life – Page 19 – chuck.goolsbee.org

Happy Birthday Macintosh!

Today is the Apple Macintosh’s 25th birthday. Time flies doesn’t it? I owe a lot in life to this little machine.

I first met the Macintosh in March of 1984. I was a Junior at Texas Tech University, studying Graphic & Package Design under Frank Cheatham. My Production class went to a computer store to have a look at one and get a demonstration. I can distinctly remember being impressed with the graphic capabilities of the machine and the quantum leap in the user interface from all other computer systems I’d seen before. My good friend and previous roommate was a Computer Science major, who built systems in our dorm room, so I was very familiar with computers, though not much of a user then. My other strong memory from that day was turning to a classmate and saying:

“When this thing gets “real” fonts, it will take off.”

I was referring of course to the early bitmapped “city name” (Monaco, Chicago, Geneva, etc) fonts that shipped with the Macintosh. “Real” fonts are just that, real. Typography that has been created and refined by masters over hundreds of years. Back when I went to school we had to learn to render typefaces by hand and I could write freehand in Garamond, Baskerville, Franklin, Helvetica, Century Schoolbook, and many other traditional fonts. Being able to just bang out a perfect typeface on a screen was a dream of every designer back then.

Well, either I was perceptive, or prophetic because not long after my graduation and entrance into the professional world Aldus shipped PageMaker, Adobe shipped PostScript and broke open the world of “real” fonts … on the Macintosh. I was present at the birth of “desktop publishing” as I was a young designer working in Seattle at the time, and all the “old guys” (as I called people my age back then) were terrified of computers and expected us kids to do all the technological heavy lifting. I learned everything I could about computers, software, networks, etc. Within a few years I was managing systems instead of designing things. By 1991 I was no longer a Graphic Designer, I was an IT guy. My design education has served me well however as the entire purpose of design, at least how it was taught to me, was the communication of complex concepts in visual/verbal form. Frank Cheatham insisted that we had to be able to EXPLAIN why we made the design choices we did. They had to make sense, otherwise, as he often said, “it was just decoration.” From that education I learned how to explain complex technology to non-technical people. I have also been able to explain non-technical things to technical people. (I’m a English-Geek translator.) This has allowed me to very successfully manage a class of people that many believe are unmanageable, “IT guys”.

I did my last professional graphic design job in 1994, designing the corporate identity of the company started by a friend of mine… a network geek I met “online” several years before on a Mac-focussed BBS. He was running the network at a local college, while I was running one at a department store‘s in-house Advertising agency. The company he started? digital.forest. That’s right, the company I joined six years later. Before that though my career took me to a publishing company headquartered in London. Along the way I learned UNIX (to manage Sun Sparcservers that ran The Bon’s OPI system), learned multi-protocol networking, people management, budget management, project management, etc. At The Bon I was telling “old white guys in ties” about this new thing called the Internet. I built my first DNS & web servers in 1995. Launched a web company of my own in 1998, and sold it in 2000.

If it were not for this little machine with a 9″ screen I’d still be drawing typefaces while designing things on paper. In a lot of ways I owe my whole professional career and adult life to this little computer from Cupertino. It changed my world. Changed my profession. Changed my career. Changed my life in some very profound ways. It even introduced me to most of my friends. It has been a very interesting 25 years. Happy Birthday Macintosh. I’ll drink a toast to you tonight.

Safe, But Also Sorry: Security expert Bruce Schneier talks about privacy and property in the information state – Reason Magazine

Safe, But Also Sorry: Security expert Bruce Schneier talks about privacy and property in the information state – Reason Magazine.

A good read, I highly recommend it. I’ve always said that 9/11 was the last airline hijacking that we’ll ever see in our lifetimes. No planeload of passengers will EVER just sit back and watch another one unfold. Never. As such TSA security is an absurd and invasive example of futility. Why bother?

Pondering Interesting Data

Have a look at this map.

I love maps, and when I was a kid I thought of becoming a cartographer. I can spend hours looking at atlases, Google Earth, etc. In fact I have found Google Earth to be a wonderful companion to reading books about history. You can visualize the terrain the author is describing.

Anyway, I saw this map linked from an article on Reason Magazine’s website: Washington’s Wealth Boom: The D.C. metro area is getting richer every year. That’s a problem for the rest of America. – Reason Magazine. As you can see they were concerned about the concentration of wealth around the nation’s capital.

