Apple product update cycle
So you want to know when it’s a good time to buy an Apple machine?
Well, you might get this page after a little Googling, and it’s a lot of fun, but what you really need is The Mac Buyers Guide.
Don’t buy before reading it, or you’ll be like my brother in law, who bought two Mac Minis last week ….
Podscope
This is absolutely huge. Somebody buy it, quick.
I’m talking about Podscope.
This is a search engine for podcasts, and if the technology they are building actually works, it will be enormous. I’ve tried searching on Podscope for a variety of topics, and have been getting very good results.
Software that automates spoken language transcription to text quite reliably: very cool.
Unlimited Access
Unlimited Access: an FBI Agent Inside the Clinton White House is a scary, scary book - even a decade after it was published.
I just happened to pick it off the library shelf last Saturday, picked it up last night, and could hardly put it down.
The revelations that author Gary Aldrich documents about the Clinton era are nothing short of mind-blowing. Corruption was so common it became banal … to the US national media as well as the Clinton insiders.
Much of what the book broke for the first or near-first time in 1996 is well-known and well-documented now: Bill’s constant affairs, the rampant drug abuse problems in the hired help, the almost incredible degree of nepotism and favoritism exemplified by Travelgate (in which Hilary wanted to fire all the existing White House travel department in order to provide plum positions for personal friends, acquaintances, and cronies).
Every page resonates with head-shaking, depressing nonsense. For example, when Vince Foster committed suicide under suspicious circumstances, the Park Service, yes, the Park Service were commissioned to investigate his death. Not the Secret Service. Not the FBI. Not the police. Not the CIA. The park service. Unbelievable.
To me, however, the biggest things that stand out are the way that Clinton and Hilary treated ordinary people, the staff of the White House. They were dirt, or less than dirt, to the Clintons - who were supposed to be compassionate Democrats. And how they (Chelsea included) referred to their Secret Service guards: trained pigs. This for people who would have given their lives to protect them.
Character is revealed by few things as starkly as how people treat those over whom they have power. On this score alone, the Clintons fail, and fail miserably.
The other major thing is the complete lack of respect for the truth, twisting it to whatever they needed it to be. Which, naturally, also demonstrates a complete lack of respect for the people Clinton was supposedly governing.
If Hilary Rodham ever gets anywhere near the Oval Office again, America is in for a rough, rough ride.
Sushi express
You know the sushi that you see on a conveyor belts running around the whole sushi bar on movies?
Well, no need to spend the 8 bucks. Herro of Japan (is that like Lawrence of Arabia?) has posted a video blog entry of precisely this fascinating phenomenon …
Rips to Indigo
The 3 happiest words in the English language are:
“Rips to Indigo”
No, I’m not going to explain why. I will say, however, that when I asked my boss what the 3 happiest words in the English are, he answered: “Not my problem.”
Nice try, Kevin!
Wow … Virtual Earth works on a Mac
I just happened to wander over to Scoble’s post on Virtual Earth and clicked a link …
It’s kind of cool that MSN Virtual Earth works on Safari. Kudos to Microsoft on this one!
Safari RSS: a Cop on my Computer
OK, full disclosure: I use Safari for almost all of my surfing, as well as my RSS.
It’s good, fast, and aesthetically pleasing - an important aspect of a discerning computer user’s experience.
Since the latest update (I’m using Safari 2.0 build 412.2), I’ve only run across one site that does not work properly with Safari. And I know that developers of that site are seriously clueless - a Javascript on the page requires IE funkiness to work. OK, I can handle that. Not Apple’s fault.
But there is something that is Apple’s fault. And I’m particularly ticked off about it because it’s a design decision that Apple must have made to brown-nose studio and music company execs: Safari won’t download movies or MP3 files anymore.
It used to be very simple … be on a page, see a movie or hear a sound you like, click File -> Save As, and you’ve got it. No more.
Well, this is a problem. Not because I can’t steal music and movies anymore - I never used it for that anyways. But I happen to blog for The Linguist, a language-learning start-up in Vancouver, Canada. And we put out a newsletter with I Make News. The newsletter is done by someone else, and the easiest way for me to get the files and submit them to our podcast directory (which is listed on iTunes, by the way) is to just suck them off the newsletter, upload them to our site, and that’s that.
Or, that should be that. Safari won’t let me suck the podcasts down. A File - Save as on an audio file results in a 4 Kb ‘audio’ file on my desktop. Double-clicking that file opens up iTunes, and precious little besides. Certainly not the podcast I’m hoping to capture.
Well, Firefox to the rescue. Firefox isn’t a cop on my own computer, wagging its finger at me every time I do something that it thinks is a problem. But I shouldn’t have to open up a new browser to do something fairly standard, fairly obvious.
This is disappointing.
But the biggest disappointment is that Apple is a company founded on enabling people to do cool stuff with technology. Disabling the existing functionality to save files is a step backward, and a rejection of that heritage.
Islands of relief
I was listening to Greg Laurie on Praise 106.5 today, and he quoted Jerry Seinfield:
“Everyone’s looking for good sex, good food, and a good laugh,” Jerry asserts. “They’re little islands of relief in what’s often a painful existence.”
Yikes, that’s a pretty downer view of life: “little islands of relief.” I guess it’s close to Thoreau’s “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Laurie brought this up in reference to Solomon’s view of life without God … which is basically the same.
If that’s you, you need to start searching. ‘Cause there’s something better.
The zen of failure
Joel put out one of his patented Joel on Software briefs today, and there’s lots of good reasons to go check it out.
This one was worth the price of admission for me:
The Creative Zen team could spend years refining their ugly iPod knockoffs and never produce as beautiful, satisfying, and elegant a player as the Apple iPod. And they’re not going to make a dent in Apple’s market share because the magical design talent is just not there. They don’t have it.
Basically, this is the Pareto Principle in action …
Office for free
OK, I needed a office suite for our new family iMac.
Did I mention free?
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About
Sparkplug 9 is John Koetsier's blog on life, the universe, and everything,
but mostly the stuff you see big in the tags to the left.
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