audio: sometimes vinyl is way better

Posted on 2012-04-15 by skierpage

I stopped playing Thomas Dolby’s classic in the background because The Flat Earth – Remastered & Expanded didn’t sound as good as I remembered it. Switching between the CD and my original signed LP, the vinyl is decisively better: deeper bass, better piano, way more realistic speaking voice. The CD isn’t any more detailed, it just brings instruments forward in the mix so most tracks have too much treble. My spouse noticed the improvement from vinyl immediately too.

It’s not a bad CD, every other Amazon reviewer says it’s better than the original CD and it doesn’t suffer from the loudness war. But it’s wanton cultural desecration that we’re losing sound quality when we have the tech to conserve or improve it. If you really love an album, try to hear the vinyl version on a great turntable through a good stereo before you die.

I’m no vinyl purist; I had just been listening to the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine on CD and thinking how good it sounds. Although the negative comments from Beatles die-hards make you realize there’s no single perfect version.

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music: Blossom Dearie swings coolly, perfectly

Posted on 2012-03-31 by skierpage

Lo-fi but enchanting, maybe the best piano+female vocal I’ve heard

At 0:39 the way she trills “surrey-with” and echoes the vibrato moments later in “fringe” is magic.  From 1:35 on her swung notes in winking, blinking, if-yur thinkin’ is right up there with Fred Astaire’s “Let the rain pitter-patter but it doesn’t really matter” on Isn’t This a Lovely Day. And her phrasing of the lines at 3:52 is sublime.

The performance is from the Jack Paar show in 1958. I’m so in love with it I ordered a DVD of the show, but sadly the DVD’s audio quality isn’t much better. There’s another version of this Irving Berlin song on her album Once Upon a Summertime, but it somehow lacks the magic and has a redundant guitar part.

“Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.” (Shakespeare’s The Tempest)

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skiing: better gloves

Posted on 2012-03-26 by skierpage

My replacement Swany Flexor FX-15 gloves were terrible, so I got new gloves, as did a ski buddy.

They’re both Gore-Tex with leather palms and fingers. They both have leashes so you can’t lose a glove.

The Dakine Rover gloves seem even better. There’s a built-in squeegee on the back of the left thumb, and the right thumb has a soft nose wipe.

I decided to get a gauntlet glove instead of a cuff, because a ski jacket won’t stay over a glove. But the Dakine completely blows it by having an interior drawstring. Instead of pulling the gauntlet over your jacket, then pulling the edge of it tight, you have to fish around inside and try to pull that over your jacket.

The problem with glove leashes is the gloves hang upside down, and then snow gets in them, and when you put them back on you wedge the snow into the fingertip and it won’t come out.

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skiing: Swany trashes their reputation

Posted on 2012-03-26 by skierpage

I had a pair of leather Swany Flexor gloves for years. These have articulated fingers “technology created for NASA space missions.” Quality comfortable gloves. They worked well for about 7 years but finally the thumb gave way, probably because I was using them for snowboarding as well. I bought a lightweight pair for spring skiing that still work perfectly.

crappy Swany Flexor FX glovesSo I bought the new version, Swany Flexor “FX-15 Weapon”, and only used them for skiing Within a year the strange PVC covering on the palm and fingers started peeling and tearing at the edges. If you compare the shiny leather on the left thumb with the left index finger and right pinky, you can see how the leather treatment has disintegrated. Also note the seam below the left index finger is splitting apart. And when the gloves’ lining got wet (and all leather gloves eventually soak through on a slushy day), they leaked purple dye onto my skin! The original had a quality Hydrofil lining, the new just had generic nylon, although they claim it has Dupont Thermolite insulation. After three seasons I gave up and bought another brand.

Maybe Swany realized how badly they screwed up, because they are now offering the “FX-1R VINTAGE” glove that recreates the original,right down to the faux slalom racer excessive padding on the knuckles that gets stuck in your ski pole loops (which was the only flaw in the original)

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software: the future desktop environment

Posted on 2012-03-23 by skierpage

Since Windows blew up I’m happy enough running a free Linux desktop, the KDE environment running on the Kubuntu distribution.

