[liff] Odds and Sods #2, 2014

3012.

Before I sign out for the day, cats and kittens, here's a few sweepings from the studio floor.

• Ars Technica has a nifty article on the slow-motion fall of QuarkXPress. I still have a copy of QXP on my hard drive … it's QXP6. I learned layout in QXP3. QXP killed PageMaker, danced all over its grave for several years, and then fell asleep. By the time Quark had woke up with Indy in its rearview, it was too late to build up steam. Now it's the minority platform, though it's hard to tell … reliable figures on market shave haven't been available for a looooong time, however, it's a sign of the times when a poster at a GD forum can soberly ask the question Is QuarkXPress still relevant and it's a calm discussion rather than a white-hot flame-war. Meanwhile, Quark is still selling XPress, and it's up to version 10. Still pretty pricy, but if you're not thrilled with the idea of the Creative Cloud …
• Common sense from FastCompany Design about how not to get screwed by clients. My experience is the real trick is not to let your desperation for work cause you to jump where you ought to have stood pat. What happens is you don't seem professional, you don't act professional … and you stay an amateur. Worst, you jump for jobs and hope to bull your way through until you get on top. This never happens. When your reach exceeds your grasp, it'll slip through your fingers and fall ugly. Trust me here. 
• A nifty-looking art contest. I'm against giving away your art for free, so, with all caution advised, this is a good-looking trifle and probably some fun to get involved with, as long as you're down with all you're going to get out of it is 25 bookmarks and Doodlers Anonymous will send 250 out to people what order their books. 
• NoLo, SoBu, TriBeCa, SoWhoTheHellCares, So what's in a cutesy little nabe name? Burrito Justice, a vibrant SanFran blog with a witty what-the-hell attitude, can tell you about La Lengua.
• It's a $20 Megabuck battle-of-the-type-giants as Hoefler and Frere-Jones duke it out in the squared circle of the courtroom over who owns all those fonts really. When it comes to H and FJ, there is no such thing as a little disagreement. 
• … and you know that TriMet cable-stay transit bridge? We have our name finalists. Not bad, but Kirk Reeves' name didn't make the cut, which has me teh sadd. We'll have to find some other way to honor him, is all.
• … and speaking of cats 'n' kittens, we have the story of what happened when one monk in one scriptorium forgot to close his book. Hey, mousing is hard work, and cat's gotta go somehwere, guise … 

Happy Frigga Day, and always remember to keep your precious documents out of Fluffy's way!

[liff] Odds and Sods #1, 2014-Week 1

3001.

Just to keep things fresh, here's some stuff I found tooling about the intartubez this week. I'll try to make this a regular Thursday morning thing.

In this article at Portland Architecture we find that the idea of demolishing the Portland Building has been broached. I'm hate this idea. I fail to understand the hatred this building generates. I think postmodernism is a silly term, because it's full of silly, but it takes a certain sort of courage to design and build an edifice like this. If they're thinking of demolishing it because 95 megabucks of renovation, that's one thing, but if they're thinking of demolishing it because WE HATES HOWZ IT LOOKZ, well, geez, grow up people. I've seen a hell of a lot worse than the Portland Building in even my modest travels. It's quite pretty, I like it, and that settles that.

Idibon wonders, in this post, about streets with strangely-coined names, a subject I'm planning to explore down the road a bit; that there are fewer First Streets than Second Streets, the reality of a 4400th Street, and Evil Avenue. These streets all exist, and I've found them on Google Maps. Read the article, then go on your own adventure.

The strange world of Lisa Frank is fading faster than the fugitive colors in her psychedelic tweenie's school supplies. The center of the candy-cane unicorn's world is a pale and lonely shadow of its former self (and, yes, there really is a Lisa Frank).

SARK, the artist (not the MCP lieutenant … this SARK is much nicer and won't make you fight on the Game Grid) has a way to get you out of your doldrums that looks workable. Micromovements*. It's sold as a way for busy people to Get Things Done, but looks like it can possibly overcome a certain inertia. Might be good for people mired in certain feelings.

While you're at it, just visit SARK's website. It's good feelin's.

And, ever wonder how our favorite art supply stores can be so awesome, compete, and not compete each other to death? Well, they compete … and they cooperate. They support each other as we support them. The pie is big enough for everyone to have a slice and still keep great art local. And this article offers you a look.

Laterz!

[pdx] A Little Bit Of PDX in GTA?

2991.

This, via Soylent News™ (Remember, Tuesday is Soylent News™day) … if you like living the dream in Liberty City, you'll love a certain transitional homeless camp there.

It looks pretty close to a little local landmark.

Art imitating life? Or kind of mocking it a little?

Harry Knowles Got To See Star Trek Before The Rest Of Us. @#%&!ing Bastich.

