This page contains all entries posted to Manufactured Environments in April 2004.

iTunes 4.5

I’m trying out the new iTunes 4.5 tonight. Looks good. Two things: I immediately turned off the arrows that link ALL of your music, every goddamn song, to the iTunes Music Store. Enough with the commercialism. Second thing: I’m trying out the Party Shuffle mode. It started off with “Magenta” by Ken Nordine, which to be honest brought my one-man party to a screeching halt. But after that it got more interesting. Looks to be basically a random mix with a few useful features—the main benefit to me being that I can see what songs are coming up in the playlist.

I’m still not buying music from the iTunes Music Store. The music sounds better than the crap I’ve heard people download off Kazaa, but bottom line: I won’t stop buying CD’s until they offer CD-quality (minimally) sound files online. I’ve heard some people suggest a tiered pricing structure. Say, $0.99 for a 128-bit AAC file but more for a CD-quality track. Ultimately though if the online songs end up costing more than the CD, there’s not much point in buying online. I also like buying used CD’s, which isn’t really a possibility with DRM-encoded audio files, not legally anyway.

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Travel Phrasebook

This is the funniest thing I’ve seen in a while. It’s the Zompist Phrasebook—handy for traveling…or not. Some of the translations are even funnier than the English versions.

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Web Typography

There’s an interesting article over at Reservocation talking to Todd Dominey, Zeldman, and others about typography on the web—the influence of anti-aliased type, limited font choices and so on. Check it out here.

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Fight Fight Unionize

The grad students at Columbia are raising a ruckus to unionize. NYTimes article here. Here at the University of Iowa they unionized some time ago as COGS, or the Campaign to Organize Graduate Students. COGS is a local of the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America (UE). That struck me as slightly odd when I was a graduate student here and still does. The unions are mostly organized around the working trades obviously, and graduate students seem an ill fit with a union of machine workers. But ultimately the goals are similar—better working conditions, benefits, and pay. Thanks to the COGS (I was a member), my pay as a Teaching Assistant (TA) was relatively good. Pre-COGS the pay was abysmal; the lowest in the Big 10 as I recall. And that is at the heart of the matter. Large universities are using TA’s for big chunks of their undergraduate teaching. It is not just training for futures in academia, but it is also very much like a regular job—you’re responsible for your students, maintain regular office hours and lecture times. So it is reasonable that graduate students be paid for the amount of responsibility they’re taking over. We’re not talking about huge amounts of money here, but previously TA’s were paid poverty wages, which maybe sounds fair, they’re students, right? But many grad students have families to support and such. The trend to unionize has already passed through most large public universities. The resistance has been stronger at some of the private universities like Harvard and Columbia. But even now that resistance is crumbling. Mass protests by grad students bring bad PR, and universities, at least under pressure, are willing to do something to address that. I was once a member of COGS, and while graduate students may not have a lot conceptually in common with electricians, the union did help to bring higher wages and better benefits to the graduate students who choose to work as teaching assistants and research assistants. Be a COG and get involved.

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A9 Search from Amazon

There’s a new search engine on the block. This one’s from Amazon.com, and it’s using the Google engine. It’s over at A9.com.

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Oops, Jose did it again

Hey, folks, Jose’s got another new book out that he co-authored this time with Brandon Palmer entitled Secure Architectures with OpenBSD. It’s affordable and would look great on your bookshelf. Check it out.

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Page 23, Sentence 5

Here’s the meme:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

Deciding which book is nearest takes a moment of thought. I look behind me and there’s a bookcase and piles of books on the floor. Several books are equidistant. But I look to my right and the bookcase along the front wall of the room is only about two arm’s-lengths away. Okay, whatever the closest book is, it’s in this bookcase. And if I stretch my arm out it’s about equal distance to either the top or second row of books. So I have my choice of two books. On the top row nearest me is a German-English dictionary. Not a good choice. But on the second shelf is the book A Happy Death by Albert Camus. And here is the fifth sentence from page 23:

Back in the theater, he remembered that when he was alone he never left his seat between films, preferring to smoke and to listen to the records played while the lights were still on.

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Happy Easter!

Happy Easter, folks. It’s been a light posting week here on the blog—I’ve been recuperating from a nasty cold that I came down with on Tuesday. ManuEnvi.com will be back in full force soon.

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Isn’t it ironic?

Here’s the latest local news from the Associated Press:

A University of Iowa art student learned the hard way that a work of art made of cash won’t last long these days. Curtis William Readel created The American Flag by meticulously coloring and stitching together 130 dollar bills in the shape of the famous flag. The piece, put on display at the University of Iowa Art Building, was swiped Wednesday evening by someone who presumably did not grasp the work’s larger message. “My whole show is about greed and how it can take over anyone, and just having this piece stolen further proves the point,” Readel said. No word on where the thief spent the big bucks.

