Tonight, I had the opportunity to be totally immersed in some really beautiful and original music performed by the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra. This week, and all week, is their New Music Festival, which features new symphonic works by international composers. (Tickets to all seven concerts can be had for $69.00.) Tonight I heard an incredibly moving piece, “Rhythms of the Earth,” by Ural-based Olga Victorova and then was treated to another contemporary composition by Jim Hiscott called “North Wind.” Victorova, youngish at 45, hails from my grandmother’s motherland. The soloist for the latter work was a flutist from China, now living here, named Xiao Nan and his virtuosity during the entire performance made my hair rise.
I’ve been here six months. It’s not that long. I have to continue to remind myself to remember that six months is about the amount of time it takes to learn where the corner deli is and that’s about it. To have found the WSO tonight, housed in a majestic and modernist building downtown (about 15 minutes drive from this computer), was stellar, surprising, and, in that surprise, a tremendous humility.
All posts by Andrew Boardman
Silver Jews.
I’ve been a big fan of the Jews ever since my friend M.G. gave me a tape of their stuff a lot of years ago. They have a newish album out called Tanglewood Numbers as well as a nice newish video of their song Punks in the Beerlight. The whole thing is one melancholic enterprise, full of hell and high waters, sad tunes set to slow guitars and the droning voice of Jewish David Berman.
It reminds me a lot of depressing things like
- The fact that Amazon.ca really sucks here in Canada
- I probably have a good 15 more really happy summers to go what with my birthday coming up and all
- I don’t read no more
- I bought OmniOutliner a few weeks ago and I’m not using it to keep any lists
- I’m not going to buy Yojimbo, though I wrote about it a lot
- There are people that called me a year ago and I haven’t returned their calls
- It’s become obvious to me that death is pre-birth
- Mail hasn’t been getting to me for some reason
- Turin don’t matter
- The dictatorship officially began
- The color yellow seems fresh. A clear indication that I’m morose
- The new Belle and Sebastian album is kind of silly in a bad way
- There’s a tribute album out for my G-d-favorite artist Elliot Smith. It’s sure to be uplifting. I can’t listen to it.
- Jeff Chester thinks the Internet as we know it is done because of corporate media consolidation and the need to monetize content that is ostensibly free
- I used to be cute
- It’s Thursday and then there’s the weekend
The Street.
The Muslim world has gone nuts over the past few days because of a pretty ugly series of cartoons. I don’t blame them for being pissed. Jews get pretty angry when Saudia Arabian and Lebanese and Syrian papers, for instance, publish heinous editorial cartoons of Jewish leaders looking like Nazis. This happens pretty much every day in strictly Muslim countries.
But more shocking than Muslims burning down the Dutch embassy in Beirut is that the liberal media (who I read with pleasure) has said absolutely nothing of meaning about this. Is their Street closed? Nothing of import and no headlines in Salon, Slate, The Nation, etc. Take a look a look. It’s not unlike a few months ago when France and other parts of Europe were burning (or at least vehicles there were). Are they afraid of their offices being torched? Do they, like the US Government, not have enough “translators” to follow the story? Perhaps they don’t have an opinion about thousands of people burning buildings, cars, and effigies?
Making Sense of AdSense.
I’m thinking of something inscrutable: Google AdSense.
I can honestly say that I have one of the longest running weblogs out there. I started after seeing Jason Kottke‘s blog back in 2000, when I featured him on my old art website (which is up but no longer living). His site was a huge inspiration for starting a weblog and he continues to impress and, on occasion, astound. In any case, I was an early advocate for blogging and Deckchairs on the Titanic has become a mildly exciting thing for me. Some days I hate it, others I’m in love with it. I started redesigning it three years ago and then again three months ago, but it’s still, pretty much, unchanged for the past 4 years. I really started blogging in a very serious way right before 9/11/01. And, after witnessing the Twin Towers on fire, it felt a little more urgent to write.
