Curious
It just hit me this morning that 740 KTRH, a station owned by the same company as the local NBC TV affiliate, has the old traffic guy from the CBS TV affiliate and the old news girl from the ABC TV affiliate.
It just hit me this morning that 740 KTRH, a station owned by the same company as the local NBC TV affiliate, has the old traffic guy from the CBS TV affiliate and the old news girl from the ABC TV affiliate.
Calling back to margin thinking, it just occurred to me that no matter what you do, the last dollar you were paid was paid because you were able, or at the least willing, to do something that nobody else would do for a dollar less. Is that profound?
Also, it’s frequently repeated that terrorism is a new kind of warfare and geopolitical relations will never be the same, etc. I agree, but it occurred to me that piracy was actually pretty close to terrorism in the early eras of the US. Essentially non-state agents doing damage to the homeland or citizens abroad.
I have a very irrational, minor, but lingering conviction that I will someday have to give an account to Claire of why fun.’s “We Are Young” was the Billboard #1 song at her birth (mine was “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” which is altogether not too shabby for the time period).
Wikipedia quotes Rolling Stone in highlighting its “emo self-deprecation that leavens the bombast” as a positive, like, totally not ironically.
Have I blogged about this before? Have I blogged about my need for a search engine on my blog? Maybe this paragraph is my own emo self-deprecation.
I guess I thought about this because I once again have savored the whole (and a half again) of Peter Gabriel’s So, which I’m sure I have blogged about before. But this time I really keyed in on the vivacity of “Sledgehammer.” Wikipedia quotes Q magazine in characterizing it as an “un-danceable dance hit,” and it has to be one of the weirdest and definitely most-awarded 80’s era music videos. There’s an air of playfulness that is lost in current music like that fun. song. And it hasn’t been replaced by deep meaning or feeling, which is deeply a shame.
I know the dude has more jewelry and makeup than the backup girls, but look how much fun The Human League is having performing “Fascination.”
Here’s the fun. video, in which everyone looks miserable and the Windows Phone product placements are even more miserable.
Interestingly, maybe the most interestingly in all of this, is that if Claire had not come early, she would have had Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know”, which is probably the best pop song in recent memory and probably the near future, although still quite miserable in content and delivery. But it’s okay, because there’s something really there, especially coupled with its video.
It seems like every music-related ad on TV talks about playlists. I almost never make playlists. I listen to singles or whole albums. Get off my lawn!
One of the singular music experiences in my life was at the relatively recent Ben Folds Five concert, when I looked out across the crowd during “Landed” and saw all these heads bobbing in the exact same way, huge mix of ages and personalities and whatnot. Just kind of a universal acknowledgement of a superb vibe in a song. Give it a listen, it’s worth it. Don’t want to color your listen too much, but I believe I read this was Ben’s attempt to mimic the feel of Elton John in “Tiny Dancer.”
“Down comes the reign of the telephone czar, it’s okay to call, I will answer for myself.” Bam!
Something subconscious and weird from my engineering education always considers ice to be a portable lack of energy.
Every time I read a Neal Stephenson novel I tell myself I will be careful, read slowly, and not get lost, but without fail I do none of those three things. Something about his prose messes with me. Don’t know why. I’m basically exactly his optimal customer in terms of theme and content, but the reality of it never works as it should.
I finally got a chance to use one of those nice boutique functions from Excel: CHOOSE.
CHOOSE takes a one-based index as its first argument, followed by an unrestricted-length list of arguments covering the gamut of that index’s expected range. In other words, if you expected the index to range from 1 to 4, you would provide four arguments following the index. CHOOSE selects the index’th argument and returns it.
Now, nothing is ever completely simple, so my task was actually to report a different string of text depending on the state of two cells, either of which could be 0 or 1. Meaning: “00” = “No activity”, “10” = “Historical”, “01” = “New”, “11” = “Continuous”. One more typical Excel way of dealing with this is to make a mapping table with the aforementioned four options, then do a VLOOKUP. But to avoid that, you can use CHOOSE as long as you can boil those four 0/1 permutations into a single index.
