In Praise of Music Visualizers (nerdy but beautiful)

For the last five years or so, I've been a pretty die-hard Mac user. But before that, in what I term my "shameful past," I used Windows almost exclusively, even making my own computers.

I rarely look back on those days with any kind of excitement or yearning, but there is one thing Windows (or, more accurately, Winamp, a music player for Windows) has that Mac hasn't had: gorgeous music visualizers.

When I mention music visualizers to long-time Mac users, they just stare at me blankly. And with good reason: iTunes has had shitty music visualizers forever. Really crap, and pretty surprising for a company whose core audience for years was designers, filmmakers and musicians.

Meanwhile, on the Windows side, Winamp (and even Windows Media Player) shipped with beautiful, responsive music visualizers, going all the way back to 1997, when Winamp was first released.

I'm not writing this as a reminiscence or history lesson, much less as a Mac bashing opportunity. I'm writing it to beg, plead, and insist that everyone who runs iTunes 9, whether on a Mac or Windows machine, switch over to it right now, turn on the music visualizer, hit show full screen, and sit in wonder at something lovely and mesmerizing.

Okay, you're back. Great, right?

The basic construct of the visualizer is that one or more emitters emit particles, with our without trails, in constantly changing colors and shapes, and one or more invisible spheres exert gravitational pull on the particles. The three basic units here (emitter, particle, sphere) interact in surprising, beautiful, and frequently unique, ways (I think the variety and complexity of the interactions varies with the abilities of your graphics card, but I first discovered the visualizer on a first-generation MacBook Pro, so anyone who's bought a computer within the last 3 years, at least, should be able to enjoy). The visualizer's responsiveness and variety are so good that it frequently seems like the software "knows" the song, and is anticipating verse, chorus and bridge.

Thanks, Apple, for letting someone really dig in and show off what a music visualizer can do. And thanks also to whoever invented the visualizer to begin with. You rock.

P.S. Hit the ? key while the iTunes visualizer is running for a list of keys you can hit to vary your experience.

Productivity Software (nerdy, sorry)

These are the free things I use all the time, and find myself constantly recommending to friends. They all offer iPhone components that sync to the provided information, so I can enter (and have access to) information wherever I am...

TRAVELING
Tripit: You sign up for free, and then forward all your reservation emails for flights, hotels, etc., to plans@tripit.com. The site parses the information in the emails, and posts your plans online. You can have Tripit friends, who can see your trip plans (though not in enough detail currently), and you can post your trips to Facebook (or not, if you'd prefer). The iPhone app really makes this site useful, with its quick ability to retrieve everything from confirmation numbers to airport maps to weather reports.

NOTES
Evernote: Basic sign-up is free, and is a full application for the Mac, Windows and iPhone. All sync through the Evernote servers, so everything is up to date wherever you go. Evernote allows syncing of text, websites, and (if you upgrade to the paid option) files of all types. This is a very full-featured application, but in its most basic sense it gives you access to all the little snippets of information you come across in daily life, wherever you are.

EVERYTHING
Dropbox: This is the one ring to rule them all. Dropbox is a free service (for 2GB; you can pay for more storage) that creates a folder on your computer that you drop whatever your want into. Whatever you drop in is synchronized (extremely quickly) to the Dropbox server, and then to any other computers you have installed the software on. You can then access the information from the Dropbox website, or from any synchronized computer. You can also share folders with other users, so that all parties can update the information in the same folder. The iPhone app allows you to look at whatever's on your Dropbox (assuming the iPhone can read the file) wherever you are. And you can star items on the app so it keeps them accessible even if you're offline. Do yourself a favor: go to the website and set yourself up. Now.

Radio Giant Faces Crisis in Cash Flow

Somewhere tonight, the Dixie Chicks are laughing their asses off.

From The New York Times:

Radio Giant Faces Crisis in Cash Flow
By GERALDINE FABRIKANT

Clear Channel, the radio station operator that was taken private last
year, is facing mounting debt payments as media companies face a steep
drop in advertising....

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/30/business/media/30clear.html

Get The New York Times on your iPhone for free by visiting http://nytimes.com/iphoneinstaller

--
John Portnoy
Sent from my mobile, and in all likelihood filled with typos.

Heh

http://tvbythenumbers.com/2009/04/04/regularly-occurring-wrong-numbers-casting-for-oxygens-bad-girls-club/15965

--
John Portnoy
Sent from my mobile, and in all likelihood filled with typos.

Heart Muscle Renewed Over Lifetime, Study Finds

It's disconcerting to find that the entire planet has been
contaminated with atmospheric radiation due to above-ground nuclear
testing. Still, at least it's being put to a good use!

From The New York Times:

Heart Muscle Renewed Over Lifetime, Study Finds
By NICHOLAS WADE

The finding upends a medical myth and suggests new therapies for heart
attack patients may be possible....

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/03/science/03heart.html

Get The New York Times on your iPhone for free by visiting http://nytimes.com/iphoneinstaller

--
John Portnoy
Sent from my mobile, and in all likelihood filled with typos.

Ant slaves' murderous rebellions

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/tS9V6MoUQxw/ant-slaves-murderous.html

--
John Portnoy
Sent from my mobile, and in all likelihood filled with typos.

Change is coming

Change of font, at least.

This drawing makes me very happy.

Manassas

Obama's final rally was in Manassas, Virginia.

Nice symbolism.

Today.

I might cry today. Sorry, whoever is around me.

I realized a couple of days ago that this is the first candidate I've supported in the primaries who's gone on to (with luck) win the election. And I supported Obama early, without reservation, not as a lesser of two evils choice, but full throatedly.

