Author: alternateorg

Kevin Conboy: i’m wary of this mighty mouse though
Kevin Conboy: i don’t trust them
Philip Luedtke: why not?
Philip Luedtke: what do you use, a microsoft mouse?
Kevin Conboy: no i bought a mighty mouse
Kevin Conboy: you never listen to me
Kevin Conboy: but i don’t trust it
Kevin Conboy: i guess i just need to clean it more
Philip Luedtke: maybe if you washed your hands it wouldn’t stop working
Philip Luedtke: the ball that is
Philip Luedtke: cause I’m guessing that’s what you don’t trust?
Kevin Conboy: yeah
Kevin Conboy: the ball
Kevin Conboy: i don’t trust balls.
Philip Luedtke: you have to clean the balls regularly
Philip Luedtke: or they get covered in funk
Philip Luedtke: you won’t be able to work them up and down if they’re covered in funk
Kevin Conboy: no one likes a funky ball
Philip Luedtke: and don’t even think about rolling those balls sideways when they’re dirty
Kevin Conboy: that’s a mess just waiting to happen
Philip Luedtke: have fun with your balls
Kevin Conboy: i will
Philip Luedtke: or in this case, ball
Kevin Conboy: gingerly

Me too!

mrgan:

I rarely need to calculate anything mathematically complex, but I often reach for the computer to do the sort of calculation you run into when doing layout design: split 760 pixels into 3 columns with even gutters; or, figure out what the left margin of a 215-px-wide element should be to center it inside a 490 px container.

Now, I’ll be the first to agree that you don’t need a calculator to crunch three integers. I know John Allen Paulos would wag his finger if he saw me typing “143/3” instead of quickly dividing it in my head (and if he were here, and if he knew who I was). But my problem is not a lack of mathematical ability; I’m not great at arithmetic, but I’m solid. My problem is that I don’t trust my brain’s math without double-checking it: “Ok so 143/3 is… 47 and 2/3 which is 47.666. Now let’s double-check: 48 * 3 is 40 * 3 + 8 * 3…” and so on. I don’t do this often enough to be sure of my results, so I spend too long reversing everything to see if it fits.

Using a calculator solves this; I trust the calculator. Here’s the part that doesn’t make sense to my brain, however: every calculator I’ve ever used puts my input in a sort of one-dimensional, single-number-at-a-time box. I type “143”, I hit ÷, and the 143 is gone. The insecurity kicks in again: “Wait, did I type 143? Did I really hit ÷, not ×?” I need to see my whole line at once, parentheses and all.

The first calculator that does this for me is not a calculator at all; it’s Mac OS X’s Spotlight. It’s probably not news to you, but there: you can type math into the Spotlight menu-item box (not in the Finder-window box). Programmer-y notation like “sqrt(35)*sin(4^3)” is totally acceptable.

(Brief digression: ok, Spotlight wasn’t the first calculator I used like this; Google was. But Spotlight is far faster and more accessible, so I actually use it daily.)

Somehow this combination of instant availability, guaranteed results, and visible syntax clicks for me. It’s all the calculator I need. Perhaps best of all is that if I decide half way through my typing that I really needed another “(” at the start of the whole thing, I can just jump back and type it in. Maybe this is possible with standard calculators, but I honestly have no idea how.

I’ve used many physical calculators in my school years, and while I can’t say I’ve played with too many scientific-calculator apps, I haven’t seen this kind of representation of input. Maybe I’m looking in the wrong place; maybe no one else needs this. Either way, I’m sure I’ll hear from PCalc fans. (I never bought PCalc, but the screenshots I saw didn’t show what I’m looking for. Paper tape ain’t it.)

But right now, I have my accidental calculator right in the menu bar, a two-key chord away, and I love it.

bedpost:

Well hello there.

Chances are you had no idea this blog existed, and you have no idea who or what is behind Bedposted.com, and you probably don’t really care that much. And that’s fine. It’s the way I’ve wanted to keep it for about a year now.

You see, I’ve worked for 4 years (a long time for a web designer) at a company that was let’s just say interested in what its employees were doing outside of the office. And due to the somewhat racy and easily-misunderstood nature of Bedpost, I quietly developed it during the late hours of the week and weekends.

When I say “I” here, I really mean that. There is no “we,” no group, no set of investors or project managers or even web developers besides myself. I conceived (ha), designed and built Bedpost all by my lonesome, and the experience has been truly amazing.

I’m asked over and over again why I made it, how I came up with the idea and who I had in mind while doing it. If you’re interested, keep reading.

The night of July 7th, nine years ago, I couldn’t sleep. (You’ll see why I know the date so precisely in a minute.) While this is unremarkable in and of itself, what happened during those hours awake was kind of interesting. I managed in my fugue state to be inspired with an idea that I just couldn’t let go, so I got up and I made it. I was thinking back over my day, going through how long it took me to get to work, what I ate while I was there, what things I had done during the day, and so on. While doing so, I envisioned some kind of layer beneath everything that recorded what you were doing into a document to be read later in sort of a Defending Your Life kind of way, and it occurred to me that HTML was a pretty neat way of doing that. So I took the main data points of the previous day and codified them into an XML/HTML-type language. I even color-coded it so that when you looked at it in a browser, it resembled what HTML might look like in BBEdit. After a rough draft was complete, I went to bed and mercifully, slept.

