danbruno.net/blog

After 24 hours with Tiger, I have one word to describe it: bestoperatingsystemever. And that’s only after playing around with two or three features!

Spotlight, the new search engine, is far and away the most useful improvement. Basically, it works like the iTunes search — you start typing, and as you type it narrows down your search results. Instead of just working for music, though, Spotlight searches your entire computer — and the contents of files. So if I don’t remember what I called that story I wrote for Creative Writing, or where I put it, I can type in “Kevin hated” (from the first sentence of the story) and Spotlight pulls it up. It’s so useful it practically eliminates the need for folders.

Dashboard is another one of the nifty new features. If you tap F12, your desktop dims and a bunch of tiny windows descend upon the screen. These are “widgets,” which are miniature programs. The default set includes a few key tools like a calculator, a weather forecast, a dictionary/thesaurus (which is stored locally, so you don’t need to be online), and a yellow pages directory. There are also more available from Apple’s website, and you can bet that that list will grow exponentially in the next few weeks (if not days).

There’s a lot I haven’t gotten around to yet — Automator looks like it’ll be especially cool — but so far, I like it. Only complaint is that Safari is inexplicably locking up every time I launch it, but that’s not a big deal since I use Firefox for everything. Very solid upgrade overall.

UPDATE: Fixed Safari. iGetter, a random downloading program that I had tried out a couple of months ago, was the culprit. Incidentally, Safari is very cool as well — I may be switching back to it from Firefox — it loads pages faster, runs faster, and has a cool RSS newsreader.

Superdickery is one of the funniest sites I’ve ever seen. It’s a bunch of scanned in comic book covers, mostly featuring Superman, and mostly involving him being a dick. There are so many absolutely hilarious ones that I couldn’t begin to summarize them here, but of course I’ll try anyway.

My favorites are the ones with bizarre sexual innuendo (including a rape threat) and the collection of (mostly offensive) WWII propaganda covers. I also like the ones where Superman is killing people for no apparent reason. Then there’s the hippie culture references (that first one completely baffles me), and the ones where, like the website says, Superman is just a dick. There are also a bunch that make absolutely no sense. And there’s much more: racism, awesome insults, thinly veiled advertisements, and slapping the President.

And that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Check out the site and see, for example, all the random girls Superman makes out with (sometimes in front of their husbands).

Fun quotes from my Psychology textbook:

“But make a mental list of the situations you find stressful, and you’ll see that people become anxious over things that would make no sense to a zebra.”

“If you masturbated freely during the preschool years…”

“The main sticking point was — and still is, for many — Freud’s emphasis on s-e-x as a driving force.”

“The last time I showed this card to my students, I received a wide range of stories. Some said the woman in the shawl is the girl’s mother, disappointed in her daughter’s choice of a husband or career or in the fact that she’s a lesbian.”

“But what did drooling dogs, puzzled cats, and key-pecking pigeons have to do with personality?”

“If you don’t expect to learn from this book or if you don’t really care, this may be the last paragraph you read.”

“In fact, the number of seconds a preschool child is willing to wait for two marshmallows — rather than settling for the one that is immediately available — is predictive of his or her SAT scores in high school.”

“‘No doubt about it,’ I tell my kids, ‘you need to believe in yourself, take charge of your life, open doors, and make things happen. As they say, the buck stops here’ (point to yourself).”

Dave Matthews Band fansite nancies.org has an interview/bio of Mark Batson, producer of the upcoming DMB album Stand Up.

DMB was my favorite band for many years before I got heavily into jazz and they were overtaken by Béla Fleck and the Flecktones. I’ll be seeing DMB at Randall’s Island in July, my first show in three years.

I’ve often thought that going through novels in middle and high school English classes ruined the enjoyment I would have gotten from them had I read them on my own. That’s not very surprising, I guess — the way we read books in school wasn’t much fun. We had to make sure to keep the characters and plot details straight for the tests, we had to write responses and essays and epilogues, and we had to painstakingly identify “literary devices,” which usually boiled down to a tally of similes and personifications. Reading for pleasure, I wouldn’t have done any of that — I’d have just read the damn thing and be done with it.

