Copyright ©1997-2012 Glenn Fleishman except as noted otherwise. All rights reserved. For permission to reprint, contact Glenn Fleishman at glenn at glennf.com. Photo © 2008 Laurence Chen; used with permission.
Copyright ©1997-2012 Glenn Fleishman except as noted otherwise. All rights reserved. For permission to reprint, contact Glenn Fleishman at glenn at glennf.com. Photo © 2008 Laurence Chen; used with permission.
Turning technology from mumbo-jumbo into rich tasty gumbo
A friend and I stopped at a Pinkberry for frozen yogurt while I was in D.C. The notion there is that you pretend you're eating something healthy (yogurt) and then put a million toppings on to make it horrifying. (Fresh fruit is also an option.)
I looked at the few basic options, and as a fan of salted caramel ice cream, figured I'd just get a plain salted caramel.
Me: "I'll have a salted caramel."
Person behind counter: "Do you want salt on that?"
"No. Wait. I want the salted caramel."
"Right. Do you want salt on that?"
"It doesn't come with salt?"
"No."
"But it's called salted caramel. Why doesn't it have salt on it?"
"Some of our customers don't like salt."
"But it's called…ok. Yes, I'd like salt please."
She picks up a strange plunger instrument and depresses it several times on top of the froz-gurt. Fine salt comes out. It looks like table salt.
My friend and I went outside to sit. I started fulminating on the injustice of it. My friend pointed out that some people do, indeed, not like the salt.
"They should call it unsalted caramel, then," I retorted and took a bite.
"What's wrong?" she asked.
"Too salty."
Posted by Glennf at 9:48 PM
I posted on Twitter the 2nd of 3 steps in cooking an artichoke from a little sticker in a container of artichokes I had purchased from Trader Joe's as a little joke, because of an obvious error. My friends on Twitter identified another, and I found two more.
Can you find them all?
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Who knew so much could go so wrong so briefly?
Posted by Glennf at 7:23 PM
The name is different now, but the friendships are the same. I had a non-stop great time at Macworld | iWorld, the new name for the 27-year-old trade show. Late January is a quiet time of year in San Francisco, which can be a beautiful city, and felt like it this time around. For the first time in many years, I stayed for the full length of the show, and even then barely talked to so many friends at the show and missed getting together with a bunch of people who live in and around SF — there just wasn't time!
My favorite story from the show starts with when I landed at SFO. At baggage claim, I turned on Find My Friends, an iOS app that Apple released some months ago. I'd barely used it before except to test. I received a group temporary request that would let me see a bunch of fellow writers during the show. I accepted it, and shortly thereafter saw that my friend was in Brisbane, Calif. Now, the only reason to be in Brisbane is because you're driving somewhere.
I texted her to see if she (a Macworld editor) was on her way to or from the airport. It turns out she and fellow editor Dan were coming to pick up yet another editor, and my buddy, Lex. I knew Lex was arriving on Wednesday, but hadn't thought to ask him when. He was landing a few minutes from when we texted and his baggage claim was feet away. I walked over, met Ren and Dan, and then we met Lex.
I had a lovely drive into the city to my hotel, where Jeff Carlson (my Seattle pal) was there with his mom and daughter. Jeff and daughter Ellie were visiting his mother in Dixon, and Jeff and I were rooming together. I texted him that we were en route, so he delayed his mom's departure so I could see her. (I love his mom.)
We pull up and Jeff, Ellie, and his mom Susan come out, along with Adam and Tonya Engst, my friends and TidBITS/Take Control publishers from Ithaca, also staying at the hotel. Moments later, I meet Michael Cohen, a TidBITS editor who I hadn't yet met in the flesh. (Not everyone is in the picture.)
From there it was off to two different parties and then a staff dinner, which involved miles of walking in moderate weather. The next morning, I interviewed Susan Orlean on the Main Stage at the event, something that had been in the works for a while. We had lunch with a small group afterwards, and then I breezed through the day of meeting a million other people and roaming the show floor.
Friday and Saturday were also full of people, meeting longtime Twitter and email correspondents, more checking out the show floor, a brief visit to a Twitter friend at Twitter itself (a block away from the convention center), and three Macworld Live events on the trade-show floor!
Sunday morning, I rose not too early, walked to a BART station, went to SFO, and flew home. It was a busy and marvelous time. The show is such a mix of social and professional. A chance for me to meet up with friends and colleagues, and a mix of the two, and an opportunity for me to chat with some of the folks who read my work who aren't in the writing field.
More pictures here. Although I'm working in my basement at home, and that can sometimes be isolating, after four days of maximum contact, I'm happy to have a little respite!
I wish we could this every three or four months.
