zachphillips

Rethinking the Student-Athlete

2013-02-02 00:00:00 +0000

Note: The vast majority of student-athletes in American colleges and universities are there primarily for an education beyond their sport. This post is focused on the edge-cases which are the celebrated players who are on national television twice a week, some of whom wind up in our professional sports leagues. If you interpret this post as being at all demeaning to student-athletes, you have missed the point in an awesomely ironic way.

There is a disconnect in our culture between things that are ostensibly work and things that are fun.

In the realm of academia, this is strictly codified. Some things you can get credit for, and some are considered “extracurricular.” This distinction is, of course, totally arbitrary, and based on what a board of very serious people very seriously consider a very serious and worthy academic pursuit.

There is a great tension about college athletes and the huge amount of attention some of them garner, and the attendant ethical problems that come when you have student-athletes who might not be attending college as a student if not for the athletics. This sensitivity is so apparent that the National Collegiate Athletics Association’s major advertising campaign (that’s been going on for years now) is basically a defensive cringe: “Hey, we aren’t all dumb jocks we do other things guys!”

On the other side, there are the very convincing arguments that athletes in the biggest sports programs are being totally exploited, that they generate millions of dollars for their institutions and conferences and that they should be paid for their talents.

I have a proposal that I think could make college athletics a little bit better, by making things a lot more honest. And it would all be in keeping with the academic standards these colleges and universities hold dear.

I would like to propose a newly accreditted degree: Bachelor of Athletic Arts. Let me explain.

Why couldn’t a stellar basketball player, one of the top players in the world at his age, decide to major in Basketball? Why shouldn’t he get credit for daily three-hour practices, have a class schedule built around all of the travel he’ll be doing to play games around the country, and take core classes on the History of Basketball, the Footwork of Michael Jordan, or the Zone Defense (taught by James Arthur Boeheim, of course)?

The most obvious reason on the surface is that we don’t think of athletic performance as the artform that it is, maybe the most celebrated in the world (admit it). Or do we?

My sister majored in Modern Dance. She has a degree in Modern Dance. “But Zach,” you might say. “Modern Dance has ‘choreography’ and ‘art’ to it.”

I was a Film-Drama major in college. Film is a big business. There are hundreds of thousands of Los Angelenos making real money telling stories on a two-dimensional screen. And then there are the folks like me, who aren’t part of Hollywood, but work in small video production houses in every town and city in the country, making commercials and web videos for clients. Then there are my friends who majored in Cello and Trumpet.

We’re all doing okay, even if none of us are directing $100 million feature films or playing in the New York Philharmonic (yet).

My point is that our college years were spent pursuing exactly what we were interested in, and because of this, college was a very interesting and valuable experience in our lives, and led, at least indirectly, to the careers we are working in today.

If you’re a 17-year-old with interest, talent, and promise in filmmaking, there are options for you. If you’re into Surface Pattern Design, you can get a Masters in that. But if you are the greatest basketball player ever to come out of the state of Missouri whose lifelong dream is to play in the NBA, you can pick a major that has nothing to do with your chosen career, doesn’t take into account that you are doubly as busy as every other student, and oh yeah, then there’s a 12-inch book of special rules for you, about who’s allowed to buy you lunch or talk to you or tweet at you.

This one time when I was a sophomore, Steven Spielberg contacted me about directing a film he was producing, but then Turner Classic Movies found out about the call and I was suspended from all filmmaking activities for two years and it was a big mess. What really sucked was that I had to remain in good academic standing with my Pre-Dental degree, but you know, I was on scholarship for Film, so…

Think about that for a second… “All I want to do is play basketball.” “Too bad. You have to do this other crap.” Imagine if someone said that to your chemistry-wiz daughter, or to your piano virtuoso brother. What a distraction. What a waste of their time and money.

“Okay Zach, every Division I player thinks he’s going to make an NBA squad, but only a handful of them do. What about the others?”

Like Film, Basketball is big business. Just because you don’t care about or respect a certain industry doesn’t mean the market hasn’t carved out a giant space for it. A lot of former college players make very decent livings in other leagues around the world. They can go into coaching, physical education, the myriad of businesses related to sports, or maybe they start their own businesses not directly related to basketball. Or they go on like most of today’s graduates and pursue further education in another field altogether.

In addition to directing and editing videos, in the last few years I’ve suddenly found myself designing and developing web applications, and getting paid good money for it. You may not think this is related to film, but everything I’ve done has jumped off of something else. Welcome to the new economy. You do lots of things now.

Playing basketball on the Division I stage involves a level of work ethic and talent that few can claim. If you were reading a resumé that contained these two items, which would impress you more: Four years of starting for the Kentucky Wildcats or a Bachelor’s in Child and Family Studies? Which would convey more confidence and drive?

So let’s quit this dumb charade. Michael Carter-Williams came to Syracuse University to play basketball, and to showcase his talents for the NBA. His options come season-end are to leave and (possibly) make millions while focusing solely on his passion, or to take the bus from South Campus to Technical Writing 205 in the snow. Now, MCW’s situation is different from a lot of guys who opt to leave early these days, as he will likely be a lottery pick, but have you ever heard of an easier decision in your life?

So what if the choice were different? What if he were given the option of spending another year focusing 100% of his energy on basketball, moving further along in the work he’s been doing with his coaches that has yielded such great results, becoming (probably) an even more certain lottery pick next year (and meanwhile have another shot at the NCAA title, because you know, gamers wanna win)? I’m not saying he would take it, and I’m not going to speculate on whether or not that would be a good idea for him, but in this case he certainly has options.

In a world with a Basketball major, everyone wins. Great players get to go to school without stupid pretenses and inefficient uses of their time (if that applies, of course… some people dual-major). Coaches officially become the Professors of the game that they always have been. Fans might get to watch a few guys play for a few more years. And some of those guys who may have gotten lost in the draft shuffle will benefit from that extra time in a strong program competing with the best amateur players on earth. Overall, the world of college basketball would be a more honest place.

Eventually, Basketball could be a major every bit as respectable as Film or Comparative Literature (my fiancé’s major… she’s a lawyer now).

Think about it.

I’ve been thinking about this idea for about ten years now and finally wrote something half-coherent about it, thanks to some pressure from Sean Keeley at Troy Nunes is an Absolute Magician.

Link: Apple Fixes iMessages→

2012-06-15 00:00:00 +0000

Scott Forstall:

“We’re unifying your phone number and your Apple ID,” said iOS guru Scott Forstall at WWDC today. “So if someone calls you on your phone number with a FaceTime call, you can answer the call on your iPad or even your Mac. And we’re doing the exact same thing with iMessage.”

Great move.

I’m almost certain that Forstall reads Daring Fireball, but I’m equally sure that my post that Gruber linked had nothing to do with this.

It was just the obvious thing to do.

I wonder if they were waiting on the new notification center and the (presumed) APIs to get rid of notifications across devices once they’ve been addressed.

If every time I open my Mac I’m greeted with all of my SMS conversations from the day, that will make me stabby.

Link: Solving the Online Payment Problem→

2012-04-21 00:00:00 +0000

Thomas Baekdal:

The solution is quite simple. The technology already exists, and it is easy to implement. We need to think of payments the same way as Facebook think (sp.) of the Like button.

I don’t think the solution is this simple. It would be arguably a better user interface, but it presupposes that there is one good payment service we can all agree on.

PayPal already has something virtually equivalent to this, though it does take you away from the site temporarily. It’s pretty quick, and like all other things PayPal, it’s as ugly as road death.

But all you have to do is enter your PayPal password, change the funding source if you want, and you’re done. I love when I go to pay for something and they have a PayPal checkout. I use 1Password, so filling out credit card and address forms is about a hundred times easier for me than for regular people who don’t have 1Password (my heart goes out to them). But even with that, the PayPal checkout process is so much easier that I breathe an audible sigh of relief.

But PayPal has proven time and time again that they are a terrible, awful company without any thought to elegance or user experience. The founder doesn’t like people, and he especially hates poor people, so I guess the total lack of respect for human beings makes sense. They just happen to be the only ubiquitous player on the web.

Implementing a PayPal payment system makes any self-respecting designer feel sick with shame, and we don’t even have to talk about their Send and Receive money feature (supposedly their flagship service) where they put confusing holds on payments and take 3-5 business days to transfer to your bank account and make you feel all stabby and get the taste of blood in your mouth.

So before we can implement a fancy slick iframe interface for payments, we need to decide who will be the processor of those payments.

The keys will be:

It must allow truly instant transfers of money with no limits, no holds, no bullshit.
It will probably need to have a huge, trusting, installed base.

The only people I can see with a chance to do this would be Amazon (who for some reason has not pushed their web payments service very hard), Apple (who makes enough money on their core business of selling deliciously wonderful hardware that they may not want to muddy the waters with a contentious service offering like web payments, where there is a major risk of bad PR and customer dissatisfaction if everything isn’t perfect… people get sensitive about their money), or, and this is something like Baekdal is talking about, a consortium of major banks and credit card companies. A company with joint interests from the Bank of Americas and Wells Fargos and Visas and Mastercards of the world. They would be positioned to do something like this, and they could cut out the middle men and make us all happier.

