classic Ze Frank video about how to hire a web developer. LOL.

Here's a a great tutorial on using GUI GPG tools with Apple's Mail client. really easy once you get it set up. yay.

In other news, I'm also really excited about the bike I'm building. The more progress I make the more excited I get. Tonite I attached some awesome cruiser-style handlebars and we did brakes. Sadly, I will finish it just a few days before I go to Europe for a month, so i won't have that much time to enjoy the thing till I get back in July.

Speaking of bikes I told some activists today how I could easily rant at them about how they all drive cars to our meetings, but that our group isn't about bicycle activism or even about global warming so I don't think it's appropriate. It's not the focus.

I'm a big fan of focus.

This is old (all of almost 10 years now!!!) but so accurate and informative to those who may be close to coders and don't understand. An excerpt:

People imagine that programmers don't like to talk because they
prefer machines to people. This is not completely true. Programmers don't
talk because they must not be interrupted.
This need to be uninterrupted leads to a life that is strangely
asynchronous to the one lived by other human beings. It's better to send
e-mail to a programmer than to call. It's better to leave a note on the
chair than to expect the programmer to come to a meeting. This is because
the programmer must work in mind time while the phone rings and the
meetings happen in real time. It's not just ego that prevents programmers
from working in groups - it's the synchronicity problem. Synchronizing with
other people (or their representations in telephones, buzzers and
doorbells) can only mean interrupting the thought train. Interruptions mean
bugs. You must not get off the train.

funny and interesting (sort of) tv talk show segment about Twitter, and then Rex, one of the 'experts' on the show, blogs about it, and there's some interesting comments too. social networking fads, trends, next big things....

wtfait, meanwhile people are still starving to death in bolivia and haiti and hell, new orleans for that matter, and polar bears are drowning and and and...

Great April Fool's joke from Google. Even more beguiling that they left it up today - well, at least for a little while... the link from their front page is now gone.

Another somewhat funny internet-based fool's joke was an announcement that 4 teachers from the spanish school i went to in Guatemala went on a surprise vacation to New York City. Complete with clever photoshopped snapshots.

A friend sent me an interesting list of essentials for the ex-mac user switching to linux.

Yeah. ok. Whatever. I already did that, and then went back. I was an everyday desktop user of linux, had a linux laptop, blah blah, from like 98 to 2001, and felt all ideologically proud and all, I even wrote my own live audio manipulation software for music peformance using a tangled thicket of perl, sql, and csound code.... but in retrospect all of that was a pain. I switched back to the Mac when I wanted to start doing desktop video stuff again and Final Cut was the killer app and still is. Not only that, but OS X gave me the unix command line anyway. And I never looked back. Despite my rant from the other day here, the mac is still so much more a pleasure to use than anything else, and I'm just done being an ubergeek. I don't even have development tools installed on my powerbook. If I have to compile something to use a piece of software on my personal worskstation, fuck it, there must be something else.

Really, even for me, user experience and interface are king now, and Apple just kicks ass at that. I recently switched from using the free, open source Audacity to using a pirated copy of Soundtrack Pro. Stupidly, Soundtrack Pro doesn't even do an important step in my podcasting workflow that Audacity does (exporting to MP3 - i use iTunes to do the conversion now), but it's worth it because Soundtrack Pro just has the easier to use and more beautiful interface. It has the standard key shortcuts that every soundeditor i've loved for the last 12 years (soundtools, protools, peak) has had, not to mention others that it shares with Final Cut. It feels good to use it. Audacity feels like I'm building a house with half-built, ugly tools that cut my hands when I hold them. The feel and look of the interface is what matters, even if one has to sacrifice a bit (just a bit) of power.

And I don't believe that "replacement" linux apps would even be that much more reliable than their Apple counterparts. Shit goes wrong all the time on linux boxen, tho not as often as on widoze, of course.. They may be a little better than 6 years ago, but not that much. It's just that so many geeks simply love to fuck around on computers for their own sake, so it seems okay to them. Well, I just want to get work done, I don't want to feel like an amateur mechanic fiddling under the hood of my hotrodded Mustang GT all day just because I can. I'd rather have that fucker on the road, taking me real places, even if it's just a Honda Civic.

As my friend Mykle once said, "Unix is like a Rubik's Cube, you can mess around with it all day and feel really good for solving it but you still haven't gotten any work done."

No, I want to, as the redneck pickup truck bumpersticker says, "Get R Done"...

