Our iPad arrived this morning (thank happy UPS driver) and Nathaniel had it unboxed in no time. But then he had to wait for me to get home, and this exposes the most serious downside of the iPad. It cannot be a standalone device. The first thing it asks to do, out of the box, is “sync” to a computer. In fact, that is the only thing it can do out of the box.

I’d love to say that the iPad is the computer for my mom. That it is the real computer “for the rest of us.” But that cannot be said, because to own an iPad requires also owning a full blown computer.

This model made sense for the original iPod, and even for the iPhone. But I think it is a serious shortcoming of a device as powerful as the iPad. This is a machine that should work out of the box, that should be able to be setup without a sync to another computer. I think that for the iPad to really take off, Apple will have to learn to make it a more capable standalone machine.

The ultimate insult I discovered setting up my iPad? Not even iBooks is installed! Helpfully, the iPad warned me of this when I first launched the App Store on the device, then helped me automatically download iBooks. Unfortunately, though, this download was cancelled by a request to read and “agree” to a 58 page iTunes license. Yeah, I read every word of that one (not). After that, iBooks was still not installed, so I had to go find it and install it myself.

Apple, this is not how my mom’s computer should work!

I want to be on the record that I am proud of my party today. I am proud that Democrats in the House found the courage to compromise. The Senate health care bill was a bitter pill to swallow for many progressives. It is far from what we hope for, but it is what we could get. The realism of this vote is the real victory for America. We may be slowly learning how to govern again, how to make hard choices and move forward. I am proud to be part of a constructive political party.

But I am also scared today. Over the past couple days John Avalon at the Daily Beast has circulated two posts that chill me to the bone.

One cites a Harris Poll which showed 57% of Republicans think Obama is a Muslim, 45% think he is ineligible to be president, 38% think he behaves like Hitler, and 24% (one quarter of Republicans) think Obama may be the Antichrist. The Antichrist? A “mainstream” party, a gem of our democracy, is becoming a home to delusion and paranoia. This can’t be good.

The other describes some of the militia movement targeting Democrats after the healthcare vote. Avalon notes that the breaking of windows at congressional offices around the country…

…follows the online exhortations of militia leader Mike Vanderboegh of Pinson, Alabama – who wrote on his blog “Sipsy Street Irregulars” this past Friday: “if we break the windows of hundreds, thousands, of Democrat party headquarters across this country, we might just wake up enough of them to make defending ourselves at the muzzle of a rifle unnecessary.” The parallels, intentional or not, to the Nazis’ heinous 1938 kristallnacht, or “Night of Broken Glass,” so-named for the 7,000 storefront windows that were smashed, are hard to ignore.

I just returned from Vienna this week. The horrors of kistallnacht are still remembered there. And even though we “won” the war against Hitler, there are still very few Jews left in Austria. Once violence starts, even winning is losing.

As Vanderboegh’s home page warns “All politics in this country now is just dress rehearsal for civil war.”

Really? Is that how far political discourse has descended? I hope there are some in the GOP who rescue their party from this lunatic fringe. Some who will stand up for the value of civil government, rather than civil war. Some who will return to constructive debate rather than obstruction and fanning flames. We need a civil opposition for democracy to work, we cannot become a one-party state.

Update via the Washington Post:

Vanderboegh said he once worked as a warehouse manager but now lives on government disability checks. He said he receives $1,300 a month because of his congestive heart failure, diabetes and hypertension. He has private health insurance through his wife, who works for a company that sells forklift products.

How’s that for hypocrisy?

I just spent a wonderful week in Asheville, NC, attending Code4Lib 2010. Code4Lib is an energetic community of library hackers who communicate all year round via IRC, email, and other media, but like to also meet annually to grab some face time with each other and share a bit of play in the process. What struck me most about the meeting was how well Code4Lib lives up to its ethos of “no spectators.” It was a meeting that demanded real participation, not simple proximity. I wrote a report about this first look at Code4Lib, take a look if you want to know more.

I have not been alone in musing about the iPad for the past few weeks. Just what is it? What will it do? Why would I want one? What is it for? Today I stumbled upon an answer. The iPad is not a device to read electronic books, the iPad will help us invent electronic books. More “below the fold”…

Read the rest of this entry »

Google today announced its Fiber for Communities initiative. They want to bring 1 gigabit per second connections (20 to 100 times faster than what most of us have access to) to 50,000 to 500,000 homes. Google figures it can (1) do something cool, (2) learn how to run a network, and (3) demonstrate the benefits of the kind of open network it advocates by putting some money where its mouth has been. This looks like a really great opportunity, now the challenge is to get our community to make a concerted response by the March 26th deadline!

