aaron evans

I’m nearly ready to kill this blog and replace it with a static page; I rarely write anything interesting and I’m tired of updating Wordpress. I don’t even like the idea of having a webhost anymore. A lot has changed in the past year or so including what I expect from a computer. In some ways I’ve switched from Mac to Cloud.

Before a few months ago, I was really dependent upon the applications on my Mac. This slowly changed.

Mail.app is nice and was my primary email client since 10.0: it looks beautiful and is intuitive. However, over time, my mailboxes grew larger, Mail.app grew slower, and I grew tired of backing up my email. So I moved all my mail to GMail. My expectations have changed but I’m way more happier with GMail. Everything always works, I don’t worry about losing data, and I can always access my mail if I have a web browser.

I used to back up my Mac with a Time Capsule. This device is really slick when it works: when I got a new laptop I was able to just transfer my backup to the new machine and get started. However, I always had lingering concerns about what would happen if my house burned down or both my Time Capsule and my laptop were stolen. I also didn’t like that I could only access this data with a Mac. I setup JungleDisk and started backing up all my data to S3. I have about 17GB of data on S3 and it costs me about $2.50/month.

I really like TextMate. It’s a wonderful text editor and is a pleasure to use to write software or just edit text. However, at my new job, I’ve started using Emacs instead. One great thing about Emacs is that you can use it on any platform. Another great thing is that you can simply ssh onto a host and develop software. When using TextMate, I always found myself mounting remote file systems via ssh so that I could edit files on remote servers.

I used to use NetNewsWire. It’s a great newsreader but I started using Google Reader instead. Now I can read my feeds everywhere including my Android phone. I can also find and create shared items with friends.

Tweetie is an awesome Twitter client and I haven’t seen anything remotely close to it in quality on other platforms. However, I don’t live on Twitter and I usually just catch up with tweets on the bus ride to work on my phone. When I’m on my laptop, the Twitter website is just fine for me to see my tweets.

I like iTunes and have used it since it was SoundJam. Over time I have fewer and fewer reasons to need it on my laptop. When I’m at home I’m near my stereo and when I’m on the go I either have an iPod or Pandora.

All my photos are backed up via JungleDisk and shared on the web on Flickr. I used to keep them all in iPhoto but I’m not sure I care anymore. I’d be just as happy with Picasa or even just an app which allowed me to import from camera to file system, do minimal editing (red-eye correction), and upload to Flickr.

When I started my new job I was given a ThinkPad and my first reaction was to request a Mac as a replacement. After giving it some thought I realized that it no longer really mattered to me. Sure, the laptop’s fit and finish isn’t as nice as a Mac and Windows is kind of weird in my opinion. My biggest concern was that it was going to be a pain to write software for fun on Windows. Running software like Ruby or Perl on Windows never seems quite right.

So, I decided to get an EBS-backed EC2 instance for personal development. It’s awesome. It took me some time to get setup properly but I can now start and stop this instance on the weekend to play around with Rails or whatever else I’m feeling like doing. It costs $0.085/hour to run this so if I keep it running all weekend it costs $4. I’m not really sure why I’d buy a Linux box for casual development at this point.

The only thing I still use my wife’s Mac for is video editing. We have a Flip and I occaisonally do very basic video editing using iMovie before uploading the videos to YouTube. I haven’t really looked into Windows alternatives but I’m guessing something is out there that could satisfy my basic needs.

If I’m spending my own money on a computer I’m still a Mac user. However, if I’m given a laptop for work on any other platform I’m fairly content on any platform. It feels like 99% of my day is spent in a terminal and a web browser.

It seems obvious to me that at some point in the not too distant future an OS like Chrome OS will make more and more sense to more and more users. I’m pretty close to this model already.

We moved to Seattle and Season and I started blogging about family stuff now that we’re farther away from our families.

My daughter is one year old and we don’t let her watch children’s programming on TV yet. She doesn’t even know it exists. We do however have an unused computer that she knows is her computer for watching Sesame Street videos on YouTube.

The Sesame Street channel has a great selection of videos from the history of Sesame Street. Here are some of my favorites:

Grover and John John Count 1

John John is awesome. I wonder where he is now….

School Pageant-Flower

The sigh at 2:22 is priceless. Poor Prarie Dawn.

Cripple Creek featuring Buffy Sainte-Marie:

You won’t find songs on Sesame Street today with lines like: “kiss her on the mouth, sweet as any wine, wrap myself around her like a sweet potato vine”. That’s a shame.

Kermit And Cookie Monster And The Mystery Box

“just thought it might be cookie.. off chance.”

Earth, Rain And Mud Sung By Slimey

… “you can’t hear this ‘Mr Music’ ? .. take five.”

Elmo’s Song

….”Catchy…”

Cookie Questions Prairie Dawn

“that the question lady!”

Bert and Ernie Fish Call

“heheheheh… he calls them?!”

Bert’s Lost Paperclips

I’m a sucker for John John. Give him a daytime Emmy for that performance.

Some of these are pure gold. I hate to sound crotchety but I have real doubts that the show is still this magical.

I use MacPorts as a package manager for Mac OS X and used it mindlessly for a long time before learning some basic commands that helped out.