Three big Linux environments are all chasing a new vision: Gnome Shell, Ubuntu Unity, and KDE Plasma are all trying to move beyond the 17-year old Windows 95 desktop paradigm of a Start menu button on a bar that also shows running applications and a handful of system icons. As is Windows 8 Metro. All of these changes are leading to much wailing and gnashing of teeth. But I don’t see any of these efforts actually addressing the yawning chasm between working with in the browser with bookmarks and favorites, and working with local files in applications.

As I wrote:

I think there are three competing visions that inelegantly share our “bigger than 40cm” computer screens:

  1. A windowed desktop running multiple programs that operate on a local file hierarchy;
  2. A tabbed browser where we interact with web pages that mostly ignore the local file hierarchy;
  3. Smartphone-like full-screen apps that hide the local file hierarchy.

Nobody has figured out how to meld these, so it’s not surprising that Linux desktop environments are in a state of churn along with Windows 8, i/Mac OS, etc. And average computer users are bewildered; most of the time they do everything in the browser, until they’re faced with a “Save as” dialog or they plug in a camera, at which point they just fill random directories with crap they’ll never find again.

I think the inexorable trend is towards browser-based software (which thanks to HTML5 doesn’t imply always needing an internet connection, or storing all your data in the cloud). But Apple/Google/Microsoft resist this because they can monetize an app store and because they’re big enough to get platform-specific development. (Note how all would-be smartphone and tablet competitors start with “write HTML apps” until they get big enough to sing a different tune “Write proprietary apps for our app store”.) But Linux desktop environments aren’t in the game for $3.99 apps. So I think they should give up on applications written for their toolkit and just work on a lighter-weight OS that provides a fantastic browser environment for great HTML5 applications. The raw source code is out there with Chromium OS, Boot to Gecko, Tizen, etc. The innovation lies in figuring out how to present a useful coherent vision for bookmarks, files, application icons, app tabs, recent documents, and all the other paradigms that currently conflict and confuse us.

http://jalopnik.com/5895814/todays-morning-shift-choose-your-own-adventure

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web: RIP Google Wave

Posted on 2012-03-21 by skierpage

Google Wave screenshotGoogle is shutting down wave.google.com. Back in 2009 it was the most exciting piece of software to come along in years. A real-time multi-user rich document editor!! So it can be a chat window, a collaborative Word document, a scrapbook, a planning area, an e-mail thread, a live news update… Google boiled it down to “A wave can be both a document and a conversation.”

Its demise was almost preordained when Gmail didn’t show new and updated waves. Perhaps another SPage’s law: If it has its own inbox, then it’s probably going to fail. After dealing with my regular Gmail inbox, the last thing I want to do is go to another inbox and fuss with that. And Gmail isn’t even my main e-mail account, so I rarely get to Gmail, let alone other Google inboxes! Which reminds me, maybe I’ve got new messages in my Google Voice inbox…

The ideas/ideals of Google Wave live on in other Google products. Several people can work on the same Google Docs document at the same time and it has a separate chat window. And Google documented the underlying Wave federation protocol and released an open source implementation. Building on that codebase, Etherpad lets multiple people go to a URL and simultaneously edit its text; then Mozilla turned this into htmlpad which lets multiple people author the same HTML document.

So instead of Google Wave taking over everything thanks to its fundamental do-everything capabilities, existing web software and new web niches have adopted its features. I think free-form amorphous collaboration is just too uncertain for us humans, even with revision history and rollback. The idea that your chat could be turned into a presentation, or your e-mail can be rewritten by someone else, is disquieting, even though in a digital fungible world that’s always the case. Google Wave too explicitly showed our 1s and 0s are just an amorphous lump of clay, most people need an organizing framework such as: my sent e-mail – your reply,  my chat – your response, or my version of the Word doc – everyone else’s ^%$#@! e-mail attachment; though the success of wikis suggest many of us can give up authorship in the right context.