For a couple of years, that was more or less the end of it, but the idea of quantifying the qualitative aspects of your life in a fun, clever way had grabbed ahold of me.

As these things so often happen, in 2003 another day arrived and I found myself wondering how many times my wife and I had had sex. If you’ve read any of the articles below, you’ll know that my wife and I have been together since we were teenagers in high school; we even went to prom together. This is a fact I’ve found that surprises most people.

At any rate, this magical number is unknowable, but I remembered back to my silly life-as-html thing and I did what I did before: I made something: a single-user app in PHP (awful, terribly-written PHP) in about two weeks to record our sex life in a really simple way. Seeing as how the idea is well, weird, I of course asked my wife’s opinion on whether I should build such a thing and luckily enough, she agreed to it. Which is good because I’d already started.

For about two years afterward, we watched the calendar fill up and the bar charts vary in their heights and we giggled to ourselves and we strived to make the average weekly number go up.

It was fun, if difficult to explain to our friends.

Quite a few of them, once getting over the strangeness of the idea, told us that they wouldn’t use such a silly tool, but surely someone on the internet would. To jump back a second, I need to reiterate that I was a really terrible PHP programmer. Just awful. I was not in any place to release something on the web that other people – potentially a lot of people – would use on a semi-daily basis. So I waited. I watched the blogs, I searched every few months, assuming that someone else would have the same idea. No one did (I would later find out I wrong about that, but the actual implementation left a lot to be desired and I wasn’t even aware of it until after Bedpost launched). So finally – and appropriately – while we were waiting for our third child to be born, during those quiet hours we knew would not last very much longer and with my wife’s gentle support, I started coding. The rest is basically history.

Having spent way too many words explaining the exact mental state from which an idea such as Bedpost sprung, I essentially wanted to let you know that I no longer work where I did when I started this journey and I can only hope my new employer doesn’t recoil in disgust when I alert them to my project. Either way though, this really means a renewed interest and focus on this strangely wonderful and fun-to-use thing that has been at the back of my mind for the better part of a decade.

So… Thanks. And please be patient, I have a lot of things in my head yet to build.

Amen:

He is adamant that he doesn’t want yes men, willing to do anything that the client wants, but strong-willed, committed people who are unafraid to express an opinion: “You want an agency to act as your conscience,” he says, “to say “that’s crap, you shouldn’t do that, we’re not doing it”. We value them far more if they value themselves—if they just become doormats we lose respect for them,” he says.

From an article in BusinessWeek about Coke’s brand resurgence and the attitudes responsible. Everyone proclaims to have this mentality, but as one of those people with strong opinions, I know that it’s rare to actually see it in practice.

factoryjoe:

Are we motivating the wrong behaviors?

thevest:

And the cliché of the backburner exists for a reason—sometimes things just need to sit and wait a little while for an influx of cash while you are busy doing other things. Notebooks can fill up and phone calls can be made and permission can be requested/denied/granted before the money is there, before the time is there.

hugsformonsters:

All I know for sure is that it’s up to you to reclaim your creativity.

2008 was a big year all around. The collapse of a world economy, the election of a landmark president, half of my clients merged with the other half. Oh, and I had a baby this year, too.

I listened to a lot of music this year, and not all of it was made in 2008. I discovered lots of artists and albums I’d never heard, some from as far back as 2006, which in this era of instant gratification is practically a lifetime.

Now, last year I had a hard time coming up with 10 albums, and this year was basically the same. That’s not to say I didn’t find 10 new albums this year I didn’t fall in love with, I just don’t think I found 10 I could convince you were the the best of the year. I also don’t think I can really write about music (or anything) like I used to, as evidenced by the grand total of 4 posts this year.

So all that aside, I decided to write only about my ten favorite tracks this year, I think it’s easier to digest and it gives a wider range of the types of music I listened to. Also, there was no new Voxtrot this year, so you don’t have to read about me going on and on about them. Onward!

#10: Tapes ‘n Tapes – Hang Them All from the album Walk it Off

I’d resisted Tapes ‘n Tapes’ earlier efforts mostly due to a perceived hipster quotient off even my charts, and not enough substance to back up that hype. Fortunately for them, Walk it off goes a long way toward delivering on this band’s musical potential. The melodies are catchy without being cloying, and you can tell there’s some real depth here. Also, I love the reverb on the guitar and the organ used throughout.

#9: MGMT – Kids from the album Oracular Spectacular

Another example of something I resisted but ended up having to give in to. I thought I was over dance punk and that I’d never hear anything new from that or the electro-pop segment to get me excited ever again (see last year’s mention of VHS or Beta). MGMT’s Oracular Spectacular showed up at precisely the right moment for me though, right before a summer road trip across the midwest to visit the very person who’d sent MGMT to me in the first place. This song is just so.. happy. And it makes me want to bounce around a field very drunk in the middle of summer and sing at the top of my lungs. If this was the theme song of a cult, I’d have a very hard time not joining.