But they won’t. You know why? Because they are fucking worthless, pathetic dinosaurs. Try using Wells Fargo’s new Send Money service to another Wells Fargo customer and when it tells you it will take one business day or when it tells you that you have reached your arbitrary $2,000 limit of sending for the month, try to keep yourself from punching the wall, because that never solves anything.

via @wes_garnett

Link: WYSIneverWYG→

2012-04-19 00:00:00 +0000

Rachel Andrew:

WYSIWYG Editors suck because they promote thinking about style rather than content. While content editors are busy changing headings to Comic Sans, pondering the use of a grimacing smiley on their about us page or getting creative with colour, they are not considering the actual copy they are adding to the site.

The CMS axiom: When there are 999 ways to make something look right, a non-designer will usually find the one way to make it look wrong.

It’s not a knock on them, because it’s not their fault, because it’s not their job.

Link: Where You Been, Malware?→

2012-04-16 00:00:00 +0000

John Siracusa on Hypercritical episode 63:

And there’s this period of time where the Macs really didn’t have a problem with malware at all. The PC had tremendous problems with viruses because they were the massively dominant platform at the time all of our computers got connected to each other (…) It wasn’t like the Mac wasn’t vulnerable. You could write malware for it really easily. It was arguably more vulnerable than Windows.

By “this period of time,” I think he means the last couple of decades.

This is the only reason I’ve ever heard for the astonishing absence of malware on the Mac since the ResEdit days. The PC just has this huge marketshare, and hackers just want to affect the greatest number of people, and so they just haven’t been interested in the Mac until… 2011?

This explanation has never satisfied me.

Though the principal motivation for hackers is monetary, it isn’t just a stereotype that there’s a bragging-rights component.

You mean to tell me that with all of the incessant, self-assured grandstanding by Mac users like me, “Don’t worry about viruses. You don’t have to protect yourself against viruses with the Mac. Viruses, schmiruses,” that not one of these vermin took a break from his RPG to put on his cleanest “iFail” T-shirt and prove us all wrong?

This does not compute.

I can only come up with two explanations:

It actually is harder to get Mac malware to spread.
Humans who are attracted to the idea of writing viruses are also attracted to Windows, and once they start running a Unix environment to test out their garbage, they find the experience so pleasant that they forget about what they were doing, start respecting themselves, and go forth with dignity.

Link: John Gruber on iMessages→

2012-04-14 00:00:00 +0000

I got a link from one of my favorite bloggers (from nearby Philly), who disagrees with me very much about using phone numbers as iMessage IDs:

I’m sure there are others who feel like Phillips does, but that would drive me nuts. When you send an iMessage to my phone number, you know it’s going to my phone and nowhere else. You, the sender, know that it’s going to my phone, and so you know not to badger me with half a dozen messages one after another like you might do if you thought it were going to the IM-style Messages app on my Mac.

The argument Gruber seems to be making is that iMessages, when used from a desktop to a desktop, should be treated like IM, but when used from a phone to a phone or from a desktop to a phone, should be treated like SMS (with SMS etiquette).

There are several suitable IM channels, and as far as I can tell, not one seems to greatly benefit the company supporting it (Hello AOL). If Apple were trying to create a better IM experience, I would be pretty surprised. Apple has done a good job of not going into spaces where they can’t score a clear victory on quality. If iMessages is IM, I don’t think anyone would say it’s much better than what we already have.

I might be wrong about this, but I don’t see how the introduction of iMessages was anything but a response to BBM, which is something like the ashen limb of a favored teddy bear lying amidst a smoldering trainwreck. BBM was RIM’s enhancement to SMS, not a new channel for IM.

Apple could, I think, grant Phillips his wish and allow the use of your phone number as an Apple ID. But they have to let you use your (email address) Apple ID for iMessage, because they want to allow iMessage for all iCloud users, not just iPhone owners.

Maybe Gruber is right and Apple wants everyone chatting on iMessages instead of Google and Facebook chat (which people can usually get to from their Windows PCs at work), but again, I don’t see how that’s valuable enough to Apple to warrant the added confusion.

A different discussion is whether the constraint of having to enter a message on your phone is in fact a necessary limiting factor, allowing SMS to be what it is. Maybe opening SMS up to the desktop is a terrible idea, something like extending Twitter beyond 140 characters. And suddenly, it isn’t Twitter anymore.

Why Can't I Use My Phone Number on Messages.app?

2012-02-20 00:00:00 +0000

Update: Gruber responded (!!!). Glad I got the blog on Jekyll last week… He hates my idea. So I followed up here.

The iMessage protocol doesn’t actually use a phone number as anything other than a unique identifier. What this means is that if you try to send a text message to someone and you are doing it from an iMessage-capable app (which right now only officially exists on the iPhone and iPad), a request is sent to Apple’s server to see if the person’s number you are sending to corresponds to another iMessage-capable customer. If the answer comes back yes, the app forgoes creating a traditional SMS clump to send over the channels reserved (and metered) for phone calls and text messages and instead sends the message as regular data through the iMessage protocol.

The practical result for the user on the other end is that the message is slightly slower (usually) to arrive, but it doesn’t count against any text message quotas they may have set up with their carrier. And it’s blue. There are other subtle differences, but the service is meant as (or as I will explain, should be meant as) a replacement and enhancement to traditional SMS. One obvious possible benefit over SMS would be the ability, while sitting at a computer or iPad, to respond from a quick window with full keyboard at hand. For me it always feels a bit silly pulling my phone out of my pocket and typing a text message on a little screen while I have a full-sized keyboard in front of me.

It would be cool if something like this were in the iMessages pipeline.

SMS is a mode of communication that is so ubiquitous that trying to change the way people think of it is not likely to be very productive. That ship has sailed. People love sending text messages, and they are used to it. It’s ultimately frustrating to people when you try to change something fundamental about a service they use every day and like. Apple has been pretty great about not frustrating its users, and yet, with Messages’s move from the iPhone to the iPad, and now to OS X as Messages.app, they are doing exactly that.

It’s worth noting that this wouldn’t be Apple’s first attempt at improving the texting experience. Their first try was, of course, brilliant, with the introduction of the threaded conversation, chat-client-like display of text messages that shipped on the orginal iPhone, and which virtually all other text message software on smartphones has copied since. The view we take for granted today replaced the embarrassingly recent, ugly, clunky, wonky POP3-like setup with Inbox and Sent “folders.” You can still see this implementation on dumbphones if you know anyone who owns one. For all of the talk of the lack of hardware buttons, the first ever usable touch interface, the great iPod, and a real web browser in your pocket, the original “SMS” app might truthfully have been the most important enhancement the first iPhone brought to my cellphone-using life. It improved so much on a function I was already using on my old flip phone, however awkwardly and painfully, that it opened up a whole new world of communication to me. The SMS app made SMS work. (Visual Voicemail was huge as well, I digress.)

Having Messages on my iPad has not enhanced my texting experience. Messages.app (beta) for OS X has not enhanced my texting experience. Messages on iPad and OS X are, in fact, completely unusable. This, and the fact that I am on a family plan with unlimited SMS messages, means that iMessages has had a net negative effect on my texting experience. “It’s like SMS, but a little slower and less reliable!”

It would only take one feature to make Messages on iPad and Messages.app useful. Allow me to use my phone number as my iMessages account. My phone number has always been my unique identifier through which I choose to receive these short bits of text (for good reason). If I can’t use my real “address,” there’s not much point in signing up for a different delivery company. The package will not arrive where I need it.

I could write a lot of theory about what makes a text message different from an email different from a tweet. Maybe I will some day, but all I really have to say about what makes a text message a text message is that out of all of these delivery methods, it represents the closest circle of intimacy. If you wouldn’t feel comfortable calling me to say hello, you shouldn’t feel comfortable texting me. Convenient that both of these services should be reached at the same number. Anyone reading this, on the other hand, can feel free to email or tweet at me.

iMessages, as an enhancement to SMS, should never use email addresses.

An obvious question: How could Apple release something as stupid and half-baked as this? Do they simply not care? Was iMessages really just the cynical answer to the BBM crowd? “You want your little BBM chew toy? Here, here’s your little shitty BBM where people can see if you read their thing and you can give them a whole different address from your phone number, here just make it your email address, I don’t know how about your fucking iCloud ID, no wait your Apple Store iTunes jimmyname, yeah that’s fine. Send eachother your little lol’s on that thing and then you can see if they read it yet or not. Happy?”

I hope this isn’t the case, but if it were, one might suppose that an Apple ID email would be better than a proprietary 9709868756789 BBM ID, and in theory it would be, if you didn’t take into account the confusion created by completely mixing up totally different, widely-used communication methods. Sending a text message to an email address is like faxing a Christmas card. So even if it were just a BBM appeasement strategy, it would still be a bad one.

Another possibility is that Apple didn’t want to spend the couple hundred dollars on a text-message opt-in for verifying the true owner of the phone number in the non-iPhone apps. They already have a whole ecosystem of Apple IDs (different from iCloud IDs), and so maybe they were just lazy.

Regardless of the reason, one thing I’m not going to do is to start sending text messages from a fucking email address. And neither will anyone else.

