“But when one of your employees yells, ‘They’re not allowed to give it to you up here!’ at a customer, that’s probably a sign that the systems you have put in place have become self-defeating. Personally, I was so offended by that expediter that I’m now getting my coffee at the Starbucks on 60th Street.”
(Via Joel on Software) #
“When we gaze into a mirror, we are all of us Narcissus, tethered eternally to our doppelgänger on the other side.” — fascinating article from the New York Times on the humble mirror.
(Via Arts and Letters Daily) #10 April 2008
Eighteen ways to pass the time between Montreal and San Francisco
There’s a common misconception that international air travel can be boring. I’m here to disprove it with this handy list of 18 ways you can pass the time between (just to take an example at random) Montreal and San Francisco.
- Idly flick CNN on in your hotel room at 2200 the night before you fly. Note that American Airlines are grounding ‘hundreds of flights’ the next morning because of a compliance issue.
- Express surprise that Qantas is still showing your flight as ‘confirmed’, even though a quick check of AA.com indicates it is one of the many cancelled flights.
- Ring American Airlines. For maximum enjoyment, spend 50 minutes on hold.
- Discover that the only flight available to make your connection at Chicago O’Hare departs Montreal at 6am.
- Note that this means getting up at 3am to check in, and that it is already 11.30pm.
- Sleep briefly.
- Get up at 3am and check out of your hotel.
- Discover that because of some unspecified code in the AA ticketing system, the check-in agent can’t issue boarding cards without redoing your booking from scratch.
- Wait while check-in agent does booking from scratch.
- Queue in deserted hall for US customs to open.
- Clear US customs.
- Sit in empty departure lounge with six other people waiting to board flight.
- Board eerily-empty aircraft and discover that even though AA has cancelled over 800 flights today, this one is only carrying half a dozen passengers.
- Travel, very bumpily, to Chicago O’Hare.
- Discover that, while you were in flight, your San Francisco flight was cancelled.
- Wait as the Admiral’s Club staff re-book you … on a flight departing Chicago at 6.30pm. Yes, that’s right, 10 hours away.
- Have pizza for breakfast and contemplate your lost afternoon that you were supposed to be spending at Fishermans Wharf, and which you will instead be spending in the Admiral’s Club at O’Hare.
- Write long list of ways to pass the time between Montreal and Chicago.
An excellent article from Harold Fromm, asking why Bach “hasn’t fired the popular imagination” ... “we have soppy movies about Mozart and Beethoven as well as proliferating biographies for the intelligent general reader, but nothing really comparable for Bach”.
(Via Arts & Letters Daily) #24 February 2008
Why I have cancelled my Mozy subscription, and what it would take for me to sign up again
Late last week, I cancelled my Mozy online backup subscription.
I’d been using Mozy to back up my Home folder on my new 24” iMac, but over about four months I’m guessing I was able to make one successful backup. Each morning, I’d be greeted by an error message from Mozy — usually ‘unable to communicate with backup servers’ — or the sad sight of the software sitting at the ‘preparing files’ stage and unable, for whatever reason, to move on.
Of course, this isn’t entirely Mozy’s fault. Broadband access in Australia is in a pretty parlous condition — we’re on an ADSL2+ connection here and, while we get decent download speeds, uploading is a bit of a joke. And this means that, even if the Mozy end of things had worked better than it did, the idea of uploading 16Gb of data ‘into the cloud’ remains a bit of a pipe dream, if you’ll pardon the pun.
But to be honest, I could have lived with the very slow backup speeds. After all, Mozy runs in the background so why should I care if it takes a month to complete a backup? So long as my data is backed up, speed isn’t crucial.
No, the straw that finally broke the camel’s back was that Mozy’s Mac client is still in beta, and, at least as of my last use, is a massive memory hog.
Before I finally shut it off on Thursday, it was chewing through 1.5Gb of RAM and counting. My previously sprightly iMac was hanging on simple tasks like clicking a link in Safari, and launching applications took forever.
As soon as I’d gotten rid of Mozy, though, everything was back to normal.
(The argument can certainly be made that what I experienced was par for the course with beta software — that I took my chances and was bitten by a bug. But for a service I’m paying around $50 per year for, I’d expect this sort of thing to be taken care of. My feeling is you can either be in beta, or charge for your product, but not both. This may turn out to be a controversial opinion.)
