Jack’s Old & Busted Blog

Someone sent a crate of slide carousels containing training units for things like forklift safety and how-to-get-along-with-your-cow-orkers. They’re all dated from the ’60s through what looks to be the mid-’70s. Flipping through these is like viewing an alien culture or a parallel universe, one where it’s just fine to show some guy getting brained with a pipe wrench because he was distracted by a woman’s short skirt (and who seems lucid about her effect on workplace safety). But, considering their intended audience, the slides must have been effective. Seems like today most training like this focuses on why you should ignore the woman in the short skirt, not how you should look out for falling pipe wrenches.

When I learn to manipulate space-time, I’m going to scan all these slides in and put them online. The artwork is hysterical, some of it appears to have been composed/drawn on the slide itself? All I know is that it is my privileged duty to preserve these relics for posterity, and perhaps prevent future generations from being decimated by short skirts.

“A New Kind of Science” by Stephen Wolfram (NYRB) looks like an interesting read. I love heretical scientific works. They spark the imagination and remind us that, for all of its cold facts, science is mostly overgrown kids with chemistry sets trying to find the Lost City of Atlantis.

I think the reason that America’s students have fallen behind in the Sciences has nothing to do with intelligence or math ability, but entirely to do with their lack of this imagination. The kind of gumption demonstrated in juvenile literature like Heinlein’s “Have Spacesuit, Will Travel” has been usurped by complete fantasy, a la Harry Potter. Oh, well. Perhaps the realities of modern science and the Nuclear Age are too much.

Just tried out iSync, Apple’s new information synchronization utility (is everybody tired of the whole i-thing naming convention yet?). It’s a beta release, but it still seems half-baked in the way it handles a Palm sync. It makes the palm desktop rather useless, but it still requires the Palm Hotsynch software to function. I suspect the other shoe will drop soon and we’ll see some Apple/Palm hardware that uses an integrated version of iCal and Address Book. None of these grimy little jewels would be worth the $129 for OSX 10.2, by the way.

Apple seems to release nothing but beta software these days, and charge dearly for it. I guess with such a miniscule installed user base for OSX, they can justify that all their software is beta to some extent. OSX is like the concept car that everybody thinks is cool but impractical; W*nd*ws XP is like the H*nda Acc*rd everybody drives. Or, better yet, OSX is like some experimental aircraft. When it crashes, people just shrug their shoulders and say, ‘What do you expect?’

Apple had better get it together, or they’ll be hawking iPods at W*l-M*rt to pay the bills. Don’t be surprised when the x86 version of OSX is released in the near future. All those “switch” ads you see? They’re planting seeds for PC users, so that when OSX-PC is released, they’ll have some motivation for purchasing it. By that time, Apple will have enough bling-bling i-toys in the pipe to make a fat living.

That’ll test that MS EULA agreement, I bet.

It’s definitely Chimera. Something with its cut-and-paste functions.

Blogger keeps chewing up the code on this page for some reason whenever I publish. Or it could be chimera. It seems to hate javascript.

Photoshop is one of those programs that has grown so big that I wonder if, individually, the team that creates it, know all of its features. Adding ImageReady to the mix stretches the feature set even further. I’ve spent the better part of two days going through online PS tutorials, and I haven’t even scratched the surface of what it can do. But, hey, I know what a clipping path does now. Yeehaa!