People Powered

Tue 4 Nov 200312:59 AM

There’s nothing particularly sexy about tomorrow’s elections, which will almost certainly guarantee that only a tiny fraction of the electorate will show up at the polls. This may explain, at least in part, why it was so hard to dig up an overview of the referendums on the New York City ballot. After some digging around, I came up with the Gotham Gazette’s overview. The hotbutton issue, of course, is Mayor Bloomberg’s quest to obsolesce partisan primaries — the Democrats are against it, and so is The New York Times.

Pulp Faction

Fri 31 Oct 200304:48 PM

Onion on an Elf

Fri 31 Oct 200311:17 AM

Everyone thinks The Onion is gut-bustingly hilarious and so do I, but if it came down to choosing between the faux newspaper’s satiric content — The Onion proper — and its supplemental entertainment section — The Onion A.V. Club — I’m almost certain I would choose the latter. This section, composed primarily of movie, music, video and book reviews, is highly underrated or at least under-noticed.

Retouching iPhoto

Wed 29 Oct 200301:30 PM

Without apology, I admit a prejudice against any Windows-based software that blatantly mimics innovations that originated on the Mac OS; a prime example is Candy Labs’ App Rocket, a startlingly faithful and shameless reproduction of Objective Development’s superb LaunchBar that was developed for — you might even say “ported to” — Windows XP recently.

Unfairly or not, I regard those indiscretions with scorn, and not a little indignation, which was my attitude when stumbling across Picasa, a program that bears a remarkable similarity to Apple’s iPhoto software for management of digital photos. I might have dismissed it altogether, but the attractive design of their Web site hinted at some level of cleverness at work, and so I decided to download and install the software on my Windows box for a trial run.

Fight the Fire

Tue 28 Oct 200307:43 PM

When I lived in Southern California in the early part of the 1990s, I saw earthquakes, wild fires, droughts, floods and the worst civil riots in recent American history. Not necessarily for those reasons exclusively, I found it hard to nurture much affection for the Golden State, but I still do have good reasons to remain sympathetic to the plights of its citizens — not the least of which is because my mother, sister and nephew all still live there.

And, from fiscal crises to horrific lapses in Democratic judgment, I always feel at least a little bit saddened by the unfortunate events that always seem to beset the world’s fifth largest economy. The recent wild fire raging throughout Southern California is another of these instances. I just got off the phone with a colleague in the Southland, and he’s tense with worry that he may lose his home to this monstrous natural disaster. I took a look at the satellite photos at NASA, too, and I found myself humbled and frightened by the immensity of the smoke. My heart goes out to everyone facing this elemental beast.

The Entitlement Culture

Mon 27 Oct 200311:59 PM

Housebreaking Tips for a Panther

Mon 27 Oct 200311:15 PM

With my girlfriend away all weekend in San Francisco, I figured that if I was going to make the somewhat reckless and potentially time-consuming decision to install Mac OS X Panther that I may as well do it while I had two good, solid days to myself. On Friday night I settled down after dinner and and set about preparing my system for the upgrade. First I did some research around the Web for tips on how best to avert any potential problems, which led me to pay for and download “Take Control of Upgrading to Panther” — a PDF-based ebook from TidBITS publishing that is an invaluable primer sold at the bargain price of US$5.

Crouching Panther, Hidden Crashes

Fri 24 Oct 200308:15 PM

All 23 gigabytes of my PowerBook’s hard drive have been backed up to my G4 tower, so I am, in some sense, ready to install Panther, the newest version of Apple’s Mac OS X software, as soon as it goes on sale tonight. In about an hour and a half, on my way home, I’ll probably swing by the venerable Tekserve and pick up my own copy… but I cant’t decide whether to actually go through with it and really install this major upgrade to the operating system on the very first weekend of its public release. Typically, I would wait a little while to see what kinds of problems other, more adventurous Macintosh fans might encounter. But there’s something about Panther that has me very anxious, and I’m just itching to get it running on my Mac. In all likelihood, I will install it on an external FireWire drive, but somehow I know I won’t be satisfied until I’ve thrown caution completely to the wind.

All Together Now!

Fri 24 Oct 200312:03 AM

Today at Behavior, we finally got a majority of the office running iTunes, thanks to the Windows version of this excellent music management, shopping and playing software that was released recently by Apple. This means both the Windows machines and the Macintoshes were all working together without a hitch, and much more seamlessly than just about any other cross-platform technology I’ve ever used.

This is all thanks to Apple’s superb implementation of the Zeroconf technology standard — Apple calls it Rendezvous — which makes networking and sharing ridiculously easy. We had already been using this between the Macs, but being able to see my colleagues’s Windows-bound iTunes music with absolutely no effort left me duly impressed.