Cdevers's blog

WYSI[sorta]WYG

The WYSIWYG post editor on Vox drives me batty and I wish I could disable or circumvent it. I know HTML. I'm not great at it, but I don't want anything fancy, and for what I want, it would be more than enough for the task. In particular: * I never ever want to use <font> tags (or CSS equivalent) -- the overall page template imposes fonts and I'm fine with working within that context. If I try to paste some text from elsewhere, such as another web page, the WYSIWYG Javascript editor somehow tries to pick up the pasted formatting -- fonts, styling, etc -- and apply it to the blog post. This is never what I wanted. Aside from hyperlinks, I'd be happy with flattened, styling free text. * I embed one of my Flickr photos with most or all of my Vox posts. This used to be twitchy, but basically worked. Now, the last two times I've tried to use it, it's throwing off the formatting for the whole post. In the current example (http://chrisdevers.vox.com/library/post/amazon-misremembers.html), I've ended up with a block of blank lines at the top that the editor won't let me delete, and a big unwanted margin all the way around the image. What I really want is an option to just use HTML, or even a subset of HTML -- the only tags I'd consistently need would probably be <p>, <a>, and <img>, with an occasional (but easily dispensable) <b> or <i>. That's it. Is it so much to ask? This has always been kind of annoying, but it's getting bad enough to make me seriously start thinking about migrating to another service such as Tumblr... :-(

Amazon Misremembers

Amazon Misremembers

Amazon.com's iPhone app has an interesting feature called "Amazon Remembers" where you can take a photo or something, wait a while, and then it magically tells you what the product is and what the best price they could find for it was. The idea, obviously, is you can go to the store, take a photo of something you're interested in buying, and see if there might be a better deal on the same product online somewhere. And for this, it works pretty well. But what happens if you abuse it? Amazon has at least to an extent anticipated the kind of misuse I'm thinking of here, as you're forced to take a photo, rather than take one from your existing library -- meaning you can't just put some silly photos in the library and pump them to Amazon to see how it handles them. On the other hand, taking a photo of a computer monitor works just fine. Yay analog hole. Just to see if Amazon loves a good scam as much as I do, I decided to "buy a bridge". I took a photo of Wikipedia's entry on the Brooklyn Bridge. Sure enough, Amazon identified it as the Brooklyn Bridge, and helpfully found a book called "Brooklyn Bridge" that could be bought for just $12. Not bad! Tried the Golden Gate Bridge next, which produced a photo of the bridge, along with a link to a poster of it. Two for two! Well, kind of, it's not selling me the actual bridge, but just products that mention it. Still, pending someone putting up the actual bridges for sale online somewhere, this will have to do for now. Trying more famous bridges, I try Scotland's Firth of Forth bridge next. This one responded with a poster of the New Hope-Lambertville Bridge in Pennsylvania. A fine bridge, to be sure, but not the landmark I was shopping for. Then I tried the Charles Bridge in Prague. Amazon responded with a rather dull poster of a bridge in Minneapolis, Minnesota. So now Amazon is down to 2 for 4 success rate on selling me bridges. Not even that, it's 2 for 4 on representations of the bridges, and 0 for 4 on the actual bridges themselves. Disappointing, I'd hoped for better from them.

A thought on saving the newspaper industry

Here's a thought: There's a widely circulating idea that the only way a lot of newspapers are going to sustain themselves is if they start charging for access to the web site, but if any of the other sites remain free, then it's a suicidal move. In the best case scenario, as you hint at here, the newspapers do all start charging at the same time, but then this has negative knock-on effects that could end up being just as suicidal, from damaging blog-journalism to diminished realized revenue. Either way, it seems like the only way forward is for a big fraction of the major papers to take some kind of coordinated effort. So how about the newspapers look into some kind of confederated subscription model, where being a "member" of one paper gets you access to other ones as well? If you get a membership to the Franklin Park & Stone Zoos, or the Museum of Science, that membership also gets you access to free or reduced admission to other zoos & science museums all over the country, and even internationally. Maybe the newspapers can do something similar, and this could play out in various ways. A membership to the NY Times might be more expensive than others, but would get you into other any other newspaper site in their network, while a cheaper Boston Globe membership might get you access to a handful of NYT articles per month, but not unlimited access there, but maybe it would get you full access to the Patriot Ledger, etc. Yes, this would involve getting a bunch of competing companies to come up with a way to pool & distribute revenue amongst themselves, but it's starting to seem like a situation where they'll either stand together, or hang separately. They have little to lose by trying it.

