It's viewer mail day. Steve Cook sent in a link to another fire engine maker, Pierce Manufacturing. Their site even has screensavers and wallpaper. Pierce was founded in 1913 in Appleton, Wisconsin and is now a division of Oshkosh Truck Corp. Dave Faris (who had been taking lots of nice photos with his PenCam until it, oops, broke) sent a link to Sensiva which allows you to draw gestures to execute commands. You can create your own gestures or use the ones they include. It's like a macro language of gestures. Neato. (I do have other email I haven't had a chance to process yet; thanks for writing and sorry for the delays.)
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A very belated thanks to Justin Henry who sent me an article that condemns the re-use of plastic water bottles. As you may recall, I'd been carting around the same bottle for an indeterminate amount of time. The article cites a study that found high levels of bacteria in re-used bottles. You could wash them, but the typical throwaway bottles are not designed for washing; the openings are too narrow (I suppose you could use a bleach solution instead). The bacteria discovery didn't bother me much (I would be as lazy about washing any bottle, re-useable or not), but I did some further research and found a greater issue: "non-food grade plastic bottles made of polyethylene terephthalate can break down or leach with the addition of water, light and warmth." This comes from a Dr. Dean Edell article on water bottle re-use. It bothers me more that I may be ingesting chemicals that my body will absorb. So I went to REI and got a Lexan bottle. It actually does fit in my purse -- it's a tight squeeze though.
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Sunday, April 29, 2001

I just discovered Yahoo!'s Buzz Index, which tracks the popular items in their search logs. It's a good way to catch up with what's on the minds of the masses. This week: "Harry Potter mania has fans going to see movies just to catch the trailer for the upcoming film."
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Here's more than you ever wanted to know about The Red Dwarf Theme Song, including ring tone versions for cell phones, parodies, and plenty of downloadable audio files. Most useful and amusing are parody lyrics of nutshell descriptions of each season. Time for some mango juice!
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Friday, April 27, 2001

It is a strange, eerie feeling to see something you haven't seen in a long time that you used to see all the time. That was the feeling I had when I ran across a page describing how to make braided barrettes. Everybody and their sister used to wear these back when many of us were in preppy Izod shirts, turtlenecks, and monogrammed sweaters. Bangs and two braided barrettes that matched your clothes. Pink & green, often. Hmmm... this eerie feeling is not turning into a nostalgic warmth.
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Some days I start feeling kinda jaded about the "web". Then a new concept comes and whacks me in the face and I sit up and take notice again. This time, to be precise, it hit me in the ear. The Silophone is a project that uses a huge grain elevator to transform sounds with its ultimate reverb. Specs: "reinforced concrete, 200 metres long, 16 metres wide and approximately 45 metres at its highest point. The main section of the building is formed of approximately 115 vertical chambers, all 30 metres high and up to 8 metres in diameter." It's in Montreal (thus the "metre" measures). What is so very cool about the setup is that you can upload sound files and hear them played to you live, via the magic of the Internet (and RealAudio). Thousands of sound files, some juvenile (cuss words), many a reflection of popular culture (Buffy bits, South Park songs), have been uploaded by the web-going public and played back.

When I first hit the site, someone(s) was merrily playing away, but I was soon left alone to try out the reverb by myself. What I'd really like to do is blast Beethoven's 5th or Spybreak! (from The Matrix's lobby shootout), but I'd have to do some editing (there's a 1mb file limit). Instead I settled for the Simpson's StoneCutters' song, which I had handy. Of course listening from inside the silo itself is probably no comparison to a web broadcast. Hmmm, I think I've got a Tuvan throat singing mp3 somewhere. (And I really hope they don't get dinged for having illegal music files on their site.) (via Yahoo's Daily Picks)
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Thursday, April 26, 2001

I've noted some recent commentary on "mouse gestures" in the Opera browser and the game Black & White (sorry, I'm too tired to dig up links and references). The idea of gestures came up back when I was doing pen user interface programming at GRiD. The use of pie menus was often discussed as being ideal for the pen interface. You'd tap the screen and/or click and a nice round menu comes up around the point you touched, and every selection is equidistant from where your pen is. Beautiful for Fitt's Law. No dragging down two inches to get to your selection. Where do gestures come in? Well, the pie menus would be multilayered, so picture your top level "File, Edit, View, etc" menu being in a circle, and when you pick "File", you'd get "New, Open, Close, etc" in the next circle. Once you learn where everything is, your menu picks get faster and faster and basically become equivalent to gestures. I remember doing a bit of implementation on a pie menu system ... I did a lot of math to get those darn circles and pie slices to come up where I needed them to. But it was a good learning experience, even if it didn't go anywhere. Nowadays, people are experimenting with Java ones and sometimes I see psuedo pies in computer games.
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Wednesday, April 25, 2001

