Well, last weekend I was a total sofa spud, and – over the course of the weekend – watched the entire first season of The West Wing.

Yeah, 15 hours of staring at that screen instead of a computer screen. Sue me.

I’ve long been a fan of the show, even though the last couple of seasons it’s fallen off a bit for me.

I never saw the first season – maybe a show or two in reruns – but it was amazing to watch the first season (especially without commercials!). Great acting, great writing, intelligent topics (for a prime-time drama) without much pandering. Just amazingly refreshing after sampling some the recent TV dreck.

So I purchased seasons two and three, and that’ll keep me occupied for some time.

Really, really quality prime-time TV. Amazing.

A week ago, 10+ inches of wet, frozen snow.

Two days ago, mid-50s weather: Fog throughout the day as the snowdrifts dwindle.

Yesterday, small ice storm. Had to chisel my way into the car.

Today and through the weekend, highs(!) of low teens, with wind chills well below zero.

Remind me again why I live in Chicago?

Ah yes, it’s that time of the year again: Time to flaunt your ignorance by proudly proclaiming to divine future events.

Hell, it’s just fun to do, and – as are most lists – fun to read.

Without further ado, my 2005 Prognositications:

• Theme of the year: Security – Hate to start off with a bummer, but that’s the big picture for 2005: Security from trojans, viruses, worms and other exploits. The winners of this derby will be the vendors (think Symantec) and ISPs (think Earthlink/AOL) who can seamlessly deliver this protection (“Mom, what ports does your firewall allow access to?” – there’s a conversation that’ll never happen…). The big loser will be Microsoft: large installed base, large target; OS and software built on pre-pervasive Net code, more brittle. At the same time, I expect MS to spend more $$ on security than any other single company next year.
• Google will have another remarkable year – I don’t mean this in the financial sense (though I don’t expect their value [currently ~192/share] to tumble in an appreciable way). I think they will continue to innovate and have at least two major impacts next year. This year I count three: Gmail, their IPO and the bookscanning project. The latter has received the least press; in many ways, it will have the largest long-term impact.
• Google will do something remarkable with Blogger – Google has really goosed up Blogger since the acquistion, but more flash (better tools, JS widgets and so on) than substance. Don’t get me wrong, they’ve taken Blogger to a whole new level, but I think they can do some really interesting things with it if they want to. I think the general dearth of significant improvements (such as those embodied for years in SixApart’s tools) signals that the big upgrade is coming.
• Six Apart will struggle – As one of the most remarkable Net stories out there, Ben and Mena have a good sense for what users want and so on. However, the generally brittle nature of MoveableType (don’t flame; it’s just hard to upgrade etc for NON-geeks) will become all too apparent this year as blogging becomes mainstream. Look for a buy out.
• Blogging becomes mainstream: – Bolstered by the divisive nature of the election, blogging actually became mainstream in 2004. Dean was an internet candidate; all candidates had blogs; bloggers brought down CBS/Dan Rather in a manner that would have been inconceiveable a year ago. All this made blogging acceptable; so look for corporate and media blogging efforts in 2005 to become as *yawn* as “..or visit or site at www.companyname.com” is today for just about any TV/radio ad. Simply put, in 2005 your mom will have heard of blogs.
• Industry consolidation a-go-go – Expect to see more mega-mergers along the lines of Oracle/PeopleSoft & Compaq/HP. Expect some rancor to accompany the big mergers, as the two previously mentioned. One possible target is Gateway: If so, it will be by an off-shore company – not Dell or IBM.
• Demise/decline of Apple and or Sun – I predict this each year to some degree, sometimes not doom and gloom, but never with expectations of progress. I see this year to be the same. Both companies will endure, gain a lot of press but not gain any market share; Apple will innovate more than Sun; Sun still won’t figure out how to make money off of Java.
• A serious Linux virus/Trojan will surface – As marketshare increases, so does the size of the target. I hope not, but PHP just got hit with one; Apache 2.x was vulnerable about a year or so ago…it’ll happen.
• This will be the year of broadband – Half of the US is now connected via broadband, but it’s been a long, painful process to get there. This is the year the incumbent telcos will pull their heads out of their asses and realize they can make money on DSL. SBC finally did this by working with Yahoo!; Verizon is starting to roll out DSL in an aggressive manner. While I love my cable modem, DSL is the answer to the broadband question: Delivered over the copper that’s already installed in just about every home. Yes, there are limitations (old lines, distance from central office etc), but it beats fiber (too costly), wireless (too flakey) and cable (not ubiquitous) in most cases. It’s the 80/20 solution that will make remarkable inroads this year. This always-on connection will help feed the security issue; instead of being online 3 hours a days, you’re connected 24×7. A port-scanner’s delight!
• Outsourcing – Will keep increasing for manufacturing/development (why not?), but will decrease/not increase appreaciably for customer service. With computers becoming commodities, service is a point of differentiation. Dell has learned this the hard way.
• Upstart Start-Up – Some new company is going to come on the radar this year and just blow us away (think Netscape/Google/Blogger). And it will probably be just a really well done job of something that – once you see it – is “duh! that’s so obvious!”
• RIAA & MPAA will again duck and miss getting hit with the clue stick – Let’s settle back and enjoy(?) another year of mindless litigation, chasing after the wrong targets by these two entrenched institutions. The current political climate makes these antics more possible than a regulatory/judicial administration that accepts that the rules have changed/don’t apply to this or that area, but that’s just gravy: The big issue is these organizations have dug in their heels and won’t budge a bit. No, the internet/DVD/VHS revolution doesn’t make us rethink our business models; it makes us want to sue people who are leveraging (uh, stealing with[?]) these tools. Disney is still doing the “lock the items in the vault for seven years” thing. Why? When theaters were the only outlet, this made some sense. Today, someone who’s kid wants to see Toy Story will (if locked away) borrow a friend’s, rent from library, burn a DVD from somewhere, buy on eBay or whatever not because they want to do these (in some cases, illegal) things, but because they can’t buy it. Rather than sue Mrs. Mom for copying Toy Story, why not make it available for sale? In seven years, her kid’s going to be X years old and won’t want to see it anymore. Or has seen it so many times over at the Johnson’s house on their old VHS that there’s no way the kid’s going to beg the parents for it.