2021.(via) I hate Harry Knowles.

Yeah. Mr "Ain't It Cool." Hate him.

Because he gets to screen the new Star Trek reboot by luring a bunch of fans to see what was supposed to be a screening of Wrath of Khan and then springing it on them.

Lucky phreaking bastiches! Neat stuff always happens to other people.

On the upside: it looks like its going to be awesome!

And Harry and a bunch of others were invited to decorate a bunch of models of the new-look NCC-1701, and what they got up there so far is pretty damn cool actually.

I'm liking this.

Even if I wasn't one of the @#$%#ing lucky bastiches that got to get in on this one.

Technorati Tags: Star Trek, JJ Abrams, Harry Knowles, Ain't It Cool News, NCC-1701, USS Enterprise

The Great Neon Sign As Civic Soul, or: Tulsa's Getting Its Route 66 Meadow Gold Sign Back

2020.(Updated with a link to ModernTulsa, who has a couple of gorgeous pictures. Scroll to end of post).

We here in the City Of Unicorns and Roses should relate to this story.

While not a point of controversy, the reaction of the Tulsa, Oklahoma community to the final fate of the Meadow Gold Dairy sign, a great neon bauble with nearly the same landmark status along Historic US 66, seems to be in the same class of public affection as the emotion the Made in Oregon sign garners.

According to Tulsa's The News On 6, The Meadow Gold Dairy sign was a fondly remembered landmark at the corner of East 11th Street and South Lewis Avenue, about a mile east of the downtown core, for many:

In the 1930's, Meadow Gold put it up atop a small building at 11th and Lewis.  It was a beacon along Route 66 until sometime in the 1970's.

"It's more than just a sign, it lives in people's hearts and memories it truly is a landmark," said Lee Anne Ziegler.

Meadow Gold, while still a regional brand across several Western states, appears to have moved on from Tulsa. But the sign remained for decades. Recently, the owner of the old building the sign rested on decided to raze that building. Local Tulsans sprang unto the breach:

The Tulsa Foundation for Architecture and others mounted a sign rescue project.  They got a grant from the National Parks Service Route 66 Corridor Preservation Program.  They were able to take the sign down and begin restoration.  Other grants and donations helped finish the project

"I just wanted it to be like I remember when I was a kid driving down Route 66," said architect Steve Vogt.

Of course, this wasn't meant as much of analogy: the power players and the people who consider themselves "stakeholders" in the discussion have much different attitudes and connections. But it would do everyone well in such discussions of changing the visual character of city skylines to remember that, whether or not they want to admit it, the public will claim a certain "ownership" to something that forms the backdrop of their very lives.

In a visual and subjective way, it becomes public property. The citizens of Tulsa handled it one way, and we're handling it ours. Adopting an "our way or the highway" approach, as the U of O side has done has, instead of being seen as an assertion of a fundamental American value, that of private property rights and doing with what belongs to you as you see fit, has instead come off as arrogant fiat. And then they ran into Randy Leonard.

Such is the course of the visual landscape. You may own a part of it, but frequently, it only seems that way. As for Tulsa, I'd suggest Unicorns, but I don't think that would get very far with them.

It all makes me think of that old T & R Truck Stop sign on I-5 at Albany. I think it's mostly gone now. And nobody has a picture of it. Pity ...

Update: The proprietor of the blog ModernTulsa, Cole Cunningham, pointed me to an post at his place which has (as already stated) two gorgeous vintage photos of the Meadow Gold Sign. Enjoy, and thanks for sharing them, Cole!

NB: The photo in this posting of the Meadow Gold sign was from the Wikipedia article on Tulsa, and is public domain.

Technorati Tags: Tulsa, Meadow Gold, Meadow Gold Sign, Public Landscape

For Those Who Remember The Glow Of The Vacuum Tubes ...

2016.Here's something that's right up your street: Thom's Vacuum Tube Hi-Fi Page.

They kick hi-fi old school. How old school?

This old-school. This is, as the blog states, an RCA-Inspired Passive Phono Preamp:

Photo copyright http://hotvalves.blogspot.com

Thom and Amanda have a whole rack of this stuff down in Salem, and I'll bet it all looks downright romantic with an adult beverage of your own choosing, some classic vinyl on, and the lights down.

Just because a technology has been superseded does not mean it's not valuable or it doesn't work.

And old technologies don't die – they are lovingly sustained by bright people who like a challenge.

 Technorati Tags: Old Technology, Connoiseur Audio, Vaccum Tubes, Classic Stereo

But, I Thought It Already Had ... Isn't that Why They Called It Humble?

2012.One of the best sentences ever, caught in passing on the Wikipedia page on Exxon:

... Humble officials realized by the late 1960s that the time had come to swallow its pride ...