Kids Music Monday: Kermit the Frog, "Rainbow Connection"

Niagara Falls: Looking down the hill east across the falls toward the American observation tower and

In the spirit of Simon & Simon's (no, not that Simon & Simon) "90's Music Monday" and "Modern Music Monday" themes (respectively), I think I'll take a stab at doing a regular Kids Music Monday piece here. 

"But," the astute among you might note, "today isn't Monday."

To which I reply, "quiet you, or I'll pull this car right over, and you can walk home, capice?"

Okay then. 

The Muppet Movie

So let's start with the Muppets, and specifically, with "Rainbow Connection". From the beginning, I've tried to expose Isaac to good music -- Beatles & Bach good, Barney & Britney bad. He hasn't latched on to the grown up music the way I was hoping he might, but that's okay, it will come in time. 

The first song he did latch on to was "Rainbow Connection" from the Muppet Movie soundtrack, which is fine by me -- as noted by Denis Leary, "We all have this incredible attachment to the Muppets, don't we? We love the muppets! They're so cute!"

Shamelessly pasting from Wikipedia, because they've already done all the hard work of researching this for me, and because I'm lazy:

Kenny Ascher and Paul Williams received Oscar nominations at the 1979 Academy Awards for the movie score and for "The Rainbow Connection", which Allmusicdescribes as an "unlikely radio hit ... which Kermit the Frog sings with all the dreamy wistfulness of a short green Judy Garland."^[1] and goes on to add that "'TheRainbow Connection' serves the same purpose in [The Muppet Movie] that 'Over the Rainbow' serves in The Wizard of Oz, with nearly equal effectiveness: an opening establishment of the characters' driving urge for something more in life."^[1] The song was also nominated for the Golden Globes for "Best Original Song" in 1979, losing both Oscar and Globe to "It Goes Like It Goes" from Norma Rae.

"It Goes Like It Goes"? Clearly the Golden Globes had their eyes firmly on posterity that year. 

"Rainbow Connection" is the kind of song, much like Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" among the vaguely yearningly spiritual types, or "(I'm not your) Steppin' Stone" among punk bands and the Monkees, doing a cover of Rainbow Connection is a rite of passage among bands that might otherwise be covering "Over the Rainbow" or "What a Wonderful World" if the market there hadn't been so commandingly handled by the Israel Kamakawiwo'ole medley version of both songs. And while I'm sure IZ could have done a lovely version of Rainbow Connection had he lived long enough to do so -- actually, for all I know, maybe he did do a version of it, though 30 seconds of Googling turns up nothing other than the ukelele chords he could have used to play the song -- I think my favorite cover is probably the Dresden Dolls version: 

Dresden Dolls - Rainbow Connection - Live @ CHAC in Seattle

Maybe that can be my segue for getting Isaac into the clean version of "Coin-Operated Boy" at some point, though I might hold off on letting him hear the rest of the Dresden Dolls oeuvre for a while yet. 

The Dresden Dolls 'Coin-Operated Boy' music video

Isaac enjoying the convertible

Anyway, Rainbow Connection. Isaac's favorite song. The "Muppet Movie" soundtrack has a permanent place  on the CD changer in the car, because every time we drive somewhere, chances are good that the first thing Isaac will say is "Daddy! Put the Muppets on! Play Kermit!" 

Much of the rest of the album is good, too -- in particular, "Movin' Right Along" with Kermit & Fozzy Bear, "Can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em" with Kermit & Rawlf the Dog, and Gonzo's "I'm going to go back there someday" are all favorites. In fact, pretty much the only song I don't like, and I really don't like it, is the Miss Piggy torch song  "Never Before", which bugs me because it's the kind of overproduced schmaltzy Broadway style cheesey dross that, thankfully, mostly went away with the seventies.

But Isaac likes it, and the rest of them too, and knows most of the words by now. Since I'm a pushover when it comes to The Boy, when he asks for it, I'll usually give in & play it for him. 