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cars: aftermarket versions as status symbols

Posted on 2012-03-02 by skierpage

Brucie's Executive Lifestyle AutosWhen it comes to status symbol cars , I’m always reminded of this purveyor:

Cars are an extension of ourselves, like DNA. And if you have the wrong DNA, you should be put out to pasture. When it comes to autos, auto modifications, or the kind of lifestyle advice that will make you a winner, come to Brucie’s Executive Autos.

Play to win, all the time, with the kind of cars winners have. My name’s Bruce Kibbutz. How do winners roll? I’m talking automotive bling, baby. I’m talking rims made with fake spinning gemstones. I’m talking putting your name in classy script on the hood. I’m talking about being original, just like everybody else who can afford to be. I’m talking about taking a 250,000 dollar sports car designed by world-class engineers and letting a guy from East Hook modify it so it’s worth a lot less. That’s right, A LOT LESS! That’s player style baby! Because you can, because you’re different! Brucie’s Executive Lifestyle Autos!”

— from the parody masters at GTA, Dan Houser and Laszlow.

Here’s the video

 

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web: ten thousand pages about a hundred ways to do any one thing

Posted on 2012-02-23 by skierpage

Developing stuff on the web isn’t hard, anyone can View > Source your work, someone made those billion web pages, and a lot of web designers promote themselves by writing about their work. In general this is great and we should be grateful but…

The paradox of choice in the supermarket is nothing compared to the tyranny of choice in web development. And none of the developers are up-front about their hack’s limitations (only one row of images, can’t support different orientations, fails utterly without JS, etc.).

57+ Free Image Gallery, Slideshow And Lightbox Solutions

at first I wanted simple image gallery solution for web design project, but when I started to search I changed my mind and thought how great would be to create article about all the best image gallery solutions available on the Internet.
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web: say no to JavaScript templates you can’t try in a browser

Posted on 2012-02-23 by skierpage

Dear developers of JavaScript templating systems (all 23 of you),

Instead of telling me that your baby runs in a browser and even showing me canned examples, let me interactively try it out! So Handlebars.js wins over EJS, jQote2, JSON Template, Tempo, … by a landslide.

Handlebars.js is a sweet javascript library for building clean logicless templates based on the Mustache Templating Language.
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web: Conoco’s feedback form incompetence proves SPage’s Law

Posted on 2012-02-18 by skierpage

Conoco-Phillips-76 e-mails me that my February statement is available on their web site. No it isn’t, they only have statement activity. I want to help companies do a better job, so I try and tell them using their contact form (Help & Contact Us > Email Customer Service), but of course SPage’s Law kicks in:

SPage’s law: the part of every Web site with the most problems is the feedback form for reporting problems

  • The form subject line is only 37 characters, but there’s no warning, just a bizarre auto-advance to the next field so you don’t realize you just screwed up your e-mail and which also makes it difficult to correct.
  • The tooltips won’t go away (and don’t activate when you make a mistake).
  • The form thinks “comm@{mysitename}.com” is an invalid e-mail address.
  • The tooltip says “Message can only be 20 lines maximum”, but there’s no immediate feedback if you go over. And 20 lines is meaningless, presumably it’s a certain number of characters.
  • You’re only informed of the last two form problems after you submit. It’s called “Client-side JavaScript form validation”!
  • If the server detects a problem the page redisplays with error text in red (good), but it’s far from the form itself. The site should display errors next to the form fields!
  • If the server detects a problem and the page redisplays it resets the Topic field to “Select one”, so after you correct one problem with the form and submit, you get an error that you didn’t select a topic!
  • The form has repeatedly failed to submit messages of mine, but the only error message is “Please enter your message in the box below” My messages are less than 20 “lines”, one was only 345 characters… is that too much? I have no idea what the f***ing problem is, I just make random changes to the text.

More woes outside this form:

  • Everything in the site navigation menu links to ‘#’ (presumably it uses JavaScript to actually go to a page), so if you right-click any menu item and choose “Open Link in New Tab/New Window”, the new tab contains exactly the same web page you were on before!

And it seems nobody answers their Online Technical Assistance phone number (1-877-345-9723) at the weekend, but they don’t tell you this on the web site or in the phone tree, you find out the hard way.

A chain of incompetence that proves SPage’s Law.

Posted in laws, service, web | 1 Comment