Via (always awesome) Follow Me Here, a nifty article on the acoustics of concert hall design. Creating a large space suitable for classical performances of all kinds is a task that seems more of an art than science. The career-denting tale of Beranek's failure at Lincoln Center's Avery Fisher Hall is told. During my tour of Lincoln Center (that would be a regular tourist type tour, not, alas, a concert tour), the guide explained how the hall was encapsulated away from the outer walls so that street noise would not penetrate. And she also described the various solutions they had tried in their attempts to fix the acoustical problems, one of which was a set of "clouds" hanging from the ceiling. Controlling reverberation is the key to a good hall design. At MIT's Kresge Auditorium, they have a system of microphones hanging from the ceiling on long cords above the orchestra. The microphones were spaced only a few feet apart and there were a lot of them. And we often set them swaying back and forth with an accidental (usually!) whack of a violin bow. The sound gathered by the mikes was played back on a slight delay to create an artificial reverb. Supposedly it worked quite well, but I haven't been in the audience for a concert to hear it myself. I just remember thinking "it figures that MIT used an electronic solution."
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Tuesday, April 24, 2001

Does this ring any bells? "Now you know my name is Simon, and the things I draw come true." And no, I'm not talking about the Saturday Night Live parody with Mike Myers in the bathtub. "Simon in the Land of Chalk Drawings" was first shown in the U.S. on Captain Kangaroo. I've had the theme song stuck in my head on and off for 25 or so years. Simon would draw people and other things on his special blackboard and then climb over the garden wall and interact with what he had drawn. Simon himself was animated, but he looked more 3-D than the characters he drew himself. Plus they were more chalky looking. Over the years, Simon and Harold (he of the purple crayon) got a little mixed up in my head, but the theme song stayed true to Simon.
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Bay Area residents take note: the Palo Alto Square Theatre has received an eviction notice from their landlord, Equity Office Properties. This is the theatre on the corner of El Camino Real and Page Mill which shows excellent non-mainstream films (and is currently showing the almost mainstream "Crouching Tiger.."). Equity tried to evict the theatre in 1996, but the public fought back successfully. They have been in a month-to-month situation since then. The theatre is one of the most successful in the Landmark chain. According to the Landmark Northern California district manager: "There's not a theater in the United States that pays market rate for rents. Landlords either want to be in the movie theater business and contribute to the culture of the country or they want to make a buck." The complex is zoned for a theatre, so I don't know how Equity plans to get more money by evicting a paying business and letting the site sit idle. Surely they weren't losing money on it? Are they going to replace it with a higher grossing chain? Or battle the zoning and try for office space? Have they seen all those "for lease" signs appearing up and down El Camino Real? A Save the Square web site has been set up where patrons are encouraged to send their comments to Equity.
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Monday, April 23, 2001

Seth has photographed a very Silicon Valley bird. Yes, if I were a nesting bird, I'd find a coil of coax to be the perfect shape for a nest. I wish I had a photo of the bird's nest I saw in a traffic light.
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Rule 240 is an important term for airline travelers to familiarize themselves with. It defines what rights a passenger has when delays and cancellations occur. And these days it seems delays are inevitable. Prior to deregulation, Rule 240 was a federal requirement, nowadays airlines keep it as a good business practice. However, it's up to the passenger to know what he or she is entitled to, since the frazzled airline agent might not be forthcoming with help unless you mention the magic words. Each airline has their own version, but in general you may be entitled to rebooking (on another airline if necessary), meals, hotel rooms, and phone calls if your flight delays were the fault of the airline. Unfortunately, weather and strikes do not qualify. But most of the recent delays I've encountered have been classified as "mechanical problems" which were actually the result of mechanics "slow downs", so those would probably qualify. OneTravel.com has even more airline specific details in their Rules of the Air section.
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Friday, April 20, 2001