Posted by Glennf at 8:54 PM
My friend Joe Kissell is an awesome fellow and awesomely productive. As a tool for him to feel that he's accomplished something in a given year, for the last three years he's assembling a list of everything he's done for work, and a fair amount of personal details, too. Here's his 2011 list.
My first reaction to seeing Joe's list is always to say, holy mother of batman, how does he manage to get so much done?! I think of myself as a hard, efficient, and consistent worker, and yet I'm a piker next to Joe. I didn't move houses this year (nor have since 1993), have a baby, or travel much at all. Apparently, I'm twiddling my thumbs for 6 or 7 hours a day.
Nonetheless, Joe's exhaustive list (exhaustive to think how hard he works, exhausting to assemble) made me want to put a stick in the sand about my 2011. I'm much lazier than Joe, so I'm going to be much less detailed, too.
I'll start with the favorite things I wrote in 2011:
In terms of counts and amounts:
There were some good personal landmarks, too, of course.
Okay, now I'm worn out just writing about what I did. I may have written 200,000 published words in 2011 (at least 60,000 for the Economist alone). I'm nearly at 6,000 Twitter followers, at which I think I tweeted 10,000 times last year.
Onward and upward.
Posted by Glennf at 12:27 PM
As I've tweeted about, I followed the lead of my friend Lex Friedman and bought a TreadDesk treadmill a few weeks ago. I've walked about 40 miles on it in the month since I set it up, and am generally satisfied with how it works and the notion of writing or researching and walking at the same time. (I'm writing this while treading!) It takes getting used to, and I haven't figure out the perfect mix of standing, sitting, and walking, but I definitely feel weird now just sitting down. Most days, I mostly stand, and walk from 1 to 4 hours. Four miles seems to be about the maximum.
Somewhere in my tweeting, a marketing person from MBT (Masai Barefoot Technology) got in touch and offered me a pair of shoes to try in exchange for writing about it if I felt it was a good fit. There were no other strings attached, and I reserved the right to return them (and say nothing) if I didn't think they worked.
As a reporter, I don't accept products, but this was offered to me personally, and I don't report on shoewear. (This is the officially mandated FTC blogger product acceptance disclosure, by the way!)
I've walked at least 20 miles in the shoes, and quite like them, but will need to walk a bit more before I can deliver a verdict. I'm using the Sport2 Men's shoe, which amazingly accommodates my 9 1/2 EEEE foot with very little compression (and no discomfort) new out of the box. I can rarely wear normal 9 1/2 anythings.
Walking in the shoes feels a bit like walking over curved surface—like walking on a solid orange-sized cushion. I can go for hours with the shoes without feeling worn out, which is great. I'm alternating with Tevas, which seem to have the right support to not stress my arch, which my New Balance shoes with custom orthotics do.
I have kept the MBTs as inside shoes, and haven't taken any long "real" walks in them yet. I'll write more as I have more experience with them.
Posted by Glennf at 2:51 PM
I previously tried to explain how I thought The Big Year went from a slapstick goofy film through, what must have been some reshoots and editing, into a sort of buddy movie. Since then, I saw the hit Bridesmaids, which features many actresses I loved before seeing the film or love having seen it.
It's a bromance movie for women about pals who suffer through mutual indignities and travails on the path to better friendship and enlightenment. I guess. I liked it. Melissa McCarthy is the absolute standout. Sometimes ridiculous, but quite remarkable.
My theory on this film's mix of genuine dialog among friends, gross-out scenes, farce, and romance is that competing teams of writers produced scenes nearly independently of one another, and then the director stitched them together into a chronologically plausible narrative.
On its face, you have a vulnerable woman, Annie (Kristen Wiig), whose boyfriend left her and had a business fail in an emotionally abusive sexual relationship with a guy who has no empathy towards others. The movie opens with the funniest sex scene I believe has ever been recorded.
Her best friend gets engaged, and this begins Annie's quick descent into madness. Annie has no filter and says anything that pops into her head, apparently, or does anything, no matter how crazy, that she gets angry or embarrassed enough to do. No human being could make it through high school or emerge as a functioning adult with the kind of behavior Annie engages in routinely, even though the movie attempts to show that's pushed towards in extremis action.
With a little fewer implausible scenes and no slapstick, this movie could have been a dreary Swedish film in which, at the end, the maid of honor walks slowly into a freezing lake as in a separate scene, the bride throws the flowers in the rain or some such.
Instead, it's a merry romp!
I did enjoy it.
I should note this film contains Frequent Film Gag #34, which is that if a scene is shown in a restaurant in a comedy, people later will have powerful gas, vomiting, or bowel movements. This movie is unfair to Brazilian restaurants.
Posted by Glennf at 9:56 PM
I come not to bury Flash, but to praise it. And then bury it.
