We are honoured to be in such good company on the Linkin’ Logs page at 37signals.com (which has been recently “refined” and looks great).

thegeniuses@actsofvolition.com have had the good fortune of witnessing a handful of fine rock concerts. You never forget seeing a flaming log hurtled into the crowd at a Greenday concert, or Sloan and Thrush Hermit levelling the UPEI Barn on the One Chord to Another tour, or Billy Pumpkin and crew on their farewell tour.

Great concerts like these are often punctuated with even greater Rock & Roll moments. Moments in which you connect with the artist and the true meaning of the lyrics reveal themselves to you in a life changing epiphany. Or maybe, as with the flaming log at the Greenday concert, the epiphany is more social than artistic.

Regardless of the circumstances, these are special moments that tend to stay with you. For myself, a few such moments come to mind; Seeing Mike Knott smash his guitar after a solo acoustic performance in a church basement and a heart wrenching puppy-gets-hit-by-car-therefore-there-is-no-god story delivered semi-sarcastically by the lead signer of Sandbox (R.I.P.).

We are going to compile our own such experiences for an upcoming aov feature and we would like your help. Write up your transcendent rock über-experience in a manageable length (preferably not more than a few hundred words, but whatever it takes) and send it to thegeniuses@actsofvolition.com for inclusion in the upcoming feature.

I am currently looking out my window, watching a woman shovel out her car. She is carefully shovelling the snow from behind her car, and dumping it behind mine. Now she is being joined by a helpful neighbour who is also burying my car.

I’d be out there helping her too. I would. Except I can’t even shovel out my own car, even before the extra snow was added. I’m not allowed to do any heavy lifting for another couple weeks.

If you don’t see me for a few days, it’s because I’m waiting for some snow to melt. And trying to find a good place to bury a body.

I have noted to those around me on occasion that I find it interesting that “the news” has never been pertinent to my life in any way. With the simple exception of the local weather (which is inevitable anyway), no news story on the radio, from the newspaper, or on television has ever pertained to me enough to require any action or illicit a response of any kind on my part.

While curious, I never paid much attention to this somewhat bizarre phenomenon. However, today I was reading Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. In the book, Postman puts forth the proposition than in the previous century, our public discourse was shaped by the medium, print, into a discourse of reason and that the public discourse of this century has been shaped by the medium, television, into a discourse of superficial nonsense.

While exploring the concept of decontextualized news (basically everything that comes from the Associated Press, with anonymity of both author and audience) Postman asks:

“How often does it occur that information provided you on morning radio or television, or in the morning newspaper, causes you to alter your plans for the day, or to take some action you would not otherwise have taken, or provides insight in to some problem you are required to solve?”

Good question Mr. Postman. The answer is never.

Prompted by a post on KirbyFerguson.com about Winamp, I will now rant about skins:

For those of you that don’t know, “skins” is a term used to describe a program that can have many different appearances (colors, shapes, etc.). Winamp is the ultimate ‘skinable’ program. It pioneered the skinable program. The trouble is, skins are evil. Let me explain.

When an operating system is being designed (think MacOS 9 and X, Win9x/2k, BeOS, etc.), a relatively significant number of talented user interface experts design a complete set of interface controls including buttons, dialogs, sliders, inputs, displays, etc. On most major operating systems, these graphical items are brilliantly designed. Sure, you may get bored of looking at the same ones all the time, but they were designed to be looked at for a long time. They are good.

Now Johnny programmer wants his new program to look as cool as he does. If he uses the boring old default Windows controls, how will the world know that he is totally x-treme? This is where skins appear.

Perhaps the idea is somewhat more innocuous in its origin than I have suggested. The idea of letting the end user (a mysterious beast as far as many programmers are concerned) customize their program seems like a neat idea. They can have they program look like they want it to.

The trouble with customization is that most end users can’t handle their new found power. Joe Winamp user never spent 2 year with test subjects perfecting the most intuitive possible slider control. The other major problem is consistency. You may have noticed that every time you press “Save As…” in a major program, you get a similar looking dialog box. This way, you don’t have to learn a new dialog in every program since they all perform the same function.

Winamp isn’t the worst skinable program out there since the controls change appearance, but for the most part, remain the same size and in the same place, preserving at least some level of consistency.