Who makes fire engines? You can't just run down to the Chevy dealer, pick between red & yellow, choose a tank capacity and then finance it with GMAC. Or can you? Every community needs fire engines, tankers, pumpers, hook & ladder trucks, rescue vehicles, and so on. There are fire fighting museums and web pages devoted to antique fire trucks. But where do new ones come from? American LaFrance Corporation. Digging a little deeper, I found, as I semi-sadly often do, that it is a small part of a much bigger deal: DaimlerChrysler. Strictly speaking, it is a subsidiary of FreightLiner, LLC, which is in turn a "DaimlerChrysler company". American LaFrance is headquartered in Cleveland, North Carolina and has ten manufacturing facilities. They offer free training courses (with purchase!), including "the science of magnetism". And they list their most recent deliveries on their website. The company started in 1832, making hand-pumped fire engines, went onto steam fire innovations ("We guarantee 80 pounds of steam in five minutes from cold water."), survived a monopoly restructuring in the 1890s and became the industry leader. So, no you can't just waltz down the street to get a fire engine, but it appears that you can finance one with DaimlerChrysler Financial Services. Which leads me to wonder: how much do these things cost?
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Thursday, April 19, 2001

Why didn't someone think of this sooner? Or maybe they did. Pledge Grab-it Mitts look so very handy! You wear them on your hand and dust dust dust. More control, more fun, less dust in those nooks and corners! These are throwaways, though. I suppose I can take my reusable dust attracting cloths and sew them into gloves. Then I can have washable dusting gloves. Hmmm. Perhaps I can sell those and make my millions.
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One of Powell's current Great Deals is the trade paper edition of "Cryptonomicon" by Neal Stephenson for $6.98. Not bad, considering they list a used copy for $10.95. I'm still kicking around a hardcover copy in the stacks by my bed and I was surprised to find that it's worth in the ballpark of $70. Powell's is listing a first edition, first printing, standard condition hardcover at that price. I've verified that the one we have matches those parameters. That means this book has increased in value more than certain stock purchases made in the same timeframe. Eeek! For a contemporary (modern? current?) author, Neal Stephenson seems to have pretty decent resell value on recent first editions. Alibris has a useful article: "Identifying First Editions for Beginners".
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Wednesday, April 18, 2001

I couldn't figure out what was making me feel uncomfortable about Williams-Sonoma's current seasonal color, jadite green. Then I suddenly realized -- it's the Martha Stewart-ubiquitous green! (I actually own a lot of light green things ... it happens to match my carpet. Which came with the condo. Maybe a Martha or green glass fan used to live here.)
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I have a bookmark folder for home and kitchen websites and the list keeps getting smaller. I just noticed that Tavolo.com now redirects to a section in OurHouse.com. I missed the December acquisition announcement.
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Ever wonder what the difference is between a Boston bagel and a New York bagel? Ever go to Boston and wonder "where the heck can I get a decent bagel around here?" Don't despair, there's a Boston Bagel FAQ just for you. The executive summary: "Boston bagels are relatively small, roughly donut-sized (but with a smaller hole). New York bagels can be used as spare tires on Geo Metros." And: "People in California think that Noah's bagels are wonderful, which is yet more confirmation that all that sunlight and smog turns your brains into bean dip." Bean dip? In my own head? Pass the chips! (And where does one go for a decent Boston Cream pie in CA?)
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Tuesday, April 17, 2001

Steve found an article on what They Might Be Giants has been up to. I can tell I have been a bad fan because although I've been watching Malcolm in the Middle semi-regularly since its debut, I had no idea it was TMBG singing the theme song. My mind went through vague "oh it's one of those new 'we're so witty' bands that try to sound like TMBG" thoughts but it didn't catch on that it might actually be them. Ooops.
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After posting about the first man in space last week, I realized I did not know who the first woman in space was. I know Sally Ride was the first American woman up there, but I was pretty sure we didn't beat the Russians at this one either. The first woman was Valentina Tereshkova, who was actually skilled at parachuting, not piloting as most cosmonauts are. She took off on June 16, 1963 for three days of orbiting and, of course, parachuted out after re-entry. It was her only spaceflight and Russia didn't send another woman up for nineteen years.
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Monday, April 16, 2001

The Faked Dr Pepper site has collected (and taste-tested) a comprehensive (as far as I can tell, after all it's pretty large!) list of Dr Pepper clones. The "Dr." names range from Dr A+ to Dr. Zing with non-doctor appellations as well, including the popular Mr. Pibb, which the taster found "extremely weak in comparison to Dr Pepper." (via Yahoo's Weekly Picks)
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Typewriter of the Month is a gallery of those wonderful tap-tap-tapping devices. It isn't being updated regularly anymore, but the past entries have descriptions that cover both their aesthetic qualities and mechanical features. (via RandomWalks)
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It's Boston Marathon day once again (ie. Patriot's Day in Massachusetts), so it's time to dust off my t-shirt essay on "The Halfway Point" of the Boston Marathon.
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Sunday, April 15, 2001

