Andy Lee’s weblog

I was at the Soho Apple Store today. I went with Jon, pictured above. When we went up to the second floor we discovered the whole theater area was blocked off by the temporary wall you can see behind him. According to the store’s web page, this has been the case for a month and will continue for another month.

On the face of it, this seems like a routine case of remodeling. The web page says they’re making the theater “bigger and better.” I suspect this means they’re upgrading it to support high-definition video, so they can show off the HD support in Apple’s media applications. But I wonder: does that add up to a two-month project? If not, what else could be going on back there that would justify disrupting store operations for two months? And why would only the Soho store be getting the makeover? And why is a corner of the sales floor also blocked off for construction?

My first thought was that they’re preparing some surprise related to Apple Computer’s 30th birthday, which will be April 1. But if that was true I’d expect a press conference to have been announced by now. So who knows. Maybe I should have tried simply asking an employee. And maybe I should have looked harder for clues; we breezed in and out of the store pretty quickly, so I didn’t look at anything closely.

While they’re at it — whatever it is — I wouldn’t mind if they’d build a glass wall to separate the theater from the rest of the floor. Noise from the sales floor has always overflowed into the theater, and vice versa. A soundproof glass wall would preserve the open feel of the store, while making the seminars in the theater more comfortable for both the presenters and the audience.

Earlier this year I bought shares of Apple at $72. Barring some major blunder by Apple, I was pretty sure the price would continue to rise for the foreseeable future. So of course since then it has steadily gone down, for no reason I can think of. Last week it closed below $60.

This is consistent with my track record as a prognosticator. In 1985, I thought Tommy Hearns would beat Marvin Hagler in their middleweight championship fight. Hagler won in a thrilling and brutal three-round knockout. In the 1990s, I invested twice in companies I worked for and was excited about. Those companies are now defunct. In 2004, I thought Howard Dean would win the Democratic nomination and rescue this country. And look how that turned out. Whether the subject is sports, business, or politics, I have an uncanny knack for guessing wrong.

If you ask me, I’ll tell you I’m still bullish about Apple in 2006, because that’s the truth. I’ll remind you of the wonderful things Apple has already announced and released in the last six months. I’ll assure you Steve Jobs has great surprises up his sleeve, because he always, always does. But I won’t blame you for being skeptical, considering the source.

It amazes me how much bad Chinese takeout there is in my neighborhood. I live on the border of Chelsea and the West Village, a busy area where I would expect competition to drive standards pretty high. But the food at most places ranges from mediocre to completely unappetizing. At one place I tried, the food was bland and way too heavy on the onions. At another place, the hot and sour soup was barely more than oily water.

King Food stands out not only as the best of a sorry crowd, but as a takeout place where the food is actually really good. When I feel a cold coming on I always get a big tub of their hot and sour soup, which has a nice vinegary edge, contains generous amounts of tofu, and is not too hot for my delicate palate. Beef with black mushrooms is also very good. Chicken with broccoli is delicious, with impossibly juicy slices of white meat, but sadly I have to avoid it, because something in the marinade doesn’t agree with my stomach. I suspect white wine is the culprit, since historically I don’t handle it well and it would be a natural ingredient in this type of marinade. I’ve never had a problem with any other dish, and I’ve gone there many times.

King Food is on 14th St. between 8th and 9th Avenues, which makes it not only the best but the closest of my options. There’s a couple of stools at a narrow counter if you insist on eating there, but it’s really a takeout place. They’re open till 11:00 most nights, midnight on weekends.

I don’t have any personal connection with the place. I just like the food there.

FreeMacWare is running a contest where if you blog about five free applications, and include corresponding links to FreeMacWare, you’re entered to win a prize. Here’s my list, in alphabetical order:

1. Camino

   I’ve switched a lot between different web browsers, for various reasons. No doubt I will switch again someday, but for now, Camino is my favorite. It’s snappy, unlike Firefox, and it doesn’t have some of the quirks of Safari. Camino does have some drawbacks that I may write about in a separate post.

2. iTerm

   I use iTerm instead of Terminal for one reason: tabbed windows. I wish it would rewrap long lines when I resize the window, the way Terminal does, but I can live with that.

3. JewelToy

   Once upon a time I removed all games from my computer, because they were sucking up all my time and giving me RSI. JewelToy is the one game I couldn’t bring myself to delete. I don’t play it often any more, but when I do I can easily while away a couple of hours, and I usually regret it when my wrist starts hurting again.

   JewelToy is open source. I’ve been meaning to study the source code for years, because I’m sure I would learn some valuable techniques. I just haven’t gotten around to it.

4. MacTheRipper

   I use this to rip DVDs to my laptop’s hard drive, so, for example, I can watch a movie on a plane ride without draining the battery or incurring wear and tear on the DVD drive.