Programs like Sonique allow you to have the program shaped however you like, putting the controls in any arrangement. Even Microsoft, who of all companies you would think would appreciate the value of consistency since they built the OS themselves, has jumped on the bandwagon. Their latest version of Windows Media Player is as flexible as Sonique. What really kills me about it is that the ‘classic’ skin, which looks like the old version of Media Player with the default windows controls is actually just a normal skin like any other made up of bitmap images that fake the appearance of the default Windows controls. If I worked on default Windows controls at Microsoft, besides being much wealthier than I am now, I would be irate.

Another big culprit in the new skinable world is the Mozilla project (or Netscape 6, don’t ask what happed to Netscape 5, it went the way of Microsoft Word versions 3, 4, and 5). Mozilla’s browser is totally based on skins and does not rely at all on the the operating systems default controls. This makes it ugly and slow (bitmap images use far more memory than the default OS controls).

Mozilla claims to have a good excuse for using skins rather than operating system controls. It allows them to develop for more operating systems with much less customization and it allows a consistent user experience across different platforms. The problem with this noble sounding idea is that most users don’t use more than one operating system. Much more important than consistency between Mozilla on Windows and Mozilla on Linux, a switch most users don’t make at all and a few do occasionally, is consistency between Mozilla on Windows and Microsoft Word for Windows, a switch many people make a hundred times a day.

I would love to have a version of Winamp, which, as Kirby said, is a fast and stable program, build on the default OS controls. I would also like to see similar a version of the Mozilla browser (fortunately it’s open source and someone is working on this).

Ahh… I feel better now. Thank you.

re: bovine balladeers.

moo.

Check out this ad from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

Quicktime Version (1Mb)
MPEG Version (1.5Mb)
AVI Version (7.1Mb)

I’m not a big wearer of cow skin, or any type of animal pelt, but I can’t see this changing my mind much. Sure, if cows sang maybe I wouldn’t eat them. But they don’t.

Just in time for Christmas – my top five books of 2000.*

At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien
Wherein very strange things happen, such as the characters within a story within a story incapacitating the story’s author so as to be able to lead their own lives. Almost as strange as it is good.

Our Dumb Century by The Onion
Because they are more angry, bitter and sarcastic than you can ever hope to be. Because they produce better and more meaningful work than 95% of the “real” newspapers out there.

The Bubble Star by Lesley-Anne Bourne
Her first novel, and a damn fine one. I am not, I assure you, recommending this book because I know the author. Not even because she is my proffesor. No. Simply because it is good.

Four Ways of Dealing With Bullies by Richard Lemm
I am extremely picky about poetry as I find most of it a waste of time. This is not. You could not hope for time better spent. There are no ulterior motives in this recommendation either.

High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
A good movie but a better book, as is often the case. Steven thought the ending was too cliched, but he is wrong, as is often the case.

*Top five would require remembering all the books I read, so it’s really just five books. Good ones though. “2000” refers to the year in which I read the books, and not in which they were published.

Also, I’m not putting goddamn links to Amazon.com for each book, OK? Type it in yourself.

Earlier in the year I was talking with a co-working about the hype surrounding e-commerce and the more recent m-commerce (“mobile commerce” – cell phones, PDAs, etc.). I put forth a proposition that soon enough, we’ll be able to buy anything we want in the context in which it arises. For example, if I’m watching TV and Chandler has a nice Gap sweater on (a scenario that arises more often than you’d think), I will be able to buy it right then, right there. If you are walking down the street and someone rides by with a kitbag you like, you’ll be able to order it, right then, right there (don’t ask me how, that’s not important).

While I’m sure this isn’t a particularly original idea, I thought I was quite clever at the time and semi-sarcastically coined the term u-commerce (ubiquitous commerce). While browsing Signal vs. Noise today, I discovered that VISA has appropriated my idea, and called it “universal” commerce.

I suspect their focus groups probably said, “males and females ages 7 to 58 don’t know what ‘ubiquitous’ means”.

The dark side:

• Top 100 Corporate Criminals of the 1990s
• Ten Worst Corporations of 2000

The bright side:

• explodingdog.com (don’t worry, it’s not exploding dogs, it’s great illustrations)