Leap Day Kiss from Jessica Rabbit

This excerpt is about a Malibu surfer named Mickey Dora. Just waves and foam and a man in black shorts on a surfboard. And this beautiful, beautiful voice, the most natural thing in the world, right there with you.

The ultimate thing for most of us is to have an endless summer.

I recently left my job and had to buy a new laptop. I decided on an ASUS N53SV. ASUS, because it’s a great brand, the N53SV because it has the right specs. ASUS is a great brand because they use standard components in their systems and then integrate them using what I suspect may be some of the best QA processes in the industry.

The end result is a system that doesn’t require much in the way of specialized drivers and that you can expect to be supported for many years on many different OSes, with excellent build quality, at a very reasonable price. It also means you don’t get forced into whatever foolish “strategic objective” the company wants you to become a part of: no stupid proprietary connectors, no bloated software that wants to “add value” to your life.

Of course, not even ASUS, bless their souls, can escape the value-add trap. Computers have been completely commoditized and “it will do what we promise” is a much harder sell than “we promise everything!”.

This new system, for example, comes with a “quick boot” feature, which is useless, and a bunch of pre-installed software that tries to hook you into signing up for some of ASUS’ “cloud service” offerings.

It’s a complete waste of effort, time and money, and anyone can see that these add-ons have been poorly conceived, poorly tested, and don’t have any serious commitment behind them. They exist solely as the joyless expression of a misunderstood idea that has been marched to death.

Still, I had some fun removing all the extranaeous crap. Computers are so finished and complete these days that there is almost no satisfaction in setting up a new system anymore. You just turn it on, install some of the de-facto standard software like Photoshop and Office, set a new background image, and presto, you have a “computer”. Certainly, you can customize things, but in a few months time, the automated upgrades will break your customizations anyway, and it all starts to fall apart. In the end it’s just more trouble than it’s worth.

I used to spend days, if not weeks, customizing my machines, and learned a lot about how they worked in the process. Now I just remove desktop icons and uninstall some programs - a kind of vestigial, mostly symbolic gesture, I guess.

But still, with each icon I removed, with each program I uninstalled, the machine felt a little bit lighter, a little less burdened. Layers and layers of management, marketing and logistics each add their own requirements to a product. As you peel off these layers, the thing itself is revealed: an improbably complicated, multi-billion component piece of consumer electronics, built at razor-thin margins, representing the effort of hundreds of thousands of people who studied and worked hard to bring it into the world.

As you remove all the aspirational crap and confused distractions, you begin to understand what drove these people. You can sense what they wanted this thing to be and catch a glimpse of what is still to come. It is like a mind-meld of nerds across time and space.

The new machine is called Arianwen, after Arianwen Brycheiniog, supposedly meaning “white, holy silver”.

]]> http://awacs.dhs.org/2011/09/blue-skies/feed/ http://awacs.dhs.org/2011/06/belladonna-panorama/ http://awacs.dhs.org/2011/06/belladonna-panorama/#comments Sun, 26 Jun 2011 18:23:14 +0000 admin http://awacs.dhs.org/?p=601

Download audio file (The Assembler - Belladonna Panorama.mp3)

Belladonna Panorama is a new track that feels more like painting than music.

According to Wikipedia…

Belladonna is one of the most toxic plants found in the Western hemisphere. The berries pose the greatest danger to children because they look attractive and have a somewhat sweet taste.

The symptoms of belladonna poisoning include dilated pupils, sensitivity to light, blurred vision, tachycardia, loss of balance, staggering, headache, rash, flushing, dry mouth and throat, slurred speech, urinary retention, constipation, confusion, hallucinations, delirium, and convulsions.

In Italy, Bella Donna means “beautiful woman”.

do

what tomorrow’s

you

wanted yesterday’s

you

to do

Eight minutes is the time it takes for the sun’s rays to strike the surface of the Earth.

VISIT EIGHT MINUTES

Download audio file (The_Assembler-Diesel_Prairie-take3.mp3)

Finished a new instrumental track over the holidays. I started on this not long after visiting a King Shiloh Sound System session last month, so there’s a lot of deep bass in the track.

Q: All I hear is a bottomless, sucking void?!

A: The bottomless, sucking void you’re hearing, that is where the bass should be, and you need better speakers.

Oh - and happy new year!