Link of the day

I don't really have a link of the day on my blog, but I do want to share this article with my readers. If you have any interest at all in the Terri Schiavo case, and especially if you're sick to death (pardon the pun) of hearing about it, Mark Steyn's piece in the UK's Spectator is a brilliant bit of writing that you should not miss.

Unfortunately, you have to register (free) to read this online, but it's worth it. I'm not citing any window passage as I usually do because there are too many salient points to single any out. So just click here and read the whole thing.

New Over the Rhine out today

It's new release Tuesday, and the most notable release today is of course Over the Rhine's Drunkard's Prayer. I got it in the mail yesterday because I pre-ordered it for my lovely wife, who is a huge fan. (This means that in addition to coming a day early, it's also signed by the artists. Plus we got some nice OTR postcards.)

It's too soon to review it yet, but I'll post a full review as soon as I can. The short version is that I was nonplussed at first, but it is snuggling a little closer each time I listen to it. A quick skim of the liner notes—Over the Rhine often put nice personal thoughts about the record in the notes—gave me some insight into the powerful emotion from which the album was born.

Once I plow through a bunch of seminary work and listen a couple more times, I'll give the CD a proper review. For now, this will have to do. Trust me, the delay is more unsatisfying to me than it is to you.

Help!

My most loyal readers know by now that I've been trying to get a free Mac mini from Gratis, the company that provided free iPods for me and several of my friends. Well, I'm almost there; I just need a little nudge to get me over the top.

So I'm asking on my blog for help. I need one referral to get a free Mac mini. Surely someone out there is kind and generous enough to sign up and get me over the hump! I've even got a Pepsi cap sitting on my desk with a "Free Song" code for iTunes. This cap could be transferred to your possession as a show of my gratitude for your participation. Strictly for being my friend.

All you have to do is click the link below, sign up for an account with Gratis, and complete one offer from their list of sponsors. Again, the list includes a variety of offers, from BMG Music Service to a Blockbuster Online membership, both well worth the money in my opinion, to several free trial offers for services like efax, etc. And if you decide to do this, please be sure to disable any popup blocking and tell your browser to accept all cookies (specifically from 3rd party sites) in order for the offer to be credited properly. You do not need to participate in any of the surveys, only the offer from their sponsor list.

I know you want to help. That referral link is right here.

Concert spending set to increase

Sigh...another can't miss show is coming to Rochester. It's Alison Krauss + Union Station featuring Jerry Douglas!

Dang, those of you who know me well are probably tripping over yourselves to buy me tickets as a graduation present, huh?

"The Donkey"

When fishes flew and forests walked,
And figs grew upon thorn,
Some moment when the moon was blood
Then surely I was born;

With monstrous head and sickening cry
And ears like errant wings,
The devil’s walking parody
Of all four-footed things;

The tattered outlaw of the earth,
Of ancient crooked will;
Starve, scourge, deride me--I am dumb,
I keep my secret still.

Fools! For I also had my hour;
One far fierce hour and sweet -
There was a shout about my ears
And palms before my feet.

G.K. Chesterton

Bred for its skills in magic?

It's pretty much my favorite animal.

A useful iChat tool: Logorrhea

I was drawn to this little app when browsing through VersionTracker because logorrhea has been one of my favorite words ever since it was the winning word in the documentary Spellbound (how apt). Anyway, Logorrhea organizes all your chats in a helpful way that allows you to see the text of the chats as you browse through the list (which is arranged in alphabuddycal order) or search for a word or phrase.

This is really helpful since OS X does almost nothing useful to help you find the chat you're looking for aside from the basic act of saving them all in a folder.

I like Logorrhea!

iPod converting PC users to Mac

According to Morgan Stanley's research arm, iPod owners are converting from PC to Mac at an incredible rate:

"Morgan Stanley drastically raised estimates on Apple Computer and introduced a $60 price target, noting that a survey made by the research firm showed that users of iPods had a 19% PC to Macintosh platform conversion rate."