I love color. One of my favorite college courses was a class on color theory where I learned that color was a lively thing, capable of surprise and even deceit. I enjoyed this article on The Meaning of Color today. I also want to recall this nice color theory tutorial.

The course was taught by Richard Lytle and was, I think, largely based on the plan set out by Josef Albers in his book Interaction of Color. I wish more art departments had such welcoming courses, so many jump right into drawing and never look back.

I’m trying to learn Ruby on Rails this week. I found a wonderful book called Learning Rails that takes a non-evangelical tone, works from the ground up, and seems to match my style pretty well (also, I love the errata). But I quickly ran into an issue not covered in the book, how do I customize the Ruby on Rails scaffold?

I wanted to customize the scaffold so that I could replace the space indents with tabs (I know, silly me) and add JSON support to the scaffold. I found a post about how to accomplish this in Rails 3, but my Mac and the book both talk Rails 2. So I dug in a little bit. Here’s what I came up with for doing this in Rails 2.2.2 on a Mac.

Copy the original Ruby scaffold folder to a new folder somewhere reasonable with the name “my_scaffold”. (For the rest of these instructions you can replace “my” with anything reasonable.)

Use a symbolic link to hook your new folder back to Ruby.

Change the name of the generator script to reflect your folder name.

Edit the generator script to modify the name of the object it creates. Change “ScaffoldGenerator” in the first line to “MyScaffoldGenerator” (adjust that name as necessary).

Now you have your own scaffold. You can edit any of the templates in /Users/myhome/Ruby/my_scaffold/templates and use the command “ruby script/generate my_scaffold MyObject my_field:string” to get rolling.

Note, the stylesheet.css name still conflicts with the same file in the original scaffold. If you want to resolve that conflict you can edit another line in the generator script. The line “m.template(‘style.css’, ‘public/stylesheets/scaffold.css’)” would be made to refer to your new stylesheet name and the layout template should be changed accordingly. Notice that you don’t have to change the name of the actual “style.css” file.

Fair warning, I am on day two of Ruby and Rails. I know almost nothing, so use the above hint with care. Feel free to comment if you know more and want to offer a better suggestion!

Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) just announced that it is suing the Central Corridor project. That is a line I am not willing to cross, so Mary and I have suspsended our membership. I love MPR, but this is a boneheaded move! Here’s the note I sent them:

Please suspend our sustaining membership of MPR.

We are not willing to support an organization that is hindering as important a civic project as the Central Corridor rail line. We have been uncomfortable with your position for years because the Central Corridor plans were well known long before MPR renovated its space. As far as we are concerned, it is wholly MPR’s responsibility that it built studios as close to a known future rail line as it did. You should not be suing the state, but rather asking funders like us to up our contributions a bit to help you make necessary remediations.

Now that you have decided to sue the Central Corridor project we can no longer in good conscience support MPR. Maybe once this suit is over we will consider rejoining, we will see what the consequences of your action are. If this in any way leads to the demise or diminishment of the Central Corridor project, though, then you have lost us as member for good.

Years ago when we were renovating our attic I made the naive choice to do the tile in the bathroom myself. I was inspired by Hundertwasser, but really knew nothing about tile. Many calls around town revealed a new little shop near the fairgrounds, Mosaic on a Stick. Lori Green and Maria founded the Stick as not only a source for the materials that mosaic artists need, but also as an open studio and learning space to invite people to discover the artform and fall in love with building a world from broken pieces. Today I read this wonderful article about Mosaic on a Stick.

I enjoyed it immensely. The broken plate had been sitting on my dresser for months, and every time I looked at it, I had a twinge of sadness, remembering the whole plate it had once been. But once I started breaking it up into half-inch pieces, it turned into something else entirely. Raw bits ready to be reassembled into something new. Possibilities.

I enjoyed arranging the pieces onto the wood picture frame, like pieces in a puzzle. It required a quiet concentration that was soothing, and I soon lost track of time.

If you live in the Twin Cities, you should really stop by some time. It is a healing experience!

The boys and I are thinking of escaping to a movie this evening and Nathaniel suggested going to see The Lovely Bones. As I was trying to assess it I stumbled upon commonsensemedia.org expecting a right-wing take down of a scary movie. Instead I found a thoughtful and well put-together review of the movie with great questions to think about with your kids and even reviews by parents and kids themselves. I found it very helpful and want to remember to come back and participate in this community down the road. Does anyone have other resources to suggest when evaluating media and talking about it with kids?