Now This

Dear Amazon: I like you and I buy a lot from you, but you seem to have been infected with stupid.

Don't make authors angry at you, but especially don't make Scalzi angry. He is quite skilled at explaining himself.

All The Many Ways Amazon So Very Failed the Weekend by John Scalzi

Hey, you want to know how to piss off an author? It's easy: Keep people from buying their books. You want to know how to really piss them off? Keep people from buying their books for reasons that have nothing to do with them. And you know how to make them absolutely incandescent with rage? Keep people from buying their books for reasons that have nothing to do with them, and keep it a surprise until it happens. Which, as it happens, is exactly what Amazon did. As a result: Angry, angry authors. Oh so very angry.

...

Think about the disparity of corporate responses here. Macmillan issued a detailed statement from its CEO discussing the event and his company's reasons and rationales for acting as it did. Amazon issued an unsigned forum comment written by someone who is apparently a little shaky on Macmillan's relationship to its own product. Now, which of these two corporate responses ... appears to be the work of actual adults?

A Message from Macmillan CEO John Sargent

Interesting framing by Carl Masak:

Code generation and stone soup

Every type of control flow in programming languages is just convenient sugar for if statements and while loops.

ifs and whiles are the stone soup to which all the rest of our control flow can be added as seasoning. ifs let you conditionally skip ahead in code, and whiles allow you to conditionally skip back. That's all you need.

Hadn't quite heard it put it like that before.

I'm as likely as not to try and turn a given task into an operation on lists -- filter with grep, process with map, repeat and fade.

I guess if you could squint you could look at map as a flavor of while and grep as your if.

Smart advice from Matt Deatherage to anyone who has the chance to ask Apple honchos a question in public.

Recommend reading the whole thing; it really highlights the value of lurking in a space before speaking (and on Apple conference calls, lurking is all most people can do).

Deatherage has apparently been listening to the calls for almost 14 years...

What analysts should ask Apple: Apple holds an earnings call Monday--here are some dos and don'ts for analysts [via @timbray]

Reporters can call and listen live ... but Apple hasn't taken a question from reporters during a quarterly conference call in well over a decade. Only financial analysts are allowed to query the company's executives.

That can be a darned shame, because a few times each year, well-meaning analysts let loose with giant stink bombs of questions.

...i.e. unproductive questions which an experienced attendee knows will be swattted aside. A couple of his suggested questions instead:

On their retail stores: "Is your retail operation exposed to any of the CRE problems, including GGP's bankruptcy?"

...someone needs to ask those executives, point blank, "How long do you believe the filter-and-review model for every application on your worldwide mobile platform is sustainable?"

..or of a decade, if you're fussy about when it starts & stops. I'm agnostic.

Kevin C. Murphy over at Ghost in the Machine has gone to a lot of trouble to put together a review of the best 100 movies of the last 10 years, according to him (I think by the end he's reviewed more like 115, but who's counting).

Worth your attention.

• The Oughts in Film: Part I (100-76)
• The Oughts in Film: Part II (75-51)
• The Oughts in Film: Part III (50-26)
• The Oughts in Film: Part IV (25-11)
• The Oughts in Film: Part V (10-1)

Kevin, 3 things:

1. Wow that was a lot of time you put in, both watching & reviewing.
2. Thanks! Found several new things I should put in (or move way up in) my movie queue.

3. Thanks for reminding me of Tom Hanks' Mr. Short Term Memory. This was my favorite sketch of his:

   Mr. Short-Term Memory : [ looks at the card ] What is this? "Tony Randall"? What you just hand these out to people you meet? That's a little sad.
   Tony Randall : You just asked me for it! You begged!
   Mr. Short-Term Memory : Wha- [ turns to Tony again] Tony Randall!

   Host [Phil Hartman] : Here's today's showcase, spend your thousand on whatever you want.
   Mr. Short-Term Memory : Oh Cool um, I-I'll take the color TV for 300.
   Host : Alright that leaves you with 700.
   Mr. Short-Term Memory : And let's see, uh, I'll take the color TV for 300.
   Host : ... Fine, that leaves you with 400.
   Mr. Short-Term Memory : Oh! A color TV! I need one of those!