Nineteen percent? That is pretty remarkable to me. M-S estimates that it could equate to a 2% market share shift in the next year, which would obviously be a huge windfall for anyone financially connected to Apple.

Apple itself it beating this drum, soliciting switchers' stories with the question "Did you fall in love with your iPod and then buy a Mac?" (Not to mention introducing the new iMac last year with the tagline, "By the designers of the iPod.") It must be working for them on some level.

I'm somewhat proud of myself that my switch went in reverse order. I bought my PowerBook almost two years ago, and I got my iPod much more recently. But now that I own the iPod, I can imagine how its fantastic design might inspire someone to consider buying a computer made by the same company. And as I've suggested before, there are more and more reasons not to tolerate the Windows platform.

Maybe this is about people realizing that Macs are not computer bogeymen as much as anything else. If the iPod helps people to realize that, great.

Today's semi-random musical thought

I wonder if Boyd ever gets jealous that Leroi is like 5 times better on his second instrument than Boyd is on his first.

And the Amplified Version, for those who have no clue what I am talking about:

I wonder if Boyd Tinsley, the violinist in the Dave Matthews Band, ever gets jealous that his counterpart on the other side of the stage, saxman Leroi Moore, is like 5 times better on his second instrument (the flute) than Boyd is on his first.

Stumble Upon

Forgive me if everyone else is so much cooler than I am and already knows about this site, but it's good stuff. StumbleUpon is a toolbar that randomly takes you to sites that fit your interests, which you define (and refine) through your account page. If you're bored and looking for a site, you click "Stumble" in the toolbar, and it takes you to a site, which you can subsequently rate as good or bad and review with your comments.

Furthermore, if you want to explore the social networking side, you can read others' reviews, go to sites they like best, see their preferred topics, etc.

The one drawback, as I see it: no Safari support. So I won't use it every day, but it is cool enough to cause me to dust of Firefox on occasion when I'm bored. If it integrated into my regular browser, I could see using it all the time.

Hat tip to my friend Mark for telling me about this. (And while we're at it, here is another plug for Mark.)

In defense of iPhoto

On Sunday night, I was talking with some friends over some corned beef (after our church's St. Patrick's Day service), and the topic of managing photos came up. I said that I really love iPhoto. And then we began to debate its merits. (In fairness, I was really trying to start a fight. I knew full well that my friend hates iPhoto, even though he does own a Mac. I've been trying to convince him that part of the reason he doesn't like his Mac is that he refuses to use it the way it's designed: by rejecting iPhoto, among other things.)

Anyway, his major complaint with iPhoto is the way it organizes photos as you import them. When you connect a digital camera to the Mac, it opens iPhoto and asks you if you want to import the photos. If you say yes, it creates a folder in the iPhoto Library for the original images based on the date. If I were to do it today, the directory structure would be iPhoto Library/2005/3 [for March]/15. The gripe my friend has is that you can't change this. The original photos always go into the Library in this way. (And iPhoto always saves a copy of the original, so if I edit the crap out of it now and want to get back to the original file in two years, I can, with one click.)

At this point, a third voice joined the conversation, agreeing with the opposition and opining, "Yeah, good directory structure control is a must. You can't just have them put in some arbitrary folder somewhere."

Here's the thing, though: it's not arbitrary. Unless you want to tell the computer where to put your pictures every time you import photos, you have to have some default location to which they will be saved. With the Mac, this is the iPhoto Library, available with one click from any Finder [like Windows Explorer] window. And to my mind, it's a bonus, not an annoyance, to have some automatic sub-level organization by date.

This is a classic Windows-Mac difference. A true Windows user wants to have control over all the little details, even if it means an extra step every time. A true Mac user doesn't mind letting the computer determine where something will go, because the default location actually makes sense. (I imagine Windows would choose a default location that would be much more difficult to find.)