   Once in a while, MacTheRipper gets stuck in a mode where it refuses to rip anything. Deleting its prefs file fixes this.

5. TextWrangler

   When I use a version control tool like CVS or Subversion, I do a ton of diffing, because I’m compulsive about knowing exactly what changes I’m checking in. To me, the way TextWrangler handles diffs is what sets it apart from its competitors. I may describe the diff process in another post; for now, suffice it to say that I like it.

   The prefs window for TextWrangler is pretty complex; I wish it had a search field like System Preferences or like the prefs window in Eclipse. Also, back when I was working with JavaCC, I wished TextWrangler had syntax highlighting for .jj files.

If you get a bad cut, you can hold it closed with a bit of egg membrane. If you crack a raw egg very carefully, you’ll find a thin sticky membrane lining the inside of the shell. You can use pieces of this to make an X-shaped bandage across the cut. The membrane dries clear and eventually wears off. Besides holding the cut closed, I suspect because it is pure protein it promotes healing.

I learned this tip from a judo player named Jeff, who learned it from our sensei. One day Jeff got a gash on his forehead from an accidental head butt during judo practice. Sensei patched it up with the egg trick, and it held so well that when Jeff got to the hospital the doctor who stitched up the cut said he could probably have just left it. There is essentially no scar; you’d have to get up close and squint to see there was ever a cut there.

I did a little googling and found this is a good remedy for insect stings. I also learned that Lon Chaney used to put egg membranes on his eyeballs to make them look cloudy.

I’m listening to Brian Lehrer on NPR doing a segment on National Pi Day, which is celebrated on 3.14, which also happens to be Albert Einstein’s birthday. I guessed an occasion like this might warrant a special Google logo, but no, Google is using their usual non-holiday logo today.

This seemed odd to me because yesterday Google used a special logo to celebrate the birthday of Percival Lowell, who was an astronomer in the late 1800’s who founded an observatory in Flagstaff, AZ. I’d never heard of the guy. But he gets a Google homage, whereas Einstein and pi don’t?

Here’s yesterday’s logo:

I haven’t posted a blog entry in a while because I’ve been experimenting with different blog services and applications, and not getting much joy from the process. Every few days I get an urge to babble in public, and I give blogging another go; every time I come away depressed, and too disgusted to post anything.

My frustration boils down to two issues.

Issue One is that blog sites don’t work on Mac browsers. Specifically, Mac browsers can’t handle the JavaScript hackery these sites use in their text editors. Say I’m using Camino to edit a long post at Blogsome.com. Every time I hit Return to add a new line, the text box jumps all the way to the top of the text. This is maddening because I have to scroll all the way back down to get back to what I was doing. Besides Blogsome, I’ve also tried Blogspot and LiveJournal. Camino, Safari, and Firefox all have problems with one or more of these blog sites.

I’m assuming these problems are Mac-specific because all the sites I tried are quite successful, which surely they couldn’t be if Windows users were getting as frustrated as I’ve been.

Issue Two is that blogging applications aren’t good enough, at least on the Mac. I tried several applications that are supposed to be more convenient than the browser for composing and managing blog posts. I quickly dismissed most of them, for various reasons I don’t remember.

By far the neatest one I tried is MarsEdit, which is a nicely designed app by a very good Mac developer. I was almost very happy, because MarsEdit has an option to compose posts using Markdown, which is a simple text syntax that is much nicer than HTML for editing blogs. MarsEdit would allow me to use Emacs key bindings, and it stores local copies of blog posts, which would satisfy the packrat in me. Unfortunately, the only blog site I found that accepts Markdown syntax is Blogsome, and MarsEdit doesn’t work properly with Blogsome. More precisely, it doesn’t work properly with WordPress, which is the software engine that drives Blogsome. I could use MarsEdit with Blogspot, if I were willing to edit my posts as HTML, but I’m not.

The blog app I should have loved is Apple’s new iWeb, but there are flaws in its user interaction that boggle my mind. I could possibly work around them, but their presence would still drive me nuts. I’ll write about iWeb’s UI flaws, and about how I think blog apps should be, in another post.

Update: Turns out the problems I had with MarsEdit were really problems with the version of WordPress used by Blogsome. MarsEdit itself works great. I’m still open to moving my blog elsewhere, but for now I’m sticking with Blogsome because it allows me to fine-tune the look of my blog, and because it supports Markdown. The key to using Markdown with Blogsome’s web interface was not only turning on the Markdown plugin, but turning off the WYSIWYG editor plugin. If I get a hankering for Emacs key commands, I’ll use Safari to edit blog entries, but for now I’m fine with using Camino, which is my preferred browser.