Rambles Blog at Star Chamber

Getting the future wrong is easy. Getting the future wrong with style requires some skill.

Paleo-Future is a blog that specializes in digging up ancient visions of the future, particularly those distant futures that we now inhabit (i.e. what will life be like in the year 2000?). It’s an impressive blog, because the author, whose name is only given as Matt, really works it. He digs up predictions as old as a newspaper from 1900 (check out how it anticipates the Segway) and as recent as Apple’s 1987 Knowledge Navigator video. Lots of great videos, like Walt Disney himself explaining the GE Carousel of Progress.

Predicting the future with any accuracy is just hopeless. This explains why we are so fascinated with the clothes they wear in the future. The same thing is true for royalty: if you don’t have power, work the pomp.

I much prefer Tim O’Reilly’s approach, which is built around the famous William Gibson quote: “The future is here. It’s just not widely distributed yet.” If you don’t see people doing something now, you shouldn’t count on seeing it in the future.

(Paleo-Future seen on tingilinde)

I bought my first iPod back in 2003, and it served me well for almost three years before the drive started making ominous clicking sounds. Then it kept popping into “Drive Mode” and wouldn’t come out. I tried all the tricks, read the support sites, and even asked a friend who used to work at an Apple store. It was pretty clear the drive was terminally ill and unlikely to recover.

“Let’s take it to the Genius Bar,” said my wife, referring to the smug/slick tech support desk at the Apple Store of White Zen Oneness with Merchandising. “I don’t want to take it to the damn Genius Bar,” I said, “That place gives me the creeps, and I already know this iPod is dead.”

And so we went. This is a fairly typical scenario in my house.

As expected, the nice man in the black t-shirt verified my click-clacking iPod was indeed dead, but then he told me something that made the trip worthwhile: you can turn in your old iPod (recycle it) and get a 10% discount on a new one. So my wife’s faith in the magical healing powers of the Genius Bar saved me some cash on my new video iPod.

Once at home, I wanted to try out the new video capabilities by playing back something on my TV. But I hadn’t bought the special Apple video cables that hook it to the TV. Since it’s just a matter of connecting the mini-jack on the iPod side to the RCA audio/video connectors on the TV side, I realized that I already had the cable I needed in my video camera bag. It took me a while to realize I needed to change the video output settings for the iPod, but then I ran into a more sinister problem. Even though the cables all fit together perfectly, the connection didn’t work. Why? It took a little Googling to find out: it’s because Apple sends the video signal out through the red RCA jack rather than the yellow one as God intended. Wha? What an odd move! Is there a reason for this, or is it just a cynical way to squeeze some cash out of the Apple-besotted marketplace?

Anyway, it works now, and I didn’t have to pay Apple for my video cables. Check it out: Playing iPod video on your TV for cheap – Lifehacker. Downloading content from Google Video and watching it on TV works surprisingly well.

As a follow-up to a post I made in January about inexpensive backup tools, I thought I would mention that I’m now using Mozy and find it to work really well. Shortly after I posted about Jungle Disk, a couple of people (Rick at work and my cousin Peter) told me about a New York Times article in which David Pogue recommended Mozy: Fewer Excuses For Not Doing A PC Backup. It’s not nearly as cheap as Jungle Disk, but it’s cheap enough for me and it’s definitely lower hassle. And now that I’ve been using it for a few months, I can testify that it works. I’ve already used it to retrieve a recording that iTunes threw away. Actually I have no idea how the file got lost, but I’m feuding with iTunes so I prefer to blame it for the loss. The point is that Mozy got it back for me and all was made well.

At long last I can sleep the peaceful sleep of a man whose computer is regularly and automatically backed up. Now I just need to defragment my hard drive, change the oil in my car, do my taxes, paint the basement, refinish the bookshelf, upgrade my earthquake insurance, train for the modern pentathlon, re-install the AE-35 antenna stabilization unit, and touch base with Martha Stewart about the announcement of our upcoming book on Hand-Woven Peruvian Reed Easter Baskets.

One of the reasons I abandoned Movable Type for WordPress was an out-of-control comment spam problem. As I said when I first made the move, solutions for this problem do exist for Movable Type, but they were too much work for me to get them tuned properly. When you spend even a small amount of time every single week mucking out the spam, eventually you realize it will never ever stop.

I’ve learned never to be against spammers, but the problem, for now, appears to be solved, for which I am truly grateful. Akismet is the name of the technology available to WordPress users. I have no idea how it works, but it does work amazingly well. Now I can just look at the amount of spam it’s deflected every now and then and gasp at the amount. Here’s my current total for the last few months.

My mental image for the internet now is a ceaseless hammering hail of nearly pure spam packets with a barely-detectable taint of useful information. As with an antarctic blizzard, even a short trip outside the firewall without your protective spamsuit on would be fatally short.