Interestingly, though, being forced to do something you like is still unpleasant even when it’s exactly what you would have done. In my History of Jazz class, I’m back to memorizing songs (57 of them, if you’re curious). Upon hearing a song, I have to be able to identify the title, artist, year, musicians, and significance (if any). This is all stuff I do in my spare time, of course; I already know that information for several hundred songs. And it’s not even that I don’t like the stuff that we’re doing in the class — some of the artists (Monk, Armstrong, Holiday, etc.) are people I love and have been meaning to delve into for some time now. But now that I have to, it’s not fun. It’s only work if someone makes you do it, as Calvin says.

The moment you’ve all been waiting for: Louis Armstrong’s original version of Oops! I Did It Again. What a ripoff that Spears woman is.

All I have to say is that it’s a damn good impression (the voice, not the trumpet).

UPDATE: Matt T was fooled.

Looks like the Yahoo! buyout turned out to be a Good Thing — Flickr sent out emails like this one to all of their Pro Account holders:

You may have heard on the grapevine that we planned to reward our dear Flickr members who bought a Pro Account in the early days. Well, it’s true! And since you’re one of those lovely people, here’s a little something to say YOU ROCK!

1. Double what you paid for!
Your original 1 year pro account has been doubled to 2 years, and your new expiry date is Jan 25, 2007.

2. More capacity!
Now you can upload 2 GB per month.

3. 2 free Pro Accounts to give away to your friends!
This won’t be activated for a day or two, but when it is, you’ll see a note on your home page telling you what to do.

Thank you so much for putting your money where your mouth is and supporting us, even while we’re in beta. Your generosity and cold, hard cash helped us get where we are today.

Kind regards,
The Flickreenies.

Yay! Also, Pro Accounts now only cost $24.95, which means that if you take pictures, there’s no reason not to get one. It’s pretty much unlimited storage — do you know how hard it is to come up with one gigabyte of pictures every month?

As reported pretty much everywhere, Adobe Systems (makers of Photoshop and Acrobat) has plans to buy Macromedia (makers of Flash and Shockwave) for $3.4 billion. Here’s a link to the press release.

The Daily News reports that the Yankees will likely have a new stadium by the 2009 season. It’ll be just north of the current stadium and have a bona fide Metro-North train station there. More details from the article:

• The stadium will be comprised of two separate structures: one, the exterior wall, constructed to replicate the original Yankee Stadium, built in 1923, and the other the interior stadium itself, rising over the top of the exterior. From the outside the structures will look like one building, almost identical in materials and design to the original stadium. There will be a “great hall” between the exterior wall and the interior structure, featuring five to six times more retail square footage than the current stadium.
• The signature frieze, the lattice work that once rimmed the original stadium roof and was recreated in the outfield of the current stadium, will be added to the new stadium’s roof. The frieze (commonly but incorrectly known as “the facade”) was painted white during the 1960s, as it now appears above the outfield. But the new stadium will return to the original copper.
• The city will provide $50 million worth of infrastructure for the new stadium. But the city and state, depending on the agreement, will build and control all 11,000 parking spaces in the area, a cash cow for taxpayers that one consultant told the Yankees was “too generous,” a source said.

So basically, it’ll look, feel, and (presumably) smell like the old stadium, but with more consumerism goodness. Sweet!

Thursday night I saw Victor Wooten at the Somerville Theatre. It was my first time seeing him as a headliner; I had only seen him with his usual band, Béla Fleck and the Flecktones. Right now, though, the Flecktones are on a year-long hiatus, and Victor is on tour to promote his new CD, Soul Circus.

Victor’s band was an all-star cast of family and friends: brothers Regi Wooten and Joe Wooten on guitar and keyboard, Derico Watson and JD Blair on drums, Saundra Williams and rapper MC Divinity on vocals, and many others. Amazingly, nearly everyone on stage was a virtuoso musician. That alone made it a great show, but it wasn’t without its weak spots.

