MarsEdit

OK. Serious blog rethinking time. Time to change the layout, the.. well everything... Lets start with editing. Time to give this whole MarsEdit thing a try.

First things first, HTML! Holy Guacamole! watch watch!

centered!

I'm tired of digging through layers of menus just to figure out out to center stuff. Journler has a nice feel to it, but does not work well with blogginess. MacJournal is ok, but to me, its just that, ok. iWeb is shiny, but doesn't have the text editing/RSS/email feel to it. Its a web page creator. Maybe Journler mixed with iWeb? nononono... HTML! Now just to decide if it is worth 30 buckaroos.

When it comes to any program that involves text and publishing, its really interesting how people expect it to work like MS Word. Just look at the progression of the iWork apps. Pages is picking up more and more aspects of Word. Its kinda funny, but standards are standards for a reason. Does this stifle innovation? maybe. I am a Mac user, but still, I want my toolbars!

27th District Caucus...

Sitting at Jason Lee, I was outraged, I had one thing on my mind. Introducing my new tag: I’m Blogging This



iPhone: I have been at the Jason Lee middle school since 8 am (its now noon). Only now are they getting through the 4th of the 30-something prisincts... I'll be here for another several hours. Moral of the story, people are incompitent, especially en masse.. More to come

Edits:

/wrists

Holy Cow...

What a horrible process this is. They were describing how this year, the caucus would happen at break-neck speeds thanks to the wonder of technology! We weren’t done with figuring out if everyone was there until 2 PM. That is 6 hours of sitting in a hot, sweaty hall filled with a whole bunch of crazies. I had a woman sing to me. She actually sang a song. About democracy. I tried to escape, but she followed me. She had a whole repertoire about the corruption of the government, and how the democrats will save the day.

I was an alternate delegate, but was eventually seated around 12:50 because none of the real delegates actually showed up. There was then a big confusion/miss communication over what came next. This was when I realized how dumb the whole thing was.

Grass Roots?!

The whole point of a caucus is to encourage grass roots politics. You all get together, discuss and well, caucus. But in an effort to streamline the process, the modern caucus involves assembling and then listening to minute long speeches from each side. The kicker is that the campaigns pick in advance who is going to give the speeches, so there is really no grass roots anything going on. Also, 1 minute speeches? You would have to be an expert at framing to be convincing at all in that amount of time. Basically, by the end of the speeches, nothing is different except people are that much more ticked off because they are losing that much more of their Saturday.

Once speeches and registration was done, the next step involved voting on the delegates that would go on to other caucuses... But really, who cares? The division of delegates is the same for each candidate, if someone thinks they should go, let them. Suddenly I realized was duped into this. Delegates are completely symbolic. They represent a vote. In a past system, maybe their voice mattered, but not anymore. If a precinct delegate didn’t show up, minus one vote for that candidate. One is no big deal, a lot might throw things off. So once I got my arm band as a delegate, I was entered into the system. As far as the presidential race is concerned, thats all that matters. So then I ask, why am I wasting my Saturday? We didn’t sit and have a ceremonious vote for a candidate or anything, we are just a further symbolic representation of what happened in the first caucus, minus the people too lazy to show up.

Why couldn’t they just count the people who signed up? Why did they have to have us physically there in order to count us? Why did they ruin my weekend? And why did they call me when I got home and ask why I wasn’t there?! I HAVE AN ARM BAND!

Caucuses are a good idea for small things. In the current system, primaries are the only way to go.

Technology could have helped in SO many ways. Swipe ID when you show up, computer then automatically figures out who is there and who isn’t instantly. The computer then calls the alternates needed to tell them to come (or provides a list to volunteers to make the call). Hooray, we just saved 6 hours of day light! Now we can talk and discuss, forget that we are all set in our ways and bickering, there is one undecided delegate here!!! Hooray for democracy!

Anyway... back to school.

LONDON!!!111!!1!!!

        Its a good thing my Dad wanted us to get to the airport 17 hours early, it is absolutely empty. Barely anyone is flying, yet the security is out in force. We were told by the ubiquitous airport voice that the threat level is orange, and we have to cooperate with airport security as best we can. The airport security outnumbered us about 2 to 1 and were apparently in the middle of some fued. They had fashioned sling shots out of rubber inspection gloves and dust clothes and were catapulting detergent-soaked rags at one-another. I was nearly caught in the cross fire as I walked through the metal detector. Lucky for me, I escaped with my life, and my dirty jacket, intact.
        I am sad that the only available internet is through T-Moible, but I guess I can post this when I get to London... at least 13 hours from now...
        Over the next few days my family and I will be traveling around southern England. We’ll be staying in London for a few days before we start moving west, seeing as many sights as we can along the way. Armed with my GPS, and my Dad’s new Nikon D200, I’ll try to drop as much as I can on here in the evening when we get back to our hotels. Anyway... I think I’ll read one of my embarrassingly nerdy books until the plane gets here... More when I land! ~>

Internet in the hotel room is 15 pounds... *sigh* I guess we’ll try it once?