For now, I’m returning to external Firewire drives. But the dream of backing up ‘into the cloud’ remains — it’s just going to take better broadband infrastructure and better Mac software to make the dream a reality.
11 February 2008
After five days: my setup and initial impressions of the MacBook Air
I’ve had my MacBook Air for five days now. This is a good moment to record some initial thoughts about it, after having taken the time to get things set up exactly how I want them, and before I get too used to it.
Design
Well, it’s beautiful. It’s like a MacBook Pro that’s been put through a clothes wringer — a single piece of milled aluminium that just happens to be very, very thin. As a result, it feels remarkably solid, and certainly a lot more solid than it looks. Amazingly, there is no flex in the shell at all.
The glossy 13” wide-screen is typically fingerprint-prone. Although it’s a nice touch, the fact that Apple includes a cleaning cloth for the screen is an indication of the fact that they think you’re going to spend a lot of time cleaning the screen…
The machine is full of nice design touches. Instead of a clip holding the lid closed, there’s a magnet – not only does this make the closure incredibly thin and tight, but it also means there’s a lovely subtle metal-on-metal ‘tap’ as the lid closes, rather than a click or a snap.
And, of course, as anyone who uses a MacBook Pro knows, the LED backlit screen and keyboard, both with automatic brightness adjustments, are a real joy.
The trackpad is much bigger than previous MacBooks, too, to accommodate for the fact that you can use iPhone-style multi-touch gestures to, for instance, rotate images in iPhoto and Preview and navigate pages in Safari.
Storage
One of the things people seem worried about is the limitations of an 80Gb hard drive. At this stage, I have to say, it’s really not an issue. Here’s how I set things up:
- Using AppDelete, I removed the standard applications I won’t be using on this machine — for example, there’s little point having iDVD installed on a laptop with no DVD drive!
- Installed the MacTeX package of the TeX document processing engine and front-end software
- Installed Microsoft Office 2008 to match what’s installed on my iMac
- Slimmed down my Applications folder using XSlimmer to remove unnecessary code from universal binaries (it’s an Intel machine so why do I need the PowerPC parts of my application bundles?)
- Used ChronoSync to synchronise parts of my Home directory between the iMac and the MacBook Air
I’m synchronising my documents, but not my photos or movies. While I’m on the road I’ll sync movies across to watch, but there’s no need for me to store them on the Air all the time.
As of this moment, I have 57.41Gb free on the hard drive.
Battery life
While I’m using it for what I’m usually going to use it for — web browsing, writing, email — the battery life is really good. During heavy use, like installing software over the air using Remote Disc, the battery life estimate dramatically drops. But given what I need this laptop for, I think I’ll be fine.
Two other associated notes:
- the MagSafe adapter is just fantastic — a truly beautiful piece of design. My wife, who is not someone you’d describe as a technology enthusiast, agrees — and wants to know why we aren’t using magnets on power cords everywhere
- the fact that the battery isn’t removable means I’m going to be travelling with the power adapter — but I can handle that. I never used to travel just with batteries anyway.
Case
None of the existing 13” laptop sleeves are any good for the Air — you could stack three of them in the sleeve without any problem — so I confess I have joined the bandwagon and ordered a ManilaMac sleeve. I know, I know.
In short, this is the first laptop I’ve had in a long time — maybe ever — that I feel like I can throw into my bag and genuinely not feel like I’m lugging a computer around with me.
And, to be honest, that’s worth the price of admission alone.
2 February 2008
On convergence: why I have already ordered a MacBook Air
I have just ordered a MacBook Air (the slower version with the 80Gb hard-drive, rather than the faster version with the solid-state storage), and if you judged orders by the number of positive reviews on the web, you’d imagine that I’m the only one to have ordered one of these.
Most of the criticism of the MacBook Air is from people who would like to use one as their only PC — for storing an iTunes library, for running heavy-duty graphics or video software, and so on.
Me, I already have a machine to do this — my 24-inch iMac — and so what I’m looking for in a little laptop is a bit different.
The biggest single appeal of the MacBook Air to me is the weight — although I would have been even happier with a smaller overall size (maybe something like the old 12” PowerBook), I can live with a full-size laptop so long as it’s light. My venerable workhorse 15” PowerBook (just entering its seventh year of near-constant use) was great, but it was heavy, and although it was of a size that I could happily toss it in my backpack/cabin bag/overnight bag/briefcase, I’d know it was there through the extra weight.