This weekend I saw a pear that had been grown in a bottle. It was a Poire William Brandy (pear brandy) carafe. The pear gets "bottled" when it is small and grows for a few months before harvest. The brandy smells yummy, but the taste is, as you may expect, alcohol intense. We didn't chill it, as I have now read is recommended, so maybe the flavor wasn't as pronounced as it could have been.
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Friday, April 13, 2001

When I'm web surfing, I always close pop-up ads immediately. These days I feel a tiny pang of guilt as I think "oh no, this site is going to go out of business because they can't get anyone to read their ads". I've wondered why pop-up ads and new larger sized, intrusively placed ads are so annoying. I often watch TV commercials. I look at ads in the newspaper. I even click through on "traditional" banner ads sometimes when the topic is interesting. What I've realized is that the placement and intrusion of these ad styles counter the act of surfing.

When I have clicked on a link or button, I have read the words that make up the link or know what I expect to be behind the button and my brain is moving ahead with it, anticipating what will be on the page, getting ready to read it. If a pop-up ad comes up, it blocks my train of thought, and I dismiss it immediately. And when I'm reading along on a web page, a large block ad that reconfigures the text and screws up the movement of my eyes is annoying to my reading task and I try to ignore it as much as I can. The way we surf through the web does not create places for effective advertising.

TV shows, however, are designed around commercials. Shows are designed to have "acts" that leave you with a natural stopping point for an interruption. When they splice up movies for network TV they are careful with the commercial pauses. And newspapers never (rarely?) stick ads in the middle of articles. When something is continued on a different page, they can't throw a pop-up ad at you, thank goodness. Magazines often do stick ad pages within articles, but it's usually easy to follow along to the continuation. So what advertising will work in a linked, web model? At what points are we interruptible and receptive to a pitch? And don't the powers that be realize the the more annoying and intrusive the ads are, the less we're going to want to look at them?

You may have figured out one answer to this. The content itself can change to make the ads work. The writers will love that.
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Thursday, April 12, 2001

Twenty years ago today, the first space shuttle took off for the first time. Twenty years before that day, Yuri Gagarin became the first human to travel in space. The space shuttle was scheduled to take off a couple days earlier than it did, so the shared anniversary was a nice coincidence. (Blogger's being very cranky so I'm not posting anything else today. Stay tuned.)
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Wednesday, April 11, 2001

When religious law IS the law: Passover cops raid restaurants serving bread on holiday. The original Israeli law was intended to apply "only to restaurants and stores displaying bread products in their windows, not to cafes serving them inside", but the current ultra-Orthodox Ministry is taking it beyond the original intent. (via The Other Side)
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Ruth Reichl (former NY Times restaurant critic, now editor-in-chief of Gourmet) has published a followup to her memoir Tender at the Bone. Called Comfort Me with Apples, it takes you through her beginnings as a food critic and onwards. This Newsday article delves more into the book, Reichl's success at Gourmet (which includes a clothing allowance), and there's a sidebar on the "new" Gourmet including the mention of grass (the smoking kind) "to sharpen gustatory perceptions". What'll happen when Gen-X grows up and takes over publishing from the baby boomers? (article via MediaNews)
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Tuesday, April 10, 2001

Travel agencies in tech areas, according to this ZDNet article, have become "the haunt of 20- and 30-somethings who pocketed cash during the stock market bull run of the late 1990s." Laid off tech workers are heading around the globe, decompressing, discovering different cultures, weathering out the downturn. Travel agents are thrilled to find that those who were laid off are willing to spend money on what is considered a luxury purchase. But if these workers' experience was typical, this is the best use of their money. They're buying back a piece of themselves. Or should I say peace.
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Sometimes I don't notice a trend until it is all over the place. The Nissan XTerra has been winning over drivers for over a year now and just about a month ago I realized it was everywhere. It's "trending" like the Ford Explorer and Toyota 4-Runner were about 5-8 years ago when SUVs really caught fire in the same age range (and that 21-30 range now has a firm Gen-X label). A lot of the ones I've seen don't have plates yet, so I think there was just a big acquisition surge. Nissan did excellent homework to attract young buyers to the styling, features and price point of this SUV. Gas mileage? Don't ask. (I'm very happy with my Subaru.)
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I did my taxes with TurboTax as usual, and was surprised to find that it no longer gave me the option of using the 1040-PC printout. This was the OCR-friendly format which usually fit on one page. A quick web search turned up the IRS Tax Topic 251: The 1040-PC Format. It was discontinued in favor of the electronic filing method. I'm not quite ready for e-file yet (and it costs money, more than stamps). Maybe next year I'll feel more comfortable with it after if I don't hear about any problems. For now, I guess I'll be sending off a pile of pages like I did before 1040-PC.
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Monday, April 09, 2001