Gina wrote a great blog entry describing the steps she took to clean and bullet-proof her mother-in-law’s Win98 computer.

Did the whole AdAware, virus protection, ZoneAlarm etc routine. Great reference for anyone who has to do same (and I’ve done my share of this, as well – believe me).

Yet the comments thread dissolved into (*sigh*) a whole “Why didn’t you just buy her a Mac?” pissing match. Even down to the “Gina, how much is your time worth? If you spent X hours at a $Y/hr rate, you could have bought a Z Mac for that money!”

It’s folks like this that give Mac users the reputation as being a little too religious, shall we say.

Come on folks, let’s look at this a little more rationally:

• Would mom’s computer have been as hosed if it was a Mac? Probably not, but that’s hindsight. Let’s deal with the hand we’ve currently been dealt.
• Mom doesn’t want a new computer – she wants her existing one fixed. If I brought a Yugo into a garage for a transmission repair, I’d be pretty pissed if the mechanic suggests I just buy a BMW instead. WTF?
  
• The whole discussion of putting valuation on time spent cleansing the machine is just….icky. It’s family. With family/friends and so on, you just do stuff. The clock isn’t running. You’re helping out. As they’ll help you when they can.
• Let’s pretend the discussion of valuation of time spent had merit. OK, you might be able to get a Mac for the price of your time spent fixing the Windoze box. But what about the cost of the software? A browser is one thing, but to work effectively today (and this may well change) you need MS Office. Pricey. And did mom have Photoshop on the Win98 box? You going to buy her a copy of Mac Photoshop (and so on…)? And installing and configuring same…the cost of converting just went up…
  
• Mom’s used to a Windoze machine. You really want to have to have her learn all the new things she’s going to have to do to get stuff in and out of the Mac? She might even ENJOY the solitaire game.
  
• If mom has a computer at work, it’s probably a Windoze box. Why learn two different systems? (Fun for geeks, not for non-geeks)
  
• Let’s say mom’s up for a change to Mac: Want to transfer all her data and guarantee nothing will be lost in the transition?

And so on.

The comments on Firefox vs. IE make sense (and this is what Gina did): It’s a discrete piece of software that is free, looks and acts like IE and can automagically import all the IE bookmarks and so on. Beautiful. More secure, more versatile and no learning curve for user.

OK, over at arts.telegraph they’ve listed the 50 best cover songs of all time.

