Versions of the truth

Just when we thought it was a winter without incident, Mother Nature gives us not one, but two snowstorms. Come on! I thinks. This is mid-February. If you let us off the hook till now, couldn’t we go just slowly into Spring. No. Certainly not after the Groundhog, On February 2, told us it would be like this.

Number 1 averaged about 7 inches. Okay we dealt with it, cleaned the cars off, shoveled around, threw some snowballs. Fluffy fluff.

18 inches of snow

Then three days later comes the second storm. My wife’s company closed for the first time in 17 years. Let that fact verify the roar that this storm brought. It was a doozy at 18 inches. It took many times hacking away with a shovel to make a pathway to even walk to the cars, and digging them out was another no pain no gain experience. Spring - come on in, you’re welcome here.

Thanks to all who gave me the answer to the mysterious question of why a package of razors said they were jetable. Duh, I should have figured that one out.  

For me, the i in iPhone is short for “I know it’s a phone, but look at all this other cool stuff.” And so here is my second installment on an iPhone app of interest.

Spawn

Productivity? - nope. Fun - yep. Spawn is an art app, but not of the drawing variety. It’s clear that the programmers have integrated trigonometry functions in, as what you see are all these swirly lines bouncing all over. And being “interactive,” you can lead the lines into shapes, areas of the screen, make them converge into a dot, or make them explode out to all the corners of the screen.

By the way, the company that made this have another nifty, triggy, arsty app named Artisan. Same concepts but different controllable aspects, such as the speed of the visual generation. Now if you will excuse me, I have some serious art playing to do…

The iPhone has an app for everything right? Well so far I have played games, gotten advice, and learned dog tricks all on the 2 inch by 3 inch screen. Excitement and yawn.

But then I get this app which is in a league of its own or maybe its just hooked into the biggest music library in all of creation. Its name is Shazam.

When ever you are near a source of music – a radio, a broadcast coming over a store’s speakers, even at home with your music gear, Shazam will tell you what you are listening to. This is so useful when out in the world and you hear some song you fall in love with only to have the DJ NEVER tell you what it is. That ever happen to you?

Shazam to the rescue. While the music is playing, start up Shazam and press the Tag Now button. It will listen to the music for about 10 seconds, then transmit its sample somewhere and then back to your iPhone is the answer. I have seen this app figure out rock, classical, jazz, and more. I get how the technology works. What I don’t get is how it can do all this so fast. It takes just a quick sample, and even at that the sample may be cluttered with other noise when your are in a public place.

And the answer gets back to you in a handful of seconds as well. It will even link to a YouTube video if there is one of the song. This is free. This is iPhone. This is 2009, the year of iPhone wonders.

It might look like an office chair, but it’s a demon with a purpose. I sit, I work, I have a sense of calm, in a safe profession, for which my life expectancy might rate high on some actuarial chart.

At work not knowing danger is near

Darn office chair, your legs are sturdy, but then why, WHY! are your arms so hard? I cushion up to you and you return the favor with a brick-like response against my torso. I am right handed, I guess I am overall right aligned (that’s meant as a physical trait, not a political one) so I lean into you often to and on my right side. And then one day (actually last week) you return my affection by nearly breaking my ribs! Haven’t I been nice to you? Gave you a nice rug to roll around on? Gave you tables, desks, and other chairs for friends?

Who would know with your innocent, flat, have no care in the world look, you would have your arm dig into me as I reached across the void of my desk towards the bookcase to grab some extra large computer books (they cost about $5 per pound). It’s bad enough I can hardly reach for anything with my right arm after breaking my shoulder, and then you add insult to injury, or rather injury to injury!

the chair arm and my ribcage - not a good mix

If I wasn’t such a forgiving type I would roll you in for one of those leather padded plush fall asleep in models. Can I still count on you?

I must be too much of a Dummy to see I have become Brilliant. As a neighbor pointed out to me recently I have increased my stature in the world of writers, not just by the number of books I have written, but also from their progression - from Dummies  to Brilliant.

Another of my education problem rants - and it’s math once again. My son and I are working with flash cards this morning. I hold this up to him:

And on my side of the card is the answer - in the upper right corner:

Either I am getting a bit loopy, or somewhere along the way the rules of math have changed. How can the answer be zero? Isn’t dividing by zero a no-no? What happens if you whip out your calculator and enter 2 divided by 0? What do you get? My calculator says Error. I bet yours does too!

I see a lot of sites. I make a lot of sites. I own a lot of sites. So when I see a site of note that I am impressed with I feel like passing it along. Today’s site of interest is twistori. It’s a mix of emotions, technology, and creativity. It lists messages run through twitter. The messages are ones that match a keyword - of which there are six: love, hate, think, believe, feel, and wish. The snippets scroll on by, actually up. It’s fun to watch. It looks like this:

Check it out!

Weird,
A neighbor rings the bell. I answer. He is holding a pie, wrapped in foil. “Is this yours?” he asks, “It was sitting on the trunk of your car.”
No, not my pie, nor do I have a clue who would leave a pie on my car. Is this pie for me? Hhhmm, I don’t think so. Think about it. If someone wanted to give me a pie, and got so close to the door, that they instead left it on the car - makes no sense.
I took the mystery pie from the neighbor and kept it inside over night. The agony! What to do?! Did someone leave me a gift? Is this someone else’s pie (left on my car on the night before Thanksgiving). What flavor is it? Can’t tell without driving a utensil into the pie, but then I could be accused of being a pie abuser. No thanks!
So the next morning, today, Thanksgiving, I put it back on my car around 6:00 am. It is now the afternoon and the pie is still there. I have to drive somewhere soon. What to do - put the pie on someone else’s car? It could be the car of the neighbor who rang the bell. I don’t know which car is his. What would he think if the pie he gave me ended up on his car. This is like musical chairs. Last person left holding the pie, what - has to eat it?

Yesterday, November 7, Joni Mitchell turned 65. Happy Birthday!

There are few musical artists that spin an influence over such a diverse group of - other artists. Joni is one of those golden few. With a career that has altered multiple genres - folk, pop, jazz, and endless variations of those, Joni just does her thing and we follow along, often in deep gratitude.

Although Joni is from Canada and has lived in various places, I never associated her earlier years as a folk musician with a bustling place like New York City. From the Clouds album is a song, Chelsea Morning. For years this tune would ring around my head but without a thought of the song’s history. Then one day I discovered the scenario of the song is looking through an apartment window in New York City’s Chelsea district.

With a line like “Woke up, it was a Chelsea morning, and the first thing that I saw
Was the sun through yellow curtains, and a rainbow on the wall” it seemed to be somewhere else. Chelsea is just another busy New York area of Manhattan.

Here is the story behind the song:
In a 1996 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Mitchell explained: “I wrote that in Philadelphia after some girls who worked in this club where I was playing found all this colored slag glass in an alley. We collected a lot of it and built these glass mobiles with copper wire and coat hangers. I took mine back to New York and put them in my window on West 16th Street in the Chelsea District. The sun would hit the mobile and send these moving colors all around the room. As a young girl, I found that to be a thing of beauty. There’s even a reference to the mobile in the song. It was a very young and lovely time… before I had a record deal. I think it’s a very sweet song, but I don’t think of it as part of my best work. To me, most of those early songs seem like the work of an ingenue.”
Story courtesy of SongFacts.

Bill and Hilary Clinton named their daughter after the song.

Hey, and that is just one song! From an artist who has written songs in the hundreds.
Your fans of long are aging with you but your art and music is as fresh as those days in the ’60s. Please don’t stop. We love you.