Curious Creature

I’m getting pretty tired of frozen vegetables.  Sure they’re better than canned.   They’re definitely better than no vegetables.  But they sure as hell aren’t as good as fresh (duh)….and last year we had real fresh. So fresh in fact that the food miles for a good portion of our veggies amounted to about 50ft.

Last year we had a pretty successful garden and I’m ready at this point to start again.    Looking through the seed catalogs is driving me nuts.  I’m deciding on what to plant, where to plant it, and when.    The one thing I can’t do is actually plant anything    I do have plans to start seed indoors again this year.   It was a successful experiment last year and I learned a thing or two (like: don’t water from the top unless you want lots of fuzz and fungus.  not a good thing to be sure).

There really is nothing like a fresh green bean.  And damn it my mouth is almost watering thinking about them.  But it seems so far off….

There really aren’t many types of tagging out there but we need applications and websites to use one method of tagging.

Delicious uses tags separated by spaces.   Wordpress uses tags separated by commas.  I believe the tagging system in most Mac applications that use tagging use the comma method.

Application developers should stick with the comma method.  Spaces limit the usefulness of tags because in many cases an item needs more than one word to have a descriptive tag.    I just tagged this page in my Delicious tags and had to tag it as “writing resources reference”.  I’d love to be able to say “writing reference” or “writing resources” and have those be one tag.  If I want a more descriptive tag Delicious forces me to use hyphens or underscores (writing-reference) which I think doesn’t look clean.

I hope people stop using the “separate tags with spaces” method.  It really isn’t very useful.

I’m as excited as anyone else I think about Obama being President.  Starting tomorrow we have the possibility ahead of us to heal this country after 8 years of complete mismanagement by the Bush administration.   But it worries me to see what is happening prior to the inauguration tomorrow.

All weekend cable news has been covering the inauguration when there really hasn’t been anything happening worth covering.   Certainly there have been newsworthy moments over the weekend but nothing warranting 24/7 coverage.  I just don’t get how these people do it.  The term “talking heads” certainly is appropriate.

The local coverage has also been pretty insane.   Given that I’m in the Chicago area I suspect it has been doubly intense but are constant stories about the locals travelling to Washington D.C. really necessary?  I’m happy that these folks are able to go and witness history but it isn’t newsworth to hear their stories.   I guess in the end it beats the hell out of hearing about the latest fire or shooting in Chicago but it still seems pretty extreme coverage given that nothing has happened yet.

I was at the chiropractor today and overheard a conversation between one of the patients and a therapist.  The patient explained that he really hoped Obama was going to be able to turn things around but noted that the guy doesn’t walk on water and he is afraid that too many people are getting a bit too hopeful.  I agree with him completely.  I hope Obama is going to be able to get this country back on track.   I just am trying to be realistic that it’s not going to happen in a year…or even a first term.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed that other people are thinking the same thing.

I was browsing through the iTunes Store earlier today and came across a recording of Bach pieces and it caught my eye because it was a Genius recommendation and the recording was by Capella Istropolitana, a chamber orchestra based in Bratislava, Slovakia.  I love their recordings of Baroque music and have many of their releases on the Naxos label.  This is a competent group of musicians so naturally when I saw this recording recommendation I wanted to take a look.

The recording aside I sometimes really wonder about the value of reviews in the iTunes store.  Here are two of the reviews of the recording in question:

beautiful melody
by mahh superma…

nice flowing beats that are played beautifully.

No offense to “mahh superma” but there are no beats.  The music certainly is beautiful and it is definitely played well but this is not how classical music should be described.  It’s not electronica.

We also have:

soothing and elegant
by Bballplaya

these compositions are soothing and elegant.  some are a bit choppy and rough though.

Actually none of the compositions are choppy and rough.   Bach didn’t produce a piece of music that was choppy or rough.  Certainly the orchestra may have *played* the piece inappropriately but even in then in the selection of music presented here it would be hard to play any of the pieces choppy or roughly.

I’m glad there were five reviews for this because this music needs to have an audience.   It is also quite possible these aren’t kids but based on the choice of words and the chosen nicknames it is kind of hard to assume these were reviews written by adults.

So call me elitist or whatever you’d like but kids, keep listening but learn to listen well.  And write better reviews!  This is best music of the last 1000 years.   It deserves as much!

Yesterday on his blog John Gruber wrote:

Rob Enderle will not be ignored in the race to say the stupidest possible thing regarding the Steve Jobs medical leave hoopla:

“Steve Jobs is the Ronald McDonald of Apple, he is the face,” said Rob Enderle of Silicon Valley research company Enderle Group. “They either need to redefine the company so his role is divided among different people or they need to find somebody that can clone Steve Jobs.”

So Enderle either (a) believes that McDonald’s was founded by a man named Ronald McDonald; or (b) believes that Jobs’s role at Apple is equivalent to that of a fictional clown.

Now, I have to say that Enderle does say some incredibly stupid things, even when it isn’t about Steve Jobs.  However  I really hope that Gruber isn’t serious when he postulates (a) and (b) in the quote.  Clearly Jobs is the face of Apple.  He’s the one guy everyone associates with Apple.    I think it’s pretty clear that if Jobs leaves it will have some effect, even if temporary, on the company.  It certainly will certainly affect the stock price.

Come on John.  Get real here.

BBC America is running this fantastic show with Chef Gordan Ramsay called ‘Kitchen Nightmares’ where Ramsay is brought in to help struggling restaurants turn themselves around.   Ramsay certainly has an attitude but he’s the perfect guy to deal with some of the unbelievably bullheaded people he has to deal with on the show.  Thumbs up!

It’s great having a nice stash of good beer down in the basement while working on various stuff.  And when I say good I mean high quality, relatively high alcohol content

Happy New Year!

I’ve spent my whole New Year’s Eve moving my blog   I actually have several blogs out there covering various things and it’s too hard to keep them all up to date.   So they’re all being moved here but really the only one I had been updating at all recently was brainfreezeblog.com so all of that content is here now with redirects set up so that links in Google come here.

Why the new blog?  I got tired of the old title.  I think the new title better represents that I want everything I’m interested in writing about here in one location.   I’m curious about lots of different things.  After all the world is an interesting place.

I’ve got various things planned like graphic updates and such but for now its all the same set up as brainfreezeblog.com.  That will work for now

Still in shock that the various curiouscreature domains were available.  Thought for sure they’d have been taken but I grabbed .net, .com, and .org.  Good thing for me