She’s just so wonderfully weird.
I Love the Weirdness That is Summer Glau
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Monthly Archives: September 2008
Oh, and For September 22d
Happy Birthday Bilbo, where-ever you are.
iTunes Genius
I finally got around to playing with the iTunes Genius feature last night. Basically, you pick a song from your library, Apple then recommends new music from their store which will go good with it. I mostly ignore this part, because it mostly recommends music I already own, although I may not have purchased it from the iTunes store. Click the genius button, and it will suggest a playlist of 25, 50, 75 or 100 songs from your library. You can save that playlist or refresh it a couple times to see if there aren’t other matches.
Most of the time I got some really good songs that I may not have put together myself. As far as I can tell, the “Genius” makes it’s matches from “similar artists,” “year song was released,” “beats per minute,” and “genre.” “Jersey Girl” by Tom Waits gave me everything from Springsteen’s “Nebraska” to “Romeo’s Tune” by Steve Forbert to “Stuck Between Stations” by The Hold Steady to “Not Fade Away” by The Crickets. Those feel right. But it also gave me “Angel From Montgomery” by Bonne Raitt/John Prine, “Handbags and Gladrags” by Rod Stewart, and “Tumbling Dice” by the Stones. And Dylan…lots of Bob Dylan. So maybe there’s a “Gravel In Their Voice” category in the database that doesn’t show on the front end.
I basically like Genius. I’m lazy. When I try to make playlists myself, I over-think my way into complete paralysis. I’m not completely in synch with the Genius, but it does give me a good starting point.
The initial setup takes some time, so before you download it and set it up, understand that depending on the size of your collection, you’re probably going to need at least an hour. And Apple will read your entire library before it sends a copy of that list to itself. If you’re afraid of Apple knowing what’s in your library, you’re not going to choose to do this. Personally, I bought and paid for all of my music, not all from iTunes, but it’s all bought and paid for so I don’t much care if they know or not.
Cowboys beat Packers like kettle drums
I had no idea that the Cowboys had so many large holes playing for them on the offensive line.
‘I looked up and .. I saw a hole. And I stopped for a second – I didn’t know we had any of those playing for us.‘
Good job, Cowboys. Packers … well y’all showed up for the game and gosh darn it, you tried hard. Yes, of course we’ll stop for dilly bars on the way home.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
Texiana – Three Roads
These last few weeks, I’ve been in the process of wrapping up the final loose ends of the Adelsverein Trilogy. The cover for it will be done when the cover artist comes back from vacation, and my prospective-hopeful-maybe employer is going over the final draft with a fine toothed comb. She edits for a living, to the very strictest standard, and asked me if I would let her do this – she loved reading “Truckee” but said there were a fair number of spacing errors and typos in it. So – the first two books are pretty well wrapped up, and I sent out most of a box of twenty of the first volume – Adelsverein: The Gathering as review copies to various websites and publications. (I will link to the reviews as they appear)
Time to think about the follow-up writing project – what to do next? Blondie wanted me to do something set in Ancient Rome. She had an idea about some characters, a family of jewelers in 2nd century Rome, and a children’s adventure set in 1st century Britain, about the children of a Druid who escape the massacre of the Druids on the Isle of Mona. I just couldn’t warm to either proposition. This writing thing, creating characters and a story, making it live so that other people get into it — you have to be into it yourself. It has to kick up a spark in you, one way or the other. It’s hard work, long and complicated and pulls a lot out of you. And it also helps to already have a lot of the required reference books on hand.
So, it’s back to the 19th century frontier. I had been kicking around the idea of going back and doing a sort of prequel about the early American settlers in Texas. I had alluded to some of the incidents and accidents involving the Becker family, and thought it might be interesting to do a book about Margaret Becker, who was a walk-on character, but with a fascinating story in her own right as a society hostess and entrepreneur. I also wanted to carry on the story of some of the Becker children, perhaps with involvement in some of the hairier range wars, like the Mason County Hoo Doo War. I did fear I might beat the franchise to death, or get into a boring rut… but there were so many angles and characters I wanted to explore, and if I had given in to that impulse as I was writing Adelsverein, it would have been several times longer.
