How to Enjoy Your Tea
how to enjoy your tea – a photoset on Flickr
A beautiful photoset, I might add.
how to enjoy your tea – a photoset on Flickr
A beautiful photoset, I might add.
Tonight we performed in Crockett, Houston County, Texas. Jon’ s new Saz solo on Snakecharmer was happening, as opposed to last night in Dallas, when it was not happening – last night no sound came out at all! Today we discovered that the cable connecting the Saz to the soundsystem was bad, broken, kaputt! Switched cables and tonight he rocked out on the saz. It’s an electric Saz that Robbie Rothschild’s brother Char lent us for the week.
Took my new Brompton bike for a spin in Dallas yesterday. Rode to the post office to mail a couple of letters. The bike folds up in a couple of minutes – and it should only take 20 seconds once I remember the sequence correctly. Much better ride than the iXi bike I had before.
Voice-input for computers a la Startrek – yawn. Why would I want everyone in the control-room to hear that I am turning down the bass… Or I am sitting in a pubic space like a Wi-Fi cafe and people can hear my commands. Voice-recognition is great for blind people or people missing one or more limbs, but otherwise un-interesting, I think. Good for quick notes though. Note to self: the Legal Grounds cafe near the Lakewood Theater is frequented by more borgs (people wearing bluetooth headsets) than any other place I have ever been in.
Handwriting-recognition – double yawn. I can type much faster than I can write and that goes double for anyone in their twenties or thirties. I thought Palm Pilots with Graffiti were cool in the nineties, but since switching to a Treo 650 a couple of years ago I haven’t used a stylus and prefer the keyboard.
No, the interaction I want with a computer is gesture-based. My fingers are the best pointing device. I use my fingers much more than I would use, say, a pen or my voice. Take my studio for example. I have a two-screen set-up and when I am using ProTools the screens have so much going on that quite often I can’t find the cursor right away. Is it on the right screen or did I leave it on the left screen? I search and wiggle the mouse… when all I should have to do is touch the screen and that’s where the mouse is. I think once we have multi-touch screens we will wonder how long we made without them. Children will ask how did you do without multi-touch the same way I asked my parents how they got by using a hand-pump to draw water from a well. How did you take a bath? We went to the well with a bucket, several times, and then heated water on a wood-stove…
A Red Cat’s Journey, Enhanced by iTunes – New York Times
Then Mr. Cooder noticed something else: When he burned a copy of the album using Apple’s iTunes software, it sounded fine. He didn’t know why until one of his younger engineers told him that the default settings on iTunes apply a “sound enhancer.” (It’s in the preferences menu, under “playback.”) Usually, that feature sweetens the sound of digital music files, but Mr. Cooder so liked its effect on his studio recordings that he used it to master – that is, make the final sound mixes – his album. “We didn’t do anything else to it,” he said.Mr. Cooder is most likely the first well-known musician to master his album using iTunes, but other producers have also noticed its effect.
If this wasn’t the NYT, I would think it was a hoax. Well, what happens when the same algorithm is applied to the music twice, once by Ry Cooder and for the second time when somebody listens to his music on iTunes? Would it be like adding an EQ twice and possible over-doing it?
Can’t Buy Me Love (or a Long Life) (TreeHugger)
On average, Chileans can expect to live longer than the average American, even though GDP per person is about a quarter of America’s. A Cuban male has a better chance of surviving until 65 than an American male, even though GDP per capita in the US is about eight times Cuba’s.
And this is also despite the US spending 15% of its GDP on health. Cuba, for, example averages around $623 USD, per person a year, while the US manages $5,711, even though Cuba has the world’s highest proportion of doctors, per capita. So ain’t it odd that we’re raping forests, digging vast holes in the ground, polluting our air and water, etc, so we can chase more ‘stuff’ that will neither make our lives happier nor longer? Maybe, just maybe, this is a merry-go-round ride from which we need to dismount.
(Via Treehugger)
Maybe not odd at all.