Drewski   Coming soon in three dimensions

YouTube - Google Mobile Products on Android

To me, this is a very compelling Android feature: log in and everything synchronizes.

Now all they need is a decent music player and a 3.5mm headphone jack…. (Just say no to adapters and proprietary jacks!)

Jeremy Denk on Brahms’ First Piano Concerto:

[P]art of what makes this first movement such a success is the brilliant, instinctive planning of epic events: his narrative, programmatic sense (never mind “absolute music”). The opening orchestral tutti is basically a ternary shape: bluster/lyricism/bluster. That is: a dramatic beginning, then a quiet interlude, and then a return to the dramatic. The quiet interlude (the “second theme,” sort of) has a deep, heavy melancholy; the return to the dramatic takes a heroic, almost joyful turn. But something is missing from this vast picture the orchestra paints; as huge as the orchestra attempts to be, as world-embracing, it still can’t capture everything. And when the piano comes in, liltingly, you know, you think: this is precisely what I’ve been missing. It is lucid where everything has been opaque; it is humane where everything has been historic, tragic, or beyond our control.

Denk’s writing is whimsical and poignant… and spot-on. This is exactly how I felt when I first heard the First Concerto. I had tried listening to it a few times on a (fantastic) twofer with Fleisher/Szell and had a hard time getting into the first few minutes, but once I did I found that the piano’s entrance was so surprising, yet so natural, and altogether perfect. The ending is equally as fitting and the entire work remains a favorite of mine.

I first started listening to Brahms when I was traveling abroad in 2003. I had up until then had a hard time with his music; I found it too dense, I didn’t get it. But I spent a lot of time (on trains, in the evenings) with his music and, finally, I got it. Both this Concerto and his First Symphony were such revelatory pieces to me—they were certainly “absolute” like Denk asserted, but their respective narratives were so compelling to me, their final movements so climactic and, well, final.

He certainly continued the tradition of Beethoven* (probably the most faithfully of those composers that took up that task) and while I think I prefer Bruckner’s narrative style (more dramatic and mysterious, less cerebral), it was Brahms that exposed me to narrative in music in the first place. And at this point, that is one of the foundational things I look for in music.

*- Sidenote about this particular concerto: I liken it (at least the structure of the first movement) to Mozart’s 20th: the key, the sturm und drang mood, the lyrical and yearing entrance of the piano. I wonder if Brahms was consciously referring to it.

Hi, I’m a Mac… Beep, beep

If Apple had gone the traditional route of portraying Microsoft as a gigantic monopolistic borg, great at crushing competition through market pressure but capable of developing only mediocre products, the ads would have been boring. More accurate, perhaps, but boring. They’d have been the 30 Seconds Hate, and that’s just so last century. Instead Apple portray the PC as mostly well-meaning, likeable, goofy… but completely ineffectual.

An interesting comparison of John Hodgeman-as-PC to Wile E. Coyote. As Chuck Jones said, “The audience’s sympathy must remain with the Coyote.” And, brushing by the paranoid “Microsoft is greedy” mantra that a lot of free software users seem to espouse, I think this portrayal of Microsoft is very accurate.

(via John Gruber)

I’m gathering, from my reading here and there, that most people don’t know that Herbert Hoover famously declared that the “fundamental business of the country” was sound. (Can it be “famously” if most people don’t know it? Never mind.)

That partly explains why Republicans seem eerily compelled to echo Hoover; they don’t know what it makes them sound like.

Fundamentals - Paul Krugman - Op-Ed Columnist - New York Times Blog

From the linked article:

For Hoover as for McCain, the insistence on “sound fundamentals” means that if necessary, the government will throw a life preserver to business leaders; the rest of us are on our own.

I’m no economist (and I’d appreciate any insight from others) but McCain’s comments really do scare me. (They wouldn’t if about half of America didn’t think he should be our next President.)

In an effort to stretch out my birthday as long as possible, my family kinda re-celebrated with me on Sunday. My sister Kaitlyn made me an adorable card:

"The things I love"

So apparently I love Star Wars more than Deanna?

These are great:

(via Ken)

So I’m actually trying to keep up with politics; call it the spirit of the times. I’m having a hard time finding what to read without it completely consuming my time. Wondering what everyone else reads.

Here, I’ll start: Ken shared Donklephant with me about a year ago, a (generally) balanced source of political news. Not too many stories a day, not too much punditry.

If you keep up, how do you do it?
(Read my update for some of my answers.)

Hello, I am from approximately two months in the future. On 10/22 at approx 2:34am CET a tachyon field failure in the main resonating ring of the LHC causes a “temporal blowback”. Shortly thereafter, the resulting destruction of the strong nuclear force causes the world to vaporize in seconds, while a few of us near the experiment are thrown into a temporal causality loop. While the predestination event (or as we have come to call it “The Big Rewind”) hasn’t occurred yet to you, for us it is about three years in our past. I came across your site looking to see if there were any other scientists that may have theorized this phenomenon who may be of assistance in preventing it. This brings me to my point, I have repeatedly checked your site for the past five rewinds at 2:34:01 CET and it still says nope, believe me at this point the LHC has most assuredly destroyed the world. I can provide a bank account in Nigeria for the funds to be placed. I am curious to the exact amount however.

Seriously, I almost want to reply.

(via Ken)

10 phone calls (1 with a piano serenade, thanks Grandma!), 2 cards, 1 e-card (containing 4 noble truths, great gift!), 1 email (and 1 blog comment), 15 Facebook birthday wishes (earliest one 186 minutes early, thanks Steve!), 6 websites’ birthday wishes, 1 emailed birthday wish for Anton Bruckner (4 days ago :)), 1 great day off with Deanna, 2 birthday meals—one more to come, who’s up for Fogo de Chão this weekend?, 1 Margarita with lunch, 1 White Russian with dinner, 1 piece of chocolate cake, 2 scoops of ice cream, 12 party poppers to top it off. 15 photos.

And 25 years! Thanks everyone!

BIS customers now getting instant IMAP e-mail | BlackBerry Cool

It’s great to see the upgrade, especially for BIS users who have had less-than-stellar delivery times, but you have to wonder why it took so long for IMAP IDLE to be supported.

Absolutely. This is the kind of fine print that they don’t warn you about when you get a BlackBerry device. “We support your IMAP and POP email, but only by routing all traffic through our servers and delaying email. Oh, and you can’t just authenticate; you need, um, service books.”

That last detail was particularly interesting to explain to my mom today, who was about to ask for a refund on her data plan from AT&T because she hadn’t been getting email for two weeks.

Actually Mom, even though your username and password are set up to check and to synchronize your email, there’s this extra layer of authentication called service books. They basically manage the synchronization between your device and the BlackBerry servers, so your mail has probably been “sitting on their server” ready to deliver, but your device hasn’t been able to get into it.

Oh, yeah, and the service books? They will stop working. Yes, even when your password is correct.

I suppose this whole instant IMAP server upgrade is to make them more competitive in the ever-lucrative consumer market, but this is the kind of zero-day feature that any real PDA should support.

Counting down the days until I can switch to something else… something that supports real internet would be good too. Maybe by the time I’m ready ($$) to switch devices, there will even be a device (Android?) that will give me pause before immediately jumping for an iPhone. But I’m not counting on it.