Well, 0 and 1 look like binary, so you can kind of do a A1+2*B1+1, if your 0/1 cells are in A1 and B1 for example. This converts the different pairs of 0 and 1 into an index from 1 to 4. Bingo.
Then, it’s just: =CHOOSE(A1+2*B1+1,"No activity","Historical","New","Continuous")
No maps needed!
This is a fantastic article looking at the prospect of “4K” TVs without the inevitable marketing hype.
I wonder if at some point in the future we will have a 5 Volt DC rail running through our houses along with the AC power. I envision a future chain e-mail, in whatever incarnation by which it might manifest at the moment, talking about the crazy path all this equipment took toward a standardized 5 Volt supply, similar to that message that circulated some time ago about how the width of the space shuttle was determined by the ancient Romans.
Inductive charging is fascinating, and - if my aging Galaxy S “1” survives for me long enough - looks to be a “must have” feature for my next phone. But those USB cables aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.
I wonder if the creators of USB ever imagined that major companies would ship USB cables with their devices that in some cases did not have the signal wire in the cable, but rather just connected the +5V and ground by way of the common format connector. No intention of ever using the cable for data transmission - just power.
I read an article or comment a few days ago that suggested cables themselves would become smarter, citing Apple’s new all-digital connector, which in some cases offloads signal modification or conversion to processing brains within the cable plugs themselves. There was a thought that a clever dedicated device like the Roku might derive a good portion of its value from the ports coming out of it, even if its actual function could be easily replicated by a more general-purpose (or perhaps even more dedicated) device.
I had an idea yesterday afternoon to locate or build some type of system for keeping a home inventory. Despite being immersed in this saturated era of apps for everything, it took me until this morning to realize that there was already a New York Times article in place to sort out all the competing options for what I thought was a novel idea, albeit written by my least favorite author in tech journalism.
As is normally the case, the fancy commercial offerings enable things like deep-featured smartphone companion apps, bar code scanning, and the like. The good ones are generally for Mac (Mac people seem intuitively to me more likely to drop $50 to make a good list of things, and I don’t say that pejoratively).
My mind goes to Google Keep for a slim solution, since it’s all the hype right now, but it doesn’t let you upload attachments to “notes” aside from pictures. One of my “killer feature” requirements is to upload the product manual PDF along with, optionally, the UPC, Amazon link, original invoice, purchase date and price, and the requisite insurance documentation photos. I’m sure you could make Dropbox public links and put them in the notes, but I could also maintain the whole thing in a file box (my current struggling system), so why inject busted tech into a busted meat-space system?
Microsoft Access, although I don’t know how many versions back I would have to go to locate a legal license in my possession, is not a bad idea for these types of things in general, although with the file upload thing being an annoyingly useful feature, you are turning a bad SQL database into a nightmare file system. Plus, it’s Access.
If you accept Dropbox links as a tolerable requirement, you could actually fall back to Google Docs or Excel, with hyperlinks to manuals and invoices. This is, amazingly, not a bad idea. You have the file system aspect of the project in a real online file system (Dropbox), and this has the pragmatic feeling of using a spreadsheet for structured data where complex SQL operations are not required, especially with the understanding that record size on a thing like this would never approach 200 rows, probably less than 100.
A lot of boxed commercial options here work under the assumption that you’re going to use them for everything (OCD factors in here, I’m sure), and things like bar code scanning presumes that you’re heavily documenting things like DVDs, which, unlike televisions and sofas, retain their bar codes after unboxing and use.
My basic preference would be to write an application myself and host it on my newly-installed Raspberry Pi behind the television. That would be somewhat fun (hopefully), would be customized, and would be a good chance to learn something new like node.js. But it would take a lot of time, and would it even be the right option in the end?
We certainly have no shortage of platforms to build on these days. Finding the right one can end up being a bigger issue than actually developing the system.