My bad: The Palm Treo had threaded SMS messages. Matt Ginzton set me straight on that. The Treo had, and still has, a dedicated fan base. The iPhone was my first introduction, and I would wager that’s the case for most people. But Matt’s right. Must give credit where it’s due.

Embark

2012-01-26 00:00:00 +0000

This looks like a nice app for navigating mass transit. You can be fairly certain a product is good when @sandwichvideo gets involved. Adam Lisagor (@lonelysandwich) gets a lot of enquiries and so when he accepts a video project, it can be safely regarded as a stamp of approval from a trusted source.

The video usually turns out pretty good too. He likes to show the viewer exactly how a product will be useful to them.

There’s one little shot at the end that I did (the Washington, DC one). Many thanks to my friend Barrett Starling for coming out in his Sunday best on short notice.

Truman Toland Christmas Cards

2011-12-24 00:00:00 +0000

My grandfather died this fall. He was 89.

Though he was an exceptional artist, he mostly kept his work to himself. You can see some of his sketches here and here.

While emptying out his Cincinnati home, my parents found a collection of Christmas cards that he had made, one each year, from 1948 to 2008.

I think they say a lot about the years he drew them. I also think they’re pretty cool.

Always a tinkerer, he was part of the first wave of artists to use computers (Amigas, in his case) for drawing.

Here are some highlights. Follow this link to see them all.

Enjoy. And Merry Christmas.

1952

This was the year Uncle Robert was born. His birth weight slickly noted on the card.

1954

The 50’s…

1955

1958

1960

Pretty bad-ass hand-lettering.

1969

1970

1978

1982

Computers.

1985

Computers!!!

1987

Pixel art before it was cool.

1991

One continuous unbroken line (other than the T and M).

2008

And a beautifully detailed illustration at 87 years old.

Link: Arment on the Slow Death of Firefox→

2011-12-10 00:00:00 +0000

I’m a bit sad for Firefox. It used to be the fast, powerful, progressive browser that finally broke IE’s era of stagnant dominance and saved web developers’ sanity. Now, it’s a bloated, slow, unstable monster that’s often a pain in this web developer’s ass.

My feelings exactly. I never thought I’d see the day when I was cursing at Firefox for bad rendering, but here we are. And is it just me, or does all type look worse in Firefox? It’s as though every typeface is semibold and jaggy.

As much as I think competition is a good thing, I really long for a WebKit-only browser landscape.

You Should be Writing with Markdown

2011-11-27 00:00:00 +0000

Markdown nerds, this is not for you. This is for regular folks who need to start using Markdown. Go away.

Also, this article is not for masochists. This is for people who want to be happy, and who want their lives to be better. If your computer is running some flavor of Microsoft Windows, this is probably not for you.*

Did you ever make a little smiley face with a colon and a close-parenthesis? Was this incredibly difficult for you to do? No? Then you, my friend, have no excuse to not be writing in Markdown. Get rid of Microsoft Word, open up a plain-text editor and start writing something that will be forward-compatible, exchangeable, and beautiful in its simple elegance.

I repeat: It is exactly as hard to write Markdown as it is to make a sad-face.

Here's a paragraph.

Here's another paragraph. See, all I did was leave a line in between.

##Here's a Level Two heading. Just a couple of pound signs.

And this is what a Level Two heading looks like (in this context)

###Here's a Level Three heading. Just add another pound.

And this is what it looks like

You can have as many levels of heading as you want, but don’t be a terrible person with more than six. Seriously.

What is a heading level, exactly? Well, it’s something that you can elect to style in any way you want, but generally you would make it bigger than say, your paragraph text. You can use a level one heading to hold your title, for example, and a level two to label sections, and a level four for something else. Whatever you want. The point of all this is that you can decide what these headings will look like in different contexts, and you get to set their style once, and it will be repeated throughout whatever you have written. If you’ve ever tried to go through a Microsoft Word document and make it “look right,” you should begin to see how much better it is to write with Markdown.

Oh snap, do you see these italics?

_This is how you do italics_.

Just an underscore on each side. Or if you would prefer to use an asterisk, that’s fine too.

**This is bold, by the way**.

Again, you can use underscores if you want. Underscores and asterisks are interchangeable when it comes to bold and italics. But hold up! It’s not even really bold and italics we’re talking about and here’s an opportunity to try to give you a small peek into how you can think about Markdown and how it works differently from what you’re used to:

In Markdown, when you surround a word or a string of words with single underscores, you are telling Markdown that this part of your text is to be emphasized. Generally, you emphasize your text by making the font-style italic, as you are used to doing in Microsoft Word. But what if, for a certain application of the piece you’re writing, you wanted emphasized text to be not italic, but slightly larger and purple? Because you have sytactically indicated all of your emphasized text using underscores in Markdown, all you have to do is change the style applied to emphasized text, whether you are outputting to a PDF for printing, the web, or wherever your piece is headed. Now, everywhere you have emphasized text, it will be automatically styled to your wishes.

And in a hundred years, when the way they are emphasizing text is by making it holographic shimmering rainbow ether, the piece you wrote in Markdown will still work fine.

Do you see? Do you?

A couple more rules:

1. Here's how you make an ordered list.
2. That's right. Most obvious thing in the world.
3. Just numbers, periods, and then stuff.

* And here's an unordered (bulleted) list.
+ You can use asterisks, pluses, or hyphens.
- Just don't forget to put a space between the bullet and the liste item.

Here’s how an ordered list looks.
Just as you’d expect.
And here’s the unordered list.
There’s a lot you can do with this.

So how can you get started? Download a simple plain-text editor. Two that come with built-in Markdown support are Byword and iA Writer. But don’t misunderstand me. The “support” I’m referring to is purely cosmetic. All plain text editors “support Markdown.” Byword and Writer are just a little prettier. If you want, you can totally just used TextEdit, pre-installed as part of OS X. Just make sure you are saving everything as .txt and not .rtf.

Last but not least. Links. Those things which make the internet so much more powerful than the printed page.

This is a link to [Byword](http://bywordapp.com/). That's it. 
Just put the text of the link in square brackets, 
and the URL in parentheses.

And out pops a link to the Byword site.

There is a lot more that Markdown can do, but I’ve covered most of what you’ll use.

In closing, I will say that one of the nicest things about Markdown is simply the act of writing in a plain text editor. It is so easy, so clean, and so fast. Anything that reduces the friction between you and your writing is well worth it, and with Markdown, I think you’ll find that writing feels much more like gliding than grinding

If you are tired of the pain in your life, there is still hope for you. And remember, you are worth it. You are a human being, and you deserve to be treated with dignity and respect.

Link: Don Imus on Newt Gingrich→

2011-11-26 00:00:00 +0000

“He’s a fat, repulsive pig! I hate to be so harsh,” Imus said. “You go out in the woods and find a piece of old, dead wood, you lift it up and underneath there’s a bunch of bugs crawling around and white stuff … that’s Newt Gingrich.”

Rare form, Imus. Rare form.

Link: Bob Schieffer, Ron Paul and Journalistic “Objectivity”→

2011-11-24 00:00:00 +0000

Glenn Greenwald:

I would have no problem with Schieffer’s adversarial behavior here if this were also how he treated claims made by David Petraeus, Joe Lieberman, John McCain, and Hillary Clinton. But one would never, ever see that. Part of this is what Jay Rosen calls “the Church of the Savvy”: journalists revere power and political success and thus revere those who wield it in their world (Washington) while scorning those who do not (like Paul). But part of it is also that their function is to defend the political establishment of which they are a part and glorify its orthodoxies — defined as: the approved views of the leadership of the two parties, which in turn reflect the interests of the private factions that control both parties — and, conversely, to try to delegitimize any views and/or persons posing a challenge to it.

Wonder why you don’t see Greenwald on Morning Joe anymore…

…when you watch a media star on TV, what you are seeing in almost every case is an extremely well-paid, high-ranking employee of a major corporate conglomerate. They are the consummate insiders in every single sense. Except in the rarest cases, it would be irrational to expect them to be adversarial to the establishment which is responsible for their status and which lavishes them with so many rewards. Those admitted to the royal court don’t make a habit out of agitating against the King; quite the opposite: they become his most loyal and devoted subjects, the ones most eager to protect and defend the monarchy which guarantees them their wealth and status. That’s all the Bob Schieffers of the world are doing. Again, there’s nothing wrong with it per se, or at least not unusual. It’s just the very opposite of “objectivity.”

Watch out for that “liberal media.”

Link: Gruber on the Tablet "Market"→

2011-11-23 00:00:00 +0000

January to October tablet sales in the USA.

At least 10 million iPads sold.

1.2 million tablets sold from all PC manufacturers combined, the top seller having discontinued its tablet.

Doesn’t seem like much of a market.

Link: The Shameless Republican Race to Cut Rich People's Taxes→

2011-11-22 00:00:00 +0000

James Kwak from The Atlantic:

The Cain 9-9-9 plan is breathtaking. The poorest Americans would see their effective tax rate increase from about 5 percent to 18 percent. The typical household would pay $4,000 more than today. But the top 0.1 percent would get an average tax cut of $1.4 million and would pay an effective tax rate of 18 percent—lower than any other income group. That a plan so insane could be proposed by a leading presidential candidate just shows how crazy our political system has become.

