Ninjamurai

One of the most important books in ages, The Dumbest Generation tells how modern teens and twenty somethings are more clueless,  more inept, and more well dumb than ever before. While they are able to carry on tons of IM conversations at once and apparently can use a computer for World of Warcraft and video sharing and ripping dvds etc., they do have problems with, oh, reading, writing and arithmetic. 

The reasons for this are many and the book does examine some of them. 

I could get into to some of the reasons here, but I try to keep politics and the like off this blog. Suffice to say this is not by some random chance that this has happened and look no farther than the 60s for when this whole downward slide began. 

You have no idea how hard it is for me not to go into my theory on this. It is a shame I have been told without any uncertainty that I can not put up political or anything other than tech on a site that I give to my students… Make what you will of that… Oh well, if you can find my other site you can read what I have to say about it.

UPDATE: I have been reading some of the posts and comments on blogs around the net about this book. It is really quite humorous watching people making excuses for kids or trying to show one or two that are smart so this “proves” that the author is stupid. It is also quite revealing reading the calls to fire the professor who wrote the book or saying that he is dumb. Sigh, well, that sounds about par for the course. If you don’t agree with them, call them a bigot, a racist and try and get them fired. Yep, wouldn’t want anyway to point out the elephant in the room or anything. Heaven forbid kids learned about history or something, I mean we can’t have them questioning Michael Moore, Al Gore and Noam Chomsky, what would the world be then?

As Rush has said, “Most people’s historical perspective begins with the day of their birth.” and people in positions of power are looking to keep it that way forever.

This song struck my heart so hard I even made a website named after one of the pivotal lines. I know many, many anime fans that consider this their favorite song. It is definately in my top 10 for sure and heading quickly for top 5. It is tear jerking. It is beautiful. It is a song few can forget.

I remember the days of summer
We were so close together
You were humming the songs of silence
Sweetly plucking the harp of wind

Every moment was sacred and mystic
We were near to the shore of eternity
The days are gone, and will never come back

You were a half of me…long time ago

Life can never be perfect without you
But I’m still on my way to the future
For I remember your sweet song in my mind

To the lost horizon, I’m calling your name
Again and again

Though the night is so dark
A new dawn is so close to me
Sun will come and shine on all seeds of hope
Bud and bloom…

I remember the days of winter
You were sitting beside me
All alone in the shuttered places
We were waiting for thawing day

Every moment was sacred and mystic
We were hoping the night was eternal
The days are gone, and so far away
I’m still singing your sweet song for long
Long windy nights…

Another wonderful song from the Final Fantasy series. Melodies of Life has some great lyrics and is very memorable. I love it. I love singing it. We used to get into arguments over whether or not to end our karaoke with this song or Yamato’s theme. Some of the more touching lyrics highlighted here:

Alone for a while I’ve been searching through the dark
For traces of the love you left inside my lonely heart
To weave by picking up the pieces that remain
Melodies of life–love’s lost refrain

Our paths they did cross, though I cannot say just why
We met, we laughed, we held on fast, and then we said goodbye
And who’ll hear the echoes of stories never told?
Let them ring out loud till they unfold

In my dearest memories, I see you reaching out to me
Though you’re gone, I still believe that you can call out my name

A voice from the past, joining yours and mine
Adding up the layers of harmony
And so it goes, on and on
Melodies of life,
To the sky beyond the flying birds–forever and beyond

So far and away, see the bird as it flies by
Gliding through the shadows of the clouds up in the sky
I’ve laid my memories and dreams upon those wings
Leave them now and see what tomorrow brings

In your dearest memories, do you remember loving me?
Was it fate that brought us close and now leaves me behind?

If I should leave this lonely world behind
Your voice will still remember our melody
Now I know we’ll carry on
Melodies of life
Come circle round and grow deep in our hearts
As long as we remember

One of my top 10 favorites is Eyes On Me from Final Fantasy VIII. A hauntingly beautiful love song and one of the finest endings to a video game every created. If you do nothing else, fast forward to 2:15 and watch what may be the most touching scene ever created for a video game.

So let me come to you
Close as I want to be
Close enough for me
To feel your heart beating fast
And stay there as I whisper
How I love your peaceful eyes on me
Did you ever know
That I had mine on you?

Darling, so share with me
Your love if you have enough
Your tears if you’re holding back
Or pain if that’s what it is
How can I let you know
I’m more than the dress and the voice
Just reach me out then
You will know that you’re not dreaming

Composed by Nobuo Uematsu with lyrics by Kako Someya and sung by Faye Wong this song rocketed to the top of the Japanese charts in 1999 and stayed there for weeks eventually becoming the first anime song to win Song of the Year.

Please, enjoy this beautiful and entrancing video

Google just can’t seem to give a nod to Memorial Day. The search engine star can spend hours making custom logos for things like Picasso’s Birthday or Walter Gropius’ birthday. Being good “progressives” they certainly have spent days I am sure making the custom logo for Earth Day. They even did one for Veteran’s Day, OMG WTF??? Yep, it’s true. Must have been a few too many complaints to try and snake out of that one.

