Author: smartpeopleiknow

Go back in time…with TIME

TIME now has what appears to be all their articles online since 1923. It’s like being able to go through old magazines online and see what was being said then. It’s not obvious from their home page: look for the input box at the top with the “Search” button next to it.

As a test, I tried two well known and very different people: Einstein and Hitler. With Einstein, we see Relativity already well established (there are films out on how to explain it, and there is talk about an upcoming eclipse to demonstrate it). Nothing too surprising. What did surprise me was the articles on Hitler. You get to see this terrible force coming into but not yet in focus (at least through the lens of TIME). TIME uses terms like “Bavarian Fascisti” and even “monarchists”, although “nationalists” comes up too.

Regardless of your interest, TIME has made a great start of putting it’s material online.

The first thing one learns on guitar

Guitar
For her 12th birthday, my daughter got a guitar. I know she is using YouTube to learn music.* I assumed she would learn something contemporary. When I came home the other day, she said: Dad! My friend taught me a new song. And the first thing her friend’s taught her on the guitar was…Smoke on the Water!!! My first thought was: cool, she can play something. And then I thought: hey, 30 years ago when I was trying to learn how to play guitar, I ALSO learned SotW. And then I thought: Has no one written anything ELSE since then worth learning first!?!? It’s quite amazing how this song continues to be passed down to people learning how to play guitar (for better or worse).

Ah well…perhaps they should have put some Deep Purple on that disk they shipped out via Yoyageur, so alien kids all over the universe can learn the first few bars of Smoke on the Water, too. 🙂

* (In fact, I was surprised how many “hits” these tutorial videos get! A tutorial of how to learn how to play “Bubbly” gets way more hits than a classic from Lyle Lovett! Hmmm, maybe Lyle should give guitar lessons on YouTube on how to play Bubbly. Nah! Although I would be happy to watch Lyle singing the ingredients of the back of a cereal box.)

Martin Luther King and the influence of Star Trek

It is easy to mock the first Star Trek. To do so, however, would be to miss out on the importance and influence it had. Lots of technical people will tell you about how it influenced the way engineers and designers see the future. But it had a much bigger influence than that. How big? Listen to Nichelle Nichols explain:

Thanks to Matthew Yglesias for the link.

How to sing the blues

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(I’ve seen this in a number of places. It’s a classic. I am sad to say I own a computer, but I still aspire to sing the blues… )

1. Most Blues begin, “Woke up this morning.”

2. “I got a good woman,” is a bad way to begin the Blues, ‘less you stick something nasty in the next line: ” I got a good woman- with the meanest face in town.”

3. The Blues is simple. After you get the first line right, repeat it. Then find something that rhymes…sort of: ” Got a good woman with the meanest face in town. Got teeth like Margaret Thatcher and she weigh 500 pound.”

4. The Blues are not about choice. You stuck in a ditch. You stuck in a ditch ain’t no way out.

5. Blues Cars: Chevy’s and Cadillac’s and broken down trucks. Blues don’t travel inVolvos, BMW’s, or SUV’s. Most Blues transportation is a Greyhound bus or a southbound train. Jet aircraft and state-sponsored motor pools ain’t even in the running. Walkin’ plays a major part in the Blues lifestyle. So does fixin’ to die.

6. Teenagers can’t sing the Blues. They ain’t fixin to die yet. Adults sing the Blues. In Blues, “adulthood” means being old enough to get the electric chair if you shoot a man in Memphis.

7. Blues can take place in New York City, but not in Hawaii or any place in Canada. Hard times in St. Paul or Tucson is just depression. Chicago, St. Louis, and Kansas City are still the best places to have the Blues. You cannot have the Blues in any place that don’t get rain.

8. A man with male pattern baldness ain’t the Blues. A woman with male pattern baldness is. Breaking your leg cause you were skiing ain’t the Blues. Breaking your leg cause an alligator be chomping on it is.

9. You can’t have no Blues in an office or a shopping mall. The lighting is wrong. Go outside to the parking lot or sit by the dumpster.

10. Good places for the Blues:

1. Highway
2. Jailhouse
3. Empty bed
4. Bottom of a whiskey glass

11. Bad places for the Blues:

1. Malls
2. Gallery openings
3. Ivy league institutions
4. Golf courses

12. No one will believe it’s the Blues if you wear a suit, unless you happen to be an old black man, and you slept in it.