You see this map paints the wealthiest counties in the USA red. The statistical anomaly I noted was the areas which we tend to think of as “vacation” spots: The San Juan Islands in Washington, The Lake Tahoe region, the areas around Sun Valley Idaho, Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Park City Utah, the Colorado ski towns of telluride, Aspen, Vail, etc. Outside of LA, SF & Seattle they pretty much make up the “rich” areas of the Western US… exclusively.

So does this mean the wealthy are not just vacationing there anymore, but have taken up permanent residence? Or was the data collection flawed? Interesting to think about.

(BTW: Can anyone explain the one county in SE Alaska? I thought the rich folks live in Anchorage?)

Last thing I’ll post about the recent weather…

I love the Internet. The fact that data about anything you might even be slightly interested in is just out there just warms the cockles of my heart. My friend Dan sent me a link to this satellite image. It was taken on the morning of December 17th, 2008. While it is focussed on Oregon, and is cropped about 60 miles south of my house, it shows the nature of the snowfall that blanketed the Northwest before Christmas. This was the morning after the snow first fell. We were expecting a dusting of an inch or two, and instead received a dump of 12 to 14 inches. I drove the boys down to Seattle that day to fly to Colorado, and this high-pressure and clear skies vanished quickly. Thankfully I had already started my timelapse gear and captured the brilliant sunrise and clear morning before those clouds you see on the western edge of the photo barreled in and delivered another foot of snow that night. I struggled home the next evening, and then got stuck in my driveway. The following week of being snowbound was sort of fun, but as it stretched into three weeks our patience ran thin.

It appears the weather has settled back to rain and in fact has now cleared – perhaps a bit of sunshine and dry weather will bring the Jaguar out of it’s hibernation?

The Big Snow of 2008-9, start to finish.

I finally had a chance last night to edit together all my time-lapse footage from the big snowfall over the holidays. Our snowfall events here in the Pacific Northwest generally are short-lived. I set up my time lapse gear to capture the rapid snowmelt that USUALLY happens, but instead it ended up continuing to fall and then staying around for over 3 weeks! So I varied the shots and continued to capture until the very end. I’ve compiled it all into a ~7 minute video. See the snow accumulate and then melt, icicles grow and shrink. Trees shake off their mantles of snow. At this latitude (>48°N) at this time of year days are short and nights long, hence the darkness. Enjoy!

Years in the making, and passing.

I was looking for a set of photos from an event in 1999 earlier today and stumbled upon this image from May of 1998. It was taken at the end of the New England 1000, where my Dad & I won our class in our first outing together in the 65E. The car was pretty fresh from it’s initial restoration and my Dad was freshly retired. I was living in the UK back then, but flew over to the east coast for the week. We had a blast!

While it was not really the start of either of our “car guy” lives, it certainly was the start of a very important era for the two of us. It has been over 10 years since that photo was taken. We’re both older, and a bit wiser. We’ve been on many many rallies since. From cost-to-coast “Vanishing Point” high-speed adventures, to weekend evil puzzlers. We still do our best to get out and have a blast. 😉

I hope to do at least two rallies with my Dad again this year, so stay tuned.

If you are terminally curious, I can dig up the URL for my very first rally report. Let me know.

What Brown Can’t Do For You: Deliver a package on-time!

Once again, I’ve been reminded why United Parcel Service are a bunch of complete morons.

If you recall, they once decided my house was “too rural” for Saturday delivery, despite the fact that we’re 4 miles from a sizable town and perhaps a mile from a major state highway. This compounded by what was likely my worst ever customer service experience ever, has basically lost me forever as a customer. I will never willingly use their services.

So what happened recently to bring this all back?

Every year my mother arranges to send us a christmas wreath for our home. It is something of a family tradition. She used to source them from a family-run business in the unpronounceable-to-all-but-Washingtonians town of Puyallup. Unfortunately, like our neighborhood tree-farm they closed up shop a few years ago. Since then my mom has sourced her wreaths from various commercial outfits. This year however, no wreath ever arrived. I thought that perhaps she had forgotten.

Until yesterday, January 2nd, 2009, when I came home from work I found our 2008 Christmas Wreath sitting in a box on the front porch! Thank you UPS. Once again, you have dazzled me with your incompetence.

But of course I’d neglected to take down the wreath from the year before… though it is looking a bit… dead.