As I’ve often said in regard to his earlier recordings, Victor’s solo work tries a bit too hard to be thought-provoking. For example, there are random tracks on A Show of Hands, his 1996 release, that are nothing but trite quotes, such as “When the goin’ gets tough, that is a positive signal to keep chargin’.” At the concert, Victor took his philosophizing to the next level. He would lapse into ruminations on life and fatherhood for several minutes at a time, losing the crowd at some points, and then have to pop out a mind-numbing solo to get everyone’s attention again.

Victor’s strong familial attachment is still evident as well, and not just because he performs with his brothers. On 1999’s Yin Yang, Wooten brings in his baby daughter Kaila to “sing” on two tracks – the musician’s equivalent of forcing someone to watch your video footage of the kids’ birthday parties. Judging from the tracklist (“Ari’s Eyes,” “Outro: Kids”), I’m sure Soul Circus is much the same. During the concert, he chastised the audience for cursing at the lighting crew for shining a spotlight onto the balcony. “There are kids here,” he said softly. “My kids are here.” Later, he brought his son Adam onstage for a high five.

Another common (and valid) complaint is that Victor’s lyrics are frequently cheesy or cliché. A new tune, aptly titled Bass Tribute, has lines like “Stanley Clarke / I tip my hat to you / Jaco Pastorius / You know I love you too.” (The names change the next time through the chorus.) Then again, “Everybody’s waiting for the hero / but the hero is in all of us” is hardly an impressive line. Nor, for that matter, is “What did he say?” repeated ad nauseam.

While Victor’s forays into lyrical songwriting leave something to be desired, his playing does not – the critiques fall to the wayside once he plunks down a solo. Of the new stuff, most notable was “Stay,” a great funk groove in 11/8. Also, Regi Wooten gave a jaw-dropping performance on a medley that included Soul Circus tune “Higher Law,” Led Zeppelin’s classic “Kashmir,” and Jimi Hendrix’s “Fire” (complete with a guitar-biting solo). There was some classic Victor as well – a solo with the looping machine, his famous arrangement of Amazing Grace, and a encore chock full of greatest hits, including Flecktones standard The Sinister Minister.

More distressing than the cheesy tributes and life lessons was an edge of arrogance and pretension not normally associated with Victor’s music. The show began with a five-minute mockumentary about Victor having eight arms, which was cute. Then JD Blair came on as a showman and played up the circus motif as the rest of the band made their way onto the stage. A good fifteen minutes after the lights went down, Victor finally made his appearance – with strobe lights, on top of a huge platform. He had his arms outstretched and his head tilted back, looking like a god demanding worship.

The rest of the show reinforced this idea. During his solos, other band members would stare at his hands with amazed looks on their faces. A couple of the songs brought an uncomfortable feeling to the show. On “Victa,” the band brags about their star: “My name is Victa and I’m a winner and I know what I’m talkin’ about / And just cuz I come out on top don’t mean I’m leaving you out / I’m a trickster but not a sinner and you may not agree / But before you start to criticize, are you talking about you or me?”

The irony is that Victor is fully deserving of the highest accolades – he is a phenomenal player, and I’ll definitely be picking up his CD. But in explicitly trying to make popular music, his admitted goal with this album, something goes wrong. Wooten is most impressive when he strips away the pretension. We don’t need the stage show, the mediocre lyrics, and the philosophical ramblings. We just want to hear him play. And sadly, in his attempt to propel himself into the mainstream, he lost some of his musical integrity.

Kelly Dobson offers something called Machine Therapy, which purports to help people work out “issues” with machines. The video of someone’s first session is ridiculous and entrancing. Also of note is Blendie 2000, a blender that responds to human communication. And by “human communication,” of course, I mean “arrrrrrrrrRRAAAAAAAAGH.”

(via Language Log)

This is pretty much the best resolution ever passed. The last “WHEREAS” is the best.

(via Waxy)

Roar.

Check out this ridiculous clip of Tiger Woods at the Masters. It’s not a real Nike commercial, but it might as well be. Nice product placement, at any rate.

(via Waxy)

The new Thing To Do on Flickr is to take a satellite shot from Google Maps and annotate it to make a so-called “memory map.” Here are mine (click the pictures to see them at a better size and to read the comments):

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