Category Archives: Uncategorized

Inauguration and Common Courtesy

One of my pet peeves is people who are incapable of being courteous at events, such as concerts, movies, and plays. And public screenings of historic events, such as the inauguration.

A few months ago, we attended an orchestra concert where our daughter played her violin. At no point during the entire event did people stop talking, laughing, answering their cell phones, or wandering around.

Last week, we went to the Kentucky Theater to watch the inauguration of President Obama.

I understand people having strong political leanings, and I support that entirely. But Mr. Bush, whatever one may think about his presidency, has been nothing but cooperative and courteous in the period of transition. That’s not my opinion, but Mr. Obama’s. Yet when he appeared on the screen, a couple hundred people felt that it was appropriate to boo loudly. Booing at an event is just rude. And showing respect, or at least courtesy, for an outgoing president is just common decency, whatever you thought of his policies while he was in office.

A couple of generations ago, showing respect for a defeated enemy was one of the signs that we were a civilized people. We certainly seem to have lost that, too, as evidenced by the way we made a public spectacle of the humiliation of Mr. Hussein when he was captured a few years ago in Iraq.

I have a notion that watching the world go by on TV is what teaches people that it’s OK to be rude at events. They’re used to being able to get up and go to the toilet in the middle of a scene, so they figure that’s ok when the Vice President is saying his oath of office, too. Or when my little girl is playing her piece at a concert. I suspect that attending events courteously is something that has to be taught and practiced, and these days people attend fewer and fewer events where silence and courtesy are expected.

The loss of common courtesy is a great shame. I, for one, intend to teach my kids how to behave politely, even if they don’t see it modeled for them anywhere else in their experience.

A Cat and a Cock

One of the gifts I got for Christmas was a collection of Aesop’s fables. I’m very fond of the Everyman’s books. I love the bindings, and I love their selections of books. I’d love to have the entire Everyman’s library some day.

Anyways, the plan is to record all of Aesop’s Fables, and here’s the first one. I’m considering maybe moving my podcasts to a separate website, since I’m hoping to do a lot of them this year. But, for now, I’ll put it here.

A Cat and a Cock, and A Wolf and a Lamb, two fables by Aesop.

Polaroid “PoGo”

Polaroid has announced that they are now marketing a camera that lets you take a photograph, and then print that photograph immediately.

It’s this kind of amazing fresh thinking and out-of-the-box engineering that keeps the United States firmly in the forefront of innovations in technology. I mean, who’s ever thought of anything like this before?

Of course, my first thought was … nice photo, can I get a digital copy of that, please?

Writing Goals – 2009

These are my writing goals for 2009.

* 300 poems – Not quite one a day, but as close as I think I can get
* 10 stories – This will be the big challenge, but I think I can do it
* 1 book – I’m actually on contract for this one, so it’s less of a goal and more of an obligation!
* 50 podcasts – Not exactly a writing goal, but literarily related. Almost one a week, so I better get moving!

What we’ve been saying for *years*

The Obama administration wants to digitize and standardize medical data. You know, have everybody collaborate and agree on a standard, common data format, and be able to exchange records between different providers, securely, in an agreed-upon data format.

To which the entire computer industry should have one loud and universal response: Duh.

In any part of any business, when you have to exchange information from one entity to another, the largest cost is converting/translating/munging from one data format to another. Anybody who has ever worked on a non-trivial integration project can tell you that.

What seems to be missing from this story is the time component. That is, if they don’t do it now, they will have to do it later, and the longer they wait, the more it will cost. Every new record adds costs to the total, and that cost will be paid by the entire health-care-consuming public.

The question should not be whether this should be done, but how quickly the standard data formats can be agreed upon, and who should be on that committee. The trouble with standards is that they take so long to agree on. What the politicians doubtless haven’t thought of yet is the standards process itself. Fortunately, a lot of that work has already been done by other countries. Unfortunately, being American, we’ll try to reimplement from scratch, in a manner that will benefit some particular overpriced vendor that will lock us into their proprietary data format for the next 50 years. What we, the consumers, should be pushing for, is a truly open data format, and truly open API, mandated by law, so that any vendor will have access to this market, and can compete on a level playing field. My fear is that about six months from now we’ll read a story about how MegaMediCo has “won the contract” to do this implementation.

Grandfather’s Pens

Grandfather’s Pens

He hugged fiercely.
He did everything fiercely.
I never knew him to do anything half way,
or unintentionally.

Every day, he wrote
a letter, threw a lifeline
to someone treading water
in some not-quite-God-forsaken
city, so far away.

Consequently his pockets were always full
of pens, full to the bursting point
against the unforeseen need
to fling another life preserver.

Hugging him, one encountered
this portcullis of pens
pressing back, a comfortable pain,
this reminder of the thousands of pages
he produced each year —
the journal of the mundane,
so beautiful to anyone
deprived of it.

Converting mp3 to ipod-ready audio books

DISCLAIMER: The below technique works about half of the time: For no readily discernible reason, some of the files come out in chipmunk mode. It appears, from what I’ve been able to determine so far, that mpg123 is playing the original mp3 file at the wrong speed.

—————–

As a fan of Librivox, it’s frustrating to me that the iPod doesn’t recognize audio books in mp3 format as audio books. It wants them in aac format. Converting them is a hassle, mostly because I always forget how. So, here’s a little Perl script I whipped up for the purpose.

The same thing is necessary if you rip an audiobook from CD.

Share and enjoy:

#!/usr/bin/perl

opendir F,".";
my @files = readdir(F);
closedir F;

foreach my $chapter (@files) {
    next unless $chapter =~ m/.mp3$/i;

    my $filename = $chapter;
    $filename =~ s/.mp3$//;
    $filename = $filename . '.m4b';

    `mpg123 -s "$chapter" | faac -b 80 -P -X -w -o "$filename" -`;
}

Note that while this retains the track name, it seems to lose the album name and author, so you may need to add that back. Presumably faac has command-line arguments for this, too, but I haven’t found them yet. Haven’t looked, either.