Obviously, this is an exercise in futility to some degree – no one will ever agree with the list in it’s entirety. But that’s part of the fun of such a list – to disagree, make your own list, support your choices and so on.

On the other hand, it seems to be a pretty good list. No, I don’t agree with all the listings; I’ve never heard some (actually, many) of the covers, and they certainly missed some important ones, in my mind. But they caught some good ones, and it’s tough to disagree with their top choice: Jimi Hendrix’s cover of Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower”. This was so well done that Dylan started playing the song this way.

But – just off the top of my head – here are some covers that are missing from the list that probably should be on there:

• Highway Patrolman, Johnny Cash Cash takes Springsteen’s sparse tale of family and morality (from the Nebraska album) and makes it his own.
• Mrs. Robinson, the Lemonheads Making immorality sound like fun! Very commercial in a very successful manner.
• Satellite of Love, U2 Bono and the boys tackle the Velvet Underground song and make it work
• She Came in Through the Bathroom Window, Joe Cocker Part of the Mad Dogs and Englishmen album, Cocker and a band of renown put a whole new power behind the Beatle’s staple. Actually, this whole album is rich with great covers: The Letter, Leon Russel’s Delta Lady, Leonard Cohen’s Bird on a Wire and so on. Seek out. Listen to.
• Percy’s Song, Fairport Convention Everyone seems to have covered Dylan, and this English folk-rock powerhouse did several Dylan covers. Percy’s Song is just a favorite, mainly for the beautiful, strident voice of Sandy Denny on this piece.
• Good Morning Little Schoolgirl, Muddy Waters and Van Morrison Not a duet; two different covers of the Sonny Boy Williamson classic. Both approach it from roughly the same direction, with Waters’ version more leering, Morrison’s more questioning.
• Wang Dang Doodle, Koko Taylor Chicago’s queen of the blues just kicks the everloving shit out of this Willie Dixon number whenever she sings it. This is her song now, much like Aretha Franklin’s cover of Respect has made it her’s.
• Wooden Ships, Jefferson Airplane Grace Slick and crowd take the CSN tune and, with Slick’s wonderful voice, make it a more mystic, ethereal song.
• Whiter Shade of Pale, Annie Lennox Lennox’s Medusa CD is an album of cover songs. It contains many gems, but her take on Procol Harum’s most famous song is the most precious of all. A great version of Talking Heads’ “Take Me to the River” here, as well.

Obviously, there are many others; these are just off the top of my head (and I think I own them all).

One interesting note: Who gets covered?

Only a handful of artists get a vast majority of the covers: the Beatles (both the song when then were together and on their own); Dylan; Velvet Underground; old blues singers, such as Willie Dixon (cover by Led Zeppelin and the Stones, for example).

For the first time in years, I actually hit the woods to do some photography. An example of what I found there is on the right; click for a sampling of some of the pics that I took today.

It was a beautiful day – a fall day: cool (high not breaking 60 degrees), little breeze, clear as a bell. Leaves starting to change and the flowers all, for the most part, done for the year. (I should have gone out last week, when the flowers were still popping to a degree.)

Nice day, nice area – Ryerson Conservation Area. Forest, prairie, a working farm (currently closed for renovation, unfortunately).

This really drove home a point I already knew: I need a better camera. The one I’m using is great for snapshots and such, but … I don’t do snapshots. I do heavy backlighting, extreme close-ups, document the division between water and terra firma.

For example, I grabbed three shots of a heron wading in the water in the middle of the Des Plaines River. With full telephoto (I don’t even know what it is, but it’s only a 1:3 ratio, so maybe 80mm equivalent?), the heron was just a dot. Blowing up the pic didn’t help, as the low light in the picture resulted in a slow shutter speed, which (in turn) results in a blurred bird.

Damn. I hate when that happens.

Was fun to see the critter, however.

The more computers change and improve, the more they don’t improve the overall (non-geek) user experience.

Yes, I could write until I ran out of disc space about this, but my latest hiccup was one that was good but ungood.

I’ve been using FireFox, and they just came out with an alert for a critical patch. OK.

I tried installing it, and it just wouldn’t take. No message, just a spinning graphic with “downloading and installing patch” message.

OK – be patient. Take shower.

Still spinning. WTF?

I went to /. to see if others have been having this problem, and I got the anwer: I have to enable web site downloads (on a per site basic) through FireFox preferences.