Yesterday while making a pair of mix CDs for a new lover (a favorite thing of mine to do for a new or potential lover) I accidentally deleted one of the 2 playlists from iTunes. A result of confusion over the interface (i was trying to delete some tracks from the playlist, but didnt know that other pane was active, the pane with the list of playlists, in which i had selected that playlist), the mistake was itself annoying that it could happen so easily, but, I believed at first, not a big deal - until I noticed that iTunes was not allowing me the opportunity to undo that. WTF?!!!? I got really mad. Why should that sort of thing NOT be undoable? Upon further examination i have found that a lot of things are non-undoable in iTunes. Why? Since when did Apple decide that something so easy and constant and expectable would be impossible?

There are all sorts of other problems with iTunes that I've been meaning to blog about for months. Really stupid obvious functional features that just aren't there. For instance, almost every day I use it, which is almost every day, I have the following interaction/desire: I'm listening to a track that played because I was in shuffle mode, or because it was in a playlist, and I want to easily call up all the other tracks on the album that it appears on, or by that same artist. It seems like such a common thing that people would want to do, why isn't it there? It would be so great and easy to just have that be a choice in the contextual menu when you ctl-click or right-click on a track. Oh, this song is great, i feel like listening to the whole album, right-click... oh shit... i guess i have to type the album name into the search bar or else scroll through the list of artists or albums.

And speaking of the fucking search bar, why in fucking HELL do they start the search as soon as you start typing? do they ever test this shit with a really truly huge library (I have over 6500 songs in mine), or a machine that isnt a million MHz or isn't doing other things with its CPU? because what happens is, you type the first letter or 2 and then have to sit and wait for it to start searching and giving me results WAY too huge, before i can continue typing... why the FUCK can't I at least have a setting in the preferences where i can choose to only start searches after i press return? It's just ridiculous.

Another ridiculously stupid and scary and enraging thing happened with an apple product a couple days ago too: all of a sudden, the last 7 months of my photos in iPhoto just .... weren't there. gone. just like that. no warning, no error message, nothing. Now the good thing is that the image files are still there on my hard drive, but when i try to re-import them into iPhoto it says they are an unreadable format! Even though I can open them just fine with other programs like Preview or Photoshop. WTF??!!!!?? And we're talking about more than just photos, there's lots of metadata i have lost too, titles and ratings and descriptions. Ludicrous. It's like it's July again, and I really don't want it to be July 2006 again. I'm happy with Feburary 2007

And I realized what is so devastating about both of these cases is that this is the Mac OS we're talking about. If it were Windoze, well, hell, everyone is used to Windoze just sucking, all the time, period. Most of the world, because most of the computer-using world uses Windoze, just assumes that computers are going to suck, and you can't trust them, and they'll cause you unending hellish hassles every single day of your life, so just get used to and that's that, tough luck, life sucks.

But this is Apple. Most of the time Apple products just work, unlike Microsoft shit, and not only do they work but they work well, and you get things done, and you feel good about it.

So it makes times like this feel like even more of a betrayal, when I realize that even Apple sucks. That even Apple, the "think different" company, will let you down, and cannot be trusted, and at any moment you will lose hours or weeks or months of time and effort and ... life. You can't trust these things either, you can't have faith in them.

I'm not saying everything should be perfect and nothing should go wrong ever. I'm just saying, when you set up the expectation that things will be good, and it would be easy to just finish the job, then finish the fucking job, Steve Jobs. I feel like going to your house in Sausalito or whereever and kicking you in the iPods.

Time for me to set up a daily backup scheme, I guess. I've lost the faith.

I so hate the paradigm in web sites, and now even cellphones and other devices, where everything is "my". "my stuff" is the name of one of the items in the main menu of my cellphone. And as you know, all sorts of sites have "my account", "my shopping cart", "my profile" - am i rare, or wrong, even, in thinking about my experience with a website as a communication with that website? or at least a story? And we all know that you should never write a story in 2nd person, unless you're writing those Choose Your Own Adventure books, which of course were a huge hit and still everywhere. NOT.

not that i exactly think that the site or device is another human, but it is a sort of presence, and a representation of its makers, who are human beings. as such, when the website "talks" to me, it should use the correct pronouns. when it talks to me about "my" things, it should say "your things". When I talk about my things, I can say "my things". When the website "talks" to me, it's not ME talking, it's the website, it's SOMEONE ELSE.

It baffles me and really disturbs me that a conception so basic as this is so backwards for all these interfaces. It's like putting the handle on the wrong end of a gun.

I guess that's another reason why I hate MySpace. It should be called YourSpace. Or maybe it should just be called, "FuckYou, we're tricking you and all your friends and taking over the internet, eat shit and die."

sometimes when i'm working on computer stuff i feel like this:

G-Rated (edited by me to protect the wholesome)

(it's gruesome, but if you want, check out the original.)

Very cool. Really good interface. From the organize tool, you can just drag photos onto the map. Awesome.