It’s too bad there are no TV reporters in this country.

Link: Occupy Wall Street Animation→

2011-11-22 00:00:00 +0000

Beautiful. I especially love the sounds.

Link: Sarah Palin: How Congress Occupied Wall Street→

2011-11-21 00:00:00 +0000

Holy smokes! Sarah Palin wrote something smart!

This call for real reform must transcend political parties. The grass-roots movements of the right and the left should embrace this. The tea party’s mission has always been opposition to waste and crony capitalism, and the Occupy protesters must realize that Washington politicians have been “Occupying Wall Street” long before anyone pitched a tent in Zuccotti Park.

Either Sarah Palin really means this, or she’s the smartest politician in America today. Which I realize isn’t saying much, but it’s something.

(I know she didn’t really write it, but still.)

Link: Sour Candy Acidity Chart→

2011-11-18 00:00:00 +0000

I have to imagine Sour Patch Kids were left off this chart because the researchers love them as much as I do.

It’s too painful to see.

My enamel is pretty solid though, thank you very much!

Link: New Food Rules From Michael Pollan→

2011-11-18 00:00:00 +0000

Loved the first edition. Haven’t followed it very well. Looks like the second is full of awesome knowledge, ideas, and cultural history as well. Here’s a preview:

3. Order the Small:

Because in this era of supersized portions, small is the new large—and is plenty. According to Lisa Young, the author of The Portion Teller Plan, when McDonald’s first opened, the soda came in one size: seven ounces. now, a “small” soda is sixteen ounces, medium is twenty-one, and large is thirty-two—a full quart of soda. At Burger King, what was a large in 1965—sixteen ounces—is now a small. Restaurant portions of food have ballooned as well: consider ordering off the children’s menu or sharing an entrée.”

Tom Coburn - “$30 Billion In Millionaires Aid Is Sheer Washington Stupidity”

2011-11-17 00:00:00 +0000

Tom Coburn, the Republican Senator from Oklahoma:

“From tax write-offs for gambling losses, vacation homes, and luxury yachts to subsidies for their ranches and estates, the government is subsidizing the lifestyles of the rich and famous. Multimillionaires are even receiving government checks for not working. This welfare for the well-off — costing billions of dollars a year — is being paid for with the taxes of the less fortunate.”

Two possibilities:

Coburn is actually a principled conservative
He’s actually been reading the polls lately

Short Film Review - Martha Marcy May Marlene

2011-11-17 00:00:00 +0000

Elizabeth Olsen (the younger sister of the Olsen Twins) definitely deserves an Oscar nod for this role. She was Oscar-good. Completely blew me away. This is just the beginning for her.

This is one of the more powerful films that I’ve seen in a long time, with tension I’ve only seen matched by Lars von Trier.

The dialogue is incredibly true-to-life. Characters talk the way people really talk. The cinematography is so deliberate and masterful, leaving the viewer feeling trapped in the frame, and often agonizing over what might be just outside of it.

All praise aside, I never want to see this fucking movie again, and I’d also like for these disturbing thoughts to go away.

Trailers can ruin movies for me, so I tend to avoid them, but if you’re not like me, go ahead and check it out.

Incredible feature debut for Sean Durkin. I’m in awe.

Link: The World's Rudest Hand Gestures - The Atlantic→

2011-11-16 00:00:00 +0000

Depending on where you are, a thumbs up could just be a sign of approval. But in some countries, this refers to an action in the nether regions, and is meant as an offense. Visitors should note that to add insult to injury, the thumb can be jerked upwards.

I think I give the “thumbs up” unconsciously all the time.

Link: Congress Fights To Keep Pizza And Fries→

2011-11-16 00:00:00 +0000

I remember that when I was in high school and there were two choices of lines.

The lunch lines, which offered arguably balanced meals (plural)
The french fry line (singular)

The french fry line was always really long, and the lunch lines were generally empty, except on certain days. Lunch cost 65 cents, I believe, and the fries cost $1.25.

The vast majority of us ate french fries for lunch. They even put out hot sauce for us.

“This agreement ensures that nutrient-rich vegetables such as potatoes, corn and peas will remain part of a balanced, healthy diet in federally funded school meals and recognizes the significant amounts of potassium, fiber and vitamins A and C provided by tomato paste, ensuring that students may continue to enjoy healthy meals such as pizza and pasta,” said Kraig Naasz, president of the American Frozen Food Institute.

I wonder if guys like Kraig go home thinking about how much they are caricatures of themselves from Kafka and Orwell novels.

American Censorship Day November 16

2011-11-16 00:00:00 +0000

George Bernard Shaw:

“The first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.”

Link: Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales→

2011-11-15 00:00:00 +0000

Commerce is fine. Advertising is not evil. But it doesn’t belong here. Not in Wikipedia.

The #5 site on the net.

The dedication and the foresight of this guy are admirable, to say the least.

Link: Ghana: Not Just an Awesome Soccer Team→

2011-11-15 00:00:00 +0000

I love this. In so many ways.

Link: Cormac McCarthy on lines at the Apple Store→

2011-11-15 00:00:00 +0000

Wonderin if when Rome was fallin all the Romans was standin in line waitin to get that new chariot or the like. The barbarians at the gates and them just standin there waitin.

From his blog of Yelp reviews.

Link: Salon.com » America’s Meritocratic, Watchdog News Media→

2011-11-14 00:00:00 +0000

Even more encouragingly, we have a media that ensures that diverse views are heard; Chelsea Clinton previously worked at a $12 billion hedge fund and her former-Goldman-Sachs-banker husband earlier this year launched his own hedge fund with “two guys from Goldman,” so she brings a depth and diversity of perspetive that is sorely lacking in our news (true, CNN boldly features the former Goldman Sachs employee and current finacé of Citigroup executive, Erin Burnett, but nothing can compete with Chelsea Clinton’s rich, impressive journalism background).

Watchdogs!

Link: MG Seigler on Consumer Reports→

2011-11-14 00:00:00 +0000

The NPD Group just released their latest numbers. The number one selling smartphone last quarter was the iPhone 4. The over-a-year-old phone which Consumer Reports refused to endorse over a year ago, remember. Meanwhile, the number two phone for the quarter? The two-year-old iPhone 3GS. Does anyone really think that the LG Thrill is going to outsell the iPhone 4S this quarter? What about the Motorola Droid Bionic? Maybe the Samsung Galaxy S II?

Consumer Reports now matters just as much as specs do. Which is to say, not at all.

When you read Consumer Reports, you just get the sense that your aunts and uncles and grandparents work there. Which is nothing against aunts and uncles and grandparents, but they still can’t figure out how to hook up the cable box. I think it’s time the folks at Consumer Reports started collecting Social Security. Just kick back and widdle some.

Astute reporting from the only good person at god-awful TechCrunch.

Chrome HTTPS Issue

2011-11-14 00:00:00 +0000

Just because I lost like 30 minutes on this problem…

If you are trying to solve insecure content issues working in Chrome, and you seem to have secured all the calls within the page, and other browsers are saying it checks out, but Chrome is still showing you a red slash, so you try clearing your browser history and cache, and it still doesn’t work, so you download special web proxy software to try and get to the bottom of it, and that isn’t showing anything funny, so you begin digging your fingernails into your cheeks just so you can feel again—

Solution: Close the tab, and reopen a new tab

Apparently, Chrome caches https errors per tab. Which makes tons of sense.

And which is also great for troubleshooting.

Link: Pressured to Name Leader, Occupy Denver Elects Dog→

2011-11-11 00:00:00 +0000

Denver Mayor Michael Hancock insisted that his city’s occupation name a leader in order “to deal with City and State officials.” And he got his wish! Occupy Denver has elected Shelby, a border collie, as its leader. Long live Shelby!

Brilliant.

Link: Why the QR code is failing→

2011-11-10 00:00:00 +0000

The vast majority of those I scanned landed me on a webpage that was the same URL as in the ad itself. That is about as useful as telling someone your name while wearing a name tag.

The emperor is nekkid.

Major Flaw in iOS Keyboard "Shortcuts"

2011-11-10 00:00:00 +0000

Though it’s awesome that Apple has created the ability to enable some universal custom auto-completion in iOS, it’s implemented in a very poor and arbitrary way.

You have to tap a trailing space in order for iOS to spit out your snippet, and the trailing space is left there. You then either have to delete it or just leave it (as a regular computer user, “invisible” space characters are not invisible to me. I know what they can do and they make me very uneasy).

The sad part about this is that it shows a continued lack of trust in regular folks' ability to use software that is actually as efficient as possible.

TextExpander and every implementation of keyboard macros (ever) has gotten this function right, but Apple feels it has to leave a place for “Are you sure?” at the end, when any user who knows how to find the shortcuts in the settings should be given the benefit of the doubt that they’re probably smart enough to choose a trigger that wouldn’t be found anywhere in their usual typing.

And the worst part is when you answer “Are you sure?” with “Yes,” it still has to leave you with a useless empty little space.

Sometimes, trying to be user-friendly winds up being very unfriendly.