13. Do you have the right to sing the Blues: Yes, if:

1. You older than dirt
2. You blind
3. You shot a man in Memphis
4. You can’t be satisfied

Do you have the right to sing the Blues: No, if:

1. You have all your teeth
2. You were once blind but now you can see
3. You have a retirement plan or trust fund
4. You won the lottery
5. The man in Memphis lived

14. Blues is not a matter of color. It’s a matter of bad luck. Tiger Woods cannot sing the Blues. Gary Coleman could. Ugly white people also get the Blues.

15. If you ask for water and Baby give you gasoline, it’s the Blues. Other acceptable drinks are:

1. Cheap Wine
2. Whiskey or bourbon
3. Muddy water
4. Nasty Black coffee

16. The following are not Blues beverages:

1. Mixed drinks
2. Kosher wine
3. Snapple
4. Sparking water
5. Diet Coke

17. If it occurs in a cheap motel or a shotgun shack, it’s a Blues death. Stabbed in the back by a jealous lover is another Blues way to die. So is the electric chair, substance abuse, and dying lonely in a broken down cot. You can’t have a Blues death if you die during a tennis match or getting liposuction.

18. Some Blues names for women:

1. Sadie
2. Big Mama
3. Bessie
4. Fat River Dumping
5. Caledonia

19. Some Blues names for men:

1. Joe
2. Willie
3. Little Willie
4. Big Willie
5. Leroy

20. Persons with names like Michelle, Amber, Jennifer, Tiffany, Brooke and Heather can’t sing the Blues no matter how many men they shoot in Memphis.

21. Make your own Blues name (starter kit):

1. Name of physical infirmity (Blind, Cripple, Lame, etc.)
2. First name (see above) plus name of fruit (Lemon, Lime, Kiwi, etc.)
3. Last name of president (Jefferson, Johnson, Fillmore, etc.)

For example: Blind Lime Jefferson, or Cripple Kiwi Fillmore, etc.

22. I don’t care how tragic your life; if you own a computer, you cannot sing the Blues.

Visio – not just for IT diagrams

As an IT architect, I use Microsoft Visio for some of the diagrams I do. (I do use IBM’s Rational products as well.) Little did I imagine you could use it for non-technical things the way David Salaguinto does to make funny comics like this one:

For more on this, see Office Hours: Drawing a daily comic strip with Visio – Help and How-to – Microsoft Office Online

Neutron loans, or how the subprime disaster works

Over at bloomberg.com is a very simple explanation of how the subprime problem works it’s destructive effect:

Joe Ripplinger took out a $184,000 mortgage in 2006 and makes his payments every month. Now he owes $192,000. The 66-year-old Minneapolis house painter has a payment- option adjustable-rate mortgage. It allows him to write a check for $565 a month even though he owes $1,300. The difference is added to the mortgage, and when his total debt reaches $212,000, or after five years have passed, he said his monthly minimum could jump to about $2,800, which he can’t afford. “We’re barely making it right now,” Ripplinger said. The estimated 1 million homeowners with $500 billion of option ARMs are beyond the help of interest-rate cuts by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke. While subprime borrowers face an average increase of 8 percent or less when their adjustable- rate mortgages reset, option ARM homeowners may see their monthly payments double after their adjustments kick in. “We call them neutron loans because they’re like a neutron bomb,” said Brock Davis, a broker with U.S. Express Mortgage Corp. in Las Vegas. “Three years later the house is still there and the people are gone.”

ARMs are fine for speculators who know what they are doing and can handle the risk. For people like Joe Ripplinger, they are anything but fine. And there are alot of people like him out there. See: Bloomberg.com: Exclusive

Autogenerated blog? And for what purpose? Ad revenue?

I noticed this blog was driving traffic to my blog, Just Being Rich. When I read the entries, it appears like they are automatically generated (based on the syntax is wrong). It appears that someone is autogenerating a blog on various topics, likely for the purpose of generating Google AdSense revenue.

Interesting idea. It’s not the type of blog I would read, but I could see this becoming part of a trend.

Free Wi-Fi at Starbucks


According to the nytimes.com blog, Bits ,

Starbucks announced today it will give most any customer two consecutive hours a day of free Wi-Fi access. Specifically, that offer applies to anyone who uses its prepaid Starbucks Card at least once a month. That represents as many as 60 hours of access for the price of one $2 cup of coffee.

