What isn’t Apple, audiobooks, or alcohol is probably cats.
A friend sent me the following screen capture from Google News:
!{border: 1px solid #ccc}/images/bush-laughs-at-poor-kids.png(Google knows that President Bush thinks poor kids without health insurance is funny)!
I take this as another sign that the first true machine intelligence will emerge in the Googleplex.
Two and a half years ago, I wrote a post describing a problem I had been having when Rochelle migrated to Mozilla Thunderbird for email, and Norton Anti-Virus was corrupting her Inbox. The gist of the post was that there didn’t seem to be a good anti-virus solution that worked well with Thunderbird.
A couple weeks ago a comment defending Thunderbird came in on the post. I started to respond in another comment, but because the attitude expressed by the commentor is so prevalent in software, I wanted to respond more publicly.
Here’s the meat of the comment (or read in full):
The problem with virus checking in Thunderbird is actually not Thunderbird. It the strategy you are using to scan for email viruses. […] If your antivirus program doesn’t have a function to scan email as it’s downloaded and prior to hitting your inbox, get a real antivirus solution that does. Let’s not be bad mouthing Thunderbird for something you are not doing appropriately in the situation you have.
Well, at the simplest level, this is correct, it’s really just a matter of configuration. But on other levels this philosophy — that the features are there to solve the problem, the user just needs to find and configure them — is not a very customer-friendly one. You could argue that it’s the opposite. There are very few people out there looking to buy “anti-virus software with an email proxy or plug-in to scan incoming emails.” They just want “safe, virus-free email.” By itself, Thunderbird still does not provide this.
And, in spite of 2½ years passing since I wrote the original post, the software and the web site still do not provide any useful information about how to achieve “safe email.” The only official information about anti-virus protection I found today is the FAQ Is Thunderbird susceptible to e-mail viruses?, which still has the same essentially useless information I noted 2½ years ago. On a very real level, the level at which most people will experience the product, getting “safe email” with Thunderbird is a challenge that most people will not be able to meet.
A person can say “don’t bad mouth Thunderbird,” but what they’re really saying is “people who aren’t smart enough to figure out this Thunderbird + anti-virus stuff for themselves should use something else.” I wonder what the response would be if the Thunderbird project posted those words on their web site, instead of the useless words in the FAQ?
Final note: Rochelle’s solution to the dilemma was to switch to Gmail. Works great, and virus-free.
A few more thoughts on my iPhone, that I’ve jotted down since my earlier post:
Last Friday I bought an 8 gigabyte iPhone at an Apple store. I’ve been using the phone for a week now, and overall, while there are certainly flaws and omissions, it is a spectacular synthesis of hardware and software excellence. No other handheld device I’ve used even comes close, including the seven previous iPods I’ve owned. It’s a major advance in mobile phones, and in computing generally, and while I certainly look forward to getting the 2nd generation product, I’m going to love this 1st generation device all on its own.
Beyond that general impression, I have a few specific things I thought would be worth writing about.
Saw an iPhone in the wild today, including watching the owner look up a contact and dial them. It looked as brilliant in real-world use as it does in the commercials.
Want. Want. Want!
The latest Harry Bosch novel was released in print and audiobook formats earlier this week. The Overlook was originally published as a serial in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, but the novel has been expanded and revised. It’s still a lot shorter than most of Connelly’s works; the audiobook version clocks in at just over six hours, instead of the usual 10+.
Michael Connelly and Harry Bosch are who introduced me to the amazing pleasure that is listening to audiobooks. Rochelle and I began listening to Lost Light, the ninth Harry Bosch novel, on a drive back from LA. When we got home we parked the car, threw our stuff in the house, and climbed into bed to continue listening. It remains my favorite audiobook so far.
One of the truly terrific things about the Harry Bosch books is that the entire series is available in unabridged form. The Overlook is the thirteenth book so far, and all told there is more than 125 hours of listening pleasure. If you want to start at the beginning, here’s the full series to date:
Relic, by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, is not a new book. It’s the first in a connected series of novels that features or involves Special Agent Pendergast, and was originally published in 1994. As an audiobook, it was only published on cassette, and has long been out of “print.” This new MP3 CD edition, released in March, is what I hope is the first of the authors’ back catalog being re-issued in modern formats.
You can read the synopsis at Amazon.com; my summary: it’s a terrific novel, and a great spoken performance. I especially enjoy the character of Agent Pendergast, who seems to be the authors’ favorite character. He is a delight. Rochelle and I listened to The Cabinet of Curiosities, which also features Pendergast, before we realized that the book had others that came prior, and was abridged. In spite of that, we were gripped the entire time we were listening, and didn’t mind the traffic we were in much at all.
To date there are seven published novels featuring Agent Pendergast, with an eighth on the way later this year:
Preston and Child are a great writing team. The later novels by the duo have been best sellers, and have also done extremely well in audiobook format. I believe that’s why Relic is being re-released at this time. If Relic’s publication is an indication that the other books will be issued in digital and unabridged formats also, then I’m very, very excited.
I accidentally got into the San Francisco Chronicle this week. The Sipping News includes a couple of photos, including one of the lovely Rebecca Chappa demonstrating perfect tequila drinking technique:
And there I am, directly beneath the wristwatch on the pouring arm.
We bought a Sonos Digital Music System back in September 2006, and I’ve been meaning to write about it for a while. It’s a terrific product that has us listening to music far more regularly than we ever did. What’s more, it works pretty well with audiobooks that we’ve imported into iTunes or purchased from Audible.com, which is nice for listening to them when we’re moving around (e.g., in the kitchen), when an iPod and headphones might get in the way.
Over the course of importing dozens of audiobooks, I’ve used a variety of techniques and different tools to try to improve my workflow and the final product. And in the course of answering hundreds of reader questions, I’ve mentioned and even recommended a few of those tools. This is my first full on software review, and I’m inspired to do so by the quality of the tool: Audiobook Builder is awesome, and at $10 it’s also a bargain.
Audiobook Builder gets my rave review for three reasons:
The only real “problem” with it is that it is for Mac OS X only.
The Bloomsday Dead, the latest novel by Adrian McKinty, has just been released in audiobook format. This is McKinty’s third novel to feature Michael Forsythe. Michael is a surviver, an angel of destruction, and a lyrical narrator; I intensely enjoy the character. Gerard Doyle has read all four of McKinty’s books, and has a lovely Irish accent that’s distinct enough for atmosphere, but not so strong as to be distracting. I greatly enjoyed the first two Forsythe novels, and have been looking forward to this one for almost six months.
The first two books are (in order) Dead I Well May Be and The Dead Yard, and they’re available from Audible.com via the links, as well as Amazon.com
and other online stores. Both are highly recommended, and judging from the early reviewer comments, so is this latest.
Note: I’ve only been able to get The Bloomsday Dead via Audible.com, though it’s ::amazon(“0786160780”, “listed on Amazon.com”)::, as well a few of the specialized audiobook retailers. When I tried ordering it from Amazon.com, they sent me a follow-up email saying there was a delay of up to a month before they could ship it, so I cancelled the order. Audible.com released it the next day, and that was that.
I am in the process of upgrading Aldoblog to the latest version of WordPress. I think I’ve finished most of the work, with just some cleanup remaining where the new version of my formatting plug-in is behaving differently. It seems to only be affecting my longer instructional pieces, mostly for numbered lists, so the scope is limited, but wrangling the formatting back to “correct” is likely to take a while.
Anyway, if you see anything that doesn’t work or look right, please do shoot me an email and let me know. Thanks!