The news that broke last about Adobe killing the mobile version of Flash for smartphones and tablets filled me with excessive schadenfreude. Adobe has beaten the drum for years that Flash was an intertwined part of the Web, and to experience the full Internet, you needed devices that would run it.
I didn't entirely agree, but I saw Adobe's point. Most Flash I interact with using a desktop browser is advertising (so I use a selective Flash blocker in my browser) or video playback. Flash is also used for interactive items, like embedded document viewing, information graphics that either run automatically or allow you to change parameters, or games. I rarely use any of those, but I understand they're in wide use.
The only time I felt deprived of Flash when using an iOS device was when trying to visit restaurant sites which inexplicably rely on Flash for simple things like displaying a menu, or other other tasks that are easily done in standard HTML. (Farhad Manjoo at Slate has an explanation as to why restaurants rely on Flash.)
As the iPhone and later iPad grew in market share, Apple's lack of Flash support but large audience to serve led to single apps that function as replacements for what you would otherwise access as a Flash app on a Web page. Those apps are often far more immersive, flexible, and stylish then the equivalent Flash player version, because Apple has requirements for how apps work and, to a lesser extent, how they look. I didn't need Silverlight (Microsoft's interactive technology) for Netflix, as I did on the Web, nor Flash to use Hulu Plus, the paid flavor of Hulu
Most video content viewed through Flash is already encoded in a format that can be played natively in Android and iOS, among other platforms, or that can use a simple viewer to access. Flash is a universal wrapper for video, but it's not per se necessary. It can also play protected content that's encrypted against casual downloading of the source files, and that's a reason Flash was used by television and other Web sites: to protect those source digital files.
On the desktop, Flash was a great supplement (which it remains to an ever-lesser extent), even if it drains laptop power, runs the processor hot, and crashes browsers. Why? Because before Flash-embedded video, which can run on every supported platform and browser, sites had to choose to encode in any of all of Windows Media, Real Video, and QuickTime formats (among others), and users had to have all those kinds of players available. For years, I mostly avoided playing video on Web sites because it invariably caused a problem.
Flash unleashed the potential of video by largely working the vast majority of the time. This led Web sites to feature more video, and made the Web a more visually interesting medium. (Netflix relied on Silverlight, which offered a similar advantage, even though it was much less used. I'd wager 95% of people who installed Silverlight on Mac or Windows did so in order to access streaming Netflix videos.)
Thus we should separate Flash's inability to deliver a consistent, battery-conserving, interactive, and fast experience on mobile devices which have less juice and less processor time available from why Flash brought the Web into a new era of multimedia. That time is aging out as native video playback support in HTML5-compliant browsers won't require plug-ins.
There's a battle still underway as to which video standard will predominate. Microsoft and Apple have backed H.264 because they have the paid licenses to allow that patent-protected format to be directly used in their browsers. Mozilla (Firefox), Google (Chrome), and Opera have other ideas, but it's unclear whether they will prevail or co-exist.
We may live in a split world in which H.264 is the format of choice, but it's delivered natively into Safari and Internet Explorer, while it's packaged inside of Flash (thus avoiding the issue) for Chrome, Firefox, and Opera.
But I will take a moment to chortle—not at Flash as such, but at Flash apologists. I've spent many hours over the last few years saying that Apple won't back off on Flash because it doesn't need to. There's nothing Apple needs from Flash to make iOS better. And the objections Steve Jobs raised in April 2010 were a crystallization of many concerns technical and strategic.
One of them, and one I've raised many times since, was the fact that Adobe never demonstrated Flash working on an iOS device. The firm could have at any time. iOS developers can create apps that run on their own equipment. Adobe could have done a roadshow, which is does to show off technology on a regular basis, and given briefings to reporters and others showing Flash running perfectly well on a variety of iOS equipment. This would involve no violation of Apple's terms and no jailbreaking. It did not do so. I'm sure Adobe had Flash ported to iOS; the performance could not have been good enough for it to want to show it off.
This was staggering because when versions of mobile Flash started to appear on Android and other devices, especially version 10.2 on devices with faster or multi-core processors, it performed seemingly reasonably well. Not embarrassingly, although it was still inconsistent in playing the highest quality video, in not being choppy, and in mapping touch gestures to mouse clicks. Still, it wasn't bad.
The real reason mobile Flash was killed wasn't performance, I'd wager. The reason was that while Google allowed its handset and tablet partners to include Flash (it lacks a competing product and likes to pretend it's "open"), Apple would likely never do so and Microsoft appeared generally uninterested in its new Windows Phone OS. RIM is in free fall and HP canceled its mobile devices, and that would leave most of the market for tablets and smartphones in Apple and Microsoft's hands.
If Adobe didn't refocus its efforts on providing developers superior ways to make HTML5 work on Windows Phone and iOS, some other company or companies would eventually produce the tools needed to steal those customers away.