The next project came into focus when the notion popped into my mind that I should also do a book and follow the adventures of another peripheral character in Adelsverein. I had made a passing reference to the fact that this person had gone to California with a herd of cattle during the Gold Rush, had stayed for a bit and then come back. Ah-ha! I had always wanted to write a picaresque adventure about the California Gold Rush, of following the trail, and of the whole great and gaudy Gold Rush experience, when Argonauts from the world over poured into California by ship, by wagon train, mule train and on foot.
So there it is – another trilogy; independent of Adelsverein but linked to it, focusing on certain minor characters which I have already created and know something about. Three different roads, three different searches; working title “The Western Trail Trilogy”. I’ve already done a couple of chapters on the first one, and begun reading a tall stack of books. Books about pre-Republic Texas, about the Gold Rush, about range wars and vigilantes… some of them that I can even take into work with me and sneak in a couple of pages between phone calls. So there it is – something to look forward to, when you have read all of Adelsverein. Which will be available in December, don’t forget.
Wander my freaks
We’ve committed to a re-commitment ceremony. We’ve settled on a style that fits us, the monkeys are thrilled with the formal wear we’ve settled on ..
Kilts! And bagpipes!
That’s my daughter. She is fifteen.
Oh … my … gawd you people are freaks! I’m the only normal person here!
Phht: Kilts are cool. And it’s not bagpipes plural – just a recording [1] that I’m mulling over for the set [2] you play when you’re getting ready for the show to start.
Nothing set in stone – and we’ve got a year to nail this sucker down.
Anyway – she’s my coolth gauge. When she goes high and to the right, I know that I’m spot on.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
[1] I like this one too. The opening is a bit .. heavy .. for an intimate gathering, perhaps.
[2] The themes that run through the Battlestar Galactica soundtrack really hit me in the gut. Redemption, Reunification … hey it’s a re-commitment ceremony, right?
Avast Me Hearties!
The Persistence of Plastic Turkey Memory
A running gag at Tim Blair’s blog over the last five years or so has been reports of the appearance of the eternal bird in the dribblings of various writers, entertainers and columnists. That is, a sneering reference to the pictures of President Bush holding a supposedly plastic turkey, in a series of pictures taken at his surprise Thanksgiving visit to troops in Iraq five years ago. Explained and debunked over and over again by eyewitnesses that it was a real turkey, for display at the steam tables where the main entrée was being dished out, put together by the mess-hall staff and that such displays are actually commonplace at military mess halls… the plasticized version of this meme appears yet again, unscathed, rather like a turkey-shaped Freddy Kruger. The bird is not only the word, it is eternal. (Spotted yet again this very morning, as I contemplated this essay while being dragged around the block by the dogs.)
Obviously, this is a convenient short-hand for the people who enjoy sneering at George W. Bush and are too damned lazy to rustle up something a little more current than the old plastic turkey story. Tim Blair and his commenters get a lot of mileage – and a lot of hearty chortling – but the fact that the meme is still current after five years and a ton of energetic debunking is kind of depressing. It proves that Joseph Goebbels was on to something when he observed the effectiveness of telling a big lie and sticking to it… even at the cost of looking ridiculous. If a story is repeated often enough, it will be believed by a depressingly large number of people: 9/11 was an inside plot by the Bush Administration, Mayor Ray Nagin of New Orleans was completely blameless in the Hurricane Katrina disaster, the 2000 election was stolen, the Swiftboat veterans’ claims about John Kerry were all debunked, that US government were Saddam Hussein’s biggest supplier of military equipment… oh, add your own favorite here, the list is practically endless.
