them as they dashed from place to place. If I hadn't known the story well beforehand, I would've had no idea who the characters were, what they were doing, and why.
During intermission, I asked a couple of locals (I'm not from England) whether this was one of the "pantomime" plays I'd heard so much about. They laughed and said no, but it might as well be.
Having seen this bomb, I am skeptical that a quality stage version of LOTR can be done. The only way it's going to work is if they pick a part of the story to tell rather than the whole thing, and let the characters really shine through instead of being held hostage to the costumes and scenery.
Good point. I used to listen to the Link back when I lived in Charlotte (and even after I moved, until ASCAP shut down online broadcasts). It's a listen-in-your-car and listen-at-work kind of station. People at either of those places are only going to buy your album if they remember the hook and the name of the band or album. And chances are, they're going to walk into Blockbuster Music looking for the album, not preorder online. The Link's audience is about as mainstream, middle of the road as you can get.
That's what I thought the title of the article said at first glance. (Though it describes what I experienced in the past with a poorly-implemented content management system that ended up becoming a glorified file server for sales proposals because most of the employees forgot it was there, didn't trust the technology behind it, or just didn't care.)
Well, when I came to this page it had an ad for a TechTV show called "Wired for Sex." Draw your own conclusions.
It is quite possible that some of the films which were top grossing lost money and were terrible.
Especially when you consider that "top-grossing" doesn't take into account the increase in the price of movie tickets over the years. It's a metric designed to guarantee that the top-grossing films will always be recent ones, and that as movie ticket prices go up, new movies will have the chance to gain that title.
A better metric for comparing the relative success of movies over a wide span of time is the number of tickets sold. However, as far as I know there's no place you can get this information - it may not even be tracked - since it could favor older films like Star Wars over recent "blockbusters" like the latest James Bond flick.
in many colleges the people learning about web sites do not learn about building decent web sites, do not learn about accessibility, do not learn about usability
It became clear from the rest of your post that you were talking mostly about college design students, but when I read the sentence I've quoted above I thought, "I know what you mean! These computer science/engineering students are taught to program the back-end but never learn how to make a decent web interface."
I know that it's impossible to become an expert in all aspects of web application programming in 4 short years in addition to all the other subjects they have to cover. But I've noticed that even recent graduates of our compsci program are still using nested blockquote elements and don't know what a doctype is. These misconceptions about how to build a web site have apparently been passed down for years and never challenged.
arguably worth the risk considering the spiritually eye-opening experience of tripping
A guy I knew named Fuzzy once described his worst trip ever. He ended up running stark naked down the middle of the street, scared for his life because there were giant horses right behind him with big, sharp teeth trying to eat his clothes. I'd say just about nothing is worth the risk of having an experience like that. Thank you, I'll take starvation over LSD if I want to alter my perceptions.
I thought the article provided some insight into logo design, and why some logos seem to "work" or "fit" and others don't. I.e., our brains are wired to match certain shapes with certain sounds and concepts.
I design logos as part of my job, and so when I see a particularly good or clever one I try to analyze it and see what makes it work. The idea of synesthesia gives me another angle to consider.
That's a common way to program cookies if you don't want them to expire any time soon: just stick some random date far in the future for expiration.
I discovered that yes, they are, when I went home for Christmas and used my dad's brand-new Dell with Windows XP and IE 6. Everywhere I went, I got pop-ups. Even worse, IE 6 for XP home seemed to have some sort of adware built in to it so that I got pop-ups at random times that seemed to be unrelated to the site I was visiting (e.g. ad pops up while I'm looking at User Friendly). Drove me nuts.
Dad didn't want to change browsers, so I pointed him to Tucows, picked the first high-rated popup blocker we found, and had him download a trial version. After a day of browsing without pop-ups and adware, he was so thrilled he bought the full version. People just need to know that they don't have to put up with this crap.
especially considering that the entire Renassance happened without copyrights
And many of the inventors of the Renaissance were paranoid about people stealing their work, and thus either reverted to writing everything in cipher or never wrote anything down at all. Leonardo da Vinci is one example of someone who used cipher to obfuscate his inventions.
So I guess you could say they had encryption to make up for the lack of copyright.
No kidding! A friend of mine is interviewing for a job tomorrow. She's perfectly qualified for it, but fears she won't get it because the company tends to hire people they know, or people recommended from within. We all told her she'd be nuts not to call the company's president, who she knows through church, and let him know she's interviewing for the position.
I see it again and again, especially in this tight job market. After all, when a friend desperately needs a job, don't you keep your eyes peeled and let him know about opportunities that could be helpful to him? ("Rachel quit today. Why don't you send in your resume?") Pity the unconnected person who has only one set of eyes and ears working for him.
Head over to netdiver and you'll see dozens of artists who use HTML, Javascript, etc. as their medium and have done so for years.
Perhaps back in 1998, this was a new art form. Today, there are more "my site is my art" web sites than you can shake a stick at.
Microsoft didn't get where it is by trying to be the next IBM. Only a fool buys into the notion of being the next Microsoft.
Marvelous quote. It should be printed on a t-shirt and passed out to every software company with a napoleon complex bigger than their potential customer base.