Link: Keystone XL Delayed, Feds To Explore New Routes→

2011-11-10 00:00:00 +0000

Or, more accurate headline:

Obama Punts On Keystone Pipeline Until Election Season Is Over, At Which Point He Will Definitely, DEFINITELY Be Laying That Pipe

Link: Adobe Communication - Matt Legend Gemmell→

2011-11-10 00:00:00 +0000

Don’t accept biz-speak as the right solution, regardless of how ubiquitous it is.

Will someone please tell everyone this?

What I Wrote During My Trial of OmmWriter Dana II

2011-10-24 00:00:00 +0000

Now this is a distraction free writing environment.

I like it because it makes me feel like I’m writing something deep and meaningful.

But I’m not. I’m just writing while pretty sounds play in my ears.

This is another sound. And this is another. And now this is another sound.

And this is a pretty cool sound that makes me feel like I’m in a robot film from the 80’s, namely “Short Circuit.”

This is actually pretty cool, this one.

This one is not as good.

Is that actually a little word counter down below? Seems distracting.

This is supposed to be a distraction free writing environment.

I’m distracted

No but actually I think it’s kind of nice. I just hate that I think it’s kind of nice. And I think the fact that I’m thinking about the fact that I think it’s kind of nice is what’s wrong with me. And what’s wrong with me is why I paid five dollars so I could try this app. I think I’ll go learn Rails now. That will help me build a CMS that I can put my writing inside. And the podcasts I will produce about my interests.

Truman Toland, 1922-2011

2011-10-13 00:00:00 +0000

My grandpa, Truman Toland, died yesterday, at the age of 89. Healthy and self-sufficient to (almost) the very end, he was a great artist and a great guy.

One of my earliest memories of him was from a family vacation in North Carolina. It was early in the morning and he had come across a tangle of black string that had washed up on the beach (if you’ve been to the Atlantic coast, you will recognize this piece of string). He decided that his project for the day would be to untangle it, and that’s what he did.

He was a Yale-educated classical painter who made his living advertising for Ballantyne in the 60s and 70s, or “slingin’ booze” as he would refer to it. He was as irreverent as a person could possibly be, with the lone exception of the great value he placed on personal responsibility.

In retirement, he was part of a successful urban tree-planting initiative, and would regularly volunteer at the Museum of Natural History & Science in Cincinnati, where one of the jobs he took on was manually (with a scalpel) creating the skin texture for the dinosaur exhibit.

When I recently visited him, one of the things that came up was his amazement at the technology we have today. He’d become old and tired and a bit of an Eyore, and he asked “Why’d I spend all those years learning how to paint photo-realistically? When now, anyone can just pull a cell phone out of his pocket and ‘click!'

“What was the point?”

The sun was going down on Topsail Island when Grandpa Truman, as I called him back then, successfully picked out the last knot and, taking a small stick in one hand, neatly wound the former tangle around the stick, creating a perfect little spool, which he set aside.

The feat was every bit as amazing as it was boring to a Nintendo kid like me. I wondered what on earth he planned to do with it now that he had finished.

“Go find me another one,” he said, and smiled.

We are all going to miss him a lot.

Take a look at his sketchbooks, and you’ll get a sense of the incredible patience and care with which he did things (not to mention skill). It seems that for a lot of my generation, myself included, this is gone.

Link: Steve Jobs Stanford Commencement Address→

2011-08-24 00:00:00 +0000

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. … Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”

Link: Wordpress Linked List Plug-in by YJ Soon→

2011-08-22 00:00:00 +0000

Update: I have since moved this site over to Jekyll and am no longer using this plugin. If you are using Wordpress, my feelings here still apply. I need to post soon about how I’ve gotten this behavior working in Jekyll. Oh, and @yjsoon is still a man among boys.

I wanted my (dusty, decaying) blog to behave more like John Gruber’s, where I could link to things and comment on them easily. Until now, I’ve just been using facebook for this. My loathing for facebook and the desire to have a place of my own led to me finally getting around to making the zach.be blog functional.

I ended up finding this (awesome) guy named yjsoon (who lives in Singapore and is apparently good at everything) who made a Wordpress plug-in that causes your RSS for linked-list posts to work correctly.

I did find out, though, that the theme I installed so long ago, which seemed like a good idea at the time, is actually pretty lame, and created by a bit of a, how do you say, jack-ass? (Example: He thinks America’s criminal justice system is too soft. With the highest rate of incarceration in the world, etc., etc..)

And he’s an all-around tool which comes across in his Twitter handle.

I’m just mad he has my money.

Anyway, I didn’t want to go through and re-implement everything in a new theme or new CMS, but for the life of me, I could not get the headlines to link correctly, though the RSS worked perfectly just as advertised on yjsoon’s site. So I sent yjsoon an email and asked what I should do.

“Hey buddy, you don’t know me, but you made me a free thing and now I am asking you to help me fix the free thing you made for me because it doesn’t work because I did something stupid four years ago when I started this blog I haven’t posted on.”

Long story medium-length: He fixed Thesis for me, made it work for a linked-list, and I love the internet because of people like yjsoon. So… If you need to fix Thesis to work like a linked list, just send me an email and I will help you make that a reality.

Unwritten rule of Internet kindness: Pay it forward.

Link: Ernie Kovacs - 1812 Overture→

2011-07-02 00:00:00 +0000

I was eating eggs with my girlfriend and listening to NPR this morning and there was a feature story on Ernie Kovacs and how much he influenced the David Lettermans and (especially) Conan O'Briens of today.

I grew up watching an Ernie Kovacs VHS boxed set with both of my grandfathers. Like a lot of comedy that is from another temporal or cultural context, it can take some effort to open your mind to a different kind of humor than you are used to. The most certain way to get a joke is to experience it with someone who is (literally) slapping their knee. I was very lucky to have my grandfathers for that.

It’s interesting how much of Conan’s work was clearly influenced by Kovacs. I never made that connection, being a longtime fan of both of them.

If you don’t think the timpani monkeys are the funniest thing you’ve seen all day, go watch it with my grandfather. It’s hilarious. I promise.

Link: Le Quattro Volte→

2011-06-13 00:00:00 +0000

Best trailer of all time?

The Friendly Mailman or How Turning Off Email Notifications has Changed My Life

2010-11-24 00:00:00 +0000

Note: I am writing this post in a WiFi enabled airplane, and hopefully finishing in time to post it. UPDATE: Just as I was about to post, a voice came over the intercom to tell me to arbitrarily return my tray-table to the upright position and put away my toys and crayons and sit up straight and stop talking to my neighbor… Oh well. Next time.

Turn off your email notifications.

Believe me, it’s the last thing I ever thought I would (or could) do.

But I did it. And it has been a mini-revolution in my life. I have a newfound sense of freedom I didn’t know I was missing. Let me explain.

Email is supposed to be just that, electronic mail. Over the last ten years or so, it has morphed into something very different.

Imagine: You are sitting at your desk, Working on something Important (you do Work on Important Things, right?), and the doorbell rings.

“My, who could that be?” you think to yourself. You get up from your desk and walk through the living room to the front hallway, kicking your kid’s pile of shoes out of the way, and you open the door.

It’s the mailman. “Hello, Ma'am, I have a letter for you. It’s such a nice day out and my load is so light, I thought I’d hand-deliver it right to you.”

“Oh, isn’t that nice of you! Thanks so much!”

“Well, you have yourself a good one, ma'am,” and he walks away.

“Thanks again!” You close the door and open the letter. It’s from your cousin Terry, who you like, and he has written about a number of things he’s planning on doing for the holidays. At the end of the letter, he writes a troubling and time-sensitive line:

Can’t wait for our annual New Years poker game!

But you’ll be in Florida for New Years. You need to tell Terry as soon as possible. Arriving back at your desk, you have a seat, and the doorbell rings again.

“My my, a busy day,” you think as you get up to go answer the door again.

You open the door, and it’s the friendly mailman again. “Howdy there again, ma'am, I have another letter for you. Must have missed it on my way by. It’s a good thing I have such a light load today.”

“Oh, why thank you.” You glance at the letter, and notice it is from your credit card company, and this upsets you because you were out of debt with them, about to cut the card, and then you foolishly bought your ticket to Boca Raton with it, because you could get “double miles.” Of course, you didn’t pay it back. Something came up.

“Say, ma'am?” The mailman is still standing in the doorway. “You don’t have any letters you need to send, do you? On account of how nice it is, I don’t mind waiting if you need to get anything together that you want me to take with me on my way back to the post office.”

“Ummm.”

“Really, it ain’t no trouble. I’m just enjoying the outdoors.”

Terry. “Okay, hold on.” You scrawl out a note, and you feel obligated to tell Terry about what your kid’s been doing because he always sends you all of his kids' stuff and they’re always doing all these amazing things and what if Terry thinks your kid is kind of a loser and maybe if you were as involved as Terry in your kid’s life but no that’s smothering—

You rewrite the note a couple of times, check it for spelling errors, and then stuff it in an envelope and hand it to the mailman, who seems to be semi-audibly humming Zip-a-dee-doo-da.

“Well, you have just a wonderful day ma'am. Great day to be alive.” He walks away, whistling.

“Thanks, you’ve been so sweet,” you call after him.

Okay, back to work. You toss the credit card statement in The Basket and walk back to your desk. But maybe you want another Diet Coke. Yes, you do. You go get a Diet Coke and then finally make it back to your Important Work. After forty-five or forty-eight seconds and a nice yawn, your fingers start moving over the keys again, and you’re back to work.