First, to update your MacPorts version to the newest release you can do:

% sudo port selfupdate

That’s really basic and well-documented. To upgrade all your installed packages do:

% sudo port upgrade installed

Finally, MacPorts keeps all your outdated/inactive software around forever. To get rid of inactive ports, do:

% sudo port -f uninstall inactive

If you want to routinely get rid of inactive ports, you can create a script in /etc/periodic/monthly.

I recently migrated all my photos from SmugMug to Flickr. A long time ago I wrote a blog post discussing why I originally chose SmugMug. I was so dedicated to SmugMug that I wrote an iPhoto plugin to upload photos from iPhoto to SmugMug. I still like SmugMug because the guys who run the site are really nice and responsive and they run an all around great site.

A few months ago I read Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody and decided to switch to Flickr because my philosophy about sharing photos online changed.

I used to think that the big value of online photo-sharing was that the producer of photos was decoupled from the consumer: I can upload photos and anyone can view and use them. This is really a big difference between pre-web photo sharing but it doesn’t really address the many ways in which consumers can discover photos. The SmugMug way for discovering photos is at its roots very similar to the pre-web analog: a user has albums; albums have photos; people can find albums and photos.

This view is a rather rigid model for consumers. The reason why people consider Flickr a ‘web 2.0′ site is because consumers of content are able to become producers by creating new content from existing photos and add a lot of value along the way.

The great thing about Flickr is that there is a huge community that finds photos using all sorts of different lookup patterns other than user->album->photo and adds value to the photos by discussing photos or mashing up content into new content.

What can be so hard to understand is that SmugMug (and other competitors) have many similar features (tags, search, geolocation, comments, APIs, etc) that allow similar patterns for finding and sharing photos yet in my experience they are far less used. No one ever added my photos to a SmugMug group, I never added goelocation data to photos, I’m not even sure if I could set licenses for my photos. When I uploaded photos to SmugMug I felt like that was the end of their existence except for the very small group of people who knew where to look to find them. With Flickr, the photos I upload can be discovered and used in many new ways and this behavior is fairly commonplace.

This phenomenon is a case of network effects. Basically, a photo sharing site becomes much more valuable as more people join and this growth is probably non-linear.

This is a shame for competitors because they are at a huge disadvantage. For users, if you value your photos by how many other people see and use them, your photos have more value if they are part of the most valuable network.

So, that is why I switched over to Flickr. The only painful part was physically moving my photos from one site to the other. I didn’t find any standard tools so I wrote a little Python script. I really just wrote it for myself and wouldn’t recommend it unless you know some Python and maybe a bit of the SmugMug/Flickr APIs. Enjoy at your own peril.

We are living in a remarkable time when leaders of the world face problems of immense scale and pundits have a diversity of opinion regarding the appropriate course of action to take. When the present becomes past we will likely forget this debate and simply accept the present as it is with its own set of problems. Remember the debate about a ‘crash landing’ versus ’soft landing’ in the housing sector? Remember the debate about whether Apple could successfully enter the cellphone market?

I find it unfortunate that we forget these debates when their outcomes are no longer uncertain. I think a consequence is that we don’t ever improve at identifying “real” debates in society or even understanding what debates are the right debates to be having. If we seek to become better at public discourse then we should certainly look at our experience with past debates as informative of present debates.

Having said that, I’ll take a stab at outlining some of the current debates regarding the economy:

• the DOW is at 6500; can the DOW go to 5000 or are we nearing in on a bottom?
• deflation or inflation? some say we’re headed toward a deflationary cycle while others say we’ll see high inflation in 2010 or thereabouts
• recovery in 2009, 2010 or later? The Obama administration expects a recovery in the second half of 2009; other say 2010, others say later
• let the banks/insurers fail? The Obama administration followed the Bush administration’s lead and continued to give money to AIG, Citibank, and other banks while Republicans argue for letting some of the banks fail.

For some of these questions, the future may not shed any light on what the right course of action is. Others may prove more interesting (I’m curious about inflation and deflation).

I have no training in economics so please take my statements about the economy with a grain of salt. The market is re-testing its lows with the DOW nearing the 7300 mark. The big banks saw ~20% losses during trading on Friday as investors seemed to acknoweldge that these banks are likely to be nationalized.

With the DOW down 45% from its high it would seem that we’re nearing in on some sort of bottom. Unfortunately, I’m not so optimistic. I came across two charts that paint a gloomy picture of where a bottom is in the market.

The first shows the SP 500 since 1960:

If you take a swag at fitting a linear curve to that graph it seems pretty reasonable to see the SP 500 as low as 500 (it’s 770 as I write this).

A similar chart compares the DOW/Gold ratio since 1980:

The ratio today is about 7 and I’ve heard predictions of it dropping to as low as 2 less. Consider DOW 5400 and gold at $2700/ounce. Seems as absurd as a 7200 DOW sounded a year ago.

I just setup our family timeline project. We finished this year’s photos this morning and I put together a page. This year was the first year where I think we now have enough content to make a slightly interesting webpage.

The original idea for the project came from Diego Godlberg’s The Arrow of Time.