Such memes persist because they are repeated incessantly by all sorts of people, against all available evidence to the contrary. The most depressing aspect is that in a lot of cases they are repeated by media figures that once I would have expected better from – and applauded by audiences that I also expected better of. (Garrison Keillor being a particular offender. I can barely stand to listen to Prairie Home Companion these days, and I used to love that show.) Now I only hope for better. Sad to say, that hope is growing fainter and fainter by the hour… especially over the last two weeks. As if it wasn’t bad enough to suspect our very own dear media folks of being lazy and careless in vetting stories in the last election cycle, as if it wasn’t bad enough that 60 Minutes could air a blatant hit piece just before election day, based on shaky fact-checking and dubious memos in an attempt to throw the election to John Kerry… as if the hurricane of vitriol this time around didn’t reach a new and unexplored depths with the Palin-faked-pregnancy story, now it looks as if mainstream media has moved solidly into place as a propaganda arm of the Obama Democrats.
Not just the dirt-digging on Governor Palin – it’s the asymmetrical dirt-digging. Plus the final edit of her interview with Charles Gibson, with her answers judiciously edited to put the worst complexion on them… (sample of it here) plus the staging of it in the studio, plus his hectoring manner, so very different from his interview with Senator Obama. Really, it does give one pause. Then consider the cover shoot of Senator McCain, for the Atlantic Magazine, with such very artistic and well-considered outtakes doctored by the photographer….
Just some examples from the last couple of weeks… but still, very revealing ones, about the various aspects of the current political scene. I wouldn’t go so far as to make a blanket insistence that the whole lot are in the tank for the Obama campaign… but I sure as hell wouldn’t assume anything about their impartiality, either. Were I a media advisor to a Republican nominee to high office, I’d certainly be advising a quick pre-interview google-search of the interviewer’s name… and for the nominee to bring along his or her own own camera crew.
(Thanks Sigivald – corrected!)
CONGRATULATIONS, AND THANK YOU!!! Day by Day Fundraiser ends early
Click on the cartoon for more details….
I love you moooore . . .
Is it the training or do they bring that attitude to the service, fully formed?
Sugary Sweetness (YouTube Video)
Via.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
If You Like Michigan’s Economy, You’ll Love Obama’s
If You Like Michigan’s Economy, You’ll Love Obama’s
Mr. McCain will lower taxes. Mr. Obama will raise
them, especially on small businesses. To understand why, you need to
know something about the “infamous” top 1% of income tax filers: In
order to avoid high corporate tax rates and the double taxation of
dividends, small business owners have increasingly filed as individuals
rather than corporations. When Democrats talk about soaking the rich,
it isn’t the Rockefellers they’re talking about; it’s the companies
where most Americans work. Three out of four individual income tax
filers in the top 1% are, in fact, small businesses.In the name of taxing the rich, Mr. Obama would raise
the marginal tax rates to over 50% on millions of small businesses that
provide 75% of all new jobs in America. Investors and corporations will
also pay higher taxes under the Obama program, but, as the
Michigan-Ohio-Illinois experience painfully demonstrates, workers
ultimately pay for higher taxes in lower wages and fewer jobs.Mr. Obama would spend all the savings from walking out
of Iraq to expand the government. Mr. McCain would reserve all the
savings from our success in Iraq to shrink the deficit, as part of a
credible and internally consistent program to balance the budget by the
end of his first term. Mr. Obama’s program offers no hope, or even a
promise, of ever achieving a balanced budget.Mr. Obama would stimulate the economy by increasing
federal spending. Mr. McCain would stimulate the economy by cutting the
corporate tax rate. Mr. Obama would expand unionism by denying workers
the right to a secret ballot on the decision to form a union, and would
dramatically increase the minimum wage. Mr. Obama would also expand the
role of government in the economy, and stop reforms in areas like tort
abuse.The states have already tested the McCain and Obama
programs, and the results are clear. We now face a national choice to
determine if everything that has failed the families of Michigan, Ohio
and Illinois will be imposed on a grander scale across the nation. In
an appropriate twist of fate, Michigan and Ohio, the two states that
have suffered the most from the policies that Mr. Obama proposes, have
it within their power not only to reverse their own misfortunes but to
spare the nation from a similar fate.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
Maybe it’s not the camera…
My mom spent my entire lifetime taking family pictures. And we have photo album after photo album filled with pictures of people missing either their heads or their feet.
