¤ jetless heights

+ Sat, July 31

Make Mine Kerry

Watching John Kerry’s speech on Thursday night, he had me sold at As President, I will restore trust and credibility to the White House.  Done.  Sold.

A minute later:

I will have a Vice President who will not conduct secret meetings with polluters to rewrite our environmental laws. I will have a Secretary of Defense who will listen to the best advice of our military leaders. And I will appoint an Attorney General who actually upholds the Constitution of the United States.

Absolute conviction.  This is the guy for me.

I sincerely hope he continues with his powerful, direct tone.  My biggest gripe with the man is his tendency towards being boring.  Thursday’s speech was stirring, simple and sincere.  Here’s hoping he stays as lively and approachable as he proved he can be.

Also, it seems there are free copies of the speeches from the DNC available on the iTunes Music Store.  One can only assume Wednesday and Thursday’s speeches will appear shortly.

2:04 PM  ×  16 Comments  ×  0 Trackbacks

+ Tue, July 27

Mama T

I hadn’t watched any of the speeches from the Democratic Convention before tonight’s speech by Teresa Heinz-Kerry.  Stately, elegant, wise and an even tone — it’s too bad she’s not running for the presidency, we certainly could use an intelligent and charismatic leader.

I’m sure there will be similarities drawn between her and Hillary Clinton, but Hillary is a subject that’s too touchy for me to approach here.  I will, however, say that Mrs. Heinz-Kerry would mark a wonderful change from the glazed-over silence we’ve received from Mrs. Stepfor Bush.

And then, as any self-respecting 18-28 year old male would do, I tuned into The Daily Show to actually learn about current events.  And laugh at Rob Corddry in a cape, which was mind-numbingly brilliant.

10:34 PM  ×  7 Comments  ×  0 Trackbacks

One Step Towards A Real iPhone?

I made it six days without directly talking about Apple.  That’s a major accomplishment for me.

It was just last night when Mike Davidson made some pretty heady predictions about Apple’s entrance into the cell phone market.  With no definite plans or rumors to back up his claims, he went out on a limb and went so far as to say,

I’m going to go on record as saying we’ll see this [the Apple iPhone] around the beginning of 2005. I’ll also go on record as saying if Apple doesn’t capitalize on this opportunity soon, the market for iPods will dry up and they won’t have a digital lifestyle leg to stand on.

That’s some drastic talk about the company who is absolutely leading the digital lifestyle revolution in the consumer’s eye.  It’s not without warrant, nor is it terribly far-fetched.  It’s simply an extreme statement that I think many people have trouble swallowing.

Regardless, his thoughts on an Apple-branded third-party cellphone running Apple software that would allow you to bind it with your Mac and its Address Book and iTunes and Mail and what have you, are very interesting and would certainly produce a must-have device for me.

And it is tonight — only one day after Davidson wrote out his predictions — that Apple and Motorola announce a version of iTunes that will run on Motorola phones starting early next year.  It’s certainly not the grandiose plan Davidson envisioned, though it is a first ground-breaking step where one did not exist yesterday.

Apple never moves their most important products to foreign platforms when they don’t feel they will turn a healthy profit from it.  In fact, I can only think of one time they did that in the past: October 16, 2003 - iTunes For Windows.  Need I remind you that Apple has sold well over 2,000,000 iPods this year alone?  iTunes for Windows allowed the iPod to blossom into the must-have device for our day and Apple knows the brand power of iTunes.

The only reason I can see iTunes moving from the desktop to the cellphone would be if a truly Apple created/licensed cellphone is sitting in the wings in Cupertino, waiting until the perfect moment for deployment.

It seems Mike was just thinking different.

1:23 AM  ×  5 Comments  ×  0 Trackbacks

+ Mon, July 26

The Dude

I don’t know about you, but I’ve always wanted to know what on earth “dude” means and where it came from.  Words don’t just pop into existence, you know.  Today, from a link from Anil Dash, I have my answer:

For a correct definition of the expression the anxious inquirer has only to turn to the tight-trousered, brief-coated, eye-glassed, fancy-vested, sharp-toes shod, vapid youth who abounds in the Metroplis at present. He is a Dood.

New York Mirror
24 February 1883

The spelling of the term flip-flopped between “dood” and “dude” for a period of time before clearly settling on our present day “dude”.  Or, y’know, “el duderino” if you’re not in the whole brevity thing.

A little more history, it seems the term originated in 1883 in a poem published in the New York World, signed by THE WORLD. You can read much more here.

So, now you know.

12:10 PM  ×  2 Comments  ×  0 Trackbacks

+ Sat, July 24

Daring

Phil in the Daring Fireball T

My Daring Fireball T-shirt arrived today.  It’s quite daring.  Like a fireball.

6:45 PM  ×  9 Comments  ×  0 Trackbacks

+ Fri, July 23

Music Stats

There are a number of things which tickle my fancy in very consistent ways.  Two of them are music and statistics.  Together, they form sort of a super-fancy-tickler-from-space or something.  There’s a handy little app that’ll pull your play counts data from iTunes and do some light processing of that (sorry, Mac only).  Let’s look at my data.