Music news music news: Another eighties band is back in view: The Psychedelic Furs are back and on tour. And they're planning for their hits to sound just like you remember 'em because lead singer, Richard Butler, says "I really dislike it when bands get back together, and they rearrange the material so much that you can't even recognize it." I like it when bands put a different twist on well-known pieces at live shows, but, yeah, completely distorting a hit is not the way to get your fans up and dancing. Joe Jackson is at The Fillmore Monday night (that claims to be a special acoustic show) and The Warfield on Tuesday night. Dogstar, featuring Keanu Reeves is still, as far as the billboard on Lawrence Expwy knows, scheduled to play at The BackBeat on April 15. And via Yahoo's Weekly Picks, Wayne Studer, Ph.D. has written a Pet Shop Boys Song-by-Song Commentary. Find out the meanings behind songs you've never even heard (unless you're a super-fan like he is, of course).
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Saturday, April 07, 2001

I'm not really sure what just happened. We were in a really long line at Blockbuster (though I've been in longer there). We gave the very outgoing cashier my rental card, the movie we were renting, and $5. She asked if I was "Lilly", and I said "yes". We expressed sympathy for her being short-staffed on such a busy night, and she asked if we liked free stuff ("well, uh yeah"). Then all of a sudden we were leaving the store with: my rental card, the movie we rented, the $5, a Charlie's Angels DVD (to keep, for free), and a 30 day - 30 DVD rental card. The entire way home I kept asking "What just happened? Are you sure we didn't give her any money at all? Why do we suddenly have this free DVD we didn't want?" Huh.
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Good thing I'm easily amused. I just saw a real estate listing for a home in Los Gatos that reads "PRICED BELOW MARKET: $4,100,000" Ha ha ha ha ha ah ha hah ahhh wahhhh! Another listing smugly touts the availability of electricity in that neighborhood (city-run utilities... although I've heard they are also subjected to PG&E's rolling blackouts).
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Friday, April 06, 2001

NY Times article: People who collect paint-by-number art! "The paint-by-number concept was the work of two men: Dan Robbins, an artist who worked for the auto industry, and Max Klein, who manufactured paint." There are collectors with over 500 paintings of this genre. I guess there's a collector for everything. And that's why there's eBay. (I was planning to post this before I saw I could nip yet another link from Larkfarm: Le Salon de Paint-By-Numbers. Thank you Mike!)
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A Nightmare sharing website linked to on Larkfarm made me remember my latest anxiety dream. I have recurring anxiety dreams (I'm always worried about something; it's a bad habit) of the "I can't turn the TV off and there's the same thing on every channel" genre, or the "I am supposed to be on a plane but I'm late and I can't find the right gate" variety. This one was brand new (out of the rut, into a new groove!). I was driving a car and looking at the left sideview mirror. All I could see in the mirror was the reflection of the side of the car. I could not see what I wanted to see, which was the road and any cars that might be coming. My hands were frozen to the wheel so I couldn't adjust the mirror, and my eyes were pretty much frozen on the mirror as I tried to figure out why I couldn't see anything except the side of the car when I wanted to see so much more.
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We had more technical difficulties on Thursday, so excuse the hiccups.
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Thursday, April 05, 2001

From New Scientist, someone has developed software that can take English language statements and turn them into machine language. Creator Bob Brennan won't reveal details about the system, called "MI-Tech", until his patents come through. The key to it apparently is knowledge of the role of context in English. I wonder how significant his developments really are. One could picture a simple system that does what he claims, but then you start dealing with ambiguities and it gets complex quite fast. And I sure hope the patents aren't going to cover obvious tactics.
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A NY Times Magazine article on Charlotte Church revealed this tangential bit of information on the classical recordings industry: "When CD's became available in the 80's, classical music aficionados began going through their records and replacing them, album by album, with digital versions. The result was a decade of vigorous sales, during which labels merely repackaged the same music into ever more expensive collections and sat back to count the revenues. But now the changeover to disc is largely complete, and sales are down by nearly half, according to some estimates." The result of this trend is the use of pop music marketing tactics. To me this means selling the fluff instead of the substance, which often also means appealing to the masses. But it also seems to take more money to push the fluff, leaving even less to spread around to those who aren't a flavor of the moment. Anyway, classical music sales were probably saved by the release of CDs and would have dived sooner without them. Perhaps it will take a new technology to spike it up again (and that won't be Napster). But if the fluff gets more people interested in the classics, more power to the 'em!
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Wednesday, April 04, 2001