None of this is news anymore, but I was moved to post on this topic once more by this remarkably compact piece of spam poetry.

Nice design! Irritable Bowel Syndrome Jerseys jewelry exchange store Japanese Jennifer Esposito

I appreciated the compliment on my design, though I was a little disturbed that the subject of irritable bowels came so quickly to mind thereafter. My apologies, but I seem to have misplaced the URL whereby you could follow up on these tempting items.

If you blog, Linkify from Xenomachina is a fantastically useful tool. If you don’t, I’m not sure it’s very useful, but it’s so good at what it does it’s worth a post.

Suppose you were writing along, and you happened to mention Dizzy Gillespie and his cameo appearance in the movie Bedtime for Bonzo. In order to add some credibility to this rather surprising story, you’d like to add a link or two. This involves opening up a browser, searching for a relevant document, grabbing the URL, bringing it back to the blogging environment, and wrapping it around your selected text.

Or does it?

Modern bloggers can now simply highlight the text (“Dizzy Gillespie”) and mash on the Linkify bookmark. Pick the first option, a Wikipedia link, and you’re done. Presto linko.

Many people are surprised to hear that Dizzy Gillespie made a cameo appearance in Bedtime for Bonzo. There is a good reason for this.

(spotted at

Even when I don’t care much for the product of an artist’s work, I am fascinated by the process they use to create it. The stories are so often surprising: what appears simple was five years in the making, or perhaps a magnum opus arrived in one crowded week. What inspired them? How long did they spend working on it? What does their workspace look like?

Some creative types make lovely temples to their craft, places where you’d love to linger and bask in the pregnant glow. Others can crank out great work in filthy cramped quarters. On My Desk is a site, a blog actually, that has the tagline “Creative folk share the stuff on their desks.” In it, you get to see what practicing artists’ workspaces are like. It’s a lot of fun to compare the neat with the dirty, the cluttered with the spare. And yet they’re all doing more or less the same thing. How does it work?

One of the reasons I enjoy comics is that, for some reason, comic artists will happily talk at great and articulate length about their influences, creative process, technique, and tools. The Comics Journal does a wonderful job recording and presenting these interviews. It’s rarer for a musician to have the same gift, but it’s a pleasure to read what any artist has to say about how and where they work.

I remember watching the end of the movie Let It Be, the part where they’re recording the title song, and I remember thinking at that moment, “So that’s what it looked like when they made that sound.”

Update: By happy coincidence, Greg just posted some pictures of his spacious basement recording studio.

Be on the lookout for a lovely young crescent moon. It was beautiful this evening, just below Venus, which is putting on a dazzling Evening Star performance for something like a two month gig here. Still, as pretty as the moon looks from down here, I was amazed by today’s Astronomy Photo of the Day. Those fat cats in the International Space Station may be stealing food from the mouths of robotic space probes, but they sure do take some purty pictures.

By the way, don’t miss the fascinating conversation about music on the web going right now over on the Baconworks post. Is the web great for discovering and encouraging musical talent, or is it a miserable shadow of the glory days of the music industry when A&R men could discover fabulous talent and promote superstars worthy of the name?

NPR recently ran a story on missing teaspoons at a scientific institute in Australia. Spoons were vanishing at an alarming rate, and it became a question of some urgency to determine what was happening.

We’ve all heard the jokes about how washing machines send socks into another dimension. But honestly, this is just one step away from the archaic folk notion of spontaneous generation. As you recall, that’s the theory where rotting meat spontaneously turns into maggots, piles of dirty rags become mice, and valued local stores turn into Starbucks. But spontaneous generation just doesn’t happen, and neither does the spontaneous disintegration of teaspoons. Filling in as the modern versions of Redi and Spallanzani are Megan S C Lim, et al of the Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health Research, Macfarlane Burnet Institute for Medical Research and Public Health, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Their paper is titled The case of the disappearing teaspoons: longitudinal cohort study of the displacement of teaspoons in an Australian research institute.

From the paper, we read

In January 2004 the authors found their tearoom bereft of teaspoons. Although a flunky (MSCL) was rapidly dispatched to purchase a new batch, these replacements in turn disappeared within a few months. Exasperated by our consequent inability to stir in our sugar and to accurately dispense instant coffee, we decided to respond in time honoured epidemiologists’ fashion and measure the phenomenon.

Truth be told, however, this study addresses the rate and circumstances under which the spoons disappear, and it fails to address the root causes. Sadly, it concludes “People have no control over teaspoon migration; escape to a spoonoid planet and resistentialism are equally plausible explanations.” Maybe Starbucks do arise magically from overripe storefronts.