An imaginary place in a reactionary time
Too ugly, too funny, too bad: vintage computer adds. Wanna see Shatner hawking Commodore’s VIC-20? Cosby plugging TI’s TI9900? Roger Moore pushing Spectravideo (the legendary machine that used 8 track cartridges to store data)? Isaac Asimov shilling for Radio Shack or Bill Gates or Bill Bixby?
Now if someone would scan in those old awefull adds Elton John did for Radio Shack’s Rogue synth…
Karen writes:
I and a couple of other Pilsen residents will be on WRTE 90.5 FM on
Monday night at 7:30 talking about pollution in the Pilsen
neighborhood. There will also be a segment on the same topic on
Wednesday at 7 pm in Spanish. You can listen online at
http://www.wrte.org/ (click “Listen live 24/7″ on the right-hand
column.) Tune in if you can!
The godfather of the Mac is dead. Note I said god father, not father. Jef’s vision for his project had no graphical user interface and no windows. It bears little resemblance to the computer/OS that was eventually released and none to the one I use every day. Follow the links in the article to Jef’s website, and read his essays. While he has great things to say about human interface design, his own ideals end up making a great case for EMACS, a finger busting UNIX text editor that I’ve spent years trying to master and finally given up on. My gut tells me that the way to improve interface design isn’t to add more keys to the keyboard, like Raskin did most famously with his Canon Cat. There are legendary/mythic tales of his hatred for the mouse. And he missed the point: GUIs work better for some people in some situations, text based interfaces work better for some people in some situations, and a mixture of both (one of his prime hatreds) works better for some people in some situations and there are times when people who normally use a GUI might want to use a text based interface. I tend to fall into the one from column A and one from column B group myself. I tend to use keystroke commands mostly in graphics programs and I tend to use the GUI mostly in text editing applications and system configuration (something which a guy with a UNIX history like me should do mostly from the command line). So go figure.
My gut tells me that we should have a extremely customizable computer interface, it should have many levels to it, along with a instant on default settings switch. Similar to the way they teach us to print before they teach us to write in cursive, you could start using the GUI, for instance, and then learn the key commands, then learn to customize your palettes, menus and widgets–or get lost in the command line. The interface should have discoverable levels of control. (arguments can be made or almost every Operating System out there having some of this paradigm, but none of them have it all, and even within the various OSes application developers don’t allow for enough customization).
Of course I wouldn’t have had these insights if it weren’t for having Jef Raskin to rebel against. I’m going going to miss reading and reacting to him. He will be missed
(and i forgot to mention all the other things he did, which is better covered in this Register obit.)
Our own Great Satan put me up for auction, in the McGuane Park fundraiser last night. Or rather an evenings escort service with me. I went for 30 bucks. Ned’s piece went for 80. I feel so cheap…
I thoroughly expect to repay the favor to GS soon. Very soon.
How’d you like a free way to share your videos like you share your mp3s using iTunes? Tryst will do it. Free, Open Source and password protectable (so you can share in a cafe without other people looking over your virtual shoulder). Uses Rendevouz, ’scuse me, Bonjour for effortless networking. This will give a whole new meaning to movie night, lots of folks clustered around their laptops watching the latest and greatest. Designed by a USC undergrad so the film school kiddies could pass around the latest dailies.
Also new and free is Musolomo, a performance sampler available as an Apple audio unit. Can’t be used with Logic Express, they recommend Rax or Ableton Live (Rax is from Granted Software, the makers of the hyper cool Still Life). Sampling, auto looping, pitch shifting, all live and on the fly. This is a deep little plugin:
“WARNING: This is no ordinary plugin. If you think you can simply ‘mouse around’ to learn, then you are wrong. Grab a controller keyboard and the manual. ok?”
Sony is having a contest to produce the best mash up of William Shatner’s new album. Well technically, it’s only two tracks from the album. Smells like irony. go check out the rules, download the tracks, and bemoan sonic foundry’s sale to Sony.
Sony drops the Clie. Sony has dropped all PDA’s, in favor of the Play Station Portable, and possibly some Palm based Sony Ericsson smart phones (and the current line of S-E phones as well).
(This is part of a larger post on Sony and Apple that I keep promising to write later.)
Happy Birthday Ben!
In honor of Ben’s birthday, we will be having all Nude Code Compiling and Debuging for the rest of the month (ok, you can set breakpoints or byte compile in your underwear). The real highlight of the celebration will be Saturday night’s naked Yeast revival and massacre.
(in the event I botched Ben’s birthday as I do every Year, it’s all dean’s fault.)
Calliope (a fork of the Otto 2.0 project) is now officially a Sourceforge project (woo hoo!). If you’re
interested in working on Calliope (vs. Otto), please move all discussion
either to the mailing list (preferred), or the developer forum at:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/kalliope
Yes, projects/calliope was taken, alas. The mailing list for developers
is under “lists” at the above link. The project home page remains on my
server at:
http://neil.verplank.org/opensource/calliope/
(Calliope is the impossible to spell MP3 player and server that lives in Neil’s dining room, and up until very recently ate all of Neil’s precious freetime. Think of it as iTunes on steroids, or The Great White Whale.)
UPDATED: Again…and again
I don’t know what posses me off more, the lack of info, the lack of coverage, the shallowness of the coverage, or the fact that John Dvorak piece is the only one that even comes close to saying what needs to be said: we lost one of our greatest writers and critics, after we had consigned him to the slag heap of sportswriting, now when we needed him most.
(It pains me to link to Dvorak, but here it is.)
Hunter S. Thompson was found dead from a self inflicted gunshot wound sunday.
ESPN archive of his recent work.
Esquire oral biography: “Young Doctor Thompson.”
John Unger’s obit.
The Reel Jeff sent in this link to the Aspen Daily News, with more info on the front page: HST wanted his remains shot out of a cannon at his funeral.
The New York Tines book section obit, Feb 22nd:
” During his career, there were moments, usually in interviews or in his own personal correspondence, when Mr. Thompson let the public in on the point. It was, he seemed to suggest, not really about guns and drugs, and tearing up the pavement and planting grass, but about grabbing public attention to focus on the failures of leadership, the hypocrisy in society.”
“In 1970 Mr. Thompson ran for sheriff in Pitkin County, Colo., on the “freak power” platform, calling himself “a foulmouthed outlaw journalist.” It seemed a joke, another outlandish act, until the votes were counted and he came close to winning. In a letter he wrote to Senator Walter Mondale in 1971, Mr. Thompson said his campaign came down “very simply to the notion of running a completely honest political campaign – saying exactly what we thought and what we planned to do.”
He added, “The real issue was Power … and Who was going to have it.”
Continue reading ‘rip hunter s.thompson’
