Tapirtype Blog

I’ve become convinced that those flashy blinking ads are designed to drive page hits. How? I just found myself reloading the New York Times web page five times in a row in the hope that I’d get an ad that wouldn’t compel me to hold my hand over the screen so I could read the actual content without being distracted.

(And yes, I know there’s software to fix that.)

So we all know that the 24 hour limit sucks. That (along with the fact that you can only get HD content if you have an Apple TV, what could otherwise be the killer feature for me) certainly prevents me from me from even considering it as an option beyond something to keep in the back of my head for last resort instant gratification.

Netflix, by contrast is of course quite happy to let you keep DVDs for as long as you like. As a subscription outfit, they just make more and more money off of you. But plenty of people would certainly prefer to pay per rental and herein lies the problem as renting on a long enough time frame becomes indistinguishable from buying.

The solution: Instead of putting an arbitrary cutoff time after hitting play, there should be a virtual check back in. You’d a allowed to have, say, 10 movies checked out at a time, paying for the rental when you download them and keeping them as long as you like, but you wouldn’t be allowed to download the 11th until you “check in” one of the 10, rendering it unplayable. Certainly this would introduce some more security holes and would set an upper limit on how many movies you could take with you on a trip if you don’t want to access the internet from the road, but it would prevent wholesale abuse. On the whole I think it would work much better for most people.

Duh!

Or well, you’d think it would be “duh.”

I’m not big on ultra portables. I use a mid sized MacBook Pro 15” (named Mallory by the way) because I like to have (and well, can afford) one machine that I largely take from desk to desk going from work to home to wherever else I need to be. I’m a large enough guy that carting Mallory back and forth from work isn’t ever much of a problem, and making her smaller, even much smaller isn’t going to magically solve the ergonomics of using her away from a desk.

So I’ve watched the complaints that Apple doesn’t offer a decent ultra-portable form the sidelines as a somewhat disinterested observer. Ok, I get that for people with desktop machines who use their portables as portables instead of “transplantable” computers might like something super small to take to the coffee shop or the plane or class or meetings or wherever it is that they go when not sitting at their desktop.

So Apple comes out with just such a machine and all those same people, the people who derided the 17” and so clearly don’t subscribe to the “transplantable” computer idea, complain that there are not enough ways to tether it down? Honestly? You really want lots of ports so you can park this super, super thin computer on a desk with wires sticking out of every end so you won’t notice how thin it is because you can’t pick it up without unplugging a bunch of things anyway? You’re really concerned that you need to install software on it with the help of a larger computer? Do you really do much installing of software on the road? If you, like me, aren’t willing to sacrifice much in the way of power for size then, news flash, you don’t actually want an ultra portable. You want a general purpose portable, and congratulations, Apple already sells those in a variety of size-power-price points.

Update: Many people are further making the comparison to the Cube. I think that’s deeply flawed as while both machines made compromises on price in order to achieve small size and exciting form factor, many people appreciate those things in a desktop, but few really benefit from them. Anyone who uses a laptop will benefit in very concrete ways from the lightness and thinness of the Air… even if many don’t feel the trade off is worth it. I strongly doubt that anyone out there would find themselves buying a computer they otherwise wouldn’t because they could fit it on a smaller desktop. There are definitely people out there who would choose to bring a computer with them at the weight and thinness of the Air that would decide not to bring one at all otherwise.

In the middle of our Friday afternoon departmental happy hour, the elevator doors sweep open, and a campus police officer on a segway(!) rolls right out, heads straight across the hall, swings around to look at our alcohol permit, and, without acknowledging anyone’s presence, swings back around and disappears back into the elevator.

This is stepping on Sasha’s turf, but the “it’s not our job to wade into difficult legal questions or conflicts between the branches of government because doing our jobs might be construed to be judicial activism and we’d rather take a nap” Roberts Court has (not) struck again.

Update: See also the NY Times editorial board’s take on this.

I don’t think most ducks migrate, but this mallard has just about finished migrating tapirtype over to the new Joyent shared accelerator “Myrtle”.

Just a couple more things to test (this post included) and I’m going to declare it done and switch the DNS over.

About a year ago I declared that Verizon was evil in a snarky little post that had much more to do with the company’s complete failure at providing us with service in a timely manner than than any grand struggle of values. But now, yup, turns out Verizon is most definitely evil in that sense, too.

Update: They caved quickly. By the way, this was never an abortion rights issue. It’s a free speech issue, in that it needs to be made completely clear that Verizon is every bit as much of a common carrier when distributing text messages as when it is distributing voice calls and should have no right censor what kind of speech occurs on their network. There may be a legal loophole for text messages, but even if there is, that’s just plain silly. We really need to set policy that being a common carrier means you are common carrier for any kind of data, not set policy piece by piece as new technology emerges.

