Just a quick note on something I just observed. Google is getting better and better at the sort of UI tweaks that I’ve come to expect from Apple. Maybe Google did this months ago and it was just so subtle that I just now noticed it, but if you look at the “mode change” box in the upper right hand corner of Google Maps, it acts as a lens showing you exactly what’s there: see my example, where you can see the corner of the Oregon Convention Center and MLK Blvd. in the box.
Really cool, guys.
OK all. I’m going to spam a few specific people who had expressed interest, but I also wanted to post this publicly as well.
Shrewsbury Renaissance Faire in Kings Valley, Oregon is September 10-11, 2011, and I need your help!
Last year, I inherited a rough job: I became the Guildmaster Pro Tempore of the Artyfactors’ Guild. We’re the guild that is responsible for the Faire getting built. We also do a bunch of other neat things, including operating the Water Dragon Maze, and this year a few little surprises which will be announced later..
All in all, it’s a wonderfully fun job. We have a good time playing with power tools for pre-faire/post-faire. We get to chase kids around the maze during Faire. We get to camp out at Faire site, and trust me: there’s no better experience than being at a Faire site after we kick the patrons out.
I NEED MORE VOLUNTEERS. I’m working on filling out my daily schedule for all the tasks that need to be performed, and I’m running very short on manpower I can depend upon. I know there’s a lot of wonderful people in my friendship circle who’ve never been to a Renaissance Faire, but might be interested in going. What better way to come to a Renaissance Faire than as a volunteer? You’ll get the total behind-the-scenes experience. You’ll be living, at least for 48 hours, in an Elizabethan English village with colorful people. You’ll be able to know that you had a hand in creating an experience for the general public: by your very presence!
There are a few rules. We will need to get you a reasonably period costume, if you don’t have one already. That we can arrange. We’ll also need to get you to Kings Valley, Oregon. That we can also likely arrange with carpooling, if you live in or around the Portland Metro (or can get there) to Corvallis. If you have a sleeping bag, we can arrange a tent for you to share with others (the Artyfactors have a guild hall behind the scenes).
There will be food. There will be fellowship. I can also guarantee a lifetime of memories. Volunteering for Shrewsbury has been one of the highlights of my life, and one that I can’t wait to share with you. If you have physical limitations, we still have jobs that need to be done. If you think you can’t, believe me .. you can.
Call me ASAP at 503-451-0714, and we’ll get your adventure started.
Steve Jobs is stepping down from Apple as CEO. He will be continuing on as Chairman. The news media has gone crazy over “OMG, what will happen now?”
Very little, in reality. And it shows just how stupid a lot of people are about how all companies, even Apple, are run.
Yes, unlike most CEOs, Steve Jobs had a lot of input into design decisions. More than any other tech company executive, Jobs seemed particularly prescient in determining high-level designs and even some low-level features. But in the end, he had as much to do with the actual end product as the CEO of ExxonMobile has to do with the formulation of the gasoline you buy at the pump.
To be sure, Jobs made sure Apple hired the best, and set the overall tone for how the company is (micro-)managed. And I have no doubt that for high-profile products he was in many of the design meetings ensuring that his vision was the one that was getting pushed.
But in the end, it’s more about the people Steve Jobs HIRED than about Steve himself. Tim Cook is one of the people that Jobs has had a strong influence over.
As long as nobody panics and the Board of Directors stays out of everybody’s way, there’s no reason why Apple can’t continue for the next ten years being the same company they have been the last 10.
There was a story on Slashdot about selling off a chunk of radio spectrum that amateur radio uses as “secondary users”. The usual arguments back and forth were had, including somebody trotting out the old standby of ham radio will save us when all else fails!~!.
Aside from the fact that even I, somebody who’s a staunch advocate of amateur radio as a technical playground and resilient backup communications plan, don’t 100% agree with that perspective, it ignores the simple fact that ham radio as a hobby is dying with the generation of men and women who took up the hobby in the Baby Boomer generation.
My comment:
Increasingly, there aren’t enough ham radio operators in some areas to really depend upon when the fit hits the shan.
I’ve seen it in my own community here in Oregon. The RACES/ARES group that helps out at our Renaissance Faire with emergency comms now does not have enough healthy bodies to man a station 24 hours a day for three days. And you can’t get enough young people interested: it’s worth noting that between myself and a handful of other young folk, there are more hams on the staff of this Faire than the emergency comms group has in its active membership (side note: I’d be a volunteer for this emergency comms group, but I live 80 miles away). But we’re too busy actually doing Faire things to have our hands on radios… we can barely keep up with our “day jobs” on site and the radio traffic relevant to our immediate Faire Guild.
The past few disasters locally have largely been worked by a handful of dedicated hams, many of them working to exhaustion. As these men (many of whom are in their 60s or older) age, their ability to man a radio for 16 hours a day is rapidly declining. Soon, there may not be enough active, well trained hams with ready-to-go equipment to respond.
If you are a tech geek and don’t have a license, get one. If you have a license and don’t have at least a “scram kit” with at least an HT and some basic tools for building antennas, making electroncis repairs, and a couple of good maps (plus all the “usual” recommended disaster supplies) you are part of the problem.
So, to that, I’d like to issue a challenge to the geek friends of mine who are out there. If you do not have a ham radio license but would like to get one, talk to me and I’ll help you anyway I can. If you are an inactive ham who doesn’t have a “scram kit” built, or you feel you lack the skills or know-how to use it, seek me out and we’ll put one together for you and teach you basic emergency techniques. If you are an active ham with an assembled “scram kit” but have never had the opportunity to use it, let’s talk about a sked, where we both take our field kits out somewhere and try to work each other.