        The flight was alright. British Airways was decent enough to supply us with two meals and complimentary wine! shazam! I got to watch Shrek the third , read my book, and nap a bit before I was startled awake by an ungodly noise. Ofcourse, a baby was crying, no, screaming, on the airplane, and we were only half way through the flight. Normally I am a fan of live and let live, so I shrugged it off and decided the matter would be best left to a pair of priests, one young and one old, who could devise a way to exercise whatever demon had possesed this poor child. So, only somewhat bothered, I tried to concentrate on my book. About an hour later, I realized that the cries from the infant were actually complete sentences, and that it was not an infant at all, but a child between the ages of 4 and 6, who was upset because their Mum (ooh look at me in England!) wouldn’t let them watch the telly. This was suddenly an in-exusable problem for me, a clear issue of bad parenting. I’m not a parent, so I don’t have to figure out how to shut the kid up, thats their job, one that they were clearly failing at. But if you ask me, some form of capital punishment was quickly beginning to sound like the only option. No I didn’t really want to kill the kid, just somehow render his vocal cords useless. Eventually someone flicked on the TV and wouldn’t you know it, the crying stopped! Before tooooo long (6 hours later), we landed into stuffy London Heathrow and joined the hussle and bussle of happy people with funny accents. The Euro trash is pretty funny. Honestly, I can’t get enough.
        We took the Heathrow Express (15 pounds each) to the Paddington Station Underground and from there to Islington (4 pounds each). While my family wandered around like headless chickens trying to figure out the Underground system (is it really so different from Bart), I vacantly stood there until a friendly Londoner approached me and offered me his day pass. I can ride free all day now. As for the fam, they will continue to pay the big bucks. Laura is passed out, my Mom is on the way there. And we are currently having communication problems with the difference between “roll-away bed,” “extra-bed” and “cette.” There was also a pretty funny mix up with the whole smoking/non-smoking thing. My Mom has issues with smelly things. So getting a room where someone once smoked a cigarette anywhere in the hotel, there will likely be an issue. I just can’t get over the money thing. 43 p for $1... We should have gone to South Korea, where $1 will get you 400 WON. Anyway, to end this rant, I look forward to having some good food and get rid of this light headed-ness..

Update and such! Subject: Music Biz

SO. I did some stupid cut and pasting of javascript, making the maps stop working... But it is fixed now. Its a little slow, but hey, my compsci degree is an AA from the University of Google.com, so I am pretty satisfied with it all. Thursday was my last day at Iris, and Friday my last day at Dolby. It was really a great summer, albeit busy. I learned a lot and had a blast doing it! I am glad that I get time off to travel and hang out before going back to school.

Thursday we got to talk to the Programming Director over at a popular music download service. The most enlightening part of the conversation involved how he chose to feature various artists. He said 75% of the features come directly from Billboard rankings. His logic was that the labels are putting a lot of money behind some of these artists, to make them popular, the music store then features these artists to give consumers what they want. This sounds fishy if you ask me. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that “a lot of money behind these bands” means he is seeing any of it... but it just seems that a popular band need not be featured because they are already well known and don’t need “free” marketing from some retailer. If people want it, they will dig for it (And by dig I mean click on an artist on the Top 10 board on the main page...SO MUCH DIGGING!). Sure, maybe some Billboard artists have actual quality music and therefore deserve features on the main page. But 75% of all features coming directly from Billboard? Makes me a little sick. Yeah, big names will get big features. But if you have control over what people listen to, why add to the machine when you can give young minds new, good music?! It just lets you know how great of an industry this all is.

One of my coworkers sent me an essay written by about Tony Brummel, CEO of Victory Records, one of the largest indie record labels. Its by Brummel’s VP, Ramsey Dean, who has since left due to the horrible working conditions. The essay surfaced a few days ago, but Victory had it taken down. Its in Google’s Cache, but its starting to resurface. If you have a some spare time and are wanting a good horror story, check it out. If the link dies, or you dont want to read it in this hip-hop blog, let me know and I’ll email you the story!

DONAGE!

Holy Cow I am done for the year! I am sitting here on the couch relaxing. InboxZero, check. Clean desktop, check. Only thing left to do is clean up the house and drive home! One neato thing I have been playing with is iusethis.com. Check out my profile:
http://osx.iusethis.com/user/bentup

Hope everyone is doing well! Turns out I got the Iris internship! woo. Its only 2 days a week tho, so the rest of the time I get to explore and write in this bloggggggg!

Application

Yeah so instead of actually doing any work for class, I have been applying for an Internship!!

Shit Son!


It looks pretty cool! Basically it is the middle man for companies like iTunes and the indies. Soooo music+digits=happy boy! Lets just hope paid plays into that equation so I will be a happy and not hungry boy!

Yeah... So I'm not too sure what the point of all this is... considering no one will actually read this. I suspect blog ≠ livejournal and that even if someone did stumble upon this by mistake, they would quickly close the window or kill themselves... haha. Well, look for more thematic posts in the future! Such topics may include:

• Geocaching!
  
• Biking/Hiking/Scenery of Marin County
  
• Music technology and distribution
  
• Uninformed Tech Rants
  

Just check for future tags!

And now.... time for class.