A co-worker was researching glass harmonicas (invented by Benjamin Franklin) and discovered the website for an actual manufacturer of the instrument. "In Europe?" I asked. No, to my surprise, they are in Waltham, Massachusetts. G. Finkenbeiner Inc. specializes in scientific glassblowing (lab equipment), but also makes glass harmonicas. You may have "played" on wine glass rims yourself. It's harder to do on the cheap stuff you get at your everyday restaurant (and probably very bad etiquette when you are at nice restaurants with the expensive crystal). But you can often get a decent glass to "ring" with the right amount of pressure. An odd sidenote: the founder, Gerhard Finkenbeiner, has been missing since May 1999. His Piper Arrow is presumed to have crashed and they have yet to find the remains.
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The Invisible Library catalogues books that have been referenced inside of books. Indexed by real author, real title, fictitous author and fictitous title, there is an eclectic mix of sources. The Harry Potter series is of course referenced with all of his schoolbook titles. Also, there's the lovely self-referential "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" from "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy".
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Tuesday, April 03, 2001

Via MediaNews, the Chicago Tribune's restaurant critic writes about keeping his identity safeguarded so he can dine anonymously. He goes over the tricks: using credit cards with his dog's name, making reservations on a phone without recognizable Caller ID, making sure the baby sitter can still reach you when you're dining under an assumed name. Ruth Reichl, the former NY Times critic, gave a Salon interview a few years ago that goes into even more detail on what life is like for a high profile restaurant critic. "I change my credit cards every six weeks or so. But, you know, they fax the names of the credit cards around to each other."
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I have fond memories of gleefully reading Byte Magazine's April Fools jokes way back in the '80s. But the only specific one I could remember actually was not a joke. It was a real product that people assumed was a joke. The MacCharlie, reported on by Byte in 1985, was a device that you plugged onto your Apple Macintosh (now you have to picture one of those old boxy Macs, not the new fruity ones) in order to run IBM-PC applications (well, DOS actually). Externally it looked like a set of two 5.25" floppy drives that plugged onto the Mac box and a keyboard extender that sat around the Mac keyboard to provide function keys and a numeric keypad. Internally, it had that good ol' 8088 processor. I don't know how well it worked, but it certainly was a creative concept for the time. Some actual Byte April Fool's products that I've hunted up were the MacKnifer, a knife-sharpener that fit into the Mac hard disk drive, edible floppy disks made out of soybeans (sensitive data? eat it), and a 5MB hard disk for the Timex/Sinclair 1000. Yes, 5MB was considered a very big joke back then.
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Monday, April 02, 2001

Oh my goodness, there's finally an image file on this site. Whatever possessed me to do that? Seems that when I have no time for them, the creative urges strike. And when I'm (rarely) unoccupied, I can never think of anything to do, or the lists I have of things to do don't appeal. By the way, though I did write it, that's not my actual handwriting. Oh, and there are now only 14 days worth of posts on the main page.
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Iridium Satellite, LLC relaunched phone service on Friday. Old handsets will still work and new phones and features are available. An interesting fact from the press release, there are 7 in-orbit spares for the 66 satellites, and they plan to launch 7 more next year. As I reported in December, the Pentagon is getting the best deal in saving Iridium from crash & burn: $3 million a month for unlimited airtime for 20,000 users.
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One of my favorite albums is The Juliet Letters which is a collaboration between Elvis Costello and the Brodsky Quartet, a classical string quartet. I had always wondered if/when sheet music for it would be released and it looks like Schirmer has obliged. That makes me wish I was still in college so I could easily grab a few friends and a practice room and have at it (not that it is completely impossible for me to get a quartet + vocalist together now, but the logistics and timing are significantly more challenging). Via Robot Wisdom, the Irish Times has an article on Elvis' latest collaboration with mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie Von Otter. They've released an album called For The Stars.
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