2007

politics — Comments Off on huh.
8
Nov 07

huh.

Georgia is in great shape, I’d say. Read all the way through…money quote is at the end.

Personal stuff / politics — Comments Off on vote
7
Nov 07

vote

vote

Today is the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, so that means Voting Day in the US. It’s an off-cycle year here, so no national offices on the ballot for another few months when the primaries start, which means most everything on the ballot is local issues: city and county level stuff. So most folks won’t get out to the polls today; in Sunnyvale, fewer than 1 in 5 residents will vote.

Still in all, in my view, local elections matter to our daily civic life in a million different ways. They determine who sits on city council, who’s the mayor, who sets the agenda. They define things like how zoning works, where you can build certain types of buildings, and what you can spend on schools. This particular election in Sunnyvale will determine whether or not we get a new library to replace our current lovely-but-50-year-old building. I’ve worked a bit on that election (although not as much as Jim, who’s completely blown me away with his dedication), and personally hope that we can get the new library bond passed. I think it’s important for our citizens, our kids, and our community.

Anyway, I voted this morning, and was reminded, yet again, how important that I think local civic life is, and how while it can be a little bit frustrating for me because of the pace and the (relatively) small stakes, compared to my work life, participation in our local communities is probably the only real antidote to the disenfranchisement and disillusionment that seems so commonplace today.

So whatever your views are, I hope you’ll go vote today if it’s happening where you live.

tv, movies, etc — 5 Comments
5
Nov 07

strike

looks like the writers’ guild strike is happening. i think my most basic emotion is that i’m strangely sort of happy about it — not about the economic impact on the writers, which is not good at all, but i’m happy that i don’t *have* to watch colbert & daily show 4 times a week. isn’t that strange? i could always have decided not to watch it, but this seems somehow easier. takes the bat out of my hands, so to speak.

anyway, i don’t find the prospect of less television very disturbing (especially since season 5 of The Wire is already in the can and awaiting us in January).

i *do* think, though, that this strike — and people expect it to be a long one — will have a highly damaging effect on the quality of television shows. the last really major writers strike in 1988 left us with shows like America’s Most Wanted and Cops, both of which heralded in a really crappy (and giant) genre of television. what will we get now?

but it’s one of those things, i think. for the studios, this feels, to me, like their waterloo, their napster. we’re in a period of incredible creativity in the world, incredible connectedness. putting down the hammer on the creatives — in other words, not letting them share fairly in the proceeds from the distribution of their work — isn’t likely to help the television and motion picture industry, in my own, admittedly uninformed opinion.

but we’ll see. maybe folks will pick up books. i do know that i’m going to cut any television shows that i’m watching that are marginal (i’m looking at you, Pushing Daisies and Weeds, and maybe you, too, DirtySexyMoney), and endeavor not to add any reality junk that shows up when scripted shows run out in january.

OSX — 4 Comments
28
Oct 07

data detectors in leopard

I’m really happy that something called “Data Detectors” has shown up in mail.app (at least) in Leopard. This is something that ATG (Apple Technology Group — the research labs) had prototyped maybe 10 years ago when I was there. The idea is that we tend to get certain types of semi-structured data in e-mails: suggested meeting times, contact info, things like that. Here’s an example from my in box yesterday:


Now when I hover over “Monday November 5th at 2:00pm”, I get a clickable menu with 2 items: “Create New iCal Event…” and “Show Date in iCal”. Selecting the first gives me this menu, mostly filled in with all the right information (note that it even picked up San Francisco as a location later in the sentence – amazing! – even though it didn’t understand enough about the context to get it right):


For my money, this is just one of the coolest things ever. Works for contact information, too — tends to work well on the contact blocks at the bottom of peoples’ e-mails. (Although I think I’d like contacts to be somewhat more automatic — I’d like to just have a big always updating database of all the contact info in all my mail all the time, synced to my iPhone — so while I think the data detector tech is really neat here, I think the usage context is a bit different.)

Books — 2 Comments
22
Oct 07

slam, by Nick Hornby

I seem to be super-bloggy today — probably just procrastinating, which is particularly dumb this week, since it’s a short week in the office.

Anyway, I read this book pretty much in one sitting (or, really, over the course of one day), which is unusual for me lately. I’ve liked Hornby since High Fidelity, and again with About a Boy, although his more recent work hasn’t captured me as much. One of the things he’s very very good at is writing with a distinctive, clear point of view, and Slam does a great job with that. It’s written from the viewpoint of an 18 year old boy who deals with a challenging few years from 16 to 18. Wonders whether you’re doomed to repeat the same patterns as your family, how to grow up, etc. I really enjoyed it, and think Hornby’s done a fine job.

I’ll contrast it with The Gum Thief, Douglas Coupland’s new novel, which I’m mired in the middle of. POV is Coupland’s great strength, too, and in his new book, it’s exceptional as usual — but it’s just a little depressing & slow, and so has taken me a couple of weeks to get through the first hundred pages. (FWIW, if you haven’t read Coupland’s Hey, Nostradamus, you should — very underappreciated book by him.)

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