If they hadn't by that time, wasn't it misleading to call themselves Humble?

Technorati Tags: Exxon, Humble Oil, The Turn of A Friendly Phrase

Actually Not An April Fools Joke: A Million RANDom Numbers, Now In Convenient Paperback Form

2006.On this, the day of the year where you really have to check your sources, I stumbled on something that should have been an April Fools joke, but it's real.

These days you can get a cheap calculator at Office Empire and do the brainwork that required professionals and big, vacuum-tube machines to do through the first three-quarters of the 20th Century.

People will frequently be heard to quip in such conversations that today's graphic calclulators can do what room-sized power hogs did in the 1940s. To put it in more concrete terms, did you ever wonder just what the original room-size mechanical and electrical Leviathans did at first?

They just crunched numbers. ENIAC was commissioned by the US defense during WWII to produce artillery firing tables, work which, just before the creation of such a machine, was performed by people who actually had the title "computer". The importance of ENIAC and similar machines wasn't so much in what they produced but what they promised; by making the computing theories of such names as Turing and Von Neumann reality they proved them, and started us down the road to the desktop computers and eventually wireless computers of the day.

Try not to cry too much when you realize that all this culminated in Twitter. Anywho, we digress.

The reason I explained that is it's important to know that back in those days, if you wanted an answer, you consulted a table, and it was the task of human "computers" and others to come up with the tables you used which were frequently published in popular reference guides. Modern electronic and electromechanical machines (like the ENIAC and the German Z3 of Konrad Zuse) promised, at the time, more reliable and precise output.

Random numbers are a particular thing. They are mad useful in statistics and mathematics, but the trouble has always been generating them. In 1955, the quinessential government contractor, the legendary RAND Corporation (always spelt in caps, because RAND is actually an acronym standing for Research ANd Development), endeavored to create a table of 1 million random digits for use by statisticians and allied schools of study in having a store of random digits to hand without having to consult a then-new electrical computer.

The list was created by using a computer to run a roulette wheel simulation, whose results were, as they say, tested and filtered before being run to create the list. The book, after the preface, consists of nothing but page after page of ranks and files of 5-digit groupings, as random as the brainiacs at RAND could make them.

The title, A Million Random Numbers with 100,000 Normal Deviates, brings up visions of James Frey and the entire run of Jerry Springer shows (although you may think that Springer's telecast maybe a few more than 100,000 normal deviates) until you remember that what a mathematical deviation is. Still, it's an interesting book, and for those of you who have a calculator (which was also once an actual human job title) that can spit out a pseudo-random number at the press of a button, you might want to keep this book around if The Change ever occurs.

And this is a real, honest-to-Gosh book. You can buy it via Amazon.com (altho at the time of this writing they only have one copy available at a price of over USD$230). You'll go to Amazon to check the price of the book, but you'll stay for the reviews, which contain such witty gems as:

The book is a promising reference concept, but the execution is somewhat sloppy. Whatever algorithm they used was not fully tested. The bulk of each page seems random enough. However at the lower left and lower right of alternate pages, the number is found to increment directly.

And ...

Such a terrific reference work! But with so many terrific random digits, it's a shame they didn't sort them, to make it easier to find the one you're looking for.

And another beauty:

Its all about Soul


The Power of Soul by Dr Zhi Gang Sha is a groundbreaking work in every sense. Revealing in classic and succinct ways the multidimensional nature of human existance and the power that our soul has to heal, bless and transform every aspect of our life is nothing short of miraculous in its scope. A true treasure house of spiritual and practical wisdom, there is no other book of this type available today. It is truly Divine. I am one reader whose life will be forever enhanced by the readng of this book and I know everyone who has searched for deeper meaning in there life will be too.

But you should just go read them.

RAND Corporation also has the book for sale on its own website in the RAND Bookstore (a term of such sheer awesomeness that both policy wonks and Objectivists will have to get a change of panties after just reading them together)

If you surf the link that ties into the books title (italiced and boldfaced above) you'll go to a Wikipedia entry about it that has links to the datafiles, if you don't have all that money to set aside.

It's not an April Fools joke. Really! That was two articles ago! The Gill bit! Because he's dead!

Technorati Tags: RAND Corporation, Truly Strange Books, Random Numbers, Mathematical References

This Was The Other Thing I'd Worried About, Aside From Being Sent To Jail For A Crime I Didn't Commit

1794.

This is a relief. The BBC site h2g2 (that's Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy for those of us who are "in the know") has put up a piece on how to survive a fall from an airplane.

So that fear's been allayed.

What? Why am I the only one who ever worries about this?

Tags: found objects, hitch hikers guide to the galaxy, h2g2, don't panic, odds and ends

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