Secondly, I like the idea of a machine made for the wireless age. I can’t remember the last time I spent any time on a laptop tethered to an ethernet port (except for a crappy hotel in Sydney that can remain nameless), so I’m very happy with a machine that only has wireless connection options.
I would have been even happier with a mobile network option built in (GPRS like my BlackBerry — or, even better, 3G), but, again, there are ways to work around this, like tethering the MacBook to the Blackberry with Bluetooth and sharing its connection that way.
And although I love watching movies on my laptop while I’m travelling, I’m also more than happy to make a disk image of the DVD and sync that to the MacBook Air for watching on the road.
So, even though there are a few things that I would have been even happier with, the MacBook Air is a pretty good fit for what I’m after — in essence, a satellite laptop for my main system.
I’m planning to set up a sync script that will synchronise my Home folder (~/Home), minus my iTunes library and photos, between the MacBook Air and the iMac.
And this brings me to the question of convergence, and, I suspect, why so many people are turned off the MacBook Air by its seemingly-meagre specs.
I don’t want a laptop that will do everything. I don’t need a laptop to do everything. For music while I’m travelling, I have an excellent iPod video with longer battery life than the MacBook. I don’t need to sync the iPod while I’m away, so there’s no need to have my iTunes library available on my laptop.
I don’t need a CD/DVD burner available while I’m travelling. I don’t need a Photoshop workstation while I’m travelling. A
All I really need is a light-weight, robust machine that will let me download photos from my Nikon DSLRs, check my email, write some blog posts and travel notes, and watch a few movies in my hotel room.
This new laptop from Apple does all that — and for everything else, I have devices to do that for me …
4 January 2007
On searching for new speakers: my critical listening disc
I’m just starting the process of searching for a new hi-fi setup, as my venerable Sony kit that came home with us from London is starting to give up the ghost.
I’ll write some more on the process, but I thought I’d start out by listing the tracks I’ve put on my critical-listening disc, and why I’ve chosen these tracks.
Track listing
- Menuet pour la petit gnomide (from La Pierre Philosophale by Charpentier): this is delicate, light music for soprano, lute and two recorders. I’m listening for good handling of the high soprano line, and a good balance between the (much softer) lute and recorders.
- Chorale Prelude Schmücke Dich, O Liebe Seele (BWV 654 by J.S. Bach): in this performance by Lionel Rogg, the stunning low notes of the Leipzig organ are a nice way to test for good bass that’s strong but retains pitch. I’ve heard cheap subwoofers that have plenty of ‘woof’ but struggle to keep the music itself clear.
- Second movement, Symphony No 6 ‘Pathetique’ (Tchaikovsky): this performance by the St Petersburg Kirov Orchestra has a beautifully-warm string section balanced with crisp woodwinds, and I’m looking for faithful reproduction of that warmth, and good separation of the orchestra on the recording. This is stereo, after all.
- Praise the Lord (chorus from Solomon, by Handel): In the Baroque era, there was a (now out of use) woodwind instrument lower than the bassoon, called the serpent. Halfway through this electrifying performance by Paul McCreesh, the serpent enters, and it’s like a kick in the pants.
- Prelude in C major (#1 from the 48 Preludes and Fugues by J.S. Bach): This is the first of the two Glenn Gould recordings and, as well as warmth and clarity in the piano sound, I want to be able to hear Gould’s hummings and murmurings. It’s all part of the experience!
- Fratres for eight cellos (Arvo Pärt): The eight cellos begin this piece all playing harmonics, and the etherial, spidery sound is a real challenge (not only for hi-fi, but for the players, too!). It needs lightness and body at the same time.
- I sing of a maiden (from El Niño by John Adams): over the six minutes of this track the sound builds to an orchestral frenzy, and the balance between singers, chorus and orchestra needs to be clear and well-maintained throughout.
- First movement of Symphony no 5 ‘Trauermarsch’ (Mahler): This opens with the famous trumpet fanfare and almost immediately plunges into full orchestral texture, with plenty of low brass, timpani and percussion. This performance, by Daniele Gatti with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, has plenty of ‘space’ in it, and is a good way to see how well the recording environment is reproduced by speakers.