#8: Ra Ra Riot – Ghost Under Rocks from the album The Rhumb Line

I have a hard time resisting a song that starts out with drums the way this one does. There’s something pensive and unsure and “fuck it, we’re doing it anyway” about them. And then: cellos. Once I read that this band had lost a drummer to fucking drowning and that this album was heavily influenced by that loss, I listened to it differently and could really hear the sorrow and the pain there.

#7: Okkervil River – On Tour With Zykos – from the album The Stand-Ins

I seriously wish I could have included 2007’s The Stage Names in my top 10, but I didn’t hear it until after I’d posted my list and had read about it on someone else’s top 10 list. 2008’s The Stand-Ins is not only a follow-up equal to last year’s effort, but apparently also the second half of a 2-disc concept album. Now, I don’t really know what the concept is, nor do I really care because I find that tiresome and boring but these albums are amazing. I basically can’t say no to songs with melodies and arrangements like On Tour With Zykos, but also I get sick of them quickly. Not true with this song; I could listen to it over and over and hum along with the strings near the end for the rest of my life.

#6: Have a Nice Life – Bloodhail from the album Deathconsciousness

Of all the songs on my list, this one was the most contentious according to those who previewed it. “I can’t get into this mope rock shit.” “I feel like I want to slit my wrists, listening to this.” Which is exactly why it’s here. An album (and track) that harkens back to The Cure’s Faith album more than any I’ve heard since Sound Team’s Movie Monster, except MM had a dance beat behind it. This song will make you go hunting for your Sisters of Mercy shirt in no time.

#5: Lymbyc Systym – Birds from the album Love Your Abuser Remixed

I will be the first to admit it: using this song is cheating because Love Your Abuser was released in 2007, with the remix album not showing up until 2008, and even then, this track was remixed apparently by the band itself. I so don’t care though because it is fucking great and gets me back into the instrumental post-rock thing I apparently will never grow out of. Yes, they sound a bit like The Album Leaf (who even remixed a track on this release as well) but that’s not a bad thing. Lymbyc Systym (the only thing I dislike about this band is their atrociously misspelled name) take the concepts put forth by TAL and they push it, and they make it wider and they make it more accessible (for better or worse) and they nail it just about every time. Jimmy LaValle is freaking god, but some of his misses are just unbearable. This track is incredible, even more so in remixed form because it doesn’t have the longer buildup of the original.

#4: The Hold Steady – Lord I’m Discouraged from the album Stay Positive

It’s unfair that The Hold Steady have already released Boys and Girls in America because I think it’s going to be very hard for them to top it. That album is from front to back a masterpiece of rock unmatched by those who would try. Stay Positive is a tremendous record in its own right, however, and I believe that this track is the highlight. We’re spared the talky-ness of some of their earlier tracks (which is great once you’re into it, but hard to grasp if you’re a new listener), and given a great mid-album piano ballad that includes an amazing guitar solo that at its best recalls a Slash without the late-80s hair. It even has a great singalong lyric: “She keeps coming up with excuses and half-truths, and fortified wine, there’s a house and the south side and she stays in for days at a time.”

#3: Fleet Foxes – He Doesn’t Know Why from the album Ragged Wood

Yes, Fleet Foxes are going to be on every top 10 list you find this year, but with good reason. This album sounds like Brian Wilson and The Shins had a baby. Yes, I could have chosen the more popular “White Winter Hymnal” but in all honesty I think this song is better. It’s more dynamic and more fun to listen to. Think Panda Bear but listenable and not entirely too abstract. Oh, and I also must admit that I didn’t hear about this band until John Hodgman Twittered incessantly about them earlier this fall to the point where I had to check it out to see what he was so jacked up about.

#2: TV on the Radio – DLZ from the album Dear Science

I honestly don’t know what TV on the Radio sings about but Jesus Fuck are they amazing musicians. How on earth do you come up with music that sounds like this? Droning and immersive and melodic and oppressive and smart and amazing. I’m sitting here listening to it trying to describe it, but it basically defies any kind of feeble description I could come with. This is maybe the kind of music you’d hear in your head if you were about to jump to your death from the 40th floor of a building full of people who would basically agree that it was the right thing for you to do.

#1: Grand Archives – Torn Blue Foam Couch from the album The Grand Archives

Despite all the intense music I might listen to, I’m a sucker for a really pretty song sung by someone with an offbeat voice (see: my obsession with Joanna Newsome). Oh, and horns. If you aren’t a band that typically uses horns but you bust them out for an accent here and there, I’m sold. This song doesn’t try to do too much, it doesn’t try to beat you over the head with how indie it is, or how pretty it is, or how smart it is. It just exists. And it’s good. I imagine the Grand Archives as a band full of really honest people who just want to make good music and are focused entirely on that goal. This entire album might be a little too mellow for some people, but focusing just on this track, you can really just soft-rock out for a few minutes, forget the world, and maybe feel a little better about things.

by Benj Gleeksman