Ring-a-ding-a-ding-dong!

It’s the mailman.

Would you put up with this?

Hell no you wouldn’t.

So turn off your email notifications.

And goddamnit, turn off Call Waiting! (Super-Advanced, I know. More on that later…)

iPod to the Face!

2010-11-20 00:00:00 +0000

We shot a short film in Central Park this summer (working title: Benny’s Blues), and in the first hour of shooting we had a significant problem to solve.

The inciting incident of the film required a jogger to accidentally catch her hand in her iPod headphones, flinging her monstrous 2nd generation iPod through the air, whereupon this iPod would need to hit a street performer in the face.

Seems like there should be a simple solution to this, but it actually presents a lot of problems:

We can’t actually hit the actor in the face with an iPod, as that would hurt just as much as it’s depicted to hurt.
Creating a foam iPod is a pain in the ass and won’t necessarily have a natural feel when it clatters to the ground.
Doing the old “basketball trick” with cinematography (throw the iPod in shot A, accurately hit the actor in the face in shot B) has the potential to be really cheesy, and won’t achieve the spontaneity or believability we want.
Even if we wanted to shoot a “forreal” version of this, the chances of the actor accurately hitting her co-star in the face 1 out of 100 times, is, well, not good. And we need several successful takes to choose from.

So someone had the simple, ingenious idea to just pantomime the action and shoot the iPod later. I was so busy trying to come up with a fancy way to achieve this that I forgot about a simple green-screen composite (or chroma key), which is something I’ve done a hundred times before.

However, as simple as the concept of chroma-keying is, I find when I told people I would just shoot the iPod later and then put it in this shot, I was met with blank stares and “Whatever you say"s and "I don’t know how you are going to do that, but okay"s.

So I thought I may as well put up a quick screencast to describe how this is done:

This is not a tutorial. If you want to learn how to do a simple chroma key composite, there are a million resources out there for you. This video is intended only to help people understand what this is, and how simple it can be when you have the right tools.

Click here to watch this on YouTube if for some reason you hate Vimeo (I don’t know how you could).

Freedom from iPhone Interruptions

2010-11-18 00:00:00 +0000

Do you ever want to put your iPhone in airplane mode to block everyone out? But you can’t, because your husband or your grandmother might need to get through? If you just want to skip over my ramblings and get to the solution, feel free.

Sometimes, the simplest things elude us.

I was listening to the Mac Power Users podcast on Workflows with Merlin Mann and just when the part of me that likes to overthink things like task management and productivity was about to climax, it got a swift kick to the groin.

Merlin mentioned that he doesn’t check email but a couple times a day, and the rest of the time, it’s off.

Being someone who established a crazy, hacked workaround to use MobileMe mail to push my Google apps mail and regular Gmail accounts to my iPhone, so that if you send me an email, I will get it that second, this made me upset (figuring out that workaround took me a while!). After thinking about it for 8 or 11 seconds, though, I had to admit he was right.

If I’m available to respond to email at any time of the day, then am I really a writer, a web developer, or a filmmaker? No. I’m first and foremost someone who checks email, and responds to email.

Being the Inbox Zero extraordinaire that I am, never comfortable unless all my emails have been replied to and my inbox is mindlikewater empty, my case, I had to concede, was even more pathetic than most.

I was an email monkey (not to be confused with a MailChimp) and I had been for some time.

So, naturally, I dismantled my-email-gets-to-me-way-faster-than-yours-does, turned off all notifications, switched back to the Gmail web interface (which I have always loved), banished Mail.app to the murky depths next to Acrobat, and hid iPhone Mail in a generic folder on page 3.

But what about phone calls? People can still call at any time of the day, and take my attention away from whatever I might be looking at.

“Turn off your phone,” you might say. But there is a problem with this: I have a girlfriend (and some family, coworkers, but mostly a girlfriend), and she needs me sometimes, and I want to be available to her.

So how do you let certain contacts get through and send others to voicemail without having to pick up the phone, acknowledge someone is calling, and ignore them (This really seems to be almost as much of an interuption as actually answering)?

Seems like there should be a simple solution to this, but surprisingly, there isn’t. There is no native way to group and filter contacts, and when you set the phone to silent, it’s silent for everyone.

With Google Voice (assuming you switched to using only your Google Voice number), you could do it easily, but that comes with a lot of other weird janky issues and most people still want to use their native SIM telephone number. I certainly do.

If you have a second line, you could set your iPhone to forward calls to your Google Voice number, and then set your settings to allow your inner circle contacts to ring that second line (You can’t have it re-ring your iPhone, because that just sets up an infinity loop of forwarding).

But I don’t have a second phone.

You could have those special people contact you through Skype or Gchat, but that just opens up a whole other can of worms, and if my girlfriend wants to call me, she might not have access to one of those services.

If you can’t tell, I gave this some thought.

After retiring to bed, frustrated and feeling that I’d wasted a lot of time, it came to me: Simplest. Solution. Ever.

Here it is. A ringtone. A silent ringtone.

Set it to your default ringtone and remember to turn off vibrate when in ringing mode. You can leave your silent setting vibrating or however you wish.

Now, only people you have set custom ringtones for will ring, and you can work in peace, and check your voicemails later, when you are on a break (I recommend Google Voice for your voicemail, now that the native app is ready.

So just download the ringtone I’ve made for you, double-click it, sync your iPhone, and don’t let ‘em interupt your important work!

Visual Thesaurus and ScreenFlow

2010-02-14 00:00:00 +0000

I am not a guy who uses a thesaurus much. I don’t have a very large vocabulary, but I try to make use of the words that I do know.

This might all change. The Visual Thesaurus is likely the coolest thesaurus ever. I used it last night when trying to come up with a clever name for something. I think it’s an interesting tool for brainstorming. It is basically a word-association engine, but the design is so nifty, you have to play with it…

I created the little screencast of it above using ScreenFlow, a great screencapture suite from Telestream. The amount of features in ScreenFlow make it so simple to do elegant screencasts, that even an anal-retentive video editor like myself didn’t have to take it outside ScreenFlow into Final Cut or After Effects.

Of all the screencasting software I’ve used, ScreenFlow is definitely the simplest, most robust, and well-designed.

The Creativityist

2010-02-13 00:00:00 +0000

I am what you might refer to as a software addict. I love finding new and useful applications to help me with all areas of my life and workflow. I take this obsession to the extreme, as is my tendency, and I often spend hours and days and weeks trialing different software and finding ways to get it into my workflow. Ironically, I am usually doing this at the expense of progress on any of my actual work.

I thought for certain that there could be no one as ridiculous as I was about this stuff, until I found the Creativityist. Behind this exceptional blog is a designer/pastor from Austin, Texas named John Chandler.

The focus of the blog is on cultivating and realizing the artist within yourself, through any number of spiritual, technological, or softwarical means.

Whenever I have a question about workflow, the Creativityist is where I find my answer. Probably half of the applications on my dock were suggested by John (not to mention the framework for zach.be!).

If you are interested in improving your relationship to your Mac, and in finding software solutions to make your creative life simpler and more engaging, whether you’re a designer, writer, filmmaker, web developer, or just need some inspiration for practicing creativity, the Creativityist has already done most of the work for you.

If my scribblings could ever be half as useful to someone else as John’s have been to me, I will consider zach.be a wild success.

Exposure of a Terrible NCAA Basketball Rule

2010-02-10 00:00:00 +0000

Tonight, the Syracuse Orangemen beat the Connecticut Huskies in a game that came down to the wire, and was ultimately tainted.

I am a die-hard Orangemen fan, and am always glad to come out with a victory, but I also have to keep it real about this game. I think it was Voltaire who was quoted as saying “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” This very important quote to me has a very weak stretch of a connection to what happened tonight, but basically: “I disapprove of UConn beating Syracuse, but I will defend to the death their right to win.”

Totally weak, but I’m tired, so forgive me. Here’s the truth:

UConn was robbed on an egregious abuse of a terrible NCAA rule.

Syracuse had the ball with the game tied and 40 seconds left. Andy Rautins rushed and badly missed a three, presumably in order to ensure that Syracuse would have the ball for the last shot. Luckily, Syracuse got the rebound, and could now hold for the final shot. Suddenly, on a nucklehead play, Scoop Jardine decided to rush down the lane and force a bad circus layup. This was a terrible error in judgment, and there is no excuse for it. He missed the layup, and UConn corralled the rebound and would now have a chance for the final shot to win.

Oops, pumpfake! Actually, Syracuse gets the ball back and another try. Mulligan! Silly Scoop Jardine! We’ll give you another crack at it!

What could possibly justify this?

Well, a few years ago, the NCAA willfully and thoughtlessly decided to institute a new rule that coaches are allowed to request time-outs. This is complete bullshit on every possible level, and clearly just the Coaches' Lobby getting their way.

Jim Boeheim called a time-out, literally while Scoop was in the air taking a shot. He tapped on the official’s shoulder. “Gee, Russell, that boy’s outta control over there! Better call a time-out before he lets go of the ball…”

Coaches are not playing the game. They should not be allowed to have any effect on the actual gameplay. They are there to coach. This was a glaring exposure of an unconscionably stupid rule instituted by the pathetically incompetent people who run the National Collegiate Athletics Association.