While this is a good thing – block trojans and so on – it’s not intuitive. And the installer message never said (even after a half-hour [shower] of trying), “uh, dude, must allow installs or I can’t help ya…”

Once I enabled downloads for the site, the install took about < 5 seconds. Again, excellent. But this is not a good user experience, overall. Most people would just give up and say, “This browser is hosed – it tells me to install this patch but it won’t install. Back to IE..” Which would be a bad thing…

There are so many things wrong with this post by Katherine at Obsidian Wings that I don’t quite know where to begin.

No, it’s not that the post is flawed, it’s just what is reported it so wrong in so many ways it makes one’s head spin.

Read. Be very dismayed. This is a bill – giving all but implicit approval to torture (so long as it’s not done by us…that would, of course, be wrong…) that specifically exempts itself from judicial oversight.

That old Marbury vs. Madison thingee??? Ancient history; dusty.

It’s also designed to be retroactive, which is troubling as well. Again, musty old ex post facto laws…

And this wonderous bill is sponsored by the third highest ranking Republican in the US: Dennis Hastert. Yes, the same Hastert who intimated – and refused to repudate his comment – that George Soros was being funneled money from drug cartels.

And Kerry’s losing?????

I just installed WinXP SP2.

I’m either very brave…or very stooopid.

Actually, I have positive results to report.

• Caveats first: I’m a computer geek and get this stuff; the download is huge, my broadband pipe (cable) is huge, and it still took about 20 minutes; this is a new box, with little installed (fewer chances of conflicts).
• Install was pretty painless; the only conflict was with Norton Anti-Virus, and it was not a “conflict” – MS sorta recommends getting another virus protection program. Which? I dunno. Didn’t care.
• So far, everything came back after the second reboot (first for install completion, second my own choice to see if it all took).
• As noted in caveats, not a lot installed here, but the Apache server and so on that I do have here are behaving nicely.
• The update attempted to block start of an FTP server I have running here; I allowed to run and the second reboot honored this request. Good.

Bottom Line: Big honkin’ update, but went extremely well as far as I can see (in 20 or so minutes…).

This surprises me, but in a good way.

Keep your fingers crossed….

As I’ve finally (finally!) gotten around to setting up my new (sigh…Windoze) box, I finally also go around to downloading Firefox.

Hey, it’s a full release – OK, v1-PR, but let’s not get picky.

Impressions, having never used it before:

• Wow, it looks just like IE! But that might be a good thing, as that’s what people are used to.
• It’s a much better look than Mozilla – I always used Mozilla with the classic (i.e. Netscape) skin. Just worked better. But this is nice
• Having not really read anything about Firefox, it’s fun to see the almost Easter Egg like items. The RSS and style switching items in the status bar and so on. Not incredibly useful right now, but points towards good things in the future.
• I have tab issues – I think Mozilla handled this better. I like Mozilla, where you had the icon on the left to “add new tab” instead of having to right-click on the tab bar. In Mozilla you could right-click, as well, but had the option of the icon. I personally miss that. One click, instead of right-click | menu selection. Hope this is addressed. (see Update)
• All the other tab goodness from Mozilla seems intact. Excellent.
• Yay! The Javascript console is retained. This is something that just kicks IE’s ass all over the place. Indispensible for Web developers (uh, like me….)
• Can’t really say how standards’ compliant this is, other than to say I haven’t run into any sites where weirdness showed.
• Alt text not displayed; interesting. I’m sure that’ll be fixed. Weird that it does not display….(see update)
  

Well done Mozillians!

Update

Trying to add a picture (the Firefox logo) to this post, I found a bug: Through Blogger, the upload doesn’t work. (JS error, but works in Mozilla. Odd.) Update 9/23/2004: I’m an idiot. Firefox was blocking pop-ups ( the JS window to load pictures). Allow pop-ups on this site and all works fine. MY bad.

Alt tags don’t display, but title tags do. While this may be standards compliant, still seems a serious oversight: Title tags are, to most, new and/or optional. Alt tags have been around for a decade. Don’t ignore the mass of the current web just to stick to principles. Bend a bit where necessay, as it is here…

Still – after one day – my firm browser of choice.

Update Deux

Once I bothered to look, I found there is a keystroke for new window: Ctrl-T – excellent; I’m all about keyboard shortcuts (which is one of the reasons I’ve really dug Gmail).

This browser keeps getting better and better in my estimation.