I know that Deckchairs isn’t the best written or nicely designed blog out there. It works. I try to keep the content diverse and informative and personal without it dragging into a complaint box, an information machine, or a leather couch. I like to write about different subjects because that’s what my experience has always been and that’s how I definitely try to live – learning and explaining are key to my personal survival.
I know this blog isn’t updated as often as I’d like; I’d prefer to post every other day. Most weeks, I’m lucky to post twice. I guess this is the one thing we all have in common – the same number of minutes in a day.
Here’s the rub: I’m flirting with AdSense. I’m looking into using (small) ads on my site because, well, I’m fascinated by the fact that, possibly, my site does enough traffic now (approximately 1000 unique visitors per day) that others might benefit. How is traffic and the benefit of others related? The more and better content featured on a weblog and the more visitors one gets, the more relevant the ads are being served on a site.
The other reason I’m thinking about ads is that, if I find ads on the site are popular (and, possibly, useful, which Google hasn’t yet measured), I’ll write more and more often. Who knows? Maybe I can even get around to finally redesigning the site which has been on deck for over six months now.
It’s weird, no? You may think I’m being disingenuous, coy, or even dishonest. Don’t get me wrong: if I could make $10 per month on Deckchairs on the Titanic, that’s fantastic. It will pay my hosting costs and a soda. (They call it “pop” around here, though.)
What I actually think is that taking small advertisements might actually direct some readers to useful information. I know I’ve often clicked on many ads on others’ blogs and, on occasion, I’ve been lead to relevant technology, political, or design information. The blogger was paid four cents but, more importantly, I gained eight cents of knowledge.
So, if you start seeing quiet ads on the site from Google, don’t hate me. I’m thinking about serving my visitors. Or serving myself more bullshit.
Postscript: In a bout of synchronicity, I see that one of my fave bloggers, John Gruber, is signed on to take visual ads as of yesterday through the elite and pretentious The Deck. Gruber previously took on text ads from a variety of customers and they were beautiful, in part because, well, he designed them.
Okay, it's cold.
I’ve been in tremendous denial during the month of January about the weather, which I generally take very lightly. I’m of the old school that believes very strongly that there’s nothing you can do about the outdoor temperature so get dressed and go outside.
It turns out that January was the warmest month on record in Winnipeg – at least since 1944, which wasn’t a very good year, afterall. I told people around here that I didn’t actually believe them that it got cold, that they were a bunch of exagerators and that I really liked the weather here.
Well, that’s changed.
Yojimbo Reviews.
I can’t stop researching the subject of Yojimbo as a new means of collecting and organizing information. For those 3 other geeks who have been Googlin’ Yojimbo-related arcania, here is a list of relevant links about Yojimbo, its feature set, interface, and functionality and whether it’s a Mover app, a Replicant, or a Dud:
John Gruber: Mover.
Nat Irons: Mover.
Macworld News: Unknown, but forum visitors say: Mixed.
Various Hog Bay forum folks (many, if not most, of whom unsurprisngly prefer Hog Bay’s Mori, which has real “Smart” folders that assign categories intelligently based on your keywording and which I like a whole lot as do others, in part because the developer runs an active user community site): Mixed.
O’Reilly Mac DevCenter’s Blog: Replicant. But, interestingly, Yojimbo uses a SQLite database to store its information, which I understand is actually better than StickyBrain’s Openbase database.
MacUser’s Derik DeLong: Mover.
VersionTracker’s forum: Mixed.
For those who don’t like to click on links for some reason, here is a brief summary of information about the application that I’ve found are relevant to my workflow and the question of shelling out for Yojimbo:
- .Mac sync is a huge value add; Yojimbo is the only application of its kind that truly integrates with .Mac syncing
- Drop Dock tab is very useful for getting information in quickly
- Pop-up data entry is very useful for getting information in quickly
- Creates embedded webpage archives
- Does fast encryption (but I question its simplicity)
- Overall ease of use (DevonThink and StickyBrain are too complicated to learn and maintain)
- It’s smart folders aren’t that smart; they can’t “read” data on the fly
- Search functionality is good but it only works upon hitting the “Return” key, a very un-Mac feature; additionally, is Spotlight searchable
- Does not do hierarchical lists
- Is stable
- Is overpriced at a $39.95 introductory price
Yojimbo.