And then he'll sing. 

And then I'll smile. 

I mean, it could be worse, right?

He could want to listen to Barney

Flickr enhancement feedback: batch operations from Organizr's map view

I wish we could do at least some of the Batch Organize operations from the Map view in Flickr's Organizr.

For example, I've just uploaded a batch of ~200 photos from my honeymoon in Paris five years ago. Over the years, the file names got messed with, the photo sequence got a bit messed up, and I don't quite remember now what all these things were or, more importantly, where they were. So I start with the Map view, placing the places I can remember on the map and doing some digging to try to figure out where the rest might have been, and for the most part this works well. But now I've got a big batch of photos, and I want to be able to say "all of these were of Versailles, while all of those were of the Eiffel Tower, and all of *those* were of Notre Dame. Ideally, I'd just be able to draw a square on the map (same UI as adding notes to an photo), but I could also just zoom out enough for the pins to merge, then select a pin. From there, I want to be able to add tags to the batch of all photos taken at that selected location, &/or do similar batch operations -- adjust the geoprivacy settings to all of them, batch-change the date, etc. 

As it is now, I have to go in and give them all titles -- which I need to do anyway, so that itself isn't a huge problem, aside from being time consuming -- and then remember to come back and tag them all appropriately. The latter is the tricky part. If you could just tag them right from the map, then you wouldn't -- okay -- I wouldn't have to do silly things like mention in each. and. every. photo. that it's a photo at such-and-such a place. If there's a way to approximate this now, I haven't been able to find it. Maybe some third party developer has a tool that can do it, but I haven't looked very hard elsewhere, as it seems like the sort of thing Flickr themselves ought to be able to offer as a fleshed out version of the tools they already present in the Organizr.

Crunchy curvy S-curve peak

So, remember all those posts I had back in the spring about peak oil, peak travel, peak globalization, peak food, peak population, peak suburbia, et cetera?

Yeah, about that. 

DJIA plummets

Let the record show that I have no idea what I'm talking about. 

The big trend at the beginning of the year was that the base price of all kinds of raw commodities -- fuel (oil), food (milk, corn...),  building materials (steel, cement) -- where in tandem hitting historic all time highs, with all kinds of nasty secondary effects. Americans lost interest in big, expensive SUVs, and started taking mass transit to work. People in places like Haiti had food riots. Shipping costs started to become prohibitively expensive, threatening globalization itself.

Now, things have gone in completely the opposite direction, less than six months later. 

South Boston sightseeing: Giant cranes & shipping containers at dockyard

Reconsider shipping. 

JEREMY HOBSON: The Baltic Dry Index measures the price of hauling sea freight. It hit an all-time high in May, and it's fallen 85 percent since then. Part of the reason is a drop in Chinese demand for raw materials like iron ore and coal, which make up a significant portion of worldwide dry shipping. But, says Douglas Mavrinac, the head of Shipping Research for Jeffries and Company...

DOUGLAS MAVRINAC: A significant portion of that decline has to do with the credit crisis, and banks aren't issuing letters of credit to companies to facilitate global trade.

Just like other industries, sea trade relies on a constant flow of money from banks -- loans for the producers of commodities, which have seen their value drop dramatically in recent months and loans for the shippers themselves.  

Got that? Fallen 85% since May.

And that's not even taking the effect of Somali piracy into account. 

Black Falcon Terminal skyways at dusk (detail)

At the same time, there's a shortage of shipping containers that is holding back the shipping business as well, and while I'm not totally clear on how the container shortage jibes with the plummeting cost of freight, it looks like the same root cause might hold sway: the credit crunch. 

But hold that thought, let's take a few more examples. 

Consider municipal recycling:

At the municipal recycling center in Branford, Conn., residents drop off all kinds of items: cans, plastic, paper, cardboard. So far this year, Branford — a town of 29,000 on Long Island Sound — has earned about $93,000 from selling recyclables. But solid waste manager Peg Hall says Branford soon may have to pay to dispose of certain items, such as mixed paper.

In the past, Branford has sold much of its paper to an intermediary that sells to China mills, which recycle it into packaging and cardboard boxes. But the economic slowdown has lowered demand for packaging, says Scott Taylor, a vice president at America Chung Nam, the world's largest exporter of recycled paper.