Oh, boy… I just read an op-ed piece in the New York Times addressing the role of elite universities in transmitting social privilege from one privileged generation to the next. As a graduate of one of those elite universities (Sasha and I both attended Princeton and have the dubious distinction of being children of alumni as well) my problem with articles like this isn’t that I dispute the problem. There is no question that the makeup of each class at each elite university does not reflect a fair sampling of all those students qualified to attend, and there is no question that we would all benefit greatly if it did. It isn’t even that I feel the solutions they propose are wrong—I don’t know nearly enough to be able to speak intelligently on what the best solutions are, and don’t get me Sasha started on the pure evil that is the test-prep racket. My problem is that, seemingly inevitably, these articles imply, if not state right out, that this is the result of some form of spiteful hoarding of privilege by a wealthy few who do everything they can get away with to keep the poor who are storming the barricades at bay. No doubt there are some few who feel this way just as there really are those few who still regularly write in to the alumni weekly decrying how the admission of women has ruined the university, but in my experience these are the exceptions and rare ones at that.

The piece ends with what is, to me, a particularly stinging and false assessment:

Last, and not least, by undermining the dubious assumption that the applicants admitted are those with the most merit, a lottery might promote a certain measure of humility — a quality in short supply in the upper rungs of the “meritocracy” — among admission officers and students alike.

The idea that Ivy League students have an arrogantly lofty idea of their own intelligence is deeply counter to my own experience and contributes to many of the stereotypes that lead to a difficulty in getting students who don’t attend elite high schools or have connected parents to consider an elite university as an option. My own experience of Princeton, and one that has been confirmed among many of my friends, was precisely one of humility. Because every Princeton student was at the top of their high school, academically, you quickly and graphically learn that you are not special. No matter how smart you think you are, someone else is smarter and smarter by a very great deal. Rare is the person with a level of arrogance so great that they can live through that demonstration and still think they are hot stuff because they got some good grades, read some difficult books, or got a degree.

On the contrary, it often seems that the assumption of Ivy League arrogance comes from everywhere but the people who attend them. Sometimes simply admitting where you went to college is interpreted as arrogance: A usual response is something along the lines of “Gee, you must be pretty smart, huh?” This can lead to a pretty ridiculous effort to downplay the affiliation. One of the biggest problems, as I see it, is that the general population views elite universities like Princeton as something foreign. As a different world. The high school I attended was generally lower-middle class, and while they prided themselves on sending a high percentage of their students to college, I witnessed not a single bit of encouragement to even the brightest students to consider elite schools. The only students who did apply to elite schools were those who had the background and resources to investigate them on their own. The elite universities of this country were simply not in the world that my high school expected it’s students to live in. Similarly the reaction that my mom would usually get from other parents was to say that they could never consider Princeton because there is no way they could afford it, never mind that with their greater resources, elite schools can often provide much more generous aid, frequently with no debt, than other seemingly more affordable schools. People just don’t consider them enough to even investigate them because their first reaction is that those are schools simply don’t exist in their world.

As I’ve said a number of times now, the admissions departments of the elite universities must do more to make admissions fair and to expand access to disadvantaged students (and they are), but the problems lie on both sides of the “divide”. I’m always a little disheartened when I read articles that reinforce the idea that Princeton and other elite universities exist in a different world from the one in which “normal” people live. As long as people keep on believing that, it will remain true.

Things I don’t like:

Fiddling around with my speaker wire to see if I can fix the (real or imagined) crackle in my speaker only to find I’ve poked my finger into an old spider nest.

Further finding the nest wasn’t as old as I’d thought when I see a tiny baby spider skitter by on the floor.

Further looking down and finding the very large momma spider rushing towards me out of nowhere doing a very good impression of a momma bear who’s found me messing with her cubs.

At least I didn’t accidentally summon a fear demon.

While checking out the new iPods at the Apple Store, I discovered a big defect in the new iPod’s marquee feature: cover flow. On the first several iPods I picked up, scrolling through cover flow would cause the audio to distort and stutter unbearably. Not just a little or just when the song hadn’t had a chance to cache and not just when scrolling all the way from one end to the other. I was just about ready to give the feature up for useless when I picked up another iPod, one attached to one of the iMacs on the other side of the room and there was no trace of the problem. A quick google search pulled up some other reports of the problem, so it wasn’t just something wrong with the iPods in that store, and frankly I was a little surprised not to find more reports given the severity of the problem.

It puzzled me for a while. At first I figured that identical seeming iPods were getting different components. Then I figured it out: The ones by the computers were restarting when they got plugged and re-plugged. Sure enough, I picked up the first iPod again, stuttery as ever. A quick restart, holding down the center and menu buttons, and it was perfectly smooth. Mystery and, as far as I’m concerned, problem solved. Hopefully a future software update will prevent it from happening at all.

Unfortunately this doesn’t change that, while cool, cover flow is of limited utility to begin with, especially so on a mobile device device with a large collection that can only be browsed in one long list. What’s especially unfortunate is that on the go playlist creation doesn’t seem to work with cover flow and that’s where I could most see using it: brainstorming about what I want to listen to next.