Finally, in the early 90s, my mom invested a couple hundred dollars in a 35mm point & shoot camera (most money she ever spent on a camera). Oddly enough, the new, fancy camera still cut off people’s heads or feet in the pictures she took. Mom blamed the camera.
We laugh, of course, because it was obviously Mom who was cutting off the heads or feet of the folks in the picture, not the camera. It was all in how she framed her shots.
Reader’s Digest had a story once, in one of their humor sections… a famous photographer had some folks over for a slide-show presentation of his trip to somewhere exotic (Alaska, Antarctica, wherever). As the guests were leaving, someone’s wife said to him – “Those are wonderful photographs. You must have a very expensive camera.” He smiled and thanked her. A while later, he was invited to a dinner party at that family’s house. He attended, and enjoyed a delicious meal. As he was leaving, he said to the hostess: “That was a delicious dinner. You must have very expensive cookware.”
It’s absurd to think that fancy cookware is all that’s needed to make an excellent dinner. Why then, do folks think a fancy camera is all that’s needed for good photos? It’s not the camera, it’s the photographer. A skilled photographer can take excellent photos with a crappy camera. Granted, good photos are easier with a good camera, but it’s ultimately the skill of the photographer that counts.
Case in point… for years, I had a 2.1mp digital camera. Folks would talk about how important it was to have higher megapixels, and faster shutter speeds, less lag between the time you click the shutter button and when the picture is actually taken. People would talk about how they missed shots because their camera wasn’t fast enough. And they needed more megapixels so they could print bigger pictures, because a 2.1mp camera just can’t give you a good 8×10 picture.
Now, I’m not against better cameras, don’t get me wrong. But I printed many good quality 8×10 photos from my 2.1mp camera. And I got many good action shots (in bright light) from my impossibly slow camera.
Because I knew how to take pictures. I had learned over the years, by practice and by reading everything I could get my hands on about the art of picture-making.
If you want an action shot, you don’t wait until the last minute to try and get it. You anticipate it. If your camera is slow, then not only do you anticipate where the action will be, you half-press the shutter button to set the focus, and keep it there until the action happens.
For instance, each of these photos was taken with my very old, very slow, 2.1mp camera, using the method I just mentioned:
Every time I’m on a message board and I see someone post “Wow, great pictures! What kind of camera do you have?” I cringe, because asking that question implies that the CAMERA is the reason the photos are so good, not the photographer. If they’re asking me, I smile politely and answer the question. Maybe they’re in the market for a new camera, after all.
But I know for a fact that there are people in this world who think that if they can only buy the correct camera, all their picture taking problems will be solved. And it’s NOT true. A camera is only a tool, not a miracle-machine. It’s up to the person using the tool to create the good picture.
UPDATE: The camera I used for the above pics, as well as my current camera both have a “fully manual” mode. My original digicam was an Olympus C2100-UZ (ultra zoom). Lens by Canon, 10x Optical zoom, 2.1mp. And yet I printed some very nice 8×10 pics (and 11×17, as well) with it. A lot of the print quality rests in the processing of the photo before sending it off to print, in my opinion.
My current is a Panasonic Lumix DMC FZ20. Leica lens, 5mp, 10x optical zoom (maybe 12x? Don’t remember off-hand). It supports additional lenses/filters, has a hot-shoe for external flash, costs 1/2 to 1/3 what a dSLR would have cost me at the time, and I don’t have to lug around a bunch of lenses. My back loves it. Yeah, I’d love to have the newer FZ-whatever, with slightly shorter lag-times, and more ISO equivalencies (mine sucks at low-light shooting), but this one is good enough for now.
I have another Panasonic that I take on business trips – it fits in my backpack or my pocket, and does what I need. It’s their Lumix TZ-1. Lens by Leica, 10x optical zoom, 5mp.
I won’t invest in a dSLR until I’m ready to go back to the world of manual shooting, and I’ve really enjoyed using the auto feature and letting my camera do the thinking for me. But my FZ20 supports fully manual mode, so as long as it’s doing what I need, why change it?