Songs: 4,159 songs
Listens: 37,711 listens
Duration: 98.6 days
Average: 9.1 listens/song
Favorite: 4-way tie; 30 listens each

Those four, by the way, are Weezer’s Tired Of Sex, The Dismemberment Plan’s Spider In The Snow and two from The Shins, Kissing The Lipless and their brilliant Young Pilgrims.

Numbers are cool, but what do they mean?  My play counts got reset when I got my G5 on October 6.  There were 291 days between October 6, 2003 and July 23, 2004.  Out of those 291 days, I’ve been awake for roughly 145 of them and of that five month timeframe, 68% of it has been spent listening to music.  That’s a lot of time spent listening to music.  Reminds me of that quote in High Fidelity:

What came first, the music or the misery?  People worry about kids playing with guns, or watching violent videos, that some sort of culture of violence will take them over.  Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss.  Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable?  Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?

I don’t mean to allude to being a sad bastard and wallowing in my own depressing music filth, a quick gander through my recent music would directly disprove that hypothesis.  No, rather that quote bubbles to the surface on account of the subject at hand.  You always have to wonder what’s the cause and what’s the effect or whether it’s a self-compounding system.  Do you choose your music to be a soundtrack for your life or do you bend your life around the music you listen to?

Personally, I choose the self-compounding system answer where the effect causes the cause which causes the effect.

1:25 AM  ×  16 Comments  ×  2 Trackbacks

+ Thu, July 22

Design Notes

As promised, I want to discuss some aspects of the design and structure here.  Below is the unformatted list I used to track the features I wanted to address in the first release of this site:

x  new design
x  MT 3.0
-  choice of designs
-  choice of font sizes
-  better searching
x  rss for linkblog
-  comments for linkblog
x  better archives for linkblog
x  new archive structure
x  kill comment popups for normal blog
x  add trackbacks

X’s are for completed items, -’s aren’t.

The other items in my list are pretty self-explanatory.  Other blogs can send trackbacks to my posts, which you can see on individual entry pages on the side.  These trackbacks are links to entries on other sites with related subject matter to the post on my site.  Further reading and whatnot.  The other items were largely user requested.  Every link I post on the side is now archived forever.  There are rss feeds for the links.  There will be comments for the links shortly (I wanted to get this out in the wild sooner rather than wait for feature creep to rear its ugly face).  Additionally, there will be site searching, but that takes quite a while to develop and again, getting this site online was far more important.  And anyway why would you need a search for two posts?  User-selectable styles?  Did I say that?  We shall see…

You’ll notice there is no firm navigation anywhere to be found on the site.  Yes, the masthead of every page points back to home base, but that’s about it.  I did this because I want this site to break free from the cut and paste format of so many blogs.  I tried to ensure that every page allows access to related pages but only to related pages.  Heavy bloat is a sin equal to skimpy offerings.  I feel that my decision here adds a personalized and logical structure to every page, hopefully making page to page browsing easier and more streamlined for you.

This site was tackled with standards and accessibility firmly in mind from the outset.  At the bottom of every page you can find urls to check the validity of the structure, style and accessibility of whatever it is you’re viewing.  There are a few small errors here and there, but as Mike Davidson so firmly put it, completely strict validation is neither necessary nor entirely worthwhile.  I wrote these pages in xhtml 1.0 strict, but - and hold on here, this is shocking - I use the target attribute in the links in the comments.  This isn’t valid and that’s a-ok with me.  That’s the only error that really comes to mind as a frequently invalid item, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there are others slinking in the shadows.

As mentioned in the colophon, I owe an absolutely enormous thank you to the wisdom of Jeffrey Zeldman.  Not to suggest he directly helped out with the work here at all, his is the most brilliant of guiding lights in web design.  Dishing out intelligent, practical and applicable advice and techniques, he has helped out more than I can say.  Between his Designing With Web Standards and his online mag A List Apart the debt I owe can be repaid only with results.  I think this site goes a long way in that department.

Web standards, man.  They produce results.

6:56 PM  ×  2 Comments  ×  0 Trackbacks

+ Wed, July 21

OKGO

Hi, I’m Dokas McClure and you might remember me from such entertaining websites as stereoboy.org and, uh… actually that’s it and you very well might not remember me from that one at all.

Crap.  I’m two sentences in and I’ve already screwed up.  Let me try that again.

Hi.  My name is Phil and I used to run a site somewhere else at some other time.  A few hiccups and server troubles later, here I am beginning anew at jetless.org.  In the time off, I’ve missed writing in a public format more than you’d believe and I’ve sorely missed hearing from you all.  You may look at this site as a one way thing where I talk to you, but let me tell you plainly: your comments and emails are the most exciting piece of this whole publishing deal.

Alongside everything you’d expect to read from me, I’m going to post quite a bit over the next few days on some aspects of the work here, both past and future.  Design notes and explanations, goals and plans.  The nitty gritty.

So in the words of Sloan, c’mon c’mon, we’re gonna get it started.

10:08 PM  ×  41 Comments  ×  1 Trackback