October 2007

All entries and daily links from October 2007.

The View From Mars

Thursday, October 25, 2007 at 10:10am 3 comments

Leading up to last weekend's Lights Out San Francisco, an event to push energy conservation by switching to more energy efficient CFL light bulbs, there was a surprising amount of negativity. While he agreed to turn out his light's SFist editor Brock told readers not to switch to CFL bulbs because they don't produce the same light as incandescent bulbs.

And while it's true they don't produce the same light, it isn't even noticeable in uses like porch lights, garages, bathrooms, etc., but even then there was still objection.

This morning, thanks to Scott Mace, I found this quote by author Jim Kunstler that sums up my feelings better than I could.

"The people I know complain endlessly about how stupid President George W. Bush is, and how badly he has lied to the public about this or that. But a casual observer from Mars would have to conclude that President Bush perfectly represents a nation that shows such a thoroughgoing incapacity for thought, and such an aversion to the truth about its own behavior. A people so hopelessly unwilling to get its act together deserves to suffer."

Something one of the United States' founding father's once said came to mind reading that. This Thomas Jefferson quote has been cited quite a bit regarding the response to 9/11, but the climate crisis is no less pressing of a national security issue than terrorism.

"Those who desire to give up Freedom in order to gain Security, will not have, nor do they deserve, either one."

Do American's deserve to survive the climate crisis if they can't even be bothered to switch out a few light bulbs?

3 Comments

Alexis

Sunday, October 21, 2007 at 10:10am 1 comments

Last weekend my niece turned 5 years old. I wrote her name on her Etch A Sketch and was then her little brother chased me around the room so he could shake the picture.

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Fonts in Mac OS X Leopard

Wednesday, October 17, 2007 at 5:10pm 4 comments

Apple has posted a list of 300+ features in Leopard, the next version of Mac OS X. Of course not all of them are groundbreaking, and sometimes the best new features can be simple tweaks to make things easier to use.

Having heard nothing so far about fonts, I jumped right down to the new font features which turned out to be less than stellar. The printable font book is a welcome edition (though it really shouldn't have taken three versions to get it) and likewise the addition of Tahoma, Microsoft San Serif and Arial Unicode probably should have come sooner.

Having accidently deleted system fonts (which can lead to applications not displaying text right and can pretty much break them), the system font protection feature is a good one, but I really wanted more.

There's mention of a language grouping feature, but will it do any more than the current collections feature? Right now you can create font groups in Font Book, but you can't actually do anything useful with them. For example, as a web designer and developer, I created a font group named "Web" that I put the usual suspects in. Arial, Georgia, and all the fonts that you'll find pre-installed on both mac and windows.

The catch of this is the group I made isn't usable in Photoshop, Illustrator, Word or most the apps I use. Instead I still just have an alphabetically ordered menu with every font I have installed forcing me to scroll through everything else to get at the font I need. A simple submenu at the top of the list, showing my custom groups as submenus before the full list, would do the trick.

I was hoping to see some real improvements with font management, but there's a lot else I still look forward to in Leopard and hopefully Apple will take font management seriously next time around.

4 Comments

It's Lights Out San Francisco

Monday, October 15, 2007 at 2:10pm 4 comments

By now everyone has probably heard replacing one just one regular light bulb with a compact florescent will save millions of dollars or make a take a nice chunk out of US energy consumption.

Hopefully you've kicked down a couple bucks for one of PG&E's discounted CFL bulbs and replaced a light or two in your place. If you haven't yet, Lights Out San Francisco has set aside Saturday, October 20th from 8-9pm as the hour to get to it locally and March 29 next year nation wide.

It's pretty simple: 1 night, 1 hour, 1 light bulb. They also ask you turn off non-essential lights along with City buildings and participating restaurants which will be holding candlelight dinners in a show of support.

Since this is San Francisco where we usually work a party into any good deed, we're all invited to watch the city go dark in Dolores Park where there will be music and free light bulbs.

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Bunnies Like no Other

Monday, October 8, 2007 at 7:10am 3 comments

Here in the United States, Sony advertises their Bravia line of televisions with the slogan "the first television for men and woman" and lame ads that show men caring only about watching sports, and having had a Bravia for nearly a year we've never watched one sports game on it, while in the rest of the world Sony has been creating scenes of brilliant colors to sell them.

Yesterday, Shawn mentioned the new commercial was running.

In the latest commercial for europe they've gone animated, with colorful play-doh bunnies hopping around the concrete jungle of New York City and coming together as "She's a rainbow" by Rolling Stones is played. It's the same song Apple used when they released the iMac in a variety of colors.

For the first commercial, a quarter million superballs bounced down San Francisco's Russian Hill while José González's "Heartbeats" played. if you live here and haven't seen it you should take a look at it. YouTube doesn't do it justice in low resolution though and there's an HD version on the Sony Flash site if you click around a bit.

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Castro Halloween Plans Come Together

Wednesday, October 3, 2007 at 2:10pm 4 comments

600 police officers will be on hand for the annual Castro Halloween Party this year, even though it's been cancelled.

The party is still likely to attract tens of thousands from around the city and bay area despite the event having been cancelled and dozens of bars, clubs and restaurants in the neighborhood are closing down to prevent a repeat of last years shooting of nine people as well as the stabbings and gay-bashings that plague the event each year.

4 Comments

What is a Radiohead Album Worth to You?

Tuesday, October 2, 2007 at 1:10pm 8 comments

Radiohead has set the internet abuzz with the announcement of their new album, In Rainbows will be available next week for download with no set price. The way it's set up, when you go to pre-order the album, there is a field where you are prompted to entry what you want to pay for it. They don't even have a suggested price, the default is an empty field.

I haven't placed my order yet because I'm not sure how much I should pay and I think I'll just wait until after the release to see what is actually included in the download. My dilemma isn't over whether to pay, because I'm planning on giving them $15 or so, which seems fair for a full length album, I just don't want to pay now for a download and pay a second time if they release it on CD with additional liner notes and artwork.

That assumes they even will release a CD, and one worth buying. The main reason I still buy CDs is to have a backup copy in case anything happens to my music library since you never know if there will be anything worth while in the liner notes or it will just be a simply insert with one page of credits. If the album can be downloaded again for free (because I would have paid the first time) then I don't need the CD at all.

So what are you going to pay them for the album? Do you plan on paying anything for it?

8 Comments