Taylor, who is based in Jersey City, N.J., says America Chung Nam was buying 400,000 to 500,000 tons of mixed paper a month this summer, when "you could get $70, $80, $90" for a ton. But prices collapsed in October, he says. As of late November, a recycling company had to pay $5 to $10 a ton for its removal.

[....]

DeVivo points to a mountain of paper. A few months ago, it was worth $56,000, he says. Now, "I can't sell that for the life of me. I have to pay a paper mill to take it away."

This summer, the plastic used to make water and soda bottles — polyethylene terephthalate, or PET — sold for $300 a ton. Now it's down to $20. Tin is way down, too.  

Got that? Communities were making money from recycling a few months ago. Not a lot -- maybe enough to pay the wages for 2 or 3 people operating a garbage truck all year -- but in the black at least. Now, they have to pay someone to take it away, and while it's still cheaper than just throwing it all in a landfill, it's not much cheaper, and that could change too. 

Diesel pump at Scituate Harbor dock: $5.49 gallon, $165 tank

Finally, consider gasoline. Last summer, it rose above $4/gallon in most of the country. Around here, it went well above $4.50/gallon for the "cheap" grade, and pushed $5/gallon for the premium grades. [The photo is of a marine gas pump, which always runs more expensive than automotive gas, but not that much more expensive.]

Now, gas prices are at a five year low, while oil, which was above $140/barrel a few months ago, is below $40/barrel now. Not that it'll help. 

Why?

Coins

That pesky credit crunch again. 

And just as before, the best updated overview of the credit crunch is another scary episode of This American Life. They aren't really talking about what's happening to the commodities markets that I'm mentioning here, because all of this is in a way aftershocks from what's happening -- or not happening -- in the world of high finance. 

The way I've been thinking about it, which may or may not be on the right track, is like pulling a slingshot until it snaps. The spring & summer were the pull back, the financial collapse back in September was the snap, and now we're seeing the broken rubber bands laying flaccidly on the ground, unable to propel anything any more. 

What will fix this? How long will it take? I'm not going to hazard a guess, other than to fear that it could be a long, long time. 

Apple, quietly

Train from Geneva to Montreaux: Train platform sign mentions APPLES and BIERE (BEER)

Is there some kind of unspoken rule among tech journalists that every article about Apple doing something has to have the phrase "Apple quietly [verb]"?

Consider:

1. Apple quietly releases Safari 3.2.1 • The Register
2. Slashdot | Apple Quietly Releases Safari 3.2
3. BetaNews | Apple quietly refreshes MobileMe
4. PC World: Apple Quietly Recommends Using Antivirus Software
5. Ars Technica: Apple quietly discontinues the 23" Cinema Display
6. Ars Technica: Apple quietly settles lawsuit over dithered laptop displays
7. Apple Quietly Kills FireWire 400 | Gadget Lab from Wired.com
8. Apple's MacBook and MacBook Pro quietly updated - Engadget
9. Don’t Tell Anyone: Apple Quietly Updates iMac! | The Mac Night Owl
10. Apple quietly updates U2 iPod, lowers price | iLounge News

That's just the first ten hits for a Google search for "Apple quietly", skipping over duplicates. But there's lots more where that came from -- 38,500 right now, and more every day.

I think I'll quietly hit the submit button now.

Tweets for Today

• 11:25 found some Ommegang beer this weekend, is suitably impressed by the presentation, looking forward to trying it on Thanksgiving :-) #
• 12:22 woefully under caffeinated today. ugh. #
• 21:20 Trying to make curry from scratch for Thanksgiving. May says it smells so good. Isaac says it smells bad & yucky. We'll find out Thursday! #

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Tweets for Today

• 09:19 didn't realize five happy years could go by so quickly! #
• 21:54 @fervidmuse boggling at tinyurl.com/5dqldd which I'd never heard of, but Must track down now :-) #
• 21:55 @fervidmuse and I already use "folder" and "directory" pretty interchangeable to begin with, I've actually lost track of which is preferred. #

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Tweets for Today

• 10:16 can't believe no one noticed it's 20 years since The Star Wars Holiday Special! tinyurl.com/4o8c5 #

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