So here we are. Very exciting. This morning, on my iPod song shuffle, up comes David Bowie's "Changes" (really):

I watch the ripples change their size
But never leave the stream
Of warm impermanence
So the days float through my eyes
But stil the days seem the same
And these children that you spit on
As they try to change their worlds
Are immune to your consultations
Theyre quite aware of what theyre going through

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes
(turn and face the strain)
Ch-ch-changes
Dont tell them to grow up and out of it
Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes
(turn and face the strain)
Ch-ch-changes
Wheres your shame
Youve left us up to our necks in it
Time may change me
But you cant trace time

Sorry for the extra dose of schmaltz. I'll leave with this:

I will be doing so ironically.

Was There Too Much Sex And Profanity In The HBO Presidential Debate?

J-Pop and Politics together!

There are few things I love better than J-Pop. One of them is Presidential politics. Here, now, for the first (?) time ever, the two combined:

one more thing

Q: How do you know conservatism's dead?

A: T. Boone Pickens is now selling wind power. (And yes it's part of an elaborate real estate scheme, but he's calculating that the next political power center will be more likely to allow him to carry on his nefarious ends is going to be pro-wind power. And that sure as shit ain't the Republicans. So now he's OUR bastard.)

Welcome aboard, T. Boone!

Next up: Rupert Murdoch. Just you wait. Fox News is going to go under the knife within six months.

And if there's any justice, someone will find some dirt on Roger Ailes and throw him in prison, then bring every one of those motherf***ing administration officials (they know who they are) up on war crimes charges in the Hague, which we will be party to, because President Obama will have forced through the ratification of the treaty that binds us to the International Criminal Fucking Court. Ah...a man can dream...

things on my mind tonight

Sorry. I'm too lazy to put these in separate posts:

1. Armageddon
   Not maybe so much end of the world, maybe, but the end of the faux conservatism that post-Nixon Republicans morphed into. You know: the kind that wants to make the U.S. an empire. Now we're all going along for the ride! (Something about reaping and sowing is coming to mind.)
2. Democrats
   I'm scared shitless about this whole thing, but let's just take a shallow breath and think about how well the Democrats have been playing this thing, from a purely political standpoint. This definitely proves the "good policy is good politics" theory. They are so in their element it's nearly making me weep.
   
3. Maddow
   I love that thing that Rachel Maddow does where she scrolls through the dozen-plus Republicans she's tried to book on a particular segment to counter her Democratic guest. It's so deliciously aggressive and self-assured for a proud liberal. Again with the near weeping.
4. McCain
   He is so personally unhinged from any objective reality at this point (even his facial expressions have become like cartoon character versions of themselves), it nearly (yeah) makes me weep. But not the same kind of tears.

That's it for now...

Homepage

This should be your homepage.

Go change it. I'll wait.

Seriously.

And another thing (banks part deux)

I read several economics blogs, try to keep up with the Bloomberg website, etc. I've read a lot of breathless paragraphs about the big traditional banks taking over the investment banks and the smaller traditional banks. I have questions:

• Is there an economic upside in concentrating all the bad debt from the various failed institutions in only a few huge banks?
• It seems like a bank such as B of A, which has low exposure to the bad debt, becomes more, not less, unstable by taking on others' bad debt. Am I missing something?
• I keep hearing the phrase "too big to fail" used in conjunction with B of A, JP Morgan Chase, and Citi. Is that supposed to reassure me? Scare me? The phrase is never accompanied by follow-up analysis. If one of these banks is on the brink of failure (because of taking on the bad debt of all the smaller banks it's gobbled up), and the government has to step in, is this something the FDIC is equipped to handle, or will it require some other form of government intervention (nationalization, etc.)?
• Where's Wells in all of this? (see earlier post)
  

Banks

How many banks will be left in six months? Two? Three? And why isn't Wells being forced to swallow any of these bad companies? Why just B of A and Chase?

George Will

Not a fan of John McCain's:

For McCain, politics is always operatic, pitting people who agree with him against those who are "corrupt" or "betray the public's trust," two categories that seem to be exhaustive -- there are no other people.

Davis and Wolfson

I'm finding it depressing, and not particularly surprising, that two people associated with Hillaryland, Lanny Davis and Howard Wolfson, have both taken jobs with Fox News. Their decisions reinforce the idea that the Clinton campaign was being run by people who don't understand the 21st century media landscape.

I wonder how Hillary "vast right-wing conspiracy" Clinton feels about their new gigs. I imagine and hope she's livid.

Too depressing for words

It's been hard for me to focus on anything else this week.  And I should.  I really, really should.

Take it away, Major General Taguba:

After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.

Having read the report, do you have any details to add that might illuminate why Taguba feels that way, Mr. Ackerman?

Some detainees were administered electric shocks, suspended by their arms from great heights and one showed "anal scars consistent with sexual trauma," according to one physician who examined the detainees, Dr. Sondra Crosby of Boston Medical Center.

[A] detainee, "Amir," was arrested in Iraq in August 2003 by U.S. troops. He endured a month of "being kept in a small, dark room" before transfer to Abu Ghraib. At the infamous prison -- around the time it was "Gitmo-ized" by Guantanamo commander Gen. Geoffrey Miller -- Amir was "sodomized with a broomstick and forced to howl like a dog while a soldier urinated on him," the report said. Similarly released without charge, he told Physicians for Human Rights that "no sorrow can be compared to my torture experience in jail."

Our Administration is evil, immoral and insane. And to be completely candid, I feel evil and immoral for not doing anything to try to stop it, relying instead on the inadequate institutions we have to check Executive power.