Readel has hung a statement in place of the missing artwork. It says—quote: “This extreme desire for wealth drives individuals to steal something that was laboriously assembled and then displayed to encourage awareness of greed. I find this ironic and very sad that someone would do this.”

Article here.

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The Fine Art of Journaling

People who know me know that I love to write. It’s been the one thing that I’ve done with absolute consistency over the years. I started my first journal when I was in elementary school—in third or fourth grade. It wasn’t until high school that I started having what you might term ‘output’ - that is, a sizeable volume of words. That’s also when I developed my skills as a letter writer—for several years in high school my journaling was more or less done through the letters I wrote. I’ve always enjoyed long distance relationships in that respect. It gives me a chance to get thoughts down on paper and communicate with people, which has always been vastly easier for me than verbal expression.

In college, I started writing more for my own amusement and have notebooks going back to that time. I have a whole section in a bookcase of old notebooks that I’ve filled with my writing. And beyond college, I have kept the practice up, writing when and wherever possible. It’s with great fun that I look back over old entries to see what I was thinking about in a given time period. Some periods of time are marked by the density of ideas—just a sheer volume of things I’m working on in my head. Other periods hold more observations of daily life and people.

In 2000, I made a significant change in that I started doing my journaling on computer instead of by hand. It seemed a natural switch at the time and continues to be. Writing longhand is a slow and laborious process, one that I enjoy certainly, but my ease at the keyboard has made it an easy thing to do.

My first electronic entry was from Wednesday, October 18, 2000. Obviously I’ve kept all the files since that time. I use a separate word document for each calendar day. I still sometimes think about issues of persistence—I keep backups of my journal entries, but these things seem more fragile than physical notebooks.

At any rate, I was looking over my electronic journal entries this morning. It’s a good output. Since October, 2000 I’ve written 288,372 words in my journal. Maybe someday I’ll think of archiving them online somewhere in some password protected directory where friends & family can peruse the intellectual life of Daniel R Stout. But for now, they remain squarely offline.

This year I’ve gotten into letter writing again. The past few years much of my communications have been over email, but as the deluge in my inbox has continued I’ve tired somewhat of the medium. So I’ve written a few dozen letters this year to friends far and wide. A typical letter runs about 700-1,000 words, though I’ve been known to send 3,000+ word missives when there’s a lot to talk about. So yes, I do enjoy writing.

Maybe that’s why I enjoy keeping this weblog here on my website. It tends to be a much different type of writing (and usually much shorter) than what I do with journaling. It is a record of sorts and hypertextual in a way that traditional journals perhaps will never be. My weblog entries go back to February 1, 2000, so I have blogging I think to blame for my switch from notebook to electronic journals. I’ve written 55,731 words in my weblog to date. At any rate, the important question is not whether the writing is electronic or longhand, but whether the activity remains relevant to one’s life. To that I can simply answer that I’ve been journaling since I was 8 or 9 years old, and it shows no sign of stopping.

I know there’s been a number of books written about journaling, and a quick search on Amazon will reveal a number of titles. But I’ve never read a book on it and don’t really see the point unless you’re somehow uncomfortable seeing your own words on paper or don’t know where to begin. I’ve heard some people say that journaling is an inherently male activity or that it works better for men than women, who tend to be more verbal. Perhaps that’s true, but it’s definitely not true of writing in general. Most if not all the journalers I know are male, but I know just as many women as men who are writers.

So if you haven’t been in the habit of writing your thoughts down on paper, give it a try. The important thing is not quantity but regularity in your writing. That is, write on a schedule until it becomes a habit. But obviously I think it’s something that if you want to do it, then you’ll have some success at doing it. One complaint I’ve heard about weblogs is that they’re public and accessible to friend and foe alike. To my mind there’s no reason for that, you can keep a password protected blog just as easily as an open one and have it available to only your friends. But even more simply, it’s a mistake to think that writing by its nature should be public. A journal (or in the feminized language, a diary) is intentionally a place for person recollections and musings. Most personal computers have some type of word processing software installed. And a notebook and pen are even easier to obtain and maintain.

I hope you all have a pleasant weekend.

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March for Web Standards

Yesterday being April 1st and all, there were a lot of gags spilling over around the Internet. From stopdesign ‘stealing’ mezzoblue’s design (and vice versa) to Google doing its typical gags, there was plenty of hilarity and groans of “enough already!” This one though captivated both my inner activist and my inner geek: the First Annual March for Web Standards in Washington DC. It’s time to stand up and fight! [via haughey]

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