They should be ashamed of themselves.

Syracuse very well may have won this game either way, but we’ll never know now, will we? I love a victory, but a tainted one leaves a bad taste in everyone’s mouth.

For any of you who think “It’s just a game. Calm down, psycho…”: A post for you will be forthcoming.

Rolling Your R's

2010-02-09 00:00:00 +0000

Here at zach.be, it isn’t all fun and games; We also aspire to help people achieve their goals and dreams. Sometimes in life, you run into roadblocks that seem impossible to get around. This can be very disheartening. At zach.be, we’re here to remind you that there is always a solution.

I am going to describe one such obstacle that almost took me down for the count when I was thirteen years old. Lucky enough for me, the solution came just when I needed it: Right before I began my first Spanish class, in seventh grade. And it came from a very unexpected place.

My whole childhood, I wanted to be able to roll my R’s, and I couldn’t. I wanted to because everyone else could. I wanted to because I had a passing interest in speaking other languages. I wanted to mostly because other guys could make cooler machine-gun noises than I could (this was probably my greatest motivation).

I asked for advice from everyone I could find. I tried and tried to understand this concept, change the position of my tongue, this way, that way, for years. It was all in vain.

Weary and bedraggled, I had almost given up all hope. I would be that lame guy who can’t roll his R’s, for the rest of my life. What kind of life would that be?

Then suddenly, one day, just like that, the solution presented itself.

I was randomly watching bloopers of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and there was a scene in which Carlton could not get a certain line out without making an R-rolling sound and then laughing hysterically. This line would change my life. It is the key to the broken tongue that can’t roll:

“But it’ll cut into my treat-or-treating time.”

Looks innocuous at first, but this statement has great power to change your life. If you want to learn to roll your R’s, here is the step-by-step solution (which I have already used to fix myself and at least ten other people):

When alone, driving, or otherwise away from the judgments of others, repeat the line “But it’ll cut into my trick-or-treating time.”
Say it louder and faster. Louder and faster. Do this for many minutes at a time. Sometimes, the remarkable moment comes almost at once. Sometimes it takes a while.
Once you feel the magic of your tongue rolling, even just a little, you can begin to shorten the phrase, eventually down to just “But it'll—”
You are now rolling your R’s! Don’t be concerned if it seems that you can only roll the R when immediately preceded by a consonant B. This is normal.
Keep playing with the new sound, and over time, your tongue will relax more and more, and you will be able to drop the B, and add any sound you want, or none at all.
You are now a pro. Go forth and learn Spanish, Italian, Russian, or all three!

And that’s it. It sounds silly, but it works. Please pass this along to anyone you feel is in need. Take it from someone who couldn’t roll his R’s: Life is much better with the rolling R than without.

Here is the video that changed my life. The first few seconds are all that matters:

Link: Scrabble and an Internet Idol→

2010-02-07 00:00:00 +0000

Ze Frank was the first web show I ever watched, and in my view, it still sets the standard for what an internet show should be. When I originally planned to start my own blog, years ago, the idea was to try and do something like Ze did.

Unfortunately, I did nothing for several years, and then all that happened was this blog.

I am not from a Scrabble family, nor have I played much Scrabble in my life (until recently), but this episode of Ze’s show I always found particularly funny.

So I started playing Scrabble (in the form of Words With Friends for iPhone) with my friend Mike and in short order I had a game going with everyone I know with an iPhone. It is a remarkably addictive game to play, but much more interestingly, it has become a great way of keeping in touch.

You can chat within the app, but even if you aren’t much of a chatter, nothing says “I acknowledge and assert our friendship” like a 91-point zinger.

Benefactor Meditation

2010-02-07 00:00:00 +0000

I was applying some hydrocortisone to a rash today (I don’t often get rashes, don’t worry), and I thought I should post something about spirituality, and specifically a certain meditation practice that I learned from a Tibetan Buddhist teacher named Joel Baehr.

Obviously, there were a number of consecutive thoughts that led me to this conclusion:

This hydrocortisone stuff works really great.
I got this particular tube of extra-strength hydrocortisone when I was in Havana, Cuba with my buddy Olivia. (It was hot there—lots of walking—hence, the need)
I also had a wheezing allergy attack in the middle of the night while I was there, and Magnolia (the woman whose bedroom we were sleeping in) fixed me up completely with vapo-rub and tea, and nasal spray, so that I could survive the night.
I was so impressed by Magnolia’s compassion and service, that when Joel Baehr instructed our meditation group on what he may or may not have called a Benefactor Meditation (or Compassion Meditation?), my first thought was of the Magnolia experience.

So that’s how we get from rashes to spiritual practices.

This meditation practice, and I will likely do it very little justice, is for anyone who wishes to cultivate love and compassion, and I’m sure we can all use a little more of that.

Here are some instructions, at a very simple, rudimentary, second-hand level:

Begin by sitting quietly, taking refuge in the practice of meditation. You can close your eyes, or not. It doesn’t matter. Whatever is most comfortable for you. Just sit, and acknowledge what you are doing. Sitting, breathing, fidgeting, whatever…
Visualize the Benefactor. The Benefactor is some person, or even animal, preferably not too close to you. This is someone who wishes the wish of love for you: “May you be deeply well and happy.” This might be someone as inconsequential as a person letting you come into a lane on the highway, or the receptionist at a hair salon, but it should be someone who you can feel and acknowledge the wish of love from them. They want nothing from you, they don’t expect to see you again even, but in their heart, they wish that you be deeply well and happy.
Now, continue to visualize that person, and feel the love that flows from them. You can see it as light that comes from them and shines through you. You can see it as water or goldfish or anything you want, really. Just feel the wish of love, as it comes from them. Don’t try to give anything in return. Remember, nothing is expected of you. They only wish that you be deeply well and happy. Your only job is to sit and accept the wish of love from them. Accept it. No thank-yous. No obligations. Just be loved.
Now, visualize that the Benefactor is standing behind you, and the wish of love is still flowing freely from them into you. Feel the power of it: “May you be deeply well and happy.”
In front of you now is someone who you love very much. Perhaps a family member, a friend, a child, a pet. Let the wish of love pass through you and on to your loved-one. Give them the wish of love: “May you be deeply well and happy.” There is no effort in this. It happens by itself. It is at the core of who you really are. Sit in this. There is no hurry.
Then there is a stranger before you. Maybe just someone crossing the street, passing you in the aisles of a grocery store, a person in a faraway country you’ve never been to. Send the wish of love also to them: “May you be deeply well and happy.”
Finally, and only if you feel ready, visualize someone you perceive as your enemy. Someone who has hurt you even, or who has hurt others. Someone you don’t like, perhaps who you have a resentment towards; even hate. Maybe it is a group of people, a political party, an ethnicity, or the leaders of an institution. Now, with your Benefactor standing behind you, supporting you, sending the wish of love through you… send also to your “enemy” the wish of love: “May you be deeply well and happy.” Do not force it. There is no force necessary. There is no effort. The wish of love is there, and you know it and feel it. Send that healing wish: “May you be deeply well and happy.”
When you have finished, dedicate your practice to the benefit of all beings.

I know I talked about cultivating compassion, but the most clear and jarring effect of this practice is how much it can serve to expel anger and resentment from your psyche. People who you normally are angry with (or even just frustrated or annoyed with) almost immediately are viewed in an entirely new light.

For more information about this type of practice visit the Foundation for Active Compassion. It was started by Joel Baehr’s teacher, the Lama John Makransky.

Magnolia seemed to be an obvious Benefactor for me. Who is yours?

Simple and Fantastic Commercial Concept

2010-02-06 00:00:00 +0000

This was created for the Doritos Crash the Superbowl contest. If it doesn’t win, everyone loses.

Concepts like these make me jealous. Simplest goddamned thing in the world. Why, when I sit down to come up with simple concepts, do I never come up with anything this brilliant?

Remember Greenland?

2010-02-05 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been alive now for more than twenty-seven years, and other than one accusatory line from Wallace Shawn in The Princess Bride and a few brief mentions when trying to label everything on a North American map as a third-grader (I was a smart-ass), I have not heard the Nation of Greenland mentioned once. They are the world’s largest island (true fact), our North American neighbors—and I think they might be hiding from us.

I’ve never met anyone from Greenland, or anyone who has been to Greenland.

I would venture to say that I’ve never met anyone who has ever met anyone who has possibly ever met anyone who is from Greenland, or has been to Greenland. I have never heard of anyone who has heard of anyone else ever hearing something about Greenland.

I used to believe in the Six Degrees of Separation theory, but I’m beginning to think that Greenland might be the exception to the rule.

Think about any other sovereign nation in the world, and I challenge you to find one you’ve heard less about. Malta is Malta. Grenada is Grenada. We all know about Luxembourg, and Swaziland is cool as that little weird country in the middle of South Africa. They pop up in the news every once in a while. You don’t hear much from Laos, but there is a Laotian restaurant in Syracuse, New York, for God’s sake.

What the hell is going on in Greenland?