7+ weeks with no posts. Shew.

The problem is: Writing for the web is one of the most optional things I do. There are a lot of less optional things in front of it, including but not limited to: work, @thelittleguy, @Medley.. sleep.. the occasional videogame..

As soon as any of the other items needs a little more time than usual, any time I might have normally written up anything for the site just goes 'poof'. And November/December are pretty much guaranteed to be busier months, in several dimensions. So, apologies.

Resolved for the new year: no gaps between posts greater than 7 days.

It's not like I don't have immense piles of links saved up to post about..

I can't find a reference for it right now, but I remember reading once that the physicist Richard Feynman ate the same lunch every day. He figured out what he needed and then just did the same thing all the time so he could stop wasting any more of his life worrying about 'Gee, what should I have for lunch today?' Could be apocryphal, but it's believable to me.

I'm not so ascetic that I'd accept no variety in my daily food, but I recognize the value in having standard procedures for some things. If you can make any potential decision point a Solved Problem, that frees up your attention for other things.

So it is with our morning coffee. We've tried a number of varieties and brands and flavor profiles, and after years of iteration we've hit on a combination which is satisfying every single morning:

• Use Dunkin' Donuts Original Blend whole beans. Grind them fresh.
• Add a bit of Penzeys Mulling Spices to the grounds. Around a teaspoon most of the time; if making a pot later in the day, or if the weather is cold, double that.

It's awfully good.

Lately I've taken to customizing the spice blend by adding even more Cinnamon Chunks than there already are in the Mulling Spices. Makes it even better.

Knowing in advance that we're going to be drinking this all the time lets us order in quantity --

• DD actually has a Home Delivery option that works out pretty well cost-wise. We started with a 5-pound bag every 10 weeks, which is the longest interval they offer; we may well need to shorten that in the end.
• Penzeys takes off a bit if you buy a lot of Mulling Spices at once.

(Not affiliated with or compensated by Dunkin' Donuts or Penzeys Spices. Though they are welcome to send me merchandise or money if they feel so inclined.)

Some other folks have already picked up the ball and run with it, posting about several Excellent Things themselves. I like!

• Medley
• Dan Lyke @ Flutterby
• Katxena @ Breaching the Web

I see both Medley and Katxena mentioned other Penzeys Spices. This is not surprising as they are generally awesome.

Back in the mists of 2008 or so, there was a Facebook/LJ-meme going around called '25 Random Things About Me'.

I lack the wiring to put any effort into that sort of overtly public navel-gazery without prohibitive amounts of throat-clearing mixed with impatience with myself for participating in it.

So, I never did get around to that. However, thinking about such lists inspired me to do something else I find less annoying and more interesting.

What I'm willing to write about instead, and what I'd like to know from other people, is:

What things are excellent?
What do you not just like, but think everyone should know about?
Can be anything. A food, a place, a website, a product, an idea, a song, a book ... whatever.

So, in Facebook parlance, I tag anyone who reads this. Post about some Excellent Things and why you like them. And you can post 1, 5, or 25, it really doesn't matter.

I have several Excellent Things in mind, and will be posting about them for the next little while.

Not so coincidentally, it's November! When some people try to post regularly on their blogs! And try to come up with approaches which will help them do so!

Matthew Yglesias writes a lot, nearly every day. It comes as no surprise then that he's a fairly quotable guy at least once a week.

The Cable Effect

...The three [daytime cable news] networks combined have an aggregate daytime audience of roughly zero. But even though the audience, looked at nationally, amounts to [a] rounding error the networks are hugely popular among the tiny number of people who work in professional politics. Just like traders have CNBC and Bloomberg on in their offices, political operatives are constantly tuned in to what's happening on cable news.

The result is a really bizarre hothouse scenario in which people are basically watching . . . well . . . nothing, but they're riveted to it. How things "play" on cable news is considered fairly important even though no persuadable voters are watching it.