For three years now they have had a pathetic excuse for not doing this–something about not wanting to offend anyone. No, Google, let’s get it right, you don’t want to offend Juan Cole and Ward Churchill. You don’t seem to have any problem offending me or millions of others who do not share your political view. 

Shame on you. Perhaps I will do an expanded post on this later as it is tangentially related to Tech ( it’s Google ) and it would go well on my other blog too :).

The New York Times released the beta of their Times Reader for Mac software. 

What is it? From the home page, it is an offline news reader for the New York Times. Good idea! The release product costs $14.95. Not too bad and newspapers have to do something to make money since people are leaving them in droves. Print circulation is on a massive downward slide and, well, paper sucks since it has to be made from trees and shipped and read and ink gets on ones’ hands, etc. etc. While I love books, I am all about making newspapers change as this sort of transitory information can certainly be better handled on the web. 

Using Microsoft’s Silverlight, the product is a pretty decent attempt at a newspaper reader application, but there are some lessons to be learned here for software engineers everywhere.

Here are some good lessons, we as software engineers can take home from this effort:

1. Trying to make something “look like” the old paper on a modern screen can be hard. This probably explains why they chose Silverlight as it makes this sort of thing, matching an existing real-world form or paper, easier. They could also have chosen Flash from Adobe, but Silverlight is newer and backed by a major partner, Microsoft.

2. If you choose a product to base your application upon, make sure it won’t make a whole bunch of people angry. The Mac community has a long history of distrusting Microsoft,  some well-founded, some not so much, but whatever the reason, they are not going to be jumping up and down with excitement to install Silverlight. Flash might have been a better choice for that reason.

3. If you are going to make an Internet application, you might want to include support for popular sharing sites like Digg and Delicious. Also, you might really want to think about allowing customers to support, uh, bookmarking. While the application does let someone email the article it allow neither saving it for use with the normal browser nor sending a summary to said user. I understand the thought process here, “it’s a proprietary application”, but it’s the customer you need to think of here.

4. Primum non nocere ( First, Do No Harm ) - If you are going to go with a custom or proprietary technology to make your application work, don’t make the result worse than its source! One big problem I have with the reader is its seeming blurring of the text and photos. Surely, this is some issue with the way Silverlight anti-aliases things, but photos should not look softer than they do in a browser. I checked this is Vista as well and the behavior is consistent across platform so I am going to make the call it is Silverlight.

5. Customers want to do their own customization not yours. NYT gives the customer three sizes to choose from allowing them to control the presentation. Many customers do not understand this reasoning and instead see this as an unnecessary restriction on their “way of doing it”. Remember, it is the customer’s perspective, not yours, that is important.

6. People will see this application as a web browser, so it better behave like one. The reader does not behave like a normal browser. Personally, I would have made this a web application and just leveraged the browser to do the lifting for the app. But, that would forgo the pay site nature of this product and the “old thinking” of having to “look” just like a newspaper. Fine, we can agree to disagree, but customers are being confused because they can not open pictures, like in a browser, or resize to the full screen, um, like in a browser. Well, you get the idea.

7. If you are going to go propeitary, ( e.g. not web application ) at least try to support common features on the platform you are targeting. Mac has incredible support for saving addresses, built-in dictionary and indexed searches ( Spotlight ), graphics and manipulation and more. Not even a sight of this is in TimesReader for Mac. I don’t know that it is a huge deal but not being able to select text in an article is pathetic. Because of this non-feature, I can’t look up a word in Google or on my local Mac. 

All in all, a good effort here, but needs some work and some people who understand Macs and people to work on this thing.

This is an AMV made to Love Hina from the Xenogears ending theme “Small of Two Pieces.”

I figured I would continue my posting of my top 5 favorite songs and this one is in there for sure. Sad, beautiful, melodic and meaningful, this song truly captures the beauty of melody and feeling. A top 5 for all time.

My recent experiences at both Digg and Technorati can be summed well in these two pictures.

First, we arrive and the world is good and we have excitement:

Then, after using them for awhile, one discovers that the collective brain power of most of the Diggers would have a very hard time lighting a 5 watt bulb and the inevitable occurs.

You wake up one day, log in to Digg and you REALIZE:

Seriously, Paul you are a good man. You need to get with the 21st century.

Paul wrote on his blog today that he was “worried” about the fact is mother in law called him to see if he was going to the Apple Boston store opening. Even his wife was asking about him going. He couldn’t resist a dig against Apple fans though even in trying to explain his ho hum behavior ( of which there is nothing wrong by the way. )

The problem comes when he says that people lining up to get into a store’s grand opening is another step toward the end of Western Civilization. Oh, really. Not a 7th century bunch of religious fanatics who have for certain said they want to wipe it out? Not politicians who really could care less about their country as long as they get the money and connections. Not the pathetic and worthless junior and high schools in most major cities of the US which now exceed the 50% drop out rate.

Seriously, Paul, lining up to see a beautiful and innovative new store is not so bad. You really need to get out more. Maybe go to a grand opening or something.

Apple won two Black Pencil design awards today for the iMac and iPhone designs. These Black Pencil awards are rare and are considered the top award for design in the industry.

Apple has now won 6 of them–more than any other company in history.

Oh, Snap!