But here's the biggest point: the whole beauty of iPhoto is that you don't manage your photos as some list of filenames in whatever folder you've saved them. You manage them as images because that's what they are.

So if you want your photos from today's import to remain together, you set up an "album" in iPhoto. If you want to combine them with three photos from the shoot you did three weeks ago, you just drag those three photos into the album. (iTunes users are familiar with this system; it works exactly like playlists, with the added bonus that you can now combine several albums into one folder within iPhoto.)

And if you want to put all those photos onto a CD, you select the album and click "Burn Disc."

If you want to edit them, you can do it: cropping, red-eye reduction, brightness, contrast, saturation, tint, etc. Pretty much anything an average or intermediate user could want.

But if you want to work with one of the files in Photoshop, you drag it onto the Photoshop icon.

Or if you want to change the format or reduce the file sizes, you select the photo(s), choose "Export to File," set the format, size, and file destination, and go. Or if you want to publish them to the web, you choose "Export to Web Page." Or you could export to a QuickTime slideshow. And on and on.

And even if you want to have full control over where the original files go, you can always drag the thumbnail(s) to the desktop, or any other folder.

So iPhoto is really a very nice little application, and it comes free on every new Mac. And I didn't even begin to talk about how other Mac applications can easily access the iPhoto library to incorporate the images into movies, DVD menus, or word processor/page layout documents. I'm not sure why anyone would want to reject it. I'll probably find out in the comments field.

New profile photo

You may have noticed I changed the photo of myself on my blog. I did this because a few people had suggested that I looked depressed and/or mopey in my previous photo. I always thought I just looked pensive, but I guess not. So to satisfy the Happiness Police, I changed the photo to one where I demonstrate a more acceptable emotion.

Better?

Forays into the Windows world

I stopped down at work tonight, and we were out of menus, so I went downstairs to print some. This involved what should have been a rather simple task: accessing the menu from another computer on the network, opening the file, and printing it. But it was Windows, so it turned into a nightmare. Well, that's exaggeration, of course. It was more annoying than terrifying. But it led me to wonder why Windows users continue to stand for it. I know I rant about Windows from time to time, but I want serious answers this time. I'm going beyond user interface (which I think it plenty reason enough to switch, although at least one person I respect disagrees); I want to know why you wouldn't prefer to use a Mac considering the following:

Viruses. Every time I go down to that machine, the anti-virus software reminds me that the virus definitions are out of date. This should not surprise me, since there are new viruses being written all the time. A few times a year, this affects life worldwide in some way. But every second of every minute, it's affecting someone, somewhere. You might be next. But I'm pretty certain I won't be.

Malware. Sitting there on the desktop was a shortcut to AdAware 6.0, an application that with varying degrees of success removes adware and spyware: those insidious little programs that somehow get downloaded and installed on your computer without your knowledge, and which run behind the scenes wicking away system resources (at best) or shipping bits and pieces of your identity up to evil people (at worst), or a lot of stuff in between. And yes, that was one sentence. And no, this is not a significant problem for the Mac OS.

Various annoyances. Such as: one time I logged it on and it attached itself to the WiFi network that contained the shared file I needed, but the next time, it connected to a different one. No file. And I didn't have the password to the right one, so I couldn't get on. Why wouldn't it always grab the preferred signal automatically? I have no idea. But my PowerBook always does, without fail. And didn't the computer world pretty much master the art of WYSIWYG a long time ago? Apparently not when you're running Word on Windows. The printer gave me something different from what I saw on the screen. (Granted, this may have been due to the document creator's rather remarkable inability to employ tab stops, or the fact that the proper fonts weren't available on the computer I was using. But still. This has not been an issue for me since I switched.)

Alright, it's turning into a rant, so I'll stop. But seriously, Windows-using friends: how do you stand it? Why don't you get a Mac?

Founding Blind Boy George Scott Dies

Sad news from Yahoo! (via Reuters), who report that George Scott, a founding member of the Blind Boys of Alabama, died yesterday.