Well, apparently, there are a lot of Inuit people living along fjords there. They speak Greenlandic (no joke), and they catch a good amount of shrimp. There are no roads because of all the fjords, and people use planes to fly around. They still respect the Danish crown, though they are independent of Denmark.

And it’s super-beautiful.

Greenland, what are you hiding? I’ve got my eye on you…

Abstinence-Only (Breakthrough!) Study is Self-Gratifying

2010-02-03 00:00:00 +0000

I was surprised when perusing the Huffington Post today to discover an article lauding abstinence-only education, claiming that there was a totally new and totally awesome scientific study which claimed that abstinence-only education irrefutably worked!

How odd, I thought, because a) the Huffington Post usually does not publish articles that run counter to certain agendas (the comprehensive-sex-ed agenda being one such untouchable darling), and b) it simply isn’t true, and has never been true. So I thought I’d better look at the article to find out just what in hell they take me for…

I was then disappointed to discover that many other semi-trusted news sources had also picked up the story, including NPR. I was further disappointed when none of them did their jobs as journalists, to point out the obvious spin being thrown in the very premise of this study:

Rob Stein, The Washington Post:

Sex education classes that focus on encouraging children to remain abstinent can persuade a significant proportion to delay sexual activity, researchers reported Monday in a landmark study that could have major implications for U.S. efforts to protect young people against unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases.

Only about a third of sixth- and seventh-graders who completed an abstinence-focused program started having sex within the next two years, researchers found. Nearly half of the students who attended other classes, including ones that combined information about abstinence and contraception, became sexually active.

The findings are the first clear evidence that an abstinence program could work.

Okay, so I’m going to step right over all of the initial shadiness about the study (why 12 and 13-year-olds?, what does abstinence-focused mean?, apparently this was a totally new technique with new role-playing games?, condoms weren’t disparaged?, why was this study on black children only?) and I’ll just hand them totally reasonable, scientific, slam-dunk answers to all these questions. Still, we’re left with one glaring flaw: What is the point of sex-education?

Is it to “delay” kids from having sex by up to two years? Is it to “delay” them having sex at all? Well, the abstinence-only people sure think so, and when you frame your articles this way, WashingtonHuffingtonABCNPR, you play right into their talking points! How convenient! What headlines!

My understanding is that the purpose of sex education is not to control and suppress sex expression, as it was in the past, but to offer information on the risks associated with sex, and safety measures that should be taken when having sex, and in a more perfect world, to indicate the possibilities for experience and fulfillment that sexuality offers if one approaches it in an honest, mature, and thoughtful manner.

So why is sex a public health problem, and why do our kids need to have sex education? Is it because people are starting when they’re twelve instead of fourteen? Or could it be because people are getting pregnant and contracting sexual-transmitted diseases…?

What the hell does this study say about unwanted pregnancy and disease? Nothing.

Studies have shown over and over again that abstinence-only education has a devastating effect on teen pregnancy and STDs when compared with comprehensive sex education. This is why all funding for abstinence-only education programs has finally been righteously cut.

Now, the moralizing Bible-interpreters that have been trying to commandeer our educational system to spread the reinterpreted, rerevealed word of their skygod have been emboldened, and will likely once again creep into our health classes and tell our children not to have sex because it’s evil and wrong, and much pregnancy and rampant disease will ensue. Thanks.

Do your job at least once in a while, would you?

Ruminations on My Long and Sordid Marriage to Diet Coke

2010-02-03 00:00:00 +0000

When I was a small child, I loved Minute-Maid Orange Soda.

Remember that stuff? When it was in the black can with the oranges on it? That was the stuff. As I have a tendency to overdo everything, I got to a place where I was drinking three or four of them a day, and I decided about the time I graduated from middle school that this just would not do.

I hated hated hated diet soda of any kind, especially Diet Coke, but I knew that in order to drink soda the way I wanted to, I would have to make the painful switch if I didn’t want to catch diabetes and weigh four hundred pounds.

So I did what any reasonable young man trying to develop a taste for aspartame would do. I forced myself, over the course of a week, to drink warm Diet Coke from a two-liter bottle, until that Sweet™ became my tongue’s interpretation of “Sweet.”

I was headed in the wrong direction, and had to cut myself off, and find a new lover, and I did.

Over the course of the many years that followed, I forgot all about what was so good about corn syrup water in the first place. I couldn’t even swallow down more than a sip without feeling full. Diet cola became the elixir of the gods, the most delicious and refreshing thing I could ever imagine. And Diet Pepsi took center stage.

The reason for the Diet Pepsi was mostly because my parents stocked the refrigerator with it, being Pepsi-cola drinkers themselves.

Over the course of a few years, I found myself becoming a very discerning Diet Pepsi drinker. “Light, Crisp, and Refreshing” was my mantra. I chose Diet Pepsi over Diet Coke whenever prompted.

Then, one day, something very odd happened. I discovered that over the previous six months, whenever I had been faced with “the decision” at the convenience store cooler, I had chosen Diet Coke… To this day, I still can’t quite tell you how it happened, but it was as if literally one night I went to sleep a Diet Pepsi man, and woke up a Diet Coke man. Perhaps it was the sleek rendering of the female body they use for a bottle, or perhaps they were still putting cocaine in their product.

As the years wore on, my consumption of this non-calorie beverage reached dangerous proportions, and I had become so violently addicted to it, that any other beverage, including water (which I need to live), became just a waiting-room holdover, as I anticipated my appointment with Dr. Diet Coke.

This had to stop, and I’d become aware of some discouraging studies about aspartame, and I wanted to do something about the various chemicals I was putting in my body through American industrial agriculture. I could no longer eat the organic, local, farm-raised meal and wash it down with a canister of chemical sludge.

I needed a strategy, so I thought I’d go right back to the beginning…

I moseyed on over to Publix, and walked straight to the Coke aisle. I proceeded to purchase every size and shape container of Diet Coke in the store, including several twelve-packs of cans, and the oh-so-wonderful glass bottles.

For the following week, I did a few things, but mostly I just continuously drank Diet Coke. By the end of the week, I could really taste it for the toxic waste that it was. As I poured the remaining gulps of cold, crisp, taste-bud melting science experiment down my gullet, I said goodnight to my old friend, and I took him for that last long walk into the woods.

Since I’ve given up Diet Coke, I have to say, I feel better, physically and psychologically. I also have found a suitable replacement in raspberry and/or lemon-lime and/or cranberry seltzer water.

A Review of Michelangelo's Pietá

2010-02-02 00:00:00 +0000

This is an excerpt from a post I wrote four years ago when I was studying abroad in Italy.

In a corner of St. Peter’s is a statue behind bullet-proof glass and a little set back. There aren’t too many people crowded around it, either. At least there weren’t the day I was there. The statue is by Michelangelo, and it’s called “The Rome Pietá.” The fact that the word “Rome” has to be thrown in there is nonsense, because I just don’t think anyone should care about any other Pietá after this one, especially not any of Michelangelo’s other Pietás.

This statue is… And you can look at pictures of it, which I don’t think even give a smidgeon of an idea… it is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. I don’t know why! I don’t know what that means! “The most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen…” Yuck! What the hell does that mean? I don’t even like the sound of that, yet I’m compelled to say it. I can’t help it. This was all I could think as I stood there staring at it for two hours, tempted (and able, if I so pleased) to cry. To actually cry! What in hell is wrong with me?! It’s a piece of stone, for Christ’s sake… It made me feel embarrassed and vulnerable about the feelings I was having for it. When a friend tried to talk to me while I was looking at it, I didn’t know what to say. I was at a loss for words. I wanted to be cool, I wanted to maintain the status quo, but the emotions were so great that the whole situation was made awkward.

When I finally left, I walked by a girl in my class, who was with her mother (her parents had come to visit her in Rome). She asked “So what do you think?” This is what I said, and I don’t embellish. “I think it dwarfs this whole building…” and then I added, or I should say, the words came out of my mouth “…and maybe this whole town,” and tears started to form in my eyes as I quickly walked away.

What a cheeseball!!! Who says something like that and walks off weeping?! I’m trying to protect my manhood here, but in all honesty, this thing that Michelangelo carved when he was twenty-three years old moved me, touched me, shook me, jarred me so deeply that I really lost control of myself, and I mean that. I felt so disoriented by it that simple tasks like walking became clumsy and surreal. Now I know what all the hype is about.

If you go to Rome, do not miss it.

Why the iPad Matters

2010-02-01 00:00:00 +0000

Okay, so there have been quite a few articles and premature reviews on the iPad, and (though I have not done a formal count) it appears that most of them are claiming that somehow this is a big letdown: “It’s just a big iPod Touch…”

What these commenters are failing to understand (and all that really matters about this device) is that: “Holy &@%#, it’s a big iPod Touch!”

The world has never seen a ten-inch multi-touch surface.

The iPhone was absolutely revolutionary, as everyone knows, but it really only gave us a little tease, a preview of how we would be interacting with our technology in the near future. The iPad will be the first time we really get to see multi-touch in action. And there is no way to overhype that.

The failure of all the haters is that they have not used their imaginations to discover what could be implied by a surface on which one can use all of her fingers simultaneously, and what that might do for the human—technology relationship.

I’m sure there were those who said they overhyped the wheel. “Bah! Wheels! Who needs that…”