i just spent a few too many minutes trying playing with some very fine new software by old OS X friends at Bare Bones Software. It’s called Yojimbo and it pretty much rocks. It can do a lot of fancy things like saving web pages, bookmarks, text, emails, pictures, menus, ideas, foot odors, and even passwords. It’s new and novel and pretty and has a good interface that appears pretty intuitive, to me. (Critical to this last sentence are the words “intuitive, to me.” Intuition should never be a universalized assumption, despite what some usability experts want to think.) Mostly, I really like the floating tab drawer that you can position on your desktop that allows you drag and drop content you want to save directly into/onto the application.
Jojimbo has some good competition out there, including the old but recently very renewed Sticky Brain, which looks a lot like Yojimbo, or should I say, the other way around. And then there’s the sweet, but odd and oddly named Circus PoniesNotebook, which is fey and pretty much allows you to do all of the above as well and a bit more. Lifehacker featured the latter application today, ironically, as Jojimbo came out, like two days ago and Notebook has been around a long time.
As I mentioned before, there’s ol’ DevonThink which I know my old college chum Steven Johnson uses and swears by. He’s in Davos today.
Jojimbo. It has a nice name to it. It’s kind of funny. Say it with me: “Jojimbo.” A search on “Yojimbo” comes up with a entry that has led me to review and re-view the well-named application VoodooPad by Flying Meat. (I really like the drawing of the voodoo’d boy on this page. You can even do some similarly ept drawings in VoodooPad, which is unlike all of the rest.)
These note-taking applications are not to be confused with outlining applications like OmniOutliner, which I quite like, though it’s pricey for a thing that makes lists. Nor are these apps to be confused with Website tracking software like Webstractor nor its little sister (more like “cousin”), Yoink.
I don’t know what the hell is going on. Maybe I need Jojimbo. Or Sticky Brain or Notebook. Then there’s good old Stickies, which come with OS X in both Dashboard and desktop flavors. Or you could just use Notepad, and copy and paste all your shite in there in one huge list and click command-F whenever you wanted to find something. The other possibility is to save all of your stuff on your blog, kind of like I’m doing now.
Run.
I just got back from a run/walk with my friend M.M. at the Pan Am Pool, where there is a sweet, albeit paved, track around the building. To many, this would be about as big a news item as eating raisins with one’s cereal in the morning. For me, it was pretty momentous. I haven’t worked out in any serious, heart-pounding, fat-burning, heat-searing, leg-pushing, arms-moving, lungs-working way probably in about 3, maybe 4, years. The best shape I was ever in was when I prepared for about eight months for hte AIDS Ride, which ended in shame the year after I rode from Boston to New York City in three days.
I can’t explain the level of immediate elation I experienced as I left the gym this morning. It was a combination of relief, satisfaction, adrenaline, and bodily warmth that I don’t know can be experienced otherwise (excepting an unmentioned activity). I feel great and it’s weird to write this. Thank goodness for the Pan Am Pool, for Winnipeg Community Services, and for my friend, M.M.
Strokes On.
The beautiful boy band The Strokes just put up an amazing little performance on SNL. You’ll be able to get to the mpegs pretty soon but for those of you who were on the phone and want to see something pretty fine, you might check out their published video of the same song, Juicebox, number two on the new album, First Impressions of Earth. (Actually, I thought I didn’t like Juicebox until I just saw the live version.)
Copy Paste.
I do a lot of copying and pasting. So does everybody who uses a keyboard. And it’s true that perhaps the most valuable class in my 20 years of education was a typing class in 9th grade.
Sometimes I wonder what the world would be like without the ability to hit control-c and control-v on that same keyboard. Could I do anything? Would any work get done? Could any code get written, any emails responded to, any spreadsheets built, any ideas revised, any reports written, any Photoshop images get made? I don’t think so. My new theory is that these two keystrokes, and these two keystrokes alone, are the keys to our global efficiency.