blog.myspace.com/mcchris:

GET IT WHILE ITS HOT (music going offline!)

all back catalog cd’s have been stricken from the shelves at indie merch store. dungeon master of cermonies and eating’s not cheating will be available on itunes for one more month, after that i will have cd’s with me on the road, but after that…

WE ARE NOT PRESSING ANY MORE.

we may bring it back but not any time soon. there are just a few hundred left so i’d say come to a show and get one of the last of its kind. thanks to indie merch for kindly shipping all those cd’s and thanks to mudhut.co.uk for hosting us on itunes. we got to lots of kids thanks to ur team’s efforts and i appreciate it for real.

as for the why… it’s just a new time in my life and i think i’d be happier if i knew u guys were just sharing it. i think sharing it is how i got to have any success in the first place. so its nice to just let it all be free. we wont be hosting any discs except for life’s a bitch. ur just gonna have to pass it along urself. regardless of what anyone else may say, i really hope u do. i need help getting the word out and i look at the back catalog like they’re dandelion spores.

peace and thanks to everyone that ever bought these discs. :)

wow. You don’t see that very often.

I’ve documented my general susceptibility to the futzmonkey — switching between different software solutions to a problem (email, web browsing, operating system, bookmarking, blogging, etc) in the quest of the elusive “best” solution.

One of the big tradeoff axes is free software vs. nonfree; another is cross-platform vs. macintosh; another, which is often the same as the latter, is web-based vs desktop-application-based.

Free vs. Non-Free:  I’m doing well enough right now to afford a Mac laptop in addition to taking care of the family, but I’ve spent a fair amount of time in my life barely getting by, never able to afford a new or nice computer, and even now it’s not like a Mac is a trivial purchase.

With the uncertainty of life it makes me nervous to assume our present relative prosperity will continue and invest myself heavily in expensive machines and software. Even the Mac OS — every few years they release an update, and you need that update if you want to run up to date software, and it generally costs $129 per computer.

Besides the free-as-in-beer factor, there is the free-as-in-speech factor.  The relationship there is that “freeware” which is not also “Free Software” tends to suck, or to be deliberately limited in its functionality to encourage you to use the for-pay version, or to become obsolete and abandoned as the rest of the software universe marches on.  If you need free-as-in-beer (“freeware”), the only safe way to get it is to go free-as-in-speech (“Free Software/Open Source”) as well.

An example of “free vs. non-free” futz would be Firefox vs Safari, or vs OmniWeb if we add in the “not even free-as-in-beer” factor.  The ultimate free-vs-non-free futz is Mac OS vs Linux, of course.

 Cross-Platform vs Macintosh: Same things as mentioned above — investing in the Mac makes me nervous, even after being there for years.  I do it, because the Mac is a wonderful place to be, hardware and software-wise.  But it’s like having a girlfriend you really like who you worry might break up with you.  Maybe this is just a personality quirk — I have to work at a job for years before I cease being afraid I’ll be fired at any moment.  Could the same be true of operating systems? Is it just me?
 Web Apps vs. Desktop Apps: You can get an amazing amount done without leaving your browser these days.  I started typing this up in a desktop application called “ecto” and finished editing it later in wordpress’s web-based post editor.  The lovely thing about web applications is that they are available anywhere, on any OS with a recent enough web browser.  The lovely thing about desktop applications is that they’re usually more pleasant to use, and they’re there for you if you don’t happen to be on the internet at that moment.  This turns out to be a Macintosh anxiety issue too, because web-based solutions are cross-OS and therefore “safe.”  When I’m moving back and forth between different platforms, the easiest way to do it is to be as web-based as possible — google reader for RSS, web-based mail, that sort of thing.

Most web services out there are proprietary — the various Google apps, Flickr, etc, etc.  One can get around those by buying web hosting and DIY’ing it, of course.  But then you pay for the web hosting and the hassle of making it work well is all on you.

mph uses the phrase let go and let Steve to describe just doing things the Mac way and enjoying it, letting go of the old paranoia.  There is certainly a big payoff.  Going with free software, in many cases, involves getting involved in all kinds of fiddly nonsense getting it all to work right.  Hacking this configuration file.  Tweaking this kernel option.  Poring over the ubuntu message boards looking for someone who got the same mysterious error message and found a fix for it.  Recompiling this and reinstalling that.

That way lies, if not exactly madness, incredible frustration and hassle.

There is also the aesthetic element: Don Norman wrote a whole book about the fact that functionality can not be separated from beauty.  We are affected by beauty and ugliness whether we want to be or not; all other things being equal, a beautiful system will work better than an ugly one, because we react to the beauty, it affects our mood dealing with it, our tolerance to problems and the speed with which we become frustrated, all kinds of things.  We can’t help being affected.  And to be honest, most free software involves ugliness.

Is there a conclusion here?  I don’t have one.  I’ve been making this up as I go along.

Am I the only one who gets weird about these things?  Comments welcome.

Who said that Bill O’Reilly and John McCain must oppose uncontrolled
immigration because it threatens the “White, Christian male power
structure” of which they are “a part”?

a. Noam Chomsky, provoking agreement from Bill Moyers
b. Al Sharpton, provoking agreement from Carol Moseley Brown
c. Michael Moore, provoking agreement from Jon Stewart
d. Bill O’Reilly, provoking agreement from John McCain

Answers here.

I’ve been hitting the Ruby pretty hard over the holiday weekend, and when you do that you can’t help bouncing against some _why here and there.

Somehow I missed this when I read it, but I noticed that the Poignant Guide to Ruby has a soundtrack! Performed by _why and the thirsty cups!

_why’s writing has always reminded me a little of Robyn Hitchcock, and I’m happy to report that that holds true musically as well. Nice songs.

UPDATE: the gem can be installed thus:

sudo gem install rubnolia –source http://www.edheil.com/software/ruby

and the rdoc is here too, for the curious.I just created my first almost-ready-for-other-people’s use Ruby library, Rubnolia. It’s designed to access bookmarks and tags on ma.gnolia, through its published API.I created it because I had been dinking around with calling web apis in different languages I know (which aren’t Perl, cuz, Perl is work to me, other languages are play). I wasn’t quite digging the style of John Nunemaker’s Addicted to Ma.gnolia — there’s nothing wrong with it; for some reason I just wasn’t comfortable with implementing everything as class methods rather than instance methods. So I did my own, and while I was putting together I had a wonderful time watching it grow and then shrink, as I found minimalist ways of accomplishing things.I’ve actually put the library to a little use — I put together a little camping app that used this library to produce tag clouds, display bookmarks with their descriptions and screenshots, and stuff like that. It was kinda cool, but I didn’t really finish it.

 

UPDATE: I realized that I totally reinvented the wheel on this one.  The stuff I added on to Hash just makes it behave like a Struct or OpenStruct.  Which weren’t there in Ruby 1.6, which is the version of Ruby I first learned DOH!  I could probably cut the code size even more knowing that.