tofias dot net
log | a bucket full of thoughts
Setting Up Mac OS X
It was time for a periodic update to my setting up a Mac post.
“ There are only two ways to write AppleScript code: 1. Copy someone else’s and adapt it. 2. Keep trying different syntax until something works.”
— Dr. Drang
“ Text is an amazingly versatile medium. Relative to other media, text has very low production costs, both in authorship and distribution. One person can produce a great essay or even a complete book. It’s much harder to be a one-person filmmaker. And since text as a medium does not have a fixed timescale like audio and video, it can be easily skimmed or read at any desired speed. In the digital world, text becomes even more useful. It takes up almost no space by today’s standards, it can be easily indexed and analyzed, and tools like mine can edit, restructure, and reflow it to do all sorts of different things. The ease of producing, distributing, and messing around with text has resulted in an effectively infinite supply of great expression, information, and entertainment being written and read in this wonderful medium. Whatever you want to read, there’s already more of it than you could read in a lifetime, and there’s probably more being produced right now.”
— Marco Arment in an interview at 512 Pixels
It Gets Better, Corporate Edition
Frank Bruni on corporate America’s sensitivity to public opinion on gay rights:
In addition to Starbucks, Microsoft and Amazon spoke up for same-sex marriage. All have surely taken note of several polls over the last year suggesting - for the first time - that a slight majority of Americans supports it. All have no doubt taken even greater note of a generational divide. In a Gallup poll, 70 percent of people in the 18-to-34 age range favored same-sex marriage, while only 39 percent of people 55 and older did.
More so than politicians, corporations play the long game, trying to engender loyalty for decades to come, and they’re famously fixated on consumers in their 20s and 30s.
“ I would not look to the United States Constitution if I were drafting a constitution in the year 2012.”
— Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Pop and Circumstance
James C. Mckinley Jr., for the New York Times:
Let’s say you’re a Republican running for president.
You’re looking for a rousing pop anthem to pump up your troops and underscore your message. There’s plenty of music out there, but you have a problem: most of the pop stars, it seems, prefer Democrats.
Perhaps a market failure?
Paying Customers
Marco Arment (developer of the much beloved iOS app Instapaper and co-host of the 5by5 podcast Build and Analyze) discussed his business model on NPR’s Planet Money:
Apple already had everyone’s billing information from iTunes … you could buy things just by typing in your password … That, for the first time, brought very, very easy payment to the modern software world. That, more than anything, is why there is a business for paid apps… you charge a small amount of money … and that’s it, you’re done. You don’t need to go seek venture capital money, you don’t need to sell out your users’ privacy. They’re not even your users, they’re your customers — for the first time in a decade. It’s great.
Good interview, but it would have been nice if the Planet Money guys had thrown Marco a bone and used Phish covering Funky Bitch as the intro/outro music.
Vacations, Morons, and Encased Meats
On the Hot Doug’s website (at least on 2012-02-01):
William Robertson Davies, one of Canada’s best-known and most popular authors, wrote, “I do not really like vacations. I much prefer an occasional day off when I do not feel like working. When I am confronted with a whole week in which I have nothing to do but enjoy myself I do not know where to begin. To me, enjoyment comes fleetingly and unheralded; I cannot determinedly enjoy myself for a whole week at a time.”
William Robertson Davies was a moron.
THEREFORE …
HOT DOUG’S WILL BE CLOSED FOR VACATION
I love me some Hot Doug’s.
“ The thing is, after college I moved to New York City and became a writer and met some people who shared my obsessions, and I ditched the Forsterian narrator thing, and then I wasn’t that awkward or isolated anymore. According to the diagnostic manual, Asperger syndrome is ‘a continuous and lifelong disorder,’ but my symptoms had vanished.”
— Benjamin Nugent on the DSM-5
