A posting every day; an interesting idea every three months…
If you want a free T-shirt, free parking, free snacks, (from Children’s) and a free lunch (from me), come to Boston Children’s Hospital today around 12:15 pm and we’ll all donate blood together. The blood center’s Web page has directions, a phone number for questions, etc.
Full post, including commentsI’m about 200 pages into 1491, a new book by Charles Mann about the civilizations of the Americas before the Europeans and European diseases came in. The book is very interesting for
Highly recommended to all residents of and visitors to the Americas.
Full post, including commentsThe disposable laptop computer is finally here: IBM (Lenovo) Thinkpads are $600 with 3/4 GB of RAM, wireless networking, and a 14″ display. I’ve always liked the Thinkpads because of the TrackPoint, the little red button in the middle of the keyboard, which I find much easier to use than the trackpads standard on most other laptops. Thinkpads are also remarkably resistant to dropping and other abuse. The only thing that one could say against this configuration is that it doesn’t include a CD/DVD burner. So the price of a decent laptop is now converging with the price of an expensive cell phone. I wrote about this possibility about one year ago: http://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2004/09/09. Will people still want to pay $1000+ for a laptop that they will have to guard from theft and impact when they could just buy a Thinkpad for $600 now and replace it two years from now for $450?
Full post, including commentsThanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday. In our current era of real estate speculation and McMansions what could be more appropriate than to celebrate land theft and gluttony? In 2005, however, a few of us have decided that perhaps we can get our 7000 daily calories without the biting cold weather and familial sturm und drang. Where? Mexico.
The plan is the following:
None of us have ever been to any of these towns so we’d be grateful for tips in any of the following areas:
Please add your suggestions to the comments or email philg@mit.edu. Thanks!
Full post, including commentsThe server for www.greenspun.com is just about dead. Fortunately this comes at a time when one of my nephews, last name of “Greenspun”, is reaching his 11th birthday. I’m planning on shutting down the outsourced online community component of greenspun.com, which is these days better handled by Yahoo! Groups, and replacing the whole server with a family Web site. The question then becomes where to get it hosted and what software to run. I want the 11-year-old punk to administer the service; I will keep my own content primarily on http://philip.greenspun.com
It would be nice to have the following:
Where to host this and what software to run?
Full post, including commentsI would like to listen in my car to some of Doug Kaye’s IT Conversations and perhaps other podcasts and audio streams from the Internet. The car has a Pioneer stereo with a fantastically horrific user interface (all faceplate and bouncing lights display; a handful of tiny buttons; the factory Toyota system was much better but it is no longer being made and the 1998 original is dead) but thankfully an AUX input and the ability to play MP3-encoded CDs.
What is the best way to get podcast items into the car? An MP3 jukebox of some sort? Burning CDs every now and then? If an MP3 jukebox is the right way to go, which one makes the most sense given that a big part of it will get wiped and refreshed every week or so?
[Please don’t suggest an iPod. I have used friend’s iPods and find the user interface to be confusing compared to the Creative MP3 jukeboxes (they have more buttons). Additionally, various commenters on http://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2005/07/16 thought that I might be gay and therefore it seems unwise to appear in public with anything made by Apple.]
[Resolution: I bought a 1 GB miniSD card for my Motorola MPx220 mobile phone and I burned an MP3 CD that does in fact play in the car. I still can’t figure out MP3 music CDs. Is there a standard format for a playlist that you also burn onto it? If not, how does the average player figure out in what order to play the tracks?]
Full post, including commentshttp://philip.greenspun.com/photography/exhibits/newport-jazz-festival-2005 contains some photos from last weekend’s Newport Jazz Festival. Enjoy!
Full post, including commentsI am releasing my scripts for using Adobe Photoshop CS2 to process camera RAW images into multiple sizes of JPEG, with black borders and copyright info, and deliver them from a Web server. The software and an explanation are available from http://philip.greenspun.com/photography/photoshop-scripts/
I believe that I have solved the “huge thumbnails filled with extraneous crud” problem that my original Photoshop CS script had. The thumbnails are now only about 9 KB in size.
http://philip.greenspun.com/images/200506-alaska-trip-s60/ and http://philip.greenspun.com/images/200506-kugluktuk/ are a couple of fun examples of directories produced with this script.
Comments appreciated.
Full post, including commentsA couple of recent news stories have shed some light on the value of formal education.
Peter Jennings is dead, having held one of the most important journalism jobs in North America. He was a high-school dropout and never attended college.
Microsoft, one of the world’s most valuable ($293 billion) and cash-rich ($38 billion) companies, was out shopping for a chief operating officer (COO), i.e., a manager. With the ability to hire anyone in the world, whom did Microsoft choose? Kevin Turner, age 40, the Chief Information Officer (CIO) of Wal-Mart. Mr. Tuner was responsible for all the information technology at a company that is famous for its advanced use of IT. What illustrious schools and brilliant professors prepared him for these challenges? Mr. Turner got a bachelor’s degree in business from East Central University in Ada, Oklahoma. He never obtained an MBA. He never studied computer science or MIS at a college.
