Falwell dies, everyone who is not an asshole cheers.
I hate Jerry Falwell. Not that I am going out on a crazy limb to say that, but yeah. Needless to say, while I don't usually cheer when people die, we are better off without him. Hatred is hatred, regardless of what 'religion' you are hiding behind. While I am an atheist, I respect the right people have to free speech and religious beliefs. My stance is I won't tell you my beliefs and you don't tell me yours.
But overall, I think he was incredibly negative. Glad to see him gone. I hope his flock of fools wanders away and realizes that they have been led around by a bigot.
Here is a list of great quotes from Jerry.
technology letdown
I have played with 2 things in the last couple days that I had high hopes for, Google Reader from Google and Coda from Panic.
I usually use Safari's built in RSS support to read my stuff. I had it nicely setup and organized. It pulls the feeds, and have each set of feeds in folders on my bookmarks bar. When a new article is posted, the number next to the folder name increments. Immediately. Works great. But, at the urging of others, I have decided to give firefox a hardcore try, as safari has been my preferred browser for a while.
So I switched default role to firefox, and poof, there went my RSS reader. I started to play with Sage, but I wasn't impressed, as I did not find an easy way to add my existing feeds into it, and I was not about to manually go to each page again.
So I exported my feeds from Safari, and dumped them all into Google Reader. While I am on my own laptop all the time, a web based solution does have some benefits. The interface is nice, grouping via folders and tags is nice. The ability to pull out starred and shared items as its own RSS feed is a feature I was liking to feed this page.
The biggest problem I am having is that the update cycle on the feeds seems to suck. For example, as I type this, Robyn and Harper have both posted things. NEITHER of them are in the reader yet. Hell, I was just reading them on harpers aggregate site instead. Lame.
That might just be the deal breaker there, which is unfortunate, as I was kinda getting to like it. I think I will try Sage again, I am sure there is an import option. Otherwise that developer needs a swift kick in the shins.
Meanwhile... Coda was released, and it looked cool. Personally, I do all my coding in BBEdit. Pure text. I have also been using CSSEdit for some nice immediate gratification CSS tweaking. I don't have a problem with WYSIWYG editors, but I can't handle the code they produce. While the sites I personally run (my blogs, my horribly out of date other sites, etc) all are shit, the sites I produce for clients are perfect, code wise. Ok, perfect is not what I mean, but I ensure that they validate properly via W3C, I get all anal about tabs, space, and other white space things. I want my source to look right and be super clear. It is partially anal, partially because it makes it WAY easier to make a tweak 3-6 months down the road when I am not fresh on the page. And lets not get into the includes, I love includes.
So when I was reading the product page for Coda, I was intrigued. Sure, BBEdit already has the text environment, GREP, code coloring, etc. It doesn't auto complete, but I often find that more annoying than it is worth. And BBEdit has built in FTP, so that is already there. But I was excited. I had a small 1 page brochure page that was a print piece that needed to be 'web-ized' and they wanted the same look. So I figured perfect chance to play with Coda in a real situation.
Lets just say I finished the site in BBEdit and CSSEdit. Coda operates on the premise that having a text editor, a FTP client, a reference library, and a browser open as multiple apps is a PITA, and thus having one app that does all that is easier. I have always preferred component stereos over all in ones, so I might be biased, but I didn't see this as a strong point for Coda. I still have a finite amount of deskspace, and I still need to be in all those apps at some point, so I still have to click around alot. Savings, marginal. And I still need to test in multiple browsers, so the savings wasn't insane. I found myself still bouncing into YummyFTP to make changes, due primarily in part to my next complaint.
Coda and I don't lay things out the same way in terms of the file hierarchy. I like the have everything separate. Everything. Hell, Dylan recently got me on the concept of keeping the images for the layout and the images for the content in different places. I like keeping all the CSS organized and in their own files. So when Coda wants to put my styles in the file I am working on, albeit at the top and not inline, I was like, no. But Coda had already decided that. So I have to go and create the incl folders and CSS folders, etc, then move my files there manually, etc. All while Coda wanted to do it in the file. Their may be a way around that, but I couldn't find it. And if I have to search much harder, it ceases to be a 'feature' or 'option'.