It’s interesting to think of Starbucks as a network service provider. It has the potential to open up lots of other business opportunities for them as well. See Bits for more info.

Toronto, beer and BeerBistro

The blog blogto.com has a really good review of a great bar/resto in Toronto: Beerbistro. I highly recommend this place to both visitors and residents of our city.

One thing they neglect to mention is the great pairings they do with beer and food. They make it easy to forget about wine. And if you love mussels, you MUST go here. Not only will you find a diverse selection of beers, but you will find different ways of preparing mussels to go with those beers.

Winterlicious: fine dining, good prices, in Toronto

Every winter, some of the finest restaurants in the City of Toronto participate in the justly anticipated Winterlicious event. They offer fine prix-fixe meals for lunch and dinner at very reasonable prices. If you are coming to Toronto in the winter, this is the time to come! For more information, see the very informative City of Toronto web site. Come for the food and enjoy the rest of the city.

P.S. There is a Summerlicious too! Just as good!

Six Degrees vs The Tipping Point and the problem with metaphors.

Kevin Kelly writes on something that is getting a fair amount of attention: the new book by Duncan Watts (Six Degrees). Watts critiques another book by Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point), and Kevin Kelly does a good job of commenting on it.

My problem with all this analysis is the use of metaphors. Using metaphors of disease or forest fires helps model and understand the characteristic of certain activities (e.g. the success of failure of certain forms of communications), but they are just that, models. And limited ones at that. It’s good that Watts has shown the limits of Gladwell’s metaphor. But I suspect his metaphor is just as limited.

Why giving up your privacy doesn’t make you more secure.

Over at techdirt.com is a very concise argument on why giving up your privacy doesn’t make you more secure. Key quote:

“Confiscating shaving cream and nail files at the airport doesn’t make anyone safer. Neither does creating a national ID card, because terrorists rely on surprise, not anonymity. The fundamental issue is that real security involves focusing resources on identifying and stopping the tiny fraction of the population that is engaged in criminal and terrorist acts. The vast majority of people pose no threat to anyone, and it’s a waste of resources to monitor them. “

See Techdirt: If You’re Watching Everyone, You’re Watching No One for the entire article.

How to make a dark room seem light (and well lit)…

…by reading this article, Chasing the Darkness With Sleight of Hand in the New York Times, which presents a nice case study on how to make a dark room light up. It features a room by Jeffrey Bilhuber, a Manhattan interior designer, whose client had a bedroom in their apartment with very little light. The end result is light and very attractive. Lots of good ideas to borrow here.

Valentino is done

To people outside the world of fashion, this could be a big, “eh…whatever”. But after 45 years as a leading designer, it’s a big thing that Valentino does his last haute couture fashion show (in Paris, of course). This piece in the NYT’s doesn’t do him justice. Maybe we’ll need the New Yorker to do a story on him, like they did for Lagerfeld recently. In the meantime, see So This Is It: Valentino – On the Runway – Fashion – Style – New York Times Blog

Wanting to move up from cheap wine at the LCBO? Look to Matthew Sullivan for advice.

Matthew Sullivan has a great idea for a wine blog. His blog, the Short Cellar, is all about:

“….offering some advice about the joy of aging wine as I build my own cellar from the ground up, detailing what is going in, when it comes out, and what happened to it along the way. My emphasis will be on wines that are easily available in Ontario and that only take a year or two before developing into something special. Who has time to wait 10 years? I’m patient, but not a saint. There’s a perception that having a wine cellar implies expertise or money. This is a myth. You’re never too young, dumb, or soaked in debt to want a better bottle of wine. It’s true that a cellar takes some foresight and knowledge, but only enough to guess what you are going to have for dinner three years from now, and the knowledge that you’ll want something extraordinary to wash it down. You can spend any amount that you wish on wine, but the sweet spot is between $15 and $25. At that level, there are some exceptional wines that will mature marvellously, but there’s no guilt in drinking them at any time since, litre for litre, they are still cheaper than a latte.”

Sounds like a great idea. See The Short Cellar for more.

Avoiding the sub-prime mortgage disaster…for now

The whirlpool that is the sub-prime mortgage disaster in the U.S. continues to get bigger and suck more things into it. But not everyone.

At kottke.org, the excellent Jason Kottke has some good references to smart people who have managed to see the problem coming and avoid it (for now). For more details, see his entry: Yay! Today is sub-prime mortgage day on kottke.org, I guess. The… (kottke.org)

Also, check out the site n+1 — he referenced earlier — that has an interview with a Hedge Fund Manager that not only talks about this problem but problems in the world of high finance generally. An eye-opening interview.