The failure of mobile Flash is a failure to adapt more readily to provide the tools to designers and content producers to reach the audiences they're serving, rather than a pure failure of the technology. It's possible mobile Flash could never reach a point in which it was good enough to work at a level Apple would accept, but that's theoretical. Flash isn't the right answer for mobile video and interaction, and Adobe has recognized it was misdirecting its efforts.
Posted by Glennf at 2:54 PM
Lynn and I saw The Big Year a couple of weeks ago, and I liked the film's heart quite a bit, even though it had a number of stupid moments, and the dialog could be atrocious. It was somehow satisfying, even though it didn't entirely hold together. Having the shape of a year for the film's structure gave it at least a sense of consistency.
The movie, in brief, focuses on three birders who compete (for no money, mind you) to catalog the most bird sightings (by eye or call) in a single year. One is the previous title holder; the other two are making their first attempts. Improbably, the gross outline of the story is true, based on Mark Obmascik's book of the same name, even down to the professions of the three birders and where they travel.
What I found odd about the movie was that it was struggling to be slapstick and stupid at times mixed with subtle emotional performances by Owen Wilson, Jack Black, and Steve Martin. A friendship between Black and Martin is underdeveloped, but genuine. Owen Wilson's character is a trickster, and overdrawn, but he and his current wife, a rather young woman, have some remarkable scenes together. (It's not a hackneyed film for the most part: I kept being surprised when I expected the same old clichéd moment, and the filmmakers brought a whiff of the real world in.)
The slapstick is quite half-assed. Jack Black is required to do pratfalls, but they're perfunctory, and then he's right back up to run out and find the birds. Gorgeous moments punctuate the movie, which clearly had crews travel tens of thousands of miles for location shots. And there are true shots of birds throughout. (The closing credits show, by category, hundreds of birds catalogued by the birders in the film.)
What I suspect happen is that they filmed a lot more nonsense with Black, including more physical comedy. When they edited the film, they realized that they had a quieter and more genuine story in the middle, and trimmed off more of the nonsense. There's still a lot of improbable characters and actions, but it's a truer film.
Now I need to read the book. Sounds like truth is funnier and more interesting than the lightly fictionalized version I saw.
Posted by Glennf at 9:53 PM
Adapted from a short non-fiction book.
Scene: Richard Stallman, dressed in corduroys, a long-sleeved shirt, and a hat, reclines on a lounge on a beach somewhere in the Caribbean.
Waiter: Sir, may I get you a drink?
Stallman: Many people assume that because I am traveling, I am having a vacation.
Waiter: Sir, this is a resort. You are on vacation.
Stallman: The fact is, I have no vacations.
Waiter: As you wish. Sir, would you like—
Stallman: It is very important for me to be able to transfer email between my laptop and the net, so I can do my ordinary work.
Waiter: There is complimentary high-speed Wi-Fi service that is included in the cost of your stay.
Stallman: If the network requires a proxy for SSH, I probably can't use it at all.
Waiter: Sir, I am not a technical expert, but I could get the front desk—
Stallman: If it involves loading a nonfree driver, I will refuse.
Waiter: I believe, sir, that the built-in adapter on most computers will work just fine. But I could ask—
Stallman: Until you have tested it, don't believe it!
Waiter: As you say, sir. Now, about the matter of a drink. Some beer? A cocktail?
Stallman: I dislike the taste of alcohol, so I don't drink anything stronger than wine.
Waiter: Ah, yes, sir, we have a wide variety of international—
Stallman: Wine is not very important to me—not like food. I like some wines, depending on the taste, and dislike others, but I don't remember the names of wines I have liked, so it is useless to ask me.
Waiter: Perhaps the house white?
Stallman: If you get a bottle of wine, I will taste it, and if I like the taste, I will drink a little, perhaps a glass.
Waiter: Yes, sir. Would you like some food to go with that, sir? Some guacamole?
Stallman: No.
Waiter: Olives?
Stallman: No.
Waiter: An orange or grapefruit?
Stallman: No.
Waiter: An entire hardboiled egg?
Stallman: No.
Waiter: Babaganoush?
Stallman: No.
Waiter (to himself): Perhaps some peanuts.
[Waiter is gone for a few moments while Stallman lies inert. Waiter returns.]
Waiter: If sir would just write his room number and sign.
Stallman: I cannot find my room key.
Waiter: Sir, are you even a guest at this establishment?
Stallman: The frustration I feel when I suffer such a loss is excruciating.
Posted by Glennf at 8:35 PM
A work in progress.
I am regularly asked to speak at events as far away as Hong Kong and Spokane. Because I live on only the money given to me by strangers in subways, I ask that you read the following before arranging for me to give a talk.
Posted by Glennf at 9:44 AM
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