Coda also lets you dev locally, then push 'publish' and sent the files to the server. But since I had to keep changing the file structure, that wasn't working well for me, and I started having 2 branches of the development going, and resyncing them wasn't seemingly easy. So there I was, 2 version of a 1 page site, using an app that wanted to do things that I was not all about, and boom, my time savings was gone. The convenience wasn't there, and in fact, it was causing me problems.
I think Coda has some nice features. The standard IDE popup as you type style thing for CSS and PHP was nice, but not that awesome. I find the BBEdit built in FTP more than sufficient, and YummyFTP is easier when I am setting up the folder structure. I can dev locally, since it is OSX and I have MySQL, Apache, PHP, etc all here, so on the off chance I am not online (like, on a plane?) I can keep working provided I plan ahead a tiny bit. CSSEdit is hard to beat, and Coda was not better, but was nice none the less. I never bothered with the reference library, isn't that what the internet is for?
I think Coda could be cool. I am sure for some people it is great. I think that when Coda 2.0 comes out, I will see if my issues have been resolved.
So overall, I haven't been thrilled with my 2 new technology test drives. I haven't given up on google reader yet, and it isn't like it is hard to keep using it. I have given up on Coda though, atleast until next version. Time to try Sage I guess.
Never Played or Are MP3s Destroying My Love of Music?
I have a smart playlist in iTunes of the above name, and it is staggering how many songs are in there. Insane. Sure, some of them are older CDs that I own that I surely played the hell out of in high school, so the iTunes play count is a poor representation of my history with those songs, but there are a lot of newer things on there.
The problem is of course caused by the very thing that makes me love digital music as I do-instant gratification. To sit here at my laptop and think, DAMN, I want to listen to that one Guided By Voices song, it will be playing within 15 seconds. Combine that with the fact that I don't spend NEARLY the amount of time in my car I that I used to, and I don't listen to music in the same way anymore.
Back in the pre-MP3 days, I would load the car up with CDs. In high school, I used to drive around with a minimum of 100 cds in the car, in wooden crates in the back seat, in the door pockets, center console, glove box. CDs were everywhere. It was a major auto theft waiting to happen. Not that the average thief would have much to do with local chicago punk CDs and random imported ska CDs, but nonetheless, it would have sucked for me.
But once I moved everything to MP3s and got the ubiquitous iPod (first on the block, waiting in line at the Apple Store that saturday morning for my (now) huge 5GB iPod. Still works quite well thank you.) everything changed. I hardwired a firewire plug behind the dash board, I wired the iPod into the CD Changer inputs of the Audi headunit. and built a fancy little holder for it.
And thus the instant gratification began. And the death of the album per se. I like the concept of an album, I think the order of tracks is important. But I don't care anymore. I don't listen to anything in order anymore. I usually have whatever I am listening to on shuffle. I am not ready to bring the album back, but I am working on listening to music as I get it, giving things a fair few times before it falls into the vast library. There have been a number of songs that I REALLY like now, but would have never found on the first pass.
So my current plan is to get everything to a play count of at the least 1. And I am seriously listening to them. I am filling the iPods off those playlists and syncing them back. I am down to ~1400 songs left. I am also trying to not add as much music at the rate I usually do. I am deleting things I don't care about in an attempt to both clear up space and also get rid of the crap. I don't know why I had so much Jennifer Lopez, but that is all gone now, needless to say. I am have an 'on deck' folder with MP3s that I will add once I listen to the album I last added.
I am getting lazy with music due to the potential floodgate that I could open at any time. I need to give more attention to what I have and digest it all versus slamming it all down. I need to rediscover my music.