Fake Steve ON FIRE

Best Fake Steve post in a while.

P.T. Barnum? David Blaine? The big J.C. himself? I have pieces of guys like that in my stool.

Be readin’ it!

Seeking Mac Software – Address Book Tool

I tweeted on this and came up 110% empty. Let’s see if a blog post gets us any further .

In Windows land, there is a very useful app called Anagram. I’ve been a happy user of Anagram for probably five years or more. What Anagram basically does is allow you to select some text and then hit a key (I used to use F12) and it would automagically take that text, parse it, process it, and put it into your address book (Outlook, in my case, though I think it worked with others too). It let you do a nice pass over the data to make sure it was kosher before you hit the final commit. It’s a nice app – I highly recommend it!

On OSX I can find nothing equivalent, and not for lack of looking. Can anybody point me in some useful directions?

Most importantly, I need it to work inside Thunderbird (Thunderbird extension, anybody?!?!?) and feed AddressBook.app. However, it should also work across any application – processing any selected text, or data on the clipboard from within Pages, Word, Firefox, Safari, Evernote, TextEdit, Preview, and so on and so forth.

If nothing exists, could one of you creative folks out there please whip one up? The Anagram guys have been making money on this for a long time. LinkedIn even licensed their technology for their “grab” toolbar. There’s gotta be a Mac market for something like this, no? And of course you can charge an extra $5 to $10 over what Anagram does, just ‘cuz you’re selling to Mac users .

Nomenclature for Pre/Post Internet?

Do we have something like this yet in the lexicon?

I was in my mid twenties when I became a full-bore Internet geek in the very early 90s. Usenet, UUCP, PPP, and so on and so forth. While I may have misspent most of my youth at Fun & Games (it was a gargantuan, loud, dark, filthy drug-den back then – not the brightly-lit kiddie birthday parlor it is today), I have plenty of life experience that pre-dates the Internet.

So how do we refer to this time division? It is indeed a hugely important time division. Future historians will care, no?

I suppose a Latin solution would be nice, but the whole “ante/a/ab/abs” and “pro/pre/prae/post/praeter” thing really queers the use of the letters A and P for Latin reference. However I am rather fond of PI ‘pre’ and AI ‘after’, for numerous, obvious geeky reasons .

Anybody have any thoughts on how to do this right, or what others are doing about it?

Of course the big mess here is that it isn’t really a hard date like the year zero in the Gregorian calendar. 1986 AD is when NSFnet came into being – which basically looks a lot like what we think of today as the Internet. When did the Internet really get going? 1995 seems to be when most of the wonks started counting. So I’d guess that each of us has their own PI/AI moment somewhere in that 10 year window. Although I was goofing on NSFnet-connected UNIX boxen in the mid-1980s, I’d have to guess that my PI/AI moment was in 1989 or 1990 when I got my NeXTcube connected to the Net.

Or do we make the division a hardfast one (Month / Day / Year) and call it done?

Neat problem.

Ablogging

Holy crap – that was my first blog post in over two months.

Apparently I have time to Twitter, but no time to blog. Now that I think about it, I’ve probably paid proportionally similar attention to my RSS feeds during the same period.

Interesting.

Twitter as a US Phenomenon

I was poking around on #hashtags this afternoon when I stumbled upon this ultra-familiar pattern in the graphs:

Ignoring the single-day events, I was surprised to see the obvious wake/sleep pattern of North America represented. I guess I expected less-deep valleys. All in due time, I imagine…

Holiday Buddy List Behavior

Has anybody done any studies on how the size of IM buddy lists wax and wane as you run up to and then get away from major holidays? I know my current list of active IM buddies is lookin’ REALLY anemic right now!

Instrument Innovation!

This is the Torzal Natural Twist bass neck:

If that’s not one of the coolest things you’ve seen in a while, please share whatever you’re smoking! Their standard bass neck twists 35 degrees – 15 at the bridge and 20 at the nut. They also do guitar necks now.

Ultra-genius Jerome Little put his first crazy-ass-neck like this together in the mid 1990s. “Why?” you ask? Ergonomics!

Tendinitis, repetitive strain injury, and a score of other physical ailments are de riguer in the professional music industry. Mr. Little – along with other smart folks – is working to help address that, and his twisted neck is a stupendous piece of the solution. As your hand moves towards the nut (the top, the tuning pegs, the head) it twists away from your body so you don’t have to do wrist gymnastics to finger the fretboard! I do hope he’s patented the bejezus ouf of this stuff!

There are lots more cool pictures of various Torzal Natural Twist necks on their web site, including my “in progress” favorite:

This dude’s a mathlete.

Entertaining Space Reporting

This was apparently the weekend for all the interns at CNN to get to write news stories about stuff happening off our planet. Maybe it went something like “if you do a good job, we’ll let you cover the stratosphere”.

Exhibit 1, courtesty of CNN’s front page (and this one is just stupid):

Space shuttle docks with orbiting station

… The shuttle and station crews were expected to greet each other soon after opening their vehicles’ hatches. …

As opposed to not greeting each other? Or waiting a long time after opening their hatches? WTF?

This one caused me to laugh milk out of my nose. Keep in mind that a run-of-the-mill .22 rifle bullet travels at about a quarter mile per second and weighs a couple grams. Exhibit 2, also courtesy of CNN, emphasis mine:

India probe crash-lands successfully on moon

… Space official Shiv Kumar said the 34-kilogram probe hit the moon surface traveling at … 3,579 mph. Kumar said the probe transmitted sufficient signals to the mother craft before landing, but no more were expected after the impact.

Gee – YA THINK??? A 34,000 gram object impacting at 1 mile per second?

Closed System = Less Support

Last week, Will outed me for switching from my Treo 750 to an iPhone 3G. It’s been a love-hate adjustment, not without pain.

For many years now, I have been using J. River MEDIA CENTER to manage my media. In fact, Will turned me on to JRMC way back when. iTunes is not capable of managing terabytes of distributed data across numerous devices. JRMC makes iTunes look like a toddler’s toy.

Over the years, J. River has worked diligently to break through the stupid walls that Apple keeps putting up in each of their new iPods. It’s non-trivial work. If I had to manage my iPod Classic 160GB with iTunes, I’m certain I’d swallow a bullet! My family thanks you, JRMC!

Unfortunately, the good folks at J. River have apparently hit their limit of dealing with this closed system bullshit:

We may come back to the iPhone in the future, but for now, we’re not going to spin our wheels supporting Apple.

Shame on Apple for making it so hard for people to support their platform.

eReaders?

I love books. I also love traveling as light as humanly possible. Given the mass of books, these two loves do not mix well.

With much interest, I’ve been watching the eReaders emerge over the years. Amazon’s Kindle seems to be leading the pack. I find the Sony PRS-505 much more compelling due to its notably smaller size. They both have the same 6″ E Ink display.  But hardware notwithstanding, it looks like the content isn’t quite there.

I went through my last six months of orders from Amazon. Those orders included twelve books. Of those twelve books, only five were available on the Kindle.

42% is a crappy hit rate in my book.