Be afraid.

In 2008, wine is going to get cheaper at the LCBO (good news for under $10 fans!)


The globeandmail.com has an article on how the LCBO will now stock cheaper wine in 2008. Fans of wine under $10, take heart! 🙂

Some highlights from the Beppi Crosariol article:

– Wine drinkers in Ontario may soon notice a strange trend taking shape at their local liquor stores: more shelf space given over to bargain imports. (Why is this strange? -bm)- Portugal is likely to be a key source of some of the best buys. The LCBO has reduced its minimum selling price for wines from that country to $6.95 for a 750-millilitre bottle, down $3 from last year’s minimum price of $9.95. Similarly, wineries from South Africa and Australia, two other low-cost regions known for abundant bargains, can now submit products for consideration priced as low as $7.95.

– The new $6.95 threshold also applies to “cellared in Canada” blends.

– Bargain wines acquired under the new purchasing program issued this week … are expected to reach shelves over the coming year, starting as early as April.

– The LCBO also sells a rotating selection of limited-release premium products through Vintages… may also choose to source under-$10 deals…

– Chris Churchill, president of Churchill Cellars Ltd., which represents such popular Australian brands as Banrock Station and Hardys, said quality at all price points has improved significantly during the almost 20 years he has been travelling to wine fairs around the world and that $8 and $9 no longer means a gamble with mediocrity. “With better-trained winemakers and better technology, it’s now difficult to find really bad wines, even in the less-than-$10 category.”

– Ontario would still have miles to go before catching up to bargain-wine trends in the United States, where mass-produced brands such as Barefoot Cellars often sell in … for as little as $4 a bottle (which are $9.95 in the LCBO! 😦 -bm))

See the article here with the misleading title of LCBO flips anti-plonk policy, since all LCBO outlets have always had alot of plonk on it shelves that never seems to shrink. Low cost wine isn’t synonymous with plonk.

P.S. for more on some of the fine, award winning and non-plonk wine from Barefoot, see here and here for some good examples.

flickr steps up the plate for the Library of Congress

[William J. Bradley, Toronto (baseball)] (LOC)

The Library of Congress has added 3,000 copyright-free, public domain photos to Flickr. The catch? It’s up to us to tag them all.

To me, this is a significant step in the growth of such Web 2.0 services. Imagine if more and more librarians put their archives on the Web in such a fashion.

Thanks to lifehacker for the tip!

(Photo: Bain News Service,
publisher.

[William J. Bradley,
Toronto (baseball)]

[1911])


Canadian Opera Company’s Opera for a New Age Tickets On-Sale Saturday


Under 30? Live in or around Toronto? Love or interesting in opera? Then mark this date on your calendar:

On Saturday
January 19, the Canadian Opera Company’s Opera for a New Age
tickets go on sale. You get tickets at $20 a seat (as opposed to $60 or more.) for performances of Tosca by Puccini and From the House of the Dead by Janácek.

See Canadian Opera Company’s Opera for a New Age Tickets On-Sale Saturday

(Credit to blogto.com)

China and Web 2.0

 

Cnn.com has alot of stories on very trivial matters. But this China story is anything but. It’s about:

Wei Wenhua (who) was a model communist and is now a bloggers’ hero — a “citizen journalist” turned martyr.

The world needs China to open up, and so does China. Here’s hoping they do. Everyone will benefit.

For more details, see Death pits technology against Chinese control. Kudos to CNN.

Kids don’t like clowns

According to a study reported on in the globeandmail.com, children hate clowns. Even older ones. It found that:

“clowns are universally disliked by children. Some found them quite frightening and unknowable.”

I think this may be an exaggeration, but I think there is alot more too it than adults realize. Perhaps a few generations from now, people will look back and think: wow! There were clowns back then! 🙂

casa cachagua and other great design at materialicious

What ismaterialicious™? As it says, it is “a weblog featuring residential architecture, design, craftsmanship, materials and products. It is edited by Justin Anthony, a New Yorker who is currently residing in Phoenix, AZ., and was a residential restoration specialist for 25 years.” It is chock full of great architecture and design, like the Casa Cachagua featured above. Go see.

casa cachagua, f3 arquitectos at materialicious