Full post, including commentsReport to the Southern Greenspuns on my New England summer weekend… (with some notes for non-family)
Friday night: One of the nice things about Boston in the summer is that people actually come through on their way to vacation spots. It becomes a bit like Manhattan. One need not travel to see friends and family because they come to us. Doug and Leslie show up from California with the girls in tow, en route to a couple of weeks of renting a place on the Cape. Doug’s family history efforts have uncovered an 18-year-old girl in their neighborhood who is distantly related to us, and she [we’ll call her “Linda”] comes to dinner as well. I explain that Yiddish has a word for relatives of whom one no longer even knows how or if they are related: “mishpocha“. Thinking that their hotel room will be a little crowded they leave Allie (almost 8 years old now) and Linda with me for the night. We walk into Harvard Square around 10:30 pm. The night is a perfect warm shorts and T-shirt temperature. We have ice cream at Toscaninni’s. Afterwards a pleasant fellow walks up and introduces himself. He attended a one-day course that I taught five years ago and reads my Web site periodically. Thinking that it might be complex to discuss first cousins once removed and more distant relationships I simply said “this is my daughter Allie and my wife Linda”. He accepted this uncritically. Allie found a couple of Brookline High School kids who were practicing juggling and they let her use their bean bags.
Saturday morning: The family reunited in East Cambridge for breakfast. Linda talks about her plans to defer college for one year and spend the time snowboarding, wakeboarding, learning Spanish in Argentina, traveling, and generally enjoying herself and seeking physical thrills. It occurred to me that times have changed in the past few decades. An 18-year-old in 1970 whose family had enough extra resources to support a year off would at least consider some sort of activity aimed at fixing what ails the world. The Peace Corps, some sort of political agitation, etc. 18-year-olds today, though, seem to leave these activities to the paid professional poverty industry and paid professional political consultants and just want to go off and have fun with their bodies while they’re still free of aches and pains.
Saturday afternoon: Alex and I trundled down to the MIT Club of Boston picnic and a good time was had by all.
Saturday evening: Drive to Nashua, New Hampshire to do a night helicopter flight. The FAA requires five hours of night solo experience before issuing a Commercial helicopter rating. At 8:15 pm I started up the Robinson R22 and listened to the ATIS, the recorded information that the control tower wants pilots to hear before calling. The ATIS mentioned the wind, the runway in use (32, oriented toward magnetic 320 or northwest), and the inoperability of some lights at the approach end of the runway. I called the tower for permission to do some touch-and-goes. “Unable,” they responed, “we had a plane crash here a few minutes ago.” A guy in a brand new Beechcraft Bonanza, the famous doctor-killing plane of the 1970s still being hand-built in tiny volumes by Raytheon, had lost power and tried to make a landing on Runway 14 but had come up short. As this newspaper article reports, David Massad, the 77-year-old pilot managed to maintain sufficient control that the landing in the trees wasn’t too hard. He and his 56-year-old passenger, Pamela Putnam, were “were unhurt but heavily mosquito-bitten”. Their friend in a Beech Baron came in to pick up Massad and Putnam just as I finally took off at 9:00 pm. Not wanting to interfere with any investigation I departed straight south to Norwood, Massachusetts and landed there before coming back towards the Needham radio towers and flying over the Mass Pike into downtown Boston and Cambridge around 1000′ above sea level. It was a beautiful smooth clear night and the buildings really sparkle. I departed the downtown area by flying up Interstate 93 to Rt. 128 and from there back up to Nashua for a total flight time of 1.5 hours. I went to the Extended Stay America efficiency suites hotel just about 1.5 miles from the airport. It was after 11:00 pm and the ladies working the front desk were just closing up shop. The hotel, which is in back of an office park, and would be tough to find without a GPS, was 100 percent full. “Who wants to stay in suburban Nashua on a Saturday night?” I asked. “Nobody should stay here unless they are forced to,” she replied.
Sunday: From Nashua, NH to Rockland, Maine and back in the Cirrus SR20, which has been getting some warranty service and an oil change (130 hours so far on the meter) but the folks at Keyson buttoned her up for weekend use. I picked up my friend Lisa at Pease, home to the longest runway in New England (11,321′; those Air France guys would have appreciated this instead of the 9000′ runway to which they were assigned in Toronto), KC135 refueling tankers, Chinook dual-rotor helicopters, and various other curious military and civilian planes. Lisa was in a good birthday (12th annual 29th) mood and I had her sit in the left seat as we flew low up the coast. The airport houses a transportation museum with an important collection of antique planes and cars and a lot of weekend events (classic convertibles yesterday). Downtown was in the throes of the last day of the lobster festival, in which thousands of innocent creatures were horribly scalded to death each hour, . In between the lobster course and the chowder course we stopped into the Farnsworth Museum to look at a very impressive Alex Katz exhibit. The place is also filled with interesting work by three generations of Wyeths and it is air-conditioned. Back to Pease in the late afternoon to drop Lisa off, letting the problematic left fuel tank run almost dry by my calculations in order to verify the fuel gauge’s accuracy (the tank had 1.2 gallons usable, enough for about 7 minutes of operation; the gauge read a cheerful “5 gallons remaining”).
Sunday night: Left the SR20 with the mechanics at Nashua and drove back to Boston to host an 8 pm party that didn’t break up until 2:45 a.m. (Harvard-educated woman arguing that an Al Qaeda nuclear bomb destroying Manhattan would be really good for the world because it would mean the end of American hegemony; this set my voluble friend Barry (a NYC native) off rather loudly…).
Next weekend: Newport Jazz Festival.
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