And cable news' hyper-agitated style starts to infect everyone's frame of mind, making it extremely difficult for everyone to forget that the networks have huge incentives to massively and systematically overstate the significance of everything that happens.

We've unsubscribed from cable TV and have no service to replace it; we don't hate TV, we just recognize that we weren't watching any for the last several months (what with 2 jobs + a 1-year-old), so why pay a monthly fee for it?

Now and then I miss a couple of shows, or live baseball. I do not miss the cable news networks one bit.

We currently get the Sunday Washington Post.

Why? Honestly, not for much. #1, I like getting the Sunday comics, #2, sometimes I enjoy looking through the Sunday ads, and #3, it's just possible there will be something interesting to read. But more often, when I browse it, I encounter a piece or 2 or 3 or 4 which is just garbage and wonder anew if we should just drop it entirely.

And, ok, #4, Gene Weingarten's pretty good most of the time.

The Post called twice this week to ask if we wanted to receive the Post for the other 6 days of the week, for free (for 12 weeks). Such a deal!

Well, knowing our past experience when we got the Post every day, it would just arrive, pile up, and go straight in the recycle pile.

(I thought there was an economics term for this sort of pointless waste of materials, energy and effort, but 'deadweight loss' isn't it. I'm certain there is one, though.)

So I said no thanks.

She, paraphrased:

"I would ask you to reconsider, Mr. Bogart. Think about the paper carriers, whom the Post will still be paying even though you're not charged for the paper. It would keep them working and paid."

"......"

Wow. What do you say, really? I had answered the phone intending to say "Look, I already said no once this week, something's wrong with your list", but this completely threw me off from remembering that.

So I refused more explicitly:

"Still. We are barely even sure we want to keep receiving the Sunday. So, no on getting the rest of the week."

With that, she let me go without a fight.

Do it for the carriers?

I'm not without sympathy, but. If you are reduced to using preserving the carriers' jobs as the reason someone should accept your paper, you seem to have run out of good arguments.

Don't ask me to please come back to your restaurant so the cleanup crew will keep their jobs; ask me to come back because you make such tasty food.

Produce a paper people would want to read, and maybe you won't have to ask people to please accept it for free. Maybe stop inflicting people with twisted value systems (like Robin Givhan, Richard Cohen, Charles Krauthammer, Howard Kurtz, George WIll...) on your readers, and I'll think about spending time with the decent rest of the paper.

Had I said yes, we'd just be back to shuttling little daily bundles from our front stoop to the recycle pile, then back out to the curb.

Just like picking up dog poop, except it's recyclable.

(The Washington Post: Think of us as Recyclable Dog Poop! But delivered to your door for free!)

(14 months)

Lately L has been making pancakes on Saturday mornings (with an egg- free, dairy-free mix -- surprisingly tasty). TLG has been pretty happy with them.

His first taste of syrup was a couple of weekends ago. He had finished maybe 2 torn-up pancakes, plain, and indicated he wanted another with the time-honored point-and-"Uh!"

I wanted to share a little extra goodness with him, so I broke off a piece of another pancake, dipped one edge of it in the small pool of 100% Maple Syrup on my plate, and told him that this bite would be a little different.

He took it and ate it, and had no visible reaction.

This wasn't what I was expecting... I pretty much expected some happy kicking of the feet, or an 'aaooh', or 'mmm', or a very quick request for more. Something to indicate he'd been pleasantly surprised.

But no, he just ate it like all the other bites of pancake before it, and he was in no hurry for the next bite. He gave no sign he even noticed a difference.

Except.

When he was ready for another bite, he picked up the next chunk of pancake in front of him and silently held it out to me. Aha.

I again dipped one edge in some syrup and gave it to him. Again he ate it as though nothing were different. But for every remaining bite, he held it out to me for a little touch of syrup until the pancake was all gone.

Thankfully, he hasn't insisted on syrup for everything ever since.

But I had to laugh at his unusually nonchalant yet unmistakable way of saying "yeah, ok, that was pretty good."