on banh mi, crappy mice, and the homeless

we have previously covered the eating of bánh mì, but today i went to a different bánh mì place, this time in chinatown. A Chau Deli is at 82A Mulberry St, between Canal and Bayard. The sandwiches are delicious, large (about twice the size of nicky's) and super cheap; the #1 is $3! It has a variety of vietnamese cold-cuts, some pâté, cucumber, pickled carrots and cilantro. The coldcuts seemed a little less processed and generic than what you get at nicky's. And so cheap was this that I decided to try a sardine sandwich too ($2.75). It was good, but not nearly as good as sandwich #1.

I only ate half of each one, figuring I could give the rest to a homeless person. but let me tell you, today must be a homeless person holiday because there was not a bum to be found between chinatown and the village. seriously, it must have been the first time in 20 years that there were no homeless people in washington square park. what the hell. for you conspiracy theorists, note that today is the day the city starts their annual official homeless census.

finally, coming up to nyu entails, as it so often does, the usage of a mac. i really don't dislike macs on principle (well, the DRM thing doesn't exactly enthrall me) so much as on practice. The keyboards, as previously noted are quite painful to my wrists. and now, the computers here in the library all have mighty mice which want to right click everything until you look it up and find out that it's supposed to sense whether you are clicking on the right or left. but there is nothing about the mouse itself which suggests it does this, so instead I just sit here getting frustrated about how this computer seems to keep getting stuck right-clicking everything making it impossible to use. Then once i figure out the problem, i find i have to lift my right finger up when I click in order to reliably click the way i want to. this is, i hasten to add, exceedingly uncomfortable and I might not even be able to do it if my piano teachers hadn't made me do finger-independence exercises when i was a kid. i appreciate that this might work well with a little getting used to, but for chrissake, stop telling me that everything apple makes is so fucking well designed. attention getting and cool are NOT good design principles, i'm sorry. though i can certainly understand why they are good for sales.

moments of pure geekitude

did you know that the cvs pserver protocol uses the strings "I LOVE YOU" and "I HATE YOU" to report successful and failed authentication respectively? it's true!

when i went to write this post, i had some other geeky moments to recount, but i can't think of what they were now. i thought the cvs bit was funny enough to post on its own however. i should write a song where i alliterate chorizo with chortle.

smallER

so believe it or not i already have two unfinished blog entries in the hopper about articles in the nytimes that are retarded, but i couldn't let this one slide. "Better Sound in Small Packages" by Michel Marriott, besides having a grammatically questionable title, has factual errors and is basically a shill piece for the consumer electronics and recording industries.

The big error is here: "DVD's have enough storage capacity for an album's worth of uncompressed music on them; CD's require compression, though not as much as MP3's and other formats read by digital audio players." That's just wrong. DVD's may contain higher quality audio by using a higher sampling rate or a higher bit-depth, and they may contain more audio information in the form of surround tracks, but standard audio CD's absolutely do not use any type of audio compression. On top of that, while DVD-audio (which is probably what this article is talking about, but who knows) isn't compressed, the standard DVD format ironically DOES support compressed audio, though I don't know how often it is actually used.

what really gets my goat though is how this article seems to unwittingly shill for the electronics companies. Regardless of what you think of it (and I don't necessarily think much) the triumph of the iPod and mp3 players in general (which DO use compression schemes) is a triumph of consumer preference over audiophile nonsense. The point is that in the market, portability totally trumps fidelity, for the simple reason that most people are listening to most of their music on the street, in the subway, on the bus, in a car, or even on a plane. These are places with a huge amount of noise. if you're really interested in listening on a nice stereo, go buy the CD; you can always rip it to your iPod.

So how is this shilling for the consumer electronics industry? Well, they loooove a format change, because that means everybody has to go out and buy brand new equipment to play their music. and the recording industry loves it to, because then they have to go out and buy all new music so that they can play it on their new equipment! so here's an article all about how horrible all of the music you have now sounds and how you should be keyed up to purchase what they want to sell you instead. honestly, i don't think that it's gonna happen again, what with the advent of the itunes music store etc. of course, that's a format change too.

when you get to the second page of the article, you realize that all of that has just been a set-up for more product shilling, this time for a few dsp processes that make you think your audio sounds better, when in fact all they do is make it sound more impressive. these audio effects have very little to do with the seemingly-misguided studio engineer who asks "Why shouldn't the listener at home hear what I hear in here?" (I don't set out to demean the engineer. I'm sure he does a great job, but the fact is there are very good reasons why, chief among them that they don't really care).

There's a scene in 24 hour party people where tony wilson wants to hear joy division's newly-recorded first single in the car. Another character complains that it will sound like shit in the car, but he replies that that's where most people will hear it so they should make sure it sounds good even there.

you know i have tons of work to do if i start writing a blog post with actual substance

let's talk about how.

it's my experience that when i say "how does it work," i mean something completely different from most people. if i ask someone "how does the vcr work," they will show me the remote control, and the various buttons. to change the channel you press this button, etc. the tape goes in here.

excuse me, but that's not how it works, that's how you use it.

i see the same problem on a bunch of wikipedia pages. for example take XMLHTTP. I have no clue, after reading that article, how XMLHTTPRequest works. I know how you use it (via browser scripting languages), what you use it for (to communicate asynchronously between client and server in a web application) and some examples of applications that use it. I even know how some web browsers implement it (IE used to use an ActiveX component).

But I still don't know how it works, and hence, I still don't what it is. "What I cannot create I do not understand" -Richard Feynman.

However, my criticism of Wikipedia here should not be seen as general. There are many articles on technical subjects which are quite excellent.

But to the extent it is a problem, I think that this is a kind of manifestation of the old "computers are scary" syndrome. There definitely seem to be wikipedia editors who are frightened that if they include "technical" details like i am suggesting that the articles would be more like a technical manual and thus these details are not "enyclopedic." I would argue that this is somewhat backwards. Details like the "known problems" section of the XMLHTTP article are far less encyclopedic.

i am now going to take a very foolish stab at reformulating feynman for my self: when you understand how it works, you can understand why you use it that way, and when you understand why you use it that way, you can understand how you use it.

gentlemen...

BEHOLD! the TWO TERABYTE FLOPPY DISK!

$ fdformat /dev/fd0
Single-sided, 1 tracks, 7806682 sec/track. Total capacity 1963888830 kB.
Formatting ... done
malloc: Cannot allocate memory
$

You know you're a geek

You know you're a geek when you find yourself snickering while reading a unix book in a bookstore.

mac ui pet peeve

i love osx in concept, but in reality, it is just pure horrible pain, both figuratively and literally (these keyboards! my god!). super-annoying: pressing delete does not delete a file. in fact, there are two keys labeled delete, and NEITHER of them deletes the file. this is just about the most obvious thing i can think of.

also, shortcut keys in text editing windows and boxes are woefully inconsistent. sometimes home and end work, sometimes they don't. sometimes i'm pleased to find that emacs-style keys work, but sometimes they don't. i'd be willing to let that slide except that the claim to fame here is supposed to be consistency and ease of use thereof.