His legacy lives on, however, and the group will not cancel any tour dates:

"Though Scott retired from touring last year, he continued to record with the group and will be heard on its new album, 'Atom Bomb,' due Tuesday (March 15) from Real World Records. No changes are planned in the Blind Boys' touring schedule, which picks up again with a March 18 showcase at the South by Southwest Music Festival in Austin, Texas."

A beautiful tribute from Clarence Fountain, the group's leader:

"We're grateful to the Lord for letting us have George for as long as we did," said Fountain, who was one of the last people Scott spoke to before his death. "He and I grew up together and sang together from little boys to old men. George was a great singer, he could sing any part in a song. We loved him and he was one of the 'Boys.' He lived a life of service and now he's gone on to his reward."

See you soon, George.

Bonds talks junk

ESPN.com's Pedro Gomez reports that Barry Bonds has been yapping at the media again about steroids, claiming that he doesn't exhibit some of the signs of steroid use:

"Bonds even brought up another alleged side affect of using steroids, a reduction in size of genitalia.

'They say it makes your testicles shrink,'' he said. 'I can tell you my testicles are the same size. They haven't shrunk. They're the same and work just the same as they always have.'"

Um, okay, Barry...I'm not sure that's true, and I really don't want to know, frankly. But see, it's your biceps and pectoral regions that we're saying have changed size and shape over the last decade. You never fathered 73 children in one season before, so I'm not sure what your testicular situation is like. But I do seem to remember 73 home runs one year, so let's keep to the topic in the future, all right?

Bill Simmons ponders: Who is the U2 of sports?

Bill Simmons is greatly entertaining for the way he tosses in pop culture with his sports writing. (I'm a little leery of the fact that he loved 90210 so much, but I give him a pass because his insight on other stuff is so good and funny.) He's a diehard Red Sox fan, and I still enjoy him even though I was raised to love the Yankees.

In his most recent column, he ponders who the U2 of sports is. The conclusion he reaches is that no sports figure has ever attained what U2 has. It ends up being a nice concise summary of the band's career and impact. Worth a read.

One hit wonders

My recent One Hit Wonder purchases at the iTunes Music Store (and thanks, Pepsi caps, for providing me a way I can justify buying these songs):

"Lullaby" by Shawn Mullins. ("Everything's gonna be all right, rockabye, rockabye")

"You Gotta Be" by Des'ree. (Is that a valid contraction? Someone's Mom didn't do her D.O.L..)

"Da Da Da I Don't Love You You Don't Love Me Aha Aha Aha" by Trio. (For those born too late to appreciate this 1982 hit in 1982, it's the song from the 1997 VW commercial with the two guys and the figurine on the dashboard.)

Great guilty pleasure listening. The best part about one hit wonders is that they're so inextricably linked with a moment in time, so they're great for reminiscing.

I wonder if it would be better to have one huge hit like these groups, or to have no real broad commercial success but a long period of small success, like say, Over the Rhine. (And if you don't listen to Over the Rhine, what the crap is wrong with you? Go buy Good Dog Bad Dog to start, and then work your way up to Ohio.) I'm pretty sure I'd prefer to go with the OTR thing. It'd be more grueling to be on the road all the time, but you'd actually have a career as opposed to a royalty check. On the other hand, if the royalty check frees you up to stay home and create the work you want, I suppose that could be good.

Blind Boys of Alabama in Rochester!

The Blind Boys are coming to town. I've heard their live show is fantastic. I'm in, dude!

Anyone else want to go?

(Thanks to Mike for the tip.)

Blog Game III

I've been pretty quiet here lately for a variety of reasons. (I'll finish up the Saga of the PowerBook pretty soon, I think, and that should get things close to normal again.) But for now, here's another iteration of the Blog Game for you all to enjoy. I'll give you two; you name the third.

Tootsie-Roll Pops, Charms Blow-Pops, and... ???

Have fun!