These skills are valuable not only to each other, but to our greater community. The more we demonstrate our value by keeping our skills current the more likely we can keep the hobby relevant and interesting to the next generation of geeks, not to mention society at large. If we lose our relevance, no amount of donations to the ARRL Spectrum Defense Fund can help us.
The old teeth gnashing about the prevalence of “good enough” technology is making the rounds again, for some reason. This is an issue that comes up from time to time in the tech world, and it’s always an interesting discussion.
It’s no secret that I’m on the side of “Worse is (often) Better”. I’ve ranted repeatedly about this both in person and in various online forums. I’ve talked about “good enough often is” so many times with colleagues and the like I’m sick of even having the argument anymore.
But the biggest reason why “good enough often is” can be summed up by the reasons why mp3s became the success they are today. To a trained ear, the format has some limitations, and even my crappy hearing can sometimes tell the difference. It certainly is inferior to the technical quality of the average CD.
However, in my world I’m never in a position to actually HEAR the difference unless I’m listening for it. Most of my music listening takes place either in transit from place to place (be it by car, bus/train, or other conveyance), or as background in my home. In either place, I’m in an “imperfect environment” anyway, so “good enough” is just that. Even if I had lossless files playing on a THX-certified player with a $300 headset, I’d still be in a noisy environment, with the 60db of traffic noise around me dulling my low-frequency hearing into oblivion.
“Good enough is” precisely because most of the time we’re not in a laboratory. Most human beings spend their days in environments (be they work or play) that are never going to be “perfect listening rooms”, so using an audio format that is lossy doesn’t matter.
You can look at every other situation were “Worse is Better” and come to the same conclusion. Large laptops (“desktop replacements”) are not as powerful and have inferior displays to desktop machines, but are more portable. Netbooks are desirable over than large laptops to some, precisely because a large laptop is cumbersome to balance on your knee on the bus, even though netbooks are typically slower and have inferior ergonomics than larger laptops: tablets are even “better/worse”, as are smartphones. Monoaural audio devices like Bluetooth headsets often have slightly better range and are not insignificantly cheaper than their stereo counterparts, even though the monoaural Bluetooth profile offers less fidelity.
The trick is finding the tipping point where worse gets better. There’s a saying in the photography community that says “the best camera is the one you have when the shot appears,” an axiom that proves how wrong I was about smartphone cameras (synopsis of that opinion: they’re shite, always will be, and therefore worthless). Even the crappy camera on my original Palm Treo 650 (“1.2 megapixels”, but that makes it sound better than it really was) was “the one I had when the shot appears” in more than one occasion. Flipping through iPhoto I find a lot of really good pictures I’ve taken with whatever camera I happen to have in my hands.. which usually is a smartphone. Meanwhile, my $1200 digital SLR kit sits collecting dust in my closet.
Are the photos technically inferior to what I can do with the digital SLR? Most certainly. I can complain all day about the “noise” in the camera phone photos, the sloppy focus, the lack of depth of field, and even the quantization errors in the often sloppy JPEG encoding. But I have the shot, where I wouldn’t have the shot if I had to find my DSLR, take it out, warm it up, and shoot.
But the greater point? I have to “switch gears” to even notice the imperfections in the photos. After they’ve been printed on my (“good enough”) inkjet printer and housed in a small frame, I still get a lot of enjoyment out of many of the photos I’ve taken of events and loved ones with.. well, quite shitty cameras. Old 110 film was “good enough” for many in the 70’s, even though it was inferior in most ways to 126 film (and not to mention crap compared to 35mm).
I guess in this regard I should have looked to my own career path as an example, and I didn’t. VoIP, be it Skype or whatever, is a great example of how “worse is better” has played out. The “old telephone network” was engineered for robustness. In our post-Bell System world, we view it as way over-engineered. VoIP is, in many ways, way worse. The audio quality can be inferior, it requires a reasonably well engineered network (or at minimum “over-engineered” bandwidth) (contrast that to conventional dialtone, which works at insane distances over very poor quality cable), and is very ‘portable’. Oh, and because of a lot of competition in the sphere and the economics of the product, essentially free.
“Worse is better” only because the people who define “worst” as solely being some artificial (and often just perceived) advantage a legacy technology has. Vinyl records are far inferior at technical sound reproduction than any digital method with a reasonable sample rate, period. End of story. There’s no arguing that from a purely scientific stance. Even high bitrate lossy codecs can provide more accurate sound reproduction than vinyl, at a significantly reduced “cost” and at lower maintenance.
Vinyl may “sound better” (and I’d argue that as well), but it isn’t technically superior in any scientifically measurable way. The irony: those who think that presence is a desirable trait in audio (mostly because they don’t have any high-frequency hearing anymore) and don’t like “brilliance” think vinyl is subjectively superior to both CDs and MP3s. But that’s only because they’re applying the “worse is better” ideal. Poor fidelity reproduction is better than precisely, scientifically engineered reproduction.
And that’s the point. The point is that the word “worst” is misapplied. It’s not really worse. It’s just the rules of what’s required is redefined by each generation of user. Modern music listeners are willing to sacrifice a small amount of fidelity for considerably more portability and accessibility. Music isn’t something they listen to in their living room turned listening room. It’s become a part of their daily life. Many non-geeks now have digital music libraries that far exceed even what an audiophile would have had 40 years ago, in both quantity of “albums” and the genres it spans.
“Survival of the fittest” is a much better way of wording “worse is better.” Fitness is defined by the environment: smarter but ugly can often win over dumb and beautiful.
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